The Bayeux Tapestry exhibition at the British Museum starts on September 10; it's already sold out for this year but booking for the rest of the run, from January 1 through to July 11, will open on October 21. If you've never seen this most breathtaking of historical artefacts, you may want to seize the chance before it leaves London next year for its permanent home in Normandy, which will have been renovated during its absence. At Southampton City Art Gallery, we're promised an extensive exhibition of British art from the first half of the 20th century, drawing on the museum's own substantial holdings and those of the Ingram Collection . Running from September 26 to February 21, Art Then! British Painting, Sculpture and Drawing, 1910-1960 will feature artists including Barbara Hepworth, Gwen John , Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious. There might not be much new on in London this month, but we'll always have Paris. Starting at the Musée Jacquemart-André with Time...
There's been a recent flurry of exhibitions in London and elsewhere about the Russian revolution and Soviet art and design, but Russian art before 1900 isn't very well known in the West. So we seized the opportunity on a trip to Oslo this month to take in The Swan Princess at the Munch Museum, a show devoted to Russian art from 1880 to 1910 and mostly drawn from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. It was a period when Nordic artists were looking to the past, to rural culture and to traditional myths and legends for inspiration. The Russians were doing something similar, many of them working from the artists' colony at Abramtsevo near Moscow. This show takes its title from one of the most famous artworks of the period. The Swan Princess by Mikhail Vrubel is drawn from a story by Pushkin, which was turned into an opera by Rimsky-Korsakov, and here is the swan transforming magically into a beautiful princess. It's a swirl of whites and greys with highlights in pink, to...