'Painted Dreams: The Art of Evelyn De Morgan' (Wolverhampton Art Gallery until March 9 2025): Lulled into a False Sense of Beauty

Evelyn De Morgan, The Storm Spirits, c.1900, De Morgan Foundation

Evelyn De Morgan might not be a household name now, but you get some sense of the clout she must have had in 1907 when Wolverhampton Art Gallery sought her out for the one-woman-show which is being recreated here. Not only was De Morgan a successful artist, but she was a lucky one. Her sister, Wilhelmina Stirling, championed her work, gathering together as much as she could and bequeathing it to what is now the De Morgan Foundation. The Foundation, with no dedicated exhibition space of its own has agreements with three venues, including Wightwick Manor, an Arts and Crafts property on the outskirts of Wolverhampton, now under the care of the National Trust. If you're making a trip to the area to see Painted Dreams, I would definitely advise a stop there, not only has it a gallery dedicated to De Morgan and her husband, the ceramicist, William, but there are fine examples of Evelyn's work in the house collection. It is the existence of the De Morgan collection which has made it possible to gather most of the 1907 pieces together again for this exhibition.

Painted Dreams, a phrase taken from a 1907 review, well describes the curatorial mood-music. You push your way in through a closed doorway and find yourself cocooned within dark walls and bright pools of spotlit colour. It's a clever hang which shows off De Morgan at her best. As an artist who loved intense, modern pigments and iridescent complimentary shadows, and who used gold throughout her career, her works can seem too gaudy in natural light. Here they glow with an inner, ethereal beauty. Yet at the same time, every detail of the Pre-Raphaelite-precise draughtsmanship is crisply visible, from the goldfinch's plumage in Flora to the tapestry weave in the background of Crown of Glory. Pre-Raphaelitism seems the influence too in the abundance of expressionless beauties, the Italianate details of landscape, architecture and costume, the Botticellian weightlessness and sway, the surface finish. There are works which seem to slot seamlessly into the extended canon of art for art's sake Pre-Raphaelitism - full length figures like Helen of Troy, female nudes like the Sea Maiden - and De Morgan's work is often compared to that of Edward Burne Jones. But it is too easy to get lulled into a dream by her art. On the one hand, she was a dedicated workaholic, who learnt her trade at the Slade and continued to ply it throughout her career with a rigorous process of preliminary drawings, some of which are displayed very illuminatingly alongside the finished oils here. On the other, she is less interested in beauty for its own sake than as a means to symbolic and often highly moralising ends.

Evelyn De Morgan, Earthbound, c.1897, De Morgan Foundation

The curators attempt to push this narrative through labelling which consistently emphasises De Morgan's suffragist and pacifist sympathies, and by using the second room to explore these 'Painted Themes'. The connections are often tenuous - Cassandra as a symbol of women's rights - but the most obvious (although perhaps less fashionable) impulse behind De Morgan's art - religion - is largely ignored. Earthbound, features a miserly old king, dressed head to toe in shimmering gold, oblivious of the barren landscape around him and and the angel hovering above, as he grasps pathetically at his hoard of gold. It seems a profoundly religious work, a classic memento mori that underlines gulf between worldly and spiritual wealth, yet the label treats it only as an illustration of patriarchal power. And Earthbound is no outlier. De Morgan returns repeatedly to the theme of mortality (she dabbled, like many of her contemporaries, in spiritualism) and was profoundly uneasy about wealth and inequality. 

The exhibition ends anticlimactically, with a bright, brisk 'tying up the loose ends' display which illustrates, with reproductions, alternatives and new interpretations, the 1907 paintings which couldn't be shown here. The pedant in me appreciated the honesty and the comprehensiveness of the curators but it is an unsatisfactory end, not least because one of De Morgan's glorious gold drawings is wasted in a corner, as a mere illustration of a lost oil painting. The room also underscores the two competing aims of the show. Arguably, a full recreation of 1907 would not attempt a modern reinterpretation of the artist's 'socio-political' themes. Yet the curators are keen to show this well-to-do Victorian as a woman with relevance today.

Painted Dreams is an exhibition full of beauty, but the title implies a kind of emptiness, an insubstantiality. De Morgan's work is the opposite of that. Her labour and skill is visible everywhere: there is a strength and self-confidence in every line she produces, and every colour she chooses. Whether one reads feminism into her work or not, her subjects were carefully chosen and deeply meaningful, exhibited with quotations, references and poems, some of which were inscribed on the canvas. Inevitably, the exhibition provides only a snapshot of the artist's career, which continued for another ten years, but is is a rare chance to see her works, well-displayed, en masse. It is tribute to her work that you leave wanting to see more and know more about her. Evelyn De Morgan is not just a 'woman artist' (even a trailblazing one) but a painter who commands your attention and demands (albeit rather politely) to be taken seriously.

