Cathy's Art Diary

Insightful discussion at Charleston Farmhouse as part of their Small Wonder Festival looking at the newly published first volume of Lucien Freud's letters. It brought together the editor of the letters Martin Gayford and Freud's daughter, Esther Freud, to be interviewed by the art historian Michael Bird. They discussed what new things they had learnt from the letters which take us up to 1954 when Freud was starting to find success. They also talked about how he adopted different voices in the letters for different people and even in some cases different handwriting. Interestingly the letters have been published with the printed text alongside a facsimile of each letter as many of them are illustrated. Oddly enough I am booked to hear Gayford on this topic again soon, so watch this space, but I suspect that will be a more of a lecture rather than this engaging style.  

Fascinating discussion at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival looking at the cultural contribution to the UK of refugees from Nazi Germany. The talk was chaired by Monica Bohm-Duchen, who has curated a year’s events on the subject, who began by paying tribute to Judith Kerr, the children’s author, whose death had been announced early that day, and who had come to England just before the Second World War with her parents.   She talked about the book which accompanies the years events for which 22 people had written chapters on different aspects of cultural life including sculpture, design, photography, art   dealers, Picture Post and much more. Norman Rosenthal, the art historian and curator, then talked about how his parents fled Nazi Germany and the friends they made in England in similar circumstances. He talked about the questions he wished he’d asked them. I loved an image he talked about of how a few years ago the second hand bookshops of H...

Interesting talk at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival looking at two aspects of art in the early 20th century. Sue Roe talked about her book “In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and Modernism in Paris, 1900-1910” looking at how and why this area of Paris became the birthplace of Modernism in art. She spoke about how Picasso went there and found a new way of working. Esther Freud then talked about her new novel “Mr Mac and me” which is a novel about Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s time in on the Suffolk coast. She’d written it after moving to the area and researching the house she bought which had been an inn. Her main character, a young boy, is imagined as the son of the family who owned the inn. There was an interesting discussion between the writers chaired by Olivia Laing and some good questions from the audience.