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 perhaps the portraits that provide some of the most memorable images in Virginia Woolf: an exhibition inspired by her writings at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. There are 80 women artists featured in this show aiming to build on Woolf's perspectives on feminism and creaticity -- quite a contrast from Chichester's last, testosterone-laden Pop Art exhibition. Considering how tough it was for many of them to make their way in a male-dominated environment, there's a remarkable self-assurance about the way painters like Dod Procter and Ethel Walker committed themselves to canvas. The theme running through this show is one of pioneering women defying convention, as Woolf did, and not just in the 20th century. In 1877, Louise Jopling is looking you straight in the eye. She's from Manchester. Bet you blink first. Coincidentally, Laura Knight was born in 1877, and in the 1930s, by now a dame, she became the first woman artist elected to full members...