'Kiefer / Van Gogh' (Royal Academy until October 26 2025): Sometimes you don't have to shout

Vincent van Gogh, Snow Covered Field with Harrow, 1890, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

There is no doubting the sincerity of Anselm Kiefer's enthusiasm for Vincent van Gogh: the small exhibition hand-out traces his 'pilgrimage' to Arles as a young man through diary entries. Somehow, though, this genuine respect, affection, perhaps even hero-worship doesn't really resonate through the Royal Academy's Kiefer / Van Gogh. Partly, this is a problem with curation. Three rooms, especially when you are exhibiting works as big as Kiefer's, is not a great deal of space, and this is a truncated iteration of a much larger presentation shown across two venues in Amsterdam earlier this year. Equally, the curators seem surprisingly reluctant to offer the works in dialogue, so van Gogh's Piles of French Novels is not shown in the same space as Kiefer's Danaë in which an elongated sunflower sheds golden seeds on a pile of crumpled books. Similarly, a line of Kiefer's drawings which so clearly speak to van Gogh's Arles quill and ink sketches are shown next to much earlier examples of the Dutchman's draughtsmanship. Was there a failure of nerve, as if the two artists might appear too close, as if Kiefer might be reduced to a mere copyist?

The problem is not just curatorial. The canvases Kiefer shows hover between brilliance and  kitsch. Nevermore slathers reference on reference, with the same abandon that the artist applies his mixed media: Edgar Allen Poe, Gauguin, Hitchcock, van Gogh, even, as my companion wickedly suggested, Brian Blessed's birdmen in Flash Gordon. The tarry flock of vampiric black shadows feels like overkill, not just unnecessary but self-destructive. In the same room Hortus Conclusus carries echoes of the woodcuts which were recently on show in the Ashmolean, messily complex, layered and inconclusive but nevertheless retaining subtlety. Under the Lime Tree on the Heather presents a rococo respite, floral and delicate, lyrical and evocative. Poetry is never far from Kiefer's art, sometimes even physically present as text, but he is often at his best when it is spoken softly.

The dilemma of the exhibition is summed up by the two most heavily influenced van Gogh pieces, The Crows and The Starry Night. The former takes the viewer into the wheatfield, through projecting stalks and perspectivally exaggerated path. The scale is such that you feel you could literally walk in, like an illusionistic painted backcloth in the Wizard of Oz, and, like that, simultaneously hyper-real and otherworldly. The sky glitters with flaking gold like a distressed altarpiece as the canon crumbles. Crows hover through the gilded mist like dark clouds. This is full-on Kiefer overload, but it works. In contrast, The Starry Night tips over the brink, the over-familiar swirls have none of the anxious brushstrokes which animate the original, and instead rely, rather like an immersive extravaganza, on shock and awe scale. Sometimes more is just too much.

Anselm Kiefer, The Crows (Die Krähen), 2019. Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, straw and clay on canvas, 280 x 760 cm. Courtesy of the artist and White Cube. Photo: Georges Poncet. © Anselm Kiefer

Pummelled by the weight of these huge creations, van Gogh seems to barely be given a chance to speak. In comparison with the National Gallery's wonderful Poets and Lovers exhibition, the paintings here seem ill-chosen (or hardly chosen at all). The exception is Snow Covered Field with Harrow, one of the many Millet-inspired landscapes which van Gogh produced in St Remy. Here the thread of inspiration leads back another generation, the same furrows and high horizon and bleakness which are visible in Kiefer's Last Load, yet with each iteration life, hope and a future spring seems to recede further until the sky is reduced to a slice of black and agricultural land becomes an apocalyptic morass. At his best, Kiefer can leave you devastated, hollowed out in the face of such physical, literal rawness and this is Kiefer at his best.

In the end, though, this uneven, unsatisfying exhibition fails to do either artist real justice. The draw of van Gogh for Kiefer is hinted at rather than fully explained and you are left wondering if the young enthusiast is really still present in these big showstoppers, or if the older artist is grasping at long lost straws. Because the image that lingers is not grandiose and declamatory but comes with the quiet creak of old leather: van Gogh's Shoes on their eighteen-inch, near monochrome canvas. Sometimes you don't have to go big to hit home. 

