She’s been doing it over almost 70 years, and the exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, in her 89th year, is the definitive retrospective, her exhibition – ‘One of the great artists this country has produced’, Ralph Rugoff, the Hayward’s director says of her, precisely. ‘Her work is a perpetual process of discovery’. She worked closely on the show with designer Paul Williams (half of the Stanton Williams architecture/design partnership), a collaborator for 25 years, and she vetoed two previous plans before sanctioning this hang.

In contrast to its previous presentation in Edinburgh last summer, this exhibition is not chronological but thematic, and though the pictures are the same – apart from four wall paintings that have been added to profound effect – the difference is between the history of Bridget Riley and the story of her work, the narrative she wants to portray.

The show effectively starts with her one conspicuous failure, Continuum (1963, revisited in 2005), the only three-dimensional piece she undertook which is a walk-in cylinder of a spiralling continuous surface, and it was too physical. ‘The viewer found himself actually “in” the work,’ she says, ‘where all I wanted was visual absorption’. She abandoned the idea, and later explored flat enveloping images that propose infinity with vast murals such as the one next to Continuum, Circles 4 of 2004.

This reflects the purpose of Riley’s work, as well as her progression: the visual, and how manipulations at different times of line, form and colour change perceptions to the extent that a flat canvas itself can become three-dimensional and colours appear where there are none. And the thing about Op Art is that it isn’t just illusion: on the top floor of the gallery are her sketches, the painstaking handwritten notes, the plans confined by graph paper squares, the tissue paper cut into spirals, as well as her competent art school life drawings; and somewhere in all this is the ingredient that turns the calculated illusion to beauty, to art.

The paintings and designs may seem essentially mathematical, but the first expression is always on to paper. ‘For me’, she wrote in the catalogue of a 2009 Arts Council touring exhibition, ‘drawing is an enquiry, a way of finding out – the first thing that I discover is that I do not know. This is alarming even to the point of momentary panic. Only experience reassures me that this encounter with my own ignorance – with the unknown – is my chosen and particular task, and provided that I can make the required effort the rewards may reach the unimaginable. It is as though there is an eye at the end of my pencil, which tries, independently of my personal general-purpose eye, to penetrate a kind of obscuring veil or thickness. To break down this thickness, this deadening opacity, to elicit some particle of clarity or insight, is what I want to do’.
Riley tells a story about Blaze I, the black and white spiral of chevrons that first made her name. She was twenty-eight on her first visit to the south of France, and had no more than an inkling of what she wanted to do. She brought the unformed inkling back to London where she developed a geometric shape in her mind, looking at it from different angles and positions, and then from above… suddenly she had it, she could commit something to paper: ‘And I realised it was about the light from the Mediterranean I was seeing, the light you never get in London’.

She had her first solo show a couple of years later at the One Gallery in 1962, seen by the critic David Sylvester, who ‘got it’ immediately: ‘This proposing and disposing of order seems no mere game with optical effects, seems to symbolise, dramatically, an interplay between feelings of composure and anxiety’, he wrote in a review.

Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art made her a painter, but it was while she was working in advertising that she fell under the influence of the Impressionists, the Post Impressionists and Seurat in particular, revealed so thoroughly in the Courtauld Gallery’s exhibition four years ago, Bridget Riley: Learning from Seurat. It was at the Courtauld in the late 50s that she saw Seurat’s Le Pont de Courbevoie and made her copy of it, a larger version than the original, that still hangs in her studio as a perpetual reminder today.

What she discovered in Seurat was the use of colour to create light, and through it movement, and how the painting was designed to inspire the act of looking. ‘His work gave me a sense of the viewer’s importance as an active participant’, she wrote later. ‘Perception became the medium’.

This has been her guiding principle, and the reason that her copy of The Bridge is still important. Cezanne, Monet, Matisse, Pollock have all been inspirations. ‘Impression was a way of looking’, she says, ‘which established what I aspired to. Abstractism is finding out what a particular form can do’.
But the difference between this Hayward account of the Riley achievement – using 200 works, and 50 key paintings – and the Edinburgh exhibition is that the chronological account is not the point. The phases and chapters stand by themselves without necessarily having to be in any order. She has all her black-and-whites in one large section, showing how she began, but also how she returns to earlier thoughts with new interpretations and fresh ideas. The confident, jangling triangles of Quiver of 2014, for instance, near the more orderly, tentative pieces making up Tremor of 1962. In recent years she has become interested again in the monochrome interaction of forms, lately returning to circles.

The way shapes respond to each other, almost introducing their colours as they interlace, led her later colour pieces (four of them shown together) from Justinian of 1988 to From Here of 1994. ‘I have to find out what a particular form can do without breaking its character’, she says. ‘Something has to serve a purpose – it doesn’t have to represent anything’. Knowing what will work is almost like déjà vu, she says, as if you’re not inventing something but remembering it. It’s already familiar: Cézanne’s word for it was “sensation”’.

When the colours are twisted along a curve, their relationship is different again, something that has been revisited though Riley’s career, with shapes cut from coloured paper, à la Matisse, and moved around like jigsaw puzzle pieces until the fit was right. ‘A rhythmic vehicle for colour’, she calls it. And the collection of her writing, edited by Robert Kudielska and recently republished by Thames & Hudson, bears the title she chose for it: The Eye’s Mind.

The dynamic varies but never seems to lessen, and today she is as enthusiastic as ever. ‘Energy, I hope and pray, is what I can still invest in it’, she says. ‘It’s a very active thing, the work, and it’s also something I love doing. And maybe that’s the secret.’

Bridget Riley (solo show) is on view from October 23, 2019 – January 26, 2020, at the Hayward Gallery. For more information, read here.

Simon Tait

The Power of Seeing, 2 Temple Place, London WC2R 3BD, January 26 to April 22
John Ruskin: Art & Wonder, Millennium Gallery, Sheffield, May 22 to September 15

There was an awkward moment at the V&A last September when Chris Smith, Lord Smith of Finsbury and the first Blair culture secretary, was delivering the Ruskin Foundation’s annual lecture. His grist was free admission for national museums and galleries which he had ushered in in 2001: “I’m afraid I find myself in opposition in one respect” he said. “Ruskin believed you should value art enough to be prepared to pay to see it”.

Well, yes. And emphatically no. And that is the problem with Ruskin. He won’t fit any convenient categories, and while he undoubtedly did think the well-off should pay to go into public galleries he also thought that not just the wealthy should have art in their lives.

So he made his own large collection of art and objects into a free museum for working people, an educational exhibition. And it was for the people of Sheffield that he gave it because he admired the devoted craftsmanship of steelworkers – craftsmanship was a sacred gift. It opened early and closed late, even on Sunday. “It was not meant for casual pottering on a nice day out, it was meant for workers to inspire creativity, but also just to make them happier”, said Louise Pullen, curator of the collection and of this exhibition.

Ruskin was a spectrum of contradictions: a high Tory who was a social reformer, a deeply devout man and powerful preacher who loathed the church, a lover of classical architecture who abhorred the neo-classical, a champion of great art, particularly of the Pre-Raphaelites and the inspiration for William Morris and the Art & Crafts movement, who despised academic painting, especially that in public galleries – “Walked down to Dulwich Gallery” he noted in his diary in 1844 “and thought the pictures worse than ever; came away encouragingly disgusted”.

