Cathy's Art Diary

Fascinating talk at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival by Turner Prize Winner Lubaina Himid.   The chair, Jennifer Higgie, led Himid though her career with intelligent questions leading her to talk about her early role as a curator and the importance of arts centre to the cultural scene through to the experience of winning the Turner Prize last year.   Himid talked in detail about her work Naming the Money, one hundred cut outs of black servants with trades some of which I had been lucky to see in Liverpool last year.   They also discussed how Himid is more interested in placing her work in museum spaces than commercial galleries and making work to fill the gaps in collections. She also touched on why it is important to her to be based in north of England and to have her studio as part of her living space.   All in all great opportunity to hear a leading contemporary artist talk about their life and work and lovely to find that Him...

Delightful talk at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival given by Ali Smith.   As the first event of the festival Ali Smith had been commissioned to write a piece about the newly rediscovered dinner service decorated by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell for Kenneth Clarke. It was a stunning prose poem, appropriately a stream of consciousness on various topics suggested by the paints. It covered the artists, the women shown on the plates, various definitions of the word plate and plates in the works of Virginia Woolf and of the women shown.   It was delivered at a cracking, exciting pace bringing out the rhythm of the words. We just now need a published version so we can comb through the detail in it.   A great start to a fantastic 12 days of talks, ideas and good company. I can’t keep up with writing up all the events so I’ll concentrate on those to do with art and design.

Interesting display at the National Portrait Gallery tracing the idea of transmission of an artistic culture over centuries by tracing a link from Ingres to Auberbach. The idea was represented by one portrait from each of five artists, Ingres, Degas, Sickert, Bomberg and Auberbach. The trail was that Degas met Ingres once plus was taught by a former pupil of the great man, Sickert was taught by a pupil of Whistler who had met Degas when taking the portrait of his mother to the Salon, Bomberg attended Sickert’s evening class at the Westminster School of Art and Auberbach was a at Bomberg’s classes at Borough Polytechnic. It could have gone one step backwards into the 18th century as Ingres was a pupil of David.   I did think some of the links were a bit tenuous but it was an interesting idea to trace an artistic tradition in this way and I’d love to see a bigger show on a similar theme   Closes on 2 September 2018  

Nice topical display at the National Portrait Gallery looking at the life and career of Sir Bobby Moore.   The show obviously included the famous picture of his on the shoulders of his team mates holding the World Cup which cemented him as national hero along with other pictures from his career, such as one of him aged 17 when he signed to Fulham. However there was a nice balance with pictures of him at home and after his retirement from football.   The majority of the pictures were press photographs so there was the added element of seeing how the press of the time represented a public figure. Closes in January 2019 Review Guardian    

Small display at the National Portrait Gallery looking at pioneering Victorian women to mark the centenary of women getting the vote.   There is another display at the Gallery looking at the campaigners for the vote but there was some overlap with this as both included Mary Wollstonecraft and Millicent Fawcett. This displayed focused more on the first women to do certain things such as Jane Cobden Unwin who won a seat on the inaugural London County Council but due to legal challenges to her eligibility was prevented her from serving as a councillor.   Millicent Fawcett sisters were featured too. I knew one, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson,   was the first woman to qualify as a doctor but not that another sister Agnes Garrett, was the first female mayor in Britain.   Closes on 2 December 2018

Nice small display at the National Portrait Gallery looking at some of the Victoria Cross holders from the First World War.   The Victoria Cross is the highest military honour and was awarded 628 times in the First World War. Patriotic interest in those who had been awarded them was fuelled by postcards and cigarette cards. Only three people have been awarded two VCs and two were non-combatant doctors, Arthur Martin Leake who died in 1953 and Noel Godfrey Chavasse who was killed in action. It was poignant to realise that a lot of the pictures were the lovely hopeful studio pictures taken of soldiers before they went to war. Two characters caught my eye. Albert Ball, the first pilot to become a popular hero, and he is shown in a flash car in a postcard which was shown with the model of his statue in Nottingham. I also liked Sir Adrian Carter who served in the Boer War and the First and Second World Wars, losing an eye and a hand. Again it was nice that as well as ph...

