Tag Archives: modern art

Modern art on display in an English country house setting

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CLAYDON HOUSE IN Buckinghamshire has been owned by the Verney family since 1620. It has been owned by the National Trust since 1956. Filled with beautifully and quite fantastically decorated rooms, the house contains many works of art – paintings, sculptures, furniture, etc – collected by the Verneys.

Until 14 September 2026, the house and its gardens are hosting an exhibition of contemporary artworks. These have been provided by the White Cube group of art galleries. More than 40 works from their collection are on display. The artists, whose work can be seen at Claydon House include (to name but a few): David Altmejd, Tracey Emin, Theaster Gates, Antony Gormley, Anselm Kiefer, Isamu Noguchi, Raqib Shaw, and Cai Guo-Qiang. These and others make a very impressive line-up. Some of the works are in the gardens, but most of them are within the house, mingling with the Verney’s own collection of objets d’art.

From the point of view of looking at these artworks, I see little point in showing them in the historic setting of Claydon House. There is something faintly amusing seeing the contemporary artwork almost competing with the variety of picturesque items within the house, which were created many years before their existence. As for the sculptures in the garden, I liked their settings.

After seeing the White Cube’s offerings at Claydon House, a thought occurred to me. The Verney’s collection of art and the interior décor of their residence reflected the aesthetic tastes of the house’s owners over the centuries. It was art that was collected by wealthy landowners who lived at Claydon and wanted to keep up with latest fashions. What I wondered was whether the family would have bought artworks such as were being lent by White Cube had they still been living in the house today. After all, what is sold by White Cube is mostly only affordable by private individuals with considerable wealth. And had the Verney family continued to live in the grand, opulent style that is reflected in the rooms of Claydon House, they might well have been tempted to add some of the kind of art – maybe not the most adventurous pieces – sold by White Cube to their collection.

Both the mansion with its historical décor and artworks and the exhibits provided by White Cube make it well worth visiting Claydon House.

Modern art from Madras (Chennai)

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OUR FRIEND THE artist Premlatha Seshadri (born 1947) lives and works in Chennai (Madras). Whenever we visit the city, we meet her. A couple of days ago, she sent us a message to inform us that two of her works were being displayed in Bateman Street, London, by The Noble Sage Gallery. They were hanging in a show, “The Journey So Far …”, to celebrate the gallery’s twentieth anniversary. Today, 31 May 2026, on the exhibition’s final day, we saw her exhibits and those of other artists. Fortunately, we arrived at the show just in time to be guided around it by the gallery’s knowledgeable, friendly owner Jana Manuelpillai.

By Premlatha Seshadri

Premlatha studied art in London at Hornsey Art College and also in Chennai at the Government College of Arts and Crafts (‘GCAC’).  Founded as ‘The Madras School of Art’ in 1850, it got its present name in 1962. It was India’s first art school of the type found in Britain. Premlatha was a student of K.C.S. Panniker (1911-1977). One of his drawings was on display at the Noble Sage show. Alongside his and Premlatha’s works, there were other pictures created by artists from Chennai, most of whom had been students at GCAC. Mr Manuelpillai explained how the selection of paintings together formed a sort of genealogy of modern art in Chennai.

The other artists from Chennai whose works could be viewed in the show included: T Athiveerapandian (1966-2025), RB Bhaskaran (b 1942), S Dhanapal (1919-2000), CJ Anthony Doss (1933-2008), P Gopinath (b 1948), Achuthan Kudallur (1945-2022), M Natesh (1960-2024), G Raman (b 1942), AP Santhanaraj (1932-2009), and KM Adimoolam (1938-2008). I imagine that our friend Premlatha knows all these artists and their work.

Although there was remarkable variety in style and composition of the works produced by the Chennai artists on display, those of Premlatha stood out from the others. The website of Noble Sage explained:

“Seshadris work has, through its differentiation, defined the contours of the Madras Movement of the early 1960s. Disinterested in Tamil Nadus rich Dravidian Hindu artistic heritage, and therefore flying in the face of much of Pannikers teaching, her art only has its driving line in common with other artists in Chennai such as A.P. Santhanaraj, L. Munuswamy and R.B. Bhaskaran. However her employment of this line is quite different. Seshadri has for many decades been inspired by the simplicity and truthfulness of Zen poetry and literature and applied this thinking to her line and her content.”

