Culture

Every visitor to Charleston Farmhouse will know the work of Quentin Bell even if they don’t realise it. He made the distinctive clay colander lights there, and many of the zany sculptures and ceramics. The son of Vanessa Bell, he grew up at Charleston, and later, when he was of great age – and even greater beard – he led a campaign to ensure the place was properly preserved. But what was Bell’s work really like? This exhibition gives us about 100 examples so that his singular vision emerges, and guess what, for all the progressive modernism of his background, he had a taste for Victoriana, fairground illusionism and the Belle Époque. His reliefs are dancers out of Degas, his figurines dressed like Manet’s bar attendant.

Watercolours can be fatal for your standing in the art world. ‘As soon as you say you paint in watercolour,’ says Gerard Stamp, ‘you can see people popping you into a pigeonhole – ah, you’re a Sunday painter doing vases of flowers.’ There are many flaws in the aesthetics of the ‘art world’, but this one is unusually absurd. Stamp’s paintings are some of the most beautiful of our time. ‘I presented one to Queen Elizabeth II when she opened Norwich Cathedral Hostry on behalf of all who love the Cathedral. I had an exhibition there… and showed her round together with the Duke of Edinburgh, who took me aside, pointed to a large charcoal drawing and said: “How the bloody hell did you do that?” I’m told the painting is still hanging in Sandringham.

As I sat down to write this article, an artist friend phoned me to deliver a pithy but convincing defence of public art: it exists, he said, to extract high culture from its supposedly elitist setting, making it visible to an audience who might otherwise feel excluded. This made me think back to my own formative encounters with the art world in the late 1990s and 2000s, most of which I owe to public commissions in the northeast of England. At that moment, a Newcastle-based commissioning body called Locus+ was in close dialogue with some of the world’s best artists: they had Douglas Gordon set fire to a grand piano and Chris Burden sail a model ship from the Fair Isle to Newcastle. They enabled Fiona Banner to melt down a Tornado warplane and reconstitute it as a giant bell.

A month ago in Hampstead, a work of art stopped me in my tracks. The piece was a vast rectangular painting on board, 7ft tall and 5ft wide, almost entirely covered in a thick layer of black acrylic save for three rectangular apertures cut through the board: windows onto something yet darker. At the composition’s fringes, where black faded to grey, it was just possible to make out the collaged vestiges of the images lying below: monochrome grids of old passport photos and shots of grand plantation mansions. Below the anger lies a depth of artistic soul-searching What looked like a long metal soap rack protruded from the surface, its bars encasing an image of a sculpture of a headless female figure.

Hull is a city of many quirks, but I didn’t expect a mermaid. Seriously: an actual mermaid, mounted in a case on the top floor of the Maritime Museum. From head to fishtail she’s about a foot and a half tall, and look away now if you treasure your illusions, because even allowing for the taxidermy process it’s clear that Disney has not been entirely frank with us. Her skin is leathery and the colour of tar. Her glass eyes stare beadily, and she bares tiny teeth in a silent, eldritch shriek. ‘Probably a monkey stitched to a fish,’ the curator told me. The Spectator always gets the inside track. Two old favourites – the stuffed polar bear known to locals as Erik and a 40ft right whale skeleton – are back Still, there are no spoilers on the signage.

I was in the most south-westerly pub in Britain, the Turk’s Head, on the Scilly island of St Agnes (population: 75) when I noticed a poster advertising a local exhibition of the work of ‘renowned artist and birdwatcher Hilda Quick, 1895-1978’. I had never heard of her, but her work on the poster, ‘The Pursuit of Art’, was compelling. A stylish wood engraving from the 1920s, it showed female art students drawing a male life model. This was the new equality Hilda Quick would have discovered when she left her native Penzance to attend the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London in 1919.

When Ai Weiwei (b.1957) arrived in Europe in 2015, fresh from state-imposed house arrest, he was greeted as a hero. Museums and galleries fell over themselves to host exhibitions devoted to the West’s new favourite dissident – even while those galleries continued, mysteriously, to participate in Chinese art fairs. Nobody dared say it at the time, but his actual art – vast, chaotic installations and whimsical sculptures that drew on Chinese folklore – was even then just a bit dull. Soon enough, the artist was positioning himself as the voice of the global dispossessed, in the process (to borrow someone else’s phrase) morphing into a kind of Chinese Banksy. His work became self-aggrandising in tone and ever more naff in form, in the process losing any trace of subtlety.

