Shuimohua gallery blog

Cypress Tree with Dog shows one of the artist's adored Bedlington terriers standing by a favourite tree. Aitchison has made oil paintings of the same subject, but the composition of the print is unique.

The wondrously coloured, child-like prints of the Scottish artist Craigie Aitchison have always been among the most popular exhibits at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition, and this year is no exception.

Within a few days of the opening, 12 red dots had appeared next to Cypress Tree with Dog. The print was made last year in an edition of 75, and now all but a few are still available, priced unframed at £530 each.

Advanced Graphics, the company that works with Aitchison to make his prints, expects that, by the end of the show, the edition will have sold out and that there will be a waiting list of clients wanting to buy the print on the secondary market at an increased price. Aitchison prints have re-sold on the secondary market for as much as £7,000.

Oil paintings by Aitchison, who has had solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery and recently at the Royal Academy, have sold for as much as £75,000 through his dealers, Timothy Taylor and Waddington Galleries.

A new exhibition at Tate Modern shows how the Russian artist, Wassily Kandinsky, used his synaesthesia - the capacity to see sound and hear colour - to create the first truly abstract paintings


Circles on Black (1921), by Wassily Kandinsky, oil on canvas; Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, Colomon R Guggenheim © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006


Murnau - Castle Courtyard I (1908), by Wassily Kandinsky, oil on canvas; Kunstmuseum Basel © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006


Improvisation No 30 (1913), by Wassily Kandinsky, oil on canvas; Art Institute of Chicago © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006


White Centre (1921), by Wassily Kandinsky, oil on canvas; Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, Hilla Rebay Collection 1971 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006


Landscape with Factory Chimney (1910), by Wassily Kandinsky, oil on canvas; Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, Colomon R Guggenheim © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006


Blue Segment (1921), by Wassily Kandinsky, oil on canvas; Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006


Cossacks (1910-11), by Wassily Kandinsky, oil on canvas; Tate © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006


The exhibition runs from June 22 to October 1

Schoenberg was eight years younger than Kandinsky but already notorious in his native Vienna; three years earlier his second string quartet had caused a near riot. What upset his audience was the sense that the grammar of music was dissolving away. The harmonies floated in some mysterious dream-like space, unanchored to any governing key centre.

This had been a feature of advanced Western music since Wagner, but Schoenberg went much further. One critic remarked about an early work of Schoenberg that it sounded as if the score of Wagner's Tristan had been "smeared while the ink was still wet".

Most people found this unsettling; Kandinsky found it thrilling. He wrote to Schoenberg, saying: "In your works, you have realised what I, albeit in uncertain form, have so greatly longed for in music." What struck him was that in Schoenberg's music all the parts were equally important, and equally saturated with hyper-expressivity.

Look at Kandinsky's paintings from around the same period, and you can see why he would feel such a kinship with Schoenberg's music. He, too, was aiming at maximum expressivity, which meant that nothing you see on the canvas can be relegated to a neutral background; everything is "up front".

Another thing that stands in the way of expression is subject matter; so that, too, had to be banished.

But why should subject matter be inexpressive? The answer is that the ordinary kind of expressivity, the one that uses subject matter, needs the rational mind to interpret it. And the rational mind was exactly what Kandinsky and Schoenberg wanted to banish from art.

It's a lonely business, pushing into the unknown, which is why Schoenberg was so delighted to receive Kandinsky's letter. "I understand you completely, and I am sure that our work has much in common, especially in what you call the 'anti-logical' and I call the 'elimination of the conscious will in art' […] Art belongs to the unconscious!"

So it was that the buttoned-up, mystically inclined Russian and the emotionally volcanic Austrian Jew became comrades in arms, comparing notes as they ventured into stormy seas of the unconscious. But the bond didn't last. Word reached Schoenberg that Kandinsky shared in some mildly anti-Semitic sentiments circulating at the Bauhaus, the famous design school where Kandinsky taught, and he sent the artist one of the most magnificently proud, scornful and heart-broken letters ever penned.

