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...
Few painters have inspired as many other artists as Jean-François Millet. For the German Impressionist Max Liebermann, Millet was "the most groundbreaking artist in modern painting", while for Vincent van Gogh, the Frenchman was "that essential modern painter who opened the horizon to many." What made Millet so thoroughly modern? It was his rough brushwork, his simplified forms with strong contours. These were radically new compositions featuring high horizons and empty expanses. And yet in his own time, Millet's warts-and-all depictions of the harsh reality of rural life were just too avant-garde, too controversial for many. Take Man with a Hoe from the start of the 1860s. The critics attacked the ugliness of the man leaning on his hoe, taking a brief breather from his back-breaking work. They decried the style as caricatured. For Millet, though, this was an image full of compassion for the peasant's lot, full of detail like the purple thist...