DISASTER OF THE DECADE

round the world, curators are rewriting the narrative of modern and contemporary art, by turning attention away from the pale, male and stale usual suspects, mostly from Europe and North America, on to lesser-known (from a Western perspective) talents from Asia, Africa, South America and the Middle East. Museums are under pressure to atone for the West’s colonial past by returning artefacts taken forcibly from faraway countries.

Art and its custodians are now fastidiously “woke” – as attested by this year’s Turner Prize being given to all four nominees. Whether mainstream audiences will accept this shift remains to be seen. You’d think that the alpha males of modern art would be out of kilter with our sensitive times. Not so. The National Gallery’s stunning Gauguin Portraits, which, millennials might argue, glorifies a predatory sex tourist in the South Seas, is going great guns. Last year’s Tate Modern show documenting a single year (his “annus mirabilis” of 1932) in the life of Picasso – who joked that women, to him, were goddesses or doormats – became the second most-visited exhibition in Tate’s history. Its most popular show, seen by more than 562,000 people, is still 2014’s flawless exhibition of Matisse’s late paper cut-outs. It’s my show of the decade.

In fact, there isn’t a single woman in Tate’s top 10 blockbusters of all time (Georgia O’Keeffe, at Tate Modern in 2016, is number 12). Yet, since 2010, there have been only two outright male winners of the Turner Prize, while dealers and museum directors have fallen over each other to pluck older female artists from the obscurity of patriarchal neglect: any roll call of contemporary British artists would surely now include Phyllida Barlow, 75, who represented her country at the

2017 Venice Biennale, Lubaina Himid, 65, who won that year’s Turner Prize, and Rose Wylie, whose anarchic style, and paintspattered

TREASURES FROM THE WRECK OF THE UNBELIEVABLE (2017)

Damien Hirst’s Venetian extravaganza, featuring monstrous sculptures fashioned from costly materials, was profligate and banal. This was his Waterworld: a wasteful, monumental flop.