In 1936, Kandinsky tried to patch things up with a conciliatory letter. But Schoenberg was not a man for compromise.

Yet their lives continued to move in parallel. Though they never declared it, both men came to realise that relying totally on the unconscious was psychologically unsustainable.

Schoenberg took refuge in a strict system, spinning his material from pre-arranged "note-rows" and embedding it in old forms like rondo and sonata. Kandinsky, too, went into a "classical" phase, creating serene abstract canvases full of severely straight lines, circles and acute angles. But it's their burningly intense creations from those tumultuous years before the First World War that have stood the test of time.

There's a peculiar fascination for a musician in seeing the great Kandinsky show at Tate Modern. This isn't for the obvious reason that Kandinsky used musical titles such as Composition and Improvisation in his paintings.

Quite a few other artists have been inspired by musical forms; think of Whistler's Nocturnes, or Klee's pen-and-ink drawings evoking fugues or two-part inventions. And it's hard to talk about painting without importing a musical metaphor such as the "play of lines" or "a harmonious balance of colours".

But with Kandinsky there's the extra element of a spiritual quest shared with a great composer, which gives these paintings a special poignancy. In January 1911, Kandinsky went to a concert in Munich, where he heard a piece by Arnold Schoenberg.

Although Christie's has estimated some rare 19th-century books to fetch as much as £80,000, nearly half of the 200 books in the sale should sell for less than £1,000. One of them is William Eggleston's Guide (above), which Parr describes as "one of the seminal photobooks", heralding the moment when colour photography became "artistically respectable".

Reprints of this book can be found on amazon.com for £12. But the comparatively rare first-edition copy at Christie's, produced for the artist's exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1976, is estimated at £300 to £500. Vintage prints of the book's cover image of a child's tricycle have sold for more than £120,000.

Tomorrow evening, the popular British photographer Martin Parr will give a lecture at Christie's on photobooks. The word "photobooks" is instantly underlined by my spellchecker, but recently Phaidon has published two books about them (by Parr), and Christie's is about to hold the first sale ever devoted to them, so clearly this is a neologism that is going to stick - in the art world, at least.

According to Sven Becker of Christie's, photobooks, usually representing the work of a single artist, differ from the coffee-table photographic book in both concept and production values. The quality of typography, design and reproduction and the cohesive ideas that they convey mark them as works of art.

Gordon's films and installations, by contrast, are menacing, dark and claustrophobic. Even where there is humour, it is of the blackest kind.

So when a show at the gallery was first proposed, Gordon's reaction was that the building was "one of the least conducive to the showing of my work".

If anything, though, with Miró as a companion, Gordon's art feels even more subversive. The exhibition contains 15 works, mostly room-scale installations.

The journey through them is a spellbinding experience, an encounter with the obsessions and reflections that haunt a sinister imagination.

Huge film projections show uncanny manipulations of sequences from Psycho, Taxi Driver and The Exorcist; one room contains 12 speakers from which a voice eerily and troublingly repeats the phrase "I love you" again and again.

"I always say that an exhibition like this is like a wedding," says Gordon. "There are a few too many guests and you have to try to get your seating arrangement right.

" If it's successful, it should feel like the whole family's in town and there can be dominant members, peacemakers, arse-kickers. It can't be a show of equal parts. That would just be dull."

Gordon's work is on show in major collections around the world, and later this year he will follow recent exhibitions in London, Paris and Los Angeles with a big show at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, opening just before his 40th birthday, followed by one in Edinburgh in November.

Despite these successes, Gordon has avoided the gossip-column fame of some of his British contemporaries. He gained wide acclaim after emerging from his native Glasgow in the early 1990s.

He won Tate's Turner Prize in 1996 but moved to Berlin directly afterwards, removing himself from the euphoria that engulfed the British art scene following the Royal Academy's Sensation exhibition in 1997. He now lives in New York.

The work that first propelled Gordon into the spotlight is still his best known piece, the extraordinary 24 Hour Psycho, in which Hitchcock's spine-chiller is slowed down so that it lasts for a full day.