'Radical Harmony. Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists' (National Gallery until February 8, 2026): Dot the Eyes

 

Georges Seurat, Le Chahut, 1889–1890, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.

The title of the National Gallery's new exhibition, with its overt reference to the Kröller-Müller collection gives a misleading sense that the curators have shipped in an almost ready-made show. The Kröller-Müller has the best Neo-Impressionist collection in the world, as well as an extensive selection of van Goghs which barely get a look in here, but the curators have gone out of their way to source beyond Otterlo, to plug gaps and tell new stories, notably that of Anna Boch. The result is a pretty comprehensive survey of core Neo-Impressionism, although the exhibition's stated aim, to underline the radical politics of the movement, is perhaps less successfully achieved. 

The work of Georges Seurat (1859–1891) and Paul Signac (1863–1935) is often labeled as Pointillism, a dismissive term coined by critics who thought they had reduced painting to a series of dots. The artists themselves preferred the term Divisionism or Neo-Impressionism to describe their new, more scientific approach to Impressionist subjects, which centred on the colour theories of Michel Eugène Chevreul. The Impressionists had exploited his ideas of complementary colours, but the Neo-Impressionists wanted to do so more rigorously, using small, regular dots and making the viewer’s eye do the work of mixing and contrasting the pure colours. 

The opening room of the Radical Harmony sets this context and gently acclimatises visitors to Neo-Impressionism with a series of landscapes and seascapes. There are obvious links back to Impressionist subjects and locations but the paintings themselves deliberately avoid the immediacy and naturalism of the earlier works. This is partly an inevitable result of the Pointillist technique which creates a structure and rigidity, and close-up gives an element of abstraction to the picture surface. Flags do not flutter in the breeze; waves seem frozen; time stands still. However, the artists also make compositional choices. Seurat deliberately emphasized that these are constructed images with his inclusion of painted borders. Signac numbered his works like musical compositions. Both focused on flattened geometry, strong lines, and angles which accentuate the two-dimensionality of the picture plane and sometimes create almost surrealist oddness. Signac's Portrieux, the Lighthouse, Opus 183, reimagines the central structure as a baton wielding bandmaster on a harbour stage. 

Alongside this, the exhibition introduces Helene Kröller-Müller, the German-born collector whose works form the basis of Radical Harmony. The daughter of a wealthy industrialist, who married a Dutch entrepreneur, Kröller-Müller became one of the richest women in the Netherlands and used her huge spending power to become a pioneering female collector. She increasingly bought directly from the artists she admired, and eventually amassed over 12,000 items including furniture and ceramics, as well as paintings. All of this sits slightly uneasily alongside the curators’ central argument that these painters were political as well as artistic radicals. There seems more than a little irony in the fact that Maximilien Luce's The Foundry hung for many years in the offices of the Kröller-Müller's iron ore business. 

Yes, many of these artists had anarchist friends and sympathies, but plenty of people did in the last years of the nineteenth century. It is a lot harder to see any such ideas carried through to their art, whether in Signac's sketch for In the Time of Harmony which could just as easily show a family picnic as a bucolic pre-industrial idyll, or in restrictive interiors, which seem more like a bridge between Caillebotte's uptight bourgeoisie and the Nabis rather than a call to arms. Jan Toorop‘s (1858–1928) Morning (After the Strike)  and Evening (Before the Strike) are an exception, forming melodramatic contrast where the beauty of the colours seems strangely at odds with the subject matter.  In fact, these so-called radicals were often surprisingly reluctant to actually show urban workers: their cityscapes and port scenes are more often almost devoid of figures.  Many seemed to retreat to the countryside. The sole example of Van Gogh’s work, The Sower, is a timeless, almost Biblical subject with a deeply symbolic sun radiating across the sky. Anna Boch‘s (1848–1936) During the Elevation is a conservative religious scene of an overflowing church and traditionally dressed congregation.

Anna Boch, During the Elevation, 1892, Stadsmuseum Oostende, Ostend, Belgium.

