…..and one global superstar, Björk Guðmundsdóttir.

Or simply Björk. pronounced B-Jork! with a short high-pitched bark.

But she is no longer the force she once was. Indeed she is now, frankly, tiresome. The yelping doesn’t help…..

Let me explain…..

Björk is an original, blessed with a deliciously thrilling voice. At her best she was capable of delivering songs of magnificent colouration and emotion.

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And there was always a sense of humour, a knowing wit, about her songs and performances which leavened the more self-absorbed aspects of her art-house pop music.

That time, I fear, has passed.

And at Iceland’s National Gallery - a modern airy building disguised on the outside by 19th century clapboard in the centre of super-cool Reykjavik - her tendency to take herself too seriously is visible in all its unfettered glory.

Three songs accompanied by lengthy videos are presented on a theatrical (ie they look expensive) scale.

They have a common theme - Woman.

You see, lately she has discovered the love that dare not speak its name. Yup, she’s finished with blokes (wankers) and found herself a girlfriend - a much younger model, of course, as if she was, er, an ageing male rockstar (stand aside Rod).

To tell us all about it, she’s made a graphic-y comic book video in which a series of grotesque horses morph into naked buxom women and then writhe back into horses again. Here’s a clip….

It’s all a bit Avatar-gone-mad, but not in a pleasant way, and not helped by being accompanied by a classically Björk-esque dirge of a song that swirls around but doesn’t go anyway significant. No tune. Disappointing? Perhaps.

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Björk has also been focusing her thoughts on her mother, presenting two elegiac (a quality best avoided in pop music) new songs – Ancestress and Sorrowful Soil.

Ancestress reckons with the cyclical nature of life. Set in a remote valley in Iceland, the lamentation is staged as a ritualistic procession of musicians and dancers.

But it comes across as film school psycho-myth. It is full of overwrought gesturing and bizarre poses in flowing gowns accompanied by cymbals banged for no reason (always fatal), quite a lot of smoke and mirrors (yes, literally) and whacky masks that are, frankly, silly at best, incomprehensible at worst.

Björk, also masked, looks like an orc. It’s quite off-putting.

Plus it has a seriously serious soundtrack. Not helpful.

Finally, Sorrowful Soil is a 9-part choral work – a requiem where canon-like melodies tumble amongst 3 groups of singers in a polychoral way (Björk’s description). Visually this works better, not least because of the video’s simplicity, Björk simply seated, with volcanic eruptions and activities behind her.

The song isn’t much though, another dirge-y tuneless thing that wanders about before, finally and at last, ending.

Here, instead of signalling deep emotions her songs brought to mind ham and cheese.

Anyway, the gallery was packed with Iceland’s hippest dudes and dames and we all drank beer that had been especially branded with Björk-y stickers.

Björk, you are a woman of convictions but I’d get a decent songwriter into your team and sack your artistic director (even if that means firing yourself). Better still, have a word with yourself.

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It’s hard work.

But not as difficult as you might think.

Let me explain.

We all know Iceland is the land of fire and ice, a world of bleak horizons and featureless landscapes. Mars on earth.

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It is cold - almost always. When it rains, it comes down as sleet. Or snow.

However, and rather counter-intuitively, this country of just 380,000 in a landmass the size as England is home to over 170 public swimming pools - more per head of population than anywhere else on the planet.

And over the past ten years I have set myself the challenge of swimming in every one of them.

Here is how it works. Every single little village and hamlet will have its own swimming pool, heated to around 29C, and at least two separate hot tubs at 38-41C. Often built by the locals themselves in the 1950s and 60s.

And not just pools. Each venue will have clean hot showers, a smart changing room, lockers and places for your shoes (none allowed in the changing rooms, you leave them at the door). Plus - free coffee - a thermos flask is always on hand.

These places are the hub of the community. Every day old people, mums and their toddlers, or swimming classes from the local schools come and gather in the pool. In the evening whole families come and sit, gossiping, in the hot tubs gradually boiling themselves.

The secret? Geothermal heating at virtually zero cost. Even as it is sleeting, the main pool will be warm enough to swim in, steam rising off the surfaces. And it is quite the experience swimming in warm water with your head covered in snowflakes.

I’ve been to Iceland at least a dozen times and I have taken a vow to swim in a new pool every day. So far I have clocked up about 50-odd, and last week I swam in eight more pools.

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It was as part of a trip to Akureryi and Húsavík in the far north-eastern corner of the island. Akureyri, btw, is Iceland’s second biggest city (the “Capital of the North”), and it has a population less than 20,000. Iceland is empty.

Tourism is one of Iceland’s principle industries - there is whale-watching, bird-watching, walking and pony-trekking in truly epic landscapes, some of the best fishing in the world and much more besides.

There is also much history and culture here, beautifully documented in both local museums and in the Icelandic Sagas - some of the first novels ever written.

But, and trust me on this, nothing beats swimming in a 29C pool in the middle of of a snowstorm, huge mountains filling the horizons, your body warmed by volcanic fissure activity and your head covered in snowflakes.

Recommended.

My review of my evening with Bjork follows.

Yesterday I collected her (it was a she, a young female less than six months old) from a taxidermist. She’d been stuffed.

I’d found the poor creature by the roadside, stunned after she had been hit by a passing van.

An awful moment.

It was a Saturday, early, cold, and I was running on a thousand foot peak in the Mendips just outside Wells, Somerset.

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I had crossed a windswept plateau and ran onto a fast B-road. On my way I had seen two kites wheeling into a headwind - and a kestrel hovering overhead, its wings trembling as it perfectly held position while tracking prey.

Back on the tarmac a van roared past. Delivery guy, Saturday, in a hurry.

And a hundred yards later I saw the small body, prone by the wayside.

I picked her up - surprisingly light. Not dead. Still warm, feathers downy-soft. She blinked, didn’t struggle.

I cradled her and considered what to do. The poor creature blinked again.

In the moment my biggest emotion was shame, shame and guilt for just how stupid humans can be. But I couldn’t run with her in my hands. I was four miles from Wells, four miles from a vet.

I found a hedge and laid her in it, pushing grass around her body to make a warm shelter. Maybe she would recover.

Then I ran on.

An hour later I drove past the spot and stopped. She was cold, stiff, dead.

This time I didn’t leave her. She was too beautiful to put into a hole in the ground. Instead I brought her home and put her in the freezer.

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Yesterday I picked her up from Becky Dick, a taxidermist in Gloucestershire. Go see her, she works out of her garage and it is the oddest place, full of stuffed animals, skulls, half-finished works and a cluttered bench that looks like serious work gets done on it….

And here she is, stuffed and not forgotten, memorialised, a celebration of exquisite creams, reds and browns contrasting with the fierce yellow of her eyeliners and beak. Glorious and graceful.

A new life.

But it also is a visible reminder of just how stupid, how thoughtless, how inconsiderate we are in the face of our impatient desires.

I would so much rather she were still alive.

PS The kestrel was ringed.

Becky, the taxidermist, kindly looked up the details and discovered, heart-breakingly, that she was only young, barely six months old, and female.

She was ringed by a C D Perry as age nestling, sex unknown on 29-Jun-2025 10:40:00 at Compton Dando, Bath and N. E. Somerset, England OS Map reference ST6463 accuracy 10, - co-ordinates 51deg 22min N -2deg -30min W accuracy.

Not six months old, yet already she was hunting in territory at least 15 miles away from where she was born. Incredible.

There is, I would suggest, a kind of artistic mass extinction going on whereby art that does not conform to a narrow bandwidth defined by an elitist, deeply ill-liberal group of taste-makers is downgraded to frippery and non-relevance.

A perfect example is the V&A’s small show focused on art from the Pacific, Australia and South East Asia. You should go.

