Cathy's Art Diary

Thought provoking exhibition at Somerset House which arose from a residency by artist Michael Takeo Magrunder in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College, London. He spent this time discussing the Book of Revelations with a range of scholars from theologian to art historians to sociologist and then looked at how to translate this academic into visual images. The result was five displays, each in their own room. One room features shots from an apocalyptic video game presented in frames and slowly moving and developing as you looked at them. Despite the devastated scenes the works were very peaceful to watch. Another had chapters of the book converted onto laser etched tables in a computer code with QR codes on them which, when scanned, did a Google image search on your phone on the first sentence of the book. My favourite was a room on the horse with an illuminated horse’s skull surrounded by small 3d prints of a skull. In the room is a 3...

Slightly disappointing exhibition at the Design Museum looking at how women’s social standing has changed over the last 150 year and how clothing has both reflected that and enable it. I liked the fact it looked at how materials had changed to meet new needs but also how changes in style and materials eg corsets and enabled some of the change. There was a nice focus on designers who had had big changes such as Chanel, Mary Quant and Schiaparelli. It was a good overview of women's fashion in this period. What woman could not be moved by seeming a genuine Suffragettes hat and look forward to a film on the movement due out next year with Meryl Streep as Emmeline Pankhurst! Some of the costumes were in the exhibition. However the best section was at the back showing clothes lent by women in power today in politics, business, fashion and culture. I think I had been hoping for more of this. It was good to read the real stories about why they dressed in a certain way and ...

An excellent study morning at the National Gallery looking in detail at their Water-lilies picture by Money which has recently returned from Tate Modern. The morning was led by James Heard who began by setting the picture in the context of Monet’s life and work. We took a detailed look at some of the series pictures and talked about why he was doing them. After a quick coffee we looked at the water-lilies pictures. I hadn’t realised they had been commissioned by the French Prime Minister Clemenceau as a war memorial. I was fascinated to see the pictures of them in Monet’s studio. The tutor handed round pictures of several of the studies and asked us in groups to think about why these pictures were so radical when compared to other pictures of the time and to think about why they appeal to a post-modern eye. Usually these sessions are purely lectures so it was nice to get a bit more interaction and discussion going. Finally we spent some time in front of the picture an...

Brilliant installation at the Whitechapel Gallery by Kader Attia. It seemed to consist of two parts. Firstly there was a huge square of bookshelves with a cabinet of curiosities in the middle. Above the cabinet was a mirror on the ceiling giving the impression that the shelves went on for ever. It was really effective and was a peaceful space to walk around. I am not sure what it meant but I didn’t really mind as I liked it and it had an effect. At the far end of the room were some beautiful busts of disfigured First World War soldiers. They had the perfection of classical sculpture yet with damaged faces. It gave the impression that it was the art work not the person who was damaged. Each one was shown with a Muslim antique learning board. Again I am not quite sure why but it worked! I wish  had sneaked a photograph as there are none on the website.

Really interesting small exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery looking at seven public sculptures in London from conception to public reception, through the artists papers taken from the Henry Moore Institute Archive. I had never heard the story of the Epstein figures for the old BMA building on the Strand which were controversial when they were unveiled and which were deliberately damaged when the Rhodesian High Commission took over the building in the 1930s. The display looked at this controversy and at more recent campaigns to get hem restored. I had not imagined that the statue of the First World War general Haig on horseback on Whitehall which I pass nearly every day had been controversial or that it was the last equestrian monument in the UK. There was also a section on the Karl Marx memorial in Highgate Cemetery which has become an icon and rallying point. All in all a fascinating little show.