He was probably the most famous man of his time, certainly the most famous intellectual, whose influence was profound and wide, who is barely known of now but whose time may have come again.

In Sheffield in the 1870s he set up the Guild of St George with its own – free – public museum. Its sole purpose was to make Britain a happier place to live in by challenging the zeitgeist for profit and mass-production with love of beauty. “I have listened to many ingenious persons” he wrote in one of his Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain “who say we are better off now than ever we were before” but (he went on) “we cannot be called, as a nation, well off, while so many of us are living… in… beggary”.

He consigned his collection of over 17,000 things to the Guild’s museum for the education, stimulation and inspiration of working men. He included copies of great paintings he’d had specially commissioned, architectural studies, Turner sketches, geological specimens, casts of sculpture, medieval manuscripts and rare books.

For the first time and to mark the centenary of Ruskin’s birth some of that collection is being seen outside Sheffield with the exhibition John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing at 2 Temple Place. The exhibition is not merely a transplanting of the Guild collection from Sheffield to London for a few months. Ms Pullen is using the collection to frame a biographical narrative, with augmentations of loans – the Turner Venetian Festival, for instance, is borrowed from Tate as a reference point; to Ruskin oil painting was for baronial halls, not for the horny-handed for whom he considered watercolour to be a more truthful medium. And rather than simply tell Ruskin’s story, the choice of objects helps set out what Ruskin wanted to say to his working class audience: that in Keatsian terms, truth is beauty, and beauty is nature.

John Ruskin was the only child of a wealthy wine merchant and Margaret, the daughter of the landlord of the Old King’s Head in Croydon, a prim and pious lady who had already changed her surname from Cock to Cox. He was a precocious infant, educated by tutors at home, and his father, John James, had a career path mapped out for his son at an early age: it would culminate in his being either Archbishop Canterbury or Poet Laureate.

But young Ruskin went his own way. When he was 13 and absorbed by the new science of geology, he was given a book-length poem illustrated by J M W Turner’s etchings, and his attention veered. Turner, born in 1775, was his mid-50s when Ruskin first came upon his work and famous, a full Royal Academician 17 years before Ruskin was born, but out of fashion.

He travelled through Europe, and his first published work was a poem, Skiddaw and Derwent Water, when he was ten. At 15 he had three articles on geology published in the Magazine of Natural History and in the year before he went up to Oxford, 1837, the Architectural Magazine began to serialise his The Poetry of Architecture.

Ruskin got a scholarship to Christ Church as a “gentleman commoner”. He won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry (when he met Wordsworth), but was ill for much of his time at Oxford with suspected consumption, despite the ministrations of his mother who took lodgings in the High Street so that she could have tea with him every day. He eventually graduated in 1842, aged 23, with a pass, elevated to a rare “honorary double fourth-class” to recognise his achievements.

A year later he began the work he is most famous for, Modern Painters, a brilliant defence of Turner which, when it was finally finished in 1860, was to run to more than 1,500 pages. The first volume was published in 1843 and he quickly became a doyen among art critics. It’s hard to believe now that in the mid 19th century Turner was unpopular, but Ruskin wrote in his Praeterita autobiography in the 1880s, “Nobody, in all England, at that time,—and Turner was already sixty,— cared, in the true sense of the word, for Turner, but the retired coachmaker of Tottenham (a reference to the wealthy collector Benjamin Windus), and I”.

In 1848 he married the 20-year-old daughter of family friends, Effie Gray, and whether or not he was disgusted by the sight of wife’s naked form as was later claimed, the marriage was never consummated and was anulled in 1854. A year later Effie married Ruskin’s protégé, John Everett Millais, and had eight children.

But Ruskin’s enthusiasms expanded to conserving architecture, and to Venice in particular, so his next books were The Seven Lamps of Architecture in 1848 and The Stones of Venice in 1851, and to science. In the mid-1850s he began teaching at the Working Men’s College in London, attracting audiences fascinated by his stentorian style of speaking and florid language, as they did when he became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford in 1869.

Ruskin had no particular affinity with Sheffield, and probably only went there half a dozen times, but he considered its steelworkers the most skilled craftsmen in the world, so aimed his philanthropy at them. The collection surivives in the city’s Millennium Gallery.

The surprising thing about this survey is the quality of Ruskin’s own work. He was an accomplished draughtsman and there is drama and infinite accuracy in, for instance, his pen and ink drawing of Ancienne Maison, Lucerne, Switzerland, done when he was 16, or his watercolour study of a peacock;s feather. A page of sketches for his The Stones of Venice of about 1849 shows an architect’s obsession with detail. And there is a moving passion in his watercolour of the porch and buttress of the 15th century St Wulfram’s church in Abbeville, done in 1868, which he was worried about – “It is the last [late Gothic building] I know left untouched, and it is to be ‘restored’ in the spring”, he wrote. The watercolour and gouache portrait, probably a self-portrait, of 1875 when he opened the museum is gently painted, but the intense gaze of the pale blue eyes demands respectful attention.

The other artists he chooses are not well known now but give honest, simple accounts: Samuel Prout’s The Piazzetta, Venice of the 1830s; William Hunt’s Grapes and Pineapple of about 1850; George Allen’s Study of Thorns done in 1859 for the last volume of Modern Painters, an example of the “minutest extremities” of a tree that have to be studied to understand the tree’s “character”.

Ruskin’s influence was immense during his lifetime and into the 20th century – he died in 1900 – and today his teaching has a new relevance. His attitude was that monetary wealth was meaningless without happiness, and happiness lay in slowing down and enjoying beauty, which fits with the modern appreciation of mindfuness and well-being.

“I think he is the finest writer living”, George Eliot wrote to Barbara Leigh Hunt in 1856 after reading volume 4 of Modern Painters. “There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the function of his own life to the utmost, has always the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.”

Simon Tait

Paul Nash, Tate Britain, London, until 5 March

When, in his 1943 book British Romantic Artists, John Piper included a painting by Paul Nash, Nash objected. “Romantic art, what is that?” he responded. “Constable, Steer, Sickert Romantic painters?… when all is said I do not like the word Romantic applied to that which in its best and truest expression in England should be called Poetic”.

Nash was certainly influenced formatively by artists generally regarded as Romantic – Blake, Rossetti, Palmer and even Edward Lear – and there is naturally a strong literary association with them. This exhibition, the largest in a generation, has the advantage of being based on the Tate’s Nash archive which has a great deal of his writing of which the in-house curators have made good use.

If there is a poet whose work Nash’s pictures embody it is Gerard Manley Hopkins whose concept of “inscape” to describe the character of a natural scene matches Nash’s of “genius loci” in which he perceived an “imprisoned spirit” and “the source, the motive power” of a place. It is that spirit that, arguably, all of Nash’s work seeks. It has been too easy to summarise Nash’s career as two world wars and some landscapes in between, but that ignores the many excursions that made him a truly important painter.

