Richard Holledge

When trombonist Craig Klein came back to his house a few days after Hurricane Katrina tore though New Orleans on August 29, 2005, he found – like thousands of others  - that his house was in ruins.

“The water was ten feet high, almost reaching the second floor,” he says. “Everything was in turmoil. All I could do was throw all the contents into the street, tear down the inside walls, clear out the foot of sludge and wait for it all to dry.”

While he waited he got in touch with friends in the music community who were in the same plight and they decided to help each other get their homes and their lives back into some sort of order.

“I knew I had to be here because this is the best place to be a musician but I didn’t know what was going to happen to the music scene because so many had left and not come back Some were dead.

Read more in The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/americas/aint-no-city-like-new-orleans

Love lost; love regained. Freedom; oppression. The casual cruelty of great nations; the plight of the weak and dispossessed. And against all hope—survival and a new life.

The Scattered dramatizes the incredible life of one man and the people he loved, caught up in the saga that befell the Acadians, a simple, peaceable people, who were expelled by the British from their homes in Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1755. The great powers—France and Britain—were caught up in a titanic battle for power in North America. The small enclave of French-speaking Acadians were in the way and were brushed aside.

To find out more, please go to The Scattered at Amazon

I’m too mean to pay to delve behind the FT paywall so here’s a piece in full….

In the spring of 1928 a Danish archaeologist unearthed a bust of a woman in the ruins of Palmyra. She had a broken nose and a fearsome glare but was clearly a woman of substance judging by a sketch drawn soon after she had been unearthed which brought red to her cheeks and gold to her elaborate headdress and  extravagant bangles.

She wasn’t the first to be discovered in that ancient Syrian city, nor even in the best condition, but a local newspaper published the painting and with an eye for a snappy headline dubbed her the “Beauty of Palmyra”. 

Next week a digital recreation of the bust will be unveiled in “The Road to Palmyra” at the Ny Carlsberg Gliptotek in Copenhagen (September 20 - March 1). What little colour survived in 1928 has long faded with time but today her headdress has been transformed into a glory of gold and jewels, her rouged cheeks made a little redder and her figure swathed in a scarlet tunic. Her nose has been straightened.

In all her radiant - some might say, gaudy - splendour, she will be the centrepiece of the exhibition in which more than 100 funerary portraits collected by Danish archaeologists since the 18th century will be on display alongside coins, sculptures, 19th century photographs and paintings. 

It is tempting to interpret her ‘resurrection’ as a kind of defiant gesture to Isis, the Islamic extremists, who destroyed many of the city’s treasures in 2015, but curator Anne Marie Nielsen takes a cooler stance. “We have made a balance between how much to say and how much not to say. We do not want to politicise it. Isis has blown up a lot of buildings but before that Assad’s soldiers and everybody else ruined things and stole things. We do say it is terrible but we are matter of fact about it.”

She is more eloquent when she talks about the show itself.

“The people in the portraits were so determined not to be forgotten that they made these monumental tombs. We are remembering them by painting a picture of a thriving merchant city at the cross roads of the ancient world. By being dead they tell us what they were when they were alive”.

The funerary portraits were discovered in the towers whose ruins even today line the Valley of Tombs along which travellers trudged on their way to the city with its theatre, noble public spaces and colonnaded streets. 

There were maybe more than 500 grave monuments, some crammed with as many as 200 graves, but rather than lining the gallery with rows of bearded men and enigmatic women which to the untrained eye look much the same as each other, the museum has brought a touch of the theatre to the galleries with the sounds which would have echoed around the city in the early years of the second millennium; the clamorous caravans of camels padding their way along the Valley of Tombs to deliver spices, donkeys braying and the raucous shouts of dealers in Aramaic clashing with the chants of priests. 

To help understand what a tomb chamber looked like and how it worked, the visitor can step into a reconstruction some three metres by four where the graves are packed one on top of the other like pigeon holes in an old-fashioned office. Each grave had loculus reliefs, rectangular limestone slabs which were placed at the head of the grave with the image of the body carved on them and included inscriptions with the names of the deceased, explaining which clan they belonged to.

