Humanity, clarity and warmth: Alice Neel, at the Barbican Art Gallery, reviewed

If you want to be taken seriously as a contemporary painter, paint big. ‘Blotter’, the picture that won the 34-year-old Peter Doig the John Moores Painting Prize in 1993, was over 8ft x 7ft. The pictures in his current show at the Courtauld are so big that only 12 of them fit in the gallery space.

‘Blotter’ was a dreamlike image based on a photo of the artist’s brother standing on a frozen lake in Canada, where Doig spent most of his childhood. Its title referred partly to his technique of letting the paint soak into unprimed canvas, partly to the way a single figure is absorbed into a landscape. Close in mood to Friedrich and in treatment to Munch, it marked out the Edinburgh-born artist as a contemporary master of atmospheric painterly effects.

The works in this new show were painted before and after Doig’s recent move back to London from Trinidad, where he spent his early childhood and has been based for the past 20 years. Anyone anticipating ‘Blotter’-like immersion will be disappointed. Only in ‘Alpinist’ (2019-22) – a postmodern spin on the sublime with its lone skier in a Picasso harlequin suit – does he pull out all the old painterly stops in evoking the snowy slopes patterned with pines and the marbled, churning glacier at the skier’s feet. Elsewhere he scrimps on atmospheric effects as if resisting the temptation to be decorative, allowing the merest shimmer of phosphorescence in ‘Night Bathers’ (2011-19). His figures have expanded to compensate. His monumental ‘Bather’ (2019-23) looms over us, a homage to Cézanne’s homonymous painting in which the French master’s stocky figure has mysteriously body-swapped with a hunky Robert Mitchum from a vintage photograph. The painting left me cold, but the photo is a scorcher.