Laura Gascoigne | The Spectator columnists & writers

The careers of artists like Carolee Schneemann and Stephen Cripps are unthinkable today

During the 1964 debut of Carolee Schneemann’s ‘Meat Joy’ in Paris, a man in the audience tried to throttle the artist before being hauled off by three female spectators. Schneemann’s performance, an ‘exuberant sensory celebration of flesh’, involved semi-naked dancers tangling and grappling while bits of chicken, raw fish and hot dogs rained from above and buckets of paint sloshed underfoot. Since her expulsion from Bard College ten years earlier for the ‘moral turpitude’ of painting herself in the nude, Schneemann had made a name for getting naked while persisting in calling herself a painter – a claim that was just about tenable in the case of ‘Meat Joy’, less so in the case of ‘ICES STRIP/ISIS TRIP’ (1972), her one-woman performance on a London to Edinburgh festival train which started with a striptease in the dining car while reciting Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and ended with her roller-skating up and down the aisle.

Thrilling: Hieroglyphs – unlocking ancient Egypt, at the British Museum, reviewed

‘Poor old Mornington Crescent, I feel sorry for it with this highly made-up neighbour blocking the view it had enjoyed,’ commiserated Professor C.H. Reilly in the Architects’ Journal in 1928. He was talking about the new reinforced-concrete Carreras cigarette factory designed by architects Marcus Evelyn and Owen Hyman Collins that had just gone up across from the station. It wasn’t the concrete that bothered him so much as the make-up: the gaudily painted façade with papyrus-form columns copied from the ancient Egyptian tomb of Panehsy and the two huge black cats representing the goddess Bast – while advertising Black Cat cigarettes – flanking the entrance. How did this time-travelling lump of Egyptiana come to land in north London? It’s a long and very complicated story told in two fascinating exhibitions marking the anniversaries of the two great eureka moments in Egyptology – the decoding of hieroglyphs in 1822 and the rediscovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb a century later – both involving imperial conquest, bitter scholastic rivalries and appropriation on a humungous scale.

The genius of Cezanne

Pity the poor curators of major exhibitions struggling to find fresh takes on famous masters. The curators of Tate Modern’s new Cezanne blockbuster have begun by dropping the acute accent from his surname, apparently a Parisian affectation not in use on the artist’s home turf. Anticipating grumbles about another major exhibition devoted to a dead white male artist, they have emphasised Cezanne’s outsider status by painting him as a provincial from Provence. It was a role the artist liked to play in Paris, once famously excusing himself from shaking Manet’s hand on the grounds that he hadn’t washed in a week. With or without his accent, Cezanne remains French. He was in fact the only full- blooded Frenchman among the three great pioneers of post-impressionism, Van Gogh being Dutch and Gauguin boasting Peruvian descent.

Do we need another Lucian Freud exhibition?

Do we need another Lucian Freud exhibition? After years of exposure to his paintings of naked bodies posed like casualties of a car crash in a nudist camp, we might have reached the ‘move along, nothing to see here’ point. But it seems we can’t get enough of the monstre sacré. To mark the centenary of his birth in 1922, London is being treated to a Freud fest of no fewer than seven exhibitions, the most prestigious of which is at the National Gallery. Subtitled New Perspectives, the National’s show promises a change of viewpoint from the perspective now most commonly associated with Freud (that of looking down on figures sprawled or splayed across beds or sofas), a promise initially fulfilled in the opening room of rarely seen early works painted under the influence of Cedric Morris.

Fresh and dreamy: Edward Lear, at Ikon Gallery, reviewed

‘It seems to me that I have to choose between 2 extremes of affection for nature… English, or Southern… The latter – olive – vine – flowers… warmth & light, better health – greater novelty – & less expense in life. On the other side are, in England, cold, damp & dullness, – constant hurry & hustle – cessation from all varied topographical interest, extreme expenses…’ That choice was effectively made for Edward Lear in 1837 when he gave up the natural history studies by which he had made his name in his teens and headed south to Rome on doctors’ advice, aged 24. Prone to asthma and epileptic seizures, the myopic artist was now also suffering from eyestrain. ‘My eyes are so sadly worse,’ he wrote to a fellow ornithologist the year before, ‘that no bird under an Ostrich shall I soon be able to do.

There’s much more to Winslow Homer than his dramatic seascapes

Until the invention of photography war reportage depended on old-fashioned illustration, and even after that the illustrated press took a while to catch up. Photographic reproduction didn’t work on cheap newsprint, which demanded a crispness of definition that early photography couldn’t provide. So reports on the American Civil War in the new illustrated periodicals aimed at the middle classes continued to rely on wood engraving, and it was as a print designer that the 25-year-old Winslow Homer was sent by Harper’s Weekly to cover the fighting in 1861. Apprenticed to a commercial lithographer at the age of 19, Homer had no formal training as an artist but he had a nose for the decisive moment that added drama to a reporter’s copy.

