Sincerity is not a quality the contemporary art world seems to value: the masking of emotions under layers of irony is where we stand. But while Damien Hirst paints from a cynical palette, British Pop Artist Stuart Semple's Nineties-inflected paintings have sincerity to spare.
Next week sees the opening of an exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art of new work by Maggi Hambling, one of the most innovative and prolific - not to mention flamboyant - artists working in Britain today, which neatly coincides with a show of sea paintings at the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge. You can see a selection in theartsdesk's gallery. Born in 1945, she has a reputation for being fierce and she’s certainly imposing – had she opted for a career in the performing arts she’d have given Edith Evan’s Lady Bracknell a run for her money – but she’s also extremely good company. And she’s a grafter, rising before dawn and putting the hours in before collapsing with a whisky in front of Coronation Street. “Well, one has to keep in touch with reality somehow,” she told me when I recently visited her at her studio in Suffolk.
I’ve seen raping Popes, I’ve seen more naked guys dancing with waggling penises than I can count, I’ve seen naked breasts on dancing girls for what feels like all my adult life. But a man with a blood-stained prosthetic cock that looks like a baby’s bottle? A teacher munching a testicle off his pupil? Well, lor' love a duck.
Arshile Gorky found it almost impossible to finish a painting. Something would always call him back. So he would go back and would add and retouch and tinker around over several years - sometimes over the course of a decade or two. “When something is finished,” he once said, “that means it’s dead, doesn’t it? I never finish a painting, I just stop working on it for a while. The thing to do is... never finish a painting.”
The habit of art - a favourite topic of late, or so it would seem - gets a pummelling in The Line, a sort of Several Decades in the Atelier with Edgar (as in Degas) that would defy even Stephen Sondheim to shake a wordy and dour play into impassioned life. Henry Goodman brings his customary fervour to an assignment whose published text is dedicated to him, but Timberlake Wertenbaker's bitty drama seems like a blueprint for the TV mini-series that in different televisual times would surely lie in wait.
The sculptor Anish Kapoor (b. 1954), RA, CBE, won the Turner Prize in 1990. His public works are characterised by their gigantic scale and ambition. In the UK he is probably best known for Marsyas (2002), the viscerally red “ear trumpet” that elegantly spanned the entire length of the Turbine Hall in Tate Modern. He is also the artist behind the world’s most expensive public sculpture. Cloud Gate (picture below), completed in 2006, is a beguiling polished steel ellipsis located in Chicago’s AT&T Plaza.
Outwardly the Morgan Library & Museum is a citadel of sedateness - inside it may be the locus of turbulence. Thirteen years ago I walked around one of the rooms with the actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, on whom I was writing a profile. She was then starring in Franco Zeffirelli’s Jane Eyre, and it made sense for us to look at the Morgan’s exhibition of Brontë juvenilia together. She seemed vaguely haunted by the show; I know I was.