RA Magazine Spring 2015

ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS MAGAZINE NUMBER 126 SPRING 2015 RICHARD DIEBENKORN RUBENS AND HIS LEGACY LONDON ORIGINAL PRINT FAIR

ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS MAGAZINE NO. 126 / SPRING 2015 / £4.95

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BRYAN KNEALE RA FIVE DECADES

28 January - 14 March

25 March - 2 May

PANGOLIN LONDON, Kings Place, N1 9AG

T:020 7520 1480 www.pangolinlondon.com

IMAGES (Left to Right): Breon O’Casey, Flightless Bird, Bronze, 2008; Bryan Kneale, Polyphemus, Steel, 2000

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PANGOLIN

BREON O’CASEY TRANSITIONS

LONDON

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Sculptors’ Prints & Drawings 16th February - 27th March Our annual exhibition of works on paper featuring prints and drawings by Modern and contemporary sculptors Collage print from Ten Variations by William Tucker RA

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GALLERY PANGOLIN CHALFORD - GLOS - GL6 8NT 01453 889765 gallery@pangolin-editions.com www.gallery-pangolin.com

05/02/2015 12:01

— Martin Finnin The Wolf of Eyelash Mountain

13 March – 4 April

John Martin Gallery 38 Albemarle Street London, W1S 4 JG

RA Finnin Single page_JML.indd 5

80 Fulham Road London, SW3 6HR

catalogue available www.jmlondon.com

T +44 (0)20 7499 1314 info@jmlondon.com

21/01/2015 04:59

ARTS

Rhythms of Light 5 2014 Oil on Fine Linen 129 x 86cm Photo: Kirsten Bresciani

DI BRESCIANI OAM NEW COMPOSITIONS IN COLOUR London Exhibition at the Royal Over-Seas League 13 May - 10 July, 10am - 6pm daily

OFFICIAL OPENING Tuesday 12 May, 6 - 8pm Royal Over-Seas League, Over-Seas House, Park Place, St James’s Street, London, SW1A 1LR www.rosl.org.uk For more information please contact +44 207 408 0214 ext 219 roslarts@rosl.org.uk dibresciani.com

A 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 London and Edinburgh, and reciprocal arrangements with over 80 clubs around the world, we offer our members a home away from home.

For information about becoming a member contact membership@rosl.org.uk or call 020 7408 0214 quoting RA Magazine for a special joining discount.

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Pont Neuf from Pont au Change, Paris 2014

Stormy morning, Quai St Michel, Paris 2014

Signed; titled on the reverse Oil on canvas: 12 × 24 in / 30.5 × 61 cm Price: £,

Signed; titled on the reverse Oil on canvas: 12 × 24 in / 30.5 × 61 cm Price: £,

Richard Green is the sole worldwide agent for Ken Howard RA. To see a selection of available London, Paris and New York views, and more recent paintings, please visit our website or come into the gallery.

On view for sale at

33 NEW BOND STREET, LONDON W1S 2RS

Email: paintings@richardgreen.com

TELEPHONE: +44 (0)20 7499 4738

www.richardgreen.com

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147 NEW BOND STREET, LONDON W1S 2TS TELEPHONE: +44 (0)20 7493 3939

23/01/2015 16:28

The BP exhibition

Indigenous Australia enduring civilisation 23 April – 2 August 2015

Supported by BP

Organised with the National Museum of Australia Logistics partner

Book now

Kunmanara Hogan, Tjaruwa Woods, Yarangka Thomas, Estelle Hogan, Ngalpingka Simms and Myrtle Pennington, Kungkarangkalpa (detail).

Acrylic on canvas, 2013. © the artists, courtesy Spinifex Arts Project.

britishmuseum.org Members and under 16s free

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still small voice British biblical art in a secular age (1850-2014) 17th January – 3rd May 2015 The Wilson Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum Clarence Street Cheltenham GL50 3JT Telephone 01242 237431 Open 9.30 – 5.15pm daily Closed Easter Sunday Admission free www.thewilson.org.uk

In partnership with:

Sponsored by:

Concept and design ArthurSteenHorneAdamson Image: Crucifixion, Pink, 2001 (oil on canvas), Aitchison, Craigie (1926-2009) Ahmanson Collection / Bridgeman Images

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AYRES RA AD_RA AD 09/01/2015 16:06 Page 1

Gillian Ayres 14 April – 30 May 2015

The Alan Cristea Gallery at 31&34 Cork St. London W1S 3NU Telephone +44(0)20 7439 1866 Email: info@alancristea.com Website: www.alancristea.com

Elizabeth Blackadder RA Decades 19 February – 19 March 2015 Monday to Friday 10-5.30 Saturday 11-2.00

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

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Still Life with Gladioli, 1997, oil on canvas, 44 x 44 inches

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Jeremy Barlow “Montefalco Cafe” Oil on Board 25.5 x 29 ins 650 x 740 mm

Jeremy Barlow

Jeremy Barlow “Cafe, Troyes” Oil on Board 27.5 x 31.5 700 x 800 mm

17 March - 15 April 2015

ROI

Open Monday to Saturday 10 am to 7.30 pm

LLEWELLYN ALEXANDER 124 - 126 The Cut, Waterloo, London SE1 8LN (Opposite The Old Vic Theatre) For more pictures and prices please see

t: 020 7620 1322/1324

www.LlewellynAlexander.com

LEON UNDERWOOD: FIGURE AND RHYTHM 7 MARCH – 14 JUNE 2015

9 North Pallant Chichester West Sussex PO19 1TJ

www.pallant.org.uk info@pallant.org.uk Tel 01243 774557

Gallery Supporters

Headline Sponsor of the Gallery 2015

Leon Underwood, Self Portrait in a Landscape, 1921, Etching on paper

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Bernard Dunstan, RA, NEAC Bernard Dunstan, RA, NEAC Susan Ryder, RP, NEAC

Please visit us at 20/21 International Art Fair 14th-17th May 2015 Stand 35 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 10-5pm Manya_Spr15.indd 1

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1 APRIL - 31 AUGUST2015 2015 1 APRIL - 31 AUGUST

Supported by

The Elizabeth Cayzer Charitable Trust

Eric Ravilious, The Westbury Horse, 1939. Watercolour and pencil on paper. Private Collection courtesy of Towner, Eastbourne

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ANTHONY SCOTT 16 April - 16 May 2015

Beaux Arts 48 Maddox Street, London W1S 1AY, 020 7493 1155 info@beauxartslondon.co.uk www.beauxartslondon.co.uk

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ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS MAGAZINE NO. 126 / SPRING 2015

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House of curiosities ‘The drawings for the mosaic flames Tom Phillips is designing for Westminster Cathedral are visible on his desk amid books, post, iPad, coffee cups, crumbs. Does he ever dream of a clean white space?’

FIONA MADDOCKS

Features 50

Painting on the threshold Ian McKeever RA explores Richard Diebenkorn’s pursuit of abstraction, as a survey of the American painter’s work opens at the RA

56

A conversation with Rubens Jenny Saville RA tells Tim Marlow about the room she has curated for ‘Rubens and his Legacy’ of contemporary responses to the Baroque master

60

All for art Caroline Bugler discovers how the Academy is breaking the barriers that prevent people from coming to art galleries

64

All the fun of the Fair As the London Original Print Fair celebrates its 30th anniversary, Anne Desmet RA is given a dream cheque to spend on her favourite prints

P H OTO © DAV I D V I N T I N ER . © B I R M I N GH A M M US EU MS T RUS T. ES TAT E O F L I L L TS CH U D I /CO U R T ESY O F R ED F ER N G A L L ERY

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A conversation with Rubens ‘There are many aspects of Rubens’s technique that, frankly, any artist would want to steal. His oil studies are amazing.’

JENNY SAVILLE RA

Regulars 13 17 18 20 26

39

40

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All the fun of the Fair ‘Capturing a carefree moment between two world wars, Lill Tschudi’s “Village Fair I” now seems achingly poignant.’

ANNE DESMET RA

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66

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Exhibition Diary Editorial Contributors Competition Preview UK Sonia Delaunay at Tate; the Converse x Dazed Emerging Artists Award; Joshua Reynolds and a society beauty; the male body in art; Goya at the Courtauld; six degrees of separation Preview International The Picasso Museum in Paris doubles its space; ones to watch at the Venice Biennale Preview Books A history of art forgery; books about art as play Academy Artists Tom Phillips RA at home in his studio; Chantal Joffe RA’s art epiphanies; Cornelia Parker RA; Anthony Green RA; Academicians’ round-up Debate Should art be more political?; the arts and the General Election; the deaccession debate; Rubens the diplomat; courses and classes at the RA; events and lectures; Friends’ excursions Listings Readers’ Offers Academy News Exhibitions and other projects in Asia; in memoriam: Geoffrey Clarke RA and Ivor Abrahams RA; news in brief Short Story ‘Coffee, Cold’ by Stella Duffy

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Burlington House · Piccadilly London W 1 J 0 BD

Thursday 23 April 10am to 9pm Friday 24 April 10am to 10pm Saturday 25 April 10am to 6pm Sunday 26 April 10am to 6pm Enquiries: 020 7439 2000 info@londonprintfair.com

www.londonprintfair.com @Londonprintfair

The London Original Print Fair

Albrecht Dürer, The Four Horsemen (detail) c.1497–98, woodcut. Courtesy C.G. Boerner

Royal Academy of Arts

What’s on at the Royal Academy this spring

Exhibition Diary Rubens and His Legacy: Van Dyck to Cézanne

London Original Print Fair Main Galleries 23 to 26 April

KO N I N K L I J K M US EU M VO O R S CH O N E KU NS T EN , A N T W ER P EN / P H OTO: R OYA L M US EU M F O R F I N E A R TS A N T W ER P © LU K AS-A R T I N F L A N D ERS V Z W, P H OTO H U GO M A ER T ENS A N D D O M I N I Q U E P R OVOS T/ E X H I B I T I O N O R G A N IS ED BY T H E R OYA L M US EU M O F F I N E A R TS , A N T W ER P, R OYA L ACA D EM Y O F A R TS , LO N D O N , A N D B OZ A R (CEN T R E F O R F I N E A R TS), B RUS S ELS . F I N E A R TS M US EU MS O F S A N F R A N CIS CO. GI F T O F P H Y L L IS G . D I EB EN KO R N /© 2015 T H E R I CH A R D D I EB EN KO R N FO U N DAT I O N . © CL A I R E U N DY

Main Galleries Until 10 April

London’s longest running print fair provides a chance to browse and buy original prints, from 19thcentury masters, such as Daumier, to contemporary works by artists such as Georg Baselitz Hon RA. To celebrate the Fair’s 30th anniversary, this year’s edition also presents a special exhibition of 30 print highlights from the Royal Collection, including works

by Dürer, Raphael and Canaletto.

A rare chance to see the vast range of Rubens’s achievements, not only in his masterpieces but also through the lens of his artistic heirs. The show traces his enduring influence on great artists, from Van Dyck to Constable and Cézanne, and includes a room dedicated to contemporary artists’ responses to Rubens curated by Jenny Saville RA. Sponsored by BNY Mellon, Partner of the Royal Academy of Arts Venus Frigida, 1614, by Peter Paul Rubens

Friends Extended Hours Wed 8 April, 8.30am-10am Open from 9am on Fridays Open until 10pm on Saturdays

Burlington Gardens Until 11 March

Richard Diebenkorn

Second-year RA Schools students show the results of their studies, mid-way through their three-year postgraduate course. The exhibition includes a variety of media, from painting, sculpture, photography and video to site-specific installation.

RA Schools sponsored by Newton Investment Management

The Sackler Wing 14 March to 7 June

Revered as one of the great post-war American painters, Richard Diebenkorn Hon RA embraced both abstraction and figuration. His seductive colour palettes and intricately balanced compositions drew from the light and landscapes of the places he worked, in particular California, as well as from European painters such as Matisse and Mondrian.

This is the first major UK survey of Diebenkorn’s work in over 20 years.

2009-2016 Season supported by JTI. Supported by The Terra Foundation for American Art Friends Preview Days Wed 11 Mar, 10am-8.30pm Thur 12 Mar, 10am-6pm Fri 13 Mar, 10am-6pm Friends Extended Hours Wed 8 April, 8.30am-10am Wed 21 May, 6pm-8.30pm Open until 10pm on Saturdays until 10 April

Premiums: Interim Projects

Seawall, 1957, by Richard Diebenkorn Hon RA

Converse x Dazed Emerging Artists Award Burlington Gardens 18 April to 17 May

This prestigious annual award celebrates artists at the start of their career, after art school but before gallery representation. Five finalists working across different media have been given £1,000 to produce a new, site-specific work at the RA. Friends Preview Day Fri 17 April, 10am-6pm Still from Claire Undy’s video Notwithstanding, 2014, on show in Premiums 2015

Continued on page 14

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Exhibition Diary

Various locations at the RA 17 to 23 May

Summer at the RA begins with the inaugural Friends Week, a range of exclusive events that includes talks

by Academicians and staff, specialist workshops and behind-the-scenes tours of the Academy, including the RA Schools (left), which is usually closed to the public.

As preparations are under way for this year’s Summer Exhibition, RA Archivist Mark Pomeroy reveals the key part that the show has played in the Academy’s history.

As a member of this year’s Hanging Committee, Jock McFadyen RA gives a bird’s eye view of

Works on Paper

by Sculptors The Keeper’s House From 29 April

The second in the RA’s series of selling shows features works on paper and limited-edition prints by some of the UK’s leading sculptors, including RAs David Nash, John Carter and Ann Christopher.

Members in Focus: Timothy Hyman RA A Year with Maggie’s The Keeper’s House From 29 April

An Abiding Standard Friends benefits The Prints of Stanley Friends of the RA enjoy Anderson RA free entry to Royal Academy Tennant Gallery and Richard Sharp Council Room Until 24 May

A key figure in the 1920s revival of line engraving, Stanley Anderson is known for his prints memorialising vanishing rural crafts. He also depicted market scenes, London’s down-and-outs, and construction sites to comment on the spiritual emptiness and elitism he saw as the hallmarks of modernity. The show coincides with a catalogue raisonné published by the RA. See Readers’ Offers (page 88).

Visitor information Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BD

A selling show of Timothy Hyman RA’s drawings from his 2011-12 art residency at Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres coincides with his new book, The Maggie’s Year (RA Publications).

See Readers’ Offers (page 88).

For general enquiries, luggage restrictions and full visitor information, call 020 7300 8000 or visit www.royalacademy.org.uk

Four Visions for the Future of Housing

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

Architecture Space Until 17 May

This show explores new approaches to the current challenges facing housing in the UK, alongside a series of special events.

exhibitions, with a family guest, and all-day access to the Keeper’s House. Friends can 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 RA exhibitions, events and news. For more on Friends membership, call 020 7300 5664, or visit www. royalacademy.org.uk/friends

Stanley Anderson’s The Chair Maker, 1944

(last entry 5.30pm) except Fri 10am-10pm (last entry 9.30pm).

The RA opens till 10pm on Saturdays throughout ‘Rubens and His Legacy’, until 10 April.

The RA Shop closes at 6.15pm Sun-Thur, and 10.15pm Fri-Sat. The Tennant Gallery Tue to Fri

curating the world’s largest open-submission exhibition, while Dan Cowap, Head of Art Handling, tells us what it’s like to manoeuvre the works in situ.

Other events include art classes and a curator’s tour of the Richard Diebenkorn show.

There’s also a chance to hear Chief Executive Charles Saumarez Smith and Director of Artistic Programmes Tim Marlow talk about the future of the RA and its 250th birthday in 2018.

For a full programme see the leaflet enclosed with this magazine and visit www. royalacademy.org.uk/friendsweek – most events are free but must be booked in advance. Booking opens on 18 March.

10am-4pm; Sat and Sun 10am-6pm; closed Mon. The RA Grand Café Sat-Thur 10am-5.30pm; Fri 10am-9.30pm.

Opening hours for the Keeper’s House Mon-Sat 10am-11.30pm;

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).

To buy art from the RA visit

royalacademy.org.uk/artsales For more information, call 0800 634 6341, or email artsales@royalacademy.org.uk Access

Disabled visitors see pages 74-75.

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

Coming soon Summer Exhibition

8 June to 16 August

Friends Preview Days Fri 5 June, 10am-10pm Sat 6 June, 10am-8.30pm Sun 7 June, 10am-8.30pm Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust

4 July to 27 September

Friends Preview Days Wed 1 July, 10am-6pm Thur 2 July, 10am-6pm Fri 3 July, 10am-6pm

P H OTO M A R K B LOW ER /© R OYA L ACA D EM Y O F A R TS , LO N D O N . P R I VAT E CO L L ECT I O N /© S TA N L E Y A N D ERS O N ES TAT E

Friends Week

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Nathan Ford 2 March to 11 April

Beaux Arts Bath 12-13 York Street Bath BA1 1NG 01225 464850 www.beauxartsbath.co.uk info@beauxartsbath.co.uk

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EVE LY N W I L L I A M S

(1 9 2 9 – 2 0 1 2 )

The Last Paintings 25 February – 25 March 2015

‘Group of Friends’ oil on canvas 2012 91 x 91cm

www.artwales.com

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MARTIN TINNEY GALLERY 18 St.Andrew’s Crescent Cardiff CF10 3DD T: 029 20641411 mtg@artwales.com Open: Monday to Friday 10–6, Saturday 10–5

06/02/2015 12:40

Introducing this issue

Editorial

Richard Diebenkorn Hon RA in his Hillcrest Road studio, Berkeley, California, in 1959

P H OTO GR A P H © F R ED LYO N

Art on the agenda Our front cover captures Richard Diebenkorn in his Californian studio in 1959. Around three years earlier, the American painter had seemingly crossed the Rubicon in terms of his practice, moving from a mode of Abstract Expressionism to figurative landscape, still-life and interiors.

But in this photograph, abstract and figurative works hang side by side on the studio wall, evidence that Diebenkorn was at ease with this transition. And there was another transition to come, in 1967, when the artist embarked on his meditative series ‘Ocean Park’, marking a return to abstraction but in a very different form, one which is considered his crowning achievement.

‘Although appearing counter intuitive, in going from abstraction to figuration, then back to abstraction, the trajectory of Diebenkorn’s work does in fact pursue a clear inquiry into the nature of what, in painting, abstraction might be,’ writes the artist Ian McKeever RA, in an essay accompanying the Academy’s Diebenkorn survey this spring (page 50). An artist with a profound understanding of the possibilities of paint, McKeever describes how, in the ‘Ocean Park’

abstracts, ‘the accretion of transparent thin washes of paint gives the paintings a sense of inner space and light.’

A figurative painting by Diebenkorn, Woman with Newspaper (1960), is the inspiration for Stella Duffy’s short story (page 98). Here space and light take on narrative dimensions, as the protagonist ignores her newspaper and ponders instead her own complex story. The American novelist William Faulkner would have approved; he argued that fiction should focus on ‘the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself’.

Kelly Grovier draws on this maxim in our Debate section, refuting Bob and Roberta Smith RA’s claim that art should be more political (page 66). ‘The times we live in are so horrible,’ writes Smith, ‘the news so unbearable, that it seems strange that so little contemporary art deals with the shocking imagery of our age.’ It may be hard to disagree if we, unlike Duffy’s character, do read the newspaper, but Grovier argues that political diatribe risks diminishing an artwork.

We have dedicated our entire Debate section to the connections between art and politics in the run-up to the General Election. Smith embodies those links by standing as an independent candidate in the seat of Surrey Heath, occupied by former Education Secretary Michael Gove.

In this section, Giles Waterfield reminds us that a political position for an artist is nothing new, when he discusses the vital diplomatic roles played by Peter Paul Rubens (page 70). Ben Luke examines how art can have an impact on wider public policy, while Louisa Buck predicts that more councils will be tempted to sell off art from their collections, as they grapple with their budgets in the next parliament (page 68-69).

Those who love art will be scrutinising the different parties’ stances on art education before they cast their vote. Chantal Joffe RA explains in this issue that a local governmentfunded art course was crucial in her development (page 45). Joffe is now one of this country’s most celebrated painters and, like many of her fellow Academicians, she has an international profile, exhibiting around the world. We must remember that she and her fellow British artists became ‘cultural exports’ because they were encouraged to make art in the first place.

In a recent debate in the House of Lords, peers argued about the Government’s support of artists (to read the transcript, visit http://roy.ac/ hansard). The words of another Academician, Grayson Perry, were quoted. ‘The idea that art will somehow look after itself – that society will breed untaught geniuses – is rubbish.’

— SAM PHILLIPS, EDITOR

EDITORIAL Publisher Nick Tite Editor Sam Phillips Assistant Editor Eleanor Mills Design and Art Direction Design by S-T Sub-Editor Gill Crabbe Editorial Intern Sophie Parker Editorial Advisers Richard Cork,

Anne Desmet RA, Tom Holland, Fiona Maddocks, Mali Morris RA, Eric Parry RA, Charles Saumarez Smith, Mark Seaman, Giles Waterfield and Sarah Whitfield Digital content Harriet Baker, Louise Cohen and Amy Macpherson, Editorial enquiries 020 7300 5820; ramagazine@royalacademy.org.uk To comment on RA Magazine

reply.ramagazine@royalacademy.org.uk Follow us online

Twitter: @RA_Mag @royalacademy Facebook: /royalacademy www.royalacademy.org.uk ADVERTISING AND PRODUCTION Advertising Manager

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

Kim Jenner 020 7300 5658; kim.jenner@royalacademy.org.uk Listings Editor Catherine Cartwright 020 7300 5657; catherine.cartwright@ royalacademy.org.uk Classifieds Irene Michaelides 020 7300 5675; irene.michaelides@ royalacademy.org.uk SUBSCRIPTIONS

RA Magazine is published quarterly in March, May, September and November and mailed to Friends of the Royal Academy of Arts as part of their Friends membership.

To become a Friend

£107 Standard Friends (£97 Direct Debit) £150 Joint Friends (£140 Direct Debit) £49 Young Friends (aged between 16 & 25) Friends enquiries 020 7300 5664; friend. enquiries@royalacademy.org.uk www.royalacademy.org.uk/friends To subscribe to RA Magazine

£20 for one year in UK (£30 outside UK). Magazine subscriptions: 0800 634 6341 (UK only), 0044 20 7300 5841 (outside UK); mailorder@royalacademy.org.uk Colour reproduction by Wings.

Printed by Wyndeham Group.

Published 2 March 2015 © 2015 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 PETER BLACK is a curator at Glasgow’s Hunterian Art Gallery and author of Geoffrey Clarke: Symbols for Man. Sculpture and Graphic Work, 1949-94 (Lund Humphries, 1994).

LOUISA BUCK is Contemporary Art Correspondent for the Art Newspaper.

REBECCA SALTER RA Works on paper 1980s to the present

14 May — 6 June 2015

CAROLINE BUGLER is a writer and editor. Her books include Strange Beauty: German Paintings at the National Gallery (Yale University Press, 2014).

LUCY DAVIS is Curator of Old Master Pictures and British Painting at the Wallace Collection, London.

RICHARD DAWSON is a

Beardsmore Gallery 22–24 Prince of Wales Road London NW5 3LG +44 (0)20 7485 0923 www.beardsmoregallery.com

photographer who regularly works for magazines including GQ and Shortlist.

ANNE DESMET RA is a printmaker. Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum recently acquired her ‘St Paul’s’ series of wood engravings.

She shows collage work at Long & Ryle, London (15 Oct–13 Nov).

STELLA DUFFY is a writer,

WLADYSLAW MIRECKI

theatre-maker and Co-Director of Fun Palaces, a national campaign for greater access for all to the arts.

Her story collection Everything is Moving, Everything is Joined is published by Salt (2014).

JENNIFER DURRANT RA is a

painter. She shows in ‘Sculpture and Painting from the Stockwell Depot’ at Stephen Lawrence Gallery, Greenwich (24 July–11 Sep).

RICK GEKOSKI is a writer and rare-book dealer. He is the author of books including Lost, Stolen or Shredded: Stories of Missing Works of Art and Literature (Profile, 2013).

PAUL GREENHALGH is Director Holme Valley, Yorkshire Watercolour 100 x 150 cm

NEW LANDSCAPE WATERCOLOURS 20 March – 18 April 2015 Illustrated Catalogue available on request

PIERS FEETHAM GALLERY 475 Fulham Road, London SW6 1HL 020 7381 3031 www.piersfeethamgallery.com Tues-Fri 10-6; Sat 10-1 (The gallery is closed for the Easter weekend 3-6 April)

of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich.

KELLY GROVIER is a writer whose

latest book is 100 Works of Art That Will Define Our Age (Thames & Hudson, 2013).

TIMOTHY HYMAN RA is a

painter. He presents work from his residency at Maggie’s Cancer Care Centres at the RA (from 29 April). His book Refiguring: Painting and Experience in the Twentieth

Century will be published in 2016 (Thames & Hudson).

PHILLIP KING PPRA is a sculptor and previous President of the RA. BEN LUKE is Contemporary Art Critic at the London Evening Standard and Features Editor of the Art Newspaper.

FIONA MADDOCKS is a journalist and broadcaster. Her latest book is Harrison Birtwistle: Wild Tracks (Faber, 2014).

TIM MARLOW is Director of Artistic Programmes at the RA. IAN MCKEEVER RA is a painter.

He presents a solo show at the National Gallery of the Faroe Islands (8 May–21 June). His essays In Praise of Painting are published by University of Brighton (2005).

MIGUEL MONTANER is an illustrator. He has worked for The New York Times among others.

CATHIE PILKINGTON RA is a sculptor. She participates in an RA event for International Women’s Day (8 March), and ‘Good Figures’ at Jerwood Gridshell Space, Weald & Downland Open Air Museum, Chichester (25 April–3 May).

AMY SHERLOCK is the reviews editor of frieze magazine.

BOB AND ROBERTA SMITH RA

is a painter. His solo show is at Galerie Von Bartha, S-chanf, Switzerland (until 21 March).

DAVID VINTINER is a photographer.

He regularly works for the Sunday Times Magazine and the Independent.

JULIANA WANG is an illustrator.

She has worked for the Financial Times and Prospect magazine.

GILES WATERFIELD is a curator and writer. His novel The Iron Necklace is published in April (Allen & Unwin).

SARAH WHITFIELD is an art critic.

She has edited a new book, Lawrence Gowing: Selected Writings on Art, published this April (Ridinghouse).

SIMON WILSON is an art historian and a former Tate curator.

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Roy Underwood, Ilkurlka, 2005, acrylic on canvas,135 x 174 cm, © the artist

TRACKS Land and Landscape in Aboriginal Art LONDON’S LEADING GALLERY FOR ABORIGINAL ART SINCE 1988

20 April – 1 August 2015 REBECCA HOSSACK ART GALLERY 2A CONWAY ST, FITZROY SQUARE, LONDON, W1T 6BA 28 CHARLOTTE STREET, FITZROVIA, LONDON, W1T 2NA 262 MOTT STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10012 WWW.REBECCAHOSSACK.COM

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Competition

Name the artist 02

Self

In each issue a Royal Academician selects an artwork – simply name the artist who made it and you could win two RA catalogues. Sculptor CATHIE PILKINGTON RA describes the work (right) she chose

The changing face of self-portraiture 24 January – 10 May 2015 Margate, free admission turnercontemporary.org

NAME THE ARTIST 01

Louise Bourgeois, Self Portrait, 2007, Bronze, silver nitrate patina with highlights, Collection The Easton Foundation, (c) The Easton Foundation/VAGA, New York/DACS, London 2014. Photo: Christopher Burke

In our inaugural competition in the winter issue of RA Magazine, Mali Morris RA chose a painting by an artist that she considers ‘a pioneering colourist, who is still underrated’. The artist was Winifred Nicholson, and the painting Glimpse Upon Waking (1976, right). Congratulations to the three winning entrants, who have now received their prizes.

TO ENTER

Send the name of the artist who you think made the work above by email to reply.ramagazine@royalacademy. org.uk, or by post: RA Magazine, Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BD. It is not necessary to give the title and date of the work. The deadline for entries is Friday 20 March 2015.

Please include your contact details in your submission. Only winners will be contacted. The answer to this competition will be published in the summer issue of RA Magazine on 26 May. THE PRIZES

Three correct entries will be chosen at random after the closing date of the competition.

The three winners will each receive two exhibition catalogues – the books that accompany the current Royal Academy shows, ‘Rubens and His Legacy: From Van Dyck to Cézanne’ and ‘Richard Diebenkorn’.

For full terms and conditions, visit http://roy.ac/catcomp

W I N I F R ED N I CH O LS O N: T RUS T EES O F W I N I F R ED N I CH O LS O N /© TAT E , LO N D O N 2015

This kind of figurative object fascinates me. At first glance we have what appears to be an oversized Barbie doll, and yet the longer we spend time with it, the more particular and disconcerting it becomes. There is something both clumsy and tender about the way the naturalistic detail is described – the high ribs, pert breasts, gesturing hand and lumpy painted toenails.

This sculpted body is a distant cousin of Degas’ Little Dancer.

The artist who made this doll worked in isolation, compelled to satisfy a personal obsession. But the piece was never intended to be exhibited naked. It was originally shown in a black-and-white photograph, coyly posed and fully dressed. The photograph was the finished work. Over time the doll’s clothes were removed and it has been shown in this present state in contemporary art shows, alongside works by Cindy Sherman Hon RA and Jake and Dinos Chapman.

Details meant for the private gaze of the maker have been revealed by curators for their own ends.

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BRITISH MASTER PRINTS Wednesday 29 April 2015 New Bond Street, London

LUCIAN FREUD (BRITISH, 1922-2011) Pluto Aged Twelve Etching printed with tone, 2000, initialled and numbered 12/46, 432 x 596mm (PL) Sold for £91,000

bonhams.com/prints Prices shown include buyer’s premium. Details can be found at bonhams.com

ENQUIRIES +44 207 468 8212 tanya.grigoroglou@bonhams.com Final call for entries Wednesday 11 March 2015

Henrietta Dubrey Henrietta Dubrey Rough Deluxe:

Rough Deluxe: Sweet Candy Sweet Candy and and Wild Wild Women Women 28 March - 11 April 2015 28 March - 11 April 2015 Preview at AAF Battersea 12 - 15 March 2015

Preview at AAF Battersea 12 - 15 March 2015 www.edgarmodern.com www.edgarmodern.com 01225 443746 07940597757 Bartlett Street Bath BA1 2EE 01225 443746 07940597757

Edgar Modern Edgar Modern Bartlett Street Bath BA1 2EE

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Presented in partnership with

HENRY MOORE BACK TO A LAND 07.03.15–06.09.15 Yorkshire Sculpture Park ysp.co.uk Large Two Forms, 1966–69. Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation. Photo © Jonty Wilde.

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

© P R ACUS A 2013057/© CN A P

Preview

Electric Prisms, 1914, by Sonia Delaunay

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© P R ACUS A 2013057/© CN A P

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Inner circles As Sonia Delaunay’s paintings, textiles and murals come to London, painter JENNIFER DURRANT RA becomes absorbed in the richness of her life and art ‘Wow, what an artist!’ That was my reaction upon seeing the works – most of which are new to me – that will be on show in an engrossing exhibition at Tate Modern this spring. Sonia Delaunay was, undoubtedly, a major artist: bold, expressive, open-hearted, highly motivated, a totally modern, networking woman and designer of international renown. Did her multifaceted career hinder her from being seen as a significant force in painting until late in her very long and creative life?