It is interesting and there are some delightful pieces, like the Mughal miniature art painting below -

Or this the Papua New Guinea barkcloth ceremonial dress wear -

And this, the delightfully intricate Mithila painting from Bihar in Nepal -

And finally this, by far my favourite - two exquisite feather-and-spinefex little baskets, simple and beautiful and a blessed relief from the message-laden rest of the show.

But I was pleased to leave the show. Why the relief?

Well, the show covers an area roughly a third of the globe - there are pieces from Mongolia, Taiwan, Japan, even Pakistan as well as the Pacific Islands, South East Asia and Australia). And yet, judging by what is on display here, there no artist in this entire region that creates representational artworks or without specific political messaging.

Every picture or work presented here wrings its hands over the same issue - a protest about something.

Is it that the curators of these shows cannot find good artists who are not obsessed with the same subjects - gender, colonialism, political oppression?

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And consequently they essentially gaslight (to use the modern parlance) any artist stupid enough not to focus on those subjects?

It is a trend that were it the other way round would, I contend, be condemned as fascist.

Rising Voices is a good example of this trend. The show is at pains to demonstrate that this art is mainstream, relevant and central to the overall art conversation, and they are right, it is. Much of what is on show is interesting, well-made and in some cases rather beautiful.

But it is uncontestably true that the overwhelming focus is the same old candidates of contemporary art: gender, political oppression, colonial history, gender politics and so on.

It isn’t that gender and oppression aren’t important. It is that the curators are so obsessed with these subjects that they deliberately ignore a swathe of artists who also have universal messages, just not the prescribed ones....

And it is boring. Where’s the variety?

I recommend going because it is great to see creative work from somewhere as far from Britain as one can get. But I’d be prepared to be frustrated at the same time. Bon voyage.

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And that is why last month I spent a couple of days in Suffolk. Accompanied by charming film director and fashion icon Ian Denyer, I visited first Gainsborough’s House which is hosting an exhibition exploring how landscape paintings became realist rather than idealised; and then on to Christchurch Mansion in Ipswich, which is celebrating Constable’s (close-knit) family who were an integral part of Ipswich during the latter half of the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries.

Gainsborough’s House explores the emergence of landscape painting in Britain as led by Gainsborough (1727-88), Turner (1775-1851) and Constable (1776-1837).

It’s biggest claim is showing off Constable’s masterly The Leaping Horse (above), the final and perhaps greatest of the series of ‘six-footer’ paintings painted between 1819 and 1825. Lucian Freud described it as ‘the greatest painting in the world, and saw all the related drawings and paintings as one work of art: ‘What is so mysterious about “The Leaping Horse” - paintings, drawings - is that they all work on one another.” IE - it is quality schmutter.

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But for me the show stand-outs are the wondrous watercolours from the likes of yes, Turner, but also Alexander Cozens (1717-86), Francis Towne (1738-1816) and Thomas Girtin (1775-1802). They are all so fluid with colour and detail it seems like the images flow across the paper.

Turner’s sublime A Bridge over the Usk (1790s) - below- needs no introduction.

But work by Francis Towne, below, and John Glover, following on, merit close inspection.

They are sumptuous examples of the great art that was achieved during what is (rightly) known as the Golden Age of Watercolours. The precision, the control, the intensity of detail : these pictures reward careful examination.

Constable’s own contribution is a lush, complex landscape that echoes Classical landscape pictures done in tones of black, brown and grey.

As ever there are two support acts complimenting the headliners. Firstly, offering contemporary reflections on landscape is a David Dawson show that I didn’t care a great deal for. Dawson is highly rated but it was a bit take-it-or-leave-it for me. All nicely painted by also, kind of, so what? Here’s an example of what I mean.

And then there were two rooms of Kate Giles’ work, much more vigorous and energetic, specifically drawing on the legacy of Constable. Her pictures are modern - noisy brushstrokes, paint trowelled on, impressionism to the point of abstraction.

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But amongst the sturm und drang of her brushwork there is also distinctive features that speak of landscape and weather, and specifically, of movement.

After Gainsborough’s House, it was off to Christchurch Mansion, in Ipswich, a 45-minute drive away.

The mansion is a Tudor-era building turned museum, featuring period rooms, original furnishings, and artworks by John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough. It is set in a lovely park, saved from Victorian developers and donated to the town by the Ipswich brewing dynasty, the Cobbold family (who also stewarded Ipswich football club, created the shipping port that is Felixstowe and provided the land for Ipswich racecourse. Lager louts? I don’t think so!)

Delightfully accompanied by curator Emma Roodhouse (thank you, Emma) a tour around Christchurch Mansion was like being shown round some aristo’s slightly rundown country house. I loved it.

The exhibition is called Constable 250: A Cast of Characters and it celebrates Constable’s close-knit family. It is a low-key sort of show, with pictures of mum and dad and (handsome - John himself was, er, no oil painting) brother, and a couple of portraits that Constable painted of local friends.

The highlight is two pictures painted with love and supreme care by Constable to mark and honour the death of his beloved mother, Ann. They are a specific views of her garden from the family house windows and Constable painted the views as the family was selling the house on her death. Here’s one of them…..

It sounds morbid but not a bit of it. Rather, they are painted with such particular purpose, there is a supreme sense of calm to them that encourages a long look.

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So, eastward bound is my recommendation. There’s trains from Liverpool Street or you can go by bus - cheaper if a little more complicated. And in this, the 250th anniversesary of John Constable’s birth, what better way to explore the world that inspired his wonderful pictures? You could even stop for a pint on the way home.

Gainsborough's House:

Christchurch Mansion:

You know, for a modern building. Lots of awkward angles, straight lines and sharp edges.

Alternatively you might call it characterless and cold.

The V&A East is London’s newest culture cathedral, its’ god a pious conventionalist who hates comfortable, cosy or decorative. It is - of course - on message. No frills, no ornamentation, decoration or concessions to the bourgeoisie. Just cliffs of brick, glass and steel.

On the inside it also toes the line. Everything minimalised down to function in a way that architects and Art Council types find very satisfying.

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Cool, calm and uncontaminated with anything as gross as detail. Lines and reflections are what count here.

Quetsch over, what is the brand spanking-new V&A East actually like to visit?

Well, first you must survive the journey - it is in the badlands of east London, a place full of architecture that looked splendid when it was displayed as a 1-100 spec model but now is a windblown place that (15 years after its re-development) still doesn’t ring with the sound of children playing.

Here’s a video from the top of the building:

The V&A East is here because, well, because it fitted the demands of the time. Remember 2012, and the promise of a regenerated east London, transforming vast areas that had drifted into decay after WW2?

I used to cycle around these parts and they were rather Romantic - full of ruins, semi-ruins and badly cobbled streets. Warehouses, old factories, old canals: it was hugely atmospheric and interesting.

All that was replaced with Big Projects - the Olympic 2012 buildings mostly but also places like V&A East. And here I was, at the opening and launch press event.

The director is an old friend of mine, Gus Casely-Hayford. Charming, passionate and open, he is also the former TV presenter of a couple of series on African kingdoms (for me at BBC Four), and a man deeply committed to ensuring diversity (of a modern kind) is properly represented.

And, in a nutshell, that is what you get here.

The first two floors offer a permanent display, and the contents are nothing if not eclectic and, er, diverse.

Floor One is called Why We Make. It is a bit of a catch-all concept (everything is made with purpose, isn’t it?) where we wander from one set of objects - or stuff - to another. Individually there is plenty to enjoy - from Hull Traders (a 1957-80 radical textile manufacturer - radical textiles??) -

- to a spectacular robe worn by a Daoist priest -

- to Nigerian American artist Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of a Hackney resident (Wiley subverts European aristocratic portraiture though it isn’t clear why) -

- to the obligatory Leigh Bowery costume (with the inevitably over-sized codpiece. Talk about obsessive…see top). There is also some pottery and, well, I could go. It’s not uninteresting and there’s plenty to look at but it is all a bit, well, bit-y.

