A Walk Through British Art (Part 2: Rose Wylie)

About fifteen years ago, I was living in Tokyo. While I was there, there was a big buzz about a visiting exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum: Treasures of the National Gallery, a 'Best of' British art from said gallery back in London. So I decided to  pop along to Ueno Park and check it out.

The Japanese are art-mad, and by the time I got there, there was a queue twenty or thirty deep stretching back a hundred yards or more. It took well over an hour to get in. But it was worth the hassle. On display was an eye-poppingly brilliant collection of British art from the fifteenth century onwards. It took in a whole range of artists and artistic movements, some well-known (step forward, pre-Raphaelites), some less so (viz. a transcendant selection of Samuel Palmers), each room offering one incredible relevation after another. Okay, the final gallery, after the succession of previous glories, suggested twentieth century British art might be just a tad undernourished. But even so, this was one exhibition to send you home in a state of mad elation.

I wish I could say the same for the A Walk Through British Art at Tate Modern. If ever there was a need for tougher editing, this is it. Slapping art on a wall simply because it is representative of a particular style or period is not my idea of intelligent design. The paintings may be rare and hardly ever seen. But often there's a very good reason for that. By the time I'd reached probably the largest room in the show, where a handful of pre-Raphaelites jostled for attention beside a cornucopia of obscure Victorian academicians, I was running, rather than walking. At least in my mind.

It was at this point that I took a sharp left, and found myself (this is starting to sound like Alice in Wonderland) in a room full of joyfully unsophisticated, large-scale paintings by Rose Wylie, an artist whose name rang only the vaguest of bells. The contrast with what had gone before could not have been more extreme. It was as though someone had slipped me some sort of massively benign psychedelic. My previous antipathy to 'bad' painting, and a lack of basic draughtsmanship, long and tenaciously held, disappeared out of the window. (Okay, there wasn't a window, but you know what I mean.)

The freshness of Wylie's work, and its uninhibited closeness to the kind of art you might see hanging on a kindergarten wall, gives it a playful innocence, particularly blown up to this kind of gigantic size. The colours are bold and roughly applied; the figures clumsy yet oddly potent. Some paintings feature a scrawl of writing, of the sort you might find on any playground wall. Surrounded by Wylies, I began to feel strangely fresh and innocent myself. There was no need false reverence or serious head nodding. This was art as fun, a rowdy counter-punch to the mass hangings I had just experienced.

All the more astonishing, then, to learn that Wylie is not some precocious ingenue fresh from art school, but a 70-plus veteran who has been toiling almost unrecognised for most of her working life. That she is finally getting her just deserts is heart-warming; but it is kind of poignant to know that this belated adulation will be hers to enjoy for a limited period only. Then again, at least - unlike van Gogh - she is still alive.

So, thank you, Rose Wylie, for reviving my faith in painting just when I was ready to run screaming from the gallery. 

Onwards and upwards, artsters!