in vestigiis

You can now read my article Key Hill Cemetery: The Living Among the Dead on curationspace.com !

We often think of museums and art galleries as static. The buildings associated with them are landmarks, and therefore geographically fixed, they are known for their permanent collections, which are generally confined to the same sequence of rooms, and they also present material which most people think belongs in a museum, entailing that there are places the…

As some of you may have noticed, posts here have become rather sporadic lately. This is related to some quite exciting news, which I can share with you now.  For the last few months or so, I have been working with Dom on a new initiative, which has now been launched. Curation Space will feature posts by a variety…

The first words a visitor sees when they step through the doors of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery are ‘free public art gallery’ and ‘by the gains of Industry we promote Art’. They appear on what is aptly named ‘the inscription stone’, which was laid by Richard Chamberlain, then Mayor of Birmingham, in July 1881.…

Viewing art in Malaga revealed a few aspects of the presentation, or even ‘performance’, of artworks that often go unnoticed. The first, which was most evident at the Museo Picasso, is the effect that museum stewards have on our impressions of the artworks. It is true that the architecture and design of a space has…

Before visiting the Cara A Cara (‘Face to Face’) exhibition at Museo Picasso Malaga, I was quite oblivious to Picasso’s play with the past.  The exhibition claims that Picasso’s art was ‘profoundly rooted in the Old Masters of the Spanish Golden Age’ and that he ‘both perpetuated and transformed the traditions of the Spanish Masters’. Cara A Cara (21/02/22-26/06/22) brings…

The Ashmolean’s description of Pissaro: Father of Impressionism offers two hints at its objective. The first is the epithet given to Pissaro, ‘Father of Impressionism’, which implies that this exhibition will focus on the artist’s influence in the early development of the Impressionist style, as well as on other, later, artists of that ilk. Second, there is…

The first immersion of mine into the mind of Peter Paul Rubens occured last Summer at The Wallace Collection. Rubens: Reuniting the Great Landscapes was considered a once in a blue moon opportunity to see two of Rubens’ landscapes, which once hung together as part of the artist’s collection, reunited. A friend of mine expressed his disappointment…

The Classical— it’s often where museums of fine art choose to begin. The Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest (Szepmuveszeti Muzeum in Magyar, hereafter referred to as MFA) is no exception; its façade is an imposing colonnade embellished with Corinthian volutes and the slaying of centaurs, and the beginning of its collection, in the basement, is…

Most of the connections and locations of Leigh Fermor’s Budapest have been traced and relayed in Budapest in the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor, an article written for iNews by Michael O’Sullivan in 2019. It would be redundant to dwell on the ground covered by it (though I managed to visit the locations mentioned), therefore this…