RA Magazine Autumn 2013

ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS MAGAZINE NUMBER 120 AUTUMN 2013 AUSTRALIA DAUMIER THE KEEPER’S HOUSE BILL WOODROW RA

ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS MAGAZINE NO. 120 / AUTUMN 2013 / £4.95

Australia Down Under takes over

Vive la République Daumier’s visions of Paris The Keeper’s House Open for art lovers

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This Autumn Pangolin London is proud to present two exhibitions by Royal Academicians

GEOFFREY CLARKE RA A DECADE OF CHANGE

13.9.13 - 26.10.13

ANN CHRISTOPHER RA TO KNOW WITHOUT REMEMBERING

6.11.13 - 7.12.13 To watch an exclusive online interview with Ann Christopher scan this page Fully illustrated catalogues accompany both exhibitions

PANGOLIN LONDON Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9AG T: 020 7520 1480 E: gallery@pangolinlondon.com www.pangolinlondon.com Open: Mon - Sat 10am-6pm; Closed between exhibitions I����: G������� C����� ��, Taunton Deane Crematorium: Test Panel, 1963

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RA adv_WFA Advert 22/07/2013 16:52 Page 1

6 Duke Street St. James’s , London SW1Y 6BN +44 (0)20 7930 9332 info@whitfordfineart.com ww.whitfordfineart.com

Autumn Exhibition AUSTRALIAN LANDSCAPE Including works by: Arthur Baker-Clack William Blamire Young Henry Gritten Kudditji Kngwarreye Lionel Lindsay Lily Kelly Napangardi Sidney Nolan John Peter Russell Helicopter Tjungurrayi Christine Yukenbarri Lucy Yukenbarri Tommy Watson

Lucy Yukenbarri A Soakage in Sandhill Country, 1997 Paul Dibble Soft Geometric No. 20, 2004

‘Nuevo Trabajo’ Susan Wilson New Work.

Wilson’s Intervention and Response to Hispanic Art

Carmen (La Bolivana) oil on linen h12” x w10”

17th – 27th September

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27 Albemarle Street W1S 4HZ London T: 020 7495 2738 Monday to Friday 10am to 6pm (Weekends by appointment) www.collcortes.com info@collcortes.co.uk Susan Wilson is represented by Browse & Darby www.wilsonartist.com

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A U S T R A L I A C O N T E M P O R A R Y

V O I C E S

6 N OV E M B E R TO 2 1 D E C E M B E R

The Fine Art Society C O N T E M P O R A R Y

148 New Bond Street | London W1S 2JT | www.faslondon.com

Charlotte Mayer

Solo Exhibition

Sculpture and works on paper 14th October - 22nd November

A newly published book with text by Tom Flynn will accompany the exhibition GALLERY PANGOLIN CHALFORD - GLOS - GL6 8NT 01453 889765 gallery@pangolin-editions.com www.gallery-pangolin.com

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JOHN OLSEN

AN EXHIBITION OF NEW WORK

3 - 2 6 O C TO B E R 2 0 1 3 To coincide with the major Australia exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, Osborne Samuel in association with Olsen Irwin, Sydney, are pleased to present an exhibition of new work by John Olsen, AO, OBE.

23a Bruton Street London W1J 6QG Tel: 020 7493 7939 info@osbornesamuel.com www.osbornesamuel.com

An illustrated catalogue available on request.

Image: Lake Eyre: The Desert Sea IX, 2012 (detail) Mixed media on French cotton paper. 160 x 120 cm

CHRISTOPHER R W NEVINSON TH E COMPLE TE PR IN TS Osborne Samuel Gallery in collaboration with Dr. Jonathan Black and Lund Humphries Publishing, are compiling the complete catalogue raisonnĂŠ of prints by CRW Nevinson to be published in the autumn of 2014 We are currently seeking works to purchase and for possible loan to a major exhibition to accompany the launch of this publication.

Please email: bchhohan@osbornesamuel.com

23a Bruton Street, London W1J 6QG Tel: 020 7493 7939 info@osbornesamuel.com www.osbornesamuel.com Image: Banking at 4000 Feet 1917 Lithograph 40.2 x 31.5 cm

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ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS MAGAZINE NO.120 / AUTUMN 2013

Contents

Review & Comment

COVER

71 Edmund Fawcett enjoys

Cézanne’s letters; Richard Cork on the role of therapy in art; an excerpt from Ian Ritchie RA’s new book; books in brief

N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY O F AUS T R A L I A , CA N B ER R A /GI F T O F S U N DAY R EED, 1977F R I DA K A H LO M US EU MS T RUS T, M E X I CO, D. F. / DAC S

The RA’s ‘Australia’ show presents four of Sidney Nolan’s 26 paintings on the outlaw Ned Kelly. In Ned Kelly (1946; right), the most famous of the series, Nolan evokes with surreal power the ambiguous relationship the settler and his animals have to the hostile Australian landscape.

Listings 75 A guide to exhibitions around

London and the UK this season

11 RA EXHIBITION DIARY

86 READERS’ OFFERS

15 THE KEEPER’S HOUSE OPENS

Academy

18 EDITORIAL

88 IN THE STUDIO

20 CONTRIBUTORS 22 RA MAGAZINE APP INSTRUCTIONS

Preview 29 LONDON

The masters of Chinese painting; portraits from fin-de siècle Vienna; British Pop Art readdressed; what the court of Elizabeth I reveals; Tom Phillips RA on Klee’s lyrical genius; Colombian gold; the Serpentine Gallery gets a second home; London’s galleries gear up for Frieze Art Fair

39 REGIONAL

The parallels between Bacon and Moore; art turns left at Tate Liverpool; Allan Ramsay at the Hunterian; Roger Hiorns; Hurvin Anderson at Ikon

45 INTERNATIONAL

Adrian Locke on Mexican murals; Dürer in Frankfurt; Magritte in New York; Aichi Triennale

Features 50 UNDER THE SUN

As the RA mounts its unprecedented survey of Australian art, Peter Conrad examines how the work on show has been influenced by the Australian landscape, with its lush groves, bush fires and long desolate roads

58 KNOWING NOLAN

Australian painter Sidney Nolan captured the imagination of a generation. Here, novelist Alex Miller explains why he was so inspired by one of Nolan’s works that he moved Down Under

60 RADICAL IN THE MAKING

Known to many as a caricaturist, Honoré Daumier is reassessed at the Academy this October. Painter Timothy Hyman RA explains why Daumier’s canvases have been so significant for generations of artists

66 WITH KIND REGARDS

Giles Waterfield delves into the history of gifts from the Royal Academy to The Queen, as the Royal Collection displays the portfolio of Academicians’ works given to celebrate her Jubilee year

68 A CUT ABOVE

To coincide with a forthcoming show of Bill Woodrow RA in Burlington Gardens, Edith Devaney examines a seminal sculpture that reveals the central role that wit plays in Woodrow’s work Extra digital content is available via the RA Magazine App in these sections and articles – just scan the marked images with a smartphone or tablet. See page 22 for instructions

Sam Phillips meets Sean Scully RA in his Barcelona studio

91 OUT TO LUNCH

Eleanor Mills talks life, music and art with David Mach RA

92 ACADEMICIANS’ NEWS

John Carter RA shows works on paper; Academicians’ roundup; why Richard Wilson RA is a high flier; Peter Freeth RA’s prints on show

94 IN MEMORIAM

Ann Christopher RA remembers sculptor Ralph Brown RA

96 EVENTS & LECTURES

The RA’s events programme

100 RESTAURANT AND SHOPPING GUIDE 104 CLASSIFIEDS

Inside Story 106 Nick Tite meets dealer turned

collector John Kasmin

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A USTRA L IA P E OPLE & PLACES 10 SEPTEmbER – 26 OCTObER

Ned Kelly, 1996, by Freddie Timms, Cassein on Arches Paper, 29 x 41cm

Waiting for Rain (Detail), 2013, by David Frazer, Linocut, 139 x 98 cm

An exhibition of Australian art including works by: Arthur boyd, Jamie boyd, David bromley, Robert brownhall, Robert Campbell Jr, David Frazer, Emily Kngwarreye, Lloyd Kwilla, Albert Namatjira, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Sydney Nolan, Dennis Nona, Jimmy Pike, Rover Thomas, Freddie Timms, Fred Williams, Owen Yalanga.

RE b ECCA HOS S ACK AR T GALLERY For twenty-five years London’s leading gallery for Australian and Aboriginal Art

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What’s on at the Royal Academy this autumn

RA Exhibition Diary Australia Main Galleries Royal Academy of Arts 21 September to 8 December

Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and the National Gallery of Australia.

Supported by Qantas Airways and The Campaign for Wool

The first major survey of Australian art in the UK for 50 years, this exhibition spans more than 200 years, from 1800 to the present day, and seeks to uncover the fascinating social and cultural evolution of a nation through its landscape art.

Friends Preview Days Wed 18 Sep, 10am-8.30pm Thurs 19 Sep, 10am-6pm Fri 20 Sep, 10am-6pm

Mexico: A Revolution in Art, 1910-1940 The Sackler Wing Royal Academy of Arts Until 29 September

A R T G A L L ERY O F N E W S O U T H WA L ES/ P U R CH AS ED 1965/© DAC S 2013

2009-2013 Season supported by JTI The Mexican Revolution of 191020 had a dramatic impact on the art of the era. With work by Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and José Chávez Morado, this show is set to delight and shock in equal measure.

Richard Rogers RA: Inside Out Burlington Gardens Royal Academy of Arts Until 13 October

Supported by Ferrovial Agroman, Heathrow Airport Limited and Laing O’Rourke This show explores Richard Rogers RA’s extensive career, focusing on ground-breaking buildings such as the Pompidou Centre, and aims to create debate around his views on city planning and urbanism.

Australian Beach Pattern, 1940, by Charles Meere, on show in ‘Australia’

The Keeper’s House Royal Academy of Arts Opens 30 September

The Keeper’s House provides sophisticated new social spaces for Friends and visitors to the Academy. Following its restoration by architects Long & Kentish, a 19th-century addition to Burlington House now hosts rooms in which to relax and socialise. Peyton and Byrne serve refreshments in the day and evening in a new restaurant and cocktail bar, as well as in refurbished rooms for Friends. David Chipperfield RA has designed the interiors and landscaper Tom Stuart-Smith has created a new garden space.

See page 15 for information.

Open to Friends Fri 27 Sep, 10am-11pm Sat 28 Sep, 10am-11pm Sun 29 Sep,10am-6pm

Daumier (1808-1879): Visions of Paris

Bill Woodrow RA

The Sackler Wing Royal Academy of Arts 26 October to 26 January, 2014

Supported by The Henry Moore Foundation

2009-2013 Season supported by JTI

A staunch Republican, freethinker and chronicler of everyday life in turbulent 19th-century Paris, Honoré Daumier lived during a pivotal time in France’s history.

This exhibition explores his art through 130 works, some of which have never been seen in the UK before, with a concentration on paintings, drawings, watercolours and sculptures, alongside a selection of his lithographs.

Friends Preview Days Wed 23 Oct, 10am-8.30pm Thurs 24 Oct, 10am-6pm Fri 25 Oct, 10am-6pm

Burlington Gardens Royal Academy of Arts 7 November to 16 February, 2014

Bill Woodrow RA is one of the most respected sculptors working in Britain today. This survey show – the largest UK exhibition of Woodrow’s work to date – contains more than 60 of his inventive works, from his earliest sculptures as a student to new pieces produced especially for this exhibition.

Highlights include his ‘Fossil’ series (1979) in which everyday objects such as telephones and hairdriers appear fossilised in stone.

Friends Preview Day Wed 6 Nov, 10am-8.30pm

Continued on page 12

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FAR LEFT Don Quixote Reading, c.1865-67,

by Honoré Daumier LEFT Revelator 5, 2006,

by Bill Woodrow RA BELOW Carnival in Huejotzingo,1939, by José Chávez Morado, on show in ‘Mexico: A Revolution in Art’

Continued from page 11 SIR HUGH CASSON PRA: MAKING FRIENDS

Supported by the American Associates of the Royal Academy Trust and the Norman Foster Foundation

Tennant Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts, until 22 September

Sir Hugh Casson was one of the Royal Academy’s most influential presidents (1976-84). This exhibition charts his contribution to art and architecture, and includes previously unseen watercolours and drawings he made for the Festival of Britain and London Zoo.

JOHN CARTER RA – BETWEEN DIMENSIONS Tennant Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts, 2 Oct to 16 Feb, 2014

Works on paper by John Carter RA reveal the thought processes behind his minimalist wall-based works.

Tennant Gallery open Tuesday to Friday 1-4pm Saturday and Sunday 10am-6pm

VISITOR INFORMATION Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BD

For general enquiries, luggage restrictions, and full visitor information, call 020 7300 8000 or visit

www.royalacademy.org.uk RA exhibition opening hours

are 10am–6pm Mon to Sun (last admission 5.30pm) except Fri 10am–10pm (last admission 9.30pm). The RA Shop closes 15 minutes before the galleries.

The Restaurant is open

Sat to Thur 10am–6pm; Fri 10am–11pm (to book call 020 7300 5608).

Disabled access page 96.

Visually impaired visitors have

access to large-print labels in the galleries and on the RA website.

The refurbished Sir Hugh Casson Room opens on

5 September, from 10am.

There will be no dedicated Friends room from 2–4 September and 25–26 September.

Thank you for your patience and understanding while we have undertaken our programme of refurbishment works. We look forward to welcoming you to the Keeper’s House.

The Keeper’s House opens

to Friends on 27 September (see previous page and page 15 for information).

The Keeper’s House opens

from 30 September.

Opening hours are 10am–11pm Mon to Sat, 10am–6pm Sun. FRIENDS OF THE RA

For details on Friends membership call 020 7300 5664 or visit www.royalacademy.org.uk/friends

For the RA Magazine App, follow instructions on page 22

Read RA Magazine online www.ramagazine.org.uk

Visit the Royal Academy online

www.royalacademy.org.uk

Follow the Royal Academy online www.facebook.com/

royalacademy; @royalacademy

To follow RA Magazine between issues, read our blog

www.ramagazine.org.uk/blog COMING SOON

Sensing Spaces: Architecture Reimagined 25 January to 6 April 2014 Friends Preview Days Wed 22 January, 10am-8.30pm Thur 23 January, 10am-6pm Fri 24 January, 10am-6pm

A R F EN T H YG G A N / L EN T BY A M GU ED D FA CY M RU - N AT I O N A L M US EU M WA L ES/ P H OTO © N AT I O N A L M US EU M O F WA L ES . CO L L ECT I O N O F B I L L WO O D R OW. CO L L ECT I O N O F P H O EN I X A R T M US EU M , GI F T O F D R . & M RS . LOYA L DAV IS/© DAC S 2013

RA Exhibition Diary

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When Britain Went Pop! British Pop Art: The Early Years

©THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

9 October – 24 November 2013 Christie’s Mayfair · 103 New Bond Street · London Above from left to right:

Joe Tilson, Gerald Laing, Francis Morland, Peter Phillips, Peter Blake, Derek Boshier, Allen Jones and David Hockney

Contact

Third Paris Biennale of Young Artists, 1963 Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, photographed by Joe O’Reilly

Roxana Afshar roxana@waddingtoncustot.com +44 (0) 20 7851 2206

Lock Kresler lkresler@christies.com +44 (0) 20 7389 2253

In collaboration with

JOHN GLOVER (1767–1849) Ben Lomond from Mr Talbot’s property – four Men catching Opossums (detail) oil on canvas · 30 1/4 x 45 1/4 in. (76.8 x 114.9 cm.) £1,800,000–2,500,000

Australian Art London, King Street s 26 September 2013 Viewing

Contact - UK

Contact - Australia

21–25 September 8 King Street London SW1Y 6QT

Nicholas Lambourn nlambourn@christies.com +44 (0) 20 7389 2040

Ronan Sulich rsulich@christies.com (02) 9326 1422

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Home is where the Art is

From September the Keeper’s House at the Royal Academy opens as a sanctuary for Friends of the RA and other art lovers in the heart of Mayfair. Over the following pages, the highlights of this historic development are revealed, including its new restaurant, bar and garden

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The Sir Hugh Casson Room

T H E K EEP ER’S H O U S E P ROV I D ES

new spaces for Friends and visitors to eat, drink, R EL A X A N D S OCI A LIS E

The Keeper’s House can be entered from the Annenberg Courtyard at the front of Burlington House. As Friends and visitors pass through the new entrance hall, with its restored black and white paving stones, the refurbished Sir Hugh Casson Room is to the left. Beautiful oak boards greet the visitor underfoot and, from a bright white bar, refreshments will be served throughout the day, including pastries, sandwiches, soups, salads and afternoon tea. This room, like others in the Keeper’s House, is hung with works by Royal Academicians.

In the evening the mood changes and the room becomes a more intimate space where visitors can relax over a glass of wine. Film screenings are planned for the future, as the room can be set up as a cinema using its state-of-the-art projector and sound system.

The Belle Shenkman Room The Keeper’s House represents a dramatic improvement in facilities that more than doubles the space available to Friends, the Academy’s most valued supporters. Award-winning architects Long & Kentish have sensitively restored a beautiful suite of rooms in Burlington House that once provided a home for the Keeper of the Royal Academy in the 19th and early 20th centuries. While the current Keeper, painter and printmaker Eileen Cooper RA, continues to work in her studio on the top floor, the remaining rooms within this architectural gem – located to the east of the Academy’s main entrance – have now been transformed into a set of exciting spaces for Friends and visitors. With attractive interiors designed by award-winning architect David Chipperfield RA, catering by acclaimed restaurateur Oliver Peyton and Academicians’ art adorning the walls, the Keeper’s House creates a new social hub in the heart of Mayfair. Moreover, it is accessible from morning to late at night for Friends, art lovers and artists alike.

If Friends and visitors wish to sink into a sofa in cosier surroundings, they can unwind in the Belle Shenkman Room – a sophisticated space with green velvet sofas. With a view overlooking the new garden, this room provides a place to sit back and relax in the afternoon. Fine wines, beer and food are served throughout the day. From 4pm the lights dim, and the room is transformed into a lounge where visitors can enjoy drinks as well as cold meats and cheeses.

The Restaurant The Keeper’s House includes a new dining room downstairs, with architectural casts from the historic RA Collection decorating the walls – soft ambient lighting highlights the modelling of the casts to provide a textural backdrop to the space. Friends can enjoy lunch from 12-3pm, and visitors may dine in the evening from 5.30pm.

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OPEN TO FRIENDS

Fri 27 September 10am–11pm Sat 28 September 10am–11pm Sun 29 September 10am–6pm OFFICIAL OPENING

Mon 30 September

OPENING HOURS

Monday to Saturday 10am–11pm Sunday 10am–6pm F O R M O R E I N F O R M AT I O N

Visit www.keepershouse.org.uk

The Shenkman Bar An impression of the new bar in the Keeper’s House

The Shenkman Bar In the evenings the Shenkman Bar downstairs provides a lively place to meet friends to enjoy aperitifs and cocktails made especially by Peyton and Byrne’s resident mixologist.

There is an extensive list of wines available by the glass, as well as sherry and port from which to choose. With black hide bar stools, Purbeck stone floor and doors that lead onto the garden, the Shenkman Bar is a pleasurable place to while away an evening.

The Garden The Academy’s new garden, designed by renowned landscaper Tom Stuart-Smith, is an exciting addition.

Stuart-Smith has created his personal vision of an art oasis, inviting Friends and visitors to take a break from an exhibition and surround themselves with its tree-like ferns, long grasses and wall-covering climbers that are lush green in summer, fiery red and orange during autumn. The beautiful natural surroundings are complemented by Flemish brick steps, reclaimed York stone and designer furniture.

S T E P H E N F RY Royal Academy Trustee We are making a spectacular breakthrough with the newly restored Keeper’s House, which should transform the whole experience of being a Friend. The building will offer more spaces for eating, drinking and relaxing. All of these are stylish and beautifully designed. I believe these facilities will encourage many more to join the Friends scheme.

CHRISTOPHER LE BRUN President of the Royal Academy The Keeper’s House will offer exceptional value to anyone interested in the arts today. With a dining room, garden, bar and its own entrance from the courtyard, it will hugely improve the experience of the RA, and provide a meeting place in the heart of the West End for Friends, Academicians and visitors.

OLIVER PEYTON Director, Peyton and Byrne The Keeper’s House provides Friends and visitors with comfort and the highest quality, from tea to champagne, light snacks to threecourse meals. There are two things I’d love anyone eating there to take away with them: the sense that the RA has created a space infused with the sensibility of art and artists, and that they haven’t had a culinary experience quite like it before.

EILEEN COOPER Keeper of the Royal Academy The Keeper’s House provides Friends with the facilities they deserve. It will also be a great destination for people who want to find out more about art. I hope it will become a hotbed for artists and art lovers alike: a place where people will live and breathe art.

The Garden Tom Stuart-Smith’s impression of the new garden, leading from the Shenkman Bar

Text: Eleanor Mills Design: Pentagram Photography: Gautier Deblonde, Anne Purkiss, Phil Sayer & Francis Ware Illustrations : Alex Hedworth, Studio of Tom Stuart-Smith

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Editorial EDITORIAL

Publisher Nick Tite Acting Editor Sam Phillips Assistant Editor Eleanor Mills Art Direction Design by St Sub-Editor Gill Crabbe Proofreader Simon Wilson Editorial Intern Aindrea Emelife Editorial Advisers Jerry Brotton,

Richard Cork, Liz Horne, Fiona Maddocks, Chris Orr RA, Eric Parry RA, Charles Saumarez Smith, Giles Waterfield and Sarah Whitfield Special thanks Irena Pogarcic, Chloe Brook at the London Library Digital Content Kate Huckle, Amy Macpherson. The RA Magazine App is made by iBiblios and powered

by Vstory Editorial enquiries 020 7300 5820; ramagazine@royalacademy.org.uk To comment on RA Magazine

reply.ramagazine@royalacademy.org.uk ADVERTISING AND PRODUCTION

Jane Grylls 020 7300 5661; jane.grylls@royalacademy.org.uk Business Manager

Old Man’s Dreaming, 1983, by Uta Uta Tjangala

Kim Jenner 020 7300 5658; kim.jenner@royalacademy.org.uk Listings Editor Sarah Bolwell 020 7300 5675; sarah.bolwell @royalacademy.org.uk

Broad horizons The title of the Academy’s sweeping survey of Australian art this season is simply ‘Australia’, allowing interpretations of the exhibition to be as wide and open as the country’s outback.

From the works of the first colonial settlers to those of immigrant modernists and Aboriginal painters, such as Uta Uta Tjangala (above), the art on view does not represent a single vision of a nation, but instead just some of its sheer plurality of perspectives.

As the most significant presentation of Australian art ever to be mounted in the UK, the exhibition will no doubt challenge British preconceptions of both the country and its culture. Events, auctions, publications, broadcasts and parallel exhibitions on Australian art coincide with the RA show, prompting a wide-ranging conversation about Australia this autumn and stimulating debate about the country’s changing relationship with Britain.

In his masterful article (page 50), Peter Conrad treads a path through the diverse work on display by focusing on one theme: landscape.

Australian art history arguably becomes, in Conrad’s words, ‘a slave of geography’, in which the central subject is how Australians have related to their country’s extremes of environment. The power of such art to shape lives is made clear in a piece by British-born novelist Alex Miller, who reveals how an image of the outback by Sidney Nolan had such allure that he emigrated to Australia (page 58).

The strength of Miller’s passion for Nolan is matched by painter Timothy Hyman RA’s admiration for Honoré Daumier (page 60), the 19th-century French artist who is the subject

Advertising Production

of a major survey at the Academy. While Daumier’s acerbic caricatures of the French establishment marked him out as a satirist, his radical paintings of Don Quixote, street entertainers and the poor of Paris, Hyman argues, offer more to today’s artists than works

by Manet, Daumier’s contemporary whose work was met with such acclaim in last year’s exhibition at the RA. Hyman brings his artist’s sensibility to his analysis of Daumier, especially his understanding of the processes and possibilities of painting.

Other Academicians also write vividly on art in this issue: Tom Phillips appraises the Swiss artist Paul Klee (page 32), while Ann Christopher celebrates the life of her fellow sculptor Academician Ralph Brown, who died earlier this year (page 94). The sculpture of Bill Woodrow comes under the spotlight in a show in the RA’s Burlington Gardens space (page 68), while at the Queen’s Gallery, Academicians take centre stage as their gift of works on paper to The Queen on the occasion of last year’s Diamond Jubilee go on display (page 66).

Friends of the RA come closer together with the Academy’s painters, sculptors and architects from this autumn in the Keeper’s House, a new set of social spaces in Burlington House that open in September for both art lovers and artists (page 15). Located in a former grace-and-favour house for the Keeper of the Royal Academy, a new restaurant, bar and garden – added to renovated existing rooms – mean that the fine arts of relaxing and socializing have a new home at the Academy.

– SAM PHILLIPS, ACTING EDITOR

Catherine Cartwright Classifieds Janet Durbin 01625 583 180 SUBSCRIPTIONS RA Magazine is published quarterly in March, May, September and November and mailed to Friends of the Royal Academy of Arts as part of their Friends membership. For information about Friends benefits, see pages 11-12, or visit the Royal Academy website (see below) To become a Friend

£100 for Standard Friends (£90 by Direct Debit) £140 for Joint Friends (£130 by Direct Debit) £45 for Young Friends (aged between 16 and 25) Friends enquiries 020 7300 5664; friend.enquiries@royalacademy.org.uk To subscribe to RA Magazine

£20 for one year in UK (£30 outside UK) Magazine subscriptions: 0800 634 6341 (UK only), 0044 20 7300 5841 (outside UK); mailorder@royalacademy.org.uk Address Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BD, United Kingdom Switchboard 020 7300 8000 Website www.royalacademy.org.uk Colour reproduction by Wings Printed by Wyndeham Group Published 2 September 2013 © 2013 Royal Academy of Arts ISSN 0956-9332 The opinions in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of the Royal Academy of Arts. All reasonable attempts have been made to clear copyright before publication

A R T G A L L ERY O F S O U T H AUS T R A L I A . S O U T H AUS T R A L I A N GOV ER N M EN T GR A N T 1984/© ES TAT E O F T H E A R T IS T L I CENS ED BY A B O R I GI N A L A R T IS TS AGEN CY LT D

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John Kelly

West Cork Landscapes 20/21 British Art Fair Royal College of Art Sept 11th / 15th 2013 Contact Tom Lighton 01798 865848 / 07989 517486 thl@mervillegalleries.com

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Contributors

RAMSAY GIBB THE PILGRIM COAST 2 – 31 October 2013

JULIAN ANDERSON is a

photographer. His work has appeared in the Guardian. He has 25 works in the National Portrait Gallery permanent collection.

CHRISTOPHER BAKER is the

Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

NICK BALLON is a London-based

portrait photographer.

BILL BURLINGTON is a

photographer and the founder of Lismore Castle Arts, Ireland.

ANN CHRISTOPHER RA is a

sculptor. Her latest show ‘To Know Without Remembering’ opens on 6 November at Pangolin London.

PETER CONRAD was born in

Australia, and until recently taught English at Christ Church, Oxford.

His books include At Home in Australia (Thames & Hudson, 2003) and Tales of Two Hemispheres (ABC Books, 2004).

H R BELL

JOHN COOPER is a Tudor

LOOKING FOR CHINA

6 November – 5 December 2013

specialist, whose book The Queen’s Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I was published in 2011 (Faber & Faber).

RICHARD CORK is an art critic

and author of The Healing Presence of Art: A History of Western Art in Hospitals (Yale, 2012).

RICHARD DAWSON is a

portrait photographer who also works in the fashion industry.

EDITH DEVANEY is the

Academy’s Head of Summer Exhibition and the RA’s contemporary projects curator.

EDMUND FAWCETT was

the Economist’s bureau chief in Washington, Paris and Berlin, as well as its books and arts editor. His book on the history of liberalism is to be published in spring, 2014.

Francis Kyle Gallery 9 MADDOX STREET LONDON W1S 2QE T +44 (0)20 7499 6870 OPEN WEEKDAYS 10am – 6pm SATURDAYS 11am – 5pm www.franciskylegallery.com info@franciskylegallery.com

TIMOTHY HYMAN RA is a

painter. He has recently completed a drawing residency at Maggies Cancer Caring Centres. He is now writing a book on figurative painting in the 20th century to be published by Thames & Hudson.

ALEX KIDSON is a former curator

at the Walker Art Gallery,

20 RA MAGAZINE | AUTUMN 2013

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Liverpool, where he specialised in 18th-century British painting. He is working on a catalogue raisonné of George Romney’s paintings.

JILL LLOYD is an art historian and curator specialising in 20th-century German and Austrian art. She is now curating a show on Kandinsky at the Neue Galerie, New York (3 Oct–10 Feb, 2014).

ADRIAN LOCKE is the curator of

‘Mexico: A Revolution in Art, 19101940’ at the Royal Academy.

BEN LUKE is a writer and Contemporary Art Critic for the London Evening Standard.

ALEX MILLER has twice won

Australia’s prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award and in 2012 was awarded the Melbourne Prize for Literature. His latest novels, Autumn Laing and Coal Creek, are being published in the UK in 2014.

COLIN PERRY is an art writer,

editor and researcher. He has written for magazines including Art Monthly, Art Review and Frieze, as well as many books about art.

TOM PHILLIPS RA is a painter

and printmaker. He has designed a new 50 pence coin, which is released into circulation in November.

GILES WATERFIELD is Director

of Royal Collection Studies for the Attingham Trust, and lectures at the Courtauld Institute. His book on Victorian art museums is to be published next year.

SARAH WHITFIELD is an art

historian. She is the editor of William Scott: Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings (Thames & Hudson, 2013) and is currently working on a book on the letters of René Magritte.

SIMON WILSON is an art historian and a columnist for this magazine.

FRANCES WOOD has recently

retired from her post as curator of the Chinese collections at the British Library.

CHRIS YETTON writes on contemporary art. His monograph on John Carter RA was published in 2010 (RA Publications).

15/07/2013 17:27

09/08/2013 12:24

Important Australian Art Colonial to Modern, Contemporary & Indigenous Art Monday 25 November 2013, Sydney

Closing date for entries Monday 7 October 2013

Entries now invited

Fred Williams (1927-1982) You Yangs landscape 1 1963 Sold for AU$2,287,500 (ÂŁ1,360,000) An artist auction world record

+61 (0) 2 8412 2222 australianart@bonhams.com

International Auctioneers and Valuers - bonhams.com/australianart Prices shown include buyer’s premium.Details can be found at bonhams.com

t

Beyond El Dorado power and gold in ancient Colombia Organised with Museo del Oro 17 October 2013 – 23 March 2014 britishmuseum.org

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Still from Approach to Mundi Mundi, 2007,

by Shaun Gladwell

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that Dupain’s title specifies that the figure is baking, not bathing, in the sun: his flesh will soon enough be terracotta.

The source of the light and heat that he basks in will also be on view on a ceiling at the Royal Academy, in John Olsen’s painting, Sydney Sun (1965, pages 50-51) – a vast panorama of a molten sky that would be dangerous to look at directly, with the sun as a bubbling orange octopus that sends out rays like writhing tentacles. Here, in this explosion of radiance, is another of Australia’s myths of origin, which at the same time celebrates the origins of painting, the heliocentric art practised by those who worship light.

‘Nature creates culture: geography rules,’ Daniel Thomas bluntly declares in the catalogue for the RA exhibition. Is Australia, even with what Thomas calls ‘the world’s poorest soils and most erratic climate’, merely the helpless subject or slave of geography?

History has surely altered the terrain and e Ab made itThhabitable, in different ways for the tracks that original and the newer arrivals. to theinhabitants oldest mo trace people

The Aboriginal people follow their songlines, tracks that trace dreams and lead backwards to the moment of creation; the white usurpers travel straight ahead on highways of Tarmac like that which races across the treeless Nullarbor Plain from Adelaide to Perth. The ancestors have their sacred monolith at Uluru, which at sunset looks like the earth before it was kneaded into shape. The newcomers have constructed a monument on Sydney Harbour that is not quite fit for its purpose as an opera house but serves as a stimulus to flighty poetic metaphors: is it a mound of shells, a flotilla of yachts with billowing sails, an orgiastic scrum of mating turtles, or a stack of white dishes drying on a kitchen sink? Despite their incompatibility, there is room in Australia for both the occult rock and the ceramic ornament.

This oldest, youngest continent is the site for a confrontation and possibly a reconciliation between two opposed world views, systems of belief that carry with them theories of how we should treat nature and why we need art.

Restless Western progress clashes here with a contemplative wisdom that used to be called

Eastern or Oriental but that now, in the age of the Asian tiger economies, should probably be called Antipodean. One culture exploits the land, the other seeks accommodation with it.

One kind of art supersedes reality by making a replica of it; the other grows or dies into that reality, like the images of totemic animals made with earth pigments on eucalyptus bark and on rocks in the Northern Territory, or the hollowed, decorated tree trunks containing powdery ancestral bones that are placed in the bush where, like biodegradable sculptures, they patiently wait to decompose.

During the autumn, this aesthetic, ecological and metaphysical dispute will rage through the RA’s galleries – an argument about how the world began, what rights we have in it, and whether our conduct may be hastening its end.

Australia Main Galleries, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 020 7300 8000, www.royalacademy.org.uk/australia, 21 Sep–8 Dec. Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and the National Gallery of Australia.

Supported by Qantas Airways and The Campaign for Wool. Events and Lectures page 96

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09/08/2013 17:44

PIERS FEETHAM GALLERY

JULIAN BAILEY 18 September – 11 October 2013 Monday to Friday 10–5.30 Saturday 11–2.00

NICK PRATT FROM A RIVER Sculpture & Drawings 3 – 26 October 2013 Catalogue available on request

Girls meeting for Coffee, oil on board, 13 ½ x 15 ½ ins

Dancing Otter, Cornish Soapstone, H 60cm W 31cm D 18cm

LONDON 2013

19 Cork Street London W1S 3LP Tel: 020 7734 7984 art@browseanddarby.co.uk www.browseanddarby.co.uk

Browse and01/08/2013 Darby_3_indd.indd 1 15:27

01/08/2013 15:25

VENUE SAATCHI GALLERY / 9-13 OCTOBER

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ART FAIR

STRARTA

PIERS FEETHAM GALLERY 475 Fulham Road, London SW6 1HL 020-7381- 3031 www.piersfeethamgallery.com Tues-Fri 10-6; Sat 10-1

WWW.STRARTA.COM

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02/08/2013 10:16

Strength In Diversity An Exhibition by Bushra Fakhoury PhD, ARBS

11 – 16 November 2013 The Gallery in Cork Street 28 Cork Street W1S 3NG 10am to 8pm 07754 888748 www.bfakhoury.com Bushra Fakhoury_lr.indd 1

31/07/2013 15:32

FRED SCHLEY THE SCOTTISH ISLES & HIGHLANDS THE COTSWOLDS & THE DORSET COAST Towards Gometra, oil on canvas, 80 x 100 cm

Cotswolds 2, oil on canvas, 80 x 100 cm

5th – 26th October, 2013 9.30am – 5.00pm . Monday to Saturday Colour catalogue £15 (incl. p&p)

Old Harry Rocks, oil on canvas, 100 x 140 cm

johndaviesgallery Period, Modern & Contemporary Art

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Ben More, oil on canvas, 70 x 100 cm

The Old Dairy Plant · Fosseway Business Park · Stratford Road · Moreton-in-Marsh · Glos · GL56 9NQ t: +44 (0)1608 652255 e: info@johndaviesgallery.com www.johndaviesgallery.com

02/08/2013 10:17

BASIL ALKAZZI AN ODYSSEY OF DREAMS: A Decade of Paintings 2003–2012 THE BRADBURY GALLERY, ARKANSAS STATE UNIVERSITY AUGUST 29 – SEPTEMBER 29, 2013 THE ANNE KITTRELL GALLERY, UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS NOVEMBER 4 – DECEMBER 6, 2013 RIDER UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY, LAWRENCEVILLE, NJ FEBRUARY 6 – MARCH 2, 2014 THE ROSENBERG GALLERY, MARYLAND INSTITUTE COLLEGE OF ART MARCH 22 – APRIL 20, 2014 THE SHELDON MUSEUM OF ART, LINCOLN, NE MAY 16 – JULY 27, 2014

JUDITH K. BRODSKY, CURATOR Full color, 136 page catalogue, with critical essay by Donald Kuspit Published by Scala Art Publishers, Inc. www.scalapublishers.com

RA ad FINALREVISED-7-12-2013.indd 1

7/12/13 1:59 PM

manya igel fine arts The Best of Traditional Modern British Art

Ruskin Spear John Bratby

Exhibiting at: 20/21 BRITISH ART FAIR Royal College of Art Kensington Gore 11 - 15 September 2013 Stand 19

Philip Sutton

Bernard Dunstan

Fred Cuming

Alfred Daniels

21 - 22 peters court, porchester road, london, w2 5dr tel:020 7229 1669/8429 www.manyaigelfinearts.com email:paintings@manyaigelfinearts.com by appointment only Also at glencorse, 321 richmond rd, ham common, surrey kt2 5qu tel:020 8541 0871 tues-sat 10-5.30pm

Manya Igel_Full Page_Aut13_4.indd 9

26/07/2013 11:50

Yorkshire Sculpture Park 12.10.13–02.02.14 AMAR KANWAR: THE SOVEREIGN FOREST + A LOVE STORY

Supported by

A Love Story, 2010, courtesy Amar Kanwar and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris. Commissioned by the Independent Cinema Office and LUX, England.

Winter Light at Waddesdon

BRUCE MUNRO A COLLECTION OF SIX OUTDOOR LIGHT BASED INSTALLATIONS

BY BRITISH ARTIST BRUCE MUNRO East Wing and Gardens open for the Christmas Season 13 November - 1 January (Wednesday - Sunday) including 30 & 31 December Waddesdon Manor, Near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire HP18 0JH www.waddesdon.org.uk Teepees by Bruce Munro, Cheekwood Gardens, TN, USA 2013. Photo: Mark Pickthall

AD_In_Page_Template_AUT13.indd 28

02/08/2013 10:18

London 29 / Regional 39 / International 45

Preview

Saying Farewell at Xunyang (detail), c.1500-50, by Qiu Ying

Revelations unscrolled T H E N ELS O N -AT K I NS M US EU M O F A R T, K A NS AS CI T Y/ P H OTO J O H N L A M B ER TO N

GIVEN THE FRAGILITY AND RARITY OF THE WORKS ON LOAN, THE V&A’S EXHIBITION OF 1,200 YEARS OF CHINESE PAINTING IS A CURATORIAL TRIUMPH, WRITES FR ANCES WOOD The V&A’s ‘Masterpieces of Chinese Painting’ offers an unprecedented opportunity to view over 70 rarely seen outstanding works, with important loans from all over the world.