Enid Marx once pondered ‘whether postage stamps are fine or industrial art. In my view the question rests on the quality of a design rather than its purpose. It is generally agreed, for example, that the work of Thomas Bewick is fine art, even when it is merely the engraving of a “trade card”.’ Marx was a textile designer, book illustrator, lino-cutter, wood-engraver, poster illustrator and, yes, postage-stamp designer (‘The calling card of a nation’, as she put it) and in all these things, the quality was unquestionable. Her unique, memorable designs were absorbed, unknowingly, by any number of people. Her best-known work was the sturdy moquette fabric she designed for seats on London Underground in the 1930s.

I love my friends at the loucher fringes of the art world, but every now and again, someone does something so obviously stupid that it calls certain such ties into question. Last week, a pal’s poor judgment engendered a Salo-grade spectacle so nightmarish that I can’t bring myself to elaborate. Suffice to say: some parties present will never shake off the trauma; and that the instigator was extremely lucky to avoid castration. It gets worse, too. I’d just returned from Margate, where I’d spent ages taking notes on the locale’s second-most-famous artist: a noisy, blue-haired ceramicist called Lindsey Mendick (b.1987). Mendick is fluent in the art-historical resonances and material subtleties of her chosen medium.

Will photography as an art form survive the age of Instagram? Now that we think we are all photographers, and curators and collectors too, constantly cropping, sifting, saving and storing, our sensibilities risk becoming blunted, and our attitudes blasé. Two new shows confirmed to me that galleries are going to have to be clever to maintain photography’s hard-won status. In Milton Keynes, the MK Gallery hosts a new retrospective of the photographer’s photographer, Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986).

A Max Beerbohm cartoon famously reduced Arthur Wing Pinero (author of that interesting play, The Second Mrs Tanqueray) to a single eyebrow and a fur coat. Frida Kahlo’s fame rests upon little more: not so much anything she painted but her eyebrows – or should that be eyebrow? – and her moustache. If you get the impression that her output contains an awful lot of images of her face, you would be right. She painted 55 self-portraits – more than a third of her output. Hers is a strange cult, but a cult it is, and Making of an Icon is what the Tate exhibition subtitle says, not ‘Making of an Artist’. The show is drawing the pilgrims in record numbers.

I miss the New Labour years, when the government gushed money at cultural initiatives and Britain, previously a backwater in the art stakes, began to look like a serious international player. Sculpture was big and inescapable, and for a brief period it felt as though we’d found our groove: the Italians and Spanish had their old masters while New York bagged canonical modernism; France did both. But, from roughly the mid-1990s to whenever it was that Big Brother stopped airing, we had the best of the new – and ‘the new’, in character, was either ribald, bizarre or monumental. This last register, as executed by the likes of Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor, was unashamedly populist but given legitimacy via the pseudo-philosophical rationale of its creators.

Grim news from gallery-land, where even Manhattan’s mega-blue chips are shedding jobs by the truckload. ‘The market’s fucked,’ one soundbite-handy dealer told me last week, admitting that the reckoning was probably long overdue. For artists, this is bleak: the oligarchs are stuck in Moscow, public funds have run dry and, short of shilling for the Saudis or tech barons, there remains only one street on which to beg: fashion. The prestige rag trade has always had a synergy with the art biz: both hawk luxury goods, at least nominally underpinned by visionary genius, for ludicrous prices. Artistic careers have been made by shows at tax-efficient fashion foundations and both domains are notoriously exclusive.

From 1940, at Benton End, near Hadleigh in Suffolk, the artist Cedric Morris brought his eye to breeding irises. Eliminating hated shades of ‘salmon or knicker’, he was, according to his biographer Hugh St Clair, ‘unstinting in his efforts to produce a pure, delicate pink’. Forty years of dedication brought a wild abundance to the garden, which was packed with cultivars, including ‘Benton Baggage’ (pale rose with a blue blaze), ‘Benton Persephone’ (very large white flowers) and ‘Benton Mocha’ (coffee-coloured, with a bright orange beard). A living flower painting.