Indeed, the two pictures we saw at the exhibition share something in common with the way that Picasso was able to capture a great deal (in some of his works) using only a few brush strokes judiciously, Although quite unlike anything produced by Picasso or Japanese artists, whose works come to mind when seeing her creations, Premlatha is able to express a great deal apparently simply, but in fact, quite sophisticatedly.

I am very pleased that Premlatha alerted us to the exhibition. Not only did we get a chance to view her works, but also seeing the show and hearing Mr Manuelpillai’s lucid discourse was a brilliant introduction to a body of artistic creation of which I was unaware: The Madras Art Movement also known as ‘The Madras Movement’).

See the masterpieces before they go under the auctioneer’s hammer at Christies

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THE AUCTION HOUSE Christies was founded in London in 1766 by James Christie (1730-1803). Their main premises are on King Street, near St James Palace in the City of Westminster. Usually, the auction house is open to the public, who may enter and view the items waiting to be auctioned, and to watch or participate in an auction. Until 12 March 2026, works from the collection of the Belgian couple Roger and Josette Vanthournout, both now deceased, are up for sale. The sale is being held as a series of auctions over a period that extended from 25 February 2026 until 12 March 2026.

“Iron Baby” by Antony Gormley

The Vanthournout couple have been collecting art for over 60 years. At first, they collected Chinese vases, but soon after that, they began buying modern and contemporary art. Roger trained as an interior designer and ran a furniture store in Izegem, Aurora, which had been founded by his father in 1921. Josette (née T’Kint) was an artist and an art lover. From the 1950s onwards, the couple travelled a great deal, visiting art fairs where they engaged directly with artists, dealers and galleries. They tended to buy much of their art from artists, who had not yet achieved great fame, and by doing so acquired artworks at reasonable prices. And viewing the pieces on display at Christies today (5 March 2026), one can easily see that Roger and Josette both had a ‘good eye’, and bought wisely. After the widowed Josette died in 2025 aged 95, the family decided to sell the collection.

And what a collection it must have been, judging by what we saw on display at Christies. There were fine examples of artworks by, to name BUT A FEW: Josef Albers, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Rene Magritte, Henry Moore, Yayoi Kusama, Jean Arp, Lucio Fontana, Jean Dubuffet, Lynn Chadwick, Paul Delvaux, Jacques Lipchitz, Tracey Emin, and James Ensor. I was interested to see a couple of works by Victor Vasarely (1906-1997) because when I lived at home, we had one of his abstract prints hanging on the wall of our living room (I have not seen the print since 1991). There were several sculptures by Antony Gormley. These are quite unlike any of the many works I have seen by this artist. Josette and Roger were lucky to have these examples of his work.

The collection we saw at Christies was well-displayed and filled with an amazing array of art created in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Once they have been auctioned, many of the bought by private collectors and galleries far away from London, it will be a very long time, if ever, before they can be seen again by the London public.  

Because it is possible to see works of art that are not usually on public display, visiting Christies (and other auction houses) allows ‘the man (or woman) in the street’ to catch a glimpse of artists’ creations that are frequently not usually accessible except by their owners. And even if you have no intention of making a bid, the staff at Christies are most welcoming and willing to answer any questions you might have regarding the items awaiting auction.

By Moore it moved from Chelsea to near Tate Britain

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RECENTLY I NOTICED a sculpture close to Tate Britain but not within it.

When the Chelsea School of Art – now the Chelsea College of Art and Design – moved from Chelsea to Millbank next to Tate Britain, so did this sculpture by Henry Moore (1898-1986). Called “Two Piece Reclining Figure No 1” and created in 1959, this was originally placed in the Chelsea campus of the art school, where for a time in the 1930s Moore was Head of Sculpture. When the college relocated to Millbank, the Sculpture moved with it.

