St Albans Town Hall, I have described in the past as the ugliest building in England. Maybe unfair but growing up and going to school there, seeing the decaying mock classical edifice on a daily basis informed my view. Can you imagine my delight now seeing it in its new form as twenty-first century Art…
Category: Gallery Visits
Jeff Koons at Oxford
The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, claims in its introduction, to be the world’s oldest purpose built public museum; founded in the world’s oldest University (in the English speaking world.) The initial collection was based on the curios assembled by the Tradescant dynasty in Lambeth, in the seventeenth century. It was opened by Elias Ashmole in…
Edward Burne Jones
Tate membership brings many benefits and I am grateful to my family for buying me an annual card in a (not very) secret Santa draw last year. We made our first trip to London for a while to visit Tate Modern last week, to test the membership and view the retrospective of Sir Edward Burne…
Tate Liverpool – Fernand Léger
Fernand Léger and Liverpool seem such good companions. Léger, the great twentieth century avant-garde artist and Liverpool, home of the Beatles and the sixties cultural revolution. Although Léger died in 1955 you feel he would have been absolutely at home in that great artistic decade where, if you did not know better, you would have…
New Painting to Enjoy
There is a new “Painting to Enjoy” Pierre Auguste Renoir, The Dance at Bougival, 1883, The Museum of Fine Art, Boston, Massachusetts. We have happy memories of a round the world trip culminating in Boston to view this lovely painting.