Jules George, 41, has just returned from being embedded with British troops in Afghanistan

The simple objective for a war artist is to record a particular war. You could ask why film and photography is not enough. I think that due to the very nature of painting or drawing, one can exaggerate or highlight poignant themes, atmospheres, moods, and it gives a completely different slant. With mass media, you see so much, so many evocative photographs. We're inundated with news footage and camera work. So you see these remarkable photographs, and then we've forgotten them.

But with a painting you can sit in a gallery, or open a book, and you can consider, and you can ponder what is going on.

Any preconceptions I had before I went to Afghanistan were based entirely on what I had seen in the newspapers and on television. But the reality was completely different.

I arrived at Camp Bastion and then I was at Camp Shorabak, the main Afghan base. I had no idea what it took to keep 100,000 troops going, the vast infrastructure. Twenty-four hours a day there were convoys of hundreds of lorries bringing in concrete for building and the food that is required to feed all these troops.

And then there is the stunning beauty of the landscape. It's incredible. When you see the local people in their traditional garments, there is only one word to describe it – biblical. It's 2,000 years ago. So there is this weird contrast of stunning beautiful landscapes, and war, with all the arms and army. Constantly you are pulled between the two.

I thought it was important not to go with too many preconceived ideas. The way I work is very rapid-fire, quick sketches and drawings. There was so much activity going on that was the best way. I had to make quick studies and drawings, encompassing all I could see.

I was embedded with the 2 Yorks (Green Howards) whose role was to lead mentoring and liaison training. I thought they might be a bit sceptical but they really supported the idea, they thought it was wonderful that someone was there to record it.

On the little patrol bases at night, when there is very little to do, I would paint a portrait of someone, watched by all the soldiers. They always wanted to know if they were in the picture, so I think it was appreciated.

I got camp life, and portraits. I went out on foot patrol. That was the first time I've ever walked and drawn and watched my step for IEDs all at the same time – a quick learning curve. On one occasion, we ended up in a firefight. I was not in the thick of it, but my role was to make drawings. So I witnessed a three-hour skirmish. Two vehicles hit IEDs but fortunately there were no bad injuries. Though one person had to be medevaced and we didn't initially know how he was and I felt physically sick.

On another occasion, at the district centre at Musa Qala, I was up on the rooftop and there was the most stunning view of the wadi and the mountains. I painted the landscape but it was so strange painting this incredible view and watching an amazing sunset with the sound of blasts and gunfire going off in the background.

I hope my sketches and paintings convey the experience of what it is like to be on the frontline, the elements of fear and energy, and equally the camaraderie and the determination of the troops. Because for every setback, for every friend injured, that makes them more determined to succeed.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the war, my objective was to study the British army in the theatre of war. I have so much respect for these men and women. They should be given full support for what they do.

Jules George was talking to Caroline Davies

An exhibition of George's work from Afghanistan is planned for later this year. Contact jules.george@ymail.com for details

The V&A's new quilts show is already causing a stir, with international enthusiasts block-booking hotels in west London. Viv Groskop finds out what all the fuss is about

As you step through the heavy wooden doors into the V&A's new quilts exhibition, the first thing you see is a four-poster bed, draped with bed hangings from 1730; these are made up of 6,500 individual pieces in shades of red, brown, green and blue. The lighting is low, the walls are baby pink, there are weird, echoing noises. I don't want to say it's womb-like, but it is.

Quilts is a strange, fascinating show, six years in the making and the first the V&A has ever devoted to the subject. It provides a window on to a world – a predominantly female world – that feels private and somewhat undiscovered. Already, it is one of the museum's most successful exhibitions, with 8,000 advance ticket sales; quilting groups from the US, Australia and Japan have made block-bookings with local hotels.

Curator Sue Prichard thinks this enthusiasm is partly due to the global downturn. "I started on this project in 2004. Now there is a huge revival of interest in traditional crafts. There are a lot of women out there who are really keen to learn new skills and step away from their computer and their Blackberry." She thinks many people will come not so much to marvel, but to gain inspiration for their own handiwork.

Not just a female pursuit

Personally, I think the exhibition's appeal is much simpler than this: quilts are comforting, intriguing, intimate and heavy with history. To enjoy them, you don't have to want to make one (and I really, really don't). But the air in the first room of the exhibition, which houses the oldest quilts, has a wonderfully musty tang to it, like breathing in the past – it's a transporting experience.

There are 71 pieces here, mostly displayed as intended: on beds or as wall hangings. Many give an insight into family life of their period; several are exhibited alongside letters and diaries. There are quilted cushions from the 18th century, when a mother was expected to "lie in" after childbirth, embroidered with mottoes such as Health to the Little Stranger and the slightly less sinister Welcome Dear Babe. (These gifts were given after birth; it was thought that receiving them before labour would make it more painful. If only a cushion could make a difference.) Every quilt tells a story: one depicting Aesop's Fables, dated 1780–1830, clearly shows evidence of two hands – one detailed and precious, the other slapdash. You start to form stories about who these people might have been.

Is this a women's exhibition? Yes and no. It showcases the ways in which women have used quilts to document the big events in their lives – love, marriage, birth, death, even their thoughts on politics and patriotism. But it is not an exclusively female art. One of the star exhibits is Grayson Perry's wonderfully disturbing Right to Life (1993), which depicts embroidered pink foetuses against a background of red, white and black velvet. And there are several military quilts, one thought to have been made by a private serving in India in the 1860s (soldiers were encouraged to take up embroidery to stop them drinking and gambling).

