Amber Cowan’s choice
MONET: THE SEINE AND THE SEA — VÉTHEUIL AND NORMANDY, 1878-1883
Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, Aug 5-Oct 26
(0131-624 6200)
MONET’S SUNLIT impressions of luxuriant horticulture have made him the most popular artist in the world. The Royal Academy’s 1999 exhibition broke all box-office records, while his garden at Giverney, home of the famous water lilies pond, is France’s most popular tourist attraction after Versailles. As long as you are prepared for a bit of a crush, this first show to be displayed in the restored and refurbished Royal Scottish Academy building should outshine all others at the Edinburgh Festival this year.
By the time of his death in 1926, Monet was a rich, successful man; but in 1878 he was broke and living in cramped conditions with his dying wife and two sons in the rural village of Vétheuil, on the River Seine. To visitors whose only perception of him are the later water lilies, this show will be full of eye-openers. While most of the images, from sun- splashed meadowscapes to his sublime beach scenes (The Cliff at Dieppe, 1882), soak slowly into the senses, there is also a handful of more immediate still-lifes and a portrait of the cooling corpse of his wife, Camille, which prickle with emotional electricity.
Advertisement
The display is complemented by a show of the French landscape painters that Monet most admired: Corot, Courbet and Daubigny.
Amber Cowan’s best exhibitions nationwide
THE CHILDREN OF EXODUS
Aberystwyth Arts Centre Gallery 1, until Sep 20
(01970 623232)
SEBASTIÃO SALGADO’s photographs of the endless waves of refugees ebbing and flowing across the globe are enough to make you feel seasick. The Children of Exodus is taken from Migrations, for which the photographer travelled to the refugee camps and slums of 40 countries. Salgado calls himself a reporter, not an artist, but his pictures are meticulously composed nonetheless. Ultimately, however, this is photography with a moral imperative: that however cheap the currency of human life has become, we cannot afford to look away.
GEORGE SHAW: WHAT I DID THIS SUMMER
Ikon, Birmingham, until Sep 14 (0121-248 0708)
Advertisement
“NOTHING, LIKE something, happens everywhere,” wrote Philip Larkin, which would be an apt caption for Shaw’s empty, evocatively romantic images of suburbia (see Blossomest Blossom). Painted from his memories of the Coventry housing estate where he grew up, these canvases are devoid of human life, the only signs of occupation being the rows of yawning garage doors stretching towards the horizon. Fifties semis shade their windows with greying net curtains, while empty playing fields have the pallid grittiness of a Ken Loach film.
CRAIGIE AITCHISON
Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, Aug 6-Sep 13
(0131-556 4441)
ONE OF Britain’s most illustrious living painters, Aitchison daubs colours on to his canvas with an innocence that belies his sophisticated subject matter (see Stable & Donkey). His favourite subjects are the Crucifixion, dogs and black people (once asked by another artist why he paints only black people, he replied: “Why do you paint only white people?”), and over the years he has scooped every award, from the Jerwood Painting Prize to a CBE. The Ingleby has lured Aitchison back to Edinburgh, where he was born, for his first selling exhibition in Scotland.
AFTER IMAGE
Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sep 27
(0131-225 2383)
THE FRUITMARKET’s Festival exhibition is a display of photographs by four women artists, all obsessed with concealing, disguising and transforming their sexuality. Alongside ten portraits by Cindy Sherman are photographs from Ana Mendieta’s series Facial Hair Transplants and Simryn Gill’s Vegetation. It is the work of Francesca Woodman, though, that really magnetises the eye. Her haunting self-portraits (see Providence), naked or clothed in flimsy, floaty dresses, were taken during her early teens up until her death at the age of 22.
Advertisement
RIVER JOURNEYS
The Lowry, Salford, until Oct 26 (0870-787 5780)
AS A source of inspiration, the Manchester Ship Canal is hardly in the same league as, say, the waterways of Venice or the River Seine. But it has still provided a solid impetus for the six artists who were invited to take part in River Journeys. Tracking the River Irwell from its source in Lancashire, through Manchester to the Irish Sea, the display includes photographs (see The Wayoh Reservoir, Edgeworth, Bolton, by Stuart Royse) and work inspired by the canal itself, such as Jill Randall’s pair of life-sized lungs, which are made out of aeroplane parts.