Cathy's Art Diary

Novel online lecture from the National Gallery on five sets of four pictures in their collection. Nick Pace took us through these sets and discussed each in some detail. He looked at “Scenes from Tebaldo’s Ecolgues” – Andrea Prevatalli about 1505, Napoleonic battles by Emile-Jean-Horace Vernet from the 1820s, “Four Times of the Day “ - Jean Baptiste Corot from 1858, “Four Elements “– Joachim Beuchelaer from 1569-70 and “Four Allegories of Love” – Paulo Veronese from 1575. This was a fascinating selection as they were all such different dates and styles. It was a clever way of talking about the different artists and techniques.

Interesting online lecture from Stella Grace Lyons on William Morris, concentrating on his decorative work. I hadn’t realised that William Morris had become trendy with the growth of Cottagecore style over recent months. Evidently he’s hot on Instagram! Who knew! I’m amused because I remember him coming back into style in the 1970s! Stella took us through Morris’s life and friendship with Burne-Jones and Rossetti concentrating on how they worked together on decorative schemes and the inspiration behind those schemes. She looked at the Red House in Bexleyheath, Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire, the Café room at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Standen House in West Sussex. I was particularly interested to hear that Morris’s Strawberry Thief design was inspired by watching thrushes steal fruit from the garden at Kelmscott as I am sitting typing at a dining table with a table cloth in that design. Maybe I am hip and trendy after all!

Fascinating online lecture from the National Gallery on the years Artemisia Gentileschi and her father Orazio spent in London working for the royal court. Desmond Shaw-Taylor, Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures, talked about Artemisia’s 2 years in London and Orazio’s turbulent 13 when he seemed to argue with lots of people. He looked at how their Italian style suited Henrietta Maria, who had known Italian art when she was being brought up at the French court and had an Italian mother, Marie de Medici. Her husband, Charles I, seemed to favour the more flamboyant Dutch and Flemish artists. He discussed how their work fitted with others in her collection which formed a cohesive style. She liked their sparse style with relatively few figures and a controlled palette as in Orazio’s “The Finding of Moses” as well as the added allusion to the senses eg in Artemisia’s “Self-Portrait as La Pittura” it is all about looking, she looks into the light and works on an unfinished picture to be lo...

Excellent three week online course from the London Art History Society looking at the art and architecture of Early Christian Rome. John McNeill was our guide on what felt like a wonderful tour of the city from about 35 to 650. In week one we looked at the catacombs and the great funerial basilicas. I was fascinated in the very early Christian images in the catacombs from secret signs to the start of the iconography we know today. Week 2 was on architecture looking at both existing basilica churches and the Old St Peters. I realised how many of these I had visited on a trip to Rome without really appreciating what I was looking at and it’s age. I so want to go back. Finally week 3 looked at the start of cycles of painting and mosaics in churches and its origins in sarcophagi decorated in scenes from the Old and New Testament. I was also fascinated by door panels which survive from about 430 at Santa Sabina. All in all an interesting three hours leaving me with much to look up...

Enlightening online discussion organised by Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair looking at the role and important of traditional print studios. The talk brought together Vincent Eames, from Eames Fine Art that specialise in prints and Jason Hicklin, Artist and Head of Printmaking at City and Guilds of London Art School. Originally they had hoped to bring it from the City and Guilds print room itself but wifi proved a problem so instead they filmed that space and ran the event from the Eames Fine Art print room. They discussed how a traditional print room is set up with specific areas for each task around the edge and the presses in the centre of the room using the video to demonstrate this. Hicklin explained how this format has developed over time and is now accepted as the model for all food practice. He talked about how he teaches in the room, learning as much from the students as teaching them, and the benefits of this collaborative space. Eames explained the benefit to dealer o...

