RA Magazine Summer 2016 by Sam Phillips Portfolio

ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS MAGAZINE NUMBER 131 SUMMER 2016 DAVID HOCKNEY RA SUMMER EXHIBITION RA SCHOOLS SHOW

ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS MAGAZINE NO. 131 / SUMMER 2016 / £4.95

In the hot seat with Hockney Barry Humphries on sitting for the artist

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Jubilee 25th Anniversary Exhibition 13th June - 22nd July

Anthony Abrahams David Bailey Nick Bibby Don Brown Ralph Brown RA Jon Buck Daniel Chadwick Lynn Chadwick RA Ann Christopher RA Michael Cooper Terence Coventry Steve Dilworth Abigail Fallis Sue Freeborough Antony Gormley RA Steven Gregory

Maquette IV Walking Cloaked Figures 1978

Lynn Chadwick

Damien Hirst

GALLERY PANGOLIN

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

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Steve Hurst Jonathan Kingdon David Mach RA Alastair Mackie Anita Mandl Charlotte Mayer Eilis Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Connell William Pye Peter Randall-Page RA Lorraine Robbins Almuth Tebbenhoff William Tucker RA Deborah van der Beek

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Leon Morrocco What the River Knew

1 July – 6 August 2016

John Martin Gallery 38 Albemarle Street London, W1S 4 JG

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

Open for Brown’s London Art Weekend: 1– 3 July Catalogue at www.jmlondon.com

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Royal Academy of Arts Magazine / No. 131 / Summer 2016

Contents Seeing double ‘We do things separately a lot of the time. We say if we don’t like something the other does. We are very unsentimental about our practice’ THE CHAPMAN BROTHERS

Hidden from history ‘For all their minority status it is still striking that the female artists are there, and seem to be making a professional living, supported to a degree by the RA’ AMANDA VICKERY

A radiant beacon of talent ‘Zaha Hadid knew she had a great potential to create extraordinary things and she also knew that the talent had to be fed by an inhumane effort’ EVA JIRICNA RA

A brush with genius As David Hockney RA unveils new portraits, Barry Humphries recounts sitting for the artist

Seeing double Fiona Maddocks meets four artist duos whose work is on display in the Summer Exhibition

Hidden from history Amanda Vickery delves into the RA’s archives to find some trailblazing female artists

Great expectations Jonathan P. Watts talks to third-year students, as they prepare for their final RA Schools Show

Regulars 7 11 13 14

RA Diary RA250 Editorial Contributors & Competition 07

Preview UK including Tate Modern’s new building, Bhupen Khakhar, Georgia O’Keeffe, Marina Warner’s found object, Etel Adnan, and summer festivals 33 Preview International Franz Marc and German Expressionist shows 35 Preview Books Art books for the beach, and new catalogue raisonnés on Beardsley and Bacon 38

Academy Artists Ron Arad RA in his studio, Bill Jacklin RA, Tess Jaray RA, Peter Randall-Page RA’s new sculpture, Anthony Whishaw RA’s monograph

Debate Should art critics ever savage the work of artists? Art history approaches; Events and Excursions

Listings A guide to the London art school shows 94 Readers’ Offers 96

Academy News In Memoriam: Zaha Hadid RA, looking back at the RA’s Brazilian art show, and Burlington Gardens’ hoardings project

106 Short Story

One in Four by Sarah Hall

P H OTO: R ACH EL K I N G . © R OYA L ACA D EM Y O F A R TS , LO N D O N / P H OTO: J O H N H A M M O N D. P H OTO CH R IS T I A N R I CH T ERS

Features

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International Craft Prize

Rules of entry loewecraftprize.com

Online entries from 12 April to 7 November, 2016

#LOEWEcraftprize

CRAIGIE AITCHISON 16 June - 23 July 2016

Yellow Bird 1996, Oil on canvas, 12 x 10 ins

Beaux Arts 48 Maddox Street London W1S 1AY

info@beauxartslondon.uk www.beauxartslondon.uk

Showing next:

Beaux Arts London_Sum16_v1.indd 1

Tel +44 (0)2074931155 Mon-Sat, 11am - 6pm

Summer Exhibition, July - August 2016

Selected Modern British and new Contemporary artists

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What’s on at the Royal Academy this summer

© DAV I D PA R RY. © DAV I D H O CK N E Y/ P H OTO R I CH A R D S CH M I DT. GEM Ä LD EG A LERIE , S TA AT LI CH E M US EEN ZU B ERLIN , K AT.-N R . 12 A / W I T H K IND P ERM IS S IO N O F T HE GEM Ä LDEG A LERIE , B ERLIN/© P HOTO JÖ RG P. A ND ERS

RA Diary

Portrait of a Young Man (Giustiniani Portrait), c.1497-99, by Giorgione

ABOVE

Installation view of the Summer Exhibition 2015 RIGHT Rita Pynoos, 1st, 2nd March 2014 by David Hockney RA

Summer Exhibition 2016

In the Age of Giorgione

Main Galleries 13 June to 21 August

The Sackler Wing until 5 June

Established in 1769, this annual open-submission show is a highlight of the British art calendar. Painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, architecture and video provide a window on the latest developments in contemporary art, offering an opportunity to see new work by both emerging artists and the the most significant names in art and architecture. This year’s Summer Exhibition is co-ordinated by the pioneering sculptor Richard Wilson RA, who has invited more than 15 renowned artist duos to exhibit, including Gilbert & George and Jake & Dinos Chapman. Sponsored by Insight Investment

Sumptuous works by masters such as Giorgione, Bellini and Dürer shed light on the art of Venice in the first years of the 16th century. 2009–2016 Season supported by JTI. Supported by Maserati

Friends Previews 10 June, 10am–10pm 11 June, 10am–6pm 12 June, 10am–8pm Every Friday, 9am–10am

David Hockney RA: 82 Portraits and 1 Still Life The Sackler Wing 2 July to 2 October

Characters leap off the canvas with warmth and immediacy in the artist’s superb new portraits. Sponsored by Cazenove Capital Management Friends Previews 29 June, 10am–10pm 30 June & 1 July, 10am–6pm Booking required

Friends are required to book a ticket to visit Hockney’s portrait show We are excited to be welcoming David Hockney back to the RA. Held in our smaller Sackler Galleries, this exhibition embraces portraiture with renewed creative vigour. As we expect the exhibition to be very popular, we have extended opening hours and scheduled additional Friends Previews (see left), giving you more opportunities to visit. To help ensure the best possible experience, Friends are required to book a ticket to visit this exhibition. You can book advanced tickets online, by phone on 020 7300 8090 or by visiting the RA.

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RA Diary RA Schools Show 2016

Friends of the Royal Academy

RA Schools Studios 23 June to 3 July

Works by third-year students, including painting, sculpture, video, installation, photography and live events. RA Schools sponsored by Newton Investment Management

The Academy relies on the generosity of its Friends and supporters to continue its programme of exhibitions, debate and education. The RA is a charity that receives no revenue funding from the Government.

Ann Christopher RA: Drawing – The Lines of Time

Friends benefits

Tennant Gallery until 29 May

A series of abstract drawings by the sculptor Ann Christopher RA.

Bill Jacklin RA: The Graphic Work 1961–2016 John Madjeski Fine Rooms 3 June to 28 August

An exhibition of Bill Jacklin’s graphic art spanning over five decades, accompanied by the book Bill Jacklin: Graphics (RA Publications).

Visitor information

Urban Jigsaw The Architecture Space until 29 May

A display of speculative proposals for London’s brownfield sites. Supported by Turkishceramics and Scott and Laura Malkin

Peter Cook RA: Floating Ideas The Architecture Space 7 June to 2 October

Drawings that Peter Cook RA has submitted to the Summer Exhibition since the 1960s, exploring the relationship between drawing, ideas and buildings. Supported by Turkishceramics

The Edge of Printing The Keeper’s House until 29 August

This group exhibition, co-ordinated by Tess Jaray RA, explores new developments in printmaking practices.

Academicians in Focus: Ken Howard RA The Keeper’s House until 23 October

Small-scale paintings by Ken Howard RA from his travels in Switzerland.

No.4 (Yellow, Black, Orange on Yellow/Untitled), 1953, by Mark Rothko

Coming soon Abstract Expressionism Main Galleries 24 September to 2 January 2017

America’s most important art movement is reassessed, including works by Pollock, Rothko and De Kooning. Lead sponsor BNP Paribas. Supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art Friends Previews 21 September, 10am–10pm 22 & 23 September, 10am–6pm

Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BD 020 7300 8000; royalacademy.org.uk Opening hours Royal Academy of Arts

Sat-Thur 10am-6pm (last entry 5.30pm); Fri 10am-10pm (last entry 9.30pm) RA Shop closes Sat-Thur 6.15pm; Fri 10.15pm. RA Grand Café Sat-Thur 10am-5.30pm; Fri 10am-9.30pm John Madejski Fine Rooms

Wed-Fri 10am-4pm; Sat-Sun 10am-6pm; closed Mon & Tues

The Keeper’s House: Sir Hugh Casson Room and Belle Shenkman Room

Friends have access from 10am, general public from 4pm. Mon-Thur and Sat-Sun 10am-6pm; Fri 10am-10pm

The Keeper’s House: Shenkman Bar

Mon-Sat 10am-11.30pm; Sun 10am-6pm The Keeper’s House: Restaurant

Intrigue: James Ensor by Luc Tuymans

Mon-Sat noon-11.30pm (to book call 020 7300 5881)

Sackler Wing 29 October to 29 January 2017

The galleries of the Royal Academy of Arts are closed on 6 & 7 June The

Tuymans curates this show of bizarrely brilliant paintings by his Belgian compatriot James Ensor. 2009–2016 Season supported by JTI. Supported by the Government of Flanders

Keeper’s House is also closed on 7 June.

Friends Previews 26 October, 10am–10pm 27 & 28 October, 10am–6pm

Access See page 74 for events. Visually

impaired visitors can access large-print labels in galleries and on the RA website. To buy art from the RA call 0800 634 6341 or visit royalacademy.org.uk/artsales

Friends enjoy free entry to all RA exhibitions with a guest, as well as access to The Keeper’s House lounges, restaurant, cocktail bar and garden, and a programme of events, including Preview Days. Friends also receive RA Magazine quarterly, and benefit from a 10 per cent discount at the RA Shop, in-store and online. Friends must show their membership card along with valid ID (driving licence, bank or credit card) at the gallery entrance. Call 020 7300 8090, visit royalacademy.org.uk/friends or follow @friendsofthera on Twitter

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The Space Between 10 June â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 9 July 2016

The Royal Academy’s major redevelopment project

RA250

Building work has begun at the RA, as the institution transforms in time to celebrate its 250th anniversary in 2018 1 Linking the RA’s two sites

The designs by David Chipperfield RA include a bridge that links the Academy’s two historic buildings, Burlington House and Burlington Gardens. This will help form a public route that stretches from Piccadilly to Mayfair, uniting and revitalising the RA. The plans also provide for significant improvements to visitors’ facilities across the RA’s two-acre site. 2 Lecture Theatre

A new Lecture Theatre in Burlington Gardens will build on the RA’s heritage of rigorous and lively debate. A magnificent double-height, daylit space, with more than 260 seats, will showcase a continuous programme of events, including lectures, debates, film screenings and concerts. 1

3 New spaces for temporary exhibitions

A new series of impressive gallery spaces on the first floor of Burlington Gardens will be the stage for an innovative programme of exhibitions, with a focus on living artists and architects. New spaces for the RA Schools include a project space for the public display of work by students. 4 Revealing the RA’s historic collection

P H OTO DAV I D PA R RY. DAV I D CH I P P ER F I EL D A R CH I T ECTS

Dedicated spaces will showcase the richness and depth of the historic RA Collections, and allow works to be brought out of storage. A new Collections Gallery will feature highlights, such as Michelangelo’s Taddei Tondo. The redevelopment project will also conserve the façade of Burlington Gardens, one of the grandest unrestored buildings in central London. 5 Clore Learning Centre

3 5

The Clore Learning Centre will be a lively space designed to engage all in the making of art, whether school children, families, local communities or the general public. The space will function as a working studio, benefiting from natural light, and will enable participation in creative learning on-site to expand three-fold. The RA250 redevelopment is being generously supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, together with trusts, foundations and individuals. To see a video of the RA250 plans to transform the RA, visit http://roy.ac/RA250

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Introducing this issue

Editorial methods, the feeling, the manners, the characteristics, and the fantasies of the painters and sculptors.’ This Renaissance tome, which set the course of Western art history for centuries, had plenty on artists’ personalities. Vasari’s biographies of figures such as Botticelli and Michelangelo helped bring artists out of the shadows – from being hired hands, their names unknown or unimportant, to becoming lives to read about, even marvel over. The foundation of art academies across Europe, including our own Royal Academy, raised the status of artists further, solidifying the idea of the artist genius. ‘Over time, the idea of the individual artist has become more about the individual than the art,’ argue the Singh Twins (page 58), whose work is included in this year’s Summer Exhibition along with more than 15 artist duos, proving the power of collective creativity. This point is echoed by Jonathan P. ABOVE Celia Birtwell, 31st August, 1st, 2nd September 2015, by David Hockney RA COVER Barry Humphries, 26th, 27th, 28th March Watts, who spoke to RA Schools 2015, by David Hockney students in the run-up to their finalyear show (page 68): ‘the greatest facility at the Schools is the community, vital to which is that immaterial thing: conversation, an important process in the production of art.’ As art histories and institutions raise up some figures, they necessarily exclude others, sometimes unfairly if they are influenced by wider biases. Amanda Vickery steps back to the Contemporary art is on the Royal Academy’s Academy’s first decades, publishing research on agenda this summer, with three shows of new the small number of women whose art reached work – the 248th Summer Exhibition, David the walls of early Summer Exhibitions (page 64). Hockney RA’s recent portraits, and the RA The shows gave – and still give – vital support Schools Show, in which the Academy’s students to professional artists through the sale of works, reveal the fruits of three-years of postgraduate as well as allowing critics to both balloon and study. This issue duly publishes many interviews deflate reputations. Should critics ever savage with living artists and architects. the work of artists? This question is debated by We all enjoy human stories, and when we read Jonathan Jones and Simon Wilson (page 72). about artists as they talk about their practice, we In portraits, it is not so much the artist that consider their characters. ‘What kind of person comes under the spotlight but their subject. makes such things?’ we ask. As an editor my Barry Humphries sat for David Hockney in the challenge is always to expand art, never to reduce it. Do such interviews – with their anecdotes, self- painter’s Los Angeles studio (page 50). The pair have long been friends, and here the actor paints analysis and stylish portrait photographs – end his own affectionate portrait of the artist. Eva up reducing the art to their makers? After all, Jiricna RA and the late Zaha Hadid RA were also we judge objects in galleries, not people. friends for 40 years, and it is a privilege to publish This question is nothing new. ‘I have striven Jiricna’s tribute to her fellow architect (page 96). not only to say what these craftsmen have done,’ wrote Giorgio Vasari in Lives of the Artists (1550), — SAM PHILLIPS, EDITOR ‘but also… to note with no small diligence the

Lives of the Artists

EDITORIAL Publisher Nick Tite Editor Sam Phillips Assistant Editor Anna Coatman Design and Art Direction Design by S-T Sub-Editor Gill Crabbe Editorial Intern Daisy Schofield Events Listings Editor Asha McLoughlin Editorial Advisers May Calil,

Richard Cork, Anne Desmet RA, Tom Holland, Fiona Maddocks, Mali Morris RA, Eric Parry RA, Charles Saumarez Smith, Mark Seaman and Giles Waterfield Digital content Harriet Baker, Louise Cohen and Amy Macpherson To comment on RA Magazine

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

Twitter @RA_Mag @royalacademy Facebook /royalacademy www.royalacademy.org.uk EDITORIAL ENQUIRIES

020 7300 5820 ramagazine@royalacademy.org.uk ADVERTISING AND PRODUCTION Advertising Manager

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

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Charlotte Burgess 020 7300 5675 charlotte.burgess@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) £50 Young Friends (aged between 16 & 25; £45 direct debit) 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 23 May 2016. © 2016 Royal Academy of Arts ISSN 0956-9332 The opinions in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of the RA. All reasonable attempts have been made to clear copyright before publication

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MODERN BRITISH AND IRISH ART Wednesday 15 June 2016 New Bond Street, London

LAURENCE STEPHEN LOWRY R.A. (BRITISH, 1887-1976) Entrance to the Dwellings signed and dated ‘L.S. LOWRY 1933’ (lower right) oil on panel 53.4 x 39.4 cm. (21 x 15 ½ in.) £600,000-800,000

bonhams.com/modernbritish

ENQUIRIES +44 (0) 20 7468 8295 britart@bonhams.com

Who’s who in this issue

Contributors GILLIAN AYRES RA is a painter who lives and

works in Cornwall. HARRIET BAKER is Assistant Digital Producer at the Royal Academy. NANCY CAMPBELL is Editor of Printmaking

Today magazine.

TIMOTHY HYMAN RA has work in ‘Bhupen Khakhar and his Contemporaries’ at Grosvenor Gallery, London (27 May–17 June). His new book, The World New Made: Reshaping Figurative Painting in the 20th Century (Thames & Hudson), is published in October. EVA JIRICNA RA is an architect. In 2013 she won the Jane Drew Prize for her outstanding contribution to architecture.

RICHARD DAVEY is a visiting fellow at the School of Art and Design, Nottingham Trent University. He has contributed to many books, including Anselm Kiefer (RA Publications).

JONATHAN JONES is art critic for The Guardian. He was a judge for the 2009 Turner Prize.

ANNA M. DEMPSTER is Head of Academic

ADRIAN LOCKE is Senior Curator at the RA.

Programmes at the RA. ANNE DESMET RA is a printmaker. Her Italian

sketchbook (published by the RA) is launched at the Royal Overseas League, London, in October. SARAH HALL is a novelist and short story writer. Her new novel is Wolf Border (Faber & Faber, 2015). BARRY HUMPHRIES is an actor, comedian,

producer and writer. Best known as the character Dame Edna Everage, Humphries has starred in many television series, films and West End musical theatre productions.

NAME THE ARTIST COMPETITION 07

Printmaker ANNE DESMET RA introduces one of her favourite artworks (right). Name the artist and you could win two RA exhibition catalogues This dark, disturbing image is from an artist’s book published in 1930, which is the creator’s second of six novels without words. The story is told in some 120 intensely wrought, monochrome wood engravings printed directly from block to page. This book was my first ever art purchase made as a student, at Oxford, just beginning to learn the rudiments of engraving. I came across it in an antiquarian bookseller’s for £25: a large sum, to me, in 1984, but actually a bargain since complete volumes are rare

FIONA MADDOCKS is a journalist, broadcaster and Classical Music Critic for the Observer. BEN MCMAHON is a photographer who has worked for British Vogue, Art Review, FT Weekend and Telegraph Magazine. ERIC PARRY RA is an architect based in London. His latest book is Context: Architecture and the Genius of Place (Wiley, 2015). MICHAEL PRODGER is senior research fellow

in art history at the University of Buckingham.

CAROL SACHS is a London-based photographer whose clients include Gucci and Wallpaper*. AMANDA VICKERY is Professor of Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London, and a writer and broadcaster. Her recent programme, Leningrad & the Orchestra that Defied Hitler, was screened in February on BBC Two. MARINA WARNER is a novelist, short story writer, historian and mythographer. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. JONATHAN P. WATTS is a critic, editor and occasional curator based in London and Norfolk. CHRISTIAN WEIKOP, Senior Lecturer at Edinburgh University, is a specialist in modern and contemporary German art. His Royal Academy projects include an essay in Anselm Kiefer (RA Publications). SIMON WILSON is an art historian and former

Tate curator. PING ZHU is a New York-based illustrator whose clients include the New York Times, the New Yorker and the Independent.

these days, having been broken up by art dealers keen to sell the prints individually. Each engraving – and this is perhaps my favourite – is its own miniature world yet suggests an epic space. The fluent, unfussy drawing, exaggerated perspective and dramatic tonal contrasts of this print recall the 1920s cinema classic The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. TO ENTER

Send the name of the artist to reply.ramagazine@ royalacademy.org.uk or: RA Magazine, Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BD, by Friday 3 June 2016. Please include your contact details. Three correct entries chosen at random receive the books that accompany the RA’s show ‘David Hockney RA: 82 Portraits and 1 Still Life’ and the Summer Exhibition. For full terms and conditions, visit http://roy.ac/catcomp

COMPETITION 06

For Competition 06 in the last issue, the RA’s Artistic Director Tim Marlow chose an etching Petticoat Lane (Houndsditch), 1884, by Walter Sickert RA. Congratulations to the three winning entrants, who have received their prizes.

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Anthony Green A Modern Olympia II Signed and dated 2013 Oil on board 59 x 54 1⁄4 inches

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Bankside Gallery | 48 Hopton Street London SE1 9JH (next to Tate Modern)

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

Preview

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As Tate puts the finishing touches to its monumental new extension, architect ERIC PARRY RA considers its aesthetic and cultural impact, while painters GILLIAN AYRES RA and TIMOTHY HYMAN RA preview accompanying retrospective shows of Khakhar and O’Keeffe

Rising immediately south of the body of Tate Modern, a new building has been emerging from the builders’ shroud, its summit celebrated with a public terrace. In many of London’s great cultural institutions we are seeing a shift in social and architectural focus away from the projects of the last decades of the 20th century, where the experience of internal intensification was predominant, to an expansive outward reach. For several of them, this involves the creation of new entrances and more interactive spaces where back doors become an open inviting ‘front’. None of these metamorphoses is as overt as that of Tate Modern’s Switch House. Its architects Herzog & de Meuron won the original competition held in 1994 to transform Bankside Power Station, which marked the start of their well-deserved global status. The Switch

V I E W O F S I T E CO U R T ESY LO B S T ER P I CT U R ES LT D 2016/© TAT E

Turning to Tate Modern

ERIC PARRY RA on the new spirit of expansion embodied in Tate Modern’s Switch House

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View of the new Tate Modern extension site, 2016

V I E W O F S I T E CO U R T ESY LO B S T ER P I CT U R ES LT D 2016/© TAT E

Preview UK

House had been envisaged, in principle, 22 years ago when that brave decision was taken to create Tate Modern within the disused and threatened shell of the 1950s power station, as part of the future Southwark regeneration plan. The idea, mutually beneficial to both Tate and Southwark, was to create a catalyst to draw life and economy southwards to a derelict hinterland, the success of which the new building now fully celebrates. It is also the culmination of a continuous dialogue between client and architect that has stimulated important bridges between the visual arts and architecture. Materially the Switch House was conceived as a glass crystal in counterpoint to Giles Gilbert Scott’s brick box and the factory-styled, twostoried glass container that Herzog & de Meuron mounted on its north wing. However the new surrounding buildings, quick on the commercial draw, are made of lightweight wrappings of metal and glass, and Tate’s architects cleverly moved to a heavy-boned skeleton of pre-fabricated concrete sections clad in a weighty perforated brick overcoat. The result is a wonderfully crafted building set in a sea of haptic mediocrity. It is in complimentary harmony with the impervious weight of the brickwork of the original power station, now known as the Boiler House. Playful contradictions make it instantly memorable: primitive gravitas / kinetic horizontality; shadowed relief / perforated skin; permanence / pre-fabrication; strange / familiar. The site was a given but with the original building’s available wing (the east is still occupied by an electrical substation) came the geometric complication of the tripartite basement oil-storage drums. Tate Modern has retained these as performance spaces, and the careful preservation of the patina of the old combined with the surgical insertion of the new structure that supports the twisting orthogonal building above, is a masterpiece of architectural engineering. The vertical stack of spaces of the Switch House counterbalances the horizontal sequences of the Boiler House and is balanced at the midpoint by Tate Exchange, a highly innovative ‘open experiment’ – an invitation to new audiences, with two floors given to education and exploration. In the new gallery spaces the promise is made that the majority of exhibits will be acquisitions from the last 20 years. The whole is a dramatic representation of a new outward perspective.

Salman Rushdie (‘The Moor’), 1995, by Bhupen Khakhar

TIMOTHY HYMAN RA appraises a pioneering Indian painter who became his close friend

Tate Modern’s retrospective of Bhupen Khakhar (1934–2003) introduces an outstanding painter, celebrated today above all for his startling, visionary images of homosexual love. He grew up to become a chartered accountant in Bombay; at 30 – after two years of an art criticism course, his only art training – he settled in Baroda with a morning job as accountant, leaving the rest of his day free for painting. Khakhar wrote short stories in a hybrid, half-westernised Gujurati and for many years sought an equivalent painting idiom. An RCA student awakened him to Indian street culture; in Henri Rousseau he found fully realised figures innocent of ‘high-cultural’ overtones. Around 1972, after many false starts, Khakhar’s art at last gelled in a sequence of wonderful signboard-like paintings: watch repairer, barber

or simply a chai stall in a landscape, each separate attribute itemised with an accountant’s crisp precision. In 1976, at a Serpentine opening, I spied a small, short-sighted man scrutinising Howard Hodgkin’s paintings as intently as I was and we struck up a conversation. Bhupen might present as a ‘naïve painter’ but his responses to art proved penetrating; speaking of our shared love for the Sienese painters, he explained that ‘they were trying to evolve a language for the first time… how to include the narrative aspects in a painting without destroying its structure’. Entering his house in 1981, I saw on the easel a magnificent Lorenzetti-like panorama; later, I was astonished by the monumental pink expanse of Yayati (1987), named after the old king in The Mahabharata, who asks his son to give him his youth. Khakhar, whose father died when he was four, devoted his adult life to relationships with

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Abstraction White Rose, 1927, by Georgia O’Keeffe

a succession of elderly men; his self-portrait in Yayati as a white-haired angel glides erect into a moribund companion. He doubted Yayati could ever be exhibited in India, so I carried it rolled back to Clerkenwell, where it presided above our bed – given over to Bhupen when he stayed. It was from our door that a dark limousine took him each morning to paint his fugitive friend, Salman Rushdie (1995; page 21). The picture is now in the National Portrait Gallery. Bhupen’s ascent from ‘insignificant man’ to international art star was exciting to witness. GILLIAN AYRES RA on the visionary American modernist Georgia O’Keeffe

Georgia O’Keeffe was born in 1887 and died in 1986 – one of seven children from parents of Dutch, Hungarian and Irish immigrant descent. O’Keeffe was key to the foundation of American modernism, but strangely none of her paintings of flowers and landscapes are held in any of the public collections in the UK. However, this summer’s O’Keeffe exhibition at Tate Modern offers an important opportunity for people outside the US to see her work.

Blue and Green Music, 1919–21, by Georgia O’Keeffe

This major retrospective includes a room that considers the professional and personal relationship O’Keeffe had with her husband Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer and gallery owner. Stieglitz organised Picasso’s first exhibition in the US, and through his gallery O’Keeffe had access to the most current avantgarde art in the first quarter of the 20th century. Stieglitz had established himself in the art world as an impresario of aesthetics – volatile and unpredictable, but utterly sincere. Their personalities were very different: he was gregarious and talkative and loved being surrounded by people, while she was an intense, quiet genius, and a ‘country girl’ who loved being under the open skies. But from the beginning Stieglitz appreciated her extraordinary talent. O’Keeffe was also influenced by the photographer Paul Strand. Writing about his photographs, she declared, ‘I almost lost my mind over them.’ Strand used sharp focusing and severe cropping to produce bold and original compositions – ‘photographs that are as queer in shapes as Picasso’s drawings.’ He transformed ordinary objects into purely abstract

compositions, showing them in a compelling new light. O’Keeffe’s paintings were clearly developed from her contact with these photographs – I think of such wonderful works like Blue and Green Music (1919–21; above right) and the powerful Abstraction White Rose (1927; above left). The Japanese artist Hokusai – whose work was introduced to O’Keeffe by her tutor Arthur Wesley Dow – was another profound early influence, as was Wassily Kandinsky’s book Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1914). But above all O’Keeffe formed an art from her own courage, daring and haunting original vision, which drew upon the vast American space of New Mexico. People used to say that women couldn’t paint, or be great artists. So just the fact that O’Keeffe existed – along with Sonia Delaunay, Natalia Goncharova and Barbara Hepworth – was tremendously important. O’Keeffe was a role model for many other women artists who came after her. Tate Modern’s new building, Switch House, 020 7887 8888, tate.org.uk, opens on 17 June Bhupen Khakhar 1 June–6 Nov Georgia O’Keeffe 6 July–30 Oct

GEO R GI A O ’ K EEF F E M US EU M /GI F T O F T H E B U R N E T T F O U N DAT I O N A N D GEO R GI A O ’ K EEF F E F O U N DAT I O N / © 2016 GEO R GI A O ’ K EEF F E M US EU M / DAC S , LO N D O N . T H E A R T I NS T I T U T E O F CH I CAGO; A L F R ED S T I EGL I T Z CO L L ECT I O N , GI F T O F G EO R GI A O ’ K EEF F E , 196 9/© T H E A R T I NS T I T U T E O F CH I CAGO

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PETER L A N YON

Dry Wind (detail) Signed, titled and dated on the reverse: DRY WIND / PETER LANYON 1958 Oil on board: 48 ¼ × 29 ½ in / 122.6 × 74.9 cm

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OP ENS

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Finders keepers

seas; they were known as tabua and were central to their economy of value, both material and immaterial, circulating as a medium of exchange against supplies (food, water, fuel) but also as gifts to bestow special honour on someone. This giant tooth is a sacred cult object, a garland, a medal, an ISA, a coin and a bride price – all at once. How it came into my family, I don’t know, but maybe my grandfather, who was a cricketer, was presented with it at some point in his long career. He could have been given it in Canada or Papua New Guinea or Tasmania or Fiji – sperm whales range the Pacific, north and south, where coincidentally the history of the British Empire brought the game. I am left with questions – among them, I can’t help wondering what teething must be like for a baby cachalot.

Writer MARINA WARNER describes the intriguing item that she has contributed to a major exhibition of found objects, curated by Cornelia Parker RA at the Foundling Museum long, it didn’t match the long sabres that curve down viciously from the lugubrious Walrus’s jaws in John Tenniel’s illustration to Through the Looking Glass. Then the other day, at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, I discovered its double in a vitrine displaying various kinds of money – glass millefiori beads, wampum belts, strings of cowrie shells and copper coins, and gorgeous coloured feathers woven into strands. It turns out to be the tooth of a sperm whale or cachalot (Physeter macrocephalus), an animal that can grow to 20 metres or more and has the largest brain in the world. In Fiji, the teeth of this creature were especially valuable, as if the islanders recognised with proper awe this wonderful giant of the

Found curated by Cornelia Parker RA, Foundling Museum, London, 020 7841 3600, foundlingmuseum.org.uk, 27 May–4 Sep

LEFT Untitled (Musclemen series), 2012, by Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou RIGHT Book of Hours, Use of Rome The Three Living and the Three Dead, c.1490-1510

Material beings

Muscle-bound men and traditional textiles are weaved together in the photographs of Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou, one of the 50 artists who feature in Camden Arts Centre’s exhibition on fabric, curated by the fashion designer Duro Olowu (19 June–18 Sep).

