Danish master Christian Købke painted empty skies, intimate portraits and melancholy landscapes. Jonathan Jones gets lost in a world of infinite mystery

When the Danish painter Christen Købke set out to depict the sprawling architectural mass of Frederiksborg castle, a dark genius seemed to possess him. The castle was a national landmark, and in the Romantic age was being rediscovered by writers and artists as a relic of Denmark’s glorious history: here was a great relic of the Danish renaissance, now long past. Like the devil tempting him to fly, this genius urged him to go up, up – higher, higher – into one of the soaring towers of the castle, to look down on its black rooftop and over the still landscape beyond. Look, look, said the devil, look into that sky. How empty it is – how infinite!

Købke drew the scene from the loftiest heights of the building and then, back in the studio, painted from memory, painted it exactly. Like a brutally cropped photograph, his view from Frederiksborg’s high towers takes in a roof as abstract as a bar placed across the canvas, a red rectangle of a chimney, the spire of a tower and the woods over the silver water. Yet this fills only the lower third of the canvas. Above there is nothing but air, the immense space of an illuminated sky. It seems to be pressing down into nothingness.

Købke’s painting Roof Ridge of Frederiksborg Castle, with View of Lake, Town and Forest (c1834–5) is a disconcerting masterpiece of Scandinavian art. Its empty sky, its melancholy attention to the unvisited heights of a building, can be seen as a precursor of the chilled fjord scenes painted by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch half a century later.

Comparisons with Munch might not be the first thing to strike a visitor to this new exhibition at the National Gallery in London, Købke’s first outside Denmark. Initially, this feels like an introduction to Copenhagen’s own Jane Austen: a sensible, modest artist who patiently worked his little bit of ivory, portraying the people around him in calm, finely observed pictures of bourgeois life. Are the curators attempting to overturn the cliched view that Scandinavian art is, um, exciting? If you thought artists in the north were all about revelations of the sublime and encounters with the abyss – from the eerie Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich to the modern light art of Olafur Eliasson – then huh, what do you know? Here is a Danish artist of the Romantic age, regarded by Danes as the greatest of his time, and he is so sensible, looking at his work is like going to church.

But this is not the whole story, not by any means. Købke’s quietness is filled with strange imaginative wanderings. His eye seems drawn to the interstitial, the neglected, the silently waiting. Even if there was nothing Romantic about his art, the brevity of his biography would qualify him as one of this breed: the son of a prosperous Copenhagen baker, he was born in 1810, and dead by the time he was 37. A lot of his life was spent in the Citadel, a vast fortress built to defend Copenhagen’s harbour, and in his time used as a prison; his father was the prison baker. From his paintings, you would never guess its military origins, or that it housed prisoners locally known as “slaves”. Or would you?

A sky tinged with blood

Købke is drawn to the fortress’s gatehouses and drawbridges, which he paints with a hypnotic sense of time slowed to a snail’s pace. For instance, his 1837 picture The Northern Drawbridge of the Citadel in Copenhagen, concentrates on the red wooden structure that suspends the bridge over mirroring still water: ice-cold water, surely. People stop on that bridge and beside the moat, staring or talking quietly. Above and beyond, we see that empty sky again: it is tinged with salmon pink, as if blood were running from the bridge’s frame into the ether. At first glance so placid, this painting lures you into a frozen moment, so that you share the introspection of the people in it; you, too, are passing time by the bridge, gloomily. It reminds me of Munch’s paintings of young women gazing into Oslofjord, to the extent that I wonder if Munch saw this work. It resembles a Van Gogh painting of a similar drawbridge structure near Arles. Købke, like Van Gogh, appears attracted to the eccentricity of the framework, which becomes troubling and uneasy.

The difference between Købke and these later heroes of the northern vision is that he revelled in a precise academic style. At the time, Copenhagen’s Royal Academy of Arts was one of the most highly regarded schools in Europe when it came to drawing and painting in the classical tradition. And Købke was a good pupil. His paintings testify to his belief in the Greek style, in close study of the human figure – all the rules of academic art that European painters were to rebel against 50 years later. Købke’s painting of a male nude is in a tradition that goes back to Michelangelo and Raphael. His 1830 painting View of the Plaster Cast Collection at Charlottenborg shows a curator wiping dust off a pedestal beneath a cast of a Greek hero fighting a centaur from the Parthenon.

