Gwen John’s singular poetic world, Enid Marx’s signature designs for the London Underground and the rural gothic of LR Vandy are among this week’s art highlights. From a moving touring exhibition of the Welsh modern painter to clay works that explore the link between nature and the human body, the round-up spans quiet intimacy, modern design and contemporary sculpture.
What is the exhibition of the week?
Gwen John: Strange Beauties is this week’s exhibition of the week, and it offers an excellent and moving encounter with the Welsh modern painter. Touring from Wales’s National Museum, it takes visitors deep into John’s silent, poetic world.
What else is showing?
The Pattern of Life: Enid Marx and Modern British Design presents Marx as a major modern designer. Creator of the London Underground’s seat coverings and other classic fabrics, she is shown here through the work that made her signature designs part of everyday life.
East of the Aldgate Pump surveys contemporary artists working in east London, including Rene Matić and Denzil Forrester. The show brings together artists whose work reflects the changing character of the area and its cultural energy.
LR Vandy: Rise features giant corn dolly-like sculptures arranged round a Maypole, offering a draft of rural gothic for summer. The installation uses familiar pastoral imagery to create something eerie and distinctive.
Ranti Bam: Sacred Groves explores the mysterious power of clay to connect nature with the human body. The British Nigerian artist uses the material to consider physical and spiritual relationships between people and the natural world.
What is the image of the week?
Era-defining photographs from the likes of Alfred Stieglitz, Dorothea Lange and Saul Leiter showcase the US cityscape, from midnight crime scenes to gloomy corridors. One image, by Saul Leiter, shows uptown Manhattan in 1960 and is part of a major new show in London.
What did we learn?
The week’s selection shows how art can move between intimate observation, design history and larger cultural landscapes. It also highlights the range of approaches on view in London, from quiet painting and photography to sculpture and material-led contemporary work.
What is the masterpiece of the week?
The Water Cistern (‘La Fontaine’) by Jean-Siméon Chardin, 1733 or later, shows a young woman bending to release water from a bronze tank into a wooden bucket. Her face is hidden, but her simple clothes and exhausting work suggest she is a servant in a grand house or on a farm.
That is as much of a story as can be extracted from Chardin’s painting, which expands a single moment in time: the small drama of water splashing from the tap and the silent attentiveness of the servant. Life, in the eyes of this early 18th-century painter of the humble and factual, is made up of such moments.
The painting sits in a line of quietness observed that leads from Vermeer’s Milkmaid to Gwen John’s portraits of women reading in solitude. As the maid fills her bucket, a red and white slab of meat hanging in the shadows catches the eye: this hunk of flesh may add a carnal hint to the scene, or make you think of mortality.
For this peaceful routine takes place, the slaughtered animal reminds us, in a world of violence and desire that always threaten to destroy Chardin’s treasured calm.
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