A bumper year for art

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Despite the challenging economic climate and government cuts, art is being seen as good value for money and a huge source of pleasure. In fact the world of art appears to be doing well. Tate Galleries had one of their most successful years to date in 2012–13, with total visitor numbers of 7.74 million to its four galleries. More people visited Tate Modern than ever before – 5.5 million, retaining its position as the most visited gallery of modern and contemporary art in the world, and the second most popular tourist attraction in the UK.

And it is not just in major cities that art is appreciated. Last month I attended the press view of Masterpieces of East Anglia. The range and scope of this exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at University of East Anglia impressed on me just what a huge subject art is, with objects ranging from a flint hand axe dating from 700,000 BC, to a Lotus 72, a car from 1970 which was probably the most successful design of a racing car in Formula 1 history. The paintings include amongst others masterpieces by Francis Bacon, Gainsborough, L.S. Lowry and J.M.W. Turner. The scope and breadth of visual art in this part of the UK is immense.

Melanie Burnell, the founder of Artists Info, a website for selling art, tells her personal story to Cassone. She launched the website in March this year and it is already top of Google and YouTube. She and her partner have over 80,000 weekly art followers and have just been nominated as the best online art gallery.

 It is Autumn and our feature by Jenny Kinsley this month on Canals is somehow fitting. One can picture those ribbons of silver placidly weaving their way through the mists in our countryside and cities. Jenny visited the London Canal Museum, and writes on canal art, which among the boat people was very much a male preserve.

Back in June 2011 we carried an article by Elizabeth Herridge on the Western market for Chinese art.  This month we have our first piece on the rapidly evolving art market in the Far East. Josh Bateman, based in Asia, tells us that China's art industry with new museums and its new revenue records for art works  can only increase its global influence.

Our reviews in this issue are many and varied. Patricia Andrew has been very busy on Cassone’s behalf  in Edinburgh this year. She writes on the exhibition of ‘Leonardo Da Vinci: Mechanics of Man’ at The Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh, where you can see Leonardo’s amazing studies of the human body. These include a set of his finest sheets, collectively known as ‘Anatomical Manuscript A’, never before displayed in its entirety in the UK. A really impressive aspect of this exhibition is that his drawings are hanging alongside 21st-century medical imagery. Unless you are squeamish this is not to be missed.

Patricia also went to Mary, Queen of Scots: ‘In the End is My Beginning’, which was this summer’s major exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland. Mary was and always will be an elusive fascinating woman. Both these exhibitions are on until 17 November, so do not miss them if you are based in or can get to Edinburgh.

Alexander Adams reviews two books for us on Austrian Expressionist painter Egon Schiele, one of which shows images from  the pages of a previously unpublished sketchbook of Schiele’s early years. Schiele wasn't a child prodigy but this book does show signs of the artist he was to become.

In the UK, October is National Photography month. One of its key aims is to encourage greater numbers of people to get involved in photography.  Our review of book on Erwin Blumenfeld by Gilly Turney gives us a wonderful example of the man who photographed beautiful women and in the process, as Gilly tell us, revolutionized the world of fashion photography and set the standards still adhered to today. He was the first photographer to produce an image incorporating the white space around the subject – something accepted as the norm today but a technique untried before he invented it.

Ros Ormiston reviews a book on a leading Canadian architectural practice, Frances Follin discovers how a wealthy Jewish family collected and preserved Christian embroideries, and Robert Radford looks at how images were disseminated in the days before photography made it easy. All this and much more, in October's Cassone.

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