Cathy's Art Diary

Eclectic and fun day from the BBC highlighting the work of museums and galleries through live streams and an interactive website. Dan Vo and Sacha Coward, freelance curators, lead the day via a series of live streams where they talk to museum staff and cultural commentators about what galleries and museums are doing during lock down from checking items in store to creating online material and running archive projects to collect stories and objects from this time. They define galleries, libraries, archives and museums as the GLAM sector and, as a librarian, I am happy to be part of that! The written live feed includes links to some fascinating videos on exhibitions which were on when lockdown made by the BBC started including “London Calling: The Clash” at the Museum of London and “Art Deco by the Sea” from Norwich. Also, great pointers to short pieces on museum websites about their exhibitions and fun content they are putting out. I am spending some time during the day fol...

Interesting archival project from the Museum of the Home, formerly the Geffrye  Museum, to record and document how our home lives are changing during the coronavirus pandemic. As part of their Documenting Homes archive. I’ve taken part and it’s easy to do. There are seven open questions around how you feel about your home at the moment while you are spending so much time in it, then you can also upload up to five photographs which you feel sum up your experience. It just took me a few minutes to do and made me reflect on the here and now and what had changed. You can also read other people’s stories which does give a sense of all being in this together if apart. In one talk I listened to last week online someone said we need to remember that everyone’s experience of lockdown will be different and once we emerge not to assume we have all been doing the same thing, Reading these stories really brings this home. Personally, as I’m furloughed, I’m treating it like a sabbat...

Fascinating series from BBC4 exploring national museum collections at a time of enforced closure. I thought these were wonderfully produced programmes with a real sense of capturing a moment when two exhibitions I had hoped to visit went into lockdown. I believe the next two episodes will look at aspects of particular galleries and museums collections rather than specific shows and I’ll return to review those once they are shown later this week. Episode 1 looked at the Andy Warhol show at Tate Modern introduced by Alastair Sooke. I found the eerie shots at the start of the empty turbine hall and static escalators moving and melancholy and liked Sooke’s spin on the show as Warhol as a commented on the 21 st century even though he worked in the 20 th and parallels he drew to these strange times. I like the fact he was in the gallery walking around it as we would have done and there was a good mix of close up images and of him interacting with the work. It is interesting...

Enjoyable course offered by Historic Royal Palaces and University of Glasgow via the FutureLearn platform looking at the history of royal and court fashion over 6 decades. The course ran over five weeks but you could do it at your own pace. Each week a new chapter was released covering Tudors, Stuarts, Georgians, Victorians and Windsors. I must admit I thought I might find it a but simplistic but I learned a lot and, as importantly, enjoyed it. I particularly liked the short videos either focusing on an object from the dress collection with one of the curators or conservators or showing how the clothes were put on with some of the palace’s historic interceptors. I wasn’t so keen on the practical exercises as you went through such as designing a crown and posting it online but I just read then skipped those. So well as being packed with information I also liked the light this shed on the work of Historic Royal Palaces and I feel I know a lot more about the behind the sce...

Interesting videos of seven of the talks given at last years festival art historical research at the Courtauld Institute of Art. I’d seen the event advertised but hadn’t managed to get along to it so was delighted to find these talks online in my digital wandering. I did find some of them a bit philosophical but there were some good highlights too. As galleries improve their digital offering these did feel a bit flat but they were a good record of how the talk was delivered on the day including jokes and technical hitches. I liked Aviva Burnstock talking about some discoveries made by the Courtauld in the technical analysis of paintings. Most interesting was the discovery of a figure painting under Picasso’s Child with a Dove, which she compared in style to other works of the time for which it might have been a study and the discovery of a sketch for the Roundabout under a picture of Garsington by Mark Gertler. Tom Nixon gave a lively talk on why people like climbing t...

