Culture

Zarina Bhimji is a photographer of ghosts. Her images of deserted buildings (‘Bapa Closed His Heart, It Was Over’, above) and desolate landscapes are empty, but haunted by humanity; her work is, as she puts it, evidence not of ‘actual facts but the echo they create’. The Whitechapel Gallery is currently home to a retrospective of the work of this Turner Prize-nominated artist (until 9 March), and includes a selection of her photographs, installations and short films. Bhimji and her family were forced to leave Uganda when Idi Amin expelled Asians from the country in 1972 and much of her work bears the imprint of this background. Her images of East Africa and India explore the vast issues created by displacement and forced exile.

Several people I spoke to when this exhibition was first mentioned thought it would be a Hockney retrospective, considering that he was commandeering all the first-floor galleries at the RA. But actually the retrospective element is very slight, consisting of half a dozen early landscapes and a couple of photo-collages, before we encounter the first of the mainly large-scale landscapes he has been painting since the late 1990s. In fact, the greater part of the exhibition (sponsored by BNP Paribas) consists of work done in Yorkshire since 2004, and Hockney has packed the galleries with hundreds of images (a single work might consist of 36 watercolours, or perhaps 51 iPad drawings with an oil painting on 32 canvases).

As cuts in government funding begin to bite, the innovative Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn finds itself short of £350,000 a year, and its long-serving artistic director, Nicolas Kent, is standing down as a result. Into the breach has stepped 89-year-old philanthropist and Tricycle devotee Al Weil. He is donating 37 paintings (including ‘The Gulf of Salerno’, above) by an artist he has collected since the 1960s, the distinguished Victorian watercolourist Hercules Brabazon Brabazon (1821–1906). Brabazon was a man of means who didn’t have to sell his work to survive, but nevertheless created a body of paintings and drawings of rare sensibility.

The last major show of paintings by Edward Burra (1905–76) was at the Hayward Gallery in 1985 and I remember visiting it with a painter friend who was rather critical of what she called Burra’s woodenness and lack of movement. At the time, I was impressed by her criticisms, but now they rather seem to miss the point. Burra made highly stylised images of people (often actually in movement) which are mostly about the darker side of humanity and the ways in which we distract and amuse ourselves in the face of despair.

When I was at school, I remember the art teacher returning incensed from a trip to London during which he’d taken a group of seniors to the Tate Gallery. The particular object of his ire was what he described as ‘a pile of blankets’ by Barry Flanagan. He could not accept that this was a legitimate work of art, and, in a state of raging mischief, he’d grouped his school party around the thing in question and surreptitiously changed the order of the blankets. This subversive act was intended not only to relieve his feelings but also to prove the falseness of the work. If it could be fundamentally changed without anyone noticing, it was — to his mind at least — undeniably bogus.

Among exhibition organisers, hyperbole is clearly the order of the day. The crowds are going wild over Leonardo at the National Gallery, expecting an exhibition packed with paintings (though only nine are by the master), and now the Fitzwilliam is hauling them in with a show called Vermeer’s Women that contains just four paintings by Vermeer. On the day I visited, the gallery was thronged, though the queues of which the management warned were thankfully not in evidence. I am frankly horrified by the volume of visitors to art galleries these days. I should perhaps be thankful that art is so popular, but the sheer numbers make the experience of viewing an exhibition increasingly disagreeable and unrewarding.

In recent years there has been a surge of interest in the treasures hidden in our public art collections, many of them rarely if ever on view. The Tate Gallery is perhaps the principal offender here, showing only a tiny percentage of its glorious and wide-ranging holdings of British art, but attention is now being directed towards our provincial galleries and museums. Since 2003 the Public Catalogue Foundation has been recording and publishing the oil paintings held in galleries and civic buildings, county by county, and issuing invaluable volumes of colour illustrations to show us what usually remains invisible. By its calculations, a shameful 80 per cent of these paintings are not on view.

