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 ...
Vuillard, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Hammershøi: The British painter Harold Gilman seems to have to sucked up a whole range of continental European artistic influences and, in the second decade of the 20th century, distilled them into a series of intimate, often enigmatic, colour-filled pictures. He died in 1919, aged 43, in the Spanish flu epidemic that swept away millions around the world at the tail end of World War I. An appropriate anniversary, then, for an exhibition about Gilman at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, the first such show for 35 years. It's called Harold Gilman: Beyond Camden Town , because it focuses on the final decade of the artist's career, when he moved on from the rather more formal post-Impressionism of the Camden Town Group around the often very murky Walter Sickert. He continued to depict everyday subjects and apply his paint thickly but became, well, just a little bit more daring and experimental. At the start of this show there's a brownish...