There was something mystical about the arrangement first of nature and then of objects and objects’ construction that fascinated Nash all his life, along with an abiding yearning to virtually fly. At the start of the exhibition is Nash’s Blake-like Vision at Evening, a watercolour of 1911 which has a female face as the moon hovering over the Buckinghamshire countryside; at the end of it, before his death in 1946 at only 57, are the moons, suns and cosmic orbs still casting their spells over English nature.

There was no thought of becoming an artist in Nash’s childhood. His parents wanted him to join the navy but he failed the entrance exams, and training to be “an illustrator of some kind” was a fall-back. He studied lithography, but was soon disillusioned with the world of posters and show-cards and more interested in writing poetry. He dropped out of the Slade because he couldn’t draw figures well.

He painted the trees that surrounded his family home at Iver Heath, especially at night when they took on beguiling new personalities under the ubiquitous moon. “O dreaming trees, sunk in a swoon of sleep,” he wrote in a poem of 1909, “What have ye seen in these mysterious places?” His paintings were being noticed and after a successful exhibition with his younger brother John in 1913 he was accepted into the pre-war artists’ coterie of Roger Fry and Duncan Grant.

But Nash had been woken from his spectral watercolour world first by falling in love and then by the First World War. A few months after marrying the suffragist Margaret Odeh in 1914 he joined the Artists’ Rifles, but even in the devastation of the Ypres Salient through which he marched, he wrote to Margaret of nature forcing its way through the desolation, nightingales singing. “One can’t think which is the more absurd,” he wrote, “War or Nature”. He took to oils for the first time, his brush strokes suddenly urgent and ferocious, and became an official war artist.

In the monumental Menin Road he was commissioned to do, the exhibition would have us believe that the spiky shards of trees standing out of the mud represent tombstones for the human dead. Just as likely is that they are the stoical guardians of this transformed place whose restoration they will eventually oversee, as in We are making a new world of a few months earlier in which melancholy stumps crowd together to reach out of the diabolical green slime into a pale blue sky.

Nash was a tyro painter in 1914 and emerged transformed in 1918, as most survivors did, especially artists. “Thenceforth the whole savour of living, and the nature of my work, seemed directly affected,” he wrote in the unpublished version of his autobiography, Outline. “I was launched into a turbulent sea where the dramatic adventures of life and art were breaking anew”. He suffered with depression and from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Still clinging to the English landscape, he looked for a style. There are hints of Cubism, Vorticism and Abstractism, and stimulated by the sea at Dymchurch in Kent his stark Winter Sea began as a sketch in 1925 that was finally resolved as perhaps his most powerful oil painting 12 years later. Through those years he and Margaret travelled the Mediterranean and, inspired by de Chirico, he embraced surrealism – the mysterious Blue House on the Shore of 1931 comes from one of these trips – and the geometric personalities of architecture became a feature of his work.

Nash began to bring landscapes into this studio as still lifes, and the displacement of objects that changes their nature fascinated him. The exhibition has a remarkable find from the period, a wood, ivory and stone abstract construction called Moon Aviary which had been lost since 1943 and found recently in pieces in a cardboard box; it is based on Mansions of the Dead, a 1932 watercolour shown nearby.

Showing in Recent Tendencies in British Painting at Tooth’s Gallery in 1931 he realised that he was not alone in striving for new inspiration; he formed a group called Unit One including John Armstrong, Edward Burra, Tristram Hillier, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, declaring in a letter to The Times that they were “the expression of a truly contemporary spirit, for that thing which is recognised as peculiarly of today…”. Within two years Unit One had broken up. Nash felt divorced from his beloved countryside, an affinity rekindled by moving to Wiltshire.

When his second tour as a war artist came around in 1940, Nash’s preoccupation with flight and surreal eye take on a mordant nature and hark back to his earlier experiences: the wreckage of war planes adding to the landscape and the mass grave of German aircraft in Totes Meer in 1940-41 being an uncanny evocation of Winter Sea. Even his most famous painting, Battle of Britain of 1941, in which the turmoil in the sky contrasts with the stillness of the earth beneath, reaches back to the lyrical Mackerel Sky of 1917.

The exhibition points to Paul Nash’s international importance, but instead it reveals the complexity of a great British artist of the 20th century, one who despised conflict but responded positively to it twice, and felt lost without it.

Simon Tait

Italian Renaissance Courts: Art, Pleasure and Power by Alison Cole, published by Laurence King; 240pp; £19.95 (hardcover)

There is a perception that the Renaissance was something that happened in Florence in the first couple of decades of the 1400s, thanks to the Medici. The Renaissance actually evolved from about 1300 to 1600, a part of what was to become known as humanism that looked back to classical times for its motifs of documentary clarity and beauty. The name was inspired by Petrarch in the first half of the 14th century who used the word “rebirth” to describe what was happening.

But, as Alison Cole guides us through the complexities of inter-city politics and manners in the late Middle Ages, we see that while the Renaissance was the inspiration of artists, it was the patronage of the rulers of the city states of un-unified Italy that made it post-classical history’s most important cultural flip.

It was a supercharged era of political turmoil and thrust for fast progress, and the magnates of took their principalities through almost permanent war interspersed with filigree diplomacy in which they swapped family members through marriage and court artists like modern footballers. These city potentates were soldiers who made their fortunes as condottieri working for cities higher up the foodchain, popes and Holy Roman Emperors, from whom they won their titles.

A powerful weapon was art, but the enthusiasm for culture was not superficial. “Against a background of constant warfare, factional rivalry, popular unrest, arbitrary violence, devastating plague epidemics and a litany of everyday concerns, there were real pleasures, spiritual nourishment and consolation to be found in the arts and scholarship that the courts commissioned and consumed”, Cole tells us.

They believed in the sophistication and refinement of fashion to which they added their own dignity – Pontano’s treatise On Splendour at the end of the 15th century says the French eat for greed, the Italians with splendour, and in an earlier one, The Prince, to a devotion to Aristotle’s Ethics – not being afraid to import it from northern Europe. The virtues, according to various expositions of the time, were fortitude, prudence, temperance, magnanimity and liberalism, an ethic summed up as “Maiestate”, majesty. This clarity, order and decorum is seen in the work of the artists they chose, like Andrea Mantegna, Piero della Francesca and Leon Battista Alberti.

Most of the artists employed by the magnates were stipendari, journeymen who ranked alongside court barbers, but a few were familiaris, members of the inner circle, and they could have a more precarious existence, vulnerable to whims and to regime change. Some were associated with the particular cities – Pisanello with Naples, Mantegna with Mantua, Cosmè Tura with Ferrara, Alberti with Florence, Filarete with Rome – but, like Giotto early in the period and Leonardo later, they travelled and would be open to offers. Salaries were not commissions, they were to give the maestri space to work; they could get presents, such as parcels of land, as well (or possibly in lieu, as seems to have happened with Leonardo in Milan).
Most artists, though formatively trained as painters or stonemasons, were also expected to be designers and architects, and after the discovery of Vitruvius’s 1st century BC treatise On Architecture in 1414 there was a frenzy of enthusiasm for neo-classical building.

