Category: Art Reviews

“I work” the great Catalan painter Joan Miró once said, “Like a gardener, or a vine grower. Things come slowly. At a certain point you have to cut”. As the splendid exhibition of his work at Tate Modern, “The Ladder of Escape” (until Sept 11) demonstrates, Miro’s work did indeed develop organically and steadily, and he pruned away a great deal of excess over the years. At one point he even held a bonfire.

The “Burnt Canvases” (1973) which hang towards the end are dramatic evidence of that. They are works created out of paint and canvas – and then partially destroyed by fire. It was a gesture typical of Miró (1893-1983) in its anarchistic extremity, and one that – like the other works that form a startling conclusion to the Tate exhibition – suggest that he was just as radical at 80 as at 30, if not more so.

These works are typical in another way: they were burnt, as the catalogue explains, carefully, “a wet mop was used for control and a blowtorch for concentration on specific areas.” That is the paradox of Miró. On the one hand, he was a fiery pioneer of modernism, boldly plunging into areas of ever bolder, starker abstraction. On the other, he was meticulous and industrious (both, like anarchism, typical Catalan qualities).

His starting-point was the agricultural countryside, wonderfully depicted in his early masterpiece, “The Farm” (1921-22. He was good on the combination of the macrocosm and the microcosm. This painting, once owned by Ernest Hemingway, dwells on tiny details – the snail crawling on the earth, the cracks in the barn wall – and also the infinity of blue above. The spectacle of the sky, he said, overwhelmed him.

From that idiom, stylised in a cubist manner but still naturalistic, he moved to something wilder and freer. His paintings of the next decade often seem to consist of nothing but sky, blue paint brushed with fastidious care over the whole surface with just a few vestiges of a subject – the red cap of a Catalan peasant, say, and a couple of wiry lines for his arms and body.

In a way, he just carried on cutting away the inessential. “What will be the direction of my work now?” He asked himself in 1961, and answered, “Sparer and sparer”. Sparest of all perhaps are the three paintings “for the Cell of a Recluse” (1968), each consisting of a single spidery line wandering across a huge expanse of white. The effect is very Spanish – austere, crazy, mystical: almost nothing but, somehow, enough.

From my column in The Lady

In Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s great novel The Leopard, Tancredi famously informs his uncle that, “In order for everything to stay the same, everything must change”. Much the same applies to the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition (until August 15). Now in its 243^rd year, this is the world’s longest-running exhibition, the Mousetrap of the art world.

It has of course, changed somewhat since 1768. But it still consists largely of works by the Royal Academicians themselves. Naturally enough, their idioms alter little from one summer to the next. On the other hand, new Academicians – and Honorary RAs from abroad – are constantly being added to the roster.

Slowly, the mix of styles on view shifts. These days “Young British Artists” of twenty years ago are pillars of this self-selected institution. Gray Hume’s “The Cradle” is among the more striking items on display in the Lecture Room, a gallery hung by  Michael Craig-Martin, who once upon a time taught many of those YBAs.

Craig-Martin’s arrangements of this room and the adjoining Wohl Central Hall are the best ensembles in the exhibition. In the latter, he has just put photography on the walls, an innovation. In the centre he placed a sculpture (Work No 998) by Martin Creed, who once won the Turner Prize with a piece consisting of the lights going on and off. This, certainly for the RA, is almost as radical: a stack of modernist chairs.

Craig-Martin’s other room also succeeds in imposing a personal taste and sensibility on the essentially chaotic nature of the Summer Exhibition. It would be hard to define exactly what unites his choices – which also include a painting of his own, and works by Allen Jones, Anish Kapoor, Alison Wilding and Richard Long. They are a bit minimalist, often hard-edged, in some cases with a dash of pop art sensibility.

At any rate, they seems to belong together, contrary to the essential spirit of the Summer Exhibition which is customarily made up works that happened to be sent in by Academicians or to survive the open selection process. Consequently, its natural tendency is to look, as David Hockney once put it, “like a jumble sale”.

Perhaps that’s part of its charm. It certainly means that large and striking works tend to catch the eye more than small and discreet ones. That certainly applies to one of my favourites, a grand and beautiful abstract by Frank Bowling RA that dominates Room VIII and – through the doorway – the room next door too.