And yet, look again at this painting. The wan contemplative spirit of Scandinavian art once again creeps in, over the shelves, infusing the silver light. Why show a man dusting? It is a pessimistic detail, and reminds us of the existence of dust. The custodian is engaged in the daily battle to keep these fragments white and gleaming. Suddenly we are there, in this empty gallery, on a freezing morning, watching this man dust antiquities in the gelid, vodka light.

Back at the castle, Købke stands by the lake and watches evening redden the sky. The mass of red walls and spired towers is reflected in the water precisely. Dark shadows glare from the palace windows. Strands of cloud hang in the emptiness. Købke is a patient, careful artist, but what he records, so accurately, is a world whose routines seem poised on the edge of infinite mystery. He is a craftsman of the abyss.

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Those who campaign against public artworks, as in Wales recently, promote a mindless, cultureless vision of Britain

Public art may be hitting the buffers, after years in which it swept all before it. An installation devised for Cardigan in Wales, by an alliance of local people and artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer – as part of Channel 4’s Big Art project – has been shelved. The strength of local opposition was apparently so intense and unbending, that to go on would have been against the democratic ideals of the Big Art venture.

It’s interesting how art’s meaning is changed when it goes public, when it invades the space in which people might expect to be free from ideas, challenges, strangeness. Walking to the shops, do you want to be challenged? Do you want to see art? Well, why not? Part of me is a public-art sceptic. And yet, the moment art is banned or destroyed or, as in this case, aborted, I am on its side. The campaigners who prevented this sound piece from polluting their river look like philistines. They look unimaginative. And yes, I am saying this from the metropolis. But why are so many stories about the arts in Wales about the arts being prevented in Wales?

The most famous cultural episode in modern Wales remains the refusal to commission a building by Zaha Hadid. Wouldn’t it be better to be known for having her opera house than for not having it? Ah yes, how bitter they are in Bilbao that Gehry’s Guggenheim spoiled their waterfront.

The Big Art piece was hardly in that league, but it was a modest local answer to such famous projects. We might argue for years about the merits of particular works of architecture and art, but the truth is that people who campaign for years – years, mind you – to prevent an innocuous artwork from being placed in their river are clearly the enemies of creativity and imagination. It’s not a rock festival, just a sculpture.

Yes, public art is often dull and silly. Its vogue has been overdone. But the joke is always on its enemies when they end up speaking for a vision of a cultureless, mindless, joyless Britain and chant the slogan “no art here, thanks!”

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The artist says: Thanks for reading my contemporary art blog! If you are involved in the art and culture industry in any way, and would like to syndicate content from or to this blog, or if you simply enjoy art and would like to get in touch, please leave a comment.

After the initial vituperation hurled in the direction of Kate Mosse’s women-only Orange prize for fiction, it has now grown to be a highly anticipated part of the literary calendar. I wonder whether the Max Mara prize for women artists, now in its third edition, will attain a similar standing in the art world. Is it necessary? Since just three women – Rachel Whiteread, Gillian Wearing and Tomma Abts – have won the Turner prize since its inception in 1984, I’d give a ringing yes.

Chaired by Whitechapel Art Gallery director Iwona Blazwick, the third Max Mara prize was awarded to Frankfurt and London-based artist Andrea Büttner last night. Her prize is a six-month residency in Italy, with the resulting body of work to be shown at the Whitechapel next year. Blazwick said: “The calibre of work being produced by female artists working in the UK at the moment is incredible, but Andrea’s fascinating practice, which draws parallels between the rituals of religious belief and making art, won the judges over.” Previously, Büttner has spent time observing Carmelite nuns in London, giving them a camera so they could film themselves making crochet baskets and little religious figures.

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National Portrait Gallery to stage exhibition of works by Hungarian-born society portraitist whose style fell out of fashion

John Singer Sargent was reputed to have said: “Every time I paint a portrait, I lose a friend.” The same could not be said of Philip de László, his successor as the leading society portraitist in Britain from 1907 until his death 30 years later.

De László, born in Hungary, was flattering and prolific, painting 5,000 portraits during his British career and capturing the likenesses of royalty and the landed gentry. He was the last of a long line of portraitists in the grand style, a tradition stretching back to Van Dyck.

