The show of the year? Easy. Everyone associated with The National Gallery’s Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan deserves congratulation beginning with the curator Luke Syson and the director Nicholas Penny. But I’d also like to single out conservator Larry Keith, whose sensitive cleaning of the National Gallery’s Virgin of the Rocks was a primary incentive for doing the show in the first place. Before Keith’s judicious restoration, the picture was thought to have been painted in large part by Leonardo’s assistants. But no one who saw it hanging opposite the Louvre version could doubt that it is by the hand of Leonardo himself.
Another highlight of 2011 was the show at the Grand Palais in Paris of scores of pictures of the highest possible quality collected by those remarkable siblings Gertrude, Leo and Michael Stein. Not only was their voracious appetite for collecting set out for us to see, but we were able to judge the strengths and limitations of each collection in a way that had not been done before. It sounds churlish to complain about a show as enjoyable as the Musée d’Orsay’s retrospective of the art of Edouard Manet but for all its pleasures it seems to have been organised in such haste that it was nothing like as comprehensive as it should have been. Manet is one of those rare painters whose achievement you diminish if you omit a single masterpiece such as his A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.
This was a good year for the old masters. In more than two decades of reviewing, I’ve never seen a show in this country devoted to 16th-century Netherlandish art so I loved the National Gallery’s display of the work of Jan Gossaert. Dismissed by Vasari as a plodding northerner, he was revealed as a painter whose work engaged in a dialogue not only with the art of classical antiquity but with artists of his own generation, such as Dürer. Though he was an exuberant painter of religious subjects, in his portraits he could enter into the minds and hearts of his subjects as few Renaissance artists before him had.
As you see, I love a good blockbuster, but museums are beginning to realise that small – even minuscule – exhibitions can be just as rewarding as big ones. Instead of staging one major exhibition to celebrate the 200th anniversary of its founding, Dulwich Picture Gallery borrowed a single masterpiece from another institution every month throughout the year. They ranged from Sir Thomas Lawrence’s wonderful portrait of the architect Sir John Soane from the Sir John Soane’s Museum, to Ingres’s ravishing portrait of Madame d’Haussonville from the Frick Collection.
A noticeable trend in these hard times is towards in-house shows drawn from a gallery’s own collection. The most successful was the National Gallery’s beautifully shown Devotion by Design – a display of its 14th and 15th-century altarpieces exhibited in darkened galleries at a height that made allowance for their original positioning over altars in dim church interiors. The atmosphere of hushed reverence restored a sense of the sacred to pictures that became secularised when they were first displayed in public art galleries.
Likewise, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s glorious survey of Pre-Raphaelite drawings and watercolours was a joy from start to finish – and 80 per cent of the works in it belonged to the gallery. Though not quite the same thing, the Courtauld Gallery built an unforgettable exhibition about the relationship between Toulouse-Lautrec and the dancer Jane Avril around its permanent collection.
For anyone who loves 19th-century British painting, the show that stood head and shoulders above all others was The Cult of Beauty: the Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900 at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Stephen Calloway, the organiser, brought a lifetime’s knowledge to the selection, labelling and display of works of art in all mediums made not to instruct or elevate or have practical use, but to appeal to the senses – a highly suspect quality in the eyes of God-fearing Victorians. The diametric opposite of this Art-for-Art’s sake aesthetic could be seen in Manchester City Art Gallery’s magisterial retrospective of the work of that not-quite-Pre-Raphaelite Ford Madox Brown. His “state of the nation” masterpiece Work looked at divisions of class in England, painted in a viscerally realistic style that can only really be compared to the art of Courbet.
Oh yes, and the John Martin show (which I saw in Newcastle but which looked 10 times better at Tate Britain) was a hoot. Here was an artist who didn’t know anything about delayed gratification. The exhibition reached its first visual climax – a scene of mass destruction by either a volcano or earthquake – in the second gallery, and then kept on climaxing in every gallery until you emerged exhausted at the end. That Martin wasn’t a particularly good painter was irrelevant – he was a showman of genius.
In the paintings of Atkinson Grimshaw , warm lights glow from within shop windows and suburban mansions of rain-swept streets, emphasising the loneliness of the unfortunate few still out in the chill night air. Grimshaw’s retrospective, which I saw at the Guildhall in London, did him proud.
For art of our own time, Susan Hiller’s emotional installations tapped into our collective unconscious to explore the deep human need to be held in the memory of others. Her show at Tate Britain was one of the best of the year, revealing an artist of great moral and intellectual stature. Compared to that, or to the popular survey of paintings by Gerhard Richter at Tate Modern, the Hayward Gallery’s Tracey Emin retrospective looked lightweight, though much more touching than I’d expected.
Earlier in the year at Tate Modern, Mexican conceptual artist Gabriel Orozco’s full-scale retrospective attracted huge crowds but left me slightly underwhelmed by the elaborate pains Orozco takes to elucidate fairly small ideas. The single work of contemporary art I most admired this year was Thomas Struth’s monumental photograph of the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh at Windsor. Without fussing too much, Struth simply showed two well-dressed senior citizens sitting side by side in a beautiful drawing room, and in doing so makes you realise how extraordinary their life together has been.
Last spring it seemed as if I went to the opening of a newly built, newly extended or newly restored gallery every other week. Architects ZMMA’s restoration of the Watts Gallery in the village of Compton, outside Guildford, met with universal acclaim, while the Glasgow-based architects Page\Park’s transformation of the dour Victorian interior of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery gave Edinburgh a major new museum.
I loved the extension Eric Parry designed for the Holburne Museum in Bath which was invisible from Great Pulteney Street and yet opened it up to the light, air and greenery of gardens at the back.
At the very start of the year, the Royal Academy’s ambitious survey of British sculpture just didn’t work. It felt like half a dozen separate exhibitions each on a different theme strung together with little attempt to integrate the parts into the whole. For what should have been a once-in-a-century survey of a medium the British excel in, there were too many omissions – and even when the organisers chose the right artist, they perversely chose the wrong work. This was the worst show of the year, only partly redeemed by a not particularly exciting show about Degas and the Ballet.
Another show that just didn’t gel was Dulwich Picture Gallery’s well-intentioned but hopelessly misguided comparison between Poussin and Cy Twombly. Twombly, whose death coincided with the opening night, would probably have been delighted since his expressionistic abstractions blew poor static Poussin off the walls – and that was what was so unfair.
At Tate Britain, a huge survey of British watercolours started with three sensational galleries tracing the golden age of the medium in this country in the 18th and 19th centuries. But in the 20th century, watercolour was not so central to the artistic practice of any major artist in this country. Yet rather than acknowledge this by ending the show in 1900, the show went on and on in galleries full of third-rate work. The show was a miscalculation but not a complete disaster.
For that you had to go to Tate Liverpool’s show about the influence of Alice in Wonderland on the visual arts. Like the watercolour exhibition it started well, with the original manuscripts and first editions, but then as it moved into the 20th century it fell to pieces.
The moment that made me love my job
When I read, in October, that the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board was to close and realised that a series of harshly critical articles I’d written had been instrumental in bringing that about.
The moment that made me want to wail
When third-rate sculptures appeared overnight in Marble Arch, Park Lane and Berkeley Square. They all came from two art galleries in the West End that were invited by Robert Davis, deputy head of Westminster Council, to treat our city as a giant open-air showroom. There was no consultation, no advisory panel – just an arrogant local politician given the power to degrade the quality of life in the capital with this visual pollution.
Read more reviews of the year 2011
