Since then, according to the Whitechapel curators, representational painting has lost its appeal, is past its sell-by date, and has been largely overtaken by photography and video produced by ambitious young artists. In a century dominated by digital photography (a jaw-dropping 1.8 billion images are uploaded every day) how can painting ever compete? 

For your answer, walk around Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium. Instagram selfies are so last year: this is a show articulating topical social issues with new energy, showing how the paintbrush is so much more powerful than the camera in its capacity to portray an inner psychological world, of the self, the body, race and gender. Reports of the death of figurative painting have been greatly exaggerated. Chris Ofili, Peter Doig, or Luc Tuymans, to name but a few established figurative painters, are not exactly languishing in obscurity, despite the ubiquitousness of the photography or conceptual art installations that continue to bemuse most gallery visitors.

Curatorial headline-grabbing aside, Radical Figures deserves attention. The Whitechapel’s director, Iwona Blazwick, says it highlights 10 of the “most exciting artists working in figurative painting today”. In stark contrast with the 1981 Royal Academy show, seven of the painters are women and four are artists of colour. The choice is inevitably subjective: who is to say there would not be 10 completely different “exciting” artists chosen at another venue? Well, the more the merrier. This is a truly enthralling vibrant display of young talent.

“Tarifa” (2001) by Daniel Richter (courtesy of Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, London)

The dialogue with art history is genuine. Tarifa (2001), by the German Daniel Richter, evokes the notion of the sublime and the terror of dramas at sea, referencing Theodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa and Turner’s The Shipwreck. Painted at the time when night vision technology started to be used by the military and the police, it is a harrowing and alarmingly prescient image showing a small inflatable raft tossed in a dark sea, overloaded with refugees huddling in fear.

Nicole Eisenman’s Brooklyn Biergarten II (2008), painted at the height of the 2008 crash, shows artists, hipsters and businessmen drowning their sorrows, echoing Édouard Manet’s masterpiece of Parisian bourgeois entertainment, Music in the Tuileries (1862); her Progress, Real and Imagined (2006), meanwhile, has clear references to Pieter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch.

But painters have always engaged in visual conversations with their predecessors. Turner was, after all, known as the “British Claude”.

Right panel of “Progress, Real and Imagined” (2006) by Nicole Eisenman (courtesy of Ringier AG/Sammlung Ringier, Switzerland)

Kenyan-born Michael Armitage uses social media videos as a source for his subjects. #mydressmychoice (2015) is taken from an incident in 2014 in which a woman was assaulted and stripped by a group of men while waiting for a bus in Nairobi. The attackers accused the victim, who wore a miniskirt, of “tempting” them with “indecent” clothing. The attack was captured on a video that was posted on YouTube and went viral. Thousands took to the streets in uproar, under the hashtag #MyDressMyChoice.

In this work, the pose of the woman is a direct reference to Diego Velàzquez’s Rokeby Venus, the mirror replaced by the “male gaze” of the attackers’ shoes. Armitage tells me that the  fascination lies in the conflation of beauty with something truly horrible and violent. “Painting is still and silent, so it gives us more time to reflect on the full horrors of what this scene depicts”. Precisely because it consists of recognisable images articulated through paint, figurative work, Armitage claims, unlike abstraction or conceptual art, is a far more powerful way of engaging and reflecting life.

This reinvigoration of figurative painting has been especially championed among black artists, such as the British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s enigmatic portraits of imagined black subjects (a retrospective of her work was scheduled to be at Tate Britain from May 20 to August 31; the Tate galleries are now closed until at least June 1), and the Chicago-based Kerry James Marshall. In both cases it is figurative painting that lends greater potency to the representation of issues of identity and racial stereotyping.

Kehinde Wiley is a young African-American painter who is quite literally changing the faces of portraiture with his pulsating and political depictions of black men and women, ranging from young people he meets on the street (a process he calls “streetcasting”) to rap artists, and even Barack Obama, whose 2018 portrait now hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. Wiley has made his name with hyper-realistic, brightly coloured portraits, often with dramatic botanical backdrops. He challenges viewers’ preconceptions of people of colour and brings them into museums and galleries where they have, up to now, been largely excluded. His works are represented in every major museum in the United States.

His portraits give power to those without it, turning the privileged and elitist identity of traditional portraiture— the “field of power”—on its head.

Installation view of “Portrait of Melissa Thompson” by Kehinde Wiley. (© Kehinde Wiley, 2020. Courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Photography by Nicola Tree)

Wiley’s latest venture is a collaboration with the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow in London. Long inspired by the floral motifs of William Morris, he first came to know the designs while helping his mother sell bric-à-brac in South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s. In what must surely be a coup for the gallery, this is his first solo exhibition at a public institution in the UK. It is also the first time he features portraits exclusively of women, all of whom he met last summer in Dalston. Kehinde Wiley: The Yellow Wallpaper takes its name from the 1892 text “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The short story, much loved by literary theorists, is a semi-autobiographical and proto-feminist tale of a new mother confined to her bedroom after being diagnosed with “hysteria”. The room’s yellow wallpaper design takes on a monstrous life of its own, contributing to her paranoia. It is a consuming, psychological parable of the dangers of denying women their independence. In deliberate contrast, Wiley’s Dalston women break out of their yellow wallpaper like powerful warriors; they are palpably not objects of consumption for the male gaze or control.

Wiley’s work is right at home in a museum dedicated to Morris, the great socialist maverick who passionately believed that art and design could change people’s lives. These monumental East End women are immortalised in a Grand Manner style in an artform previously reserved for royalty, aristocratic landowners or simply the very rich and famous. Museums can no longer afford to ignore or exclude culturally the people who live their lives outside their doors. Wiley’s portraits address centuries of inequality and lack of representation with scintillating and empowering images that turn the genre on its head.

Installation view of “Portrait of Dorinda Essah” by Kehinde Wiley. (© Kehinde Wiley, 2020. Courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Photography by Nicola Tree)

“Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium” was at the  Whitechapel Gallery, London, scheduled to run until May 10. “Kehinde Wiley: The Yellow Wallpaper” was at the William Morris Gallery, scheduled to run until May 25. Both galleries are now closed until further notice

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Louise Baring’s new book, Lartigue: The Boy and the Belle Époque, details a golden age as seen through the lens of an unusual photographer. Young Jacques captured the dawn of the 20th century as a time of japes and escapades and the innocent pursuit of the new. But for more than half a century this joyous body of work languished in a bundle of family albums. His story is one of privilege and obscurity, of a buried vision and a late resurrection.

Lartigue was born in 1894, into an haute bourgeoisie bubble. His father, Henri, was a successful banker—and enthusiastic balloonist—who provided a cossetted life of fun, access and opportunity for his sons. “I have plenty of money,” said Henri. “My children should learn how to spend it.” Jacques was given a chunky wooden plate camera when he was seven and a catalogue of models followed—Gaumont Block-Notes, Kodak Brownie, Klapp Takyr—each more advanced than the last. The boy was provided with a darkroom and developing chemicals, and a steady stream of subjects drawn from the comings and goings at their hôtel particulier in Paris.

