Watercolour at Tate Britain

I like the way they are charging £17.50 for this show, which includes a voluntary 'donation' to the gallery. Nice one.

The show has famously been curated under themes, rather than chronologically, which obviously has its benefits and drawbacks. It is interesting to see botanical art grouped together in one room, when you probably wouldn't see it at all in most exhibitions. I also liked the large room in which travel and watercolour were explored - there were fantastic works by John Nash and Eric Ravilious (below) on display here. The breadth of the show ('anything in watercolour) means that it is full of surprises, but it is also a weakness: a lot of the watercolours don't really look like they were painted in watercolour, but rather like imitation oil paintings. In their striving to show the versatility of the medium, they don't have nearly enough examples of what watercolour at its best can do. I would have liked to see a lot more sketch work in watercolour (probably its strongest use), illustration work (Quentin Blake only uses watercolour, but wasn't on show here) and yes, twee, traditional Victorian watercolour stuff, which is what everyone thinks of when they think of watercolour. My guess is the curators wanted to steer well clear of 'what everyone thinks of' and surprise us with Watercolour Where You Least Expect It. What wasn't surprising is Tate Britain rolling out Turner again, their favourite star turn. He's bound to turn up, because Tate Britain has a lot of him, and his preparations, if you squint a bit, look a bit like abstract expressionism, so he neatly straddles the abstract and figurative schools of art.

There was a Watercolour and War room here, which could have been larger. I've seen some excellent James Boswell war watercolours at the British Museum Drawing and Prints Room, and of course Henry Moore used watercolour (with wax and chalk and ink) for his famous subway pictures from the Blitz, surely worth a look, but sadly no sign of them here. What I'm getting at, is that any exhibition that is this broad is laying itself open to accusations of missing out a lot of the best stuff in an effort to pack everything in.

Exhibition ended very badly in a sort of catch-all room about the imagination, which included William Blake and Tracy Emin. Spot the connection - I couldn't. Overall, I really enjoyed the high points of the show, and it was excellently displayed, particularly the room about watercolour materials, about which I already know a good deal, but still found it fascinating. I understand the criticism that this show is going to attract from watercolour purists, but I think it is worth looking beyond that. This show has something for everyone. It brings in the punters and goes a good way towards destroying the reputation that watercolour has as the medium of choice for old ladies on 'Watercolour Challenge' and the Prince of Wales. That's quite an achievement.

L'escalier truque

I don't know much about Jean-Pierre Duffour, apart from what I've been able to glean from Wikipedia (fr) and the most useful Lambiek encyclopaedia of comic creators. Apparently, he works in advertising or something. He doesn't publish many books, though he has worked with a couple of big names in French comics, Lewis Trondheim (Lapinot, Donjon) and Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis). His drawing style is very naive, but precise and clinical at the same time. His stories are like if Kafka wrote children's books. The characters are all simple, often based on animals, and have very basic motivations, but they seem to be caught in frustrating and surreal situations which they can't escape from.

All the stories in L'Escalier Truque take place in a depressing concrete building with a seemingly infinite number of floors. We start with Floor 352: The Noise under the bed, in which an Elephant hears a noise under his bed and before long is being pursued through his flat by shadowy monsters. On floor 298. a mouse with a briefcase is trying to get back to his floor after work, but the lift is broken, so against the advice of a supernatural gatekeeper, he takes the stairs, which get higher and higher, until he is barely able to scale them. The stories can be read as just stories, or as existential metaphors, or as visualisations of some kind of psychological state. Are the shadows that pursue the elephant from under his bed his own fears? Is the mouse engaged in a futile struggle against the natural order of things, by refusing to wait for the lift to be repaired?

Elsewhere, on other floors, stories pit the individual against authority (as when a cat tries to see his boss to ask for a raise, but his feet grow so heavy on the way that he cannot continue) , or seem to hint at the ultimate pointlessness of existence (as when a dog jumps out of the 443rd floor on the advice of a phone call and then spends the rest of the story in trivial considerations on the way down). If anyone has seen the movies of Roy Anderson (Songs from the Second Floor; You, The Living), you will be reminded of this.

It's a shame that the book didn't remain in this vein, or even better, try to suggest a philosophy that holds all these strands together. Unfortunately, in the last third, the quality of the stories dips noticeably, as in the 1st floor: Justice, in which an all too familiar scenario, the Kafkaesque trial takes place.  If you've read Kafka, or Koestler, Orwell or Chesterton, you'll find the story here, the longest in the book, retreading old ground without very much visual interest. Still, the rest of the book was excellent, and I really wish M. Duffour was a little more prolific!