Description
‘Friends and Strangers’, the title of Margie MacKinnon’s article on the London-based exhibitions of painters Alice Neel and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, could be used to describe the whole of Restoration Conversations. Indeed, Issue 3, Spring 2023 comprises a series of ‘meetings’ with modern-day and historic women – both familiar and largely unknown. Many of their ‘facts’ may be known to readers: we recall that Joan Mitchell painted in France, and that Catherine de’ Medici introduced the fork to that country. We may acknowledge our indebtedness to Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici who saved Florence’s art from being sold off bit by bit, once her family dynasty reached its end, or recognise many of the women included in Jann Haworth and Liberty Blake’s seven-panel monumental Work in Progress, at London’s soon-to-be reopened National Portrait Gallery.
At the same time, each woman featured in these pages is like a world waiting to be discovered. Nicole-Reine Lepaute calculated a comet’s arrival more accurately than Halley himself. Lee Miller, best known by some as merely ‘a Surrealist muse’, had the guts to bathe in Hitler’s bathtub, the day his death was announced – while working as a ‘combat photographer’, reporting from his Munich flat. Then we have the modern-day women – custodians of culture and disseminators of knowledge – the writers, curators and scholars whose words populate this issue. Wendy Grossman’s efforts to uncover the contributions of surrealist Adrienne Fedelin in ‘Hidden in Plain Sight’ is a case in point, and the same is true of art historians Ellen Landau and Joan Marter, in their new book Abstractionists, the Women on the Levett Collection in Florence, featured in the article ‘A Moveable Feast’. Restoration Conversations Issue 3 Spring 2023 is a celebration in words and pictures.
Restoration Conversations magazine and cultural broadcast is supported by Calliope Arts – a not-for-profit organisation based in Florence and London that promotes public knowledge and appreciation of art, literature and social history from a female perspective, through restorations, exhibitions, education and cultural initiatives.
