The artistry will be glittering at the second edition of the Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival, which runs in London from 12th March to 8th April at the Royal Ballet and Opera, Sadler’s Wells, South Bank Centre and Tate Modern.
Following on from the hugely successful inaugural event in 2022, this iteration of the festival created in partnership with the world-famous French luxury jewellery company features 15 dazzling shows from a whole gamut of different cultures.
Taking place at iconic venues in our capital city, Dance Reflections showcases artists who, in the words of Catherine Renier, President & CEO of Van Cleef & Arpels, have specialised in, “Collaborations with prestigious partners, contributions to major choreographic events, support for emerging and touring artists… These various commitments, in keeping with the values of creation, transmission and education dear to the Maison, all meet the same objective of celebrating contemporary choreographic art.”
Including repertory works, dance workshops, artist forums and awareness-raising initiatives, all emphasising the connections between dance heritage and modern choreography, the festival highlights imaginative ways in which dancers have evolved exciting new…
A tribute to the work of one of the fundamental figures of French Modernist painting
After three years in the making, the Amar Gallery is bringing to London Hélène de Beauvoir: The Woman Destroyed, a unique exhibition featuring paintings and works on paper from the 1950s to 1980s by this French artist, crucial to the feminist movement. Often overshadowed in the past by her older sister, Simone – the groundbreaking […]
Despite being separated in time by nearly 200 years, Sigmar Polke felt a deep admiration for Francisco de Goya. The show at Museo del Prado, Sigmar Polke. Affinities Revealed, explores how the Spanish master influenced the work of the German painter, after he saw for the first time Goya’s Time and the Old Women in […]
William Blake must be seen as one of the greatest Britons of all time. Blake’s talent as an English poet, painter, and printmaker, seems endless, but sadly, was unrecognised during his lifetime. Fortunately Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of poetry and the visual arts of the Romantic Age.
Although Blake was considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, he is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness, creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. Ahead of his time, his paintings and poetry have been classified as part of both the Pre-Romantic and the Romantic movement.
William Blake – Pity (1795).
Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake’s work makes him difficult to categorise. The 19th century scholar William Michael Rossetti characterised him as a “glorious luminary,” and “a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily summarised by his successors.”
Of what he called his prophetic works, 20th-century critic Northrop Frye said they formed “what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language.” His visual artistry led 21st century critic Jonathan Jones to proclaim him “far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced”. In 2002, Blake was placed at number 38 in the BBC’s poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. While he lived in London his entire life -except for three years spent in Felpham-, it was during his time in Felpham that he started working on his epic poems, Milton and Jerusalem, producing a diverse and symbolically rich overture which embraced the imagination as “the body of God” or “human existence itself”. At this time, Blake was awaiting his trial for Treason, so it is ironic how this radical poem has become a national anthem.
The Tate Britain has brought to us an experience that will enable all of us to see Blake as he wanted to be seen. With over 300 original works, which include watercolours, paintings and prints, this is one of the largest exhibitions of William Blake’s work for 20 years.
Have you ever wondered who wrote the words to In a Bleak Midwinter, one of our most famous and definitely my favourite carol? It was actually Christina Rossetti, sister to Gabriel Dante Rossetti.
Woman were central figures in the Pre-Raphaelite movement, not just as lovers, models and muses, but as artists themselves. 160 years after the first pictures were exhibited by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1849, The National Portrait Gallery are showing this autumn the works of twelve incredible woman who, in their own way, were at the heart of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of young artists who aimed at overturning the conventions of Victorian Art. As the self-styled ‘Young Painters of England,’ they challenged the previous generation with startling hues and compositions inspired by early renaissance painting. The names of John Millais, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris are now well-known, and have become synonymous with the Romantic notion of the male genius.
The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood – The First Meeting of Petrarch and Laura by Marie Spartali Stillman.
The Pre-Raphaelite Sisters exhibition shows the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in a new light, revealing how they were both supportive of and dependent on the women in their lives and art. This exhibition brings together unseen works from public and private collections across the world, as well as photographs, manuscripts and personal items all of which help reveal the women behind the pictures and their creative roles in Pre-Raphaelite’s successive phases between 1850 and 1900.
I mentioned Christina Rossetti in the opening of this article, who is probably the best known female artist of this time but I must not forget to mention Elizabeth Siddal, who was also an astounding character. She was discovered in a millinery shop and went on to model for William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. It is Elizabeth who will forever be Ophelia in my imagination. Eventually she would only pose for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, became his pupil and lover, and eventually, his wife. In fact, Rosetti never fully recovered from Elizabeth’s death.
