Laura Gascoigne

It’s five o’clock on a November evening, and I’m leaning over a balcony watching a pipe band parading in the concourse below. But it’s not the chill of a Scottish autumn I’m feeling, rather the mildness of autumn in Japan — and the pipers are not Scots, but Japanese members of the Tokyo Piping Society welcoming a touring exhibition of French and Scottish 19th-century paintings from the National Galleries of Scotland to the Bunkamura Museum in downtown Shibuya. If you think London is multicultural, you should try Tokyo — the main difference being that, whereas we British rely on others for our multi-culture, the Japanese are happy to do it for themselves.

Laura Gascoigne on the Pompidou Centre’s massive survey of Dada Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism: it’s funny how many names of modern art movements originated as insults on the lips of critics. Not Dada, though. The founders of art’s first anartism were ahead of the game, pre-emptively christening their movement with a silly name designed to put any critic off his stroke. The many derivations since attributed to the word ‘dada’ are missing the point, which is that, as founder Dadaist Tristan Tzara plainly stated, ‘Dada does not mean anything.

Also at Ben Uri Gallery, 108a Boundary Road, London NW8, until 19 November Four years ago, the painter Christopher P. Wood was browsing in a second-hand bookshop in Harrogate when he came across something very unusual. Opening one of a series of Victorian Magazines of Art, he discovered that the inside was full of drawings, scrawled over both the text and illustrations. They were obviously not the doodles of a child, but the work of a trained artist — albeit one who had absorbed Picasso’s lesson of relearning how to draw like his younger self. The handwriting was witty and literate, revealing a thorough knowledge of modern art.

The human eye is an amazing mechanism, but its vision is limited. We can’t see behind us, we can’t see much to the side, and in front — unless we’re desert tribesmen or Eskimos — our view is almost always obstructed by something. So some of what we see is actually ‘seen’, the rest is extrapolated from experience. Plus, our view from any one point — between those rocks, beyond that gateway, through those trees — exists only in that one spot at that one time. Move forward, back, to the side and it changes; wait for the light to alter and it’s further transformed.

If you took a national poll on our greatest watercolourist, Turner would win hands down, Girtin would come second and Cotman might get honourable mention behind TV artists Alwyn Crawshaw and Charles Evans. Cotman’s name means nothing to the general public, and carried so little clout in his own day that his death in 1842 didn’t even rate an obituary in his native Norwich. Yet in Landscape 200, Norwich Castle Museum’s triple bill of watercolour shows celebrating the bicentenary of the Norwich Society of Artists, it is Cotman who comes out on top. John Sell Cotman was born in Norwich in 1782, the son of a barber — the one thing he shares in common with Turner.

There are 13 Canalettos and 19 Guardis in our National Gallery; there are no paintings by either artist in the Rijksmuseum. The Dutch, having been painting landscape views for years, had enough of their own by the 18th century not to bother with Venice: canals were not exactly a novelty to them. So while the English went overboard for Venetian vedute, the Dutch politely ignored them. They can do so no longer, since a Venetian exhibition has opened on their doorstep. Venezia! Art from the 18th Century is the third exhibition at Hermitage Amsterdam, the State Hermitage Museum’s latest European outpost in a converted 17th-century old folks’ home on the Amstel.

In the official account of British 20th-century art, the big names belong to the international players whose universal vision won them a place in the annals of world art. This is understandable. What is harder to explain is the official version’s almost total neglect of those native artists who kept alive, through this century of global change, the peculiarly English tradition founded by Hogarth. Carel Weight, Ruskin Spear, Richard Eurich — names virtually unknown to the general public — all played a part in this unwritten history, as did the David Hockney of A Rake’s Progress before defecting to America. Another key figure was James Fitton (1899–1982), whose reputation is up for reassessment in a show of paintings at Crane Kalman.

If you were looking for someone to blame for the explosion of multi-disciplinarity in contemporary art, L.

As a teenager in Cambridge, I used to have tea with a blind philosopher. One afternoon, spotting the sugar lurking behind the milk, I told it — as one does — to come out from there. My friend was aghast. ‘Are you talking to the crockery?’ he asked. Ontologically speaking, of course, I was on shaky ground, but there was an empirical logic to my remark which was lost on him. A blind man can apprehend objects in space, but not the spatial relationships between them. I’d forgotten this incident until the Estorick Collection’s new exhibition Still Life in 20th Century Italy brought it back, setting me thinking about the nature of ‘natura morta’.