Painting

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

To bleak, boarded-up Margate — and a salt-and-vinegar wind that leaves my face looking like Andy Warhol’s botched 1958 nose-peel — to see Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’ at Turner Contemporary. The exhibition has been organised by a group of local residents, who selected the exhibits, designed the layout, and wrote the exhibition texts. In ‘The Waste Land’, some of it written in the Nayland Rock seafront shelter, Eliot writes: ‘On Margate Sands./ I can connect/ Nothing with nothing.’ The local research group have connected Eliot’s text with everything — some duds, some successes. For example, in ‘The Fire Sermon’, a gossipy, gripping, ungrammatical female voice says: ‘It’s them pills

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

Lorenzo Lotto’s portraits — nervous, intense and enigmatic — are among the most memorable to be painted in 16th-century Italy, but his fellow Venetians didn’t see it that way. In a letter to Lotto of 1548, the poet and satirist Pietro Aretino wrote that he was ‘outclassed in the profession of painting’ by Titian. Now, though, with an exhibition of his portraits in store at the National Gallery next year, it looks as though Lotto’s time may finally have come. On a bright day this autumn my wife and I went on the trail of this most fascinating and idiosyncratic of Renaissance artists. Our goal was Cingoli, in the foothills

Tove Jansson, according to her niece’s husband, was a squirt in size and could rarely be persuaded to eat, preferring instead to smoke fags and drink whisky. And when she did eat, it was usually salted cucumbers — to go with the drink. You know, this late in life, I may have encountered my role model. We were at the launch of an excellent edition of four books in her Moomin series at the Finnish embassy. London is in the grip of a kind of Moomin madness right now, what with the books, a Moomin event at the South Bank and a new exhibition of Tove Jansson’s artwork at the

The critic and painter Adrian Stokes once remarked on how fortunate Cézanne had been to be bald, ‘considering the wonderful volume that he always achieved for the dome of his skull’. It’s a good joke, and all the better for being perfectly true — as is demonstrated by the superb sequence of self-portraits included in Cézanne Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. These are the finest hairless craniums in the history of art. That, however, is only one of the attractions of the exhibition. This is the most impressive array of work, by one of the greatest of all painters, to be seen in London in more than 20 years.

Leonardo da Vinci thought sculpting a messy business. The sculptor, he pointed out, has to bang away with a hammer, getting covered in the process with a nasty mixture of dust and sweat. In contrast the painter can sit at his easel, dressed like a gentleman, and portray the whole wide world and everything in it. (Michelangelo, not surprisingly, disagreed.) Such spats were by-products of the paragone — a sort of Punch-and-Judy debate, much enjoyed in 16th-century Italy, about which of the arts was the most powerful. Intriguingly, the National Gallery has revived the paragone in one section of its new exhibition, Monochrome. There are no works by Michelangelo or

In the 1880s the young Max Klinger made a series of etchings detailing the surreal adventures of a woman’s glove picked up by a stranger at an ice rink. At a certain point the glove washes up, nightmarishly large, beside a sleeping man’s bed on to which a shipwrecked sailor is desperately hauling himself. Storm-tossed billows merge with rumpled pillows in an image simply titled ‘Angste’. Klinger’s nightmare vision came back to haunt me at the exhibition Tracey Emin, ‘My Bed’/JMW Turner. Yes, you read that right. Since its loan to the Tate in 2015, Emin’s most famous oeuvre has been partnered in exhibitions with the work of Francis Bacon

The first pastry cook Chaïm Soutine painted came out like a collapsed soufflé. The sitter for ‘The Pastry Cook’ (c.1919) was Rémy Zocchetto, a 17-year-old apprentice at the Garetta Hotel in Céret in southern France. He is deflated, lopsided, slouch-shouldered, in a chef’s jacket several sizes too big for him. His hat is askew, his body a scramble of egg-white paint. Soutine painted at least six cooks in their kitchen livery. In their chef’s whites they look like meringues that have not set (‘Pastry Cook of Cagnes’, 1922), îles flottantes that do not float (‘Cook of Cagnes’, c.1924), and, in the case of the ‘Little Pastry Cook’ (c.1921) from the

Where was Degas standing as he sketched his ‘Laundresses’ (c.1882–4)? Did he watch the two women from behind sheets hanging to dry? Or was he hidden by steam from the basins? The laundry women are unselfconscious, unguarded. One reads aloud from a list, calling out shirts, collars, cuffs to be washed and ironed. Another leans over her workbench, staring into the placket of a folded shirt like Narcissus into his pool. Neither is the least bit bothered by the artist making a rapid chalk sketch to be worked up later in pastel. Nor the two men in ‘At the Café de Châteaudun’ (c.1869–71), reading a newspaper with monocle and magnifying

At the heart of Basic Instincts, the new exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London, is an extraordinarily powerful painting of a mother and baby. At one time the ‘Angel of Mercy’ was sold as a greetings card by its owner, the Yale Center of British Art in Connecticut, presumably intended as something you might send your own mother or child. But take a second glance and you might well wonder who bought the card and who they might have sent it to. In Joseph Highmore’s Georgian scene, a young, fashionably dressed woman is splayed across the canvas, her feet in delicate silk shoes, a tiny baby, naked, resting precariously

Stand in front of ‘Fall’, a painting by Bridget Riley from 1963, and the world begins to quiver and dissolve. Something you normally expect to be static and stable — a panel covered with painted lines — undulates and pulses. In addition to just black and white, the pigments actually present, other hues appear and disappear: faintly luminous pinks and greens. To her irritation, the artist was once told, ‘as though it were some sort of compliment’, that ‘it was the greatest kick’ to smoke dope while looking at this painting. The remark, much though it affronted Riley, is wonderfully characteristic of its epoch, the mid-1960s. We usually think of

Last year, Gary Hume made a painting of himself paddling. At a casual glance, or even a longer look, it might not appear to be what it is. What you see is a wrinkled, pinkish surface with a sort of dome of curving green and blueish shapes at the bottom. This, to Hume, is a sort of self-portrait as a child at the seaside. ‘I’m on the beach, I’ve got the ripples going around my ankles making little coloured shapes, and all the sand.’ Hume’s paintings are like that. They may look abstract, but it turns out that they are startlingly real. One from some years ago consists of six

One day, somebody will stage an exhibition of artists taught at the Slade by the formidable Henry Tonks, who considered Cézanne a ‘curiously incapable’ menace, and a cracking show it will be. Until then, we must take what we can from exhibitions like True to Life: British Realist Painting in the 1920s & 1930s. Here, many of Tonks’s pupils, and others schooled with similar exactitude, can at last reclaim their rightful positions in British art after decades in the wilderness, pushed into the shadows by the alpha art of abstraction and the ironies of pop. True to Life is a marvellous show. The portraiture is the stand-out stuff, dominated by