Neja's Art Walks

02/11/2026

Exciting news! Lisa Brice’s exhibition is coming to London next year! In the meantime, why not join us for a Tate Modern art walk, where you can discover one of her wonderful paintings currently on display?

View images of the exhibition and selected artworks. 'Lisa Brice' at Serpentine, London, United Kingdom on 8 Oct 2027–6 Feb 2028.

01/11/2026

A little art history gossip! 🎨

Did you know that Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (the infamous n**e picnic scene) could have ended up in a completely different collection?

In the 1870s, Dr Émile Blanche, a physician and art lover, nearly bought the painting directly from Manet. His wife, however, was apparently uncomfortable with the nudity, and the purchase fell through. Their son, the future painter and art critic Jacques-Émile Blanche, admired Manet and later recalled the episode.

Manet eventually sold the monumental painting to the singer Jean-Baptiste Faure in 1878. It is now one of the star works at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

Meanwhile, the Courtauld Gallery in London owns something closely related: Manet’s smaller study for the composition, painted around 1863. Samuel Courtauld purchased it in 1928.

So, while Blanche’s father nearly acquired the famous original, it was the Courtauld that eventually secured the preparatory study. Two versions of one revolutionary idea, now in two different collections!

30/10/2026

I’m delighted to announce that I’m now offering guided walks of the Victoria and Albert Museum!

I’ve actually been doing these tours quietly for years, whenever requested, but I wanted to make sure more of you know that this is now an option when booking a private art walk with me.

The V&A is full of fascinating stories hiding in plain sight. For example, if you stand in front of the doors leading into the café, you are actually standing at the original front door of the museum, completed in 1865.

At the time, you would have been standing in a garden stretching all the way to the present-day main entrance on Cromwell Road. Look up, and you’ll see a grand pediment decorated with black and gold mosaic. This is, in a way, the origin story of the V&A.

At its centre, Queen Victoria greets bearers of science, invention and the arts, whose achievements were displayed as part of the Great Exhibition of 1851 — the first international exhibition to celebrate modern industrial technology and design.

Behind Victoria is the iconic silhouette of the Crystal Palace, where the Great Exhibition took place in nearby Hyde Park. Around the border are the names of participating nations, including ‘Prussia’, ‘Zolverein’ and ‘British Colonies’.

And this is just one of the many stories I’ll be exploring on my new V&A art walks — looking beyond the obvious highlights to uncover the history, architecture, design and fascinating details that make this museum so extraordinary.

If you’d like to explore the V&A with me, get in touch to arrange a private art walk.

28/10/2026

Although Degas is best known for his depictions of ballet dancers, he was equally fascinated by the world surrounding the performance.

When Degas was a regular visitor to the Paris Opéra in the 1860s–1880s, audiences could enjoy grand French operas by composers alongside ballets that were performed either independently or as part of an evening's entertainment. Yet the theatre was about much more than what happened on stage.

In nineteenth-century Paris, the Opéra was one of the city's most important social institutions. Wealthy subscribers enjoyed privileged access not only to performances but also to private boxes, corridors, rehearsal rooms, and other areas closed to the general public. Audiences were far less silent and disciplined than today: people arrived late, moved between spaces, chatted, visited acquaintances in neighbouring boxes, and often paid as much attention to one another as to the performance itself. For many affluent Parisians, the Opéra functioned as a social club as much as a cultural venue.

Influenced by photography and Japanese prints, Degas embraced unusual cropping and off-centre compositions, creating works that still feel strikingly modern today. His attention often wandered away from the stage towards orchestra musicians, theatre boxes, and fleeting interactions between audience members.

Several works by Degas can be seen in London today. Join one of NEJA's Art Walks at the National Gallery to explore his art in person and discover how he helped redefine modern painting.

25/10/2026

There are so many artists I have never heard of before and Cuno Amiet is one of them.

Born in Solothurn, Switzerland in 1868, he began painting at an early age. He enrolled to the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich where that he met his life-long friend, fellow painter Giovanni Giacometti. In 1888–92, both artists moved to Paris to study at the Académie Julian.

Unhappy with the program at the Paris institution, Amiet left in 1892 to join the Pont-Aven School in Brittany, where he was introduced to the work of Gauguin, Van Gogh, and others in that circle. The experience would have a significant impact on his painting, especially on his use of color, which he embraced wholeheartedly.

Color meant the world to Amiet and to a certain extent, it was even more important than the form. He loved life and the beauty of people, nature, and objects. With color, he found a tool to express that affection.

By most measures, Amiet was a hugely successful artist during his lifetime, with exhibitions at the Guggenheim in New York, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and at the Venice Biennale in 1934. He was also the only Swiss artist in “Die Brücke,” an influential group of mostly German expressionist artists.

So glad I have found this hidden gem of an artist, thanks to an exhibition catalogue sent to me by a friend from Basel. I hope you enjoy looking at Amiet's paintings as much as I did.

22/10/2026

Barnett Newman’s The Stations of the Cross (1958–66) is generally regarded as the peak of his achievement. The series of black-and-white paintings was begun shortly after Newman recovered from a heart attack.

Its subtitle, Lema sabachthani — “Why have you forsaken me?” — refers to Christ’s final words on the cross. Newman believed these words had a universal significance in his own time, and the series has also been interpreted as a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.

Newman was close friends with fellow artist Mark Rothko, but their friendship eventually broke down. The reasons were tied to growing tensions around artistic influence, recognition and competition; one contemporary account described the dispute simply as a question of “who took from whom”.

If you’d like to explore Newman, Rothko and the wider story of Abstract Expressionism at Tate Modern, get in touch to book a NEJA’s Art Walk.