The aim was to impress not only Palmyrene society by their wealth but to assert that the family intended to exist for a long time – at least in the memory of those left behind - and to reach out through the centuries as a way of claiming a kind of immortality. 

All end with a final lament, the single word, ‘alas’.

Close up even the untrained eye can see how the features were exaggerated; large eyes, big ears, high cheeks, high and pointy chins. Long hands and fingers. This was a deliberate attempt to make the portraits which were placed high above the mourners to stand out in the darkness of the tomb and be recognisable from a distance. 

It was on a dig in a tomb like this that the Glyptotek’s archaeologist Kai Harald Ingholt discovered the “Beauty” in a burial place reserved for the city elite known as Qasr Abjad or White Castle and thanks to evidence built up over the 90 years and the interpretative work of Aarhus University we now know a great deal about the world she inhabited, and the connections she and her community shared with far away places. 

Disappointingly, nothing is known about her apart from an estimate that she lived in the early AD 200s. Her name has been cut away, the inscription long gone but placed in her own gallery and picked out by spot lights she is a resplendent figure, the crème de la crème of Palmyra society. 

But she is not just a pretty face; thanks to forensic work on her and seven other portraits using UVF (ultraviolet fluorescent light), x-rays and microscopic examinations of samples the size of a pin head experts can use her to tell a story of the city and its place in the world at the time of her life. 

Traces of madder lake, a vegetable red dye whose earliest use is recorded in India in three millennium BC have been detected in her headdress and indigo, one of the most expensive pigments, was found in Egypt and Afghanistan. Cinnabar, a red pigment which came from Almadén in Spain but also as far way as China, has been traced on the tunic. Red ochre came from Turkey and Egypt, yellow from France.  

Although she looks Indian, her hair curls fetchingly on to her cheeks in a Roman style popularised by the Empress Faustina the Elder (104 - 140 AD). Her jewellery has been carved and her eyes inlaid with glass in a way which is typical of the art of Iran, which was part of Parthia to the east, but one strand of her necklace and the finger rings are believed to be inspired by the west. 

She may well typify the elite of society, but little is known of the life of the women in the city despite 30 per cent of the portraits being of females. It is assumed that some, at least, lived in luxury and maybe held important positions but Palmyra was a patriarchal society and the daily life of women was tied to the home and family.  

One woman did rise to a position of power. The third-century Queen Zenobia (AD 240-274) defied Rome and was described in the “Historia Augusta” as a woman of immense beauty with teeth ‘as white as pearls’, but the only surviving likenesses of the Queen are on coins minted in about AD 271 which depict her with a sharp nose and large ears. 

She would almost certainly had bedecked herself with all the trappings of status displayed by the anonymous “Beauty” and probably would have stayed locked in affluent domesticity had it not been for the murder in AD 267-268 of her husband, the city’s ruler. She took over and expanded Palmyra with such success that that it controlled the trade routes from the East to the West until AD 273 when she lost her empire to the Roman emperor Aurelian who sacked the city and took her prisoner.

She remains clad in myth as one of the most fascinating women of the Orient alongside Cleopatra and the Queen of Sheba. The Romans were intrigued by her and perhaps a little scared by the vision of a strong woman, especially if bedecked in the forthright finery exemplified by the “Beauty of Palmyra”. This was not the way women were supposed to behave. 

She became romanticised in the European rediscovery of the Orient in the 17th and 18th centuries and was sexualised in Victorian times when she emerges as a femme fatale and, again, a subject of fascination and fear.

Her image has grown and changed as she has wandered through history imbued with many guises to suit the fantasies of the moment. Most recently in 2016 a new statue of the warrior queen was briefly erected in the Syrian capital Damascus as a symbol of Arab pride.  

Such an obvious propaganda stunt could never be a match for the real thing. Palmyra may be battered by Isis but what Zenobia, the “Beauty of Palmyra” and the stern-faced portraits affirm is that for a few centuries the city was at the heart of world commerce, where East and West met.

