Culture

Curtain walls, dreaming spires, crockets, finials, cantilevers, bush-hammered concrete, vermiculated rustication, heroic steel and delicate Cosmati work are all diverse parts of the architect’s vocabulary. But while Gothic, Classical, Baroque and Modern are well-thumbed volumes in his library of style, the architect’s real language is profound and prehistoric. Or, at least, it consists of prehistoric-style labels. So much of the ‘debate’ about architecture has been crudely adversarial with tweedy historicists, conservationists and pseudo-classicists supposedly lined up against antagonising, pitiless and chromium-plated technocrats, futurologists, social engineers and ditsy dreamers.

In this round-up of exhibitions in London’s commercial galleries, I feature three shows of little-known but mature contemporary British artists. There is a great deal of interesting and worthwhile art being made out there, but not enough of it comes to public attention. Most museums won’t show it, and there are only a handful of commercial gallerists who are prepared to back quality over proven popularity. In such a world, the quieter talents tend to get overlooked, so it is a particular pleasure to be able to draw your attention to the subtle small paintings of Liam Hanley (born 1933). Hanley paints in oil and draws in pencil on linen laid down on to paper.

Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1609–64) was, I must admit, unknown to me until I visited this show, the only Castiglione I was properly aware of being the one who wrote The Book of the Courtier published in 1528; clearly not the same man. The artist Castiglione was a tempestuous character, always losing his temper and getting into fights. He tried to throw his sister off a roof and is said to have committed murder; perhaps more importantly for his artistic career, when he was at the height of his popularity in Genoa, he slashed to shreds a painting commissioned for the Doge of Venice, and fled the city in which he was born and trained.

Last year saw the centenary of the London Group, a broad-based exhibiting body set up in a time of stylistic ferment in the art world as an independent alternative to the closed shops of the academies. Formed from the amalgamation of the Allied Artists’ Association and the Camden Town Group, it boasted such notable founder members as Lucien Pissarro and Walter Sickert, while Jacob Epstein is credited with naming it. Inevitably, the London Group has gone through innumerable highs and lows in its 100-year history, yet the mere fact that it still exists is testament to the enduring need for such an independent collective.

It is often said of John Craxton (1922–2009) that he knew how to live well and considered this more important than art. Perhaps there is a certain truth in this, but if he really believed it, did he have any business in being an artist? And an artist he undoubtedly was, by temperament and sensibility, as well as by the rich endowment of natural talent. Of course, letting it be known that you think life more important than art is a very good cover for that most debilitating (and paradoxically productive) of besetting fears: self-doubt. Craxton had it in large measure, and it is probably this quality that accounted both for his originality and for the painter’s block he periodically suffered.

The death of painting has been so often foretold — almost as frequently as its renaissance — that any such prediction today is nothing short of foolhardy. Of course, painting is alive and well and living in London, but you wouldn’t know that from the current exhibition of five artists at Tate Millbank. (By the way, this is a paying display, the regular admission fee being £10. Not surprisingly, it was deserted when I visited. This sort of show, to do its job properly and communicate to the public at large, should be free.) According to the press release, each of the five artists ‘has adopted an approach to painting that both exploits and subverts its conventions’. I wish.

Rediscovering the unduly neglected is one of the chief excitements of those who curate exhibitions and write books. And there’s nothing I enjoy more than saluting the achievement of those who bring back to our attention an artist who – for one reason or another – has slipped off the art world radar. Before this exhibition and, more importantly, the book accompanying it, Alan Sorrell was only a name to me, with a few rather vague visual connotations. Now I can put definite images to the name and begin to build a context for his work. For anyone interested in the broader picture of 20th-century British art, the current Sorrell initiative is of real interest and value.

There hasn’t been a decent Daumier exhibition in this country for more than half a century, so art lovers have had to be content with the handful of pictures in national collections and books of reproductions. This works all right for the lithographs, which were after all made to be reproduced, and it is on his high status as a satirical printmaker that Daumier’s fame principally rests. And yet he is frequently lauded by artists who talk about him as a major draughtsman, sculptor and painter, not just as a political and social cartoonist, however fine. The chance to see a show of all aspects of his work is thus very welcome: how does the Academy acquit itself of the responsibility? The first thing that must be said is that there are rather too many lithographs on display.

The current exhibition in the Sainsbury Wing claims to be a portrait of Vienna in 1900, but in fact offers rather an interesting survey of portraits made there from the 1830s to 1918. The gallery layout has been usefully adapted to display the work thematically rather than chronologically, which is more dynamic but stylistically confusing. The only way to enjoy the show is to wander at will and pick out the paintings that appeal. There are some horrors here (I wouldn’t linger over Broncia Koller), but plenty of good things as well.

Pop Art Design, curated by the Vitra Design Museum and currently at the Barbican, opens with Richard Hamilton’s 1956 ‘Just what makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?’. Made as a poster for the Whitechapel show This is Tomorrow, it’s a witty collage of consumer fantasies scissored out of magazines, reminding us that interest in popular culture among British artists operated as a humorous, semi-anthropological collegiate research project. In part, British Pop was a riposte to the lushness of American consumerism from a small island that had won the war but had lost the peace. Pop Art in the United States got under way later and many American Pop artists had had first-hand experience of commercial art.

