A man in a dark coat turns his back to us. He is painting white letters onto a red banner draped across a table. A Venus de Milo towers before him. The room is grey, an attic, a window, the cable of the electric light, in plain sight, dangling from the ceiling with its lamp. The letters in white proclaim: ВСЯ ВЛАСТЬ СОВЕТАМ, “All power to the Soviets”. There is no palette present, a brush and a glass suffice.   Nikolai Terpsikhorov, First Motto, 1924, Moscow, State Tretyakov Gallery, Photo © State Tretyakov Gallery   The artist is Nikolai Terpsikhorov, a little known painter who depicts himself carrying out his new duties. By turning his back to us, he draws us into the canvas. First Motto is the work that greets me as I enter Revolution: Russian Art 1917 – 1932, the new exhibition at the Royal Academy of London (until the 17th of April). Curated by Ann Dumas, John Milner and Natalia Murray, this exhibition takes inspiration from a grand event held in 1932 at the State Russian Museum of what was then Leningrad. “Fifteen Years of Artists of the Russian Soviet Republic” (“Khudozniki RSFS za 15 let”) was a largescale retrospective, a massive exhibition of post-revolutionary...

’s-Hertoghenbosch, 9 August 1516. The funeral service for the painter Jheronimus Bosch is held in the church of St. John. The mourners gather in the new chapel of the Brotherhood of Our Lady (Lieve Vrouwe Broederschap), of which Bosch is a “sworn member”. The Requiem mass is organised by the brotherhood, who cover the costs, as was the custom. The perfectly preserved book of accounts is a precious artefact: from the expenses accrued we can deduce that this is the final tribute to an important and highly revered man. He would have been around 65 years old, although the date of his birth is unknown (1450-55).   Ten years ago, to mark the 500th anniversary of the death of the artist, Charles de Mooij, director of the Noordbrabants Museum, began work on an ambitious project: to bring the entire body of the surviving work of the most imaginative Netherlandish artist back to ‘s Hertoghenbosh, the city where Jheronimus Bosch was born, for the largest retrospective ever dedicated to him.   Bosch’s work is spread around the world: 25 museums, some giants like the Louvre, Metropolitan and Prado, in ten different countries. And Charles de Mooij, from the Noordbrabants Museum, doesn’t...