Unseen

Charming exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery of rarely seen drawings to mark the opening of their new Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery.

This is a lovely new space on what they are calling the mezzanine level ie the half way point on the stairs between the ground and first floors. It’s a square room with nice lighting and at the moment it is painted white.  It will be really interesting to see what else can be done with the space and how different colours work.

There were some really nice pictures on show from a nice Fra Bartolommeo sketch of a landscape which may have been done rapidly out of doors to a Henry Moore air raid shelter picture.

My favourite was the picture of a back of a woman going through a door by Fuseli. She is in a lovely empire line dress and intricate headdress and is in an impossibly sinuous pose. The most unusual was by Valentine Klotz of a city after a seige. Klotz was a military engineer and the grey and blue blocky tones gave the picture a very modern feel even though it had only been drawn to record the damage.

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