RA Magazine Autumn 2014

ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS MAGAZINE NUMBER 124 AUTUMN 2014 ANSELM KIEFER GIOVANNI BATTISTA MORONI ALLEN JONES RA

ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS MAGAZINE NO. 124 / AUTUMN 2014 / £4.95

Anselm Kiefer Fields of vision

Sarah Dunant on Moroni Melvyn Bragg on Rembrandt Jeanette Winterson short story 001_Cover_White_16.indd 1

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PETER RANDALL-PAGE

WILLIAM TUCKER RA

UPSIDE DOWN & INSIDE OUT

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IMAGES: Peter Randall-Page, Espalier; William Tucker, Messenger Photography by Steve Russell Studios; Courtesy Pangolin London

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Lago Maggiore: Early Morning Clouds 7th May 2013 Signed lower right; inscribed with the title on the reverse Oil on board 8 x 10 in / 20.3 x 25.4 cm

Ken Howard OBE RA

Lago Maggiore: The Blue Mountain 11th May 2013 Signed lower right; inscribed with the title on the reverse Oil on board 8 x 10 in / 20.3 x 25.4 cm

Price: ÂŁ8,000 for the pair Richard Green is the sole worldwide agent for Ken Howard Email: paintings@richardgreen.com

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ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS MAGAZINE NO. 124 / AUTUMN 2014

62

GER O L A M O E R O B ER TA E T R O/ P H OTO GER O L A M O E R O B ER TA E T R O. LO N D O N , P R I VAT E CO L L EC T I O N / P H OTO CO U R T ESY O F T H E A R T IS T/© A L L EN J O N ES .

CO U R T ESY T H E A R T IS T. S E AT T L E A R T M US EU M , GI F T O F M R . A N D M RS . R I CH A R D C . H ED R EEN / P H OTO S E AT T L E A R T M US EU M /© A NS EL M K I EF ER

Cut from a different cloth ‘Painting from nature: it is a rich idea, suggesting truth over vanity, realism over artifice and man’s humility in the face of God as the ultimate creator. In Moroni you find all of those ingredients’ SARAH DUNANT

68

Step this way ‘The taut calves and elongated thighs of Allen Jones’s ‘First Step’ insinuate erotic accentuations beyond the teasing frame’ KELLY GROVIER

Features 50

Anselm’s alchemy Martin Gayford meets the visionary artist Anselm Kiefer ahead of his RA retrospective

60

Through artists’ eyes David Chipperfield RA, Ann Christopher RA and Barbara Rae RA respond to Kiefer’s work

62

Cut from a different cloth Giovanni Battista Moroni painted people with unflinching honesty, says Sarah Dunant

68

Step this way Kelly Grovier focuses on an American road trip that was formative for Allen Jones RA

Regulars 11 15 16 22

Preview UK Melvyn Bragg on Rembrandt; Fred Cuming RA on Constable; a Ming warrior; Schiele unwrapped; contemporary calendar; artists’ mannequins; art and the Spanish Civil War; Folkestone Triennial; six degrees of separation 34 Preview International Joseph Rykwert takes a tour of the Venice Architecture Biennale 37 Preview Books Black British artists; art and fiction 40

Academy Artists Will Alsop RA’s studio; RA President Christopher Le Brun’s new paintings; Gillian Wearing RA; David Remfry RA’s art epiphany

70

Debate The Question: Are high prices good for art?

The Warburg Library under threat, by Martin Kemp; Events and Lectures; Friends Excursions

80

Academy News Artists in need; Alan Davie RA in memoriam

83 85

Readers’ Offers Listings

98

Short Story ‘Night Orders’ by Jeanette Winterson

98

Night Orders ‘Whatever derelict room or broken hotel I stayed in, I unrolled the rug.

It was a map of myself, invisible to others. I was knotted there, and despair could not dislodge me’ JEANETTE WINTERSON

Exhibition Diary Editorial Contributors

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TRUTH·BEAUT Y·POWER THE DESIGNS OF DR CHRISTOPHER DRESSER FROM THE JOHN SCOTT COLLECTION

10 September to 2 October 2014

The Fine Art Society in association with Michael Whiteway 148 New Bond St · London w1s 2jt +44 (0) 207 629 5116 For sales enquiries please contact Rowena Morgan-Cox rm@faslondon.com To order catalogues please email art@faslondon.com

What’s on at the Royal Academy this autumn

Exhibition Diary Anselm Kiefer

Radical Geometry

Main Galleries 27 September to 14 December

Modern Art of South America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection

Sponsored by BNP Paribas

The Sackler Wing Until 28 September

P R I VAT E CO L L EC T I O N / P H OTO P R I VAT E CO L L ECT I O N /© A L L EN J O N ES . P R I VAT E CO L L ECT I O N / P H OTO P R I VAT E CO L L EC T I O N

This first major UK retrospective of the German artist Anselm Kiefer Hon RA fills the Academy’s Main Galleries with an extraordinary body of work, drawing on complex themes of history, mythology, literature and philosophy. The show includes painting, sculpture, photography, artist’s books and installation on an epic scale spanning the key stages in his career, as well as new work created especially for this exhibition.

2009-2016 Season supported

by JTI. Supported by Christie’s This show reveals how avant-garde artists in Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela created groundbreaking forms of geometric abstract art from the 1930s onwards.

Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album

Friends Preview Days Wed 24 Sep, 10am-6pm Thur 25 Sep, 10am-8.30pm Fri 26 Sep, 10am-6pm Friends Extended Hours Tue 28 Oct, 8.30-10am Mon 24 Nov 6-8.30pm

Giovanni Battista Moroni

Burlington Gardens Until 19 October

Lead Series Supporter JTI Supported by Nikon UK

Portrait of a Young Lady, c.1575, by Giovanni Battista Moroni

The Sackler Wing 25 October to 25 January 2015

Over 400 photographs by the Hollywood actor and director Dennis Hopper evoke the spirit of 1960s America, from portraits of celebrities to records of the pivotal social and political events of the day.

Friends Extended Hours Mon 6 Oct, 6-8.30pm

2009-2016 Season supported by JTI Supported by UBI Banca The Royal Academy sheds light on a genius of late-Renaissance portraiture, presenting the most significant exhibition in this country of works by Giovanni Battista Moroni. From devotional images to portraits of people from all walks of life, the paintings reveal the artist’s rare skills in capturing the character of his subjects with vitality, directness and immediacy.

Allen Jones RA Burlington Gardens 13 November to 25 January 2015

Lead Series Supporter JTI The pioneering Pop artist Allen Jones RA is celebrated with a retrospective, featuring his influential and provocative paintings, sculpture and prints since the 1960s.

Friends Preview Days Wed 22 Oct, 10am-8.30pm Thur 23 Oct, 10am-6pm Fri 24 Oct, 10-6pm Friends Extended Hours Mon 24 Nov 6-8.30pm

Friends Preview Days Wed 12 Nov, 10am-8.30pm Friends Extended Hours Mon 1 Dec, 6-8.30pm

Interesting Journey, 1962, by Allen Jones RA

Continued on page 12

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Exhibition Diary

The Keeper’s House and online at the RA website From 29 October

Red Hand, 2006, by Humphrey Ocean RA, available through RA Art Sales

Dream, Draw, Work Architectural Drawings

by Norman Shaw RA Tennant Gallery Until 14 September

Supported by Lowell Libson Ltd and the Collections and Library Supporters Circle This show brings together drawings by 19th-century architect Norman Shaw RA, considered one of the finest draughtsmen of his time. It chronicles his work at the Academy, while a map of his London buildings is also on show in the Architecture Space until 5 October.

100 Buildings 100 Years Views of British Architecture since 1914 Architecture Space 11 October to 1 February 2015

In partnership with the Twentieth Century Society The architecture of the 20th century with its vast array of styles and approaches has long polarised

opinion. This show presents one building a year from 1914 to 2013 to illustrate the impressive diversity of architecture over the past 100 years. Examples range from grand architectural icons to vernacular buildings, to those from the war years.

RA Schools International Residency RA Schools 3 to 14 September

The RA Schools has formed an exchange residency programme for emerging artists, joining forces with the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and Arts in Heritage Research, Hong Kong. The scheme gives artists from culturally different backgrounds the opportunity to work alongside one another and exchange experiences.

The first residency took place in the Schools in August and culminates in this group show.

Residencies in China and Hong Kong take place over the next two years.

The Royal Academy launches its new Art Sales programme in October, when works by Royal Academicians, alongside a smaller selection by emerging and established contemporary artists, will be available to purchase at the Academy and on the RA website.

The first in a series of selling shows at the Keeper’s House, ‘Painter Printmakers’, sheds light on how painting feeds into printmaking and vice versa. Unique works and limited-edition prints from RAs including Stephen Farthing, Tracey Emin, Mali Morris and Humphrey Ocean (Red Hand, 2006, left, available at £2,000 unframed, incl. VAT) are on sale, alongside work by artists

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 Opening hours for the Royal Academy Mon-Sun 10am-6pm

(last entry 5.30pm) except Fri 10am-10pm (last entry 9.30pm). The RA Shop closes 15 minutes before the galleries. The Tennant Gallery Tue-Fri 10am-4pm; Sat-Sun 10am6pm. The Restaurant Sat-Thur 10am-5.30pm; Fri 10am-9.30pm (to book call 020 7300 5608) The Keeper’s House Mon-Thur

10am-11.30pm; Fri-Sat 10ammidnight; Sun 10am-6pm

The Keeper’s House Restaurant

Mon-Sat 12-3pm for Friends and from 5.30pm for the public (to book call 020 7300 5881) Access

Disabled visitors see page 74.

Visually impaired visitors have access to large-print labels in the galleries and on the RA website.

such as Katherine Jones and Janet Milner. There will also be an expanded collection of works available to purchase online.

The programme includes two shows a year in the Keeper’s House, with works priced from £200 to £5,000-plus. Staff will be available on site, and the RA can organise framing and delivery via its museum-quality suppliers.

To register your interest before 29 Oct and receive updates on RA Art Sales

visit http://roy.ac/artsales Keeper’s House special offer

To enjoy a special offer at the Keeper’s House, dine between 5pm and 7pm Monday to Wednesday from the pre-theatre menu and receive a complimentary glass of wine with your meal. To book a table, call 020 7300 5881 or email keepershouse@ peytonandbyrne.co.uk and quote ‘early wine’.

Friends benefits Friends of the RA enjoy free entry to all of the RA’s exhibitions, with a guest (one family adult) and up to four family children under 16, and all-day access to the Keeper’s House. Friends can also view exhibitions before the public at Friends Preview Days, and they receive RA Magazine quarterly, in March, May, September and November. Friends also receive a monthly e-newsletter with regular information on exhibitions, events and news at the RA. For more details on Friends membership call 020 7300 5664, or visit www.royalacademy.org.uk/friends

Coming soon Rubens and his Legacy

24 January to 10 April 2015 Friends Preview Days Wed 21 Jan, 10am-8.30pm Thur 22 Jan, 10am-6pm Fri 23 Jan, 10am-6pm

CO U R T ESY T H E A R T IS T

RA Art Sales: Painter Printmakers

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Introducing this issue

Editorial EDITORIAL Publisher Nick Tite Editor Sam Phillips Assistant Editor Eleanor Mills Design and Art Direction Design by St Sub-Editor Gill Crabbe Editorial Volunteers Emma Hollaway,

Elizabeth Hill

Editorial Advisers Richard Cork, Anne

Desmet RA, Tom Holland, Liz Horne, Fiona Maddocks, Mali Morris RA, Chris Orr RA, Eric Parry RA, Charles Saumarez Smith, Mark Seaman, Giles Waterfield and Sarah Whitfield Digital content Kate Huckle, Amy Macpherson Special thanks Lukas Gimpel Editorial enquiries 020 7300 5820; ramagazine@royalacademy.org.uk To comment on RA Magazine

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

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

Morgenthau Plan, 2013-14, by Anselm Kiefer Hon RA

P R I VAT E CO L L EC T I O N /© A NS EL M K I EF ER . P H OTO CH A R L ES D U P R AT

The stories we tell The best corrective to the claim that our contemporary culture is banal is the work of the German artist Anselm Kiefer: immense in scale, magnificent in execution, and rich in metaphor and metaphysical inquiry, Kiefer’s ambitious art, in the words of the critic Robert Hughes, ‘sets itself against the sterile irony and the sense of trivial pursuit that infest our culture’.

Visitors to the RA’s Kiefer retrospective will be immersed in a gesamtkunstwerk – a total work of art – as his powerful paintings, sculptures, installations, prints, photographs and artist books, including new, previously unseen work from his ‘Morgenthau’ series (2013-14, above and cover), are brought together within the Academy’s 19thcentury neoclassical galleries. As Martin Gayford learned when he travelled to the artist’s studio complex in Barjac (page 50), histories and stories are as much a part of Kiefer’s material as are paint, paper or metal, whether the subject is the Second World War or Egyptian myths, cosmological texts or the Cabbala.

It is apt, then, that a consummate storyteller, Jeanette Winterson, has chosen one of Kiefer’s paintings as her inspiration for a new short story, ‘Night Orders’ (page 98). This launches a new series of RA Magazine short stories, for which writers produce a piece of fiction under

Kim Jenner 020 7300 5658; kim.jenner@royalacademy.org.uk

the influence of a favourite artwork. Winterson’s moving story reminds us of the range of possible responses one can have to art; elsewhere in this issue, three Academicians – architect David Chipperfield, sculptor Ann Christopher and painter Barbara Rae – give us their own highly individual views of Kiefer’s work (page 60), while Fred Cuming gives his landscape painter’s perspective on John Constable RA (page 25).

Storytelling is an abiding interest for another of our contributors, novelist Sarah Dunant.

She finds a kindred spirit in Giovanni Battista Moroni, the Italian Renaissance portraitist celebrated for the way he captured the psychology of his sitters. Visit the Academy’s Moroni exhibition ‘as a discerning observer of art,’ she urges in her essay, ‘but throw in a touch of the novelist too’, in order to engage with the characters that here come from the canvas rather than the page (page 62). Another distinguished novelist, the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, reveals in this magazine his love for Rembrandt’s late self-portraits (page 22).

Despite the digital revolution, the printed word is still an integral part of our culture. In our Debate section, Renaissance scholar Martin Kemp makes an impassioned case for London’s Warburg Institute Library, a historical treasure trove whose future looks uncertain due to a dispute with the University of London (page 72).

If such an eminent academic institution is in peril, then what hope for our local libraries? But that’s another story.

— SAM PHILLIPS, EDITOR

Advertising Production and Listings Editor Catherine Cartwright

020 7300 5657; catherine.cartwright@ royalacademy.org.uk Classifieds Irene Michaelides 020 7300 5675; irene.michaelides@ royalacademy.org.uk SUBSCRIPTIONS

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Twitter: @RA_Mag @royalacademy Facebook: /royalacademy www.royalacademy.org.uk Colour reproduction by Wings.

Printed by Wyndeham Group.

Published 1 September 2014. © 2014 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.

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Contributors GEORGINA ADAM writes on the art market for the Financial Times. Her new book Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century is published

by Lund Humphries.

He exhibits photos from his first book, Ezekiel 36:36 (the grounded Bolivian airplane), at this year’s Guernsey Photography Festival.

MARTIN KEMP is Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at Trinity College, Oxford University. He has been a Trustee of the National Galleries of Scotland, the V&A and the British Museum.

MELVYN BRAGG is an awardwinning novelist and broadcaster.

His latest novel is Grace and Mary (Hodder & Stoughton, 2013).

BEN LUKE is Contemporary Art Critic at the London Evening Standard and Features Editor of the Art Newspaper.

CAROLINE BUGLER is a writer and editor specialising in the visual arts. She is the author of Strange Beauty (National Gallery, 2014).

FIONA MADDOCKS is a journalist and broadcaster. She is Chief Music Critic of the Observer.

NICK BALLON is a photographer.

J.J. CHARLESWORTH is an

art critic and associate editor of ArtReview magazine, and writes extensively on contemporary art.

DAVID CHIPPERFIELD RA is RA MAGAZINE QUARTER PAGE 128 x 98mm

an architect. His work includes the renovation of the Neues Museum, Berlin, and he was awarded the Order of Merit by the German government in 2009.

ANN CHRISTOPHER RA is a sculptor. She is showing a series of drawings at Rabley Drawing Centre, Marlborough (14 Sep– 10 Oct), and exhibits sculpture in ‘Crucible 2’ at Gloucester Cathedral (1 Sep–31 Oct).

RICHARD CORK is an art critic, curator and broadcaster. He is author of The Healing Presence of Art (Yale, 2012).

Tom Among the Flowers 1978 Etching and aquatint 13.7 x 18.7 in

JULIAN TREVELYAN ETCHINGS

13 September to 25 October 2014 15 Reading Road, Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire RG9 1AB Tel/fax 01491 576228 Tue-Sat 10:00-1:15 & 2:15-5:00 www.bohungallery.co.uk

FRED CUMING RA is a painter.

His book, Another Figure in the Landscape, is published this autumn by Unicorn Press.

SARAH DUNANT is a novelist, historian and broadcaster. Her most recent novel, about the Borgias, is Blood & Beauty (Virago, 2013).

MARTIN GAYFORD is a writer and art critic. His latest book is Rendez-Vous with Art (Thames & Hudson, 2014), co-authored with Philippe de Montebello.

RENE GIMPEL is Director of Gimpel Fils gallery, London.

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KELLY GROVIER writes for the Times Literary Supplement and is author of 100 Works of Art That Will Define Our Age (Thames & Hudson, 2013).

EAMONN MCCABE is a freelance photographer and former picture editor of the Guardian. He reviews shows for BBC Radio’s Front Row. KEVIN MCLOUGHLIN is Principal Curator for East and Central Asia at the National Museum of Scotland, where he is curating ‘Ming: The Golden Empire’ (until 19 Oct).

BARBARA RAE RA is a painter and printmaker based in Scotland.

She exhibits at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (until 26 Oct).

JOSEPH RYKWERT is an architecture historian, critic and Honorary Fellow of the RA. His books include The Seduction of Place (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000).

GILES WATERFIELD is an independent writer and curator.

The People’s Galleries, his study of Victorian museums, will be published in 2015 by Yale.

NEIL WEBB is an illustrator. His work has appeared in the Economist, the Sunday Times and the Guardian.

SIMON WILSON is an art historian and specialist on Egon Schiele. His book on the artist was published by Phaidon in 1980.

JEANETTE WINTERSON is a novelist and Honorary Fellow of the RA. Her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (Pandora Press, 1985), won the Whitbread Prize. Her latest book The Daylight Gate (Hammer, 2012) is being made into a film.

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NEW PAINTINGS 8th – 25th October 2014 Oil Landscapes of London, Norfolk, Scotland and Ireland

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P ETER S P EN S

NORMAN ACKROYD RA A Shetland Notebook The exhibition of watercolours and etchings to accompany Norman Ackroyd’s latest book

Eames Fine Art Gallery

GRANDSTAND: The Cheltenham and London series

58 Bermondsey Street, London SE1 3UD

4 – 28 September 2014

8th - 20th October 2014 Gallery 8, 8 Duke Street, St James’s London SW1 6BN Tel: 020 8883 3557 E info@cranleygallery.com Catalogue available

www.eamesfineart.com

CR ANLEY GALLER Y

Norman Ackroyd will give an introductory talk about this project at the Eames Fine Art Studio in SE1, to receive more information about this talk and the exhibition please contact Eames Fine Art 0207 407 6561 / info@eamesfineart.com

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Catto - Derek Balmer RA Advert 200mm x 131mm 17/06/2014 16:47 Page 1

CATTO GALLERY 100 Heath Street • Hampstead • London NW3 1DP

An exhibition of paintings by Derek Balmer PPRWA 11th September – 1st October 2014 Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 6660 www.cattogallery.co.uk • art@cattogallery.co.uk Opening times: 10am - 6pm Mon - Sat 12.30pm - 6pm Sunday • and by appointment

Catalogue available upon request

Snowfall in Babylon 2014, 143 x 112cm, oil on canvas

Scottish Paintings September 9th - October 2nd Douglas Davies RSW Anna King Neil Macdonald RGI RSW Rory McLauchlan Ryan Mutter David Smith RSW Graeme Wilcox Christopher Wood SSA PAI RSW

Medici Gallery

5 Cork Street, London W1S 3LQ 020 7495 2565 info@medicigallery.co.uk www.medicigallery.co.uk

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Graeme Wilcox ‘Cyclist’ oil on canvas 96x76cm

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Diana Armfield

Ken Howard

Bernard Dunstan

EXHIBITING AT: 20/21 BRITISH ART FAIR, ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART, 10 - 14 SEPTEMBER 2014, STAND 19

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_Aut14.indd 1

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ANDREW MACARA recent pantings

28th Sept - 12 Oct 2014 open everyday 9.30am - 5pm

THE CONTEMPORARY FINE ART GALLERY ETON 31 High Street, Eton, Windsor, Berkshire SL4 6AX 01753 854315 / 07831 822641 mail@cfag.co.uk www.cfag.co.uk

private view invitation and catalogue on request

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What’s new this autumn in London, the UK and abroad

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Facing the truth

OPPOSITE PAGE

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As a major show of Rembrandt’s late works opens, MELVYN BRAGG considers the artist’s achievement as a consummate witness of life I look at my Rembrandt every morning. It is one of the majestic late self-portraits and I am very lucky to have it. His self-portraits intrigued me when first I saw them and I am increasingly absorbed in them the older I get. He is, for me, the autobiographical master of the human face, peerless, fearless, repaying all the daily attention I can offer.

I am doubly lucky because if I want to see the original of the postcard propped on my desk, I can walk across Hampstead Heath to nearby Kenwood House and see in all its glory Self Portrait with Two Circles (c.1665-69, opposite). But the postcard is no mean stand-in. Postcards of favourite paintings are like calling cards from the artists, or aidesmémoire. ‘Titter ye not’, as the late great Frankie Howerd would say. And remember Ernst Gombrich.

Gombrich spoke of ‘the beholder’s share’.

We all exercise this faculty of imagination. A tiny photograph from our past, with parents squinting at the sun and a tree growing out of the head of a favourite uncle, can provoke a spectrum

of pleasure because of what we bring to it.

Our share.

So it is with postcards. As I look even now at the small replica of Self Portrait with Two Circles my mind enlarges it. And even on some days, if I merely take it as it is – an ageing postcard – its powers are more than sufficient to remind me of why it matters to me.

Ingmar Bergman, in an interview I did with him more than 30 years ago, talked about the supremacy and the infinite satisfaction to be found in filming the human face. We see that in many of his best films. In Rembrandt’s selfportraits I see it constantly. From the dashing young man in his early, successful, flamboyant days, with his long earring and opulent confidence, to the almost gargoyle, to the thankfully many studies of himself in later years. He made his face a masterpiece of art.

One characteristic particular to the later paintings is that as an ageing man he could as easily be an old woman, especially with the bosomy clothing. In some of the portraits you

Self Portrait with Two Circles, c.1665-69,

by Rembrandt THIS PAGE The Jewish Bride, c.1665-69,

by Rembrandt

see one eye that is as intelligent as could be, while the other is dead to the world. The expression is more enigmatic than Mona Lisa could have dreamt of.

In Rembrandt’s self-portraits I see a profound representation of the human condition. In Two Circles, for instance, we see him as a working man, his palette in the foreground. We see him as an aged witness to life – not, in my view, a King Lear as some critics have suggested, much more a Socrates. Deeply thinking through what it is to be him and alive.

The puzzlement at life – that is in his expression. And also the sadness. Perhaps that life is so short or so full of failure or so cruel to passion. Yet there is a stability, if not of contentment then of acceptance.

I had a friend in Cumbria who lived alone much of the time and used to tell me: ‘I have no problem in suffering my own company.’

That phrase comes to mind when I see the self-portraits. And above all, I see them as an attempt to make art out of what we most simply are. Ourselves; the thing we are.

Autobiographical fiction, pursued so eagerly in Western literature – especially in the last 150 years or so – is the nearest we novelists can get to that state of self-portrait, that use of ourselves as the palette. Perhaps that is one of the reasons I have pursued Rembrandt through galleries in London, Amsterdam, Washington, New York. But when we turn away from the self-portraits, there is so much more that he did apart from those internal landscapes. In The Jewish Bride (c.1665-69, left), for example, also known as The Bridal Couple, painted about the same time as Two Circles and one of my great favourites, he gives us an unparalleled story of conjugal grace, devotion, discreet but complicit sexuality, and the lightness of recognition.

This makes a solemn study lift the spirits and look to what there is in us out there, which most truly tells us who we are and what we are.

Like Socrates, Rembrandt is a teacher.

Rembrandt: The Late Works National Gallery, London, 020 7747 2885, www.nationalgallery.org.uk, 15 Oct–18 Jan 2015 To see more images from the National Gallery show, visit http://roy.ac/rembrandt

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CHRISTOPHER R W NEVINSON A P R I N T M A K E R I N WA R A N D P E A C E A major exhibition of prints, with selected drawings and paintings 25 September – 18 October 2014

Returning to the Trenches, 1916, Drypoint, 15 x 20 cm

Marking the centenary of World War I and the publication of the complete catalogue raisonné, this exhibition of prints by Nevinson includes rare and iconic images depicting the horrors of war alongside contrasting cityscapes of London, Paris and New York.

Selected prints will also be shown on our stand in New York at the annual IFPDA Print Fair from 5-9 November 2014.

For more information about the exhibition please contact the gallery or email. Exhibition catalogue available.

A new comprehensive deluxe catalogue raisonné CRW Nevinson: The Complete Prints published

by Lund Humphries in association with Osborne Samuel Gallery written by Dr. Jonathan Black, will be launched during the exhibition exclusively priced at £125 +pp (RRP £150 +pp)

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

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A breath of fresh air

© V I C TO R I A A N D A L B ER T M US EU M , LO N D O N . B R I T IS H M US EU M , D O N AT ED BY M ES S RS . YA M A N A K A /© T H E T RUS T EES O F T H E B R I T IS H M US EU M

Landscape painter FRED CUMING RA pays tribute to the elusive inspiration of Constable, as a new V&A show opens You can feel the air in Constable’s work – the stillness before a storm, the breeze, the squalls, the rain, the brilliance of sunlight. His colour is full of mood; it speaks, it is poetic. The handling of paint can be energetic or placid as the subject demands. He was a quiet religious man, and the focus of his passion lay in his studies of land, sea and sky, the transient ever-changing English weather.

In the 1950s, when I was a student at the Royal College of Art, I would walk through the collection of Constable’s sketches in the V&A and receive my daily shot of adrenalin.

This was my first taste of the power of his sketches. Even now at age 84, they are imprinted on my mind and affect all my work. Like many painters, I have used Constable as a foundation – he is an elusive inspiration, one of the greats, a high point in the history of painting.

Constable’s effect on the history of art is immeasurable; Delacroix, Corot, the Impressionists and practically all schools of landscape painting were influenced by his work. One could also imagine that Constable might have inspired Debussy’s La Mer, or Britten’s ‘Sea Interludes’ from his opera Peter Grimes, for example.

PICTURE THIS

KEVIN MCLOUGHLIN picks a must-see work from an exhibition this autumn Title Figure of Zhenwu Artist Unknown Date c.1416-39 Exhibition ‘Ming:

50 Years that changed China’, British Museum, London (18 Sep–5 Jan 2015)

The drawings in Constable’s tiny sketchbooks, which were remarkable for their minute observation and detail, were transformed into major works. The landscape painter Richard Eurich RA once noted that these sketches were the products of years of concentrated observation, allowing Constable to know exactly what he wanted and how to achieve it. Some of them were obviously worked and reworked, yet they retain a remarkable freshness.

I find it difficult to choose a favourite work – they are all so strong. Would it be the Royal Academy’s The Leaping Horse (1824-25)? Or the tiny A Windmill near Brighton (c.182829, right)? That powerful work – the chiaroscuro, the violent use of contrast and colour – could have been painted by Rembrandt or by Van Gogh. Constable owed a debt to Dutch painting.

Or perhaps it would be the ‘Weymouth Bay’ series (a sketch from 1816 is in the show). The largest work in the series, in the National Gallery, is dubbed unfinished, but perhaps Constable stopped at the point where he could say no more.

He had achieved perfection. The painting is reminiscent of Keats

A Windmill near Brighton, c.1828-29, by John Constable

or Wordsworth, sheer visual poetry.

‘The Opening of the Waterloo Bridge’ series (1817-32) would also be among my favourite Constables.

Here are all his strengths – atmosphere, consummate skill and detail – all under complete control.

Put into any modern exhibition of landscape painting they would not look out of place. By modern standards they would be small –

even the seven-footer in the Tate – but they are so powerful, they might well eclipse everything else.

During China’s Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), Zhenwu – the ‘Perfected Warrior’ – became the most high-ranking deity in the prevailing Daoist pantheon.

The first and third Ming emperors Hongwu (r. 1368-98) and Yongle (r. 1402-24) both actively patronised him with regular imperial sacrifices.

Zhenwu was originally known as Xuanwu, the ‘Dark Warrior’, a deity who represented the cardinal direction of the north.

Xuanwu’s popularity during the Northern Song Dynasty (9601127) led to his transformation into Zhenwu, a powerful warrior with healing abilities: by 1304, his titles included Supreme Emperor of the Dark Heaven, Primal Sage and Benevolent Majesty.

This bronze sculpture of Zhenwu has now patinated with age, but the traces of polychrome lacquer on its surface suggest that it would originally have been richly gilded and coloured.

Zhenwu’s importance to the Ming emperors is also symbolised in this sculpture by the five-clawed dragon on the front of the robe, a motif reserved for imperial use.

His favour in Ming society was in part linked to his association with the north. The continuing threat of Mongol invasion along China’s northern borders preoccupied the Ming and Zhenwu was tasked with protecting the state and imperial family.

