Nature Morte, Nature Vivante: Cézanne & Morandi in London

Travelling through a still, dead, January landscape to a wintery London to be met with the lively, cicada-filled warmth that radiates from the canvases of Paul Cézanne is a restorative experience. Whilst the country lies in its dormant state, still and unchanging, there is a deep joy to be found in surrounding oneself with the fluttering, flicking leaves, the sultry mistral breezes, and the quiet lapping of diminutive Mediterranean waves that Cézanne mastered in his late age. The Art Institute of Chicago had this large retrospective last year before the works were shipped to the Tate Modern where they currently constitute the winter ‘blockbuster show’ but, whilst my first intention was the review and record this major exhibition, it was a much smaller, quieter show that I saw a day later which brought a certain clarity to the particular way of seeing both artists explore.

Jean-François Millet: the Grandeur of Humility

'...Millet’s harvesters, bakers, shepherds, and farmers are massive and tactile in their form, one entirely believes in their existence and their solidity despite their individually so often being absent. His peasants look as if they have climbed down from Michelangelo’s ceiling and got back to the day job...'

Review: ‘The Making of Rodin’, Tate Modern

★★★☆☆: After more than a year of semi-solitary existence, interspersed with the occasional out-door meeting with select family and friends, the appearance of other people has become increasingly alien. And with the government mandated distance to be maintained at all times, the usual interactions of hands and arms and the close-up reading of each other's faces have become not only a distant memory but even, at times, a life threatening action. And so, it was a delight to find that my first exhibition visit out of the trap after the (hopefully) final lockdown was one filled with such humanity and tactility.

Heroic Doubt: Cezanne and The Modern Eye

Open any general survey of the art of the twentieth century and you’ll find him right there at the beginning. The Jesse at the root of the modernist tree, it all comes back to Cezanne. Without him there's no cubism, there's no fauvism, then there's no expressionism or futurism. For Picasso, Cezanne was a “mother hovering over” his work, for Matisse he was “father to us all”. Having been posthumously made both matriarch and patriarch of all modern art, it has become hard to understand Cezanne in his own terms, to strip away the retrospective epitaphs and mythos in order to discover the old man in the big Provencal house who painted only for himself. The Cezanne of those hesitant, sketchy, sun baked landscapes and quietly rotting still lives, so unassuming, yet so revolutionary.

Ashes to Ashes: Fires, Cathedrals, and Resurrections

On the 11th June 1144 Abbot Suger of the Abbey of St Denis, Paris, gathered the bishops of France for the dedication of his newly built choir and east end. This marked a sea-change in architecture, gone was the heavy solidarity of the Romanesque and in came the lightness and delicacy of the Gothic. In the years after the meeting of the bishops, many of their home cathedrals would burn down only to rise from the ashes in the new gothic style of Suger’s St Denis.

Nicolas Poussin: The Unresolved Cadence

Artists fall in and out of fashion all the time, that is the way of the canon, an artist who has been admired in equal measure from their own time to the present day is a rare thing indeed. Nicolas Poussin (1594 - 1665) is one such artist. Lorded by his contemporary Bernini as the only French artist who who really mattered, he won posthumous favour with both Ingres and Delacroix (possibly the only thing on which those two agreed), as well as Cezanne who said he only truly understood himself after spending time with a Poussin. Even the wunderkind of Modernism, Pablo Picasso, was known to copy Poussin’s works.

The Image of a King: The Wilton Diptych and Richard II

The Wilton Diptych is one of the oldest and most luxurious works in the National Gallery’s collection. This gold covered diptych was made some time between 1395 and 1399 by English or French craftsmen for King Richard II of England, it is laden with symbolic imagery connected with Richard and his divine right to rule, not just in its subject matter but also in the materials and techniques involved in its making.

Review: Gauguin’s Portraits at The National Gallery

★★★☆☆: Gauguin has been out in the cold for a while now. At this juncture in the twenty-first century, to praise a upper-middle class man who abandoned his family of six to become a painter and who proceeded to fetishise the culture of Polynesia to the point of engaging in sexual relations with minors (in western eyes) and fictionalising their society, seems counter to the direction in which the study of art has been moving.