In glorious colour The extraordinarily rich colours and intricate compositions of medieval and Renaissance religious manuscripts seem a miracle (Book of Hours, c.1490-1510; above). But a new exhibition at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, the jewel of its bicentenary celebrations, reveals the hard-won technical breakthroughs that allowed artists to illuminate their pages so vividly.

An unprecedented research project has shown, for example, that some brilliant blues were made from smalt. Derived from grinding blue glass, this pigment was previously thought to have been pioneered by Venetian easel painters decades later. Colour: The Art and Science of Illuminated Manuscripts Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, fitzmuseum.cam. ac.uk, 01223 332900, 30 July–30 Dec

CO U R T ESY FO U N D L I N G M US EU M . © T H E F I T Z W I L L I A M M US EU M , CA M B R I D GE . CO U R T ESY JACK B EL L G A L L ERY.

We used to play ‘Animal, vegetable, mineral?’ in the car on long journeys and many of the things that used to fascinate me most fell between the cracks: where did coral belong, or ink or ivory or soap? What about clouds? The found object (right) I have selected for the ‘Found’ exhibition at the Foundling Museum is a similar kind of poser: it’s heavy as a rock but warmish to the touch, grooved and scarred like an organic root vegetable, with a ragged socket at one end, and pierced at the other, tapered end. I came upon it after my mother died; it was mixed up with some old coins, regimental buttons and buckles, race meeting tags and a very worn, initialled cigarette case. For a long time I thought it might be a walrus tusk, but even nearly a foot

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ASPEC TS OF

BR ITISH IMPR ESSIONISM

SIR W INSTON CHURCHILL

A distant view of a town in the South of France (detail) Signed with initials lower left: WSC Oil on canvas: 22 × 27 in / 55.9 × 68.6 cm

EXHIBITION OPENS W E D N E S D AY 1 5 t h J U N E

147 New Bond Street, London W1S 2TS Telephone: +44 (0)20 7493 3939

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Detail of

Sarah and the Mandela Triptych Signed; titled on the reverse Oil on canvas: 40 × 48 in / 101.6 × 121.9 cm R ICHARD GR EEN IS THE SOLE WOR LDW IDE AGENT FOR KEN HOWARD OBE R A

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Forthcoming exhibition 18 May – 10 June

Forthcoming exhibition

WILLIAM GEAR

DANNY MARKEY

GESTURAL STRUCTURES

WILLIAM GEAR 1915-1997

DANNY MARKEY b.1965

Jan '59 Gouache on paper 49 × 61 cm

Elmer's 2006 Oil on canvas 55 × 76 cm

Forthcoming exhibition

ST IVES

DAVID TINDLE

PAUL FEILER 1918-2013

DAVID TINDLE b.1932

Grey Receding 1962 Oil on canvas 152.4 × 182.9 cm

Still Life 1957 Oil on canvas 43.2 × 58 cm

CONTACT THE GALLERY FOR MORE DETAILS : THE REDFERN GALLERY 20 CORK STREET LONDON W1S 3HL

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The poetry of paint For Etel Adnan, art world success came late – in her eighties. ANNA COATMAN met the writer and painter in Paris ahead of a major show in London

©CO U R T ESY G A L ER I E L ELO N G / P H OTO FA B R I CE GI B ER T.CO U R T ESY T H E A R T IS T A N D S F EI R-S EM L ER G A L L ERY, H A M B U R G / B EI RU T

Etel Adnan opens the door to her Paris apartment before I have the chance to knock. The grand scale of the door frame makes the nonagenarian artist and writer appear even tinier than she actually is. But her diminutive stature belies her impressive reputation, and I am nervous. I have no need to be – she grins, clasps my forearm and pulls me into her home. It is, gratifyingly, exactly the kind of place I imagined her to have: windows with views onto

the streets of St Germain, parquet floors, faded Persian rugs, books and paintings everywhere. I force myself to stop staring and hand over the cakes I have brought, as an offering. ‘From England?’ she asks, impressed. No, I admit, they are from the patisserie around the corner. Still, she says, ‘certainly they won’t be wasted!’ We settle down in the living room and Adnan begins to tell me about her life and work, in a voice richly textured with accents from the

many different places she has called home. She was born in Beirut, in 1925, to a Greek mother and Syrian father, and went on to study philosophy in Paris before continuing her education in the United States. From 1958 she lived and taught philosophy in California, until she moved back to Lebanon in 1972, where she stayed for five years. After that, she alternated between California and Paris, eventually settling in the French capital. She speaks five languages – as evidenced when she answers the phone in several of them, over the course of the afternoon. Having already established herself as an important poet, academic and essayist, Adnan began painting at the age of 34. ‘Painting just happened,’ she explains. ‘I didn’t know I would become a painter; I didn’t go to art school. When

Etel Adnan at home Untitled, c.1995– 2000, by Etel Adnan

LEFT

ABOVE

I was teaching the philosophy of art I had access to artists and materials, so I began to paint, and people I trusted liked what I did.’ If painting came relatively late to Adnan, the kind of recognition she now has as a painter came even later, when she was already in her eighties. A turning point came in 2010 when the Galerie Sfeir-Semler, with spaces in Hamburg and Beirut, asked her to show with them. Two years later, her work was the highlight of the dOCUMENTA (13) art fair, and since then she has had a string of solo shows in high profile venues, including White Cube. The next will be at the Serpentine Sackler in London this summer. Adnan creates, among many other things, small-scale, colourful, semi-abstract landscape paintings and tapestries, and foldout illustrated books known as leporellos, as well as large-scale public murals. ‘When I do a painting it may be like a landscape, but there is more to it,’ she continues. ‘You don’t recognise what landscape it is, as it is not a particular landscape – it is maybe a memory of a particular landscape. I lived in California for most of my life and I loved it, so

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Etel Adnan: The Weight of the World Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, 020 7402 6075, serpentinegalleries.org, 2 June–11 Sep

Fun of the festivals Summer is the season when artists let their hair down and get seriously creative as a string of art festivals springs up in cities across the UK. RA MAGAZINE follows the trail

1. A DAY AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY...

On a sizzling day last July, the inaugural RA Burlington Gardens Festival brought the Mayfair street behind the Academy alive with performances, artworks, artisan food and drink stalls and live music – including an Art Party Parade led by Bob & Roberta Smith RA (left). This year’s festivities (2 July, 12–6pm), which accompany Brown’s London Art Weekend, celebrate Yinka Shonibare RA’s colourful, imagistic installation across the Academy’s façade. 2. THEN A NIGHT IN THE WEST END...

When the music stops at Burlington Gardens on 2 July, art-lovers can take to the streets of Westminster as part of Art Night. This new annual festival features for-one-night-only art installations and performances in unusual locations – a luxury flat on the Strand, a disused station platform at Charing Cross and NeoGothic mansion Two Temple Place, which is taken over by choreographer Alexandra Bachzetsis (From A to B via C, 2014, right). 3. BEFORE A MONTH IN EDINBURGH... There is more to an Edinburgh summer than theatre and comedy, as visitors to the city’s art galleries can discover. The Edinburgh Art Festival (28 July–28 Aug), now in its 13th year, sees significant exhibitions staged at the same time as the main festival, including the first Scottish survey of acclaimed American portraitist Alice Neel at Talbot Rice Gallery, a Fruitmarket Gallery show of Mexican artist Damián Ortega’s spectacular sculptures of found objects, and the lyrical landscapes of Barbara Rae RA at Open Eye Gallery (Spring Tide, Lacken, 2015, left). 4. AND A BIENNIAL IN LIVERPOOL...

This year’s Liverpool Biennial (9 July–16 Oct) invites international artists to make new work in response the city’s past, present and future. Childhood is a key theme: Japaneseborn Koki Tanaka re-enacts, with the help of original participants, 1985 protests by school children against the Youth Training Scheme, while young people produce a film with British performance artist Marvin Gaye Chetwynd (Jesus and Barabbas Puppet Show, 2014, right)

P H OTO B EN ED I CT J O H NS O N . CO U R T ESY T H E A R T IS T. CO U R T ESY O F O P EN E Y E G A L L ERY. CO U R T ESY CR I COT EK A , K R A KÓW, A N D S A D I E CO L ES H Q , LO N D O N .

my paintings are homages to those memories, to the beauty of them.’ She paints, primarily, because she enjoys it. ‘I love the pleasure of painting and why shouldn’t I be happy? I think that is why people sometimes don’t like artists: they see that they are happier than they are themselves. In fact they are not more happy – in their everyday life they may have big tragedies, but the act of making art is happy. It is a liberating gesture.’ Happiness, for Adnan, is political. ‘Art has a political function in the sense that it brings something life-enhancing, a desire for life.’ Reaching people beyond the exclusive coterie of the contemporary art world is important to Adnan, who feels ambivalent about suddenly becoming one of its rising stars. The art market, for one thing, dismays her: ‘Some collectors don’t even look at the art they own. It is not about art any more, it is about ego – “I own ten Picassos”. So what! I would rather have one reproduction and look at it than ten sitting in the bank.’ She also regrets that she cannot make the most of her position, confessing, ‘I wish it had happened before, because I make money and you know I cannot spend it – I cannot go on aeroplanes, I cannot do many things. And it breaks my heart.’ Her sadness, however, is short-lived. She brightens within seconds, countering, ‘On the other hand it’s good it did not happen before because I had peace of mind, and I stayed meditative about art. I am not against galleries – it is necessary for art to be shown and reach the public – but they have their own financial pressures. So they have to keep selling and the artist has to keep producing. I have not fallen into that trap. I do not think a real artist falls into that trap. They do what they have to do anyway.’ For this reason, Adnan believes fervently in the importance of public art. ‘We emphasise too much galleries and shows, because art has become an industry,’ she argues. ‘We need public participation in art. With a small budget, a few artists can go into an ugly street and help the people who use that street to beautify it. They pay great attention to the beauty of Paris, for instance.’ She gestures to the window. ‘They do not pay attention to the ugliness, the visual poverty, of the suburbs. I am not saying this is the only reason for the trouble there, but it is one of the reasons, and it is a problem we can more easily answer than the others.’ At the age of 91, Adnan has lived through many political earthquakes, but these have only made her more resolute in her conviction that ‘in times of trouble we need even more art and not less. It is not an extra, it is not superfluous, something marginal: it is something fundamental.’ She may have reservations about the art world, but there is no doubt the art world needs Etel Adnan.

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Laurence Edwards

25th May – 24th June 2016 Catalogue £15 inc p&p

Edwards’ most recent work signals a clear change of direction and shift in texture: from the consolidated to the dispersed, from the hard to the mobile, and from the encumbered to the dissolved. His bodies have always escaped themselves in some manner, but where his earlier figures have tended to be built up and bulked out, these new figures are made up more of gaps than of joins. In some, only a pair of feet remain whole of the figure that once was. The rest of the body has taken flight into metal petals that swirl before the eye, held delicately aloft by a cross-hatch of fine struts. Robert Macfarlane Writer

MessuM’s The Borrowed Breath, 2016 bronze – series of 5 H. 192 x W. 159 x D. 58 cms

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SIR JOHN LAVERY Japanese Switzerland Sold for £509,000 Irish Art, London, October 2015

BRITISH AND IRISH ART LONDON AUCTIONS 2016 Modern & Post-War British Art June & November Victorian, Pre-Raphaelite & British Impressionist Art July & December Irish Art September Made in Britain September Scottish Art November To book your complimentary and confidential valuation please contact Modern British Art +44 (0)20 7293 6424 rachel.ross@sothebys.com Victorian, Irish & Scottish Art +44 (0)20 7293 5718 britt.roberts@sothebys.com 34–35 New Bond Street, London W1A 2AA. Sothebys.com

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Six degrees of separation

© DAV I D M ES S EN T. © F R A N CK GO D D I O/ H I LT I F O U N DAT I O N / P H OTO CH R IS TO P H GER I GK . CO U R T ESY O F T H E A R T IS T. © N AT I O N A L P O R T R A I T G A L L ERY, LO N D O N . © T H E N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY, LO N D O N . V I C TO R I A N S P I R I T UA L IS TS ’ U N I O N , M EL B O U R N E , AUS T R A L I A

SAM PHILLIPS steps from the Sydney Opera House to a long-forgotten Victorian spiritualist in six summer shows

2. SUNKEN CITIES

The great structural engineers of the antique world, the Egyptians, are the focus of a show at the British Museum. It presents monumental sculptures (below left) and objects found on the bed of the Mediterranean, telling the story of two Egyptian cities long since claimed by the sea (until 27 Nov; 020 7323 8000).

1. OVE ARUP

3. RAGNAR KJARTANSSON

Breathtaking buildings are feats of engineering as well as architecture, and the 20th century’s most significant engineer – Ove Arup – is given due praise in a V&A retrospective. The Dane changed the landscape of his profession by integrating engineers and designers in his London offices; boundary-pushing projects included Sydney Opera House (1973; above), whose ‘sails’ were created thanks to pioneering computeraided design (18 June–6 Nov; 020 7942 2000).

From submerged art to a submerged artist: Ragnar Kjartansson, who sings and plays guitar in a bath in his video installation The Visitors (2012; above). The Icelandic artist is projected on one of nine huge screens; the other eight feature various performers in different rooms of a mansion, all playing the same melancholy song simultaneously in an hour-long take. This unconventional group portrait is a highlight of Kjartansson’s Barbican solo show (14 July–4 Sep; 020 7638 4141).

6. GEORGIANA HOUGHTON

Around the time that Corot completed his portrait in Paris, an artist in London – Georgiana Houghton – exhibited abstract watercolours that were decades ahead of their time. These works moved radically beyond genres such as portraiture, and were described by one newspaper as ‘tangled threads of coloured wool… the most extraordinary and instructive example of artistic aberration’ (Glory be to God, c.1868; above). Houghton claimed she was guided by spirits, including those of Renaissance artists. Her 1871 show, displayed in a rented Bond Street gallery, was unlike anything seen in Victorian Britain and a commercial failure. The Courtauld Gallery’s exhibition this summer, which reunites these works for the first time, will enthrall audiences today (16 June–11 Sep; 020 7848 2526).

5. PAINTERS’ PAINTINGS

4. TURNING TO SEE

The artist’s eye is also the focus of a National Gallery show (23 June–4 Sep; 020 7747 2885) in which works by pre-eminent European painters, including Van Dyck, Degas, Reynolds and Matisse are displayed alongside paintings they owned. Don’t miss the magnificent Corot portrait (Italian Woman, c.1870; above) that once hung in Lucian Freud’s London home.

More traditional portraits, including the selfportrait of Anthony van Dyck (c.1640; above) recently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, are brought together by the artist John Stezaker for a show he curates at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Stezaker’s eye is on what he calls ‘physical and metaphorical turning in portraiture’ (28 May–4 Sep; 0121 348 8000).

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MARIA LUISA HERNANDEZ E X H I B I T I O N U N T I L 2 5 M AY 2 0 1 6 Works available to view after exhibition

87 Old Brompton Road London SW7 www.cadogancontemporary.com

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‘Barco’ (detail), 175 x 200cm

CADOGAN CONTEMPORARY

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155th Annual Exhibition 11 May – 30 October 2016 Free Admission nationalgallery.org.uk #GeorgeShaw

28 July – 7 August 10am – 5pm daily (3pm on 7 August)

society-women-artists.org.uk The Associate Artist Scheme is supported by the Rootstein Hopkins Foundation

View and purchase a rich mix of works in all media by today’s leading professional women artists. Mall Galleries, The Mall, London SW1

George Shaw, The Living and The Dead (detail), 2015–16 © Courtesy: The Artist and Wilkinson Gallery, London

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Riding high As the centenary of Franz Marc’s death is celebrated, CHRISTIAN WEIKOP reassesses the poetic paintings of this pioneer of German Expressionism EXPRESSIONISM EXHIBITIONS ACROSS THE GLOBE MUNCH AND EXPRESSIONISM Neue Galerie, New York until 13 June

H A R VA R D A R T M US EU MS/ B US CH -R EIS I N GER M US EU M , CA M B R I D GE , US A , B EQ U ES T I N M EM O RY O F PAU L E . A N D G A B R I EL E B . G EI ER , © P R ES I D EN T A N D F EL LOWS O F H A R VA R D CO L L EGE . KU NS T- U N D M US EU MS V ER EI N , W U P P ER TA L /© M ED I EN ZEN T RU M , A N TJ E Z EIS - LO I / KU NS T- U N D M US EU MS V ER EI N , W U P P ER TA L

Saturated in anxiety and alienation as much as colour, the works of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch were a heady influence on German and Austrian Expressionism, as this standout show reveals. PAUL KLEE: IRONY AT WORK Centre Pompidou, Paris until 1 August

An affiliate of the Blaue Reiter group of Expressionists before he taught at the Bauhaus, Paul Klee was restlessly inventive, producing a dizzying range of work, now the subject of a vast Paris survey. Grazing Horses IV, 1911, by Franz Marc

Franz Marc’s reputation has suffered somewhat from mass reproduction, especially towards the end of the 20th century. On one hand, the commercial use of his iconic German Expressionist art has helped popularise his work throughout the world; on the other, the proliferation of cheap reproductions of his animal paintings has perhaps had a detrimental, ‘kitschifying’ effect. The centenary of his death this year, however, offers a chance to re-engage with his art in the flesh at several German art museums with Marc holdings. Bavarian institutions have some of the best collections, including Lenbachhaus in Munich, and the Franz Marc Museum in Kochel am See, which marks the anniversary with major loans from Europe and America, including Grazing Horses IV (1911; above) on loan from Harvard Art Museum. Despite his untimely death on the battlefields of Verdun in 1916, Marc was a prolific painter, especially between 1911 – when he helped form the Blaue Reiter group – and the outbreak of the First World War, when he produced many of his most stunning canvases. Work from this period includes the radiant and primitivistic Red Woman (1912), now in the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester, which has the best German Expressionist collection in the UK. This is the only painting by Marc in a British art museum and it is worth making the pilgrimage to see this glowing jewel in the crown. Marc represents the lyrical, harmonious and spiritual aspects of Expressionism, developed partly from his own aesthetic theory, which assigned emotional values to colours, and partly

in appreciation of the paradisiacal work of Parisian painters Henri Rousseau and Robert Delaunay, as well as the simplicity of folk art, a passion he shared with his Blaue Reiter collaborator Wassily Kandinsky. His pure Utopian depictions of animals in nature, places uncorrupted by man, show he was undoubtedly the poetic soul of the Expressionist movement. His work does not possess the sexual vitalism of the figurative Expressionism of the Brücke group, whose members included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Pechstein. But he greatly admired the collective, and Marc and Pechstein were the links between the two art circles. Marc visited the Brücke studios in Berlin early in 1912, eventually persuading a rather prudish Kandinsky back in Munich to include examples of Brücke art in the Blaue Reiter Almanac. Marc also published an important essay, ‘On the “Savages” of Germany’, in the Almanac, which pulled together recent developments in German art, including the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (a precursor to the Blaue Reiter), the Berlin-based Neue Secession and the Brücke – several years before the term ‘Expressionism’ would really be applied to German artists. It was an important statement in presenting youthful regeneration and the overcoming of established forces, and also demonstrates that Marc was a radical figure, a point that might well be forgotten when, as spectators, we are seduced by his ideal worlds. Grazing Horses IV Franz Marc Museum, Kochel am See, Germany, franz-marc-museum.de, 12 June–11 Sep

Head of a Young Girl Wearing a Straw Hat, c.1905, by Paula Modersohn-Becker PAULA MODERSOHN-BECKER: AN INTENSELY ARTISTIC EYE Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris until 21 August

A revealing retrospective of the Dresdenborn painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, whose highly sensitive still-lifes, landscapes and portraits (above), produced during a tragically brief career, mark her out as an early exponent of Expressionism. MODERN MASTERS: ‘DEGENERATE’ ART Kunstmuseum, Bern until 21 August

Expressionists, including Marc, Macke Modersohn-Becker and Kirchner, feature in this overview of art in the Kunstmuseum’s collection that was once denigrated as ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis and sold from German museum collections.

SUMMER 2016 | RA MAGAZINE 33

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Buy these books from the RA Shop online at http://roy.ac/ reviewed – Friends get a 10 per cent discount (enter code SUMMER16 at checkout)

Summer collection MICHAEL PRODGER heads for the beach with his pick of the best holiday reads on artists – in fact and fiction

Artrage! The Story of the BritArt Revolution Elizabeth Fullerton Thames & Hudson, £24.95 hbk

Agnes Martin and Me Donald Woodman Lyon Artbooks, £14.95 pbk

Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination Ghislaine Kenyon Bloomsbury, £25 hbk

Paulina & Fran Rachel B. Glaser Granta, £12.99 pbk

For this vibrant account of how Hirst, Lucas, the Chapmans et al came to noisy prominence Elizabeth Fullerton interviewed 50 artists and observers. She pieces together what happened between the 1988 Freeze show that introduced the Young British Artists and the 2004 Momart fire that saw them flicker out as a group. What was it like to be part of it? ‘It felt,’ says Sam Taylor-Johnson, ‘like we were a rock band on the road.’

Donald Woodman met Agnes Martin – recluse and painter of delicate grids that formed a lovely show at Tate Modern last year – in New Mexico in the 1970s and became her assistant. The portrait he paints is not of an artist of contemplative calm, as her pictures suggest, but a rebarbative, domineering and self-centred character. Woodman overlooked these traits (despite his own suicide attempt) because he recognised they made her the painter she was.

Quentin Blake had his first cartoons published in Punch while still a schoolboy and went on to become Roald Dahl’s indispensable ally and Britain’s best loved illustrator. His scratchy penmanship and whimsically subversive humour are instantly recognisable, but the man himself isn’t: Kenyon’s study of the inimitable Blake, now 83, is richly illustrated and its revealing interviews give a welcome insight into this most distinctive artist.

Paulina and Fran meet at art school, become friends, dream of genius, fall out. The writing in this novel is sassy: ‘Why did you come to art school if you don’t make art?’ Paulina is asked. ‘For the memories.’ And indeed this coming-of-age story of intense relationships, oddball wannabe artists and shifting allegiances is full of scenes that stick in the mind, all fuelled by fast-talking characters who mix the naive with the knowing.

The Strawberry Girl Lisa Stromme Chatto & Windus, £12.99 hbk

Artist in Residence Simon Bill Sort Of Books, £8.99 pbk

Six Facets of Light Ann Wroe Jonathan Cape, £25 hbk

Pretentiousness: Why it Matters Dan Fox Fitzcarraldo, £12.99 pbk

Johanne Lien is a go-between; the lovers she brings together are the painter Edvard Munch and Tullik Ihlen, the daughter of a well-to-do family holidaying in a fishing village in the Norwegian fjords in the summer of 1893. Munch is already infamous, while Tullik churns with sexual awakening: it is a setup that demands a crisis. In her debut novel, Stromme adroitly imagines the forces that lay behind The Scream.

This satirical novel of London’s contemporary art scene follows an unnamed artist on his creative and financial uppers. While imbibing whatever he can get at private views (a show of Cibachrome prints of celebrities’ thumbs at the Black Hole Gallery, for instance), he is offered the job of artist in residence at a neurological institute in Gray’s Hospital. So begins his entertaining and enlightening entanglement with the amnesiac Emily and the mysteries of the brain.

Light – intangible, elusive, vital – is the very stuff of art. Here, during a series of walks along the Sussex Downs, Wroe meditates on its protean qualities and uses the insights of a series of painters – from Fra Angelico to Turner and Ravilious – to tease out its nature. She switches from thoughts about an English lane to Coleridge, Thoreau, Samuel Palmer, larks, ragwort and Ravilious’s taste in poetry, in effortless and beguiling succession.

Pretentiousness, not an alien concept in the art world, should not be despised but lauded, says Dan Fox, co-editor of frieze magazine. Yes, it has a downside – blather and second-rate thinking – but it is vital in pushing culture forwards and countering social conservatism. Fox’s lively essay lays out his case with references from Plato to Brian Eno and even a slice of autobiography. ‘Pretentiousness is always someone else’s crime,’ he notes, but we should make it ours too.

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Preview Books

Sinners to saints SIMON WILSON celebrates two landmark publications on Beardsley and Bacon and suggests these great bad boys of British art have more in common than may seem

The Dancer’s Reward, 1893, one of Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé LEFT The third panel from Francis Bacon’s triptych Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962

2016 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. /A RS , N E W YO R K / DAC S , LO N D O N / S O LO M O N R . GU GGEN H EI M M US EU M , N E W YO R K H A R VA R D A R T M US EU MS / FO GG M US EU M , CA M B R I D GE , M A , B EQ U ES T O F GR EN V I L L E L . W I N T H R O P (194 3 .652)/CO U R T ESY YA L E U N I V ERS I T Y P R ES S

FAR LEFT

‘He is a Decadent and must do as Decadents do: he must gloat upon ugliness, and when it is not there he must create it.’ ‘Cruelty, ambiguous sex, a penchant for the perverse, all these occur in his art… he both gloats over the unusual and derives stimulus from the decadence he paints.’ The first of these quotations is from an article in the November 1896 issue of the Magazine of Art, titled ‘Aubrey Beardsley and the Decadents’. The second is from an editorial in the art magazine Apollo, published on the occasion of Francis Bacon’s first museum retrospective, at the Tate Gallery in 1962. On the face of it the artists Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) and Francis Bacon (1909–1992) have absolutely nothing in common. On one hand is Bacon, the most painterly of painters, who claimed never to draw, notorious for his view that painting was ‘pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the bits down’. On the other is Beardsley, exclusively a draughtsman, whose consummately skilled drawings, executed with the finest of pens, are the epitome of painstaking art. How then could critics in their own time comment on them in such strikingly similar terms? This question is raised by the remarkable coincidence of the almost simultaneous publication of a massive and definitive catalogue raisonné for each of them. At this point I

have to declare an interest, which is that I was involved with the Beardsley catalogue as an advisor. However, my concern here is not so much with the books, magnificent though they both are, as with the artists. I will also mention that coinciding with the Bacon catalogue are two fascinating exhibitions. One, in Monaco, celebrates his lifelong love affair with France and assembles more than 60 paintings by Bacon, together with works by the French artists who inspired him from ToulouseLautrec to Picasso. In the UK, Tate Liverpool examines a darker aspect of his art that has always attracted much attention, his use of a space frame or cage around his figures to heighten the sense of their existential isolation and angst. In relating Beardsley and Bacon we can begin with why they both attracted such criticism. Both rejected the idea that art should present an idealised view of human life, and presented instead, although in both cases very beautifully in terms of technique, its messy realities of sex, suffering and death. In Beardsley’s late-Victorian day, to do this was considered outright immoral – decadent in a word – and even at that moment of Bacon’s first Tate show in 1962 that view, as we see, was still influential. The art of both Beardsley and Bacon exists in a framework of the same sources – Greek myth, Judeo-Christian myth, history and literature. In this respect both went radically against the dominant grain of art in their time – in Beardsley’s case Impressionism and in Bacon’s

case abstract art, and thus appeared old-fashioned as well as offensive. Time has revealed that in fact both were acutely relating these sources to their own era and were creating a dramatic new artistic synthesis, in which the modernist demand for abstraction was married to the richness and range of traditional subject matter and its expression through the human figure. For both, arguably their greatest work was inspired by the story of Christ: Beardsley focusing on the fate of John the Baptist in his illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé (1893; far left), and Bacon on the Crucifixion itself, a subject which launched his career and to which he returned throughout his life. Bacon consistently claimed never to make sketches for his paintings. Beardsley too apparently made no sketches for his highprecision finished drawings. In both cases this is untrue. We know that Beardsley’s procedure was to make a loose, almost scribbled pencil sketch on his sheet of paper and then ink over it, erasing the pencil when the ink was dry. One such sketch, abandoned before inking, has survived to tell the tale. It was only after Bacon’s death that a group of drawings by him, clearly related to his paintings, appeared. They point up the easily overlooked calligraphic element in his work. The powerful bounding lines of the suspended carcass and the circlet of bones in his 1962 Crucifixion triptych (detail above left), for example, place him plausibly beside Beardsley. These two artists made work that shocked and disturbed their contemporaries, and their respective place in the history of art has long been far from clear. These monumental new books about them constitute for each their art-historical apotheosis; they are the evidence of the attention that scholars think they deserve and the basis for the continuing exploration of their significance. Aubrey Beardsley: A Catalogue Raisonné by Linda Gertner Zatlin, Yale University Press, £175 Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné Edited by Martin Harrison, The Estate of Francis Bacon (HENI Publishing), £1,000 Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms Tate Liverpool, 0151 702 7400, www.tate.org.uk, until 18 Sep Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture Grimaldi Forum Monaco, grimaldiforum.com, 2 July–4 Sep

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Fondation Beyeler, Basel.

Art in Swiss cities. Welcome to a world of art. Switzerland may be best known for its glorious natural landscapes, but it is also heaven for art enthusiasts. In the country’s charming cities you will discover world-class art museums and exhibitions. A combination of well-preserved historic districts, modern architecture, cool restaurants and elegant boutiques gives the Swiss cities an irresistible charm. With some top exhibitions coming up, 2016 is a great year to take a city break in Switzerland. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern designed by Renzo Piano

Sculpture on the Move 1946 – 2016 From 19 April to 18 September, this exhibition at the newly re-opened Kunstmuseum in Basel focuses on the artistic medium of sculpture from the end of World War II up to the present day.

Paul Klee and the Surrealists This is the first comprehensive exploration of Paul Klee’s relationship with Surrealists in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s from 18 November to 12 March 2017 at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern.