Constable: The Making of a Master Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 020 7942 2000, www.vam.ac.uk, 20 Sep–11 Jan 2015 To explore video and audio content about Constable’s works in the RA Collection, visit http://roy.ac/constable

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THE BAD SHEPHERD

PIETER BRUEGEL I PIETER BRUEGHEL II JAN BRUEGHEL I ABEL GRIMMER MARTEN VAN CLEVE PETER DOIG NICOLE EISENMAN JEFF KOONS SARAH LUCAS NEO RAUCH THOMAS SCHÜTTE JEFF WALL 14 October 2014 to 16 January 2015 Christie’s Mayfair 103 New Bond Street London W1S 1ST badshepherd@christies.com

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The body electric

T H E L EO P O L D M US EU M , V I EN N A

Although their erotic and existential angst once fell foul of public taste, Egon Schiele’s nudes have stood the test of time, argues SIMON WILSON

shows have come together – there is no significant anniversary – but it is certainly a tribute to Schiele’s incredible productivity in his tragically brief life from 1890 to 1918.

The Courtauld claims its exhibition to be the first ever solo show of Schiele in a British public gallery and I believe it. Egon Schiele is undoubtedly one of the most powerful and original painters of the human body of any time, yet there is no work by him in the Tate or British Museum collections and only one print in the V&A. In fairness, this is only partly due to prudery. At precisely the moment when the socio-sexual revolutions of the 1960s enabled us to see past the eroticism of Schiele to the artist beyond, the British art establishment finally caught up with modernism and went overboard for it. Schiele just seemed to have no place in the dominant narrative of modern art, running from Cézanne to Cubism to abstract art, never mind the sex.

An additional problem has been that although Schiele painted in oil Standing Nude with Orange Stockings, 1914, by Egon Schiele and produced striking allegories, portraits and landscapes, the bulk of his work consisted of drawings with watercolour, traditionally considered a less First a comprehensive Shunga show at the important medium than oil. Now, the Courtauld venerable British Museum, and now, less than show confirms the importance of Schiele’s a year later, a groundbreaking exhibition of Egon drawings and even goes further in its title, Schiele’s electrifyingly frank nudes (both male ‘The Radical Nude’. Radical is a term of high and female) at the hallowed home of art history, approbation in modernism; could it be that the the Courtauld. To slightly misquote Whistler, Courtauld boffins are re-engineering Schiele erotic art is upon the town. as a major modern?

And not only in London. In Zürich at almost If so, in what way is Schiele radical? Well, the same time, the Kunsthaus has a major Schiele we can argue that he was the first major artist to exhibition, but with a fascinating twist which address with complete frankness, and consistently pairs Schiele with that leading contemporary in a large body of work, human sexual anatomy painter of the nude, Jenny Saville RA. Further and, as important, sexual psychology. His afield, Schiele’s birthplace, the small town of drawings speak vividly of the anxieties that Tulln not far from Vienna, has a Schiele season surrounded sex then (Freud’s Vienna, remember), whose focus is an exhibition of his earlier and and his frankness then did him no good at all later work. Almost incredibly, in New York, (he was briefly imprisoned on morals charges). the Neue Galerie, a specialist museum of early Because we live in a more relaxed, yet more than modern Austrian and German art, also has a ever sex-obsessed society, his engagement with major Schiele show this autumn, concentrating the sexual now seems wholly admirable and on his portraits. I have no idea why all these

pioneering, and his work can speak directly to us.

The Courtauld’s boldly chosen publicity image (Standing Nude with Orange Stockings, 1914, left) presents a female figure that might have the pop star Madonna, for example, murmuring ‘sister’.

But the angst in Schiele’s nudes is not just sexual. It is existential. Is this really all there is, he is asking: ‘Birth, copulation and death’, as T.S. Eliot pithily put in Sweeney Agonistes (1932). We still seem to be worrying a lot about this one too.

Not least, we can now see how innovative (another modernist buzzword) was Schiele in reinventing the classical depiction of the figure at exactly the moment when that tradition was elsewhere being smashed to fragments

by Cubism. Schiele’s achievement is that while forcefully evoking the body and its sexuality, and the great issues of human existence, he does so in a highly stylised, even abstracted manner – depicting his figures in almost pure bounding line, which distorts and exaggerates to express his own response. The works positively crackle with sexual and psychological tensions. Equally novel is his placing of the figure against a blank ground or even floating in space.

Putting Schiele alongside the young, notably female, and highly acclaimed painter of the nude, Jenny Saville RA, is an intriguing idea. But the Zürich show is a very serious one, carefully curated so that the extreme contrasts between the artists, particularly of scale, combined with the connections of theme, throw each artist into fresh relief. It is on a far larger scale than the Courtauld one, indeed is a major Schiele show in itself even without the Jenny Saville element. Notably it brings together no less than 37 of Schiele’s rare oil paintings as well as many of the watercolour drawings, both organised into thematic groups that bring out the full range of his art.

The Courtauld and the Zürich shows are brilliantly complementary, offering a unique opportunity to consider afresh this contested artist, with the bonus of the comparison with Saville.

Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude Courtauld Gallery, London, 020 7848 2526, www.courtauld.ac.uk, 23 Oct– 18 Jan 2015 Egon Schiele – Jenny Saville Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland, www.kunsthaus.ch, 10 Oct–25 Jan 2015 Egon Schiele: Beginning and End Egon Schiele Museum, Tulln, Austria, www.egon-schiele.eu, until 26 Oct Egon Schiele: Portraits Neue Galerie, New York, www.neuegalerie.org, 9 Oct–19 Jan 2015 To see images from ‘Egon Schiele – Jenny Saville’, visit http://roy.ac/kunsthaus

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Contemporary calendar

Girlfriends,1965-66, by Sigmar Polke

Untitled, Antella, Italy, 1977-78, by Francesca Woodman

Study for Regrets, 2012, by Jasper Johns Hon RA

September 3

‘Francesca Woodman: Zigzag’ Victoria Miro Mayfair

Photographer Francesca Woodman’s brief life – cut short by her suicide at 22 in 1981 – produced an exemplary body of black-and-white works, such as photograph Untitled, Antella, Italy (197778, top), in which the female form is framed in experimental compositions (until 4 Oct).

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‘Jasper Johns: Regrets’ Courtauld Gallery

In a rare UK show, Jasper Johns Hon RA – one of America’s most eminent postwar artists – presents works in oil, watercolour, pencil and ink, and collage (Study for Regrets, 2012, above) that respond to a single source: a photo of Lucian Freud sitting in Bacon’s studio (until 14 Dec).

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‘Pio Abad: Some Are Smarter Than Others’, Gasworks

The extravagant taste of Filipino dictators Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos are the subject of sculptures, photographs and textiles by RA Schools alumnus Pio Abad, in the Manila-born artist’s first major UK solo show (until 6 Nov).

Late Lady dating, curve, on voicemail, 2013, by Neïl Beloufa

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‘Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg’ Lisson Gallery

Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg present videos in which clay figures perform transgressive acts.

The Swedish duo’s Lisson show extends their work into mixed-media installation (until 1 Nov.)

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‘Neïl Beloufa: Counting on People’ ICA

Parisian Neïl Beloufa incorporates electronics in his low-fi assemblages, from video screens to mobile phones, in works such as Late Lady dating, curve, on voicemail (2013, above; until 16 Nov).

October 3

‘Yoshitomo Nara: Greetings from a Place in My Heart’, Dairy Art Centre

Anime-influenced paintings and drawings by the acclaimed Japanese artist that explore the psychological world of children (until 14 Dec).

9

‘Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010’ Tate Modern

As the RA surveys the career of German artist Anselm Kiefer, Tate Modern focuses on his compatriot Sigmar Polke, whose multidisciplinary

Still from Ashes, 2014, by Steve McQueen

art often drew on found photography, in works such as Girlfriends (1965-66, top), to examine postwar German society (until 8 Feb 2015).

11

‘Richard Serra’ Gagosian Gallery

American artist Richard Serra Hon RA, celebrated for his monumental steel-sheet sculptures, installs recent works in Gagosian’s Kings Cross gallery (until 28 Feb 2015), plus a large drawing in its Mayfair space (until 22 Nov).

14

‘Steve McQueen’ Thomas Dane Gallery

Following his Oscar-winning epic 12 Years a Slave, film-maker Steve McQueen returns to an artworld environment with this show of new works, which has at its centre Ashes (2014, above), shot in Super 8 in the West Indies (until 15 Nov).

15

Frieze London and Frieze Masters Regent’s Park

Contemporary fair Frieze London (until 18 Oct) introduces a performance art section, while Frieze Masters’ conjunction of old and new (until 19 Oct) includes Leon Kossoff’s drawings after artists such as Goya and Poussin, at Mitchell-Innes & Nash and Annely Juda’s stand.

© T H E ES TAT E O F F R A N CES CA WO O D M A N /CO U R T ESY GEO R GE A N D B E T T Y WO O D M A N , A N D V I C TO R I A M I R O, LO N D O N . © JAS P ER J O H NS/CO L L EC T I O N O F T H E A R T IS T. © N E Ï L B ELO U FA / CO U R T ESY F R A N ÇO IS GH EB A LY G A L L ERY. © T H E ES TAT E O F S I GM A R P O L K E /A RS , N E W YO R K / VG B I L D - KU NS T, B O N N . © S T E V E M CQ U EEN /CO U R T ESY T H O M AS DA N E G A L L ERY

Every autumn a giddying amount of contemporary art comes to London.

RA MAGAZINE schedules ten essential exhibition openings in your diary, from recent works by Jasper Johns Hon RA to the annual Frieze Art Fair

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Alan Cotton

Sicily – Autumn in the Madonie Mountains

Bold colour and handling have always marked Alan Cotton’s work. But his new paintings prove that even after three decades, his tireless challenge of painting knife technique takes the sensual possibility of oil to whole new levels. The heady, sensual punch of these works – landscapes of Sicily, Cyprus, Ireland, Piedmont, Provence and Devon – are often emphasized by daringly stylized foregrounds that progress through complex tones, textures and turns of the painting knife towards horizons that alluringly suggest somewhere beyond the canvas.

Exhibition 10th – 27th September 2014 Catalogue £15 inc p&p

Exhibition posters £19.50 inc p&p

Messum's RA Mag. 7.7.14 (Cotton).indd 1

oil on canvas 91 x 91 cms 357⁄8 x 357⁄8 ins

MessuM’s www.messums.com 8 Cork Street, London W1S 3LJ Telephone: +44 (0)20 7437 5545

26/06/2014 12:08

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All dolled up

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Portrait of Henri Michel-Lévy, c.1878, by Edgar Degas

When I co-curated an exhibition in 2009 on artists’ studios since 1700, for Compton Verney in Warwickshire, one of the most interesting aspects we examined was the development of the lay figure. These doll-like models of the human body were once regular inhabitants of the artist’s studio. They came in all scales, from the life-size to the miniature, and with adjustable limbs so they could be clothed.

For the Compton Verney show the mannequins were part of the supporting cast, but this autumn they take centre stage in ‘Silent Partners’, an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. This unusual show, the first of its kind, is the fruit of years of research

by Jane Munro, a curator at the museum.

For many years, the lay figure functioned primarily as a studio tool – most familiar perhaps to a British audience in Gainsborough’s early portraits. But in the 19th century, as mannequins became increasingly lifelike, they took on an independent life, and were sometimes included in paintings by artists such as Degas (Portrait of Henri Michel-Levy, c.1878, left) to act as troubling counterpoints to ‘living’ figures.

This development took place notably in France and is a leading theme of the exhibition, which includes lay figures from the 16th century to the 21st, and illustrates their increasing and disturbingly successful verisimilitude.

As the concept of fetishism developed around 1900 under Freud’s influence, mannequins came to have a new meaning. They were represented in paintings by Giorgio de Chirico and Paul Delvaux and by photographers including Hans Bellmer and Man Ray as embodiments of man’s mechanical proclivities and as erotic symbols. Oskar Kokoschka even created and destroyed a doll in the image of his ex-lover Alma Mahler.

One of the most haunting exhibitions for a long time, ‘Silent Partners’ demands to be seen.

You can catch it in Paris next year if you miss it in Cambridge. But don’t take the children: these dolls were not made for play.

Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 01223 332900, www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk, 14 Oct– 25 Jan 2015; Bourdelle Museum, Paris, www.bourdelle. paris.fr, 1 April–12 July 2015

Viva España ELEANOR MILLS on how British artists saw the Spanish Civil War As nations continue to commemorate the First World War, Pallant House Gallery draws our attention to another conflict that changed Europe: the Spanish Civil War (1936-39).

Picasso’s Guernica (1937) springs to mind, and there have been many shows of Spanish art about the tragedy – but never of British art.

This is surprising given that in 1933 UK artists formed the Artist’s International Association, which went on to support the fight against Franco. By 1936 AIA membership had grown to 600 artists, from Realists to Surrealists.

Henry Moore was a member of the AIA, and Edward Burra took part in at least one of its exhibitions. Pallant House shows both (01243 774 557; 8 Nov–15 Feb 2015). ‘Their concern lay in the way Fascists like Hitler and Mussolini were giving military aid to Franco,’ says Simon Martin, the show’s curator. ‘They felt compelled to support the Republicans because Communism still had a sense of utopia and democracy about it, and the horrors of Stalin’s regime had not yet become apparent.’

Images to raise awareness of the civil war include Frank Brangwyn RA’s 1936 lithograph

Spain, c.1936, by Frank Brangwyn RA

(above) for a poster depicting a Madonna-like figure clutching her child as smoke rises from bombed wreckage. ‘It’s one of the most potent images in the show,’ says Martin. Artists also mounted fundraising exhibitions, and in 1938 Roland Penrose arranged a tour of Guernica around the UK. Evidently, the British Government’s policy of non-intervention did not stop the artists’ resistance.

Beside the seaside Folkestone is a backdrop for artists this autumn as site-specific works spring up across the Kent port during the Folkestone Triennial (until 2 Nov). In previous years works such as Mark Dion’s Mobile Gull Appreciation Unit (2008, above) have cannily commented on the seaside town’s character. Highlights this year include Jyll Bradley’s light sculpture in a disused gasworks and Pablo Bronstein’s beach hut in the style of a Hawksmoor church.

© CA LO US T E GU L B EN K I A N F O U N DAT I O N , L IS B O N M .C .G . , P H OTO: CATA R I N A GO M ES F ER R EI R A . P H OTO GR A P H T H I ER RY B A L . P R I VAT E CO L L ECT I O N /© DAV I D B R A N GW Y N

The secret world of artist and mannequin is the subject of an unusual show in Cambridge, says GILES WATERFIELD

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moDern BritisH anD irisH art including Pro ert from the ollection of Barbara and Arnold Burton Wednesday 19 November 2014 New Bond Street, London

Dame BarBara HepwortH (1903-1975) Cantate Domino bronze with a green patina 209.8 cm. (81 1/2 in.) high Conceived in 1958 ÂŁ500,000 - 700,000 ContaCt +44 (0) 207 468 8366 penny.day@bonhams.com

entries now inviteD losing date 10 ctober 2014

bonhams.com/modernbritish

The BP exhibition

Ming 50 years that changed China 18 September 2014 – 5 January 2015 #Ming50Years Supported by BP

Book now Cloisonné jar, decorated with dragons and imperial mark.

China, Ming dynasty, Xuande period, 1426–1435.

Art Exhibitions China – principal Chinese contributor

Germany memories of a nation 16 October 2014 – 25 January 2015 #MemoriesOfANation

Coming soon Georg Baselitz (b. 1938), Adler (Eagle). Linocut, 1977.

Reproduced by permission of the artist. © Georg Baselitz.

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Six degrees of separation

T H E N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY, LO N D O N . P H OTO: DAV I D L E V I N T H A L . © V& A , LO N D O N 2014. © V& A , LO N D O N 2014. © A N N E H A R DY/CO U R T ESY M AU R EEN PA L E Y, LO N D O N . CO U R T ESY O F H I L L A B ECH ER

Connecting the English Romantic tradition with minimalist photography in six steps. By SAM PHILLIPS

3. WILLIAM MORRIS

The National Portrait Gallery examines the legacy of Pre-Raphaelite affiliate and Arts and Crafts pioneer William Morris (020 7306 0055; 16 Oct– 11 Jan 2015). While he inspired countless designers (C.R. Ashbee’s brooch, below), his egalitarian philosophy and politics laid the ground for the public’s postwar participation in art and culture.

1. J.M.W. TURNER RA

2. EFFIE GRAY

Turner is the trump card in any game of six degrees of separation. Almost any artist can be connected to the painter, who is as easily seen to be a successor to Rubens and Claude as he is the progenitor of modern art. His late works, such as Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railway (1844, above), are surveyed at Tate Britain (020 7887 8888; 10 Sep–25 Jan 2015), while Timothy Spall plays the lead in Mr. Turner (released 31 Oct; see page 75 for RA event with Spall).

The critic John Ruskin, Turner’s great supporter, has a cameo in Mr. Turner, but a central role in Effie Gray (released 3 Oct; see page 74 for an RA special event). The film dramatises the marriage of Ruskin (Greg Wise) and Gray (Dakota Fanning, pictured above with Emma Thompson), which was annulled and followed by her marriage to Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais PRA (Tom Sturridge). Thompson, who plays Lady Eastlake, wrote the screenplay.

6. ARCHITECTURAL PHOTOGRAPHY

5. MIRRORCITY

4. ABRAM GAMES

If Hardy’s interiors are works of fiction, then Bernd and Hilla Becher’s exterior images are as objective as it gets: minimalist documents of industrial buildings across Europe (Goole, Great Britain, 1997, above). The Barbican’s show of architectural shots since 1930 (020 7638 4141; 25 Sep–11 Jan 2015) brings the Bechers together with a strong line-up that includes Gursky and Struth.

The success of the Festival of Britain put the Southbank Centre on the map, which since 1968 has included the Hayward Gallery. Its autumn exhibition ‘Mirrorcity’ (020 7960 4200; 14 Oct– 4 Jan 2015) presents more than 20 London-based artists, including photographer Anne Hardy (Untitled IV (balloons), 2005, above), who stages suggestive interiors as subjects for her camera.

The Morris show features material from the famously feel-good Festival of Britain, which in 1951 drew huge numbers to the south bank of the Thames, promoting the country’s postwar recovery. Abram Games, a child of Jewish émigrés, was the festival’s graphic designer (see poster, 1951, above); London’s Jewish Museum celebrates his career (020 7284 7384; 8 Sep–4 Jan 2015).

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A Clockwork Jerusalem, 2014, by FAT Architecture, on display in the British Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale

Back to the future This year’s Venice Architecture Biennale focuses on the fundamentals of architecture and the legacy of modernism. JOSEPH RYKWERT, Honorary Fellow of the RA and Venice veteran, takes a tour Now over a century old, the Venice Biennale celebrated all the arts until 1980 when architecture was separated to alternate with painting, sculpture and suchlike: this year is architecture’s turn.

And it is a biennale with a difference: its director, the Dutch starchitect Rem Koolhaas, has been allowed an unusually reasonable period to prepare the central pavilion show, from which he excluded any contemporary colleagues so as to concentrate on what he has called ‘Fundamentals’.

‘Fundamentals’ are what you are supposed to go back to, particularly when starting anything over again in business, and many of today’s architects could certainly try to go back and start again. So it is a bit of a let-down when ‘fundamentals’ are taken in the main pavilion display to mean presentations of what the building industry, articulated according to trades, has on offer. Wall and floor, ceiling and roof, door and window (such as Britain’s Brooking National Collection wall of windows, right), so far so good – although foundation is unaccountably left out.

But then comes an odd list of displays – stair, escalator, elevator and ramp – all of which are, fundamentally, forms of vertical transport; and then balcony, corridor, fireplace and ‘toilet’. The plumbed water-closet is an innovation (like the plumbed bathroom of the 18th century) that may, arguably, be fundamental now, but the fireplace, an older Western device, was superannuated by other forms of heating long ago.

Such quibbling aside (it only concerns the main pavilion, after all), another topic offered to the 65 national pavilions taking part was

what one might call ‘coming to terms with modernity’. Our elders (never mind betters) struggled with modernity for a couple of centuries. Our generation also has to find new ways of coping with it, now that postmodernity has been relegated to one of many vintage styles of architecture.

Reactions in the national pavilions differed.

The Russians have followed the director’s prim lead and produced a trade fair. Meanwhile, the French enter into a brilliant polemic on modernism, examining how Jean Prouvé ran up metal prefabs for the homeless, and showing Jacques Tati struggling with a machine à habiter in the 1958 film Mon Oncle. The French also review the sinister transformation of the optimistic, much admired and even emulated housing estate on the outskirts of Paris that Eugène Beaudoin and Marcel Lods finished just before the Second World War, when it subsequently became the concentration point for death-camp deportees; later it was turned into barracks, and is now largely demolished.

The French contribution received a commendation from the biennale jury, which gave the first prize to South Korea for a show that includes ungainly Socialist Realist posters from its northern neighbours, although it was assembled without North Korea’s participation (the biennale is also about politics, after all).

The British Pavilion – a bit maligned at home as usual – niftily tells the story of modernism, from Blake’s Jerusalem to Milton Keynes.

It is co-curated by Dutch collective Crimson

Architectural Historians and the British firm FAT Architecture, who contributed visualisations such as A Clockwork Jerusalem (2014, left), and includes a commendable excursus on William Morris’ modernism against that of Bostonbased futurologist Edward Bellamy, whose 1888 science fiction novel Looking Backward located a socialist utopia in the year 2000. The Chilean Pavilion, another prizewinner, gives a dramatic account of former president Salvador Allende’s doomed attempt in the 1970s to implant Sovietmade concrete prefabrication in his seismically challenged country.

The vast, variegated spaces of the Corderie halls (named after the ropes, or cordes, made for Venetian galleys) house a third element of the biennale called ‘Monditalia’. The spaces are given continuity by billowing hangings that reproduce, on a huge scale, an image of Italy copied from an antique map of Roman roads known as the Tabula Peutingeriana. This continuity is essential, as the halls are disjointedly populated by screens showing disconnected snippets from classic Italian films and quasi-balletic group shows that your correspondent – a seasoned biennalista – could not quite make sense of. At any rate visitors might not be much helped by the catalogue, whose design is as perplexing a piece of modish typography as you could find anywhere, in contrast to what some pavilions had on offer, such as the sensible book produced by the French (again), which invites you to consider whether modernity was a promise – fulfilled or unfulfilled – or yet a threat.

We are still left to come to terms with modernity after this biennale, and its promise to assure and inform us about our ‘fundamentals’ is not fulfilled. It does, however, deliver enough incidental pleasures to reward a visit.

Fundamentals: 14th International Architecture Exhibition Venice, www.labiennale.org, until 23 Nov

The Brooking National Collection’s display of 18th-century window frames at the Venice Architecture Biennale

©FAT A R CH I T EC T U R E /S A M JACO B . P H OTO BY F R A N CES CO G A L L I /CO U R T ESY L A B I EN N A L E D I V EN E ZI A

Preview International

34 RA MAGAZINE | AUTUMN 2014

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MARY FEDDEN

E X H I B I T I O N O F O I L S A N D W AT E R C O L O U R S 3 – 1 9 DECEMB ER 2 0 1 4 We would appreciate hearing from you if you have works which you would consider selling or lending to the exhibition. We are pleased to provide free valuations.

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TELEPHONE 020 7493 1888 EMAIL SIDONIE@PORTLANDGALLERY.COM www.portlandgallery.com

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RA Magazine Autumn 2014 Yale

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Page 1

The Long March of Pop

Sculpture Victorious

Shadows

Owning the Past

Art, Music, and Design, 1930–1995 Thomas Crow

Art in an Age of Invention, 1837–1901 Edited by Martina Droth, Jason Edwards and Michael Hatt

The Depiction of Cast Shadows in Western Art E. H. Gombrich

Why the English Collected Antique Sculpture, 1640–1840 Ruth Guilding

With a preface by Neil MacGregor and an introduction by Nicholas Penny

In a lively re-examination of the British collectors who bankrupted themselves to possess antique marble statues, this book chronicles a story of rivalry, nationalism and myopic obsession with posterity.

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Preview Books

Paint it black

© S O N I A B OYCE /A L L R I GH TS R ES ER V ED, DAC S 2014/ P H OTO GR A P H © A R TS CO U N CI L CO L L EC T I O N , S O U T H B A N K CEN T R E . P H OTO L I T T L E R ED PA N DA

RICHARD CORK finds the first comprehensive study of blackBritish artists revelatory The first artist explored in Eddie Chambers’ fascinating book, Black Artists in British Art: A History from 1950 to the Present, is a great surprise: Joseph Johnson, a seaman in the Merchant Navy until he was wounded, discharged and became a busker nicknamed ‘Black Joe’. In 1815 he was portrayed in an etching by John Thomas Smith, Keeper of Prints at the British Museum. This portrait shows ‘Black Joe’ supported by crutches and wearing a model of the seafaring military vessel Nelson perched on his cap. He built the model himself as a tribute to Horatio Nelson, who had been killed in 1805 and then memorialised by a full-rigged ship launched at Woolwich in 1814.

Chambers suggests that ‘we are perhaps, in Smith’s portrait of Johnson, looking at one of the first documented examples of a black-British artist (in this case, a sculptor) in London’.

Very adroitly, Chambers links him with Yinka Shonibare RA, whose admirable and widely hailed sculpture on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square was unveiled two centuries later. Called Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle (2011), it contained a scale model of HMS Victory with brightly patterned African fabric enlivening its sails. But Chambers goes on to admit that nobody knows when the first artists of African, Asian and Caribbean origin made their way to Britain: ‘There is a terrible burden of invisibility and eradication that history has bequeathed the black-British artist.’

This book begins with sculptor Ronald Moody, who came from Jamaica to the UK during the 1920s. Moody became a pioneering figure, and in 1989 his work introduced the Hayward Gallery’s landmark exhibition ‘The Other Story’.

As Chambers, who took part in that much-needed

survey show himself, points out: ‘British art itself has tended to keep black artists – both Britishborn as well as immigrant – at arm’s length.’

Chambers, now Associate Professor of African Diaspora Art at Austin’s University of Texas, devotes his first chapter to the pioneering generation of Caribbean artists. Besides Moody they include eminent artists Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling RA. The first black-British artist to be elected to the Academy, Bowling grew up in Guyana and arrived in London at the age of 14. After beginning as a figurative painter with socio-political themes, he won an international reputation as an abstract artist.

Francis Newton Souza, who arrived from India in 1949, was one of the first South Asian artists to make an impact in Britain. After enduring years of poverty, Souza made his mark – most controversially in a painting of London prostitutes called Young Ladies in Belsize Park (1962). Here, he referred back to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Black artists in Britain were open to adventurous work across the world.

Uzo Egonu, described by Chambers as ‘perhaps the most significant pioneering African artist to settle in London’, came from Nigeria in the 1940s. He was fascinated by landscapes, whereas two of the first black female artists to gain reputations in Britain focused on people.

Zarina Bhimji developed in the 1980s a mixedmedia involvement with the frightening conflicts in her native Uganda. Sonia Boyce, by contrast, produced figurative works based on the complexity of family life (Lay Back, Keep Quiet and Think of What Made Britain So Great, 1986, right).

In 1988 she became the first British-based black artist to have a show at the Whitechapel Gallery. Soon artist and writer Errol Lloyd was exclaiming, ‘For the first time in Britain black women artists are exhibiting together’, thanks to exhibitions curated by Zanzibar-born Lubaina Himid. Since then, as Chambers reveals in this enlightening book, they have played an ever more distinguished part in the vitality of British art.

SHELF LIFE

SAM PHILLIPS selects new books in which artists and writers come together ‘I know that clay, the damp and dirt of it, / The coolth along the bank, the grassy zest.’ So wrote the late Seamus Heaney in a poem inspired by Banks of a Canal, Near Naples (c.1872) by French painter Gustave Caillebotte, reminding us that it is often poetry in which great art finds its equivalent.

Heaney is one of more than 50 distinguished Irish writers who, in the new anthology Lines of Vision (Thames & Hudson, £19.95), respond to the National Gallery of Ireland’s art collection with works of their own. There has, of course, been a longstanding love-in between poetry and painting, and Jenni Quilter’s New York School Painters & Poets (Rizzoli, £50) explores a fruitful period of

Lay Back, Keep Quiet and Think of What Made Britain So Great (detail), 1986, by Sonia Boyce Black Artists in British Art: A History from 1950 to the Present by Eddie Chambers, I.B. Tauris, £56

their crossover during Abstract Expressionism, reproducing rare material that reveals the relationships between artists such as Willem de Kooning and poets such as Frank O’Hara.

Artist and architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh becomes a subject for fiction in Esther Freud’s new novel Mr Mac and Me (Bloomsbury, £16.99), which focuses on the Scotsman’s stay in Suffolk during the First World War. RA Schools alumna Sarah Pickstone warms to an interdisciplinary theme in Park Notes (Daunt Books, £16.99) – the painter draws together works about Regent’s Park by artists and writers such as Sylvia Plath and Michael Landy RA. Other earthly paradises, from the gardens of ancient Egypt to those of the commuter belt, are meanwhile celebrated in text and artworks in the anthology Pleasures of the Garden (British Library, £20).

