I'd be up for the Richter, Tubby. From my ignorant armchair I accuse him of making frown porn, but I'm usually wrong and it all looks quite big spectacular. (Plus I get free entry till the end of Jan.)

Ah great. Have you got holiday to be used up?

It's a very very good show, and not unpleasantly full, all things considered. There are a lot of drawings and bits from the sketchbooks relating directly to the picture which you need to get very close to. But seeing so much work of such quality by one artist is extraordinary Also good to see work by his pupils on similar themes or using the same ideas. It's like seeing the work of a really focussed record label like Atlantic in its prime perhaps.

Being in the same room with the two versions of the Virgin on the Rocksis pretty incredible, as is the Lady with the Ermine and the Madonna Litta and La Belle Ferronière as normally those pictures are in St Petersburg, Krakow and the LOuvre it's incredibnle that they're in london. Sold out already but it would be worth checking out the Louvre. I think the exhibition is showing there.

The Cartoon looks pretty good in this company too. Don't miss it.

One effect I noticed was when I left I noticed other paintings when I walked through the Gallery I'd never noticed Veronese before, but a couple stood out very strongly.

This is excellent, if anyone's interested: Robert Hughes' The Shock of the New, up on YouTube. Fascinating to compare TV today to TV then. Andrew Graham Dixon's BBC4 programmes about art have been enjoyable, but in focusing on his experience of visiting the US, his personal take on each painting or artist etc. he actually keeps you at an arm's length. Whereas this is the real thing - and broadcast on BBC2 at a time when at least a million must have watched. No one would credit audiences with this much intelligence now, despite so many more of us having degrees.

Tubby Isaacs wrote:


How did he manage when he's been underground for almost forty years?

The big abstracts do nothing for me. He wants to head down to St Ives and see how to do it properly.

You're a bold man. That'd be a bit like Ben Nicholson telling Picasso and Braque that, compared to his, their cubist stuff was a bit naff.

I loved The Shock Of The New when it was first shown. I think I'd like to see it again, but not on a computer. I must check with Tubby on that other thread to find out how to do it...

Amor de Cosmos wrote:


Picasso and AN Other are the first two at everything, aren't they? Nicholson is some time after and a very obvious imitator.

Frost, Hilton, Blow, Barnes-Graham aren't followers of Richter. And they're better.

It's all about opinions, as Garcia probably says when someone phones him up with an argument of the standard of mine just now.

Gangster Octopus wrote:


The chance of me typing in Shock of the New on my TV's version of youtube in less than 2 hours is pretty low. Ask Hobbes about buying a proper typewriter style input device. I'm stuck with something that would shame an old arcade machine. And you only had to type your initials in those.

Picasso and AN Other are the first two at everything, aren't they?

It sometimes seems that way, but not really. Most forms of expressionism were outside PP's remit. He also claimed his work wasn't abstract — and technically he was right. More fundamentally he wasn't much of a colourist, it was probably the main thing Matisse had over him.

Frost, Hilton, Blow, Barnes-Graham aren't followers of Richter. And they're better.

It's all about opinions,

Well yeah, but I'm guessing you're number one in a very small field on this one. Any chance you could come up with some reasons why the rest of us might join you?

I get a sense of place from the St Ives artists, a place I go to regularly. Most of all from Lanyon, who isn't abstract, but also from Frost. I'm not sure I can explain how.

I got none of that from the Richter abstracts in the show- that isn't the only criterion, but they didn't interest me in any other way. As I look online now, there are several I like very much. They look better there than in the show.

I prefer him to Twombly though.

Have you seen this? LL will have done:



By Terry Frost's son, Anthony. I like it very much.

Tubby Isaacs wrote:


Context is of course extremely important. Did you initially engage the St Ives painters in St Ives? That would have a massive impact, a bit unfair on Richter though.

Sadly I won't be able to see the Richter show, but I admit, based on what I know of him, I'd have a hard time making comparisons of any kind with the St Ives group. He was intensely urban, political, eclectic in approach. They were pastoral, socially distanced, localised. All those differences show up in their respective works wouldn't you say?

I haven't seen the album cover before. Is it a painting, or a painted object that's been photographed? It's hard to tell.

I knew the St Ives artists before I went there. I did though see a Lanyon show there, in winter, and took a bus ride to St Just past some very bleak Lanyon-esque land. It was very special.

It's the only artist colony I know at all, now I think about it.

Nicholson's got a bit of urban about him, but the others are more rural.

Tate Modern has some one of the more abstract Monet Waterlillies in it, and maybe that dragged down my opinion of some of the Richters in this show. They looked like the same thing done in more oily point.

The Anthony Frost is a painting.

I'm most familiar with Richter's graphics and woodcuts — I've never seen any of his films and should — they're impressive, definitely of their time, but sometimes very powerful.

Like this:



The St Ives group doesn't really resonate for me. I generally find their work kind of predictable and constrained looking — though some of Ayrton's pictorial stuff is crazy/mad/wild, I love this:



But I'll concede I'm unkind and do harbour prejudices regarding that period of English painting which I think we've discussed before.

I think Lanyon is the St Ives artist for you to get stuck into. This is one of his more famous ones, from the time he took up gliding. Which is how he died:



Ayrton reminds me a bit of the Sunderland horned figures, but much wilder.

His sculpture is less wild but quite good. His Minotaur is cited on an incredibly bleak bit of raised walkway round Barbican.

The Grayson Perry exhibition at the British Museum is fantastic

His juxtaposition of his contemporay work with various pieces from the museum collection is brilliant, at times it feels like having a transplant of surrealism into your head. His accompanying narrative is excellent (only regret that there wasn't more), he manages to transplant ancient items into the current day allowing them to come alive

Really recommended

Gerhard Richter's still alive.

Ha ha ha! That's hilarious, Don't tell me Tubby and I have been arguing at crossed-Richters?

I love it.

Who's your Richter?

This is Daniel Richter. Like Peter Doig

How do you measure your Richters? Is there some kind of scale?