Watts Gallery: Marie Spartali Stillman, G F Watts, Evelyn de Morgan

The Enchanted Garden of Messer Arnaldo

On Sunday we made one of our occasional pilgrimages to the Watts Gallery, Compton - home to a permanent collection of works by the Victorian painter G F Watts, and a short walk from the remarkable Arts and Crafts Chapel designed by his wife Mary. G F and Mary Watts lived in Compton at a house called Limnerslease, which has been recently converted to a new space for exhibitions, conservation and educational events, and is now called The Studios. This superb space allows us to see examples of Mary's designs across a range of media. The whole complex is now known as The Artists' Village: a community of late nineteenth century artists used to gather there around the sage figure of GFW, and the project today is to recreate that spirit with rooms for an artist-in-residence, a conservation workshop and opportunities for hands-on making that the Wattses would surely have blessed. In the spirit of community, the wonderful Chapel was made by local people under Mary's direction.

The main temporary exhibition there at the time of writing is the female Pre-Raphaelite painter Marie Spartali Stillman (1844-1927) - the memorable name is formed by her Greek parentage (her father was the Greek Consul-General in London) and marriage to the American journalist William Stillman. Marie was by all accounts remarkably beautiful - when Swinburne met her, he wanted to "sit down and cry", which I suppose one should take as a compliment. We get a glimpse of her here in some photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron, posing as 'Memory, Mother of the Muses' and so forth, which I admit left me dry-eyed if somewhat intimidated by her lustrous and regal presence. Marie entered the art world as a model for the Pre-Raphaelites but also practised as a painter. Under the tutelage of Ford Madox Brown she worked in watercolour and gouache, creating rather dense-looking images which instantly say 'Pre-Raph': pallid beauties with waterfalls of hair stand before thick groves and rills depicted in loving detail. The subjects are generally still, contemplative scenes, often drawing on Italian sources: the Stillmans lived for some years in Florence and Rome, when William was stationed there as foreign correspondent. I particularly liked The Enchanted Garden of Messer Arnaldo, the climactic scene from Boccaccio's story of a lover performing an impossible task, analogous to Chaucer's Franklin's Tale. Here the contrast of Winter and Spring gardens has an undeniable charm and, while luxuriating in the historical costume and rich floral detail, we can also appreciate the rather skilful range of expressions, from the wondering guests to Arnaldo hiding a grin of smug satisfaction. Madonna Pietra degli Scrovigni captures Dante's stone-hearted lady holding a globe in which Love is imprisoned. Daringly alluding to the Mona Lisa, this image distils a Victorian sense of the poetic, characterised by sheer profusion of beautiful objects. A photo of the Wattses at home has the same aesthetic - every available surface seems to be ornamented, and the spaces are crammed with fine furniture and objects of every kind. It all seems quite suffocating to a modern sensibility, or mine at any rate, though at the time it must have felt like a  fortress against modern industrial ugliness.




Evelyn De Morgan, The Gilded Cage

Elsewhere in the main Museum is a selection of G F Watts landscapes, ranging from Egypt to the Surrey hills. These are different from the Pre-Raphaelite amassing of detail, building large sculptural blocks of colour. They do connect with his great symbolic and allegorical canvases in some respects: one late landscape, apparently inspired by a dream, gives us a pregnantly symbolic easy path down and steep one up amid some mountainous pass. I was taken by the paintings of Evelyn de Morgan, saluted by GFW as perhaps the greatest female artist ever: lingering memories of a sensuous Ariadne in Naxos, a lady trapped with a scholarly spouse in The Gilded Cage, and some satisfyingly weird later pieces, such as a group of benighted souls going through a transformative passage of redemption that has to be read from the bottom up.

