MAHARAJAH  The Splendour of India's Royal Courts  is an impressive exhibition of "The Raj" - the regal life in India from the Murghal empire (late 1600's) until independence just after the Second World War.  There are four galleries.   The first is devoted to the Murghal Empire - an India which English traders were just coming to terms with - flamboyant and with significant cross-overs between state affairs and religions.    The next gallery tells the history of the series of fragmented states and the tribal warfare which followed the collapse of the Murghal rule. An India which was increasingly influenced and eventually controlled by the British East India Company.  The third gallery is devoted to the late 1800's when India became the "Jewel in the Crown" of the British Empire.  There are a lot of old photographs and films of the British lording themselves around - when you see it as a modern observer you can clearly understand why the rest of the World despised these arrogant British invaders. The final gallery is dedicated to the Royal Indian Courts between the two great wars - the "roaring twenties" brought a facade of an East-West cultural integration which might have been superb if only it had involved the millions of inhabitants of India, rather than just the ruling elite. There are some excellent Man Ray photo's, an opulent Rolls Royce and some classic Art Deco style furniture and portraits.

Luckily, there was also one small side room which had some exquisite works in it - items for sale in another forthcoming sale of impressionist and modernist works.  There were only a dozen items in this small exhibition - but they included a magnificent Monet and a couple of major Picasso's. There was also a large granite work by Dame Barbara Hepworth.  All were listed for between £2million and £12 million.

However, there was some of the usual rubbish - daubed works which might have been done by a child, most didn't even have the excuse of looking "fresh".  Rubbish sculptures of "found" materials, which looked just like the original owners had been glad to lose them.  Whoever had designed the architecture exhibition had made a huge mistake by putting everything up high on shelves - not only were there very few good architectural exhibits, but you had to be at least eight feet tall to be able to se them properly.  

There was lots of good stuff too. As well as new things which made me smile, my favourites were all there as well.  Donald Hamilton-Fraser and Ken Howard, plus loads of others had great works hanging.  My biggest surprise was an amazing sculpture/casting/statue which I loved before I found out who had been responsible.  It is made of (apparently) solid silver - a slightly taller than life size flayed human male with amazing musculature exposed, and with his skin draped over one arm. The title of the work was Saint Bartholomew - Exquisite Pain. 

I was really surprised to find out that it was a work by Damian Hirst - an artist I have never really appreciated before. This was very good - in fact, it was the highlight of this years exhibition. 

I look forward to visiting again soon to see how my senses judge the exhibition when it is less crowded, and when there is not champagne available to numb the senses.

I went with my friend Stephanie. There were hundreds of coloured woodblock prints on display, and the place was extremely crowded, so we couldn't give the exhibition all the attention it deserved - we did however see the bits we knew we'd like! which included this amazing print of Hatsuhana praying under a waterfall. 

To find it was a revelation because a copy of this print has hung in Stephanie's downstairs toilet at her farm in Devon since the late nineteen seventies! At that time Kuniyoshi wasn't well known in the UK, or very collectable - the picture had been picked from a pile of old prints because it seemed appropriate for a toilet!

The place has been turned upside down - almost literally.  The walls at the eastern end have been replaced with huge window panels, and the entire lead roof has been replaced by glass.  The fabulous Monet Water Lilies have been moved from the basement to the main floor - in rooms of the same oval shape, but with natural light.  The paintings are still vibrant and moving - but somehow the exhibition space is less sepulchral.  The old springy wooden floorboards are now quiet modern flooring, and where people used be hushed and reverential in the huge cathedral like spaces - they are now chattering and the setting is no longer awesome in the real sense of the word.  It's no longer a place to contemplate in peace, but the artwork is still mind blowing.

The available paintings of the era 1250-1500 are dominated by religious iconography -  acres of amazing rich blues set against gold leaf and a very clear demonstration of the evolution of such techniques as linear perspective as the art "scene" developed.  Most, if not all, of the very early religious works are "saved" from old churches where they were objects of devotion.

Leibovitz initially made her name photographing the famous in the sixties and seventies - Mick Jagger  and John & Yoko Lennon being among her most iconic images.  She then gained a name for photographing the uncomfortable truths of warfare - piles of bodies in Sarajevo for instance.  This exhibition spanned her stay in the Balkan states during the uprisings of the nineties, but omitted a lot of her more stark (not to mention stomach churning) shots.  There was one very emotional photograph of a little boys bike lying on its side in a pool of blood - the aftermath of a shell exploding nearby; and some more personal ones of her father and one of her friends close to - if not just at - the point of dying.

