The Art Exhibitions Blog

Tate Britain offers a double-header of 20th-century British artists this month with  Edward Burra -- Ithell Colquhoun . Though they were close contemporaries, it's not an obvious combination; Burra is perhaps best known for his depictions of sometimes seedy inter-war nightlife, Colquhoun for her Surrealist work. This show features more than 80 pictures by Burra and over 140 Colquhoun exhibits. On from June 13 to October 19.  At the National Portrait Gallery, you can see  Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting , featuring 45 works from across the career of the contemporary British artist known for her large-scale, close-up paintings of the human body. June 20 to September 7. Another double bill, this time at the Royal Academy, where contemporary artist Anselm Kiefer is paired with one of the all-time greats, Vincent Van Gogh. As a teenager Kiefer received a travel grant to follow in Vincent's footsteps. From June 28 to October 26 Kiefer/Van Gogh  looks at the Dutchman...

If you lived in Britain, particularly in London, during the middle of the 20th century, Barnett Freedman was all around you. As the go-to commercial artist during a period spanning the 30s to the 50s, his work was all over the Tube and London buses, on advertising, stamps and book tokens, as well as adorning the covers of collectable books and providing their illustrations. It's a career that's celebrated, more than six decades after Freedman's death, in a hugely enjoyable exhibition, Barnett Freedman: Designs for Modern Britain , at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, which has just reopened after months of coronavirus-induced closure. The Pallant is our local art gallery, and its director, Simon Martin, said he didn't want to "sanitise the experience" of museum-going on reopening. So, while visitor numbers are limited and timed tickets are compulsory, we were pleased that once you got inside, there's actually very little that you would notice tha...

There are some harrowing images in Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War I at Tate Britain: dead bodies, mutilated faces, mechanised slaughter. It's not exactly a feel-good exhibition. But it does contain a lot of uplifting art, some of it stunningly displayed, and it's well worth seeing. Millions died on each side between 1914 and 1918; millions more were wounded. At the start of this exhibition we see in a glass case three steel soldiers' helmets, from Britain, France and Germany, the three countries the show focuses on. The abandoned helmet was widely used to symbolise the death of an individual combatant, and William Orpen was among the painters to adopt the image in A Grave in a Trench . This, like many of the works early on in this exhibition, is from the Imperial War Museum.  More explicit images of death were not wanted by the military authorities. Christopher Nevinson's Paths of Glory was censored, but the artist defied the ruling by including it an...