Andrew Lambirth

The Art of the Poster — A Century of Design London Transport Museum, Covent Garden Piazza, WC2, until 31 March The first thing to say is that this is not an exhibition of posters. It is, in fact, an exhibition of the original art works from which were made some of the last century’s best LT posters. There are more than 60 exhibits, and many of the finest were commissioned by Frank Pick (1878–1941), a founding member of the Design and Industries Association and managing director of LT. He was one of those enormously influential background figures — like Jack Beddington at Shell — who was responsible for LT’s publicity from 1908, and aimed to sell the Underground through its destinations, its urban and green-belt attractions.

‘The Roundhouse of International Spirits’: Arp, Benazzi, Bissier, Nicholson, Richter, Tobey, Valenti in the Ticino Kettle’s Yard, Castle Street, Cambridge, until 15 March ‘I turned it into a palace’: Sir Sydney Cockerell and the Fitzwilliam Museum Fitzwilliam Museum, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, until 17 March The Ticino is the Italian-speaking canton of Switzerland, home to Lakes Lugano and Maggiore. In the early 1960s, it played host to a number of artists who were drawn by its natural beauty and the presence of other artists and intellectuals. It is the focus and reason for this immensely enjoyable exhibition at Kettle’s Yard, which is well worth making a trip through the snow to see.

Palladio: His Life and Legacy Royal Academy, until 13 April In a truly civilised society, a basic understanding and appreciation of architecture would be taught in schools. After all, most of us spend a large portion of our lives in buildings. Yet you only have to look around you to see that architecture is dishonoured and despised in England. How have we come to this? We have a good share of fine buildings scattered about the land, and even poor desperate built-upon London retains quite a few architectural marvels. Why then are we prepared to accept almost without comment acres of disfiguring ugliness? I refuse to believe that the English have no visual sense — though this is often said of our triumphantly literary nation.

The abstract painter John McLean celebrates his 70th birthday this year, and the enterprising Poussin Gallery (Block K, 13 Bell Yard Mews, 175 Bermondsey Street, SE1) has mounted a show of his recent prints in recognition (until 14 February). McLean is an inventive printmaker and when paired with a master craftsman, as he is here — work produced at the Cambridge studio of Kip Gresham — the results are first rate. McLean’s introduction to the little catalogue accompanying the show is a fascinating and lucid account of his techniques, which range from screenprinted monoprints to carborundum etchings via drypoints and woodcuts.

Unique Forms: The Drawing and Sculpture of Umberto Boccioni Estorick Collection, 39a Canonbury Square, N1, until 19 April The year 2009 sees the 100th anniversary of F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, celebrated by a major reassessment of Futurism at the Tate in June. Meanwhile, the Estorick Collection has got in first with a small but select show devoted to the leading Futurist Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916). Boccioni is one of those figures we speculate about — would he have developed into an even greater artist had he survived the first world war, or would he have declined into academicism and self-plagiarism?

Beth Chatto — A Retrospective Garden Museum, Lambeth Palace Road, London SE1, until 19 April The Garden Museum, situated in the old church of St Mary’s, hard by Lambeth Palace, has undergone a major refurbishment. It looks tremendous, much better than in the old days of slight muddle and a feeling of temporary storage. A new freestanding structure of pale wood has been built within the church, a Belvedere, as the architects, Dow Jones, call it. It complements beautifully the limestone columns and interior walls of the former church. Rarely have I seen a renovation look so elegant and so satisfying.

Bruegel to Rubens: Masters of Flemish Painting The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, until 26 April If you felt deprived of snow this Christmas, hasten along to The Queen’s Gallery, for there, in a splendid exhibition of Flemish painting from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, is one of the best snow-scenes ever — Bruegel’s ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ (1565–7). You may think this too grisly a subject for the season of good will, and the Emperor Rudolf II thought so too, for the painting was bowdlerised at his orders in the early 17th century.

Andrew Lambirth looks forward to some great exhibitions in the year ahead There’s a very full year’s viewing ahead to cheer the eye and gladden the heart however bleak the financial prospects. For a start, the National Gallery is mounting a major exhibition focusing on the fascinating relationship that Picasso had with the art of the past. His reworkings of Goya, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Chardin and Delacroix, together with responses to more contemporary masters such as van Gogh and Gauguin, provide a riveting dialogue of minds. Picasso: Challenging the Past (25 February to 7 June) will offer new ways to look at the Old Masters as well as a different take on Picasso.

A major new exhibiting space is always welcome in London, and the multi-purpose venue at Kings Place, 90 York Way, N1, comes with the added attractions of restaurants and concert halls. It’s a conference centre as well as the home of the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and the new HQ of the Guardian and Observer newspapers. It also houses Pangolin London, a dedicated sculpture gallery currently showing works in silver by the likes of Antony Gormley, Ann Christopher and Lynne Chadwick (until 18 January), and Kings Place Gallery, where a show of Bert Irvin’s vibrant abstracts lights up the inner walkways and balconies of this vast building (till 6 February).

A Countryman in Town: Robert Bevan and the Cumberland Market Group Southampton City Art Gallery, until 14 December The Women’s Land Army — A Portrait St Barbe Museum, New Street, Lymington, until 10 January The recent Camden Town exhibition at the Tate was a useful reminder of the originality of one of the few significant radical groups of modern British artists. It’s often said that the English aren’t joiners, but at the beginning of the 20th century when the Royal Academy dominated the London exhibiting scene, there were a number of rebel coalitions organised to provide mutual support and venues in which to show avant-garde work. The Camden Town Group was one such, and its successor, the much less-known Cumberland Market Group, was another.

