December highlights
Senga Nengudi: Topologies
Denver Art Museum 13 December–11 April 2021 www.denverartmuseum.org
The Chicago-born artist
Senga Nengudi creates improvisational works that fuse sculpture, performance art and photography, often inspired by dance traditions from Africa and Japan. This display of more than works traces her career from the s to the present.
Victor Hugo, Liberty at the Panthéon Panthéon, Paris 4 December–14 March 2021 www.paris-pantheon.fr
Victor Hugo’s funeral procession in May was attended by some two million people. This show of art and archival materials at the site of his tomb considers the importance of the event in the history of the Third Republic, while also delving into the writer’s life and work.
Frank Duveneck:
American Master
Cincinnati Art Museum 18 December–28 March 2021 www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org
This is the first major exhibition for years of Cincinnati’s favourite artistic son. Duveneck’s genre paintings of street children are among the works on show, as are Bavarian landscapes and Venetian harbour scenes from the two decades he spent in Europe.
Become who you are! Ruth Baumgarte: The Art of Living
Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Dortmund 1 December–21 February 2021 www.dortmund.de
The most significant survey of the Bavarian-born painter since her death in , this display explores Baumgarte’s lifelong engagement with social and environmental issues, culminating in the cycle of works depicting her travels in Africa.
Richard Hamilton: Respective
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
3 December–14 March 2021 www.pallant.org.uk
With works from the 1950s to the early 2000s, this exhibition focuses on the influence of international modernism on Hamilton’s Pop-art style. Highlights include The Oculist Witnesses, a collaboration with Marcel Duchamp from 1968.
Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented
Museum of Modern Art, New York
13 December–10 April 2021 www.moma.org
This display considers how artists such as Aleksandr Rodchenko, Fré Cohen and John Heartfield (pictured) used photomontage and other new mediums to redefine the role of the artist in the 1920s and ’30s.
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek
9 December–9 May 2021 www.louisiana.dk
Jafa’s famous video work Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016) is at the heart of this exhibition, which also includes new commissions that reveal how the American artist brings a shrewd perspective to questions of race and celebrity in the United States.
Walter Gramatté and Hamburg
Hamburger Kunsthalle 1 December–14 March 2021 www.hamburger-kunsthalle.de
Drawing on nearly 50 donated works by Walter Gramatté, this show looks at the links between the Berlin-born painter, whose style moved freely between Symbolism, Expressionism and Surrealism, and the art scene in Hamburg, a city he visited frequently in the 1920s.