A victory of the imaginatively crafted over the conceptual: In the Black Fantastic reviewed

‘These artists are offering other ways of seeing,’ says Ekow Eshun, curator of In the Black Fantastic, and from the moment you push open the Hayward’s heavy swing doors you see what he means. Outside, a world of grey utilitarian concrete; inside, a vibrant crew of invaders from planet Zog glittering like Technicolor Pearly Kings in bright carapaces of beads, sequins and buttons. The kind of thing a nimble-fingered alien might come up with if his spaceship crash-landed in a haberdashery department, Nick Cave’s ‘Soundsuits’ make Ziggy Stardust look Earthbound (see below). Brought up with seven brothers by a single mother in Missouri, Cave learned early how to pimp hand-me-downs and his suits are exquisitely tailored.

As cool and refreshing as a selection of sorbets: RA’s Milton Avery show reviewed

‘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 of colour…’ Ouch. ‘Light’ is a fair description of Avery’s work: light in tonality, in weight of paint and intellectual baggage.

A showstopper is at the heart of this winning show: Dulwich Gallery’s Reframed – The Woman in the Window reviewed

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 that launched a thousand paintings of w-in-ws after Rembrandt’s pupil Gerrit Dou took up the motif and Dou’s pupil Gabriel Metsu followed suit.

At her best when lightly ruffling the surfaces of things: Cornelia Parker, at Tate Britain, reviewed

Cornelia Parker wasn’t born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but when she was growing up her German godparents sent her a silver spoon or fork every birthday. She seems to have had a thing about silverware ever since. She used to sell it on Portobello Market, and it formed the basis of her first large installation. ‘Thirty Pieces of Silver’ (1988) could be viewed as an elegy to the fish knife and all those other superannuated aids to aspirational dining whose genteel functions are now all but forgotten – salvers, sauceboats, toast racks, sugar tongs and those scalloped silver shells holding coils of butter beaded with condensation from the fridge – if it wasn’t in practice a mass grave. On the same day in 1988, after years of gathering tarnish at the backs of cupboards, its constituent pieces of silver met a violent end under the drum of a ten-ton steamroller.

The women’s lips are pursed; the men’s are kissable: Glyn Philpot at Pallant House reviewed

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 year he was elected an RA. It was not his best work. He was less comfortable with male authority figures than with writers, actors and society hostesses, who queued up to be flattered by his brush.

Nobody paints the sea like Emil Nolde

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 of the subject. Landlubbers love a good disaster at sea: when Géricault’s ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ (1819) was shown in London in 1820, 40,000 rubberneckers came to gawp.

A brief introduction to Scottish art

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 of two new shows: Scottish Women Artists at the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, and Window into Scottish Art at the Lightbox, Woking, in collaboration with the Ingram Collection.

Artist, actor, social justice warrior, serial killer: the many faces of Walter Sickert

‘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 allegiance to Degas, whom he had first met two years earlier in Paris while delivering Whistler’s portrait of his mother to the Salon.

Evocative tribute to the orphaned caped crusader: Superheroes, Orphans & Origins at the Foundling Museum reviewed

Instead of wasting money, like other museums, on extravagant architectural statements, the Foundling Museum in Brunswick Square has sensibly chosen to welcome visitors with a written statement. In 2014 it commissioned the poet Lemn Sissay, who spent his teenage years in a children’s home, to create a memorial in its entrance hall to the many parentless heroes and heroines in fiction. ‘Heathcliff was a foundling… Harry Potter was fostered… Dorothy Gale was adopted… James Bond was fostered…’ The list goes on, running to more than 100 names. Sissay’s mural will trigger a lightbulb moment for any dimwit like me who has failed to notice this narrative trope – and there are further revelations in the show downstairs. Superheroes, Orphans & Origins is a fascinating flick through 125 years of comic strips whose heroes and heroines – role models to generations of children – are all orphaned, abandoned, adopted or fostered.

Exquisite and deranged: two glass exhibitions reviewed

A ‘Ghost Shop’ has appeared between Domino’s Pizza and Shoe Zone on Sunderland High Street. Look through the laminated window glass and you’ll see more glass: glass shop fittings, a glass cheese plant, a glass pedal bin spilling disposable glass cups, glass chocolate wrappers and glass betting slips littering the floor. Ryan Gander likes the fact that there’s no explanation of his see-through betting shop: ‘If you tell everyone it’s a contemporary art project, they’d run away.’ Gander is one of four artists commissioned by Sunderland’s National Glass Centre to make works inspired by the history of the north-east. Two artists, Katie Paterson and Monster Chetwynd, have chosen themes relating to St Bede, marking the thousandth anniversary of the relocation of his relics from Jarrow to Durham.

