Painting

Why were the Scots so much better at painting than the English?

This exhibition is awash with luscious brushstrokes, but then that’s to be expected: it’s full of Scottish painting. Before the barren era of conceptual art, which most hope is over, people often observed that the Scots could paint while the English could draw. Why is a bit of mystery, but it was true right through the 18th and 19th centuries and well into the 20th. The Dovecot Studios exhibition opens with John Duncan Fergusson’s portrait of his lover and first muse, Jean Maconochie, painted about 1902. It’s a fabulous eyeful of brush marks. Her pale pink, oval face nestles under her black billowing locks, flanked by two glowing pearls dropping

Why is the National Portrait Gallery’s collection so poor?

The recent announcement that the National Portrait Gallery has purchased two works by Sonia Boyce and Hew Locke for its collection came as something of a shock. The surprise? The art was actually good. Boyce’s quarterised collage ‘From Someone Else’s Fear Fantasy (A Case Of Mistaken Identity? Well This Is No Bed Of Roses) To Metamorphosis’ (1987), reminiscent of an enlarged and doodled upon set of passport photographs is a complex work of art made better the more attention you give it; Locke’s maximalist approach with the bust ‘Souvenir 17 (Albert Edward, Prince of Wales)’ (2024) may not be to everyone’s taste, but his sculpture is full of humour and

Melanie McDonagh

The two young women who blazed a trail for modernism in Ireland

In 1921, the sternly abstract cubist Albert Gleizes opened the door of his Parisian apartment to two young women in their twenties, the Irish artists Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett. They explained that they wanted him to teach them his method of ‘extreme cubism’. He wasn’t sure that he had a method, nor whether it was teachable. They were inexorable. Their gentle voices and their tenacity, he wrote later, terrified him, and he capitulated. They had accepted his pronouncements on ‘painting without subject’; now they wanted to know how. They were to be trailblazers for modernism in the newly independent Ireland, Jellett as a painter and Evie as both painter

Why was this fêted Mexican painter left out of the canon?

Think of a Mexican painting, and chances are you’ll conjure up an image of an eyebrow-knitted Frida Kahlo, or a riot of exotic figures by her husband Diego Rivera, or a brightly coloured guitarist by Rufino Tamayo. What you’re unlikely to have in mind is an earthy landscape with a dusty road leading to a nascent city, dotted with hyper-real plant life, and an eagle soaring under a vast, cloudy sky. This is ‘The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel’ (1877), the finest work by a painter who was a household name in Mexico long before Kahlo, Rivera or Tamayo. And from next week, it and many

If ‘wokeness’ is over, can someone tell the Fitzwilliam Museum?

Optimists believe that the tide of ‘wokeness’ is now ebbing. If so, the message has not yet reached Cambridge, whose wonderful university museum has its classical façade covered in sententious phrases in neon, and which has recently opened a new exhibition in agit-prop style: Rise Up: Resistance, Revolution, Abolition. Such activism is fully in step with the Museums Association, the curators’ club that instructs its members to turn their institutions into activist cells. If all this makes its founding benefactor Viscount Fitzwilliam turn in his grave, all the better: he is stigmatised as a profiteer from the slave trade, even before one reaches the cloakroom. The same accusation was made

‘The possibilities of paint are never-ending’: Sir Frank Bowling interviewed

‘I’m full of excitement waiting for this to dry out,’ Sir Frank Bowling exclaims. We are sitting in his studio, a room in a quiet Victorian yard that survives amid the tower blocks of Elephant and Castle. In front of us a semi-finished canvas – a glorious welter of yellow and orange in diverse modulations – is pinned to the wall. It’s executed in acrylics, a water-based material. Bowling, like Turner – one of his heroes – believes in using buckets of water, sometimes more or less literally. ‘I don’t always use conventional tools to mark the surface,’ he confides. ‘Sometimes marks are made by a brush, sometimes by simply

The art of sexual innuendo

Paula Rego’s 2021 retrospective at Tate Britain demonstrated that, among art critics, ambiguity is still highly prized as a measure of merit. Martin Gayford: ‘No one, including its creator, can be aware of everything that’s going on.’ Laura Cumming at least gave examples. Of ‘The Cadet and his Sister’ (1988), she commented: ‘Bondage – physical, emotional, familial – is always in the air.’ The adjectives in that nervous parenthesis are insurance, the critic spreading her bets. The picture shows an older, bigger sister, formally dressed, with her cadet brother in uniform, wearing white ceremonial gloves. Behind them, a careful vista of trees. The painting depicts a milieu of public formality.

