'Kith and Kinship: Norman Cornish and L S Lowry': (Bowes Museum until January 19 2025)

Norman Cornish, Busy Bar,The University Gallery, Northumbria University © the artist's estate. 

Incongruously in the grandiose and distinctly French surroundings of Bowes Museum, Kith and Kinship celebrates the work of two very English, very down to earth artists - Norman Cornish and LS Lowry. Lowry, of course, is a familiar name, one of only a handful of artists who can claim to have inspired a pop song, and something of a cliche with his 'matchstick' figures. Cornish may be less familiar: a miner in the Durham coalfields, he only became a full-time artist at forty-seven. In many respects the two men are poles apart: Cornish was a loving husband, Lowry a loner; Cornish was from a pit village, Lowry originally from suburban Manchester; Cornish was a product of the 'Pitman's Academy', Spennymoor Institute,  whilst Lowry studied under a French Impressionist at Manchester School of Art. Perhaps most crucially, Cornish was an active member of the working class community which he portrayed, whilst Lowry was always an outsider looking in. The Bowes' thorough and well-curated survey points up all these differences, whilst at the same time creating a sense of nuance. If you reduce Lowry to his crowd scenes and factory chimneys then you miss the pictorial expressiveness of his work (so well revealed in the recent Lowry and The Sea exhibition at Berwick's Granary Gallery). If you label Cornish the 'amateur' you miss his subtle referencing of artists of the past and his obvious interest in media and experimentation. 

This is an exhibition of small scale works, including drawings, prints and pastels, and they ripple along the walls, punctuated by the odd larger piece, especially by Cornish, and splashes of wall colour, with protruding flats to create more intimate niches. One such contains a line of images of Cornish's wife carrying out everyday tasks: the wall text references Rembrandt but I was also reminded of Jean Francois Millet's solid yet tender portrayals of the Barbizon peasant community. Cornish conveys the same salt of the earth eternalism. His works are balanced by two Lowry bedroom interiors, the first an age of austerity, middle class and monochrome riff on Van Gogh; the second showing a visit by the doctor. There is a hint of Munch bleakness in the apparently banal everyday scene - recovery does not seem likely.

The curators make significant use of paired images, starting with two self portraits at the start. It is an obvious choice in a dual show but here has unexpected results: Lowry's 1927 The Procession pales alongside Cornish's 1947 view of Durham Gala. It is not just that the later is larger and more colourful, it successfully conveys both the sea-like mass of humanity above which the cathedral towers black in the background and the characterful, just the right side of caricature, foreground close-ups that Cornish is so good at. Lowry's crowd are all isolated in their own space, disconnected and alienated even on a holiday. His best work here foregoes the panoramic in favour of the quirky and the intimate: Meeting Point is divided centrally by a absurdly tall thin building into which assorted figures flow, women one side, men the other. My Two Uncle makes similar use of absurdist symmetry. It's a fine line between the surreal and the just plain cruel,

Cornish's best work has deceptive emotional strength. Busy Bar, one of the largest pieces here, seems painted with beer itself, the fuggy amber warmth of the background juxtaposed with the drown-your-sorrows pints lined up on the bar. The faces are animated, weary, sour; the atmosphere ambiguous. You don't need the pen and ink sketches alongside to believe the authenticity. And you cannot help but see these same figures trudge through the grey cold of Pit Road or agonisingly bent double in Going In-Bye. Facing it Pit Gantry Steps adopts a looser style, Cornish's usual chunky figures replaced by hunched blurs of Lowry-thin miners, lost in the mesh of metal, the noise and steam, dashes of orange as their lamps swing in their hands. The accompanying text quotes the artist remembering what he 'saw and felt as a boy' starting his first shift. All the labelling, along with a wall of videos, treats these works as personal and social history as much as pieces of art and ultimately this is a glimpse into a lost world of heavy industry and smoke blackened towns. 

Kith and Kinship is in many ways an odd title. There is so little of either in Lowry's work and it suggests a nostalgic cosiness which is not at all what Cornish is about. Arguably, too, the artists rarely compliment each other, despite the curators' best efforts. Lowry, for all the fame of his matchstick crowds, excels as an artist of emptiness and oddness. Cornish emerges as an artist of strength and empathy, who deserves to be better known. I wish the exhibition was travelling to a venue down south, if only to prove that where there's muck, the class.