The next sections are dominated by a series of very middle-class portraits and scenes of domesticity: well-dressed figures in well-furnished rooms. Théo van Rysselberghe‘s (1862–1926) In July, Before Noon is Impressionism in all but name, with its snapshot-like composition of leisured ladies, sunlight dappled like Renoiresque powder puffs on their dresses. In contrast, Toorop, who emerges as the real start of the show, gives his Portrait of Marie Jeannette de Lange a combination of delicate naturalism in his representation of the sitter and a background so packed with objects and pattern that it becomes a Symbolist representation of her character. His use of a restricted tonal range and heavily impastoed dots creates an almost sequin-like effect as the paint catches the light. 

Strutting through these and given top billing against a dramatic, deep purple wall, although it hardly needs such theatrics, is Seurat's La Chahut, not seen in the UK since the 1950s. Seurat’s monumental can-can dancers high-kicking with fixed smiles and watched by leering figures, as the orchestra plays, rejig the compositional tricks of Degas and  Toulouse-Lautrec. Now we are not part of the mayhem but, like the performers themselves, alienated and detached, frozen in an unreality of sleazy sepia. Life is a cabaret, but it doesn’t look much fun.

Increasingly Chevreul's complementary colour contrasts are rejected in favour of tonal uniformity. Rysselberghe’s Coastal Scene  is a study in blue, and van de Velde’s  Twilight  is dominated by violet hues. The curators choose to end the exhibition with a series of landscapes which emphasize this sense of peaceful harmony, although works like Johan Thorn Prikker’s (1886–1932)  Basse Hermalle, Sun at Noon  hint at the possibility of something more radical. His sparse pastel dashes, which hark back to van Gogh’s brushwork, create a simplified, flattened abstraction in which the landscape seems almost incidental.  This is the point at this the exhibition could look forward, joining the dots between these artists and Henri Matisse (who gets only a mention), Piet Mondrian or other groups like the Italian Futurists who used pointillism. That it doesn't feels like a missed opportunity. 

Ultimately, then, there is less “radical” and more “harmony,” but that is no bad thing. This is a Zen-like exhibition which encourages you to take your time, breathe deeply, and appreciate the deceptive complexity and inherent beauty of the works. Neo Impressionism can often be represented as scientifically cold and dull, here is it inventive, lyrical and genuinely enthralling. 

This is a version of the review published in DailyArt Magazine

'Millet, Life on the Land' (National Gallery until October 19 2025)

Jean-François Millet, The Wood Sawyers, c.1851, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

It has been a very long time since the last exhibition dedicated to Jean-François Millet and I suppose that is reason enough to welcome the National Gallery’s Life on the Land. The current show is, however, a meagre affair, built around the admittedly substantial coup of the Angelus loaned from the Musée d'Orsay, but without depth or substance. One room and a handful of works does not lend itself to a successful survey of a prolific artist who had a thirty year career. Equally, Life on the Land is simply too broad a title and ambition. A better show would have been more focused, perhaps on the central theme of the Angelus - faith - or, even more conducive to a contemporary audience, Millet's clear gendering. One can see that the curators wanted to include the National's own Winnower but they miss the opportunity afforded by the available works to construct an interesting narrative around action and stillness. As it is, a disparate selection of seemingly random pieces (anything they National could acquire from British museums) are not given enough cohesion and simply left this viewer wanting more.

Millet is unfashionable and problematic for 21st century tastes, hardly surprising when one considers that even his contemporaries didn’t really know what to make of him. One time posterboy of the 1848 radicals: the Winnower was bought by member of the short-lived Republican government, he became the darling of conservatives who saw his religious, stoic peasantry as the reliable backbone of France. A victim of his own mythologising, he was labelled the 'peasant painter' by his first biographer, Alfred Sensier: the Normandy lad who made good in Paris but never really left the land. Ever since, writers have felt compelled to debunk that version: Millet was aloof from his Barbizon neighbours, he read Virgil, he didn’t attend church, even to marry. Whatever the unknowable truth, he represented the rural poor with a commitment, clarity and earnestness which no other 19th century French artist could match. He had none of Courbet's in-your-face stridency nor, even in his milkmaids and goose girls, the saccharine academicism of Jules Breton. Only Jules Bastien Lepage comes close, imbuing his chunkily awkward figures with a pallid clarity which does little to disguise his debt to the older artist.

