Van Gogh Hysteria, Kapoor's Toothpaste Cannon...

...London’s Royal Academy gets ready for autumn 2009-10.

The major exhibition of the season at the London venue is of work by sculptor Anish Kapoor (September 26-December 11, 2009). He, of course, is the master of spiritually evocative holes, or as he calls them, “voids.” In his art, minimalism meets mystery.

Kapoor also makes curved mirrored objects that reflect the viewer and the world in a weirdly distorted form. In two new works, quantities of red wax will be shot from a cannon into the corner of a gallery and extruded through the doors of the building like toothpaste from a tube, thus forming a sort of solid hole.

The Royal Academy also will offer “Wild Thing” (October 24-January 24, 2010), featuring works by a trio of early 20th-century sculptors: Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Eric Gill. They’re all notable for forceful stone carving and tempestuous private lives. Beyond that, it’s unclear what they share.

Over at Tate Modern, “Pop Life: Art in a Material World” (October 1-January 17, 2010), looks at the connection or, some might say, Faustian pact, between contemporary art and celebrity. Since the later career of Andy Warhol, certain artists have sold themselves like rock stars or supermodels.

Jobs for Twins
Works by Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and other prominent suspects will be rounded up for a show. By the way, if you are an identical twin Tate museum is seeking look-alike people to sit in front of identical Hirst dot paintings for the duration of the show.

This autumn London also features simultaneous career retrospectives by two veterans of the Los Angeles art scene. Tate Modern presents one of the pioneers of conceptual art, John Baldessari (October 13-January 10, 2010). At the Hayward, Ed Ruscha, a master of Californian visual cool, has a retrospective “Fifty Years of Painting” (October 14-January 10, 2010).

Tate Britain’s big show is “Turner and the Masters” (September 23-January 31, 2010). This, like the Picasso show in Paris last year, places an artist’s work side by side with his influences as an exercise in compare-and-contrast. In Turner’s case, those included Claude, Canaletto, Rubens and Titian, so the masterpiece count should be high.

Baroque Gore
The National Gallery’s “The Sacred Made Real” (October 21-January 24, 2010), explores an overlooked by way of art history: Spanish painted sculpture of the 17th and 18th centuries. Spattered with hyper-real gore, this style cedes nothing to contemporary works by artists such as the Chapman brothers in shock and horror.

The world is about to succumb to a bout of Van Gogh mania, touched off by the publication of a massive new edition of the artist’s correspondence. To mark the occasion, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is putting on a show “Van Gogh’s Letters: The Artist Speaks” (October 9-January 3, 2010) built around those precious and eloquent documents.

There also will be drawings and paintings on show, by Vincent and others, from the museum’s collection. London-based Van Gogh fans may prefer to wait for the spectacular exhibition, “The Real Van Gogh,” opening at the RA early next year.

Lastly, at the Grand Palais in Paris, there’ll be a survey of the dodgiest of the Impressionists, “Renoir in the 20th Century” (September 23-January 4, 2010). Was he a true master or a purveyor of chocolate-box kitsch? This show will provide evidence for a verdict.