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 

Hollywood Costume: A Smash Hit

This exhibition is thoroughly enjoyable and perfect for this time of year. I went with my brother, mother and some old friends from America and there was something for everyone. My brother was slightly skeptical at first about going to an exhibition all about clothes.... But as soon as we went into the exhibition it was clear that clever curating had provided a broad range of costumes from diffuse eras and film genres, with a fairly even split between costumes for men and women. Making it fabulous for a family day out during the Christmas period although pre-booking is definitely a good idea as it has proved very popular. We managed to just turn up on a Monday and get tickets at 3. 45 so it is always worth giving it a try. The V&A has such a fantastic permanent collection anyway that if you can not come by tickets there is always a great back up plan.

Of course there is much more to this exhibition then just looking at the clothes. The curators, Deborah Nadoolman Landis, Sir Christopher Frayling and Keith Lodwick, have placed the costumes alongside pertinent companion quotes from the designers, the actors or the directors. These make you really examine the costumes and give some insight into the important role that they play within the creation of not only the image but the character.

Possibly one of my favorite sections of the exhibition, pictured below, addresses how the transition from black and white films to colour cinema has effected costume design. Here the lighting is manipulated so that the costumes themselves can be seen in black and white and then in colour.

Of course a big part of the fun for myself, being quite a girly girl, was picking which costume I would most like to take home. Of course there were numerous contenders but I think I managed to cut down to a short list of the stunning dress from Atonement, the beautiful Shakespeare in love dress  and the slinky gold number that Kate Hudson wears in How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days, complete with the to die for Harry Winston Necklace of course. On the other hand my brother went for the magnificent red cloak of Dracula. If you are going with youngsters or even just for fun I recommend this virtual shopping approach as a light-hearted way of looking around the exhibition. Particularly useful as due to the exhibitions popularity the rooms are crowded and without being seriously persistent you were not always able to have a good read of the information.

The exhibition is infused with a really nice feeling of fun especially in the last room where you must not forget to look up.....

I thought that looking at all the care, attention and delicate craftsmanship that goes into costume design I wouldn't ever be able to watch a film in the same way again. But as I realised when I went home and re-watched on of my favourite films, Breakfast at Tiffany's, the magic of great costume design is precisely that you do not realise you are looking at costume design.

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/exhibition-hollywood-costume/

Master Drawings from Mantegna to Matisse

This exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery is entering it's last couple of weeks, finishing on the 9th of September. At first glance the exhibition seems small and unassuming. This first impression is fleeting. In fact, the two rooms with their collection of approximately 60 drawings from the Courtauld's prestigious collection pack a considerable punch. The exhibition guides us through some of the most famous names in art history; Michelangelo, Pinturicchio, Seurat, Manet, Rembrandt, Matisse, Van Gogh, Ingres, the list goes on. 

The scale of the exhibition space and the undeservedly limited attendance does allow those of us that have visited this delightful exhibition to do what you must do with drawings... get up close and personal with them. There is no such thing as standing too close to a drawing, the nearer you get the more you will be able to appreciate the intricacies of linear work on paper. The guards on duty are relaxed enough to allow this close inspection, (within reason!!).

The exhibition also dispels the notion that drawing is merely a stage that comes before painting. Although some works in the exhibition are preliminary studies for well known paintings many can not be linked to a surviving art work and perhaps never work. They are experiments in which artists push the boundaries of their talents and explored the work of other artists and studies from nature and life.

For me I think the highlight of the exhibition was viewing Seurat's nude in the second room. 

I have always been skeptical about this artist and his highly technical methods based upon early 20th century scientific theories. However this drawing, one of only a few in existence, jumps off the Courtauld wall. It has necessitated my revisiting of this artist, who died at the age of just 31, which is what any good exhibition should do. During this revisit I came across an interesting examination of his works on paper which took place at MoMA in 2008: http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2007/seurat/

Every drawing in the exhibition allows the viewer a new insight into the artists works, this is merely the one that stuck me most. So for the small price of £6, (which allows you access to the galleries breathtaking permanent collection as well) get down there and start exploring to find your favourite!