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Showing posts from August, 2026

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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New Exhibitions in September

The Bayeux Tapestry  exhibition at the British Museum starts on September 10; it's already sold out for this year but booking for the rest of the run, from January 1 through to July 11, will open on October 21. If you've never seen this most breathtaking of historical artefacts, you may want to seize the chance before it leaves London next year for its permanent home in Normandy, which will have been renovated during its absence. At Southampton City Art Gallery, we're promised an extensive exhibition of British art from the first half of the 20th century, drawing on the museum's own substantial holdings and those of the Ingram Collection . Running from September 26 to February 21,  Art Then! British Painting, Sculpture and Drawing, 1910-1960  will feature artists including Barbara Hepworth, Gwen John , Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious.   There might not be much new on in London this month, but we'll always have Paris. Starting at the Musée Jacquemart-André with Time...

Picture Postcards from the Alps

Visit the evocative Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller exhibition at the National Gallery in London and you could think it was sponsored by the Austrian Tourist Board, because these oil paintings so beautifully depict the magnificent Alpine scenery that has long attracted visitors.  Those towering mountains with their craggy grey peaks, so high they're topped with a glacier, the rich green meadows, some above the treeline, others on lower slopes or down in the valleys where the rivers meander. It's all there. But look a little longer and you become aware that some things are missing; where are those familiar chairlifts, cable cars, broad ski pistes, railways and roads? There are only a scattering of houses; maybe just a few inns and hotels catering for the adventurous, for Austrian tourism is in its infancy. That's because Waldmüller was born in Vienna in 1793 and died near the Vienna Woods in 1865.  Waldmüller: Landscapes , a free single-room display of just over a dozen paintings...

Four Scotsmen Walk into an Art Gallery....

France had the Impressionists, Germany had the Expressionists, and Italy had the Futurists, but Scotland -- well, Scotland had the Colourists. Four of them, to be precise, creating quite distinctive, often very exuberant art in the first few decades of the 20th century, and you can see them right now in  Scottish Colourists: Radical Perspectives  at The Arc in Winchester.  We've featured the Colourists on this blog before , but you don't get the chance to see them in southern England that much, and this Winchester show (previously on at Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh) places them in context with some of their British and European contemporaries, some of whose work carries quite an impact. All in all, it's a very enjoyable exhibition.  The Colourists were JD Fergusson, SJ Peploe, FCB Cadell and Leslie Hunter. All influenced by developments in Post-Impressionist French art, and notably by the bold use of colour and line of the Fauvists , they didn't actually exhibit tog...