Cathy's Art Diary

Fascinating online lecture from the National Gallery looking at the life and work of the 19th century artist Georges Seurat. Amy Mechowski, a freelance art historian, started by leading us though Seurat’s life and techniques. She outlined ideas of colour contrast, Pointillism and Neo-Impressionism clearly, then talked us through the main paintings which used these ideas. I n the second half she focused on Seurat’s works which would appear in the “Radical Harmony” exhibition at the Gallery. Since I listened to the talk I have visited the show and this was a useful introduction to what I saw there.

Interesting online lecture from the National Gallery to mark International Women’s Day looking at how women artists have supported other women artists. The discussion between Amy Mechowski and Jon King started by looking at Rosa Bonheur and how she mentored her female partners who were also artists. They also used her to look at how difficult it was for women to train as artists until the late 19th century. They also looked at Adelaide Labille-Guiard and Louise Vigree le Brun and how society set them up as rivals in the 18th century. They also looked in detail at Labille-Guiard’s self-portrait with two of her pupils. They came up to date by looking at some of the artists in residence in the gallery and what they have done to rebalance the collection.  

Fabulous online lecture from the National Gallery discussing some of the practicalities of putting on the current "After Impressionism" exhibition and what the curators have learnt from it. Julien Domerq, the co-curator of the show and Amy Mechowski, an art historian covered the curation of the show highlighting the negotiations and compromises, new interpretations following the show and the critical response to the show. I was fascinated to realise that a third of the works in the show were from private collections and to hear the issues they faced changing their plans following the outbreak of the war in the Ukraine as they had planned a number of Russian loan. Also to hear about how they negotiated those loans. They talked us through the process for some of the key works. They addressed some of the issues raised by the critics about the show around the lack of female artists in the show and how it addressed colonialism. I was much amused to hear that one reason ther...

Useful four week online course from the National Gallery introducing four art historical approaches which can be used to ‘read’ paintings. The four approaches were social history, decolonisation, feminism and queer studies and each week we took a picture from the gallery’s collection and discussed it with one of these approaches in mind. Inevitably to make a point, the discussion sometimes felt a bit one dimensional and we sometimes strayed a long way from the painting in question to look at history of the art historical approach. I think week one looking at social history was the most natural to my approach. John Fagg, from the University of Birmingham, looked at “Men of the Docks” by George Bellows from 1912. I do like to know about the context of a picture and what it shows about the times it was painted in as well as what the market for the type of work might have been. Ana Howie, from the University of Cambridge, took the decolonisation theme using “Drunken Silenus Supporte...