Art

Thursday

Philip Hensher

Give Eric Ravilious a rest

How do artists sustain a reputation? We’d like to think it’s on the basis of their work. In the case of visual artists, it would be nice to think they make it because their art is beautiful, original or absorbing. It shouldn’t be a matter of what the art is about, or Benjamin West’s epic historical tableaux would be better paintings than Jean Siméon Chardin’s still lives. It shouldn’t be about the artist’s personality or history, or we would rate Benjamin Haydon (tragic suicide) over John Constable (domestically inclined Tory). On the other hand, it doesn’t always work like that. Because the visual arts depend a great deal on public

Saturday

Katie Glass

What’s wrong with taking selfies in galleries?

There is nothing more glorious than an art gallery selfie. In the same way that hearing someone mispronounce Van Gogh lets you know you’re dealing with an autodidact (the best!), so a gallery selfie suggests someone who doesn’t quite belong in that space: someone who is ignorant of the etiquette of the art world and who is enjoying themselves because of, not despite, that. Complaining about taking selfies in galleries is so obviously a class thing (not to mention an age thing). Which is why it’s so charming to see Tate Britain’s director Alex Farquharson (whose name does not make him sound like a class warrior) enthuse about encouraging visitors

Thursday

Grayson Perry

Why do my outfits make people so angry?

I have always cycled everywhere in London, not because I want to save the planet but because I want to get to my destination on time. I ride a big heavy Dutch woman’s bike: practical, less nickable and I can wear pretty much anything while riding it. On this occasion I was wearing frilly pink nursery-print dungarees, pink patent bootees, a sweet little jacket with puffy pale-blue bows down the front, a pink cloche hat and a pink-and-blue shiny PVC backpack. I was just locking my bike to the railings on Charing Cross Road when an angry man approached. ‘Are you a paedophile?’ he roared. ‘Why are you dressed like

Sunday

Alec Marsh

The blossoming career of Cedric Morris

In the winner-takes-all world of modern art, there’s every chance you might not have heard of Cedric Morris. Why should you? No matter how much you sweeten the tea, the Welshman, born in 1889, was no Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko or Salvador Dali. Nor from our 21st-century outlook can it be said that the name itself inspires much confidence: ‘Cedric’ sounds about as on-trend as a character from a short story by Saki, and when paired with Morris, the combination offers up all the avant-garde promise of a baked camembert starter at an Aberdeen Angus steakhouse. But don’t be put off, because there’s more to Morris than meets the eye

Tuesday

Frances Wilson

Admirable in their awfulness – the siblings Gus and Gwen John

‘In 50 years’ time,’ Augustus John gloomily reflected following his sister’s death on 18 September 1939, ‘I will be known as the brother of Gwen John.’ He was right. In 2004, when the Tate mounted a joint retrospective of Augustus and Gwen John, it was Gwen who had become the major artist. The ‘variable strident chords’ of the self-styled Gypsy King, likened in his youth to Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Raphael, had been supplanted by the ‘sustained minor key’ of the nunlike recluse.  The first decades of the 20th century were what Virginia Woolf described as ‘the Age of Augustus John’; but the praise lathered on him after his own death,

Sunday

Hannah Tomes

The Judgment of Berkshire

Almost 50 years ago, in a hotel bar in central Paris, French wine faced a reckoning. Steven Spurrier, a British wine merchant, decided California deserved a spell in the sun: at the time French wine was the dominant force in Europe, with bottles from the New World – Australia, New Zealand, the US and the like – considered their poor cousin. Spurrier came up with the idea to pit the very best French Bordeaux against Californian cabernet sauvignons and chardonnays against white Burgundies, and have a panel of experts – all French – rank them in a blind tasting that came to be known as the Judgment of Paris. California won

Thursday

Alexander Raubo

Real artists have nothing to fear from AI

Christie’s is making digital-art history again – or at least trying to. Between 20 February and 5 March, it is hosting Augmented Intelligence, the first major auction dedicated solely to AI-generated art. This follows a series of headline-grabbing stunts, including the first major sale of an AI-generated artwork in 2018 – ‘Portrait of Edmond de Belamy’ ($432,500) by the Paris-based collective Obvious – and the first NFT sale by a major auction house,  Beeple’s ‘Everydays: The First 5,000 Days’, which shattered expectations (and good taste) by selling for $69 million in 2021. With the NFT bubble – which Christie’s played a significant role inflating – having burst in 2022, its

