The Art Exhibitions Blog

Terrible times: poverty and unemployment everywhere around; right-wing strongmen and populists in power overseas; and the shadow of war hanging over it all. Times for artists to take a stand.  And, in the 1930s, some of them did, forming a group in London called the Artists International Association. Their story is the subject of  Comrades in Art: Artists against Fascism at Towner Eastbourne, a show with a lot of very interesting art amid fascinating history -- but rather too much detail to absorb easily. There are many little-known or unknown names to conjure with, and it's a big exhibition; this is a venue where you never feel short-changed.  Let's plunge straight into the action, because it's all kicking off in Trafalgar Square, where the police are going in violently against protesters who've arrived in London after a hunger march against unemployment.   The Struggle between the Unemployed and the Police Forces  (also known as Hunger Marchers Entering ...

Do you sometimes find it's not so much the art itself as the stories behind it that make for a really enjoyable exhibition? It's certainly the case at Towner Eastbourne in  A Life in Art: Lucy Wertheim, Patron, Collector, Gallerist  and  Reuniting the Twenties Group: From Barbara Hepworth to Victor Pasmore ; these two linked shows take us well beyond the paintings and sculpture to uncover fascinating personal histories and to shine a light on the mid 20th-century art scene in Britain. And, unless you're an absolute expert in the art of the period, you'll discover many talented artists who are very unfamiliar names.  Who was Lucy Wertheim? Without formal art training but with a fair amount of money, she broke into the male-dominated British art scene and was a patron to many young artists, establishing her own gallery in London in 1930. She set up the Twenties Group -- artists in their 20s, as the name suggests -- whose work she tried to exhibit round the country, wit...

Summer's almost here, and it's perhaps the time for outdoor pleasures; there certainly aren't that many big exhibitions to tell you about in June. So let's start with a small one, a free display at London's National Gallery. Picasso Ingres: Face to Face , running from June 3 to October 9, brings together for the first time Pablo Picasso's 1932 painting Woman with a Book , from the Norton Simon Museum in California, and the work that inspired it, the National's own Madame Moitessier by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Picasso saw the Ingres portrait in 1921 and was enthralled by it. "Lesser artists borrow," Picasso said. "Great artists steal."  Summer means the seaside, so what better destination to see an exhibition than the Towner in Eastbourne. Following 2021's superb John Nash retrospective, this year's big event puts the spotlight on the pioneering female collector who opened the Wertheim Gallery in London in 1930 and the arti...

You may, like us, have seen her face in paintings before, but quite probably you haven't seen the art she made herself. In the 1920s and 30s, Eileen Mayo was an in-demand model for artists including Laura Knight , Dod Procter, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, but at the same time she was pursuing a career of her own as a creative artist in a range of media. She left Britain in the 1950s for Australia and then New Zealand; her name is little known in this country, but she became much more celebrated -- and honoured -- in Australasia.  Now, for the first time in Britain, she has an exhibition devoted to her.  Eileen Mayo: A Natural History  at Towner Eastbourne shows her as a model, a painter, a graphic artist, a designer of tapestries and stamps, and as a book illustrator. It's free to visit, and we thoroughly enjoyed it. Back in 2019, the Dulwich Picture Gallery put on an exhibition about the linocuts that emerged from the Grosvenor School of Art in Pimlico run by Claude F...

It's a beguiling, entrancing landscape, yet somehow also very reassuring. The year is 1918, and John Nash is back in England after many months of service on the Western Front in World War I, one of the few survivors from his company. While working by day on paintings to commemorate the conflict as an official war artist, in the evening he's able to leave the memories of the slaughter behind to work for himself, on pictures that purged the horror of the trenches. This is The Cornfield , and it's probably the stand-out painting in a really outstanding exhibition at Towner Eastbourne, John Nash: The Landscapes of Love and Solace , the first retrospective devoted to the life and work of the artist, the less well-known younger brother of Paul Nash, in more than half a century. You can see in this painting a fascination with shapes, patterns and shadows that characterises the best of Nash's landscapes: the angular forms of the row of corn sheaves, their edges highlighted by t...