Courtauld Gallery, WC2
The reopening of the Courtauld Gallery after a massive and (because of the pandemic and the discovery of a medieval cesspit in the basement) much delayed redevelopment was a highlight of the cultural year. Its climax is the Great Room, the theatrical gallery in which all the drama of the Royal Academy’s annual Summer Exhibition was once played out. It now reclaims its former splendour as it provides a show space for impressionist and post-impressionist canvases. A host of our nation’s most popular paintings glow with what feels like fresh life.
Thomas Becket: murder and the making of a saint, the British Museum
We are all familiar with the cult of celebrity, but in the Middle Ages instead of reality TV stars there were saints. And about the most famous of these was Thomas Becket, the archbishop who, in 1170, was murdered at the behest of his friend turned foe Henry II. This marvellous multifaceted exhibition assembling a rich range of treasures to commemorate this dramatic moment, among them the many often gorily dramatic depictions of the murder, brought history to imaginative life. It resurrected not just a solitary figure but an entire age of faith.
Paula Rego, Tate Britain
The personal and the political, the folkloric and the fetishistic, the erotic and the religious find themselves all rubbed together in the pastels of Paula Rego. This Portuguese-born artist is a phenomenon. You could spot this right from the start in a Tate Britain exhibition that followed her idiosyncratic vision as it developed across the course of seven decades. Her disturbing psychodramas, however mad or fantastical, are pervaded by an uncompromising commitment to truth.
Epic Iran, V&A, SW7
What ambition! The V&A embraced more than five millennia of cultural history in a single coherent narrative. As some of the most entrancingly beautiful and intellectually iconic Iranian treasures from museums the world over were gathered, territories typically seen as closed-off and restrictive were revealed to have been the home of a succession of extraordinary shape-shifting civilisations. Arabs, Greeks, Kurds and Jews; Zoroastrians, Sufis and Muslims all mixed. This show was a blockbuster that dazzled and informed, shedding light on one of the world’s most misunderstood nations.
Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, the Box, Plymouth
To step into the Box is to set out on a fantastical voyage through time and across space. Songlines, which is still runninghttps://www.theboxplymouth.com/events/exhibitions/songlines , tells the story of the seven sisters that indigenous Australians see when they gaze up at the Pleiades star cluster. An ancient aboriginal songline tells the story of these sisters as they flee a priapic pursuer. And this show follows it over deserts and mountains, along rivers and through skies. Paintings, sculptures and soundscapes come together to plot a tale that is as epic as the Odyssey, wise as the Bible, wonderful as Gilgamesh and yet feels relevant at the same time.
Advertisement
And one turkey . . .
Princess Diana statue, Kensington Palace
We waited 25 years for a statue to commemorate Diana, Princess of Wales. And then, in a year when it has become all the rage to pull down public sculpture, we went and erected an utter monstrosity. The princess, standing in the pose of the traditional religious Madonna, appealed to all the most mawkish aspects of Diana worship. Dubbed “dismal Diana”, the effigy fell flat from the moment it was put up.
