Category Archives: Arts & Literature
Photography Exhibitions: “Virtual Encounters – The World Of David Yarrow”
David Yarrow is a British fine-art photographer, conservationist and author. He has travelled to isolated locations to capture images of wildlife, indigenous communities and landscapes. He currently lives in London.
Podcast Interviews: Poster House Museum NYC Director Julia Knight
When New York City’s Poster House museum had to close its doors in early March, director Julia Knight wondered how the institution could support the city.
Today her inspiring solution can be seen across all five boroughs.
Poster House is the first museum in the United States dedicated exclusively to posters.
Through exhibitions, events, and publications, Poster House presents a global view of posters from their earliest appearance in the late 1800s to their present-day use. Poster House takes its mission from the medium, aiming to engage and educate all audiences as we investigate this large-format graphic design and its public impact.
Posters explore:
- mass communication and persuasion
- the intersection of art and commerce
- control of the public domain
Top Watercolorists: Rae Andrews – “Landscapes That Bend The Rules”
Video Interview: British Painter David Hockney – “The World is Beautiful”
In this short and uplifting video, the influential British painter David Hockney talks about looking and painting for more than 60 years – and shares a story that made him reflect on our time.
“The world is very, very beautiful if you look at it. But most people don’t look very much. They scan the ground in front of them so they can walk, but they don’t really look at things incredibly well, with intensity. I do, and I’ve always known that.” In March 2020, Hockney sent out his iPad drawing ‘Do Remember They Can’t Cancel the Spring’ (2020) in response to the coronavirus outbreak. In this video, he shares the story of how a philosopher on a news program was asked how he could be optimistic with the current news: “And he said: Well, that’s television. Bad news sells.” The reporter then inquired what the good news was, to which the philosopher responded: “Well, the arrival of spring,” Hockney continues laughing.
In the video, you also get to experience the world premiere of an animation technique, which Hockney himself calls “time-based brush painting.”
David Hockney (b.1937) is a British painter, printmaker, photographer and stage designer, who is considered among the most influential and versatile British artists of the 20th century. Hockney is a notable contributor to the pop art movement in Britain, both in its foundation and growth, beginning with his participation in an annual exhibition called ‘Young Contemporaries’ in 1960, which also marked the start of his recognition in the art world. Hockney is the recipient of several prestigious awards including the Praemium Imperiale for Painting (1989), and the Lifetime of Artistic Excellence Award (Pratt Institute) in 2018.
His work can be found in numerous collections worldwide, including National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, National Portrait Gallery and Tate Gallery in London, Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, De Young Museum in San Francisco, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, and Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.
David Hockney was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner at his home in France in March 2019.
Many thanks to David Hockney for providing the works and the animation shown in the video. Camera: Jakob Solbakken Edited by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen Produced by Marc-Christoph Wagner Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2020 Supported by Nordea-fonden
New Art Books: “Titian – Love, Desire, Death” By Matthias Wivel (May 2020)
Titian (active 1506–1576) produced a masterful group of paintings for Philip II of Spain, celebrating the loves of gods, goddesses, and mortals. Depicting scenes from Ovid’s narrative poem Metamorphoses, Titian named them “poesie” and considered the works as visual equivalents of poetry.
This volume presents a detailed study of the complete series—Danaë, Venus and Adonis, Perseus and Andromeda, Diana and Actaeon, Diana and Callisto, and The Rape of Europa, as well as The Death of Actaeon—lavishly illustrated with details of these emotionally charged paintings. The book explores Titian’s creative process and technique, in addition to his use of literary and visual sources and his correspondence with Philip II.
The artistic legacy of the series for later European painting is also examined in the works of artists such as Rubens, Velázquez, and Rembrandt. Offering the most comprehensive overview of these remarkable works, Titian: Love, Desire, Death is an indispensable resource for scholars and admirers of Renaissance painting.
Virtual Tours: “Sir John Soane’s Museum – London” – “Spectacular Imagery”
TAKE A 3D “DIGITAL TOUR” OF “THE SOANE”
The story of the restoration of Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Filmed over a period of 6 years, it traces the research, the discoveries and the skills that made transforming this magical place possible. This third episode reveals the painstaking work that went into restoring artworks within the Museum, and the legacy of the project.
Top Upcoming Art Books: “Leonor Fini – Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings”
Leonor Fini (1907–96) is one of the most important artists and personalities of the twentieth century. Her work came to prominence as part of the 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where her paintings were widely celebrated for their uniquely female approach to surrealism—although Fini never joined the surrealist movement.
Self-made and self-taught, she preferred to work on her own and was known for her fierce independence and provocative panache. A prolific painter, Fini also wrote, worked extensively in book illustration and printmaking, and designed for plays, ballets, operas, and film.
Presenting the definitive catalogue raisonné of Leonor Fini’s more than 1,100 oil paintings, this book brings together more than one thousand color illustrations and essays on her work by Fini experts Richard Overstreet and Neil Zukerman and a concise, up-to-date biography by British art historian Peter Webb.
Richard Overstreet is an American artist and photographer. In 1998, he founded the Leonor Fini Archives in Paris.
Neil Zukerman is the owner of the CFM Gallery in New York. He is an expert of Leonor Fini’s work and author of several books about her.
Peter Webb is an art historian and has published extensively on art and artists of the 20th century. He formerly taught at the Coventry College of Art, the Hornsey College of Art and the Middlesex University in London.
Leonor Fini (1907- 1996) was an Argentinian surrealist painter, designer, illustrator, and author, known for her depictions of powerful women.
Cocktails With A Curator: Boucher’s ‘A Lady On Her Daybed’ (Frick Collection)
In this episode of “Cocktails with a Curator,” Xavier F. Salomon, Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, examines the life and work of French painter François Boucher, with a focus on “A Lady on Her Daybed.” Discover why Boucher was said to epitomize the taste of the eighteenth century.
This week’s complementary cocktail has a kick: the potent French 75, named after the powerful French 75mm field gun.
Literary Arts: New Website Archives Work Of British Illustrator And Designer Peter Campbell (1937-2011)
The website is about the work of the designer, writer and illustrator Peter Campbell (1937‑2011). The intention is to present an archive of Peter’s illustration, design and editorial work, as well as occasional selections from his writing.
When asked what he did for a living, Peter would usually say he was a designer, or, a typographer. Designing for print – books, exhibition catalogues, magazines, posters – 
took up the most substantial part of his time, at the BBC in the 1960s and 1970s and thereafter as a freelance. He was also an illustrator, a journalist, an author of children’s books, an editor and a publisher. The great range of his professional work, and his encompassing interest in the work of others, made him a collaborator sought out by writers, publishers and artists.
Diana Souhami, who worked with Peter often, wrote in the Guardian after his death: “He had the ability to conceptualise what each publishing project needed and to get it right. He was hugely and diversely productive, but seldom hit a wrong note.”
Discussing his journalism in her appreciation in the London Review, Mary‑Kay Wilmers wrote: “There are people whom getting a grip doesn’t suit, who don’t want to be confined. One can honour the world in depth or across a wide range and there were few aspects of the world that Peter didn’t wish to honour.”
He probably would have been delighted by – and certainly modestly sceptical of – Alan Bennett’s appraisal, in the posthumous publication of a catalogue of his pictures in Artwork, that he was “an heir to Ardizzone, Bawden and Ravilious.”
Peter Campbell was born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1937. In 1960 he emigrated to London where he lived for the rest of his life. He died in 2011.
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