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 ...
It's a great story. Two brothers-in-law, with two competing visions of art: one from Venice's greatest family of painters, the other the son of a carpenter. In their early years they found inspiration in each other's work; while Andrea Mantegna's is full of invention, theatre and painterly tricks, Giovanni Bellini's is less intricate but more emotionally charged. For decades afterwards, they worked apart, in different cities; then Giovanni was called on to complete Andrea's final commission, one he was unable to finish before he died. As you make your way through Mantegna and Bellini at London's National Gallery, you find yourself weighing up the respective merits of these early Renaissance painters. Mantegna perhaps shades it in the first few rooms, but Bellini puts in a strong finish. This is, it has to be said, quite an intense exhibition, not one in which you can drift through easy-on-the-eye landscapes, wonder at the realism of still lives or admir...