It’s 1915, and the painter Bernard Meninsky, life drawing tutor at London’s Central School of Arts + Crafts, has been charged with looking through the portfolio of a fifteen-year-old girl, Clara Klinghoffer. A task which, one would imagine, he was expecting to be humdrum, turned out to be anything but. “Good Lord,” he stated. “That child draws like da Vinci.” 

Klinghoffer’s 1923 painting Bananas, of an East End peddler, is included in the exhibition Crossing Borders: Internationalism in Modern British Art, at British Art Fair 2023.

A major work by the artist David Breuer-Weil will serve as the centrepiece and the entrance feature of the SOLO CONTEMPORARY section at British Art Fair. The piece, titled The Gold Metaverse, is inspired by the vast 15th-century polyptych The Ghent Altarpiece, by Hubert and Jan van Eyck, which dominates the interior of St Bavo’s Cathedral in the medieval Belgian city.

In 1988 the Scottish figurative expressionist painter John Bellany was given a liver transplant by the pioneering surgeon Sir Roy Calne. “When he came to afterwards,” Calne later remembered, “he asked not for analgesics, but for paper and paint.”

Bellany had had liver disease for years, despite giving up alcohol in 1985, and his brush with death – and new lease of life – galvanised his art practice, enabling him to ‘see colours he hadn’t seen before’.

What do Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgois, Barbara Hepworth, Georgia O’Keeffe, Berthe Morisot, Helen Frankenthaler, Bridget Riley, Tracey Emin, Leonora Carrington, Tamara de Lempicka, Angelica Kauffman, Artemisia Gentileschi, Yoko Ono, Gwen John, Yayoi Kusuma, Sarah Lucas, Cornelia Parker and Cindy Sherman have in common?

None of them have been given a solo exhibition in the main galleries of the Royal Academy, that’s what. In fact, NO woman has ever been given that honour in the 255-year history of Britain’s most prestigious venue.

Until now, that is.

Take a bow Marina Abramović…

From his work being described as ‘violent’ and ‘garish’ in 1905, to ‘the real pioneer of the English Modern School’ in 1926, Robert Bevan had a turbulent time winning over critics.

Being shown at British Art Fair by Harry Moore-Gwyn Fine Art, learn of the painters journey in our latest news piece.

In 1947 the 22-year-old St Martins and RA graduate Sandra Blow, daughter of a fruit wholesaler, embarked on a tour of Italy on a motorcycle, studying pre-Renaissance architecture and frescoes, and enrolling in the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome…

If Eve hadn’t gone for that apple, would the Garden of Eden have remained, for evermore, an unspoilt, innocent paradise? James Mortimer’s surrealist, symbolic, uncanny paintings suggest not, describing an alternative Eden, where: ‘Freed from social constraint, people behave unthinkingly with a blissful lack of self-awareness, and once governed by their basest instincts soon find themselves given over to shameless naked abandon: to foolish acts of wanton violence, sexual impropriety and long afternoons of listless indolence’.

Soon after WW2 broke out in 1939, the watercolourist and commercial illustrator Eric Ravilious applied to become an official war artist, and this application – to his great delight – was accepted in January 1940.

In the spring of 1941, he was commissioned to depict the newly developed control rooms. From this space the Ministry of Home Security organised air raid precautions and collated bomb damage. This painting – fresh to market having been bought from a private collection by the Fine Art Society – is from that series. Fire Control Room will be shown by The Fine Art Society at British Art Fair 2023.

The Belfast-born sculptor Tim Shaw has had a good 2023. From works in the Summer Exhibition at the RA , to his piece, Man on Fire, being unveiled in July of this year outside the Imperial War Museum North, to being chosen by the Fiumano Clase Gallery as the artist they are exhibiting in the second edition of SOLO CONTEMPORARY…

The economist John Maynard Keynes sits in the garden of Charleston Farmhouse in the summer of 1917, painted by his host, friend and former lover Duncan Grant. The painting is in the collection of the Charleston Trust, and is in the inaugural exhibition in their new gallery in Lewes, East Sussex, which opened with a sumptuous private view this week.

