Culture

Culture

Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels

Passion and support for choreographic arts

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…

Culture

Hélène de Beauvoir: The Woman Destroyed

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 […]

Culture

Sigmar Polke. Affinities Revealed

The artistic encounter of two masters

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 […]

Culture

Bartolomé Bermejo – Master of the Spanish Renaissance

by Lavinia Dickson-Robinson

The man who painted his way to heaven.
National Gallery. London. Until 29th September

The National Gallery is continuing its summer of Spanish excellence with a small but mesmerising exhibition of Bartolome Bermejo (c. 1440 – c.1501). It may not be a name familiar to you, but he is considered to be the master of the Spanish Renaissance. Very little is known about the man and, sadly for us, very little of his work has survived; actually, as few as 20 paintings.

Bermejo- Saint Michael triumphant over the devil with Donor Antoni Joan 1468 @National Gallery London.

Considered one of Spain’s most innovative and accomplished painters, Bartolomé de Cárdenas was born in Cordoba around 1440. It is believed that he was a Jewish convert, a theory supported by the fact that his wife was a convert herself and was even questioned by the Inquisition at some point. Certainly, the intensity in his paintings indicates a man of great religious devotion… or greatly motivated to proof his Catholic faith. Bermejo adopted Flemish painting techniques and conventions. Almost always on the move, he is known for his work in the Kingdom of Aragón, which included what is now Cataluña and the kingdom of Valencia. They say that all good things come in small packages, and never has been so true as it is in this exhibition, made up of just 6 works on loan from the Spanish master, which have never been seen outside of Spain.

Bermejo Desplà Pietà, 1490 @Catedral de Barcelona. Photo Guillem F-H.

The centre of the exhibition is Saint Michael Triumphant over the Devil with Donor Antoni Joan (1468). It is considered the most important early Spanish painting in Britain, acquired by the National Gallery years ago and painstakingly restored to its former glory. Powerful and dramatic to look at, this depiction of the Archangel Saint Michael defeating the Devil is impressive for its level of detail, richness of colour and curious attributes -please don’t miss the Devil’s ruby-like encrusted breast plate, not to mention what a true lesson in oil painting technique Bermejo is giving to his contemporaries, who were far behind in skill and savoir-faire.

Bermejo- Ascension (1470-5) © Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (2019).

This painting is displayed alongside Bermejo’s Triptych of the Virgin of Montserrat (1470-5), painted for the Italian cloth merchant Francesco della Chiesa, from the Cattedrale Nostra Signora Assunta in Acqui Terme, Alessadria (Italy) and the recently restored Desplà Pietà (1490), named after the man who commissioned it, Lluís Desplà, archdeacon of Barcelona Cathedral, where the painting has been since the 15th century. Neither work has been exhibited in Britain before. In addition, four panels depicting scenes from Christ the Redeemer are displayed, for the public to enjoy the mastery of this great Spanish Renaissance artist.

www.nationalgallery.org.uk

Culture

IWC Mark 11 Exhibition

Until 10th August

Lovers of pilot watches are in for a treat. Swiss luxury watch manufacturer IWC Schaffhausen have just opened their first pop-up exhibition in the United Kingdom, in honour of the 70th anniversary of the “Navigational Wrist Watch Mark 11 6B/ 346” being supplied to the Royal Air Force.

The exhibition is located on the first floor of IWC’s flagship boutique in London. Watch aficionados will discover twelve historical Mark 11 timepieces from the British Overseas Airways Cooperation, the New Zealand, the Royal Australian, South African, and the Royal Air Force. The IWC team have also brought in other priceless navigational artefacts, such as a periscope from and military uniforms of the time, which will allow visitors to immerse themselves in IWC’s world of Pilot’s Watches.

IWC has been producing innovative and technically advanced watches since 1868, and being a leader in the development of pilot’s watches since 1936. The Mark 11 was IWC’s first megastar, but it came from modest origins. Starting its career in 1949 as a “Navigational Wrist Watch,” the timepiece was supplied to the British Ministry of Defence following a military supply contract. Intended as a highly accurate, anti-magnetic instrument for astro-navigation, the Mark 11 was primarily issued to Royal Air Force navigators and later, to pilots. It was also used by other Commonwealth armed forces until the early 1980s.

