Painting

Alberto Della Ragione (1892–1973) was a naval engineer from Genoa with a passion for music, poetry and the visual arts; he also had the collecting bug. Alberto Della Ragione (1892–1973) was a naval engineer from Genoa with a passion for music, poetry and the visual arts; he also had the collecting bug. Towards the end of the 1920s, he sold his earlier accumulation of 19th-century paintings and began to acquire modern art, concentrating on works with a figurative bias, but by some of the most adventurous spirits then active in Italy.

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.

Andrew Lambirth talks to the artist Keith Coventry about drawing inspiration from Sickert, Churchill and Ladybird Books Keith Coventry has no time to visit the two lap-dancing clubs that lurk a few doors down from his studio, a small room with barred windows in a light-industrial block in the East End. Here, he puts in long hours, often forgetting to eat in his total immersion in the act of putting paint on canvas. He grudgingly admits to being a workaholic. This is where he painted ‘Spectrum Jesus’, which two months ago won him the £25,000 John Moores Painting Prize, one of the most prestigious accolades in the art world. Winning the John Moores does not guarantee immortality — not much does, except perhaps genius — but it can make a difference.

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.

In an upstairs room in an unfrequented corner of Zurich’s Kunsthaus, there is a portrait of one of the unsung heroes of modern art. In an upstairs room in an unfrequented corner of Zurich’s Kunsthaus, there is a portrait of one of the unsung heroes of modern art. Wilhelm Wartmann was the first director of this splendid gallery, and in the autumn of 1932 he mounted the first major retrospective of the work of Pablo Picasso. This autumn, to celebrate its centenary, the Kunsthaus is mounting the same show. It’s a unique chance to see how the world saw Picasso at his peak — and how Picasso saw Picasso — for this groundbreaking exhibition was curated by the artist himself.