What can you expect to see? A rather uneasy mixture of Old Guard RAs interspersed with a selection of current stylistic orthodoxies. The range of contemporary artistic expression nationwide is actually far greater than suggested, but this exhibition does not reflect it, being too readily the dupe of fashion and political correctness in its steadfast determination not to look antiquated and academic. Of course, it ends up being the usual hotchpotch and gallimaufry, though this year perhaps more elegantly installed and hung than in the past. The intrepid visitor enters the exhibition via the Central Hall to be confronted by a vast Anthony Caro sculpture in steel called ‘Shadows’, and a ‘found’ carving by Cornelia Parker, of wood used by elephants to sharpen their tusks. Moving through into the main space, Gallery III, a tribute to Mary Fedden, who died last summer, features a bold painting from 1977, called ‘Blue Plough and Horse’. Next to it hangs a gentle but subtly expressive group of paintings by nonagenarians Diana Armfield and Bernard Dunstan. After that the eye swivels wildly (why does one think of politicians?) and the game is on: how much competing art can the brain seriously assess before admitting defeat?

The Summer Exhibition Experience can be pleasurable, but it has to be taken briskly. If you start to linger, you may as well resign yourself to coming back another day. My advice is to scan and pounce: homing in on the image that stands out or attracts you in a wall of very mixed talents. Let me draw your attention to a few good things in Gallery III: Leonard McComb’s small intense ‘Rocks by the Sea, Cornwall’, intriguingly paired with a Terry Setch landscape. An oil called ‘From the Arabian Nights’ by Tom Phillips, looking rather like a mosaic, and Humphrey Ocean’s characteristically bare canvas punctuated by street lamps. Below it hangs a trio of Sickertian naughties by Jock McFadyen, whose impressive big painting ‘Tate Moss’ hangs on the gallery’s end wall. Here, too, are fine things by Gillian Ayres, Anthony Eyton and Frank Bowling. There’s also a group of recent works (the best are in oil on paper) by another nonagenarian, Alan Davie, and a lovely small Mick Moon.

One of the finest works in this gallery is Per Kirkeby’s gloriously vibrant snaky landscape ‘Laokoon’, with a big watercolour bridge by Michael Sandle nearby. On the opposite side of the room hung high are three large ink drawings by the newly elected RA Emma Stibbon, along with a very blue interior by Anthony Whishaw and a magnificent Barbara Rae landscape of Downpatrick. Next one encounters the print rooms, Galleries I and II this year, and the heart sinks at the crowded walls. Nevertheless there are stalwarts: Joe Tilson and Jim Dine, Quentin Blake and Eileen Cooper, Tim Lewis’s kinetic sculpture of a mule drawing a self-portrait (emblematic of the whole enterprise?), and a welcome note of anarchic humour from Glen Baxter with ‘Trouble in the Design Museum’, featuring beavers gnawing a Rietveld chair. In Gallery I, Stephen Chambers shines out amid strangely archaic echoes of William Nicholson alphabets and McKnight Kauffer Vorticism. I liked the woodcuts by Hilary Daltry and Michael Craig-Martin’s supremely elegant etchings.

The spare hang of the Weston Rooms is encouraging, but the work is almost uniformly dire. I make exceptions of Clyde Hopkins and Belinda Cadbury, while Ron Arad’s car is quite amusing, as is Richard Long’s dandyish spiral of thumbprints on a broken board. Moving swiftly on to Gallery IV, notice the beautiful little canvas by Albert Irvin, yet another artist still working in his 90s. The other painting of note in this room (let’s draw a veil over the melancholic Kiefer) is Maggi Hambling’s ‘War Zone’, featuring a terrorist like a stylite saint atop a pillar in a desert of destruction. (I look forward to more of her war paintings at this year’s Snap at Aldeburgh Festival, until 30 June.) Gallery V holds two grand Nigel Hall drawings, a couple of Bryan Kneale sculptures in polished stainless steel, Ken Draper’s evocative pastels and a split and bound large plaster piece (for bronze) by Ann Christopher. Even the Architecture Room looks minimal this year with a real sense of space among the models and sculptures. I particularly liked Phillip King’s ‘Memory Garden from 1963’ in which he revisits his most famous early sculptures in miniature.

Gallery VII looks brighter than usual, illuminated by a large and inventive Philippa Stjernsward painting and mad new tower in vivid fibreglass by Ivor Abrahams — one of his best recent sculptures. Gallery VIII contains some more distinguished visitors: Chuck Close, Alex Katz and Rodney Graham, a big Frank Auerbach drawing and Allen Jones’s portrait of Kate Moss in body armour, featuring a return to his Sixties motif of the shelf — no doubt to keep her myriad admirers at bay. Aside from a couple of fine Vanessa Gardiner structural landscape paintings, Room IX contains too many instantly forgettable photographs, with the exception of Jean Macalpine’s inkjet inventions, and the intriguing bonus of a couple of Jane Dixon drawings.

The Lecture Room offers the most traditional hang of the whole show, arranged around a lovely centrepiece of floored aerodynamic shapes by Zaha Hadid. Here it’s time for the binoculars to decide if any of the skied paintings are good. Among the highlights are pictures by Mick Rooney, Judith Green, Danny Markey, Bridget Keen, Louise Balaam, Eileen Hogan, Shanti Panchal, Sarah Armstrong-Jones and Michael Kirkbride. I liked Anthony Green’s triple-layered cake-stand approach to ‘A Country Wedding’, and Delia Tournay-Godfrey’s small oil of Aldeburgh was refreshingly empty. Gallery X is devoted to six tapestries by Grayson Perry of little real interest, but just the sort of thing for a channel-surfing culture not much given to thought. And that’s another Summer Exhibition over…

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At one point there was talk of a Tate retrospective of Kossoff’s drawings to complement the museum’s paintings show in 1996. That has yet to happen, but into the breach has stepped Kossoff’s dealer, Annely Juda, and organised a superb exhibition of 90 drawings and 10 paintings on the theme of London. The earliest work comes from 1952, the most recent from 2012, and the selection will tour first to Paris in September, then to New York in November and on to Los Angeles in the new year. It offers a substantial survey of Kossoff’s urban subjects, many of which have never been exhibited before.