"24 Hour Psycho was necessary," says Gordon, emphatically. "Whether I did it, or someone else did it, it was necessary."

He puts its enduring appeal down to the unique social situation presented by art galleries. "The museum offers this bizarre half-way house between the privacy and intimacy of the bedroom and the intellectual rigour of the academy," he says.

"You don't really know how to behave in a museum because you have your thinking head and your pulse, and the art. Maybe there are half a dozen people in the room watching 24 Hour Psycho who are PhD candidates and there could be another couple who are young lesbians using the dark to explore each other."

Gordon has a busy period ahead: his MoMA show opens in June, and the Guggenheim in New York will have a big group show featuring him and various close contemporaries in 2007. Yet Gordon fears that retrospectives and epoch-defining group shows "have the feeling of a mausoleum, and I don't want to be buried alive".

He deals with anxiety about artistic mortality with customary wit. The Miró Foundation show is titled What you want me to say… I am already dead and he has treated it like a posthumous exhibition - the catalogue even includes an essay written as a kind of obituary.

But proof of how alive his creativity is can be found in The Rules of the Game, a new series of photographs in an accompanying show at the Estrany-De la Mota gallery, also in Barcelona.

They are based on his earlier work Blind Star, in which he cut out the eyes from publicity shots of cinema icons such as Janet Leigh and Steve McQueen, like an attack by an obsessive fan. The new works add another sinister layer.

Gordon has burned into the slashes, often obliterating the face. "This set of works looks like somebody who hates me bought all my work and tried to destroy it," he says.

Behind each of the mutilated photographs is a mirror reflecting your face that seems to ask you to reflect on the darkness in your own soul. Gordon has created another intensely chilling work - one that remains with you long after you leave the gallery.

Douglas Gordon is not a man to shirk a challenge. He has taken on some famously difficult art spaces and, through the dramatic power of his work and a kind of natural showmanship, his art has flourished where others' would have floundered.

The Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona sits in a hilltop park above the city. Built to house a collection of work by the great Catalan painter, the building is bathed in glorious light, a perfect setting for his pure, bright colours.

He was 12 when the Spanish Civil War broke out. "I came from a very liberal family that was opposed to any kind of dictatorship, so we were very shocked by what happened," he says. "There were a lot of arrests, there was a lot of repression." A great deal of his life was lived under the Franco regime, to which he was vehemently opposed; in 1966 he was arrested at a clandestine assembly at Barcelona University. His work of the early 1970s is marked by symbols of Catalan identity (which was anathema to Franco).


"I have always loved Catalonia very much," he says. "My family has always lived here. My parents, my grandparents, great-grandparents - they all spoke Catalan." Catalan is the language in which he writes and his works are then translated into other languages, including Spanish. He thinks of his art as engaged with life. "I am totally convinced that I am doing useful work for society. If I did not think that, I would have given up long ago."

Tàpies's paintings of the 1940s were, he explains, in part a reaction to the fascist government. "I think you could say they were very, very primitive. I was extremely angry at the political situation at the time." At that point he began to use graffiti in his work, and to draw the cross (+) which remains a frequent motif. But though these pictures look rough and angry, they don't contain a simple message. The meaning of that cross, for example, is unclear. Is it a "t" - for Tàpies? Or could it be a plus sign, or a fundamental indicator of location or identity (x marks the spot, Kilroy was here), or a Christian symbol, or all of these? Tàpies won't say.

Characteristic of his work - and that of other Spanish and Catalan artists - is the use of extremely humble objects to express complex ideas and emotions. Thus Miró embodied his despair at the Civil War in a painting entitled Still Life with Old Shoe. Shoes also abound in Tàpies's work (there is a giant one, once a shop sign, on his sitting-room wall), as do feet, chairs, straw, clothes, hand-prints, excrement and, most fundamental of all, earth.

"Sometimes people have the idea that art should be highly refined. But I always believed that one could make art out of simple, humble things," he says. "Small things can be transcendental. They can change our way of looking at the world. I think it's important to make art out of almost anything."

