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. 

Anselm Kiefer: Early Works (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, until June 15 2025)

Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945)  Wer jetzt kein Haus hat (Whoever has no House now), 2023Emulsion, acrylic, oil, shellac, lead, string and chalk on canvas, 190 x 330 cm Collection of the artist. Courtesy of White Cube. © Anselm Kiefer. Photo: Georges Poncet

Huge, multi-media encrustations, apocalyptic installations: now in his eightieth year, Anselm Kiefer has become an established behemoth, internationally recognised for his mature style of lyrical destruction. Oxford's Ashmolean brings us the origin story, the 'Complete Unknown' of an angry young man, searching for answers in art and history. The result is uneven, to be sure, but also compelling. It's not a big show but it's not afraid to ask big questions and to accept that the answers are either impossibly complex or deeply unsettling. 

Before all that, however, you come face to face with three near-contemporary works. Two elegiac, autumnal reflections on Rilke's poetry, softly red and orange, leaves falling from their surfaces, generate a dreamy serenity. In the centre, the third piece, looms darker, autumn seems to have shifted to night. It is only when you approach, and figures emerge, fleeing, faceless, and the discrete label Whoever Has no House Now catches your eye, that you are drawn into their nightmare. Then the silvered leaves become fallen shrapnel and mellow fruitfulness, explosive fire. 

If you can move on - and it takes a lot - the next display drops back fifty or so years. A different time, a different place, but the angry incomprehension which torments the surface of Kiefer's recent canvases is immediately, vividly present. Here is the young man creating a mock-swagger self portrait dressed in his father's Wehrmacht uniform; giving a banned Nazi salute to countryside sliced through with barbed wire; repurposing Second World War propaganda images. Anything to force a conversation about things Germany would rather have kept quiet about. There's anger, there's brazen defiance and there's nothing subtle about it. 

The young Kiefer is a man in search of a style. He borrows heavily, from Weimar Expressionists like Dix and Beckmann, from the strong tonality and heavy impasto of Kokoschka, from Nolde and Kollwitz woodcuts. He rifles through German and Nordic history and mythology, from Arminius in the forest through to Wagner. He riffs off popular culture - magazines and teach yourself art books. Amidst all the heavy-handedness there is delicacy: small watercolours, a curation of lilac-y landscapes, winged palettes that suggest fleeting optimism. Equally, you sense the development from scattergun rage to an older, wiser, sniper-accurate subtlety. Kiefer is often portrayed as an artist of bombast, too over-sized and over-loaded, but really he is a master of understatement and detail. His works nag at your mind, pulling threads of reference and meaning, so layered and knotted that you can't dismiss them, can't forget them. He is still the young man standing in the countryside demanding a reckoning.

'Goya To Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection' (Courtauld until May 26 2025): 'Now That's What I Call Art....'

Francisco Goya, Still Life - Three Salmon Steaks, 1808-12, Oskar Reinhart Collection ‘Am Römerholz’, Winterthur, Switzerland.

Compilation albums are always a bit soulless - full of great tracks but never quite the sum of the their parts. So it proves at the Courtauld where the curators have cherry-picked some of the best nineteenth century paintings from the Oskar Reinhart collection in Switzerland and created a 'Now that's what I call Art...' In many ways it is a marriage made in heaven - Samuel Courtauld and Reinhart were mirror images, both industrial philanthropists and art lovers who gifted their respective collections to the public, and actually met. It is also very definitely a marriage of convenience - the Reinhart collection is currently mothballed as its museum location gets a facelift and no institution can resist the marketing lure of Impressionism. (The pendant in me balks at the tacit description of Van Gogh, Lautrec and Picasso as Impressionist). The curators pay lip-service to giving this show a theme: ostensibly it has a narrative in which Goya is the father of modern art, but this is never told with any great conviction in the labelling, or in the choice of works (you sense they came first and the argument followed to fit). Equally, the Courtauld-Reinhart links, which are interesting, are not really exploited. Instead of integrating the two collections - which would have admittedly required more effort and cost - you are simply told to clock parallel paintings on your way out.

It all starts so well. On one wall, Goya's three salmon steaks leer menacingly and Gericault's Man Suffering from Delusions of Military Rank stares skyward in plaintiff bewilderment. It is impossible to look away and the more you stare back, the more these works draw you into their haunted interiors. Goya's salmon are like the sinister sister skull of Holbein's Ambassadors, oblique, eyeless and open mouthed in a silent scream. Or perhaps the discarded mask of a carnival clown. His ketchup blood, like that in the Third of May, is an unnecessary horror and yet also the painting's final potency. It is the memories of Goya's implied conflict which haunt Gericault's soldier, his face, too, shadowed and starved into a portending skull. Here, also, red - a noose-like tassell - is the final, terrible flourish. Madness hangs in the air. But if these two paintings are the starting point, where do they lead? The next still life one sees is a bland, floral oversized Renoir. The bleak, understated monochrome is mirrored across the room in Cezanne's early portrait of Dominique Aubert, yet here paint is trowelled on, a barrier rather than a vehicle to empathy. It is not until Van Gogh's acidic, alienting hospital ward in the next room, that anything packs the same emotional punch.