Some of the pieces are unexpectedly satirical. A cover depicting the A-Z of Love (1875-1885) shows a young couple cringing next to a moustachioed man, who represents G for Guardian. Other quilts are overtly political: one takes a fabric template of "Her Most Gracious Majesty Caroline, Queen of England" as its centrepiece. Caroline was never Queen; when she was divorced by the future George IV, many women were disgusted. (Jane Austen wrote: "Poor woman, I shall support her as long as I can, because she is a Woman, and because I hate her Husband.")

Impatience is a modern vice

What struck me most was how intricate the 300-year-old work was compared with the contemporary quilts. Perhaps this is an unkind thought. I'm sure a lot of work went into Tracey Emin's To Meet My Past, despite the self-consciously faux-naif stitching. Equally, Jo Budd's Winter/Male and Summer/Female (2010) is strikingly beautiful; but it is a quilt made of giant slabs of colour, not tiny woven pieces. Quilting has moved further towards the grand statement, and there is a kind of impatience to the more modern pieces. There is another tension here, too: the earlier works were never intended as art, or to be exhibited. It made me want to see more examples of modern domestic quilting, rather than the professional art work of Emin and Perry.

Above all, a theme of confinement pervades this exhibition – literal confinement (labour and childbirth); and domestic: these pieces required hundreds of hours of homework. Later, the theme resurfaces in another form. One of the most striking quilts here is by prisoners at HMP Wandsworth. The slogans are funny and poignant: "I miss my family"; "I will go home"; "I didn't do it, guv, honest". Having time on your hands can feed an extraordinary creative focus, whether you are an 18th-century woman, or a 21st-century inmate.

Quilts 1700-2010 is at the V&A from 20 March until 4 July. Details: vam.ac.uk.

Sew simple: How to make a quilt

Where to start

The V&A's Patchwork for Beginners by Sue Prichard is excellent, as are a number of free online tutorials. Quilting.about.com is a good place to start, or eHow's videos (tinyurl.com/ehowvideos). Save your cash for pattern books – Kaffe Fassett is worth a look, or for modern stuff try the Material Obsession set by Kathy Doughty and Sarah Fielke. There are lots of workshops: I learned at Liberty (liberty.co.uk), but London's Make Lounge (themakelounge.com) and Brighton's Just Sew (justsewbrighton.co.uk) come highly recommended, too. The Quilter's Guild can help find a course (quiltersguild.org.uk).

What to buy

Basics – a rotary cutter, cutting mat and a decent ruler – start at about £30. (Omnigrip rulers and Olfa cutters outshine any other products.) If you don't want to fork out just yet, though, get a decent pair of fabric scissors and cut each piece out with a cardboard template.

Stick to cotton, and mix expensive, patterned stuff with cheap, plain fabric to keep costs down. Liberty have a new range of material tied into the V&A show; if you're after something bright and contemporary, Amy Bulter quilting fabrics (at John Lewis) are your best bet. Or design your own – see UK-based thefabricpress.com – or recycle dresses or table cloths.

Seeking inspiration

Flickr's quilt group should give you a few ideas (flickr.com/groups/quilts/), as will blogs such as aquiltaday.com. See what contemporary quilters such as Laura Kemshall (sixart.co.uk/Laura_Kemshall) are up to; I also like the picture-heavy book Quilting, Patchwork & Appliqué: A World Guide by Caroline Crabtree and Christine Shaw. If it's real-life inspiration you want, take a trip to the Quilt museum in York (quiltmuseum.org.uk) or join the hardcore quilters who fly in from all over the world for Birmingham's four-day Festival of Quilts in August (tinyurl.com/festivalofquilts).

Perri Lewis

Landscape and portrait artist often described as the father of Jamaican painting

Albert Huie, who has died aged 89, was often described as the father of Jamaican painting. Although he produced folkloric genre pieces, his main concern was with his island's rich landscape and the physical beauty of its people.

His appreciation of beauty occasionally got him into trouble. A locally famous example is his voluptuous nude Miss Mahogany. This caused an uproar when it was first exhibited in Kingston in 1960, and a second uproar 40 years later when it featured in Air Jamaica's SkyWritings magazine. There was such an outcry that the edition of the magazine had to be withdrawn.

Huie, who was by then living in Baltimore, Maryland, was philosophical about the revival of the scandal: "The first time, I thought the people were backward because nude paintings had been shown throughout the world for years. I now just think these people [who complained] are limited."

He had perhaps more reason to feel slightly aggrieved by the way in which the intellectual elite of his own country had turned away from the kind of art he practised. In his latter years, the fashion in Jamaica was for "intuitives" – untutored artists, usually from a Rastafarian background, whose work resembles that of the voodoo artists to be found in Haiti. These were thought to be more representative of local sensibilities and, in particular, to reflect links with African culture – something that Huie could not claim to do.

He was born into a poor family during colonial rule and grew up in the town of Falmouth, Trelawny. The only member of his family who encouraged his ambition to be an artist was his grandmother Sarah. He used to scribble on her walls and floors with pieces of charcoal taken from her stove. He moved to Kingston, aged 16, and became a china painter, although his family wanted him to become a teacher. His first formal training in art came from the Armenian painter Koren der Harootian, then living in Jamaica. He was selected for shows of world art at the New York World's Fair (where he was a prizewinner) and the San Francisco Golden Gate exhibition, both in 1939.

