Art history

Restless visionary: Man Ray was always ahead of his time

In the summer of 1940, after almost 20 years in Paris, Man Ray fled the Nazis for the country of his birth. Disliking New York, where he’d spent his youth, he made for the West Coast. He hoped to get as far as Tahiti or Hawaii. But his trip came to an end when, braced by the space, lifted by the lack of skyscrapers (‘made me feel taller’) and swept off his feet by a dancing girl (the latest in a long line of hoofers for whom he’d have the hots), he settled in Los Angeles. Though he would live there for more than decade, he never really liked the

This radical Nativity is also one of the great whodunnits of art history

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

A keepsake – and to-do list – of Europe’s greatest cathedrals

In his new book on Europe’s cathedrals, Simon Jenkins begins with the claim that the greatest among them are our most important European works of art. Greater than the paintings of El Greco or Berthe Morisot? More momentous than the buildings of Mies van der Rohe or Norman Foster? More important than the organ music of J.S. Bach or the Duruflé Requiem? Still, I see his point. Given the vast numbers who have visited these cathedrals over the centuries for worship or on tour, their powerful multimodal communication (cathedrals incorporate the visual arts, architecture, stained glass, music, wood- and iron-work, masonry, weaving and many other forms of expression) and the

The life of René Magritte was even more surprising than his art

We live at a time in which we could (until recently) travel without difficulty and take for granted access to cultural treasures. It’s easy to forget that this wasn’t always the case, and minds were shaped by what possibilities were available. The Belgian painter René Magritte is a good example of huge talent pushed through a very narrow opening. His art has now become an exemplar of the striking image that commerce can feature. Advertising regularly uses his paradoxical visual combinations of faces replaced by apples, of skies in the shape of doves, of roses filling rooms and, supremely, the conundrum of the pipe demurely labelled ‘Ceci n’est pas une

Bright, beautiful and deceptively simple: the art of the linocut

In the 1920s the linocut broke out of the schoolroom and on to gallery walls. Here was a democratic new art form, perfect for the times with its lowly materials — a piece of old linoleum flooring for the block, while the best tools, according to the artist Claude Flight, were an old umbrella spoke for cutting and a toothbrush to rub the back of the paper. The finished prints, Flight hoped, would be cheap enough for working-class pockets. Above all, the bright, dynamic images themselves, often depicting scenes of contemporary life — busy streets, the London Underground, skating, the first motor races — captured the mood of the age.

The first patrons of Modernism deserve much sympathy and respect

If Modernism is a jungle, how do you navigate a path through its thickets? Some explorers — Peter Gay and Christopher Butler among them — have been fool-hardy enough to attempt an overall map, identifying factors common to a half century of music, art and literature. But the borders remain disputed and light cast on one area only leaves another consigned to the shadows. Philip Hook, however, has been less ambitious, confining himself to one patch of special interest: the painting and sculpture of the decade preceding the first world war. Although this may sound like familiar territory, it’s widely regarded, in Hook’s words, as ‘quite possibly the most important

Like burst balloons after a party: the last paintings of John Hoyland

When the internationally acclaimed abstract painter John Hoyland died in 2011 at the age of 76, a large chunk of light, laughter and danger went out of the British art world. Hoyland, who was born in Sheffield and trained at the local art college before coming to London and the Royal Academy Schools, was a force to be reckoned with. Reaching maturity in the 1960s, his career was established by a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1967, after which he divided his time for several years between London and New York. In the 1970s he settled back in London and Wiltshire, but travelled widely, often to the tropics.

Why should art have ever been considered a male preserve?

‘I’m a lady,’ insists the improbable damozel in David Walliams’s Little Britain sketch. I’m a lady, I kept thinking, reading these two books. More: I’m a lady art historian. Oughtn’t I to like books by other lady art historians about lady artists and ladies in art. Why don’t I? Why so out of sync with the sisterhood? Start with the positive. Jennifer Higgie’s The Mirror and the Palette follows an interesting, original line: ‘If she had access to a mirror, a palette, an easel and paint, a woman could endlessly reflect on her face and, by extension, her place in the world.’ Higgie, editor-at-large at frieze magazine and the host

Apostle of modernism: Clive Bell’s reputation repaired

Clive Bell is the perennial supporting character in the biographies of the Bloomsbury group. The husband of Vanessa Bell, brother-in-law of Virginia Woolf and friend of Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey, he is often depicted as a witness to historical events rather than a participant in them, a sort of modernist Forrest Gump. At best he is a dilettante with good taste who didn’t quite belong with the intellectuals of Bloomsbury; at worst he is a womaniser with Nazi sympathies who took advantage of Virginia Woolf. In this useful book Mark Hussey lets him take centre stage and delivers a far more nuanced portrait. Bell liked to play up to

Ceramic art has been undervalued for too long

The use of ‘Ceramic’ rather than ‘Ceramics’ in the title of this book indicates Paul Greenhalgh’s passionate belief that ‘ceramic is a thing in itself: a many-headed but nevertheless singular entity, with an on-going intellectual discourse’ which he christens ‘the ceramic continuum’. He believes that this has been ‘actively denied its place as an artistic practice’ and that ‘its exclusion from the canon of art history is squarely to do with money, class and race’. The book is a prodigious attempt to right that wrong. Ceramic, Greenhalgh says, has been seen as ‘too cheap’ (though the sale of the Qianlong Vase in 2010 for £43 million might change that), is

