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...
Wouldn't it be nice to get away for a while, to spend some time in a really exotic environment? Well, you can. Just book a ticket to Peru: a Journey in Time at the British Museum, where the past, the present and the future merge into an other-worldly experience. And this is another world, a very strange different world, where the inhabitants make curious but stunning artefacts, where they sacrifice humans to appease the gods, where great civilisations develop, but without the invention of the wheel, or the invention of writing. If you have no script, images play a huge part in everyday life. And in this absorbing show we're confronted by a succession of arresting objects made by the peoples who lived in Peru over the course of several thousand years. Such items were used in ceremonies to seek the assistance of higher powers for the living and to prepare the dead for the afterlife. And these were not merely inanimate objects; they were seen as living beings themselves. The f...