Sofia/Sara Ilinitchna Stern was born into a poor family in Ukraine in 1885. She was ‘adopted’, aged five, by her wealthy uncle Henri Terk and moved to St Petersburg, becoming Sonia Terk. One can only imagine the trauma it must have been for one so young. Did this determine her obsessiveness, her need to achieve in order to confirm her worthiness? She never saw her mother again, never spoke of the first 20 years of her life.

During her cultured, privileged upbringing, a family friend, the German Expressionist Max Liebermann, gave her her first box of paints. When she studied in Karlsruhe, Arnold Schoenberg was a classmate, and fascinated by music and dance, Delaunay surely sensed their equivalent in painting in the rhythm, interval, complementarity and dissonance in colour.

She arrived in 1905 in Paris, the City of Light, to take part in the great modernist movement.

Having studied Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin’s surfaces of flat interlocking areas of colour, she began painting in a Fauvist manner.

One sees in her powerful portraits of this early period, her lyricism and the noise of colour countered by the self-contained/distracted countenances of her sitters. I find the Munch-like Young Finnish Girl (1907) haunting – taut arms, nervous, clasped hands revealing discomfort.

Through a brief marriage with the collector and gallery owner Wilhelm Uhde, she absorbed Cubism. Uhde owned 13 Braques and exhibited her work. Then there was her second marriage to the painter Robert Delaunay in 1910 – ‘different souls with a shared passion’. For their son Charles, she made a coverlet from fragments of fabric and fur, evoking Cubist ideas (Paul Klee would have

seen it when he visited). A seminal work, it was her path to abstraction and to her textile design, which she considered ‘exercises in colour that inform my true passion, painting’.

In collaboration with her husband and painter František Kupka, Delaunay worked on early Cubist researches that Apollinaire named Orphic Cubism, or Orphism. This focused on a pure lyrical abšstraction and bright colour to communicate meaning. For Orphists, the symbol of life was light itself, into which one could be absorbed. She experimented with the scientist Michel-Eugène Chevreul’s notion of simultaneity, the sensation of concurrent movement by juxtaposing contrasting colours, creating unity from elements conventionally regarded as disharmonious – and, importantly, to me, creating the existence of an infinitude of interrelated states of being.

The brink of the First World War saw, among other great things, Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring performed, Futurists in Italy, Malevich’s Suprematism, the Blue Rider Group, Scriabin’s Eighth and Ninth Piano Sonatas, and Delaunay beginning her series of paintings inspired by Le Bal Bullier, a Parisian night spot. Here, rhythmically entwined figures dance, punctuated by earthy tones and, significantly, arcs of new electric lights appear. Nothing is stationary. Encouraged by her husband, Delaunay started to draw directly onto canvas with colour, without preliminary drawing, and her brushmarks constructed colour areas with ‘furry-like’ edges, as in her pastels (and recalling the early stitched work, Foliage, 1909).

In the series ‘Electric Prisms’, some works are non-figurative, their surfaces fluctuating with the manner of their making. Blaise Cendrars was described by Delaunay as ‘the greatest poet of our time’, and their meeting led to her joyous pictorial interpretation of his poem, The Prose of the TransSiberian…, in an innovative, scroll-like work – known as a ‘simultaneous book’, for the way it unified painting and text. Embedded, surprisingly, in the left-hand side of Electric Prisms (1914, opposite) is a poster for this famous poem.

In this painting, I sense figures with haloes, auras perhaps, colour bands of sound, radiant light and vibration. I am reminded of Buddhist cave paintings I have visited in north-west China, but here there is no calm or peace, nor the ‘activity in tranquility’ I seek in my own work. As friends, Kupka, Kandinsky, Schoenberg and the Delaunays were exposed to Theosophy, which incorporates aspects of Buddhism and Brahmanism, especially a belief in spiritual evolution. They shared an interest in mysticism, Kupka being a practising medium.

With the loss of financial support from her family after the Russian Revolution, Delaunay concentrated on textile design, and their bewitching Rousseau, The Snake Charmer (1907) – commissioned by Robert’s mother – was sold.

Delaunay saw ‘no gap between painting and my “decorative” work’. She became a wealthy designer.

On her return to painting, a troubled Europe, again, and the early death of Robert in 1941 are reflected in the dark calling in her work. Gone is the joie de vivre, replaced by an angry, painful, painterly experience. One finds opaque colour, crisp edges; my eye moves, yet I am anchored.

Black, with its own sensuosity, dominates – is it a void or closed surface? Burnt reds are overtaken by the jangle of white and black, citrus greens that are a result of over-painting, and impenetrable greys (the muted Coloured Rhythm, 1952). In the late works the pitch is constant, the palette similar.

Triptych (1963) is a remarkable cacophony of gongs or solemn, chiming bells. Harshened vermilion, and richly darkened – and also lightened – viridian, make sonorous tones against the blacks.

Do not these grand works vibrate, shout and cry out with the clamour of sound? And are there echoes? Kandinsky believed every work must announce, ‘Here I am’. Yes, this is elegiac painting. I sense a meshed veil closing as loosely assembled, vigorously painted blocks move across from the right in Coloured Rhythm (1968). Delaunay was in her 70s and 80s when she made these revelatory works. She continued working until her death, aged 94, in 1979. This remarkable woman was able to say: ‘…I have done everything, I have lived my art.’

Sonia Delaunay Tate Modern, London, 020 7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk, 15 April–9 Aug To see works by both Delaunay and Durrant, visit http://roy.ac/delaunay

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As the Academy hosts this year’s Converse x Dazed Emerging Artists Award, RA MAGAZINE explains what sets this contemporary art prize apart

PICTURE THIS

LUCY DAVIS picks a must-see work from an exhibition this spring

The studio of Jonathan Trayte, one of the artists shortlisted for the Converse x Dazed Emerging Artists Award 2015

TITLE Mrs Mary Robinson ARTIST Joshua Reynolds PRA DATE 1783-84 EXHIBITION ‘Joshua Reynolds:

How do you define ‘emerging artists’?

Experiments in Paint’, Wallace Collection, London (12 March–7 June)

Artists who are not yet established in the art world. The Converse x Dazed Emerging Artists Award is open only to artists who have yet to find representation by a commercial gallery.

As a result, the show of shortlisted artists is an opportunity to see types of work that hasn’t yet reached gallery spaces – a chance to get ahead of the curve in contemporary art. Those shortlisted since the first award in 2010 have gone on to achieve great things, such as a solo show at the Hayward Gallery and representation by a New York gallery.

Is it open to art students?

Artists of any age can enter the award, but students are not allowed. The majority of submissions are from recent graduates who are in that difficult period in their career: the time after formal art education but before they are selling work regularly through a gallery. Artists from any discipline can enter. Five artists are shortlisted from thousands of entries.

Who judges the award?

An art prize is only as good as its judges. Artists want recognition from those they respect most, so selection by a distinguished panel means more than any money they might win. The award has always brought together distinguished artists and curators as its judges, and this year’s panel is no exception: Sarah McCrory, the Director of the Glasgow International Festival; multidisciplinary London-based artist and musician Steve Claydon; Brooklyn street artist José Parlá; Javier

Peres, whose gallery Peres Projects in Berlin has championed young artists to great success; the RA’s Director of Artistic Programmes Tim Marlow; and the chair, Dazed & Confused Visual Arts Editor Francesca Gavin.

What happens to the shortlisted artists?

Each artist is awarded £1,000 to create a sitespecific work at an exhibition free to the public.

Previously staged at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, the show takes place this year in the Royal Academy’s Burlington Gardens building. An exhibition at a prestigious venue is an invaluable platform for the shortlisted artists. The winner – announced on 16 April – receives £5,000.

What can we see at this year’s award show?

Each of the five artists present inventive installations for the viewer to explore.

Jonathan Trayte develops his infatuation for exotic foodstuffs (above) by showing what he calls ‘an intense multi-layered environment, like a never-ending candy store or Middle Eastern bazaar’. Duo Tamsin Snow and Sarah Tynan recreate a chapel by the contemporary Austrian architect Gerold Wiederin, while Lawrence Lek simulates physical spaces with video game software. Rachel Pimm works with scientists to create and present clones of rubber trees, while Patrick Cole presents satirical performances in an immersive dystopian environment.

The Converse x Dazed Emerging Artists Award 2015 Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington Gardens, London, 020 7300 8000, www.dazeddigital.com/emerging-artistsaward/2015, 18 April–17 May

The woman portrayed in contemplation is Mary Robinson, an actress, writer and society beauty in 18th-century England.

She had first come to attention after playing Perdita – the ‘lost one’ – in David Garrick’s adaptation of The Winter’s Tale. She was spotted by the Prince of Wales, briefly becoming his mistress, and was known in the gossip columns as ‘Perdita’ Robinson.

Not long before this portrait was painted, she had been abandoned by her lover, Banastre Tarleton, a dashing soldier and gambler who fled to France to avoid his creditors. Mary pursued him from London to Dover, but on the journey she suffered a probable miscarriage that left her partially paralysed. Forced to withdraw from public life, she relied on her writing to support herself. Reynolds’ striking portrait shows Robinson in ‘lost profile’, turned away and gazing out to sea, an Ariadne abandoned by her Theseus, withdrawing into her memories. She is depicted in a plain white gown and black neck-ribbon that accentuate her pallor. The contemplative, almost melancholic air of the painting is amplified by the unfinished treatment of the pink ribbon and her lower torso.

To watch a video that explores letters and diaries by Joshua Reynolds in the RA archive, visit http://roy.ac/reynolds

© J O N AT H A N T R AY T E /CO U R T ESY DA ZED & CO N F US ED. © T H E WA L L ACE CO L L ECT I O N / P H OTO T H E N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY, LO N D O N

Eyes on the prize

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K1426 RA Craig Wylie RA Advert 02/02/2015 08:22 Page 1

CRAIG WYLIE NURSE

2 – 18 April 2015 View exhibition catalogue online at jonathancooper.co.uk A colour catalogue is available on request

Jonathan Cooper Park Walk Gallery

20 Park Walk London SW10 0AQ t: +44 (0)20 7351 0410 mail@jonathancooper.co.uk jonathancooper.co.uk

Clarion Call Oil on linen 132 x 136 cm

25 FEBRUARY TO 19 MARCH 2015

Alfred Gilbert And frederic leiGhton The New SculpTure the fine Art Society Dealers since 1876

148 New Bond Street · London w1s 2jt +44 (0)20 7629 5116 · art@faslondon.com www.faslondon.com The Fine Art Society will be exhibiting at tefaf Maastricht, stand 386, 13–22 March 2015 Sir Alfred Gilbert 1854–1934 Perseus Arming, 1881–3 Bronze · 36.8 x 17.8 x 12 cm

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Naked ambition

© TAT E / P R ES EN T ED BY T H E T RUS T EES O F T H E CH A N T R E Y B EQ U ES T 1911. R O B ER T A N D L IS A S A I NS B U RY CO L L ECT I O N /S A I NS B U RY CEN T R E F O R V IS UA L A R TS/ © T H E ES TAT E O F F R A N CIS B ACO N / A L L R I GH TS R ES ER V ED, DAC S 2015 . © T H E T RUS T EES O F T H E B R I T IS H M US EU M

Three exhibitions reveal pivotal moments in the depiction of the male nude, says SIMON WILSON ‘And God said, let us make man in our image... so God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He him.’ Genesis I, 26-28 in the Bible is pretty unequivocal about this, so it is entirely unsurprising that when man came to create his gods, he did so in his own image.

Genesis was probably first written down about 2,500 years ago, around the same time as the great flowering of Greek sculpture of the Classical period, during which the ancient Greeks both cultivated the body beautiful and created sculptural images of it that represented gods and heroes. In particular they created an image of the male body that continues to grip us. Three current exhibitions offer us the chance first to consider the origins of this phenomenon in Ancient Greece, and then to glimpse it at two critical moments in its long development in subsequent Western art.

The most significant of these shows is the British Museum’s Defining Beauty: The Body in Ancient Greek Art (26 March–5 July; 020 7323 8299). This is a real eye-opener, not least because it reminds us that until the Parthenon Marbles arrived in London around 1812, ancient Greek art was mostly known in the West only from later copies. Authentic works are still rare, and the British Museum’s show will bring together an unprecedented number.

But as the title suggests, the exhibition particularly explores the very real question of why ancient Greek art so emphasises the nude,

especially the male nude. According to the show’s curator Ian Jenkins the answer to this is more complicated than one might think: ‘When a young man took his clothes off he was not naked, but wearing a uniform, that of those who would die for their city.’ But contemplating the sheer taut-muscled beauty, and the way it is flaunted, in the reclining figure of a god (438-432 BCE, below left), the erotic element is also inescapable.

As it is 2,000-odd years later, when the great Victorian painter and sculptor Frederic, Lord Leighton PRA, created a sensation with his Athlete Wrestling with a Python (right) at the 1877 RA Summer exhibition. This is one of the key works in Tate Britain’s Sculpture Victorious (until 25 May; 020 7887 8888), a survey of the role of sculpture in the Victorian age when, thanks to the industrial and technical ingenuity of the time, sculptural work was reproduced and disseminated to new and wider audiences.

Early in Victoria’s reign, the Greek tradition had reached a nadir of intellectual and aesthetic vacuity. Then, almost out of the blue, Leighton’s Athlete appeared to put back into British sculpture both the virility and the message. This is Adam wrestling with the serpent in Eden. This is man as the god he already was without knowing it, the god that the serpent promised him he would be, if he and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

The results of the lost battle with the serpent in Eden have never been more searingly realised in art than in the paintings of Francis Bacon. In these we see fallen man, either twisted with the pain of existence in a godless universe, or engaged in crude copulations. At the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, an unmissable exhibition, the result of a unique collaboration with the Hermitage Museum, shows how Bacon’s art, on the face of it completely antithetical to tradition, is profoundly engaged with the art of the past. Astonishingly, we learn

A figure, possibly Dionysos, from the Parthenon, 438-432 bce, by Phidias

An Athlete Wrestling with a Python, 1877, by Frederic, Lord Leighton

in Francis Bacon and the Masters (18 April–26 July; 01603 593199) that the tortured protagonist in his Two Figures in a Room (1959, below), about to commit a nameless sexual act, is based on Michelangelo’s beautiful marble Crouching Boy (c.1530). The human male, these shows seem to conclude, started well and ended badly.

For video interviews about ‘Francis Bacon’ at the Hermitage, visit http://roy.ac/bacon

Two Figures in a Room, 1959, by Francis Bacon

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Nightmare, c.1819–23,

by Francisco de Goya

Drawing on our fears TIMOTHY HYMAN RA ponders the dark and visionary nature of Goya’s drawings, as an entire album of his sheets come together in a rare reunion There hangs over all Goya’s imagery of the supernatural – the witches’ Sabbaths, floating figures, wraith-filled limbos – a question of interpretation: should we see them as Dream, or as Satire? In his mid-70s, Goya made a sequence of brush drawings in a bound volume (now known as ‘Album D’, or the ‘Witches and Old Women Album’) long since dispersed to public and private collections all over the world.

But this spring all 22 of the surviving drawings are reassembled at the Courtauld Gallery, together with related sheets from the other albums, as well as several of his greatest etchings and lithographs.

Album D, with its drawings now dated to around 1819-1823, arrives just after Deanna Petherbridge’s fascinating survey at the British Museum, ‘Witches and Wicked Bodies’.

What is striking is how little of the lurid, often

pornographic, witch imagery by artists such as Jacques de Gheyn and Salvator Rosa was taken up by Goya. His witches are sordid rather than exotic, heavily clothed rather than naked.

The Courtauld’s own sheet, Singing and Dancing, shows an old woman levitating and bawling out a song to her guitar, while below, her masked companion gazes up into her petticoats – and holds her nose. A page from the Art Institute of Chicago, Dream of Flogging, has three witches in mid-air hauling up a male figure, pulling back his nightshirt to bare his pale bottom for beating. A drawing now in the Met (originally inscribed Vision, but retitled Nightmare, above) presents an old woman bent beneath the weight of two unruly old men balanced crazily on her shoulders.

While each of these could be understood as comical carnival fantasy, a further Nightmare (recently rediscovered in Marseilles) has

an upside-down figure, fists clenched, falling headlong into the void. As in so many of these drawings, the placing within the page is extremely telling, the shapes intensified by Goya’s scraping into the white paper. If the washand-ink comes out of 18th-century Venice, spiced with English caricature, the draughtsman who comes most to mind is Rembrandt – as in the dark, powerful figure in Covetous Old Hag, bent over her money bags. In all of these images, only the cadaverous Wicked Woman – hooded, teeth bared, about to take a mouthful out of a struggling infant – seems truly horrific, until we recall that Goya in these same years decorated his own dining-room with Saturn Devouring His Son. Like much of Goya’s later work, his albums remained little-known far into the 20th century; this is the first time any has been shown complete and in its original sequence. Curator Juliet Wilson-Bareau has given much of her life to Goya, and also curated the Hayward Gallery’s Goya: Drawings from His Private Albums (2001), which included seven sheets from Album D. In the later 20th century, reacting against the romantic legend, art historians recast Goya as an Enlightenment intellectual, the ‘Caprichos’ series of prints as social criticism.

Goya began making his informal image-books after the life-threatening sickness in 1792 that left him not only deaf but liable to recurrent fits of delirium, partial blindness and paralysis.

The boundaries between real and imagined became more porous. Goya’s self-portrait of 1820 emerged from another near-fatal episode – in bed, raised in the arms of his medical saviour Dr Arrieta, but with demonic countenances glimpsed in the darkness behind. One hypothesis is that Album D served Goya’s convalescence, when he was still too weakened to stand and paint.

His master Domenico Tiepolo made his album of 104 Punchinello drawings in his 70s; and in the 1820s, near the end of his life, Blake would sit up in bed, working on the folio of Dante watercolours. By contrast, Goya’s sheets, although numbered, are without any narrative continuity; they are more akin to ‘associations of ideas’.

But when we try to lay hold of those late thoughts, their meaning remains as elusive as our own dreams. In the graphic cycle closest in time to Album D, ‘Los Disparates’ (translated as ‘The Incongruities’), nothing ‘makes sense’. The lucid follies of his ‘Caprichos’ are exchanged for horizontal many-figured compositions, evocations of that half-life where fears assume visible form: each conjures not allegory or emblem, but a parallel world. The Album D drawings seem more in the nature of play – perhaps even ‘playing with one’s fears’.

(The exhibition catalogue relates them to an 1811 report on a witch trial of 1610, written by Goya’s friend Moratín.) However we may interpret them, this close-focus exhibition offers an unrepeatable recreation of Goya’s intimate thought sequence.

Goya: The Witches and Old Women Album The Courtauld Gallery, London, 020 7872 0220, www.courtauld.ac.uk, until 25 May

M E T R O P O L I TA N M US EU M O F A R T

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PRUNELLA CLOUGH UNCONSIDERED WASTELANDS 16 APRIL - 16 MAY 2015

Prunella Clough is widely recognised as one of the most significant British artists of the post-war period. This exhibition will consist of paintings, drawings, prints and collages demonstrating the development of her work and the various influences on her. She found beauty in the urban and industrial landscape, the colours, texture and reflections surrounding her. The fully illustrated catalogue will feature essays by Margaret Garlake and Gerard Hastings.

For information about the exhibition please contact the gallery or email. A fully illustrated exhibition catalogue is available.

Image: Barrels in a Yard, 1955. Oil on canvas, 48.2 x 35.8 cm

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

Preview UK

SAM PHILLIPS steps from a Persian paradise to pourings of paint

3. JOHN SINGER SARGENT

Monet was a mentor for arguably the most accomplished Impressionist in England, John Singer Sargent RA – it is said that Sargent met the Frenchman at Durand-Ruel’s gallery.

Sargent’s friendships with such figures from across the arts are the focus of a show at the National Portrait Gallery (until 25 May; 020 7306 0055), which presents his portraits of the period’s movers and shakers (the Spanish dancer La Carmencita, 1890, below).

1. ART OF THE GARDEN

2. INVENTING IMPRESSIONISM

The Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace stages what should be a sumptuous show about artists’ infatuations with gardens. From the ornately illustrated orchard of an Islamic manuscript (Seven Couples in a Garden, c.1510, detail above) to Leonardo da Vinci’s botanical illustrations and 18th-century oils of English idylls, over 150 works reveal how our images and ideas of earthly paradises flowered over time (20 Mar–11 Oct; 020 7766 7301).

Monet grew modern art’s most famous garden at Giverny, ploughing the profits from his paintings into its plants. He had his art dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, to thank for these funds. ‘Without Durand-Ruel we would have died of hunger, all us Impressionists,’ he claimed. The National Gallery gives the dealer his due with a survey of the Impressionist works he showed (4 Mar–31 May; 020 7747 2885). It includes five from Monet’s ‘Poplars’ series (Poplars in the Sun, 1891, above).

6. LYNDA BENGLIS

5. HENRY MOORE

4. THE ARTIST AS COLLECTOR

Young sculptors in the 1960s moved away from the semi-figurative styles of Moore’s generation, executing abstract works to explore the natures of materials and physical processes. Lynda Benglis (above) famously poured onto the floor pigmented latex, which hardened into a hybrid of both painting and sculpture. The American artist’s wide-ranging work is now the subject of a major retrospective at Hepworth Wakefield (until 1 July; 01924 247360).

Henry Moore also collected skulls – but of the animal variety – as well as bones, shells and other objects he found outdoors. These small forms directly inspired his large-scale sculptures.

A recreation of Moore’s studio at Mayfair’s Gagosian Gallery includes this collection (until 2 April; 020 7493 3020) and coincides with Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s presentation of his monumental sculptures in the landscape (above, 7 Mar–6 Sep; 01924 832631).

Sargent acquired four of Monet’s paintings.

But artists often look back in time when it comes to their collections: think of Howard Hodgkin’s paintings from Mughal India, or Edmund de Waal’s 19th-century netsuke (above), the subject of his bestseller The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010).

Both artists loan their treasures to a Barbican show of artists’ collections, which includes oddities such as Warhol’s cookie jars and Hirst’s human skulls (until 25 May; 0845 120 7550).

R OYA L CO L L ECT I O N T RUS T/© H ER M A J ES T Y EL IZ A B E T H I I 2015 . © THE NATIONAL MUS EUM OF WESTERN ART, TOK YO. PA R IS/ M US ÉE D ’ O RS AY/ P H OTO © RMN – GR AND PAL AIS (MUS ÉE D’ORSAY )/GER ARD BLOT. P H OTO BY J US T I N P I P ER GER . P H OTO © J O N T Y W I L D E / R EP R O D U CED BY P ER M IS S I O N O F T H E H EN RY M O O R E F O U N DAT I O N . P H OTO: H EN RY GR OS K I NS K Y/©L I F E I N C/ I M AGE CO U R T ESY T H E A R T IS T A N D CH EI M

Six degrees of separation

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Book now

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15/01/2015 10:21

Si mo n C a rte r The Series Paintings The best way to understand Simon Carter’s paintings is to put them alongside his other paintings. Looked at in this way, they seem to converse among themselves in a manner profoundly revealing of his attitude not merely to landscape and motif but also to time, space and figuration.

Essex Coast, Seawall, 2014

Essex Coast, Bird Hide, 2014

acrylic on canvas. 130 x 160 cm 511⁄8 x 63 ins

acrylic on canvas. 130 x 160 cm 511⁄8 x 63 ins

Two Swimmers, 2013

Four North Sea Swimmers, 2013

acrylic on canvas. 150 x 160 cm 59 x 63 ins

acrylic on canvas. 150 x 160 cm 59 x 63 ins

Peter Vergo

MessuM’s www.messums.com 28 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG Telephone: +44 (0)20 7437 5545

I am drawn to Constable’s idea of painting as like doggedly driving a nail… The persistent return to the familiar, and realising that beyond the surface and the apparent, nothing is very familiar; that there is in the ordinary the ineffable and transcendent.

The finished paintings appear not at the seeming end of the process but during it, through surprised glimpses, wrong turns or small revelations, through other ways of seeing the same things or of reconstructing the Simon Carter same image from the flow of drawings.

Exhibition 22nd April – 8th May 2015 Catalogue £15 inc p&p

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Exhibition posters £19.50 inc p&p

22/01/2015 11:29

DAVID TRESS David Tress is an artist of unusual expressive vigour, best known for his landscape paintings in mixed media on paper.

He also works in acrylics and has made many fully-realised drawings in graphite and charcoal. Widely regarded as one of our most inventive Modern Romantic painters, Tress has won an enviable reputation for quality and integrity.

Wet Spring, 2014, mixed media on paper, 62 x 81 cm

Andrew Lambirth’s New Book – DAVID TRESS

245 x 290 mm, 232 pages with over 200 full colour illustrations.

£35

This new monograph on the artist David Tress (born 1955) is the first account to deal with all aspects of his career in detail and to explore fully the cultural context of his thought and achievement. Tress is a landscape painter working in the Romantic tradition whose primary subject is the Welsh countryside around his home in Haverfordwest. He paints his response to the landscape he knows and loves with an expressive power rare in contemporary art. His paintings combine formal assurance with a passionate response to subject: evocation of place is balanced by human involvement, just as realistic depiction is qualified by abstract mark-making.

Exhibition and book launch Wednesday 13th May – Friday 5th June 2015

Messum's RA Mag. 16.1.15 (Tress).indd 1

MessuM’s www.messums.com 28 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG Telephone: +44 (0)20 7437 5545

27/01/2015 16:49

BOOK NOW npg.org.uk/sargent 020 7766 7344 FREE FOR MEMBERS #npgsargent Exhibition organised in collaboration with

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Open 10.00 – 18.00 Thursdays and Fridays until 21.00 u Leicester Square

Supported by the American Friends of the National Portrait Gallery, London, and the Sargent Exhibition Supporters Group.

Spring Season 2015 sponsored by

Dr. Pozzi at Home (detail) by John Singer Sargent, 1881. The Armand Hammer Collection, Gift of the Armand Hammer Foundation. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

NOW OPEN Until 25 May 2015

23/01/2015 10:33

Preview International Under the new director, aptly named Laurent Le Bon, political wrangling was deftly solved by inviting the former director Anne Baldessari to take charge of the opening exhibition. And she has made a beautiful job of it. Helped by the new spaces devised by the architect Jean-François Bodin that use the spacious attics (displaying Picasso’s own art collection donated by his family) and the vast vaulted cellars (hung with photographs of – and artefacts from – the artist’s various studios) Baldessari has done full justice to the towering presence of her subject.

Although one could argue that it would be difficult to fail, given the material and the setting, much depends on how that material is shown. Baldessari knows the work backwards, and the confidence with which she puts it together, following a fairly conventional chronological sequence, produces moments of beatific recognition of well-known masterpieces perfectly installed, as well as a series of bold The Pipes of Pan, 1923, by Pablo Picasso, installed in the recently and exhilarating conjunctions of reopened Musée National Picasso-Paris painting and sculpture.

Then there is the way Baldessari has used the setting of the building.

To see The Pipes of Pan, a major work of 1923, hung at the head of the SARAH WHITFIELD visits the refurbished grand staircase (left) is to understand château in Paris housing the world’s finest collection how appropriate a context Hôtel Salé is for an artist who, from the of Picasso, a tour de force in the City of Light time he could afford it, chose to work in the architecturally imposing spaces of old French châteaux.

This installation will have a short life. From The recent reopening of the Museé National June, Le Bon’s new vision for the museum will Picasso-Paris (formerly the Museé Picasso) begin to take shape. He will start by reversing housed in the magnificent 17th-century Hôtel the museum’s reputation for being unhelpful to Salé in Paris’s Marais district, comes after scholars. Access will be granted to the library’s five years of controversial construction, well11,000 books and 200,000 documents. Next, publicised internal disagreements and behindhe will end the long years of the museum’s selfthe-scenes political manoeuvrings. Picasso is a imposed isolation and start to forge links with huge prize for any city, hence the renaming of the museum to emphasise its national importance. other institutions, starting with other museums in Paris. Exhibitions on Picasso and Primitivism Of the three other important Picasso and on the so-called Blue and Pink periods are museums in Europe (in Barcelona, Málaga and planned with the Museé Quai Branly and the Antibes) Barcelona’s is the one that comes closest Musée d’Orsay respectively. in significance to Paris, housing over 4,000 works Further afield, a large selection of the as against the 5,000 and more held by the Hôtel sculptures will be going on loan this autumn to Salé. Whereas Barcelona has the largest collection the Museum of Modern Art, New York. There of the artist’s early work, Paris benefitted from is no reason to suppose there will not be equally the Acceptance in Lieu law devised by the wily satisfying exhibitions at the Hôtel Salé in the arts minister André Malraux, passed in France future, but for those who can visit the museum in 1968 with the specific intention of acquiring before this summer, do so. a substantial part of the artist’s estate for the nation. Further bequests by the artist’s widow Musée National Picasso-Paris Jacqueline and his children have formed the most www.museepicassoparis.fr comprehensive collection of Picasso’s work to be seen anywhere. And the upgraded museum now To see an image gallery of works installed in has double the exhibition space. the museum, visit http://roy.ac/picasso

© M US ÉE N AT I O N A L P I CAS S O - PA R IS/ B É AT R I CE H ATA L A . CO U R T ESY J U L I A N S I M M O NS

A national treasure

Don’t forget Venice AMY SHERLOCK picks the pavilions to watch in the world’s longest running art biennale Curator Okwui Enwezor has chosen the theme ‘All The World’s Futures’ for the 56th edition of the Venice Biennale. His show in the central pavilion will consider the ways in which artists across the globe are responding to current turmoil and violent histories. Enwezor has consistently sought to broaden the art-historical canon, so expect a politicised show with plenty of unfamiliar names.

Among the national pavilions, artist Danh Võ, in the Danish pavilion, seems a fitting choice for Enwezor’s theme.

Vietnamese-born Võ, was among the ‘boat people’ who fled the country in the late 1970s, growing up in Copenhagen.

Võ’s works include performance and complex installations that address themes of belonging and otherness.

The British pavilion shows work

by Sarah Lucas (below, and page 58), whose suggestive sculptures are acerbic reminders that some struggles – like those against the banal sexualization of women – are ongoing. And, in an unprecedented move, the Indian multimedia artist Shilpa Gupta will be collaborating with the Pakistani master of photomontage Rashid Rana in an off-site project organised by the Gujral Foundation.

Elsewhere in the city, the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation shows new work by Scottish painter Peter Doig at Palazzetto Tito. Doig’s acute sensitivity to place, and the particular alchemy of water, makes La Serenissima an ideal setting for his first solo show in Italy.