The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood – Fanny Eaton by Joanna Wells.
In the exhibition will be works by Joanna Wells, a Pre-Raphaelite artist in her own right, whose work was practically absent from the history books until very recently, alongside works by Maria Stillman and Evelyn de Morgan, their work just as important in shaping the Pre-Raphaelite movement as the Brotherhood’s.
Working as a lowly press officer at Sotheby’s Bond Street salerooms during the early 1990s brought me into contact with any number of interesting people, some more ‘interesting’ than others – but perhaps, the most truly interesting of all was the legendary art critic Brian Sewell.
Anyone remotely connected with the global art scene of the time knew him for the often acerbic, usually outspoken, unfailingly controversial but always eminent columns he wrote for the London Evening Standard after taking over the gig in 1984.
Famed for the almost comically exaggerated ‘received pronunciation’ with which he spoke, Sewell was perceived as an arrogant snob by many – but I saw only a man of uncommon intelligence and knowledge who combined a wicked sense of humour with a resolute belief in speaking his mind.
As a result, everyone in the art world knew that there was no point whatsoever in inviting him to a ‘view’ at which other people would be in attendance. For him, only a ‘private view’ was acceptable – i.e. ‘private’ in the sense that no one else would be there.
And it was just such an occasion that first brought me into contact with him. Stepping through a door behind the ‘works of art counter’ (as Sotheby’s St George Street reception desk was called) my eyes alighted on a shortish, strangely powerful-looking man with white hair and kindly, mischievous eyes. He was wearing a loosely-tied cravat and light, summer clothes.
“I’ve come to see some Old Master Drawings. Is it you?” he asked without introduction.
“No, I’m from the press office,” I responded.
“That’s a shame…” replied my unashamedly flirtatious interlocutor, who later said of being gay “I never came out – but I have slowly emerged.”
Now is probably the time to mention that I am not gay, never have been and probably never will be. But that didn’t prevent Sewell and I striking up a sort of friendship based around a mutual interest which, some might be surprised to learn, was old motor cars. He adored them and probably knew as much about the history of the major marques as he knew about the history of art (which was rather a great deal).
At the time, Sotheby’s had an in-house department specialising in classic motors, and Sewell would often telephone me to ask about one lot or another that he had spotted in the latest catalogue and was either contemplating buying or writing about for the occasional – and of course unconventional – motoring page he wrote for the Standard’s large format ‘ES’ magazine.
I can almost hear him now, correcting me in his OTT ‘RP’ for stating that the engine of a pre-war Riley Lynx that he rather fancied had twin camshafts.
“I think you mean twin high camshafts – that’s a rather different matter,” he said. “Percy Riley developed the system in 1926. Twin, gear-driven camshafts mounted high in the block, operating the valves via short pushrods. It gave the advantage of a twin cam engine without the same complexity.”
People who thought he was simply an out-spoken old queen who liked to upset the art world establishment might have found such in-depth mechanical knowledge surprising. But Sewell was always full of surprises.
His father – whom he discovered only in 1986 to have been the composer Peter Warlock – died from coal gas poisoning in a flat in Chelsea’s Tite Street seven months before Sewell arrived on Earth, the product of his mother being one of the Bohemian Warlock’s intermittent girlfriends.
The family name was taken from that of Robert Sewell whom Sewell’s mother, Mary, married when her son was five.
Before he came into their lives, mother and son lived happily in a tiny cottage at Whitstable on the Kentish coast without ‘two pennies to rub together’. All the same, she allowed the three-year-old boy to have a dog, a mongrel called Prince, which became Sewell’s constant companion until August 31, 1939 – when, with war looming, his step father took Prince to the beach, shot him dead and let the tide take the corpse.
Brian Sewell in the living room of his house in Wimbledon with his dogs Lottie, Jack and Winck, 2008.
The fact that Sewell later said that it had been ‘exactly the right thing to do’ – given that the family was moving to London in a bid to avoid potential German attacks on the vulnerable Kentish coast – says a lot about the deep-thinking intelligence of the man who went on to love dogs more than humans and took in numerous canine waifs and strays throughout his life, always allowing them to sleep on his bed.
The move to London led the young Sewell to become a pupil at Haberdashers’ Aske’s school in Hampstead where, at the age of 11, he discovered a ‘rampant sexual nature’ that he largely managed to control while doing national service in the Royal Army Service Corps during the early 50s prior to finding his niche as an outstanding student at London’s Courtauld Institute – where he became a close friend of director Anthony Blunt, whom he subsequently sheltered from the press after he was outed in 1979 as the ‘fourth man’ in the Cambridge spy ring.
