1. GILLIAN AYRES | Ding Dong Merrily on High (1989)
2. TITIAN | The Assumption of the Virgin (1515-1518)
I chose Titian because this was also Gillian Ayres's favourite painting. It's one of my favourite paintings too. I was a little torn as to which of his work to choose as I'm also a huge fan of the late Titians hanging in the National Gallery. And like Gillian Ayres, Titian in his last years is painting with his hands - slapping paint on and using his fingers to create shapes - it's marvellous. But this piece, the Assumption of the Virgin is the high altar of Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice, where I try to go almost every year with one of my daughters, and every time I go to Venice, I go to see this picture again. Like Gillian's, it is absolutely enormous. If you haven't seen it in the flesh, you kind of sit or crouch below it, and it spreads up above you.
It's the largest painting on wooden panel in the world, apparently - 22 feet high. It's just extraordinary. It's got that characteristic Titian twist - he's very famous for his twisting figures and that very rich, glorious Titian colour. And the way the painting is divided into two or three parts, depending on how you look at it - it's not quite a third and two-thirds, but quite nearly. All those painting tricks that became famous across the Renaissance are in this picture.
And you can see how this prefigures the Baroque later on. Rubens was hugely influenced by this. It's a Renaissance work that carries forward. For me, a lot of the Baroque and Mannerist painting that learned from this kind of work becomes quite stilted and a little soft around the edges. Titian still has that energy and muscularity of the High Renaissance powering through. If you haven't been to the Frari, it's very much worth it.
3. PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA | The Baptism of Christ (c. 1448-1450)
I'm very lucky to be a trustee of the National Gallery, and this is one of our most beautiful and iconic pictures. There are so many Pieros I could choose - the Resurrection would have been another obvious one. But there is something about the pure light and the calm and the balance. Piero was a great mathematician and became obsessed by mathematical shapes and values. There is something about Christ's absolutely dogged, determined - but worried - expression that I love very much. Another detail I personally love about this picture is that there is the man taking his shirt off. I've had a stroke, and I find taking shirts and jerseys off and on quite difficult. I absolutely relate to this man. He's just about to take his shirt off. And it shows that even in the greatest, most balanced, mathematically pure moments of the Renaissance, there is still a lot of humanity - people getting their clothes on and off, people getting wet, people with dirty feet. I just love it. If you walk into the National Gallery and into this room, it's one of those pictures you can't look away from. And you can't quite work out why. The geometry and the maths might seem very abstract, but it really pulls you in. There is that wonderful central axis. The walnut tree to the left actually describes the golden section, so there are all sorts of wonderful geometric moments in here. It reminds me that proper geometry, well done, has a beautifully calming element to it.
There are so many of Hockney's works I could have chosen for this - any one of 100 Hockney pictures, probably. The great thing about David is that, again, people think he's quite a safe painter - he paints pretty flowers, Yorkshire Wolds paintings, gorgeous pencil portraits of his friends when he was younger. But he's a very ambitious painter.One of the aspects of his ambition is that all his life he was pushing forward, trying to find new ways to represent the world around him, new ways to make pictures.
At the stage of making this work in America, he was driving around a lot in his car - famously playing Wagner at full volume in his open-top car, taking his friends around - and he started to think: I don't need to just draw a landscape from one point of view, sitting in one place, as if there is no time. I want to draw time. I want to draw movement. This picture depicts his commute to his studio each day from Hollywood to Santa Monica. And it's the experience of a journey rather than a topographical landscape, as it were. But it is a return to landscape for him. It marks a watershed again.
David always inveighed against abstractionism and particularly hated conceptual art, but I think this picture shows there is no such thing as a purely representational or purely abstract artist. The way he's balancing the different blues and purples and yellows and colours -It's almost Fauvist.
5. LEONARDO DA VINCI | The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint
John the Baptist (The Burlington House Cartoon), (c. 1499-1508)
And here we are returning to the National Gallery - in my view, this is the single most beautiful object inside the National Gallery. And it is a drawing; a cartoon. I admit, I find - you may hate me for this - quite a lot of Leonardo's works somewhat overfamiliar. There's something about the weight of expectation that comes with them having seen them in reproduction so many times. But this one - if you got up close to it, you can see Da Vinci's fingers: his hand in its creation.
Going back to what David Hockney said: the eye, the heart, and the hand - you need all three. You can see all three here. This is a delicious piece. It has so much humanity to it. And there is also something completely unearthly about it. If you look at the Virgin on the left and Saint Anne beside her, Saint Anne looks like she comes from another planet. It's not even clear who's sitting on whose knee. There is something very strange about this picture. Leonardo is a very weird and very strange artist - constantly putting himself through nights in dissection rooms where rotting bodies are being pulled apart to understand the human body. Constantly reading and looking at the latest treatises on perspective coming from the Arabs over in Spain.
Again, a bit like Hockney - a mind that never stopped asking questions, never had enough information. Constantly questioning.