Simone Roussel, Rouzat, 1913, by Jacques Henri Lartigue © 2020 Ministère de la Culture–France/AAJ HL

Baring has a penchant for such glamour: her previous books have delved into the high life and elegant works of the French photographer, painter and poet Dora Maar and the English fashion photographer Norman Parkinson. But in Lartigue she has a subject who is both elite and elegiac, whose fledgling talent was extraordinary but unrecognised when it emerged. It is on that period—between the turn of the century and the outbreak of the First World War—that she concentrates.

After providing a whistle-stop biography, Baring looks at young Jacques’s four pillars of interest: speed, travel, family and society. Sometimes all four elements overlapped in a single frame. “The subject always finds me,” Lartigue noted. “I am only the spectator. I don’t run after it.” It was unnecessary. Thanks, he said, to his tennis player’s eye, he had mastered the art of the instantanés: images of action frozen in motion.

At the family’s estate in the Auvergne he took pictures of family members, guests and servants as they somersaulted into swimming pools, fell off go-karts and leapt over chairs. When his older brother Zissou built a homemade glider, using sheets borrowed from the mansion’s laundry room, Jacques was on hand to capture the moment the wind lifted him off the ground.

His most famous photographs show a world shifting up a gear. He came of age in the first decade of the 20th century, and witnessed and photographed many of its spectacles: the pioneering flights of Louis Blériot, competitors hurtling down the avenues of Picardie during the French Grand Prix and the rising drama of the first Coupe Aéronautique Gordon Bennett gas balloon race (during which Charles Rolls, co-founder of Rolls-Royce, got lost and came down near Hull). One remarkable photograph, taken at a skijoring competition in Chamonix in 1913, fixes the moment a man in a dashing Homburg hurtles across the snow-flats towed by a galloping horse.

The French Grand Prix, Circuit de Dieppe, Normandy, 1912, by Jacques Henri Lartigue © 2020 Ministère de la Culture–France/AAJ HL

His compositions record the playful and emboldened but they are also part of the game: skiers, skaters and cyclists act up for the camera at a time when it was still a novelty. He also focused on the great and good as they pottered around the Bois de Boulogne tipping their hats to each other. The latest fashions impressed and amused him, the men with their canes, the women—invariably photographed from behind—in their buttressed frocks and plumed headwear.

His ideal prey, he said, would stand out among the strollers “like a golden pheasant in a hen coop”. In addition to photographing the haut monde, he drew them in detailed fashion studies. In his teenage years he exhibited great skill as a draughtsman, producing sketches and watercolours of flamboyant orange and green outfits. In his mathematics exercise book, he dashed off a drawing of a woman shrouded in a fine lace veil, her face obliterating his scribbled sums and fractions.

But Lartigue’s work is also interesting for what it doesn’t show. The Belle Époque was not belle for everyone. His photographs do not show the colonial subjects who bankrolled the joie de vivre. This is a photographic microclimate. The Lartigue household included a valet, cook, butler, tutor and private secretary, all of whom were expected to throw balls, goof around and smile for the young man’s camera.

Photography has always fallen foul of snobbery and Lartigue’s legacy illustrates a Venn diagram of cultural haughtiness. It is often described as the epitome of a democratic medium which implies that anyone can make art from it (not true) and that painting, an autocratic medium, one assumes, is of an inherently higher value (equally absurd). Even the term “snapshot” suggests a lack of consideration. But Lartigue’s understanding of composition, perspective and momentum could rival the Futurists at their easels.

He was caught between two judgments: his photographs were seen as hobby shots while his social position meant he couldn’t make photography his profession. It was no job for a gentleman. The irony is that in middle age he took up painting, in the post-Impressionist vein: canvases that are today overshadowed by his photographs.

“Anna la Pradvina, avenue du Bois de Boulogne, 1911”, by Jacques Henri Lartigue, © 2020 Ministère de la Culture – France/AAJ

Perhaps his most obvious British counterpart would be Cecil Beaton, snapper of the tweedy and gowned residents of stately homes and Knightsbridge apartments. Both photographers ploughed a gilded field. “He contrived nothing,” Beaton wrote of his French contemporary. “It is this utter straightforwardness that gives his work an abiding quality.” No one could spike a compliment quite like Beaton. Jealousy may have played a role. While Beaton was something of a castle creeper, Lartigue owned the chateau. And, according to one of his contemporaries, Beaton could barely work the shutter, but even as a child Lartigue was technically adept—he recorded apertures and light readings like other boys noted football scores.

War brought an end to the idyll. Many of the aviators, divers, drivers and tobogganists pictured in Baring’s book were destined for the trenches. Lartigue spent the war as a military chauffeur in Paris but friends and cousins died at the front. “His profound faith in his right to happiness served as a bright shield against the increasingly chaotic world outside,” Baring writes, emphasising that the boy never really grew up.

Lartigue married three times, giving his wives juvenile nicknames such as Bibi and Coco. Baring’s selection of quotes suggest that he used the present tense when he wrote a memoir of his early years. As an adult he tried his hand at writing and commercial illustration for couture houses, as well as oil painting, but recognition as a photographer, his great obsession, continued to elude him.

It was the Americans who recognised his genius. In the mid-1960s the portrait photographer Richard Avedon, having been introduced to his work by curators at MoMA in New York, helped rescue him from obscurity. A MoMA show was followed by a book, Diary of a Century (1970), edited by Avedon. And so the amateur finally entered the canon, just as he turned 70.

Lartigue took some 280,000 pictures, starting in the time of Kitchener and Toulouse-Lautrec and ending eight decades later in the era of Madonna and Microsoft. He died in 1986, aged 92. In his dotage, snowy-haired but still impish, he welcomed journalists to his home on the Riviera where he waxed lyrical about the dreamy days of his youth. He recollected, with plenty of nostalgic flourishes, the dazzling endeavours of a lost age. “I want to stop time,” he said. “As a boy I already had a passion for preserving the fleeting images of life.” The good life, at least.   

“Lartigue: The Boy and the Belle Époque” by Louise Baring is published by Thames & Hudson, £29.95

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The Ghent Altarpiece has long been viewed as one of the most important works of art in history, primarily because of van Eyck’s trailblazing use of oil and pigments. He may not have invented oil painting, as the 16th-century art historian Giorgio Vasari suggests (the technique had been around for at least two centuries), but he was certainly “the alchemist” who established its magical potential. According to the curators, he perfected the use of oil paint by expertly adding substances to quicken the drying process. Multiple layers could then be applied, resulting in greater depth and texture. His “optical revolution” was to create glossy prismatic colours and glittering highlights, achieving what E.H. Gombrich called “miracles of accuracy”. No other artist had ever done this before.

The most famous section of the Altarpiece, The Adoration of the Lamb, is now back on view. The muddy overpainting and varnishes of the 16th century are gone, to reveal the work as van Eyck would have intended, pulsating with colours almost humming with electrical charge. The restoration has already caused a stir, with some—mostly on social media—suggesting that the alarmingly humanoid face of the lamb is somehow inappropriate. But that is the whole point. We are meant to be alarmed. This is no demure sheep; this is Christ, as the sacrificial Lamb of God, blood spurting from his heart into a chalice, looking out defiantly with what can only be human eyes.