Blunt’s influence helped Sewell to a top job in the Old Masters department at Christie’s, where he established a reputation for having a good ‘eye’ and knowledge beyond his years, attributes that enabled him to quit the house in 1966 and set-up as a freelance art adviser who travelled around Europe researching, finding and buying.
But it was only as a result of the Blunt scandal that Sewell’s name became widely known to the British public, causing Tatler editor Tina Brown to offer him the job of art critic in 1980 – a role he embarked upon with gusto, writing about the work of his friend Salvador Dalí who, Sewell claimed, once asked him to lie in the foetal position in the armpit of a statue of Christ while masturbating.
It was only after being taken on by the Standard, however, that Sewell’s true genius came to the world’s attention. Famous for despising most contemporary art and the artists who created it, he would also use his often poisonous pen to dismiss artists who were revered by dealers, auction houses and the moneyed collectors they served.
Lucien Freud, for example, was belittled by Sewell for “…allowing his paintbrush to crawl into a woman’s crotch with the insistence of a caterpillar into a cabbage heart.”
Regardless of how well or badly they were received, his Evening Standard art pages proved so popular that he was invited to write on other topics, producing considered and insightful pieces on everything from the world’s abuse of water to the immorality of the Iraq war.
Once firmly established as a British institution, Sewell was inevitably invited to appear on television shows such as the BBC’s Have I Got News For You and was even given his own series, The Naked Pilgrim, about the journey to Santiago de Compostela, and the 10-episode Grand Tour in which he drove his Mercedes-Benz 560 coupe (mostly barefoot) between the celebrated artistic centres of Europe. All the while, Sewell suffered serious heart problems (I once telephoned him to discover that he was lying in the hallway of his Kensington home having suffered a coronary, surrounded by worried dogs and awaiting the arrival of an ambulance), but his remarkable energy – enhanced by a super-human appetite for coffee – enabled him to complete two volumes of autobiography in 2011 and 2012, respectively entitled Outsider and Outsider II.
Sleeping with Dogs followed in 2013 and charted his lifelong attachment to man’s best friend, with his final book, The White Umbrella, appearing shortly before his death in September 2015 at the age of 84.
I’ll always regret not having said goodbye -but I’ll always remember the finer details of a Riley engine’s twin high camshafts…
Sleeping With Dogs Published by Quartet Books. ISBN9780704373259 £12.50.
Coco Chanel – The Illustrated world of a Fashion Icon – by Megan Hess
“in order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different” Coco Chanel This delightful book, beautifully illustrated by Hess herself is an enchanting narration of Coco Chanel’s life. Each page is lovingly put together with stunning illustrations and a small paragraph of text about Coco and how she became on of the most iconic fashions designers in the world. From the moment I opened the book, I could not put it down, it was almost if you were engulfed by the pages and become part of the story.
Born Gabrielle in 1883 in Saumur, the illegitimate daughter of a laundrywoman and a merchant, Coco managed to rise to the dizzy heights of top society, counting among her friends personalities such as Picasso, Dali and Winston Churchill.
Coco was famous for reinventing herself and leaving out things she did not want to remember. As you turn the pages of the book, you will discover that there are various versions on how she came to be called Coco, and you will be able to decide for yourself which one you believe is the real one.
This book provides great insight into the life of one of the most revered women of the 20th Century, a woman who in many ways, influenced the lives of many generations of women, by pioneering a revolution in fashion.
One of the others thing I liked about Megan Hess’s book is that, this is the kind of story you can share and enjoy with your daughter, women of all ages and quite possibly men too. This is a book I would happily keep forever on my bedside table to read again and dip in out of for inspiration.
Published by Hardie Grant Books (£12.99) Available at Waterstones and through Amazon.
Let me start by telling you this production is unlike any Shakespeare I have ever seen. It’s almost as if the Bard went to Glastonbury and spent a wee bit too long in a rave tent.
It’s not surprising Director Sean Holmes decided to take a wholly unique approach, when this particular classic is wheeled out time and time again – there are three major productions of it across the capital this summer alone.
This entire show is pitched somewhere between a festival and a drag queen’s birthday. There are piñatas, streamers, glitter, pink hair and loads of deely boppers. Members of the Hackney Colliery Band play throughout the performance, really adding an extra layer to the enjoyment. The stand out stars of the show are the costumes: Theseus in a pink satin military suit, Bottom dressed as a piñata, the Athenians in cosplay ruffles and Titania with glorious pink hair and kick-ass silver boots.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream- Victoria Elliott as Titania.