Jean-François Millet, The Angelus, 1857-9, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Arguably Millet carried on resolutely doing the same thing whilst the world shifted and French politics whirled around him. In that sense he was a painters' painter, beloved by Vincent Van Gogh, Georges Seurat and Camille Pissarro, and all the politicised readings miss the point. Millet's canvases are like a rich winter stew, complex and layered, warmly satisfying even when composed of the most mundane ingredients. They are hearty in a literal sense, creating a meaningful connection across time and space with figures who are not only beyond our experience, but, largely featureless and introverted, defiant in their disconnection from us. In the absence of detail, of expression, of eye contact, he achieves an emotional bridge though brushwork and colour. You are in the barn with the Winnower , dust catching in your throat, feeling the effort in his back, the scratch of the straw in his sabots, the subtle power of a grip which can flick up the basket with practiced precision. In the same way you can hear the Angelus bell, perhaps with the impatience some have read into the man's twirling of his cap, perhaps ominously -  Dali imagined a grave in the foreground - perhaps elegiacally with the sunset. 

What the exhibition does provide are examples of Millet's drawings, energised, vigorous and gestural in their determination to capture the reality of pose and movement. There is much speculation about whether these were done on location, or from posed studio models: I suspect a combination of the two. It seems of little consequence when the intention is so clear. Millet laboured to represent labour because it mattered, a case of basic survival for women bent double with the burden of scraggly twigs which one imagines would burn within moments, for girls old beyond their years charged with watching geese or sheep, for landless men earning a pittance or a couple grateful for their scrap of earth. He had been there and the reality of what he saw in Barbizon was so overlaid with Millet's own memories of childhood that the paint soaked up his empathy and understanding. In that sense I find him akin to Constable, another artist whose deep affinity with the agricultural countryside is misunderstood today.

The National Gallery exhibition might be a missed opportunity (it is for instance far less successful than their similarly sized show about the Haywain) but it reminds us why Millet was so popular and why he remains so compelling. It’s not about politics or religion; it’s not, as Jonathan Jones writing in the Guardian seems to think, about sex. It's not about realism either. Millet was an old romantic. It’s all about love. Love of the land and love of his materials. Stand close and relish the gnarly brushwork and the writhing lines and the unctuous, oozing colour. One room is as paltry as the stoney ground Millet so often portrays but even here you can glean so much.

'The Edwardians: Age of Elegance' (King's Picture Gallery until November 23 2025): All that Glitters

Frederic Leighton, Nanna (Pavonia), 1859, Royal Collection Trust

Last year the Royal Collection Trust gave us the Georgians, this year, the Edwardians, a rather more amorphous title which encompasses a significant amount of Victoria's reign (from the Prince of Wales' marriage in 1863) and slides well beyond Edward VII's death to a finishing point after the end of the First World War. It is definitely a show to please the summer tourists, with an eclectic mix of gifts, jewellery and costume alongside fine art and photography. The emphasis is on objects and their stories, rather than fine art, and the quality of some of the paintings might be called into question - Laurits Tuxen particularly is over-represented and under-performs.  However, with a busy display which makes the most of the space available, plenty of anecdotes and a free audio guide, there is always something to interest, even as you find yourself deploring the extravagance.

The curators make little effort to counterbalance all the glitter. History is a passing annoyance and the dynastic complexities of the British royal family are never really explained. There are multiple, multi-figured canvases where a guide to the characters involved would have been helpful; even a basic family tree. A scene-setting drawing room gathering contains the figure of Albert Victor, mentioned without explanation in the caption, yet surely only the most ardent royalist would know him to be Edward VII's eldest son, soon to die of pneumonia. In a small, sunny image of 1911, George V and the Kaiser take the salute together at the opening of the Victoria Memorial - a poignant enough image given that three years later they would be opposing sides, but specifically why Wilhelm is there is not discussed. Empire and international relations are passing excuses for presentation gifts rather than the subject of interrogation. You long for surfaces to be scratched.