Vincent van Gogh, Ward in a Hospital in Arles, 1889, Oskar Reinhart Collection ‘Am Römerholz’, Winterthur, Switzerland.

Renoir. There are always some filler tracks on a compilation album, but three very similar Renoirs in a row is a problem, unless you are a devotee, as Reinhart obviously was and I am not. Unevenness dogs the whole show - and it is not a big enough show to hide it - so, alongside the rough, foaming power of Courbet's seascape you have a soft-porn, studio-lit, Ingres-necked model besporting herself in The Hammock. It is particularly queasy opposite the quiet dignity of Corot's Girl Reading. Monet's masterful evocation of ice on the Seine is one of those paintings which captures you across a room and becomes a completely different, arguably even better, picture close up. Eerily calm reflections zig zag in juxtaposition with the textured solidity of the chunks of ice. Monochrome misted chill disguises a complexity of colour. Next to it, Sisley is just too easy to ignore. The Monet, arguably, lessens everyone else in the room. Manet's Au Cafe, which I've always rather liked, seemed like an awkward collection of missteps and inconsistencies. Both it and the Lautrec next door are best viewed from a distance, across a crowded room, as the captured slices of life they purport to be. 

Goya to the Impressionists is disappointing only because it sets expectations high. There are pictures which would be worth the entrance fee on their own, and with the odd exception, all the works are pretty classy. You can't really complain about an exhibition which offers three great Cezannes in a row, or brings you such an unexpected Van Gogh. In both cases London has been recently spoilt by large exhibitions but these works still feel fresh. But a great show needs more than great art and the curatorial heart here is hollow. It feels like such a missed opportunity, for instance, not to have tried to unite Au Cafe with its other half from across town at the National Gallery, (especially as the latter was purchased with Courtauld money) or failing that, hang it next to the Bar at the Folies Bergere. It is almost criminal to have two Daumier Don Quixotes literally on either side of a wall and not actually hang them together. Like the Daumiers, this exhibition feels like the unfinished ghost of something great. 

'Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury' (Pallant House Gallery, Chichester until April 27 2025)

Dora Carrington, Spanish Landscape with Mountains, c/1924, Tate, London

Describing Dora Carrington as 'Beyond Bloomsbury' is a double edged sword. Undoubtedly it is sound marketing to attach a familiar name to a relatively unknown artist, but the cosy Charleston clique are a very marmite bunch. Even the clever suggestion that Carrington is 'more than' Bell, Grant and co might well be enough to put some people off. More importantly, the association is tenuous, focusing more on biography than art, and it highlights the big problem in dealing with Carrington - her complicated, tragic life gets in the way. The best thing to do - and the best thing the curators at Pallant House could have done - is to ignore the personalities and concentrate on the paintings. Unfortunately, they try but don't succeed.

Another barrier to understanding Carrington: her art was varied and variable. Dotted throughout the exhibition are loosely painted, washed-out works which could indeed fit into that Bloomsbury aesthetic. The watercolour of Spanish Soldiers at a Stream with its flattened background pattern of verticals and arcs and elongated figures reduced to khaki-ed anonymity is an extreme example of this. Her characterful portrait of the cedar tree at Tidmarsh, although it bridges the gap to her more recognisable strong-coloured chunkiness, has the same scrappy linearity. Then we get Carrington the craftsman, obsessively decorating her homes and the objects in them, and making a bit of money on the side with 'tinseled pictures' using textured tin foil on glass. The evidence here is sketchy - old photographs and a few surviving pieces. The style seems almost fin-de-siècle fairy-tale in its sugary colours and curving, dapple-brushed figures. Her often reproduced Iris Tree on a Horse is one of the few occasions in which she transferred this decorative style into an oil painting.

So far so Bloomsbury, perhaps, but if you want to get to the heart of Carrington's art you need to start at the beginning, with the Slade. It is represented here by skillfully rendered nudes, for which she won prizes (an exhibition of UCL's collection of Slade student work is one I would really like to see). Carrington was one of a prodigious group of students: a photo from around 1912 shows her alongside Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, Christopher Nevinson; other contemporaries included David Bomberg and Paul Nash. Leaving aside the fraught, possibly abusive relationship Carrington had with Gertler, these are the artists who most closely share her aesthetic vision. Most of them, at some point, exploited a pseudo-naive style which, rather in the way New Objectivity did in Germany, could show the world in all its oddness by appearing to simply show reality. Carrington's two great landscapes in show here, The Farm at Watendlath and Spanish Landscape with Mountains, exemplify this. Watendlath has a brooding creepiness, as otherworldly as a Tolkien illustration it foregoes tweeness in favour of proto-Surrealist unease. Meanwhile, the Spanish countryside is evoked in bodily forms reminiscent of Ithell Colquhoun.