Van Eyck’s uncanny realism would have propelled his 15th-century viewers into unquestioning faith: seeing is believing. The contemporary Belgian artist Luc Tuymans says van Eyck took things even further: his genius was to create powerful, believable images of the world while working under “the cloak of religion”. His religious painting was so hyper-real, it leaves almost no room for God. He signs his work Als Ich Can: the “Ich” is a pun on “Eyck”—apparently more or less pronounced the same. The artist is in one sense coming across as a humble Christian servant, but he is also telling us “I’ve done as best as I can . . . as only I can”.

The Ghent Altarpiece consists of 24 separate pieces with 12 different panels on view, depending on whether the altar is open or closed. The real treat of this exhibition is that it brings us nose-to-nose with eight of these side panels, which until now could only be seen behind bullet-proof glass, in the chilly dark chapel at St Bavo’s. This is as close to an exclusive experience as you will ever get: not since the man himself painted them, has anyone had the chance to scrutinise such crystalline religious and naturalistic imagery.

Outer panels of the closed altarpiece, c.1432, by Jan and Hubert van Eyck, (Saint Bavo’s Cathedral, Ghent. © www.lukasweb.be—Art in Flanders)

Also on show in the exhibition are the two practically life-sized panels depicting Adam and Eve. Adam, with his barely concealed soft downy pubic hair, is depicted with his foreshortened foot jutting out of the frame, connecting his space with ours and producing an intimacy powerful enough to make the viewer blush. We can greet him, touch him and embrace his naked vulnerability.

Van Eyck, born in about 1390, probably trained as a miniaturist, painting tiny yet very precise images in illuminated manuscripts. Strands of hair, eyelashes, and folds of fabric are all created in microscopic exactitude. As you stare at the face of the goldsmith Jan de Leeuw, you cannot help being fascinated by his face stubble. Each hair follicle is individually painted, probably with a single-hair brush: five o’clock shadow circa 1436. Who would have thought it could ever be so hypnotic? Look even closer and you can see a window pane reflected in his eye.

“Portrait of Jan de Leeuw”, 1436, by Jan van Eyck (Kunsthistorisches Museum Wenen, Gemäldegalerie)

Van Eyck painted from life in what the curators describe as “inclusive vision”: he studied the soil and the air and everything in-between. He spent much of his career working in the court of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, at a time when Flanders was the cultural powerhouse of northwest Europe, and attracted the best artisans. He understood buildings like an architect, observed fabrics like a weaver, studied plants like a botanist (so far 75 plant species have been identified in the lower section of the Ghent Altarpiece), and painted jewels like a goldsmith: these were the contemporaries he knew and learned from in the cosmopolitan Burgundian court.

Some 50 years before Leonardo, van Eyck captured the natural with clarity and precision. The snow-laden clouds in the two versions of St Francis Receiving the Stigmata (both painted in about 1435-40) are meteorologically accurate; geologists have identified distinct geological strata in the rocks, and palaeontologists have identified fossils—even if van Eyck had no idea what these strange forms might have signified. The curators ram this home by comparing his paintings of St Francis with a picture of the same subject painted five years earlier by Fra Angelico. I leave you to make up your own mind.

Erwin Panofsky compared van Eyck’s style to “infinitesimal calculus”; a “technique so ineffably minute that the number of details comprised by the total form approaches infinity”. And beyond, one might say. He certainly had a great knowledge of science and theology, and, crucially, optics. Although there is no documented proof, it is hard not to conclude that he must have had the use of glasses and mirrors to achieve such miniscule details, many of which are imperceptible without a magnifying glass. His was indeed an optical revolution, and this exhibition offers truly a once in a lifetime opportunity to observe such artistic ingenuity. Get thee to Ghent!   

“Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata”, 1440, by Jan van Eyck (Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection, 1917. Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art)

“Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution” is at the Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent, until April 30

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“Photographers should follow their own judgement and not the fads and dictates of others,” Bill Brandt wrote in 1948. However, in Bill Brandt/Henry Moore, an inspired exhibition pairing at The Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire, we find the photographer’s enthusiasms reflected in the work of one of Britain’s greatest sculptors.

Brandt and Moore were contemporaries with similar aesthetics but wildly different backgrounds. Brandt was born in Hamburg in 1904, yet, following a period of Freudian analysis in Vienna, disowned his German origins and reinvented himself as an English gentleman. Moore was the son of a Yorkshire miner, born in 1898. The two were in tune, however, in their shared fascination for biomorphic forms.

The Wakefield exhibition shows how the pair created reversals of each other’s work. Brandt became famous for nudes that resembled geological shapes, while Moore turned bronze, wood and marble into bulbous torsos, heads and limbs.

In Britain, Brandt initially garnered a reputation as an ethnographer, with noir-inspired series on the bustle of Billingsgate Market, the coke-choked lives of Durham coalminers and, most notably, people sheltering in the London Underground during the Blitz. “The blackout was absolutely, fantastically, beautiful,” he recalled. His status changed in the late 1940s with his first major solo show, at MoMA in New York. Martina Droth from the Yale Center for British Art, who has curated the Wakefield exhibition, notes how Brandt was swiftly recognised as an artist in America. “But in Britain there wasn’t a MoMA to adopt him.”

Henry Moore, Flint Torso, 1978, Charcoal, gouache, collaged photograph, Photo: David Rudkin, Courtesy The Henry Moore Foundation

Bill Brandt, East Sussex, 1963, color transparency, Bill Brandt Archive Ltd., © Bill Brandt/Bill Brandt Archive Ltd.

Brandt believed that anything went in the pursuit of the perfect picture. And he considered the darkroom process part of the creative act; using the enlarger as an editing tool he manipulated his images, cropping and retouching them and heightening atmosphere to create his signature chiaroscuro. His prints are as dense as granite.

Henry Moore is not a figure one immediately associates with photography but, like Brandt, he recognised its power and flexibility. The sculptor kept a tight control over the photographic representation of his maquettes and monumental works. He also used photographs on his outdoor projects, exploring the seasonal changes in light and helping to shape his public image as a hands-on chiseller.

Moore sat for society snappers such as Cecil Beaton, Lord Snowden and Norman Parkinson (and Brandt photographed him in his studio repeatedly from the 1940s through to the 1970s) but he also shot extensively himself using a series of Leicas and Hasselblads. He processed and printed at home and disseminated the results through catalogues, magazines and books. And for a quarter of a century he employed a personal photographer. 

Brandt’s and Moore’s work was modern in the way that Ted Hughes’ poetry and the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were modern: with one eye on the zeitgeist and the other on the country’s pagan past. They referenced the changing mores of the post-war period and the potency of myths and monoliths.

“Where Stands Britain?,” Picture Post, April 19, 1947, cover, Yale Center for British Art, Friends of British Art, original copyright: Picture Post, text © 2019 Reach PLC, © Bill
Brandt/Bill Brandt Archive Ltd.

The cutting edge of the ancient is palpable in Brandt’s pared-back 1947 study of Stonehenge. Taken during the depths of a winter that brought Britain to a standstill, it is both specific and abstract, a monochrome barcode made up of sky, stone and snow which featured on the cover of Picture Post (right). “The way he made that picture is all choice,” observes Droth. “It’s not a documentary picture. That’s his raw material and then he turns it into something that he wants to evoke.”