Huie joined the circle of the sculptor Edna Manley and, from 1940 to 1944, served as a teaching assistant at the art classes she organised. In 1943 he exhibited his work at the Institute of Jamaica in Kingston, his first major solo exhibition and the first solo show given there to any living Jamaican artist.

In 1944, thanks to a British Council scholarship, Huie went to the Ontario College of Art in Canada. He later studied aesthetics at the University of Toronto. Two of his teachers in Canada, JEH MacDonald and Frank Carmichael, who had been founder members in 1920 of the Group of Seven, influenced his attitude towards landscape. Later that decade, when he moved to Britain, he went first to the Leicester College of Art and then the Camberwell School of Art in south-east London. Here he studied under Victor Pasmore and Claude Rogers, founder members of the Euston Road school, which emphasised the close observation of nature.

Later he settled in Canada, before moving to Baltimore. He received a number of Jamaican honours – the Institute of Jamaica Silver Musgrave medal (1958), the Gold Musgrave medal (1976), the Order of Distinction (1983) and promotion to Commander of the Order of Distinction (1992). One of his images, The Vendor, was also used on a Jamaican postage stamp.

In addition to Miss Mahogany, his best known images include The Counting Lesson, a portrait of a Jamaican girl, now on extended loan to the National Gallery of Jamaica, and Crop Time (1955) in the National Gallery's own collection. The Bahamian art historian Krista Thompson said of The Counting Lesson that it provides "a rare representational mirror of black Jamaica, allowing black viewers to attribute to themselves the signs of distinction, prestige and selfhood formerly reserved for the white colonial elite".

Huie was much loved for his genial personality and was always celebrated when he returned to Jamaica. He is survived by his wife, Phyllis, three daughters – Evelyn, Christine and Alicia – and three grandchildren.

• Albert Huie, artist, born 31 December 1920; died 31 January 2010

Theatre composer to sell Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto, which is predicted to fetch between £30m-£40m at auction

Andrew Lloyd Webber's charitable foundation is to make a second attempt to sell one of its most valuable possessions: a Picasso blue period portrait which Christie's today said would have the largest pre-sale estimate of any work ever auctioned in Europe.

The work, Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto and the party-loving sitter's languid expression may be explained by the painting's other title, The Absinthe Drinker. It has been estimated at between £30m and £40m and all proceeds will benefit Lloyd Webber's charitable foundation.

An attempt by Lloyd Webber to sell it in 2006 was aborted after lawyers for a German academic, Julius Schoeps, claimed the painting had been sold under duress to the Nazis in the 1930s. The claim that Schoeps, an heir of Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy, was the rightful owner was dismissed by a court in New York two years ago. In January it was revealed that a confidential new agreement had been reached between the heirs and Lloyd Webber's foundation, in which the former relinquished all their claims.

The settlement means that an extremely rich person or institution now has the chance to buy an enormously important masterpiece. Christie's president Jussi Pylkkänen called it "one of the most important works of art to be offered at auction in decades".

Lloyd Webber bought it in 1995 for £18m and his foundation has been encouraged to sell by recent high amounts raised at auction, not least the record £65m paid for a Giacometti sculpture in February.

Steven Morris on National Portrait Gallery giving unknown portraits to writers to make up stories

A new exhibition at the Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, explores the unique partnership of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert through their passion for arts

The Institute of Contemporary Arts does what it says on the box better than any other public gallery I can think of at the moment. Its closure would be a terrible loss to creativity

This Thursday at the ICA in London's Mall, artist and musician Billy Childish will be talking to curator Matthew Higgs about his exhibition there, which has been extended until May 2. I enjoyed this show, and I can't think of any other important public gallery that would currently harbour such a subversive figure – well, maybe the Serpentine, which is brilliant these days. It's the second intriguing exhibition at the ICA in the last few months: the other one that I enjoyed being Rosalind Nashashibi's films.

This venue, right now, puts on interesting, worthwhile explorations of contemporary art that are a little bit more engaged with what's happening than you might get in, say, the temporary space on the Tate Modern's riverfront, which always seems to host the most God-awful irrelevant art to be found anywhere in the global art scene.

The ICA, in this critic's humble opinion (I've always wanted to say "in this critic's humble opinion") is doing pretty much what it says on the box. Institute of Contemporary Arts. It's still doing what it did when Richard Hamilton and the Independent Group were here in the 1950s: putting forward stuff you might not see elsewhere, with a certain courage and indifference to the mainstream.

But everyone is saying the ICA is financially doomed. The place appears to be erupting behind the scenes with Mark Sladen, responsible for the shows I've praised, leaving, and it seems fashionable to opine that it doesn't matter, that the ICA is past its prime and superfluous, and God, wasn't it always a pain anyway.

I disagree. Being imperfect is part of its heritage of supporting the new. But to dismiss it is ignorant, philistine, and dangerous. The ICA has a powerful character and a permanent purpose. It is a precious part of British culture. It would be a tragedy to see it close – a terrible loss to creativity. It is a great British eccentric. It should highlight, not change, what it is: a place where the new is always incubating in ways that no one expected.

Save the ICA! We would miss it badly.

Celebrated in London, New York and now in a major show in Paris, Lucian Freud is one of our greatest living painters. But will his work stand the test of time?

In Lucian Freud's painting Two Irishmen in W11, the bare floorboards of his studio support a white armchair in which he has seated a big, ochre-faced man in a dark suit. Just behind him stands a younger figure with unkempt hair, a dazed expression and a tight-fitting black jacket. The relationship between the two is electrifying. Are they gangsters? But then, after a while, taking in the gold ring on the hand of the seated man, you realise they are, in fact, Renaissance clerics. Or that's how I interpret it. The older man is Freud's homage to the enthroned Popes painted by Raphael, Velázquez – and by his friend Francis Bacon. And the relationship with the younger man could be seen as his tribute to Titian's painting of Pope Paul III and his nephews.