'Akseli Gallen-Kallela: Picturing Finland': (Lower Belvedere, Vienna until Feb 2 2025): Cold Comfort

Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Autumn: Five Crosses (Preliminary work for Jusélius Mausoleum)

Akseli Gallen-Kallela is not a household name in the UK, although visitors the National Gallery may well have fallen for the chilly calm of Lake Keitele with its zigzagging surface striations and weirdly anthropomorphic clouds hanging heavy in the sky. There is another version in the Belvedere's Picturing Finland exhibition which provides a short, but comprehensive account of an artist who was both isolated in his Nordic wilderness and an active participant in early twentieth century modernism. If you start the exhibition knowing little about Finnish art, and about Gallen-Kallela, you will leave wanting to know more. In truth, if you delve deeper you might find yourself disappointed: Gallen-Kallela travelled widely visiting sub-Saharan Africa and North America, and painting what he saw with mixed results. However, as an artist of Finland - the story told here - he was compelling in his use of landscape and folk culture to create poetic, nationalist and deeply personal works. 

Like many Northern European artists in the late years of the nineteenth century Gallen-Kallela gravitated to to the Academie Julien in Paris where he picked up the airy naturalism of Jules Bastien Lepage. His early work focuses on peasant and fishing communities, figures with hands and feet gnarled and oversized by a lifetime of cold, hard work and images of childhood made poignant the knowledge of what their lives would become. But you sense Gallen-Kallela was not a natural Lepageist: figures interested him less than landscape and increasingly the real world interested him less than the symbols and myths he saw represented there. At the same time he was picking up the Arts and Crafts vibe which was sweeping across Europe, linking it, as one sees elsewhere, to a sense of traditional nationhood. William Morris' appropriation of Arthurian legend mirrors Gallen-Kallela's repeated exploration of the Kalevala. Like Morris he explored printmaking, and was working on a massive project to illustrate the folk epic at the time of his death. 

Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Spring, c.1900, Belvedere, Vienna

The exhibition catalogues these divergent, and almost irreconcilable, interests. There are bombastic, overblown and sometimes frankly weird reinterpretations of Finnish myths: The Forging of the Sampo is 1950s Hollywood technicolor, all big moustaches, high drama and uber-masculinity. Yet alongside this you have strong expressionistic landscapes - forests and snow - and dreamily symbolist seascapes. Arguably, Gallen-Kallela never settles to a style: stylised Japanese-inspired branches and flattened surface patterns seem to fight against the more vigorous brushwork which he learnt as a young man in Paris. Arguably too, he is often to heavy-handed: do we really need a broken fir tree to symbolise Russian oppression? But even so, there is a conviction which carries you through these works. No one makes snow as oppressively heavy, no one makes water look quite so chill, icy even when it is still liquid, no one makes spring sunshine quite so welcomely warm. The isolation of that far north, often forgotten corner of Europe, at the time fighting for its self-determination, is palpable. So too is the warmth of home and family, keeping all that literal and metaphoric darkness at bay.

Gallen-Kallela takes British viewers outside their comfort zone, to an alien world of winter darkness and deathly cold. He exploits myths which bamboozled Salon-goers and seem just as incomprehensible to us today. Yet he is a Finnish exponent of pan-European ideas, widely travelled and artistically literate. Japonism, Arts and Crafts, proto-abstraction, symbolism: these are the strands which wind their way through this exhibition. Like John Duncan in Scotland, like Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis in Lithuania, like any number of artists throughout Europe, Gallen-Kallela was exploring ideas of tradition through an aesthetic of modernism. It is that juxtaposition which makes this exhibition so interesting, an ultimately so universal.

Victorian Radicals (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, ongoing): Definitely Victorian, But Radical?

Ford Madox Brown, The Last of England, c.1852–1859, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham

 

Birmingham has some claim to be the centre of Pre-Raphaelitism. It was the birthplace of Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), who, along with William Morris (1834–1896), provided spectacular stained glass for the city’s cathedral. Its School of Art, founded to teach design in 1843, became the UK’s first public art school in 1885. Promoting Arts and Crafts principles, it taught some of the leading figures of late Pre-Raphaelitism. Birmingham’s manufacturers produced ceramics, jewellery, and metalwork, which upheld the ideals of craftsmanship and beauty that the movement championed. The city’s Victorian businessmen and industrialists were some of the first significant collectors of Pre-Raphaelite painting. Most importantly, they supported the Art Gallery, which opened in its present form in 1885, and has amassed a collection of over 2,000 late Victorian works and objects. If you like Pre-Raphaelitism, it is the place to go. Victorian Radicals toured the US as a hugely successful temporary exhibition before Covid. Now back in Birmingham, it is an odd hybrid, essentially a showcase of the gallery’s own holdings, it is being used to lure visitors back after the museum’s four year closure, raise revenue (you are being charged admission for pictures which used to be visible for free) and has already been extended into a semi-permanent display.