As the Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder wrote: “Palmyra forged its own destiny between the two mighty empires of Rome and Parthia.” 

One of the most moving - and beautiful - exhibitions is Armenia: Masterpieces from an Enduring Culture at the Bodlean Library in Oxford as you can see in the Gulf News;  http://gulfnews.com/culture/arts/armenia-s-history-and-culture-at-the-bodleian-1.1656929

In the wood-panelled formality of the Trustees Room of the New York Public Library an intense, rather nervous, woman is holding an audience in rapt silence. 

In gentle cadences Lebanese playwright Maya Zbib is performing her one-woman show, The Music Box. There is a lightness to her voice which contrasts with the shelves of portentous books and elaborate tapestries that stuff the room but it is a lightness that is deceptive, because her story tells of life in Beirut - a world of violence to women, disappointed marriages, mislaid dreams and untimely death. It is so affecting that when the short performance ends there is a silence, then heartfelt applause and even tears.  Few shed more than the charismatic theatre director Peter Sellars who is sitting in the front row. 

“I was crying my eyes out,” he said. “I knew the text but this is the first time I have seen Maya perform.  So much in the Middle East comes from a sense of desperation so it is beautiful to see something of intelligence, of balance, of quiet and understanding that comes from an inner clarity.”

Read more in The National

London is on the rise. 

Almost 250 buildings of 20 or more stories are being built or planned for the city and its suburbs. in the next few years, about 150 of which would be residential blocks. Recently, a fresh tranche of planned developments were announced for Canary Wharf and in to the east, including a several skyscrapers - one 58 stories. 

And those numbers have grown as recently as the end of July, when a new group of high rises, including one of 58 stories, was announced for London’s East End.

The high rises are hailed by some as the only solution to the city’s chronic housing shortage, and are the result of overseas investment that has flowed into the capital since the global downturn of 2008, most of it attached to high-rise projects.

But others argue that the buildings will clog London’s skyline and that the city’s post-World War II practice of grouping towers on streetless sites, in a kind of residential version of an industrial park, produces a sterile environment -- and actually does not provide as many housing units as traditional terraced housing.

Read more in the New York Times

Museum director James Bradburne is not slow in coming forward when he has something say. Here the director Milan's Pinoteca de Brera says who he thinks about the demorialising effect of the blockbuster. And has one or two other opinions to share as well. Frustratingly the FT keeps its works to itself (very sensible of them) so the story appear in the blog. 

https://www.ft.com/content/dc3e411c-f20b-11e7-bb7d-c3edfe974e9f

Most years Brazilian gallerist Juliana Cintra would have promoted her artists and their work at the key international art fairs such as Frieze New York and Arco Madrid.    

    Not this year. Mrs Cintra, co-owner of the Silvia Cintra + Box Gallery in Rio de Janeiro, says: “People are not in the mood to buy. We have a political crisis, the president may well be impeached, the economy is weak and the dollar is too strong. Then there is the situation in Paris and Brussels with terrorism and the confusion in Europe.”

    Add to this the rising cost of the Olympic Games opening in Rio this August - now at 39.1 billion reals (£7.6 billion) - throw in the chaos caused by the building of new infrastructure, and it is understandable why she laments: “We have had to take a step back and go only to Art Brussels and Basel Miami. Art is something that people buy when they are happy. It isn’t something that people need.”

Read more in the FT. 

Terrific show at the Estorick in north London about the drink that had an art movement doing its marketing. Sort of. This appeared in the brilliant New European which relies more on the physical world ie news print than than the digital. All the better for it.

Anyway, mine’s a Campari Soda.

When F. T. Marinetti launched the Futurist movement in Italy the firebrand poet and philosopher proclaimed “There is no beauty that does not consist of struggle. We intend to destroy museums, libraries, academies... We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.” 

Whether he toasted his 1909 manifesto with a Campari and soda history does not say, but it would have been entirely fitting because many of his followers found time amidst all the feverish struggle to design posters advertising that most Italian of drinks. 

