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Showing posts with the label Edward Bawden

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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Pallant Landscapes : An Appreciation of the Countryside

For centuries, landscape was usually seen as a backdrop in history or religious paintings, but  British Landscapes: A Sense of Place  at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester shows how it evolved as a genre in its own right. And in particular, how artists in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries were not just reproducing a scene before their eyes but trying to convey in their pictures the emotions and feelings evoked by the land and countryside: the sense of the place, as  Pallant Director Simon Martin, who c urated this exhibition, aptly describes it. The show's not on for much longer, but here's a few of our impressions, and let's start with a painting that's a fine example of how an artist puts current events and concerns on canvas.   It was December 1916 when Mark Gertler painted this view of the South Coast Near Swanage . It looks so peaceful, the sea is smooth, the distant cliffs of the headland appear soft and even the nearby greenery is out of focus. But W...
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Opening and Closing in October

There are a tremendous number of exhibitions opening this month, starting in London with Paul Cezanne at Tate Modern. Cezanne's painting revolutionised art at the end of the 19th century, and the Tate is promising us a "once-in-a-generation" show, the first big retrospective in the UK for more than 25 years, with around 80 works, more than 20 of them never before seen in Britain. They include The Basket of Apples from the Chicago Institute of Art, where the previous version of this show earned rave reviews. Cezanne is on in London from October 5 to March 12.  It's certainly not once in a generation for an exhibition about Lucian Freud, but it is the 100th anniversary of his birth this year, and his seven-decade career is surveyed at the National Gallery. Lucian Freud: New Perspectives will have more than 60 paintings, from early, intimate works to his late monumental fleshy nudes. It runs from October 1 to January 22, before heading to the Thyssen-Bornemisza muse...
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Venice in Peril, Part 2

You've just been to one exhibition about Canaletto and Venice, and then a second one comes along straight away, a bit like delayed vaporettos on the Grand Canal.  Canaletto's Venice Revisited at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich contrasted the painter's classic views of the lagoon city with the threat it faces today from rising sea levels and mass tourism, and  Canaletto and Melissa McGill: Performance and Panorama  at the Lightbox in Woking takes a similar tack. But if Greenwich's display of statistics about population decline and increasing flooding and an array of disposable plastic boots for tourists left us rather depressed, we found something surprisingly soothing and uplifting about the American artist Melissa McGill's attempt to alert us to the same problems.  Back in 2019, McGill created the Red Regatta project, which saw dozens of traditional Venetian sailing boats hoisted with sails she had hand-painted in varying shades of red traversing the ci...
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The Artist Who Was Everywhere

If you lived in Britain, particularly in London, during the middle of the 20th century, Barnett Freedman was all around you. As the go-to commercial artist during a period spanning the 30s to the 50s, his work was all over the Tube and London buses, on advertising, stamps and book tokens, as well as adorning the covers of collectable books and providing their illustrations. It's a career that's celebrated, more than six decades after Freedman's death, in a hugely enjoyable exhibition, Barnett Freedman: Designs for Modern Britain , at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, which has just reopened after months of coronavirus-induced closure. The Pallant is our local art gallery, and its director, Simon Martin, said he didn't want to "sanitise the experience" of museum-going on reopening. So, while visitor numbers are limited and timed tickets are compulsory, we were pleased that once you got inside, there's actually very little that you would notice tha...
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The Englishness of Edward Bawden: Linocuts and Watercolours at Dulwich

There's an distinctive Englishness about Edward Bawden's art. Quirky, humorous and rather understated. So there's quite a lot to like in the  Edward Bawden  exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, the biggest such retrospective since he died in 1989. Some of his linocuts and illustrations are masterful, but his watercolours, while nice, are a wee bit underwhelming. Dulwich's attempt to persuade you of the breadth and depth of his artistic achievement, in a show that brings together more than 150 works, doesn't totally succeed. At his best, Bawden could produce the sort of bold graphics that are instantly recognisable, and one of the six rooms in this show brings together a selection. It's Victoriana seen from the 1950s and 1960s, when, if not quite yet coming back into fashion, it was on the cusp of doing so -- unless it had already been lost to bombing or redevelopment. We get to enjoy  Liverpool Street Station ,  London Markets , and, in this example,  Brig...
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Opening in May

Shape of Light is the title of the new show that Tate Modern says aims to tell the intertwined stories of photography and abstract art for the first time. Man Ray and Alfred Stieglitz are among the pioneering photographers featured from May 2 to October 14. At the Royal Academy, the third of Tacita Dean's three spring shows at major London museums opens on May 19. This one focuses on Landscape  and runs to August 12. The two others --  Portrait  at the National Portrait Gallery and Still Life at the National Gallery -- can be seen until May 28. Edward Bawden , perhaps best known as an illustrator and graphic artist, is the subject of a wide-ranging retrospective at Dulwich Picture Gallery that's also intended to champion his work as a fine artist, including innovative watercolours in the 1930s. It's on from May 23 to September 9, following on from Dulwich's excellent David Milne show. The Guildhall Art Gallery in the City of London focuses on William De Morgan...
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