Rodin and the art of ancient Greece at The British Museum, 26th April to 29th July 2018

Wow, this is good! Rodin and the art of ancient Greece at the British Museum is an eye-pleasing, myth-busting, brain-tickling stonker of a show. By focusing on the creative relationship between Rodin and Pheidias, this brilliantly conceived and designed show offers a retrospective of Rodin’s most iconic pieces and a fresh look at the Parthenon statues. But in doing so, it raises questions about authenticity and artifice, production and reproduction, pathos and bathos. Again wow!

All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life at Tate Britain, 28th February to 27th August 2018

Billed as a landmark exhibition, All Too Human showcases how some of Britain’s most celebrated artists from Sickert and Spencer, via Auerbach and Kossoff, to Freud and Bacon, and newer female artists like Paula Rego and Jenny Saville, have captured life’s most intense experiences in paint. The trouble is that while there are many fine individual paintings on display, the thematic coherence of this show completely disappears from view under the sheer number of exhibits.