Art for August

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During an extremely hot July here in the UK it was pleasant to enter cool art galleries and enjoy the treasures exhibited within. Do keep a look out for our Art News pages  which are usually updated at least twice a week as exhibitions and art-related events take place. Cassone writers regularly visit museums and galleries on your behalf and you can read in this issue their thoughts on some of the large exhibitions that opened for the summer.

Patricia Railing was at the exhibition ‘Malevich: Revolutionary of Russian Art’at Tate Modern 16 July – 26 October 2014,which culminates in London after a year of travelling, and explains why she thinks that ‘Kazimir Malevich was, truly, a great painter’.

No one claims that Jeff Koons is a great painter (probably not even Jeff Koons) but his art has been pulling in the crowds in New York. We asked Tom Huhn to investigate.

Sarah Lawson went to the exhibition ‘Art and Life 1920-1931: Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, William Staite Murray’, which is at Dulwich Picture Gallery until 21 September. David Ecclestone covered this exhibition for Cassone when it was on show at Kettles Yard Cambridge, where he concentrated on the work of Ben Nicholson, and now at Dulwich Sarah Lawson looks at the others in the group – particularly Winifred Nicholson.

Sue Ecclestone has been delighted by the National Gallery, London, exhibition 'Making Colour', where you not only see some very beautiful paintings but find out how the colours they are made from link them to far-flung parts of the world and the ingenuity of those who learned how to make paint from some unlikely substances.

Birds have been depicted in art for centuries, so an exhibition currently on in Norwich, England, has no shortage of beautiful and fascinating exhibits - not restricted to the usual painting or sculpture. Hugh McGlyn found it 'hugely enjoyable' and he explains why here.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson is famous as the first woman to qualify as a doctor in England. The orignal Elizabeth Garrett Anderson hospital building now houses a gallery. The interiors were designed by Rhoda and Agnes Garrett, Elizabeth's cousins - in their day famous as decorators, a profession, like medicine,  just opening up to women. Jenny Kingsley visited to investigate for Cassone.

The English have had a love affair with Italy and its art for centuries. Jenny Kingsley is American by birth but is certainly not immune to its charms, particularly those of the more out-of-the-way spots. She takes us to Emilia-Romagna, a part of the country more of us should visit.

Art may not be your first association with Palma de Mallorca, so join Louis Byrne in an eye-opening trip to Es Baluard, a defensive structure now guarding a fine art collection.

In the early days of the Soviet Union, the new government was keen to win the hearts and minds of children. Robert Radford writes on Inside the Rainbow: Russian Children’s Literature 1920–1935: Beautiful Books, Terrible Times, a book that shows how they attempted to do that with books. Alexander Adams reviews  John Sloan: Drawing on Illustration, by Michael Lobel,which  he says will engage anyone interested in ‘American art, social realism and the area where fine art and commercial illustration overlap’. Art and politics often overlap in the world of photography and film, as Susan Noyes Platt discusses in a review of two new books.

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Cassone – ca-soh-neh – the elaborately  decorated chest that a wealthy Italian bride of the Renaissance period used to hold her trousseau: a box of beautiful things.