Over the past 50 years, however, his work has been written off as glib and facile. When he died in 1937, the role of the British aristocracy was soon to change forever after the second world war. In a transformed UK, his works fell out of fashion. Now, however, the National Portrait Gallery, in London, is to mount the first exhibition of De László’s work since his death.

One of the highlights will be a portrait of the Queen Mother, painted in 1925, when she was the Duchess of York, which the Hungarian Pesti Hírlap newspaper praised as “harmoniously expressing the winsomeness of the duchess’s personality”.

Another will be a portrait of US society beauty the Duchess of Portland. Her husband, who commissioned the painting, was thrilled with the results, writing: “It has a ray of heaven illuminating in her face the charming qualities of her soul.”

Paul Moorhouse, the 20th century curator at the gallery, said De László was ripe for reappraisal. “He is a much more sophisticated and complex painter than he has been given credit for. He was incredibly good at what he did. He was prolific, and that very facility has caused a certain amount of suspicion. In his day, he was celebrated for being able to capture a likeness in two hours, which has been taken as a mark of superficiality.”Moorhouse said De László’s “brilliance can now be seen for what it is. He was an excellent colourist, a wonderful craftsman and hugely accomplished”.

De László was born in 1869 and moved to England in 1907. He was interned during the last years of the first world war, despite a petition in his defence started by the writer Jerome K Jerome.

The De László works will be on displayat the National Portrait Gallery from Saturday until 5 September.

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Debt woes and a sprawlingly diverse programme haven’t stopped this year’s Dubai art fair from showing some exhilarating art – just don’t expect any nudity

Much more exciting than the recent completion of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa (renamed at the last minute as a shout out to Dubai’s creditors in Abu Dhabi) was the relatively uncelebrated opening of the first sections of Dubai’s metro system. The idea of the “public” has never been prominent in Dubai, but that may be starting to change. The city’s incredibly diverse ethnicities, used to encountering one another only in strictly hierarchical service situations, are now being squeezed together in rude proximity for the first time. The only nationality I did not see on the crowded train, as we glided along elevated tracks beside Sheikh Zayed Road were Emiratis.
 
I start with the metro because it’s an unsung triumph for a city that you’d be forgiven for thinking – if you read the Daily Mail – or indeed certain commentators in this venerable publication – that this hubristic Babel of a city is slipping into the Persian Gulf like something out of Roland Emmerich’s 2012. Thanks to bailouts from its big brother in Abu Dhabi, it isn’t. And, sorry to say, its confidence – or at least defiance – is starting to return as a result. Even its art fair (who buys art with this economy?) enjoyed a surprisingly successful fourth edition in the Disney-like luxury of the Madinat Jumeirah Hotel last weekend.
 
Art Dubai is not like western art fairs: it doesn’t have the quality that connoisseurs are accustomed to at Basel or London’s Frieze. No works featuring nudity or obvious political content are allowed (of which more later); there is an exclusive “women’s day” for the sheiks’ wives to roam around and add to their burgeoning collections; and it has more accompanying exhibitions, installations, talks, tours, prizes and passion than one person could possibly absorb. In short, it feels like Dubai is trying to prove something here. Perhaps that it does indeed possess the culture that it’s derided for lacking?
 
Out of 72 galleries, the art has come from 31 countries – mostly from what Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, Dubai’s leader, calls the Central World: the Middle East and Asia, of which Dubai still wants to be capital.
 
So someone like Javier Peres, the hip LA and Berlin gallerist who’s right at home at a fair such as Art Basel Miami Beach, felt like a fish out of water the first time he participated in Art Dubai. “I had to look up where the United Arab Emirates was on Google before coming here,” he said. “I admit my stupidity.” By the second day, though, he had already made more money than he did at the recent Armory Show in New York, mostly by selling a few Dan Colen paintings. As for the rest of the works on show, mostly from the Middle East, Peres said: “I don’t know how to look at it. If I respond to it instinctively, with my gut, fine. But I don’t understand it.”
 
That’s true of a lot of art in galleries such as ATHR from Jeddah or even the Middle East-dominated New York gallery Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller (which reported such rapid sales that “we haven’t even had time to invoice”). But, amid the newness of the fair, there are moments of familiarity. A squat toilet by Iranian artist Behdad Lahooti is an obvious homage to Duchamp’s urinal, except Lahooti has charged his with political meaning by covering it with conjugations of the verb “to be free” in Farsi. Tehran’s Aaran gallery sold the piece on the first day for $4,700 to French collectors.
 