More idiosyncratic subject matter appears in the book which accompanies the exhibition. This resurrects Brandt’s forgotten “assemblages”, his 1970s collages of beachcombed debris, compositions of starfish, coral and feathers that were boxed in Perspex and photographed. It was a late labour of love that verged on the sculptural.

“Fifteen”, by Bill Brandt, 1971, a collage of beachcombed debris in a Plexiglas box, can be seen in “Bill Brandt/Henry Moore” at The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire, from February 7 (© Bill Brandt Archive Ltd, London. Photograph by Jon Stokes)

His most famous series, however, remain his nudes. In the wake of the war he captured unsettling images of women spread-eagled and distorted in the mansion flats of Hampstead and Mayfair (perhaps unsurprisingly, he was a great admirer of Hitchcock). And, on the beaches of Sussex and Normandy, he produced wide-angle shots of hips, shoulders and ears which appear like giant pebbles, cliffs and rock-pools. These silver prints are sinister, not sexy; they feature carriage clocks and moths, shingle and seaweed. They are hardly the stuff of Pirelli calendars.

One of Brandt’s London nudes features in Breaking Away, a selling exhibition at the Richard Nagy Gallery on New Bond Street. Organised by the American photo-dealer Michael Shapiro, it features some 50 Modern masterpieces by an international roll call of photographers, although the selection is weighted towards the Americans. Among the works on view, dating from the 1920s to the 1950s, are masterpieces by Ansel Adams, Robert Frank, Berenice Abbott, Imogen Cunningham and Irving Penn.

Bill Brandt, Nude, East Sussex Coast. Gelatin silver print, 1960 Bill Brandt Archive, London, © Bill Brandt / Bill Brandt Archive Ltd. Photograph by Richard Caspole

The show’s title, Shapiro explains, refers to the “radical stance” these photographers took against traditional photography. “The early Modernists were emphatic about the fact that the camera could make pictures unlike any other medium.” Shapiro shows us images of migrant workers, animal bones, dunes, garage doors and cellos.

Abstracted eroticism was universally popular. Like Brandt, Detroit-born Harry Callahan treated the body as a landscape. In Eleanor: (nude from rear) he turned the contours of his wife’s thighs into a spindly tree-like form, with the same love of line that flowed through his pictures of reeds and weeds. And, over in California, Edward Weston cropped his lover’s head out of a portrait, creating a nude that is all bust and elbows, angles and arches, and no character. Whether this is objectification or adoration is open to interpretation.

Nude (Miriam Lerner), 1925, Photograph by Edward Weston, All Rights Reserved ©1981 Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents. Courtesy of Michael Shapiro

But, in general, the Americans kept their powder dry. “In my eyes the Europeans were more experimental,” Shapiro observes. He cites the rayographs and photograms, both “pushing the limits” of Man Ray—an American turned Parisian—and the Bauhaus antics of László Moholy-Nagy.

One of Shapiro’s Man Ray prints, a daring 1930s image of his model and muse Lee Miller, highlights the cultural difference between the continents. “She is in sort of S&M stuff. She’s got this leash around her neck or something,” Shapiro explains. “I mean who was doing that in the States? Sadly, we’re kind of a conservative country.”

There was no harking back to prehistory in American photography. But at the turn of the 20th century pioneers like Alfred Steiglitz and Edward Steichen were still charting romantic waters. “They had at least a few toes in the Pictorialist period,” Shapiro maintains. “And that was about imitating Impressionist painting.”

As the decades passed things became more inventive. Ansel Adams injected storm clouds and sharp shadows into his images of the American West while others were preoccupied with the elevation of objects. Shapiro cites a Paul Strand shot of a cine-camera taken in 1922. “He’s taking pictures of his movie camera. And he photographed it like one would photograph architecture. It’s this bold, geometric, in-your-face statement of an otherwise ordinary machine.”

Paul Strand, Akeley Motion Picture Camera, 1922
© Aperture Foundation, Inc., Paul Strand Archive

The American Modernists focused on a nation making headway, framing its steaming liners, diverging railroads and towering skylines. This was the iconography of muscle-flexing. “Before that it was just a bunch of trees and gardens,” Shapiro observes. And then, of course, they photographed the fall: Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, who are all represented in Breaking Away, recorded the jarring, often absurd, juxtapositions of the Depression.

In Europe it was the First World War that was the great spur, as photographers sought a new visual language to make sense of a ruined world. Brandt and Moore would later employ that language when they focused on London during the Second World War, documenting the home front as a hive of fraught, but resilient, figures.

Seen in tandem, these exhibitions illuminate a complex transatlantic conversation. There is whimsy in Manhattan and dismay in the Dust Bowl, naked legs in Belgravia and eggshells in the home counties. It is a kaleidoscope of vintage vantage points that support Brandt’s conviction that “the young photographer must discover what really excites him visually. He must discover his own world”.

“Bill Brandt/Henry Moore” is at The Hepworth Wakefield, 7 February-31 May.

“Bill Brandt/Henry Moore”, edited by Martina Droth and Paul Messier, is published by Yale Center of British Art in association with Yale University Press, £50.

“Breaking Away: Modernism in Photography since World War I”, presented by Michael Shapiro Photographs and Richard Nagy Ltd., is at Richard Nagy Gallery, London, 6 February-27 March

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His was the art of poetical alchemy and extraordinary hallucinogenic visions. It could only ever have been misunderstood and continues to befuddle, dazzle and divide. My views were coloured by the ubiquitous poster reproductions of bearded longhaired prophets with six-packs, bluetacked onto college bedroom walls. There is something a little, dare I say, trippy about Blake, and Tate Britain’s latest show reveals an artist who fearlessly eschewed convention in favour of a seemingly boundless capacity to invent.

The most comprehensive exploration of the artist for a generation includes more than 340 works: paintings, drawings and prints, and illuminated books, as well as contributions from his contemporaries. In an unfashionable yet welcome chronological layout, the curators trace the life of Blake the poet, the painter, the engraver, and the Londoner, born in 1757, the son of a Soho hosier, who died 70 years later in squalid cramped rooms off the Strand.

His was truly revolutionary art, working against the backdrop of the social and political convulsions of the American and French Revolutions and the European wars which followed. In his particular and eccentric way, he projected the hopes and fears of his age.

Forget those posters. Throughout the exhibition one is reminded that most of his works are palm-sized. A magnifying glass helps grasp the fury, zeal and terror that fill his vibrant illuminated manuscripts. The intimacy draws us into Blake’s world; his other-worldly figures begin to make sense in our world and its division, hypocrisy, faithlessness and faithfulness. Blake plumbs our depths, the worst and the best.

The exhibition brings together the highlights of Tate’s collection with many of his most famous pieces from other British collections along with some rarely seen international loans. It also provides a fascinating new focus on the significant role played by his wife Catherine in printing his designs, colouring his prints, looking after the household and finances and, according to one friend, singing “sweetly” to him.

