Live in Art

Outside the window of Tate Liverpool the wind is whipping up a storm. The Mersey is a steely, inhospitable grey, and the clouds are louring. Indoors, the veteran English pop artist Peter Blake , creator of the cover art for the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album, who is having his first major painting retrospective in a quarter of a century, seems to be alive in quite a different sort of climate. On a wall panel, he explains what has inspired his latest series of paintings in homage to Marcel Duchamp , that Frenchman who almost 100 years ago displayed a pristine white urinal inside a museum and declared it art. “I decided to send him on a posthumous world tour, rather like the Flying Dutchman,” Blake burbles merrily, “where he would travel the world forever in a big rock‘n’ roll tour bus. He meets people along the way, and people come and go on the bus, and he goes to various happenings.

In 17th-century Holland, artists such as Rembrandt moved away from painting the nobility and focused on the new middle class, as a fascinating show at the National Gallery reveals. The National Gallery is playing host to a gathering of distinguished Dutch burghers. It doesn’t look, on the face of it, like a bundle of laughs. Dutch Portraits is dominated by dreary-looking worthies dressed in black costumes, their pale, solemn features framed by white ruffs. But nothing, this exhibition suggests, is ever simply black and white.