Wendy Gray

Teacher by trade; art lover by choice. Like all manner of artists and movements but somehow always end up back in 1910!

Stories By Wendy Gray

Renaissance

Pieter Bruegel: Hunters in the Snow. Hidden Stories and Meanings

By Wendy GraySeptember 18, 2018

In the ‘Bruegel Room’ in Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, twelve paintings hang in the space, covering the final ten year period of the life of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. One painting, in particular, takes us on...
Surrealism

Lee Miller And Surrealism In Britain

By Wendy GrayAugust 7, 2018

In the delightfully quirky Hepworth Wakefield, in West Yorkshire, is a quiet exhibition that packs a whole range of mad surrealism in three galleries. What was particularly exciting about this was the fact that the lead...
20th century

Kyffin Williams And The Welsh Landscape

By Wendy GrayJuly 17, 2018

The Welsh Landscape has inspired artists, poets and writers for generations. But, for one 20th century artist, they were more than just a subject for the canvas, they were a metaphor for melancholic isolation, for power...
Museums And Exhibitions

Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One

By Wendy GrayJuly 11, 2018

When you walk into the first room of any exhibition, there is an involuntary holding of the breath as it can often be a make or break moment. Walk into the first room of Tate Britain’s...
20th century

American Synthesizers: Gerald Murphy, Louis Lovowick, and George Ault

By Wendy GrayJuly 7, 2018

In the catalogue for a 1959 exhibition on Precisionist art at the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, Director Martin Friedman said of the precisionist artists that they were not so much innovators or theorists as they...
Art Nouveau

‘The Divine Sarah’ – Sarah Bernhardt, The First Artist Superstar

By Wendy GrayJune 9, 2018

While we are all familiar with celebrity culture and can recognise all of the Kardashians from their silhouettes, the idea of ‘celebrity’ is not a new one. In the 19th century, a notorious French actress, who...
19th Century

Edvard Munch and The Frieze of Life

By Wendy GrayMay 17, 2018

By 1902, Edvard Munch’s life had seen a pattern of chaos within his professional life, his health and his love life. While his life had become solitary, his artwork was not destined to remain stacked against...
19th Century

Get To Know The Cultural Legacy of Albert, Prince Consort

By Wendy GrayApril 12, 2018

The Royal Collection is one of the largest and most important art collections in the world, and one of the last great European royal collections to remain intact. A press release by the UK’s Royal Collection...
20th century

George Tooker: A Purveyor of Modern Alienation and Despair

By Wendy GrayMarch 15, 2018

When the American figurative painter, George Tooker died in 2011, The New York Times said of his 1956 painting, Government Bureau, “was inspired by his maddening encounter with the New York City Building Department. Most people...
20th century

And it’s War! The Art Of The War Wounded

By Wendy GrayFebruary 27, 2018

Being an English teacher, so much of what I look at is linked to the literary world. With the previous examination specification, we used to be able to do a series of war poems for examination that...