Exhibitions

A conservator at Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum was recently astonished to find a tiny grasshopper stuck in the paint of Van Gogh’s ‘Olive Trees’ (1889). The discovery would not have surprised Van Gogh, who complained to his brother Theo in 1885: ‘I must have picked up a good hundred flies or more off the four canvases that you’ll be getting.’ On the evidence of a new exhibition of drawings on the theme of Artists at Work at the Courtauld Gallery, insects are the least of the plein-air painter’s problems: the 19th-century protagonist of Eduard Gehbe’s ‘The startled painter’ has been sent flying by a passing roebuck. Animals aside, there’s the

‘My Acropolis,’ Auguste Rodin called his house at Meudon. Here, the sculptor made a Parthenon above Paris. Surrounded by statues of ‘mutilated gods’, he cast himself as the Phidias of the age. His collection was part cabinet of curiosities, part charnel house. He bought Nile crocodiles and Peking ginger jars, painted sarcophagi and chipped red-figure vases. Crowded among his 6,000 Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Assyrian, Chinese and Japanese objects were his own plasters, bronzes and clay models: hands by the hundred, legs vast and trunkless, arms beckoning, fidgeting, reaching. Isadora Duncan set up her ‘Dionysian’ dance school nearby to teach Hellenic rhythms. In the catacombs of the Rodin Museum of Meudon

A friend of mine once owned a vase by the potter Hans Coper — until, that is, her teenage son had his friends around for a party. It wasn’t clear who knocked it off the shelf, but it was an expensive accident; a similar Coper pot sold last month at auction for almost £400,000. But then the tricky thing about studio pottery is where to put it — in more senses than one. It isn’t just whether it will be safer on the mantelpiece or in a cupboard. There is also the problem of how to categorise the stuff: is it art or is it craft, and what’s the difference?

Think of the work of Claude Monet and water lilies come to mind, so do reflections in rippling rivers, and sparkling seas — but not buildings. He was scarcely a topographical artist — an impressionist Canaletto, even if Venice was among his themes. Nonetheless, Monet & Architecture at the National Gallery is an intriguing experience. Before I saw it, the suspicion crossed my mind that this was the solution to a conundrum that must puzzle many galleries. Namely, how to put together another Monet exhibition without it being the same as all the others? An institution such as the National Gallery could not just borrow a lorry-load of Monets and

Amid the thick of the Crimean war, Florence Nightingale dispatched a plea to the Times deploring the lethal conditions of British military field hospitals. Ten times more soldiers were dying from diseases like cholera and dysentery than from battle wounds. Shocked, the War Office commissioned 49-year-old Isambard Kingdom Brunel to design the world’s first prefabricated hospital. Components were manufactured to Brunel’s specifications in Gloucestershire then rushed to Turkey for erection. He took the commission on 16 February 1855 and fewer than five months later, the new Renkioi Hospital could accept 300 patients (2,200 by March 1856). Infection rates collapsed. Nightingale called it ‘magnificent’. The new architecture of prefab had triumphed.

‘Ding, Clash, Dong, BANG, Boom, Rattle, Clash, BANG, Clink, BANG, Dong, BANG, Clatter, BANG BANG BANG!’ is how Charles Dickens transcribes the sound of 1,200 men building the first iron-clad frigate Achilles at the Royal Dockyard, Chatham, in the 1860s. A Chatham boy, Dickens lived to see — and hear — the age of sail turn into the age of steam, when the creak of ropes, the flap of canvas and the ding of bells gave way to the hiss of steam, the chug of motors and the shriek of whistles. As soundscapes go, both strike the modern imagination as more musical than the roar of road traffic. So they

Digital art is a crowded field. It’s also now older than I am. Yet despite a 50-year courtship, art galleries have been reluctant to allow it more than a toehold in their collections. Things are changing. Take MoMA’s visit to Paris last year. Alongside the Picassos and Pollocks was a very popular final room, made up of a single, beautiful computer-generated animation, in which a huddle of humans tramp across a constantly disintegrating landscape. ‘Emissaries’ (2015–17) is the work of the 33-year-old artist Ian Cheng, who two weeks ago opened his first show in the UK at the Serpentine Gallery. Cheng’s first inspirations were video games like The Sims, and

René Magritte was fond of jokes. There are several in René Magritte (Or: The Rule of Metaphor), a small but choice exhibition at Luxembourg & Dayan, 2 Savile Row W1 (until 12 May), that includes numerous variations, accomplished and disturbing, on similar ideas to his famous ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ painting. ‘L’usage de la parole VI’ (1928) contains two amorphous brown patches resembling mud or merde or molten chocolate. They are labelled as if in a scientific diagram, one with the word ‘miroir’, the other ‘corps de femme’. It’s true that Magritte could be repetitive, but his early paintings are beautiful, and the humour had a serious point. We

