Cathy's Art Diary

Fascinating online lecture from the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at Peter Brathwaite’s lockdown project recreating portraits of black figures. Brathwaite is an opera singer who in lockdown took up the Getty Challenge to recreate portraits using objects around the house. He decided to look at black figures and produced an image a day for 50 days which he has now published in a book “A Story in Three Acts”. I had seen some of their works in a street exhibition on King’s College so was intrigued to hear him talking about them and to see more. He was interviewed by Jenny Gaschke, the coordinator of a display at the museum at the moment called “Between Two Worlds” for which he has produced the image shown here. He explained how making the images led him to research not only the people shown but also his own family history.   He talked about the bias in archives, not only in their content but also in the racist language to search them because of when they were created and cata...

Intriguing online lecture from the National Gallery examining the presence or lack of presence of Black figures in two Titian paintings. The talk was given by Rosy Akalawu-Ellman, an artists and student who had started he BA a few days before. She had been on the gallery’s Articulations scheme to encourage public speaking skills to young people. She talked about Black History Month and some of the problems she thinks it raises in that it can concentrate on suffering and liberation and put Black people in a white context and she discussed some of the philosophers being this. For me the more interesting section of the talk looked at the Black figure to the far righthand side of Titian’s “Diana and Actaeon”. Is she a maid or an allegorical figure? Why is she the only clothes female in the work? She talked about the trend for Black models across Europe but particularly in cosmopolitan Venice. She then looked at “Perseus and Andromeda”, in the same series of paintings for Philip II, ...