The Chapel remains the crowning glory - a palace of brick and terracotta and an assembly of figures amid Celtic interlace in some esoteric symbolic scheme which one day I shall get around to studying.  The Artists' Village is one of the best days out in the south. It enshrines a deep Victorian faith in the positive powers of art and beauty, a mindset which seems light years away from modern cool, hip, ironic and sensationalist attitudes on offer today. In the Aesthetic / Symbolic / Arts and Crafts / Pre-Raphaelite world of late Victorianism a religious passion is turned towards art and art production. I liked the anecdote in the film shown in The Studio. A painting came back from some gallery damaged. A furious Mary told G F he shouldn't exhibit there again. Ah, he said, but we must not let our emotions get the better of us. Let us remember that all our pictures are merely meant to serve. Which might in its way be cooler than anything our century has come up with yet.
 

Andy Warhol

A brief but enjoyable visit to the exhibition of Warhol pieces from the Hall collection at the Ashmolean. Brevity of attention seems appropriate to work that is about - to the extent that it is 'about' anything -  a world of flashy celeb sensation, ephemeral fame, the replacement of the gaze with the glance. From my own porous memory, a few days later, what clings? Early silkscreen flowers which convey, beneath the deadpan cool of the Warhol image, an actual sense of beauty and excitement in making; a minute or two watching the various films on simultaneous display in Room 2, and being held by the scratches in the film and wavering light in Empire (1964); a huge screen print portrait of Joseph Beuys - another master of the self-image, and solemn prophetic critic of Western materialism - gazing gloomily across at the array of portraits of the once famous on the opposite wall; aleatoric creations in oxidized urine and a Rorsach image, made in some kind of nervous satirical dialogue with the Abstract Expressionism which represented a completely opposite aesthetic. Where Pollock & co. proclaimed the heroic and isolated soul of the artist taking form in unconsciously guided  paint, Warhol's works give us the deliberately vacuous maker, absorbed into the shallow anonymity of a superficial world of easy fun and brash sensation.

One might, on an astringent day, feel moved to criticise a lack of individual draughtsmanship, a reliance on facile technique, but that seems to be the point: the easily captured and reproducible image is the image of a world based on commerce and populist rhetoric, visual and verbal. Warhol could draw quite well - and did, in his fledgling days as an illustrator - but preferred to make drawn portraits by tracing photos with a thick carpenter's pencil, denying the possibilities of nuance and subtlety. In the last room, copies of kitsch religious imagery, ads and slogans (Heaven and Hell are Just one Breath Away) add up to a kind of commentary on last things, following Warhol's near-death experience when he was shot in 1968. Warhol heralded the infinite inanities of social media, self-branding, and fashion - our versions of the icons which fascinated him in the churches of his youth. The show is disconcertingly honest in holding up a mirror to our nature, turning pop images into a new iconography. It's all fun to look at, and very cool - but also one senses that coolness and facility leaves out almost everything that gives the human story any interest and dignity. It's beguilingly difficult to tell whether Warhol is providing some kind of critique of modernity or simply embodying its vulgarity. He was obsessed with money, fame and attention. Perhaps in a clever ironic way, perhaps not.  But he was certainly a voyeur (in a very literal sense, as one panel reminds us) and a valuable recorder of his age. The record that he leaves here is like a room where a party has taken place, bearing the acrid after-party taste of futility. The melancholy of the glossy polaroid snap.

Botticelli, Dante's Inferno

The Courtauld is presently exhibiting thirty of Dante's drawings illustrating scenes from Dante's Divine Comedy. Dante wrote his vision of hell, purgatory and heaven when in exile from Florence, between (approximately) 1308 and 1320. Botticelli's drawings are dated to c.1480-1495, by which time the poem was a national Florentine treasure. It is thought that Botticelli's drawings were made for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, who is also thought to have received, variously by gift or direct commission, the same artist's Pallas Athene Training a Centaur, Primavera and Birth of Venus. Fortunate fellow, though as a Medici I suppose you felt entitled to such reminders of your magnificence. In time, the Dante drawings wound up in the collection of the 12th Duke of Hamilton, who was obliged by financial distress to sell them - along with other manuscripts - to a national collection in Berlin in 1882. The Courtauld exhibition brings together drawings and manuscripts, including the sumptuous 'Hamilton Bible', in a show entitled 'Botticelli and Treasures from the Hamilton Collection'.

