Lovely Lovely

Overview

"Lovely, Lovely", examines the idea of beauty: is it still a valid idea in Modern art? Collings goes to town on Matisse, takes a jab at Picasso for parodying one of Matisse's nudes, touches on Mondrian and Morris Louis, lingers a while in America on Jules Olitski and Alex Katz, then on the contemporary Elizabeth Peyton; still in America, goes into some detail on Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jasper Johns; returns to Britain with Chris Offili's paintings decorated with and supported by elephant dung; returns to Matisse, specifically the Vence chapel, and winds up the chapter with four pages on Patrick Heron (about fifty of whose paintings from a retrospective were destroyed in a recent fire in a London storage facility).