January is the cruellest month. TS Eliot was wrong. A full 31 days with the sad tinsel of Christmas a departing memory in the winter darkness and February stretching rigidly before you. Even willing yourself to go out for a walk can sometimes feel heroic. This year’s cultural diet, rapidly becoming a tradition for Observer readers, will speed you on your way.
Here is a work of art for every day of the month – to lift your spirits, shift your mood, deepen your thinking. Everything here reaches the mind and heart through the eyes. And some of it does so with fast-acting effects. Painting, surely the most open and immediate of all art forms, offers itself so instantaneously. You have the sense of it straight away, even backlit on a glowing screen. Some of the images here are so small, in fact, that you can look at them without any loss of scale while out on that walk with your smartphone.
Art can take you anywhere, any time: to snowbound Japan in the 19th century or to the Dutch golden age; to the Mediterranean in blazing July or British Columbia in windswept autumn. It is not separate from life. We should use it, not least to enter the lives of others. Day by day, through what follows, you will know something of what it was to be an Elizabethan courtier, a painter during the French Revolution or a worker in Weimar Germany.
This diet has drawings, sculptures, videos and films. You can home in on a single star by Van Gogh, in almost subatomic closeup, or view the whole oeuvre of Vermeer. You can learn how to weave like Anni Albers, study the tiny woodcuts of Thomas Bewick for inspiration to make your own prints in lino or humble potato. Everything here can be lingered over at leisure, without the museum’s milling crowds pressing you ever onwards, or consumed at speed in a frantically busy day. And everything here is free.
Thirty-one artworks skimmed out of the billions that exist, these can only show a fraction of what artists can achieve through their work: the mysteries and motivations, miracles and methods of art. But they are also chosen to encourage. Once you have been buoyed up on New Year’s Day by the Rev Walker cutting such a suave figure on the Scottish ice, move swiftly to the rare clip of Monet at work in 1914. Let his brisk example be a spur, his art a tonic to the imagination. Happy 2024!
1 January
The Skating Minister
Sir Henry Raeburn
c1795
Start as you mean to go on – best foot forward! Raeburn’s celebrated Rev Walker gliding across Duddingston Loch, poised on one red-ribboned skate, the ice incised with his elegant arabesques, is absolutely still and yet in full swing. Such a cool painting, in both respects: hold it in mind through 2024.
2 January
Claude Monet painting at Giverny
1914
In this startling film of Monet painting at Giverny, you see how he turns from the canvas every few seconds to look at the lilies, swiftly shifting between four different brushes in rapid dabs from the palette. The French artist’s agility of mind and art is measured by his defunct cigarette; its ash never once drops as he works.
3 January
Winter View of Shimasaku in the Province of Iki
Utagawa Hiroshige
1856
Three rocky promontories recede into a deep blue sea, each turned an immaculate white by the soft petals descending from above. Hiroshige’s woodblock print is a perfect image of snow: all weightless stasis at a distance, swirling in closeup. Yet every flake is exactly the same size, near and far – art’s beautiful lies.
4 January
Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura)
Artemisia Gentileschi
c1638
Back to work with Artemisia Gentileschi, body kiltering, head tilting towards the mark she’s urgently making, sleeve falling away to expose her strong forearm. Whatever she’s painting could be any size, shape or subject. The first self-portrait by a woman to become internationally famous, this is painting as live performance.
5 January
Tale-pieces
Thomas Bewick
Thomas Bewick’s tale-pieces – vignettes designed to fill blank space on the page at the end of book chapters – are pure genius condensed into two-inch woodcuts teeming with visual humour. A doomed traveller can’t see his hand before his face in a storm (neither can we). A housewife pegs up her washing without noticing the pigs marauding the basket behind her. A drunk swaggers home through the 18th-century fields, two crescent moons winking a double entendre above him.
6 January
Starry Night
Vincent van Gogh
1889
MoMA in New York offers an enthralling zoom into a beloved modern masterpiece: Van Gogh’s whirling Starry Night, shown in powerful closeup. This virtual view homes in further and further, from night sky to brushstroke to the secrets of the pigment itself, resembling the very constellations Van Gogh painted. You literally see more than he ever could.
7 January
The Fifer
Édouard Manet
1866
Manet’s The Fifer is quick as a flash: a lifesize figure arriving out of thin grey air, nearly futuristic for 1866. The pose was supposedly derived from a tarot card, but he is a real boy too, perfectly contained in Manet’s suave outlines and lively as a firefly. You can hear the bright notes of his instrument.
