Summer Exhibition 2015

Overheard in the Small Weston Room from a couple contemplating 'Remembering the Treason Trial' by South African artist William Kentridge HON RA:
'So what does it represent to you, in your mind?'
'The Tree of Life?'
'Right.' Pause. 'And…?'
'Well… there's the scale of it.'
'And there's dramatic stuff mixed up with everyday stuff, and a whole lot going on. I'm not trying to give you a hard time, I'm just trying to get you to tell me what you see…'

There is certainly 'a whole lot going on'. This year's Summer Exhibition is a riot of colour: the Wohl Central Hall has been daubed a 'rich turquoise', Gallery III a 'vivid magenta' and the Lecture Room 'sky blue'; and, as ever, there is an embarrassment of riches. It is not easy picking out three favourites from a strong field, but I would say my choices for this year (in reverse order) are:

3.  Daydreaming (Oil)
     Lucy du Sautoy

A smudge of landscape streaked with droplets of water in sharp focus, as if looking out of a train window after a shower. It is an unusual perspective for an oil painting, and the grey sky and damp-looking greens seem to lull you into a sort of rainy-day reverie.

2.  Looking South (Woodcut)
     Pine Feroda

Another landscape: this time of dark jagged peaks thrusting out of the sea against a misty pink and purple horizon. It is an intense, dramatic composition – but not brooding: I love the way the ripples and waves catch the shimmering light. The title is intriguing – looking south from where? From some Nordic fastness, or a Patagonian peak? I would later learn that Pine Feroda are a collective of five woodblock artists based in north Devon, so perhaps the work was inspired by the rugged Devon coast.

1.  Somerford Grove Adventure Playground in Tottenham (C-type print)
     Mark Neville

A boy with close-cropped fair hair leans against a counter and pulls a little moue. All around him is the chaos of a typical junior school, with kids waiting to be allowed out into the playground for break. The light that falls on him seems to accentuate his pallor; his other classmates appear to be of mixed heritage. An interesting social commentary? I would later learn that this was one of a series of portraits commissioned by the New York Times for a photo essay entitled 'Here is London', and that the scene depicted was of an after-school club!

Honourable mention to Paul Hosking for 'Mimic (Black)', a visually arresting work in and of itself, made all the more interesting by the reflection of the room within it; Sir Anish Kapoor RA for his untitled acrylic cube with mirrored sides and a row of bubbles suspended within, refreshing as an ice-cube on a summer's day; and Emily Allchurch for 'Babel London', an amusing, contemporary take on Breughel's Tower of Babel.

Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2014

I'm surprised I haven't paid more attention to the National Portrait Gallery's annual photographic portrait prize. The last time I went was five years ago; having some time to spare this evening, however, I decided to drop in to view the 2014 exhibition - and I am glad I did.

The 2014 exhibition marks the last one judged by Sandy Nairne as director of the National Portrait Gallery (Nairne has announced that he will step down later in the year).  Over 4,000 submissions were received, and whittling them down to the 60 on display must have been a daunting task.

The top three prizes awarded by the panel for 2014 went (in reverse order of merit) to:

3.  Braian and Ryan
     Birgit Püve
     (Third place)

Two ash-blond twins, nine year old Braian and Ryan, crouch in the garden at their great grandmother’s house in Saue, Estonia. Braian, the younger twin, stares moodily at the camera, his arms crossed over his knees; while Ryan, the elder, looks up less guardedly, holding a large hen between his legs.

2.  Skate Girl
     Jessica Fulford-Dobson
     (Second place)

A waif of a girl, dressed in a shimmering blue hijab, holds a skateboard almost as large as she is tall. Her little fingernails are painted orange, and her toes (which peek out of a pair of dusty sandals) are painted blue. The photograph was taken in Afghanistan. 'What I loved about this girl,' explained Jessica Fulford-Dobson,'was how immaculately dressed and composed she was. The skate hall is a dusty, noisy place filled with laughter and yelps of excitement as the girls skateboard freely up, down and around with their robes and scarves flying.' There is something in the little girl's expression that suggests a masked restlessness - I assumed this was an eagerness to get back to the fun of skateboarding, but I would later learn that she was in fact rushing for the school bus home.

1.  Konrad Lars Hastings Titlow
     David Titlow
     (First place)

The top prize for 2014 went to David Titlow for his portrait of his infant son. The child, aged nine months, stretches out his stubby fingers to touch the nose of a little black and white dog. I love the look of wonder on the child's face and the dog's slightly perplexed expression at the encounter. The shot was taken in Rataryd, Sweden, the morning after a midsummer's party: a hazy Nordic light bathes the scene, and a couple of empty cans of beer are still visible in the foreground. 'The composition and backlight was so perfect that I had to capture the moment,' commented Titlow.

