Painting

Roll up, there’s a new old master in town. Or a new old mistress, if you prefer. Michaelina Wautier (1614-89) is revealed here as a painter who excelled within the genres of her time: flower painting, portraiture, emblematic tronies, and, if the scholars are right, classical epic, too. The new Royal Academy show cracks open the received idea of what a Flemish woman operating in the decades immediately after Rubens and Van Dyck could achieve. Her c.1650 self-portrait at the easel is a confident statement. She is enthroned under a mantel of lusciously painted black velvet, which looks restrictive, but emerging from it comes her agile, three-dimensional painting hand. Her beauty is incidental, an aspect of her concentration and skill.

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 draws 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 ageing 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.

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.

The long overlooked staircase by Hogarth at St Bartholomew’s Hospital has been cleaned and restored in a £9.5 million scheme. It is now open to the public, the management says, for the first time since the 1730s, although when I lived nearby in the 2000s, I used to slip in to look at it sometimes. No one seemed to mind. Murals are of course the original site-specific artworks, and you have to enter a working hospital to see this one. Literally: turn right for the clap clinic, turn left for the Hogarth mural. Turn right for the clap clinic, turn left for the Hogarth mural You might pass a small group of patients smoking outside in the James Gibbs quadrangle; I remember seeing people who were visibly sick, in wheelchairs or on ventilators, puffing away.

Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) was so earnest that it landed him in jail. When a former student asked him to use forged identity papers to open a bank account, Rousseau, who was then in his sixties, was happy to help out his old acquaintance. He seemed unaware that he was doing anything more than a favor, let alone committing fraud. To prove the painter’s innocence, his lawyer brought one of his canvases before the jury and declared: “You do not have the right to condemn a primitive.” The works that result from such legendary naivety are on view at the Barnes Foundation in Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets.

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.

Even if you think you don’t know William Nicholson, it’s a fair bet that you’ve come across his work. If you’ve read those excellent children’s books, The Velveteen Rabbit or Clever Bill, you’ll have taken in his drawings – never wholly sentimental, even the rabbit – into your mental world. And if you’ve seen his woodcuts (they’re everywhere) – say, of Queen Victoria looking stout and dour – you’ll have noticed their economy, their clever use of space and their humour. This exhibition has the familiar elements of his work, but also the grander stuff: the still lifes, the landscapes, the portraits. Then there are the unexpected aspects – who knew he designed costumes for the stage production of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan?

The Two Roberts, Robert MacBryde (1913-66) and Robert Colquhoun (1914-62), are figures of a lost British bohemia. Both born in Ayrshire, they met on their first day at the Glasgow School of Art, becoming lifelong partners and painters. Well-connected in louche literary London, their conversational barbs were recorded by Julian Maclaren-Ross, their jig-dancing antics noted by Joan Wyndham, their drunken fights observed by Anthony Cronin – so that one sometimes forgets what sort of art they made. This show, staged in a former municipal building in Lewes, is a reminder. The work is haunted, unbeautiful British neo-romanticism, second cousin to Piper and Sutherland. They established this angsty, angular modernist style in the 1940s.