Laura Cumming

Laura Cumming brings artworks to life so that those who may never get to see them can feel they have experienced them. The eyes of Goya’s ‘Black Duchess’ flash, her sash blazes scarlet, “the yellow and gold of her bodice burn like flames,” and Cumming’s suggestion that the subject was the artist’s lover as well as patron is no surprise. There is similar warmth in her description of a painting by Joseph Wright, in which a young woman is reading a letter by candlelight, an old man in pince-nez peering at it over her shoulder. “This is not the first time they have relished that letter, with its gently worn folds” and “couple of comical ink stains,” she observes. 

By contrast, the “disturbing” retrospective of performance-art pioneer Marina Abramovic is “peculiarly uninvolving,” and Cumming’s distaste for the visibly suffering naked young woman pinned on a high wall is evident in her final sentence: “Six million years of evolution, and all of civilisation, to get to this.”

Cumming’s criticism conveys “how it feels to be in [the] presence” of a particular piece of work, and “arrives in prose vivid and supple with insight … an art in its own right,” said the judges.