My personal favourites also included:

• a portrait of  Freyja Haraldsdóttir, MP and disabled rights activist, outside Parliament in Reykjavik, Iceland, by Gabrielle Motola;
• Felix, a portrait of a tousled-haired boy being nuzzled affectionately by his pony, by Tracy Howl; and
• Ann-Christine Woehrl's powerful portrait of Christine and Moses (pictured below), from a series on the lives of women who have survived acid attacks.

Summer Exhibition 2014

'I never used to like still lifes, but increasingly I find them quite pleasing.'
'Yes… nice colours. Shall we move on?'
'Shall we?'
'Let's.'

For me, this year's Summer Exhibition is not so much about still lifes as it is about landscape and portraiture – and the various techniques of printmaking. It is immediately apparent, gushes the Exhibition guide, why the Print Rooms of the Summer Exhibition are so popular. More than any of the galleries, they exemplify the Exhibition's democracy by presenting a rich survey of contemporary printmaking in all its forms. This year, Galleries I and II have been hung by artist-printmakers Professor Chris Orr MBE RA and Emma Stibbon RA. Orr observes that the Summer Exhibition offers excellent insight into emerging trends in printmaking, while Stibbons points out that prints, being generally more affordable than unique works of art, offer great opportunities for building up a wide collection.

My top three picks for this year are all prints. They are, in reverse order:

3.  Winter Hedge (Archival pigment transfer print)
     Boyd & Evans

A tree surges out of the mist in the middle of a hedge. In this muted landscape, drear and grey, I like how the bare branches seem to explode into the frosty air, lending a strange sense of dynamism to the piece – a distant promise of spring in its simple, sturdy form. As it turns out, its pendant piece 'Spring Hedge' hangs nearby, depicting the same tree triumphant in the luminous green of new foliage under a bright blue sky.

2.  Leicestershire (C-type print)
     Mitra Tabrizian

A half-demolished factory stands in the middle of a concrete courtyard wet from recent rain, its brick and tile interior exposed to the elements. Beside it stands a tall and weathered chimney stack. The colours seem faded: worn reds and smudged whites squeezed between grey ground and grey-blue sky; and the still and sullen emptiness reinforces the overall impression of desolate urban decay.

1.  O Jogo Bonito (Photograph)
     Hermès

My favourite work in this year's Exhibition is of the 'beautiful game'. Here, against a backdrop of dramatic peaks and drab apartment blocks (barely visible through the mix of sea spray and smog), is a beach full of bronzed bodies of all shapes and sizes engrossed in the game. Above their heads, as if suspended, are a flight of footballs – like a host of hovering planets, each one catching a glint of sun. I love the way the picture encapsulates what I imagine to be the crazy, creative chaos of Brazil!

Honourable mention to Ben Johnson for 'Sala de Dos Hermanas', a quietly beautiful black-and-white study of Moorish arches; Gavin Turk for 'Totem', a mesmerising image of a puff of smoke rising against a dark background (or possibly ejaculate in water, thought one wag who must have been spending too much time in the bath); and to Peter Abrahams for 'Approximate Precision – Scourers 4', with its used scourers stacked two-deep on a white surface (I thought they looked vaguely edible, but this was clearly not a sentiment shared by the lady next to me who shuddered and said, 'Ugh – I hate them, they always look "grot"!').

Some parting words of wisdom from Tom Phillips RA: 'Waste not the remains of the day'!

Summer Exhibition 2012

In this year's Summer Exhibition, some of the smaller works have been collected and hung in a 'wave' to give them 'rhythm' and 'energy'. Visitors are encouraged to follow the 'flow', and I do – although I eventually drift off on a slipstream to explore some of the larger works as well. Here are my top three picks for this year, in reverse order:

3.  TQ 31949 05471 (charcoal on Bristol board)
     Peter Marsh

Marsh's charcoal drawing depicts a street half obscured in darkness. Its houses, brooding and silent, seem derelict; yet in the centre of the piece is what appears to be a spreading tree. The curious sense of foreboding evoked by the work is reinforced by its enigmatic title – a Torquay postcode followed by an incomplete OS reference? Unlikely...

2.  Andvord Bay, Antarctica (oil on wood panel)
     Frances Walker

Walker's triptych is visually arresting, its size conveying something of the sheer scale and elemental expanse of Antarctica. In the background broods the base of a snowy mountain, its peaks reflected in the occluded surface of the icy waters in the foreground. Although the peaks disappear into cloud in part of the triptych, in another is a dazzling patch of sky.

