With strings of pearls and collars of lace - #SargentAndFashion is now open at Tate Britain.
Discover Sargent’s use of fashion as a powerful tool to express identity and personality with nearly 60 portraits https://bit.ly/3RTc3iA
Until 7 July 2024. Members go free.
As everyone on TwiX seems to be an expert on the subject of John Singer Sargent - see my timeline! - here are some more of my favourite works in the big Tate Britain tribute to Sargent and Fashion. I know they are all portraits of women but that’s where Sargent hit his bullseyes! pic.twitter.com/aboj665YNq
"Delve into the strange and magical world of pastels
Liotard's pastel and oil versions of 'The Lavergne Family Breakfast' have been reunited for first time in 250 years.
Book to visit our free exhibition: http://bit.ly/3gR1VIO"
In London, the Piano Nobile Gallery presents the exhibition - R.B. Kitaj: London to Los Angeles. This short film features interviews with Marco Livingstone, a leading specialist on Kitaj’s work; Simon Martin, Director of Pallant House Gallery; and the artist’s daughter Dominie Kitaj.
R.B. Kitaj: London to Los Angeles is the first retrospective of the artist’s work in a decade. It provides a chronological overview of Kitaj's career, exploring the relationship between his art and the places he lived.
The Piano Nobile Gallery explains that "Although he travelled widely, spending seasons and sometimes whole years in California, Catalonia, Paris and New York, Kitaj made London his home from 1959 – the year he entered the Royal College of Art – until 1997. For the last decade of his life, from 1997 to 2007, he lived in Los Angeles. The exhibition includes little-known early work of the fifties, the groundbreaking ‘collagist’ work of the sixties that established his reputation, and the life drawings and glowing paintings of the seventies, continuing through to Kitaj's rediscovery of painting in the eighties and his final period in Los Angeles. An accompanying publication includes original essays by Andrew Dempsey, Marco Livingstone and Colin Wiggins, in addition to extended excerpts from Kitaj’s letters to Livingstone, now held by the Tate Archive and published here for the first time."
Gregg Chadwick Changes - David Bowie 41.5"x25.5"pastel on paper 2016
On January 8, 1935 Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi and in Brixton, London on January 8, 1947, David Bowie was born.
Bowie's decades of groundbreaking music and his shapeshifting persona inspired so many of us little aliens in suburbia to fight against conformity and become our true selves. My artwork looks back on Bowie when he released his haunting song "Where Are We Now?", which is as much a painting in soft greys as it is a song. A quiet rhythm of drums and synth warp and weft with minor key piano chords and Bowie's plaintive, elegiac voice. Set in a Berlin of memory and dream, Bowie's voice and lyrics question the themes of human bondage, release, freedom, doubt, ageing, and death. Bowie lived in West Berlin between 1976 and 1979 in the Schöneberg district in a house with Iggy Pop while Brian Eno and Tony Visconti were helping record Bowie's Berlin trilogy of albums Low, Heroes, and Lodger in the now legendary Hansa Studios. Years later, Bowie looks back in "Where Are We Now?" and echoes his words about Low, "Berlin has the strange ability to make you write only the important things. Anything else you don't mention."
The political and the personal merge in my pastel painting of Bowie. We are left with existential questions and are reminded that bodies age, marriages end, friendships dissolve and memories fade. But Bowie's quietly defiant voice does not give in to any dying of the light.
Henri Maillardet's Automaton at The Franklin Institute
In November 1928, the fire scarred remains of a mechanical boy were dropped off at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Left in pieces, it took months of painstaking work to reassemble the automaton. Little was known about the history of this extraordinary object. Like the automaton in Brian Selznick's magical, graphic novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Martin Scorsese's wonderful film adaptation of the book now simply entitled Hugo, the machine itself provided the clue to its origins.
When the complicated cogs and mechanisms were repaired and the machine was rewound for the first time in decades, the automaton's hand began to draw. Remarkably the machine's mechanical memory, held four drawings and three poems (illustrated below). One of the poems finished with a signature in French, "Ecrit par l'Automate de Maillardet." The mechanical boy signed the name of his creator - Maillardet.
Further research led to the Swiss watch-maker and automaton creator Henri Maillardet. Working primarily in London, Maillardet seems to have created The Franklin Institute's Automaton before 1800 while working in the mechanical shop of Pierre Jaquet-Droz. The Franklin Institute believes that Maillardet created only one other automaton that could write. This missing masterpiece wrote in Chinese and was created for the Emperor of China and given as a gift by King George III of England.
Mysteries still remain. How did the automaton get to the United States? Why did it end up in Philadelphia? A clue might be found in the fire damaged state of the automaton upon its delivery at the Franklin Institute.
It is known that the circus impresario and showman P.T. Barnum collected curios, including automata, and housed them in his museums in New York that were destroyed by fire. Perhaps the Franklin Institute's mechanical boy was saved from P.T. Barnum's smoldering collection - waiting for someone to turn his key once more.
Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret was inspired by the Franklin Institute's Automaton.
In this video shot at the museum, Selznick discusses Maillardet's Automaton and its influence on his book.
Above:
Four Drawings and Three Poem's Written by Maillardet's Restored Automaton at the Franklin Institute
Charles Penniman adjusts Maillardet's Automaton at the Franklin Institute.
A Still From Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" Illustrating His Adaptation of Maillardet's Automaton
Henri Maillardet's Automaton at The Franklin Institute and More From CBS Sunday Morning
Henri Maillardet's Automaton at The Franklin Institute
Discover Sargent’s use of fashion as a powerful tool to express identity and personality with nearly 60 portraits 
bit.ly/3RTc3iA
