Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion and Design (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford until Feb 18 2024): Not Revolutionary but Certainly Colourful

John Frederick Lewis, The Pipe Bearer, 1858, Birmingham Museums

William Morris would have loved the Ashmolean's 'Colour Revolution'. It is crammed full of  beautiful, often useful things and it provides an equally beautiful, useful survey of Victorian culture, taste and innovation, their priorities and their prejudices. It is larger than I expected, more interesting, full of detail and well presented, albeit sometimes frustratingly dingy, for obvious conservation reasons. Ultimately, however, it is unsatisfying: stories left unfinished, avenues unpursued, threads dangling.

The main problem is that the exhibition starts with a flawed premise: we have a mourning dress, a black and white photograph, a Dickens quote, all setting up the narrative that the past is a dreary place. Yet anyone who knows anything about nineteenth century art and design, knows that it's all about colour, pattern and excess. The interesting story here is not the manufactured narrative of a 'colour revolution', but rather the real revolutions in manufacture, technology and trade which allowed the Victorians' love of colour to permeate through society and across the world. The exhibition does a good job of looking at potentially dry topics like the discovery of aniline dyes, advances in electroplating; and the costs involved, to individuals hanging arsenic-green wallpaper, or lead-painting majolica, to the wider world (natural dye producers in India), and to nature - thousands of hummingbirds sacrificed to fashion each year. This is where the exhibition is strongest and most innovative.

Interesting too is the focus on the 1862 great(ish) International Exhibition which rarely gets any mention. William Burges' Great Bookcase is an arts and crafts masterpiece. A Daughter of Eve, her skin colour achieved with electrotype bronze, stops you in your tracks. The curators do well, in this age of didactic labelling, to let the image speak for itself: abolitionist pride in the midst of the American Civil War off-set by the statue's relegation to a trade stand. Not art but commerce. The fashion - not usually my thing - is also well-chosen and well-presented. Gaudily-striped stockings (for men and women) and a purple aniline dress which seems to have walked out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting; iridescently-gleaming necklaces which on closer inspection are made from hummingbird heads and beetles. Finally, the show dips into the Victorians' inspirations: from history, from the Middle and Far East, and from nature itself. Again, there is luscious Kashmir paisley, jewel-like Medieval manuscripts, ubiquitous Japanese prints, but the displays only scratch the surface.

JMW Turner, Venice, from the Porch of Madonna della Salute, c.1835, 

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The paintings are colourful. but hardly revolutionary. Many of the works are overfamiliar loans from the Tate - beautifully lit here and still a pleasure to see, as old friends always are, but Mariana and April Love are too-obvious curatorial choices. The Turner view of Venice on loan from the Met is on another level. Not one of his too-vague sunlight and air canvases but a luminous explosion of colour, rich reds and blues bleeding out from the boat in the centre of the painting like dye in water. Albert Moore is also nicely showcased, with a run of three near-identical paintings, differing only in their colour choices; and placed alongside Whistler his dreamily-soft palette takes on a new, more radical edge. Both artists are a welcome boost to the last room which seems a little low-key. Perhaps the 'Yellow Nineties' simply cannot compete with the intense colour and pattern already shown, perhaps it is just too difficult to buy into the immorality. Although Grasset's 1897 poster showing a morphine addict injecting her thigh is genuinely shocking.

There is a lot that the Ashmolean doesn't focus on. William Morris is poorly covered. Art Nouveau surely deserves a mention. The importance of colour to the Spiritualist movement is ignored, despite a focus on High Anglican design. But it is always churlish to dwell on what isn't in an exhibition. Ultimately this is show of intensely beautiful detail which also manages to convey big ideas, like Darwin's theory of sexual selection, with almost throwaway ease. You leave with a vivid sense of 'Victorian art, fashion and design', and a desire to find out more.

I want to go back. You can't really have a better recommendation. 

