5 Amazing art exhibitions around Europe in 2024

The Courtauld will be presenting, for the first time together, 17 of Frank Auerbach’s large-scale, charcoal portraits of heads produced during his early career in the 1950s and 1960s. Born in 1931 Frank Auerbach was a leading figure of the School of London and great friends with Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. Bacon’s Double Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, 1964, is a testament to the deep friendship between the artists.

Auerbach arrived in Britain from Germany on the Kindertransport shortly before the outbreak of the second world war, never again to see his parents who died at Auschwitz. The scars of this are said to be reflected by slashes of red chalk in his portraits. His subjects included Stella West, with whom he had an intense relationship, the figurative painter Leon Kossoff (Auerbach’s Head of Leon Kossoff, 1954, sold for £2,658,500 at Christie’s in 2016),  his older cousin Gerda Boehm (Head of Gerda Boehm, 1961) and Julia Wolstenholme (Head of Julia II, 1960) whom he married in 1958.

Vienna’s Albertina is celebrating Roy Lichenstein’s (1923–1927) canon of Pop Art with a major retrospective a hundred years after his birth, featuring those iconic comic strip pictures which Lichenstein parodied so brilliantly. Lichenstein became a pioneering Pop Art printmaker and painter who used the Ben-Day dot, the pointillist printing technique favoured by newspapers.

Drowning Girl, 1963, inspired by Picasso, repurposed the image of a drowning heroine from the splash page of a comic illustrated by Tony Abruzzo. Other memorable paintings include: Look Mickey, 1961; Whaam!, 1963; Woman in a Bath, 1963 and Thinking of Him, 1963.

This exhibition of rivals Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) launches the reopening of one of Paris’ lesser-known museums, the Eugène-Delacroix Museum (formerly Delacroix’s apartment).

Ingres and Delacroix clashed over a battle between Neoclassicism and Romanticism. Their portraits and their personal collection of artefacts will be shown as part of the exhibition which continues at the Ingres Bourdelle Museum in Montauban from July 12 to November 10, 2024.