For me drawing is everything, I draw every day. This reminds me of David Hockney's early drawings - those very famous drawings of his friends done in coloured pencil - are potentially the best drawings done since Ingres, or possibly even Rubens, who is also a beautiful draughtsman. But this work by Da Vinci, for me, is probably the best drawing that's ever been done. Simple as that.
6. HENRI MATISSE | The Piano Lesson (1916)
I don't think there is any serious modern painter who doesn't want to be Matisse. I think Matisse has a greater influence on art after him than anybody else, Picasso included. Though interestingly, the only painter I've ever come across who tried seriously to make art like Picasso was David Hockney.
This painting is in New York at the moment. For me, all the great artists are fundamentally mysterious. I can't sit here and explain why this is a great picture - there are aspects of it that I struggle with, and I think proper art historians struggle with too. Clearly this is Matisse's son, Pierre learning the piano. There is a kind of slightly forbidding piano teacher sitting on her stool at the top with a white face. And clearly, you can see their expressions are both unimpressed. As well as the little boy we see the balcony, the window with the wrought iron, and beyond it, the tough grey morning outside. My father used to make me sit and do mental arithmetic with a ghastly little red book. I'd sit there for hours and hours, aware that the glorious world was just outside the window. It's all there waiting for the boy. So it's a psychological picture. It's a picture about time passing, about boredom. But fundamentally it's a quasi-abstract picture about colour values - the pink, the green.
We've already talked a bit about maths, and balanced composition, and harmony, and calm. And we've talked about the abstract importance of colour values fighting against each other. It's absolutely all here in one picture. For me, in the end, I have to say Matisse is a greater painter than Picasso, because there's so much anger in Picasso - particularly around women and politics. He's an angry, angry artist. Matisse is in many ways a more devastatingly insightful painter. I always remember the story of their huge feud - Picasso's followers were literally going around Paris chalking obscene graffiti about Matisse all over the city, because Picasso was so challenged by him. When Matisse went down to the south of France to Collioure to work on his Fauvist experiments, Picasso couldn't stand it and set up nearby in the hills to try and work out what Matisse was up to. Such incredible rivalry. And then when Picasso fell very ill in the early 1920s - everyone thought he was about to die - Matisse sent him the most beautiful still life of oranges, knowing that Picasso loved them. Picasso was very moved by this and survived. Much later, when Matisse was mortally ill, one of Picasso's companions at the time said, "You have no idea what you did for the master by bringing him that picture. It still sits above his bed. He watches it every day. It makes him so optimistic." And Matisse looked at her and said, "When I was painting that picture, I was about to kill myself." That a painting comes from a joyous moment. Sometimes you're trying to create joy because you're not feeling it. There's a surprisingly large amount of grey in this picture, though I remember it with more colour because the colour is so well done, isn't it? It's a beautiful example.
Now this work is in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. This painting is here to remind ourselves to look further afield than just familiar art. This brings me back to David Hockney, who was always looking outside the traditional Western art traditions for new ways of thinking and seeing - he was fascinated by the attitude to time passing which you find in Chinese and Japanese art, and by the lack of shadows in Chinese art, which he thought was a different way of thinking about the world. In a similar way, there is a great Russian tradition of art which is analogous to ours but not quite like ours. They have their romantic period, their impressionism, their symbolism and cubism, but it's not quite like ours. And of course they have their great figures like Malevich. I was walking through the Tretyakov thinking about this, and I turned a corner and came across this picture. I think it is probably the best self-portrait by a young woman I've ever come across. Serebriakova had a very hard time during the revolution - she painted the obligatory peasant paintings during that period and she eventually escaped to Paris and became a more conventional portrait painter there in the twenties, thirties, and forties. She was allowed to return to Moscow in the 1950s to meet her daughter, whom she hadn't seen since the daughter was a child, and who had by then become a scene painter for theatres in Moscow. There is something so lively and fresh and optimistic about this picture.
I wouldn't say it's one of the world's great paintings. I'd just say there are so many things in Polish, German, Russian, Persian art galleries that we haven't yet seen which are so impressive and exciting. There is an intimacy to this image that you very rarely see. We the viewer are the mirror that she's looking into as she gets ready.
This collection is also a kind of homage to female art, because one of the exciting things about the time we're living in is how many of the great artists coming up are women. Women are now probably dominant in modern British painting, frankly - for the first time ever.
And here is another great portrait. Anyone who loves painting loves Manet. Famously the Impressionists said there was no such thing as black, that you simply
couldn't use it in painting. Well, Manet uses black like nobody else.
It's a portrait of Berthe Morisot who was a great, great painter in her own right. And what Manet does here, as David Hockney also does in some of his best work, is radical simplification. What you've got is a really simple composition, with the light and the dark. It's almost drawing in paint - a very simple composition. You can see the flick of the wrist in the marks, and yet he's absolutely caught the character in those simple gestures. Manet, by the way, is the best painter of water in a glass jug. His late flower paintings are something that Hockney talked about a lot and Hockney learned from Manet and did some fantastic flower paintings in the same mode. And not coincidentally, Manet is the greatest painter of beer in the history of art!
