Cathy's Art Diary

Clever exhibition at Tate Britain looking at the work of the Rosettis, Dante Gabrielle, Christina and Elizabeth ne Siddal. It was nice to see three protagonists given almost equal billing and to have poems presented like paintings on the walls with spots to stand on to hear them read. It was an excellent way to blend the visual arts and poetry. The show concentrated on their art more than their lives which was refreshing but to such an extent that I wasn't sure when in the narrative Gabrielle and Elizabeth married. It was also good to see so much of Elizabeth's work. She seemed to work on quite a small scale and a lot of the work was not as fine as her husband's but she was very good at composing an image and I was amused to see that he photographed all her drawings when she died and continued to base work on them. I was interested to see Gabriele's work divided into his work with the Pre-Raphaelites and the later aesthetic work with a beautiful room devoted to t...

Comprehensive but dense exhibition at the National Library of Ireland on the poet William Butler Yates. I must admit I think I had done too much on the day so, when I did this show, I found it hard to engage with it. It didn’t help that as I started to look at it a group of European youth arrived and took over the space. They didn’t seem to be engaging either just talking selfies! I wish I had known more about Years before I went so that the copies of manuscripts and first editions might have meant more. I liked the four little rooms with contemporary settings and good audio visual presentations. I particularly enjoyed the one on the Abbey Theatre as I was off there that evening! I was also interested in the campaign to save the Hugh Lane collection as I had been there in the morning. There was a good leaflet outlining Yeats life but it was a bit too much to read in the show so I’ll look at it as homework. Closes 7 January 2024

Tiny one cabinet display at the British Library to mark 250 years since the birth of the poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. There were just five items in the display which seemed a shame and only three were by him, a later transcription in his own hand of a childhood poem and   two notebooks. The other two items were copies of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner with illustrations by Willy Pogany and Mervin Peake. Don’t have much knowledge of Coleridge so it would be nice to have had more. Closes 25 September 2022  

Touching online talk from the National Gallery with a reading of a new poem inspired by Gosseart’s Adoration of the Kings. The National Gallery currently has an immersive exhibition of this painting if only we could get to it. It sounds wonderful with booths in which you can look at very high resolution images of the work and animated sections of it as well as seeing the picture itself. They also commissioned a poem from an x-Young Poet Laureate for London, Teresa Lola. This event consisted of Clara Davarpanagh talking about the painting which is one of my favourites. She talked us through some of the detail of the work and also about the evolution of Balthazar appearing as a black king in images. Although he was described as black in early Christian writing he does not appear as such in images until the late 14th century. There is some idea that this post-dates the Council of Florence in the 1440s where there was a delegation from Ethiopia. This was followed by Teresa touchingly...

Beautiful exhibition at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery looking at works by William Tilyer illustrating poems by Alice Oswald.   The poems and pictures developed over three years with each inspiring the others with shared ideas and prompting. The theme is water and the lovely abstract pictures give as a sense of swirling water and reflections on it. Although lines from the poem are stencilled on the wall I would have liked to see more of the words. I did stand and read the book for a while but as it’s on the reception desk you don’t feel you can linger too long.   Closed on 30 June 2018

Fascinating exhibition at the ICA on the work of the Merseybeat poet Adrian Henri who had also trained as a painter and who ran ‘happenings’ in Liverpool. I have always loved Henri’s poems and have a beloved copy of the Penguin anthology “The Mersey Sound” so I was really pleased that they included a recording of him reading his work. It was lovely to hear “Without you” read by the author. It never fails to make me smile. The happens sound wonderful and there were lots of posters and flyers for them as well as some of his art works, often Leger like collages using adverts and text. I liked a campaign he ran to memorialise bits of Liverpool which were being destroyed in the 1960s and 1970s and his campaign slogan of “Ashes to ashes, Dust to dust, If the bombs don’t get you, the planner must”! Most interesting was a signed copy of Howl by Ginsberg signed for Henri after Ginsberg had stayed with his on a visit to Liverpool. Also a picture called “Entry of Christ into Live...