From my column in The Lady

It was a tale worthy of Wilkie Collins or Anthony Trollope. The cast of characters included penny-pinching schoolmasters, waspish clergymen and a famous, thin-skinned architect – plus six elderly ladies whose rights somehow had to be preserved throughout and three cadavers in sarcophagi. At the centre of the plot was a collection of masterpieces by great painters, intended for an Eastern European monarch, and an ancient school on the outskirts of London.

It is now two hundred years since the foundation of Dulwich Picture Gallery. That’s quite long enough for us all to have grow used to a very odd arrangement: a superb collection of old master pictures, installed in a Jacobean educational establishment in South London.

It came about like this. In 1790 a French art dealer named Noel Desenfans and his younger business partner and friend, Sir Francis Bourgeois RA, a Swiss painter of mediocre talent, were both asked to put together an array of paintings for Stanislaus Augustus, the King of Poland. They spent the next five years accumulating a splendid cache of works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, Poussin and many other artists, mainly of the 17^th century. The result was more in contemporary European than British taste (the fine English pictures at Dulwich mainly arrived through later bequests). But it was unquestionably good enough for a king.

Unfortunately, for them and from many points of view – especially that of the Poles – by the time they had finished Desenfans and Bourgeois no longer had a royal customer for all these fine canvases. Stanislaus Augustus was an ex-King – the very last monarch of Poland – and his realm itself was partitioned into non-existence as an independent nation by Russia and Prussia. On November 25, 1795 poor Stanislaus was forced to abdicate, and went to live in St Petersburg on a pension provided by Catherine the Great.

At this point, Desenfans and Bourgeois were left with a lot of pictures on their hands. After trying unavailingly to interest the Tzar of Russia – one of the architects of Poland’s downfall – and the British Government (often a tough sell when it comes to art), their thoughts turned to leaving it as a monument to themselves. They traded some works, and sold others. So matters went on until 1807, when Desenfans died.

Sir Francis Bourgeois (his knighthood was Polish) then began to search more urgently for a home for the pictures. It proved a tiresome quest. Rev. Robert Corry, a fellow of Dulwich College, described how it went. “The Royal Academy had given him some offence, he disapproved of the rules and regulations of the British Museum”. Bourgeois wanted, as benefactors often do, to have his collection remain intact.

Next, Bourgeois considered buying the ground rent of his own house at 38 Charlotte Street, Soho, where the architect John Soane had already built a sombre, domed mausoleum in the garden to contain the remains of Desenfans, Mrs Desenfans and Bourgeois himself (they had all lived together in a slightly strange ménage). However, the Duke of Portland was unwilling to negotiate, so the prospective Charlotte St Picture Gallery never came to be.

Bourgeois was a friend of Rev. Corry, and had often visited him at Dulwich. He was “much pleased” with the place, and its “stillness” so close to London, and decided to leave his masterpieces to the College. This was part of a large charity, Alleyn’s College of God’s Gift, founded in 1619 by a notable actor-manager of the day Edward Alleyn, who had once taken the star roles in Christopher Marlowe’s major plays.

Corry hurried to deliver the news, which came with some awkward conditions attached – notably that it included custody of the late Mr Desenfans “who had some sort of prejudice against being put underground” and there wished to be housed in a sarcophagus.

His first problem, though, was to find someone to tell the good tidings to. Among the senior members of the College, “the master was very far advanced in years, Stowe was unstable and debilitated by disease, Dowell was too nervous to take any part in College discussions, and Smith was I believe, absent””. It sounds like a thoroughly Trollopean institution.

Accordingly, it was the Warden, Lancelot Baugh Allen, who was left to come to an arrangement with Sir Francis. The two men agreed that gothic was the most suitable style for a new purpose-built picture gallery, to match the existing 17^th century College buildings. Allen asked Bourgeois what architect he would recommend. The latter suggested John Soane – added enticingly that Soane was a “man of fortune” had only two sons, already amply provided for, so he would treat the College “as a friend”. The implication was that Soane would not charge for his services. Allen saw the point.

Thus was how the commission for one of the most illustrious structures in British architectural history decided. The brief was an odd one. As the scheme developed, it was decided Soane should design a picture gallery, but incorporating a mausoleum – to contain all three sarcophagi – and also providing housing for the indigent women whose almshouses would be demolished to clear the site.