The true birthplace of the Renaissance

The baby reaches out to touch his mother’s scarf: he studies her face intently, and she focuses entirely on him. There is connection; there is familiarity; there is love. It could be one of the pictures on my phone from last weekend of my daughter with her six-month-old. In fact, it dates from Tuscany c.1290, and the mother and child are the Virgin Mary and Christ. It’s a small painting, tempera on wood; it’s the opener of the National Gallery’s new blockbuster, Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350; and it’s there to make the show’s fundamental point, which is that its creator, the Sienese Duccio, introduced many of the painterly

The greatest paintings are always full of important unimportant things

Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection, at the Courtauld, consists of a selection of 25 absorbing paintings chosen from 207. I was disappointed but not surprised that one of the greatest paintings in the world, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ‘Die Anbetung der Könige im Schnee’ (The Adoration of the Kings in the Snow, 1563), didn’t make the journey from Winterthur in Switzerland. Too precious to put at risk. There is no requirement for a collector to accumulate thematically consistent paintings. Whim, availability, opportunism, taste, connoisseurship, pleasure, accident, catholicity all play their part. The Oskar Reinhart collection is gloriously heterogeneous, a series of bonnes bouches. What is it,

In defence of Jack Vettriano

The death of the painter Jack Vettriano at the age of 73 is sure to delight at least one art critic: the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones. Jones has consistently attacked the creator of The Singing Butler, Britain’s best-selling single image, as ‘brainless’ and ‘not even an artist’. He derided his work as ‘a crass male fantasy that might have come straight out of Money by Martin Amis.’ Nor is he alone. The Daily Telegraph sneered that Vettriano was ‘the Jeffrey Archer of the art world’, and the director of the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art refused to include his work in the collection, saying, ‘I’d be more than happy to say

The plain-speaking bloke from Warrington who painted only for himself

We don’t all get to achieve what we could have achieved in life. And yes, I know, so what? Tough luck. Cry me a river, build me a bridge and get over it. But, like it or not, some people really do have the odds stacked more heavily against them than others and yet somehow carry on regardless. In The Secret Painter, the scriptwriter Joe Tucker (Parents, Big Bad World) tells the true story of his Uncle Eric, born in 1932 – an ordinary man who never gave up. Let’s be honest, The Secret Painter could have been absolutely terrible. I mean, it sounds like a bad idea: a biography

‘Innovation is not enough’: meet visionary English painter Roger Wagner

In the side chapel of the church of St Giles’, at the northern apex of the historic Oxford thoroughfare, hangs a remarkable painting. ‘Menorah’ (1993) depicts the (now demolished) Didcot power station with its six massive cooling towers and central chimney stack as the setting for the crucifixion; Christ and the two thieves are set against the minatory bulk of the huge industrial buildings while other figures, lamenting and covering their faces, occupy the foreground. It is haunting and profound, an appalling vision but also a beautifully realised one – the work of a master of his craft. For Wagner, art should never be ‘one person thick’. He believes in

The rediscovery of the art of Simone de Beauvoir’s sister

An exhibition of the art of Hélène de Beauvoir (1910-2001), sister of the great Simone, opened in a private gallery near Goodge Street last week. It was the first time Hélène’s work had been shown or received any attention in London, and young people in alternative clothing gathered to sip orange wine and listen, rapt, to the 75-year-old biographer and friend of the de Beauvoir sisters, Claudine Monteil, as her recollections helped elucidate Hélène’s abstract paintings. The reclamation of a new ‘lost’ artist was under way. De Beauvoir’s cubist self-portrait is quite good – but ‘Simone in red jacket’ must never be seen It is possible, these days, for gallerists

Was Brazil the real birthplace of modernism?