Over at the Third Line gallery, Dubai’s local powerhouse, a diptych of black holograms by Babak Golkar create the illusion of a circuit around the Ka’aba; the piece is called From God to Malevich. At Sfeir-Semler gallery, which has branches in Hamburg and Beirut, Etel Adnan’s stunning, Andreas Gursky-style photographs of the Golan Heights are loaded with anger and cold-eyed beauty.
 
As a western visitor to the fair, then, it’s hard to put aside familiar frames of reference. But the lesson of Art Dubai might be that such regional groupings and divisions are increasingly irrelevant, anyway. artists everywhere share similar influences, and work in multiple locations. We all dip in the same pool.
 
This might also explain why Art Dubai has managed to survive the fact that several heavy-hitting galleries that attended last year, such as Haunch of Venison and New York’s L&M, chose not to return this time around: the collector base is sufficiently broad to absorb local difficulties. “We don’t fear the crisis,” says gallerist Ulrich Semler. “It’s not important for us, because we sell to England, the US, Turkey, Saudia Arabia, Lebanon. We don’t have any local collectors.” However, plenty of new faces graced the fair for the first time this year – sheiks, ultra-wealthy collectors from the Middle East and Ukraine, and the US mega-collectors Don and Mera Rubell.
 
Still, the variation in quality here is massive – excitingly so. Hunar, which was Dubai’s first fine art gallery, opening in 1998, displayed among lyrical paintings of horses and mysterious dishdasha’d figures a bronze bust of Sheikh Maktoum by British sculptor Carolyn Morton. It was commissioned, according to the gallerist, as a tribute. Only if appropriated by someone such as artist Jeff Koons – it seems like the kind of kitsch/sincere object he’d love – would it accrue the level of conceptual value expected at most art fairs. In the meantime, it’s a healthy challenge to have to swallow art that is made with no other purpose than pure glorification.
 
Another local gallery, Isabelle Van Den Eynde, showed a big, sloppy, jovial painting by the young Iranian Rokni Haerizadeh, of a chaotic picnic in the middle of a busy roundabout. I assumed – or wished – that this thrilling scene, reminiscent in spirit of Manet’s paintings/edouard-manet-music-in-the-tuileries-gardens”>Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862) or Jean Dubuffet’s The Busy Life (1953), was in Dubai. Here is the vibrant public life, the cross-contamination, that the city has been allergic to. But it actually depicts Tehran, not Dubai, on the 13th day of the Persian New Year, when everyone eats together outdoors.
 
The gallery was also showing work by Haerizadeh’s brother Ramin. Or at least it did, until Dubai’s state censors – the same guys who diligently black out nipples from issues of the Sun destined for British tourists – removed it from the fair. They also slapped a big white sticker over the hundreds of issues of the art fair’s daily newspaper that featured Ramin’s work.
 
I took a break from the fair to visit the Haerizadeh brothers in their 42nd-floor penthouse at Dubai Marina, overlooking the artificial archipelago that is the Palm Jumeirah. The duo arrived in Dubai last year, shortly after appearing in Charles Saatchi’s exhibition Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East. The provocative nature of that show earned them a visibility they’d never had before in Tehran – including threats that were convincing enough to make them leave immediately for Dubai.
 
“We came here as exiles,” Ramin says. “And now we have a problem with censorship here as well.” The work in question was a political collage in which the Shah’s wife, Farah Pahlavi, pays a benevolent visit to a classroom. Instead of school children, though, Ramin had inserted multiple images of himself, with his massive beard, wearing a chador and gleefully munching on pieces of paper with the empress’s image on it.
 
Several gallerists privately warned journalists against overestimating the importance of censorship in Dubai. But the significant tragedy of the Haerizadehs’ situation is that Dubai, which is potentially a beacon of relative freedom and opportunity for the Middle East and Asia, has become so unstable for them. If Rokni’s brilliant new series of paintings depicting the torture currently going on in Iran’s prisons were discovered in his studio, he’d have to go into exile again – this time to London. “We are thinking of becoming fugitives,” he half-jokes.
 