AUTUMN 2014 | RA MAGAZINE 37

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M A RT I N R A N D A L L T R AV E L T h e 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

215 travel tips from Martin Randall January 2015

February 2015

10–20 Oman Professor Dawn Chatty 13–20 Valletta Baroque Festival Juliet Rix 24–29 Mozart in Salzburg Richard Wigmore 26– 8 Temples of Tamil Nadu Asoka Pugal 26–11 Lands of the Maya Professor Norman Hammond 30– 1 Chamber Music Weekend: I Fagiolini in Newcastle

11–26 Ethiopia Jacopo Gnisci 16–22 Florence Dr Antonia Whitley 20–22 Chamber Music Weekend: The Leonore Piano Trio Richard Wigmore 20– 6 Essential India Dr Giles Tillotson 24– 1 Connoisseur’s Rome Dr Michael Douglas-Scott 24– 2 Essential Rome Dr Thomas-Leo True

March 2015 2–15 Sacred India Charles Allen 7–14 Venice & Florence Dr Kevin Childs 8–15 Courts of Northern Italy Dr Michael Douglas-Scott 9–16 Granada & Córdoba Dr Philippa Joseph 10–14 Ballet in Paris Jane Pritchard mbe 13–15 Chamber Music Weekend: A Weekend of Mozart Richard Wigmore 13–19 Piero della Francesca Dr Antonia Whitley 13–20 Gastronomic Andalucía Gijs van Hensbergen

16–28 Sicily Christopher Newall 17–21 Opera in Marseille & Lyon Dr Michael Downes 17–24 Modern Art on the Côte d’Azur Mary Lynn Riley 18–24 Gardens of the Riviera Caroline Holmes 21–29 Essential Jordan Jane Taylor 21– 1 Morocco James Brown 24–28 Venetian Palaces Dr Michael Douglas-Scott 24– 1 Normans in the South John McNeill 24– 2 Israel & Palestine Dr Garth Gilmour 30–11 Indian Summer Raaja Bhasin

April 2015 3– 6 7–12 7–15 8–13 9–15 9–21 11–17 12–21 13–18 13–19 13–19 13–19 13–19

Chamber Music Weekend: Easter at The Castle Palladian Villas Dr Michael Douglas-Scott Extremadura Adam Hopkins Opera in Vienna Professor Jan Smaczny Gardens & Villas of the Italian Lakes Steven Desmond Central Anatolia Dr Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones Gastronomic Emilia-Romagna Marc Millon & Dr R. T. Cobianchi Jordan Revisited Jane Taylor Gardens of Northern Portugal Gerald Luckhurst Antiquities of Upper Egypt Dr Robert Morkot Genoa & Turin Dr Luca Leoncini Lucca Dr Antonia Whitley Gastronomic Catalonia Gijs van Hensbergen

13–25 Sicily John McNeill 14–21 The Heart of Italy Professor Ian Campbell-Ross 18–28 Chinese Ceramics Dr Lars Tharp 19–24 History of Impressionism Dr Frances Fowle 20–25 Gardens & Villas of Campagna Romana Helena Attlee 20–25 Pompeii & Herculaneum Dr Mark Grahame 20–25 Lisbon Neighbourhoods Adam Hopkins 22–26 Leonardo da Vinci Dr Charles Nicholl 22–30 The Cathedrals of England Jon Cannon 23– 7 Persia Dr Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones 29–12 East Coast Galleries Gijs van Hensbergen

May 2015 2–11 4–13 4–17 5–17 6–10 6–13 7–13 8–14 9–24 11–15 11–17 11–20 13–18 13–21 17–24 19–24 19–29 22–29

23–30 24–30

Classical Greece Dr Oswyn Murray Minoan Crete Dr Alan Peatfield The Western Balkans David Gowan Ming & Qing Civilization Dr Rose Kerr Ravenna & Urbino Dr Luca Leoncini The Douro Adam Hopkins St Petersburg Dr Alexey Makhrov Brittany Caroline Holmes Eastern Turkey Rowena Loverance The Lukas Cranachs Walking Hadrian’s Wall Graeme Stobbs Classical Turkey Henry Hurst At Home in Weston Park Anthony Lambert Andalusian Morocco James Brown Central Macedonia Dr Oswyn Murray Palaces of Piedmont Dr Luca Leoncini Samarkand & Silk Road Cities Sue Rollin Walking in the Footsteps of Leonardo & Michelangelo Dr Antonia Whitley Mediaeval Burgundy John McNeill Art in the Netherlands Dr Guus Sluiter

Contact us: +44 (0)20 8742 3355 • www.martinrandall.com 24–31 Courts of Northern Italy Dr Michael Douglas-Scott 27–31 Art in Madrid Dr Xavier Bray 30–10 Frank Lloyd Wright Tom Abbott

June 2015 1– 8 Art in Le Marche Polly Buston 2– 9 Moravia Dr Jarl Kremeier 2–13 Walking to Santiago Adam Hopkins & Gaby Macphedran 4– 7 Flanders Fields Andrew Spooner 6–13 The Po Valley John McNeill 8–14 French Gothic Dr Matthew Woodworth 8–15 Cave Art of France Dr Paul Bahn 9–16 Great Houses of the South West Anthony Lambert 15–21 Connoisseur’s Vienna Dr Jarl Kremeier 15–23 Mediaeval Saxony Dr Alexandra Gajewski 18–23 Ardgowan Caroline Knight 19–26 Walking the Rhine 20–27 The Rhine Valley Music Festival 25–29 The Western Front Major Gordon Corrigan 25– 3 Finland: Aalto & Others Dr Harry Charrington 26– 4 Mitteldeutschland Jeffrey Miller 28– 1 The Renewed Rijksmuseum Dr Sophie Oosterwijk 29– 2 Literature & Walking in the Lake District Dr Charles Nicholl

July 2015 3–11 4–7 5–11 6–10 6–10 6–11 7–12 13–16 21–25 21–27

Trasimeno Music Festival The Age of Bede Imogen Corrigan The Johann Sebastian Bach Journey West Country Churches John McNeill Agincourt, Crécy & Waterloo Major Gordon Corrigan Snowdonia & Anglesey Neil Johnstone King Ludwig II Tom Abbott Constable & Gainsborough The Western Front Major Gordon Corrigan Opera in Munich & Bregenz Dr David Vickers & Tom Abbott

August 2015 5–13 Baroque & Rococo Tom Abbott 9–22 The Baltic States Neil Taylor 11–15 Connoisseur’s London Various lecturers & guides 16–20 Vienna’s Masterpieces Angus Haldane 20–27 The Danube Music Festival 28– 9 The Road to Santiago John McNeill 31– 6 The Sibelius Festival

September 2015 1–11 Samarkand & Silk Road Cities Professor James Allan 2– 5 Flemish Painting Dr Sophie Oosterwijk 2– 6 Agincourt, Crécy & Waterloo Major Gordon Corrigan 4– 6 Mediaeval Art in Paris Dr Matthew Woodworth 4– 7 Poets & The Somme Andrew Spooner 4– 9 Vienna & Budapest 1900 Dr Diane Silverthorne 4–18 Persia Dr Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones 6–10 Connoisseur’s London Various lecturers & guides 6–12 Walking Hadrian’s Wall Graeme Stobbs 7–13 French Gothic Dr Alexandra Gajewski 7–13 History of Medicine Professor Helen King & Dr Luca Leoncini 7–14 Bohemia Michael Ivory 7–14 Bilbao to Bayonne Gijs van Hensbergen 7–15 Berlin, Potsdam, Dresden Dr Jarl Kremeier 7–21 The Iron Curtain Neil Taylor 8–19 Walking to Santiago Adam Hopkins & Gaby Macphedran 8–21 Essential China Dr Jamie Greenbaum 10–13 In Churchill’s Footsteps Terry Charman 10–15 Palladian Villas Professor Fabrizio Nevola

St Petersburg Dr Alexey Makhrov Morocco James Brown Istanbul Jane Taylor The Greeks in Sicily Professor Tony Spawforth 14–23 Great Houses of the North Gail Bent 15–21 Connoisseur’s Prague Michael Ivory 15–22 The Heart of Italy Dr Michael Douglas-Scott 10–16 12–23 13–19 14–21

‘A beautifully organised, thoroughly enjoyable, culturally uplifting and educationally enriching tour: all we had hoped for and so much more!’

16–20 Art in Madrid Gail Turner 17–23 Gardens & Villas of the Italian Lakes Steven Desmond 19–28 Classical Greece Dr Andrew Farrington 20–27 Dark Age Brilliance Dr Ffiona Gilmore Eaves 21–27 Walking a Royal River Dr Paul Atterbury 21–28 Granada & Córdoba Dr David McGrath 21– 3 Sicily Dr Luca Leoncini 22–29 Modern Art on the Côte d’Azur Lydia Bauman 22– 2 Samarkand & Silk Road Cities Dr Peter Webb 23–30 Essential Puglia Christopher Newall 24– 1 Barcelona 1900 Gijs van Hensbergen 26– 4 Sardinia Dr R. T. Cobianchi 28– 2 The Divine Office: A Festival of Choral Music in Oxford

ABTA No.Y6050

5085

Illustration: Florence, The River Arno, aquatint c. 1840.

28– 3 Pompeii & Herculaneum Dr Mark Grahame 29– 7 Aragón Adam Hopkins 30– 4 Siena & San Gimignano Dr Antonia Whitley

October 2015 1– 5 1– 7 1–10 3–10 3–18 4–10 4–11 5–10 5–11 5–13 5–16 5–17 5–18 7–22 8–17 10–21 12–17 12–19 12–20 13–22 14–18 19–25 19–28 19–29 25– 2

The Venetian Hills Dr Joachim Strupp Gardens & Villas of the Italian Lakes Steven Desmond Provence & Languedoc Dr Alexandra Gajewski Athens & Rome Professor Roger Wilson Eastern Turkey Rowena Loverance Art in the Netherlands Dr Guus Sluiter Courts of Northern Italy Dr Michael Douglas-Scott Friuli-Venezia Giulia Dr Joachim Strupp Malta Juliet Rix Roman Algeria Anthony Sattin Ancient Egypt Professor John Ray Sicily Dr Philippa Joseph The Western Balkans David Gowan Ethiopia Jacopo Gnisci New England Modern Dr Harry Charrington Cliff Dwellings & Canyons John M. Fritz Pompeii & Herculaneum Professor Roger Wilson Caravaggio Dr Helen Langdon Palestine Dr Felicity Cobbing Israel & Palestine Dr Garth Gilmour Ravenna & Urbino Dr Luca Leoncini Gastronomic Sicily Marc Millon Castile & León Gijs van Hensbergen Essential Andalucía Adam Hopkins Essential Jordan Sue Rollin & Jane Streetly

The RA’s painters, printmakers, sculptors and architects

Academy Artists

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In the Studio

Going for bold Known for his colourful urban buildings, Will Alsop RA also retreats to paint in his Norfolk studio, says FIONA MADDOCKS. Photograph by EAMONN MCCABE Architects rarely live in the kind of buildings they design. The chance to test this assumption is part of the pleasure of visiting them in their own homes. Take Will Alsop RA, radical designer, abundant painter, creator of asymmetrical visions in glass, steel and colour from Marseilles to Toronto to south London.

Think of his Peckham Library, which won the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2000 – a riot of red, orange, blue, lime green – and acted as a catalyst for urban regeneration of the whole area.

Accordingly, you proceed down the quiet, residential road where he lives, in the seaside town of Sheringham in Norfolk, looking for shock and bold statement. You find both, but not as you expect. Alsop’s long, narrow front garden is entirely occupied by an ironarched tunnel of green and blue, foliage and flowers, ground cover and gravel. The impact is dramatic. The house is almost hidden from view. Arrival takes on a processional mood: like walking up the aisle, with Alsop himself, in nondescript white open-necked shirt and grey trousers, waiting at the end to greet you.

Apparently it’s a redbrick Victorian former stable block but I have to take his word for this.

Orientation is not obvious. Where, in fact, is the front door? Dark rooms run into one another, as in a warren. Then suddenly you step out into a glass dining area at the rear, one of Alsop’s few additions. It’s airy, elegant, lived in, with a view into a secret garden of huge architectural shrubs, exotic pines and tree ferns.

‘You wouldn’t call Will a minimal architect,’ observes his wife, Sheila, drily, from a narrow library room which used to be the garage.

Large model biplanes are suspended from the ceiling. Every wall is covered with photographs, a collection of china jugs and plates, silver, books. Alsop himself embraces life with a devil-may-care wholeheartedness, smoking and drinking enthusiastically, giggling, doing cryptic crosswords at top speed.

Yet he works ferociously hard, as the pile of large, generously colourful, splashy paintings in his studio testify. He built the studio in a corner of his garden in the early 1980s. It has a pitched roof and full-height glass doors either end. A long room to the side is for reading and writing. The painting area is clear, but for well ordered trays

and brushes, and drawers full of acrylic paint.

‘I like colour. I’m not afraid to use it,’ he says.

Some of his paintings are abstract, others form the basis of architectural ideas. One, in the house, is a blaze of colour with a huge cactus in the middle. It makes you chuckle. Bluff, burly and slightly raffish – eyes laughing while keeping a straight face – Alsop’s exuberance extends to his buildings and paintings.

Together with fellow Academicians Ken Howard and David Mach, Alsop has just chosen his own colour range for the RA’s new wall paint range. His colours are inspired by Norfolk.

‘I was particularly taken with the sight of fishing boats reflected in the sea. I had fun mixing up colours I’d seen, some muted, some strong. Not all are inspired by Norfolk though; Nancy Rose, a pinkish colour, is named after my daughter.’

Alsop and his wife spend roughly half their time in Norfolk – they have another home in Kensington. The architect’s Battersea practice and studio, a stone’s throw from Norman Foster’s, is in a converted Victorian factory. On the ground floor of the building is Testbed1, an experimental art space, and the Doodle Bar – all designed by Alsop – where visitors can scribble on the walls.

‘It’s not just that I enjoy a companionable drink,’ he says. ‘A bar or pub is an important indicator of a community. It’s part of what makes east London so buzzing, in a way west London is not.’ He currently has a big project underway which includes a hotel near the elevated section of the M4. ‘The dominance of the east has taken its toll on the vibrancy of west London. It’s time for the west to fight back,’ he says, half seriously.

How did Alsop end up on the remote north Norfolk coast? ‘Sheila’s parents lived in Sheringham so we knew the area. Sheila was pregnant when we first moved in and used to go to bed early, so I would go to the pub and have a quiet drink. I rather liked the fluorescent strip lighting and old lino. One of the first times I went, someone said, “You’re not from these parts?” I said, “No, London,” and he replied, “Ah, down Thetford way.” I liked that.

I thought we had come to the right place.’

For information on the full range of Royal Academy paints, including Will Alsop RA’s colour range, visit http://roy.ac/RApaints

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AN ESCORTED TOUR OF MOROCCO WITH NOBLE CALEDONIA

SPAIN

Art & Gardens of Morocco

Strait of Gibraltar

An escorted tour of the history, culture & landscapes of Morocco 3rd to 12th March; 9th to 18th April; 10th to 19th September; 4th to 13th October 2015 Explore the heart of Morocco with a focus on Marrakech and the surrounding valleys and mountain villages. Staying in a range of beautiful accommodation including a luxury riad in Marrakech, a Kasbah in the Atlas Mountains, and a delightful property in the Ouarzazate Valley, we will take an in-depth look at this exotic land. Looking out over the mountain and desert landscapes, exploring dramatic gorges and immersing yourself in the colourful souks of Marrakech is the perfect escape from modern life. We will explore art galleries, historic houses and palaces with their beautiful gardens and enjoy fantastic cuisine in some of the best restaurants in Marrakech.

The Itinerary in brief Day 1 - London to Marrakech. Fly by scheduled flight. On arrival, transfer to our Riad, La Maison Arabe, for a four-night stay. This evening enjoy welcome drinks and a private dinner at the Riad.

Day 2 - Marrakech. After breakfast, we will take a guided tour of this second imperial city with its rich monuments, including the Koutoubia minaret, a symbol of the city for 800 years, the Bahia palace with its lovely courtyards, late Moorish architecture and the Saadian tombs including the royal pavilion. Enjoy lunch at La Mamounia, where Winston Churchill liked to stay, and visit the beautiful gardens where he often set up his easel.

Return to La Maison Arabe and this evening enjoy a private hosted dinner.

Day 3 - Ourika Valley. This morning we will take a scenic drive across the plains south of Marrakech towards Ourika Valley, in the spectacular Atlas Mountain region.

Visit the Nectarome Herb gardens and enjoy lunch.

Day 4 - Marrakech. This morning, visit the Bert Flint Museum at Maison Tiskiwin which houses an excellent collection of Moroccan art and artefacts. Close by we stop at Dar Si Said Museum, a beautiful palace housing the very essence of Moroccan art. We visit the Museum of Palmeraie which has a garden of two hectares and houses a permanent exhibition devoted to contemporary art in Morocco and then head to the traditional country gardens of La Maison Arabe in the Palmeraie where we enjoy a delicious lunch under the trees.

Day 5 - Ouirgane & Imlil, Atlas Mountains. After breakfast we visit the Majorelle Gardens, one of the most

visited sites in Morocco. It took French painter Jacques Majorelle forty years of passion and dedication to create this enchanting place in the heart of the city.

We then drive south to the lush valley of Asni where we enjoy lunch at Sir Richard Branson’s exquisite property, Kasbah Tamadot. In the late afternoon, continue to Imlil in the pretty Mizane Valley, where we walk or ride by mule to Kasbah Toubkal for a two night stay.

Day 6 - Imlil, Atlas Mountains. Today enjoy a walk or mule ride to Armed Village (2000 metres), located at the foot of Jebel Toubkal, the highest peak in North Africa at 4167 metres. Explore the Berber village and stop for lunch in a Berber house.

Day 7 - Imlil to Ouarzazate. Today we leave Imlil and drive through the valley along scenic mountain roads, enjoying spectacular views. Before reaching Ouarzazate we head south over dirt roads to Ait Benhaddou along the fabulous Ounila Valley. Used as the location for many films this fortified village is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Continue to Berbere Palace for a two-night stay.

Day 8 - Todra Gorges. Today will be devoted to exploring the Todra and Dades Gorges and some of the towns and villages in the area. Enjoy beautiful scenery of green oases that have been inhabited for hundreds of years.

Day 9 - Ouarzazate to Marrakech. This morning you will drive back to Marrakech for an overnight stay at the Sofitel Marrakech. Remainder of day at leisure.

Our farewell dinner tonight will be taken at Yacout, the most spectacular restaurant designed by the American Bill Willis.

Day 10 - Marrakech to London. After a morning at leisure we transfer to the airport for the return scheduled flight to London.

MOROCCO Marrakech

ATLAS MOUNTAINS Ourika Valley Todra Gorges

Ouirgane Asni Imlil Ouarzazate TOUBKAL NATIONAL PARK

ALGERIA

Your Accommodation in Morocco During our time in Morocco we stay at some truly special riads and hotels:

La Maison Arabe Since opening in 1946, La Maison Arabe has achieved a legendary status in Marrakech. Ideally situated in the medina, the hotel features 26 rooms and suites, most with a private terrace and fireplace, three restaurants, a piano bar, a world famous cooking school as well as a new spa including a traditional hammam.

Kasbah du Toubkal Located on the slopes of Jbel Toubkal, the highest peak in the Atlas Mountains, known as the “roof of North Africa” on account of the majestic panoramic view that it commands, the guest house is surrounded by vast spaces, plateaus, plantations, cliffs, a lake, waterfalls, and

deep ravines. The Kasbah is the result of a unique partnership with its British owner and the local Berber community; with a five per cent levy included in guests’ accommodation bills being funnelled back to the villagers.

Le Berbere Palace With its fragrant alleyways surrounded by jasmine and roses, Le Berbere Palace offers luxurious accommodation on the edge of the desert. Sumptuously decorated, the hotel offers a relaxing environment with spacious and wellequipped guest rooms. Relax by the pool under the typical Berber tent, sip a cocktail in the piano bar or make use of the fitness centre, hammam, Jacuzzi and sauna.

Hotel Sofitel Marrakech Lounge & Spa Just a short walk from the Jema El Fna square, the five star Hotel Sofitel is a contemporary Andalusian-style hotel set in exotic gardens. A place of calm and relaxation, the hotel offers a high level of service and hospitality. There is a choice of bars and restaurants, an extensive spa area with beautifully furnished guest rooms.

Prices and Inclusions Prices per person based on double occupancy start from £2795. Single prices start from £3995.

Price includes: Economy class scheduled air travel, nine nights hotel accommodation as described, all meals (excluding lunch on days 9 and 10) with mineral water, wine with welcome and farewell dinners and hosted dinners, all excursions as described, entrance fees, Tour Manager, English speaking guides, gratuities, one complimentary spa treatment or cooking class at La Maison Arabe.

NB. Itinerary subject to change. Travel insurance and lunch on days 9 and 10 are not included in the price. Our current booking conditions apply to all reservations.

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

Alternatively view or request online at www.noble-caledonia.co.uk 7576 Noble Cal RA Mag Ad.indd 1

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Academy Artists Enter the City, 2013, by Christopher Le Brun PRA

Painting the mystery

© CH R IS TO P H ER L E B RU N . © T H E A R T IS T/CO U R T ESY M AU R EEN PA L E Y, LO N D O N

New paintings by RA President Christopher Le Brun embrace the transcendent powers of abstraction, says BEN LUKE More than a decade ago, Christopher Le Brun PRA spoke of one of the consistent tensions in his work as being that between ‘revealing and covering’. He added: ‘That can be just as potent psychologically as any narrative. What goes on in the overall project is this continuous debate, or dialogue, internally as to what painting can be.’

One’s initial reaction towards his latest pictures, which go on show in an exhibition in New York this September, might be that covering has the upper hand – these are the most abstract paintings Le Brun has created to date. But rather than breaking with his past work, he told me that

he felt that he was ‘letting the essential elements of my work speak more clearly, and relying on those to do the work’. This is what makes that tension between exposure and concealment such fertile ground – because of what Le Brun calls ‘the odd, metaphysical language of painting’, so much can be evoked in the interplay of colour, the swathes, dabs, mists and drips of oil on canvas.

Take the breakthrough picture of this new group of works, Walton (2013), a rich, crimson painting with intricate trails of drips along its bottom edge. It was triggered by William Walton’s late Romantic opera Troilus and Cressida,

Hidden lives Gillian Wearing RA’s new film follows themes of memory and regret in the lives of West Midlands residents, and expands her body of work about the disparity between public persona and private reality.

We Are Here is at New Art Gallery Walsall (until 12 Oct) and Maureen Paley, London (13 Oct-16 Nov).

Still from We Are Here, 2014, by Gillian Wearing RA

and began with the names of the composer and the opera written on the canvas. But in the midst of painting it, Le Brun said he ‘had an absolute, sudden conviction’ of what he needed to do, and painted the entire canvas red, leaving only traces of pale blue beneath. The effect, Le Brun says, was to bring all the elements underneath into connection, so that they were all ‘speaking with each other’. So while the specific references to Walton’s opera are now lost, its emotional power and a deep, almost overwhelming, sense of the sublime remain.

That overpowering quality is a strong element of Le Brun’s new paintings. Both Enter the City (2013, left) and Ceres (2013) prompt gasps with their hot yellows and vivid reds, while Neither White, nor Warm, nor Cold (2013), some four metres long, envelops you in gentler tones, evoking veils of mist or diffuse early morning light on water. Le Brun is a proud descendent of ‘extreme Romanticism’ as he puts it, and the connection between these works and Turner’s later paintings is unavoidable.

Le Brun, through his process of revealing and covering, can evoke landscape to different degrees. Painting as Sunrise (2013) is a crucial painting in this sense. It immediately conjures a morning sky of deep vermilion and pale blue, with white and lilac clouds and the circle of the sun just about distinguishable in an expressive flurry at the bottom right of the picture.

But that title is important: not Painting of Sunrise but Painting as Sunrise. It speaks of the power of painting not only to depict its subject, but to embody it: to provoke feeling, to stir emotion, to create wonder, just as a natural phenomenon like a sunrise can. This is the abiding feeling that Le Brun’s new work transmits – of a deep conviction in and passion for painting’s transcendent power and enduring mysteries.

Christopher Le Brun: New Paintings Friedman Benda Gallery, New York, www.friedmanbenda.com, 11 Sep–15 Oct Christopher Le Brun: New Paintings by David Anfam and Edmund de Waal, Ridinghouse, £17.95, available at the RA Shop. Le Brun exhibits sculpture in Beyond Limits at Chatsworth, Bakewell, Derbyshire, 01246 565300, www.chatsworth.org, 8 Sep–26 Oct For more information and images of Christopher Le Brun’s recent projects, visit http://roy.ac/lebrun

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Academy Artists Epiphany

Alarmed Stiltwalkers, 1988, by David Remfry RA

Dancing in the dark A chance encounter in 1988 liberated David Remfry RA’s painting practice, as SAM PHILLIPS discovers. Portrait photograph by NICK BALLON ‘One shouldn’t really disavow one’s early work,’ says David Remfry RA, as we walk together in Kensington Gardens. ‘But I had fallen into a trap – a trap where I was doing something just because it was successful.’ I had asked the painter if we could discuss his epiphany: the major turning point in his practice or his understanding of art.

The softly spoken artist suggested we come to this magnificent London park, the place where in 1988 he escaped from the trap, leaving behind his early style for something new.

Remfry sets the scene with an extraordinary story, beginning in 1979. The artist – then an oil painter in his mid-30s – fell ill with sarcoidosis, a rare condition that, in his words, ‘affects your

respiratory system and every joint in your body, so you’re virtually unable to move. I wasn’t able to lift a brush of oil paint.’ He was, however, able to lift a watercolour brush – easier to apply, watercolour offered a way to work while he convalesced. On the basis of his oils, the Ankrum Gallery in Los Angeles had offered Remfry a debut US solo show. He sent them 30 watercolours, mainly still-lifes; they sold out before the opening.

Soon a revived Remfry was awash with watercolour commissions and a medium that he had thought was a weak alternative to oil had revealed its true potential. ‘I carried on doing these simple paintings – still-lifes of china on tables, or portraits, or young women sitting

at tables. They were so successful it just seemed natural to pursue them.’ But by the late 1980s he had become tired of such straightforward subject matter, however lucrative it was – the aforementioned trap. On a summer’s evening in 1988, he saw a way out, in the form of three female stilt-walkers, dressed in black, who were roaming around the Henley Festival in what seemed to Remfry to be ‘a continuous dance’.

‘They were mysterious, almost not human,’ he recalls. ‘It was the freedom in their movements that made them so intriguing, and I liked the fact that they appeared powerful because, mostly, women aren’t portrayed as being powerful.’ He approached the stilt-walkers after the event and they agreed to model for him. His Kensington studio had too low a ceiling, however, so they bounded across nearby Kensington Gardens, up to its neoclassical Italian Gardens, to reprise their performance for Remfry’s sketchbook.

The large-scale watercolours – with their strange sub-human subjects, heavy use of black and highly gestural drapery – were a world away from what Remfry calls his ‘cosy’ earlier work.

‘Since that series I have felt free to paint anything I like,’ he says, and that breadth now encompasses everything, from figures dancing to salsa to the accordion players that feature in a new series commissioned for the Diamond Jubilee Tea Salon in Fortnum & Mason, across from the RA. ‘I never really went back to still-lifes in the same way. Immediately afterwards I became interested in painting skulls and that sort of thing.

All remarkably unsuccessful in commercial terms – my art dealer said to me ironically, “An exhibition of skulls? Thank you very much.” But I was liberated for the future.’

Capriccio with 22 Inventions: An Installation

by David Remfry RA is on permanent display at the Diamond Jubilee Tea Salon, Fortnum & Mason, London, 020 7734 8040, www.fortnumandmason.com For an article by painter Mick Rooney RA on Remfry’s new Fortnum & Mason works, visit http://roy.ac/fortnums

© DAV I D R EM F RY. P H OTO © N I CK B A L LO N

David Remfry RA, photographed in London, July 2014

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Enquiries to: The Royal Mint, PO Box 500, Pontyclun CF72 8WP. Conditions of Sale, Payment Options and Coin Specifications are available on request. Coins shown are not actual size. For our full set of Terms and Conditions please visit royalmint.com/terms. See our website for delivery charges. Standard despatch of in-stock items is within 3 days of receipt of order. Calls charged at local rate (9am-6pm Mon-Fri, 9am-8pm Sat & Sun). © The Royal Mint Limited 2014

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28/07/2014 16:29

Now showing

Architects

Our guide to where you can see the art and architecture of Royal Academicians

● Edward Cullinan’s award-winning 1990 office building Cemex House in Egham has been awarded Grade II listed status ● Norman Foster and Spencer de Grey’s practice Foster + Partners has designed the new First World War Galleries that have now opened at the Imperial War Museum, London (below)

● Thomas Heatherwick’s studio is designing a new park in the centre of Abu Dhabi, opening in 2017. It includes a public library, mosque, outdoor cinema and a ‘sunken oasis’ garden ● Nicholas Grimshaw’s firm has been appointed to design the terminal complex for a new six-runway airport in Istanbul. It has also designed the underground station platforms along the Crossrail line for London, due to open 2018 ● Michael Hopkins’s firm is working on a design for a new pavilion for the Herne Hill Velodrome, London, which was originally built for the 1948 Olympic Games ● Louisa Hutton’s firm Sauerbruch Hutton has completed new offices at Two New Ludgate in the City of London ● Ian Ritchie’s firm has submitted the planning application for a new design for the Tricycle Theatre in north London.

The firm has also been invited to submit plans to transform the Grade II-listed Walthamstow Cinema into a theatre. ● Richard Rogers’s firm RSHP has completed the new nine-storey World Conservation and Exhibitions Centre at the British Museum, London ● The winner of a major competition to rebuild London’s Crystal Palace and restore the surrounding park is due to be announced this autumn. The shortlist includes David Chipperfield, Nicholas Grimshaw, Zaha Hadid in collaboration with Anish Kapoor, and Richard Rogers.

Painters and Printmakers ● Elizabeth Blackadder’s print retrospective is at Glasgow Print Studio (until 5 Oct) ● Frank Bowling has a solo show at the Spritmuseum, Stockholm (23 Oct–6 April 2015; right) ● Jock McFadyen takes part in ‘In the City’ at the Lion and Lamb Gallery, London (20 Sep–11 Oct) ● Anne Desmet shows wood engravings at Brook Gallery, Budleigh Salterton (18 Oct–16 Nov) ● Tracey Emin has a solo show at White Cube Bermondsey, London (8 Oct–15 Nov; above) ● Anthony Eyton’s show ‘Drawing on Hawksmoor’ is at Eleven Spitalfields, London (7 Nov–23 Dec) ● Paul Huxley delivers a lecture on Rothko at the Mark Rothko Art Centre in Daugavpils, Latvia (23 Sep) ● Christopher Le Brun (see article on page 41) exhibits in a two-person show at Valentina Bonomo, Rome (until 15 Sep) ● Grayson Perry shows new work at the National Portrait Gallery, London (25 Oct–15 March 2015) ● Bob and Roberta Smith’s film The Art Party! is out on DVD ● Wolfgang Tillmans has a solo show at Philadelphia Museum of Art (until 26 Oct) ● Joe Tilson’s prints are shown at Villa Manin Passariano, Codroipo, Italy (until 14 Sep) ● Gillian Wearing’s sculpture, A Real Birmingham Family, is unveiled in Centenary Square, Birmingham, on 30 Oct.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT

Good Red Love, 2014, by Tracey Emin, at White Cube Bermondsey; Foster + Partners’ First World War Galleries at the Imperial War Museum, London; detail of Black Path (Bunhill Fields), 2013, by Cornelia Parker, at the Whitworth; Absolut Bowling, 1997,

by Frank Bowling, on show in Stockholm

Sculptors ● Antony Gormley’s Room, a sculpture

that doubles as a hotel suite, has opened at the Beaumont Hotel, London ● Nigel Hall shows in ‘Sculpture in the City’, in the City of London (until May 2015) ● David Mach’s war memorial for Polish men who fought in Arnhem is unveiled in the Dutch town on 28 Sep ● Cornelia Parker’s solo show opens

the Whitworth Gallery’s new extension in Manchester (25 Oct–8 March 2015; above) ● Yinka Shonibare shows at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (10 Sep–9 Nov) ● William Tucker has a solo show at Pangolin, London (15 Oct–29 Nov) ● Rebecca Warren has a solo show at Matthew Marks, New York (13 Sep–25 Oct) ● Several RA sculptors show in ‘Crucible 2’ at Gloucester Cathedral (1 Sep–31 Oct), including Ann Christopher, Bryan Kneale and Leonard McComb.