One of Tàpies's paintings is entitled Matter in the Form of a Foot. An old shoe, a chair or a foot are as mysterious as anything else. In the early 1950s he tried to make his art more material: thicker and more sculptural. He experimented with mixtures of materials such as sand, marble dust and varnish to produce a thick paste more like clay than paint. Through this he cuts with carpentry or bricklaying tools to create a mark.

These so-called "matter paintings" vary. Sometimes the surface is like skin, sometimes like a cracked plaster wall (Tàpies is fascinated by walls). Dalí thought the effect resembled the skin of a rhinoceros, which was to be the subject of the joint work he proposed. On occasion the picture is made with soil gathered near Tàpies's house in the country - literally the earth of Catalonia.

Tàpies's art might be taken as representative of two qualities described, in Robert Hughes's book Barcelona, as the twin poles of the Catalan temperament. One is "seny", or rational good sense; the other is "rauxa", or utterly over-the-top wildness. His work contains earth and is preoccupied by feet, but at the same time is full of mysticism and metaphysics. "With time I've come to see the unity of all things," says Tàpies. "That the cosmos is a mass of matter struggling with itself, positive and negative." That chair floating in the cloud above his foundation represents artistic meditation.

Above the roof of the Antoni Tàpies Foundation, in Barcelona, there rises what at first appears to be an enormous skein of tangled metal tubing nearly 13 metres high. As an abstract form it seems exhilarating, but in fact it is not abstract at all, as its title, Cloud and Chair, suggests.

This is a sculpture not only of that most unsculptural thing, a cloud, but also of an extremely unusual item to find in the sky, a chair. And that combination of the ordinary with the wildly imaginative is characteristic of its creator - as I discover when I visit him in his Spanish home.

Tàpies, who is now 82, is one of the major figures of post-war Spanish art. He belonged to a generation, in Europe and America, that took its inspiration from things raw and primitive - graffiti, stained walls, discarded cloth. He has affinities with Cy Twombly, another lover of scratching on walls, and the French artist Jean Dubuffet, exponent of art brut.

But Tàpies is also in some ways the direct successor of Antoni Gaudí and Joan Miró. Of the latter, he says: "I always considered him to be one of my masters, and we became very good friends. In fact, he helped me a lot."

About another Catalan giant, Salvador Dalí, he is more ambivalent. Dalí was an early Tàpies fan: "The first article about me published in America was by Dalí, and he wanted to collaborate with me on a painting." And, I ask, did that happen? "No," he replies. "I was against Dalí. He made statements in favour of Franco." This gives one of the clues to Tàpies's world.

The artist produced the lithograph, measuring 18in by 24in, to illustrate the invitation to his show at New York's Leo Castelli gallery in 1963. Most of the invites were folded in four and unsigned, but Lichtenstein kept about 150 in mint condition, signing each in pencil in the bottom right-hand corner.

"I hate the word 'iconic'," says Max Reed, director of the Sims Reed gallery, which is offering this signed invitation for £28,000 at the 21st London Original Print Fair, opening this week. "But that's exactly what this is. It's one of Lichtenstein's most famous images."

If the asking price seems steep, don't be put off from visiting the fair. Prices start at around £200, and the spread of artists whose prints are on sale ranges from Old Masters such as Rembrandt and Castiglione to Jake and Dinos Chapman.

That tearful, doe-eyed gaze is instantly recognisable. Roy Lichtenstein's distressed Crying Girl, a blush of pinkish dots staining her neck, may be one of his earliest forays into Pop Art, but she has since become one of his signature works.

Snowdon has signed every photograph and the title page. "In the 'under a grand' range, this is our star bargain," says Hunter, whose gallery specialises in work associated with the royals, including selling watercolours by Prince Charles.

The pictures are also highly decorative. "I've got them in a bedroom at home. They look lovely," Hunter says. "My daughter's got hers above her baby's cot." The photographs measure 10 x 8in. The edition size is 500.