By 1930, Pablo Picasso, nearing 50, was as rich as Croesus. He was the occupant of a flat and studio in rue La Boétie, in the ritzy 8th arrondissement, owner of a country mansion in the north-west, towards Normandy, and was chauffeured around in an adored Hispano-Suiza. He stored the thousands of French francs from the sale of his work in sacks deep inside a Banque de France vault, like a ‘country bumpkin who keeps his savings sewn into his mattress’, someone once said. Married since 1918 to one of Sergei Diaghilev’s ballerinas, Olga Khokhlova, Picasso was coming to dominate the art world in a manner no painter has before

Leonard Rosoman is not a well-known artist these days. Many of us will, however, be subliminally familiar with his mural ‘Upstairs and Downstairs’ in the Grand Café at the Royal Academy, painted in 1986 when the artist was in his early seventies. Two worlds are portrayed with a degree of satire — dressy guests arriving for the private view of the Summer Exhibition and below, in sober grisaille, Royal Academy Schools students engaged on life drawing. ‘Upstairs and Downstairs’s wit and perspectival acuity notwithstanding, its status as a mural makes it easy to overlook, an extended splash of colour behind the Café’s lunch counter. Leonard Rosoman is worth rediscovering. He

One of the best things about Beehives, Bobs and Blow-dries — yep, an exhibition about hairdressing — is the reaction of visitors. Some are getting on a bit and their pangs of recognition as they pass 1970s straightening tongs or Carmen heated rollers are evident. One woman exclaimed, as she passed a Ronson hairdryer with its shower-cap hood, ‘Ooh, they were good, they were. We’ve only just got rid of my mum’s.’ A hairdresser called Keith from Wakefield observed of the Beatles era that it was a worrying time to begin with: ‘Nothing happened for about two or three months. Nobody came. We thought we’d lost our business. But it

Looking at the sketchbook of William Whitelock Lloyd, a soldier-artist who joined a P&O liner after surviving the Anglo-Zulu War, I’m reminded why I avoid cruises. On board this India-bound ship were: a ‘man who talks a great deal of yachting shop and collapses at the first breeze of wind’, ‘a successful Colonist’, and ‘the victim of mal de mer who lives on smelling salts’. It would be just my luck to be stuck in the cabin between ‘One of our Flirts’, the busty lady with pretty eyes, and what Lloyd affectionately called ‘Our Foghorns (automatic)’ — two bawling babies. By the late 19th century, ocean liners attracted all sorts,

Walking around the Andreas Gursky exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, I struggled to recall what these huge photographs reminded me of. Gursky has built a career on colossal, panoramic pictures of subjects that are extremely ordinary — the view from a departure lounge of the empty runway at Schiphol airport, for example. Or, yet more exquisitely uninteresting, a wall-sized image of a section of beige carpet in an art gallery. Then I got the connection that had eluded me. These pictures were much like Martin Parr’s little books of Boring Postcards. These are collections of real cards made over the years by the British photographer, with separate volumes devoted to

Peter Paul Rubens thought highly of Charles I’s art collection. ‘When it comes to fine pictures by the hands of first-class masters,’ he wrote from London in 1629, ‘I have never seen such a large number in one place.’ In Charles I: King and Collector the Royal Academy has reassembled only a fraction of what the king once owned, yet even so this is a sumptuous feast of an exhibition. Some of what’s on show will be familiar to an assiduous British art-lover, since it comes from the Royal Collection and the National Gallery. But the sheer concentration of visual splendour is overwhelming and the installation spectacular. The Renaissance, like

Has a more beautiful machine in all of mankind’s fretful material endeavours ever been made than a ’60 Ferrari 250 Granturismo? Go to the Design Museum and decide. I have driven many Ferraris and the experience is always unique. They are alive, demanding, feral, sometimes even violent or truculent. Addictive, too. Once, in Haverfordwest, I arrived sweating and puffing after seven hours in traffic. I parked the 246 GT at the hotel for a moment but then, unable to ignore the hot, seductive car, I got back in and drove up and down the coast road; up and down, up and down. Just because it was there. Kierkegaard thought that

Seventeenth-century Roman art at its fullblown, operatic peak often proves too rich for puritanical northern tastes. And no artist was ever more Baroque than Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the supreme maestro of the idiom. But I love his work, which is why, on a spare afternoon in Rome before Christmas, I strolled over to the Borghese Gallery where the largest array of Bernini sculpture ever assembled is currently on view. Admittedly, the Borghese collection already contains the world’s finest collection of Bernini (1598–1680) and has done so ever since the artist’s lifetime. But on this occasion some 60 loans — including many full-scale marbles as well as paintings and terracotta models