The curators, however, have a big idea: to explain to a modern audience just what makes these so old-fashioned and, well, Victorian, looking artworks, so radical. It’s an uphill struggle. The opening display, set against a fashionably intense blue wall colour, features some of the most beautiful images in 19th-century painting. Yet Charles Dickens, writing in 1850, declared works by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to be the ‘lowest depths of what is mean, odious, repulsive, and revolting.’ Despite good captioning, it is tough to look at John Everett Millais‘ The Blind Girl, William Holman Hunt’s (1827–1910) Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus or Arthur Hughes’ (1832–1915) The Long Engagement and see what he was getting at. The PRB’s back to basics ethos - pure colour, precisely observed detail, meaningful subjects – are all there and demonstrated in breathtaking style, but you also have obscure literature, complex symbolism and sentimentality. Occasionally the radicalism creeps in. Hughes’ Nativity, with its abstracted angel wings and claustrophobia, is an entirely new take on an old subject. Henry Wallis’ 1857 Stonebreaker is a furious indictment of poverty for all its lush beauty. Ford Madox Brown completely reinvents the landscape with his oval panorama of An English Autumn Afternoon. However, the exhibition could do far more than their tokenistic examples of William Etty David Cox, to show what the PRB were rebelling against.

Arthur Hughes, The Nativity, 1857–1858, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, UK.

 

Although the PRB itself was short-lived, its influence was immediate and lasting. The following sections of the exhibition examine this by looking at graphic art and sculpture - notably with a newly acquired portrait relief of Millais by Alexander Munro - and new followers: the Sandys siblings, Emma (1841–1877), Frederick (1829–1904) and Simeon Solomon (1840–1905). The changing work of the members themselves is covered, particularly Rossetti’s shift in focus to deeply personal, aestheticist images of women, including a stunning pastel of Fanny Cornforth, Woman with a Fan, from 1870, which has an ethereal softness. There are gaps; for instance, Millais and Hunt’s careers are not followed through and Elizabeth Siddal (1829–1862) is little represented, although thankfully introduced as ‘artist’ rather than muse or model. It is the perhaps inevitable consequence of relying solely on the gallery’s own collections. What is noticeable in these middle sections, is how insular the work quickly becomes: landscapes and social commentary give way to Medievalism and fantasy.

The foil to all this Art for Arts Sake and Aestheticism should be William Morris, who along with his close friend and associate Edward Burne-Jones, carried the torch of the PRB forward. Morris was a romantic socialist who championed the ideal of the Medieval craftsman, of a society that appreciated skill and individual labour rather than factory-driven mass production. While the exhibition has good examples of Morris’ designs and is particularly strong in its use of light-box stained glass, the Arts and Crafts Movement seems too big an area to cover successfully. There are dresses, jewellery, and even a carpet, but they are displayed as individual objects rather than part of a coherent narrative. They become simply more beautiful things, and again, the radicalism, indeed any real intellectual drive, is lost. 

What Victorian Radicals does showcase is the exquisite, labour-of-love book-making of Morris and his circle. Examples of Edward Moxon’s 1857 edition of Tennyson’s Poems and the Kelmscott Press’ Chaucer (1896) are accompanied by original drawings, like Rossetti’s St Cecilia: tiny, dense, and intensely erotic. An uncut woodblock of one of Burne-Jones’ illustrations gives a sense of the painstaking and time-consuming process. Although Edward Burne-Jones was a designer for Morris and Co. and produced his own pieces, like the oversized and luridly gilded Garden of the Hesperides cassone (1888), his art became increasingly detached from the real world. The Pygmalion series which tells a cautionary tale of a sculptor in love with his creation, is shown here in full, with room to breathe on a wall of rich, deep pink, and bolstered by some tenderly soft preliminary sketches. An unsettling quality is never far from Burne-Jones’ work, however, and there is an almost surreal weirdness to his late The Wizard, which seems more attuned to fin-de-siecle symbolism than the sunlit nature and exuberance of early Pre-Raphaelitism.