The acting is clever, passionate and energetic. Sometimes a little too much, so it can be hard to follow the plot if you didn’t already know the story well. There are many clever twists to the classic, Bottom was a woman (the hilarious Jocelyn Jee Esien), and she gave the character a glorious turn. Nearly every member of the cast plays Puck at sometime or other – to my mind a clever way to show that magic and mischief are in us all. The play within a play is just brilliant, presented like a budget game show or a unique pop up one finds at a festival late at night.
In conclusion, this is the perfect play to take a teenager to. It demonstrates Shakespeare’s work is beautiful, poetic and oh so very funny, not a bastion of boredom from GSCE English. Tell them from me its Pucking good!
“Women having freedom to play sport leads directly to women having political freedom.”
Winner of the BAFTA Special Award and RTS Presenter of the Year Award for her expert coverage of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Clare Balding is one of Britain’s most recognizable faces in media. Leading broadcaster, best-selling author and an ardent campaigner for better coverage of women’s sport, Clare is loved across the length and breadth of the country and considered by most a national treasure.
In this interview, Clare shares with us her passion for women’s sport, equality and diversity, and suggests bold and original ways to overcome the prejudices and obstacles still affecting those in the younger generations who may consider a career in sport.
I-M: Horses have been an integral part of your life since childhood. Where does your love for other sports stem from?
C.B: My father was very competitive and he was a good all-round sportsman: he was a good rugby player, a good cricketer, not a bad tennis player, a good squash player… and he rode as an amateur jockey. He decided later in life to take on the Cresta Run in St. Moritz and threw himself down
it about six times. He was a terrible skier, genuinely dangerous on the slopes to anyone else around him. I wouldn’t say he’s brave, because I’m not sure he’s ever felt fear in his life and I think you need to feel fear and overcome it in order to be genuinely brave. I think he’s just a bit unhinged. But watching his love of adrenaline meant that if I wanted to be part of it, I had to follow him. I realized that actually it was much more fun if I was interested in the sport, learnt a bit… field- ing positions in cricket, the significance of a particular football match, understanding the rules of rugby…
To me, all sport is a living drama; it’s all happening in front of your eyes, unscripted within a certain setup, within a boundary. There are different acts or scenes, and the characters that play in them. The story will unfold in front of your eyes and you don’t know what it’s going to be. I love being the person who interprets the story. So as a presenter, broadcaster, author, or journalist, my job is to make you interested in something that you weren’t sure you understood or cared about. That’s great fun. It is part marketing, because you’re selling something and trying to grab people’s brains and more importantly, their hearts, and it is part storytelling, or certainly story interpretation.
Clare as a kid on Mill Reef, who won the Derby in 1971.
I-M: In the past you’ve mentioned finding it hard to fit in as a kid. In our current society, dominated by the false projections from social media, should these platforms be subjected to tighter controls?
C.B: I think that certainly, anyone who threatens violence or is abusive, in terms of making reference to race, gender, sexuality, body shape… they should be stopped. This is not so difficult to work out. You have to direct change. It’s not like someone in a mask throwing something, where you can’t identify them. In these cases, the social media platforms know who they are. The chain is quite straightforward.
I believe these companies have a much, much bigger responsibility to police their users. They can do it. It’s not that complicated. The problem is that these social media companies see themselves as a portal to humankind, not responsible at all for humankind’s behaviour. Now, while it is true that they’re not responsible, they could be. I’ve done a lot of work with Google over the years; they have very high values. They want to solve some of the world’s biggest problems: find a cure for cancer, give Africa free internet access, so that all kids have access to education…
If these companies want to bring out the best in humankind, they need to help police the worst in it. That’s the balance, trying to get that right. I’m very careful and disciplined with social media. Absolutely I use it: to get my news, to gauge opinion, to have a laugh… but I am not interested at all in whether people like what I’m wearing or not; and if I’ve made a mistake, I’d be the first one to hold my hands up and say, “I’m sorry, I was wrong,” but people are pretty keen and quick to point out when you’ve made a mistake. There are so many trivial things that people get hyped up about. We need to remember that, although this kind of fire burns bright and hard, it burns out quite quickly.
Clare with her dog Archie.
I-M: You have spoken about ‘benign negligence’ on the side of your parents when you were a kid, of feeling a bit ignored. May this be a reason why nowadays kids seek refuge and sense of belonging in social media?
