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Showing posts from March, 2025

Tales of the Unexpected in Southampton

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...

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Opening and Closing in April

We'll start this month at the King's Gallery in London, where more than 300 artworks and other objects from the Royal Collection will be on display from April 11 for  The Edwardians: Age of Elegance . Illustrating the tastes of the period between the death of Victoria and World War I, the show features the work of John Singer Sargent , Edward Burne-Jones , William Morris and Carl Fabergé, among others. On to November 23. More Morris at, unsurprisingly, the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow.  Morris Mania , which runs from April 5 to September 21, aims to show how his designs have continued to capture the imagination down the decades, popping up in films and on television, in every part of the home, on trainers, wellies, and even in nuclear submarines.... From much the same era, Guildhall Art Gallery in the City offers  Evelyn De Morgan: The Modern Painter in Victorian London  from April 4 to January 4. De Morgan's late Pre-Raphaelite work with its beautifull...

The Early Chelsea Flower Show

Flowers -- Flora in Contemporary Art & Culture at the Saatchi Gallery gets its statement of intent across to you right from the start: big, bold and bright. Sure, there are all sorts of flowers, large and small, of every conceivable hue in this expansive show, but remember, we're on the King's Road in Chelsea. This is no place for shy retiring wallflowers or shrinking violets. The tone is set by Sophie Mess's enormous and eye-catchingly vibrant  Journey of Progress  mural on the walls of the stairwell you ascend to the start of the show; an only slightly more modest work by her -- appropriately entitled Burst -- is the very first painting you encounter as you enter the nine galleries.   It is stunning, but the big flower close-up is nothing new. A century ago Georgia O'Keeffe was producing canvas-filling paintings of irises, oriental poppies and  Red Canna .  The first room takes us on something of a magical history tour of flower painting. There's a ...

The Recent Story of Art without Men

It's a bestseller: Katy Hessel's The Story of Art without Men . And if you've read her 2022 book rewriting art history, or even if you haven't, you can go beyond the printed page and see the real thing close up for yourself, in Europe's only art museum without men. It's in the south of France, in a hilltop village just outside Cannes: Femmes Artistes Musée Mougins .  Now in an ideal world, you shouldn't really need a museum in 2025 devoted solely to women artists. But this is clearly not an ideal world. As Hessel and many others have pointed out, women have historically been woefully underrepresented both in traditional museums and galleries and on the commercial art market. This women-only space (on the walls, we hasten to add; male visitors very welcome) aims to go some way to restore the balance. Did we like what we saw? Most definitely. The museum, which opened last year, displays a rotating selection from the hundreds of works by women artists collected...