Venice Biennale www.labiennale.org, 9 May–22 Nov

Sarah Lucas, 2013, by Julian Simmons

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LEFT

Self-Portrait, 1889, by Vincent van Gogh RIGHT A portrait of Vincent van Gogh,1925-28, by an imitator

The imitation game A new book on art forgery not only exposes fakers, from Michelangelo to Tom Keating, but searches out their motives, writes RICK GEKOSKI Many of us, I suspect, have rather a romantic view of art thieves, and are titillated by the swiping of the Mona Lisa, the empty frames at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: the whole Thomas Crown Affair business, so daring and so chic. But I prefer forgers, who hoodwink the socalled experts with their combination of technique, scholarship and chutzpah, whose remuneration depends not on smashing and grabbing, but actually making something of high quality.

You might suppose them aesthetic mercenaries, but The Art of Forgery claims (I find it hard to believe) that money is rarely the object. Apparently forgers need to be SHELF LIFE

SOPHIE PARKER picks new books that encourage artists to play Play has become a buzzword in contemporary art recently. In her new book Time to Play (I.B. Tauris, £18.99), artist Katarzyna Zimna discusses the concept of play in art theory, explaining that art inspired by play is ‘seen as better than the old-fashioned, deadly serious art-making – it seems to be more “natural” and promises a liberation from notions of production, mastery and authority’.

Four practical guides expand on this fertile territory this spring. In Drawing and Painting (Thames & Hudson, £24.95), which features the work of many Academicians, RA

distinguished one from the other. To do this, we are offered eight categories that define the primary motivation: genius, pride, revenge, fame, crime, opportunism, money and power.

This concept is useful, if arbitrary, for most of the forgers we encounter fit into a number of these camps. The cast of characters is enchanting, ranging from Michelangelo to Tom Keating, encompassing fictional Argentinians, Italian master craftsmen, German fresco fakers, criminal New York gallerists, museum curators with dubious standards and a host of others all intent, as the book’s author Noah Charney puts it (too mildly), on ‘rewriting history’.

Schools alumna Kate Wilson encourages us to understand both traditional and non-traditional materials through play. In Unlearning to Draw (Princeton Architectural Press, £7.99), Peter Jenny invites readers to revert back to our more playful, childhood ways of looking at the world, and to use family photographs as inspiration.

Art and design professors Judith and Richard Wilde believe childhood creativity is unlearnt as we age. In The Process (Laurence King, £30) they create a foundation course comprising 13 projects, encouraging participants to rediscover play and awaken innovation. And after a new foundation course, comes a new art school – Akademie X (Phaidon, £24.95). Thirty-six artists and writers, such as Marina Abramovic Hon RA and Olafur Eliasson, tutor the reader through manifestos, scavenger hunts and hands-on assignments.

The irony, of course, is that this book can only discuss cases of forgers whose work is now understood – sometimes imperfectly – to be bogus. But what of the myriad forgeries that have not been exposed, and which – as gallerists, auctioneers and curators sadly acknowledge – have infiltrated our most august institutions? It’s an ongoing problem, well known at our own National Gallery, the Getty, the Stedelijk, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One could go on, and on. Is nothing fixed and sacred?

As forensic interrogation grows ever more sophisticated – the earliest examples date only from the 1920s – and standards of provenancial evidence more demanding, many works have been demoted from the artistic canon, and others brought into serious doubt. We still rely to a degree on the expert eye – on what used to be called connoisseurship – but it is disheartening to realise how often such eyes are cast in opposite directions.

This leads Charney to an odd conclusion: ‘It is up to each viewer to decide whether they think the work is authentic or not.’ Experts may disagree about authenticity. But we are not all experts, and whether we think a work is authentic or not doesn’t matter a hoot. We are too easily fooled.

Our image of the forger as an adventurous rapscallion is reinforced, but deepened. Many of these craftsmen merely scratch a living, though often providing an opulent one for the front men to whom their fakes are delivered. Forgery itself is often a grubby, inky business, and the Art of Forgery an enjoyable introduction to it: a pleasing compendium of fraud, its examples well chosen, characters vivid and memorable, illustrations crisp and engaging, the accompanying text well informed. Unlike many books in its field, it is fun to read, and will entertain both you and your friends.

The Art of Forgery: The Minds, Motives and Methods of Master Forgers by Noah Charney, Phaidon, £19.95 (to pre-order before publication on 18 May, visit www.phaidon.com)

N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY O F A R T, WAS H I N GTO N /CO L L ECT I O N O F M R A N D M RS J O H N H AY W H I T N E Y. N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY O F A R T, WAS H I N GTO N /CH ES T ER DA L E CO L L ECT I O N . P H OTO L I T T L E R ED PA N DA

Preview Books

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MODERN BRITISH AND IRISH ART Wednesday 10 June 2015 New Bond Street, London

PAUL NASH (BRITISH, 1889-1946) A Drawing (detail) watercolour, pen, ink, pencil, crayon and chalk 55.9 x 38.1 cm. (22 x 15 in.)

Sold for £212,500, November 2014 A new world auction record for a work on paper by the artist.

bonhams.com/modernbritish Prices shown include buyer’s premium. Details can be found at bonhams.com

ENQUIRIES +44 (0) 20 7468 8295 matthew.bradbury@bonhams.com Closing date for entries Friday 24 April 2015

The RA’s painters, printmakers, sculptors and architects

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Academy Artists

House of curiosities When Tom Phillips RA rented a room in a south London house 50 years ago, little did he know the entire house would become his studio. FIONA MADDOCKS has privileged access. Portrait by DAVID VINTINER

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In the Studio

The best place to interview Tom Phillips is in the kitchen over breakfast. There are two vacant chairs, which is a good start, and the strict work regime of his day has not yet begun. ‘Kitchen’ needs some qualification. The room is at the top of a tall Victorian house, almost level with the crown of his favourite tree, a giant ginkgo. Were it not for some evidence of food supplies, you might think you were in an overcrowded archive that just happened to boast a microwave and sink.

The kitchen provides storage for Phillips’s collection of 100,000 postcards, arranged floor to ceiling in 150 plastic files. Walls are covered in prints and sculpture: Indian, Oceanic, his own. Shelves are crammed with tiny African goldweights (a fraction of his collection), box files, coffee, Lemsip, beard trimmer, fruitcake, tins of soup and bottles of red wine. He eats out a lot.

The ‘breakfast table’ is obscured by toppling heaps of reading material – the New York Review of Books, New Scientist, a Lee Child thriller – plus sketchbooks, pots stuffed with pens, scalpels and brushes, old coffee cups, the remains of two boiled eggs and many crumbs. If you clear a space – less easy than it sounds – you see the table is a glass-lidded display case, with more African goldweights visible beneath. If you come a month later, little will have moved. Clearing up, like home improvements or soft furnishings, is not encouraged. ‘It’s a place without vanity.

Or at least without the vanity of a homemaker.’

This is where, since 1966, Phillips has worked on A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, an altered book which has been a fertile touchstone in his prolific, prominently autobiographical output. After five revised editions, this undertaking is almost complete. ‘God willing, it reaches its half-century, and a conclusion, in 2016.’

The younger of two brothers, he grew up in Clapham but first knew the house when he was 12. ‘My mother bought it to save us from financial peril after my father’s gas mantle factory went out of business after the war. She let rooms to students from Camberwell School of Art, down the road.

The last one, ironically, was her own son, in 1961.’

He gradually took over each room until he had all four floors. ‘Now it is all studio. If that was good enough for Picasso, it’s good enough for me.’

Phillips, 77, is married with children and

stepchildren. Doesn’t his wife mind his domestic eccentricity? I can answer with some authority: I am his wife. My response, in précis, ‘We muddle through cheerfully.’ His description of the house is no exaggeration. The ground floor contains an office and small library (with books spilling into every nook and cranny elsewhere). The bathroom, once named the ‘Samuel Beckett memorial bathroom’ in honour of its spartan plumbing, featured in Peter Greenaway’s film, Inside Rooms: 26 Bathrooms, from 1985.

The first floor has a large painting studio.

A smaller, adjacent room (left) overlooks the jungle-like garden. An ardent recycler, Phillips has turned a variety of objects, from a child’s sledge to tangerine peel, into art. A truncated wooden cross, exactly as he found it in the street, is festooned with ‘quasi offerings, like a sort of fetish’. A still-life from Phillips’s student days and a recent pastel hang either side of the window.

He says this east-facing studio is ‘light and warm in the mornings. I tend to do sculpture, collage or special projects here.’ These include designing coins for the Royal Mint, including commemorations of Benjamin Britten and the 2012 Olympics, with a Shakespeare one planned.

His current preoccupation is with the mosaic ceiling for the Chapel of St George and the English Martyrs in Westminster Cathedral, reaching completion this year. Soon the black, vaulted ceiling will be bejewelled with 40 mosaic ‘flames’, each bearing a martyr’s name. Some are already installed.

The drawings for the ‘flames’ are visible on Phillips’s desk, amid Humument fragments, books, post, iPad, more coffee cups, more crumbs.

Does he ever dream of a clean white space?

No, and yes: he has a purpose-built studio nearby, designed by Eric Parry RA. ‘Like many artists in the 1980s, I was seduced by pictures of New York lofts, and I went in with Antony Gormley, then a near neighbour.’ But does Phillips use this airy haven? ‘Yes. It’s a perfect place for storing pictures and playing ping pong…’

Tom Phillips’s English Martyr Mosaics are installed in Westminster Cathedral during the course of this year, www.westminstercathedral.org.uk, www.tomphillips.co.uk

SPRING 2015 | RA MAGAZINE 43

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Japanese woodblock by Utagawa Kunisada 1861

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Academy Artists Epiphany LEFT Self Portrait at Night, 2015, by Chantal Joffe RA BELOW Hornet for Molloy, 2012, by Chris Fisher, who was Joffe’s tutor at the Royal College of Art

Me and my mentors

© CH A N TA L J O F F E R A /CO U R T ESY J ER WO O D G A L L ERY. © CH R IS F IS H ER . © S A R GY M A N N /CO U R T ESY CA D O G A N CO N T EM P O R A RY

In the latest in our series on turning points in artists’ careers, Chantal Joffe RA tells SAM PHILLIPS about the impact two teachers had on her work Appropriately for an artist famous for her paintings of figures, Chantal Joffe’s epiphanies involved people, specifically two men whose encouragement changed her life. She was 15 years old when she met the first, painter Sargy Mann (Lucas Gardens, c.1974, above right). It was 1985 and an art teacher at her Islington comprehensive had signed up Joffe to a summer art course funded by the Greater London Council.

‘I was one of a group of kids from inner-city schools who were taken to the countryside, near Seaford, to spend a week painting,’ she explains.

‘Sargy was the teacher. He gave us oils, brushes and easels, taught us how to make a palette, and took us outside to paint the landscape.’ In the evenings, he would show slides of French painting. ‘I can remember looking at a Monet and the ideas that Sargy was explaining seeming so fresh,’ she continues. ‘He taught us about how Monet painted paths in his pictures so that our eyes would walk into his paintings. He taught us about how the shadows in Bonnard were built up with different colours. It blew our minds.’

More significant than this wisdom was the respect with which Mann treated the teenagers.

‘I remember painting a bush and trying to make the shadow purple rather than black, like a Bonnard. It was a mess, but Sargy took it seriously. He talked to us like we were artists, and he had such humility.’ Sargy Mann’s eyesight was deteriorating at that time, but although he was soon to go blind, he has continued to paint.

‘I remember one evening, I was drawing on the lawn by myself, trying to draw the shadows crawling across the grass. I know this sounds a bit breathless, but the light was so incredibly beautiful – it was English early summer light across bright green grass – and I thought, “How could you ever want to do anything else but draw it?” In a funny way, all the time I’ve been an artist I’ve tried to get back to that feeling. Very rarely as an artist do you get that real ecstasy of painting – you are always chasing it.’

If Mann gave her ‘a glimpse of what painting could be’, she learnt the discipline she needed to develop her career from her MA tutor at the Royal College of Art, Chris Fisher (his diptych Hornet for Molloy, 2012, top right). ‘I was quite full of myself at that time, but Chris challenged me.

Why was I using those colours? Why that

BOTTOM Lucas Gardens, c.1974, by Sargy Mann, who led a summer course in painting that Joffe attended as a teenager

size of board? Why only one figure and not two figures or no figures at all? I realised I had got mentally lazy. My style had become stale, as I had stopped asking why I was painting something.’

One question that cut through was Fisher’s first: ‘Are you going to paint from life your whole career?’ They discussed painting from photographs instead of models, and, because Joffe wanted to paint nudes, she decided to use pornography as a source. Shy of buying some herself, Joffe went with Fisher to Soho to find some magazines, before they visited Tate’s show of Picasso sculpture in the afternoon. Working from photographs refined Joffe’s practice, giving her distance from her subjects. Even in her latest self-portraits, one of which is on view in her solo show at the Jerwood Gallery, Hastings (Self Portrait at Night, 2015, above left), she retains a distance, thanks to the discipline Fisher taught her. ‘I’m almost in a frenzy when I paint them, but because they’re in such intense colours, I can’t indulge myself.

And I think of Chris and hear him telling me not to be complacent.’

Chantal Joffe: Beside the Seaside Jerwood Gallery, Hastings, 01424 728377, www.jerwoodgallery.org, until 12 April To see a video interview with Joffe about her Jerwood show, visit http://roy.ac/joffe

SPRING 2015 | RA MAGAZINE 45

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Academy Artists

Poppy appeal Cornelia Parker RA’s new installation recalling Remembrance Day is a highlight of her show at the Whitworth Gallery, says ELEANOR MILLS

© CO R N EL I A PA R K ER / P H OTO DAV I D L E V EN E /CO U R T ESY O F T H E W H I T WO R T H . © A N T H O N Y GR EEN

War Room, 2015, by Cornelia Parker RA, installed at the refurbished Whitworth Gallery, Manchester

‘There were poppies as far as the eye could see,’ says Cornelia Parker RA of her recent trip to Aylesford in Kent. But she is not talking about real flowers. She is recalling a visit to the village’s huge factory that produces paper poppies for Remembrance Day. This led to her new work War Room (2015, above), on view as part of her survey show at the newly refurbished Whitworth Gallery in Manchester.

Each year, over 40 million poppies are punched from rolls of red paper before being distributed across the world, but it is not the poppies themselves that Parker is interested in.

She has taken the rolls of punched paper from the factory and layered them to create a tent-like

poppy room. It is not hard to be moved by what those poppy-shaped holes represent – just like any memento mori, the effect is thought provoking but tremendously sobering.

The earliest sculpture on view in the show is Cold Dark Matter (1991), Parker’s massive mobile of an exploded shed. But the exhibition also takes in her impressive drawings, embroideries, video work (including War Machine, a new film of the aforementioned poppy factory), her stringwrapped version of Rodin’s The Kiss, photographs of statues with nets over them and even an artwork in the form of an opening event.

Blakean Abstract (2015) began the Whitworth’s show with a bang. Parker worked with graphene,

a new super-conductive material made from a one-atom-thick layer of graphite. She collaborated closely with Konstantin Novoselov, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2010 for his work on graphene together with Andre Geim. Parker gained permission for the scientist to collect graphite particles from works in the Whitworth’s huge collection of Old Master drawings, including particles from a drawing by William Blake.

From this graphite Novoselov made graphene, which he then used to trigger the fireworks to mark the opening of the show. The idea of ‘a physicist controlling nature to a prescribed time and date’ captivates Parker. And together with the fireworks, Parker blasted a chunk of meteor – gathered from the giant Arizona crater – into the sky. ‘William Blake writes about meteors in his book America, A Prophecy,’ Parker continues, ‘so the idea of an American meteorite landing in Manchester was rather appealing.’

Parker’s layering of concepts is complex, and her project in response to the Magna Carta’s 800th anniversary is no exception. She is creating an embroidered version of the document, commissioned by the British Library to coincide with its show on the subject. Parker wants to capture ‘a contemporary snapshot of where the debate about Magna Carta is right now’, so the work will represent the Wikipedia page on the document’s 799th birthday on 15 June 2014.

Since that date, Parker has been busy asking people from all walks of life, from all over Britain and the Commonwealth – from prisoners and parishioners to celebrities and solicitors – to sew designated sections. The result, Parker explains, will be a long scroll that is ‘a testimony to the hours spent making, and to a history unpicked.’

Cornelia Parker Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, 0161 2757450, www.manchester.ac.uk/whitworth, until 31 May Magna Carta (An Embroidery) British Library, London, 0330 333 1144, www.bl.uk, 15 May–24 July, on view as part of the exhibition Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy 13 March–1 Sep To watch a video of Cornelia Parker RA at her exhibition at the Whitworth Gallery, visit http://roy.ac/parkerwhitworth

Domestic bliss PAUL GREENHALGH hails Anthony Green RA’s transformations of the everyday Some artists eschew anything we might see in the world; others make poetry from what they see in front of them. Anthony Green RA is such an artist. Through the last decades he has painted the knick-knacks in his life – his home, furnishings, sheds, cutlery, ornaments, plumbing – making them into symbols of his life, his affections, and his loves. His unusually shaped canvases (Monbretia, the Reflection, 2009, right) are self-portraits and autobiographies combined, and, as such, they create a self-contained universe.

The Curwen Gallery’s new show explores Green’s domestic world. He meticulously records the spaces he occupies in what has become his definitive style. Humorous and melancholic, his work is an homage to normative existence, and achieves a timelessness by living in the intimacy of the now.

Anthony Green Curwen and New Academy Gallery, London, 020 7323 4700, www.curwengallery.com, 5–28 March

Monbretia, the Reflection, 2009,

by Anthony Green RA

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Passage to the Golden Earth A unique voyage exploring the Andaman Islands, Myanmar and the Mergui Archipelago Aboard the Silver Discoverer - 19th November to 2nd December 2016 BANGLADESH

Norman Lewis, regarded by many as one of our greatest travel writers visited Burma some sixty odd years ago and soon after published ‘Golden Earth’. This wonderfully poignant work still resonates today and is essential reading for anyone contemplating a visit to this beautiful and enigmatic land. There is no doubt that for the cultural traveller, Myanmar is the jewel of Southeast Asia and we are delighted to have chartered the 120-passenger Silver Discoverer for this unique voyage which offers the opportunity to explore the country‘s cultural wonders combined with calls into the southern Mergui Archipelago, a pristine collection of islands where tourists are a rarity and the only possible means of exploration is small ship. Our voyage in November is perfectly timed, the weather may be cold at home but will be warm and sunny for our exploration.

Imphal

Bagan

MYANMAR Bago Yangon

With its ancient civilisation, its Buddhist culture, its traditional life-style, golden pagodas and sublime hospitality, ANDAMAN the ‘Golden Land’ of Burma offers a stark contrast to major cities, to Western expectations and to mass SEA tourism. There is no other Asian country with such a vast and varied range of cultural sites and our itinerary ANDAMAN Ritchies Archipelago ISLANDS includes highlights such as bustling Yangon known as the ‘city of Peace’ where we will visit the impressive Mergui Neill Island Archipelago reclining Buddha and the most sacred Golden Pagoda which overlooks the city. Enjoy the sheer beauty of Port Blair Bagan, surrounded by the most significant pagodas and temples and explore the local markets selling fresh fruits, nuts, fish, flowers, wood carvings, fabrics, longyis and rattan products. After our days ashore which will be filled with new impressions and remarkable sights and as the sunlight fades in the early evening and disappears behind a golden pagoda, one can understand why the country is often called “Mystical Myanmar”, a land of beauty and promise.

THAILAND Phuket

Upon leaving Yangon we sail for the rarely visited Mergui Archipelago and end our voyage surrounded by pristine beaches perfect for beachcombing, snorkelling or simply relaxing. Our unusual itinerary will appeal to those looking for something different, incorporating explorations of remote archipelagos with a more expedition focus with a fascinating look at the cultural highlights of Myanmar.

Special offer prices per person based on double occupancy start from £6895 for an Explorer Suite and include economy class scheduled air travel, overnight hotel accommodation in Phuket, 11 nights aboard the Silver Discoverer on a full board basis, all drinks whilst onboard, shore excursions, Expedition Team, transfers and all gratuities.

NB. Ports and itinerary subject to change. Travel insurance and visas are not included in the price.

All special offers are subject to availability and 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

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Academy Artists

Now showing

Sculptors

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

● Stephen Cox’s new sculpture Relief:

Figures Emerging has been unveiled at 8 St James’s Square, London ● Tony Cragg has a solo show at Buchmann Gallery, Berlin (21 March–25 April) ● Antony Gormley’s ‘Land’, comprising five life-size standing sculptures installed at five UK sites, opens on 16 May ● Nigel Hall’s solo show is at Galerie Scheffel, Bad Homberg, Germany (7 May–20 June). He and David Nash show in ‘British Art +’ at Museum Biedermann in Donaueschingen, Germany (until 20 Sep)

● Anish Kapoor shows new work at

Lisson Gallery, London (25 March–9 May) ● Bryan Kneale shows sculpture and drawings at Pangolin London (25 March–2 May; below) ● Richard Long shows his new print series ‘The Spike Island Tapes’ at Alan Cristea, London (until 2 April) ● New RA Cathie Pilkington contributes to ‘Good Figures’ at Jerwood Gridshell Space, Weald & Downland Open Air Museum, Chichester (25 April–3 May) ● Conrad Shawcross takes part in ‘Da Vinci: Shaping the Future’ at ArtScience Museum, Singapore (until 17 May) ● Yinka Shonibare shows photo works at William Morris Gallery, London (until 7 June), and takes part in ‘Staying Power: Photographs of Black British Experience, 1950s–1990s’ at the V&A, London (until 24 May). He also has solo shows in New York at James Cohan Gallery (30 April–20 June) and MorrisJumel Mansion (1 May–31 Aug) ● William Tucker has a solo show at the Buchmann Gallery, Berlin (1 May–27 June) ● Antony Gormley and Yinka Shonibare take part in ‘Self’ at Turner Contemporary, Margate (until 10 May), alongside Tracey Emin, David Hockney and Gillian Wearing.

Painters and Printmakers ● Gillian Ayres has a solo show at Alan

Cristea, London (14 April–30 May) ● Elizabeth Blackadder shows work

at Browse & Darby, London (until 19 March; above) ● Frank Bowling shows his ‘Map Paintings’ at the Dallas Museum of Art (until 2 Aug) and also shows at the Spritmuseum, Stockholm (until 6 April) ● Eileen Cooper has a solo show at Rabley Drawing Centre, Marlborough (18 May–19 June) ● ‘Where I want to go: Tracey Emin and Egon Schiele’ is at the Leopold Museum, Vienna (24 April–14 Sep) ● Grayson Perry’s solo show ‘Who are You?’ is at the National Portrait Gallery, London (until 15 March) ● Hughie O’ Donoghue has a solo show at Marlborough Fine Art, London (15 April–5 June) ● ‘Fiona Rae: Monochrome Works’ is at Timothy Taylor, London (15 April–23 May) ● New RA Rebecca Salter shows at Beardsmore Gallery, London (14 May–6 June), and Howard Scott, New York (16 April–25 May) ● Sean Scully shows at the Palazzo Falier, Venice (9 May–22 Nov), to coincide with the Biennale ● Emma Stibbon is exhibiting at the Polar Museum, Cambridge (11 June–5 Sep) ● New RA Rose Wylie shows at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (6 March–13 May) ● Tony Bevan, Timothy Hyman and Christopher Le Brun contribute to a show of works

CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP LEFT

Irises, 2011, by Elizabeth Blackadder; Polyphemus, 2000, by Bryan Kneale; the oculus at the Fulton Transit Center, New York,

by Grimshaw; Untitled No. 29, 1963, by Paul Huxley

on paper at Clifford Chance Gallery, London (9 March–24 April; by appointment) ● David Hockney, Paul Huxley (above), Allen Jones and Phillip King take part in ‘A Slice of the Sixties’ at the Setareh Gallery, Dusseldorf (20 March–9 May) ● Eileen Cooper, Gus Cummins, Anthony Eyton, Peter Freeth, Anthony Green, Paul Huxley, Timothy Hyman, Neil Jeffries, Sonia Lawson, Christopher Le Brun, Chris Orr, Mick Rooney and Anthony Whishaw all show at Wolfson College, Cambridge (until 19 Dec).

Architects ● Ron Arad is collaborating with artist Guy Bar-Amotz to make an architectural foam labyrinth for a performance work by Jasmin Vardimon Company, Maze, to be staged at the Winter Gardens, Margate (10–15 April) ● Edward Cullinan’s firm is to redevelop a housing estate in Gospel Oak, London, to provide 112 dwellings. Work at the National Automotive Innovation Centre at the University of Warwick is nearing completion ● Nicholas Grimshaw’s practice Grimshaw Architects has completed the Fulton Transit Center in Lower Manhattan.

The new metro interchange connects 11 subway lines and the oculus (above) was designed in partnership with Arup and James Carpenter Design Associates ● Contemporary seating designed by Thomas Heatherwick is on show at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire (28 March–23 Oct) ● Ian Ritchie’s firm is to design a masterplan for a mixed-use commercial development in Malta with a capacity of 100,000 people ● Chris Wilkinson’s firm Wilkinson Eyre has renovated Oxford’s Weston Library (formerly known as the New Bodleian Library), which has its official opening in March. The practice’s Bath Rugby Stadium redevelopment is due for completion this year.

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The crystalline light and urban landscape of California provided a doorway into painting for Richard Diebenkorn Hon RA. As the Academy celebrates the American master, painter Ian McKeever RA explores Diebenkorn’s profound inquiry into the nature of abstraction

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Painting on the threshold

LEFT Ocean Park #79, 1975, by Richard Diebenkorn

Paint is slippery stuff. It drips, pours, spreads, pools, thickens, thins, slips and slides; once out of the tube or can, it is almost formless. Unlike most materials used by artists, which retain something of their inherent form in the making process, giving the artist an intrinsic structure to build upon, paint, its fluidity, rubs right up against the artist’s sensibility.

This makes for a raw engagement, one often difficult for the painter to get their hands on. Much of painting’s history over the last 200 years has been about this predicament: paint’s illusive nature and how the artist either tames it, or lets it run wild. For paint either heats up the artist’s temperament, encourages excess, or else it is held in stasis by the artist, somehow stilled as it is applied to the canvas. Either way, most painters struggle with this beast in one way or another. For painting is first and foremost a declaration and display of temperament. Before all else, it is this we feel when we engage as a viewer with a painting.

The American artist Richard Diebenkorn Hon RA painted Ocean Park #79 (left) in 1975.

It is one of an extensive group of abstract paintings, all with the title Ocean Park, which he made between 1967 and 1985, eight years prior to his death in 1993. They evolved, one leading to the next, their collective identity slowly becoming discernible with time. There are now 125 such paintings. They represent what is considered to be the third and last phase of Diebenkorn’s oeuvre, the ‘Ocean Park’ series having been preceded by an overtly figurative middle period, which itself followed on from an early phase of work. These early paintings were again abstract, however in a different way to the later ‘Ocean Park’ series, in that they were more rooted in the biomorphic forms of the Abstract Expressionists, more specifically in the work of fellow Americans, the painters Arshile Gorky and Robert Motherwell.

If the early abstract works by Diebenkorn are composed of flowing interlocking forms, then the ‘Ocean Park’ series is distinctly angular and urban. Although appearing counter intuitive, in going from abstraction, to figuration, then back again to abstraction, the trajectory of Diebenkorn’s work does in fact pursue a clear inquiry into the nature of what, in painting, abstraction might be.

By contemporary standards, in comparison to, say, the consciously theatrical mega-pictures of Anselm Kiefer Hon RA or David Hockney RA,

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Cityscape #1, 1963 Untitled, 1954 OPPOSITE PAGE Ocean Park #27, 1970 RIGHT

Ocean Park #79 is not a big painting. It measures 236.2cm x 205.7cm. Indeed its size could be said to hold a relative modesty, a characteristic common to Diebenkorn’s work. Higher and wider than a doorway, yet still having a sense of the scale of the human body, perhaps the height and width of a man with arms raised high or spread wide, this human scale seems important to the painting. Indeed the paintings in Diebenkorn’s ‘Ocean Park’ series seem actively to want to pull us back to our own physical place in the world, to find an intimate contact with the viewer, whereby it becomes a specific one-to-one, body-to-body relationship. The body that is the painting and the body that is our own.

A painting is a door. It is also a threshold.

Grace Hartigan, the American painter, said, ‘I want a surface that resists, like a wall, not opens like a gate.’ We could say that one of the fundamental differences between American and European painting is how space is handled.

American painting tends to be flatter, the image,

if there is one, more emblematic, a quality typified in something like Jasper Johns Hon RA’s ‘Flag’ paintings or the stylized still-lives of, for example, Wayne Thiebaud. Space in European painting, on the other hand, tends to be more nuanced, and there is greater spacial depth. Diebenkorn is often referred to as having a European sensibility because of his use of space. The paintings in the ‘Ocean Park’ series do have a flatness to them, as has all his work, yet at the same time the space in them is finely nuanced, oscillating between the sensation of looking down, as in an aerial view, while at the same time looking straight ahead, suggesting a doorway, a space we can enter.

A pronounced vertical and horizontal view is presented to us. In most of the ‘Ocean Park’ paintings horizontal bands are running predominantly across the upper part of the painting, these being met either by vertical columns or a more open, generalised space, imbuing the paintings with a strong architectural feel (Ocean Park #116, 1979, page 54). One is

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B R O O K LY N M US EU M . GI F T O F T H E R O EB L I N G S O CI E T Y A N D M R . A N D M RS . CH A R L ES H . B L AT T A N D M R . A N D M RS . W I L L I A M K . JACO B S , J R . 72.4/© 2015 T H E R I CH A R D D I EB EN KO R N F O U N DAT I O N

‘One senses strongly the dry brittle light of where the desert meets the ocean’

P R E V I O US S P R E A D: P H I L A D EL P H I A M US EU M O F A R T. P U R CH AS ED W I T H A GR A N T F R O M T H E N AT I O N A L EN D OW M EN T F O R T H E A R TS A N D W I T H F U N DS CO N T R I B U T ED BY P R I VAT E D O N O RS , 1977/© 2015 T H E R I CH A R D D I EB EN KO R N FO U N DAT I O N . T H IS PAGE: S A N F R A N CIS CO M US EU M O F M O D ER N A R T. P U R CH AS E W I T H F U N DS F R O M T RUS T EES A N D F R I EN DS I N M EM O RY O F H ECTO R ES CO B OS A , B R AY TO N W I L B U R , A N D J . D. ZEL L ER B ACH /© 2015 T H E R I CH A R D D I EB EN KO R N F O U N DAT I O N . CO L L ECT I O N O F EL L I E B L A N K FO R T A N D P E T ER CLOT H I ER /© 2015 T H E R I CH A R D D I EB EN KO R N F O U N DAT I O N

BELOW

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B R O O K LY N M US EU M . GI F T O F T H E R O EB L I N G S O CI E T Y A N D M R . A N D M RS . CH A R L ES H . B L AT T A N D M R . A N D M RS . W I L L I A M K . JACO B S , J R . 72.4/© 2015 T H E R I CH A R D D I EB EN KO R N F O U N DAT I O N

FO U N DAT I O N . T H IS PAGE: S A N F R A N CIS CO M US EU M O F M O D ER N A R T. P U R CH AS E W I T H F U N DS F R O M T RUS T EES A N D F R I EN DS I N M EM O RY O F H ECTO R ES CO B OS A , B R AY TO N W I L B U R , A N D J . D. ZEL L ER B ACH /© 2015 T H E R I CH A R D D I EB EN KO R N F O U N DAT I O N . CO L L ECT I O N O F EL L I E B L A N K FO R T A N D P E T ER CLOT H I ER /© 2015 T H E R I CH A R D D I EB EN KO R N F O U N DAT I O N

begin with something visually realistic in the world, and then somehow modify it, simplify it away from its original recognisable form. But are there other ways to understand abstraction?