Owing the capabilities of the aircraft in the RAF fleet circa 1949, Mark 11 watches had to meet the requirements of a flight from ground level to 26,000ft and speeds up to 500mph and later on in the 60s of up to 70,000ft and 650mph. The glass had to be fixed in way that ensured maximum water tightness, so no humidity could get into the case and cause deviation of accuracy. Although radar equipment for navigation was standard on the RAF’s bomber nuclear force in the 1950s and 1960s,
there was always a navigator responsible for conventional navigation. This was critical because crews had to shut down the radar to be undetected when entering hostile airspace.

The RAF received their watches in four batches ordered in the years 1948, 1950, 1951 and 1952. The reference number consisted of a combination of numbers and letters. In the case of the Mark 11, the number is 6B/346.

During its term of service, the design of the watch was refined. On its introduction in 1949, the numbers from 1 to 12 were still written out. The small rectangles at 3, 6, 9 and 12 o’clock were already made from luminous material, while in 1952, the number 12 was replaced by the characteristic triangle with a dot on either side. This is now one of the most important visual features of the IWC pilot’s watches, along with the stubby hour hand instead of the pointed hour hand in use until 1952.

The Mark 11 was also used by other Commonwealth countries such as South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. The Royal New Zealand Air Force procured two batches of Mark 11s, one delivered 1952/53, the other in 1957. A Mark 11 also featured in another story: New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary was not only the first person to conquer Mount Everest; in 1958, he also led a team to reach the South Pole by land. To determine his position during this expedition, the navigator from the New
Zealand Air Force relied on his watch: an IWC Mark 11.

The Royal Australian Air Forces procured the IWC Mark 11 once in 1957, after having ordered two batches of Mark 11s from Jaeger LeCoultre in 1948 and 1953. The South African Air Force procured three series of Mark 11s, in 1953, 1961 and 1967, all of them sold to the South African Embassy in Berne. Since 1988, subsequent civilian models of the Mark 11 were issued and the watch evolved into a legend, evoking the romance of flying and the significance of history.

Pilot’s watches developed into an entire genre of the Swiss watch industry. They represent the antithesis of a jewellery watch, with their plain black dials and stark white Arabic numerals. Additionally, IWC was the first to introduce navigational wrists watches as a luxury good.

IWC Mark 11 Exhibition
IWC boutique. 138, New Bond Street. London
Until 10th August

www.iwc.com

Culture

Mini Scrapbook

60 years of a British icon by Martin Port
Published by Porter Press International
RRP: £20.00

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Mini – a little car which made a big impact when it was launched in 1959 thanks to its unique combination of aesthetics, space efficiency, engineering approach, and handling.

The Mini was the brainchild of genius designer Alec Issigonis, and proved to be an instant hit – not just with the general public, but also with celebrities like The Beatles, Twiggy and Peter Sellers, and racers like Sir Stirling Moss. It became a much-loved staple of the British car industry – a position that it has maintained for 60 years and I think continues to enjoy today.

In this latest addition to the Scrapbook series from Porter Press, the story of this unique little car is broken up into accessible nuggets and supported by an extensive array of archive and contemporary photographs, to illustrate just what makes the Mini so special, so loved and such fun.

From revealing how Alec Issigonis and his team turned their thoughts from rough sketches to prototypes to production cars to Mini’s celebrity owners and its appearances in many movies (who doesn’t remember The Italian Job?), this book takes you into a journey of discovery, featuring Mini’s many incarnations (the Moke, the Midas…), including the 60th anniversary model.

Lavishly illustrated with hundreds of never-before-seen photographs, documents and memorabilia that document the car’s past, present and future.

Mini Scrapbook  – 60 years of a British icon  by Martin Port.  Published by Porter Press International. RRP: £20.00

About the author:
Martin Port has worked in automotive publishing for 18 years – the last 16 of these for leading classic car title, Classic & Sports Car. Over the last 27 years he has owned a variety of classics, from a Mini Metro to a Morris Minor, a Porsche 912 to a Series II Land-Rover, and, of course, the legendary Mini. The first of these was a 1968 Morris Mini MkII Super DeLuxe, driven from Cheshire to Berkshire with a hole in one of the valves. The second was a 1980 model rescued from a hedge in Richmond the day that it was due to be scrapped. Thanks to the Mini’s unique driving experience, which always puts a smile on his face, it will always have a corner of his motoring heart.