They were Antony Gormley's work of art - Another Place.  They looked very enigmatic and formed a far more focused piece of art than had I imagined they would.  The rusting iron figures, now encrusted with sea moss and tiny barnacles fit very well with the bleak flat vista and stand in contrast to the modern windmills half a mile or so out to sea- at which the strange iron figures are gazing.

We returned to the Klimt exhibit on the ground floor of the gallery. The whole ground floor exhibition space is taken up with a full size replica of his Beethoven Frieze. The original was destroyed in the second World War, but this reconstruction was undertaken using the original drawings, original materials and original techniques.  It is a fantastic work and I spent the best part of three quarters of an hour just gazing. This may be a modern copy - but it is a work of real art.  The story line is Beethoven's ninth symphony, ending with The Ode To Joy - now the European national anthem.  I found this a very moving work of art - I hope it finds a permanent exhibition space somewhere, I would love to spend more time seeing it.

The gallery was built "for the people" and has no entrance charge.  It contains a superb collection of statues and furniture, and some wonderful classic paintings by the likes of Sir Joshua Reynolds and JMW Turner;  but it also contains one of the finest collections of Pre-Raphaelite paintings in the world - rivalling even The Ashmolean at Oxford.

We spent the afternoon marvelling at paintings by Frederic Leighton, Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Lawrence Alma-Tadema and many famous others.  The gallery also includes some fantastic tapestries dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and fine collections of Chinese  art and Wedgwood pottery, as well as a huge collection of Greek and Roman Antiquities - mainly pottery and statues.

A key one was a huge mirrored egg, with the top broken off,  The outside was blue and had amazing reflections in it, the inside was silver and acted as a curved mirror showing the ceiling - a brilliant work of art (though I suspect it would be a bugger to dust and keep clean !).   There was one room dedicated the works (I use the term loosely) of Tracy Emin.  I cannot see where the art is in any of her exhibited work in this exhibition. I found the whole lot puerile, and one exhibit (a zebra fucking a lady) to be absolutely offensive.   We scoured the exhibition and enjoyed most it before doing a quick tour of the Madjeski Fine Rooms (one of which is the room in which Darwin first presented his paper on the Origin of the Species.)

Cranach - Venus

His drawings were finely detailed, exhibited excellent linear and tonal perspective and were clearly representative of real models.  What was even more remarkable was that many of them were executed as woodcuts.  The fine detail was fascinating - especially in such an unforgiving medium, where one slip of the chisel could screw up the whole work !

His paintings were equally amazing.  The colour was vibrant and the portraits were almost "modern" in their style of clarity and eye-contact between sitter and viewer.   Some of his set piece religious scenes were also interesting.  Cranach clearly had a fascination with beheading. There were at least three versions of St Catherine about to be beheaded, and three versions of Salome with John the Baptists head on a plate, all had gruesomely realistic neck wounds and one had a horribly vivid body lying on the ground pumping blood which was being lapped up by a dog !  Ugh !  Technically, however, it has to be one of the earliest surviving pictures which use movement lines to indicate motion (of the pumping blood).

Malyavin - Peasant Woman Dancing

The four galleries are The Pushkin,  The Tretyakov gallery, The Hermitage and St Petersburg State Museum.   The exhibition was breathtaking in its scope and magnitude. 

The exhibition showed French Impressionist and other 19th/20th century genre art works which had been acquired by great Russian collectors (such as Diagalev) and then contrasted them with the Russian generated art of equivalent genres, evidently influenced by - and complimentary to - these Western styles.     The sheer breadth of numbers of styles in a single exhibition was amazing - and the juxtaposition of European influence and Russian homogenous artworks was fascinating.  The impacts of Monet, Cezanne and many others was very evident.   Some of the more modern works (Tatlin for instance) left me a little cold, but it is an excellent exhibition and I shall be making sure I have some London meetings with long lunch gaps in the near future !

Ophelia

This is a major exhibition and a fascinating one - I'm sure I will need to visit it again.  There are many "old friends" from other galleries and previous exhibitions - and many beautiful paintings which I have never seen before.    As well as his more famous Pre-Raphaelite works, there are rooms dedicated to romance, aestheticism and even his works in "The Grand Tradition".  There is a section of "fancy pictures" including "Bubbles" the painting which sparked an intense Victorian debate about the potential commercialism of art when it was used to advertise Pears Soap. This section also includes the famous Souvenir of Velasquez and the infamous Cherry Ripe, which led to Millais being denigrated as an artist who pandered to popular sentiment.

This visit to the Royal Academy took in three separate exhibitions:

Georg Baselitz is one of Germany's most famous and prolific artists. He made his name by painting things rather scruffily and upside down.  I'm not a fan of this sort of art, or of the people who justify it  as "his motif's are upside down as a strategy to liberate the subject matter".  It was interesting to see how much acreage was dedicated to this sort of painting - and how few people were looking at it !  Not to my taste, I wouldn't go out of my way to see another exhibition of his work.

