DESPITE its rather pretentious title Poets And Lovers the National Gallery’s major Van Gogh exhibition is one of the highlights of 2024.

Although he never joined a political group, Van Gogh devoted his life to expressing his empathy with workers and peasants coupled with a disgust for social injustice. He worked from 1880, yet his best known works date from 1888 to his untimely death in 1890.

It was a pleasure to see paintings such as Starry Night over the Rhone, The Sower and his own Bedroom. The latter’s rough-hewn pine furniture, plain blue distempered walls and uncarpeted floor reflect his desire for raw simplicity which critiqued the contemporary bourgeois taste for ornate decoration. He gave such love of nature, humanity and culture that it is tragic that his professional and personal life were unfulfilled during his lifetime.

Entangled Pasts 1768-Now at the Royal Academy explored the fundamental themes of human exploitation, oppression and injustice. Life-size portraits of richly dressed royalty assisted by black slaves, were contrasted with works by contemporary black British artists.

Sonia Boyce’s Lay Back, Keep Quiet And Think What Made Britain So Great consists of three large, narrow panels depicting colonial exploitation with the fourth being a self-portrait in which Boyce returns our gaze with a quizzical, accusatory stare. No need for words.

Hew Locke’s Armada, also at the Royal Academy, was a stunning installation of a flotilla of life-size boats, dominated by a rusting cargo ship surrounded by smaller boats and a flimsy raft, it echoed social disparities.

His current exhibition What Have We Here at the British Museum is a clear-eyed indictment of colonialism by one with personal knowledge of its exploitation and cruelties.

Born in Britain to a Guyanese father and British mother, he travelled by ship between the two countries since childhood, so that boats and ships feature large and also act as metaphors for the travel through life.

With characteristic modesty, Locke uses this commission to curate objects, many from the museum’s collection rather than with his own works, to demonstrate the often submerged or unquestioned links between culture, politics and history.

The display of a Guinea coin, a currency named after the former British colony from which its metal is mined, is worth one pound and one shilling rather than one pound to price luxury items such as art to suggest exclusive cultural and social status.

He said: “I want to bring people beautiful objects with awkward histories, and smaller objects easy to walk by, that are just as compelling when you stop and look.”

Tate Britain’s Artists International Association (AIA) is a display rather than an exhibition and so is sadly devoid of a catalogue or even an explanatory leaflet and is tucked away on the ground floor apart from the main galleries.

Initiated by the communist Cliff Rowe in 1933, the AIA was inspired by the cultural policies of the USSR, where he worked as an illustrator from 1930-33. The AIA challenged the parochial British art world dominated by Roger Fry’s art for art’s sake doctrine.

It was stylistically inclusive with members ranging from Modernist pioneers such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth to traditional realists such as Percy Horton and Clive Branson. It was committed to art’s social responsibility and as a weapon for social change.

The Hungarian Peter Peri and the New Zealander James Boswell were proof of its internationalism, yet most members were British, one being the communist Patrick Carpenter, and it was a great pleasure to see a facsimile of his large painting The Death of Gabriel Peri, depicting the Nazis’ murder of l’Humanite’s editor during the Paris occupation.

Carpenter was proud of this being his “first really serious socialist painting,” painted in a precise realist manner. Sadly almost all his work was lost in a flood, and as a working-class postman’s son, he lacked to social contacts to support and promote his work.

Finally, what a joy to see the British Museum’s Picasso Printmaker. While most of the prints are black and white, Still Life Under the Lamp is a riot of bright red, yellow and green against black. Created late in his long life, it bursts with vitality and hope.