Raphael – saint or hustler?

For tourists to Rome, the must-see event of 1833 was the exhumation of Raphael from his tomb in the Pantheon. For years the city’s Accademia di San Luca had been claiming possession of the artist’s skull and running a profitable line in souvenirs. That September, the question would be settled. Was the ‘most eminent painter’, lauded in his friend Pietro Bembo’s fulsome epitaph as having ‘lived virtuously 37 virtuous years’, really buried there? And did his skeleton have a head? Hans Christian Andersen was one of 3,000 ticket holders for the six-day lying-in-state. The skeleton was there all right, complete with head, but its dignity, reported Andersen, was somewhat dented by the rattle of bones when it was returned to the tomb.

Fails to dispel the biggest myth of all: Whitechapel Gallery’s A Century of the Artist’s Studio reviewed

Picture the artist’s studio: if what comes to mind is the romantic image of a male painter at his easel in a grand interior with an admiring audience and a nude model at his elbow, you’re in the wrong century for the Whitechapel Gallery. Its new exhibition, A Century of the Artist’s Studio, runs from 1920 to 2020, and there’s precious little romance about it. To be honest, the studio was never that romantic; Gustave Courbet’s ‘The Artist’s Studio’ (1855), the main source of the stereotype, was itself a send-up. The Whitechapel’s show sets out to complete Courbet’s work, dismantling the myth cliché by cliché. ‘The artist hero… is both abject and absurd,’ Dawn Adès writes in the catalogue. ‘Is the painter a shaman, a sacrificial victim or the sexualised infant that we repress in ourselves?’ All options are on the studio table in this show.

Part-gothic horror, part-Acorn Antiques: Louise Bourgeois, at the Hayward Gallery, reviewed

Louise Bourgeois was 62 and recently widowed when she first used soft materials in her installation ‘The Destruction of the Father’ (1974). The father in question was not her American late husband Robert Goldwater, the father of her children, but her own French father Louis Bourgeois, long deceased. Set in a space evoking the interior of a digestive tract, the installation’s centrepiece was a table bearing the remains of an imagined feast at which Louise and her brother had eaten their dominating father after dismembering him and cutting off his penis. You have been warned. There is nothing soft about Bourgeois’s soft sculptures, though — on the evidence of the Hayward’s new exhibition of her late textile works —they did soften with age.

The fascination of house fronts: Where We Live at Millennium Gallery reviewed

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 invasion of privacy. A house portrait painted on spec invites speculation, encouraging nosiness about the occupants.

Ethereal and allusive, all nuance and no schmaltz: Helen Frankenthaler, at Dulwich Gallery, reviewed

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 the surface; when thinned with turps, the paint acquired the transparency of watercolour.

Is Gauguin redeemable? No. Would he have wanted to be redeemed? Absolutely not

‘This is not a book,’ is the first line of Paul Gauguin’s final memoir, Avant et Après, written on Hiva Oa in the Marquesas Islands in 1903 a couple of months before his death aged 54 from syphilitic heart disease. In his dedication to the critic André Fontainas he describes the manuscript as ‘born of solitude and savagery — idle tales of a naughty child who sometimes reflects and is always a lover of the beautiful’. Fontainas failed to find a publisher as Gauguin had hoped, and although a facsimile appeared in 1918 it wasn’t until 1923 that the artist’s eldest son Émile had the memoir published in an English translation. The manuscript, meanwhile, was thought to be lost until it was offered last year under the government’s Acceptance in Lieu scheme to the Courtauld Gallery, which has now put it on display in its refurbished Great Room opposite Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings ‘Nevermore’ and ‘Te Rerioa’ and alongside a sensitive and surprisingly accomplished marble bust of his Danish wife Mette from the early years of their marriage.

How crazy was Louis Wain?

Before Tom Kitten, before Felix the Cat, before Thomas ‘Tom’ Cat, Sylvester James Pussycat Sr, Top Cat and Fat Freddy’s Cat, there were the cats of Louis Wain. The Wain cat came in a variety of breeds and colours: black and white, tabby, marmalade, white and blue (sky blue rather than Persian). But it always had the same disconcerting look in its wide, glassy eyes with the dilated pupils. It looked bombed out of its tiny mind. The original Wain cat was a black-and-white kitten called Peter belonging to a young late-Victorian magazine illustrator and his sick wife. In 1884 the 24-year-old Louis Wain had married his sisters’ governess, Emily Richardson, only for his new wife to fall ill with breast cancer. To amuse the invalid her loving husband took to drawing sketches of Peter in comical poses, which she encouraged him to show to his editors.

