Wellcome Library: The Healing Presence of Art

If you feel like getting some knowledge under your belt this February then I recommend The Healing Presence of Art talk at the Wellcome Library by Richard Cork.

Here he is looking thoughtful

I went to a very similar lecture that he gave on this topic at the Courtauld Institute about a year ago. It opened my eyes to how art has been used over the centuries to adorn hospitals.

My favorite work that he mentioned was the Russian sculptor Naum Gabo's beautiful fountain in the lower garden of St Thomas's Hospital which I had never come across before. It is a truly stunning piece of work that looks different every time you see it. Very suitable as it is a work of art that some patients might see on a daily basis.

For more information on the lecture go the the Wellcome library page and get booking.

Lucian Freud leaves a beautiful painting by Corot to the nation

The late great artist Lucian Freud has donated this stunning painting 'The Italian Woman or The Woman with yellow sleeves' to the nation and more specifically to the National Gallery. The painting is now on display in Room 41.

With it's strong brush work, the solidity of the form and a certain depth and frankness of the subjects gaze it is perhaps unsurprising that this painting appealed to Lucian Freud when he bought it at auction in 2001.

The painting will join several landscapes by the artist that the gallery already owns. Such as this atmospheric painting 'A Flood'. An appropriate subject considering the weather from the last couple of weeks

The addition of a portrait to the galleries collection gives us a greater insight into the work of this French artist as well as some understanding of the collecting habits and taste of one of Britain's most celebrated artists.

Happy Tax Deadline Day!

Here are some depictions of taxes through the years. I guess things don't change that much.

Gillray's satirical print 'The Friend of the People' published in May 1806. Make sure to take a good look there is lots to see, the smart new tax cart in the background, the bulging pockets of the tax collector, the emaciated hissing cat at the window.

 Pieter Brueghel the younger's 'Paying the Tax' from 1620-40 I'm sure many of us can relate to the chaos.

Masaccio's fresco in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence painted circa 1427 showing Jesus and his disciples being asked to pay the tax to enter the city. The tax collector wears the short orange tunic and Peter can be seen on the left receiving the money for the tax from the mouth of a fish.

Wish that's were everyone's tax money could come from eh!

How to solve a problem like Kate Middleton?

A lot of fuss has been made over Paul Emsley's portrait and I  think it has been terribly unfair. Painting a royal is a notoriously difficult challenge for any artist. The public are looking for a grand, beautiful and recognisable depiction of the person in question. 

However, they are figures that we are rarely seen in any state less than perfectly presented. Kate Middleton is no exception to this, in fact she is the epitome of it. You rarely see a photograph of her that does not appear to have been shot in ideal lighting, that she is not completely made up and that she doesn't sport her frankly enviable locks and her lovely smile.

I mean you just have to Google image her to see that...

So for an artist whose photo-realist approach feeds off making the imperfections in a face beautiful by celebrating the honesty of them this portrait was always doomed to have the critical lash-back that it has received. 

The artist himself said as much stating:  "The fact she is a beautiful woman is, for an artist, difficult. When you have lines and wrinkles it is much easier as an artist to capture them as a  person. Obviously she has none of that.”

Looking at his other work demonstrates this point admirably. His BP Portrait award winning painting of Michael Simpson has to be one of my favorite contemporary portraits.

This approach is not only effective when it is applied in such an extreme way or only to men, as this portrait of Katerine shows. You can see the slight bags and lines underneath the sitters eyes and the slight line on one side of her mouth which when combined with the fly away hairs over her forehead gives a much more true depiction.

To see more work by this phenomenal artist then do go to his website it really is worth it!

To make you mind up about his Kate Middleton portrait for yourself head to Room 37 in the National Portrait Gallery. It is quite different in person and if it still isn't your cup of tea then go and check out some of the other royal portraits. 

I wonder if they would be considered so fantastic if we had been barraged with hundreds of photographs of those sitters.

Happy 180th Birthday Édouard Manet hope you are looking forward to the Royal Academy's celebration of your work as much as I am!