1.  Flood (blue pencil with black and white aquacry and aluminium)
     Shirazeh Houshiary

Blue seems to be the theme this year, as I move from Walker's frozen blue-and-white landscape to Houshiary's mesmerising blue-and-grey canvas, its patterned surface lined as if with ripples. Towards the top of the work, a black inky spot appears to be dissolving – or perhaps it is meant to be a vortex appearing out of the deep. The work carries a hefty price tag of £300,000, making it perhaps the most expensive work on sale at the Exhibition.

Honourable mention to Matthew Darbyshire for his tongue-in-cheek 'Untitled Homeware No. 13', a slightly kitsch yellow flock Buddha draped in a blue Union Jack; and to Lucy Glendinning for 'Feather Child I', a fascinating (and slightly disturbing) work of lifelike sleeping child fledged in down.

Lucian Freud Portraits

'What do I ask of a painting?' Freud once mused.  'I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.'

Freud's portraits bear testimony to all of these qualities. 

The exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery is not a memorial exhibition, as Sandy Nairne, director of the gallery, is at pains to point out. It had been planned with the artist as far back as 2006, before Freud's death aged 88 last year. Gathered together are 130 of Freud's works, from his early portraits in the 1940s and 50s through to his final canvas. The shift in styles in the late 1950s and 60s, towards his distinctive impasto realism, is particularly noticeable.

There is something about Freud's nudes that I find unsettling. 'Naked Girl Asleep II', for example, presents us with a recumbent figure in seemingly innocent slumber, but for the perspective which has us staring up her crotch; while in 'Naked Man with Rat' we find a pensive, reclining man, whose legs are splayed to bare his genitals. 

One of the best-known works in the exhibition, however, has to be 'Benefits Supervisor Sleeping' (pictured above), which fetched £17.2 million when it was sold in 2008 – then the highest price paid for a work by a living artist. The portrait is one of several that Freud painted of Sue Tilley ('Big Sue'), and Freud had this to say of her: 'She is, in her way, very feminine and, as she says, luckily she's got a sensible gene. Initially, being aware of all kinds of spectacular things to do with her size, like amazing craters and things one's never seen before, my eye was naturally drawn round to the sores and chafes made by weight and heat....'

Freud's last work, 'Portrait of the Hound', is a large unfinished canvas of David Dawson (Freud's assistant, model and friend) and his whippet Eli. Dawson, propped up on one elbow and cradling his knee with the other, gazes up at us; while a half-painted, sleek, fawn-and-white whippet lies next to him, staring mutely ahead.

Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World

The artefacts displayed in the exhibition at the British Museum are from four sites in northern Afghanistan:

• Tepe Fullol, a Bronze Age settlement;
• Ai Khanum, a Hellenistic city founded by one Alexander’s generals;
• Begram, summer capital of the Kushan Empire; and
• Tillya Tepe, a nomadic burial mound.

It is strange to think that these are a legacy from two thousand years ago: what the vagaries of fate and chance and – latterly, the courage of a small group of curators – have preserved for us. The exhibition guide aptly refers to them as 'surviving treasures' from the National Museum of Afghanistan. Treasures that have escaped the clumsy, clutching grasp of looters, and the destructive zeal of cultural vandals, and that speak so eloquently of an antique land that was once so very different to what it is now.

Amongst the many delightful objects on display are a set of buxom ivory maidens; miniature bronzes; glassware from the Mediterranean; and ornate gold jewellery.

A parting thought, from the inscribed fragments of a Greco-Bactrian funerary monument:

         'As a child, learn good manners.
          As a young man, learn to control your passions.
          In middle age, be just.
          In old age, give good advice.
          Then die, without regret.'

Giuseppe De Nittis: La Modernité Elégante

A pleasant discovery at the Petit Palais today: an exhibition dedicated to Giuseppe De Nittis, a contemporary of Manet and Degas, in whose artworks Jules Claretie found 'un accent de modernité élégante qu'on n'avait pas eu, avant lui, à un tel degré'.

Here is an extract from the exhibition notes:
"Peintre de la vie moderne, De Nittis s'intéresse à la vie des boulevards, des Tuileries et aux courses hippiques d’Auteuil ou de Longchamp, attentif à noter les toilettes et les modes de l'élégance parisienne. C'est un paysagiste sensible, aussi habile à traduire les contrastes lumineux de son pays natal que les ciels brumeux d'Ile de France, ou les brouillards londoniens."

