Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting display and new gallery at the National Gallery showcasing their collection of work by Rubens and Rembrandt, two of the great masters of the 17th century. While the Michelangelo and Sebastiano exhibition is on upstairs the gallery has had to have a move around and has taken the opportunity to show the work they have by these two artists together in a refurbished gallery downstairs Gallery B. It feels a slightly odd space for this work as it’s a white box with quite a low ceiling however, although this is not ideal for these works, it does give an opportunity to see them hung fairly low and to get a close look at the detail. Some of the grander works, such as the Ruben’s Samson and Delilah, lose their iconic feeling and you look at their more carefully and with a fresh eye. I enjoyed the chance to look the Rembrandt portraits in the eye and to get up close to study the detail in the brush strokes. I love the way the closer you get the surface of the work ta...

Fantastic exhibition at the National Gallery looking at the friendship and working relationship between Michelangelo and Sebastiano del Piombo. This was a well presented and thought through show which set out the narrative clearly with good commentaries. Huge thanks to the Gallery for bringing back the booklets with the picture descriptions which really help the flow through the rooms. There was good use of letters to tell the story as well as drawings to highlight the collaboration. I was surprised at how much of Michelangelo’s work was in the show and had assumed it would just be the National Gallery’s own pictures and a few drawings. The use of the good copy of the Vatican’s Pieta was clever and it was so nice to be able to view it from all sides and see how the sides were worked. You usually view it from the front in a horrible crush of people. There was also a good collection of Sebastiano’s work including the Gallery’s own huge Razing of Lazarus with the Michela...

Interesting exhibition at the Design Museum tracing the history of post-revolution Russian design through six unrealised architectural projects. The idea of using the six projects is clever in that each sets a theme but in some cases there seems to be very little on the actual project itself. For example the first section looked at Cloud Iron, El Lissitzky’s horizontal skyscraper which was used to show how images of aviation were used to show Communist ideals but there were only a few sketches of the actual imagined building. It was interesting to ponder what some of these projects would have been like. Most of them had the gem of a good idea but it all felt like it was being imposed on people for their own good. I loved El Lissitzky’s idea for a health factory where workers could retreat and spend time in isolated rest cubical and get their food off conveyor belts in communal areas all with the idea of ‘productive rest’. As with the Royal Academy show I loved the inc...

Confusing exhibition at Leighton House Museum looking at one of Leighton’s last works “Flaming June” which is currently on loan from Puerto Rico. My advice is go to the last room of the show which is fantastic as it brings “Flaming June” back together with four of the other works Leighton painted for what turned out to be his last Royal Academy show. They are hung in the same configuration as in a photo of them in his studio next door. Most of them are in private collections plus one is from the Metropolitan Museum in New York so it’s a wonderful achievement to have brought them together. Once you have seen the pictures do the rest of the show which is studies for them, other work which had influenced them and sketches of another commission he was working on at the time. If you do these first, as the leaflet indicates, you do wonder why you are looking at some of them. You need the grounding of understanding the work before hitting the detail. It’s not helped by the works ...

Touching small exhibition at the Royal Academy focusing on a work which Anthony Green has finished recently telling the story of his mother’s second marriage through his eyes as her 13 year old child. He has been working on it since she died in 2004. The work itself is a life sized figure of his mother, the Miss Dupont of the title, incorporating her mink coat, handbag and scarf. Her room and possessions radiate out from her. It is an irregular shape and the section at the top, presumably representing the upstairs of the house, includes surprisingly sexy pictures of his mother and step-father. I love the way both the upstairs and downstairs images include reflections of his mother in a mirror. The picture shows a real tenderness for her as well as an understanding of her. The exhibition also had sketches for the work and other objects from his mother. One display cabinet had her marriage certificates plus her divorce papers from the artist’s father and the divorce papers o...

Disappointing exhibition at the Royal Academy looking at American art of the 1930s. I found the narrative of the show a bit thin but this may have just been in contrast to the richness of the Russian exhibition which I had just been to. The rooms were themed well but the handout then concentrated on specific artists in each section even though in some cases there was only one picture by the artist. Maybe I should have got the audio tour to give me a story. There were however some wonderful pictures and it did have a good sense of time and place. I hadn’t realised that the term “the American Dream” was defined in this period and the Star Spangled Banner became the national anthem.   I liked Stuart Davies’s “New York – Paris No 3” a painted collage of images of the America and France including a café and a gas station. Also Grant Wood’s strange “Daughters of the Revolution” with three older ladies from that organisation set against “Washington Crossing the Delaware”...

Fantastic exhibition at the Royal Academy looking at how art and design was used following the Russian Revolution to embed its ideals. From the wonderful red of the first room I was hooked and my O level history came rushing back! The show concentrated on art but incorporated posters, textiles, ceramics and film. It   also blended the art and history well. It didn’t assume you knew the history but wasn’t patronising in its narrative. The rooms were a good mix of themes and looking at artists. I discovered lots of fascinating modern artists I’d not come across before. I loved the portraits of Lenin by Issak Brodsky. I also kept being drawn to work by Pavel Filonov such as a picture of a tractor workshop with tractor parts forming the pattern in the middle of the composition. I also liked his dense pictures, which he called formula, which looked a bit like maps on first view but were lots of small images brought together in pattern. I loved the reconstruction of Mal...