If you stand really close to Leon Golub’s painting Gigantomachy II, the colours and brushwork are perversely reminiscent of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies. Step back and what come into view are not the lyrical gardens of Giverny, but a writhing mass of bodies on a raw canvas stripped of framing conventions, punched through with metal and nailed straight into the neat white walls of the Serpentine Gallery.
This DIY history of post-war Britain exhibition ranges from Mrs Thatcher’s handbag to a section on mad cow disease. The gallery has invited seven contemporary artists to become curators, creating installations of objects they have selected to define a period in ways we are not used to seeing.
The intention is that, by reassessing our past, we may find new ways of articulating our expectations for the future, in the lead up to May’s general election.
Mass-produced prints of works by impressionist artists are so readily available that some people now see the art as bland with little to say about modern life. But when it was created it was seen as shocking and dangerously avant garde. The artists used experimental techniques and new media — such as ready mixed paint in tubes — bright colours, quick, obvious brush strokes and layers of texture.
This exhibition is also the occasion of the reopening of Manchester’s Whitworth gallery following a major expansion and refurbishment. he gallery’s director Maria Balshaw is a fervent advocate of the public space, saying, “This is everybody’s art,” and referring in particular to the large local Muslim community.
Alasdair Gray is under-appreciated outside Scotland, although his novels, especially Lanark and Poor Things, have been deservedly and broadly praised. Even in Scotland no one loves Alasdair Gray like Glaswegians. After visiting this retrospective of his art it is easy to imagine that no one loves Glasgow like Alasdair Gray.
The poet and engraver William Blake was one of the great revolutionary artists. Some of his best works were inspired by the French Revolution. He courageously donned the famous symbol of liberty and equality — the “bonnet rougein”. In 1780 he took part in a riot in which the notorious Newgate Gaol was burnt to the ground and its prisoners freed. In 1803 he stood trial for sedition.
Throughout his working life he used all his talents to wage war on the institutions of the state and the church, which he passionately believed were instruments of repression and corruption.
Many will be familiar with writers such as George Orwell, who wrote about the Spanish Civil War. Less well known is the response of British visual artists. They are splendidly surveyed in this ground-breaking exhibition which marks the 75th anniversary of the end of the war.
This multimedia show includes many fascinating paintings, sculpture, photography, posters, banners of International Brigade battalions and even billboards that encouraged people to contribute food supplies to Spain.
At the centre of his understanding of art, William Morris saw an inseparable connection between the imagination of the worker and his or her labour.
His concept of art was not simply making art objects to place in galleries or hang on rich people’s walls, but the human labour involved in making all the objects of our lives. He argued ideas of beauty were integral to us as human beings. Art was a result of the pleasure gained in the process of making something beautiful.
In 1968, while Europe and America were in uproar, art student Anselm Kiefer put on his father’s Wehrmacht uniform and photographed himself giving Nazi salutes at various European ssites. This “Occupations” series was shocking, and Kiefer has said that shock is at the beginning of all his work, but it wasn’t just gratuitous spectacle.
Tate Modern, London, until 26 October
The curators at Tate Modern have assembled, quite simply, a magnificent exhibition. Kazimir Malevich was born near Kiev in 1879. He died in 1935 after being diagnosed with cancer while imprisoned in one of Stalin’s camps. Throughout his adult life he was a revolutionary artist, an innovator and teacher.
