Painting

Philip Guston is hard to dislike. The most damning critique levied against the canonical mid-century American painter is that he is too uncontroversial, his appeal too broad, his approach altogether too winsome. None of that stopped the team behind Philip Guston Now – a travelling mega-survey of his work, which will reach Tate Modern in 2023 – from announcing otherwise. In 2020, the year the show was due to open, the curators announced that in light of the ‘racial justice movement’, the artist’s works might now legitimately be read as racist, and the show could not go forward as planned. This was and is quite obviously nonsense. The works in

‘I like the way he puts on paint,’ Milton Avery said about Matisse in 1953, but that was as much as he was prepared to say. Contemporary critics tried to ‘pin Matisse’ on him as if art criticism were a branch of police work. He resisted, and remains a slippery customer. Post-impressionist or abstract expressionist? Colour field painter with added figures? To those who view art history as the march of progress towards modernism, he looks like a backslider. Clement Greenberg thought as much, dismissing him in 1943 as ‘a “light” modern who can produce offspring of Marie Laurencin and Matisse that are empty and sweet with nice flat areas

Themed exhibitions pegged to particular pictures in museum collections tend to be more interesting to the museum’s curators than to the general public. But with Reframed: The Woman in the Window Dulwich Picture Gallery is on to a winner, as not only is the particular picture a showstopper, but the theme opens up a whole can of feminist worms. Whether it’s her pensive pose, her idle fiddling with her necklace or the shy look in her shadowed eyes, Rembrandt’s ‘Girl at a Window’ (1645) is impossible to walk past. Scholars continue to bicker about her status. Serving wench? Kitchen maid? Prostitute? Rembrandt’s lover? Whoever she was, hers was the face

Of all the photos of artists in the studio, the one of Glyn Philpot being served a martini by his white-jacketed Jamaican model Henry Thomas must be the strangest. Taken to publicise his 1934 exhibition, it would be unthinkable now but in the circles Philpot moved in at the time it might, I suppose, have been viewed as cool. For 20 years Philpot had been London’s leading portraitist, a position he inherited from Sargent. His sitters included admirals – four during the first world war – and King Fuad of Egypt, who commissioned a ‘dignified, decent, usual and rather sumptuous’ portrait from the 38-year-old artist for £3,000 in 1923, the

In April, ten years after opening its gallery on the beach in Hastings, the Jerwood Foundation gifted the building to the local borough council. Thrown in at the deep end without a permanent collection, Hastings Contemporary, as it is now known, has to sink or swim on the strength of its exhibition programme. How to please local audiences while attracting outsiders? For a seaside gallery, nautical themes are an obvious answer: this summer’s offering is Seafaring, a dip into two centuries of maritime art from Théodore Géricault to Cecily Brown. What’s the worst that can happen? Shipwreck. The show opens with three recent canvases by Brown inspired by romantic paintings

When Nikolaus Pevsner dedicated his 1955 Reith Lectures to ‘The Englishness of English Art’, he left out the Scots. The English art establishment has never bothered with what was going on north of the border, which explains, though doesn’t excuse, the underrepresentation of Scottish art in the Tate’s so-called national collection. This leaves a gap in the story of British art that the Fleming Collection has set out to fill. Since its reinvention as a ‘museum without walls’ by director James Knox – a former publisher of this magazine – the best collection of Scottish art outside a public gallery has gone on the road. Last month saw the opening

Describing the Venice Biennale, like pinning down the city itself, is a practical impossibility. There is just too much of it, tucked away, scattered throughout the maze of alleyways and canals. And the art is no longer confined to the Biennale’s national pavilions in the gardens. It has spread, via dozens of tagalong shows cashing in on the presence of the global art world, to a motley array of disused palaces, warehouses, churches, at least one shop and a hidden garden loggia. A good way to sample it is just to follow your fancy: step through an ancient doorway and find out what is on the other side. That’s how

‘It’s too dark and life is too short,’ was Walter Sickert’s explanation of his decision to leave London in 1898. Separated from his first wife Ellen Cobden and in financial trouble, he did a flit across the Channel to Dieppe. A magnet for artists in the summer season, the town had long been a popular subject for tourist views. ‘I see my line…’ he wrote soon after his arrival. ‘Picturesque work. This place Dieppe, is my only up to now, goldmine.’ The place had already had a transformative effect on his painting. It was while spending the summer there with his mentor Whistler in 1885 that he had shifted artistic

On 25 October 1960, a Boeing pilot aiming for Heathrow accidentally landed at an RAF base, only realising his error when the runway turned out to be alarmingly short. Disaster was averted, but the near-miss caused some embarrassment, and the minister of aviation had to answer questions in the House. What had confused the pilot, it emerged, was the advice from air traffic control to start his descent ‘in line with the gasholder’. He had picked the wrong one. Ever since, the gasholders near Heathrow and RAF Northolt have had painted on them, in 50ft-high letters, ‘LH’ and ‘NO’. There is a surprising amount of strange lore about these industrial

