Cathy's Art Diary

Excellent exhibition at the National Gallery looking at how Durer’s travels influenced his work and the art of the artists he met on them. The show looked at his four journeys one around Germany from 1490-94, two to Venice in 1495 and 1505-07 and around the Low Countries from 1520-21. There were lots of stunning works by Durer and carefully selected works by artists he saw or met. I was pleased that I had done a short course on these journey’s as well as a curators talk so I was very excited to see the exhibition and already knew it’s narrative which helped. It was a lovely touch to include a print by Schongauer, who Durer aimed to visit on his first journey but he arrived after the artist had died, that was one of three prints by the artist that Durer himself owned. Also to see a book frontispiece of St Jerome by Durer which he was commissioned to produce to pay his way. From the two Venice trips there were some of the stunning watercolours of his journey across the Alps which ...

Beautiful exhibition at Courtauld Gallery of late 19th and 20th century drawings given to the gallery by the artist Linda Karshan in memory of her husband, Howard. The gift is of 24 works ranging from Cezanne to contemporary artists. The Cezanne was a beautiful still life of a jug. There was a brutal Otto Dix drawing   called “Lament” from 1915 of mourning women which was scored into the paper. The most interesting section was the contemporary and more modern artists including three Philiip Guston’s, a minimal Cy Twombly and this lovely Wayne Thebald of cake from 1963. I love the way the blank space is as important as the black. Closes 9 January 2022

Interesting exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery spotlighting a donation to their photographic collection of architectural images by Anthony Kersting. This show looks in particular at his pictures of Kurdistan from the 1940s many of them of architectural features which have been destroyed in recent conflicts. The commentaries on each work were his own notes which were written on the back of the pictures including the date it was taken. There were some insightful pictures of people but I picked this one of a Assyrian gateway as I love this style of art and architecture. Closes 20 May 2022  

Charming exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery of British drawings and watercolours from the 17th century to the mid-20th century. The exhibition was showcasing the gallery’s own works on paper collection to mark the reopening of the gallery. The earliest work was a sheet of Isaac Oliver figure studies from about 1610. It was interesting to see James Thornhill’s design for the ceiling of the Painted Hall in Greenwich and I loved a Peter Lely drawing of two heralds. It was good to see works from the great British landscape artists, so there was a Gainsborough, a Constable and a Turner. It was a nice touch to include the Edward Dayes, shown here, of Somerset House before the Embankment was built because, of course, we were standing in part of the building. Of the later works there was a wonderfully detailed drawing of a chaffinch nest and May blossom by William Henry Hunt, a Henry Moore shelter drawings and a super Wyndham Lewis self-portrait from 1911. Closes 27 February 2022

Fabulous reopening of the refurbished Courtauld Gallery. Goodness I had missed it. T he galleries had gained some useful new spaces including a lovely new Bloomsbury Room shown here which brings together paintings, Omega workshop furniture and African masks collected by Roger Fry. It was painted in Charleston Farmhouse colours. There is also a new space which was currently showing photographs and a new shop in the basement which now feels more spacious and airy. They have also taken the opportunity to do a rehang of the collection, moving the oldest works upstairs and showing pieces in a better chronological order. They have also opened up the top gallery which had been the Great Room of the Royal Academy where the annual show used to be held. You get a much better sense of how the room would have looked. I liked the touch that all the room labels told you what the room had been used for in previous incarnations. Two other highlights include the newly commissioned work by Cecily...

Simple but effective installation at Somerset House by recent Central St Martin’s graduate, Rene Matic. The work consisted of large tubs of pin badges which you were encouraged to take away and wear and give to others. I duly did so and each one said “Conserve me”. The idea was to get people thinking about preservation and cultural property. I’m not sure the idea behind it came across that clearly, I would suggest simplifying the language in the explanations, but it was fun to take a badge and then watch people look quizzically at it. Closes 6 February 2022  

Disappointing online talk from The Times Plus on the current Hogarth and Europe exhibition at Tate Britain. I say disappointing as it as quite short and recorded rather than live. It was nice that it was filmed in the exhibition but it was aimed at people with little knowledge and didn’t really give a full overview. The curators, Alice Insley   and Martin Myrone, picked three pictures to talk about along with their European comparisons in the show, Hogarth’s self-portrait from 1745, Marriage A La Mode and the portrait of Mary Edwards shown here. They talked about how one of the aims of the show was to talk about Hogarth within the European tradition of the time and to show how he was influenced by continental and how they were influenced by him. I have visited the show since so watch out for my review of it coming soon!

Fascinating online lecture from the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at their new exhibition on Faberge in London. Hanne Faurby and Kieran McCarthy, the curators of the show, led us through its layout and talked about what they were trying to achieve with it. They explained why it was divided into sections on the Russian royal family, the craft process, the opening of the London shop and its clientele and why they chose to finish with 15 of the Imperial Easter eggs. I loved McCarthy’s quote “I want people surfing on waves of enamel as they leave” and, having been since, I can confirm that I did! I have to say watching this talk was a real help when I went as it was quite busy and hard to read the labels and commentary so I didn’t feel I needed to concentrate so much on them. It was nice to get insights into how the exhibition was put on and some of the issues they had faced including that they didn’t finish the install until an hour before the opening and the issues McCarthy had...