But it is perhaps as a painter of women that I find De Nittis excels himself: a pale curve of neck, a bare shoulder in the lamplight, the languid gaze of Léontine, his young, doe-eyed wife… In these canvases, the exhibition notes explain, De Nittis 'fait entrer le spectateur dans l’intimité féminine et crée une forte sensation de mystère'.

In Effet de Neige / Effetto di Neve (pictured above), a young woman sits contemplating the Parisian snowscape around her. Goncourt thought the work an 'extraordinaire symphonie de la blancheur', but the blinding whiteness is merely a backdrop: it is the sombre profiles of the subjects that stand out. The dress and folded brolly of the lady are black – as are the silhouette of the two birds that flit through the middle of the canvas: their pairing emphasising her solitude, their flight her stillness.

In Rêverie (en écoutant le piano) / Pensierosa (ascoltando il pianoforte), we encounter another young woman, again in profile and dressed in black – this time in a dim, sumptuous interior with a pink lampshade on a shelf and a bouquet of flowers behind her. An air of solitude and melancholy pervades the piece, and the night that enfolds the scene mutes the delicate melody that holds her in its thrall, leaving us with a picture of a pensive stillness suffused with a myriad private thoughts.

Summer Exhibition 2010

'Fifteen grand, that pink one up there,' said the lady, pursing her lips.
'We've seen better,' said her male companion.

As ever, this year's Summer Exhibition is exhilaratingly eclectic, with something to cater for all comers and all tastes. Picking three favourites out of the thousands of entries is never easy, but here nevertheless are my choices for this year, in reverse order:

3.  Departure (archival digital print)
     Güler Ates

A veiled woman in a striking blue dress ascends a flight of white stairs, bent forward in an attitude of haste. Ates's composition is dynamic and enigmatic. Why the urgency? Where is she going? Why is she headed upstairs if she is leaving? The picture is devoid of clues, and all that we have is a glimpse of a pregnant moment, of bustle reduced to an eerie stillness.

2.  Last Snow Sixhills (etching)
     Melvyn Petterson

Petterson's monochrome etching is of a hill silhouetted in the slicing rain, with a wide muddy lane dominating much of the foreground. There is something bleak but beautiful in the wet, windswept landscape, and the tyre tracks in the mud seem to emphasise the lonely desolation of the scene.

1.  Acceptance (video installation)
     Bill Viola

It's been a while since I've encountered Viola's work but 'Acceptance', his submission for this year's Summer Exhibition, reminded me of how quietly compelling it can be. The short film, shot in black and white, depicts a naked, middle-aged woman with cropped hair stepping out of the darkness into a light space where water starts to pour over her. It is clear from her frown and silent gasps that the experience is not pleasurable. For a few moments the flow ceases, and a fleeting smile of relief spreads across her face, but the flow soon starts again and her distress returns. 'It's drenching her,' comments Ann Christopher on the piece, 'and she doesn't have much choice. But there are religious undertones: it's a kind of filmed late baptism.' There were also more sinister parallels, I thought, of shaven-headed women being sent to 'showers' against their will.

Honourable mention to David Mach for 'Silver Streak', his sculpture of a chest-thumping gorilla made from metal coat hangers, which drew appreciative cries from the younger public ('Wow cool - look at his face!'); Ruth Dupre for her glass and wood entry, 'Butchery', with its four vitreous slabs of meat oozing off the sides of a table into black, bulbous drops of putrefaction; and Chris Coekin's giclée print 'The Altogether #2' depicting four workmen in dark overalls, right hands extended in cross-handshakes while their left hands clutch their tools of trade.

Neues Grünes Gewölbe

As with the historical Green Vault, the new Green Vault contains an embarrassment of riches. Having missed the 'Moor with Emerald Slab' in the historical vault, I decide to make a beeline for Dinglinger's works.

There is no doubt that Johann Melchior Dinglinger was a jeweller and master craftsman of the highest order. His 'Golden Coffee Service' – a centrepiece in silver, gold and enamel – comprises 45 vessels encrusted with 5,500 diamonds elaborately arranged on a pyramidal étagère. The work is an exuberance of exotic shapes and colours, with intertwined snakes, salamanders and frogs decorating the coffee pot perched on the apex. Augustus was so delighted with the creation he reputedly paid 50,000 thalers for it – almost equivalent to the cost of building Moritzburg castle.

