World's greatest artists go on show

In total 70 drawings, spanning over 500 years of creativity from the British Museum, have gone on display at the University’s Brynmor Jones Library.

Probably the biggest art exhibition the city has ever hosted, it includes everyone from Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Cezanne, Rubens, Moore and Monet, as well as David Hockney and Bridget Riley.

Entitled Lines of Thought, the exhibition, which runs until February 28, aims to give an insight into the minds of some of the world’s greatest artists, and is arranged by types of thinking, rather than period or style.

The earliest, from the Book of The Dead, an Egyptian papyrus dated 940BC, is placed next to Michael Landy’s 2000 Diagram for Break Down, a preparation for a performance piece in which the artist destroyed all his possessions.

A lovely, simple drawing by Degas of a Nude Woman Bathing is shoulder to shoulder with a harsher masculine study by Picasso for Les Demoiselles D’Avignon.

Georgia Mallin, from the British Museum said the touring exhibition was “arguably the best selection of masterpieces from our Prints and Drawings collection that we’ve been able to offer our national partners.”

The exhibition is the first of a series of five at the University in City of Culture year.

Acting Vice-Chancellor Prof Glenn Burgess said: “The point of bringing people here is to make the campus more visible and make it part of the city community in a much deeper way than it has been and make people feel it is a comfortable place to come.”