19/10/2026

Mark Rothko once dubbed Ben Heller’s apartment “the Frick of the West Side.” The New York textile executive filled his home with works by Po***ck, Kline, Newman, Giacometti, alongside pre-Columbian, African and ancient sculpture.

Born in 1925, Heller discovered modern art on his 1949 honeymoon, after seeing exhibitions of Georges Braque and Paul Gauguin. He returned to New York and bought a Braque still life and an African fe**sh figure. Though he began with European modernism, he soon turned to contemporary art.

Around 1953, during a studio visit with his soon-to-be friend Jackson Po***ck, Heller bought One, Number 31, 1950 for $8,000, paid in instalments. Po***ck included No. 6, 1952 in the deal, and Heller also bought Echo for $3,500. Heller later wrote of One: “It was the first of our truly large paintings and from it we learned how penetrating, changing, enlarging and vital an experience living with such a painting is.” The acquisition, he said, gave them “a new understanding of the import of an act, of risk.”

Heller took substantial risks on emerging artists before Abstract Expressionism was widely accepted. MoMA largely ignored the movement at first—Robert Motherwell once joked that you had to visit Heller’s apartment to see modern art—until curator William S. Rubin began expanding the museum’s holdings in the late 1960s. Heller helped by gifting and selling works, including One, which MoMA bought in 1968 for $350,000. He also frequently loaned works from his collection, sometimes requiring a crane to move them from his tenth-floor apartment.

In 1957, Heller bought Po***ck’s Blue Poles (1952) from Fred and Florence Olsen. Working with dealer Max Hutchinson, he sold the painting in 1973 for $2 million to the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra—around $14 million today. The price and the decision to send the painting outside the US attracted enormous attention, and the purchase became a political controversy in Australia. Heller later recalled: “Art was becoming big, and collectors were becoming big, and all that stuff was becoming bigger than the work of art.” He believed the sale helped demonstrate just how much the market value of these paintings had changed.

16/10/2026

Italian painter, Massimo Giannoni, documents the depositories of learning. The book shop, library and museum are his subjects. Serried ranks and columns of multi coloured volumes, folios and manuscripts both line and define the walls of their architectural enclosures. Bookshelves create a space within a space, a capsule of text, diagram and illustration that enfolds any potential occupant with a boundless variety of entertainment and information.
Giannoni works in oil, thickly rendered and worked into turbid, glutinous descriptions of the books, architecture, and objects of his world. His paint is clotted and sticky, richly applied and slathered on to make an impasto of sensuous immediacy. The handling of the brush is deft and assertive, which makes for a lively, agitated surface or ‘facture’. Colour ranges across the spectrum – his is not a monochromatic palette, despite sometimes-shadowy interiors. Illumination is by a diffuse light, that subtly articulates and discloses each mis-en-scene, establishing a hermetic and numinous atmosphere that verges on the sacred.

These images suggest the scholarship and enlightenment that arises from sites of study and revelation. They are, however, entirely unpopulated; the client is absent; the people have left or have not yet arrived. What we see is a resource untapped, ignored or possibly abandoned. Melancholy attaches itself to empty spaces. Nevertheless, we sense a presence from the voices of the books themselves – a constant murmuring, an undertow of discourse which is intrinsic to the learned object.

We can choose to experience these pictures as depictions of cultural decay or, on the other hand, as a hard-won inheritance ripe for exploration. In a post-modern world that devalues and discards the intellectual achievements of its past, Giannoni’s paintings invite us to take up the book, view the museum and immerse ourselves in the life of the mind, wherever it may lead us.

To book our Mayfair art walk, please do get in touch.

15/10/2026

In 1972, Tate bought Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII, made from 120 ordinary firebricks, for £2,297. The work had been exhibited without much controversy, but in 1976 a Sunday Times article brought the purchase to public attention, and the press reaction was enormous — more than 1,000 articles followed, criticising the Tate for spending public money on what appeared to be a pile of bricks.

The controversy became a wider debate about public funding of contemporary art. Critics attacked the work and the Tate defended its importance as Minimalist art. On 23 February 1976, a visitor even threw blue vegetable dye over the bricks, although it was successfully washed off. The Tate then had to think about obtaining replacement bricks because the particular type mattered to the work. Equivalent VIII was one of eight different arrangements Andre made from the same 120 bricks, which he considered equivalent because they had the same material, weight and volume.

Ana Mendieta, Andre’s former wife and fellow artist, is currently the subject of a major exhibition there, running until 17 January 2027. Mendieta’s work is radically different, exploring the body, nature, identity and displacement through photography, film, performance and ephemeral interventions in the landscape.

If you’d like to discover her work with a bit more context, get in touch to book a guided art walk with me at Tate Modern.

14/10/2026

After years of admiring Salman Toor’s work, mostly online and through books, but occasionally encountering his paintings in person, I finally got to see his marvellous exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery.

Across two rooms filled with his signature green hues, one painting in particular stood out: Cross Street.

The painting grew out of a scene Toor glimpsed through the window of Tayyabs, a restaurant in Whitechapel that he frequented. A group of muscular skaters hang around a street sign as a mullah passes by. Toor was struck by the proximity of these two very different kinds of masculinity — both of which had intimidated him growing up.

As a long-term resident of the borough, I know this street and Tayyabs all too well myself, which made encountering this painting particularly special.

Toor’s relationship with London is deeply personal, too. In the early 2000s, visits to friends meant nights out in Soho, gay clubs, and kebabs before catching a night bus back to Streatham. As he puts it, London was a city that opened him up to gay nightlife and art history.

Salman Toor: Someone Like You is at the Courtauld, London, until 10 January