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...
The year is 1843. And the theme of this hard-hitting painting is slavery, in all its gory detail, as practised in France's West Indian colonies. Slavery, you say? What about liberté, égalité, fraternité? Ah yes, slavery was abolished in 1794, after the French Revolution. But, and this takes a bit of getting your head round, it was reestablished by Napoleon eight years later. By the 1840s there was a strong abolitionist movement going in France, and an effective way to spread the message was to shock the public with the visual truth of what slavery actually meant. This painting by Marcel Verdier, Beating at Four Stakes in the Colonies , is perhaps the most searing image in a sprawling exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, Black Models: From Géricault to Matisse , focusing on the way black people have been depicted in French art over the past 200 years or so and taking in broader themes of black history along the way. In Verdier's picture, a black slave is stretched...