Videoed play made available by the Barbican on the Trial of the 17 th century female artist Artemisia Gentileschi. Two of the things I have been most sad to miss during this Covid-19 lockdown have been the Artemisia exhibition at the National Gallery, which is hopefully being rescheduled, and this play which I was due to see at the Barbican. I’ve been an admirer of Artemisia’s work since reading a novel about her and of course seeing her work. I think her self-portrait in the Royal Collection is one of my favourite pictures. I was therefore delighted when an email popped up telling me about this videoed version of the play. Produced by Breach Theatre iot is largely based on the transcript of the trial of Agostino Tassi for breach of promise to marry Artemisia in the course of which she accuses him of rape. At its heart it is a classically, hopefully old fashioned, bad rape trail with witnesses brought to her bad character and the defendant allowed to cross examine her. It i...

Having reviewed videos of an exhibition I hadn’t seen yesterday today I thought I’d look at one I had managed to get to before the lockdown “ Picasso and Paper ” at the Royal Academy. The video, without commentary, did recreate the feeling of going round the show well. It went round room by room, starting by scanning the commentary board, then showing an overview of the layout display and finally focusing on a few works and showing their labels. However I must admit it felt like going round following a particularly annoying fellow visitor as you couldn’t pick the pictures you wanted to see more detail of, OK I know I’m asking a lot, but also looking at pictures from strange angles which seemed unnecessary as the gallery was empty.   The ethereal music which ebbed and flowed worked well at first but over the 37 minutes could have done with more variation. I think I would have preferred some commentary to add another dimension to the show. I must admit I found the sho...

As the Covid-19 lockdown happened the largest exhibition ever of Van Eyck’s work was open at the Museum of Fine Arts (MSK) Ghent containing about half of his 22 known works as well as workshop copies of now lost originals and over 100 other masterpieces from the later Middle Ages. I had looked at how I might get to this show but failed to work out the logistics. However, in wonderful video Till-Holger Borchert, Director Museums Bruges and one of the curators of exhibition leads you around the show after it was closed. It really gives an idea of what the show was like, taking you around room by room and following it’s narrative. In just 26 minutes he talks you through some fascinating detail of the symbolism of the work with fantastic close ups of the pictures which give a sense of how you yourself would look at the details in a show. There is another fun video of the show by the art critic Waldemar Januszczak for the Sunday Times. It was filmed as the show was being set u...

Fun offerings from contemporary artists in lockdown. I’ve been enjoying the new works of art artists are offering pictures of or downloads of during the Covid-19 lockdown. I loved Banksy’s witty redecoration of his bathroom captioned “My wife hates it when I work from home” shown here. It’s so witty and beautifully done but with that added sense of desperation we all feel of what on earth can I do now! Damien Hirst has produced a new butterfly picture called “Rainbow Butterflies” a limited edition of which will be sold for NHS charities but he has also provided a free downloadable poster version. I had only recently blogged his White Cube exhibition of butterfly mandalas so I was particularly excited to see this.   Tracey Emin did a seven day lockdown diary on Instagram, written thoughts, images and short film from her bathroom and studio, commissioned by White Cube. I’m not convinced thoughts on an art work are an art work in itself but then I often won...

Interesting online offering from Hauser and Wirth with a series of online exhibitions. The most interesting and successful of these are the two showcasing new work by two artists during the Covid-19 crisis. Rashid Johnson presents a series of intense red, abstract paintings entitled “Untitled Anxious Red Drawings and George Condo a series of Picasso like figurative drawings called “Drawings for Distanced Figures”. I like the quote from Johnson that the times feel “simultaneously unsettling, urgent and radical” and the inclusion at the end of his piece of watch, reading and music play lists as well as a recipe! Both artists sum up the current zeitgeist well and makes me wonder what other art will come out of these times. Less successful but still noteworthy are the online offerings of older works. I was particularly drawn to the Louise Bourgeois drawings which had originally brought me to the site and the photographs by Zoe Leonard as I remembered her show at the gallery las...

