Exhibitions

Paint is but coloured mud, pace scientists and conservators, and it can be said that the human animal comes from mud and goes back to it. Thus are the activities of painting and being human linked at a fundamental level, which can be raised by consciousness to impressive heights. As the philosopher T.E. Hulme wrote, ‘All the mud, endless, except where bound together by the spectator.’ This is an apt description of an exhibition by Leon Kossoff (born 1926). Kossoff paints thickly with much piling up of the mud of paint, which is trenched and seamed and dribbled across the surface of board supports.

Sixty per cent of the best Renaissance art is said to be in Italy, and half of that is in Florence. So why bother going to Florence for a particular Renaissance sculpture exhibition when there’s huge amounts of the stuff on show in the city’s museums any day of the year? It’s true that some of the best Donatellos at the Palazzo Strozzi have taken only a short trip from the Bargello, ten minutes’ stroll away; ditto works from the Duomo Museum. But there’s lots more from museums around the world — from the Louvre, Berlin and the V&A — and from the rest of Italy, Naples in particular, that make this show a must, even for Firenze addicts. It’s even more of a must for anyone who’s a bit hazy about the Renaissance.

There are so many good exhibitions at the moment in the commercial sector that the dedicated gallery-goer can easily spend a day viewing top-quality work without paying a single museum admission fee. The following shows nicely complement some of the current or recent displays in public galleries — such as Mondrian||Nicholson at the Courtauld and the Tate’s Picasso and Modern British Art. Despite the financial squeeze and such new burdens as the bureaucratic nightmare of Artists’ Resale Right, commercial galleries continue to play an extremely important role in the nation’s artistic life, though they are not given much credit for it.

Bridget Riley turns 80 this year, a fact easy to forget when looking at the surging energy and contemporaneity of her pictures. She is a remarkable artist who, although imposing severe formal restraints on her work, manages continually to surprise us with the richness of her invention. Perhaps it is because of the self-limitations she endures that her imagination is compelled to delve so deeply in the narrow field she has made her own. And its very modernity is an aspect of the way her vision is directly and inspirationally linked to the art of the past. The free display in the Sunley Room at the NG, sponsored by Bloomberg, demonstrates this very effectively. The exhibition begins with Riley’s own work in company with Old Masters.

Penelope Curtis, director of Tate Britain, talks to Ariane Bankes about the planned revamp of the museum and 100 different ways of showing sculpture The evening after first meeting Penelope Curtis, director of Tate Britain, I bumped into a mutual friend who told me, only half-joking, that she could be frightening. Fair enough, I thought: to become the first woman director of one of Britain’s pre-eminent public galleries you have to frighten a few people along the way. As it happened, I hadn’t found her alarming at all at the press briefing that morning: direct, brisk, purposeful — she was, after all, embarking on a wholesale top-to-toe redesign and rehang of the gallery — but approachable.

Although I stopped watching TV some years ago, films are a continuing solace and pleasure. Among the Christmas treats was a previously unseen Jack Nicholson movie, entitled The Bucket List. The plot revolves around two very different Americans, Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, both of whom are suffering from cancer and are given a mere matter of months to live. The Bucket List is their wish list of things to do before they die, some of the more exotic of which the wealthy Nicholson enables them to achieve. The excellent Freeman, a poorer man but the greater philosopher, reminds Nicholson of a more important consideration: the two questions asked of Ancient Egyptians at the gates of Paradise. Have you found joy in your life? And, has your life brought joy to others?

The trend of fewer temporary exhibitions in our museums is becoming established, as the cost of mounting blockbusters escalates beyond even the generous reach of sponsorship. This is in sharp contrast to the commercial galleries, which still put on as many as 10 or 15 different shows a year in the hope of tempting clients to part with their cash. Taking a keen look at forthcoming exhibitions is always a mixed pleasure: the expected counterpointed with the novel, the obvious with the obscure. Thankfully, there are still enough exciting prospects in the public sector to raise the spirits and move us to make a note in the diary.