Find out more about the Swiss Cities and upcoming exhibitions at 00800 100 200 30* or MySwitzerland.com/cities *local charges may apply

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The RAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s painters, printmakers, sculptors and architects

Academy Artists

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In the Studio

Bending the rules There is barely a straight line to be found in the north London studios of artist, designer and architect Ron Arad RA. FIONA MADDOCKS meets the maverick whose life and art is always on the move. Photograph by BEN MCMAHON Ron Arad is rarely without his trademark hat. Today’s example is pulled over his head, urchin style. He likes to keep his head covered. Is it for religious reasons? ‘No. I have no religion in me. Some people have good hair. I have a good hat.’ At once Arad launches into another thought, not connected with headgear. ‘This workspace is what I call a progressive kindergarten. I am not organised or responsible or methodical. I rely on others’ – his team of 20 – ‘to be all those things.’ They are, he says, architects and engineers and people who are well ordered. ‘I jump from one thing to another. Look at that,’ he says, pointing to a sculpture on the table. ‘No one asked me to blow some glass and stick it in a bucket.’ Secluded from a busy north London thoroughfare, the approach to Arad’s hidden world is unpromising. As you climb the old fireescape-style stairs and open a weather-beaten wooden door, you feel you might be entering a garden shed or workshop fronting some shady enterprise. But inside the transformation to hitech and rampant elegance is absolute. ‘It used to be a sweatshop. When we first came it was full of old sewing machines,’ Arad says. ‘I liked the idea of an indoor-outdoor space – there are little courtyards between the various buildings.’ One houses his celebrated curved table-tennis table: all in his team are ping-pong addicts. Is he competitive? He laughs at the very possibility that he wouldn’t be. ‘Yes. I’m competitive.’ Born in Tel Aviv in 1951, Arad studied in Jerusalem at the Bezalel Academy of Arts, moving to London in 1973 to train at the Architectural Association. ‘I had a privileged childhood, with nothing to rebel against. Yet I always had a profound dislike of convention. I always wanted to find a way of not doing what I was supposed to and getting applauded for that!’ He has an international reputation as architect, industrial designer and artist. All are connected. As we walk round the vast arched gallery which is his studio, he indicates a dizzying variety of objects he has created: wrap-around eye wear, jewellery, furniture of every kind, including his 1981 Rover Chair – ‘I picked up this Rover seat and made myself a frame’ – and the iconic curvy Bookworm that can be bent into any shape to make a bookshelf (left).

On a raised gallery, on walls, on ledges, on the floor, items made of tubular and tempered steel, unnameable kinds of textured or sleeksmooth plastic, silicone, polished aluminium, glass and Perspex are shaped into coils and spirals, louvred and slatted and each possessed of industrial beauty. It’s hard to find a straight line. The canopied polyamide roof, designed to last ten years, is now 30 years old, weathered only by a few cigarette burns from the days when workers in the office next door tossed their stubs out onto it. ‘Sometimes it leaks,’ he muses, more out of interest than despair. Arad’s current architectural projects include revamping Washington D.C.’s Watergate Hotel and building Beit Shulamit, a cancer hospital in northern Israel to serve Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Druze communities. ‘Architects have a duty to do good things,’ he says. For all the wit and fantasy in his creations, he has a strong sense of responsibility that extends to the way he works with his team. A design may start with his drawing but the process quickly becomes collaborative. This is so with his new, kinetic sculptural installation for St Pancras International Station, the latest commission by HS1 in collaboration with the RA. A suspended double swirl of spun aluminium, it will, he says, ‘not obscure the clock!’ – that vital tool of travellers. For the RA’s Summer Exhibition Arad has designed for the Annenberg Courtyard Spyre, a constantly moving sculpture with a built-in camera recording live footage of its surroundings. It certainly looks alarming (he shows me a video realisation), swinging over the heads of passers-by in a voluptuous, snake-like arabesque, or bending down like a long-necked Jurassic sauropod. Might it be mildly terrifying? ‘Not at all,’ he says, with a semi-sinister, infectious giggle. ‘It’s huge, that’s true. But it’s dancing for you. Normally we are looking at sculpture, now it is looking at us.’ Thought of Train of Thought – Terrace Wires: Ron Arad RA St Pancras International Station, London, in partnership with HS1 Ltd, 7 July–Jan 2017. Ron Arad’s Spyre is installed in the RA’s Annenberg Courtyard as part of the RA Summer Exhibition 13 June–21 Aug To see more of Ron Arad’s work, visit http://roy.ac/ronarad

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International Art Fair

TUNBRIDGE WELLS

24th June from 11am to 8pm 25th June from 11am to 6pm 26th June from 11am to 5pm www.tunbridgewellsartfair.com Tunbridge-Wells-International-Art-Fair TWArtFair

24 - 26 June 2016 Assembly Hall Theatre Tunbridge Wells TN1 2LU Organised by

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Enjoy free re-admission for a year by asking us to treat your ticket purchase as a donation.

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Academy Artists

Manhattan transfer

No-one captures New York quite like Bill Jacklin RA, who moved to the Big Apple in the 1980s and never looked back. NANCY CAMPBELL caught up with him ahead of his show of prints and drawings at the RA

Rink II, 1995, by Bill Jacklin RA

The paintings and prints of Bill Jacklin RA celebrate places, but he does not see himself as a topographical artist. ‘I use location as an emotive vehicle to describe my feelings and my relationship to the world,’ he explains from his Connecticut home. The London-born artist is best known for his dramatic depictions of New York, where he lived for two decades. He records ‘people involved in their passions’ – on parade, at the beach, in the park. These scenes are revisited and renewed in many moods and media; the swirling skaters on the ice rink in Central Park, for example, feature in a number of works, from his first handcoloured carborundum prints (Rink I and Rink II, above; both 1995) to a vast mural at Washington National Airport (The Rink, 1996). The figure skater tracing elegant arcs on the ice could be a metaphor for the artist himself, his lightness of touch matched with formidable skill. Jacklin came to prominence in the 1960s as a ‘Systems artist’, composing complex works of grids and dots. But he realised that ‘the avantgarde was too rigid’, and he embraced instead a free style of figuration, examining ‘the flow of forms and the play of light’. Commissions from

the Bank of England and the London restaurant the Ivy followed, and he became a Royal Academician in 1991. Jacklin has never lost his early enthusiasm for printmaking, as a show of his graphic art at the Royal Academy reveals this summer. After he relocated to New York in 1985, he adopted print techniques that suited his gestural approach, such as monotype, where an image is painted directly onto a plate – in Jacklin’s case, zinc plates that he inherited from the great American artist Robert Motherwell. He spritzes a mixture of turpentine and oil on the plate to create dazzling light effects. Jacklin often works on a painting and a print simultaneously in his own studio, ‘moving between canvas and press, adjusting both compositions.’ But he also enjoys the discipline of working separately in the studio of a masterprinter. Recently Jacklin produced 20 monotypes during one intense week at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, Connecticut, some of which will be on show at the RA this summer. ‘They set up a system and I came in and hit off against it. How much can the system tolerate with me battering it?’ He laughs. ‘Everyone was exhausted by the end of the week, myself included.’ The new monotypes are impressive in scale; the most ambitious is a tribute to the Manhattan skyline. ‘I always thought of the city as an arena,’ Jacklin concludes. ‘The light shining down is my spotlight, in which I can create my own drama.’ Bill Jacklin RA: The Graphic Work 1961–2016 John Madejski Fine Rooms, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 020 7300 8000, royalacademy.org.uk, 3 June–28 Aug. A monograph Bill Jacklin: Graphics (RA Publications, hbk £29.95) accompanies the RA exhibition – see Readers’ Offers page 94 Bill Jacklin: Paintings and Monotypes Marlborough Fine Arts, London, 020 7629 5161, marlboroughlondon.com, until 7 June To see a gallery of works from the RA’s exhibition, visit http://roy.ac/jacklingraphic

Progressions in print Tess Jaray RA showcases pioneering printmakers for an RA selling show. ANNA COATMAN reports

Nine Thorns, 2016, by Tess Jaray RA

‘We don’t know precisely when the first human print was made’, says Tess Jaray RA, who has just curated a show of prints for the Royal Academy’s Keeper’s House. ‘Probably it happened when a child put their palm on some enjoyable substance, transferred the covered hand onto a wall, and was fascinated by the result.’ What we do know is that printmaking has been evolving ever since, and that today new technologies are allowing artists to experiment even further with digital, photographic and 3D methods. For ‘The Edge of Printing’, Jaray has selected a range of prints by herself (Nine Thorns, 2016; above) and fellow Academicians Anne Desmet, Rebecca Salter and Peter Freeth, as well as a number of other specially invited artists, showcasing the diversity of – and latest innovations in – printmaking media. What’s remarkable is that whatever the technique – be it wood-block, silkscreen or 3D printing – the expression of the artist is still allowed to shine through in the work. ‘It has always surprised me that the transference of the mark, through printmaking, in spite of the mediation of other material, still defines the artist. The signature is not lost,’ Jaray observes. The Edge of Printing The Keeper’s House, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 020 7300 8000, royalacademy.org.uk, until 29 Aug. All works in the show are available to buy through the RA website. Visit royalacademy.org.uk/artsales

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D TS E R H F I G I INKN W SUPPORTED BY

8TH JUN — 18TH SEP 15 mins by train: Victoria to West Dulwich, London Bridge to North Dulwich

In-kind support from

@dulwichgallery #WinifredKnights

A Canadian Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery exhibition. Winifred Knights, The Deluge, 1920, Oil on canvas, 152.9 x 183.5 cm, Tate: Purchased with assistance from the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1989. © Tate, London 2016. © The Estate of Winifred Knights

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Academy Artists

How I made it TITLE The One and the Many (2015) ARTIST Peter Randall-Page RA INSTALLED AT Fitzroy Place, London W1 INTERVIEW Gill Crabbe What was the starting point for this commission?

I have worked a lot in the past with naturally eroded boulders. In this case, I have inscribed a boulder with different texts from ancient and modern writing systems. My sculptures often combine an element of randomness with a structuring principle – here marks inscribed on the surface breathe human meaning into the random form of the boulder. I am fascinated by how humans try to make the world meaningful. How did you source the material for the work?

The boulder came from a quarry in Bavaria, where thousands of rocks are strewn across the forest. It took me five days to find the rock I wanted, and I cut a 25-tonne piece – about three-quarters of the stone – before transporting it back to my studio in Devon. How did you select the texts for your inscriptions?

I chose creation stories that were imaginings about physical creation, covering all the main families of writing systems. I took advice from the British Museum, SOAS and scholars around the world. You can access a map of the texts I used, giving the sources and translations, on a dedicated website: theoneandthemany.co.uk How did you inscribe these texts?

P H OTO GR A P H: A N D R E W F I N D L AY

The boulder was put on a turntable and scaffolded on three sides, with the fourth side left open so I could turn the stone to see what it looked like from every angle. I decided where to place the texts using strips of paper. I divided the surface of the boulder into sections according to the golden proportion, with sections for horizontal writing systems and others for vertical systems. I then applied the scripts directly onto the stone using a brush, before letter cutters set to work, cutting them into the stone. There were a lot of practical considerations, such as how many lines will a story take up and what’s going to fit where, whether Mongolian works next to Arabic, as well as the weight of the mark, so there was a lot of juggling things and changing my mind. How do feel about the work now?

Peter Randall-Page RA works on his sculpture The One and The Many, 2015

These creation stories and the imponderables they contain have stayed with me. The stone has a text from Adam Frank, an expert on the Big Bang: ‘In the beginning there was a single geometrical point containing all space, all time, all energy and all matter. It did not exist within space, it was space, and there was no inside and no outside.’ It’s a scientific statement but it sounds as mythical as the epic of Gilgamesh from 2000 BCE.

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DOUBLE TAKE: DRAWING AND PHOTOGRAPHY

Supported by Idlewild Trust

Donald Judd Catalogue Raisonné Call For Works

First Time Skating, Gelatin silver print, 2008–2009 © Jolana Havelková. Courtesy the artist

15 APR–03 JUL 2016

A Room of Their Own: Lost Bloomsbury interiors 1914-30 Paintings, furniture, ceramics, wallpaper, fireplaces...

Judd Foundation is pleased to announce a Call For Works for the Donald Judd Catalogue Raisonné project. Owners of Donald Judd artworks – paintings, objects, and wood-blocks – are invited to submit information. For details please visit: juddfoundation.org/catalogue

Vanessa Bell, Nude with poppies, oil on canvas 1916 (Swindon Museum & Art Gallery)

or contact: cr@juddfoundation.org Tel +1 432 729 4406 ext. 102 juddfoundation.org

john hoyland

catalogue RaisonnÉ of the paintings

the estate of john hoyland is working on a complete online catalogue of hoyland’s paintings that will document all six decades of his career.

Roger Fry and Omega Workshop, Giraffe cabinet, wood 1915-16 (Manchester Art Gallery)

Victoria Art Gallery if you own a hoyland, please let us know catrais@johnhoyland.com 41 charterhouse square, london ec1M 6ea www.johnhoyland.com

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11 June – 4 September 2016 By Pulteney Bridge Bath BA2 4AT T 01225 477233 www.victoriagal.org.uk Daily 10.30 – 5.00

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Academy Artists

Unity in diversity RICHARD DAVEY celebrates the independent spirit that characterises Anthony Whishaw RA’s paintings in this extract from a new monograph

P H OTO: J O H N B O D K I NS/ DAW K I NS CO LO U R

Come Dance With Me, 2013–15, by Anthony Whishaw RA

Every April since his election to the Royal Academy in 1980 Anthony Whishaw has stood in his studio, surrounded by his paintings, and finalised his selection of the works he will be submitting for the year’s Summer Exhibition. April 2015 was no different. In November 2014 Whishaw had already decided on Come Dance with Me (2013–15; above), a three-metre-long canvas he had been working on since 2013. Now, with just a month to go before the submission deadline, he had to decide on the others. With every Royal Academician allowed to submit up to six pieces he could have entered another five, but in the end he selected just three more. The four paintings Whishaw chose challenged the modernist narrative of linear progression, in which artists focus on one defined series of work at a time, and in which one idea flows neatly into the next, always looking forward rather than back. Whishaw doesn’t work in this way. The walls of his Kensington studio are covered with paintings that use a variety of visual languages and explore a range of subjects. Paintings of trees

and Mediterranean seascapes, abstract colour fields and chiaroscuro still-lifes jostle for attention with no sense of hierarchy or obvious evolution. Whishaw started some of the paintings here 30 years ago, yet he is still adding to and altering them. On their reverse can be seen crossed-out dates that record a lifetime of continued reflection in which nothing is finished until it actually leaves the studio and is no longer in his possession. The Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition also challenges the modernist narrative by offering a visual miscellany of paintings, prints and photographs that vie for the viewer’s attention, with abstract works hung next to more traditional figurative works, still-lifes next to portraits, landscapes next to architectural drawings, just as in Whishaw’s studio. In 2015 Come Dance with Me was hung high on the south wall of the RA’s largest gallery surrounded by the work of his fellow Royal Academicians. This large, abstract painting is a celebration of line and colour, its ribbons of pink, red, turquoise and blue weaving sinuous patterns around the

picture surface to suggest a series of joyful, dancing rhythms. Nearby was St Paul’s Multiview II (2009–10), a painting that combines elements of cubism and abstraction, collage, realism and topographical architectural drawing. The composition’s fractured space sends the viewer’s gaze ricocheting around multiple viewpoints, sometimes sliding off steeply angled geometric planes of colour, sometimes being drawn into distant views of Wren’s iconic dome. Whishaw’s two other paintings hung amid the dense grouping of small works in another gallery. Like his depiction of St Paul’s, Flying Above II (2011–15; page 46) had an architectural focus. As we look down on the rooftops of a Spanish hilltop pueblo, the towers of a church rise out of a blue-and-green mist, with roofs and chimneys tumbling around them in a cubist cascade of multiple viewpoints. Some of these architectural features are painted with a hard-edged clarity while others are left as mere suggestions, halfglimpsed through the fog. Mirrored Flowers (1998–2005) employs multiple viewpoints too,

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Academy Artists

Critic’s choice This summer Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury is showing works from the collection of the art critic Andrew Lambirth. For most of the 1990s Lambirth was RA Magazine’s contributing editor, before he became art critic of the Spectator. At the same time he has been a collector, informed by his passion for Modern British art and the artists he has written so intelligently about – in particular Royal

Flying Above II, 2011–15, by Anthony Whishaw RA

details and picturesque scenes reminiscent of the 19th or early 20th centuries. His disregard for stylistic boundaries and subject hierarchies has all the hallmarks of postmodernism, and yet Whishaw’s art is without the knowingness and parody of much contemporary work. The four pieces Whishaw submitted to the Summer Exhibition in 2015 had so little in common in terms of style or content that they could easily have been mistaken for the work of four different artists. But it is this very commitment to diversity rather than uniformity, and a refusal to be defined and restricted by labels, that unites Whishaw’s prolific output. Even in his 80s he still wants to explore the boundaries of paint, and to push its ability to inspire, delight, evoke memories, shock and excite, as he has always done – not by focusing in and narrowing down his work into an identifiable visual signature, but by constantly trying new things, hoping to be surprised and intrigued by what might emerge. Anthony Whishaw by Richard Davey (RA Publications, £29.95). See Readers’ Offers page 94 Anthony Whishaw RA – Woodland Encounters: Paintings and Works on Paper Art Space, London, 020 7359 7002, artspacegallery.co.uk, until 10 June To see photographs of Anthony Whishaw’s studio, visit http://roy.ac/whishawstudio

Academicians past and present. The exhibition, ‘Face to Face’, focuses on the portrait and includes works by an impressive array of artists, including Augustus John RA, Leon Kossoff and RB Kitaj RA. Interesting asides include Patrick George’s portrait of Jeffery Camp (c.1950) and a 1921 portrait of Surrealist painter and photographer Eileen Agar by her teacher Leon Underwood. Some of the works were given to Lambirth by the artists who made them – such as a lyrical self-portrait by Camp (above) – while others have been bought at auction or acquired through dealers. Lambirth’s taste isn’t for the fashionable; as with his writing, his collection reflects his own interests and passions. The wall texts he has written for the show reveal the connections between many of the works, as do the letters and memorabilia also included in the exhibition. It all makes for a fascinating show. Nick Tite

Face to Face: Portraits from the Andrew Lambirth Collection Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, gainsborough.org, 01787 372958, 11 June–16 Oct

P H OTO: J O H N B O D K I NS / DAW K I NS CO LO U R .CO U R T ESY O F A N D R E W L A M B I R T H

but that is where the visual similarity ends. Using elements of both abstraction and figuration to create a fantastical Escher-like composition, the work contains conventional landscape elements, with hints of sea and sky, fields and fences, flowers and stars. Yet it is also a fantasy, with two horizon lines, multiple perspectives, and two dark curving lines that evoke the mirror of the title, pulling the viewer, Alice-like, through the surface into a tilting, twisting pictorial space that is at once rational and incoherent. For those wanting to pigeonhole artists into schools or ‘-isms’, Whishaw’s eclecticism can be frustrating. His paintings defy classification. Despite being a Royal Academician, and exhibiting widely in group shows with other major British artists, he has never been one to follow trends, or to align himself with a particular stylistic group. He resists art-historical categorisation or contextualisation, pursuing his own unique path and commitment to his materials. One moment he is exploring cubist constructions of space, the next, trompe-l’œil playfulness. His use of photocopies and collage, and his application of plastic cups, plastic flies and other objects to his picture surfaces, suggest that he is someone with contemporary concerns and an interest in experimentation. And yet his subjects are often traditional or come from his everyday experience, focusing on architectural

Self-Portrait, 2013, by Jeffery Camp RA

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The BP exhibition

Sunken cities Egypt’s lost worlds Supported by BP

‘the stuff of legend’ The Daily Telegraph

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Until 27 November 2016 Open late Fridays Members/under 16s free Organised with the Hilti Foundation and the Institut Européen d’Archéologie Sous-Marine Photo: Christoph Gerigk. © Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation.

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Academy Artists

Now showing Our guide to the current art and architecture of the Royal Academicians

Sculptors Richard Deacon and Mrdjan Bajić are working on a project in Belgrade with the Institute of Transportation CIP to create a joint pedestrian bridge and sculpture

Painters and Printmakers ● Tony Bevan shows at Cartwright

Hall, Bradford (16 July–19 Feb 2017) ● Jeffery Camp has a solo show at Art

Space Gallery, London (1 July–5 Aug) ● Fred Cuming has a solo show at Adam Gallery, Bath (9–30 July) ● Tacita Dean takes part in ‘Reset Modernity’ at ZKM, Karlsruhe (until 21 Aug) ● Tracey Emin has a solo show ‘Stone Love’ at Lehmann Maupin, New York (until 18 June) ● Stephen Farthing’s work is included in a celebration of Capability Brown at Milton Abbey, Dorset (6 July–21 Aug) ● Paul Huxley has a retrospective at the Mark Rothko Centre, Daugavpils, Latvia

(15 July–15 Sep) ● Michael Landy has a retrospective at Museum Tinguely, Basel (8 June–25 Sep) ● Leonard McComb contributes to an Arts Council Collection show at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, near Wakefield (16 July–16 Oct) ● Barbara Rae has a solo show at the Portland Gallery, London (2–17 June). She contributes to ‘Juxtaposition’ at Zillah Bell gallery, Thirsk, with Fred Cuming, Mali Morris and Emma Stibbon (until 4 June) ● Wolfgang Tilmans has a solo show at Maureen Paley, London (9 June– 31 July) ● Gillian Wearing is the invited artist at HOUSE 2016, premiering her film project A Room With Your Views at the University of Brighton Galleries (30 April–29 May) ● John Wragg has a solo show at Bath Contemporary (3–25 June).

● Phyllida Barlow takes part in ‘Not All that Falls has Wings’ at ARTER, Istanbul (9 June–18 Sep). Barlow is to represent Britain at the 2017 Venice Biennale ● John Carter’s solo show ‘Déplacements’ is at Galerie Wagner, Le Touquet Paris-Plage (24 May–3 July). He contributes to ‘Rythme et Géométrie’ at Couvent des Cordeliers, Châteauroux (24 June–18 Sep) ● Antony Gormley has solo shows at Galleria Continua, Beijing (until 20 Aug), Sean Kelly gallery, New York (until 18 June) and Alan Cristea, London (until 2 July) ● Anish Kapoor has a solo exhibition at Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC), Mexico City (28 May–27 Nov) ● David Nash

Fennel and Friends, 2012, by Elizabeth Blackadder, who has a solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh (4 Aug–3 Sep)

Architects ● David Chipperfield Architects is to

Eva Jiricna has designed a new shop on Sloane Street, London, for the jewellers Boodles. The interior features a sculptural, semi-circular glass staircase

has a solo show, ‘Columns, Peaks and Torso’, at Galerie Lelong, Paris (until 13 July) ● Twenty RAs take part in ‘Found’, curated by Cornelia Parker, at the Foundling Museum, London (26 May–4 Sep; see page 24) ● Conrad Shawcross’s architectural intervention for the Greenwich Peninsula, The Optic Cloak, can be seen from Summer 2016. It has been designed in collaboration with C.F. Møller Architects. Shawcross takes part in ‘Light Show’ at CorpArtes, Santiago (until 11 Sep), and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (30 July–9 Jan 2017). He has a solo show at Tucci Russo Studio per l’Arte Contemporanea, Turin (until 31 July) ● Yinka Shonibare takes part in ‘Making and Unmaking’ at Camden Arts Centre, London (19 June–18 Sep; see page 24).

design a chapel for The Boenfukyukai Foundation at the Inagawa Reien cemetery near Osaka. The firm is also redeveloping the ‘Boulevard Morland’ site in Paris. The Chipperfield-designed office building, One Pancras Square, has won the 2016 Civic Trust Award, as well as the Special Award for Sustainability ● Edward Cullinan Studio and Jerram Falkus Construction are to carry out the refurbishment and extension of the Queen Mary School of Mathematical Sciences – a 1960s brutalist building in east London ● Nicholas Grimshaw’s practice and NOW architects are to design LetsRun Park in Yeongcheon,

South Korea. Volunteers from the firm have started work in Rwanda on a charitable project to replace the existing timber Coko Bridge ● Thomas Heatherwick’s studio is the subject of an exhibition that is touring Asia, starting at the Daelim Museum, Seoul (16 June–15 Oct). Heatherwick Studio and Diamond Schmitt Architects have been selected to lead the renovation of the David Geffen Hall at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York ● Michael Hopkins’s firm Hopkins Architects is to design the new Academic Building for Brighton College ● Farshid Moussavi’s practice is designing a new office block at 130 Fenchurch Street, in the City of London ● The Brighton College Music School, designed by Eric Parry Architects, is now complete.

T H E I NS T I T U T E O F T R A NS P O R TAT I O N CI P, B ELGR A D E , S ER B I A . CO U R T ESY O F T H E S COT T IS H G A L L ERY. P H OTO: P E T ER CO O K

Sculptors

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Â© DAV I D H O CK N E Y/ P H OTO CR ED I T: J E A N - P I ER R E GO N CA LV ES D E L I M A

OPPOSITE PAGE

David Hockney painted Barry Humphries’ portrait over three days, between 26 and 28 March 2015 TOP, FROM LEFT Day 1 at 11am; Day 1 at 11.50am BOTTOM, FROM LEFT Day 1 at 1.10pm; Day 3 at 12pm

David Hockney RA returns to the Academy this summer with his sparkling new series of portraits. Barry Humphries, creator of Dame Edna Everage and friend of the artist, recounts his experience of sitting for a portrait in Hockney’s Los Angeles studio

A brush with genius David Hockney has drawn me twice and painted my portrait once – the painting goes on show at the Royal Academy this summer together with his other recent portraits. Last year I was performing one of my innumerable farewell shows in a seven-week season in Los Angeles, so I found that I could visit my artist friend on several occasions. On one of these he said he’d like to paint me. I have known David for a long time but he was a particularly close friend of my late father-in-law Stephen Spender, with whom he collaborated on China Diary (1982): a record in words and pictures of their visit to China in the early 1980s. But David had been a friend of the family long before that book and he even designed the invitation to my wife Lizzie Spender’s 21st birthday. David made paintings and drawings of many of the poets and writers who had come to fame in the 1930s, notably Auden and Isherwood, as well as Spender. He loves to draw people, and in this art he exceeds the work of all his contemporaries. So it was, one morning in early March last year, having cancelled a trip to New York, I set off from my favourite Beverly Hills hotel for my first sitting in David’s studio way up on Mulholland Drive. My preferred accommodation is a rather modest affair and was recommended to me by Billy Wilder, whom I first met at David’s place in Malibu about 20 years ago. The hotel was, and still is, a ’70s time-warp with a Hockney-like swimming pool beside which

only the most obscure movie stars have ever reclined. David has not only immortalised Los Angeles, but forever changed the way we look at swimming pools. After he moved to Los Angeles in 1978, David’s first studio was on Santa Monica Boulevard. He commuted up and down Nichols Canyon from his house on Mulholland Drive, painting the canyon, as well as making his famous full-length ‘portrait’ of Mulholland Drive (page 54). Hockney built a studio at his home in 1982 after he bought the adjacent house from the actor Tony Perkins (whom he never met). Everyone in Los Angeles – or that end of it – lives in a house that belonged to someone else. For a long time I rented a rambling old farmhouse with its own lemon grove and colony of rats that had formerly belonged to the film star Myrna Loy. And I once nearly bought a modernist villa in Los Feliz where that forgotten crooner and heartthrob of the early ’30s, Russ Columbo, had been fatally shot under mysterious circumstances. On that morning in March I found myself seated in a comfortable wooden chair with armrests in Hockney’s studio. The chair was set on a dais and below me to the left stood David at his easel, brush poised over a 22 by 91cm virgin canvas and a shrewd eye tilted inquisitively in my direction. That morning I had deliberately dressed in Hockney colours, as fortunately I have come to prefer brighter, even slightly gaudy habiliments. Arranged around the walls of the

studio were many of his other subjects, mostly friends, male and female, all posed in the same chair and painted directly and without emotion (see portraits on pages 52 & 53). These diverse personages all look as if they might suffer from elevated blood pressure, since David imparts to his subjects ruddy complexion. Throughout each sitting we were filmed by his assistant Jean-Pierre, a charming Frenchman and devotee of the artist, and there is a filmed record of every portrait, so that the movement of the artist’s brush can be seen on a screen at every stage of the creation, from blank canvas to completed painting. Hockney is as much a looker as a painter and the intensity of his scrutiny as it switched from brushstroke to me, seated as still as I could manage, was rather awe-inspiring. In this age where it is possible to call yourself an artist without being able to draw, David Hockney is a rare phenomenon. Throughout the process he smoked – there was usually a nourishing cigarette in his left hand. And although he is an energetic and always entertaining talker, he rarely spoke when painting. Sometimes he gave a short grunt of satisfaction or looked up at his subject with a smile that told me it was going well. I was able to give him three sittings, though some of his other subjects have only offered the artist two. We broke for lunch at 1pm or 1.30pm and adjourned to the house for a very good Californian lunch, where there was much talk

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and laughter. David’s table talk really should be recorded and published because his enthusiasms are always impassioned and infectious. He explained the critical neglect of Dufy and Marquet in comparison with the disproportionate hyperbole heaped on Matisse. He survived a disabling stroke in October 2012 and he is very deaf, so avoids noisy crowds but can still engage in a lively conversation across the dinner table. When he came to my show I practically sat him on the stage and made sure my body language was as loud as possible. I first saw and briefly met David in the late ’70s in New York at that legendary nightclub Studio 54, where one sometimes glimpsed the ghostly figure of Andy Warhol loitering in the shadows beside the hectic dance floor. Some time in that same decade I sat to the photographer Cecil Beaton for my portrait and he never stopped talking about Hockney and Nureyev, who seemed to have replaced even Greta Garbo as the objects of his affection and admiration. David was the child prodigy of British art but unlike many child prodigies he didn’t fizzle out. His work has broadened and deepened and when he paints your portrait and occasionally speaks to you in that soft Yorkshire accent, which reminds me of the voice of my Lancastrian grandfather, you find yourself hoping not that the picture will look like you, but that you, with any luck, will look like the picture.