The frisky side of a classical master: National Gallery’s Poussin and the Dance reviewed

In the winter of 1861, visitors to the Louvre might have seen a young artist painstakingly copying one of the museum’s 39 paintings by Poussin. The subject was ‘The Abduction of the Sabine Women’ and the artist was the 27-year-old Edgar Degas, then at work on his own classical battle of the sexes, ‘Young Spartans’. Although lumped with the impressionists, Degas was a classicist at heart. ‘The masters must be copied over and over again,’ he believed, ‘and it is only after proving yourself a good copyist that you should reasonably be permitted to draw a radish from nature.’ A dedicated copyist himself, Poussin would have approved. The paintings in Poussin and the Dance at the National Gallery copy from Titian, Annibale Carracci, Giambologna, Reni, Raphael, Mantegna — and especially from Roman sculpture, as illustrated by the two Roman vases and ‘The Borghese Dancers’ bas-relief included in the exhibition.

The genius of Frans Hals

Since art auctions were invented, they have served to hype artists’ prices. It can happen during an artist’s lifetime — Jeff Koons’s ‘Balloon Dog’ — or half a millennium after their death — Leonardo’s ‘Salvator Mundi’. And it can sometimes restore a lost reputation, as happened with Frans Hals. When the picture now famous as ‘The Laughing Cavalier’ came up for auction in Paris in 1865, Hals was all but forgotten. A successful portraitist in his lifetime, he never made much money — with a wife and at least ten children, he remained a renter throughout his career — and after his death his reputation, overshadowed by Rembrandt’s, was tarnished by claims that he was a piss artist. In the 19th century the modernity of his style began to pique the interest of connoisseurs, but it was the bidding battle for the mystery ‘Cavalier’ (the ‘Laughing’ was added later) between Baron James de Rothschild and the 4th Marquess of Hertford that sent his prices soaring.

The art of the pillbox

When Oscar Wilde famously claimed: ‘All art is quite useless’, he may not have had artistic subjects in mind. But it’s certainly true that since the Romantic era, artists have had a special affection for the superannuated. An image of an abandoned building with some sort of past, not necessarily glorious, appeals to our emotions, be it Rachel Whiteread’s ‘House’ or Constable’s ‘Hadleigh Castle’. Even ephemera pre-loved by strangers evoke nostalgia when incorporated in the shadow boxes of Joseph Cornell or the assemblages of Peter Blake. But what about things that are not just obsolete but have never had any use at all? That’s the curious question prompted by a new exhibition at Bodmin Keep, Cornwall’s Army Museum.

The magical art of boxer, labourer & sometime gravedigger Eric Tucker

Artists’ estates can be a curse on a family. The painter dies, leaving the house stuffed with unsold canvases. What to do? If he or she has a dealer, they will drip-feed work on to the market with varying degrees of success. If the artist is famous there’s no problem; any unsold work will be fought over. If middlingly successful, shifting it can be a slog. But if unsuccessful — better still, completely unknown — the equation changes. When the art market discovers a ‘secret artist’, their estate acquires the cachet of a hoard. Such a hoard came to light three years ago in the Warrington home of former boxer, unskilled labourer and sometime gravedigger Eric Tucker. On his death aged 86 in July 2018 Tucker’s family found his end-of-terrace council house crammed with 400 paintings, piled on beds, on top of wardrobes, in the loft, the shed, the airing cupboard, under the stairs.

Covid has been great for drawing

Amid the greatly exaggerated reports of the death of painting issued and reissued over the course of the past century, nobody thought to check on the health of drawing, perhaps because what artists did in the privacy of their own studios was considered to be no one else’s business. Drawing wasn’t a saleable commodity. Yes, Hockney’s portrait drawings attracted admiration, but most artists kept their scribbles to themselves. Then about 20 years ago, just after Saatchi’s 1997 Sensation exhibition seemed to have consigned all traditional art forms to the bin of history, it was noticed that drawing was alive and, if not kicking, showing unmistakable signs of continued health. It may have been a reaction to Sensation — been there, done that, got the YBA T-shirt — but around the Millennium the world woke up to drawing.

How has this complete original been sidelined?

A party of disorderly couples has gatecrashed the Picture Gallery at Bath’s Holburne Museum, climbing on to the antique furniture, hanging off the track lighting and sprawling on the floor, putting the noses of the resident Gainsboroughs, Constables and Zoffanys out of joint. Lawks-a-mercy! What has come over the Holburne? A passel of Mrs & Mrs Popes, that’s what: 36 years’ worth, to be precise. Nicholas Pope carved his first married couple from sliver-thin Forest of Dean stone in 1978 in homage to Van Eyck’s ‘Arnolfini Portrait’. At the time, this young minimalist contemporary of Antony Gormley, Richard Deacon and Tony Cragg was on the up and up: in 1980, aged 31, he would represent Britain at the Venice Biennale.

Today

Thursday

Wednesday

Wednesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday