There are some familiar names and familiar paintings in Art Then! British Painting, Sculpture and Drawing, 1910-1960 at Southampton City Art Gallery, but it's the unfamiliar that makes it especially worth the trip to a venue you might not normally consider for an exhibition. This show provides an excellent overview of art trends in this country in the first half of the 20th century. And it's free! Southampton has a very good collection, but we often get the feeling that a lot of interesting works are in store behind closed doors. Pleasant surprises await when they finally see the light of the day, in this case in combination with a selection from the extensive Ingram Collection of modern British art. In all, there are more than 100 works by over 100 artists, demonstrating how the British reacted to the latest developments in art on the Continent. So let's start with a couple of hidden gems from the Southampton treasure trove, first of all a Landscape that really stoppe...
It turns out that the free exhibition at the National Gallery in London offering you the chance to Discover Manet & Eva Gonzalès provides you with the opportunity to discover a whole lot more besides; there are portraits and self-portraits going back to the late 18th century in a display that puts women artists and the challenges they faced at the forefront. Eva Gonzalès was Edouard Manet's only formal pupil, and his fairly monumental portrait of her, nearly 2 metres high, is a rather strange picture at first sight. She's working on an already framed painting; she seems to be sitting, awkwardly posed, rather too far away from the canvas, the floor is carpeted, and she's wearing a most unsuitable snowy white dress; you wouldn't want to get any paint on her clothes or the carpet. It wasn't an easy painting for Manet to get right; there were apparently numerous sittings and a lot of reworking. You might assume that the elegantly clad young woman dabbing at a pictu...