Charming display at the National Portrait Gallery as part of the Tacita Dean: Portraits exhibition which I missed on my first visit to that show as it was not with the main show.   This was room looked at the idea of miniature portraits with the title taken from Hamlet where Hamlet refers to the escalating value of “portraits in little” of his uncle when he became king. For this reason there was a portrait of Shakespeare in the room along with those of Donne and Drayton who also mention miniatures in their work.   The miniatures were shown to reflect the literary world of the time with a picture of one of the brothers to whom the First Folio is dedicated and the Earl of Derby, the earliest court patron of the stage.   In the midst of this was a small scale Tacita Dean video of David Warner, Stephen Dilliane and Ben Whishaw, all of whom have played Hamlet. Oddly compared to the miniatures the film felt rather out of focus and misty however it was a nice m...

Charming exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery of drawings and prints of artists at work from the Katrin Bellinger Collection.   These pictures were a chance to look at the private world of the artists glimpsing them working in the landscape and in their studios. The commentary calls it “a world of dirty brushes but also creativity”. I liked Jan Bisschop’s picture of two artists drawing an antique bust as it reminded me of all the exhibitions I’ve seen recently on how different eras have reacted to the ancient world. On a similar theme there was Hubert Robert’s 1762 sketch of himself drawing in Rome but no explanation of why he’s sitting in a wheelbarrow! I loved a picture by an anonymous artist from 1896 of a covered easel as it was so finely drawn. Also Egon Schiele’s picture of the area of his prisoner of war camp that he set up as a studio. My favourite was a picture of a female artist from the back by Fanny Guillaume de Bassoncourt from 1837.   Closes...

Nice exhibition on Brighton Station of photographs by James Bellorini of some of the people appearing in the Brighton Fringe Festival.   This was just a line of photos with good descriptions of tthe people show but include a wonderful array of characters including an extreme doodler, a drag club bear, a singing barber, various comics and a juggler. You have to love Brighton!   Closed on 28 May 2018  

Small exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at how graphic design was used to stimulate consumption following the Depression.   The show looked at how using design to improve daily life was part of the Modernist movement and how British designers rose to this challenge. The examples all came from the National Art Library’s Jobbing Printing Collection, a wonderful collection of ephemera of promotional material. It just reminds you how much paper were had pre-internet when all advertising and information was paper based.   A lot of these leaflets were for quite mundane products such as the use of zinc in the building trade but others explained ground breaking changes to the general public such as a leaflet to explain Clarence Birdseye’s invention of flash freezing.   I loved the BBC leaflets on modern art with cover designs by Eric Ravilious, can we bring those back please?   Closes on 19 August 2018

Confused exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at how the natural environment has influenced clothes and fashion over the centuries. I say confused because it had too many themes, from the materials clothes are made from through to flowers and animals that have influenced design trends. Overlying the whole was a rather heavy handed look at the sustainability of clothing. Any of these themes would have made a good smaller show but put together the whole thing became unwieldy. The ground floor gallery looked mainly at how all clothes were made from natural products before manmade fibres were invented in the 20th century. It’s obvious when you think about it but I’d not realised it before and w2as surprised at what some of the materials were made of. You’d think this would all be good but the show did look at the damage some of these processes did to the environment and the social deprivation it brought.   I did like the section on the use of flowers in design...

Stylish exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at the style and lifestyle of the ocean liners.   The whole show was beautifully designed from the gang plank you cross to get into the heart of the show, through the recreated interiors, an on deck swimming pool and a grand staircase complete with clothes that had been worn on the ships.   I hadn’t realised that the liners grew from government contracts to transport post which is why many of them continued to have a link back to their host nation. The main style galleries followed this theme looking at the style of the different countries in chronological order of their heydays. The British section looked at the Art Nouveau and included Christopher Dresser water jugs and William de Morgan tiles.   There was an interesting room on the technological developments which speeded up the Atlantic crossing before we moved into the section on life on board. I loved the array of table wear mainly f...

Fabulous exhibition at the British Museum on the influence of ancient Greece on Rodin. The show was beautifully laid out and the new exhibition space at the museum was used in quite a different way with the whole space opened up and visible and yet with a very definite path round and narrative. What a surprise to the find the space had a wall of windows at one end which had not been used before. A perfect space and light for showing sculpture. The show made great use of the Parthenon sculptures and frieze which Rodin saw and sketched in London from 1881 and drew on those drawings throughout his career. The show blended Greek pieces and Rodin’s work in a seamless narrative and it was lovely to see sections of the frieze at eye level.   There was a good section in the middle looking at the Gates of Hell and how that was influenced by Greek work plus how Rodin reused motifs from it in other works. Also an extensive look at the Burghers of Calais including life siz...

