Art postcards are like time capsules
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
A little tour of a big collection
I was just looking through some postcards I bought in Japan. These are by Chie Okumura and she was selling them in a little shop near the end of the Fushimi Inari trail in Kyoto, with the actual cat curled up asleep in the corner. Aren’t they lovely? I was wondering what to do with them and it got me thinking about postcards in general, why I buy them and why I’ll never get rid of them in one of my rash clear outs.
My mum collected postcards, kept in an old bureau in our living room. I loved looking through them when I was little, imagining where she was when she bought them and why she picked each one to keep forever. My teen bedroom wall was covered in postcards from early visits to the National Gallery and Tate when I was just discovering the Impressionists, Matisse and Picasso.
While initially buying them as a souvenir from an exhibition or a particular work I want to remember, postcards now anchor me to a time and a place in my life. Not quite as visceral as music or as direct as a photograph, but a blurry flashback to previous chapters - the people, the friendships, the holidays.
I thought you might like to see some of them.
Matisse was the reason I wanted to be an artist and I’ve got enough Matisse postcards to open a small Matisse postcard shop. Here are just two - from the Pompidou Centre, Paris 1991 and Saint-Paul-de-Vence 1992 I think. Both trips with school friends = many happy and many cringey memories.
This one - Waiting by R.B Kitaj - was from a retrospective at the Tate in 1994. I remember walking around at the time and being surprised I had never heard of him. Now googling to check the dates, I was interested to read that this exhibition was so savaged by critics, it led to Kitaj’s self imposed exile back to the US, and he partly blamed it for the death of his wife. Here is an interview with him just before the exhibition opened, when he still considered himself a Londoner.
Julia Margaret Cameron at the National Portrait Gallery 2003, with my friend who looked exactly like one of JMC’s Pre-Rafaelite models at the time, and at the Getty in Los Angeles, from their retrospective in 1996.
Tell me you were at college in the 90s without telling me you were at college in the 90s. Film postcards, some of which probably came from the National Film Theatre shop (now the BFI Southbank).
Escapades with an old friend: Salt’s Diner by Hockney, Bradford 1995, from Yves Klein ‘Leap into the Void’, London 1995 - an exhibition we still laugh about today. Barbara and Gaby by Franz Gertsch, Berlin 1993 (which is huge and also not a photograph (blew our tiny minds), City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco, 1995.
Four icons from my favourite London gallery, the National Portrait Gallery. Many visits over many years.
The thoughtful woman collection - Matisse, Hopper, John William Godward, Grancel Fitz.
These days, if I love an exhibition I tend to buy the book, so I don’t get quite so many postcards, which is a shame. But here are a few more recent faves.
Finally, one from my mum’s postcard collection. I was wondering how she had it in her bureau when I was a child, since she posted it to her parents while travelling in Europe in the ‘50s. And then I noticed right at the bottom she’s written a plea -
‘Please preserve postcard’.
So you see, it runs in the family.
