Culture

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.

Joan Miró (1893–1983) was a great imaginative artist and a pure painter of genius. Joan Miró (1893–1983) was a great imaginative artist and a pure painter of genius. He produced a huge body of work over a long life, and this excellent selection of it transforms the uninspiring galleries at Tate Modern, which have rarely looked so good. This exhibition offers the political interpretation. You can see Miró as a surrealist, as a formalist or as a political artist. Actually, he was none of these, but allowed each to touch upon the wellsprings of his creativity and have some sort of relationship with his art.

There were two John Tradescants, father and son, operating in the 17th century as travellers and gardeners from a base in south London. Their family tomb is at the heart of the garden surrounding the Garden Museum in the former church of St Mary-at-Lambeth in Lambeth Palace Road, a garden designed as a Tradescant memorial 30 years ago by the Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury. This hallowed place has been the principal subject for the past year of the painter Charlotte Verity (born 1954), the museum’s first artist-in-residence. The initiative has been generously funded by the Cochemé Trust, and the results of Verity’s year-long residency are now on show in the museum’s new gallery.

At the beginning of Richard Ingrams’s book on John Piper (1903–92), he quotes the artist as saying: ‘The basic and unexplainable thing about my paintings is a feeling for places. At the beginning of Richard Ingrams’s book on John Piper (1903–92), he quotes the artist as saying: ‘The basic and unexplainable thing about my paintings is a feeling for places. Not for “travel”, but just for going somewhere — anywhere, really — and trying to see what hasn’t been seen before.’ It’s a good description of what makes Piper’s best work special and memorable, that feeling not just for identifying the spirit of a place, but for depicting it as never before.

So far, 2011 has been a good year for drawing. The great Pre-Raphaelite drawings show at Birmingham is still fresh in my mind as I write this review of a superb Watteau exhibition at the Royal Academy (supported by Region Holdings) and a select survey of Victorian drawings and watercolours at the Courtauld. Watercolours are often described as a form of drawing, though they are in fact made with paint. So they occupy a hybrid category, allowing rather too great a laxity of definition, as can be seen in the Tate’s current watercolour compendium. But there is no uncertainty about the Academy’s show: this is all drawings, and of a very high quality indeed. So far, 2011 has been a good year for drawing.