Monthly Archives: July 2014

Pontormo

I joined a small group of art historians to see the great Pontormo e Rosso Fiorentino exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi, taken round by Carlo Falciani, one of the curators.   The idea of the exhibition is to explore the differences between the two artists:  both pupils of Andrea del Sarto, Pontormo remained in Florence, doing work for the Medici (he did the decoration for their villa in Poggio a Caiano), whereas Rosso travelled widely in Italy, to Naples, Volterra and Sansepolcro, dying in Fontainebleau in 1540.   Pontormo’s style is already evident in his Joseph Sold to Potiphar in the National Gallery, painted when he was only 21:  the etiolated figures, the movement in the composition, influenced, according to the argument of the exhibition, not by maniera, but by his knowledge of German engravings.   There’s a room full of Pontormo’s portraits, including a Portrait of Two Friends from the Cini Foundation in which one of them is pointing to a passage in Cicero’s De Amicitia.   Then a room of nearly all the portraits known to have been painted by Rosso.   The greatest pictures in the exhibition are Rosso’s Ginori Altarpiece from the basilica of San Lorenzo, newly cleaned for the exhibition, full of fiery colours and an equally fiery sense of pictorial invention, in which all the figures are crushed together;  and Pontormo’s Visitation, borrowed from Carmignano.   Afterwards, we went on a pilgrimage, which I do whenever in Florence, across the Ponte Vecchio to S. Felicita, to see Pontormo’s Deposition in a side chapel.   Nothing equals it.

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Hastings

I loved Hastings, a nice, still slightly tatty seaside town with sidestreets and antique shops and shabby Regency squares, what Brighton must once have been.   Annoyingly, Hendy’s Home Store was closed.

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Jerwood Gallery

I finally made it to the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings in spite of having been invited to the opening in 2012 and a series of exhibitions, including some by RAs.   It’s an incredibly well considered set of intimate interior spaces, half public, half domestic, with a great deal of natural daylight, including windows looking out onto the town, oak floors and door surrounds, and the minimum of air conditioning.   It was designed by Hat Projects as their first public project, intelligently thought out and detailed, sitting comfortably amongst the surrounding tar-pitched fishermans’ huts.   By chance, we caught the hang of their forthcoming exhibition, Drawn Together:  Artist as Selector, which consists of drawings by artists who have been involved in the selection of the annual Jerwood Drawing Prize:  a large watercolour sketch by Anthony Green RA, a series of handkerchieves rubbed on tarnished silver by Cornelia Parker RA, and drawings by Lisa Milroy, Tony Bevan, Tim Hyman and Peter de Francia (unusually they indicate on the label if someone is an RA).   Alongside the exhibition space are a series of spaces showing works from the Jerwood’s own collection, a group of works of postwar British art, including David Jones, Prunella Clough and Maggi Hambling.

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Monty Python

We went to the Millennium dome tonight for the reunion of Monty Python.   It was the first time we had been back since a bleak afternoon in January 2000 when we went to visit the government’s lamentable efforts to mark the millennium.   The evening was highly elaborate and technologically sophisticated for a vast audience, a far cry from the wilfully amateurish graphics and mad schoolboy humour of the original, watched on a black-and-white television.   I was trying to work out where Terry Gilliam’s graphic language had come from:  a mixture of surrealism, Mervyn Peake, psychedelia, neo-Victorianism and the idiom Peter Blake used for the cover of Sergeant Pepper.   I was also impressed by how much had entered the language:  the Ministry of Funny Walks;  the spam song;  the anti-Germanism.   And now for something completely different….

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Kensington Park Gardens

We have an annual picnic in the private gardens of Kensington Park Gardens, the grandest boulevard in west London (well, we’ve done it two years running which makes it feel like a tradition).   I’m always amazed by the scale and the spaciousness of these private gardens, a product of mid-nineteenth century bourgeois opulence, with nannies using them to park prams and businessmen can have their morning constitutional.   They occupy the site of a racecourse known as the Hippodrome owned by the Ladbroke estate.   Hence Ladbroke Square.   Nine acres, the largest private gardens in London after Buckingham Palace.   We had supper in a glade with monogrammed white table napkins and the sound of tennis in the background.

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Drawn to the Real

I looked in yesterday at Alan Cristea’s gallery at the far end of Cork Street to see the work of Jane Dixon, which has been included in an exhibition of the work of five artists, all of whom work in the area of detailed observational drawing, including the work of Emma Stibbon, who has recently been made an RA.   I strongly recommend the exhibition because it represents a form of traditional art practice being taken seriously and shown in a major art gallery, which I more normally associate with the work of Gillian Ayres and Howard Hodgkin.

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Glenthorne (1)

We spent the weekend staying at Glenthorne, one the most romantic houses in England.   One approaches it by turning off the top road which runs across Exmoor and then making a steep and twisting descent down a rough track, through woodland, past a small gothic lodge and through gates until the drive opens up to a view across the Bristol Channel towards Wales:

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The house itself is late Georgian gothic, built for a squarson, Walter Halliday, and with the atmosphere of Thomas Love Peacock:

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Hughie O’Donoghue

I was asked to the opening of a set of three paintings in the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey entitled The Measure of all Things.   I had heard that he had done a set of paintings commemorating the first world war for Eton College.   These may belong to the same genre, thoughtful and reflective meditations on death, realist, but not over so, and made poignant by his family’s own experience of war.   I couldn’t quite work out the technique, which is nearly photographic:

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Hauser and Wirth in Somerset

We were invited to the opening of the new Hauser and Wirth gallery in Somerset.   I mistakenly thought that the opening was at lunchtime, so we were nearly the first people there.   It’s a fascinating phenomenon of an ultra sophisticated, international, avant garde art gallery opening on the outskirts of Bruton.   Its galleries are now in London, New York, soon to be in Los Angeles, and  Bruton.   It’s been very beautifully done, with an old medieval house converted by the Argentinian architect Luis Laplace as a guest house for artists:

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New Art Centre

Because we were travelling down to the west country, we thought we would call in at the New Art Centre, a private house east of Salisbury which shows contemporary sculpture in the garden.   I thought that they had an exhibition of the work of Richard Deacon and Bill Woodrow.   It turned out that they were just opening a new exhibition of a single work by Bridget Riley installed in a single gallery like a private chapel and sculpture by Toby Ziegler.   So, instead of just wandering around, the only people there, there were two coach loads from London, a speech by Andrea Rose, and lunch.   We saw a horse by the President in the kitchen garden:

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A figure by Antony Gormley lost in the wood:

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