C.B: I think that, as human beings, we are terribly inclined to overestimate and exag- gerate our own possessions, position and profile. We dress it up in a way that there is a false selling of day-to-day life. People think that their friends have everything, that they are very happy, when actually, social media often hides a much deeper, darker side, where people are frightened to ask for help, to admit they are vulnerable, to sound unhappy.
Another problem in my opinion is that we are living in the world of the selfie, which is not just a physical act, it’s a complete distortion of reality. It’s almost as if nothing exists unless it is captured in a selfie. Selfies stop me looking at you in the eye, concentrating and most importantly, they stop me looking out at the world because I am constantly looking at myself against the foreground of the world. For example, watching the golf recently, Brooks Koepka was leading the US PGA and he had a shot into the crowd, so he had to play it from there.
Well, every single person had their phone up. When you watch a fantastic singer, at the start of the performance, when they first walk on stage, you can’t see them at all because all the cameras are up. You don’t hear applause because people can’t clap and hold their phones at the same time. That is very sad and I hope we’ll come out of this phase soon, go back to using our eyes to look at things.
I think kids are way more aware of trying to live in the present that we give them credit for. Maybe they understand more about their own psychology than we ever did. And I think they care about things. For example, I had a long conversation with my nephews and my niece about the fact that Alice and I have stopped eating red meat at home, as a way to dramatically reduce our red meat intake. It is not what red meat does to our bodies, but what it does to the planet. They understood. I think kids now are becoming more aware of changes that we all can make, and that we want to make, as a responsibility to the future. When they reach certain age, they understand the consequences of their actions.
To read more please order the latest issue of I-M Intelligent Magazine here.
Bauhaus (house of building) was founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, by architect Walter Gropius.
In conceptual terms, Bauhaus emerged out of late-19th-century desires to reunite fine and applied art, to push back against the mechanization of creativity, and to reform education. Gropius envisioned the Bauhaus as encompassing the full totality of artistic media, including fine art, industrial design, graphic design, typography, interior design, and architecture.
Influenced by 19th and early 20th century artistic directions like The Arts and Craft Movement, Art Nouveau and its international incarnations Jugendstil and Vienna Secession, Bauhaus itself possibly became the most influential modernist art school of the 20th century. Its approach to teaching and the relationship it established between art, society, and technology had a major impact both in Europe and in the United States long after its closure under Nazi pressure in 1933. The origins of all of these movements lie in the late 19th century, in anxieties about the soullessness of modern manufacturing, and fears about art’s loss of social relevance. They all sought to level the distinction between the fine and applied arts, and to reunite creativity and manufacturing; their legacy was reflected in the romantic medievalism of the Bauhaus ethos during its early years, when it fashioned itself as a kind of craftsmen’s guild. But by the mid-1920s this vision had given way to a stress on uniting art and industrial design, and it was this which underpinned the Bauhaus’s most original and important achievements.
Professor Gerry McGovern, Chief Design Officer Land Rover, has had a life-long love affair with Modernism. In his opinion, “There is a lot of over intellectualisation about the Bauhaus movement. Bauhaus was certainly very influential, but its main purpose was to bring together fine arts and crafts, such as furniture making, lifestyle and household products. Post Industrial Revolution, everything was mass-produced, and a lot of it wasn’t very good, there was no design literacy. At the other end of the spectrum, you had the world of fine arts, painting and sculpture, which looked down on the ‘lesser’ arts and crafts. Bauhaus was about the democratization of creative products. Original pieces became very expensive but the designs have been copied by big manufacturers worldwide, making them available to most people.” The school was also renowned for its extraordinary faculty, who subsequently led the development of modern art – and modern thought – throughout Europe and the United States. A key aim of the Bauhaus pedagogical approach, one which applied across all courses, was to eliminate competitive tendencies, to foster not only individual creativity but also a sense of community and shared purpose. “A lot of what was done in the Bauhaus school was quite experimental for its time,” comments Prof McGovern,
“for instance, one of my favourite Bauhaus artists, Josef Albers, was a stained glass artist and was hired by Gropius to teach handicrafts, together with other artists such as Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Albers is considered the founding father of modern printmaking. Up until that point, people in their houses wouldn’t have had any modern art on their walls, but thanks to Albers and the Bauhaus school, lithographs and silk- screen printing techniques were developed and made art available to all.”