There was a logic to it. The Futurists embraced all that was industrial and dynamic but, above all, new and innovative and were attracted to advertising as something modern, something that took bourgeois art off the walls and into the streets. This radical thinking probably meant little to the drink company’s owner Davide Campari but when he was casting around for artists to promote his product he lighted on several angry young Futurists who were happy to forego the ‘slap and the punch’ and instead express themselves with wit, style and glamour. 

Perhaps it was inevitable. Campari was created in 1860 in Milan by Davide’s father, the city was the hotbed of Futurist activity and no doubt they met at the Camparino bar, the favourite watering hole for anyone who was anyone.

“The Art of Campari” at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London (until September 16), shows how the work of these revolutionaries brought the thoroughly capitalist concept of brand image to the aperitif with such panache that the drink, with its distinctive small conical bottle (note: it is two words not one as often spelt) became one of the world’s unmistakable brands. 

Many might match it for iconic status - the Michelin man, a bottle of Tabasco, Rolls Royce or Coca Cola - but only Campari is associated with an art movement. 

How better to mark the twentieth anniversary of the opening of the Estorick, the UK’s only gallery devoted to modern Italian art, with work by some of the most celebrated poster designers of the day? Names such as Leonetto Cappiello, Marcello Dudovich, Adolf Hohenstein, and Marcello Nizzoli, may not mean much out of Italy but their work absolutely reflects a time and a place - Milan was already one of the world’s most fashionable cities - and celebrates the drink that went with it. 

The early posters reflect an enviable life style with examples from the Belle Époque of the early 20th century, the Art Nouveau and Cubist campaigns of the 1920s and on to the elegant designs of the 1960s.

Adolf Hohenstein, whose technique owes something to photographic realism and Art Nouveau, depicts two smart gents at a café table looking on longingly as the soda is squirted into the ruby red aperitif. It has no title, just the name: Bitter Campari. No need to say any more.

In “Women and Officers” Marcello Dudovich enhances the brand image with a gathering of Milan high society. The pouring of the Cordial, a sweet version of the drink designed to appeal to the ladies, is almost hidden behind elegant frocks but the message is clear; this drink is for the refined, for those with good taste.

Post World War One the posters become more overtly advertorial, particularly those by Macello Nizzoli, artist, architect, chief designer for Olivetti typewriters and a designer of handbags. The ruby red of the Campari bottle, the blue of the soda syphon, the fizz of the soda, his series of posters are distinctly Cubist, simple, direct, but entirely evocative of a sophisticated night out in Milan in 1920s.

Ugo Mochi part time opera singer, but best known as the ‘Poet of Shadows’ for his paper silhouettes of animals, produced a series of enchanting cameos of cafe life - a maid serving drinks, intimate moments on board a ship, a waiter scampering to replenish glasses - they are deceptively simple evocations of a privileged world which one can’t help thinking the more hard-line Futurists began by despising.

(The founder, F.T.Marinetti, published the Futurist’s Cookbook with the ‘lofty, noble and universally expedient aim of changing radically the eating habits of our race.’ One of his targets was the banality of pasta. His thesis rather faltered when he was photographed tucking into a huge bowl of spaghetti).

It becomes more fun in the 1920s. Leonetto Cappiello depicted a cheery girl hanging from a lamp post. No bottle to be seen, just the words “Bitter Campari, Milano.” A jester leaps out of a swirl of orange peel - the essential ingredient to complement the drink’s bitter-sweet tang.

Nowhere does the commercial meet art more than in the posters of Fortunato Depero, who did more than anyone to establish Campari’s corporate identity. Throughout the 1920s he produced a vast quantity of posters and newspaper advertisements including a series of highly stylised, graphical images, bold, witty and geometric, which were nonetheless quirky and surreal. 

He was a key figure in the Futurist movement, a painter, a poet, a dance designer for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. He also wrote Fascist fighting songs and designed a cover for the magazine supplement of Mussolini’s newspaper. 

