Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting one day course from the London Art History Society looking at two married 19th century artistic couples, William and Evelyn De Morgan and Charles and Margaret Mackintosh. Anne Anderson split the day into four lectures with one of each of the characters. All the talks gave a good overview of their art with good illustrations but I’d have liked a clearer narrative. We seemed to spot around their lives a bit and inevitably looking at each of a married couple separately led to some repetition. I did however like the fact they got equal billing and emphasis. I also liked the fact that she included Margaret Mackintosh’s sister. Frances, in the section on Margaret. I did learn new things about all the artists and look forward to seeing more of their work and understanding it better.      

Interesting talk at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival looking at two aspects of art in the early 20th century. Sue Roe talked about her book “In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and Modernism in Paris, 1900-1910” looking at how and why this area of Paris became the birthplace of Modernism in art. She spoke about how Picasso went there and found a new way of working. Esther Freud then talked about her new novel “Mr Mac and me” which is a novel about Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s time in on the Suffolk coast. She’d written it after moving to the area and researching the house she bought which had been an inn. Her main character, a young boy, is imagined as the son of the family who owned the inn. There was an interesting discussion between the writers chaired by Olivia Laing and some good questions from the audience.  

Stylish exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects on the architectural career of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. This was a well described and presented exhibition which aimed to put Mackintosh in his professional context and to look at the factors which influenced his practice such as function, budget, process and aesthetics. I loved the timelime at the beginning which included artefacts and photographs and two interweaving lines of his life and world events. I loved the section on his early career and to see what his early style was like plus what projects he worked on which we no longer associate with him. I was interested to see that he had worked on most of the competition drawings for the firm he worked for, Honeyman and Kepple, including an unsuccessful submission for Liverpool Cathedral. The section on houses he built was fascinating with nice short videos showing the buildings now. His architectural drawings are works of art in themselves. There were...