© T R ACE Y EM I N / P H OTO: B EN W ES TO BY/CO U R T ESY W H I T E CU B E . N I GEL YO U N G / F OS T ER + PA R T N ERS . CO U R T ESY T H E A R T IS T A N D F R I T H S T R EE T G A L L ERY. PA R T O F T H E A B S O LU T A R T CO L L ECT I O N / P H OTO GR A P H Y K L AS- GO R A N T I N B ECK / CO U R T ESY O F S P R I T M US EU M

Academy Artists

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—— AN EXHIBITION FROM THE ROYAL COLLECTION 27 SEPTEMBER 2014 TO 8 FEBRUARY 2015

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Roman Ostia Ancient Ruins, Modern Art 24 September – 21 December 2014

Estorick Collection of modern italian art 39a Canonbury Square, London N1 2AN Highbury & Islington Tel: 020 7704 9522 www.estorickcollection.com

Opening Times Wednesday to Saturday 11.00 – 18.00 Sunday 12.00 – 17.00 Closed Mondays and Tuesdays 11.00 – 21.00 on the first Thursday of each month

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07/08/2014 16:59

Give a gift that will last forever

John Flaxman RA Apollo and Marpessa (detail), c. 1790-94 Marble relief, 48.40 x 54.80 x 6.90cm Photo: Š Royal Academy of Arts, London

Approaching its 250th anniversary, the Royal Academy has a story like nowhere else. Led by an extraordinary group of artists, we have been making, debating and exhibiting art since 1768. Help us write the next chapter in our history by leaving a gift in your will.

To find out more and request an information booklet, please email Matthew.Watters@royalacademy.org.uk or call 0207 300 5677 royalacademy.org.uk/legacies

Your support is our future The Royal Academy Trust is a registered charity with Charity Number 1067270

B N P P A R I B A S I S P R O U D TO S P O N S O R

Anselm Kiefer at the

R O YA L A C A D E M Y O F A RTS

27 SEPTEMBER - 14 DECEMBER 2014

Anselm Kiefer, Morgenthau Plan, (detail), 2013 Acrylic, emulsion, oil, shellac, metal, fragments of paint, plaster, gold leaf, and sediment of electrolysis on photograph mounted on canvas, 330 x 560 x 45 cm Private Collection Š Anselm Kiefer. Photography: Charles Duprat

As a committed sponsor of art around the world and a long-standing supporter of the Royal Academy in London, BNP Paribas is pleased to be sponsoring Anselm Kiefer’s retrospective exhibition this autumn. We hope you will share in the enthusiastic support we are lending to this landmark exhibition.

Sponsored By

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Throughout his career, the German artist Anselm Kiefer has confronted the weight of the past and the power of myth on a monumental scale.

As the RA stages a major retrospective, Martin Gayford chronicles the extraordinary vision and transformative force of this colossus of contemporary art

T H E D O R IS A N D D O N A L D F IS H ER CO L L ECT I O N / P H OTO: T H E D O R IS A N D D O N A L D F IS H ER CO L L ECT I O N /© A NS EL M K I EF ER

Anselm’s alchemy

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‘I was born in ruins.

As a child I played in ruins… but I also like ruins because they are a starting point for something new’

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WINTER LANDSCAPE: LENT BY THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, DENISE AND ANDREW SAUL FUND, 1995 (1995.14.5)/PHOTO © 2014. IMAGE © THE METROPOLITAN

factory, a rambling building in vernacular stone architecture containing a house and workshop.

Around this, however, has accreted what can only be described as a Mediterranean landscape strewn with contemporary art spaces. The long, winding drive is lined with some 50 individual pavilions, each containing a group of paintings, sculptures or installations. Other works are housed in a maze of underground tunnels, and in glass structures of Kiefer’s own invention – part greenhouses, part vitrines.

Just in scale, what Kiefer has done at Barjac is daunting. A day is scarcely sufficient to see everything. Asked how his retrospective at the RA would relate to this gesamtkunstwerk – this total work of art – at Barjac, Kiefer replied, ‘It will be a concentration of all this.’

When Kathleen Soriano, curator of the RA’s exhibition, first visited Kiefer’s studio, she found the experience overwhelming, but by her third

THIS PAGE: © ANSELM KIEFER . PHOTOGR APHY: CHARLES DUPR AT OPP OSITE TOP: HALL COLLECTION/PHOTO HALL COLLECTION/© ANSELM KIEFER PHOTO OF ARTIST: © ANSELM KIEFER . PHOTOGR APHY: RENATE GR AF

W

alking down a hillside in the foothills of the Cévennes, we come across a group of massive towers. Multi-storeyed, irregular, almost tottering, these look at once old and new. The material they are made from – cast concrete – gives them the appearance of a contemporary shanty town or some haphazard industrial structure. Their form and presence, silhouetted against the clear southern French sky, suggest the architecture of Dante’s Italy or medieval Greece.

These extraordinary objects – it is hard to know whether to call them sculpture, architecture or installation – are among the landmarks of La Ribaute (above), the estate near the town of Barjac on which the German artist Anselm Kiefer Hon RA has created perhaps the most ambitious and complex work of art of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. At La Ribaute’s centre is a disused silk

Margarethe, 1981 Kiefer’s towers punctuate the parched landscape around his studio complex at Barjac in southern France, 2012 THIS PAGE, BELOW LEFT Anselm Kiefer RIGHT Detail from his book work, For Jean Genet, 1969, showing a photograph of Kiefer performing a Nazi salute BELOW RIGHT Winter Landscape, 1970 OPPOSITE PAGE

WINTER LANDSCAPE: LENT BY THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, DENISE AND ANDREW SAUL FUND, 1995 (1995.14.5)/PHOTO © 2014. IMAGE © THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART/ART RESOURCE/SCALA , FLORENCE/© ANSELM KIEFER

THIS PAGE: © ANSELM KIEFER . PHOTOGR APHY: CHARLES DUPR AT OPP OSITE TOP: HALL COLLECTION/PHOTO HALL COLLECTION/© ANSELM KIEFER PHOTO OF ARTIST: © ANSELM KIEFER . PHOTOGR APHY: RENATE GR AF

PREVIOUS SPREAD

visit she felt more reassured, because she had grasped that all of Kiefer’s works were connected.

All of Kiefer’s art, she says, is concerned with ‘a handful of issues, themes, stories that he is constantly revisiting; at the heart of it are ideas about cosmology, the connection between heaven and earth’. Thus everything Kiefer makes is part of a whole that is always in the process of evolving. ‘He isn’t someone who thinks about time being linear,’ as Soriano puts it. ‘He thinks about it being cyclical and everything being connected.’ On the May morning when I saw those towers, Kiefer told me he had woken up with the idea for a new building in his mind, and an intuitive feeling – on which he did not elaborate – about what he would put inside it.

Change and decay are built into his art, in the way that planned obsolescence was a feature of American cars. His paintings often contain materials that are bound to mutate: straw, lead

that once flowed like a sluggish liquid. Some of his recent works were given a final touch by electrolysis – they were placed in a chemical bath with a cathode and an anode so that copper was deposited on its lead, which in turn became part of the surface of the painting. The copper turned green, but – and this was the point that delighted Kiefer – alterations carried on occurring. People who bought these works, he told me with glee, would have to be told that in six months they would have a different picture.

Two of Kiefer’s towers, entitled Jericho, were exhibited in the RA’s Annenberg Courtyard in 2007. Around the towers at Barjac is strewn the wreckage of similar mini-Babels that have come tumbling down. I asked his studio manager, Waltraud Forelli, whether Kiefer minded when his works collapsed in this way. ‘Oh no,’ she replied, ‘Anselm loves it when they do that!’

Rubble, indeed, is one of his favoured materials.

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put them on the roof of my VW Beetle and drive to Düsseldorf to show him.’ Of all the major postwar German artists, including Richter, Georg Baselitz Hon RA and Sigmar Polke, it is Beuys to whom Kiefer is closest. A profound interest in ritual and metaphysics is something Kiefer has in common with Beuys, as well as a deep sense of German Romantic heritage, in literature and philosophy as well as the visual arts. There is also a stylistic similarity between Beuys’s works on paper and Kiefer’s delicate and intimate watercolours, such as Winter Landscape (1970, page 53) – a counterpart to his massive paintings, sculptures and installations.

The artists also shared a ritualistic feeling for materials. Again and again in his art Beuys used felt and fat, both materials that are connected with a personal myth about his healing after being injured in an air crash during the war. In Kiefer’s case the signature substances, as well as lead and straw, include concrete and sunflowers.

In his case, too, there are probably biographical associations. His affinity with concrete, for example, is perhaps the result not only of the pulverised townscapes of postwar Germany but also of a formative stay at the monastery

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M US EU M B O I J M A NS VA N B EU N I N GEN , R OT T ER DA M / P H OTO: M US EU M B O I J M A NS VA N B EU N I N GEN , R OT T ER DA M / P H OTO; S T U D I O

Unearthing that hidden past was one of his first undertakings as an artist. In the ‘Occupations’ series of 1969, he was photographed in various places in France, Italy and Switzerland performing the Nazi salute, as seen in his book work For Jean Genet (page 53). At the time – and for some people still – it was an outrageous (and illegal) thing to do. When work, including these images, was submitted for his degree at Freiburg School of Fine Arts, some on the jury were appalled. But the point of this extreme gesture was, of course, not to extol Nazism, but to force Kiefer and his fellow Germans to confront it.

Only by doing so, he felt, would it be possible to reclaim the past – to start building again from the ruins. This was no doubt why the young Kiefer was supported by Joseph Beuys (1921-86), a leading figure in German art of the 1960s whose works, which took forms including sculpture and painting but centred around performances, often examined ideas of rebirth.

Beuys was an occasional mentor of Kiefer’s, though not a formal teacher. Kiefer remembers how, as a young artist, he would take work to show to the older man. ‘I was working in the forest and I would roll up these huge paintings,

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Inside a glass pavilion nearby lies a lead battleship, perhaps 12 feet long, having foundered on the waves of a sea of smashed concrete.

Ruins, as a matter of fact, were exactly where Kiefer started. He was born on 8 March 1945, just two months before V.E. Day. His arrival in the world therefore corresponded with the beginning of the postwar era; and – equally relevant to his development as an artist – he grew up among the debris of saturation bombing. A few years ago, he told me how he had been powerfully affected by that beginning. ‘I was born in ruins. So as a child I played in ruins, it was the only place. A child accepts everything; he doesn’t ask if it’s good or bad. But I also like ruins because they are a starting point for something new.’

This is Kiefer’s fundamental beginning, aesthetically and emotionally: his life started after a cataclysm. Unlike a German artist of a slightly older generation, Gerhard Richter (born 1932), who has memories of growing up in the Nazi era, Kiefer knew only the aftermath: a world which had been shattered by high explosives, and a society in which the immediate past was mentioned as little as possible because it held terrible secrets.

‘The magical sword of the mythical hero Siegfried sprouts from the floorboards… This attic was a theatre, a space in which Kiefer could act out history’

of Sainte-Marie de la Tourette, outside Lyon, designed by Le Corbusier during the 1950s in starkly moulded concrete. There, Soriano notes, he was affected by ‘the combination of spirituality and scholarship that he saw in the monks’.

Kiefer is both spiritual and extremely well read, as well as unexpectedly jolly. A conversation with him might begin with medieval philosophy, and progress, via alchemy, to architecture. In origin, he is a Catholic, from Donaueschingen in the Black Forest, near the border with France and Switzerland (in contrast to Richter and Baselitz, who come from the Protestant north-east, almost another country from southern Germany). You could not, he told me, ‘imagine anywhere more Catholic’ as Donaueschingen. He was an altar boy: ‘I’ve forgotten a lot of the poems I learned by heart but I still know the mass in Latin.’

As befits someone who once assisted at the mystery of transubstantiation, in which bread and wine become the body of Christ, Kiefer has a metaphysical approach to materials.

No doubt he relishes lead for its physical attributes: its enormous weight and sombre matt-grey surface. But he likes it as much for its metaphorical qualities. As Soriano explains:

‘Lead is the basest of materials but also it is changeable. If you heat it up, it bubbles, it is constantly in flux. Above all, to Kiefer’s mind, there’s its weight: he considers it the only material heavy enough to carry the weight of human history.’

Kiefer uses lead paradoxically. He makes it into the kinds of objects you would least employ it for from a practical point of view: aeroplanes too heavy to fly, boats that would immediately sink, books whose pages would require huge effort to turn. At the entrance to the Royal Academy exhibition will stand a new sculpture, incarnating this paradox: lead books with wings (The Language of the Birds, 2013, opposite).

In alchemy, lead was to be transmuted into gold, and Kiefer is intensely interested in alchemy – he admires the writings of the Jacobean English astrologer, cosmologist, cabbalist and alchemist Robert Fludd (1574-1637). His work, especially in the last two decades, has been fed by deep interests in many esoteric traditions, such as the Jewish Cabbala and ancient Egyptian religion. Just as Soriano felt overwhelmed by the volume of art in his studios, one can feel as if one is drowning in references and allusions when one

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The Language of the Birds, 2013 THIS PAGE, BELOW Nothung, 1973

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floorboards. Others in the series were executed in a sinister, shamanistic combination of oil paint and blood. This attic, as Soriano says, was ‘a theatre, a space in which he could act out history’.

A number of works took as their settings the starkly severe neoclassical monuments of Nazi architecture. Interior (1981, page 61) depicts the mosaic room in the New Reich Chancellery, designed by Hitler’s favourite architect, Albert Speer, and virtually destroyed in 1945. In the foreground, flames flicker. Such paintings have the melancholy grandeur of the masters of 19thcentury German art and architecture – painter of northern landscapes Caspar David Friedrich, and Karl Friedrich Schinkel, architect of Berlin – but are overlaid with a much darker mood.

The vanished Nazi buildings, destroyed in or after the war, reappear like sombre ghosts, witnesses to a terrible history. Such paintings have a spectral, sinister magnificence.

Fire, destructive and transformative, was a presence in Kiefer’s work at this time. The Burning of the Rural District of Buchen IV (1975),

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1939 by the architect Wilhelm Kreis. It was a grim expression of the Nazi cult of the dead transformed by Kiefer into a memorial to the victims of Nazism, as art historian Daniel Arasse put it in his 2001 monograph on the artist.

If one wanted to find a stylistic description for the earlier phase of Kiefer’s art, in the 1970s and early ’80s, far better than Neo-expressionism – which was tried, but doesn’t fit – would be postcataclysmic romanticism. The principle theme of Kiefer’s work at this time was, Arasse concluded: ‘How can anyone be an artist in the tradition of German art and culture after Auschwitz?’

Kiefer depicted, for example, a path through a forest merging with a railway line leading to the concentration camps. He painted the forests that had been a place of refuge and also fear for his family during the final stages of the war.

He also painted primitive halls of wood, often based on his own studio in the upper storey of an old school house in the town of Buchen. In one, Nothung (1973, page 55), the magical sword of the mythical hero Siegfried sprouts from the

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reads about Kiefer’s work. But – this is a crucial point – it is not necessary to decode all those layers of meaning in order to appreciate his art.

They are all compressed into a visual experience; you can just look, and sense the complexities.

Kiefer also has a deep interest in poetry.

He has said that when he ‘looks inside himself he finds poetry’, yet he thinks in images. Indeed, he is haunted by the German-speaking Jewish poet Paul Celan (1920-70), whose parents were murdered in the Holocaust. Celan’s poem Death Fugue (1948) gives the titles and themes to Kiefer’s paintings Margarethe (1981, pages 50-51) and Sulamith (1983, opposite).

They refer, respectively, to a German guard and a Jewish prisoner in a death camp. Celan wrote of ‘your golden hair Margarete / your ashen hair Shulamith’. Each painting has their name inscribed onto the canvas. Kiefer’s works often contain words in this way and, as in these paintings, they affect the meaning of the work. Sulamith depicts the funerary crypt of the Soldier’s Hall built in Berlin in

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‘His work has been fed by deep interests in many esoteric traditions, such as the Jewish Cabbala and ancient Egyptian religion’

one of his many book works, documents an imagined conflagration and destruction of the area where he was then living and working.

The later pages of the book are burnt, encrusted with charcoal, just as much of Germany itself had been during the war. But fire, while terrifying and annihilating, can also be healing, as Kiefer’s title hints. The German word he used for ‘burning’, ausbrennen, also means ‘cauterisation’. This is how the traditions of Friedrich and Schinkel looked and felt to Kiefer in the aftermath of the Third Reich: burnt out, haunted by overpowering, terrible events.

The ultimate purpose of Kiefer’s art in the 1970s and ’80s, Arasse argued, was ‘to perform an act of mourning for the whole of German culture and all of its finest and most ancient works’.

But, he continued, the changes that took place in Kiefer’s work during the 1990s ‘seem to imply that the time of mourning is over’.

In 1992, Kiefer moved to France and began to work at Barjac. From being an artist preoccupied by German history, he became, in

the words of critic Matthew Biro, ‘a global artist’.

He travelled the world and his art took on an international sweep. A series of works, including the earlier Osiris and Isis (1985-87, pages 56-57), take as their central subject huge ruined pyramids of sand-coloured brick. These are based on structures he had seen in Egypt, Israel, Central America, southern India and the China of the Cultural Revolution.

Kiefer’s preoccupation with starry skies and sunflowers is both cosmographical and a response to his new environment in the south of France. Barjac, after all, is not far from Arles, where Van Gogh painted both the flowers and the sky at night. When Kiefer depicts wheat fields, however, as he has in his new series of paintings, ‘Morgenthau’ (opposite), some of which go on show for the first time at the RA, he has in mind not only the cycle of life and death evoked by Van Gogh’s harvests with their yellow corn and black funereal crows. He is also thinking of the Morgenthau Plan, named after the US Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr, and

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Osiris and Isis, 1985-87 Kiefer’s ‘Morgenthau’ series in his studio in Croissy, 2012 THIS PAGE , BELOW Sulamith, 1983 OPPOSITE PAGE

proposed late in 1944 (around the time when Kiefer was conceived). Morgenthau’s idea was that after the war Germany should not just be demilitarised, but also deindustrialised, transformed into a peaceful bread basket: the European equivalent of the Prairies.

This quixotic, historical might-havebeen both amuses and inspires Kiefer. It also demonstrates that, no matter how far he ranges in time and space, in some way he remains rooted in his beginnings: the end of the Second World War and the start of the new era in which we are still living. A large space at Barjac is also devoted to work based on this scheme. It is an installation: a plantation of grain in the centre of the room, the ears gilded with gold-leaf and – nestling in the middle – a serpent.

Anselm Kiefer Main Galleries, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 020 7300 8000, www.royalacademy.org.uk, 27 Sep-14 Dec. Sponsored by BNP Paribas. See Events and Lectures page 74 To see a series of videos on Anselm Kiefer’s work, visit http://roy.ac/kiefervideos

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Three Royal Academicians – an architect, a sculptor and a painter – respond to memory, mystery and material in the work of Anselm Kiefer

One cold winter day, on a journey from Berlin to Dessau, I travelled through a Kiefer painting.

The short, spiked corn stubble emerging through the mist was scattered with snow, the light level was sombre, the colour subdued. The only things missing were Kiefer’s words, but the experience was profound and the memory is as vivid as ever.

Kiefer’s paintings – with their thick textural surfaces – often incorporate objects; his sculptures, with their ancient surface patina, are as if unearthed from an archaeological dig. It is this many-layered

use and choice of materials that gives Kiefer’s work its rich and powerful feeling, full of ancient mystery and foreboding.

I look in two ways at his work. Initially, as a viewer, I am compelled by his portrayal of dereliction, his use of a limited palette and the textural qualities of his paintings and sculptures.

Secondly, as a sculptor, I am fascinated by the manipulation of so many unexpected materials, often raw and natural – plants, earth and ash – but also brutal materials such as concrete and metal.

Kiefer’s works, even his paintings, such as Black Flakes (2006, above) which incorporates a lead book, branches and plaster, exude a strong feeling of being ‘made’. He is a powerful image maker.

Having experienced this power many times over the years, it was with joy and trepidation that I watched the erection of Jericho, his sculpture in the RA courtyard, in 2007.

Lead sheets were compressed between concrete slabs to create two towers that echoed and challenged the surrounding buildings. The placing was inspired.

I also recall one of his large book works containing photographs, worked on and covered with a gritty texture, showing bricks in a desert emerging from a misty mirage. It was another testament to Kiefer’s ability to manipulate the widest variety of materials, in both an irreverent and challenging way.

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Sculptor ANN CHRISTOPHER RA on Kiefer’s manipulation of materials

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Through artists’ eyes

The painting Interior (1981, below left) depicts the so-called Mosaic Hall of the New Reich Chancellery, the largest completed project in Berlin by Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, and one of the few realisations of Hitler’s plan to rebuild Berlin as the world capital, Germania. Although demolished after the war, having been badly damaged in the Battle of Berlin in 1945, Kiefer paints the room as a ruin as if it had survived, reminding us of the temporary power of the Reich, its pompous aspirations for domination and permanence, and the ambiguous role of architecture as propaganda and testament.

Kiefer’s monumental architectural paintings explore this theme of the ruin. Along with railway

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Architect DAVID CHIPPERFIELD RA considers the ruin as a key theme in Kiefer’s paintings

tracks, the forest and the huge textured landscapes, the architectural ruin has been a recurring image and reference in Kiefer’s work. The ruin reminds us of both the temporary nature of our lives and visions and the lasting persistence of the physical, the built – for despite all circumstances and actions, something remains. In time these remains take on their own beauty, no longer only indebted to the forces that made them but also to the time and climate that has worn them into a state close to nature itself. This is a quality that Kiefer’s work seems to share and aspire to, a deep emotional record, a search not for truth but for memory.

The ruin is apparently innocent, but what if the ruin is not of Egypt or Rome but of the German Reich? What if the time that has passed is not sufficient for us to forget the aspirations and actions of those builders but rather reminds us of the inevitable appropriation of architecture

as a tool of propaganda, the sensational backdrop of power acted out on the biggest stage. Kiefer has compared the dismal results of Nazi art, cleansed of its ‘degenerate’ tendencies and therefore its intellectual ambitions, and the effect of its architecture, which inevitably managed to channel monstrous ambitions into sentimental but impressive scenography with calculated and sophisticated effect.

Postwar Germany relied on its artists, writers and film-makers to make sense of the terrible events of the Nazi regime. Even in this context it is difficult for us to understand how Kiefer has managed to make works of aesthetic power and depth from subjects and materials that would suggest otherwise. With apparently imprecise technique, with crude and unwieldy materials, and with the darkest of subjects, the artist confronts us with meaning and emotion and in this alchemy produces work of irresistible beauty.

Black Flakes, 2006; Interior, 1981; The Secret Life of Plants for Robert Fludd, 1987-2014

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Painter BARBARA RAE RA explores the way in which Kiefer layers both colour and meaning Anselm Kiefer is an extraordinary painter. I find most interesting the work after 1992, when he was working in Barjac in the French countryside.

He had already been painting the stars in the late 1980s, with series such as ‘The Secret Life of Plants’ (above right), and he must have loved the big skies around him at Barjac.

Sunflowers also appear in the Barjac works, such as The Orders of the Night (1996, page 98). When I worked in that area of France,

the sunflowers that caught my attention were dead and withered, their sun-dried shapes twisted into myriad architectural creations.

For Kiefer, the colour of sunflowers seems unimportant. His paintings often have bright colours that have been almost totally obscured by layers of grey, brown and black. I don’t find that odd at all. I used to begin with bright hues in acrylic, before overlaying greys and blacks in oil to leave little glimmers of colour.

Like his contemporary, the German artist Joseph Beuys, Kiefer understood that art is about destruction as well as creation. Destruction is a key part of the way Kiefer works as a visual artist: he transforms the image into something

new, giving a sense of its vulnerability, its fragility, its transformative characteristics.

He obscures what went before, but that still exists deep within the layers of his work.

Brightness, that sharpness, often disappears in painting. When the beholder looks at Kiefer’s imagery they are caught by some of the bright elements held in the dark sections. Their curiosity is sparked. The eye is telling the brain something that is provoking greater interest. With closer study the observer notices minute detail and, bit by bit, the discord becomes a coherent whole, the intellect is delighted, the emotions pleasured.

The observer is drawn into the image and finds cohesion, strength and meaning.

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One of the greatest of all portraitists, Giovanni Battista Moroni captured his sitters’ psychology with exceptional honesty and insight. As the Academy stages the biggest survey in Britain of the Renaissance painter’s work, novelist Sarah Dunant evokes the many characters who emerged from his canvases

Cut from a different cloth

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OPPOSITE PAGE The Tailor, 1565-70, by Giovanni Battista Moroni

e is busy. Those heavy scissors in his hand are about to make a cut, the shape marked out, white chalk on black material, on the table in front of him (The Tailor, 1565-70, opposite page). He has an honest face; handsome, yes, but open, engaged, not afraid to look his client – or whoever else walks into his shop – in the eye.

If the clothes he produces are as substantial as his appearance, then he will make a decent living. No doubt he is pleased to be taken seriously by a professional artist. He is only a tailor after all, and not many such men in a small town in northern Italy in the 1560s and 70s have their portrait painted. But whatever the satisfaction, he will not, you feel, be able to pose for long. He has work to do and needs to get on with it.

Then there is the disgruntled old man, sitting in his chair, staring out at us (Old Man Seated with a Book, c.1570-75, page 65). Here is someone who has no need for our approval. Perhaps he was reading his book, or thinking about death, before he turned towards us; either way he seems to have little time or inclination to open up his soul to the brush of the artist. That grumpy expression on his face, as the art historian John Pope-Hennessy put it, ‘makes one wish one had knocked before entering the room.’ We are already halfway to knowing him.

It is not only novelists like myself or art historians such as Pope-Hennessy who find the study of portraits so rewarding. Anyone who has seen the work of Giovanni Battista Moroni (and generations of visitors to the National Gallery will have been entranced by that tailor, who has been in the collection since the 1860s), will surely feel the same thing: that although the past may indeed be a foreign country with all the cultural strangeness and challenge that suggests, with the right guide and a little imagination it can offer up universal humanity alongside deeper, sometimes darker, individual psychology and character.

Born in the village of Albino, near Bergamo in Lombardy in the early 16th century, Moroni may not be as well known today as many other Renaissance artists. Indeed some art historians have been decidedly sniffy about his talent: Bernard Berenson dismissed him as ‘the only mere portrait painter that Italy has ever produced’, adding, ‘these people of his are too uninterestingly themselves’. But spend a couple of hours in Moroni’s company, as visitors to the Sackler Wing at the RA will do this autumn, and you will surely understand why over the centuries some of his canvases have been attributed to Titian. And Titian himself, older and always much more famous, is said to have rated Moroni’s work, recommending him to Venetian

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about Moroni’s personal life, the interaction of those two cultures finds its way into his work.

For many years he is, in effect, Bergamo’s equivalent of a court painter, and his full-length, life-size portraits of the city’s aristocracy show that he can fashion shoot with the best of them, using his brush like a needle on embroidered cloth, painting a feather fan so soft your fingers itch to touch it (Isotta Brembati, c.1555, below), or creating a chain mail jacket where you feel the weight of every link (Faustino Avogadro, c.1555-60). That latter portrait, also known as A Knight with his Jousting Helmet (The Man with the Wounded Foot), does not flinch from showing

LEFT Isotta Brembati, c.1555

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sitters come down to us with distinct physical personalities as well as psychological ones.

For most of his life, Moroni lived and worked within 35 miles of Albino. As a young man he moved to Brescia to study with the painter Il Moretto and when his master died in 1554, he settled in Bergamo, later moving back to Albino.

This area of Italy was under Venetian control, with thriving local aristocracy and governors, and the wealth and visual ostentation of Venice was never far away. But it was also on the border with Milan, for many years ruled by the Spanish, and by then in the throes of the Counter Reformation. While we know tantalisingly little

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patricians, because, as he put it, he painted men ‘from nature’.

Painting from nature: it is a rich idea, suggesting truth over vanity, realism over artifice and man’s humility in the face of God as the ultimate creator. In Moroni you find all of those ingredients in different ways. While he can conjure up the silk of a woman’s dress so that the whole canvas glows with its warmth and wealth, he is not afraid to paint the men – or women – in front of him, warts and all, from choleric faces to scarlet, bulbous noses, an obvious mole on the cheek of a middle-aged woman or the facial cyst on the forehead of a doctor. Many of Moroni’s

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‘He can fashion shoot with the best of them… painting a feather fan so soft your fingers itch to touch it’

BELOW The Widower (Portrait of a Gentleman and his Two Children) c.1570 BELOW RIGHT Old Man Seated with a Book, c.1570-75

a brace on the sitter’s left leg, the scattered armour offering a more poetic explanation of what we now know was the deformity the sitter had from birth. There is a certain mischief here, with the jaunty feathers of a stack of hats mirroring tufts of weeds growing from the stone behind him.

