Tate Britain’s Lee Miller retrospective begins with a soft focus picture of her by New York photographer Arnold Genthe dated 1927, when she was working as a fashion model. The image is so hazy that she appears as dreamlike and insubstantial as a wraith.It exemplifies one of the hallmarks of a good model – the ability to become a screen that invites projection, rather than expressing your own personality. And in shot after shot for British and American Vogue, Miller remains an enigma – impassive and searingly beautiful. Would the exhibition bring her into sharper focus, as I hoped, or would Read more ...

Billed as “a journey through painting and photography”, Capturing the Moment reveals many ways in which artists have responded to photography – either by taking up the camera themselves, as did Candida Höffer, Andreas Gursky, Louise Lawler and Thomas Struth, or by making some superb paintings.By way of introduction, the first room makes no sense, though. Picasso once said – probably as a riposte to anyone criticising his disregard for surface appearances – “photography has arrived at a point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and even from the Read more ...

What a feast! Congratulations are due to the National Gallery for its latest blockbuster After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art. Such a superb collection of modern masters is unlikely to be assembled again under one roof, so this is a once-in-a-lifetime, must-see exhibition.Room after fabulous room is hung with a hundred artworks, mostly paintings, on walls painted navy blue. This daring decision works well for most artists, the exception being Van Gogh whose landscapes die against the dark background. Luckily the dark blue offsets the cream wallpaper and pale pink blouse of Van Gogh’s Read more ...

The night after visiting Tate Modern’s Surrealism Beyond Borders I dreamt that a swarm of wasps had taken refuge inside my skull and I feared it would hurt when they nibbled their way out again.If I painted a self-portrait with wasps escaping from my eyes, nose, ears and mouth it would be a striking image; but would it make me a Surrealist? According to this exhibition, the answer would be a resounding “yes”, since its goal is to chart how Surrealism spread across the globe and how, since the 1920s in Paris, this radical way of thinking has taken root in the collective unconscious ( Read more ...

The Whitechapel Gallery's exhibition opens with Cell IX, 1999 (pictured below) one of the wire cages that Louise Bourgeois filled with memories of her dysfunctional family. This one contains a block of marble carved into hands. A tender portrayal of the mother-daughter bond, it is under scrutiny via three circular mirrors.The sculpture embodies Bourgeois’s dilemma as an artist. While paying tribute to her main source of inspiration – her childhood – it also proclaims her need to protect her memories from prying eyes. Once, when Alan Yentob probed her with questions for a television programme Read more ...

Eileen Agar was the only woman included in the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, which introduced London to artists like Salvador Dali and Max Ernst. The Surrealists were exploring the creative potential of chance, chaos and the irrational which they saw as the feminine principle, yet they didn’t welcome women artists into their group.Agar wasn’t easily discouraged, though. At the tender age of six, she’d been sent away to boarding school, an experience that made her fiercely independent. Later she studied at the Slade, but rebelled against the art school’s academic approach. A Read more ...

What are we to make of the two circles dustily inscribed in the background of Rembrandt’s c.1665 self-portrait? In a painting that bears the fruits of a life’s experience, drawn freehand, they might be a display of artistic virtuosity, or – more convincing were they unbroken – symbolise eternity. For an artist so very conscious of his own mortality, his 80 or so self-portraits a relentless record of the passage of time, this last reading seems most unlikely.An intelligently curated exhibition at the Gagosian’s handsome Mayfair gallery provides both space and fuel for thinking about this Read more ...

When I interviewed John Richardson, who has died at the age of 95, he was edging through his definitive four-tome life of the minuscule giant of Cubism. Of the various breaks he took from the business of research and writing, one yielded The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a gossipy, elegant account of his own friendship with Picasso in the 1950s, when he lived in Provençal splendour with Douglas Cooper, then the owner of the finest collection of Cubist art in the world. Where the biography is a vast monument, the memoir is a more intimate, dashed-off sketch, in which Richardson hangs out with Picasso Read more ...

What an ambitious project! Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-garde looks at over 40 couples or, in some cases, trios whose love galvanised them into creative activity either individually or in collaboration.The best thing about the exhibition is that it blows out of the water the traditional notion of the artist as a lone (male) genius who draws inspiration from a supportive but essentially non-creative muse, usually his lover. At last, the role of women as essential partners in many creative relationships is being acknowledged and explored. A typical example is that of Read more ...

Painted in ice-cream shades punctuated with vivid red, the series of portraits made by Picasso in the early weeks of 1932 are as dreamy as love letters. His mistress Marie-Thérèse Walther – we assume it is she – lies adrift in post-coital languor, her body spread before us as a delicious and endlessly fascinating confection. But the mood shifts from picture to picture, and she appears by turns as a wisp-like erotic reverie, an imposing, moon-faced goddess, and, in a flash of humour that teeters on the edge of cruelty, a cartoonish blob of a creature with a long, upturned snout (Pictured below Read more ...

What a gallimaufry! The polymath Picasso (1881-1973) was one of the most prolific, obsessed and best-known artists in the history; in fact, without qualification, he remains the best-known, for his genius, his mastery of so many media, his public personal life. Not to mention the four museums, the thousands of books and catalogues, the auction records, and the posthumous marketing of his name (both authorised and not) from the Citroen Picasso to coffee mugs. The Mystery of Picasso, remastered for this Arrow Academy release, is Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1956 film of Picasso drawing (Clouzot, Read more ...

Modigliani was an addict. Booze, fags, absinthe, hash, cocaine, women. He lived fast, died young, cherished an idea of what an artist should be and pursued it to his death. His nickname, Modi, played on the idea of the artiste maudit – the figure of the artist as wretched, damned. His funeral was an artistic Who’s Who in Paris in 1920 but the disease that killed him – tubercular meningitis – is a disease of poverty, and his penniless death has been matched exactly a century since his nudes were exhibited in a Parisian gallery (and immediately censored) with a vast exhibition at Read more ...