MICK MCSHANE is roused by a band whose socialism laces every line of every song with commitment and raw passion
Latest editorial
Life presented as it really is
Walter Sickert’s depictions of the lives and behaviours of ordinary people was ground breaking and free from hypocrisy, contends JAN WOOLF
(Left to right) La Hollandaise, Cecily Hey
New releases from Mountain, Soul Asylum and Michael McDermott
ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
Walter Sickert
Tate Britain
EIGHT rooms of Walter Sickert is a treat, and a trick — of the light certainly — and of our sensibilities around sexual politics.
Sickert said that “the plastic arts are gross arts, dealing joyously with gross material facts.” And it was the materiality of human flesh, (much of it female), the lives and behaviours of ordinary people, and the handling of paint, that was so ground breaking in his time.
The French painter and Communard Gustav Courbet (who Sickert admired) said: “Most art owed more to other art than it ever did to nature.” And so it goes. Apprenticed to Whistler, Sickert was also influenced by Degas and Bonnard, the painterly conversation later extending to Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon.
More from this author
This is poetry in paint, spectacular but never spectacle for its own sake, writes JAN WOOLF
JAN WOOLF relishes a book of poetry that deploys the energy of political struggle, rooted in post-war working class history and culture
JAN WOOLF marvels at a rich brew of steam-punk Victoriana, homosexual scandal, and contemporary reference
JAN WOOLF ponders the images of humanity that emerge from the tormented, destructive process of the Kindertransport survivor Frank Auerbach