In March 2008, a year after Art Dubai began, the newly-formed Dubai Cultural and Arts Authority announced plans for some permanent cultural infrastructure for the emirate. Khor Dubai was to be a 22km tract of culture, boasting 14 theatres, 10 museums (including a Museum of Middle Eastern Modern Art), 11 galleries, nine libraries, seven “cultural icons”, seven arts and cultural institutes, and an opera house. All of this is now in deep freeze.
 
That’s part of the reason why Abdul Raheem Sharif turned his modest old house (they do exist in Dubai) into The Flying House, a spontaneous, overflowing mini-museum for local artists to display and preserve their art in the absence of a proper institution to do it for them. Local artist Hassan Sharifi’s works dominate: he obsessively accumulates Arte Povera-type junk and stores it on shelves and in glass cases. It will be a shame when this place, and the delightfully unpretentious Dubai Museum in the old town, which features historical dioramas and relics, are inevitably superseded by some starchitect mega-museum.
 
What Dubai is left with in the meantime is actually much better: a burgeoning grassroots cultural scene in the industrial Al Quoz district, which will soon be accessible from the fair by metro (admittedly with a couple of taxi transfers). Young galleries like the Third Line, Carbon 12, Traffic and Ayyam are all sticking out the crisis here. “Dubai has always been the little guy,” says Hetal Pawani, director of Jamjar, a gallery studio space and sometime yoga venue. Pawani is one of the city’s apparently limitless supply of ambitious, self-confident young women who are basically running the art scene here. “We’ve always been bottom up,” she says, “and then the policy would emerge later. There’s a clear distinction between Dubai and Sharjah, with its biennial and art museum, and Abu Dhabi, which has its big plans.” (These bring for a cultural island featuring franchises of the Guggenheim and the Louvre.) “In Dubai,” says Pawani, “we have to do things ourselves.”

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Study finds food portion sizes have soared 69% in paintings of Jesus’s last meal with his disciples

According to the gospels, as Jesus led the consumption of bread and wine at the start of the Last Supper, he beseeched his disciples: “Do this in remembrance of me”.

While that final dinner is indeed remembered, even almost 2,000 years later, it appears that aspects of the meal have been embellished by those charged with depicting the scene – specifically the amount of food the guests enjoyed.

A study of paintings of the Last Supper from the past 1,000 years has found the size of the portions set in front of the diners has increased dramatically over time.

Brian Wansink, the director of the food and brand laboratory at Cornell University, said the findings showed that the current tendency for people to eat bigger portions on bigger plates, leading to increased obesity, has gradually developed over the millennium.

Researchers from the New York-based university used computer technology to compare how much food the diners were presented with in each painting.

“We took the 52 most famous paintings of the Last Supper [from the book Last Supper] and analysed the size of the entrees, bread and plates, relative to the average size of the average head in the painting,” Wansick said.

Computer-aided design technology enabled the researchers to scan and rotate items in the paintings, allowing head, plate, meal and bread size to be calculated.

The study, published today in the International Journal of Obesity, found that the size of the meals in the paintings had grown by 69% over the 1,000-year period. Plate size had increased by 66%, while bread size had risen by 22%.

“The last thousand years have witnessed dramatic increases in the production, availability, safety, abundance and affordability of food,” said Wansink, the author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think.

“We think that as art imitates life, these changes have been reflected in paintings of history’s most famous dinner.”

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If only more public artworks could be like The Burghers of Calais, a powerful monument to everyday heroes

It’s great to be able to celebrate a genuinely powerful and moving public sculpture. There have been so many disappointments, and that’s a gentle way to describe the ugly, stupid stuff our cities have become cluttered with since public art became a British obsession of the noughties. The recession has slowed it down a bit – I haven’t heard as much about it lately, anyway – but the torrent has not ceased: we still have Yinka Shonibare’s Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle to look forward to.

But this is not the work I wish to praise. No, I want to take a moment to point out Britain’s most poignant and beautiful work of modern art in a public place. It is Rodin’s sculpture The Burghers of Calais and it stands in the gardens west of the Houses of Parliament. Have you stood and looked up at this tender masterpiece recently, its dark figures framed against the gothic honeycomb of Westminster?