Tracey Emin has never been shy about putting herself at the centre of her art. In her early career, this reflected a provocative, feisty personality, though it would be short-sighted to dismiss Emin as a mere provocateur. She has, over the years, demonstrated her prodigious talent in many mediums, including installation, sculpture, painting, printing, textiles, photography, film and neon.

Several examples of Emin’s prints will be on display during British Art Fair (and until October 9) on the ground floor of The Conran Shop’s new flagship store in Sloane Square, to mark a partnership with the Fair. The prints have been chosen by the Conran group from the collection of Chelsea gallerist Tanya Baxter.

Before WW1, Slade drop-out David Bomberg made his name as a radical, avant-garde artist, creating complex, geometric compositions, blending elements of cubism and futurism. Without Bomberg we wouldn’t have had Auerbach or Kossoff.

Bomberg’s work, Calle de San Pedro, courtesy of Osborne Samuel Gallery, can be seen at the Crossing Borders exhibition on the second floor of Saatchi Gallery during British Art Fair.

The current retrospective of the work of Gwen John, at Pallant House Gallery until October 8, attempts to dispel the widespread notion that John was something of a recluse. There’s no doubting the sublime, beguiling quality of the work but a whole room of austere limited-palette nun portraits hardly tells a convincing story of Gwen John living the high life in Montmartre. However, a different side to the reclusive artists work is revealed through love letters and gifts to the subject of her fixation- a Russian-Jewish emigrée named Vera Oumançoff…

The Scottish artist Charles Hodge Mackie RSA RSW, the founding president of the Scottish Society of Artists, had a fruitful love affair with Venice, and made several extended visits to the ‘La Serenissima’ between 1908 and 1914, creating many works which significantly enhanced his reputation. You can admire his work at the Fine Art Society’s latest exhibition, titled Twentieth Century, at their London gallery.

This rather gruesome etching is part of a series of works by the London-based Dutch artist Marcelle Hanselaar, titled Apocrypha. Hanselaar’s etching is titled Vindication: Judith and Holofernes, and it depicts a scene from one such tale, the Book of Judith…

The ‘discovery’ of the naïve Cornish painter Alfred Wallis is a well-known tale, but the story of his sad demise, in 1942, is less commonly related. Wallis didn’t start painting until he was 70…

Happy birthday to the Redfern Gallery, who are celebrating their 100th anniversary with two consecutive centenary exhibitions of paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures. The first is currently on show in their Cork Street space, where the gallery has been based since 1936 (having moved from Redfern House in Old Bond Street, hence the name).

Is this muscular angel falling, floating, or dancing? Perhaps all three at once. The colourful pink-winged creature is the creation of Amy Beager, and is typical of her romantic, melodramatic, enchanting work, which transforms neo-classical figures into modern-day deities, in dayglo tones. It is titled Bobbidi, referencing The Magic Song from Cinderella, inferring a spell has been cast: rest assured we are not moving in the material world. Beager entered the piece for the Ingram Prize 2022 (for contemporary UK artists), and was chosen as one of the four winners. As a result Bobbidi has been acquired by the Ingram Collection, and is on show at their latest exhibition.

I’m pretty sure that when Lisa Ivory lay awake at night as a young child, she was convinced that a monster lay drooling under her bed. Such creatures reappear in all her oil paintings: dark, shaggy beasts of vaguely humanoid form.

You can currently see the artist’s latest series of paintings at Saatchi Gallery, in the show Beyond the Gaze – Reclaiming the Landscape, curated by Zavier Ellis. The exhibition explores landscape painting through a contemporary female gaze.

FCB Cadell (pronounced to rhyme with ‘Paddle’) is often referred to as the ‘most Scottish’ of the four Scottish colourists, as much of his work depicted the interior of his sumptuous studio at Ainslie Place in the Georgian New Town of Edinburgh, or the landscape of the Inner Hebridean island of Iona, where he used to spend every summer. He often sported a kilt, in the Campbell tartan, albeit set off with a yellow waistcoat…