Anslem Kiefer at the Pompidou

Kiefer’s work is always monumental. That’s why one piece of stacked shipping containers, filled with unfurling rolls of photographically imprinted lead, takes up more than a floor’s height in the atrium of the Pompidou. It’s why this show of 150 works goes on for room after room, some containing as few as three canvases, such is the scale.

Wear sensible shoes and don’t expect to be able to sit down very often. This is a marathon, but a very worthwhile one. It’s a huge and impressive survey of his work and certainly bears more than one visit to take it all in. I particularly enjoyed the vast landscapes and architectural paintings, and the installations behind glass.

The early rooms deal with the German past, including the Nazi uniform paintings which first brought him to attention. Later a recurring motif is the snake, which slithers its way from painting to sculpture and back again.

Much here is narrative, including books incorporated in paintings and painted books, and it is fertile ground for letting your imagination run riot. Make up your own stories, while admiring the muscularity of the paint work, even flowers have a thickness and strength that command one’s attention.

Frank Auerbach at Tate Britain

Frank Auerbach is an acquired taste: one that I have yet to sup willingly. I am not exactly fond of his thick layers of paint and the dull palette mixes of sludge and mud. And judging by how quiet this show was on a Saturday afternoon, I am not the only one.

If find the early to mid career work depressing, but he later work is vibrant, and even cheerful, now that he has dispensed with layering and is scraping off paint before reworking.

His London landscapes in different seasons are lovely. The most impressive for me were the charcoal portraits and self-portraits - very resonant.

Go, if he's your cup of expressionism, otherwise he's unlikely to grow on you by means of this show alone.

Hidden Paris - Musee Zadkine

Making good on my promise to visit Paris' less well known museums this year, I started with the Musee Zadkine, housed in his former home,  just a hop, skip and jump from the Luxembourg Gardens in the 6eme.

It is small and perfectly formed, and a lovely way to pass an hour looking at beautifully serene and gentle sculptures.

You can easily see the influence of his friend Modigiliani and later Cubism. It was hard not to reach out and touch the sinuous forms.

Seek out the tranquil green courtyard  and enjoy everything for free. There were only two other people there when I visited. Thank you Paris.

Gothic London

Image not from the Museum

In the thrub of the city, there are quiet, small spaces of calm if you know where to find them. Take Lincoln’s Inn Fields on a Saturday morning when the law is at rest, for example, or the imaginary monk’s cell and parlour in the basement of the Sir John Soane Museum that abuts the park.

It is wasteful, almost profligate to spend the hours of sunshine on a winter’s day indoors in the semi-dark amongst gargoyles, a marble skull, heavy furniture and blood red walls. But with my teenage Goth daughter in tow and delighted by everything here from the architectural ‘specimens’ to the fabulous sculpture packed into every square inch of the house, there was no choice. And more, it was a positive choice to keep from the Arctic cold that arrived with insufficient notice for me to pack properly last weekend.

As usual, I wanted the fires lit, everyone else banished and the place to myself, a good tome from the library and a pot of tea. My needs are fairly simple, no? Barring that, free entry, an exhibition on death and architecture and four of Hogarth’s paintings from the Rake’s Progress kept us more than happy for the morning.

Nous sommes Parisians, but I’m not gawping

It’s been ten days since the terrorist attacks in Paris. A week and a half in which something approaching life has continued, but people have become variously scared, defiant, distrustful.

The present concerns are whether the political response of bombing the hell out of Syria is wise, and resistance to the French government’ s move to constrain personal freedoms. For the French, Liberté is a very serious tenant, even in a state of emergency.

On a daily basis these things concern me much less than my neighbours. Je suis Paris, but I have long since given up on active political engagement as it does no good to my health. I cannot over-fill my mind and heart or they will break completely. That’s why I will not be going to Place de la Republique to look at the growing shrine to the dead. It’s the reason why I do not join the collective mourning.

My only contact with public expressions of grief and outrage was the floral tributes at the school gate next to my apartment building  It was hard to avoid the white flowers, candles and messages from the pupils for their murdered music teacher. And impossible to side-step the girl walking towards me one morning last week, carrying a perfect rose, her expression of sadness not one any child should know.

Four good reasons to go to Birmingham

Southerners are pretty snobby about Brum, so here's a finger to them and four good reasons to pay our second city a visit, even on a grey and drizzly day in November:

1. Anthony Gormley - check out this huge Iron Man stuck just there in the pavement outside the City Art Gallery and Museum, and Town Hall.

2. The Staffordshire Hoard - a cache of over four thousand pieces of Anglo Saxon gold, some with marvellous garnet inlay. It's in the museum in a purpose built gallery. Bling.

3. The Pre-Raphaelites - there are several rooms full of Holman Hunt, Bryne-Jones, Rosetti and Millais, which you have to trip past on your way to the Hoard. Some of these paintings are so famous, you'll find yourself saying something like, 'Oh so that's where this one belongs'.

4. The new New Street station - shopping and travelling under one rather shiny roof. Great for reflections.

Ai Weiwei at the RA

This is not the first time I have been to an Ai Weiwei show, but it may be the last. In a word, disappointing. I get it now, actually I've got it for a long time. The message is wearing thin and this is not art that I have to think very hard about.

Yes, it is important that he continues to show up the Chinese government and its secrecy, duplicity, control, hypocrisy and so on, and yes, it is appalling the way Ai has himself been treated, but I think he has reached the point now where politics has over taken art if it takes an army of people and three studios around the world to create his works. Take for example the steel rods from the earthquake destroyed schools and the number of workers needed to straighten them. Yes, they are nicely arranged and fitted together in a pleasing wave form, but really, is that it?

Such were my feelings as I toured Ai's latest show. Yes, it's good to see the drip vases and marble camera, the jade handcuffs and the enormous cube of tea, but I wanted more. It's a function of the size of the works and the relative lack of space in the RA to do them justice.

Go if you've not seen these in the flesh before, but if you have, beat the long queue and perhaps save those 17 good British pounds for something else. The porcelain crabs though are cute.