Kossoff does not overtly celebrate nor castigate, he merely states and restates, with exceptional sympathy and engagement. His pictures are about the relative positions of things — an urgent attempt to fix the look of reality before it changes. The awkwardness is essential to the interpretation, which challenges the expected stasis and equilibrium of appearances. As Christopher Neve has written, ‘To see the country transfigured by the individual psyche is a crucial function of the landscape painter. It defines what he does.’ Kossoff paints town rather than country, but the proposition still holds. His drawings are his response to a particular moment seized from the flux, his paintings comprehend a series of moments, brought together and reconciled in works of complex emotionality.

Take the lift to the fourth floor of Annely Juda’s building and contemplate Kossoff’s work in the beautiful top-lit gallery. Whoever accuses him of being a dark and angst-ridden painter should look again here and rethink their opinion. In such radiant surroundings his charcoal drawings become architectural traceries or nets of light, and a vigorous pastel of the fruit and flower stall on the Embankment is revealed as surprisingly colourful. Even a dark painting, such as the heavily seamed ‘View of Hackney with Dalston Lane, Dark Day’ (1974), employs a series of green detonations like a line of hands curving across the surface, opening up the space and bringing light to the crepuscular afternoon.

There is something oceanic in the drawings, with the buildings like breakwaters against the surge of urban humanity. Kossoff is adept at suggesting the dynamics of the street, the movement of the crowd (one thinks of Lowry here), the edged-in buildings cutting the space and forcing the pace of his pictorial rhythms. The oatmeal browns of ‘Inside Kilburn Underground’ (1983) are varied by blue moving to green and grey, while opposite is one of Kossoff’s superb light-generating paintings of Christ Church Spitalfields, arching monolithic out of the ground like a missile. In the back gallery is a new series of drawings in pastel and charcoal of Arnold Circus in the East End. Here we see the mystery and energy of a crossroads that is also a perfect shape (a circle), sectioned into slanting glimpses. The speedy notation reveals a joy in handling unexpectedly reminiscent of Dufy, that much-maligned and most underrated of modern masters.

Downstairs is another whole floor of work, the end wall dominated by one of the exhilarating 1970s swimming-pool paintings, with related drawings. Note the group of early charcoals, of which ‘Building Site St Paul’s’ and the tawny pelt of ‘York Way’ are moving testament to the remarkably high quality of the exhibits. This is a big show in every sense, and there’s far more than I can begin to mention: not to be missed.

The history of modern art in America has been dominated by the New York School of Abstract Expressionists, that roll-call of famous names that includes Pollock, de Kooning and Rothko. But not everything of interest was confined to the East Coast, and over in San Francisco the Bay Area School was pursuing an alternative trajectory, from abstraction back to figuration. The best-known artist of the group was Richard Diebenkorn (1922–93), most celebrated for his ‘Ocean Park’ series of luminous architectural abstracts, which demonstrate conclusively that Abstract Expressionism was not just the preserve of New York artists. Thomas Williams’s exhibition examines the wider story and launches a new scholarly study of The Bay Area School, subtitled ‘Californian Artists from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s’ (Lund Humphries, £35), written by the gallery’s owner.

The book is handsomely illustrated and admirably detailed, making a convincing argument for a reassessment of the Bay Area School. It really deserves a full-scale museum retrospective to illustrate its thesis, but in the absence of this, Williams’s Bond Street gallery has mounted a modest but piquant exhibition including paintings by Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Ernest Briggs, John Grillo and David Park. Without doubt, the star of the show is Diebenkorn. I liked the unarguable durability of ‘Man’s Head’ (1958) and ‘Folding Chair’ (1966), but ‘Untitled (Albuquerque Series)’ from 1951 is my favourite — beautifully fresh and inventive. An exhibition of Bay Area drawings will follow (25 June to 12 July): time to take these Californian artists seriously.

Finally, at the Mall Galleries, SW1 (10–15 June), is a show I’m involved in, entitled Critics’ Secrets, part of the Critics’ Circle centenary celebrations. Visual arts members have each selected an artist they consider to be insufficiently well known, in an age when a few much-hyped stars are endlessly promoted to the exclusion of a broader and more representative cross-section of artistic activity. More than 20 participating members are revealing their secrets, including such distinguished writers as Edward Lucie-Smith, William Packer and Marina Vaizey, alongside fellow-contributors to The Spectator Laura Gascoigne, who has chosen the allotment-painter Elvira Rose Oddy (born 1982), and Tanya Harrod, who has selected the ceramicist Carol McNicholl (born 1943). I have put forward Ian Welsh (born 1944), a painter of great particularity, who has been exploring further the nature of paint with a new series called ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’. Definitely worth a look.

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Certainly the selection and hanging demonstrate Scott’s development to good advantage and present for our scrutiny a rich and coherent body of work sufficiently diverse to maintain interest. These are slow paintings that reveal themselves only gradually: you won’t gain a great deal if you simply browse or scan as you pass through these rooms. Take time to examine the densely textured surfaces, make comparisons between subjects and treatments (noting the lifelong abstraction/figuration dialogue), give thought to the way Scott uses line and colour, flatness and depth. He himself said: ‘I am an abstract artist in the sense that I abstract. I cannot be called non-figurative while I am still interested in the modern magic of space, primitive sex forms, the sensual and the erotic, disconcerting contours, the things of life.’ Test this statement against his pictures.

