Studies in World Art

Exhibition organizers at the Royal Academy are expressing bewilderment and mild outrage, at least in public, because the people who run advertising for the London Underground have decided to ban a poster featuring a nude Venus by the German 16th-century artist, Lucas Cranach the Elder. In private, they must be hugging themselves. At the time of writing, three major newspapers have picked up the story.

As a working critic, I find the most difficult exhibitions to write about are those that combine an evidently important subject with a faintly dispiriting result. The new Edvard Munch show at Tate Modern is a case in point. Munch is undoubtedly a major Modernist artist, a Norwegian cultural icon who was the precursor and to some extent the inventor of what came to be known as Expressionism. One version of his composition, The Scream, very recently made a record price.

The story of David Burliuk, now generally regarded as the father of Russian Futurism, is in some ways one of the strangest in the history of the Modern Movement in art. He was immensely influential in the years immediately before the Russian Revolution, at a time when the whole of the Russian cultural world was in ferment. And fairly soon after that, he was almost forgotten in his own country. This exhibition is, among other things, an attempt to correct an injustice.

"Gothic Nightmares" at Tate Britain in London was an important exhibition, but not entirely for the reasons that its organizers thought. They clearly saw it as a stage in mapping an episode in British art - the rise of the Sturm und Drang, hand-in-hand with a new age of Gothic sensibility in literature - that has, until now, been relatively uncharted. What they almost entirely failed to perceive was its relevance to recent, and even current, developments in British and American art.

Forgotten Empire, the new exhibition in London devoted to the great realm that Alexander the Great destroyed, is an openly political occasion, designed to stress links in the present as well as to revive interest in a part of the past that has more or less sunk into oblivion. It stresses the fact that, despite the tensions that now exist between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Western Europe, a degree of cultural cooperation is still possible.

Going to the Frida Kahlo exhibition current at Tate Modern in London is like entering the shrine of a secular saint. The rooms are thronged. People peer closely at the paintings, many of them very small. They seem afraid to talk much above a whisper. There are a number of reasons for this reaction. One is Hayden Herrera’s highly readable biography of the artist, first published in 1983, and now established as a classic feminist text. Another is the feminist movement’s general need for heroines, which has had a similar effect on the posthumous reputation of Georgia O’Keeffe. A third, probably the most powerful, reason is Kahlo’s own personality, which combined self-assertion, defiance and masochism in almost equal proportions. In this respect Kahlo can be compared with a slightly later generation of English-language poets, male and female. Prominent among them are Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.

The new Gauguin exhibition at Tate Modern in certainly the art event of the year in London. It’s a blockbuster exhibition of a kind that, thanks to the continuing worldwide financial crisis, may soon become extinct. It is also an exhibition that raises important questions about how we currently see and think about art.

Eminent art historian and writer Edward Lucie-Smith discusses an ambitious digital art book series called 100 London Artists, designed to celebrate London as an art city.

British, even more than most countries, like to have a "boss" artist - an artistic figure who is indubitably the head of the profession. In the old days, this need was easily accommodated within the establishment structures of the time. The big boss could be Sir Joshua Reynolds, knighted by the monarch of the day, or Lord Leighton, given a peerage. Both of these were also presidents of the Royal Academy.

It is a paradox of a sort that the only fully authentic Holbein painting of King Henry VIII of England should now reside in Madrid, in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. It left Britain as late as 1933, sold by Earl Spencer, grandfather of Diana, Princess of Wales. Holbein is, after all, the author of what is perhaps the most iconic and formidable of all British royal images. Fittingly, the Thyssen-Bornemizsa portrait adorned the cover of the catalogue that accompanied the "Holbein in England" exhibition at Tate Britain in London. 

"The Queen: Art and Image", now on view at the National Portrait Gallery in London, makes a lot of claims for itself. The blurb on the gallery web-site tells one that by “exploring the startling range of artistic creativity that the Queen has inspired, the exhibition also reveals the radical changes in portraiture and profound developments since the 1950s.” It goes on to list some of the supposedly distinguished painters and photographers who have, during her long reign, produced likenesses of Elizabeth II.

The artist Ingres was a supreme bourgeois who also succeeded in being one of the supreme rebels of 19th-century art. Like Caravaggio, his opposite in most respects, he is historically recalcitrant.

In Chinese culture, calligraphy is so closely allied to traditional modes of ink-and-brush painting as to be almost indistinguishable from them. There is no definite border between the two art forms, as this exhibition amply demonstrates. 

The new exhibition at Tate Britain celebrates one of the best loved of all British artists, the landscape painter, John Constable. In his own lifetime, Constable was constantly struggling to catch up with his great rival, J. M. W. Turner, whose astonishing fluency he could never match. Turner has maintained his fame, but, among the British at least, Constable is now more intimately loved.

John Millais is the most paradoxical of Britain’s major Victorian artists. Already recognized in his teens as prodigiously gifted, he chose to risk everything by becoming a founder-member of the Pre-Raphaelites, a revolutionary group of neo-primitive painters who, despite the support offered to them by John Ruskin, the most influential critic of the day, risked being treated as outcasts by the ruling artistic establishment.

Many people - among them, most art-world insiders - think that Joseph Beuys was the most important artist of the second half of the 20th century. Beuys was many things - a shaman, a trickster, a charismatic social and political activist. He spearheaded the return to prominence of the German avant-garde post-World War II, and his impact on both the European and American art worlds continues to be felt today, nearly 20 years after his death in January 1986.

Wifredo Lam is by far the most celebrated, and most people would say the greatest, artist produced by the Caribbean region in modern times. His relationship with where he came from is, however, extraordinarily complex - much more complex than most of his admirers suppose, largely because they usually have no direct experience of the region and little knowledge of its social history.

We all have friends like that, who promise, and fantasize, and disappoint, then somehow contrive to charm us all over again. In the history of Western art, Leonardo da Vinci is the supreme example of this personality-type, the great non-deliverer. It’s interesting to speculate why his legend remains so powerful. Perhaps, most of all, it is because of his restless curiosity about so many aspects of nature, recorded in notebooks that place him well in advance of his time.

The creation of a masterpiece needs more than simply determination on the part of a single individual - though this, of course, is a myth that has continuously gained in strength since the time of Michelangelo. As Michelangelo himself well knew, masterpieces grow from a will to see them made on the part of patrons, who often play nearly as important a part in the process as the man who holds the brush or wields the chisel. The Sistine ceiling would never have come into existence had it not been for Pope Julius II.

The current agitation about the restitution of artistic treasures of all kinds to their original locations is usually presented as overdue justice for faults committed by European colonialism. In fact, this is a serious oversimplification. Conquering armies have always regarded works of art as legitimate spoil. Modern attitudes to the legitimate or illegitimate possession of famous artworks can be traced to the European Enlightenment that blossomed in the late 18th century.