'Paris 1924: Sport, Art and Body' (Fitzwilliam Museum until November 3 2024):

Robert Delaunay, The Runners, c.1924. The National Museum of Serbia

Paris 1924 is as much about social history as art and is all the better for it. There is flickering film of the opening ceremony and grey stills of the spartan athletes' village; there are running shoes and tennis rackets, medals and programmes. None of it is the least bit dry, thanks in part to some of the best labelling I've read in a long time. The curators combine fact, anecdote and opinion in a refreshingly down-to-earth style: this is probably the only occasion you are likely to see the word 'ballsy' in the Fitzwilliam Museum. They counteract the floating elegance of a silk tennis dress by pointing out the sweat stains, a bobsleigh is brought to life with the gossipy titbit that Daphne du Maurier's war-hero future husband was injured competing in just such an unwieldy and weighty wooden contraption. Johnny Weissmuller's extraordinary Olympic record is balanced by a gem of an article from Movie Maker 1932 listing his myriad masculine perfections.

The labelling is just one aspect of a cleverly designed show. Much use is made of blown-up images, too often the fall-back of lazy curation but here a ghostly presence hovering behind the displays. The oversized image of 'Flying Finn' Paavlo Nurmi training in nothing but the briefest of pouches and ballet-like running shoes, hovers like a shadow behind the almost identically posed sculpture of The Athlete by Renée Sintenis. Both have a gravity defying lightness, an elegant fragility alongside the propulsive strength that drives them forward. Turn round and you get a cut through to the iconic St Andrews beach sequence at the start of Chariots of Fire, again with a sculpture -Wäinö Aaltonen's image of Nurmi -  intervening. It is one of the best pieces of exhibition design I've seen this year. The addition of the Vangelis film music might ben too much for some, but it is restrained and only intermittently audible, a knowing nod rather than intrusive annoyance. The large middle room uses an Olympic ring to split the space, generating dynamism and visual interest albeit at the expense of some oddly dingy corners. And throughout you are presented with a neat balance of size and shape, with varied objects, levels and methods of display, keeping everything fresh. The consequence is that in the course of a relatively small space you find out about gender, class, race, sexuality, commercialisation, popular culture and politics almost without noticing. The Paris Olympics of 1924 are no more than a starting point.

Art is woven throughout, from copies of ancient Greek athletes and antique vases which disprove the myth of the ideal physique, to examples of those who actually competed in de Coubertin's cultural olympiad. Not an afterthought or an illustration, it tells its own narratives: the divide between modernism and tradition, the aestheticism of the human body and the perennial difficulty of rendering movement in static form. The examples might unkindly be described as mixed. Robert Delaunay's Runners and George Grosz Gymnast would never be classed as among their major works and Jean Jacoby's clunky Sport Studies paintings do little more than justify the dropping of art from Olympic competition. Alongside these, however, you have the famous - the oxymoronic static weight of Umberto Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space - and the less familiar - Jan Sluijters The Boxer Rolf is slumped in expressionist exhaustion against a jagged blur which makes you feel punch-drunk. Helen Wills is minimised in wire by Alexander Calder and maximised as a staring icon by Diego Rivera.

The Discus Thrower, plaster copy, Museum of Classical Archeology, Cambridge

'Paris 1924' is not curated by art historians, but by two genuine enthusiasts, one a German scholar, one a classicist. It is perhaps that which gives this exhibition such a light yet deft touch. Everything is nuanced, and as a viewer you are gently nudged into pivoting your opinion. Just as you cheer the success of working class Lucy Morton winning Britain's only swimming gold in the 200m breaststroke, having being involved in a car crash on the way pool, you are told that she was reduced to performing at Blackpool Tower Circus. The subtlety is never better than in the investigation of the Diskobolus. Nazi fetishisation of the athletic Aryan physique is a silent menace throughout the show, and here the purposing and repurposing of the iconic Greek sculpture succinctly juxtaposes Johnny Weissmuller and  a Leni Riefenstahl still, before bringing things right up to date with a ten euro coin designed for Paris 2024. It is all you need. The Fitzwilliam Museum can usually be relied on to produce interesting, well-designed exhibitions, to give us unusual perspectives. 'Paris 1924' is one of their best.