'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.

'Sargent and Fashion' (Tate Britain until Jul 7 2024): Fashion might be in Fashion, but Sargent is the Star

John Singer Sargent, Dr Pozzi at Home, 1881, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles 

(Wikimedia Commons)

Sargent and Fashion is an awful title. I went to the exhibition with a feeling of dread: women sitters as clothes-horses and John Singer Sargent reduced, as he so often is, to celebrity portraitist. And yes, there are dresses and fans and feathers, but they enhance, not detract from, the paintings. The real reason to go, is to see a wonderful collection of Sargent's portraits, many of them from the United States, some of them never seen before in the UK. Fashion is something of a fashion at the moment: the Ashmolean recently linked art, objects and clothes in its Colour Revolution show and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery is currently exhibiting dresses alongside its Pre-Raphaelites. Personally, I can take it or leave it: dresses are no different from other 'ephemera' which gets included in exhibitions as context. Like photographs or letters, or the rococo furnishings which Dulwich included in the exhibition last year to elucidate their claims about Berthe Morisot's 18th century influences, clothes can be helpful. But for me it remains all about the art.

Sargent is too often and too easily dismissed as a portraitist and whilst this exhibition sticks firmly to his representations of people, it is obvious, even from the first couple of rooms, that he isn't 'just' a painter of portraits. Equally, he is an artist who overlaps with Impressionism, both chronologically and personally - there is a lovely anecdote about his dismay in visiting Monet and finding no black paint in the house - yet is most emphatically not an Impressionist. In the context of innovation-obsessed art history, this makes him seem like a fuddy-duddy throwback, churning out Grand Manner portraits whilst the modern world moves on around him. Yet there is nothing staid about Sargent, or, one suspects, despite their corsets, about his sitters.

Sargent's female subjects are anything but clothes-horses. Many were personal friends, many he painted more than once, and the closeness shows. He is a master at finding the telling detail, the revealing tic. Madame X, so often seen as a cypher for unobtainable sexual allure because of that infamous drooping strap, in reality betrays a brittleness. You see it in that sharply profiled, retrousse nose and the thumb tensed on the polished wood table. Vernon Lee sparkles with vitality, like electricity crackling: the reflection on her glasses, the sheen on the end of her nose, the moist, mid-conversation lips and the random dashes of white above her eyebrows, under her chin. You are desperate to hear what she has to say. Mrs Edward L Davis strides out of the canvas with her mouth set and her hand on her hip, her skirts smothering her sailor-suited son whose hand she holds iron-fast. You fear for his future wife - she's never going to let him go.

The clothes are just as important. Not fashion, not decoration, but integral to the character  of their wearers. They give Mrs Edward Darley Boit her engaging energy - all polka-dots and swirls with a flame-like feather rising from her head. She's straight out of Henry James, the life and soul of every dinner party and, boy, does she go to a lot. They define the differences between sisters Betty and Ena Wertheimer: the quiet, pretty one, and the character who'll go on to play act for Sargent in borrowed robes. And of course, Sargent the artist uses clothes for his own purpose, pleasure and challenge. Black on black, white against white, dramatic colour contrasts, texture and pattern. Is fashion the right word for all this creativity with cloth?

If the curators get the title wrong, then they also over-egg their labelling with dressy details. I don't feel the need to have a written description, even if it is from a contemporary source, of an outfit which is literally next to it, either on canvas or in a vitrine. They have also succumbed to the fashion for eccentric wall colouring: here including a particularly nasty orange. A major gripe is the room which looks at Sargent's performativity and fluid representation of gender. Again, these are buzz themes which are easily overcooked and what the three 'masculinities' on display really show is the painter's ability to render character. Waif-like in his attenuated pallour, Graham Robertson is a 19th century Timothée Chalamet, so elegantly fragile he seems held vertical only by the tight rigidity of his coat. In Dr Pozzi at Home, the surgeon's fingers pluck delicately at the fabric of his floor-length red dressing gown, giving him an edgy femininity which the clothes alone do not. Between them, Henry Lee Higginson lounges in self-confident tweed, chin up, holding our gaze with a sense of impatience. Performance seems a superficial dismissal of these careful, subtle character studies.

John Singer Sargent, The Chess Game, c.1907, private collection (Wikimedia Commons)

What the curators get wonderfully right, however, is the expansive range of Sargent's work. They cover his idiosyncratic portraits of children, and of Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife; his theatricality including the masterly Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth; his dabbles in aestheticism, not just Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose but the ethereal Cashmere, paint as soft as the fabric itself. The small, late landscapes where strangely posed figures are swallowed up by verdant vegetation have a unique, abstracted mood. Fashion and character are not the issue here, you sense the impatience of an artist who just wants to experiment with paint, with form. Fabrics become watery pools, dappled with sunlight, clefted with shadow. Features blur into nothingness.

Sargent and Fashion might be an awful title, but it's clever marketing, and the exhibition is bound to be a success, attracting art lovers, clothes lovers and those for whom rooms full of elegance (male and female) have its own appeal. If the curatorial argument seems weak, then the paintings simply speak for themselves. Ultimately, Sargent is about so much more than fashion.