Such grand and confident references to the Old Masters bring us straight to the question: how great a painter is Freud? Is 21st-century Britain truly harbouring an artist who can deal on equal terms with Titian and Rembrandt? It's a question clearly asked by a lavish new exhibition in Paris: banners bearing Lucian Freud's name have been slung over the shafts and girders of the Pompidou Centre, announcing a show that has the feel of France's bouquet to a living master. It comes hot on the heels of an equally reverent exhibition in New York. At 88, Freud is one of the most famous painters in the world. But is he the greatest – and if he is, how great is that?

Zebras, top hats and grand sofas

Lucian Freud: L'Atelier (the studio) is not a chronological retrospective but something more imaginative, an examination of Freud at work, in the secluded west London room where he poses his people. It starts and ends with films and photographs of him in the studio; its bare boards, battered walls, skylight and bits of furniture haunt the exhibition. Occasionally, there is a trip into the garden, a view from his window. Freud's studio never completely reveals itself – there is no panoptic joiner photograph to show us the entire place – but from the very start, it is there as an idea. At the entrance to the show, his 1944 picture The Painter's Room depicts a yellow and red zebra poking its neck into a magician's lair, in which a top hat has fallen beside an empty, grand sofa. This is an image of the studio as a place where anything might happen – and where the painter is not in control; the artist has vanished, his magician's hat abandoned, and in his place comes the zebra, an intruder over which Freud has no power.

The next painting lurches you forward 60 years, into our century, and into the startling reality of Freud's mature art. In David and Eli, painted in 2003-4, the risk and danger promised by that early work has gained an achieved menace. A man sprawls on a bed, between potted plant and slumbrous dog. The thing that holds your attention is this man's purple penis, flopping on pink testicles whose roundness is powerfully mirrored by the roundness of his buttocks, glimpsed in shadow between spread legs. Freud means you to stare: the painting revolves around a single point.

Peoples' bodies still appear to surprise Freud, like strange apparitions invading his environment. Another recent painting, The Painter Surprised By a Naked Admirer (2004–5), was getting laughs in Paris, affectionate ones – and quite rightly. It's a tantalising allegory of the artist in his studio: as Freud works in front of a paint-spattered wall – in an old man's jacket, with a face far changed from the handsome features of earlier self-images – a young woman sits at his feet and embraces his leg. The painting on his easel is this painting, unfinished. Has fantasy become reality? Or does painting the nude earn you the homage of the nude? Perhaps its meaning is that to put life on canvas is to be rewarded by life: unlike an abstract painter, Freud might be saying, an artist whose obsession is with real, living bodies will always be led back to actual, flesh-and-blood human contact.

There is a more brutal allegory of painting in Naked Portrait (1972–73). Here a woman lies on the studio bed while Freud's brushes, straight and long, bristle in the foreground. You don't need to be Lucian Freud's grandfather Sigmund to read a fairly direct meaning into those phallic tools. Baring all is the mythic adventure of the artist's studio: in the atelier, a muse strips for a painter – it's the old story. Except that, unlike most other artists who have made a speciality of the nude, Freud is equally at home painting male and female nakedness. And unlike Titian (whose Diana and Actaeon he recently championed on behalf of the National Galleries in London and Edinburgh), he is not usually seen as a beautiful artist. This, of course, is the trouble with Freud for some people. You can't dismiss his ability; but can you love his art? Put more crudely, can you desire his nudes?

In this exhibition there is a convincing answer to anyone who wonders why Freud paints bodies so that every blemish is magnified. The answer – looking closely at these paintings in the Pompidou's perfectly lit, spacious galleries – is that he does nothing of the sort. When he was young, Freud was a very precise draughtsman; in his later works, he rejects prosaic accuracy and instead paints flesh in mottled, powdered, massed, pockmarked, misted attacks of colour. His subjects' skin is not portrayed accurately so much as apprehended suddenly, and the violence has a function: to make us see mass, energy, life. It's a modern version of Titian's similarly elusive technique.

The potential doubt I might harbour about Freud, on a bad day, is that he is not imaginative enough. He paints what he sees: he is a much more traditional British painter than, say, Bacon, and has always stuck to conventional genres: the portrait, the nude, the landscape. Is he not mired in the same British smallness that William Blake once accused portraitists such as Gainsborough of suffering from? Just occasionally in this show, I found myself wishing Freud didn't spend quite so long getting the look of a potted plant just so.

But, again and again, this exhibition reveals that Freud is not restricted by his self-imposed limits. Reality liberates rather than imprisons him. In his hands, a portrait becomes profound and intellectually rich. His patient observations of people, animals (lots of great dogs here) and nature bring . If Bacon can resemble Turner, all drama and awe, Freud is our Constable, digging deep into his own patch, his studio in west London.

Paint as real as flesh itself

Freud's most challenging works are saved for the last room of the show. You feel almost dizzy looking up at the colossal head of Leigh Bowery, towering over you. In Leigh Under the Skylight (1994), Bowery's immense shape becomes movingly heroic as the painter lingers over every A view of bulge and ripple, posed naked on a pedestal. Bowery was a cornucopian source of wonder for Freud, a marvel of nature. His face glowers savagely, unforgettably. The scale of the painting â€“ almost three metres tall – is profoundly satisfying.

