MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
Visual arts round-up 2022 with Christine Lindey
(L to R) Kathe Kollwitz, Woman with Dead Child, 1903; Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Straw Hat, August - September 1887
[(L to R) Kathe Kollwitz Museum Koln Public domain Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam] 
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
INSPIRED curating at the National Gallery managed to provoke a multitude of ideas by juxtaposing just two life-size portraits — Jean Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Madame Moitessier of 1856 and Pablo Picasso’s Woman with a Book of 1932.
The contrast between the arch-traditionalist and the quintessential modernist embodied the cultural and social change from France’s 19th-century bourgeois rule and values to the progressive ones of the first decades of the 20th century.
Ingres’s portrait being commissioned by her father-in-law, a minister of state, Picasso’s painting being a non commissioned portrait of his current young partner. Yet Picasso paid tribute to his predecessor by choosing to pose his sitter to echo that of Ingres’s portrait.
More from this author
CHRISTINE LINDEY welcomes a fascinating survey of the work of the communist and socialist artists who founded the AIA in the 1930s
CHRISTINE LINDEY guides us through the vivid expressionism of a significant but apolitical group of pre WWI artists in Germany
CHRISTINE LINDEY salutes an outstanding exhibition imbued with a sense of national guilt
CHRISTINE LINDEY surveys the cosmopolitan, enigmatic compositions of an idiosyncratic artist whose work speaks of mystery and exile