It is believed that Botticelli originally planned to colour the Dante illustrations, but that at an early stage in the project this scheme was abandoned. Certainly one does not regret the absence of colour in these designs, where the formal qualities of line and composition convey an overwhelmingly vivid impression of Dante's visionary experience and its moral lessons. Often multiple events crowd the same page, as in Inferno 8 (5th Circle of Hell), where Phlegyas rows souls to the underworld, Dante berates one forlorn figure clinging onto the boat, and is subsequently embraced by Virgil, who congratulates him for his virtuous outrage. Around the poet and his guide contorted souls writhe, howl and moan. In the bottom corner, the pair arrive at the city of Dis (Abandon Hope ...), to be met by a group of grinning, winged and horned devils. There is a splendid Disney-like demon smiling straight out at us from another tower. It's hard not to smile back, and to a modern eye the whole infernal scenario has a certain amusing charm. Everywhere, hands and gestures sketch emotional states like members of  the Pina Bausch dance troupe. The Inferno drawings are so crowded with detail that one can only list some of the most memorable figures: the monster Geryon, with a man's head, dragon's body and scorpion's tale; or the terrific drawing of the simonists (Inferno 19) disappearing headfirst into holes in the ground, giving us the bizarre sight of Dante lecturing the splayed legs of Pope Nicholas III. Dante does quite a lot of berating and altogether comes over as quite a bruiser, not the gentle poetic soul of romantic representations. Presiding over this theatre of cruelty - and the Inferno is an intensely mean and cruel book - is the full-page Lucifer, whose three heads crunch up the bodies of Judas and, startlingly for those who come to the story via Shakespeare, Caesar's assassins Brutus and Cassius. These conspirators annoyed Dante and other medievals for getting in the way of a stable empire under a strong ruler.


In the Purgatory drawings, souls take on more individual characteristics. The devils drift away and there is generally more space on the page. We see the proud weighed down by stones (thus they can't stand proud, another attraction of the drawings is that with a bit of help from the label they are easy to read), and the envious with their eyes sewn shut, among whom Dante receives the metaphysical light of revelation from an angel. Punishments are mirror opposites of the sins committed: thus, the slothful in life become whirling, frenzied mobs stampeding around (Purgatory 18), and gluttons are reborn as emaciated figures resisting the temptations of water and the fruit of an upside-down tree. The Divine Comedy reads as a  legal compendium, covering all possible cases: even in heaven, we meet those who broke their vows, though through no fault of their own, a strange little lawyerly subclause one feels. As Dante enters Paradise, he is accompanied by Beatrice, and the more realized worlds of Inferno and Purgatorio fade out to leave abstract designs of cosmic spheres through which the happy couple glide. There's a lovely fade-out as we leave them, tiny couples on a cloud, disappearing from mortal view.


It's funny how things overlap. I caught this exhibition in a break from the excellent National Theatre Drama Teachers Conference over the river. On the same evening, we were given tickets to Sarah Kane's Cleansed - an updated Inferno, though here the torments and cruelty are unexplained, not drawn into any comprehensible modern scheme; nor was there anything really to recreate the tension between the delicacy of the drawing and the roughness of the content that we find in Botticelli. From faith in art and God to the modern loss of these, je suppose. And the next day, I was fortunate enough to attend a presentation by 1927 theatre company. Their work seemed in the tradition of the drawings, too: 1927 combine music, actors and animation in productions which look back to silent film and early cartoons. The expressive, opened out bodies, the eyes, and the interaction between animated and real figures of their works (Golem, for example) are pure Botticelli, pure Dante. A replacement bus service from Basingstoke made the journey through various underworlds complete.

Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art

'Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art' is, as its title implies, a show with a thesis. Delacroix, Old Master of Romanticism, was also a revolutionary artist whose stylistic verve makes him a forefather of the modern movement. At the National Gallery exhibition, we see Delacroix canvases next to works by contemporaries and later artists who picked up on some aspect of the Master's work. Colour, for instance. Delacroix immersed himself in the collours of Rubens and transported this Flemish world to France, where the dominant language was the high finish and sobre harmonies enjoined by the Academy. In this context, a work like 'The Death of Sardanapalus' (1827-8, seen here in a reduced replica made by the artist himself for his own purposes) was truly revolutionary in its energetic swirls of colour, and duly reviled when it was shown at the Salon, making Delacroix, in his own rueful words, 'the abomination of painting'. Yet to a later generation, the array of sensual tones and daring decentred composition were sources of inspiration. A genealogy can be traced from Delacroix to the Impressionists to the Post-Impressionists, at each stage colour detaching itself from realistic depiction on its way to becoming a pure expressive element, the beating heart of the image, while classical composition breaks into a million fragments. As an example of this family tree, the third room argues that Delacroix revived the genre of the floral painting, which had descended into limp decorative prettiness. From his full-blooded delight in fruit and flowers 'tis but a step to the inner world figured in van Gogh's sunflowers or the dream visions of Odilon Redon. Elsewhere we can see how van Gogh recaptured from memory the colouristic schemes of the Master in a glowing Pietà. Links are made to even later artists like Kandinsky, whose formal experiments belong to a narrative in which Delacroix's journals, concerned among many other things with the theory of optics, are a central document.

I learned a great deal from this exhibition. Delacroix looks so much like the summation of old-style grand history painting that it is refreshing to consider  him as a forerunner of later schools, his freedom from tradition underpinned by tributes from Baudelaire, Cézanne and other admirers. The paintings from Africa make a sumptuous mini-display in the second room, where whirling sufis, senatorial menfolk and the lustrous 'Women of Algiers in their Apartment' display a Moroccan experience transmuted through memory into a blazing oriental world, half real half enhanced by imagination. Here was the alternative the artist sought to biblical and ancient historical scenes. Memory, indeed, is a major theme in this exhibition: like Wordsworth, Delacroix insisted on the importance of experience re-collected, and many of the paintings from Africa were executed many years after his brief trip to Morocco in 1832.
There were art-historical detective stories to remind us of the scholarly precision end of the discipline:  A might have seen this painting by B in the private collection of C when he visited X. Such links are a reminder, too, of a now vanished world of transmission and influence. When van Gogh had only a lithograph to copy, he recaptured from memory the arrangement of complementary colours he had seen in Delacroix's other works. This kind of memory must surely be rarer in the age of mechanical reproduction.
I found the argument - Delacroix as the grandfather of modernity - pretty persuasive, although the organisers themselves say that Delacroix's journals are so complex and compendious that you can use them to prove pretty much whatever you like. Put him next to Veronese and other earlier narrative painters and you'd get another story. But both can be true, of course. The visual evidence for moderns doffing their cap to Delacroix is the most compelling, the textual is rather weaker. Despite Cézanne's flamboyant remarks about the nineteenth-century master, his work does seem to be in a very different register, although his rather dotty oil sketch of D being assumed into the heavens while contemporary artists peer up at him is saying something, however wryly, about the handover of revolutionary daring. Over the show Delacroix himself almost disappears, effaced by the storm he helped to create: there is just one painting by him in the flowers room, and in the final room a single tiny copy of a ceiling mural is overwhelmed by the cultural progeny it allegedly helped to spawn. Then there is the question of quality. The great works in the Louvre cannot be lent, and so Delacroix is not represented by many of his his masterpieces here; so the fantastic array of works by the likes of Courbet, Renoir, van Gogh, Gauguin et al. are in may cases more emphatic works than the Master's and take over our attention. The van Gogh painting of olive groves is a simply stunning piece, and doesn't gain much in interest if we consider its somewhat elusive debt to Delacroix's landscape oil sketches from England.
The exhibition is continually interesting, though I confess I didn't spend much time at the film of mural projects. My favourite picture of all was a Kandinsky, on the cusp of abstraction, where the figures and horses gradually revealed themselves after a minute or two of puzzled looking (and profitable listening to the genial audioguide). The exhibition itself also revealed its value over the two hours it took to look round. After being treated to amazing representations of Rembrandt and Goya in the Sainsbury Wing there was perhaps an initial disappointment in not seeing more Delacroix here. But that would be to miss the point of this thought-provoking and stimulating exercise in comparative looking. Baudelaire described Delacroix as a volcano concealed beneath a bouquet of flowers. In this inventive and thoughtful display, we were able to trace the range and direction of that ongoing eruption.

