Exit Through The Giftshop - Postcards at an exhibition....

More adventures in museum and exhibition gift shops...

1) NAKED MAN STANDING (1505-6?) - Michelangelo

Although this postcard is published by the Louvre I have an idea I bought it at the British Museum in 2010 for their Italian Renaissance Drawings exhibition.

Michelangelo's pen and ink sketch wonderfully conjures solidity and muscle out of thin air; even The Louvre are unsure of exact dates for the drawing or what it might have been a sketch for.

2) THE ARTIST'S GARDEN AT GIVERNY (1900) - Claude Monet

I bought this at the Royal Academy's 1999 exhibition MONET IN THE 20TH CENTURY which made me appreciate Impressionist painting for the first time as I was exposed to room after room of Monet's remarkable works.

A bed of vibrantly painted Irises lead you away from the painter to the seclusion of the tree-lined path by his house; another painting I just want to jump into!

3) LILY POND TABLE (1913) - Duncan Grant

The table design is attributed to Duncan Grant and I bought the postcard at The Courtauld Gallery's 2009 exhibition "Beyond Bloomsbury: Designs of The Omega Workshops".  It was a poor excuse for the actual table itself but I would have had difficulty hiding it under my coat.

This lustrous design really stood out against all the other exhibits and suggested the dark cool water beneath the lovely greens and oranges of the lily pads.  Roger Fry set up the Omega Workshop in Bloomsbury to give younger artists the opportunity to make art (and money) by designing and making objects for the home, surrounding yourself with beautiful furniture as well as paintings on the wall.  Along with Grant, artists who worked on and off for Omega in it's six years of trading were Vanessa Bell, Carrington, Paul Nash and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.

4) DAVID TRIBUNE (1501-4) - Michelangelo

Another postcard from the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence where Michelangelo's epic David stands in solitary majesty.  As you can see I do love a Michelangelo bloke in the nip.

DAVID was originally placed in the Piazza della Signoria beside the Palazzo Vecchio.  It stayed there for 369 years until it was moved to the Galleria in 1873.  One of the most famous bums in art.

5) PORTRAIT OF JEANNE KÉFER (1885) - Fernand Khnopff

I bought this a while ago at the Royal Academy's exhibition IMPRESSIONISM TO SYMBOLISM: THE BELGIAN AVANT-GARDE 1880-1900.  I love the charming delicacy of the painting of little Jeanne Kefér, dressed in her best to go out. The subdued colours of Khnopff's palette gives the picture an oddly luminous quality.

Five year-old Jeanne was the daughter of Khnopff's pianist friend Gustave; his positioning her in front of the large front door, along with her pensive expression, emphasizes her hesitancy in facing the outside world.

Moments of Being

When I heard that the National Portrait Gallery were staging an exhibition about Virginia Woolf I was excited but worried too - she is my favourite writer and the concern is how do you do an exhibition of her which would include her writing as well as her personality.

 

Although I loved walking around the exhibition, the curator Frances Spalding (whose books on Bloomsbury I have enjoyed) has not really addressed that central problem of balancing the woman and her art.  That would not stop me however recommending it to anyone who admires Woolf and her work.

As you enter the exhibition you are confronted by a close-up of that extraordinary face along with a photograph of her bomb-shattered house in Tavistock Square in 1940, setting up the premise of the fragility of life.  After that it is a fairly chronological exhibition which only takes up four rooms.  This was also a bit disappointing, it gave the exhibition the air of skimming the surface.

Through the exhibition it was interesting to see the constant representations of Virginia through photographs, paintings and even sculpture.  The now-iconic Beresford photographs of the 20 year-old Miss Virginia Stephen share space with snapshots from family and friends - Bloomsbury loved to photograph itself! - and with professional photographers such as Giséle Freund and Man Ray.

Paintings of Virginia by her sister Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry share space with portraits of fellow Bloomsbury figures such as the artists named, Lytton Strachey, Desmond McCarthy, Saxon Sidney Turner, Dora Carrington and of course Leonard Woolf.  Also included is Stephen Tomlin's haunting life-size bust of her, eyes wide with mouth open as if about to speak.

