Art Study

The Tate Britain’s "display", Seeing Africa - it was hardly big enough to be called a proper exhibition - raised more questions than it answered. Consisting of paintings and sculptures drawn from a single private collection, it aimed to explore the subject of Africanisme through images of African people and African landscape made by European painters who traveled to the Dark Continent at the height of the colonial epoch. That is to say between the 1870s and the 1950s.

The magnificent Veronese show that opened at the National Gallery in London in 2014 met with a curiously subdued response from local reviewers. They recognized that it was a magnificent event of its kind, and one that was especially appropriate because the gallery has an important group of works by this 16th-century Venetian painter in its own collection, among them the famous Family of Darius Before Alexander.

The Gale Dictionary of Psychoanalysis defines ‘self-representation’ as “the image the subject has of him or herself based on his or her own interpretation.” The hugely influential 20th century psychoanalytic researcher and philosopher Jacques Lacan enlarges on this by speaking of “the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark [the subject’s] mental development with its rigid structure.” Not surprisingly, psychoanalysts see this construct as a manifestation of the ego, and also as something intimately linked to narcissism.

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.

When Beryl Cook died, she was the subject of a large number of obituaries. Some of them were predictably condescending, which I suspect she would not have minded a bit. The really telling thing, however, is what has happened since then on the web. If you go to the site maintained by The Times, still regarded as the British paper of record, and look for the paper’s obituary archive, you will find a section within it devoted to "Artistic Genius". The subtitle is "Artists and makers who changed the way we see".

Andrea Palladio is the most influential architect who ever lived - much more so than those heroes of the Modern Movement - Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. It is significant that buildings we call "Palladian" are still being built today - for example, by the British architect Quinlan Terry. Palladio’s ideas were disseminated not only by his buildings, but also, even more effectively, by his writings, most notably by his didactic masterpiece, I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (The Four Books of Architecture), published in 1570.

This article is essentially a follow-up to a piece by The Jackdaw’s revered editor, David Lee, published in The Times on July 25, 2013. In it, he detailed just what a fiasco the Arts Council’s contribution to an otherwise successful Olympic year was, with £5.4 million spent and nothing to show for it.

Philip Pearlstein is a paradox. He is one of the great survivors from a time when American art was at its most creative and influential. And at the same time, he seems to oppose everything that the two major revolutions in American art - Abstract Expressionism and Pop - seem to stand for.

"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.

More than 30 years ago - in 1977, to be exact - I co-authored a book called Work and Struggle: The Painter as Witness. Its subject was one aspect of the academic painting of the late 19th and very early 20th century - art which dealt not with the comfortable lives of the rich but with all the social problems of the time. There were over 200 illustrations, most of them drawn from publications issued in conjunction with the official Salons of the period, but when we searched for these, they were largely missing.

The show of Michelangelo drawings at the British Museum in London counted as one of the artistic events of 2006. It is unlikely that the public will have another chance to see such a complete panorama of the artist’s achievement as a draughtsman for many years to come, if indeed ever again. The reasons for this rush to get in are not hard to discover. Michelangelo’s reputation is that of the greatest of all artists. Most of his finished, or near-finished, works are in marble or fresco, and can never leave their locations in Florence or Rome.

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.

Britain’s Culture Minister, David Lammy, recently suggested that the history of slavery should be made a compulsory part of the nation’s school curriculum. Mick Hume, a columnist in The Times, promptly retorted, “Slavery and the Holocaust are now likely to be taught as little chunks of history, removed from any proper context. They become simplistic parables of good and evil, over which children are encouraged to emote and empathise...." How well founded was this criticism?

"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 first thing to be said about the new exhibition at the British Museum, Defining Beauty: The Body in Ancient Greek Art, is that it is genuinely spectacular and deserves the hosannas it has already been greeted with in the press. The second thing is that it is highly political. It is political in all sorts of ways. The most obvious of these can be found in the fact that it plucks a number of the so-called "Elgin marbles".

"Citizens and Kings", the new blockbuster show at the Royal Academy in London, contains an almost overwhelming number of celebrated paintings and sculptures, even if one or two of them, such as Jacques-Louis David’s Marat Assassiné, turn out to be studio versions rather than the real thing. The show aims to trace the shift in attitudes towards the human personality that was set in motion by the American and French Revolutions and the wars associated with these great political and social upheavals.

The term avant-garde continues to be used, in my opinion with far too much frequency, in discussions of contemporary art. It derives, of course, from military terminology, and implies that the art to which it is applied is somehow ahead of the game. It’s worth taking a look at how this assumption works in practice. Essentially, Western and now world art has witnessed the emergence of a series of avant-gardes since just before the third quarter of the 19th century.

We live at a time when there is great confusion, certainly here in the West, about contemporary art in Russia. It is now nearly a quarter of a century since the Soviet Union fell. No convincing narrative has emerged concerning the development of Russian art during that period.

As a number of recent exhibitions have shown, there is a growing fashion for what is called appropriation in art. To you and me, what this means is slavish copying - no ifs and buts, apologies replaced by the paradoxical assertion that this is a thoroughly original, impeccably avant-garde thing to do. Examples were a recent show at the Saatchi Gallery, entitled "Post Pop: East Meets West"; and "Sturtevant: Double Trouble", on view till late February at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Byzantine art has a slightly odd reputation. It is regarded, on the one hand, as something remote, hieratic, and difficult. On the other hand, the word Byzantium has a very romantic ring - it lives in our minds as the name of a citadel of civilization, a place that preserved for posterity both intellectual and material treasures that would otherwise have vanished forever. The remarkable exhibition now at the Royal Academy in London touches on both of these aspects.