Edward himself remains a mystery: his gambling and womanising are simply ignored apart from the most oblique of asides: images of favorite race horses and his collection of photographs of actresses and singers, displayed as one side of a folding screen, well away from the generals and politicians. A man who could not even be bothered to stand for his coronation portrait by Luke Fildes, he preferred suits to military uniform and enjoyed fancy dress. In the most extraordinary image, Jules Bastien Lepage, better known as a portrayer of peasant poverty, shows him as Renaissance ruler in front of a tapestry-like Thames. 

Laurits Tuxen, The Family of Queen Victoria in 1887, 1887, Royal Collection Trust

Alexandra seems to become more elongated with each passing year, famous for her tiny waist and swan-like neck, a succession of flashy society portraitists fail to reveal more. She becomes more rounded through her possessions, a love - perhaps homesickness - for her Danish homeland which does not seem to fade and her genuine enthusiasm for photography. If Edward and Alexandra are sketchy, George V barely gets a walk-on part. A small John Lavery study for his 1913 group portrait of the royal family is labelled to suggest that dullness, duty and an impending sense of doom had already overtaken the king. Equally, one might argue, it was Lavery's preferred palette. The intriguing figure here, and intermittently throughout is that of the future Edward VIII, delicately blonde and boyish. In a Sargent drawing from 1920, he seems unnaturally young - a twenty-six year old schoolboy who has served in a war.  

Amongst the royal watching, the tea-sets and dinner services, the silverware and exotic gifts, you can overlook the art. Some pieces are old friends: Alfred Gilbert's Icarus, a sleekly sensuous reinterpretation of Donatello's David weighed down by his wings; three beautiful, individually distinctive Burne-Jones drawings; a small, slice of Mediterranean blue from Alma-Tadema. Gustave Doré's Wood Nymph, luminous amid dense, dark, greenery, is a surprise for those more familiar with his graphic work. Leighton was clearly a royal favourite: his Nanna (Pavonia) has a sultry sensuality despite the artist's usual impassive surface. Edward chose Nanna; in contrast, Guthrie's tiny, smudged and almost sky-less landscape was a gift, and one suspects an under-appreciated one. 

Ultimately there is little substance to the Edwardians. It is all surface and show. Even the downbeat, final room, with its sombre march past the newly unveiled cenotaph, does little to tarnish the glitter. The Edwardian era is often misrepresented as a long elegiac summer; here it is a brash, flash party. The original glitterati. You might be impressed, but it is difficult to feel anything but emptiness.

'Sussex Modernism' (Towner Eastbourne, until September 28 2025): Magical Modernist Mystery Tour

Ivon Hitches, Day's Rest, Day's Work, 1960, Sussex University © the artist's estate

Sussex Modernism feels like an oxymoron. The counties - rural, rolling, coastal, chalky - have a determinedly timeless provincial appeal. The well-known art they generated in the twentieth century from the washed-out greens of Eric Ravilious to the middle-class flowers and furnishings of the Charleston set are safe and back-waterish. You might think of Ditching and then decide to unthink it as the name Eric Gill hovers into your mind. The Towner curators are determined bring the two words together, by sticking with admirable rigidity to their location and, perhaps less successfully, by bombarding their visitors with a wealth of examples from the late nineteenth century through to the present day, defining Modernism very much as an extended time period rather than a set of values. Curator Hope Wolf has talked about modernisms in the plural and perhaps that would have been a better title, justifying the range of styles she choses to display. This is an exhibition which leaves no stone unturned: generous, inclusive and inventive in its juxtaposition of objects, media and makers.

The Vorticist magazine is a literal Blast in the centre of the first room around which swirls a disparate selection of works. LS Lowry is here, incongruously, with a windmill, Ravilious too, alongside Edward Wadsworth, who sits more comfortably within the modernist canon.  Gluck is represented by one of their huge-skied landscapes, peacefully serene and empty, and there are less familiar names: Peggy Angus, whose view of cement works is as pallid as if covered with a dusting of the stuff and Margaret Benecke's icily abstracted Glacier Forms. This first display sets the tone, both in its range of materials - including ceramics - and the focus on overlooked, regional figures. The second room delves deeper into that regionalism, acknowledging the sisters who established a modernist gallery in Lewes (here painted by Cedric Morris) and Mary Stormont, a founder-member of Rye Art Club.