The stress on experiment and problem-solving which characterized the Bauhaus’s approach to teaching has proved to be enormously influential on contemporary art education. It has led to the rethinking of the ‘fine arts’ as the ‘visual arts’, and to a reconceptualization of the artistic process as more akin to a research science than to a humanities subject such as literature or history. It is no surprise that many of the Bauhaus’s most influential and lasting achievements were in fields other than painting and sculpture. The furniture and utensil designs of Marcel Breuer, Marianne Brandt, and others, paved the way for the stylish minimalism of the 1950s-60s, while architects such as Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe were acknowledged as the forerunners of the similarly slick International Style that is so important in architecture to this day.
Bauahus Maison Dom – Ino by Le Courbusier, 1941 – Plan FLC19209a @flcdacs2019.
From a young age, Prof McGovern was attracted to Bauhaus product design, particularly to Breuer’s furniture, “The first piece of furniture I ever bought, before I went to college, was a Wassily chair, which together with the Cesca chair, both by Breuer, are two of the most iconic furniture designs of the 20th century. I love the severe visual language of these designs, the Wassily leather strapping against a tubular steel frame, which Breuer apparently thought of after looking around old aircraft scrapyards.” The influence of Bauhaus in other 20th century design movements like Modernism was quite dramatic. “If you look at the evolution of modernist design,” analyses Prof McGovern, “its earliest period, the 20s, was the time defined by Bauhaus design and its rudimentary, quite elemental principles. If you look now at pieces of Bauhaus furniture, they seem very primitive, very industrial, but Bauhaus influenced all the big manufacturers in product design, such as Herman Miller or Ames.”
Curiously though, despite its influence on industrial design in general, there is no evidence of it having an impact in the car industry per se. As Prof McGovern stated, “At the end of the day, car manufacturing was primordially an industrial affair, with design being second to function. As Henry Ford famously said, ‘You can have it in any colour as long as it is black.’ It wasn’t until after WWII that car manufacturers recognized the importance of design as a market differentiator. “It was the Americans who led the way, developing cars of incredible proportions and designs, reaching the zenith in the mid to late 50s, during what was called ‘The style wars’ between GM, Ford and Chrysler. This is for me, the most influential period in car design. In the 50s, European cars simply looked like miniature American cars. Eventually, the Europeans got good at building cars and at infusing them with personality; good examples of which are some of the early BMWs and Alfa Romeos. Later came the Japanese, who learnt much quicker how to make cars, and finally, the Koreans and the Chinese.
“In our case (Land Rover), we try to harness engineering and design together in harmony. It could be said that if you actually told young designers too much about the engineering, and they became more cognizant of it, that may make them less creative, whereas if they don’t know anything about the way you are going to manufacture something, their creativity can run free. However, you’ll get a lot of stuff that you can’t make. So you have to reconcile both.”
One could say that furniture design and architecture are the disciplines where Bauhaus was best represented. The famous Maison Dom-Ino by Le Corbusier was a revolution in residential architecture. It was a prototype as the physical platform for the mass production of housing. The name is a pun that combines an allusion to domus (Latin for house) and the pieces of dominoes, because the floor plan resembled the game and because the units could be aligned in a series like dominoes, to make row houses of different patterns. As Prof McGovern explains, “The work of Le Corbusier was very influential and very austere. He believed that a house was a machine for living. A personal favourite is his Villa Savoye, the purity of its design, the black and white… I find it very compelling.” In 1925, the Bauhaus moved to the German industrial town of Dessau, initiating its most fruitful period of activity. Gropius designed a new building for the school which has since come to be seen not only as the Bauhaus’s spiritual talisman, but also as a landmark of modern, functionalist architecture. It was also here that the school finally created a department of architecture, something that had been lacking in its previous incarnation.
In 1928, a worn down Gropius stepped down, turning over the helm to the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer. Meyer, who headed up the architecture department, was an active communist, and incorporated his political ideas into student organizations and teaching programs. The school continued to grow in strength, but criticism of Meyer’s Marxism grew, and he was dismissed as director in 1930. After local elections brought the Nazis to power in Dessau in 1932, the school was again closed and relocated, this time to Berlin, where it would see out the final year of its existence. In Berlin, the Bauhaus briefly survived under the direction of the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a famous advocate of functionalist architecture latterly associated, like Gropius, with the so-called International Style. Mies van der Rohe struggled with far poorer resources than his predecessors had enjoyed and with a faculty that had been stripped of many of its brightest stars. He attempted to extricate politics from the school’s curriculum, but this brief rebranding effort was unsuccessful, and when the Nazis came to power nationally in 1933, the school was closed indefinitely under intense political pressure and threats.
Glass house by Philip Johnson @David Mark.