Interesting online lecture from Stella Grace Lyons on Johannes Vermeer. Vermeer is one of my favourite artists so I was looking forward to this talk and it didn’t disappoint. Taking six paintings Stella took us though his short career pointing out the main themes and ideas. She included his two outdoor works, “View of Delft” and “The Little Street” as well as the unusual “Allegory of the Catholic Church”, a classic “Girl Reading a Letter at a Window” and of course “The Milkmaid” (a detail of which is shown here) and “Girl with the Pearl Earring”. She also talked about how little is known about Vermeer’s life. As he didn’t have a studio, was also an art dealer and we only know of 39 paintings but him, she speculated that in a sense he may have painted in his spare time. She also ruminated on the peacefulness of his pictures which he produced in a house with 11 children.

Intriguing online lecture from the National Gallery looking at migration in art. Bethan Durie from the National Gallery education department takes two pictures from the galleries own collection to look at migration in art and the artist as migrant. She gave other examples of each genre and used five other pictures to highlight other themes. Interestingly she used “The Thames Below Westminster” by Claude Monet from 1871 as it was painted when he was in exile in London from the Franco-Prussian War. She felt the melancholy colours and painting of fog reflect his sense of displacement. She also discussed how this picture reflects the modern world showing the newly constructed Houses of Parliament and Embankment as well as steam boats on the river. She compared this to artists who deliberately migrate in search of new artists ideas such as David Hockney and his move to California in the late 1960s. “The Men of the Docks” by George Bellows from 1912 was use to illustrate migrants in ar...

Stunningly  detailed online lecture from the London Art History Society on two ivory Romanesque crosses. Sandy Heslop from University of East Anglia took us through the iconography of the Gunhild Cross from about 1100 now in Copenhagen and the Cloister Cross from 1180 now in New York. He described then in detail with particular reference to the inscriptions on them and great illustrations. I hadn’t known either piece before and was fascinated by the detail of them. He went to speculate convincingly on whether a Christ figure now in Oslo was originally from the Closter Cross linking it’s style to a roundel of the Deposition of Christ on cross. He then looked at where and who each cross might have been made for drawing the conclusion that the maker of the latter cross may have known the earlier piece or at least come from the same tradition of art in Saxony under Henry the Lion. I was interested in the links he made to the anti-Semitism of the time of the First Crusade and the...

Fascinating online talk from the Woolwich Contemporary Print fair looking at art crime and what to be aware of when buying.   Will Korner of the Art Loss Register and Fred Clark from law firm Boodle Hatfield talked us through the different types of art crime pointing out it is not just the high profile thefts that might affect buyers but also fraud in the market and copyright issues. Clark told some interesting stories of cases that have dealt with for the street artists Stik around works which he had done for community projects turning up on the art market.   They outlined things to consider when buying art including using reputable sources such as art fairs which have been vetted, not to feel the pressure to by as it is a buyer’s market, to keep records of what you own and to ask questions, and as with many things in life if it looks to good to be true it probably is too good to be true.  

Innovative new website providing online exhibition and collaboration space for artists, filmmakers, photographers, musicians and writers. The site currently has three live projects delivered via Vimeo. Two recreate the sense of walking into an art cinema to see a film. You enter through the foyer and into the screening then settle before a screen which open out to show the film. One is a relaxing piece of found pictures of graffiti and textures from Brighton and Berlin which gentle merge into one another and the second is a music video for a song called Crow. The third project creates a video space to recreate the atmosphere of a contemporary art venue and starts with a piece of video art with that sense of walking into a dark space to view it then leads you into galleries of photographs and paintings some of which have interesting commentaries by the artists. I particularly liked Alex Hesslenberg’s three photographs and Elizabeth Vicary’s haunting paintings. This web site is the c...