Ashmolean, Titian to Canaletto

The Ashmolean's latest exhibition follows their recent Great British Drawings, and can be seen as a continuation of the British Museum's Italian Renaissance Drawings (2010). All serve as reminders of the fundamental importance of drawing in art, and of drawing's many purposes - drawings may be executed as studies of light, texture and form; or as experiments, or educational tools for a workshop; they may be intended as finished works to be bought by collectors, or made as studies for paintings (we see several squared up for transfer onto a larger surface). In this exhibition, the Ashmolean seeks to refute the assertion of Vasari in his Lives (1568) that the Venetians neglected drawing and started work directly with paint on canvas. This opinion was followed by other Florentine writers (despite the fact that the Uffizi housed an important collection of Venetian works on paper) and by later authorities, including Sir Joshua Reynolds. The notion perhaps has a particular attractiveness: while Vasari had an interest in contrasting the undisciplined Venetians - as he saw them - with the Florentines and their meticulous attention to disegno, there is also an undeniable appeal in the idea of Titian, Bellini and Tintoretto spontaneously creating work without painstaking mathematical preparation - it fits the picture of instinctive art, such as we associate with Shakespeare and Mozart.

Yet, as this exhibition make clear, the Venetian masters produced wonderful drawings, generally using chalk and charcoal rather than silverpoint. The first masters on display are Giovanni Bellini (active 1459 - d.1516) and Vittore Carpaccio (1460/6 - c.1525/6). Bellini's 'Portrait of a Man' (on loan from Christ Church) uses subtle tonal effects to create a finely modelled head with a real sense of character: the creases and folds in the face give it a 'lived-in' look, and the textures of hair and soft cap are superbly rendered. Carpaccio's studies of female heads are more ethereal - as befits sketches for angels in the altarpiece of the Glory of St Ursula - and use shimmering white highlights to convey the sense of streaming light. I was particualrly taken by the sadly vulnerable-looking dragon in the centre of Carpaccio's townscape with figures, 'The Triumph of St George'. This work also made clear the Venetians' profound sense of drama, with a variety of expressive and theatrical attitudes among the bystanders. Titian picked up on the sculptural and luminous qualities of these artists, using drawing to explore contour, volume, and the effects of transient light. Above all is the idea of public theatre. Everything, from the knotted muscles of an executioner's legs to the fall of cloth, is a source of drama: the 'Drapery study for the figure of St Bernardino' is a study in the expressive qualities of a garment's folds, as we look at the saint from behind. There is a free and creative use of materials: charcoal is dampened and rubbed to create subtle shading, blurring the transitions beneath a chiaroscuro effect and creating a hypnotic, flowing pattern. We see Bellini, Carpaccio and Titian using blue paper to bring out the range of tones in their subjects. Alongside these premier league names, it is instructive to learn about other Venetian artists, such as Domenico Campagnola, a specialist in Veneto landscapes where rustic fortifications and pastoral figures appear against distant hills; or Andrea Meldolla (Schiavone, c.1510-63), whose sinuous figures and sense of vivid composition are illustrated by 'Presentation in the Temple' and an unidentified female figure. Lorenzo Lotto (c.480-1556/7) creates in 'Head of a bearded man' one of the most memorable pictures in the show - a mass of soft, refined touches coalesce into a wonderfully characterful face, the textures of beard and skin immediately registering on our imagination.

