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...
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...