Culture

One of the greatest Renaissance paintings remaining in private hands, Hans Holbein the Younger’s ‘The Darmstadt Madonna’, was sold discreetly this summer. It was not offered at auction but sold by private treaty sale — auction-speak for a negotiated private sale rather than a public auction — in a deal brokered by the art consultant and former head of Sotheby’s Germany, Dr Christoph Graf Douglas. This seminal panel painting, begun in 1526, was commissioned by Jakob Meyer zum Hasen, Mayor of Basel, who is portrayed alongside his family praying at the feet of the Virgin and sheltered by her cloak. It is the artist’s first major altarpiece to represent a new and Italianate form of ideal beauty.

The introductory room to Women War Artists at the Imperial War Museum confronts the visitor with a large canvas of a women’s canteen in 1918 by the little-known Flora Lion. It’s an honest painting, workmanlike but dull. Hanging to its left is Laura Knight’s famous ‘Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring’ (1943), and in between is a monitor playing a wonderful film clip of Dame Laura and Ruby going to see the painting at the Royal Academy. Ruby, overcome by emotion, kisses Dame Laura; Dame Laura bobs about, smoking furiously. Of course, Laura Knight on film and in paint grabs the attention; Flora Lion is inevitably sidelined. And that sets the tenor of the show, which is rather a shame, as there is work of real interest among the more obscure names.

In the Weston Rooms of the Royal Academy’s main suite of galleries is the third of a series of exhibitions designed to show the processes by which artists arrive at their work. In the Weston Rooms of the Royal Academy’s main suite of galleries is the third of a series of exhibitions designed to show the processes by which artists arrive at their work. Nigel Hall (born 1943) is an internationally celebrated abstract sculptor, known for his restrained purist forms, exquisitely balanced combinations of cone, ellipse, circle and wedge, executed in bronze, steel or polished wood. He also exhibits tautly rhythmic charcoal and gouache drawings of twisting ribands or other flat geometric shapes.

Very last chance to see the inaugural exhibition at the magnificently revamped Holburne Museum — a selection from the collections of Peter Blake, together with some of his own work. If, as Geoffrey Grigson suggested, the mind is an anthology, and the museum case or exhibition is a map of that mind, then what a remarkably diverse but ordered person Mr Blake must be. The new temporary exhibition gallery at the top of the Holburne’s new wing is filled with images of fantasy, dream and even nightmare, but everything is calmly laid out with great clarity and precision. The result is obsessional but intriguing.

The subtitle of Treasures of Heaven is ‘saints, relics and devotion in medieval Europe’. The key words here are medieval and Europe. The subtitle of Treasures of Heaven is ‘saints, relics and devotion in medieval Europe’. The key words here are medieval and Europe. There’s not much from England because we suffered the autocratic cleansing of the Reformation in the 16th century, and much of our native tradition of what was then dubbed idolatry was destroyed or swept away. And because our Church was reformed in this way, those of a C of E persuasion tend to be suspicious of relics and devotional aids.

To celebrate Elizabeth Blackadder’s 80th birthday, the Scottish National Gallery is staging a landmark retrospective (until 2 January 2012) spanning the last six decades of the artist’s career. To celebrate Elizabeth Blackadder’s 80th birthday, the Scottish National Gallery is staging a landmark retrospective (until 2 January 2012) spanning the last six decades of the artist’s career. Blackadder is best known for her vibrant still-lives of the Sixties, a time when most of her contemporaries were experimenting with Pop and Abstract Expressionism. Influenced by her passion for collecting and for fastidious attention to detail, she has spent a lifetime popularising and successfully re-inventing the genre.

When a major artist dies while an exhibition of his or her work is up and running, there is inevitably a surge in visitor numbers. Consequently, the death of Cy Twombly at the beginning of last month has sent along to Dulwich a number of people who didn’t know his work to find out what all the fuss was about. Others, the long-standing admirers of Twombly, will visit Dulwich with sadness in their hearts that this delightful and surprising artist, this genius of the wayward mark, will make no more new work. Dulwich is not the easiest of London galleries to get to, but I recommend this show, not just for its quota of Twomblys, but also for the added bonus of Poussin, seen here in great glory. Their juxtaposition is a stimulating one.

The Fry Art Gallery is housed in a Victorian Gentleman’s Gallery of two main rooms, built in 1856 for the Quaker banker Francis Gibson. The Fry Art Gallery is housed in a Victorian Gentleman’s Gallery of two main rooms, built in 1856 for the Quaker banker Francis Gibson. It was first intended to accommodate his own collection, but was always open to the public, and in 1985 it was taken over by the Fry Art Gallery Society, a charity set up to create the North West Essex Collection, of work by artists of the locality. The focus is primarily on the remarkable group of painters and printmakers who settled in nearby Great Bardfield from the 1930s to the 1970s, and which included Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious, John Aldridge, Michael Rothenstein and Kenneth Rowntree.