Between chance and control on sheets of paper

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THE ARTIST BARBARA Nicholls (born 1963) invited us to the opening of her solo show at the Patrick Heide Contemporary Art gallery in Church Street, near Edgware Road. All her creations on display are watercolours on paper. Each of them resembles what looks like a natural phenomenon, but an imagined one. Although her pictures do not depict actual natural occurrences, each one of them is a result of the artist exploiting the unpredictability of the behaviour of the materials she is using at the same time as exerting some control over how they behave. To give some idea of what I am trying to say, here is something written in the notes issued by the gallery:

“Nicholls’ operations begin at times with large-scale sheets of heavyweight paper laid flat on the studio floor. The physicality of her practice is vital; she moves across and over the surface, first guiding water into pools or creating delicate lines with transparent washes. Once water touches the paper, it no longer remains flat, requiring Nicholls to carefully manage the buckling surface as she introduces pigment, experimenting with how much liquid the paper can handle. The drying process can be natural or carefully controlled through appliances like electric fans and heaters, which create microclimates that accelerate evaporation, allowing layers of colour to settle and crystallise over time.”

In other words, the artist chooses the places on the paper  where the pigment and the water can be allowed to act as nature determines, and then lets them get on with it, producing whatever result the conditions permit. Thus, she covers the paper with a composition that is partly her choosing and partly the result of chemical and physical processes within the areas she has chosen for them to occur. The results are colourful abstract images, which are both beautiful and intriguing.

The exhibition continues until 21 June 2025.

Superb sculptures at a gallery in South London

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HE WAS BORN in Chicago (Illinois) in 1935 and as a child was often taken by his mother to public galleries in the city. Maybe at least partly because of this Richard Hunt, who died in December 2023, became an artist. In 1953, he was awarded a scholarship to study at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was there that his interest in working with metal began and that he became acquainted with the work of the leading modernist artists of the 20th century. He taugh himself welding, and many of his fascinating sculptures that are on display at the White Cube Gallery in Bermondsey (until 29 June 2025) can be seen, beautifully displayed.

Many of the sculptures consist of bits of waste metal that Hunt salvaged, modified, polished, and welded together. Other sculptures are made of cast metal. Many of Hunt’s works are abstract, but suggest to the viewer that they might also depict transformations of organic forms. Each of the sculptures is intriguing and original. The influences of other artists might be subtly evident in some of them, but they are not at all obvious. The gallery’s website noted:

“Hunt developed a sculptural language that was both deeply personal and richly associative, drawing on a broad array of influences: the forms and rhythms of the natural world; the mythic narratives of Greek and Roman antiquity; his cultural heritage and global travels; the formal vocabulary of European modernism and the legacy of African American civil rights leaders who shaped his time.”

 As one looks at the works on display, many of the things in the quote above become apparent.

Although some of the works at White Cube are quite small, Hunt has produced many huge works – too large to be within the White Cube – that are displayed in public places. I thought that Hunt’s sculptures were wonderful, and was surprided that until visiting this show I had not been aware of his work.  The show at the White Cube was quite a wonderful eye-opener for me and I can strongly recommend seeing it.

Traditional inlaid metalwork used to make contemporary art

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BIDRI WORK IS a method for creating decorative metal items. Its name derives from Bidar in Karnataka,  where this technique was developed and is still used. Objects are made by casting a black coloured alloy containing copper and zinc in the proportion 1: 16. Then, craftsmen use fine chisels to engrave often very intricate patterns on the surface of the cast alloy. These grooves are then filled by hammering fine silver wire into them. So, the resulting item is a dark metal object inlaid with silver.

 

Today, 8 February 2025, we visited the Kaash gallery, which is housed in a well-preserved traditional Bangalore bungalow. One of the three small exhibitions currently being displayed is a collection of Bidri art works. The artefacts were designed by Stephen Cox, a British artist, and were made by Abdul Bari, a Bidri craftsman. The resulting artworks are both unusual and beautiful.

