A Walk Through British Art (Part 4: Faves & Raves)

Greetings artsters!

Here are a few of the paintings I've been talking about in the past few blogs. You can see these (and hundreds more) at BP's Walk Through British Art exhibition at Tate Britain. You'll need plenty of stamina, and some tough walking boots. Worth it though, despite some hangable choices. If you know what I mean.

Girls Running on Pier, Philip Wilson Steer, c1888

The Gleaning Field, Samuel Palmer 1833

Reclining Figure, Henry Moore, 1967

The Fall of London, James Boswell, 1933 

(from a set of drawings that are oddly prescient of the Blitz)

Titania & Bottom, Henry Fuseli, c1790

Autumn Composition, Flowers on a Table, Ivon Hitchens, 1933

Lady Charlotte Hill, Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1782

Countess of Kildare, Sir Peter Lely, 1632

Mrs Siddons, Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1804

A Walk Through British Art (Part 3)

Art! What are you? Are you a thing that can be hung on a wall? Or are you something that can be hung and a wall and dribbled down it to end up as a sort of geometric heap on the floor?

An example of the latter in one of the later galleries in the mammoth Walk Through British Art exhibition at Tate Britain (sorry, artsters, but I failed to make a note of the culprit in this instance) got me thinking about the way, in the post-modern era (so-called), art has divided itself in two. On the one hand, you have the kind of work that remains, in the old-fashioned sense, hangable. On the other, the kind of art that you wouldn't, generally speaking, want cluttering up your living room.

You know the sort of stuff I mean. A pile of bricks. Big squares of animal fat. A shark in a tank. An unmade bed. Okay, you wouldn't hang any of those things on your wall, anyway. But you get my drift. What bothers me about this stuff is that it is made primarily to be shown in a gallery. And this to my mind is immediately problematic. Not just because of its elitism (its removal from the public realm in the ordinary sense), but because by being made essentially for a gallery scenario, it is ipso facto being made with the art market in mind. It is product. It is often very clever, funny, controversial, provocative product. But that is what it is. That's why a lot of it ends up sitting alone warehouses of the sort that (ironically) burned down, in the case of Mr Charles Saatchi. These places are the art equivalent of bank vaults: depositories where swag is stashed in the hope that its value will increase over time, like Nazi gold in a Swiss bank. 

Doesn't always work out that way, of course. Damien Hirst appears to have overplayed his hand by swamping the market (and by foolishly revealing with his Wallace Collection show a year or two back how rubbish he is at 'proper' painting). As a result, the value of that spot meisterwork you snapped up a few years back has probably gone a bit arse-up. And that shark you've got festering in the garage? Better call in the taxidermists. Sucked in? Well, it's not really for me to say, artsters. Just be careful when you part with hard-earned cash for something less than fifty years old.

There I go, rambling off-piste again. Or am I? The thought that recurred, as I made my way through the modern section of the BP rehang, was just how arbitrary the selection of 20th and 21st century paintings was, the aforementioned dribble painting being a case in point. Likewise, Sarah Lucas's staggeringly silly Pauline Bunny, effectively a pair of stuffed tights sitting on a chair with a couple of floppy 'ears' hanging over a headless torso. I know there are serious points to be made about how women are viewed in society, but this isn't it. Would the same choices be made when a similar exhibition is put together in ten years' time? Or will the rickety roundabout of taste have moved on, leaving much of the work on show here to languish in the warehouse of oblivion?

We will have to see. Meanwhile, there was some notable stuff on view amidst the dross. The flash angularity of sculptor Anthony Caro was an obvious and rightful inclusion, even though I nearly decapitated myself on one of his girderlike excressences. Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein, were likewise well represented, although the real revelation for me was a couple of tiny, colour lithographs of reclining figures Moore did late in his career. Made me think he should have dabbled in colour more often (no pun intended), because these were genuinely exquisite. 

So, yes, as exhibitions go, this is a tad over-ambitious, and somewhat flawed in choice and execution. But there are plenty of gems amid the trash, more than you can realistically hope to take in, in one viewing. It'll be on for a while, so my advice is to pop back a few times, have a coffee and pastry in the gallery cafe, and focus on a few rooms at a time.

As for me, on my first go-round, the real standout was Sickert's small but atmospheric streetscape, Cafe des Tribunaux, Dieppe, which captures the magical heat and light of a summer afternoon so perfectly you feel an overwhelming urge to step right into the scene, cross the street, order an iced tea at the Tribunaux bar, and sit for a while, watching a vanished world go by.

A votre sante, artsters!

(Selection of top AWTBA images, next posting)

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!