The Picasso Problem

2023 is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso, one of the giants of twentieth century Modernism. Hailed as a genius, he transcended the art world, achieving the kind of universal status and recognisability normally reserved for film stars. Only Warhol, Pollock and possibly Dali have reached that level of ubiquity. Perhaps inevitably, since his death, there has been a reckoning, accelerated by the #metoo movement. Picasso is now more likely to be cast as a misogynistic abuser and exploiter of women, the personification of all that is negative about the 'male genius' myth. The backlash is so significant that there are no major exhibitions to commemorate this year's anniversary - although plenty of lesser ones. The Picasso Museum in Paris has controversially rehung the artist's work, with the aim of appealing to a younger generation, employing British designer Paul Smith to add 'colour and kitsch' and including interventions by contemporary artists. Meanwhile, the Brooklyn Museum commissioned Australian comedian, Hannah Gadsby to curate 'It's Pablo-matic', examining 'the artist’s complicated legacy through a critical, contemporary, and feminist lens'. 

Picasso needed to be reassessed and his personal life, particularly his relationships with a series of women, is deeply problematic. But in all this, the one thing that that is in danger of being ignored is the art. For much of his life, Picasso may indeed have lived off his reputation and his celebrity, but for a few crucial years at the start of the twentieth century he really did, undeniably, revolutionise art. In a post-Modernist, post-representational, post-painterly world, the significance of Cubism can be underplayed, but look at one of Picasso's paintings of, say, 1910, in the context of what else was being produced and the impact is immediate. The National Gallery's 2023 After Impressionism exhibition meandered through tinkering experimentations with colour and composition until it brought you face to face with Portrait of Wilhelm Uhde, a silent explosion, like a Cornelia Parker on canvas. The fragmented facets, multiple viewpoints in time and space, create a characterful representation which is nevertheless divorced from the reality of both traditional Western art and photographic imitation. The ghost of Cezanne lingers in the subtly applied brushwork and soft tonal shifts but Picasso has effectively relegated the past to the past. 

Analytical Cubism, as it is drily known, was not just an esoteric, intellectual exercise. Its impact spread rapidly and widely. Futurist work in Italy, Russia and the UK could not have existed without Picasso and Braque, and through the Futurists came dynamic abstraction. Mondrian, having dabbled with colour based simplification, turned to Cubism for his Pier and Ocean series, again a step on the road to geometric abstraction. The Delaunays saw the potential of fragmenting through light and colour. Others, like Leger, created a more solidly sculptural version of Cubist facets. And if that wasn't enough to guarantee Picasso's significance, his found-object reliefs play a similarly seminal role in twentieth century sculpture, paving the way for constructivism, ready-mades and the use of new materials. 

You could end your story of Picasso in 1914 and he would still have done enough to earn a place in the history of twentieth century art, but the story does not stop there. Like virtually all of his contemporaries, Picasso's radical vision shifted after the First World War, turning back to representation and embracing a chunky classicism. However, by the end of the 1920s he was synthesising the clear colours and draughtsmanship of the start of the decade with the angularity and spatial distortions of his earlier work. The Spanish Civil War added a political, personal dimension, culminating in Guernica, a cri de coeur on a monumental scale which tears savagely at the rules of art.

The elephant in the room here is Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Picasso's huge 1907 depiction of five nude sex workers, two of whom are wearing African-style masks. It is a deeply disturbing painting. It's meant to be. Similar shock-tactics by Manet in Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe have been softened by time and familiarity, so that the panting now looks slightly quaint, but Demoiselles still cuts deep. Ugliness is hard to take. The casual appropriation of Iberian, Egyptian and African artistic heritage is problematic in a post-colonial world. The cold manipulation of the five female figures can be read as misogynistic. Yet, Demoiselles is in many ways the logical end-point of Post-Impressionism, which had seen artists question traditional ideas of beauty, perspective and finish; and consciously look beyond the Western academic tradition. Picasso was doing what other artists have done. He was just pushing a bit further. 

Whilst all these profoundly significant works were being produced, Picasso was living a life as a serial exploiter, sometimes abuser, of a number of women. He was, by all accounts, not a nice man. His artistic success probably exacerbated the problem: from around 1910 he was feted, increasingly wealthy, and able to have and do whatever he wanted. For the second half of his life, certainly after the Second World War, he pretty much lived off his past reputation, nurtured by an art market which paid ever extortionate amounts for anything and everything which he produced. But none of that changes the fact that he made some extraordinary, seismic art. The problem with Picasso is Picasso, not the paintings.