Culture, Gourmet

Champagne: The march of the grower…

Who doesn’t love champagne? A chilled glass of something sparkling in your hand is profoundly uplifting, whether to enjoy with friends and family in celebration, or alone, as a treat at the end of a long day. Doubtless, there are champagne houses you turn to every time for your go-to bottle, but there is a class of champagne that is gaining the edge on the old grandes marques, with delicious and sometimes better value alternatives to the big names.

“Grower” champagne is champagne made by the person who actually grows the grapes – an oddity in this region, which for decades has been dominated by the famous brand owners buying in tonnes of fruit from armies of farmers, then churning out thousands of bottles with a uniform house style. By contrast, these are artisan champagnes, created by small scale growers – the land holding per person being limited – perhaps a family, or even a one-man band.

But, what is so good about these handcrafted champagnes? The small size of these types of champagne domaines means that there is utmost focus on every step of the winemaking process, from planting the vine to bottling it, which has a huge effect on the quality of the end product. These growers are custodians of their land, and they are changing attitudes in the region towards sustainability.

Many of them farm organically or bio-dynamically, and use few chemicals in the winery; all the better to respect the work they have done in the vines. They care passionately about expressing a “sense of place” from the grapes they grow. This place might be a particular village, an individual vineyard, or even a Iieu dit (a specific plot within a vineyard), meaning these types of champagnes have real character and personality.

These bottles are a far cry from simple bottles of fizz for parties. Created in limited numbers from individual, quality parcels of vines by people with intensely passionate philosophies, they have true diversity and authenticity. These are champagnes with stories to tell, and real live people to tell them.

Ruth Ford, Marketing Manager at Wine Source, one of the best-connected drinks suppliers in the business (Alice Lascelles, FT How To Spend It Magazine), likens the quality and individuality of top grower champagne to premium burgundy, which is made from a similar patchwork of vineyards, by small-scale producers. She comments,

We are receiving ever-growing requests for the small-scale producers of champagne, whose wines are increasingly fine, complex, structured and revered. The booming popularity for this class of champagne would have been unimaginable not so long ago, but as with top burgundy wine, we expect demand to soar, thanks to their scarcity and sheer quality.

A word of caution: there are thousands of growers in Champagne, but only a small number of them are good winemakers. Here are some fiercely individual and utterly charming champagne growers, making superb must-have bottles for your fridge and cellar.

Frédéric Savart
Fréd Savart first toyed with a career as a professional footballer before realising where his heart really lay, returning home to his family Domaine in the village of Écueil.

Utterly uncompromising about quality, he does everything single-handedly, including tending his vines organically, what involves a huge amount of work. Just don’t call him a control freak…

Despite the very small scale of his production, his reputation is global. Make sure you get yours before it sells out! Try the Champagne Savart “L’Ouverture” Brut Premier Cru, 100% Pinot Noir: a gorgeously golden glass of champagne, tasting of ripe apple and pear, with crisp minerality, and incredible purity, £49 per bottle.

Guillaume Selosse
Selosse ‘Junior’ makes an absolutely micro- scopic amount of champagne from two tiny vineyard plots. One of these, Au Dessous De Gros Mont, is just a few rows of ancient vines given to him by his grandmother for his 18th birthday.

She told him the gift was instead of a car and that he would thank her in the end… He certainly did! As rare as hen’s teeth, existing quantities of his champagnes are just a few hundred bottles.

Try Champagne Guillaume S “Largillier”, made from pinot noir grapes grown by Guillaume’s friend Jérôme Coessens in Côtes des Bar. More of a wine than a champagne, this is breathtaking, stony saline minerality, rich, deep fruit, and more layers than a millefeuille. £POA – if you can find it!

Eric and Mickael Rodez
Eric Rodez may look like a nutty professor, but appearances deceive… He is one of the superstars of the current champagne generation, a hugely respected winemaker named by his peers as the grower they most look up to.

His family has been growing grapes in Ambonnay for more than nine generations. Today, he and his son Mickael together
run their small biodynamic domaine. Eric’s first work experience was at Krug, learning the art of blending and ageing, but this is just a small part of his story.

He has since spent decades caring for the family domaine, fastidiously obsessing over his terroir and forever thinking about ways to improve the way he tends his vines and makes his wines.

