Art

For a man who casts such a huge, dark shadow over the history of British art, William Blake’s drawings, paintings and etchings are quietly unobtrusive little things. The poet, artist and printmaker (1757-1827) spent his life huddled over, creating mesmerising, tiny works to illustrate poems and histories. His giant bearded man who haunts the entrance of the show is barely bigger than a rat in real life. His gods could fit in your palm, his angels are the size of swifts. It’s at this small, hypnotising scale that Blake drags you into his universe of rebel demons, invented mythologies and head-spinning dissident philosophies. He had an incredible way with line and composition. His figures, whether allegories for the American revolution or characters from the bible, are solid, dramatic constructions, all rippling muscles, tormented faces and fierce, piercing eyes. They’re all arranged in swooping curves and arcs, whipped up to heaven or dragged down to hell. Some are tiny, like the incredibly coloured, dramatic works from his Small Book of Designs, drawing you closer and closer. Others are grander, like the breath-taking room of watercolours with the crawling, shocking image of Nebuchadnezzar, his eyes wild and horrified.  Every work is thrillingly, uniquely Black, These are his visions of society, history, religion and science, and they couldn’t be anyone else’s. That’s probably why he was never rich, never able to achieve his more ambitious projects: he was too busy being

If you’re British, Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946) is a relatively unknown artist. If you’re Finnish, Helene Schjerfbeck is a very famous artist. This show of 60 paintings is the first chance London audiences have had to join the Schjerfbeck fan club. Separating her output into themed categories – including early work in France and Cornwall, pictures of contemplative women and sartorially focused poses – the exhibition repeatedly shows how her style morphed from French-influenced naturalism to looser, fuzzier modernism. Ignoring painting style for a moment, there’s a ‘modern’ aspect to many of Schjerfbeck’s images. Right from the off, the women in her portraits look alive, real and healthy in a way they almost never do in comparable early twentieth-century British art. Looking at the smiling girl painted in St Ives or the hazy-edged and self-possessed women with downcast eyes is a bit like seeing a contemporary actress in a period drama. It makes the past seem less… past. And wearing yards of lace around your neck seem perfectly normal. That said, the more her artwork slipped into modernism, the more interesting it became; the early works are often ‘lovely’ but not all that memorable. One of the very best paintings here is ‘The Sailor (Einar Reuter)’, a chalky ochre and denim-blue portrait that’s as sexy an image of a sailor as Jean-Paul Gautier ever dreamed up (a reference the fashion-loving Schjerfbeck would surely appreciate). The soft-edged depiction of his muscled nec

If you’ve ever seen Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’, then you know you’ve never really seen it. What you’ve really seen is a jostling crush of irritable tourists with their cameras obscuring your view of an enigmatically grumpy Renaissance woman somewhere in the distance. Leonardo is arguably the most important artist ever. He’s a superstar, a god, a legend who once walked among us. Only a handful of his paintings have survived the 500 years since his death – many in poor shape, like the crumbling ‘Last Supper’, and one of dubious provenance, ‘Salvator Mundi’. But forget those, because the Queen has 200 of his drawings in her collection, and they offer something far more intimate than his over-popular, unreachable paintings. Pulled from an album of drawings acquired by Charles II, the works here are as private as drawings get. There are figure studies, maps, engineering and weapon designs, anatomical explorations and architectural plans. It’s all of Leonardo, spread out and put on display. There are pages filled with the same repeated face, perfect drawings of hands cradling crudely sketched fingers, a sheet combining clouds, figure studies and engineering diagrams. Some moments are breathtaking. The head studies for ‘The Last Supper’, the shower of mortars landing on a fortress, the faceless bust of the Madonna, the series of botanical drawings, the staggering abstract deluges. Leonardo was obsessive, passionate, maniacal in his need to analyse and deconstruct, and her

Tate Britain is filled with the corpses of British industry, the long dead, rotting remains of this country itself. Strewn across the massive central Duveen Galleries are chunks of enormous abandoned machinery: presses, clamps, welders, cutters. Some have been left untouched, others have been piled on top of each other. Their wires are frayed, their oils have dried, their spindles have rusted. Nelson spent months collecting these objects from salvage yards and asset strippers. As our national industries waned, debt collectors waded in, seizing equipment and discarding the humans who used it. On the one hand, Nelson has repurposed these machines and turned them into sculptures, laying bare their aesthetic qualities, their twists and turns, shapes and shadows. But on the other, the narrative of these objects is inescapable. Even when he places a concrete ring on a bed of telephone poles, or an engine on a pile of sleeping bags, you’re still haunted by the pasts of the machines. Nelson makes it a claustrophobic experience. The works tower over you, threaten to crumple on your soft, fragile body. And it never ends, there are doors to push through, spaces that unfold, an unending trip through the misery of Britain. You can see it all as a metaphor for the death of Empire and British pride, for the impact of Brexit, for the dire sadness of modern life moving forward too quickly. Or you can see it as an ageing man who is finding a reflection of his own body and mind in the cru