In the Far East, museums do not display large numbers of such paintings at any one time – the treasures of famous collections spend much of their life in storage to protect them. Their fugitive colours and light silk mountings are not appropriate for permanent display and their significance has always been tied to traditional ways of viewing. Hanging scrolls would have been shown briefly to celebrate special occasions and hand-scrolls opened rarely in the company of appreciative companions.

Recent exhibitions of Chinese paintings in London and Europe have shown items from a single collection like that of the British Museum, or paintings from a single period, such as the RA’s exhibition ‘China: The Three Emperors’ in 2005, which showed Qing paintings from the Forbidden City in Beijing. At the V&A show,

visitors can see treasures from the Tang dynasty (618-907) to the Qing (1644-1911) – from major museums in China, America, Japan and Europe – all of which are rarely displayed and known even to most specialists only through reproductions.

It is a curatorial tour de force for Hongxing Zhang, senior curator at the V&A, and the culmination of years of research and patient negotiation.

The chronological arrangement of the exhibition traces the major developments in the history of painting in China. The first section, ‘Objects of Devotion’, concentrates on the Tang dynasty silk paintings and banners from the Buddhist centre of Dunhuang, and also reveals the cosmological interests of the period.

Although landscape dominates in subsequent sections, the inventiveness and playfulness of the painters is also demonstrated in characterful depictions of horses, doves, flycatchers, roosters, monkeys and dragons.

One can also note the shift towards a more monochrome aesthetic from 950, a style that

came to dominate until the late 19th century.

Despite this shift, one of the ‘Four Great Masters’ of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), Qiu Ying, reveals a more playful approach by his unexpected use of colour in the hand-scroll Saying Farewell at Xunyang (c.1500-50, above).

In a painting about intellectual friendship, a classic subject of Chinese poetry, instead of the traditional monochrome landscape style, the artist employs a startlingly brilliant green and blue reminiscent of the earliest landscapes of the Tang.

The final sections of the show cover the impressive artistic achievements of the Ming period – one of wealth, confidence and urban sophistication – as well as later artists’ explorations both of China’s past and an increasing awareness of the West. The country’s painting and calligraphy reached new heights that were inspired and extraordinarily creative.

Masterpieces of Chinese Painting: 700–1900 V&A, London, 020 7942 2000, www.vam.ac.uk, 26 Oct–19 Jan, 2014

AUTUMN 2013 | RA MAGAZINE 29

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Birds going to Swan Lake, 2001 oil on canvas 41 x 41 inches

RA P Sutton ad_Layout 1 04/07/2013 14:49 Page 1

Philip Sutton at eighty five 3 October – 3 November 2013 Richmond Hill Gallery

26 Richmond Hill Richmond London TW10 6QX Tel: 020 8940 5152 Email: info@therichmondhillgallery.com www.therichmondhillgallery.com

Preview London

Society beauties of the Vienna Secession

© P R O P ER T Y O F T H E L E W IS CO L L ECT I O N . L EI L I H U T H CO L L ECT I O N /CO U R T ESY I NS T I T U T E FO R CU LT U R A L E XCH A N GE , T Ü B I N GEN /© A L L EN J O N ES

THE EXTRAORDINARY FLOWERING IN PORTRAITURE PROMPTED

BY THE BURGEONING MIDDLE CLASSES IN FIN DE SIECLE VIENNA IS REVEALED IN A SHOW AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY, SAYS JILL LLOYD Although major exhibitions of fin-de-siècle Viennese art have been shown in recent years across the globe from New York to Melbourne, the British public has rarely had an opportunity to enjoy an in-depth overview.

All the more welcome then is the focused selection of outstanding works by Viennese artists at the National Gallery in ‘Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900’.

By concentrating on portraiture the exhibition introduces us to the fin-de-siècle city through the many individual personalities involved in its vibrant art world. The central relationship in this fascinating milieu was between artist and patron, a pairing represented in

the show by Klimt’s haunting Posthumous Portrait of Ria Munk III (1917-18, right) and his delicately shimmering Hermine Gallia (whose family was driven from Vienna by anti-Semitism in the 1930s), alongside powerful self-portraits by Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl.

While commissioned portraits remained a vital source of income for Viennese artists, their focus on individual identity had deeper historical implications in a city characterised by its multinational, multi-ethnic and multifaith population. Many of the so-called ‘new Viennese’ – whose fortunes and broad-minded, liberal tastes attracted them to modern art – had Jewish roots; having their portrait painted by

a fashionable artist like Klimt was a means of securing social status and a sense of belonging.

The foreword to the exhibition catalogue is written by Edmund de Waal, whose best-selling book The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010) affords us a glimpse of this brilliant and sadly lost world; he has also lent an album of photographs documenting the rise and tragic fall of the Jewish banking dynasty to which his family belonged.

Klimt’s portraits, which capture the fragile beauty of the middle classes, are now extremely highly valued and correspondingly difficult to borrow for major exhibitions.

‘Facing the Modern’ nevertheless contains fine examples of Klimt’s work from private collections, alongside masterpieces by Schiele and Kokoschka. Lesser-known artists of the period, including Broncia Koller, and precursors such as Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, provide a historical and artistic context for these Viennese stars.

Snap, crackle and Pop

Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900 National Gallery, London, 020 7747 2885, www.nationalgallery. org.uk, 9 Oct–12 Jan, 2014

Phillips, his fellow-student at the Royal College of Art. ‘At first,’ Jones recalls wryly, ‘it looked like a cross between the Royal Academy Summer Show and a sketch club exhibition. But we decided it wasn’t right, and opted to rehang the entire show. It really looked different, with works by Derek Boshier, Phillips, Hockney and myself – and we gave Ron Kitaj a complete wall.

It was a new broom.’

Jones, who at that time still lived at home in Ealing and hung paintings in his bedroom, was exhilarated by all the media attention. The exhibition was part of an exciting new era for London, with the emergence of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Jones produced his energetic ‘Bus’ paintings and images such as Bikini Baby (left) the following year. He now defines British Pop Art as having ‘full-hued colour, clearly defined imagery and urban subject matter – one’s actual environment, with traffic, cinema and posters in the street. I was one of the softer or gentler practitioners, but I realised one should have no fear. It was sink or swim.’

RICHARD CORK POPS ALONG TO CHRISTIE’S TO HEAR ABOUT THEIR NEW GALLERY’S VERY BRITISH OPENING SHOW

Although Pop Art is now seen as dominated by American titans such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Britain also played a ground-breaking role in the movement. But British Pop Art has tended to be neglected in exhibitions since its inclusion in the Royal Academy’s major survey in 1991, which is why a new show exclusively on the subject is so welcome.

Launching Christie’s new Mayfair gallery, and curated in association with Waddington Custot Galleries, the exhibition reveals how Pop Art began in Britain as early as the late 1940s, with Eduardo Paolozzi RA’s irrepressible collages, and then developed during the 1950s in the work of Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake.

Hamilton, whose iconic image Swingeing London is in the show, described pop culture as, ‘witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, big business’. But British Pop Art was never as commercial as its New York

Posthumous Portrait of Ria Munk III, 1917-18,

by Gustav Klimt

Bikini Baby, 1962, by Allen Jones RA equivalent, even if Peter Blake focused on subjects like Hollywood actress Kim Novak in the late 1950s.

By 1961, emerging Londonbased artists organised their own Pop breakthrough in the ‘Young

Contemporaries’ exhibition at the Royal Society of British Artists. This was the moment when British Pop asserted itself, and the rebellious Allen Jones, now a Royal Academician, curated the exhibition along with Peter

When Britain Went Pop! British Pop Art: The Early Years Christie’s Mayfair, 020 7495 5050, www.christies.com, 9 Oct–24 Nov Pop Art Design Barbican, London, 020 7638 8891, www.barbican.org.uk, 22 Oct–9 Feb, 2014 Scan the image above to see an interview with Allen Jones RA. See page 22 for instructions

AUTUMN 2013 | RA MAGAZINE 31

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Preview London

All of a twitter TOM PHILLIPS R A ON PAUL KLEE’S GENIUS, AS A RETROSPECTIVE COMES TO TATE MODERN

Just as the clown in Twelfth Night could ‘sing both high and low’, Paul Klee’s prolific output, the subject of a major survey at Tate Modern, contains as much melancholy as playful wit.

Like the young Stravinsky, Klee had to choose between painting or music as a career. Luckily for us, both of them made the right choice, since Stravinsky’s music is richly pictorial and Klee’s lyrical watercolours abound in notational devices, scales, arpeggios, rhythmic energy and ornament.

His famous description of ‘taking a line for a walk’ does not tell the whole story. He was equally able to take colour for a stroll or to stride off with his unfolding compositions to the far horizons of the mystical. Inside a Swiss artist one might expect to The Procession Portrait of Queen Elizabeth, c.1600-03, artist unknown

Elizabethan people-watching Is the Virgin Queen really being carried by four swaggering courtiers? Look closely at The Procession Portrait of Queen Elizabeth (c.1600-03, above), one of the star canvases of the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition ‘Elizabeth I and her People’, and one finds, immediately behind the Queen’s litter, a groom in crimson livery pushing a wheeled chair of state. The courtiers in fact bear the canopy protecting Elizabeth from the elements, but it’s the humble servant who actually takes the strain. Is this a Renaissance revival of a Roman imperial triumph, or a concession to the Queen’s advancing age?

The Procession Portrait is emblematic of the late-flowering cult of Elizabeth. The 18thcentury critic George Vertue was unsure about the quality of the painting, deciding that it was ‘not well or ill done’. The perspective in the painting, however, was calculated with skill.

From the ethereally floating Queen, the eye is drawn down to the balding figure of Edward Somerset, 4th Earl of Worcester, in red in the

foreground, the angle of Elizabeth’s stomacher pointing like an arrow towards him. The turn of Worcester’s body directs us towards his son Lord Herbert, in white, who holds the gaze of the viewer while gesturing towards his new bride Anne Russell. Elizabeth attended their wedding in 1600, appointing Worcester her Master of the Horse the following year. The portrait celebrates these marks of favour towards a Catholic family at a time when both sides of the religious divide may have been suing for peace.

Chief curator at the National Portrait Gallery Dr Tarnya Cooper says the show aims to present an ‘alternative narrative’ of the Elizabethan age, focusing on social mobility and the rising middle class, and the genteel subjects watching the royal procession remind us that owning such a portrait could itself be a passport to respectability.

Elizabeth I and Her People National Portrait Gallery, London, 020 7306 0055, www.npg.org.uk, 10 Oct– 5 Jan, 2014

Go for gold Featuring a figure wearing an elaborate bird-adorned head-dress, this chest ornament is one of over 300 precious objects in ‘Beyond El Dorado’ at the British Museum (17 Oct–23 March, 2014), a show that reveals that beautifully crafted gold had a central cultural role in ancient Colombian societies.

Static-Dynamic Intensification, 1923,

by Paul Klee find a watchmaker and Klee’s refined delicacy ticks away with chronometrical precision. Pitch perfect, haunting in harmony, the concentration of his miniatures make him the Webern of art.

Painting is always predictive. With our texting and tweets we have become miniaturists of the global Twittering Machine. The sprightly picture of that name, with its exclamatory evocations of birdsong, was the first work of Klee that I saw, in the art room of my school (unfortunately the painting does not travel to Tate). It still sings its reassurance to me that we don’t all have to work to fill the Turbine Hall but can produce, on a kitchen table, resonant images, which also give the line that we are taking out walking a spring in its step.

Paul Klee: Making Visible Tate Modern, London, 020 7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk, 16 Oct–9 March, 2014

© S H ER B O R N E CAS T L E , D O RS E T. M E T R O P O L I TA N M US EU M O F A R T, N E W YO R K . T H E T RUS T EES O F T H E B R I T IS H M US EU M .

AS THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY MOUNTS A SHOW OF THE TUDOR QUEEN, JOHN COOPER UNCOVERS THE HIDDEN MEANING BEHIND ONE OF THE KEY WORKS

32 RA MAGAZINE | AUTUMN 2013

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DAVID TRESS “A rent in the clouds, a flash of brilliant orange, the momentous weather patterns that work through these mountainous landscapes feed into my paintings.”

Big Sun Suddenly, Ben Damph, 2013 mixed media on paper 46 x 70 cms 181⁄8 x 271⁄2 ins

Tress sets out simply to make paintings of landscape. This is an important distinction, but the fact that his work is only incidentally Romantic does not diminish the resonance it gains by being inescapably part of that great

Andrew Lambirth

MESSUM’S

Author and Art Critic

www.messums.com

tradition. One of the things that makes Tress’s work so authentic and convincing is that he is a Romantic naturally, and not by design.

Exhibition 11th September – 12th October 2013

8 Cork Street, London W1S 3LJ Telephone: +44 (0)20 7437 5545

Catalogue £15 inc p&p

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Preview London

Julia Peyton-Jones at the new Serpentine Sackler Gallery, designed by Zaha Hadid RA

Serpentine lines JULIA PEYTON-JONES, DIRECTOR OF THE SERPENTINE, TELLS BEN LUKE ABOUT ITS SECOND SPACE IN KENSINGTON GARDENS. PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD DAWSON My immediate response when I first see the new Serpentine Sackler Gallery on a sweltering summer afternoon is to gaze in wonder at Zaha Hadid RA’s stunning building. It is an extension to a 19th-century brick building, a former ammunition store located on a separate site from

the original Serpentine Gallery, over the Serpentine Bridge in London’s Kensington Gardens. How has Hadid’s structure, with its shimmering white undulating roof and soaring lightwells within, been kept quiet until now?

Although Hadid’s extension is a restaurant space, it is also a place for cultural and social events, and one senses this dramatic light-filled structure will become a destination in its own right. The Academician has also transformed the older building into some of London’s most beautiful, flexible art spaces: a promenade of elegant daylit rooms, ideal for showing painting and sculpture, installation and performance.

I prise the Serpentine’s Director, Julia Peyton-Jones, away from the preparations

for the building’s opening, and from her attempts to grab lunch (though it is well past lunchtime), to take a look at the new space itself. She describes Hadid’s restaurant as ‘a wonderful, glorious, swooping, dramatic space that is so completely part of Zaha’s language’. She reminds me that, in 2000, Hadid was the first architect to take on the annual summer pavilion commission, in which leading architects create startling temporary structures outside the original Serpentine building. These have proved one of the most eye-catching initiatives of PeytonJones’s 22-year tenure. ‘That pavilion from 2000 was much more angular, and although this new structure is all about curves, both share the idea of swooping up to the sky and touching the ground,’ she observes.

Along with Hans Ulrich Obrist, who codirects exhibitions and programmes at the gallery, and a small but dynamic team, PeytonJones will now double the amount of the gallery’s activities, and broaden them, too, to embrace other art forms such as dance and film. With admirable boldness they have commissioned Adrián Villar Rojas, a young Argentinian artist who makes atmospheric sculptural installations, to create the first show in the gallery, with new work made in response to the brick architecture of the space.

Peyton-Jones began her career as a painter, studying at the Royal College of Art in the 1970s, before becoming a curator and, after a stint at the Hayward Gallery, the Serpentine’s Director in 1991. A sense of experimentation permeates her activities at the gallery. ‘I think play, in the best and most constructive sense, is very much part of what these two buildings can do,’ she explains. ‘We can play with different art forms, we can play with different audiences, we can play with combinations, and we can play with our existing programmes, because the pavilion commission will continue.’

She is also proud that the gallery is still far from monumental. ‘We have got huge, powerful art institutions in this country, so in a modest way we are resolutely small. Hurray!’ she exclaims. ‘But we are in this fantastic context – the park is bigger in size than any of our great art institutions.’ Indeed, the Serpentine’s recent use of the Kensington Gardens itself to present sculptures by Anish Kapoor RA and Fischli & Weiss has shown that it can provide a stunning context for contemporary art.

Remarkably, the Serpentine has now existed for longer with Peyton-Jones at the helm than it has without her. The expansion project must give her a huge personal sense of pride. ‘Yes it does – it has been over four years in the making, it has been challenging, extremely interesting and the end result is terrific,’ she says. ‘However, it’s really a beginning. There have been 43 years of the Serpentine: that was the first chapter; this is the second chapter.’

Adrián Villar Rojas Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, 020 7402 6075, www.serpentinegallery.org, 28 Sep–10 Nov

34 RA MAGAZINE | AUTUMN 2013

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RICHARD HAGEN FINE PAINTINGS

Indian Summer Oil on canvas 35½ x 35½ inches

Stephen Mangan Signed

AUTUMN EXHIBITION 26 OCTOBER – 9 NOVEMBER 2013

STEPHEN MANGAN Catalogue £10 BROADWAY, WORCESTERSHIRE WR12 7DP T: 01386 853624/858561 fineart@richardhagen.com www.richardhagen.com

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DaDa surrealism

in Brussels, Paris and london

The Star Alphabet of

e.l.T.

mesens

✤✤✤ 1903-1971

☛ mu.zee ostend - 6.7.2013-17.11.2013

Kunstmuseum aan zee Romestraat 11 B - 8400 Ostend muzee.be

a celestial offer for the ra Magazine readers E.L.T. Mesens, La Colomba, 1962. Verbeke Foundation, Kemzeke. Photo Jan Torfs. SABAM Belgium 2013 - E.T. Mesens, Art of COLLAGE AKA Art of collaers, 1958, British Pathé, London

©kaatflamey.be

E.L.T. Mesens posing in front of the painting ‘la clairvoyance’ by René Magritte at the London Gallery in London, January 1937. Photo: Archive of Contemporary Art Belgium - Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels - Keystone Press Agency. © C. Herscovici - SABAM Belgium 2013

&

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Come to Ostend this summer and discover the intriguing story of the man who introduced Surrealism to England: E.L.T. Mesens. Between 1938 and 1950, he ran the London Gallery with the English Surrealist painter and poet, Roland Penrose.

Located at 28 Cork Street, it was just a stone’s throw from the Royal Academy! A world of paintings, prints, drawings, documents, musical scores and photographs by Mesens and his fellow artists are now on show in a breathtaking exhibition at Mu.ZEE: the art museum by the sea!

special offer for the ra Magazine readers

Combine your visit to ‘The Star Alphabet of E.L.T. Mesens’ with a stay in the sparkling coastal city of Ostend. With its charming shopping streets, outstanding fish restaurants, vibrant cultural life and museums, there is plenty to see and do… ☛ Receive at Mu.ZEE a discounted entry ticket to the ‘The Star Alphabet of E.L.T. Mesens. Dada and Surrealism in Brussels, Paris and London’ on presentation of this magazine. ☛ Special package deal in a 4 or 3 star hotel in Ostend: two nights accommodation, buffet breakfast, special Mesens poster and a visit to the Ensor House (where the painter James Ensor lived). Package price from € 160. Book via Tourism Ostend: info@visitoostende.be or telephone + 32 59 701199 For all information contact: + 32 59 56 45 89 or pers@muzee.be

02/08/2013 11:42 30/07/13 10:48

Preview London

Fair game

FROM FAR LEFT Nice Tits, 2011, by Sarah Lucas, at the Whitechapel Gallery; Down with Liebknecht, 1918, by George Grosz, at Richard Nagy; Portrait of Dr. Ephraïm Bueno (detail), 1645-47, by Rembrandt, at Ordovas

© T H E A R T IS T/CO U R T ESY S A D I E CO L ES H Q , LO N D O N . CO U R T ESY O F R I CH A R D N AGY LT D, LO N D O N . CO U R T ESY O F T H E R I J KS M US EU M

AS FRIEZE ART FAIR RETURNS TO REGENT’S PARK, BEN LUKE PICKS THE BEST CONTEMPORARY SHOWS AROUND TOWN, WHILE AINDRE A EMELIFE SEES THE STIRRINGS OF A ‘FRIEZE MASTERS WEEK’

FRIEZE LONDON

It is a decade since the first Frieze Art Fair changed the landscape of London’s contemporary art scene overnight. It attracts the international art world to the city each October and prompts an avalanche of top quality contemporary shows to be scheduled to coincide with the fair. This year’s ‘Frieze week’ is typically rich.

Among the highlights is the Whitechapel Gallery’s Sarah Lucas retrospective (020 7522 7888, 2 Oct–15 Dec), which covers two decades of this linchpin of the Young British Artists.

Lucas uses everyday materials such as coat hangers, vegetables and tights in ribald combinations (above) that have tough underlying themes such as gender politics and national stereotypes. She made her mark with early works such as Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab (1992), in which the food in the title is presented on a table in a bawdy reference to breasts and genitals. Her recent ‘Nuds’ series featuring stuffed tights evoking bodily forms shows Lucas to be among the most consistently creative sculptors of her generation.

One of the autumn’s most ambitious projects is Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset’s Tomorrow (2013), a site-specific installation in which the Danish-Norwegian duo transform five galleries at the V&A into the imagined apartment of a disillusioned architect (020 7942 2000, 1 Oct–2 Jan, 2014). They have selected over 100 items from the V&A’s collections, as well as objects from antiques markets, to create a series of rooms, and visitors are encouraged to participate, acting as uninvited guests, lounging on the furniture and reading the books.

Two new commercial galleries arrive on the RA’s doorstep in time for Frieze. Victoria Miro gallery was based on Cork Street before moving to Hoxton in east London in 2000, but from October it returns to Mayfair, adding a gallery on the corner of St George and Maddox Streets. The first exhibition features Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s latest densely patterned ‘Infinity Net Paintings’ (020 7336 8109, 1 Oct–9 Nov). Meanwhile, Sadie Coles opens a new 6,000 sq ft space in Kingly Street in September with a show of the young New York abstract painter Ryan Sullivan (020 7493 8611, 11 Sep–26 Oct).

Frieze Art Fair itself is also being revamped.

Inspired by the open spaces of their recently inaugurated fairs Frieze Masters and Frieze New York, the organisers have commissioned a new layout for the Regent’s Park site that includes a stage for performances running throughout the day. Despite increased demand by galleries, Frieze has reduced the number taking part in order to create a more intimate atmosphere; the quota of public tickets available has also been cut by a quarter: it might be wise to book ahead.

FRIEZE MASTERS

Just a stone’s throw away in Regent’s Park from Frieze London, Frieze Masters returns for its second edition this autumn to present pre-21stcentury works in a contemporary context.

The fair has grown in size from its successful inaugural year with a third more dealers joining the ranks, including Old Masters specialist Otto Naumann, Brazilian modernism expert Dan Galeria and 20th-century British art dealers

Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert.

Frieze Masters looks 6 like it is galvanizing our capital’s commercial art galleries in the same way as Frieze London, judging by the dazzling selection of exhibitions coinciding with what might also be coined ‘Frieze Masters Week’.

Those with a love of the unusual should head to Colnaghi gallery to see ‘Art of the Curious’ (020 7491 7408, 2–20 Oct). From Dutch vanitas to Chinese porcelain, this exhibition draws inspiration from the cabinets of curiosities of Enlightenment collectors and scholars.

At Ordovas, Frieze’s characteristic juxtaposition of old and new is echoed in a show that examines the pivotal influence on Frank Auerbach of Rembrandt (above right; 020 7287 5013, 4 Oct–3 Dec). The British artist selects a small group of Rembrandt’s paintings and etchings from Amsterdam’s newly renovated Rijksmuseum to display alongside his works.

Hauser & Wirth dedicates its Savile Row and Piccadilly galleries to the modern masters assembled by German collector Reinhard Onnasch, which include some of the greats of post-war American art such as Clyfford Still, Andy Warhol and Carl Andre (020 7287 2300, 20 Sep–14 Dec). Meanwhile, it’s all prostitutes, profiteers and politicians on Old Bond Street, at Richard Nagy’s ‘George Grosz’s Berlin’ (above centre; 020 7262 6400, 28 Sep–2 Nov), the first major show of his nightmarish visions of German life after the First World War since the RA’s 1997 exhibition.

Frieze London and Frieze Masters Regent’s Park, London, 020 3372 6111, www.frieze.com, 17–20 Oct

AUTUMN 2013 | RA MAGAZINE 37

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Oil on linen 36 x 40 in

RA magazine Quarter page (128 x 99mm)

L AUNCH NIGHT PRIVATE VIEW

12.09.13

Learning Italian

PRELUDE HELEN BOOTH / ANDREW CRANE / FINN DEAN LANCE HEWISON / MARIA KUIPERS TIM PATRICK / DAVID STOREY

VICTORIA CROWE A CELEBRATION

40 Years of Painting 19 October to 9 November 2013 20 Bristol Gardens, Little Venice, London W9 2JQ Nearest tubes: Warwick Ave & Maida Vale For further details visit www.thomasandpaul.com From the founders of The Art Collective Ltd

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15 Reading Rd, Henley-on-Thames, Oxon RG9 1AB Open Tue–Sat 10-1.15 & 2.15-5 Tel/fax 01491 576228

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Preview Regional

Brothers under the skin

© T H E H EN RY M O O R E F O U N DAT I O N / L EN T BY S COT T IS H N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY O F M O D ER N A R T, ED I N B U R GH . © M US EO D E B EL L AS A R T ES D E B I L B AO

SIMON WIL SON IS FASCINATED BY AN UNLIKELY PAIRING OF THE TWO GREATEST BRITISH ARTISTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY THAT REVEALS THEM AS SURPRISINGLY APT BEDFELLOWS, IF NOT ONE FLESH

Henry Moore: dour, taciturn, down-toearth, sober Yorkshireman and countryman, emphatically heterosexual, notably uxorious, draughtsman of genius, sculptor to his fingertips.

His friend the poet Stephen Spender once noted how ‘normal as a man’ Moore was. Francis Bacon: garrulous, wasp-witted, champagneswilling metropolitan dandy, promiscuous masochistic homosexual with a taste for rough trade, painter of genius who claimed never to make drawings. Moore, sculptor of massively calm monuments of the earth mother in repose; Bacon, painter of grotesquely twisted humanity, writhing agonising in the void.

On the face of it they could not be more different, yet the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is bringing them together in an extraordinary exhibition that combines a selection of work by two great artists with an intellectual argument, which enables us to see them as a complementary duo that dominated the art of their time.

‘Francis Bacon/Henry Moore: Flesh and Bone’ is the brainchild of two curators profoundly knowledgeable in their respective fields, Martin Harrison, author of one of the most illuminating of all studies of Bacon’s art, In Camera: Francis Bacon (2005), and Richard Calvocoressi, Director of the Henry Moore Foundation. What they reveal is eye-opening.

Harrison suggests that Bacon’s art is fundamentally sculptural in the way in which, uniquely among major modern painters, he evokes three-dimensional figures in space.

He charts Bacon’s fascination with the sculpture of Michelangelo – arguably as great a painter as sculptor – as well as with Rodin, of great importance to Moore too, who owned a cast of Rodin’s iconic Walking Man (1907).

Calvocoressi reminds us that Bacon is on record as planning to make sculpture at one point in his career. This has always been known, but a riveting revelation is that Bacon actually asked Moore if he would give him lessons.

Apparently the response was ‘non-committal’, Calvocoressi explains in his catalogue essay.

In the end Bacon dropped the idea.

Calvocoressi’s main thrust is to discuss the affinities between the two artists. So what are these? The first and most obvious is that both vividly reflect the political anxieties and tensions of their time, as well as much more personal pain and existential angst. In both, pain, fear, suffering, alienation and anguish are continually and strongly expressed. In both there are disguised sexual forces surging through the work. In both, and perhaps surprisingly, the figure is often ambiguous in its gendering.

The critic David Sylvester pointed out in his catalogue of the 1968 Tate retrospective of Moore that his reclining women are ‘more

Reclining Figure: Festival, 1951, by Henry Moore

Lying Figure in a Mirror, 1971, by Francis Bacon

male than female’ and there too he noted the sculptor’s ‘underlying sexual imagery’.

In exposing such elements in Moore and the correspondences between Moore and Bacon, the Ashmolean exhibition is particularly valuable, since Moore’s huge success as a public, and indeed corporate, sculptor has significantly blurred our perception of the fundamentally disturbed nature of his vision.

Both artists are notable creators of biomorphic form – that is form which, while highly abstract, neverthelesss evokes and refers to the forms of the human body and is expressive of the fundamentals of life such as procreation, suffering and death. Biomorphism is one of the most fruitful inventions of modern art.

Both artists picked up on and built on Picasso’s biomorphic figures of the early 1930s inspired by his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter. The results are exemplified in Bacon by the bulbous humanoids in his famous triptych Three Studies for Figures at

the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) and in the Ashmolean show they are crucially compared with the equally powerful biomorphs of Moore’s Three Upright Motives of 1955-56. Here, as in the Bacon, the bulbous forms, although more abstract, evoke the human body and flesh.

The central figure, Moore admitted, ‘took on the shape of a crucifix – a kind of worn-down body and a cross merged into one’. It is hugely important for our understanding of him that for Moore, as for Bacon, the Crucifixion, that central image of man’s inhumanity to man, was an essential reference point in the articulation of a vision of suffering humanity in the postwar era.

Other striking comparisons are between heads by both artists and between their recumbent figures. One of Bacon’s most savage but also most beautiful early paintings, Head II (1949), can be compared with Moore’s Helmet of 1939-40. Both might be read as images of faces looking to the sky and screaming with horror as bombs fall, but both also embody a more universal sense of the anguish of being human.

But it is the recumbent figure that is central

‘...both artists vividly reflect the political anxieties and tensions of their time, as well as much more personal pain and existential angst’ to Moore’s art and it is a major motif for Bacon too. A truly telling comparison is that of Bacon’s 1971 Lying Figure in a Mirror (left), a painting as emotionally disturbing as it is visually ravishing, and Moore’s famous Reclining Figure (top) created for the Festival of Britain in 1951. I have always thought this frightening skeletal object was an odd choice for the supposedly upbeat festival, and Calvocoressi confirms that it is ‘hardly a comforting maternal sight… the figure is tense, unrelaxed, wary’, and notes how alien is its head.

Art lovers may feel that they have nothing much to learn about either Bacon or Moore, so familiar have they become. This exhibition reminds us that with artists such as these, and curators of insight, there is always scope for new discoveries and fascinating revelations.

Francis Bacon/Henry Moore: Flesh and Bone Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 01865 278002, www.ashmolean.org, 12 Sep–19 Jan, 2014

AUTUMN 2013 | RA MAGAZINE 39

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Preview Regional (2008), in which the artist grew copper sulphate crystals throughout the interior of an ex-council flat in London. In this work, recently relocated to Yorkshire Sculpture Park (01924 832631), Hiorns has created a cavernous, blue crystalline interior, which transports the viewer to a mysterious world. – ELEANOR MILLS

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Art around the nation OUR TOUR TAKES IN A BIRMINGHAM PAINTER WITH CARIBBEAN ROOTS, ROGER HIORNS IN WAKEFIELD, ALLAN RAMSAY IN GLASGOW AND HOW ART TURNED LEFT IN LIVERPOOL RAMSAY REASSESSED

This year marks the tercentenary of the birth of Allan Ramsay (1713-84), best but misleadingly known as George III’s principal painter, responsible for the dozens of versions of the full-length portraits of the young King and his consort, Queen Charlotte, that were sent around the world in the 1760s and 1770s. Ramsay’s role as court painter is one of the many facets of a much more complex artistic persona examined afresh in the Hunterian’s new exhibition in Glasgow (0141 330 4221, 13 Sep–5 Jan, 2014).

Combining a choice selection of paintings with drawings, prints, and a group of the political and philosophical writings which came increasingly to preoccupy him, the exhibition places Ramsay’s art in the context of his wider creativity and its reception by contemporaries.

Ramsay is well-known to specialists, but despite the magical beauty of many of his paintings, such as Anne Countess Temple of 1760 (1), he has defied popularisation. He enjoyed his boom period as a society portraitist just before the dawn of the Golden Age of the British School, which obscured the fundamental

modernity of his work. Later, as a Scot in London who avoided the cut and thrust of metropolitan art politics, and art societies (such as the Royal Academy), he seems consciously to have positioned himself on the periphery of the art world, with ambitions for a European rather than a national reputation. – ALEX KIDSON HIORNS HAPPENINGS

Hepworth Wakefield’s new contemporary art space, the Calder, has opened with the first major UK survey of the work of Roger Hiorns (01924 247360; until 3 Nov). For one untitled performance work (2) Hiorns has found benches from the streets of Wakefield and asked local art students to undress, fold their clothes, then light a fire and sit on the bench watching the fire burn.

The work questions people’s relationship to their architectural surroundings, as well as evoking the spiritual action of the lighting of a candle in a church. Hiorns will broadcast sounds from inside Wakefield Cathedral live into the gallery to highlight this spirituality. Hiorns’s other works similarly breathe life into urban objects and architecture, such as Untitled (Seizure)

BEYOND BORDERS

At the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, Hurvin Anderson’s show ‘Reporting Back’ (0121 248 0708, 25 Sep–10 Nov), captures a sense of the displacement of a second-generation immigrant – his parents were originally from Jamaica and Anderson was raised in the Midlands. He often depicts contrasting sites of luxury and poverty, from an exclusive Caribbean tennis court in his Country Club Series: Chicken Wire (2008) to a makeshift barber shop established by immigrants in postwar Britain, as seen in Peter’s 1 of 2007 (4).

Anderson is interested in barriers designed to block physical access or sightlines – recurring motifs include wire fences, security grilles and dense hedge-like foliage. Such subjects become the cue for the kind of exploration of the hazy area between abstraction and figuration that has also preoccupied Peter Doig, who was Anderson’s tutor at the Royal College of Art in the late 1990s. Anderson’s works are filled with tangles of bottle-green vegetation, blocks of washed-out teal and electric cerise – they are, as much as anything, a joyous celebration of painting, colour and form. – COLIN PERRY

P R I VAT E CO L L EC T I O N . © T H E A R T IS TS/CO U R T ESY T H E B R I T IS H CO U N CI L CO L L EC T I O N . GOV ER N M EN T A R T CO L L EC T I O N . P H OTO GER T JA N VA N R O O I J/CO U R T ESY T H E A R T IS T A N D CO R I - M OVA , LO N D O N

ART FOR THE PEOPLE

An intriguing show at Tate Liverpool, ‘Art Turning Left’ (0151 702 7400, 8 Nov–2 Feb, 2014), looks at how left-leaning political values have influenced the processes of making art.

This wide-ranging survey takes in subjects such as David’s Death of Marat (1793) – copies of which the artist commissioned so that they could be paraded through the streets of Paris – as well as Rodchenko’s advertising posters for state-run industries following the Russian Revolution, and the Hackney Flashers’ photographs documenting women’s working lives in the 1970s. The exhibition reveals how increased democratization stimulated new production techniques, allowed works to reach everwider audiences and created collective voices.

