The National Portrait Gallery has announced its 2023/24 programme, commencing this June, after a two-year closure for the largest redevelopment in its history. 

The news last summer that the 2023 Turner Prize had been awarded to Towner Eastbourne was met with surprise in certain quarters. Eastbourne? The Turner Prize? The Sussex seaside town was best known to the greater public, after all, as a genteel resort favoured by the older generation, and nicknamed ‘God’s Waiting Room’.

‘My paint brush always gives a tremor of pleasure when I let it paint a flower’, wrote Winifred Nicholson, in her 1969 essay The Flower’s Response.

Margaret Thatcher famously called him ‘That man who paints those dreadful pictures’ and Francis Bacon’s work, always full of existential anguish, certainly divided critics throughout his five-decade career, his shocking images simultaneously intriguing and repulsing his viewers.

When the abstract painter Trevor Bell died in 2017, many mourned the passing of ‘the last of the St Ives Modernists’.

Until March 27 Willoughby Gerrish is holding a show of Gerald Laing’s work at Thirsk Sculpture Garden in Yorkshire.

In a recent interview with ROSA Magazine (Review of Sussex Arts), Sue Tilley, one of Lucian Freud’s regular sitters, called the artist “a monster, but a humorous monster”.

We’d like to wish you a very merry Christmas, with this season’s-greetings card created by David Jones in December 1926, a very rare wood-engraving print, courtesy of Dominic Kemp in association with Austin/Desmond Fine Art. It is a proof of a card Jones was asked to design, but was never used.

‘Alberto painted as an Italian operatic tenor sings, that is with a passionate theatricality and always con brio.’ So wrote artist and lecturer David McClure, about his compatriot and near-contemporary Alberto Morrocco, one of the leading figures of 20th-century Scottish art.

The latest exhibition at Candida Stevens’ eponymous Chichester gallery, Water & Ways, is subtitled ‘an exhibition of artworks inspired by Sussex, post war and contemporary’. It acts as an interesting counterpoint to the big autumn show at Pallant House Gallery, just down the road, entitled Sussex Landscape: Chalk, Wood and Water (see ‘Bill Brandt’s geological nudes’, below).

One day Stanley Donwood will be written about without mention of the fact that he has been responsible for all Radiohead’s album-cover artwork since they started. Although not in this piece. Not yet.

Before his death, in 1974, the post-impressionist landscape painter Edward Seago wrote in his will that one third of the paintings stored in his studio in Norwich should be destroyed. Luckily for the world, Seago was a prolific artist, and around 19,000 watercolours and 300 oil paintings remain.

You might say the collage artist and photographer Nigel Henderson was well connected.His Bohemian mother set up Peggy Guggenheim’s London gallery in 1938; through her he met Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy, and saw his early collage work exhibited alongside that of Picasso, Braque and Gris.

Bill Brandt escaped from Germany in the 30s and made his name as a photographer chronicling the customs of his adopted compatriots in books such as The English at Home (1936) and articles in illustrated magazines such as Lilliput and Picture Post.

Lucian Freud and John Craxton met at art college in 1941 when they were 19 years old, and they were soon living together, painting together, and drinking together, enjoying what there was to enjoy in wartime London, both exempt from military service.

Simon Casson went to the National Gallery, aged ten, and stood in front of a Titian. He hasn’t been the same since.

If Adrian Heath’s audacious attempt to escape from Stalag 383 in Bavaria in 1942 had succeeded, British abstract art might have taken a different course. As it was, he was captured, and put into solitary confinement, where he experimented with abstract techniques (there wasn’t much to draw). Once out, he met fellow-POW Terry Frost, and encouraged him to develop his artistic style.

Iwona Blazwick, Matthew Burrows win prestigious Critics’ Circle Awards. On Wednesday October 26, at a reception at Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery in Mayfair, The Critics’ Circle Art & Architecture section, representing many of the country’s top critics in those fields, presented their annual awards in front of an invited audience of 70 guests from the art world.

Throughout the duration of British Art Fair, the RSA are showcasing a selection of leading and emerging contemporary Scottish artists.

The Ingram Collection of Modern British & Contemporary Art is one of the UK’s most significant art collections and we are pleased to announce a partnership for our 2022 edition.