Exhibitions

Jean-François Millet (1814-75). One Room. 14 items. Eight paintings. Six drawings and sketches. Modest, interesting. No masterpieces. The show appeals to the contemporary English preference for the unassuming, the humble, the unpretentious. Take ‘The Wood Sawyers’ (oil on canvas, 1850-2). Two figures are sawing a tree trunk with a long two-man bucking saw. Two thick sections have already been cut and the sawyers are busy with a third. The simplified trunk is like a salami, the bark corresponding to the floury skin. The main foreground figure with his blue rump has his foot braced against the trunk and commands our immediate attention. You can see the folds of flesh gathered

If you came to this show accidentally, or as a layperson, it could confirm any prejudices you might have about avant-garde sculpture. Pretentious, ugly and resorting to kink. Those pendulous string bags, that enormous turd – gimme a break. Except that would be a mistake. Because the work here is the real thing: the 1960s originals that spawned a million imitations and parodies. The exhibition is perhaps a little cool about selling itself, so allow me. This is a snapshot of the work of three artists around the time they all took part in a 1966 New York show called Eccentric Abstraction. Two of the artists, Louise Bourgeois and Eva

Since 2005, a Chinese man called Zheng Guogu has been creating a garden inspired by the strategy game Age of Empires. The project is ongoing, so the garden is expanding. It currently covers 20,000 square metres but it may yet become larger, spreading over more of Yangjiang, where Guogu lives. It’s not clear how he came by all this space. Nor is it immediately obvious how a garden can be inspired by a game in which you go to war with others. Perhaps he’s particularly fond of invasive species. This is all quite intriguing and unusual, and most visitors to Garden Futures: Designing with Nature will have questions. Who is

Last month, I got the train down to Margate to interview the Egyptian-Armenian artist Anna Boghiguian (b. 1946), whose exhibition The Sunken Boat: A glimpse into past histories was about to open at the Turner Contemporary. Long story short, the conversation did not go well: Anna reacted to my questions with some irritation, swatting them away like low-flying bluebottles. I got flustered, she got bored, and eventually so did I. We wrapped things up around the 20-minute mark and I ran away to stare into the abyss. It was a shame, because the show was, for the most part, really good. A political scientist by training, Boghiguian makes installation art

Slowly the canvas was unfurled across the concrete floor of a warehouse on an industrial estate in Suffolk. On and on it went, a flurry of paint marks and brush strokes, yellow, green and occasionally blue, like a cornfield at harvest time. By the time we got to the end some seven metres of it lay stretched out at our feet. It was the first time anyone had seen this unknown magnum opus by Gillian Ayres since it was rolled up in 1974 – and it looked sensational. Recently I’ve been reflecting on the 1970s for a couple of reasons. One is that I’m working on a book about art

Through the grey downbeat years of postwar austerity, we nursed cheering fantasies of a life more lavishly colourful and hedonistic. Oliver Messel fed them: born into Edwardian privilege, the epitome of well-connected metropolitan sophistication, he doubled up as interior decorator and stage designer, creating in both roles a unique style of rococo elegance and light-touch whimsy that sweetened and consoled – ‘a gossamer world of gilded enchantment’ as Roy Strong soupily put it. ‘Marie Antoinette would have felt at home in any of his settings.’ Like his rival Cecil Beaton, Oliver Messel sums up an era Posterity has not been kind to Messel. Only a little of his art has

The most-watched TV programme in human history isn’t the Moon landings, and it isn’t M*A*S*H; chances are it’s Ramayan, a magnificently cheesy 1980s adaptation of India’s national epic. The show has a status in India that’s hard to overstate. Something like 80 per cent of the entire population watched its original run; in rural areas entire villages would crowd around a single television hooked up to a car battery. When the show ended, omitting the ‘Uttara Kanda’, the fairly controversial last book of the original poem, street sweepers across the country went on strike, demanding the government fund more episodes. The government caved. But while every country has its pieces

Every few years the shade of Edward Burra is treated to a Major Retrospective. The pattern is long established: Edward who? Forgotten genius, sui generis, well known for being unknown save by beardy centenarians and art tarts with ginny voices. Why have I never heard of this man? LGBT-ish avant la lettre, Polari-ish. After the show inhumation beckons again and he will disappear into an obscurity that cannot be relieved until the curatocracy once more lets loose the dogs of hype. George Melly and Dan Farson are no longer around to peal his name and Jane Stevenson’s impeccable and often funny biography suffers from its subject’s being a forgotten genius,

At any one time eighty per cent of the art owned by Britain’s many museums and public art galleries will find itself hidden away in storage. And once it is, it can stay there for years. Yet in these vaults are a wealth of treasures. It’s why I recently launched ‘Everyone’s Art’, which has a simple premise: to get these works out of the storeroom and into community centres, libraries, churches, village halls and schools, so their makers, and what they made, can finally be celebrated. Consider Henry Bright, a friend of the critic, writer and painter John Ruskin. Ruskin paid for Bright to accompany Turner on many of his

Much of Venice’s Giardini this year was as boarded up as a British high street. The Israeli pavilion was empty, apparently awaiting refurbishment. (At the 2024 art biennale, the curators had closed it in the face of pro-Palestinian protests, prompting the latter to demand it should be opened, presumably so they could protest its closure.) The Russian pavilion has been shut, by order of the Biennale, because of the Ukraine war. The Venezuelan pavilion was closed (‘Go look at nature instead,’ said the workman when I approached it.) The Czechoslovakian was shut, the turns taken by the two independent nations faltering during Covid. The French was closed for refurbishment, although

History is full of odd couples: famous but unrelated people who happen to have been born in the same year. 1809: Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. 1926: Queen Elizabeth II and Marilyn Monroe. Yet few historical pairings are as unlikely as the novelist Jane Austen and the painter J.M.W. Turner, born within a few months of each other in 1775. Usually the only time these two cultural icons encounter one another is in our purses or wallets: Turner depicted as a dashing young Romantic on the £20 note, Austen looking demure and doe-eyed (a heavily airbrushed version of the portrait originally sketched by her sister Cassandra) on the £10 note.

The jazz style was the blowsy filling between the noxious crusts of two world wars. More than 30 years passed between its flourishing and its remonikered second coming as art deco, no longer gaudy ephemera, now a legitimate addition to the inventory of fashions. The coinage was initially ascribed to the antique dealer John Jesse. It is, more probably, Bevis Hillier’s. He was a scholar of the style, then organiser of its first retrospective, far ahead of the game, in Minneapolis-St Paul in 1971. The Twin Cities rival Tulsa in their abundance of ziggurats, sunbursts, sans-serif signs (favoured for appearance rather than function), streamlined-everything to effect a quick getaway, bas-relief