In his book, Early Christian Art (1967), Frederic van der Meer writes of, ‘this constant double image – prefiguration and fulfilment, shadow and reality, past and present…’, words which are redolent with the complexities of attempting to paint an abstract painting. For the painting must find itself, and hold itself, in a condition whereby figuration is never declared and fulfilment is withheld, yet it must suggest a presence; a precarious state, a sort of waiting to be.

The term ‘prefiguration’, as used by Van Der Meer, is perhaps helpful in understanding the nature of the abstract in Diebenkorn’s late works.

If our conventional understanding of abstraction in painting is that the image somehow moves away from the concrete object, be it a chair, an apple or indeed the human body, becoming in the process more ‘abstract’, then prefiguration suggests something prior to the object actually being perceived. A kind of painting that is formed in the artist’s mind before the concrete world appears. This is perhaps what Diebenkorn referred to as ‘not representing’. Certainly in the architectonic spaces set up in the ‘Ocean Park’ paintings, there is a sense of expectancy, as if the space is waiting for the figure to materialise, to come into being. Yet, curiously enough, we somehow know it will not arrive, and the empty space in the paintings takes on a significance whereby absence becomes more weighted than presence (Ocean Park #43, 1971, opposite).

This pregnant space is not new to painting. One need only think of Simone Martini’s incredibly beautiful painting, from 1333, of the Annunciation

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It is by light, I come to know you.

It is by breath.

It is by light, I come to know you.

Peter Levitt, A Book of Light (1982)

Paintings either breathe in, or they breathe out. One only needs to look at the large brooding painting by Sean Scully RA, Doric Night (2011), currently on display in the Academicians’ Room, to see that it is sucking in air as fast as one can breathe. And the light too. In Diebenkorn’s paintings, especially the ‘Ocean Park’ series, one senses strongly the dry brittle light of where the desert meets the ocean. A crystalline light, noticeably different to the moisture-softened light we have here on the British Isles. Diebenkorn said, ‘I arrive at the light only after painting in it, not by aiming for it.’ For the painting to hold the light, as opposed to depicting it by the means of chiaroscuro and shading, would seem to be what Diebenkorn is aiming for. A state in which the space in the painting is self-illuminating, almost transcendent. Such omnipresent light takes us back to Italian Duecento and Trecento painting, to a light before the slant of the shadow and human tainting. A time when form was in pure colour.

The American painter Willem de Kooning, when asked about abstraction in painting, said it was the smile on a Dutch man’s face. Georgia O’Keeffe, another American artist, when asked about an abstract drawing she had made, replied that it was about a headache. Our usual understanding of abstraction in art is that artists

F I N E A R TS M US EU MS O F S A N F R A N CIS CO. M US EU M P U R CH AS E , GI F T O F M RS . PAU L L . WAT T IS/© 2015 T H E R I CH A R D D I EB EN KO R N F O U N DAT I O N . © 2015 P H OTO S CA L A , F LO R EN CE

reminded of the look of the frescoes of Pompeii, or of some early Italian painting, where figures meet architectural features and both become subsumed in a broader composition, attaining, as Roberto Longhi wrote in reference to Piero della Francesca (right), a reduction back to ‘demonstrations of surfaces’.

It is curious that the more paint one puts on a painting, builds the surface up, the less depth the painting has. It reverts to becoming material, flat paint. After all, a blob of paint is first and foremost just that, a blob of paint. It is also often the case that as a painter gets older, the application of paint gets thinner, more sparse. Think of the late paintings of Edvard Munch or Henri Matisse.

Less becomes more, and transparency begins to annul the materiality of paint. With Diebenkorn’s ‘Ocean Park’ paintings the accretion of transparent thin washes of paint gives the paintings a sense of inner space and light.

Legend of the True Cross: Annunciation, c.1452,

by Piero della Francesca, in the Church of San Francesco, Arezzo OPPOSITE PAGE, BELOW Ocean Park #116, 1979

G A L L ER I A D EGL I U F F IZI , F LO R EN CE , I TA LY/ B R I D GEM A N I M AGES . CO L L ECT I O N O F GR E TCH EN A N D J O H N B ER GGRU EN , S A N F R A N CIS CO/© 2015 T H E R I CH A R D D I EB EN KO R N F O U N DAT I O N

F I N E A R TS M US EU MS O F S A N F R A N CIS CO. M US EU M P U R CH AS E , GI F T O F M RS . PAU L L . WAT T IS/© 2015 T H E R I CH A R D D I EB EN KO R N F O U N DAT I O N . © 2015 P H OTO S CA L A , F LO R EN CE

OPPOSITE PAGE, TOP

THIS PAGE, LEFT

The Annunciation with Two Saints and Four Prophets, 1333, by Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi, in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence THIS PAGE, BELOW LEFT Ocean Park #43, 1971

in the Uffizi in Florence. Flanked on the left side by the Archangel Gabriel and to the right the unsuspecting Virgin, the empty central area of the painting is, literally, pregnant with expectation (left). The Annunciation’s ‘abstractness’ is the subject of the painting.

Perhaps related to this is a sense of time. For paintings are as much about holding time, their own time, as they are about form and space. The time it takes for apparently empty, abstract space to begin to hold potential meaning or the waiting for meaning to configure itself. Of course, wedded to this is also a sense of stillness, a slowing down. Have you noticed how fast-painted paintings are seldom quiet, rarely hold still? The art critic Adrian Stokes wrote, ‘The great work of art is surrounded by silence.’ One senses in the ‘Ocean Park’ series that this was something Diebenkorn was striving for, to still the painting, whereby we too, as viewers, are invited to be still.

They are meditative paintings, in no rush to reveal themselves. Paintings that need time.

In our contemporary world of ceaseless moving images, where pictures bounce forth to meet us as soon as we get up in the morning, there is a fundamental question of what painting is for today. Many contemporary painters now embrace the new technologies and the pace of the modern visual world, run with the pack so to speak. Indeed much of postmodernism’s raison d’être has been about assimilating the canon of painting into its fold. However, for some painters, and Diebenkorn is certainly among them, there is always one fundamental question: what is specific to painting, sovereign to painting, that allows it to find its own place in the world? To stand alone, to be of itself, above and beyond references to other visual media, whereby we are left with no crutches, but have to face the painting emphatically as painting.

This question asked now, in an art world that is so self-consciously knowing, and where a belief in painting per se is treated with scepticism, might appear naïve. Yet the question is still pertinent, and the reason why the paintings of Richard Diebenkorn are so relevant.

Richard Diebenkorn Sackler Wing of Galleries, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 020 7300 8000, www.royalacademy.org.uk, 14 March–7 June.

2009-2016 Season supported by JTI. Supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art. See Readers’ Offers page 88 for a discount on the catalogue. See Events and Lectures pages 73-75.

To read painter Barbara Rae RA’s recollections of Richard Diebenkorn, visit http://roy.ac/rae

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Jenny Saville: In my teens. My uncle is an art historian and he encouraged me to look at paintings from history. He took me to Venice for the summers, so Titian was the first artist that I started to look at closely. Then I went to Amsterdam to see Rembrandt, and Rembrandt then led me to Rubens. I also started looking at Picasso, and I realised that there were things in Picasso which refer to Rubens, so it became something like a pinball machine, where I went from one artist to another and a dialogue started.

There are many aspects of Rubens’s technique that, frankly, any artist would want to steal. His oil studies are absolutely amazing [opposite] and his drawings are phenomenal. Studies are the things that pass through time better than anything else. With a number of Rubens’s studies, there are whole areas of washed-in canvas or washed-in panel, but then he has just made a little drawing mark, which feels like the paintings of today. Our eyes are used to that approach. It’s something that’s been reinforced for me as I’ve been looking at Rubens during this exhibition.

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A conversation with Rubens

Tim Marlow: When did you start to look at Rubens’s work seriously?

P R I VAT E CO L L ECT I O N /© J EN N Y S AV I L L E . A L L R I GH TS R ES ER V ED, DAC S 2015/ P H OTO M I K E B RU CE /CO U R T ESY G AGOS I A N G A L L ERY

Rubens’s influence on painting extends right up to today, as a room curated by Jenny Saville RA for ‘Rubens and His Legacy’ reveals. Tim Marlow asks the painter about her response to the Flemish master as both artist and curator

M Ü N CH EN , B AY ER IS CH E S TA ATS GEM Ä L D ES A M M LU N GEN - A LT E P I N A KOT H EK / P H OTO © B P K | B AY ER IS CH E S TA ATS GEM Ä L D ES A M M LU N GEN

P R I VAT E CO L L ECT I O N /© J EN N Y S AV I L L E . A L L R I GH TS R ES ER V ED, DAC S 2015/ P H OTO M I K E B RU CE /CO U R T ESY G AGOS I A N G A L L ERY

OPPOSITE PAGE

Voice of the Shuttle (Philomela), 2014-15,

by Jenny Saville RA THIS PAGE Recto. A Lion Hunt, 1621-22,

by Peter Paul Rubens

One of the problems I have with Rubens is how flouncy he can be. At times there are just too many puffy sleeves and rosy cheeks and his work lacks a poetic mystery. That’s why I like the oil studies so much. There are passages of quiet, suggestive paint and then a flurry of brushwork that describes form in an almost abstract way.

There can be a melancholic atmosphere to the studies that’s absent in the large canvases. His great strength in the large works is composition.

He can orchestrate twisted torsos, limbs and cloth into a believable painterly mass. If you look at Massacre of the Innocents, that’s an incredible feat of painterly engineering.

TM: Like so many clichés, there’s a truth in the one about Rubens: that he is a painter’s painter. But is his painterliness the most important thing?

JS: It’s his intellect that I like in the oil studies.

In these studies there are passages of nothingness that make them feel modern. I look at abstract painting and figurative painting with the same eyes, and when I look at a more full-on Rubens painting, taking in all of its aspects, I often think it has a relationship with a very fulsome abstract painting, like the De Kooning in this

room [page 59]. Figurative paintings today, or from the recent past, tend not to be so fulsome.

De Kooning and Rubens are alike because of the nature of their paint – the movement of their mark-making – and the nature of their vulgarity.

But when you discuss Rubens, you’re talking about somebody who was making art before film and photography, at a time when the Church was paying artists to promote the Counter Reformation. Rubens was commissioned to put religious subjects in his paintings, but now we’ve taken all those subjects out because God doesn’t exist for many artists any more. What exists is our nature and the nature of painting, which has dominated artists’ thoughts since the 1940s or ’50s, basically since Pollock declared, ‘I am nature’. The game has changed for painters, so you’ve got to consider what Rubens’s game was at that time – it wasn’t as empty as it is now. That’s why Bacon seemed so relevant to include in this room, as he fits with our modern existential ideas [page 58].

TM: Within your choice of artists for this room, you have included Warhol [page 59].

JS: His work doesn’t have a technical relationship to Rubens in the way that De Kooning’s does.

Warhol’s relationship with Rubens is through their shared subject matter and their persona as artists with factory-style studios.

Warhol is also connected to my title for the room, ‘La Peregrina’. La Peregrina was a pearl that was renowned in the Spanish Court. Rubens painted a portrait, around 1625, of Elisabeth of France, Queen of Spain, wearing the pearl – and it featured in many other portraits by artists of the time, including Velázquez. The pearl then travelled to France and to Napoleon, and then the English Court. Then it disappeared, until about 1968, when Richard Burton bought it for Elizabeth Taylor. That led me to Andy Warhol, because he famously painted Elizabeth Taylor.

The pearl that wandered from painter to painter – La Peregrina means ‘the wanderer’ – sums up the conversation between artists and Rubens in this room.

TM: Would you say that Picasso is a case apart in this conversation?

JS: Yes, Picasso famously didn’t like, or said he didn’t like, Rubens. He thought Rubens had great facility but didn’t use it well. But as an artist Picasso is heavily influenced by Rubens.

Just think of his paintings of Marie-Thérèse

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TM: Is there a direct conversation between your own work and Rubens, or is it more mediated, say, through De Kooning and his relationship to Rubens?

JS: The conversation moves around. When I work, there will be art-history books all open on the floor of my studio. There will be a detail of a De Kooning painting, Picasso’s Guernica, Rembrandt’s Descent from the Cross, and a book that looks at the technique of Rubens, and all those images are buzzing around me at the same time. I sit down in between periods of painting and I look at images and make connections.

The historical period in which a work was created has no relevance. Whether it’s a curve of a bull’s head from the caves of Lascaux or the loop of a breast on a De Kooning woman, if I see it, I can use it. I don’t see my conversation with artworks as a sequence, moving from here to there in a conceptual way. I see the conversation as a poetic movement from eye to hand co-ordination, one which has an energy and potential for the way I work.

TM: What about your painting, Voice of the Shuttle (Philomela) [page 56], which you have made specifically for this exhibition?

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WAV E: WO LV ER H A M P TO N A R T G A L L ERY/ I M AGE CO U R T ESY O F WAV E , WO LV ER H A M P TO N A R T G A L L ERY/© 2015 T H E A N DY WA R H O L FO U N DAT I O N F O R T H E V IS UA L A R TS , I N C . /A R T IS TS R I GH TS

Walter – the sumptuousness, the twisting and turning of a torso, the inventiveness. If there was ever a misshapen pearl in the history of art, it’s Marie-Thérèse. Rubens made artists paint greater works of their own, whether or not they liked his work. Rembrandt became a better artist by looking at Rubens, as did Picasso. Even if you as a viewer don’t like all of Rubens, you may like what Rubens helped other artists to do. That’s the critical issue with this show: the dialogue between artists and the conversation that the viewer has with it.

M U R D ER M E / P H OTO CO U R T ESY O F M U R D ER M E /© S A R A H LU CAS/CO U R T ESY O F S A D I E CO L ES H Q , LO N D O N . P R I VAT E CO L L ECT I O N /© T H E ES TAT E O F F R A N CIS B ACO N /A L L R I GH TS R ES ER V ED/ DAC S 2015

‘There is a vulgar truth to Rubens’s nudes and there is the same truth in this work by Sarah Lucas. It absolutely nails what it is to have a female body’

Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, 1992, by Sarah Lucas BOTTOM Self-Portrait, 1973, by Francis Bacon

WAV E: WO LV ER H A M P TO N A R T G A L L ERY/ I M AGE CO U R T ESY O F WAV E , WO LV ER H A M P TO N A R T G A L L ERY/© 2015 T H E A N DY WA R H O L FO U N DAT I O N F O R T H E V IS UA L A R TS , I N C . /A R T IS TS R I GH TS S O CI E T Y ( A RS), N E W YO R K A N D DAC S , LO N D O N . F O N DAT I O N H U R B ER T LO OS ER , Z U R I CH /© T H E W I L L EM D E KO O N I N G F O U N DAT I O N , N E W YO R K /A RS , N Y A N D DAC S , LO N D O N 2015

M U R D ER M E / P H OTO CO U R T ESY O F M U R D ER M E /© S A R A H LU CAS/CO U R T ESY O F S A D I E CO L ES H Q , LO N D O N . P R I VAT E CO L L ECT I O N /© T H E ES TAT E O F F R A N CIS B ACO N /A L L R I GH TS R ES ER V ED/ DAC S 2015

OPPOSITE PAGE, TOP

THIS PAGE, BELOW Jacqueline, 1964,

by Andy Warhol RIGHT Untitled IX, 1970-71,

by Willem de Kooning

JS: It is based around the myth of Philomela.

Rubens’s The Banquet of Tereus (1636-37), now in the Prado, shows a key moment of this complicated myth, told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

There are two sisters, Procne and Philomela, and Philomela is raped by Procne’s husband, King Tereus. He cuts out Philomela’s tongue when she protests against the rape and keeps her in a shack for a year, going back and continuing to rape her. Procne thinks that Philomela is dead, but Philomela weaves a tapestry on a loom and sends it to Procne – Philomela’s voice becomes what Sophocles called the ‘voice of the shuttle’ in the loom going back and forth.

Procne and Philomela kill Itys, the son of Tereus and Procne, in revenge. They cook up the body and feed it to the husband, the rapist. They feed him his son and he doesn’t know it – he eats Itys during a Bacchanalian feast. Rubens paints the moments where Tereus says, ‘Bring me my son’, and they say, ‘Well, your son is inside you’, holding up the severed head of Itys.

Can you imagine charging a painting with that myth now? The viewer just wouldn’t buy into it, so I have tried to find another way to work with this myth. I became interested in the the shuttle going back and forth, and its idea of speechlessness, in particular the speechlessness of an artist involved in depicting violence and rape, the need to depict the layers of such a story without being sensational.

I’ve never really made a narrative painting before, so the way that I’ve approached it here is by putting all the narrative in a mass of figures in the foreground, so you feel the narrative within that mass. That approach actually comes from Leonardo and the way he made drawings of black masses from the figures of the Mother and Child, although it’s a new development in my work.

TM: Rubens’s connection with De Kooning can be seen in the visceral painting process.

How does Rubens link to Sarah Lucas’s Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab [1992, opposite]?

JS: It’s the vulgarity. There is a vulgar truth to Rubens’s nudes, and there is the same truth in this work by Lucas. It absolutely nails what it is to have a female body – the fact that the image of the body is repeated in the head. When people look at the artists in history who represented nudes, then Rubens is in the top five, but this piece by Lucas should be thought of as one of the greatest nudes of our time. I thought it was a fantastic sculpture when I first saw it, and it often comes into my mind.

TM: Why do you think it is difficult for us to consider Rubens in a contemporary context?

JS: It comes back to the fact that Rubens existed before film and photography. Imagine the experience of seeing his altarpiece The Descent of the Cross [1612-14] without having ever seen a photograph – it would be like magic, the way it depicts a body falling from the Cross so realistically. It’s harder to understand Rubens today now that we have so many photographic images – everyone’s got a camera phone. So you have to come to Rubens in a slightly different way and that’s what this room in the show is about. It’s about the struggle of doing what Rubens was doing as an artist before photography, and the way this relates to the struggle of other great artists since.

TM: I’m also curious about the cultural changes during the 20th and 21st centuries that have meant that there is a difference in the way that Rubens is perceived.

JS: Whatever date a painting is made, it has to live for us in the present. Caravaggio is hot

now but he was forgotten for centuries after his death. Even Vermeer hasn’t always been loved as much as he is now. African sculpture was not always considered art. In 200 years Picasso may no longer be seen as the greatest artist of the 20th century. We shift our lens according to our time and we always have done. I think Rubens hasn’t fitted with our sensibilities for a long time, as our emphasis has been on something different – for instance the grubby humanity of Caravaggio. In 50 years we might be looking at and talking about someone like Bronzino more than Caravaggio.

Hopefully, ‘Rubens and his Legacy’ will re-engage more of us with Rubens. It shows how Rubens helped Rembrandt with his own Descent from the Cross, how Rubens helped Picasso with his own etching, the fact that Cy Twombly would have looked at Rubens’s Bacchanalian feasts before painting his own ‘Bacchus’ series. You’ll see some of those relationships.

I remember the ‘Cy Twombly and Poussin’ show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. Those two artists have the most phenomenal relationship.

I hadn’t looked at Poussin as much as I should have done, so Twombly helped me to look at Poussin again. That’s what an exhibition can do for us – it can bring an artist up to the surface again, and then another artist can use them as a platform in their studio.

Rubens and His Legacy: Van Dyck to Cézanne, Main Galleries, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 020 7300 8000, www.royalacademy.org.uk, until 10 April. Sponsored

by BNY Mellon, Partner of the Royal Academy of Arts. See Events and Lectures page 74 To watch a video tour of ‘La Peregrina’ with Tim Marlow, visit http://roy.ac/peregrina

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All for art In November last year, I found myself in the Royal Academy’s large exhibition gallery, inspecting two companion paintings by Anselm Kiefer Hon RA in minute detail. Nothing extraordinary about that, of course, but what is remarkable is that I was learning about the art of looking in the company of eight people who have some degree of visual impairment. We listened intently as artist Harry Baxter lingered over every inch of the canvases, describing motifs, colours and surfaces encrusted with globules of paint, straw, canvas and wood. As I began to discover details that I had previously overlooked, I realised that for those who have trouble seeing, or who cannot see at all, this meticulous account was a wonderful way to paint those pictures in the mind.

Part of the Academy’s InTouch programme, the session had begun earlier over refreshments in the John Madejski Fine Rooms, with Baxter outlining the different phases of Kiefer’s career.

He explained that he would concentrate on six paintings in the exhibition, each representing a particular aspect of the artist’s work. I wondered how easy it would be for people to engage with objects that they had difficulty seeing, but when I mentioned this to the group, they reminded me that listening to objects described on the radio can be just as enjoyable as seeing them in reality.

Sensitive storytelling can bring art to life with extraordinary vividness.

Kiefer’s paintings are highly textured – ‘like treacle or molasses’ as Baxter put it – but since you couldn’t reach out and touch them in the exhibition, he had thought of an ingenious way to convey their tactile qualities in the handling session that followed the gallery visit. He passed round a ‘mini Kiefer’ he had made himself, complete with impasto and collage, together with another canvas covered with gold leaf, so everyone could feel the surfaces. Some typical Kiefer materials were also circulated: a piece of lead, shellac and cubic zirconia (representing the diamonds embedded in some of the pieces). The imagination that goes into these sessions makes them highly popular; most of those present attend as often as they can. Robin, a regular, said: ‘I have been able to see in the past, but I would like to come even if I could see again.’

I have passed through the RA on numerous occasions without knowing a great deal about its Access programme. But, as I soon discovered, it is a central part of the Academy’s activities. ‘I’m very pleased we do as much as we do,’ says Charles Saumarez Smith, the RA’s Secretary and Chief Executive. ‘People assume that because the RA is a private institution that doesn’t get public funding we’re not under the same pressure to do public and access programmes. It’s not a requirement of funding, but we want to do it because we want people to be able to come and experience the collection and the exhibitions across the spectrum.’

An RA volunteer works with a child to make a ‘forest in a box’ in response to the RA’s recent Kiefer show, at a family workshop for children with special educational needs

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How do you break the barriers that stop people coming to an art institution? Caroline Bugler gets some first-hand experience of the RA’s creative sessions that encourage access for everyone. Photography by Richard Dawson

The InTouch event was one of four sessions that Molly Bretton, manager of the Access programme, invited me to sample. Over coffee, she explained that she and her team of artisteducators and volunteers present workshops and sessions for a range of audiences that might otherwise face considerable barriers to accessing the exhibitions and events, including children and adults with learning and physical disabilities, people experiencing mental health issues, those with hearing and visual impairments, and people with dementia and their carers. All of the sessions draw upon the RA’s resources, whether that means what is on show in the exhibition galleries, the elegant Fine Rooms with their display of Academicians’ works, or the architecture of the RA. The RA’s involvement in the making of art gives it a unique advantage. ‘As an artist-led institution, the Academy has a commitment to the idea of practice, which makes it different from a traditional museum,’ says Saumarez Smith. ‘It’s not just about treating our works as things to be admired and respected, but showing that they derive from a process. And people should be encouraged to think about that process.’ The handling element of the InTouch session that I visited certainly fosters that awareness, as do practical workshops where participants get a chance to make their own work. These currently take place in a room in Burlington House, but when the Academy’s new development at Burlington Gardens is complete in 2018, there will be a dedicated learning studio on the ground floor next to a new lecture theatre, allowing for the future expansion of the programme.

I went on to attend a family workshop for children with special educational needs (left).

The walls of the current studio were covered with images of forests, and sprigs of greenery lay on tables alongside makeshift palettes with daubs of blue, green, yellow and brown paint.

Nine family groups were taking part. Most of the children, whose ages ranged from two to late teens, had learning disabilities or autism, and some had mobility and visual impairments. Cash Aspeek, the facilitator, described how the forest theme had been inspired by the Kiefer show, and the family groups began creating their own ‘forests in a box’, using cardboard, paint or bits of vegetation. The parents seemed to be having just as much fun as the children. Nadine, an artist with a disabled son of five, said she relishes the time that she has with him here. ‘It gives me a chance to spend three hours with my son with no interruptions. We work together and I evolve as well. I love coming here because there’s no pressure and it’s so friendly and it’s a quiet time.’

At the end of the workshop the little forest boxes were displayed together on a table. Each family had come up with a completely individual take on the theme. Ethan, whose father is

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InPractice forum BELOW An InMind workshop, where people with dementia are encouraged to share their response to the art in the RA’s Fine Rooms

Canadian, had inserted a lumberjack in his forest alongside a tree nymph and a wolf. Natasha opted to make a winter woodland, while her father painted a blazing sun for the roof. Most were planning to continue work on their pieces and display them after they had taken them home.

The RA’s InMind sessions cater for an older audience of people with early- to mid-stage dementia and their family members, friends and carers. I was once again astonished at just how much I gained from the intense experience of looking encouraged in these meetings. The aim is to provoke immediate responses without reliance on memory, and picture labels are covered up so no-one approaches the paintings with prior

in articulating their ideas, and many decisions can begin to be made for them. Bretton and her team try to structure sessions so that there are a series of choices to make.

Being heard is also a key element in the InPractice sessions, in which artists who may face barriers to accessing the art world, such as disabled artists, are provided with an opportunity to present their practice on Powerpoint. They receive constructive feedback and get the chance to form new contacts. At the session I attended the nine participants showed colourful abstracts and figurative canvases, watercolour landscapes, ceramics, woven and crocheted works and installation. None of them was making a living from their art, although many had exhibited publicly, at venues including a London health centre, the Morley Gallery in Lambeth and Chichester’s Pallant House Gallery.

As I watched the presentations, I wondered whether some of the works might be considered

Outsider Art – work that exists outside the official art establishment. But it didn’t fit neatly into that category. A number of the participants had been to art school or had some art training, and in any case the emphasis was firmly on ensuring they could overcome any exclusion from the establishment rather than setting them apart from it. But it was certainly true that everyone there had a powerfully original voice that had not been stifled by any attempt to conform to the demands of market or fashion. ‘I like to do things my own way and to use my own inspiration,’ said Georgia Drysdale, as one of her paintings flashed up on screen. That is a sentiment that must be shared by every single Academician.

See Events and Lectures page 74-75 for a full range of special workshops and access events this spring To watch a video of a recent multisensory tour of the Royal Academy, visit http://roy.ac/tinctures

A L L P H OTOS © R I CH A R D DAWS O N

Getting the feel of the work in the RA’s Kiefer show through a hands-on InTouch session RIGHT A diverse range of artists present their work and receive feedback at an ABOVE

knowledge. Two groups were assembled in the Fine Rooms, each focusing on a different work.

The first, led by Baxter and fellow artist and educator Jonathan Huxley, gathered in front of William Hamilton’s Vertumnus and Pomona (c.1789). ‘We just want to know what you think,’ said Baxter, ‘there are no right or wrong answers.’

Most of those present are unlikely to have come across the picture’s relatively obscure subject, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but the duo skilfully drew out the participants by asking what they thought of the picture, before inviting them to speculate on what the figures’ gestures might mean.

Meanwhile, a group in another room, led

by Francesca Herrick and Kim Jacobson, were passing round pieces of fake fur fabric as they discussed Briton Rivière’s The King Drinks (1881) – a painting of a lion lapping the waters of an oasis. The samples prompted a discussion about the texture of the lion’s mane, and whether the artist had ever seen a lion in the wild. (It turned out that he had travelled no further than London Zoo.) At the end of the session both groups came together to vote on the pictures they would like to discuss next time they meet. In the best democratic tradition, everyone was given a wooden spoon to hold up beside his or her chosen picture.

The multi-sensory and active nature of these sessions sometimes spurs unexpected creativity.

Tony, a former barrister who is one of the regulars, said that at a previous session he had been encouraged to draw. He had never picked up a pencil or brush before, but was so inspired that he went on to produce his own art at home, encouraged by William, a volunteer. Tony’s art was recently displayed at an event co-hosted with the Alzheimer’s Society and held in the Fine Rooms. Rowena, who had been coming along for around nine months, said that although she no longer made her own art because her condition meant she has trouble interpreting visual data, she goes home feeling her ‘brain has been stimulated’.

According to Bretton, an important element of these sessions is the way that they allow people to voice their opinions and make decisions. When someone is no longer able to communicate in the way they used to, they can often lose confidence

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Let art be your legacy Protect the future of the Royal Academy with a gift in your will.

For nearly 250 years, the Royal Academy has given art lovers a sense of wonder; artists the chance to create. Together we’ve been absorbed in past masterpieces and inspired by future marvels.

With a gift in your will, you could help the Royal Academy to make, debate and exhibit art in the years to come.

To find out more, please contact Matthew Watters on 020 7300 5677 or email legacies@royalacademy.org.uk

The Royal Academy Trust is a registered charity with Charity Number 1067270.

Image Š Benedict Johnson

crimson and veronese green, at Redfern Gallery, will consume half my budget at £15,000. Tschudi studied at the London-based Grosvenor School, which was founded in 1925 by the excellent wood engraver Iain MacNab and achieved swift renown for its distinctive linocut prints. Tschudi’s actionpacked linocuts of workmen, sportsmen and acrobats fizz with the Futurist-inspired energy advocated by tutor and fellow artist Claude Flight.

Grosvenor School prints, in scarce small editions, are now highly collectable and have rocketed in

price in recent years – and Tschudi was a chief exponent. My favourite is Fixing the Wires (1932), created when Tschudi was not yet 21. A linocut from that edition sold at £27,500 through Bonhams in 2013 so, if available at this year’s LOPF, it would likely cost my entire budget.

Tschudi’s Village Fair I, however, is a fine print at about half that price. Capturing a carefree moment between two world wars it now seems achingly poignant. It was made towards the end of the Grosvenor School’s heyday, when the

ES TAT E O F L I L L TS CH U D I /CO U R T ESY O F R ED F ER N G A L L ERY

At the 30th outing of the London Original Print Fair (LOPF), staged once again at the Academy, I shall arrive with £30,000 to spend on prints – £1,000 for each year of the Fair’s existence.

Nothing would give me greater pleasure but, alas, my bankroll is fictitious. RA Magazine has given me an imaginary chequebook, asking me which prints I would prioritise with this budget.

In this glorious fantasy, here’s what I’ll buy.