Innovative exhibition/installation at the Whitechapel Gallery of figurative sculpture from the V-A-C Collection from Moscow curated by installation artist Mike Nelson. This consisted of a large platform on the floor with an interesting collection of sculptures arranged on it. There was a nice Giacometti woman in the middle, a William de Kooning torso sitting on the edge and a Marino Maroni head and shoulders. The way the items were displayed made you look at them in relation to cone another and objects in their own right. Putting them all on one level seemed to make who the artist was less important and the work speak for itself. I loved the largest work “Camp Fire” by Althamer Ognisko which consisted of four pieces two of which were a sort of broken vehicle of some sort but the other two were wonderful life sized figures with realistic faces but almost skeletal bodies covered in badges, They had an odd mummy like feeling and yet I found them strangely endearing.

Retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery of work by Richard Tuttle, a companion show to his current installation at Tate Modern. I had liked the Tate installation but this left me a bit cold. The commentary to the pictures was by him, often in poetry form, and I found it didn’t explain the work to me so I was a bit confused. I liked the wires which had been stretch along a line drawn on the wall and then released giving an image of three lines, the original, the wire and the shadow of the wire. However I did find the three inches of rope nailed to the wall a bit silly and would personally have hovered up the bits of string on the floor.

Charming exhibition at the Town House looking at work by 20th century artists. This was a really lovely chance find. I was walking around the Spitalfields area and spotted a sign for this exhibition outside the shop and was attracted in by the fact it had a work by Duncan Grant in it. You go through a delightful early 18th century shop into a gallery across a yard. The show was beautifully curated and began with a colour sketch by Beryl Touchard, taking up its colour themes and then thinking about how works on paper are the best ways of looking at how an artist develops and works on a creative idea. The booklet to go with the show guides you through the links between the pictures and the ideas. I loved the watercolours of Venice by Hercules Brabazon Brabazon and Frank Brangwyn   in misty shades of blue with small red highlights. There were some lovely Laura Knight circus scenes. Most moving was a picture of prisoner at Belsen by Feliks Topolski in his role as a wa...

Interesting exhibition at the Old Truman Brewery of work by Nathan Sawaya made in LEGO bricks. I found the show a little pompous in places but some of the work was stunning. I particularly liked the figurative sculptures such as “The Swimmer” the top half of a swimming map on a glass table and the three large masks showing different facial expressions. The show was really well lit to make the best use of the shadows thrown by the bricks. I wasn’t so convinced by the pictures as the bricks gave them a rather pixilated effect. A few of the works were like shop displays such as the big dinosaur and the two op groups at the end but then I am a girl whose screen saver is the Queen and corgi made in LEGO in Hamley’s, so who am I to me snooty! Reviews Guardian Independent

Sumptuous and fascinating exhibition at the Royal Academy looking at the work of Giovanni Battista Moroni. I knew of Moroni’s work from the National Gallery but is was great to see so much in one place and not just portraits but also altar pieces. I was fascinated to see that he was actually in Trent around the time of the council which set the rules for counter-reformation art and how he incorporated these ideas, in particular how he represented new ideas in prayer recommended by Ignatius Loyola. Of course the portraits are the heart of the show and I liked the way it broke them down into the early works for the great families of the Lombard region, the simpler works for the local bourgeois and clergy and later works which the show described as the beginnings of modern portraiture. I love this sort of show which is not only about the artists but becomes a picture of a society at a given moment in time. I liked the connections between the people. It was good to i...

Surprisingly good exhibition at the Royal Academy of work by Anselm Keifer. I say surprisingly good because from the bits I had read about the show I didn’t think I was going to like it but I did! I’m not sure I always got all the historical and symbolic meanings but on a very basic level I liked the work and found it attractive and interesting. Knowing a bit more about it added something but I felt I responded to a lot of the work without that and sometimes the slightly over ponderous explanations didn’t add anything to an attractive piece.   Any show which has a picture of Virginia Woolf in the first room must be OK even if she is drowning! I liked the large scale works such as the attic studio works. I didn’t get all the Wagnerian references but I liked the scale and simplicity. I liked the way he painted wood and the sense of putting history in his own space. I also liked the room of paintings of buildings of the Third Reich. Again the scale drew you in. There...

