Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting exhibition at the British Library of photographs by Chris Steele-Perkins of families that have relocated to London. This is part of an ongoing project which has recorded 164 families for 187 countries pictures in their own homes. The British Library is purchasing a set of these photographs. The pictures have immediacy and joy about them. I loved the ones, like the one shown, which show big families from many countries. There was one clever one which showed the family in the reflections of mirrors on a wall opposite them,. Closes 7 July 2019

Fascinating exhibition at the British Library looking at the development of writing. I’d never really thought about the evolution of writing and this show told the story in a clear and engaging way. I found it very moving how often early pieces of writing concern mundane personal things like a person’s wages or how much someone sold goods for. In particular I loved a small piece of broken pot from 110AD which was a woman called Thinabella’s licence to be a sex worker for a day. The only record we have of that person. I was fascinated to see how letters developed and the display that took the capital letter A from a hieroglyph of a antelope’s head turning round to form the letter we know today. Also to see how Renaissance humanists changed writing from the Gothic script to a text which became the basis of modern printed text. There were sections on the different materials and techniques from sticks to keyboards and on how we learn to write and what writing means to peop...

Disappointing exhibition at the British Library looking at the role of motion in in his quest to understand the natural world. The show was based around three of the codex’s The British Library’s own, Codex Arundel, one from the Victoria and Albert Museum, Codex Forster II and Codex Leicester from the Bill Gates Collection. The leaves from these were shown well in upright display units and double sided ones showed both sides and wove both into the narrative. I just say disappointing as I hadn’t realised the show had such a narrow subject matter and the descriptions become quite scientifically dense. It is always wonderful to see Leonardo’s neat backwards writing but I found it frustrating that you were so reliant on the descriptions as you couldn’t read the originals. I did love the exquisite small sketches in the margins which still had a real immediacy. The show finished with a wonderful AV of the British Library’s own Codex where you could see a scan of the original, ...

Fabulous exhibition at Tate Britain looking at the effect Van Gogh’s time in Britain on his art and in turn of his art of British Artists. This was quite a complex story to tell in one show particularly as Van Gogh wasn’t a practicing artist when he lived in Britain but the show set out a clear narrative which it led you though gradually and clearly. Questions it raised in your mind it had answered by the end of the show. You were led into the story with a set of prints from Gustave Dore’s London: A Pilgrimage, published the year before Van Gogh arrived. He later collected copies of these prints which appeared later in the show with works by him that were influenced by them. I loved a room which brought together pictures Van Gogh recorded having seen in his letters in one room and hung them with later works by him that picked up similar themes and motifs. Another room concentrated on how he was influenced by black and white prints which were seen as a particularly Brit...

Gem of an exhibition at the Wiener Library looking at the life and work of the photographer Gerty Simon. Simon was a German Jewish photographer who photographed many important figures in Weimar Germany then as a refugee in Britain, set up a studio in London and photographed figures from 1930s London society. Her archive and a large collection of prints have been given to the library by her son. The show told the story of her life clearly using the archive material then had a display of about 20 of her pictures with Berlin on one wall and London on the opposite one. You felt every photograph had a story behind it that you wanted to know more about. It was touching in the Berlin section to see a picture of the six year old Anna Judith Kerr who went on to write “The Tiger Who Came to Tea” when she moved to London and who died recently. I rather liked Alexander Iolas shown in the top left hand corner of the attached picture. I looked him us and he was a dancer and later become...

Disappointing exhibition at Senate House looking at magic from the 16th to the 20th century. I say disappointing because the description of the show was much more exciting than the way it was delivered. The objects, given it was the library which had organised it, were very book and paper based. The items were displayed in rather dull display cases made slightly more exciting with red draped curtains at the top. The books were shown brief descriptions but with much more information in a handout. It was often hard to match the object to the leaflet as items weren’t numbers. The large section descriptions were not always next to the cabinet they referred to. There were remarkable things including the earliest book on sleight of hand magic, a book on “Tricks for the Trenches and Wards” from the First World War, a handbill for Houdini and catalogues of magic tricks. The most interesting section was on Harry Price, who had collected these items and investigated alleged psych...

