Robin Simon

It was summer 1874 at Claude Monet’s house in Argenteuil on the Seine just outside Paris. Édouard Manet arrived from his house at Gennevilliers, on the opposite bank, and began painting Monet’s wife and infant son in the garden. Auguste Renoir turned up and started to paint the same scene alongside Manet. The little masterpiece he created is in the forthcoming exhibition Renoir and Love at the National Gallery. In 1924, Monet recalled that day half a century earlier: Manet, seduced by the colour and the light, decided to paint a picture en plein air of people under the trees… Renoir arrived… He asked me for my palette, a brush and a canvas, and there he was, painting away beside Manet.

A Max Beerbohm cartoon famously reduced Arthur Wing Pinero (author of that interesting play, The Second Mrs Tanqueray) to a single eyebrow and a fur coat. Frida Kahlo’s fame rests upon little more: not so much anything she painted but her eyebrows – or should that be eyebrow? – and her moustache. If you get the impression that her output contains an awful lot of images of her face, you would be right. She painted 55 self-portraits – more than a third of her output. Hers is a strange cult, but a cult it is, and Making of an Icon is what the Tate exhibition subtitle says, not ‘Making of an Artist’. The show is drawing the pilgrims in record numbers.

A retired priest in North Wales told me that after the war he had been asked by Billy Butlin to buy 19th-century paintings for the holiday-camp chapels, because they were going cheap. One he bought, for 49 guineas in 1947, was William Dyce’s 1835 ‘Lamentation of the Dead Christ’. In 1983, after the Butlin’s chapels had closed, it made a handy £125,000 at auction, when it was bought by Aberdeen Art Gallery. As late as 1962, Lord Leighton’s great ‘Flaming June’ (1895) was sold for £50. Today? Millions. Talk about ‘the bubble reputation’. The pattern of artistic fame followed by subsequent obscurity has been repeated through the centuries.

The first thing you see on entering this major new Viennese exhibition is not one of Canaletto and his nephew Bernardo Bellotto’s majestic paintings of London, Venice or Vienna, but a camera obscura. The magical art of both artists depended upon this simple but effective device, which exploits pin-hole projection – an optical phenomenon that had been known since antiquity.  The decision to open the show at the Kunsthistorisches Museum with a deceptively boring little wooden box amounts to a curatorial throwing down of the gauntlet. Because – although I find it hard to fathom – there are still art historians and critics out there who refuse to countenance the fact that great artists used optical aids.

‘Cultural cringe’, that lovely Aussie coinage, perfectly describes the Roman attitude towards Greece. The curators don’t say so, but it is the theme of this inspired exhibition. By the time the Romans finally took control of mainland Greece in 146 BC with the Battle of Corinth, they had long admired everything Greek. That date marks roughly the middle of the Hellenistic period, during which Greek culture and language dominated the Mediterranean and the Middle East. In comparison with Greeks, Romans were oafs – and knew it. In comparison with Greeks, Romans were oafs – and knew it After the battle, Corinth was flattened – quite an oafish thing to do – and emptied of all its works of art, which were sent to Rome.

The adherents of the American alt-right are not known for their delicate aesthetic sensibilities, but there is an exception. They love neoclassical architecture and are calling for it to be deployed in the 250th celebrations this year of what they still call ‘the country of liberty’. Judging from the desecration of the Oval Office and its surroundings, and the plans for the world’s most expensive dance hall, what they have in mind is a style derived not from ancient Greece and Rome but 1950s Technicolor movies. Donald Trump’s White House interior reminds me of Hogarth’s crisp verdict on French 18th-century rococo interiors: ‘All gilt and beshit.’ Expect more of the same.

Flanders and Swann; Tom and Jerry. Some things come in pairs. Like Turner and Constable, even though our two most famous painters were more like chalk and cheese than cheese and pickle. They were close contemporaries: Turner was born in 1775, Constable a year later. Both painted landscapes. But that’s almost all they had in common. In every other way that matters, personal and artistic, they could hardly have been more different. Turner was a prodigy, a student at the Royal Academy Schools from the age of 14 and an associate (ARA) at 24. That same year, Constable had only just enrolled in the Schools, and was not elected ARA until he was 33. Constable did not become a full RA until the age of 52, while Turner had been one since he was 27.

I prepared for this exhibition in Düsseldorf by taking the short train journey down the Rhine to Cologne, which would hate to be thought of as a twin city. Its gigantic cathedral is as I first saw it some 40 years ago, still black with soot (but where would you start to clean it?), and the streets still remind me of Swansea, but without the sense of space. The same low-rise blocks of anonymous postwar buildings are on every side, with the same seemingly temporary shops and takeaways, only with Würstel as well as burgers. Where Swansea has the fine Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Cologne has the Wallraf-Richartz, now in a handsome new building adorned in the old-fashioned manner with the carved names of artists whose works are held within.

On The Courtauld’s 75th anniversary, Robin Simon looks back at its colourful and distinguished history The Tate Gallery ...sorry, I’ll start again. ‘Tate’ spent £100,000 a few years back just to lose its ‘the’. Staff are strictly instructed by the gallery’s Oberkommando to refer to it according to the brand name, as in ‘I’m at Tate’. It sounds as if they come from Mars — or Yorkshire. It doesn’t work, and I enjoy the announcement on the Victoria Line at Pimlico which gets it all wrong: ‘Alight here for the Tate Britain.’ The Courtauld Institute of Art turns 75 on 6 October this year and has also undergone a rather expensive ‘brand refreshment’.