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The Guardian
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Artwork of Jane Austen's older sister to go on show in house where siblings lived
Perhaps most well-known for destroying thousands of her more famous sister's letters, Cassandra Austen's act of what some called literary vandalism overshadowed her accomplished skills as an artist. But now the artwork of Jane Austen's older sister – played by Keeley Hawes in the recent BBC drama Miss Austen – are to go on display together for the first time in the house where the siblings lived. Cassandra was a talented watercolourist, and her most well-known piece is a 1810 sketch of Jane that hangs in the National Gallery. Ten of her lesser-known family portraits and copy work – imitations of other works – have been brought together for an exhibition at Jane Austen's House in Chawton, Hampshire, as part of the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the author's birth. Paintings on display include Cassandra's watercolour portraits of her niece Fanny Catherine Knight and of her brother James Austen. Six of the works have never been seen in public before, and four were only recently discovered in the possession of Austen family descendants. Sophie Reynolds, head of collections, interpretation and engagement at the museum said: 'This is a small display, but a truly exciting one. Cassandra was an accomplished artist and for the Austen family her artworks were as important as Jane's writing. 'Her skill was akin to Jane's own – neat and careful, with delicacy and lightness of touch, so to see them is a pleasure in itself – but more than that, for those interested in Jane Austen, Cassandra's artworks also remind us of the many paintings and drawings in Jane's novels.' After Jane died, Cassandra destroyed many of her sister's letters, an act heavily criticised by later generations of critics angered at being denied insight into the cherished author's mind. However, many now assert that Cassandra acted to protect her sister's memory and reputation, as well as her wider family from hearing themselves mocked or criticised. About 160 of Jane's letters survived Cassandra's purge out of as many as 3,000. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion The art display has been curated by Janine Barchas, a professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin in the US, whose recent research has focused on Cassandra's artwork. 'Not since Cassandra's creative years in this very cottage have so many of her surviving artworks been gathered together in one place,' she said. The Art of Cassandra opens on 29 April and is free with entry to the house.
The Guardian
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Hockney says he did not offer to paint King Charles during royal visit
Renowned artist David Hockney has said he did not offer to paint King Charles when the monarch visited his London home on Monday because he doesn't know him well enough. This is not the first time that Hockney has shied away from painting royalty. The 87-year-old also refused a number of offers to paint the late Queen Elizabeth II because he only paints people he knows. Speaking in an interview with the Times, before his latest art show, Hockney said of the king's visit to his Marylebone home: 'He came on Monday for about an hour. But I didn't offer to paint him.' Of Elizabeth II he said: 'It's difficult to do the majesty … I thought, she is a genuinely majestic figure, and I just couldn't see a way to do it.' The Bradford-born artist said in the interview that his pictures were better if he knew the subject 'really well', and he criticised Lucian Freud's portrait of the late Queen. He said: 'When you look at the queen, her skin is absolutely marvellous. It's very beautiful skin. Well, he didn't get that at all.' In the interview, Hockney explained that he had moved back to London from his former home in Normandy, France in 2023 because of 'intrusion', as 'people kept coming round'. The 87-year-old painter's latest show, called David Hockney 25, will open in Paris at the Fondation Louis Vuitton art museum and cultural centre. Hockney talked about the new paintings he had produced from his Marylebone home. One of his efforts, which he calls Play Within a Play Within a Play and Me with a Cigarette, is a pro-smoking message. 'I'm nearly 88 years old and I didn't think I'd be here. I'm still a smoker, but I'm surviving,' he said. 'I read in the newspaper the other day that lung cancer was going up and smoking was going down. Well, what did that tell me? It told me that it wasn't really smoking.' The outspoken artist also remarked on his perceived rise of officiousness: 'People are getting very … bossy. There's an awful lot of bossy people about now. They're little Hitlers, aren't they? And there's lots of them. Bossy bossy boots.' Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion Hockney, who began working in the early 1950s, is best known for A Bigger Splash (1967), Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) (1972), and Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1971). Even though Hockney did not paint the late Queen, he did make a stained glass window for her named the Queen's Window, which was unveiled in Westminster Abbey in 2018.