Dora Carrington, Mrs Box, 1919, The Higgins, Bedford

It is, however, in portraiture that Carrington really shines. From the Van Gogh-like salt of the earth solidity of Mrs Box to the crumpled pastiness of EM Forster, she approaches her sitters with utter conviction and confidence. She treats pots of flowers with the same solemnity. Tellingly, when she paints herself, she resorts to style over substance, retreating behind cap, pantaloons and strong outlined colour-blocks which remind one of Mary Cassatt's prints. She twists, already in the process of departing, as if wary of giving up too much of herself. The filmed cavorting, the long-fringed 'crop-head', the lack of signed works and reluctance to exhibit: this was a woman who didn't want to be exposed. It is this self-portrait, above all, which makes me reluctant to jump on the biographical band waggon. Her life is there in her painting - Lytton Strachey, Gerald Brenan, Mark Gertler, Ralph Partridge, Tidmarsh. Would she really have wanted us to flesh it out any more, to analyse and agonise, to empathise and pity? 

Pallant House do a great job of promoting British twentieth century art and they have a solid track record in promoting lesser known, especially women, artists. Dora Carrington deserves the recognition and this show succeeds best when it lets her art speak for her. It is ultimately frustrating that the curators can't quite resist bringing in the two 'B's. Ignore biography, in my view Dora Carrington is far, far beyond Bloomsbury.

'Leighton and Landscape: Impressions from Nature' (Leighton House, London until April 27 2025): Everyday Escape

Frederic Leighton, The Bay of Cadiz - Moonlight, 1866, Leighton House Museum, London

Frederic, Lord for a day, Leighton is easily pilloried as the epitome of Victorian academic art. His mighty, frozen in aspic, Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna usually greets visitors to the National Gallery. Flaming June is the height of chocolate box popularity. If you know his home, now Leighton House museum, you might sense another side, but that too can slot neatly into cliches about nineteenth century orientalism. However, the museum's current exhibition, Leighton and Landscape, tosses all that out the window. Leighton was a traveller, yes, to Italy, Spain, North Africa, but he was not a tourist. His paintings are small, quiet, celebrations of the ordinary. A surprisingly large, thoroughly researched and beautifully presented show ends up making the ordinary seem magical and turning Leighton from eminent Victorian into sympathetic interesting individual.

Leighton travelled throughout his life, compulsively, almost as therapy. It was a way of escaping his responsibilities, his public. As much a way of being alone as the ascetic bedroom you can visit at his home. It was, you feel, a way of getting back to his artistic roots, to the basic principles of observing and recording. The exhibition, consequently, is a means of discovering the man: you see what mattered to him through his eyes but you also sense the restlessness of someone who was receptive to new experiences, experimental in his approach, happy to leave his comfort zone. This was a man who could sketch alongside the rebel Newlyn artists in Cornwall, who was prepared to make a five hundred mile round trip to see Biskra on the edge of the Sahara. He could challenge himself to record every leaf of a lemon tree with precise, painstaking beauty, yet dash off, with almost impressionistic bravado, the swirling peatiness of Findhorn river. This was a man who turned his back on the Dome of the Rock because the opposite view was more interesting. 

Frederic Leighton, Sketch: Rocks and Water, Scotland (A Pool Findhorn), c.1890, Leighton House Museum, London

A much bigger exhibition than you might imagine, with over sixty works, spread across different exhibition spaces (one of my few criticisms, but they have to work with the architecture they have), there are surprises at every turn. It is impressively researched. Not only are there significant number of paintings from private collections, which must have involved a lot of leg-work, but there is an effort made to identify locations and provide near-contemporary photographs of them. Again, not an easy task. They point out the very odd occasion when Leighton referenced these landscapes in his history paintings. Finally, it is elegantly presented, especially in the main Verey Gallery. You are led of a winding journey of your own through free-standing panels, which stop the small paintings being overwhelmed, and allow you to get indecently close. 