Paul Mellon's Legacy is subtitled An American's Passion for British Art.  A nice little display in the Sackler Gallery of this collection.  Some lovely JMW Turner's,  a couple of Reynolds and a superb Canaletto of Warwick castle.  It also contained the lovely Stubbs - but this time a Zebra rather than a racehorse - on the right.

 Making History, an exhibition of how the fascination for British Antiquaries has developed from the early eighteenth century antiquarians through to today's hi-tech archaeology.  Some nice Celtic and Roman jewellery and weaponry, a display of the evolution of recording the monument at Stonehenge and a lot of really interesting historic documents - but, is it art?  Not sure why this exhibition was in an art gallery instead of a museum - but it was fascinating and well worth the visit.

Antony Gormley is already an established contemporary artist with such well known works as The Angel of the North and Another Place  (the iron statues on Crosby beach near Liverpool).   I didn't actually visit the exhibition inside The Hayward Gallery - the queue was long, it was a hot day, there was a much more interesting carnival going on outside, but I did get to see a lot of Gormley's work because you can see the best part of the exhibition from outside !

As usual this blockbuster exhibition comprised so many variations of art that you are equally likely to find stuff you love as well as stuff you hate.  My old favourites were there - Ken Howard, Elizabeth Blackadder, Eileen Cooper and Donald Hamilton-Fraser - and the exhibition was worthwhile just to see them alone. 

There were some quite interesting works by newcomers, especially a huge triptych drawing set outside number ten Downing Street.  In the left panel is an American soldier clubbing hooded prisoners with a baseball bat ; in the right panel is a pile of dismembered bodies and in the centre, standing outside the door to number ten are Cheri and Tony Blair, naked and with blood on their hands.  Not very subtle, but reflective of a popular opinion about his war crimes in Iraq.  Another feature was a massive collage of paintings by David Hockney, making up a single scene of some woodland beside a house. It was impressive, but not my cup of tea. I guess the most impressive bit is that Hockney must be in his seventies now, but he is still experimenting with different techniques - well done !  There were also the works which made me come over all "grumpy old man-ish" and want to snort "what idiot thought that was art ! "   But perhaps not as many as usual, and I internalised my immature urges because I might change my mind when I see them again..

On the whole my first impression was that this 239th exhibition was an average sort of Summer Exhibition, but I'm sure that view will be tempered by subsequent visits.

The National gallery has excelled itself with this exhibition.  One of the best collections of Renoir's work I have ever seen gathered under one roof.  The exhibition spans his early works (from 1865 to 1883) and has some vibrant classics, such as The Rowers at Chatou; The Luncheon at Fournaise; Claude Monet painting in his garden at Argenteuil and - my favourite - The Skiff (La Yole).

This is my favourite because it is the first classical painting which I tried to copy. This was following a drunken exclamation at a 1984 works gathering in a wine bar about how easy painting must be (The words I recall are "Piece of piss - only a load of dotty brushstrokes")  and a subsequent gift of an otherwise unwanted "oil painting set" from my secretary .  I quickly learned just how hard it is to be a good artist and this painting must be the picture which I have most copied - mostly very badly.  But I feel now as if I know every brush stroke which Renoir laid on that canvas and seeing it in an exhibition was like unexpectedly meeting a really good old friend.  Joyful.

This exhibition is entitled "landscapes" but it covers virtually all his work except portraits !   His use of colour and the aura of his soul - 140 years later - still moves me.  His painting of waves (1882) are incredible - they really seem to be rolling toward you out of the canvas.  A fantastic exhibition, on until May 28th. I shall try to find time to go again.

Another understated Sackler Gallery exhibition.  This collection is mainly of Monet's workbooks, sketches and pastel drawings - many of which were done in preparation for some of his masterpieces.  The exhibition also includes several of his final oil paintings in order to demonstrate the development from initial sketches to finished work.

A fascinating corner of the exhibition included some interactive computer screens on which you could bring up nine or ten of his sketchbooks and page through them at your leisure.  I spent a happy hour exploring them and being surprised by the juxtaposition of some drafts of which the final works were produced many years apart, but the sketches were obviously contemporary.  Some works obviously took longer to develop than others.

The exhibition starts with some tone compositions in greys and blacks from his youth which are very mature for a ten or eleven year old boy - and ends with some tone compositions in blues and greens - his London Bridges series and his Water Lilly series.

