Cultural Dessert

‘Laura Knight: A Panoramic View’

25 February 2022

Dame Laura Knight (1877 - 1970) was one of the most popular English artists of the twentieth century. On Saturday I was at Milton Keynes Gallery to see ‘Laura Knight: A Panoramic View’ - an exhibition curated by Anthony Spira and Fay Blanchard bringing together over 160 works from public and private collections to provide a fascinating overview of Knight’s career. A painter in the figurative, realist tradition, Laura Knight embraced English Impressionism. She was the perfect candidate for a biographical exhibition because her work falls neatly into a series of distinct periods, styles, locations and subjects. After her early works, painted while she was living in Staithes, North Yorkshire, she spent the First World War in Cornwall where she produced a range of rural pictures. After moving to London, Knight’s attention turned to ballet, painting some of the most famous dancers of the day from Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Later she went on a tour with the combined Bertram Mills and Great Carmo's Circus in order to paint circus scenes. During the Second World War, Knight was an official war artist, producing portraits and posters in the socialist realist style to bolster female recruitment to the war effort. In 1946 she painted scenes from the Nuremberg war crimes trials, spending three months observing the main trial from inside the courtroom. The MK Gallery exhibition focussed on each of these periods in her life in chronological order. It was a fascinating collection of the work of this prolific and varied artist. You can see a selection of Laura Knight paintings at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-_pqbr6EjM
 

Labels: Exhibitions, VisualArt

posted by Robin Simpson @ 3:04 pm