Exhibitions

This exhibition will be busy. You’ll shuffle behind fellow pilgrims. But it’ll be worthwhile. It’s a tour de force that tells the story of Marie Antoinette’s 17 years on the throne with detail, focus and flair. There are 34 items here that she owned personally – opulent, carefree objects that resonate with impending disaster. These precious items need protecting from light, and in the first room curator Sarah Grant cleverly runs with this, evoking the candlelit ambience of a Versailles ball by hanging silver baubles from the ceiling and covering the walls with smoked mirrors. Here we have a taste of Marie Antoinette’s wardrobe – its annual budget peaking at £1.

In Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Sondheim catches something of what makes Georges Seurat so brilliant – not just his technical flair, but his engagement with ordinary life. Sondheim has Seurat sing, or rather woof, a little duet between two dogs meeting on the island of La Grande Jatte; later, Sondheim gives Seurat a pointillist melody as he works, crotchet-dabs of blue, blue, blue, red, red… Seurat’s muse, meanwhile, is called Dot. Seeing the National Gallery’s somewhat overloaded presentation made me long for the light touch of Sondheim.

Jean-François Millet (1814-75). One Room. 14 items. Eight paintings. Six drawings and sketches. Modest, interesting. No masterpieces. The show appeals to the contemporary English preference for the unassuming, the humble, the unpretentious. Take ‘The Wood Sawyers’ (oil on canvas, 1850-2). Two figures are sawing a tree trunk with a long two-man bucking saw. Two thick sections have already been cut and the sawyers are busy with a third. The simplified trunk is like a salami, the bark corresponding to the floury skin. The main foreground figure with his blue rump has his foot braced against the trunk and commands our immediate attention. You can see the folds of flesh gathered at the back of his neck as he looks up from the task towards his fellow worker.

If you came to this show accidentally, or as a layperson, it could confirm any prejudices you might have about avant-garde sculpture. Pretentious, ugly and resorting to kink. Those pendulous string bags, that enormous turd – gimme a break. Except that would be a mistake. Because the work here is the real thing: the 1960s originals that spawned a million imitations and parodies. The exhibition is perhaps a little cool about selling itself, so allow me. This is a snapshot of the work of three artists around the time they all took part in a 1966 New York show called Eccentric Abstraction. Two of the artists, Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse, were nascent superstars.

Since 2005, a Chinese man called Zheng Guogu has been creating a garden inspired by the strategy game Age of Empires. The project is ongoing, so the garden is expanding. It currently covers 20,000 square metres but it may yet become larger, spreading over more of Yangjiang, where Guogu lives. It’s not clear how he came by all this space. Nor is it immediately obvious how a garden can be inspired by a game in which you go to war with others. Perhaps he’s particularly fond of invasive species. This is all quite intriguing and unusual, and most visitors to Garden Futures: Designing with Nature will have questions. Who is this guy? How does he handle his borders? Is his preference for perennials or annuals? Does he watch Gardener’s World? Where does empire-building come in?

Last month, I got the train down to Margate to interview the Egyptian-Armenian artist Anna Boghiguian (b. 1946), whose exhibition The Sunken Boat: A glimpse into past histories was about to open at the Turner Contemporary. Long story short, the conversation did not go well: Anna reacted to my questions with some irritation, swatting them away like low-flying bluebottles. I got flustered, she got bored, and eventually so did I. We wrapped things up around the 20-minute mark and I ran away to stare into the abyss. It was a shame, because the show was, for the most part, really good.

Slowly the canvas was unfurled across the concrete floor of a warehouse on an industrial estate in Suffolk. On and on it went, a flurry of paint marks and brush strokes, yellow, green and occasionally blue, like a cornfield at harvest time. By the time we got to the end some seven metres of it lay stretched out at our feet. It was the first time anyone had seen this unknown magnum opus by Gillian Ayres since it was rolled up in 1974 – and it looked sensational. Recently I’ve been reflecting on the 1970s for a couple of reasons. One is that I’m working on a book about art in London at that time, the other is that I’ve been helping to organise an exhibition of Ayres’s work from that era at the Heong Gallery, Downing College, Cambridge. Of course, as L.P.

Through the grey downbeat years of postwar austerity, we nursed cheering fantasies of a life more lavishly colourful and hedonistic. Oliver Messel fed them: born into Edwardian privilege, the epitome of well-connected metropolitan sophistication, he doubled up as interior decorator and stage designer, creating in both roles a unique style of rococo elegance and light-touch whimsy that sweetened and consoled – ‘a gossamer world of gilded enchantment’ as Roy Strong soupily put it. ‘Marie Antoinette would have felt at home in any of his settings.’ Like his rival Cecil Beaton, Oliver Messel sums up an era Posterity has not been kind to Messel.

The most-watched TV programme in human history isn’t the Moon landings, and it isn’t M*A*S*H; chances are it’s Ramayan, a magnificently cheesy 1980s adaptation of India’s national epic. The show has a status in India that’s hard to overstate. Something like 80 per cent of the entire population watched its original run; in rural areas entire villages would crowd around a single television hooked up to a car battery. When the show ended, omitting the ‘Uttara Kanda’, the fairly controversial last book of the original poem, street sweepers across the country went on strike, demanding the government fund more episodes. The government caved. But while every country has its pieces of cult media, in India the cult is literal. Some viewers would take a ritual bath before tuning in.

Every few years the shade of Edward Burra is treated to a Major Retrospective. The pattern is long established: Edward who? Forgotten genius, sui generis, well known for being unknown save by beardy centenarians and art tarts with ginny voices. Why have I never heard of this man? LGBT-ish avant la lettre, Polari-ish. After the show inhumation beckons again and he will disappear into an obscurity that cannot be relieved until the curatocracy once more lets loose the dogs of hype. George Melly and Dan Farson are no longer around to peal his name and Jane Stevenson’s impeccable and often funny biography suffers from its subject’s being a forgotten genius, sui generis, unknown save… etc. In later years Burra was the very picture of a different neglect: physical.

At any one time eighty per cent of the art owned by Britain’s many museums and public art galleries will find itself hidden away in storage. And once it is, it can stay there for years. Yet in these vaults are a wealth of treasures. It’s why I recently launched ‘Everyone’s Art’, which has a simple premise: to get these works out of the storeroom and into community centres, libraries, churches, village halls and schools, so their makers, and what they made, can finally be celebrated. Consider Henry Bright, a friend of the critic, writer and painter John Ruskin. Ruskin paid for Bright to accompany Turner on many of his sketching expeditions, where he was encouraged to paint what he saw.

Much of Venice’s Giardini this year was as boarded up as a British high street. The Israeli pavilion was empty, apparently awaiting refurbishment. (At the 2024 art biennale, the curators had closed it in the face of pro-Palestinian protests, prompting the latter to demand it should be opened, presumably so they could protest its closure.) The Russian pavilion has been shut, by order of the Biennale, because of the Ukraine war. The Venezuelan pavilion was closed (‘Go look at nature instead,’ said the workman when I approached it.) The Czechoslovakian was shut, the turns taken by the two independent nations faltering during Covid.