'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.

'In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900–1930s' (Royal Academy until October 13 2024): Bright Colours, New Names

Oleksandr Bohomazov, Sharpening the Saws, 1927, National Art Museum of Ukraine

Defiance is in air at the RA. It's there in the title of the exhibition: 'The Eye of the Storm'; in the bright wall colours; in the introductory explanation about the spelling of artist names. It is hard not to get caught up in the emotion when you hear that many of the works themselves are effectively refugees from the Russian invasion, smuggled to safety in the early days of the war. But when you start looking at the art, you see a different story. And when you start to unravel the history you wonder if the nationalist, self-determinist subtext is really what these works are about. The start of the twentieth century was geo-politically messy and Modernism went out of its way to be deliberately transgressive, including of state boundaries. 

Thankfully, this is the RA where wall texts tend to be minimal and unpreachy and the focus is on aesthetics rather than politics. It can be frustrating, in an exhibition where most names are unfamiliar, to search round the room for the one label which gives you some basic biographical information. But ultimately the curators let the art speak for itself - and it does so, loudly and clearly.  The song is one of modernism rather than nationalism but that does not make it any less compelling. These artists are a very international bunch. Sonia Delaunay is included in the show, by dint of her birth, although she was brought up in St Petersburg and was Paris-based throughout her adult career. Alexander Archipenko similarly left Ukraine for good at the age of nineteen. Many of the others travelled widely - Exter's landscapes reference Genoa and Sevres - and most spent time living, training and working in Russian territory.

The exhibition keeps trying to bring things back to nationalism and identity. There is a lot of text about folk art and traditional craft but it is not overtly reflected in the works on display. The importance of embroidery in Exter's art and her practical promotion of Ukrainian handicrafts  surely deserve more attention. The section on the Kultur Lige talks about 'synthesising Jewish cultural tradition' but it is difficult to see the evidence in the swirling abstractions of El Lissitzky and Sarah Shor. And then there is the complex issue of rural life, an early twentieth century identity trope in any number of countries. Works like Oleksandr Bohomazov's Sharpening the Saws see it co-opted by the Soviet Union, bright coloured labour albeit subversively ambiguous and modernist, but the display gives little sense of earlier iterations, and consequently little context.

Alexandra Exter, Composition (Genova), 1912

If you ignore the labelling, however, and focus on the visuals, this is a feast of artistic experimentation, cross-pollination and individual idiosyncrasy. The first section loosely explores different interpretations of Cubo-Futurism, from Exter's Cezanne-esque landscapes, to Bohomazov's futurist Landscape, Train and Delaunay's more familiar dreamily prismatic abstractions. Yet you also have the Burliuk brothers, Davyd's strong, chunky, expressionistic Carousel and Volodymyr's almost Munch-like Ukrainian Peasant Woman. There is a fine selection on theatre design, including Anatol Petrytskyi's witty collages of costumes for Turandot. 

The second room is a mass of contradictions. Do Shor's darkly swirling abstractions  - evoking the 'eye of the storm' of the title - drag us towards an abyss or evoke excitement? Either way they make me desperate to see more of an artist I have not come across. Tymofii Boichuk looks back to the future with his tempera apple pickers, all clear colours, flat lines and deceptive fairy-tale sweetness. Yasyl Yermilov's seedy relief self portrait presents the artist as a corrupt and ailing Tin Man. From there on, the inexorable slide to inevitable Soviet control and Stalinist purges hangs heavy. Petryskyi's Invalids is all grey gloom. Oleksandr Syrotenko's Rest seems like a lurid contradiction, gaudy colours no substitute for a decent meal. Semen Yoffe's In the Shooting Gallery has sinister decadence. 

This is ultimately too small an exhibition, perhaps too narrowly drawn (largely from two collections) to do justice to the theme. Kazymyr Malevych seems particularly poorly represented. His sole oil painting, from 1927, showing a rural winter landscape, is contextualised well in the accompanying text, but you really want some of his earlier woodcutters and harvesters as comparison. Suprematism itself barely gets a mention. But it a sense you don't need Malevych at all - the real strength here is the showcasing of little known artists who deserve their moment in the sun. The RA deserve credit for picking up a touring exhibition about a fairly unknown bunch of painters. I suspect many people might go out of a sense of empathy or solidarity with Ukraine. But in the end, for all the quibbles about spelling, and nit-picking about geography, it is early twentieth century modernism which is on show here in all its kaleidoscopic complexity. Nationalism is not the eye of this storm.