Scott was a great painter of still-life, and even his nudes and landscapes owe much to the architectural design that dominated his table-top compositions. An introductory section shows early work from the 1930s and 40s, Cézanne-ish or Chardin-esque. The main gallery is filled with more mature delights: a very subtle and beautiful untitled painting from 1954, brushy but structured, hung with a lovely reclining nude in gouache and ‘The Harbour’ (1952), minimal but satisfyingly precise. Another effective group, ‘Still-life’ (c.1956), ‘Orchard of Pears No 10’ (1976–7) and ‘Bowl (White on Grey)’ of 1962, makes a tremendous yet understated impact. Notice the awkward shapes and lively surface of ‘Still-life’ (1955–6) and the serenity of ‘Orange Segments’ (1976). The third room contains mostly drawings with a couple of mesmeric ‘Berlin Blues’ paintings on the far wall. This is an exhibition to relish, which effortlessly reasserts William Scott as one of the pre-eminent painters of his era.

It’s always a pleasure to visit the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings, and its focus on Scott’s figure paintings and drawings offers up a lesser-known aspect of his work for detailed study. The visitor is greeted by a very sensuous untitled reclining nude in hot earth tones (terracotta and a range of dark reds), which unusually presents the figure as landscape — as, in effect, a mountainous hillside. This is the kind of metaphor we are familiar with in Henry Moore’s work, or indeed in the paintings of Graham Sutherland, but not what one immediately associates with Scott. Around the walls in the Foreshore Gallery are ten other powerful Scott oils, all but one of nudes. The exception is a large and potent still-life. Looking at this selection is like viewing a mini-retrospective, even though the majority of paintings date from the 1950s. Here are bodies metamorphosing into aerial views or furniture (the nude as upturned table-top or sofa), or rendered in linear shorthand, hieratic and Egyptian or ultramarine and fragmented.

The palette is predominantly ruddy or ochre-ish, the colours of mud or pots or cured leather rather than living human skin, but the aim here is not verisimilitude. There’s also a monochrome grey reclining figure, and a pale Bonnard-like nude. Seated or standing, these figures are tough interpretations of reality (‘I find beauty in plainness,’ Scott said), stark and instinctive, expressive and uncontrived — intimately concerned with the physical experience of being in a body. The exhibition extends into two rooms. In the first are two more still-life paintings, a fish from 1950 and a small late canvas ‘Poem for a Jug no 4’, potently juxtaposed with Kenneth Armitage’s bronze ‘Standing Figure’ (1961). In the second are six charcoal drawings from 1956, including ‘Figure Divided’, four joined sheets, which begins to look more like landscape again, reminiscent of what Peter Lanyon was doing around the same time. The display ends with a bang: an unexpected and very striking oil called ‘Blue Standing Nude’, from 1956/7.

The Hepworth exhibition travels on to its final venue, the Ulster Museum in Belfast, in the autumn, showing there from 25 October 2013 to 2 February 2014. Meanwhile, Scott celebrations carry on elsewhere. The vast but magnificent four-volume catalogue raisonné of his oil paintings has just been published (T&H, priced £595), expertly compiled by Sarah Whitfield, who has also written an excellent and accessible introduction to Scott published by the Tate (£14.99). There are various other exhibitions planned or already open, including two in London: 1950s Nude Drawings at Karsten Schubert, 5–8 Lower John Street, W1 (until 12 July), and William Scott and Friends at Osborne Samuel, 23a Bruton Street, W1 (11 June to 13 July). The drawing show ranges from abstract nudes that look like table-tops or harbours seen from above, to more overtly sensual reclining figures, partially clad or otherwise. These charcoal drawings are more about bodies than faces, and the features, when visible, are smudged or caricatured. In fact, they are really about the disposal of lines and forms, of patterns of black on white, and make an interesting companion to the Jerwood show. As Scott said, ‘Drawing for me is exploring, not explaining.’

William Scott and Friends offers a very different range of pleasures, approaching the artist through some fine examples of his work set in the context of his friends and contemporaries. Scott liked to swap his own pictures for those by artists he admired, and this unusual exhibition brings together a group of works that remain in the Scott Estate. So we see good paintings by Roger Hilton, Patrick Heron, Terry Frost and Adrian Heath, together with little-known sculptures by Scott’s wife Mary, and Abstract Expressionist work by Paul Jenkins and Herbert Ferber. Scott also traded one of his paintings with Jim Ede for an Alfred Wallis, thus at the same time augmenting his own collection and ensuring his work was included at Kettle’s Yard. Other treasures include a collage by Tàpies and a poignant landscape by Lanyon. The whole exhibition is an intriguing take on a key figure of mid 20th-century British art.

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So why does Tate Modern now devote a solo show to her? Could it be because she is Lebanese (and we don’t see the work of many Lebanese artists in this country), female and has reached the distinguished age of 97? The fact that the Tate has recently acquired six works by her may also have something to do with it: one gifted by the Saloua Raouda Choucair Foundation, two presented anonymously and three purchased by the Tate with funds from the Middle East and North Africa Acquisitions Committee. Suddenly Ms Choucair is hot property.

