Exhibitions

A retired priest in North Wales told me that after the war he had been asked by Billy Butlin to buy 19th-century paintings for the holiday-camp chapels, because they were going cheap. One he bought, for 49 guineas in 1947, was William Dyce’s 1835 ‘Lamentation of the Dead Christ’. In 1983, after the Butlin’s chapels had closed, it made a handy £125,000 at auction, when it was bought by Aberdeen Art Gallery. As late as 1962, Lord Leighton’s great ‘Flaming June’ (1895) was sold for £50. Today? Millions. Talk about ‘the bubble reputation’. The pattern of artistic fame followed by subsequent obscurity has been repeated through the centuries.

At Chartwell, Sir Winston Churchill’s home of 42 years, now owned by the National Trust, lies his painting studio. Reached by a path through the green-gold gardens, it is a standalone building with a little doorway and a soaring ceiling, clearly a place of refuge, and recreation, but also of serious commitment. The walls display a hundred or so paintings, lit by a big window that gives on to the garden and the purple horizon of the Weald of Kent; his armchair is set at the easel, near his twisted paint-tubes, housed in a former cigar humidor. His bespoke painting overcoat is flung over the armchair, his drink of ‘mouthwash’ (a splash of whisky and a lot of soda) set ready. It was here that Xavier Bray, director of the Wallace Collection, had his revelation.

A pious Caravaggio JASPREET SINGH BOPARAI The Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbaran is sometimes thought of as a pious equivalent to Caravaggio – a Caravaggio without the bad temper, brutal vices or criminal record. But it seems difficult to argue that Caravaggio had any direct influence on his work. After all, he died when Zurbaran was 11 and a half years old. Since Zurbaran never left Spain, he could not have seen any of Caravaggio’s paintings with his own eyes. Indeed, he might never have even heard the artist’s name. Still, there are unavoidable similarities between the two men’s work. Zurbaran shared Caravaggio’s sense of drama and his love of shadows broken up by patches of strong light.

I feared this summing-up of Tracey Emin’s career might be self-congratulatory – biennale here, damehood there. But it’s Emin at her most operatic, facing mortality after surviving extensive surgery for bladder cancer in 2021. Blood and suffering are its subjects: the broken body, and the ascension of the spirit. The Young British Artists are getting on for 60, and Emin embraces it. Arranged in the centre of the exhibition is a ‘corridor to the afterlife’, inspired by an Egyptian tomb, dark and narrow. Along one side are sexy Polaroids she took of herself 26 years ago, along the other, gruesome hospital selfies. You might not want to look too closely at the latter, but the dialogue between the two is strong. ‘You thought you had problems?

One of the miracles of art history is how painting, so often written off, keeps on coming back. Right now we are in the middle of just such a resurgence, and one sign of the current vitality of the medium is the emergence of painters such as Hurvin Anderson. Admittedly, Anderson – who was born in 1965 – has been emerging for a long time now. But, with the opening of a big retrospective at Tate Britain, his status as a major figure in modern British art is clear. Anderson is completely individual yet visibly connected to the tradition – indeed, to several traditions – and capable of creating huge, wall-filling canvases into which you can sink and float away, but which also make you think and feel.

Cecily Brown, like pop art, moved from Britain to America and found an audience. Picture Making, her new show at Serpentine South Gallery, is a return to the country of her birth – her first solo exhibition here since 2005. Brown has steered clear of art movements. But she has a reverential attitude toward art history that keeps her work from identifying with recent genres of painting that have tried to escape either subject or materiality, or that have tried to collapse the space between painting and life.

The Notre-Dame de Paris has had several close shaves down the years – even before the 2019 fire that nearly obliterated it. The revolutionaries temporarily turned it into a ‘Temple of Reason’, then a grain warehouse; some of it was even sold for scrap. It only became the recognisable Gothic fantasy and French national icon that we know today largely down to the efforts of architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, who headed its definitive restoration from 1844 to 1864. Following the cathedral’s 2024 rebirth, Bard Graduate Center is now hosting the most comprehensive exhibition in the Anglosphere of the architect’s work. Viollet-le-Duc kept superhuman working hours: 6 a.m. to midnight.

When so much contemporary art is riven with obscurity and angst, it is disorientating, at first, to encounter something as straightforwardly enjoyable as Hockney’s latest exhibition. Aged 88, the artist went out into his garden in Normandy with his iPad to make a visual diary of the year 2020. A hundred or so of the iPad sketches he made have been put together here, blended into a frieze, a walk-through panorama of the seasons rendered with Vivaldi-like virtuosity. As we move along the curve of this frieze, we see nature through Hockney’s bright yellow spectacles As we move along the curve of this 90-metre frieze, we see nature through Hockney’s bright yellow spectacles. He distils the garden to its dramatic essences.

