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Opening and Closing in August

August is always one of the quietest months for new exhibitions, and this year is no different, but we do have one big event to alert you to, as well as two splendid shows that only have weeks to run.  The one major opening is  Gwen John: Strange Beauties  at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh. Running from August 1 to January 4, this is a comprehensive retrospective of the work of the woman perhaps now seen as Wales's most significant artist, born 150 years ago this year. Maybe a little too comprehensive, according to some of the reviews of the show when it was on at the National Museum in Cardiff. The exhibition goes on to the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, in February and then at the end of July next year to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC. We saw a rather smaller Gwen John exhibition in Chichester in 2023.  Last chance to see.... Ending on August 23 is the exhibition at the Lakenhal in Leiden ...
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Opening in April

If you enjoyed Claude Monet's views of Westminster in Impressionists in London at Tate Britain, your next destination is clear: Monet and Architecture just up the road at the National Gallery from April 9 to July 29. It's a new way of seeing Monet's work, the National says: the first exhibition looking at the great Impressionist's career through the buildings he painted, with more than 75 pictures together for the very first time.
There's another blockbuster of a French-themed show coming at the British Museum: Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece opens on April 26 and can be seen until July 29. Rodin was captivated by the Parthenon sculptures when he saw them in 1881, and 100 years after his death, his work including The Thinker and The Kiss can be seen alongside them in a new light, the museum says.

It's the season to get into the garden. So it's the perfect time to be inspired by the paintings of Cedric Morris, not only a botanist who cultivated 90 new irises but also the teacher of Lucian Freud. Two venues in London celebrate this rather forgotten painter simultaneously in Artist Plantsman at the Garden Museum and Beyond the Garden Wall, showing his landscapes, at Philip Mould in Pall Mall. Both run from April 18 to July 22.
But there's no getting away from Monet. A new show at the Orangerie in Paris looks at the links between his late work and Abstract Expressionism in the US. The Water Lilies: American Abstract Painting and the Last Monet starts on April 13 and is on until August 20.

Images

Claude Monet, The Doge's Palace (Le Palais ducal), 1908. (c) Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, Gift of A. Augustus Healy
Sir Cedric Morris, May Flowering Irises No. 2, 1935. (c) Philip Mould & Company, Courtesy the Cedric Morris Estate

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