'The Throne of the Grand Mogul Aureng-Zeb' is another of Dinglinger's masterpieces. A contemporary of Augustus, Aurangzeb held the world monopoly on diamonds and had his own gold mines. According to the audioguide, Aurangzeb was 'viewed by European rulers as the quintessential oriental potentate, embodying absolute power and infinite wealth'. Occupying an area of nearly one metre square, Dinglinger's display is made up of over 130 bejewelled enamel figures, all of which can be freely moved, and over 5,000 diamonds and precious stones. Aurangzeb himself is seated on a red cushion in the centre of a golden pavillion, surveying the scene from a haughty angle. It took Dinglinger and his brothers seven years to complete the work, for which they were paid the princely sum of almost 60,000 thalers.

Other notable objets d'art in the new Green Vault include an ivory frigate by Jacob Zeller, with its delicate ivory mainsails and streaming pennants and rigging of gold wire; Dinglinger's Apis altar, with its focus on the ancient Egyptian Osiris myth of death and resurrection; and the colossal Dresden green diamond, the most valuable diamond in the entire jewel collection of the Green Vault.

Porzellansammlung

It was Böttger the failed alchemist who, together with von Tschirnhaus, would eventually succeed in producing the white porcelain so desired by Augustus the Strong, using a mixture of Colditz clay, alabaster and quartz. Europe could now manufacture the 'white gold' it had hitherto imported from the Far East and, in 1710, the Porzellan-Manufaktur Meissen started production from the security of Albrechtsburg castle.

Not that that would wholly cure Augustus of his porzellankrankheit. In the spring of 1717, the year in which Köhler and Mehlhorn would succeed in producing a formula for a cobalt underglaze blue, Augustus exchanged 600 cavalrymen for 150-odd porcelain vessels from Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia, including the infamous 'dragoon vases'.

In addition to these and other exquisite Chinese and Japanese pieces, the collection also houses various delightful pieces of Meissen manufacture: animal sculptures (including a couple of Kirchner rhinoceroses with horns on their backs as well as their noses, a Kändler peacock, a monkey with a snuffbox, and two Bolognese dogs, wide-eyed and snarling); delicate little figurines (the characters of the commedia dell'arte were particularly appealing to Kändler, who saw them as 'both gallant and ribald at the same time'); and large elaborate centrepieces.

Historisches Grünes Gewölbe

No more than a hundred visitors are admitted at any one time to the historical Green Vault. Behind the airlock that separates the vault from the rest of the Residenzschloß, Augustus' sumptuous treasury and personal collection of objets d'art still stands, largely intact, having survived the Allied bombing of Dresden by being spirited away to the Königstein Fortress. The collection was subsequently confiscated by the Soviet Union at the end of the war, but was restored to East Germany in 1958.

Reconstructed to reflect Pöppelmann's late Baroque layout and design, the historical Green Vault comprises nine rooms – four (each increasing in detail and complexity) leading up to the Pretiosensaal, the great hall of precious objects, and four leading back away from it:

1. the Bernsteinkabinett, which showcases the Electors' collection of amber (or 'Baltic gold'), harvested from the sea;
2. the Elfenbeinzimmer, with its exquisite collection of lathe-turned and carved ivory;
3. the Weißsilberzimmer, with its nautilus goblets, mother-of-pearl basins and serpentine objects, all within a 'brilliant vermillion' setting;
4. the Silbervergoldete Zimmer, with its collection of figurative drinking vessels in a green setting;
5. the Pretiosensaal, described by the audioguide as 'the first climax of the tour' and the largest of the rooms, formerly the privy custody of the Saxon Electors;
6. the Wappenzimmer, which once housed the automaton of a female bust known as 'the Oracle';
7. the Juwelenzimmer, described by the audioguide as the 'absolute climax' of the historical Green Vault, and housing a 'breath-taking' and 'exuberant' collection of jewels and other treasures;
8. the Bronzenzimmer; and
9. the Raum der Renaissancebronzen.

I manage to miss Dinglinger and Permoser's 'Moor with Emerald Slab', one of the main works in the collection, so a return visit is clearly in order!

Christen Købke: Danish Master of Light

The exhibition in the Sunley Room of the National Gallery is a small one, featuring just 48 of Købke's works – but then Købke was never a particularly prolific artist, nor one of great renown. By all accounts, he led a quiet and modest life which – with the exception of a trip to Italy – was rooted in and around Copenhagen, and was happiest painting the people and places he knew best (or where, in the words of the audioguide, 'bonds of love and affection tied him to his chosen motifs'). Not that his style was in any way simple or naïf; Købke's 'sophisticated handling of composition, colour and, above all, light' would, after all, subsequently distinguish him as one of the greatest painters of the Danish Golden Age.