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Rufus Hale, 23rd, 24th, 25th November 2015 ABOVE RIGHT Dagny Corcoran, 15th, 16th, 17th January 2014 LEFT Lord Jacob Rothschild, 5th, 6th February 2014 OPPOSITE PAGE, TOP John Baldessari, 13th, 16th December 2013 BOTTOM David Hockney painting Barry Humphries in Los Angeles, 27th March 2015

THIS PAGE, ABOVE LEFT

‘You find yourself hoping not that the picture will look like you, but that you, with any luck, will look like the picture’

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‘Hockney is as much a looker as a painter and the intensity of his scrutiny, as it switched from brushstroke to me, was rather awe-inspiring’ Some years ago, the Los Angeles County Museum staged a recreation of the Nazis’ infamous ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition. Many of the original paintings and drawings that had been held to ridicule in 1937 had, surprisingly, not been destroyed, but prudently flogged in Switzerland to raise cash for the Reich. ‘How extraordinary,’ I said to David, ‘that so many fragile works had survived the bibliocausts of that terrible epoch.’ ‘Why?’ I asked my friend. ‘Because somebody loved them,’ replied Hockney. By the same principle it is reassuring to think of the afterlife of my own portrait. Does it deserve to be an object only to be enjoyed and cherished by a solitary collector? Or ought it to be the venerated centrepiece of a large and distinguished museum, reproduced on postcards, T-shirts and oven mitts in the gallery boutique? Sometimes on stage I might improvise something rather successful and my other self standing in the wings says, ‘I wish I’d thought of that.’ It’s similar with my portrait by David. It’s not how I always look but how I rather wish I did. David Hockney: 82 Portraits and 1 Still Life The Sackler Wing, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 020 7300 8000, royalacademy.org.uk, 2 July–2 Oct. Sponsored by Cazenove Capital Management. See Public Events page 76. The RA expects the exhibition to be very popular: to ensure the best possible experience, Friends are required to book a ticket in advance (see page 7 for details) To see a video of David Hockney RA talking about his forthcoming exhibition visit http://roy.ac/hockney

© DAV I D H O CK N E Y/ P H OTO CR ED I T: R I CH A R D S CH M I DT/CO L L ECT I O N LOS A N GEL ES CO U N T Y M US EU M O F A R T (L ACM A). © DAV I D H O CK N E Y/ P H OTO CR ED I T: R I CH A R D S CH M I DT

Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio, 1980 BELOW Margaret Hockney, 14th, 15th, 16th August 2015 ABOVE

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Artist duos are challenging the concept of individual authorship. Now they are celebrated at this year’s RA Summer Exhibition. Fiona Maddocks asks four pairs of artists how they collaborate

Seeing double

To see Jake Chapman discuss his creative partnership with his brother, visit http://roy.ac/chapmanbrothers

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RA Summer Exhibition 2016 Main Galleries, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 020 7300 8000, royalacademy. org.uk, 13 June–21 Aug Public Events see page 76. Summer Exhibition sponsored by Insight Investment

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will appear throughout the exhibition, from the opening staircase too – with the photographs of Jane & Louise Wilson [see page 61]’. Some exhibits are already world famous. Peter Fischli & David Weiss will show their sixminute video Büsi (Kitty) from 2001, in which a cat laps milk; it caught worldwide attention when it was displayed on electronic billboards in New York’s Times Square. Five years ago the selection committee for the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale chose an artist duo for the first time: Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, based in Puerto Rico, whose work combines sculpture, performance, photography, video and sound. Their 2 Hose Petrified Petrol Pump (2012) – which, yes, is a stone carving of a petrol pump – will feature in the RA show. The Berlin couple EVA & ADELE who dress identically and flamboyantly, describing themselves as ‘an artwork’ from the future, have submitted a canvas entitled Double Act XIII (2015). Wilson is particularly delighted that Gilbert & George, known for refusing to appear in group shows, have made a major new work. Ackroyd & Harvey, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Langlands & Bell, Zatorski & Zatorski, and The Kipper Kids – a duo since the 1970s – will be among those showing too. As Wilson points out, few artists today work without some kind of collaboration. His own sculpture, so often resulting in site-specific installations requiring many levels of practical and technical input, is reliant on others: ‘In the past, too, most of the great artists had assistants and workshops. We cannot know exactly who did what. It challenges the idea of artists working in isolation and begs the question, “Can good art only come from a single artist working alone?” I certainly believe in the collective consciousness, the shared experience.’ And if there are duo RAs in future? ‘I always joke that at the annual banquet they would have to share a dinner…’ P H OTO: M AT T T H O M AS

Laurel & Hardy, Joel & Ethan Cohen, Herzog & de Meuron, Gilbert & George. Spot the odd one out. Comedy duos are part of the landscape. The Coen Brothers have been making films together since 1984. Architects commonly work in pairs, as do singers and songwriters, creators of musicals, or opera composers and librettists. In those cases, at least, one can imagine the division of labour. When it comes to Gilbert & George, world famous, working together for more than four decades and jointly creating single works of art, eyebrows are still raised. Who knows who does what, let alone what their surnames are? Does it matter? To the public, they are one entity, joined indelibly by an ampersand, trendsetters for a way of making art collaboratively which has become almost a norm in the past half century. This year’s RA Summer Exhibition, which is co-ordinated by sculptor Richard Wilson RA, celebrates this phenomenon with works by more than 15 two-people partnerships: men, women, man and woman, women who have been men, twins, siblings, friends, lovers, ex-lovers, spouses. Historically the statutes of the Royal Academy do not permit joint membership, so these artists are not, or cannot be, Academicians. Is it time to change? ‘It wasn’t my idea to politicise the issue,’ Wilson says. ‘That said, some of us have raised the issue over the years but we tend to get tripped up by the mechanics of how it could work – would a duo have a single vote on Academy issues? What if they disagreed or split up or one died? None of these obstacles are insurmountable but they take some disentangling and if this year’s Summer Exhibition helps bring the matter to the fore, that can’t be a bad thing. These are important artists, part of the debate.’ The RA’s General Assembly meets again in June to discuss a law change. Wilson praises Michael Craig-Martin RA for introducing bold changes to last year’s Summer Show. ‘It’s important to build on that. Michael moved the goal-posts. It was a fantastic success. Even putting Jim Lambie’s stripes on the main staircase was an adventure. Michael’s idea of having a couple of shows-within-the-show made an impact too. This year, the works by duos won’t be seen quite like that, all located in one place, but

The Singh Twins, Amrit and Rabindra, were born in London and grew up in Liverpool. Identical in appearance and dress, their ‘oneness’ extends to their work, which draws inspiration from the vivid colours and fertile detail of Mughal miniatures. Many of their works trace the way Indian and British cultures merge, and also explore the sisters’ own duality, as British, Liverpudlian, Indian and Sikh twins. Their work is overtly political and has embraced global events such as the Iraq War and the Indian Army’s storming of the Golden Temple in Amritsar. A splash of decorative red on a Singh Twins miniature may turn out to be a pool of blood. Central to their work is a belief in the role of the artist as a recorder of history.

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The Singh Twins

‘Our artwork for the RA Summer Exhibition, titled London’s Burning: Read All About It, explores various historical burnings of London, from the Gunpowder Plot, the Great Fire of London and the Gordon Riots to the Blitz and, most recently, the riots of 2011. It mixes the flattened perspective of Indian miniature styles with linear perspective, and combines digital technology with hand-painted techniques, including gold work. The work is inspired by a 15th-century illuminated manuscript, said to be the earliest topographical representation of London, depicting the Duke of Orléans in the Tower and illustrating verses from one of his poems that begin ‘News from London’. That ‘headline news’ feel and notion of art as documentation underpins the artwork. Every artwork starts with research. We go away, think, read and make notes independently, then come back and pool our ideas. It’s rare that we disagree about the main scheme of things: we have the same aesthetic and political outlook. We might argue over a colour for this detail or that, but not often. We divide the different elements of fauna, flora, portraiture, architecture and decoration between us evenly. Of course we know our own work, but others find it difficult to tell who did what – and that’s as we like it. We haven’t felt the need to go separate ways or stress our individuality. As children, we were given the same creative opportunities – often drawing and painting together – and we shared the same education and life experiences. So perhaps, there was a certain inevitability to our artistic partnership. As individual artists who happen to be twins, we have faced criticism, and even been accused of copying each other. Our professional partnership has been about responding to that with a united front. But it’s also a political statement against the false perception and concept of ‘true’ art as the work of the individual genius, when even great artists of the past were influenced by others or worked with assistants and a workshop. Over time, the idea of the individual artist has become more about the individual than the art. It’s important to challenge how art has come to be defined and valued in this way because so many artists are working outside that solo framework. And genius can be collective too.’

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‘How do two people work together? By a process of conversation – that’s our perpetual answer. Our interest is not in making some sort of autobiographical rumination but of asking

was it ‘Dinos not Jake’… I can’t remember. The presumption was that if we worked separately for a year the work might veer towards the more autobiographical. But all that happened was that after that year we were back exactly as before. Early on we had worked for Gilbert & George – though their work, unlike ours, tends towards symbiosis, two people merging into one. We’re the opposite. Some of our favourite artists were people like Art & Language, Fischli and Weiss, people who worked in multitudes rather than singularities. It gave us the idea that we could work like that. We didn’t work like that as children. My brother is nearly five years older than me, so we didn’t play much. Yes, making art has an element of play to it but there’s no return on making art together if you just happened to play together. Let’s nip that in the bud. Dinos has moved to LA, maybe not permanently, I don’t know. We’ve worked exhaustively over a number of years. The hiatus caused by distance and logistics nowadays just makes us think about it all the harder. Instead of just floating into the studio every day because

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P H OTO: M A R K B LOW ER

Jake & Dinos Chapman – born in Cheltenham in 1966 and London in 1962, full names Iakovos and Konstantinos, always nominated in that order – have made work together and apart but are known best as the Chapman brothers. They first collaborated publicly in 1991, after leaving the Royal College of Art. They were included in YBA shows in the 1990s, and were nominated – as one unit – for the Turner Prize in 2003. Their work is predominantly sculptural, often using multitudes of tiny figures. For Hell (2000), an apocalyptic depiction of man’s inhumanity to man, they chopped up, remodelled and recast 60,000 toy soldiers. Dinos recently moved to Los Angeles. Jake still works in their Hackney studio, from which he gave this interview.

how the world works, and how art operates in the world. It’s more discursive, not a manifestation of internal angst. Being brothers must have some effect on the levels of tolerance we accord each other, but I don’t think having a sibling relationship means there’s some sort of genetic, telepathic, aesthetic, telekinesis going on. We discuss the work. It’s an aggregate of all sorts of conversations. We work with each other because we like each other’s ideas. There’s no separation of talents or assumed talents. It’s interchangeable. Working together was a way of destroying that notion of the reduction to the signature of an artist. Is there something duplicitous about the work coming from two people, rather than one single artistic truth? If you multiply the entities involved in a work it becomes even more schizoid. That’s what we’re interested in. But it’s not four hands on one object. We do things separately a lot of the time. We say if we don’t like something the other does. We are very unsentimental about our practice. We made a show called ‘Jake not Dinos’. Or

P H OTO: R ACH EL K I N G

Jake & Dinos Chapman

The sisters Jane & Louise Wilson began working together in 1989. Born in Newcastle in 1967, they studied respectively at Newcastle Polytechnic and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee, then together at Goldsmiths, after which they became associated with the YBAs. Their photography, film and video works have often featured institutional spaces, from the Houses of Parliament to the Stasi archives of former East Germany, and they were nominated for the Turner Prize in 1999. They are identical twins but do not dress alike. In conversation they overlap, one continuing the thread of the other and are happy to be represented as one voice.

LOW RES

‘We first came out as working together at the end of our undergraduate art courses. It was a natural extension, so to speak, as before then, in Newcastle at our comprehensive school, we were the only two in our year doing an art A-Level. There was a general perception then that you were a bit of a loser if you were doing art. After we left school we went to study at different art colleges. At the end of three years we produced identical degree shows, which meant that examiners in both colleges had to collaborate because if they’d passed one of us and failed the other they would have effectively been judging the same work. One of the reasons we collaborate is because of the pleasure we derive from working together. Otherwise it wouldn’t work. We’re very conscious of the dialogue that we have and it feels somehow liberating to exist within that dialogue. Of course, we grew up making things together as children, and that then evolved. Working together as two female artists and twin sisters has the potential to place you outside somehow. It makes for a certain kind

of tension that perhaps happens with all artist collaborations, when two artists work together as one, actively looking for that space to oppose the orthodoxy of the single artistic ego. Our work for the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition will be displayed in a double-height, salon-style hang on either side of the entrance staircase. We’re showing a photographic series we made in Ukraine in 2010. It’s titled ‘Atomgrad (Nature Abhors a Vacuum)’ and commemorates the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. The photographs document the city of Pripyat, which is within the 30km exclusion zone and is now all but deserted, abandoned in haste – civic and public buildings, the People’s Palace, hotel, kindergarten, swimming pool, cinema. The work explores the ideas around ‘dark tourism’. Anyone can now take a tour bus from Kiev and visit the exclusion zone and Pripyat for the day. Imagine this city was once considered a Utopian new town, a place where the idea of progress would happen through the wealth created by nuclear power. Instead, it’s now empty, devastated. It was completed in the 1970s just before the explosion. When we went to Pripyat, as a result of an invitation from the British Council and with the support of Forma Arts and Media, we took camera equipment and film and a prop in the form of a single yardstick measure. You are discouraged from removing anything from within the zone, so instead we decided to bring this yardstick with us. It is an obsolete, imperial measure, two yards long, and it acts in the series like a marker, an intervention. We placed the yardstick within each of the Pripyat interiors that we photographed, using the object as a recurring motif. We had a desire to make conscious the act of us entering and photographing these spaces. The sites are constantly being measured and monitored for radiation. We needed something to make manifest this act of measuring.’

‘Being brothers must have an effect on the levels of tolerance we accord each other, but there’s not a genetic, telepathic, aesthetic telekinesis going on’

P H OTO: M A R K B LOW ER

P H OTO: R ACH EL K I N G

Jane & Louise Wilson

it happens to be there, we are forced to question what we are doing and why, which I think is a good thing. Short answer: Skype. The work for the RA Summer Exhibition consists of a bronze machine called Striptease and an attendant nuclear family viewing it. I’m not sure the work has a specific narrative. We’ve done exhibitions before where we’ve made figures as an audience adoring a work of art. Instead of waiting for that audience we’ve made our own.’

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The Kabakovs – who are husband and wife, Soviet-born in Dnepropetrovsk and now living in Long Island, US – began working side by side in 1989 but only announced themselves as a joint partnership in the mid-1990s. Ilya (b.1933), first a children’s book illustrator and then part of a conceptual group in Moscow, working outside the Soviet system, came to the West in 1985. Emilia (b.1945) studied music and originally planned to become a professional pianist. After emigrating to Israel, she moved to New York in 1975 and worked as a curator and art dealer. Distantly related as cousins, and having known each other all Emilia’s life, the pair eventually married in 1992. They make monumental ‘total installations’ large enough for the viewer to enter. Next year they have a major retrospective at Tate. Emilia is the spokesperson for the duo.

‘Our piece in the RA Summer Exhibition is an oil painting of autumn leaves and trees, Emergency Exit 4. It was part of an installation for the 1993 Lyon Biennale based on the idea of an artist’s studio, full of unfinished work, out of which the visitor tries hard to escape. There was a sense of fantasy. Despite the idea of escape, the colours of the trees are beautiful. We decided to show an existing work because the RA show is a big exhibition, with lots of

new works already. Ilya is 83 and I too am of a certain age. We thought it wouldn’t make sense to compete with the young generation. We still do new work of course, but it’s more important to show something established. How do we work together? That is the hardest question to answer. We’ve been doing it for some 27 years. Ilya paints. He is the painter, I am not. Everything else – everything – we do together. I work on the installations. I travel and discuss and shape ideas. I write. We were both uprooted from the Soviet Union. To go to live in another place, emotionally and physically, is to go to another planet. If you change your surroundings, leave behind friends and family, it can make you angry and bitter. You have to change too, or else you die. This was true both for Ilya and for me. I didn’t start out as an artist but as a musician. When it came to adding my name to the work, Ilya wanted me to but I was a bit nervous, and had serious reservations. It’s a very serious question: whose art is it? I felt I was a musician, not an artist. But the Oldenbergs [artist duo Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen] urged me – they said, “You are working together, you are contributing to the finished result, your ideas are there as well as Ilya’s.” Now I represent our work around the world as Ilya is not well enough to travel. I always say working together is like a marriage. How do you explain it? In our case, it is a marriage!’

‘Ilya paints. He is the painter, I am not. Everything else – everything – we do together’

P H OTO: Y U R I R OS T

Ilya & Emilia Kabakov

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Summer loving RA MAGAZINE selects some highlights of this year’s Summer Exhibition AONO FUMIAKI

The Japanese artist Aono Fumiaki takes found objects and transforms them into curious sculptures. His practice is restoration, of sorts, but rather than return damaged items to their original function, he modifies their materials and structures to draw out their hidden qualities. In the aftermath of Japan’s devastating earthquake in 2011 he began to gather household debris that had been scattered around – cassette tapes, sake bottles, tiles and books (right) – as raw material for his art. This is the first opportunity to see Fumiaki’s poignant work in the UK. KUTLUG ATAMAN

A-LEVEL STUDENTS’ ARTWORK

See work by aspiring young artists in the A-Level Summer Exhibition Online (https:// alevel.royalacademy.org.uk, 13 June–21 Aug) which was judged and curated by a panel of artists, including Bob and Roberta Smith RA. ONLINE ART SALES

For the first time, many of the artworks on display at the Summer Exhibition 2016 will be available to purchase online via the Summer Exhibition Explorer on the RA’s website. To find out more about online art sales, sign up to an e-newsletter at http://roy.ac/artsignup

LEFT Mending, Substitution, Consolidation, Coupling, ‘Restoration of a Sake Bottle Collected in Watari-cho Arahama, Miyagi, Japan, after the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami (Memorial Configuration)’, 2015, by Aono Fumiaki BELOW Pegasus, 1982, by Albert Irvin RA

P H OTO CO U R T ESY O F T H E A R T IS T. P H OTO CO U R T ESY O F T H E ES TAT E O F T H E A R T IS T A N D GI M P EL F I LS

Artist Kutlug Ataman was commissioned in 2011 to make an artwork marking the tenth anniversary of the death of Turkish business leader and philanthropist Sakıp Sabancı. The result was an ambitious multi-image installation that was three years in the making, consisting of around 10,000 LCD panels – each depicting one of the many people who worked with, were close to, or were supported by Sabancı. The work, which resembles a carpet of flickering images, is draped from the ceiling of Gallery I in the Main Galleries. As you are walking around the show, don’t forget to look up.

ALBERT IRVIN RA MEMORIAL DISPLAY

The late Albert Irvin RA (1922-2015) was known for his exuberant abstract paintings (Pegasus, 1982, below). He rose to fame in the 1960s, and his work became more and more vibrant over time – in the latter years of his career, he began to use a squeegee to apply paint to the canvas in thick bands of popping colours. Painter Basil Beattie RA, a friend from their days as students at Goldsmiths College, has selected three of Irvin’s paintings for the Summer Exhibition 2016.

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Hidden from history

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While the past decade has seen more female artists becoming Academicians, they have been a rare sight for much of the RA’s existence, and were even excluded from Zoffany’s famed painting of the Academy’s founders. Historian Amanda Vickery delves into the archives to discover the pioneering women who wielded the brush

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BELOW The Academicians of the Royal Academy, 1771–72, by Johann Zoffany RA

One painting in particular is infamous in the history of the representation of women in British art. If ever there was a commemoration of artistic fraternity, Johann Zoffany RA’s The Academicians of the Royal Academy, of 1771-72 (left), appears to be it. The recent foundation of the Royal Academy is memorialised in this group portrait of 35 men, two of them naked models, preparing to embark on a life class. Remarkably, among the 34 founder members there were two women, Mary Moser (1744-1819) and Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807). Notoriously, however, Zoffany’s institutional portrait excluded them. They appear only virtually, in two indistinct portraits on the back wall to the right. Their physical absence is partially explained by the setting within the life class: a forum from which women were barred on grounds of propriety. Hence the painting is seen to epitomise the ambivalent recognition and conditional institutional support extended to female artists. For most commentators, Zoffany’s painting provides a depressing confirmation that female institutional accreditation was grudging and tokenistic at best. Kauffman and Moser can also be seen in a later painting – Henry Singleton’s The Royal Academicians in General Assembly (1795). They are in the deep background of the assembled throng in the Council Room, though at the apex of the group. Nevertheless, Moser and Kauffman were not the first swallows of a summer of women RAs. After Kauffman’s return to Rome and Moser’s death, there were no further women Royal Academicians until Dame Laura Knight was elected in 1936. Women had gained a toehold in the institutions that preceded the Royal Academy. The Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (known as the Society of Arts) was established in 1754, with a mission to encourage innovation in agriculture, manufacture, chemistry, mechanics, polite arts, colonies and trade. In 1759, Moser – a daughter of an enamellist and then aged 14 – won a silver medal in the category of ‘Polite Arts’ for a painting of a vase of flowers, and several other women exhibited in sections on drawing, needlework and engraving in a small display. Art historian Marcia Pointon has suggested that the Society’s openness to industry may have encouraged women to enter from the applied arts end of the spectrum of trades. After the Society of Arts came the Society

of Artists, which held its first exhibition in 1760. Moser was one of only two women who appeared in this show of 130 works, which attracted around 1,000 visitors a day. Moser’s flower painting joined a portrait by Catherine Read. At the second annual exhibition in 1761, Moser was joined by a Mrs Cawardine and a Miss Charpin. In 1762, a Miss Grace, Miss Benwell and again Mrs Cawardine exhibited alongside Moser. In fact, Moser exhibited in nearly every show between 1760 and 1768 (11 works in all), then switched allegiance to the Royal Academy when it was founded. At just 24, she became the youngest founding Academician of the Royal Academy. The decision to include Kauffman and Moser in the Royal Academy is poorly documented and subject to continuing speculation. There are no records of explicit debates on whether to include women or not, nor of complaints from the male majority on their presence. It is possible that Kauffman was seen to add a continental cachet to the fledgling Academy. She had already achieved a position of some prominence within the expatriate artistic colonies of Italy, impressing British painters, architects and Grand Tourists with her cultured persona and innovative Neoclassicism. Both Kauffman and Moser possessed the requisite credentials in history painting which, combined with a level of court favour and professional achievement, probably made them difficult to exclude. The Instrument of Foundation of the Royal Academy addresses men, and uses the male pronoun throughout, but otherwise the Academy’s laws never explicitly excluded women. This was not an unusual circumstance of course. In the 18th century the hegemony of men was so deeply ingrained that it was not thought necessary to codify the exclusion of women from such institutions. After all, it was not until the Great Reform Act of 1832 that women were specifically banned from the vote. Neither Kauffman nor Moser were admitted to the Council (the committee responsible for overseeing the Royal Academy) or to the Academy’s life drawing classes. They could play no role in the governance or direction of the Academy. In fact women were not invited to the Academy’s annual dinner until 1967. Nevertheless, the evidence of the archive suggests that Kauffman’s concerns were handled respectfully. When she wanted a painting removed on grounds of it being a scurrilous

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Design, 1778-80, by Angelica Kauffman RA

attack on her virtue, the RA obliged. The painting in question, Nathaniel Hone’s The Conjuror, was accepted for the Summer Exhibition in 1775. It was said to ridicule Kauffman’s alleged relationship with Joshua Reynolds PRA as it depicted Kauffman as a child leaning across Reynolds’s knee in front of a backdrop of prints, one of which shows naked figures dancing around St Paul’s Cathedral. Kauffman sent a letter to the President and Council in protest – and the painting was subsequently removed on the grounds that it was offensive to the Royal Academy’s female members. In 1780, Kauffman was commissioned to produce four oval allegories for the ceiling of the Academy’s Council Room, representing Invention, Composition, Design (above) and Colour. She exhibited 79 works between 1769 and 1797, while Moser showed 36 between 1769 and 1802. A letter sent from Joseph Bonomi to Benjamin West PRA containing an account of Kauffman’s funeral in Rome was read aloud with great pomp at a meeting of the General Assembly in December 1807 and transcribed in full in the minutes. These two artists were nothing if not high profile. They were not, however, alone on their platform. Scour the RA’s index of exhibitors and you’ll find a fair scatter of women designated ‘artist’. Eliza Cook, a ‘miniature painter’ listed at several London addresses,

showed seven works between 1777 and 1786; Mary Bertrand, ‘painter’, exhibited 10 items between 1772 and 1800. Among the honorary exhibitors there are more works ‘by a young lady’. Mary Benwell, another ‘miniature painter’, showed 20 paintings before marrying, then showed 18 works as Mrs Code. None of which suggests anything approaching equality of the sexes among the Membership. In

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Summer, c.1780, by Mary Moser RA

1777 for instance, by my count of the exhibition catalogues, of 190 exhibitors 15 were women (8 per cent) and of 364 paintings 27 were by women (7 per cent). Yet for all their minority status it is still striking that the female artists are there, and seem to be making a professional living, supported to a degree by the RA. It is worth remembering that there were no equivalent institutional roles and platforms accessible to women in the fields of law, medicine, science, politics, local government, the universities, the Navy or the Army. The 18th century was the great era of associations, but women participated in only a tiny minority. They were excluded from the Linnean Society, the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Society, the first female fellows being elected in 1904, 1921 and 1945 respectively. The only professional field in which women were seen to have made a public mark was in literature and letters. But the prominence of female novelists, translators, philosophers and polemicists in the late 18thcentury was founded on commercial success or nurtured by influential, informal networks, and owed little to institutions. So, by comparison, the fraternity of artists was open. To read more about the role of women in the RA’s history and in the contemporary art world, visit http://roy.ac/womeninart

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Kira Freije in her studio at the RA Schools

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The studio space of Robin Seir, featuring some of his paintings

The stage is set and the pressure is on as third-year students from the RA Schools prepare work for their final show, which opens to the public this summer in the studios of the Academy. Jonathan P. Watts goes behind the scenes to meet the artists at this critical point. Photographs by Carol Sachs

Prejudices have formed about the kind of work London’s postgraduate fine art institutions produce. The Royal College of Art painters supposedly graduate gallery-ready. Goldsmiths students, tooled up with theory, adopt the ubiquitous, and therefore democratic, medium of the moving image. Work at the RA Schools is beautifully produced, often big. Expectations can be oppressive, and they are intensified at the RA Schools, where around 50 students are fortunate to participate in the country’s only three-year, entirely fee-free postgraduate art programme. In London, a city that’s increasingly hostile to people with even median incomes, RA students have the rarest commodity of all: space to develop as an artist. Because it is fee free, entry is strongly competitive and the standard is therefore very high. The programme culminates in the RA Schools Show, in which third-year students display work to the public in their studios behind Burlington House. Touring the Schools’ facilities – from the studios to the sculpture and printmaking workshops, photographic darkroom and Epsom Digital Suite – instills a powerful sense of possibility. The plural of ‘Schools’ is key: there are no categories enforced between disciplines. Traditionalists sometimes speculate that this leads to a lack of rigour, but Mark Hampson,

Head of Fine Art Processes at the Schools, says it is essential for creativity and, in terms of process, can lead to compelling hybrids of old and new. ‘We tend to think innovation comes with new technology,’ Hampson says, ‘and yet many students come here already digital-tech savvy and want to learn traditional techniques of making.’ Typically, students acquire the skills required to realise a piece of work as they go along. In addition to the tutors in the Schools’ workshops, artists consult YouTube, which hosts a vast bank of video tutorials for almost any technique, from digital video colour-correction to mixing silicon rubber moulds. Of course, material costs exercise very real constraints on work, but at the RA the scale of imagination grows to fit the possibilities. ‘It’s best that you know you don’t want to do something because you’ve tried it, instead of speculating,’ says third-year student Claire Undy. Ideas are one thing; making and seeing the materiality of the thing in front of you is another. This is apparent in Molly Palmer’s work. When I reach the top of four flights of narrow stairs to her studio – tucked away on high – I open the door into an interior lined by storyboard sketches and technical diagrams, shelves adorned with primitive ceramic coil pots and, hanging from the far wall, boldly-patterned costumes (page 70). At the centre of the room, standing on

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LEFT Elliot Dodd working at his drawing board in the RA studios BELOW LEFT Molly Palmer’s studio with a green screen used for filming BELOW Gery Georgieva collages fabrics in her studio, in preparation for one of her digital media performances

a green screen that curves up to form a backdrop, is an actress in full garb. ‘Give me a moment,’ comes a voice from the darkness. Palmer then emerges from behind a Canon cinema camera, borrowed from the Schools’ store. The actress takes a rest. For months Palmer has been absorbed in the large-scale production of a new film for the final exhibition. Many of the objects around the studio are props she made. Post-production of the video occurs in the media suite. There, Palmer will isolate the image of the actress, virtually placing her in a fantastical setting of her own design. She shows me one of her characters, or at least part of it: a monstrous beast’s hand in latex, with pointed nails and a Rococo-ish frilled sleeve, that only ever enters the side of the frame in close up. It just so happened that a workshop tutor had previously worked in mainstream cinema prosthetic make-up, producing latex body

‘Material costs exercise very real constraints on work, but at the RA the scale of imagination grows to fit the possibilities’

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Wanda Wieser midproduction, constructing a larger artwork from component parts of sculpture, painting and print

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parts. ‘Funnily enough,’ Molly admitted, ‘when I started the course the access to materials and workshops meant I got carried away with learning new software and techniques. My interim show work ended up looking too finished, too slick. Since then I’ve gone back to working with lo-fi processes initially, using the new skills I’ve learnt here to speed up production and amplify the handmade quality of the work.’ Standing in Kira Freije’s studio (page 68) I’m surrounded by physically improbable stainless-steel sculptural constructions. Inflated by a fan, a pair of billowing leggy forms flap atop a drainpipe bolted to the studio wall; on the other side of the studio, is an occultish tableturning apparatus, reminiscent of a Victorian seance, with metal hands placed flat on the tabletop and poised to point to letters around the rim as they receive communiqués from the other side. Kira is considering motorising the tabletop, so it spins and whirs, the letters endlessly illegible. Alana Francis, who entered the Schools on the basis of a writing practice, shows me documentation of a spoken-word performance recounting horrific post-operation morphine dreams. I try to reconcile this with what I see next: Wanda Wieser’s gorgeous copper, salt and crystal sculptural assemblages (above). Then Gery Georgieva (opposite bottom) introduces

me to her alter ego Vera Modena, who reworks Beyonce’s power pop songs dressed in folky Balkan chinoiserie. After their final-year show, the students will no longer have access to materials and workshops as they once did. This is a very serious consideration, and many of the students voice their desire to develop a sustainable practice that can continue outside the Schools. But moving between studios, as I meet more artists individually and in groups, in the canteen and in hallways, it becomes evident that, more than the IT suite or the wood workshop, the greatest facility at the Schools is the community, vital to which is that immaterial thing: conversation, an important process in the production of art. The value of it is inestimable. The relationships that have formed will serve the graduates far beyond the walls of Burlington House. RA Schools Show 2016 RA Schools Studios, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 020 7300 8000, royalacademy.org.uk, 23 June–3 July. RA Schools sponsored by Newton Investment Management. We regret there is no level access to the exhibition due to extensive building works to improve our site: please call 020 7300 8090 for further information. Access is via the Keeper’s House. To find out more about the RA Schools, visit http://roy.ac/raschools

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Critical issues in art and architecture

Debate

I L LUS T R AT I O N BY P I N G Z H U

The Question Should art critics ever savage the work of artists?

