Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting exhibition at the Design Museum tracing the history of post-revolution Russian design through six unrealised architectural projects. The idea of using the six projects is clever in that each sets a theme but in some cases there seems to be very little on the actual project itself. For example the first section looked at Cloud Iron, El Lissitzky’s horizontal skyscraper which was used to show how images of aviation were used to show Communist ideals but there were only a few sketches of the actual imagined building. It was interesting to ponder what some of these projects would have been like. Most of them had the gem of a good idea but it all felt like it was being imposed on people for their own good. I loved El Lissitzky’s idea for a health factory where workers could retreat and spend time in isolated rest cubical and get their food off conveyor belts in communal areas all with the idea of ‘productive rest’. As with the Royal Academy show I loved the inc...

Confusing exhibition at Leighton House Museum looking at one of Leighton’s last works “Flaming June” which is currently on loan from Puerto Rico. My advice is go to the last room of the show which is fantastic as it brings “Flaming June” back together with four of the other works Leighton painted for what turned out to be his last Royal Academy show. They are hung in the same configuration as in a photo of them in his studio next door. Most of them are in private collections plus one is from the Metropolitan Museum in New York so it’s a wonderful achievement to have brought them together. Once you have seen the pictures do the rest of the show which is studies for them, other work which had influenced them and sketches of another commission he was working on at the time. If you do these first, as the leaflet indicates, you do wonder why you are looking at some of them. You need the grounding of understanding the work before hitting the detail. It’s not helped by the works ...

Touching small exhibition at the Royal Academy focusing on a work which Anthony Green has finished recently telling the story of his mother’s second marriage through his eyes as her 13 year old child. He has been working on it since she died in 2004. The work itself is a life sized figure of his mother, the Miss Dupont of the title, incorporating her mink coat, handbag and scarf. Her room and possessions radiate out from her. It is an irregular shape and the section at the top, presumably representing the upstairs of the house, includes surprisingly sexy pictures of his mother and step-father. I love the way both the upstairs and downstairs images include reflections of his mother in a mirror. The picture shows a real tenderness for her as well as an understanding of her. The exhibition also had sketches for the work and other objects from his mother. One display cabinet had her marriage certificates plus her divorce papers from the artist’s father and the divorce papers o...

Disappointing exhibition at the Royal Academy looking at American art of the 1930s. I found the narrative of the show a bit thin but this may have just been in contrast to the richness of the Russian exhibition which I had just been to. The rooms were themed well but the handout then concentrated on specific artists in each section even though in some cases there was only one picture by the artist. Maybe I should have got the audio tour to give me a story. There were however some wonderful pictures and it did have a good sense of time and place. I hadn’t realised that the term “the American Dream” was defined in this period and the Star Spangled Banner became the national anthem.   I liked Stuart Davies’s “New York – Paris No 3” a painted collage of images of the America and France including a café and a gas station. Also Grant Wood’s strange “Daughters of the Revolution” with three older ladies from that organisation set against “Washington Crossing the Delaware”...

Fantastic exhibition at the Royal Academy looking at how art and design was used following the Russian Revolution to embed its ideals. From the wonderful red of the first room I was hooked and my O level history came rushing back! The show concentrated on art but incorporated posters, textiles, ceramics and film. It   also blended the art and history well. It didn’t assume you knew the history but wasn’t patronising in its narrative. The rooms were a good mix of themes and looking at artists. I discovered lots of fascinating modern artists I’d not come across before. I loved the portraits of Lenin by Issak Brodsky. I also kept being drawn to work by Pavel Filonov such as a picture of a tractor workshop with tractor parts forming the pattern in the middle of the composition. I also liked his dense pictures, which he called formula, which looked a bit like maps on first view but were lots of small images brought together in pattern. I loved the reconstruction of Mal...

Interesting small but dense exhibition at the Royal Academy which invited six curators to look at plans for rebuilding cities in post-war Britain.   These buildings were often planned with a sense of social and economic aspirational change however often the ideas unravelled in reality. I liked the mix in this show of looking at specific projects alongside themes. I was interested in the section of the University of Essex which pointed out it’s idealistic ideas of building a series of 28 towers as student accommodation which would be unsupervised and self-governing. However following demonstrations in 1968 the university became synonymous with unrest and only six of the towers were built. The best of the themed section looked at carparks. Suddenly more people had car and obviously needed to park them when visiting cities. Bomb sites were seen as an opportunity by the x-military founders of Central Car Parks who developed a number of these building but as these were pri...