Excellent online lecture form the Victoria and Albert Museum on the Raphael cartoons and the refurbishment of the gallery. Ana Debenedetti, Curtator of Paintings and V&A and lead curator for the renovation, took us through the history of the cartoons and their creation. I hadn’t realised that three had been lost, one very soon after they were made but two others were rumoured to be owned by a Medici in the 16th century. What a find that would be! She also talked about the new gallery display and the av resources which will be available both there and online. In the gallery you will be able to look at high res images, a 3D scan and the infra-red images in layers. The walls have been painted a darker colour and there is new furniture and lighting. Such as shame that it was due to open the day of the lecture but Lockdown 2.0 hit. She also hinted that when they do open there will be some research results and new discoveries published for the press. I can’t wait to see and hear the...

Insightful online lecture from Stella Grace Lyons on the life and work of Edvard Munch. Stella began by posing the question of whether Munch’s portrayal as a troubled artist was a correct one and then went on to prove it definitely was. She started by using some of his 70 plus self-portraits to look at his life from the death of his mother and sister when he was young, thought various love affairs to the reclusive end of his life. She then went on to look at his pictures of other people which are studies of form and emotion with heart warming titles like “Despair”, “Ashes” and “Love and Pain” and broadened into talking about him as a symbolist.   She ended by looking at the evolution of his most famous work “The Scream” from 1892 which we tend to think of as a work created in an artistic frenzy but it evolved from earlier drawings and from works like the attached. She discussed whether the figure was meant to me him, his sister who was committed or a universal image of crisis...

Interesting online lecture from the Courtauld Institute looking at the background and relevance of black figures in two paintings by Filipino Lippi. Jonathon Nelson from Syracuse University took us through the history of the coming of Christianity to Ethiopia and of subsequent delegations from there to Rome and Florence. He talked about how these delegations were viewed and their affect on art. He then took us through the possible iconographic meanings of the figures in the two paintings mentioned in the title. The figures are a man with an earing shown with a group of exotic characters being led by an older grey haired man and a richly dressed figure in a traditional Ethiopian white scarf. Lots of ideas to think about.

Fascinating online lecture from the National Gallery putting Artemisia Gentileschi into the context of the feminist writing of the time. Mary Garrard, writer of numerous books on Artemisia, outlined the main feminist writers of the early 17th century, discussed whether Artemisia would have known these works and how they may be reflected in her art. Despite having studied this period I am ashamed to say I had not heard of any of these authors and there is so much now I want to follow up. Garrard set this discussion within the context of the misogyny of the Counter Reformation and a period of two strong female rules, Elizabeth I and Marie de Medici. I had never realised that Marie de Medici spent three years living with her daughter Henrietta Maria in England in the 1930s so was probably there when Artemisia was painting the Queen’s House ceiling with her father which had only female figures. I now really want to go round the exhibition again with these new ideas in mind. The talk ...

More of this enjoyable series of short videos from the Metropolitan Museum filmed during lockdown highlighting recent exhibitions and specific works of art. These are emailed to members and patrons once a week, so I hope it is OK to share the links. Most take the form of a talk from the curator’s home with a powerpoint presentation. A number of the curators have picked works which are particularly poignant at this time. Episode 25 : A Visit to Brittany with Henri Rivière Ashley Dunn, Assistant Curator, Drawings and Prints, introduces the work of French artist Henri Rivière (1864–1951), a pioneer in the renewal of the woodcut technique and coluor printmaking in the late nineteenth-century. She focuses on two new acquisitions a watercolour “Boats Anchored off Treboul” and a woodcut “The Winnowers”.   Episode 26 : Cups of Ancient Iran Associate Curator Sarah Graff, who studies ancient Mesopotamian objects made of clay, explores connections with the ancient past through these...

Cumbersome online exhibition for the annual Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair. I go to this show each year as I live in Woolwich and always enjoy it. It has a good variety of artists and is shown in a big space with a relaxed atmosphere but I am afraid I found their online version quite hard to navigate. It took me a while to realise there was a ‘walk round’ option and I didn’t find it that natural to navigate around however it did give you a chance to see works from a distance and to get some idea of relative sizes. There was a good section on the artists but that only seemed to show one picture by each of them and not to link to prices and pieces to buy. I found that in a different section.   I did like the curated selections such as Collectors Picks or the Lockdown 2.0 section as these gave more manageable numbers of works to look at with all the information in one place but it did leave you feeling you might have missed something, They are also running some interesting onli...