The basement galleries of the Sainsbury Wing are darker than ever for this intriguing redisplay of some of the oldest paintings in the National Gallery. The atmosphere attempts to recreate the penumbral gloom of church and chapel in which these paintings were originally to be seen, before impoverished religious foundations flogged them to dealers and collectors. Nearly all these pictures come from the NG’s permanent collection, but it is always revealing to see things exhibited in new ways, and this exhibition is no exception. For a change, it focuses our attention on the nuts and bolts of altarpieces — how they were commissioned, constructed, framed, positioned — and in so doing sheds much light on them as devotional objects.

Vorticism is often referred to as the only British 20th-century art movement of international importance, but the work of the Vorticists — Wyndham Lewis, Edward Wadsworth, Gaudier-Brzeska and their associates — has up to now not been widely known. Vorticism is often referred to as the only British 20th-century art movement of international importance, but the work of the Vorticists — Wyndham Lewis, Edward Wadsworth, Gaudier-Brzeska and their associates — has up to now not been widely known. However, the Tate’s show has already been seen in Venice at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, making it the first ever Vorticist exhibition in Italy, stronghold of Futurism (Vorticism’s rival), and in America, at the Nasher Museum of Art in North Carolina.

There are just 26 drawings and watercolours in the magnificent exhibition at Lowell Libson, but they are all of such quality and interest that the show is a feast of connoisseurship and visual delight. Selected by Libson and Christopher Baker from the National Gallery of Scotland, the range of work gives a distinct flavour of the museum’s holdings, from major watercolours made for exhibition to more informal studies. Here are the big names (Turner, Constable, Blake) and the lesser-known (William Callow, John Webber). Most deal with travel or landscape, but there are figure studies and visions, too. The variety within such a small compass is impressive. For pure pleasure, this show is hard to beat.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901), diminutive aristocrat and radical artist, was roundly travestied in John Huston’s 1952 film Moulin Rouge, and at once entered the popular imagination as an atrociously romanticised figure doomed for early death. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901), diminutive aristocrat and radical artist, was roundly travestied in John Huston’s 1952 film Moulin Rouge, and at once entered the popular imagination as an atrociously romanticised figure doomed for early death. In fact, Lautrec was a tough and original artist, incisive and unsparing in his observation though also compassionate of the human comedy, a perfect painter of what then passed for modern life.

This year, the sequence of galleries has been subtly altered, and for a change we enter the fabled Summer Exhibition (sponsored by Insight Investment) through the Octagon rather than Gallery 1. This brings the visitor straight into the heart of the show, and it’s quite a good idea at this point to turn right into the Lecture Room for a gallery dedicated entirely to RA members, hung by that éminence grise, Michael Craig-Martin. Of course this is Craig-Martin’s choice, so the more traditional practitioners are excluded, but the Lecture Room nevertheless looks better than it has done for years. A big tattooed head by Tony Bevan keeps company with Humphrey Ocean’s ‘Windscreen’, a roughly massed urban landscape.

In the Mellon Gallery of the Fitzwilliam is an unashamedly rich and demanding exhibition of Italian drawings, ranging from the 15th to the 20th century. I say ‘demanding’ because you need to look closely and with attention at these works — not simply to decipher what is going on (the narrative component), but to appreciate how it has been achieved (the formal aspect). So much of the stuff that is produced under the name of art today is easy on the eye and mind, with as much aesthetic nourishment as used air. Real art solicits the spectator’s involvement: it’s not a variant on wallpaper, it requires interpretation and response, intellectual as well as emotional.

Cleanliness was nowhere near godliness in 17th-century Europe — except in Delft, where God came second. The Wellcome Collection’s examination of humanity’s relationship with dirt begins in Vermeer’s city, where thousands of girls with pearl earrings scrubbed hearths for a living. Delftware, those distinctive blue and white ceramic tiles so common in antique shops, was mass-produced because it was so easy to clean and molysmophobic merchants used it to plaster their interiors. It’s tempting to mock the fashion; but the show immediately moves on to Dickens’ s London – a miasma of grime, dust and disease. The obsessive compulsives of Delft were visionaries.

Over the years Chris Beetles must have made the pencil-wielding fingers of Quentin Blake and Ronald Searle itch with a desire to draw him. He presents a vigorously compact figure, possesses a pair of appropriately beetling brows sheltering an extremely shrewd gaze and sports an unabashedly splendid set of bugger’s grips. Standing in the doorway of his gallery on Ryder Street in the heart of art-dealing London, both he and his collection are a world away from the smooth-talking, sharp-suited power-broking of Christie’s and Sotheby’s, the plush hush of Colnaghi. The walls of the gallery bristle with pictures, hung to fill every possible available space from floor to ceiling.

Foundling Voices at the Foundling Museum in London’s Bloomsbury (until 30 October) is the fruit of an oral history project that recorded the memories of 74 men and women (the youngest is now 68, the oldest 98) born to unmarried mothers who were placed as babies in the care of the Foundling Hospital Schools in the first half of the 20th century. Foundling Voices at the Foundling Museum in London’s Bloomsbury (until 30 October) is the fruit of an oral history project that recorded the memories of 74 men and women (the youngest is now 68, the oldest 98) born to unmarried mothers who were placed as babies in the care of the Foundling Hospital Schools in the first half of the 20th century.