It might seem a bit odd travelling to Madrid to see an exhibition by a Scandinavian artist.... but the Swede Anders Zorn made the journey to Spain nine times in his career. He wasn't a painter we'd been familiar with, the Swedes lagging some way behind their Nordic neighbours in our art explorations; we'd been intrigued by the idea of seeing a retrospective of his work in Hamburg late last year but didn't make it, so we seized the chance to view the same show at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid under the title Anders Zorn: Travelling the World, Remembering the Land . Zorn, who lived from 1860 to 1920, was a big name in his day, and it's easy to appreciate why from this exhibition. He had fantastic technique and worked in a broad range of genres, famed particularly for his portraiture. But he's quite difficult to pigeonhole, and as for some of his early subject matter, it really is rather sickly sweet. As the exhibition title spells out, Zorn explored the worl...
It's a beguiling, entrancing landscape, yet somehow also very reassuring. The year is 1918, and John Nash is back in England after many months of service on the Western Front in World War I, one of the few survivors from his company. While working by day on paintings to commemorate the conflict as an official war artist, in the evening he's able to leave the memories of the slaughter behind to work for himself, on pictures that purged the horror of the trenches. This is The Cornfield , and it's probably the stand-out painting in a really outstanding exhibition at Towner Eastbourne, John Nash: The Landscapes of Love and Solace , the first retrospective devoted to the life and work of the artist, the less well-known younger brother of Paul Nash, in more than half a century. You can see in this painting a fascination with shapes, patterns and shadows that characterises the best of Nash's landscapes: the angular forms of the row of corn sheaves, their edges highlighted by t...