Winning a city state through conquest was often the easy part: victors then had to become accepted by the rest of the Italian princes. Alfonso V of Aragon took Naples in 1442 and used art as a diplomatic lingua franca. He brought Jacomart from Valencia as his court painter, attracted Jan van Eyck, Rogier Van der Weyden and the peripatetic Gentile da Fabriano. In 1449 Pisanello was behind the creation of the great monumental signature for him, a triumphal arch.

At Urbino there was Federico da Montefeltro who had been a child hostage in Mantua where he was taught at the court of the humanist Gonzagas. He hired Piero de la Francesca who had worked in Ferrara and Rimini (powerbase for Montefeltro’s great rival Sigismondo Malatesta) who painted and created architecture for him, and the Flemish colourist Justus of Ghent. The profile portrait of him and his wife Battista Sforza by Piero was used as a model for medallists and illuminators.

The Estes of Ferrara claimed descent from Alexander the Great but were actually of German stock. Pisanello made medals and naturalistic paintings for them, and only the best materials could be used. Tura’s fee for painting the religious figures in Borso d’Este’s chapel was less than the cost of the pigments.

The Gonzagas’ Mantua was a buffer between the argumentative Milan and Venice, and they accordingly increased their condottieri fees accordingly to invest in the arts. In 1460 Mantegna – knighted by Francesco Gonzaga as “our dear familiari” – was lured to Mantua from Padua and stayed for over 40 years, while the city was rebuilt in classical style. He did a chapel in the church of Sant’ Andrea and bought the land beyond the window so that no other new building could interrupt the light. He created the famous Camera Picta, also called the Camera degli Sposi, the marriage chamber, with its breathtakingly real fresco portraits of the Gonazaga family, where visiting nobles could assess the eligibility of the Gonzaga ladies. Mantegna was also a collector of antiquities, a taste he passed on to Isabella d’Este, Franceso’s wife, who may have created one of the first art galleries in her studiolo where she had up to 1,500 items and where she would hold debates on their qualities – she set Praxiteles’s 4th century BC Sleeping Cupid against Michangelo’s version.

Leonardo sold himself to Milan’s Ludovico Sforza as a military engineer, but one of his most breathtaking portraits was of the duke’s mistress Cecilia Gallerani, also called The Lady with an Ermine (1490). In 1498 Leonardo painted his incomparable Last Supper in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie ostensibly for the Dominicans, though their patron was Ludovico who dined there twice a week. But Sforza was running out of money (he was overthrown a year later partly because he had spent so much on art he had nothing left for mercenaries), and Leonardo was given a vineyard instead.

It is a potentially confusing story Alison Cole has set herself to tell, and she does it succinctly. None of these princes is the same, there are interruptions to their lines and while fortunes could be made by artists they had to choose their patrons shrewdly, but these patrons enabled some of the most glorious demonstrations of Western creativity. Without going into the detail a volume twice the size could not satisfy, in 240 pages she gives us an image of the cities’ contradictory professional bellicosity against their humanistic sophistication – their ineffable “majesty”.

Simon Tait

From Bow to Biennale: Artists of the East London Group David Buckman , Francis Boutle Publishers, 2012, 382pp, £30 (paperback)

When David Buckman’s From Bow to Biennale, Artists of the East London Group was published in 2012 it was the result of nine years of research and shone a light on an unknown group of East End painters who briefly flourished for a decade across the 1920s and 30s. They were amateurs, night school pupils of a messianic teacher called John Cooper. Their fame resounded briefly internationally, but then were forgotten. Buckman, a journalist by training and technique, ferreted out the story, curiously reminiscent of the Pitman Painters of Ashington that William Feaver wrote a book about in 2008 which became a successful Lee Hall play. But Buckman had unearthed a goldmine.

And it was an exploding goldmine because that first edition detonated a burst of new information. Buckman had thought all the participants in the story to be dead, and they weren’t. Aimee Valdez, known as Birdie, was 101 when he found her, with a vivid memory of Cooper and his work. Eunice Veitch died in 1952 when her son was six, and he had no idea his mother had been a painter until this book was first published. Lost panels made for St Pancras Town Hall by Cecil Osborne were found. One of Cooper’s best pupils was the navvy-cum-pipe inspector Archibald Hattemore who disappeared at the group’s height: his grandson came forward with the story – he had got a new job which left him no time for classes and he ceased to show, but continued to paint at his Hackney home. There was the basket-maker Henry Silk whose great niece revealed a newspaper interview in which he told the reporter: “If I tell my customers that Lady Cunard has bought one of my paintings, and that one had been over to Ohio for a permanent collection, and that I had been mentioned over the wireless as an artist – do you think they would believe me? They would think I was just spinning a yarn”.

When the East London Group had its first exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in December 1928 the influential magazine Studio described it as “little short of sensational”. The amateurs had become accomplished painters, among them the brothers Harold and Walter Steggles (respectively a solicitors’ clerk and a shipping clerk), Albert Turpin (window cleaner), Reginald Tomlinson (school inspector), Elwin Hawthorne (house decorator) and the navvy Hattemore. Some even got advertising commissions.

The group’s origins had been in the Bethnal Green Men’s Institute Art Club whose librarian, A K Sabin, pompously wrote that the club was “the first serious attempt to interest the worker of the district in the executive side of art”. The institute’s first annual exhibition was in 1924 at the Bethnal Green Museum, all the exhibitors being self-taught. “My Bethnal Green gang produced good and various paintings,” said their teacher, William Finch. But by 1927 they had switched allegiance to the Bow and Bromley Evening Institute and a recent Slade graduate teaching there, John Cooper, who saw enough potential in them to launch them onto the West End gallery circuit, making a deal with the Lefevre Gallery. “Life in those days could be very new and exciting,” recalled one of the group, Cecil Osborne, “and all art very wonderful, opening new vistas to be explored”.

Born in Yorkshire in 1894 Cooper had served in the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War and with his ex-serviceman’s grant went to the Slade where he was taught by Henry Tonks. Graduating in 1922 he underpinned his income as a painter by teaching evening classes. He created a network of powerful supporters among former fellow students, subjects and collectors, such as Henry Moore, J B Priestley, Thomas Beecham, Arnold Bennett, Aldous Huxley, Ramsay Macdonald and Osbert Sitwell.

For that first exhibition in 1928 “about 30 members drawn from Hackney, Whitechapel, East Ham, Poplar, Mile End and so on” showed, according to the Evening News. Thed groups had grown from nine to 35, and many of them wanted to do no more than paint images for greetings cards. Cooper steered them into more challenging areas. “It was his inspiration to get the members to stop painting film stars and to paint what was all about them, say, a dingy bedroom, and look at it in a new way,” said Nancy Sharp, a Slade student recruited to help by Cooper along with her fellow student and future husband William Coldstream.

As early as 1924 Cooper had been surprised by the painter-like qualities of some of the students. “They boldly tackled scenes from their everyday life, seeing beauty in most unlikely subjects and reproducing it with surprising success,” he told the Evening News. Teaching help came from his Slade friends, and Rodrigo Moynihan was another of his assistants; Sickert gave the group informal lectures, telling them that expensive excursions to find landscapes to paint were unnecessary. “There is no need to go to Bognor,” he said. “You can go into the Tube”.

