Culture

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’.

There are only eight single paintings in the current show of early work by Gillian Ayres (born 1930) — eight paintings and the four panels of a mural created for the dining room of Hampstead High School for Girls. The mural is over seven feet high and 27 feet wide, and its scale and achievement are remarkable for a young painter. (Ayres was 27 when she painted it.) But it is less original than the paintings it prepared the way for, and which now hang in the Foreshore Gallery of the Jerwood Foundation’s splendid new space in Hastings. The mural has an undeniably decorative impulse and looks very much of its time, but the paintings have moved beyond period confines and peer expectations.

The primary experience of looking at painting is the crucial encounter between a painted surface and the human eye. Nothing is quite like it, and this unique experience cannot be replaced or replicated by looking at a painting in printed reproduction or on a computer screen. This may be a truism but it is worth emphasising once again in an age that relies increasingly on mediated experience, and lives — almost literally — by the screen. It is a truth brought into especial prominence by the concatenation of three exhibitions currently showing in London. Photography does not require the same intimate experience of viewing.

Every so often, about once a decade, the work of Mark Gertler (1891–1939) is rediscovered and exhibited. I remember seeing excellent shows of his work at the Ben Uri Art Gallery in 1982 and in 2002, and at Camden Arts Centre in 1992. Each time a well-selected body of his paintings is gathered together, we are reminded of the extraordinary talent of this young artist, who tragically took his own life. Yet for many of those who care about art, Gertler is still best remembered as the wild bohemian obsessed with the Bloomsbury siren Dora Carrington. Certainly, Gertler’s 1913 portrait of her, a striking example of his Neo-Primitive tempera style in the key of blue, and one of the many treats of this exhibition, doesn’t quite explain the attraction.

If you want to see how myths arise from misunderstandings, the Tower of Babel provides a textbook example. In ancient Assyrian babilu means ‘door of God’ and thus correctly describes the Babylonian ziggurat erected to the god Marduk by Nebuchadnezzar II and later seen in ruins by Herodotus. But in Hebrew the word bâlal means ‘to confuse’, hence the confusingly different account in Genesis.

In this Olympic year, when we feel less guilty than usual about promoting and celebrating all things British, it is appropriate to be lauding our greatest writers. Shakespeare is commemorated at the British Museum, but what about Dickens? Unbelievably, in what is after all the bicentenary of his birth, the Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street is closed. Thank goodness the Watts Gallery has had the initiative to mount an exhibition devoted to Dickens’s relationship with art — at least somewhere the spirits of Phiz, Dolly Varden and Little Nell may disport themselves with Olympic pizazz in a museum setting. That is, if you think Little Nell would be up for it...

Fifty years ago, the Stanley Spencer Gallery was founded in a converted Wesleyan Chapel by a group of local enthusiasts who wanted to celebrate the extraordinary achievement of Cookham’s most famous son. As Joan George recounts in her fascinating book, Stanley Spencer Remembered (Taderon Press, £6), at the gallery’s inauguration, Gilbert Spencer (Stan’s younger brother) quoted an inscription remembered from childhood on the chapel’s wall: ‘How amiable are thy tabernacles O Lord of Hosts.’ ‘Nowhere,’ declared Gilbert, ‘would its message be more appropriate than in this Gallery.

John Berger (born 1926) is one of the most intriguing and richly controversial figures in British arts and letters. Actually, since he lives full-time in France, he can scarcely be considered English in any meaningful way, and is indeed an international figure, widely regarded outside this country as one of Europe’s greatest intellectuals and quite often as some sort of cultural guru. Here he is thought of as a Marxist art critic, a dangerously potent broadcaster and a writer or novelist who defies categorisation. One suspects he is a bit of an embarrassment to the arts establishment, so he tends to be ignored.

Van Gogh to Kandinsky presents a rare and exciting opportunity to see some 60 paintings as examples of landscape symbolism from major international institutions and private collections. The exhibition extends beyond the usual north European definitions of this subject, with the coupling of the emotionally charged graphic-colourist van Gogh with the increasingly reductive and programmatic application of colour-to-form associated with late Kandinsky. It challenges, therefore, conventional categorisations of modern European art. Who would think, moreover, that Lord Leighton, Hammershøi, Monet and Mondrian could share a common thesis, let alone inhabit the same gallery rooms? In lesser hands, such an ambitious project could have descended into chaos and visual incoherence.