Moving online exhibition from the National Portrait Gallery of 100 photographs of people taken during the first Covid lockdown.   The works were a result of an open call for entries on three themes helpers and heroes, your new normal and acts   of kindness. from which 100 were picked by a committee led by the Duchess of Cambridge.   The pictures are online with commentaries written by the photographer or subject and are very moving. If it’s not a cliché every picture tells a story. From the first picture “Glass Kisses” by Steph James of a baby holding a hand up to an old lady who kisses it on the other side of a window, I was hooked! A number of pictures seem to have been taken as part of   projects such as Sarah Wood’s “Ruth, Danial and Scarlet in Lockdown” where she has photographer people around Lewes in a series on furloughed friendship and Kenny Glover’s “On Your Doorstep” part of a series of family portraits to fund raid for Marie Curie Hospices.   ...

Glitzy online lecture from the Victoria and Albert Museum examining the influence of China and Japan on the jeweller Cartier.   Pascale Lepeu, Cartier Collection Curator and Estelle Nikles Van Osselt, former Bauer Collection Curator (about to move to Hong Kong Palace Museum) discussed the material and stylistic influences chaired by Anne Jackson, the curator of museums Kimono’s exhibition. They gave a brief overview of how and when Eastern artefacts started to come to the west and how the 1920s saw a study and appreciation of these pieces following the opening of Japan to the west and the fall of the Chinese Empire in 1912. They pointed out how this coincided with the Art Deco style in Europe and how eastern materials and motifs complimented this. They outlined the different materials and colour combinations which were introduced as well as outlining the main motifs used from the East using wonderful illustrations comparing items made by Cartier with original Eastern pieces ...

Thoughtful exhibition at Pace Gallery of new work by Trevor Paglen. I loved the enhanced images of flowers an plants in this show which reminded me of Dutch still lives and indeed, in the excellent video on the website, Paglen points out the work is talking about the fragility of life during Covid and the momento mori aspect of those Dutch pictures. Those works were enhanced using an AI technique and other works in the show discuss aspect of AI. The giant head in the centre is based on the standard head used as a base for facial recognitions. One picture, which at first glance is a series of stripes is made up of tiny pictures in sequence of people from surveillance cameras. Another work references a data set for teaching machines to read handwriting based on children writing out the Declaration of Independence. This show reads like an installation as it has an interactive element of camera’s around the gallery livestreaming people viewing the works while it is open and giving y...

Fas cinating little display at the Royal Academy focusing on Grayson Perry’s Diploma work, Map of Days (2013). Shown within the permanent exhibition “The Making of an Artist : The Great   Tradition” this large-scale etching, which he has described as a “self-portrait as a fortified town”, are a selection of prints and books from the RA Collection relating to Perry’s sources in creating Map of Days and at how artists traditionally created a sense of their identity in self-portraits. I loved an example of Renaissance printed map design for a fortress at Palmanova which is very close to Perry’s spikey structure as well as one of the photographs of Lost London than he used in the design. It was a nice touch to hang this unusual self-portrait of an artists mind along side other print self-portraits of academicians over the ages. Closes 31 December 2020  

Small exhibition at the Royal Academy presenting the four finalists in the Royal Academy Dorfman Award. It was a hard to find out much about the winners and displays when you were   at the show as the bulk of the information was presented in large books to browse which, of course, with the impact of Covid restrictions, you could no longer handle. It would have been nice if some other temporary alternative had been put in place. I do now find that the books are available to browse online. The display looked at each of the four practices through models, prototypes, photographs and drawings to show how they are responding to local landscape, climate and culture and experimenting with new materials and traditional craftmanship. From the photographs I was attracted to AAU Anastas interlocking stone technique which was shown off though it’s use to build an arch in Jericho which seemed to be being enjoyed by goats. From the models I like the one shown here by BCKJ Architects for th...

