Andrew Lambirth

Andrew Lambirth on the splendour of the Canaletto exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery Magnet for tourists as it is, Buckingham Palace is the perfect setting for Canaletto in Venice, an exhibition devoted to the grandest producer of tourist art of the 18th century focusing exclusively on a city which had already become one of the world’s leading tourist destinations. Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697–1768) was known as Canaletto to distinguish him from his father, a successful painter of theatrical scenery. Young Giovanni trained in Venice in the family business, before branching out on his own in the early 1720s and painting views of Venice for the rich nobles undertaking the Grand Tour.

A Christmas spirit hovers over Art of the Middle Ages at Sam Fogg (15d Clifford Street, W1, until 12 January), visible particularly in the Three Kings bearing gifts in the tiny 14th-century French ivory diptych, and in the green-winged stained-glass angel probably from the glazier who worked at Sées Cathedral, Orne in Normandy, around 1270–80. This high standard is maintained in the stucco relief of the ‘Virgin and Child Enthroned’ of c.1420, by Michele da Firenze, a kneeling wooden king from an Austrian ‘Adoration of the Magi’, and a remarkable Bavarian limewood Jesse figure. Other treasures include illuminated manuscripts, miniatures and Romanesque architectural sculpture. Here are gifts indeed to impress loved ones.

André Derain (1880–1954) has a somewhat mixed reputation. He is widely praised for his early paintings, done when he worked alongside Matisse and Vlaminck and they took the art world by the throat with their Fauve extremism, but his later work is largely dismissed. To quote the Yale Dictionary of Art & Artists, it ‘combined traditional modes with modern sketchiness attractive to those who seek academic assurances in new art’. Fairly slighting, but, in some cases at least, justified. Derain’s post-war work was certainly unadventurous, but then he had determined to be the solid classical reactionary. What we need now is a well-chosen retrospective of his entire career to highlight its undoubted strengths, rather than dwell upon its weaknesses.

It was towards 11 o’clock on the 11th that I approached Paul McCarthy’s exhibition. The Two Minutes’ Silence caught up with me on Monument station and was properly observed apart from the distant wailing of a busker in one of the tunnels and the giggling chatter of a couple of youths. But as I walked into the welcoming and well-lit ground-floor space of the Whitechapel Gallery, I wondered what I had let myself in for. In the centre of the room was a group of small sculptures on plinths, mostly in chocolate or faecal brown. Around the walls was a series of large drawings, some with collage elements. The subjects seemed to be exclusively sex and violence, rendered with a mocking savagery which accorded ill with the children’s storybook approach.

If there’s one exhibition Tate Modern has mounted which needed the attentions of a sympathetic designer it’s this one. Never have such vibrant paintings begun to seem so dull, displayed to disadvantage on the drab, no-colour walls of the unsympathetic boxes of the temporary exhibition galleries on Level 4. There’s something intrinsically disheartening about the proportions of these rooms: they don’t encourage study or celebration, and their spaces seem oppressive to the extent of being claustrophobic. For a moment, as the visitor steps into the first room to discover jungle-patterned walls, there is hope that this exhibition — so potentially full of a wild richness — will bring these dreary galleries to life.

Most novel-readers will be aware that Anthony Powell’s celebrated roman-fleuve A Dance to the Music of Time is named after and inspired by Poussin’s great painting in the Wallace Collection. As Jeremy Warren, head of collections at the Wallace and this exhibition’s curator, points out: ‘Both novel and picture examine the nature of mortality and the strange mixture of predetermination and hazard to which human relationships appear to be subject.’ Poussin was one of Powell’s favourite painters, and the ambiguity of his famous image was evidently a useful and compelling source for the fictional dance of Powell’s characters.

The National Gallery really is a remarkable place. In addition to displaying its diverse and beautiful permanent collection in increasingly sympathetic and attractive ways, it continues to mount a string of temporary exhibitions of great interest and unobtrusive scholarship. Yet these loan shows are generally housed in a suite of cellar rooms oppressive to the spirit, while the vast book-and-merchandise shop is situated on the ground floor with ample access to natural light. Should it not be the other way round? Is it feared that sales would plummet if the shop were in the basement? I am only expressing the opinion of a considerable proportion of gallery-goers when I ask — is it too late to acknowledge the mistake and to swap round the shop and the exhibition halls?

In 1960, writing a postcard to her friend and mentor Marvin Israel, Diane Arbus (1923–71) worried that she was ghoulish. From an early age her photographs had recorded the marginalised and dispossessed, capturing the imperfections and frailties of humanity. She was a woman with a mission — scrutinising society and chronicling the damaged or eccentric, what she called ‘singular people’. She made square-format photographs of a startling clarity, but, despite her technical brilliance, her vision was dark and bleak. It comes as no surprise to learn that she suffered acutely from the devils of depression and that she committed suicide. The great empathy which informs her image-making in the end got too much for her.

