Hello all and welcome back to my blog which I missed last week on account of not being arsed to do anything cultural – oops. This week I did quite a number of culturally related activities, however they all took place yesterday and I was rather hungover and out of it and to be honest didn’t quite catch the crest of any of the exhibition waves at any point alas. My cultural companion this week was the delightful Andrew, who I fear I have to apologies to for my slightly out of it countenance!We started back in my old student stomping ground of the Courtauld Institute which, somewhat scarily I don’t think I’ve entered for about 6 years. It’s such a shame it always looks such a mess these days – all winter it’s the hideously tacky headache of the naff ice rink and in the summer it seems to be either a film venue, a gig venue, or a fashion week venue and the rest of the time given over to corporate hospitality. Is there any point ever that you’re actually able to hang round in the beautiful be-fountained courtyard as in days of old??
The show, which closes next weekend, was Toulouse Lautrec and Jane Avril – Beyond the Moulin Rouge. I am very fond of Toulouse Lautrec and have been for many years, not to be too enormous a teenage girl stereotype but I actually did my A-Level art coursework on his Japanese influences – ahhh! I suppose since those days I have slightly abandoned him, when you come up against Manet and Degas I guess he does get rather cast in the shade but actually this exhibition, small as it was, totally re-awoke my love of him, he really was very good. As well as the famous one in the Courtauld the show had an impressive array of loans from across the UK and the states in a variety of mediums as you know it’s not all poster poster poster with old Toulouse I hear.
The standalone star of the show was definitely the large and incredibly rich oil painting At the Moulin Rouge which I have seen in reproduction but never in the flesh where it is a totally different and jaw dropping experience. When you think of Lautrec, or I suppose when I think of him, one naturally thinks of his strong graphic poster style or his sketchy textured painting style. This piece however was very highly worked with a decidedly choreographed composition (ok well clearly most compositions are well choreographed but you get what I mean!) and was somehow more surprising to me than the other works in the show. It has an incredible seedy air to it; the viewer is drawn towards the conspiratorial group in the centre yet at the same time repelled, turned away at the door perhaps by the sickly and haunting looking woman in the foreground. You’re not quite sure if she is accosting you or turning you out, probably because you are in no way going to be cool enough to hang round with the crème de la crème of avant garde Paris sitting in the centre. The central group, like the majority of the figures in the painting, are portraits of people who frequented or worked at the Moulin Rouge, I could list them but I can’t be arsed. They look engrossed yet somehow disjointed from each other, tightly knit in the same social circle yet you get the impression that each of the protagonists is in someway separate, caught up in their individual cares and concerns. In this group Avril has her back to us, showing us her elaborate coiffure, her high neck richly trimmed coat, and not much else. It seems to be the way Lautrec preferred to depict his favourite model; detached, unapproachable and unknown.Lautrecs single depictions of Avril seems to continue this theme. Nowhere does she ever seem to be smiling; rather she is always distant and seemingly in her own world.
The only time she doesn’t have this far away look in her eyes is when she is depicted dancing. However, even here she has an unnerving look about her. I didn’t really know much about her before the exhibition and assumed she was just the bog standard high kicking eye brow raising Moulin Rouge style dancer of the day but I was apparently wrong. Avrils fame, which was certainly bolstered by Lautrec yet at the same time independent of him, was linked to her notorious past where she was, for a time, put in a sanatorium style place because of a nervous breakdown or something. The popular press of the day loved to associate her jerky, dangerous dancing style with that of the hysterical woman, a theme close to the heart of the 19th century. This was a reputation which Avril, consciously or subconsciously, allowed to flourish and I can imagine it was the dangerous nature of her dance and her personality that attracted the avant garde of Paris at the time. The underground, unknown and seedy nature of the Moulin Rouge and its famous clientele is where the attraction lay no doubt, the thin line between the elite and the degenerate walked on a daily basis. Lautrecs own illness, mental and physical, was perhaps what attracted him so much to this particular woman. This is well represented in the below work.
One of the few works on display not depicting Avril was this work of the dancer La Goulue. One of the more risqué performers she was famed for wearing highly controversial see-through dresses for her dances. Here she is depicted in one such plunging outfit standing between her sister and her lover. She is grotesque and looks like one of the ugly sisters in Disney’s Cinderella. She stares at the viewer in a direct and slightly terrifying way. It seems this mix of the exotic, the repulsive, and the sexually deviant is what enticed the crowds of late 19th century Paris. 
After we had done with the Courtauld we wondered up to the National Gallery to see the show Devotion by Design; Italian altarpieces before 1500. I didn’t expect an awful lot from this as it’s just a reorganisation of pieces already in the collection and we assumed it would be in one of the small rooms they use to show free exhibitions in the main section of the gallery near the central foyer place. However, they had actually spent some cash on it and it was situated in the main exhibition space in the basement of the Sainsbury wing. I imagine I have moaned about this place before as it really is one of the worst exhibition spaces in London, which says a lot as my god there are some awful spaces in the main museums, I name the British Museum and the V&A as top offenders. However, like the Relics show currently on at the BM, the curators had embraced the dark claustrophobic gloom of the space and used it to their advantage – low lighting, purple walls and choral music helped create a really quite immersive experience. The central room was particularly fine with those clever pretend spluttering candles and a cross arranged in front of one altarpiece and the room around it arranged to resemble a haunting church to give the viewer a different experience to the usual National Gallery renaissance displays. The show went into some detail about the commercial nature of altarpiece production as well as the techniques and processes involved but to be honest by that point I had reached my information absorption limit and instead I just enjoyed looking at some familiar pieces afresh in a new context. 
We also had a very quick look around another free show there called Forests, Rocks and Torrents; Norwegian and Swiss Landscapes from the Lunde collections. I’m assuming said Lunde collection, wherever that may be, are having some sort of refit or flooding problem and asked the NG to take some of their crap off their hands for a bit so it doesn’t get damp or something because my god this show was pointlessly dull. I thought maybe they would be some Romantic landscapes, and you know I like a bit of the sublime as much as the next person, but there was decidedly no sublime here, no sublime at all:
Cheerio folks xx