Walker Art Gallery Artwork of the Month

June 2009: Pylon Chair by Tom Dixon and Little Heavy by Ron Arad by various artists

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

'Pylon Chair' by Tom Dixon

Born in Tunisia, Tom Dixon moved to England in 1963. He was educated in London but dropped out of Chelsea School of Art to play bass in a band before teaching himself welding.
Tom rose to prominence in the mid 1980s as "the talented but untrained designer with a line in welded salvage furniture". By the end of the 80s, he was designing chairs for powerhouse Italian brands like Cappellini; by the mid-90s, he had created his own company, 'Eurolounge', to make and sell his work. His earlier pieces are now collectables and have changed hands at auction houses around the globe.

He was appointed head of design by the high street furniture chain, Habitat in 1998 and later became Creative Director until his departure in January 2008. He was the public face of a creative team responsible for driving forward the Habitat brand to maintain Conran's dream of enriching everyday life through simple, modern design and creating a shopping experience that is theatrical and intimate.

Tom's earlier works have been acquired by world famous museums across the globe from the Victoria & Albert Museum through to Museums in New York, Boston, Paris & Tokyo. Tom was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 2001 and the most recent accolade included Tom winning Designer of the Year 2008 from Architektur and Wohnen Magazine.

Dixon’s early use of welding enabled him to make his own designs before manufacturers realised his abilities and potential. In 1988 he designed the ‘S’ chair, this was the first design to get noticed. His welding continued to be a source for his inspiration and combined with the frame drawings seen on early computer aided design programmes, he came up with the idea for this piece.

Like the ‘S’ chair, this too is made by Cappellini. It is essentially a desk or dining chair, though can be used for occasional purpose too. Its design may be minimal and quite cold looking, but it can support a lot of weight and is surprisingly comfortable when sat on.
Dixon has been described as a self-educated maverick whose only qualification is a one-day course in plastic bumper repair.

May 2009: Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion by Nicholas Poussin

Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

In 1648, Nicholas Poussin completed two landscape paintings based on Plutarch’s story of the Life of Phocion written in 75 AD. These works marked a change in the French artist’s style of painting as he moved away from historical narrative and developed a new approach to landscape. Unlike the works of his Flemish contemporaries, his landscapes were heroic rather than rustic. In their solemn grandeur they framed stories from classical and biblical sources and established a relationship between man and nature.

April 2009: Princess Marguerite of Navarre by Jean Clouet (attributed to)

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The attribution is necessarily cautious. It was sold at Christie’s in 1813, as either by Holbein or by Leonardo. The latter attribution was perhaps suggested by the lady’s smile. When it was sold again, in 1816 from William Roscoe’s collection, Holbein’s name had been taken out of the equation and credit for the work was given to Leonardo alone. In 1836, however, in the catalogue of the Liverpool Royal Institution, it was first attributed to Jean Clouet. Following its arrival in the Walker Art Gallery in 1893 and its formal acquisition in 1948, for a long time cataloguers played safe and vague, identifying it only as ‘French School’, dating it ‘about 1530’, and calling it 'Portrait of Lady with a Parrot'. Recent research has suggested that the 1836 attribution to Clouet may be correct. If so, this is a treasure indeed. Fewer than ten paintings have been indisputably ascribed to him.

March 2009: Hooded jumper and trousers from the ‘Stop Terrorizing our World’ collection by Walter Van Beirendonck

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT

This amazing outfit is made from hand-embroidered and appliquéd wool. The design is known as Mr Greedy, from the words appliquéd across the centre front of the jacket. The back of the jacket and the sleeves are decorated with a number of images that make reference to the raging consumerism of the Western world – the Yankee dollar symbol and dollar note, the iconic Golden Arches of multi-national giant McDonalds, and the rather sinister-looking, clown-like face of Ronald McDonald on the back of the hood.

February 2009: The Walker Art Gallery by Maurice Cockrill

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Even with the ripple of the banner and the descending figures, there is a mood of stillness in Maurice Cockrill’s 'The Walker Art Gallery' which is strange and perhaps “unsettling”. The blank windows and empty frontage impart a feeling of absence. This sense of eeriness is perhaps heightened by the guillotine-like banner. The banner also renders the rigid classical facade slightly exotic, as if a carnival has taken place.

