Art

Like most ambitious artists, Julian Cooper has been pulled this way and that by seemingly conflicting influences. The son and grandson of Lake District landscape painters — his mother was a sculptor — he fell among abstractionists at his London art college, Goldsmith’s, in the late 1960s. But when I first saw his work in the early 1980s, he had emerged as a flagrant figurative painter, with a series of large canvases depicting scenes from Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano. There was no subterfuge about these works; they went straight back to Manet and Degas, not as imitations but developments. Whether from heredity or early practice at his father’s

The world’s big national museums are deeply glamorous places. We keep quiet in their hallowed halls, we wander the galleries in reverence, we look at a caption here and there, but, sometimes, if we’re honest, deep in our hearts, we may be asking ourselves what we’re doing there. Art enjoys unparalleled prestige in the modern world, but the reasons for this are rarely explained in plain terms. Just why does art matter? When people want to praise art museums, they sometimes remark that they are our ‘new cathedrals’. This seems an extremely accurate analogy, because for hundreds of years, cathedrals were, just like museums, by far the most significant places

With her long blonde hair tied in a ponytail, Sylvette David is familiar from many of Picasso’s paintings. She met the artist in the South of France as a teenager and became one of his models – his muse but never his mistress — during the spring of 1954 (Picasso’s relationship with Françoise Gilot had ended and he hadn’t yet met Jacqueline Roque). A collection of drawings, paintings, metal sculptures and ceramics documenting their relationship can now be seen in the Kunsthalle Bremen’s exhibition Sylvette, Sylvette, Sylvette: Picasso and the Model (until 22 June). And in London, the Francis Kyle Gallery, 9 Maddox Street, W1, is showing some of Sylvette’s

For a committed, if unsuccessful, capitalist, I enjoy French culture an embarrassing amount – every last state-funded drop of it. Give me five-act operas with cast lists the size of a small Chinese city, give me obscenely expensive works of public art, give me inhumane concrete estates, give me unintelligible modernist music and I’ll be drooling with pleasure all night. In fact, I’m seeing a five-act French opera with a cast list the size of a small Chinese city tonight in Bordeaux. That’s the kind of disgusting thing I like to do. In my defence, I am aware that what I am doing is immoral and what is being created should be

In this round-up of exhibitions in London’s commercial galleries, I feature three shows of little-known but mature contemporary British artists. There is a great deal of interesting and worthwhile art being made out there, but not enough of it comes to public attention. Most museums won’t show it, and there are only a handful of commercial gallerists who are prepared to back quality over proven popularity. In such a world, the quieter talents tend to get overlooked, so it is a particular pleasure to be able to draw your attention to the subtle small paintings of Liam Hanley (born 1933). Hanley paints in oil and draws in pencil on linen

The death of painting has been so often foretold — almost as frequently as its renaissance — that any such prediction today is nothing short of foolhardy. Of course, painting is alive and well and living in London, but you wouldn’t know that from the current exhibition of five artists at Tate Millbank. (By the way, this is a paying display, the regular admission fee being £10. Not surprisingly, it was deserted when I visited. This sort of show, to do its job properly and communicate to the public at large, should be free.) According to the press release, each of the five artists ‘has adopted an approach to painting

One of the great treats of the exhibiting year will undoubtedly be Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs (17 April to 7 September) at Tate Modern. The last phase of Matisse’s productive career was devoted to making extraordinarily vivid images from painted paper cut with scissors, as the physical effort of wielding a paintbrush became too much for him. Matisse’s greatest strengths were as draughtsman and colourist, and the cut-outs combine these skills in abundant measure, releasing a new sense of joyous celebration almost unmatched in the history of art. The largest ever exhibition of the cut-outs, the Tate’s show will feature 120 works, many seen together for the first time. Unmissable.

Let’s imagine for a minute that the Turner Prize is cancelled next year. Would anyone care? A few members of the artistic elite and a handful of artists perhaps, but beyond that? I don’t think they would. There are plenty of other valuable art prizes out there, after all. And no one has really taken it seriously for a while now. Each year the same, tired debates come out about how ‘art can be whatever it wants to be’, which is true, but also happens to be the least controversial thing you can say. So it’s off. Cancelled. No more queues of people waiting to see a light switch turn

Catalyst: Contemporary Art and War at the Imperial War Museum North (until 23 February) is alone worth a trip to Manchester. The exhibition shows how artists living in the age of mass media have explored conflict in the age of mass destruction. The most successful works are not those that ‘make a statement’ but those which address the viewer, usually by embarrassing their indifference and inspiring empathy. Taysir Batniji’s ‘Gaza Homes’ is a set of mock estate agents’ particulars for bomb-damaged houses. Captions about ‘well appointed’ rooms, ‘airy living space’ and ‘beach access’ are a joke in bad taste. Yet Batniji’s satire is so much more effective than ‘Photo Op’

The V&A’s remarkable survey of Chinese painting begins quietly with a beautiful scroll depicting ‘Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk’, from the early 12th century, which, with its bright colours, shallow space and lack of setting, invites comparison with a western masterpiece of a similar date, the Bayeux Tapestry. The crowded urgencies and narrative drive of the English/French embroidered cloth couldn’t be further from the refined intervals and sophisticated relationships of the Chinese scroll, and yet both tell much about the cultures that produced them. However, neither should be read simply as historical documents: both offer rare aesthetic pleasures of quite different distillations. The Chinese elixir seems to me to