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Art

Something to write home about

As it happens I was out on the golf course yesterday partaking in a traditional practice round in the company of a Canadian relative by marriage in advance of an annual family tournament – an outing in days of yore used to be a welcome warm-up for the main event. Sadly, I fear that at my stage of [...]

October 4, 2019 // 0 Comments

$50m art swindle/BBC 2

This documentary is the story of art dealer Michel Cohen who went from rags to riches and back to rags again. Born in impoverished circumstance in France after the war he came to the USA with a friend in the 80s. He bought a stack of lithographs and sold them. He realised that he had a talent to [...]

September 25, 2019 // 0 Comments

Ivon Hitchens /Pallant Gallery

I like to say “I’ve a Hitchens” – the alliteration being sufficiently close to Ivon Hitchens that many think I possess one of his, rather than one of his son John. Whether by accident or design, John’s rectangular abstract landscapes of the Downs resemble his Dad’s work in [...]

September 3, 2019 // 0 Comments

The Impartiality of Love/Hannah Rothschild

This is a novel of many parts, most of which do not work. Above all it reveals the amoral ruthlessness of the art world after a woman called Annie, a cook who is unlucky in love, discovers a lost Antoine Watteau called Improbability of Love in a junk shop. This develops into a chick lit romance, an [...]

August 6, 2019 // 0 Comments

Fake or Fortune

It’s good to see Fake or Fortune back on our screens – not on Sundays at 8.00pm but Thursday evening at 9.00 pm. Its formula of the investigation into whether a painting is genuine or not clearly attracts the viewing public. It’s a bit contrived with the informal chats between presenter [...]

August 3, 2019 // 0 Comments

Take a look at this one

As Rusters  and indeed “any fule no” [(c) Nigel Molesworth circa 1955], on this organ we do lists. I need say no more. Here’s another one worth considering, courtesy of a feature spotted overnight on the website of – THE [...]

July 7, 2019 // 0 Comments

Adventurers of modern art

I chanced upon this Sky Arts programme about Paris and its contribution to art and writing from 1900-50. This period produced artists that shaped modern art: Picasso, Miro, Chagall, Braque, Andre Breton (the father of surrealism) and the better known artist he loathed Salvador Dali, Cocteau, Chaim [...]

June 27, 2019 // 0 Comments

A VISIT TO THE NATIONAL GALLERY

Yetserday I attended a tour of the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery curated by our art teacher at the local adult learning institute. She kindly invited me though I did not enrol on her course of Women in art. I regarded this too narrow. Last term, on British Art in the Twentieth [...]

May 29, 2019 // 0 Comments

Rembrandt at the Rijksmuseum/Van Gogh Museum

Yesterday was the raison d’etre of our trip – a visit to the Rijksmuseum for “all the Rembrandts”, a retrospective to celebrate the 350th year of the Netherlands’ most famous artist. Although it was heralded as the biggest collection ever of Rembrandts, his Night Watch was in [...]

May 22, 2019 // 0 Comments

Jason Bowyer

I was shocked to learn, in reading the brochure of the forthcoming New English Exhibition, a group of which he was once President and founded its Drawing School, of the death of Jason Bowyer. I knew Jason for most of his life and his oil painting of Walberswick is hanging on my wall as I write [...]

May 14, 2019 // 0 Comments

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