Daily Brief — 17 October 2026
Poetry, overlooked sculptors and contested art histories give this weekend’s programme a distinctly investigative edge, from major museum exhibitions in Newcastle and Paris to the closing days of London’s two Frieze fairs.
Image: Beata Beatrix by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1862). Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.
Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle explores the links between Pre-Raphaelite art and poetry
The Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne has opened Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Poetry, described by the museum as the first large-scale exhibition to explore the movement’s connections with poetry. More than 100 paintings, drawings and objects bring together works by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, alongside a particular emphasis on women artists including Elizabeth Siddall, Kate Bunce and Julia Margaret Cameron. Hunt’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil and Burne-Jones’s Laus Veneris are shown with preparatory studies and related material, while loans include Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix and the Morris & Co. tapestry The Forest. The exhibition also includes embroidery, stained glass, manuscripts, books and works on paper.
Image: Prune Nourry, Jane Poupelet (bronze) (detail), 2025. Bronze with white patina and marble eyes, 71.1 × 66.7 × 40.3 cm. Photo © Laurent Edeline. Courtesy of the artist and Templon, Paris – Brussels – New York.
Prune Nourry portrays eighteen overlooked women sculptors in a carte blanche at the Petit Palais
At Paris’s Petit Palais, Prune Nourry’s Visionnaires opens on 20 October, placing eighteen portraits of little-known or forgotten women sculptors throughout the museum’s permanent collection and garden. The project follows a year of research by three art historians, who gathered writings and photographic portraits of sculptors active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Nourry’s subjects include Käthe Kollwitz, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Jane Poupelet, Selma Hortense Burke, Sarah Bernhardt and Wang Jingyuan. The exhibition also addresses the Petit Palais collection itself: according to the announcement, barely four percent of its works were made by women. A portrait of Jane Poupelet, dated 2025, is cast in bronze with a white patina and marble eyes.
Image: Anna Esposito, Cross Bräu, 1973. Collage on acrylic resin, 93 x 78 cm. Courtesy the artist and Gramma_Epsilon Gallery
Frieze London and Frieze Masters close 18 October, with rediscovered and overlooked voices in focus
Frieze London and Frieze Masters close on 18 October, bringing almost 300 galleries from 48 countries and regions to The Regent’s Park. At Frieze Masters, rediscovery is central, with nearly 140 galleries presenting material ranging from ancient civilisations and Old Masters to modern British, postwar and Asian art. Spotlight, curated by Devika Singh and Sofia Gotti, focuses on pioneering work made from the 1950s to the late 1970s across several regions, while Queering Modernism: Visual Languages of the 20th Century foregrounds work engaging with queer experience and LGBTQIA+ subjects. Frieze Sculpture remains free to visit in the park’s English Gardens until 1 November 2026.