The new vision

Framing Modernism: Architecture and Photography in Italy 1926-65
Estorick Collection, until 21 June

Adrian Berg: Panoramic Watercolours
Friends Room, Royal Academy, until 11 June

Adrian Berg (born 1929) is one of those artists who has consistently produced good work over a long career, but has never really been given the acclaim he deserves. He’s had a couple of museum shows (notably at the Serpentine in 1986 and the Barbican in 1993), but the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition has been his main shop window in recent years. The Academy now honours his 80th birthday with a show of his panoramic watercolours in the Friends Room (open to the public daily 4–6 p.m., Fridays till 10 p.m.), and very splendid they look too. They serve to remind us that a proper survey of Berg’s work as a painter in oils is long overdue.

Primarily a landscape painter, Berg is a powerful and inventive colourist, a superb pattern-maker and a tireless researcher into ‘natural’ appearances. He is particularly interested in man’s relationship with wildness, and has spent much time investigating the shapes imposed upon nature in parks and gardens. The watercolour show at the RA begins with a wall of long, impressive paintings, Lake District panoramas exploring the endless varieties of green and the less expected pinks in that lush landscape. A group of Kew Gardens drawings shows Berg on especially fine and detailed form, another of the Alhambra in Granada providing a more exotic counterpoint. They whet the appetite for a full retrospective.

Last chance to see a delightful exhibition at the Ikon in Birmingham (until 25 May), of vignettes by Thomas Bewick. These small wood engravings or ‘tale-pieces’ as he himself called them, were made for books and intended to illustrate ‘some truth or point some moral’. But they are far from platitudinous or hectoring, offering a piquant humour and directness of observation that is as fresh today as it ever was. If, like me, you are unable to get to see the actual exhibition, there is a sumptuous hard-back book accompanying it (£24.95) which reproduces more than 100 examples. It contains three essays, including one by Jenny Uglow, whose brilliant biography of Bewick appeared in 2006 and held me totally enthralled. Thomas Bewick (1753–1828) was a great naturalist but he was also exceptionally observant of his fellow Northumbrians, and couldn’t resist showing their lower natures. This is what Ruskin, otherwise a fervent admirer of Bewick, castigated as the ‘love of ugliness that is in the English soul’. But in giving expression to it, Bewick made the ornamental space-filler of the vignette into a Tyneside soap opera. Remarkable.