Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting exhibition at the Brazilian Consulate of photographs of Brazilian football since 1958. OK I admit will go to anything but my main reason for going into this show, as well as the fact its poster caught my eye as i I walked past, is that it’s always good to pop into this building with its wonderful decoration which used to be the headquarters of P&O. The show has 42 images and cleverly split the two displays by date but also by the move from black and white to colour. There were some wonderful action spots but it would have been good to have more fulsome labels for the uninitiated even just the photographers name. Closed 23 December 2022

Fascinating exhibition at Sala Brasil (the Brazilian Embassy) looking at a collection of modernist work which was sent to Britain in the Second World War. I had assumed this was just an exhibition of Brazilian modernist art and on one level it was however more interesting was the story of how it came to Britain. 168 works were sent to Britain in 1944, donated by the artists to boost the war effort. The British Council arranged the transport and the pictures were shown at the Royal Academy and the Whitechapel Gallery as well as around the country. The Royal Academy didn’t seem too pleased by the idea and there were wonderful archive letters recording their resistance. The pictures were then sold in aid of the RAF Benevolent Fund. The show included all but one of the 25 pictures that entered public collections in the UK and included some lovely work. The captions were well written and told you a lot about the artists. I loved Thea Haberfeld’s landscape of a patchwork of fields ...