In the second room, the Master is Jacopo Tintoretto (1518/19-1594), for whose practice figure drawing was of great importance. He drew from models, wax sculptures (some small models as would have existed in a workshop have been specially created), statues and as many copies of Michelangelo as he could acquire. Twisting and rippling torsos are displayed alongside vigorous copies of busts, where the emphasis is on volume and dramatic tension of light and shade. But these are not simply figurative exercises. There is, too, a strong feeling for character: the study of a bust of Vitellius evokes a stern and gloomy Roman personality.

After the brilliance of the earlier masters, the third room feels relatively flat. Later generations worked under the influence of Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese and Bellini, and the Baroque drawings do not seem to add much to the vocabulary, apart from taking it to even more spectacular operatic heights.  Yet it is valuable to learn about the teaching practice of Palma Giovane and to come upon artists such as Bernardo Strozzi and Francesco Maffei. Moving into the eighteenth century, two of the most striking images were the 'Head of a Youth' (used as the poster for the exhibition) and 'Standing Youth Seen from Behind' , both by Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (1682-1754), where the broad touches, melting forms, psychological acuity and delight in light are applied to real-life figures. Giambattista Tiepolo's 'Study of a foreshortened head' achieves an intense drama through the orientation and lighting of the subject that we saw earlier in Tintoretto. One senses in these later artists the tools of the Old Masters being exploited with delight and fresh vision.

The exhibition ends with drawings by Canaletto among other scenes of Venice, as the fading republic becomes a consumable tourist experience. It is followed by a room of visual responses by Jenny Saville, an important contemporary artist who I last saw in Oxford's Museum of Modern Art a few years ago. I found I didn't have much energy left to take in this room, though a quick survey made clear how Saville had responded to the free and confident handling of Titian, the array of postures and the dramatic potentalities of the figure on display in the Venetian works. There's an improvisatory quality, too - palimpsests of forms and lines - that convey an energy and attack which connects Saville with the rest of the show. These days we are perhaps happier to see drawing as an end in itself, and prefer the sense of being in front of a performance on paper than a polished masterpiece in paint. A drawing does not call for the same reverence as an altarpiece does; looking at a sketch with various subject, or several goes at the same subject, is rather like listening to a pianist practise before a concert - in some ways, a more intimate and rewarding experience than the final performance. I found 'Studies for the Coronation of the Virgin' by Paolo Veronese (1528-88) particularly engaging in this respect, as you see him work his way down the paper, varying the configurations of the central group and trying out gestures and attitudes of the surrounding figures. This work, too, was lent by Christ Church; many other works were lent by the Uffizi. With the Ashmolean's own holdings, this allowed an exhibition which triumphantly disproved Vasari's assertion and allowed us to enjoy, in a different light, the achievement of Venetian art. a footnote: the descriptive panels for each work were extremely well written, and an object lesson in how the terms of art, when accurately applied, can enhance our appreciation of an image.

Goya, The Portraits (National Gallery)

My last engagement with Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) was the remarkable exhibition of his drawings of witches at the Courtauld last year. Scarcely less vivid was a showing of the Disasters of War prints in Barcelona I came upon some years ago. Where shock in art is concerned this is the real thing, making the efforts of contemporary provocatieurs seem tepid at best. This familiarity (to a degree) with the dark side of this painter's universe makes me a typically modern Goya viewer, more clued up on, and responsive to, his private nightmarish word than the official commissions that earned him a living - religious paintings, tapestry design and portraits. The last of these is the subject of the latest Sainsbury Wing exhibition. The prospect of seeing room after room of portraits of the Great and the Good does not set the pulse pounding; but this exhibition maintains and rewards attention throughout with what it reveals of a remarkable time in Spanish history, and of the relentless interests of its visual record-keeper.