High Arctic, the inaugural exhibition in the newly opened Sammy Ofer wing at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (until 13 January), brings a thoroughly 21st-century, technology-driven museum experience to this historic site. It’s an exhibition, Jim, but not as we know it. In 2010 Matt Clark, creative director of the art and design practice UVA, joined an expedition of artists and scientists to the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. High Arctic, which he describes as ‘a monument to an Arctic past set 100 years into the future’, is a response to this trip; an attempt to address, in a non-preachy way, the issue of man’s impact on the environment.

In 1935, Paul Nash observed that Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890–1954) was responsible for the change in attitude towards commercial art in this country. An American, Kauffer arrived in England in 1914 during a period of European study. He liked it and decided to stay, enabled to do so by his remarkable ability to design posters. In 1915 Frank Pick commissioned him to produce the first of what became a remarkable stream of some 140 posters for London Transport. Hugely impressed by Vorticism, Kauffer became a friend and ally of Wyndham Lewis and introduced the Modernist sensibility into commercial art.

For far too long, John Martin (1789–1854) has been dismissed as ‘Mad’ Martin, the prophet of doom. In the eyes of many, this unacademic painter was a grotesque curiosity, producing colossal pictures of apocalyptic destruction, crude dramas of catastrophe and tumult, much to the delight of the populace. The mere fact that he was so popular an image-maker made him irredeemably vulgar (rather like Lowry today), and the cognoscenti looked for faults rather than appreciating his strengths. In fact, Martin was a reforming inventor as well as a painter, much concerned with draining the marshes around London and ensuring a pure water supply for the capital, simply because he wanted, as he says in his ‘autobiography’, to improve the condition of the people.

The caption on the photograph (above) makes a difference: ‘A young boy grieves at the funeral of his father who died of Aids at Ndola, Zambia, 2000.’ There were two million Aids orphans in Zambia alone. ‘I care about not letting this tragedy go unseen,’ Don McCullin said. Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin, at the Imperial War Museum (until 15 April 2012), shows 250 items from the long career of a man best known for his photojournalism, from Vietnam onwards. The boy at Ndola looks straight at the lens, if he is looking outwards and not into the empty future, or back into the life with his father that has gone. Light from one side catches tears that have coalesced in the valley by his left nostril.

Photographs of roadworks feature regularly in the Hampstead Village Voice but, even with the postmodern fashion for grungy subjects, no contemporary residents have made paintings of them. Yet that, astonishingly, was what Ford Madox Brown did in the 1850s, lugging his two-metre canvas on to The Mount, off Heath Street, to do it. Brown’s unlikely masterwork ‘Work’ was the first ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ painting bought by Manchester Art Gallery, where it is now the centrepiece of a major exhibition dedicated to the artist. I put ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ in inverted commas because Brown — a prickly individual with a deep distrust of all ‘Bodies, Institutions, Art unions & academies’ — was never strictly a member of the Brotherhood.

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) was born into a banking family, always knew he wanted to be a painter and was fortunate enough to be encouraged in his enthusiasm by his parents. After a classical training he began to paint portraits and history subjects, before seeing the relevance of real life and developing ways in which to depict it. Influenced by Manet and allied to the Impressionists, he was nevertheless not a committed member of the group and was impatient at its definition of painting. He remained classical in his approach to picture-making but fused this with a keen interest in colour and texture, and an awareness of how photography and Japanese prints had influenced ideas of space and vision.

Rome contains many hidden treasures, but the most remarkable of the lot is concealed on the Caelian Hill, above the Colosseum, in the medieval monastery of Santi Quattro Coronati. It’s a cycle of frescoes dating from around 1250. It is extremely rare for painting from this period to survive anywhere, but it’s even rarer in Rome, where the rebuilding of the city by the Counter-Reformation popes destroyed almost all medieval painting. The paintings are in a vast vaulted gothic hall, the walls of which — about 800 square metres of them — were originally completely covered in frescoes. About half the original paintings remain: an earthquake, and the construction of additional windows, have destroyed the rest.