The haunted paintings of Patricia Hurl

Plus: Surrealism, Romanian-style

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Tom Walker grapples with a grim vision of modern Ireland

For more than a couple of hundred years, Ireland has been culturally identified as a gothic space. Historically, much of this was a question of England thinking of itself as enlightened or modern by banishing to the Celtic periphery what it wished to deny: the irrational, the backward, the Catholic. Irish culture in turn took on, rather than merely rejected, a sense of itself as a strange, haunted place. More recently, this has included reckoning with the legacies of what was, in the south of Ireland, a near theocratic post-independence state. In her first retrospective, drawing together more than 80 works produced during the past four decades, Patricia Hurl emerges as a powerful artistic witness to the misogyny of modern Irish society.

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Will Wiles on constructive criticism and mid-century modernism

In a decade or two of working on architecture magazines, I dealt with publicists every day. Often maligned as obstructive, they were generally essential, the people you could get on the phone, the people who understood what kind of images you needed, how much time and access was desirable for an interview, and what a deadline was. But they weren't working for us, the magazines. They were working for architects, shepherding their buildings into the light, building up their reputations. Eva Hagberg's When Eero Met His Match is an intriguing book about the formative years of this profession, the middle of the 20th century.

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Samuel Reilly gets lost on the road to abstraction

Before Sotheby's 'Modern and Contemporary' evening sale on 1 March, I spent a few moments standing in front of Wassily Kandinsky's Murnau mit Kirche II (Murnau with Church II; 1910) – the auction's headline lot – conducting an experiment. I tasked myself with looking at the painting solely on its own terms – not thinking about trajectory, that is. I made myself notice the way that the spire of the church dominates the landscape, its leaning vertical rhyming with the contours of the sheer mountains behind. I thought about the ways that the cool blue of the Alpine sky gives way to the blood-red of what might be the sun creeping in at top-right, and the way these warm and cold colours are refracted across the roofs of houses and the hills they nestle between. But before long, it became impossible not to allow the mind to further fragment the jumble of curves and lines – to remember that, in short order, Kandinsky would abandon all attempt at reference to reality.

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Juliet Jacques on the belated homecoming of Victor Brauner

The Romanian Surrealist spent much of his career in France, even representing his adoptive country at the Venice Biennale in 1966. Romanian politics were never amenable: he did not fit into the nationalistic wave that came with independence in 1918. Between 1925 and 1938 he lived at various times in Paris, where he befriended his compatriot Constantin Brancusi, André Breton and other Surrealists, and Bucharest. After Romania became an absolute monarchy in 1938 (military dictatorship was to come in 1940), Brauner left for good. He remained in France for the rest of his life, hiding from the Nazis (he was Jewish) during the war and ignoring threats of expulsion. Although he had joined the Romanian Communist Party in 1935, the post-war Socialist Republic plumped for Socialist Realism as its official style. Only 20 of his works, featured here, are now in the country, some in private collections.

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Acquisitions of the Month: February 2023

David Bowie's archive and the first clutch of NFTs to be acquired by a French institution are among the most important works to have entered museums this month

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Tom Stammers on the far-flung collecting of the Sassoon family

'His grave countenance, commanding figure, rich turban and flowing robes, made up a picture worth beholding': in such orientalising terms Sir Richard Temple, the governor of Bombay, described the impression made on him by David Sassoon in the early 1860s. Despite having come to India as a stateless refugee, David went on to lay the foundations of a global business empire which stretched between Bombay and Shanghai, Hong Kong and London. One hundred years later, David Sassoon's descendants would be mixing with European royalty and buying masterpieces of art. His distant descendant, the writer Siegfried Sassoon, still cherished the patriarch's photo in the 1960s, insisting that of all his relations: 'He was the one that really counted.'

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