My art week

Pending the return of my art courses next week, my art week concentrated more on two arts programmes on BBC4.

The first was called Ego and was presented by Observer art critic Laura Cumming.  She featured the art of self/portraiture.

She started with a 1500 self portrait by and of Albrecht Dürer in the Alte Pinotech museum in Munich.

He has flowing gold braided locks and stares intently at the viewer.

Her journey after that that took us to the most famous and prolific painter of this genre –  Rembrandt – who did some 600 self-portraits  over his life.

We moved onto Jaques Louis David and Gustave  Courbet, to Van Gogh and finally Lucian Freud.

I had come across Laura Cumming more as a writer.

She wrote one book ( on Chapel Sands) about the abduction of her mother on a Lincolnshire beach and another about the travails of a Reading stationer in Victorian times who thought he had acquired a Velazquez.

I found this programme over-long at one and a half hours and some what indulgent for showing the sketch book of her father, an Edinburgh artist, which had just one self-portrait in it.

BBC4 also had a behind-the-scenes programme Inside America’s Treasure House – The Met on the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

The following day appeared a photo of a politician Democrat Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez attending its US$35000 per ticket  gala dinner with the words “Tax the Rich” written boldly on her white dress.

This indicated to me the hypocrisy of the American art world – based on exhibitions of wealth – presumably with tax breaks to fund it – and those attending who would like to see greater taxation.