'Michelangelo: The Last Decades' (British Museum until July 28 2024): Strength and Fragility

Michelangelo, The Punishment of Tityus, c.1533, Royal Collection Trust, UK

Drawing exhibitions are by their nature quiet, sombre affairs. Curators can accept it or fight against it. The British Museum’s Michelangelo show goes for the latter approach: the first rooms are dominated by moving screens and an exaggeratedly halting voice reading out the artist’s words. The sound follows you round like a death knell. Mortality hangs in the air. And yet this is an exhibition of thirty productive years. It seems counter intuitive and slightly dismissive to downplay all that industry and invention. 

It’s the most obvious mis-step in an exhibition which pulls in too many disparate directions. We see Michelangelo the spiritually inquisitive, the friend, the businessman, the architect, the power-player, the family patriarch, the poet, and coyly hinted at only, the lover. We see a man frustrated by competing demands or a man who couldn’t say no. We see an artist happy to have his drawings turned into second rate potboilers - and the exhibition gives far too much time Marcello Venusti's stolid paintings. Perhaps the curators just wanted some colour? They don’t really explore the motives behind the collaboration. Maybe he had an eye on the market, or maybe, after the initial invention, Michelangelo just lost interest - he was already moving on to the next drawing, the next idea. 

The exhibition is at its best when it takes the time to explore how Michelangelo planned out those ideas. The first room is dominated by his Sistine Last Judgement. Sketches worked and reworked, from overall compositions down to individual figures, some just scribbles on paper, visual notes. Frustratingly, a moving representation of the finished fresco never allows you to see these ideas in fruition - it would be far better to have seen small images alongside the drawings. This is where Venusti's paintings have some value. Wooden and gaudy as they are, it still helps to see the final intention alongside the preparatory works. Where this approach fails spectacularly is in the display of the Epifania - the only extant cartoon in existence, recently conserved by the British Museum and arguably the whole point of the show. In a generally cluttered space, it is difficult to stand back and view it, and when you do it is impossible not to have the Mannerist extravagences of Ascanio Covidi in the corner of your vision. Why? The cartoon should be allowed to speak for itself.

Michelangelo, Christ on the Cross between the Virgin and St John, 1555-64, British Museum, London

All this fades into insignificance in the last room, a dark-walled inner sanctum dominated by a series of crucifixions, repeated meditations that re-make a familiar theme anew. There is frailty here, spidering lines of thin black chalk which suggest perhaps fading vision, fading motor skills, but there is also resilience and strength. Michelangelo works and reworks, imagines and reimagines, explores nuance, subtle change, restless and unsatisfied right to the end. These works buzz with life even as they are about death, they celebrate the creative drive even when they are full of mourning and sorrow. They illustrate, just as all the drawings on display, precisely what gives a Michelangelo his unique intensity. He eschews the High Renaissance concept of perfection, for all the beauty of the musculature and the clarity of the modelling, for all the idealisation of his figures. There is always a sense of the human, a striving for something more. 

This is such a frustrating exhibition. It gets so much wrong, not least the poorly designed display plinths which clutter the floor and have the information text on an indented slant which is only readable when you stand directly in front of it. It gets so much wrong but it's a rare chance to see some of the most inspiring, life-enhancing, 'rage against the dying of the light' drawings ever produced. See them and weep. 

Guercino at Waddesdon: King David and the Wise Women (Waddesdon Manor until Oct 20 2024): Deceptive Ease

Guercino, The Cumaean Sybil with Putto, 1651, National Gallery, London

Guercino is not a household name. If you like Italian Baroque painting then he will be familiar, but whether he is enough to tempt the casual visitor to travel to Waddesdon Manor and pay the not inconsiderable (for non National Trust members) entrance fee is debatable. Certainly, on the day I went, the house was heaving to the point where you felt inexorably carried along in the crowd, but the single room devoted to Guercino was a haven of calm and relative emptiness. Credit then, arguably, to Waddesdon for putting on this mini exhibition of his works but at the same time, it was disappointing to see them penned into such a small space. 