Swiss artist Lill Tschudi’s Village Fair I (1934, below), a three-block linocut in ultramarine,

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CO U R T ESY O F R A B L E Y CO N T EM P O R A RY A N D EM M A S T I B B O N , 2015 . CO U R T ESY O F J U L I A N PAGE . © T H E ES TAT E O F GER T RU D E H ER M ES

All the fun of the Fair

As the London Original Print Fair celebrates its 30th birthday, Anne Desmet RA sets out to scoop the cream of this year’s crop with a dream cheque to spend on prints of her choice

CO U R T ESY O F R A B L E Y CO N T EM P O R A RY A N D EM M A S T I B B O N , 2015 . CO U R T ESY O F J U L I A N PAGE . © T H E ES TAT E O F GER T RU D E H ER M ES

ES TAT E O F L I L L TS CH U D I /CO U R T ESY O F R ED F ER N G A L L ERY

OPPOSITE PAGE Village Fair I, 1934, by Lill Tschudi, at Redfern Gallery THIS PAGE, LEFT Lead II, 2014,

by Emma Stibbon RA, at Rabley Contemporary BELOW White collar black man, 2014, by Marcelle Hanselaar, at Julian Page Gallery BELOW LEFT Two People, 1934,

by Gertrude Hermes, at the Fine Art Society

popularity of its vivid, almost naïvely optimistic linocuts was about to wane. Osborne Samuel and Redfern galleries regularly show Grosvenor School prints at LOPF, in displays that for years have been a highlight of the Fair.

Next, I’ll go to the Fine Art Society stand to snap up Gertrude Hermes’ wood engraving, Two People (1934, below). A fine sculptor and only the second wood engraver ever elected a Royal Academician in the category of printmaking, Hermes made engravings and linocuts notable for their exuberantly bold cutting combined with rich tonal and textural effects. Wood engravings remain surprisingly modestly priced and this example – with its Picasso-style entwined couple in singing black and white – is a snip at £3,750.

Nipping over to Abbott & Holder, I will pause to pick up, at only £225, one of Blair HughesStanton’s wonderful tiny wood engravings, from 1930, that illustrated an edition of Thomas de Quincey’s The Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Hughes-Stanton was Hermes’ husband for seven years, until they divorced in 1933: their

works display fascinating parallels. Abbott & Holder have a range of Hughes-Stanton’s engravings – well worth browsing.

Still with £11,025 to spend, I’ll make for Rabley Contemporary to buy Emma Stibbon RA’s latest intaglio print at £1,250: Lead II (2014, above), which emerged from her recent visit to the Antarctic, organised by the Scott Polar Research Institute. Stibbon voyaged on the Royal Navy icebreaker HMS Protector and this image shows the zigzag track the ship cut through the frozen sea. Stibbon’s work involves in situ examinations of Earth’s fragile crust and the precarious state of our global environment, from Icelandic volcanoes to Arctic ice floes, which she translates into intensely wrought, haunting images, often at epic scale. Tempting contemporary prints by other RAs can also be found at Rabley, Brook Gallery, Marlborough, Paupers Press and RA Editions.

Onward to Julian Page for Dutch-born Marcelle Hanselaar’s new etching: White collar black man (2014, right) at £895. In a variable edition of 30, it employs painterly red handcolouring contrasted with a rich black etched line.

Inspired, in Hanselaar’s words, by a ‘tiny gem of a painting by Govert Flinck’, her print, she says, is ‘a response to the slave trade and colonialist view that a non-white person was not a person till they were moulded in dress, behaviour and thinking to resemble a white person.’ Hanselaar’s subjects have the raw earthiness and deft characterization of Paula Rego’s figures, coupled with the more experimental qualities of William Kentridge Hon RA’s prints – all compelling attributes.

Now I head to Long & Ryle for Su Blackwell’s book-cut sculpture Magnolia Tree (2013), at £7,200.

Much imitated, Blackwell’s delicate, carefully considered pieces are arguably the most original of their genre, and are keenly collected. While printmaking is not their creative impetus, printed pages provide these sculptures’ whimsical appeal.

At Advanced Graphics I will acquire Alice Mara’s digitally printed, slip cast, porcelain vessel Wrapped Building Pot (2013) for £650. Inspired by

walks around south London, the young artist says: ‘The wrapped building signified progress, change and regeneration – I was interested in the way that the [image of the] tarpaulin would wrap around the pot and how the perspective would change with the building’s corners…’ I enjoy the happy marriage of visual and physical form and function in Mara’s works. Like the best smallscale art, it draws you into its own world and leaves a big impression.

To mark its 30th anniversary, LOPF also features 30 highlights from the Royal Collection, drawn from over 100,000 prints at Windsor Castle. The display includes Dürer’s vast twometre woodcut celebrating the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, The Great Triumphal Cart (1523). Inspired, I’ll scour the Fair for a modest Dürer on which to spend my remaining £1,030, though, for that sum, I may have to settle for a ‘School of Dürer’ print…

London Original Print Fair Main Galleries, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 020 7439 2000, 23-26 April.

Events include a talk by Anne Desmet RA about her print picks, and talks by Norman Ackroyd RA, Chris Orr RA and Bob and Roberta Smith RA. See www.londonprintfair.com and Events and Lectures page 73-75

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General Election special

Debate

© J U L I A N A WA N G

The Question Should art be more political?

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© J U L I A N A WA N G

Yes… Artists should make work that speaks out against society’s ills, argues BOB AND ROBERTA SMITH RA I know what people mean when they say artists should be ‘more political’. They mean people should address politics more directly in their art.

The times we live in are so horrible, the news so unbearable, that it seems strange that so little contemporary art deals with the shocking imagery of our age. For the RA’s 2014 Summer Exhibition, I transcribed onto canvas an interview between BBC Radio 4 presenter Eddie Mair and Dr David Nott that had discussed the surgeon’s efforts to save lives in Syria. I was trying to say something about the gap between the average Summer Exhibition-goer’s experience of enjoying life and David Nott’s experience of saving life.

But sometimes I think that to draw a lemon or a landscape can be deeply subversive in a time when our Education Secretary Nicky Morgan declares that ‘choosing the arts in school can hold children back’. I believe it has been a terrible time for art education – so much so that I am now standing as an independent candidate against Michael Gove in Surrey Heath – and one could argue that the last thing we should be doing is placing more prescriptive demands on

No… Politics should not dominate art, argues critic KELLY GROVIER Art with an agenda is rarely good art. The only obligation that art bears is to enable its audience to reflect more profoundly on what it means to be here in the world.

If one thinks of the most moving examples of political art from the Western tradition – Picasso’s Guernica, say, or David’s The Death of Marat – their success lies less in the particularities of the social conflicts they chronicle than in the timelessness of their comprehension of what in 1950 the American writer William Faulkner called ‘the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself’. These ‘alone’, Faulkner said, are what makes the act of creating ‘worth the agony and the sweat’. What makes Picasso’s and David’s masterpieces moving is precisely that which deepens the countenances of less obviously political works, such as Rothko’s diaphanous veils or the world-weary blossoms of Van Gogh’s sunflowers: the poignant grasp of the contours of human anguish and soulful travail. Goya’s The Third of May, 1808 and Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa are not great works of art because they are political, they are great works of art that happen to be political.

Politics, at best, can only be incidental to the achievement of a great work. At worst, it risks

people who call themselves artists. ‘Let people do their thing,’ I can hear my inner hippy cry.

But great art is always political. Great art has to say something, and that something is often mind-bending, earth-shaking and epoch-altering.

Take, for instance, Goya’s The Horrors of War, Picasso’s Guernica, Louise Bourgeois’ Cell or John Heartfield’s collages that warned of the rise of Nazism. Or Tracey Emin RA’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, her piece where the names of people she had slept with were embroidered on the inside of a tent – the embodiment, in nylon, of the idea that the personal is political. Or J.M.W. Turner RA, who showed us not only dying slaves thrown from ships to drown close to port, but also wives picking through the corpses of their husbands killed on the plains of Waterloo.

At MoMA PS1 in New York last year, I saw a landmark exhibition, ‘Zero Tolerance’, curated by the museum’s director Klaus Biesenbach.

The show examined the idea that the world’s repressive regimes are cracking down on art for the same reason that New York Mayor Giuliani cracked down on homeless people at the end of the 1990s. The reason? Kill the chicken and you scare the cow. Imprison Ai Weiwei Hon RA and beat up Pussy Riot and you tell wider society that compliance is the only way forward.

I don’t think that in Britain we live in an extreme police state, but we do live in a state of mind that is deadened by the media, where kids are told education is just about getting a job,

‘Artists need to get in front of politicians and with an eagle eye inspect and depict each expression of mean-mindedness’

miring an object in the ephemera of transitory context, diminishing the work’s meaning to something didactic and disposable. Insisting that art should be more political is surely as arbitrary as asserting it should be more scientific or philosophical or theological. Such an insistence suggests an impatience with the power of art as art to be significant – that it requires an auxiliary cause to justify and elevate it.

Fortunately, we live in an age of agile artists, adept at deploying politics as an invigorating texture in their works – one that agitates subliminally from beneath without capsizing meaning. Indeed, politics is everywhere in today’s art if we know how to detect and decode it.

In Sean Scully RA’s ongoing series of austere grids, ‘Doric’, the quadrate jostle of simple blocks of monochrome may seem at furthest remove from the social frictions of the day. Scully’s title alludes to one of the three ancient orders of classical architecture and the furious purity of form he achieves in his work commemorates Greece’s gifts to global culture, including democracy. Exhibited in 2012, the ‘Doric’ series unveiled itself at a moment when many in Europe were demanding that Greece be cut off for its alleged fiscal improvidences. Without tethering itself to the fleeting specifics of this clash, Scully’s series embraces timeless and archetypal tensions.

Or take the squeegeed canvases in Gerhard Richter’s ‘Cage’ series, created for the 2007 Venice Biennale. Though the paintings appear to scrape clean any acknowledgement of the political

‘Insisting that art should be more political is as arbitrary as asserting it should be more scientific’

where few young people can afford to buy somewhere to live and where some kids are brainwashed to think violence is the only way out.

For the first time since Mosley in the 1930s, we now have a serious political party that is telling people Britain’s problems stem from outsiders.

This is why art is embracing, indeed must embrace, politics. Call me old fashioned, but I think we have a duty to society not just to buy things we don’t need and borrow money we cannot afford, but also to speak out. We need to treat our politicians with the same zero tolerance of which they are so fond. Artists need to get in front of politicians and with an eagle eye inspect and depict each expression of mean-mindedness.

We also must advocate the world we want to live in. It’s not Pussy Riot or Ai Weiwei who are extreme or outrageous, it is the governments who rule over them. To protect our society and make it more democratic, artists’ diverse, angry voices must be celebrated and heard. The Royal Academy and the great public collections are not just art galleries. They are huge repositories of free speech and free thinking.

context against which it was conceived (escalations in violence between Palestine and Israel in 2006), they nevertheless harmonize into a mute symphony of tumult and torment, in which each note of colour is conducted through a tug-of-war between horizontal and vertical scores.

Or, lastly, take the crumpled eloquence of Cornelia Parker RA’s brutal chandelier, Breathless, installed in the V&A in autumn 2001.

Comprising 54 brass instruments crushed flat by the machinery used to raise and lower London’s Tower Bridge, the work at once proclaims the end of imperialism while salvaging a tortuous elegance from the debris. Described by Parker as ‘the last gasp of empire’, Breathless aims to crush shut not only an era of colonial arrogance and exploitation but centuries of chauvinism during which any such work by a woman artist would have been accorded little space. What Scully, Richter and Parker intuitively understand is that politics is most powerful when it is an ingredient that vibrates from below the surface, not a perishable varnish that glazes the eye.

Should art be more political? To vote in our online poll, visit http://roy.ac/politicalart

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Art is the best policy Visual art can shape approaches across public policy, argues BEN LUKE, as he examines three unlikely areas where art and artists can make a difference

INFRASTRUCTURE Making art an integral part of Britain’s major public buildings would boost the country’s economic and cultural assets

Among the biggest government investments announced in this parliament was the £42bn HS2 project, a high-speed rail link between London, the Midlands and England’s North-West. But will such an initiative place great art and great architecture at its heart?

Britain lags behind other countries in public art commissioning. It has never had a ‘Percent for Art’ policy, where a proportion of the budget for every major building project, usually 1 per cent, is allocated to public art commissions, whether permanent or temporary. ‘Europe is much better at doing this than we are,’ says Vivien Lovell, Director of art consultants Modus Operandi. ‘Per cent for Art’ is policy at a national level in France and across Scandinavia, and at federal level in Germany. Critics suggest that it simply leads to poor public art, but Lovell disagrees. ‘If you have a per cent law, and very good curators, then it can lead to fantastic results.’

One of the major infrastructure projects in the UK that involved extensive arts commissioning was the London 2012 Olympics. Owen Hopkins, Architecture Programme Manager at the Royal Academy, notes ironically: ‘It was a huge infrastructure and regeneration project which staged two, two-week festivals of sport as an excuse to spend over £9bn on new facilities, new transport links and art.’ Both on a cultural and infrastructural level, it was perceived as a success.

Increasingly, however, the arts are having to justify themselves in ways that have nothing to

do with aesthetics. As Hopkins puts it: ‘If you’re working in an environment where every cost has to be justified, how do you begin to measure the economic value of culture?’ In a recent panel discussion at the RA, Jolyon Brewis, Chief Executive at Grimshaw Architects, said that Slipstream, Richard Wilson RA’s huge sculpture unveiled in 2014 for Heathrow’s new Terminal 2 building, had generated more than £26.5m worth of free publicity for the terminal [based on a multiple of the equivalent advertising costs], while the artwork had only cost £2.5m. ‘In those terms it not only had cultural value but it had a clear economic value as well,’ Hopkins says.

‘Architects are much more willing to work with artists now than was the case 10 or 20 years ago,’ Lovell says. ‘They see it as being an interesting collaborative aspect of their work.’

The stage is set for a golden age of collaboration between the two disciplines. Will politicians have the vision to nurture it?

For details of exhibitions organised by The Koestler Trust visit www.koestlertrust.org.uk Illumination: The Koestler Exhibition for Wales Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, www.wmc.org.uk, until 13 April

For more information on the RA Architecture Programme see page 73-75, and visit www.royalacademy.org.uk/architecture

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British prisons are at breaking point, with almost 100,000 prisoners in the UK compared to 68,000 in France, which has a larger population. In addition, over half those serving sentences of less than 12 months are reconvicted within a year, according to Ministry of Justice figures from 2013. Yet the shrill political debate around crime remains as dominated as ever by notions of toughness and hard-line approaches. As Stephen

‘but it’s a line I’ve borrowed over the years with regard to prisons: “Making art is the only way you can run away from home without leaving the room.”’

But giving prisoners hope is only part of the battle. ‘The closest thing to a political dimension for us, though it’s not explicitly political, is that we know that for offenders to rehabilitate, it’s not just the offenders that need to change, but also society’s attitudes towards them,’ Robertson says. The Trust’s statistics are impressive: more than 8,000 prisoners enter the Koestler Awards, from over 300 different institutions, and 20,000 people visit the exhibitions, held at the Southbank Centre in London and around the UK every year. In a 2013 survey taken in Cardiff, 55 per cent of people interviewed said that the exhibition had given them a more positive attitude towards offenders.

As Robertson says, ‘You can’t come through a Koestler exhibition of art by offenders and not a) realise that offenders are human beings and b) think, “Wow, some of these people have got skill and talent.”’

I L LUS T R AT I O N BY M I GU EL M O N TA N ER

PRISONS Bringing art to Britain’s prisons can help change attitudes, both inside and outside these institutions

Chambers RA says, ‘There are certainly no votes in prison reform’.

Chambers is a trustee of the Koestler Trust, the charity which, through exhibitions and an awards programme, encourages offenders to create art as a way of making positive changes in their lives. Former RA president Sir Hugh Casson was a key figure in establishing the Trust in 1962. ‘No other country in the world has an arts award scheme open to all its prisoners, or a programme of exhibitions to get that work shown to the public,’ says Tim Robertson, the Trust’s outgoing chief executive. ‘And Casson’s great achievement was to engage the top level of arts people.’ His legacy is clear in that leading artists such as Sarah Lucas and Grayson Perry RA are still getting involved in Koestler projects.

The arts can make a tremendous difference to offenders, Robertson explains, in terms of literacy and numeracy but also what he calls emotional literacy. ‘To create artistically, you have to get some perspective on your own emotional situation and connections and relationships – and, perhaps almost more importantly than that, to communicate it to other people.’ Art also offers ‘a sense of hope and possibility’, he adds.

Offering prisoners a different outlook is vital. ‘I can’t recall who said it,’ says Chambers,

Selling the nation’s silver As the local government funding gap grows, councils will cash in on their art collections, warns LOUISA BUCK Whoever wins the General Election in May, the future looks precarious for our public art collections. According to a recent report by the Local Government Association, core funding for councils will have shrunk by 40 per cent in real terms over the course of this parliament, and there’s no light on the horizon, with all the main political parties in agreement that national and local government spending cuts will continue until at least 2020. And the funding gap for local services will widen by a boggling £2.1 billion every year until the end of the decade.

In this bleak climate it is no surprise that beleaguered local authorities are looking long and hard at the assets sitting in their museums and public spaces and – especially in the context of a temptingly buoyant art market – pondering the benefit of some sales to raise much-needed cash. Some have already done so: in July last year Northampton Borough Council sold a 4,000-year-old Egyptian statue of Sekhemka for nearly £15.8 million, and in 2013 the sale of Chinese porcelain from the Riesco Collection raised £8.24 million for Croydon City Council. Others continue to try. Tower Hamlets has been prevented from auctioning off Henry Moore’s Draped Seated Woman – known as ‘Old Flo’ (right) – only because Bromley Council challenged Tower

P H OTO T H E H EN RY M O O R E FO U N DAT I O N A R CH I V E . I L LUS T R AT I O N BY M I GU EL M O N TA N ER

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Debate

HEALTH Art is not only good for wellbeing, but can reduce hospital stays for patients – and save money for the NHS

Although the main political parties are now locked in debate about the state of the NHS, both the previous Labour government and the current Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition agreed on one health-related issue. ‘Both governments have understood mental health and people’s wellbeing as being integral to their physical

Hamlets’ ownership of the work; the court decision is due later this year.

But while there’s no doubt that in the face of savage public spending cuts in all quarters the arts cannot be regarded as immune, there have to be other options apart from such ad-hoc asset stripping. Even the immediate benefits are questionable: nearly half of the proceeds from the sale of Sekhemka went to Lord Northampton (whose ancestors originally donated the statue) and both Northampton and Croydon museums lost their Arts Council accreditation and were expelled from the Museums Association for five years – blighting both their reputations and their prospects for future funding or sponsorship.

The Museums Association already acknowledges that, on occasion, sales have to be made and in 2007 changed its code of ethics to

Henry Moore’s Draped Seated Woman (1957-58) in its original site at Stifford Estate, Stepney Green, c.1962

health,’ says Ben Pearce, Director of Paintings in Hospitals, which loans artworks to healthcare institutions across the country. He believes the presence of art can have a huge impact, both ‘in terms of recovery and as preventative measures’.

Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London has a far-reaching programme run by its charity CW+ that seeks to improve the care conditions for patients – and art and design are crucial elements. Its arts director Trystan Hawkins says there is ‘tangible evidence now on the value of art in terms of enhancing clinical outcomes but also in saving the NHS money’.

More than ten years ago, the Staricoff Report found that between 1998 and 2002 there was a 32 per cent decrease of stress hormones in patients who came into contact with music or art within the hospital, and they also needed less morphine.

But there was an even more compelling statistic.

‘Patients undergoing surgery who were exposed to music or art were in hospital for a day less than patients who weren’t,’ Hawkins says. So savings made through CW+’s work quickly begin to add up to significant sums.

CW+ has an art collection that ranges from a Veronese to a giant sculpture by Academician

accept ‘financially motivated disposal’. But they added a string of criteria in an attempt to ensure that any sales would be the right ones and made for the right reasons. However, the stipulations have been criticised as vaguely worded and open to abuse.

So what instead? Many believe that an effective alternative would be for all of our public collections to sign up to a code of ethics that includes the crucial stipulation that any funds generated by sales must be ploughed back into the collections and not used for any other purpose. Stephen Deuchar, Director of the Art Fund, says, ‘It is not helpful that different institutions have their own policy statements on de-accessioning: we should get to a point where the sector is able to take a united and robust position and make a clear commitment to reinvesting in its collections.’

This would not only ensure the quality, vigour and longevity of our public collections but also lay down a firm marker that public collections really do belong to the public.

If we are to maintain the health of our public art collections and to weather the financial storms ahead, there must be an across-the-board consensus that they are worth preserving for social, cultural, educational and aspirational purposes, and that they are as crucial to the health of an integrated, civilized society as schools, hospitals, public housing and social services. Back in the early 1980s, another financially precarious time, there was a widely-used slogan which once again needs to be shouted from the rooftops: ‘Art is not a luxury.’

Allen Jones, and it continues to commission new work. Artist and musician Brian Eno is working on creating environments to enhance the wellbeing of surgery patients, and digital artist Matt Pyke has created interactive iPad art for use in the paediatric treatment room. ‘To get a cannula [intravenus tube] into a child can take up to 40 minutes, as you need to find a vein and keep them still,’ Hawkins says. But in trials in which they were given Pyke’s iPad work, that time was reduced to seven minutes.

Government interest in an art and health parliamentary group has not yet led to substantial grants for charities like CW+ and Paintings in Hospitals to develop their approaches further.

In the face of compelling evidence of the transformative effect of art in healthcare settings, and the economic benefits that result, we should be asking why not.

Paintings in Hospitals www.paintingsinhospitals.org.uk CW+ cwplus.org.uk. Friends of the RA can tour Chelsea and Westminster Hospital’s art collection on 7 and 21 May. For more information on these and other events, including an event at St Christopher’s Hospice, see Events and Lectures page 74-75

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The art of diplomacy Rubens was not only a magisterial painter but also a shrewd diplomat, says GILES WATERFIELD, as he marvels at the artist’s dual achievements Confident, learned, polished, charming, able to inspire confidence in princes with his blend of deference, loyalty and acuteness, Rubens was a born courtier. Although he claimed he did not like princely courts, when obliged to attend them he excelled, whether in Brussels, Paris, London or Madrid, as a diplomatic envoy. A leading theme of the RA’s Rubens and his Legacy is his success in depicting power and redefining its nature. It was a rare achievement for a visual artist: though artists have always been involved in political protest, almost none other than Rubens and Jacques-Louis David (in the unusual context of revolutionary Paris) have actively engaged in exercising political power or influence.

In the case of Rubens, major commissions related to State or Church brought out his genius.

In 1621 he was commissioned to execute for the Palais du Luxembourg the Marie de’ Medici cycle, depicting the life and reign of a woman whose period as regent of France was frequently disastrous. From the moment when Rubens began to produce his oil sketches for these works (two are in the show), his sense of colour and his feeling for design were brilliantly apparent.

Visually overpowering, yet supremely adroit, the cycle is imbued with a spirit of serious playfulness in handling allegorical devices, with Marie variously depicted as Juno and Justice, and a host of gods and goddesses attending: here was an essentially courtly, highly elite art that avoided the over-blown vacuity of much official art. These skills were also apparent in his designs for ceiling paintings in the Jesuit church in Antwerp.

The Banqueting House London, www.hrp.org.uk/ banquetinghouse. Read more on the RA’s show Rubens and His Legacy page 56 To take an online tour of Rubens’s Banqueting House ceiling, visit http://roy.ac/banqueting

B R I D GEM A N I M AGES

The Unification of the Crowns, 1632-34, by Rubens, from the Banqueting House ceiling, Whitehall, London

In 1629 Rubens was sent by Philip IV of Spain as a diplomatic envoy to London. This was a complex period for European politics, with Spain and France both negotiating for a treaty with England, while Spain still hoped to re-establish its dominion over the United Provinces, the Protestant northern Netherlands.

At the English Court Rubens found the French and Venetian ambassadors conspiring vigorously against him, but he could negotiate courtly intrigue and worked to establish peace. Charles I, whom Rubens had described as ‘the greatest amateur of paintings among the princes of the world’, received him warmly. Rubens found ‘this island… a spectacle worthy of the interest of every gentleman… for the beauty of the countryside and the charm of the nation’, and above all for the ‘incredible quantity of excellent pictures, statues, and ancient inscriptions which are to be found in the Court.’ He showed his appreciation by presenting Minerva Protects Pax from Mars (1629-30) to his royal host.

We can no longer experience the original setting for the Marie de’ Medici paintings, or the Jesuit church that burnt down in 1718.

But Rubens’s ability to respond to the demands of his patron in terms of programme and setting are magnificently apparent in his ceiling paintings for the Banqueting House in Whitehall. This commission developed over more than a decade, from Inigo Jones’s completion of the building in 1621 to the paintings’ installation in 1636.

Divided into panels in the Palladian manner, the ceiling demanded powerful foreshortening.

The subject matter was entirely within Rubens’s scope. Personifications of virtues and floral decorations surround three principal subjects: the peaceful reign of James I, his apotheosis, and the union of the crowns of England and Scotland (left). This union in 1603 was seen as one of the great benefits of the Stuart dynasty, even though it hardly led to harmony. Rubens handled the subject with his usual grace: two buxom maidens are presented by Minerva to the king, to whom they introduce a young boy, either the future Charles II or Great Britain. At the top, putti are flourishing wreaths. The blowing of trumpets is all but audible.

Today, the painting has an ironic significance.

While the classical symbolism is hardly current, what remains relevant is Rubens’s mood of heightened rhetoric, glamour and excitement.

In the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence reason tended to be forgotten in the sort of emotional optimistic theatricality that characterised Rubens’s political paintings.

His ability to clothe such heightened rhetoric in the most seductive visual language, while sometimes undercutting it with subtle satire, was as persuasive as his passionate advocacy of peace.

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Debate

Short Courses and Practical Classes Our programme of short courses and classes offers the opportunity to explore subjects ranging from the art of collage to the history of portraiture, led by expert tutors and practising artists. For full details, visit royalacademy.org.uk/courses (described by Edward Burne-Jones as ‘the beautifullest place on earth’) and Richard Rogers RA’s modernist house, 22 Parkside, Wimbledon, designed for his parents in 1967.

Reynolds Room, Burlington House; £190 (incl. glass of wine); maximum 60 places; 6.30–8.30pm SHORT COURSE The History of the Portrait: Renaissance to Contemporary

Tue 5 and 12 May and Thur 7, 14 and 21 May The history of portraiture in Western art encompasses changing ideas of what it means to be human. From its first Renaissance appearance in religious settings to its gradual independence and development as a genre in its own right, portraiture has formed a mirror on our changing sense of self. By following the course of this shape-shifting genre – from reverence to self-aggrandisement, self-analysis to satire – we aim to offer an insight into the shifting definitions of identity. Leading this course is Ben Street, a freelance art historian, lecturer and writer who teaches about art old and new at Tate, the National Portrait Gallery and Sotheby’s Institute of Art, as well as contributing to museum publications across Europe and the US. Reynolds Room, Burlington House; £245; maximum 60 places; 11am–12.30pm ‘HOW TO’ COURSE Collecting Prints

P H OTO BY R OY M AT T H E WS © R OYA L ACA D EM Y O F A R TS

Collage workshop led by Andy Malone

SHORT COURSE

SHORT COURSE

The Painted Word

The House as Manifesto

Six Tuesdays: 14 April – 19 May Award-winning poet, novelist and art critic Sue Hubbard hosts a series of creative writing workshops for beginners and established writers, based on the RA’s ‘Richard Diebenkorn’ show. Participants will engage with Diebenkorn’s lyrical abstraction and figurative work to generate a body of writing, in a supportive yet critical arena.

Hughie O’Donoghue RA visits one session to talk about his practice.

Slaughter Room, Burlington House; £395 (lunches and exhibition entry included); maximum 12 places; 10.30am–3.30pm

Four Tuesdays: 28 April – 19 May In a ‘manifesto house’, architects announce the values and sensibilities that define their style. From the 17th century to the present day, ‘manifesto houses’ have often changed the direction of architectural history. Dr Alan Powers examines key ‘manifesto houses’, explaining fundamental architectural principles and revealing the social and personal histories of each house and its inhabitants. This short course explores masterpieces such as the Queen’s House by Inigo Jones (Greenwich, 1616–19), Red House by William Morris

Four Tuesdays: 9, 16, 23 and 30 June Are you interested in collecting prints or building your knowledge about collecting them? In this four-part course, discover the practical processes behind printmaking, as well as commercial and theoretical approaches to print collecting today. Explore a variety of prints in the RA’s Library (the oldest institutional fine arts library in the UK) with our Director of Collections, visit a working studio with a Royal Academician to see printmaking in action, and engage in discussion and discovery with a diverse selection of voices from the art world, including printmaker RAs. RA Library, Burlington House; £295 (incl. access to the Summer Exhibition and wine reception); maximum 15 places; 10.30am–12.30pm

SHORT COURSE Containing the World in Words: Poetry and Joseph Cornell

Mondays: 29 June and 6, 13, 20, 27 July This practical poetry-writing course takes inspiration from the exhibition ‘Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust’. Cornell is best known for his extraordinary ‘shadow boxes’ and this course considers the way a poem might also construct and contain the world. Led by Tamar Yoseloff (Ted Hughes Poetry Award-nominated poet) the course examines poets who had a profound effect on Cornell, such as Emily Dickinson, and writers who have been influenced by his vision, such as Charles Simic, Frank O’Hara and Robert Pinsky.

Belle Shenkman Room, Keeper’s House; £180 (incl. private access to Cornell exhibition and wine reception); maximum 15 places; 6.30–8.30pm PR ACTICAL CLASS Your World in a Box: Cornell and Collage

Three Tuesdays: 14, 21 and 28 July Learn about Joseph Cornell’s intuitive attitude towards collage, and be inspired to create your own after viewing the RA’s exhibition ‘Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust’. We will provide a box frame and a wide range of mixed media materials and you will be encouraged to incorporate materials that have a personal significance to you in creating your own artworks. Artist educator Andy Malone guides you in exploring different approaches to collage, and exhibition curator Sarah Lea will provide insights into Cornell’s work.

Hugh Casson Room, Keeper’s House; £185 (incl. private access to Cornell exhibition, mixed media materials and wine reception); maximum 20 places; 6.45–8.45pm How to book ● Visit royalacademy.org.uk/

courses, or call 020 7300 5839. ● You can also fax the booking

form overleaf to 020 7300 8023. ● For queries or further

information about these events, email events.lectures@ royalacademy.org.uk or call 020 7300 5839.

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Debate

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

INSTUDIO AT THE R A Workshops Designed for Groups Working with Disabled Adults or Adults at Risk of Exclusion from the Arts

Tue 3 March and 5 May These workshops, led by artist educators, are based around the exhibitions ‘Rubens and His Legacy’ and ‘Richard Diebenkorn’. Individuals explore the galleries and are then guided to create their own work.

Meet in the Front Hall; 2.30–5.30pm; free SPECIAL EVENT From Encounters to Performance: Spun through Shadows

Thur 5 and Sat 7 March Choreographers, composers and performance artists come together to create pieces that explore the fusion of movement, live electronic effects and visual and sonic design. Including works

by Jonathan Cole, Lizzi Kew Ross, and Cameron Graham and Thea Stanton.