There were of course her publications: from her first novel THE VOYAGE OUT to the first Hogarth Press publications, hand-bound and printed by Virginia and Leonard, hand-written proofs as well as her great works where she wrestled the novel form into something new, something closer to life in all it's complexity.

The final room is called "Thinking Is My Fighting" and covers the growing threat of Fascism in the 1930s.  There is a drawing by Picasso called "Weeping Woman" which he donated to a fundraising event for Basque children which Virginia, Leonard, Vanessa and her youngest son Quentin had supported.  The title proved sadly prophetic when three weeks later, Vanessa's oldest son Julian was killed driving an ambulance for the Republicans in Spain, leaving Vanessa inconsolable.  Also on display is the Nazi 'black book', of intellectuals and writers who were to be arrested after a Nazi invasion, with Leonard and Virginia's names printed within.

All the way around the exhibition I felt Virginia eluding one's grasp, slipping around the far corner of the room, but here in the final room she was suddenly very close by.  Displayed in the same case as Virginia's taut, nervy letter to Hogarth Press editor John Lehmann on March 20th 1941 stating she felt her recent novel BETWEEN THE ACTS was unpublishable, was her walking stick that was found eight days later lying on the bank of the nearby River Ouse.

Facing this, framed together, were Virginia's last two letters, one to Vanessa, one to Leonard.  Although I have read these letters transcribed in countless biographies of her, to actually see them was incredibly moving and I cried as I looked at them.  Virginia the novelist, writing now for the last time to her sister and husband, the people who she loved the most.  Not writing to stretch the form or to test boundaries, just to express her love to those who would miss her the most and her apology that now she was losing herself to another of her terrible depressions she knew she could not find her way back this time.

And I thought of the last words of MRS DALLOWAY “...For there she was.”  For, finally in the exhibition, there she was.

For Art's Sake 2: "...the God-given genius of certain individuals..."

There have been quite a few visits to galleries this year, some more memorable than others.

We went to the Dulwich Picture Gallery to see their exhibition titled DAVID HOCKEY: PRINTMAKER and while not making me any more of a fan, it certainly showed the breadth of his ever-roaming interest in creating art - the show even ended with artworks he has created on a photocopier. The colours were particularly vibrant and lush...

We also saw the exhibition at the National Gallery, STRANGE BEAUTY: MASTERS OF THE GERMAN RENAISSANCE.  Again it didn't exactly rock my world - once you have seen one North European wizened, monkey-like face you have seen them all.  But there were some that I really liked... Jan Van Eyck's famous "Arnolfini Portrait" of the named couple looking very stately yet mysterious, Lucas Cranach the Elder's enigmatic "Portrait of A Woman" and Hans Holbein was well represented by a cameo of Anne of Cleves as well as "A Lady With A Squirrel And A Starling" - the squirrel was particularly lovely!

At Tate Britain, there was a very interesting exhibition called KENNETH CLARKE: LOOKING FOR CIVILISATION which was an overview of the wide-ranging art collection which belonged to the art historian and broadcaster, whose 1969 BBC series CIVILISATION was one of the first 'personal view' arts series.

Across the exhibition you follow Clark's life, from his privileged upbringing to his remarkable ascension to being, at 30, the youngest ever director of the National Gallery.  He used his influence - and private wealth - to help artists on their way (particularly during WWII).  Also during WWII, he saved the National Gallery's finest works from the London bombings by hiding them in Welsh caves while keeping the building open for free lunch-time recitals. 

 
The show has been criticised for showing his traditionalist interests - he was famously dismissive of the 1950s explosion in Modern Art - but there was plenty to enjoy.  It is unsurprising however that Clark himself remained an elusive, anonymous subject - can you understand anyone simply by their interest in art?

Clark was a particular fan of Bloomsbury and in one of the rooms Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell's self-portraits are close to each other, as well as Vanessa's portrait of daughter Angelica as a Russian princess and home furnishings designed by them too for Roger Fry's Omega Workshop.