Notoriously, the past is another country: what’s more, it’s a terrain for which the guidebooks need constantly to be rewritten. That’s one attraction of the new exhibition Postwar Modern at the Barbican. It’s a survey of what might seem all-too-familiar territory: British art in the two decades that followed VE day. Yet it succeeds in revealing numerous half-forgotten or undervalued movements and people, the good, the bad and – most intriguingly – candidates for reassessment. The decades that followed the second world war were marked by dreary austerity, perhaps explaining the tendency for the art to be coloured oatmeal, beige, grey and brown. But this was also a time of

‘Camp,’ wrote Susan Sontag, ‘is the paintings of Carlo Crivelli, with their real jewels and trompe-l’oeil insects and cracks in the masonry.’ She didn’t even mention the renaissance painter’s curious cucumber fetish. Nor the unwittingly comedic homoeroticism of his portrait of Saint Roch, one stocking rolled down coquettishly to reveal a decorous inner-thigh wound. Nor the extraordinarily ugly baby Jesus clutching an apple as big as his head while his mother, understandably, averts her eyes. ‘Camp is playful, anti-serious,’ argued Sontag. Sontag wasn’t alone in not taking Crivelli (c.1430–95) seriously. Giorgio Vasari, who scorned the illusionism that some have taken to be Crivelli’s USP, erased him from his art history.

In September 1889, Vincent van Gogh sent his brother Theo a new self-portrait from the mental hospital at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. ‘You must look at it for some time,’ he instructed, then ‘you’ll see, I hope, that my physiognomy has grown much calmer, although the gaze may be vaguer than before, so it appears to me.’ Vincent was severely ill and was in the hospital to recover from his affliction, the nature of which remains controversial. Yet he carried on creating marvellous pictures, including several of himself. One of the questions raised by Van Gogh. Self-Portraits, the wonderful exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, is simple but fundamental: why? We take it as

Paintings of houses go back a long way in British art: the earliest landscape in Tate Britain is a late 17th-century view of an estate in Belsize Park by the inventor of the country-house portrait, Jan Siberechts. The genre quickly became déclassé. By the 18th century Thomas Gainsborough was painting peasant cottages; by the 20th, Algernon Newton had turned his attention to middle-class villas on London’s canals. Not made for the owners of the houses they depicted, these paintings were destined to decorate the walls of strangers: the householders might not even know the pictures had been ‘taken’. A commissioned house portrait has legitimacy; a non-commissioned one feels like an

The superb new exhibition at the Royal Academy, Francis Bacon: Man and Beast, is not a retrospective. Nonetheless it is one of the most revealing presentations of this great painter’s work I have ever seen. It follows one of the most important of the chains of thought and feeling that ran through his art — animality: the beastliness in humanity, and the humanity of beasts. He was a great master of the feral. ‘Man with Dog’ (1953) depicts a creature with which it would be hazardous to tangle: a blurred, slathering smear with just a hint of Cerberus, the ancient guardian of Hades. Just below its paws is the gutter,

Where do you see paintings by Ruskin Spear (1911–90)? In the salerooms mostly, because his work in public collections is rarely on display. Until the National Portrait Gallery closed for redevelopment it was, however, possible to study Spear’s splendid portrait of ‘Citizen James’ (Sid James) peering from a black and white TV screen, and his oil sketch of Harold Wilson wreathed in pipe smoke, the epitome of political cunning. Both were strikingly more convincing than their companion array of anodyne commissioned images. Like his beloved Sickert, Spear painted commissioned portraits but also took to making enigmatic ‘unofficial’ portraits based on press photographs — or, in the case of Sid James,

In 1950 the 21-year-old painter Helen Frankenthaler, fresh out of college, went to an exhibition at New York’s Betty Parson’s Gallery that changed her whole perspective on art. ‘It was as if I suddenly went to a foreign country,’ she later recalled. ‘I wanted to live in this land; I had to live there, and master the language.’ The language was in fact American and the discoverer of the new land was Jackson Pollock. After seeing his drip paintings Frankenthaler ditched her easel and, too impatient to bother with primer, applied oil paint straight on to canvas on the floor. The oil sank into the canvas, isolating the pigment on

On 25 October 1510 Isabella d’Este, the Marchioness of Mantua, wrote a letter to her agent in Venice inquiring after a certain highly collectable item. ‘We believe that in the effects and the estate of Zorzo da Castelfranco, the painter, there exists a painting of a night scene, very beautiful and unusual.’ She thus set off one of the great whodunnits of art history: a mystery hidden inside an enigma that caused a furious 20th-century quarrel between one of the greatest connoisseurs of Renaissance art and the most powerful dealer of the age — and which has never been definitively solved. It concerns a beautiful picture, now in the National