A drawing by Egon Schiele
I am Ashurbanipal: King of the World, King of Assyria
British Museum, 8th November to 24th February
The British Museum’s magnificent Assyrian reliefs celebrate a successful but brutal monarch as he chases lions or takes tea beneath trees decorated with his enemies’ heads. Ashurbanipal, self-proclaimed King of the World, presided from Nineveh—recently targeted by Islamic State—over an empire stretching from the Mediterranean to Iran. This first major exhibition on the monarch has drawn many loans, including ornate art works and elaborate weaponry, which feature alongside the museum’s outstanding sculptures and cuneiform tablets.
Klimt/Schiele: Drawings from the Albertina Museum, Vienna
Royal Academy of Arts, 4th November to 3rd February
Among the calamities that coincided with the ending of the First World War were the deaths of two of Vienna’s foremost artists. Gustav Klimt had been a pioneering modernist in fin-de-siècle Vienna; his protégé 28 years his junior, Egon Schiele, above, had turned his prodigious talents to the raw scrutiny of sex and mortality. This exhibition shows how both were inspired by the immediacy of drawing, an ideal medium for their erotic subject matter.
Norman Ackroyd: The Furthest Lands
Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 17th November to 24th February
Norman Ackroyd’s monochrome aquatint etchings of the western outskirts of the British Isles are among the most stirring and poetic evocations of landscape in contemporary British art. Ackroyd, who turned 80 this year, discovered etching as a student at Leeds College of Art. Yorkshire Sculpture Park is mounting this exhibition in his honour—a record of a lifetime’s work.