'I'd say Lord Snowdon is in the top five photographers Britain has ever produced," says Anna Hunter, director of London's Belgravia Gallery. "Up there with David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Lord Lichfield…"

Snowdon, aka Anthony Armstrong-Jones, is best associated with the celebrity portrait. His is the famous, maniacal image of Laurence Olivier as The Entertainer; his, too, a ravishing portrait of Princess Margaret, taken during their tempestuous 16-year marriage.

But Hunter is selling some atypical Snowdons: limited-edition sets of eight exquisite flower photographs, at £950 for the group. Delicately printed, these columbines, irises and poppies look more like botanical drawings than things taken with a camera. Snowdon pooh-poohs the notion that photography is a fine art - it should be called "button pressing" or "mechanics", he said in a recent interview. These pictures are a quiet refutation of his comments.

"I had this outfit on with a sequinned codpiece," he explains. "And I arrived on the red carpet just behind Claudia Schiffer. So I'm standing next to her with this big codpiece, she's there looking gorgeous and all the paparazzi are thinking: 'Result.' And now here I am in Walthamstow. That's the sliding scale of weirdness I have to deal with."

But hang on a tick. That weirdness is of his making. Everybody knows that the words "Grayson Perry" are synonymous with "transvestite potter". The 46-year-old accepted the 2003 Turner Prize as his alter ego Claire, a chaste little girl with a dress sense like Goldilocks, so no wonder his cross-dressing hogs the limelight more than his ceramics.

Well yes, Perry concedes. "It's good PR," he says. "But I get bored of answering questions about being a transvestite. It comes out of my mouth dry as cream-cracker crumbs. That's why I did the book."

His genial memoir, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, a series of interviews written up by his friend Wendy Jones, came out earlier this year. In it, Perry talks about trying on women's clothes while growing up in rural Essex, being roughed up by his stepfather, and his time as a raucous "tranny" art student at Portsmouth Polytechnic. It ends soon after Perry, aged 23, started getting into pottery.

Before it was published, he worried that it might be a "Pandora's box". I ask what effect it had. His boisterous, blokey manner momentarily disappears. "My mother did seek recourse in a newspaper," he says, referring to an article in which she is quoted calling her son's artwork "disgusting". "But I've never read it."

Does he ever see her? "No." The atmosphere turns sepulchral. Perry sits in silence for a few beats before mustering up a forlorn monosyllable: "Sad."

Once we move on to his new show, though, his freewheeling articulacy returns. The Charms of Lincolnshire opened at The Collection, Lincoln, in February. It delighted his dealer Victoria Miro so much that - in the art-world equivalent of a play transferring to the West End - she decided to bring it to her gallery in north London, where it opens next week.

In the catalogue, Perry describes the exhibition as "a poem written with objects". He rustled up the show at the invitation of The Collection, who asked him to rummage through the dusty holdings of several museums across the county. "The Museum of Lincolnshire Life have this huge warehouse full of stuff: farm machinery, steam engines, costumes, furniture - Victorian, mainly," he says. "So I started thinking about Victoriana and the themes around it that interest me: death, childhood, folk art, religion."

He sifted the warehouse for objects that caught his eye: floppy dolls in velvet breeches, a chintzy painting of a heifer, mildewy photographs, a lark lure. These appear in the show alongside 20 or so new works made by Perry in different media, including three pots and six plates (one depicts a horse in silhouette with the legend "Ikea").

"In a way, this show is like one artwork," Perry says. "I conceived it from the off as about atmosphere. The walls of the gallery will be a dark colour and the lighting will be low, so it will feel slightly spooky."

It is also a departure. "I've always dealt with metropolitan ideas, so making a show about rural Lincolnshire was a holiday for me. There's so much sentimental mythology around the country. Even the people who live there keep this myth that it's a Victorian idyll where there are no cars and everybody goes about on horseback carrying baskets of local produce - when that is absolute tosh.

"That's why I made the Ikea plate. It's saying you don't go to a local craftsman for your handmade Windsor chair turned out of raw willow by some guy in the forest. You go down to Ikea just like everyone else."