Ramses and the Pharaohs’ Gold is, let’s not shy away from it, a profit-seeking exhibition mounted by an entertainment business. Neon opened its high-tech space at Battersea Power Station last year with dinosaurs, and has partnerships with the likes of Harry Potter and Marvel. The gold mask fronting Ramses’s publicity has nothing to with Ramses. Neither does the other gold and jewellery on display: his tomb was looted long ago, and all that remains is his recycled cedar box, sarcophagus and the king himself. A notable offer in the expansive retail zone is the chance to have your name drawn on papyrus by a robot. But go forewarned, and you will enjoy the experience.

I got my first paid writing gig back in the early 2010s, for an online magazine fixated on the then-current phenomenon we were already calling ‘post-internet art’. The journal was all but unreadable, its house style both po-mo and po-faced to the extent that contributors were obliged to adopt pseudonymous bylines. I went with ‘Screamin’ Jay Jopling’, which counted for a rare laugh. Yet the tone was very much in tune with the art we covered. Whether it was video, sculpture, photography or pretty much any other medium, it was chiefly concerned with the intrusion of digital technology into – the style guide’s punctuation, not mine – ‘real’ life.

A pilgrimage to Cardiff Central, sorry, Caerdydd Canolog (according to the signage in the station, which also had my return train’s destination ‘Lundain Padd’ton’) to see the new Gwen John show. She is being lauded as Wales’s greatest artist, but she left Tenby at 18 in 1895, and never went back. After studying at the Slade she moved to Paris, fell in love with Rodin, and adopted the Catholic faith.

Climb the Reading Room steps to reach the British Museum’s dazzling Hawaii exhibition, and you perform an obeisance. At the top is a representation of Ku, a larger-than-human god of war and chiefly power, carved in stylish fury from the trunk of a breadfruit tree. He once commanded a flight of stairs at the Museum of Mankind in Burlington Gardens. In Hawaii he would have looked down with royal authority from a stone temple mound. We pass below him into the show, it feels, only with his consent. This is a landmark event that tells of moving encounters with stunning exhibits For that we should offer thanks. At an important time for the museum (on which more below), this is a landmark event that tells of moving encounters with stunning exhibits.

Is it right to put human remains on show? It’s a question that museum curators and the public have been asking themselves ever since European institutions began displaying bodies of the dead – notably Egyptian mummies – in the early 19th century. It’s the same question that continues to be posed today in Canterbury. Here, an exhibition at the Beaney House of Art & Knowledge chronicles and collates the significant archaeological discoveries in and around the city over recent decades. Finds that have unearthed skeletons of the city’s previous occupants – mostly Anglo-Saxon nobility and Roman soldiers and civilians from the 2nd and 3rd century AD. The question remains the same: what to do with these remains?

Flanders and Swann; Tom and Jerry. Some things come in pairs. Like Turner and Constable, even though our two most famous painters were more like chalk and cheese than cheese and pickle. They were close contemporaries: Turner was born in 1775, Constable a year later. Both painted landscapes. But that’s almost all they had in common. In every other way that matters, personal and artistic, they could hardly have been more different. Turner was a prodigy, a student at the Royal Academy Schools from the age of 14 and an associate (ARA) at 24. That same year, Constable had only just enrolled in the Schools, and was not elected ARA until he was 33. Constable did not become a full RA until the age of 52, while Turner had been one since he was 27.

‘Places in Cookham seem to me possessed by a sacred presence of which the inhabitants are unaware,’ wrote Stanley Spencer. Mystically devoted to the Berkshire village near the Thames where he grew up, Spencer was synonymous with Cookham as early as 1912, when he was at the Slade; ‘Cookham’ was his nickname. His greatest work is probably ‘The Resurrection, Cookham’ (1924-7), and he lived out his life there. He became known for pushing an old pram full of paints around town. The former Wesleyan Chapel, where he worshipped as a boy, is now the Stanley Spencer Gallery. So it was intriguing to come across this new show connecting him with Suffolk.

Slavoj Zizek        Hegel thought that, in the movement of history, the world spirit passes from one country to another, from the East to the West. Something similar happened at the beginning of the 21st century: the world spirit passed from cinema, the art of the 20th century, to the TV series.

Numerous research academics have contributed to this highly cogent show celebrating the craftspeople of Ancient Egypt. My pre-teen companion, though a big fan of Egypt, was still slightly hesitant about whether this would be the most interesting angle. It began with a 4,000-year-old stele, or tombstone, on loan from the Louvre, praising the sculptural and painterly skills of an artisan called Irtysen, about whom, of course, nothing more is known. The perennial problem. General information, however, came thick and fast. We learned that a cooperative of skilled workers was a hemut, and a singular skilled worker a hemu.