The exhibition opens on the 26th.... get booking.
http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/manet/about-the-exhibition/
 

Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde - Get it before it's gone

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is really where my interest in art history began. The Royal Academies exhibition Pre-Raphaelite and other Masters: the Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection in 2003 was the exhibition that first left me really wanting to know all I possibly could about the paintings, the painters and the subjects of the works hanging on the walls around me. Since then I have been to lots of other inspiring exhibitions and studied some fascinating periods of art history but I have always maintained a fondness for Rossetti and the gang.

At the age of 13 I was only really able to appreciate the beauty of the paintings, the vibrant colours, the elaborate textures and the incredible natural details. Of course these aspects are all present in this exhibition and the paintings are a feast for the senses particularly the fifth room which focuses upon the groups preoccupation with beauty.

One of my personal faves

But the exhibition does not rest upon it's laurels and merely present a 'beautiful' exhibition, it seeks to reexamine the brotherhood within their context, looking at their interest in science, contemporary theology and concerns with contemporary morals and society and how their paintings, sculpture and decorative objects express these concerns. The exhibition challenges the viewer to see past the beautiful and luxurious images which give the impression of artists merely attempting to paint sentimental scenes and instead presents the idea that the brotherhood were breaking new ground through their engagement with the present.

One of the most interesting aspects of the exhibition for me was the inclusion of painted furniture and stunning tapestries which I had not seen presented alongside the paintings before. It certainly gave you an impression of the breadth of their influence upon British art, particularly the arts and crafts movement. 

This stunning wardrobe painted by Edward Burne-Jones is just one magnificent example of this.

The exhibition was huge and packed with things to see, read and engage with, frankly there are some paintings there that you could stare at for hours and continue to notice details you had missed. The magnificent Lady of Shallot in the final room being an excellent example. I did hear several viewers lament that it was not the more famous John William Waterhouse representation of the Tennyson poem, however I found myself almost preferring the drama of Holman Hunts work lesser known work, the billowing red hair, the chaotic floor, the vibrant colours and the thread from her weaving strewn around her. Don't know what you think?

The Lady of Shalott John William Waterhouse

The Lady of Shalott William Holman Hunt

But the details I think shouldn't be missed, and most often were, were the poems engraved on many of the paintings frames. Reading these, often written by the artists themselves, gives you a new insight into the painting and the wider work of the brotherhood.

It has taken me woefully long to get to this exhibition between getting back from traveling and the chaos of working in retail during Christmas so if you read this and it peaks your interest then get down there quick as the exhibition ends on the 13th. The galleries advice regarding tickets for the last days is that the advance booking tickets are sold out but that they can be bough on the door on the day (in the morning to avoid disappointment). If you are reading from Russia then lucky you as the exhibition is traveling to Moscow's Pushkin museum in July of this year.

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/pre-raphaelites-victorian-avant-garde

Ok so they might not have been 100% right on the end of the world but it's not all bad...

Well here I sit on the 21/12/2012 and luckily the world is still spinning, the polar ice caps are intact and there are no flaming meteors heading for earth ... touch wood. So this seemed like a perfect time to have a little look at Mayan Art.

The Mayan's were a highly developed civilization located in what we now know as central America. Putting to one side their lack of psychic powers, lets face it a feat that no civilization is likely to truly achieve, they had a developed written language of glyphs, they built huge cities such as Tikal which reached a size of approximately 6 square miles and they even developed calenders. The glyphs which are decipherable have given historians a fantastic insight into Mayan culture.
Sadly as with all early civilizations the art works that remain represent only the tip of the iceberg and what an awe inspiring iceberg it would have been. In London's British Museum we are lucky enough to have 6 of the lintels (a type of architectural detail) from Yaxchilán.

Yaxchilán is a complex of temples located on the Mexican side of the border between Mexico and Guatemala. The fragments in the British museum would have belonged on structure 21.

A birds-eye view of the complex... thank you google maps!

These reliefs which according to their glyph inscriptions were commissioned by the king Bird Jaguar IV (awesome name) show the fairly gruesome practice of blood-letting common in Mayan culture and most commonly undertaken by societies elite using a stingrays spine. This instrument can be seen in the hands of the women (Bird Jaguar's wife) in the carving immediately below.

If you want to visit these incredible pieces they are located in Room 27 of the British Museum which focuses upon Mexican art. Oh and it's free!

And for more fascinating in depth information about the reliefs head to : http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/cultures/the_americas/maya.aspx