Lucian freud

The artist Malcolm Morley once fantasised about a magazine that would be devoted to the practice of painting just as some publications are to — say — cricket. It would be filled with articles extolling feats of the brush, rather than the bat. ‘Well painted, sir!’ the contributors would exclaim at an especially brilliant display of visual agility. ‘Fine stroke!’ If such a periodical had existed in the late Victorian and Edwardian ages, no one would have been heaped with more praise than John Singer Sargent (1856–1925). Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends at the National Portrait Gallery is filled with mesmerising displays of his skills. There are so many,

‘Love of the human form’, writes the painter John Lessore, ‘must be the origin of that peculiar concept, the Life Room.’ Then he goes on to exclaim on the loveliness of that name. It is indeed a venerable institution with a delightful description: a place devoted to looking at life — or, at any rate, to earnest attempts to depict people without a stitch of clothing. Currently two exhibitions in Norwich — at Norwich Castle Museum and Norwich University of the Arts — by Lessore and another distinguished painter, John Wonnacott, focus attention on this time-honoured practice, apparently remote from the contemporary art world of video, installation and performance. Between

At the opening of Rembrandt: The Late Works at the National Gallery (until 18 January), I met a painter friend of mine in the final room. This was, he said, one of the most magnificent exhibitions he had seen in his entire life, which — considering he is perhaps 70 and a frequent visitor of galleries — was praise indeed (and entirely deserved). Mischievously, I mentioned that he had also been highly enthusiastic about Veronese at the National Gallery a few months ago. ‘Ah, but there is a huge difference between Veronese and Rembrandt,’ he vehemently responded. ‘When you look at a Madonna by Veronese, you see a glamorous model

One of the more exotic attractions at the 1939–40 World’s Fair in New York was Salvador Dalí’s ‘Dream of Venus Pavilion’, which behind its surreal façade — an architectural marriage between Antoni Gaudí and a coral reef — catered to the public’s aquatic fantasies of spume-born goddesses and topless sirens. Something similar is going on behind the cool modernist exterior of Tate St Ives. Aquatopia: The Imaginary of the Ocean Deep is a bottom-trawler of an exhibition that dredges the depths of the human psyche for fishy fantasies. As the show’s catalogue points out, earth’s deepest oceans — the murky regions known, in descending order, as bathypelagic, abyssopelagic and hadal