I have to say that I rather enjoyed her exhibition, which is not too large, but carefully arranged over four rooms. She was a pioneer of abstract art in the Middle East, but her work is rarely seen outside the Lebanon, and mingles indigenous influences with the inspiration of certain European artists. The exhibition begins with a tough-looking, schematised but not unbeguiling self-portrait dating from 1943. Around that time Choucair visited Cairo and discovered a new world of geometric pattern, calligraphic script and architecture that moved her deeply. Five years later she travelled to Paris to drink deep at Modernism’s fount, studying at the Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, and more particularly with Léger. Although her work does not closely echo his, he was undoubtedly an inspiration behind the gouache nude figure compositions hung here in the first room. Of these, ‘Nude with Iris’ (1948–9) is one of the finest, interestingly composed of stylised and overlapping forms with plenty of distortion, which makes for an intriguing arrangement of shapes and colours. It reminds me a bit of untutored Outsider art — the kind of thing you find in the work of Albert Louden (born 1943), for instance.

Choucair returned to Beirut in the early 1950s, and a group of bright and rather lovely abstract gouaches of arches and overlapping semi-geometric forms attest to her new researches in this period. Also in Room 1 are a couple of early sculptures, one in wood, one stone, both with the title ‘Trajectory of a Line’, in which Choucair investigates the space of a block of material by taking a straight line or curve into it. Room 2 is full of sculptures, interspersed with paintings. There’s a long bench display of small pieces in wood, fibreglass or stone with gouaches on the wall behind (two called ‘Visual Meter’ are especially notable). Many of the sculptures investigate embracing or interlacing forms and how a basic module may be combined or stacked. The parallels with architecture are evident, but Choucair varies and reconfigures her units in interesting ways.

In Room 3, a large wall cabinet contains a grouping of even smaller sculptures, maquettes mostly, in terracotta, white wood, or brass clasping aluminium. Parallels emerge: the minimalism of Carl André, the aluminium sculptures of Geoffrey Clarke (born 1924), the bronzes of Bernard Meadows (1915–2005) and Robert Adams (1917–84). I’m not trying to make an argument about who did what first, merely pointing out that certain ideas were in the air at a particular time and resulted in a comparable expression. At its least effective, Choucair’s small-scale work looks too much like a cross between jewellery and puzzle games. The final room, of sculptures from the 1970s in plexiglass and stainless steel, strung with nylon, is altogether too reminiscent of Naum Gabo and Barbara Hepworth to pack the punch it should.

A number of the paintings and wooden exhibits are slightly scruffy, knocked about a bit, not the usual perfectly presented modernist masterworks — as if to remind us that they come from what has been, after all, a war zone. Paint has been worn off a canvas or chipped from corners of wooden sculptures, edges are sometimes scuffed. This only increases their expressive potential and renders them more poignant, though the cynic might suggest that accidental damage has been deliberately left to achieve this enhancement. A handsome and substantial hardback catalogue (£24.99) accompanies the show.

Over in west London, at Piano Nobile, is a glowingly beautiful exhibition of figurative watercolours by Shanti Panchal. Panchal was born sometime in the mid-1950s in northern Gujarat (exactly when is not recorded), studied at the Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay, then came to this country on a British Council scholarship in 1978. He has made his home in London but returns regularly to India, and his work effectively mingles the traditions of East and West. He paints people almost exclusively, though this exhibition (his first ever in a commercial gallery) includes two serene still-life paintings of a watering can, one in blue and one in green. The show also features the greatest preponderance of nudes I have seen by this artist, exquisite studies of much grace and sensual delicacy.

One of the nudes is entitled ‘The Three Graces’, making an overt reference to Canova’s great sculpture, and this kind of referencing is a leitmotif of the show. For example, ‘Moore’s Three Points’ depicts a spiked Henry Moore sculpture, with a girl positioned in the background between two of the points. This is a brilliant and inspired way of articulating pictorial space, and makes for a striking image. The sculptural theme continues more obliquely in the rendition of the balloons in ‘Millie’, the main subject of which is a girl’s glance full of meaning across a room at a party. A more blatant reference to western art appears in ‘Frida at Tate Modern’, an imaginary portrait of Frida Kahlo demure in the foreground with Bankside chimney rising irresistibly phallic in the background.

Resonant colour and crisply precise drawing are the keys to this memorable exhibition. Panchal’s method of layering paint to achieve such delicately emphatic surfaces is time-consuming and involves much lifting off of colour, with blotting paper and brushes, sometimes to return to the white of the paper. (Look at the chef’s whites in ‘The Last Orders’.) Large paintings such as the magnificently lucid ‘River Bank, Maldon’, with its no doubt unconscious echoes of Puvis de Chavannes’s ‘Poor Fisherman’, alternate with smaller studies such as the gently erotic ‘Pelvis’, the first painting to sell from the show. In these splendid pictures, the passion is all in the succulent colour, ranging from richest burnt umber to orange and purple, lilac and lime. Highly recommended.

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The exhibition does not pretend to be a comprehensive collection of Titian’s works. It is merely a selection of some of his greatest masterpieces. The gorgeous young woman known simply as ‘La Bella’ looks at you with a penetrating, unblinking gaze, her eyes so hot with the fire of life that you feel sure that, in just one moment, she will move. The portrait of wily, worldly Pope Paul III is a study in character of the very highest level: you know this man — and you do not want to cross him.

Titian was obliged to paint a succession of Venetian Doges under the terms of the pension he was awarded very early in his career by the Venetian state. That he was able to wring the individuality of the sitters out of this dull official genre is a tribute to his humanity as well as his skill. Doge Francesco Venier, looking harassed and hesitant underneath his gold robes, is one of several stunning official portraits exhibited here. There are also a number of young men, sometimes portrayed as brooding, sometimes as questioning, and sometimes as defiantly confident. Probably the least successful portrait is the one Titian would have been paid most for: his depiction of the Emperor Charles V. Even he could not get past the myth to the man concealed behind it.

