Luchita Hurtado: I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn @ the Serpentine Sackler Gallery

Books & Boots

This is a really wonderful exhibition. I thoroughly enjoyed it and had a struggle dragging myself away. And it’s FREE!

Luchita Hurtado has had the most extraordinary life and career. She was born in 1920, in Maiquetía, Venezuela, and is still working and painting, 98 years later! In fact the last section of the exhibition features a dozen or so works from just the past twelve months. But let’s start at the beginning…

The 1940s

Untitled (1949) by Luchita Hurtado © Luchita Hurtado, Private Collection. Photo by Genevieve Hanson

This is Hurtado’s first solo exhibition in a public institution, which seems amazing given the quality of everything on show.

The 95 or so works featured here are arranged in a straightforward chronological order to help the visitor make sense of the astonishing range and variety of styles and approaches to making art which have characterised her career.

Very broadly…

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Van Gogh and Britain @ Tate Britain

Books & Boots

Before I went I’d read some disparaging reviews of this exhibition – but I found it really interesting, thought-provoking, full of wonderful paintings and prints and drawings, and making all kinds of unexpected connections. And big, much bigger than I expected.

The premise is simple: Vincent van Gogh came to live in England at the age of 20 in 1873, He lived in London for nearly three years, developing an intimate knowledge of the city and a great taste for English literature and painting. The exhibition:

1. explores all aspects of van Gogh’s stay in London, with ample quotes from his letters to brother Theo raving about numerous aspects of English life and London – and several rooms full of the paintings and prints of contemporary urban life which he adored
2. then it explores the development of van Gogh’s mature style and the many specific references he made back to themes and…

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Byzantine Emperors 324-802

Books & Boots

This blog post uses the timeline of Byzantine emperors from Wikipedia and then adds details and comments from John Julius Norwich’s book Byzantium: The Early Centuries.

Constantine I ‘the Great’ (324-337)

Son of the Augustus Constantius Chlorus and Helena. Proclaimed Augustus of the western empire upon the death of his father on 25 July 306, he became sole ruler of the western empire after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312. In 324, he defeated the eastern Augustus Licinius and re-united the empire under his rule, reigning as sole emperor until his death. Constantine completed the administrative and military reforms begun under Diocletian, who had begun ushering in the Dominate period. Actively interested in Christianity, he played a crucial role in its development and the Christianization of the Roman world, through his convocation of the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea. He re-founded the city of Byzantium as ‘New…

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The Art of Persuasion: Wartime Posters by Abram Games @ the National Army Museum

Books & Boots

Maximum meaning, minimum means

This is a cracking exhibition, beautifully designed and laid out, packed with information about not only the artist (wartime poster designer Abram Games), and including a hundred or so dazzling examples of his ground-breaking graphic designs, but also providing a fascinating insight into the social history of the wartime years and after.

Abram Games

Abraham Gamse (later anglicised to Abram Games) was born in the East End of London to Russian Jewish immigrants in 1914. His dad ran a photographic studio and introduced the young artist to the airbrush which he used to retouch photos, and which was to play a major role in Games’s mature style.

Games left school at 16 and attended Saint Martin’s School of Art in London but left after just two terms, disillusioned by the teaching and worried about the expense. Nonetheless, he was determined to establish himself as a poster…

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Media, relieved that Notre Dame relics were saved, acts as if they were real

Why Evolution Is True

The fire at Notre Dame is out, and much of the main building was spared, though it will take years, if ever, to bring it back to where it was before. I’m not sure about the status of its famous stained-glass windows, though one photo seems to show that a big one is gone, for, after all, the glass was held together with easily-melted lead. The cause of the disaster has not been determined, and may never be.

All in all, it’s not the disaster I feared; here’s what it looks like today:

Photo from the NY Times. Thibault Camus/Associated Press

President Macron has pledged that it will be rebuilt, and private donors have already given millions to that purpose, with the LVMH Group having donated 200 million Euros.

