'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.