I approached this exhibition like a conscientious critic, poring over the catalogue, the signage, making notes… And then, about halfway through, I drifted. I dawdled. I stopped thinking and gave in to the aesthetic rapture, the rhyming half-tones, the ‘breath-like softness’ of Whistler’s paint. I was a disciple, briefly, of art for art’s sake, even though I wasn’t wearing white, nor carrying a peony. It was the room full of Nocturnes that sent me. Their opiate-like gloomth put me right beside the Thames at dusk. No, that’s too pedestrian. Not beside the Thames; with the Thames. Whistler lived on Cheyne Walk, but watching the river was not enough; he would take a boat out at night to prepare for his paintings.

The 61st Venice Biennale arrived freighted with portent. To cut a long story short: Russia and Israel were invited to exhibit, and the prize jurors resigned in protest. Then, on preview day, the city was hit by a storm of biblical force. I sat in the Stansted Wetherspoons for hours, oblivious to the fact that the Ryanair ahead of mine was taking a pummelling that ultimately landed it on the wrong side of the Adriatic. ‘It was terrifying,’ a journalist colleague recounted. ‘And apparently, Bjork was on board, too.’ You’ll leave feeling that you’ve spent five hours trapped in the basement of Italy’s most patronising headshop The bad juju had set in last May when Koyo Kouoh, the programme’s curator, dropped dead aged 57.

The problem with exhibiting costumes is well known. Should the mannequins be lifelike with human features, or faceless? What about trying a more surreal approach with Perspex or metals? This show of her late Majesty’s wardrobe opts for something more ghostly: hundreds of shoulderless, neckless, wristless, legless figures, floating magically in space, presented in cases at eye level, with others, higher, in serried ranks, like some gorgeously arrayed terracotta army. The unifying factor is that instantly recognisable royal silhouette – from the youthful wasp waist to the later fuller frame.

I’d just emerged from Stratford station when I realised it had been almost a decade to the day since I’d last been here. I thought back to a dismal morning press call in early 2016 to the mangy park landscaped as a visible legacy of the London Olympics. The collected hacks shivered as Mayor Johnson unveiled the latest of the development’s showpiece public sculptures, devoting much of his speech to boosterish predictions of the area’s imminent renaissance. ‘Really?’ I thought as I surveyed the spectral, vaguely Soviet townscape emerging from the mist. ‘In this shithole?’ Years hence, it appears that Boris, for once, wasn’t bluffing. The new-look Stratford resembles an idiot’s doodle of the Chicago skyline, novelty towers sprouting far into the distance.

I was on the way to Cecily Brown’s exhibition at the Serpentine last week when I heard that Kensington Gardens had been locked down. Word was that terrorist drones armed with ‘radioactive material’ were on course to blitz the Israeli embassy, presumably taking out a large part of west London with it. Scary though this was, it was also –  as far as I’m aware – a wholesale fiction: an elaborate psy-op some would-be jihadist had staged to convince us that, yes, it could happen here. That it didn’t, and probably couldn’t, was irrelevant; what struck me was the fact that the security services didn’t consider it wholly improbable.

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.

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.

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.

You might be forgiven for thinking that a charity sale of particularly kitschy furniture has been set up just past the entrance of the Barbican Art Gallery. There’s a chunky brown dressing table, an ornate table several decades out of fashion and a trio of bedside tables. They are piled haphazardly and on each is a garishly painted picture, invariably a pastiche of a historical painting or a Biblical scene. Raphael’s 1512 ‘Madonna and Child with St John’ rendered slightly sloppily where the mirror of the bureau once was; ‘The Last Supper’ on the table top; three popes in profile staring impassively from the tops of the nightstands.

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.

‘Cultural cringe’, that lovely Aussie coinage, perfectly describes the Roman attitude towards Greece. The curators don’t say so, but it is the theme of this inspired exhibition. By the time the Romans finally took control of mainland Greece in 146 BC with the Battle of Corinth, they had long admired everything Greek. That date marks roughly the middle of the Hellenistic period, during which Greek culture and language dominated the Mediterranean and the Middle East. In comparison with Greeks, Romans were oafs – and knew it. In comparison with Greeks, Romans were oafs – and knew it After the battle, Corinth was flattened – quite an oafish thing to do – and emptied of all its works of art, which were sent to Rome.