The object of court painting, of course, was to immortalise through status as much as likeness.

How ironic then, that the most memorable people in Moroni’s work, and in the exhibition, come from more modest means. Following a factional murder in Bergamo which caused a crackdown by the Venetian state on the city’s noble families, Moroni went back to Albino after 1563 and the work that came out of his studio there, which includes the portrait of the tailor, is remarkable.

Most of his sitters presented themselves, to the world and to him, in sombre dress. This was not simply lack of wealth. Black was the colour of the professional – the lawyer, the cleric, the

doctor, the magistrate, the scholar – whose dress identifies them as people of mature judgement.

Of course, there was another, albeit more subtle, propaganda going on; they too aspire to status and Moroni doesn’t let them down. They look like serious men (the same is true of his portraits of women). But they also look like themselves.

There is an unguarded quality in these faces, as if – even when they appear grumpy – they have nothing to hide from the man studying them.

In some cases it is clear that Moroni knew his subject. Albino was a small community; the doctor with the cyst on his forehead, for instance, is fingering a letter with Moroni’s name on it in Portrait of a Doctor (The Magistrate), from 1560.

There is a similar informality to the settings.

A simple, wooden chair features in a number of his works and canvases are smaller, half- or threequarter length. As the exhibition’s curator, Arturo Galansino, points out, while this was partly

a commercial decision – a less expensive format for a more modest clientele – it also allowed the sitter’s faces to become more dominant. Moroni, it seems, made virtually no preparatory sketches (the only one we have is in the exhibition) so that his first impressions of a personality went straight onto the canvas.

With black as the uniform, colour now becomes a kind of emotion. In The Widower (c.1570, above left), the subject’s grief and solemnity are emphasised by the bright orange and red outfits of his children as they huddle in his protective arms. The sitter in Portrait of a Man with a Red Beard (c.1558-59) seems as playful and good-natured as his untamed facial hair. And finally, in works such as Portrait of the Lady in Black (c.1572-73), there is the dramatic contrast of black against starched white cuffs and ruff collars, a Spanish style that took Europe by storm around the middle of the 16th century.

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was still wallowing in doctrinal laxity: think of the sumptuous decadence of Veronese’s biblical settings, shown this year at the National Gallery, and how when the local, comparatively toothless, Inquisition accused him of filling one canvas with ‘jesters, drunks, heretics and midgets’, Veronese changed the title of the painting rather than the image itself.

But there is another layer to Counter Reformation doctrine on art that, in Moroni’s hands at least, proved more freeing. Although Moroni died in 1579, three years before Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti’s Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images was published, he would certainly have been aware of the issues around portraying real people, with painters soon to be instructed by Paleotti ‘not to depict the face or any parts of the body as more beautiful than in real life’.

In Moroni’s hands, this honesty becomes a kind of vivacity. One of the great pleasures of the exhibition is the way it represents churchmen.

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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, T H EO D O R E M . DAV IS CO L L ECT I O N , B EQ U ES T O F T H EO D O R E M . DAV IS , 1915 (30. 95 . 255)/ P H OTO © 2014/ I M AGE © 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

This is more than just fashion. It also reflects undercurrents in religious culture. Living on the edge of Milan, Moroni couldn’t help but be drawn into the Counter Reformation. We know that he attended the first two sessions of the Council of Trent and went on to execute a number of religious commissions in the new style decreed by the Church in readiness for the visit of Cardinal – later Saint – Charles Borromeo of Milan. Visitors to the RA show will be surprised by the rigidness of composition in his altarpieces, though at the time such lack of complexity in favour of didactic clarity would have made them the height of fashion. So too would his sympathetic paintings of men and women imagining religious scenes, such as A Gentleman in Adoration before the Baptism of Christ, (c.155560, above), which illustrated the latest method of devotion based on Ignatius of Loyola’s spiritual exercises. In contrast Venice, with its historically greater independence from Church government,

GER O L A M O E R O B ER TA E T R O/ P H OTO GER O L A M O E R O B ER TA E T R O

A Gentleman in Adoration before the Baptism of Christ, c.1555-60

ABOVE

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, T H EO D O R E M . DAV IS CO L L ECT I O N , B EQ U ES T O F T H EO D O R E M . DAV IS , 1915 (30. 95 . 255)/ P H OTO © 2014/ I M AGE © 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

GER O L A M O E R O B ER TA E T R O/ P H OTO GER O L A M O E R O B ER TA E T R O

RIGHT Portrait of Abbess Lucrezia Agliardi Vertova, 1557

There are two splendid portraits of monks (saved from black by the nature of their order) both seen close up, and both bursting with life, faces mobile and eager, filled with kindness, and even, it seems, a sense of humour. Although the Counter Reformation may not go down well in history, these men’s faith seems to make them more human.

Then there are the women. For a historian and novelist like myself, looking to breathe life into Renaissance women as well men, art is a problem as well as a source. History, on and off the walls, favours men and those women who do manage to be represented are too often defined by their beauty, sexuality and status, leaving precious little room for subtler characterisation.

Moroni, however, gives us some wonderfully rounded personalities. There is a stunning study of contrast in Portrait of the Lady in Black (think Ingres, think Whistler). The lady in question might once have been a beauty, but those huge dark eyes speak more of experience and quiet authority. Like many of his sitters, she is busy, her index finger in the book she holds to save her place: whatever her past she also has a future to get on with.

And finally there is the portrait of the abbess.

Be warned: she is not an inviting figure. Nuns are a strange lot in Renaissance culture. While they tell a history of social control – too many girls in an era of expensive dowries who have been married off to Christ – there is little sense

‘Enter the exhibition as a discerning observer of art, but throw in a touch of the novelist too’

of individual character to be found in any artistic representations. Moroni’s abbess (Portrait of Abbess Lucrezia Agliardi Vertova, 1557, above) is an exception. The inscription in the painting tells us she is a widow who is founding a convent.

Certainly she has no problem being seen as old or even disfigured (let’s hope the convent doctor keeps an eye on the goitre in her neck). She has her eyes on something more important: her new responsibilities and the journey to God’s grace. Look closer and there is an intensity, even a slight sadness to her, as well as a touch of artistic affection: the way that densely wrinkled face echoes the fine crinkles in her veil. Strong minded? Certainly. Formidable? Possibly. But her refusal to be prettified or patronised gives her a sense of self as real as that grumpy old man staring back at us.

In the end, perhaps it is Berenson’s insult that best pinpoints the power of Moroni. ‘These people’ of his are indeed ‘themselves’, but does

that really make them ‘uninteresting’? Or might it be that it is their very ordinariness that keeps us looking?

Back to the tailor: we will never know who he was, or how and why he came to be painted, but there is more than enough in the portrait to get our imaginations going. By all means enter the exhibition as a discerning observer of art, but throw in a touch of the novelist too. I promise it will be a worthwhile combination. And once you have given imaginative lives to Moroni’s sitters, try staring out from their eyes, to the painter himself. We need to know more about him.

Giovanni Battista Moroni The Sackler Wing, Royal Academy of Arts, 020 7300 8000, 25 Oct–25 Jan 2015.

2009-2016 Season supported by JTI. Supported by UBI Banca. See Readers’ Offers page 83 for a discount on the exhibition catalogue. Sarah Dunant leads the RA Book Club on 21 Nov – see Events and Lectures page 74 To see more of the works in the Moroni exhibition, visit http://roy.ac/moroni

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CO U R T ESY O F T H E A R T IS T. CO U R T ESY O F T H E A R T IS T/ P H OTO L I T T L E R ED PA N DA

LO N D O N , P R I VAT E CO L L EC T I O N / P H OTO CO U R T ESY O F T H E A R T IS T/© A L L EN J O N ES . CO U R T ESY T H E A R T IS T

Step this way

OPPOSITE PAGE First Step, 1966, by Allen Jones RA THIS PAGE, LEFT Jones’s map of the US marked with the route of his 1965 road trip BELOW The slot machine in Reno, Nevada, that changed the course of Allen Jones’s art

crude advertising, Jones found himself rolling a different die. Instead he took inspiration from a mythic American pastime where the female form is an ambivalent totem of alternately good and hard luck – at once rigged for defeat yet pregnant with the possibility of enormous, if unlikely, fortune. The gamble paid off, resulting in some of the most iconic and immediately recognisable art in the past half-century.

Jones is conscious of the formative influence of the showgirl slot-machines on the construction, years later, of his infamous erotic furniture. The salacious sculptures of fetishistically clad young women, positioned to serve the souless function of a table, a chair and a hat stand, would evoke heated reaction when exhibited, making both artist and artwork the target of physical attack.

But the creative impact that the Reno mannequins made on Jones’s consciousness was perhaps less delayed than he thought, or has been appreciated.

It accounts for the sudden sculptural quality First Step projected – the disassembly of the body, and even the introduction of a shelf at the bottom of the canvas, which seems uncannily to echo the carpentry of the sculpted showgirls. It can alone account for his work’s first step towards becoming truly iconic.

Allen Jones RA Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington Gardens, London, 020 7300 8000, www.royalacademy. org.uk, 13 Nov–25 Jan 2015. Lead Series Supporter JTI. An interview with the artist appears in the next issue of RA Magazine, published 15 Nov. To see photographs of Allen Jones RA at work in his studio, visit http://roy.ac/jonesstudio

CO U R T ESY O F T H E A R T IS T. CO U R T ESY O F T H E A R T IS T/ P H OTO L I T T L E R ED PA N DA

LO N D O N , P R I VAT E CO L L ECT I O N / P H OTO CO U R T ESY O F T H E A R T IS T/© A L L EN J O N ES . CO U R T ESY T H E A R T IS T

One of the key moments in modern British art occurred one day in 1965, when Allen Jones RA, then in his late 20s, first stepped inside an American casino. Kelly Grovier spotlights the Pop artist’s first step towards iconic status, as the Academy mounts a major show of his work

In 1965 Allen Jones embarked on a three-month road trip with fellow artist Peter Phillips. They were keen to trace the perimeter of a lassoed loop around America, clockwise, from their starting point in New York (above). But of all the folk and everyday objects that the alien pair would encounter – as they made their way down the Eastern Seaboard, then delving deep into the southern psyches of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, before continuing west through humid Louisiana and Texas – it was a slot machine, which he and his friend chanced upon in a gambling hall in Reno, Nevada, that etched itself most deeply into Jones’s imagination.

The machine’s bulky chassis was inserted into a life-size model of a busty showgirl.

To see the still-preserved photograph (right) that Jones snapped of a room lined with these gadgeted effigies is to discover the missing link between the works that came before Jones’s journey and everything that followed – a new beginning symbolised by his fittingly entitled work First Step (1966, opposite).

In many respects, the works that Jones had created before he stumbled upon the mechanised mannequin suggest a deep susceptibility to its hypnotic, hybrid appeal. Paintings such as Man Woman and Hermaphrodite, undertaken only two years earlier in 1963, already involved the merging of male and female elements, inspired

by Jung’s psycho-spiritual theories of the union of opposites. Articulated by expressionistic gestures that situate the works somewhere between figuration and abstraction (another hybrid tendency), these early canvases succeeded

in bringing Jones to wide public awareness.

In retrospect, however, they also appear more attuned to the spirit of Kandinsky than to the more urgent energy of Lichtenstein and Warhol, who were eradicating from their slick commercial surfaces every trace of discernible brushwork.

In Jones’s imagination, the sexed-up slot machines suggested an original way forward, into a territory uncrowded as a wide-open Nevadan desert yet at once compatible with the new aesthetic of Pop Art. The ingenious carpentry of the contraptions, which visually broke the sexualised subject into a stack of disjointed pieces, with horizontal shelves positioned across the upper thigh and through the breasts, provided the artist with a new grammar for describing the human body as so many severable parts.

The paintings that Jones would execute following his trip around America are obsessed with unpacking the implications of that Reno readymade. A sequence of works begun the following year, which included First Step, echo the proportions of the casino mannequins by snapping the female body into constituent parts and focusing attention entirely on the legs.

The taut calves and elongated thighs, which insinuate erotic accentuations beyond the teasing frame, are no longer enunciated through the kind of Gorkyesque, expressionistic brushiness that characterised his previous efforts, but begin instead to have the flawless complexion of Warholian silkscreens.

Where his Pop Art peers were taking their cues principally from the world of mass consumerism, blurring the boundaries between elite art and

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Critical issues in art and architecture

Debate

ILLUSTR ATION NEIL WEBB

The Question Are high prices good for art?

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Yes… The money has allowed artists and art lovers new opportunities, says GEORGINA ADAM Every six months, it seems, the prices for art take a huge lurch upwards. Christie’s or Sotheby’s hold another sale that pulverises the results of the last one: a swathe of new price highs are set and a few brand-name artists once again hit the headlines. So a Jeff Koons Balloon Dog can make an eye-watering £34.75m or a ‘Joke’ painting by Richard Prince can make over a million dollars.

More occasionally, news of an astonishing private sale filters out: £44.5m last year for Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi; a cool £147.7m for Cézanne’s The Card Players in 2011. Such stratospheric prices are in fact only achieved at the top of the market, for very few artists, and on the secondary, or resale, market. Even rarer are artists who can even dream of such sums on the primary (first sale) market.

Nevertheless, I would argue that the current boom is, overall, good for art and for the art world.

The sheer amount of money that is flowing into the market today – an estimated £47.42 billion in 2013 – has given artists, and art, far more opportunities, a far higher profile, and a far more positive status in society than ever.

Remember when a career as an artist was a ‘no-no’, generally a direct route to penury and

No… J.J. CHARLESWORTH argues that high prices have turned artworks into investments Let’s be fair. It’s probably the case that high prices for art are very good for artists (and their dealers), and it’s always nice to see artists who are happy because they can now afford to buy themselves a new Porsche, or that second house in the south of France, or be able to cover the salaries of a few more studio assistants.

But joking aside, what is good for artists is not necessarily good for art. So where does the difference lie? If you’re a critic like I am, you probably get into writing about art because you find art exciting, interesting and inspiring. More importantly, you get into writing about it because you think what art does is important enough to tell other people about it and to argue about why art matters in our culture.

You don’t need to own art to have an opinion about it, so its price is an irrelevance, since

‘An artist who makes art uniquely to flatter his collector’s taste, in anticipation of the cash that will follow, soon becomes a slave to it’

obscurity? No longer so. In our highly visual, image-driven society, the creativity and the imagination of the artist is in demand in multiple domains, from advertising, fashion and pop music to luxury goods. Art is hip, art is hot: far more people today know the names of contemporary artists, and art is embedded much more deeply in the national consciousness – just look at Tate’s record 7.7 million visitors in 2012-13.

While today’s mega-prices go to a tiny handful of artists who are working – along with their collectors – in a seemingly parallel universe, there is much available at far lower prices. The Royal Academy sells art at a wide range of prices at the Summer Exhibition. Websites dedicated to art sales offer original works of art from a few hundred pounds, and events such as print fairs or the Affordable Art fairs are also good for ‘starter’ collectors.

Today’s art boom has also given artists unprecedented international exposure. The number of biennials has grown to over 100 events each year reaching across the globe.

Between September and Christmas this year, for example, there are no less than 15 of these ostensibly non-profit events, including those in São Paulo, Fukuoka in Japan and Kochi-Muziris in India. Without the amount of money now swirling around the art world these events simply would not be happening.

The number of art fairs has mushroomed even more, with at least 220 major ones worldwide. And clustered around the main

‘High prices have enabled many artists to follow their dreams and go places they couldn’t have dreamed of’

the cultural value of an artwork for a whole community is more important than the price a particular individual may want to pay for it.

Just as a Hollywood blockbuster isn’t worthwhile because of the money spent on it but because of what we the public think of it, so contemporary art’s value to our culture isn’t reducible to what a tiny minority of wealthy people want to pay for it.

The trouble today, however, is that the cultural value of art is too often thought of as synonymous with the price paid for artworks by this tiny minority. The gossipy, puerile chatter of commentators who are more fascinated by the self-indulgence of the ultra-rich than the significance of the art the ultra-rich happen to buy has replaced any substantial debate about what might be good and bad in art. In this, it is the tastes and predilections of very rich collectors that have come to count, above all else.

This would be alright if those collectors had good taste – great art of the past was often made possible by enlightened patronage. But collectors of contemporary art mostly don’t have good taste; or at least, if the kind of art that regularly fetches millions is anything to go by, the taste of some collectors seems to be no more advanced than that of an average child.

What we see today is that a kind of art is being made which slavishly reflects the taste of those who buy it, regardless of whatever anyone else thinks. And whatever an artist might think to the contrary, an artist who makes art uniquely to flatter his collector’s taste, in anticipation of the cash that will follow, soon becomes a slave to it.

High prices are, however, bad for art in another way. If, culturally, the high prices paid for contemporary art have turned it into a ritual of status display for the new global rich, the high prices paid for art also represent the financialisation of art.

Financialisation means turning the buying and selling of art into nothing more than another asset class, just another investment opportunity.

So when a rich collector pays another £20m for an artwork it isn’t really to show off their ability to dispose of such a sum and not really notice, though they would probably like us to think that it is. It is done in the belief that the artwork will hold its monetary value – that it is a safe investment. Its artistic value is therefore of secondary significance.

This dynamic, while parasitical on a work’s cultural value, has the effect of eating that value from the inside, since the owner does not care why an artwork is good, only that it should remain valuable. And this is bad for art, because it means that the artistic value of art, once hijacked by the desire for secure monetary value, can never be revised, gainsaid or discussed in public again.

The higher the prices for art, the more overbearing – and unquestionable – the weight of private taste over the public good of art becomes.

fairs are the far more affordable satellites – often the places to make real discoveries. Fairs also have a positive fall-out on their host city: Frieze, for example, has transformed the once fallow month of October in London, offering gallery openings and new exhibitions, in addition to the fair itself.

It’s not just artists and the general public who are benefitting – there are far more jobs available in the art world than ever before. London’s specialist recruitment agency Sophie Macpherson can hardly keep up with demand. Curators, art advisors, gallery staff, auction house specialists, artists’ managers… all have the high prices of art to thank for being able to do what they love.

Now, is the art ‘good’ as a result of all this?

This is another matter entirely, which future generations will have to judge. What I can say is that today’s high prices have enabled many artists to follow their dreams and go places that they couldn’t have dreamed of. In what other period could Antony Gormley RA be given the chance to design a luxury hotel suite, which takes the form of a sculpture, for a swanky new £40m Mayfair establishment, and at the same time offer the free spectacle of the Angel of the North – seen by 150,000 visitors a year, plus another 90,000 drivers every day passing by on the A1?

These are just two opinions in this debate.

What do you think? To post your comments on this article, visit http://roy.ac/artprices

AUTUMN 2014 | RA MAGAZINE 71

Debate

From left: Heinrich Brockhaus, who was the first Director of the German Art History Institute in Florence, with Aby Warburg, his wife Mary and Elise Brockhaus, in Warburg’s flat in Florence, c.1898

A betrayal of trust?

One of the the world’s foremost academic resources, London’s Warburg Institute Library, is under threat, 80 years after being saved from the Nazis. MARTIN KEMP argues vehemently for its survival Each year 3,000 people travel to Woburn Square in London to enter the world’s greatest research engine dedicated to the intellectual and artistic legacies of Greece and Rome. This is to say nothing of some 12,000 downloads of material accessed each month online. As we enter the Warburg Institute Library we see a circular emblem inscribed in pale stone above the door. Taken from an early printed edition of the seventh-century bishop Isidore of Seville’s book On the Nature of Things, it represents the four diverse elements of earth, water, air and fire, the four seasons and the four temperaments, gathered together within a system of cosmic equilibrium.

Our step is quickened by the anticipation of journeys of discovery that will lead us beyond the predictable.

The library is like no other. Its treasures, ranging across many centuries, are held in an open-access system in which things of a kind belong together through natural cultural affinity

rather than subjection to the modern classifiers’ mechanical taxonomies. If I want to find out about Leonardo da Vinci, I don’t have to visit different libraries of art, engineering, medicine, geology and so on. If Leonardo lambasts alchemy, I climb the stairs to find shelves that present a living bibliography of the subject in and before the Renaissance. If I want a crash course in images of the Salvator Mundi, so that I might better understand Leonardo’s recently discovered painting, I go to the photographic collection to sample its multitudinous wonders arranged by subject matter. The Warburg is where I encounter things I did not know existed. But maybe no more.

The Library and its Institute was founded

by Aby Warburg (1866-1929, above, second from left), an art historian and cultural visionary, born to the great Jewish banking family in Hamburg.

The library escaped inevitable dissolution by the Nazis and was transferred to London in

1933-34 on a little steamer that carried 531 boxes of intellectual provisions on two trips back and forth. The Institute had been promised safe haven by a group of avid supporters, including Lord Lee of Fareham and Samuel Courtauld. On 28 November 1944 a trust deed was drawn up with the University of London, which acknowledged the Institute’s ‘worldwide reputation in its special fields of culture and research’. The University as trustee undertook to ‘maintain and preserve the Library in perpetuity’ and house it ‘in a suitable building in close proximity to the University centre at Bloomsbury’, and to keep it ‘adequately equipped and staffed as an independent unit’.

Under this dispensation the Institute has served as a powerhouse in humanities research, not least through its internationally renowned staff and directors, among whom art historian Ernst Gombrich is its biggest public name.

The terms of the trust deed seem unambiguous, but the University has been questioning its obligations. Its first move was to levy a huge increase in the sum the Warburg is charged for the building, which now consumes 60 per cent of its annual grant. According to a complex formula that is typical of institutional accounting, the Institute currently receives an annually variable sum in compensation for part of the charge. The Institute’s recent annual deficits range from £125,000 to almost £420,000, effectively ensuring financial ruin.

The University argues that it is not charging rent but imposing a building-specific service charge across its estate. We await the results of a 10-day trial held in June, involving the University of London, the Attorney General and the Advisory Council of the Warburg Institute.

The basic issue is, of course, cost and income-generation. The University, which lost a significant part of its business with the independence of Imperial College, appears to be cutting back on some of its remaining obligations.

But there are costs other than those identifiable on an accountant’s sour balance sheet. The cost of losing the Institute as presently constituted cannot be calculated in pounds. The international disgrace cannot be estimated in cash. The current exhibition in the library is devoted to ‘Laughter’.

The only way for this not to be followed by weeping is for the University and all interested parties to promote the establishing of a long-term endowment that will prevent the greatest act of vandalism in Western academia of my lifetime.

P H OTO GR A P H WA R B U R G I NS T I T U T E

‘The international disgrace of losing the Warburg Institute Library cannot be estimated in cash’

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courtauld.ac.uk/schiele Sponsors

Benefactor Martin Halusa

ELLEN TERRY THE PAINTER’S ACTRESS Exhibition ends 9 November 2014

An icon of Victorian Art, Fashion & Theatre

Supporters AKO Foundation Friends of The Courtauld

www.wattsgallery.org.uk Ellen Terry (‘Choosing’) © National Portrait Gallery, London

THE CLUB WITH A PASSION FOR THE ARTS The Royal Over-Seas League is a unique, not-for-profit, private membership organisation. For over 100 years we have encouraged international friendship and understanding through arts, social, music and humanitarian programmes. With membership benefits including accommodation and dining at our historic clubhouses in Green Park, London and Edinburgh, we offer our members a home away from home.

Contact ROSL for more information, quoting RA Magazine for special joining discounts. www.rosl.org.uk +44(0)20 7408 0214 (ext. 214 & 216) info@rosl.org.uk

London: Over-Seas House, Park Place, St James’s Street, London, SW1A 1LR Edinburgh: Over-Seas House, 100 Princes Street, Edinburgh, EH2 3AB

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Debate

Public Events and Lectures Further information on our events can be found at www.royalacademy.org.uk/events

September INMOTION AT THE R A Radical Geometry Exhibition Tour for Mobility Impaired Visitors

Mon 1 Sep An introductory tour of ‘Radical Geometry’ for wheelchair users and mobility impaired visitors.

Meet at the RA; 9–11am; £3 INTER ACT AT THE R A BSL Translated Lecture – Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album

Sat 6 Sep A lecture about the ‘Dennis Hopper’ exhibition with BSL translation and speech-to-text transcription

by STAGETEXT for deaf, deafened and hard of hearing visitors.

Burlington Gardens; 2.30–3.30pm; £3 INTOUCH AT THE R A Audio Described Tour: Radical Geometry

Mon 8 Sep An audio described tour of ‘Radical Geometry’ plus a handling session, for blind and visually impaired visitors.

Meet at the RA; 9–11am; £3 INPR ACTICE AT THE R A Access and Community Programmes Artistic Presentation

Fri 12 Sep and 5 Dec At this event, we invite disabled artists and creative people at risk of exclusion

from the art world to share their art practice in a warm and welcoming environment.

Meet at the RA; 6–8pm; free. If you are interested in presenting, contact access@ royalacademy.org.uk or 020 7300 5732 INMIND AT THE R A Art in Conversation for People Living with Dementia

Mon 15 Sep, 13 Oct and 17 Nov Artist and gallery educators facilitate these sessions for individuals living with early to mid-stages of dementia and their carers, friends and family members.

Meet at the RA; 11am–12.30pm; £3 ARCHITECTURE EVENT Reimagining Mayfair: Public Presentation

Fri 19 Sep In July, we selected four teams from an open call to reimagine the area of Mayfair to the north of the RA. In this event, the teams present their proposals to the public and an expert panel for the first time.

Burlington Gardens; 6.30–7.45pm; free SPECIAL EVENT Open House at the RA

Sat 20 and Sun 21 Sep Join us on Open House weekend as the RA opens its doors. Explore our building’s hidden spaces and learn about its four centuries of history.

10am–6pm; free; for details of the full programme visit roy.ac/openhouse

October KIEFER FREE LUNCHTIME LECTURE The World and Iconography of Anselm Kiefer

Mon 6 Oct Exhibition curator Kathleen Soriano uncovers the oeuvre of Anselm Kiefer, and explores the meanings behind his complex yet sublime artworks.

Reynolds Room; 1–2pm; free (pre-booking strongly recommended)

ARCHITECTURE EVENT Places to Call Home: Designing the Next Generation of Housing

Wed 15 Oct Housing in the UK will lead the debate leading up to next year’s general election.

In this event in association with the AllParliamentary Design and Innovation Group, we discuss ways to move the focus away from political arguments to how to design places we can call ‘home’.

The Keeper’s House; 8.30–9.30am (coffee served from 8am); £6/£4 reductions

KIEFER EVENING EVENT Short Stories with Lionel Shriver

KIEFER EVENING EVENT

Fri 10 Oct Join us for a rare opportunity to hear a short story reading by the Orange Prizewinning novelist Lionel Shriver (We Need to Talk about Kevin). Her choice will be inspired by work in the ‘Anselm Kiefer’ exhibition. In partnership with Pin Drop.

Reynolds Room; 6.30–7.30pm; £16/£7 reductions (incl. exh entry), £12 (event only)

‘Your golden hair, Margarete…’

Marina Warner on Kiefer’s Symbolism and the Language of Fairy Tale

DENNIS HOPPER WORKSHOP Street Photography in Black and White

Sat 11 Oct Rediscover the beauty of black and white photography on the streets of London, guided by professional photographer Roy Matthews. This workshop is designed for all abilities and camera types (although digital is preferred).

Meet at the RA; 11am–5.30pm; £85/£65 reductions (incl. exh entry) DENNIS HOPPER SPECIAL EVENT Sixties Snapshot: A Late Inspired by ‘Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album’

Sat 11 Oct We’re bringing the 1960s to life to honour the counter-cultural icon Dennis Hopper.

In partnership with UAL, join us for an evening of photography, interactive installations and performances, all capturing the spirit of this definitive era. Burlington Gardens; 6.30–10pm; £20 (incl. exh entry). Details at roy.ac/snapshot

Fri 17 Oct Author Marina Warner reveals how Anselm Kiefer’s imagery embraces the language of German fairy tales and folk tales. A book signing of Warner’s new book, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale, follows the event.

Reynolds Room; 6.30–7.30pm; £16/£7 reductions (incl. exh entry), £12 (event only) COLLECTIONS EVENT Effie Gray: Behind the Scenes

Sat 18 Oct Screen legends Claudia Cardinale and James Fox chat with scholar Robert Hewison and film producer Andreas Roald about the mysterious relationship between Victorian art critic John Ruskin and his teenage bride, and their experiences making the film Effie Gray.

Reynolds Room; 3–4pm; £12/£6 reductions KIEFER WORKSHOP The Art of Collage

Sat 25 Oct Take inspiration from Anselm Kiefer and learn the art of collage in a creative workshop that explores references from history to poetry.

Meet at the RA; 10.30am–1.30pm; £35/£25 reductions (incl. exh entry)

SPECIAL EVENT uk/events, or call 020 7300 5839. You can also visit the RA ticket office, or complete the booking form overleaf and post to ‘Events and Lectures’ or fax 020 7300 8013. ● Booking is advised for lunchtime lectures. Unclaimed seats will be released at 12.50pm on the day. No admission after 1pm. ● Reductions are available for students, jobseekers and people with disabilities with recognised proof of status. ● RA Friends and carers go free to Access events; pre-booking is advised. Disabled parking spaces and wheelchairs can be reserved on 020 7300 8028.

Short Stories with Graham Swift

Wed 24 Sep Join us for a short story reading by Graham Swift, the Booker Prizewinning author of Waterland and Last Orders. Swift will be reading from his new collection England and Other Stories, followed by a Q&A session. In partnership with Pin Drop.

Academicians’ Room; 7–8.30pm; £25 KIEFER FREE LUNCHTIME LECTURE ‘Once upon a time in a deep dark wood...’ – Anselm Kiefer and the German Forest

Mon 29 Sep We venture into the ‘deep dark wood’ of Anselm Kiefer’s paintings to learn why representations of trees and forests feature so often in his work, with art historian Christian Weikop.

Reynolds Room; 1–2pm; free (pre-booking strongly recommended)

The School of Historical Dress stages a Moroni-themed event at the RA on 1 Nov

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● Visit www.royalacademy.org.

P H OTO CH R IS T I A N D O L L I M O R E

How to book

INMOTION AT THE R A Anselm Kiefer Exhibition Tour for Mobility Impaired Visitors

Mon 27 Oct An introductory tour of ‘Anselm Kiefer’ for wheelchair users and mobility impaired visitors.

