Art Study

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 Antonello da Messina exhibition now at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome is one of those rare occasions that takes place only once in a lifetime. In fact, an exhibition devoted to Antonello will almost certainly never happen again. Like Vermeer, whom in some respects he resembles through his quietism, he is known through very few paintings - less than 50 in all. About two-thirds of these have been gathered together for the exhibition.

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.

This year sees the 300th anniversary of the foundation of St. Petersburg, an event that is being widely celebrated here in London as well as in Russia. And today The Times of London carried a story about the "widespread sleaze" that is hampering the restoration of Russia's former capital city. Though Oleg Kulik is not a Petersburg artist, these two facts help to provide a context for his career. Western interest in and curiosity about Russia is acute. The tendency is, however, to look at the Russian past, not at the present.

Every now and then, an exhibition comes along that hits you in the solar plexus. The compact Daumier show at the Royal Academy in London is one of those. It is housed in the moderately sized Sackler Galleries on the top floor of the building, not in the main exhibition rooms below, where it would be swallowed up. Most of the works on view are quite small. Very few are more than medium sized. For the most part, the color is subdued. Indeed, some of the paintings seem monochromatic until you examine them more closely, The range of subjects is, if not exactly restricted, not hugely wide.

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".

Hammershoi is, in a certain sense, the Danish Vermeer, an artist whom he occasionally paraphrased. That is to say, a quietist painter obsessed by subtle effects of light, forgotten very soon after his death, but rediscovered and turned into a demi-god by a later generation.

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.

It is understandable that, in current circumstances, major arts institutions should try to ally themselves with the more anarchic, contrarian elements in contemporary culture. Perhaps this is especially true of those dealing with the contemporary visual arts, committed as these still are to the myth of avant-gardism. One problem that immediately presents itself, of course, is that this myth is not itself contemporary - it is rooted in the very earliest years of the century before ours.

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.