Dated exhibition at the Royal Academy of work by Allen Jones. I use the word dated because although I am sure the work had something meaningful to say in 1960s Britain Jones’s style does not seem to have moved on much further since then so the ideas now come across as rather misogynistic. I thought the design of the show was good and I loved the arrangement of the room with the painted steel dancing figures and even the room at the end of trade mark figures. However it’s the works in the show that left me cold. I could have coped if there had been one sympathetic portrait or representation of a woman. I did find one sketch in the last room but as it dated to 1959 I’m not counting it! I would have also liked to see a bit more on technique. I liked a room representing the shelves of his studio showing some of the marquettes and sketches which are part of the process however I’d like to have known how the sculptures are made, does he have any hand in the manufacturing process...

Informative exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry looking at the city in the First World War. There was the usual selection of objects and tracing of details of the men who had served. There was a lovely water colour of a billet by Kenneth Wotten. I liked the information boards particularly the one with the best and easies to follow time line of the battles I’d seen. Most interesting however was the section on the role of industry in the war including a piece on the men of the Coventry Fortress Company who all signed up as part of the Machine Gun Corps and become some of the first tank crews. I also got a sense of a militant city. In late 1917 there had been a strike in the Coventry factories doing war work and leaflets were dropped on the city to urge people back to work. Also at there was rioting at the main commemoration service as former soldiers and factory workers were not included in the parade. Two incidents I had not heard of a gave a d...

Interesting exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry of photographs by Jason Scott Tilley. The show looked at three groups of photographs Tilley made over a ten year period travelling around India taking portraits of the people he met. He was inspired to do this by the work of his grandfather Bert Scott, who had been a press photographer in India before partition. The pictures were very tender and showed an involvement with his subjects. There were a set of various beggars who he got to know over a period of time and a number where people came up and asking him to include them. I liked the fact they were show with an album of his train tickets. These pictures were twinned with a selection of work from a Victorian publication “The people of India” which attempted to get a better understanding of the people in that part of the British Empire. The text with the pictures showed the assumptions and attitudes of the time. Finally there was also work...

Moving sculpture/installation in Trafalgar Square by Mark Humphrey to promote the British Legion campaign of the same name. It will tour Britain over the next four years. The work consisted of a statue of a soldier holding an armful of poppies in a long glass pointed box. At regular intervals air blew round the box blowing hundreds of loose poppy petals around him. I liked the fact the poppy petals were proper British Legion ones with the stalk and black centre removed. I thought this was a very simple and moving idea and I would love to see it in other spaces and it travels around the country.      

Interesting exhibition at St Margaret’s Westminster of work by members of the Army Arts (and Crafts) Society looking at War and in particular the First World War. There was an interesting selection of works in different materials. I liked the inclusion of a page from a graphic novel by Will Kevans and Richard Horner’s picture in crude wooden frames with barbed wire and trench items. I loved Ray Taylor’s “Lights out in Europe” which showed a government minister looking out over St James’s park with stretcher bearers in the section above and poppies above that, all shown via a window. An interesting subject and beautifully executive.  

Interesting film looking at the life of Effie Grey and her marriage to John Ruskin. It was interesting to see this film only a couple of days after seeing Mr Turner as Ruskin and Effie feature in that as well. I thought his was a good picture of the art world at this time. I loved the Royal Academy dinner and I thought Emma Thompson was majestic as Lady Eastlake. I would have liked a bit more about the Pre-Raphaelite’s as a group as although they appeared there was no real sense of their revolutionary effect and quite how bold Ruskin was to support them. I would have also liked more about Effie’s later life with Millais.. As it was it ended almost abruptly with Effie leaving Ruskin. I would have liked some idea of how the annulment worked, was there a court case? Even a note on the credits would have given some closure to the movie. My major gripe though was using Ophelia on the poster! The film does not imply that Effie modelled for Ophelia and does refer to Millais h...

