Cathy's Art Diary

Nice little exhibition at the National Maritime Museum looking at the role the sea and sailors played in the First World War. At first glance the show just looks like a slightly musty model ship display but it uses the ships to outline the history of the war and along the centre aisle are smaller personal objects and super interactive information boards telling the stories of the men whose medals are displayed, giving more detail on the main battles and looking at the role of the merchant navy and the home front. Don’t do what I did which was walk round the outside first and moan that there was no narrative, just head down the middle straight away. I was moved by the German bullet which had been made into a cross and was used by a Royal Naval Reserve Chaplain throughout the war. I also loved a film of the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich (of course!) There were a number of incidents I didn’t know about such as the fact that the German fleet was interred in the Firth of ...

Interesting exhibition at the Queen’s House, Greenwich looking at the role artists played on Captain Cook’s three voyages of discovery. These artists established the structure and style for documenting voyages which lasted until photography. Hodges, who went on the second voyage, came out of the show best. He was the first professional artist to meet people unaffected any European contact. He produced pictures both on the trip and on his return to London. He seems to be a genius at using white paint and I loved the way he used thick white paint to show the sailors trousers. As well as developed scenes Hodges also made detailed coastal profiles to mirror the maps the expedition were making and trained the officers to paint so they could help him. I wasn’t quite sure that Stubbs and Zoffany fitted into the picture as they did work back in London based on the voyages however I guess it was another way of showing the Stubbs pictures of the kangaroo and dingo! The las...

Fun installation in Covent Garden of a Santa and his reindeer made of LEGO. OK I might be stretching this to include it in an art diary but it is public artistic work and if there can be whole exhibitions of work made in LEGO I decided I could have a fun Santa! It was designed and built by the UK’s only LEGO Certified Professional, Duncan Titmarsh, what a job! It was a lovely addiction to a busy shopping area at Christmas!

Disappointing exhibition at Somerset House of the work of fashion photographer Guy Bourdin. There were some lovely work in this show but I found it became quite repetitive and the work came from quite a narrow time frame. I would also have liked more commentary on the pictures to tell me more about who the model was and what the clothes were. It was very much a style of fashion photography which was more about the style of the picture than the clothes. I did like the first section where he had been commissioned to do a series of adverts for the shoe maker Charles Jourdan so he set off around Britain with a pair of manikin legs and lots of shoes and photographer the disembodied legs in various settings. There were some striking images but I found the whole show rather sterile and unengaging. Review Times

Fascinating exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace tracing a journey made by the then Price of Wales (later Edward VII) to the Middle East in 1862. The show told the story through the photographs of Francis Bedford who was among the entourage and used them to look at the cultural and political significance of the region at that time. There were also objects which the Prince collected on his travels which had been in the Royall Collection ever since. It is easy to forget when looking at slightly clichéd pictures of Egypt that these were early days of exploring the area and when the photographs were exhibited on their return to England that these may have been some of the first images the public had seen of the region. I loved a photo of a display of objects which the Prince had bought in a market shown with all but one of the objects in the same arrangement. The later section on the Holy Land was fascinating and included pictures of the great crusa...

Nice exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace looking at gold, it’s uses and the techniques for working it. Gold is thought to be the first metal discovered by man and has always been associated with the high status people and the divine because it does not deteriorate. The first section looked at gold an royalty and included an Ecuadorian crown and a lion’s head from an Indian princes throne as well as looking at the Coronation of British Monarchs via a lovely picture of Queen Victoria’s coronation. The next section looked at the artists meaning of gold in art with a lovely picture by Reymerswaele of two misers to show avarice and how artists have shown the gold light of sun rise and sunset. An substantial part of the show looked at how gold has been worked with the earliest object being the Rillaton Cup dating from1700-1500 BC which was probably worked with stones. It was shown next to a lovely picture by William Nicholson of a gold cup to show artists...

Installation of illuminated inflated rabbits at the Royal Festival Hall by Amanda Parer. They are made of paper so there is fragility to the work which makes them seem rather vulnerable. I am sure I saw them displayed outside earlier in the month but I guess they didn’t cope too well with London weather, or that might have been launch night. Anyway I have no idea what they mean, but who can resist a giant inflatable rabbit!  