Kate Elizabeth Bunce, Musica (Melody), 1895–1897, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, UK.

The exhibition’s final section takes the story into the twentieth century with artists and designers mainly from, or trained in, Birmingham. There seems to be a deliberate attempt at celebration: a pale pepperminty wall colouring lightens the mood, and these are works of joyful colour and pattern. However, it is an uneven selection: Kate Bunce (1856–1927) and Joseph Southall (1861–1944) deserve to be better known, but there is an insipid version of Beauty and the Beast by John Dickson Batten. A few judicious loans to include, say, Evelyn de Morgan (1855–1919) or Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (1872–1945) would have helped here. It is easy to dismiss these artists as head-in-the-sand nostalgists, painting scenes of knights, working in tempera, and determinedly ignoring modernity. Yet, if you look at their curving, floral patterns and surface decoration, they display clear links to Art Nouveau and foreshadow the quirky Englishness of later artists like Stanley Spencer. And there is a direct link back to those first aims of purity and simplicity. Working at the time of, and apparently defiantly in the face of, modernist experiment, only the most perverse would describe these artists as Radical. But they are distinctive, unique, and, if you ignore the art historical obsession with 'the new', they are worth seeing in their own right.

Victorian Radicals tries hard to make Pre-Raphaelitism and the Arts and Crafts movement forward-thinking, radical and relevant – there is, for instance, a tagged-on section which looks at works like Ford Madox Brown’s The Last of England as illustrations of contemporary issues (in this case migration). Here it feels like it is trying too hard; elsewhere there is a lack of context, so that if you are visiting without a background knowledge of Victorian academic art it is very difficult to see just what these artists were rebelling against. But even when it doesn’t succeed, Victorian Radicals reveals art and design of beauty, skill, and integrity: art to gladden the soul, and design you want to have in your life. Above all it acts as a potent reminder of the importance of Birmingham Art Gallery, and other local collections. There is great art here, there are unexpected gems; they have produced a spectacular exhibition entirely from their own holdings. I wish them every success with their full reopening.

This is an extended version of a review which appeared in Daily Art Magazine (3.6.24)

'Painted Dreams: The Art of Evelyn De Morgan' (Wolverhampton Art Gallery until March 9 2025): Lulled into a False Sense of Beauty

Evelyn De Morgan, The Storm Spirits, c.1900, De Morgan Foundation

Evelyn De Morgan might not be a household name now, but you get some sense of the clout she must have had in 1907 when Wolverhampton Art Gallery sought her out for the one-woman-show which is being recreated here. Not only was De Morgan a successful artist, but she was a lucky one. Her sister, Wilhelmina Stirling, championed her work, gathering together as much as she could and bequeathing it to what is now the De Morgan Foundation. The Foundation, with no dedicated exhibition space of its own has agreements with three venues, including Wightwick Manor, an Arts and Crafts property on the outskirts of Wolverhampton, now under the care of the National Trust. If you're making a trip to the area to see Painted Dreams, I would definitely advise a stop there, not only has it a gallery dedicated to De Morgan and her husband, the ceramicist, William, but there are fine examples of Evelyn's work in the house collection. It is the existence of the De Morgan collection which has made it possible to gather most of the 1907 pieces together again for this exhibition.

Painted Dreams, a phrase taken from a 1907 review, well describes the curatorial mood-music. You push your way in through a closed doorway and find yourself cocooned within dark walls and bright pools of spotlit colour. It's a clever hang which shows off De Morgan at her best. As an artist who loved intense, modern pigments and iridescent complimentary shadows, and who used gold throughout her career, her works can seem too gaudy in natural light. Here they glow with an inner, ethereal beauty. Yet at the same time, every detail of the Pre-Raphaelite-precise draughtsmanship is crisply visible, from the goldfinch's plumage in Flora to the tapestry weave in the background of Crown of Glory. Pre-Raphaelitism seems the influence too in the abundance of expressionless beauties, the Italianate details of landscape, architecture and costume, the Botticellian weightlessness and sway, the surface finish. There are works which seem to slot seamlessly into the extended canon of art for art's sake Pre-Raphaelitism - full length figures like Helen of Troy, female nudes like the Sea Maiden - and De Morgan's work is often compared to that of Edward Burne Jones. But it is too easy to get lulled into a dream by her art. On the one hand, she was a dedicated workaholic, who learnt her trade at the Slade and continued to ply it throughout her career with a rigorous process of preliminary drawings, some of which are displayed very illuminatingly alongside the finished oils here. On the other, she is less interested in beauty for its own sake than as a means to symbolic and often highly moralising ends.