The Tate responded to the 1928 Whitechapel show, buying two pictures from it and in the following year putting on its own exhibition of 24 pictures from the group, showing “what British artisans can do in their spare time”, as the gallery’s press release put it.

And so the amateur East London Art Club metamorphosed into a professionally recognised East London Group with Mayfair art dealers taking an active interest. In 1935 there was a touring exhibition of Canada and the USA, organised through the Courtauld Institute and augmented by contributions of professional London Group artists such as Paul and John Nash, Charles Ginner and CRW Nevinson. The high point, though, was the inclusion of paintings by the East London Group’s Elwin Hawthorn and Walter Steggles in the 1936 Venice Biennale.

The end of the group began when a five year Lefevre contract ended in 1937, followed by the decision of the Bromley & Bow Institute to expel the group – because other students thought it unfair that they were allowed to use the institute’s facilities to exhibit and sell their work – and Cooper left too. After some war work as an air ministry draughtsman, he died of sclerosis of the spine in 1943, aged 48. The East London Group never exhibited together again, until the ten-week 2014 exhibition at The Nunnery, Bow (and more exhibitions are scheduled for the Nunnery and Southampton City Art Gallery in 2017).

Although several of the artists continued to work and show, as well as pursuing their day jobs, they never exhibited as the East London Group again. “My efforts have been directed to stimulating the students to express something which they feel about life,” Cooper had told The Millgate magazine. “This was some of the reason for Rembrandt’s greatness”.

David Buckman has a great story to tell and despite his fastidiousness in making sure every single fact is not missed, much like his meticulous researching, the book is an easy read, written by a reporter who has fallen for his subject.

Simon Tait

Designing the V&A: The Museum as a Work of Art (1857-1909), by Julius Bryant, published by Lund Humphries in association with V&A Publishing, May 2017, pp. 176, £35 (Hardback)

At the end of June the Victoria & Albert Museum opened its spectacular Amanda Levete designed new £50m extension beyond the reverent arches of the Aston Webb Screen on Exhibition Road, the biggest new build since the place opened in 1909.
It brings to an end more than 35 years of frequent returns to the drawing board as the museum tried to find solutions to the problem of the Boiler House Yard, and as Julius Bryant’s timely new book shows it is a compliment to the original terracotta building that set a South Kensington characteristic.
How the museum ever got built in the first place is a mystery, however, and its tribulations make the Boilerhouse wranglings pale into insignificance.
The V&A owes existence primarily to Henry Cole, a bustling, liberal, extraordinarily well connected civil servant-cum-journalist. He also moonlighted as a freelance entrepreneur who did business producing household goods under the happy soubriquet of “Felix Summerly”, and commissioned the best artists to design them, – Richard Redgrave, William Dyce, J C Horsley (who designed the first Christmas card for him), Daniel Maclise and Milliam Mulready among them. Several of them were involved in the School of Design, opened in 1837, and Cole joined them. He took it over, reformed it, expanded it, created a museum in it, and public design education became his mission.
It was also Prince Albert’s and the two worked together to create the first world’s fair, the Great Exhibition of 1851, out of the profits of which Cole persuaded the prince and the government to buy an estate at Brompton in which to create an educational precinct.
The first of the institutions to be planned was the museum, and to save money a Royal Engineers captain, Francis Fowke, was commissioned to design it. Cole and Albert were not patient men, however, and Fowke was asked to create a temporary structure to get the institution established, and the pre-fabricated iron building he made still stands, but now in Bethnal Green where it houses the V&A Museum of Childhood. It was unkindly dubbed “The Brompton Boilers” by those who thought it looked more like a power station than a place of culture.

But Cole’s insistence on using the building itself to teach design excellence prevailed. There were decorations by Edward Burne-Jones, Frederic Leighton, Edward Poynter, G F Watts, J M Whistler, Owen Jones and William Morris – though the most famous artist of the time, John Everett Millais declined, saying “Show rooms should be made not to assert themselves” – and Bryant details how it was done in very readable style having had unique access to the V&A’s exhaustive archives, superbly illustrated.
That it did get built is testament to the determination of it progenitors, who succeeded against combinations of bad luck, political parsimony and stifling bureaucracy. Having got a temporary iron building on the site to satisfy Cole’s bustling urgency, Fowke died at 42 in 1865; two months later his chief engineer, Geoffrey Sykes, 41, also died; in 1861 Prince Albert died, then in 1873 Cole resigned over funding cuts; in 1882 Henry Scott, Fowke’s successor and designer of the Royal Albert Hall, was fired (he died a year later) and at the same time his designer, Reuben Townroe, resigned because he hadn’t been paid. And all the time the collections were growing, changing the space requirements of the museum.
But Scott kept to Fowke’s masterplan and the V&A was built in three phases: 1857-1868 when Cole’s redbrick galleries for showing paintings and giving lectures were built; 1869-1884 when Scott built the architectural courts and National Art Library; the last phase, 1899-1909, saw Aston Webb’s main building completed.
The grand screen was not only a link between the museum and the Science Schools to the north in Exhibition Road, it shielded the a boilerhouse that powered the building. The screen was eventually created by Aston Webb in the plan’s third phase.
This area’s difficulties were partly solved in 1983 when the Science Schools, which had become an outstation of the Royal College of Art, became the V&A’s Henry Cole Wing with a new entrance from Exhibition Road. Temporary offices were created where the boilerhouse stood, and the beginnings of the Design Museum was sparked beneath as the Boilerhouse Project, before it moved to Shad Thames and now Kensington High Street.
By 1996 the V&A was in dire need of expansion on a tight site and the controversial design by Daniel Libeskind for a pyramidal structure, called The Spiral, was to create new exhibition spaces, education rooms and offices, but it was controversially out of rhyme with the “South Kensington Style” established 140 years before and matched by the Royal Albert Hall and Alfred Waterhouse’s Natural History Museum. It struggled to get funding, and was eventually abandoned in 2004 with its main champion, the director Alan Borg, having moved on in 2001.
And although Amanda Levete’s design is quintessentially of our time, it takes its inspirations from the Victorian museum and from some of the plans that were never realised. The Sackler Courtyard, for instance, has been porcelain tiled, with examples of 19th century decorative ceramics. The Italian mosaics in the entrance lobby echo the restored floors around the museum – made by female prisoners – and the support structure for the balustrade to the staircase leading down to the Sainsbury Gallery also takes its cue from the century-old staircases in the museum.

The Aston Webb Screen encountered on Exhibition Road is back after conservation. Originally envisioned by Cole it was only realised many years after his death, and the helter-skelter like tower he wanted at the screen’s centre was never built, nor was the bridge he wanted to connect the museum with the rest of the estate across the road. Levete’s design completes Cole’s vision, she believes.

Before, in her last public act, Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone of the finished building she had been determined that the South Kensington Museum should emerge as the Albert Museum, but she was persuaded to change her mind so that on May 17, 1899, she declared “that in future this institution shall by styled the Victoria and Albert Museum”.

