Nov. 9 (Bloomberg) -- London’s most impressive temporary display of art is free, and to be found in Room 10 at the National Gallery. For sheer, compressed artistic power it is hard to beat.

Amid the hubbub of the big London exhibition openings, Frieze fair and art auctions, this display hasn’t been much noted. Yet here are works to outrank the likes of “The Sacred and the Real,” also at the National Gallery; the Royal Academy’s “Wild Thing”; the Victoria and Albert Museum’s “Maharaja”; the Wallace Collection’s Damien Hirst and the Tate’s Pop Art show.

In the center of one wall hangs Titian’s “Diana and Actaeon,” this year bought jointly by the National Galleries in London and Edinburgh for 50 million pounds ($82.9 million). Indeed, the purpose of the exercise is to introduce this amazing work into the collection.

It is flanked by a Rubens, “The Judgment of Paris” (1628) and “Bathers,” on which Cezanne was working when he died in 1906. The choice of a proto-modernist picture is daring.

That trio of masterpieces makes up, as an art historian friend of mine enthused when she saw it, “quite a wall.” Interestingly, the Cezanne holds up well beside the mighty force of the Titian, while the Rubens looks a little soft-centered.

The room also has works by numerous painters who took their cue from Titian, including Claude, Poussin and Constable. This is a one-room show that makes a big point: the high road of European art begins with sensual and elegiac painting of Venice. And Titian was its godfather.

The “Diana and Actaeon” exhibition runs until spring 2010 and is part of a rehang of Rooms 9, 10, 12 and the central hall of the gallery. Information: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/

Courtauld’s Auerbach

There is a lot to be said for non-blockbusters. The Courtauld Gallery does them well: most recently “Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites 1952-62,” a small exhibition that makes a big case. What it demonstrates is that Auerbach was (and in his late 70s still is) one of the greatest painters at work anywhere in the contemporary world. He is a member of the group -- more a loose affiliation of friends than a movement -- that also included Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.

A description of his subject matter in these early pictures may not sound promising: construction sites, machinery, and muddy London earth. They are like no paintings ever done before.

Auerbach’s glutinous oil paint seems to turn into Thames clay. The works give an almost physical sense of descent into excavations, of feeling your way around the churned-up chaos of a city then halfway between wartime destruction and rebuilding.

The show runs through Jan. 17, 2010. Information: http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/index.html

Palace Fashion

A charming show has opened at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace: “The Conversation Piece: Scenes of Fashionable Life.” This lightly traces one of the great changes in European life: the 18th-century discovery that private life and informality is more fun than public ceremony.

This led to the development of the “conversation piece”: a type of portrait that presents the subject relaxed and often at home, having tea with the family or playing with children.

At the heart of the exhibition are pictures by Johann Zoffany (1733-1810), revealing such intimate glimpses as the royal princes in 1764-5 dressing up in a Turkish costume and an army helmet in the presence of their mother Queen Charlotte.

The exhibition includes two of Zoffany’s finest paintings: group portraits of artists and connoisseurs in, respectively, the Royal Academy and the Uffizi, Florence. It also traces the conversation piece back to 17th-century Holland and forward into the 19th century, and throws in some delightful mixed equine and human groups by George Stubbs. These pictures of riders, grooms and steeds are very English -- and so too, you might say, is the idea of including horses (plus the odd dog) in a conversation.

The show runs until Feb. 14, 2010. Information: http://tinyurl.com/2jdho3

(Martin Gayford is chief art critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on the story: Martin Gayford in London at martin.gayford@googlemail.com.

Last Updated: November 8, 2009 19:00 EST