Try Champagne Rodez Blanc de Noirs Grand Cru, the house “flagship” champagne, made from 100% Pinot Noir grapes. A magnum, possibly the very finest way to enjoy champagne, cost £106.50. Compare and contrast with the Blanc de Blancs, which is 100% Chardonnay, for £50 per bottle.

For a real treat, and to witness the true intensity of Eric and Mickael’s commitment to expressing their family’s land, try their Champagne Rodez Fournettes 2009, a deliciously rich and round champagne from a ripe and complex vintage, £98 per bottle.

www.wine-source.com

Culture, Lifestyle

Where Whicker Went

Fifty years on from his award-winning documentary Black Sheep,
Simon de Burton profiles the inimitable Alan Whicker.

It takes guts to sit in front of a dictator, judged by many to be the most evil man on the planet, and point out the dichotomy between his role as a doctor of medicine and the fact that he was responsible for ordering the deaths of an estimated 30,000 of his island’s citizens.

But, when it came to asking all the wrong questions, no man could get away with it more easily than the ice-cool journalist Alan Whicker, whose affable manner, effortless charm and impeccable tailoring were the only weapons he needed in order to disarm characters such as the murderous Papa Doc Duvallier, Haiti’s infamous ‘president for life’ about whom Whicker made his award-winning documentary ‘Black Sheep.’

That was exactly 50 years ago, since when few television reporters have come close to matching Whicker’s ability to bring the more remarkable aspects of the world and some of its most interesting characters right into the living rooms of the far less travelled and much more average. That said, he enjoyed a substantial head start on today’s makers of fly-on-the-wall documentaries such as Louis Theroux and Stacey Dooley by dint of the fact that, when the first, short ‘Whicker’s World’ was broadcast in 1958, the concept of the package holiday was only just getting off the ground. Democratised air travel was years away and the ‘virtual reality’ of the internet was beyond anyone’s imagination.

Alan Whicker at The Pomme d’Or Hotel in April 1982.

As a result, the majority of Whicker’s UK viewers had never left the country, meaning they were more than ready to travel the world vicariously, with him as their decidedly articulate tour guide whose colourful, lilting descriptions were delivered with impeccable timing, subtle satire and an exquisite appreciation of irony (in fact, I can almost hear him speaking that very sentence). From quizzing John Paul Getty for the first, in-depth ‘Whicker’s World’ in 1963 – ‘The Solitary Billionaire,’ in which the subject admits to wishing he had a ‘better personality’ and justifies installing a pay phone in his Surrey mansion for the use of house guests, despite his $4 billion fortune – to meeting John and Eleanor Alliston, who, for 38 years, had lived alone on the remote Three Hummock Island off the north coast of Tasmania, Whicker never changed his easy style, yet managed to adapt perfectly to every situation.

Who else, one wonders, could have persuaded the enclosed and silent order of Poor Clare nuns to be caught on camera playing football in their habits? Or created an entirely compelling film about the three-mile long Polynesian island of Nauru that became the richest republic in the world by selling the phosphate dust that covered it – and staged regular ‘bubutsi’ days during which inhabitants were allowed to enter fellow islanders’ homes and help themselves to any object they fancied? Whicker visited them all, always arriving as a model of sartorial elegance in a perfectly cut suit or gilt-buttoned blazer, teamed with just the right accessories, shirt cuffs protruding the regulation inch beyond the sleeves of his jacket, moustache neatly trimmed, hair brilliantined into abeyance and blue eyes glinting from behind the generous lenses of his trademark, horn-rimmed spectacles.

When conditions really demanded it – such as while interviewing the self-proclaimed ‘world’s best writer’ Harold Robbins aboard his yacht in the south of France – Whicker would don suitably casual linens and sometimes even shorts. Otherwise, he saw no reason to abandon his trademark Doug Hayward two-piece, even when mingling with the hippies in San Francisco during the ‘summer of love’ or meeting English ex-pats who had made new lives for themselves in Australia after taking advantage of the so-called ‘£10 Poms’ assisted migration scheme.

Rarely, of course, was Whicker lost for words – although his propensity to flirt with attractive women interviewees almost caught him out during his second full-length documentary, about Baroness Fiona Thyssen.