Glittery installation at the Now Gallery by Sara Shakeel. Behind a black curtain in installation of a family meal which is dramatized by being covered in glass crystals giving these ordinary objects a sense of glamour and purpose. The handout says it aims to celebrate the gregariousness of the family table and to mark the sparkling conversations around food and family. Sadly I’m not too sure how many families still eat together in this idealistic way. Closed on 23 June 2019

Colourful exhibition at the National Gallery of new work by abstract artist Sean Scully in response to time spent in the National Gallery. Scully works in broad patterns of stripes with a limited range of colours but looks to figurative art for ideas and inspiration. In the first room which included Turner’s “Evening Star” there were works which engaged with the colours in that work and its basic structure. They made you look in more detail at the Turner itself and think of its component parts. In the second room there were works responding to Van Gogh’s Chair which hangs upstairs in the gallery. These all had the same basic pattern but in different colour patterns. They had a very painterly quality with a looser quality than the precise geometry implies. They really showed how colours work together and react to each other. I loved a set of four pictures where each had an inserted panel from one of the other pictures giving a sense of viewing something which lay beyond the ...

Interesting exhibition at Canada House of new work by Mfanwy MacLeod. MacLeod’s work tends to be for public commissions. This show was dominated by a series of beautiful water colours of migrant birds that live and breed in Canada for a set of posters to mark the 100th anniversary of the Migration Bird Treaty Act between Canada and the USA. The mirror Dutch floral still lives called “Impossible bouquets” as the flowers, in this case the birds, would not be seen in the same place at the same time of year. These were shown with two sculptures,   “The Birds”, marquettes for 20 time life sized sculptures made for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and “Wood for the People” shown here, a wooden log and seven plaster casts o fit, a precursor for an installation at the University of British Colombia. I loved this later work and how the logs looked different depending on the angle they were placed at even though you knew they were the same cast. Closed on 8 June 2019

Fascinating exhibition at the Wallace Collection showing the seven sculptures in Henry Moore’s Helmet Head series and looking at how they were inspired by his visits to the Wallace Collection. This show was cleverly set out to take you through the inspiration for this work and preliminary ideas. It showed sketches of helmets by Moore in the Wallace collections own collection alongside the actual objects then showed you how he worked with the ideas these had inspired and how these developed into the Helmet Heads. It really made you look differently at the real helmets and armour which I’d always found quite dry before. It then looked at the evolution of the Helmet Heads including small marquettes for them and full sized plaster versions. I had never realised that the interior and exterior where cast separately and I loved the fact that there were five interior figures made which he matched with different exteriors in the first three heads. The three surviving models for t...

Small but effective exhibition at the National Theatre of photographs by Ronan Mckenzie to mark the Caribbean experience in Britain in response to their current production of Small Island. The images themselves were stunning and effective in the space, given they were shown in such a large format, but not very self-explanatory. Reading the leaflet I did understand the nuances and how they illuminated the tension between the fantasy and reality of the British-Caribbean experience. The pictures were taken on the coast to include the idea of seascapes and new beginnings and the models were some of today’s emerging theatre-makers dressed in outfits reminiscent of ‘Sunday best’. Closes in September 2019 Review Evening Standard

Fascinating talk   at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival bringing together Sue Roe with her book on the surrealists in Montparnasse and Anthony Penrose, the son of Roland Penrose and Lee Miller, surrealists who lived in Sussex. I have to admit to a bias here as I know Sue Roe well and love the way she writes group biographies filling in lots of detail about what the world around her subjects and what was happening in Paris that they may have been influenced by. She started the event with a talk on the birth of surrealism and why it evolved in Paris after the First World War. She brought to life an array of characters. Penrose then talked his parent’s early lives and about his childhood in Sussex where many of the people Sue had talked about came to stay. He talked about Manray as an inventor of a fly trap, Paul Elliard smuggling poems out of France in the War which Penrose had translated and published and Picasso coming to stay when the press hounde...

Delightful book talk at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival with Adam Nicolson talking about his book on when Coleridge and Wordsworth lived together in Somerset and Tom Hammick, the artists he asked to illustrate it. The discussion was held in front of a wonderful, brightly coloured screen decorated with one of the pictures based on his idea of Xanadu. Nicolson talked about why he wrote the book and how he went to the Quantock Hills where they stayed to experience the landscape. He said by doing this he experienced the rhythm of walking in the poetry they wrote at this time. Hammick got involved when Nicolson invited him to join him in the area and go walking together. The original idea was to have eight black and white woodcuts but this ended up as 50 coloured ones. They are not just about Coleridge and Wordsworth but brought in modern themes such as replacing a manor house with a Barrett Home. He talked about how the wood used for the woodcuts was pic...

Fascinating book talk at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival with Posy Simmonds talking about the process of writing her latest book “Cassandra Darke”.   Posy gave an illustrated talk on how the book evolved from early sketches saying how you started to give your characters clothes in in this case how Cassandra’s trappers hat isolates her from weather and the world. She told us how she draws the floorplans of characters and sketches their interiors so that she can see the characters in them.   Her sketches were art works in their own right regardless of how they are then used in the book. She talked about taking long bus rides to find locations for the book and how she uses those rides to look at people who she then sketches when she gets home.   She said she was taught to draw by looking. She told us how she works in crayon and paint and writes the story in long hand. Her husband then sets that text in speech bubbles. The event was cle...