Evelyn De Morgan, Earthbound, c.1897, De Morgan Foundation

The curators attempt to push this narrative through labelling which consistently emphasises De Morgan's suffragist and pacifist sympathies, and by using the second room to explore these 'Painted Themes'. The connections are often tenuous - Cassandra as a symbol of women's rights - but the most obvious (although perhaps less fashionable) impulse behind De Morgan's art - religion - is largely ignored. Earthbound, features a miserly old king, dressed head to toe in shimmering gold, oblivious of the barren landscape around him and and the angel hovering above, as he grasps pathetically at his hoard of gold. It seems a profoundly religious work, a classic memento mori that underlines gulf between worldly and spiritual wealth, yet the label treats it only as an illustration of patriarchal power. And Earthbound is no outlier. De Morgan returns repeatedly to the theme of mortality (she dabbled, like many of her contemporaries, in spiritualism) and was profoundly uneasy about wealth and inequality. 

The exhibition ends anticlimactically, with a bright, brisk 'tying up the loose ends' display which illustrates, with reproductions, alternatives and new interpretations, the 1907 paintings which couldn't be shown here. The pedant in me appreciated the honesty and the comprehensiveness of the curators but it is an unsatisfactory end, not least because one of De Morgan's glorious gold drawings is wasted in a corner, as a mere illustration of a lost oil painting. The room also underscores the two competing aims of the show. Arguably, a full recreation of 1907 would not attempt a modern reinterpretation of the artist's 'socio-political' themes. Yet the curators are keen to show this well-to-do Victorian as a woman with relevance today.

Painted Dreams is an exhibition full of beauty, but the title implies a kind of emptiness, an insubstantiality. De Morgan's work is the opposite of that. Her labour and skill is visible everywhere: there is a strength and self-confidence in every line she produces, and every colour she chooses. Whether one reads feminism into her work or not, her subjects were carefully chosen and deeply meaningful, exhibited with quotations, references and poems, some of which were inscribed on the canvas. Inevitably, the exhibition provides only a snapshot of the artist's career, which continued for another ten years, but is is a rare chance to see her works, well-displayed, en masse. It is tribute to her work that you leave wanting to see more and know more about her. Evelyn De Morgan is not just a 'woman artist' (even a trailblazing one) but a painter who commands your attention and demands (albeit rather politely) to be taken seriously.

'Paris 1924: Sport, Art and Body' (Fitzwilliam Museum until November 3 2024):

Robert Delaunay, The Runners, c.1924. The National Museum of Serbia

Paris 1924 is as much about social history as art and is all the better for it. There is flickering film of the opening ceremony and grey stills of the spartan athletes' village; there are running shoes and tennis rackets, medals and programmes. None of it is the least bit dry, thanks in part to some of the best labelling I've read in a long time. The curators combine fact, anecdote and opinion in a refreshingly down-to-earth style: this is probably the only occasion you are likely to see the word 'ballsy' in the Fitzwilliam Museum. They counteract the floating elegance of a silk tennis dress by pointing out the sweat stains, a bobsleigh is brought to life with the gossipy titbit that Daphne du Maurier's war-hero future husband was injured competing in just such an unwieldy and weighty wooden contraption. Johnny Weissmuller's extraordinary Olympic record is balanced by a gem of an article from Movie Maker 1932 listing his myriad masculine perfections.

