There are some familiar names and familiar paintings in Art Then! British Painting, Sculpture and Drawing, 1910-1960 at Southampton City Art Gallery, but it's the unfamiliar that makes it especially worth the trip to a venue you might not normally consider for an exhibition. This show provides an excellent overview of art trends in this country in the first half of the 20th century. And it's free! Southampton has a very good collection, but we often get the feeling that a lot of interesting works are in store behind closed doors. Pleasant surprises await when they finally see the light of the day, in this case in combination with a selection from the extensive Ingram Collection of modern British art. In all, there are more than 100 works by over 100 artists, demonstrating how the British reacted to the latest developments in art on the Continent. So let's start with a couple of hidden gems from the Southampton treasure trove, first of all a Landscape that really stoppe...
Who could resist a trip to the seaside? Especially when you're tempted by this glamorous bathing beauty, luring you into the warm waters of the North Sea. Cromer, Cleethorpes, Scarborough or Skegness, so seductive in the 1920s and 30s, especially when you could travel there in comfort and speed on the London and North Eastern Railway. In our case, we took a rather more workaday Southern Railway train to Hastings, for Seaside Modern: Art and Life on the Beach at Hastings Contemporary. It's the perfect venue for an exhibition about the art of the seaside, right down on the front by the fishing boats and those black wooden sheds for fishermen's nets that it's built to blend in with. Fish and chips, ice cream and seagulls are all around. Oh, and the miniature railway runs right past the gallery. It was hot and sunny, it really was. Because it always is at the seaside, apparently. These railway posters from between the wars are your introduction to this fun show. As curato...