Small exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in which seven contemporary artists give a critical appraisal of the World Wide Web 15 years on from its invention. Jon Rafman presented a series of Google map images, tidied up and presented as an archive. Some of the images are odd an unexplained such as a man lying in the street with his head propped up on the pavement. Erica Scourti kept a daily diary which she sent to herself on Gmail them in a video diary reads out the adverts which appear next to the email. This translates her words into another diary form which remotely define her personal traits. Liz Sterry sought to reproduce a bloggers world from their blog and built a reproduction of their room from what she could distill from their online presence.   Some interesting idea which made you think about what the internet has done to our lives both good and bad. Review Evening Standard  

Interesting exhibition at the Hayward Gallery which asked London artists to look at the challenge of living in the digital age, living life between the physical and virtual world. I loved the installation by Lindsey Sears set in an upturned ship’s hull with videos of its antislavery mission projected onto concave and convex round screens.   You may know my stance on video art but using the different screen made it into more of an installation piece. I also liked Tim Etchells daily ripostes in response to current news displayed as posters. Who can resist “Flat pack melancholia for easy transportation. By two get an inflatable depression”! Other works stimulated interesting ideas but have not stayed in my memory so well. All in all though the show did make you think about what is real and what is a construct of a virtual world. Reviews Times Guardian Telegraph    

Fascinating exhibition at the British Library looking at the history of Gothic fiction. It started with the Castle of Otranto and looked at the life and work of its author Horace Walpole. I loved seeing a reliquary of Thomas Beckett he owned shown with a letter by Henry Cole describing it. It then looked at the growth in the genre and showed an early copy of Northanger Abbey with the seven ‘horrid novels’ mentioned in the book. It then looked at the Romantic period including the events leading up to the publication of Frankenstein and The Vampyre. Next came the Victorian era with works by Wilkie Collins but it also included Dickens on the premise that Gothic fiction moved into the ‘modern world’ of slums and poverty rather than an imagined past. Cinema was well covered both from the point of view of films of these early books but also as a medium in its own right for telling gothic tales. All the classics were covering including works like The Birds. Modern gothic was...

A lovely study morning at the National Gallery looking at the Aldobrandini Madonna by Titian lead by Caroline Brook. I thought I knew the National Gallery Titian’s well but I must admit to not consciously looking this one before. On first glance it looks like a standard Madonna and child plus John the Baptist with a saint but as you look closely you start to question whether the figure is a saint as she has no halo or attributes and also to wonder why the Madonna is sitting in the countryside. We started by looking at the context of the picture in 16th century Venice and where it sits in Titian’s career. Titian was prolific in the 1530s when this picture was probably painted but very little of the work survives. For example of 12 works done for the Hapsburgs only 2 survive. We spent a lot of time in the gallery looking first at a Bellini of a Madonna in a landscape and then comparing that to the Titian. The tutor made us look carefully at the work and then we compare ...

Small exhibition at Abbott and Holder of fashion drawings by Brian Stonehouse. These were very stylish, Mad Men like drawings done for Vogue from 1952. The images all had buff or grey backgrounds which accentuated the clothes and those clothes were very classic and chic. I liked the pictures of the men best as they were both 1950s and straight laced and a bit camp. My favourite was a classic Don Draper style man in a suit and a hat and carrying a coat. More interesting though was the biography in the leaflet which pointed out that Stonehouse had been a spy in the war and ended up as a prisoner of Dachau. In one camp the guards had made him draw pictures of them and their families and the Imperial War Museum holds the drawings he made of the liberation of Dachau. Now those I would like to see.

Interesting lecture at the British Museum given by Caroline Campbell, a National Gallery curator, and looking at a Mantegna picture in the current Ming exhibition which features one of the Magi holding a Ming bowl. She talked about Mantegna as an artist and how this picture is a rare survival on linen. She also looked at how artists chose to depict foreignness or otherness in pictures and compare magi pictures and pictures of the circumcision, the next episode in the life of Christ. She pointed out that the bowl in question was already about 40 to 50 years old when the picture was painted. Was this object owned by the patron? How did Mantegna know of works like this? She mentioned that there is also Ming wears in Bellini’s “Feast of the Gods” and the inventory made after Isabella d-Este’s death implied she may have owned some porcelain. I found this a fascinating talk. I sensed from the Q&A session that some people would have liked a bit more about the bowl an...

Surprisingly interesting exhibition at the British Museum looking at the historical and cultural influence of Germany. It took as it’s starting point how post-unification it has looked back to find a common memory and how over the years as its boundaries have changed it has constantly had to do this. I must admit I went along thinking this would be quite dull with maybe a few iconic objects but I found it fascinating to put a modern country into context. Despite having studied medieval history I’d never really thought about what the Holy Roman Empire was and how it had changed and developed over the years until the core of it has become Germany. The show told this story with objects in particularly a constant returning to currency. I loved the section which looked at cities which had been parts of the Holy Roman Empire but were now in different countries such as Geneva, Prague and Strasburg. I was also fascinated by the section which looked at the German Confederation post ...