Perhaps only tourists see it, but actually you can walk here in a few moments from Tate Britain. It’s worth the stroll. The medievalism of the architecture that looms over it sets the scene nicely: when Calais was besieged by the English king in the 14th century, six townsmen gave themselves over as prisoners, believing they were to be executed in return for the city’s salvation. In the event, they were spared, but Rodin’s sculpture portrays the moment of their martyr-like sacrifice: it is a poem to surrender. The emaciated bodies, tattered robes and, above all, the wonderfully delicate and melancholy gestures and poses of the figures express a strange and captivating mood of self-negation.

With this sculpture, designed in the 1880s, Rodin proved himself the greatest European sculptor since Michelangelo and Bernini. Indeed, the soft feeling of surrender it evokes is comparable with Michelangelo’s Dying Slave in the Louvre. Yet, in Rodin’s hands, this is disconcertingly modern art.

Rodin’s masterpiece is sculpture as history painting, and it serves in London as a monument to humble, everyday heroes. It is true and it is beautiful. If only more public art rose to its level.

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Artes Mundi’s rhetoric doesn’t convince – but its flashes of beauty do

The trucks roar through Kyrgyzstan, on what was once the Great Silk Road. Laden with scrap metal and heading for western China, they fill the air with dust. A lone boy on a horse chases them. A New Silk Road: Algorithm of Survival and Hope is one of the works in Artes Mundi 4, now at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff. The trucks roar on, through Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev’s five-channel video. The artists live and work in Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek. Youths laugh at the camera and a group of men sing a folk song on an empty road. The song echoes through the galleries, as you wander from room to room, artist to artist.

Albanian weddings, everyday life in Russia, trouble with Taiwanese immigration officials: Artes Mundi, with its £40,000 prize for the winning artist, aims to be global in its reach. “One World, All Humanity” reads a slogan on the cover of the gallery guide. The show’s remit also says that the artists should refer to “the human condition and the human form”. I’m not sure what that means: art with people in it, doing people-type things? Even Lady Gaga and Beyoncé’s Telephone fits that category.

There is something a bit worthy about Artes Mundi. At worst, there are works that tend towards a National Geographic, slice-of-ethnicity view of the world, which doesn’t take us very far, except geographically. The show is sprawling and unevenly installed; sound leaks between different works.

Fernando Bryce’s art is at once a history lesson and the product of mind-boggling labour. A Peruvian-German, Bryce trawls through history’s major and minor events, redrawing and copying newspaper pages, advertisements and all kinds of printed ephemera. A pamphlet extolling America’s new possessions in the Pacific has nearby a drawing of US soldiers torturing a Filipino prisoner with the “water cure” (as if to say that nothing changes in the war on terror). There are adverts for the sailing of the Titanic and for Odol mouthwash. Bryce unifies all this into one big conspiracy. You could stay for hours.

Mostly, Artes Mundi focuses on video and film, and it eats your day. It’s easy to drift in and out of installations without quite grasping them. Chen Chieh-jen’s Factory mixes old footage of the Taiwanese economic boom with recent footage shot in a closed-down garment factory. There are some marvellous moments and passages of excruciating dullness.

Maybe these bewildered and frustrated victims of uncaring bureaucracy should follow the example of the family pushing a piano across the border between Bulgaria and Turkey in Ergin Çavuşoğlu’s Liminal Crossing. It’s a metaphor – but of what, exactly? Another piano is pushed up a hill in a second work shot in the British countryside, while an older and a younger men hold a stilted conversation. Its probably full of portent but the acting isn’t up to it. Raised in Bulgaria as part of a Turkish minority, Çavuşoğlu now works in London. Borders and migration seem to be his theme (as well as of several other artists in the show), but there’s too much going on to really make much sense of it.Sometimes all one is left with are startling images. In Adrian Paci’s Per Speculum, children sit in the branches of an English oak, flashing shards of broken mirror at the camera. The glass catches the sun and flares in the lens, the tree filled with flashing light. This is very beautiful, and enough in itself. In another room, Paci has erected two brick walls, which he has covered in plaster and frescoed with a sequence of pallid, painted images derived from videos shot at a wedding in Paci’s homeland, Albania. There is something nicesatisfying about rendering video-grabs in fresco painting, but it is difficult to know exactly why Paci is doing it. Perhaps for him, film and video are painting by other means, and he wants us to make the connection.