Amy Sawyer, Gentle Spring Brings
Her Garden Stuff to Market, 1896,
Russell Cotes Museum, Bournemouth 

Modernism proper comes into the equation with the Ditching-focused display: Jacob Epstein's sculpture and Ethel Mairet's textiles, jazzily displayed against blue, with Ivon Hitchen's dramatic polyptych and William Gear's Vertical Feature popping exuberantly off the wall. Yet this is modernism undercut by magic, mythology and romanticism, and the same is true as you confront four female figures against their blood-red background. Amy Sawyer, Jennifer Binnie, Edward Burne Jones and Alexi Marshall's works are not set-up in opposition to each other, but rather in a sisterly solidarity which coheres the disparate styles and collapses a century of change. It is one of the best hangs I've seen in long time. Before that we have gone into full 'Season of the Witch' territory with darkly trippy landscapes by Carlyle Brown and Pavel Tchelitchew.

The final room shifts mood, from elegy to energy with the Pop Art vibe of Jeff Keen's LAFF, the dynamic co-operatism given off by two panels of the Eastbourne International Workers' Mural and the future-now optimism of László Moholy-Nagy's Pavilion Bexhill on Sea. Edward Burra did his share of eerie, empty landscapes but is here represented by jokey, jazzy etchings and the exhibition ends with pop and popular - Sophie Barber's Kendrick on his Way Back from Camber Sands. This is not the triumph of the new, however, and the introspective, retrospective mood lingers with Julian Bell carrying on the family name and David Bowie's Ashes to Ashes channelling that same restless, rural oddity. 

Bowie's video is just one of several film pieces and the great achievement of Sussex Modernism is not just the range of media but the successful integration of the display. Strict chronology or theme are eschewed in favour of aesthetic considerations as the curators invite you to enjoy the art, setting up sight-lines, and formal and colour juxtapositions which enhance and elucidate. Whether this is art which is unique to Sussex, I am not sure: Neo Romanticism is a broad movement in 20th century Britain and the curators themselves acknowledge the impossibility of tying artists to specific regions. More problematically, the label of 'modernism' is at the very least disingenuous and constrictive. As Philip Hoare's recent book William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love demonstrates, these artists trace a lineage back not just to the late 18th century, but to folk traditions and prehistoric forms. Whilst I can applaud the curators' desire to deconstruct the term, and create a user-friendly title to advertise their show, it is arguably much better to forget it the moment you enter the exhibition. Modernism condemned British artists to a backwater, this show proves that they should be mainstream.

Sand, Sea and Sculpture

Antony Gormley, Another Place, Crosby Beach (WikiCommons)

In 2005 Antony Gormley’s one hundred life-sized cast-iron figures were erected on Crosby Beach, Merseyside. Initially, a temporary installation, which had already been exhibited in Norway, Belgium and Germany, the local council agreed make their presence permanent in 2007. Another Place, or the Iron Men as they are affectionately known, has become a major tourist attraction and is perhaps the best known example of seaside sculpture. But all along the British coast, holiday resorts have turned to art to bring in visitors and put themselves on the map.

Some coastal towns have long established artistic connections. In the nineteenth century, with the rise in popularity of painting plein air (outside), ‘colonies’ of artists decamped to the coast, where living was cheap, the light was pure and traditional subjects abounded. Places as far afield as Newlyn in Cornwall and Cockburnspath, south of Edinburgh, became home to artists, art schools and exhibition societies, and many still trade on that tradition today. St Ives was probably the most famous of them all, home to successive generations of artists including Marianne Stokes, Laura Knight and Barbara Hepworth. It now boasts not only a museum dedicated to Hepworth but Tate St Ives which sits right on the beach: there is literally sculpture everywhere.