People are dwarfed as they walk among the paintings in this last room. Across the gallery, there is the prodigious immensity of benefits supervisor Sue Tilley, lying on her flowery sofa; there is Bowery sitting on a little red stool showing us his back; Tilley lying naked in front of an embroidering girl; Bowery displaying his genitals. The revelation is that, in spite of all the technocratic global homogenisations of our age, the human being remains a vast, irreducible mystery. Freud has said he wants to make his paint as real as flesh itself, so that you see a body before you. In these paintings, he achieves that. Force of personality has translated itself into sheer physical plenitude.

In Paris, you can compare Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping with Manet's Olympia, hanging in the Musée d'Orsay, or with Ingres's Odalisque in the Louvre. What do such comparisons tell you? That Freud's work will endure for centuries. This truth resounds throughout this superb exhibition, like the footsteps of a master walking into a studio where miracles are about to happen.

The Barbican's new exhibition features birds playing musical instruments – which leads to the occasional unexpected drama

There was a look of mild panic on the face of the steward at the Barbican's Curve gallery when she politely asked everyone to leave on Monday evening."I'm sorry, we are having a technical difficulty," she said.

Half an hour earlier, the only problem had been you couldn't hear the cymbals in Céleste Boursier-Mougenot's exhibition. They had microphones on them, but all you could hear was the guitar and bass. Oh, and the vocals; the soft, busy chatter of the live flock of zebra finches sharing the room with us. They are the players in Boursier-Mougenot's rock band, inadvertently plucking and scraping the strings of the guitars as they perch or take-off, or shuffle along the fretboard while preening.

At one point a finch appeared to be doing an experimental solo, as he weaved Marram grass around the bridge of a guitar; one man's Hendrix is another bird's doomed attempt at nest building. The loudspeaker in the far corner seemed to be a favourite place to take a crap, but hey, this is rock'n'roll.

Whatever Ozzy Osbourne did with a bat on stage doesn't come close to what happened next. To intakes of breath from the crowd, an egg was laid on one of the horizontally mounted Les Pauls. It rolled perilously close to the edge, but came to a halt. The collective wisdom seemed to be that no one should touch the egg: it would cause the mother to abandon it. So, we were ushered out while the bird expert was called. The band, meanwhile, played on.

"It's sort of abandoned anyway by not being laid in a nest," says naturalist writer and broadcaster Stephen Moss. But the perceived wisdom, he says, is misguided: "If you touch an egg in a nest, a bird will not abandon it. Birds have a strong instinct to incubate."

So what did happen? "The breeder has taken it back to the aviary for another bird to sit on," says a Barbican representative. "We've now installed boxes so if any of the birds want to nest they can. The gallery is not the right environment for baby birds, but the birds in the exhibition are happy in the environment."

I hope so. The Barbican says it has consulted both the breeders and City of London animal health inspectors to make sure this is not a damaging experience. But I can't help thinking I'd find accidentally being in an experimental rock band every time I got up to lay an egg a bit stressful.

Storytellers invent life histories for unknown subjects in National Portrait Gallery vaults

For more than half a century they have lain in a storeroom, unidentified and unseen by the hundreds of thousands of visitors to the National Portrait Gallery every year. But new life is being breathed into a collection of 16th and 17th century portraits of mystery figures thanks to a collaboration between the gallery and seven popular writers.

The authors, including the Booker prizewinner John Banville and Joanna Trollope, have examined pictures that the gallery could not hang in public because the subjects were anonymous. The writers have imagined the lives the sitters might have led and produced a short work of fiction around the images.

Banville takes a portrait of a handsome man on his deathbed and reinvents him as a much-admired officer, Launcelot Northbrook, who served with Cromwell's New Model Army. "The saying was that half the women of London went into mourning when, in 1643, he married," Banville writes.

Trollope imagines the subject of one of the paintings writing a diary entry for the day the painting was completed. "I am a little taken aback in the matter of my nose," writes Paxton Whitfield, a Cornish gentleman. "My nose has about it a shine and a hint of colour which would indicate a propensity to being fuddled. I am, in truth, seldom fuddled … I remonstrated with the painter."

Many pieces are melancholy. Tracy Chevalier, best known for her novel Girl with a Pearl Earring in which she weaves a story around the image of a young woman in a Vermeer masterpiece, repeats the trick with a rare 16th century sketch of a painfully pale woman. The painter, William, is "too honest", she has the figure say. "He did not hide how thin I look, the flesh melted from my cheeks, my brow so bony."

A second Chevalier story imagines a portrait of a handsome boy with flushed cheeks as the object of a male friend's desires. "Only George could call me Rosy … He managed to make the word tender."

The crime writer Minette Walters and the journalist and author Sarah Singleton also contributed pieces of writing.

There is some light relief in a story fantasy writer Terry Pratchett creates around a hopeless seafarer called Joshua Easement, who presents Queen Elizabeth with a "marvellous and intriguing animal" from the Americas. It turns out that Easement does not have a sense of smell and had given the queen a skunk. Tarnya Cooper, curator of 16th century collections at the National Portrait Gallery, said the writers had done something "incredible".

"They have looked into a portrait without knowing anything about it and judged from a gesture, from costume, from the look in someone's eyes what might be going on in their lives. I hope it will help people engage with portraiture in a new way."

Cooper said the 13 portraits were bought between 1858 and 1971. When the identity of the sitters was disproved or disputed, the pieces were removed from display or lent out.