While I was watching the news last night, they had a special report from a correspondent who was talking about…

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Seven Clues to the Origin of Life by A.G. Cairns-Smith (1985)

Books & Boots

The topic of the origin of life on the Earth is a branch of mineralogy. (p.99)

How did life begin? To be more precise, how did the inorganic chemicals formed in the early years of planet earth, on the molten rocks or in the salty sea or in the methane atmosphere, transform into ‘life’ – complex organisms which extract food from the environment and replicate, and from which all life forms today are ultimately descended? What, when and how was that first momentous step taken?

Thousands of biologists have devoted their careers to trying to answer this question, with the result that there are lots of speculative theories.

Alexander Graham Cairns-Smith (1931-2016) was an organic chemist and molecular biologist at the University of Glasgow, and this 120-page book was his attempt to answer the Big Question.

In a nutshell he suggested that life derived from self-replicating clay crystals. To use…

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Readers’ wildlife photos

Why Evolution Is True

We’re going to count astronomy as wildlife today, as it’s Honorary Wildlife®. These two swell Cosmos Photos come from reader Tim Anderson in Australia, and I’ve indented his notes. As always, click on the photos to enlarge them.

It is the galaxy season in the Southern Hemisphere, which is to say that there are large number of galaxies up in the night sky down in these parts.

Here is one of them. This is an image of the Sombrero Galaxy (catalogued as M104 in the Messier catalogue). The dark dust lane that crosses the galaxy horizon is where new stars are forming.The galaxy is approximately 28 million light-years away from us. The image was formed from sixty 30-second frames taken using a colour camera and a 127mm refracting telescope.

Attached is an image of NGC 2997, a large barred spiral galaxy in the local supercluster. It is approximately 25…

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The Double Helix by James Watson (1968)

Books & Boots

The short paper by James Watson and Francis Crick establishing the helical structure of the DNA molecule was published in the science journal, Nature, on April 25, 1953. The blurb of this book describes it as the scientific breakthrough of the 20th century. Quite probably, although it was a busy century – the discovery of antibiotics was quite important, too, not to mention the atom bomb.

James Watson and Francis Crick with their DNA model at the Cavendish Laboratories in 1953

Anyway, what makes this first-person account of the events leading up to the discovery such fun is Watson’s prose style and mentality. He is fearless. He takes no prisoners. He is brutally honest about his own shortcomings and everyone else’s and, in doing so, sheds extraordinarily candid light on how science is actually done. He tells us that foreign conferences where nobody speaks English are often pointless. Many scientists…

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The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey Into the Land of the Chemical Elements by Peter Atkins (1995)

Books & Boots

Chemistry is the science of changes in matter. (p.37)

At just under 150 pages long, A Journey Into the Land of the Chemical Elements is intended as a novel and imaginative introduction to the 118 or so chemical elements which are the basic components of chemistry, and which, for the past 100 years or so, have been laid out in the grid arrangement known as the periodic table.

The periodic table explained

Just to refresh your memory, it’s called the periodic table because it is arranged into rows called ‘periods’. These are numbered 1 to 7 down the left-hand side.

What is a period? The ‘period number’ of an element signifies ‘the highest energy level an electron in that element occupies (in the unexcited state)’. To put it another way, the ‘period number’ of an element is its number of atomic orbitals. An orbital is the number of orbital positions…

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The Spice Islands Voyage, in Search of Wallace, by Tim Severin

ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

The Spice Islands Voyage, in Search of Wallace is the June choice for our Indonesian bookgroup but I’m reading it early because it’s hard to source and we need to circulate the library copy as best we can.

It’s more than a travel book.  Tim Severin is an explorer who specialises in recreating historic voyages, and the list of his books at Wikipedia is impressive:

• Tracking Marco Polo (1964) – Motorcycle ride from Venice to Central Asia along the Silk Road
• Explorers of the Mississippi (1968)
• The Golden Antilles (1970)
• The African Adventure (1973)
• Vanishing Primitive Man (1973)
• The Oriental Adventure: Explorers of the East (1976)
• The Brendan Voyage (1978) – Sailing a leather currach from Ireland to Newfoundland
• The Sindbad Voyage (1983) – Sailing an Arab dhow from Muscat, Oman to China
• The Jason Voyage: The Quest for the Golden Fleece (1986) – Sailing from Greece to Georgia
• The…

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