My art week
Monday’s edition of the Collector series which I so enjoy on Sky Arts featured Frank Cohen, an engaging man who started as a market trader and ended up with 16 drapery shops which he sold out profitably.
He then built up a collection of modern British art.
He was different from the other collectors as he housed these in a warehouse and dealt in them but he had the acquisitive slightly grandiose air of other collectors.
The three artists he collected of which he was most proud were L.S. Lowry, Patrick Heron and Frank Auerbach.
I once joked to Ken Howard that Auerbach should have been around in Roman times when paintings were valued by their weight as his impasto style resulted in a heavy work.
Poor Ken once ricked his back moving an Auerbach.
He chiefly painted London reconstructed after the War where he lost most of his family in the camps.
He rarely left Camden Town, perhaps for a meal at the Wolseley with his chum Lucian Freud.
The presenter Emmeline Hallmark swiftly got it in that she had lunched with Freud there.
In our Tuesday art class we studied the 1920 and 30s.
Our teacher explained that the course is titled Art And Visual Culture so we took in the architecture of le Corbusier and the Bauhaus movement.
I admired their clean pure lines with some discomfort as those motives of cleanliness and hygiene espoused by Corbusier were not that far removed from the absurd racial theories of the Nazi Party founded in 1920.
Sadly many a great artist – and in some cases a nationalistic one – was to be classified by the Nazis as degenerate.
In the Thursday class we studied English art of the eighteenth century.
One of the strengths of our teacher is that she puts art in its political, philosophical and in this case literary context.
The 18th century was not just the period of the Romantic poets but the Gothic novel.
The polymath William Blake could paint and write with equal genius.
Yet I find his art and that of Samuel Palmer weird and scary.
Finally I must mention an excellent rerun of Rumpole of the Bailey on the Talking Pictures channel.
This featured this week an artist charged with forging a Septimus Crabb (Augustus John?).
His defence was that he did paint this picture but to show he was his equal.
Also he wanted to humiliate what he called the conno-sewers.
It was a typical John Mortimer iconoclastic tilt at the establishment and made for a most entertaining hour.
Why do we no longer see such compelling and humourous drama?
