Art

Emma Crichton-Miller

Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One

Tate Britain, 5th June to 23rd September

This exhibition, marking the centenary of the 1918 armistice, explores the art that emerged in Britain, France and Germany between 1916 and 1932, as Europe took stock. Memorial sculptures by Käthe Kollwitz and others sought new language to do justice to catastrophic loss. Surrealists and Dadaists, like Hannah Höch, Max Ernst and Edward Burra, deployed collage and photomontage to confront the dismembering of people and civilisations. German satirists George Grosz and Otto Dix (below) showed a world twisted and betrayed; others sought salvation in classicism or vibrant modernity.

Lee Miller and Surrealism in Britain

The Hepworth Wakefield, 22th June to 7th October

The Hepworth looks at Lee Miller, fashion icon, surrealist muse and war correspondent, who used her camera to document the birth of surrealism in Britain during the 1930s. Mistress to Man Ray and wife to British surrealist Roland Penrose, she was a vital creative link between the European pioneers of surrealism—Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte—and British experimenters like Eileen Agar, Leonora Carrington and Henry Moore.

Thomas Cole: Eden to Empire

National Gallery, 11th June to 7th October

In 1829 Thomas Cole, a self-taught painter whose British family had emigrated to America in 1818, embarked on a study tour of Europe. What he learned from Claude, Turner and Constable transformed him, on his return, from a talented newcomer to the founding figure of American landscape painting. This revelatory exhibition, which includes 58 paintings by Cole and those who inspired him, includes his masterpiece, The Oxbow (1836).