Work continues on naming the sitters – Chevalier's "Rosy" has just been identified by students from Bristol University as Sir Robert Dudley, the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth I's favourite courtier, the Earl of Leicester.

The actor, writer and director Julian Fellowes said he jumped at the chance to be involved in the exhibition, Imagined Lives: Mystery Portraits, which opens today at the National Trust's Montacute House, near Yeovil in Somerset.

"The importance of portraits is that they remind us of the central truth that can get lost at times – that history is the reporting of the actions of real people," he said.

"There were real men and women making choices, calamitous or happy, throughout history."

Who are you? Re-imagined lives

The Life of Edmund Audley by Sarah Singleton

Discretion was the hallmark of this minor official's life, in both the professional and private realms. Something about the attitude of his hand suggests the keeping of a secret – of holding matters close to his heart.

Perhaps a clue lies in a recent discovery made during the renovation of the former Audley residence. A collection of elegant, intelligent but passionate poetry was found in a locked, wooden box underneath Elizabethan-era floorboards ... Did the respectable official harbour an intense, secret passion for a mistress in Flanders?

Was she considered unsuitable for marriage or did he meet her after making his matrimonial alliance with the Mayne family?

A Hand on My Shoulder by Tracy Chevalier

I am not sure why I agreed to let William draw me. I certainly did not want a painting of me, not now. "A drawing, then," he said. "That is all." He let me see the drawing today. Though he has done his best, William is too honest … I cannot seem to hide my thoughts – sadness and fear brim in my eyes like tears.

The hand of death has been heavy on my shoulder and left its mark. I still feel its weight, though it is now only a ghost – a ghost waiting to return one day.

From the Diary of Paxton Whitfield by Joanna Trollope

This day was my likeness completed. I am at last well satisfied. I had much argument with the painter, who would not have me stand with my left hand towards my breast, saying that such a gesture was reserved for artists alone when portraying themselves. But I held my ground in the matter. Indeed, I am known for holding my ground.

Blanche Vavasour, Lady Marchmont by Julian Fellowes

This portrait appears to have been commissioned to commemorate Blanche's sorrow. Dressed in widow's weeds, she wears a downcast look as well as a distinctive brooch, as witness to the tragic death of her husband, to whom she appears to have been defiantly loyal ... Blanche did not remarry, instead spending much of her time trying to rescue her husband's property which, as belonging to a traitor, had reverted to the Crown.

• The exhibition runs until October 2010 at Montacute House, near Yeovil, Somerset. A collection of the stories is available.

Dealer and collector with a passion for art nouveau and art deco

Victor Arwas, who has died of a heart attack aged 72, was a larger-than-life personality, even for the London art world. As a dealer and collector, his interests centred on the graphic and applied arts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As the 1960s reawakened an interest in art nouveau, he found a growing market for original artefacts.

No mere salesman, Victor had a true passion for his subjects. He identified with his chosen period to the extent that he was a modern incarnation of the aesthete. He followed in the footsteps of Oscar Wilde or Jean Des Esseintes, the anti-hero of French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans's 1884 bible of decadence, À Rebours (Against the Grain). Invariably wearing black, Victor was always ready with an aphorism. He reversed night and day. A midnight telephone call would be answered by Victor with a polite "good morning" as he began a session of writing and research.

Victor could trace his ancestry to a Sephardic Jewish family who had been chased out of Spain at the time of the Spanish Inquisition. Victor was born in Cairo and educated at the British school there and later at New York University. At the time of the Suez crisis, in 1956, he moved to London with his parents, and remained there for the rest of his life.

His father was a successful businessman, but from a young age Victor's interests lay in the world of art. In 1969, he opened his gallery, Editions Graphiques, in Clifford Street, off Bond Street in central London, where it has remained for more than 40 years. Victor had a conviction that London needed a gallery in the French style, which meant exhibiting together different sorts of art works from a particular period: sculpture, jewellery, interior design and graphic works.

In Victor's gallery, exquisite objects caught the light of glowing lamps by Tiffany and Émile Gallé. Bronze and ivory sculptures by Ferdinand Preiss and Demetre Chiparus (whose elegance and eroticisim he loved) crouched beside art nouveau sphinxes. On the walls hung mysterious and darkly erotic graphics by Félicien Rops, Aubrey Beardsley, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Alphonse Mucha and James Tissot.

Visitors to the gallery were unlikely to encounter Victor without an appointment. He was likely to be curating an exhibition in Japan or busy contributing to a catalogue, as he did for more than 30 exhibitions in eight countries, often lending works of art as well (the most recent being the Royal Academy's Wild Thing exhibition, featuring Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Eric Gill).

Victor was the author of major works including Art Deco Sculpture – Chrys- elephantine Statuettes of the 20s and 30s (1975), The Art of Glass: Art Nouveau to Art Deco (revised edition 1999), Art Deco (revised edition 2000) and Art Nouveau, the French Aesthetic (2002). He published catalogues on costume design and 1920s sculpture, and pioneered the appreciation of fin-de-siècle illustrators such as Rops, Paul César Helleu, Marcel Vertes, Théophile Steinlen and Louis Legrand.

Victor always took immense care over selecting the illustrations for his books and catalogues, and the results were works of art in themselves. He could communicate enthusiasm through his writings while still giving them the vigour of intellectual pursuit. He was also a source of funny and sometimes unprintable stories about the artists he admired.Victor did not restrict his exhibitions to his favourite period. He showed the work of the Brotherhood of Ruralists (including Peter Blake and Graham Ovenden) before they were well known. He was one of the first London dealers to have the courage to show the drawings and photographs of Hans Bellmer at a time when this German surrealist was widely considered to be a pornographer. This exhibition served as a launch for my book on Bellmer in 1985.