The Gallery opened in 1817, the first public museum of paintings in Britain. It was a compromise that initially pleased no one. The costs, as usual with building projects, rocketed. Therefore, Soane was instructed to cut back on inessentials. The bare, functional austerity of the exterior – much admired by contemporary architects – was consequently forced on him against his better judgement.

Soane himself would have preferred something more ornate. He was mortified by the criticism of the Rev. Thomas Frognal Dibdin, who exclaimed, “What a thing – what a creature it is!… Semi-Arabic, Moro-Spanish, Anglico-Norman – a what-you-will-production! It has all the merit and emphatic distinction of being unique!” Soane darkly suspected this attack to be the work of his estranged son George, writing under a pseudonym.

Two centuries later, Soane’s Gallery is widely regarded as one of the most perfect ever conceived. The guru of American modernist architects, Philip Johnson, once said “the Dulwich Gallery set forever the way to show pictures.” Essentially, Soane came up with the sort of space he had produced for the display of paintings in country houses, but pared of windows and fireplaces, and top-lit.

The mausoleum, off the central space of the picture gallery, is shadowy, impressive and a little eerie. How the impoverished women felt about living next to it, in a row of little dwellings, is not recorded. Later, in any case, their apartments were transformed into extra galleries in which temporary exhibitions are held these days.

Dulwich Picture Gallery is in every way an accidental triumph. The collection, intended to improve taste in Warsaw, ended up in a leafy London suburb. For economic reasons, the building turned out not gothic as its patrons wanted, nor opulently classical as its architect planned, but proto-modernist.

However, a triumph it is. Each month this year a different visiting masterpiece a month will go on show in celebration – including works by Velazquez, Vermeer, and Van Gogh (the last of whom visited the Gallery while living in London, and wrote with uncharacteristic banality in the visitor’s book). In the mausoleum, Desenfans and Bourgeois should be feeling proud.

From my column in The Lady

Art has long had an affinity with stardom. It goes back many years before Andy Warhol started making silk-screen pictures of Marilyn Monroe, as is demonstrated by a delightful small exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery: Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril: Beyond the Moulin Rouge (until September 18).

It charts an alliance between two misfits. The details of the life Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) are almost as familiar as the story of Van Gogh and his ear. He was the victim of a genetic disorder – probably pycnodysostosis – with the result that his legs failed to grow after two fractures in early adolescence. As an adult, his legs were very short, his upper body of normal proportions. Alcoholic, aristocratic but marginalised, he was drawn to the bohemian night-life of Montmartre.

Jane Avril – real name Jeanne Beudon – was a similarly unusual being. She was the illegitimate daughter of a courtesan, born in 1868. In her early teens she was sent to a psychiatric hospital, the Saltpêtrière, suffering from chorea – a nervous condition also known as St Vitus’s Dance. Two years later at a bal des folles – Ball of the Mad – held at the hospital she danced, carried away by the music, and found herself applauded for the first time.

Later, after a period of working and living in a brothel, she found her way to the night spots of Montmartre and quickly became well-known for her waif-like appearance and unconventional dancing style, apparently modelled on the movements of her fellow patients. But Avril credited a particular poster by Toulouse-Lautrec, however, with really making her famous.

Her wry, melancholic face and elegantly emaciated figure frequently appeared in his work. He made her the emblem, the spirit, of glamorous Parisian decadence (perhaps why Picasso later depicted her). This exhibition brings together a fine group of his paintings and advertisements featuring her, including “At the Moulin Rouge” ((1892-95), one of his masterpieces in which he walks past in the distance, she sits, got up in a flamboyant outfit, back to the viewer at the front.

There seems to have been if not a romance, a close alliance between these two brilliant oddities, even a bit of identification with Avril on the artist’s part. A photograph catches him dressed in her clothes for a fancy dress party arranged by a racy magazine of the day.

Their fates, however, were rather different. He died, of alcoholism possibly complicated by syphilis in 1901. She eventually retired from the stage in 1911, married an artist and wrote her memoirs before eventually dying in 1943.

At the V&A for the next month it’s possible to see four of the original tapestries woven to Raphael’s designs side by side with those very designs – or cartoons – themselves (until October 17th). It is currently the most exciting artistic sight in London.

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