8 January
Hoop-La
Jeremy Moon
1965
Holidays thoroughly over by now, try this instant visual uplift. In British painter Jeremy Moon’s Hoop-La, blue discs arc through the air like a juggler’s balls, never dropping because the colour red holds them up for ever. A vivacious sight gag, offsetting shape against colour, it’s also a subtle skit on solemn 60s abstraction.
9 January
The Tempest
Giorgione
c1508
Show don’t tell. Giorgione’s fathomlessly strange painting The Tempest) shows a half-dressed woman with a baby looking out at us, observed by a soldier, in a landscape of weird architectural fragments beneath a lightning-torn sky. A riddle, a poem, an allegory: nobody knows. The painting holds its secrets. The thrill is in the mystery.
10 January
The Visitors
Ragnar Kjartansson
2012
Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors unites poetry, music, theatre and cinema in a magnificent nine-screen installation shot in one take, in a crumbling mansion in upstate New York. Each screen shows a musician performing alone (visible to us, but significantly not to each other) in this celebrated multipart elegy for Kjartansson’s failed marriage.
11 January
The Jewish Bride
Rembrandt
c1665-69
In Rembrandt’s The Jewish Bride, the man lays his hand on the woman’s breast and hers gently covers it. The picture is a secular altarpiece. People crossed Europe to witness the way Rembrandt could turn paint into gold, like this, but the tenderness here even exceeds the brushwork. Their names are lost, but their love survives for ever.
12 January
Spiral Jetty
Robert Smithson
1970
Smithson’s Spiral Jetty is a legend of land art, a 1,500ft promontory of rocks, crystals and mud way out in the Great Salt Lake of Utah. Like the road to Lindisfarne, it is sometimes entirely submerged. For many years, pilgrims had to search, and wait, but higher temperatures have made it more visible, a symbol of the lake’s own health.
13 January
Closer to Johannes Vermeer
Sunday silence via Vermeer. If you couldn’t get to 2023’s epochal exhibition, the Rijksmuseum offers this mesmerising virtual tour. From the View of Delft to The Little Street, the milkmaid, the pearl earring and the seed in every loaf, it gets ever closer. And you can duck Stephen Fry’s narration with a solo tour, if you prefer perfect silence.
14 January
Que me veux tu?
Claude Cahun
1929
Two shaven heads, fused at the neck like conjoined twins through double exposure, appear in a frightening self-portrait by the French artist and resistance heroine Claude Cahun. One head is anxiously watching the other, wild eyes hooded, pathologically disengaged. Androgynous, lesbian, Jewish, secretly campaigning against the Nazis on Jersey, Cahun knows (and shows, through her photocollages) what it is to live outside society.
15 January
The Bay of Angels, Nice
Raoul Dufy
1927
Blue Monday! Cheer up the year’s most depressing day by plunging straight into the colour itself, with Dufy’s exhilarating scenes of the bay at Nice. The Mediterranean in his fauvist art is so intensely blue as to be counterintuitive – hot blue: the colour of summer.
16 January
Eva Hesse
American sculptor Eva Hesse made fragile works of great tragicomic force and wit out of little more than beeswax, string and paper. Almost as ephemeral as the artist herself, dead of cancer at 34, they are rarely shown but extraordinarily influential. See them in this brilliantly condensed film trailer.
17 January
Madonna del Parto
Piero della Francesca
c1460
Book a virtual trip to a staggering revelation: the Madonna del Parto, hanging midair in a village room in Tuscany. Two angels draw back the curtains to reveal Mary with eyes gently lowered, one hand to her waist, dress tightening with pregnancy. One of Piero della Francesca’s most mysterious figures, she is a column of calmness, silent in blue.
18 January
Who’s Afraid of Barney Newman
Frank Bowling
1968
Colour sings a political anthem in the art of British-Guyanese painter Frank Bowling. His celebrated 1968 work Who’s Afraid of Barney Newman parodies the self-containment of abstract expressionism with great glowing verticals of yellow, green and red, in which the outlines of African and Caribbean countries seem to drift below the surface like sea wrack.
19 January
In a Cafe (The Absinthe Drinker)
Edgar Degas
1875-6
January is more than half done, so don’t give up on your resolutions now. Consider Degas’s dead-eyed couple paralysed by absinthe. He’s nursing a hair of the dog, she’s still drunk from the night before; wasting their lives in the bar. It’s a painting of modern life, in Baudelaire’s famous phrase, composed in the studio later: the cropping skewed, the conversation stalled. Even the mirror reflections are drunk.
