Visual treats for 2007

Although it must be a nightmare to administer a museum in these philistine and turnstile-obsessed times, the nation’s galleries are still doing their best to provide a service of sorts to the minds and hearts of the populace. If there is a perceptible drift towards dead-cert favourites, who can blame the institutions which now have vast bureaucracies to support, as well as lighting and heating bills to pay? So at the National Gallery, hard on the heels of the prestigious Velázquez exhibition, is a display of Renoir’s landscapes (21 February to 20 May). Well, that should keep the crowds happy, but it’s hardly nourishing fare — spiritually, intellectually or aesthetically. More rewarding, I hope, will be the autumn show Renaissance Siena: Art for a City (24 October to 13 January 2008), with some of Leon Kossoff’s pictures in the Sunley Room (14 March to 1 July) offering a usefully contrasting contemporary take on the Old Masters.

The Whitechapel is enmeshed in empire-building, with a £10 million extension under way, which means it will be operating a reduced service of film and video for 18 months. I just hope that by the time it reopens, a sufficiently impressive and varied exhibition programme is in place that’s not ghettoised by political correctness and the fads of fashion. Too many London venues still show the same kind of ‘trendy’ art (some call it State Art), and there are inevitably no surprises at the once-wonderful Serpentine Gallery (where the showman and film-maker Matthew Barney is the star turn, from 14 September to 11 November), or at the Hayward Gallery. That rudderless flagship on the South Bank is pleased to announce another show of the Arts Council’s favourite son, Antony Gormley (17 May to 27 August), followed by an earth-shattering display about the importance of photography in art, misleadingly titled The Painting of Modern Life (4 October to 30 December).