The embarrassment of riches in this show includes one of Pinot-Gallizio’s 1958 ‘Industrial Paintings’, which were created on rolls of canvas, then sold by the metre in an inventive attempt to debunk the values of the art market and the sanctity of the art object. Humphrey Spender’s photographs and Julian Trevelyan RA’s collages represent life in the industrial north before the Second World War, while in Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane’s Folk Archive (3) from 2005, the people become the makers, creating an alternative vision for art. And in David Medalla’s Stitch in Time, first conceived in 1968, viewers are invited to sew directly onto a canvas in the gallery, with instructions from Medalla’s original banner displayed alongside. – GILL CRABBE

40 RA MAGAZINE | AUTUMN 2013

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Jane Joseph RA Advert

9/7/13

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Jane Joseph Imprints : 6 September – 5 October 2013 Murray Edwards College /New Hall, Cambridge www.art.newhall.cam.ac.uk

William Scott

SIMPLICITY AND SUBJECT

7 September – 17 November Victoria Art Gallery Bath

By Pulteney Bridge, BA2 4AT Tel: 01225 477233, www.victoriagal.org.uk Tuesday to Saturday 10.00-5.00, Sunday 1.30-5.00 Showing only in Bath, catalogue £8 William Scott: Still life with candle, 1950, oil on canvas. © Estate of William Scott 2013

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Common Grounds : 12 September – 11 October 2013 Eagle Gallery /EMH Arts, London www.emmahilleagle.com EAGLE GALLERY EMH ARTS 159 FARRINGDON ROAD LONDON EC1R 3AL T: 020 7833 2674 emmahilleagle @aol.com

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M A RT I N R A N D A L L T R AV E L T h e u k ’ s l e a d i n g s p e c i a l i s t i n c u lt u r a l t o u r s December 2013 8–21 20–26 20–27 20–27 20–27 20–27 20–27 20–27 21–28 27– 2

Bengal by River Dr Rosie Llewellyn-Jones

Art in Switzerland at Christmas Dr Alexey Makhrov Vienna at Christmas Dr Jarl Kremeier

Modern Art on the Côte d’Azur at Christmas Lydia Bauman

Music in Dresden & Prague at Christmas Prof. Jan Smaczny & Tom Abbott Budapest at Christmas Dr József Sisa

Venice at Christmas Dr Michael Douglas-Scott Florence at Christmas Dr R. T. Cobianchi Rome at Christmas Dr Luca Leoncini

Music in Berlin at New Year Tom Abbott

12–27 17–23 18– 2 19– 2

21–23 25– 2 25– 2 25– 3 26– 2

3– 8 3– 9

3–13

5– 9

18–29 24–26 25–30 31–14

The British Raj Raaja Bhasin & Prof. Gavin Stamp Karnataka John M. Fritz

Chamber Music Weekend: The Dominant Quartet Prof. Geoffrey Norris Mozart in Salzburg Richard Wigmore

Essential India Sue Rollin

February 2014 5–15 7–20 11–20

Mughal & Nawabi Architecture Dr Giles Tillotson

Kingdoms of the Deccan John M. Fritz Israel & Palestine Dr Garth Gilmour

Extremadura Adam Hopkins

Sailing the Ganges John Keay

29– 6

Chamber Music Weekend: The Chilingirian Quartet

29– 9

Essential Jordan Sue Rollin & Jane Streetly

Florence Dr Antonia Whitley

Art in Texas Gijs van Hensbergen

Music in Berlin Prof. Jan Smaczny & Dr Jarl Kremeier Connoisseur’s Rome Dr Michael Douglas-Scott Essential Rome Dr Thomas-Leo True

Siena & San Gimignano Dr Antonia Whitley

March 2014

January 2014 4–16

27– 4

Opera at La Scala; Music in Nice & Montecarlo

4–11

Oman Prof. Dawn Chatty

Ethiopia Prof. David Phillipson

9–22 10–16 10–16 12–18 17–29 18–22 19–27 24– 5 25– 2

Walking in Madeira Gerald Luckhurst

Zurbarán & the Golden Age Dr Xavier Bray Modern Art on the Côte d’Azur Mary Lynn Riley Ruskin’s Venice Christopher Newall

Bengal by River Dr Anna-Maria Misra

Art History of Venice Polly Buston Granada & Córdoba Adam Hopkins

28–30

30– 6 31 –5

Palermo Revealed Dr R. T. Cobianchi

4– 9 4–11 4–13 5– 9

7–12 7–16 8–15 8–16 10–16

21–29

21–27

The Cathedrals of England Tim Tatton-Brown

23–27

Normans in the South John McNeill

25–27

23– 1

Symposium: Art Historians in Newcastle Opera & Ballet in Versailles & Paris Michael Downes Gastronomic Andalucía Gijs van Hensbergen

Walking in Eastern Sicily Dr Ffiona Gilmore Eaves

May 2014 2– 9

3–12

4– 6

The South Downs Janet Sinclair

Turner & the Sea; German Cars; Opera in Genoa & Turin; Southern Umbria; Anzio & Montecassino; Opera in Spain

April 2014

Venetian Palaces Dr Michael Douglas-Scott

Contact us: +44 (0)20 8742 3355 www.martinrandall.com

Courts of Northern Italy Dr Michael Douglas-Scott

28– 5

2–11

14–21

Indian Summer Raaja Bhasin

Morocco James Brown

25–30

Hogarth & Handel; Tudor England; Budapest Spring Festival

Gardens of the Riviera Caroline Holmes

Sicily Dr Luca Leoncini

Chamber Music Weekend: The London Haydn Quartet

5–14 5–18 9–12 9–15

Walking in Northern Tuscany Dr Antonia Whitley

Eastern Andalucía: Caliphs to Kings Gijs van Hensbergen Classical Greece Henry Hurst Pilgrimage & Heresy John McNeill The Western Balkans David Gowan

Flanders’ Fields Andrew Spooner

St Petersburg Dr Alexey Makhrov

Jordan Revisited Jane Taylor

10–25

Eastern Turkey Rowena Loverance

Pompeii & Herculaneum Dr Mark Grahame

13–23

Transoxiana Prof. James Allan

Charles Dickens Andrew Sanders

12–17

Classical Turkey Dr Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

16–19

Andalusian Morocco Dr Amira Bennison

21–25

The Heart of Italy Prof. Ian Campbell Ross

Gardens & Villas of the Italian Lakes Steven Desmond Semana Santa in Spain Adam Hopkins

Lucca Dr Antonia Whitley The Greeks in Sicily Prof. Tony Spawforth

Ravenna & Urbino Dr Michael Douglas-Scott

Middle Egypt Angus Graham Chamber Music Weekend: The Vienna Piano Trio Richard Wigmore

18–24

21–27 29– 5 31– 7

31–10

Villas & Gardens of Campagna Romana Helena Attlee El Greco 1614 Dr Xavier Bray & Gijs van Hensbergen Walking Hadrian’s Wall Graeme Stobbs

Art in Madrid Gail Turner The House of Hanover Dr Jarl Kremeier

Rhine Valley Festival of Song

Mediaeval Burgundy John McNeill Frank Lloyd Wright Dr Harry Charrington

Estonia & Latvia; The Veneto; Naples: Art, Antiquities, Opera; The Bergen Music Festival

June 2014

July 2014

3–14

6–12

4–12 5– 8 7–12 7–13 9–14 9–15 9–18 10–17 12–15 12–15 15–19 17–22 18–26 19–26 19–26 20–28 21–25 23–27 23–28 25– 1 27– 3

Walking to Santiago Adam Hopkins & Gaby Macphedran Great Houses of the East Dr Andrew Moore

Berlin: New Architecture Tom Abbott

Opera in Vienna Simon Rees The Duchy of Urbino Dr Luca Leoncini

Summer 1914: End of Peace Richard Bassett

Art & Industry Dr Paul Atterbury Castile & León Gijs van Hensbergen Moravia

Chamber Music Weekend: The Schubert Ensemble in Frascati The Louvre at Lens Mary Lynn Riley The Western Front Gordon Corrigan

Palladian Villas Dr Michael Douglas-Scott

Northumbria Christopher Newall Armenia Alan Ogden Habsburg Austria Dr Jarl Kremeier

Transylvania Bronwen Riley Operation Overlord Andrew Spooner

Mediaeval Middle England John McNeill Music in Palladian Villas

Charlemagne to Charles V Jeffrey Miller

Opera in Leipzig & Dresden Simon Rees

The Schubertiade; Vikings; Country House Opera; Thomas Hardy; Georgia; Minoans & Mycenaens; Trasimeno Festival; Gardens of Northern Portugal

10–15 14–18 17–24 18–26 20–26

King Ludwig II Tom Abbott

Savonlinna Opera Simon Rees German Gothic Jeffrey Miller Mitteldeutschland Dr Jarl Kremeier

Art in the Netherlands Dr Richard Williams

Shakespeare & his World; Opera at Aix; Verona Opera; Summer Opera in Italy; Incontri in Terra di Siena; The East Neuk of Fife

10–17 12–18 13–24 15–20 15–21 15–23 15–26 16–19

August 2014

16–23

4–11

The Victorian Achievement Dr Paul Atterbury

18–24

Royal Residences Giles Waterfield

19–26

11–15 19–23 21–28

Bertie, Prince & King Professor Jane Ridley

The Danube Music Festival

The Salzburg Summer Festival; Walking the Danube; Verona Opera; Torre del Lago; Macerata & Pesaro Opera; Martina Franca; Bellini Festival Catania; Edinburgh Festival; Opera in Drottningholm; Santa Fé Opera

September 2014 1– 8

1–13 3– 6 5– 7 5– 8 8–14 8–14 8–15 8–22

Image: Tallinn, the Upper Town, lithograph c. 1840.

Scotland: the Borders Amanda Herries

9–19

10–14

9–15 9–16

Bohemia Michael Ivory

West Coast Architecture Dr Harry Charrington Flemish Painting Dr Richard Williams

19–25

22–25 22– 4 23–29 27– 4 27– 6 29– 5 29– 5 30– 8

Transoxiana Prof. Hugh Kennedy Art in Madrid Gijs van Hensbergen

Hungary Dr József Sisa

St Petersburg Dr Alexey Makhrov Morocco James Brown

Oxford & Oxfordshire Dr Cathy Oakes

The Etruscans Dr Nigel Spivey The Heart of Portugal Adam Hopkins

Ancient Egypt Dr Angus Graham The Battle of Britain Terry Charman

The Heart of Italy Dr Michael Douglas-Scott

Gardens & Villas of the Italian Lakes Steven Desmond Connoisseur’s Vienna Dr Jarl Kremeier

Modern Art on the Côte d’Azur Monica Bohm-Duchen

Arts & Crafts in the Cotswolds Janet Sinclair

Classical Greece Dr Andrew Farrington

Connoisseur’s Prague Michael Ivory

Dark Age Brilliance John McNeill

1– 9 3– 9

7–12 8–23

10–17 13–18 13–20 13–25 15–23 17–23 18–31 20–25 20–27

The Western Balkans David Gowan Palladian Villas Dr Joachim Strupp Ethiopia

Walking in Northern Tuscany Dr Antonia Whitley

Ancient Rome Dr Mark Grahame Bilbao to Bayonne Gijs van Hensbergen Sicily John McNeill

Essential Jordan Jane Taylor

Roman & Mediaeval Provence Dr Alexandra Gajewski Andalucía Adam Hopkins

Pompeii & Herculaneum Dr Ffiona Gilmore Eaves

Walking in Southern Tuscany Dr Antonia Whitley

21–30

Palestine Dr Felicity Cobbing Israel & Palestine Dr Garth Gilmour

Gastronomic Sicily Marc Millon

November 2014

Connoisseur’s New York Gijs van Hensbergen

1– 8

Istanbul Sue Rollin

Walking to Santiago Adam Hopkins & Gaby Macphedran

October 2014 1– 5

6–19

Courts of Northern Italy Dr Michael Douglas-Scott

Algeria; The Western Desert; Cold War Berlin; Northern Greece; Parma Verdi Festival; Puglia; Opera in Cardiff

French Gothic Dr Alexandra Gajewski

The Iron Curtain Neil Taylor

Malta Juliet Rix

6–13

History of Medicine

A Festival of Music in Bologna

Cave Art in Spain Dr Paul Bahn

Budapest & Vienna 1900; Music in London; Beethoven in Bonn; Gastronomic Parma; Lucerne Summer Festival; Castles of Wales

Berlin, Potsdam, Dresden Dr Jarl Kremeier

6–12

20–28

30–11

Lucca Dr Flavio Boggi

Eastern Turkey Rowena Loverance

6–12

Wellington in the Peninsula Patrick Mercer

Mediaeval Art in Paris Dr Matthew Woodworth Poets & The Somme Andrew Spooner

4–19

Ravenna & Urbino Dr Luca Leoncini

10–16 10–18 11–16

Venice & Florence Dr Michael Douglas-Scott Florence Revisited Dr Joachim Strupp

The Greeks in Sicily Dr Ffiona Gilmore Eaves Venice Revisited Dr Susan Steer

Museums of Japan; The Lucerne Piano Festival

The Cathedrals of England Jon Cannon Monasteries of Moldavia Alan Ogden

ABTA No.Y6050

5085

SMALL SHIPS – BIG EXPERIENCES WITH NOBLE CALEDONIA

History & Music Under Sail in the Baltic Aboard Sea Cloud II with Peter Warwick, Humphrey Burton and London Festival Opera 9th to 23rd July 2014 Join us for a journey of history, art and music in the Baltic aboard the magnificent SWEDEN FINLAND Sea Cloud II, one of the largest fully rigged three-mast sailing ships ever built St Petersburg NORWAY Helsinki for passengers. The Baltic is to Northern Europe what the Mediterranean Stockholm Tallinn Lillesand BALTIC is to Southern Europe. So, at the height of summer where better to ESTONIA Dundee SEA Skagen explore, under sail, than on a journey that begins in St Petersburg, NORTH Visby SEA DENMARK Copenhagen taking in the most interesting and important places around the Baltic, UK before sailing across to Dundee.

Bornholm Gdansk

London Festival Opera will be accompanying us on this unique POLAND GERMANY voyage and performing onboard as well as in some magnificent settings ashore. In addition we will be joined by our expert guest speakers and local guides who will add greatly to our enjoyment and understanding of this fascinating region. Combined with a sailing ship as special as Sea Cloud II, this truly is a voyage of a lifetime.

The Itinerary in Brief Day 1 - London Heathrow to St Petersburg, Russia. Fly by

Sea Cloud II Sea Cloud II is a stunning vessel, the 29,600 square feet of sails is set by hand which is a truly magical sight.

Built to accommodate 96 passengers in five star luxury, she offers a range of beautifully appointed suites and cabins which are furnished with great style. All accommodations have outside views and the bathrooms are unusually spacious and extremely comfortable. No expense has been spared to create a sympathetic ambience in both the accommodations and public areas and this is reflected throughout the vessel. Public areas include an elegant lounge, library, fitness centre, boutique, lido bar and hospital. The single sitting dining room is airy and modern and the quality of the cuisine and service will be to the highest of standards, as one would expect on a Sea Cloud II cruise. Relax on the Lido deck and experience the natural grandeur of travelling under sail, rekindling memories of a bygone age.

scheduled flight. Arrive and transfer to Sea Cloud II. Day 2 - St Petersburg. We will begin our exploration of St Petersburg with a morning city tour. Return to Sea Cloud II for lunch and enjoy an afternoon at leisure. This evening we enjoy a private visit to the magnificent Yusupov Palace where a guided tour will be followed by drinks and canapés and a performance by London Festival Opera.

Day 3 - St Petersburg. This morning we drive out to Peterhof.

After touring the grand palace and park, return to the vessel for an early lunch. The afternoon will be devoted to the Hermitage.

Day 4 - Helsinki, Finland. Spend a relaxing morning at sea cruising in the Gulf of Finland. We arrive in Helsinki during lunch and explore the city this afternoon.

Day 5 - Tallinn, Estonia. Enjoy a morning of exploration in Tallinn and an evening concert by London Festival Opera.

Day 6 - Stockholm, Sweden. This morning we sail through the many

islands of the Swedish Archipelago into Stockholm. Spend the afternoon exploring this handsome city.

Day 7 - Stockholm. Enjoy a free morning in Stockholm and sail at lunchtime, through the Stockholm archipelago and then in a southerly direction to the Swedish Island of Gotland.

Day 8 - Visby, Gotland. Today we visit this once important Hanseatic port. Best explored on foot, the beautifully preserved medieval town snuggles inside 13th century walls. Sail during lunch and this evening enjoy a performance by London Festival Opera.

Day 9 - Gdansk, Poland. We have the day to explore Gdansk, visiting the church of St Mary, an enormous Gothic hall church with crystal vaulting, Arthur’s Hall and the Knight’s Great Watermill.

attractive rocky coastline dotted with fishing villages. We moor in Gudhjem and visit Nykirke, one of the 12th-century round churches on the island. Evening performance by London Festival Opera.

Day 11 - Copenhagen. We have a full day in the charming Danish capital which will include the Palace of Amailienborg (exterior only), Christiansborg Castle, the Royal Theatre and Nyhavn. In the afternoon explore independently or join the excursion to Helsingor to see the Kronborg Castle.

Day 12 - Skagen, Denmark. Relax as we cruise the Kattegat to the far northern tip of Denmark and the picturesque town of Skagen.

After lunch we enjoy a few hours

Day 10 - Bornholm, Denmark.

Prices per person based on double occupancy range from £7995 for a category E suite to £10295 for an owner’s suite.

Suites for sole use start from £9795.

We visit the beautiful Bornholm Island with its woodland and

of exploration. Walk through its flower filled streets to the museum which houses a marvellous collection of paintings by Danish artists. Evening performance by London Festival Opera.

Day 13 - Lillesand, Norway.

Lillesand is, a charming summer resort. Small islands and skerries dot the coastline making the approach to the town by sea a memorable sight. On a morning ashore we can soak up the unique atmosphere.

Day 14 - At sea. The last opportunity to enjoy a day under sail as we cross the North Sea to Scotland. Enjoy farewell drinks, dinner and concert by London Festival Opera.

Day 15 - Dundee. Disembark this morning.

Prices & Inclusions

Price Includes: Economy class scheduled air travel from London to St Petersburg, 14 nights aboard Sea Cloud II on full board, wine, beer and soft drinks with lunch and dinner, shore excursions, performances by London Festival Opera, services of a cruise director, tour manager, guest speakers, transfers, onboard gratuities, port taxes, airport taxes.

Not Included: Travel insurance, gratuities ashore, Russian visa.

NB: Ports subject to change. Our current booking conditions apply.

Call us today on 020 7752 0000 for your copy of our brochure.

Alternatively view or request online at www.noble-caledonia.co.uk 6687 Noble Cal RA Mag Ad.indd 1

17/07/2013 09:12

Preview International

A mural lover’s marathon

© 2013/ P H OTO A R T R E S O U R C E / B O B/S C H A L K W I J K /S CA L A , F LO R E N C E

FOR THE BEST WALL PAINTINGS IN MEXICO CITY TAKE A TOUR WITH ADRIAN LOCKE , CURATOR OF THE RA’S ‘MEXICO’ EXHIBITION For anyone visiting Mexico City it is virtually impossible to avoid public art: murals are quite simply everywhere. In 1921, the Education Minister José Vasconcelos funded an ambitious mural programme, employing artists to decorate public walls across the city with subjects designed to inspire Mexicans with apolitical, universal themes. The very first examples can be seen at the 18th-century Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, in particular Diego Rivera’s Italianate semireligious Creation (1922) and numerous individual works by José Clemente Orozco. Among them is Orozco’s The Trench (1926), a later canvas version of which is currently included in the RA’s ‘Mexico: A Revolution in Art, 1910-1940’.

There is also a fine historical mural, The Massacre in the Templo Mayor (1922-23), by the French-born artist Jean Charlot, who initially worked as Rivera’s assistant. The subject matter of Mexico City’s murals, however, soon embraced a radical political agenda as artists celebrated the events of the Mexican Revolution (1910-20) and nationalist themes.

The best place to start on a tour of these murals is the Palacio de Bellas Artes, where works include those by the three artists most associated with this period – Rivera, Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros – as well as significant painters such as Rufino Tamayo and Jorge González Camarena.

The variety of murals here serves as an introduction to the different styles, which range from Rivera’s narrative Socialist Realism through to Tamayo’s abstraction and Siqueiros’s expressionism.

Deciding on your favourite flavour of mural here can help determine what you take in across the city.

Those who like Rivera should not miss the vast The History of Mexico (1929-35) at the Palacio Nacional, which heralds a bright

Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Park (detail), 1947-48, a mural by Diego Rivera for the Hotel del Prado, Mexico City

new, socialist future while simultaneously criticising the exploitation of indigenous Mexicans at the hands of the colonial masters, as well as the Museo Diego Rivera’s Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Park (1947, above), a private commission that once graced the dining-room walls of the Hotel del Prado opposite the alameda (central park).

For more of Siqueiros, From the Porfiriato to the Revolution (1957– 66) at Museo Nacional de Historia at Chapultepec Castle is a must.

This vibrant cycle looms above you and sweeps you round with its extraordinary breathless vitality.

The challenge of marrying a modern painting to a historic setting is demonstrated at the 16thcentury colonial Iglesia de Jesús Nazareno, where the remains of Hernán Cortés were originally buried. The building hosts Orozco’s mural Apocalypse (1944), which explores the horrors of the Second World War. A hidden gem is at the Abelardo R. Rodríguez Market, a few blocks from the Zócalo, the main square in the historic centre. Here one can find works by American artists who were commissioned in 1936 to decorate the newly constructed

food market. The market provides a glimpse of the ‘real’ Mexico, where you can see murals by Isamu Noguchi as well as Marion and Grace Greenwood, whose work attacked Fascism and the exploitation of the working class.

And at the end of a long day, why not relax with a margarita sitting beneath a mural? A 17thcentury private residence in the historic centre has been converted into the chic hotel Downtown México, which means its 1944-45 mural by Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, The Holocaust, in which shrouded women lament the death of a prostrate man, can now be fully appreciated by visitors to the hotel’s bar. Meanwhile, the luxurious Hotel Camino Real in the Polanco neighbourhood boasts Rufino Tamayo’s Man Before the Infinite (1971), in which a large silhouetted figure stands on a hill watching a lunar eclipse.

Mexico: A Revolution in Art, 1910– 1940 Sackler Wing, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 020 7300 8000, until 29 Sep. 2009–2013 Season supported by JTI Scan the image above to see a video of Mexico City, including Adrian Locke discussing its murals. See page 22 for full instructions

Mexico goes global Mexican culture is celebrated in several shows this autumn.

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas looks at how Mexico’s political and social issues have been addressed in its art since 1990, in ‘Mexico: Inside Out’ (www.themodern.org; 15 Sep5 Jan, 2014). An extraordinary artistic relationship is explored at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, in ‘Frida Kahlo/Diego Rivera: Art in Fusion’ (www.museeorangerie.fr; 9 Oct–13 Jan, 2014). Kahlo is also the focus of a show at the Arken Museum, Copenhagen (www. arken.dk; 7 Sep-12 Jan, 2014), which includes work by her contemporaries. And the Irish Museum of Modern Art

in Dublin shows work by the British Surrealist Leonora Carrington (www.imma.ie; 18 Sep–26 Jan, 2014), who moved to Mexico in 1942.

– SARAH BOLWELL

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Preview International

ALBRECHT DÜRER, CONSUMMATE PRINTMAKER AND HERO OF THE NORTHERN RENAISSANCE, IS CELEBRATED IN A SHOW THAT EMBRACES THE EXTRAORDINARY BREADTH OF HIS ACHIEVEMENT IN ALL MEDIA. CHRISTOPHER BAKER REPORTS

St Jerome in his Study, 1521, by Albrecht Dürer

‘Dürer’s achievement remains intact... As long as the stars illuminate the heavens,’ wrote his friend, the lawyer Willibald Pirckheimer, after his death in 1528, and due to his technical mastery and artistic brilliance his reputation has never dimmed. It is however difficult to grasp a sense of Dürer’s achievement because of the staggering variety of his work and sheer richness of invention it represents.

Now a rare chance to consider in depth the common threads that run through Dürer’s work is provided by an outstanding exhibition at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt. Featuring 180 works, it sets out to create an inspiring survey of the artist’s entire career, with major loans from London, Vienna, Lisbon, Florence and

Fushimi Underground Shopping Street, by Open United Studio, 2013, at the Aichi Trienniale in Nagoya, Japan

Los Angeles complementing the riches of German collections.

Born in 1471 in Nuremberg, Dürer soon excelled as a printmaker, producing woodcuts and engravings that combined startling observational skills with an unerring elegance of design.

They brought him a European reputation and he soon exploited and enhanced this through his travels, which involved a seminal visit to Italy. Dürer was equally comfortable exploring secular and sacred themes, such as St Jerome in his Study (left), working on a microscopic or monumental scale, producing altarpieces and portraits, designs for the decorative arts and glorious natural history studies, all of which are underpinned by sensational draughtsmanship and an unquenchable curiosity about the world. It is little wonder that he enjoyed the admiration of men such as Erasmus and Giovanni Bellini, as well as extensive and distinguished patronage.

The Städel show not only explores key themes in his work but also illustrates how he was inspired by and often surpassed the creations of contemporaries, such as Lucas van Leyden and Joos van Cleve. The ambition and breadth of this show are its defining characteristics, as so many recent exhibitions on the artist have analysed individual media or genres he explored. The result offers an ideal opportunity for immersion in the humanism that lies at the heart of Dürer’s achievement, which transcended the circumstances of his life and career.

Albrecht Dürer: His Art in the Context of his Time Städel Museum, Frankfurt, www.staedelmuseum.de, 23 Oct–2 Feb, 2014 The Young Dürer: Drawing the Figure Courtauld Institute, London, www.courtauld.ac.uk, 17 Oct–12 Jan, 2014

Giant steps The Aichi Triennale (until 27 Oct) is Japan’s largest international arts festival, staging site-specific installations in Nagoya and Okazaki, and bringing together emerging and established Asian artists with those from the West, including Academicians Cornelia Parker and Richard Wilson.

Magritte’s mystique SAR AH WHITFIELD PONDERS THE MYSTERY AND MEANING IN THE BELGIAN SURREALIST’S BREAKTHROUGH YEARS – THE FOCUS OF A SHOW IN NEW YORK

Unlike recent exhibitions of René Magritte, a show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, this autumn – which travels to Houston and Chicago – concentrates on the Belgian artist’s earlier work, bringing together an impressive number of masterpieces, many of which have not been seen together for several decades.

From the start Magritte was a singular Surrealist. He was a natural rebel, torn between becoming a member of the Paris Surrealists and a reluctance to submit to the authority of André Breton, who dominated the Surrealist art scene in Paris.

As time has shown, however, it is Magritte who now exerts the authority.

He is one of the 20th century’s most widely reproduced artists, not only because his images have a punch and an immediacy but because his grasp of mystery and ambiguity is as seductive and as unfathomable now as it was at the height of the Surrealist movement. The show focuses on Magritte’s early experiments with

The Human Condition, 1933,

by René Magritte themes rooted in anxiety, such as displacement (as seen in The Human Condition, 1933, above) the double image (An End to Contemplation, 1927) and metamorphosis (The Red Model, 1935). These paintings deal with the deceptive world of appearances in which the ordinary is transformed into the momentous and the disturbing.

Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938 MoMA, New York, www.moma.org, 28 Sep–12 Jan, 2014; Menil Collection, Houston, www.menil. org, 14 Feb–1 June, 2014; Art Institute of Chicago, www.artic.edu, 29 June– 12 Oct, 2014

M US EU N ACI O N A L D E A R T E A N T I G A , L IS S A B O N . N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY O F A R T, WAS H I N GTO N , GI F T O F T H E CO L L EC TO R ’ S CO M M I T T EE C CH A R LY H ERS COV I CI /A DAGP/A RS , 2013 . © O P EN U N I T ED S T U D I O/CO U R T ESY A I CH I T R I EN N A L E

Following a northern star

46 RA MAGAZINE | AUTUMN 2013

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The Campaign for Wool is a proud supporter of 'Australia'.

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The Campaign for Wool is a global initiative, led by our Patron, His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales to promote the incredible benefits and versatility of wool.

TCFW13.indd 1

16/07/13 7:23 PM

Cox & Kings, the world’s longest established travel company, is delighted to be the travel partner for the Royal Academy of Arts. Our programme of smallgroup tours has been specially created with the Friends of the Royal Academy in mind and Cox & Kings pays a fee for every booking to contribute to the work of the RA and specifically its Education Department.

Our new collection of tours focuses on the art, architecture and archaeology of some of the world’s most fascinating and intriguing destinations. All the tours are accompanied by expert lecturers who help to design the itineraries, give talks along the way and, in many cases, open doors that would be closed to the general public. Their passion and knowledge bring the destinations to life and make the tours equally rewarding for art enthusiasts and experts alike.

2013 Late Availability

At the time of going to press we still have limited availability remaining on the following tours for the end of 2013.

Romania: Mountains, Monasteries & Medieval Castles Dates: 10-19 Oct 2014 Expert: Lucy Abel Smith Price from: £1,625 per person

In the Footsteps of Verdi Dates: 25-29 Oct 2014 Expert: Daniel Snowman Price from: £2,295 per person

Morocco: Medinas, Mosques & Mountains Dates: 1-8 Nov 2014 Expert: Andrew Allen Price from: £1,475 per person 5035

V2999

RA •FullMagazine Page.inddAdvert 10 DPS - Art Tours 2013 (AUG13).indd 2-3

Bruges & Ghent: Flemish Art & Architecture Dates: 6-10 Nov 2014 Expert: Margaret Campbell Price from: £995 per person

02/08/2013 11:19

Art Tours Worldwide

Art • Archaeology • Architecture • 2013-2015 2013 Late Availability

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The Temples & Treasures of Laos & Cambodia Dates: 19 Nov – 01 Dec 2014 Expert: Denise Heywood Price from: £3,195 per person

Barcelona: Gaudi’s Masterworks Dates: 20-24 Nov 2013 Expert: Colin Baily Price from: £1095 per person

New Tours For 2014 / 15

Our extended programme of expert accompanied art tours in 2014 and early 2015 includes 60 departures of 32 small-group tours, featuring a combination of well and lesser knowncentres of art in Europe, Africa and Asia.

To see the full range of tours, please request a brochure or visit our website for full details.

Europe

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Italy – Florence Dates: 28 Apr – 03 May & 06-11 Oct 2014 Experts: Fenella Billington

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Oman Dates: 09-17 Nov 2014 Expert: Konstantine Politis

Italy – Renaissance Rome Dates: 07-11 May 2014 & 29 Oct – 02 Nov 2014 Expert: Clare Ford Wille & Andreas Petzold

Tunisia Dates: 06-13 May & 18-25 Sep 2014 Expert: Neil Faulkner & Rowena Loverance

Italy – Umbria Dates: 02-08 Jun 2014 Expert: Antonia Whitley

Burma Dates: 2-15 Feb & 03-16 Nov 2014 & 01-14 Feb 2015 Experts: Julian Brown

Russia – St Petersburg Dates: 21-26 Feb 2014, 23-28 May & 29 Aug – 03 Sep 2014 Expert: Colin Bailey

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Italy – Carvagio’s Rome Dates: 29 Sep – 04 Oct 2014 Expert: Fenella Billington

Armenia & Georgia Dates: 12-22 May 2014 Expert: Andrew Allen

Germany – Dresden, Berlin & Potsdam Dates: 17-24 Oct 2014 Expert: Tom Abbott

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Morocco Dates: 7-14 Mar & 07-14 Nov 2014 & 06-13 Mar 2015 Expert: Andrew Allen

Romania Dates: 09-18 Oct 2014 Expert: Lucy Abel-Smith

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Italy – Naples Dates: 15-21 Mar & 20-26 Sep 2014 & 14-20 Mar 2015 Expert: Andrew Allen & Annalisa Marzano

Jordan Dates: 04-11 Apr & 31 Oct – 07 Nov 2014 Expert: Neil Faulkner

Italy – Venice Dates: 22-26 Mar & 25-29 Oct 2014 Experts: Sian Walters

Albania & Macedonia Dates: 07 Oct – 15 Oct 2014 Expert: William Taylor

Denmark – Copenhagen Dates: 17-20 Jul 2014 Expert: Anne Anderson

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Italy – Sicily Dates: 6-14 Apr & 14-22 Sep 2014 & 05-13 Apr 2015 Expert: Annalisa Marzano & Andrew Allen

Asia

China Dates: 27 Apr – 08 May 2014 & 05-16 Oct 2014 Expert: Marlies Weston India Dates: 01-14 Nov 2014 & 09-22 Feb 2015 Expert: Diana Driscoll

Spain – Madrid & Toledo Dates: 03-07 Mar 2014 & 17-21 Nov 2014 Expert: Colin Bailey

Indonesia Dates: 14-28 Aug 2014 Expert: Denise Heywood

Turkey – Istanbul Dates: 31 Mar – 05 Apr & 29 Sep – 04 Oct 2014 Experts: William Taylor

Laos & Cambodia Dates: 31 Jan – 12 Feb & 07-19 Nov 2014 & 1-13 Feb & 19 Nov – 1 Dec 2015 Expert: Denise Heywood

Turkey – South West Dates: 05-14 Apr & 04-13 Oct 2014 Experts: Konstantine Politis & Rowena Loverance

Africa & The Middle East

Uzbekistan Dates: 25 Apr – 6 May & 19-30 Sep 2014 Expert: Diana Driscoll

Italy – Puglia Dates: 03-09 Mar 2014 Expert: Colin Bailey

Ethiopia Dates: 25 Apr – 09 May & Oct – 07 Nov 2014 Expert: William Taylor & Chris Bradley

For detailed itineraries and prices,please request a copy of the 2014 RA Worldwide Art Tours brochure by calling 0844 576 5518 quoting reference RAARTS, or visit www.coxandkings.co.uk/ra

Italy – Ravenna Dates: 10-13Apr & 20-23 Nov 2014 Experts: Rowena Loverance & Sally Dormer

Jerusalem Dates: 18-24 May & 14-20 Sep 2014 Expert: Konstantine Politis

For reservations, please call 0845 564 1606

Bernini’s angel with thorn crown, Sant Angelo Bridge, Rome, Italy

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50 RA MAGAZINE | AUTUMN 2013

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Sydney Sun, 1965,

by John Olsen

LEFT

Under the sun Whether seen as a golden land of opportunity, harsh deserted wasteland, or sacred wilderness, Australia’s landscape has always dominated its diverse culture. In the following pages Peter Conrad sets the scene for the Academy’s sweeping survey of Australian art, evoking the spirit of the land that has inspired and challenged its artists

AUTUMN 2013 | RA MAGAZINE 51

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‘scraggy hip bones’ jutted out, their furry covering worn pathetically thin. America was at least a newfound land; to the first European arrivals, Australia looked dishevelled, decrepit, burned-out. Was it already moribund? In 1906 the geologist John Walter Gregory described central Australia as a ‘dead heart’, a phrase that had lethal consequences for Australian thinking about the land: our country, we were told when I was growing up there in the 1950s, was a corpse. Art can make sense of the world and make us feel at home in it, but the colonists pined for a remote mother country – hence the archetypal Australian story of the child lost in the bush, depicted in Frederick McCubbin’s Lost in 1886 – and preferred instead to look away from their benighted surroundings.

The first landscape paintings made by Europeans in Australia were therefore modest topographical reports, or an offshoot of the struggle for subsistence. John Lewin’s Fish Catch and Dawes Point, Sydney Harbour (below), painted around 1813, focuses on the edible riches of Sydney Harbour – including a Murray cod (actually a freshwater fish, caught far inland), a mullet and a hammerhead shark. This is a still life, though the eyes of these creatures that were living not long before accuse the viewer with a quizzical or reproachful stare. It’s a reminder that the civilizing process is another name for killing.

In Australia, culture followed agriculture or horticulture. European farming methods failed THIS PAGE , LEFT Fish Catch and Dawes Point, Sydney Harbour, c.1813, by John Lewin OPPOSITE PAGE , TOP Bush Fire Between Mt Elephant and Timboon, 1857, 1859,

by Eugene von Guérard OPPOSITE PAGE , BOTTOM A View of the Artist’s House and Garden, in Mills Plains, Van Diemen’s Land, 1835,

by John Glover

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intolerable continent’, he had trouble with nomenclature: shuddering in parenthesis, he referred to ‘the Australian countryside (if one can call that inhospitable fringe between sea and desert by such a reassuring name)’.

Countryside is an accessory to the city; it offers reassurance by giving evidence of human presence, ownership and control. But in Australia the first settlers and generations of their descendants saw only emptiness and menace. They were unaware, of course, that for centuries the people they dispossessed had mapped, mythologized and cared for this land, walking across it, singing about it and painting not only the way it looked but its origins as it was moulded into shape by migratory spirits.

For the colonisers, the vacancy they saw out there was convenient. The legal fiction of terra nullius justified the continent’s use as what the Victorian novelist Henry Kingsley called Britain’s ‘cesspool’, where ‘a vast quantity of nameless rubbish’ – he meant the convicts – could be dumped.

It also came in handy when Britain tested nuclear weapons in the outback in the 1950s, and it helps to explain the ravaging of nature by mining companies in Western Australia and wood-chippers bulldozing forests in Tasmania.

The penal colony established in 1788 was situated as far as possible from Europe.

No-one thought of civilizing or cultivating this waste land, which – in the opinion of Joseph Banks, the naturalist who accompanied Captain Cook – resembled ‘the back of a lean cow’ whose

P R E V I O US S P R E A D: N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY O F AUS T R A L I A , CA N B ER R A . P U R CH AS ED W I T H F U N DS F R O M T H E N ER IS S A J O H NS O N B EQ U ES T 20 0 0/© DAC S 2013 T H IS PAGE: A R T G A L L ERY O F S O U T H AUS T R A L I A . GI F T O F T H E A R T G A L L ERY O F S O U T H AUS T R A L I A F O U N DAT I O N A N D S O U T H AUS T R A L I A N B R E W I N G H O L D I N GS L I M I T ED, 1989. GI V EN TO M A R K T H E O CCAS I O N O F T H E CO M PA N Y ’ S 1988 CEN T EN A RY

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rt, according to the classical theory, is nature perfected or at least ameliorated.

Traditionally, artists were trained to idealize, producing stationary crystalline waves like those on which Botticelli’s Venus balances, or trees that, as painted by Fragonard, look as fluffy as cushions. Given such a visual education, it’s easy to imagine what an affront the landscape of Australia must have been to the first Europeans who set eyes on it. Here ragged trees shed bark not leaves, misbegotten marsupials gave birth in unorthodox ways, and the indigenous population seemed still to be living in the Stone Age. Could it be, as Charles Darwin suspected after visiting Sydney and Hobart in 1836, that there were two creators operating in separate hemispheres – one who conceived the Garden of Eden, the other a fumbler or diabolical parodist who dreamed up Australia’s shaggy flora and bizarre fauna?

America had its mind-boggling gulfs – Niagara, the Grand Canyon – but they could be classified as sublime phenomena, awe-inspiring evidence of divine power. Until the explorer Ernest Giles sighted Uluru in 1872, Australia had no such marvels, only the dry jungle of the unkempt bush and, beyond a barricade of mountains, the flat, dull and deadly emptiness of the desert. In 1949 when Kenneth Clark visited what he privately called ‘that

A R T G A L L ERY O F B A L L A R AT. GI F T O F L A DY CU R R I E I N M EM O RY O F H ER H US B A N D, T H E L AT E S I R A L A N CU R R I E , 194 8 . A R T G A L L ERY O F S O U T H AUS T R A L I A . M O R G A N T H O M AS B EQ U ES T F U N D, 1951

P R E V I O US S P R E A D: N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY O F AUS T R A L I A , CA N B ER R A . P U R CH AS ED W I T H F U N DS F R O M T H E N ER IS S A J O H NS O N B EQ U ES T 20 0 0/© DAC S 2013 T H IS PAGE: A R T G A L L ERY O F S O U T H AUS T R A L I A . GI F T O F T H E A R T G A L L ERY O F S O U T H AUS T R A L I A F O U N DAT I O N A N D S O U T H AUS T R A L I A N B R E W I N G H O L D I N GS L I M I T ED, 1989. GI V EN TO M A R K T H E O CCAS I O N O F T H E CO M PA N Y ’ S 1988 CEN T EN A RY

‘Art can make sense of the world and make us feel at home in it, but the colonists pined for a remote mother country’

in the earliest years; My Harvest Home, painted

by John Glover in 1835, celebrated a successful crop and for that reason allowed the plains of central Tasmania, described by the artist as ‘a new Beautiful Land’, to be irradiated by a beatific setting sun. Each of the flowers and shrubs planted in strict rows in Glover’s A View of the Artist’s House and Garden in Mills Plains, Van Diemen’s Land (1835, below) represents art’s small victory over the fertile mayhem of nature.

Nothing could have been further from Aboriginal gardening which, rather than coaxing imported species to take root, specialises in locating succulent and sometimes medicinal fruits, nuts and fungi, especially those startled into life by rainstorms or even by fire.

The incongruity remains. Autumn Equinox, The Loss of the Sun (2009) by the contemporary painter Philip Wolfhagen, a transplanted Constable, depicts a corner of northern Tasmania that is a plausible simulation of England, with oaks, elms and hawthorn hedges.

But the skeletal relic of a silver birch remains on display in Wolfhagen’s garden: this immigrant withered and died of homesickness.

Australians still call sheep farmers ‘pastoralists’, using a word with a quaint classical pedigree, and Glover’s landscapes are versions of pastoral, proof that a kind of Arcadia could be cultivated in surroundings that initially seemed so inimical.