20 January
Emily Carr video
Take a walk on the wild side with Canadian painter Emily Carr (1871-1945), a heroine of true grit who lived outdoors in the forests she painted with such whirling, fearless, exhilarating passion. High skies, whispering trees, radiant with stirring motion and flickering light, her paintings are as staggering as the places she represents. And when poverty, frostbite and illness finally got her, Carr took up a pen and wrote Klee Wyck, her great 1941 memoir of British Columbia.
21 January
Little Stories of Great Women Artists: Anni Albers
Bauhaus artist Anni Albers (1899-1994) was a revolutionary with a handloom, working in silk, jute, Lurex and even cellophane to create her avant-garde weavings. Everything she made prompts you to make something yourself. This gorgeous film for viewers aged seven and above teaches her methods, throwing in a charming history of art for free.
22 January
Two Peaches
Adriaen Coorte
1696
Two peaches glow in deep darkness, side-lit on a stone ledge. The 17th-century Dutchman Adriaen Coorte notices every dip and cleft of their planetary strangeness. The artist himself is still just coming to light, like the fruit in his tiny still lifes, mostly painted on paper. His peaches are like two phases of the moon in outer space.
23 January
Portrait of the Artist
Jacques-Louis David
1794
David was the unrivalled image-maker of the French Revolution. But here the mighty are fallen. Alone, puzzled, hurt, imprisoned for his association with Robespierre, he paints himself literally in solitary confinement. He does not know who, if anyone, will see this self-portrait – this poignant proof of life.
24 January
The Ife head
14th-15th century
“What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties… in apprehension how like a god!” This magnificent Nigerian head was made about two centuries before Hamlet’s speech, which it so perfectly embodies. Shape, expression, contour lines, all exquisitely cast in brass, it was discovered during building works in 1938 (British Museum, give it back). Inspiration: hold your head high!
25 January
Self-Portrait with Saucepan
Maria Lassnig
1995
The main character in the Austrian painter Maria Lassnig’s art is herself – droll, defiantly original, put upon by social convention. A woman tries to say something from under the saucepan jammed on her head. A nude shoots you a glance from an altar laid with cakes. In this paradoxically dynamic image, Lassnig has became strange to herself through old age.
26 January
Unknown Man Clasping a Hand from a Cloud
Nicholas Hilliard
1588
Nicholas Hilliard’s miniature Unknown Man Clasping a Hand from a Cloud is a masterpiece to have and to hold in the palm of your hand. The exquisitely painted gentleman (once thought to be Shakespeare) reaches up to the hand descending from transparent circles of cloud above. Male, female, who knows, certainly dead and gone, but still holding hands through the afterlife.
27 January
Self-Portrait of Left Profile
Käthe Kollwitz
1933
In German artist Käthe Kollwitz’s marvellous self-portrait, the fingers narrow to hold the charcoal just the way a pencil contains its lead. The drawing arm is a long black zigzag issuing directly from the charcoal’s tip. Art is a live current that flows from mind and eye through hand to charcoal. It’s a portrait of drawing!
28 January
Vexation Island
Rodney Graham
1997
A shaggy dog film from the Canadian Rodney Graham closes in on a shipwrecked sailor lying beneath a palm tree on a desert island. Woken by a squawking parrot, he eventually staggers to his feet, shaking the tree in hope of sustenance. What follows is a meditation on Sisyphus, Freud, Crusoe and the philosophy of jokes.
29 January
The Birds of Paolo Uccello
Italo Calvino
1985
Italo Calvino once wrote a fanciful essay on why there aren’t more birds in the paintings of Paolo Uccello, the Renaissance artist whose name actually means bird. It is an antic skit on art history. But Calvino goes much further, entering so imaginatively into Uccello’s art, it is as if he himself lived in the pictures.
30 January
Porter
August Sander
1929
August Sander might have set out to record the people of Weimar Germany, but he became the poet-photographer of the human race. Every picture is exemplary. The hotel porter is exhausted, elderly, hands swollen with labour, one thumbnail blackened. The gentleness of his face invokes respect and compassion.
31 January
Las Meninas
Diego Velázquez
1656
Bid January farewell with Las Meninas, Velázquez’s mirror-bright vision of a princess, her servants and the painter himself, gathered in a pool of sunlight beneath darkening shadows that instantly sets the tenor of the scene. You know these beautiful children are dead, and yet they live for ever in this moment – kept alive, Velázquez implies, not just by his painting but by you!
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