Cathy's Art Diary

Gem of an exhibition at the Wiener Library looking at the life and work of the photographer Gerty Simon. Simon was a German Jewish photographer who photographed many important figures in Weimar Germany then as a refugee in Britain, set up a studio in London and photographed figures from 1930s London society. Her archive and a large collection of prints have been given to the library by her son. The show told the story of her life clearly using the archive material then had a display of about 20 of her pictures with Berlin on one wall and London on the opposite one. You felt every photograph had a story behind it that you wanted to know more about. It was touching in the Berlin section to see a picture of the six year old Anna Judith Kerr who went on to write “The Tiger Who Came to Tea” when she moved to London and who died recently. I rather liked Alexander Iolas shown in the top left hand corner of the attached picture. I looked him us and he was a dancer and later become...

Brilliant exhibition at Tate Modern looking at German art from the end of the First World War to the rise of Hitler.   The show started with a good timeline of the art and politics of the time which was a good grounding for the show. The show was them arranged by theme. The first room contrasted those artists who looked at everyday life through precise observation and those who employed satire and the grotesque. In particular it looked at how this came out through the theme of circus. I loved the room of portraits with pictures of artists’ studios on wall and wonderful run of portraits on the other. It was like looking at the faces of the time and being part of an exciting party. You then moved into the real party in the next room which looked at cabaret and talking about how the clubs were a very equal space and a place where women could visit unchaperoned. The last room looked at religion and how some of the experiences of the artists who had fought in the First ...