As settlement established a foothold, fear of Australian nature abated, or – for painters at least – became a sensation to be harmlessly cultivated.

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N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY O F AUS T R A L I A , CA N B ER R A /GI F T O F A M ER I CA N F R I EN DS O F T H E N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY O F AUS T R A L I A I N C . N E W YO R K , N Y, US A , M A D E P OS S I B L E W I T H T H E GEN ER O US S U P P O R T O F M R A N D M RS B EN N O S CH M I DT O F N E W YO R K A N D ES P ER A N CE , W ES T ER N AUS T R A L I A , 1987/ ES TAT E O F RUS S EL L D RYS DA L E

a distance, prettifying the plumes of reddened smoke that improbably fail to blot out the moon.

Another painter featured in the exhibition, Fred Williams, studied this seasonal Australian peril at closer range a century later, when a runaway fire at Upwey in suburban Melbourne swept past his house in 1968. The experience changed the painter’s attitude to the land: fire, as he saw when he returned to the charred area, was a necessary agent of renewal, which is how the Aborigines used it in their controlled burnings. Among the cinders Williams found a sudden, almost disrespectfully premature resurgence of greenery, like laughter at a funeral.

Indigenous artists have a stark but resignedly tragic understanding of Australia’s extreme weather. Rover Thomas (also known as Joolama) – who painted some of his most ambitious landscapes not on canvas, unavailable in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia, but on dismantled tea chests – imagined how the

N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY O F AUS T R A L I A , CA N B ER R A . P U R CH AS ED 1991/© T H E A R T IS T ’ S ES TAT E CO U R T ESY WA R M U N A R T CEN T R E

‘Indigenous artists have a stark but resignedly tragic understanding of Australia’s extreme weather’

Eugene von Guérard, who arrived in Australia in 1852, was relieved to find mountains as impressive as Kosciusko, and in North-East View from the Northern Top of Mount Kosciusko (1863) even set a windblown Caspar David Friedrich wanderer in the foreground with outstretched arm to orchestrate the viewer’s excitement. Meanwhile, a geographer crouches behind a boulder to the side, making barometric readings. Rapture is irrelevant to the serious business of topography, just as art in Australia was for Guérard a second best, a compensation for the failure of another dream: he had travelled from Germany during the Gold Rush, and it was only after failing to strike it lucky at the diggings that he resumed his career as a painter.

Guérard’s customers were pastoralists, and from their verandas they wanted to see nature pacified, smoothed into pasture. His Bush Fire Between Mt Elephant and Timboon, 1857 (page 53), painted in 1859, therefore keeps terror at

N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY O F AUS T R A L I A , CA N B ER R A /GI F T O F A M ER I CA N F R I EN DS O F T H E N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY O F AUS T R A L I A I N C . N E W YO R K , N Y, US A , M A D E P OS S I B L E W I T H T H E GEN ER O US S U P P O R T O F M R A N D M RS B EN N O S CH M I DT O F N E W YO R K A N D ES P ER A N CE , W ES T ER N AUS T R A L I A , 1987/ ES TAT E O F RUS S EL L D RYS DA L E

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cyclone that demolished Darwin on Christmas Eve in 1974 might have looked if seen from high above. The black wedge in Cyclone Tracy (1991, opposite) is the river of annihilating wind, fed by speckled tributaries that represent sandstorms, devils of whirling dust. One of Thomas’s relatives was killed by a flood in the cyclone’s aftermath, and his aerial perspective sees the land as a transmigrating spirit might do. It is also the cosmic vantage-point of the meteorological simulations used by weather forecasters on television: mysticism or myth are not, after all, necessarily incompatible with science.

In English paintings of rural estates, the gentry are seen strolling at their ease in fields that are a personal fiefdom. Figures never establish such precedence in the Australian landscape. The dumpy subject in Russell Drysdale’s The Drover’s Wife (1945, right) has separated herself from the brittle, stick-like vegetation and perhaps from the drover, and has her hat on and her bag packed, as if ready to move on. She is a descendant of the battling outback matriarch in Henry Lawson’s story of 1892, also called The Drover’s Wife, who protects her four children in her husband’s absence and, stranded in a hut with ‘bush all around – bush with no horizon, for the country is flat’, kills a poisonous snake that lurks under the floorboards; she rehearses for this feat by fighting a bush fire on her own, wearing her husband’s trousers and thrashing the flames with a green branch.

Drysdale’s woman has no such tasks to perform. In 1971 the novelist Murray Bail wrote a short story – the third great Australian work of art entitled The Drover’s Wife – that speculates about her identity. Bail’s narrator, a timid and narrow-minded dentist, claims to be her real husband, on whom she skittishly walked out.

The painting annoys the dentist, because despite its desolation it can’t convey the horror of the bush, with its scorching heat and maddening swarms of flies. He is also not sure whether he is pleased to have discovered the whereabouts of his errant wife. Bail leaves their little drama unresolved, and admits its insignificance: what the narrator calls ‘the rotten landscape’ dominates everything.

To make the combat with nature more uneven, Sidney Nolan deprived a bushranger of his cover in the bush. In his painting Ned Kelly (1946, see cover of this issue) Nolan moved the outlaw away from Glenrowan in rural Victoria, where he and his gang went to ground, and placed him on the edge of a desert whose surface is filled in with the harsh, blistery enamel used by house painters – a medium that is another indication that the artist in Australia is an artisan, not an aesthete. Nolan’s Kelly is a tersely symbolic demonstration of what it takes to survive in Australia. The outlaw has metallized himself, disappearing into his home-made iron armour; there’s an aperture for his eyes, but no head is visible. When the impervious skin of metal runs out just below the waist, no legs are visible either. At that point he merges with his horse, like a centaur whose upper half is mechanized not human, so it remains unclear whether the tail belongs to his mount or is a tassel added to the armour. Like a down-under

Cyclone Tracy, 1991, by Rover Thomas (Joolama)

OPPOSITE PAGE

Don Quixote he rides into a distance where he will surely perish, as the explorers of central Australia mostly did, and the rifle he carries at a diagonal angle is aimed at a cloud, not the police – unless, of course, what seems to be a cloud is actually smoke discharged from the rifle, which would turn the painting into Ned’s paranoid dream of Australia, a mental space that exists only inside his spectrally empty helmet.

Elsewhere in the Royal Academy show that helmet, with its rectangular opening, turns into the windscreen of a car, the picture frame with which suburbanized Australians separate themselves from the landscape: hence the nuclear family on an outing in John Brack’s sharply satirical The Car (1955, page 56), or Wesley Stacey’s photographs of long, dusty road trips between the cities (1973-75). Conversely, in Shaun Gladwell’s video Approach to Mundi Mundi (2007, page 57) the motorcyclist appears to embrace the desert before him with outstretched arms.

THIS PAGE , BELOW The Drover’s Wife, c.1945, by Russell Drysdale

The man Max Dupain photographed on the beach in Sunbaker (1937, page 56) has a more relaxed attitude to nature than Ned Kelly, who maintains his guard with his gun. The photograph was taken a year after the Olympic Games in Berlin staged a eugenic festival of physical health and vigour, admiringly recorded

by Hitler’s pet film-maker Leni Riefenstahl.

Dupain was attracted to this cult of the body, but he knew that Australia was no place for heroic posturing. His figure lies face down, disarmed not domineering, asleep on the sand.

The soporific stillness of the image suggests that the man has been there long enough to merge with the ground, and the low, almost subterranean angle chosen by Dupain gives his head and shoulders – if you let your gaze go slightly out of focus – the profile of Uluru dozing in the desert. He buries his head in an act of prostrate homage to the earth, just as the head of Nolan’s Ned is invaded by the sky. It’s significant AUTUMN 2013 | RA MAGAZINE 55

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by Max Dupain

The Car, 1955,

by John Brack

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A R T G A L L ERY O F N E W S O U T H WA L ES - J O H N K A L D O R FA M I LY CO L L ECT I O N / P H OTO J OS H R AY M O N D CI N EM ATO GR A P H ER: GOTA R O U EM ATS U/© S H AU N GL A DW EL L

N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY O F AUS T R A L I A , CA N B ER R A . P U R CH AS ED 1976 . N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY O F V I C TO R I A , M EL B O U R N E

ABOVE Sunbaker, 1937,

Still from Approach to Mundi Mundi, 2007,

by Shaun Gladwell

A R T G A L L ERY O F N E W S O U T H WA L ES - J O H N K A L D O R FA M I LY CO L L ECT I O N / P H OTO J OS H R AY M O N D CI N EM ATO GR A P H ER: GOTA R O U EM ATS U/© S H AU N GL A DW EL L

N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY O F AUS T R A L I A , CA N B ER R A . P U R CH AS ED 1976 . N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY O F V I C TO R I A , M EL B O U R N E

BELOW

Scan the image below to see a clip from Shaun Gladwell’s Approach to Mundi Mundi. See page 22 for instructions

that Dupain’s title specifies that the figure is baking, not bathing, in the sun: his flesh will soon enough be terracotta.

The source of the light and heat that he basks in will also be on view on a ceiling at the Royal Academy, in John Olsen’s painting Sydney Sun (1965, pages 50-51) – a vast panorama of a molten sky that would be dangerous to look at directly, with the sun as a bubbling orange octopus that sends out rays like writhing tentacles. Here, in this explosion of radiance, is another of Australia’s myths of origin, which at the same time celebrates the origins of painting, the heliocentric art practised by those who worship light.

‘Nature creates culture: geography rules,’ Daniel Thomas bluntly declares in the catalogue for the RA exhibition. Is Australia, even with what Thomas calls ‘the world’s poorest soils and most erratic climate’, merely the helpless subject or slave of geography?

History has surely altered the terrain and made it habitable, in different ways for the oldest inhabitants and the newer arrivals.

The Aboriginal people follow their songlines, tracks that trace dreams and lead backwards to the moment of creation; the white usurpers travel straight ahead on highways of Tarmac like that which races across the treeless Nullarbor Plain from Adelaide to Perth. The ancestors have their sacred monolith at Uluru, which at sunset looks like the earth before it was kneaded into shape. The newcomers have constructed a monument on Sydney Harbour that is not quite fit for its purpose as an opera house but serves as a stimulus to flighty poetic metaphors: is it a mound of shells, a flotilla of yachts with billowing sails, an orgiastic scrum of mating turtles, or a stack of white dishes drying on a kitchen sink? Despite their incompatibility, there is room in Australia for both the occult rock and the ceramic ornament.

This oldest, youngest continent is the site for a confrontation and possibly a reconciliation between two opposed world views, systems of belief that carry with them theories of how we should treat nature and why we need art.

Restless Western progress clashes here with a contemplative wisdom that used to be called

Eastern or Oriental but that now, in the age of the Asian tiger economies, should probably be called Antipodean. One culture exploits the land, the other seeks accommodation with it.

One kind of art supersedes reality by making a replica of it; the other grows or dies into that reality, like the images of totemic animals made with earth pigments on eucalyptus bark and on rocks in the Northern Territory, or the hollowed, decorated tree trunks containing powdery ancestral bones that are placed in the bush where, like biodegradable sculptures, they patiently wait to decompose.

During the autumn, this aesthetic, ecological and metaphysical dispute will rage through the RA’s galleries – an argument about how the world began, what rights we have in it, and whether our conduct may be hastening its end.

Australia Main Galleries, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 020 7300 8000, www.royalacademy.org.uk/australia, 21 Sep–8 Dec. Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and the National Gallery of Australia.

Supported by Qantas Airways and The Campaign for Wool. Events and Lectures page 96

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The RA’s ‘Australia’ exhibition is complemented by a series of talks by some of the country’s leading writers. Here, novelist Alex Miller describes how his life was transformed by Australia’s great 20th-century painter Sidney Nolan, whose work is featured in the show

Veranda, 1953, by Sidney Nolan, which was on the cover of Patrick White’s novel The Tree of Man (1956, Penguin)

ABOVE

deserted house, the tragedy and consequence of history and failed ambition. It is a picture of the death of the tree of life.

Perhaps it was this view of Australia that eventually led Nolan to decide to go to live in England’s green and pleasant land. The nationalist poet Henry Lawson, in A Song of the Republic (1887), likened England to the ‘Old Dead Tree’ and Australia to the ‘Young Tree Green’, a theme also celebrated in the title of volume six of Manning Clark’s A History of

Australia: The Old Dead Tree and the Young Tree Green (1987). Nolan’s fiercely honest image reversed Lawson’s and Clark’s nationalistic pretensions and cut through to the bleak truth. Nolan’s vision of Australia was too much for his contemporaries and he paid for it with the enmity of many of his fellow artists. Leaving Australia and going to live in England, where he was to earn a knighthood and membership of the Royal Academy, was perhaps Nolan’s response to this early but stubborn reluctance among his own people to celebrate his work.

Nolan did not abandon Australia, however, when he went to live in England in 1950, but continued to paint his native land for the rest of his life with the same uncompromising honesty and love of country with which he had first depicted it. As a result he has become over the years the most celebrated of Australia’s artists in his own country. His iconic ‘Ned Kelly’ series from 1946-47 in particular – four of which are in the RA show – are easy reading and remain his most popular works, but it is the uncompromising quality of his vision of the landscape that still unsettles many Australian artists and remains his greatest achievement.

Nolan was an intellectual as well as a painter of genius. His originality and fierce independence has made him difficult to place for many people. Nolan’s work is not derivative of the traditions of European or American art, and he is one of the few non-indigenous Australian artists to have established a style uniquely his own. Nolan does not belong to a tradition.

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CO L L ECT I O N: A R T G A L L ERY O F N E W S O U T H WA L ES - P U R CH AS ED 1949/© T H E T RUS T EES O F T H E S I D N E Y N O L A N T RUS T / AGNS W. P H OTO T ER R EN CE S P EN CER / T I M E & L I F E P I CT U R ES/GE T T Y I M AGES

My first encounter with the art of Sidney Nolan was not with a painting but with one of his photographs in a book on the Australian outback. In the photograph several stockmen in silhouette are lounging on a veranda, their attention directed towards a featureless horizon.

The sole incident in the image is a dead tree in the middle distance, its solitary splintered branch gesticulating like a shout into the emptiness and the silence.

The year was 1953. I was 16 at the time and working as a labourer on a farm in Somerset, my mind filled with dreams of adventure in distant lands. The empty horizon of Nolan’s image and the silent cry of his dead tree captivated my imagination and haunted my dreams. With that photograph Nolan had arrested something in the desolate field of his vision that most people would not have seen.

I conceived my own vision out of his photograph and decided to go to Australia and see the outback for myself.

The dead tree was a theme that was to reappear in Nolan’s paintings and drawings later. Veranda (right), his drawing on the cover of the Penguin edition of Patrick White’s 1956 novel, The Tree of Man, replicates the image – the veranda of the abandoned house, the featureless horizon and the dead tree, its single branch gesturing toward the sky like a Giacometti figure. This is not a neutral landscape study, but an image filled with social commentary on Australia. It is the aching absence of the human figure that holds our attention in the drama of the

© T H E S I D N E Y N O L A N T RUS T

Knowing Nolan

CO L L ECT I O N: A R T G A L L ERY O F N E W S O U T H WA L ES - P U R CH AS ED 1949/© T H E T RUS T EES O F T H E S I D N E Y N O L A N T RUS T / AGNS W. P H OTO T ER R EN CE S P EN CER / T I M E & L I F E P I CT U R ES/GE T T Y I M AGES

© T H E S I D N E Y N O L A N T RUS T

Pretty Polly Mine, 1948,

by Sidney Nolan ABOVE Sidney Nolan, photographed in 1967 with a painting from his ‘Ned Kelly’ series, After the Glenrowan Siege (1955) TOP

A year after seeing Nolan’s photograph I arrived alone in Australia, where I found Nolan’s outback and became a stockman. No image has ever spoken to me so vividly and with such consequence. In 1961, Thames & Hudson published the first monograph on the art of Nolan. Although I was a university student by then and short of money, I bought a copy of the expensive book and sent it to my father in England as a Christmas gift. I believed Nolan’s images, informed by myth and history, the anti-establishment iconography of Australian nationalism, and the stray and broken bonds of old Europe, would tell my father more about the strange attraction Australia held for me than my letters ever would.

Kenneth Clark wrote in his introduction to the book, ‘he [Nolan] treats his medium with a certain impatience, and uses any means to secure his meaning’. I hoped my father would respond as I had to this vivid freedom in Nolan’s pictures. But he loathed Nolan’s art.

I was bewildered. Why hadn’t my father, a keen amateur painter himself, been as ravished as I had been by the Australia Nolan invited us to contemplate?

Nolan came back to the forefront of my life in 1989 when the Australian poet and long-time friend of Nolan, Barrett Reid and I became friends. Barrett had inherited the care of the home of John and Sunday Reed at Heide, where Nolan had spent his formative years becoming an artist with the support of the wealthy couple.

Barrett took me to a retrospective of Australian

Modernism at the National Gallery of Victoria, and as we went from painting to painting he described for me the genesis of each picture.

Some years later, after I began my novel The Ancestor Game (1992) with a brief commentary on the 1961 Nolan monograph, Barrett said to me, ‘You’re the one to write a novel about Nolan.’

The result of this suggestion was eventually to become Autumn Laing (2011), a novel in which Nolan and his art are seen through the eyes of his one-time lover Sunday Reed.

Nolan was a working-class boy with ambition.

His early years in this respect paralleled my own, and I felt I understood him and the struggle to achieve in art that he had set himself.

Nolan’s art remains mysterious to me, although that early silver-gelatin photograph of the dead tree is engraved in my memory. It isn’t, after all, what we think we understand of the artist’s work but what eludes us that sustains our belief in the artist’s genius. Sometimes the mystery of what art is and what it does for us can touch the sacred in our lives. Nolan has been one such artist in my life. Despite the many years he lived in the softness of England’s countryside, the truth of his Australian vision remained uncompromised to the end.

Autumn Laing by Alex Miller, £7.99, Allen & Unwin.

To complement the Royal Academy’s ‘Australia’ exhibition, the Events and Lectures programme features talks by Australian writers, including Tim Winton, Courtney Collins and Evie Wyld. For more information, see page 96

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M US EU M FO L K WA N G , ES S EN / P H OTO © M US EU M F O L K WA N G , ES S EN

Ecce Homo, c.1849-52, by Honoré Daumier

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Scan the image opposite to see a video interview with the show’s curator Catherine Lampert. See page 22 for instructions

Honoré Daumier was admired by the artists of his time, as well as those who have followed, from Degas and Delacroix to Francis Bacon. As the Academy presents Daumier’s revolutionary work, painter Timothy Hyman RA assesses the pioneering role the Parisian played in modern art

Radical in the making ‘I am writing to you from a café below the Pont-Marie, where 20 years ago the future was rose-tinted.

But I still believe in the future…’

Daumier (letter to Geoffroy-Dechaume, 1863)

M US EU M FO L K WA N G , ES S EN / P H OTO © M US EU M F O L K WA N G , ES S EN

The painter Honoré Daumier emerged late.

He was already into his forties when his fivefoot Ecce Homo (opposite) – arguably his first fully characteristic oil painting – took shape around 1850. Today this image may seem to relate unproblematically to our experience of art, perhaps as a Rembrandt essentialised and ‘made modern’, while the 20th-century painter who comes to mind is Emil Nolde, with his masked Dionysiac crowd acting out the Passion. All the figures except Jesus appear to be naked, and the heads are visibly improvised, masks hacked Goya-like out of tone rather than line. Although he has made some alterations – for example, the platform has been raised – it is evidently the work of a few intense hours, perhaps no more than two sessions. (In 1852, when Baudelaire and a friend were visiting, Daumier explained, ‘I start everything over again 25 times; in the

end I do the lot in two days’.) As in so many of his later pictures, the figures are shown contrejour, forms emerging out of darkness, silhouetted against the diffuse, yellowed and murky light of the 19th-century metropolis. To Daumier’s contemporaries such a painting must have appeared extraordinarily brutal and ‘primitive’; it probably remained unexhibited until the 1900s.

Daumier’s most fertile years as a painter were the most disastrous of his outward career.

In 1860 he was dismissed from the satirical newspaper Le Charivari after 27 years as its chief caricaturist, and for the first time in his life devoted all his energies to oil painting. A large proportion of Daumier’s surviving pictures are thought to have been started over the next three years – begun, but not ‘finished’, and remaining unsold. When he sat down in 1863 to write to the sculptor Geoffroy-Dechaume, his closest friend, and declared, ‘I still believe in the future’, he was 55 and destitute. Shortly after, heavily in debt, he would be forced to move with his wife from the Ile St Louis to distant Pigalle. The massive silhouette of the washerwoman in The Laundress (1861-63, page 62), climbing up from the Seine, hand in hand with her little child who has been assisting with her paddle, is set against AUTUMN 2013 | RA MAGAZINE 61

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TOP LEFT Gargantua,

1831; Jacques Lefèvre, c.1832; The Laundress, 1861-63 OPPOSITE PAGE , LEFT Man on a Rope, c.1858 OPPOSITE PAGE , RIGHT Man on a Rope, c.1858-60

Louis-Philippe not just as the familiar pear-like figure, but as Gargantua, Rabelais’ giant infant, waiting open-mouthed to be fed, like some great cuckoo in the midst of the city (top). It is an image partly about the separateness of the classes.

To the right, The People, starved and exhausted: a flunkey holds a list, and a pauper lets fall his last sous into the basket, which will join the others up the terrible ramp into the fat Bourbon.

Gargantua’s throne is a lavatory; monarchy is revealed as an obscene mechanism that exists only to supply the ruling class with what they crave most, the honours and ‘decorations’ that flow out of the royal anus. Below Gargantua’s puny legs, courtiers grovel enthusiastically.

It was for this print that Daumier was fined and sentenced to six months in Saint-Pélagie.

Two years later, he turned his guns on the politicians, and made one of the sculptural masterpieces of the 19th century. His series

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M US EU M O F F I N E A R TS , B OS TO N . TO M P K I NS CO L L EC T I O N - A R T H U R GO R D O N TO M P K I NS F U N D. N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY O F CA N A DA , OT TAWA . GI F T O F H . S . S O U T H A M , OT TAWA , 1950/ P H OTO © N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY O F CA N A DA

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P R I VAT E CO L L EC T I O N . S TA AT L I CH E KU NS T H A L L E K A R LS RU H E / P H OTO © S TA AT L I CH E KU NS T H A L L E K A R LS RU H E 2013/A . F IS CH ER / H . KO H L ER . L EN T BY T H E M E T R O P O L I TA N M US EU M O F A R T, B EQ U ES T O F L I L L I E P. B L IS S , 1931 (47.122)/ P H OTO © T H E M E T R O P O L I TA N M US EU M O F A R T/A R T R ES O U R CE /S CA L A , F LO R EN CE

a wonderful fragment of hazy, sunlit cityscape, realised in impasted lead-white, with little figures and carriages on the far bank, locating us close to that ‘Pont-Marie’ which links the Ile to the heart of Paris. Although Le Charivari rehired him and he once again undertook to supply a hundred or more lithographs each year, he was paid only an artisan’s wage, his income far below that of his artist friends; at the end of his life, blind and broken, their help would save him from ruin.

That ‘rose-tinted future’ which Daumier and his friends had dreamed of in the early 1840s and in which he ‘still believed’ was the hope for a reordering of society. Daumier was a lifelong Republican. He experienced three great disappointments. First, the 1830 revolution, when he was 22, which morphed into the repressively conservative regime of Louis-Philippe. Daumier had been apprenticed to a lithographer and now (partly inspired by the great, compassionate 1821 sequence by Géricault, Various Subjects Drawn from Life and on Stone), he emerged in the new medium as a prodigy of crayon-on-stone. In December 1831, he drew

M US EU M O F F I N E A R TS , B OS TO N . TO M P K I NS CO L L EC T I O N - A R T H U R GO R D O N TO M P K I NS F U N D. N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY O F CA N A DA , OT TAWA . GI F T O F H . S . S O U T H A M , OT TAWA , 1950/ P H OTO © N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY O F CA N A DA

P R I VAT E CO L L EC T I O N . S TA AT L I CH E KU NS T H A L L E K A R LS RU H E / P H OTO © S TA AT L I CH E KU NS T H A L L E K A R LS RU H E 2013/A . F IS CH ER / H . KO H L ER . L EN T BY T H E M E T R O P O L I TA N M US EU M O F A R T, B EQ U ES T O F L I L L I E P. B L IS S , 1931 (47.122)/ P H OTO © T H E M E T R O P O L I TA N M US EU M O F A R T/A R T R ES O U R CE /S CA L A , F LO R EN CE

of wonderful little subversions of Neoclassical busts ‘The Celebrities of the Juste Milieu’ (including Jacques Lefèvre, opposite) is a rogues’ gallery of self-important creeps modelled in unfired clay and vigorously polychromed; the effect resembles Plasticine, and there is a gleeful infantile zest in these abusive characterisations.

In one view of Daumier, he was really a thwarted sculptor. His relief The Fugitives (made about the same time as Ecce Homo, when many Republicans were being forced into exile) has a tragic grandeur. We witness this army of the defeated passing before us; their motion of turning away recalls the Captives winding around Trajan’s Column, of which Daumier is said to have possessed some fragmentary casts. The figures of his greatest paintings would re-echo that Michelangesque nobility and power of sculptural contour, yet rendered – as in The Laundress – proletarian, déclassé.

The second disappointment came at the end of the 1840s. Daumier had published his greatest political image in 1834, after the massacre of innocent civilians in the Rue Transnonain –

a sober, almost realist portrayal, admired by Courbet. But the following year, much harsher laws suppressed all press opposition; it became an offence even to declare oneself a Republican.

Daumier was forced to turn from political imagery to the much more trivial comedy of contemporary manners, and this coincided with a shift of style: his lithographs became more summary, the figures more blatantly ‘comic’. It must have become clear to him that he would no longer be fulfilled in this medium.

In 1848, when another street uprising deposed Louis-Philippe, a new Republican era seemed to be dawning. Daumier’s paintings began to accumulate, first as neo-baroque Rubeniste, then in more sombre mode. But around the time he depicts the Ecce Homo crowd that has chosen Barabbas instead of Jesus, Republican Paris chose Louis Bonaparte, soon to have himself crowned Napoleon III. One project set in motion by the Emperor was the destruction of Old Paris, its warren of barricadable lanes, in favour of Haussmann’s artillery-friendly new boulevards. ‘Le vieux Paris

n’est plus’: when Daumier’s admirer Baudelaire wrote The Swan (dedicated to the exiled Victor Hugo), in 1857, the whole city appeared an alien building site in which the poet is displaced, ridiculous as a swan stranded in the street.

To me the greatest of all Daumier’s emblematic images is Man on a Rope. In the first version (c.1858, below left), it seems like the fulfilment of the fluidly brushed drawing-painting – sinopia – that underlies Italian frescoes. We hear of Daumier at this time still having ‘problems of finish’ in his oil paintings – though he could certainly complete his watercolours to whatever level contemporary taste demanded. That struggle, which was in essence a profound inner resistance to descriptive detail, is nowhere more poignant than in the second Man on a Rope (c.1858-60, below right), where the picture’s surface – wounded, almost destroyed – is crucial to the creation of the image. The human figure is cut to skin and bone, suspended in a white void upon which the pigment lies like dried blood.

Both versions may have come out of a modest

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LEFT The Clown, c.1865-66

OPPOSITE PAGE Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, c.1870

‘To me art’s subject is the human clay / And landscape but a background to a torso. / All Cézanne’s apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier’

silhouette-drawing (discovered by the RA exhibition’s curator Catherine Lampert at the Musée Rodin) of a whitewasher seen above the street, now taking on, through the power of the medium, a new significance and depth. This is painting returning to its origins, to that primary delineation across the uneven roof of the cave at Lascaux. It is one of several Daumiers that could be described as – in Merlin James’s phrase – ‘definitively unfinished.’ Incompleteness becomes allegory for the instability and transience of existence, or here, James suggests, even for ‘the artist’s grim determination to hold on to a thread of narrative.’ However we may interpret it, the effect is visceral and liberating, the most radically expressive painting of its time.

‘Absolute poverty, misery decked out, to complete the horror, in comic rags…’

Baudelaire (Le Vieux Saltimbanque, 1861) The figure of the ageing itinerant street entertainer becomes a constant in Daumier’s work after 1860. These saltimbanques were by now outlaws. The commedia dell’arte tradition had always been marginal and anti-official, often persecuted by the authorities. Domenico Tiepolo had drawn his Punchinellos in the 1800s, pitting

Auden was writing in 1936, just before the Spanish Civil War divided Europe. In that brief moment of the Popular Front, when the their freedom of fantasy against the moralising Left tried to unite against Fascism, Daumier’s of Enlightenment Neoclassicism. But under human-centred art became emblematic of hope, Napoleon III, the saltimbanques were to be finally of liberty. Most of his paintings date from the cleared out as potential subversives. Baudelaire’s same years when Realism was turning towards prose-poem explicitly identifies the old defeated Impressionism, but Daumier ‘never drew from clown as a self, and so surely does Daumier, in nature’ and landscape and still-life are alien to a wonderful tragic-comic sequence of drawings his vision. It will be fascinating to see Daumier (see The Clown, above) and watercolours; he still at the RA so soon after Manet; 1863 was the beats his drum, still carries his chair on which year of Olympia and both were finding their to stand at the corner and belt out his song. subject-matter in contemporary Parisian life.

Long before he got underway as a painter, As it happens, we know a little of Daumier’s Daumier had achieved recognition with his views, recorded by the young Cézanne, who thousands of comic images; in 1845, Delacroix probably visited the ageing artist around 1870. wrote to him, ‘There isn’t a man I value and ‘I absolutely do not like Manet’s way of painting, admire more than you.’ But in the 1860s, the but I find in it this enormous quality: it takes us old entertainer’s greatest songs went unheard. back to the figures on playing-cards’. That hope, Walking through the huge Daumier to recover some primitive or primal human retrospective that filled the Grand Palais in 1999, image, would be fundamental in the reform you came to a long hemispherical wall, on which we now call Modernism. Manet in 1863 is often some 20 images made evident his identification seen as the pioneer, but I find my response to with the old, mad knight-errant Don Quixote.

Man on a Rope more visceral than to any Manet, Daumier’s mother was illiterate, but his father, and I have written partly to understand why a glazier and frame-maker by trade, believed I am so moved – and why Daumier may offer himself a great dramatic poet, leaving his more to ‘the future’ of 21st-century painting. family in Marseilles, eventually dying insane in Charenton. Daumier’s late pursuit of painting Daumier (1808-1879): Visions of Paris Sackler Wing, was also ‘Quixotic’. He discovers a tremulous, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 020 7300 8000, ever-in-motion line that embodies his absurd www.royalacademy.org.uk, 26 Oct–26 Jan, 2014. and restless quest. In Don Quixote and The Dead 2009–2013 Season supported by JTI. See Events Mule (c.1866), we are made to feel the solitude and Lectures page 96

M US EU M B O I J M A NS VA N B EU N I N GEN , [F I I 174 (P K)] . KO EN I GS CO L L ECT I O N / P H OTO S T U D I O T R O M P, R OT T ER DA M

W.H. Auden (‘Letter to Lord Byron’, 1937)

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T H E S A M U EL CO U R TAU L D T RUS T, T H E CO U R TAU L D G A L L ERY, LO N D O N / P H OTO T H E S A M U EL CO U R TAU L D T RUS T, T H E CO U R TAU L D G A L L ERY, LO N D O N

and silence of the distant riders; painted on wood (and Daumier is known to have framed his work before completion) the composition has a superb finality, the dark form of the mule placed so close to us, the tragic endpoint of their journey, their lost cause. Don Quixote Reading (c.1865-67, page 12) – the version once owned

by Degas – has an extraordinary breadth of handling in the rhythms of torso and chair; Daumier may already have been losing his sight.

Most poignant of all is the large, very late Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (c.1870, opposite) from the Courtauld. Daumier had perhaps already witnessed his third, most terrible failed revolution, the Paris Commune. Exhausted but still upright, carrying his shield-cum-palette, the old fool endures, riding on and on.

This was the work Francis Bacon declared ‘amongst the greatest paintings in the world’ and its possibilities still resonate, drawing and painting becoming inextricable.

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T H E S A M U EL CO U R TAU L D T RUS T, T H E CO U R TAU L D G A L L ERY, LO N D O N / P H OTO T H E S A M U EL CO U R TAU L D T RUS T, T H E CO U R TAU L D G A L L ERY, LO N D O N

M US EU M B O I J M A NS VA N B EU N I N GEN , [F I I 174 (P K)] . KO EN I GS CO L L ECT I O N / P H OTO S T U D I O T R O M P, R OT T ER DA M

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© R OYA L CO L L ECT I O N T RUS T/© H ER M A J ES T Y Q U EEN EL IZ A B E T H I I 2013 . © R OYA L CO L L EC T I O N T RUS T/© H ER M A J ES T Y Q U EEN EL IZ A B E T H I I 2013 . CO U R T ESY T R ACE Y EM I N /© T H E A R T IS T/ P H OTO R OYA L CO L L ECT I O N T RUS T. © DAV I D H O CK N E Y

With kind regards

When the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, George III could afford to offer – besides the prestige of royal support – financial underwriting only for a short period. But he took a keen interest in the Academy’s affairs, and the links between the Crown and the RA have remained strong to this day. The present Queen has received periodic gifts from the Academicians of their works of art – for the coronation in 1953, the Silver Jubilee in 1977 and again in 2012 to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee.

This autumn an exhibition at The Queen’s Gallery displays their latest gift of 105 works on paper in a variety of media, each chosen by the individual artists. Some are newly created pieces, some are representative of older works. All are to be housed in the Print Room at Windsor Castle.

Jane Roberts, former Royal Librarian and Curator of the Print Room, explained how the Royal Collection has never aimed to be a museum collection and has different priorities in developing its holdings. In terms of contemporary works on paper it commissions high quality artistic records, from portraits of members of the Order of Merit to Alexander Creswell’s watercolours of fire damage to Windsor Castle and the subsequent restoration in the 1990s. The Royal Collection also houses numerous gifts made to The Queen by heads of state and other official visitors.

For Martin Clayton, Head of Prints and Drawings at the Royal Collection, ‘Each of the three successive gifts from the Royal Academy to The Queen has been a remarkable snapshot of modern British art, and the Diamond Jubilee

© R OYA L CO L L EC T I O N T RUS T/© H ER M A J ES T Y Q U EEN EL IZ A B E T H I I 2013

Royal Academicians presented The Queen, the Academy’s patron, with a gift of their own works on paper to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee in 2012. Giles Waterfield reports on the RA’s unique links with the Crown, as the works go on display

Revisiting Night Journey, 2012,

by Frank Bowling RA

© R OYA L CO L L ECT I O N T RUS T/© H ER M A J ES T Y Q U EEN EL IZ A B E T H I I 2013 . © R OYA L CO L L EC T I O N T RUS T/© H ER M A J ES T Y Q U EEN EL IZ A B E T H I I 2013 . CO U R T ESY T R ACE Y EM I N /© T H E A R T IS T/ P H OTO R OYA L CO L L ECT I O N T RUS T. © DAV I D H O CK N E Y

© R OYA L CO L L EC T I O N T RUS T/© H ER M A J ES T Y Q U EEN EL IZ A B E T H I I 2013

OPPOSITE PAGE

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From Cleopatra’s Point of View, 2004, by Chris Orr RA; Daylight, 2012, by Leonard Manasseh RA; HM Royal Britannia, 2012, by Tracey Emin RA; 2012 Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee, 2012, by David Hockney RA FROM BELOW LEFT

portfolio has transformed the Royal Collection’s holdings in this area.’ He is impressed by the quality and variety of the latest selection: ‘The range of media, techniques, styles and subject matter is breathtaking – there is no sense that the Academicians were playing safe in their choice of works for the monarch.’

Some of the artists have chosen or created works with a particular royal association.

John Maine RA has given a recent drawing of Westminster Abbey Sacrarium, where

coronations have taken place since the 13th century. Maine was closely involved in the recent conservation of the Cosmati Pavement, which had been hidden from view but which can now be seen in the sacrarium. Fellow sculptor Bryan Kneale RA, a passionate Manxman, has contributed an inkjet print of the symbol of the island, The Legs of Man (2003), to reflect The Queen’s role as Lord of Man. Tracey Emin RA has created a symbolic image of The Queen entitled HM Royal Britannia (2012, bottom right). Always interested in new media, David

Hockney RA has given a print of an iPad drawing (above left), which is his personal celebration of the Diamond Jubilee.

Some Academicians have chosen Britain’s capital as their theme. Chris Orr RA explains how his hand-coloured etching, From Cleopatra’s Point of View (2004, top left), ‘takes an imaginary bird’s-eye point of view of London from above Cleopatra’s Needle, on the Embankment’, in a panorama showing crowds of pedestrians, cricket at The Oval and The Queen waving from the

balcony of Buckingham Palace. Anne Desmet RA has chosen a print from her 2011 ‘Olympic Metamorphoses’ series studying the development of the Olympic site near her home in Hackney. Desmet says the series reflects her interest in ‘transformation linked to architectural evolution, degeneration and regeneration’.

By no means all the subject matter is British.

A characteristically evocative lithograph by Bernard Dunstan RA presents a view of Venice.

And Humphrey Ocean RA’s gouache from 2012, Birds at Ngong, is inspired by visits to his sister,

a nun in Kenya, and includes a red-billed firefinch and a white-browed sparrow weaver.

The RA’s gift reflects the diverse styles and interests of today’s Academicians. Tony Bevan RA has presented a recent self-portrait, Olwyn Bowey RA a charcoal and watercolour drawing of a West Sussex pony, Susie (2007), a work she hoped would appeal to The Queen’s interest in horses. Abstract compositions form an important group, whether geometrical works – as in sculptor John Carter RA’s Stepped Forms (2012) – or painterly – as in Frank Bowling RA’s Revisiting Night Journey (2012, opposite).

Contributions from the architect members are also strong. They include a wide range of media, from photographs (such as Spencer de Grey RA’s The Sage Gateshead, the Tyneside performing arts centre which he designed) to mixed-media works such as Zaha Hadid RA’s representation of her design for the Olympic Aquatics Centre.

Leonard Manasseh RA has created an exuberant ink painting, Daylight (2012, above), and David Chipperfield RA has given a print of a section of his design for the Neues Museum in Berlin.