Floor Two is about design. Inevitably, because it is about design, there are some chairs on display. (What is it with conservators with chairs? And, btw, what is it about designers and their determination to produce chairs that are as uncomfortable as possible. Are they all Puritans? )

Again, across the floor as a whole the narrative line lacks creative connective tissue. Rather the concern is with highlighting diversity, gender, culture. This is all well and good but it is intellectually grey and dulls the mind. I don’t sense grip or narrative to the displays. And perhaps because the message of inclusion is so important it all fels a bit lacking in passion, emotion, obsession.

What there is, however, is quite a lot of waffle that tries hard to provide an intellectual shape to what we are shown. Here’s a good example:

But the signs quickly descend into wet me-too speak, and consequently they are generic rather than the specific.

Which brings me to the top of the building, Floor Three.

Which was a revelation, because here was a show worth coming for.

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The Music Is Black is a genuinely enjoyable, not to say funky, walk-through the story of popular music seen entirely through the lens of black musicians.

It is a terrific show, a joyful celebration of how black musicians made music that both influenced and transcended whatever was currently being made by, usually, white musicians (who often promptly adopted that same music for themselves).

From blues and early R&B to soul through to Hip Hop and rap, and including the superstar breakouts like Michael Jackson, Whitey Houston and Jimi Hendrix (and Phil Lynott, obvs), the exhibition functions as an enjoyable wander down one’s own musical recollections, whatever they are.

This is the kind of investigation into diversity that is to be applauded. It works by being specific, creatively demanding and applying a critical eye - and entertains at the same time, quite important for paying customers.

I wish the V&A East well. It is quite hard to get to and there are plenty of alternative attractions nearer the centre of town. They will need to bring their A-game to ensure it becomes a must-attend venue.

The Music Is Black

V&A East

Which may strike you as like being France’s fourth best racing driver, a bit, you know, so-so. Mediocre.

Don’t be fooled. Magi is a great painter, his pictures a mix of Van Gogh’s hyper-realism and Gauguin’s supersaturated colour palettes.

As a result, his pictures vibrate with texture and colour, delivering a form of hallucinogenic experience. Look at ‘em for too long and it’s like you dropped acid. Not that I would know.

The show is currently on at Dulwich’s Picture Gallery, a gallery that is on a bit of a roll at the moment exhibiting relatively obscure (to us) foreign artists that upon closer inspection prove to be wonderfully entertaining.

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Magi (1878-1926) was that classic thing, the tortured artist who spent his life suffering from mental ill-health, principally depression and anxiety.

However he used his condition to produce highly impactful landscapes and (slightly) weird portraits (more on that later).

Of course, his landscape paintings do speak of a troubled mind. Nobody can see the world as he does without there being, in layman’s terms, a screw loose.

Clouds that bleed pink; rivers and lakes that ooze turquoise and green; landscapes that hum with too much intensity: that’s how he saw the world around him. Hang these pictures in your monastically white living room and after a while the wall will start to wobble.

I mean, I have been to Norway and yes, it is beautiful. But no fjord water looked like that!

It’s Van Gogh on overdrive. And like the more famous Dutchman’s work, despite it being not how the rest of us see our environment, it does makes for terrific paintings.

But unusually for a tortured artist - and unlike Van Gogh - Magi did become successful in his own lifetime (this after a long period of serious artistic poverty), establishing himself as the most in-demand portraitist of his day.

Mind you, his portraits are bizarre as his landscapes. The faces are finely painted, yes, but feature over-large eyes and a skin tone that suggests cholera. Meanwhile the subject’s clothing is frequently pasted on with fat coarse strokes of paint.

It makes for striking pictures even as the sitter tends to look a little nervous, like they’re about to jump up and run away.

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Konrad Magi is a complete unknown in Britain (well, he was to me) but this exhibition makes a strong case that this lack of profile is something the exhibition has done well to alter.

Check him out. But maybe bring sunglasses….

We’re awash with solo, largely female, warblers who sing lame songs of wronged lives. Yes, they have terrific voices and incredible production values.

But despite the glamorous spectacle they present when performing they seem only able to sing if they are wearing a swimsuit. More critically, their songs are colourless and sound too much like each other.

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Of course, it is easy to sing praises for Dylan or Bowie or, if you must, Swift. But pop is an ephemeral world (rightly) and greatness is quickly forgotten. So what about we celebrate a Top Ten of Pop’s More Interesting Songwriters?

It is random - of course it is. It isn’t The Final Word - why should it be? And, it is open to debate -though you are probably wrong.

And I have chosen 12.

Here goes, and in no particular order:

Black Sabbath - (it could have been Deep Purple) - a band derided as more common than cornflakes turns out rock innovator. Ozzy Osbourne had one of rock’s great voices and Tony Iommi one of rock’s great guitarists. Between them they wrote songs that re-invented rock music. Album to get: Black Sabbath, or Paranoid (both 1970).

Kate Bush - yes, lauded as the possessor of an extraordinary voice (and entertainingly bonkers stage performance). But Bush is so much more. Producer, arranger and song-writer, her total mastery of music creation is phenomenal. A true original. Album to get: Hounds of Love

Paul Westerberg - the very definition of wayward musical genius. The key creative on America’s punk-y indie-rockers the Replacements, Westerberg’s ability to wring out a melody almost at will is unmatched in a musical genre that favours energy over tune. (Alex Chilton from Big Star being the other candidate for that!). Album to get: Suicaine Gratifaction (1999)

Carol King - pop’s most consistently overlooked singer-songwriter? She wrote plenty of bubblegum with real life and songwriting partner Gerry Goffin but it is her seven-million selling masterpiece Tapestry that defines her genius. She wrote it, she arranged it, she sang on it and she played on it - a joyful record of mood swings, uptempo and ballads, it contains four stone-cold hit classics. Album to get: Tapestry (1971)

Paddy McAloon - McAloon’s band Prefab Sprout was a pop band from the 80s but behind the bright melodies was Ivon Novello-class songwriting with sparkling, witty lyrics. Pop music that fascinated. Album to get: Andromeda Heights (1997)

Chas ‘n’ Dave - were there ever better musicians who played in a pub? Long mocked as, er, mockney, Chas ‘n’ Dave wrote witty stories of working class life to tunes heavily influenced by Jerry Lee Lewis. But behind the apparent comedy were two brilliant songwriters who understood music inside out. Album to Get: Gertcha: The EMI Years (2013)

Phil Lynott - the man behind Thin Lizzy, Lynott wrote 14 albums-worth of songs across his tragically short career (he died of drug-related pneomonia aged just 34). When not raising Hell, Lynott mixed romance and poetry into his hard-nosed rock. More importantly, he brought sex and swagger. And leather trousers. Album to get: Jail Break (1976)

Underworld - While Ric Smith weaves a tidal wave of melody through solid beats. Karl Hyde sings cryptic lyrics of urban disassociation. The combination brings an almost holy quality to their epic long songs. Nobody combines atmosphere and joy to the techno world as euphorically - Leftfield’s Neil Barnes did create the perfect techno album, Leftism (but just the one.) Album to get: Bassnodubwithmyhead (1994)

Richard Thompson - Britain’s greatest guitarist? Once of Fairport Convention where he contributed to the greatest folk album of all time, Lief and Liege, Thompson left to become a prolific solo song-writer. His songs are bitter sweet, his lyrics caustic, his voice biting but his songs are often deeply affecting and his guitar-playing always sublime. Album to get: Rumour and Sigh (1991)

John Fogerty - Fogerty was the singer, the lead guitarist, producer and song-writer for Creedence Clearwater revival. Between 1969 and 1971 CCR released five (five!) albums, each containing at least two Fogerty classics (Suzie Q; Proud Mary; Favourite Son; Bad Moon Rising: Who’ll stop the Rain etc). In 1970 CCR was the biggest album-selling band in the world. Album to get: Green River (1969)

Gene Clark - the epitome of the hidden genius in a famous band - the Byrds. (The other candidate is Dennis Wilson, in the Beach Boys - just as talented, just as hopelessly addicted to alcohol and cocaine). He wrote, probably, the Byrds best songs, he left to produce probably the finest lost classic in rock and his subsequent career knocking out classics while pissed is the finest template for lost rock souls. Album to get: No Other (1974)

Dolly Parton - easy to underestimate just how great Parton is because she is so Country and that’s shorthand for white-vulgar. But Parton wrote almost all her own material, she lived much of what she wrote about and her delivery and sharply observed lyrics puts her down as an underrated genius. Album to Get: 9-5 and Odd Jobs (1980)

Paul Weller - perhaps it is because he has been around so long. Perhaps it is because he has released so many records. Or perhaps it is because he has transformed himself at least three times. But he leaves a track record (sic) of such consistent high quality that he is Britain’s greatest living song-writer (Elvis Costello might - would! - disagree). Album to get: Wild Wood (1993)

So that’s your 12. (And yes, I know…..)

