Cathy's Art Diary

As the Covid-19 lockdown happened the largest exhibition ever of Van Eyck’s work was open at the Museum of Fine Arts (MSK) Ghent containing about half of his 22 known works as well as workshop copies of now lost originals and over 100 other masterpieces from the later Middle Ages. I had looked at how I might get to this show but failed to work out the logistics. However, in wonderful video Till-Holger Borchert, Director Museums Bruges and one of the curators of exhibition leads you around the show after it was closed. It really gives an idea of what the show was like, taking you around room by room and following it’s narrative. In just 26 minutes he talks you through some fascinating detail of the symbolism of the work with fantastic close ups of the pictures which give a sense of how you yourself would look at the details in a show. There is another fun video of the show by the art critic Waldemar Januszczak for the Sunday Times. It was filmed as the show was being set u...

Fun new art podcast from the Sunday Times featuring two of my favourite TV art historians, Waldemar Januszczak and Bendor Grosvenor. From its jaunty opening music I was hooked and I found their good humoured discussion easy and interesting to list to. They seem to be planning to divide the show into four sections which is about right for one listening, They started with an opinion piece on a topic in the art world, in this case the decommissioning of works from collections. They talked about why galleries and museums to this and the pros and cons. Waldy, as I feel I should now call him, then talked about how good Gauguin was at painting children while mourning the cancellation of the Royal Academy’s Gauguin and Impressionism show. Next came a fun section called Art in Isolation where they reviewed what some of the galleries are doing online while they can’t open. This week they looked at a tour of a Raphael exhibition in Rome to make 500 years since his death ...