Burlington Gardens; 7.30–9pm; £15/£7 reductions RUBENS EVENING EVENT Short Stories with Sebastian Faulks

Fri 6 March We welcome the award-winning and best-selling novelist Sebastian Faulks for an exciting literary evening, in partnership with Pin Drop. Faulks will How to book ● Visit royalacademy.org.uk/

events, or call 020 7300 5839 (option 3). You can also visit the RA Ticket Office, or complete the booking form overleaf and post to ‘Events and Lectures’ or fax 020 7300 8023. ● Booking is strongly advised for lunchtime lectures. Please arrive before 1pm as unclaimed seats will be released at 1pm that day. ● Reductions are available for students, jobseekers and people with disabilities with recognised proof of status. ● RA Friends and carers go free to Access events; pre-booking is advised. Disabled parking spaces and wheelchairs can be reserved on 020 7300 8028.

read a short story selected by him in response to ‘Rubens and His Legacy’.

Reynolds Room; 6.30–7.30pm; £16/£7 reductions (incl. exh entry), £12 (event only) SPECIAL EVENT International Women’s Day

Sun 8 March Join us to celebrate International Women’s Day. The day includes a special screening of Mirrors to Windows: The Artist as Woman (a documentary film by award-winning filmmaker Susan Steinberg), a drop-in workshop, and a panel discussion with Royal Academicians Cathie Pilkington, Eileen Cooper and Tess Jaray, and RA Schools student Gergana Georgieva, about their experiences as practising female artists.

Please check the RA website for more details ARCHITECTURE EVENT Forgotten Masters: Bernard Tschumi & Jacques Gubler discuss Jean Tschumi

Mon 9 March Together with the academic and writer Jacques Gubler, architect Bernard Tschumi discusses the work of his father, Jean Tschumi, an important figure in the modern movement.

Geological Society; 6.30–8pm; £12/£6 reductions (incl. drink)

Casa Ventura, Monterrey, Mexico, 2011, designed by Tatiana Bilbao (see 12 March)

discusses recent housing projects and explores the ways her architecture weaves together people and place.

Geological Society; 6.30–8pm; £12/£6 reductions (incl. drink)

DIEBENKORN EVENING EVENT

DIEBENKORN AFTERNOON EVENT

Richard Diebenkorn: A Riotous Calm

Gretchen Diebenkorn Grant on Richard Diebenkorn

Wed 11 March Exhibition curator Sarah Bancroft explores Richard Diebenkorn’s consuming attention to detail and the improvisational process that led to his masterful compositions, set within the context of 20th-century American art.

Reynolds Room; 6.30–7.30pm; £14/£7 reductions (incl. exh entry), £10 (event only)

Sat 14 March Gretchen Diebenkorn Grant discusses her father, artist Richard Diebenkorn, and gives an insight into his personality, career and the environment in which he produced his exceptional body of work.

Reynolds Room; 3–4pm; £14/£7 reductions (incl. exh entry), £10 (event only)

ARCHITECTURE EVENT

INMIND AT THE R A

Roundtable on Housing in Mexico

Art in Conversation for People Living with Dementia

Thur 12 March Prior to the lecture by Tatiana Bilbao (listed below), join us for a roundtable discussion about housing in Mexico.

Burlington Gardens; 4.30–5.30pm; free, register at architecture@royalacademy.org.uk

Mondays: 16 March, 20 April and 11 May 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 in the Front Hall; 11am–12.30pm; £3

ARCHITECTURE EVENT Tatiana Bilbao

Thur 12 March One of Mexico’s leading architects, Tatiana Bilbao creates powerfully geometric buildings which connect to their users on both material and emotional levels. In her lecture, Bilbao

INMOTION AT THE R A Rubens Exhibition Tour for Mobility Impaired Visitors

Mon 23 March A tour of the Rubens show for wheelchair users and mobility impaired visitors.

Meet in the Front Hall; 9–11am; £3

FREE LUNCHTIME LECTURE An Introduction: Richard Diebenkorn

Mon 23 March Curator Edith Devaney explores the exhibition ‘Richard Diebenkorn’, and gives an overview of his career as one of America’s most celebrated artists.

Reynolds Room; 1–2pm; free (pre-booking strongly recommended) SPECIAL EVENT Celebrating Life, Death, Legacy and Art

Fri 27 March Join us for our annual collaboration with St Christopher’s Hospice, where we will be exploring life, death, legacy and art.

This celebration will feature work made by patients from the hospice, a drop-in creative workshop, a talk about their latest collaboration with artists Whitney McVeigh and Eiko Honda, performances by the Hospice Community Choir, and a discussion led by Director Nigel Hartley about art in times of crisis.

Please see the RA website for more details ARCHITECTURE EVENTS The Future of Housing Season Soapbox Talks

Fridays: 27 March, 24 April and 8 May Contributors to the exhibition ‘Four Visions for the Future of Housing’ offer their ideas and answer questions from the audience. We welcome Dallas Pierce Quintero, 5th Studio and Sarah

P H OTO © I WA N B A A N

March

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ARCHITECTURE EVENT New Realities of Ownership

Mon 13 April One of the effects of the housing crisis has been to confine many people to spending increasing amounts of money on rent, unable to raise a deposit to get a foot on the housing ladder. A discussion panel explores how to find new models of ownership that better reflect the realities of how people live today.

Geological Society; 6.30–8pm; £12/£6 reductions (incl. drink)

Family Fun

Royal Academy Talks

FAMILY STUDIOS These drop-in workshops are supported

by Jeanne and William Callanan. Pop in anytime and get creative.

New Friends’ Welcome Tours

Collage College

2pm first Sunday of the month.

Curators’ Gallery Talks on collection displays are at 3pm on the first Tuesday of every month.

Sun 15 March

Royal Academy Tours

Tomorrow’s World

Visit our website to see the schedule of these free hour-long tours.

Sun 12 April Curious Animations

EVENING EVENT Arts, Society and Medicine: The ‘Saving Faces Art Project’

Wed 15 April Professor and surgeon Iain Hutchison tells us about his ‘Saving Faces Art Project’, charting the physical and emotional journey of patients undergoing facial surgery, which was documented in paintings by BP Portrait Award-winner Mark Gilbert.

Royal Society of Medicine; 6.30pm; free, prebook at rsm.ac.uk/royalacademylecture2015 INTER ACT AT THE R A BSL Lecture: Diebenkorn

Fri 17 April An event for deaf, deafened and hard of hearing visitors – a BSL lecture about ‘Richard Diebenkorn’.

Burlington House; 6.30–7.30pm; £3 SPECIAL EVENT

Sun 17 May 11am–3pm; free; suitable for all ages

EXHIBITION TOURS 45-minute introductory tours, free with an exhibition ticket:

SEN FAMILY WORKSHOP Tue 14 April Experienced gallery educators lead these creative sessions for families with children with special educational needs. Pre-booking is essential.

Meet in the Front Hall; 11am–1pm; free

Rubens and His Legacy

SPRING FAMILY WORKSHOPS This year we are running a special week of family workshops during the Easter Holidays, exploring a different art form every day.

Please check the RA website for further information spanned nearly half a century.

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

Diebenkorn Late

Wigglesworth Architects.

The Keeper’s House; 7–7.30pm; free

Sat 18 April Join us for a special evening of activities inspired by Richard Diebenkorn.

6.30–10pm; for more information call 020 7300 5839 or visit our website

R A SCHOOLS SPRING SYMPOSIUM ‘Until Recently I Only Had a Voice’

EVENING EVENT

Mon 30 March Organised by artists Adham Faramawy and Cécile B. Evans, this symposium critically examines embodiment, outsourcing, and emotional labour in relation to new technologies: the interfaces we use today. The event launches Faramawy’s new app, ‘Hi! I’m happy you’re here!’ and includes author readings, audience-led discussion and panel critique. Supported by the David Lean Foundation.

Geological Society; 11am–4pm; £10, free to all students

London Original Print Fair Lecture with Bob and Roberta Smith RA

April ARCHITECTURE EVENT Winy Maas

Wed 1 April Dutch practice MVRDV has an international reputation for its innovative and striking architecture. Founder Winy Maas discusses the practice’s work, focusing on their housing projects, including the recently completed Markthal in Rotterdam.

Geological Society; 6.30–8pm; £12/£6 reductions (incl. drink)

Fri 24 April Join us to celebrate LOPF’s 30th anniversary, in an event featuring guest speaker Bob and Roberta Smith RA, whose talk is titled: ‘Why prints are not only for hanging in frames, but also for putting in windows!’ Tickets include a drink in the Fair following the event.

Reynolds Room; 6.30–7.30pm; £16/£7 reductions, £12 (RA Friends) INTOUCH AT THE R A Audio Described Tour and Handling Session: Diebenkorn

Mon 27 April This event, an audio described tour of the ‘Richard Diebenkorn’ exhibition for blind and visually impaired visitors, is followed by a handling session.

Meet in the Front Hall; 9–11am; £3 FREE LUNCHTIME LECTURE The Art of Stanley Anderson RA

Mon 27 April Professor Robert Meyrick, co-curator of the Academy's Stanley Anderson exhibition, reassesses the work of this underrated printmaker, whose career

2.30pm Wed, 7pm Fri (until 3 April) Richard Diebenkorn

2.30pm Tue, 7pm Fri (17 Mar–29 May) EXHIBITION SPOTLIGHT TALKS 10-minute talks on individual works, free with an exhibition ticket.

3pm on Thursdays ONE-TO-ONE ACCESS TOURS Tours for wheelchair users and audiodescriptive talks about our exhibitions and the permanent collection.

Call 020 7300 5732 for details Expressionism and author of Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas. Supported by the David Lean Foundation.

Royal Institution; 6.30pm; £16/£5 students

ARCHITECTURE EVENT The Psychology of Home

ARCHITECTURE EVENT

Mon 27 April Although housing is most people’s largest monthly outgoing, our relationship to where we live is much more than financial. But to what extent is this relationship reflected in the new houses being built in Britain today? Our panel discusses a variety of propositions for designing homes to which we instinctively feel a connection.

Burlington Gardens; 6.30–8pm; £12/£6 reductions (incl. drink)

The Tercentenary of Vitruvius Britannicus

May INMOTION AT THE R A Diebenkorn Exhibition Tour for Mobility Impaired Visitors

Mon 11 May A tour of ‘Richard Diebenkorn’ for wheelchair users and mobility impaired visitors.

Meet in Burlington House; 9–11am; £3 R A SCHOOLS ANNUAL LECTURE 2015 Frank Stella Hon RA in Conversation with Dr David Anfam

Mon 11 May American abstract painter and sculptor Frank Stella was elected an Honorary RA in 1993. His next major retrospective opens at the Whitney Museum of Art in autumn 2015. Dr David Anfam is a leading scholar and curator of Abstract

Sat 16 May This symposium marks 300 years since the publication of Vitruvius Britannicus, one of the most influential books in the history of British architecture.

Meet in Burlington House; to book, visit: sahgb.org.uk/symposium R A BOOK CLUB Emma Healey: ‘Elizabeth is Missing’

Fri 22 May Join author Emma Healey, winner of the Costa First Novel Award, as she leads this book club on Elizabeth is Missing, a heartbreaking reflection on memory and aging. In support of Dementia Awareness Week 2015, this event coincides with an InMind session.

Meet in the Saloon; 6.30–8pm; £15 (incl. drink & InMind ticket if applicable) EVENING EVENT Frank Auerbach in Conversation with Tim Marlow

Sat 23 May Frank Auerbach joins Tim Marlow to discuss why he paints every day of the year. The event precedes a display of Auerbach’s work at Tate Britain this autumn, and coincides with the publication of Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting by Catherine Lampert.

Reynolds Room; 3–4pm; £12/£6 reductions

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Royal Opera House

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Mon 27 April and Thur 7 May Friends tour this iconic building in the heart of London’s theatre district. We visit the huge backstage area, the historic Front of House and the stunning Paul Hamlyn Hall as we are given an insight into the colourful history of the theatre.

Our tour also includes aspects of the current opera and ballet productions with the possibility of glimpsing rehearsals.

2.30–4pm; £23; ROH, Covent Garden

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● London Transport Museum’s Poster Collection

Godinton House and Garden in Kent, which Friends visit on 3 June Leighton House

Thur 9 April Leighton House was the home of Victorian artist Frederic, Lord Leighton PRA. It is one of the most remarkable buildings of the 19th century, with a fascinating collection of paintings and sculpture by Leighton and his contemporaries. From modest beginnings it grew into a ‘private palace of art’ featuring the extraordinary Arab Hall. Friends learn about the life of Lord Leighton and the house’s restoration.

6.30–8pm; £26 (incl. gls wine); meet at Holland Park Rd, W14 Broadgate Sculpture Walk

Fri 10 April and 1 May Hidden behind Liverpool Street Station, Broadgate is a peaceful, open-air space in the heart of the City, containing world-class sculptures and an impressive collection of art situated in picturesque squares and piazzas. Our walk reveals the surprising story of Broadgate, from its Roman history to its role today.

11am–12.30pm; £24; meet at Liverpool Street Station Armourers’ Hall

Mon 13 and 27 April After surviving the Great Fire of London, Armourers’ Hall was completely rebuilt in 1839 to become the building we see today, full of historic 16th- and 17thcentury armour, weapons and paintings.

Friends enjoy a tour of the building, now listed, and learn about its artworks including Tudor portraits by Marcus Gheeraerts and John De Critz.

11am–12.30pm; £25 (incl. coffee); meet at Coleman St, EC2 Royal Automobile Club

Mon 20 April and 18 May By huge demand, we return to the

RAC. Opened in March 1911 at a cost of £250,000, the RAC Clubhouse was described in a Vanity Fair article of the time as being ‘on a scale of grandeur absolutely unparalleled anywhere’. Our tour, led by the club’s librarian, takes in the splendour of the club, including the Great Gallery and Mountbatten Room.

11am–12.30pm; £27; meet at 89 Pall Mall, SW1 (dress code will apply) Prudential Art Collection

Wed 22 April Join us for an exclusive curatorled private tour of the Prudential Corporation’s art collection. Everything in the collection is by British artists or those who have lived and worked in Britain, and includes works by Edward Burra, John Sell Cotman, Maggi Hambling and Rachel Whiteread.

6–8pm; £30 (incl. wine and canapés); Laurence Pountney Hill, EC4

Tue 28 April and 9 June The LTM has a collection of over 7,000 items, and our behind-the-scenes tour is a fascinating journey through a century of art and design. The modern graphic poster revolutionised advertising in the 1890s. Then in 1908, Frank Pick was given responsibility for London Underground’s publicity and commissioned works by artists such as Man Ray and Abram Games.

11am–12.30pm; £22; 2 Museum Way, Acton, W3 (directions with ticket) Strawberry Hill and Garrick’s Temple, Middlesex

Wed 6 May Friends learn about Horace Walpole’s Gothic masterpiece Strawberry Hill, its two-year restoration and its intensely theatrical design. Our private tour takes us through the shadowy hall, up the grey gothic staircase to the splendour of the galleries above. After lunch, we visit actor David Garrick’s Temple to Shakespeare, a hidden gem on the River Thames, which was built in 1756.

9.30am–5.30pm; £73 (incl. coach, coffee, lunch, gls wine, tea) Chelsea and Westminster Hospital

Portcullis House, Westminster – Contemporary Portrait Collection

Thur 23 April By special arrangement, while Parliament is dissolved before the General Election, we are delighted to offer a rare private tour of the House of Commons’ contemporary portrait collection on display in Portcullis House. Our tour is followed by a talk given by Malcolm Hay, chief curator of the Parliamentary Art Collection, and drinks.

4.30–7pm; £55 (incl. sparkling wine and nibbles); directions with ticket Royal Academy of Dramatic Art

Sat 25 April Our special tour of RADA, led by its students, offers a behind-the-scenes look at the Academy’s current home.

From its humble beginnings, the tour traces the Academy’s development to

Thur 7 and 21 May Friends can enjoy a tour of hospital charity CW+’s extraordinary public art collection at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. The tour takes in a giant indoor sculpture by Allen Jones RA, works by Julian Opie, and Veronese’s Resurrection of Christ c.1580, which hangs in the hospital chapel. A talk follows on art and its role in the healing process, which highlights the place of the visual arts at the centre of this hospital’s conception and design, and the arts programme organised by CW+ (see page 69).

11.30am–1pm; £22 (incl. donation); meet at C&W Hospital, SW10 (directions with ticket); more info: cwplus.org.uk Chevening House, Kent

Tue 19 May By special invitation, we privately tour Chevening, the official residence of the

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Post the booking form to ‘Events & Lectures’, or fax 020 7300 8023.

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 coaches leave 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 royalacademy.org.uk/ friends For queries about these events, please call 020 7300 5839.

Foreign Secretary and the Deputy Prime Minister. The Grade I-listed house was built in the 1620s to a design attributed to Inigo Jones, with the gardens, pleasure grounds and park also Grade II-listed. In the morning we visit the nearby Saxon church, St Botolph’s.

9am–7pm; £145 (incl. coach, coffee, donation to church, lunch, high tea at Chevening).

Places limited.

Contrasts and Continuities in St James’s

Wed 20 May and Fri 22 May When the Royal Academy moved to Burlington House in 1867, St James’s, the district to the south, had already seen several transformations, and had become a firmly aristocratic area with grand houses along Green Park and Lord St Alban’s district. Our walking tour with Owen Hopkins (RA Architecture Programme Manager) examines the various buildings – old and new – that have come to define St James’s as one of London’s most distinctive areas.

11am–12.30pm; £20; meet at Burlington House.

Godinton House and Garden, Kent

Wed 3 June This exceptional Jacobean house is built around a medieval core and was home to the Toke family for over 600 years.

The house contains many treasures: glorious carved paneling and friezes, an exceptional collection of porcelain, Chippendale furniture, and portraits.

Following our private tour of the house, we explore the magnificent gardens with the head gardener. We also visit the 14thcentury church of St Mary’s at Great Chart with the Reverend Tim Wilson.

9am–7pm; £85 (incl. coach, coffee, lunch, gls wine and tea)

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These events are very popular. We recommend you post your booking form as soon as you receive the magazine. Remaining tickets will be sold online and by phone from 23 March.

How to book ● Postal bookings open now.

P H OTO BY M A R T I N FAGG

Friends Events and Excursions

its present residence in Gower Street, where the original architecture blends with cutting-edge facilities, and historic artefacts and paintings.

First tour 11am–12pm, second tour 12–1pm; £23; meet at Gower Street, WC1

Friends Worldwide Art Tours

Madama, designed by Raphael, and privately view Carracci’s frescoes at the Farnese Palace. Call 020 7873 5013 or visit coxandkings.co.uk/ra

Italy: Renaissance Rome with Dr Andreas Petzold

Events booking form For Friends Events and Excursions, please list your event choices in preference order (do not use this form for Friends Week events).

Event

Date

Number of Tickets

Cost

20–24 May This art tour explores the golden age of art in Rome. Highlights include a private visit to the Vatican Museum and Sistine Chapel, plus special access to Bramante’s Palazzo della Cancelleria. We also visit the Villa

Stanley Picker Trust

Garrick Club

Tue 16 June We privately visit the former home of art collector Stanley Picker (1913–1982) to explore the paintings, sculptures and objects he gathered throughout his lifetime. Much of the collection was acquired through Picker’s personal relationships with gallery owners, and is a fascinating account of London’s art market in the 1950s. The house was designed to showcase the collection, including works by Chagall and Moore.

11am–1pm or 2–4pm; £23 (incl. coffee); Kingston-Upon-Thames, KT2 (directions with ticket). Places limited.

Tue 23 June and Thur 9 July Founded in 1831, the Garrick Club houses the largest and most significant collection of British theatrical works of art, with over 1,000 paintings, drawings and sculptures, including works by Zoffany, Lawrence and Millais. We are privileged to offer these special tours with theatre historian Frances Hughes.

10am–12pm; £37 (incl. coffee); Garrick St, WC2

M U R A L I N T H E VAT I CA N M US EU M , T H E VAT I CA N , R O M E , P H OTO CO U R T ESY COX A N D K I N GS

P H OTO BY M A R T I N FAGG

Aspen Corporate Art Collection

Thur 18 June Friends enjoy an after-hours tour of insurance company Aspen’s art collection, which contains works by Fiona Rae RA, David Hockney RA and Chris Ofili.

The tour is led by Fabienne Nicholas of the Contemporary Art Society, who will discuss the values and parameters of corporate art collections.

6.15–7.45pm; £28 (incl. gls wine); meet at 30 Fenchurch St, EC3 Saddlers’ Hall

Fri 19 June Destroyed three times by fire or bombing, the current Saddlers’ Hall is the private city mansion of the Worshipful Company of Saddlers. We enjoy a talk on the history of livery halls, a tour of the rebuilt hall with the Beadle, and a rare viewing of the company’s treasures with the Silver Steward.

2–4pm; £23 (incl. tea/coffee); meet at 40 Gutter Lane, London, EC2 Whitechapel Bell Foundry

Sat 20 June and 4 July Established in 1570 and still in operation, the Whitechapel Bell Foundry is Britain’s oldest manufacturing company, famous for the design and manufacture of the Liberty Bell in 1752 and Big Ben in 1858.

We learn about the variety of bells it produces and explore the building itself, which dates back to 1670. Please note there are uneven floors and steep stairs, and children under 16 are not permitted.

10–11.30am; £30 (directions with ticket)

Rodmarton Manor and Sapperton, Gloucestershire

Thur 25 June Rodmarton Manor is the supreme example of a house crafted to the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement. Much of the furniture was made especially for the house, either in local Cotswolds workshops, or by the Barnsley Brothers and Peter Waals. Friends enjoy an exclusive tour of the house and the Manor’s beautiful gardens. After lunch, we visit nearby Sapperton and its church.

9am–7.30pm; £78 (incl. coach, coffee, lunch, gls wine, tea) Broughton and Compton Verney, Warwickshire

Tue 30 June Friends visit Compton Verney’s exhibition ‘The Arts and Crafts House: Then and Now’, which celebrates both historic and contemporary design.

Beginning with Ruskin and Morris, the show explores the source material that inspired a new era of domestic creativity.

We then privately tour Broughton Castle, a moated manor house. Home to the Fiennes family for 500 years, and rebuilt in the 16th and 18th centuries, the castle's mix of architectural styles, includes a 14th-century chapel and gothic gallery.

9am–7.30pm; £86 (incl. coach, coffee, lunch/ gls of wine, tea) Overnight Tour of Northumbria

Tue 6 to Sat 10 October Our exciting five-day Friends excursion to Northumbria includes tours of Durham Cathedral, Alnwick Castle, the Bowes Museum, Auckland Castle and the privately-owned Meldon Park.

For details, call Sue Stamp on 020 7300 5811

Total Cost £

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

Jobseeker

Disabled

Please note that reductions are not available for Friends Events and 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 Title First name Surname Address

Postcode

Daytime telephone Friends Membership no.

Email address The Royal Academy reserves the right to refuse admission to any event

● 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 Visitor & Friends Experience Team Royal Academy of Arts Piccadilly London W1J 0BD Fax booking line: 020 7300 8023

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ANTHONY GREEN

RA

27 MARCH!27 APRIL 2015

DETAIL: Chris Orr, Train Time

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E X H I B I T I O N

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JOURNEYS OF DISTINCTION Sunflowers on Margaret’s Trestle Table, oil on MDF, 94 x 109cm

C u r w e n

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34 Windmill Street, Fitzrovia, London W1T 2JR E: gallery@curwengallery.com www.curwengallery.com Tel: 020-7323 4700 Open Mon- Fri 10-6 (Thurs 10-8) Sat 11-5

.

EXHIBITIONS CORPORATE SOURCING CONSULTANCY

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www.brookgallery.co.uk

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

THE ART OF A NATION IRISH WORKS FROM THE ALLIED IRISH BANKS AND CRAWFORD ART GALLERY COLLECTION “A RARE OPPORTUNITY TO SEE OVER 70 IMPORTANT IRISH WORKS FROM ALOYSIUS O’KELLY TO SEAN SCULLY IN LONDON.” 13 to 31 May, Admission Free Mall Galleries, The Mall, London SW1 www.mallgalleries.org.uk Image: Shane Blount, It’s a Blue Giraffe (detail)

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Exhibitions in London and the rest of the UK

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

© ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO/COURTESY THE NATIONAL P ORTR AIT GALLERY. COURTESY BONHAMS . © THE ARTIST/COURTESY BROWSE AND DARBY. © THE ARTIST/COURTESY BE AUX ARTS LONDON

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

Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector Discover the collections

of 14 contemporary and post-war artists, until 25 May Roman Signer: Slow Movement Renowned for his sculptural installations, Roman Signer uses the kayak in this exhibition - a long standing symbol and form in his work for three decades, 4 March-31 May THE BRITISH MUSEUM

Great Russell Street WC1, 020 7323 8181 www.britishmuseum.org

Defining Beauty: The Body in Ancient Greek Art Experience the brilliance

and diversity of ancient Greek art with a focus on the human body, 26 March5 July The BP Exhibition: Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation

Discover the remarkable story of one of the world’s oldest continuing cultures, 23 April-2 Aug DULWICH PICTURE GALLERY

Gallery Road SE21, 020 8693 5254 www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk

From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia, until 15 March Eric Ravilious: Composition The first

major exhibition to survey watercolours by celebrated British artist Eric Ravilious (1903-42). Ravilious is widely considered one of the key figures in mid-20th century British design but he was also one of the finest watercolourists in the country, 1 April-31 Aug ESTORICK COLLECTION OF MODERN ITALIAN ART

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

Renato Guttuso: Painter of Modern Life First major exhibition in the UK

for 20 years to focus on Renato Guttuso, until 4 April Modigliani: A Unique Artistic Voice Featuring Amedeo Modigliani’s works on paper, showing his unique portrayal of the human face and form, 15 April-28 June MALL GALLERIES

The Mall SW1, 020 7930 6844 www.mallgalleries.org.uk

The Royal Society of British Artists Annual Exhibition, 11-21 March The Art of a Nation: Irish Works from the Allied Irish Banks and Crawford Art Gallery Collection, 13-31 May

NATIONAL GALLERY

TATE MODERN

Trafalgar Square WC2, 020 7747 2885 www.nationalgallery.org.uk Inventing Impressionism This major exhibition brings together 85 Impressionist masterpieces through the story of Paul Durand-Ruel, 6 March-31 May Peder Balke Groundbreaking free exhibition rediscovering the works of this Norwegian artist who is one of the forerunners of modernist expressionism, until 12 April Frames in Focus: Sansovino Frames Unique free exhibition looking at innovative Sansovino Frames, enabling visitors to realise how frames transform the way we look at paintings and to appreciate them as artworks in their own right, 1 April-13 Sep

Bankside SE1, 020 7887 8888 www.tate.org.uk

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

St Martin’s Place WC2, 020 7306 0055 www.npg.org.uk

Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden This large-scale survey charts

the artist’s career from early works to newly finished canvases, until 10 May The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay

The first UK retrospective to assess the breadth of Delaunay’s vibrant artistic practice. It features the groundbreaking paintings, textiles and clothes she made across a sixty-year career, as well as the results of her innovative collaborations with poets, choreographers and manufacturers, from Diaghilev to Liberty, 15 April-9 Aug V&A

Cromwell Road SW7, 020 7942 2000 www.vam.ac.uk

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty

TATE BRITAIN

This exhibition is the only major retrospective of McQueen’s fashion design work to be presented in Europe, showcasing the best of his creative output up until 2010, 14 March-19 July What is Luxury? See exceptional examples of contemporary design and craftsmanship, ranging from finely crafted exhibits to specially commissioned installations, 25 April-27 Sep All of this Belongs to You The V&A belongs to all of us. But what does this really mean? Enjoy specially commissioned installations by James Bridle, Natalie Jeremijenko and Jorge Otero-Pailos, 1 April-19 July

Millbank SW1, 020 7887 8888 www.tate.org.uk

London Commercial

Providing a rare behind-the-scenes look into one of fashion’s most innovative and celebrated names, Waplington’s photographs capture the creative journey of McQueen’s final Autumn/Winter collection, Horn of Plenty in 2009, 10 March-17 May Sculpture Victorious This exhibition celebrates some of the most astonishing and lavish works produced in the Victorian era. Included are many extraordinary objects, from magnificent marble, limewood and ceramic sculpture shown at the Great Exhibitions, to exquisite jewellery and silverwork, and ornate carving of beauty and wonder such as Monti’s Veiled Vestal, until 25 May Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840-1860 The first exhibition in Britain devoted to salted paper prints, one of the earliest forms of photography, until 7 June

31 & 34 Cork Street W1, 020 7439 1866 www.alancristea.com

Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends A major exhibition exploring

Sargent’s intimate portraits of his impressive circle of friends, including Robert Louis Stevenson, Claude Monet and Auguste Rodin, until 25 May Wellington: Triumphs, Politics and Passions Marking the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, this exhibition will explore the personal life and political and military career of Wellington, 12 March-7 June

Nick Waplington/Alexander McQueen: Working Process

The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, Italy, 1907, by John Singer Sargent at the National Portrait Gallery

The Windmill, 1933, by Sybil Andrews at Bonhams

ALAN CRISTEA Richard Long RA: The Spike Island Tapes Pioneering land artist Richard

Long has been making prints for over forty years. In his first exhibition at the gallery, Long presents a new series of monumental carborundum prints, his first experimentation with this medium, until 2 April Gillian Ayres RA An exhibition of historic and new paintings and woodcuts, 14 April-30 May Julian Opie An exhibition of editions from 2012 to the present day, 4 June-18 July

In the Woods, 2014, by James Lloyd at Browse & Darby

BANKSIDE GALLERY

48 Hopton Street SE1, 020 7928 7521 www.banksidegallery.com

RWS Contemporary Watercolour Competition, 6-18 March Watercolour Etcetera: Royal Watercolour Society Spring Exhibition, 27 March-25 April RE Original Prints 2015, 8 May-7 June

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

Eochaid, 2014, by Anthony Scott at Beaux Arts London

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BEAUX ARTS LONDON

Untitled AC17, 2011, by Rebecca Salter RA at Beardsmore Gallery

48 Maddox Street W1, 020 7493 1155 www.beauxartslondon.co.uk Sungyong Hong Introducing a new Korean artist: ‘SungYong Hong is calling his current series of images “Heuristic” (...) which refers to a method of study, or learning, whereby the tools of deduction, and trial and error, lead the investigator into a discovery. The depths and layers emerge in striking three-dimensional images, where circles and whorls of bright colours jump out of a black background’, 5 March-11 April Anthony Scott, 16 April-16 May BONHAMS

Figure and Yacht, 2012, by Simon Carter at Messums

101 New Bond Street W1, 020 7447 7447 www.bonhams.com The Scottish Sale On view in London before the auction in Edinburgh on 15 April, 24-25 March The Wellington, Waterloo & the Napoleonic Wars Sale Marking the bicentenary of The

Battle of Waterloo, 29 March-1 April The British Master Prints Sale Works

by major British artists including Lucian Freud, David Hockney RA and C.R.W. Nevinson, 26-29 April The Wolf of Eyelash Mountain, 2014-15,

by Martin Finnin at John Martin Gallery

BROWSE & DARBY

19 Cork Street W1, 020 7734 7984 www.browseanddarby

Elizabeth Blackadder RA: Decades

Watercolours and oils from the 1950s to the present day, until 19 March James Lloyd New nudes, portraits and still-lifes from the acclaimed and awardwinning painter, 25 March-16 April Craigie Aitchison RA: The Stirling Tapestries A set of six tapestries

conceived and designed by Craigie Aitchison for the walls of the Chapel Royal, Stirling Castle, 24 April-15 May CONNAUGHT BROWN

Comedy and Tragedy “Sic Vita”, 1890,

by Sir Albert Gilbert RA at The Fine Art Society

2 Albemarle Street W1, 020 7408 0362 www.connaughtbrown.co.uk MMXIV Geoff Uglow, 26 March29 April CURWEN & NEW ACADEMY GALLERY

34 Windmill Street W1, 020 7323 4700 www.curwengallery.com

Anthony Green RA and Thirza Kotzen: Skyhigh (and the Space Between), 5-28 March Seascapes

Jane Corsellis, Donald Hamilton Fraser, Andrew Macara and Richard Pikesley.