This is a spirited and highly enjoyable collection, a vivid record of artistic life in Britain in the early 21st century. Martin Clayton is confident that this unique gift in its silk-covered solander boxes ‘will take a worthy place in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle alongside the Leonardos, Michelangelos and Holbeins.’

Gifted: From the Royal Academy to The Queen The Queen’s Gallery, London, 020 7766 7301, www.royalcollection.org.uk, 1 Nov–16 March, 2014

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A cut above

Spin Dryer with Bicycle Frame Including Handlebars, 1981,

by Bill Woodrow RA

BELOW

Bill Woodrow RA belongs to an influential group of British artists, born in the late 1940s and early 1950s, who are celebrated as a dominant force in sculpture internationally – a group that includes fellow Academicians Richard Deacon, Tony Cragg and Antony Gormley. Woodrow has had less exposure in the UK than his contemporaries in recent years, but a survey show of the artist’s work in the Royal Academy’s Burlington Gardens galleries this autumn aims to redress this. The full extent of Woodrow’s output will be examined, from his earliest sculpture Ear-Ring for Ablah (1969) – executed when he was at St Martin’s School of Art – to his most recent work.

Woodrow has been engaged directly with the development of this exhibition. Featuring more than 60 works presented chronologically, the show reveals the many significant stages and concerns through which Woodrow’s work has moved. His transitions from one stage to the next will also be explored, as will the extent to which each new phase is informed by the preceding one.

In his ‘Fossil’ series, from 1979, Woodrow presented consumer items, such as telephones, as fossilised remains, embedding them in plaster to look as if they had been unearthed in an archaeological dig. These works were a comment on the disposal of objects and the waste of materials that this represented, as well as the conflict between the natural and technological worlds,

and the extent to which one exploits the other.

Spin Dryer with Bicycle Frame Including Handlebars (1981; above) is an early example from Woodrow’s celebrated ‘Cut-out’ series and it emerged directly from his work using discarded bicycle frames. In Eight Bicycle Frames (1980) he dismantled these frames and rearranged them in patterns on the wall.

(Woodrow is making a new configuration of them for the Burlington Gardens exhibition.)

In Spin Dryer with Bicycle Frame Including Handlebars, the discarded electrical appliance becomes host to the bicycle. An exciting silhouette emerges from the mundane metal cube of the spin dryer, inviting comparison with a sculpture being carved out of a block of stone.

The skill of the execution gives the work a sense of simplicity, which serves to highlight the more complex and humorous relationship between the host and the emergent form.

Such humour and inventiveness is evident throughout Woodrow’s career. The RA show reveals the great extent to which he has explored a range of themes and working methods, and in doing so has constantly set himself new challenges.

Bill Woodrow RA Burlington Gardens, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 020 7300 8000, www.royalacademy.org.uk, 7 Nov–16 Feb, 2014. Supported by The Henry Moore Foundation. The exhibition coincides with the publication of The Sculpture of Bill Woodrow by Julia Kelly and Jon Wood, £40, Lund Humphries.

CO L L EC T I O N O F T H E A R T IS T/ P H OTO EDWA R D WO O D M A N

Bill Woodrow RA is known for his witty transformations of everyday objects. On the eve of his retrospective at the RA’s Burlington Gardens gallery, Edith Devaney celebrates the artist by exploring a key sculpture in the show

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G O O

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Review & Comment

Self-Portrait with Soft Hat, c.1890-94, by Paul Cézanne

Cézanne’s thoughts writ large

B R I D GES TO N E M US EU M O F A R T, IS H I B AS H I FO U N DAT I O N , TO K YO

The French artist’s letters provide a vital key to understanding 20th-century painting, as a new translation shows, says Edmund Fawcett Paul Cézanne liked to say that it was pointless to talk about painting. Luckily for us, he ignored the warning. In letters to fellow artists and friends, the great French painter poured out thoughts about art throughout his life (18391906). Though many of Cézanne’s letters are lost, the just under 300 extant are a trove of insight into what this sharp-tongued and frequently misunderstood painter was after.

Cézanne set 20th-century painting on its course. The Fauves, Cubists, Mondrian, the German Expressionists, and Russian Suprematists and Constructivists all followed where Cézanne led. Finding his ‘pictorial way’ as he called it, did not come easily. It took years of looking, thinking and trying again. Weeks before his death, when he was still up early each day to paint in the countryside, Cézanne wrote to a fellow artist Emile Bernard, ‘I always study from nature, and it seems to me that I’m making slow progress.’

In the late 1930s, the Cézanne scholar John Rewald published an edition of the letters, which was then translated into English. Now Alex Danchev has brought out a new edition in English, copiously illustrated with Cézanne’s work.

Danchev is a multi-talented professor of international relations and a military biographer who has also written lives of Braque and Cézanne. For this edition, Danchev has added some previously missing letters, corrected transcription errors, put back earthy language that Rewald bowdlerised and, as he tells us, freshened the translation to make it sound less stiff to presentday ears. A manuscript sample shows Cézanne’s vigorous hand.

Its right-sloping letters with high risers and descenders fill the page in an all-over grid not unlike his angled marks on the canvas.

With theatrical vividness, Cézanne’s letters track the dramas of his personal life: conflicts with family and friends, early money troubles and complex attitudes to artistic fame. Candid and thin-skinned, he poured his feelings on to the page in urgent, angry bursts. Yet never lost to view amid the squalls is Cézanne’s clear-blue singleness of artistic purpose.

His parents were the ‘foulest’ people in the world, Cézanne complained to Camille Pissarro in 1866. At 27, Cézanne still counted for money on his banker-father, who did not want him to be a painter. He took his father for a tyrannical hypocrite. Cézanne was five before his parents married. Even so, terrified of being cut off, he tried to hide from his father the existence of his mistress – later wife – Hortense Ficquet, and their son.

The writer Emile Zola dominates Cézanne’s correspondence in the 1870s and early 1880s.

They were boyhood friends from Aix-enProvence. As young men in the big city they stayed close at first. Soon Zola was a celebrated, author. Cézanne remained an obscurity, admired

by Monet, Degas, Renoir and Pissarro, but shunned by the Salon and mocked in the Paris press. Zola, an engaged left-winger, campaigned for radical causes. Cézanne had a conservative indifference to politics. He focused on his painting. Perhaps inevitably they drew apart.

Zola would send Cézanne his latest novel.

Cézanne wrote back in praise, though with ever more inventive excuses as to why he had not

quite read the new one through. An accomplished Latinist and translator of Virgil, Cézanne preferred the classics to modern fiction, though he admired Balzac and Stendhal.

In April 1886 Zola sent The Masterpiece, his melodramatic novel of a misunderstood artist who kills himself in despair over an unfinishable painting. To Cézanne, the gesture was absurd.

‘If you can’t finish a painting, you toss it in the fire and start again,’ he told the dealer who finally brought him commercial success, Ambroise Vollard. Cézanne thanked Zola for The Masterpiece in a brief, impersonal letter.

It was the last letter between them that survives.

Cézanne had a ready wit and quick temper.

He played the bumpkin up from the provinces.

When introduced in 1866 to the suave Manet, Cézanne refused to shake hands, excusing himself, ‘I haven’t washed for a week’. He carped about his artistic supporters, grumbling for example that an early champion, the critic Gustave Geffroy, was ‘an intellectual’ stuffed up with what he remembered from museums.

Institutes, stipends and honours were for careerists and fakers, Cézanne told Bernard.

He could afford to talk that way. After the death of his father in 1886, Cézanne was rich.

With age, Cézanne’s health declined. Doctors diagnosed diabetes in 1890. He suffered small strokes and withdrew more into himself. It was as much a withdrawal into painting. The painter should stay in the shadows and work, Cézanne believed. His last 15 years marked an artistic arrival and summation. The letters from this period, though occasionally harsh and bleak, are more often magisterial, packed with hard-won wisdom and aphoristic thoughts about painting.

Painters, Cézanne insisted, needed ‘personality’, by which he meant clear artistic aims and strength of purpose to carry them through.

They should ‘study nature’, by looking at it long and hard so as to grasp lasting appearances rather than to chase fleeting impressions. ‘I wanted to make of Impressionism,’ Cézanne said, ‘something solid and enduring, like the art in museums.’ In the introduction or in footnotes, Danchev suggests – without laying down the law – how to take Cézanne’s shifting use of innocent looking but loaded terms such as ‘study’, ‘motif’ and ‘nature’.

Cézanne’s letters are as essential to understanding the painting of the past century as were Van Gogh’s and Pissarro’s. Cézanne’s scorn for painting talk was understandable.

The worse sort leads you away from painting’s trials and achievements. Cézanne’s letters are the better sort. They lead you back.

The Letters of Paul Cézanne, edited by Alex Danchev, £29.95, Thames & Hudson

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Review & Comment Books

Where art and self-help meet Should art guide, console and exhort its viewers? Richard Cork welcomes a new book that offers a therapeutic vision of art Impatient with the whole notion of ‘art for art’s sake’, Alain de Botton and John Armstrong have written a wide-ranging rebuttal called Art As Therapy. As their book’s title suggests, they believe ‘art can be a tool’, and we need to focus

Books in brief

Art as Therapy by Alain de Botton and John Armstrong, £24.95, Phaidon

insights made by the artists he has studied.

His appreciation of Cy Twombly Hon RA, for instance, includes perceptive comments by Nigel Hall RA, Allen Jones RA, Ian Walsh, Maggi Hambling and Anthony Eyton RA in order to reveal the profound nature of the American expressionist’s art. The book is a joy to dip into.

Eric Ravilious: Artist and Designer

A is a Critic: Writings from The Spectator

by Andrew Lambirth (£12.99, Unicorn) Formerly RA Magazine’s contributing editor, Andrew Lambirth is now art critic of the Spectator. This compilation of essays from his column for the weekly magazine revels in the

by Alan Powers (£35, Lund Humphries) Eric Ravilious (1903-42) is more popular now than he ever was in his lifetime. His nostalgic views of rural England have lent themselves to the greetings card, his designs visual reminders of a more benign world. But Ravilious, as Alan Powers points out, was a major player during the inter-war years, creating a style of painting that combined the traditional with the modern.

This book is beautifully produced and reveals the full breadth of Ravilious’s work. – NICK TITE

Sharing the adventure In this book extract Ian Ritchie RA reveals the deeper meaning of his life as an architect I recall once being warned that, as an architect, until you are 50 you will not be taken seriously enough to receive a decent commission in England. It is a country that prides itself on its creativity and innovation but rarely takes risks, preferring to insure rather than implement. In France that moment comes when you are qualified.

A career in architecture engages with so many disciplines and aspects of life it is impossible not to enjoy it.

The cyclical phenomena of nature – day following night following day, the life-regenerating cycle of the seasons – provide evidence for the Taoist paradigm. Successes and failures in architecture are part of the duality of being alive – happy and sad, good and

Crystal Palace Concert Platform, 1996,

by Ian Ritchie Architects bad, life and death. I am reminded that no amount of darkness can extinguish a candle’s flame. This is why, for me, optimism always prevails.

And architecture is as much about sharing the social adventure as it is about the end product. Living a life through architecture shows me that in every collaboration there is a chance to grow, and that gives the greatest of pleasures, both personal fulfilment and the satisfaction of watching that growth in others in the studio. Yet I am so aware that the only certainty about certainty is its uncertainty. Nothing is given, nothing sure. It is my philosophy, what underpins the art of living to begin every morning when I wake with a smile, and this is the expression I enjoy every day in the faces of the people I work with.

Being: An Architect by Ian Ritchie RA, £60, RA Publications Scan the image above to see an interview with Ian Ritchie RA on the philosophy behind his work

© R I CH A R D LO N G /CO U R T ESY O F I M P ER I A L CO L L EGE H E A LT H CA R E CH A R I T Y A R T CO L L ECT I O N . © I A N R I TCH I E A R CH I T ECTS

Waterlines, 1989, by Richard Long RA

more clearly on ‘what good it can do for us.’ While recognising that modern civilisation believes increasingly in the importance of art, they emphasise that ‘our encounters with art do not always go as well as they might.’ Despite the record-breaking attendance figures of blockbuster shows, de Botton and Armstrong point out that ‘we are likely to leave highly respected museums and exhibitions feeling underwhelmed, or even bewildered and inadequate.’

The fault lies ‘in the way that art is taught, sold and presented by the art establishment.’ Art in its widest sense should be regarded as ‘a therapeutic medium that can help guide, exhort and console its viewers’, enabling them to become better versions of themselves.

It is a highly optimistic vision and the book discusses how art can help us combat our psychological frailties. The selected artists range from Vermeer and Constable to Johns and Serra, as well as Mies van der Rohe. The book roams widely through subjects as immense as love, nature, money and politics.

Their examination of love is most rewarding, and here the authors are eloquent about Richard Long RA’s lyrical Waterlines (above left), a print which I commissioned in 1989 to be displayed in NHS hospitals. The work focuses on Long’s epic 560-mile walk across Portugal and Spain, pouring water from a bottle along the line he walked each day. The authors ponder Long’s emphasis on ‘the value of patience’ in combating our tendency to ‘lose sight of what we really believe in the tumult of our daily lives’.

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n pa ow pe in r

RA Magazine Autumn 2013

In the Olden Time

Roof Life

Strindberg: A Life

The King’s Pictures

Victorians and the British Past Andrew Sanders

Svetlana Alpers

Sue Prideaux

A celebrated art historian who has spent a lifetime looking at art writes about looking as a way of being in the world.

‘A series of discrete, eloquent meditations on the undervalued act of looking … What connects [Alpers’s] stirring personal narratives is this elastic theme of distance: distance as a state of mind … and distance as a condition of life … resonant, highly original writing.’ – Publishers Weekly

Winner of the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize for 2012

The Formation and Dispersal of the Collections of Charles I and His Courtiers Francis Haskell

This groundbreaking cultural survey of Victorian responses to British history sheds new light on the intersection of architecture, art, literature and religion in Victorian England. Sanders explores the extent to which painters were indebted to written records both fictional and factual.

Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art 80 colour + 20 b/w illus. Hardback £40.00

Hardback £18.99

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‘[A] rich and absorbing biography.’

– John Carey, The Sunday Times ‘Prideaux is a deft guide to the absintheheavy bohemian underworlds of Berlin and Paris which Strindberg inhabited for much of the 1890s.’

– Claudia FitzHerbert, The Daily Telegraph 20 colour + 50 b/w illus.

Paperback £12.99 e book available

With a foreword by Nicholas Penny Edited and introduction by Karen Serres

A great art historian recounts the dramatic events surrounding the acquisition and loss of the incomparable art collections of Charles I and his courtiers.

Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art 80 colour + 40 b/w illus. Hardback £30.00

tel: 020 7079 4900

www.yalebooks.co.uk

02/08/2013 12:25

susan ryder RE F L E C T E D L I GHT

11 th –27 th september 2013 entire exhibition can be viewed at www.panterandhall.com catalogue available on request Terrace Doorway, Le Beduer oil on canvas 28 x 22 ins (71 x 56 cms) £4,800

pa nt e r & h a l l

11–12 PALL MALL • LONDON • SW1Y 5LU + 4 4 ( 0 ) 2 0 73 9 9 9 9 9 9 enquiries@panterandhall.com www.panterandhall.com

“Columbage, Rouen” Watercolour 13.5 x 19.5 ins 343 x 495 mm

“Burlington Gardens” Watercolour 13.5 x 19.5 ins 343 x 495 mm

JOHN YARDLEY RI

New Watercolours and Oils

28 October – 21 November 2013 Open Monday to Saturday 10am to 7.30pm

Illustrated brochure available

LLEWELLYN ALEXANDER 124-126 The Cut, Waterloo, London SE1 8LN (Opposite The Old Vic Theatre) t: 020 7620 1322/1324 Open Monday to Saturday 10am to 7.30pm For more pictures and prices please see

www.LlewellynAlexander.com Llewellyn Alexander_AUT13_2.indd 1

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“Along the Heldenplatz, Vienna” Watercolour 13.5 x 20.75 ins 343 x 530 mm

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London Public Galleries ... London Commercial Galleries ...

Rest of Britain ... Artists’ Websites

Listings

Her People This exhibition explores the

achievements of the Elizabethan period through portraits of the monarch, the nobility and the rising middle classes 10/10–5/1/13; Jacob Epstein: Portrait Sculptor One of the twentieth century’s leading portrait sculptors.

Busts of artists, writers and politicians seen alongside photographs of works in progress in his studio, until 22/11/13 TATE BRITAIN Millbank SW1, 020 7887 8888 www.tate.org.uk

© M A R I A N O P EU RS ER , CO U R T ESY O F G A L ER I E EM M A N U EL P ER R OT I N . © TAT E LO N D O N , 2012, P R ES EN T ED BY T H E A R T F U N D, 19 05, CO U R T ESY D U LW I CH P I C T U R E G A L L ERY © H AT F I EL D H O US E , CO U R T ESY N AT I O N A L P O R T R A I T G A L L ERY. © GU F R A M

Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life A major exhibition of urban landscapes, until 20/10/13; Art Under Attack: Histories of Iconoclasm in Britain The exhibition will examine

London Public

displaying Greco’s Etruscan, Greek and Roman art influences 25/9–22/12/13

BARBICAN ART GALLERY Silk Street EC2, 020 7638 8891 www.barbican.org.uk Ayşe Erkmen: Intervals An ambitious new work for the Curve, highlighting the artistry and craft of scene painting. A series of backdrops move up and down, dividing the gallery 24/9/13–5/1/14; Pop Art Design Bringing together more than 150 works, ‘Pop Art Design’ paints a new picture of Pop Art, exploring its relationship with design 22/10/13–9/2/14

GEFFRYE MUSEUM 136 Kingsland Road E2, 020 7739 9893 www.geffrye-museum.org.uk

CITY & GUILDS OF LONDON ART SCHOOL 124 Kennington Park Rd SE11, 020 7735 2306 www.cityandguildsartschool.ac.uk MA Show: Fine Art 11–15/9/13 COURTAULD GALLERY Somerset House, Strand WC2, 020 7848 2526 www.courtauld.ac.uk/gallery The Young Dürer: Drawing the Figure

This exhibition will examine the figure drawings of the young Albrecht Dürer and in particular, those of his ‘Wanderjahre’ or journeyman years 17/10/13–12/1/14 DULWICH PICTURE GALLERY Gallery Road SE21, 020 8693 5254 www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk Nash, Nevinson, Spencer, Gertler, Carrington, Bomberg: A Crisis of Brilliance 1908–1920 This exhibition

showcases 6 Slade artists, until 22/9/13; An American in London: Whistler and the Thames Paintings, prints, rarely-

seen drawings, watercolours and pastels 16/10/13–12/1/14 THE ESTORICK COLLECTION OF MODERN ITALIAN ART Canonbury Square N1, 020 7704 9522 www.estorickcollection.com Emilio Greco: Sacred and Profane

Sculptures, drawings and etchings,

Ceramics in the City Selling Fair

An annual celebration of ceramics, showcasing the work of around 50 artists – a mix of both leading names and rising talents. Classic tableware, lighting and other domestic objects will be on show, alongside purely decorative and one-off pieces 19–22/9/13 LONDON TRANSPORT MUSEUM Covent Garden Piazza WC2, 020 7379 6344 www.ltmuseum.co.uk Poster Art 150: London Underground’s Greatest Designs Since its first

graphic commission in 1908, London Underground has been a pioneering patron of poster art. Coinciding with the 150th anniversary of the London Underground, this exhibition showcases 150 of the best designs, until 27/10/13 NATIONAL GALLERY Trafalgar Square WC2, 020 7747 2885 www.nationalgallery.org.uk Michael Landy: Saints Alive A series of large-scale kinetic sculptures accompany collage inspired by images of saints in the National Gallery, until 24/11/13; Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900 Exploring the central role played by

portraiture in Viennese painting during the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This show includes works by Gustav Klimt & Egon Schiele 9/10/13–12/1/14 NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY St. Martin’s Place WC2, 020 7306 0055 www.npg.org.uk Laura Knight: Portraits 30 portraits showcase Knight’s diverse artistic career. In 1936 she became the first full female member of the Royal Academy of Arts 11/7–13/10/13; Elizabeth I and

Rosa, 2006, by Elmgreen & Dragset at the V&A

the movements and causes which have led to assaults on art through objects, paintings, sculpture and archival material from the 16th century to the present day 2/10/13–5/1/14; Painting Now: Five Contemporary Artists This exhibition will focus on artists including Tomma Abts and Gillian Carnegie, who are concerned with the act of painting and the physicality of paint itself 12/11/13–9/2/14 TATE MODERN Bankside SE1, 020 7887 8888 www.tate.org.uk Mira Schendel The first international, full-scale survey of Schendel’s work.

Alongside her contemporaries Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica, she reinvented the language of European Modernism in Brazil 2/9/13–19/1/14; Paul Klee: Making Visible Challenging Klee’s reputation as a solitary dreamer, this exhibition will reveal the innovation and rigour with which he created his work and presented it to the public 16/10/13–9/3/14

Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge, c.1872–75, by James Abbott McNeill Whistler at Dulwich Picture Gallery

V&A Cromwell Road SW7, 020 7942 2000 www.vam.ac.uk Sky Arts Ignition: Memory Palace

The narrative world of the author Hari Kunzru is visualised through a series of commissions by 20 internationally acclaimed illustrators, graphic designers and typographers, until 20/10/13;

Queen Elizabeth I, ‘The Ermine Portrait’, 1585, by Nicholas Hilliard at the National Portrait Gallery

Club to Catwalk: London Fashion in the 1980s The exhibition explores the

capital’s vibrant club scene’s influence on a new generation of designers, including Katharine Hamnett, Wendy Dagworthy & John Galliano, until 16/2/14; Pearls The history of pearls from the early Roman Empire through to the present day 21/9/13–19/1/14; Tomorrow – Elmgreen & Dragset A site-specific installation, creating a stage set for an unrealised drama which explores the relationship between sculpture, architecture and design 1/10/13–2/1/14;

‘Drocco & Mello’ Cactus, 1972, by Gufram at Barbican Art Gallery

Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700–1900 Over 70 of the finest

examples of Chinese painting, from

HOW TO BOOK For inclusion in RA Magazine’s paid Listings section for public and commercial galleries in the UK call 020 7300 5657 or email sarah.bolwell@royalacademy.org.uk. Readers should contact galleries directly for opening times and ticketing queries

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Listings London Commercial

Spherical Pot with Disc Top, 1965,

by Hans Coper at Erskine, Hall & Coe

Paris, 1991, by Alain Senez at Francis Kyle Gallery

11 SPITALFIELDS 11 Princelet Street E1, 020 7247 1816 www.elevenspitalfields.com Ian Harper Paintings of Venice 6/9– 25/10/13; Victoria Kiff 8/11–20/12/13 ALAN CRISTEA 31 & 34 Cork Street W1S, 020 7439 1866 www.alancristea.com Abstract Prints Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Josef & Anni Albers, Eduardo Chillida, Bridget Riley (at 31 Cork Street) 11/9–5/10/13; Richard Serra Etchings from 2004–12 (at 34 Cork Street) 11/9–5/10/13; Thirteen New work by 13 Gallery artists (at 31 & 34 Cork Street) 10/10–9/11/13 ANISE GALLERY 13a Shad Thames SE1, 020 7403 9938 www.anisegallery.co.uk Façade Artists Nina Fowler & Rosie Emerson explore themes of façade and illusion in expressive drawings and constructed photographs respectively, until 28/9/13; The Last Stand Marc Wilson’s photographs document the physical remnants of the Second World War on British and northern European coastlines 4/10–2/11/13 ART SPACE GALLERY MICHAEL RICHARDSON CONTEMPORARY ART 84 St. Peter’s Street N1, 020 7359 7002 www.artspacegallery.co.uk Yves Berger: Mountain Grass

Paintings and drawings from an artist based in the Haute-Savoie region of France 13/9–11/10/13; George Rowlett: New Paintings Paintings of the river Thames and the landscape of East Kent 18/10–22/11/13 Pelorus, 2010, by Susan Wilson at Coll & Cortes Fine Arts

BANKSIDE GALLERY 48 Hopton Street SE1, 020 7928 7521 www.banksidegallery.com Off The Wall: RWS & RE Summer Exhibition Contemporary watercolours

and original prints by artists from the Royal Watercolour Society and Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, until 8/9/13; John Robertson Architects: Retrospective Exhibition 1993–2013

4th Bus Slow Red and Green, 1962, by Allen Jones RA at Christie’s Mayfair

This exhibition explores the relationship between the firm’s design process and buildings and their surroundings 18–29/9/13; Watercolour Now New work by artists from the Royal Watercolour Society 4/10–2/11/13 BEAUX ARTS LONDON 22 Cork Street W1, 020 7437 5799 www.beauxartslondon.co.uk TREE Stephanie Carlton Smith, Anna

Gillespie, Sarah Gillespie, Marilene Oliver. A diverse appreciation of the tree 4/9–5/10/13 A Celebration Celebrating 2 decades in Cork Street 9/10–17/11/13 BROWSE & DARBY 19 Cork St W1, 020 7734 7984 www.browseanddarby.co.uk Julian Bailey Dorset landscape and seascape paintings and works on paper 18/9–11/10/13; Dandans Japanese emerging artists 17/10–7/11/13; Duncan Wood Still life and landscape paintings & Endellion Lycett Green Intensely detailed nature paintings 13/11–5/12/13 CHRISTIE’S MAYFAIR 103 New Bond St W1, 020 7408 0362 www.christies.com When Britain Went Pop! British Pop Art: The Early Years

Launching a new gallery space in Mayfair, this exhibition will explore the early revolutionary years of the British Pop Art movement 9/10–24/11/13 COLL & CORTES FINE ARTS 27 Albemarle Street W1, 020 7495 2738 www.susanwilsonartist.com Susan Wilson 17–27/9/13

Multiplied At Christie’s South Kensington 16–20/10/13; Art Toronto 23–27/10/13

EAGLE GALLERY 159 Farringdon Rd EC1R, 020 7833 2674 www.emmahilleagle.com Jane Joseph: Common Grounds

12/9–11/10/13 ERSKINE HALL & COE 15 Royal Arcade, 28 Old Bond Street W1S, 020 7491 1706 www.erskinehallcoe.com Hans Coper, Ruth Duckworth & Lucie Rie 11/9–3/10/13; Jennifer Lee 9/10– 1/11/13; Shozo Michikawa 6–28/11/13

FEDERATION OF BRITISH ARTISTS At Mall Galleries, The Mall SW1, www.mallgalleries.org.uk Royal Society of Marine Artists 16–27/10/13; Royal Miniature Society

15–27/10/13 FRANCIS KYLE GALLERY 9 Maddox Street W1, 020 7499 6870 www.franciskylegallery.com Jumping for Joyce: Contemporary Painters Revel in the World of James Joyce Works by 25 contemporary

CONNAUGHT BROWN 2 Albemarle Street W1, 020 7408 0362 www.connaughtbrown.co.uk

artists in a variety of media, inspired by Joyce’s life and writings, until 25/9/13;

Miró: His Friends and Influences

Ramsay Gibb: The Pilgrim Coast

25/9–31/10/13

Landscape paintings associated with St. Cuthbert’s journeys, marking the return of the Lindisfarne Gospels to Durham 2–31/10/13; H. R. Bell: Looking For China Bell’s focus is on the daily lives of the people of China, encountered on her travels 6/11–5/12/13

CONTEMPORARY MODERN AUSTRALIAN ART (COMODAA) Gallery 8, 8 Duke Street SW1Y, 020 7930 0375 www.comodaa.com Pursuits: The MacNab New work by the Sydney-based artist Linton Meagher exploring the ‘MacNab Challenge’ - to stalk a red deer stag, catch a salmon and shoot a brace of grouse within the space of 24 hours 21–27/10/13 CURWEN AND NEW ACADEMY 34 Windmill Street W1, 020 7323 4700 www.curwengallery.co.uk Albany Wiseman: Garden Squares of London Watercolours and lithographs & London…continued A group exhibition

of London-themed works (upper galleries) 5–28/9/13; Brenda Hartill New work & Rachel Clark Etchings and paintings (upper galleries) 3–26/10/13 Landscapes and Seascapes: Jane Corsellis, Richard Pikesley and David Poole Figurative paintings & Sinéid Codd New work

(upper galleries) 31/10–27/11/13 THE CYNTHIA CORBETT GALLERY 15 Claremont Lodge, 15 The Downs, Wimbledon SW20, 020 8947 6782 www.thecynthiacorbettgallery.com Collective View: Tom Leighton

New photographic work by the RCA graduate; Young Masters At Sphinx, Kensington Church Street 8–23/10/13; E-merge At Rubell’s Skyline Hotel in Washington D. C. 3–6/10/13;

THE GALLERY IN CORK STREET 28 Cork Street W1, 020 7287 8408 www.tribalgatheringlondon.com Tribal Perspectives The only annual London exhibition for collectors and enthusiasts of quality tribal art. A selected group of specialist dealers exhibit rare works of art 1–5/10/13 GREENWICH PRINTMAKERS GALLERY 1a The Market, Greenwich SE10, 020 8858 1569 www.greenwich-printmakers.co.uk Olivia Krimpas Until 8/9/13; Peter Luty 10–22/9/13; Elaine Marshall 24/9– 6/10/13; Sandra Millar 8–20/10/13; Michael Reid 22/10–3/11/13; Stephen Robson 5–17/11/13 GUILDHALL ART GALLERY Guildhall Yard, London EC2V, 020 7332 3700 www.guildhallartgallery.cityoflondon.gov.uk Victoriana: The Art of Revival Graphic design, film, ceramics, taxidermy, furniture, textiles and fine art by artists inspired by the nineteenth century 7/9–8/12/13; Painted Faces Familiar and unfamiliar faces from the Gallery’s permanent collection, until 9/12/13

© HANS COPER, COURTESY ERSKINE, HALL & COE. COURTESY FRANCIS KYLE GALLERY. © SUSAN WILSON. © ALLEN JONES/CHRISITE’S IMAGES

small-scale intimate works by monks and literati through to a 14 metre-long scroll painting 26/10/13–19/1/14

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DEBORAH STERN SCULPTOR

MPMG015098 Landscape Advert - RA Magazine.indd 1

ARBS

01/07/2013 16:56

The Tree 1986. Bronze.

9.5” x 12” x 5” (24cm x 30cm x 13cm) Ed.of 9.

To view this and other sculptures telephone for appointment in central London Telephone: 020 7262 7104 Email: info@deborah-stern.com Website: www.deborah-stern.com

Deborah Stern_Autumn13_v3.indd 1

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02/08/2013 11:51

02/08/2013 11:52

Listings Angela A’Court PS and Teresa Lawton

A’Court’s soft pastels of interiors alongside Lawton’s abstract Dorset coastline. Both artists concentrate on integrating and simplifying shape, tone and colour 11/9–6/10/13; Brian Rice, Ursula Leach RE and Tony Martin

These three accomplished printmakers present different approaches to colour and form. Brian Rice’s Catalogue Raisonné will be launched at the gallery on 9th October 9/10–3/11/13; Tim Benson ROI New landscapes and figurative work 6/11–1/12/13 Two Boats, 2011, by Robert Innes at 54 Gallery

JENNINGS FINE ART The Art Workers Guild, 6 Queen Square WC1N, 07812 994558 www.jenningsfineart.co.uk Edward Bawden Work from the 1920s to the 1980s 4–8/11/13 KINGS PLACE GALLERY 90 York Way N1, 020 7520 1490 www.kingsplace.co.uk Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Competition Thomas Newbolt’s prize-

Lion and Zebras, 1989, by Edward Bawden at Jennings Fine Art

winning entry and 120 works, until 22/9/13; Sandra Blow RA: Paintings and Prints A pioneer of post-war abstraction in Britain, Blow’s work started in the 1950s in the radical atmosphere of European Art Informel under the influence of Alberto Burri 4/10–9/11/13 LANDMARK ARTS CENTRE Ferry Road, Teddington TW11, 020 8977 7558 www.landmarkartscentre.org Sparkle: Contemporary Craft & Gourmet Food Fair Ceramics, glass,

textiles, jewellery and gourmet food, in a Grade II* listed gothic church 22–24/11/13 Interior Flower Piece, 1975, by Alan Lowndes at Manya Igel Fine Arts

LLEWELLYN ALEXANDER 124-126 The Cut SE1, 020 7620 1322/1324 www.llewellynalexander.com Society of Feline Artists: Annual Summer Show Until 20/9/13 FourMan Show Two watercolour painters

and two oil painters 30/9–22/10/13; John Yardley New watercolours and oils 28/10–21/11/13

Man, 1954,

by Geoffrey Clarke RA at Pangolin London

LONG & RYLE GALLERY 4 John Islip Street SW1, 020 7834 1434 www.longandryle.com 20/21 British Art Fair 11–15/9/13; Brian Sayers: New Works Sayers explores the still life tradition 19/9–11/10/13; Derrick Guild: After A.D. This exhibition highlights the influence of the Ascension Islands on Guild’s oeuvre & Colonialism’s impact on nature 16/10–15/11/13 MANYA IGEL FINE ARTS 21-22 Peters Court, Porchester Road W2, 020 7229 1669 www.manyaigelfinearts.com 20/21 British Art Fair 11–15/9/13

MARLBOROUGH FINE ART 6 Albemarle Street W1, 020 7629 5161 www.marlboroughfineart.com Matthew La Croix New work 3–7/9/13; David Dawson New work 11/9–5/10/13; Avigdor Arikha 9–26/10/13; Sarah Raphael 30/10–22/11/13 MEDICI GALLERY 5 Cork Street W1, 020 7495 2565 www.medicigallery.co.uk The Nude Bill Bate, Judith Green, Oisin Roche, Steven Lindsay & Michael Alford, until 27/9/13; Cityscapes Barry Wilson, Louise Diggle, Michael Kidd & Fabio Coruzzi, 3–31/10/13; Michael Bennallack Hart & Graeme Wilcox 5/11–5/12/13 THE MILLINERY WORKS GALLERY 87 Southgate Road N1, 020 7359 2019 www.millineryworks.co.uk Sarah Cawkwell Drawings and sculpture 17/9–13/10/13; Susan Rosenberg Paintings 20/10–10/11/13 OSBORNE SAMUEL 23a Bruton St W1, 020 7493 7939 www.osbornesamuel.com John Blackburn New paintings 5–28/9/13; John Olsen New paintings 5–22/10/13; Modern British Art 24/10–16/11/13 PANGOLIN LONDON 90 York Way N1, 020 7520 1480 www.pangolinlondon.com Geoffrey Clarke RA: A Decade of Change 13/9–26/10/13; Ann Christopher RA: To Know Without Remembering

6/11–7/12/13 PIERS FEETHAM GALLERY 475 Fulham Road SW6, 020 7381 3031 www.piersfeethamgallery.com Nick Pratt: Sculpture and Drawings

3–26/10/13 REDFERN GALLERY 20 Cork Street W1, 020 7734 1732 www.redfern-gallery.com The Radev Collection Until 5/9/13;

open exhibition featuring both contemporary and traditional equestrian-inspired paintings, drawings, original prints and sculpture. This year includes category winners from the Injured Jockeys Fund 2014 Calendar competition 9–14/9/13 THACKERAY GALLERY 18 Thackeray Street W8, 020 7937 5883 www.thackeraygallery.com Celebrating 45 Years An exhibition of new work by all the Gallery artists 10– 27/9/13; Gareth Parry RCA Colourful, impasto paintings of the sea, mountains and rivers 8–25/10/13; Ethel Walker New work bringing Scottish sea and sky scapes to central London 5–22/11/13 THOMAS AND PAUL CONTEMPORARY ART 20 Bristol Gardens W9, 020 7289 6200 www.thomasandpaul.com Late night opening gallery launch 12/9/13; Prelude Highlights some of the top artists that will feature at the gallery in the next 12 months. Helen Booth, Tim Patrick, David Storey, Andrew Crane, Maria Kuipers and Susie David, September 2013; An Abstracted View October 2013; Works on Paper November 2013 UNITED SOCIETY OF ARTISTS At Bankside Gallery, 48 Hopton Street SE1 www.unitedsocietyofartists.com INSIGHT Showcasing a diverse range of artwork from a long standing and respected Society 12–17/11/13 WADDINGTON CUSTOT GALLERIES 11 Cork Street W1, 020 7851 2200 www.waddingtoncustot.com Group Exhibition Painting, sculpture and work on paper by Gallery artists, until 28/9/13; Pop Imagery A group show of international artists associated with the Pop Art movement. Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, Robert Rauschenberg, Joe Tilson RA and H. C. Westermann 2/10–2/11/13

John Carter: Surface and Structure

Recent works 8/10–15/11/13 RICHMOND HILL GALLERY 26 Richmond Hill TW10, 020 8940 5152 www.therichmondhillgallery.com Philip Sutton at 85 3/10–3/11/13 ROBERT INNES At 54 The Gallery, 54 Shepherd Market W1, 020 8940 5152 www.robert-innes.com 2013 Exhibition 9–15/9/13; 2013 Exhibition At the Dundas Street Gallery, Edinburgh 23–29/9/13 THE SOCIETY OF EQUESTRIAN ARTISTS At Mall Galleries, The Mall SW1, 020 7930 6844 www.equestrianartists.co.uk The Horse in Art 2013 Annual

Rest of UK ACCORDING TO MCGEE 8 Tower Street, York, North Yorkshire YO1, 01904 671709 www.accordingtomcgee.com Radiate Paintings and drawings

by Patrick Smith & Phil Reynolds 6/10–4/11/13 ANTHONY HEPWORTH FINE ART DEALERS 16 Margarets Buildings, Bath BA1, 01225 310694, www.anthonyhepworth.com The Decorative Antiques & Textile Fair, Battersea 1–6/10/13; Pictures from a Private Collection Modern

British and twentieth-century Irish pictures; Peter Waldron Solo exhibition of recent paintings 2–20/11/13

© ROBERT INNES. © ESTATE OF EDWARD BAWDEN, COURTESY JENNINGS FINE ART, LONDON. COURTESY MANYA IGEL FINE ARTS. © GEOFFREY CLARKE RA, COURTESY PANGOLIN LONDON

HIGHGATE CONTEMPORARY ART 26 Highgate High Street N6, 020 8340 7564 www.highgateart.com

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QUENTIN BLAKE EXHIBITION 11 Sept -12 Oct 2013

IAN HARPER

BY THE WATER VENICE - ISTANBUL 6TH SEPTEMBER - 25TH OCTOBER 2013

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Instantly recognisable, loved by millions. Brook Gallery is delighted to be showing the original work of Sir Quentin Blake.

