Art

Unexposed photographic paper is akin to John Locke’s tabula rasa. Translated from the Latin, the surface was a ‘clean slate’, a uniform grey, ready to receive the white chalk marks of thought and experience. He qualified this by saying that at birth the mind is a “white paper, void of all characters, without ideas”. So too in the photographer’s darkroom, the unexposed photographic paper is an unblemished white surface.

The Frick Collection has a temporary home in the Bauhaus-concrete Breuer Building on Madison Avenue in New York. It is replete with remarkable works of art collected by Henry Clay Frick (1849 - 1919), the coke and steel industrialist, who bequeathed his art collection and its residence to a Board of Trustees. The public may view all of it.

There is much to delight the eye in the newly re-opened Courtauld Art Gallery in London. Although the paintings remain the same within their newly-pristine environment, one sees them more clearly thanks to lighting which is superb, unobtrusively shadowless and encourages close inspection.

Rants don’t usually contain reasoned explanations. Although this may sound like one, it therefore isn’t - as you will see. The BBC Sounds app (for Android) is so unfit for purpose that one reviewer on Google Play described it as “a gigantic steaming Turd of an app”.

London’s Tate Modern is home to some gorgeous Bridget Riley canvases, huge rectangles of rhombic mosaics, in shifting colour that one can stand in front of and lose oneself in. A fifteen minute stroll west along the embankment, the Hayward Gallery seems to have all of them and then carpet bombs the place with a massive selection of the artist’s extraordinary, life-long output. The gallery’s airy spaces are filled with a veritable cornucopia of her work, spanning from 1947 to today.

Flowers in a glass vase by the Dutch painter Jacob van Walscapelle is only midway in size between A1 and A2 paper sizes, an oil painting dwarfed by many of the larger canvases around it at the V&A Museum in London. What it lacks in scale it makes up for in quality. It is as if the light-infused oil paint applied just after the middle of the 17th century is still blazing off its canvas some 350 years later.