MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
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
[Tate Britain and British Council Collection/public domain] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
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.
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