Every picture tells a story...but all is not what it seems according to UCL museum studies lecturer, Caroline Marcus.
The overarching theme is newsworthy stories. We will look at stories that made headlines in their day, linking to our three focus images:
- 16th Century Plague Pamphlet (which evolved from plague broadsheets – like newspapers)
- Rokeby Venus, Velazquez
- Tom Hunter’s Ye Olde Axe
- In the past year, some that hit headlines include Dominic Cummings flight during the pandemic and comparisons today of the language around the plague and pandemic and visual commonalities
- Choosing to Challenge – from Meghan Markle to Sufragettes - a National Gallery painting of a naked goddess found itself at the centre of the big news story of 1914, when a suffragette slashed the painting Rokeby Venus as a protest to enhance the profile of the suffragette movement
- The way that artist and photographer Tom Hunter uses provocative newspaper headlines to depict Hackney today and creates a challenging pastiche of the Rokeby Venus
We will look at:
- PLAGUE TRACTS: We will look at some plague pamphlets and the language and visual metaphors that shaped the epidemic into narratives which made sense of calamities. We will look at the notion of flight then and now.
- PAINTING: Rokeby Venus, National Gallery – a nude painted at the time of the counter- reformation when it was forbidden in Catholic Spain and the story behind the name Rokeby Venus and why it hit the newspaper headlines in 1914 and was linked to the suffragettes.
- TOM HUNTER: Recreates Old Masters on the Streets of London - Ye Olde Axe – see the Venus fallen to a stripper, from Olympus to housing block, and using contemporary artist uses newspaper headlines as inspiration for his work
And Caroline will link all of them to newspaper stories. After all, every picture tells a story – often hidden ones.