Meet at the RA; 9–11am; £3 MORONI FREE LUNCHTIME LECTURE Giovanni Battista Moroni: An Introduction

Mon 27 Oct Curator Arturo Galansino reveals how Giovanni Battista Moroni distinguished himself from his artist contemporaries.

Reynolds Room; 1–2pm; free (pre-booking strongly recommended) MORONI EVENING EVENT Dressing an Italian Countess

Fri 31 Oct Jenny Tiramani, former Director of Theatre Design at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre joins curator Arturo Galansino and others to discuss the importance of costume for both 21st-century stage actors and Moroni’s 16th-century sitters.

Reynolds Room; 6.30–7.30pm; £16/£7 reductions (incl. exh entry), £12 (event only)

November HISTORICAL FASHION WORKSHOP

Actor Timothy Spall talks at the RA as the new film Mr. Turner is released, in which he plays the artist J.M.W. Turner RA

SPECIAL EVENT

Family Fun

Around the RA

FAMILY STUDIOS These free drop-in workshops, supported

by Jeanne and William Callanan, run from 11am–3pm

New Friends’ Welcome Tours

Room without a Roof

Royal Academy Tours

KIEFER EVENING EVENT

Sun 21 Sep

Provocations in Art: Anselm Kiefer’s ‘Heroic Symbols’

The Big Draw at the Royal Academy

1pm Tue to Fri; 3pm Wed to Fri; 11.30am Sat

Mon 10 Nov We reconsider Anselm Kiefer’s 1969 book Heroic Symbols which documented a provocative performance art project featuring the forbidden Nazi salute. Panelists Christian Weikop, Lara Day and Andrew Renton probe Kiefer’s motivation regarding this taboo gesture.

Reynolds Room; 6.30–7.30pm; £20/£10 reductions (incl. exclusive exh entry)

Schools of Rock

EXHIBITION TOURS

Sun 16 Nov

Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album

Behind the Scenes of ‘Mr. Turner’

Fri 7 Nov Actor Timothy Spall and art historian Dr Jacqueline Riding join us for a panel discussion of Mike Leigh’s new biopic of the artist J.M.W. Turner RA. Please check our website for further details

Moroni’s Subjects and their Clothes

Sat 1 Nov Explore the fashion of Moroni’s portraits of 16th-century Italian sitters in this workshop, which includes a close look at the exhibition, an explanatory talk with images of surviving garments, and hands-on sessions where participants can make a cutwork purse and try setting a ruff. In collaboration with The School of Historical Dress.

Meet at the RA; 10am–5.30pm; £85/£65 reductions (incl. exh entry) INTER ACT AT THE R A BSL Talk: Moroni

Sat 1 Nov An event for deaf, deafened and hard of hearing visitors – a slide assisted lecture about ‘Moroni’ delivered in BSL. Meet at the RA; 2–3pm; £3 INTOUCH AT THE R A Audio Described Tour: Anselm Kiefer CO U R T ESY S I M O N M EI N / T H I N M A N F I L MS

P H OTO CH R IS T I A N D O L L I M O R E

Debate

Mon 3 Nov An audio described tour of ‘Anselm Kiefer’ plus a handling session, for blind and visually impaired visitors Meet at the RA; 11am–1pm; £3 MORONI FREE LUNCHTIME LECTURE The Gentle Worker

Mon 3 Nov Jonathan Jones of The Guardian explains why Moroni’s The Tailor is a revolutionary and superb example of portraiture.

Reynolds Room; 1–2pm; free (pre-booking strongly recommended)

2pm first Sunday of each month.

Curator’s Collection Talks

3pm first Tuesday of every month.

Sun 19 Oct 2.30pm Thur (until 9 Oct) Anselm Kiefer

CREATIVE FAMILY WORKSHOPS Tue 28 Oct and Thur 30 Oct This workshop, inspired by the work of Anselm Kiefer, comprises an interactive tour and a practical handson session. Pre-booking essential.

Learning Studio; 10.15am–1pm; £15/£5 Friends/£3 children 6 + yrs

2.30pm Wed, 7pm Fri (1 Oct–5 Dec) Giovanni Battista Moroni

2.30pm Tue, 7pm Fri (28 Oct–16 Jan) Allen Jones RA

2.30pm Thur (13 Nov–15 Jan) EXHIBITION SPOTLIGHT TALKS 10 minute talks focusing on works from current exhibitions.

3pm on Thursdays

MORONI EVENING EVENT Jonathan Yeo in Conversation with Tim Marlow

FAMILY WORKSHOP (SEN) Sun 12 Oct Experienced gallery educators lead this creative session for families with children with Special Educational Needs (SEN). Pre-booking essential.

Meet at the RA; 11am–1pm; free

Fri 14 Nov In this evening with artist Jonathan Yeo, best known for his portraits of celebrated figures in the arts and politics, we ask if contemporary portraiture fulfils the same role that Renaissance portraiture once played in society.

Reynolds Room; 6.30–7.30pm; £16/£7 reductions (incl. exh entry), £12 (event only)

ARCHITECTURE EVENT

R A BOOK CLUB Sarah Dunant: ‘Blood and Beauty’

KIEFER EVENING EVENT

Anselm Kiefer: The Artist and his Studio

Works You Think You Know: A. S. Byatt on Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales

Mon 17 Nov Novelists A.S. Byatt and Lawrence Norfolk venture together into Germany’s dark woods to discover witches, goblins, lost children and treasure.

In collaboration with the Folio Society.

Reynolds Room; 6.30–7.30pm; £20/£10 reductions (incl. exclusive exh entry)

ONE-TO-ONE ACCESS TOURS Tours for wheelchair users and audiodescriptive talks about our exhibitions and collection. Call 020 7300 5732

Wed 19 Nov Anselm Kiefer discusses the ways in which he has shaped his three successive artist studios – and their landscapes – both as a place to work to his full potential but also for displaying and comprehending his vast paintings, sculptures and installations.

Main Galleries; 8.30–9.30am; £32/£22 reductions (incl. exh entry)

Fri 21 Nov Acclaimed novelist Sarah Dunant (see page 62) leads a discussion of her novel about Renaissance Italy’s most infamous family: the Borgias. Stripping away the myths, Blood and Beauty traces this complex family and their relentless quest for power.

Meet in the Saloon; 6.30–8pm; £15 (incl. drink). Please read the book prior to attending this event.

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12 w m SP w on E w. lo th CI nd s A on SA for L O lib VE th F ra £ e p FE ry 39 ri R ce .c o. of uk 11 /R A2 01 4

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With 15 miles of books to browse and borrow, The London Library is a literary oasis located just a few minutes from the Royal Academy – the perfect place to indulge in some literary pleasures.

10% of the the RA RA magazine magazine 10% discount discount for for readers readers of Maximum 6 customers dining

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t r av e l l e r s

Kirker Holidays features short breaks, tailor-made holidays and escorted tours to Europe’s most important art cities, including carefully selected hotels, private transfers and the services of the Kirker Concierge to arrange advance tickets to the latest exhibitions.

The Hague

Mauritshuis Grand Re-Opening Although lesser known than the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Hague’s Mauritshuis holds a treasure trove of over 800 pictures, including many from masters of the Dutch Golden Age such as Vermeer, Rembrandt, Franz Hals and Rogier van der Weyden. The gallery reopened on 27 June 2014 after a refurbishment and expansion which has taken over two years.

Des Indes ***** Deluxe

Located on a leafy square in the heart of the city, this famous luxury hotel has played host to royalty, emperors and heads of state and was originally built in 1858 as the residence of King William III’s personal advisor.The hotel has some grand classical features and a recent redesign by Parisien interior designer Jacques Garcia has added a chic, contemporary style.

Rembrandt - Self portrait

3 nights price from £649

Amsterdam & The Hague A four NIGHT HOLIDAY | 10 November 2014 Amsterdam’s great trio of art museums – the Rijksmuseum, the Stedelijk Museum and the Van Gogh Museum – are all now open after lengthy closures for renovation. The Hague’s ‘Mauritshuis’ museum has also been closed for renovation and its spectacular collection of Flemish masters is on show once again.

We will be visiting all three collections in the company of an expert lecturer on our new escorted tours, staying at the 4* NH Museums Quarter Hotel. The Hague’s Mauritshuis gallery has also been renovated recently, and here we will see important works by Vermeer, including The Girl with a Pearl Earring and The View of Delft, as well as Rembrandt’s self-portrait and works by Pieter de Hooch, Holbein and Paulus Potter.

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.

Speak to an expert or request a brochure:

020 7593 2284

quote code XRA

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Debate

Friends Events and Excursions

Title of event

How to book ● Postal bookings open now. Post

Day X Month Xxxxxx

●

These events are generally very popular. We recommend you post the booking form overleaf as soon as you receive the magazine. Remaining tickets will be sold online and over the phone from 24 September Broadcasting House and Beyond

Sun 5 Oct and 9 Nov Our walking tour of the area around Oxford Circus features a number of architectural gems, such as All Saints Church, a Grade I-listed Robert Adam townhouse, and the Langham, London’s first grand hotel. We finish at BBC Broadcasting House, where we look at the architecture of the original building

by George Val Myer, tour the restored Art Deco foyer and then visit the new building to see the 24-hour newsroom.

2–4pm; £26; Meet at All Saints Church, Margaret St, W1 Savile Club

Mon 6 Oct, Fri 28 Nov and Mon 8 Dec Join us for a rare opportunity to privately tour this wonderful building with the Savile Club’s Secretary. Friends hear about the unique architecture of this 18th-century house, which conceals some of the finest French interiors surviving in London. We learn about the Club’s colourful history and hear about some of its past members, including Edward Elgar, Thomas Hardy and H.G. Wells.

10–11.30am; £28 (incl. coffee); 69 Brook St, EC4 (small groups) Badminton House, Gloucs

Wed 8 Oct By very special arrangement, Badminton House opens privately for Friends and we are privileged to have architectural historian and writer John Harris lead our tour. Home to the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort, Badminton House is an impressive country mansion dating from the 1660s, with later additions

by William Kent. During our visit, we explore the fascinating collection of family portraits as well as the great hunting pictures by John Wootton.

9.45am–7pm; £85 (incl. coach, lunch/gls wine, tea); numbers limited Army and Navy Club

Fri 10 Oct and Mon 3 Nov Join us for our inaugural tour of ‘The Rag’ (as the Army and Navy Club is affectionately called), which was founded in 1837. On our tour we learn about the history of the club, and see fascinating artefacts and paintings by artists such as Sir Peter Lely, David Shepherd, Sir Francis Grant PRA, as well as a miniature of Lady Emma Hamilton that Nelson displayed in his cabin. Friends

●

●

are welcome to book for lunch in the fine dining restaurant after the tour (details with ticket).

10.30am–12.30pm; £28 (incl. coffee/cake); 36 Pall Mall, SW1

●

●

Goldsmiths’ Hall

Mon 13 Oct and 10 Nov Led by the librarians at Goldsmiths’ Hall, Friends enjoy an exclusive private visit to this historic livery hall, designed

by Philip Hardwick RA. The Hall is the home of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, founded in 1300 and one of the twelve Great Livery Companies.

Friends tour the magnificent Hall and the Court, Exhibition and Drawing Rooms, and also have an opportunity to view the silver collection and library.

11am–12pm; £23; Foster Lane, EC2 King’s College Chapel, University of London

Wed 15 and Thur 16 Oct On our tour led by the Revd Tim Ditchfield, we discover the story of King’s College Chapel, a Victorian gem hidden within the King’s College Strand buildings. The chapel was redesigned

by George Gilbert Scott RA in 1864, after the College Chaplain declared that the original 1831 chapel should be reconstructed due to its ‘meagreness and poverty’. The chapel now has a fine polychrome interior treated in an Italian Romanesque style. Friends learn about the recent restoration, including Joseph Nuttgens’s stained glass windows that celebrate the role the college played in the discovery of DNA. 10.30–11.30am; £16; The Strand, WC2 British Academy’s Art Collection

Mon 27 Oct On our archivist-led tour, Friends view the British Academy’s art collection, and learn about the process of loans and acquisitions overseen by the Academy’s paintings committee. As well as portraits by Sir Thomas Lawrence PRA, the Academy’s collection contains excellent pieces of post-war British art

by Sir Terry Frost RA, Gillian Ayres RA, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. The collection also includes Six Academy Presidents by Stuart Pearson Wright, winner of the National Portrait Gallery’s BP Portrait Award in 2011.

10.30am–12pm or 3–4.30pm; £24 (incl. tea); Carlton House Terrace, SW1

●

●

booking form overleaf 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 leaves from outside the RA on Piccadilly and 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 queries about these events, please call 020 7300 5839.

On 11 Nov, Friends travel to Ely Cathedral Bank of England

Wed 29 Oct We are privileged to be able to offer this visit to the private rooms of the Bank of England. We learn how the building, created by Sir John Soane RA in 1788, evolved into the rooms we see today. Our exclusive tour includes the Committee Room and the splendid Court Room which houses an antique weathervane, originally installed so that the Bank’s directors could forecast the arrival of merchant shipping in the Port of London.

5.30–6.30pm; £30; Threadneedle St, EC2 Breamore House, Hampshire

Tue 4 Nov Built in 1583, Breamore is an Elizabethan manor house that has changed very little over the past 400 years. During our private tour, we explore the marvellous interiors and stunning collection, including paintings by Godfrey Kneller, David Teniers, Francis Cotes RA and Peter Andreas Rysbrack, as well as Flemish tapestries, Regency furniture, a Chinese Chippendale mirror and exceptional pietre dure and gilt-bronzemounted ebony cabinet. We also visit St Mary’s, a fine example of an AngloSaxon church.

9.45am–7pm; £78 (incl. coach, set lunch, gls wine, tea) Ely Cathedral

Tue 11 Nov Considered by many to be the most magnificent of our medieval cathedrals, Ely was founded as an abbey by St Etheldreda in 673 CE and established as a cathedral in 1109. The present building dates from 1081 and is a remarkable example of Romanesque architecture. Our tour includes the 14th-century Lady Chapel, Norman

stonework, sculptures, memorials and the Octagon, described by Simon Jenkins as ‘unreservedly his favourite feature of medieval architecture’. We also visit the Stained Glass Museum.

10am–7pm; £75 (incl. coach, lunch, gls wine, tea) Spitalfields Walk

Thur 13 and Wed 26 Nov Our walking tour of Spitalfields is led by Charlie de Wet, Chair of the Huguenots of Spitalfields charity. We begin with the interior of Hawksmoor’s Christ Church and then make our way around this curious, closed world of Early Georgian terraces and grand 17th-century silk weavers’ houses. We learn about the area’s history, which includes a visit to Sandys Row synagogue, formerly a Huguenot chapel. Our tour also takes us to Eleven Spitalfields to view a new exhibition entitled ‘Bell Ringers’ by Anthony Eyton RA, who kept a studio in the area from 1968 to 1982.

11am–1.30pm (13 Nov) or 2–4.30pm (26 Nov); £30 (incl. donations to church and synagogue); meet at Christ Church, Commercial Rd, Spitalfields, E1 Royal Courts of Justice

Tue 18 and Tue 25 Nov Friends have the chance to explore the Royal Courts of Justice – one of the last major Gothic Revival buildings erected in London during Queen Victoria’s reign, and now home to the High Court and Court of Appeal.

Designed by George Edmund Street RA in 1868, these imposing buildings, composed of a staggering 35 million bricks, include over 1,000 rooms and in the main building alone have more than three and a half miles of corridor.

2–3.30pm; £25; The Strand, WC2

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Friends Exclusive Viewings

Enjoy all of our exhibitions out of hours and before they open to the public.

Photo: Benedict Johnson

Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album Until 19 Oct Burlington Gardens

Friends Extended Hours Mon 6 Oct 6–8.30pm

Anselm Kiefer 27 Sep – 14 Dec Main Galleries

Friends Previews Wed 24 Sep 10am–6pm Thu 25 Sep 10am–8.30pm Fri 26 Sep 10am–6pm Friends Extended Hours Tue 28 Oct 8.30–10am Mon 24 Nov 6–8.30pm

Giovanni Battista Moroni 25 Oct 2014 – 25 Jan 2015 The Sackler Wing Friends Previews Wed 22 Oct 10am–8.30pm Thu 23 Oct 10am–6pm Fri 24 Oct 10am–6pm Friends Extended Hours Mon 24 Nov 6–8.30pm

Allen Jones RA

Visit royalacademy.org.uk/friends or call 020 7300 5664 to find out more.

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13 Nov 2014 – 25 Jan 2015 Burlington Gardens Friends Previews Wed 12 Nov 10am–8.30pm Friends Extended Hours Mon 1 Dec 6–8.30pm

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Debate Friends Worldwide Art Tours Spain: The Art of Madrid and Toledo with Colin Bailey

Reina Sofia, which also features an impressive array of predominantly 20th-century Spanish art. We finish with a visit to Toledo (pictured here), and an in-depth look at one of Spain’s greatest artists, El Greco. Call 020 7873 5013 or visit coxandkings.co.uk/ra

17–21 Nov Madrid is famous for its ‘Golden Triangle of Art’, encompassing the Museo del Prado, the ThyssenBornemisza Museum and the Reina Sofia. The Prado holds unrivalled collections by masters such as Goya, Velázquez, Rubens, Titian and Bosch.

Nearby is the Thyssen-Bornemisza, which displays more than 1,000 works of art spanning eight centuries.

Picasso’s Guernica hangs in the

Event

Date

Number of Tickets

Cost

Reductions are available for students, jobseekers and people with disabilities with recognised proof of status. Please indicate your status if relevant Dorney Court

Wed 19 and 26 Nov Led by the Old Vic’s stage door keeper, Friends have the opportunity to enjoy a unique backstage tour of this theatre, including the public areas such as the foyer, auditorium and upper circle, and also the stage door and stage itself.

Built in 1818, the Old Vic has hosted some of the most iconic productions and stars in London’s stage history including Laurence Olivier, and Kevin Spacey, the current Artistic Director. The stage door keeper will share stories of the theatre’s architecture and past, as well as the history of the Old Vic Company, which went on to found the National Theatre.

10.30am–12.30pm; £27 (incl. coffee); The Cut, Waterloo, SE1

Tue 9 Dec By kind invitation, we enjoy a private tour of Dorney Court, one of the finest examples of a Tudor manor house.

Built in 1440, the house has been home to the same family for over 450 years.

Our tour includes portraits by Peter Lely and Godfrey Kneller, 15th- and 16thcentury oak furniture and panelling and beautiful 17th-century lacquer furniture.

We visit the family’s private chapel and conclude our tour with a festive drink in the Great Hall.

12.45–6pm; £50; (incl. coach, tea, wine & mince pies)

Thur 20 and Fri 21 Nov Granted Royal Charter in 1364, the Vintners’ Company is one of the 12 Great Livery Companies and for centuries has been known for its involvement in the importation, regulation and sale of wine.

We explore the collection of paintings, silver and textiles as we tour the principle rooms, including the magnificent Court Room, the Boardroom and Livery Hall with original chandeliers dating from 1874.

10.15am–12pm; £26 (incl. coffee); Upper Thames Street, EC4

For Friends Events & Excursions, please list your event choices in preference order.

Total Cost £

The Old Vic Theatre

Vintners’ Hall

Events booking form

Sadler’s Wells

Thur 11 Dec Friends tour the internationally renowned performing arts institution Sadler’s Wells with the theatre’s technical director. Originally set up as a music house in 1683, Sadler’s Wells has had multiple incarnations; most recently the theatre was completely rebuilt in 1998. Sadler’s has an expanded sprung stage, a 1,500 seat auditorium and a glass-fronted foyer that encapsulates the company’s belief that theatre should embrace everyone. We peek behind the scenes of their latest production and learn about the history of this magnificent dance company and venue.

10–11.15am; £23 (incl. coffee); Rosebery Ave, EC1

Student

Jobseeker

Disabled

Please note that reductions are not available for Friends Events & Excursions Please indicate any dietary or Access 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 Events & Lectures 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

CO U R T ESY B I GS TO CK

St Paul’s Triforium Tour

Mon 1 and Tue 2 Dec On our private tour of the triforium at St Paul’s, we visit places not normally open to the public. These include the library, the Geometric Staircase and the spectacular views from the west end down the nave. We also explore the Trophy Room, where Sir Christopher Wren’s ‘Great Model’ – an early plan for the cathedral in the form of a Greek cross – is on display. Please note there are 141 steps to the triforium level and no lift.

11.30am–12.45pm; £36; St Paul’s Cathedral, EC4

Carols at St James’s Church

Tue 16 Dec Please join us for our Friends’ Christmas celebrations with a reception in the John Madejski Fine Rooms, followed by a candlelit carol service at St James’s Church, Piccadilly.

The evening includes traditional carols and festive readings by Royal Academicians and special guests. We are delighted to welcome back the chamber choir Vivamus to sing again this year.

Reception 6.30–7.30pm, service 7.45– 8.45pm; £27 (incl. drinks reception and mince pies) or £17 (concert only)

● Some of the venues we visit occasionally offer tours to the general public. 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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The latest developments in and around the RA

Academy News ‘Royal Academicians formed a charity that would help artists unable to work through illness or injury’

A charity that assists professional artists in need is celebrating its bicentenary with a special auction. CAROLINE BUGLER reports

J.M.W. Turner tends to be portrayed as something of a curmudgeon, but he made a supremely charitable gesture that deserves to be celebrated. When the watercolourist John Robert Cozens died in 1797, Turner was so deeply moved by the plight of Cozens’s young family, who were threatened with destitution, that he began rallying his fellow Royal Academicians to form a charity that would help artists unable to work through illness or injury, as well as those who depended on them.

Turner’s persistence paid off and the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution (AGBI) was founded in 1814. This year the AGBI celebrates its bicentenary with a fundraising auction at Bonhams in London. Artists including Paula

Rego, Maggi Hambling, Tracey Emin RA and Ken Howard RA are donating works.

Fundraising events have occurred throughout the AGBI’s history, but initially the money raised was used to support only Royal Academicians. The remit has since widened to include all professional artists, but the AGBI remains closely linked with the Academy. Its offices are in Burlington House, RA Presidents are invited to be AGBI President, several Academicians serve as trustees and there is usually an RA Steward who acts as advocate and fundraiser for the organisation.

Brad Feltham, the charity’s Secretary, says that around 140 artists or their dependents are currently being assisted. ‘We can provide regular or one-off

help. If an artist has been in a car crash or has had a stroke our financial support may only be short-term – say six months. If they have a serious illness they can be on our books for 40 years.’

The institution’s minute books reveal that in the early years of its work the funds generated were used to help artists with the most basic necessities, such as food, fuel and clothes. These days the AGBI is more likely to step in with assistance in those areas that are not covered by the state. For example, it can help artists to pay rent on a studio, or foot the mortgage or utility bills in the short term. It can also help support children, and fund household adaptation and respite breaks for a family. One applicant, the painter June Lisle (see above left), was awarded the funds she needed to buy an adapted easel so that she could paint from her wheelchair. ‘Thank you for the generous support,’ she wrote. ‘Not being able to paint properly at my easel for all these months has been so difficult. I need to paint, it makes me feel alive.’

AGBI Bicentenary Auction Bonhams, London, 020 7468 8246, www.bonhams.com, 1 Oct, viewing 29-30 Sep. AGBI www.agbi.co.uk June Lisle www.lisleart.com

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P H OTO B I L I DAV I E

Help is at hand

© J U N E L IS L E

Livia’s Garden, Rome, 2014, by June Lisle

In Memoriam: Alan Davie RA For Alan Davie colour was the essence of painting and spontaneous gesture the preferred mode of its application. RENÉ GIMPEL, Davie’s art dealer and a lifelong friend of the artist, remembers a life well lived I knew Alan Davie (1920-2014) the way one comes to know a member of the family. Alan came into my life when he joined Gimpel Fils gallery in 1950. My father, Charles Gimpel, was director at the time and I was three years old. I grew up learning which family member was a fixture and which wasn’t – Alan was in the first category, because he was always present and, as such, he shaped my life, my thinking and ultimately my work as an art dealer, when I succeeded my father.

Alan, his wife Bili and Jane, their daughter, lived near Hertford. My brother and I would visit and see Alan’s paintings, which for us were matters of wonder. First and foremost was the colour. Alan was a great colourist, a master at mixing and remixing startling combinations, a magician – and shaman – for whom colour was the essence of his chosen vocation. Colour spread from the canvases to the walls of the artist’s home, to the recesses of his studio, to the accumulated impasto, inches deep, of his palette.

This love of colour was matched by a similar passion for music. Many instruments lay around his home, so many beautiful shapes stacked around a grand piano, dozens of scores lying on the lid. As a professional saxophonist Alan championed free-form jazz and I enjoyed several public performances that he gave. Five LPs were issued, each with a dust-jacket designed by the artist.

A few years ago, a German music publisher, specialist in the byways of the jazz world, reissued the LPs as CDs. I sat in on conversations between artist and publisher, only then realising Alan’s complete mastery of music-making, not just jazz but also the classical canon (most days he played Bach). Over the years however, Alan came to the conclusion that free-form jazz was not as satisfactory as the challenge of playing to a set score.

As a visual artist Alan emphasised the spontaneous gesture, the gesture that results in an image with as little mediated reflection as possible. He often failed to finish a painting – at least failed in the traditional sense of signing it off. This was because, for this artist, painting was a process rather than the creation of a discreet, isolated entity.

A painting in Alan’s studio might reach a point where the artist could decide that nothing further needed to be added; then, if it remained stored in situ, he might bring it out again much later and decide that the time had come to modify the image. He believed that a painting was not a static thing – it was unstable, and its meaning could not be fixed by the artist or by anyone else.

In brief RICHARD MACCORMAC RA As RA Magazine went to press we received news of the death of architect Richard MacCormac RA. A full obituary will appear in the winter issue of this magazine, published 15 November.

To read about MacCormac’s life, visit http://roy.ac/MacCormac NEW RAS AND HONOURS Cathie Pilkington has been elected a new Academician in the category of sculpture. Among the Queen’s birthday honours, Alan Stanton RA received an OBE for services to architecture and Honorary Fellow Joseph Rykwert (see page 34) received a CBE. SOFTEN THE BLOW The design of this vibrant cushion cover is from Sandra Blow RA’s 199394 screenprint, Side Effect (Blue).

Each cover is individually numbered in a limited edition of 250. Three other designs by Blow are available in red, green and yellow, and all cost £60.

Visit http://roy.ac/ShopSandraBlow

BP Spotlight: Alan Davie Tate Britain, London, 020 7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk, until 28 Sep

CADMIUM CRISIS Artists rely on cadmium paints for their strength and permanence, in hues from golden yellow to scarlet.

But the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) is considering banning these pigments, due to fears about their impact on health. The RA is supporting Spectrum Artists’ Paints campaign to allow their use by artists: to learn more and give your view to the ECHA, which is now consulting on the issue, visit http://roy.ac/Cadmium

P H OTO B I L I DAV I E

© J U N E L IS L E

Academy News

Alan Davie painting in his studio in the 1940s

AMERICAN ASSOCIATES The Associates’ autumn programme begins on 10 September with a private view of Christopher Le Brun PRA’s exhibition at the Friedman Benda Gallery in New York (see page 43). This is the President’s first show in New York for ten years, and it features new paintings.

For more information on this event or membership, email info@aarat.org or call 001 212 980 8404.

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WOOD ENGRAVING

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Readers’ offers are open to all RA Magazine readers when they show a copy of this magazine

Readers’ Offers Ticket Offers The Holburne Museum is offering

a discounted rate of £6.50 (reduced from £7.95) for their exhibition ‘High Spirits: The Comic Art of Thomas Rowlandson’ (27 Sep-8 Feb 2015). The absurdities of fashion, the perils of love, political machinations and royal intrigue were the daily subject matter of Thomas Rowlandson, one of the leading caricaturists of Georgian England. This show features portly squires and young dandies; Austenesque heroines and their gruesome chaperones; and dashing young officers and corrupt politicians. See advertisement on page 47

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To celebrate ‘Constable: The Making of a Master’ (20 Sep-11 Jan 2015) the V&A are pleased to offer a 15 per cent discount* on their product range of specially created prints, books and gifts. Present this page instore at point of purchase, or online enter the code RAOFFER1 at the checkout. (*Cannot be combined with any other offer. Valid until 28 November 2014. Single use only. Excludes p&p.)

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2-for-1 Tickets 20/21 British Art Fair (10-14 Sep) at the

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months membership for the price of 11; save £39. Visit www.londonlibrary.co.uk/ RA2014. See advertisement on page 76 The Royal Over-Seas League, located close to the RA, provides bedroom accommodation, fine dining and a private garden. ROSL offers readers a discounted joining fee, and pro-rata subscription rates for 2014. For more information visit www.rosl.org.uk or telephone 020 7408 0214. See advertisement on page 73

Eating Out Richoux, opposite the RA, is offering a 10 per cent discount on breakfast, morning coffee, lunch, afternoon tea or dinner. See advertisement on page 76

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Two Black Pears, 2008, by Mary Fedden RA, from Beaux Arts Bath, at the 20/21 British Art Fair

The RA Shop is offering an exclusive 10 per cent off the following titles: Anselm Kiefer Use online code RAMAG90 for the softback £25.50 (rrp £28) and RAMAG91 for the hardback £43.50 (rrp £48); Giovanni Battista Moroni Use online code RAMAG92 for the softback £18 (rrp £20) and RAMAG93 for the hardback £27 (rrp £30); Allen Jones Use online code RAMAG94 £15.25 (rrp £16.95); A Shetland Notebook Use online code RAMAG95 £15.25 (rrp £16.95); The Blue Cupboard Use online code RAMAG96 £15.25 (rrp £16.95).

