Art: How Turner squared up to the oblong tendency

Late Turner: Painting Set Free
Tate Britain

For the longest time pictures were brick-shaped. Photographs in an album and portraits on the wall were often pre-figured to the Golden Ratio, that pleasing aspect that had mathematical as well as aesthetic qualities.

Exhibition: Lowry And The Painting Of Modern Life, Tate Britain

Laurence S Lowry painted football matches. He painted evictions, and men at work and magnetised huddles around a suicide in the street.

Little wonder then that his work was popular and that popularity - as usual - was a double-edged sword, bringing him affection among "his" people and a derision and dismissal among the critics.