Fantastic exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of work by Grayson Perry on the topic of identity. This is my favourite show of the year so far and I can’t spot anything on my to do list which might match it! It is based on his recent television series, which I am ashamed to admit I missed, in which he interviewed various people he felt might be typical of a group to try to determine what they felt they saw as their identity. I liked the fact the show starts with a work called “Map of Days” in which Perry looked at himself. It’s a large etching of a map with all the roads buildings etc given names of the emotions and ideas he had at the time. It was done over a period of time and he marks each day’s work as a date on the work. He is making the point that self is not a fixed thing just who we are at a moment in time and that can change. Next the trail round the first floor of the gallery takes you to a wonderful tapestry in the form of a bank note examining the B...

Fun public art trail art around London featuring work by different artists on model London buses to mark the Year of the Bus. I have not done the whole trail but have covered the Westminster area and South Bank. I preferred the buses that incorporate the shape of the bus on the design and acknowledge it has wheels and is not just a flat surface. Having said that I loved the bus which had been turned into Buckingham Palace complete with a small Queen taking the corgi’s out for a walk on the back! Some of the art work is really lovely and reminds you just how diverse and iconic London is.

Charming public art trail around London in aid of the NSPCC featuring fifty Paddington bears.  Each of the statues is created by artists, designers and celebrities with the trail following Paddington’s favourite places in London. I’ve not had time to do the full trail but I have found a few around Westminster and along the Southbank and I hope to track down more as I am out and about. My favourite has to be the bear by where I work which I can see from my window. Sponsored by the Telegraph his coat is covered in newspaper with appropriate headlines such as an article about marmalade. This is such a lovely idea and it’s fun to see all lots of children having their photos taken with the bears.

Amazing film on the later life of Turner. I don’t usually blog films but I think as this one is about art then I can count it. Watch out in a few entries times as I am allowing another one too! I thought this film was amazing. I loved how it recreated the Royal Academy. It gave a better understanding of how the hang worked and the relationships between the artists. It was fascinating to see the different stages of pictures as Turner worked on them and to get some idea of the physicality of his painting style. I liked the scenes of his father preparing canvasses and paint and the nod to showing how the works were shown and sold. Timothy Spall produced a masterclass in acting through grunts! By the end you felt you understood every nuance of every grunt! I must admit to shedding a tear when “The Fighting Temeraire” was recreated as a real event. It gave an idea of the sense of occasion and of real sadness at the demise of an old ship. A really artistic film worthy of a g...

Interesting exhibition at Tate Modern of drawings and prints by Louise Bourgeois. I knew this artist purely as ‘the big spider lady’ and therefore had slightly avoided her work as I hate spiders but this show opened my eyes to why she liked the motif of a spider and her other work.   She used spiders as her family’s business had been in tapestry. The show started with a very tender set of etchings including a woman washing her hair and a man sleeping in a chair. I also liked a set of fabric books she had made from cloth she had kept for a long time such as the napkins from her trousseau. Some of these made up a visual poem to the river she had grown up near. I found the work quite gentle and personal and a nice contrast to the rather bombastic Polke.

Retrospective at Tate Modern of the life and work of Sigmar Polke. I have to admit I am a bit late in writing up the show and in coming to set down and catch up I realize how little of it has stuck with me. I think the impression I got was of a very experimental artist which tried many techniques and did not leave me with an image of any one style. Since seeing this I have seen the Kiefner show at the Royal Academy and oddly the first notes I make on Polke about him exploring and coming to terms with Germany’s Nazi history sounded very similar to my notes on Kiefner. I did like the collages he did using cheap decorative fabrics and the large scale works of watchtowers but I seem to have forgotten the rest! The leaflet kept referring to his humour but I must admit I missed it! There are various quotes which seemed to aim to burst the pomposity of the art world but somehow just sounded more pompous. All a bit of a turn off for me, sorry! Reviews Times Guardia...

