Cathy's Art Diary

Disappointing exhibition at Kensington Palace looking at the life and reign of Queen Victoria. I say disappointing as it’s trying to be all things to all people in quite a limited space. It includes a rather strange installation by Jane Wildgoose looking at her grief for Albert and poems by local South-Asian women and University College London students on the subject of Empire.   There was also quite a bias towards her relationship with India. It would have been better to just tell the story of her life or of her relationship with India without the distractions. There were some wonderful objects in the show including numerous of her dresses from which you gradually saw her getting more and more rotund. It was magical to see the dress she wore to the opening of the Great Exhibition particularly as I’d just watched that episode of “Victoria”! It’s always lovely to see the Winterhalter portrait of herself she commissioned for Albert showing her with her hair loose. The exh...

Charming exhibition at Kensington Palace looking at Queen Victoria’s life before she became Queen. Later in her life Victoria created a myth around her unhappy childhood but this exhibition shows that she had had a happy, privileged though restricted start in life which lead to her being very strong willed. It talked about the race between George IV’s brothers to produce an heir on the death of George’s daughter Charlotte and how Victoria’s mother and her companion John Conroy introduced the Kensington rules to protect and control her. I hadn’t know before that her mother and Conroy took her on a tour of the country and the show included the travel bed she had used. It was lovely to see her handwriting exercise books as well as delightful drawings she did of plays and ballets she had seen. The story was told using wonderful objects from the Royal Collection and charming small figurines which appeared around the show of Victoria, her governess Lehzen, her dog Dash and Con...

Nostalgic  small exhibition at the Design Museum to mark 150th anniversary of Sainsbury’s supermarket by looking at the role of their in-house design department in the 1960s and 70s. With the end of rationing in 1954 and the opening of the first self-service store in 1950, packaging took on a more important role as there was more choice and products had to stand out from their competitors. Sainsbury’s therefore saw the need for an in house team to design packaging for their own brand products. They produced hundreds of packages a year and also worked on store guidance and staff publications. I liked a case which took you through the design process for a 1966 cola tin from initial ideas to the finished product. Also a set of photo slides of products on shelves to give ideas of how to make the own brands stand out. It was nostalgic to see some of these packs from my childhood although we didn’t have a Sainsbury’s in my home town until the 1980s. These were exotic desig...

Fascinating exhibition at the Design Museum looking at the work of Stanley Kubrick and the designers who worked with him. I must admit I went along to with low expectations and I’m not a huge fan of Kubrick’s best known films but it was so well arranged and explained with a wealth of archive material and artefacts and I’d forgotten what a range of films he made. I was grabbed from the first display which looked at how he researched his films in amazing depth taking a film on the life of Napoleon he researched but never made. As a librarian you have to love his card filing system! The show then went through his career film by film using each one to illustrate some aspect of how his design process worked. The films followed in chronological order but for once I didn’t mind this. I hadn’t realised he’d directed Spartacus after the previous director was sacked and added the great battle scene to it. I loved a photo of numbered extras on a battlefield. The section on Clockw...

Excellent study day organised by the London Art History Society and held at Friends House focusing on the role of Pisa in Early Italian Art. This was the second study day in the series and the first to focus on a particular city. In the morning we started by looking at the early painting from Pisa focusing on the Byzantine style of Giunta Pisano. We looked at the various styles of Crucifix and how they changed from the open eyed living Christ to the contorted dead figure and how this followed the theology of the time. We then moved on to the sculpture of Nicola Pisano and talked about how he studies Roman sarcophagi and worked out the techniques involved in them to produce wonderful pulpits. The lecturer has excellent pictures of the pulpits at Pisa and Sienna. In the afternoon we moved on to Giovanni Pisano and looked at how he developed this style having worked with his father on the Sienna pulpit and how he developed the idea of figurative tombs and how this was taken u...

Delightful new stained glass window at Westminster Abbey designed by David Hockney. This was unveiled a few months ago but this was the first time I’d seen it when a friend very kindly took me up to the new galleries. I’d not noticed it as we came in but he pointed it out to me from the gallery and its bright colours and modern design are very striking. It’s lovely to see such a new piece in this gothic setting and to see it shed coloured light over the rather nasty, busy visitors entrance. Reviews Times Guardian Telegraph

Charming exhibition at the Coningsby Gallery of work by artist Fred Dubery which chronicled his life with his fashion designer wife, Joanne Brodgen. Dubery was Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy and throughout his long marriage to Brogden painted in France and Italy as well as recording their domestic contentment in Suffolk. The pictures were delightful colourful landscapes, townscapes and domestic interiors. They gave a sense of a life well and happily lived. Closed 17 June 2019

Strange exhibition at the British Library of works by contemporary artist Michael Takeo Magrunder transforming the British Libraries digital map collection into fictional landscapes for the information age. I’m afraid the most interest thing in the show were the original maps that had been used to create the four works and the information about the British Library project to digitise 19th century books and to extract the maps, Illustrations and photographs into a database.   I loved his description that an archive was not just a repository but “a storehouse of creative potential that engenders new avenues or culture”. My only problem was that I didn’t really understand the art works he had produced. This wasn’t helped by the fact the virtual reality one wasn’t working when I was there. The Paris works were large square, kaleidoscope like images but I couldn’t understand the explanation of how these related to the maps. I did like the London triptych which gradually cha...

Interesting small exhibition at the British Library looking at the history of women’s football in Great Britain. The show was timed to coincide with the Women’s World Cup and consisted of good commentary boards and display cases of books and ephemera. I hadn’t realised how most major towns had a team up to 1921 when the Football Association banned women from playing. A ban that was only lifted in 1970. I loved the section on these early days including a photo of Nettie Honeyballs (a pseudonym) and details of a North v South matched played in London to a crowd of 12000. It then explained how, post the 1966 England men’s win in the World Cup, and with the rise of feminism, people began to question the ban. There was a nice collection of ephemera from this time including minutes of the first AGM of the Women’s Football Association. The last section brought things up to date by looking at the Women’s World Cup which began in 1991 and of course included a copy of the dvd of...