Wonderful virtual tour of the Gallery on Honour at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It’s a room I love although I am usually pretty tired by the time I get there having done the rest of the museum. Not for me a quick sprint to the famous bits! This is a virtual recreation of the room which you can navigate round as you walk up the centre. It took me a little while to work out how to move round a bay but I got there in the end. One or two pictures in each bay then show an audio sign and there are delightful descriptions of the works, often including the sounds which might be in the picture. Particularly delightful was the sound of milk pouring with Vermeer’s milk maid and the music which might have been created by the figures in Jan Steen’s Merry Family. At the end there is a more expensive set of pieces on the Night Watch and it is pictures in its current state of conservation. The commentaries talk about the content of the picture as well as it’s history and a discussion...

Poignant series of short films on The J Paul Getty Museum Facebook pages and blog looking at some of the works in their Michelangelo: Mind of the Mast exhibition filmed in the last few hours before the museum closed due to the Coronavirus. Curator Julian Brooks talks about 11 drawings in what looks to have been a wonderful exhibition with a focus on over two dozen of the drawings but displayed with lovely large reproductions of the finished works. Brooks gives some nice insights into the works including noting that the study of a knee for the figure of Day in the Medici Chapel shows both sides of the knee even though one side in the finished figure is against the wall. I particularly liked the studies for the leg of God in the Sistine Chapel. There is a lot more information about the exhibition on the Getty website but these films demonstrate how sad it is that so many great exhibitions have had to close early. They have also brought to my attention a show I would not hav...

Charming series of short videos on the Metropolitan Museums website to share stories gathered from visitors to the museum about what it means to them. This is part of an initiative to mark 150 years since the founding of the Museum and at the time of writing there were four episodes on the site covering nine different people. I loved the fact it includes well known people but also members of the museum staff and cultural figures. I enjoyed the chef Yotam Ottolenghi’s piece which compared the experience of viewing art to that of eating a shared meal with lovely pictures of food from the collection running in the background and Tim Gunn, host of Project Runway talking about how he realised designers didn’t know about the history of fashion so he started bringing students to the museum to not only show them the fashion collection but also the ancient statues and Great Master paintings. I enjoyed two pieces by museum staff. Stephane Post, a photo archivist, talked about her...

Fun new art podcast from the Sunday Times featuring two of my favourite TV art historians, Waldemar Januszczak and Bendor Grosvenor. From its jaunty opening music I was hooked and I found their good humoured discussion easy and interesting to list to. They seem to be planning to divide the show into four sections which is about right for one listening, They started with an opinion piece on a topic in the art world, in this case the decommissioning of works from collections. They talked about why galleries and museums to this and the pros and cons. Waldy, as I feel I should now call him, then talked about how good Gauguin was at painting children while mourning the cancellation of the Royal Academy’s Gauguin and Impressionism show. Next came a fun section called Art in Isolation where they reviewed what some of the galleries are doing online while they can’t open. This week they looked at a tour of a Raphael exhibition in Rome to make 500 years since his death ...

Fun and slightly addictive game on the National Portrait Gallery website, a version of pairs using Tudor and Elizabethan Portraits. I dare you to start playing and you will rapidly not be able to stop and want to beat your previous score. It does get easier the more you play it as the pictures don’t change so you start to remember them better but still it’s fun. You also find yourself shouting “Ah Wolsey” or is that just me? I’ve just found Regency Familiar Faces  too so off to try that!

Excellent series of short films made by the art dealer Philip Mould during the Coronavirus lock down. As of today (10 April) there have been 10 films all set in Mould’s beautiful 17 th century house and featuring works of art from his own collection. It has been delightful to watch the series develop as he and his son Oliver, the cameraman, learn new techniques and introduce little competitions. I love the appearances by Cedric, the whippet, especially the action shot in the opening credits which appeared in about episode 4. The introductory film gave you a history of the house and showed you two pictures from the time of its construction in about 1620. It’s lovely to hear a bit more about why Mould bought the pictures so there is a King Charles I portrait because he wanted a picture of the monarch of the time and a portrait of the owner during the Civil War which he found by chance shortly after he bought the house. I was delighted in episode 7 to discover a new cont...