With hundreds of exhibitions and eventsvying for attention in London during Friezeweek, Apollo’s editors pick out the showsthey don’t want to miss >
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The blue mood continues in Holland Park.Walter Sickert once said that love and deathwere ‘the only two subjects of all great art’;Piano Nobile is politely correcting him bypointing out that ennui is just as present inhis work. This selling exhibition (until 19December) draws on the collection ofHerbert and Ann Lucas, who avidly collected paintings, drawings and prints by Sickert.Their collection of prints, which includesetchings, engravings and lithographs fromacross Sickert’s career, is remarkable, but the centrepiece of the exhibition is the artist’s oilpainting Ennui (1913). Five versions of thework exist, owned by institutions includingthe Tate, the Ashmolean and the RoyalCollection Trust (it’s one of King Charles III’smost cherished works); it depicts a publicansitting, smoking and staring into thedistance while his wife leans on a chest ofdrawers, her head out of view. It captures‘the accumulated weariness of innumerabledays’, to quote another of the painting’sillustrious admirers, Virginia Woolf.
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