 I was particularly excited to see two paintings by Seurat which I had never seen before: the mysterious and hazy "The Forest at Pontaubert" from 1881 and the glorious "Le Bec du Hoc, Grandcamp" from 1885.  The reproduction really does not do it justice - his remarkable use of colour in his pointillist style was hypnotic and I stood for a long time in front of it, lost in it's rhythm.

I was hugely engaged walking around the exhibition and among other fine works were a glowing Samuel Palmer painting from around 1830, some moody works by Victor Pasmore and John Piper and Paul Nash's epic BATTLE OF BRITAIN from 1941.

Sharing the space with this huge canvas were smaller, more painful works based on the human experience of conflict.  Henry Moore's cramped and gloomy sketches of people huddled together in the tube stations during the Blitz and the evocative and haunting works of Mary Kessell, a WWII accredited war artist who was based in Europe at the end of the conflict and was well-placed to document the refugees and the revealed horrors of the concentration camps.

I particularly liked her 1945 work "Refugees: '... pray ye that your fight be not in the winter...' Matthew XXIV, 20" of refugees trudging through an impenetrable winter.

This hugely enjoyable exhibition is on until 10th August.

So... where was I?

Hopefully Constant Reader you are still there.
 
It's been a while.
 
It's a funny thing but when you lose faith in what you think of things then it is difficult to think that others will be interested too.
 
So I have not shared my thoughts on this, that and t'other and have wondered what might make me start again.  That production? That film? That gig? That exhibition?
 
Well no.  Not that exhibition.
 
But this exhibition has!

 
Yesterday afternoon Owen and I had an adventure and made our way to the leafy 'burbs of Dulwich.  It's like another world!  Hard to believe it's only 20-something minutes from Brixton by bus.  I presume it's twinned with Richmond.  You know, the kind of place where you wonder how did we ever lose an Empire.
 
Which was all very appropriate as we went to see an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery (I do like the use of the word Picture) which covered the years 1908 - 1922 in the artistic lives of six students of the Slade Art School: Paul Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, David Bomberg and, my own favourite, Dora Carrington.
 
It's not a huge exhibition but it does give you an insight into the six artists and in particular, their humanity.  Time and again your read their own comments on the changes they are living through - their struggles with what movement best represents them and in particular, the men's response to the all-encompassing impact of World War I.
 

 
I knew Carrington and, to a lesser degree, Gertler and Spencer, but it was good to get more familiar with the work of the other three, Nevinson in particular.  I had written him off as one of Wyndham Lewis' lot but was heartened to find out that they had fallen out.  His modernist works such as 'Dance Hall Scene' give way to the more, blocky woodcut-like paintings of the War years.  Along with Paul Nash's desolate paintings of the blasted Western Front, they make for sombre viewing,
 
It strikes me that Carrington is the most under-represented of the six artists while David Bomberg remains the most elusive to define.  The exhibition does leave you feeling oddly sad, as so few of them seemed to fulfil the genuine promise of their pre-war years.  Of the six, Carrington and Gertler killed themselves, Nevinson and Bomberg ended their lives in obscurity while Nash and Spencer thrived.  Spencer is the strangest case, his unique vision remains the most constant throughout the exhibition.  I wonder if this points to a reason for his more long-term success over his contemporaries.
 
Last year I had recourse to research more into Carrington's life so it was a joy to see her work again.  From her early pencil sketches - her study of Gertler is particularly fine - and a delightfully illustrated letter to Paul Nash, to her paintings, she reveals how she made the personal public.  None more so than in her hypnotic portrait of her beloved Lytton Strachey.

 
I stood looking at this picture for a long time, caught up in the intensity of her concentration, with, I don't mind telling you, a tear welling.  Entering the last room I read on the wall the entry she wrote 21 days after Lytton's death from undiagnosed cancer "Everything was for you... I see my paints, & think it is no use for Lytton will never see my pictures now, & I cry" and felt so sad.    

The exhibition is open until September 22nd so there is still plenty of time to experience it for yourselves - clicky on the image below:

Um.

It's good to be back x