Famous artist inspired by or following Bauhaus include Paul Klee, Marcel Breuer and Vassily Kandinsky, whose works almost never feature human figures, focusing mainly in depicting towns and landscapes, using deep swaths of colour for depth and character. In America, Philip Johnson, designed his famous Glass House inspired by Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth house. The building is an essay in minimal structure, geometry, proportion, and the effects of transparency and reflection; it is considered one of the first, most brilliant works of modern architecture. Another iconic modernist design by Philip Johnson is the Seagram Building, a skyscraper in in Midtown Manhattan. The integral plaza, building, stone faced lobby and distinctive glass and bronze exterior, were designed by Mies van der Rohe, whilst Johnson designed the interior of The Four Seasons and Brasserie restaurants. He famously had lunch at The Four Seasons everyday.
We are seeing in our days a resurge of Modernism, a phenomenon that Prof McGovern has observed himself: “Modernism is certainly becoming more popular nowadays. Its roots are in the 20s, when Bauhaus was at the zenith of its popularity; unfortunately the war stopped everything. The next iteration of Modernism is found in the mid 20th century, and a lot of it actually in Britain. I think modernism has returned to favour because people recognize the beauty in it and realise that it is a great way to design future living; and it can be warm, it can be collected, it can have character. Personally, I would much rather live in a modern house than in a traditional one. Maybe this is because I grew up in Coventry, so my preference has always been looking forward. Bauhaus looked forward. Another reason why Modernism is coming back is as a reaction to the Postmodernism of the 70s and 80s. Philip Johnson himself had a postmodernist period, during which he designed the Miami Art Museum, the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California and 550 Madison Avenue among others.
Lamp by Alfred Schafter.
“Furthermore, nowadays there is far more connectivity; people are much more aware about what is happening in the rest of the world. I had the chance to meet Pierre Koeing a couple of times. He was the architect who designed the famous House Study #22, another icon of modernist architecture. I asked him who had influenced him and he said “Nobody” and added, “I know you think I’m being arrogant, but I’m not.” I understood what he meant. At the time, TV was still in its infancy and it was very difficult to be aware of what other designers were doing in other countries, let alone in other continents.”
Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was a Norwegian painter whose best-known work, The Scream, has become one of the most iconic images of the art world. His childhood was overshadowed by illness, bereavement and the dread of inheriting a mental health condition that ran in the family. Studying at the Royal School of Art and Design in Kristiania (present Oslo), Munch began to live a bohemian life under the influence of nihilist Hans Jaeger. It was Jaeger who urged Much to paint from his own emo- tions and psychological state. This would in time, emerge as Munch’s distinctive style.
The British Museum, in partnership with The Sir Joseph Hotung Great Court Gallery and supported by the AKO Foundation are hosting a major exhibition Edvard Munch. It is the largest exhibition of prints in the UK for 45years. This unparalleled exhibition helps us once again examine his ability to strip down and examine human emotion in its rawest form. He was an artist of great experimentation, who produced compelling prints, from which he made his name.
Of course, no major Munch exhibition would be complete without The Scream. The Scream is considered one of the most recognisable images in art history. In this exhibition, the British Museum is displaying a rare black and white lithograph of this universally famous painting. What makes this lithograph so rare is that, unlike the painted version and two further drawings of The Scream, this lithograph has an inscription. It had been widely believed that The Scream depicted a human screaming but the inscription on this rare lithograph suggests otherwise, since it translates into English as “I felt a great scream pass through nature.” Sadly, only 15 of these haunting lithographs survive.
The Scream.
We can’t forget the notoriety that The Scream acquired after it was stolen twice. It is almost inconceivable that a painting so famous could just be taken off a museum wall, as it happened the first time it was stolen by two thieves who walked in to the National Gallery in Oslo. The nation was transfixed with the opening of the 1994 Winter Olympics, so the thieves simply took it off the wall and walked away. A decade later, a 1910 copy was stolen when masked gunmen took it from the Munch Museum in the Norwegian Capital.
Thankfully, both copies were later recovered. A pastel version of The Scream was later sold in 2012 in New York. I took less than 12 minutes to reach a staggering hammer price of £74million.
The British Museum hopes that the public will not see Munch just as the artist who painted The Scream. Lead curator Giulia Bartrum has said that they feel that those who appreciate art in the UK are less familiar with Munch’s beautiful print-making and therefore they hope that it will shed a new light and understanding on how talented his print making truly was, alongside other printmakers of that period.