Muscovite Olga Chernysheva’s short films – a camera walked through a crowded train, a boy uncomfortable in his uniform at some kind of official parade – are a delight. A further film, shot in a St Petersburg museum, wanders between paintings and spectators and loses us in reflections – in the gallery windows and the glazing on the paintings. A girl looks at a portrait that looks like her. Chernysheva has installed this among the collection in the National Gallery of Wales. Here we are in one collection, looking at images of another. We overhear the Russian gallery guides delivering their spiel, and are interrupted by the gallery guides in Cardiff. Chernysheva’s work is extremely rich and rewarding. For me, she is the surprise of this show.

But Yael Bartana should win. The Israeli artist shows the first two parts of an unfinished trilogy that takes as its premise a call for Jews to return to Poland. In the first film, a young man gives a political speech, exhorting Jews to return and save the country from being only for “Polish Poles in Poland”. Bartana plays on and inverts nationalist sentiment, EU and old-style Communist party rhetoric; the whole thing is stirring, but windswept, threadbare and absurd. In the second film, a kibbutz is built in a Polish suburb. First, a wooden tower is erected, then a wall. Everyone looks happy, motivated, their eyes shining with utopian zeal. As building work goes on, razor wire appears atop the wall, and the tower is fitted with a searchlight. It’s a watchtower, and the whole place looks like a prison camp, but no one seems to notice. Somehow, inadvertently, Bartana throws into relief Artes Mundi’s rhetoric of “one world, all humanity”, its empty talk of “the human condition and the human form”. Bartana skewers this, and comes up with the goods.

Artes Mundi 4 is at the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, until 6 June. Details: museumwales.ac.uk. A longer version of this review appears at guardian.co.uk/artanddesign

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The artist Jacques-Louis David was no pacifist. But his epic painting of the Spartans’ last stand doesn’t merely glorify war

A war leader sits frozen at the heart of a bristling crowd of soldiers in Jacques-Louis David’s daunting canvas Leonidas at Thermopylae, a battle painting so vast that it would only inspire numbed amazement, were it not for the figure of the Spartan king who gazes straight out of the drama at you, catching your eye, leading you into the terror and pity of the moment.

That moment is the last stand of the Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae, when the army of this warlike Greek state sacrificed itself to slow the Persian advance through a narrow mountain pass. The Spartans did not believe in retreat. Their battlefield memorial recorded their honour:

Go tell the Spartans, stranger,
That here obedient to their laws we lie.

David was no pacifist. In the late 18th century, this heroically minded French artist painted scenes from Roman history, whose images of sacrifice for the fatherland helped to create the mentality of the French revolution. During the revolutionary years, he was a Jacobin and mourned the murderous zealot Marat. He went on to become Napoleon’s official artist and – together with his pupils and followers, including Baron Gros – to commemorate the emperor’s conquests and glorify his reign.

But David’s vision of Thermopylae is no superficial glorification of war. As the Spartan heroes prepare to lay down their lives, their king Leonidas stops and stares into space, arrested by thought. Is the painting a monument to doubt? It seems that Leonidas must be wondering if he has made the right decision, or if the laws of Sparta are correct. Or is he thinking of the glory that will be theirs on the pages of history? For Thermopylae is an undying memory.

The painting was completed, after many years’ work, in 1814, the year of Napoleon’s abdication. It gives powerful expression to a mood of dignified self-knowledge, of the soldier’s sorrow.

But it is not a pacifist painting. Soon Napoleon would be back, and his followers would head for Waterloo to sacrifice themselves like Spartans.

War is one of the enduring themes of art. But we fail to understand its representations if we try to batter them into our own ideology. Since Picasso’s Guernica, all respectable war art has been anti-war art; but in earlier history, for a painter like David, or for the creators of the Bayeux tapestry, battle inspired more complex emotions – or more honest ones.

Cinema is still truthful about war; it sees it as a good story as well as a terrible reality. History painters in the past shared that ambivalence. It is both the heroism and horror of war that Leonidas contemplates on the field of his lost battle.

The artist says: Thanks for reading my contemporary art blog! If you are involved in the art and culture industry in any way, and would like to syndicate content from or to this blog, or if you simply enjoy art and would like to get in touch, please leave a comment.