Circles and Tangents sounds like a show of abstract art, but actually the title is somewhat misleading. As Vivienne Light, the exhibition’s curator and author of the accompanying book, explains, the circles are intended to denote networks of artists (not the circular forms in a Ben Nicholson painting, though Nicholson is included in the show), and the tangents are really digressions. Clear? Put more simply, the exhibition focuses on art made on or about Cranborne Chase, the lovely unspoilt stretch of Dorset landscape once William the Conqueror’s hunting ground and more recently the inspiration for countless painters and sculptors.

Anyone interested in art holidaying in the Lake District this summer — or indeed taking a short break in the Lakes — is in for a treat. The Lakeland Arts Trust, which administers both Blackwell and Abbot Hall, has mounted a pair of exhibitions which offers a range of painting and sculpture a good deal better than most things currently on view around the country. And many people may find that tuning into the wild beauty of Cumbria will help them to look with greater enjoyment and discernment at contemporary art. Certainly Baillie Scott’s magnificent 1898 Arts and Crafts house, Blackwell, on the shores of Lake Windermere, is the perfect setting for Halima Cassell’s work in clay, glass, marble and porcelain.

With the death of the critic and historian Robert Hughes, a great beacon has gone out in the art world of the West. I take his absence personally, not because I knew the man (I met him only once), but because he was such an invigorating and perceptive guide to excellence. Of course I didn’t agree with everything he said, but he wrote like an angel (possibly a fallen one) and he certainly made you think and even revise your opinions. Although I was aware that he’d been unwell for a long time, I was unprepared for his death at the age of 74, and feel robbed of the books he didn’t write. What happened to the second volume of his memoirs, and what else might he have got around to writing?

The British Museum has collaborated with the Royal Shakespeare Company on this exhibition, in order to make links between the rich array of BM treasures and Shakespeare’s plays. I’ve never been very convinced about the intermingling of video screens and art: people almost always gravitate to the moving image, particularly if words are involved and people featured. Clips of actors rolling out Shakespeare’s lines with every appearance of enjoyment are bound to capture the attention of the audience at the expense of artefacts, which simply don’t have the same drama or human interest. ‘Oh look, there’s Siân Phillips — or is it Harriet Walter?

Thomas Heatherwick (born 1970) is one of our most exciting and inventive designers, so it is somewhat unfortunate that he is much associated in the public mind with a project that failed, the memorably named ‘B of the Bang’. This was a sculpture commissioned to commemorate the 2002 Commonwealth Games held in Manchester, and the idea was to create a sunburst of tubes and poles to symbolise an explosion of energy. It was a good idea and a formidable undertaking. Erected in 2005, it was plagued with technical problems and bits even fell off. It was taken down in 2009, and only the documentation remains.

Metamorphosis (sponsored by Credit Suisse) is more than an exhibition, it is wider in its manifestations and implications. The Sainsbury Wing galleries are full of interesting works of art, but the Metamorphosis festival — for that is what it surely is — extends to the Royal Opera House and beyond, through dance and poetry. Unfortunately, there are only limited performances by the Royal Ballet, but these will be filmed and thus available for viewing, and the poetry is published in a handy illustrated paperback (price £8.99), with a learned but accessible introduction by the director of the National Gallery, Nicholas Penny.

Nothing gains headlines for art quite like high prices. A few weeks ago, one of the versions of Munch’s famous image of ‘The Scream’ was sold at auction for £74 million, which couldn’t have been bettered as advance publicity for the Tate’s new show. Admittedly, there is not a single version of that key painting in this exhibition (owners are jittery about loaning them — particularly since one was stolen from Norway’s National Gallery in 2004), but there are plenty of other treats for admirers of this Scandinavian ray of sunshine. Among his favourite subjects were sickness and death, lust and jealousy, fear of sexual disease and even fear of life.