Museum Hours

As regular readers will appreciate, this blog eschews the portentous, self important or indeed sententious in favour of scholarship worn so lightly as to take flight, or indeed fright, in the slightest breeze. So it is to be hoped that, on this occasion, they will allow a departure onto more serious terrain given the potentially ground breaking work undertaken by this blog over many minutes which seeks to follow humbly in the revisionist footsteps that writers on art history of the stamp of Dan Brown have developed in recent years. The point of departure for what can, sadly, only be the merest apercu is a picture currently to be seen hanging innocently in the back room of this  exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery . The subject is Elizabeth Vernon, the Countess of Southampton at the end of the reign of Elizabeth I but to distinguish her from the monarch we shall hereafter call her 'Liz' which we feel is also more in keeping with the style to which she aspired and of

One of the more interesting aspects of this  exhibition  at the British Museum of the Japanese erotic art form generically called shunga, is the rather peculiar notion that shunga calligraphy and script was considered to be capable of protecting your house from catching fire. Whilst that would be a clear benefit in 18th century Japan, it is less welcome in the context of a show in which something catching fire would frankly be a blessing. I'm quite surprised at how positively this exhibition has been reviewed, including in my own  newspaper of choice . It just seems to me be rather relentless; just how many drawings of various exaggerated and/or energetic activity can you take before it all becomes, well, just a bit dull? Afficionados and art historians would certainly argue that shunga occupies a space with which the West has always struggled, hovering between art and pornography.  However, if looked at in terms of the latter, this show rather reinforces the sense that