By Natalie Bennett

The tradition of European painting started out small and intimate. Paintings were kept in cabinets, little more than book-sized, and brought out for intimates to share and admire. But around the 16th century that changed – they became larger, more items of general display to impress anyone who entered the room.

It was a change that didn’t happen in Indian painting, which remained small scale and usually on paper, maintaining a delicacy and intimacy lost in the larger European works. A new exhibition at the British Museum suggests what might have happened had European art stayed small, while also offering an insight into a tradition immediately, viscerally, foreign to our own.

The key difference is in realism, or the lack thereof. In Indian paintings psychological insight was regarded as more interesting than photographic reality – the aim is to convey information and elicit an emotional response, rather than accurately depict a single scene.

Having said all of that, the exhibition opens with its single large-scale work, an almost life-size image on paper of Maharana Karan Singh of Mewar (died 1628) painted a half-century after his death. Here we’re not far from the traditional European ruler portrait – all the symbols are there: imperial jewelry, weapons and sash, and he holds a flower just as Mughal emperors did in their portraits.

But after that the visitor familiar chiefly with European traditions is on unfamiliar ground, and will quickly learn new terms, and new ways of looking at paintings.
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by Natalie Bennett

There’s a question feminists have been asking for a long time: do professions lose status because women join them, or are women allowed into professions only when they are losing status? (Doctors in Russia – who through the 20th century had relatively low status compared to their compatriots in Western Europe – are the classic example.)

As I passed around the Crafting Beauty exhibition, presented by the British Museum in association with the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, that old question was at the front of my mind. In the West, by and large, women’s “craft” has had poor status, low expectations as opposed to men’s “art”. It has been left, by and large, to “the ladies”. It’s not that way in Japan, and it seems that, at least in most of the celebrated national crafts, the women have never, and still are not, getting a look-in, not being given that peculiarly Japanese status of “Living National Treaure”.

I’m through the pottery section and well into metalwork before I find the first woman, Osumi Yukie (born 1945) with ‘Sea Breeze’, a vase in hammered silver decoated with inlay. Ripples on the surface of the vase are laid on ripples of darker inlay, which overlay the rhythmic base pattern of hammering. You are looking into the depths of the universe.

Finally, in textiles, there are more women – which you might, perhaps Eurocentrically, expected. The spectacular kiminos, made by patient wood-block printing or sometimes through fancy weaving techniques were traditionally designed and made by men but now women artists are increasingly influential says the exhibition; a claim that the presentation of the work of four women and nine men almost supports.

With lacquer however we are back to an all-male cast, although this part of the exhibition generates the positive though that if you can do all these things with lacquer and bamboo — pretty environmentally friendly materials — you really don’t need plastics. A rich red orange “Tray with Handle” by Masumura Kiichora has the shape but a glorious depth of volour and an organic shape no petrochemical could quite match.
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by Natalie Bennett

When Andre Breton and Louis Aragon led the disruption of the 1926 Paris premiere of the Romeo and Juliet for which the sets had been designed by Max Ernst and Joan Miro, they were complaining about selling out. “It is inadmissable that ideas should be at the behest of money,” their leaflet read: they wanted to keep the ideal that surrealism was essentially subversive.

It is another surrealist set, Giorgio de Chirico’s for the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo’s Le Bal of 1929, that opens the Surreal Things exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and it seems, in this room, that art and commerce can live together, can both flourish. In this production the dancers were styled as walls, columns, architraves, statues, that came alive for one night, and the imaginative leap is exciting, enrapturing, helped by the display of this static set in three dimensions, so that the visitor can look in from the wings, and from back stage.

Yet as the exhibition progresses it is clear that the surrealists did lose something, perhaps everything, in their eagerness to be co-opted by the seductions of wealth. A Man Ray photo of a model in a design-name evening gown reclining in Oscar Dominguez’s “Brouette” (a wheelbarrow lined with plush red satin) doesn’t so much scream “sell-out” as ooze it from every tiny, manicured pore.
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By Natalie Bennett

Early in the exhibition of “England’s First View of America” now in its final days at the British Museum, is a spectacular vellum map of the world, more than 2m long, made about 1550 by Pierre Deceliers of Dieppe. Maps like this would have been hung on the walls of the Elizabethan court. It features not just geography, but exotic wild beasts, wealthy foreign kings, lush strange landscapes – this was the cyber world of its day: new, threatening, strange, unknown in its impact on the comfortable, known Europe.

So Amerigo Vespucci wrote in 1505:

The people are thus naked, handsome, brown, well_formed in body…they also fight with each other. They also eat each other even those who are slain. And have no government.

It is clearly the last sentence that is the most threatening.

Yet when the painter and adventurer John White went on the English 1585 expedition to the Americas his mission was different – it was to record the plants and animals and people encountered, to try to make them known, safe, familiar.
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by Natalie Bennett

Sacred, the exhibition at the British Library, undoubtedly has a tough task: the stated aim is to put some of the great texts – the physical objects – of the three “religions of the book” – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – on display, but that’s a task fraught with the potential for dangerous controversy.

That the curators have chosen to bend over backwards to avoid offence is only to be expected, so don’t hope for any brilliant insights from the text of this exhibition, or radical interpretations. Descriptions tend to range from the banal (“within most church buildings an altar or Communion table forms an important feature”) to the kowtowing: “No Christian tests are known to have been written during Jesus’ lifetime on earth.” You can see the priest leaning over the curator’s shoulder there.

That doesn’t, however, mean that it isn’t worth seeing – for over the past two millennia a huge amount of the human race’s greatest creative efforts (and monetary resources) went into supporting these three faiths, so the objects themselves are unmissable, even if, as I’d recommend, you ignore the interpretative captioning.

If these books could talk how much more would we know about the last millennia and more? Three Coptic biblical manuscripts are displayed with the simple pot in which they were found with coins from Justinian I, Justin and Maurice Tiberius. They were probably buried during the Persian occupation of Egypt c 616-26, when many Coptic clergy fled.
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By Natalie Bennett

As your bus passes up the Kingsland Road, you might wonder where it is taking you. In this densely packed mass of council estates, dubious mobile phone shops and dismal “convenience” stores, are you really going to find a history museum? But fear not, for soon, looming up on your right as you leave the city behind, is a vision of peace, tranquility and Georgian benevolence – the Geffrye Museum.

It is the complex of almshouses founded in 1714 by Ironmongers’ Company in memory of Sir Robert Geffrye, a wealthy member who left a large part of his estate for philanthropic purposes. Once there were 14 houses with accommodation for 50 pensioners in total, each having their own room.

By 1912, however, the once rural almshouses had been swallowed by urbasisation and the pensioners were moved out of London, the local council seeing the need most of all to preserve the front garden as a badly needed “lung” for the area. The building was re-opened in 1918 as a museum of furniture and woodwork.

Today it styles itself as a museum of “the middling sort”, focusing on domestic interiors and gardens from Tudor to modern times. That there might be a certain irony in celebrating the middle classes in one of the most deprived areas of London is undeniable – but perhaps it is best regarded as an aspirational approach.
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