The Scream was said to have been inspired by Munch’s Norwegian home wild skies. It has been long been my opinion and it seems that also of many art experts that Starry Starry Night by Van Gogh painted in 1889 may have given inspiration to Much to create The Scream. Both are dark in their stories, but if you look at the brush-stroke and composition, there is a similarity in style. The oil on canvas painting technique possesses multiple interpretations; one evident theme is Van Gogh’s communication and Edvard Munch feelings and vision of vastness. Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh brought art and life together by finding a very individual way of communicating, using their own personal experiences and passions.
Madonna.
The Scream is, of course, the image everyone wants to see in this exhibition. I, in my own heart, prefer Vampire II, one of my favourite paintings by Munch. Originally titled Love and Pain, its most popular name was given by Munch’s friend, the art critic Stanislaw Przybyszewski, who saw the painting in an exhibition and described it as “a man who had become submissive, and on his neck, a biting vampire’s face.” Others though, have seen it as “a man locked in a vampire’s tortured embrace.” Munch painted six different versions of
the subject between 1893 and 1895. The original painting shows a woman with long flame red hair kissing a man on the neck, as the couple embrace. Munch himself always claimed it showed nothing more than “just a woman kissing a man on the neck.” In 1895, Munch created a woodcut with a very similar theme and composition. In the British Museum exhibition, we can also admire Jealousy II (1896), another of his haunting lithographs. Jealousy was originally painted in 1895 as oil on canvas and became an image that he returned to throughout his life time. Munch completed no less than 11 painted versions of Jealousy, the last one in the 1930s. He also created four lithograph versions and one dry-point.
Jealousy.
Visitors may be taken back by the dark and harrowing Madonna featuring a sperm and a foetus (1902). Again, Munch painted several versions of this composition between 1892 and 1895, using oil on canvas. It shows a bare-breasted half- length female figure. The lithograph print of the composition is distinguished by a decorative border depicting wiggling sperm, with a foetus-like figure in the bottom left hand corner. Like so many of his works, this one was stolen in 2004, thankfully recovered two years later. As a great admirer of Munch, I hope that this exhibition will bring to light that he was much more than a scream on a notebook or a Halloween mask. There is a lot to learn from this artist. As the British Museum stated, Much should be considered one of the greatest artists of all time.
Till 21st July 2019
The Sir Joseph Hotung Great Court Gallery, British Museum. Supported by AKO Foundation
It was in Paris, as spring was beginning to flourish that Steinway & Sons unveiled its new and possibly most beautiful piano yet: the Lang Lang Black Diamond Grand Piano. This beautiful instrument was presented to 1,600 guests during an exclusive Lang Lang concert at the Paris Philharmonic.
This piano has been specially designed for the virtuoso pianist and marks the first time in history that a classical pianist has been invited to join the design process of a Steinway & Sons grand piano. Besides its unique design, which is visually distinctive from traditional concert grand pianos, the Lang Lang Black Diamond is the very first Steinway & Sons piano to come with the revolutionary new Spirio R technology, which enables pianists to record their own playing, then reproduce it identically and instantly on the same piano. This iPad®-controlled system creates new ways of interacting with the instrument and a new way of experiencing music.
US designer Dakota Jackson, a long-time friend of the company, was chosen to collaborate with Lang Lang to take on this unique project and to design a piano embodying his talent and passion. With its reflections and expressive lines, the Lang Lang Black Diamond exemplifies the black diamond, a rare and precious stone whose origin is shrouded in mystery; there is even a theory that states that black diamonds are of extra-terrestrial origin. Maybe a parallelism with Lang Lang’s out-of-this-world performances?
The design of the Lang Lang Black Diamond combines the elegance of either classical ebony high polished or Macassar ebony with the brilliance of chrome. Three slender diamond-shaped silhouettes punctuate the line of the rim. It features metallic accents on the legs, the music desk and the back of the case. A small diamond silhouette is engraved in silver above the keyboard and Dakota Jackson’s final touch is provided by the S-shaped top stick, holding the one-piece piano lid.
This year, Lang Lang will tour with the Black Diamond including a concert at the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie in October and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw in November.
Only eight concert grand pianos Model D in Macassar ebony finish and 88 grand pianos Model B in black high gloss finish or Macassar ebony will be available – all equipped with the new Spirio R. POA.
Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was a Norwegian painter whose best-known work, The Scream, has become one of the most iconic images of the art world. His childhood was overshadowed by illness, bereavement and the dread of inheriting a mental health condition that ran in the family. Studying at the Royal School of Art and Design in Kristiania (present Oslo), Munch began to live a bohemian life under the influence of nihilist Hans Jaeger. It was Jaeger who urged Much to paint from his own emo- tions and psychological state. This would in time, emerge as Munch’s distinctive style. 