Shetland is a quiet, self-possessed nation of 22,000 whose population still considers itself to be more Norse than British. They like celebrations, foys they call them, but the big one comes on the last Tuesday of January, a midwinter relief when male Shetlanders dress up as Vikings, process through the capital, Lerwick – or Lerook in the vernacular – with torches and set fire to a galley. The day after is the public holiday to allow the revellers to recover.

The name of Up Helly Aa, according to John Jamieson’s 1818 Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, is from the Old Norse word uppi meaning “the end of”, helly is “holy” – the end of Christmas – and aa is “all”. So, given the abandon the festivities are consigned to at the depths of the near-Arctic climate, “the end of all that’s holy” would be about right.

Thousands descend on Up Helly Aa in their vast tourist cruise ships, and welcoming as Shetlanders are, much of their chatter will be alien to even the English speaking visitors. Half of Shetland’s residents can still speak their ancestors’ tongue, once forbidden by the ruling Scots but still alive, unique and charming, in which the biggest insult is to call someone a “soothmoother’, one whose speech comes from beyond the islands. Our “ith” has been largely lost to dialect, so that “they” is “day”, “then” is “dan”. “Their” and “there” have both become “dare”, but “you” is “du” – the “y” form having once been runic for “ith” so that “du” comes from “thou”. “Wat du daan da day, dan?” is “What are you doing today, then?”

Shetland dialect has German, Old Scots, elements of Latin, even discernible traces of French, but at its base is their own Norn which reclines on Old Norse.

Norn, or Norrøna, is essentially a street language. Much as Shetlanders love their sagas and blood curdling yarns of whaling disasters and family tragedy it’s largely an oral tradition, though I have a volume of dialect poetry that takes much from Norn. Despite its Old Norse base Norn relies heavily on onomatopoeia and where there isn’t a word to fit a particular situation, a new one emerges from the idiom. And there is its great charm.

Life is hard in this land where the sun only shines for half the year, when the men traditionally fished for whale in the winter months and worked the land where no trees can grow in the long hours of the seasons of “simmerdim”, while the women were spinning and weaving, plucking wool from the gorse bushes and cutting peat all year round. So it is not surprising that the dialect has, for instance, 12 different words for exhausted: you could emerge from the daily grind daddit, debaetless, depooperit, disjasket, forfochen, hurless, maegered, mankit, moyenless, ootmaagit, pooskered or even pyaagit, largely depending on which of the islands you hail from.

To help rescue this beguiling language Alistair Christie-Johnston and his wife Adaline, who live on the island of Yell, published a dictionary, Shetland Words, with the Shetland Times, compiled because he and his editor, Neil Anderson, feared that many of the intrinsic words were falling out of use and will be lost for ever. At the end of the 19th century there were thought to be about 10,000 Shetland dialect words extant, by 1970 only about 15% of them were found; through ground knowledge and detective work Shetland Words has recorded about 4,000. The book, published in 2010, sold out and a second edition has just been published with 300 more words gleaned from the outer islands, difficult because the accents change from island to island so that the same word might sound quite different at Skerries to the north east, say, than it will at Foula in the west.

The basis remains, and the survival of Norn is remarkable. It began to die as long ago as the 16th century when rule reverted from Norway to Scotland and Scots law was imposed with the indigenous language proscribed, but many beautiful words of Norn remain in the argot. Bonnhoga, for instance – from the Old Norse barn (child) and hagi (pasture) – which means spiritual home. Gauvenliss is the word for feeble or clumsy; a mouse is a bohonnin, which by some old irony comes from the Norse for watchdog; a pig is a pottisidna; a clergyman is a prestengolva (“the one in the cassock”). A swee is a strong dram, an organic word, and a clock midder is a hen with chicks, but a hansel is a commemorative gift, from the Old Norse for the transference of a right; a cangle is a quarrel.

Modern life has made its incursions, but in a curious way that leaves a helpful distinction. The shower in your bathroom is pronounced “shower”, but a quick downfall of rain is still a shooer. Shetland also has its own, not always appealing, cuisine and words to go with it. It may not be a surprise to know that a dish of fish livers mixed with oatmeal, stuffed in a herring’s head and boiled is called “krappit” and is rarely eaten any more.

The etymology of some words is mysterious until you know more of the island life. Wild thyme is taegirse, which translates as “toe grass” and makes no sense until you know that thyme here is used as a treatment for athlete’s foot. But Alistair Christie-Johnston and Neil Anderson were not content – “tae” after all is Scots and plants in Shetland tend to keep their Norn traces. They tracked the real derivation down to the Old Norse word for root fibre tág, plural taeger, which fits the tight network of the Shetland variety of creeping thyme. You have to be there.

It is an ancient language full of social history, and a glimpse into a lost age, Neil Anderson told me. He is a Shetlander of the old school who can give you the family name of a man he has never met simply because of the way he walks; in the same way, he can tell from which island a person comes from the words he uses. And he had an affirming experience in the Lerwick shop he runs when he offered a young man a foodbag. He didn’t know what he meant, but he did know the Shetland word, maetpockie.

https://www.shetlandheritageshop.com/Shetland-Words-A-Dictionary-of-the-Shetland-Dialect.html

Philip Sutton celebrated his 90th birthday on October 20 with two exhibitions, in what has become his home town of Bridport in Dorset. One of them was of charcoal drawings, the other was a retrospective of the last seven decades, including some new canvases, “my whole life”. Painting still is his life, and although his eyes are not good any more and the sight is gone in one eye he paints constantly and walks the West Bay beach three times every day.

Less conspicuously, there was also a small exhibition at the Red House, the Britten-Peers Library at their home in Aldburgh, Suffolk, of the seven Suttons the library owns, including his portrait of Peter Pears and the picture that changed his life.

Sutton he says he owes his profession to chance – that he was able to make use of the ex-serviceman’s grant scheme for higher education in 1949, that the Slade saw something in his evening class drawings of car badges, that William Coldstream was the Slade professor, that the dealers Henry Roland and Gustave Delbanco went to the Slade’s 1953 degree show on Coldstream’s recommendation and saw Sutton’s melancholy portrait of a fellow student. And that the singer Peter Pears happened to pass the Roland, Browse & Delbanco gallery in Cork Street.

The ex-aircraftman arrived at the Slade, as did Coldstream, in 1949 with an intake that included Ewan Uglow, Craigie Aitchison and Michael Andrews whose different kinds of genius were recognised and nurtured by the avuncular, taciturn Coldstream – not least Phil Sutton’s. His friend Derry Irvine – Lord Irvine of Lairgs – recalls Coldstream telling him: “Phil can never be written off. His work can go through bad phases, but he is and always will be capable of producing something that is really good because he is a gifted, intuitive painter”.

The college career – at the Slade he met the film-maker Heather Cooke, his wife of 64 years, who died last year – was auspicious by any standards, but graduation reality in austerity London was hard. He and Heather escaped to Europe for a while on bursaries he’d won, and at one point Uglow found them living in Menton on a diet of potatoes. Heather became pregnant and they returned to London penniless with baby Jake in a woven straw carrycot.

