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...
Two museums in two countries collaborate on a big exhibition, to be shown in both, and you tend to assume that, apart from a few tweaks, you'll see much the same in each city. What we weren't quite expecting when we went along to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to see Rembrandt-Velázquez this month was to find not only a completely different approach to the show we'd seen at the Prado in Madrid during the summer, but for the most part a completely different set of paintings. The Prado exhibition bringing together the great Dutch and Spanish masters of the 17th century included some superlative pictures, but we were less than convinced by the curators' premise that, beneath the surface, there weren't really any national differences in the approach to art 400 years ago. It seemed a bit too much of an obvious pro-European political message and led to comparisons between paintings that we felt at times were rather contrived. This show in Amsterdam, by con...