The wall text at the start of this exhibition reads, in part;

Belonging takes different forms. Humans can share an affinity for a specific place, familial bonds and friendship, or spiritual connections based on religion or stories. Geography can also underpin local, national, and international connections. Hobbies and traditions in both real and imagined space can inspire a sense of camaraderie.

I’ve previously mentioned Wendy’s propensity to respond to wall texts by saying ‘I don’t have the bandwidth for that’. On this occasion, it was me perhaps imperceptibly rolling my eyes. Belonging does take different forms, but it’s hard to see how you can successfully curate a coherent exhibition around a feeling you’re choosing to define so expansively.

And, to be honest, I didn’t get it. But there were some nice pictures.

Here’s Mary Cantrill’s 1941 watercolour of a local landmark, Leazes Park Lake in the Snow of 1941. The label said that the park ‘offers tranquil escape in the bustling city’, which is probably true, but my overriding association with Leazes Park is of being asked to find patients who had absconded there from the RVI, which is just over the road.

This is JW Carmichael’s 1839 lithograph of The Ouse Burn Viaduct, looking like it is crossing an impossibly rural setting. It’s only a few weeks since I featured a photograph of the viaduct on this very blog.

This is Beryl Davies’s 1940s watercolour of The Haymarket, a part of Newcastle that has changed surprisingly little despite huge changes outside of the frame. This was painted as part of a project run the The Laing. After the council approved major redevelopment work in the city centre, the gallery’s committee sent forth artists to document the city as it existed before the work started, which feels somehow inspired and a little eccentric at the same time.

There’s something about the lighting in this picture which, along with all of the arches, that sort of feels like the kind of art that AI generators often spit out. It is, in fact, an 1813 painting by Thomas Miles Richardson, show a View of the Ruins of Tynemouth Monastery. For some reason, I had always thought that the the monastery had been damaged in the war, so to find out that it was in fact already a ruin over two centuries ago was a bit of a surprise!

And lastly, here’s that other local home of brilliant art, the Baltic, captured in watercolour here by an unknown artist at some point when it was clearly still a flour mill rather than a centre for contemporary art.

Belonging continues at The Laing until 30 November.

In celebration of its bicentennial, the National Gallery has deigned to send some of its works out of London and out to visit the nation that owns them. Newcastle has been ‘loaned’ The Fighting Temeraire, Turner’s 1893 masterpiece which Radio 4 listeners once voted ‘the greatest painting in Britain’. If I’m totally honest, I’m so ignorant about art that I’d probably not have recognised it.

I wrote recently about the grief of aging, and it was that feeling that came to mind as I contemplated this painting: the outmoded sailing ship being pulled along to its final destruction by new-fangled Tyneside-built tug boats. The exhibition, though, made me note the brightness of the sunset, which perhaps represents hope for the future. The grief of aging is often paired with the joy of a new generation taking over.

This being the Laing, they haven’t just stuck The Fighting Termeraire on the wall and left it at that: they’ve built an ambitious and absorbing exhibition around it, featuring dozens of Turner paintings alongside other works. They even—and here’s a bit of lateral thinking—have displayed a piece of wood from the actual Temeraire.

I particularly liked how the exhibition unpicked Turner’s technique, featuring colour studies and sketches that would go on to inform his future work. I’ve never really thought about the artistic process of watercolour painting before, nor really of the way an artist would want to plan out both the colours and the objects in this way.

There was some interesting discussion on Turner’s view on the ethics of the sea battles he painted: was he a patriotic supporter, or more interested in the abhorrent loss of life? I find it difficult to look at his paintings and see anything but the latter—they all feel tinged by sad reflections on humanity. But for this to be a point of academic disagreement, there must be another way of seeing them, and I must just be projecting my views.

The exhibition also made the point that steamships are now as old-fashioned as sailing ships were in Turner’s time. That made me think about whether there is any art being made now, chronicling the ‘industrial revolution’ we are going through in terms of artificial intelligence putting people out of work. Are the Turners of today making brilliant works about that revolution which will be revered in centuries to come? We can only hope.

Turner: Art, Industry and Nostalgia continues at The Laing until 7 September.

This exhibition has recently transferred from the National Portrait Gallery to The Laing. Before visiting, I knew nothing about Yevonde, but I came away with a real appreciation for her life and work. She was a photographer who developed her practice in the period between the two World Wars, and who was a pioneer of the use of colour photography. There were several strands running through the exhibition that stood out to me.

The exhibition did a good job of helping me to understand how colour photography initially developed. It was a simple process involving taking multiple simultaneous images effectively through multiple cameras, with coloured filters in front of each one. These could then be developed using coloured inks and composited to create a colour image. It’s a simple and logical process, but one that was entirely new to me.

Yevonde developed a distinctive style for her colour photography:

If we are going to have colour photography, for heaven’s sake, let’s have a riot of colour.

My colour perception is pretty poor, but even so, the Vivex photography combined with Yevonde’s compositions seemed stunning vivid on the gallery walls, almost hyperreal. This is perhaps most celebrated in her work photographing women dressed as goddesses.

The exhibition included a small goddess-inspired dressing up corner, and during my visit, this was occupied by a woman who seemed to be having the time of her life, alone in front of the mirror. More power to her.

I was interested in Yevonde’s feminism, which was well represented in the exhibition. Most of the human subjects featured in her work were female, and it was suggested that much of her early interested in photography was driven by a desire to be independent.

The duties of a wife with a separate career have yet to be defined, and although complete unselfishness, has always been considered a sure foundation for domestic happiness, I am not convinced.

The curators placed one of the largest of Yevonde’s self-portraits alongside this quotation:

This is not the story of a woman’s life, but the story of a photographer that happens to be a woman.

