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Opening and Closing in September

Are you ready? London's National Gallery says you're going to "be blown away by Van Gogh's most spectacular paintings in our once-in-a-century exhibition", Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers , which is on from September 14 to January 19. The show brings together "your most loved of Van Gogh’s paintings from across the globe, some of which are rarely seen in public," according to the museum. Given Vincent's prolific output and the plethora of Van Gogh shows, such hype may be a little overblown. Note that tickets are already selling well, and standard admission costs £28 before Gift Aid.  Still, the Van Gogh show may provide more bang for your buck than Monet and London -- Views of the Thames in the rather small exhibition space of the Courtauld Gallery (for which standard tickets are £16). Claude Monet stayed in London three times from 1899 to 1901, painting the Houses of Parliament, Charing Cross Bridge and Waterloo Bridge. He showed the pictures in Paris,
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There's Still Life in Britain!

When the Louvre put on a huge retrospective of the genre of still life in 2022-23, there were only five works by British artists on show out of a total of nearly 170. Brits don't do still life? Wrong, as shown in The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, with some 140 artworks. Some are beautiful, some are arresting, some are utterly surprising; one or two are downright weird. Boring? Not these still lifes. 

The show starts off traditionally enough, with paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries, some the work of immigrant artists from the Low Countries, but some home-grown: Right here in Chichester, the three Smith Brothers were among the earliest English artists to specialise in still lifes, and here you can see the work of the eldest, William, with a choice array of fruit, and of George, with as English a theme as you could get, a joint of beef. 

The second room takes us into the start of the 20th century, where the emphasis is very much on British Post-Impressionists, drawn to the work of Manet, Cezanne and Gauguin, as you can discover in paintings like Still Life with Apples by Spencer Gore, with a bowl of fruit taking centre-stage on the edge of a dramatically cropped table against an elaborate carpet and curtains. All painted very flat, but a riot of colour. More subdued but equally striking is The Cup and Saucer by Harold Gilman, like Gore a member of the Camden Town Group. While painters in earlier eras might have concentrated on rendering surfaces with illusory mastery, with Gore and Gilman it seems to be all about patterns and shapes. 

Prominent here too from slightly later, after World War I, are the Scottish Colourists, including JD Fergusson, with The Blue Lamp. They always seem so un-Scottish, the Colourists....
Then things start to take a surreal turn. Flowers they may be, but what to make of Lords and Ladies by Gluck, a very unsettling image indeed? 
Lords and ladies is a poisonous plant, and a suitable subject for the artist born Hannah Gluckstein but who challenged expectations of gender with androgynous clothes, short hair and a shortened name with "no prefix, no suffix, or quotes". Writing to her lover, she asked: "How can these flowers be female? Anything more male than this prominent feature I cannot imagine." 

The instability of the 1930s is summed up in this image by the pioneering colour photographer Yevonde, taken on the eve of World War II. 
A bust of Julius Caesar wears one of the gas masks issued to the British population amid fears of German gas attacks. The bright red geraniums seem to presage the bloodshed ahead.

After the end of the war, some artists headed for the Mediterranean to escape the dreariness of British austerity. Lucian Freud, though, doesn't seem to have quite captured the spirit of things in the sun. What is this? 
Well, it may look like the moon with those craters and a dark side, but this is an unripe green tangerine, life size. Quite bizarre. 

Some of our favourite pieces came in the section on Pop Art: Jann Haworth's soft sculpture Donuts, Coffee Cups and Comic features Willow-pattern crockery and even a Willow-pattern doughnut. The coffee's fabric too....
And maybe the news in that newspaper's a fabrication as well? 

Patrick Caulfield never regarded himself as a Pop Artist, but his strong outlines and fields of saturated colour from the 1960s show the influence of advertising in a similar way.
These glasses, bowl and jug are as traditional a still-life theme as you could conceive of, yet the execution was completely of the moment in 1967. 

Still life doesn't have to be objects on a table or a windowsill, of course. But it's very frequently concerned with everyday items, and in one eye-catching exhibit, yesterday's items are bagged up and ready to go in the bin. 
This is Gavin Turk's Dump, sitting in the corner of the gallery, looking for all the world like a plastic sack of rubbish. But this recreation is not at all what it seems, it's bronze, painted to look realistic. So this apparent waste is actually an expensive material, in a perplexing reversal of values. And, as Turk points out, if someone wants to spy on you, they can find out a lot by going through your bins: "We are what we throw away." 

So the curators in Chichester have really redressed that neglect in the Louvre with plenty of famous names represented in this very wide-ranging show. David Hockney, Richard Hamilton, Edward Burra, Dod Procter, Eric Ravilious and Rachel Whiteread are among the artists we haven't had space to mention. But we couldn't leave out Jane Simpson. Her vases and jugs entitled Our Distant Relatives have strangely anthropomorphic features and, being made of rubber rather than clay, wobble slightly in response to footsteps near the shelf they sit on. Still life that really moves.... 

Practicalities

The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain is on at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester until October 20. The gallery is open from 1000 to 1700 Tuesdays to Saturdays and 1100 to 1700 on Sundays and bank holidays. Admission costs a standard £14, including a £1.50 Gift Aid donation, but you get 10% off if you book online, which you can do here. Allow yourself a good two hours to take it all in.  

The gallery is just a few minutes walk from Chichester station, to which there's a train every half hour from London Victoria Mondays to Saturdays. The journey takes about 90 minutes. Hourly trains on Sundays take longer. 

Images

John Duncan Fergusson (1874-1961), The Blue Lamp, 1920s, Rugby Art Gallery and Museum. © The Fergusson Gallery, Perth and Kinross Council, Scotland. Image credit: Rugby Art Gallery and Museum Art Collections
Gluck (1895-1978), Lords and Ladies, 1936, Private collection, London 
Madame Yevonde (1893-1975), Crisis (A.R.P.), 1939, National Portrait Gallery, London
Lucian Freud (1922-2011), Unripe Tangerine, 1946-47, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
Jann Howarth (b. 1942), Donuts, Coffee Cups and Comic, 1962, Wolverhampton Art Gallery
Patrick Caulfield (1936-2005), Coloured Still Life, 1967, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
Gavin Turk (b. 1967), Dump, 2004, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

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