A paradox of art history: to understand the artists of the past, it helps to study how, and where, they conceived of the future. If today we foresee the future in the East, previous generations looked westward. In the last century, Europeans, having inherited a seemingly aged and decrepit civilisation, determined that the future of art was to be found in the New World. That much is well known. But this did not always mean America. Indeed, the true cognoscenti had a different country in mind: Brazil. Brazil’s modernists proudly integrated all traditions – European, Amerindian, African, Asian For the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, it was Brazil that was the

Tirzah Garwood just isn’t as good as her husband

Tirzah Garwood, wife of the more famous Eric Ravilious, is having a well-deserved moment in the sun, benefiting from this era of equality in which artists’ and composers’ wives and sisters (such as Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn and Elizabeth Siddal) are having the spotlight shone on their under-appreciated works. It’s not profound art but it’s a pleasure to look at, created to delight all ages Garwood is not quite as good as Ravilious, in the same way that Clara and Fanny are not quite as good as Robert and Felix, but she is nonetheless a pleasure to encounter, with an infectious, playful delight in everyday sights of her time, such

The otherworldly artist who made his name at The Spectator

There is something otherworldly about Rory McEwen’s paintings of plants, leaves and fruit. They are indisputably beautiful, often breathtakingly so, but they are almost eerie in their self-possession. They are like planets vibrating to the music of the spheres – quivering with arrested energy. These images are super-real (rather than surreal) but they sometimes have a surreal edge that can be disturbing. ‘I paint flowers as a way of getting as close as possible to what I perceive as the truth’ Although best known for painting these botanical watercolours on vellum, Mc-Ewen (1932–82) was a man of many parts: an extraordinarily talented figure, a poet and broadcaster, a folk and

We’ve got Francis Bacon all wrong

You have to hand it to the curators of this excellent survey of Francis Bacon’s portraits. Not only have they alighted at an obvious but under-explored vantage point from which to reconsider this most mythologised of postwar painters, securing some serious loans to make their point, they have also dared to open their show with what might be the single worst picture it contains. ‘Self Portrait’ (1987) speaks of everything that Bacon got wrong in his final decades: it’s recognisably the 78-year-old artist, dressing up as a younger version of himself. His lips are pursed, his face pockmarked with a spray of tiny red dots, his pate capped with a

How a single year in Florence changed art forever

The story goes that one day early in the 16th century Leonardo da Vinci was strolling through Florence with a friend. Near the Ponte Santa Trinita they came across a group of gentlemen disputing a point in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Seeing Leonardo, they asked him to explain the passage. At that same moment, Michelangelo Buonarroti also happened to hurry by, and Leonardo beckoned the sculptor over to interpret it for them. But Michelangelo, feeling he was being mocked, rounded on Leonardo: ‘Explain it yourself, you who tried to cast a horse in bronze, and couldn’t do it, and had to abandon the project in shame!’ With that he turned on

The triumph of surrealism

When Max Ernst was asked by an American artist to define surrealism at a New York gathering of exiles in the early 1940s, he pointed across the room at André Breton and said: ‘That is surrealism.’ Even today it can seem as if no other answer is available, so tenacious was his grip. A former student of neurology and psychiatry, with no qualifications other than an instinct for the coming thing (‘an astute detector of the unwonted in all its forms’, as he later described his fellow conspirator Louis Aragon), Breton encountered the early writings of Freud as a medical orderly on a trauma ward, during the first world war,

Fog, tea and full English breakfasts: Monet and London, at the Courtauld, reviewed

For the maids on the top floors of the Savoy, everything was in turmoil. The 6th had been commandeered by wounded Boer War officers, and since February 1900 a suite of rooms on the 5th had been taken over by a French painter, who was using one as a studio. The officers were nice enough, but the Frenchman spoke almost no English and you could smell the turps down the corridor. Whatever was the management thinking? ‘Without the fog, London wouldn’t be a beautiful city. It’s the fog that gives it its magnificent breadth’ What the management was thinking was that the Frenchman was an internationally famous artist and the