Andrew Lambirth

Regular readers of this column will be aware that I champion small exhibitions which combine judicious selection with sufficient breadth to give an adequate representation of the artist under discussion. With Adam Elsheimer (1578–1610) there is no choice: the fullest retrospective must needs be a small exhibition. An artist who worked slowly, suffered from depression and died young, his total output was 34 paintings. Thirty of these have been gathered together at Dulwich, supported by a lavish publication from Paul Holberton Publishing (£35 hardback and £22.50 soft cover), which is the first decent book on Elsheimer in English for some 30 years.

Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8–1543) needs no introduction: his vision of kingship in the person of Henry VIII has become part of our national identity, despite Holbein himself being a German whose first taste of success was in Basel. It’s a strange fact that, although endowed with a robust tradition of drawing and linear ornament in England, our great painters tended to be incomers from the Continent, at least until the time of Hogarth. Holbein was the first of these, wafted to Britain on trade winds and the all-pervading breeze of the Renaissance. In search of patronage, he found Sir Thomas More, friend of his first patron the great humanist thinker Erasmus, and then on his second trip to this country (1532–43) was taken up by the king.

What a spectacle at the Royal Academy: the main galleries packed with the sculptures of Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), in a massive show which dazzles with its vehement and emotional handling of materials. Here is a giant of an artist, but the paying public is overloaded with visual stimulus. It is simply impossible to take in so much at one time. How many visitors will return? How many have the time or will spend the money? (Admission is £10.) And yet this is work of central importance to the development of Western art in the last century and a half, not some petit maître like Modigliani, who is being given his second exhibition at the RA upstairs in the Sackler Wing.

It’s very pleasant to be able to greet a small show at the V&A after the relentless stream of blockbusters we’ve seen in Brompton Road in recent years. Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design is confined to one gallery and consists of 60 drawings displayed in two banks of angled cabinets down the length of the room. Above the display cases animations of the drawings are projected, bringing Leonardo’s static designs to life in the manner of a computer screen saver. Is this necessary? The show itself is so low-key I presume the organisers felt it advisable to include a bit of technological back-up to amuse the punters.

The best-known exchange between artist and royalty must be George VI’s celebrated remark to John Piper, who had been painting the castle and surrounding parkland at Windsor: ‘You seem to have had very bad luck with your weather.’ It was the early 1940s, and Piper had invested his watercolours with a brooding quality he no doubt thought appropriate to the mood of the times, and which also echoed his own essentially Romantic vision. The project was a commission from Queen Elizabeth, and extended to 26 views, a rare feat of modern topography that also turned out to be good art. But even the Queen thought Piper’s lowering skies a little overbearing, and reportedly suggested he might ‘try a spring day’.

That eminent Victorian George Frederick Watts — Strachey thought of including him in his seminal study but was sadly deflected — is at last undergoing something of a revival. In his lifetime one of the most famous of contemporary painters (though his works never sold for quite the vast sums realised by Millais or Burne-Jones), Watts has been neglected. His ambition was to be a history painter, and he spent much of his long life and considerable energies on allegorical pictures, which today find little favour. His portraits, which he often used as a means of subsidising his less popular High Art compositions, are recognised as supreme examples of the art, and were given a comprehensive showing at the National Portrait Gallery in 2004.

Since 2003, the National Gallery has been organising a series of annual exhibitions in partnership with Bristol’s City Museum and Art Gallery and the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle. (Readers will perhaps recall previous themed shows: Paradise, Making Faces and last year The Stuff of Life.) This initiative has proved so successful that the programme has been extended for a further three years, with Passion for Paint being the first in the new sequence. It has already been seen at Bristol and Newcastle, and now arrives in London minus the early Leon Kossoff painting ‘Children’s Swimming Pool, Autumn Afternoon’ (1971), which was shown at both other venues.

The Grade I listed Queen Anne townhouse in North Pallant in the city of Chichester, for the past 20 years the home of Walter Hussey’s collection of modern British art, has been closed while undergoing a major extension project. I have been following the fortunes of Pallant House since the late-1970s, when I lived locally. Once it opened in 1982, I visited regularly and watched the development of the collection with interest, particularly the addition of the Charles Kearley Bequest in 1989. At that point, the collection was a little gem of 20th-century art — mostly British, with some European additions. Now it has received a further boost. The house has reopened to universal acclaim with an £8.

The German painter Albert Oehlen (born in Krefeld in 1954) is of the same generation as the infamous Martin Kippenberger (1953–97), recently celebrated so lavishly at Tate Modern. They were good friends and collaborated on various projects, including jokey mottoes on ‘I Love...’ stickers and poems. Both were of that group of German artists who turned to joking as a way of dealing with the artist’s predicament in an age of so-called postmodernism. If Kippenberger was the wilder of the two, obsessed with being famous and grabbing headlines for a whole stream of pranks and artistic interventions, Oehlen has gone on to produce an increasingly authoritative body of work after his self-destructive friend’s tragic early death.

