Exhibitions

Sometimes, contrary to a widespread suspicion, critics do get it right. On 17 August, 1798 an anonymous contributor to the Diario de Madrid, reviewing an exhibition at the Royal Spanish Academy, noted that Goya’s portrait of Don Andrés del Peral was so good — in its draughtsmanship, its freedom of brushwork, its light and shade — that all on its own it was enough to bring credit to the epoch and nation in which it was created. He (or she) was absolutely correct. The same could be said of many of the exhibits in Goya: The Portraits at the National Gallery. The people in these pictures rise up, as Vincent

‘Celtic’ is a word heavily charged with meanings. It refers, among other phenomena, to a football club, a group of languages, a temperament, a style of art and a fringe, once the stronghold of the Liberal Democrats. But who are — and were — the Celts? The curators of the new British Museum exhibition are not at all sure, and that’s one of the reasons why the result is so enthralling. There is a familiar answer to this question: the Celts were an ancient people who moved into Europe from the east in prehistoric times and occupied most areas north and east of the Alps, together with northern Italy and

Marshall McLuhan got it at least half right. The medium may not always be the entire message, but it certainly dictates the kind of message that can be transmitted. This is one lesson of Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns, an exhibition at the British Museum that is packed with subtle masterpieces, and as a bonus contains — for those who like such things — two of art’s great studies of dogs. I might as well start with those: one by Albrecht Dürer from around 1520, ‘Dog resting’, and the other by the later Dutch artist Hendrick Goltzius of his own pet, curled up and sleeping in

When I went to visit Edward Bawden he vigorously denied that there were any modern painters in Essex. That may not have been true then — this was in the 1980s — or even now. What is indisputable, however, is that there have been plenty of artists in the county. They are the subject of two small but delightfully jam-packed exhibitions at the Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden. Bawden (1903–1989) is at the heart of both of them, even if the second point he made to me — equally emphatically — was that he called himself a designer rather than an artist (‘out of self-defence, mainly’). That distinction, and the

This is not the biggest exhibition at Edinburgh and it will not be the best attended but it may be the most daring. While the main gallery at the Royal Scottish Academy, commandeered as usual for Festival season by the National Galleries of Scotland, hosts a glittering exhibition of David Bailey photographs, the lower galleries offer three small rooms of Jean-Etienne Liotard. Who? You may well ask, because for anyone not schooled at the Courtauld, Liotard is likely to be as obscure as Bailey is recognisable. Drawing the two together in the same building is less of a leap than it might appear, however, for Liotard was also an eminent

I learnt to splash about in watercolour at my grandmother’s knee. Or rather, sitting beside her crouched over a pad of thickly ‘toothed’ paper and a Winsor & Newton paintbox on a wind-swept East Anglian seashore. Now, looking back, I see that what she was doing belonged to a tradition. Her predecessors, idols and reference points are to be seen in an admirable small exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Watercolour — Elements of nature. This consists of works from the museum’s collection, but is much more full of delightful surprises — even for those who know the Fitzwilliam well — than that description suggests. The reason is that, while

Charles Dickens’s description of Cobham Park, Kent, in The Pickwick Papers makes it seem a perfect English landscape. Among its ‘long vistas of stately oaks and elms’, he wrote, ‘occasionally a startled hare’ ran with ‘the speed of the shadows thrown by the light clouds’. It was there on the morning of 29 August 1843 that a butcher from Rochester got a nasty surprise. He discovered the corpse of an apothecary named Robert Dadd; he had been battered and stabbed to death by his son Richard. There is no doubt that Richard Dadd was far from sane. On the other hand, his loss of mental balance — though very bad

Art is not jewellery. Its value does not reside in the price of the materials from which it is made. After all, the cost of the pigment, oil and cloth that made up a Rembrandt was negligible. It’s what he did with them that counts. On the other hand, spectacular works of art can be made from gold and gems, as is clear from some — if not all — of the items displayed in the new installation of the Waddesdon Bequest at the British Museum. ‘As soon as the swallows made their appearance,’ Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild wrote in his memoir Bric-à-Brac, ‘my father’s curiosities were packed and stored