A Walk through British Art (Part One)

It was only when I got lost trying to find my way from Victoria Station to Tate Britain that I realised how long it is since I was last there. Not that I mind being Lost in Pimlico. Wandering around London's posher areas, Notting Hill, say, or Chelsea, is one of my favourite pastimes. All those elegant Georgian terraces, mysterious mansions half hidden behind implausibly high walls (who lives there?) and small enclaves of enticingly expensive boutique shopping, cafes and restaurants with eye-poppingly pricey menus.  It's one of the things that makes living in London worthwhile.

But I digress. After twenty minutes or so of fruitless rambling, I admitted (humiliating) defeat and fished out the mini A-Z I keep stashed in my backpack. I wasn't far off, as it happened, and a brisk five minutes later, found myself in sight of the venerable Thames-side institution. It's a big old neo-classical pile that still has bomb pockmarks on its western wall and is currently entered via a basement on the side, rather than through the original, river-facing grand portico. A 'reshaped' main entrance is due to open later this year. Apparently.

So why was I here? Well, I had hoped to visit the Patrick Caulfield show, and/or the Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde, but as both charged heftyish entrance fees, I decided to give them a miss. I'm not a huge Caulfield fan, anyway (although I'm open to persuasion), and I don't know about you, but I'm a bit pre-Raphaelited out. I love a lot of their stuff. Holman-Hunt's The Haunted Manor, a tiny oil dominated by exquisitely rendered foliage and running water, with said manor glimpsed (paradoxically, in sunlight) in the background, is one of my all-time favourite paintings. But there is something relentlessly overwrought and contrived about a lot of the PR oeuvre. Why (after being out of fashion for a century or more) do they now receive such attention? Could it be because there was nothing else 'radical' happening on this side of the channel at the time, so we have to 'big up' the PRs just so we can say, 'Look, we were revolutionary too.' Well, yes, if drawing your inspiration from five hundred years ago is 'revolutionary'. Certainly, the PR movement was 'out there' in terms of its reaction against established Royal Academy norms. But viewed against the wider momentum towards modernism, it's little more than a diversion.

Are you getting the feeling I'm putting off writing about what I actually did end up seeing at the Tate? You're right. Having decided not to part with £14 a shot for either the Caulfield or the PRs, I opted for the pocket-friendly (ie.free) BP's A Walk Through British Art. Though feted by some, this turned out to be a bit of a slog. Too much of it. Too many rooms. Too sombre. Too much brown. And too much art that is just there because it is 'representative' of a certain time and place. Some of it shockingly bad (the apotheosis of 'bad art', John Martin's high kitsch Plains of Heaven, for instance, shrieks bad taste in a riot of incadescent colour). Some brilliant stuff, too, inevitably. Tucked away, and almost unnoticeable, two tiny but magical Samuel Palmers, Coming from Evening Church (1830) and Gleening Field (1833), for instance. Some wonderful, lifesized portraits of aristocratic beauties of yesteryear, too. Lely's frankly saucy-looking Countess of Kildare, in daringly low-cut satins and silks (1679), for one. Likewise, Joshuah Reynolds' Lady Charlotte Hill, memorable for her knowing half-smile and casual way with a symbolic offering, and Thomas Lawrence's portrait of 18th century Welsh tragedienne Sarah Siddons, who cuts an imperious figure in her drawing room, magnificent in voluminous black velvet dress (brilliantly realised by Lawrence's trompe d'oeil brushwork) and a bustline that appears to have a life of its own. How dare we interrupt her?

Best of the bunch though: George Romney's Lady Hamilton as Circe (c.1782). Fresher, and less formal than most studio works of the time, this image of Ms Hamilton as a teenager, doe-eyed and eager, loose shift falling from her shoulders in a cascade of fluid brushstrokes, makes it immediately obvious why she left a trail of broken hearts and besotted lovers across the late 18th century. But more than that, here is the image of a decidedly 'modern'-looking young woman, almost photographic in the directness of its engagement with the viewer. A snapshot, in other words, an 18th century Polaroid that appears to sense a new world, and a new way of interpreting the world, just around the corner.

More to follow, artsters!

Saints Alive: Michael Landy at the National

I was born and brought up in Barry in South Wales, a former coal port and seaside town that's probably best known these days as a location for hit TV romcom Gavin & Stacey. Back when I still wore short trousers, myself and various pals used to visit an amusement arcade on the promenade over at Barry Island. Inside was a selection of fairly morbid kinetic creations in glass cases. You would put a penny in the slot, and strange, rather sick things would happen. Our favourite was the electric chair. You put your money in, and a metal cap would lower onto the head of a doll dressed in prison garb, lights would flash and the chair would jiggle up and down. I never realised being an executioner could be so much fun.