Go argue with that amongst yourselves and let me know your thoughts.

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PS I could have chosen 12 different ones….Richard Carpenter; Jeff Tweedie; Jeff Lynne (ELO); Gillian Welch; Jason Isbell; Brittany Howard; Ray Davis; Roxy Music/Brian Ferry; Bob Marley; Tears for Fears (yes!); The Cure/Robert Smith; Teenage Fanclub (all of them).

Angelica Kauffman, originally from Switzerland, was one, Élizabeth Louise Vigée le Brun, a French woman, the other.

They specialised in painting portraits for the nobs - in le Brun’s case, most famously Marie Antoinette - and they did so with such a brilliance that the (very) sexist society they inhabited was both astonished and enchanted.

Both women, but especially Kauffman, also painted classical scenes with a wit and an originality that very few could match.

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These two artists worked during the era of the French Revolution and the subsequent turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars. As a mark of their greatness they remained among the most in-demand portraitists in Europe, despite all the upheavals. They were wealthy and connected wherever they did their painting - Rome; London; Paris etc, and other great artists sought them out and admired their work.

They succeeded despite a constant struggle against the prejudices and abuses of their sex. Indeed they were always challenging the powerful ruling institutions of the arts that sought to contain them.

The author to shine new light on these women is Franny Moyle, one of Britain’s most talented art historians. Her Hans Holbein (The King’s Painter) is an industry standard, and her Turner equally regarded as a benchmark on that great artist.

In Mrs Kauffman & Madam Le Brun her abilities as an art historian haven’t failed her: the book is a great read. She weaves with great skill their individual stories together with their relationship with each other.

Moyle is also great on unpacking in detail just why some of their pictures are truly first class - tho’ sometimes in rather too much detail for my tastes.

If the book is flawed, it is in Moyle’s persistant determination to highlight the unfairness of these women’s situation as sexist victims of a patriarchal society to the extent that she mentions the issue on almost every page.

Consequently Moyle constantly references how clever, how perspicacious, how canny these two women are. These aren’t just women, they are superwomen etc etc.

And yes, I know this was an age which was fearfully rough on women, especially talented, clever women. Plenty of men behaved appallingly - jealous, peevish and patronising.

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However, once raised a few times I really don’t need telling every time. And perfection, unfortunately, is not just tiresome. It is also boring. Which is why both women come across a little on the dull side (and why Caravaggio, for example, is so appealing, even though he was a complete bastard). These apparent badass women might come across a bit more interesting if Moyle rounded their characters more?

Still, if you want to know more about these two pioneering female artists, this is the book to read. Good to see such a good turn-out at her launch the other month as well. At the very least it means a decent start to the book’s sales.

His pictures - prints, collages and paintings - are ever-present at auction. I went online and found a dozen or so examples of his work, decent prints from as little as £500.

And the Wiltshire Museum’s new show John Piper: In the South Country, has a fine range of examples of Piper’s work.

But although Piper’s life and art run right through the 20th century and he is closely associated with the likes of Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland, his reputation has never approached that of the big beasts of this world: Freud; Bacon; Hockney; Hepworth, to name some of the obvious.

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Perhaps it is because his art is a touch on the dour side. His pictures never quite ascend. They all seem a bit gloomy, a bit glum.

His colour palette doesn’t help. His go-to’s are sad browns, fading blues, thin reds, sour creams and underwhelming greens. It is an artist’s version of mid-century furniture.

As a result things look a little washed-out, hollow, transparent. A bit, well, thin.

He had a deep focus on architecture, landscape, church buildings and ruins, and his combination of modern abstraction with a new-Romantic drawing style to depict his buildings can be - quite literally - spooky.

Buildings and landscapes are rendered in a pencil-thin black outline, and washed over with thin see-thru layers of watercolours. It’s a world seen through coloured mist. Consequently there is an endless quantity of pictures like this - a slightly messy brown thing.

However there is redemption.

Piper’s long interest in abstraction is ever-present and I think it is when he mixes that abstraction with more concrete forms and block-y colourings that he does his best work - like the picture below with its much bolder use of solid colours and more forceful outlines.

Or this enjoyable picture of Wiltshire’s henges….

Or the painting at the top of this article, Approach to Fonthill, painted in 1940.

The exhibition at the Wiltshire Museum - a museum you must visit if only for its beautifully presented meso- and neolithic artefacts in the rooms below the exhibition rooms - explores Piper’s interest in Devizes itself (where the Wiltshire Museum is located) and his abiding interest in the country’s great store of pre-historic monuments.

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It’s a good show with plenty of Piper exhibits. But if you go, don’t waste the opportunity to go back 3000 years by wandering round the Museum’s Stone Age exhibits. You will not be disappointed.

John Piper: In the South Country

Wiltshire Museum

Yes, there are far too many tourists (mostly bovine in nature). And the traffic is awful (take the Park and Ride, I did - it is quicker, cheaper and environmentally sounder).

But when the sun is shining and the city’s glorious buildings give off a reflective warmth, the walk through its streets is surprisingly uplifting. You feel, well, cleverer-er.

And this year I got to see inside of two of those buildings when I chaired talks at the 2026 Oxford Literary Festival (with thanks to organiser Sally Dunsmore and OLF chair Tony Byrne).

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Firstly historian Luka Jukic and I exchanged views about the concept, history and changing significance of Central Europe - essentially the former Holy Roman Empire, then Greater Germany, and the Austro-Hungarian empire. His book, Central Europe: The Death of a Civilisation and the Life of an Idea, covers the ground better than I can so if you are interested, go read it.

Then I chaired a conversation with Scottish artist and critic Lachlan Goudie and American poet and columnist Kelly Grovier on the dirtier aspects of painting. That is, the actual materials that gets slapped onto canvas -pigments, binders and some other stuff (like urine….).

Goudie’s book, The Secrets of Painting: The Hidden Art of the Masterpiece from Prehistory to Today, is a delightfully grimey journey into the world of painting. It travels across thousands of years, demonstrating how epochs of art are ushered in not just by new ideas but by new technology relating to the actual paint.

The Golden Age of Watercolours was possible because gum arabic stopped the paints drying too quickly; acrylics allowed for a more vibrant colour span no matter how thinly the paint was applied; oil added to pigments gave paint unguentcy; handy metal tubes that stored those oily pigments enabled the Impressionists to work outside, and so on.

Grovier’s book, The Art of Colour, is more a compendium than an actual narrative: a series of cards packed with facts and examples that delightfully explain the story behind different colours. It is a treasure chest of insights into how famous paintings came into being.

Meanwhile, over at the Ashmolean, a new exhibition, In Bloom, seeks to explore the global histories behind some of Britain’s most familiar plants, tracing the curiosity of early plant explorers, the networks that shaped global trade and how the pursuit of exotic plants transformed landscapes, economies and cultures - to semi-quote the PR blurb.

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The show is a springtime pick-me-up. Drawings, rare prints, paintings and ceramics all feature.