Interesting exhibition at Tate Britain looking at the work of Marlow Moss, an international constructivism artist. The work had a feeling of a British Mondrian as it tended towards the white background, lines and block of colour school of abstraction and it turned out Marlow had spent time in Paris and associated with Mondrian. At the age of 30 Marlow had changed her name and adopted a masculine appearance. She eventually settled in Cornwall but did not hook up with the St Ives gang! Following a trip to Greece she began to do white reliefs. I must look up more about Marlow as although the work was a bit derivative she sounds a fascinating character.

Fascinating exhibition at Tate Britain looking at the how artists, activists, writers and artist models of African and Asian descent shaped the identity of London between the wars. This was a time when more artists were using black models and the commentary recalls how these models would knock on artist’s doors looking for work. The shame is that in very few cases do we have the models names. There was a wonderful wall of pictures by major artists of the day such as Duncan Grant, Edward Burra, Glyn Phipot and William Roberts. The show talked about the Harlem Renaissance and how in London Bloomsbury became a cultural hub due to two hostels in the area. Despite being a Bloomsbury Group fan I had not come across Duncan’s Jamaican lover Patrick Nelson and the show included a picture of him and a letter from him to Duncan. The shame was that there was not so much to say about black artists. Thank goodness for Edward Moody’s sculpture, but it felt like the show wanted t...

Interesting exhibition at Tate Britain of two sequences of photographs by Karen Knorr. Knorr was born in Puerto Rico and came to the UK in the late 70s so she takes a slightly quirky outsider’s look at very British subjects. The first set “Gentlemen 1981-1983” showed London gentlemen’s clubs. Each picture had a quote from a speech in Parliament at the time or a news item. The effect was to slow you down as you read the quotes and make you look properly at the pictures. The quotes gave some of the photographs an ironic twist. You couldn’t help but also notice that there were a good record of the art works held by clubs. I loved the picture which used contemporary club members to recreate almost exactly a picture which hung behind them over the mantelpiece of a previous set of members. The second set “Belgravia 1979-1981” took a similar approach using pictures of a privileged minority living in that area of London at the time and quotes from them. I   found myself a...

Slightly strange exhibition at Tate Britain of work by contemporary artist Caroline Achaintre. The work is in difference media including textiles, ceramics, woodcuts and watercolours. There is sense of craftwork in all the pieces and a feeling of being in an ethnographic gallery at the British Museum. There were tufted wool wall hangings like abstract pictures, melting hollow ceramic masks, a strange slug hanging from one display which I rather liked and some slightly odd sculpture. I liked the effect of the pieces together but, apart from the slug, I didn’t warm to any of it.  

Fascinating small installation at Tate Britain of work by David Hall. David Hall was one of the pioneers of video art so after visiting the Turner Prize earlier in the day I felt he had a lot to answer for! However I quite liked this. The show was a room of screens made to look like old fashioned televisions. These were showing 10 short films which were shown on television as part of the 1971 Edinburgh Festival. They were shown unannounced with no credits to disturb passive viewing. The display had the sets at odd angles so you could only watch one or two screens at a time. I must admit I now can’t really remember what any of the films were, one might have been a running tap, but I liked the way you had to walk amongst them to watch and the slightly retro feel to an installation.

Small exhibition at Tate Britain to mark 250 years since the death of William Hogarth focusing on the relationship the gallery has had with him over the years. It showed how in the early years of the Tate Hogarth was seen as the founding father of British art and works by him were the earliest in the collection. The first major show of Hogarth at the Tate was in 1951 and can you believe the last one, which seems like yesterday, was in 20071 The display showed how the collection of Hogarth’s grew and each label explained when and how it was added. All the pictures which had come from the National Gallery on the Tate’s independence in 1955 were on show. Of course I love the self-portrait with his pug dog but other lovely works included some great paintings of children in which he seems to give them a certain worldly wise wisdom. I also like the scene from the end of the Beggar’s Opera as it is one of the first pictures of a stage performance. The wonderful portrait...

