LONDON - On February 25, 2009 the National Gallery opens the exhibition Picasso: Challenging the Past. From his earliest years Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) was a passionate student of the grand European painting tradition, frequently visiting the Louvre, the Prado and many other museums for inspiration. The masters of Spanish painting, including El Greco, Velázquez and Goya, were of crucial importance to him, as were Rembrandt, Delacroix, Ingres, Manet and Cézanne. Picasso pitted himself against each of these painters in a life-long artistic dialogue, taking up their signature themes, techniques and artistic concerns in audacious paintings of his own.

Featuring approximately 60 major works by Picasso, this exhibition explores the many ways in which the greatest painter of the 20th century sought to challenge the Old Masters. The exhibition focuses on enduring themes Picasso confronted throughout his career, with sections dedicated to the self portrait, the Spanish tradition of the male portrait, the female nude, the still life, the seated female figure, and the artist’s later ‘variations’ on great works of the past such as Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.

Sometimes his ‘quotations’ from the Old Masters were direct, at other times highly allusive and inflected by personal concerns; occasionally, they were full of parody and irreverence. Always, Picasso made the implicit case that it was he, in the 20th century, who most forcefully reinvigorated the European tradition.

Reference will be made back and forth between the exhibition and the Gallery’s own incomparable collection of Old Master paintings. In so doing, the exhibition will explore Picasso’s relationship with the art of the past, and show its daring transformation under his brush into ‘something else entirely’. Picasso: Challenging the Past has been organised in conjunction with the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, the Musée National Picasso, the Musée du Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay.

On July 8 Corot to Monet will open. In seeking to capture the transient effects of nature in this way, the Impressionists were indebted to a plein-air tradition which had thrived in Western Europe since the late 18th century.

Drawing on the National Gallery’s rich collection of 19th-century French landscapes, this exhibition charts the development of landscape painting from the late 18th century to the year of the first Impressionist exhibition, 1874, and features all the major artists of this genre.

At the end of the 18th century, artists from across Europe were congregating in Rome, before setting out for the Campagna and other picturesque locations. The opening section of the exhibition features works by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot alongside Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes and Simon Denis. Many of the works are drawn from the Gere Collection, which is on long-term loan to the Gallery.

By the first half of the 19th century, artists in France, including Corot and Théodore Rousseau, were also sketching their native scenery to great effect. A major part of the exhibition focuses on the so-called Barbizon School, named after a small town in the Forest of Fontainebleau where landscape artists including Rousseau, Jean-François Millet and Narcisse-Virgilio Diaz de la Peña gathered to work out-of-doors.

The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600-1700 opens on October 21, 2009. While Spanish religious paintings of the 17th century are relatively well known, the country’s polychromed sculptures have never been the subject of a major exhibition. The Sacred Made Real presents a landmark reappraisal of an art form crucial to the development of Spanish art.

The hyper-realistic approach of painters such as Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Zurbarán was clearly informed by their familiarity – and sometimes direct involvement – with sculpture. Francisco Pacheco, Velázquez’s teacher, painted the flesh tones and drapery of many wooden sculptures carved by the celebrated Juan Martínez Montañés. Indeed, Pacheco taught a generation of painters, including Velázquez and Alonso Cano, the skill of painting sculpture as an integral element of their training.

In response to this challenge, Spanish sculptors and painters combined their skills to create arrestingly real depictions of the saints, the Immaculate Conception and the Passion of Christ, each painstakingly carved from wood, gessoed and intricately polychromed. To obtain greater realism, some sculptors such as Pedro de Mena, introduced glass eyes and tears as well as ivory teeth into their sculptures. In addition to important canvases by Velázquez, Zurbarán and Cano, the exhibition features sculptures carved by Gregorio Fernández, Juan Martínez Montañés and Pedro de Mena and polychromed by Francisco Pacheco and Alonso Cano.

At the end of the 18th century, artists from across Europe were congregating in Rome, before setting out for the Campagna and other picturesque locations. The opening section of the exhibition features works by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot alongside Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes and Simon Denis. Many of the works are drawn from the Gere Collection, which is on long-term loan to the Gallery.

The exhibition is organised by the National Gallery, London, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington. It is supported by the American Friends of the National Gallery as a result of a generous grant from Howard and Roberta Ahmanson.

Kienholz's Hoerengracht closes out the year when it opens on November 18. The Hoerengracht (1983–8), by American artists Ed and Nancy Kienholz, will transform the Sunley Room into a walk-through evocation of Amsterdam’s red-light district. This highly polemical tableau explores a theme which has been investigated by artists over many centuries and echoes visual traditions that are well established within European art. Recalling in particular the Dutch masters of the 17th century, the work recreates the glowing windows and mysterious doorways of Amsterdam’s claustrophobic streets – The Hoerengracht’s half-dressed, garishly lit mannequins enact a theatre of grim sociology.

Near to this powerful installation, a small selection of Dutch paintings from the Gallery’s collection will be displayed, including Jan Steen’s 'Interior of an Inn', Schalcken’s 'A Man Offering Gold and Coins to a Girl' and de Hooch’s 'Musical Party in a Courtyard'. These paintings will demonstrate some direct links between the modern world and the past.

The Hoerengracht revisits a theme first tackled by Ed Kienholz in his first environmental sculpture made in 1961, the now legendary Roxy’s. Named after a brothel in Los Angeles, the work has become recognized as marking a seminal moment in the history of installation art. Made in their Berlin studio, The Hoerengracht shows how the work of the Kienholzes remains a major reference point for contemporary artists such as Francisco Pacheco, and Damien Hirst.