Portraits of Artists – a ‘riveting’ exhibition

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“Artists owe their inspirations to more than just their great, individual genius,” said David McAllister in Prospect. They depend heavily on “those who get it” – “friends, family or romantic partners”, who more likely than not “will often also be artists”. Unsurprisingly, these collaborators frequently end up painting each other. This new exhibition at Pallant House in Chichester takes this “simple conceit” and runs with it, bringing together more than 150 portraits of British artists as depicted by other British artists across 125 years – from Augustus John and Francis Bacon to Tracey Emin and the YBAs. Featuring works by household names and lesser-known figures, it contains “wonderful” and “surprising” moments aplenty, resulting in a show that gives “a fascinating glimpse of what feels like the whole living world behind British art” across the past century.

“Seeing Each Other” “darts and dives between artistic movements and the booze-fuelled social coteries and amorous liaisons that sustained them”, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. We see Barbara Hepworth, for example, depicting her first husband John Skeaping in a “muscular chalk and charcoal drawing”, only to be portrayed herself first in a “delightful” painting by Cedric Morris, then by her second husband Ben Nicholson in a semi-abstract linocut of 1933. There’s some great stuff here, said Evgenia Siokos in The Daily Telegraph. One intimate moment comes with Celia Paul’s portrait of Lucian Freud sleeping, itself juxtaposed with Freud’s own likeness of Paul. Yet the sheer number of works by middling mid-century artists soon makes the show feel incoherent: it’s difficult to digest the connections between the artists and their sitters. Indeed, “the cacophonous hodgepodge of works on the walls” made me feel “as though I had been abandoned at a party full of strangers, only I didn’t have a drink, and everyone at the party was inanimate”.

Well, I thought it was a “riveting” exhibition, said Laura Cumming in The Observer – “beautifully choreographed”, with many fascinating instances of painterly reciprocity. We see Roger Fry’s portrait of the painter Nina Hamnett, then a likeness she painted of Walter Sickert, and then Sickert’s own painting of her. We get a real sense of how artists were “connected through each other’s eyes and works” – in Eric Ravilious’s “startling” but rather comic depiction of his friend Edward Bawden working, and in Freud’s “breathtakingly acute” portrait of doomed fellow painter John Minton, his eyes downcast and “mouth half-open”. Johnnie Shand Kydd’s photographs of the YBAs show them “drinking, dancing, snogging” and “laughing their heads off”, while Ishbel Myerscough’s double portrait of herself and Chantal Joffe painting each other’s faces provides a wonderful denouement. This is “an enthralling show, vivid with life stories as well as their expression in art”.

Pallant House, Chichester, West Sussex (01243 774557, pallant.org.uk). Until 2 November