Women with Birds II, 2012, etching and aquatint

brookgallery .co.uk

Fore St | Budleigh Salterton | Devon | EX9 6NH | 01395 443003 | art@brookgallery.co.uk

11 Princelet Street w Spitalfields w E1 6QH w w w .e l e v e n s p i t a l f i e l d s .c o m w 0 2 0 7 2 4 7 1 8 1 6

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The Art of John Lawrence & Celebrating the Publication of Wayland 18 September -12 October 2013 200L Normal Ink

Illustrationcupboard Gallery, 22 Bury Street St. James’s, London, SW1Y 6AL

St Monans Skiff

9 – 15 September 54 The Gallery, 54 Shepherd Market, London W1J 7QX

www.illustrationcupboard.com +44(0)207 976 1727

23 – 29 September The Dundas Street Gallery, 6 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ

www.robert-innes.com

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Listings Martin Bentham RWA, Christopher Garratt, Robert Organ Still life paintings 15/9–6/10/13; Margaret Lovell FRBS RWA 20/10–10/11/13

ARTWAVE WEST Morcombelake, Dorset DT6, 01297 489746 www.artwavewest.com Kathy Little 6/9–5/10/13; Martin Goold 12/10–9/11/13

A Walk Along Aldeburgh Beach, 2011,

by Peter Blake at Caroline Wiseman

ASCOT STUDIOS Bee Mill, Ribchester, Lancashire PR3, 01254 878100 www.ascotstudios.com Angela Wakefield Urban landscapes of New York, London & Europe, until 15/11/13 BEAUX ARTS BATH 12–13 York St, Bath BA1, 01225 464850 www.beauxartsbath.co.uk Elisabeth Frink: Sculptures, Drawings and Prints Celebrating the release of the 2013 Catalogue Raisonné & Mark Johnston: New Paintings 9/9–5/10/13; Akash Bhatt New work featuring

The Topiary Garden, Great Dixter, 2013,

by Louis Turpin at Bohun Gallery

Cuba, New York, Gujarat & London & Anthony Scott New sculpture based on Irish mythological beasts 14/10– 9/11/13; Joy Wolfenden Brown; Sarah Gillespie; John Maltby 18/11–24/12/13 BOHUN GALLERY 15 Reading Road, Henley-on-Thames, Oxon RG9, 01491 576228 www.bohungallery.co.uk

Mary with a Blue Bowl, 1938 or 1939,

by William Scott at Victoria Art Gallery

Slee, Campana Brothers, Vivienne Westwood & Leigh Bowery 12/10/13– 9/3/14; Turner in Brighton Celebrating the recent acquisition of J. M. W. Turner’s watercolour Brighthelmston, Sussex (1824), the display will feature works by his contemporaries, including John Constable 2/11/13–2/3/14 BROOK GALLERY Brook Gallery, Fore Street, Budleigh Salterton, Devon EX9, 01395 443003 www.brookgallery.co.uk Quentin Blake 11/9–12/10/13 CAROLINE WISEMAN AT THE ALDEBURGH BEACH LOOKOUT AND ART HOUSE 31 Crag Path, Aldeburgh, Suffolk IP15, 01728 452754/020 7622 2500 www.carolinewiseman.com 20/21 British Art Fair 11–15/9/13; Weekly residencies in the Aldeburgh Beach LOOKOUT by established and emerging artists: Anne Desmet RA 21/9; Declan Jenkins 28/9; Pauline Bickerton ‘My Big Idea’ 19/10; Lynn Dennison ‘Shipping Forecast’ 26/10; Aldeburgh Poetry Festival The poet Ian McMillan and the artist Fran Crowe collaborate on ‘Pilotage’ 9/11/13 CHRIST CHURCH PICTURE GALLERY Christ Church, Oxford OX1, 01865 276172 www.chch.ox.ac.uk/gallery Temptations to Devotion: Creating the Italian Altarpiece in the Renaissance and Baroque Old Master

drawings exploring the power of the image for religious purposes, until 14/10/13; The Florentine Innocenti :

Louis Turpin: A Passion for Gardens New horticultural paintings 14/9–12/10/13; Victoria Crowe: A Celebration of 40 Years in Painting

Vincenzo Borghini and the Artists of the Foundling Hospital in Florence

15/10–9/11/13

23/10/13–February 2014

BRIGHTON MUSEUM AND ART GALLERY Royal Pavilion Gardens, Brighton BN1, 030 0029 0900 www.brighton-hove-museums.org.uk Regency Colour 1785–1835 Interior décor and Regency understandings of colour, until 13/10/13; Subversive Design Alexander McQueen, David Shrigley, Studio Job, Philippe Starck, Grayson Perry RA, Richard

ESSEX COLLECTION OF LATIN AMERICAN ART Firstsite, Lewis Gardens, High Street, Colchester CO1, 01206 874438 www.escala.org.uk Mexican Migrations Featuring paintings, drawings, prints and objects

by Mexican artists in the Collection including recent acquisitions by Graciela Iturbide, Mexico’s foremost living photographer, until 3/11/13

THE GALLERY AT 41 41 East Street, Corfe Castle, Dorset BH20, 01929 480095 www.galleryat41.com Colour and Form Landscape and figurative painting and sculpture by contemporary Dorset artists including Richard Price ROI, David Atkins, Felicity House PS,Vicky Finding, Mike Jeffries, Judy Tate, Edward Vine, Moira Purver ASWA and Sue Lansbury 21/9–26/10/13 GALLERY PANGOLIN 9 Chalford Industrial Estate, Chalford, Gloucs GL6, 01453 889765 www.gallery-pangolin.com Mammals of Africa: Jonathan Kingdon

Original drawings, new colour prints and sculpture 7–29/9/13; Charlotte Mayer: Solo Exhibition Sculpture and drawings from four decades, accompanied by a specially-published book 14/10–22/11/13 GRAY MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART 01935 881696 www.graymca.co.uk LAPADA Art & Antiques Fair

25–29/9/13; The Decorative Fair 1–6/10/13; Winter Fine Art & Antiques Fair, Olympia 4–10/11/13 GREAT NORTH ART SHOW Ripon Cathedral, Minster Road, Ripon HG4, 01765 603534 www.greatnorthartshow.co.uk Great North Art Show This freeentry selling exhibition features over 250 pieces of new work by contemporary painters, printmakers and photographers, until 22/9/13 HAYLETTS GALLERY Oakwood House, 2 High Street, Maldon, Essex CM9, 01621 851669 www.haylettsgallery.com Shanti Panchal Building up layer upon layer of colour, Panchal’s watercolours evoke his past in Western India 7/9–5/10/13; Paintings by Anthony Atkinson RCA & Pam Dan RCA

Atkinson is drawn to the landscapes of East Anglia and Provence, whilst Pam Dan is fascinated by the patterns and colours of reeds 12/10–9/11/13

© PETER BLAKE, COURTESY CAROLINE WISEMAN. © LOUIS TURPIN, COURTESY BOHUN GALLERY © THE WILLIAM SCOTT FOUNDATION, COURTESY VICTORIA ART GALLERY

THE ART ROOM 8a The Strand, Topsham, Devon EX3 www.theartroomtopsham.co.uk

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LANDSCAPES & SEASCAPES JANE CORSELLIS, RICHARD PIKESLEY, DAVID POOLE 31 October - 27 November 2013

Images: Jane Corsellis, The White Sail, Newport, Pembrokeshire, oil on canvas. Richard Pikesley, Gig Boat Turning, Lyme Regis, oil on canvas. David Poole, Cornfield, pastel.

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3 4 W i n d m i l l S t r e e t L o n d o n , W 1 T 2 J R , Te l : 0 2 0 7 3 2 3 4 7 0 0 E: galler y@curwengaller y.com W: www.curwengaller y.com

Fred Cuming RA Limited edition small run silk screen prints, printed on hand-made paper. Signed and numbered by the artist.

All print prices now include VAT giving a saving of 20% per print!

Substantial discounts available on purchase of two or more prints Highly collectable Artist Proofs also available View & Buy from: www.fredcuming.com

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Listings JENNA BURLINGHAM FINE ART 2a George Street, Kingsclere, Nr Newbury, Hants RG20, 01635 298855/07970 057789 www.jennaburlingham.com LAPADA Art & Antiques Fair 25– 29/9/13; The Decorative Fair Modern British paintings, prints, ceramics and sculpture including works by Ivon Hitchens, Keith Vaughan, Victor Pasmore & Julian Trevelyan 1–6/10/13; Contemporary Classics Peter Joyce, Ffiona Lewis, Keith Purser, Daisy Cook, Adam Milford & Jane Skingley 9–30/11/13 JERRAM GALLERY Half Moon Street, Sherbourne, Dorset DT9, 01935 815261 www.jerramgallery.com Exhibition of British Contemporary Sculpture Figurative bronze sculpture & carved pieces 21/9–9/10/13; John Maddison New Work of Still Life and Interiors Maddison’s paintings

continues the lineage of Morandi and Nicholson 19/10–6/11/13 LEMON STREET GALLERY 13 Lemon St, Truro, Cornwall TR1, 01872 275757 www.lemonstreetgallery.co.uk Len Tabner: An Artist in His Element

Paintings and drawings from the 1960s to the present day, until 7/9/13; Noel Murphy Work by the Belfastbased portrait and Assembly painter 15/9–12/10/13; Ronald F. Smith Semi-abstract landscape paintings 19/10–16/11/13

Frank Holl

Emerging from the Shadows

MERVILLE GALLERIES Church House, Stopham, Pulborough, West Sussex RH20, 01798 865848 www.mervillegalleries.com 20/21 British Art Fair 11–15/9/13

'What a knockout of a show it is' **** The Daily Telegraph Watts Gallery, Down Lane, Compton, Guildford, Surrey GU3 1DQ 01483 810235 / info@wattsgallery.org.uk / www.wattsgallery.org.uk

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Affordable Art Fair, Battersea 23–27/10/13; Affordable Art Fair, Seattle 6–10/11/13; Affordable Art Fair, Singapore 21–24/11/13

MARINE HOUSE AT BEER Fore St, Beer, Devon EX12, 01297 625257 www.marinehouseatbeer.co.uk John Hammond: Solo Show Colourful, warm paintings of Devonshire, Monet’s gardens at Giverny & the Isle of Capri 21/9–4/10/13; Affordable Art Fair, Battersea Tina Stokes, David Eustace, Susan Bower, Mike Bernard RI, Jim and David Farrant, Mary Pym, Helen Tabor, Emma Rimer 23–27/10/13; Peter Barker and Helen Tabor Two contrasting landscape artists 2–15/10/13; Tabor Annual major show of sculptural pottery 2–15/10/13

18 June - 3 November 2013

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LINDA BLACKSTONE FINE ART The Studio at Little Stafford, 2 Loudwater Ridge,Sarratt Lane, Rickmansworth WD3, 07808 612193 www.lindablackstone.com

MOMA WALES Heol Penrallt, Machynlleth, Powys SY20, 01654 703355

www.momawales.org.uk Elizabeth Haines: The Rocks Remain

Haines uses mixed media to interpret the textures and light of the landscape of the Welsh mountains 9/9–19/10/13; The Three Judges From the 2012 Tabernacle Art Competition - Wendy Stephens, Catherine Leyreloup and Jane Chapman 16/9–2/11/13; Holly Whittaker Aberystwyth University printmaking graduate presents a variety of techniques based on lithography 16/9–9/11/13 NORTH HOUSE GALLERY The Walls, Manningtree, Essex CO11, 01206 392717 www.northhousegallery.co.uk Trees Tony Carter, John Cobb, Delores de Sade, Hugh Gillan, Jason Hicklin, Lucy Mellor, Justin Partyka, Peter Randall-Page, Chris Roantree, Emma Simpson, Ian Steadman and Patricia Swannell, until 5/10/13; Telfer Stokes: Sculpture Wall pieces created from reclaimed marine and industrial metal 11/10–9/11/13 PALLANT HOUSE GALLERY 9 North Pallant, Chichester, West Sussex PO19, 01243 774557 www.pallant.org.uk Eduardo Paolozzi: Collaging Culture

Explores Paolozzi’s key preoccupations: popular culture, science-fiction and the machine, until 13/10/13 ROYAL BIRMINGHAM SOCIETY OF ARTISTS 4 Brook Street, St Paul’s, Birmingham B3 0121 236 4353 www.rbsa.org.uk Galactic Craft Exhibition Exploring the spectacle and wonders of outer space, the show features futuristic jewellery by Mandana Oskoui, Emily Thatcher and Annie Cracknell, and glass by Samantha Donaldson, until 19/10/13; Members and Associates’ Exhibition Recent works in an annual exhibition held since 1842 11/9– 12/10/13; RBSA: Our Collection, Our Archive, and You A diverse selection of works from the RBSA’s permanent collection, exploring the relationship between the Collection and the people of Birmingham 11–23/11/13 SLADERS YARD West Bay, Bridport, Dorset DT6, 01308 459511 www.sladersyard.co.uk David West: Woodcuts and Carvings

Inspired by a Zen pathway through Japanese mountains, West has made gilded panels, woodcuts and drawings, until 22/9/13; David Inshaw: Recent Paintings English landscapes, the nude and atmospheric dream-like figures within the landscape. With furniture by Petter Southall 28/9–17/11/13 THE STANLEY SPENCER GALLERY High Street, Cookham, Berkshire SL6, 01628 471885

19/07/2013 16:08

09/08/2013 14:46

Medici MediciGallery Gallery

Русская Весна/Russian Spring - Contemporary Russian Figurative Art People Places The Nude Featuring the work of& Andrey Demin, Dmitry Lisichenko, Maria Stcherbinina & Asya Feoktistova Русская Весна/Russian Spring - Contemporary Russian Figurative Art June 7th July 5th People & Places Featuring work of BillofBate, Judith Green,Dmitry MichaelLisichenko, Alford, Oisin Roche & Steven Lindsay 5th – 28ththeMarch Featuring the work Andrey Demin, Maria Stcherbinina & Asya Feoktistova June 7th - July 5th Noel Mark Harrison 29th5th August - Bensted, 27th September – 28th March & Amnon David Ar Michael Hlousek Nagle, Charlie Noel Bensted, Mark HarrisonCalder Potts & David Taylor 4th – 29th April Cityscapes & AmnonNagle, David Ar Michael Hlousek Charlie Calder Potts & David Taylor Featuring Wilson, Louise Diggle, Michael Kidd & Fabio Coruzzi 4th Summer – the 29thwork Aprilof Barry Exhibition Elaine & Christopher Marvell 3rd - 31stPamphilon October July 10th - August 30th Summer Exhibition MayElaine 2nd - June 6th Pamphilon & Christopher Marvell July 10th August 30th A show of- work May 2ndBennallack June by 6thour Gallery Michael HartArtists & Graeme Wilcox A show- 5th of work by our Gallery Artists 5th November December Noel Bensted, “Neo-Orientalist Portrait”

Christopher Marvell, “Birdtable, Edition V” Christopher Marvell, “Birdtable, Edition V” Graeme Wilcox, Portrait of a Young Man, oil on canvas 60 x 40in

oil on canvas 81 x 61cm Noel Bensted, “Neo-Orientalist Portrait” oil on canvas 81 x 61cm

m

Elaine Pamphilon, “Frost I, Coronation Mug” Michael Bennallack Hart,“Frost Riviera, oil on canvas 16Mug” x 18in Elaine Pamphilon, I, Coronation

Andrey Demin, “Bright Morning, Zagorsk”

Michael Hlousek Nagle “Love’s Old Sweet Song”

Michael Alford,Demin, Nude Reclining, oil on canvas 20 x 30in Andrey “BrightGold, Morning, Zagorsk”

Barry Wilson,Michael Southbank, Dusk, oilNagle on canvas 31.5 Old x 39cm Hlousek “Love’s Sweet Song”

5 Cork Street London W1S 3LQ 020 7495 2565 info@medicigallery.co.uk www.medicigallery.co.uk MarkW1S Harrison “Cuckmere Meanders To Seaford Head” info@medicigallery.co.uk oil on panel 46 x 92cm 5 Cork Street London 3LQ 020 7495 2565 www.medicigallery.co.uk Mark Harrison “Cuckmere Meanders To Seaford Head” oil on panel 46 x 92cm

London W1S 3LQ Medici_AUTUMN13.indd 020 7495 2565 1info@medicigallery.co.uk www.medicigallery.co.uk eet London W1S 3LQ 020 7495 2565 info@medicigallery.co.uk www.medicigallery.co.uk

Royal Society of Marine Artists

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ANN GARDNER

24/4/12 16:23:22

24/4/12 16:23:22

‘PINES AT CAVALAIRE’ OIL ON CANVAS

Annual Exhibition 16 to 27 October

The Mall, London SW1 www.mallgalleries.org.uk

Free entry with this voucher

Image: Paul Banning RSMA RI, Looking out across the Caribbean Sea from North Coast Trinidad (detail)

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Ann Gardner and Jill Barthorpe are showing at She Has A Space from 23–28 September 2013. Private View 24 September.

For invitations and enquiries: francescagonshaw@gmail.com or 07951 386 929

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Listings www.stanleyspencer.org.uk

An American in London

THE THAMES WHISTLER ��&October ���� - �� January ���� Supported by FRIENDS

AMERICAN FRIENDS

American Art Supporters’ Group

Summer Exhibition: Perspectives on Love An insight into the passionate

inner life of Spencer, his marriages and his devotion to his home village Cookham, until 3/11/13 THE SUNBURY EMBROIDERY GALLERY The Walled Garden, Sunbury-on-Thames TW16, 01932 788101 www.sunburyembroidery.org.uk My Journey Tree-Paper-Book Ewa Morawski from Poland and Mali from Mumbai express visual experiences of nature and the environment using tree images as inspiration 17/9–12/10/13 TATE ST IVES Porthmeor Beach, St Ives, Cornwall TR26, 01736 796226 www.tate.org.uk/stives Summer 2013 A series of simultaneous, one-room displays. Exhibitions by Barbara Hepworth, Patrick Heron and Marlow Moss are shown alongside contemporary artists Linder, Allen Ruppersberg, RH Quaytman, Gareth Jones and Nick Relph, including performance, fashion, design, dance and print, until 29/9/13

Image Credit: James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge, c.1872–75, oil on canvas, 68.26 x 51.2 cm, © Tate London, 2012, presented by the Art Fund, 1905

UNIVERSITY GALLERY & BARING WING Northumbria University, Sandyford Road, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne NE1, 0191 227 4424 www.northumbria.ac.uk/universitygallery A Universal Archive: William Kentridge as Printmaker 100 prints

ALDEBURGH BEACH

L O OKOU T

in all media from one of South Africa’s pre-eminent artists, until 11/10/13; The Lost World of Norman Cornish

Cornish’s work is a poignant reminder of the post-industrial age and workingclass values 18/10/13–31/1/14 VICTORIA ART GALLERY Bridge Street, Bath BA2, 01225 477772 www.victoriagal.org.uk

Aldeburgh beach has inspired Royal Academicians including: PETER BLAKE EILEEN COOPER STEPHEN FARTHING ANTHONY GREEN NIGEL HALL CHRIS ORR ALISON WILDING Meet Anne Desmet RA at the opening party following her residency in the LOOKOUT on Saturday 21st September RSVP

sh iti Br 1 CA /2 R er 20 he mb at t t te g r a ep tin ai S bi F h hi rt 15t Ex A 1– 1

Contact Caroline Wiseman: Aldeburgh Beach LOOKOUT and ArtHouse, 31 Crag Path, Aldeburgh, Suffolk IP15 5BS T 01728 452754 or 020 7622 2500 E caroline@carolinewiseman.com www.carolinewiseman.com www.aldeburghbeachlookout.com

William Scott CBE RA: Simplicity and Subject Fifty paintings, sculptures

and drawings marking the centenary of Scott’s birth and his close connections with Bath 7/9–17/11/13 WATTS GALLERY Down Lane, Compton, Guildford, Surrey GU3, 01483 810235 www.wattsgallery.org.uk Frank Holl: Emerging from the Shadows This exhibition brings

together 27 works to examine how Holl became a leading figure of social realist painting, until 3/11/13; The Making of Mary Seton Watts An opportunity to reassess the artists, institutions, influential figures and sources that inspired Mary Seton Watts’ career 12/11/13–26/1/14 THE WILLS LANE GALLERY Wills Lane, St Ives, Cornwall TR26, 01736 795723 www.willslanegallery.co.uk

Trouble and Other Recent Works

Paintings and prints, until 27/10/13 YORKSHIRE SCULPTURE PARK West Bretton, Wakefield, West Yorkshire WF4, 01924 832631 www.ysp.co.uk Lucy & Jorge Orta New work by the Ortas. YSP has commissioned the major installation Drifting Raft. Inspired

by Géricault’s shipwreck painting Le Radeau de la Méduse and the YSP lakes, it illustrates the artists’ ongoing enquiry into contemporary social and environmental issues, until 3/11/13; Josephsohn A survey of sculpture with drawings by the late Zurich-based artist, until 5/1/14

Artists’ Websites LOUISE DIGGLE Pastels of London life and light www.louisediggle.co.uk JOAN DOERR Paintings inspired by the elemental impact on the environment www.joandoerr.com MICHAEL FAIRCLOUGH Textured oil paintings of vast skies above reflecting seas and brooding landscapes www.michaelfairclough.co.uk JACQUIE GULLIVER THOMPSON Memories in oil paintings of Mexico, Byzantine Greece, Yemen & the Sahara www.jacquiegulliverthompson.com OLIVER NEEDS Contemporary artist. Surreal, symbolic and meaningful paintings www.oliverneedsart.co.uk ULLA PLOUGHMAND Paintings. Colourful female forms, landscapes, flowers and the cosmos www.ulla-art.com NICOLA SLATTERY Thoughtful, peaceful art from the imagination www.nicolaslattery.com ELINOR TOLLEY Oils, watercolours, paper mosaics www.elinortolleygallery.co.uk ANGELA WAKEFIELD Contemporary urban landscapes of New York, London and Europe www.angelawakefield.co.uk JO WHITNEY Oil paintings; sea, sand, city life.

Venice; Nice; Cornwall; Plymouth www.jo-whitney.co.uk MARJANA WJASNOVA Symbolic, abstract, spiritual artist www.wjasnova.com

Stephen Chambers RA: Trouble Meets

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TribalAdRAMag2_TribalAdATG 24/07/2013 13:34 Page 1 Š Photogrpah by David Godfrey

www.tribalperspectives.com Gallerie 28, Cork Street London W1S 3NG 2-5 October

Contemporary Aboriginal Art from Central Australia We hold an exceptional collection of paintings by established artists from the Central and Western Deserts, Utopia and the Eastern Desert in the Northern Territory.

Sarah-Jane Holden Exhibitions

detail- wallala tjapaltjarri

Brian Rice invites you to the launch on Wednesday 9th October 6 - 8.30pm

Highgate Contemporary Art 26 Highgate High Street, London N6 5JG 020 8340 7564 info@highgateart.com www.highgateart.com

www.aboriginal-artists.co.uk sj@tingariarts.com +44 20 8944 1396

British art at its very best with a focus on Post-War and Modern British art

Royal College of Art Kensington Gore SW7 2EU

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Readers’ offers are open to all RA Magazine readers when they show a copy of this magazine

Readers’ Offers 20/21 British Art Fair (Royal College of Art, 11–15 September) is offering a special entry price of £5. See advertisement page 85.

The Ashmolean Museum is offering concessionary ticket prices to Francis Bacon/Henry Moore: Flesh and Bone (12 September–19 January). See advertisement page 70.

The Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art is offering 2-for-1 tickets to Emilio Greco: Sacred and Profane (25 September–22 December). See advertisement page 77.

STRARTA Art Fair London 40 leading

galleries exhibit at STRARTA London 2013 at the Saatchi Gallery, Duke of York’s HQ, King’s Road, London (9–13 October). Save £5 by booking before 30 September. Call 020 7637 3677 or email ticket@strarta.com and quote RA02.

Normal price: £15. See advertisement page 24.

Eating Out/ Membership The London Library is offering 12 months membership for the price of 11, a saving of £36. Join online at www.londonlibrary.co.uk/ra13 or call 020 7766 4720 and quote RA13 offer.

See advertisement page 87.

Goldsmith’s Fair London (23–29

September; 1–6 October) is offering 2-for-1 tickets to both its London fairs this autumn. See advertisement page 70.

Mu.ZEE in Ostend is offering discounted entry to The Star Alphabet of E. L. T. Mesens: Dada and Surrealism in Brussels, Paris and London (until 17 November). Special package deals are also available on local hotels. Book via Tourism Ostend: info@visitoostende. be or +32 59 56 45 89 quoting ‘RA Magazine’. See advertisement page 36.

Terra del Fuego, 1995, by Mark Visione at Whitford Fine Art

Richoux, opposite the Royal Academy,

is offering a 10% discount on breakfast, morning coffee, lunch, afternoon tea or dinner. See advertisement page 90.

Publications & Prints Allen & Unwin is offering a free copy of Autumn Laing by Alex Miller to the first 20 readers to email uk@allenandunwin.com with the correct answer to the question ‘Which artist’s life inspired Autumn Laing?’

(For a clue see Miller’s piece on page 58). See advertisement page 70.

Jointly organised by Christie’s and Waddington Custot Galleries, When Britain Went Pop! British Pop Art - The Early Years (9 October – 24 November) will launch the new Christie’s Mayfair space, a five-minute walk from the RA at 103 New Bond St (www.christies. com; 020 7389 2253). The show includes works by Royal Academicians including David Hockney, Allen Jones, Joe Tilson and the late Patrick

Man in a Museum (Or You’re in the Wrong Movie), 1962, by David Hockney RA at Christie’s Mayfair

Caulfield. RA Magazine readers receive a 15% discount on the catalogue.

Please quote RAOFFER2013. See advertisement page 13 and article page 31.

Fred Cuming RA is offering a 20% discount on limited edition silk screen prints, printed on hand-made paper.

Signed and numbered by the artist.

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The RA Shops are offering a 10% discount on the following titles: Australia Use online code RAMAG69 for the softback £24.95 (rrp £27.95) and RAMAG70 for the hardback £43 (rrp £48). Published September; Daumier: Art and Life in Nineteenthcentury Paris Use online code

RAMAG71 for the softback £19.50 (rrp £21.95) and RAMAG72 for the hardback £36 (rrp £40). Published October; Matisse: The Chapel at Vence Use online code RAMAG73 for the hardback £54 (rrp £60). Published September; Want A selection of 100 postcards of beggars belonging to the art dealer John Kasmin. Use online code RAMAG74 £8.95 (rrp £9.95). Published September;

Whitford Fine Art is offering a 25% discount on limited edition prints (unframed) by Australian artist Mark Visione. Call 020 7930 9332. See advertisement page 3.

Caroline Wiseman will give readers

who visit the Aldeburgh Beach LOOKOUT and ArtHouse a free copy of her book Modern Art NOW. Call 01728 452754 or visit www. carolinewiseman.com for details.

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Courses Book by Friday 13 September and claim a 20% discount on V&A popular ‘Year Courses’. Phone 020 7942 2211 and quote ‘RA Magazine’ to book.

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Craigie Aitchison Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné Use online code RAMAG75

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All titles are available from the RA Shops or online at royalacademy.org. uk/shop or place a telephone order on 0800 634 6341 (10am–5pm, Monday–Friday). See advertisement page 95.

‘Shadows’ from the portfolio ‘Revolving Doors’ 1926, by Man Ray at Mu.Zee

© DAVID HOCKNEY, COURTESY OF THE BRITISH COUNCIL OF VISUAL ARTS, LONDON. © MARK VISIONE, COURTESY OF WHITFORD FINE ART. © SABAM BELGIUM 2013. DIGITAL IMAGE, THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK/SCALA, FLORENCE

Art Fairs & Exhibitions

86 RA MAGAZINE | AUTUMN 2013

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THE SUNDAY TIMES

SHORT COURSES AT CHRISTIE’S EDUCATION

WATERCOLOUR COMPETITION 2013

AUTUMN/ WINTER 2013

Impressionist and Modern Art U British Modern Art 1900–1940: Making a New World 18 – 20 September U Masterworks of the Avant-Garde 30 September – 1 October U London Art Course: Art, Style & Design 9 October – 4 December U British Modern Art 1948 –1968: Pop Art 23 – 25 October U Vienna 1900 Experience 9 –11 December

Old Masters U A Closer Look at Baroque 2– 4 December Post War and Contemporary Art U London Art Course: Modern & Contemporary Art 9 October – 4 December

U Giants of 19th Century Opera: Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner 6 November – 11 December

U Exploring Prints and Multiples 2– 4 December

Collecting U ÊThe Christie’s Collecting Course Beginning 9 September 2013

Art Business U The Christie’s Art Business Course Beginning 10 September 2013

U ÊUnderstanding Great Collectors: Professor Sir Albert Richardson 16 –18 September

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Lifestyle U ÊThe Christie’s Wine Course Beginning 1 October 2013

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In the Studio 88 / Out to Lunch 91 / Academicians’ News 92 / In Memoriam 94 / Events & Lectures 96

P H OTO © E A M O N N M C CA B E

Academy

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In the Studio

Art of darkness BORN IN IRELAND, RAISED IN ENGLAND AND WITH STUDIOS IN AMERICA, GERMANY AND SPAIN, SEAN SCULLY RA IS AN AVOWEDLY INTERNATIONAL ARTIST. SAM PHILLIPS VISITS THE PAINTER IN HIS CAVERNOUS SPACE IN BARCELONA. PHOTOGRAPH BY NICK BALLON

P H OTO © E A M O N N M C CA B E

C

Sean Scully RA in his Barcelona studio

haracterised by rhythmic arrangements of rectilinear shapes, Sean Scully RA’s abstracts have always elicited associations with architecture. And as I walk with the artist through the streets of Barcelona’s affluent neighbourhood of Dreta de l’Eixample where he has periodically lived for over a decade, he describes details of the elegant five-storey buildings we pass, from the warm colours of their 19th-century stone to the ornate patterns of iron at their imposing doorways.

Soon one of these doorways is opened by Scully and we are plunged into the dark. As I strain to see where we are in the blackness, we move through into a larger space barely lit by what comes through its skylights. I say to Scully that most people would have turned on the lights by now, but he replies that he is at ease in the dark.

‘There’s something about the dark light of Barcelona and its gloomy interiors that provokes a relationship with dark colours when I paint here,’ he says. ‘I’m very comfortable with that, because I’m a kind of melancholy person. I love the end of the day.’ He tells me that his painting Dying Day (2007) – in the Pompidou Centre’s collection in Paris – is a eulogy to twilight: its crepuscular colours of ‘falling deep reds mixed with blacks’ evoke ‘birds singing their lament at the end of the day, their song of dying.’

When the halogens are on I realise the sheer size of Scully’s studio, which is one of three in which the Irish-born, London-raised artist works – the others are in Manhattan and Munich. Stretching back for 50 metres, with a similar size basement below, the sparse, white-painted space is on a scale one can’t anticipate from the building’s narrow fin de siècle façade. On the ground floor a low table hosts plastic containers of oil, while the focus of the basement is a pool table – when Scully moved from London to New York in the 1970s, he played as a bar-room pool shark to help make ends meet.

Scully’s hustling days are over. Now acknowledged as one of the world’s leading abstract painters, the 67-year-old artist has been the subject of major shows at venues from the Metropolitan Museum New York to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. He enjoys a peripatetic life with his wife, the Swiss painter Liliane Tomasko, and their young son, moving between the US, Spain and Germany, as well as the countries in which he exhibits.

A constant is his commitment to paint.

‘Painting is an animal that is not a dodo: it will not become extinct,’ he says. ‘It always has the ability to shape-shift itself into something different as an art form.’ Scully’s signature style filters the emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism through the serial structures of Minimalism. His application of paint is gestural, his choice of palette intuitive, but his repeated rectangles are ‘fundamental shapes’ that connect to universal values. The columns of paint in his ongoing series ‘Doric’ – now touring Europe – evoke ancient Greek architecture in order to celebrate the contribution Hellenic culture has made to European civilisation.

Scully’s triptychs are the focus of a show at Chichester’s Pallant House this autumn. These works extend his abiding interest in serialisation, with the possibilities for repetition across all three panels of each triptych. A new triptych he has produced for the exhibition, Arles-AbendVincent (2013), has the same configuration of shapes across each of its three panels, but each is produced in different colours. ‘It’s like painting someone’s portrait again and again and getting a different result each time. It is serialisation painted as an expressionistic artist, which is an idea full of contradictions.’

Scully has generously donated a painting from the ‘Doric’ series to the RA’s latest fundraising auction. He sees the Academy as a ‘counterweight to an England which is addicted to popular culture’. This superficiality was one of the reasons he left London; he believes Barcelona, New York and Munich have, in contrast, ‘a seriousness, a connoisseurship that simply doesn’t exist in England.’

He paints a picture of the British contemporary art world split down the middle between real artists and mere ironists. On one side he sees the RA, on the other Tate, which he claims is being run for curators rather than artists. ‘The Royal Academy is like the antidote to snake bite,’ he continues. ‘A lot of people are interested in art as a form of entertainment or as a one-liner. I’m interested in mystic profundity, primitive utterance and the whole pathos of the history of painting. This is a deep ambition.’

Sean Scully: Triptychs Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 01243 774557, www.pallant.org.uk, 2 Nov–26 Jan, 2014 Sean Scully: Doric Mougins Museum of Classical Art, Mougins, www.mouginsmusee.com, until 29 Sep; Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome, www.scuderiequirinale.it, 4 Nov–1 Jan, 2014

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Roy S Ga al Acaemina rde de rs ns, my at Lon , 6 the don Burl , W ingt 1S 3 on ES

MA in the History of Art: the Renaissance to Modernism October 2014 – September 2015 In association with the Royal Academy, a one-year programme of ten evening seminars and an individual research-project, offering a overview of Western art from the Renaissance to the late 20th century, with lectures by a series of internationally acclaimed art historians, artists, and gallerists.

Lecturers for 2013/14 include: Lecturers for 2014/15 include Professor Martin Kemp (Emeritus Professor of the History of Art, Oxford), Tim Knox (Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), Turner Prize-Winner Grayson Perry, historic collections expert Professor Gert-Rudolf Flick, and the internationally acclaimed biographer, Martin Gayford.

Each lecture or seminar is followed by a dinner during which participants can engage in a general discussion with the guest speaker.

Until 3 November 2013

Examination is by a research dissertation, on an approved art history topic chosen by the student, of not less than 20,000 words.

Others wishing to attend the seminars, but not intending to take the MA degree, may join the course as Associate Students at a reduced fee.

Course enquiries and applications: Linda Waterman, School of Humanities, University of Buckingham Tel. 01280 820120 Or via email to the Course Director, Michael Prodger: michael.prodger@buckingham.ac.uk THE UNIVERSITY OF

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Academy Out to Lunch

Mach points

P H OTO © J U L I A N A N D ERS O N

MATCHES, PINS AND COAT-HANGERS IN THEIR THOUSANDS HAVE GONE INTO DAVID MACH RA’S SPIKY SCULPTURES. ELE ANOR MILL S SHARES A STEAK WITH THE ARTIST AT HAWKSMOOR, AS HE TELLS HER ABOUT HIS LOVE OF LARGE NUMBERS. PHOTOGRAPH BY JULIAN ANDERSON ‘In the 1980s I was creating massive installations made up of thousands of magazines. At one show, a guy came up to me and said he had always wanted to buy my work but never could because it was too big.’ With characteristic humour, David Mach RA mimes a cartoon character’s jaw dropping heavily onto the table.

‘That was an epiphany for me.’

Mach is tall, he’s Scottish, he likes meat and his sentences are peppered with expletives.

Fittingly, we’re having lunch at Hawksmoor in Air Street, renowned for its exceptional steak and only five minutes walk from the RA. We’re here to talk about the Fife-born artist’s smallscale sculptures, which he has produced with as much gusto as his large-scale works ever since his conversation with the aforementioned collector. The newest of his small pieces is a limited-edition series of pocket-sized, vaseshaped sculptures constructed from pins and newly on sale at the RA. He calls them ‘Mini Machs’ or ‘i-Machs’.

Mach’s sculptures – colossal or tiny – are fundamentally laborious. Everyday objects in their thousands make up each work, whether it’s a gorilla made from coat-hangers, the Parthenon

from tyres, intricately collaged biblical scenes, or animal heads made from matchsticks. ‘When I was younger I lived next to oil platforms being built hundreds of feet high, and I worked in factories and a brickworks – I listened to thousands of bricks being fired every night.

Everything around me was in big numbers,’ he recalls.

‘We were rough as chips in Fife. And I was embarrassed to be an artist for a long time because of where I’m from and the work ethic there.’ Mach clearly felt he needed to prove that art could be tough too. ‘I used to make my installations so enormous as if to say, “Look, I’m an artist but I had to work really hard”.’

There is no need for Mach to justify the scale and energy involved in his works now; he just enjoys it. He was elected an Academician in 1998, and continues to travel frequently between studios in Fife and London.

We order Porterhouse steak, rare, with beefdripping fries, and follow the sommelier’s advice of the 2010 Californian Qupé Syrah. ‘We nearly killed ourselves making those colossal magazine installations,’ he remembers. ‘We worked backto-back, show after show.’ Mach is a tough guy,

but he couldn’t make these huge sculptures on his own, and over the years he has employed up to 40 studio staff at any one time. ‘Just one of my coat-hanger sculptures takes nine months to make. And the collages take ages too.’

Although his work might be considered extravagant, he has an uncomplicated approach to art.

As we tuck into our steak, we talk about his use of functional found objects. ‘The reason I make sculpture with worthless, common objects, like pins for the RA edition, is because a pin is the least interesting, most regular item there is. I don’t use gold, silver, bronze or special pigments, and I think people can relate to my work better because of that.’

He thinks the art world is snobbish and reads too much into artworks. ‘If you make a sculpture of a dog, it’s a sculpture of a dog – it doesn’t have to mean much more.’ He is so refreshingly straightforward about his art that it doesn’t surprise me when he reveals he’s started playing drums in a band, the Voyeurz. What kind of music? ‘Rock! Sexy, dirty rock,’ he proclaims feistily. He explains that he likes to play music ‘because it is so much more accessible than art. I’d love to make art that’s just as accessible as music.’

