During this pandemic year, closure of public cultural spaces like museums, theaters, galleries, and so on could have made life impoverished, but across the world cultural institutions have stepped up. For example, The Metropolitan Opera in New York has been streaming complete opera free every night for months. Vast museums worldwide offer free virtual tours of their otherwise-closed collections. Symphony orchestras stream innovative offerings from their members. Art schools now offer a wide range of workshops and courses via Zoom or other interactive media.
Although not a virtual offering, one of my favorite series has been The Great British Art Tour published by the Guardian since the beginning of 2021. These articles each deal with a piece of art in public collections in the United Kingdom. The series is in collaboration with Art UK which is a nonprofit that collaborates with more than 3000 collections. Each week the series focuses on a single work from a public collection, providing background on the artist, the work, and it's location. So the bonus for the reader is a chance to learn about wonderful museums and public art that you'd probably never see.
A good example of the treats of the series is the nearly-unknown painting "A Game of Cut Throat Eucre," a large painting by Frank Gascoigne Heath, a British painter of the early 20th century. The painting shows us a group of fishermen, playing the Cornish card game euchre in the hold of their boat. It's almost five feet across and my guess is that if you could see it in person you'd feel as if you were in the boat too. The use of tenebrism, the dramatic light and dark we associate with Caravaggio, gives this work its charm, in my opinion. In addition, Mr. Heath has used the device of a single contrasting color at the center of interest--the red cap--against the other, duller colors. The painting only entered the Penlee House Gallery and Museum in Penzance in 2017 (it was in a private collection).
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| Frank Heath, "A Game of Cut Throat Eucre," oil, 1909 |
For all of us who are still isolated and unvaccinated, and probably for always, anyone who wants to see new art can follow the links, and disappear down many online rabbit holes and links.
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