Exhibitions

Eating makes us anxious. This is a feature of contemporary life: a huge amount of attention is devoted to how much we eat, when we eat it, where it comes from, to toxic foods, organic and inorganic ones, environmentally damaging groceries, those that tot up too much mileage or cause damage to the rainforest. Some of these worries are relatively novel, but preoccupation with the nourishment we consume is not. A remarkable and imaginative exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500–1800, documents just how obsessed our ancestors were with every aspect of their meals. At its heart are a series of recreations by Ivan Day, a specialist on the subject of what can only be described as edible art.

One of the most extraordinary paintings in the exhibition of work by Craigie Aitchison at Piano Nobile (96–129 Portland Road, W11) is entitled ‘Georgeous Macauley in Blue against a Red Background’ (1968). It depicts the sitter, a Nigerian who was Aitchison’s favourite model of the 1960s and ’70s, wearing a peaked cap and double-breasted jacket. The catalogue quotes a reminiscence by the artist which provides a partial explanation of the headgear. ‘He wanted to be a traffic warden, and I said, “Why do you want to go about in the rain doing that?” And he said, “Because you get a uniform.”’ The art and life of Aitchison (1926–2009) were all like that: perfectly logical and at a unexpected tangent from normality.

As you enter the forecourt of the Royal Academy, you see them. A row of artistic titans, carved in stone, peer down from their alcoves in the higher half of the gallery’s façade. Thanks to the name plaques, they’re easily identified. You can see Pheidias, the genius of the Parthenon; Leonardo and Raphael; Sir Christopher Wren. And then there’s… John Flaxman. Who? That’s a completely legitimate question. If these guys are, so to speak, the Avengers of art history, then Flaxman is the equivalent of Hawkeye. Hell, maybe he’s Agent Coulson. Even on his plinth, he has a mildly apologetic air. Under a bald pate, his hair hangs down in curly curtains. His hand, clutching a chisel, crosses his chest self-deprecatingly.

While looking at the photographs of food in this humorous exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery, I thought of how hopelessly outdated our own snaps will soon look. What seems fresh, clean and wonderfully modern to our eye — an Ottolenghi salad, say, dotted with pomegranate seeds and za’atar — will soon look almost tragic. How we photograph food betrays some of our deepest fantasies about ourselves. What’s more, good taste can quickly sour. Feast for the Eyes brings together food photography from the 19th century up to the present day and reveals just how much our attitudes to food change. At first, photographers emulated the principles of still- life painting, using symbolic gatherings and classical references.

In the early 1660s, Pieter de Hooch was living in an area of what we would now call urban overspill surrounding the commercial boom town of Amsterdam. It wasn’t the best of neighbourhoods. Nearby was a little street nicknamed ‘whorehouse alley’ (het hoerenpad). Tanners plied their trade thereabouts, which involved soaking hides in urine. But smells and sounds are not necessarily recorded in pictures, and in this 17th-century version of affordable housing, De Hooch painted images of utter domestic tranquillity. One such picture, ‘A Mother’s Duty’ (c.1658–60), is among the star exhibits in a delightful little exhibition of De Hooch’s work at the Museum Prinsenhof, Delft.

Call me soppy, but when the credits rolled on ‘Wooden Boulder’, a film made by earth artist David Nash over 25 years, I was blinking back tears. Funny what the mind will make human. Within a few minutes I started to think of Nash’s boulder, hewn from a storm-struck oak in the Ffestiniog valley in Wales, as ‘the hero of our story’. A hefty hero, weighing half a tonne, but buoyant. In October 1978, Nash launched the boulder into the Bronturnor stream near his studio at Capel Rhiw in the slate-mining village of Blaenau Ffestiniog in Snowdonia. For 25 years, switching from crackling film to high-def digital, Nash filmed the boulder, through snow, rain, heat and gloom of night, as it made its way downstream. Mired, moored, marooned on an inland sea.

While Sir Joshua Reynolds, on his plinth, was looking the other way, a little girl last Saturday morning was trying to prise a littler sculpture from the pavement of the Royal Academy’s courtyard. For all its tininess — from a distance the sculpture’s curvy lumps, 12 x 28 x 17cm, resemble horse droppings a security guard might dig into their rose bed — she couldn’t shift it. ‘Iron Baby’ (1999) is a solid iron cast made by Sir Antony Gormley of his six-day- old daughter abased before the Enlightenment temple of art, buttocks facing Piccadilly in eloquent critique. But for the Instagramming hordes, you might step over her heedlessly on the way to the exhibition, a survey of Gormley’s works from the late 1970s to today.

‘My basic intention,’ the late Patrick Caulfield once told me, ‘is to create some attractive place to be, maybe even on the edge of fantasy — warm, glowing, but often, by use, rather seedy.’ He frequently succeeded, as you can see from a beautifully mounted little exhibition at the Waddington Custot Gallery. It is a reminder of what a witty and inventive artist Caulfield (1936–2005) could be. Four screen prints from 1971, ‘Interior: Morning, Noon, Evening and Night’, give a virtuoso display of the visual legerdemain he could work using the simplest of props. These all have the same basic design: a window frame, consisting of thick, black lines, with a lampshade dangling in front of it.

Set down the secateurs, silence the strimmers. Let it grow, let it grow, let it grow. Ivon Hitchens was a painter of hedgerow and undergrowth, bracken and bramble. Whoosh! go his seedlings, sprouting, bolting, demanding repotting. The first Hitchens you see on the wall outside this exhibition at Pallant House is his lithograph ‘Still Life’ (1938). A squabble of stems break bounds, vault the vase, bid for freedom. I’m a wildflower, get me out of here. ‘I love flowers for painting,’ Hitchens said. ‘Not a carefully arranged bunch such as people ought not to do — but doing a mixed bunch in a natural way.’ If his posies were ever bridal bouquets they have long since been thrown, trampled, sat on by an usher and shoved in an ice bucket to revive.

Twenty years ago, I visited the ancient Egyptian city of Amarna with a party of American journalists. Even in those days this place, near Asyut on the Middle Nile, was regarded as a dodgy destination for western tourists. As a tribute to the value of an entire CBS television crew as a terrorist target, we were accompanied by a squad of heavily armed, black-clad Egyptian special forces. But the sense of daring adventure was dented when, shortly after arriving at the ruins, we were joined by a couple of intrepid Germans who had come in a taxi. The Germanic world has long been fascinated by Amarna and its ruler, the pharaoh Akhenaten — which is why many of the best finds from the place are in Berlin — and none more so than the founder of psychoanalysis.