The exhibition traces `a path from 17th century botanists to stories of tulips, orchids, roses and other foreign imports and then into colonial plants like tea, opium and rubber before ending in Victorian obsessions like ferns and rhododendrons.

For me the most enjoyable aspects of the show are the astonishing, detailed pictures of flowers. Dutch oil paintings of ravishing bouquets of flowers to the mind blowingly precise watercolour and pen pictures of specific varieties of flowers. Mostly drawn by women - Maria Sibylla Merian; May Morris (William’s daughter); Clara Maria Pope; Mary Delany; Marianne North - these pictures are of scientific value. They also blend artful composition with delicate colours showing off each flower as if it was a fashion model.

These are highly accomplished artworks whose creators are just as original and thought-provoking as any of the yobbish contemporary artists with their lumpen offerings (I dread to think how Rose Wylie might chose to paint a flower).

A third section brings the depiction of flora into the present day.

Perhaps it is inevitable that all the five artists chosen - all female, by the way - invest in their work less in the simple wonder of nature but choose instead to use the flowers to moan on about the usual modern themes - colonialism, climate change, capitalism. It’s the contrast, you know - Beauty and the Beast. Keep up…

The results are varied. I loved Isik Guner’s enormous single flower compositions, so big they stand eye to eye with us as we look at them - as equals?

And I enjoyed Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s decorative tapestries.

I was less enamoured with Kate Friend’s big photos. Big - and? And zip - just big. I say, so what. Easily done with modern technology, and consequently far less intriguing than Guner’s drawings.

Similarly Anahita Norouzi’s black glass irises, which are pretty enough but ultimately gloomy since they represented an unhappy journey east to west.

And Justine Smith’s displays of flowers made from cut-up bits of banknotes are decorative but ultimately smartarse. Something about money being bad? Or capitalism is wrong? (Apologies, I rather lost focus).

So, Oxford in spring - definitely worth dropping in (Park and Ride, mind). The Oxford Literary Festival (held every March) is a must for the thoughtful’s diary - truly and awesome collection of speakers and, er, hosts.

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And In Bloom, an exhibition full of simple beautiful pictures of flowers. Ahhhh.

Got to be, surely.

It is the only explanation, why she is so funny.

ME-ghan Markle - er, sorry - Ma’am, the Duchess of Sussex (please assume here a virtual curtsey) - was recently a guest speaker at the three-day Her Best Life Retreat at the InterContinental Hotel at Coogee Beach, Sydney.

Hullo, I thought - a retreat?

Meghan’s stepping back?

Unexpected.

And wrong. Meghan’s ‘retreat’ was “a gala dinner featuring an in-person conversation with Meghan”, and an opportunity for “powerful conversations, relaxation, laughter and unforgettable experiences”. Over three days. And with hundreds of other people.

So, more a festival rave-up than an actual retreat.

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Still, it promised to be unforgettable. So, I thought - I’m in.

Except, I wasn'‘t. Partly because it was A$3000 a pop.

And partly it was because I was the wrong gender.

Still, undaunted, hundreds of right-on and oppressed (but evidently well-heeled) Aussie women did pony up to for the chance to see her, er, perform. Lucky ladies. And what did I miss, what, er, pearls of wisdom did they hear?

Well, in between a series of “powerful conversations” and highly controlled photo opportunities, and in a dazzling disp[ay of Meghanese* Meghan gushed her innermost concern -

“I’ve spent all my life investing in women, can I finally invest in me?”

I mean, where to begin?

Face value alone, a sentence of comic genius, no?

And, translated out of MEghanese into English - at last, after years in the twilight zone, my chance to shine.

Her husband, the renowned sparkling bon vivant Harry (who also speaks MEghanese, but less fluently and with an English accent), would call it ‘an upgrade’.

Caroline Aherne, who understood the meaning of irony better than most, would surely applaud - while calling it something else. It is genuinely unfortunate that her tragically early death has denied us the chance to see her interview Meghan. That is a sore, sore loss to comedy indeed.

But it got me wondering - I had retreated from the actual event - if only we could engineer a zoom call with ME-Ghan and Paul Gauguin.

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Now that would be worth ticket money.

(*Meghanese: a language where the words ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘myself’ are grammatically indivisible from ‘narcissist’ , ‘delusional’ and ‘self obsessed’.)

This is one of a short series on the topic of The Self-Absorbed.

Click here for Part One: Paul Gauguin - Goat? Or GOAT?

And here for Part Two: Tracy Emin - Bloody Hell

She has chosen to focus the entire show, A Second Life (a pun unsubtly intended) on her personal life, again, directing particular attention on her unhappy sexual past (a lot of teenage couplings including episodes that she says were rape), and her abortion.

It is a grim, messy and self-absorbed display of an artist letting it all hang out. I have no doubt it is sincerely meant.

Judging by the crowds in the exhibition, women outnumber men two to one, maybe more. And by and large - a purely empirical observation - I say they find plenty to empathise with in the show.

But it doesn’t work for me.

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Because here’s the thing: if art is to be anything, it is surely through the excercise of control.

It is about forcing universal insights into a space that is confined, and using that confinement to precisely approach big subjects, ideas, concepts in ways that both entertain and provoke discourse.

There is nothing like that here. Instead we get one raging picture after another of (presumably) Emin’s naked self-portraits, mostly with red paint spattered over her genitalia, sometimes with additional words added explaining how awful or angry or regretful Tracey Emin feels. There are roomfuls of these.

There are also two videos where Tracey Emin talks about Tracey Emin’s life, in intimate detail. There are a couple of tapestries that repeatedly tell us about Tracey Emin bad stuff.

And there are pages upon pages of biography handwritten by Tracey Emin about Tracey Emin’s childhood, her upbringing, about aspects of Tracey Emin’s sexual history, the abuse Tracey Emin suffered (she was called ‘slag’, for example) and how in her estimation she was raped.

It is clear that from her perspective, she is telling the truth. I don’t doubt the awful trauma that both rape and abortion can stimulate. Emin had a pretty miserable time of it for a long while and it has left her scarred. She carries with her a constant regret from that past. This is a tragedy.

But it is my opinion that great art requires great control, and great artists must exercise control. It is the biggest mis-conception of modern times that expression is all, and that expression should be to do exactly as you feel. In Tracey Emin: A Second Life we get a Gestalt-y, primal scream-y howl of artistic (in the broadest of terms) rage. Uncontrolled.

It kinda worked with The Bed all those years ago (here, thrown in like the obligatory hit song encore) because that expression of a life in chaos and disorder tinged with regret and unhappiness had never been displayed in such a fashion before. And the form was (sort of) controlled, a specific and physical manifestation of a take on life.

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But this display is self-absorption taken to beyond the limits. Indeed one might consider that if Donald Trump is (rightly) critiqued as narcissistic, what then does that make Emin?

Emin also includes works and graphic photos which describe in medical terms what an abortion means and how it is done.

Frankly if you are interested maybe go check out a pro-life website. They’re quite keen to give you the terrible details. And judging by Emin’s deep and lifelong regret for the baby she never had, maybe it is an argument for more debate about abortion. But that is probably not what Emin has in mind.

Tracey Emin's A Second Life is a show without control and as such, it is self-indulgent.

A shame because she comes across as a very decent and nice person. Someone should have had a word....

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This is part of series of shorts on the topic of The self-absorbed.

Click here for Part One: Paul Gauguin - Goat? Or GOAT?

And here for Part Three: Meghan Markle - It’s meeee, ME-ghan!

He took under-age girls for wives, he spread venereal diseases, he got into an argument with Van Gogh, he abandoned his family fleeing to Tahiti just for his art.

In other words, a selfisg, self-absorbed bastard.

He was, to quote one of Fleet Street’s finest art critics, an old goat. And she should know. Shouldn’t she?

But was he? If you read Sue Prideaux’s excellent biography you will discover that, uncomfortable reading for the woke brigade, much of this isn’t true.

