Culture

Penguin Classics uses details from the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich to illustrate the covers of some of its Nietzsche volumes (for instance, ‘Riesengebirge’, on display here, features on the cover of its Nietzsche Reader). Walking around this exhibition, one gets the same heady, slightly giddy feeling one gets from reading a lot of the philosopher in one sitting. What seems, on later reflection, slightly hysterical in philosophy works much better as visual art. Heated religiosity, the towering figure of Goethe, nationalist fervour, hatred of Napoleonic domination of Europe, a longing for an imagined mediaeval world of chivalry and heroism — all were part of the cultural mix that led to the German Romantic movement.

In the official account of British 20th-century art, the big names belong to the international players whose universal vision won them a place in the annals of world art. This is understandable. What is harder to explain is the official version’s almost total neglect of those native artists who kept alive, through this century of global change, the peculiarly English tradition founded by Hogarth. Carel Weight, Ruskin Spear, Richard Eurich — names virtually unknown to the general public — all played a part in this unwritten history, as did the David Hockney of A Rake’s Progress before defecting to America. Another key figure was James Fitton (1899–1982), whose reputation is up for reassessment in a show of paintings at Crane Kalman.

The very fact that this exhibition’s subtitle has to explain who Nicholson is stands as a blatant admission of his supposed obscurity. The Academy is surely faint-hearted here — does it underestimate the intelligence of its audience? How many visitors might, without benefit of subtitle, have naturally assumed that Nicholson was an Iranian swordsmith? I have no doubt that a good percentage of the Academy’s core support group will be acquainted with Nicholson’s work or with his secondary role as father of the more-famous Ben. After all, people become Friends of the RA because they’re interested in art, and have some knowledge of that world.

They don’t make ’em like The Manchurian Candidate of 1962 any more. That weird, creepy, paranoid thriller of the Cold War flopped at first, was given retrospective topicality by the assassination of President Kennedy, and became a cult. Though it is, like Citizen Kane, a brilliant film rather than a profound or serious one, those virtues, too, have been ascribed to it. It dealt with an important topic — the ruthless manipulation of power in America then — but it did not deal with it in a convincing way. For years Tina Sinatra (her father Frank had the rights) has been trying to launch an updated remake and she was lucky; she failed. Now she has succeeded just when war and elections, though not yet assassinations, are back in the news.

It is not Robert Frank’s fault, but one might think from the hype — ‘arguably the world’s greatest living photographer’, etc. — that he had invented documentary photography. When Humphrey Spender, who did for Mass Observation and Picture Post in the 1930s and 1940s what Frank did for social documentation in the 1950s, was similarly praised, he pointed out that photography had been an instrument of social change since the 1870s. And the photo-journalist’s favourite camera, the 35mm Leica, was invented in 1914.

If you were looking for someone to blame for the explosion of multi-disciplinarity in contemporary art, L.