The exhibition is based around Waddesdon's own King David, now shown with two National Gallery Sybils and one from the Royal Collection, but by happy coincidence, the unexpected star is a recent acquisition. Moses was bought by the Rothschild Foundation after it came to light in Paris in 2022: it is the sort of quality Old Master which British institutions can rarely afford to bid for. It stands as a quiet yet potent reminder amid all the flashy bling of the Manor, of the lingering wealth and influence of the Rothschild family - a poignant reminder too after the recent death of the 4th baron. Arguably out of place in the company of David and his Sybils, the Moses is on a much more intimate scale and belongs to Guercino's earlier tenebrist style. It feels a little swamped by the red damask richness of the room and by its neighbours' weighty calm. But ultimately its presence proves that Guercino is an artist of greater complexity, variety and emotional heft than the exhibition might otherwise have shown.

Guercino, Moses, c.1618-19, Waddesdon Manor

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666) has come down to history as Guercino, 'the little squinter', cross eyed, poor born, self taught. He worked mainly around the vibrant Baroque artistic centre of Bologna, but also spent a few years in Rome. Aside from some almost Giorgione-esque landscapes, his focus was religion and the human figure. I first came across his work at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge where his small, intense Betrayal of Christ has a dark, dramatic claustrophobia which immediately recalls Caravaggio's treatment of the same subject. Guercino's early work is full of movement, confusion and crowded figures exaggerated by dark shadows and anguished expressions. The single figure of Moses is like a close-up from one of these scenes, his hands raised protectively as he looks towards the light, uncertain how to react in the presence of god. Head and arms disembodied by a geometry of deep folds so that we focus entirely on gesture and expression. 

The other works in the exhibition could almost be by a different hand. On two metre plus canvases, carefully posed, authoritative figures inhabit classical architectural settings, surrounded by attributes of wisdom. There is a deceptive simplicity in Guercino's late work, which renders awkward poses easy, conveys an airy depth lightly and models form with subtle softness. In these works Guercino is a Baroque Raphael, wearing his skill with casual insouciance, almost convincing the viewer that there is nothing to see here. Set up together in a confined space, it is too easy to sweep your eye across the room, note the similarities and think him a lesser artist than he is, churning out sybils on autopilot. In truth, the Samian Sybil was a repeat order, after the initial pendant for King David, the Cumaean Sybil was snapped up by another buyer. 

Guercino, The Libyan Sybil, 1651, Royal Collection, UK

Don't be fooled, however. Guercino is no pot-boiler. The canvases breath with life. Poses are chosen to convey body and movement: the thrust of David's sandalled foot, the backward curve of the Cumaean's head. Draperies catch the light, gentled rumpled like waves on a calm day, so that large blocks of colour become instead objects of interest. The embrace of pink around the Libyan Sybil, the inner swirl of three centrifugal colours creates the mood of  introverted contemplation. Tonal highlights are balanced: open books resonate cross the canvas, reflected in exposed flesh, white headdresses, all signposts on a visual journey. And the same applies to Guercino's characteristic palette, limited, cool colours, worked through with repeated effect. Even pinks and oranges have a restraint, maintaining the intellectual seriousness of his female prophets. All this and you haven't begun to take in the little details - the ruffled pages, the lace edges, the strands of hair.

Waddesdon take their art seriously  - all their artworks, for instance, are beautifully lit - and it perhaps seems churlish to criticise the effort which has gone in to secure these loans and present the show, but I wish they given the paintings a little more space, a slightly more sympathetic hang, perhaps sought out another loan which would have offered a companion to the Moses. That said, Guercino is a marvellous, underrated and unfamiliar artist and any opportunity to see a gathering of his work is to be welcomed. Once you know about the little squinter, you will not forget him.

