With hundreds of exhibitions and events vying for attention in London during Frieze week, Apollo’s editors pick out the shows they don’t want to miss.
In 1898, the Birmingham-born photographer Emma Barton published portraits of Dan Leno, a star of the music hall affectionately known as ‘the king’s jester’ after a performance for Edward VII at Sandringham. Many of her images took inspiration from the Old Masters, and The Awakening (1903), a carbon print restaging a Renaissance Madonna and Child painting, is among around 200 vintage prints assembled at Tate Modern for ‘Light and Magic: The Birth of Art Photography’ (14 October–21 February 2027). Tracing the development of Pictorialism from the 1880s up to the 1960s, the exhibition also includes delicate landscapes taken in the 1940s by Long Chin-San, whose visual language is clearly rooted in Chinese ink painting.
For curators, writers and many others, the Bloomsbury Group’s bloom is, apparently, never off. Some of us, however, might feel we’d fare tolerably well if we didn’t hear or read the names Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and yes, even Virginia Woolf, for a good while hence. But if we must be fed more Bloomsbury, better that it be served up in the form of one of the set’s many talented shadow members. Winifred Gill (1891–1981) was a key designer at Fry’s Omega Workshops, and her exuberant watercolours for toy designs, included in a display of her work at the Courtauld (14 October–20 January 2027), are charming.
Carmen Herrera was another woman who knew what it was to be unsung in a male-dominated field – hers being that of New York heavyweight painters such as Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock. At Lisson (24 September–7 November), art historian Marie Perennès has curated an exhibition of drawings, paintings and sculpture made by the Havana-born artist in the final decade of her life (she died in 2022). Her many years of exploring space and line as well as, of course, colour, are brought to bear in these powerful geometric abstractions. Herrera said in 2020 that she had always been curious about ‘two colours reacting or dancing with each other’. Stand in front of her harlequin-like patterns, and be curious in turn.
From children’s toys and harlequins to ‘Bedtime Stories’ (14–23 October), a special exhibition at Charles Ede, where the designer Ellie Peugeot and curator Valerio Polimeno have been invited to create an imagined collector’s home – the kind of mise-en-scène you might create after a spree at Frieze Masters. Here the gallery’s specialist antiquities are complemented by art and design of later eras from Galerie Chastel-Maréchal in Paris: sculpture by Lynn Chadwick, for instance, or a 1920s floor lamp by André Groult. One room takes inspiration from the Gabinetto Segreto at the Archaeological Museum in Naples, so expect bedtime erotica, too – Etruscan votive phalluses included.
Winifred Gill: A Bloomsbury Pioneer (Courtauld Gallery, 14 October–20 January 2027)
Carmen Herrera: Pulse, Pause, Repeat (Lisson, until 7 November)
Light and Magic: The Birth of Art Photography (Tate Modern, 14 October–21 February 2027)
Bedtime Stories (Charles Ede, 14–23 October)
