Cathy's Art Diary

Second pair of episodes in this fascinating series from BBC4 exploring national museum collections at a time of enforced closure. The first two episodes focused on exhibitions which had had to close due to the Covid outbreak whereas these two looked at specific galleries and talked about what the art and artefacts in them show us about the human condition. James Fox takes us around Tate Britain and Janina Ramirez looks at the British Museum. I found Fox’s tour started in such a melancholy way, talking about how art shows how we don’t suffer alone and that suffering is a human condition, that I found it hard to watch however it did cheer up and look at the human need for beauty and imagination. Ramirez took a more upbeat view from the start and looked at objects which demonstrated our need for love and spirituality although we did stray into death as well with a Mexican mosaic skull and cat mummies. Both pieces were beautifully filmed and drifted around the closed galler...

Fascinating series from BBC4 exploring national museum collections at a time of enforced closure. I thought these were wonderfully produced programmes with a real sense of capturing a moment when two exhibitions I had hoped to visit went into lockdown. I believe the next two episodes will look at aspects of particular galleries and museums collections rather than specific shows and I’ll return to review those once they are shown later this week. Episode 1 looked at the Andy Warhol show at Tate Modern introduced by Alastair Sooke. I found the eerie shots at the start of the empty turbine hall and static escalators moving and melancholy and liked Sooke’s spin on the show as Warhol as a commented on the 21 st century even though he worked in the 20 th and parallels he drew to these strange times. I like the fact he was in the gallery walking around it as we would have done and there was a good mix of close up images and of him interacting with the work. It is interesting...