Culture

It is a desperate state of affairs when museums and art galleries sell outstanding works of art in order to raise funds. It is even worse, perhaps, when they do so because they no longer want them. Next month, on 5 June, Sotheby’s New York is offering some 25 classical carpets on behalf of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, which includes what the auction house describes as ‘one of the most important and revered carpets in the world’. No one taking the trouble to contemplate the 17th-century Isfahan ‘Clark Sickle-Leaf Carpet’ (right) for more than a minute could fail to be entranced by it, or to recognise that this most beautiful and astonishingly complex of textiles is a remarkable work of art. That is, in one sense, precisely why it is being sold.

Alexander Calder (1898–1976) needs no introduction. The master of the mobile — that poignant hanging arrangement of moving elements — he also invented the stabile (stationary) and the standing mobile. There was no one who could cut and shape sheet aluminium and suspend it from wire with quite the same wit, economy and shape invention. His imagery is primarily abstract and organises flat geometrical forms in contrasting planes through space: discs and triangles balance more biomorphic shapes and are linked by bent sprung wire into a multidirectional kinetic experience of colour and light. Calder mostly used black, white and red, supplemented with blue and yellow, his forms poised and counterweighted with supreme grace and the kind of intricacy that demands utter clarity.

In 1951, the artist and writer Barbara Jones (1912–78) organised an exhibition called Black Eyes and Lemonade at the Whitechapel Gallery celebrating the popular arts of toys, festivities, souvenirs and advertising, to reveal to a largely unsuspecting public the richness of vernacular art in Britain. The original exhibition was evidently an Aladdin’s cave of objects, from decorated pub mirrors to ships’ figureheads, horse brasses, corn dollies and needle packets. Jones crossed the boundaries of folk art, mingling the handmade with the machine-made, and the traditional with the contemporary and ephemeral. She wrote a book about the subject, published the same year and called The Unsophisticated Arts.

Nowadays, R.B. Kitaj (1932–2007) tends to be ignored by the critics in this country — like a bad smell in the corner of the room. It was not always thus: for years he was an admired, if somewhat controversial, presence, but then came his great retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1994. A large proportion of the British critical fraternity united to condemn and vilify him, to ‘take him down a peg or two’, as if he were an unruly schoolboy too big for his boots, too clever for his own good. This chorus of complaint (some of which amounted to abuse) was deeply felt by Kitaj, and when his beloved second wife, Sandra Fisher, died suddenly in the midst of what he called his ‘Tate War’, he was heartbroken and his love for England all but extinguished.

The Reading Room is currently packed with Roman remains and with visitors attempting (or pretending) to look at them. The latest blockbuster at the BM (sponsored by Goldman Sachs) looks set to exceed all other oversubscribed sensationalist exhibitions, with more than 250 objects in a mazy but airy layout. When I first heard about this show, my main concern was how it could possibly compare or compete with the experience of visiting what’s actually left of the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in Italy. The principal attraction of this subject for those with some interest in the fine arts must be the famous wall-paintings, and how could these be transported to London? Yet, as is swiftly apparent on entering the display, there is enough here to make even the specialist excited.

The American artist George Bellows (1882–1925) is best known for his boxing paintings, but as this surprising exhibition reveals, that was only the half of it. We don’t really know his work in this country, apart from the odd picture in a mixed show, but here is indisputable evidence that we have been missing out. Bellows died from appendicitis aged only 42, so this exhibition inevitably offers us work which varies wildly in style and competence, as he tried his hand at different approaches and different subjects. Nevertheless there are at least half-a-dozen paintings of real worth and presence, in addition to the boxing pictures, which I personally find of limited interest, though Bellows’s handling of bodies in dynamic movement is dramatic and convincing.

To some extent, all Romanticism has its origins in darkness, coming in the wake of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake that introduced fear into the age of reason. ‘Reason’s Sleep Produces Monsters’ proclaims the opening drawing in Goya’s series ‘Los Caprichos’ (1797–99), which features in this entertaining exhibition. After all the cruelties that man had inflicted on man at the 18th century’s twilight, it was only natural to turn to ghosts and witches for light relief. The exhibition’s title comes from an Edgar Allan Poe story but Goya’s phrase would be equally appropriate. The exhibition starts not with Goya but with F.W.

The Anglo-Irish designer Eileen Gray keeps on being rediscovered but she remains a puzzle. The nub of the Gray ‘problem’, which her last large retrospective at the Design Museum in 2005 failed to answer, is this: how did the author of some of the most sensual, disturbing interior design and furniture of the 1910s and 1920s become an uncompromising modernist whose preferred materials were tubular steel, aluminium, plywood and celluloid? Of course artists do reinvent themselves — designers and architects more than most. Careers have odd trajectories that upset linear histories of art.

The press release blithely informs us that Federico Barocci (1535–1612) is ‘beloved by artists and art historians throughout the ages’, but I must beg to differ. Not by me, nor by any of my considerable range of friends and acquaintances in both fields, has he been loved or even much known. Barocci is one of those artists who has slipped under the general radar, partly, I suspect, because his work often looks like a sweet and sentimentalised version of Raphael. Raphael is a great genius, but there are a number of paintings by him I find hard to take, particularly when he descends to sickly emotionalism.

‘When Matisse dies,’ declared Picasso, ‘Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is.’ Wandering around this splendid show you can see exactly what he meant. Chagall never used colour for cheap effect, but to convey meaning and emotion. The effect of seeing so many of his works together is almost overwhelming — a symphony hung upon a wall. But these aren’t the romantic paintings of Chagall’s later years, the visions of young lovers floating over seas of flowers. These are the urgent artworks of his youth, made at a time of immense upheaval. By focusing on these early years, to the virtual exclusion of his later work, this fascinating retrospective casts Marc Chagall in an entirely different light.