The great and the good have never been less stiff or more exposed. Goya's approach as a portrait artist was precisely to put aside the expectations of pomp and circumstance. He took a strong interest in the personalities of his subjects. 'The Family of the Infante Don Luis de Borbón' (1783-4) is the product not of a formal sitting but of the artist's close familiarity with the exiled prince and his entourage. Although the composition is matching itself against the great forebear Velázquez, there is something Hogarthian in the vivid sense of character and animation in the scene. The same relaxed depiction of the person behind the title comes at us again and again, never more surprisingly than in 'Charles III in Hunting Dress' (1986-8), in which the dazzlingly ugly monarch grins at us, rifle in hand - a different image altogether from the usual portrayal of a king as soldier or wrapped in the robes of state. There was a wider cultural and political point to this: Spain was catching on to the enlightened stirrings going on over the Pyrenees, and Goya was part of this brief liberalising movement in Iberian government and high society. Thus we see young aristocrats enjoying the benefits of a modern education, the Duke of Alba nonchalantly leaning on a fortepiano while leafing through a new score, and family groups where children play, relaxed mothers display fashionable frizzed hairdos and a Rousseauian contentment prevails. The brushwork is correspondingly free and bravura, lovingly capturing the folds and textures of fashionable costumes and a range of expressions in his subjects (if the self-portrait drawing is anything to go by, sitting for Goya must have been a fairly unnerving experience).

The exposure to liberalism was to be a brief one. War with France, the Revolution, a short but profound Spanish Enlightenment, the Napoleonic Empire, Wellington's defeat of Napoleon and eventualy the restoration of the Spanish throne in the figure of the ghastly autocratic Ferdinand VII provide a narrative that gives the steady flow of portraits a compelling underlying dynamic. Certain qualities in Goya transcend the warp and woof chronicle time, such as the naturalism which makes the famous portrait of the Duchess of Alba and the double portrait of Charles IV and María Luisa such a fascinating, Shakespearean examination of human character in its many layers, pomp masking vulnerability, fancy lace mantillas at once ravishingly desirable and pathetically impotent in the face of encroaching age and illness. Friends are depicted with a total commitment to honesty: the architect Juan de Villanueva is shown with uneven eyes and crooked nose, the glint in his eyes an assurance by sitter and artist alike that friendship goes beyond surface errata, and even takes cheer in the natural deformities that nature and history bestow upon us all. In their deep sense of human character, the paintings seem out of their age, most strikingly perhaps in female subjects. Gainsborough could get nowhere near the range of feelings in the portraits of women here: 'Thérèse Louise de Sureda' (1804-6) or 'The Countess of Fernán Nuñez' (1803) are examples of the directness and autonomy of Goya's lady subjects which make orthodoxies of 'the male gaze' seem quite beside the point.

Goya's in-the-headlights frankness seems not to recognise any frontier. The pompous regalia of Fernado VII's portrait succeeds in bringing out the King's dangerous and malevolent stupidity (did Fernado see this? Goya was put through exhausting tests of his loyalty to the regime, and humiliatingly paired with an inferior as official painter to the court). The extraordinary 'Self Portrait with Doctor Arrieta', showing a Goya brought back from somewhere close to the dead, and surrounded by shadowy figures - the phantasms of the black paintings, perhaps - take this unflinching honesty into the realm of self-depiction. It is this capacity for looking at faces and recording them as they really are, for seeing the person whole, that makes the exhibition more than a collection of portraits, and turns it into a vision of life that we can take as a moral lesson. Those who knew Goya in his exile in Bordeaux - old, ill, profoundly deaf - remarked on his boundless curiosity in the world around him. There's a a black crayon self-portrait, with flowing white beard as he moves on two sticks, with the simple heading 'Aun aprendo' (I'm still learning). There was certainly much to be learned - about Goya, Spain, and looking - in this exhibition curated by Xavier Bray. I found the Spanish version of the audioguide extremely helpful. Bray and other experts warn us not to 'read in' the Goya of the Black Paintings into the portrait work, much of which was produced earlier; T J Clark in the LRB isn't so sure, noting points of tension in the background and composition that suggest inner dramas at work. I'm still at the much more basic stage of feeling I've met Spanish nobles and royals of over two centuries ago and listened in on their thoughts and conversations, seen them across the grave through the alchemy of art. How much truth, how much fiction in this vision? How much faith in the eyes and hand of the Master? Aun aprendo.

