According to a review in today's Guardian, this exhibition, Pre-Raphaelite Sisters at the National Portrait Gallery is a bit of a disappointment: [T]he heroic women behind the frilly-shirted bro-fest: [T]hat this exhibition seems to make a less forceful case for them as a creative force is perhaps a question of venue: the National Portrait Gallery ( Read more... )

Columnists are deploring the closing-down of women's magazines: Women’s magazines are more progressive than ever - and they’re all closing down and Marie Claire wasn’t all fluff. It filled a crucial gap in women’s lives.
And, okay, I'm glad to see that they're acknowledging the work that these magazines did, but - as ever, I'm a bit irked that ( Read more... )

Since I felt I was finally ahead of myself on various academic commitments*, I suggested to partner that we might to what had been on our list to do for a while, and go to the Lee Krasner: Living Colour exhibition at the Barbican.
Worth seeing.
I was struck by the way she repurposed materials - the early works made with broken glass and the ( Read more... )

British Museum launches guided tours of LGBTQ treasures.
Perhaps the report is - after all it's rather short - a tad misleading and it's really not all about gay men having it off on Greek and Roman vases...
- while the Sapphic side is represented by the extremely chaste chocolate cups of the Ladies of Llangollen. Sigh.
I hope at least they're ( Read more... )

An excursion to Strawberry Hill House has long been a thing mooted between partner and myself as a thing we should do, and the current exhibition seemed like a particularly good occasion to do so: Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill: Masterpieces from Horace Walpole's Collection.
Without these, one fears dear Horry's camp Gothick folly* might have ( Read more... )

It is many a year, nay, 'tis many a decade, my dearios, since I did Religious Knowledge O-level: but, and here I call upon those whose Biblical scholarship is fresher and more up to date than mine, am I not correct in disinterring from the vaults of memory the fact that the gospels were not, in fact, first-hand accounts? The book I wish I’d written
( Read more... )

And pontificate generally. A certain Mr J- J- who writes on ART in The Guardian yet again makes us ask, what are they teaching them in art-critic school these days, or possibly back in the 1950s?
Godwin encouraged his daughter’s own feeling for art, taking her to studios including that of JMW Turner. But painting, like making a monster, was a man’s ( Read more... )

Well, in this instance it was actually Twitter, but it was almost laugh-out-loud appropriate coincidence.
The first one was apropos of the Museum of the Vagina - the press page is here - and we discover that, perhaps appropriately, it is at present a potential rather than an actual space.
(And, as someone who has recently been billed as 'Gender and ( Read more... )

Some while ago I was asked to apply one corner of my expertise (not, I may add, any of the more usually called-upon areas: Sid was not involved) to assist one of the curators at the V&A involved in the exhibition now up and running: Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up.
As a result of which I got an invite to the Private View, which, unfortunately, was ( Read more... )

Well, I am all for quiet carriages and minimising the aural impact of one's fellow passengers, but does not 'psychotherapist and writer' quoted in the article muddle together chosen and unchosen sound effects? There is a difference between having to listen to somebody else's transistor radio and having your own carefully curated mixtape on your ( Read more... )