The highlight, halfway through the exhibition, is a room showing his enigmatic cycle of 12 so-called “Large Colour Prints”, including Newton and Nebuchadnezzar, commissioned by Thomas Butts, a civil servant whose main job was to
ensure the army had sufficient uniforms, but who had a sideline as a coal merchant and ran a girls’ boarding school with his wife. Picture the scene: Mr and Mrs Butts and the visual equivalent of heavy metal on the walls of their modest Soho house.

Blake depicts Isaac Newton both as a man of science and a tyrannical figure, the architect of a clockwork universe, which Blake found so repellent. Newton’s scientific laws measured our world and therefore restricted humanity. His “science” produced the miseries of the Industrial Revolution and the “dark satanic mills” of Blake’s most famous poem, Jerusalem. Yet Blake’s image has been reclaimed as a universal symbol of knowledge, appearing on the covers of science textbooks. Eduardo Paolozzi recreated it as a sculpture in 1995 to grace the forecourt of the British Library. Is this Blake’s ironic version of the perfect man, classical rippling muscles bursting from his marbled torso, responsible for all the ills of 18th-century society?

Hanging next to Newton in the exhibition is the bedraggled leonine King Nebuchadnezzar, driven mad and forced to live like a wild animal as a punishment for excessive pride. Perhaps these two breathtaking images were designed as a pair: Nebuchadnezzar a slave to emotional weakness, Newton a slave to Reason.

Around 1788 Blake invented a new form of printing in colour, combining text and image, painter and poet. He described it as his “infernal” method, which he claimed he had learnt from the ghost of his dead brother Robert. So his art came as a sort of added bonus to his verses neither of which gave him establishment kudos. He earned what little he did as an engraver, and sold his art to a small coterie of friends and supporters who were seduced by his fantastical, and for the time, risqué images. The earliest owners of Blake’s illuminated books included a number of rare book collectors, some of whom were dubbed “The Lunatics”. Another owner of Blake books, Isaac Disraeli, the father of the future prime minster, Benjamin, described how his guests would “disport” themselves with Blake’s books “beneath the lighted Argand lamp of his drawing room” delighting in his engraved images of “angels, devils, giants, dwarves, saints, sinners, senators and chimney sweeps.” As T.S. Eliot later wrote in 1921, Blake was “a wild poet for the super-cultivated”.

The exhibition ends with one of his most powerful images, The Ancient of Days (right, 1827), a figure from his imagination, Urizen, the man who measures the world at the moment of creation. Naked, bearded and sinuous, the old man leans out from the sun with vast compasses; a grim scientist measuring the world at the moment of creation, measuring what can never truly be measured. This work was coloured in the last days of Blake’s life and he declared it to be the “best I have ever finished”. He died in August 1827. An obituary in the Literary Chronicle expressed the conflicted contemporary view, that he was “one of those ingenious persons . . . whose eccentricities were still more remarkable than their professional abilities”. Blake would not have cared: in 1809, following a disastrous one-man show in London, he had written that, “if a man is master of his profession, he cannot be ignorant that he is so; and if he is not employed by those who pretend to encourage art, he will employ himself, and laugh in secret at the pretences of the ignorant”.

The genius of this Tate show lies in highlighting Blake the artist, who happened to write poetry on the side. The images unravel allegorical stories, like some elaborate graphic novel. He aspired to be a British Michelangelo but instead delved inwards into a furnace-like, phantasmagoric world based on the Bible and his own poetry. His was not the art of his contemporaries such as Constable and Turner: poetical and atmospheric collaborations of clouds and sunlight on English landscapes. Blake’s oeuvre, instead, is of a man with an imagination on fire, struggling against the realities of being an artist in a commercial world and trying to make sense of social and political changes way beyond his imaginings.

“William Blake” is at Tate Britain until February 2, 2020

“THE ANCIENT OF DAYS ” courtesy of the WHITWORTH , MANCHESTER. “PORTRAIT OF WILLIAM BLAKE”, 1802, by WILLIAM BLAKE, COLLECTION Robert N. EssICK

“ALBION ROSE”  courtesy of the HUNTINGTON ART COLLECTIONS. “NEWTON ” COURTESY TATE

Above: “Albion Rose”, c.1793, opposite: “Newton”, 1795-1805, both by William Blake

The post William Blake: Method and madness appeared first on Standpoint.

In the credits of his striking new film, Never Look Away, the writer and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (best known to English-speaking audiences for his previous work, The Lives of Others, on Stasi surveillance in the former East Germany) gives thanks to Richter, now 87. The film follows the career of a fictional artist, Kurt Barnert but the parallels with Richter’s life are unmistakable. (Richter initially collaborated with the script but has since disavowed the film.) Yet it beautifully conveys the healing power of Richter’s art—and the paintings featured in the film are by Andreas Schön, a former assistant of Richter’s.

Born in 1932, Richter lived through the rise of the Nazis, the Second World War and the communist occupation of the eastern zone of Germany. He entered the art academy of Dresden in 1951 at the age of 19. As an East German art student his was the world of Socialist Realism, “I was only allowed to draw,” he wrote later, “I was not allowed to paint.” He stood out as a superb draughtsman with forensic skills of observation. In 1961, before the Wall went up, he defected to the West.

A family photograph album was one of the few items Richter took with him when he fled Dresden. Some of these family snapshots provided the basis for early photo-paintings whose muted blue, brown and grey tones resemble historical photographs: random snapshots of strangers with suitably innocuous titles—Mother and Child, Family at the Seaside. But as he became more famous, he began to reveal the biographical truths hidden in his work.

He has put together a vast inventory of visual images, Atlas, which is an ever-expanding compendium of thousands of news photos, snapshots, postcards and drawings. Atlas is his archive from which a photograph is projected onto the canvas; he traces it with a piece of charcoal and a ruler, each minute detail of the photograph is transcribed, after which he is ready to paint. While the pigment is still wet, he drags over the paint with a dry brush or sponge, blurring the outlines.

One of Richter’s earliest photo paintings is a tender black and white portrait of a teenage girl holding a baby which was first exhibited in 1965 with the unremarkable title, Mother and Child (above).

Later he renamed the painting Tante (Aunt) Marianne, and over time it emerged that the woman it depicted was his mother’s younger sister, Marianne Schoenfelder, and the baby was Richter himself aged four months. Marianne was a sensitive, beautiful girl who, by the time she was 20, had been institutionalized on an alleged diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Mental illness was a death sentence in Nazi Germany. Women like Marianne were subjected to forced sterilisation and in 1940 the government established a medical extermination programme with six execution centres equipped with gas-filled showers to murder them; a dress rehearsal for the gas chambers of the Holocaust. Marianne, however, was starved to death in 1945 and buried in a mass grave. The painting, which is alluded to in the film, is a glimpse of a moment of happiness, seen through a black chasm of history. On Richter’s website (gerhard-richter.com), where his works are categorised according to subjects such as Aeroplanes, Alpine, Candles, Clouds, and Families, Aunt Marianne comes under the heading of Death.

When Richter painted the picture, though he knew Marianne’s fate was terrible, he did not know the full details. The final twist emerged 14 years ago, dug up by an investigative author, Jurgen Schreiber, who wrote a biography of Richter in 2005. It seems that the father of Richter’s first wife, Heinrich Eufinger, was the doctor responsible for the sterilisation and euthanasia of the mentally ill—a plot twist reflected in Donnersmarck’s film.