Not surprisingly the success of Tate St Ives has led other seaside towns to follow suit. Margate built the Turner Contemporary on the site of the boarding house frequented by the great nineteenth century landscapist, JMW Turner, who was a regular visitor to the town. Local artist Ann Carrington’s Mrs Booth, Shell Lady monumentalises a tourist souvenir in twelve foot high bronze and names her after Turner’s landlady. In theory, Mrs Booth is an ideal seaside sculpture – relevant, engaging and populist – although the reality is that she seems forlornly marooned at the end of the harbour. Morecambe similarly, but more successfully, gives pride of place, not to past mayors or benefactors, but to its famous namesake, comedian Eric Morecambe. His statue, plinth-less and approachable, brings sunshine and smiles as he dances in an ungainly action pose on the seafront.

Like Margate, Bexhill on Sea invested in culture by redeveloping their 1935 Art Deco De La Warr Pavilion as an arts centre in 2005. They always have contemporary sculpture on show outside, at present Tschabalala Self’s Seated. Self’s larger-than-life polychromatic bronze of a black female figure turning in her chair, exemplifies a different approach to seaside sculpture. Neither the artist nor the work has any direct relevance to the town or the coastal location, but it is hoped the presence of the work itself (even though it might be controversial) will attract visitors. Seated was vandalised in 2023, an event which made the national press and led to huge numbers of local volunteer cleaners. Damien Hirst’s Verity has been on long-term loan to Ilfracombe since 2012: the stainless steel, heavily pregnant woman, skin partly flayed to reveal her internal organs, is the ultimate marmite sculpture, loved and loathed in equal measure. One thing it does prove is that size isn’t everything. Verity, including her raised sword, stands over twenty metres tall and dwarfs the harbour, making it look like Toy Town.

Most towns play it safer. Newlyn promenade is dominated by a three metre high figure of a fisherman poised on the act of casting a rope. Commissioned from a local artist, Tom Leaper, and focussing on the traditional industry of the town, this sets itself apart from hundreds of similar pieces by the solid force of its presence. On one hand it is a traditional memorial, commemorating fishermen lost at sea, but it also cleverly channels the spirit of the nineteenth-century artists, like Stanhope Forbes, who put Newlyn on the map. This is ordinary man made heroic. Tintagel’s Gallos also successfully suffuses culture and location. The shredded, hollowed-out figure of a knight, stands sentry-like on cliffs by King Arthur’s legendary castle. Despite the scale (2.4m) and solidity of the bronze, the work feels both ancient and fragile, only half present, like the myth itself, and as eroded as the rocks around it. That relationship between sculpture and surroundings, also achieved by Gormley’s Iron Men, is one of the keys to creating a successful seaside sculpture.

Non-figurative works can be just as involving. The most famous example is probably Maggi Hambling’s 2003 memorial to Benjamin Britten, Scallop, which rises directly out of the shingle on the beach at Aldeburgh. Subject to repeated vandalism and campaigns to have it removed, it is a work which has to be experienced in the round and in situ, where it becomes less a representation of a shell and more a series of interesting forms and silhouettes against sky and sea. At Cleveleys in Lancashire, a huge stainless steel spiral conch, Mary’s Shell, sits on the sand, submerged at high tide and big enough to walk inside. The shell is part of a sculpture trail based on local legends, but its real strength is the interaction between installation and environment, with the waves creating a soundscape as they meet the structure, barnacles and limpets colonising it, and the sand shifting around. This is surely the aim of any beach sculpture – to be distinctive yet also to integrate into its surroundings.

There are thousands of sculptures and hundreds of sculpture trails along the length of the British coast. Most are not memorable enough to draw visitors in their own right. Many are not significant works of art. Plenty have been derided by critics and opposed by the local population. Even when seaside sculpture does succeed, it cannot in itself bring regeneration and wealth: Margate still contains some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in Kent, despite increased visitors and a cachet of ‘coolness’ associated with the Turner Contemporary. Yet, when an artwork does strike a chord either because of its local associations or its visual impact, it can really put somewhere on the map. Another Place has transformed Crosby Beach into a tourist destination. Thanks to Gormley's Iron Men there is no other place like it.