Colourful exhibition at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery of work by William Tillyer. The title work was a huge long painting which looked great in the space. It was great swathes of colour against a grey background. Up close you could see the wide brush strokes.   I loved the work opposite it, “Skydancer” which a mix between a painting and a sculpture. Acrylic paint had been applied to stainless steel mesh in an abstract pattern so that in places it escaped the rectangle of the mesh to form flat projections. Also interesting was a lovely conventional seascape from 1956 which was shown with four later pictures showing how Tillyer’s art had developed. On the upper floor I liked “Relentless” from last year which again was mesh but this finer with paint pushed up through the holes from the back as well as being applied to the front. It had a wonderful texture. Closes on 13 April 2017

Fabulous exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery looking at the life and work of Vanessa Bell. It was so good to see Bell’s work in its own right rather than being shown as part of a group. I loved the fact the show looked at her design work as well as her paintings including a lovely case of her book covers for her sister Virginia Woolf’s books and material designs in different colour ways. There were lots of old friends here but also lots of work I’d never seen before. They had got some really good loans from American’s galleries and private collections and it was a real treat to see those works. I’d never seen the self-portrait which was used a s the poster before and I loved the way she paints her checked dress and the engaging expression which just makes you want to sit down and talk to her. Old favourites included “Iceland Poppies” which I’d never seen as a comment of opium before but now it’s obvious. I was very touched by her painting of a bunch of flowers and f...

Delightful exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery of photographs from Vanessa Bell’s photo albums alongside pictures by Patti Smith taken while working at Charleston and Monks House. It was a shame that the Bell pictures had to be reproductions as the originals were too delicate to display but a nice touch that there were mounted in the original albums.   The images were nicely picked to complement the Vanessa Bell exhibition. It was good to go round both before doing the main show to familiarise yourself with the people mentioned but then to go back later to see how the photos related to the art on show. I loved the Patti Smith images as I had seen her when she did her residence at Charleston   a few years ago. Hearing her sing a acoustic version of “Because the Night” there is one of my magic moments in life. I wasn’t so sure about the inclusion of her pictures on the lives of other artists. It would have been nice to keep it to a contemporary view of Bloomsbury....

Brilliant exhibition at One Temple Place looking at the artists and writers who settled in Sussex in the first half of the 20th century. The core of the exhibition was based on the collections of various Sussex museums and houses such as Charleston Farmhouse, Farley Farm, Ditching Museum of Art and Craft, Pallant House and many more. However it was enhanced by lovely loans from other galleries and museums. I have been to three of these annual exhibitions of items lent by regional galleries and this was the best curated one. It built a good narrative rather than just being about slightly random objects. If you follow my blog you’ll realise that this exhibition was right up my street and full of old friends. It was fascinating to see objects from Charleston in a different setting, and in fact I had been there the Saturday before and tried to work out what was missing! Thank you for the wonderful hang of Grant’s Venus and Adonis behind his Leda and the Duck chest as I realise...

Fascinating exhibition at the Estorick Collection   looking at the artists and photographers who recorded the role of the British forces in Italy in the First World War. I was so excited to discover that the main artist featured was Sydney Carline. As well as being a good artist in his own right he was also Stanley Spencer’s brother in law and I have drawing by him. Carline was in the Royal Flying Corps and many of the works here were pictures of air battles or views from planes. These pictures were full of action and gave a wonderful sense of the speed and height of flying by showing the ground below as slightly out of focus. I particularly loved some closely observed sketches of in the local villages. The second room looked at two photographers, Ernest Brooks and William Joseph Brunell, who recorded the same campaign. The pictures were not only of the front and the solders but also the people of Italy who were helping them. There were wonderful studies of women loadi...

An excellent interview at the British Library with the chief executive of the library, Roly Keating, which was also broadcast live to Sheffield City Libraries. Keating was interviewed by Gaby Wood, Literary Director of the Booker Foundation and it was interesting to hear him say that he put custodianship as the core of the library’s offering and all other services and uses flow from that. He talked about the formation of the library and the project to design and build the new building. He also talked about ongoing projects including the Living Knowledge report looking at what the library should be like by its 50th anniversary. The interview marked the start of a season of talks in celebration of libraries.    

Strange exhibition at the Wellcome Collection looking at how we think, feel and value animals. It wasn’t until the 18th century that we started to seek a scientific explanation of the animal world and there was a really good section on Linnaeus and his work to classify and name all the species and he was the first person to define humans as animals. It claimed that how he defined a hierarchy of species has influenced our thinking ever since. The middle room looked at how we display and look at animals. I must admit to being slightly freaked by the examples of taxidermy hidden round the display. There was a sweet fox asleep under a display case! There were good sections   on zoos and natural history museums, how they have changed and how their design has influenced our thinking. I was also very interested in cases on William Hornaday, a taxidermist for the Smithsonian who realised that in collecting some of the last bison for the museum he was contributing to them becom...