“Have you run out of things to ask me?” said the ‘Model Millionairess’ as she tried on some of her fabulously valuable jewellery for the benefit of a clearly mesmerised Whicker. “No,” he replied after a brief hiatus. “I’m just having such a nice time…”

Indeed, ‘nice times’ seemed to make up the bulk of Whicker’s professional life, after he found his niche, while serving with the Eighth Army’s Film and Photo unit during WWII. He made his military mark by interviewing Field Marshal Montgomery, arresting the fascist traitor John Amery and, after being among the first allied soldiers to enter Milan, single-handedly taking into cus- tody a German general and his entire unit – seconding a trunk-full of cash set-aside for the SS payroll in the process.

After the war, Whicker edited the Army newspaper ‘Union Jack’ in Venice before returning to England to work for the Exchange Telegraph news agency that sent him on assignment, first to Cairo and then to report on the Korean War – where he is said to have irritated the bedraggled American correspondents with his insistence on maintaining a daily shaving routine and donning crimson pyjamas at bed time. While in Korea, he was mistakenly reported killed after an aircraft identical to the one in which he had been travelling was shot down – a misapprehension he soon corrected in typical Whicker style with a three-word telex that stated simply: ‘Unkilled, uninjured, on-pressing’.

In 1957, having returned to regular civilian life in London, Whicker joined the television magazine programme, ‘Tonight’ for which he filed his first, peripatetic reports, about unusual people and interesting subjects, that were to form the basis for the longer documentaries that soon made him a household name. By 1982, he was able to produce a programme called ‘Whicker’s World – The First Million Miles’ having circumnavigated the globe an estimated 97 times.

Alan Whicker arrives to take part in Channel Television’s 10th birthday celebrations and is greeted at the airport by C.T.V.’s John Rothwell. (later Senator Rothwell) Picture taken 11.30 am Friday 1st September. 1972.

Paradoxically, however, Whicker had by then been settled on the tiny Channel island of Jersey for more than a decade, a place he moved to with his long-standing companion, the photographer Valerie Kleeman, after contracting ‘island-itis’ (his word for a love of island life) during his first visit to Norfolk Island in 1960. His relationship with Kleeman was considerably more stable than the one he endured with his previous lover, the eccentric socialite Olga Deterding who, having inherited a useful £50 million from her father, petroleum tycoon Sir Henri, could easily have qualified as Whicker’s World subject matter. The couple became engaged and stayed together from 1966 – 69, but a combination of Whicker’s regular absence due to work and Deterding’s personal problems (including eating disorders, an addiction to tranquilisers and suicidal tendencies) drove them apart. For a while, Whicker was the sole beneficiary of her will – but she changed it before choking to death on a nightclub sandwich in 1978.

By then, however, Whicker was more than capable of standing on his own two, financial feet and fitted in seamlessly with the low-key millionaires of Jersey. Wafting around in his beloved ‘dawn blue’ Bentley Continental, he socialised with the great and the good of the island, ranging from its most influential legal and financial professionals to the television cook Fanny Cradock and her brow-beaten husband, Johnnie. Indeed, so successful had Whicker become that he was once been the largest shareholder in Yorkshire Television and was discovered, by means of a poll conducted by advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, to have been ‘the most envied man in Britain’.

Perhaps the ultimate endorsement of his fame came, however, when he was parodied on the comedy show Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The ‘Whicker Island’ sketch featured a tropical paradise inhabited solely by well- dressed Whicker clones, a skit that inspired ‘Whicker conventions’ where lookalikes would gather in his honour. And so familiar was his face that he was recruited to front television commercials for American Express and Barclaycard and, as the Internet age blossomed, AOL appointed him their world-wide travel ambassador – not realising, until they sent an envoy to Jersey to meet him, that he not only didn’t own a computer but had never even tried to use one.

But a lack of modern technology proved no drawback to the veteran broadcaster, who continued to live with Kleeman in their £5m, clifftop home ‘Mont d’Olivet’ until the great man died in July 2013 at the age of 87 – leaving the world that was Whicker’s a noticeably emptier place.

Culture

Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition

Design Museum. London.

Until 15th September

Kubrick is, without a doubt, one of the most influential filmmakers of all time. Commemorating the 20th anniversary of his death, the Science Museum has put together its own interpretation of the incredibly successful exhibition by the Deutsches Fimmuseum, which explores the life and work of this master of the seventh art.