Lovely little exhibition at the British Museum of prints and drawings for the designs for and recording Francis I’s renovation of his palace at Fontainbleau.   Francis summoned artists from Italy to oversee the decoration of his palace many of whom had fled the Sack of Rome and had worked with Raphael including Giullio Romano. As well as organising this work a print making industry grew up in the area to disseminate their work and earn them some more money.   The show also looked at the elaborate Fontainebleau style which developed and was propagated via prints even after Francis died with highly ornamental strap work and stucco frames. There were some lovely work in the show such as a drawing for a lost fresco by Francesco Primaticio of Minerva being carried to heaven by the Graces which has a wonderful interweaving legs. Who can resist a allegory of Francis as an elephant, no I’m not sure I understood either! Closed on 13 May 2018  

Beautiful exhibition at the National Gallery looking at how Monet used architecture in his paintings.   It did more than the predicted Rouen Cathedral and House of Parliament pictures and I loved the early sections on the picturesque looking at where he grew up in Normandy, a trip to the Netherlands, the coast near Dieppe and towns on the Mediterranean sea. In each case it looked at how he used repeated images to explore light effects.   The next section looked at cities with pictures of central Paris and London including the wonderful Boulevard des Capucines which records the moment when bright sunlight hits the street and cuts it into a light and a dark side. It then looked at the suburb of Argenteuil where he moved in 1871 and I particularly like the pictures of the bridge which had been destroyed in the Franco-Prussian War being rebuilt.   The final section entitled the “Monument and the Mysterious” did hit us with the pictures of Rouen Cathedral as well as ...

Fascinating exhibition at Sala Brasil (the Brazilian Embassy) looking at a collection of modernist work which was sent to Britain in the Second World War. I had assumed this was just an exhibition of Brazilian modernist art and on one level it was however more interesting was the story of how it came to Britain. 168 works were sent to Britain in 1944, donated by the artists to boost the war effort. The British Council arranged the transport and the pictures were shown at the Royal Academy and the Whitechapel Gallery as well as around the country. The Royal Academy didn’t seem too pleased by the idea and there were wonderful archive letters recording their resistance. The pictures were then sold in aid of the RAF Benevolent Fund. The show included all but one of the 25 pictures that entered public collections in the UK and included some lovely work. The captions were well written and told you a lot about the artists. I loved Thea Haberfeld’s landscape of a patchwork of fields ...

Eclectic open houses and artists’ studios in Brighton open for the duration of the Brighton Festival.   I spent two lovely weekends looking around this amazing collection of work. From paintings to ceramics to jewellery to sculpture to much, much more. The first weekend we concentrated on the Fiveways group and thanks to their excellent brochure managed to see nearly all the houses. Highlights include Dawn Thornhill’s papercut tableaux and Mr Craven : Raconteur’s wonderful series of Brighton men prints representing areas of the city. We also went to Francesca Grace McLeod’s preview party as we have bought from her in the past. I loved her new pictures based on photographs from her recent honeymoon. Thank you for the invitation. The second weekend was more random and more about finding parking then following a trail but we did make a point of going to the Collectors’ Selection to see Eve Shepherd’s recent small sculptures and to pop to Dion Salvator Lloyd’s to see his ...

Lovely exhibition at Brighton Museum looking at the life an work by Glyn Philpot.   I know Philpott’s work well and am fond of it but had not realised that his family had donated a lot of his work to this museum. It was lovely to see so much of it together and to learn a bit more about his life. He started as a good society portrait painter and there was a delightful picture of his niece, who donated the work, as a child. It told the stories of his main relationships including with Henry Thomas, his black chauffeur who modelled for him an a number of occasions and there were some lovely examples of these paintings and sculptures shown with pictures painted of jazz musicians in New York. It also told the sad story of Vulcan Forbes, who Philpot met in the First World War and shared a house and studio with from 1923-1935 and who killed himself the day after Philpott’s funeral.   I’d not come across the lovey works commissioned by Syrie Maughan, the interior designe...