Thursday

Alexander Raubo

Why young MAGA supporters are flocking to Remilia

The MAGA social scene was defined on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration by the Coronation Ball – perhaps the most exuberant celebration of the new ‘Golden Age’. The principal speaker was, unsurprisingly, Steve Bannon, the architect of Trump’s first victory and the voice of the neo-reactionary core of the President’s movement. More surprising perhaps though was the Ball’s principal sponsor, Remilia Corporation, a conceptual art movement. It was as if a Reform UK rally were sponsored by the Turner Prize. After Bannon’s speech, a representative of Remilia, an artist operating behind the pseudonym L.B. Dobis, stood at the podium to speak about internet art and to outline Remilia’s plans

Tuesday

Ian Sansom

The plain-speaking bloke from Warrington who painted only for himself

We don’t all get to achieve what we could have achieved in life. And yes, I know, so what? Tough luck. Cry me a river, build me a bridge and get over it. But, like it or not, some people really do have the odds stacked more heavily against them than others and yet somehow carry on regardless. In The Secret Painter, the scriptwriter Joe Tucker (Parents, Big Bad World) tells the true story of his Uncle Eric, born in 1932 – an ordinary man who never gave up. Let’s be honest, The Secret Painter could have been absolutely terrible. I mean, it sounds like a bad idea: a biography

Monday

Dot Wordsworth

From Balfour to Zola: the many faces of ‘naturalism’

My husband said ‘A.J. Balfour played the concertina’, which is perfectly true, though he did other things, even as prime minister. The concertina was inessential to what I thought was a neat way of sorting out the meanings of naturalism. The word is used quite a bit these days, with four main meanings. My mnemonic for the meanings are Balfour, Bolingbroke, Zola and Caravaggio. When ‘The Hay Wain’ went on show in 1824, the Telegraph explained, ‘its naturalism and heroic scale were hailed as a revelation’. That naturalism may be labelled Caravaggio after an observation in 1950 by E.H. Gombrich in The Story of Art about ‘Caravaggio’s “naturalism”, that is,

Thursday

Andrew Lambirth

The otherworldly artist who made his name at The Spectator

There is something otherworldly about Rory McEwen’s paintings of plants, leaves and fruit. They are indisputably beautiful, often breathtakingly so, but they are almost eerie in their self-possession. They are like planets vibrating to the music of the spheres – quivering with arrested energy. These images are super-real (rather than surreal) but they sometimes have a surreal edge that can be disturbing. ‘I paint flowers as a way of getting as close as possible to what I perceive as the truth’ Although best known for painting these botanical watercolours on vellum, Mc-Ewen (1932–82) was a man of many parts: an extraordinarily talented figure, a poet and broadcaster, a folk and

Wednesday

Mary Wakefield

‘When a work lands the excitement is physical’: William Kentridge interviewed

Watching William Kentridge’s film Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot is like being submerged inside his mind, inside the coffee pot maybe. There’s so much going on both visually and intellectually that there’s no room at all for a viewer’s own feeble thoughts. ‘When a work lands the excitement is physical, like biting into chocolate. You feel it in your salivary glands’ Superficially, the film is a look inside the South African artist’s studio and an invitation to watch him work. Over four-and-a-half hours and nine themed episodes you see him making his familiar expressive drawings in charcoal and ink, but this studio is also a stage; there’s dance, puppetry, dips into

Tuesday

Daniel Marc Janes

The curse of distraction: Lesser Ruins, by Mark Haber, reviewed

Earlier this year, I visited the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. This cherished museum appears at first to be a collection of bizarre arcana: botanical specimens, miniature dioramas, tributes to forgotten polymaths. Closer inspection reveals it to be something altogether stranger, at the junction of fact and fiction. Witty and highly individual, it invites us to sit with the wonder, to contemplate what we have seen. Phones are strictly banned. Lesser Ruins, the consummate third novel by the Minneapolis-based Mark Haber, feels like a literary analogue – taking us as it does down rabbit holes, a twisting tour of an overloaded mind. Its unnamed narrator is a former