In his old age, Titian invented a new style of painting, in which form is almost dissolved into colour. No attempt is made to hide the fact that a painting is a ‘constructed’ object: the brush strokes are very obvious, and that is clearly part of the point (although contemporary observers noted that Titian, in his last years, painted more with his fingers than with his brushes). The effect is extraordinary, and was to be immensely influential, defining, as it did, the notion of what it is for a picture to be ‘painterly’: Rubens, Rembrandt, Velázquez, not to mention Delacroix and the Impressionists, all found something to imitate in Titian’s late style.

The first picture that confronts you as you enter the exhibition is ‘The Martyrdom of St Lawrence’, an astonishing depiction of St Lawrence’s grisly death: he was grilled over a fire. This picture usually hangs in a dark church in Venice, where it is very hard to see. It is beautifully lit in this exhibition, and alone is worth the trip to Rome.

The exhibition ends with the horrifying ‘Flaying of Marsyas’: the satyr Marsyas is skinned alive for having challenged Apollo to a flute-playing competition. Marsyas should have won. But Apollo cheated, then punished Marsyas for daring to compare himself to a god by having him flayed. It is an almost unbearable scene — except that it is fascinating to examine the details of the picture carefully, and so to start to understand how Titian achieved his miraculous effects.

Still, I couldn’t leave the exhibition on that agonising note, and wanted to go back and look again at some of Titian’s more joyful masterpieces. There are plenty of them here. In the room before the ‘Flaying of Marsyas’, there is the naked ‘Danae’, lying back as Jupiter, disguised as a shower of gold, drops on to her bed. Michelangelo criticised this picture as badly drawn — which was rich coming from him, whose male and female nudes seem often to be anatomically indistinguishable. Titian’s female nudes — he rarely painted naked men — are most definitely ‘all woman’. He was the first to use female models in his studio, and the benefits of painting directly from life certainly show.

Whether you are sceptical about Titian’s art or already one his fans, the works in this exhibition will convince you that Titian was one of western art’s greatest geniuses. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

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Born into a family of writers and intellectuals, Trevelyan was not destined for an artistic career. When he dropped out of an English degree at Cambridge in 1931 to study art in Paris, his uncle G.M. Trevelyan expressed the hope that he was not ‘going to meet one of those Matisses or Picassos’ — which of course was just what his nephew had in mind. But during his four years of haphazard self-education in a Montparnasse studio adjoining Alexander Calder’s, the artist who had the most lasting influence on him was in fact an Englishman. It was while assisting the experimental printmaker Stanley William Hayter in his legendary Atelier 17 that Trevelyan rubbed shoulders with Masson, Ernst, Miró — and occasionally Picasso — and that, along with hands-on experience of developments at the cutting-edge of etching, Surrealism rubbed off on Trevelyan.

To mark the launch of Julian Trevelyan: Picture Language, a new book on the artist by his son Philip (published by Lund Humphries), the Bohun Gallery in Henley has put together an exhibition of some 30 works from all periods of his career, starting with a Picassoesque ‘Figure (after Piero della Francesca)’ painted in Paris in 1933 that would have confirmed his uncle’s worst fears. In the same opening room a fragile Klee-like construction of tensile lines describing a ‘City’ (1936), annotated with surreal pictograms of kites, boats, comets and keyholes, sits alongside a ‘Mediterranean Landscape’ — a juxtaposition illustrating the youthful personality clash between the representational images Trevelyan called his ‘Jekylls’ (which sold) and the Surrealist ‘Hydes’ (which didn’t). A collaged ‘Landscape with Church and Telegraph Pole’ (1937) dates from an eccentric episode in his early career as a volunteer for the anthropologist Tom Harrisson’s ‘Mass Observation’ project, a scheme involving posting middle-class observers to places like Bolton and Blackpool to record the ordinary British way of life. Never one to duck a challenge, Trevelyan chose collage as his medium of record, working out of a suitcase on the pavement with scissors, gum and Indian ink. To local observers with a small ‘o’, he must have seemed quite mad.

As a self-taught artist, Trevelyan passionately believed that art should be part of everyday life; he admired Alfred Wallis and visited the Pitmen Painters in their tin hut studio at Ashington Colliery. On the eve of war he resigned from the Surrealist Group, feeling that the movement had outlived its usefulness: ‘It became absurd to compose Surrealist confections,’ he later wrote, ‘when high explosives could do it so much better, and when German soldiers with Tommy guns descended from the clouds in parachutes dressed as nuns.’ His Jekylls and Hydes resolved their differences and eventually merged into a distinctive personal style. True, paintings like ‘Paddle Steamer’ (1986) and ‘Harbour’ (1988) show the marked influence of the St Ives School — Trevelyan had been in Cornwall as a camouflage officer during the war. He was more himself on his home stretch of water, the Thames flowing past his Hammersmith studio at Durham Wharf with its ceaseless traffic of floating forms, nautical and natural, including the rather comical wartime ‘Swans’ (1943). But his unique contribution was in the field of print. Here his elementary grasp of composition, in the truest sense, reduced reality to its essential elements — a tendency to simplification that became more pronounced after an attack of meningitis in 1963 left him better able to control an etching needle than a brush.

Having had to quit his post as inspirational Head of Etching at the Royal College of Art — where his students included David Hockney — Trevelyan went on his travels with his second wife Mary Fedden, each new journey sparking a new suite of prints. A procession of windmills on the coast of Crete inspired the first etchings made after his illness, along with a painting in the exhibition. Machinery had always fascinated him, and despite the exotic charms of his ‘Hindu Temple’ (1968) with passing Brahman bull, his most memorable images are urban or industrial. ‘Avenue of the Americas’ (1982), with its stream of black and white cars funnelling faceless passengers down Sixth Avenue under a violet sky, is an iconic image of New York, while ‘Runway’ (1973) and ‘Jets’ (1974) sum up the lumbering preposterousness of air travel from the perspective of someone living under the Heathrow flight path.