The moonlit view of Cadiz which has become something of a poster-boy for the exhibition is in reality something of an outlier. Leighton rarely included figures or indeed a focal centre, and arguably his best works exploit strong sunlight with the same crisp effectiveness of Corot. Rocks, both formations and patina, and silhouettes; man-made geometry juxtaposed with vegetation, colour variations, especially in the elongated strata of his Nile paintings - these are the things which he takes notice of. Despite his draughtsmanship skills, which he practised rigorously throughout his career, his spare pencil drawings are the least engaging works in the show. Leighton is an oil painter through and through, you sense someone who has complete confidence in the medium, and that confidence is conveyed through the easy effortlessness of the works. Leighton was notorious for never cutting corners in the laborious ritual of his academic works, but here he puts himself completely in the moment - precision, fluidity, depth, detail are determined by what he sees rather than what he has learned.  Perhaps it helped that I went on a quiet day, when I largely had the place to myself, but the peaceful intimacy of these landscapes was profoundly therapeutic. I will never look at Leighton the same way again.

'Glenn Ligon: All Over the Place' (Fitzwilliam Museum, until March 2 2025): Here and There Not Everywhere

Unknown artist (Dutch), Adoration of the Kings, c.1520, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge has been going through a process of self-reflection, reassessing its history and collections. Last year they won awards for their exhibition Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance; this spring will see a second show, Rise Up: Resistance, Revolution, Abolition. Inviting Glenn Ligon to reinterpret, redisplay and critique the museum's permanent collection is another part of this process. Artist interventions are an increasing feature as institutions seek ways of engaging both with the past and with diverse contemporary audiences. The British Museum recently invited Hew Locke to do the same. However, while the Fitzwilliam's intentions are admirable, the impact initially seems strangely muted.

You know something isn't right when you walk past the first installation without noticing it. Waiting for the Barbarians is a set of neon scripts on the Fitzwilliam's imposing classical portico. The museum have used their grandiose entrance to good effect in previous exhibitions: noticeably plastering their columns in banknotes for Defaced. Here though, Ligon's potent message is small, dwarfed by the supporting scaffolding, barely illuminated. The effect is a visual whisper, arguably a little apologetic, and ultimately disappointing. Armed with a plan you can then make your way round the museum on a kind of Ligon trail. It is patchy: 'all over the place' seems an exaggeration. 

Some pieces work better than others: black moon jars cluster amongst the porcelain displays with a sense of mild threat. You can't walk past these: in fact you have to resist touching their sleek bulbousness. Apparently similar, they are in fact individual; apparently monochrome, they are in fact infinitely subtle shades of blackness, apparently perfect they are a mass of surface blemishes. The matt vacuum sucks you in compellingly. Yet, their looming power distracts from the careful curations around them which reference cross-cultural appropriation and interaction. There is a running tension throughout Ligon's work between visual forthrightness and intellectual nuance.

Upstairs, amongst the fine art rooms the impact is also mixed. Ligon's academic hang of flower paintings is a joyous, riotous triumph. The Fitzwilliam always devotes this room to their impressive collection of floral art but it is usually hung with a sparse restraint that showcases the furniture and polished floorboards as much as the art. Here, flowers tumble off the walls so that you hardly see where one picture ends and another begins. This opulence, as the now customary line about still life goes, is supposed to underline imperial plunder, the capitalist drive for possession and control. But it is nature and art which triumph here. Repeated patterns, colours and forms constantly engage and distract, rippling across the surface, pushing out all thought of politics. Anyone who things flower paintings are tame and tedious, needs to sit here and soak this up. Sumptuous, sensual, subtle. If I was the Fitzwilliam, I would keep this display permanently. It is magnificent.

Elsewhere, Ligon tackles the familiar story of the Balthazar, the Black Magi. Isolating a single c.1520 panel on the wall, he makes us look closely, but ultimately it is not painting which holds the attention, it is the wall itself. Old paper reveals ghosts of pictures past in its eerie pattern of shading: gleaming gold finally seeing the light of day as the canonical paintings were stripped out. The only other image is one of Ligon's own -  Study for Negro Sunshine (Red) - the first of a series which goes on an irreverent journey through the galleries, disrupting the natural order of symmetry and rhythm. A constant reminder of another presence, which is somehow never quite present enough.

The Fitzwilliam's intense little octagon gallery becomes the focal point of Ligon's interventions, dedicated to his own large scale, text-based works. After the gentleness, the quiet, these are raw screams of rasping texture, the words overlaid so frequently and violently that eventually they become blotted out entirely in a visual white noise. Stand in the centre of the room and it is a surround-sound assault, but up close to the surface of an individual canvas the complexity of material and message draw you in with the same mesmeric power of the matt moon jars. The museum's trail makes this the end point, but it pays to retrace your steps because Ligon's own works make his interventions all the more meaningful. This is a man for whom words are as important as images, whose inspirations are writers more often than artists. Do not underestimate him. Sometimes you don't need to be all over the place, you just need to be clever.