★★★★★: Belgium, land of beer, chocolate, charming medieval towns and cosy city breaks. If this is your idea of the diminutive Benelux nation then Léon Spilliaert is here to make you think again. Prepare to be drawn into an intoxicating world of insomniac melancholy that will forever change the way you see the home of Tintin and waffles.
★★★★☆: Works on paper can often be seen as room-filler when a gallery can’t quite muster enough ‘proper works’, paintings and sculptures, to fill their space. They are normally objects that exist primarily in the realm of art historians, tools for them to unlock the secrets of an artist’s grander works. However, in the eternal struggle to find an original angle on that godfather of modernism, Pablo Picasso, the RA have dedicated an enormous show just for his works on and using paper.
The final part of the guide, featuring St Paul's Cathedral and Blenheim Palace.
Part 2 of the guide, featuring Greenwich and works of the English baroque in Oxford
The latest development in the ongoing campaign to squeeze every last penny out of each square foot of our urban space, Façadism is on the rise across London. This now highly fashionable practice is doing nothing more than placing a mask of faux respectability over the continued butchering of our city’s architectural heritage.
★★★☆☆: 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.
A shift in thought almost unrivaled in the development of European civilisation, Romanticism spread its way through every form of culture - sometimes like a delicate mist, seeping into the psyche, other times bursting forth with volcanic vigour. Today we still live in the hangover of this revolution of thought and, with its developments incorporated into our quotidian existence, it is easy to overlook the seismic influence it had and has on the way we think, act, and create.
Morgan Haigh 