Sutton got low-paid teaching shifts at the Slade and another college friend, Harold Cohen – later to be the pioneer of computer art in the United States where he developed the “cybernetic artist “, AARON – found the family a room in the house where he had a flat. Toilet, kitchen and bathroom were shared, Jake slept in a cardboard box, and it was a fairly squalid environment from which to launch a career, a career Sutton was not sure was there to be had.

It was at about this time that Peter Pears happened to pass the gallery window and had his eye caught by Sutton’s sombre, expressionistic portrait of a fellow student, Tony Tice, who was later to commit suicide. Struck by the vibrant colour use he bought it on an impulse – the first Philip Sutton picture to be sold through a commercial gallery – got into conversation with Delbanco and heard of the poverty the family were subsisting in, got Sutton’s address and asked him to lunch with Benjamin Britten at their favourite Covent Garden restaurant, Bertorelli’s. “All I can remember of it was that I was starving hungry but so nervous I couldn’t eat anything”, he says.

Britten and Pears thought the family were in need of a holiday and offered them the use of a cottage in Snape, Suffolk, for a fortnight. It was called Joy Cottage and they stayed for three years, during which two more children were born, and Sutton commuted three days a week to the Slade.

He arrived at Joy Cottage at a crossroads in his painting. He was aware of developments in St Ives, saw the American Expressionists’ exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956, and was agonising on whether abstractism was the way he should go. Several canvases were destroyed in his frustration, before he finally rejected it. “At periods in your life when something’s floating in the air you pick it up, almost like a virus”, he says. Instead he felt the power of the landscape outside his windows. “All I can do is respond to how things fall. But I was a different painter when I left Snape than the one that went there”.

The invitation was a life-changing, career-making, act of kindness. Britten and Pears used to take the family off in their car on fine days for beach picnics, and it was at the cottage that Pears’s portrait was painted. The family lived a spartan life and when Delbanco visited he found “a most disorderly household… the piss-pot stood in the kitchen and so on” and he found it “amusing to have to sleep in my overcoat because it was so cold”.

But Delbanco liked what he saw. Sutton’s style matured and coalesced at Joy Cottage, the colours became less hectic and less mordant, the paint thinner on the canvas, the strokes more lyrical; there were pale seascapes, dreamy landscapes from the open country that had inspired Constable and Gainsborough, and many happy depictions of his growing family. “As an extrovert colourist – because there are introvert colourists – this complete lack of hesitation with the handling of paint, this instinctive understanding of the nature of colour, is a thing so rare in the English school, and it’s Sutton’s greatest asset”, Delbanco said. The art began to sell.

In 1958 the family left Suffolk for affordable Battersea, transported by their friend Jeffrey Camp, for a phase in which Philip Sutton became popular, and then in the 60s and 70s fashionable. Their house, bought thanks to a loan from Heather’s father, became a salon, the work was collected by the Tate, the Government Art Collection, Harrison Birtwistle, Albert Finney, Penelope Wilton, Arnold Wesker, Nell Dunn, Irvine, Carl Davis and Lord Snowdon, who did an elegiac photographic feature of the Sutton household for the Sunday Times Magazine. In the 70s Sutton was elected an RA and never misses showing and selling in the Summer Exhibition.

It was in the Suffolk years that Sutton became assured that he was a painter by profession, not a teacher that paints. He arrived at Battersea with confidence and ease in the depiction of form and colour that he found within himself, thanks to the tranquility of Joy Cottage.

“I was looking for a target, what I should be painting, and realised it was in myself”, he says now, “and I found it by chance. Chance has been so important.

“As long as you bump into something you don’t know is there and can take it on, that’s being creative, but if you bump into something you know is there and look no further, that is not a creative act. The essence of a spirit of adventure is that you don’t know the result, and for that you need courage.”

Philip Sutton at 90 is at Bridport Arts Centre until October 6
Philip Sutton RA is at the Literary and Scientific Institute Bridport until October 6
Early Philip Sutton is at The Red House, Snape, until October 28

Hokusai: the Master’s Legacy, ed. Rosella Menehazzo, published by Skira

The early 20th century French printmaker and art historian Henri Focillon described Hokusai as “freely inspired and inebriated by life and its phenomena” (Hokusai, 1914) at a time when the Japanese artist was influencing not merely design but very lifestyles, having been barely known outside his own country 50 years before.
Hokusai, who died in 1849 aged 90, led Japan’s equivalent of the Impressionists, bringing the everyday, the beautiful, the comical and the erotic to a newly eager general public as the country entered a modern era, working largely in a classical medium, woodblock, in a radical modernist way.

In the last couple of decades Katsushika Hokusai’s name has become almost as familiar worldwide as those of Cézanne and Monet, and his Great Wave off Kanagawa has become the most reproduced image in the world, and last year’s British Museum exhibition, Hokusai: beyond the great wave, was a sell-out visited by 150,000 people.

His recent rise in Western consciousness is thanks to scholars like the BM’s Tim Clark, who curated that show, and Rosella Menehazzo of Milan University. After more than 20 years studying the Japanese art of the late Edo period, she has edited the book which, while the British Museum’s exhibition underlined Hokusai’s standing with the story of his long life, places him as a major influence not only among his own contemporaries but on artists, from the east and west, to the present day.

Hokusai – the last of several names he adopted as he passed through phases of his life – was born in a district of what is now Tokyo, the son of a mirror-maker from whom he inherited nothing except a skill to design the decoration around mirrors. At 14 he was an apprentice woodcarver and at 18 had become the pupil of an artist of the ukiyo-e style of woodblock prints and paintings that focussed mostly on images of famous geishas and Kabuki actors. Menahazzo translates ukiyo-e as “Pictures of the Floating World”.

He began to develop a reputation for his spare and faultless line, but regarded his first 60 years as a preparation for what was to occupy the last third of his life. ‘…until the age of 70, nothing I drew was worthy of notice” he wrote in a translation of his Manga by Henry D Smith III. “At 73 years I was somewhat able to fathom the growth of plants and trees, and the structure of birds, animals, insects and fish. Thus when I reach 80 years, I hope to have made increasing progress, and at 90 to see further into the underlying principles of things, so that at 100 years I will have achieved a divine state in my art, and at 110 every dot and every stroke will be as though alive. Those of you who live long enough, bear witness that these words of mine are not false”.

He applied his ukiyo-e techniques to a much broader range of subjects, principally to nature, and eschewing traditional practice. He won a competition by painting a single blue curve on a large sheet of paper and chasing across it a chicken whose feet had been dipped in red paint, saying that it represented the Tatuita River with red maple leaves floating in it. In the 1820s, able to make use of imported Prussian blue, he produced his seminal Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, followed by the three volumes of One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, the last volume of which was published in the year of his death.

At 50 he created his own exhaustive manuals on how to draw, the Hokusai Manga, which included facial types and changing expressions as well as of flora and fauna, street life and the supernatural. There were 20 in all, five published posthumously, and they are still reproduced and much-used references.

