Exhibitions

Paula Rego’s 2021 retrospective at Tate Britain demonstrated that, among art critics, ambiguity is still highly prized as a measure of merit. Martin Gayford: ‘No one, including its creator, can be aware of everything that’s going on.’ Laura Cumming at least gave examples. Of ‘The Cadet and his Sister’ (1988), she commented: ‘Bondage – physical, emotional, familial – is always in the air.’ The adjectives in that nervous parenthesis are insurance, the critic spreading her bets. The picture shows an older, bigger sister, formally dressed, with her cadet brother in uniform, wearing white ceremonial gloves. Behind them, a careful vista of trees. The painting depicts a milieu of public formality. Except that she has removed her gloves to tie his shoe laces.

Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection, at the Courtauld, consists of a selection of 25 absorbing paintings chosen from 207. I was disappointed but not surprised that one of the greatest paintings in the world, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ‘Die Anbetung der Könige im Schnee’ (The Adoration of the Kings in the Snow, 1563), didn’t make the journey from Winterthur in Switzerland. Too precious to put at risk. There is no requirement for a collector to accumulate thematically consistent paintings. Whim, availability, opportunism, taste, connoisseurship, pleasure, accident, catholicity all play their part. The Oskar Reinhart collection is gloriously heterogeneous, a series of bonnes bouches.

Ithell Colquhoun was always a bit of a mystery surrealist. Her greatest hit is the unsettling, dream-like ‘Scylla’ (1938), a painting of two towering cliffs, which could equally be thighs in the bath. The prow of Odysseus’s Argo peeps through them. The pubic hair is seaweed, and there are shells, but, as far as discernible, no crabs. The point of view of the painting is that of the titular monster Scylla, lying in wait. It’s witty and disturbing; mythic and domestic. A British surrealist high point, frequently anthologised. This aside, her name was relegated to lists.

On his deathbed, the Austrian writer Karl Kraus remarked of the Japanese attack on Manchuria: ‘None of this would have happened if people had only been more strict about the use of the comma.’ The implication being that by channelling rage into the ordering of small things, we might stay away from violence on a colossal scale. Unable to restrict ourselves to matters of punctuation, alas, humanity is often at war: with itself, and others, however hallucinatory. Two current exhibitions come at rage from very different starting points. War and the Mind demonstrates the devastating psychological impact of war on those who fight it and those who have no choice but to suffer it.

An exhibition of the art of Hélène de Beauvoir (1910-2001), sister of the great Simone, opened in a private gallery near Goodge Street last week. It was the first time Hélène’s work had been shown or received any attention in London, and young people in alternative clothing gathered to sip orange wine and listen, rapt, to the 75-year-old biographer and friend of the de Beauvoir sisters, Claudine Monteil, as her recollections helped elucidate Hélène’s abstract paintings. The reclamation of a new ‘lost’ artist was under way. De Beauvoir’s cubist self-portrait is quite good – but ‘Simone in red jacket’ must never be seen It is possible, these days, for gallerists to do good work – self-defining as allies and activists – while making a good fortune.

When Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies of the Spring was published in 1923, a post-first world war mass wishful belief in fairies was at its height in Britain. Just over two years previously, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, writing in the 1920 Christmas issue of the Strand Magazine, had stated that the ‘Cottingley Fairies’ (tiny winged figures visible in photographs taken near Bradford by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths) were almost certainly genuine and were clear evidence of the existence of psychic phenomena. Barker remained unmarried, and lived a quiet life of flowers and innocence The public – 21 years on from the birth of Peter Pan – were hungrier than ever for fairies: their innocence, their delicate beauty, and their hint of benign mischief.

Towards the end of the British Museum’s Silk Roads show, there is a selection of treasures found in England. Among them is a copper flagon made in Syria and buried in Essex in the late 500s. It is believed that the flagon belonged to an English mercenary who went to fight for the Byzantines against the Sassanians in the 570s. The flagon’s looping handle would have held it tight to a saddle, so perhaps it came to England attached to the warrior’s horse as he rode home from his adventures in the East. There are many spectacular objects in this exhibition. Very many If objects are to inspire more than awe in us, we also need a handle.

Tirzah Garwood, wife of the more famous Eric Ravilious, is having a well-deserved moment in the sun, benefiting from this era of equality in which artists’ and composers’ wives and sisters (such as Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn and Elizabeth Siddal) are having the spotlight shone on their under-appreciated works.

Christmas, and in every city already crowds congregate around the festive department store displays in defiance of the apparent disappearance of the ‘high street’. For despite digital merchandising and online delivery, adults as much as children delight in this annual extravaganza, and such windows prove more popular than ever precisely because they cannot be enjoyed other than physically, in person. For many, these windows remain an indelible early metropolitan memory and perhaps the first experience of a work of visual art, something specifically conjured to arrest the attention, intrigue and entertain.