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Exhibitions in London and the rest of the UK

Listings London Public BARBICAN CENTRE (ART GALLERY AND THE CURVE)

Silk Street EC2, 020 7638 4141 www.barbican.org.uk

© THE WALLACE COLLECTION. COURTESY IL CIGNO GG EDIZIONI. © HOWARD HODGKIN/COURTESY ALAN CRISTEA GALLERY. © THE ESTATE OF SIGMAR POLKE/DACS, LONDON/VG BILD-KUNST, BONN

Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age Features architectural images of

extraordinary scope, starting with the birth of the skyscraper in 1930s New York to the modern day towers of Venezuela, 25 Sep-11 Jan 2015 Walead Beshty Walead Beshty transforms the Curve, from floor to ceiling, with more than 12,000 cyanotype prints, 9 Oct-8 Feb 2015 THE COURTAULD GALLERY

Strand WC2, 020 7848 2526 www.courtauld.ac.uk

Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude

Bringing together an outstanding group of the artist’s nudes to chart his groundbreaking approach during his short but urgent career, 23 Oct-18 Jan 2015 DULWICH PICTURE GALLERY

Gallery Road SE21, 020 8693 5254 www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk Art and Life 1920-1931 Works by Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis and William Staite Murray, until 21 Sep From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia First UK

exhibition by Canadian artist Emily Carr, 1 Nov-8 Mar 2015 ESTORICK COLLECTION OF MODERN ITALIAN ART

Canonbury Square N1, 020 7704 9522 www.estorickcollection.com

Gerardo Dottori: The Futurist View

Striking examples of aeropainting, until 7 Sep Roman Ostia: Ancient Ruins, Modern Art Bringing together art of two different eras: Roman antiquities from Ostia Antica and the modern sculpture and painting of Umberto Mastroianni, 24 Sep-21 Dec NATIONAL GALLERY

Trafalgar Square WC2, 020 7747 2885 www.nationalgallery.org.uk

Building the Picture: Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting Works

by artists such as Duccio, Botticelli and Crivelli, until 21 Sep Take One Picture – Discover, Imagine, Explore: Children Inspired by Georges Seurat

Work by primary schools, all inspired

by Seurat’s Bathers at Asniéres, until 21 Sep Rembrandt: The Late Works Experience the passion and innovation

of Rembrandt’s late works, featuring paintings, drawings and prints, 15 Oct18 Jan 2015 NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

St Martin’s Place WC2, 020 7306 0055 www.npg.org.uk BP Portrait Award 2014 Prestigious portrait painting competition now in its 25th year, until 21 Sep Virginia Woolf: Life, Art and Vision An exhibition of portraits and archival material exploring Virginia Woolf’s life and achievements as a novelist, intellectual, campaigner and public figure, until 26 Oct Anarchy & Beauty: William Morris and His Legacy, 1860-1960 The life and ideas

of this great Victorian artist, writer and visionary thinker are explored through portraits and personal items, 16 Oct-11 Jan 2015 SOMERSET HOUSE

Strand WC2, 020 7845 4600 www.somersethouse.org.uk

The National Open Art Exhibition

Now in its 18th year, this annual open art exhibition aims to nurture creative talent from both emerging and professional artists, 18 Sep-25 Oct TATE BRITAIN

Millbank SW1, 020 7887 8888 www.tate.org.uk

The EY Exhibition: Late Turner– Painting Set Free The first exhibition

devoted to the extraordinary work J.M.W. Turner created between 1835 and his death in 1851, 10 Sep-25 Jan 2015 Turner Prize 2014 Tate Britain presents nominated artists for this year’s Turner Prize, celebrating its 30th year, 30 Sep4 Jan 2015 Olafur Eliasson: Turner Colour Experiments A new series of paintings by Olafur Eliasson made in response to the work of J.M.W. Turner, until 25 Jan 2015 TATE MODERN

Bankside SE1, 020 7887 8888 www.tate.org.uk Malevich The first major retrospective of the work of Kazimir Malevich for almost 25 years, 16 July-26 Oct Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963–2010 This groundbreaking retrospective of the maverick Sigmar Polke explores the full scope of his work, 9 Oct-8 Feb 2015 Conflict, Time, Photography Timed to coincide with the centenary of the First World War, this exhibition concerns the relationship between photography and sites of conflict over time, 26 Nov-15 March 2015

V&A

Cromwell Road SW7, 020 7942 2000 www.vam.ac.uk

Constable: The Making of a Master

This major exhibition reveals how Constable combined a reverence for the Old Masters with a revolutionary approach to capturing light and atmosphere, 20 Sep-11 Jan 2015 Horst: Photographer of Style This retrospective presents Horst P. Horst’s most iconic fashion images alongside some of his less well-known work, 6 Sep-4 Jan 2015 Wedding Dresses 1775-2014 Tracing the development of the white wedding dress, until 15 March 2015 Disobedient Objects From Suffragette teapots to protest robots, this exhibition is the first to examine the powerful role of objects in movements for social change, until 1 Feb 2015

Perseus and Andromeda, c.15541556, by Titian at the Wallace Collection

THE WALLACE COLLECTION

Hertford House, Manchester Square W1, 020 7563 9500 www.wallacecollection.org The Great Gallery Reopening

Yellow, Black and White, 1965, by Umberto Mastroianni at Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art

One of the finest collections of Old Master paintings in the world reopens with a new hang following its two-year refurbishment, opens 19 Sep

London Commercial ALAN CRISTEA

31 & 34 Cork Street W1, 020 7439 1866 www.alancristea.com

Jim Dine: A History of Communism at 34 Cork Street, 10 Sep-7 Oct Jim Dine: Printmaker at 31 Cork Street, 10 Sep7 Oct Howard Hodgkin: Green Thoughts

at 31 & 34 Cork Street, 11 Oct-15 Nov

Autumn, 2014, by Howard Hodgkin at Alan Cristea Gallery

BANKSIDE GALLERY

48 Hopton Street SE1, 020 7928 7521 www.banksidegallery.com

National Original Print Exhibition

An open show promoting the best of printmaking, 17-28 Sep RWS Autumn | Watercolour Secrets Celebrating the launch of the latest RWS publication, Watercolour Secrets, a selection of paintings featured in the book are on display, 3 Oct-1 Nov Cultivation & Creativity RHS & RWS Showcasing work featuring the four Royal Horticultural Society gardens as seen by RWS artists, reflecting the changing seasons and the life of the gardens, 6-16 Nov

Police Pig (Polizeischwein),1986,

by Sigmar Polke at Tate Modern

BEAUX ARTS LONDON

48 Maddox Street W1, 020 7493 1155 www.beauxartslondon.co.uk Master Drawings John Bellany RA, Eileen Cooper RA, Elisabeth Frink RA, Sarah Gillespie, Philip Harris, Barbara

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 catherine.cartwright@royalacademy.org.uk. Readers should contact galleries directly for opening times and ticketing queries

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Hepworth, Nicola Hicks, Bryan Kneale RA, Jonathan Leaman, Ben Nicholson, William Scott, 4 Sep-4 Oct John Piper A collection of oils and mixed media paintings highlighting the diversity of a remarkable artist, 9 Oct-8 Nov Luke Frost: Volts and Simon Allen: Silence Two contemporary artists rooted in the St Ives tradition reinvent the use of colour and light, 13 Nov-13 Dec Garçon, 2014, by Stephen Polatch at John Martin Gallery

BROWSE & DARBY

EAMES FINE ART GALLERY

19 Cork Street W1, 020 7734 7984 www.browseanddarby.co.uk Edmund Chamberlain New work from the Sussex-based artist, 15 Oct-7 Nov Andy Pankhurst New paintings and drawings, 12 Nov-4 Dec

58 Bermondsey Street SE1, 020 7407 1025 www.eamesfineart.com

CITY & GUILDS OF LONDON ART SCHOOL

124 Kennington Park Road SE11, 020 7735 2306 www.cityandguildsartschool.ac.uk MA Show Fine Art 10-14 Sep Kaidi Practising, by Bernard Dunstan RA at Manya Igel Fine Arts

watercolours and etchings. This show accompanies Norman Ackroyd’s new book by the same title, 4-28 Sep Mila Fürstová: Her Wings Original etchings and paper cut-outs, exquisitely made by the Czech artist, 1-19 Oct Marc Chagall: Drawings for the Bible The full series of the original colour lithographs from 1960, 21 Oct-9 Nov

Anne Frank, 29 Oct-15 Nov JOHN MARTIN GALLERY

38 Albemarle Street W1, 020 7499 1314 www.jmlondon.com Have We Met Before? Five new painters, until 13 Sep Dylan Lewis: Recent Cat Bronzes, 19 Sep-11 Oct LA GALLERIA Royal Opera Arcade, Pall Mall SW1 www.ramunasrupsys.com Mental An exhibition of work

by Ramunas Rupsys, 6-18 Oct THE LINDA BLACKSTONE GALLERY

The Studio at Little Stafford, 23 Oaklands Road N20, 07808 612193 www.lindablackstone.com In the Studio by appointment AAF Autumn Edition Battersea Park, SW11, Stand J12, 22-26 Oct AAF Singapore F1 Pit Building, Singapore, 19-23 Nov

CONNAUGHT BROWN

ELEVEN SPITALFIELDS

11 Princelet Street, Spitalfields E1, 020 7247 1816 www.elevenspitalfields.com

LLEWELLYN ALEXANDER

GALLERY ELENA SHCHUKINA

124–126 The Cut SE1, 020 7620 1322/1324 www.llewellynalexander.com Peter Graham ROI New paintings, 25 Sep-18 Oct

Drawings and sculpture which show Lobo’s fascination with the feminine form, from mother and child imagery to the female nude, 11 Sep-9 Oct Boaz Vaadia: Sculpture New bronze and stone sculptures exploring ‘the primal connection of Man to Mother Earth’, 14 Oct-22 Nov THE CYNTHIA CORBETT GALLERY

15 Claremont Lodge, 15 The Downs, Wimbledon SW20, 020 8947 6782 www.young-masters.co.uk www.thecynthiacorbettgallery.com

Young Masters Art Prize 2014

at Lloyds Club, London EC3, 16 Sep5 Dec Young Masters Art Prize 2014 at Sphinx Fine Art, 125 Kensington Church St, London W8, 14-31 Oct Art Silicon Valley / Art San Francisco

San Mateo, California, 9-12 Oct CURWEN & NEW ACADEMY GALLERY

34 Windmill Street W1, 020 7323 4700 www.curwengallery.com

Artizan Editions with ‘Animals’ by Brendan Hansbro Original screenprints

The King’s Wedding, 2014, by Paula Rego at Marlborough Fine Art

Norman Ackroyd: A Shetland Notebook A beautiful selection of

Cartoons Week, 20-25 Oct The Art of Angela Barrett Featuring The Diary of

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

Baltasar Lobo: The Feminine Form

Salomon, 1960, by Marc Chagall at Eames Fine Art Gallery

EAGLE GALLERY / EMH ARTS

159 Farringdon Road EC1, 020 7833 2674 www.emmahilleagle.com Peter Rasmussen: Disparates Solo exhibition of paintings and monotypes, 11 Sep-4 Oct Panel Paintings II Includes work by Stephen Chambers RA, Jane Harris, James Fisher, Mali Morris RA, Trevor Sutton and Amanda Thesiger, 9 Oct-7 Nov

from artists at Artizan Editions. Animalthemed wood engravings by Brendan Hansbro, 4-27 Sep Curwen Gallery Prize for Figurative Painting Works by artists shortlisted for the gallery’s Prize for Figurative Painting. The winner to be announced during the exhibition, 8-29 Oct New works by Lucy Willis Recent watercolours and prints, 5-26 Nov

Anthony Eyton RA: Drawing on Hawksmoor, 7 Nov-23 Dec

10 Lees Place W1, 020 7499 6019 www.galleryelenashchukina.com

Leonid Borisov: Lessons in Geometry The Russian artist explores

geometric abstraction through a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, collage and photography, 18 Sep-16 Jan 2015 THE GOLDSMITHS’ COMPANY Goldsmiths’ Hall, Foster Lane EC2, www.goldsmithsfair.co.uk Contemporary Jewellery & Silverware Week One, 22-28 Sep,

Week Two, 30 Sep-5 Oct HIGHGATE CONTEMPORARY ART

26 Highgate High Street N6, 020 8340 7564 www.highgateart.com Jane Swannell Portrayal of friends, family and the famous, 10-14 Sep Still Life A selection of artists including Angela A’Court and Arnold Toubeix, 17 Sep4 Oct Philip Richardson and Andy Waite Landscapes captured, 8 Oct-1 Nov Alex Uxbridge 2014 New work, opens 5 Nov THE ILLUSTRATION CUPBOARD 22 Bury Street SW1, 020 7976 1727 www.illustrationcupboard.com Anthony Browne 30 years of Willy the Wimp, 3-20 Sep The Art of Shaun Tan, 24 Sep-18 Oct The Annual Political

LONG & RYLE GALLERY

4 John Islip Street SW1, 020 7834 1434 www.longandryle.com 20/21 British Art Fair Exhibiting a selection of artists: John Monks, Brian Sayers, Ramiro Fernandez Saus, Su Blackwell, Katharine Morling, Geoff Routh, Melanie Miller, Jocelyn Clarke, 10-14 Sep LAPADA Fine Art and Antiques Fair Exhibiting a selection of artists, 24-28 Sep Lost in Paradise: Nick Archer New paintings, 16 Oct-14 Nov MARLBOROUGH FINE ART

6 Albemarle Street W1, 020 7629 5161 www.marlboroughfineart.com Therese Oulton Exhibition to coincide with the publication of a book by Jacqueline Rose, 3-27 Sep Paula Rego: Stone Soup (and publication of book by Enitharmon), 1-25 Oct Frieze Masters, 16-19 Oct Robert Devriendt, 28 Oct-23 Nov MEDICI GALLERY

5 Cork Street W1, 020 7495 2565 www.medicigallery.co.uk Scottish Exhibition Paintings and works on paper by contemporary Scottish artists including Anna King, David Smith RSW, Graeme Wilcox and Christopher Wood RSW, 9 Sep-2 Oct Landscapes A small group exhibition of paintings by Fergus Hare, Kevin Hughes

© STEPHEN POLATCH/COURTESY JOHN MARTIN GALLERY. © BERNARD DUNSTAN RA/COURTESY MANYA IGEL FINE ARTS. © THE ARTIST’S ESTATE/COURTESY EAMES FINE ART GALLERY. ©PAULA REGO/PHOTOGRAPH PRUDENCE CUMING/COURTESY MARLBOROUGH FINE ART

Listings

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DEBORAH STERN ARBS

‘Mental’

SCULPTOR

Exhibition at La Galleria Royal Opera Arcade PALL MALL LONDON SW1 6-18 OCTOBER 2014 10am-7pm (5pm Sun)

RAMUNAS RUPSY S www.ramunasrupsys.com

Back view

Courier 1983. Bronze. Ed.of 9. 6½” x 12” x 5½” (11.2 x 20.5 x 16.3cm)

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

Michelle Pearson Cooper “Off the Beaten Track” 13th -18th October 2014 Royal Opera Arcade Gallery Pall Mall, London Sw1y 4uy (Opposite the institute of directors)

www.michellepearsoncooper.co.uk

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Listings

MORLEY GALLERY (in association with Liss Fine Art)

61 Westminster Bridge Road SE1, 020 7450 1826 www.lissfineart.com

The Great War: As Recorded through the Fine and Popular Arts Based on a

Standing Still, 2014, by Helen Simmonds at Beaux Arts Bath

collection of paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, posters, photographs and ephemera, this exhibition records the Great War as it was seen in both fine and popular art. The exhibition forms part of a series of IWM-led First World War Centenary initiatives, 5 Sep-2 Oct OSBORNE SAMUEL

Void, 2005, by William Tucker RA at Pangolin London

23a Bruton Street W1, 020 7493 7939 www.osbornesamuel.com David Farrell: Photographs An important exhibition drawn from across this artist’s remarkable five-decade career, 1-20 Sep C.R.W. Nevinson: A Printmaker in War and Peace Prints

by Nevinson depicting the horrors of war alongside contrasting cityscapes of London, Paris and New York, 25 Sep-18 Oct 20th Century British Art New acquisitions including sculpture by Kenneth Armitage RA, Lynn Chadwick RA, Elisabeth Frink RA and Henry Moore, and paintings by Prunella Clough, Paul Feiler, Roger Hilton and Keith Vaughan, 23 Oct-22 Nov PANGOLIN LONDON

90 York Way N1, 020 7520 1480 www.pangolinlondon.com

Peter Randall-Page: Inside Out & Upside Down An exhibition of

Figures in Conflict, 1939, by Eileen Agar at Redfern Gallery

new work exploring the wide range of materials Randall-Page uses, from carved stone to cast bronze and iron, sterling silver, ceramic and works on paper, 5 Sep-4 Oct William Tucker RA: Figurative Sculpture Explores the development of Tucker’s unusual approach to the figurative form over the past four decades. From maquettes to monumental bronzes, 15 Oct-29 Nov PIERS FEETHAM GALLERY

475 Fulham Road SW6, 020 7381 3031 www.piersfeethamgallery.com Lynda Minter: New Paintings Oil landscapes of London, Norfolk, Scotland and Ireland, 8-25 Oct REDFERN GALLERY

Henley Regatta, 1978, by Julian Trevelyan RA at Bohun Gallery

20 Cork Street W1, 020 7734 1732 www.redfern-gallery.com George Kennethson Sculpture and Eileen Agar Works on paper, 9 Sep-4 Oct Brendan Neiland New work, 7 Oct -13 Nov

ROCA LONDON GALLERY

Station Court, Townmead Road SW6, 020 7610 9503 www.rocalondongallery.com Urban Plunge New designs for natural swimming in our cities curated by Jane Withers for Wonderwater. Showcasing international design and architectural projects that transform urban rivers into public leisure spaces, envisaging imaginative new ways to enjoy natural water environments, 11 Sep-10 Jan 2015 ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART

Kensington Gore SW7, www.rca.ac.uk 20/21 British Art Fair Exhibitors offer an impressive collection of paintings, prints, drawings, photography, sculpture, 10-14 Sep ROYAL OPERA ARCADE GALLERY Pall Mall SW1, www.michellepearsoncooper.co.uk Michelle Pearson Cooper: Off the Beaten Track, 13-18 Oct

SYLVESTER FINE ART

64 Belsize Lane NW3, 020 7443 5990 www.sylvesterfineart.com

Rare French Lithographic Posters from WW1 Original WW1 propaganda

posters from France. Historic lithographs including work by Sem, Steinlen, Faivre and Droit, 8-28 Sep THACKERAY GALLERY

18 Thackeray Street W8, 020 7937 5883 www.thackeraygallery.com

Fact and Fantasy by Jennifer McRae RSA A solo show of new work by the

highly acclaimed Scottish artist, 9-26 Sep Ethel Walker: Two Collections Bringing together for the first time two exclusive private collections that were exhibited at Crear, Argyll, Scotland and Home House, London, 7-24 Oct 25th Anniversary Show by Joe Fan RSA

Special show marking this milestone year for the Scottish artist. Consisting of paintings alongside painted furniture, 4-21 Nov TRIBAL ART LONDON

The Mall Galleries, The Mall SW1, www.tribalartlondon.com Tribal Art London The new show of African, Oceanic, Asian and photographic work, 10-13 Sep

Rest of UK ANTHONY HEPWORTH

16 Margarets Buildings, Brock Street, Bath, 01225 310694 www.anthonyhepworth.com

The Decorative Antiques and Textiles Fair Modern British paintings and

sculpture, together with old tribal art, Battersea Park, London SW11, 30 Sep-5 Oct Phelan Gibb (1870–1948): Paintings from a Private Collection, 11 Oct-1 Nov John Eaves Selected works, 8-20 Nov THE ART ROOM

8a The Strand, Topsham, Devon, 07718 480 604 www.theartroomtopsham.co.uk Robin Rae: New Work Surrealist paintings, 14 Sep-5 Oct Carina Ciscato Loose rhythmic forms in porcelain, 14 Sep-5 Oct Hitchens, Lovell, Thursby – Fifty Years On An exhibition of work by three eminent artists who originally showed together in London in 1964, 19 Oct-9 Nov BEAUX ARTS BATH

12–13 York Street, Bath, 01225 464850 www.beauxartsbath.co.uk

New Paintings by Helen Simmonds and New Bronze Sculpture by Pieter Vanden Daele Atmospheric still-lifes

by Helen Simmonds alongside Pieter Vanden Daele’s wonderful bronze fish, 8 Sep-4 Oct Secret Lives A themed exhibition featuring paintings by Jennifer Anderson, Nathan Ford, Naomi Frears, Anthony Scullion, Jennifer McRae, Donna McLean, Shani Rhys James and Jason Walker, 13 Oct-10 Nov New Sculpture by Christopher Marvell

A beautifully crafted array of bronze characters, 13 Oct-10 Nov BOHUN GALLERY

15 Reading Road, Henley-on-Thames, Oxon, 01491 576228 www.bohungallery.co.uk Julian Trevelyan: Etchings Celebrating the creative innovation that Julian Trevelyan brought to the world of 20thcentury etching. The show spans the full 50 years of his printmaking career and reflects the breadth of his etching technique and subject matter, 13 Sept-25 Oct Eric Rimmington: Still Life New work by one of the UK’s leading still life painters, 1-23 Nov

WHITFORD FINE ART

THE BOWES MUSEUM

6 Duke Street St James’s SW1, 020 7930 9332 www.whitfordfineart.com

Barnard Castle, County Durham, 01833 690606 www.thebowesmuseum.org.uk

Pop and Abstraction: British Art from the Post-War, 16 Sep-17 Oct Poetry in Motion: Ceramics by Lurcat and Paintings by Bernède,

11 Nov-10 Dec

Birds of Paradise: Plumes & Feathers in Fashion Featuring extravagant catwalk

creations and elegant eveningwear, together with exquisite shoes and chic accessories from Christian Dior, Cristobal Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen and

© HELEN SIMMONDS/COURTSEY BEAUX ARTS BATH. © WILLIAM TUCKER RA/COURTESY PANGOLIN LONDON. © THE ARTIST’S ESTATE/COURTESY REDFERN GALLERY. © THE ARTIST’S ESTATE/COURTESY BOHUN GALLERY

RI, Michael Bennallack Hart and Robert Wells, 9 Oct-5 Nov

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CURWEN GALLERY PRIZE FOR FIGURATIVE PAINTING AN EXHIBITION OF THE SHORTLISTED ARTISTS

08-29 Octo ber 2014

LUCY WILLIS

RWA

05-26 N ovember 2014 Image: House Among Pines, watercolour, 42 x 60cm

Curwen & New Academy Gallery

Curwen & New Academy Gallery

34 Windmill Street, London W1T 2JR T: 020-7323 4700 E: galler y@curwengaller y.com www.curwengaller y.com M o n d ay - F r i d ay 1 0 - 6 ( T h u r s d ay 1 0 - 8 ) S a t u rd ay 1 1 - 5

34 Windmill Street, London W1T 2JR T: 020-7323 4700 E: galler y@curwengaller y.com www.curwengaller y.com M o n d ay - F r i d ay 1 0 - 6 ( T h u r s d ay 1 0 - 8 ) S a t u rd ay 1 1 - 5

Flying Colours Gallery. established 1986 - in Chelsea since 1995

20/21 BRITISH ART FAIR Royal College of Art | London SW7 11 - 15 September

"Joan's Cornish World"

STEPHEN MANGAN Solo Exhibition 2 - 24 October

Joan Gillchrest 1918 – 2008 A Major Exhibition of works from private collections JENNIFER ANDERSON Solo Exhibition 4 - 21 November

12th – 31st October 2014

JEAN MARTIN RSW

Solo Exhibition 27 November - 12 December

Request an illustrated catalogue View on our website www.wrenfineart.com

The Courtyard 6 Burnsall Street Chelsea London SW3 3ST (20 metres off Kings Road) t) +44 (0)20 7351 5558 e) jane@flyingcoloursgallery.com Monday to Friday 10.30 - 5.30 evenings and weekends by arrangement

www.flyingcoloursgallery.com

tel: 01993 823495 e: enquiries@wrenfineart.com

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Wren Gallery 34 Lower High Street, Burford, Oxfordshire, OX18 4RR

08/08/2014 10:55 08/08/2014 12:17

Jean Paul Gaultier, 25 Oct-19 April 2015 Julian Opie: Collected Works For the first time see this artist’s work within the context of his personal collection, 25 Oct-22 Feb 2015 17th-Century Spanish Painting: The Golden Age Louis in a Box, 2013, by Elizabeth Blackadder RA at the Glasgow Print Studio

The Bowes Museum celebrates the conservation of their important painting The Last Communion of Saint Peter Nolasco,

by Francisco Pacheco, in this show, 11 Oct1 Feb 2015 BRIGHTON MUSEUM AND ART GALLERY

Royal Pavilion Gardens, Brighton, 030 0029 0900 www.brighton-hove-museums.org.uk

War Stories: Voices from the First World War To commemorate the

100th anniversary of the start of the First World War, this exhibition brings to life the wartime experiences of 15 individuals, until 1 March 2015 BROOK GALLERY

Fore Street, Budleigh Salterton, Devon, 01395 443003 www.brookgallery.co.uk

Wood Engraving: Developing the Medium Featuring Anne Desmet RA First and Second Floor Lodgers, 1786, by Thomas Rowlandson at The Holburne Museum

and works from four selected artists: Edwina Ellis, Peter Lawrence, Peter S. Smith and Roy Willingham, 18 Oct-16 Nov CAMPDEN GALLERY

High Street, Chipping Campden, Glos, 01386 841555 www.campdengallery.co.uk Garden A group of leading artists respond to the subject of ‘Garden’, 13 Sep-12 Oct Nicola Bealing: Heartburn New paintings, 18 Oct-9 Nov David Atkins Places in Britain where Turner painted, 15 Nov-7 Dec

Courtyard Garden, Jerico, 2014,

by Derek Balmer at Campden Gallery

CAROLINE WISEMAN AT THE ALDEBURGH BEACH LOOKOUT AND ART HOUSE

31 Crag Path, Aldeburgh, Suffolk, 01728 452754 www.carolinewiseman.com The Shock of the Brand New Each week a new artist in residence reveals brand new works, 1 Sept-15 Nov 25th Anniversary Exhibition

Works by major British and international artists including several Royal Academicians are exhibited. By appointment, 1 Sept-15 Nov Aldeburgh Ah Yes, Ah Yes, Far Bodmin (Garrow Tor), 2013, by David Tress at John Davies Gallery

Poetry Festival at the Aldeburgh Beach Lookout Poets collaborate

Sep Just Let Go: Janie CochraneStewart Exhibition of ceramic sculpture, 29 Sep-19 Oct Looking Up and Thinking: Lyndsey Smith The artist captures everyday life surrounding the buildings of our towns, using pen and water, 20 Oct-9 Nov CHRIST CHURCH PICTURE GALLERY

Christ Church, Oxford, 01865 278172 www.chch.ox.ac.uk/gallery

Goddesses: Designing Female Beauty in the Renaissance and Baroque, 12 Sep-23 Dec Mounts, Mats & Marks How collectors took ownership

of their drawings, 12 Sep-2 Feb 2015 THE CONTEMPORARY FINE ART GALLERY ETON

31 High Street Eton, Windsor, Berkshire, 01753 854315 www.cfag.co.uk Andrew Macara Recent paintings 28 Sep-12 Oct THE GALLERY AT 41

41 East Street, Corfe Castle, Dorset, 01929 480095 www.galleryat41.com

Autumn Exhibition: The Captured Moment A time, a place, a mood an

atmosphere captured in a variety of mediums by Dorset contemporary painters. Including Richard Price ROI, David Atkins, Felicity House PS, John Bowen, Judy Tate, Vicky Finding, Edward Vine, Mike Jeffries and sculptors Moira Purver SWA and Sue Lansbury, 20 Sep-1 Nov GALLERY PANGOLIN

9 Chalford Ind. Estate, Chalford, Gloucs, 01453 889765 www.gallery-pangolin.com Crucible 2 at Gloucester Cathedral.

This show includes 100 works by over 60 artists including internationally acclaimed sculptors Kenneth Armitage RA, Lynn Chadwick RA, Antony Gormley RA, Damien Hirst and David Mach RA, 1 Sep-31 Oct Mini Crucible Small-scale works reflecting and echoing those on show in Crucible 2 at Gloucester Cathedral, 22 Sep-21 Nov GLASGOW PRINT STUDIO

Trongate 103, Glasgow, 0141 552 0704 www.glasgowprintstudio.co.uk Elizabeth Blackadder RA

Etchings and screenprints, until 5 Oct

Yorkshire, 01765 603534 www.greatnorthartshow.co.uk Great North Art Show This freeentry selling exhibition showcases great art in the north by some of our finest contemporary painters, printmakers, sculptors and photographers, until 22 Sep HAYLETTS GALLERY

Oakwood House, 2 High Street, Maldon, Essex, 01621 851669 www.haylettsgallery.com Paintings by Arabella Shand and Ceramics by Pam Schomberg

Shand’s inspiration starts with pattern, interiors and family life, and Schomberg’s ceramics are each hand-made in porcelain and stoneware, 12 Sep-11 Oct Michael Smee & Charles Debenham Smee paints the traditional British pub in watercolour and oil, while Debenham captures the beauty of the everyday in oil, 18 Oct-15 Nov HILTON FINE ART

5 Margarets Buildings, Bath, 01225 311311 www.hiltonfineart.com Hannah Woodman New paintings from Cornwall, 8-29 Nov THE HOLBURNE MUSEUM

Great Pulteney Street, Bath, 01225 388569 www.holburne.org High Spirits: The Comic Art of Thomas Rowlandson

An exhibition from the Royal Collection, 27 Sep-8 Feb 2015 JENNA BURLINGHAM FINE ART

2a George Street, Kingsclere, Nr Newbury, Hants, 01635 298855/07970 057789 www.jennaburlingham.com Specialising in 20th-century British paintings, prints, ceramics and sculpture.

