Who would have thought that the valuable works of Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis and Edouard Vuillard will grace the city of Canberra from December 4, 2009 up to April 5, 2010 all at the same time?

Most of the prized French paintings included in the exhibit are those that we just see from the history books as they rarely go out of their permanent home at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris.

Expect to be enthralled by a total of 114 paintings which includes seven paintings from Vincent Van Gogh, five from Claude Monet, eight from Paul Cezanne and nine from Paul Gaugiun to name a few.

Indeed, the National Gallery of Australia is beaming with excitement and pride that they will be able to offer the best of the French art and culture not only to the art lovers but even to novices and art students.  It is the masterpieces first stopover as they will travel to Tokyo and San Francisco to complete the tour.

This event was made possible because the Post-Impressionist Galleries at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris is undergoing a major renovation and decided to lend them all together to different respectable museums in the world.

There are three confirmed masterpieces that will be showcased in the exhibit and that is Van Gogh’s Bedroom at Arles 1889, Gauguin’s Tahitian women 1891 and Cézanne’s beloved Mount Saint-Victoire c 1890.

These great masters were also friends but some said that their relationship were somehow rocky.  Paul Gauguin even lived on that same Yellow House of Vincent Van Gogh for nine weeks.  If you get the chance to attend the exhibit, if you notice a door on the right of Van Gogh’s The Bedroom painting, that one leads to Gauguin’s own bedroom.

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On August 24, A.D. 79, the Roman city of Pompeii was buried by the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The pumice and thick volcanic ash that ended the lives of so many also encased the city in a virtual time capsule for the next 17 centuries. The city remained largely lost and forgotten until rediscovered by archaeologists in the early 1700s, resulting in Pompeii today being one of the most complete and intact archaeological sites in the world.

‘This exhibition is an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see Roman treasures from almost 2000 years ago,’ said Dr Patrick Greene, CEO, Museum Victoria.

The exhibition will be developed by Museum Victoria in partnership with the Soprintendenza archeologica di Pompeii, and will feature over 250 objects from daily life in Pompeii and surrounds, as well as a number of body casts.

A Day in Pompeii will be on display at Melbourne Museum from 26 June to 11 October 2009.

Melbourne Winter Masterpieces is a Victorian Government initiative and is exclusive to Melbourne, Australia.

Ballarat is the only city in Australia to host John Lennon – Imagine! which comes from London’s Proud Gallery and is a showcase of rare black and white images by world-class photographers such as Dixie Dean, Tom Hanley, Polly Moseley, Terry O’Neill, Michael Peto, Barry Plummer, David Redfern and Jurgen Vollmer.

The exhibition will also include paintings and sculptures from the 1960s and 70s that are part of the Gallery’s own collection by artists of the period. These include John Hopkins, Richard Larter and Robert Rooney as well as Alun Leach-Jones, who went to art school in Liverpool in the 1950s.

The exhibition coincides with the 28th anniversary of the former Beatles’ assassination by Mark Chapman in New York City.

“John Lennon – Imagine!” opens on Saturday 21 February and runs through to Easter Monday 13 April.

The Gallery is open daily from 9am to 5pm. Admission to the Art Gallery of Ballarat is free. Entry to the exhibition costs $9 for adults, $5 for concession and is free for children under 16.

The exhibition comprises over 300 works and covers all artistic media from painting to photography, fashion to film and architecture to jewellery.

Art Deco was a popular international design movement from 1925 until 1939, affecting the decorative arts such as architecture, interior design, and industrial design, as well as the visual arts such as fashion, painting, the graphic arts and film. This movement was, in a sense, an amalgam of many different styles and movements of the early 20th century, including Neoclassical, Constructivism, Cubism, Modernism, Bauhaus, Art Nouveau, and Futurism. Its popularity peaked in Europe during the Roaring Twenties[1] and continued strongly in the United States through the 1930s.[2] Although many design movements have political or philosophical roots or intentions, Art Deco was purely decorative. At the time, this style was seen as elegant, functional, and modern.
28 June to 5 October 2008

Open daily 10am–5pm
Open until 9pm every Wednesday
Ground Level, NGV International
Admission fees apply