Front Row

The portraits in the National Gallery’s new retrospective of the artist Frans Hals capture his informal and fresh style which contrasted with other masters like Vermeer and Rembrandt. We hear from the exhibition’s curator Bart Cornelis and by the writer Benjamin Moser whose forthcoming book The Upside-Down World describes his lifelong passion for the art of what’s often called the Dutch Golden Age. The enthusiasm of politicians for the spectacular U-turn has reached the cultural sphere; in Scotland the government has U-turned a U-turn in its arts funding. Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman’s theatre critic and political columnist, explains what has happened and not happened and what it all means for the arts in her country. As a retrospective of her work opens at the Courtauld Gallery in London, Claudette Johnson talks to Tom Sutcliffe about her portraits of Black women, her work in the 1980s with the BLK art group and how Rembrandt and Toulouse Lautrec’s approach to painting women has inspired her. And Ghosts a