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.
When Wood showed the book to the art conservator and curator Andrew Stewart, Stewart went straight back to the shop for the remaining six books, which he learned were part of a lot cleared from a house in north Leeds recently vacated by an artist called Joash Woodrow.
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