Satire is one of the great British traditions, closely associated with the notions of personal liberty, readiness to express opinion and our much-vaunted freedom of thought. The English appetite for satire has long set standards of democratic licence unequalled in the rest of the world: the lampoon is sacrosanct in our culture, a guarantee of a healthily sceptical attitude to authority and self-importance. It is a great safety valve, as well. Perhaps because the British have been so effusive and inventive as satirists, as a nation we have felt less need to rebel in more active ways. Instead of dragging politicians from their seats of power and stringing them up, we have been content to satirise the swine. Well, it’s this attitude that has made us what we are today.

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) is one of the great figures of Modernism, a pioneer of abstraction, whose works are known in this country mostly from reproduction. The Tate has now gathered some 60 key paintings from important international collections (a significant portion come from Kandinsky’s native Russia) and put together a superb exhibition which it’s difficult to fault. It is particularly refreshing to be completely unaware of the galleries for a change, and focused so intently on the paintings. I was involved, drawn in, enthralled. These are paintings which seem to dematerialise the walls rather than simply hang upon them. The drama of the pictures takes over and monopolises the attention.

Hard on the heels of the National Gallery’s show Rebels and Martyrs, about the changing perception of the artist, comes this exhibition of Modigliani’s paintings. The title makes a shameless and immediate reference to the myth of the decadent bohemian surrounded by lovers. This may serve to attract the punters, but it doesn’t help us take the art more seriously. Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920) was a middle-class Italian Sephardic Jew, born in Livorno, who left home for the bright artistic lights of Paris in 1906, and tragically never found success there. As an artist he has been ill served by the legend that grew up around him, the misplaced glamour of self-destructiveness and early death.

An examination of the artist’s image is an excellent idea for an exhibition, and it has been thoroughly and effectively realised in this new show of some 70 exhibits at the National. Brainchild of Alexander Sturgis, who has written much of the useful catalogue (£25 in paperback), it explores the ways in which personality and originality have been bound up together in the art of the past 200 years. We are all familiar with the romantic idea of the starving but ennobled artist in the garret; this exhibition questions the plausibility of that myth.

The gallery walls of the Level Two temporary exhibition space at Tate Britain are currently aflame with colour. The gallery is playing host to the first exhibition ever to span the entire career of Sir Howard Hodgkin (born in 1932), though there have been plenty of other shows of his work over the years. (Notable among them being displays at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 1990 and 2002, the Hayward Gallery in 1996 and the Whitechapel in 1985, not to mention numerous commercial shows in between.) Despite the dazzling white surfaces of the studio in which he works, Hodgkin often exhibits his paintings on coloured walls, and the Tate show is no exception.

The Summer Exhibition is like a leviathan, a monster from the deep, that every now and again shows itself to general outcry and occasional consternation. Unfortunately, however, it’s not actually the stuff of myth and legend, but all too often of rather dismal reality. This, the 238th Summer Show, is co-ordinated by the architect Peter Cook and the sculptors David Mach and Alison Wilding, and revels in a theme which, though not ‘compulsory’, was optimistically expected to inspire those non-RA artists blessed with sufficient temerity to submit work. The chosen subject was ‘From Life’, which is unspecific enough not to make the slightest difference to anyone.

John Constable (1776–1837) is the quintessential painter of rural England. If we carry in our hearts an image of unspoilt countryside it will, more often than not, bear the lineaments of what has become known as Constable Country, that stretch of land along the river Stour in Suffolk that includes Dedham and Flatford, and the nearby village of East Bergholt. Magical names, redolent with the history imbuing Constable’s paintings of his native county. He immortalised the area in timeless images of extraordinary freshness and beauty. The Tate’s show of some 65 pictures does intelligent justice to a vision of landscape which continues to refresh the spirit.

This small but telling retrospective at Tate St Ives is one of a number of Hoyland exhibitions timed to coincide or overlap this summer. There have already been a couple of commercial shows of recent and older work in London, and another has just opened at the Lemon Street Gallery in Truro (until 24 June). At the age of 72, John Hoyland is experiencing a resurgence of interest in his work which is entirely justified. Since the 1960s he has been an international figure in the world of art, an inventive and uncompromising abstract painter who has continued to take the most extreme risks in his work, and to develop new ways of expressing his sense of wonder and delight in the world around us, and in the further reaches of the human imagination.

Listing page content here Surrealism is in the air, what with the Hayward and Max Ernst shows (reviewed in these pages last week), and it’s been lurking around in a different guise since April in an enthralling show at the Whitechapel which focuses on Outsider Art. Outsider Art, or Art Brut as Dubuffet originally termed it, is art made by ‘people free of artistic culture’; in other words, not artists, though the categories are increasingly blurred. It’s often the product of the mentally disturbed, of those beyond the fringes of society, who make drawings or paintings, sculpture or embroidery, which deal directly with their obsessions. They may not intend to make art, but their work is collected and often displayed as art.