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 ...
You'd have had to be on another planet or in a remote part of the world without Internet access to have missed that it's fifty years since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon (or since NASA faked the entire thing, if you subscribe to the conspiracy theory). Only 10 other men have followed their giant leap, and none since 1972, which is something surely nobody would have expected in 1969. Thomas Cook was even printing luggage labels for the package tourists it was going to take there, and you can see one of them in The Moon , the latest exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. The curators use the anniversary not only to relive the breathtaking scenes from 1969 and to explore how the race to get there developed but to examine the significance and allure of the Moon around the world, before bringing us bang up to date with the latest plans for a permanent human presence on Earth's only satellite. As the show reveals, human...