Interesting installation in the turbine hall at Tate Modern by Richard Tuttle. In the commentary it says Tuttle is interested in everyday materials as well as being a collector and historian of textiles. I thought the cleverest thing about his installation was that it was shaped like a wave turbine, get it?! It looked like a beached whale in the air. I wasn’t too sure about the swathes of material on it and what they meant but they looked good in the photos I took! I guess the long red piece was something to do with blood but I’m not sure. I was interested to see that he had had them woven in India. I wanted the whole thing to move, even if it just bobbed up and down to give it some extra dimension. There are more pieces in this show at the Whitechapel Gallery and I hope to get along if I have time.  

Late night opening for members at the British Museum with a focus on the current Ming exhibition. I had not been to one of these before but found that a friend was a member so we decided to go together. We were shocked at first by the huge queue to get in but the people soon diluted as they spread into the vast space of the museum. Many headed to the next queue to get exhibition tickets but we decided we could do that any time so headed to the members room and a glass of wine to make a plan of action. We went to an excellent lecture by Yu-Pong Luk, the projector curator of Ming, who talked us through the history of the period the exhibition focuses on using the objects from the show. She also outlined the three main points they had hoped to make, the importance of the Ming princes in running regional courts, the Mongol legacy in the styles and China’s engagement with the outside world in this period.   I had already seen the exhibition but felt this added to what I had...

Slightly confused exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum taking as its premise the idea that many social movements start form disobedience and create objects made by people taking design into their own hands. I think what I struggled with was it seemed to take the premise that all disobedience was good and I’m not sure I would agree. Sure some amazing social and political change has come out of disobedience such as votes for women and equal rights in America but some disobedience is just violence in another disguise.   I did like the idea of showing objects designed by people for a cause and used by them in their campaign and this included now iconic ideas like the pink triangle for gay rights. It was good to see the suffragette tea set which I think I’ve now seen in three shows this year!   It was also interesting to see practical design solutions not just artistic design such as a gas mask made out of plastic water bottle. Reviews Times Guardian...

Very elegant exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at the life and work of the photographer Horst. The first section looked at Horst’s fashion work in the early 20th century during the time he was one of Vogue’s first star photographers. It was great that these were shown with a selection of outfits by the same designers from the museum’s own collections. It gave the slightly static pictures a lovely life and vibrancy. The next section looked at his surrealist work from early pieces with Dali and working with Schiaparelli’s designs through to surreal still lives he did in 1989. I loved “Hands, hands, hands” from 1941, a chain of black and white hands. The show also included the untouched version of his Mainbocher corset shot as well as the iconic finished version. Next the show looked at his portraits of movie stars and his travel work taken while staying with his partner, Valentine Lawford, the political counsellor at the British Embassy in Tehran. I l...

Fascinating exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at how Constable was influenced by the Old Masters especially Claude, Rubens, Von Ruisdael and Titian. The early rooms looked is early access to Old Master works via Sir George Beaumont and there was a nice section where his work was hung next to the work which had influenced it. Later on there was a section on Constable’s habit of copying Old Masters and again his work and the original were hung together. There was also a lot on how Constable liked to work from nature and was interested in getting the detail right so there were lovely drawings and watercolour sketches including a beautiful picture of poppies and cloud studies. I liked the section on technique and was fascinated to see he sometimes painted a scene outdoors on glass which he held up to a scene so he had the proportions exactly right when he got to the studio. Another room looked at the evolution of a picture and had drawings for sections ...

Wonderful exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery looking at the life and work of William Morris as well as taking a look at how he has influences cultural and political life since. This was a brilliantly curated show which touched on all aspects of Morris’ life as a designer, poet, social reformer, environmentalist and political theorist. It included moving personal objects such as one of his satchels and items from the Red House and other homes. It would have been easy to just do a show on his design work but this was dealt with cleverly with the array of wallpapers being show in small panels between the different sections of the exhibition. I loved one quote from the commentary which said that “Wallpaper by the yard was Morris’s most truly democratic art”. The political and social reforming side of his life was shown in an understandable manner and of course I loved the section on his friendships. Did you know Emmeline Pankhurst has run a show selling Morris fabrics...