Tuesday

Anne de Courcy

Wondrous treasure troves: the Jewish country houses of Europe

The words ‘country houses’ immediately make one think of England, yet only five of the 15 featured in this hefty, impressively illustrated book are in Britain. It is a compilation of essays: part histories of various Jewish families, part architectural descriptions and part stories of the chateaux, mansions, villas and, of course, country houses all over Europe, owned and sometimes built by these families. Each chapter is by a different author. The swimming pool was surrounded by such a profusion of lilies that the scent at night was overpowering  These homes had different functions. Some, like that of the German-born painter Max Liebermann, were built as traditional country retreats –

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Sue Prideaux: Wild Thing, A Life of Paul Gaugin

41 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast Sam Leith’s guest is the great Sue Prideaux who, after her prize-winning biographies of Nietzsche, Munch and Strindberg, has turned her attention to Gauguin in Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin. She tells me about the great man’s unexpected brief career as an investment banker, his highly unusual marriage and his late turn to anticolonial activism. Plus: why she starts with his teeth. This podcast is in association with Serious Readers. Use offer code ‘TBC’ for £100 off any HD Light and free UK delivery. Go to: www.seriousreaders.com/spectator Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Oscar Edmondson.

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

Inside the mind of Vincent Van Gogh

Van Gogh only got one major review in his career, and he was mystified by it. When the critic Albert Aurier described his six paintings in the 1890 Brussels exhibition of Les XX as the product of a ‘terrible and distraught genius’, the artist responded that, far from being a genius, he was ‘very secondary’ and that his sunflowers – now in the National Gallery – were no different ‘from so many pictures of flowers more skilfully painted’. If he were alive today he would probably have protested at the National Gallery making an exhibition of his work the high point of its bicentenary programme, but he would have liked

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Why is no one marching against VAT on school fees?

How passively we respond to revelations of Labour’s real direction of travel. As millions of pensioners brace for the confiscation of winter fuel payments and other Budget tax raids, shouldn’t they be pinning on their medals, raising their banners and marching down Whitehall – alongside columns of private school parents, furious at the imposition of VAT on fees? Yet so far barely a whimper of protest, as though those affected are racked with guilt at having kept the Tories in power for so long. In response to the school-fee fait accompli, Eton with its mile-long waiting list will hit parents with a full 20 per cent VAT hike from January,

The Spectator

What are the most ‘unsettling’ artworks to hang in 10 Downing Street?

The art of politics Keir Starmer moved a portrait of Lady Thatcher from one room at 10 Downing Street to another because he found it ‘unsettling’. Some more possibly unsettling artworks that have hung at No. 10: — ‘More Passion’, by Tracey Emin, featuring the words ‘More Passion’ in neon, was installed by David Cameron in 2011. In 2022 Emin wrote on Instagram about her unhappiness that it was still there after the revelation of Boris Johnson’s lockdown parties. His ‘behaviour and lack of contrition’, she said, were ‘bizarre’. — Annabel’s – a series of lino cuts depicting Sloanes revelling at the Mayfair nightclub in the hedonistic mid-1980s – also

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

The art of Japanese woodblock printing

Van Gogh owned a copy of Utagawa Kunisada’s woodblock print of the ‘Yoshiwara Poet Omatsu’ (1861), which is currently on display at the Watts Gallery. It depicts the poetess who rose from humble origins in an elegant kimono at her dressing table and was part of Kunisada’s series of paintings titled Biographies of Famous Women, Ancient and Modern, but Van Gogh may not have known that. By the time he started amassing Japanese prints – he splurged on 600 of them in the winter of 1886 – they had become collectibles sought after by avant-garde artists for their clear lines, bright colours and the immediacy of their cropped figure compositions

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

How Miss La La captured Degas’s imagination

‘Can you come Saturday morning to my studio, 19 bis rue Fontaine?’ Degas wrote to Edmond de Goncourt in 1879. ‘From 10.30 to half-past noon, I will have my négresse and her partner who will come expressly to be at your disposal.’ Not content with dangling from a rope by her teeth, she suspended a 300-kilo cannon barrel from her jaw It’s not what it sounds like. The ‘négresse’ in question was Anna Albertine Olga Brown, stage name Miss La La, an aerialist at the Cirque Fernando who had been sitting – or more accurately hanging – in Degas’s studio for a painting for that year’s fourth Impressionist exhibition. As