The centrepiece is a cast-iron child's coffin called Angel of the South. With its rusty patina and subtly textured surface - fungal growths sprout from the lid, on which a child's corpse is sculpted in relief - it represents a frail counterpart to Antony Gormley's gargantuan Angel of the North.

"Young boys are always seen as proto-men," Perry says. "They're never allowed to be wet, and that's symptomatic of how heavily policed the male role is. If you stray even one iota out of the strict guidelines of what it is to be a man, then you're 'gay'."

Perry, a fiercely heterosexual Harley-Davidson-owner who likes to wear women's clothes, clearly ignores society's "guidelines" on manhood. In several sepia photographs in the exhibition, he dresses up as a Victorian mother grieving for the child in the coffin.

"I was thinking about the whole Victorian female aesthetic," he says. "You know: the corsets and the crinoline. And it seemed pretty kinky. These people wore S&M in the street. Women were encouraged to walk around looking like pieces of furniture in very restricted bondage."

Bondage also inspired Perry's most recent piece, one of a dozen pots he is creating for a big show in Japan next year. He leads me up the stairs of his pebbledash studio (he bought the former corner shop five years ago) to inspect the beautiful oriental-looking vase, fresh out of the kiln.

When he nonchalantly tells me it will sell for £20,000, I break out in a sweat, worried I might knock it over. From afar it looks resplendent, the colour of salmon flesh flecked with swirls of white and overlaid with intricate gold stencilling. But closer examination reveals dark-blue transfers of tied-up women that Perry found in Japanese porno magazines.

Damien Hirst, an enthusiastic collector of Perry's work, once called his pottery "a vehicle for venom". He's absolutely right: the surfaces of Perry's pots have a lustre that lures you in, but up close their imagery can repel.

"I don't go out of my way to shock," Perry says. "I hardly see the imagery any more - I just see it as pretty colours. When I was an angry young man my pots were one-liner shocks - I used a lot of sexual imagery designed to undermine the very fact I was doing pottery.

"But now I don't choose subjects because they're shocking. I choose them because they interest me. My job description is 'Do what you want'. If I didn't, my integrity would go out the window."

Grayson Perry is in his studio in Walthamstow, east London, reflecting on life as a successful British artist. In a tight white Paul Smith T-shirt, his shaggy beach-blond hair mussed up around his face, he looks like an ageing surfer. But the night before, attending the glitzy opening of the Royal Academy summer show, he went for a very different look.

The current vogue for ragged, post-punk guitar rock was represented by the Kooks, who were breezy and confident, but too scrappy, and the Dirty Pretty Things, the band formed by former Libertine Carl Barat, who did much the same thing but much better, having the benefit of a decent rhythm section and some proper tunes.

But the best musical performances of the weekend came from two acts who produced something quite unexpected. Primal Scream, apparently back from the brink of oblivion, played an absolutely scorching set on Saturday night, showing just why they have fallen back in love with rock and roll. Swastika Eyes, Rocks, and their current single, Country Girl, were especially electrifying. So what if singer Bobby Gillespie looked utterly bewildered and sang like a small girl? The backing vocalists filled in the gaps, and the band did the rest. Fantastic.

And on Sunday evening, Richard Ashcroft, so flat for so long, was in one of his super-passionate moods: he took his shoes off and waved them in the air, he ranted at us not to vote for Cameron (or "Tony", for that matter), he poured beer over his head, he shouted at us about suicide and depression, and he and his band played a succession of cracking tunes, most notably old favourites Lucky Man and Bittersweet Symphony, but also a couple of terrific recent songs, Why Not Nothing and Words Just Get in the Way. He was a man possessed, and it was a joy to witness. Festivals are made for moments such as this.

"You look pretty much the same from here as you did in 1970," said Gary Booker, lead singer with Procol Harum, as he surveyed festival-goers basking in fierce sunshine. I wasn't at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival, as Booker and his band were, but I think his eyesight may be fading, because this was a very different affair from the one that descended into near-anarchy as thousands of ticketless festival-goers ripped down the fences.

