Cathy's Art Diary

Lovely exhibition at the British Museum of drawings by Richard Hamilton drawn with the idea of producing an illustrated version of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The book didn’t happen but the drawings were lovely. Hamilton said he was aiming “to make the pictorial equivalent of Joyce’s stylistic leaps” and each section did have a different artistic technique. I loved a picture for the section where the hero of the book Leopald Bloom takes a bath. The picture was a wonderful picture of him in his bath with the bath vertical in the picture with Bloom’s head in the foreground. It perfectly showed which bits of the body were above or below the water. It really reminded me of the wonderful scene of Daniel Craig in the bath in “Love is the Devil”, the film about Francis Bacon. I also liked the pictures for “In Hornes House” which were a drinking scene but each figure was drawn in a different art historical way so there was an icon, a take on a Rembrandt self-portrait, a Cezanne like fi...

Interesting retrospective at Tate Modern of work by Richard Hamilton, often seen as the inventor of Pop Art. I found this show fascinating as I keep coming across iconic works by Hamilton such as “Just what is it that makes today’s homes so modern, so appealing?” and the Rolling Stone screen prints but I had no idea how they fit into the body of his work. The show was arranged chronologically but also drew comparisons across his work. He seemed to strike an interesting balance between political comment and humor. I liked the way the show used reconstructions of iconic exhibitions such as his work for the “This is Tomorrow” exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery and I look forward to popping to the ICA which is currently showing two more of these reconstructions in the space for which they were devised. My favourite works were the three Northern Ireland diptychs showing a dirty protestor, a soldier and an Orangeman. I was also interested to see how often he reused the on...