Museum exhibitions in Europe — posted as a running calendar,  with items added regularly. Below are listings in art, design, architecture and photography. 

 AMSTERDAM

Begins Sept 24: Discovery! Van Gogh’s recently confirmed painting Sunset at Montmajour goes on display for one year at the Van Gogh Museum. Read the back story in the New York Times. Link to the Van Gogh Museum 

Can’t get there? You don’t have to leave home to access high-quality digital versions of 125,000 works in the Rijksmuseum collections. You can download onto a tee shirt, phone cover or even your car!  New York Times business article. Portal to the Rijksstudio

BERLIN

Through Jan 27 2014  The Art of Two Cities. From Schiele to Grosz: Here’s a potent collaboration: , the Berlinische Galerie and the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere will show 200 key works of modern art from Vienna and Berlin ranging from the Secessionists via Expressionism to New Objectivity. This is the first time the two institutions have worked together, selecting masterpieces from both institutions’ collections. So expect to see the early days of modernism: Berlin Secessionists around Max Liebermann, Viennese artists around Gustav Klimt and Koloman Moser. (A Moser show just ended at the Neuegalerie in New York.)  Selected artists include: Hans Baluschek, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Carry Hauser, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner, Erika Giovanna Klien, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Broncia Koller-Pinell, Max Liebermann, Jeanne Mammen, Ludwig Meidner, Koloman Moser, Max Oppenheimer, Emil Orlik, Christian Schad, Egon Schiele, Max Slevogt. WOW! Details from Art News

Web site for Berlinischegalerie

LONDON

Through Jan 5, 2014: Art under Attack at the Tate Britain  is a provocative exhibition that may raise the hackles of every museum director and curator. The first British exhibition in over five centuries to explore the practice of attacks on art, it is organized by three themes: religion, politics and aesthetics. The works in the show are not the smearings and scratches of mere lunatics, but of people who had a purpose to defile – in pursuit of religious iconoclasm, political change or the actual creation of a new artwork by defiling one that already exists.  The goal may be pursued in a variety of ways: defaced, obliterated, or removed. Take your pick – it’s as ancient as the Romans and continues today.  Details . New York Time article

Through Jan 19, 2014 Victoria & Albert Museum: Pearls. Miraculous creations of nature, pearls are sought after for their beauty, size, color and rarity. This exhibition, a joint project of the V&A and the Qatar Museums Authority, explores the history of pearls from the early Roman Empire to today. If you saw the Pearls exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History (2003), you know this will be an extraordinary show. Through Jan 19 2014. Details

Through Mar 9 2014 Tate Modern:  EY Exhibition Paul Klee Making Visible.  Exhibition focuses on the decade Klee spent teaching and working at the Bauhaus, the hotbed of modernist design. Paintings, drawings and watercolors from worldwide collections will be reunited and on display as Klee intended. Some are on view for the first time since Klee exhibited them himself!  Details 

PARIS & ENVIRONS

Through Feb 14, 2014  Musée des arts décoratifs (Paris) : Trompe l’oeil…sham, imitation, pastiche and other illusions.

It is the art of deception taken to the highest level. From ancient frescoes (Pomepii comes to mind) to Dutch still lifes and even American  painters (Hartnett and Peto),  artists and artisans have transformed plebian materials (wood, canvas) into the semblance of  lacquer, velvet, gilded wood and three-dimensional objects that create vision games, optical illusions and unusual visual effect.  See the web site for a panoply of masterful deceptions. Better yet, visit if you’re in Paris.

Opens Oct 22 Château de Versailles: Le Nôtre in Perspective  (1613-2013).  Gardener, designer, architect, engineer- hydraulics specialist, and planner, André Le Nôtre gave form to The Sun King’s (Louis XIV) myth and power by transforming the gardens at Versailles into the center of the universe. The exhibition ends a year of celebrating Le Nôtre’s 400^th anniversary. Through Feb 24 2014. Details 

Through Nov 4 Centre Pompidou: Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein gets his due  in a retrospective organized by the Tate and Art Institute of Chicago  that also traveled to the National Gallery of Art. This is the first retrospective of his work in over 20 years! Details 

SPAIN: Barcelona and Madrid

Museum of Modern Art’s huge Le Corbusier exhibition (300 works) –Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, 1887–1965, a protean figure in the world of design travels to Spain: Fundació “la Caixa” in Barcelona (Jan 28–May 11, 2014), and to Fundació “la Caixa” in Madrid (June 11–Oct 13, 2014).

ITALY: Milan, Rome, Venice

To Mar 9 2014 Warhol at Milan’s Palazzo Reale : Works by Andy Warhol from the Peter Brant Collection at Milan’s Palazzo Reale brings together pieces from all his major periods: his early Death and Disaster series, celebrity portraits of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, to a 1986 self-portrait. Brant started collecting Warhol at the age of 20: he purchased a drawing of a Campbell’s soup can in 1967. Just a year later he was introduced to the artist, and developed a warm friendship that lasted for the duration of Warhol’s life.  Brant’s collection consists of 200 pieces and has never previously been on display. Details

Warhol Milan web site

Opens June 7 2014: If you like to plan ahead, the Venice Architecture Biennale may lure you to La Serennisima.  Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is the director of the Architecture Biennale, which will draw exhibitions from dozens of countries to the Giardini and the Arsenale (a huge pre-industrial work space in Venice). The US the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs has selected the team of Ashley Schafer, Ana Miljački, and Eva Franch i Gilabert for their proposal to reinterpret the last 100 years of American building abroad,  in a project called OfficeUS. The curators may select up to 1,000 worldwide projects for their Repository, including Detroit architect Albert Kahn and Architects’ Collaborative of Cambridge, Mass (also known as the Cambridge Seven). Article from ArchRecord.  Biennale web site 

Rome’s national museum for the twenty-first century is Maxxi is a nifty play on the Roman numerals for 21. The three-year-old institution was designed by world architect Zaha Hadid (winner of the Pritzker Prize), and the building itself is an artwork. Then there’s the programming that promises to be diverse: jazz and Indian music concerts; a film series on contemporary architects; and a yoga class – not to mention exhibitions. The institution also collaborates with museums abroad to develop a following an steadier revenue stream. It’s not clear from recent media coverage, but perhaps Romans are not quite ready for Maxxi’s 21^st century approach to art!  New York Times article