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To begin with Gauguin was something of a trouble maker in Tahiti, vocally hostile to the French colonialism which was deliberately destroying Tahitian culture. And he almost certainly did not have syphilis. Tests on three of his teeth (found in a dis-used well beside his final home on the Marquesas Islands) show no signs of the medication to combat it.

Neither was Gauguin a sexual predator. His relationship with Tahitian girls was consistent with both local traditions and (in age terms) no different than the age of consent in France at the time.

All his three ‘wives’ were free to come and go - and they did. Plus - he was a devoted husband - constantly broke, it is true, but deeply committed to providing for his family even if he never quite managed it. His wife - a Danish woman called Mette Gad - actually abandoned him by taking off with the children back to Denmark. She also cleaned him out of all his possessions.

But, ah - the self-centered egocentrism that he is accused of? Well, that is true.

The Gauguin who emerges out of Wild Thing is absolutely self-absorbed and selfish - as many artists are, and always have been. But - unlike many modern-day artists - that selfishness was in the interests of art and creativity, not himself. It wasn’t about himself.

And it cost him dear.

His obsession - to find a truth in primitism, to explore radical concepts of symbolism, to re-interpret some of Life’s great questions through the prism of colour - these cost him his marriage, fame, fortune and, eventually, his life.

As a result, Prideaux’s book, Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, is a tonic because it exposes just how astonishingly radical a painter - in concept and ambition - Gauguin was. How committed he was trying to achieve his artistic vision. He was, as they say, all in.

Gauguin is very male and very single-minded but he is also charismatic, bold and possibly the most influential painter of the 19th century. Born of a Peruvian mother, Gauguin was originally a stockbroker, quite successful, before he decided he had to be an artist.

At first he painted in the style most popular at the time, Impressionism. But quickly he began to diverge from the main track. Not just with his inventive use of colour and his intense focus art that reflected a more original human existence. But because he had a wholly new ambition behind his work.

Gauguin didn’t want to paint just what he saw. He wanted to paint the idea of what he saw. He wanted to paint pictures with more meaning.

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So he turned to African and Asian art, hence his decision to live in Tahiti and paints images of Polynesian life.

He first went to Tahiti in 1891 by which time the islands were already being thoroughly trashed by the French. His art quickly developed - bold contrasting colours painted flatly on canvas, primitivist-style exaggerated body proportions, animal symbolism and geometric design - so different from impressionism.

The pictures he sent back from Tahiti were revolutionary, subversive even, filled with blazing colours and Symbolist scenes, breathtaking still today. And his topics were controversial, not least the depiction of his young wives.

Indeed, even now he is too difficult for some: take his painting Nevermore (1897), a complex painting of an apparently traditional ‘European’ reclining nude. But he is exploring the death of his baby, its impact on his common law wife, and a metaphor for the destruction of Tahitian culture by French colonialism (which, by the way, makes the British Empire look benign). It also has elements of unease, an uncomfortable sense of foreboding.

But try getting an image of Nevermore online!

You can’t.

Not because of its ambitious and ambiguous depiction of sorrow, the afterlife and mourning. But because it portrays his 15-year-old wife….naked.

Now of course by today’s standards Gauguin should not be painting naked 15-year-old girls. But it is laughable to think that any male artist before, say, the 1920s would pause even for a moment to be concerned about his model’s age. Most of the time they were sleeping with them anyway. So why does Gauguin cop so much attention for this?

After a brief return to France, Gauguin came back to French Polynesia in 1985 and spent the remainder of his life living on the remote Marquesas Islands.

But he was carrying trouble - drinking too much, self-medicating an old wound with increasing amounts of morphine, and, of course, he had no money. He died in 1903, alone, his final days racked with pain, wretchedly poor and reliant on only his own convictions of his genius.

Prideaux has written a fine biography. The book is nicely paced and, like Wullschlager’s biography of Monet, it sheds much interesting light on contemporary France and the world these men painted in (and their fellow artists).

Be in no doubt - the Gauguin who emerges in Wild Thing is definitely self-absorbed. But not self-indulgent, like Tracey Emin’s art or like Me-ghan’s narcissim. He is someone you’d want to meet and have a drink, a dinner, a conversation with.

He was no goat. He was probably the GOAT.

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This is part of a series of shorts on the topic of The Self-Absorbed.

Click here for Part One: Tracey Emin - Bloody Hell

And here for Part Three: Meghan Markle - It’s meeee, ME-ghan!

Outside of the obvious - Freud, Bacon, Riley, Hockney, Hepworth, Moore, Nicholson to name a random few - most of this art has rested in relative obscurity, overshadowed by not being French or American (YBAs excepted).

But figuratively speaking and across the piece, from (again, randomly chosen) Bomberg and Nash to Grant, Knight, Ravilious and Smith and on to the likes of Rae, Tunnard, Fedden and Hilton there are hundreds of really rather good British painters, male and female, that merit attention and limelight.

So hats off to Clive Ingram for deliberating and exclusively targeting British artists for his fantastic collection.

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Ingram made his considerable fortune in advertising and marketing, and he has spent a good chunk of his gains on assembling one of the largest and most significant publicly accessible collections of Modern British art in the UK - about 650 pieces in all and covering over 400 of Britain’s best artists of the 20th century. Alphabetically from Robert Adams and Eileen Agar to Bryan Winter, Christopher Wood and Rosemary Young.

He then based pretty much all of it at the Lightbox Gallery in Woking.

That’s what I call a collector: single-mindedly buying based on obsession, not worrying about ticking various uninteresting (and, ironically, constricting) media fashions; covering one base, not all - evidently from Ingram’s point of view, some bases aren’t worth spit - and I agree; and slightly off-piste until, suddenly, it turns out to be the main run.

Now you can see some of his collection at the Dorset Museum and Art Gallery where over 50 artists across 100 years explore British portraiture in their new show, People Watching.

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I’ll be honest and admit that portraiture isn’t wholly my thing but this is a delightful exhibition that highlights a range of British talent wielding paintbrushes in a satisfyingly large variety of different ways.

From the relatively traditional….

to the relatively modern….

It is definitely worth a visit.

What it also does is serve as a potential appetiser to the full three course meal on offer at Woking’s Lightbox. Jump on the train to Dorchester, by all means, but make a trip to Woking too if you can.

People Watching

The Ingram Collection (to be visited soon….)

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Because, let’s be honest, being an artist is a by-word for wanker, surely.

Cruel, selfish, self-obsessed - normal for an artist.

Mania, odd views, weird behaviour - de-rigour for an artist.

Time and again behaviour that would have ordinary mortals banged up or at the very least labelled social pariah is chalked off as artistic temperament or just part of the creative process.

That’s why it was OK for Michael Landy to destroy all his possessions (Breakdown 2001) as a commentary on consumerism - and then have to stay at his girlfriend’s because he hadn’t got a bed to sleep in….

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Or why, for example, it was OK for Picasso, then aged 45, married and with children, to openly accost a 17-year-old schoolgirl, Marie-Thérèse Walter, on the streets and invite her to become his, ahem, muse….

Which brings me to Sir Stanley Spencer.

Gainsborough’s House - that lovely destination in Sudbury, Suffolk (do make the effort to go, the rattling little train ride through pleasant countryside is reward enough) - is hosting a show highlighting Spencer’s relationship with Suffolk - Love & Landscape: Stanley Spencer in Suffolk.

Now Spencer is considered one of Britain’s finest 20th painters. A visionary, a seer, whose most famous paintings depict a series of Biblical stories set in a humble English village, Cookham in Hampshire, and featuring the ordinary folk who lived there as Biblical characters.

And Spencer could certainly paint. He was brilliant at creating multi-figure compositions and he had a masterly grasp of the art of painting. Taken as such, some of his pictures are fantastic - for example his masterly Shipbuilding on the Clyde series.

As a result a Spencer painting once held the all-time record for a modern British painting - Sunflower and Dog Worship sold for £5.4m, in 2011.