I was lucky enough to collaborate twice more with Victor. For my book Portrait of David Hockney (1989), he put on an accompanying exhibition of drawings, engravings and theatre models. For Sphinx, the Life and Art of Leonor Fini (2009), he once again put together a wonderful show of drawings, engravings and book illustrations. The opening of the Fini exhibition at Editions Graphiques in December last year was a typically crowded, spirited event and, sadly, his last public appearance.

Victor is survived by his wife and business partner, Gretha, whom he married in 1989.

• Victor Arwas, art dealer, collector, curator, art historian, born 29 June 1937; died 23 February 2010

Japanese film-maker and artist Takeshi Kitano has turned Paris's prestigious Fondation Cartier into a brightly coloured children's funfair

The Treasures of the Aga Kahn Museum – Masterpieces of Islamic Art exhibition opens at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin on 17 March 2010

Overanalysing art, as opposed to intuitively rating it, is fraught with peril

Some of you ask why reviewers (or this reviewer) are always just saying what's good and what's bad, what we like or don't like. According to critics of the critic, this is typical of, well – typical of me. But I beg to differ. It is actually typical of artists.

I've just been dipping into an interview that Lucian Freud gave the critic William Feaver at the time of the great Constable exhibition Freud selected in Paris in 2002. And guess what: when this famously reticent painter steps from behind his easel to express an opinion, you can hardly stop him rating his favourite artists. Among his true greats, Freud lists Constable (of course), Rembrandt, Corot, Ingres, Gericault and Courbet. He also cites Delacroix then takes it back, alleging that the artist is not deep enough. Elsewhere, Freud has been heard to praise Titian's Diana and Actaeon as one of the greatest paintings on earth.

So, here's one of the greatest artists alive, doing what we critics are accused of doing – rating the artists, making little lists of favourites, dismissing others on a second thought.

Evidently, it's not such an insensitive approach after all. In fact, in all the interviews with and biographies of great artists I have read, this is how they talk about art.

The truth is that overanalysing art, as opposed to intuitively rating it, carries its own dangers. You can convince yourself of anything by study and sympathy. A potential, though interestingly ambiguous, case in point is the National Gallery's current exhibition of Paul Delaroche. After years of laughing cynically at his Lady Jane Grey, I for one was convinced by this show that it has an honourable place in the story of French art. But am I being lured into overintellectualism? There is obviously a case for saying it's absurd to devote an entire exhibition to this of all the paintings in the National Gallery. My weekend visit to the Louvre, mentioned in my last blogpost, convinced me that French history painting deserves to be paid more attention by British art lovers and that Delaroche is far from being its greatest exponent.

And then again, how can Freud dismiss Delacroix? You see, this is where all proper discussion of art must begin – with "I like this, I don't like that". Otherwise it's just catalogue-speak.

Best known for his violent arthouse films, Takeshi Kitano is also an accomplished comic, prankster and painter. It's all fuel for his big new show in Paris, he tells Steve Rose

There's plenty of evidence that artists can make decent movies – Steve McQueen, Sam Taylor Wood, Julian Schnabel to name a few – but it rarely works the other way around. Looking at Dennis Hopper's goatee-stroking conceptual works, or Sylvester Stallone's hamfisted attempts at abstract expressionism, you suspect they were misled into overestimating their talents by a coterie of star-struck sycophants. So when it was announced last year that Takeshi Kitano, Japan's foremost film-maker, was holding an art exhibition in Paris, the alarm bells rang. Over the last 15 years, Kitano has turned out a series of spare, violent, existential thrillers, but increasingly his prime concern seems to be his own navel: last month saw the UK release of his 2005 film Takeshis', a wilfully confusing essay exploring the many facets of Kitano's personality. He followed that with the self-referential Glory to the Film-Maker, this time exploring the burden of being an important movie director. Variety magazine's damning verdict? "Hailed as Kitano's 8&½, pic weighs in closer to 1&¼".

And then there are the paintings. Anyone who has seen 1997's Hana-Bi, Kitano's best film, will be familiar with them: the movie is full of the director's own artworks. At best, they are colourful, crafted examples of what you might call "the naive style"; at worst, they are the sort of amateurish doodles you might find at a flea market. Yet here he is in Paris, with carte blanche to take over the Fondation Cartier, a prestigious steel-and-glass culture outlet on the Left Bank. Meanwhile, over at the Pompidou Centre, there is a parallel retrospective of Kitano's films; last week, France's minister of culture made him a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres – the country's highest artistic accolade.

In fact, Kitano's takeover turns out not to be an exhibition at all; it's a children's funfair. Some of his paintings have been turned into giant transparencies and stuck on the glass walls; there are jokey installations and interactive exhibits making fun of art. The centrepiece is a clanking contraption like a steam locomotive, turned by a giant pair of disembodied feet in tatty woollen socks; at its prow, there is an ordinary sewing machine stitching a little piece of material. The might of industry is harnessed to make a pointless little decoration.

Another installation, The Japanese Imperial Army's Secret Files, consists of scale models of animals turned into weapons: a whale with an aircraft runway strapped to its back, an elephant with a gun attached to its trunk, that sort of thing. There is a stall where participants can fire paintball guns at large cut-out dinosaurs and a machine that produces random Jackson Pollock-style paintings. There are strange chimera, animatronic puppets and scientific brainteasers. Far from being another journey into Kitano's psyche, it's generous, accessible, funny.

