Three diverse architectural paintings @ Bowes Museum







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The Fallen Woman @ The Foundling Gallery, London

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Intended as a corrective to the view of the ‘fallen woman’, this exhibition charts the emergence and development of that idea over the course of the seventeenth to twentieth centuries through a display of museum effects - mainly archival - and supporting artistic media. As an enticement to the largely social-historical narrative the exhibition presents, several canvases ease the spectator in, showing him first of all the productive importance of renewing one’s understanding of an artwork’s subtext, for while the first painting on the left-hand wall shows an interior family scene of parents with their children, the introductory blurbs helps us to see it as an encapsulation of the ideal. In other words, we are not witness only to the fact of nineteenth-century family life, but to the attitude that such a picture of family life was the proper aspiration of any spectator: one was supposed to want to live like that.  Clearly middle class, a painting several along shows a woman playing...
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Spaces of Defamiliarisation 1: Chile’s Museo Histórico Nacional

Under the stewardship of a new director, the historian Sofía Correa Sutil, from the mid-1990s Chile’s Museo Histórico Nacional (National Historical Museum) in the capital Santiago began to revise its presentation of national history. As a result of these critical efforts, Joanna Crow appraised the museum's gallery concerning ‘Chile’s First Inhabitants’ as a more inclusive contact zone.[1] However,  Crow remarked,  the labels there continued to use the past tense, and in the museum’s own reflection  a few years later  on Correa Sutil's modernisation project, one contributor averred that ‘the tiniest room is for the indigenous world, which is not shown in all its diversity and complexity’.[2a] Yet another observed: ‘ The history [the museum] represents did not seem to me to be the history of Chile; it is rather the history of Santiago and its institutional milestones. It is not the history of a people or of its indigenous minorities, or its regions or its place in t...
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Sculpture, changed - Some notes

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