DUAS Newsletter: December 2022
Welcome to the December edition of the DUAS Loop!
What’s On
Our Tuesday and Thursday Sessions will be going ahead as normal, unless otherwise stated on the Instagram pages @dulifedrawing and @duthursdaysessions.
Unfortunately, we only have one other event to present to you this month due to our time in Durham being cut short by the Christmas holidays. However, please do get excited for…
Sanctuary in Words with Lizzie Lovejoy
Wednesday 7th December, 4-6pm at 7 Owengate
What is Sanctuary? This year's Student Art Prize theme follows this concept, and throughout the word-based workshop, with artist and writer Lizzie Lovejoy, you are invited to explore what Sanctuary means for you. Where do you find it? What does it look like? Each participant will delve into words that represent these ideas and, with guidance, create their own visual poem to create a piece of art which is part word, part illustration.
Spaces are free but limited. Please sign up here.
Enjoy your Christmas holidays! We will be back next term with lots of new events to get those creative juices following!
What’s In
The Story of Art without Men, Katy Hessel
Being a woman interested in art, this news really excited me. Having followed Katy Hessel’s Instagram page @thegreatwomenartists for a little while now, the idea that she was publishing a book was a wonderful revelation.
The title The Story of Art without Men, immediately brings about connotations of E.H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art and, this is entirely purposeful. Many in the Art World see Gombrich’s book as a relative Bible for all academic study of the History of Art but Hessel, rightly, makes the point that in the first edition of the text there were no women artists mentioned and it was not until the 16th edition that there was any feminine representation and even then, only one woman featured.
This inequality is not specific to written publications, it proliferates throughout the art world. Only 1% of the National Gallery’s collection holds artworks by females and, where the highest auction room record for a living male artist is Jeff Koons’ Rabbit which fetched $91m in May 2019, the female equivalent is Jenny Saville’s Propped which sold in 2018 for $12.5m. Yet, in spite of these figures, around 70% of students in art colleges are women. It seems as though attitudes like Georg Baselitz’s that “Women don’t paint very well. It’s a fact. The market doesn’t lie” are still reasonably prevalent in the art market.
However, it seems there has been some recent movement towards change. With publication of books such as this and galleries showing female works in exhibitions such as Artemisia at the National Gallery in 2020 and adding more to their permanent collections. Though there is a long way to go, Hessel’s work is bringing us leaps and bounds of progress and, at £25 on Amazon, it could be a great stocking filler!
Who’s About
The Paul G. Allen Collection Sale, Christie's
This month I have decided to focus on Paul G. Allen and the sale of a vast number of lots from his private collection which spans over 500 years and features many unique pieces from the ‘big names’ in the art world. Having earnt his millions in tech and co-founding the Microsoft Corporation with childhood friend Bill Gates and was ranked as the 44th-wealthiest person in the world by Forbes in 2018, with an estimated net worth of $20.3 billion at the time of his death. Allen decided to utilise some of this wealth to curate an astonishing art collection and the high quality of his selection shows how his visionary instinct proliferated in all aspects of his life.
“I believe that good art helps us see the world around us a little differently… [it] gives us fresh perspectives, even sometimes a little stronger sense of purpose” – Paul G. Allen
For Allen, art became a source of inspiration for the everyday. He is quoted in the auction’s E-catalogue to say “It’s great to make a pilgrimage to museum […] but after a while you start wondering what it would be like to live with amazing pieces like this in your own living spaces and to have them give you those same kinds of feelings in daily life”. Though, obviously, we would all like to be able to claim that we simply picked up works by infamous painters such as Botticelli, Seurat and Hockney just to experience their effect on our living environment, this decadent attitude must have had some sway in his lifetime of achievements and leads me to think that more of us should try to include art in our day-to-day lives as inspiration.
To take a deep dive in to one of the collection’s many distinctive works; Georges Seurat’s Les Poseuses, Ensemble (1886-88) sold for the highest price of the day, fetching a prodigious $149,240,000. Even a quick glance at this piece reveals its unique nature as it contains a snipet of Seurat’s most famous works, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-86). This is the backdrop to three female nude figures in varying stages of undress, a rare sight in Pointillist works due to the belief at the time that it was a more scientific, methodical means of creating art and thus not worthy of more noble subject such as the nude. This work is an optimum example of the genius in Allen’s collecting and an illustration of his visionary attitude towards art.
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