He believed that ‘the art of the future will be largely advertising... a spellbinding art boldly placed on walls and the facades of big buildings, in shop windows, in trains, alongside pavements and streets, everywhere; a living, multiplied art, not isolated and buried in museums – art free of all academic restraints – art that is cheerful - bold - exhilarating.’ 

Perhaps nothing epitomised that exhilaration more than the drawings he made which were used to inspire the classic conical Campari Soda bottle which was launched in 1932 with its ready to drink mix - just add ice and a slice of orange.

After World War Two, perhaps lifted by post conflict optimism, there was something of a return to the glamour and sophistication that characterised the posters of the 1920s. Many by Franz Marangolo epitomised the spirit of the Swinging Sixties with pastel shades, full of zest and humour. The women - always women - look like a Sophia Loren or an Audrey Hepburn. They are gamine and soignée, they have long mini-skirted legs and they perfectly sum up a mood of permanent Italian summer when all that was needed to make everything perfetto was the pétillant fizz that signalled the opening of another bottle.  

His posters of the little bottle portrayed as a long legged model with a coquettish wink, looked at objectively are rather strange - a conical container as a mannequin? - but with a pinch of salt, or rather a sip of Campari, they appear delightfully stylish, conjuring up a Milanese catwalk or London’s King’s Road. 

The image with its slogan: ‘For your thirst, Campari Soda keeps up with the times’ captures what one commentator described in 1960 as ‘an aura of soft and enjoyable happiness.’

“From that single word (Campari), infinite sketches have sprung like from a firework,” he wrote. “Before our eyes, there is an increasing parade of lively inventions and sparkling and funny claims, in an astute and cheerful game of allegories.

“An illustration of the bottle and glass is now enough to produce a particularly inviting lure...  synonymous of exquisite and sociable gallantry, whether it is made up of a simple word and claim of merit and quality, or conveyed through a series of large, artistic billboards.”

Nothing bettered those billboards. In a nod to more recent times the exhibition has one poster from 1990 by Ugo Nespolo, made to celebrate Italy hosting the World Cup. While his predecessors understood that less is more this is a confused jumble of conflicting images made from a jig saw of lacquered wood.

Inevitably, perhaps, the posters were replaced by TV commercials. One directed by Italy’s legendary director Frederico Fellini showed a bearded man and younger women in a train carriage looking out of the window apparently hoping to see the perfect sight. He leers, she pouts. It ends with a vision of the Campari bottle framed by the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Pantheon in Rome. Perfection at last, the commercial seems to say. But the imagery is confusing and a bit creepy. Above all it misses the simple message of Campari campaigns over the years which is all about fun, sophistication, verve.

As one of Marangolo’s posters has it: ‘É sempre giovane.’ 

‘And always young.’

“Digging, digging, digging, always bloody digging.” That was the rueful refrain of Britain’s First World War soldiers as they gouged out the trenches that stretched from Switzerland to the English Channel.

Nothing symbolizes the mayhem of the 1914-18 war more than those crude lines of defense so it is fitting that one of the most dramatic features of London’s newly-redesigned Imperial War Museum is a re-creation of a trench. More than 52 feet of dark, claustrophobic, passageway, eight feet high, filled with the infernal racket of whizzing shells, the rat-a-tat of machine guns, the roar of planes. A British Mark V tank looms menacingly, a Sopwith Camel biplane ‘flies’ overhead. 

The museum, in Lambeth, South London, opened this summer after a £40 million ($64 million) refit to coincide with the centenary of the war. 

To read more go to Wall Street Journal

Why is that Croatia, a nation of four million people can reach the World Cup Final? How does New Zealand always win the rugby with when the country has barely enough people to make up a team?

Incongruous questions to be considering in the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, surrounded by the works of centuries, carvings, statues and paintings, while standing before screens of stained glass which shimmer and glow in the light of the gallery’s vaulting space.

“It’s about the way we value skills,” says Director of Visual Arts Paul Greenhalgh. “It is very clear when you look at sport. For Croatia it is because it has a very, very, intense tradition to preserve and clearly it impacts positively on the culture and society in terms of national pride, shape and cohesion.