Visitors enter the exhibition walking on a replica carpet from the iconic scene in The Shining, before entering a ‘one-point perspective’ corridor mirroring Kubrick’s celebrated camera technique, at the tune of Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, (the famous soundtrack to 2001), this show helps us discover Kubrick’s unique command of the whole creative design process of film making, from story teller to editor and director.

Kubrick was most inventive in his introduction of revolutionary devices to his filmmaking, such as the camera lens designed for NASA to shoot by candlelight. He was fascinated by architecture and design, and this fascination showed at every stage of his films. He worked with designers like Hardy Amies, Eliot Noyes and Pascall Morgue to name but a few.

Stanley Kubrick actually lived in Britain for over 40 years. It was here that he created Dr Strangelove’s War Room (1964), an orbiting space station for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and the battlefields for Full Metal Jacket (1987).

Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) in the Korova Milkbar. A Clockwork Orange @Warner Bros. Entertainment.

The show is set up in a way that helps you understand how this genius created genre defining worlds for his films and how London was his inventive canvas. There are several themed rooms, each shaped around a different film, including Barry Lyndon, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Full Metal Jacket, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Paths of Glory, Spartacus, Lolita, Eyes Wide Shut and Dr Strangelove.

Of this exhibition, Steven Spielberg said:

…Stanley was a chameleon with the astonishing ability to reinvent himself with each new story he told. I defy anyone who just happens upon a Kubrick film while channel surging to try with all your might to change the station – I have found this to be impossible…
Kubrick and Nicholson on the set of The Shining @Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

www.designmuseum.org

Culture

Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing

The Queens Gallery, Buckingham Palace. London SW1

May 24th – October 13

Earlier this year, to mark the 500-year anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death, 144 of the Renaissance master’s greatest drawings in the Royal Collection went on display in 12 simultaneous exhibitions across the UK.

Following the exhibitions at Royal Collection Trust’s partner venues, on 24th May 2019, the drawings will be brought together to form part of an exhibition of over 200 sheets, at Buckingham Palace, the largest exhibition of Leonardo’s work in over 65 years. A selection of 80 drawings will then travel to The Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyrood house in November 2019, the largest group of Leonardo’s works ever shown in Scotland.HRH The Prince of Wales introduces the 12 exhibitions around the UK in a film available on the Royal Collection Trust website. To watch this and to watch an introduction from the Curator Martin Clayton please follow the link. A botanical drawing – one of 12 da Vinci works being exhibited at Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens as part of an exhibition to mark the five century anniversary – is forming part of a new Royal Mail collection of stamps to mark the anniversary.

The collection features a total of 12 stamps, one picked from each of the venues across the UK, which are simultaneously showing other drawings by the artist – on loan from the Royal Collection, which holds more than 500 sheets of drawings by Leonardo, housed in the Print Room at Windsor Castle, where they are kept in carefully controlled conditions because of the potential for damage from exposure to light. Revered in his day as a painter, his most famous being the Mona Lisa and the most expensive in the world, Salvator Mundi, Leonardo completed only around 20 paintings; he was respected as a sculptor and architect, but no sculpture or buildings by him survive; he was a military and civil engineer who plotted with Machiavelli to divert the river Arno, but the scheme was never executed; he was an anatomist and dissected 30 human corpses, but his ground-breaking anatomical work was never published; he planned treatises on painting, water, mechanics, the growth of plants and many other subjects, but none was ever finished. As so much of his life’s work was unrealised or destroyed, Leonardo’s greatest achievements survive only in his drawings and manuscripts

The drawings in the Royal Collection have been together as a group since the artist’s death, and provide an unparalleled insight into Leonardo’s investigations and the workings of his mind. Leonardo firmly believed that visual evidence was more persuasive than academic argument, and that an image conveyed knowledge more accurately and concisely than any words. Few of his surviving drawings were intended for others to see: drawing served as his laboratory, allowing him to work out his search for the universal laws that he believed underpinned all of creation.