Enlightening online lecture from the Wallace Collection looking at the recent cleaning of Fragonard’s The Swing. Yuriko Jackall, a curator at the gallery talked us through what they already knew about the picture and what they discovered after the cleaning. The latter included realising the gentleman pushing the screen was older than they had assumed, finding a fountain with an embracing couple in the background at the top left-hand side and the fact that the man lying in the ground it pulling back the roses he is hiding in or had he fallen. She discussed who the mystery commissioner of the work may have been and the world for which it was created. I am not fond of Rococo work however from this, and a series of talks I have done since based on the painting I have a newfound appreciation of its depth even if I still find it a bit sugary. You can see a revolution coming!  

Majestic exhibition at the Imperial War Museum of photographs of Ground Zero by Wen Wenders. There were just five huge pictures taken a couple of months after the attack on the Twin Towers. There were displayed like paintings and it was moving to be able to walk up and look at the details. They reminded me of sublime landscapes and I loved the contrast of the wreckage with the skyscrapers that overlooked the site and how shafts of light cut through. They were shown with quotes from people who were there or who were affected by the attacks including one from Wenders himself “this was hell, where we were, nut heaven had opened up to shine the most stunning light into it”. I can’t believe 9/11 was 20 years ago and this was a lovely way of marking that. Closes 9 January 2021

Excellent refurbishment of two sets of galleries at the Imperial War Museum, the Second World War galleries and the Holocaust Galleries . Both galleries were beautifully designed leading you chronically through the period with sections on themes such as The Home Front. The narrative was told simply but was not dumbed down and used objects to help tell the story. The objects were often linked to people and there were no object labels as the narrative described them. I thought a change in the Second World War galleries was that they were now aimed at people born since the war. I think the previous version was as much a stimulator of memories and conversations and I remember going around with my own parents who were children of the Liverpool Blitz. The ARP uniform shown here is in honour of my grandfather who was a member. The Holocaust galleries were sympathetically described. They didn’t shy away from the horrors but did broaden the topic to look at its origins and effects. I lov...

Fun online award ceremony from Apollo Magazine. I’d not done an online awards before so thought I’d give it a go and enjoyed it. I poured myself a glass of wine and pretended I had dressed up! They were introduced by Fatema Ahmed, the acting editor of the magazine, with the usual listing of the short-listed entries and interviews with he winners. I was pleased how many of the short-listers I had heard speak recently or visited over the past year. So the winners were : Exhibition of the Year – Alice Neel: People Come First at the Metropolitan Museum. OK I’d not seen it but I had read a lot about it and would love to have gone. Museum Opening of the Year – Musee Carnavelet, Paris I’d not heard of this. It looks are the history of Paris and is in a refurbished Renaissance mansion so it’s now on my list of things to do. Book of the Year – Painting in Stone   by Fabio Barry. I listened to him in an online discussion the other week. Digital Innovation of the Year – NFTs ...

Eclectic fair at Woolwich Works of prints by contemporary artists. Pictures were shown in a mix of spaces for individual galleries and larger spaces for works curated from across the show. This gave you a chance to see an overview of work as well as delving into more pieces by particular artists. Sadly I didn’t manage to make notes and, as I am a bit behind with blogging, I don’t remember what I saw that well! Sorry! I do remember there being a lot of work based on maps, either reproducing them or printing on top like the one shown here. Annoyingly I can’t find it on the website so I don’t know who the artist is. Shout outs go to Rachel Clewlows for her imaginative alternative colour charts and Pag Morris’s exquisite pictures of deserted interiors. I also like the art historic approach of John Angus, reducing annunciation pictures to their basic forms, and Toby Holmes, with his reworking of Rococo portraits with sweet wrappers for their outfits. Closed 14 November 2022  ...

Lovely exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery of the greatest hits of the Royal Collection paintings. The works are at the Queen’s Gallery while Buckingham Palace is being refurbished, and although all the works were well known, it was a god opportunity to look at them up close to see the detail. They also become a good introductory walk through of art history. Name an artist, and they are probably here. I liked the fact the labels not only told you about the picture but also how they came into the Royal Collection. Highlights included Vermeer’s “The Music Lesson” which is always a joy to see, four wonderful portrait shaped Canaletto’s and the Artemesia Gentileschi self-Portrait. There was a wonderful room of works by Rubens, Van Dyck and Rembrandt and their contemporaries which featured one of my favourite pictures, Agatha Bas by Rembrandt shown here. I love the detail of her clothes and fan and the way one hand breaks the frame. Closes 13 February 2022 Reviews Times Guardia...