“But do we value the status of skill and the artist in the physical visual arts to the same extent? The hand to eye and physical coordination, is that genuinely something we should worry about losing?”

It is to Greenhalgh. For the exhibition “Brian Clarke: The Art of Light” (until 14 October 14) he has brought together 30 stained glass panels and screens and though Clarke is one of the world’s finest workers in the medium he is relatively little known and that, claims Greenhalgh, is down to a ‘ridiculous class structure’ in which ‘some arts are deemed high and some are not. Some are thinking, some not.’ 

The debate was polarised in the 19th century with the setting up of the Special Committee of the Government School of Design to define the arts. Some, it was decided, originated wholly in the mind - predominantly, painting, bronze and stone sculpture - while others came about through technical, mechanical ingenuity and were to do with skills.

“The arts were siloed out and separated in the 20th century because it was the age of specialism,” says Greenhalgh, who has just completed a book, “Ceramics, Art and Civilisation,” which makes a similar point about pottery: “When I worked at the Victoria and Albert (where he was the museum’s Head of Research) the struggle was to get what we had taken seriously as art to be dealt with intellectually not just as something for the Antiques Road Show.

“Stained glass was inevitably positioned as a craft, with all the confused cultural and economic consequences of that class allocation. ”

Unsurprisingly Clarke agrees: “You’d think since Duchamp and Modernism we would have grown out of that puerile absurdity in which painting is in pole position but we simply haven’t. It is absurd to attribute categories of significance in an entirely arbitrary way to different medium. 

“Stained glass has undoubtedly provided some of the greatest art in our civilisation from Pharaonic times, Mesopotamia, and Greece. It certainly exists in European Gothic architecture and the even in Modernism. Charles Rennie Mackintosh and many of the greatest artists have not just dallied but been intensely involved with stained glass. It helped them advance their radical views of the world - Mondrian, de Kooning, Max Ernst, Le Corbusier, Matisse - stained glass has been some of their greatest works.”

Like them painting is inextricably bound up with his work.

“I couldn’t make stained glass without the nourishment of painting,” says the 65-year-old. “The two work in very harmonic tandem. I can’t imagine how I would do anything without being able to draw. It’s fundamental. I can’t think without a pencil in my hand.”

His need to paint is matched by his passion for architecture.

“I believe that the medium has the potential of having the same kind of uplifting impact on the urban fabric as it had on architect in the 15th century,” he says. “The idea of bringing that kind of liquid, fluid, transparent colour into our daily experience. Once you’ve tasted it you really want another lick at that lolly.” 

He argues that painting, architecture, glass, all the arts, should be considered as a whole.

“When you’re an artist there is an undeniable pleasure seeing your work on a pristine gallery wall but the much greater rush for me is when that wall becomes the room, the room becomes a building. The  Germans call it gesamtkunstwerk, I wish there was an easier word for it, to describe art that embraces everything in the space, from paintings to ceramics, maybe even the sounds. To put it clumsily, the space is the work.”

His early enthusiasm for architecture has been enhanced by years working with the likes of the late Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster, who designed the Centre. Clarke has worked with the architect on major projects, such as the wall of glass, 81 metres wide by 24 metres high depicting desert scenes, for his Al Faisaliah skyscraper in Riyadh and the apex of the Pyramid of Peace in Kazakhstan. He has brought art and architecture together in shopping malls and airports, churches, mosques and synagogues. 

Born in Oldham, Lancashire, in 1953 his interest was piqued when he saw a stained glass window being installed in a local church and further inspired by a visit to York Minster with its monumental array of Mediaeval stained glass. He studied at Oldham School of Arts and Crafts and now, 50 or so years on, finds improved technology has made the medium flexible enough for him to express any idea that interests him.

“It’s a real vehicle for real ideas and real artists,” says Clarke, who will be taking the Sainsbury show to Russia, China and the Far East. “It’s not a medium that is simply applied in one specific way to one specific type of building or one specific project.”

