Art

Emma Crichton-Miller

Manga

British Museum, 23rd May to 26th August

Today a multi-billion pound global industry, Manga, the Japanese comic book art form, traces back to 1200, when an anonymous artist with a satirical sense of humour produced the Handscrolls of Frolicking Animals (Chōjūgiga), with monkeys and rabbits disporting like humans. It is in the 20th century, however, that Manga became such a powerful cultural force, gripping the Japanese with its gender- and species-fluid characters and magical transformations, and inspiring international fans through anime films. The British Museum, in collaboration with the The National Art Center, Tokyo, illuminates the whole sweep.

Vuillard: The Poetry of Everyday Life

The Holburne Museum, Bath, 24th May to 15th September

What is poetic in the painting of Édouard Vuillard, beyond the quiet justness of form and colour, is his feeling for the subtle stuff of domestic life: corner tables, sunlight in a garden, mother and sister quietly at work, sewing, in the intimacy of their shared home. This exhibition, the most extensive of Vuillard’s work in the UK for 15 years, explores his delicate evocations of the complex emotions beneath the quotidian.

Huguette Caland

Tate St Ives, 24th May to 1st September

It is only recently that the astonishing oeuvre of Lebanese artist Huguette Caland has been widely exhibited. All tribute to Tate St Ives for this show of her joyful, erotically charged, colourful paintings and intricate drawings from the 1970s and 1980s. Born in 1931, the daughter of Lebanon’s first post-independence president, Bechara El Khoury, Caland fled for Paris and then LA. Her work shifts between abstraction and figuration, the suggestive and the explicit, circling the female body.