"I still haven't figured out why a prominent institution like the Fondation Cartier would want to hold an exhibition of my work. Not a clue," says a bemused Kitano, talking through his interpreter. Far from the shark-like killer he often plays in his movies, he is genial and expressive in person, verging on the cuddly. He is starting to look like the 63-year-old he is, even if his hair has blond highlights. "When people tell me I'm an artist, I say what? It's impossible for me to take the idea seriously. So I just wanted to have fun here. Psychologically, I'm still a 12-year-old boy."

A sideline in standup

The title of Kitano's exhibition is Gosse de Peintre, which you could translate either as "kid of painting" or "painter's kid". It's a reference not just to Kitano's juvenile side but also to the fact that his father was a painter and decorator. In his autobiography, Kitano wrote of being embarrassed by his father's lowly trade, and at having to help paint the houses of his classmates. He is now generally sceptical about contemporary or conceptual art, or indeed anything too theoretical. He says he has never heard of Damien Hirst, although he is friends with Japanese pop art mogul Takashi Murakami. "The thing about art for me is that you can go on theorising your work forever, because it's open to interpretation," he says. He points to his steam engine contraption as an example. "I can give a straightforward answer: it's just funny, isn't it? Or I could say it's a very ironic comment on ecology and the advances of technology, in that human beings waste all these resources like iron, coal, plastic and whatnot, just to sew this little thing."

He agreed to the exhibition because he had been making a film about art, recently released in France. Entitled Achilles and the Tortoise, it is a black comedy about a terminally self-absorbed artist, who goes through every style in the book before realising, at the end of his life, that he's simply no good. Again, all the paintings featured in the film are by Kitano. He says he has no illusions about his own talents. "I paint for the sheer joy of painting," he says. "I have never sold any of my paintings. I'd rather give them to people for free."

To Japanese audiences, Kitano's populist mischief-making will be nothing new. To the west, he might be Takeshi Kitano, respected film-maker and actor; back home, he is better known as "Beat Takeshi", ubiquitous television celebrity, Japan's answer to Chris Tarrant. He has been a household name there since the 1980s, initially for his frank, fast-talking standup comedy. Now, he hosts eight TV shows a week, including a maths quiz, a Harry Hill-style clips show, even an art-based variety show called Anyone Can Be Picasso. He is regularly ticked off by the censors for pushing the boundaries of decency, and his audiences love him for it. But until recently Japanese audiences have largely ignored Kitano's movies, which only found an audience when they were praised by European critics. He saves his arthouse auteur persona for when he's overseas. It's a double life even Clark Kent would struggle to get his head around.

According to his producer, Masayuki Mori, who has known him for 30 years, Kitano's career is like a pendulum. "The more serious he gets in his films, the stronger he swings back to the other side, and the more absurd and stupid his TV shows get. He really needs to do both to be him." Kitano won the Golden Lion at the 1997 Venice film festival for Hana-Bi; the next thing he did on television was parade down the streets of Tokyo in his underwear. You wouldn't have caught Kurosawa doing that. Or even Chris Tarrant.

It probably says more about us than him that Europeans tend to prefer Kitano's dark, violent, mysterious side. But he is the first to observe that comedy often simply doesn't translate as well as "matters of life and death". To Kitano, there is no great contradiction in his work, anyway. "Humour is like violence. They both come to you unexpectedly, and the more unpredictable they both are, the better it gets. That's how it works. If somebody slips on a banana, it's funnier if it's someone high up, like a king or an emperor, than if it's an ordinary man. So this demonic character is shared between comedy and violence. They both lurk in the most unpredictable moments."

After the crash

Perhaps his Paris exhibition will finally fill in some of the gaps in Kitano's divided personality – except that the pendulum swings the other way there, too. He might poke fun at art, but painting clearly has a therapeutic, even spiritual dimension for him. He took it up in 1994, while recovering from a serious motorcycle accident. He hit a crash barrier and suffered severe head injuries – the right side of his face still bears the scars. The way Kitano tells it, a piece of bone threatened to enter his brain. "The surgeon said I might go crazy if they didn't operate. I thought, 'Good. I might become a crazy painter – like Picasso or Van Gogh!'" Those early paintings appear in Hana-Bi, as the work of a character who is coming to terms with being paralysed after a shooting incident. Mori, the producer, later tells me Kitano has no memory of the crash and gets events mixed up. The surgeon did want to operate, but to restore facial movement on his right side. Kitano refused, preferring to accept his fate.

Death, violence and suicide are constant preoccupations in his work. In several of his films, Kitano's character kills himself in some way, or at least contemplates it; he has described his motorcycle accident as an "unconscious suicide attempt". He has also regularly committed career suicide, it seems, by making a wilfully unappealing comedy just as he is starting to get serious critical acclaim. Acknowledging this, he has referred to his recent films as part of an ongoing "creative destruction" of his career, and it's difficult to tell whether he is joking or not.

Either way, that stage of his life is coming to an end, he says. His next movie, Outrage, will return to more familiar yakuza thriller territory. "Psychologically as well as physically, during the last two or three films I've been going through the transition from being a middle-aged man to being an old man. It's been excruciating, but I think I've survived it."

Does he feel reborn? "No. I feel ... fermented," he says with a laugh. With his restless intelligence, it's hard to imagine Kitano ever describing himself as settled, but he seems to have struck a happy equilibrium – part wise old man, part 12-year-old kid.