This is his aspiration for his colourful, decorative ‘Mini Machs’. ‘I like the idea of people being able to access art through small things like these. I got the patterns you see on them from pictures of fish.’ These patterns, along with all sorts of others, ‘just seeped into me from 20 years of looking at National Geographic.’ He also collects and catalogues thousands of these images in boxes. And this level of organisation will be crucial for his next enormous project: a series of collages based on the Kama Sutra. ‘I’m fascinated by the idea of the decorative, so I’ll make rich patterns on the cushions and the backgrounds. It will be very Gustav Klimt.’

While we dig into our dessert of a chocolate and salted caramel tart, Mach asserts, ‘I’m driven to make my art, no matter what.’

His combative attitude to the art world has even permeated his imagination – he regularly envisages he has ‘to fight people who try to stop me making things.’ Mach certainly seems to be winning the fight so far.

David Mach RA’s limited-edition Mini Machs are available from the Royal Academy Shop, www. royalacademy.org.uk/shop David Mach Opera Gallery, Seoul, www.operagallery.com, 23 Nov–31 Dec Hawksmoor Air Street London, 020 7406 3980 Scan the photo above to see a video of work by David Mach RA, and music played by the Voyeurz

AUTUMN 2013 | RA MAGAZINE 91

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Academy Academicians’ News

John Carter RA uses drawing to develop ideas for his finished works, searching for clear meaningful images with balance and harmony.

His mature work is closest to the European tradition of Concrete Art, deriving from Theo van Doesburg in the 1930s and Max Bill after the Second World War. However, two 1965 collages, Study for ‘Monument’, and Caprice, in an exhibition of Carter’s works on paper in the Academy’s Tennant Gallery, reveal a surprising creative clash between Pop Art and formal abstraction. He frequently reconsiders earlier work, and the 1974 abstract drawing in conté crayon, also on view, is one of a series based on an early figurative drawing of his parents’ garden, with a drain cover in the lawn.

Matrix (2012, left) is a square of paper with an equal rectangle cut from three corners. Further cuts read as lines drawn on the

Matrix, 2012, by John Carter RA

Now showing

in the show ‘Royal Academicians @ 108’ at 108 Fine Art, Harrogate (1 Sep–15 Oct) ● Stephen Chambers, David Hockney, Barbara Rae, Emma Stibbon and Joe Tilson show in ‘Multiplied 2013’ at Christie’s South Kensington (18–21 Oct) ● David Hockney, Allen Jones and Joe Tilson show in ‘When Britain went Pop!’ at Christie’s Mayfair, London (9 Oct–24 Nov)

OUR GUIDE TO WHERE YOU CAN SEE THE ART AND ARCHITECTURE OF ROYAL ACADEMICIANS THIS SEASON

Painters/ Printmakers ● Norman Ackroyd’s show of etchings since 1986, ‘The Furthest Land: A Journey Around the British Isles’, is at Eames Fine Art, London (4–21 Sep) ● Basil Beattie’s solo show ‘Promises, Promises’ is at Jerwood Hastings (12 Oct–8 Jan, 2014) ● Frank Bowling shows ‘The Map Paintings’ at Hales Gallery, London (16 Oct–23 Nov) ● A solo show of Jeffery Camp is at Jerwood, Hastings (until 2 Oct) ● Stephen Chambers’ show ‘Trouble meets trouble and other recent works’ is at Wills Lane Gallery, St Ives (until 27 Oct) ● Michael Craig-Martin is a selector for the 2013 Jerwood Drawing Prize, Jerwood Space, London (11 Sep–27 Oct). He has a site-specific mural in the Bowery, New York (until 29 Sep) ● Eileen Cooper shows new work in ‘Edge to Edge’ (right) at Art First

(10 Sep–12 Oct) ● Tacita Dean shows at Frith Street Gallery, London (13 Sep–26 Oct) ● Anne Desmet is artistin-residence at Aldeburgh Beach South Lookout, and shows work at the Lookout Gallery (16–22 Sep) ● ‘David Hockney: Early Reflections’ is at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (11 Oct–16 March, 2014) and ‘David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition’ is at the de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco (26 Oct–20 Jan, 2014) ● Albert Irvin’s show ‘The Complete Prints’ is at the Atkinson Gallery, Millfield School, Street (until 19 Oct) ● Tess Jaray’s pavement for St Mary’s Church, Nottingham, is now complete ● Lisa Milroy has been appointed a Trustee of Tate ● Mick Moon and Anthony Whishaw show in ‘Under the Greenwood: Picturing British Trees’ at the St Barbe Museum, Lymington, Hampshire (12 Oct–23 Nov) ● Mali Morris opens her studio for visitors at APT, Creekside, London (27–29 Sep).

She has also been appointed a Trustee of Poetry London ● Grayson Perry is this

John Carter RA – Between Dimensions Tennant Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2 Oct–16 Feb, 2014 John Carter: Surface and Structure Redfern Gallery, London, 020 7734 1732, www.redfern-gallery.com, 8 Oct–15 Nov John Carter RA by Chris Yetton (RA Publications); see Readers’ Offers page 86 for discount

Sculptors ● Phyllida Barlow’s show ‘SCREE’ is

Spring Fever, 2013, by Eileen Cooper

year’s BBC Radio 4 Reith Lecturer.

His tapestry series ‘The Vanity of Small Differences’ is at Sunderland Museum and Winter Garden (until 29 Sep), then Manchester Art Gallery (24 Oct–2 Feb, 2014) ● Tom Phillips shows new work at Flowers Cork Street, London (4 Sep–12 Oct). His design for a new 50p coin for the Royal Mint, goes into circulation this November ● Philip Sutton has a solo show at Richmond Hill Gallery, Surrey (3 Oct–3 Nov) ● Maurice Cockrill, Alan Davie, Anthony Green, Sonia Lawson, David Mach and Michael Sandle participate

at Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines Iowa (until 22 Sep) ● Anthony Caro’s show ‘Caro at Museo Correr’ is at the Correr Museum, Venice (until 27 Oct) ● Ann Christopher’s solo show, ‘To Know Without Remembering’ is at Pangolin Gallery, London (6 Nov–7 Dec) ● Geoffrey Clarke’s solo show ‘A Decade of Change’ is at Pangolin Gallery, London (13 Sep–26 Oct) ● Stephen Cox’s six-ton work Cosmic Head has been installed on the corner of Eric Parry’s One Eagle Place, London ● Tony Cragg and Antony Gormley contribute to ‘Uncommon Ground: Land Art in Britain’ at the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff (4 Oct–5 Jan, 2014) ● Antony Gormley’s Parallel Field (1990) shows in ‘Sculpture in the City’, St Mary Axe, London (until May, 2014).

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CO U R T ESY P E T ER F R EE T H . P H OTO © S T EP H EN W H I T E

JOHN CARTER RA IS NOTED FOR WORKS THAT PLAY SCULPTURE AGAINST PAINTING. NOW A SHOW OF HIS WORKS ON PAPER IN THE ACADEMY’S TENNANT GALLERY REVEALS HIS THOUGHT PROCESSES, WRITES CHRIS YET TON

paper, appearing to divide it in half horizontally and vertically and suggesting squares within it. Carter here makes sculptural incision masquerade as painted mark.

Dark marks in some of his drawings (such as Pierced Square Study, 1990) indicate voids in finished works.

The drawings explore forms of equality: squares (equal sides); parallel lines (equally spaced along their length); division (equal halves); golden section (the ratio of the smaller section to the larger equals that of the larger to the whole).

Through the juxtaposition of the reality of sculpture with the illusion of painting, these works are meditations on the relationship between knowledge and imagination. They are preparatory drawings using various media with a delicate sensuality that makes them beautiful in their own right.

© J O H N CA R T ER / P H OTO P E T ER A B R A H A MS , LU CI D P L A N E . CO U R T ESY EI L EEN CO O P ER A N D A R T F I RS T

Geometry of beauty

Academy Academicians’ News Richard Wilson’s fly by

A lasting impression

Ever the experimenter, Richard Wilson RA is currently working on an ambitious sculpture for the new Terminal 2 at Heathrow Airport, due to open in 2014. Wilson’s aluminium work Slipstream (below) visualises the flight path of a plane and its patterns of air turbulence (see App instructions below for an aviation demonstration). Parts of the 77-tonne sculpture have already been cast, and they will be installed over a three-month period before the sculpture is unveiled in June.

Peter Freeth RA’s soft, evocative etchings belie the complexities that underpin his working process. The title of his show at Highgate Gallery, London (13–26 September) – ‘Previous Convictions’ – is a playful reference to the developments in his style and technique over the course of his career. ‘It’s not so much my convictions that have changed, but my expressions of them have,’ says Freeth. The exhibition is the most comprehensive presentation of his

This is one of two projects Wilson is working on – the other is at the Pool of London. Employing whistles, bells, horns and sirens from an armada of sail, steam and diesel vessels, Wilson has created a concerto titled 1510: A Ships’ Opera as a spectacular climax to the Thames Festival (14 Sep; www. thamesfestival.org). Eleanor Mills Scan this image to see a video of Richard Wilson RA talking about the work and an animation of it.

See page 22 for instructions

CO U R T ESY P E T ER F R EE T H . P H OTO © S T EP H EN W H I T E

© J O H N CA R T ER / P H OTO P E T ER A B R A H A MS , LU CI D P L A N E . CO U R T ESY EI L EEN CO O P ER A N D A R T F I RS T

A CGI of Slipstream, by Richard Wilson RA, for Heathrow’s Terminal 2, opening in June, 2014

He contributes to ‘Masterpieces: Art and East Anglia’ at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich (14 Sep–24 Feb, 2014) ● Allen Jones’s retrospective ‘Off The Wall’ is at Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, near Dresden (until 29 Sep). He has solo shows at Galerie Levy, Hamburg (2 Sep–9 Oct) and at Galerie Hilger, Vienna (16 Oct–24 Nov), and contributes to ‘The New Situation’ at Sotheby’s, London (4–14 Sep) ● Anish Kapoor has a major show at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul (10 Sep–5 Jan, 2014) and ‘Kapoor in Berlin’ is at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (until 24 Nov) ● Christopher Le Brun’s bronze sculpture, City Wing, has been unveiled at 125 Old Broad Street in the City of London (right) ● ‘Richard Long: Prints 1970-2013’ is at Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (until 20 Oct) ● David Nash’s solo show ‘Thirteen Reds’ is at Château Chaumont-sur-Loire, France (until 11 Nov) ● Alison Wilding displays work in the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain, London (11 Nov–9 March, 2014) ● Richard Wilson’s solo show, ‘No Formulas’ is at Chelsea Space, London (18 Sep–26 Oct). Wilson also takes part in ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ at the Mead Gallery, Warwick University (4 Oct–14 Dec)

works to date, celebrating how his practice has evolved over 50 years, including his time at the Slade, followed by three years in Italy, and his long teaching career at the RA Schools. The ghostly quality in his etching Night City (2009, below), depicting a leopard leaping over an imagined metropolis, reflects his interest in childhood fables and dreams. Nature, poetry and literature also provide enduring inspiration for the master etcher.

Sarah Bolwell

Night City, 2009, by Peter Freeth RA

Architects

Christopher Le Brun PRA’s City Wing, 2013, at 125 Old Broad Street, in the City of London

● Will Alsop’s firm All Design has completed Calypso, a residential complex in Rotterdam ● Ron Arad shows at the Design Museum in Holon, Israel (until 19 Oct) and at Ivorypress, Madrid (5 Sep–9 Nov) ● Norman Foster and Spencer de Grey’s firm Foster + Partners has submitted a proposal for a design for a new airport for the Isle of Grain in the Thames Estuary ● Nicholas Grimshaw’s practice is designing the new Koç Contemporary gallery in Istanbul. The Highpoint Shopping Centre in Melbourne is now complete ● Zaha Hadid shows at the Danish Architecture Centre in Copenhagen (until 29 Sep). The Complete Zaha Hadid has been published (Thames & Hudson). Hadid’s Galaxy Soho office and retail complex in Beijing has been shortlisted for the 2013 RIBA Lubetkin Prize ● Thomas Heatherwick’s studio is designing the Bombay Sapphire distillery in Laverstoke, Hampshire ● Thames & Hudson have published Architecture: A Modern View by Richard Rogers ● Chris Wilkinson’s Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth has now opened.

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Academy

News in brief RA ELECTS FIVE NEW ACADEMICIANS New Royal Academicians have been elected in the following categories: Thomas Heatherwick (architecture), Chantal Joffe (painting), Mike Nelson and Conrad Shawcross (both sculpture).

The Netherlands-based painter Marlene Dumas becomes an Honorary RA. HONOURS FOR FOUR MEMBERS Anish Kapoor RA has been knighted for services to visual arts. Grayson Perry RA and Thomas Heatherwick RA have been appointed CBE, Perry for services to contemporary art and Heatherwick for services to the design industry.

Albert Irvin RA receives an OBE for services to the visual arts.

WESTON ROOMS UPGRADE The Academy’s Weston Rooms are closed for refurbishment until 25 January, 2014, which includes updating the air-conditioning system to maintain optimum environmental conditions for displaying valuable artworks.

NEW LOOK ONLINE SHOP The RA’s new online shop (www. royalacademy.org.uk/shop) includes enhanced and updated features.

Explore the wider range of exclusive gifts, such as this tray featuring Leonard McComb RA’s Oranges from the South (below), as well as this year’s selection Ralph Brown RA in his studio in Digswell in 1963, with Head. Queen (1963) to his right and other works in progess

In memoriam: Ralph Brown RA THE WORK OF SCULPTOR RALPH BROWN WAS A HOMAGE TO THE HUMAN FIGURE. ANN CHRISTOPHER R A REMEMBERS HER TUTOR, FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE Ralph had been linked to the postwar group of artists known as the ‘geometry of fear’ school (an allusion to its artists use of spiky forms), which included other Academicians such as Kenneth Armitage, Lynn Chadwick and Eduardo Paolozzi. But Ralph’s work appeared much more organic than those sculptors. His work connected more with that of Auguste Rodin, or Germain Richier, whose sculpture he saw in the early 1950s when he spent time in Paris as a young artist.

Ralph’s work kept evolving throughout his career. He moved from the tough Meat Porters – a much acclaimed commission for Harlow new town in 1959 – to an organic semi-abstract phase (as near as Ralph would get to abstraction) in the 1960s, which included his enamelled cast-aluminium work Confluence, shown in the Greater London Council’s sculpture exhibition in 1966 in Battersea Park. From around 1974-75, his work became more

figurative and sensual, taking the human body and especially the female form as his inspiration.

Ralph’s path and mine crossed many times over the years: my partner cast his work for over 30 years, and when Ralph and his family moved to France we visited often. We always took bacon, Marmite and sculpture materials to France for him, and we lived off gathered snails, wild strawberries and wine. Later, on his return to England, Ralph and I had studios in the same complex, and we also had many meetings at the RA. One of my last memories of Ralph was asking him to write a piece recollecting me as a student: ‘You were very determined,’ he said.

He was determined too.

I will always be indebted to Ralph for his friendship and guidance, and although our work was very different there was a mutual respect for the attempt to survive as a sculptor.

of Christmas cards. The new checkout function enables shoppers to make their online purchase more easily.

RA PUBLICATIONS AWARD RA Publications has been awarded a High Commendation at the Bookseller Industry Awards, in the Independent Academic, Educational and Professional Publisher of the Year category.

REDUCING CARBON EMISSIONS The RA has been awarded the Carbon Trust Standard award for taking action on climate change by reducing carbon emissions by 15 per cent in the past three years.

AMERICAN ASSOCIATES The American Associates of the Royal Academy Trust (AARAT) hosts a curatorled tour of Ellsworth Kelly Hon RA’s ‘Chatham Series’ on 5 September at MoMA in New York. On 6 November AARAT is holding a luncheon at the Metropolitan Club in New York to honour the Duke of Devonshire. For details call +1 212 980 8404 or email info@aarat.org.

P H OTO: J O R GE L E W I NS K I

I first met Ralph Brown (b.1928) in the late 1960s while I was studying sculpture at the West of England College of Art in Bristol, and was unaware at the time how great a friend he would become. It was with Ralph’s encouragement that I first submitted work to the RA Summer Exhibition in 1971. Ralph became a Royal Academician in 1972 and I was later elected in 1980.

As a tutor Ralph was constantly challenging. He made us question ourselves and, in retrospect, he was teaching us what it was like to spend one’s life making sculpture.

Although Ralph’s work was figurebased he never imposed his ideas on students who made abstract work. He was the consummate professional artist and always forward-looking, having previously helped many art schools move from the technical-based structure of the National Diploma in Design to the more creative Diploma in Art and Design.

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Become part of our team Chair of the Friends Board of Directors Voluntary position

As the existing Chair’s successful tenure reaches an end, the RA would like to invite applications for a new Chair to lead the Friends Board of Directors for a three year period starting in January 2014.

The RA seeks a recognised industry leader with credible board Chairmanship experience or clear potential and prior exposure to a Charity or Arts Organisation Board. With strong commercial acumen, (s)he will oversee a charity with over 95,000 Friends, raising over £10m per annum. With a track record of successful revenue generation, ideally in organisations with strong membership or loyalty schemes, we seek a strong facilitator, with outstanding interpersonal skills who can elicit optimum performance from a high calibre Board of Directors.

The time commitment involves five board meetings annually, however, the successful candidate must be able to afford the RA 15 days each year. For further details visit www.royalacademy.org.uk/careers Candidates wishing to be considered should send their CV and covering letter, outlining how they feel they meet the criteria and why they wish to apply to our appointed search firm, Blackwood Group, to Alexa.Downey@blackwoodgroup.com Closing date for applications: 30 September 2013

New titles published this Autumn from the Royal Academy

Craigie Aitchison Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné £35 hardback This authoritative publication brings together for the first time all of Craigie Aitchison RA’s prints.

Beautifully produced, full colour plates reveal these luminous and touching images

Matisse The Chapel at Vence

Being: An Architect Ian Ritchie

Want

£60 hardback

£60 hardback

£9.95 paperback

With stunning new photography, this volume provides an unparalleled view of an iconic and sacred space, making the book the definitive exploration of Matisse’s masterpiece.

The book heralds the Tate’s show Matisse: The Cut-Outs in 2014

Ian Ritchie RA is one of the most original contemporary architects.

This book, slip-cased in two volumes, brings together all aspects of his diverse practice, including critical writings, photographs, poems and drawings

Want contains 100 postcards of beggars belonging to legendary art dealer and collector John Kasmin.

Both strange and moving, each image tells an intriguing story.

See interview with Kasmin on page 106

See page 86 for RA Magazine Readers’ offer on these exciting books Available from the RA Shops and online by visiting www.royalacademy.org.uk/shop Mail order call freephone 0800 634 6341 (9.30am - 5.00pm Mon - Fri) RA Publishing_Aut13_half_4.indd 1

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Academy Public Events & Lectures

Autumn Events at the Royal Academy FURTHER INFORMATION ON OUR EVENTS CAN BE FOUND AT WWW.ROYALACADEMY.ORG.UK/EVENTS

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To book, please visit our website or call 020 7300 5839, visit the RA Ticket Office, or complete the booking form overleaf and post to ‘Events and Lectures’ or fax 020 7300 8013.

Booking is strongly advised for lunchtime lectures. Unclaimed seats will be released at 12.50pm that day.

Reductions are available for students, jobseekers and people with disabilities with recognised proof of status.

RA Friends and carers go free to Access events. Disabled parking spaces and wheelchairs can be reserved on 020 7300 8028.

September InTouch at the RA

Mon 9 Sep An event for blind and visually impaired visitors – an audio-described introduction to the ‘Mexico’ exhibition in front of selected artworks, followed by a multi-sensory handling session.

The Sackler Wing and the Saloon; 9–11am; £3; volunteer support provided RICHARD ROGERS EVENING EVENT Architecture and Politics

Mon 9 Sep A panel of figures from the worlds of architecture and politics discuss architecture’s importance in delivering and shaping social change.

Royal Institution, Albemarle Street, W1; 6.30–8pm; £12/£6 reductions ACCESS EVENTS InMind at the RA

Mons 16 Sep, 21 Oct, 18 Nov Artist and gallery educators facilitate these sessions for individuals living with dementia and their carers, friends and family members. Join us for coffee and conversation to discuss artworks from our permanent collection.

Fine Rooms; 11am–12.30pm; £3; volunteer support provided PHOTOGR APHY WORKSHOP

R A CAREERS TALK Learning about Architecture: the Possibilities of Architecture Clubs in Schools

Sat 21 Sep Rob Griffin and Mark Burton discuss how Architecture Clubs can successfully help school-age students engage with and learn about architecture and the built environment.

Gallery X, Burlington Gardens; 3–4pm; free with an exhibition ticket (no booking required) RICHARD ROGERS EVENT London As It Could Be Now

Sun 22 Sep As the culmination of a design workshop with The Architecture Foundation, multidisciplinary teams present new ideas for sites along the length of the tidal Thames to a jury of experts.

Gallery X, Burlington Gardens; 3–5pm; free with an exhibition ticket (no booking required) AUSTR ALIA LUNCHTIME LECTURE The Making of Australia

Mon 23 Sep Kathleen Soriano, exhibition curator; Dr Anna Gray and Franchesca Cubillo, National Gallery of Australia.

Reynolds Room; 1–2pm; free (seats must be reserved online or by telephone)

London: Hidden Nature

Sat 21 Sep Professional photographer Roy Matthews leads this workshop in successfully capturing London’s hidden natural landscape. Comprising a practical session followed by a critique, this workshop is designed for all abilities and camera types (although digital is preferred for immediate review).

Meet at the RA; 11am–5.30pm; £80/£65 reductions (incl. exhibition entry)

Centre Pompidou, Paris, designed by Richard Rogers RA and Renzo Piano Hon RA

AUSTR ALIA EVENING EVENT

AUSTR ALIA LUNCHTIME LECTURE

Painting for the Stage: Kenneth MacMillan and Sidney Nolan’s ‘Rite of Spring’

The Antipodean Dream

Fri 27 Sep Fifty years on, Kenneth MacMillan’s choice of Sidney Nolan as the designer for his ‘Rite of Spring’ has proved to be extraordinary and enduring. Deborah MacMillan and Clement Crisp discuss how a painter used to working in two dimensions came to terms with a third.

Reynolds Room; 6.30–7.30pm; £16/£7 reductions (incl. exhibition entry) £12 (event only) AUSTR ALIA LUNCHTIME LECTURE

Mon 7 Oct Imants Tillers, exhibition artist.

Reynolds Room; 1–2pm; free (seats must be reserved online or by telephone) RICHARD ROGERS EVENING EVENT What Next For Architecture?

Fri 11 Oct An evening of talks presenting a variety of views on the possibilities for architecture over the next 80 years.

Gallery X, Burlington Gardens; 7–8.30pm; free with an exhibition ticket (no booking required)

Land and Landscape: The Colonial Encounter

AUSTR ALIA ACCESS EVENT

Mon 30 Sep Ron Radford, Director, National Gallery of Australia.

Reynolds Room; 1–2pm; free (seats must be reserved online or by telephone)

Fri 18 Oct An event for deaf, deafened and hard of hearing visitors – Francesca Herrick talks about the ‘Australia’ exhibition with Speech to Text Captioning and BSL Interpretation.

Reynolds Room; 6–7pm; £3 (incl. exhibition entry); deaf hosts support this event

October

InteRAct at the RA

RICHARD ROGERS EVENING EVENT

RICHARD ROGERS EVENING EVENT

Designing Cities

Richard Rogers RA and Renzo Piano with Alan Rusbridger

Shaun Gladwell: Artist Talk

Fri 4 Oct Richard Rogers RA and Renzo Piano Hon RA reminisce with Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger on their famous collaboration, the Centre Georges Pompidou (above), and reflect on the possibilities of architecture.

Royal Institution, Albemarle Street, W1; 6.30–8pm; SOLD OUT

Sat 26 Oct Internationally acclaimed Australian contemporary artist Shaun Gladwell discusses his video ‘performance landscapes,’ which often explore the dynamic between people, the rural or urban spaces they occupy, and extreme sports.

Reynolds Room; 3–4pm; £7

Mon 23 Sep A panel of key urban thinkers and figures involved in the shaping of cities discuss how architecture can help create cities that are great places to live, work and play, and reflect on the proposal, ‘If architects ran cities, would they be better places to live?’

Royal Institution, Albemarle Street, W1; 6.30–8pm; £12/£6 reductions

AUSTR ALIA AFTERNOON EVENT

P H OTO K ATS U H IS A K I DA

MEXICO ACCESS EVENT

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N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY O F AUS T R A L I A , CA N B ER R A / P U R CH AS ED T H R O U GH T H E M AS T ER P I ECES F O R T H E N AT I O N F U N D, 2012 /© ES TAT E O F T H E A R T IS T L I CENS ED BY A B O R I GI N A L A R T IS TS AGEN CY LT D

How to book Public Events and Lectures

AUSTR ALIA ACCESS EVENT InTouch at the RA

Mon 28 Oct An event for blind and visually impaired visitors – an audio described tour of the ‘Australia’ exhibition, followed by a multi-sensory handling session.

Main Galleries; 9–11am; £3 (incl. refreshments); volunteer support provided

N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY O F AUS T R A L I A , CA N B ER R A / P U R CH AS ED T H R O U GH T H E M AS T ER P I ECES F O R T H E N AT I O N F U N D, 2012 /© ES TAT E O F T H E A R T IS T L I CENS ED BY A B O R I GI N A L A R T IS TS AGEN CY LT D

P H OTO K ATS U H IS A K I DA

R A BOOK CLUB

Families

Royal Academy Talks

FAMILY STUDIO SERIES These free drop-in family workshops are supported by Jeanne and William Callanan. Pop in anytime and get creative

New Friends Welcome Tours

2pm first Sunday of the month.

Curators’ Gallery Talks on collection displays are at 3.30pm on the first Tuesday of every month.

Wonder Wall

Royal Academy Tours

Evie Wyld: ‘After the Fire, a Still Small Voice’

Sun 15 Sep (11am–2pm)

Mon 28 Oct Celebrated author Evie Wyld leads a discussion of her award-winning first novel. Set in the unforgiving landscape of eastern Australia, her book tackles the inescapability of the past, the ineffable ties of family, and the wars fought by fathers and sons.

The Saloon; 11am–12.30pm; £10 (incl. tea/ coffee). In association with Allen & Unwin.

Sun 20 Oct (11am–3pm) No booking required. Suitable for all ages.

1pm Tue to Fri; 3pm Wed to Fri; 11.30am Sat. Tours are free and last one hour, meet in the Entrance Hall.

Sheepish Shenanigans

Australia Family Workshops

Tue 29 and Thur 31 Oct Explore the art of landscape, as seen in the ‘Australia’ exhibition, in a workshop comprising an interactive slide talk, a visit to the exhibition and a hands-on session.

Learning Studio; 10.15am–1pm; £10 adults/£5 RA Friends/£3 children 6+ yrs; booking essential on 020 7300 5995 or online

November AUSTR ALIA FOCUS DAY Australian Identity

Fri 1 Nov This event considers the representation and reinvention of Australian identity through Australian film, art, cultural legend, television, design and cuisine.

Further details are available on the RA website. Supported by the Government of Victoria, Australia.

Reynolds Room; 1–5.30pm; £35/£20 reductions (incl. exhibition entry) AUSTR ALIA ACCESS EVENT InMotion at the RA

Mon 4 Nov An event for wheelchair users and mobility impaired visitors – an introductory tour of the ‘Australia’ exhibition, followed by coffee and conversation in the Saloon.

Main Galleries; 9–11am; £3; volunteer support provided

Kundaagi – Red Plains Kangaroo, 1962,

by Yirawala

DAUMIER EVENING EVENT Honoré Daumier and Quentin Blake: Artists of Modern Life

Fri 8 Nov The illustrator (and occasional lithographer) Quentin Blake considers the significance of Daumier’s work in journalism, in conversation with arts educator Ghislaine Kenyon.

Reynolds Room; 6.30–7.30pm; £16/£7 reductions (incl. exhibition entry) £12 (event only) DAUMIER LUNCHTIME LECTURE Daumier: The Curators’ View

AUSTR ALIA LUNCHTIME LECTURE

Mon 11 Nov Ann Dumas and Catherine Lampert, exhibition curators.

Reynolds Room; 1–2pm; free (seats must be reserved online or by telephone)

A Tale of Two Countries: Australian Art in the UK

BILL WOODROW ACCESS EVENT

Mon 4 Nov Dr Sarah Scott, Australian National University.

Reynolds Room; 1–2pm; free (seats must be reserved online or by telephone) AUSTR ALIA EVENING EVENT

InteRAct at the RA – BSL

Fri 15 Nov An event for deaf, deafened and hard of hearing visitors – an interactive BSL talk on the ‘Bill Woodrow’ exhibition.

Burlington Gardens; 6–7pm; £3 (incl. exhibition entry); deaf hosts support event

Christian Thompson: Artist Talk

Thur 7 Nov Australia-born artist Christian Thompson discusses the notion of landscape in his work featured in ‘Australia’, his childhood in the Australian outback, and the inspiration for his multidisciplinary practice while based in the UK. The Hospital Club, 24 Endell Street, WC2H 9HQ; 6.30–7.30pm; £16/£7 reductions (incl. exhibition entry) £12 (event only)

AUSTR ALIA EVENING EVENT Tim Winton: The Island Seen and Felt; Some Thoughts about Landscape

Fri 15 Nov Author Tim Winton explores his belief that ‘Australia the place is constantly overshadowed by Australia the national idea. Undoubtedly the nation and its projects have shaped my education and my prospects, but the degree to which geography, distance and weather have moulded my sensory palate,

ONE-TO-ONE ACCESS TOURS Tours for wheelchair users and audiodescriptive talks about our exhibitions and the permanent collection.

Call 020 7300 5732 for details

my imagination and expectations is substantial.’

Reynolds Room; 6.30–7.30pm; £16/£7 reductions (incl. exhibition entry) £12 (event only) DAUMIER LUNCHTIME LECTURE Daumier in his Century

Mon 18 Nov Prof. Robert Gildea, Oxford University.

Reynolds Room; 1–2pm; free (seats must be reserved online or by telephone) ACCESS EVENT InPractice at the RA

Fri 22 Nov A space for artists to share and celebrate their art practice. If you are an artist and would like to share your work or just someone who’d like to support and appreciate others then come along.

Those wanting to present work should contact access@royalacademy.org.uk Learning Studio; 6–8pm; free DAUMIER EVENING EVENT The Satirical Image: From Daumier to Private Eye

Fri 22 Nov What is the role of political satire in contemporary Britain? Tony Rushton (former Art Director of Private Eye) and exhibition curator Ann Dumas explore satirical imagery from 19th-century France to 21st-century Britain.

Reynolds Room; 6.30–7.30pm; £16/£7 reductions (incl. exhibition entry) £12 (event only)

EXHIBITION TOURS 45-minute introductory tours, free with an exhibition ticket: Mexico: A Revolution in Art (1910–1940)

2.30pm Tue, 7pm Fri (until 20 Sep) Australia

2.30pm Wed, 7pm Fri (25 Sep–29 Nov) Richard Rogers RA: Inside Out

2.30pm Thur (until 3 Oct) Daumier (1808–1879): Visions of Paris

2.30pm Tue, 7pm Fri (29 Oct–17 Jan) EXHIBITION SPOTLIGHT TALKS 10-minute talks on individual works from current exhibitions, free with an exhibition ticket.

3pm on Thursdays FOUND AT THE R A An Evening Curated by Students from University of the Arts, London

Fri 22 Nov Students take over the galleries, using themes and ideas from the ‘Bill Woodrow’ exhibition to create interventions, sculptures and displays throughout the evening. You are invited to participate in this project as you reconsider and re-utilise found, everyday objects.

Burlington Gardens; 6.30–9.30pm; free entry; admission to exhibition ‘Bill Woodrow’ requires a ticket AUSTR ALIA LUNCHTIME LECTURE Albert Namatjira: Magic Windows into the Central Australian Desert

Mon 25 Nov Scott Rankin (writer/director), Trevor Jamieson (actor) and Big hART. Reynolds Room; 1–2pm; free (seats must be reserved online or by telephone) DAUMIER LIFE DR AWING WORKSHOP Life Drawing: Light and Shadow

Sat 30 Nov Francis Bowyer, life drawing tutor at the RA, leads a drawing workshop that focuses on contrasts of light to create a sense of drama using the figure. The class is designed for those with previous experience of life drawing.

RA Schools; 10.30am–5.30pm; £85/£60 reductions (price incl. exhibition entry)

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Academy Friends Events & Excursions How to book Friends Events and Excursions ●

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These events are generally very popular. We recommend you post your booking form in as soon as you receive the magazine. Remaining tickets will be sold online and over the phone from 16 September.

Postal bookings open now. Post your booking form to ‘Events & Lectures’, or fax 020 7300 8013.

Friends may purchase a guest ticket to Friends Events.

Friends Events booking forms are balloted; please list your choices in preference order.

When an event is running on more than one day and/or time and you forget to choose a time, we will select one for you.

Excursion coach return times are approximate.

There is no discount if you choose to drive instead of travelling by coach.

For Friends membership enquiries, call 020 7300 5664 or visit www.royalacademy.org.uk/friends For any queries or special requirements please call 0207 300 5839.

and learn about the £100 million restoration completed in 1997.

3–4.15pm; £20; King Charles St, SW1 London Oratory

Fris 4 and 25 Oct The Oratory of St Philip Neri, more commonly called the Brompton Oratory, was built between 1878 and 1896 by architect Herbert Gribble. The church was designed in a deliberately exuberant Italian style to offer an example to patrons who were unable to see an Italian church for themselves. On our guided tour we learn about the church’s baroque features and see a range of monuments and paintings, including the only known religious painting by Rex Whistler.

2.30–3.30pm; £15; Brompton Road, SW7 The Lansdowne Club

Island Hall and Peterborough Cathedral

Tue 1 Oct Island Hall is an elegant riverside mansion built in the 1740s for John Jackson, Receiver-General for Huntingdon. The house was purchased and restored by interior designer Christopher Vane Percy in 1983 and he and his family continue to live in the house today. In the afternoon we visit Peterborough Cathedral (below), one of the most important 12th-century buildings in England to have remained largely intact. The present building was begun in 1118 with the wooden ceiling completed in 1250; it is one of only four

wooden ceilings of this period to survive in the whole of Europe.

9am–7pm; £75 (incl. coach, coffee, lunch, tea) Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Weds 2 Oct and 27 Nov Completed in 1868, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was designed

by George Gilbert Scott after he successfully won the commission in a public competition. Scott originally planned a gothic building, but was forced to change his designs after Lord Palmerston, the then Foreign Secretary, insisted on a classical style. We privately tour the principal rooms of the building

Mons 7 and 14 Oct and 11 Nov Now a private members’ club, Lansdowne House has a fascinating history. Curator and art historian Pamela Campbell-Johnston charts the journey of this Robert Adam building, from its creation in 1763 as a private house, through 1930s Art Deco additions to the ongoing 21st-century refurbishment programme. Highlights include the stunning Adam ballroom, Art Deco swimming pool, and new artworks that reinforce and reflect the important historical and contemporary identity of the building.

10–11.30am; £25 (incl. coffee); 9 Fitzmaurice Place, W1

Lincoln’s Inn

Wed 16 and Mon 28 Oct The Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn is one of the four Inns of Court.

During our private tour, Friends visit the Old Hall, Chapel and Great Hall.

We learn about the wonderful collection of art, including an important fresco by G.F. Watts; works by William Hogarth and Norman Hepple; and portraits

by Reynolds and Sargent.

2.30–4pm; £23 (incl. tea); meet at Main Gate, Serle St, WC2 Wren Churches

Tue 22 Oct and Wed 20 Nov Architectural historian Roger White leads this walking tour of a selection of Wren churches in the City of London. We visit a number of churches, including St Mary Aldermary, St Margaret Lothbury and St Vedast.

10.30am–4pm; £70 (incl. coffee, lunch); meet at portico of St Paul’s Cathedral, EC4 Freemasons’ Hall

Thurs 24 and 31 Oct Freemasons’ Hall has been the centre of English freemasonry for 230 years.

The current building was completed in 1933 and designed by H.V. Ashley and F. Winton Newman. Our tour includes the Grand Temple and ceremonial areas, as well as the library and the museum, which contains an extensive collection of items belonging to famous Freemasons such as Winston Churchill and Edward VII. 11am–12pm; £15; 60 Great Queen Street, WC2

The Honorable Company of Master Mariners

Peterborough Cathedral (see Tue 1 Oct)

Mons 4 and 18 Nov Established in 1926 and granted livery status in 1932, Master Mariners was the first ‘modern’ livery company to be welcomed into the City of London in over 200 years. By special arrangement, Commodore Angus Menzies leads our

P H OTO M AT T H E W R O B ER TS

Tue 29 Oct Established in the late 1800s by British social reformer Emma Cons, this adult education centre was founded as the Royal Victoria Coffee and Music Hall and was originally set up to offer ‘morally decent entertainment at affordable prices’. Hosting ‘penny lectures’ on the site that is now the Old Vic Theatre, Morley College moved to its present location in 1924 and was rebuilt in 1958 following extensive bomb damage. A main feature of this new building was the artwork, including murals by John Piper and Edward Bawden; and works by Bridget Riley, Maggi Hambling, Ruskin Spear and Oskar Kokoschka. Vice Principal Nick Rampley leads our private tour.

2.30–4pm; £20; meet at main entrance Morley College, 61 Westminster Bridge Rd, SE1

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CAS A M I L À (L A P ED R ER A), B A R CELO N A

Morley College Art Collection

Friends Worldwide Art Tours

Events booking form For Friends Events & Excursions, please list your event choices in preference order.

Number Event Date of Tickets Cost

Barcelona: Gaudí’s Masterworks

20 to 24 November 2013 Led by art historian Colin Bailey, this tour concentrates on the history, technical innovations and influence of Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926), one of the world’s most celebrated architects, and a central figure of Catalan Modernism. Based in Barcelona, we explore a range of Gaudí buildings including Casa Calvet, Güell Palace and the Sagrada Família.

