August is always one of the quietest months for new exhibitions, and this year is no different, but we do have one big event to alert you to, as well as two splendid shows that only have weeks to run. The one major opening is Gwen John: Strange Beauties at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh. Running from August 1 to January 4, this is a comprehensive retrospective of the work of the woman perhaps now seen as Wales's most significant artist, born 150 years ago this year. Maybe a little too comprehensive, according to some of the reviews of the show when it was on at the National Museum in Cardiff. The exhibition goes on to the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, in February and then at the end of July next year to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC. We saw a rather smaller Gwen John exhibition in Chichester in 2023. Last chance to see.... Ending on August 23 is the exhibition at the Lakenhal in Leiden ...
Wouldn't it be nice to get away for a while, to spend some time in a really exotic environment? Well, you can. Just book a ticket to Peru: a Journey in Time at the British Museum, where the past, the present and the future merge into an other-worldly experience. And this is another world, a very strange different world, where the inhabitants make curious but stunning artefacts, where they sacrifice humans to appease the gods, where great civilisations develop, but without the invention of the wheel, or the invention of writing. If you have no script, images play a huge part in everyday life. And in this absorbing show we're confronted by a succession of arresting objects made by the peoples who lived in Peru over the course of several thousand years. Such items were used in ceremonies to seek the assistance of higher powers for the living and to prepare the dead for the afterlife. And these were not merely inanimate objects; they were seen as living beings themselves. The f...