For one thing, among this year's festival-goers there was not a whiff of the hairy, counter-cultural hippie ethos that prevailed in 1970: designer casuals and England football shirts were, overwhelmingly, the dress code. Cans of lager rather than cannabis were the drug of choice for most. The fans were also exceptionally well-behaved, making no attempt, as far as I could see, to tear down fences or to challenge the forces of repression.

Indeed, however hard the event's promoters try to maintain links with the original festival - the hippie-style graphics, the snatches of Hendrix's Voodoo Chile played over the PA system between bands (the 1970 festival was his last ever appearance), Procol Harum on the bill - the festival, revived in 2000, bears almost no relation to its predecessor: it takes place not in a rural setting, but is squeezed into a suburban park, the bands appear on time, and it even has its own Marks & Spencer.

Anyway, it's now another date in the festival season, and one that this year boasted its best ever line-up of bands: the Foo Fighters gave a typically surging, pulsing performance on Saturday night (though some of their shtick would have been familiar to anyone who's seen them before), while Coldplay played their only UK festival appearance of the year on Sunday night, again full of energy and singalong glory, and featuring a hastily-rehearsed version of Perfect Day, apparently at the request of grumpy Lou Reed, who had left it out of his set earlier in the day. But again, most of it would have been familiar to anyone who saw their tour last year.

The show opens after Constable had returned from studying art in London to his birthplace, the tiny village of East Bergholt in Dedham Vale on the Essex- Suffolk boarder. In 1805, he painted the (newly discovered) watercolour View of the Stour Valley looking towards Langham Church from Dedham - and accomplished though it is, much of the 18th century still lingers in its delicate tints, feathery brushstrokes and decorously balanced composition. At this date, Constable was already 29 years old, yet he is still indebted to the landscapes by Claude and Gainsborough that he had seen in the collection of his early patron George Beaumont.


Constable may have been thinking of works like this when he declared: "There is no easy way of becoming a good painter. I have been running after pictures, seeking the truth at second hand, [trying] to make my performances look like the work of other men." Now he resolved to develop "a pure and unaffected manner" - that is, to stop thinking in terms of this or that old master, but to paint as if he had never seen a picture before.

In the years 1809 to 1816, Constable evolved a wonderfully direct and expressive sketching style, gaining complete mastery of his medium in little plein air oil sketches such as those showing Flatford Mill from the Lock of 1811-12. These are at once objective and expressive, accurate in that Constable records exactly what he saw before him, but poetic in the way the swift brushwork conveys the artist's feelings of inner turbulence and exhilaration as he stands before his motif.

For Constable, landscape was almost an extension of his own personality - capable of expressing joy, anxiety or grief. When another artist asked him why he was so anxious about what he was doing in art, Constable replied, "Think what I am doing", meaning, the diarist Joseph Farington helpfully explained, "how much greater the object & effort".

Since the 18th century, artists had been able to capture fleeting effects of light, motion and time in small-scale oil sketches painted directly from nature. But a sketch is almost by definition limited because it can tell us only one thing: what the artist saw at that moment, on that day, in those atmospheric conditions. How could a painter translate the spontaneity of the brushwork in the little sketches painted out-of-doors on to a large-scale canvas executed in the studio without losing the immediacy and freshness of the original?

You can see Constable wrestling with the problem in several canvases of 1814-15. Like the little sketches, these are painted directly from nature. Now, however, we are looking at finished pictures, not starting points for larger works.

In Boat-building near Flatford Mill, which measures 20in x 24in, he records the myriad details of a flat, featureless landscape on a hot summer's day. So precise and detailed is the scene that time stands still and all movement ceases: you can almost hear the distant sound of rushing water and the faint scraping of tools in the enveloping silence.

Had Constable been less ambitious, his art might have developed no further than this. But he courted conventional success, longing for the patronage and recognition that, at this date, could come only from success at the Royal Academy's annual exhibition. This he very well knew could be attained not by showing small-scale views of a Suffolk boatyard, but landscapes of the scale and importance of Turner's Hannibal or Tenth Plague of Egypt.

