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 ...
There's something very un-Scottish about the Scottish Colourists. So vibrant, so exuberant, so full of sun. Four artists who, in the first few decades of the 20th century, infused their art with a French spirit, the feel of the Mediterranean, Fauvist and Cubist influences. There are a lot of paintings by JD Fergusson, SJ Peploe, FCB Cadell and GL Hunter in Scottish galleries, but the Tate's website musters only five works between them. So Burning Bright: The Scottish Colourists at the Lightbox in Woking offers those of us in south-east England the rare chance to appreciate these groundbreaking British modernists. The Colourists weren't a movement in the sense that they worked and exhibited together; indeed, the description Scottish Colourists wasn't coined until after World War II, by which time three of them were already dead. But they were friends, their careers followed similar courses and they absorbed the same European influences, having all gone to France bef...