The exhibitions Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing include examples of all the drawing materials employed by the artist, including pen and ink, red and black chalks, watercolour and metal point. They also present new information about Leonardo’s working practices and creative process, gathered through scientific research using a range of non-invasive techniques, including ultraviolet imaging, infrared reflectography and X-ray fluorescence. The findings have been brought together in a ground breaking new book, Leonardo da Vinci: A Closer Look, published by Royal Collection Trust and written by Alan Donnithorne.

Also accompanying the exhibition will a book entitled Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing by
the curator Martin Clayton, Head of Prints and Drawings, Royal Collection Trust.

www.rct.uk/visit/the-queens-gallery-buckingham-palace

Culture

The Art Of Glass

Chihuly at Kew Gardens

13th April – 27th October
Words: Victoria Macmillan Bell

Dale Chihuly, crafter of extraordinary glass sculptures is back at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew for the ‘Chihuly at Kew: Reflections on Nature’ exhibition, on display until the end of October this year.

It’s also the 260th anniversary of these historic gardens on the banks of the Thames and the April sun is throwing a beautiful spotlight on the whole show with eye-popping colours, shape and form.

With a career spanning 50 years, Chihuly is known for his fantastical installations that have appeared in hundreds of museums, gardens and cities around the world. The intricacy of his work close-up is breathtaking.

Dale Chihuly. Summer Sun. Maker’s Mark Distillery, Loretto, KY. © Chihuly Studio.

At Kew’s busiest entrance, Victoria Gate you’ll spot the Sapphire Star, shards of glass like a celestial object exploding, mind-blowingly beautiful. Further on, red hot pokers soar up out of a bed of huge tulips and from here across to the Temperate House where inside you’ll find myriad ferns – real and blown glass, amongst a plethora of larger pieces and all seamlessly ‘growing’ amongst nature’s botanical bounty.

• This year, the exhibition is sponsored by DS Automobiles, the premium arm of the PSA Group – created off the back of Citroën’s iconic car launched at the Paris Motor Show in 1955; they’re putting the brand amongst the premium big guns of Audi, Mercedes and Jaguar.

• New to the market here is their smaller luxury compact SUV, the DS 3 Crossback. From 2025 their model line up will be fully electrified including their forthcoming DS 3 Crossback E-TENSE BEV (Battery Electric Vehicle), to give it its full name.

• In the meantime we have the Ultra Prestige PureTech petrol 155, available as an automatic only for our test.

• Flush door-handles pop out smoothly to greet you as you approach without pressing a thing – the design team have used their every whim putting this car together, nips, curves, tucks and more.

• All the surface entertainment outside – that continues inside, this is a very busy car. Lots of buttons to operate air con, heated seats, music et al housed in diamond shaped metal trim on the dash surrounded by soft touch cushioned Nappa leather – the seats are nicely cushioned and supportive too thanks to a high density foam.

• Head up display is on board and for those of us not used to having a Perspex screen in our eye line with driver information projected onto it, it doesn’t get in the way – nice to have your phone charged wirelessly too.

• Ride quality is good, being behind the wheel is a comfortable place to be and once you’ve got used to where everything is, the DS3 will carry you effortlessly from A to B as it did with us through urban traffic and with decent performance too. From £32,450

• Back to Kew Gardens and the vibrancy of the Chihuly glass exhibition which, when seen at night, lit up in all its kaleidoscopic colours must be quite something. Really worth seeing, day or night.

www.dsautomobiles.co.uk

www.chihuly.com

www.kew.org/read-and-watch/reasons-to-come-to-chihuly-kew

Culture

Vanessa Brady OBE

Feminine, warm and soft spoken, Vanessa Brady is a woman who is literally being the change she wants to see. With her beaming smile and serene manners, one could be fooled to think she is “just another interior designer,” but this lady has revolutionised the whole interior design sector with the creation of the SBID (Society of British and International Interior Design).

She has brought universities and industry closer together and still had time to raise a daughter and amass an award winning portfolio of projects such as the Hard Rock Cafe, the British Luxury Club; and private clients like His Majesty The Sultan of Brunei and His Majesty The King of Saudi Arabia.

I-M: The University of Southampton granted you an Honorary Doctorate in 2014, the same year that you received your OBE. After decades of working really hard, what does this recognition mean to you?

V.B: The OBE is really special because it’s from the Queen and it’s recognition for my work in the industry. I set up the SBID to professionalize an industry which still is, predominantly woman orientated and was, at the time, completely unregulated. Interior Design was the most popular sideline profession for women.