Fascinating online lecture from ARTscapes looking at the later life and work of John Constable. Nicola Moorby, Former curator at Tate Britain, talked about the current   show at the Royal Academy which shines a light on a less familiar part of Constables career. She talked us through his earlier block buster works, the River Stour Six-Footers, which were seen as the pinnacle of work but then went to analyse the later works which have sometimes been seen as a falling off in his style. Alongside talking about the work she likened it to his life with the death of his wife, his election to the Royal Academy and his own ill health. She talked about how experimental his work was in this period not only working in oil but also returning to experiments in watercolour, prints and ink. We also looked at how Constable was trying to use his work to elevate landscape painting to the prestige of history painting at the time particularly looking at “Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Rey...

Engaging live streamed lecture from The Charterhouse with Philip Mould looking at his life in art. Mould took 5 or 6 pictures to take us through his art dealing life from his early work with a genealogist buying pictures of names people and tracing their descendants through to a recent discovery of a portrait of Winston Churchill painted during the Blitz when it had been said that he didn’t do this. He talked about how the internet has changed his business making research easier as more archives go online however also how buying has become easier but also more dangerous. He told a story against himself of buying an Elizabethan portrait online which he realised had been 75% overpainted in recent times. He described the picture underneath as a “glorified pub sign”. He answered a range of questions from the live audience with much mention of “Fake or Fortune” and touchingly he seemed genuinely moved when given a gift at the end of a bowl made of part of a cherry tree in the grounds...

Fascinating online lecture from the Foundling Museum looking at Georgian trade cards. Jon Stobart from Manchester Metropolitan University set out clearly what these cards can tell us about the retail trade in London in the 18th century and how they changed over the period. He had great illustrations mainly from the John Johnson Collection of Trade Cards. I was particularly interested in the cards which showed pictures of the shops and sometimes how the service worked. I loved one of a lady trying on shoes and another of a couple sitting at a counter being shown goods by the shop keeper. I was also interested to learn that in the 1770s London banned shop signs as they were a hazard to traffic so shop fronts became more important for marketing the goods. Also that in this period the numbering of buildings on street was introduced but before that the shops had to give quite detailed descriptions of where they were such as “St Paul’s churchyard opposite the tree”. Who would have t...

Interesting exhibition at Cromwell Place for the National Portrait Gallery of this year’s shortlisted pictures in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize. The show was at Cromwell Place as the National Portrait Gallery is being refurbished and it made by a good alternative venue even if the space was more limited. I did however find the reflection off the pictures a problem as it made them hard to view without seeing yourself in the image. It might have been good to use more non-reflective glass. I went to a member’s preview event at which a speaker, sorry whose name I didn’t catch, talked us through the awards and photographs. She taught me different things to look for in photos plus learned that the works are judged without knowing the artist or the stories. There was inevitably concentration on Covid and quite local pictures to the photographers. There were a number where people had moved in together for lockdown with particularly tender pictures of older parents. Do...

Dense online lecture from the Courtauld Research Forum looking at an interview between the art critic Gene Swenson and Andy Warhol. Just occasionally I sign up to an online talk where I wish I knew a bit more about the subject before I’d joined in. The talk looked in depth at the art critical philosophy of Swenson but, I have to admit, I’d never heard of him so I was a little at sea. However I did look him afterwards and will look out for his work and ideas in future. The core of the talk looked at an interview with Andy Warhol which was used as the basis for a profile of the artist in the journal “Art News” and quoted in much of the later works on Warhol. However the speaker, Jennifer Sichel, from the Hite Art Institute at the University of Louisville, has recently discovered the original tapes which show that substantial sections of the interview were left out or adapted particularly around questions of homosexuality. She also looked at how this interview later led to Swenson ...

Fascinating streaming of an interview from the Victoria and Albert Museum with the Oscar winning costume designer Sandy Powell. Powell was interviewed by Bethan Holt, the fashion news and feature writer at the Telegraph, who started by asking how Powell began working in the industry and what got her to the top, the answer to the latter being “luck”! They discussed about how she researches her projects and I loved the quite of “there is always another way of doing something”. She talked about how she is driven to work on a film by the script and how she can’t start working on a costume until she knows who will be in the role.   The Q&A session was vibrant from questions about which actors were most involved in the design of their costumes, what it was like to see her outfits in exhibitions, about her work on Mary Poppins Returns and the difference between big and small budget films. I was fascinated to hear about her project to gather autographs on a white suit, a tuill...

Fascinating online lecture from the Wallace Collection looking at how Frans Hals depicted women. Marjorie E. Wiseman from the National Gallery of Art, Washington took us through the role of women at different stages of their lives in the 17th century and how Hals depictions of them reflected this. I loved the blend of social and art history in the talk and the clear structure of the talk. The lecture was in connection with the current Hals exhibition of male portraits so it was lovely to see some of the men in the show’s other halves in this lecture from their pendant pictures. Wiseman talked about how often the women’s portraits were painted in a smoother style as the convention of female beauty was for smooth complexions. This was despite the convention of the light coming into a pair of pictures from the upper right which leaves the man in flattering shadow and the woman in full light. Her last section on older women was particularly interesting and I liked how Wiseman used f...