Someone once asked Joseph Cornell who was his favourite abstract artist of his time. It was a perfectly reasonable question to put to a man who numbered Piet Mondrian, as well as other masters of modernism, among his acquaintance. But, characteristically, Cornell veered off at a tangent. ‘What’, he replied, ‘do you mean “my time”?’ In its way it’s a good response, as the exhibition at the Royal Academy, Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust, makes clear. The subtitle of the show refers to travel in mental space. In mundane reality, Cornell (1903– 72) seldom left New York City, and never ventured further afield than Maine. But in his imagination, he journeyed across

James Turrell gave me extremely precise instructions. After dinner, I was to walk out through the grounds at Houghton Hall to the skyspace he has built. Here I should observe the gradual darkening above as brightness fell from the Norfolk air. At 9.40 p.m., I was to join him and the Marquess of Cholmondeley to witness the illumination Turrell has devised for the west front of the house. So we stood in the chill air of an English summer evening and watched as a slowly changing sequence of pinks, mauves, blues and reds lit up the colonnades and Palladian windows designed in the 1720s by Colen Campbell and the domes

The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition has very little in common with the Venice Biennale. However they do share one characteristic. Each always contains so many diverse and potentially incompatible elements that orchestrating a smoothly blended result is dauntingly difficult. But, as with many almost impossible tasks, some manage it much better than others. Michael Craig-Martin, this year’s chief co-ordinator at the RA, has produced a distinctly better result than usual. The Summer Exhibition always tends to look — as David Hockney once put it — like a jumble sale. But the 2015 edition is a jumble sale with pizzazz and a chromatic zing. The transformation begins before you even get

At the start of Canto XXI of the ‘Inferno’, Dante and Virgil look down on the pit of Malebolge, the Eighth Circle of Hell, in which sinners guilty of simony, hypocrisy and graft are punished. The last of those spend eternity immersed in a river of bubbling pitch. This sinister black liquid, the poet noted, looks much like the tar that Venetians boil up in their arsenal to smear over the hulls of their ships. Those lines came to mind more than once as I walked around the 56th edition of the Venice Biennale, not least because a large section is installed in the ancient buildings of that very Arsenale.

The British painter Nina Hamnett recalled that Modigliani had a very large, very untidy studio. Dangling from the end of his bed was a web inhabited by an enormous spider. ‘He explained that he could not make the bed as he had grown very attached to the spider and was afraid of disturbing it.’ This anecdote — in its combination of Bohemian squalor, fin-de-siècle strangeness, whimsical humour and delicacy of feeling — gives a few clues to the art of the man who slept in that bed. More are provided by a nicely focused little exhibition at the Estorick Collection, Modigliani: A Unique Artistic Voice. It is made up of

One evening before the first world war, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, fired by drink, tried out such then-fashionable dances as the cakewalk and the tango, ‘his eyes burning — his hair wild’. What was funny about this spectacle, his companion Sophie Brzeska confided to her diary, was not so much the dances as the sight of the dancer himself, ‘the young bear like nothing on earth with his seven league boots jumping in the air like an extraordinary buffoon’. It is a description that evokes many works displayed in a delightful little exhibition, New Rhythms, at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. This marks the centenary of Gaudier-Brzeska’s death; he was killed in action on

Different concepts of luxury may be inferred from a comparison of the wedding feast of Charles Bovary and Emma Rouault with the habits of their contemporary the Duke of Wellington. At the Bovary wedding were served four sirloins, six chicken fricassées, stewed veal, three legs of mutton, four chitterlings (with sorrel), brandy, wine, foaming sweet cider, yellow custards, tarts and sweets with an architectural cake comprising angelica, oranges, nuts, jam and chocolate. The austere Duke’s ‘conception of duty’, David Piper wrote, ‘did not provoke popularity at all times’. His daily routine was tea with bread and butter in the morning, no lunch and an unvaryingly simple dinner of a joint

In 1978, shortly before she died, the artist Sonia Delaunay was asked in an interview whether she considered herself a feminist. ‘No! I despise the word!’ she replied. ‘I never thought of myself as a woman in any conscious way. I’m an artist.’ It is pretty obvious, though, that the Sonia Delaunay retrospective at Tate Modern (which has come from the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris) has been organised if not explicitly by feminists, then at least with feminism in mind. You can see the thinking behind it: let’s give the wives of the artists a break. And Mrs Delaunay, whose work has traditionally been discussed in