Charming talk at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival by two novelists who had written novels about artists. The event was a well chaired discussion  between the authors,  led by Nicolette Jones,  bringing out the reasons they wrote the books and their different approaches. This made it much more dynamic that just each talking about their own book in isolation. They had obviously each read and enjoyed the others books which led to a good conversations. Amy Sackville talked about “Painter to the King” about Velazquez at the Spanish Court. She said she started by wanting to invent a court painter at a Baroque court as a painter is an observer plus she wanted to use the world of Jacobean plays. In the end she felt she just kept inventing Velazquez so just used him! Elizabeth Macneal talked about “Doll Factory” a novel based in the world of the Pre-Raphaelites but using imagined main characters. She said she began by looking at the famous p...

Interesting book talk at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival by Rupert Thomson on his novel about the artists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. Thomson began by reading a passage from the book then outlined the story of this remarkable couple. The women, having met in the 1909, took on masculine names and were later to become step-sisters. They are best known for the photographs of Cahun they collaborated to take. He talked about their place in the art scene of 1920s Paris, the people they met there and their political activism. He then went on to their life and resistance activity in occupied Jersey. In discussion with art historian Frances Spalding, they discussed how he approached the novel and why he chose to write in the voice of Moore. I had read and enjoyed the novel as ‘homework’ for the festival so was fascinating to hear more about how it was constructed and the decisions he’s made when writing it. 

Interesting discussion at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival about the role of the visual arts in protest. The sculptor Hazel Reeves, who created the statue of Emeline Pankhurst for Manchester, gave an outline of protest art she’d  seen while on a six month post with the UN to work on women’s issues.   She then talked about the commissioning process for the Pankhurst statue, the unveiling and how she sees it not just as a one off art work but also a focus for further expression. Maria Balshaw, the director of the Tate, then talked about how the Tate galleries are opening themselves up more protest art talking about the Tate Exchange project on the 5th floor of Tate Modern which invites in different groups to give people creative tools. She sees the turbine hall as a megaphone for issues. They then had a fascinating discussion on the issue covering how art is moving off walls and out of galleries and the emotional resonance of events like ...

Fascinating discussion at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival looking at the cultural contribution to the UK of refugees from Nazi Germany. The talk was chaired by Monica Bohm-Duchen, who has curated a year’s events on the subject, who began by paying tribute to Judith Kerr, the children’s author, whose death had been announced early that day, and who had come to England just before the Second World War with her parents.   She talked about the book which accompanies the years events for which 22 people had written chapters on different aspects of cultural life including sculpture, design, photography, art   dealers, Picture Post and much more. Norman Rosenthal, the art historian and curator, then talked about how his parents fled Nazi Germany and the friends they made in England in similar circumstances. He talked about the questions he wished he’d asked them. I loved an image he talked about of how a few years ago the second hand bookshops of H...

Interesting discussion at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival looking at Leonardo da Vinci on the 500th anniversary of his death. It began with the bother Michael and Stephen Farthing talking about their book   on Leonardo’s anatomical drawings. Michael is a surgeon and Stephen an artist so they had brought their different expertise to the work. They talked about Leonardo’s ideas to publish an anatomical text book and how the pictures were largely forgotten in the Royal Collection until William Hunter, the first professor of anatomy at the Royal Academy brought attention to it. They talked about how accurate the drawings were and how close Leonardo came to changing anatomical knowledge. Ben Lewes then talked about his book on the Salvator Mundi and looked at the controversy around its authenticity. It was initially bought at an auction in New Orleans for about $1000 but later sold for $450m. The author had researched who the original seller was and ...

Vibrant discussion at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival between Grayson Perry and his wife Philippa ably  chaired by Helen Bagnall. Funny but insightful discussion about relationships and how they influence creativity. Philippa admitted that she had partly been driven to write books on psychology because of being jealously of the attention Grayson got when he won the Turner Prize which I thought was interesting and honest. Grayson commented on how people think artists are very Bohemian but he said “Artists are middle class professionals”. To create successful art you need to work hard and meet deadlines. There were some brilliant quotes on relationships “We form in a relationship” her and she said a relationship was about “mutual impact” which I loved. Also from her “Your authentic self is good enough” and “You can change your link in the chain”. They also talked about children and her book on bringing them up. He told us how drawing with...

