One of the Rijksmuseum’s great 2016 highlights was our comprehensive survey of the experimental Dutch printmaker Hercules Segers, who created landscapes of astonishing originality. I am delighted that this exhibition, featuring every known print alongside a selection of paintings by Segers, will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (13 February–21 May). It will be the first major Segers retrospective in the United States. Our second collaboration with the Met is an exhibition at the Cloisters focusing on the virtuoso art of miniature carving, which will feature 50 or so figurines, miniature altars, prayer nuts, monstrances, skulls and other memento mori boxwood pendants (22 February–21 May).
At home in the Netherlands, I am looking forward to the centenary celebration of the Dutch art and design movement De Stijl. The Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, holder of the world’s greatest Piet Mondrian collection, will put all 300 works on show in one great exhibition to chart the painter’s ground-breaking career (3 June–24 September). I shall be making a number of trips to London in the spring – starting with Tate Britain’s 80th birthday celebration of David Hockney (9 February–29 May). Presented as a chronological overview, the exhibition will trace Hockney’s development from his student days in 1961, through to his iconic works of the 1960s and 1970s, and on to his recent success at the Royal Academy and beyond.
Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1971), David Hockney. © David Hockney
The National Gallery’s major spring exhibition explores the relationship between Michelangelo and Sebastiano del Piombo, focusing on two collaborations: the Pietà for San Francesco in Viterbo (c. 1512–16) and The Raising of Lazarus, painted for the Cathedral of Narbonne (15 March–25 June).
Fifty years after the Tate first showed work by Giacometti (under the guidance of David Sylvester), Tate Modern will show the full evolution of Giacometti’s work. With unparalleled access to the collection and archive of the Fondation Giacometti, the Tate Modern exhibition charts his career from his first works of art through his surrealist compositions, to the emergence of his mature style (10 May–10 September).
Giacometti will also be the subject of a major exhibition in Doha. Qatar Museum’s Fire Station Artist in Residence space will host ‘Picasso-Giacometti’ (which is currently on show at the Musée Picasso in Paris). It will be the first exhibition in the Middle East dedicated to two of the most important artists of the 20th century (22 February–21 May).
Taco Dibbits is director of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Keep up with Apollo’s 12 Days selection of art highlights here.