Good Morning, Midnight

25 May – 7 July 2024
Katja and Nicolai Tangen 20th Century Gallery

Visitors can preview the exhibition as part of The Courtauld Lates on Friday 24 May from 18:30.

This summer, iconic works from The Courtauld’s collection will be presented in dialogue with artworks from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection for the first time.

In Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s painting In a Private Dining Room (At the Rat Mort), electric light illuminates the space with a strange, green glow. The painting sets the tone for the exhibition’s exploration of performance, spectacle and social space at night-time. The exhibition takes its title from a 1939 modernist novel by Jean Rhys in which a woman, alienated and lonely, traverses the cafés and bars of Paris. 

Good Morning, Midnight will also showcase works from The Courtauld’s rich Post-Impressionist collection. Highlights include Georges Seurat’s Study for ‘Le Chahut’, a series of prints by Toulouse-Lautrec depicting renowned actresses of the era, and drawings by Jean-Louis Forain of performers backstage at the opera and ballet. Post-Impressionist artists began to question established modes of depicting their subjects, using looser brushstrokes and employing techniques such as pointillism which dispersed colours across their paintings to capture fleeting encounters.

Similar formal concerns are shared in the paintings, drawings and photography from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection, facilitated by a first-time collaboration between the Roberts Institute of Art and The Courtauld. Across many of the works, artists use light as a tool to create atmosphere, and often zoom in and crop their compositions, fragmenting the body. Many of the artists take bars, clubs and stages as their subject matter, and raise questions about the complex nature of relationships which occur within such spaces, often looking to screen-based entertainment for their source material. 

Curated by The Courtauld’s 2023-24 MA Curating the Art Museum students, Good Morning, Midnight offers new perspectives on relationships between Post-Impressionism and artists in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection, Anthony Cudahy, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Louise Giovanelli, Harry Gruyaert, Celia Hempton, Susan Meiselas, Marlo Pascual, Pádraig Timoney, Prem Sahib and Rose Wylie. The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of public events.

The Roberts Institute of Art is a non-profit contemporary arts organisation. RIA commissions pioneering performance art, runs a residency programme in Scotland, and collaborates with national partners on exhibitions to research and share the David and Indrė Roberts Collection. The programme is responsive to context and seeks to inspire and open up conversations about how we engage with culture. 

The David and Indrė Roberts Collection features nearly 2,500 works by over 850 artists, dating from the mid-20th century to today. The collection is rooted in a passion for contemporary art and an ambition to share extraordinary work by some of the world’s most influential artists and to support artists at different stages of their careers.

Included with Gallery Entry.

A Summer of Art at The Courtauld

If you are booking tickets to visit from 14 June – 7 July 2024, select ‘Mayne+Gallery Entry’ ticket at check out and enjoy a summer of art at The Courtauld Gallery, including:

• Entry to Good Morning, Midnight; Vanessa Bell: A Pioneer of Modern Art and Henry Moore: Shadows on the Wall
• Entry to Roger Mayne: Youth
• Entry to the permanent collection