I just love the directness of the gaze in this work. It's a beautiful, spare composition. And being able to handle blacks is something really special.
I'm a Scot, so there had to be a Scottish painting. This is a painting of Loch Lomond - Balloch, with houseboats in a very beautiful light. George Leslie Hunter was one of the four Scottish Colourists, and possibly the least well known of them. He was also the cousin of my great-grandfather, so he is my closest family connection to art.
In an earlier phase of Matisse's painting, you find a lot of dry colour - scratchy, dry colour that Matisse uses like nobody else had done before. Oil paint almost left to dry out and then applied to the canvas, giving a very distinctive kind of mark-making.
Leslie Hunter was one of the only painters I know who picked up that style, though you have to get up close to the picture to really see it. Like the rest of the Scottish
Colourists, he spent a lot of his life in the south of France. And sadly, like a lot of people in those days, he drank very heavily.
In fact, I have a truly shameful story to tell you tonight: Without question, Leslie Hunter was a great painter - he made a huge numbers of portraits, and a huge numbers of landscapes. My family had scores, if not hundreds, of his pictures in our family house in Glasgow. My great-great-grandfather was the last Unionist Lord Provost of Glasgow - a fearsome man with a big moustache and very strong teetotal views. Leslie Hunter was a drunk and this was a big problem for my great- great-grandfather. Something happened; we don't know what exactly, but we do understand that he disgraced himself and the family in some way in Glasgow in the 1920s. And in fury the old man took all his pictures and burned them in the garden.
Oh it's a terrible and shameful story - think of all those lost works. If you don't know them, look up the Scottish Colourists, because they are a fantastic group of painters. Scotland has had a very interesting painting tradition of its own, very heavily influenced by Italians actually.
It is important for me to have something by a Scot in this collection: It reminds me of where I come from. I was really lucky in that my parents loved painting and they had friends who were painters, including Alberto Morrocco and Mackintosh Patrick, a very famous Scottish painter. I would come across them in the village I came from - just outside Dundee - sitting in the backs of their cars at the easel, or painting under an umbrella. So I grew up not thinking that painting was a strange thing to do. Painting was something that people around us did and when they could afford it, my parents would buy pictures from local painters and hang them at home. My mum, when I was probably only seven or eight, would take me off to little local exhibitions, including of the Scottish Colourists, and every year we'd go together to the Royal Scottish Academy. This felt very important to me.
I've been drawing and painting for as long as I can remember. I can even remember being spanked when I was young because we had a very modernistic house with big white walls, and there was never enough white paper to draw on. So I would move the furniture away from the walls and draw all over them. And then from time to time, the furniture would be moved again and they'd see what I'd done.
Anyone who loves abstract art, if that's what we call it, loves Kandinsky. This composition was painted around two years after he was working in a very recognisable representational tradition - admittedly with extremely bright colours and big blocks of colour, painting Russian villages, folktales, and horses galloping through the night. This work marks the exciting point when he suddenly pushed his work to a level where he's leaving behind representation. This is one of his most famous paintings - I think this is in Moscow - it was made in 1913, when everything was changing around the world. In my opinion, with his later work Kandinsky becomes a little too hard-edged and mathematical for my particular taste.
But in this period, I just think he's extraordinary. It's symphonic. And it's a stunning work - oneof the keystone moments in the development of abstraction. Colour again is hugely important for Kandinsky. There's a series of Kandinskys in Zurich which are simply extraordinary - they just hit you in the eye even from 200 yards away as you walk towards them. Of all the big Ks - Klee, Kokoschka and Kandinsky - the latter is my top K.
Final thoughts:
What I want to say, right at the end, is something about this moment. We are all surrounded by little glass screens on mobile phones, computers, and tablets, and that's where we see most of the images presented to us day in, day out. A vast number of them are now created by AI - what is often, and I think rightly, called AI slop. The kind of images generated by Grok and similar machines are all winsome ladies in medieval frocks holding apples - absolutely pathetic, ghastly, and I think a kind of visual pornography that eats away at what it is to be human. We live in a time when those of us who make art by hand, using traditional materials, using pigments ground from the earth and from natural sources - from cow's urine to plants - have a special responsibility to keep alive the traditions of handmade, genuinely human art by humans, for humans. That's the strain that runs through everything I've chosen, and that is why I'm here. That is why I hope you're here as well.
And in true 'Desert Island Pics' style, if you had to choose one of these works to take home, which one would it be?
What an awful decision to make!
Well, I have to be realistic. I couldn't have the Titian - my house isn't big enough. And all those nice people going to the Frari to see it would be so disappointed.
I would actually take the Gillian Ayres at the top.
There is not a painter I need to spend more time with than Gillian Ayres.