Fascinating talk at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival with the artists Peter Blake being interviewed by the art critic Martin Gayford. Gayford took Blake gently through his life using a series of his paintings as talking points. They talked about how Blake’s ‘arts’ as he was growing up were speedway, wrestling and fairgrounds and about his contemporaries at art college. I particularly enjoyed hearing Blake discuss his self-portrait of 1961 where he wears denim covered in badges. He described his clothes as an outfit and likened himself in the picture to a Pierrot. He talked about moving to the country in the 1970s and founding the Brotherhood of Ruralists and about later series of pictures. He laughed that at 75 he had now entered his “late period”. The questions of course included one on the Sergeant Pepper cover to which Blake’s reply was “I nearly got away with it.” He talked about how little he was paid for it particularly as his agent signed ...

Delightful exhibition at Charleston Farmhouse of landscapes by Philip Hughes. The show concentrated on two areas of importance to Virginia Woolf, the Downs in East Sussex and West Penwith in Cornwall. The pictures were pared down, minimalist landscapes with shape and patches of colour defining the scene. I loved one where the tip of the downs was highlighted in a rainbow of colours. It was lovely to be seeing them within one of the landscapes. Closes 26 August 2019

Stunning exhibition at Charleston Farmhouse looking at the impact of colour in 20th century art. Curated by the designer Cressida Bell, Vanessa Bell’s granddaughter, the exhibition shows a selection of paintings without labels against rich coloured walls to emphasis the colours in them. You do get a leaflet to tell you what the pictures are to give some description from Cressida about why she chose the works. I loved the mix of work in this show.  There are some great loans to this show with pictures not only from Charleston’s own collection but also from the British Council, Hepworth Wakefield, Pembroke College Oxford and York Art Gallery. It was lovely to see Francis Cadell’s “The Embroidered Cloak” from the Ferens in Hull, an old favourite. The pictures looked fantastic against the vibrant, dark coloured walls and were hung in a roughly similar and contrasting colour palette to show off the colours in the works. It really made you look carefully at the works and a...

First of a series of study days on Early Italian Art in the 13th and 14th centuries organised by the London Art History Society and held at Friends House. This first day was lead by John Renner and gave an introduction to and overview of the period. It’s a subject I know quite well but it’s good to hear it put into context. The first talk looked at how this art was discovered after it fell out of favour following Vasari’s great work which upheld Michelangelo and Raphael as the pinnacle of art and how early Italian art was rediscovered and championed in the 19th century. We then went on to look at the drivers for artistic creation in this period from the strong economic background, the inception and growth of the new religious orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans, and the role of art in showing civic and family importance. This was followed after lunch by a look at the techniques and forms of the art. The lecturer had good slides from the National Gallery which looked at ...

Striking exhibition at Fabrica in Brighton of a new installation by Ghanaian artists Serge Attukwei Clottey. The space was full of a tapestry made from pieces from yellow jerry cans used in Ghana to import cooking oil but then repurposed as water carriers. This practice is not just unhealthily but is adding to the countries the regions plastic waste problem. I love the fact the work is not just on the wall but is draped across the floor and you walk on it as it crunches under your feet. It was a clever way to make you think about the issues involved. Closes 27 May 2019

Two glorious weekends at the Brighton Artists’ Open Houses looking at an array of art and craft work. The show was on longer but we only managed to do three days over two weekends however we went into full train spotter mode and got round 22 houses! We concentrated on the groups at Five Ways, Beyond the Level, Hove, and Dyke Road. It was a mix of old favourites such as the wonderful sculpture at Collectors’ Selection and Dion Salvador Lloyd’s lovely seascapes, although it was nice to see him branching out into delicate flower pictures.   New discoveries included St Augustine’s Rough Diamonds, not so much for the art but for the amazing things that had been done with the building. Random shout outs go to Claire Morris’s lovely garden sculptures, the eclectic 11 Rugby Road, Frances Doherty’s botanical ceramics and John Beetham’s paintings of archaeological sites and abstracted maps shown with wonderful ceramic heads by Alain Guy. Closed 26 May 2019

Striking exhibition at the JD Malat Gallery of new work by Li Tianbing. I loved these large works which felt like a strange meeting of Francis Bacon and Street Art. They were full of realistic figures alongside broken down, melting images. I loved the large red picture with huge hands emerging from a crowd of faces with dead eyes. Thank you to the gallery’s owner who came over to discuss the work with me and explain some of the themes and style. It’s rare to get such a welcome in the small private galleries and it was much appreciated. Closes 15 June 2019