Saul Steinberg: Illuminations Dulwich Picture Gallery, until 15 February 2009 Cartoons & Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster The Wallace Collection, until 11 January 2009 Saul Steinberg (1914–99) was born in Romania and studied architecture in 1930s Milan. His first cartoons appeared in 1936 and he began to build a reputation, despite the threat of war. In 1941 he was interned briefly, then fled Italy to the Dominican Republic, while applying for American citizenship. His first cartoon for the New Yorker appeared in 1941, and by 1942 he was in the States. Registering for the draft, he worked in propaganda for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in North Africa and then back in Italy. In 1945 his first book of drawings was published and sold over 20,000 copies.

Byzantium 330-1454 Royal Academy, until 22 March 2009 In his excellent book Portrait Painters, written more than half-a-century ago but still full of wisdom and stimulating observations, Allan Gwynne-Jones includes a note on the character of English art. He has been discussing the great glories of the medieval school of manuscript illumination in Britain, often forgotten when an assessment is made of our contribution to the visual arts. Yet between 1000 and 1300 the English school was the finest in Europe without a doubt. Gwynne-Jones writes: ‘In order to understand English art one must study its source. English art is Byzantine in root, the Byzantine tradition having found its way to Durham and thence to Winchester by way of Ireland. It is a very austere tradition.

Paths to Fame: Turner Watercolours from the Courtauld Courtauld Institute, Somerset House, WC2, until 25 January 2009 This is the first full display of the Courtauld’s holding of Turner watercolours, recently enriched by nine paintings from the Scharf Bequest. The exhibition is further enhanced by loans from the Tate, and offers a splendid introduction to one of the greatest English artists. Despite a lifetime of almost ceaseless travel, J.M.W. Turner was very much a Londoner. Born a barber’s son in Covent Garden in 1775 he showed early promise and the unflagging industry to put his talent to best use. He was ambitious as well as hard-working, travelling England to record notable architecture and natural scenery.

Miró, Calder, Giacometti, Braque: Aimé Maeght and His Artists Royal Academy, until 2 January 2009 The role played by dealers in modern French art seems to exceed that of their English counterparts. Perhaps this is because the French were more bombastic and self-serving, but we remember the names of the great dealers such as Vollard or Durand-Ruel. Actually, I think it is because they played a crucial role in the nurturing of the artists they represented which was perhaps more personal and involved than the subtle and retiring English. Aimé Maeght (1906–81) was just such a dealer who, ably supported by his wife Marguerite (1909–77), founded a commercial art gallery in the dark days towards the end of the second world war.

From Sickert to Gertler: Modern British Art from Boxted House Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, Suffolk, until 13 December Private collections of art are fascinating, both for the light they shed on the tastes and preoccupations of their owners, and for the otherwise often hidden network of associations they can reveal. Paintings and sculptures made on a domestic scale exert a subtly different appeal than the products of public or museum art. The intimacy of the home setting often awakens a resonance in the art which the de-personalised aura of a gallery can stifle or deny. However, few collections, apart from the grandest, are maintained in the houses for which they were assembled, and if they are left to museums are inevitably broken up and lose their identity.

Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian National Gallery until 18 January 2009 When people think of the Renaissance, it’s to Italy that their thoughts immediately turn. The names of Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo and Michelangelo spring to mind, although the Renaissance in northern Europe was of equal importance, as a glance at Dürer, van Eyck or Holbein will at once confirm. Yet it remains the case that the Renaissance and the Mediterranean are somehow connected in the popular understanding, perhaps because Italy produced so many great masters in this period, and so comparatively few thereafter.

It’s possible that my life would have been quite different if I hadn’t met the literary agent Jacintha Alexander at a party in 1985. At the time I was an impoverished researcher and aspirant writer, with a specialism in 20th-century British art. As we chatted of this and that, it emerged that Jacintha had a project that might interest me — working on the memoirs of an artist who’d already written quite a substantial text but needed help to prepare her book for publication. The artist in question was the distinguished surrealist Eileen Agar, and I jumped at the suggestion that I might work with her. I remember our first meeting, at a group exhibition of English surrealists.

Gerhard Richter: 4900 Colours Serpentine Gallery, until 16 November Lucian Freud: Early Works, 1940–58 Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, 38 Bury Street, London SW1, until 12 December At the Serpentine is an exhibition of little squares of colour, randomly arranged in grids. There are 49 paintings on show, each one composed of four panels consisting of 25 squares each. They are painted in enamel on something synthetic called Aludibond, on boards or plates attached directly to the wall. The colour combinations are selected by chance through a specially developed computer programme, and the initial idea for the work was sparked by the industrial colour charts produced by paint manufacturers.

Joan Eardley The Fleming Collection, 13 Berkeley Street, London W1, until 20 December The interplay between realism and abstraction that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s in British art gave rise to a number of fascinating paintings as artists struggled to resolve the balance to their own satisfaction. The co-existence of these extremes in the art world had the effect of polarising opinion, yet some of the best solutions were supplied by those who could harness both drives and make them work in a single painting. Joan Eardley (1921–63) was one who mastered enough of both idioms to make an original statement, and who thus took the evocation of landscape to poignant new heights.

Rothko Tate Modern, until 1 February 2009 The first thing that should be noted is that this exhibition is not the retrospective that its title implies. In fact, it’s a severely limited show, concentrating on the late work only. There are therefore none of the joyful, brightly coloured paintings that sell so well around the world in reproduction. This exhibition is an altogether more sombre experience, the work darker and more minimal. I wonder how many people will buy their tickets (£12.50 per head, concessions £10.50) expecting a feast of colour and be disappointed. I hope they won’t — this is a fascinating exhibition — but it is not a general introduction to the work of Mark Rothko (1903–70).