The labelling is just one aspect of a cleverly designed show. Much use is made of blown-up images, too often the fall-back of lazy curation but here a ghostly presence hovering behind the displays. The oversized image of 'Flying Finn' Paavlo Nurmi training in nothing but the briefest of pouches and ballet-like running shoes, hovers like a shadow behind the almost identically posed sculpture of The Athlete by Renée Sintenis. Both have a gravity defying lightness, an elegant fragility alongside the propulsive strength that drives them forward. Turn round and you get a cut through to the iconic St Andrews beach sequence at the start of Chariots of Fire, again with a sculpture -Wäinö Aaltonen's image of Nurmi -  intervening. It is one of the best pieces of exhibition design I've seen this year. The addition of the Vangelis film music might ben too much for some, but it is restrained and only intermittently audible, a knowing nod rather than intrusive annoyance. The large middle room uses an Olympic ring to split the space, generating dynamism and visual interest albeit at the expense of some oddly dingy corners. And throughout you are presented with a neat balance of size and shape, with varied objects, levels and methods of display, keeping everything fresh. The consequence is that in the course of a relatively small space you find out about gender, class, race, sexuality, commercialisation, popular culture and politics almost without noticing. The Paris Olympics of 1924 are no more than a starting point.

Art is woven throughout, from copies of ancient Greek athletes and antique vases which disprove the myth of the ideal physique, to examples of those who actually competed in de Coubertin's cultural olympiad. Not an afterthought or an illustration, it tells its own narratives: the divide between modernism and tradition, the aestheticism of the human body and the perennial difficulty of rendering movement in static form. The examples might unkindly be described as mixed. Robert Delaunay's Runners and George Grosz Gymnast would never be classed as among their major works and Jean Jacoby's clunky Sport Studies paintings do little more than justify the dropping of art from Olympic competition. Alongside these, however, you have the famous - the oxymoronic static weight of Umberto Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space - and the less familiar - Jan Sluijters The Boxer Rolf is slumped in expressionist exhaustion against a jagged blur which makes you feel punch-drunk. Helen Wills is minimised in wire by Alexander Calder and maximised as a staring icon by Diego Rivera.

The Discus Thrower, plaster copy, Museum of Classical Archeology, Cambridge

'Paris 1924' is not curated by art historians, but by two genuine enthusiasts, one a German scholar, one a classicist. It is perhaps that which gives this exhibition such a light yet deft touch. Everything is nuanced, and as a viewer you are gently nudged into pivoting your opinion. Just as you cheer the success of working class Lucy Morton winning Britain's only swimming gold in the 200m breaststroke, having being involved in a car crash on the way pool, you are told that she was reduced to performing at Blackpool Tower Circus. The subtlety is never better than in the investigation of the Diskobolus. Nazi fetishisation of the athletic Aryan physique is a silent menace throughout the show, and here the purposing and repurposing of the iconic Greek sculpture succinctly juxtaposes Johnny Weissmuller and  a Leni Riefenstahl still, before bringing things right up to date with a ten euro coin designed for Paris 2024. It is all you need. The Fitzwilliam Museum can usually be relied on to produce interesting, well-designed exhibitions, to give us unusual perspectives. 'Paris 1924' is one of their best.

'Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider' (Tate Modern until Oct 20 2024): Love, Life and Colour

Wassily Kandinsky, Riding Couple, 1906-7, Lenbachhaus Munich, Donation of Gabriele Münter

Tate Modern's extensive Expressionist exhibition has two clear and admirable aims. The first, set out in the title, is to refocus the group towards its influential but comparatively unknown female members, and to emphasis their role as producers rather than patrons. In this respect, Tate could have been even bolder, ditching Kandinsky altogether - is there really still a need to have a big (male) name in there, as witnessed by last year's Mondrian and Af Klint mash-up? The second aim is immediately obvious from the slightly pedantic labelling: there is a determination to establish the transnational nature of The Blue Rider, away from the traditional idea that it was, alongside The Bridge, one of the twin pillars of pre-War (distinctly) German Expressionism. Artists are labelled by where they were born and where they worked. It is a remarkably effective strategy, reinforcing the internationalism of early twentieth century art and would be a useful model for others to adopt (the RA's current exhibition on Ukrainian art, for example, might benefit from such clarity). 

Such clear ambitions, however, are often disappointingly lost in the course of a sprawling show. The problem is immediately apparent in the opening room. On the one hand you have Wassily Kandinsky's Riding Couple, that jewelled colour which is to characterise the Blue Rider's output leaping out of the canvas. Its folk art inspirations, heavy dotted technique and linear clarity propel you forward into the rest of the exhibition. Yet, alongside this, there is a cul de sac wall of Gabriel Münter's North American photographs: the connection is tenuous, the curators' main aim seems to be position their two 'names' alongside each other.