It is Købke's 'View of Dosseringen near the Sortedam Lake looking towards Nørrebro' (pictured above) which the critics rightly alight on as one of his most arresting works, and which, for me, embodies the quiet – almost meditative – charm of Købke's art. Painted just before he departed for Italy, it depicts a 'low-key, underplayed narrative' of leave-taking or arrival, bathed in a 'static, poetic light'. There is a sense of enigma about it. 'We see no faces, read no emotions, barely sense the body language of the participants,' comments the audioguide, 'but the simplest things are rendered beautiful: the soft, radiant light; the fragile shape of the little jetty; and the humble vegetation on the banks, painted with botanical accuracy'.

J. W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite

You can't miss her ripe, pubescent pout. Here, in her manifold guises, is the Waterhouse woman. Or, rather, the Waterhouse girl – for it was the promise of womanhood that really intrigued Waterhouse. In all my years of admiring his art and aesthetic, it never occurred to me that there might be something borderline transgressive about his obsession with beautiful young women, but then I suppose I never had the benefit of various Waterhouse experts to instruct my eye.

Among the first expressions of Waterhouse's interest in adolescent females is the Martyrdom of St Eulalia, which depicts (in the words of the audioguide) 'an adolescent, semi-naked girl' who 'lies before us at a dramatically foreshortened angle'. As Peter Trippi, art historian and Waterhouse biographer, explains, St Eulalia was Waterhouse's 'breakthrough picture'. It was not only large and much noticed at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (resulting in Waterhouse being elected as an associate of the Royal Academy - although presumably not for presenting us with 'what might be considered an eroticised body for our viewing pleasure'), but it also 'summarised in many ways his desire to take an obscure subject and make it absolutely unforgettable'.

It is, however, in St Cecelia (pictured above) that, according to Robert Upstone, curator of modern British art at the Tate, we get the 'full fulfilment' of the Waterhouse girl. 'There is a subtle eroticism to the way in which we look at this very beautiful woman who is sleeping. We are allowed to gaze upon her because she cannot see us looking at her, but there is also something unattainable about her. She is other-worldly, she is in a strange dreaming state, but she also hovers in this ambiguous state between childhood and adolescence and full adulthood.'

In terms of popularity, however, both are trumped by the Lady of Shalott – who is neither semi-naked nor somnolent - and the Tate apparently sells more postcards of this than of any other painting in its collection.

The Unguarded Moment

"As a photographer, I am sustained by the rhythms of everyday life: the routines of herding and fishing; the chanting of prayers and the hawking of wares. Where do humans sleep? How do we feed ourselves? How do we keep warm? For me, documenting the infinitely varied ways we meet these fundamental human needs has proven to be a profound journey indeed.

The sequence of images that follows is not tied to specific events or cultures, but is instead suggestive of the vast tapestry of human experience and my chance encounters with silhouette and shadow, water and light, spire and sky. In this exhibition, I wanted to create for the audience [sic] a sense of beauty and wonder I'm confronted with during my travels when the shock of the strange rubs against the delight of the familiar.

These frictions - between past and present, the sacred and the profane, the domestic and the exotic - invigorate me. My impulse is to share them, to draw a circle of stillness around them so they can touch and inspire others.

[...]

In the end, I can't imagine another way of living. My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport. Here are the results of this restless curiosity - a selection of those precious, unguarded moments I was fortunate enough to witness."

- Steve McCurry
Introduction to the Unguarded Moment
A photographic exhibition at the Asian Civilisations Museum

It was good to find McCurry's portrait of Sharbat Gula, the 'Afghan Girl' (pictured above), in the exhibition. I remember that arresting gaze - those extraordinary eyes, so startlingly green - staring out at me from the cover of a back issue of a National Geographic magazine, which I used to read as a schoolboy. A haunting image that has the power still to mesmerise.

Summer Exhibition 2009

'What a load of tat!' grumbled an old curmudgeon a little too loudly.
On display, of course, was the usual mixed bag of works: some witty, some serious; some cheery, some bleak; some executed with great skill and panache, and others, well, less evidently so. If there is one thing about the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, it's that it caters to every taste!

Here are my top three favourites from this year's exhibition, in reverse order:

3.  Bird 2 (photograph)
     Elizabeth Zeschin

Zeschin's work is a sepia photograph of a dead sparrow, head convulsed to one side, little claws curled, and wings half-splayed. Its feathers are beautiful still, their fine, intricate structure clearly visible - a small but potent reminder that there is sometimes a strange and solemn sweetness in death.