'Dame Laura Knight - I Paint Today' (Worcester City art Gallery and Museum until June 30 2024): Just Scratching the Surface

Laura Knight Sundown, 1940-47, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, © the estate of Dame Laura Knight, DBE, RA / Bridgeman Images. Photo credit: Wolverhampton Arts and Heritage

It is impossible to do justice to a career as long and prolific as Laura Knight's in two very small rooms, and you can leave Worcester Art Gallery's  I Paint Today feeling disappointed by the absences. There is very little of her early work: the soft shadows of a Staithes interior leaves you desperate for more, and two sun-baked clay pits noisy with labour are the only hint of her breezy, endless-summer Cornish coastal scenes. There is just one of her incredible series of works for the War Advisory Committee - but, boy, is it good. And a whole wall is given over to her husband's paintings, including two large, similar society portraits, in what seems a frustratingly unnecessary act of gender balance. 

What you do leave with, however, is a sense of Laura Knight's range and variety. Partly this is a product of a long life, lived determinedly in the present (here the title of the show seems particularly apposite). Knight started as a late nineteenth century naturalist, befriended by George Clausen, influenced by Dutch and French art; she became increasingly Impressionistic, embracing a richer almost Bloomsbury-esque palette during the 1930s, before employing her portraitist's eye for the observed realism of her wartime paintings. But her output is not just an accident of longevity. Knight was constantly exploring and experimenting, from acquiring Clausen's printing equipment for her own etchings, to jewellery, ceramics, and London Transport posters. In a small space, the Worcester curators give a sense of all this and more.

In some ways it's a messy exhibition. The chronology dots about, the thematic approach seems governed by availability of works as much as by any coherent plan. There are, for me, too many of Knight's circus and Gypsy subjects, presented here without comment despite their potentially problematic representations. Whilst The Grand Parade, Charivari has an unintentional  surrealism, her backstage theatricals seem polite and dated. However, the curators' efforts are also clear: there are loans aplenty, good, sensibly written wall texts and even some afternoon talks. Could it have been a better exhibition if it focussed on one aspect of her work - perhaps. The local interest connection of the Malverns, the subject of a 2020 book by Heather Whatley, could easily have become the theme of the show. 

Laura Knight suffered under the modernist hegemony of the late twentieth century: she was too naturalistic, too figurative, and far too establishment. Thankfully, she is now gaining the attention she deserves and if the exhibition at Worcester introduces more people to her variety and her talent it will be a good thing. I Paint Today might not be the best exhibition you'll go to, it certainly isn't the best exhibition of Knight's work that I've seen. But it contains at least one masterpiece: Take-Off, Interior of a Bomber is big and bold and utterly compelling in its juxtaposition of calm observation and impending tragedy. A display of Knight's wartime paintings  - now that would be a grand thing indeed. 

'Pesellino: A Renaissance Master Revealed' (National Gallery until March 10 2024): Delight in Detail

Pesellino, King Melchior Sailing to the Holy Land , c.1440-45, 

Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, (Wikimedia Commons)

A single, dark room in the National Gallery shimmers with colour and pattern and detail. It feels intimate and otherworldly after the cavernous spaces and damask walls of the main displays; even busy with people there's a hushed, chapel-like atmosphere. Pesellino is not a 'big name' but you walk out thinking he ought to be. There is something so joyously exuberant about his art, so crazily outlandish. Why add pink marshmallow clouds to his King Melchior Sailing to the Holy Land ? Why surround his Pistoia Crucifixion with surreally-weird disembodied putti? Why have a bear cub snuffling in the foreground of David's grand victory parade? Just for the hell of it, for the brash Icarus-like, 'look at me fly' nerve of it. Even without knowing the tragedy of his early death from the plague, you have to love the guy.

Pesellino was at the centre of artistic life in Florence, at a time when Florence was pretty much at the centre of artistic life; he worked with big names like Filippo Lippi, he worked for big names like the Medici, who commissioned the David panels here. He was also a canny operator: illuminated manuscripts, devotional diptychs, furniture. You get the idea that if the price was right, and the patron was right, then Pesellino, like most of the artists of the day, would turn his hand anything.  He lived right in the middle of that exciting, anything-is-possible time in the midst of the fifteenth century when new - Masaccio's perspectival experiments - and the old - pattern and gold and natural detail  - coexisted in a gloriously chivalrous battle. You can see Uccello's San Romano in Pesellino's foreshortened knights and stylised horses; you can see Botticelli's elegant angels their draperies blowing in the breeze; you can see Gentile da Fabriano's gilded luxury. But if that all makes, Pesellino sound like an artistic magpie, nicking the others' best ideas, you'd be wrong. There is also something uniquely, idiosyncratically him.

Pesellino, David and Goliath, c.1445, National Gallery, London, (Wikimedia Commons)

The little exhibition also showcases the National Gallery. They do this kind of thing so impeccably well that you forget the time and effort (and money obviously) which goes into even a one-room exhibition like this. We owe them for originally gathering together the hacked up pieces of the Pistoia altarpiece, now united. We owe their conservation team their labour in restoring the battered furniture panels of the cassone, with their visible key marks. We owe the curators for having the foresight to see that this was a show worth having and reaching out to get loans like the King Melchior. And most of all, we owe them for not charging an entrance fee. It would be very easy for the gallery to rest on its laurels, put on the big shows and watch the visitors come through the doors, but, as anyone who visits regularly knows, they are constantly tweaking, moving, changing; and always producing these mini-displays. You can also see Jean-Étienne Liotard's pastels at the moment. 

So, go! Make use of the magnifying glasses provided, the excellent key which clarifies the complex multiple scene-narrative of the David panels, and the conservation video which shows just how mind-blowingly skillful Pesellino was in his pre-application of tiny gold leaf details. But most of all just go and enjoy some of the best art you'll see this year. By a guy who never even makes it into the history books.