Menahazzo puts Hokusai in the context of the modernised Japan of the late Edo period (1603-1868), which ended more or less with the opening up of trade to the West, and the other ukiyo-e artists that rose alongside him. His pupils Hokkei, Hokuba, Shinsai and Gakutei, and his peers Eisen and Utamaro established great success, but the most famous of them, Eisen, always acknowledged that Hokusai represented “an absolute point of reference for him in painting”, Menegazzo writes.

Hokusai and his fellows were making art for public spaces and places, but also for private consumption, including the abuna-e – “dangerous pictures” – which were a testament to the liberalised society of the late Edo they illuminated. Often there were coy hints at sexuality such as glimpses of red underwear, red being seen as a provocative colour and forbidden for outer clothing by the sumptuary laws. But they could also be explicit, such as Hokusai’s Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife which, writes Menegazzo, “only the consummate skill and wit of the master could render so captivating and devoid of bad taste”.

A flood of Japanese art hit the West following the arrival of the American fleet under Commodore Matthew Perry in 1854 and the trade deal sealed by the Convention of Kanagawa, coincidentally the site of Hokusai’s most famous image. It inspired designers and artists across Europe and America in the later 19th century and through the 20th, with The Wave appearing in Van Gogh’s Starry Night of 1889, and being the image for the cover of Debussy’s La Mer in 1905.

In Tate Modern’s 2018 exhibition Picasso 1932 there is a suggestion that Picasso was inspired by Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, the lascivious tentacles seducing the sleeping woman, to paint the series of reclining nudes of Marie-Thérèse Walter he made at Boisgeloup that year when his own work was becoming more sensual.

The instructions of his Manga – the word means random or impromptu pictures – in which the emphasis was on the simplicity of the fewest possible but perfect lines to tell simple stories were seized on by the Impressionists, among others, liberating them from existing assumptions about how to draw and paint. It is the basis of the modern genre that borrows the same word, the comics and animations that have created world-wide market worth billions of dollars. It is not too much to claim that modern art begins, at least partly, with Hokusai, and as Rosella Menehazzo that he brings to the current era “the art of the Floating World in full bloom”.

Frank Auerbach
Tate Britain

When Frank Auerbach first came to public notice – emerged rather than burst – in the 1950s he was noted as a “British Expressionist” in the white hot enthusiasm for the American abstract colourists Clement Greenberg (not to mention the American government) was punting around the world with spectacular success.

It was a gross misreading of his work. Auerbach was not concerned with conveying an emotional response but has spent his life examining his changing relationship with objects, people and scenes to which he has returned repeatedly for 60 years. He is part of an extraordinary post-war flourish of British talent that was too often only seen in the context of the likes of Pollock, Rothko and Newman and, difficult though it can sometimes be to read, Auerbach’s work is never abstract in the sense of internalised perception. His paintings are not mere expressions, they are evocations, and although the paint is applied very quickly and often in large amounts, the process can be prolix. Often they require long consideration by the viewer, a case in which patience is always rewarded as a form gradually becomes plain from a maelstrom of paint. That is Auerbach’s inimitable magic.

This exhibition is not just a retrospective, it is the artist’s own statement on his life’s work, chosen, he says, not particularly chronologically and certainly not stylistically or by subject or context, but so that “each work be considered as an absolute which works (or does not work) by itself”. Yet there is a chronology in that six rooms are each devoted to a decade, with the seventh being a kind of summary by his friend and long time sitter the curator Catherine Lampert.

Auerbach builds his paintings, and famously his impasto can be several inches thick so that some of the frames here are more like vitrines, so deep do they have to be to accommodate the mountain of oil paint. But as he shows with his choices, he can excavate an idea as much with sparse almost faint strokes as he can by piling paint on with a palette knife (and the piling on is not a process of correction, he will scrape off ounces of pigment if he feels it is not going right and start again).

One of the wonders of Auerbach’s art is that he gets so much from so little, and it would be easy to assume that each image of a sitter or a scene is a new attempt to get it right, writing-off what went before. It doesn’t work like that for him: each essay is an articulation for the truth he sees at a moment, and sometimes developing over years, and each offers answers to a perception of a new verity. He has got a whole world out of Mornington Crescent. In Lampert’s room she has included three images from 1988 called J.Y.M. Seated in the Studio in which his long-time model Juliet Yardley Mills is painted in exactly the same pose. They could almost be like different state impressions from a print process, but they are individual paintings in which Auerbach has found different qualities in the scene through using different pigments – none is a preparation, each is a resolution.

He introduces himself in the first room by covering a huge span of his early work. There are two portraits of his friend and stalwart sitter Stella West (“E.O.W.”). One is a charcoal drawing of 1959-60 in which the exquisitely drawn features – almost a Henry Moore face – look out expressionlessly and slightly austerely from a piece of paper that is dotted with marks, bits of stuck-on labels, old adhesive marks, as though she is an authoritative presence in a space of casual chaos (there is a self-portrait of 1958 in the same vein). Four years earlier he had painted a Head of E.O.W. in a dark study in which the sitter’s melancholy face emerges from a background of thick dark swirls, mordantly pale and looking down in an almost sculptural statement of features. And then again, Head of E.O.W II of 1961 is so impasto it cannot help but be a flurry of movement, and in this impression there is gentleness, humour, affection, fun – action painting in which the action is in the image, not the energy of the artist.

Auerbach’s story is remarkable but not unusual for the mid-20th century. He came to England aged eight on the Kindertransport leaving behind the parents he was never to see again. Naturalised British in 1947 he studied at St Martin’s and the Royal College of Art, but with his friend Leon Kossoff did David Bomberg’s famous evening classes at Borough Institute which perhaps gave him the confidence to be so different. His first solo show was at the Beaux-Arts in 1956 and he was taken up by the critic David Sylvester, and his reputation grew so that in 1978 the Arts Council gave him a Hayward Gallery retrospective when he was still in his forties. In 1981 he was a strong part of the RA’s seminal New Spirit of Painting, curated by Christos Joachimides, Norman Rosenthal and Nicholas Serota, in which he took his place alongside not only Francis Bacon, R B Kitaj and Lucian Freud but Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter and Pablo Picasso as representing the most inventive work of the 1970s.

By then he had found his place, Camden, from which he seldom budges, painting what he sees about him and each time extracting a new essence, and at 85 he is painting with undiminished enthusiasm and invention – the most recent painting here is one of his studio from 2014. Primrose Hill appears frequently in his show, cold, stark and slashed with blood red fissures in Spring Sunshine, angular but festively green and red in Winter Evening of 1974-5, and then in 1971 a joyous sweep of flowing warm summer strokes in Primrose Hill.

His portraits are not so much likenesses as descriptions, and he has included two of his son Jake in 2008-9 and 2009-10, both head and shoulders in exactly the same pose, but the first is oil the other charcoal and pencil, and the effect is the same as having a different conversation with the same person. In fact, the next Auerbach exhibition should be in the National Portrait Gallery.

In this exhibition Auerbach shows himself as an artist who has accomplished, the points in his life of those accomplishments being irrelevant, and in his catalogue essay the arts historian T J Clark has a phrase which sums it up perfectly: “…full of grimful glee…”.