Painting

Without a model, Moroni could be stunningly dull. With one, he was peerless…

Giovanni Battista Moroni, wrote Bernard Berenson, was ‘the only mere portrait painter that Italy has ever produced’. Indeed, Berenson continued, warming to his theme, ‘even in later times, and in periods of miserable decline, that country, Mother of the arts, never had a son so uninventive, nay, so palsied, directly the model failed him’. It was a harsh judgment, but the great connoisseur inadvertently managed to put his finger on exactly what was so marvellous about his victim. A splendid exhibition at the Royal Academy triumphantly demonstrates that when Moroni actually did have a model in front of him, he was one of the most remarkable painters of later 16th-century

Egon Schiele at the Courtauld: a one-note samba of spindly limbs, nipples and pudenda

One day, as a student — or so the story goes — Egon Schiele called on Gustav Klimt, a celebrated older artist, and showed him a portfolio of drawings with the abrupt query, ‘Do I have talent?’ Klimt looked at them, then answered, ‘Much too much!’ One gets an inkling of what Klimt was getting at from the feverishly intense work on show in Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude. From childhood, Schiele drew with manic fluency. His father, a syphilitic stationmaster, was irritated to discover that a sketchbook, a gift to the boy intended to last for months, had been filled in less than a day. In 1906, at the

The pop artist whose transgressions went too far – for the PC art world

Allen Jones (born 1937) has been demonised. In 1969 he made a group of three sculptures of scantily-clad female figures. They were slightly larger than life and arranged in positions that enabled them (with the addition of a glass top or padded seat) to be turned into a table, a chair and a hat stand. These super-mannequins were highly modelled, wigged and leather-booted, and unavoidably realistic. When first exhibited in 1970 they provoked outrage among the feminist community. Jones’s 1978 retrospective of graphic art at the ICA caused a near riot even though the sculptures weren’t shown. In 1986, when the chair went on display, it had acid thrown over

How Rothko become the mythic superman of mystical abstraction

Mark Rothko was an abstract artist who didn’t see himself as an abstract artist — or at least not in any ‘formalist’ sense. If a critic called him a ‘colourist’, he would bristle; if they admired his sense of composition, he would complain that this was not what he was about at all. His was an art of deep content, his subject an invocation of the religious, the tragic, the mythic. ‘The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them,’ he once famously said. ‘And if you, as you say, are moved only by their colour relationships, then you miss

Mr Turner: the gruntiest, snortiest, huffiest film of the year – and the most beautiful too

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/apollomagazine/Apollo_final.mp3″ title=”Tom Marks, editor of Apollo magazine, talks to Mike Leigh”] Listen [/audioplayer]Mr Turner may be the gruntiest film of the year, possibly the gruntiest film ever. ‘Grunt, grunt, grunt,’ goes Mr Turner (Timothy Spall) as he sketches, paints, gropes his housekeeper, woos a Margate landlady, winds up John Constable something rotten. But what I now know is that when you have Spall doing the grunting, and Mike Leigh at the helm, as both writer and director, such gruntiness can be quite sublime, as can snorting and huffing. This is a biopic of the painter J.M.W. Turner, ‘master of light’, and the greatest painter that ever lived according to

Tate Modern’s latest show feels like it’s from another planet

‘Some day we shall no longer need pictures: we shall just be happy.’ — Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, 1966 Who says Germans have no sense of humour? OK, so their writers tend to be a pretty gloomy bunch — but like loads of other German artists, from Otto Dix to Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke’s paintings are illuminated by a dry, mordant wit. It’s encapsulated in an early doodle called ‘Mona Lisa’ (1963), which hangs near the entrance to this hugely enjoyable retrospective — the first comprehensive survey of his eclectic, eccentric work. ‘Original value $1,000,000,’ reads the handwritten caption. ‘Now only 99c, including frame.’ That Polke’s pictures now sell

