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...
So, it's Spain against Holland in Madrid, for a much-anticipated meeting in the heat of the summer. And, from a rich pool of talent, there are some really big names on both sides. But it's not football we're here for, we've come to the Museo del Prado for 17th-century art, in the shape of an exhibition called Velázquez, Rembrandt, Vermeer -- Parallel Visions . Is it any good? Well, the opening 25 minutes are fantastic and there's a real purple patch in the second half, but unfortunately they can't keep the pace up for the entire game. The idea of this show isn't so much a contest between the painters of opposing nations, it's to illustrate how similar their art was 350 years ago in the context of a united European culture (strong message here, one might say). National differences were overstated by art historians in the 19th and 20th centuries, the curators argue. Works by Spanish and Dutch masters hang side by side, for you to compare and contrast....