Mixed September Show Contemporary works by Peter Joyce, Ffiona Lewis, Daisy Cook, Stephen Palmer, Richard Fox and Jane Skingley, alongside a selection of Modern British art including pieces

by Ivon Hitchens, John Piper, Elisabeth Frink RA, Mary Fedden RA, Roger Hilton and Patrick Heron, 6-20 Sep JOHN DAVIES GALLERY

The Old Dairy Plant, Fosseway Business Park, Stratford Road, Moreton-in-Marsh, Glos, 01608 652255 www.johndaviesgallery.com David Tress An exhibition of new work, 4-25 Oct

GOLDMARK ART

MOMA WALES

Heol Penrallt, Machynlleth, Powys, 01654 703355 www.momawales.org.uk

4 North Street, Lewes, East Sussex, 01273 474477 www.chalkgallerylewes.co.uk

Orange Street, Uppingham, Rutland, 01572 821424 goldmarkart.com Dora Holzhandler New paintings, 13 Sep-5 Oct

Reflection and Retraction: Tony Parsons An exploration of sunlight on

GREAT NORTH ART SHOW

Abstract paintings by the winner of the 2009 Gold Medal at the National Eisteddfod for Wales, 13 Sep-15 Nov

water; oils on canvas and board, 8-28

Ripon Cathedral, Minster Road, Ripon,

James Dickson Innes (1887-1914):

with artists in surprising ways, 7-9 Nov CHALK GALLERY LTD

Elfyn Lewis: Atgofion Melys

© ELIZABETH BLACKADDER RA/COURTESY GLASGOW PRINT STUDIO. ROYAL COLLECTION TRUST/© HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH II 2014. © DEREK BALMER/COURTESY CAMPDEN GALLERY. © DAVID TRESS/COURTESY JOHN DAVIES GALLERY

Listings

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gaLLeRy Of afRiCaN aRt

Through the Life of RA

19 October until 30 November

Nike Davies-Okundaye, A group of friends, 2004, Watercolour, pen and ink on paper

Chief Nike Davies-OkuNDaye: a RetROspeCtive 9th October – 22nd November 2014 Monday to friday 10am – 6pm saturday 10am – 4pm

Sladers Yard

www.sladersyard.co.uk tel: 01308 459511

Quarter Vertical.indd 1

9 CORk stReet, LONDON W1s 3LL iNfO@gafRaaRt.COM WWW.gafRaaRt.COM

ROYAL WATERCOLOUR SOCIETY

Gafra_v3.indd 1 01/08/2014 14:35

Elizabeth Blackadder

08/08/2014 11:00

Wild Flowers, 2013

Annie Williams RWS RE, Patchwork in Blue, watercolour

Screenprint (edition of 65) Image size: 89.5 x 73 cm

£2000.00 + VAT Available exclusively from Glasgow Print Studio.

Call: +44 (0)141 552 0704 to order or email: sales@ glasgowprintstudio.co.uk

Forthcoming Exhibition: Elizabeth Blackadder - Etchings and Screenprints 23rd August - 5th October 2014. www.glasgowprintstudio.co.uk

WATERCOLOUR SECRETS 3 October - 1 November To celebrate the launch of the latest RWS publication, Watercolour Secrets, the RWS Autumn Exhibition demonstrates Members’ virtuosity in the medium.

The book offers a rare insight into individual artists’ working methods and materials.

Open daily | 11am - 6pm Bankside Gallery | 48 Hopton Street | SE1 9JH | London | 020 7928 7521 info@banksidegallery.com | www.royalwatercoloursociety.co.uk

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Listings

in Snowdonia, borrowed from around the UK to mark the centenary of the artist’s death, 13 Sep-8 Nov Arenig Revisited Contemporary views of the area around Arenig mountain by many of Wales’ best loved artists, 20 Sep-15 Nov A Good Day for Cyclists, 2013,

by Jeremy Deller at Turner Contemporary

NORTH HOUSE GALLERY

The Walls, Manningtree, Essex, 01206 392717 www.northhousegallery.co.uk

North House Gallery 15th Anniversary Show The director selects work by

artists shown in the last few years in this celebratory show, until 13 Sep Esmond Bingham New work in two and three dimensions including intricate rectilinear wooden wall pieces, 20 Sep18 Oct RABLEY DRAWING CENTRE

Rabley Barn, Mildenhall, Marlborough, Wilts, 01672 511999 www.rableydrawingcentre.com Three Stages of My Life, 2013,

by Nana Shiomi at Rabley Drawing Centre

Ann Christopher RA: Marks on the Edge of Space Paper works with strong

three dimensional qualities, 14 Sep10 Oct Nana Shiomi RE: Eternal Gaze Contemporary Japanese woodcuts, 14 Sep-10 Oct ROYAL BIRMINGHAM SOCIETY OF ARTISTS

4 Brook Street, St Paul’s, Birmingham, 0121 236 4353 www.rbsa.org.uk Friends Reunited Celebrating artwork produced by the Friends of the RBSA; a community of artists and art-lovers, 10-20 Sep Robert Perry RBSA: New Landscapes and a Glance Backwards

New work produced on location, wherever Robert’s mobile ‘Field Studio Van’ happened to take him, 22 Sep4 Oct A Place for Art: The Story of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists Dawn in the Clear Morning Air...

Crete, 2011, by Philip Sutton RA, at Sladers Yard

This exhibition explores the history and development of the RBSA from the landmark 1814 exhibition to the present day, 8 Oct-15 Nov ROYAL PAVILION

Brighton 03000 290900 www.brighton-hove.pavilion.org.uk

Pavilion Contemporary: Maisie Broadhead Look out this autumn for

Maisie Broadhead’s stunning installation in the Royal Pavilion’s Music Room, 25 Oct-1 March 2015 Ellen Terry, c.1863-64, by George F. Watts at Watts Gallery

SCULPT GALLERY

Braxted Park Road, Nr Great Braxted, Colchester, Essex, 07980 768616 www.sculptgallery.com Shaping the Future An exhibition of sculpture by three emerging Essex artists: Simon Bacon, Billie Bond and Lucy Lutyens, 11-25 Oct Frosted Earth

Works in glass by Peter Newsome ARBS, Adam Aaronson, David Flower, Caroline Moiret and Elena Fleury-Rojo, 1-30 Nov SLADERS YARD

West Bay Road, West Bay, Bridport, Dorset, 01308 459511 www.sladersyard.co.uk When the Roads Meet Dan Llywelyn Hall’s landscape paintings, Svend Bayer’s ceramics and Petter Southall’s furniture, until 14 Sep Surface Tension Group show of leading gallery artists; ceramics by Robin Welch and furniture by Petter Southall, 20 Sep2 Nov Through the Life of Philip Sutton RA , 19 Oct-30 Nov THE STANLEY SPENCER GALLERY

High Street, Cookham, Berkshire, 01628 471885 www.stanleyspencer.org.uk

Paradise Regained: Stanley Spencer in the Aftermath of the First World War To coincide with the centenary of

the First World War, this show examines the effect this momentous event had on Spencer’s art, until 2 Nov THE SUNBURY EMBROIDERY GALLERY

The Walled Garden, Sunbury-on-Thames, 01932 788101 www.sunburyembroidery.org.uk Mother and Child Solo exhibition of oil paintings by Renzo Galeotti, 2-28 Sep Wildlife of Sunbury Park– Photographic Exhibition Sunbury Park has extensive areas of grassland, scrub and woodland and is bounded by ancient walls.

Each of these has its own distinctive fauna and flora, 29 Sep-29 Oct TATE ST IVES

Porthmeor Beach, St Ives, Cornwall, 01736 796226 www.tate.org.uk/stives

International Exchanges: Modern Art and St Ives 1915–1965, until 28 Sep Closed for rehang, 29 Sep-13 Oct The Modern Lens: International Photography and the Tate Collection

This exhibition showcases key artists associated with the development of international modernism in photography, featuring pioneering photographers from across Europe, the Americas and Japan, 14 Oct-10 May 2015 TURNER CONTEMPORARY

Rendezvous, Margate, Kent, 01843 233000 www.turnercontemporary.org Jeremy Deller: English Magic See the final showcase of English Magic, commissioned for the British Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, where Deller explores mysterious acts and ‘magical’ transformations in British society, 11 Oct11 Jan 2015 Krijn de Koning: Dwelling

See the Dutch artist’s new work, a colourful architectural labyrinth, made specially for Turner Contemporary’s Summer of Colour Festival and Folkestone Triennial 2014, until 2 Nov Edmund de Waal: Atmosphere

Presenting vessels suspended in Turner Contemporary’s Sunley Gallery to capture the changing light, until 8 Feb 2015 UNIVERSITY GALLERY & BARING WING

Northumbria University, Sandyford Road, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, 0191 227 4424 www.northumbria.ac.uk/universitygallery Keith Vaughan: Figure and Ground: Drawings, Prints and photographs

50 works on paper bring together two themes: the human figure and landscape, until 12 Sep Brita Granström: The Night Swimmer New paintings, 19 Sep31 Oct The Beatles: Drawings and Watercolours by Mick Manning and Brita Granström Preparatory drawings

and watercolours for their most recent book The Beatles, 19 Sep-31 Oct WATTS GALLERY

Down Lane, Compton, Guildford, Surrey, 01483 810235 www.wattsgallery.org.uk

Ellen Terry: The Painter’s Actress

This is the first exhibition to explore how the influence of Britain’s most famous Victorian actress reached beyond the stage to inspire generations of visual artists, until 9 Nov YORKSHIRE SCULPTURE PARK

West Bretton, Wakefield, West Yorkshire, 01924 832631 www.ysp.co.uk Ursula von Rydingsvard YSP present the first large-scale survey of work in Europe by this highly acclaimed American artist, until 4 Jan 2015 Fiona Banner: Wp Wp Wp An exhibition by UK artist Fiona Banner, featuring an ambitious new project, Chinook. The installation, accompanied by related work, is described by the artist as the culmination of a body of work started nearly two decades ago, 20 Sep-4 Jan 2015 ZILLAH BELL GALLERY

Kirgate, Thirsk, North Yorkshire, 01845 522 479 www.zillahbellgallery.co.uk

The Royal Academy of Arts in Yorkshire Norman Ackroyd RA selects

original prints from this year’s RA Summer Exhibition, 6 Sep-1 Nov In the Footsteps of Turner Invited artists revisit and reinterpret Hackfall Woods, 25 Oct-15 Nov Upstairs at Zillah Bell: “Intaglio and Relief” An extensive exhibition of the best of British contemporary printmaking and Norman Ackroyd etchings from 1966 to 1968, 1 Oct-15 Nov

© BRITISH PAVILION 2013. © NANA SHIOMI/COURTESY RABLEY DRAWING CENTRE. © PHILIP SUTTON RA/COURTESY SLADERS YARD. © THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

Arenig Paintings of Arenig Mountain,

92 RA MAGAZINE | AUTUMN 2014

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MA in the History of Art: the Renaissance to Modernism Untitled-1 1

22/04/2014 12:41

October 2014 – September 2015 A one-year programme of ten evening seminars and an individual researchproject, offering an 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.

Examination is by a research dissertation, on an approved art history topic chosen by the student, of not less than 20,000 words.

Lecturers for 2014/15 include:

Course enquiries and applications: Claire Prendergast, Humanities Research Institute, University of Buckingham Tel. 01280 820204 or via email to the Course Director, Michael Prodger: michael.prodger@buckingham.ac.uk

• • • •

Martin Kemp Tim Knox Xavier Bray Martin Gayford

Each lecture or seminar is followed by a dinner during which participants can engage in a general discussion with the guest speaker.

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.

THE UNIVERSITY OF

BUCKINGHAM

LONDON PROGRAMMES

The University of Buckingham is ranked in the élite top sixteen of the 120 British Universities: The Guardian Universities League Table 2012-13

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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 Irene Michaelides on 020 7300 5675 or email irene.michaelides@royalacademy.org.uk RESTAURANTS SHOPS

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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.

2

ATELIER CAFE

A studio café where food and drink of outstanding provenance is served in the light, airy surrounds of the Royal Academy’s Burlington Gardens building.

Bellini on the terrace, breakfast, morning coffee, lunch, a glass of wine, or afternoon tea – in tandem with an inspiring gallery visit, to meet friends, or whenever you need to escape the frenetic pace of the West End.

Michelin awarded Chef Richard Corrigan.

11-15 Swallow Street W1, 020 7734 4756 www.bentleys.org

35 Panton Street SW1, 020 7930 0088 www.busaba.com 5

BUTLERS RESTAURANT

Butlers home of “the best Dover Sole in London”. A warm and intimate restaurant offering elegant dining, delicious food and

6 Burlington Gardens W1, www.ateliercafe.com

4-5 Duke of York Street SW1, 020 7839 3090 www.alduca-restaurant.co.uk

juices and a simple yet selective wine list.

Renowned for its core cult following, stylish interiors and bustling atmosphere, 15 years on Busaba remains one of London’s hottest tables.

4

BUSABA EATHAI

Conceived by Alan Yau, Busaba Eathai is a modern Thai eatery. Delivering a much coveted, flavoursome selection of freshly prepared salads, stir fries, noodles and Thai curries, the menu also offers an extensive list of Asian-inspired

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 98 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

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

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Restaurant & Shopping Guide 6

CUT AT 45 PARK LANE

Created by internationally-acclaimed chef founder Wolfgang Puck, CUT at 45 Park Lane is a modern American steak restaurant, and his debut restaurant in Europe. Enjoy delectable prime beef, succulent pan-roasted lobster, sautéed fresh fish and seasonal salads.

Outstanding cuisine is accompanied by an exceptional wine list of over 600 wines, featuring one of the largest selections of American wines in the UK. Breakfasts are another highlight and on Sunday’s relax with brunch as you listen to live jazz.

45 Park Lane, Mayfair, W1, 020 7493 4554 www.dorchestercollection.com

know, a lunchtime essential. Our menus offer refined excellence without being pretentious. The modern Eurpean menu changes on a weekly basis. 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 9

FRANCO’S

Some believe Franco’s was the first Italian restaurant in London, having served residents in St James’s since 1942. Open all day, the personality of Franco’s evolves and provides a menu for all occasions. 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.

61 Jermyn Street SW1, 020 7499 2211 www.francoslondon.com

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CRITERION RESTAURANT

Our breathtaking ceiling, professionalism, modern European menu and most central location make the Criterion restaurant the perfect address to enjoy a delicious late lunch, an amazing champagne afternoon tea, a romantic dinner, or just a relaxed drink after work. Head Chef Matthew Foxon only uses the finest and freshest ingredients and loves creating alchemy in the kitchen, where everything is homemade – from smoked fish to butter, not forgetting ice cream.

224 Piccadilly W1, 020 7930 0488 www.criterionrestaurant.com

36 Duke Street St. James’s, SW1, 020 7930 4566 www.greens.org.uk 12 GUSTOSO RISTORANTE & ENOTECA

Ristorante Gustoso is moments from Westminster Cathedral and Victoria Station. 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. Open Mon-Thu: 12–3pm, 6.30–10.30pm Friday/Sat: 12–3pm, 6.30–11pm Sun: 12.30–9.30pm 35 Willow Place SW1, 020 7834 5778 www.ristorantegustoso.co.uk

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GETTI

11 GREEN’S RESTAURANT & OYSTER BAR

“In a fast changing world…. Green’s is a bastion of calm” Runner up, Test of

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MATSURI ST JAMES

Matsuri St James’s was opened in 1993 and is the icon of authentic Japanese food in London. 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, 020 7839 1101 www.matsuri-restaurant.com

15

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

A modern Italian restaurant at the fastpaced 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.

16/17 Jermyn Street SW1, 020 7734 7334 www.getti.co.uk

8 THE FOX CLUB Our Dining Room is one of London’s best-kept secrets and for those in the

Time Award (for the most consistently excellent restaurant), Tatler 2013.

Inspired by Seasonality we are renowned for classic British fish, meat and game dishes. An essential part of your visit to London and a stone throw away from the RA. Please quote RA when making a reservation or on arrival and receive a complimentary Summer Cocktail.

13

MAHARANI SOHO

Open all day and situated in the heart of Soho this family run restaurant established 42 years ago offers the best cuisine that the north and south of India has to offer, with our own little twist.

All our dishes are cooked fresh to order, using free-range meat and locally sourced vegetables. We offer a special set lunch menu at £6.95 which runs to 5pm, or you can choose from our mouth watering à la carte menu which offers excellence without pretension, leading us to be counted as one of the best Indian restaurants in London.

To avoid disappointment it is best to make a reservation. Last order 11.30pm.

77 Berwick Street W1, 020 7437 8568 www.maharanisoho.com

16

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 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

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Restaurant & Shopping Guide 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 17

VILLANDRY ST JAMES’S

Welcome to Villandry St James’s, between Piccadilly Circus & Pall Mall. We have created a beautiful all day French Mediterranean Café and Restaurant: a great spot to enjoy breakfast, lunch, a delicious afternoon tea, a pre-theatre or a romantic dinner. At weekends there is a brunch menu. We also have private dining rooms (30 covers and 12 covers). We’re open 7am -11pm (Mon-Fri), 9am – 11pm (Sat) and 9am – 6pm (Sun).

12 Waterloo Place SW1, 020 7930 3305 www.villandry.com

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.

18

20

19

THE WOLSELEY

A café-restaurant in the grand European tradition and located just a few minutes’

6

3

LOCK & CO.

Choose from our wide range of summer headwear: fine quality hand woven panama hats, foldable travel and safari hats, linen and cotton caps. For those unable to visit we provide a mail order service orders can be made on line or ask for our catalogue.

7

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 HILDITCH & KEY

100 Years of Excellence. Hilditch & Key has long been recognised as London’s leading Jermyn Street shirt maker with a

RICHARD OGDEN

In Medieval times signet rings were used to seal and authenticate letters and documents, using crests taken from family heraldic shields.

The impression these rings made when pressed into wax seals would represent the authority of the wearer, a tradition which continued well into the 20th century. Nowadays signet rings are often presented to celebrate a 21st birthday or a graduation. We keep a copy of Fairbairn’s Book of Crests at our premises and can help you find your own family crest.

28 Burlington Arcade W1, 020 7493 9136 www.richardogden.com

Shopping

2

MATTHEW FOSTER

25 Burlington Arcade W1, 020 7629 4977 www.matthew-foster.com

6 St James’s Street SW1, 020 7930 8874 www.lockhatters.co.uk

1

5

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. 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.

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 12–21:30 (Last order) Mon to Sat.

WILTONS

55 Jermyn Street SW1, 020 7629 9955 www.wiltons.co.uk

37 & 73 Jermyn Street SW1 020 7734 4707 & 020 7930 5336 www.hilditchandkey.co.uk

160 Piccadilly W1, 020 7499 6996 www.thewolseley.com

3 Piccadilly Place W1, 020 7287 6622 www.yoshino.net

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-Friday and dinner Saturday. To secure your reservation please quote RA Magazine.

reputation, among the discerning, for the finest gentlemens’ shirts, knitwear and clothing as well as an increasingly popular ladies shirt and knitwear collection.

4 LONDON GLASSBLOWING STUDIO AND GALLERY

Peter Layton’s London Glassblowing Studio and Gallery is one of Europe’s leading studios focussing on creating and exhibiting individual pieces of

RA SHOP

Explore an extensive range of exquisite homewares, accessories and artist inspired gifts at the RA Shop. From limited edition items designed by some of the leading names in Contemporary Art, to one-off pieces produced exclusively for the Royal Academy; the RA Shop is the perfect place to find unique and inspired gifts.

RA Shops (Burlington House and Burlington Gardens) are open 10am – 5.45pm daily and until 9.45pm on Friday.

Pictured is a limited edition cushion ‘Inside Story Yellow’ featuring original work by Sandra Blow RA.

Discover more at royalacademy. org.uk/shop. Mail Order 0800 6346341 (Freephone, Mon-Fri 9.30am – 5.00pm)

contemporary decorative and sculptural glass art. The studio, which is renowned for its painterly use of vibrant colour, texture and form, welcomes visitors.

Arabesque is a stunning new version of Paradiso, one of Peter Layton’s signature series. Its vibrant colours and dynamic gestural markmaking achieve brilliant new levels of exploration and invention.

62-66 Bermondsey Street SE1, 020 7403 2800 www.londonglassblowing.co.uk

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Classified

Art Services Artefact Picture Framers

Bespoke Framing, Conservation and Museum Standards Art & Frame Restoration, Mirrors, Canvas Stretching, Installation 36 Windmill Street, London W1T 2JT, t: 020 7580 4878 www.artefactlondon.co.uk

Bespoke Artists Canvases Canvases & Stretcher Bars Made to Measure Professional Quality Hardwood Stretchers 10oz, 12oz, Superfine and Claessens Linen Fabrics Online Ordering & National Delivery www.harrismoorecanvases.co.uk

Commission Art Portraits

House portraits and animals by experienced artist, reasonable fees.

John Wilkinson. R.A.S., R.B.A. t: 01425 656048

Courses 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. t: 020 8788 6910

Weekend Art Courses

with Nicola Slattery learn to paint with acrylic, discover printmaking, create art from imagination. 01986 788853 www.nicolaslattery.com

Draw Cartoons and Caricatures!

CD-ROM and downloadable course by top professional. www.cartoonworld.org/courses

Painting & Drawing Classes

Sawbridgeworth, Barnet, Epping.

10am-noon. Experienced teacher of adults, competitive rates. 8th Sept start.

Call Keith on 07806 710861

Foundries FINE ART FOUNDRY LTD

Fine Art Bronze Casting Welding – Patina Specialists Ceramic Shell Contact: AB or Jerry 1 Fawe Street, London E14 6PD t: 020 7515 8052 f: 020 7987 7339

Galleries for Hire Bankside Gallery

48 Hopton Street, London SE1 9JH Airy & well-lit. Beside Tate Modern.

200m sq space. Competitive rates.

Life Painting and Drawing

with Rachel Clark. Highly recommended. Small classes.Week/ Weekend/Saturday/Private Tuition. t: 07528 674389 www.rachelclark.com

Saturday Life Classes

All Media, all levels with professional tutoring. Long and short poses Experienced portfolio advice for students. Elianor Jonzen t: 020 7221 4525

Vineyard cottages 2-4 pers. Pool. Also off season long lets at discounted prices. t: 00334 90 76 65 16 or www.cottagesfaverot.com Chic, elegantly restored 18th century riad in Medina. 4 dbl. bedrooms, seductive baths, cook & housekeeper. t: 07770 431 194. www.riadhayati.com

Venice Centre

Self-catering apartments in charming 15th C palazzetto, sleep 2/5. www.valleycastle.com

France: Nice

t: 020 7580 4878 www.theframersgallery.co.uk

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

Artist’s Beautiful French Farmhouse.

all important artists represented.

The Contemporary Fine Art Gallery (Eton) 31 High St, Eton, nr. Windsor, Berks. t: 01753 854315 7 days a week 10.30-5.30 p.m.

Artist’s Websites

Marrakech

Scottish Borders

Unique Space, Great Location, No Commission, 36 Windmill Street, London W1T 2JT

STONE SCULPTURE from

ZIMBABWE

Provence Luberon

Asia House

The Framers Gallery

Sculpture

Holidays

Stunning view over roofs of old town.

Quiet sunny 2 room balcony flat. Sleeps 2/3. 30 mins bus to airport. £485 p.w. t: 020 7720 7519 or 01736 762013.

t: 020 7307 5454 e: philip.woodfordsmith@asiahouse.co.uk

Step into the Renaissance from our finely restored farmhouse. All ensuite. Large/small group rates.

020 7059 0278 www.lafoce.co.uk

Splendidly maintained gallery in prime location – helpful, experienced management and full facility support 8 Duke Street, St. James’s, London SW1Y 6BN t: 020 7930 0375 and 07973 292958 e: gallery@8dukestreet. co.uk www.8dukestreet.co.uk

t: 020 7928 7521 e: info@banksidegallery.com www.banksidegallery.com 100 sq m gallery in the heart of central London. Full technical support available. For further information contact Philip Woodford-Smith

Autumn in Tuscany

Gallery 8

Renovated but unspoiled.

4/6 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, pool.

Set in over 3 acres of gardens, orchard, barns & fields. £300,000. 16 photos & details. e: frenchhouse@gugenheim.net www.gugenheim.net/property

Joan Doerr Paintings inspired by the elemental impact on the environment www.joandoerr.com Judy Larkin Contemporary organic, abstract and figurative sculpture in alabasters and limestones for interior and garden spaces.www.judylarkinsculpture.com Owl Art Studio Woodcarvings and printworks. A mythology of one’s own www.owlartstudio.net Ulla Plougmand Paintings. Unique female forms, landscapes, flowers and, latest, ‘My Colourful Cosmos’ www.ulla-art.com Hilary Roodyn Capturing the personality. Portrait sculptor London www.hilary-roodyn.squarespace.com Sabrina Rowan Hamilton www.sabrinarowanhamilton.co.uk www.srhprints.com Nicola Slattery Thoughtful, peaceful art from the imagination www.nicolaslattery.com 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 To advertise here please call 020 7300 5675

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Night Orders

By JEANETTE WINTERSON. Inspired by Anselm Kiefer’s painting ‘The Orders of the Night’ (1996, above), this short story launches a new series of art-influenced stories written especially for RA Magazine I didn’t know how much there is to lose until I lost it.

Losing everything is death without dying.

We are our objects.

When we were forced to flee we had no time to pack. The mortar fire had been coming nearer, we were told to evacuate. The world we knew was occupied, military, bombed, exiled. We were glad to escape with our lives and our loved ones. But our loved ones looked different; the child who can’t be tucked up in bed because there is no bed. The old person who can’t sit by the fire because the chair was broken up for firewood and now the fire has gone out.

My wife cooking – but she has no kitchen.

Myself fixing up the house – but there is no house.

Our roles needed props. We were actors with an improvised script running a reality TV show.

We believed in the characters we were playing.

We had small dramas, difficult decisions, affairs, sickness, betrayals, sudden happinesses, good news, and mostly, nothing, the day to day of work and home and security and boredom and longing.

We had what you have. Life.

And then the fighting started. Every day the rebels came nearer like a dragon in a story, burning the crops, and then the houses. Taking the women, killing the men. We stayed as long as we could, as people do when the ship is sinking.

You know you should get into the lifeboat, you know you should leave, but you stay where you are because the invisible part of you is imprinted in every object you own. Your dreams and your memories surround you. It’s not about money; it’s about what you invested without realising it was an investment. When the bombs are falling nobody remembers what they paid for something – they remember what it means to them, and the simplest things are the hardest to lose.

When we left at last, leaving it too late to leave, our smouldering footprints burning the past, all I took with me was a rug.

It was not an expensive, precious Persian carpet, but it was a flying carpet, if the mind has wings, and I think it does.

Whatever derelict room or broken hotel I stayed in, I unrolled the rug. It was a map of myself, invisible to others. I was knotted there, and despair could not dislodge me.

Sometimes you have to live in precarious places, temporary places, unsuitable places.

Sometimes the safe place won’t help you.

I learned something important while I was wandering. Gradually I learned that whatever is outside of you can be taken away. You think you own it, or you think it will always be there – the market, the bank, the friend’s house, that road fringed with trees where you like to walk,

the lamp in the evening, the contentment of a book, a good meal, home.

So easily gone. When your outside world is taken away there is only one world left. What is inside you cannot be taken away so easily. They can kill you, of course, they can always kill you, but then that is a simple matter and when it is done it is done.

But if they don’t kill you, but they destroy everything you know? If you see your identity atomised – then what?

What remains? What is on the inside? What is yours?

Can’t kill the spirit? I remembered Simone Weil. Yes they can, she said, the spirit can be killed, and that is why you must protect it before it is threatened – because by the time it is threatened it is too late.

Objects gone, home gone, town gone, country gone. iPhone gone, no photographs, no messages.

Museum looted. Galleries shuttered. A camp.

Queue for food.

Big birds flying overhead. The sun. The cracked earth. Myself as an object in uncertain relation to space.

I remember – in a better time – going into an art gallery to look at a painting. I would never own it. Probably I would never see it again – it was on loan. I could buy the catalogue or a postcard but that wasn’t the experience. What was the experience? Nothing I could sell or trade.

Nothing that improved my CV or my economic status. Nothing that would help me lose weight or find a lover. A man looking at a painting of a man broken on the broken earth.

This is strange. A man I don’t know is trying to communicate something he feels – to himself, I suppose, and also to me, whoever I am. A rich man can buy the painting. A poor man can look at it. What is more valuable? The most intangible of moments and yet the most solid. I hold that day in my mind, invisible, impossible, but it belongs to me.

I sat on my rug on the dirt floor of a half-blown house cataloguing what was indisputably mine.

The day we met – and I am smiling because I will never forget it. The day you said yes to me.

Music, I can hear it clearly. Conversations. The taste of wine. Certain books.

My invisible archive is growing because I add to it daily. I must, because I am the broken man on the broken ground.

At the edges of language there is so little anyone can say. I’m looking at the painting – probably I have repainted it my mind but the artist will understand. My own silence is repeated by the silence of the painting. What cannot be said is there.

When this time is over, if I am not over before the time is, I’ll stage an exhibition of invisible objects – the opposite of the Emperor’s New Clothes – which I think now is the daily world as we know it – a fantasy, an advertising campaign, an expensive hoax.

What is real is what the object allows to happen. The painting is an ally of my Soul.

S E AT T L E A R T M US EU M , GI F T O F M R . A N D M RS . R I CH A R D C . H ED R EEN / P H OTO S E AT T L E A R T M US EU M /© A NS EL M K I EF ER

Short Story

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Art Tours Worldwide Art • Archaeology • Architecture 2014

Cox & Kings is the travel partner for the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) and our programme of small-group tours has been specially created with the Friends of the RA in mind.

The 2014 collection focuses on the art, architecture and archaeology of many of the world’s most culturally-rich destinations. 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 normally be closed to the general public.

2014/15 Highlights Ravenna: Mosaics & Marble With Sally Dormer 20 Nov 2014 - 3 nights from £1,045 Barcelona: Gaudi’s Masterworks With Colin Bailey 24 Nov 2014 - 4 nights from £1,195 Laos & Cambodia: Temples & Treasures With Denise Heywood 1 Feb 2015 - 11 nights from £3,495 India: Mughal Art & Architecture With Diana Driscoll 9 Feb 2015 - 10 nights from £3,195 Ethiopia: A Journey through Landscape & Time With Chris Bradley 13 Feb 2015 12 nights from £3,495

ATOL 2815 ABTA V2999

For reservations, please call 020 7873 5013 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 Statue: Menelaus, Loggia della Signoria, Florence, Italy

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