When I looked at floating my practice in the stock market, we observed that there wasn’t a single interior design company listed in it. Nobody in the city recognised it as a business of tangible value.
So I set about creating the SBID. That was 2009.

I-M: Since its creation, how has the SBID grown in terms of the role that is now playing at an international level?

V.B: The SBID has become the largest interior design organisation in Europe, and is among the measured organisations of the European Council. The UK is among the 19 countries of Europe that offset agreed standards, and SBID is the largest organisation in the interior design sector and we are just 10 years old. We are present in 46 countries, what proves that it wasn’t just a British issue, but a global one. Customers take their designer with them to their homes or business in other countries. We needed to expand globally because there are different test points and interests in different countries.

The second reason why we have grown so much is that, with so much money involved, we needed to make the industry professional. Contraction, engineering, architecture… are all highly professionalized businesses; interior design had to step up or step off; we were either going to be professional or lose our place.

Our biggest burst of growth in the UK took place in 2009 at the time of the global credit crunch. People were investing in property, in their homes. Interior design should have been right in there, but it wasn’t. I saw it as a barrier as well as an opportunity. The barrier was that it wasn’t professional, the opportunity was … that it wasn’t professional.

I-M: You regularly engage with policymakers, the House of Commons, the House of Lords, the European Council… Why is all this so important?

V.B: I sat at a business breakfast in the House of Commons around a decade ago. I was one of two women around the table. There were 19 men. One of the MPs or Ministers asked me my opinion about certain subject to which he clearly didn´t expect me to be able to respond; I did indeed respond, and provided all the statistics to back my statement. Suddenly, they all started looking at me. I learned from that reaction that, in order to get the grey suits to follow me, I would have to do whatever it took to make sure that they listened to what I had to say.

Do you remember that saying about what was the difference between Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers? The difference was that Ginger Rogers had to do it in high heels and backwards, so she had to be twice as good. I feel that’s what happened at that time, I had to work double as hard as a man to get their attention and then hold it. To change views you have to galvanize people and prove yourself.

Culture

Passion and support for choreographic arts

A tribute to the work of one of the fundamental figures of French Modernist painting

The artistic encounter of two masters

by Lavinia Dickson-Robinson

The man who painted his way to heaven. National Gallery. London. Until 29th September

Until 10th August

Lovers of pilot watches are in for a treat. Swiss luxury watch manufacturer IWC Schaffhausen have just opened their first pop-up exhibition in the United Kingdom, in honour of the 70th anniversary of the “Navigational Wrist Watch Mark 11 6B/ 346” being supplied to the Royal Air Force.

60 years of a British icon by Martin Port Published by Porter Press International RRP: £20.00

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Mini – a little car which made a big impact when it was launched in 1959 thanks to its unique combination of aesthetics, space efficiency, engineering approach, and handling.

Fifty years on from his award-winning documentary Black Sheep, Simon de Burton profiles the inimitable Alan Whicker.

Design Museum. London.

Until 15th September

The Queens Gallery, Buckingham Palace. London SW1

May 24th – October 13

Earlier this year, to mark the 500-year anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death, 144 of the Renaissance master’s greatest drawings in the Royal Collection went on display in 12 simultaneous exhibitions across the UK.

Also accompanying the exhibition will a book entitled Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing by the curator Martin Clayton, Head of Prints and Drawings, Royal Collection Trust.

Chihuly at Kew Gardens

13th April – 27th October Words: Victoria Macmillan Bell

Dale Chihuly, crafter of extraordinary glass sculptures is back at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew for the ‘Chihuly at Kew: Reflections on Nature’ exhibition, on display until the end of October this year.

www.dsautomobiles.co.uk

www.chihuly.com

www.kew.org/read-and-watch/reasons-to-come-to-chihuly-kew

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The man who painted his way to heaven.
National Gallery. London. Until 29th September

60 years of a British icon by Martin Port
Published by Porter Press International
RRP: £20.00

Fifty years on from his award-winning documentary Black Sheep,
Simon de Burton profiles the inimitable Alan Whicker.

Also accompanying the exhibition will a book entitled Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing by
the curator Martin Clayton, Head of Prints and Drawings, Royal Collection Trust.

13th April – 27th October
Words: Victoria Macmillan Bell