Weegee, Tadek Beutlich and the ‘first English abstract artist’

As the art world takes stock of the highs and lows of 2024, and looks ahead to the new year, museums and galleries around the world launch their 2025 programmes. These are the exhibitions opening in January that caught our eye.

Paule Vézelay: Living Lines, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol

25 January-27 April

The self-proclaimed “Master of Line”, Paule Vézelay, applied herself to sculpture, painting, collage, prints, photography, textiles and more. Opening this month at the Royal West of England Academy (RWA) in Bristol, this show will include more than 60 works from the artist’s seven-decade career, some of which have never been exhibited before. More

Alexej Jawlensky, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk

30 January-1 June

In the years leading up to the First World War, two mystical-minded Russian friends helped determine the course of German Expressionism. One—Wassily Kandinsky—is remembered as an influential visionary and pioneer of abstraction; the other, Alexej Jawlensky (1864-1941), is now just getting his due. This show will features 61 works, running from 1908, when the artist began to explore an ever-wilder palette, to his final, subdued works of the mid 1930s. More

Weegee: Society of the Spectacle, International Center of Photography, New York

23 January-5 May

Rarely seen without his trademark cigar, clutching a Speed Graphic camera, Weegee rose to prominence working at night as a freelance news photographer in Manhattan in the mid-1930s. He was famed for his uncanny ability to arrive before police or ambulance crews at the gruesome scenes that he would record and then sell on. Weegee: Society of the Spectacle will attempt to offer a fresh reading of this paradoxical man, born in 1899 by the name of Ascher Fellig in what is modern-day Ukraine. More

Tadek Beutlich: On and Off the Loom, Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft

18 January-22 June

Tadek Beutlich was a seminal figure in the mid 20th-century reinvention of craft weaving as an art form. A new show at the Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft in East Sussex will be the first gallery survey in more than 25 years of his groundbreaking work both as a textile artist and a printmaker. More

Peter Hujar: Eyes Open in the Dark, Raven Row, London

30 January-6 April

Peter Hujar: Eyes Open in the Dark will attest to the expansiveness in Hujar’s work, moving beyond his hectic New York downtown scenes. The show’s ambition, as the co-curator John Douglas Millar puts it, is to resituate the photographer’s work, to make us see the serene authority of the image not just in the portraits but in the entire breadth of Hujar’s photography. More