Man Ray, born Michael Emmanuel Radnitzky (1890–1976) in Philadelphia, was a maker of images par excellence. He made sculptures, paintings and photographs, but the medium was always secondary to the image. After all, it is the reproduction of his marvellous painting ‘Observatory Time — The Lovers’, in which Lee Miller’s lips are emblazoned across the sky, that one remembers, or the reproduction of his object ‘Gift’, a flat iron with tacks stuck to its ironing face; not the originals. Perhaps the only sculpture one recalls as a three-dimensional presence is his ‘Indestructible Object’, a metronome with a photo of a woman’s eye attached to its swinging arm; and that’s chiefly because it moves.

Over the past year or so, art world insiders have queued up to denounce the current state of the contemporary art world. Charles Saatchi started the ball rolling with a column at the end of 2011 in the Guardian. Breaking his self-imposed ban on interviews or writing, he launched a withering attack on an art world that, according to him, had descended to ‘the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard’.

Although Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) did not invent the technique or theory of collage, he was one of the greatest practitioners of it, raising it in his work to the level of an independent art form. The Cubists may have made art out of collage first, but for them it was intricately allied with painting, whereas Schwitters made collages for their own sake. They are some of the finest things in this rich and varied exhibition, which focuses on his years in Britain (1940–8), though the full range of his work, including a fascinating selection of paintings and sculptures, is also indicated in this typically large Tate display. Viewing it is a potentially exhausting experience, so best to be selective in what you choose to study.

When collectors want to purchase an expensive work of art, they contact their lawyers to write up a contract with the dealer, spelling out pages of contingencies and indemnity clauses. ‘We have a steady stream of business writing agreements for collectors and galleries,’ said Jo Backer Laird, a Manhattan arts lawyer and a former general counsel at Christie’s. ‘We didn’t see much of this just ten years ago.

One of the pleasures of the critic’s life is to review exhibitions of work by artists who have been forgotten or overlooked, and to recommend them for general attention. I know some arts editors are only interested in fashionable or mainstream artists, but I’m happy to say that The Spectator’s editorial policy is altogether more wide-ranging. Hence this review of the unjustly neglected Randolph Schwabe (1885–1948), an artist who believed in the value of classical draughtsmanship, which he promulgated through a lifetime of teaching. German by origin (his cotton merchant grandfather settled near Manchester), he trained at the Slade, then studied in Paris and travelled in Italy before returning to England.

Francesco Clemente (born Naples 1952) began his rise to prominence in this country with two exhibitions at the Royal Academy — the famous New Spirit in Painting of 1981, when figuration was officially relaunched on London (though for some it had never gone away); and Italian Art in the 20th Century eight years later. A third RA venture was a Clemente solo show in 1991, a touring exhibition entitled Three Worlds, memorable as much for its plethora of exciting and witty images (many in pastel or watercolour), as for the beautiful girls thronging the private view. Clemente has long been a fashion icon; in him popular art and high art meet and mingle.

John Sell Cotman (1782–1842) is a key figure in the great tradition of English watercolour painting. A prominent member of the Norwich School (he was born in the city), he was a landscape painter of genius, who transcended mere topographical record by making paintings of superb abstract design which also evoke the particularity of place. He could suggest space and light and weather with the lightest and broadest of touches, in images that look curiously modern, if not timeless. He earned a living by teaching and travelling, making saleable studies of antiquities, many of which were reproduced as etchings. Between 1810 and 1821 he focused on the architecture of Norfolk and Normandy, and it is from this work that the exhibition is drawn.

In 1997, the Russian Academy of Sciences gave the names Hermitage 4758 and Piotrovsky 4869 to two small planets discovered 500 million kilometres from earth. The signal honour paid to the State Hermitage Museum and Boris and Mikhail Piotrovsky— its dynastic succession of directors — heralded a new era of post-Soviet expansionism for the former Imperial museum: from now on, the sky would be the limit. Since then, the Hermitage has opened branches in London, Las Vegas, Amsterdam, Kazan, Ferrara and Vyborg. More than a goodwill gesture, the St Petersburg museum’s overseas expansion has been a way of getting its collections seen.

Christopher Wood (1901–30), billed as the great white hope of British Modernism, who perished by his own hand before his full potential could be explored. Friend of Ben Nicholson, with whom he supposedly ‘discovered’ the naïve painter Alfred Wallis in 1928, he was a Europeanised sophisticate who knew Picasso and Cocteau and dabbled in Cubism and Surrealism. He was a talented painter with a penchant for harbour scenes, but, as this fascinating exhibition suggests, his gifts have been exaggerated (no doubt because of his romantic life story), while the achievement of his older contemporary Cedric Morris (1889–1982) has been marginalised and largely ignored.

In 1929 the founder of Italian Futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, reported from Milan that, after a wartime setback, the movement was ‘in full working order’ under the leadership of ‘the very young and very ingenious Bruno Munari’. Bruno Munari (1907–1998) was 22 at the time. He had arrived in Milan two years earlier as a refugee from his family hotel business in the Veneto and embraced with enthusiasm Giacomo Balla’s suggestion in The Futurist Universe that ‘useful and pleasing’ consumer products in shop windows were ‘a much more rewarding sight than the grimy little pictures nailed on the walls of the passéist painter’s studio’.