The result is a range of styles and improbable themes which challenge the preconceptions of anyone who supposed modern glass work to be anything other than a pretty decoration. 

In the “Seville” series, sun drenched oranges are so luscious against a deep blue that you could eat them - perhaps only to be expected since he has a home in the city. The tumbling shapes of “Flowers for Zaha”, “Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out” with oak leaves in yellows and oranges, tipping into reds glow with their intensity. 

To say the Deco-esque “Falling Water” with its clusters of flower heads and long elegant stems is pretty is not do the work a disservice, while “Daffodils” would have William Wordsworth reaching for his lexicon.

But while he talks about some of his work as ‘abstracted Arcadian landscapes in celebration of an as yet undefined optimism’ he also tackles subjects which might seem too banal to consider.  

“Wall Street” is based on the Bloomberg stock market lists that flicker all day on television and made quite simply because he ‘liked the way it looked,’ while “Blue Computergram” with its red, pink and yellow squares and stars evokes some mysterious digital calculation.

Nor does he flinch from taking us into dark, desperate places with the Warhol-esqe atom bomb clouds in “Manhattan,” the skulls in “Chill Out,” lined up as if on the shelves of a catacomb and the Munchian screaming figures in ‘Grief.”  

In the “Office for the Dead” series he turns the art on its head by not always using glass. Instead skulls are are picked out in scribbles of molten lead in a sort of macabre graffiti on sheets of forbidding matt black lead. When he does introduce a splash of glass it serves to accentuate the darkness. 

“Don’t Forget the Lamb,” a moving tribute to his ailing mother includes the work which gives the series its title - an uncompromising expanse of lead, with a skeleton, an uneven patch of colour depicting fleur de lys and a note from his mother, like a post-it on a fridge door: “Don’t forget the lamb.”

Such diversity makes him hard to categorise, which is exactly what he and the gallery intended. 

Just as the Sainsbury Centre opened in 1978 with ‘none of the nonsense’ as Greenhalgh puts it of dividing up painting and sculpture from artefacts from Africa or the east, the screens are mixed in with the collection. Lit up by the sun shining through the window which is the width and height of the entire building, the colours dance off a striding Giacometti or a sculpture of the Papuan hornbill and mingle with pieces from Mesopotamia, sculptures by Henry Moore and a Cycladic vase from 2,700 BC. 

Nonetheless, as Greenhalgh laments: “It is odd in our times - and a little sad - that this exhibition is an unusual thing for a public art gallery to do. These are works that simultaneously well out of a grand tradition and stridently move into the contemporary world. They stretch our understanding of what it is art can do. Like Croatia they prove the importance of valuing skills. ”

And even though they are his own works, Clarke still finds the purity of light and colour so intense that he finds himself having to pull back from them ‘because I feel they are going to swallow me up.’

He says: “I swing between expressions of how joyful it is to be alive and the shit, the horror, the suffering of the brief summer of the dormouse that we call our lives. 

“But I have discovered that if I grub away, if I push the oils away, peel the layers back, I find an absolutely new kind of beauty which I have not seen before and that makes me feel - he pauses, hoots with laughter - very horny.” 

Colombian artist Jorge Julián Aristizábal was 16 when a group of artists and architects converted a small house in his home city of Medellín into a museum of modern art. That was 1978, and Mr. Julián, who is now 52, says “I grew up with the museum. Like many other artists of my generation, it accompanied me throughout my entire career. It held very important shows to promote young artists, and without the museum it would have taken me much longer to be where I am right now.”

In 2009, the Museo de Arte Moderno moved to much larger quarters in a former steel mill, built in 1938, and a dramatically contemporary $12 million extension will open next year. In addition, there are plans for a culture center to house the city orchestra and ballet company. 

“We are an expression of the transformation of the city,” says María Mercedes González, 36, who has been museum director since 2012, “This could not have been achieved before, when the city was in such difficulties.” 

To find out more, go to Wall Street Journal