Walking around Michael Landy's Saints Alive exhibition at the National  Gallery put me in mind of these creaky and rather sinsister old arcade installations. Inspired by Renaissance paintings of saintly goings-on in the Gallery collection, and evoking the medieval fascination for collecting and exhibiting saintly body parts, Landy's surreal constructions of fibre glass and bits of scrap metal clank and whirr on demand, although (with one exception) you don't have to put money in a slot to make them work. You just hit a pedal in the floor, and the saints crank into masochistic gear, beating breasts and foreheads, stabbing hearts and waving heated irons. You have to laugh, but it's an uneasy mirth, knowing that what you're cackling at is in reality not very funny at all. Unless you really are a sadist.

Strongly influenced by the work of pioneering kinetic sculptor Yves Tinguely, with a bit of Heath Robinson and Monty Python thrown in (whatever you do, don't mention the Spanish Inquisition), these are among the most improbable constructions you are ever likely to see. But is it art? Well, if art is meant to engage you on many different levels, and leave you asking some serious questions about (gulp) the meaning of life, then, yes it is. All this torture and masochism may look like historical eccentricity now. But we shouldn't get too complacent. Turn on the television news, and it's clear that, when it comes to inflicting pain in the name of crackpot ideas, we are not quite out of the woods, yet.

 Saints Alive is running at the National Gallery, London, until November, and it's free to get in.

Pax vobiscum, artsters!

Auerbach & the Old Masters (espresso optional)

It's not easy to find, but hidden in the bowels of the National Gallery is an espresso bar, on the walls of which is a set of Frank Auerbach drawings of Old Masters from the Gallery collection. These are not new. They were originally completed for an exhibition back in 1995. Why they are now on the walls of the espresso bar is unclear, but I'm not complaining. They're exceptional. 

Auerbach has taken works by a broad range of painters, Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, Caravaggio, Degas, Constable and Turner among them, and reinterpreted them in a vigorous celebration of expressive penmanship. Each painting is given two or three interpretations, for the most part using felt-tip either on its own, or over a watercolour wash, or counter-pointed with pencil or crayon. Some of the drawings are reduced to near abstraction, some verge on caricature, others are more considered, but always pulsing with an energy that sucks you in, and smacks you around the head a bit. That's great art for you. It does that.

My guess is if Rembrandt were to saunter in, order an espresso and peruse this exhibition, he would recognise a kindred spirit. The dramatic juxtapositions of darkness and light, the stabs of thick black line over scrapings of colour: this is high drama, relentless and positively Jacobean in its insistence on violent catharsis. Art with a capital 'A', in other words. Cursory in some ways, and not always successful. But dynamic and fearless and reckless in a way that is all to rare in the cold and calculating world of contemporary art.

And you don't even have to buy an espresso if you don't want to.

Ciao for now, artsters!

Donald Harris Prints and Drawings at Pistachio's

Where I live, in Brockley, South East London, there are a lot of artists. They seem to be attracted to this part of the capital. The great 19th century painter and engraver, Samuel Palmer, lived nearby. Goldsmith's Art College is just up the road. And if you climb the hill up to the top of Hilly Fields Park, which looks down over Brockley and Ladywell, you can see fas far as Kent. I sometimes think you could see as far as Calais, if the clouds didn't keep getting in the way. It's the kind of view that seems to have artists in mind, and certainly helps to give the area a sense of being part of London, but not quite of it. If you know what I mean.

Looking the other way, you get a good view of the Shard, London's newest and tallest architectural extravagance, glass facaded and jaggedy-tipped, rising in the distance like an abandoned Egyptian artefact, alternately shrouded in cloud and reflecting light like a garden mirror. Personally, I like it (although there are plenty who don't) for its arrogance and simplicity, and its slender elegance. I was waiting for six months or more for them to finish the thing before I realised that that was it. There never was going to be a point. The whole thing is pointless. Literally, if not figuratively.

You get a great view of the Shard from Pistachio's, a cafe that opened on Hilly Fields last year, replacing what used to the the loo. Every now and then they exhibit work by local artists, and the quality is surprisingly excellent. I say 'surprisingly', but given what I said in the opening paragraph, I suppose it shouldn't be surprising at all, given the number of working artists that populate the area. The current exhibition, by veteran painter, etcher and lithographer Donald Harris, is a case in point. The works on show are all monochrome, either etchings or pen and ink, with a couple of linocuts thrown in. The presentation's a bit higgledy-piggledy, but then what do you expect? This is a cafe, not an art gallery. The work itself, from tiny, scratchy landscapes, to larger, moodier studies of trees with boughs all twisted and overwrought, is quietly impressive. It carries echoes of an earlier, less frivolous time, when young men went to war and didn't come back. Hints, too, of Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore (his drawings), Walter Sickert, and the Arts & Crafts movement of an earlier century. David Hockney should check it out (see previous blog). Coffee's good, too.

Ciao for now, art fiends!