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I L LUS T R AT I O N BY P I N G Z H U

Yes… Without harsh criticism praise can never be meaningful, argues JONATHAN JONES T.S. Eliot once observed that it would be very dull to have a conversation about poetry with someone who loves all poetry. When people talk in the pub about films, plays or sport, it’s natural to praise this one and disparage that one. The more intense the opinions, the more passionate and witty the conversation tends to be. What we are pleased to call criticism is just a formalised version of these chats or disputes. To ask a critic to be polite is to ask them to be a dullard. Art criticism as a genre of writing grew out of the rivalrous polemics of artists themselves, expressed in pungent words on the piazzas of Renaissance Italy. Giorgio Vasari’s enduringly popular book The Lives of the Artists, published in Florence in 1550, is spiced with the vicious and often highly perceptive critical remarks the great artists made about one another. Vasari tells how he and Michelangelo visited Titian in the studio in Rome where he was painting his Danae: Michelangelo said nice things to Titian’s face, records Vasari, but as they were walking away he commented that these Venetians would be really great painters, if only they bothered to draw. In my experience this kind of criticism is still bandied between artists today – from art students

No… Critics should ignore artists whose work they dislike, says SIMON WILSON It is peculiarly appropriate that this question should be posed in the pages of this magazine and specifically in its summer issue, since the most cogent case for a resounding no to it that I know of was made within the very walls of the RA and by the guest speaker at the Annual Dinner which marks the opening of the Summer Exhibition. In this case it was on 3rd May 1851 and the speaker was none other than Prince Albert, a man with a profound love and understanding of art. In his address he delivered a forensic attack on hostile art critics and what he said sadly remains as strikingly true today as it was then: ‘We have on the one hand a vast array of artists of every degree of talent and skill, and on the other a great public, for the most part wholly uneducated in art, and thus led by professional writers who often strive to impress the public with a great idea of their own artistic knowledge by the merciless manner in which they treat works which cost those who produced them the highest efforts of mind or feeling.’

‘Savage criticism of a work of art is simply the expression of the critic’s tastes, prejudices and ego’

competing with their classmates to octogenarian masters dissing one another. When I first started reviewing art in a small-circulation magazine it was artists who egged me on to be rude. This is not just because artists are spiteful, but because the grit of criticism is necessary, to stop the art scene turning into a bland blancmange of mediocrity. Tough reviews keep everyone edgy and creative. Obviously, no-one likes getting one of those bad reviews, but without the cruel outpourings what meaning can praise have? I hate bad art because I love great art. It makes me angry to see weak, pretentious, talentless, ugly or stupid work overvalued and overpraised while genius gets ignored or taken for granted. No review is written in a vacuum. Today I write for a national paper and the context I am continually aware of is that of media hype and the overexcitement nonspecialist journalists can get whipped up into over the latest fashionable name. The critic’s challenge is to point out the fakes, frauds, poseurs and charlatans and uphold true brilliance. Why would anyone think that it is a good idea for art to be spared criticism? In Britain this notion has historical roots. There was a national prejudice against modern art until a few decades ago. A President of the RA even proposed to horsewhip Picasso. People who championed new art in Britain in the 1980s and early ’90s understandably saw themselves as guerilla fighters in a culture war. Critics who sneered

Prince Albert’s denunciation was made in response to the storm of hostile criticism that had descended on the work of certain young artists at the RA Summer Exhibitions of 1850 and 1851. These were the members of the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, who went on both to become much loved by the public and to exercise a profound influence on art, architecture and design both in Britain and internationally. Another early supporter of the PRB was John Ruskin, who less than a decade before had been driven to write what became the six volumes of Modern Painters as a riposte to the hostility of the critics to his beloved Turner. To its great credit the RA stood by both the PRB and Turner. But it and almost everyone else in this country suffered serious failure of the critical faculty in the case of Constable, whose work was incomprehensible to his contemporaries. If he hadn’t had family money we would certainly have no Constable. I wonder how many of the visitors to the RA who revelled in the lush Impressionist masterpieces in the recent Painting the Modern Garden exhibition were thinking as they did so of the hysterical hostility with which Impressionism was greeted by the critics and public when it first appeared. The history of art is littered with such calamitous critical misjudgements. Savage criticism of a work of art is simply the expression of the critic’s tastes, prejudices and, as Prince Albert acutely observed, their ego. And such criticism can be immensely damaging. How many readers may be put off seeing a show

‘The grit of criticism is necessary to stop the art scene turning into a bland blancmange of mediocrity’ at everything new were their enemies. Criticism itself got a bad name because too many critics had dismissed original art without a second thought. That was all a long time ago and the problem today is that rude criticism is too rare. London has become a glittering art capital. Commercial galleries have been known to employ art writers as part of their publicity teams, as well as commissioning catalogue essays from eminent experts. There is a real danger of the entire national conversation about art being shaped by dealers, art fairs and the most influential museums – of everything arriving pre-packaged and pre-praised as an icon to be revered. Meanwhile, celebrity culture means that artists who are good on telly are able to define their own status. It is important, just for the sake of balance, that someone is rude about Grayson Perry’s pots. Critics are now too careful about what they say, paralysed by the fear of looking ‘conservative’ or stuck in the mud. Much of today’s esteemed art is backed up by complex, or apparently complex, theory that can terrify us into silence. Dare I say that I am left a bit cold by that empty room with the lights going on and off? Well, dare I? It is the critic’s job to be honest even when everyone else is cooing about the king’s groovy new suit.

that they might in fact have found interesting and rewarding? And what about the poor artists who are attacked in the public prints? Not all of them are as rich and famous as Tracey Emin RA or Damien Hirst, and surely even they are entitled to ask, ‘If you prick us do we not bleed?’ Of course newspaper editors tend to take the view that what the readers want is indeed blood on the carpet. A classic case of the combination of this editorial attitude with a critic perfectly fitted to express it was the 25-year reign at the London Evening Standard of the late Brian Sewell, who made a consistent unrelenting hostility to art (and not just contemporary art – I recall a television programme in which he even savaged Leonardo) his journalistic stock-in-trade. As the response to his death confirmed, the media and the public adored him. The purpose of newspaper art criticism should be to describe, analyse and inform in such a way as to encourage readers to go and see for themselves. If critics personally dislike certain artists then they should simply ignore them and leave the job of judgement to posterity. There is nothing worse after all than not being talked about. They should also remember the wise words of Wittgenstein: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof must one remain silent.’ Should art critics ever savage the work of artists? Visit http://roy.ac/criticsdebate to vote online. Last issue we asked: should we care about attribution? 79 per cent in our poll said ‘Yes’, 21 per cent ‘No’

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Handling the history of art All too often an art history class summons up a vision of a dark room, illuminated only by a rolling stream of projected images chronologically narrated by a cultured intellectual with a soothing voice. Admittedly, a survey approach can certainly be useful. There is an efficient logic to a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, whether that be in a course that gallops its way from 3,000 BCE to the present day, or one that covers a shorter bite-size chunk. A lot of ground can be covered and this approach provides a perspective of how it all fits together. However, a simple timeline of events is often not enough for the culturally curious. In an essay in History Today, ‘What is the History of Art?’ (1985), Alex Potts remarked that ‘the history of the visual arts, defined simply as a chronological description of the various objects we now classify as art, would be a pretty marginal affair’, and that it only becomes ‘more interesting where it claims that art has a symbolic value, and that visual artefacts reflect important attitudes and “realities” of the society’. Art, alongside other cultural artefacts, provides clues to understanding our past and becomes a part of all human history. Here expert interpretation of the evidence is key – only through the eyes of someone who can expertly source, filter and explain does the story come to close to the ‘truth’.

Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1908, by Pierre Auguste Renoir

A survey perspective can have additional limitations. Too often it reads like a roll-call of ‘masters’ (mostly men) and their ‘masterpieces’ (mostly European). It has an exclusive flavour and comes across essentially as a story of high culture expounded by an elite. From Vasari’s hugely influential Lives of the Artists (1550) to E.H. Gombrich’s seminal Story of Art (1950) four centuries later, the big question remains who’s in the club and who’s out. An accepted ‘canon’ – which scholars generally believe includes the most important contributions to shape our culture – is temptingly unambiguous but frustratingly unyielding. It is not surprising that there are constant calls for alternative perspectives. One of these is the ‘New Art History’, also the title of a book published in 2001 by Jonathan Harris following debates that began in the 1970s. This theoryled approach, applies frameworks from other fields to reconsider value judgements and shine a light on under-appreciated art and culture. The influence of feminist, postmodern, Marxist and psychoanalytical theory has enabled novel interpretations of existing works, as well as the discovery of overlooked works and artists. A theory-led approach means we can dive deeper into ideas that reflect broader social and cultural concerns. For example, the late-20th and early 21stcentury preoccupation with body, gender and identity has placed these topics as central to both academic theory and artists’ practice. Theories can provide powerful frameworks by which to deconstruct the complex world. However, by definition, they have boundaries. Whether taking a survey or theoryled approach to art history, it’s critical not to underestimate the role of the object. Although the examination of specimens remains a mainstay of medical and biological sciences, it is much less common in the arts and humanities. And yet, as Annette Wickham, Curator of Works on Paper at the RA, explains: ‘Starting with the physical evidence provided by a work of art reveals important, sometimes surprising, insights that inform its broader interpretation.’ Learning with objects has the benefits of providing a multisensory, interactive, discursive experience. And it’s fun. ‘People respond well to something tangible

and also to a progression from the specific to the more general,’ Wickham concludes. Our relationship with art is nothing if not physical. Research by neuroscientists into how the brain responds to an aesthetic experience has provided novel, albeit controversial, evidence that we can literally feel what we see (see ‘The Science of Art: A Neurological Theory of Aesthetic Experience’ by Ramachandran and Hirstein, 1999). This might explain why viewers of Degas’ ballerinas sometimes report a sensation of dancing. The experience of seeing has the ability to excite the same parts of the brain that control corresponding muscles in bodies. Although we may be taught ‘don’t touch’ from an early age, the best dealers, collectors and curators will often reach for the artwork first to examine it by hand, understanding that its physical properties can hold information that their eyes alone might miss. For Milko den Leeuw, painting conservator and founder of the Haguebased Authentication in Art Congress, which aims to promote best practice in the field, access to the physical object provides crucial insights. ‘First, the impact of true size and the object’s context. The object’s original purpose is better understood when we can “meet” it in real life and in situ. Secondly, the perception of colour. No technique, not even the best digital option, is close enough to the original. To experience colour depth one has “to see” the object in real life. Thirdly, the construction of a physical artwork. Materials must be constructed and manipulated in order to get the result an artist wants to achieve and this starts inside an artwork. To discover that aspect of the making of an object we have to examine it physically, technically and in the right historical context.’ So what is the best way to study the history of art? Well, it depends on what you want. An expert-led chronological overview can situate works and artists and explain their evolution. Using theory and focusing on themes allows for deep and rich exploration and can unpack the complex nature of art and its many interpretations. An object-based approach creates a tangible link with the past that we can consider in context. At the Royal Academy we do all of these, through our exhibitions, courses and classes, our archives and collection. Together we can explore the history of art and what that means for the future. The RA’s Academic Programmes include Courses and Classes that introduce traditional art-making processes, as well as perspectives on the history of art, culture and the art world. For details, contact Mary Ealden, Courses and Classes Coordinator, on 020 7300 5641 or mary.ealden@ royalacademy.org.uk, or visit http://roy.ac/classes

What is the best way to learn about the history of art? ANNA M. DEMPSTER, the RA’s Head of Academic Programmes, assesses the different approaches, from a chronological survey and a theory-led perspective to the handling of artefacts

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Public Events Further information and the complete listing of all events can be found at royalacademy.org.uk/events. Public Events go on sale to Friends on Thursday 26 May at 12pm. Booking opens to the public on Tuesday 31 May

PERFORMANCE Grace Schwindt: Undead and Other Tales

Sun 5 June and Sat 18 June As part of the annual Block Universe performance art festival, which brings together cutting-edge performance art in venues across London, artist Grace Schwindt performs a new commission specifically created for the Annenberg Courtyard at the RA. Her performance sets out to explore the fragility of the physical in modern society. Annenberg Courtyard, Royal Academy of Arts; 3pm Sun; 6.30pm Sat; free (no booking required) FREE TALK Bill Jacklin RA in Conversation with Nancy Campbell

Sat 4 June Royal Academician Bill Jacklin To book Events ● Events go on sale to Friends

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on Thursday 26 May at 12pm. Booking opens to the public on Tuesday 31 May Visit royalacademy.org.uk/ events, call 020 7300 8090, visit the RA Ticket Office, or complete the booking form on page 81 and post to ‘Events and Lectures’ or fax 020 7300 8023. Booking is required for free talks. Please arrive promptly as unclaimed seats will be released five minutes before the start. Reductions are available for students, jobseekers and people with disabilities with recognised proof of status. RA Friends and carers go free to Access events. Disabled parking and wheelchairs can be reserved on 020 7300 8028.

discusses the graphic art he has made over the past 50 years with writer and artist Nancy Campbell. In particular they will explore the dynamic tension between abstraction and representation in his work. The event coincides with the publication of a monograph, Bill Jacklin: Graphics (RA Publications), and a retrospective exhibition in The John Madejski Fine Rooms. A book signing follows the event. Reynolds Room; 3–4pm; free (booking required) FREE TALK Bill Jacklin RA: The Graphic Work 1961-2016

Self Portrait, 2011, by David Bailey, who is in conversation at the RA in September

Tue 7 June and 5 July Helen Valentine, Senior Curator of the Royal Academy Collections, introduces the first retrospective survey celebrating the graphic work of Bill Jacklin RA, on view at the Academy this summer. The exhibition includes his seminal suite of etchings from 1977, ‘Anemones’, which reflects his interest in both figuration and abstraction. Meet in the Tennant Gallery; 3–3.30pm; free with an exhibition ticket (no booking required)

Mon 13 June, 18 July, 22 Aug Artist and gallery educators facilitate these sessions for people living with early to mid-stages of dementia and their carers, friends and family members. Join us for coffee and conversation to discuss artworks from the permanent collection. Burlington House; 11am–12.30pm; £3

SUMMER EXHIBITION TOUR

EVENING EVENT

Summer Exhibition Edits

Unbuilt with Ian Ritchie RA

See website for dates Summer Exhibition Edits is a series of afternoon tours in which pacesetters from various fields share their personal highlights of the 2016 Summer Exhibition, with each speaker selecting five works from the show. We invite you to accompany them as they explain why their chosen works have captured their imagination. Please check our website for speakers and details. Meet in the Central Hall, Summer Exhibition; 3–3.30pm; free with an exhibition ticket (no booking required; limited headsets available, offered on a first-come-first-served basis)

Fri 17 June Explore the works in the Summer Exhibition’s Architecture Room with one of the organisers, Ian Ritchie RA. Summer Exhibition; 7–7.30pm; free with an exhibition ticket (no booking required)

INMIND AT THE R A

EVENING EVENT

Art and Conversation for People Living with Dementia

RA and Pin Drop Short Story Award

AFTERNOON EVENT The RA LEGO Architecture Challenge

Sun 19 June As part of the London Festival of Architecture, we invite you to see how four architectural practices battle it out to create the greatest work of LEGO architecture. Summer Exhibition; 2–4pm; free with an exhibition ticket (no booking required)

Fri 24 June Join us for a special event announcing the winner of the 2016 RA and Pin Drop Short Story Award, with the winning story narrated by a special guest. The judging panel for the award includes Pin Drop co-founders Elizabeth Day and Simon Oldfield, and the RA’s Artistic Director Tim Marlow. Reynolds Room; 6.30–7.30pm; £16/£7 reductions (incl. exh entry), £12 (event only) FREE TOUR RA Schools Show Guided Tour

Sat 25 and Wed 29 June Join the Royal Academy’s graduating artists for a guided tour of the RA Schools Show 2016, which offers you a chance to explore the work of the next generation of artists. This is a rare opportunity to meet the artists in the historic Royal Academy Schools studios, which are usually not given public access, and most importantly, to see a wide-ranging selection of compelling work in this annual contemporary art show. Meet at the exhibition entrance; 3–3.45pm; free, no booking required; limited capacity

June

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Debate FREE TALK Summer Exhibition Stories

July EVENING EVENT

Family workshops

Fri 1 July Join Richard Wilson, one of Britain’s most renowned sculptors and coordinator of the Summer Exhibition 2016, as he discusses his critically acclaimed work with RA Artistic Director Tim Marlow. Reynolds Room; 6.30–7.30pm; £16/£7 reductions (incl. exh entry), £12 (event only)

EVENING EVENT

FREE TALK

Sun 14 Aug 11am–3pm; free; no booking required; suitable for all ages. See website for details

Architecture – You Ask the Questions

Introduction to David Hockney RA: 82 Portraits and 1 Still Life

Gallery Works

Mon 4 July Curator Edith Devaney introduces David Hockney RA’s exhibition at the Royal Academy, giving an insight into Hockney’s relationship with portraiture and his remarkable new series, as well as revealing her own experiences of sitting for one of Hockney’s portraits. Reynolds Room; 1–2pm; free (booking required)

Wed and Fri: 22, 27, 29 July; 3, 5, 10, 12, 17, 19 Aug Creative workshops inspired by the Summer Exhibition led by experienced artist educators. A chance for famillies to explore the galleries and create a collaborative artwork in response. 11am–1pm; £15 adults/£5 RA Friends/ £3 children 5+ yrs; booking essential

An Aside to On Stage

EVENING EVENT

Thur 30 June An all-day event convened by artist Sarah Jones, who brings together arts and theatre professionals to consider the noise and voices of objects. Contributors to the symposium include curator Marie de Brugerolle, poet-artist Paula Claire, and founder of Stockholm’s ‘Marionetteatern’, Michael Meschke. There is also a display of drawings and objects from Meschke’s Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera. Reynolds Room and Life Room; 11am– 7pm; free (booking essential). For more information, please contact sarah.jones@ raschools.org.uk. The RA Schools Public Programme is supported by The David Lean Foundation

Peter Cook RA

WORKSHOP FOR FAMILIES WITH CHILDREN WITH SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDS

Mon 27 June Speakers from the architecture world and beyond answer questions from the audience, in this headline debate for the London Festival of Architecture, a month-long, citywide celebration of architectural experimentation, thinking and practice. Royal Institution, Albemarle Street, W1; 6.30–8pm; £12/£6 reductions

Richard Wilson RA in Conversation with Tim Marlow

FAMILY STUDIOS Drop-in creative workshops supported by Jeanne and William Callanan Take Me Away

Sun 12 June

Mon 4 July Visionary architect Peter Cook RA discusses the relationship between drawing and ideas. Geological Society, Piccadilly, W1; 6.30–8pm; £12/£6 reductions EVENING EVENT Turkishceramics Grand Prize for Architecture

Fri 8 July Join us in the Summer Exhibition Architecture Room to hear the winner of the prize for most outstanding architectural work discuss their winning project. Summer Exhibition; 7–7.30pm; free with exhibition entry (no booking required)

R A TOURS Free one-hour tours exploring the art, architecture and history of the RA. 12 noon Tue to Sun; meet in the Front Hall. Subject to change at short notice.

A Bigger Portrait

Sun 17 July On Your Mark

R A SCHOOLS SYMPOSIUM

Holiday Makers

Sun 24 July Experienced gallery educators lead these creative sessions. Places are limited and must be reserved via the website or call 020 7300 8090. Burlington House; 11am–1pm; free (booking essential) FREE TALK Sandy Nairne on Contemporary Portraiture

Mon 11 July Sandy Nairne, former Director of the National Portrait Gallery, examines recent developments in portrait-making and compares the portraits of David Hockney with those of Lucian Freud and Marlene Dumas. Reynolds Room; 1–2pm; free (booking required) ANNUAL ARCHITECTURE LECTURE 2016 Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu

Tours and talks

Mon 27 June Senior Curator of Collections Helen Valentine explores the origins, behind-the-scene stories and some of the characters that make up the history of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, the world’s largest open-submission show of contemporary art that is now in its 248th year. Reynolds Room; 1–2pm; free (booking required)

Mon 11 July The Royal Academy welcomes Chinese architects Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu of Amateur Architecture Studio to deliver the 26th Annual Architecture Lecture. Summer Exhibition; 6.45–8pm, followed by drinks reception in the Summer Exhibition; £22/£12 reductions

CUR ATORS TALKS on the RA’s collection displays 3pm; first Tuesday of each month OPEN SATURDAYS Delve into our boxes of artist materials and tools and find out how the RA’s masterpieces were created. Saturdays, drop-in between 1–4pm EXHIBITION TOURS 45min tours, free with exhibition ticket Summer Exhibition 2016

7pm; Fridays (17 June–12 Aug) Summer Exhibition Family Tours

2.30pm; Sundays (throughout July) David Hockney RA: 82 Portraits and 1 Still Life

2.30pm; Tuesdays (5 July–20 Sep) ONE-TO-ONE ACCESS TOURS Tours for wheelchair users and audiodescriptive talks about our exhibitions and the permanent collection. Call 020 7300 5732. Access at the RA is generously supported by Robin Hambro. NEW FRIENDS WELCOME TOURS 2pm; first Sunday of each month be guided to create your own work in response to themes and techniques shown in the exhibition. Burlington House; 2.30–5.30pm; free (booking essential) EVENING EVENT Portraits and Perceptions

Fri 15 July A portrait can be defined as an artistic representation of a person, with the aim of displaying the likeness, personality or mood of the sitter. But who determines what we really see – artist or subject? Our panel – portrait artists James Lloyd and Daphne Todd, and philosopher Nigel Warburton – delve into this question and others related to representation and perception in portrait painting. The event is chaired by writer and broadcaster Charlotte Mullins. Reynolds Room; 6.30–7.45pm; £16/£7 reductions (incl. exh entry), £12 (event only) INTER ACT AT THE R A

Tacita Dean will discuss her new film with Tim Marlow at the RA in September

INSTUDIO AT THE R A

BSL Tour: Summer Exhibition

Creative Workshop for Access and Community Groups

Sat 23 July A gallery tour of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition in British Sign Language. Burlington House; 2–3pm; £3

Tue 12 July This workshop, based around the Summer Exhibition, is led by two artist educators. A chance to explore the artworks in the galleries and then

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Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Maggi Hambling, Gerald Laing, Dame Laura Knight, Dame Barbara Hepworth, Edward Seago and Sir Stanley Spencer are just some of the many artists and estates that prefer the personal ACS approach to managing and administering their Artist’s Resale Right. The only numbers we look at are the ones that we ensure you receive for the works of art that you create. We wouldn’t want it any other way – and neither would our artists.

Self portrait (Adelaide Road), Sir Stanley Spencer Private Collection / Bridgeman Images © Artist’s Estate

Painting by numbers? We prefer to support artists by name

ENJOY ANOTHER WORK OF ART AT RICHOUX JUST OPPOSITE THE ROYAL ACADEMY IN PICCADILLY

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Debate ROUNDTABLE Self-Representations from Portrait to Profile

Sat 23 July Join sociologist and cultural critic Bernie Hogan for a roundtable discussion of the relevance of portraits in the age of selfies and an exploration of self-representation from an artistic perspective. It also considers how David Hockney RA’s paintings have both typified and subverted the genre of portraiture. General Assembly Room, 3–4.30pm; £10/£6 reductions (incl. exh entry), £8 (event only) INMOTION AT THE R A Summer Exhibition Tour for Mobility Impaired Visitors

Mon 25 July An introductory tour of the Summer Exhibition for wheelchair users and mobility-impaired visitors, followed by coffee and conversation in the Fine Rooms. Burlington House; 9–11am; £3

September

Fri 9 Sep Legendary photographer and filmmaker David Bailey joins the RA’s Artistic Director Tim Marlow to discuss his influential work and innovative portrait photographs shot over the past 60 years, giving a fascinating insight into the work of one of the world’s great portrait photographers. Royal Institution; 6.30–7.30pm; £20/£10 reductions FREE TALK Hockney and Clothing: Identity and Collective Consciousness

Fri 29 July Disabled artists and creative people at risk of exclusion from the art world are invited to share their practice in a welcoming environment. British Sign Language interpretation provided. General Assembly Room; 6–8.30pm; free. If you are interested in making a presentation at this event, contact access@royalacademy. org.uk or 020 7300 5732

Sat 10 Sep What we wear and how we wear it communicates a great deal. The people we interact with make judgements about our character, based on our appearance alone, in less than a second. Join Dr Carolyn Mair as she discusses David Hockney’s use of fashion in portraiture from a psychological perspective, as a mark of identity and of the societal climate. Reynolds Room; 2–3pm; free (booking required)

Sat 30 July Join musicians from the Royal College of Music for a very special performance in the RA galleries, inspired by selected works from the Summer Exhibition. The RA and the Royal College of Music are proud to present Summer Sounds, kindly supported by Dasha Shenkman. Main Galleries, 6.30–8.30pm; free with exhibition ticket (no booking required)

August INTOUCH AT THE R A Audio Described Tour, Handling and Art Making Session: Summer Exhibition

Mon 1 Aug An event for blind and visually impaired visitors – an audio described tour of the Summer Exhibition, followed by refreshments and an art-making session. Burlington House; 9am–12pm; £3 INTER ACT AT THE R A STAGETEXT Supported Talk with BSL Translation: David Hockney RA

Fri 12 Aug An event for deaf, deafened and hard

Friends Events at the RA go on sale on Thursday 26 May at 12pm. To book, and to learn about more Friends events, visit royalacademy.org.uk/friendsevents or call 020 7300 8090

David Bailey in Conversation with Tim Marlow

Access and Community Programmes Artistic Presentation

Summer Sounds: An Evening of Music Inspired by the Summer Exhibition

Friends Events at the RA

EVENING EVENT

INPR ACTICE AT THE R A

SUMMER EXHIBITION CONCERT

P H OTO GR A P H BY V I K M U N IZ /CO U R T ESY O F V I K M U N IZ S T U D I O

of hearing visitors – a slide-assisted talk about the exhibition ‘David Hockney RA: 82 Portraits and 1 Still Life’, with speech-to-text transcription and British Sign Language interpretation. The talk is followed by exhibition entry. Reynolds Room; 6.30–7.30pm; £3

EVENING EVENT Portraits: Tacita Dean in Conversation with Tim Marlow

Fri 16 Sep Artist Tacita Dean discusses her films with the RA’s Artistic Director Tim Marlow, including her new 16mm film, Portraits (2016), which documents David Hockney RA smoking cigarettes in his Los Angeles studio as he contemplates his work. Hockney smokes when he looks and thinks, but never when he is painting. Portraits also features in Dean’s exhibition of new work at Frith Street Gallery, London, from 16 September. Reynolds Room; 6.30–7.30pm; £16/£7 reductions (incl. exh entry), £12 (event only) COURTYARD CINEMA AT THE R A

Marat/Sebastião – Pictures of Garbage, 2008, by Vik Muniz, who is the subject of Waste Land, screened at Film Club in August

Exhibitions on Screen Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse

Thur 16 June, paid Explore ‘Painting the Modern Garden’ with a special film screening and Q&A with Executive Producer Phil Grabsky. Manet: Portraying Life

Thur 28 July, paid Revisit the RA’s 2013 Manet show, the first survey on the artist’s portraiture. The event includes a Q&A with the film’s Executive Producer Phil Grabsky.

Masterclass

A collection of cinema gems screened in the Annenberg Courtyard

The Art of Glass Tasting with Riedel: Champagne

Thur 1, Sat 3, Sun 4, Mon 5 Sep The Nomad Cinema presents this series of open-air summer screenings in the magnificent Annenberg Courtyard at the Royal Academy of Arts. The programme includes Hollywood classics such as Mulholland Drive, Some Like it Hot and Taxi Driver, plus street food and cocktails.

