Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan

All advance tickets are now sold out for this season’s biggest hit, however there is limited availability each day so be prepared to turn up when it’s still dark and queue. Why all the fuss?  Only fifteen of Leonardo’s paintings survive of the twenty or so that he started and nine of them are in this collection alongside more than fifty of his extraordinary drawings. Marking the end of the medieval, paintings such as Musician and The Lady with an Ermine imbue the subjects with a luminescent stillness and display a more thoroughly articulated psychological and physiological reading than hitherto seen.There’s no Mona Lisa which doesn’t fall into Leonardo’s Milanese period, but you can’t have everything, if you did, where would you put it?

Gerhard Richter: Panorama

See it by  January 8th 2012         Admission £12.70     Concessions £10.90

Sunday – Thursday, 10.00–18.00       Last admission at 17.15

Friday – Saturday, 10.00–22.00 (10.00–18.00 on Friday 23 and Saturday 31 December)   Last admission at 21.15

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/gerhardrichter/default.shtm

Bankside

London SE1 9TG

020 7887 8888

 Richter is der Grossvater of German modernist painting and this show is a major retrospective to coincide with the artist’s 80th birthday.Richter’s photorealist style is as controversial as is his subject matter, and reflects his early life under Nazi and then Communist rule as well as dealing with some of the more disruptive aspects of the last fifty years; the 15-part work October 18 1977 1988 is a series of paintings that features the Baader Meinhof group and September 2005  is a painting that depicts the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre. The exhibition also features his squeegee abstracts, landscapes and portraits.