Adrian Sykes, 2-30 April Emma

Dunbar and Fiona Millais. Mark Cazalet, 7-28 May

www.jonathancooper.co.uk Craig Wylie: Nurse, 26 March-18 April

EAGLE GALLERY / EMH ARTS

LLEWELLYN ALEXANDER

159 Farringdon Road EC1, 020 7833 2674 www.emmahilleagle.com Building Dwelling Thinking Peter Ashton Jones, Denise de Cordova, James Fisher and Robert Welch, 19 March-1 May

124–126 The Cut SE1, 020 7620 1322/1324 www.llewellynalexander.com Jenny Wheatley NEAC RWS Over 40 new watercolours and oils of Greece, France and Cornwall, until 11 March Jeremy Barlow ROI Over 50 new oils by the eminent landscape painter, 17 March-15 April Mary Pym Over 25 oil paintings of the British countryside and coastline, 21 April6 May Bruce Yardley Town and cityscapes, as well as still lifes and interiors, painted in oils, 12-30 May

EAMES FINE ART GALLERY

58 Bermondsey Street SE1, 020 7407 1025 www.eamesfineart.com

Patrick Caulfield RA: Original Screenprints Featuring the complete

1973 series of Illustrations for Poetry by Jules Laforge, 12 March-12 April Malcolm Franklin: Rock-Paper-Wood

A new exhibition of Franklin’s sculptures, drawings and original lithographs and linocuts, 16 April-10 May Jason Hicklin: Impressions of Orkney New etchings, paintings and etched plates by master printmaker Jason Hicklin, 14 May-7 June THE FAN MUSEUM

12 Crooms Hill SE10, 020 8305 1441 www.thefanmuseum.org.uk Waterloo: Life & Times Commemorating the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo.

Featuring fans made to commemorate military campaigns, battles and victories associated with the period, until 10 May Fans of the Belle Époque Late 19th and early 20th century fans, including examples from Duvelleroy & Kees; an array of beautifully conceived Art Nouveau confections and exotic feather fans and exuberant designs by painters such as Abbéma, Lasellaz and Billotey, 12 May-2 Sep

LONG & RYLE GALLERY

4 John Islip Street SW1, 020 7834 1434 www.longandryle.com Maro Gorky: Familiar Motives

The spectator sees Gorky’s formal portraits as figures that come forward from the surface of the canvas. With landscape, the opposite happens. The spectator steps behind the membrane of the painting to walk along its imaginary paths, 12 March-17 April London Original Print Fair, Royal Academy of Arts. Exhibiting work from Ramiro Fernandez Saus, Katharine Morling, Su Blackwell, Paul Coldwell, Anne Desmet and Melanie Miller, 23-26 April Jocelyn Clarke: Small Moon

Shifting from close-up observation to imagined horizons, Clarke combines the depiction of natural forms with memory and symbolism, 14 May-19 June MARLBOROUGH FINE ART

THE FINE ART SOCIETY 148 New Bond Street W1, 020 7629 5116 www.faslondon.com

6 Albemarle Street W1, 020 7629 5161 www.marlboroughfineart.com Ken Kiff: The Hill of Dreams, 4 March-11 April Hugie O’Donoghue, 15 March-6 June

THE ILLUSTRATION CUPBOARD

MESSUMS 28 Cork Street W1, 020 7437 5545 www.messums.com

Alfred Gilbert and Frederic Leighton: The New Sculpture, until 19 March

22 Bury Street SW1, 020 7976 1727 www.illustrationcupboard.com

Spring exhibitions with Anita Jeram, Oliver Jeffers, John Vernon Lord,

April-May (contact gallery for dates) JOHN MARTIN GALLERY

38 Albemarle Street W1, 020 7499 1314 www.jmlondon.com

Martin Finnin: The Wolf of Eyelash Mountain, 13 March-21 April Josh Dorman: Recent Paintings, 24 April16 May Andrew Gifford: New York,

22 May-6 June JOHNATHAN COOPER PARK WALK GALLERY

20 Park Walk SW10, 020 7351 0410

Simon Carter: The Series Paintings,

22 April-8 May OSBORNE SAMUEL

23a Bruton Street W1, 020 7493 7939 www.osbornesamuel.com

Brendan Stuart Burns: Gesture, Glimpse, Memory, until 21 March Prunella Clough: Unconsidered Wastelands This exhibition will consist

of paintings, drawings, prints and collages demonstrating the development of her work and the various influences on her, 16 April-16 May London Original Print Fair, Royal Academy of Arts. An exhibition of modern and contemporary prints including a

© T H E A R T IS T/CO U R T ESY B E A R DS M O R E G A L L ERY. © THE ARTIST/COURTESY MES SUMS . ©THE ARTIST/COURTESY JOHN MARTIN GALLERY. © THE ARTIST ’S ESTATE /COURTESY THE FINE ART SOCIE T Y

BEARDSMORE GALLERY 22-24 Prince of Wales Road NW5, 020 7485 0923 www.beardsmoregallery.com Rebecca Salter RA Works on paper from 1980s to the present, 14 May-6 June

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TW R O EA SP TH EN DE EC E TR RS IAL PR Y ’ O IC TIC FF E K E OF ET R ON S F E OR

DEBORAH STERN ARBS SCULPTOR

18–24 MARCH 2015 Duke of York Square, off Sloane Square, London SW3 4LY Tel: +44 (0)20 7589 6108 “Primavera”. Bronze. Edition of 9. 11” x 13” x 11½” (28cm x 33cm x 29cm)

For the latest information, including recommended luxury hotels and to book a table at the Cellini restaurant by Absolute Taste, visit: bada-antiques-fair.co.uk

To view this and other sculptures telephone for appointment in central London Telephone: 020 7262 7104

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Email: info@deborah-stern.com Website: www.deborah-stern.com

Claude Monet, Poplars in the Sun (detail), 1891. The National Museum of Western Art, Matsukata Collection. Tokyo © The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo

GOYA

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The Witches and Old Women Album

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26 Februa r y — 25 May 2015

Embassy of Spain Benjamin Proust Fine Art Limited – London Sam Fogg Tavolozza Foundation – Katrin Bellinger

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selection of linocuts from the Grosvenor School, 23-26 April PANGOLIN LONDON

90 York Way N1, 020 7520 1480 www.pangolinlondon.com

Breon O’Casey: Transitions, until 14 March Bryan Kneale: Five Decades, 25 March-2 May Jon Buck: Colour, 13 May-27 June

PIERS FEETHAM GALLERY Poise, 1916, by John Fergusson RBA at Richard Green

475 Fulham Road SW6, 020 7381 3031 www.piersfeethamgallery.com Wladyslaw Mirecki Landscape watercolours of East Anglia, Yorkshire and Wiltshire, 20 March-18 April Maryanne Nicholls New drawings and ceramic sculpture, 23 April-13 May Monika Veriopoulos and Alexandra Buhler Drawings and paintings,

20 May-6 June THE ROYAL OVER-SEAS LEAGUE Copse, 2014, by Craig Wylie at Jonathan Cooper, Park Walk Gallery

Heloise and Abelard, 2012, by Evelyn Williams at Martin Tinney Gallery

Over-seas House, Park Place, St James’s Street SW1, 020 7408 0214 www.rosl.org.uk www.dibresciani.com

Di Bresciani: New Compositions in Colour, 13 May-10 July

RICHARD GREEN 147 New Bond Street W1, 020 7493 3939 www.richardgreen.com Pre-War Scotland A selection of paintings by twentieth century Scottish artists including works by S.J. Peploe, J.D. Fergusson, F.C.B. Cadell and G.L. Hunter, as well as Alan Davie, William Scott, William Turnbull and Craigie Aitchison RA, 20 May-10 June Ken Howard RA Richard Green is the sole worldwide agent for Ken Howard. To see recent paintings, please visit the website or the gallery SYLVESTER FINE ART

64 Belsize Lane NW3, 020 7443 5990 www.sylvesterfineart.com Graham Sutherland, 11-29 March Pablo Picasso, 20 May-7 June 20th and 21st Century British and European Fine Art Including modern

masters such as Henri Matisse, Henry Moore, David Hockney RA, Salvador Dali and Marc Chagall, ongoing THACKERAY GALLERY Dusk Arrival, 2014, by Donna Goold at Artwave West

18 Thackeray Street W8, 020 7937 5883 www.thackeraygallery.com Eleri Mills Solo show by the awardwinning Welsh artist. 30 works showcase her unique style with hand stitch, appliqué and paint, 10-27 March Vanessa Gardiner High impact, stylish linear semi-abstract landscapes with an essence of inspiration from the St Ives School, 21 April-8 May Carey

Mortimer Working on reclaimed

materials, including timber and gessoed cloth, the artist has also created some outstanding Italian-inspired frescoes, 19 May-5 June WIMBLEDON FINE ART

41 Church Road, SW19, 020 8944 6593 www.wimbledonfineart.com Andrew Hewkin MA New paintings 26 April-10 June

Rest of UK ARTWAVE WEST

Morcombelake, Dorset, 01297 489746 www.artwavewest.com Spring Exhibition Amy Albright, Bee Bartlett, Suchi Chidambaram, Heather Duncan, Donna Goold, Martin Goold, Robert Hewer, Val Hudson and Leanne Stephens, 6 March-18 April Four Artists Exploring the edge of abstraction: Martin Goold, Sonia Stanyard, Elisa McLeod and Jane Bohane, 24 April-30 May THE ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM

Beaumont St, Oxford, 01865 278000 www.ashmolean.org Great British Drawings, 26 March31 Aug Love Bites: Caricatures by James Gillray, 26 March-21 June BOHUN GALLERY

15 Reading Road, Henley-on-Thames, Oxon, 01491 576228 www.bohungallery.co.uk Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: Coast to Coast Comprehensive overview

from 1947 of the work by this founding member of the St Ives School, until 7 March Collector’s Prints: Celebration of Master Printmaker Kip Gresham Featuring Elisabeth

Frink RA, William Rothenstein, Peter Blake RA, Eduardo Paolozzi RA, Prunella Clough, John Hoyland RA and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, 14 March11 April Colin Bishop and Peter Hayes Paintings by Colin Bishop focusing on the Dorset landscape, accompanied by sculpture and garden statuary by Peter Hayes, 18 April-9 May THE BOWES MUSEUM

Barnard Castle, County Durham, 01833 690606 www.thebowesmuseum.org.uk

Birds of Paradise: Plumes & Feathers in Fashion This colourful exhibition

features extravagant catwalk creations from designers including Dries van Noten, Balenciaga, Prada, Gucci & Alexander McQueen, until 19 April Confected, Borrowed & Blue In Paul Scott’s hands, domestic ceramics mutate into subversive comments on our life and times. His expert manipulation of familiar motifs like the Willow

Pattern gives his work special resonance and broad appeal, until 12 April Milk Snatcher: The Thatcher Drawings

Featuring Gerald Scarfe’s drawings of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, 14 March-7 June BRIGHTON MUSEUM AND ART GALLERY

Royal Pavilion Gardens, Brighton, 030 0029 0900 www.brighton-hove-museums.org.uk

Wildlife Photographer of the Year,

2 May-6 Sep BROOK GALLERY

Fore Street, Budleigh Salterton, Devon, 01395 443003 www.brookgallery.co.uk Chris Orr MBE RA, 27 March-27 April Bruce McLean, 22 May-28 June CAROLINE WISEMAN AT THE ALDEBURGH BEACH LOOKOUT AND ART HOUSE

31 Crag Path, Aldeburgh, Suffolk, 01728 452754 www.carolinewiseman.com Craigie Aitchison RA: Recreated

The Aldeburgh Beach Lookout is recreated as the sitting room of this wellloved Royal Academician, until 6 April Eileen Cooper RA in Residence

Brand new works inspired by Aldeburgh on show, 11 April-15 May Antony Gormley RA: Land Look Alongside Gormley’s major sculpture commission on Aldeburgh’s Martello tower, the Aldeburgh Beach Lookout creates an extraordinary installation, 16-31 May THE FRY ART GALLERY

Castle Street, Saffron Walden, Essex, 01799 513779 www.fryartgallery.org Kenneth Rowntree (1915-1997): A Centenary Exhibition, 5 April-12 July The Fry Art Gallery 30th Anniversary Exhibition From Eric Ravilious to

Grayson Perry RA. Works from the Fry Art Gallery collection, 5 April-25 Oct THE GALLERY AT 41

41 East Street, Corfe Castle, Dorset, 01929 480095 www.galleryat41.com Spring Exhibition Dorset artists and sculptors explore atmospheric environments here and abroad in a range of mediums. Including Richard Price ROI, Felicity House PS and David Atkins, 7 March-16 May (closed 23-27 March) Purbeck Art Weeks Festival Exhibition Showcasing a wide variety of work by contemporary Dorset painters and sculptors, 23 May-7 June GALLERY 49

1 Market Place, Old Town, Bridlington, East Yorkshire, 01262 679472 www.galleryforty-nine.com

© T H E A R T IS T ’ S ES TAT E /CO U R T ESY R I CH A R D GR EEN . © T H E A R T IS T/CO U R T ESY J O N AT H A N CO O P ER , PA R K WA L K G A L L ERY. © T H E A R T IS T/CO U R T ESY M A R T I N T I N N E Y G A L L ERY. © T H E A R T IS T/CO U R T ESY A R T WAV E W ES T

Listings

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Richard Bawden RWS RE, Amber II, ink on paper

Richard Bawden RWS RE, Bamboo Hall, watercolour

ROYALWATERCOLOUR WATERCOLOURSOCIETY SOCIETY ROYAL Watercolour Etc. 27 March - 25 April The Bridge to Campo San Trovaso, oil on canvas 16”x16”

This exhibition will showcase the Royal Watercolour Society artists’ latest work in water-based media and, exceptionally, one work in another medium such as oil, photography or print.

Richard Bawden RWS RE is this year’s featured artist.

CAROL OWEN MBE COAST AND CANAL

Paintings from the Isle of Wight and Venice

Open daily | 11am - 6pm

5b Pall Mall, London SW1Y 4UY tel: 07817 641198 www.carolowenfineart.co.uk

Image: Rowan Crew Sen RBA, The Kitchen Garden En-Suite

Bankside Gallery | 48 Hopton Street | London | SE1 9JH | 020 7928 7521 info@banksidegallery.com | www.royalwatercoloursociety.co.uk

11-15 MAY 2015

ROYAL OPERA ARCADE GALLERY

Annual Exhibition 2015 11 to 21 March, 10am to 5pm (closes 1pm on final day)

Free entry with this voucher

Late Night opening Thursday 12 March, until 7pm Work will be available to Browse & Buy online from 4 March www.royalsocietyofbritishartists.org.uk The Mall, London SW1 www.mallgalleries.org.uk Tel: 020 7930 6844

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ART HISTORY SHORT COURSES 2015

Unearthed: Barbara Wood and Hilary Angle Ceramics and mixed media

t Scholarly t Sociable t Accessible t Small Groups t Close Attention

paintings exploring the effects of time and neglect on surfaces, 21 March5 April Pedal Power: The Art of Two Wheels A celebration of the first Tour de Yorkshire Cycle Race by various artists, 25 April-1 Aug

SUMMER SCHOOL: 13 July - 7 August 32 week-long art history courses Explore Western and Non-Western Art and Architecture in its various contexts t from the Medieval Imagination to Urban Photography

GALLERY PANGOLIN

9 Chalford Ind. Estate, Chalford, Gloucs, 01453 889765 www.gallery-pangolin.com Sculptors’ Prints and Drawings

Annual exhibition of works on paper featuring prints and drawings by modern and contemporary sculptors, until 27 March Toro! Sculpture and works on paper by a selection of artists exploring and celebrating this formidable beast. Including a series of life-size drawings by Marcus James, 20 April-29 May

t from Classical Greece and Rome to Contemporary China t: +44 (0)20 7848 2678 e: short.courses@courtauld.ac.uk www.courtauld.ac.uk/publicprogrammes

GOLDMARK ART

The major centre in Britain for the study of art history

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Orange Street, Uppingham, Rutland, 01572 821424 goldmarkart.com Jean-Nicolas Gérard New ceramics by this leading French potter, 21 March19 April Jenny Grevatte New paintings inspired by trips to Italy and Greece, 15:54:35 21 March-19 April Olive Wootton Contemporary bronze sculpture, 25 April-24 May HAYLETTS GALLERY

Oakwood House, 2 High Street, Maldon, Essex, 01621 851669 www.haylettsgallery.com Annual Modern British Original Print Exhibition Works by Barbara

Painting courses at stunning Picton Castle in Pembrokeshire Visiting tutors include Nicky Philipps, Nick Bashall Minna Stevens, Rosalie Watkins Keep an eye on our website for Nicky’s special Painting-with-the-Artist days

Picton Castle Studios www.pictoncastlestudios.com TEL 01239 891899

Hepworth, David Hockney RA, Mary Fedden RA, Patrick Caulfield RA, Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Elisabeth Frink RA; Eduardo Paulozzi RA, Peter Blake RA and Terry Frost RA, 7 March-4 April Watercolours by Michael Coulter Coulter’s observation of people, birds and the ordinary are portrayed skilfully with a light touch and quirky charm. Coastal and estuary settings of Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk regularly feature in his work, 11 April9 May Albert Irvin RA, 16 May-13 June THE HOLBURNE MUSEUM

Great Pulteney Street, Bath, 01225 388569 www.holburne.org Gwen John to Lucian Freud: Home and the World This exhibition

juxtaposes a confident sense of national identity with a yearning for exploration.

Varied artistic approaches reveal the changing landscape of 20th-century art: the boldness of Vanessa Bell, the introversion of Gwen John, the gravitas of Duncan Grant, the Pop Art invention of Richard Hamilton and the intensity of Lucian Freud, until 7 June

MOMA WALES

Heol Penrallt, Machynlleth, Powys, 01654 703355 www.momawales.org.uk David Nash RA , until 25 April Ian Phillips: New Views on Old Hills, until 11 April Kyffin Williams RA: Patagonia, until 9 May NORTH HOUSE GALLERY

The Walls, Manningtree, Essex, 01206 392717 www.northhousegallery.co.uk Chris Gough: Now & Then New works on paper, improvisations in mixed media on reconfigured earlier etchings, 7 March-4 April Daisy Cook: Chronicles in Water Paintings

Relating to walks along the East Coast of England, 11 April-9 May Michael Flint: A Retrospective Etchings of East Anglian landscape and a series inspired by medieval church graffiti, 16 May-13 June PALLANT HOUSE GALLERY

9 North Pallant, Chichester, West Sussex, 01243 774557 www.pallant.org.uk

Leon Underwood: Figure and Rhythm The first major museum

retrospective for over forty years of the British artist Leon Underwood (1890-1975), who was described as ‘the precursor of modern sculpture in Britain’, 7 March-14 June Joseph Emberton: The Architecture of Display, until 17 May

RABLEY DRAWING CENTRE Rabley Barn, Mildenhall, Marlborough, Wilts, 01672 511999 www.rableydrawingcentre.com Place 10 Rabley artists-in-residence: Helen Barff, Alan Bond, Martyn Brewster, Sara Lee, Nik Pollard, Kate Raggett, Lucy Strachen and Sandy Sykes, 22 March-17 April London Original Print Fair, Royal Academy of Arts. New prints by Eileen Cooper RA, Naomi Frears, Katherine Jones, Sara Lee, Nana Shiomi RE and Emma Stibbon RA, 23-26 April Eileen Cooper RA: Playing Out New large-scale drawings, intimate gouache and ink works on paper and bronze sculptures of love and myth, 17 May-19 June ROYAL BIRMINGHAM SOCIETY OF ARTISTS

4 Brook Street, St Paul’s, Birmingham, 0121 236 4353 www.rbsa.org.uk Open All Media First open exhibition of 2015 showcasing artists from across the UK working in a variety of media, until 28 March Expressions of the Human Form Six RBSA Members and Associates focus on the human figure, 30 March-11 April Candidates This annual exhibition features work by artists

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Paul Nash Photographs Edward Bawden Drawings and Linocuts Ian Beck · Glynn Boyd Harte · Alan Powers

Art Workers Guild 6 Queen Square London WC1N 3AT seeking election to become Members or Associates of the RBSA, 13-25 April SLADERS YARD

West Bay Road, West Bay, Bridport, March 2nd 10:30 - 4:30 (6:00 - 9:30 Private View) Dorset, 01308 459511 rd th th th th March 3 March 5 March 6 10:30 - 4:30 | March 7 9:00 - 12:00 | March 9 10:30 - 4:30 www.sladersyard.co.uk Time Lines Paul Jones’s landscape For further information contact neil@jenningsfineart.co.uk · 07812 994558 paintings and Akiko Hirai’s ceramics are linked by texture and tone, with furniture by Petter Southall, until 12 April Earth and Rock Paintings by FLORA McDONNELL ABBOTT and HOLDER Frances Hatch and Jan Walker with ceramics by Robin Welch and furniture

by Petter Southall, 18 April-31 May Jennings_eighth_Spr15.indd 1 06/01/2015 15:56 THE STANLEY SPENCER GALLERY

FROM PARK ROYAL TO ORKNEY AND DONEGAL Thursday 19th - Saturday 28th March

www.abbottandholder.co.uk

High Street, Cookham, Berkshire, 01628 471885 www.stanleyspencer.org.uk Paradise Regained Exploring Spencer’s recovery from the devastating effect of the First World War on his personal and professional life, to produce some of his finest and most hauntingly memorable works, until 29 March The Creative Genius of Stanley Spencer A combination of fine paintings, including the full permanent Spencer collections of the Art Galleries at Aberdeen and Leeds, on loan to the Gallery. This show exemplifies the diversity of Spencer’s output and the breadth of his genius, 2 April20 March 2016 TATE ST IVES

Porthmeor Beach, St Ives, Cornwall, 01736 796226 www.tate.org.uk/stives

The Modern Lens: International Photography and the Tate Collection

This exhibition brings together pioneering artists from across the Americas, Japan and Europe for the first time at Tate St Ives, in the largest display of photographic works ever to be exhibited at the gallery, until 10 May Images Moving Out Onto Space

featuring modern and contemporary art from the UK, Europe and Asia Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7 2EU

14–17 May 2015 Thurs: 11am-9pm Fri: 11am-8pm Sat: 11am-7pm Sun: 11am-6pm Tel: 020 8742 1611 Email: info@20-21intartfair.com See Readers’ Offer

Shonibare RA, J.M.W Turner RA and Andy Warhol, until 10 May Grayson Perry RA Only on show in Margate, an exhibition of Turner-Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry’s ceramics and other artworks including tapestries, prints, bronze and iron sculpture, 23 May-13 Sep UNIVERSITY GALLERY & BARING WING

Northumbria University, Sandyford Road, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, 0191 227 4424 www.northumbria.ac.uk/universitygallery

Frans Widerberg: The Art of ReEnchantment Paintings, watercolours

and sculpture by one of Norway’s most significant figurative painters since Edvard Munch, until 2 April Peter Lanyon: The Mural Studies

The final large-scale gouache sketches for the Liverpool and Birmingham murals, as well as other related sketches, 10 April-22 May Louise Bourgeois: Autobiographical Series and 11 Drypoints A Hayward touring

exhibition from the Southbank Centre, London, 18 April-22 May WATTS GALLERY

Down Lane, Compton, Guildford, Surrey, 01483 810235 www.wattsgallery.org.uk

Liberating Fashion: Aesthetic Dress in Victorian Portraits Artists include:

G. F. Watts, Frederic Leighton, Edward Burne-Jones, Lawrence Alma-Tadema and James Tissot, until 7 June THE WILSON Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum, Clarence Street, Cheltenham 01242 237431 www.thewilson.org.uk Still Small Voice British biblical art in a secular age (1850-2014), until 3 May YORKSHIRE SCULPTURE PARK

West Bretton, Wakefield, West Yorkshire, 01924 832631 www.ysp.co.uk

Spanning 50 years, this exhibition comprises the work of nine international artists, each concerned – in very different ways – with perception and play, with movement and bodies in space, 23 May-27 Sep

Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson: Song for Coal, until 19 April Henry Moore: Back to a Land, 7 March-6 Sep Laura de Santillana and Alessandro Diaz de Santillana, 2 May-6 Sep

TURNER CONTEMPORARY

Kirgate, Thirsk, North Yorkshire, 01845 522 479 www.zillahbellgallery.co.uk

Rendezvous, Margate, Kent, 01843 233000 www.turnercontemporary.org Self: Image and Identity Historical and contemporary artists sit side by side, including Anthony Van Dyck, Mary Beale, Louise Bourgeois, John Constable, Tracey Emin RA, Jason Evans, Lucian Freud, Antony Gormley RA, Damien Hirst, David Hockney RA, Angelica Kauffmann RA, Sarah Lucas, Gillian Wearing RA, Yinka

ZILLAH BELL GALLERY The Society of Wood Engravers

The 77th Annual SWE Exhibition celebrating the best in international wood engraving, until 11 April ‘It’s like this’ by Margaret Shields A personal interpretation of the North East, 18 April-9 May Scottish Printmakers Contemporary Scottish Printmakers including Elizabeth Blackadder and Phillip Reeves, 9 May-30 June

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Continuing Education Programme Spring 2015

Handel and Hogarth 16–17 March 2015

Chinese Study Day: The British Museum 20 March 2015

Rubens the Master 26–27 March 2015

The London Art Circle Begins 13 April 2015

Art World Access Course 13–17 April 2015

The London Art Course 22 April 2015

Art Business Spring School 23–27 April 2015

Japanese and Korean Study Day 24 April 2015

Contact shortcoursesUK@christies.edu +44 (0) 20 7665 4360 christies.edu/spring

Spring Exhibition Image: ‘Palais de L’Isle’by Martin Goold

6th March – 18th April

artwave west | morcombelake | dorset | Dt6 6DY www.artwavewest.com | info@artwavewest.com 01297 489746

3 mins walk from Camden Town Tube www.jewishmuseum.org.uk

RA

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

Readers’ Offers Yane collage brooch, 2014, by Mariko Sumioka, at COLLECT

Ticket Offers

2-for-1 Tickets

The Holburne Museum is offering half price admission to ‘Gwen John to Lucian Freud: Home and the World’ (28 Feb-7 June). See advertisement on page 6.

COLLECT: The International Art Fair for Contemporary Objects (8-11 May)

The Ashmolean Museum is offering a discounted combined-ticket offer for the following summer exhibitions: ‘Great British Drawings: Gainsborough, Turner, Rossetti, Ravilious, Hockney & more’ (26 March-31 Aug), and ‘Love Bites: Caricatures by James Gillray’ (26 March-21 June). See advertisement on page 46.

Celebrating its 30th anniversary, the London Original Print Fair (23-26 April) offers free entry plus one adult and up to four children and the catalogue for the reduced price of £5. Visit www. londonprintfair.com. See advertisement on page 12.

Chelsea Art Fair (16-19 April) at Chelsea Old Town Hall. Complimentary ticket for two. Visit www.chelseaartfair.org or call 07961 371961 for details. See advertisement on page 85.

Free entry to the Mall Galleries for ‘The Royal Society of British Artists Annual Exhibition’ (11-25 March), and ‘The Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours’ (25 March-11 April).

See advertisements on pages 83 and 87.

at the Saatchi Gallery. The very best in contemporary applied arts is presented by 35 galleries from all over the world.

Please quote ‘RA15’ when booking online or by phone. www.craftscouncil.org.uk/ collect/. See advertisement on page 25.

Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art ‘Modigliani: A Unique Artistic

Voice’ (15 April-28 June). Focusing on Modigliani’s works on paper, this show identifies his unique portrayals of face and form. See advertisement on page 22.

Watts Gallery ‘Liberating Fashion:

Aesthetic Dress in Victorian Portraits’ (until 7 June). Offer not valid on Tuesdays.

See advertisement on page 72.

The Fan Museum 'Waterloo Life &

Times’ (until 10 May). Visit www. thefanmuseum.org.uk. See advertisement on page 24.

Pallant House Gallery ‘Leon Underwood:

Figure and Rhythm’ (7 March-14 June).

Visit www.pallant.org.uk.

See advertisement on page 8.

BADA Antiques and Fine Art Fair

(18-24 March), in the Duke of York Square, off Sloane Square, London SW3.

See advertisement on page 81.

The Jewish Museum ‘For Richer, For

Poorer: Weddings Unveiled’ (until 31 May). Wedding dresses, invitations and menus displayed alongside vintage wedding photographs. Offer valid on full-price tickets. See advertisement on page 87.

20/21 International Art Fair at the

Royal College of Art (14-17 May).

Modern and contemporary art from the UK and around the world. Visit www.2021intartfair.com. See advertisement on page 86.

Dulwich Picture Gallery ‘Ravilious’

(1 April-31 Aug). Over 90 watercolours

by Eric Ravilious. See advertisement on page 9.

Shopping The Turner Contemporary is offering 10 per cent discount in their shop for the duration of ‘Self: Image and Identity’ (until 10 May). Over 100 self-portraits from Anthony van Dyck to Louise Bourgeois. See advertisement on page 20.

The Wilson, Cheltenham’s art gallery and museum, is offering 10 per cent off in their shop throughout ‘Still Small Voice: British Biblical Art in a Secular Age, 1850–2014’ (until 3 May). Please quote ‘ssv2015’. See advertisement on page 6.

15 per cent off your first order at Sahara, in-store or online. Visit www.saharalondon. com/ra to receive your unique voucher code. Valid on orders over £150, one use per customer. Valid until 19 April.

Going 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 96.

Wonderful Artful Theatre Company is offering half price programmes to readers attending ‘An Evening with Lucian Freud’ at the Leicester Square Theatre Lounge (19 May-6 June). Be transported to Lucian Freud’s painting studio in the world premiere of this new play by LauraJane Foley. The one act play blends the personal and anecdotal, with intriguing art historical and biographical insights. See advertisement on page 24.