Fascinating exhibition at the Wellcome Collection looking at electricity, focusing on its generation, supply and consumption. It wasn’t till I started going round this exhibition that I remembered I used to work in the electricity industry, how could I have forgotten! Despite this I’d never thought about how the electricity industry developed and how the infrastructure like the National Grid was developed. The first section looked at early observations of natural electricity and how we started to generate it. I was very amused by an early experiment to pass a charge around a group of people with a wonderful picture of 180 of Louis XV’s guard trying the trick and then a wonderful film of 1950 scientists trying a similar thing with an electric eel. I loved the section on supply which included one of the first batteries but I most interested to see that the Grosvenor Gallery, known to me as holding Impressionist exhibitions, was one of the first buildings in the UK to us...

Interesting course over two afternoons at the National Gallery exploring the themes behind their current exhibition on the Australian Impressionists. In the first week we looked at the lives and output of three of the artists in the show, Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Charles Condor. We discussed why the show was laid out as it is and what the two main themes of cities and countryside showed about Australia at the time. We discussed how only became a country in this period and how art reflected and helped shape its national identity. We also discussed what the Australia artists would have known about art trends in Europe. In the second week we focused on the fourth artist in the show John Russell who moved to Europe and became friends with many of the European artist of the time. He studied with Toulouse Lautrec and Van Gogh and continued to write to Van Gogh until the latter’s death. He also met Monet and later Matisse while painting. We talked about the house he built...

Interesting exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery looking at the development of photography in portraiture and the galleries own collection which had started almost from its foundation. This was a good overview of the subject and had some lovely work in it but I never worked out why they had picked those years. I guess it meant from the start of photography to the Second World War photography but that wasn’t clear and it felt a bit like a randomly picked century. However as I said there were some beautiful and iconic images. Of course there was a lovely Julia Margaret Cameron of Mary Princep and the Baron Adolf de Mayers of Ottoline Morrell in an aesthetic pose. I loved a picture of Adolphus Huxley by Howard Coster making a feature of his thick glasses to emphasis and distort his eyes. Also a Man Ray of Schiaparelli exposed multiple times to give a checked effect. I also learnt something, I hadn’t realised Beatrix Potter’s father was a keen amateur photographer ...

Small display at the National Portrait Gallery to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality. This was a nice show but very small with just seven pictures of contemporary figures, each shown with a quote from the subject about coming out. They covered a good cross section of public life, Will Young from music, Angela Eagle from politics, Tom Daley from sport, Ben Whishaw from acting and Alexander McQueen from fashion. I just felt seven pictures doesn’t seem enough! I am hoping the gallery has something else planned for later in the year, possibly looking at how things have changed since 1967 or looking further back to the hidden or not so hidden figures from history. This was a nice starter, now where is the main course? Closes on 7 August 2017. Review Evening Standard  

Charming video installation at St Pauls Cathedral by Bill Viola. This is a permanent piece at the cathedral but as it’s still relatively new I feel I’m allowed to blog it! The piece is shown on a triptych of screens in the shape of an altarpiece with a larger section on the middle. The video is shown across the screens, either in sections or using the whole shape as one backdrop and tells the story of the life of the Virgin Mary. It does help to know your iconography to interpret some of the scenes but once you work them out they are moving and all brought into the modern world. Most stunning though is the end sequence where Mary holds the dead Christ in a classic Pieta composition. From a distance this has the effect of an altarpiece but as you get close you realised Mary is gently moving and looking at every part of the Christ figure in a desperate and loving way. Like Viola’s work “Martyrs” nearby I find this work mesmerising. It’s about 15 minutes long but the tim...

Fun exhibition at the Newport Street Gallery of work by Gavin Turk. This was a good overview spanning 25 years of Turk’s work. I’d seen odd pieces by him before but never really looked at the development of his art. I like the way he plays with the idea of the creative act and uses his own signature to look at identify and value in art. I liked the large Pollock style canvas’s which turn out not to be random splats but hundreds of his signatures one over the other. These work beautifully with the large mirrored cubes which multiplied the images around the room. I found the room of figures a bit creepy as I have a bit of a thing about wax works. These were a series of models of him in different guises and in different materials. I loved the great bronze one with a shower head which regularly pumped water over the figure. I wasn’t too sure about the tramp like one with no display case. My favourite room was the last one which featured works which play with the idea of r...