Please call 020 7873 5013 or visit www.coxandkings.co.uk/ra tour of the Company’s floating Livery Hall, HQS Wellington, the only ship surviving of those on convoy duty in the Atlantic during the Second World War. We learn about the history of the Master Mariners and view their collection of marine paintings, artefacts, and gold and silver plates.

10.45am–12pm; £20 (incl. coffee); directions on ticket. This visit includes narrow steps and uneven surfaces. Not recommended for anyone unsteady on their feet

Total Cost £

Reductions are available for students, jobseekers and people with disabilities with recognised proof of status. Please indicate your status if relevant 18 Stafford Terrace

Mon 25 Nov and Thur 5 Dec We privately tour 18 Stafford Terrace, a unique example of a late Victorian townhouse. Home to the cartoonist Edward Linley Sambourne and his family from 1874, the house survives with almost all of its furniture and fittings intact, including William Morris wallpaper, elaborate stained glass and many of Sambourne’s original drawings.

11am–12.45pm; £18; meet at 18 Stafford Terrace, W8

The Reform Club

Tue 5 and Thur 14 Nov Widely regarded as one of the finest Victorian buildings in the country, this palatial masterpiece by Charles Barry has remained largely unchanged since it opened in 1841. We tour the library, drawing room and card room and learn about the flamboyant interiors, which have been inspired by Italian Renaissance architecture and feature a magnificent atrium, gilded ceilings and multi-coloured mosaic floor.

We also view a special exhibition of portraits by Eyre Crowe with curator Dr Peter Urbach.

10.30–11.45am; £23 (incl. coffee); 104 Pall Mall, SW1

CAS A M I L À (L A P ED R ER A), B A R CELO N A

P H OTO M AT T H E W R O B ER TS

The Munnings Collection and Gainsborough’s House

Thur 7 Nov Complementing the release of the film Summer in February, we visit Castle House, the home of Alfred Munnings from 1919 until his death in 1959.

The house is a mixture of Tudor and Georgian architecture, and we explore the extensive collection of Munnings’ work. We also visit Gainsborough’s House, where the artist was born in 1727. The house is home to a range of Gainsborough’s work, from early portraits and landscapes to later works from his London period. We also see memorabilia including his studio cabinet, paint scraper and pocket watch.

9am–7pm; £75 (incl. coach, coffee, lunch, tea)

The Jockey Club Rooms and One Myddleton Place, Cambs

Tue 3 Dec The Jockey Club Rooms have been at the heart of British horseracing for over 250 years. We tour the historic rooms and explore the unique art collection with works by many key figures in British equestrian painting, including George Stubbs and Alfred Munnings.

After lunch we visit One Myddleton Place, a medieval house in Saffron Waldon, which is not normally open to the public. The house is a combination of three medieval buildings dating from 1497 and after our tour with the owners, we finish with a traditional Christmas tea of mulled wine and mince pies.

9am–7pm; £80 (incl. coach, coffee, lunch, gls wine, Christmas tea) Friends Christmas Carol Concert

Tue 10 Dec Friends are invited to join our Christmas celebrations with a reception in the John Madejski Fine Rooms, followed by a candlelit carol service in the church of St James’s. We are delighted to have once again Vivamus, an exhilarating London-based chamber choir perform for us. The programme also includes traditional carols and festive readings by Royal Academicians and special guests.

Reception 6.30–7.30pm, service 7.45– 8.45pm; £25 (incl. drinks reception and mince pies) OR £15 (concert only)

Student

Jobseeker

Disabled

Please note that reductions are not available for Friends Events & Excursions Please indicate any dietary requirements where relevant Please debit my credit/charge card number (we no longer accept cheques) Expiry date

Issue number/start date (Switch only)

Signature

First name Surname Address

Postcode Daytime telephone Friends Membership no.

Email address

Please indicate if you would like to receive event and lecture information (Your details will not be passed on to a third party) by post or by email The Royal Academy reserves the right to refuse admission to any event

● Some of the venues we visit occasionally offer general public tours. By purchasing a ticket through the RA, you are supporting the Friends’ Events programme and other Learning initiatives and we are grateful for your patronage. ● There is a handling charge of £5 for all refunds. We regret that refunds cannot be made less than 14 days before an event.

● All events are correct at time of publication but are subject to change without notice. ● Send or fax your completed form to the booking address: Events & Lectures Learning Department Royal Academy of Arts Piccadilly London W1J 0BD Fax booking line: 020 7300 8013

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Restaurant & Shopping Guide The RA Magazine’s directory of places to eat and shop around the Academy. This is an advertisement feature.

To advertise please call Janet Durbin on 01625 583180 or email classified@royalacademy.org.uk 2

RESTAURANTS SHOPS

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28 Upper Grosvenor Street W1, 020 7499 9943 www.corrigansmayfair.com

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6 CORRIGAN’S MAYFAIR Corrigan’s Mayfair offers the quintessential lunch time experience, spend the day in elegance and style; all for a mere £25 for 2 courses on our market menu. Nip in before an exhibition or even better, join us afterwards for a long and well deserved lunch. Available Monday to Friday, 12-3pm.

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core cult following, stylish interiors, chattering atmosphere and mouth watering food, Busaba provides London with a youthful yet sophisticated venue and one of the city’s hottest tables.

Restaurants 1 AL DUCA Serving modern Italian cuisine, Al Duca focuses heavily on bringing out the very best elements of what is one of the most acclaimed gastronomic regions of the world. The menu at Al Duca emphasises the use of simple fresh ingredients skilfully combined to bring out the best of a wide range of traditional dishes offered both in classic style and with a new twist, all following Pulze’s ethos to offer reasonably priced good Italian food.

Now serving breakfast.

4-5 Duke of York Street SW1 020 7839 3090 www.alduca-restaurant.co.uk

35 Panton Street SW1 020 7930 0088, www.busaba.com

3 BENTLEY’S OYSTER BAR AND GRILL Hidden just around the corner from the RA, a local resting place for weary art lovers and gourmands for over 97 years. Trading from Midday to Midnight, Champagne and native oysters, traditional fish and chips or for those who care not for the mollusc beautiful lamb or a simple slab of steak.

A best of British menu, designed by the incorrigible, controversial and twice Michelin awarded Chef Richard Corrigan.

11-15 Swallow Street W1 020 7734 4756 www.bentleys.org

2 BELLAMY’S RESTAURANT & OYSTER BAR Situated in central Mayfair next to Bond Street, Bellamy’s offers a classic French brasserie menu with an affordable famous name wine list.

Patron mange ici. Open for Lunch Mon to Fri. Open for Dinner Mon to Sat.

18/18a Bruton Place W1 020 7491 2727 www.bellamysrestaurant.co.uk

7 CUT AT 45 PARK LANE CUT at 45 Park Lane is internationallyacclaimed chef Wolfgang Puck’s first restaurant in Europe, a modern American steak restaurant serving exceptional food in a contemporary interior with impeccable service.

Delectable dishes range from prime dry and wet aged beef to succulent pan-roasted lobster, sautéed whole fresh fish and salads. The superb wine list features 600 wines including the largest selection of American wines in the UK. Breakfasts are another highlight or relax at weekends with brunch and custom-made Bloody Marys as you listen to live jazz.

45 Park Lane, Mayfair W1, 020 7493 4554 www.45parklane.com/CUTat45ParkLane

5 BUTLERS RESTAURANT Butlers home of “the best Dover Sole in London”. A warm and intimate restaurant offering elegant dining, delicious food and impeccable service. Located in the heart of London’s most exclusive district, Mayfair, near the Royal Academy it is as popular with local residents as it is with hotel guests. Offering British cuisine tempered with international touches of chef Ben Kelliher, to include a pre-theatre menu and traditional afternoon tea served daily.

35 Charles Street W1 020 7491 2622 www.chesterfieldmayfair.com

8 THE FOX CLUB Our Dining Room is one of London’s best-kept secrets and for those in the know, a lunchtime essential. Our menus offer refined excellence without being pretentious. The modern Eurpean menu changes on a weekly basis.

4 BUSABA EATHAI Busaba Eathai, conceived by acclaimed restaurateur Alan Yau, is a casual dining venue offering a single course eating experience devised to feed you with minimum fuss.The diverse yet simple menu offers a selection of authentic Thai salads, noodles, curries and stir-fries. Renowned for its

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The Fox Club now offers a delightful afternoon tea from 3-5pm. To avoid disappointment it is best to make a reservation.

46 Clarges Street W1, 020 7495 3656 www.foxclublondon.co.uk

FRANCO’S Open all day the personality of Franco’s evolves and provides a menu for all occasions. The restaurant has been serving the residents and visitors to St James’s for over 60 years. The day starts with full English and continental breakfast on offer. The à la carte lunch and dinner menus offer both classic and modern dishes from the north to south of Italy. The afternoon menu offers a full afternoon tea as well as salads and more hearty dishes for those that like a late lunch, while the pre-and post theatre menu offers exceptional value. Above all our relaxed and friendly service ensures there is always somebody to greet you with a smile.

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61 Jermyn Street SW1, 020 7499 2211 www.francoslondon.com 10 GETTI A modern Italian restaurant at the fast-paced heart of London’s West End, Getti Jermyn Street is an authentic Italian dining venue in London’s historic tailoring district, dedicated to offering a traditional and memorable Italian dining experience. A splendid destination for London locals and tourists alike, Getti Jermyn Street focuses on serving simple, regional dishes from mainland Italy. Private dining available.

of approximately 3,300 bins, which has won the Wine Spectator Grand Award every year since 2005, one of only three restaurants in the world to have achieved this. Special offer: 3-course set lunch and coffee, £25. Quote Royal Academy of Arts when booking. Open for lunch noon-2.30pm, Mon-Fri; dinner 6.30-11pm Mon-Sat. 27a Hay’s Mews W1, 020 7499 3331 www.greenhouserestaurant.co.uk

pieces by Tracey Emin RA and Bridget Riley.

Brown’s Hotel, Albemarle Street W1 020 7518 4004 www.hixmayfair.co.uk 14 HIX SOHO HIX Soho opened its doors to critical acclaim in 2009 and soon after won London’s Time Out Award for Best New Restaurant in 2010. The restaurant boasts Mark Hix’s signature dailychanging menu of seasonal British food, and an eclectic collection of mobiles and neons from celebrated British artists.

special menu each month, and Head Sommelier Michael Simms is on hand to recommend the perfect Italian wine.

Quiet confidence in the kitchen is complimented by warm, friendly and attentive service, whilst the stylish bar is a fashionable spot for a light lunch, an espresso or classic Negroni. Sartoria is open for lunch Monday to Friday and for dinner Monday to Saturday.

20 Savile Row W1, 020 7534 7000 www.sartoria-restaurant.co.uk

66-70 Brewer St W1 020 7292 3518 www.hixsoho.co.uk

12 GUSTOSO RISTORANTE & ENOTECA Home-style Italian dining room Ristorante Gustoso is found moments from Westminster Cathedral and Victoria Station. Quietly situated, pleasingly intimate, Gustoso is the ideal place to unwind after work, with friends or to enjoy a little romance. Cocktails are professionally served from the well stocked bar and the menu is based around the Italian classics, cooked using authentic ingredients to recipes passed down through the generations of Italians. There is an extensive wine list and an unrivalled collection of grappas.

Opening times : Mon-Thu: 12–3pm, 6.30–10.30pm Friday/Sat: 12–3pm, 6.30–11pm Sun: 12.30–9.30pm

35 Willow place SW1 0207 834 5778 www.ristorantegustoso.co.uk

15 MATSURI ST JAMES Matsuri St James’s was opened in 1993 and it will celebrate its 20th Anniversary in March 2013. When the restaurant opened in the heart of Mayfair, Matsuri St James’s introduced not only traditional Japanese food, such as Sushi and tempura, but also a new style of Japanese cuisine - Teppan-yaki and the art of “live cooking”.

Food and wines or sake tasting courses bring together the best possible ingredients that we select from the market, with a well-balanced list of wines, champagnes and sakes in order to maximise your dining experience, from aperitifs to starters to dessert.

15 Bury Street SW1 0207 839 1101 www.matsuri-restaurant.com

18 THE SQUARE With 22 years of service to London and 15 of those with two Michelin stars there is no finer pedigree to be found.

The Square offers one of the capitals true lunchtime bargains - world class cooking, often heralded as the best in London, in an elegant, spacious and contemporary setting yet devoid of pomp and ceremony. There is also a private dining room for up to 18 people.

The restaurant offers a set lunch menu Monday to Friday, 2 courses £32.50 and 3 courses £37.50; Sat set lunch menu 2 courses £35.00 and 3 courses £40.00 alongside our ALC at £90.00 and tasting menu at £115.00 with matching wines £185.00. Opening times: Monday to Saturday Lunches from 12–2.45pm, Monday to Thursday Dinner: 6.30–10pm Friday to Saturday Dinner: 6.30–10.30pm, Sunday Dinner: 6.30–9.30pm.

6-10 Bruton Street W1 020 7495 7100 www.squarerestaurant.com

16/17 Jermyn Street SW1 020 7734 7334 www.getti.com

11 THE GREENHOUSE The Greenhouse’ Executive Chef, Arnaud Bignon combines his traditional French training with contemporary techniques. He applies a philosophy of perfect harmony and balance to all his dishes, often playing with fresh and original flavour combinations. This is accompanied by an exceptional wine list

13 HIX MAYFAIR Situated close to the Royal Academy, this fashionable restaurant offers an outstanding menu of classic British dishes, using local seasonal ingredients.

Mark Hix and Lee Streeton offer a full a la carte menu alongside a special set lunch, pre-theatre and dinner menu of £27.50 for 2 courses and £32.50 for 3 courses. HIX Mayfair is also home to an amazing collection of British art including

16 RICHOUX A unique traditional restaurant open all day, serving coffee, all day breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, supper and dinner from 8am to 11pm daily.

172 Piccadilly W1, 020 7493 2204 www.richoux.co.uk 17 SARTORIA Sartoria is an elegant Milanese-style Italian restaurant located on the corner of Savile Row and New Burlington Street, behind the Royal Academy of Arts. Head Chef Lukas Pfaff creates refined yet uncomplicated Italian food and showcases a different regional

19 UMU Umu prides itself on the provenance and integrity of ingredients, serving timeless Japanese cuisine in the heart of Mayfair. Michelin-starred Chef, Yoshinori Ishii, has designed an innovative menu with both the traditional Japanese restaurant goer and the contemporary Japanese food lover in mind. The wine list consists of over 500 references, and there are also 150 different types of sake available. Enjoy

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a Michelin-starred lunch from £25 with a selection of seasonal shokado bento boxes. Lunch 12–2.30pm (Mon-Fri) Dinner 6–11pm (Mon-Sat)

12–21:30 (Last order) Mon to Sat. 3 Piccadilly Place W1, 020 7287 6622 www.yoshino.net

14-16 Bruton Place W1, 020 7499 8881 www.umurestaurant.com

Shopping 20 THE WOLSELEY A café-restaurant in the grand European tradition and located just a few minutes’ walk from The Royal Academy, The Wolseley is open all day from 7am for breakfast right through until midnight.

Its all-day menu means it is possible to eat formally or casually at any time, whether a full three course meal or just a coffee and cake. Whilst booking in advance is advised, tables are always held back for walk-ins on the day.

160 Piccadilly W1, 020 7499 6996 www.thewolseley.com

1 BERRY BROS. & RUDD A stone’s throw from the Royal Academy, Britain’s oldest wine merchant Berry Bros. & Rudd offers the finest drinking wines in a unique historical setting dating back more than 300 years. From super premium spirits to artisan Champagnes from lesser known houses and the finest red and white wines from around the globe, our experts are on hand to help you make an excellent selection whatever your drinking requirements. Or just take a visit to see the wonderful venue and step back in history to 1698. Open Monday to Friday 10-6 and Saturday 10-5. For more information visit www. bbr.com/london or call 0203 301 1576

3 St James’s Street SW1 020 3301 1576 www.bbr.com/london

21 WILTONS Established in 1742, Wiltons enjoys a reputation as the epitome of fine English dining in London. The atmosphere is perfectly matched with immaculately prepared fish, shellfish, game and meat.

Choose from an exclusive wine list.

Open for lunch and dinner, Monday to Friday. To secure your reservation please quote RA Magazine.

55 Jermyn Street SW1 020 7629 9955 www.wiltons.co.uk

YOSHINO Restaurant Yoshino is serving Healthy, Beautiful, Original authentic and innovative Japanese food. Situated at 3 Piccadilly Place where it is the only restaurant on this alleyway and close to the RA. There is no surprise that Yoshino continues to receive the highest accolades for its products and standards and our reputation for fresh, quality food is second to none. Open from 22

2 DR HARRIS Situated in St. James’s Street for over two hundred years, our family owned business holds the warrant to HRH The Prince of Wales and Her Majesty The Queen.

We are renowned for our range of quality products for men and women including soaps, colognes, bath and shaving preparations. The majority of products are still produced by traditional methods, being hand-made and packed in our own premises in London.

35 BURY STREET, LONDON, SW1Y 6AY

35 Bury Street SW1 Now open also at 52 Piccadilly W1 020 7930 3915 www.drharris.co.uk

3 EMMETT SHIRTS Founded in 1992 by tailor Robert Emmett, some say Emmett Shirts are one of London’s best kept secrets - with only twenty – five shirts made in any one material and over four hundred designs to choose from each season, there is a shirt to suit all tastes.

Both ready to wear and a made to measure service are available. If you appreciate superior quality and are looking for a degree of exclusivity then visit Emmett Shirts at Jermyn Street, near Piccadilly. Shops also situated on the Kings Road and Eldon Street.

112A Jermyn Street SW1 020 7925 1299 www.emmettlondon.com

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4 FLORIS ‘The Art of Fragrance’. Issuing the family’s most prestigious range of perfumes the Private Collection is exclusively produced in small batches.

Inspired by people and events past and present, Floris’ in-house perfumer artfully composes each unique fragrance by combining exquisite ingredients sourced from around the world. Some have previously been created as private commissions for customers while others have been commissioned by the Floris family to mark a celebration.

89 Jermyn Street SW1, 020 7930 2885 Mail Order: 0845 702 3239 www.florislondon.com

them and terrified them.

Subscribe now for just £32 and receive Granta 124: Travel as a free gift.

Visit granta. com/subscribe and enter the promotion code “WT” to take advantage of this offer. www.granta.com/subscribe 6 GIEVES & HAWKES Gieves & Hawkes has been located at No. 1 Savile Row, a short stroll from Burlington House, for over 100 years. With a tradition of military and fine bespoke handwork, the firm has enjoyed the continuous patronage of royal families both at home and abroad over three centuries. Today No 1 Savile Row houses the company’s bespoke workshops, Private Tailoring suites and flagship ‘ready to wear’ store selling stylish British menswear. Do pay us a visit.

No.1 Savile Row W1, 020 7432 6403 www.gievesandhawkes.com

7 HILDITCH & KEY 100 Years of Excellence. Hilditch & Key has long been recognised as London’s leading Jermyn Street shirt maker with a reputation, among the discerning, for the finest gentlemens’ shirts, knitwear and clothing as well as an increasingly popular ladies shirt and knitwear collection.

37 & 73 Jermyn Street SW1 020 7734 4707 & 020 7930 5336 www.hilditchandkey.co.uk

5 GRANTA Granta 124: Travel. From the Amazon to rural China, west Texas to the caves that lurk beneath the Peak District, this issue of Granta takes you out of your chair and out into the world.

Haruki Murakami goes home to Kobe, Teju Cole meditates on danger in Laos and Lina Wolff imagines a woman adrift in Madrid. Here are eighteen collisions between people and the places that have made them, shaped

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8 LA MAISON DU CHOCOLAT Passion, rigour and savoir-faire have been the driving force of the work, creation and excellence of La Maison du Chocolat, founded in 1977 by Robert Linxe in France. La Maison du Chocolat is the place to find chocolate in all its forms; chocolate bonbons, pastries, éclairs, macaroons with ganache and hot chocolate,all crafted in a spirit of refinement and perfect balance of flavours.

11 MATTHEW FOSTER Established in Mayfair since 1987, in addition to our collection of Art Deco and period jewellery we now offer a selection of Art Deco period Objets d’Art, sculpture, mirrors and lighting.

Website to be launched in May 2012.

Our jewellery and Objets d’Art collection covers a wide price range suitable for all occasions, each piece carefully selected for its quality and style.

25 Burlington Arcade W1, 020 7629 4977 www.matthew-foster.com

46 Piccadilly W1, 020 7287 8500 www.lamaisonduchocolat.co.uk 9 LOCK & CO. Supplies a wide range of exceptional quality ladies’ and gentlemen’s headwear, expert hat advice and fitting service. New winter styles are now available. For those unable to visit our shop, we provide a mail order service visit www.lockhatters.co.uk or ask for our new catalogue .

6 St James’s Street SW1 020 7930 8874, www.lockhatters.co.uk

Art Deco Period “Tiger”

By C. Charles “Bronze d’art” Alloy Portor Marble Base.

French Circa 1920s 12 N. PEAL CASHMERE Modern contemporary design in cashmere knitwear. N.Peal is well known for the best quality cashmere, its beautifully crafted garments, use of texture and contemporary designs for men and women. N.Peal is available from No.37 The Burlington Arcade and 149A Sloane Street. We welcome you to come and discover the difference.

37 Burlington Arcade W1 / 149A Sloane Sreet SW1, 020 7499 6485 www.npeal.com

Amsterdam & The Hague F o u r 10 LONDON GLASSBLOWING STUDIO AND GALLERY Peter Layton’s London Glassblowing is a hot-glass studio focused on the creation and display of contemporary glass art. It is one of Europe’s leading glassmaking workshops, renowned for its particular flair for the use of colour, form and texture. Producing individual pieces of decorative glass in sculptural and functional forms, the studio’s philosophy is that each object is unique and signed by the artist. Visitors will experience the magic of an ancient craft with the opportunity to purchase something of great beauty. Open: Monday to Saturday 10am–6pm info@londonglassblowing.co.uk

62–66 Bermondsey Street, SE1 020 7403 2800 www.londonglassblowing.co.uk

13 RA SHOP The RA shops sell an exclusive range of gifts designed in collaboration with Royal Academicians and specially commissioned gifts inspired by current exhibitions. The RA Studio Shop (Royal Academy 6 Burlington Gardens) specialises in limited edition gifts and prints by Royal Academicians and is situated on the right-hand side of the entrance. RA shops are open 10am5.45pm daily and until 9.45pm on Friday.

Pictured is a limited edition Terry Frost plate featuring Red, Black and White 1967. A large selection of items are also available in our online shop –

www.royalacademy.org.uk/shop and via Mail Order by calling Freephone 0800 6346341 (Mon-Fri, 9.30am-5.00pm).

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E s c o r t e d

H o l i d a y s

Amsterdam has regained its position as one of the leading art capitals of the world with the reopening this year of the Van Gogh Museum, Stedelijk Museum and the spectacular Rijksmuseum.

We will be visiting all three collections in the company of an expert lecturer on our three new escorted tours. Staying at the 4* NH Museums Quarter Hotel in the centre of Amsterdam, we will also visit the Hague for a day to see a major exhibition of works by Vermeer, Rembrandt and Van Dyck at the Gemeentemuseum.

Price from £1,154 for four nights including flights, accommodation with breakfast, two dinners, a full programme of sightseeing and the services of the Kirker Tour Lecturer.

Departs 14 November 2013, 20 March & 29 August 2014.

Speak to an expert or request a brochure:

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Classified The RA Magazine is published quarterly and has a circulation of 100,000 making it the most widely read art magazine in the country. To advertise in this section please contact Janet Durbin on 01625 583180

Art Services WE PAY YOU INSTANTLY FOR YOUR ANTIQUES Why wait many months and lose money in high auction commision and charges?

Works of Art, Sculpture, Silver, Jewellery, Tribal and Scientific objects,Walking sticks, Historical Medals, Portrait miniatures particularly sought.

Auction Reserves Matched

Black Mountains Wales Nr Hay-on-Wye Painting, drawing, life classes, landscape, 2-3 day courses. Beautiful surroundings, very spacious studio. Excellent food www.artcourseswales.com tel 01874 711 212

Saturday Life Classes All Media, all levels with professional tutoring Long and short poses Experienced portfolio advice for students Elianor Jonzen tel: 020 7221 4525

Phone 07751 790646 Straiton Taylor Fine Art 8 Duke Street, St. James’s, London SW1Y 6BL

By Appointment

Established 37 years

Bespoke Artists Canvases

Canvases & Stretcher Bars Made to Measure Professional Quality Hardwood Stretchers 10oz, 12oz, Superfine and Claessens Linen Fabrics Online Ordering & National Delivery

JULIAN COX ARBS

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INK DRAWINGS

www.juliancoxartist.co.uk e@juliancoxartist.co.uk m. 07814 556936

Artefact Picture Framers Bespoke & Conservation Framing, Art & Frame Restoration, Canvas Stretching, Bespoke Mirrors, Framing of Tapestries & 3D objects (medals, football shirts etc.) Installation and Hanging, 36 Windmill Street. London

PROFESSIONAL ARTIST SEEKS agent to exhibit and promote figurative paintings.

TEL: 020 8346 7011 www.mari-artist.co.uk

Commission Art Portraits, house portraits and animals

by experienced artist, reasonable fees.

John Wilkinson. R.A.S., R.B.A.

Courses

Tel: 01425 656048

International School of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture in Umbria,

House Portraits in Watercolour

by established artist Please contact Tim Rose email tim@timrose.co.uk www.timrose.co.uk Tel 0114 255 2171

Original hand drawings

W1T 2JT email: artefact@xln.co.uk www.artefactlondon.co.uk T: 020 7580 4878.

The perfect present

Italy. Studio, residency, and continuing education programmes for artists in a beautiful medieval Italian hill town, halfway between Rome and Florence.

Day-trips to Rome, Florence, Siena, Assisi, and Arezzo. The ideal artist’s community in a setting of breathtaking beauty. International School of Painting, Drawing, & Sculpture in Umbria, Italy 06057 Montecastello di Vibio (PG) Italy Tel/Fax +39 075-878 0072. Email: info@giotto.us, Web: www.giotto.us

Fine Art Courses & Private Tuition for 9 yrs to Adults

Your house, church, university etc.

www.sophiewootton.co.uk Tel: 020 7652 1762

Scholarship preparation, GCSE & A Level booster tuition Located on idyllic farm in North Oxon Accommodation available

www.buttermilkartschool.co.uk Tel: 07549 157855

An exciting range of art courses for all abilities in relaxed surroundings.

See our website for more details or contact us to receive a brochure.

New House Farm Barns, Ford Road, Arundel BN18 0EF. Tel: 01243 558880 office@themillstudio.com www.themillstudio.com

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Classified Dillington House, Somerset The Big Art Weekend 29 November – 1 December

Presentations, debate & documentaries in fantastic surroundings, first class accommodation & marvellous food Check it out on www.dillington.com Half Day Art History Courses special themes followed on Mondays am/pm in informal atmosphere in south west London. Lectures with slides by highly qualified speakers and guided visits.

Tel: 020 8788 6910.

Draw Cartoons and Caricatures!

CD-ROM and downloadable course by top professional. www.cartoonworld.org/courses

Weekend Art Courses with Nicola Slattery

learn to paint with acrylic, discover printmaking, create art from imagination.

Telephone: 01986 788853 www.nicolaslattery.com

L Learn the AArtt off th Fine Art Printmaking curwenprintstudy.co.uk 01223 892380 enquiries@curwenprintstudy.co.uk

Arts Circle

Offers talks, courses, readings and screenings around England Coming Soon:

The Big Blue (The Arts of Cornwall) A short course focusing on the artists & writers magnetised to the beautiful area around St Ives, including Laura Knight, Alfred Munnings, Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron, Dylan Thomas, D.H. Lawrence & Barbara Hepworth For more details see www.artscircle.net Or email info@artscircle.net

For Sale TUSCANY 17thC stone house 1hr Florence fully renovated £90,000 parkergore@btopenworld.com SPAIN: RONDA. Magnificent 17/18th.

Century Townhouse. Centre old City (opposite Palace). Beautiful private home, Boutique Hotel or Art Centre. 6 Beds. 4 Rec. Moorish Patio. Approx. 1 hour coast/Malaga Airport. Mainline train Madrid, Granada. 950,000 euros.

Approx. 810,000 pounds ono.

00 34 952 879616, 00 34 639 966682, www.rondatownhouse.co.uk blosseymoore@gmail.com Brittany Watermill, small, unique, with lake. Furnished, ready to move into. £140,000. www.moulinenbretagne.com 01223 243782

Foundries FINE ART FOUNDRY LTD

Fine Art Bronze Casting Welding – Patina Specialists Ceramic Shell Contact: AB or Jerry 1 Fawe Street, London E14 6PD Tel 020 7515 8052 Fax 020 7987 7339

Galleries for Hire The Framers Gallery Unique Space, Great Location, No Commission, Fully Staffed; 36 Windmill Street, London W1T 2JT email: artefact@xln.co.uk www.theframersgallery.co.uk T: 020 7580 4878 BANKSIDE GALLERY 48 Hopton

Street, London SE1 9JH Airy & welllit. Beside Tate Modern. 200m sq space.

Competitive rates. t 020 7928 7521

Exhibitions

F m-Hirshfield ARBS 1st show 1959 à Cannes 2nd show 1971 à Paris

15th C palazzetto, sleep 2/5. www.valleycastle.com Marrakech. Chic, elegantly restored

18th century riad in Medina. 4 dbl. bedrooms, seductive baths, cook & housekeeper. Tel: 07770 431 194. www.riadhayati.com PROVENCE LUBERON Vineyard

cottages 2-4 pers. Pool. Also off season long lets at discounted prices.

pattiebarwick@gmail.com www.mentonsejour.com

VENICE heart of the city. Pretty apt newly restored in small courtyard 1 dble bedrm. Sleeps 2 Reasonable rates 3nts+

Tuscany near Lucca Beautiful, secluded hillside hamlet restored by sculptor with sea views & pool offers s/c accomm sleeping from 2 to 30!

Ideal retreat for writers, artists. Also groups/workshops. Catering avail.

Tel 07796 957579 patricianolan@btopenworld.com Riviera: French/Italian coast. Breathtaking, uninterrupted views. Romantic, spacious 2/3 bedroom flat with own large garden, in 18thC stone villa.

Parking. Menton 5 mins, Ventimiglia 10. email: vitosmi@gmail.com www.ilvalico.eu ITALY Tuscany/Umbria Farmhouse and

barn ideal for lovers of landscape and art. Pool, panorama, gardens, terraces, books, pictures, walks, medieval towns.

Sleeps 2-16+ (sliding scale), all ensuite.

07989 864976 www.lafoce.co.uk

co.uk web: www.8dukestreet.co.uk t: 020 7930 0375 and 07973 292958

www.peraltatuscany.com Tel: 0039 0584 951 230 ARLES. EUROPEAN CAPITAL OF CULTURE 2013. and home to Van Gogh. Central town house with large roof terrace, sleeps 2/6. £600 per week.

Tel 01308 456288.

Holidays UK SEE NEW WEBSITE: St Ives, 2nd floor flat. Views, sleeps 2, stylish, light,spacious open plan living. www. fifteenthedigey.co.uk 01223 295264

FRANCE: NICE. Stunning view over

roofs of old town. Quiet sunny 2 room balcony flat. Sleeps 2/3. 30 mins bus to airport. £485 p.w. Tel: 020 7720 7519 or 01736 762013.

Menton town centre, sleeps 12. Enjoy the eclectic art collection and interior design in this restored 1860’s villa and separate guest house situated just above town centre, 5 mins walk to shops and beaches. Beautiful garden with panoramic views across the bay and over old town. Lovely pool area with shower and shady places to sit and read.

Secluded dining area on front terrace or in shady citrus tree courtyard. Enjoy versatility of 2 houses on one site.

Ideal for 2 families. Off street parking for 2 cars. Small speed boat for rent.

Now booking summer 2014. tel: 07900

Scottish Borders – magical, spacious,

secluded farmhouse & garden, stunning hill views. Sleeps 10. Large kitchen with Aga. Games barn. Wood-burning stoves.

Barn owls. Fabulous walking. 07957 396 232 www.middleholms.com ROCK, near Padstowe. Comfortable

House sleeps 8. All mod Cons. wifi.

Garden. Parking. Close to golf course, beaches and great painting seascapes. www.rockcornwallholiday.co.uk Tel: 07968 041665.

Sculpture

STONE SCULPTURE from

ZIMBABWE

all important artists represented.

The Contemporary Fine Art Gallery (Eton) 31 High Street, Eton, Near Windsor, Berkshire.

916729 pattiebarwick@gmail.com www.mentonsejour.com

Tel. 01753 854315 7 days a week 10.30-5.30 p.m.

Framing Burlington House Piccadilly, London, W1J 0BD T: 020 7300 5646 E: raframing@royalacademy.org.uk Contact us for a free consultation Open Monday to Friday 10am–5pm.

heart of central London. Full technical support available. For further info. contact Philip Woodford-Smith

in prime location – helpful, experienced management and full facility support – 8 Duke Street, St. James’s, London SW1Y 6BN e: gallery@8dukestreet.

in Tanzania 25 Feb to 6 Mar 2014 is a Workshop-on-Safari for artists. Meet colourful tribes people and big game in the wilderness with an artist as your guide www.paintingsafari.com FRANCE: MENTON 2 bedroom house in grounds of 1860’s town villa; pool Beautiful views of sea and old town charming courtyard with lemon trees; Easy walk to covered market, sea, train and bus station. Off street parking available. tel: 07900 916729

Tel 00334 90 76 65 16 or www.cottagesfaverot.com

Asia House 100 sq m gallery in the

Gallery 8 Splendidly maintained gallery

PAINTING & SKETCHING SAFARI

VENICE CENTRE s/c apts in charming

e-m info@banksidegallery.com www.banksidegallery.com

Tel 020 7307 5454 or email philip.woodfordsmith@asiahouse .co.uk

V.Last show Septʼ2013 at Lilford Gallery in Canterbury.

Holidays

Private & commercial clients

Wide range of hand gilded & custom stained finishes All work carried out to Museum standards

Acrylic fabrications & design-led factory finishes Original contemporary artwork for sale Conservation/restoration service

The Mercury Journal, USPS 009/065, is published quarterly, March, May, September and November. Periodicals Postage Paid at Rahway, NJ. US agent: Mercury International, 365 Blair Road, Avenel, NJ 07001 POSTMASTER: Address change to THE MERCURY JOURNAL, 365 Blair Road, Avenel, NJ 07001

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Inside Story

John Kasmin The art dealer affectionately known as Kas, whose gallery was at the centre of the swinging Sixties, tells Nick Tite about his passion for postcards and the appeal of the underdog. Photograph by Bill Burlington

The Sixties art scene is enjoying a revival at present Yes, I have curated a show at Sotheby’s

that celebrates those days. My gallery in Bond Street introduced the work of American colourfield painters like Noland, Louis and Frankenthaler to London, but also championed British artists such as Caro, Hockney and Richard Smith.

Why did you stop running a gallery?

It coincided with the financial crisis in 1992, and also I had lost interest at that point in both the art and the buyers. I loved travelling and wanted to pursue my other interests, particularly in ancient art and artefacts. I enjoyed that world of dealers and experts – Gray’s Market under Oxford Street, with its Afghan traders, was like being in Peshawar.

The Academy’s ‘Turks’ exhibition benefited from what you had found on your travels. I used to go to India with Howard

Hodgkin to look at and buy Indian miniature

paintings. On our way back we used to stop over and in Istanbul, at the Topkapi, there was a display of Siyah Qalam’s work. I was struck at once by their power and later found a book of fine facsimiles. Norman Rosenthal [former RA Exhibitions Secretary] knew I had a passion for Turkish art, and when he asked what would be important for his exhibition I showed him this book and said, ‘You must get the originals’.

He did, and they were a great hit.

When did you start collecting postcards?

I’m a habitué of second-hand bookshops which often have boxes of old cards in them. Originally I bought postcards of exotic places where I imagined being: street scenes, country landscapes of faraway places. I bought an epidiascope to project the cards onto the wall – I would smoke a joint and imagine myself somewhere else. It was not completely effective, as the heat from the epidiascope warped the cards, and I would think I was

on opium rather than pot. In 1978, I presented a show in my gallery of cards from artists, including Peter Blake, Allen Jones RA and Tom Phillips RA, who each made their own display.

The Academy is publishing Want, a book of your postcards of beggars. What intrigues you about this subject? They are

fascinating: the faces, the clothes, the stories they might tell. You only have to be a fan of Samuel Beckett to like the ‘odds and sods of life’, whether they are pilgrims or tramps.

I remember, when I was 15 years old, fobbing off my father’s endless questions about going into business or the law by saying I wanted to be a tramp. I liked the tramp poet W.H. Davies and the vagabond life appealed to me.

The book coincides with the Daumier exhibition at the RA. Are there parallels between your cards and his pictures of the poor? Certainly the focus on the underdogs

of society is a common theme. I love his work, especially the paintings, and I am lucky enough to own one, which hangs above my postcard albums. In it, a mother suckles her child while her man gulps soup.

Want is published in September by RA Publications, £9.95 The New Situation: Art in London in the Sixties Sotheby’s New Bond Street, London, 020 7293 6424, www.sothebys.com, 4–14 Sep

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Impress your guests at one of Mayfair’s most historic and versatile venues Now available to hire for any occasion, from receptions and dinners to product launches and even fashion shows, Burlington Gardens’ 19th century Senate Rooms offer a grand and elegant setting for your event.

Burlington Gardens is also home to an exciting programme of contemporary art, allowing you to book private views alongside the hire of the Senate Rooms. Forthcoming exhibitions include a retrospective of sculptor Bill Woodrow RA and an exhibition of Hollywood actor and celebrated photographer Dennis Hopper’s work.

Whatever the scale of your event, this unique and beautiful space promises to give you and your guests an unforgettable experience in one of Mayfair’s finest venues.

Capacities Receptions and Breakfast Up to 115 guests Dinners Up to 60 guests Product Launches/Fashion Shows Dependant on set up – Up to 115 guests Meetings Up to 60 guests theatre style Hire Charges Evening Hire (£5,000 + VAT) Full Day Hire 8 – 5pm (£7,000 + VAT)

Please contact Bethan Garland on 020 7300 5699 or bethan.garland@royalacademy.org.uk for further information

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the great

SCHOOL PRINT offer

schoolprints.co.uk or see brochure inside