 

The two other exhibitions at Kaash were: colourful contemporary seating made by weavers from Tamil Nadu and designed by David Joe Thomas,  and some sculptures and lighting by Italian artist Andrea Anastasio.

 

Our visit to Kaash was very satisfying. Although small, it is a place in Bangalore that art-lovers should not miss.

Finding a box of photographs and rediscovering a forgotten artist

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UNTIL ABOUT 1991, my widowed father resided in my childhood home in northwest London. For as long as I can remember, there was a collection of black and white photographs in a cardboard Kodak photographic paper box. The photographs contained images of sculptures, which my mother Helen Yamey (1920-1980) had created at St Martins School of Art in London during the later 1950s and first half of the following decade. In 1991, my father married again, and moved from our childhood home to another address. Every now and then, after my father moved, I used to ask him what had happened to the photographs. He used to reply that he did not know where they were. Maybe, he suggested, they were stored somewhere in the garage of his new home. He died in 2020. After that, I thought that it was extremely unlikely that I would ever set eyes on the photographs again.

A year or two after my father’s demise, his widow, my stepmother, arranged to meet me at a café. When she arrived, she was carrying a plastic carrier bag, which she handed to me. To my great delight, I found that it contained the Kodak box filled with photographs of my mother’s sculptures. I posted a few of these images on the Internet. Some months after that, my friend Edesio mentioned that he was impressed by the images of my mother’s sculptures, and suggested to me that I should write something about my mother and her art. This I have done.

When I began writing my mother’s biography, our daughter Mala, who is an art historian and a curator, sent me a pdf file containing the contents of a catalogue of an exhibition held at London’s Grosvenor Gallery in the 1960s. It contained mention of some of my mother’s work that appeared in the exhibition. Mala did a little more research and discovered the existence of catalogues of other exhibitions in which my mother’s sculpture was included. I investigated these catalogues and came across a few more, I was surprised by what I discovered.

During the first half of the 1960s, my mother’s sculptures were selected to appear in exhibitions alongside artworks created by artists, many of whom are now quite famous. These include, to mention but a few, David Hockney, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Howard Hodgkin, Bridget Riley, Kim Lim, and LS Lowry. These exhibitions were held when I was between 8 and 13 years old. In those days, I was not particularly interested in my mother’s artistic activities and was too young for the names of these artists to mean anything to me. In addition, I do not recall even having been told that my mother was participating in exhibitions, let alone showing her work alongside that of these now famous creators.  So, until I studied these catalogues more than 40 years after my mother died, I had no idea that for a while she was in the vanguard of 20th century British sculpture. Had I not been stimulated into beginning to write about her, I would not have known that my mother, who never boasted about her achievements, had been an artist of such a high calibre.

I have written my memories of my mother in a book called “Remembering Helen: My Mother the Artist” (available from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DKCZ7J7X/) . In it I have tried to describe her upbringing; what she was like as a mother; and her achievements in the world of sculpture. I have included many of the images I found in the box of photographs, and our daughter has written some insightful notes on her grandmother’s sculptural styles and the techniques. I hope that my book will help bring my mother’s artistic  achievements out of obscurity. Modest as she was, I feel that it would be good if she were to get at least a little of the fame she deserved.

Inverted images by an artist born in Germany at a gallery in London

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CERTAIN IMAGES IMMEDIATELY come to mind when the names of some artists are mentioned. For Vincent Van Gogh it is sunflowers; for Claude Monet it is waterlilies; for Salvador Dali it is melting clocks; and for Edvard Munch it is “The Scream”. In the case of the German artist Georg Baselitz (born as ‘Hans-Georg Kern’ in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, Germany in1938), mentioning his name conjures up inverted images: paintings in which the images appear to be upside down. He signs them with his signature, but it is not upside down.

Recently, we viewed an exhibition of this octogenarian’s latest paintings at the White Cube Gallery in London’s Bermondsey Street. The show is on until the 16th of June 2024. If you miss it, you will not have missed much worth seeing. As you can tell, I was not over-impressed by what I saw, but it did get me thinking about why the artist often chooses to paint his subjects – human and others – upside down.