Disappointing exhibition at Tate Britain for this year’s Turner Prize. I went with an open mind and wanted to like is but just couldn’t. As you’ll see from the picture the best bit was the comments board at the end. Three of the artists had done not very inspiring video art which frankly I couldn’t be bothered to give the time they needed.   When I saw one of the winner Duncan Campbell’s video’s was 54 minutes long I just walked through. I am sure I’ve said it before but I won’t want to spend that sort of length of time in an art gallery looking at a pretentious film. The fourth artist Ciara Phillips was a bit more interesting with an installation room with wall’s covered in repetitive prints in bright colours/ The commentary said she “initiatives ideas and situations through the process of printing” whatever that means! Sorry but this can’t be the best that contemporary art has to offer! Reviews Independent Evening Standard  

Interesting exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery to mark this annual photographic award. The themes this year seemed to be Africa and parents and children and the images tended to be clear and simple/ The first picture you see as you walk towards the show is a stunningly simple picture by Gorm Shackleford of a man in blue overalls. As ever there was a mix of commissioned and non-commissioned work. In the commissioned works I loved one by Neil Raja of two older ladies laughing on a bench which was taken for Age UK. I just wanted to sit down and join them, they were having such fun. I loved one in a series by Robert Timothy of news readers about to broadcast. Also how could I resist Laurence Cartwright’s “Boy and dog” of his son imitating the dog the picture. Reviews Times Telegraph Evening Standard  

Atmospheric exhibition at the National Gallery of new works by Maggi Hambling. The pictures almost created an installation of large works of waves or waterfalls against grey walls. They had a feeling of the Monet’s at the Orangery and spoke to the new Monet display over the stairs from it. The room actually smelt of paint but I wasn’t sure if that was of the thickness of the paint on the pictures to because it had only recently opened. The pictures were thick splashes and swoops of paint. Often at the back there was a thin layer of paint with an almost lace effect. Some were quite monotone but others were packed with colour when you got up close. They reminded me of one of my favourite places in the world, North Point in Barbados where the waves crash against rocks. Reviews Guardian Telegraph Evening Standard  

New display at the National Gallery for their large Monet Water Lilies which has only recently returned from Tate Britain. I must admit I never liked it at Tate Britain as it never seemed to work so well in such a large white space. The delicate greens and yellows in it just looked insipid. However back at the National Gallery with a lower ceiling and against a darker wall it looks stunning. It was also nice to see it hung with other pictures from the collection of the garden at Giverny so you got a lovely sense of place and of an artist working through ideas.

Interesting exhibition at the National Gallery focusing on the landscape paintings of Norwegian artist Peder Balke. Balke travelled a lot in his early life but then gave up painting for politics and property development but spent the rest of his life exploring the themes of his earlier trips. In this later phase he painted for his won pleasure and did not sell works so they are very personal. There were interesting paint techniques with some sea picture having water which was almost sculpted in white paint but others had an almost ironed quality, having very flat thin paint. They were rather beautiful but did become a bit repetitive. For example the same boat with the same combination of men appeared in a number of pictures. There was very little commentary to the works but I guess other than setting the scene there was not much more to say! Reviews Guardian Telegraph  

Fun exhibition scattered around Somerset House looking at fashion trends in cold climates in the 20th century. There were nine displays in all each curated by a different person. There was a display of skiing accessories over the years and one of fashion illustrations from the Courtauld’s collection of fashion journals. I loved the films of people skating although they were shown on quite a small screen. My favourite was an installation on the Stamp Stair which looked at the use and meaning of the colour white in Western history. I’m not sure I understood that when I looked at it but it used the space really well and had floating, almost angel like figures.

Moving exhibition at Somerset House of photographs by Bryan Adams of British servicemen and women who have suffered life-changing injuries on military duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. These pictures are quite hard to look at and it is hard to imagine that you can survive with such injuries. Some of the images are more shocking as it takes a moment for your eye to take in what the injuries are. However very quickly you find you are looking at vibrant, very fit young people and that you are looking into their eyes and seeing the real person. There were some interesting commentaries in the accompanying leaflet on some of the people and how the photos came about and I would have liked more about that. I loved the fact that the centre piece over one fire place was a battered Union Jack, a nice metaphor and quiet focal point. Reviews Telegraph Independent  

Nostalgic exhibition at Somerset House of photographs by Chris Stein of the band Blondie, of which he was a member, and the New York music scene of the late 70s. I was always a bit of a Blondie fan and have fond memories of 3rd year French and someone singing Denis before the teacher arrived because there were bits in French! Also the wonderful quote from a lecturer at University who had a full sized picture of Debbie Harry in his office “It’s the weekend and Debbie Harry is on the Muppets, life is good!” But enough of me these pictures were great fun and gave a real sense of a generation of musicians at a particular time. I got a real sense of the friendships which existed and was interested to see on the commentaries often included news of what people were doing now. I had also forgotten just how different Debbie Harry herself looked to teenage eyes and to many of us was the first strong, independent female figure in music. The shame was that there was one person mi...