@thecommonviewer.bsky.social
Independent researcher. British Art Groups 1830s-1930s. Early 20th century Art & Visual Culture: London, Paris, Moscow & beyond. Work in (slow) progress: "Nancy Cunard - An Uncommon Viewer".
'The Orange Seller.' (c1960) Reginald Brill was an English social realist and narrative painter whose work primarily depicts the lives of ordinary people and the landscapes that they inhabit.
Today would have been Brynhild Parker's birthday as she was born on 10th February 1907. Attached herewith are her paintings of "Saloon Bar(1931)": "Appledore(1932)": "Islington Street Scene(1935)" & "Windy Day on Marine Parade, Southend(1930)"ex the collection at the Beecroft Gallery, Southend #botd
Pearl Binder (artist, writer, & East End chronicler): ‘the future of European Culture is being decided on Spanish soil. All sincere writers must support the legal Spanish Government in its heroic struggle for learning and liberty against the dark forces of General Franco. Ralph Fox was one of us.’
'Watney's Red', Hammersmith (1970s) by Ruskin Spear
(Private collection)
A film currently screening at Sundance Film Festival in Utah offers a unique look into the Harlem Renaissance. Once Upon a Time in Harlem gathers footage from a gathering at Duke Ellington’s home of some of the movement’s most important figures.
buff.ly/FKIsM4q
#BookoftheWeek
Venice Requiem by @khalidlym.bsky.social, translated by Ros Schwartz and published by @hoperoadpublish.bsky.social — “A vibrant and poetic tribute to all African migrants. A necessary book” (Jury of the Alain Spiess Second Novel Prize).
👉 www.hoperoadpublishing.com/books/venice...
Samuel John Peploe was born #OnThisDay in 1871 🎨
Read about the success story of the Scottish Colourist 👉 https://artuk.org/discover/stories/samuel-john-peploe-the-success-story-of-a-scottish-colourist
📷 National Galleries of Scotland
Sober and compelling, interview with Andrey Kurkov Viva Ukraine! @meganjgibson.bsky.social www.newstatesman.com/internationa...
A fascinating evening with artist Helen Cammock and architectural historian Andrew Jones discussing The Line in East London!
US born painter Ethel Sands,
The Pink Box, 1913 #Womensart
Fun fact: Cunard composed a poem while sitting for McCown's 1923 portrait. Her unpublished typescript can also be found in @ransomcenter.bsky.social's collections.
For further details, check out Tracy Bonfitto's blog post from last March: sites.utexas.edu/ransomcenter...
#speccolls #humanities 🗃️📜📚
my piece on Nancy Cunard for forthcoming Inque magazine No.3
Matthew Beeber's fascinating reading of Negro alongside Los poetas - “Nancy Cunard and the 1930s Coalitional Anthology.”
doi.org/10.1215/0010...
It's lovely, though I've also enjoyed the portrait of Nancy Cunard which has been on display in the lobby while Frida was on tour.
youtu.be/QbwVJt32wB0?...
(I've only seen a few of the Diego & Frida drawings, which are similarly impressive...)
'Nancy Cunard,' (1919) seen here in a portrait by the Chilean painter Álvaro Guevara is the subject for numerous works of art including a Brâncusi sculpture and a study by Kokoschka. Guevara studied at the Slade and was at the heart of the Bloomsbury and Chelsea sets.
I curated this exhibition and it is on at Charleston in Lewes until April. You absolutely don’t need to have read my novel to appreciate the works on show. AND It has pictures that have never been seen in public before!
Looking forward to this!
'Gatti’s Hungerford Palace of Varieties. Second Turn of Katie Lawrence' (1903) by Walter Sickert
(Yale Art Gallery)
Gabriele Münter,
Dahlias, 1945
Expression painter
#Womensart
‘She hates Gorky and Tolstoy (“a graphomaniac”). She admits few influences and even fewer heirs. Asked to name five great novels, she refused: “I’m not a reader, I’m a writer.”’
Natasha Fedorson on the Russian novelist Ludmilla Petrushevskaya:
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Russia’s largest book publisher Eksmo has shut down its embattled young-adult literature subsidiary Popcorn Books, which became a primary target of the Kremlin’s crackdown on so-called “LGBT extremism.”
John Constable’s understanding of the landscape, gained as a reluctant apprentice in his father’s corn business, set him apart from his contemporaries. Plough technology, barge-caulking, dunghills… it was all, ultimately, grist to his mill, writes Susan Owens
'Far from a literary gimmick, the novel comes across as an urgent call to resist complacency and recover one’s vitality in the face of injustice. It’s a stunner.' @publisherswkly.bsky.social gives THE DISAPPEARING ACT by Maria Stepanova, tr. Sasha Dugdale: www.publishersweekly.com/9780811239400
In the 1950s, the artist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun published a rapturous account of her travels in Ireland. Philippa Conlon considers what her writing says about the surreal ways in which she saw – and painted – the world
'Child in the Sun.' (1869) Trained in Naples, Giuseppe de Nittis settled in Paris in 1868, and there he befriended many of the French Impressionists, particularly Degas who taught him how to depict the changing play of light on a subject or a scene.
NEW REVIEWS in britishartjournal.co.uk. Roderick Conway Morris reviews a glorious exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery of the work of one of Denmark’s greatest artists, Anna Archer (1859–1935). David Stacey offers more thoughts on the Wright of Derby exhibition at the National Gallery
The ghost of the Cambridge classical scholar Jane Harrison haunts the pages of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One's Own (1929). Here's my post on the layers of connections, for over 30 years, these two writers shared.
Constable’s father ‘does not sound like a man who would have been happy to allow a capable son to wander around sketching all day when there was a business to be managed’. But once free of the family agriculture business, writes Susan Owens, the artist turned his practical knowledge to painterly use
This is "The Mill" by Phyllis Bray from 1933. The scene depicted was at Chalford in Gloucestershire on a section of the Thames and Severn canal. The round-house to the right on the canal bank was one of five "lengthmen's" houses: a distinctive feature of the Thames & Severn canal. #PhyllisBray