This exhibition in the Sackler galleries of the Royal Academy is very peaceful.  A collection of ancient bronzes from Southern India.  Some were four armed representations of Shiva, although some were also unmistakably female and one was a Ganesh (Elephant head). There were also many bronze "saints", who just had the regular human number of limbs.    Some have been revered for hundreds of years, and the practise of washing them at every ceremony has left them very smoothly polished;  while others had been buried for hundreds of years, and looked suitably crusty, although not badly corroded.

The bronzes were designed according to established traditions with the appropriate hand positions, dreadlocks, belt accoutrements etc. and were initially modelled in wax, which was then coated in clay.   The whole assembly was fired and the wax melted and drained out through strategically positioned drain holes, leaving a hollow mould made of fired clay.  This was then filled with a mix of gold and bronze and left to set before the clay mould was broken away.   The idol makers don't appear to have been particularly committed to Shiva because apparently they also made Buddha's and any other images any local religion might want ! 

A fascinating exhibition covering the whole of Velasquez's working life from 1616 through until his death in 1660.   The guy was obviously an extremely clever artist.  The very first picture in this exhibition - The three musicians - was painted when he was only sixteen or seventeen.  The examples displayed show how his mastery grew rapidly, first in painting still life and liquids, and then being able to present space around his subjects - initially foreground and eventually background.  
It is noticeable that his paintings of friends are significantly more vibrant than the formal portraits of the Hapsburg court where he spent most of his career.  The piéce-de-resistance of the exhibition is the amazing The Toilet of Venus - known locally as The Rokeby Venus.  This is a classic example of his ability to paint quickly and loosely for a subject which was not a formal portrait;  and to display his understanding of both compositional balance and his understanding of the human psyche.  The reflection is purposefully blurred so that every viewer can picture at least some aspects of his or her ideal companion - and it is also a great example of Velasquez's other amazing technique - "impressionism".  Two hundred and twenty years before it was "discovered" in France he had worked out what certain types of brushwork and patterning looked like when viewed from a distance and applied these techniques to his work.

I'm not deeply into sculpture, but if I was then August Rodin would be my favourite.  I have revelled over The Kiss when it used to sit in the Tate National (now banished to the Tate Modern), and loved the hard lines of The Thinker when that has been on display in London.  I have also appreciated his work at The D'Orsay in Paris, and at his own museum just down the street from the Eiffel Tower.

My first taste of this exhibition had been a couple of weeks previous when Jacky and I had skipped into the courtyard on our way to another gallery just to appreciate The Gates of Hell - which stand thirty feet or more high in the courtyard.  Jacky had commented that it just seemed like a lot of fornication going on - but it didn't look to me as if it was very pleasant fornication. Nobody was smiling, and most were sinking into quicksands.  Very moving.  In fact some of his seminal works - including The Thinker - were originally prepared for this massive work.

When I eventually managed to view the whole exhibition I was intrigued at the painstaking research and practice which Rodin put into his works.  There were sketches, small models, larger models and then the final work.  The number of models and pre-works which make up the Burghers of Calais occupies an impressive square footage of the exhibition.  Another factor which fascinated me is that he used a technique I have always associated with portrait painters, in that he often worked from nude models and then "clothed" the resulting works before rendering them as sculptures.    My favourite items - apart from The Kiss of course - were the white marble works he made of society ladies in the early twentieth century. 

Amadeo's main work was - of course - portraiture, which is perhaps why I like it.  Among the works were six of his "Grand Nudes" including the Seated Nude from the Courtauld Gallery, which was one of my first lessons in appreciating art.  When I worked at Euston in the late nineteen eighties I used to take my sandwiches to the old site of the Courtauld and sit in front of the picture for an hour - amazed at all the new things you could see if you looked long and properly.

one of the "Grand Nudes" on show

This year took a quantum leap and I found that liked about 10% at first sight !  Firstly, there are some excellent sculptures ranging from small bronzes through to eight foot tall women made out of tiles (the same artist who did "Dominatrix" last year.)   Next, there are my old favourites,  Ken Howard, John Ward, Elizabeth Blackadder and Allen Jones - I like most of their stuff and there seemed to be more of that sort of style about this year.  Then there are the "gems" - new artists who do something really eye-catching, but not so avante garde as to be outrageous.  There seemed to be a lot more "pleasing" art this year. Finally there is the architecture section, which has been slowly working its way into my zone of interest for the last twenty years. This year I found myself positively enjoying it, and even laughing at some of the designs.

Then of course there is the other ninety percent. The smears and scrawls. The pretentious "art for arts sake", rubbing shoulders with the "new respect" artists (whom I don't respect !) like Damien Hirst.  His current work is professionally finished and on the surface has some classical dimensions - but actually the main drive is to shock rather than to please. I don't believe that art should do that.