Does he choose to do this because his childhood in Germany was spent in a country that had been turned upside down by the Nazi regime, the 2nd World War, and its immediate aftermath in the early years of the German Democratic Republic? The White Cube website quotes the artist as having said:

“I’ve got my early childhood drawings of eagles, stags, deer, dogs and so on in folders,’ Baselitz remarks. ‘Every now and then I look at them, and I think was it a good time, was it a bad time?”

Or does he paint his images upside down to attract the viewer – to make his artwork ‘stand out from the crowd’? Alternatively, does he invert his images so that the viewer is forced to consider not only the subject matter, but also his painting techniques (brush strokes, colour choices, and so on)?

I do not know the answers to these questions. However, I am glad I have seen the exhibition, which did not particularly thrill me, because it did stimulate me to consider his art a little more that I had expected.

Paintings by artists in India who escaped from western European artistic traditions – at the Brunei Gallery

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WHENEVER I VISITED my in-laws in India, I used to admire the painting by the Bengali artist Jamini Roy (1887-1972), which used to hang in their flat. His style of painting was both modern (20th century) and at the same time almost folkloric. When our friend Bob Annibale posted on Facebook about an exhibition at the Brunei Gallery (in London’s Bloomsbury) that included Roy’s works, we could not resist visiting it, and we were glad we viewed it.

The exhibition, which continues until the 22nd of June 2024, not only contains a good selection of Roy’s works, but also others by Bengali artists working mainly between the late 19th century and the 1950s. Apart from works by Roy’s contemporaries including various members of the Tagore family, Hemendranath Mazumdar, Nandalal Bose, and Qamrul Hassan, there were also paintings by lesser-known or unknown artists who painted in the traditional late 19th century Bengali (Kalighat) style, rather than in experimental styles of the 20th century.

The emergence of modern Indian painting was a consequence of the establishment of The Government College of Art in Calcutta (in 1854). As the website of the Brunei Gallery explained, it was:

“… established by a benevolent government for the purpose of revealing to the Indians the superiority of European art.”

In the late 19th century, Indian artists working in the college began questioning the validity of Indians painting in the alien Western European fashion that was being taught them. The gallery’s website continued:

“Academic art, introduced by the British Raj, was challenged by the nationalist art movement, the Bengal School of painting, led by Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951) and his disciples who dominated the art scene in the first decades of the twentieth century.”

It is works by these artists, who used their creations as part of their expressions of desire to see India free of British rule, that form the greater part of the show at the Brunei.

Several things particularly interested me whilst viewing the excellently curated and displayed exhibition. One was three paintings by Jamini Roy that illustrate Christian themes (e.g., the Crucifixion, the Last Supper, and the Flight to Egypt). I had not before seen any of Roy’s paintings depicting Christian stories.  Another exciting discovery for me were a selection of paintings by Sunayani Devi (1875-1962), who was the sister of the artists Abanindranath Tagore and Gaganendranath Tagore, some of whose pictures are also hung in the show. These 3 siblings had a famous uncle, Rabindranath Tagore, some of whose paintings were also on show. At the exhibition, there were portraits of Rabindranath Tagore by each of his above-mentioned relatives, and one by Jamini Roy.

Yet another artist on show, whom I had never encountered, is Qamrul Hassan (1921-1988), who was born later than the other artists. Born in Calcutta before independence and the Bangladesh War (1971), he died in what is now Bangladesh. He studied at The Government College of Art in Calcutta in the late 1930s, and afterwards became involved with left wing political activities as well as his art. Later, he was active in the struggle for East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to become independent of what was then West Pakistan. Beneath one of his creations at the Brunei, there is a quotation by Qamrul about his style of painting:

“… where Jamini Roy ends , I begin …”

And this is so easy to see in the excellent exhibition at the Brunei Gallery

I have told you what stood out for me, but although I have highlighted a few things, the rest of the exhibits are wonderful, and not to be ‘sniffed at’. After seeing the show, I thought that never before had I seen such a fine and large collection of paintings by the liberated artists either here in the UK or in India. The curators of this show deserve hearty congratulations.