This is a version of an article which first appeared in Erato Magazine in July 2024

'That Marvellous Atmosphere: Stanley Spencer and Cookham Regatta' (Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham until November 2 2025): Not Feeling It

Stanley Spencer, Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta, 1952-9 (private collection) © the estate of Stanley Spencer. All rights reserved / Bridgeman Images. Image credit: Stanley Spencer Gallery

Stanley Spencer's last great vision, nearly half of which remains nothing more than a tantalising spider's web of pencil lines, is the centrepiece of the current exhibition at the Cookham gallery dedicated to his work. Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta was in Spencer's words conceived as an image of love. His love for a place, his love of god, his love of life. The problem was life kept getting in the way. Finally fashionable, readmitted to the Royal Academy (from which Spencer had resigned over rejected paintings in 1935), and permanently in need on money, Spencer found himself distracted by demands for portraits. God was not on his side either: cancer required an operation and extended recuperation. For a poorly, near- 70 year old, employing painstaking precision, precariously perched atop a stool on 3a table, and faced with a canvas so large it was permanently partly rolled up, the task must have seemed all but impossible. Spencer was a man of details, never inclined to see the big picture and other distractions were of his own making - fleshed out scenes like Dinner on the Hotel Lawn which never made it into the final composition were still lovingly worked through. 

Christ Preaching as it stands is thus both poignant and frustrating. And the same could be said of the exhibition. The Spencer Gallery may not be the smallest in the UK but it's not far off. Just a single room with mezzanine, it feels churlish to begrudge them the £7 entrance fee and their marvellous little open access library and archives, not to mention their extensive holdings of Spencer's work, certainly warrant a bigger venue. This exhibition is well curated by Amy Lim and others and comes with its own slim catalogue. The wall texts and labelling although slightly repetitive cover the Regatta, Spencer's life and links to Cookham and the development of Christ Preaching. They have on loan two lovely Victorian interpretations. one of Edward Gregory's studies for Boulter's Lock has a deliciously thick marmalade-y colour; Hector Caffieri's Going to Cookham Lock is all delicate fluff. Good primary sources show champion women punters and evoke the crowds. 

Stanley Spencer, The Last Supper, 1920, Stanley Spencer Gallery, © the estate of Stanley Spencer. All rights reserved / Bridgeman Images. Image credit: Stanley Spencer Gallery

Spencer's preparatory works from small soft chalk scribbles to crisp pencil precision dominate the ground floor of the exhibition. They are fascinating enough to warrant more space, both in terms of method and of the developing final image. Hung as they are beneath the final canvas, you have to strain upwards to see how they connect: Christ Preaching is really too large for the wall, only really visible by standing awkwardly on the stairs. Paintings from the collection add context: portraits, landscapes, bathers, frustratingly random, and in some cases disappointingly bland. Spencer is at his best cataloguing life's oddness, not representing aldermen and vicar's wives. He was also increasingly obsessed with detail at the expense of composition and form with the late works, his jaunty cherry and green palette veering towards Beryl Cook-like caricature (his work will feature in an exhibition of Cook's work at The Box, Plymouth, next year). The Last Supper, all malt brown and wriggling toes, stands out amongst the later works on show for its austere repetition.

Spencer's never-realised Church House project, which he envisaged including the Last Supper, the Baptism (here represented by a drawing which depicts a seated Christ surrounded by joyous fish) and Christ Preaching, receives only the briefest mention. I can't help thinking this would have made for a better exhibition. Alternatively, a focus on Christ Preaching, which despite the exhibition's slightly misleading title, is definitely the star of this show, would allow the preparatory works the focus they deserve. An even braver choice, might have ditched the large canvas entirely and focused instead on the regatta and Spencer's nostalgic love of Cookham. The real problem, you suspect, is curators whose ideas - and an artist whose works - deserve more space. To feel the marvellous atmosphere of Spencer's work you have to be immersed in it (as you can be at Burghclere Chapel). That is hard enough in the context of an unfinished canvas, but here the high hang, diffuse curation and above a micro-venue act as unnecessary extra barriers.