A major exhibition of new and recent works by Peter Doig – including paintings created since the artist’s move from Trinidad to London in 2021 – is now open at The Courtauld Gallery. Doig’s unfinished paintings, including some for the Courtauld, follow him around the world. “Some I started in New York, others in Trinidad. Often I’d do them in distemper paint, then roll them up and post them to myself, making sure they are fumigated so termites don’t eat through the canvas stretchers. I don’t like finishing things really. I like to have things on the go. Actually, I like paintings where you can question whether they’re finished.” Many of the Cézannes at Tate Modern’s current retrospective are like that, he says. “Some look like they were taken off the easel by someone else.” I walked around Lucie Rie: The Adventure of Pottery at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge twice. The first time I was concentrating hard, making notes, absorbing dates, places and styles. The second time, I raced around, as if I was in a shop: Heal’s some time after the second world war, say, or David Mellor in its earliest incarnation. Which things would I buy if I could? So many! A pair of stoneware teapots with bamboo handles from the 1950s. A collection of prototype cups, saucers and mugs for Wedgwood, made of its famous blue and white jasperware in 1963 but never produced. A footed bowl from 1971 of porcelain with a uranium acid yellow glaze. A tall “bottle” – a vase by any other name – from 1986 with a manganese glaze, horizontal stripes and wide lip that could somehow only be Rie’s work. All these things I would wrap in tissue, before rushing for the door, my booty over my shoulder. Recognition took its time, but finally arrived in 1967 when the Arts Council staged a retrospective of her work. Rie’s pots, for those interested in technical things, were fired only once, the glazes applied while the clay was raw, and she used an electric kiln, liking its precision. “Is it a revelation?” asks Attenborough, as she removes a piece from this kiln, about the size of a bedside table. “Not a revelation, but a surprise,” she replies, holding a small miracle in her hands. Friends get free unlimited entry to The Courtauld Gallery and exhibitions including The Morgan Stanley Exhibition: Peter Doig, priority booking to selected events, advance notice of art history short courses, exclusive events, discounts and more. To become a Friend, please visit courtauld.ac.uk/friends

He has long admired the collection of The Courtauld Gallery and the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists who are at its heart have been a touchstone for Doig’s own painting and printmaking over the course of his career. Visitors will be able to consider Doig’s contemporary works in the light of paintings by earlier artists in The Courtauld’s collection that are important for him, such as those by Cézanne, Gauguin, Manet, Monet, Pissarro and Van Gogh.Hitch Hiker” also gave him the idea of using his Canadian experience in his work. “I suddenly had a subject that I hadn’t had before,” he said. Canada had always seemed familiar and mundane to him, but now, in London, it became exciting. During his time at Chelsea, and for the next few years, Doig painted what he called “homely” suburban houses, frozen ponds, ski areas, and open fields. The houses in these early paintings look uninhabited and desolate, and you see them through a screen of trees or underbrush, or blurred by falling snow. (He went on to paint architect-designed houses—including Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Briey-en-Forêt, France, half hidden behind a screen of trees.) He was painting spaces that you had to make an effort to look into. This is a ravishing exhibition – it arrives at Kettle’s Yard from Mima in Middlesbrough, and will go on to the Holburne Museum, Bath. Arranged chronologically, the show’s atmosphere of tranquillity – even of contemplation – is never spoiled by the curators telling us more than we need to know. The focus, always, is on the work, which is just as well because there is so much to see. The biggest survey of the potter for two decades, 25% of the more than 100 items in it come from private collections, something that makes it completely unmissable in my eyes. The Morgan Stanley Exhibition: Peter Doig presents an exciting new chapter in the career of one of the most celebrated and important painters working today. It is the first exhibition by a contemporary artist to take place at The Courtauld since it reopened in November 2021 following its acclaimed redevelopment. Sponsored by Morgan Stanley and supported by Kenneth C. Griffin and the Huo Family Foundation, with additional support from the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne, The Morgan Stanley Exhibition: Peter Doig is the first exhibition by a contemporary artist to take place at The Courtauld since it reopened in November 2021 following its acclaimed redevelopment. In 1994, Doig had solo shows at Victoria Miro and at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, in New York, which represented Elizabeth Peyton, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and other rising young innovators. “Peter saw unfashionability as an asset, as a weapon,” Brown recalled recently. “At the height of the Y.B.A.s, it was clear that he would outlast them.” He was short-listed for the Turner Prize in 1994 (the sculptor Antony Gormley won it that year), and a year later he was invited to be an artist-trustee of the Tate. The critical establishment, though, was not convinced. “[It’s] hard to see what all the fuss is about,” Artforum grumbled in 2000. “Doig is overstating his understatement.” When a Belgian collector said to him, “Tell me why I should buy your paintings,” Doig couldn’t think of an answer. Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre, 2000-02