Interesting exhibition at Bastian showing three portfolios of prints by Cy Twombly from the 1970s. Two of the sets show natural history subjects based on Pliny the Elders book, a theoretical text on the natural world published in 77-79 AD which positioned nature with an interdisciplinary link to art. Part 1 was ten pictures of mushrooms and part 2 eight pictures of Italian trees. Both series included collage elements as well as Twombly’s own drawing. The third set “Five Greek Poets and a Philosopher” were less exciting with just the names written in a childlike script. Closes 15 June 2019

Fabulous exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in Grosvenor Hill of self-portraits by 20th century artists hung with a Rembrandt self-portrait from Kenwood House. You name the artist and there was a picture of them here! Picasso, Freud, Bacon, Ego Schiele, Robert Mapplethrope, Jeff Koons and I could go on! There was also a new Jenny Saville painted in direct response to begin hung with the Rembrandt. My favourite piece though was by an artist I’d not heard of before, Urs Fischer, who had produced the sculpture shown here made of paraffin wax, pigment, steel and wicks! It was really strikingly realistic as you looked into the gallery. The biggest crowd though was around the Rembrant and it was interesting to see it hung in a contemporary setting. It coped with it very well. It’s one of my favourites, the late one with two circles in the background. I always feel it’s referring to the legend of Giotto that says that great artists can paint a perfect circle freehand. Closed o...

Lovely exhibition at the Halcyon Gallery of new work by the sculptor Lorenzo Quinn. I discovered Quinn’s work in this gallery a few years ago and fell in love with it so it’s always nice to see new pieces. They always have such a wonderful sense of balance such as the piece shown of a man in the lotus position balanced on just two fingers of upturned hands. I loved “Force of Nature II” of a body covered in beautiful drapery which is hollow when you look at the end of it. The body pulls back a globe and the whole thing has such tension. There were some new pieces in the Quinn tradition of hands or figures within circles. I want to push them to see if they’d rock. Quinn has produced a bridge of six giant hands for the Venice Biennale which I’d love to see and a new work empowerment was billed that it “will play a vital role in promoting the Duke of Edinburgh’s International Award Foundation”. Watch this space! Closes 30 June 2019

Fun exhibition at Sotheby’s Café of images representing the last 275 years of the auction house from its beginnings as a bookseller. It was lovely to get a great cup of coffee in this café and read through the handout which described the images around you. Make sure you get the handout of it would all just feel a bit random and confusing. I loved the fact that it included a portrait of the founder Samuel Baker as well as pictures of objects which recorded record sales. The handout was full of fascinating stories and I particularly liked the tradition of the gallery technicians who handle a sale where 100% of the lots are sold giving a pair of white gloves to the auctioneer of the sale. Closes on September 2019 Review Guardian

Interesting rehang of the modern galleries at Tate Britain covering the period from the 1960s to now using only work by women artists. The galleries were divided into three sculptures, portraits and humour and strangeness. It questions the historical bias and the captions include open questions. There were some fun works including Anthea Hamilton’s “Karl Lagerfeld Bean Counter”, a lounging, acrylic figure of the designer, which greeted you as you entered the room. There were artists who would you expect including Sarah Lucas, Bridget Riley, Maggi Hambling, Gillian Wearing and Tracey Emin. There were also some artists I’d not come across such as Susan Hiller with her installation reacting to reports of apparitions on tv screens after broadcasting stops, not that it does any more. This period is probably one of the easiest to just express with female artists. I did however feel that representing a period of time purely with female artists is just as biased as those with o...

Intriguing exhibition at Tate Britain of new work by Arina Bhimiji. The show takes “Lead White”, the pigment, to be a symbol of purity plus an implication of the painterly. It consists of stripped back references to real events. One wall was enlarged stamps and the others bits of text and impressions on paper taken from archives. I loved the fact one had the metal deposit from a paper clip left on it. A touch to appeal to a real archive geek! Each item is an unknown story. What was the letter from Downing Street? Who was writing from Calcutta on 31 March 1879? What and where was the “Native authority”? Do they say more about the subject of the piece, the creator of it or us the viewer? There was a whiff of colonialism about the whole piece but any criticism was left unsaid but implied. Closed on 2 June 2019 

Strange exhibition at Tate Britain of new work by Joanna Piotrowska. The show was made up of two series of work. My favourite was the one with the title of the show which consisted of photographs of make shift shelters she asked people to build in their homes in Lisbon, Rio de Janiero, Warsaw and London. People had used things they found around their house including umbrellas, a table propped up on books and plants. I think they were meant to represent the home as a refuge. The second set was photographs and films of your girls posed in martial arts poses. The commentary said they were capturing the fact that “young girls silence their inner voice to comply with the patriarch society” but I’m not sure I’d have got that on my own. I just through they were rather odd photographs. Closes on 9 June 2019 Review Guardian