The artistic response to the pandemic has so far been mind-numbingly banal

Travelling around Latin America three years ago, Stephen Chambers was attracted by pharmacy signs with pictograms advertising treatments to illiterate customers, and on his return he painted a series of serio-comic pictures of fatal diseases from the plague to bird flu. Could he get a gallery to show them? Could he hell. They all complained that they weren’t ‘cheery’ enough.

Art is particular: loves death, hates sickness. Look at the first world war: an inspiration to cubism, futurism, vorticism, expressionism and dada. And the Spanish flu? Forgotten. In the face of death from disease, the avant-garde that sharpened its cutting-edge on conflict retreated.

Artists who were personally affected painted it. It inspired two miserabilist self-portraits by Edvard Munch, who survived, and a tender drawing by Egon Schiele of his dying wife, made days before he succumbed himself. It left no mark on the art of Paul Klee, who shook it off; he was more affected by the clean-lined Bauhaus aesthetic, itself a response to public health concerns about overstuffed, germ-ridden Victorian furniture.