Pallant House: Conscience and Conflict

Merlyn Evans, Distressed Area (1938)

The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) was an internal conflict; but it was also a crucible in which the world forces of left and right met each other, and thus a battleground for competing international ideologies. In England, we are familiar chiefly with the literary responses - Auden, Laurie Lee, George Orwell. Last year's exhibition Conscience and Conflict showed us the waves sent out through the art world by what now feels like a dry run of WWII.


The closeness of art, society and politics is made clear in a photograph in the vestibule, 'Artists painting a hoarding in Bouverie Street, London, 17 Feb 1939' (John F Stephenson). They are painting the slogan,  'Send Food to Spain'. Bouverie Street was one of the 22 hoardings made available by London County Council. Soon it was defaced by Sir Oswald Moseley's blackshirts.


During the Spanish Civil War, artists found themselves committed to a public cause, and thus to a publicly available artistic language. Art was also stepping in where politicians feared to tread: in 1936, Britain and 24 other countries signed a non-intervention agreement, terrified of the conflict escalating. France and Britain maintained an arms embargo, and the Republicans could only buy weapons from Soviet Russia, while the Fascists were supplied by Fascist Italy and Germany. Many organisations were founded to send aid to Spain, and we get a poignant sense of grass-roots activity in Clive Branson's documentary paintings: Noreen and Rosa (1940), studying a volume from the Left Book Club; Daily Worker (1939) showing a newspaper seller in Battersea and Selling the Daily Worker outside Projectile Engineering Works (1937), the point of the last being the attempt to create a feeling of solidarity among the factory workers for their Spanish comrades. Henry Rayner's drypoint etchings, There is no Peace, There is no Shelter make a more direct appeal to human compassion.


The war coincided with the Surrealist movement, which had an important exhibition in June 1936, on the eve of the conflict. One might have thought that the art of the unconscious would have little to say to, or about, the political. On the contrary, there was an intense and precise engagement. Papier-mâché masks at an anti-Chamberlain protest mark surrealism's presence on the streets. A surrealist pamphlet provides an acute analysis of the situation: 'We know that capital will not respond to socialist democracy with only constitutional means; we know that violence is not only the weapon of the proletariat; Britain's policy is implicitly pro-fascist, it freely allows Portugal to arm fascists'. Perhaps the most iconic picture today to come from this engagement is Miró's 'Aidez Espagne'. This was originally intended as the image for a one-franc postage stamp, but the French government didn't issue it. Surrealism captured, too, the monstrous and desolate, in Edward Burra's Medusa, or the faceless nuns of John Middleton's works, drawing on Jung's female archetype and at the same time pointing the finger at the Catholic Church's complicity in fascist atrocities. This theme is addressed in other works, such as André Masson's La Messe a Pampelune (1937) and John Banting's Absolution: Spanish Civil War (1937). Beyond the surrealist ambit, John Armstrong's tempera paintings of bombed-out buildings in scorched plains are more powerful for being drenched in Mediterranean colours: the light associated in art with gorgeousness and the relish for life here illuminates only a splintered emptiness.


Not all artists were sympathetic to the Republicans: the modernist Francis Rose (1909-79) was strongly pro-Nationalist. His satirical The Reds are Really Not Bad Sorts, or the Tastes of War (1936) bristles with contempt for what he must have seen as a communist menace. For Rose, at least, the right side won, and the exhibition ends with a reminder of the misery of war: Clive Branson's Hut Against Trees, Prison Camp in Spain (1938) has tremendous further impact when we learn from the label that he himself was imprisoned in Spain. Many ghosts hover over the gallery, among them John Cornford, dead at 21, and Julian Bell, volunteer ambulance driver, brother of Quentin, daughter of Vanessa, who suffered a breakdown on hearing the news of his death. Or Felicia Browne (1904-36), artist and communist, the first British volunteer to die in action, whose sketchbooks were brought back from the Front and stand as testament to the high emotions and high ideals recorded in this wonderful and revealing exhibition.