'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. 

'Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads' (The Courtauld until May 27 2024): Creative Destruction

They haunt the room like ghosts, not so much portraits as memories of personal and collective trauma. Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads at the Courtauld is in many ways a limited exhibition: two rooms, twenty three works, mostly monochrome; a handful of sitters and a few short years out of a long, ongoing career. Yet there is nothing limiting about it. Auerbach is best known for solidity and forcefulness: his landscapes - the Courtauld has its own example on permanent display in an adjacent room - are literal reliefs, paint worms writhing out of the ground, deep furrows ploughed and excavated. The term 'impasto' seems drastically inadequate. There are some oil portraits in the Courtauld show which display the same aggressive manipulation of his medium, where features crumple under the weight of paint, into an almost Dorian Gray-like state of decay. But their sheer physicality is no match for the ethereal subtlety of the charcoal works which have both the otherworldly oddness of photographic negatives and the time-ravaged sense of something ancient.

Auerbach is no ordinary portraitist. His subjects are familiar, familial, himself, seen here in repeat. He observed them over months, each sitting recorded and erased in a process of layering and repeat. The time and process are writ large in scuffs and tears and mends: whilst Auerbach's oils seem often a process of building up, here he is constantly breaking down. It is one of the many contradictions. Works which have been produced so slowly are utterly immediate, a flash of dynamic lines. Faces in close-up scale largely avoid our gaze, with hollows for eyes which tilt down or turn aside. Line and structure are etched with a rubber. Never has creation seemed so destructive.

There is no context given to these figures - no background, no space, little detail - but once you know the context, rawness hangs acrid in the air. Auerbach's own tragedy, refugee child of parents murdered in Auschwitz, and the long, lingering shadow of the Second World War: physical and mental scars, visible wounds, patches of poverty and endless, endless grey. The occasional slash of colour seems like an attack rather than a respite. The faces take on a ghoulish emptiness, stripped back, almost genderless. Yet the final, greatest paradox of this show is that humanity triumphs in the end. Auerbach's self portraits are thoughtfully challenging in their strong, straight stare. His cousin, Gerda Boehm, another refugee, his substitute parent, retains her poise and gentility. Helen Gillespie is all angles and sharp edges, positively glinting with wit. These characters breath and move, with subtle shifts of pose, lighting and expression across the different charcoals. Not ghosts after all.

'Entangled Pasts: 1768–now Art, Colonialism and Change' (Royal Academy until 28 April 2024): Difficult to Disentangle

John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark, 1778, National Gallery of Art, Washington

'Entangled' is one way to describe the Royal Academy's big spring show. Messy might be another. On one hand it's a wholly admirable and often successful attempt to come to terms with the institution's (and, by association, Britain's past). You couldn't describe this as tokenist.  It sprawls over twelve galleries and outside into the bleak wind-tunnel of a courtyard, an unsympathetic location for Tavares Strachan’s First Supper, where an ambiguous dialogue is set up with Joshua Reynolds atop his plinth behind. There are big loans - who doesn't want to see Watson and the Shark in all its absurd Jaws-esque glory - and some wonderful curatorial choices. The sight-lines created through the forlorn driftwood of El Anatsui's Akui's Surviving Children to both Frank Bowling's Middle Passage and Ellen Gallagher's Stabilising Spheres are aesthetically stunning and emotionally devastating. And, mercifully, there are none of the preachy wall texts which places like the Tate are so prone to. 

In their absence, however, is blandness and vagueness. Too often I was left wondering why? Why was John Singleton Copley there? Because he, like Benjamin West was American, although there was no attempt to analyse their unique position as colonial but white? Because of the Black figure ignored in a caption which focuses instead Watson's survival to become Mayor of London? Because Copley was a big eighteenth century name they could get hold of? Similarly, Bowling and Gallagher are part of a room dedicated to the sea which is split awkwardly between the Middle Passage and whaling with a couple of second-rate Turners for good measure. The 'Constructing Whiteness' display feels especially thrown together. Frank Dicksee's laughably awful Startled doesn't need a caption which ties itself in knots over 'aryanising', 'nordic' and 'classical'. The slippery language emphasises a nettle ungrasped: issues of Academy racism are taken up to the Second World War and then glossed over. Surely this was the moment to acknowledge the embarrassing truth that Sonia Boyce, the first Black female academician, was only elected in 2016.

Unknown Artist, Portrait of a Man in a Red Suit, c.1740-80, Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Gallery, Exeter

'Entangled Pasts' raises obvious comparisons with the recent, albeit much smaller, 'Black Atlantic' exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum - even some of the same works are on show. The Fitzwilliam went for tightly written text and impeccable lighting to create nuance and structure and maximise their limited exhibits. The Royal Academy, in contrast, underuses Barbara Walker's Vanishing Point and the beautiful Man in a Red Suit is shown, along with fine portraits by Gainsborough, Reynolds and others in a gloomily empty octagon. Isaac Julien's film deserves a better space: crowded watchers jostle with those trying to get through to the sculptures beyond and the tintypes behind are impossible to see. Meanwhile, Lubaina Himid's Naming the Money installation sprawls over two rooms, its impact lessened as a result. Inevitably, with 100 works and 50 artists, there are weaker pieces and you could certainly make the case for some judicious pruning.

In some ways 'Entangled Pasts' is a show of (mainly) good art, poorly served. But maybe that doesn't matter. Its big, rambling, inconclusiveness is in itself a metaphor for the entangled past it's seeking to represent. There are no easy answers or straightforward narratives. There are questions and problems and dead-ends. The curators resolutely refuse to tell us what to think, but thank goodness for that.  What the show does - and arguably what it could have done even more - is pit the past against the present and let the results speak for themselves. Let's have more of the same.