This exhibition explores the complex relationship between Italian Divisionism and the emerging Futurist movement in the early years of the 20th century. It is the first of its kind to be organised outside Italy.

Centred in Milan, Divisionism was arguably the most significant art movement to emerge in Italy during the last decades of the 19th century.

Dissatisfaction with modern civilization led Divisionist painters to explore Symbolism. Their aim was to represent political concerns and make their art into an instrument for social change.

The movement also sprang from research into optics and the physics of light. Inspired by French developments with pointillism, and fuelled by a desire to increase the luminosity and brilliance of their paintings, artists developed new techniques applying paint in a variety of dots and strokes.

This exhibition features around 60 paintings, including works by the main protagonists of Divisionism: Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, Giovanni Segantini and Gaetano Previati. It will also display works by the Futurist artists Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni and Carlo Carrà.

Radical Light is a unique opportunity to explore a lesser-known, yet undoubtedly important movement, offering a link to the National Gallery’s great historical collections of Italian art.

The exhibition is organised by the National Gallery, London and Kunsthaus Zurich.

Opening times:
18 June - 7 September 2008

10am - 6pm daily
(last admissions 5.15pm)
10am - 9pm Wednesdays
(last admissions 8.15pm)

Location:
Sainsbury Wing

Tickets:
A timed entry system will be in operation.

British Orientalist Painting will explore the responses of British artists to the cultures and landscapes of the Near and Middle East between 1780 and 1930, offering vital historical and cultural perspectives on the challenging questions of the ‘Orient’ and its representation in British art.

It will bring together over 120 paintings, prints and drawings of bazaars, public baths, domestic interiors and religious sites, and all the major genres, themes and preoccupations of Orientalism in British art will be considered. Several exceptional and rarely seen paintings by John Frederick Lewis, Edward Lear, David Wilkie, Richard Dadd, Lord Leighton, and William Holman Hunt, will be shown, as well as significant works by many less familiar names.

The exhibition is organised at TATE BRITAIN

Opening times:
Tate Britain is open daily, 10.00-17.50
Exhibitions 10.00-17.40 (last admission 17.00)
Late night opening on the first Friday of each month - last admission 21.00