1. Rembrandt: The Late Works | National Gallery, London
This was staggering: the kind of show you never ever expect to see, for which museums all over the world yield up their most treasured possessions just so that the gallery-goers of one country can witness Rembrandt’s last decade in all its concentrated intensity.
It set countless masterworks before you, from the overwhelming tenderness of The Jewish Bride to the fantastically alert Syndics, each one eyeballing the viewer from a different direction; from the tragic Anatomy Lesson to the haunting nightmare of Lucretia about to stab herself (not once but twice, in before-and-after pictures), knife in hand, sleepwalking towards death.
There were surprises throughout, though, no matter how well you thought you knew Rembrandt. Sweden sent a picture never shown in Britain before: The Conspiracy of the Batavians Under Claudius Civilis, which stopped visitors in their tracks with its shadow-play of raw-faced warriors illuminated from below and dominated by the towering Civilis, who had one eye working but the other a horrendous gaping socket. It was a commission for Amsterdam town hall, but Rembrandt wouldn’t compromise on the outlandishness of the picture. He was never paid; the picture was taken down almost immediately.
This defiance was everywhere apparent at the National Gallery: in the magnificent impasto of the husband’s sleeve in The Jewish Bride, nubs of paint fully an inch thick, but setting off such a twinkling interplay of golden-yellow light; in the strange, rheumy-eyed Christ child looking up at Saint Simeon in the freezing cold of Christmas; in the weird self-portrait at the start, a tiny etching in which Rembrandt shows himself pig-eyed, flaccid and confused, otherwise nearly faceless where he has simply wiped himself out of the plate.
There was an unexpected intimacy to the whole event. It showed Rembrandt out in the countryside – from which he seems to recoil – in tiny drawings; visiting his friends and neighbours in their diamond-paned Amsterdam homes; taking a boat to sketch the corpse of a maid, dangling pitifully from the gallows.
But I couldn’t help circling back to the self-portraits in the first room time and again, with their inexhaustible range of emotional nuance. They represent the fons et origo of everything to come: the artist in all his doubt, courage, shambolic pathos, humanity, profundity, shrewdness, sadness and power. This was an exemplary show of an exemplary master of all human life. It continues until 18 January: catch it while you can.
2. Henri Matisse: The Cut-outs | Tate Modern, London
The late great scissor works in the most comprehensive showing ever were a joy from first to last. And the ultimate generosity of Matisse’s cut-outs was to inspire the artist in every one of us.
3. Giovanni Battista Moroni | Royal Academy, London
Anyone who’s watched the 16th-century Italian painter Moroni gradually reaching centre stage at the National Gallery over the years will have been hungry for this show. It didn’t disappoint: marvellously acute portraits that establish a mutual exchange between sitter and viewer half a century before Velázquez.
4. Veronese | National Gallery, London
For sheer uprush, there was nothing to beat the first (and possibly the last) Veronese show in Britain in this lifetime. Brilliant colour, light and drama; figures surging upwards through space.
5. Malevich | Tate Modern, London
From the epiphany of abstraction – the revolutionary Black Square presented exactly as it was first shown in 1915 – to the desperate later years, when Malevich was forced back into figuration, this was an exemplary show. Huge, historic, and unexpectedly moving.
6. Silent Partners | Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
The best curating I’ve seen all year, in a show devoted to the uses and abuses of mannequins in art – from early Renaissance models to mutant Chapman children. The focus on these queer quasi-sculptural surrogates revealed so much about the making of art, and the minds of the artists themselves.
7. Emily Carr | Dulwich Picture Gallery
Emily Carr, Canada’s best-kept secret, came as a genuine revelation: a painter of such passion, power and singularity that her landscapes of Northern Canada had something of Van Gogh’s intensity. She lived in the forests of her paintings and you can practically hear the wind whistling through her work.
8. Ai Weiwei | Blenheim Palace and Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Ai was everywhere this year, and it’s hard to choose between the eloquent austerity of his urns, stools and ceramic crabs in the baroque splendour of Blenheim or the outdoor sculptures in Yorkshire. But his Iron Tree, with its lichen of ochre rust, its parts cast from branches gathered by people all over China, its message of hopeful unity, stood highest.
9. Mondrian and Colour | Turner Margate
We’re not supposed to admire pre-grid Mondrian, but this beautiful selection of early landscapes from Belgium showed the priggishness of that convention. Mondrian could make the sky sing and the sea catch fire with the most counterintuitive of colours.
10. Generation: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland | Various venues
This massive one-nation survey was all over the place in both respects: a chaotic miscellany of shows running from the Borders right up to Lewis. But there were great individual works, particularly films by Torsten Lauschmann and Amar Kanwar.
View all comments >
comments
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion.
This discussion is closed for comments.
We’re doing some maintenance right now. You can still read comments, but please come back later to add your own.
Commenting has been disabled for this account (why?)