'William Blake's Universe' (Fitzwilliam Museum until May 19 2024): Trying Too Hard to be Universal

William Blake, America, A Prophecy, 1793, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

It's never a good thing if the main memory of an exhibition is the colour of the walls. Sadly, the Fitzwilliam's William Blake's Universe will forever be linked in my mind with the daffodil yellow of the final room. Strong colours are the fashion of the moment (a moment which is hopefully reaching its end) but they are always intrusive, an assertion of curatorial presence, even when you agree with the choice, and that intrusiveness is magnified in an exhibition of mainly small-scale prints and drawings where there is so much more wall on show.

I have doubts about other curatorial choices too. The Fitzwilliam Museum has a wonderful collection of Blake's work and you can imagine the conversation about how it might be exhibited afresh. The decision to link him to Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich is boldly idiosyncratic. These are artists who didn't meet or really know of each other's work, whose points of artistic confluence are few. There's an interesting intellectual case to be made, but there is not enough integration in the display of the works, and, in Friedrich's case, the examples are poor. I suspect, given the enthusiasm with which his 250th anniversary is being celebrated across Germany, this is not the best year to borrow Friedrichs. The vagueness of these European connections is particularly frustrating because the exhibition touches on stronger British links and influences - Fuseli, Barry, Linnell, Palmer. In the case of John Flaxman especially, there is the nugget of a fascinating show: better known for his sculpture, Flaxman has been relegated to the status of Neoclassical also-ran alongside Antonio Canova, yet his drawings here have a beautiful clarity and economy of line. 

The exhibition also takes a lot of time to get going. A first portrait gallery (deep purple) creates a fine sense of the characters involved. Some are familiar - like the wary, slightly petulant intensity of Palmer's self image - some less so. Catherine Blake's posthumously remembered image of her youthful husband is loving and lively, a far remove from the portly middle age that we usually see. But the second room squanders those personalities in a meander through Academy practice and the, in Blake's view, malign influence of classicism. In reality, the artist's viciously annotated Laocoön is really all you need. 

William Blake, Laocoön, c.1818, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

In the end, this exhibition is about William Blake and it really takes off in the flame-coloured third room where there are some wonderful examples of his work: rich colours, heavily anatomised figures, impossibly attenuated poses, flowing beards. The Songs of Innocence and Experience are ignored in favour of a brave attempt to explain and contextualise his religious and political works (sadly hampered, it has to be said, by poorly applied wall texts with missing letters and half-visible words). Blake's universe and the characters which inhabited it are extraordinarily complex and it is a credit to the curators that I left the exhibition feeling as if I understood at least part of what he was trying to say. What is even more clear is the repeated visual language, the idealised youths, repressive old age, colourful angels, figures flying skywards, spiralling curves and natural motifs. And the depth of that influence, not just in his immediate acolytes, like Palmer, who synthesised his style into a quaint and utterly unBlakean conservatism, but through the nineteenth century to Art Nouveau illustrators, into German Expressionism and beyond - surely Tolkien was familiar with his work. 

William Blake is a difficult artist to exhibit. Many people find him a difficult artist to like. Some might argue he is better seen as a poet who illustrated his own work. But the Fitzwilliam exhibition - when it focuses on him - is utterly convincing and compelling. It ends with some of the smallest, most intense works, intricate monochromes from the Book of Job. The whole universe is condensed into these tiny squares: Blake's ideas, his aesthetics, his humanity. And it's enough.

Angelica Kauffman (Royal Academy until June 30 2024): More Than Just a Woman Artist

 

Angelica Kauffman, Self Portrait at the Crossroads Between the Arts of Music and Painting, 1794, Nostell Priory 

Angelica Kauffman has been badly served by both fate and the Royal Academy. In 2020, before COVID intervened, she was all set to have a landmark exhibition, a fitting tribute to the institution’s female founder-member (alongside Mary Moser). The planned show did go ahead in Dusseldorf, and featured around a hundred works under the title Angelica Kauffman: Artist, Influencer, Superwoman. Now, finally, four years later, the RA have gone with a truncated version - three rooms, thirty odd works. I've read plenty of reviews suggesting that this might be a blessing in disguise, that Kauffman could not have sustained a bigger exhibition. This seems a poor argument. The problem here isn't the art, it's the half-hearted way it's been presented. Where Dusseldorf trumpeted her contemporary superstar status and pan-European importance, the RA has been content to say 'Angelica Kauffman, woman artist', as if somehow that is the only reason to have the show. With little biography and less context, the exhibition asks a lot of its visitors, who are somehow expected to understand and appreciate paintings like Armida Begs Rinaldo in Vain Not to Leave Her. 