Feinerman’s verdict, at the close of a seven-day trial, in 2016, was conclusive: Doig “absolutely did not paint the disputed work.” Matthew S. Dontzin, the lead lawyer on Doig’s defense team, is seeking sanctions against the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Bartlow Gallery, Ltd., and Fletcher for at least some of the million-plus dollars that Doig paid in legal fees. “I have rarely seen such a flagrant example of unethical conduct in the U.S. courts,” Dontzin wrote, in a post-trial statement. Asked last week to comment, Bartlow said that he denies any unethical conduct, adding, “If Doig did not paint it, it would not have taken millions of dollars to win their case.” Two Trees, 2017 Rie (1902-95) was born in Vienna and trained at the city’s school of arts and crafts; the earliest piece on display at Kettle’s Yard, an artfully shaped earthenware pot of 1926, suggests the influence of the secession movement, its swirling oranges and blues bringing Klimt irresistibly to mind. In 1938, however, she fled Austria (Rie was Jewish), settling in London, her base a mews near Marble Arch. This in itself was radical – under the influence of Bernard Leach, the grandfather of British studio pottery, most ceramicists worked in the countryside, albeit near main roads (the better, he advised, that buyers could access them), and thereafter Rie would always forge her own path. Leach didn’t like her pots when they first met – though they eventually became firm friends – and having at first tried to please him, she soon gave up. That questioning surfaces in Two Trees, one of his best recent paintings. It’s another Trinidadian picture, originally commissioned by the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum to sit alongside its works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, most notably Hunters in the Snow. Like that famous scene, Doig’s painting is dominated by bare-limbed trees, but it goes way beyond the Flemish master’s vision, having been inspired by a view from his window in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago. Three nocturnal figures stand before the sea, silhouetted by a setting moon like escapees from a Munch fjord. Since relocating to London, Doig has been developing paintings started in Trinidad, New York and elsewhere, which have been worked up alongside completely fresh paintings, including a new London subject. The works produced for the exhibition at The Courtauld convey this particularly creative experience of transition, as Doig explores a rich variety of places, people, memories and ways of painting. Published to accompany Doig’s major European traveling retrospective originating at Tate Britain, this extremely satisfying and lavishly illustrated book provides a comprehensive account of the artist’s practice over two decades of extraordinary achievement. It is the most thorough overview of his work to date. With an essay by art historian Richard Shiff, an introduction by Tate curator Judith Nesbitt and an illuminating conversation between Doig and his friend, the artist Chris Ofili, this is an enlightening survey of one of the most influential painters at work today.At the Courtauld Gallery, a small show of recent work by Peter Doig (b.1959), the Scottish-born artist now living in London again after years in Trinidad. Such an exhibition should be a tonic in these late winter days: here is so much colour. But be warned. His vast canvases are not sun lamps for the soul. The daughter of an architect, Mogadassi met Doig when she came to work for his New York dealer, Gavin Brown, in 2010; she is now an independent curator who also works for the Michael Werner Gallery, which has exclusively represented Doig worldwide since 2012. In addition to the end of his marriage, Doig has had to cope with the recent death of his father, to whom he was very close, and with a protracted lawsuit, in which he had to prove that he had not painted a work that was attributed to him. Although the ensuing trial kept him away from his studio for months at a time, the paintings he has done in the past two years are among the most powerful and disturbing of his career. “Now, with all that trauma behind him, he’s freed up,” Mogadassi said to me. “He’s at an age when he doesn’t have anything to lose.” Rain in the Port of Spain (White Oak), 2015 Peter Doig has been the subject of scores of exhibitions throughout his career, including a major traveling survey in 2008 at Tate Britain, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Richard Shiff is a renowned art historian and critic. Catherine Lampert is an independent curator and writer based in England. after newsletter promotion I don’t like finishing things. I like paintings that make you wonder if they’re finished