Botticelli exhibition, Victoria & Albert Museum

There are three aspects to this exhibition, split into sections. The first section is worth considering. It shows how modern and contemporary artists - in a wide spread of genres -  have bounced off Botticelli's images and produced something of their own - Warhol is an obvious one - but there are many others, for example, Dolce and Gabbana with a suit and dress with a Primavera pattern - recently worn by Lady Gaga. So many different takes on Venus and Primavera. You have only to Google "Venus Botticelli" and you see so many different pastiches of the image of the woman on the Half-Shell  -some are really naff   - others are thoughtful.

The second section is about the rediscovery of Botticelli in the UK; and how the pre-Raphaelites - from Ruskin to Morris to Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, in the post-industrial age, tried to find the same kind of beauty that Botticelli expressed, but of course they couldn't, - they didn't have the inherent piety - but they failed in interesting ways. I like the pre-Raphs because somehow, in spite of their espousal of the early renaissance aesthetic, they always seem English and they always seem Victorian - as Jane said, even while focussing on the daisies, you can smell the steelworks in the background.

The third section included some masterpieces by Botticelli - Mystic Nativity - Portrait Giuliano de Medici - Ideal Portrait of a Lady - Pallas and the Centaur - and two versions of Venus - amazing - plus some late work that expresses a change in the emotional and spiritual temperature in the Savonarola era. There are also pictures by Botticelli's "workshop" and pictures not by Botticelli but supposed to be. So some of them are wonderful and some are really bad! You can tell immediately which ones are by Botticelli.

Mystic Nativity

This picture of Giuliano di Medici was painted after he had been assassinated.

I think these are probably the loveliest pictures in London at the moment and I do recommend everyone to go and see this - take about 2 hours over it. I went with Jane and had a great time.

There are two of these Venuses to compare but I prefer the religious pictures myself.

More about the Lechlade trip

Helena, who rowed at stroke in the crew that I coxed, wrote a blog about the Lechlade trip, and it is very good. She is a talented writer who absolutely loves doing this sort of thing (physical challenge, small boats) which comes across quite clearly, and I just sat and steered, somewhat against my will as I would have liked to have done some skiffing too! She put everything into it but she has rowed across the Atlantic with her husband and I suppose rowing down the Thames is a breeze compared to that. She is a small but fit woman in terrific shape. I come into this blog only as a bit of a know-all who has all the low-down on William Morris. I just couldn't do justice to William Morris!

Helena's blog how-thames-grows-up-from.html?spref=fb

Notice also that the Thames was a "total mess". The effects of the flood need serious effort to remedy, and this will take some time, for example, collecting rubbish from weirs. We were out on the river yesterday and floating islands of organic matter were still coming down, at quite a pace. Also, in the case of boats that have floated away onto land and become marooned, or have sunk at their moorings, the owners need to be interested enough in them to retrieve them, and in many cases they are not.

Up UP UP - arty day in London

Yesterday I took my bad cold to London as my friend Judith and I thought we should see the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition before it closed. It was indeed a very comprehensive and impressive exhibition of all the great / or at least most familiar paintings, but in a way it was all lost on me because I have seen them all before. I rather wished I could see them with fresh eyes, but no, can't be done.

Ferdinand being lured by Ariel, from the Tempest

A Roman Soldier is reluctant to part from a Celtic Briton, (and she's clearly not in the best of moods about it either)

 The most talented of the group was Millais, and his early pictures stand out for their brilliance, but I think he also lapsed into aestheticism most totally, and fundamentally aestheticism was a commercial movement - a fashion. He did very well financially, you can imagine. In his old age he took to painting landscapes and these are very interesting pictures because they seem to be just for his own pleasure - not to anyone else's taste or fashion.

 The brother I like least, especially in later pictures, is Dante Gabriel Rossetti, because he is the most repetitive. I don't think he was a great help to his mistresses and I think badly of his affair with Morris's wife.

My favourite is William Morris and that is because his commitment to socialism was lifelong and I think he had that fundamental humility - he was not too grand to design wallpaper. He was grateful for simple things like his bed, after a hard day's work. Not just that, I like that his firm created jobs and tried new methods and revived old skills - it is typical of him that he wanted to use traditional organic dyes instead of the new chemical ones in his wallpaper - he was an artist, but he was also in industry. He was faithful to his wife, as far as we can tell, even though she was not faithful to him, (I think he felt he had been unfair to marry someone who did not feel about him the passion he had felt for her) he worked incredibly hard and his friends loved him. He was a romantic who lived in a machine age, which is a kind of curse.

Anyway after the exhibition we visited the shop and I eschewed all the Pre-Raph merchandise and bought a poster of a Lowry which was in the sale! What a contrast. Because Lowry had no truck with all that long skirts and pretty flowers stuff, did he, let alone the knights and fair maidens? He just painted the kind of narrow streets and anonymous crowds he saw around him, without painting like a realist. He was not scared of the masses and their culture like so many modernists, he liked crowds if anything, and tried to show the way a crowd moves in ones and twos and groups. I believe there is going to be a big Lowry show soon, and I might go, but I went to the Lowry Art Gallery in Manchester last year and it seems a bit soon.

Judith and I started by going to Selfridges department store in the morning, which was too soon after Christmas really - the windows were dull and minimalist in the extreme. We could not believe how many top of the range watches were on display - case after case, and shop assistants with nothing to do. But we enjoyed the food hall very much - such a lovely place to do food shopping! if only I was rich! and they have lovely healthy salads and breads so that one would eat very healthily. There were also many luxury foods. We went upstairs for coffee and were not very impressed with the ambience or decor of the french style restaurant - and then we went to the shoe department. I think it was a really splendid array of the most wonderful shoes in the world - they cost hundreds of pounds, but they draw ooohs and aaahs. At the moment there is a sale on. It was great to see that Gordon Selfridge's vision of supplying lovely things that people will desire was still being fulfilled.

We had a fab lunch in Duke Street - don't remember the name of it but there was a fun and attractive range of decorative items on display in the French style dressers, and nice simple food - I had some soup like a chicken minestrone, with toast, and Judith had a spinach and feta omelette - both delicious.