A new blossoming: David Hockney paints Normandy

In 2018 David Hockney went to Normandy to look at the Bayeux Tapestry, which he had not seen for more than 40 years. He liked its great panoramic length and the absence of shadows. But while there he found himself seduced by the scenery of Normandy, its winding lanes and orchards of blossom trees. He decided he would like to paint the arrival of spring there, as he had in Woldgate, East Yorkshire, a decade earlier. He asked his long-standing assistant, Jean-Pierre Goncalves de Lima, known as J-P, to look into the possibility of renting a house. He was so delighted with the first one J-P showed him, La Grande

Bright and beautiful: the year’s best art books reviewed

When he was a student, the celebrated American modernist master Robert Rauschenberg once told me that his ‘greatest teacher’ — Josef Albers — would proclaim ‘art is svindle’ in heavily accented English at least ten times a day. By that provocative remark Albers probably meant not so much that art was a cheat but that intellectualising about it is usually bogus. He once thanked his lucky stars that his father was a painter-decorator rather than an intellectual. For him it involved simple forms, clear colours and no nonsense. Albers and his equally brilliant wife are the subject of a remarkable and visually beautiful joint biography, Anni & Josef Albers by

From light into darkness: the genius of Goya

The great Spanish artist Francisco Goya was born in Zaragoza in 1746, the son of a gilder whose livelihood was doomed by the new fashion for marble. The young Goya first studied in his home town before graduating to Madrid, rising through academy and court circles and navigating his way through the reigns of three Bourbon kings and the intervening rule of Joseph Bonaparte before retiring to Bordeaux in his late seventies. From early commissions for religious frescoes, altarpieces and tapestry cartoons for royal palaces, he went on to paint celebrations of everyday Spain en fête and to establish a portrait practice encompassing all the leading figures of the wildly

Will our churches ever reopen?

There used to be a joke, repeated by English tourists in deserted piazzas, that the Italian for church (chiesa) and for closed (chiusa) were almost the same. Whatever the orari on the door, you were always several hours out. And so you would consult your guidebook, admire in miniature the Ghirlandaio, the Lippi, the really very special fresco — and go for a consoling ice cream. The joke was told with the smug Anglo-Saxon certainty that our churches were open to all-comers from before breakfast until after vespers. Not so now. And not during the months we weren’t in lockdown — for all the bishops are protesting about the new

Ivan Morozov: the Russian businessman with a passion for the avant-garde

If you want to see the very best of Gauguin and Matisse, go east. That was the case in 1914 and it’s still true today. The reason, then and now, lay in the collecting habits, both discerning and extravagantly acquisitive, of two men: Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. The first of these has already been the subject of a notable book by Natalya Semenova; the present work is its sequel. Although long since ‘nationalised’, the pictures these two men owned are still among the principal treasures of the Hermitage in St Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum, Moscow. On a visit to Moscow in 1928 Alfred Barr, the director of the

From Hogarth to Mardi Gras: the best art podcasts

If you study History of Art, people generally assume you’re a nice, conscientious, plummy-voiced girl. Sometimes, people are right. It is the only subject I can think of that requires a student to describe what is already printed on the exam sheet. ‘In the foreground of the picture is a tree — in full leaf! — and on the horizon, a tower.’ It feels a little basic. But with art history podcasts description is everything. And to do it well is a real art in itself. The presenters of the Art Newspaper’s The Week in Art podcast were superb last week in their exploration of a portrait by William Hogarth.

Arthur Jeffress: bright young person of the post-war art scene

The name Arthur Jeffress may not conjure many associations for those not familiar with the London post-war art world, but this wayward, flamboyant, controversial connoisseur and patron who left much of his ‘small but subversive’ collection to the Tate and the Southampton Art Gallery after his death in 1961 certainly deserves his footnote in history. ‘Small but subversive’ could describe the man as well as his collection: his fabulous wealth, inherited from Virginian tobacco plantation-owning ancestry, coupled with his rampant homosexuality, shaped a life of compulsive and conspicuous extravagance, in which art and sex vied with one another for supremacy against the backdrop of Belgravia and a palazzo just off

The Renaissance in 50 shades of grey

The Mediterranean-centred era spanning a century or so either side of 1492 is filled to the brim with stories. There was the discovery of the Americas by a bold Genoese navigator; power struggles between wealthy Italian families, waged through conspiracies, poisonings and stabbings; a radical Dominican monk who managed to impose near-theocratic rule on a republican city before being burned at the stake; the advent of humanism and, subsequently, of a modern, power-focused theory of politics; and the maturing of the visual arts to a new level of sophistication, realism and emotional power. Such stories make up a significant part of the cultural inheritance of the West.  Histories, biographies, novels,

Only connect | 14 February 2019

At the time of his death in 1900, John Ruskin was, according to Andrew Hill, ‘perhaps the most famous living Victorian apart from Queen Victoria herself’. He was a landmark — more or less literally. You could visit Brantwood, where he had his Lake District home in later life, and buy postcards of him. There were ‘Ruskin ceramics, Ruskin linen and lace products and Ruskin fireplaces’ available. In New Jersey, undismayed by the great man’s loathing of tobacco, there was a company that sold ‘John Ruskin’ premium cigars. Postmortem you could get Ruskin souvenir brassware or toasting forks and a scale model of the Ruskin monument near Keswick. But that,

Birth of a masterpiece

In the early 1370s an elderly Scandinavian woman living in Rome had a vision of the Nativity. Her name was Birgitta Birgersdotter, and she was later venerated as St Bridget of Sweden. In her account of the experience, transcribed by her confessor, she described herself as an eye witness. Her narrative began: ‘When I was present by the manger of the Lord in Bethlehem…’ Around a century later, Piero della Francesca (c.1412–92) used Bridget’s vision — or parts of it — as a starting point for a painting. This picture, now in the National Gallery, is one of the best-loved depictions of this immensely popular subject in the history of