Online exhibitions
Confined to her childhood home, art critic Laura Freeman finds online solace in the world’s best pictures
Private view from my sofa
For the last three months, caught between house moves and lockdowns, I’ve been living in Oxfordshire with my parents. Every morning, my husband commutes down the garden to a converted pig shed. I set up in a bedroom decorated in the taste of my 17-year-old self.
On Saturdays, for the sake of stimulus and a leg stretch, we walk to the Rollright Stones, our local Neolithic circle. Never gets (5,000 years) old.
I’ve come to look at the all-tooshort interregnum between the art-starved spring and the cultureparched winter as a golden age. I hared about on almost empty trains and wolfed down cathedrals, cast courts, exhibitions and permanent collections. Then the Tiers fell. Soon after that: Lockdown III.
Don’t let the lockdowns get you down, I’ve said to myself in more morose moments. I miss museums and pine for Venice, Florence, Paris, Margate, anywhere...
But all is not lost. You just have to (Google) search for it. Whether it’s the wretched virus, illness, disability or simply not being able to face the queues keeping us at home, all art-lovers should take heart from the extraordinary technological leaps of the last few years. Highresolution photography has made it possible to get nose-to-canvas with works otherwise inaccessible or impossibly crowded.
Two years ago, I fought for my fifteen minutes in front of Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece. Since then, Closer to Van Eyck has launched online. This project aims to capture every fraction of an inch of every one of his paintings, using macrophotography, infrared macrophotography, infrared reflectography and X-radiography.
Whether or not you understand the theory, what these techniques mean in practice is a jeweller’s eyeglass view of some of the most exquisite works ever painted in oil. The image quality is gobsmacking. You can get within 2mm of the hem of the Virgin in the Virgin of Canon van der Paele at Bruges and count each silken stitch.
Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait was the most viewed picture on the National Gallery’s website last year. It tied for first place with Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Other top ten hits were Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and Turner’s Fighting Temeraire.
Then there’s the V&A’S spectacular scheme to document their celebrated Raphael Cartoons in three ways: in ultra-high resolution colour (the visible paint layer); in 3D (showing intervention, wear and tear and restoration); and in infrared (uncovering the charcoal drawings beneath the paint). This really is revelatory.
Formerly in a dimly lit gallery rendering the scenes murky and dull, the Cartoons are now vivid and brilliantly clear. You can see the pinpricks used to transfer the Cartoon designs from paper to loom before being woven into tapestries. The artist’s shifting intentions are revealed as he drew and redrew.
You can get near enough to the catch-of-the-day in The Miraculous Draught of the Fishes to see every gill on the wing of a gasping ray.
When it comes to video tours, galleries have upped their game. I’d been kicking myself for missing Artemisia Gentileschi at the National Gallery, but the video tour by curator Letizia Treves is superb.
Rather than a static lecture, it really feels like a ‘walk-through’, allowing you to understand how rooms and themes fit together, how pictures ‘speak’ across the space and how Artemisia’s style became ever more daring.
Do, if you haven’t already, invest in an ipad. No Luddite excuses. Last year, I met a lady who had become an iwhiz at 96. Navigation and zooming in for close-ups is a great deal easier with the touch-screen of an ipad or tablet than with a mouse or a desktop trackpad.
Trying to wander the Vatican on my laptop reduced me to sweary fury when what I was after was spiritual uplift. On an ipad, the tour toggles were much more intuitive.
Consider going bigger. There are two types of cable – HDMI and VGA – which can connect a laptop computer to a TV screen, both less than £10. Some newer ‘smart’ televisions such as the Apple TV allow you to do this wirelessly.
My mother-in-law is a dab hand at throwing (the technical term is ‘Screen Mirroring’) films and photographs from her ipad on to the wider screen of the telly.
Nevertheless, there are limits to what screens can offer. One of last year’s new expressions was ‘skin hunger’, to describe the longing for human touch.
A letter to the Telegraph, printed soon after the churches reopened, still troubles me. It was from a widowed parishioner who said that, with the banning of the sign of the peace – handshakes being unhygienic – she had lost her only physical contact with others.
For all the benefits of Zoom, Ocado or online yoga, leading virtual lives makes for a textureless existence. At times, I’ve been struck by a sort of ‘surface hunger’: a
desperate craving for rust and patina, marble and bronze, the glossy tooling of a gold-leaf halo and the almost caramelised ridge of thickly laid impasto.
The trouble with screens is that they flatten art and make every picture uniform. A Frank Auerbach painting, grooved, furrowed and scored, becomes the same as a seemingly brushless Vermeer.
Then there’s scale. A Rothko painting ought to impose, shoulder out and take up space. Reduced to an online thumbnail, it might as well be a Dulux paint swatch: ‘Rothko Maroon.’
When Rothko was at work on his series of murals for the Seagram Building in New York – now at Tate Modern – he wanted the total effect to echo that of Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence with its blind windows and geometry.
Michelangelo, he said, had ‘achieved just the kind of feeling I’m after – he makes the viewers feel that they are trapped in a room
where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall’. Sounds like lockdown.
Still, it takes some imaginative leap to get that by clicking through the Tate website.
There’s also the question of ‘headspace.’ Forgive a spot of jargon, but headspace isn’t a bad word for the state of mind needed for looking at art.
Architecture prepares us for art. The awe of approaching Rubens’s four great altarpieces in Antwerp Cathedral and the sense of reverence inspired by the nave and the vault are both specific and special.
All the pomp and paraphernalia of porticoes, temple fronts and flanking lions ready us for what’s
inside. I still feel cheated by the National Gallery’s decision to make the central entrance ‘Exit’ only. Mounting the steps set you up for a visit. What we have missed this last straitened year isn’t just experience, but ceremony.
If you’re simply sick of screens, there’s much to be said for travels on paper. When we do all get out again, don’t stint on postcards, guidebooks, catalogues and city maps.
My much-travelled aunt – Wandering Miranda, we call her – has kept herself going with slides, photographs and scrapbooks from her many and varied adventures.
Clearing out a drawer in the first lockdown, I found a box of souvenirs from a student trip to Italy. I thought I’d been excessive at the time, buying dozens of postcards covering every scene of the vast mosaic at Santa Maria Assunta.
But, as I smoothed the creased edges, I was transported far from the flat and back to Torcello on a sunny morning in spring.
‘At times, I’ve been struck by a craving for the glossy tooling of a gold-leaf halo’