Exhibitions

In recent years there has been a surge of interest in the treasures hidden in our public art collections, many of them rarely if ever on view. The Tate Gallery is perhaps the principal offender here, showing only a tiny percentage of its glorious and wide-ranging holdings of British art, but attention is now being directed towards our provincial galleries and museums. Since 2003 the Public Catalogue Foundation has been recording and publishing the oil paintings held in galleries and civic buildings, county by county, and issuing invaluable volumes of colour illustrations to show us what usually remains invisible. By its calculations, a shameful 80 per cent of these paintings are not on view.

High Arctic, the inaugural exhibition in the newly opened Sammy Ofer wing at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (until 13 January), brings a thoroughly 21st-century, technology-driven museum experience to this historic site. It’s an exhibition, Jim, but not as we know it. In 2010 Matt Clark, creative director of the art and design practice UVA, joined an expedition of artists and scientists to the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. High Arctic, which he describes as ‘a monument to an Arctic past set 100 years into the future’, is a response to this trip; an attempt to address, in a non-preachy way, the issue of man’s impact on the environment.

In 1935, Paul Nash observed that Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890–1954) was responsible for the change in attitude towards commercial art in this country. An American, Kauffer arrived in England in 1914 during a period of European study. He liked it and decided to stay, enabled to do so by his remarkable ability to design posters. In 1915 Frank Pick commissioned him to produce the first of what became a remarkable stream of some 140 posters for London Transport. Hugely impressed by Vorticism, Kauffer became a friend and ally of Wyndham Lewis and introduced the Modernist sensibility into commercial art.

For far too long, John Martin (1789–1854) has been dismissed as ‘Mad’ Martin, the prophet of doom. In the eyes of many, this unacademic painter was a grotesque curiosity, producing colossal pictures of apocalyptic destruction, crude dramas of catastrophe and tumult, much to the delight of the populace. The mere fact that he was so popular an image-maker made him irredeemably vulgar (rather like Lowry today), and the cognoscenti looked for faults rather than appreciating his strengths. In fact, Martin was a reforming inventor as well as a painter, much concerned with draining the marshes around London and ensuring a pure water supply for the capital, simply because he wanted, as he says in his ‘autobiography’, to improve the condition of the people.

The caption on the photograph (above) makes a difference: ‘A young boy grieves at the funeral of his father who died of Aids at Ndola, Zambia, 2000.’ There were two million Aids orphans in Zambia alone. ‘I care about not letting this tragedy go unseen,’ Don McCullin said. Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin, at the Imperial War Museum (until 15 April 2012), shows 250 items from the long career of a man best known for his photojournalism, from Vietnam onwards. The boy at Ndola looks straight at the lens, if he is looking outwards and not into the empty future, or back into the life with his father that has gone. Light from one side catches tears that have coalesced in the valley by his left nostril.

Photographs of roadworks feature regularly in the Hampstead Village Voice but, even with the postmodern fashion for grungy subjects, no contemporary residents have made paintings of them. Yet that, astonishingly, was what Ford Madox Brown did in the 1850s, lugging his two-metre canvas on to The Mount, off Heath Street, to do it. Brown’s unlikely masterwork ‘Work’ was the first ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ painting bought by Manchester Art Gallery, where it is now the centrepiece of a major exhibition dedicated to the artist. I put ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ in inverted commas because Brown — a prickly individual with a deep distrust of all ‘Bodies, Institutions, Art unions & academies’ — was never strictly a member of the Brotherhood.

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) was born into a banking family, always knew he wanted to be a painter and was fortunate enough to be encouraged in his enthusiasm by his parents. After a classical training he began to paint portraits and history subjects, before seeing the relevance of real life and developing ways in which to depict it. Influenced by Manet and allied to the Impressionists, he was nevertheless not a committed member of the group and was impatient at its definition of painting. He remained classical in his approach to picture-making but fused this with a keen interest in colour and texture, and an awareness of how photography and Japanese prints had influenced ideas of space and vision.

Rome contains many hidden treasures, but the most remarkable of the lot is concealed on the Caelian Hill, above the Colosseum, in the medieval monastery of Santi Quattro Coronati. It’s a cycle of frescoes dating from around 1250. It is extremely rare for painting from this period to survive anywhere, but it’s even rarer in Rome, where the rebuilding of the city by the Counter-Reformation popes destroyed almost all medieval painting. The paintings are in a vast vaulted gothic hall, the walls of which — about 800 square metres of them — were originally completely covered in frescoes. About half the original paintings remain: an earthquake, and the construction of additional windows, have destroyed the rest.