“Woman with Umbrella”, 1964. (© Gerhard Richter)

Richter’s paintings are full of psychological tension. In 1964 Richter painted a black and white “photo” titled Woman with Umbrella (above). In one hand she carries an umbrella, with the other she covers her mouth. This “woman” is in fact Jackie Kennedy at the very moment she realises her husband, JFK, has died. By using feathery brushstrokes to blur the original image, Richter takes an instance of abject tragedy, or what the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called the decisive moment of the photograph, and creates ambiguity and mystery. The innocuous, anonymous title itself blurs our understanding of what we see: could it not be any woman? Is it grief or is it astonishment?

Richter’s blurred subjects are like ghostly traces. They conjure up the famous line from the 1960s television programme: “You are now entering the Twilight Zone.” Richter’s zone is one between reality and interpretation: the happy mother and child versus the aunt starved to death by the Nazis and her four-month-old nephew. Nothing is quite what it seems—what effect does this have on our understanding of the event portrayed?

At 8:45 am on Tuesday, September 11, 2001—a bright, cloudless morning—a hijacked commercial airliner hit the north tower of New York City’s World Trade Centre, causing destruction on a scale unprecedented on American soil. At 9.03am, a second plane hit the south tower. The magnitude of these events unfolded live in front of a stunned world. On that morning, Richter was en route to New York for the opening of a solo exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery. With the airspace over the city immediately shut down, Richter’s plane was diverted to Halifax, Nova Scotia where he had no choice but, like everyone else, to wait and to watch. Two days later, on September 13, he returned home to Cologne.

“September”, 2005. (© Gerhard Richter)

Four years later, in 2005, Richter painted a small canvas (above)depicting a horizontal blur colliding with two vertical  thrusts against the backdrop of a clear blue sky. It is an immersion in colour based on horror: its title is September. The painting features Richter’s characteristic blurring techniques to convey an almost abstract commemoration of an indelible moment in history. He depicts disintegration at the very moment when the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center, but it is done in such a way as to lend the horror a calm beauty. The abstract blurring becomes a place of refuge from the reality which was transmitted around the world. He takes a photographic portrayal of an event and quite literally rubs it better, like a mother soothing a bump on a child’s knee. Does he wipe away traces of emotion and memory or does he give us a chance to step out of mass produced photographic images into something so compelling precisely because it is blurred, imprecise and beyond our reach?

On the second floor of Tate Modern a large gallery is devoted to six huge abstract canvases by Richter. The works are known collectively as Cage, named after the American minimalist composer John Cage, whom Richter greatly admired and to whose music the artist listened to during the period he was making the paintings in 2006. They are produced by a process of smearing the thickly applied paint, which Richter calls “mechanical sweeping”, using handmade squeegee tools several metres wide. It is a technique that allows, as with much of his work, some scope for chance. These are not based on photographs. They start out as hard-edged geometrical forms and end up as shimmering surfaces that still look as if they might be images of something else. These are contemplative, immersive works, which despite their abstraction haunt us into looking for something behind the blur, a mirage hiding something real.

“I steer clear of definitions,” Richter once wrote, “I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.” His art is effective and evocative on so many levels precisely because he likes uncertainty, ambivalence and mystery. In this age of instant digital reproducibility, his works interrogate how images that seemingly portray truths—real stuff—can be wholly untrustworthy and unstable, giving painting a powerful role in the 21st century as a medium for confronting the images of
our time.

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Identity politics has sowed seeds of a bitter civil war in an iconic American art form, driving it towards cultural irrelevance and financial collapse. Against the odds, devoted fans and a few creators are struggling to establish an alternative network. How did things get so volatile?

Welcome to the inverted world of American superhero comics. In an age of blockbuster superhero movies making billions, comic sales are low and dropping. Rather than embodying aspirational qualities of bravery, self-sacrifice and fairness, today’s comic-book superheroes are weak men wrestling with toxic masculinity. Ineffectual, hapless and emotionally incontinent, they are wretched role models. Some fans deride these emasculated heroes as “beta males and cucks” (cuckolds); the descriptions are dismissive, but accurate. King’s other book Heroes in Crisis is set in a counselling centre attended by superheroes seeking treatment for stress.

On the other hand, the women are bad-ass warriors and super scientists who don’t need men—quite literally, as many of them have been converted to lesbianism. The Unstoppable Wasp featured an all-female team of self-validating young genius scientists (in a rainbow coalition of ethnicities) who also happened to be lesbian or bisexual. The characters were examples of transparent virtue signalling and demographic targeting. Shallow interchangeable characters and feeble stories failed to appeal to young girls—The Unstoppable Wasp was ignominiously pulled because of low sales.

A cohort of female young-adult authors was hired to tap fresh audiences but has instead driven away the established audience without bringing in youngsters, women and ethnic minorities. These writers do not take American superhero comics seriously. They undercut everything with humour, hence endless quips about pop culture and banter about food. Exciting adventures are replaced by slice-of-life dramas. New writers push leftist politics and fringe social attitudes: escapist adventures are problematic because they allow readers to ignore social issues; muscular men and shapely women reinforce body stereotypes, marginalising the overweight and transgender people. In an age of “positive representation”, characters are unblemished representatives of identity groups, hence the glut of perfect (and perfectly dull) characters. Characters are gender- or race-swapped to undermine supposed stereotypes. There’s a Korean-American Hulk (Amadeus Cho, in The Totally Awesome Hulk) and a teenage black girl Iron Man (Ironheart).

When fans complained about bizarre story choices, lazy art and drastic alteration to established characters, they were called bigots and smeared as Nazis not just by other fans but also by creators. The comics industry, which has always had diverse creators and characters, was castigated as a white patriarchy by newcomers ignorant of its history. Experienced popular artists who are Republican voters (Mitch Breitweiser, Jon Malin) and traditional Christians (Doug TenNapel) have been unofficially blacklisted by social influencers and industry insiders. Artist Ethan van Sciver experienced harassment, stalking and intrusion into his private life. There is a climate of fear as a handful of professionals and a few hundred political activists use social media to intimidate creators, fans and staff into support or silence. The specialist press runs a sombre roll-call of comic-book shops, which are practically the sole sales outlets, closing because they are unable to sell politically-correct comics to readers in search of escapist entertainment. My book Culture War details how the American superhero industry has been damaged by entryists, who enter cultural production with the sole aim of using it for political goals.

A group of fans and creators rejected the politics, abuse, relentless tampering with  the canon, exploitative business practices and boring stories to form a movement called ComicsGate—the name is an echo of the earlier, similarly bitter, online culture war in the video games arena. In a consumer revolt against big publishers and aggressive creators, ComicsGaters built communities in chatrooms and comment sections. They made videos critiquing lazy creators and complicit publishers. Then they published their own books. Last year van Sciver, a veteran of the comic-book business, launched CyberFrog Bloodhoney, a book of his own characters. Building rapport with fans via videos and showing them artwork in progress, he raised more than $800,000 on the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo. When Richard Meyer wanted to publish the action comic Jawbreakers, he struck a deal with independent publisher Antarctic Press. But  within 24  hours it was off, allegedly after a major writer, Mark Waid, contacted Antarctic Press and interfered – with the result  that Meyer is now suing Waid for damages.

