My art week

Monday evening on BBC 4 is excellent for the arts.

Waldemar Janusczak concluded his series on The Impressionists with Georges Seurat, an enigmatic artist specialising in dot painting, who died only 32.

Claude Monet in his final years painted the lilies in his pond at Giverny which are to be found in the Orangerie Museum in central Paris.

Janusczak made the point that at the end of a long life Monet was still the revolutionary.

After this came a programme on Britain’s Lost Masterpieces in which the erudite and courteous Dr Bendor Grosbenor located a Joshua Reynolds portrait of society beauty Mrs Linley in a Glasgow museum.

His co presenter Emma Dabiri calls herself a social historian.

Over-dressed, she tends to simper and does not add that much.

In our Tuesday art course we looked at first Stanley Spencer then the Young British Artists (YBAs).

Spencer is typical of so many British artists as he is individualistic and not part of any movement.

In particular he painted his beloved Cookham.

Though not a war painter, he did create the Sandham War Chapel near Newbury.

Some of his nudes, especially of his second wife Patricia Preece, who even after marrying Spencer never left her female lover, are redolent of Lucian Freud.

With the TBAs – notably Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin – we moved onto colourful characters who promoted their conceptual art.

Neither the media nor public seem to know how to deal with a new group or “ism”, other than by mockery.

Our teacher showed us a cartoon of an unmade bed with the strap-line of a mother saying to her daughter:

”I don’t care if it’s art. Make it.”

On Thursday we covered Dadaism, a loose anti-war movement which began in 1917 in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.

The first half of the lesson was taken up with Marcel Duchamp, a fascinating character.

He outraged the art world by presenting a urinal as art at the Armoury Exhibition in New York in 1913.

He assumed a different female identity as Rrose (sic) Selavy and painted the Mona Lisa with a moustache.

A notable chess player he abandoned art to play at grandmaster level.

He forced us to examine what actually is art as, according to him, a copy is as valuable as an original.

After him we looked at Otto Dix and George Grosz, who bravely ridiculed Hitler in cartoon style.

Pulling all this together, I reject the theory that “all art is political” but rather a visual experience – whether a urinal, Traey Emin’s bed, Patricia Preece’s large, pendulous breasts, or Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of Mrs Linley.

Furthermore, critical rejection seems to accompany every new “ism”, be they the Impressionists or YBAs.