Almost exactly a year ago, I enjoyed the Design Museum’s exhibition on Surrealism. I was therefore interested to see in this exhibition the interaction between Yevonde’s photography, and colour photography more generally, and surrealism. It is surely no accident that the often bright colour of surrealist work came about just as colour photography was beginning to make a splash.

All things considered, I thought this was a great exhibition. I learned things from it and gained new insights and perspectives on the art featured. It was well worth a visit.

Yevonde: Life and Colour continues at The Laing until 20 April.

Whenever I’m at Schiphol, provided I’m in the non-Schengen zone, I try to make time to pop into the tiny branch of the Rijksmuseum. The current exhibition is ‘Longing for Nature’, and I thought it made quite a nice partner to the ‘Essence of Nature’ exhibition I saw at The Laing earlier this summer.

Whereas ‘Essence of Nature’ was about the changing artistic representations of nature, ‘Longing for Nature’ is about the shifting relationship between humankind and the natural world. The exhibition focuses on the 19th century, which was a period of immense change in this relationship. The exhibition posits that, in the early 19th century, nature was considered indestructible and immutable. The Industrial Revolution clearly challenged that perception.

I think that’s a hard case to demonstrate with such a small exhibition. Yet, I was struck by this painting: Orchard at Eemnes by Richard Roland Holst. From ‘Essence of Nature’ I’d learned about how art moved from aiming to be photorealistic in the pre-Raphaelite era to being more about character and atmosphere later on. Seeing this in the context of ‘Longing for Nature’ made me realise that the latter is filtering the scene through the human experience.

Just as popular perception shifts from nature being immutable to humans having an impact, we also started to consider nature in art through the human experience, rather than appreciating its essential quality. That surely can’t be coincidental.

‘Longing for Nature’ doesn’t have a publicly advertised end date but is on now at Rijksmuseum Schiphol.

‘Essence of Nature’ continues at The Laing until 14 October.

This exhibition aims to show three different approaches to representing nature through painting.

It opens with pre-Raphaelite paintings, showing their highly detailed, almost photo-realistic approach to capturing the world. We move through rustic naturalistic paintings, which are still fairly realistic in style but concentrate more on character and atmosphere than fine detail. And we close with paintings by British Impressionists, who forwent the realistic to concentrate almost entirely on the wider experience of the places featured.

To give you an idea of my level of ignorance, before I went to this exhibition, I couldn’t have told you anything about the Pre-Raphaelite ideals or their approach to representing the world. I therefore felt educated by this exhibition: it was very well-curated, combining clear text with a plethora of well-chosen paintings which underlined each of the points the text made.

As you’d expect, some paintings struck me and others didn’t. I usually enjoy more abstract works, and was particularly taken with Samuel John Peploe’s On the Brittany Coast and Moses Adams’s Harbour Scene at Night, Runswick.

I thoroughly enjoyed this exhibition.

‘Essence of Nature’ continues at The Laing until 14 October.

When I decided to post every day in 2023, I didn’t expect to be on my third Egypt-themed post by March. Yet, last year’s centenary of the excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb has sparked a renewed fascination in all things ancient Egypt, and so after Hieroglyphs and a coffin, I’ve been to see some art.

This exhibition by the Sainsbury Centre explores artistic responses to ancient Egypt, including all sorts of objects from paintings to pottery, and dresses to neon lights.

The first pair of objects in the exhibition make a clear statement of intent for the exhibition as a whole. Joshua Reynolds’s 1759 oil painting, Kitty fisher as Cleopatra Dissolving the Pearl (to demonstrate her wealth) shows Cleopatra as we hear about her in Western myth: an extravagant, white seductress. Using the same medium in 1992, Chris Offil paints Cleopatra as a black African queen, shorn of the imposed Western myth.

This exhibition taught me how much of what we imagine to be ‘ancient Egyptian’ is anything but: much of it is actually reflective of other cultures. Before this exhibition, I didn’t know how much of ‘Egyptian’ style was actually Roman, the Romans having conquered Egypt in 30BC and Roman objects having been misattributed to ancient Egypt. Wedgwood, who pioneered ‘Egyptian’ designs in pottery, was actually (unknowingly) working from Roman artefacts–and never actually visited Egypt himself.

Before I visited this exhibition, I think I vaguely knew that The Times had an exclusive deal with Howard Carter for the photographs of his excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb. It’s the sort of thing newspapers like to celebrate. But I hadn’t previously understood that this exclusivity applied even within Egypt, depriving Egyptians of coverage of one of the most significant archeological findings in their country’s history… hardly something to be proud of in retrospect.

This exhibition features several watercolour paintings by Howard Carter, recording decorations that he uncovered during excavations, necessary in his early career as photography wasn’t an option. I had no idea that he was a talented artist, and I’d never really considered the necessity for archeologists to be able to paint and draw.

The exhibition closed with David Hockney’s 1961 Egyptian Head Disappearing Into Descending Clouds. This was an inspired choice. I wandered through the doors and tried to ponder exactly how I’d think of ancient Egypt in the future, given that all of my existing pre-conceptions had been blown away.

This was an exhibition that taught me things, corrected my misconceptions, and made me think: more than either of the other Egyptian things I’ve seen this year. I thought it was excellent.

Visions of Ancient Egypt continues at The Laing until 29 April.

A quick note about the photos in this post. The one at the bottom is a picture I’ve ‘borrowed’ from the David Hockney Foundation. The one at the top is a photo I took during the exhibition, before I realised that photography was banned… oops. I’m ummed and ahhed about whether I should include it given that I shouldn’t have taken it, but decided that it was such a great piece of curation that it deserved celebrating. Sorry, if you think I shouldn’t have done that.