Small exhibition at Brighton Museum giving an overview of the career of Gilbert & George, I’m afraid I might have done too much Gilbert & George recently and although I appreciate how ground breaking they were the pictures are starting to look a bit similar and shown on mass this is emphasised. However put the show put the work in context very well particularly the pictures pointing out the role their work played in the commentary on the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. It was nice to see some of their early work including one of their drinking sculptures, a collage of photos of an evening in a pub complied in separate frames to create a wall sculpture. I also loved their Ten Commandments including “Thou shalt not know exactly what thou dost, but thou shall do it anyway”. We could all live by that!   Closes on 2 September 2018  

Charming exhibition at the National Maritime Museum looking at the work of four photographers who have focused on the British seaside, Martin Parr, Tony Ray-Jones, David Hurn and Simon Roberts. The exhibition space is beautifully designed with the centre devoted to a cinema disguised as beach huts, starting in shades of grey to reflect the black and white pictures then gradually becoming coloured. The videos   about the artists shown there are excellent. The works started in the late 1960s with the work of Ray-Jones as part of his “The British at Leisure” series with all the lovely clichés of sandcastles, men in socks and jackets and getting changed under towels but all pictured with a wry humour. The theme was continued by Hurn’s pictures from the 1970s. Both were showing the seaside holidays of my youth. Worryingly no-one really looked happy! Maybe the British endure their holidays rather than enjoy them.   Colour came with Parr’s pictures. I’m a huge fan ...

Lovely exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery looking at the work of the four main Victorian photography pioneers in England, Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll, Lady Clementina Hawarden and Oscar Reylander. The show was excellent and pointing out the links between these photographers and how they learnt from and influenced each other. The Duchess of Cambridge, the patron of the gallery, had written some of the labels as her undergraduate thesis had been on these photographers. The show was arranged by subject to emphasis the thematic links and all the works were shown as vintage prints. The pictures of children were the most engaging but the show was quick to point out that all of Carroll’s were taken in the presence of a parent or governess and that only half his output was of children. Of course there were the famous pictures of Alice Lidell but I found Reylander’s were more sweet and sentimental including his version of the Raphael angels which was bought by Prince ...

Varied exhibition at Somerset House   of the short listed entries in this year’s Sony World Photography Award. There was a wonderful selection of pictures and subjects in this show, all telling stories which you want to follow up. The labels were quite long but sometimes they described the project a picture had come from not the picture itself so they felt a bit disjointed. As ever one wing was devoted to professional entries submitted as photo collections and the other wing to individual photographs on various themes. The best approach is just to pick out some of my favourite works. I loved Adam Petty’s picture of water polo from under the water with a sea of flailing legs. Also Mark Edward Harris’s picture amazing picture of an orangutan and John White’s hopper like picture of a dog at a diner window looking   in to his human pack eating lunch.   My favourite picture was Andrius Burba’s picture shown here of a horse taken from underneath, look at it a...

Delightful exhibition at Pallant House Gallery of original designs by textile designer Sheila Bownas. Bownas’s work was largely unknown until an archive of her work was auctioned in 2008. It was also interesting to read that companies often bought designs but did not use them.   I would love to see some of these designs reused. I liked one of her early works of people sitting on a London bus as well as one of children in red and blue playing against a bright yellow background. The 1970s designs were more abstract and bold. They made the friend I was with and I reminisce about the wallpapers of our youth!   My favourite design was the one shown here of white gates on a navy background.   Closed on 20 May 2018  

Fun exhibition at Pallant House looking at Pop Art in Britain and how artists responded to rapid social change.   This was a nicely curated show drawing on the gallery’s significant collection of work from this period but I’ve done a number of exhibitions about the individual artists recently   (Blake, Paolozzi, Caulfield and Hamilton) and I didn’t feel it added to those. I was predicting at the start which pictures would appear and was right.   It did find the section on the 1961 Young Contemporaries show interesting as it showed you this group of people at the start of their careers not as the Grand Dames of the art world they have become. It was also a nice touch to start the show with lovely photographs of the artists by Snowdon.   There was a good section at the end looking at the importance of prints in this period as a way of popularising art including a lovely set by Paolozzi.   Closed on 7 May 2018   Reviews Times Telegr...