Popular in his native Madrid, Sorolla is elsewhere obscure. One critic praises his “Impressionist effervescence” and immense skill in depicting light. However, key works, from the 1890’s, when Impressionism was no longer new, were essentially traditional. [He represented] “everything modern painting set out to overthrow.” Sorolla aspired to be Goya’s heir. He was not.
Kossoff’s subject is London – roads, buildings, tube stations, individuals. His early cityscapes are “bare and joyless but [they] have authority”. That was true of postwar London. His more recent work is lighter; a school building is “a mighty structure that seems to stand for something more lasting”. Says one critic “an oeuvre that is among the most original in postwar painting”.
The Sackler families are prolific donors to arts organisations. They are now accused of misrepresenting the addictiveness of their pain control drug. US artist Nan Goldin opposes institutions accepting their “blood money” donations. London’s National Portrait Gallery has just announced that it will decline a donation. Tate and Guggenheim are set to follow.
Here is a vehemently different view of the arts patronage issue. How do we know that the Sacklers are morally “worse” than other donors? Institutions have been accepting their money for years. To reject it now is simply “over-politicisation”. The arts “are fast becoming just one more vehicle through which to strike moral poses, regardless of whether they have much real effect.”
This “magnificent” show has a painful resonance with the Brexit identity crisis. Nelson has salvaged a mass of obsolete machinery from post-war industrial Britain. A show “not of nostalgia but deep sadness” says one critic “It’s about the end of an era: industries moving on and out of the country … everything must go, entire eras of the past.” More images are here.