It’s the ‘deliberate persistence in his own kind of sophisticated innocence’ described by Mel Gooding in his foreword to the book that makes Trevelyan’s work such a visual tonic. His last big retrospective was at the Royal College in 1998. Time for another.

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The exhibition opens dramatically with eight 12ft-high canvases by Anselm Kiefer. They were made especially for the show and provide the exhibition’s title, in turn taken from Madame de Staël’s famous book De l’Allemagne. Collaged with dramatic woodcuts and painted inscriptions — ‘Melancholia’, ‘der Rein’, ‘Vater, h. Geist, Sohn, Satan’, ‘Atlantic Wall’ — Kiefer’s portentous, doomy ensemble gets a room to itself. So, too, does Tischbein’s marvellous portrait of ‘Goethe in the Roman Campagna’ showing the great man on leave from the Weimar court, delighting in nature and the antique.

Alarm bells begin to ring in the first section of the show where an introductory storyboard argues for two strains in 19th- and early-20th-century German art and culture, the Apollonian (rational and classical) and the Dionysian (dark, illogical, cruel). The first rooms offer Apollo in the form of a fine group of narrative paintings by the Nazarenes and their circle and by later artists such as Johann Anton Ramboux and Adrian Ludwig Richter. Theirs was a romanticism that drew variously upon Greek temple structures, the pure colours of early Italian art, Dürer’s precise draughtsmanship, medieval German architecture and folk tales being noted down by the Brothers Grimm. All these paintings have a luminous charm.

The Dionysian section that follows, with paintings such as Franz von Stuck’s nastily neo-primitive ‘Fight for a Woman’ (1905) and Arnold Böcklin’s weird, late ‘Nereids at Play’ (1886), makes a suitably striking contrast. But does such work epitomise a strand of German-ness — the dark side? After all, von Stuck and Böcklin’s febrile imagery was hardly specific to German art at that date. One has only to turn to Edvard Munch or to the Polish Jacek Malczewski’s surreal confections to realise that Dionysus held sway all over Europe just before and after 1900.

The second part of the show, ‘L’Hypothèse de la Nature’, is also given a binary treatment, with Goethe’s colour theories and nature studies set against the visionary landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and Karl Gustav Carus. There are 17 very fine paintings by Friedrich. In a much less familiar section, chronology is abandoned and intriguing comparisons are drawn between the plant and mineral studies of Goethe and of Paul Klee. Philipp Otto Runge’s attempts at a symbolic cosmology using arabesques and floral symmetry inspired by the mystical writings of Jacob Böhme are ranged opposite Carl Wilhelm Kolbe’s etchings of fantastical trees and gardens. ‘L’Hypothèse de la Nature’ ends with a group of neo-Romantic landscapes full of melancholy foreboding painted in the 1930s by Otto Dix, George Grosz and Franz Radziwill.

The final part of the exhibition, ‘Ecce Homo’, concentrates on artists’ reactions to the first world war. An unnerving selection of photographs by August Sander dominates, alongside suites of prints by Max Beckmann and Otto Dix that meditate on the horrors of conflict. The mood of ‘Ecce Homo’ is grim and monochrome. Strangely, key interwar groups such as Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter are excluded as are the design and architecture achievements of the Bauhaus — on the grounds that De l’Allemagne is not a survey show. There is no sculpture but some film, including, controversially, Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda masterpiece Olympia (1936), shown opposite Siodmak and Ulmer’s playful, hedonistic Menschen auf Sonntag (1930).

The exhibition has provoked fiercely hostile articles in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the weekly Die Zeit. Both argue that De l’Allemagne presents Germany as programmed for war and catastrophe, making the culture of National Socialism appear inevitable. One of the key German scholars involved in the exhibition, Andreas Beyer, director of the German Forum for Art History in Paris, has criticised the deterministic slant of the show. The Germans have a point. Although De l’Allemagne does not seriously engage with the art of the Third Reich, despite its cut-off date of 1939, the Apollo–Dionysius binary that floats up all through the exhibition is unfortunate. But despite its dubious intellectual framework, the high quality of the work included means that De l‘Allemagne is not an exhibition to miss.

The post Interrogating the German soul appeared first on The Spectator.

Such a sale is alarming for several reasons, not least because it may represent just the tip of an iceberg. In 1925, Senator William A. Clark bequeathed some 997 predominantly European fine and decorative arts to the gallery William Corcoran had founded in 1869. Yet there is no mention of this or any of the gallery’s European holdings in the Strategic Framework for a New Corcoran issued by its board of trustees in April. It seems that the current regime has decided to revise the museum’s mission, as American museum trustees are wont to do. The gallery will now narrow its focus to contemporary art, American art and, a new category, design.

This strategic plan was prompted by the financial difficulties of the privately endowed Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art + Design, and its process included identifying the institution’s core mission. This is the latest example of what could be called ‘museum mission creep’, an exercise offering an automatic green light to justify sometimes radical change — and cash in the coffers for future, and more fashionable, acquisitions.

The Corcoran is, of course, not the first American institution to deaccession. In the post-war years, major museums took to selling collections en bloc — Minneapolis alone selling 4,500 items. Since then, the Association of Art Museum Directors has issued professional guidelines (my italics) on what might legitimately be sold — essentially duplicates, poor-quality items and works with condition issues — and advocating that no funds realised be spent on capital or operational expenses. But even these allow for the sale of work ‘no longer consistent with the mission or collecting goals of the museum’. Restrictions that preserve the historical character of a collection are rare.