The first two rooms emphasise these strengths and weaknesses. They are brimful of wonderful paintings but their inclusion is justified by passing friendships, social connections and coincidences of geography rather than aesthetic concerns. The melting pot argument is a persuasive one, and I am all for debunking over-categorisation, but it is easy for everything to descend into a gossipy muddle. Robert Delaunay is never more than a friend of a friend, although his inclusion is justifiable on stylistic grounds. Paul Klee is remembered as a keen violinist who argued with Kandinsky but his art is a peripheral add-on. We get a random section of photographs illustrating the 'Western gaze' thrown in for good measure. There is little chronology, with works dotting about between 1903 and 1916; little sense of how and why these artists influenced each other. Does it matter? Perhaps not. Marianne Werefkin's Self Portrait, August Macke's Promenade, Albert Bloch's Prize Fight: these paintings pack a punch in their own right.

The exhibition meanders through twelve rooms in a similar stop-start style. We have a digression to North Africa, an odd (not very) interactive investigation of optics, a corridor-like display of 'artist as collector'. 'Performing Gender' seems just there as a bit of virtual signalling - there are interesting observations to be made but it feels forced to include, for instance, Werefkin's Skaters here. We wait a long time to see the actual Blue Rider almanac and I'm not sure it's really the grand finale the exhibition deserves. The most successful rooms are the most focused: on Murnau, on 'The Inner Necessity of Art'. The incorporation of sound, specifically the impact that a concert of Schoenberg's music had on Kandinsky, works well but but feels underexploited.

Marianne Werefkin, The Red Tree, 1910, 

Fondazione Marianne Werefkin, Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna, Ascona

What the exhibition does best, perhaps unintentionally, is to highlight how badly served the Blue Rider (like much else) has been by traditional art history. Here, the big names are not the ones you will remember. Franz Marc's Tiger is too prissy, too frozen in it's futurist jungle to be fearsome. Kandinsky's slide towards abstraction produces canvases of fussy calligraphic confusion which have none of the impact of his earlier landscapes. But you will see Werefkin's Red Tree in your dreams; her Storm a haunting nightmare. The self-composed solidity of Elisabeth Epstein's self portrait combines the monumental and the deeply personal. Wladimir Burljuk's sinewy cubo-futurism writhes with life. You can smell the crisp freshness in Münter's outdoor portrait of Werefkin and Jawlensky, whilst her jaunty portraits of him, pink, fat and gleaming, and a leg-warmer-sporting Kandinsky debunk their status with the observational wit of the best caricaturist. 

Sometimes infuriating, definitely in need of pruning, Expressionists is still full of life and love and colour. It is impossible to look at these paintings and their creators through the doleful lens of the First World War, as so many traditional narratives tend to. No poignant nostalgia here. There's too much exuberance, optimism, experimentation and sheer joie de vivre. Perhaps that makes the Blue Rider less 'modernist' but it makes the works so much more compelling. You leave with a spring in your step and a renewed determination seek out new narratives, new artists and ways of thinking about early 20th century art.

'Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920' (Tate Britain until October 13 2024): Maybe Seeing is Believing

Elizabeth Butler, Calling the Roll After An Engagement, Crimea (The Roll Call), 1874, Royal Collection

'Now You See Us' is a statement of intent. It has to deliver. And I'll be perfectly honest: I had my doubts. Despite thorough research by a number of art historians I respect, there is something depressing about a single sex exhibition which offers up a narrative of trail blazers and discoveries. We've been here before, even before Linda Nochlin's celebrated 1971 essay. Women artists might have been patronised and denigrated, thwarted, ignored and forgotten but they always been there to be seen. Equally, there has recently been a spate of similar shows, both abroad (Making Her Mark in USA, Maestras in Spain) and at home, with last year's excellent Fleming Collection survey of Scottish women artists. The Tate exhibition is part of a sizeable bandwagon.

Then there is that decision to include 'women artists in Britain'. This allows the exhibiton of Rosa Bonheur - very popular here, but no more than a holiday-er herself, Edmonia Lewis who might have died in London but whose career was not centred in the UK and Harriet Hosmer who had even fewer connections here. We have long claimed Angelica Kauffman as an honorary Brit, given her status a s a founder member of the Royal Academy, and the exhibition starts with Invention, one of her ceiling panels for their Council Chamber. Equally, the Tate might have pulled off a coup by getting Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting and the recently re-discovered Susannah and the Elders from the Royal Collection, but Artemisia Gentileschi only briefly worked here. She is also one of the most popular artists around, and one can't help wondering whether the 'in Britain' criteria is partly based on a desire to increase the ratio of familiar names and/ or interesting stories.