Slightly lack lustre Royal Academy Summer Exhibition however in the circumstances it was amazing they had managed to put it on and a breath of fresh air to have at least one seasonal event actually happen. I say lack lustre as very little either struck me as so beautiful I wanted to own it or so cutting edge that it pushed boundaries. It was interesting to see works by Royal Academician’s I’d seen in other shows appear here and works by artists I’d seen at the Venice Biennale last year. One theme which seemed to emerge was portraits and I wondered if this was a result of lockdown and people painting what was available to them ie their families. I loved the life sized lady shown here by Eugene Palmer who smiled at you from quite high up in the Large Weston Room and in the same room two striking double portraits by Joy Labinjo. I also spotted a number of works using the troupe of Blue and White China to which I am always attracted, Susan Marston’s reassumed patchwork of pieces, Ai...

Excellent two part online course from the National Gallery looking at the role of families in artistic traditions and in particular the benefits for female artists. Sian Walters led two two hour sessions over two days covering early female artists through to the 18th century. On the first day we looked at why women were only really able to operate as artists if they were part of an artistic family and some examples of this from the Renaissance including Marietta Robusti, Tintoretto’s daughter, Sofonisba Auguissola, Lavinia Fontana and Catharina Van Hemessen. We then went on to discuss Artemisia Gentileschi and her father and their influence on each other. Day two we looked at some male dominated families mainly the Bellini’s and their brother in law Mantegna, concentrating on how Giovanni Bellini and   Mantegna influenced each other. We also looked at the Brueghel family and their family connections to later artists. We finished by looking at some later female artists, Judith ...

Dense online lecture from the Courtauld Institute looking at a print by James Berry from the time of the American Revolution. In this talk Esther Chadwick examined how the subject matter and technique of “The Phoenix or the Resurrection of Freedom” reflected revolutionary thinking of the time. It fits into an emergence of contemporary events being shown in the style of history painting at the time and she placed this in the context of contemporary philosophical and political writing. She also looked at how Barry used the new techniques of aquatint which closely resembled drawing and had been used by French Revolutionary print makers.

Interesting recorded online discussion from the Metropolitan Museum about Jacob Lawrence’s series of paintings “Struggle” currently on show at the Museum. Lawrence was covered in a recent course I’d done on 20th century American art and I had been intrigued by him so was delighted to see this discussion advertised on recent emails from The Met   Kevin Young, Director of the Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture, LeRohn P. Brooks, Associate Curator for Modern and Contemporary Collections at the   Getty Research Institute LA and Tommi Lawson, Curator of Art and Artefact also as the Schomburg discussed the importance of the Centre, then the 135th Street library, to Lawrence’s education. They talked about how the library was a pioneer of adult education and how he was helped by a mentorship programme. They talked about the informal groups of artists and writers which grew up around the library. They then went on to look at the series of pictures them...

Lively online discussion from the National Gallery on Artemisia Gentileschi. I t brought together Michael Palin, who had done a documentary on her a few years ago, Alexandra Lapieere, who wrote a fictionalised biography and Letizia Treves, curator of the current exhibition to re-examine her life. Although this was generally ground that I had gone though a few times in lectures, it was interesting to hear different opinions from people very close to the subjects. I loved Palin’s quote on Artemisia as a personality that today “She’d have been on the Graham Norton Show”. Now that’s a programme I would watch! It did make me go an watch Palin’s programme, which the BBC has shown again recently. It was wonderful to see the story told in the buildings which she would have known and to illustrate points with scenes of life in Italy in modern times. It gave her a contemporary feel. Tv programme