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But, but, but - boy, oh boy, and but - he was also weird. His religious fervour, of which he had plenty, seemed to make him sweaty-palmed about romance and sex, and his freakish obsessions with painting fleshly matters in hi-vis would probably have him locked up these days. Certainly, er, cancelled. Here is his portrait of Patrica Preece, the lesbian he married in haste after abandoning his first wife:

I am pretty sure my wife would look equally as irritated if I presented her with a similar portrait of her….And Stanley, how well did that marriage go?

So it was with some trepidation that I wandered around the exhibition and, to be honest, I was half reassured that my prejudices were confirmed and half surprised. Some of the pictures displayed are wonderful: warm, lucid, complex and yet very clear - like this busy, warm picture of a beach in Suffolk:

Or this beautifully framed landscape:

And then there are others that don’t do anything for me, like this typical Spencer-ish take on an everyday subject:

Or this distorted self-portrait with Patricia, as part of his series of paintings about love, desire and infatuation….

Stanley Spencer is one of Britain’s great 20th artists, no doubt, and some of his pictures are sublime but I’d suggest that some of his work is ageing better than others. And I still think he was an odd fish.

Also showing at Gainsborough House is a series of 20 or so Humphrey Ocean paintings, called Home.

Ocean is a painter I admire. He creates highly impactful images of simple objects that define modern life with barely a half dozen strokes of paint (though they still cost £20,000). This show features his take on domestic matters - a house, a car and so on.

There’s also an entertaining little film of the old boy pottering around the car park of what he thinks is a derelict pub, picking up various bits and pieces from the ground, like a screw or a brick, and commenting on them. Rather charmingly he then realises the pub is, in fact, fully functioning and not an example of deserted suburbia.

Also showing at Gainsborough is a neat little show, Song for Autumn, by Hannah Brown, who paints, well, foliage.

That is, detailed depictions of a hedge or a large clump of grass.

Agreed, it doesn’t sound promising but the paintings are beautifully rendered and you could do worse than have one across the room from your bed, something nice to look at first thing on a gloomy morning.

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Gainsborough’s House, then - get out there and take sandwiches.

P.S. It also houses a splendid Gainsborough-only paintings room, wall-to-wall with the great man’s work.

For Stanley Spencer:

For Gainsborough’s House Gallery

Beatriz González spent her entire career using humour and critique to hold up a mirror to social constructs about taste, all while laying bare the ongoing legacies of colonialism by way of found images from the western canon and tattered newspaper clippings focusing on power and conflict.

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This link between formal painting and widely held traditions propelled González to become one of the leading painters in neo figuración (new figuration) and what today is generally known as pop art. No for nothing is she refferred to in Colombia as ‘la Maestra’.

González studied fine arts at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and print-making at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. She first came to prominence when she exhibited her Encajeras [Lacemaker] series based on Johannes Vermeer’s famous painting. This series revealed what would reoccur in her oeuvre: a careful study of canonical paintings and an interest in colour blocking and saturated colours.

González also made Pop-Arty use of everyday household furniture in which to feature her art - enamelled pictures on metal plates form part of a bed or a chair or a bedside cupboard. I’d certainly wake up happy next to one of these earlier, and thought-provoking, works.

Her hallway mirror stand is particularly entertaining because every time one looks one expects a reflection, not an image of the Mona Lisa, thereby creating questions of who you are, how you look and so on.

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I suppose it might be annoying if you’re trying to check out the size of your bum before you go out but that, sigh, is the price of art.

But despite being both admirer and critic of western art, copying and re-drawing specifically Vermeer and Velasco, she gradually became less playful and more serious in the face of increasing violence (this is Colombia in the 70s and 80s) and her art turned to politics and social commentary.

At first it was paintings like the 1965 series Los Suicidas del Sisga [The Suicides of Sisga] - inspired by a tabloid story about a young couple who committed suicide by throwing themselves over the Sisga Dam.

The second half of the show is increasingly focused González’s preoccupation with commentary on Colombia’s ruling military juntas - with pictures like this:

And then with the brutal narco violence that engulfed Colombia for 30 years from the 80s onwards.

They are beautifully rendered - her use of colour is exquisite throughout - like these startling pictures of mourning women.

And by the end we had a wallpapered room adorned purely with her frame after frame depictions of porters disposing of bodybags - a reflection of the lack of a proper site for mourning the victims of the years of violence so the accompanying note says, or as González noted: “Art says things that history cannot.”

The themes are inevitable - violence is wrong, women mourn, climate change is hurting the poor. And it is, of course, good that a major artist makes protests because she was very visible - Colombia’s greatest living artist etc - but it makes the latter half of the exhibition thematically a little predictable.

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Which is why, I guess, towards the end of her career Beatriz looked kinda down beat….

Beatriz González is not an artist I had heard of before this exhibition and it is to the Barbican’s credit that they have created a show that gives full coverage of her range and talents. Check it out.

I am referring to the grubby flecks, smears and dirt that tracks across most of Rose Wylie’s paintings. Take a look for yourself - see above for details…

I mean, has she wiped her nose on the canvas? Cleared up dog shit with it? Here’s the full picture, by the way:

Now, I know mooodeeern art paintings aren’t supposed to be attractive. Or, ahem, nice. And, jumping right in here, Rose Wylie’s infant-style creations across grubby grey canvases really aren’t nice.

Not only are her pictures smeary and stained. But the painting itself is of an order that would draw admiration if Wylie were, say, five years old. Nice, you’d say. Except she drew these pictures in her seventies and eighties.

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Now, plenty of you at this point will be leaping up and down, whinnying on (and on) about how art isn’t meant to be nice. Nice, you’ll scream. NICE???

No, art must be angry, shouty, real. It doesn’t matter if it is a mess. In fact, all the better, mess it up. Make it bloody ugly. Beauty is for losers. F**k nice.

Splash it down, and to Hell with crafting. That doesn’t matter any more.

What matters is: the Idea.

The decision by Britain’s art schools - Slade, Goldsmith, Manchester, the RCA, GSA and the rest - to rip up the lecture book, abandon technique and champion art expressed exclusively through emotion and/or self — has created an army of artists who believe only intent counts. Art critics and gallery curators are cut from the same cloth.

So what you get now is invariably poorly executed. Because, hey, it doesn’t matter. And also, ugly. Again, because, hey, pretty is actually a bit wet. Beauty is truth, truth beauty? No, that’s for also-rans. Bin Monet now.

But it’s become a trope, a kind of monochromatic artistic landscape, no?

(A by-product of this ideas-based art is the increasingly hilarious — and lengthening — essays that are required to, ahem, explain the art - dummy).

Now, Rose Wylie is a self-declared product of this brave new world. And she’s an art world big cheese. Her show - Rose Wylie: The Picture Comes First makes her the first British woman artist to enjoy a solo exhibition in the RA’s main galleries. Her works sell for £200,000+. She is feted, a Royal Academician, and Germaine Greer (who knows about this stuff) called her ‘hot’.

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Her work adorns the walls of the super-rich in penthouses across the world. And catch-up galleries desperate to fill wall space with female artists.

And I say - good for you, Rose. Grab it while you can (a late bloomer (sic), career taking off in her seventies, she now weighs in at 91).

However, dear readers, I can discern little significant meaning in her sprawling paintings beyond banal messages about domestic life all fashioned in a child-like painting style.

The picture above, for example, references Wylie’s childhood and how a German V1 flying bomb blew up some houses on her street. It’s still bothering her, apparently.

As for the wit some critics refer to (that elitist get-out clause), it passes me by. If these pictures are funny it is the wrong kind of funny. If there is a joke, it is on us, like her drawing of a chocolate biscuit, below. Ha Ha….

As a result, and unlike the saintly Germaine, it was I who got hot-and-bothered as I wandered round the show. Acres and acres of scrawled and scribbled figurations all be-spattered with grime and dirt and dribbles.