Wed 22 June Did you know that the shape of a glass can change the taste of champagne? Friends of the RA are invited to a masterclass with Riedel, to taste champagne in specially crafted glasses (worth £110) which you can keep to enjoy at home. The Sir Hugh Casson Room; 7–9pm; paid

Film Club The East End Film Festival is collaborating with the Royal Academy of Arts on a series of film screenings for Friends. Season Two explores the theme of ‘Artists and Adversity’ Lucy Walker: ‘Waste Land’

Wed 24 Aug British documentary filmmaker Lucy Walker follows the artist Vik Muniz (above) as he travels from his home in Brooklyn to his native Brazil to photograph the inhabitants of Jardim Gramacho, once the site of one of the world’s largest rubbish dumps. The Sir Hugh Casson Room; 7–9pm; paid

Private Views An expanded programme of Friends Private Views of Royal Academy exhibitions is launched this summer. For full details of upcoming Previews and Private Views, visit royalacademy.org.uk/friendsevents

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Postal booking is open now. Excursions are very popular and we recommend you post your booking form as soon as you receive the magazine. Remaining tickets are sold online and by phone from 15 June

● Postal booking is open now. Government Art Collection

Wed 10 Aug For over 100 years, the Government Art Collection has collected works of art to promote British art and artists. We go behind the scenes with the curator and discover how the art is selected and conserved for government buildings across the world. 5.45–7.15pm; £30 (incl. wine); directions with ticket Lambeth Palace

Elton Hall and Gardens in Cambridgeshire, which Friends visit in August Clifford Chance Art Collection

Fri 12 Aug and 23 Sep Our private tour of the London home of the Archbishop of Canterbury, with its 13th-century vaulted crypt and Tudor gatehouse, includes the State Rooms, the Great Hall and the Chapel. By special permission from Archbishop Welby, we also take tea in the State Drawing Room. 2–4pm; £30 (incl. tea); meet at Palace, Lambeth Palace Rd, SE1

How To Read The City – Walking Tour

Bedford Park, Chiswick – Walking Tour

Wed 20 July and 7 Sep Join guide Karen Chester on this walk which tells the story of the City of London through its plaques, signs and statues, heraldry and hagiography. We explore ancient streets, churches, pubs and the history of livery companies. 1.30–4pm, £27 (incl. tea and biscuits); directions with ticket

Wed 17 Aug and Tue 20 Sep John Scott, a descendant of the Victorian architect George Gilbert Scott RA, offers Friends an insight into Bedford Park, built in the 1870s as an enclave for artists. Its Queen Anne-style houses provided architectural inspiration for the garden city and garden suburb movements. We learn about the history of the area and the artistic community it fostered. 3–4.30pm; £25; meet at St Michael and All Angels Church, Bath Road, W4

Chapels Royal

Tue 12 and 26 July We are privileged to offer a private

Charterhouse

Thur 4 and 11 Aug Our tour of this historic palace in Clerkenwell is led by one of the Brothers of Charterhouse and includes the Courts, Great Hall, Library, Great Chamber and Chapel. In the course of its 600-year history, Charterhouse has been a Tudor mansion and a Jacobean

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Mon 22 Aug Home to the Proby family since 1660, Elton Hall has an art collection that boasts Old Master and Pre-Raphaelite paintings, portraits by Reynolds, Hoppner and Romney, and works by Millais and Turner. Our private tour takes in the medieval chapel, Marble Hall designed by Henry Ashton, and Library, which contains Henry VIII’s Prayer Book. There is also time to visit the gardens and nearby All Saints Church. 9.30am–7.30pm; £82 (incl. coach, lunch, cream tea); meet at the RA

Thur 7 July and 21 July Merchant Taylors’ Hall dates back to 1347. Despite being damaged during the Great Fire of London and again in the Second World War, the current hall has been sympathetically restored. Our private tour explores the Great Hall, Parlour and King’s Gallery, with its 18th-century Chinese wallpaper, and 15th-century oriel window. 10.30am–12pm: £26 (incl. coffee); 30 Threadneedle St, EC2 Two Temple Place

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Elton Hall, Cambs

Merchant Taylors’ Hall

Mon 11 July and 12 Sep This late-Victorian mansion, designed by neo-Gothic architect John Loughborough Pearson, houses notable works by George Frampton RA, William Silver Frith, Nathaniel Hitch and Thomas Nicholls. Our private guided tour explores the opulent interior, completed for William Waldorf Astor in 1895. 11am–12.30pm; £22; meet at Two Temple Place, WC2

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Fitzrovia Chapel

guided tour of the private Chapels of the Queen and the Royal Family, both of which are closed to the public outside services. The Tudor Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace, constructed for Henry VIII in 1531, has a ceiling decorated by Hans Holbein. The nearby Queen’s Chapel, designed by Inigo Jones for James I in 1623, also features architectural additions to the interior by Grinling Gibbons and Christopher Wren. 3–4pm; £27; meet outside Marlborough House, SW1

Thur 28 July and Tue 2 Aug Bloomsbury has a rich but underexplored Art Deco heritage. Highlights on this guided tour include Senate House, designed by Charles Holden, and the former Daimler car-hire garage. 2–4.15pm; £24; meet at the fountains in Russell Square, WC1

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Post the booking form opposite to ‘Events & Lectures’, or fax 020 7300 8023. Friends Excursions booking forms are balloted; list your choices in preference order. Friends may purchase a guest ticket to Friends Excursions. 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. Remaining tickets are sold online or by phone from 15 June – visit royalacademy.org.uk/ events or call 020 7300 8090. 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.

Tue 16 Aug This Grade II-listed chapel, designed by Gothic revivalist John Loughborough Pearson, was completed in 1929 for the benefit of the patients and staff of the Middlesex Hospital. It closed in 2005 and everything else on site was demolished. Now a £3 million restoration project has returned it to its former glory. The project’s architect and lead conservationist hosts our private visit. 11am–12pm; £22; meet at chapel, Pearson Sq, off Mortimer St, W1

Wed 6 July International law firm Clifford Chance’s collection of limited-edition original prints dates back 270 years and includes works by today’s Academicians Gillian Ayres, Tess Jaray and Cornelia Parker, as well as graduates of the RA Schools. We tour the art in the public areas of their Canary Wharf Tower, and view the firm’s annual ‘Pride’ exhibition in its gallery on the 30th floor. 6pm–8pm; £30 (incl. gls wine); meet at 10 Upper Bank St, E14

Art Deco In Bloomsbury – Walking Tour

To book Friends Excursions

hospital, and is now an almshouse. 2.15–4pm; £29 (incl. tea); Charterhouse Square, EC1

Lancaster House

Fri 19 Aug By popular demand, we return to one of the greatest of London’s surviving townhouses. Commissioned in 1825 by the ‘Grand Old’ Duke of York, the exterior of Lancaster House was designed mainly by Benjamin Wyatt. It is now part of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. This exclusive tour, led by furniture expert and former V&A curator Dr James Yorke, includes the Louis XV interiors and Grand Hall. 11am–12.30pm or 2.30–4pm; £24; Stable Yard, St James’s, London SW1

London Glassblowing Studio

Thur 25 Aug Studio owner Peter Layton gives Friends an introduction to the art of glassblowing, followed by a live demonstration and private view of their current collection. 6–8pm; £30 (incl. wine/nibbles); meet at 62–66 Bermondsey St, SE1 Great Fire Of London – Walking Tour

Fri 2 and 30 Sep This year is the 350th anniversary of the Great Fire of London, and our tour begins at Wren’s Monument, built to commemorate the event, and finishes near St Paul’s, where we hear about how the original cathedral was destroyed by the fire. 2–4pm; £28; meet at The Monument, Fish St Hill, EC3 Spencer House

Mon 5 Sep Spencer House, one of London’s great aristocratic town houses, was built in 1756 by John Vardy for the first Earl Spencer, and completed by James Stuart, who was a pioneer of neoclassical architecture. Our private tour includes the state

Friends Excursions

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Debate Friends Worldwide Art Tours Bulgaria: Balkan and Thracian Treasures

17–25 Sep 2016 Bulgaria offers a wealth of historical monuments, fine mountain scenery

and warm hospitality. Our tour begins in Sofia, visiting the National Historical Museum, where prehistoric Thracian treasures are displayed. We continue to Veliko Tarnovo, with its stunningly situated citadel, and Plovdiv, visiting the Roman theatre. Call 020 7873 5013 or visit coxandkings.co.uk/ra

Booking form This is the last RA Magazine in which there will be a booking form. From this autumn, events and excursions will be bookable by phone on 020 7300 8090 or online at royalacademy.org.uk/events For Friends Excursions, please list your event choices in preference order: Event

Date

Number of Tickets

Cost

Total Cost £

rooms, where we explore its magnificent collection of paintings and furniture. 11am–12.15pm; £26; meet at 27 St James’s Place, SW1 Cambridge Study Day

Tue 6 Sep Devised especially for Friends, our study day begins at the Fitzwilliam Museum, where Dr Victoria Avery, Keeper of the Applied Arts Department, introduces us to highlights of the collection. After lunch, art historian Siân Walters leads our special tour of King’s College Chapel, famous for its stunning vaulted ceiling and altarpiece by Rubens. 9am–7.30pm; £120 (incl. executive coach, coffee, lunch); meet at the RA The Lansdowne Club

Mon 12, 19 and 26 Sep Art historian Pamela Campbell-Johnston reveals the history of Lansdowne House, and shows us the ballroom, Art Deco swimming pool, and new artworks which reflect the historical and contemporary identity of the building, which is now a private club. 10–11.30am; £30 (incl. coffee); 9 Fitzmaurice Place, W1 The Art of Art Handling: National Gallery

Wed 14 Sep This private behind-the-scenes tour with the National Gallery’s Head of Art Handling, Patrick O’Sullivan, reveals the processes of hanging and framing works of art, as well as exploring the practical aspects of lending paintings from its collection to galleries abroad. This is a rare chance to witness the Gallery’s experts at work. 10.30am–12.30pm; £55 (incl. coffee/ biscuits); meet at NG café, WC2

Musical Museum

Wed 21 Sep This quirky museum contains one of the world’s foremost collections of selfplaying musical instruments, including minute clockwork music boxes, and the ‘Mighty Wurlitzer’ organ. Our private tour includes demonstrations of some of the rarer instruments, and is followed by a concert of Wurlitzer organ music from the 1920s, 30s and 40s. 2–4pm; £27 (incl. tea and cake); meet at museum, 399 High St, Brentford, TW8 House of Lords, Art and Architecture

Tue 27 Sep Our tour, led by specialist guides, starts at the Norman Porch and includes the Lords’ Chamber, Peer’s Lobby, Central Lobby and St Stephen’s Hall, as well as the Royal Gallery with its murals by Daniel Maclise RA which were commissioned to commemorate the Battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo. Our tour concludes with a glass of champagne and a visit to the historic Westminster Hall. 5–7.15pm; £56 (incl. champagne & nibbles); directions with ticket

Reductions to Public Events are available for students, jobseekers and people with disabilities with recognised proof of status (please note that reductions are not available for Friends Events & Excursions). Please indicate your status if relevant Student

Jobseeker

Disabled

Please indicate any dietary or access requirements where relevant

Please debit my credit/charge card number (we no longer accept cheques)

Expiry date

Issue number/start date (Switch only)

Signature First name Surname

Postcode

Address

Daytime telephone Friends Membership no.

Rochester Cathedral and Restoration House, Kent

Thur 29 Sep Our cathedral tour explores the building’s Norman, Gothic and Early-English Perpendicular architecture, with its fine crypt and medieval wall paintings. After lunch we visit Restoration House – a restored mansion that was once two medieval buildings. Our tour is led by the restoration project team, and includes an impressive collection of furniture, paintings and objects. 11am–4.45pm; £73 (incl. coffee, lunch, tea); Meet in Rochester (directions with ticket)

Email address

● Some of the venues we visit occasionally offer tours to the general public. ● 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 Visitors and Friends Experience Team Royal Academy of Arts Piccadilly London W1J 0BD Fax booking line: 020 7300 8023

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Exhibitions in London and the rest of the UK

Listings Art school crawl From Wimbledon to the West End, art school exhibitions across London this summer showcase Britain’s best emerging artists St. Paul’s Cathedral

3 2 Buckingham Palace

Tower of London

Picadilly Circus

London Eye

Tate Modern

1 Tate Britain

4 South London Gallery

Battersea Park

CAMBERWELL COLLEGE OF ARTS

45-65 Peckham Road, SE5 020 7514 6302, arts.ac.uk/camberwell Denmark Hill

All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club

NORTHERN GRADUATES AT CURWEN GALLERY

34 Windmill Street, W1 020 7323 4700, curwengallery.com Goodge Street On view Northern Graduates 2016, selected work from Northern art colleges, 4-31 Aug About the schools Northern Graduates is an annual London showcase for the best of each year’s graduates from the North of England, with past students drawn from colleges including Manchester School of Art and Northumbria University (Detail from Baby’s Arm, 2015 by Suzie Cichy; left)

On view Undergraduate Summer Shows in Graphic Design, Illustration, 3D Design, Drawing, Painting, Photography & Sculpture, 18-25 June (closed 19 & 20 June); Postgraduate Summer Shows in Book Arts, Designer Maker, Fine Art Digital, Illustration & Printmaking, 1825 June (closed 19 & 20 June), and Conservation 15-20 July (closed 17 July) About the school One of London’s smaller art colleges, Camberwell College of Arts is a vital part of a thriving south-east London art scene that hosts a variety of galleries, project spaces and studios, which regularly display work by the school’s students, staff and graduates (Escalator, 2015, by Queenie Clarke; above)

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CHELSEA COLLEGE OF ARTS

On view Undergraduate Summer Show, 18-25 June; Postgraduate Summer Show, 3-9 Sep About the school One of London’s most prestigious art and design colleges, Chelsea College of Arts offer courses in curating, fine art, graphic design communication, textile design and interior and spatial design (Detail from Untitled, 2015, by Georgina Walton; left). Its Grade II-listed site overlooks Tate Britain and the River Thames.

On view RA Schools Show, 23 June-3 July

(see page 68) Established in 1769 and Britain’s longest-running art school, the RA Schools offers a free three-year postgraduate programme from studios behind Burlington House (Love has no reason, 2014, by Julie Born Schwartz; left). Alumni include J. M. W. Turner RA and Richard Hamilton, and more recently Turner Prize nominee Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. About the school

7 6

ART ACADEMY

Mermaid Court, 165A Borough High Street, SE1 020 7407 6969, artacademy.org.uk Borough On view Graduate Show 2016, includes work by students of the Fine Art Diploma, Fine Art Foundation and Certificate courses, 8-10 July (private view 7 July) About the school The Art Academy is an independent school offering a wide range of programmes to a diverse group of participants. It believes creativity is best nurtured in a small but vibrant artistic community, and maintains approximately 45 Diploma students who each receive more than 24 hours a week contact time with tutors (Metamorphosis: Inner Eye Meditations – A Journey Through Healing HIV, 2016, by Dennis Thornbury; above)

RA SCHOOLS

Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, W1, 020 7300 8000, royalacademy.org.uk Piccadilly

16 John Islip Street, SW1 020 7514 7751, arts.ac.uk/chelsea Pimlico

WIMBLEDON COLLEGE OF ART

Merton Hall Road, SW1 020 7514 9641, arts.ac.uk/wimbledon Wimbledon On view Undergraduate Summer Shows for Fine Art, Theatre & Screen, 17-25 June (closed 19 June); Postgraduate Summer Shows for MA Drawing, Painting & Theatre Design, 17-25 June (closed 19 June), and for MFA Fine Art, 2-8 Sep (closed 4 Sep) About the school Painters Peter Doig and Hurvin Anderson, and sculptors Tony Cragg RA and Yinka Shonibare RA, are among the artists who studied at the multi-discipinary Wimbledon College of Arts in south west London (costume design by Simona Perotta; above).

ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART

Battersea Campus, Howie Street, SW1 020 7590 4444, rca.ac.uk/show2016 Clapham Junction On view ShowRCA, includes work by graduating students from Painting, Photography, Printmaking and Sculpture, 26 June-3 July (closed 1 July) About the school Named the world’s leading university of Art and Design in the 2016 QS World University Subject Rankings, the Royal College of Art was founded in Somerset House in 1837. Students now spread across two campuses in South Kensington and in Battersea (Deep Lee, London 2010, 2016, by Kenji Hirasawa; above). Alumni include Barbara Hepworth and Tracey Emin RA.

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

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London Public BARBICAN CENTRE

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

Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers Until 19 June. Imran Qureshi: Where the Shadows are so Deep Until 10 July. Ragnar Kjartannson 14 July-1 Sep.

Cover di Grazia, 1968, at the Fashion and Textiles Museum

Conceptual Art in Britain 1964–1979

DULWICH PICTURE GALLERY

Art and Photography from the PreRaphaelites to the Modern Age

Winifred Knights (1899-1947)

8 June-18 Sep.

Astrazione Oggettiva: The Experience of Colour Until 31 July.

FASHION AND TEXTILE MUSEUM

83 Bermondsey Street SE1, 020 7407 8664, ftmlondon.org Missoni Art Colour Showcases over 60 years of fashion alongside paintings by leading 20th century European artists, and previously unseen textile studies and paintings and tapestries by Ottavio Missoni, until 4 Sep. THE NATIONAL GALLERY

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

Painters’ Paintings: From Freud to Van Dyck Explore the connections

between artists and the paintings they possessed including Lucian Freud, Matisse, Degas, Reynolds, and Van Dyck, 23 June-4 Sep. Dutch Flowers Admire the exquisite detail of Dutch flower painting from the early 17th century to the late 18th century, until 29 Aug. George Shaw: My Back to Nature This former Turner Prizenominee and Associate Artist unveils his new work in response to the National Gallery’s collection, until 30 Oct. NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

Monk’s House Drawing Room with Desk, 2016, by Lottie Cole at Cricket Fine Art

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

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

Canonbury Square N1, 020 7704 9522, estorickcollection.com

Untitled, (Marcia Hare in Memphis Tennessee), c.1975, by William Eggleston at the National Portrait Gallery

TATE BRITAIN

Showcases how conceptual artists took art beyond its traditional boundaries and questioned how it was defined, until 29 Aug. Painting with Light:

ESTORICK COLLECTION OF MODERN ITALIAN ART

Edge of Abruzzi, 1924-30, by Winifred Knights at Dulwich Picture Gallery

exhibition surveys Eggleston’s career from the 1960s to the present day and is the most comprehensive display of his portrait photography ever, 21 July-23 Oct.

St Martin’s Place WC2, 020 7306 0055, npg.org.uk BP Portrait Award 2016 The most prestigious international exhibition of contemporary portrait painting, 23 June-4 Sep. Black Chronicles: Photographic Portraits 1862-1948 Until 11 Dec. William Eggleston Portraits This

Uncovers the dynamic dialogue between British painters and photographers, until 25 Sep. The Tate Britain Commission 2016: Pablo Bronstein Pablo Bronstein is the latest in a series of celebrated British artists to create a site-specific work in response to the Duveen galleries, until 9 Oct. TATE MODERN

Bankside SE1, 020 7887 8888, tate.org.uk Mona Hatoum The first UK survey of the work of Mona Hatoum, presenting 35 years of consistently poetic and radical thinking expressed through a diverse range of media, until 21 Aug. Georgia O’Keeffe The first major solo exhibition of O’Keeffe’s work in the UK for more than twenty years, 6 July-30 Oct. Bhupen Khakhar: You Can’t Please All The first international retrospective of Indian artist Bhupen Khakhar since his death, bringing together the artist’s work from across five decades and collections around the world, 1 June-6 Nov. V&A

Cromwell Road SW7, 020 7942 2000, vam.ac.uk Botticelli Reimagined Explore the variety of ways artists and designers from the Pre-Raphaelites to the present day have responded to the artistic legacy of Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510), until 3 July. Paul Strand: Photography and Film for the 20th Century A major

retrospective of one of the greatest photographers whose images defined the way fine art and documentary photography is understood today, until 3 July. Engineering the World: Ove Arup and the Philosophy of Total Design

Explore the design philosophy of the most influential engineer of the 20th century, 18 June-6 Nov. Undressed: A Brief History of Underwear Discover the evolution of underwear design from

the 18th century to the present day, until 12 March 2017.

London Commercial ABBOTT AND HOLDER

30 Museum Street WC, 020 7637 3981, abbottandholder.co.uk Monthly ‘LISTS’ Introducing 100 watercolours, drawings, oil paintings and prints to the gallery’s large stock arranged over the three floors. Details go online the first Wednesday of every month. ALAN CRISTEA

31 & 34 Cork Street W1, 020 7439 1866, alancristea.com Antony Gormley: CAST 13 May-2 July. BANKSIDE GALLERY

48 Hopton Street SE1, 020 7928 7521, banksidegallery.com Exploring Beauty: Watercolour Diaries from the Wild Exhibition

of work by Tony Foster, 8-26 June. Shakespeare: A Celebration Artists

from the Royal Watercolour Society and the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers 29 June-10 July. Off the Wall The RWS and RE Summer exhibition, 1 Aug-11 Sep. BEAUX ARTS LONDON

48 Maddox Street W1, 020 7493 1155, beauxartslondon.co.uk Craigie Aichison RA 16 June-23 July. Summer Exhibition Selected modern British and new contemporary artists, July-Aug. CADOGAN CONTEMPORARY

87 Old Brompton Road SW7, 020 7581 5451, cadogancontemporary.com Maria Luisa Hernandez Until 20 May. CHELSEA ART SOCIETY

Chelsea Old Town Hall SW3, 020 7731 3121, chelseaartsociety.org.uk Chelsea Art Society 69th Annual Open Art Exhibition Admission free,

16-20 June, 10am-7pm daily; Sunday 10am-5pm; final day 10am-2pm. CHRIS BEETLES GALLERY

8 & 10 Ryder Street SW1, 020 7839 7551, chrisbeetles.com Chris Beetles Summer Show

200 pictures across three centuries of British Art, including paintings by Anthony Green RA, opens 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

© M IS S O N I /CO U R T ESY T H E FAS H I O N A N D T E X T I L ES M US EU M .© T H E ES TAT E O F W I N I F R ED K N I GH TS/CO U R T ESY D U LW I CH P I CT U R E G A L L ERY.W I LS O N CEN T R E F O R P H OTO GR A P H Y ©EGGL ES TO N A R T IS T I C T RUS T.© LOT T I E CO LE

Listings

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David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation

Mall Galleries The Mall, London SW1 Telephone: +44 (0)1483 272323 Email: dswf@davidshepherd.org Website: www.davidshepherd.org

Wildlife Artist of the Year 2016 28 June - 2 July (PV 27 June)

Image Atsushi Harada ‘A Young Bengal Tiger’

The David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation is a UK registered charity (1106893)

AN EXHIBITION OF WORK CELEBRATING

AT THE BROOK GALLERY SELECTED ARTISTS INCLUDE: Alan Cotton Vin Jelly Richard Slater Martin Bentham

Gill Watkiss Ray Balkwill Robert Clement Martin Procter

Philip Creek Stuart Edmondson Vanessa Gardiner Sarah Adams

Laurence Belbin Anita Reynolds

SELECTED AND DIRECTED BY ALAN COTTON | CURATED BY ANGELA YARWOOD

Alan Cotton: Winter Sun at Hartland, Oils on Canvas. Courtesy of Messum’s Fine Art, London.

Vanessa Gardiner: Field Edge 28, acrylic on plywood

www.brookgallery.co.uk

EXETER: 1 Barnfield Crescent, Exeter EX1 1QT BUDLEIGH: Fore Street, Budleigh Salterton EX9 6NH

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Listings

The Small Paintings Group 21st

anniversary exhibition. 35 distinguished, eclectic artists including members of the RA, NEAC, RBA and RWS exhibit cabinet size paintings limited to 30x30cm, 8-14 Aug.

Alessandro Papetti: I Live Here Until 4 June. William Peers: The Space Between 10 June-9 July. CIRCA Summer Show 15 July-3 Sep.

Plant Pot and Still Life, 2016, by Sophie Layton at Eames Fine Art

CONNAUGHT BROWN

GREENWICH PRINTMAKERS GALLERY

2 Albemarle Street W1, 020 7408 0362, connaughtbrown.co.uk Abstracting from Nature Arp, Bissiere, Calder, Hepworth, Kandinsky, Vieira da Silva, until 3 July. Summer Exhibition Chagall, Degas, Dufy, Picasso, Moore, Renoir, 7 July-31 Aug.

1a Greenwich Market SE10, 020 8858 1569, greenwich-printmakers.co.uk Philip Solly 10-29 May. Maureen Sweeney 31 May-19 June. Peter Wareham 21 June-10 July. Sue Whitmore 12-31 July. Barbara Zalecki 2-21 Aug. Jacki Baxter 23 Aug-11 Sep.

CRICKET FINE ART

2 Park Walk, SW10, 020 7352 2733, cricketfineart.co.uk

Bloomsbury Interiors: Recent Paintings by Lottie Cole Throughout

June and July. CURWEN & NEW ACADEMY GALLERY

34 Windmill Street W1, 020 7323 4700, curwengallery.co.uk Lucy Willis: Moments in Time 2-25 June. Curwen Gallery Online Auction 1-18 July (Live auction 19 July at 7pm). THE CYNTHIA CORBETT GALLERY A Game of Old Maid, c.1890-1, by Elizabeth Adela Forbes at Richard Green

020 8947 6782, thecynthiacorbettgallery.com young-masters.co.uk / art-southampton.com The Cynthia Corbett Gallery & Young Masters La Galleria Pall

Mall SW1, 26 June-9 July. Transfers to Wimbledon Gallery, until 31 July. By appointment only. Art Southampton Nova’s Ark Project, Bridgehampton NY, 7-11 July. EAMES FINE ART

Il Mondo Che non Vedo 202 - Italy, 2016, by Fabiano Parisi at The Cynthia Corbett Gallery

58 Bermondsey Street SE1, 020 7407 1025, eamesfineart.com Sophie Layton: NEW Drawings, carborundum prints and monoprints, 18 May-12 June. Jason Hicklin RE ‘St. Kilda - And the Sea below is still as deep as the Sky is high above’. Etchings, monoprints and drawings, 15 June-10 July. Anita Klein RE and Nigel Swift New works from Australia. Paintings and original prints, 10 Aug-4 Sep. GALLERY 8

8 Duke Street, St James’s, SW1, 020 7930 0375, 8dukestreet.co.uk Josephine Trotter New paintings, 13-25 June. Moored Barge & Rocking Horse, 2015, by Leon Morrocco at John Martin Gallery

GALLERY 54

54 Shepherd Market W1, 020 7491 7322, thesmallpaintingsgroup.co.uk

THE FOUNDLING MUSEUM 40 Brunswick Square WC1, 020 7841 3592, foundlingmuseum.org.uk Found An exhibition curated by Cornelia Parker RA, 27 May-4 Sep. THE ICE HOUSE GALLERY Ilchester Place W8, 07427 365927, janicewahnich.com Janice Wahnich: Encounters Exhibition of work by figurative artist and printmaker Janice Wahnich, 31 May-14 June (10am to 6pm). JOHN MARTIN GALLERY 38 Albemarle Street W1, 020 7499 1314, jmlondon.com

Martin Finnin: The Garden of Opposites 26 May-25 June. Leon Morrocco: What the River Knew

1 July-5 Aug. THE LINDA BLACKSTONE GALLERY

23 Oaklands Road N20, 07808 612 193, lindablackstone.com Affordable Art Fair Hampstead, NW3. Exhibiting artists: Dganit Blechner, Anne-Marie Butlin, Paul Kavanagh, Colin Kent, Sebastien Levigne, Ian Mastin, Rosa Sepple. Sculpture by Paul Vanstone and Eoghan Bridge. Studio Glass by Phil Atrill, Louise and Colin Hawkins, 15-19 June. LLEWELLYN ALEXANDER

124–126 The Cut SE1, 020 7620 1322/1324, llewellynalexander.com Not The Royal Academy 2016 A Salon des Refusés. Now in its 26th year, 7 June -20 Aug. LONG & RYLE GALLERY

4 John Islip Street SW1, 020 7834 1434, longandryle.com Paul Coldwell: Small Journeys Until 27 May. Group Show ‘Garden’ themed works by selected artists, 9 June-2 Sep.

MALL GALLERIES: FEDERATION OF BRITISH ARTISTS

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

The David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation: Wildlife Artist of the Year 2016 Featuring this year’s short-list of

original paintings and sculptures from over 150 international wildlife artists. 28 June-2 July (Private view 27 June). Society of Women Artists Summer Exhibition 28 July-7 Aug. New English Arts Club Annual Open Exhibition 2016 16-25 June.

MARLBOROUGH FINE ART

6 Albemarle Street W1, 020 7629 5161, marlboroughlondon.com Bill Jacklin New paintings and prints, until 4 June. Manolo Valdés Paintings and works on paper, 10 June-15 July. Summer Exhibition 19 July-1 Sep. MESSUMS

28 Cork Street W1, 020 7437 5545, messums.com Laurence Edwards Exhibition of recent work, 25 May-24 June. OSBORNE SAMUEL

23a Bruton Street W1, 020 7493 7939, osbornesamuel.com

Avant-Garde British Printmaking

This exhibition has been curated quite specifically to show the diversity, originality and technical expertise evident in so much of 20th century British printmaking, until 4 June. Masterpiece London The Royal Hospital Chelsea. Including sculptures by Lynn Chadwick RA and Henry Moore, and paintings by Patrick Heron, Peter Kinley and Keith Vaughan, 30 June-6 July. PANGOLIN LONDON

90 York Way N1, 020 7520 1480, pangolinlondon.com Sculpture in the Garden An ambitious exhibition that brings the outdoors in. The sleek, architectural gallery space is transformed into three parts: a woodland, formal and walled garden complete with trees and water sculpture. The exhibition explores how sculpture has been synonymous with the landscape since ancient times, until 9 July. PIERS FEETHAM GALLERY

475 Fulham Road SW6, 020 7381 3031, piersfeethamgallery.com

Flying and Floating: Derek Nice and Mary Nice Structures and images

formed from recycled fabrics and timber fragments, until 9 June. Charles Rodwell Recent paintings, 14 -18 June.

© T H E A R T IS T/CO U R T ESY E A M ES F I N E A R T.© 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 T H E CY N T H I A CO R B E T T G A L L ERY.© T H E A R T IS T/CO U R T ESY J O H N M A R T I N G A L L ERY

CIRCA GALLERY LONDON

80 Fulham Road SW3, 020 7590 9991, circagallerylondon.com

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not theroyalacademy 2016

NRA 2016 for RA_Layout 1 15/04/2016 12:56 Page 1

NoW iN its 26tH YEAR Over 12,000 paintings are submitted each year to the prestigious Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Only 800 pictures finally make it onto the walls of the Royal Academy.

‘A sEcoND cHANcE ’ The Llewellyn Alexander Gallery, inspired by the original ‘Salon des Refusés’ held in Paris in the 19th century, will hang the best of this year’s work submitted to the Royal Academy but not hung. Hundreds of artists bring their work for a further selection process at the Gallery where they will be told immediately whether they have been successful or not. Oils, watercolours and pastels of all sizes pass through the doors of this lively Gallery on the South Bank. Every painting is for sale and may be taken by the purchaser straight away, creating space for another to be displayed. All paintings will be on show for three weeks, after which new work will be hung. Over the years purchasers have returned again and again, commenting that this alternative exhibition contains more original and exciting work! The Gallery is open from 10am until 7.30pm, Tuesday to Saturday giving the opportunity for everyone to see this regularly changing show.

Daryl Ashley Murray “The Arbour”

Paul Dilworth “Cleveland Square – Fireworks Night”

Henrietta Stuart ‘Loch Light’

Roo Waterhouse “Cultch 1”

LLEWELLYN ALEXANDER 124 - 126 The Cut, Waterloo, London SE1 8LN (opposite The Old Vic Theatre) t: 020 7620 1322/1324 e: gallery@LlewellynAlexander.com Open 10am to 7.30pm - Tuesday to Saturday

For more pictures and prices see

www.LlewellynAlexander.com

not the royalacademy2016

14 June - 6 November 2016 New exhibition

Close up & Personal Victorians & their Photographs W. & D. Downey (fl. 1855-1940), Famous “Four Generations” Queen Victoria, Edward VII, George V, and Edward VIII, Duke of Windsor, 1894. Watts Gallery

Watts Gallery - Artists’ Village GU3 1DQ, Guildford Galleries • Chapel • Studios • Tea Shop wattsgallery.org.uk • 01483 810235

New English Art Club Annual Open Exhibition 2016 16 to 25 June The Mall, London SW1 www.mallgalleries.org.uk Image: Patrick Cullen NEAC Offerings To The Rising Sun, Varanasi (detail)

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Free entry with this voucher

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Listings

PORTLAND GALLERY

3 Bennet Street SW1, 020 7493 1888, portlandgallery.com Barbara Rae CBE RA 2-17 June. The Art of John Piper 23 June-22 July.