Put simply, Constable needed to paint bigger pictures and to find a way to invest his views of a tiny East Anglican village with the gravity and monumentality that his contemporaries associated with the landscapes of Claude, of Gaspard Poussin or, closer to home, of Richard Wilson and Turner. His solution - unheard of in Western art at this date - was to paint full-size sketches for large-scale pictures in the studio, a working method that was to extend the very definition of what a finished picture could be.

At the heart of this exhibition is a large gallery hung with six monumental canvases that the artist painted for exhibition at the Royal Academy between 1818 and 1825, each showing the progress of a barge on the canals of the River Stour. The finished pictures are shown side-by-side with the matching life-size sketch for each. These 6ft x 4½ft sketches are painted with a freedom that, until then, had been found only in quick studies measuring 8in x 12in.

No one quite knows what purpose these sketches served. Most likely they were trial runs for finished pictures that allowed Constable to handle paint with an undreamed-of freedom. In them we can see Constable's mind at work as he blocks out masses and works out compositions, minimising differences in tone and texture, background and foreground, and even colour.

In this way, he was able to explore the formal values of the scene in front of him without becoming bogged down in naturalistic detail, suppressing the particular in order to emphasise the timeless.

Since they were not painted from nature but in his London studio, they should be seen not as views into the real world but exercises in pure painting. And remember: by all standards of judging art in the early 19th century, the sketches were unfinished and therefore of little value. They were only truly appreciated in the 20th century (by Roger Fry, Kenneth Clark and Lawrence Gowing) because these critics saw them through eyes accustomed to Cézanne's studies of Mont Ste Victoire of the 1890s.

In the finished canvases, Constable restores focus, texture, colour and outline to make the scene look much more like a photograph. Though in many of them he retains the freedom you find in the sketches, now the articulation of foreground, middle ground and distance is much clearer and it is even possible to identify individual plants and trees.

In my youth, the sketches were universally admired but the finished pictures usually dismissed as "chocolate box" replicas. But, with our renewed interest in academic painting, nowadays we look at the finished pictures differently, judging each on its own merits. And so I infinitely prefer the sketch for Stratford Mill (1819) where every inch of the canvas crackles with fitful light and where paint is handled with a bravura that reminds you of Delacroix. The finished version of the picture feels flat, over-worked, and its surface ever so slightly dead.

On the other hand, when it comes to The Haywain, I'd plump for the finished picture, where the skies feel bigger, the clouds deeper, and the light and space truer to what you find in East Anglia. The picture isn't over-worked like some of six-footers, which may be why it won the gold medal at the Paris Salon when it was exhibited there in 1824.

As anyone who visits Constable country knows, the artist monumentalised and falsified the original landscape to create a composition that could bear comparison with the landscapes of old masters. Flatford Mill is smaller than the building in The Haywain, the River Stour is not as wide, and the landscape does not have the dignity and scale of the one we see in the picture. In fact, in all of Constable's views of the Stour Valley, nature is denser, more intense and more teeming than in reality.

He painted in surprisingly few locations - besides Suffolk, he worked in Salisbury, Brighton, Hampstead and Kent - and his reaction to each is different. When he paints Brighton, a place he hated, he shows the beach crowded and tawdry, littered with bathing machines, customs inspectors and day-trippers. After his beloved wife's death in 1828, he paints Hadleigh Castle in Kent, and his wild brushwork and dark tones are like a howl of misery.

You'd never guess from the first few exhibits in Tate Britain's Constable: The Great Landscapes how ambitious the young John Constable was, or that he was to paint some of the most revolutionary pictures in the whole of British art.

So never underestimate Constable. He is one of the most demanding of painters in British art. In this show, you need to think as well as look, to ask yourself what Constable is trying to do in each work - and whether or not he succeeds. Once you engage actively with the problems he faced and attempted to solve at every stage in his career, the show is endlessly rewarding. To curator Anne Lyles and all those associated with this superbly realised show: nice going.