Mary Beale, Jane Fox, Lady Leigh as a Shepherdess, c.1675, Moyse’s Hall Museum

However, quibbles aside, and despite the title, the exhibition provides a very solid, very thorough retrospective of ‘women artists in Britain'. It lets the art speak for itself - not something which often happens at Tate Britain. It sticks generally to chronology with the odd jump into thematic displays - flowers, photography, watercolour. The labelling is substantial (usefully so as many of these artists will be unfamiliar to most visitors) but avoids the usual pitfalls of describing women's work solely in the context of the men in their lives, and the equal crime of hyperbole about pioneers and feminists. If anything it is all too prosaic. The chronological approach means that the first rooms are dominated by portraiture, initially in the form of miniatures, and there is just too much. Eight works by Mary Beale swamp more interesting examples, like Anne Killigrew's Venus Attired by the Three Graces, and with Three other portraits by Joan Carlile, the inclusion of her copy of William Dobson's Charles I seems unnecessary.

There is the same imbalance in the 18th century room. Too many Kauffman's (especially given the concurrent exhibition at the RA) and eight portraits by Katherine Read, due in part to the decision to split her oil and pastel production. There are also issues of quality control: surely there is little justification for including Frances Reynolds' portrait of Elizabeth Montagu other than to point up the distinction between her career and that of her brother, Sir Joshua. The curators seem unsure how to deal with 'craft' and strike an uneasy balance between highlighting increasing prejudice about 'what ladies do' and sidelining it themselves. The stories behind producers of needlework and watercolour are some of the most compelling in the exhibition but they deserve their own space. There is the same dilemma with the photography section later: it's inclusion here feels tokenist and simply extends an already over-sized exhibition.

The whole room devoted flowers demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of the show. Yes, they are discovering artists, but there are simply too many to fully appreciate, and there are ongoing issues of defining 'professional' artists, and indeed what constitutes an artist at all. It seems perverse to include botanical drawings but ignore book illustration which provided an income for many women artists in the later 19th century. And although it is always possible to complain about omissions in this type of exhibition, the exclusion of Marianne North seems inexplicable. However, this is an exhibition which gathers pace in the second half. The 19th and early 20th century rooms dazzle with the sheer number of names, the variety of works. No artist seems to have more than a couple of examples, with the exception of Laura Knight whose wall of richly assertive Cornish coastal scenes epitomise devil-may-care confidence.

There is such joy in discovery here. So many loans from private collections, including a large number coming from the King, mean that alongside the familiar - Rebecca Solomon's Young Teacher recently saved for the nation and regularly on show at Tate Britain - there is the new: I had never seen her Sherry, Sir? Similarly, Henrietta Rae's Psyche Before the Throne of Venus has been just about visible high on the wall at the Tate for some time but her Bacchante is a revelation: the sugary academicism of the first, already so much livelier at eye eye level, replaced by sketchy, flattened patterning in the second. Whilst Elizabeth Butler's Roll Call seems slightly diminished in the flesh (I had always imagined a more Courbet-esque realism to it), Lucy Kemp Welch's horses audibly pound out of the canvas. And for those not familiar with the new galleries at the Imperial War Museum, the First World War paintings, particularly Anna Airy's, are devastating in their strength and evocative observation.

Anna Airy, Shop for Machining 15-inch Shells: Singer Manufacturing Company, Clydebank, Glasgow, 1918, Imperial War Museum

'Now You See Us' (and us, and us) is arguably too big, too ambitious, too amorphous to succeed. It takes four hundred years of artists who have nothing in common beyond their gender and tries to meld them together. No one would attempt a comparable show of male producers and it feels wrong that anyone felt the need to do it with women. The one thing it does very successfully if debunk the myth of a feminine aesthetic, for these artists tackled every subject in every possible way. And there is no sense that these are 'second-rate' painters: critics who have complained about variable quality seem to have conveniently forgotten that that is always the case. Now let's move on. Forget the trailblazer, 'gosh, there's a woman!' narrative and start to treat these artists like they always wanted to be treated. As equals.