For Strip Consequences (II), 1963, by Antony Donaldson at Whitford Fine Art

THE REDFERN GALLERY 20 Cork Street W1, 020 7734 1732/0578, redfern-gallery.com

William Gear: Gestural Structures

Until 10 June. RICHARD GREEN

33 and 147 New Bond Street W1, 020 7499 4738 / 020 7493 3939, richardgreen.com Colour Set Free British painting 19461975, Including works by Hitchens, Heron, Scott and Lanyon, 15 June-22 July (at 33 New Bond St). Aspects of British Impressionism Including works by Clausen, Sickert, Munnings and Lavery, 15 June-22 July (at 147 New Bond St). Green Hill Wet Spring, 2015 by David Tress at Beaux Arts Bath

ROCA LONDON GALLERY Station Court, Townmead Road SW6, 020 7610 9503, rocalondongallery.com

Anupama Kundoo: High-speed Housing See prototypes for the Full Fill

Home and Easy WC from acclaimed architect Kundoo, until 18 June Mode in Flux An exhibition which explores the adaptable within fashion design, 1 July-27 Aug. SOUTHBANK PRINTMAKERS

Church Cove, 2014, by Gill Watkiss at Brook Gallery

Gabriel’s Wharf, 56 Upper Ground SE1, 020 7928 8184, southbankprintmakers.com A contemporary artist printmakers gallery next to the Thames. We are a co-operative group showing a wide range of images and techniques at accessible prices. All work is original and limited edition, for example, etching, lithography, silkscreen, lino and woodcut, open seven days a week. STERN PISSARRO

66 St James’s Place SW1, 020 7629 6662, pissarro.net

Marc Chagall: The Master of Colour

16 June-16 July. SYLVESTER FINE ART

Paysanne Tricotant, 1881-3, by Camille Pissarro at Stern Pissarro

64 Belsize Lane NW3, 020 7443 5990, sylvesterfineart.co.uk Rigby Graham A selection of work by this outstanding British artist, opens 16 July. Henri Matisse: Prints A mixed exhibition showcasing the beautiful prints made by this modern master, opens 17 Sep.

THACKERAY GALLERY

18 Thackeray Street W8, 020 7937 5883, thackeraygallery.com

Michael Honnor: Feeling the Place

British landscape artist Michael Honnor conjures another show of the immense beauty of the British Isles, 7-24 June. Thackeray Gallery Summer Show

New works by gallery artists, 5-22 July. WADDINGTON CUSTOT GALLERIES

11 Cork Street W1, 020 7851 2200, waddingtoncustot.com Vibration of Space An exhibition examining the artistic exchange between British painter Patrick Heron and the non-figurative painters of post-war Paris, including Hans Hartung, Pierre Soulages and Nicolas de Staël, 25 May-9 July. WHITFORD FINE ART

6 Duke Street St James’s SW1, 020 7930 9332, whitfordfineart.com Pop Art Heroes: Pop, Pin-Ups & Politics 27 May-1 July.

Rest of UK ARTICHOKE GALLERY

Church Street, Ticehurst, East Sussex, 01580 200905, artichokegallery.co.uk Summer Fruits Celebrating the gallery’s bountiful gardens in painting, print and sculpture, 2 July-24 Sep. ARTWAVE WEST

Morcombelake, Dorset, 01297 489746, artwavewest.com Five Artists Louise McClary, Martin Goold, Susan Laughton, Sonia Stanyard and Jeannette Hayes. Atmospheric natural and urban landscapes on the edge of abstraction, 10 June-16 July. Summer Exhibition Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf, Edward Kelly, Paul Denham, Martin Goold, Louise McClary, Liz Salter, Donna Goold, Stephen Bishop and ceramics by Chris Taylor, 22 July-24 Sep.

Featuring work by Simon Allen, Akash Bhatt, Andrew Crocker, Nathan Ford, Greg Gilbert, Nicholas Middleton and Conor Walton, 27 June-27 Aug. BOHUN GALLERY

15 Reading Road, Henley-on-Thames, Oxon, 01491 576228, bohungallery.co.uk Artists & Music This exhibition explores the influence of music on artists and their work including: John Piper, Mary Fedden RA, Julian Trevelyan, Maggi Hambling, Wilhelmina Barns Graham, Peter Blake, Louis Turpin and specially commissioned work by gallery artists, 11 June-13 Aug. THE BOWES MUSEUM

Barnard Castle, County Durham, 01833 690606, thebowesmuseum.org.uk

The English Rose: Feminine Beauty from Van Dyck to Sargent Featuring

a newly acquired portrait by Van Dyck, of Dame Olivia Porter, alongside famous ‘English Roses’ painted by Lely, Kneller, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney, Millais and Sargent, until 25 Sep. From Temple to Home: Celebrating Ganesha This exhibition from the British

Museum centres on a large stone sculpture of the elephant-headed god Ganesha, until 18 Sep. Shoes: Pleasure and Pain Over 200 pairs of shoes on display by 70 designers, including Christian Louboutin, Manolo Blahnik, Jimmy Choo, Christian Dior and Prada, until 9 Oct. BRIGHTON MUSEUM AND ART GALLERY

Royal Pavilion Gardens, Brighton, 030 0029 0900, brightonmuseums.org.uk Fashion Cities Africa First major UK exhibition dedicated to contemporary African fashion. Explore fashion and style in four cities at the compass points of the African continent, Casablanca in Morocco, Lagos in Nigeria, Nairobi in Kenya and Johannesburg in South Africa, until 8 Jan 2017.

ASSEMBLY HALL THEATRE

BROOK GALLERY

Assembly Hall Theatre, Tunbridge Wells, tunbridgewellsartfair.com

1 Barnfield Crescent, Exeter, Devon 01392 278522 / Fore Street, Budleigh Salterton, Devon 01395 443003, brookgallery.co.uk

The Tunbridge Wells International Art Fair 2016 A boutique arts event raising

the profile of the arts and businesses in the South East of England. TWIAF also exhibits a selection of schools art projects and supports local charities, 24-26 June. BEAUX ARTS BATH

12-13 York Street, Bath, 01225 464850, beauxartsbath.co.uk

New Sculptures by Anna Gillespie and New Paintings by David Tress Until 18 June. Artists of Fame and Promise

Posters from the Past Masters

Including works by Picasso, Miro, Chagall and Henry Moore, until 7 June (Exeter gallery). Moor to Sea An exhibition of work celebrating the light, life and landscape of the Westcountry, 11 July-29 Aug (Exeter gallery). Grosvenor School Inspired Exhibition Including work by Paul Cleden, Lisa Takahashi, Andrew Pavitt and Gail Brodholt, 15 July-28 Aug (Budleigh Salterton gallery).

© T H E A R T IS T/CO U R T ESY W H I T F O R D F I N E A R T.© T H E A R T IS T/CO U R T ESY B E AUX A R TS B AT H .© T H E A R T IS T/CO U R T ESY B R O O K G A L L ERY.© T H E A R T IS T/S ES TAT E /CO U R T ESY S T ER N P IS S A R R O

Drawn to the Line Contemporary and modern British drawings. Artists include Elisabeth Vellacott, Caroline McAdam Clark, William Packer, Paul Rumsey, Jane Rye and Laetitia Yhap, 13-30 July.

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The impact of modern art on fashion & textiles

Open Tuesday to Sunday from 11am Thursday until late Closed Monday Fashion and Textile Museum 83 Bermondsey Street London SE1 3XF ftmlondon.org S © London Bridge Ottavio Missoni, Senza titolo (detail), 1973, 173 × 98 cm, acrilico su tavola.

In association with

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MA in theHistory of Art: Quarter Vertical.indd 1

TheRenaissance to Modernism October 2016 – September 2017

A one-year, London-based, programme of ten evening seminars and an individual research-project, 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.

Lecturers for 2016/17 include:

Others wishing to attend the seminars, but not intending to take the MA degree, may join the course as Associate Students at a reduced fee.

Course enquiries and applications: 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

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 expert on the issues raised by the seminar.

Examination is by a research dissertation, on an approved art history topic chosen by the student, of not less than 20,000 words.

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18/04/2016 13:32

Martin Kemp MaryAnne Stevens Richard Cork Martin Gayford

THE UNIVERSITY OF

BUCKINGHAM

LONDON PROGRAMMES

28/04/2016 17:07

THE BROWNSTON GALLERY

THE GALLERY AT 41

MOMA MACHYNLLETH

36 Church Street, Modbury, Devon, 01548 831338, thebrownstongallery.co.uk

41 East Street, Corfe Castle, Dorset, 01929 480095, galleryat41.com A Place to Dream Special Exhibition for Purbeck and Dorset Art Weeks featuring Dorset painters and sculptors working in a range of mediums, 28 May-12 June. Summer Exhibition Changing exhibition by contemporary Dorset painters David Atkins, Richard Price ROI, Felicity House PS, Judy Tate and Vicky Finding and sculptors Moira Purver SWA, Sue Lansbury and Brendon Murless, 2 July-2 Sep.

Heol Penrallt, Machynlleth, Powys, 01654 703355, moma.machynlleth.org.uk Glenn Morris : Anthropocene 7 May13 Aug. Wynne Jenkins: Summer

Jerry Browning: Islands of Memory

New work from this British abstract artist who uniquely painted with both Sir Terry Frost RA and Patrick Heron, 20 May-11 June. Summer Exhibition Including Fred Yates, Robert Lenkiewicz, Anthony Amos, Charles Jamieson, Derek Holland, Jennifer Wright, Michael Hill and ceramicist Caroline Mercer, 4 July-27 Aug. CAROLINE WISEMAN AT THE ALDEBURGH BEACH LOOKOUT AND ART HOUSE Self-portrait, 1927, by Christopher Wood, at Pallant House Gallery

31 Crag Path, Aldeburgh, Suffolk, 01728 452754, carolinewiseman.com, aldeburghbeachlookout.com

Stephen Farthing RA: The North Sea

During the Aldeburgh Festival musicians improvise to this huge painting, painted by Farthing during his residency at the Lookout in 2011, in June. Artists Residencies Including Iain Nicolls and Alison Gill, in July. Artists residencies Including Lynn Dennison and Tai-Shan Schierenber, in August. The Aldeburgh Beach Arthouse Hung with works by RAs and emerging artists, open by apt. during June, July and August. Early Bird, 2002, by John Buck, at Gallery Pangolin

CHRIST CHURCH PICTURE GALLERY

Christ Church, St Aldates, Oxford, 01865 276172, chch.ox.ac.uk/gallery

Filippino Lippi and drawing in Florence around 1500 Until 26 June. Sublimate: An exhibition of works by Christ Church’s Ruskin students Until 13 June. Changing Roles Changing Characters: From Lady to Saint and Back Until 4 Sep. The Beautiful Everyday: Old Masters Transforming the Mundane into Art Discs of Eshelon, version 2, 1935, by Barbara Hepworth, at Turner Contemporary

2 July-16 Oct. THE FRY ART GALLERY

Castle Street, Saffron Walden, Essex, 01799 513779, fryartgallery.org Ravilious in Black and White

Photographs from James Ravilious and wood engravings from James and Eric Ravilious, 18 June-24 July. Rural Modernists? Bawden, Ravilious, Rothenstein and the artists’ community in Gt Bardfield. Symposium: Dr Alexandra Harris, Alan Powers, James Russell, Dr Gill Saunders, Peyton Skipwith. Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, 2 July (10am-4pm). Edward

Miss Alice, 2015, by Kate Malone, at Waddesdon Manor

THE GARDEN GALLERY

Rookery Lane, Broughton, Hampshire, 01794 301144, gardengallery.uk.com

Footprints on the Sands of Time with Charlotte Mayer FRBS Contemporary

sculpture, until 9 July. GALLERY PANGOLIN

9 Chalford Ind. Estate, Chalford, Gloucs, 01453 889765, gallery-pangolin.com Jubilee Celebrating the gallery’s 25th birthday with a spectacular exhibition of silver sculptures. Artists include: David Bailey, Nick Bibby, Ralph Brown RA, Jon Buck, Daniel Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick RA, Ann Christopher RA, Michael Cooper, Terence Coventry, Steve Dilworth, Antony Gormley RA, Steven Gregory, Damien Hirst, David Mach RA, Alastair Mackie, Charlotte Mayer, Eilis O’Connell, William Pye, Peter RandallPage RA, Almuth Tebbenhoff and William Tucker RA, 13 June-22 July. HAYLETTS GALLERY

Oakwood House, 2 High Street, Maldon, Essex, 01621 851669, haylettsgallery.com

Shanti Panchal: A Way of Watercolour, until 11th June. David Britton Large

figurative landscapes and seascapes, 18 June-16 July. Essex Women Artists Alison Stockmarr; Barbara Peirson; Elizabeth Morris; Patricia Price; Jill Desborough, Stephanie Stow; Heidi Jukes; Emma Cameron; Tessa Spencer Pryse; Dione Page; Olwen Jones; Eliza Kentridge and Anne Schwegmann-Fielding, 23 July3 Sep. THE HOLBURNE MUSEUM

Great Pulteney Street, Bath, 01225 388569, www.holburne.org

Bawden: The Early Watercolours

A Handful of Dust: Georgian Pastels from the Permanent Collection Until 18 Sep. Linda Brothwell: The Missing, 4 June-4 Sep. Stubbs and the Wild Including some of the artist’s

Works from the Fry Art Gallery collection, national collections and private loans, 30 July-30 Oct.

most charming and fascinating animal portraits, grand fantasies, and superb prints and drawings, 25 June-2 Oct.

Canvases & Meic Watts: Sculptures 25 Jun-10 Sep. Mary Lloyd Jones 30

Jul-10 Sep. NORTH HOUSE GALLERY

The Walls, Manningtree, Essex, 01206 392717, portsmouthcitymuseum.co.uk Jonathan Clarke: Headscape

Sculpture, large and small, concentrating on heads and wall reliefs in cast aluminium, until 28 May. Lino Mannocci: Typologies Monotypes with themes developed from classical myths and biblical iconography and personal themes relating to the sea, 4 June-2 July. I Dream of Colour Summer show of painting referencing Alberti’s ideas on the juxtaposition and psychological effect of colours, 9 July-27 Aug. PALLANT HOUSE GALLERY

9 North Pallant, Chichester, West Sussex, 01243 774557, pallant.org.uk Christopher Wood Exploring the turbulent life and art of British artist Christopher Wood, 2 July-2 Oct. Friedrich Nagler: Wunderkammer

Small-scale sculptural works by selftaught Jewish artist Friedrich Nagler, 29 June-14 Aug. Contemporary Abstract Prints Marking 15 years of The GolderThompson Gift of contemporary prints, 17 Aug-16 Oct. RABLEY DRAWING CENTRE Rabley Barn, Mildenhall, Marlborough, Wilts, 01672 511999, rableydrawingcentre.com Passes Between Us: Tom Hammick

Inspired by the British Romantic tradition and Eastern culture, Tom Hammick’s new atmospheric landscape prints emerge from cut wood, 23 May-24 June. In-Grain New print publications by represented artists: Prudence Ainslie, Eileen Cooper RA, Katherine Jones, Tom Hammick, Jane Harris, Sara Lee, Rebecca Salter RA, Nana Shiomi, Emma Stibbon RA, 11 July-11 Aug. By appointment only. SARAH WISEMAN GALLERY

40-41 South Parade, Oxford, 01865 515123, wisegal.com Line & Surface New paintings by Simon Harris, Steven MacIver and Henrietta Dubrey, sculpture by Mark Beattie, 11 June-2 July. Summer Exhibition New paintings by gallery artists Clare Bonnet, Peter Kettle and Fletcher Prentice, 9-30 Aug.

© T H E A R T IS T ’ S ES TAT E /CO U R T ESY K E T T L ES YA R D.© T H E A R T IS T/CO U R T ESY G A L L ERY PA N GO L I N .© ©B OW N ES S/CO U R T ESY S A I NS B U RY CEN T R E F O R V IS UA L A R TS .© K AT E M A LO N E .CO U R T ESY O F A D R I A N S AS S O O N , LO N D O N , P H OTO SY LVA I N D EL EU.

Listings

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BRIAN COLLIER

“Enduring Creation” mixed media, 2010, 120 x 90cm (Themes from the National Gallery, London)

www.briancollier.co.uk

12/04/2016 16:38

THE SMALL PAINTINGS GROUP 21st ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION

Watersound_Qtr_Sum16_2.indd 1

8th to 14th August 2016

Shoreham Lock Bob Brown NEAC

35 distinguished, eclectic artists including members of the RA, NEAC, RBA and RWS, exhibit cabinet size paintings limited to 30 x 30cm Private View Tuesday 9th August 6.30pm-9pm Private View Saturday 13th August 10am-9pm

Gallery 54

54 Shepherd Market, London W1J 7QX Opening times: Monday to Saturday 10am-9pm Sunday 10am-1pm

Tel: 020 7491 7322

www.thesmallpaintingsgroup.co.uk

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castlegate house gallery

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04/05/2016 115:17 Castlegate_Spr16.indd

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Martin Greenland Paintings A collection of new works by the highly acclaimed John Moores Prize winner

7th - 28th May

Catalogue upon request

www.castlegatehouse.co.uk thegallery@castlegatehouse.co.uk Castlegate House Gallery Cockermouth Cumbria CA13 9HA 01900 822149 07920 836874

04/04/2016 15:51 04/05/2016 15:21

Listings THE SCOTTISH GALLERY

16 Dundas Street Edinburgh, 0131 558 1200, scottish-gallery.co.uk Old Tiblisi, watercolour, 57 x 76cm

Pat Douthwaite: The Outsider 1-25 June. Flora Depicta Michael

Brennand-Wood, David Cook, Bob Crooks, Victoria Crowe, Andrea Geile, Derrick Guild, Susan Hipgrave, Angie Lewin, Kirsty Lorenz and Naoko Shibuya, 6-30 July. Elizabeth Blackadder RA Festival Exhibition 2016 4 Aug-3 Sep. THE SENTINEL GALLERY

LUCY WILLIS 2-25 June 2016

C u r w e n

G a l l e r y

34 Windmill Street, Fitzrovia, London W1T 2JR Te l : 0 2 0 7 3 2 3 4 7 0 0 w w w . c u r w e n g a l l e r y . c o m Mon-Fri 10-6 (Thurs 10-8) Sat 11-5. Closed bank holiday weekends

The Sentinel Gallery & Workshop, Chapel Road, Wivenhoe, Essex, 01206 827490, thesentinelgallery.co.uk Explosion of the Palette Paintings by Valerie Armstrong and Stephanie Stow, 4 June-3 July. Depth & Detail Essex artists Terry Curling, Lisa Temple-Cox and Jessica Jane Charleston guide us through life and death with detailed drawings juxtaposed with fantastical dolls and assembled boxes of curiosities, 9-31 July. Simon Carter x CAS Simon Carter curates this exhibition featuring his own work alongside that of eight members of the Colchester Art Society, 2-29 Aug. SLADERS YARD

West Bay Road, West Bay, Bridport, Dorset, 01308 459511, sladersyard.co.uk Coastlines New landscape paintings by Vanessa Gardiner, ceramic sculpture by Peter Hayes and steambent furniture by Petter Southall, until 19 June. Cast Light Alex Lowery recent paintings, Petter Southall furniture. Richard Batterham at 80 recent pots, 25 June-4 Sep. Waiting for Time Tom Hammick new paintings and works on paper. Petter Southall furniture. 10 Sep-30 Oct. THE STANLEY SPENCER GALLERY

High Street, Cookham, Berkshire, 01628 471885, stanleyspencer.org.uk

Stanley Spencer: Visionary Painter of the Natural World Exquisite flower

paintings, garden vistas and landscapes, warm and sensous, with figurative and spiritual scenes depicting the great personal loves of Spencer’s life, until 31 Oct. THE SUNBURY EMBROIDERY GALLERY

The Walled Garden, Sunbury-on-Thames, 01932 788101, sunburyembroidery.org Karen Trower: Wildlife Life size birds made from soft leather and pure silk, until 5 June. Community Art Projct: Miniature Spaces Children from local schools will create their own room-space to represent their ideas and visions, 7 June-3 July. Archive Exhibition This year the gallery celebrates its 10th year, 12 July-11 Sep.

Lee Kang-hyo, Oval bottle, Punch’ŏng

PASSIONATE ABOUT POTS 64 Belsize Lane, London NW3 5BJ Wed - Fri: 11am - 6.30pm, Sat: 10am - 6pm, Sun: 10am - 4pm (also by appointment)

t: 020 7443 5990 e: info@sylvesterfineart.co.uk www.sylvesterfineart.co.uk

92 RA MAGAZINE | SUMMER 2016

24953 Sylvester Fine Art Lee Kang-Hyo RA Advert 98x131.indd 1

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SWINDON MUSEUM & ART GALLERY

swindonmuseumandartgallery.org.uk

Eileen Cooper RA: Hide and Seek

Cooper’s drawings are presented alongside her own selection of works on paper from Swindon’s collection. Artists include Gwen John, Lucian Freud, Henry Moore, R.B. Kitaj and Denis Creffield. Organised in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts, until 10 Sep. TATE ST IVES

Porthmeor Beach, St Ives, Cornwall, 01736 796226, tate.org.uk/stives

Tate St Ives is closed for major construction work and will reopen 31 March 2017.

TURNER CONTEMPORARY

Rendezvous, Margate, Kent, 01843 233000, turnercontemporary.org

Seeing Round Corners: The Circle and Art 21 May-25 Sep. Yinka Shonibare: End of Empire Until 31 Oct. Portfolio Art Competition

24 May-24 July. WADDESDON MANOR

Nr. Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, 01296 653226, waddesdon.org.uk Tales from the Archive Explore what the archives reveal about the people who lived, worked and visited Waddesdon Manor, Weds-Sun, until 23 Oct. Bountiful Invention: Drawings by Gilles-Marie Oppenord (1676-1742) and Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier (16951750) Weds-Sun, 8 June-23 Oct. Kate Malone: Inspired by Waddesdon An

exhibition, in collaboration with Adrian Sassoon, of new ceramic work, WedsSun, 8 June-23 Oct. YORKSHIRE SCULPTURE PARK

West Bretton, Wakefield, West Yorkshire, 01924 832631, ysp.co.uk Not Vital Internationally renowned as a leading sculptor, this is Not Vital’s first major exhibition in the UK, 21 May-2 Jan 2017. Transparency Taking the exceptional light qualities of the Chapel as inspiration, this exhibition explores the condition of transparency and responds to the particular aesthetic of the 18thcentury building, 25 June-4 Sep. Night in the Museum An exhibition from the Arts Council Collection curated by Ryan Gander, 16 July-16 Oct. ZILLAH BELL GALLERY

Kirkgate, Thirsk, North Yorkshire, 01845 522479, zillahbellgallery.co.uk Juxtaposition Contemporary orginal printmakers including Fred Cuming RA, Katherine Jones, Mail Morris RA, Barbara Rae CBE RA and Emma Stibbon RA, until 4 June. Victor Pasmore Rare 1970s printers proofs from Gordon House and Cliff White’s ‘White Ink’ Studio, 1 June-1 July. Paul Curtis NEAC Recent paintings.Seascapes, landscapes and still life, 2-23 July.

Bath Road, Old Town, Swindon, 01793 46656,

31/03/2016 16:53

05/05/2016 11:40

‘A remarkable picture of Britain’s greatest living artist’ The Daily Telegraph

Paul Rumsey Fortuna’s Maze Charcoal 106 x 68 cms

DRAWN TO THE LINE Contemporary and Modern British Drawings 13 – 30 July 2016

The bestselling book of conversations between David Hockney and Martin Gayford

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

TC - SEEING ROUND CORNERS - AD - 131x98 - OUT.pdf

12/04/2016

10:26

KATHARINE CHURCH 1910-1999

A Life In Colour The Later Years

Katharine Church, the Dorset & Bloomsbury connected painter. This 288 page book with over 200 colour illustrations of oils & works on paper, Chronology, and photographs, which gives an insight into this powerful painter with major artistic connections. Text by John Duncalfe. Foreword by Vivienne Light MA FRSA ISBN 978-0-9567177-3-3 This Publication is available from: Amazon.co.uk, the Publishers: tillingtonpress@hotmail.co.uk Bookstores and Gallery Art shops.

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Hard back: £35 (£5 p&p) UK Order by email or send remittance to: Tillington Press, PO Box 736, Harrogate HG1 4EE or by Paypal at www.tillingtonpress.com

28/04/2016 17:07

David Hockney

82 Portraits and 1 Still-life Tim Barringer and Edith Devaney

Readers’ Offers Ticket Offers

£30.00

Art in Action (14-17 July) at Waterperry

David Hockney RA is perhaps the most popular and versatile British artist living today. This lavishly illustrated volume focuses on the extraordinary series of portraits that he has been painting in LA over the last few years.

Gardens, Oxfordshire are offering 10% off entry price for anyone booking by 12 June. Visit artinaction.org.uk and see advertisement on page 95. The New English Art Club 'Annual David Hockney, David Juda, 22nd, 23rd, 25th March 2015

Anthony Whishaw Richard Davey £29.95 This authoritative and long-overdue survey of the work of Anthony Whishaw RA presents this inimitable painter’s long and remarkable career, unpicking the complexities of his oeuvre and illustrating some 150 works.

Bill Jacklin Graphics

Jill Lloyd and Nancy Campbell £29.95 This beautiful book, the definitive collection of evocative prints of this New York-based British artist, includes many of Bill Jacklin’s most famous works, such as his prints of ice skaters, as well as lesser-known, more intimate prints.

Open Exhibition' (16-25 June), at the Mall Galleries, are offering free entry. See advertisement on page 87. Christie’s Education To celebrate Christie’s 250th anniversary, Christie’s Education is hosting a conference entitled 'Creating Markets, Collecting Art', exploring the inter-relationships between commerce, collecting and the idea of the 'academy'. A limited number of discounted tickets for readers available from christies. com/conference2016 using code RA2016, see advertisement on page 95.

2-for-1 Tickets

the magnitude of Wood’s achievement in the ten years before his untimely death. Visit pallant.org.uk and see advertisement on page 18. The Holburne Museum ‘Stubbs and the Wild’ (25 June-2 Oct). Visit holburne.org and see advertisement on page 91. Watt’s Gallery – Artists’ Village

‘Close Up & Personal: Victorians & Their Photographs’ (14 June-6 Nov). Offer valid Weds-Sun. Visit wattsgallery.org.uk and see advertisement on page 87.

Eating Out, Membership & Shopping Veeraswamy Restaurant, is offering

Colour: Astrazione Oggettiva’ (until 31 July). Abstract works by a group of Italian painters of the 70s. Visit estorickcollection.com and see advertisement on page 89.

a free glass of house wine or soft drink when ordered with two courses from the à la carte menu. Only available for lunch and dinner until 6.30pm and for a table of up to four people. Valid until 31 Aug 2016. Cannot be used in conjunction with any other offer. See advertisement on page 75.

Fashion and Textiles Museum ‘Missoni

Richoux, opposite the Royal Academy,

Art Colour’ (until 4 Sep). Explore the creative process of Italian fashion house Missoni. 2-for-1 on a full price adult ticket, one offer per person. see advertisement on page 89.

is offering 10% discount on breakfast, morning coffee, lunch, afternoon tea or dinner. See advertisement on page 78.

The Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art ‘The Experience of

Pallant House Gallery ‘Christopher Wood’ (2 July-2 Oct). A major exhibition on the life and art of a turbulent British painter, exploring

The Royal Over-Seas League, located close to the RA, provides accommodation, fine dining and a private garden as well as a discounted joining fee and pro-rata subscription rates. Visit rosl.org.uk and see advertisement on page 75.

Publications RA Publications The RA Shop is

Exclusive readers’ offer – 10% off all our new titles Enter RAMAGSUMMER at checkout to claim your discount or call 0800 634 6341 (Mon–Fri, 10 am–5 pm) royalacademy.org.uk/shop

Untitled, c.1976-77, by Aldo Schmid at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art

offering a 10% discount on the following new titles: David Hockney: 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life £27 (rrp £30); Anthony Whishaw £26.95 (rrp £29.95); Bill Jacklin: Graphics £26.95 (rrp £29.95). See advertisement, left. All titles are available from the RA Shop, online at royalacademy.org.uk/shop (enter RAMAGSUMMER at checkout to claim your discount) or by calling 0800 634 6341 (Mon-Fri, 10am-5pm).