2.  Sunday Morning (oil on board)
     Marion Pritchard

Pritchard's 'Sunday Morning' is a quiet, intimate picture of two men on a sofa in a simple living room, heads buried in the paper (one reading the main news section of the Observer, and the other the sports). There is a delightful domesticity about the scene. The two are casually dressed, and the sunlight that spills in from the window conveys a sense of warmth and laziness. Who are they? Were they brothers? Lovers? Father and son? There are no clues - it doesn't matter. Nor is there any sense of what else the day might bring. All that matters is that moment of shared repose. Two men reading silently in the morning sunshine - a small, mundane moment rendered sublime by the artist.

1.  Saint Bartholomew, Exquisite Pain (silver)
     Damien Hirst

The highlight and undisputed masterpiece of this year's exhibition, for me, was Hirst's gleaming silver statue of St Bartholomew, scalpel upraised in triumph and flayed skin draped like a trophy over his right arm. In his left hand is a large and fearsome pair of scissors, and at his feet lie an array of surgical implements. Macabre yet compelling, the almost life-sized sculpture (in the words of the display note) 'exposes the full anatomical complexity of the figure's muscular structure'.

Honourable mention to Meg Dutton for her etching and watercolour, 'Mosques', a vibrant jumble of domes and arches and latticed windows strongly evocative of the exotic east; and to Natalia Calvocoressi for her untitled photograph of a child in a red dress in a muted room scattered with dead leaves, staring up with intriguing intensity at the photographer.

Shah 'Abbas: The Remaking of Iran

My first encounter with Safavid architecture was in the Persia court of the Ibn Battuta mall in Dubai, where I had nursed a coffee under an ersatz dome modelled on the Shaykh Lutfallah Mosque in Isfahan. Here at the Shah 'Abbas exhibition, I would re-encounter that famous dome in a small gallery flanked by high screens, onto which images of the Shah's architectural legacy were projected: not just the Shaykh Lutfallah Mosque, but also the Shah Mosque in Isfahan, the Shrine of Shaykh Safi in Ardabil, and the Shrine of Imam Riza in Mashhad.

Magnificent monuments apart, the other enduring legacy of Shah 'Abbas was the establishment of Shi'a Islam as the state religion of Iran, although this wasn't without its difficulties. As Karen Armstrong, comparative religion specialist and trustee of the British Museum, explains over the audioguide: 'Politics is a religious matter for Muslims far more than it is for Christians. Jesus said, "My Kingdom is not of this world." The Qu'ran says, "You must create a just society." So, therefore, the state of society reflects the state of Islam.' Yet, 'how do we accommodate Sufis in a burgeoning, developing, evolving Shi'i state? Even though Shi'ism began as a mystical movement, once it becomes Establishment, you can't have people making extreme claims about total justice, total love and total goodness, or else you are not even going to associate with them in government – this is not viable. And so there are clashes….'

Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism

Non-objective art, the audioguide helpfully explains, is 'an impersonal kind of abstract art with no recognised subject, story or emotion'; and non-objective artists, declared Rodchenko, 'are the only innovators of this earth, who play with inventiveness like jugglers play with balls.' I decide I am prepared to be educated and entertained by abstract inventiveness - or, indeed, inventive abstraction - and find myself drawn to a dark canvas.

Rodchenko's 'Black on Black' appears to have foreshadowed Rothko's 'black-form' paintings half a century later. Margarita Tupitsyn, the curator of the exhibition, comes on the audioguide to explain how it 'emphasise [sic] colour black as a complex colour, rather than just a mechanical colour'. The audioguide goes on to talk of 'textures appearing within the blacks' although, thankfully, it doesn't go so far as to describe the painting as 'luminous' (that solecism was reserved by the Tate for one of Rothko's black-on-black paintings in a previous exhibition).

I suppose the whole idea of submitting single-colour canvasses (or, indeed, a blank canvas) was clever before it became clichéd. Rodchenko's triptych, 'Pure Red Colour, Pure Yellow Colour, Pure Blue Colour', is a case in point. Three blocks of primary colour, which he displayed at the 5 x 5 = 25 exhibition in Moscow in 1921 under the bold assertion: 'I reduced painting to its logical conclusion. [...] It is over. Basic colours. Every plane is a plane and there is to be no representation.'

As with all pronouncements of the kind (the end of art, the end of history, the end of boom and bust), it proved to be wide of the mark. Fashion is a fickle mistress, and the Constructivist movement would subsequently be deemed subversive and disbanded, to be replaced by a Socialist realism which - in a final ironic twist - would usher a return to the 'bourgeois' representational art which the Constructivists so maligned.

