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 ...
There are some harrowing images in Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War I at Tate Britain: dead bodies, mutilated faces, mechanised slaughter. It's not exactly a feel-good exhibition. But it does contain a lot of uplifting art, some of it stunningly displayed, and it's well worth seeing. Millions died on each side between 1914 and 1918; millions more were wounded. At the start of this exhibition we see in a glass case three steel soldiers' helmets, from Britain, France and Germany, the three countries the show focuses on. The abandoned helmet was widely used to symbolise the death of an individual combatant, and William Orpen was among the painters to adopt the image in A Grave in a Trench . This, like many of the works early on in this exhibition, is from the Imperial War Museum. More explicit images of death were not wanted by the military authorities. Christopher Nevinson's Paths of Glory was censored, but the artist defied the ruling by including it an...