Earlier this year, activists’ spite reached dangerous levels. Small publisher Alterna Comics has stayed out of the ComicsGate controversy, steadfastly committed to published comics with a minimum of politics, but it has been viewed as sympathetic to ComicsGate.

On February 13, someone contacted police and falsely stated that Peter Simeti (owner of Alterna) had a gun and was a danger to others—an illegal practice called “swatting”. During an online video chat about comics, Simeti’s home was raided by a police SWAT team. In non-ComicsGate cases, swatting has become a tactic to intimidate people and has led to accidental shootings and at least one killing by police. (Swatting was later used against a prominent anti-ComicsGater.)

Ultimately, readers will accept diverse characters, but only if they care about them. For that to happen, creators need to care about stories and characters. Sadly, cultural entryists’ disdain for both genre and readership may yet destroy American superhero comics. If there is a future, it lies in ComicsGate.

The post Comics plight no laughing matter appeared first on Standpoint.

Morris was not the sole originator of this trend, but she was its most explicit voice. Her campaign has been effective and in the last few years single shows of female artists have become the norm. In 2016 Georgia O’Keeffe received top billing at Tate Modern. Last year it was Joan Jonas and Anni Albers, while elsewhere, Jenny Saville, Frida Kahlo and Tacita Dean were among other women honoured. This year, beside the Tate shows of Dorothea Tanning, Natalia Goncharova and Dora Maar, there are major exhibitions featuring Lee Krasner—the Abstract Expressionist who is better known as Mrs Jackson Pollock (Barbican); the role-playing photographer Cindy Sherman (National Portrait Gallery); the Op Art doyenne Bridget Riley (Hayward Gallery); and the sinister tableaux of Paula Rego (Milton Keynes). Next year, one of the highlight London exhibitions will be the National Gallery’s Artemesia Gentileschi show.

A readjustment was overdue. For obvious reasons, the numbers of significant pre-19th-century female painters is vanishingly small: there were early practitioners such as Plautina Nelli (1524-1588), who had a major show at the Ufizzi in 2017, Sofonisba Anguissola (1532-1625), and Clara Peeters (1594-c1657), subject of the first solo exhibition of a female artist at the Prado in 2016, but they hardly represent the Renaissance’s finest flowering. Despite the 20th-century upswing in both numbers and quality, female artists are still far from achieving parity in the national collections. Even with Morris’s advocacy, only 37 per cent of the works on show at Tate Modern are by women. The National Gallery owns  2,300 pictures, of which only 24 are by women, while at the National Gallery of Scotland, women represent a little over 4 per cent of the total number shown. Across Europe and the United States as a whole, women artists account for just 3-5 per cent of important permanent collections. This comes some 50 years after the pioneering feminist art historian Linda Nochlin stirred up the whole debate about gender representation with her essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”

What ultimately stands in the way of wider acceptance of women artists is not the art institutions that have long been aware of the problem, but the market. Morris wishes the link between art and the market undone: “We really have to stop celebrating creativity depending on how it’s monetised.” A laudable aim, but an entirely unrealistic one. And it just so happens that the market values female artists at only a fraction of the men. A 2017 report by the University of Luxembourg found that works by women fetched an average of 47.6 per cent of those by men. Using the data compiled from 1.5 million auction transactions between 1970 and 2013 for 62,442 artists in 45 countries, it discovered the average transaction price for men was $48,212 while for women it was only $25,262.

There are 22 artists whose work has sold for more than $100 million and all are male. The most expensive work by a female artist doesn’t even get within touching distance—Jimson Weed/White Flower No.1 by Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) which sold for $44.4 million in 2014. This price in turn is way ahead of the next most expensive work by a female artist, $32 million for one of Louise Bourgeois’s Spider sculptures. Indeed, the combined total for the 10 most expensive female works is $165.7 million: in 2013 one of Picasso’s 1932 pictures of his young mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter sleeping, Le Rêve, sold for $166.7 million and 14 other individual works by men have sold for more.

To put this gap in a museum context, last year’s Tate Modern exhibition Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy, which featured Le Rêve, attracted 521,080 visitors while a concurrent exhibition of the American artist Joan Jonas brought in just 47,876. This discrepancy was obviously only partly to do with gender, but women barely registed in the 2018’s most popular exhibitions worldwide. Frida Kahlo’s clothes and knick-knacks at the V&A was London’s most popular female (and sole ranking) show, coming in fourth among ticketed exhibitions with 284,000 visitors, but no women appeared among the top 10 exhibitions in either New York or Paris. Indeed, the only major category of show that featured more than one woman was photography, where Lizzie Sadin at the Saatchi Gallery was the seventh most visited photography show (250,000 visitors) and Susan Meiselas at San Francisco MoMA was fifth-ranked (283,000 visitors).

It is often posited that because male buyers drive the art market and because they instinctively prefer male artists, women artists therefore underperform in sales terms. It is a supposition given weight by a recent survey which presented 2,000 respondents with computer-generated artworks that had been assigned a male or female creator: those “made” by women were ranked lower than those by men. The same gender bias does not apply, however, to gallery-goers.

Frances Morris has stated: “We’re interested in art whose value lies in excellence and provocation and fascination for the public. And, more often than not, that art is made by women.” That “more often than” should be changed to “as often as” since, as things stand, the public’s fascination remains heavily on the side of the men.

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On at least two occasions I have viewed installations by Wilkes yet I have absolutely no memory of what I saw. As an art critic, it is my job to look at art, memorise and assess it, then describe it in writing. Yet I have no visual memory of Wilkes’s art. It is as if instead of entering a gallery I had entered an operating theatre and undergone general anaesthetic. Only after checking photographs can I vaguely recall her approach, which is to make assemblages of junk and plaster casts and scatter them about display spaces. (It is an approach that was already passé when I encountered it while studying art at Goldsmiths College in the early 1990s.) In the hands of a satirist, it would be a cutting parody of banality and pretention. Yet Wilkes is representing Britain in Venice,  following in the footsteps of Moore, Hepworth, Bacon, Freud and Sutherland.   

Why should I have so thoroughly blanked on Wilkes’s art? In fact, why have I walked through many exhibitions of new art in the last decade and remembered nothing? To blame contemporary art as forgettable is not accurate. There seems to be a recent trend that is generating this amnesiac art. The YBAs (Young British Artists) who were collected and promoted by Charles Saatchi in the 1990s—and exhibited at the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997—cribbed ideas and imagery from American art of the 1970s and 1980s. Combining pre-existing art with popular culture and techniques of advertising, the YBAs produced pithy art. Little of it had worth and it was largely plagiaristic and parasitic in nature, but it was at least memorable. Like or dislike the art of Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread and the Chapman brothers, you could remember and describe it. They knew their success depending upon catching the eye and establishing a brand identity.

