He can still turn on the old brilliance, and the old heroic arrogance, from time to time. But the touch gradually becomes much freer.And therefore wilder? You’d get that impression from what’s sometimes said. “A charged, violent, emotional style”; “violent and pessimistic … crude and Expressionistic” (quoted from two general surveys). I don’t see that at all, and the judgement seems to follow a simple stereotype. Free brushwork plus German equals violent, agonised, apocalyptic But there’s more than one way to lose self-control. You can lose it for the sake of added self-assertion, to fill the world with your wildness.

Or you can lose it to resign mastery, to allow that the self and the world are not there for the grasping. That is Corinth’s way in the work from the Twenties: the negative way. If it was mere stylistic opportunism, he found something rare.Look at the last death-facing self-portraits from 1924 and 1926. They’re not heroic, but nor – it would come to the same thing – are they raging or agonised. There are no poses or gestures, either in the figure or in the paint, which goes on in dumb and almost hesitant jabs and blodges These are Corinth’s first truly inquiring pictures.

They’re self-portraits of someone who isn’t sure who he is, admitting a doubt that the earlier ones so insistently denied, who’s willing now to present a faintly ludicrous character.1924. The figure fills the frame in a rather oppressive way, but not to dominate so much as to bring forward this lump of a body and head with its bulbous, gently battered features, materialising uncertainly into a nearly oafish expression: is that what I look like? 1925. It’s closer- up on the head, which lurks against the picture edge, and turns to us in three-quarter view, showing a sharply hollow cheekbone and big, sunken eyes, one peering with anguished attention, the other losing all focus. The mouth doesn’t know what it’s doing, as if trying to form a forgotten word. And, in a mirror behind, the face is reflected in profile – with an expression between dead calm and dead vacancy. “A unique act of leave- taking from the world,” his widow called it in her memoir.

It is a heart- breaking picture.When you come to these final works – and see also the portrait of Georg Brandes, the Cowshed, the Still-Life with Flowers, Skull and Oakleaves, and almost all the late prints and drawings – you see the point of Corinth. The preceding work becomes interesting mainly because it’s by the same man who did these. (Having it there makes for contrast and comparison, which is useful, but comparison with other Expressionists would be more useful, to show the difference.) So these pictures deserve to be famous now, to be circulated. It’s a pity the Tate has chosen one of the earlier self-homages for the poster it has on sale To 4 May, Tate Gallery, Millbank, London SW1 (0171-887 8730). Even today, the exotic shapes of pots by Lucie Rie and Hans Coper, Britain’s greatest contemporary ceramicists, are an aesthetic challenge. On show at the Barbican, Rie’s slender bottle vases with flared lips, Coper’s spades, thistles and arrowheads, exude an arrogance that seems to forbid actually putting anything in them – although collectors have urged me to fill my Coper barrel vase with gladioli. The fact is, this quiet and mysterious pair, who potted alongside one another for 12 years, were out of place.