He also kept alight the modernist flame under Stalin: we should see more of his work.
This kind of exhibition has perhaps a duty to the public to show masterpieces, but the side paths of the avant-garde also yield treasures. For instance, Jean Fautrier, whose paintings are rarely shown in Britain. Four are here, all sensitive colour, texture, massy presence. Also, within this first section, is another self-contained show. Seen from a distance, his painting of athletes on a running track is reminiscent of Muybridge and Bacon, and it’s no surprise to discover that Deineka (1899-1969) worked for a while as a photographer. The opening theme is Reality-Distortion, in which Picasso and Matisse set the pace Brancusi edges in beside the Cubists and the Futurists. The Expressionist maenads of Emil Nolde greet Kirchner’s marvellous high viewpoint depiction of the Berlin Victory monument, watched sardonically, sorrowfully, by Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s Head of a Thinker.

Then around the corner comes the “recall to order” of the 1920s and 1930s, and one of the surprises of the exhibition: Alexander Deineka. Each in itself could be a separate exhibition: the scale of this visual and intellectual feast is awe-inspiring. The show is divided into four sections, vast themes with fluctuating boundaries, which serve to group the works only roughly but allow for fascinating and fruitful juxtapositions. This month, Rosenthal celebrates 20 years as Exhibitions Secretary at the Royal Academy in London, and he has known and worked with Joachimides for even longer. This epic exhibition was supposed to come to London, but was prevented by last-minute uncertainties It’s our loss.

But you know it is not quite what they originally had in mindn’Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt’ is at the British Museum, London WC1 (0171-636 1555) To 20 July. If Modernism is the driving force in the visual arts this century, it’s appropriate that Berlin should play host to its first great survey. The city is a powerhouse of renewal, a building site of collaged styles, seeking to make a new identity out of past division. “The Age of Modernism: Art in the 20th Century” includes over 400 works of art by 130 artists and is staged in Berlin’s monumental Martin-Gropius-Bau. Here is the history of Modernism from 1907 to the present day, as interpreted by the exhibition’s organisers Norman Rosenthal and Christos Joachimides.

These people did not want to die and these images are the spells which they wove against their own extinction.They seem to watch you with an air of melancholy and not a little resentment, this misanthropic tribe of the dead trapped behind glass. The galleries of the museum are corridors filled with ghosts You brush past them, but not easily. There’s the handsome young man with his hair cut in the fashionable Trajanic fashion; the long-faced woman with her gold ball earrings, a single wet highlight of white paint suspended in each; the young athlete, with his head of tight black curls, down on his upper lip; the swarthy priest of Serapis with the entrancing eyes and the seven-pointed star of gold in his hair …Each one detains you, as if willing you to imagine him or her back into life It is a form of immortality, perhaps. Despite that, they cannot easily be mistaken for more trivial or light-hearted forms of portraiture. These faces are too severe for that – too earnest, too naked and too alone before whatever vastness it was that they believed themselves about to confront.In the introduction to her book The Mysterious Fayum Portraits, the painter and scholar Euphrosyne Doxiadis recalls the experience of being locked into a storage room in a museum in Berlin with a couple of dozen of these intense faces for company: “I felt a very strange sensation – that I was not alone.

None of these portraits was still on its mummy, and yet they transmitted the energy of human beings.” Seen in daylight, in the company of others, they are no less spooky. Most have long been detached from the mummies to which they were once fixed, which seems a particularly brutal severance of art from its original context. Others were carried out, more deliberately, in cold or “punic” wax, a medium close to egg tempera which tended to produce more idealised and statuesque likenesses. Not for some 14 centuries would Western painters, in the age of Masaccio and Van Eyck, start to recover the knowledge of how effectively, and how variously, paint can be made to stand in for living, breathing individuals.Altogether around 1,000 “Fayum” portraits have been excavated, many of them not from Fayum at all but from a range of sites stretching from the Nile Delta more than 300 miles up river to Panopolis Some 200 have been assembled at the British Museum. Some of the portraits were carried out in hot wax, a medium which required great speed of the artist and which produced, in the finished works, a powerful impression of the malleability of flesh and the fleeting nature of human expression. Later examples begin to show a stiffening of the human face once more into an inscrutable icon.