All my doubts about Anselm Kiefer are blown away by his Royal Academy show

In the Royal Academy’s courtyard are two large glass cases or vitrines containing model submarines. In one the sea has receded, dried up, and the tin fish are stranded on the cracked mud of the ocean floor. In the other, the elegantly rusted subs are mostly suspended like sharks in an aquarium: a fleet in fact, all pointed in the same direction. These works are the visitor’s first sight of the vast and glorious exhibition by Anselm Kiefer (born Germany, 1945) currently occupying the main galleries of Burlington House, and they are apparently related to his interest in the Russian poet and futurist Velimir Khlebnikov. At once we are confronted

Tate Britain’s Turner show reveals an old master – though the Spectator didn’t think so at the time

Juvenilia is the work produced during an artist’s youth. It would seem logical to think, therefore, that an artist’s output during their old age would be classified as ‘senilia’. Yet no such word exists. But how else to classify the three blockbuster exhibitions this year that deal with Matisse, Turner and Rembrandt’s late work? These titans produced some of their finest art during old age. The exuberance of Matisse’s cut-outs are all the more astonishing given that they were produced not in the first bloom of life but rather in the dying embers of it. Rembrandt’s late works — on display at the National Gallery from October and discussed by

Why everyone loves Rembrandt

Talking of Rembrandt’s ‘The Jewish Bride’ to a friend, Vincent van Gogh went — characteristically — over the top. ‘I should be happy to give ten years of my life,’ he exclaimed, ‘if I could go on sitting here in front of this picture for a fortnight, with only a crust of dry bread for food.’ Without undergoing such rigours, visitors to Rembrandt: the Late Works at the National Gallery next month will be able to see the picture that drove Vincent to such a paroxysm of enthusiasm, along with many other masterpieces from the artist’s last years. It may be that in recent decades other 17th-century masters — Caravaggio

‘I like vanished things’: Anselm Kiefer on art, alchemy and his childhood

At the entrance to Anselm Kiefer’s forthcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy visitors will encounter a typically paradoxical Kiefer object: a giant pile of lead books, sprouting wings. When I asked Kiefer to explain this strange object, he immediately — and characteristically — began talking about alchemy. Lead, of course, was the material from which alchemists hoped to make gold. ‘But at the beginning,’ Kiefer explained, ‘it wasn’t just a materialistic idea, it was a spiritual one: to transform matter into a higher spiritual state.’ So, I suggested, in a way all art is alchemy: transforming one substance — paint and canvas, for example — into something else entirely. ‘Yes,

Ali Smith’s How to be Both: warm, funny, subtle, intelligent – and baffling

Pity the poor art historian writing a survey of painters from Giotto to, say, Poussin. In order to produce a history that is as gender-balanced as possible it is absolutely necessary to include every woman painter ever heard of, some perfectly worthy of their place, some less so. How the art historian might envy the novelist who at the stroke of a pen can change the sex of a little-known 15th-century painter — Francesco del Cossa, say — from male to female. Make the painter in question a woman disguised as a man, make her story the product of a teenager’s imagination and the trope is not only complete but

Futurism’s escape to the country

Futurism, with its populist mix of explosive rhetoric (burn all the museums!) and resolutely urban experience and emphasis on speed, was a force to be reckoned with (at least in Italy) for longer than one might imagine. It was launched in Paris in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, poet and performer, a superb propagandist for the movement he effectively founded, and it managed to survive the upheavals of the first world war, continuing into the 1920s. (Some say it lasted until Marinetti’s death in 1944.) Besides the core figures of Boccioni, Carrà, Balla and Severini, there were a number of other artists closely involved in Futurism, one of whom was

How Richard Wilson made Wales beautiful

‘I recollect nothing so much as a solemn — bright — warm — fresh landscape by Wilson, which swims in my brain like a delicious dream,’ wrote Constable of his encounter with the Welsh artist’s ‘Tabley House, Cheshire’ after he visited the gallery of that house owned by Sir John Leicester. Recalling this epiphany, Constable went on to say of Richard Wilson: ‘He was one of the great appointments to shew to the world what exists in nature but which was not known till his time.’ Turner, too, was an ardent Wilson admirer and as a young man set out on a reverential pilgrimage to Wales, seeking out his birthplace

Dear Mary: How can I tame my brother’s savage table manners?