The Guardian
26-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Champagne for my real friends!' Francis Bacon masterpiece escapes to the artist's old drinking den
When a work of art fails to excite, interest or move me, the word that comes to mind is 'dead'. Bad art is lifeless, good art is alive and great art is supervital. And it's a supervital masterpiece I am looking at right now. Face as sharply hewn as a Congolese mask, with a flesh-coloured pullover melting into the shadows of his loins, Peter Lacy dominates the room, captured in a gold-framed portrait by his lover Francis Bacon. That room is the Colony Room Green in London, not the original Colony Room but a bar nearby that lovingly recreates, with the precision of an art installation or stage set, the bohemian drinking den run by Muriel Belcher where Bacon would order drinks all round with his famous toast: 'Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends!' Its green walls are covered with art and memorabilia, including a wanted poster made by artist Lucian Freud to recover his own lost portrait of Bacon. So how has Peter Lacy, who seems an immense, baroque phenomenon propped up in the middle of these cosy confines, made his way home ? He is on 'day release', explains Jago Cooper, director of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia – as in a day out from prison. The Sainsbury Centre has declared that all the artworks it owns are alive: 'Art is alive and animate, waiting to be communicated with by anyone with a soul.' So, Cooper wondered, where would a living work of art want to go if it had a brief escape from the jail of the museum? It's a pretty good guess that a Bacon painting would choose to return to its creator's old haunt, or at least this replica. The burningly intense painting holds court at the centre of the room. You half-expect it to start dropping acid one-liners to the cackling delight of drunken ghosts – all the Soho monsters and reprobates hovering in the afternoon shadows, drinks in their skeletal hands. It's a lovely bar, but if you do visit the new Colony Room, you won't, sadly, find Bacon's painting. This really is just a day release, although it is all being recorded for a film to be shown from April at the Sainsbury Centre, with actors playing gay men from Bacon's generation and from today, comparing experiences. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion So what is this about? A lightning visit by a masterpiece to a drinking den where the public can't see it except on film? Let's not use the dread words 'publicity stunt'. Instead, let's wonder whether it really is meaningful to claim that a work of art is a living thing, with a mind of its own and opinions about where it would like to go. Anyone who has ever loved a work of art knows this to be true. It is fundamental to art's power and magic. The Bacon in the bar is electrifying proof. Every smoky brushstroke, every matted smear of black or pink, simmers with life. Lacy is a sentient being, and behind him, you feel the vital presence of the artist himself, the warm blood coursing through his painting hand. Five centuries ago, the Renaissance writer Giorgio Vasari praised the Mona Lisa thus: 'In the pit of the throat, if one gazed upon it intently, could be seen the beating of the pulse.' In fact, art has been experienced by most people in the majority of places throughout human history as animate: that is, as sacred objects in which a divine or magical force is infused. In southern Italy, you can still see statues weep, come to life, process at festivals. In this pleasantly claustrophobic little bar, I am getting that same uncanny feeling about Peter Lacy. Is he about to reach out of the painting and hit me, as he was wont to hit Bacon? It's a reverence that was replaced in most parts of Europe by the 18th century with a more secular, rational spirit of aesthetic admiration. Works of art – or objects designated as such – were torn from religious or ritual settings and placed in museums. Or imprisoned, to continue the 'day release' image. There we sometimes struggle to feel their magic power, their life. The Sainsbury Centre is trying to reclaim that intoxicating belief in art, not just through its day-release programme but in its displays, which urge you to encounter artworks as living beings, from carved masks of the Pacific Northwest to Picasso drawings. Its app tells you not the 'history' of an artwork, but its 'life story'; not when it was made, but when it was 'born'. Gimmicky? Not to me. Either you believe art is alive, or it means nothing to you. Do yourself a favour. Believe. The Living Art collection displays can be experienced at Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia, Norwich.
The Guardian
06-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Monkeys, clowns and bottles hidden in Jackson Pollock's paintings, study says
Monkeys, clowns, self-portraits, elephants and bottles of alcohol are among the things that could be hidden within the work of Jackson Pollock, one of the giants of 20th-century abstract expressionism, new research claims. The American painter, who used a 'drip technique' to pour or splash paint on to a horizontal surface, once said he stayed away from 'any recognisable image' in his work. But a new study suggests the chaotic patterns contain images Pollock himself may have been unaware of because of his bipolar disorder. Published in CNS Spectrums by Cambridge University Press, the paper claims that Pollock's technique camouflaged 'consciously or unconsciously encrypted images', which they term 'polloglyphs', at the base of some of his most renowned paintings. It argues that many of the 'recognisable images' have parallels with sketches Pollock made for his first psychoanalyst in 1936 at the age of 24, and which the medical professional later sold. The paper, entitled Do Images in Jackson Pollock's Paintings – Polloglyphs – Arise from His Conscious and Unconscious, Or Are They All in the Viewer's Mind? cites Pollock's 1945 work Troubled Queen. While, on first glance, the painting looks like a complex mesh of colours and geometric patterns, if rotated by 90 degrees it reveals a 'charging soldier holding a hatchet and a pistol with a bullet in the barrel; a Picasso-esque rooster; a monkey with goggles and wine; and one of the clearest images, the angel of mercy and her sword,' the study said. Psychiatrist professor Stephen M Stahl, who led the research, and his team wrote: 'His remarkable ability to hide these images in plain sight may have been part of his creative genius and could also have been enhanced by the endowment of extraordinary visual spatial skills that have been described in some bipolar patients.' The researchers said it was possible that Pollock's 'bipolar visual perceptions allowed him to develop a unique technique to camouflage images beneath drippings'. They said the mass repetition of the same images made it 'very unlikely to be random provoked pareidolia'. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion They acknowledged that polloglyphs in later drip paintings were more difficult to see or 'decode' from the chaotic layers of thrown paint. 'Ultimately, we may never know if there are polloglyphs present in Jackson Pollock's famous drip paintings. Nor can we know for sure whether they are merely in the mind of the beholder or put there consciously or unconsciously by the artist,' they said. The Rorschach quality of Pollock's paintings has fascinated art lovers for decades, with viewers perceiving many things in them – from scenes of classical mythology to Jungian symbols. In his book Tom and Jack, art historian Henry Adams claimed Pollock hid his own signature in his 1943 painting Mural. Jackson would cover entire canvases and used the force of his whole body to paint, often in a frenetic dancing style. His extreme form of abstraction divided critics: some praised the immediacy of the creation, while others derided its randomness, comparing it to the work of a child. But the painter remains a favourite of the art market. His works fetch tens of millions of dollars at auction, with the most expensive of all, Number 5 (1948), setting a world record when it sold for $140m in 2006. The artist died in 1956 after crashing a car while drunk.
The Guardian
06-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Museum turns up the dial on pioneering art collector Joséphine Bowes
'We would not be stood here if it were not for Joséphine Bowes,' said Vicky Sturrs, a curator, in a stupendously grand building that has one of the most enviable collections of art, ceramics and fashion to be found outside the UK's capital cities. 'I wouldn't be employed in this job, this museum would not exist.' The Bowes Museum has of course always known that the Frenchwoman Joséphine Bowes was an important part of its story, but the spotlight has more often been on her English landowner husband, John Bowes. 'Joséphine had a bigger role than we've ever made visible,' Sturrs said. 'In the coming years we are going to turn up the dial on who Joséphine was, why she built the museum, why she chose the things that she chose, why she collected what she collected and why she did it here.' A new exhibition celebrates Joséphine at the museum in the Durham Dales that she created in the 19th century with John. It contains examples of her own paintings, works that she collected, and also radical and joyous works that curators think she would be collecting if alive today. Joséphine, born 200 years ago, was an actor and performer at Paris's Théâtre des Variétés when she met John. They fell in love and married and she became a pioneering collector and patron of the arts. She collected 15,000 objects of astonishing variety, from art by Boudin and Courbet to the finest ceramics, glassware, textiles, furniture and mechanical objects. At the time, the Bowes bought more early impressionist works than the National Gallery. Joséphine collected what she loved and hoped people would enjoy, but she was also open to advice. 'She did collect things she didn't like,' Sturrs said. 'She was told by her dealers that 'a collection of this calibre' should really have a Goya. She didn't like Goya.' It meant the Bowes Museum now has in its collection what has been described as 'easily the greatest Goya portrait' in the UK. Joséphine was the driving force in creating the undeniably grand museum in Barnard Castle. The museum's executive director, Hannah Fox, said visitors often assumed the building was once a stately home. It wasn't. It was built as a museum 'for the people' and opened in 1892, after the deaths of Joséphine and John. The exhibition aims to celebrate the 'vision and the spirit' of Joséphine and includes work that curators think she would have been collecting today. All the evidence suggests Joséphine was generous and open minded. 'She was much more accepting of all sorts of different people and their lifestyle than Victorian society was,' Sturrs said. 'The works in the show feel authentic to the person we think Joséphine was … she would be championing these works. This is Joséphine in 2025.' Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion The works include a pot by Grayson Perry and sculptures by Leilah Babirye, who fled her home in Uganda after being outed as gay. There are also four original photographs from a series by the Turner prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing for which she stopped people in the street and asked them to write down what they were really thinking. 'I'm desperate,' says a smart-suited young man; 'I'm depressed at the moment,' writes a person who is unsettlingly smiley. The show includes a new commission from the artist Phoebe Cummings and ceramics by Lucy Waters, a winner of the north-east emerging artist award. Sturrs, the museum's director of programmes and collections, said the name of Joséphine Bowes needed to be shouted louder. 'There is this assumption in history that a man must have been behind this, that a man must have been leading this. To be clear, this is not about erasing John. But it is about saying that Joséphine had an equal and at times more leading part.' From Joséphine Bowes: Trendsetters and Trailblazers is at the Bowes Museum, 8 February to 29 June.