New books from the RA for the Summer

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

94 RA MAGAZINE | SUMMER 2016 Publications_SUM16_v7.indd 1 094_ReaderOffers_SUM16_1h.indd 94

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DEBORAH STERN ARBS SCULPTOR

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In Memoriam: Zaha Hadid RA

Zaha Hadid RA’s first completed building, the Vitra Fire Station (1993) in Weil-am-Rhein, Germany

A radiant beacon of talent Fellow Academician and close friend EVA JIRICNA remembers the uncompromising architectural genius of Zaha Hadid RA A few days ago I attended a school reunion after an indecent number of years since graduation. Having walked into a room of 20 or more people who once formed a group of close friends, I realised that I could not match the faces with names I once knew so well and now could only just remember. Simply put, I hardly recognised any of my old friends. That could not happen to anybody who once – recently or a long time ago – came across Zaha. She had a striking personality, brilliant intelligence, remarkable appearance and unique talent radiating like a beacon, which hit you whether you wanted it to or not. She certainly was, and still remains, unforgettable. I met her for the first time about 40 years ago at the Architectural Association, where she was a student just about to graduate. I can still see her clearly in my memory surrounded by a group

of students – all of them involved in a heated discussion about what else but architecture. She had massive, dark, curly hair, a deep voice and total determination to have the last word, a feature which she never lost. I was not yet an experienced teacher but I knew even then that I was looking at somebody who was not going to disappear in the mist of forgotten history among the names of insignificant alumni. I also remember on another occasion talking to her about the Russian Constructivists, who I had some knowledge of, having come from former Czechoslovakia and studied at a Russian grammar school, and also having seen some of their work as a young student in Moscow in the late 1950s. She was totally passionate about their work and their unfortunate fate under Stalin, and she was trying to recreate their memory. Her devotion to

them is clearly detectable in her projects. When we met again, either in Joe’s café in Knightsbridge or Peter Cook RA’s Art Net gallery in Bloomsbury or a party, we often shared our experiences of having strong encounters with historic sites or past cultures. She was born in Baghdad, which her family left with the rise of Saddam Hussein; I escaped from a Communist regime. She, as an Arabic girl, went to a Catholic School run by nuns in Beirut, the city at whose American University she consequently studied, with an admirable success, mathematics – a very daring choice for a girl, especially at that time. Her mother influenced her interest in art and by so doing woke in her another dimension of her extraordinarily diverse talent. I first saw her paintings at a celebration of her birthday in the early years after I met her. They were displayed in a large classroom of a Victorian school, and I can still remember the works in detail. They were just beautiful: poetic, elegant dreams, which later on turned into brilliant architectural creations of great competence and remarkable power. Zaha was a very hard-working person. Her natural way of life was to get up late and finish late. She was so devoted to her creative activities that she never stopped and she expected everybody else to follow her drive. During her travels she used to call people working on important projects late at night and she could not understand if they were unavailable or not even in the office. She spoke to them with an irritation in her voice and expressed her displeasure regarding their lacking responsibility and interest in the project – but when she finished the conversation she would look at her watch and whisper: ‘I suppose it is rather late.’ Many times I heard people saying that she was either too ambitious or over ambitious. I do not think so. She knew she had a great potential to create extraordinary things and she also knew that the talent had to be fed by an inhumane effort. And an inhumane effort it was indeed. During the years I knew her I witnessed in her the most amazing transformation from a student to a fighting young architect to eventually an architectural giant. After graduation she had to go through a long period of lost opportunities, lost competitions, criticism of her designs, doubts that she was able to build. She was a bad loser, and suffered a lot from others’ lack of

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P H OTO CH R IS T I A N R I CH T ERS . P O R T R A I T BY M A RY M CCA R T N E Y

Academy News

In Memoriam

P H OTO CH R IS T I A N R I CH T ERS . P O R T R A I T BY M A RY M CCA R T N E Y

Zaha Hadid RA (1950-2016)

trust in her and deceit. I do not think she ever recovered from her first success and tragedy at the same time – the Cardiff story. Having won a competition for Cardiff Bay Opera House, her design was consequently pronounced unbuildable and the project went to another architect. But in the same year as this sad story took place she was approached by Rolf Fehlbaum (owner of Vitra) to design a fire station in Weil-am-Rhein. That was her breakthrough moment. This first building (opposite), with its characteristically angular concrete cantilevers and unusual aesthetics, was a success for the pure fact that it was real rather than unrealised: anybody could touch it and walk through it, and it opened the door to a massive flow of new projects and new buildings. Her competition entries were not just to remain on paper but to become the real thing. The project for Vitra was finished in 1993

and since then Zaha’s office has completed an amount of work which several top architectural practices put together would find hard to match. She no longer had to fight for recognition – the entire world was at her feet. And she did not bend under the load of her commitments. On the contrary, she thrived. She managed to design more and more complex structures. She did not stagnate. Her inquisitive nature and constant questioning made sure she climbed higher and higher, as her structures became more beautiful and more and more convincing. She surrounded herself with and relied on the people who worked with her, and she made people sparkle under her guidance. Her old friend and partner Patrik Schumacher was her solid rock. Zaha was awarded practically every possible award architects can ever dream of, including the

most prestigious, the Pritzker Architecture Prize, in 2004. She was made a Dame by the Queen in 2012. Her work has become so widely known that practically everybody would be able to name a few examples of her creations, from her buildings to her artworks to her designs of everyday objects. She lived the most incredibly busy life which only a few can imagine; and yet Zaha had lots of real friends and she found time to keep in touch with them, and to help them as need be. And she would remember everyone. If she saw the designs of somebody’s project, she would know who had done them, how many children she or he had, and where they last met. She had as big a heart as she had talent. She was always entertaining her friends – often by vividly detailing the films she had seen (cinema was her great passion too), sometimes simply by telling stories that were witty, sharp and amusing. Her sense of humour helped her overcome life’s disappointments. She knew how to celebrate, whatever the occasion, and never missed the opportunity to gather all her constantly growing circle of acquaintances. And no need to say she always sparkled and impressed. When she was awarded her Gold Medal by the Royal Institute of British Architects in February – which she deserved to receive many years prior to this spring – she proved to herself and everybody else that even as a woman and a foreigner she could reach the highest of the peaks. She started her Gold Medal lecture with her old sketches – first competitions, first ideas – and slowly the sketches started turning themselves into architecture, monuments, mega-structures. The audience was speechless. Her ability to turn her buildings into true pieces of art has not been achieved in this magnitude by anybody else in the world. Her family took her once, she remembered, to see Sumerian ruins when she was a little girl. She told me it was the first time she realised what it meant to create the foundations of civilization, of cities and the cultural history of the human race. Through her achievements she built superstructures on top of those foundations. To read more tributes to Zaha Hadid by Royal Academicians, including the architects Peter Cook and Alan Stanton, visit http://roy.ac/hadidtributes

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Friends booking for David Hockney RA: 82 Portraits and 1 Still Life 2 July â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2 October 2016

We are excited to be welcoming David Hockney back to the RA. Held in our smaller Sackler Galleries, this exhibition will embrace portraiture with renewed creative vigour. As we expect the exhibition to be very popular, we have extended opening hours and scheduled additional Friends Private Views, giving you more opportunities to visit.

To help ensure the best possible experience, Friends are required to book a ticket to visit this exhibition. You can book advanced tickets online, by phone on 020 7300 8090 or by visiting the RA. Celia Birtwell, 31st August, 1st, 2nd September 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 121.9 x 91.4 cm Barry Humphries, 26th, 27th, 28th March 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 121.9 x 91.4 cm Both works by David Hockney and ÂŠ David Hockney. Photos: Richard Schmidt

Academy News NEW ACADEMICIANS Sonia Boyce (below), whose art tackles issues including race and gender, has been elected as a Royal Academician. Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, best known for his Tate Modern installation The Weather Project (2003), and American conceptual artist Jenny Holzer have been elected as Honorary Academicians. The Duke of Devonshire and Agnes Gund have become Honorary Fellows.

Plantation with Seven Pigs, 1943, by Tarsila do Amaral

Rio to the RA

P H OTO GR A P H: A L E X A N D R E S A N TOS S I LVA . P H OTO GR A P H: M AYA B A I L E Y. P H OTO CO U R T ESY O F R A ED I T I O NS

As the world awaits the 2016 Olympics ADRIAN LOCKE explores the Academy’s early links with Brazilian art All eyes will be on Brazil this summer when the Olympics open at the Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro. Seventy-two years ago, Brazil also came under the spotlight in Britain, with the RA’s 1944 ‘Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings’. It was the first show of its kind to be mounted in Europe. Taking place in the midst of the Second World War, it represented a grand goodwill gesture by the Brazilian government after diplomatic relations had gone through difficult moments. Artists donated all of the works on display, which were sold in aid of the RAF Benevolent Fund. This was the golden age of art as cultural diplomacy (as well as somewhat literal exhibition titles). In the winter of 1930, for the ‘Exhibition of Italian Art 1200-1900’ – still the fifth most successful exhibition in the RA’s history – Benito Mussolini had sanctioned the loan of some 1,000 masterpieces. The Italian naval vessel that transported the works was renamed the Leonardo da Vinci in honour of its cargo. In 1944 the British Ministry of War Transport brought the Brazilian paintings across the Atlantic to London in similar fashion. Brazil had declared war on Germany and Italy in 1942, and the exhibition was timed to coincide with the transportation of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force of more than 25,000 troops to Europe. Though the artists showcased in the ‘Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings’

were largely unknown outside Brazil, they have since become recognised as the generation of Brazilian modernists, whose images of everyday life embraced a new national identity that, rather than look abroad for subject matter, looked to its own multiple diversities. Among those who donated work were Cândido Portinari, a Neo-Realist painter who was the subject of a solo show at MoMA, New York, in 1940; Tarsila do Amaral, whose work (above) incorporated Brazilian imagery with the daring new styles she had been exposed to as a student in Paris; and Roberto Burle-Marx, who became internationally famous for his landscape garden design. Tarsila, along with the contemporary artists Adriana Varejão and Beatriz Milhazes, fetches some of the highest prices among Brazilian artists at auction. At the time, the recently elected (and knighted) President of the Academy, Alfred Munnings, had summed up the prevailing opinion on the show: ‘Our Council were not favourably impressed by the specimens of these paintings as they appeared in photographs… I note that the posters and catalogue will state clearly the provenance of the collection, so that no responsibility for its quality will rest on the RA’. The Embassy of Brazil in London is researching the story behind the show and what has happened to the pictures. It transpires the architect Lord (Alfred) Bossom gifted to Tate a painting he acquired from the show by José Cardoso Jr, an artist who has since faded into obscurity. It would be nearly 60 years before Tate created a Latin American Acquisitions Committee to help diversify its collection. But the unique opportunity to acquire paintings – at knock down prices – by artists who have since become internationally famous was long since spurned.

ONLY AT THE RA SHOP Bob and Roberta Smith RA has designed an exclusive range of artists materials (below) and Barbara Rae RA has created a series of unique, handpainted ceramic pieces produced by Poole Pottery in Stoke. Both ranges are for sale online at http://roy.ac/shop and in the RA Shop.

PRINTS CHARMING Adam Dant RA has produced a new series of prints celebrating the Academy’s buildings (The Discovery of Burlington House, 2016, £500, below). Proceeds from RA Editions sales support the RA Schools. Visit http://roy.ac/raeditions

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Academy News

Art on the streets Students have created a giant collage to greet passers-by while restoration work takes place at the RA’s Burlington Gardens building. HARRIET BAKER finds out how they made it

It’s a Wednesday afternoon at the Royal Academy and the Learning Studio is alive with activity. Around 20 young people are enjoying a workshop led by artist Diana Taylor. The aim is to create a site-specific artwork to cover the hoardings of Burlington Gardens while the building undergoes restoration work as part of its major redevelopment in time for the Academy’s 250th anniversary in 2018. The hoardings project, which is supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, is introducing pupils and students to the Academy and its heritage, while equipping them with new skills and offering professional guidance. Some 55 people have taken part, drawn from a primary school and three further education colleges. In the Academy’s studio, groups of students are silkscreen printing, stencilling and making collages under Taylor’s guidance. She has

encouraged them to explore the architecture of the Academy, and many are sketching from their own photographs of the building. Another group has been searching the RA Collections for inspiration, selecting images of portraiture, marble busts and architectural plans. Each student is exploring various techniques to create images that Taylor will collage together, before they are printed onto the vinyl that will cover the hoardings’ surfaces. ‘I’m looking for clear prints and a range of colours and themes,’ she explains. ‘I will experiment with layering the works on Photoshop, playing around with composition, translucency, scale and colour.’ Taylor explores the relationship between analogue and digital processes in her own work. ‘I’m interested in traditional materials and processes, and integrating them with digital methods. I wanted the students to work in

Students’ images on the Burlington Gardens hoardings

different visual languages, to engage them and encourage them to produce work they could be proud of.’ ‘I’ve never done silkscreen printing at school, so I now have a new skill to take away,’ says Ronaldo, 17, who is studying for a BTEC in Art and Design at City & Islington College. ‘It has been useful getting some professional advice, and it doesn’t feel like school.’ His classmate Ben is cutting and splicing images sourced from the RA Collections: ‘I like collage because, as you layer one thing over another, it creates ideas.’ Amelia, who has been making monoprints, says she is ‘excited to see how Diana is going to work with all of our pieces to create something new.’ For sculptor Richard Wilson RA – who gave a lecture to the students – the project is about revealing the Academy’s creativity to a new audience. ‘I wanted to open the students’ eyes to the idea of creating artwork for the public domain,’ he says. ‘There’s a different set of rules when it comes to public art; you’re trying to capture the attention of the casual passer-by. We could have put a notice on the hoardings of Burlington Gardens, but the RA is about the communication of the visual arts, and using the hoarding as a canvas is a very inventive thing to do.’ The education partners who took part in the RA’s hoardings project are City of Westminster College, City & Islington College, Kensington & Chelsea College and Gateway Academy Primary in Westminster

Artist Diana Taylor (front) leads a workshop for college students as part of the RA’s hoardings project

To read a student’s account of helping to create artwork for the hoardings around Burlington Gardens, visit http://roy.ac/hoardings

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Restaurant & Shopping Guide The RA Magazine’s directory of places to eat and shop around the Academy. This is an advertisement feature. To advertise please call Charlotte Burgess on 020 7300 5675 or email charlotte.burgess@royalacademy.org.uk RESTAURANTS SHOPS

1 1

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THE CHESTERFIELD MAYFAIR

Berkeley Square, 35 Charles Street W1, 020 7491 2622 chesterfieldmayfair.com

2 3

A short walk from the Royal Academy is The Chesterfield Mayfair, home of the ‘Charlie and The Chesterfield’ themed afternoon tea, priced at £36.50 and hosted by Willy Wonka himself. Perhaps add a glass of Champagne to give the occasion added sparkle.

2 14 9

13 10

1 5 7

Please note: not drawn to scale

Restaurants 1

AVENUE

Serving up new American cuisine for breakfast, lunch and dinner, Monday to Sunday, Avenue captures the buzz of the New York dining scene whilst nodding to its St James’s roots with stunning art-focused interiors and a French and American-driven wine list. Head Chef James Hulme has created a bold and distinct menu with his signature US-style dishes given a Mayfair twist. The bar at Avenue is a destination in its own right for pre-dinner and after-work drinks, serving up craft beers and classic cocktails inspired by the US Prohibition era. 7-9 St. James’s Street SW1, 020 7321 2111 avenue-restaurant.co.uk

2 BENTLEY’S OYSTER BAR AND GRILL

Hidden just around the corner from the Royal Academy, Bentley’s is a local resting place for weary art lovers and gourmands for over 98 years. Trading from midday to midnight, Champagne and native oysters, traditional fish and chips, or for those who care not for the mollusc, beautiful lamb or a simple slab of steak. A ‘best of British’ menu, designed by the controversial and twice Michelin-awarded chef Richard Corrigan. We have private dining facilities to seat up to 60 guests and run regular

cookery schools.

11-15 Swallow Street W1, 020 7734 4756 bentleys.org

as, “the only real brasserie in London”, it is open from 11.30am to midnight, seven days a week and serves great French food at remarkably low prices, with two course prix fixe menus starting at £9.75. 20 Sherwood Street W1, 020 7734 4888 brasseriezedel.com

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 selection of American wines in the UK. Breakfasts are another highlight and on Sundays you can relax with brunch as you listen to live jazz. 45 Park Lane, Mayfair W1, 020 7493 4554 dorchestercollection.com

BENIHANA

Just one minute’s walk from the Royal Academy is Benihana, an exclusive Japanese culinary experience, providing Teppan-Yaki style cooking. Diners can enjoy the luxury of a personal chef preparing fresh and delicious meals at their table. A variety of seafood and steaks are cooked to perfection; fresh sushi is also available. 37 Sackville Street W1, 020 7494 2525 benihana.co.uk 4

BOULESTIN RESTAURANT

Warm, convivial, relaxed and elegant, Boulestin is inspired by legendary food writer and restaurateur, Xavier Marcel Boulestin, and uses many of its namesake’s original recipes, as well as lighter and more contemporary dishes created by head chef, Elliot Spurdle. Offsetting the Parisian-style dining room, guests can bask outside in the beautiful courtyard. Open Monday to Saturday for breakfast, lunch and dinner. 5 St James’s Street, SW1, 020 7930 2030 boulestin.com

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 its own little twist. All dishes are cooked fresh to order, using free-range meat and locally-sourced

BRASSERIE ZEDEL

A large, bustling, grand and elegant Parisian brasserie with an authentic 1930s interior, Brasserie Zedel is perfectly located for the Royal Academy, just off Piccadilly Circus. Described by renowned French chef Pierre Koffman

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Restaurant & Shopping Guide vegetables. A special set lunch menu priced at £6.95 runs until 5pm, or you can choose from the mouth watering à la carte menu which offers excellence without pretension. Counted as one of the best Indian restaurants in London, to avoid disappointment it is best to make a reservation. Last orders 11.30pm. 77 Berwick Street W1, 020 7437 8568 maharanisoho.com 9

FRANCO’S

Franco’s, founded in 1946, has acquired a brand new sleek interior. Open all day, Franco’s evolves from a bustling breakfast service, to a charged lunch atmosphere, to romantic evenings. From MondaySaturday, the beautifully-appointed private dining room with curtained and mirrored walls can accommodate between 16 and 55 guests, providing the ideal setting for a range of private events.

serves an all-day dining menu, inspired by Francesco’s home region of Calabria and surrounding areas of Italy. Described as a “temple of Italian cuisine” and the only restaurant on Savile Row, Sartoria has recently undergone an extensive refurbishment by acclaimed designer David d’Almada. Boasting a heated terrace, destination bar, cicchetti counter, two private dining rooms and wine cellar, the exquisite and timeless design lends itself perfectly to its glamorous Mayfair location. Sartoria is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner Monday to Saturday. 20 Savile Row W1, 020 7534 7000 sartoria-restaurant.co.uk

which to welcome friends, family or colleagues for a truly memorable meal. 55 Jermyn Street SW1, 020 7629 9955 .wiltons.co.uk 14

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 perfect for Friday late-night exhibitions. Its all-day menu means it is possible to eat formally or casually at any time, whether a full three-course meal or a coffee and cake. Whilst booking in advance is advised, tables are always held back for walk-ins on the day.

QUAGLINO’S

16 Bury Street SW1, 020 7930 6767 quaglinos-restaurant.co.uk

SARTORIA

With renowned Italian chef Francesco Mazzei at its helm as chef patron, Sartoria

45 Piccadilly W1, 020 7734 0981 freywille.com

FREYWILLE BOUTIQUE

160 Piccadilly W1, 020 7499 6996 thewolseley.com

61 Jermyn Street SW1, 020 7499 2211 francoslondon.com

A legendary hot spot with a glamorous Art Deco-inspired restaurant, two stunning bars and private dining rooms. The modern European menu designed by Executive Head Chef, Mickael Weiss, changes seasonally and always uses the highest quality ingredients. The restaurant offers a host of menu options, along with Q Brunch now available on Saturdays and Sundays, accompanied by bottomless bubbles. The bars boast an iconic cocktail list and an extensive wine list. The Main Bar also serves up an Afternoon Tea from 3-5pm. From 9pm, the restaurant transforms, showcasing live music from an exciting, varied list of bands and renowned DJs. Open Monday to Saturday for lunch and dinner and Sundays for lunch service, with the bars open until 1am Monday -Thursday and 3am on Fridays and Saturdays, with late bar food also available.

Giverny, Honfleur and Orangerie – the three new enamel jewellery designs are FreyWille’s artistic tribute to one of the greatest French impressionist artists. Claude Monet inspired FreyWille’s in-house artist with his unforgettable artworks and the luscious gardens of blossoming Normandy.

VEERASWAMY

The true taste of tradition, Veeraswamy is superbly located overlooking Regent Street, just two minutes walk from Piccadilly Circus. Veeraswamy offers divine dishes, lovingly prepared and beautifully served in sumptuous surroundings. Sunday lunch is offered at £26 for three courses. Lunch and pre- and post- theatre menus are available. Veeraswamy is part of MW Eat Group consisting of Chutney Mary, Amaya and Masala Zone. Victory House, 99 Regent Street W1, 020 7734 1401 veeraswarmy.com

No.1 Savile Row W1, 020 7432 6403 gievesandhawkes.com

Shopping 1

WILTONS

Offering a selection of traditional menus for memorable parties and a range of exciting wine packages for 10 guests or more, Wiltons’ private dining room is an ideal venue for any occasion. The ‘Jimmy Marks Room’ offers guests an exceptional, discreet environment in

GIEVES & HAWKES

Gieves & Hawkes has been located at No.1 Savile Row, a short stroll from Burlington House, for over 100 years. With a tradition of military and fine bespoke handwork, the firm has enjoyed the continuous patronage of royal families both at home and abroad over three centuries. Today, No.1 Savile Row houses the company’s bespoke workshops, private tailoring suites and the flagship ‘ready-to-wear’ store, selling stylish British menswear. Do pay us a visit.

D.R. HARRIS

Situated in St James’s Street for over 200 years, D.R. Harris, London’s oldest pharmacy, 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. Visit them at their newly reopened and expanded shop at 29 St. James’s Street. The full range is also available from 52 Piccadilly. 29 St. James’s Street SW1, 52 Piccadilly W1, 020 7930 3915 drharris.co.uk

RICHARD OGDEN V I E W T H E F I L M AT: W W W. G I E V E S A N D H AW K E S. C O M

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 twentieth 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 richardogden.com

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Proof for RA Magazine pub. 23 May

Classified

To advertise here please contact Charlotte Burgess on 020 7300 5675 or charlotte.burgess@royalacademy.org.uk

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AUTUMN ART COURSES IN CORNWALL at Boconnoc House, nr. Lostwithiel & Botanical

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Three day courses with luxurious accommodation Excellent tutors, small classes & magical surroundings 01208 872507 www.boconnoc.com

BRAMBLES ART RETREAT Painting holidays worldwide. Relax and paint in beautiful locations. Japan, France, Greece, Italy, Ireland. Skye and Cornwall. Two tutors, all media, small groups. email: janet@bramblesartretreat.com write to: Brambles, Sprytown, Lifton, Devon, PL16 0AY tel: +44 (0)1566784359 www.bramblesartretreat.com Sea Sculpt: Residential Stone Carving Courses Exciting opportunity to carve stone with renowned sculptor and enjoy wholesome food. julietaylor1@hotmail.com www.seasculpt.co.uk 07971 48944

Greece: Skyros

The Art Studio is an exciting creative arts holiday. Embark on an inspirational journey through the picturesque Skyros village and sandy beaches. Call 01983 865566 for your free Skyros Holidays 2016 brochure. Use code RA16 for 10% off your 2016 Greece holiday. www.skyros.com

Saturday life classes

All media, all levels with professional tutoring. Long & short poses. Experienced portfolio advice for students. Elianor Jonzen. Tel: 020 7221 4525

Brecon Beacons

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Based at Uig Lodge Isle of Lewis 3rd to 10th September 2016 Oils, Watercolours, Drawing, Still Lifes and Landscapes for Beginners and Experienced

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of ES GRAU in Biosphere Reserve. A retreat for two, delightful studio apartment set in large shady courtyard 45 seconds to beach +34629381601 churchillalipaintings@gmail.com

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VIEWPOINT Exhibition of Paintings 20 - 26 May 2016 Camden Image Gallery London NW1 OSP www.sianbennettfineartist.co.uk

Italy: Spoleto, Umbria

Chic, elegant self-contained flats in historical residence, town centre. Studio flat w/balcony, separate kitchen, sleeps 1/2. PETER BROOK PRINTS One bedroom flat, bathroom & spa tub, Signed, limited edition prints of Yorkshire SianBennett_ClassifiedAd_v1.indd 1 18/03/2016 sleeps 1/2. Short/long let. Call Cristina: www.peterbrookprints.co.uk 07950 141489 cristinamarignoli@gmail.com 03/05/2016 France: Menton

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2 bedroom house in grounds of 1860s town villa. Pool and 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. Now booking 2017 Tel: 07900 916729 pattiebarwick@ gmail.com www.mentonsejour.com

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Sunny, spacious, balcony Paris flat 11th arr. on Bvd Voltaire. Sleeps 2/3. Easy walking to Bastille, Marais, Picasso Museum, buses to Louvre etc. £95 a night - min 3 nights. For more details, email: ristone2@wanadoo.fr

Tuscan/Umbrian border

Sleeps 12. Enjoy the eclectic art collection and interior design of this restored 1860s villa and separate guest house town centre, 5 min walk to shops and beaches. 11:46 Beautiful garden with views. Lovely pool area with shady places to sit and read. Secluded dining areas. Enjoy versatility of 2 houses on one site. Ideal for 2 families. Off-street parking for 2 cars. Now booking 2017 Tel: 07900 916729 pattiebarwick@gmail.com www.mentonsejour.com

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LOVE ST IVES

SUMMER 2016 | RA MAGAZINE 105

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04/05/2016 14:17

Short Story

One in Four

Four Trees, 1917, by Egon Schiele

My darling Christine, I can’t call you that, I know, but I still love you and the children very much. I’m sorry you’re reading this, sorry I wasn’t stronger. I know I let you all down. You were never supposed to be involved, but how could you not be involved. It’s all such a mess. Don’t let Nicky and Dominic believe everything negative. I can’t bear the thought of them hating me. I can still see Dominic’s face the last time I tried to talk to him. I won’t try again. I wake up at night terrified that they’ve caught it. Or that you have. We’re in the second wave now, I’m sure of it. Stay safe. It’ll be you at risk, Chrissy, your immune system is stronger, a liability – you know that already, you’ve heard me say it a million times. If you feel sick, with anything, don’t go to the doctor, don’t go anywhere public and crowded. I wish I could make you promise me. And don’t ask for the anti-viral. People are queuing up for it but it doesn’t work, it’ll just make you think it’s worked. I never told you but that was my idea, my brand-name – Vedi-flu. After the god of healing – Vediovis. What it does to the ego, creating such a thing. We all become gods. You found it dull, my work, didn’t you? All that boring theory. ‘Cytokine storm sounds about as interesting as it gets’, you once said. Look at the

storm now. Tents outside the hospitals, chaos, people drowning in their own fluid. It looks so different outside the lab. I used the think the virus was beautiful under the microscope. A beautiful planet, with so many reaching arms. It’s such a clever little thing, Chrissy, it uses us to kill us. We’re the perfect weapon. I want the kids to know – I didn’t bury the trials. I didn’t lie. Maybe I didn’t shout loud enough about ineffectiveness, but I followed protocol, I raised it at boardroom – you must remember me doing that? I said, slow down, it isn’t ready, when Cochrane gets the full data the company’s reputation will be damaged. They didn’t listen. Listening isn’t profitable. No one was ever going to stop it, certainly not me. They’re a government agency, Chrissy, at least the CIC is funded by Eli-Meyer. I’ve seen emails. My computer’s gone now, so I can’t prove it. And Sharon Blake doesn’t answer my calls, she’s on a book tour is what they told me. The newspapers aren’t interested anymore. Yesterday’s whistleblower, what a fucking joke. They just want the epidemiologists, the A&E stories, the end-of-world stuff. At least someone’s getting rich as well as Meyer. That picture of the little boy asleep on a bench at Paddington, everyone walking past him – except he isn’t

asleep, is he. I keep seeing it everywhere, can’t get away from it. They did that to him. I know, I know, this is more of the same, and you’ve heard enough to last you a lifetime. I just need you to understand. Anyway, bottom line. It is my fault. I helped make a drug that makes people feel well enough to go out and infect others. They’re saying that one in four will die – a quarter of the population. A hundred years after Spanish flu and we’re no safer. Maybe I should just wait, I might get a lucky draw, might end up in the morgue myself. But I’ve had enough, Chrissy, they’re rinsing me. The phone calls don’t stop. I moved four times last month but they always find me. They’re clever bastards, they know how to open you up, how to climb into your brain. Always at night, when everything seems so hopeless. Or it’s just after the school run, when it could be you phoning, because something’s happened. And the other things. They moved my car last week. Just to the other side of the road, but they moved it. And the deliveries – pornography mostly, but then letters from the bank, accounts I don’t even have, all overdrawn, and, you won’t believe this, mum’s funeral bill! £2,863.80 for a woollen coffin, roses and freesias – she loves freesias, how did they know? How could they have asked her that when she can’t even remember her own name? The undertaker doesn’t exist – I phoned them. I got sent a new number plate last week – H6N1. The police don’t care. Everyone thinks I’m mad. Some kind of ranting madman. They won’t even let me on the library computers anymore because they say I make too much fuss, I disturb people. I know they sent you that letter and the photos and I’m sorry. I should have told you myself. Maybe I do deserve it all. I wish it would stop. Why don’t they stop now – I’m finished, everything’s finished. I just keep thinking of our old garden in Stokenchurch. We always had such good light in the trees in the evenings, didn’t we? God, I miss it. I’m not going there – I wouldn’t do that to you, even though I know you and the kids have left. The woods at Merryhill. It’s quiet, not many people, I don’t know another way. I’ve been afraid for months and months, I can’t really remember anything else, but I’m not afraid now. Funny how you begin to feel better once you know what to do, once you get out from under it. I’ve been so tired, Chrissy, and sick in my heart. You don’t realise how small and weak you are until you’re shown how big everything else is. I’ve spent my whole life trying to find a cure, and here it is, all of a sudden.

by SARAH HALL. This story is inspired by the painting Four Trees by Egon Schiele, who died of Spanish flu in 1918, a year after he made the work

106 RA MAGAZINE | SUMMER 2016

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Art Tours Worldwide Art | Archaeology | Architecture Cox & Kings is the travel partner for the Royal Academy of Arts and our programme of small-group tours has been specially created with the Friends of the RA in mind, although they are open to everyone. The 2016 collection focuses on the art, architecture and archaeology of many of the world’s most culturally rich destinations. The tours are accompanied by expert lecturers who help to design the itineraries, give talks along the way and, in some cases, open doors that would normally be closed to the general public.

AUTUMN 2016 HIGHLIGHTS INDIA: Treasures of the Punjab & ‘Little Tibet’ with Jasleen Kandhari 9 October – 12 nights from £3,295 ALBANIA & MACEDONIA: Cradle of the Balkans with Dr William Taylor 23 September – 8 nights from £1,445 LISBON & SINTRA: Portuguese Palaces & Art with Dr Anne Anderson 3 October – 3 nights from £1,045 SICILY: Crossroads of the Mediterranean with Richard Wallace 10 October – 8 nights from £2,195 MEXICO: Maya, Murals & Conquistadors with Chloë Sayer 17 October – 12 nights from £3,495 OMAN: Land of Frankincense with Chris Bradley 23 October – 7 nights from £2,395 Golden Temple, Amritsar

For reservations, please call 020 3773 1419 For detailed itineraries and prices, please request a copy of the 2016 RA Art Tours Worldwide brochure by calling 0844 576 5518 or visit coxandkings.co.uk/ra

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Frank Dobson 1886-1963

Frank Dobson... was a sculptor of immense integrity and vision, with a feeling for the female form that seemed to wrest it out of the earth and make its very earthiness not only monumental but sublime. I would call him a great sculptor; certainly one of Englandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s greatest. Duncan Grant Above: plaster for Reclining Nude (ht 33 cms) circa 1926, now available for the first time in a bronze edition of 12. Exhibition of sculpture and drawings from 25th June. A fully illustrated catalogue is available with essay by Andrew Lambirth (ÂŁ10 plus p&p.) The exhibition may be viewed and purchases made online at goldmarkart.com, 14 Orange Street, Uppingham, Rutland, LE15 9SQ 01572 821424

goldmark