The famous court case in which Ruskin accused Whistler of ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’ continues to rumble through the public response to art in this country. The man in the street, the man on the Clapham Omnibus and most of the men who drive black cabs all like their art to be recognisable. (Perhaps women are less hidebound.) Their definition of skill is the ability to paint with photographic fidelity, and they prefer art to tell a story. James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), leading exponent of ‘art for art’s sake’, painted pure visual poetry rather than the hard facts of detailed realism. His paintings are supremely atmospheric: subtle and allusive, they suggest rather than state, evoke rather than describe.

The V&A’s remarkable survey of Chinese painting begins quietly with a beautiful scroll depicting ‘Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk’, from the early 12th century, which, with its bright colours, shallow space and lack of setting, invites comparison with a western masterpiece of a similar date, the Bayeux Tapestry. The crowded urgencies and narrative drive of the English/French embroidered cloth couldn’t be further from the refined intervals and sophisticated relationships of the Chinese scroll, and yet both tell much about the cultures that produced them. However, neither should be read simply as historical documents: both offer rare aesthetic pleasures of quite different distillations.

There is a school of thought that sees Paul Klee (1879–1940) as more of a Swiss watchmaker than an artist, his paintings and drawings too perfect, too contrived. Viewing this new exhibition at Tate Modern, one might add that they are also too mannered and precious. I had been looking forward to this show, but going round it I found myself all too frequently impatient and disappointed. Yet Klee is a great modern master, you say; can he be dismissed so easily? Perhaps it is all in the selection of work, for Klee was prolific even though he died young, with a total output of about 10,000 paintings, drawings and works on paper, more than a thousand of which he made in the last year of his life.

Emilio Greco (1913–95) is considered to be one of Italy’s most important modern sculptors, and certainly he was a successful one, enjoying considerable popularity and renown with his deliberately mannered re-interpretations of classical subjects. A figurative sculptor, Greco went in for elongated limbs and awkward yet dynamic poses that often have a surprising elegance and no little wit. His most celebrated work is ‘Monument to Pinocchio’ (1953) in the Tuscan hill town of Collodi, and one of the highlights of this new exhibition at the Estorick — no doubt intended to revive Greco’s reputation (on the wane since the 1970s) — is a bronze study for it.

The Watts Gallery, just outside Guildford off the Hog’s Back, is a delightful place to visit at any season, with its permanent collection of work by G.F. Watts, whose studio it once was, and an ambitious programme of exhibitions on related subjects. But as autumn reaches over the hills a sense of the Victorian past may be even more closely felt and appreciated, and particularly a life of promise cut short, as was the case with Frank Holl (1845–88). Until this exhibition began to gather a fresh audience, few had heard of Holl or were able to summon an image by him to mind. This show brings together some 30 of his most famous works and offers us the chance to reassess an unfairly forgotten talent.

Astonishingly, the last major survey show of Australian art in this country was mounted more than half-a-century ago. Then it was the innovative writer, critic and museum director Bryan Robertson who staged Recent Australian Painting at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1961, a show he consolidated by monographic exhibitions of Sidney Nolan, Roy de Maistre and Arthur Boyd, also at the Whitechapel. Later Robertson also wrote extensively about Brett Whiteley, but his one-man Australian project was not taken up by other curators. Although Nolan and Boyd have had their supporters here (particularly Nolan), Australian art has for far too long remained not just a closed book but an unknown quantity in the UK, too.

In the Musée du Cinquantenaire, a grand gallery on the green edge of Brussels, those bureaucratic Belgians are welcoming home a prodigal son. Henry van de Velde — Passion, Function, Beauty is a celebration of the 150th birthday of Belgium’s most prolific polymath, yet a lot of people here in Brussels scarcely seem to know his name. While Victor Horta is fêted as the father of Art Nouveau, his great rival, van de Velde, is frequently forgotten. It’s ironic that this prophet of modern design wasn’t honoured in his own country until he’d made his name in Germany, the nation that invaded his homeland twice in the course of his long career.

Like all artists of independent spirit, David Tress (born 1955) resists categorisation. He has been called a Romantic and a Neo-Romantic, a mixture of Impressionist and Expressionist, a traditionalist and a modernist, yet not one of these labels quite fits. He is all and none, drawing his inspiration from the great traditions of western art but principally from the British landscape that continues to evoke a response in him that can only find outlet through drawing and painting. Tress is a landscape painter and draughtsman of great poignancy, imbuing his dramatically coloured and vigorously constructed works with an emotional intensity that makes them difficult to ignore.

A mixed exhibition of paintings, drawings and prints devoted to the subject of the tree might sound an unexciting event, filled with what Johnny Cash memorably described as ‘hopeful stars of flickering magnitude’, but actually in this case the reverse is true. The show has been divided into two halves, the first of which deals with a historical survey of the tree in past art, the section which is herewith under review. The sequel, focusing on the tree in contemporary art, will be at the museum from 12 October – 23 November. Readers who have to travel any distance, and may thus be limited to a single visit, should choose with care which portion of the show they think they’d most like to see.