In 1989, for instance, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis decided to sell its entire holding of 19th-century American art to enhance its endowment for 20th-century art. In 2007, the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo offloaded outstanding antiquities in order to buy modern and contemporary. Those sales realised $68 million. Such is the scale of this deaccessioning that both Christie’s and Sotheby’s now have dedicated museum liaison departments. Institutional collections are proving one of the richest seams of supply for the current art market.

The dangers of these disposals are self-evident. It is hard to imagine that potential donors are not alarmed by this kind of trading in, for even stipulations on gifts have been overruled in the courts. There is also the issue of overconfidence in current taste and curatorial interests. Certainly, the Corcoran’s curators would be extraordinarily fortunate, and prescient, to acquire works of art of a quality comparable with that of the ‘Clark Sickle-Leaf Carpet’.

This tour-de-force represents the pinnacle of Persian carpet weaving under Shah ’Abbas in the late 16th and early 17th century. Probably woven in Kirman, its rare ‘vase’ technique, which uses three weft ‘shoots’ — two of wool and cotton, and one of silk — allows for a particularly fine weave and crisp drawing, and its vitality lies in its vivid palette and dynamic patternmaking over three pictorial planes. Swirling, intertwining and overlapping vine leaves and flowering and fruiting branches are overlaid with curling serrated ‘sickle’ leaves and palmettes, and pierced by cypress trees. A real paradise garden, it comes to the block with a relatively conservative estimate of $5 million to $7 million — the current record price for any carpet sold at auction, £6.2 million ($9.5 million), was set in 2010 for a later and less complex ‘vase’ carpet. In this particularly polarised market, rare, early examples are now commanding huge prices from buyers across the globe.

The Corcoran’s chief curator Philip Brookman argues, not unreasonably, that carpets are ‘very much outside what we do — we have no Islamic art, no curatorial expertise for it, and no way of showing it in relation to the rest of our collection’ (one is being retained as an example of Clark’s collecting interests).

His comments highlight the contrasting attitudes to so-called permanent collections in the US and in Europe, where deaccessioning is not an option. But before anyone here thinks of gloating, they ought to reflect that, while national museums do not deaccession, there are no restrictions on regional collections belonging to local councils or other institutions. As I write, Tower Hamlets Council in London would sell a monumental Henry Moore if it could prove legal title, Northampton Borough Council is considering the sale of a 2400 BC Egyptian figure, while some members of Southampton City Council remain in favour of disposing of works from the city’s art gallery to help develop a new cultural quarter. Meanwhile, Bournemouth and Poole College quietly disposed of part of its art collection last year — including another Henry Moore bronze — to fund new facilities. It is not only money — or the lack of it — that can have a transformative effect on a museum or art gallery; it is the trustees and the councillors who hold the purse strings.

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It focuses on the paintings and sculptures that Calder made in one of the most fertile periods of a productive career, 1945 to 1949. The downstairs gallery in Burlington Gardens, at the back of the Royal Academy (where the last substantial Calder exhibition was mounted in 1992), is filled with the most dazzling array of three-dimensional form, light as thistledown, beautifully tempered in its tensile rigidity. There’s a lot of work here, but in this bright white space it doesn’t look crowded: it has been so expertly installed that the disposition of the sculptures looks as natural as breathing. The rigours of engineering (that sheer precision) meet humour: the masks and petals, the quivery ‘Aspen’ (1948), the arcing ‘Sword Plant’ (1947) and the egregious and wonderfully whiskery ‘Rat’ (1948). The smallish ‘Horse and Rider’ and the cigar-box miniatures of ‘Louisa’s 43rd Birthday Present’ contrast with the aerial grace of ‘Snow Flurry’, one of my favourite pieces here.

Upstairs, in Pace’s newly renovated first-floor gallery, a display of Calder’s bright and playful paintings is altogether less impressive but certainly worth viewing — particularly a group of small untitled gouaches from 1949. But it is the sculpture that takes the ludic to new heights of exquisite seriousness: breathtaking.

Eilís O’Connell (born 1953) is a very different kind of sculptor, who uses a wide range of materials and finds inspiration equally among the man-made and the organic. In the past she has fashioned shell-like forms out of woven stainless-steel cable or a nest from goose feathers; her latest work, on show at Canary Wharf, ranges from bronze to resin in a rich and satisfying vein of invention. Outside, in the small but popular Canary Wharf Park, where office workers congregate to smoke, lunch and chat, and young mothers bring their children to play in the spring sunshine, there are five substantial O’Connell pieces dotted around the grassy hummocks. ‘Anodos’ (2010) is like a stylised flame or tear drop, its deeply waisted vertical form in metallic bluey-green polyester resin has a sparkling, candescent quality, the colour shifting as you walk around it, your shadow distorting the surface reflections in a hall-of-mirrors way. It looks like a rather solid ignis fatuus, the will-o’-the-wisp or marsh gas exhalations that burn eerily of their own accord on boggy ground.

‘Circuit’ (2011), by contrast, is a rolling swirl of pipe in textured grey, an elegant bit of three-dimensional drawing. Two other pieces are strongly reminiscent of Henry Moore — nothing wrong with that, he’s a sculptor to revere — though exerting their own independence of character at the same time. ‘Sacrificial Anode’ (2007), in cast bronze, has anatomical qualities, recalling the curve of hip and haunch and belly, yet it doubles back on itself like some kind of hook or clasp. It’s a lovely form with a smooth tactile surface crying out to be caressed. (One big advantage of sculpture in the open air: you can touch it.) ‘Slope’ (2011) is a chunky slab of resin, a miniature mountain with lovely lines that reveal themselves as you walk around it and the form moves, swelling out from a crisp edge. I nearly missed the fifth piece, a tall bronze slice of tree called ‘Atlantic Oak’ (2013), presented bark outwards, standing like a sentinel or lightning-struck totem in the grass.