Q. I live far away from my brother and his family, but went to stay with them recently for the first time in many years. Having supper was like eating a meal with the starving. Brother, wife and their young teenager hunched down low in order to be nearer to their large plates of stew, which they ingested by noisy slurping and eating off both forks and knives, scraping the plates clean intently and, in my brother’s case, lifting plate to mouth to make sure the last bit of gravy went unwasted. Sister-in-law holds knife and fork like pencils. Child is learning the same. My mother would have been horrified

The age of the starving artist

What remains of art is art, of course; and what chiefly interests us is the creative talents of a painter or a sculptor. What we forget is that the work of art wouldn’t be there without some kind of engagement with the brutal forces of money. James Hamilton’s riveting book is a richly detailed study of how, in Britain in the 19th century, artists and a small army of opportunists, art lovers, collectors and businessmen of all sorts used their ingenuity to turn the visual arts into money. ‘The business of art, when seen in the perspective of the time, does not always reflect the course of art history as

The mathematical revolution behind ‘the greatest picture in the world’

It seems odd to enter a room dominated by what Aldous Huxley famously called ‘the greatest picture in the world’ to find not another soul there. Looking down from an end wall of the mediaeval civic hall in the quiet little Tuscan town of Borgo San Sepolcro, Piero della Francesca’s ‘Resurrection’ is an image of astonishing power, showing a stern-faced risen Christ stepping out of his tomb in the dawn light of the first Easter morning like an unstoppable force of nature, exuding supernatural authority as he turns the leaves on the trees behind him from wintry death to the new life of spring. This is a painting like no

Ladies’ hats were his waterlillies – the obsessive brilliance of Edgar Degas

Lucian Freud once said that ‘being able to draw well is the hardest thing — far harder than painting, as one can easily see from the fact that there are so few great draughtsmen compared to the number of great painters — Ingres, Degas, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, just a few.’ Christopher Lloyd’s new study of Degas’s drawings and pastels, with over 200 beautifully reproduced illustrations, demonstrates that Edgar Degas (1834–1917) deserves his place on that list. And more than that, it shows that for him there was no distinction between painting and drawing. In his art these categories so blur together that it is hard to say whether certain pictures

Do critics make good artists? Come and judge ours

Artists make good critics, but do critics make good artists? It’s hard to tell, when most are too chicken to try. For over 20 years, Spectator critic Andrew Lambirth has been making collages. He caught the habit from the British Surrealist Eileen Agar in the late 1980s and kept it private, until forced to go public last year when Eileen Hogan selected six of his works for The Discerning Eye. Now 20 are going on show at the Minories in Colchester in a joint exhibition with his friend and fellow Suffolk resident Maggi Hambling (8–14 March, closed Sundays). Hambling’s contribution to the show is a new five-day series of paintings

A spirit to warm Bruegel’s ‘Hunters in the Snow’

The ostensible subject matter is misleading, as is any conflation with his lesser relatives’ wassailing peasants and roistering village squares. But Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s work is profoundly serious. It has a formidable intellectual content, a Shakespearian emotional range: a sardonic and stoical view of the human condition. There are paintings — ‘The Triumph of Death’, ‘The Blind Leading the Blind’ — which descend from Hieronymus Bosch. There is also the marvellous ‘Fall of Icarus’. According to recent scholarship, the version we have is not a Bruegel, but a later copy. That is plausible; it looks later. Yet the composition is classic Bruegel. He would be drawn to any legend expressing

Painting Now doesn’t represent painting now. Thank goodness

The death of painting has been so often foretold — almost as frequently as its renaissance — that any such prediction today is nothing short of foolhardy. Of course, painting is alive and well and living in London, but you wouldn’t know that from the current exhibition of five artists at Tate Millbank. (By the way, this is a paying display, the regular admission fee being £10. Not surprisingly, it was deserted when I visited. This sort of show, to do its job properly and communicate to the public at large, should be free.) According to the press release, each of the five artists ‘has adopted an approach to painting