New Exhibitions

A couple of interesting exhibitions are looming on the horizon: Kenneth and Mary Martin at Tate St. Ives, and the Queen Mother's collection at Norwich Castle Museum & Gallery, both opening on the 6 October. The Norwich exhibition will include (according to their rather dreadful website), work by John Piper, presumably the series of paintings commissioned of Windsor Castle produced between 1941-1944. With dark and brooding skies above Windsor, Piper painted the mood of the country as well as the buildings, although King George VI failed to appreciate the artistic license, remarking that Piper must have had "very bad luck with the weather". Also on at the same time is the touring Tate Britain exhibition of the work of Prunella Clough. Clough, along with John Minton and Keith Vaughan, was one of the generation of British painters to follow Piper, Sutherland and Moore. Taught by Ceri Richards and Henry Moore at the Chelsea Scool of Art (and later by Victor Pasmore at Camberwell), her mature style reflected figurative cubist influences filtered through a post-war industrial palette of brown and grey. These paintings of east coast fishermen, lorry drivers and road workers are highly stylized, and unrecognisable as individual subjects (in this they are similar, but very different in intent, to Vaughan's male nudes). Like many Clough moved into pure abstration in the 1960s, and her later work is more dynamic, although her palette never moved out of the early industrial hues.

Sources & Links
Richard Cork, National Treasure, New Statesman, 18 August 2003.

Prunella Clough, Tate Britain