In the foyer of nearby 1 Canada Square is a group of smaller sculptures, including a tear drop and a pebble in clear resin and some small bronzes with striking patinas. The most beautiful of these is ‘Cronody’, an invented form a little like the skull of a bird, infinitely preferable to ‘Meniscus’, which looks rather too like a bedpan to earn my wholehearted approval. There are various found objects embedded in clear resin, a sheep skull, a vulture feather, a whalebone, and a number of larger, grouped, standing sculptures. The most memorable of these have conical bodies and a single proboscis or feeler emerging more or less vertically from them, like a plant shoot or a long thin tongue.

The title of one of these forms in a smaller version, ‘Gourd Elongated’, indicates one organic source of imagery. O’Connell’s work is strange, various and intriguing: Irish-born, she lived in London from 1988 to 2001 before returning to Ireland and settling in County Cork. An artist of originality and vision, she deserves to be more widely recognised.

Another original was the painter Mary Newcomb (1922–2008). How to describe her work? The nearest I can get is this: poetic realism of extraordinary oddness and gentle lyricism, which lodges in the mind and radiates sensations of quiet revelation and benign surprise. At her best — and there are a number of very fine examples in the current show by her long-time dealers Crane Kalman — Newcomb is utterly beguiling. She takes a subject as seemingly neutral as a black-and-white house in a field at the end of a day. Into the warm apricot sky she streaks some sunset colour behind the chimneypots, reminiscent of a flag or a rainbow, and the magic sets in. To the left of the house is a three-storey hen coop (how do the chickens get out of their high rise?), to the right a minuscule water tower. At the top corners of the painting are grey-black castors on wires, four on the left, two on the right, which echo another four on the left-side back of the house. Although not visibly joined by cables, these are presumably telephone connections. There are trees, also dwarfed — like everything else — by the house, and finally one notices two tiny figures near the very front of the picture, almost lost amid the lush and joyful patterning of meadow: a black cat and a white and black cat.

Clearly Newcomb’s vision is firmly rooted in observation, but the way she combines and reinterprets what in other hands would look trite becomes under her shaping intelligence unique. Not to be missed.

The post Mobile master appeared first on The Spectator.

It’s true that some of the best Donatellos at the Palazzo Strozzi have taken only a short trip from the Bargello, ten minutes’ stroll away; ditto works from the Duomo Museum. But there’s lots more from museums around the world — from the Louvre, Berlin and the V&A — and from the rest of Italy, Naples in particular, that make this show a must, even for Firenze addicts.

It’s even more of a must for anyone who’s a bit hazy about the Renaissance. Every schoolboy used to know that the period earnt its name as the renaissance of classical learning, art and architecture. It’s easy to forget the link between ancient and medieval, because the pupil outgrew the master — in fame, anyway. Everyone’s heard of Michelangelo, not so many of Phidias, the pre-eminent ancient Greek sculptor.

This show restores the link, with exceptional ancient works placed alongside their Renaissance offspring. It reminds us, too, that contemporary artists thought they were thoroughly inferior to their ancestors. Vasari said of Donatello’s enormous bronze horse head, commissioned by the King of Naples, that it was ‘so beautiful that many take it for an antique’.

Looking at some of the antique works in the exhibition, you can see what he meant. The staggering 1st century BC bronze of an anguished old man — found buried in Herculaneum, once wrongly thought to be Seneca — matches, excels even, the masters that followed 1,500 years or so later. Touching as Nicola Pisano’s 13th-century sculpture of a winged Virtue is, its stiff and doughy modelling is nothing on the tortured expression, twisting neck and hyper-real human vitality of the ancient pseudo-Seneca.

The competition between the two periods heats up when you reach the greatest hits of the Renaissance. Sitting next to each other are the two panels showing the Sacrifice of Isaac, submitted by Ghiberti and Brunelleschi for the project to fit gilded bronze doors on the Baptistery of San Giovanni. The strong classical allusions — particularly Isaac’s rippling torso in Ghiberti’s winning version — have given the 1401 competition hallowed status as the supposed starting date for the Renaissance.

In fact, there were earlier classical echoes in 14th-century art. But, still, it would be churlish to deny the extraordinary advances of the 15th and 16th centuries. I wrongly thought that some of the sculpture will have lost power through overfamiliarity. But you could never get too familiar with, say, Donatello’s ‘St George and the Dragon’ in the flesh — or in the marble. This 1417 bas relief — originally below Donatello’s ‘St George’ at Orsanmichele — is another 1066 and All That date for art historians: ‘the first scene in any medium to employ the resources of Brunelleschan linear perspective’, as John Pope-Hennessy put it.

It is rather more heart-stopping than that clinical definition: George and his horse rush into the marble away from you, as the relief flattens from the boldly carved stone of his flailing cape and the horse’s haunches, standing proud, to the barely incised lines of the background trees and colonnade.

The show has several paintings — including a charming ‘Madonna and Child’ by Filippo Lippi — but they are here largely to illustrate points about Florentine sculpture. And architecture, too: there are two marvellous wooden models here, one by Brunelleschi of the drum and dome of his Duomo; another, by Giuliano da Sangallo or Benedetto da, of Palazzo Strozzi. The nine rooms of the palazzo’s piano nobile that host the show are themselves prize exhibits — a measured, restrained series of plain interiors, with the lightest touch in classical decoration in pietra serena.

Two years ago, another Strozzi show, called Money and Beauty, cleverly and convincingly linked the development of the modern banking system in Italy with the emergence of the Renaissance. Money alone can’t explain the miraculous concentration of such sublime beauty. It remains too mysterious to explain; better just to enjoy.

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