The Royal Over-Seas League is

a unique non-profit members club dedicated to fostering social and cultural connections, with clubhouse premises in St James’s and an exceptional arts and classical music programme.

RA readers receive a discounted joining fee; please quote ‘RA 2015’. 020 7408 0214 ext. 214 or visit www.rosl.org.uk.

See advertisement on page 4.

RA Publications The RA Shop is offering an exclusive 10 per cent off the following Royal Academy titles: Timothy Hyman: A Year with Maggie’s, £15.25 (RRP £16.95); Stanley Anderson: A Catalogue Raisonné, £30 (RRP £27); Richard Diebenkorn, £20 (RRP £18); Le Corbusier: The Chapel at Ronchamp, £48 (RRP £43); Available from the RA Shop, online at www.royalacademy.org.uk/shop (Enter RAMAGSPRING on checkout

to claim your discount) or call 0800 634 6341 (10am–5pm, Monday–Friday)

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Opens with THE MERCHANT OF VENICE romeo & juliet KING JOHN

MA in the History of Art: the Renaissance to Modernism October 2015 – September 2016 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 2015/16 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 MaryAnne Stevens Xavier Bray Martin Gayford

Each seminar takes place in central London and 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

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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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The latest developments in and around the RA

Academy News Untitled (laptop turquoise), 2014, by Michael Craig-Martin RA

Made in China © M I CH A EL CR A I G- M A R T I N /CO U R T ESY G AGOS I A N G A L L ERY/ P H OTO M I K E B RU CE

From shows in Shanghai to a student exchange programme, the Academy’s artists, artworks and staff are creating connections with Asia, reports SOPHIE PARKER Before he hangs this year’s Summer Exhibition, Britain’s longest running art show, Michael Craig-Martin RA turns east. At Shanghai’s Himalayas Museum (until 31 March), the artist presents his first museum exhibition in Asia, displaying 50 new paintings that depict everyday objects in his characteristically stripped-down style, including items such as laptops (above) famous for being made in the region. This is just one of several projects involving Academicians that is forging new links with Asia, as the continent increases its interest in British art.

Sean Scully RA has become the first Western abstract artist to have a full survey exhibition in China. As well as a new largescale sculpture inspired by his first visit to the Republic, over 100 paintings, drawings and photographs at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum chart 50 years of his work (13 March–23 April). Fellow Academician, architect and designer Thomas Heatherwick RA, returns to China, following his success at Shanghai World Expo in 2010, as part of his Asian tour. Devised

by the RA’s Architecture Curator Kate Goodwin, a retrospective of his work tours the region including stops at Shanghai (11 July–7 Aug; Power Station of Arts) and Beijing (5–15 June; CAFA).

Meanwhile, sculptor Richard Wilson RA is taking a bus to Hong Kong – but not in the way you might imagine. The bus is in fact an artwork, which will perch precariously on the roof of the 120-metre high hotel, the Peninsula Hong Kong.

Hang On A Minute Lads, I’ve Got A Great Idea…

(2012) is a homage to the iconic 1969 film The Italian Job – a red, white and blue bus will hover on top of the skyscraper, echoing Michael Caine and co’s bus which famously teetered on the edge of a cliff in the film’s final scene. Wilson, who previously mounted the work on top of Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion, says, ‘It is a such a complex piece to put on a very large building. It will be higher up in the air than before, and much more structurally daring. You’ll get a real wow factor.’

The sheer logistics of installing such an artwork underlines the skills of art handlers. Last autumn, the RA Art Handling Team was invited

by Art Basel Hong Kong to lead a specialist training workshop in the city, with participants ranging from curators to shipping and logistics companies. The RA’s Head of Art Handling, Dan Cowap, has been hanging the RA’s shows for over 30 years, including the annual Summer Exhibition. ‘Usually, a curator makes a model of the galleries that maps where every object will go,’ says Cowap. ‘But no one knows what’s coming to the Summer Show. We have up to 1,400 works to hang in just 12 days – and it’s curated not by one curator but ten.’ Meeting such challenges means they are well placed to share their expertise with their Asian counterparts.

For the first time in the Academy’s history, a major exhibition of works from the RA Collection has been touring Japan. Genius and Ambition includes nearly 100 paintings, sculptures and drawings made between the Academy’s inception in 1768 and the end of the First World War. The treasures on show include Joshua Reynolds PRA’s painting Theory (1789-90), and Agostino Carlini’s bust of George III (1773), both of which are travelling abroad for the first time. And Japan’s art lovers are getting their first close-up view of Turner’s Dolbadern Castle (1800) and Constable’s Boat Passing a Lock (1826), two of the many highlights in a show that reveals the Academy’s pivotal role in British art of the period.

At Tokyo’s Fuji Art Museum, which has its own significant collection of Western as well as Eastern art, Director Akira Gokita noted how ‘visitors praised this exhibition for the superior quality of the masterpieces from the Royal Academy’. The tour concludes at Nagoya’s Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art (until 5 April).

While artworks have been travelling from the RA to Asia, young artists have been travelling to the RA – to take part in the RA Schools International Residency Programme. In this six-week residency, eight young artists drawn from the RA Schools, Bejing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts and Hong Kong’s Arts in Heritage Research Ltd worked alongside each other, culminating in a group exhibition in the Schools studios last summer. Painter Cui Ran, from Beijing, was impressed by the printmaking facilities. ‘A tutor told me my work resembles engraving, so I was encouraged to make a number of prints,’ she explains. ‘I created something totally different from my usual work.’ The next residency takes place in China this August.

To watch a video about Richard Wilson’s installation ‘Hang on a Minute…’, visit http://roy.ac/minute

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Academy News

In memoriam Geoffrey Clarke RA

When I think of Geoffrey Clarke, I see him in his rambling old Suffolk house where I often visited him in the 1990s. He settled there in 1954, attracted by large well-lit rooms, which he turned into studios, and outbuildings where he set up a foundry. It is significant that he moved away from London before his greatest moment, his three stained-glass windows and numerous sculptures for Coventry Cathedral, designed by architect

News in brief NEW ACADEMICIANS The Royal Academy has elected three new Academicians: Eva Rothschild as a Sculptor, Rebecca Salter as a Printmaker, and Rose Wylie as a Painter and Senior Academician. Jim Dine and William Kentridge are new Honorary Royal Academicians, and Chris Orr RA is the Academy’s new Treasurer.

Basil Spence and consecrated in 1962. His work is often about a universal figure, Man, and his place in nature. The creator of these extraordinary images needed to maintain a discrete distance from the metropolis, only occasionally stepping into a beautiful German car to drive to Burlington House.

The sculptures that the Academician produced for architecture are essentially two-dimensional

RA ART SALES This spring sees the latest in the RA’s new series of selling shows. ‘Works on Paper by Sculptors’ features emerging and established contemporary artists, including Royal Academicians such as Bill Woodrow RA, who shows his limited-edition print Kestrel (2008, £1,200, right).

In the Belle Shenkman Room, Timothy Hyman RA’s drawings go on show from his year-long residency

and abstract. Clarke takes an important place in 20th-century art for works such as The Spirit of Electricity (1958), the 23.5m-high bronze for Thorn House in Upper St Martin’s Lane (now Orion House), which is one of London’s landmark modernist sculptures – even, that is, without mentioning his work as a printmaker and iron sculptor, for which he is best remembered.

As one of eight young sculptors, he represented Britain at the 1952 Venice Biennale. Herbert Read coined the memorable phrase ‘the geometry of fear’ to describe their practice, a comment provoked by the metal in which they worked, and which almost applies to Clarke’s skeletal, plant-like forms, but misses the allegorical aspect of his imagery. That is found encoded in the artist’s dark sugar-lift etchings, of which he made 77 in 1950 alone as designs for sculptures.

It was Clarke’s good fortune to work with architects to produce imaginative works on a grand scale. It allowed him, to some extent, to ignore the world of commercial galleries and focus on making art for the wider world. In doing so he remained true to his first love: the ‘primitive’ imagery of ancient pottery, decorated with signs and symbols that became a part of the acts of worship in which the vessels were used.

Clarke’s iron figures, which he would ideally have made on a huge scale and placed on cliffs in his beloved Lake District, are delicate and vulnerable. His archetypal ‘Man’ sculptures receive messages about the world through antennae or through roots that link them to the landscape. Inside their heads Clarke placed a cross, not to mark them as Christian, but as a symbol of Man’s receptivity. Clarke was only broadly a believer, but he relished opportunities to create works for the Church, something that was in his blood.

with Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres.

Hyman made over 60 visits to capture life at one of the centres on paper, and this spring you can view and purchase the results. Visit www.royalacademy. org.uk/artsales. For more information, call 0800 634 6341, or email artsales@royalacademy.org.uk FRANK STELLA IN THE COURTYARD Honorary RA and celebrated American artist Frank Stella shows his new

COURTESY OF PANGOLIN LONDON . © B ILL WOODROW

Geoffrey Clarke RA at work on his iron sculpture Symbol, 1955

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© ANNE-K ATRIN PURKIS S/PHOTO © R OYA L ACA D EM Y O F A R TS , LO N D O N

Curator PETER BLACK pays tribute to one of Britain’s leading sculptors, whose achievements included commissions for Coventry Cathedral

Ivor Abrahams RA PHILLIP KING PPRA remembers with affection his friend and fellow sculptor Ivor Abrahams RA, admired for his playful images of animals

© ANNE-K ATRIN PURKIS S/PHOTO © R OYA L ACA D EM Y O F A R TS , LO N D O N

COURTESY OF PANGOLIN LONDON . © B ILL WOODROW

Academy News

Ivor Abrahams was a colleague and friend and we go back a long time; in fact to my early days in the 1950s at St Martin’s School of Art, when I was at the beginning of thinking of myself as a sculptor. When I first met Ivor, he had already found his way, and his work was to progress further over the following years with increasing professionalism.

Ivor was a traditionalist, who ignored the current trends and found his inspiration mostly in the endless possibilities of the human figure, as well as the English garden, often combining the two happily in a manner that gave his work an unusual atmosphere, unique in British sculpture. Working mostly in bronze, his work fed into experiments with other materials.

As a printmaker he was able to print on threedimensional surfaces, which resulted in works that were both original and provoking and nevertheless sculptural.

Ivor also had a good eye as a collector, reflecting his wide-ranging interests. In his home I remember seeing bronze Balinese drums next to jars of preserved snakes, as well as exquisite porcelain. With his inquisitive mind and broad knowledge in many fields, he was able to fight health problems with incredible guts over many years, when most people would have given up long before.

Apart from feeling enriched and stimulated by our interchange of ideas over many years, and by the good times we spent together, I think of Ivor every day when I bounce for a few minutes on the rebounder, a small trampoline for exercising on, which he persuaded me to buy and which I now value more than I could ever have imagined.

Thank you, Ivor.

Ivor Abrahams RA in his studio, April 2006

sculpture, Inflated Star and Wood Star, in the RA’s Annenberg Courtyard this spring (until 17 May).

NEW SHOP OPENING HOURS The RA Shop will now close 15 minutes after gallery-closing time, instead of 15 minutes before, so visitors will have time to shop after they have viewed an exhibition. From Sunday to Thursday, the RA Shop will close at 6.15pm, and from Friday to Saturday at 10.15pm.

SUMMER OPENING HOURS On 3 June Burlington House closes at 1pm to allow for preparations for the Summer Exhibition Preview Party.

The galleries in Burlington Gardens will remain open.

SCHOOLS ANNUAL DINNER Academicians’ artwork is going under the hammer at the Schools Annual Dinner and Auction on 24 March.

The auction includes work by Antony

Gormley, Cornelia Parker, Richard Wilson and Wolfgang Tillmans. To buy a ticket or place an absentee bid, visit www.royalacademy.org.uk/ schoolsauction2015 RAIN, RAIN, GO AWAY Edward Bawden RA’s design for the 1953 London A-Z appears on a new umbrella, available from the RA Shop and online at http://roy.ac/ bawdenumbrella. With its striking red

panels, the umbrella is guaranteed to brighten up the greyest of days.

AMERICAN ASSOCIATES The American Associates tour Frieze New York with VIP access and private views from 13 to 17 May. To join the Associates, or find out more about the upcoming series of events for active and emerging collectors, email Janine Catalano at jcatalano@aarat.org or call 001 212 980 8404.

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Tickets available now Be the first to view and buy works at the world famous Summer Exhibition and enjoy a glamorous evening of champagne and canapés in the beautiful surroundings of the Royal Academy.

The highlight of London’s social calendar

Summer Exhibition Preview Party 2015 Wednesday 3 June 2015 7–9.30pm

Tickets from £255 royalacademy.org.uk/summerparty Your Support is our Future

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For further information please contact the Royal Academy Events Office on 020 7300 5792

11/02/2015 13:57

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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20 Sherwood Street W1, 020 77344888 www.brasseriezedel.com

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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 Michelin awarded Chef Richard Corrigan.

We have private dining facilities to seat up to 60 guests and run regular cookery schools.

AL DUCA

4-5 Duke of York Street SW1, 020 7839 3090 www.alduca-restaurant.co.uk

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THE BALCON

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W1, www.ateliercafe.com

5

BRASSERIE ZEDEL

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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

A large, bustling, grand and elegant Parisian brasserie with an authentic 1930s interior, Brasserie Zedel is perfectly located for The Royal Academy, just

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. 6 Burlington Gardens

11-15 Swallow Street W1, 020 7734 4756 www.bentleys.org

The Balcon is an all day dining destination combining innovation with French and British traditions. Perfect for breakfast, lunch and dinner, it is also ideal for an afternoon tea or a tasty plate of charcuterie. Flooded with natural daylight and separated by silk curtains, giving the opportunity to enjoy the atmosphere of the restaurant, The Balcon has its own private dining room seating up to 16 guests. Opening Hours: Monday-Saturday 6.30am – 11pm Sunday 7am – 10pm 8 Pall Mall SW1, 020 7389 7820 www.thebalconlondon.com

BUTLERS RESTAURANT

Butlers home of “the best Dover Sole in London”. A warm and intimate restaurant offering elegant dining, delicious food and impeccable service. Located in the heart of London’s most exclusive district, Mayfair, near the Royal Academy it is as popular with local residents as it is with hotel guests.

Offering British cuisine tempered with international touches of chef Ben Kelliher, to include a pre-theatre menu and traditional afternoon tea served daily.

35 Charles Street W1, 020 7491 2622 www.chesterfieldmayfair.com

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Please note: not drawn to scale

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.

off Piccadilly Circus. Described by renowned French chef Pierre Koffman as “the only real brasserie in London”, it is open from 11.30am to midnight, 7 days a week and serves great French food at remarkably low prices, with 2-course prix fixe menus starting at £8.75.

4 BENTLEY’S OYSTER BAR AND GRILL

Hidden just around the corner from the RA, a local resting place for weary art

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FRANCO’S

Franco’s has been serving the community and visitors to St James’s from early

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Restaurant & Shopping Guide morning to late night for over 60 years.

Franco’s beautiful private dining room can be used as one open space or divided into two more intimate rooms. Accommodating up to 16 guests in the ‘Wine cellar’ and up to 30 guests in the larger semi-private ‘Mirror room ‘or 55 should you wish to take the entire space. We have a beautiful festive menu available and once again we will be offering a range of exciting wine packages to compliment parties of 10 and over.

chowder and an extensive sweet soufflé menu – the first of its kind in London.

The Dorchester, Park Lane, W1,020 7317 6531 www.dorchestercollection.com

35 Willow Place SW1, 020 7834 5778 www.ristorantegustoso.co.uk 11

61 Jermyn Street SW1, 020 7499 2211 www.francoslondon.com 10 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

9 THE GRILL AT THE DORCHESTER

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

An iconic Mayfair restaurant, The Grill at The Dorchester has been transformed for a new culinary chapter.

In keeping with this original concept, Alain Ducasse’s protégé Christophe Marleix has created new seasonal menus. Serving breakfast, lunch and dinner; the delicious dishes range from grill favourites alongside the restaurant’s signature blue lobster

77 Berwick Street W1, 020 7437 8568 www.maharanisoho.com

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Enjoy another another work work of of art art at at Richoux Richoux Enjoy Justopposite opposite the the Royal Royal Academy Just Academyin inPiccadilly Piccadilly

Open week Openseven seven days days a week Breakfast, morning coffee, coffee,lunch, lunch, Breakfast, morning afternoon afternoontea tea&&dinner dinner

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.

QUAGLINO’S

Quaglino’s is a legendary hot spot with a glamorous Art Deco inspired restaurant and two stunning bars. The menu, designed by Executive Head Chef Mickael Weiss, is a perfect canon of European classics, with a nod towards Middle Eastern spicing; all made using the highest quality British ingredients.

The bars boast an iconic cocktail list, serving tipples with a taste of the past and an extensive wine list, with a balanced mix of Old and New World beauties. From 10pm the restaurant transforms into an entertainment mecca, showcasing music icons, renowned DJ’s and our resident house bands. Quaglino’s is open Monday to Saturday, for lunch and dinner, with the bars open until late Monday to Saturday.

Late bar food is also available on Friday and Saturday.

16 Bury Street SW1, 020 7930 6767 www.quaglinos-restaurant.co.uk

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

Kindly show your RA membership card at any of the following Richoux Kindly show your RA membership card at any of the following Richoux 172PICCADILLY, Piccadilly, W1J 020 7493 74932204 2204 172 W1J 9EJ 9EJ • 020 41a South AUDLEY Audley Street, W1K 2PS 0207629 7629 5228 5228 41A SOUTH STREET,Mayfair, MAYFAIR, W1K 2PS• 020 86 Brompton Road, Knightsbridge, SW3 1ER • 020 7584 8300 86 BROMPTON ROAD, KNIGHTSBRIDGE, SW3 1ER 020 75848300 Circus ROAD, Road, ST St JOHN’S John’s Wood, 0207483 7483 4001 4001 3 3CIRCUS WOOD,NW8 NW86NX 6NX• 020

•

www.richoux.co.uk www.richoux.co.uk

• • •

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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 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

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WILTONS

Our exceptionally appointed ‘’Jimmy Marks Room’’ accommodates up to 20 guests for a seated meal and up to 40 guests for a drinks reception and the whole restaurant is available for private hire.

We will be offering a selection of traditional menus for a truly memorable Christmas party and a range of exciting wine packages for 10 guests and over. Our private dining room is an ideal venue for any occasion.

Wiltons ‘’Jimmy Marks Room’’ offers guests an exceptional, discreet environment in which to welcome friends, family or colleagues for a truly memorable meal.

55 Jermyn Street SW1, 020 7629 9955 www.wiltons.co.uk

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THE WOLSELEY

A café-restaurant in the grand European tradition and located just a few minutes’ walk from The Royal Academy, The Wolseley is open all day from 7am for breakfast right through until midnight.

Its all-day menu means it is possible to eat formally or casually at any time, whether a full three course meal or just a coffee and cake. Whilst booking in advance is advised, tables are always held back for walkins on the day.

160 Piccadilly W1, 020 7499 6996 www.thewolseley.com

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Classified

1

DR HARRIS

Situated in St James’s Street for over 200 years, D. R. Harris is London’s oldest Pharmacy and has been owned by the original family since 1790. D. R. Harris are renowned for their range of quality products for men and women including soaps, colognes, bath and shaving preparations. The majority of products are still produced by traditional methods in the UK. The main shop and pharmacy are temporarily located at 35 Bury Street for 18 months whilst works are done at 29 St. James’s Street. The full range is also available from 52 Piccadilly.

35 Bury Street SW1 / 52 Piccadilly W1, 020 7930 3915 www.drharris.co.uk

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Weekend Art Courses

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

2

GIEVES & HAWKES

No.1 Savile Row W1, 020 7432 6403 www.gievesandhawkes.com 3

HILDITCH & KEY

100 Years of Excellence. Hilditch & Key has long been recognised as London’s leading Jermyn Street shirt maker with a reputation, among the discerning, for the finest gentlemens’ shirts, knitwear and clothing. 37 & 73 Jermyn Street SW1,

Art Courses in Andover, Hampshire

Drawing, Painting & Sculpture Top tutors, beautiful countryside www.quiddityfineart.co.uk 07717 833999

DEVON/EXMOOR COURSES Painting weeks and short breaks “One of the best holidays I’ve ever had” Spacious light studio & 4* accommodation Wonderful landscapes and gardens to visit Small groups, all abilities welcome Individual attentive tuition

Catherine Stott tel: 01398 332094

Proof for RA Magazine pub. 2 March

Artist’s Websites

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.

with Nicola Slattery learn to paint with acrylic, discover printmaking, create art from imagination. 01986 788853 www.nicolaslattery.com

St Ives old town

Stylish, spacious and light 2nd floor flat, sleep 2. Close to beach and Tate Gallery. t: 01223 295264. www.fifteenthedigey.co.uk

Joan Doerr Paintings inspired by the elemental impact on the environment www.joandoerr.com Judy Larkin Contemporary organic, Nadia_Waterfield_proof.indd South of France 1 Villa for rent abstract and figurative sculpture in Lorgues, 1 hr Nice, sleeps 8. alabasters and limestones for interior and 4 beds 3 1/2 baths. garden spaces.www.judylarkinsculpture.com Pool, availablity in July/August/Sept Ulla Plougmand Paintings. Unique Proof for RA Magazine female forms, landscapes, flowers and, All details: 01367 252749 pub. 17 November latest, ‘My Colourful Cosmos’ diannecarnegie@gmail.com www.ulla-art.com Hilary Roodyn Capturing the Radda in Chianti for Sale Beautifully restored historic townpersonality. Portrait sculptor London house with a balcony €160,000 info@ www.hilary-roodyn.squarespace.com casintoscana.com +39-335-43.88.89 Sabrina Rowan Hamilton www.sabrinarowanhamilton.co.uk Magical Tuscany www.srhprints.com Step into the Renaissance from our Nicola Slattery Thoughtful, finely restored villa. Flexible rates. peaceful art from the imagination Pool, gardens, views, art, walks. www.nicolaslattery.com 020 7059 0278 www.lafoce.co.uk Jo Whitney Oil paintings; sea, sand, House and Gallery for Sale city life. Venice; Nice; Cornwall; Rural North Herefordshire. Lovely Plymouth www.jo-whitney.co.uk village house, orig. C15th cruck house Marjana Wjasnova & forge with 50m/sq self-contained Symbolic, abstract, spiritual artist art gallery/studio attached. 4 beds, 3 www.wjasnova.com

France: Menton

2 bedroom house in grounds of 1860’s town villa; pool, beautiful views of sea and old town. Charming courtyard with lemon trees; Easy walk to covered market, sea, train and bus station. Off street parking available. t: 07900 916729 pattiebarwick@gmail.com www.mentonsejour.com

Menton Town Centre

Sleeps 12. Enjoy the eclectic art collection and interior design of this restored 1860’s villa and separate guest house situated just above town centre, 5 mins walk to shops and beaches. Beautiful garden with panoramic views across the bay and over the old town. Lovely pool area with shower and shady places to sit and read. Secluded dining area on front terrace or in shady citrus tree courtyard. Enjoy versatility Proof for RA on Magazine of 2 houses one site. Ideal for pub.

17 November 2 families.

Off street parking for 2 cars. Now booking Summer 2015. t: 07900 916729 pattiebarwick@gmail.com www.mentonsejour.com

Portugal, Algarve.

t: 09799905959 www.casajuno.co.uk

FINE ART FOUNDRY LTD

Fine Art Bronze Casting Welding – Patina Specialists Ceramic Shell Contact: AB or Jerry 1 Fawe Street, reception rooms, historic features, 50m London E14 6PD t: 020 7515 8052 f: 020 7987 7339 gdn to open fields w/studio. £340,000 Belinda_Horley_proof.indd 1

Classifed

020 8878 5196 cjm@macforge.plus.com

Venice Centre

Self-catering apartments in charming 15th C palazzetto, sleep 2/5. www.valleycastle.com

020 7734 4707 & 020 7930 5336 www.hilditchandkey.co.uk

Italy: Spoleto, Umbria

Claudia Pritchard_proof.indd 1

Painting Workshops Learn about all aspects of drawing & painting with artist Patrice Lombardi Weekend and day courses available The Gallery Sail Loft Wivenhoe Essex pl@rwbpl.com 07780 917800 www.rwbpl.com

Beautiful studio flat w/balcony, sleeps 1/2, separate kitchen, historical residence, town centre. Large painting studio (optional). Contact Cristina on 07950 141489 cristinamarignoli@gmail.com LIFE PAINTING AND DRAWING with Rachel Clark Highly recommended. Small classes.

Week/Weekend/Saturday/Private Tuition t: 07528 674389 www.rachelclark.com

INK DRAWINGS

10/1

www.juliancoxartist.co.uk e@juliancoxartist.co.uk m. 07814 556936

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Elegant town house. Private flowerfilled garden, large pool and terraces, 4 bedrooms, stunning sea views. Easy walk to sea, town, restaurants, transport and Marina.

JULIAN COX ARBS

Shopping

Proof for RA Magazine pub. 17 November

12/02/2015 11:39

Short Story

Coffee, Cold

Claudia is not reading the newspaper, and the coffee in her cup has gone cold. It was warm, hot even. At some point this morning it was hot, she knows this to be true. A coffee pot was boiled, thick, gritty liquid poured out. It was warm, it is cold, time has passed. Claudia is not reading the newspaper.

She is holding in her, somewhere, in her skin, perhaps on her skin, a picture, a feeling of Ted, Teddy, her lover, her husband. They are at high school, she is thirteen, he sixteen, and the three years’ space is impassable, impossible. Then she is fifteen and he has left school and is working for his uncle at the garage on the main road, the one road in and out of their one-garage town, and now that space does not seem so wide. And now she is sixteen, pregnant, married, all three in the same month, neatly tidied away, made good, the way they took the wrecks that came into Ted’s uncle’s shop and fixed them up, cleaned them, sent them out again, good as new. There was

no old, borrowed, blue.

There was no space.

They are Ted and Claudia, and baby Eddie, named for his daddy.

Daddy Teddy, Teddy and Eddie. A two, man and boy, a unit, and Claudia so proud of them both, so proud of herself as Mama, as Wife, as both. These new titles she holds dear as rain water in dry July. Claudia, whose own mama could never get her to bake so much as a pie crust, no matter how hard-pressed she was with so much else that needed doing in the house, and Claudia’s daddy off so often, so long, away from home and no idea when he’d be coming back. Claudia did not want him coming back. Claudia is mistress of her own home now.

Claudia is the MamaWife who prides herself on keeping a good table, a tidy house. It’s barely a house, truth be told, three rooms and an outhouse, but it is spotless, there are preserves in the cellar and pickles in the cupboard, and, above all, there is a warm bed. Didn’t Teddy say on the night of their wedding, Claudia’s belly already swelling, keeping a firm, set place for the baby above her sharp hips, didn’t Teddy say that now they were man and wife their bed must always be warm?

The coffee sits in her hand, perhaps it will warm again, from the constant touch of her pulsing blood. Who’d have thought Claudia’s blood could pulse, still, would pulse, still? Yet it does.

Claudia does not drink, she does not read the newspaper.

Then Eddie was at school, and so clever, that boy as clever with his mouth as ever his daddy was with his hands, and as clever with his hands as his mama was with her mouth. That’s what Claudia’s mama said, and it made a kind of sense when she said it. Whichever way you looked at it, Eddie was whip-smart and had the makings

of an all-state athlete, that much was true.

Trouble was, Teddy knew it too, it drew them apart, their man-boy unit. And he took it hard. Hard when Claudia’s gaze, that had been all for him, only for him, for all those years of the waiting and the space, was now, some of the time at least, for her boy. Their boy, sure, but as he grew, there was something about Eddie that Ted never could fathom. He looked like Ted, no doubt about that, Ted was in his eyes and his nose and his mouth, but Eddie’s manner was such that no-one would ever say he was a chip off the old block. And that burned in Teddy. Burned when he thought of it and even when he didn’t, when he pushed the thought far away, into the dark place where the dark things lay.

But the thought kept coming back, crawling back, like it was begging to be seen, crawling back and asking for more.

And so, one night, one day, one night that shadowed into whole day and back again, that thought came out and showed itself, fierce and hard in the dirt yard, back of Claudia’s place, the little house she was so proud of, so happy to be its housewife. The thought came fierce and hard as Ted’s fist in his son’s gut, as Ted’s boot on his son’s neck, as Ted’s hand over his own mouth in surprise. Because when the boy hit back, bit back, kept coming back for more, Ted didn’t even have time to say a round-mouthed ‘oh’ of shock, as that dark thought came back, just one more time, into the light of the yard, back for more.

And Claudia, wringing her hands on her apron and calling out no, and stop, and the two men – because Eddie was a man now, even though he was just sixteen, he was surely a man – the two of them smacking at each other, going at each other like they were boys in a school yard, but with such dark blood between, that neither was ever going to stop before the space came.

The space of light that pulled one man off another. The space of silence where there was no sound and no whirling dust and no groan and grunt and heave. The space that flooded in and shrugged off the light. Night. One man, shrugging off another’s hard light.

Claudia does not drink the coffee and she does not read the newspaper.

There is Claudia, and there is the space around her.

A space behind her and inside her where her men used to be, one in the ground, and the other joining him soon enough.

There is space around Claudia.

Her coffee is cold.

P R I VAT E CO L L EC T I O N /© 2015 T H E R I CH A R D D I EB EN KO R N F O U N DAT I O N

by STELLA DUFFY. Inspired by Richard Diebenkorn’s painting ‘Woman with Newspaper’ (1960, below), this is the latest in a series of art-influenced stories written for RA Magazine

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Art Tours Worldwide 2015 Art • Archaeology • Architecture • Music 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 2015 collection focuses on the art, architecture, archaeology and music 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.

2015 Highlights Sicily: Crossroads of the Mediterranean with Richard Wallace 14 September – 8 nights from £2,195

Jordan: Crusaders, Traders & Raiders with Dr Konstantine Politis 26 September – 7 nights from £2,225 Puglia: Italy’s Undiscovered South with Dr Colin Bailey 5 October – 6 nights from £1,695 Netherlands: Golden Age to Modern Minimalism with Thomas Abbott 18 October – 4 nights from £1,795 India: Mughal Art & Architecture with Diana Driscoll 31 October – 10 nights from £3,245

For reservations, please call

020 7873 5013

For detailed itineraries and prices, please request a copy of the 2015 RA Worldwide Art Tours brochure by calling 0844 576 5518 quoting reference RAARTS, or visit www.coxandkings.co.uk/ra ATOL 2815 ABTA V2999

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Rembrandt Etchings Basan edition 1807/8 from the original plates goldmark ORANGE STREET, UPPINGHAM, RUTLAND, LE15 9SQ 01572 821424 goldmarkart.com 1. Woman Bathing her Feet at a Brook, 1658, 16.0 x 8.0 cm, £5000 2. Three Heads of Women, One Asleep, 1637, 14.2 x 9.5 cm, signature in plate, £3750 3. Old Bearded Man in a High Fur Cap, assumed 1635, 11.2 x 10.4 cm, signature in plate, £2950 4. Abraham Caressing Isaac, assumed 1637, 11.6 x 9.0 cm, signature in plate, £4500