I too have tried to make sense

Today I've spent my day off at the From Russia exhibition at the Royal Academy and at the Ken Kiff mini-retrospective at Marlborough Fine Art.

From Russia has a strong spiritual strand within its overall theme of exploring ways in which the French avant-garde influenced early twentieth century Russian art. Interestingly, this strand is viewed purely as a Russian phenomenon despite the influence of the Nabi's and, in particular Maurice Denis, on the French art that was purchased by the two principal Russian collectors. This means that the role of Denis and other Nabi's in developing a modern French sacred art is once again overlooked and the opportunity to explore links between L'art Sacre and Russian spirituality is missed. That said, From Russia is a marvellous exhibition with masterpieces from many of the key Modern movements from Impressionism to Suprematicism.

While at the RA I picked up a monograph on the late Norman Adams, produced for his posthumous retrospective at 108 Fine Art last year. Here is Nicholas Usherwood on Adams' achievement: "“I grew up beginning to associate art and religion and political thinking as one great big thing that had to be dealt with as a whole” he once wrote and it is this natural and intuitive linking of political and moral concerns with the sacred which has always given such a sharp edge of contemporaneity to the eternal human values to be found in all of his work. “Probably the greatest mystery of all is Man” he once observed of himself, “and I think that my art is about him, even if it doesn’t depict him, or seem figurative…”, words that bring together in sharp focus all the apparently diverse strands of landscape and still-life, pagan and Christian themes, transcriptions of the Old Masters and re-workings of van Gogh that make up his apparently broad-ranging subject matter." Adams believed that: “The artist should be able to hold his head up in the presence of great priests and be able to say ‘I too have tried to make sense, to be helpful, to be necessary.’”

Finally, this quote from Norbert Lynton really sums up why I like Ken Kiff's work so much: "He was an extraordinary and lyrical colourist, a fine draughtsman and an inventive printmaker. The way he saw the world, its characters and situations, has much in common with the structures of myth and fairy tale. Through symbolic narrative he explored man’s condition, in imagery of great sympathy and subtlety." That, and he hails from Dagenham.

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Arvo Pärt - Spiegel im Spiegel.