I have also read a lot of reviewers bemoaning the fact that Kauffman is no Artemisia Gentileschi. True, but utterly irrelevant - pick two random male artists who lived more than a century apart and see how preposterous and pointless the comparison is. Kauffman was working within the eighteenth century European neoclassical tradition, her works channel the legacy of Poussin - often strikingly in her use of colour blocks - but also display elements of decorative softness such as you might see in French court painting. This is not a world of spurting blood and dramatic deaths: emotion is definitely here, but it is more subtle. This is art which was designed to speak to the mind as well as the gut. The subject material is drawn less from the Bible and more from mythology and literature: Armida and Rinaldo were the protagonists in an 1580 epic poem by Italian Renaissance poet Tasso, which tells how Rinaldo is deflected from his Christian duty as a crusading knight by a Saracen sorceress. Elsewhere in the exhibition we have Laurence Sterne and Euripides - these are not easily accessible narrative images for a twenty-first century audience. 

Kauffman also needs to be understood in a European context, and this exhibition has a decidedly parochial feel. Perhaps inevitably, given that it is produced by the RA, there is an emphasis on Kauffman's relationship with the institution and its founder, Joshua Reynolds. We have the much quoted Zoffany in which male founders of the Academy gather around a life model, with Kauffman and Moser relegated to portraits on the wall. More interesting is the strikingly forceful letter in which Kauffman stood up to Nathaniel Hone's insulting parody of her. This alone gives a sense of the strength of character which was probably necessary to succeed as a woman in a masculine dominated art world. But there were other strong women: Richard Samuel's 1779 Portraits in the Characters of Muses at the Temple of Apollo, shows Kauffman amongst her female peers. What we don't have is a sense of the depth and range of her influence, seen as far afield as Russian court portraiture, and sustained by the vast market in prints of her works. In comparison, artists like Reynolds and Gainsborough were provincial nobodies.

Angelica Kauffman, Armida Begs Rinaldo in Vain Not to Leave Her, 1776, Kenwood House

In the end, however, an exhibition hangs or falls by what is on the display. Kauffman's self-representations have too much of an agenda to be insightful, although it is impossible not to be awed by the ambition and sheer chutzpah of Self Portrait at the Crossroads Between the Arts of Music and Painting. Paradoxically she seems less at ease in portraying of women, almost as if the knowledge that presentation was everything gets in the way: her generic muses for the RA ceiling decorations are more believable, rounded characters than some of her portraits. Although it was much less common for female artists to paint men, it is these works which show her portraitist's skill. You can see in the informal warmth of her portrait of Reynolds how the scandalmongers might have found their material. And I would love to put her view of David Garrick alongside Gainsborough's: there is an unfussy honesty about Kauffman's interpretation of a man famous for his ability to act.

Much of her mythological works have a frieze-like staginess, deliberately easy-to-read gestures and cursory backgrounds. It is the style of the period. What Kauffman does differently is put both her female characters and the emotional world they represent, centre-stage. But what catches your eye are the, dare I say, feminine details. Garlands are exquisitely painted, precise patterning, hair decorations, fabrics are all picked out, considered. This is not to belittle her, or create a 'feminine aesthetic' in her work, but it does give her neoclassicism a uniqueness.  It works alongside her tendency to soften male figures - not so much a feminising as an emotionalising - which can be linked to eighteenth-century ideas of sentiment. Kauffman was a canny operator: determined to conquer the 'masculine' territory of history painting, she cultivated a Poussin-esque style, yet softened it into her own, distinctive version which points the way forward to more Romantic treatments. To really appreciate this, however, you need some comparative examples, some context. A cleverer curation might have been able to point these up and suggest why 'artist, influencer, superwoman' may not be that much of an exaggeration.