Friday 15 November 2013

Black Bloomsbury


THE Slade School of Art in University College London was from the start renowned for its training in expressive figure drawing and painting.  Currently in the UCL art museum [aka print room] is a small exhibition curated by Gemma Romain that plucks from oblivion a diversity of students and models. who studied or worked at UCL in the inter-war period.  The painting by Ivy MacKusick on the easel [left] is a good example of the works : an unnamed model, whose life story before and after posing for students can only be guessed at; an artist of evident talent named Ivy MacKusick whose post-Slade life and work remain unknown, as do her vital dates ; and a canvas intended only as a study in handling paint that is the sole evidence of their encounter and their lives.  But UCL should be rather ashamed of the display space, which is crowded with tall cabinets and has very limited wall space, which is moreover lit by unscreened windows - all making for unsatisfactory viewing.  A shame, because the material is varied and fragmentary, suggesting further avenues of research.    See also here for one postgraduate response.

http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/researchers-in-museums/category/museum-collections/

Not in the display, but in the UCL Art Collection, are some of the remarkable portrait sketches drawn by Prof. Henry Tonks, widely credited with giving Slade students like MacKusick their rigorous training in observational depiction.  During WWI, Tonks  worked with pioneer plastic surgeon Harold Gillies, in efforts to record and repair facial injuries, Tonks bringing all his draughtsman skill to render what we'd call disfigurement in an aesthetic rather than medical/surgical manner.
Here [right] is Nigerian-born Pte.J.Williams in 1917 before treatment for the loss of half the lower jaw.

Monday 4 November 2013

Janey Morris @ NPG and PS

well, alas, not quite literally. Even though she did believe in reincarnation, she is unlikely to have been re-born in recognisable  form just as she approaches the centenary of her death in January 1914.
This is to announce a display of drawings and photographs in the National Portrait Gallery's collection, depicting Jane, her husband and daughters, her friends and lovers - and four previously unshown images of Janey in rather funereal aspect, taken by Emery Walker at Kelmscott Manor in 1898  - funereal because it was the occasion when William Morris;' gravestone was installed in the churchyard and because despite the month of  May, it was bitterly cold and wet, the house unheated and the roads too muddy for walking

The display in Room 28  opens on 12 November and runs till 12 March 2014.  It includes two rarely-seen self-portraits by Rossetti, a fine drawing of Rosalind Howard by her husband, and several photos from Jane's own collection, including two of the self-regarding cad Wilfrid Blunt, which came from the estate of her daughter May, via May's executor who, when tasked with the disposal of what was effectively the Morris family archive, presented literary manuscripts and correspondence to the British Library, most drawings and sketches to the British Museum, jewellery and some art works to the V&A  and a mass of portrait photographs to the NPG.  
Link here http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/display/2013/janey-morris-pre-raphaelite-muse.php  




UPDATE
and see here