With hundreds of exhibitions and events vying for attention in London during Frieze week, Apollo’s editors pick out the shows they don’t want to miss >
...
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 by pointing out that ennui is just as present in his work. This selling exhibition (until 19December) draws on the collection of Herbert and Ann Lucas, who avidly collected paintings, drawings and prints by Sickert. Their collection of prints, which includes etchings, engravings and lithographs from across Sickert’s career, is remarkable, but the centrepiece of the exhibition is the artist’s oil painting Ennui (1913). Five versions of the work exist, owned by institutions including the Tate, the Ashmolean and the Royal Collection Trust (it’s one of King Charles III’s most cherished works); it depicts a publican sitting, smoking and staring into the distance while his wife leans on a chest of drawers, her head out of view. It captures ‘the accumulated weariness of innumerable days’, to quote another of the painting’s illustrious admirers, Virginia Woolf.
...
