Venice

Walter Sickert was once shown a room full of paintings by a proud collector, who had purchased them on the understanding that they were authentic Sickerts. The painter took one look around, then announced genially, none of these are mine, ‘But none the worse for that!’ Were Giorgione to return to life, and take a stroll around the Sackler Galleries at the Royal Academy, he might echo those words. Few of the works on show, in all probability, were actually executed by Giorgione, but they are none the less magnificent for that. This is — wisely — not an exhibition that attempts to reassemble the artistic personality of that enigmatic

On 7 February 1506, Albrecht Dürer wrote home to his good friend Willibald Pirckheimer in Nuremberg. The great artist was having a mixed time in Venice: on the one hand, as Dürer explained, he was making lots of delightful new acquaintances, among them ‘good lute-players’ and also ‘connoisseurs in painting, men of much noble sentiment and honest virtue’. However, there was also a very different type lurking in the early 16th-century Serenissima: ‘the most faithless, lying, thievish rascals such as I scarcely believed could exist on earth’. Dürer hints that among these latter were painters, perhaps including some whose works will be seen in a forthcoming exhibition at the Royal

The Accademia is one of the smallest of the world’s great art galleries, and picture for picture perhaps the most concentrated collection of masterpieces anywhere — though its rambling layout may surprise first-time visitors. But there are changes afoot as it expands into spaces once occupied by the Venice Fine Arts Academy. This means more works on permanent display and larger special exhibitions. In the days of the Venetian Republic, the city saw no reason to have a public picture gallery. Paintings were everywhere: in the Doge’s Palace, administrative buildings, churches, chapels, monasteries, convents, hospitals, orphanages, confraternity houses and in hundreds of private palazzi. But after Napoleon’s overthrow of La

If Julian, Dick, George and Anne had become terrorists they’d have called themselves The Angry Brigade. It’s such a Wendy house name. The quartet of violent outcasts met in a Camden squat in the late Sixties and moved to Stoke Newington where they rented a house to deflect unwanted attention. They began planting bombs around London in the hope of jerking the proles from their consumerist trance and sparking a communist war. They preferred catchy locations for their fireworks: the Albert Hall, a BBC film unit, an MP’s garden. And it took the cops ages to track them down and sling them in jail. James Graham’s new play uses a

As a purveyor of lairy souvenirs Venice outdoes even Lourdes. The scores of shops and booths that peddle this lagoonal kitsch are manned by graduates of hard-sell whose market-barker schtick does not need to include descriptions as their goods are self-explanatory. Every other year they coexist with a different sort of operation: the galleries, ateliers, showrooms and studios of the Biennale. And with them an ever-burgeoning cadre of soft-sell operatives, who compose the hieratic order of the curatocracy. There is no piece of approximate art or workshopped event that cannot be curated just as there is no foodstuff that cannot be sourced. At a recent ‘ideas festival’, I was enjoined

It is true that, like wine, certain artists don’t travel. Richard Diebenkorn, subject of the spring exhibition in the Royal Academy’s Sackler Wing, is a case in point: an American painter who is revered in his native land, but of whom few will have heard over here. Will the RA show change that, and — more crucially — does it deserve to? Up to a point. Diebenkorn (1922–93) was no Mark Rothko or Willem de Kooning. He was a second-generation abstract expressionist, almost two decades younger than those two, and a lower-voltage talent to boot. But he created some memorably beautiful pictures, most of the best of them situated in

‘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

What does an artist do with work that isn’t quite up to his or her standards? Throw it out? Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg both tried that, putting artworks they didn’t like out with the trash, only to find them on sale in galleries a few years later. Some artists preemptively destroy works they don’t like. ‘There’s enough bad art in the world,’ Indiana painter Charles Mundy said. ‘I want to spare the public bad art, especially if it’s mine.’ The solution for most artists is just to keep their misfires in storage, which only postpones a decision. The question becomes trickier when the artists are dead, and a current exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan