Welcome to April's Cassone

Associated media

Springtime for art!

In Britain the clocks have all gone forward and we are now officially in British Summertime. The clocks' going forward does give an extra hour to enjoy all the many forms of art that surround us and hopefully we will have some lovely summer evenings to do so.

An exhibition I recently visited is the ‘Homage to Manet’ in Norwich Castle. Focusing on the period from 1860 to about 1914, the exhibition comprises approximately 40 works including oils, prints and drawings on loan from national, regional and private collections. Manet's Portrait of Mademoiselle Claus, painted in 1868, is the star of the show and is exhibited alongside selected works by fellow artists and supporters such as Claude Monet, John Singer Sargent, Walter Sickert and Philip Wilson Steer. The main theme of this pleasing exhibition is how Manet’s vision of women influenced the way that other artists depicted female subjects, and how did his art change the way that we look at women in art today? Alongside the artists already mentioned are paintings by Gwen John, Vanessa Bell,  and Laura Knight  (look out for her self-portrait). This exhibition is well worth a visit (closing 19 April) and there is a great deal more to see in the castle itself, notably the works of John Crome and John Sell Cotman in the Norwich School  galleries.

This month we have the usual eclectic mix of exhibitions and book reviews. Alexander Adams writes on the exhibition ‘Man Ray–Human Equations: A Journey from Mathematics to Shakespeare’, touring from Washington DC to Copenhagen and Jerusalem and featuring American artist, Man Ray’s paintings and photos and the mathematical objects that inspired them. This exhibition is on in Washington until 10 May.

It's a long way from Barcelona, but in New York Henry Matthews visited the City University's school of architecture, for an exhibition of 'Sagrada Familia: Gaudi’s Unfinished Masterpiece: Geometry, Construction and Site’.  It includes models, and drawings as well as stunning photos of this building, which is still being constructed over a centry after it began. The exhibition finishes on  8 May. We also have some images of the cathedral itself, in Barcelona.

Ute Klein’s name is much more familiar in Europe than in the USA or UK but Alexander Adams thinks that we are missing out. His thoughts on the artist is one of our Perspectives pieces this month.

Rosalind Ormiston visited the ‘Made in China’ exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Here conceptual artist Doug Fishbone has replaced one of the major works of the collection by a replica painting sourced from an artists’ workshop in China and hung in the frame belonging to the original. For three months the identity of the work will remain concealed.  You have until 26 July, when the exhibition closes, to see if you can guess which painting is the replica.

Alexander Adams reports on the Royal Academy exhibition ‘Richard Diebenkorn’. The last time the art of American artist Diebenkorn (1922–93) was exhibited in Britain was in a 1991 show in Whitechapel Art Gallery and Alexander advises ‘see this one while you can’. It closes on 7 June. 

Meanwhile Gilly Turney attended the press view of ‘Fashion on the Ration: 1940s Street Style’ at the Imperial War Museum, London. This exhibition shows how fashion was alive and well during the austerity of wartime Britain in the 1940s. It gives an insight into how people coped with their situation in those harsh years.

While we often have reviews of exhibitions, we less frequently review the galleries that hold them. Alexander Adams visited the Musee Picasso, which has been successfully renovated, and tells us of his findings and Jenny Kingsley writes on The Brunei Gallery, which is owned and managed by the London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). She says it ‘is a fine contribution to the list of galleries and museums in the West devoted to showcasing Asian, African and Middle Eastern art’.

We have a lot of 'gems' in our archive - do you make a point of looking through that? If you do, you might have come across Sue Ward's interview with Antony Penrose, son of photographer Lee Miller and surrealist artist Roland Penrose. We have brought it up from the archive to bring it to your attention this month. Not many people can say that they once bit Picasso!

Our book reviews are as varied as ever.

Fifty Portraits You Should Know by Brad Finger and published by Prestel is a manageable showcase for 50 representative, mainly European artists of the past seven centuries, says Sarah Lawson.

Peter Moore reviews Mark Hallett’s monograph Reynolds: Portraiture in Action, which complements the exhibition on this important British artist at the Wallace Collection ‘Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint’, which runs until 17 June 2015.  

A book on Karl Marx’s approach to art history ReNew Marxist Art History published by Art/Books has Louis Byrne commenting ‘As Marx himself said 'art is the immortal movement of its time' and ‘a Marxist approach to art and its history is arguably crucial to any understanding of the epoch in which it was produced’. The book isn’t an easy read but Louis’s review conveys the importance these ideas have had in the 20th century.

Ian Jones reviews Hollywood Unseen, which features over 40 years' worth of publicity photographs drawn from the wonderful archives of the John Kobal Foundation. 

 So there is a taste of what we have for you this month, in Perspectives, Art and Artists, Photography and Media, and Feature Reviews. Don’t forget to check our Art News pages throughout the month and look out for new articles posted over the next couple of weeks.

Cookies on Cassone


 Whilst you are browsing our website, to make your experience as fluent and intuitive as we can, we sometimes place small amounts of information on your device, for example, your computer or mobile phone. These include small files known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally but will help you to browse our website easily. We also use this information to track what pages are popular, what website you came from before this and what Internet browser you are using. Again, this is all so we can continually improve our service to you and is not identifiable to you personally. 

These pieces of information are used to improve services for you.

For examlple, we measure how many people are using our website, so it can be made easier to use and more informative to the end user.
Without cookies, you would need to log in again every time you chose to view a new article. Cookies allow you to move from one article to another without having to do this. For more information, see our Frequently Asked Questions page.


Cassone – ca-soh-neh – the elaborately  decorated chest that a wealthy Italian bride of the Renaissance period used to hold her trousseau: a box of beautiful things.