Cathy's Art Diary

Fascinating exhibition at Tate Britain which seeks to put L.S. Lowry in an art historic context as well as showing some fascinating pictures. The first couple of rooms looked at the genre from which Lowry came placing him alongside Monet and Seurat as social commenters recording modern life displaying his work next to other inheritors of this real life tradition such as Van Gogh and Pissarro. It made you look at the work with a different eye and forget the 1970s cliché which its last revival had made it. I did reflect on the fact that we seem to inevitably go back to Lowry in times of economic hardship. The early works were by far the best and I loved the way the scenery and figures made you start to make up stories about what each character might be doing or feeling even the dogs! I was also interesting to read that Lowry had deliberately chosen his style if painting people as he felt real figures would have “broken the spell of my vision”. The social commentary on t...

Small exhibition in the Sunley Room at the National Gallery which has already been on tour to Bristol's City Museum and Art Gallery and the Laing Art Gallery, in Newcastle upon Tyne. It takes the opportunity too look at a bit of social history, how work and leisure have changed over the last 4000 years, and show this through works of art from the National Gallery’s own collection and loans from other galleries. It was a good idea and done well but somehow left me wanting more! As it is such a small space it could almost have been worth doing two separate exhibitions to give more depth, however it was good to see the links between the themes. Works such as the acrylic sculpture “The Traveller” by Duane Hanson showed how leisure can actually be hard work. There was the inevitable Lowry given the theme was work and a Ford Maddox Brown picture “Work” showing the sentimental view of the working classes in Victorian England. The most extraordinary piece was a roll of material from 1992 ...