January 2009: The Mower by William Thornycroft

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

In November 1882, William Hamo Thornycroft wrote to his fiancée, Agatha Cox, that he had begun work on a sculpture of “a mower”. The inspiration for this work can be traced to earlier that year when he spotted a farmhand resting on the banks of the River Thames whilst on a boating trip. From the rapid sketches made on the spot, the artist went on to create several maquettes before setting to work on a life sized version in clay.

December 2008: Portrait of Henry VIII by unknown artist, after Hans Holbein

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

This painting depicts a full length portrait of the English monarch King Henry VIII. It is one of the most recognisable images in the Walker Art Gallery’s collection and is one of the most popular paintings with schools and other groups studying Tudor history.

November 2008: Evening dress - Silk satin and chiffon with sequins and silk thread decoration by Jean Dessès

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Between 1940 and 1955 the fashion industry had undergone an enormous amount of change. This dress by Jean Dessès, is the height of femininity and opulence, a reaction against the ‘make do and mend’ years of the Second World War. Not only is it in complete contrast to what women had become accustomed to wearing but it also signals a new era of prosperity in post-war Briton, when people had ‘never had it so good’.

October 2008: Fontana by Peter McDonald

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Peter McDonald was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1973. He studied in London at Central Saint Martins and at the Royal Academy Schools. The artist writes of his work as follows:

‘My paintings depict a colourful world inhabited by people engaged in everyday activities. Images of teachers, artists or hairdressers are constructed with an elementary graphic language. They have a cartoon-like simplicity and waver at the point were figuration might tip at any moment into abstraction. Human forms veer towards the geometric: circles stand in for heads, flat planes describe rooms and crude poses denote narrative. These simplifications appear to create a community of super-humans living in a world that has a harmonious transparency. By making use of archetypes, symbolism and our irresistible tendency to make the strange readable, this alternative world operates like a parallel universe, with a very familiar logic and practices. This utopia may be a vision of an ideal world in the future or a simplified and optimistic version of the one we already know.’

September 2008: Off To the Fishing Grounds by Stanhope Forbes

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The special impact of this picture is partly explained by the fact that it was painted not in an artists’ studio but on the deck of a Cornish fishing boat at Newlyn near Penzance. The artist paid the fishermen to pose for him. The boat is a two-masted Cornish lugger. When this picture was painted the Cornish fishing industry was at a peak and no less than 570 such boats were registered in the ports and harbours of Cornwall, employing 3,500 men and boys at sea. These boats were an average of forty foot in length with a beam of between twelve and fourteen feet. The ‘fishing grounds’ for such boats were inshore waters, where pilchard and herring were caught but boats would also fish for mackerel with drift nets off the south west coast of Ireland, while some boats fished with long lines for ray, conger and turbot, out as far as the coast of Brittany.

August 2008: The Family of Sir William Young by Johan Zoffany (1733-1810)

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

William Young was born in 1725 and was by the time of this picture a successful and wealthy man. This painting was probably made between 1767 and 1770 as confirmation of Sir William Young’s arrival within the elite in England. The steps to the right of the painting and the parkland in the background indicate that Sir William and his family are in possession of key status symbols: land and an English country house. Sir William bought the manor of Delaford in Iver, Buckinghamshire in 1767. He achieved the other key status symbol of a title when he was created a baronet on 2 May 1769.

May 2008: The Railway Station by William Powell Frith

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT

When William Powell Frith’s monumental canvas, The Railway Station went on show, at a gallery in the Haymarket, London, in April 1862, The Times reported that the artist had been paid the astonishing sum of £8,750 for it, while the Athenaeum put the total at 8,000 guineas, or £9,187 10s. Whatever the correct amount, Frith’s earnings from The Railway Station broke all previous records. ‘As a rule, it is only dead men whose works have risen to such figures,’ declared The Times, ‘and even these honoured dead may be counted on the two hands.’ However, only £4,500 of this was paid for the painting itself; the rest secured the far more lucrative copyright and sole exhibition rights.