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...
Google The Great Wave , surely the most widely known, the most easily identifiable image in Japanese art, and, in less than a second, you'll get more than 1 billion results, some of which might even tell you something about its creator, the great painter and printmaker Katsushika Hokusai. Of course, in the days before the Internet and search engines, you'd have needed to get some sort of reference book off the shelf to find out about something like that. Where to turn first? An encyclopedia, possibly. The Great Picture Book of Everything : that sounds perfect.... let's see; it's got depictions of plants and animals, distant lands and distant peoples, myths and gods, inventions. Who's created the illustrations? Wow, Hokusai himself.... Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything at the British Museum in London puts on public display for the first time more than 100 drawings Hokusai made in the 1820s to 1840s for an encyclopedia that was never actually published....