Art

In all the recent hoo-ha about banknotes and who or what to put on them, one name has been curiously absent – that of John Constable. Born 250 years ago this year, he was the son of a prosperous Essex miller and merchant who would rise to become probably the greatest proponent of landscape painting in history.  Where his contemporary Turner – who got the £20 note, of course – had an expressive style that took landscapes towards ethereal impressionism, Constable took nature itself to his heart and somehow made it even better – not unlike a portrait painter flattering his subject. If we weren’t British, we would probably have a major gallery in his name.

I may be biased because I teach it, but history of art A-level often feels like the greatest, yet most dismally undervalued, subject in the curriculum. It explores history’s most innovative thinkers, enhances visual literacy, teaches history through the prism of creativity and emotion, sharpens critical thinking, and fosters empathy and open-mindedness. Yet it languishes as a minority character in the pantheon of school subjects. It has always been chronically underappreciated by students, teachers, school heads and governments. I worry that its disparagement tells us something rather depressing about our own cultural values and even our sense of what education is for. Just to scotch a popular misconception from the outset – history of art is not a ‘soft’ subject.

It was a given that the critics would indulge in emotional onanism when they covered the Tracey Emin retrospective at the Tate Modern – apt enough when you consider the sexual content of so much of it. But what surprised me was that it wasn’t just women. For the art is almost entirely about Being Tracey: her abortions, her sexual abuse as a teenager by horrible men, her diaries, her cancer with pictures of the bloody stoma, her famous unmade bed, with its used condoms, granny slippers and teddy (it sold in 2014 for £2.5 million) and her death mask, which was done in life … obviously. That, you might have thought, would put off the men.

There’s a new exhibition on Picasso which is actually transgressive: Picasso and the Bible. That promises to stir things up among worshippers of the great man, who was known for being Republican, Communist and atheist.   The premise of the exhibition – which was opened this week with great fanfare at Burgos Cathedral in Spain – is that an artist can leave the Church, but the Church never really leaves him. The real theme of the exhibition isn’t Picasso and the Bible; it’s Picasso and Catholicism, a more explosive subject.

There is nothing more glorious than an art gallery selfie. In the same way that hearing someone mispronounce Van Gogh lets you know you’re dealing with an autodidact (the best!), so a gallery selfie suggests someone who doesn’t quite belong in that space: someone who is ignorant of the etiquette of the art world and who is enjoying themselves because of, not despite, that. Complaining about taking selfies in galleries is so obviously a class thing (not to mention an age thing). Which is why it’s so charming to see Tate Britain’s director Alex Farquharson (whose name does not make him sound like a class warrior) enthuse about encouraging visitors to take ‘Instagrammable pictures’ of the gallery’s work in an effort to entice tourists in.

In the winner-takes-all world of modern art, there’s every chance you might not have heard of Cedric Morris. Why should you? No matter how much you sweeten the tea, the Welshman, born in 1889, was no Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko or Salvador Dali. Nor from our 21st-century outlook can it be said that the name itself inspires much confidence: ‘Cedric’ sounds about as on-trend as a character from a short story by Saki, and when paired with Morris, the combination offers up all the avant-garde promise of a baked camembert starter at an Aberdeen Angus steakhouse.

Almost 50 years ago, in a hotel bar in central Paris, French wine faced a reckoning. Steven Spurrier, a British wine merchant, decided California deserved a spell in the sun: at the time French wine was the dominant force in Europe, with bottles from the New World – Australia, New Zealand, the US and the like – considered their poor cousin. Spurrier came up with the idea to pit the very best French Bordeaux against Californian cabernet sauvignons and chardonnays against white Burgundies, and have a panel of experts – all French – rank them in a blind tasting that came to be known as the Judgment of Paris. California won both categories. Odette Khan, a well-known critic, reportedly demanded her scorecard back so news of her grave error wouldn’t reach the papers.