That blend of savviness and cynicism is almost completely (and deliberately) absent from recent British art. Without checking, name five winners of the Turner Prize over the last 15 years. Even art professionals would struggle to do that. There is a reason new art is so forgettable. Artists are skipping between fields of art: presenting films, installations, sculpture and photographs as the mood takes them. Well, Picasso also worked in many areas. Yet he developed distinctive styles. Drawings, prints, sculptures and paintings by Picasso share themes, styles and imagery. Many current artists hate the idea of developing a distinctive style and they deliberately create work as heterogeneous as possible. Why?

If you study postmodernism, the prevalent intellectual strand in higher education and the outlook that most curators of current art subscribe to, you will notice a deep and abiding fear of aesthetics. Anything that could lead viewers to assessing art by its visual qualities is antithetical to contemporary art as promoted by the Tate, Arts Council, British Council and other state organisations. There are two reasons.

First, according to postmodernists, there is a theoretical problem with judging art visually. They deny any immutable universal values which could be used to form objective standards. Postmodernists also seek to undermine hierarchies and agreed criteria of judgment because they consider any consensus to be imposition of power and unjustifiable in ethical terms. Postmodernists have an ingrained distrust of discussion that relies on assessing worth because it necessarily involves use of value hierarchies. Any form of discrimination (which is essentially informed judgment on value) is abhorrent to postmodernists. The hypocrisy and absurdity of this position is obvious: deciding that all value judgments are exclusive and discriminatory and thus invalid is in itself a value judgment.

Second, there is a self-serving motive to avoiding aesthetics. If grounds for discussion of visual appearance of art cannot be established then no one can ever criticise art in a reasonably authoritative manner. Therefore no critic, artist or even well-versed layperson can point out that an art work is inept or dull. Today’s artists are thusinsulated from criticism and intelligent assessment because the basis of all art—its visual appearance—is beyond discussion. Beauty, competence, skill and affect all become redundant measures. If viewers could sweep aside self-protective theories of art theory, they would find postmodernist art largely worthless because its makers eschew aesthetic qualities.

Young artists avoid any signature style by making conceptual art (where visual properties of art are unimportant) or have their pieces made by assistants or specialists. Many British art students have been taught to hate and fear art as a visual medium by tutors who cannot draw or paint and who believe true artists are intellectuals not craftsmen. British postmodernism has gone beyond the glib self-promotion of the YBAs and developed to a stage where art is dour, neutral, evasive and visually null. Making art unremarkable is a deliberate strategy designed to protect artists (and their supporters) from criticism.

At the most prestigious international art biennale in the world, the British pavilion will host work by an artist who makes art designed to be inconsequential, unassertive and forgettable. The selection of Wilkes embodies the sour pessimism that postmodernist curators feel towards both art and society. They consider aesthetics a parlour game played by the privileged. They hate Western culture and want to efface the very notion of exceptional individuals making contributions of beauty and insight for the benefit of everyone.

Cathy Wilkes is the perfect artist to represent Great Britain in 2019.

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The French government placed a 30-month export ban on the picture on the grounds that it was “a very important Caravaggio marker, whose history and attribution are to be fully investigated”. Neither the Louvre nor any French museum took up the offer to buy the work for €100 million and last December the export ban was lifted. The picture, cleaned, restored, rechristened the Toulouse Caravaggio and dated to 1607, will now go on sale at the Toulouse auction house of the finder, Marc Lebarbe, on June 27. There is no reserve, but bidding will start at some €30 million, and it is estimated to fetch between €100-150 million. Should the picture hit that level, it will become the second most expensive Old Master painting ever sold, after the $450 million Salvator Mundi ascribed to Leonardo. The Toulouse Caravaggio is currently on a world tour, part of a marketing drive to drum up interest, taking in London, Paris and New York.

It is a painting that has split opinion. Keith Christiansen, of the Met in New York, and Nicola Spinosa, former Director of the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, are among the scholars who claim it is a genuine work. But many other experts dispute this (including two leading British specialists I spoke to and Mina Gregori, the grande dame of Caravaggio studies). When the Louvre examined the painting, it did not rule either way on attribution (though its failure to buy has been taken as some sort of judgment) and a gathering of Caravaggio scholars at a study day for the picture at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan in 2016 failed to reach a consensus regarding the hand of the artist.

Attributions of old paintings are a curiously imprecise business. Technical examination has shown several factors that place the image at least very close to Caravaggio: it is painted on the same type of canvas used for other paintings he made in Naples while on the run from a murder charge in Rome; the paint contains substantial amounts of calcium carbonate, again characteristic of his work at the time, as were the incised lines along the limbs, again present. Importantly, the picture has pentimenti, signs of modifications overpainted by the artist, that are traditionally held to show the painter changing his mind and that therefore can’t be the work of a copyist (though even the most proficient copyist might need to make adjustments).

The clinching evidence for the Caravaggio believers, however, is documentary. On September 25, 1607, the Flemish painter Frans Pourbus wrote to the Duke of Mantua from Naples describing two “bellissimi” works by Caravaggio for sale, one of which was a Judith and Holofernes. The pictures may have been for sale in the workshop of the artists and dealers Louis Finson from Bruges and Abraham Vinck from Antwerp, who knew Caravaggio. The Duke didn’t buy the pictures because they are mentioned in Finson’s will dated 10 years later in Amsterdam in which he bequeathed his half share of them to Vinck. The first of the paintings, the Madonna of the Rosary, was bought by a consortium of artists including Rubens and Brueghel and is now in Vienna. The fate of the Judith and Holofernes is, from this point on, unknown. To complicate matters further, there is another version of the Toulouse painting made by Finson and now in Naples.

The sellers have commissioned a handsome website devoted to their picture ahead of the auction. On it they state: “The authenticity of the rediscovered work . . . is well documented.” But this is not the case. There is plenty of suggestion, but simply no indisputable evidence to prove that their picture is the one seen by Pourbus in 1607. That line in Pourbus’s letter is the key to the painting’s success at auction.

The same suggestibility was at play too during the sale of the Salvator Mundi. A vital part of the pre-sale promotion stressed that it was a painting with a royal heritage. When, after Charles I’s execution in 1649, an inventory of his goods was drawn up for sale, one item, number 49, was a “Peece of Christ done by Leonard”. From this imprecise tag a link was made to the Salvator Mundi, despite it not carrying the branded mark of the Royal Collection (a “CR”—Charles Rex—surmounted by a crown) on the back. There is, though, a painting of Christ as the saviour of the world by one of Leonardo’s followers,  Giampietrino, now in the Pushkin in Moscow, that does bear Charles’s mark. Nevertheless, when Christie’s sold the Salvator Mundi in 2017 the catalogue essay dealing with its provenance was entitled “A peece of Christ done by Leonardo” and a possible link had become a near-certainty.

Of course, the documentary links in both cases, although far from copper-bottomed, could be correct: the paintings have enough about them to suggest they might be by Leonardo and Caravaggio. Indeed, a major art historical journal apparently has a piece ready to run after the Toulouse sale explaining why its writer believes the Caravaggio to be an autograph work. There are, however, more than enough stylistic doubts about the picture and gaps in its provenance that those suggestive scrawled lines can’t bridge for the sale to be a test of the faith—as well as the purses—of would-be purchasers.

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