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Indeed, I have rarely been so miserable as I traipsed past one unkempt picture after another. For your sakes, however, I completed the course.

The Wylie base model is a picture at least six foot square of squatter’s beige, figures daubed on with crude brushstrokes and then a few words crayoned on to, er, explain the thing.

Then there is a side order of verbiage alongside the picture explaining in classic caricature what the (simple) message is: it’s about me; or it is about not being me; or it is about being me being something else. Eh?

Wylie says the picture below is a kind of portrait. I say - it ain’t Rembrandt.

Now I’d suggest it is questionable to need several hundred square feet of badly drawn hands to reveal that you, Rose, like to draw. You’re an artist for Pete’s sake! There’s an assumption made before we’ve paid the entrance fee that you, er, like drawing.

And here’s Black Strap (Red Fly) (2012) - one of a series of paintings inspired by an image of Nicole Kidman on the red carpet in a backless dress.

What is it about? Curator Katherine Stout (hopped up on Kool Aid) explains.

“She didn’t wake up and think ‘I want to paint Nicole Kidman,’” curator Katharine Stout told Artsy. “She happened across an image of a woman standing on the red carpet in a backless dress that was particularly striking who happened to be Nicole Kidman.”

And the flies? More Kool Aid please….

As if to emphasise the point, Kidman is flanked by two large flies that hover on either side of her. Wylie often unites elements from different times and places simply because “they feel to her like they might sit well together,” Stout said. “She likes not being obvious.”

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Wylie is also interested in films and domestic life and about half a dozen other subjects, and these get splashed randomly onto pictures too, here and there.

The last room is, well, an eye-opener. In here Wylie declares, and I kid you not, that she’s done with paint brushes altogether. Instead she’s used her hands to wipe vats of red and blue paint across gigantic screens. It was doubtless huge fun but surely parody doesn’t do justice to these creations.

Can I recommend this show? Frankly, No.

Am I right? Well, the art market and the art gallery world disagree. According to them:

“Wylie’s bold, colourful paintings reference everything from art history, cinema, and celebrities to the flowers in her garden and what she had for breakfast. The subject matter is always of secondary concern to the visual details that initially captured Wylie’s vivid imagination..”

And:

“Wylie’s pared-back approach to imagery shares an affinity with that of Philip Guston. Just as the mid-century painter has occasionally been labelled “crude,” Wylie’s work has been designated “naïve.”

For Stout, this description misses the point, as Wylie’s approach “comes from a very knowing place in the sense that she’s very well versed in different art styles.”

So what do I know?

And, in the end, who cares?

Because judging by the state of the canvases, Wylie doesn’t. So why should I?

PS I am dreading the Emin.

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Tim Winton’s latest novel is set in a climate-changed apocalyptic Hell where 21st civilisation has long been replaced by dystopian societies that scratch desperate livings in a sun-baked, heat-devastated Australian Outback.

And yet the book is a rasping page-turner with a classically Winton-esque outsider-hero to root for, and a narrative that holds suspenseful attention throughout.

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At the heart of Juice is an un-named protagonist and his capable mother, and their harsh but working life as farmers in a dangerously over-heated land (radiation sunburn is common and summers are spent underground). It’s a frontier world where hardship and existential struggle sit alongside fortitude and simple but high principles.

Told in retrospect when he is on the run with a child across a scorched and ash-covered wilderness, the story slowly unravels a mystery at the core of his life as he navigates boyhood and then recruitment into a secret militia (‘the Service’) that wreaks revenge on Big Oil/Big Capitalist descendants. What follows is young love, fatherhood, growing cynicism and finally a kind of epiphany of understanding. All in the context of an unspecified quest, some sense our hero has an something unexplained in his life.

Juice works because of the thrill of our hero’s trials, his highs and lows. but there’s loads of story too - adventures, narrow escapes and everyday capabilities. And plenty of detail about a world destroyed by carbon emission climate change (‘the Dirty World’) and then ruined by war and mass migration (‘the Terror’).

But nothing is over-explained, just the viewpoint of our protagonist of a world turned into a desert by hundreds of years of destructive behaviour. And there is no moralising or finger-wagging - though one does feel a surge of triumph every time the descendants of fossil-fuel magnates are dealt with - killed - by the avenging militia forces that scan the earth for signs of their existence.

Oddly, althugh the book is set in the most apocalyptic of scenarios, it is feel-good read. That is because, in the end, Juice is about how to maintain human decency in the face of increasing barbarism.

I thoroughly recommend Juice, as I do much of Winton’s other work: The Riders, Dirt Music, Cloud Street, Breath. In all, Winton’s main character are outsiders, refugees from modern day hullabaloo, Romantics morally admirable even as (usually) their lives are troubled or mis-understood. Kind of old-fashioned (and increasingly rare) but these are male heroes that feel real and representative.

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Most people rate Peter Carey as Australia’s greatest living writer. And of course, Carey is first class. But for sheer readability nothing touches Winton.

No wonder he is twice nominated but never a winner of the Booker. He’s too good. He certainly has the juice.

Take JMW Turner and John Constable - you don’t need me to tell you their work is brilliant.

Titans of art, they are the Lennon and McCartney of British 19th century painting, the rock stars of their age. Their pictures are some of the most recognisable and evocative art this country has produced.

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The big guns of British art criticism - Waldemar; Rachel; Jackie and the rest - all think so. And the British public do too. The Turner-Constable exhibition at the Tate Britain is such a sell-out even the gallery’s cloakroom has a queue.

So I shan’t waffle on about what makes them great - go and see for yourself. You won’t be disappointed. The Tate has assembled a world-class collection of their oils, watercolours and drawings.

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(A tip - if you do get in, take your sharpest elbows with you - you’ll need ‘em to get up close to the pictures.) These pictures are lovely, deeply convincing works of art.

To create a bit of narrative tensions - the show is full of quite familiar works - the curators have had a brainwave…. Why not, they thought, weave a narrative around comparisons between the two? Clever! And this does make for a scintillating journey through the exhibition’s rooms.

But also - unoriginal. Because, sigh, that emphasis has tempted the critics to get their measuring sticks out to pronounce - again - who is best? Why, even the great iconoclast himself - and I mean you, Waldemar - has declared.

And, he comes out for Turner as, hands down, the better painter. As do most others too.

My view?

Borrring!

This is the same argument that rages on (and on, and on) about Lennon and McCartney. Lennon, the darling of snotty rock critics (and there are none so snotty as rock critics). McCartney downgraded - his music too nice, too melodic, too poppy - as if these are sins. Lennon’s faults, on the other hand - moody, broody, difficult - are elevated to mythic status.

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Same with Turner and Constable. Turner - cool, a bit abstract-y, complicated. Constable - pretty, too lovely, a bit too, well, nice.

Now, I’m not going head-to-head with Waldemar. He’s probably right. He usually is.

But I do think the comparison misses the point.

Sometimes you want an Agatha Christie or a PG Wodehouse not an Albert Camus or an Aldous Huxley. Sometimes you want an Alan Ackroyd or a Noel Coward, not a Harold Pinter or a Bertolt Brecht. Sometimes you want Band on the Run (Paul McCartney), not Unfinished Music Vol 1: Two Virgins (John Lennon).

(PS When do you ever want Camus??? Indeed, and admittedly off the point, when after Victor Hugo do you ever want anything written by the French? Controversial? Peut-etre. Houellebecq is honourably excepted).

Comparisons are odious. And in my opinion, pointless. Turner and Constable were doing different things. To go back to music - take another listen of Rumours, by Fleetwood Mac. Once derided as too easy listening, now considered one of the greatest rock albums of all time. Meanwhile Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica is just as brilliant but he has never left the Too Cool For School box.

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So for me - ignore the rivalries and celebrate vive la difference. Instead, go, enjoy the show and sing Hallelujah that we got ‘em both.

For the show

For the comparisons!