The Lure Of The East - British Orientalist Painting at Tate Britain

I squeezed in a trip to Tate Britain earlier this week to see this exhibition before it closes at the end of the month. It is a selection of paintings from British artists who travelled around the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East throughout the nineteenth century capturing the landscapes, religious places and local traditions of the area.

I particularly enjoyed the beautiful landscapes in there, which captured the hazy beauty of the land really well.

Radical Light at The National Gallery

The National Gallery currently is currently showing an exhibition by the name of 'Radical Light' featuring a group of Italian painters who worked in Milan towards the end of the 19^th century. I went along after work on Wednesday evening to investigate.

The exhibition apparently marks a change in direction for the NG, focusing on a smaller, lesser well know movement - Italian Divisionism - rather than opt for a big name ‘blockbuster’. Time will tell how successful this will be but my own opinion was that it is a move that should be celebrated.

It was a fairly small show - only 6 rooms. It began with a selection of landscapes showcasing the painting technique which has given rise to their name - the Divisionists. The paintings definitely have a distinct luminosity to them and the sense of light emanating from the canvas is immediately tangible. The exhibition makes quite a lot of this stylistic innovation and whereas it is undoubtedly effective the real merit for me lay in the political and social themes that were represented in the artists’ work.

The show moves on to feature images of Italy’s poor in scenes of social hardship - women working without respite in the rice fields or old men taking refuge in the church (one of highlights for me was the stark ‘The Christmas Of Those Left Behind’ by Morbelli).

Room 4 is arguably the strongest of the exhibition. It is dominated by Giuseppe Pellizza’s ‘The Living Torrent’, a powerful piece depicting a faceless, amorphous, concentrated crowd of workers in pursuit of justice. It is an imposing piece and I found it almost cinematic in certain ways. It has been called socialism’s greatest painting and it is easy to see why.

There are a few other pieces which also incorporate some of these social issues. The politicisation of these artists was what I will take from the exhibition - if you look at Italian history around the period it certainly was an eventful time - social unrest followed by government repression, assassination of the reigning monarch and eventual trade union legislation. It seems quite appropriate how the art of the Divisionists reflected these slightly turbulent times.

On a separate point while I was at the NG I took the opportunity to check out some of the paintings by Canaletto, Claude & Turner - some of the most beautiful art you will ever see!

Caramel

Just got back from seeing Caramel at the PCC. It is a movie set in Beirut and follows the lives of a number of women who work in and around a beauty salon. The events unfurl at a modest, reflective pace as the circumstances of each of the characters are slowly revealed. Throughout the film we witness moments of sadness, humour, disappointment, happiness and poignancy.



The director Nadine Labaki also features in the film as Layale, a young Lebanese woman who works in 'Si Belle', the small beauty salon. The movie shows that despite the troubled political situation of Lebanon its citizens still lead lives which contain the kind of small preoccupations and personal concerns that affect us all. The themes of love, marriage, tradition, sexuality and family all appear. The fact that no mention is made to the recent war with Israel ensures this message is carried through with quiet strength. The dedication at the end of the film adds a nice, silently moving touch.

Overall I enjoyed the film very much. It is very easy to watch, is beautifully shot and falls into the category of film that carries a message without ever overstating its case.