This is the season of the self-portrait. At the Royal Academy until 11 December are 150 self-portraits by Edvard Munch (reviewed in this column three weeks ago), the depth of his obsession bordering on sheer tedium. Just opening at the National Portrait Gallery is the first major museum study in this country of the self-portrait, from the Old Masters to now. A most distinguished collection of self-portraits by 20th-century British artists assembled by the writer Ruth Borchard, which has been touring this country and will visit America next year, has now found a permanent home in London.

Nowadays ‘Kienholz’ is a brand. Its founder, Edward Kienholz (1927–94), was a self-taught artist who grew up on a farm on the borders of Washington and Idaho. He made a living as an odd-job man and drove a truck stencilled ‘Ed Kienholz Expert, Estab. 1952’, before co-founding a commercial art gallery and establishing a reputation as an artist of nightmarish surrealistic installations, using real furniture and life-size figures. In 1972 he met and married Nancy Reddin (born 1943), and in 1981 he issued a statement that all works from 1972 onwards were co-authored by him and Nancy.

Although marginalised or ignored for much of her long life, the designer and architect Eileen Gray (1878–1976) is now a hugely admired and influential figure, celebrated in the same breath as Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto and Charles Eames. I was first aware of her as the aunt of the distinguished painter Prunella Clough (who looked after Gray in her declining years), and acquainted with her work mostly through illustrations in books and catalogues. So this retrospective of her work was eagerly awaited, even though the Design Museum seems so often to be hamstrung by limited budgets. In the event, the exhibition is quietly exciting, though it leaves the visitor with the appetite stimulated rather than appeased.

Much trumpeted as the first exhibition to explore together the lives of Horatio Nelson and Napoleon Bonaparte, Nelson & Napoleon at once raises the double question of was it a good idea and does it work? This crowded display is a qualified success, with an audiovisual presentation which re-enacts the Battle of Trafalgar every five minutes or so in blips of light and moderate sound effects, and is curiously unconvincing as a centrepiece. Two upper floors of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, are given over to this large and ambitious exhibition, which is the highlight of SeaBritain 2005, a year-long festival of events around the UK (for more information consult the website: www.seabritain2005.com), celebrating our special relationship with the sea.

The Canadian painter David Milne (1882–1953) is not known in this country. His name is shamefully overlooked by the Yale Dictionary of Art & Artists, and there has never before been a show of his work here. The fact that there is one now is largely due to the vision and enthusiasm of Frances Carey, who acquired three watercolours by Milne while she was deputy keeper of Prints and Drawings at the BM. However, even when there is a really superb exhibition of his work in London, the public is not beating a path to its door. (Would it be different, one wonders, if the show had been mounted elsewhere — at the Royal Academy or the Tate, with their prestigious exhibition halls and effective publicity machines?) Quite frankly, people don’t know what they’re missing.

Andrew Lambirth on an artist’s relationship with the Llanthony Valley in south Wales On a warm but dampish day a month ago, I set off for the wilds of south Wales to explore the Llanthony Valley in the Black Mountains. The train takes the visitor as far as Abergavenny, after which you’re somewhat reliant on a car, unless you favour pony-trekking or have the leisure for hill walking. The darker green on the hillsides in July was bracken, the distinctive red earth slipping here and there into red mud after the cloudbursts of the day before. The narrow, twisty lanes climbed hills and traversed vales embowered with dank herbage, but the views when the hedges opened up were glorious. This article is as much about a place, a tract of country, as it is about art.

The Bloomberg Space on the edge of Finsbury Square is a fine ground-floor gallery with rocketing ceilings that exudes wealth and sophistication. It’s a rare and pleasantly civilised experience to walk in off the street and not only be welcomed but also handed a complimentary catalogue of the exhibition. The catalogue is a modest illustrated pamphlet containing ample information about both artists and exhibits — sufficient even for the knowledgeable spectator. Here are none of the door-stopper tomes beloved of academic curators, just a neat, stapled brochure, and a handlist of the exhibits if you require more specific information. The surroundings are spacious and elegant. Museums should be like this.

There has been a great deal of media coverage of this exhibition of new paintings by Cecily Brown (born 1969) at the curiously named Modern Art Oxford. (It’s actually an Arts Council-funded public gallery.) Brown, though a Londoner, has lived in New York since 1994 and has made a substantial name for herself there and in Europe, showing recently at the Reina Sofia in Madrid, and at Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome, in 2003. This is her first major solo exhibition in Britain. Its reception has been mixed. Magazine profiles tend to stress her impeccable pedigree (her father is the late David Sylvester, her mother the distinguished novelist Shena Mackay), and dilate upon the primary subject matter of her painting — sex.