Exhibitions

No one paints fairyland like Richard Dadd (1817-86). In ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’, 1855-64, he reveals a teeming congregation of tiny folk, summoned by a dragonfly trumpeter, marshalled by a pompous chamberlain no bigger than a daisy, all gathered in the presence of Merlin (dead centre) to witness a macho fairy break a hazelnut with an axe. The shell will serve, of course, as Queen Mab’s chariot. And yet the scene isn’t cute. By placing the shiny bald pate of a frightened gnome a jot too close to the swing of the axe, the artist suggests the fairy feller might break that nut instead. Dadd is like a Victorian Hieronymus Bosch.

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.

More than 30 contemporary artists have contributed to the Wellcome Collection’s latest exhibition, which asks what it’s like to age at a time of unparalleled longevity. But as so often happens at the Wellcome’s exhibitions, it’s the ephemera that draw the eye first. “These 2 men are the same age,” says a leaflet advertising Kellogg’s All-Bran breakfast cereal. “One has driving power – energy – the will to succeed. The other is listless – tired all the time – it is an effort for him to plod through each day’s work.” The point being that aging is, to a not inconsiderable degree, something we do to ourselves, and something we do to each other. It is a process, not an event.

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.

Few connoisseurs of the image are unfamiliar with the great French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927). But his name is, unfortunately, unfamiliar to the lay person. This is a shame: his gloriously detailed, sharply focused black-and-white images of late 19th- and early 20th-century Paris evocatively conjure the shadows and lights of the boulevards, parks and alleyways of the Belle Époque. His astonishing close-ups of finely crafted architectural details are as striking as his sometimes surreal views of storefront windows and food-stall displays. Whether training his bulky large-format view camera on scenes interior or exterior, he reveals an aesthetic sensibility exquisitely sensitive to the world around him.

Recognition can be late in coming for many artists, but perhaps especially so for women whose originality and talents too often become overshadowed by their more famous romantic partners. Museums are often eager to put on shows making this very argument as women artists are rediscovered. Sometimes the thesis succeeds; other times, it does not. The latest of these is the case of the German artist Gabriele Münter (1877-1962), whose reputation, until recent decades, rested less on her own body of work than on her long-time connection to her mentor and lover, the Russian expressionist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). The Guggenheim Museum’s exhibition, Gabriele Münter: Contours of a World, attempts to rectify the imbalance.