The run-up to Christmas is the perfect season for an exhibition of Andrew Logan’s joyful and extravagant art. The run-up to Christmas is the perfect season for an exhibition of Andrew Logan’s joyful and extravagant art. At Flowers (82 Kingsland Road, E2, until 31 December) is an installation of glittering sculptures which lightens the spirit and brings a song to the lips. Fashion meets fantasy in Logan’s signature mirror sculptures, his unique blend of resin, glass, fibreglass, paint and glitter. For the past 40 years, Logan (born 1945) has brought colour and light into people’s lives. He was a pioneer of the sensational long before the YBAs toddled into view; revealingly, Sir Norman Rosenthal, chief enabler of the YBAs, is a long-time admirer of Logan.

The so-called Glasgow Boys had no manifesto, common background or style, apart from working in and around the city of Glasgow and sharing a belief in the importance of painting from direct observation and experience. They acknowledged the influence of the naturalism practised by the Barbizon and Hague schools in the later 19th century, and rejected narrative in painting and especially the sickly sentimentalism that bedevilled so much Victorian art. They were a loosely associated group of painters, sometimes called the Glasgow School but preferring to be known by the slightly more raffish title of the Glasgow Boys, who banded together principally to exhibit. This ploy worked and they achieved a degree of international recognition.

The historic centre of Bruges has 16 museums, enough to cater for every touristic taste. There’s a Diamond Museum, a Lace Centre, a Choco-Story (the narrative element distinguishes it from the 50 chocolate shops) and a Friet Museum — or ‘Belgian Fries Museum’, for English-speakers under the misapprehension that fries are French. But the main focus of the city’s five-yearly festival, now in full swing, is on a local product the French cannot lay claim to: the Flemish painting tradition founded by Jan van Eyck, who died in Bruges in 1441. The historic centre of Bruges has 16 museums, enough to cater for every touristic taste.

As I pointed out last week, one of the chief attractions of the Treasures from Budapest show at the Royal Academy is the inclusion of two rooms of Old Master drawings. For those of us who find large exhibitions overwhelming, there is a refreshingly modest display of French drawings (admission free) at the Wallace Collection, which makes a good companion to the RA’s blockbuster. The earliest work is a fanciful, somehow ethereal, black-chalk and brown-wash 16th-century drawing of a water festival at Fontainebleau, by Antoine Caron. Much tougher is a neighbouring red-chalk study by Jacques Callot, ‘Ecce Homo’. Despite a certain vulgarity of pose and gesture, it has a brash energy that buttonholes the viewer in a way the Caron never could.

Harry Becker (1865–1928) is one of those artists too often dismissed as being of regional interest only, who feature but rarely in the art chronicles of the period. Harry Becker (1865–1928) is one of those artists too often dismissed as being of regional interest only, who feature but rarely in the art chronicles of the period. He is most widely known for his illustrations to Adrian Bell’s celebrated Suffolk trilogy — Corduroy, Silver Ley and The Cherry Tree — and it is worth noting that Becker’s pictures were matched to Bell’s prose after the artist’s death, though they seem to be made for each other in their near-perfect fit. Becker only moved from London to Suffolk in 1913, but he found there his perfect setting.

Sometimes an exhibition does what it says on the tin. The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy, the Ashmolean’s first major show post-revamp, is such an exhibition. Sometimes an exhibition does what it says on the tin. The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy, the Ashmolean’s first major show post-revamp, is such an exhibition. This fidelity is simultaneously its strength and its weakness. In a dazzling and far-reaching show, the exhibition organisers ultimately leave us questioning the nature and meaning not only of Pre-Raphaelitism but also of 19th-century concepts of Italy. This may be part of the exhibition’s achievement. It does not make for the easy ride exhibition-goers have come to expect from the Pre-Raphaelites.