Scent and the Art of the pre-Raphaelites… there’s an obvious problem here: how do you represent one sense by another? Synesthesia is a neurological condition whereby some people do just that: they experience colour when they hear music, or taste words – think of the Revd Sydney Smith describing heaven as eating foie gras to the sound of trumpets. There may come a time when we get all-enveloping sensory effects when we look at paintings – an exhibition on medieval women at the British Library uses the stink of sulphur to suggest Julian of Norwich’s vision of hell and strawberry and honey for Margery Kempe’s scent of angels – but still the most obvious way of representing scent visually is by painting things that smell.

You have to hand it to the curators of this excellent survey of Francis Bacon’s portraits. Not only have they alighted at an obvious but under-explored vantage point from which to reconsider this most mythologised of postwar painters, securing some serious loans to make their point, they have also dared to open their show with what might be the single worst picture it contains. ‘Self Portrait’ (1987) speaks of everything that Bacon got wrong in his final decades: it’s recognisably the 78-year-old artist, dressing up as a younger version of himself.

Decades after its inclusion in the Hippie Trail, Afghanistan is again open to tourism, according to the Taliban’s spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid. It is perhaps a source of regret for the group that the 6th-century Buddhas of Bamiyan are missing in action. They were blown up in 2001 either, depending on who you ask, because of Islam’s strict beliefs on anti-idolatry or to punish the West for offering money to preserve them rather than give aid to starving children. The war rugs, depicting camels and flowers alongside rocket launchers, are striking and jarring While the country continues to export fruit, nuts and insect resins – opium production was massively scaled back by the Taliban – Afghanistan is justly famous for its woven rugs.

There is a popular Japanese television show that features a segment called ‘Candy Or Not Candy?’. Contestants are presented with objects and must guess if they’re edible or not. Is that a dish sponge – or a steamed sponge cake? I might not consider afternoon tea to be art, but the confectionery artifice required to dupe contestants into mistaking the replica for reality is impressive – or at least entertaining. The lacquered steaks, fruits, vegetables and sliced bread feel wrong. They surely ought to be matte The inverse – using inedible materials to create replicas of food – is also a Japanese art form, and the subject of Looks Delicious! at Kensington’s Japan House.

For the maids on the top floors of the Savoy, everything was in turmoil. The 6th had been commandeered by wounded Boer War officers, and since February 1900 a suite of rooms on the 5th had been taken over by a French painter, who was using one as a studio. The officers were nice enough, but the Frenchman spoke almost no English and you could smell the turps down the corridor. Whatever was the management thinking? ‘Without the fog, London wouldn’t be a beautiful city.

In 2022 the Wellcome Collection caused a stir by closing its Medicine Man exhibition on the grounds that it was ‘based on racist, sexist and ableist theories and language’. Director Melanie Keen had previously talked of reinterpreting the collection but had now evidently decided it was beyond redemption. ‘We can’t change our past,’ she said in a statement at the time. ‘But we can work towards a future where we give voice to the narratives and lived experiences of those who have been silenced, erased and ignored.

George Orwell took a dim view of competitive sport; he found the idea that ‘running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue’ absurd. ‘Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play,’ he wrote in Tribune after scuffles broke out during the Russian Dynamo football team’s 1945 tour. ‘It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war without the shooting.’ Suzanne Lenglen’s loose-fitting knee-length tennis dresses inspired the new ‘style sportif’ of Coco Chanel Baron Pierre de Coubertin, visionary founder of the modern Olympics, took the opposite view: to him the three words ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger’ represented ‘a programme of moral beauty’.

Van Gogh only got one major review in his career, and he was mystified by it. When the critic Albert Aurier described his six paintings in the 1890 Brussels exhibition of Les XX as the product of a ‘terrible and distraught genius’, the artist responded that, far from being a genius, he was ‘very secondary’ and that his sunflowers – now in the National Gallery – were no different ‘from so many pictures of flowers more skilfully painted’. If he were alive today he would probably have protested at the National Gallery making an exhibition of his work the high point of its bicentenary programme, but he would have liked its focus on his inspirations rather than his distress.

‘It had nothing to endow it with the title of studio at all,’ was Edward James’s first impression of Leonora Carrington’s Mexico City workspace in 1946. ‘The place was combined kitchen, nursery, bedroom, kennel and junk store. The disorder was apocalyptic: the appurtenances of the poorest. My hopes and expectations began to swell.’ Carrington blended Egpytian, Mayan, Mesopotamian and Celtic legends learned at her nanny’s knee Over six decades in the creative chaos of this house on Calle Chihuahua, Carrington would paint some of her best-known works and write her quirky serio-comic novella The Hearing Trumpet, which is narrated by a 92-year-old woman.

The lunatics were once in charge of the asylum. The first six directors of the National Gallery were all artists: before art history became an academic discipline, artists were the leading authorities on art. Founded more as a teaching resource than a visitor attraction, until the mid-1940s the gallery was reserved for artists two days a week, when other visitors had to pay for entry. This stopped them getting in the way of artists copying from the masters, an essential part of an art education in the days before cheap colour reproduction. There’s something of the altarpiece in this image of an artist’s progenitors flanking a touchstone for his art It’s rare to see artists copying in the galleries now that they are so jam-packed with tourists.