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 ...
It's a bestseller: Katy Hessel's The Story of Art without Men . And if you've read her 2022 book rewriting art history, or even if you haven't, you can go beyond the printed page and see the real thing close up for yourself, in Europe's only art museum without men. It's in the south of France, in a hilltop village just outside Cannes: Femmes Artistes Musée Mougins . Now in an ideal world, you shouldn't really need a museum in 2025 devoted solely to women artists. But this is clearly not an ideal world. As Hessel and many others have pointed out, women have historically been woefully underrepresented both in traditional museums and galleries and on the commercial art market. This women-only space (on the walls, we hasten to add; male visitors very welcome) aims to go some way to restore the balance. Did we like what we saw? Most definitely. The museum, which opened last year, displays a rotating selection from the hundreds of works by women artists collected...