My art week
Three matters to report this week.
The first was the podcast of Waldemar Janusczak and Bendor Grosvenor’s World of Art.
I have already mentioned that Waldemar Janusczak’s style of presentation grates and there is a constant leitmotiv of class friction between the down to earth Janusczak and the posh Grosvenor emanating from the former’s banter against the latter.
However there is no doubting both are knowledgeable on art and in the most recent and last one in the series Janusczak noted something I had never seen in Edouard Manet’s Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe.
The podcast was highlighting birds in art and Janusczak noted a small bullfinch in the Manet painting.
The 3 characters in the foreground – two well-dressed men and one naked woman – and a fourth woman washing herself behind them – has always occupied me but there is a bullfinch high in the centre of the picture.
Birds are often symbolic but quite what this bird symbolises neither of the two could verify.
Last Sunday I joined Daffers in Eastbourne to view the John Nash exhibition in the Towner Gallery.
Neither John nor his brother Paul Nash’s works float my boat – I find both gloomy.
I had to admire John Nash’s World War One pictures but his landscapes had a pallid palette and lacked the glorious richness and colour of a Corot, Poussin or Claude.
Maybe it was the wet, gusty day but both of us did not have our moods enhanced by the exhibition.
Finally Fake or Fortune returned to our screens last Monday.
It’s a contrived programme where conversation between presenters Fiona Bruce and Philip Mould – and the picture owner Bob – are filmed as natural when we all know they are not.
In this programme the picture owner Bob acquired a picture for £1 in bric-à-brac shop in Lyminghton Hampshire.
He thought it might be the work of the Italian modernist Georgio di Chirico.
Personally I always thought it was a fake.
It had originally been rejected by the Authentication Committee, there were numerous fakes, it was not signed, there was no provenance.
They did not overcome these difficulties but the journey took us through the life of Di Chirico, a nuclear testing of the wood frame to verify its age, various interviews with Di Chirico experts and all in all it made for absorbing television.