Le Corbusier - The Art of Architecture (A Post-Script)

"The Barbican art gallery has just launched its major spring show, devoted to the architecture of Le Corbusier. The many vigorous reactions, for and against, have reopened all the powerful arguments about the legacy of modernism and about Le Corbusier’s influence on buildings you either love or loathe.

One thing is certain: this exhibition is in the right place. The Barbican Centre, which opened in 1982 after years of planning, was designed by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, who were directly inspired by Le Corbusier’s vision for utopian living. The Barbican’s high-density urban housing, linked by high walkways away from street level, was a quixotic enterprise at the time, and has often been criticised since. But now it is recognised as an iconic, unique undertaking (“There is nothing quite like the Barbican in all British architecture,” says Pevsner). [...] In fact the whole centre is surely a superb example of a form which has spawned too many inadequate imitations. Le Corbusier shouldn’t be blamed for all the awful, substandard copies of his ideas, any more than Rachmaninov can be blamed for all those slushy film scores derived from bad imitations of his music."

- Sir Nicholas Kenyon
The Diary, FT Weekend edition, March 7/March 8 2009
(http://http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/cf2e22e2-09dc-11de-add8-0000779fd2ac.html)

Le Corbusier - The Art of Architecture

'Une auto est une machine pour rouler.
Un avion est une machine pour voler.
Une maison est une machine à habiter.'
- Architecture d'aujourd'hui (1930)
I must confess to having mixed views about Le Corbusier. There is something about the spareness of his designs - zen, almost, in their simplicity: full of clean lines, free façades and ribbon windows - which appeals to my sense of order. At the same time, I can't help feeling a disturbing sense of sterility at the heart of them. Here are spaces, you feel, where laughter never quite rings true and is to be dissipated, quickly and clinically; and where memories of the hearth are discouraged as too much clutter.

In what might have been a manifesto for the Barratt boxes of our age, Le Corbusier wrote in l'Esprit Nouveau: 'Il faut construire en série pour pouvoir se loger. [...] Construire en série, c'est atteindre le prix acceptable. C'est aussi affronter le problème du plan de l'appartement: c'est fixer les données de ce plan; c'est commencer la réorganisation indispensable de l'économie domestique.'

Simplified forms and standardisation. The house as a machine for living. It occurs to me, sauntering through the exhibition, that my problem with Le Corbusier is that I don't fundamentally believe in either. I believe in living spaces which are just that: living. The best domestic spaces I've encountered have always had a certain unique 'lived in' quality, like a teenager's bedroom writ large, perhaps - slightly messy, but always full of its own quirky character.

In the background, a group of grungy young architecture students is being told off. 'Please don't rest your sketchbooks next to the original models. I believe one of my colleagues has already spoken to you about this.' Indeed. Tear up your sketchbooks and start again! I sneak a peek at their sullen faces as they gather up their materials and imagine that some of them might, one day, do better.

Calico Textile Museum - Ahmedabad

'Come, follow!' says our guide, striding ahead with a flick of her sari, and we bustle along behind, following the swaying pigtail. There is much to see – no time for stragglers!

Set in lush and profuse gardens dotted with dovecotes and fishponds, the Calico Textile Museum is a welcome sight for a visitor recently arrived from the dusty, arid wastes of Arabia. The Museum, unsurprisingly, has a vast collection of Indian textiles, fabrics and costumes, most of which are swathed in plastic wrap to protect them from the heat and humidity. As something of a Gujarati V&A, however, it also houses a far more diverse and eclectic collection than its name might suggest.

We stop before an old painting celebrating the arrival of the monsoon rains. 'Look at the maidens, how their skirts are blowing with joy! Even the cows are leaving the shepherd and wagging their tails!' It's not just a celebratory painting, however. In between the mango trees, in the centre of the picture, is what at first glance looks like a shower of petals. Study it closely, and you begin to see the outline of a figure. 'Can you see the Lord Krishna? It is because we are not pure that we cannot see.' Ah. We pause before another devotional painting in the Jain gallery. 'Their mantra is rim. Hear the vibration…,' she says, stirring the air with a finger to illustrate. 'It is the vibration which awakens the energy. And then the energy will say, "Why have you awakened me?" And we can tell our complicated problems and get a simple solution. This is a miracle.'

I have come with laptop, blackberry and a pile of work in tow and, alas, not even a Jain mantra was going to solve that for me!