Culture

The popular conception of Dame Laura Knight is of an energetic woman piling on the paint in the back of a huge and antiquated Rolls-Royce at Epsom Derby, the door propped open to the view, or charging off in pursuit of gypsies, clowns or ballerinas. A widely popular and successful artist, she painted people in action in a robust, realistic style, and was able to compete with men on their own terms, managing to get herself elected to that hitherto almost entirely masculine preserve, the Royal Academy. But wasn’t there something slightly mannish about her?

Sir Alfred Munnings (1878–1959) did himself a grave and lasting disservice when he publicly attacked modern art in a bibulous after-dinner speech at the Royal Academy in 1949. He had been president of the RA for five years, pipping Augustus John to the post, but the controversy he stirred up (he called Picasso and Matisse ‘foolish daubers’) led to his resignation. The echoes of his rant linger on more than half-a-century later, constituting for many the most memorable thing about him. Like Canute, Munnings could not stem the tide, and Modernism for a time swamped and eroded his reputation.

My wife says you can always tell a self-portrait by the quality of its self-regard. There’s something about the eyes and mouth (though not invariably flattering or admiring) or the set of the chin that give the artist away. Perhaps it’s simply that the artist is more interested in depicting the self than anyone else; or that the degree of self-awareness is inevitably deeper. Some of the great paintings have been self-portraits, from Rembrandt to van Gogh, and when they’re good they’re always worth looking at. So it was with optimism in my heart that I made my way to Kings Place to view the results of the second bi-annual Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Competition.

Revolution shook Mexico between 1910 and 1920, but radical political change was not mirrored in the art of the period. In this exhibition, we do not see avant-garde extremes, but witness instead a deepening humanism, as if for once art was interlocking with human need. The cultural renaissance that followed was state-sponsored, and artists were employed by the Ministry of Education to promote the revolution. This was political art at its best, and three artists were active at its heart: los tres grandes, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Their most significant achievements were murals, which remain firmly in place on Mexican buildings and thus are difficult to make an exhibition about.

In 1929, Samuel Courtauld owned the most important collection of works by Paul Gauguin in England: five paintings, ten woodcuts and a sculpture. He subsequently sold two of the paintings, but for this show the gallery that bears Courtauld’s name has borrowed them back. One of them is the very beautiful ‘Martinique Landscape’ (1887), now owned by the National Galleries of Scotland, in which colour and pattern lock together in the most subtle and satisfying way. Even the rather startling turquoise with which the gallery’s walls have been painted cannot distract from its powerful presence. The other great painting here is supposedly ‘The Dream’, which Roger Fry declared was ‘the masterpiece of Gauguin’.

One generation is usually so busy reacting against its predecessors that it can take years for a balanced appreciation of real and relative merits to emerge. Henry Moore was born in 1898, and Rodin didn’t die until 1917, but they never met. All his life Moore was aware of Rodin’s work, and although early on he made apprentice works influenced by Rodin, it was only when he had established his own territory as an artist that he could afford to look long and admiringly at the senior artist. Indeed, Moore came to value his work so highly that he included four sculptures and three drawings by Rodin in his own collection and was happy to be consulted over the installation of the great Rodin exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1970.

There has been much positive comment about the rehang of the Tate’s permanent collection, which sees a welcome return to the great tradition of the chronological hang and thus gives the visitor a chance to see the development of British art from 1545 to today. At last we are permitted a rest from themed displays and given a proper educational arrangement that maps out our artistic heritage — at least in part. (Most of the larger movements are covered.) This is not a conservative stratagem: there is still plenty of room for discussion and controversy in the various inclusions and omissions (particularly noticeable when we reach the 20th century).

This exhibition was dreamt up by David Boyd Haycock, a freelance writer and curator, following the success of a book he published with a similar title in 2009. The Crisis of Brilliance book focused on the early career of five Slade-trained artists and their relationship with the first world war. When I reviewed it at the time, I felt that Dr Haycock was simply retreading rather familiar ground, however agreeable his text, as all of the artists he chose to highlight had already been extensively written about. To the five artists of the book a sixth has been added for the exhibition: David Bomberg. This enables the show to include two large canvases by Bomberg that contribute considerably to the impressiveness of the display.

What exactly are the ‘secrets of the royal bedchamber’? That the actual bed was seldom if ever slept in let alone used for romping sex (the latter took place in private bedchambers, often barred off by an ingenious system of locks). But the royal bedchamber was, as the organisers of this exhibition state, ‘the equivalent of the modern-day boardroom’, where government decisions were made and private access to the monarch gained. Those who controlled that access were the most important members of the court. They may have been awarded earldoms, but they vied for jobs that involved serving the monarch at the most intimate (and demeaning) level. The point of the royal state bed was to emphasise the pomp and splendour of the room where you met the monarch in person.

Eduardo Chillida (1924–2002) is one of the greatest of modern sculptors yet curiously little known in this country. The last major show in London was at the Hayward Gallery in 1990, where I first encountered his work in real depth. Before that, he had only exhibited once in the UK, a solo show at the McRoberts & Tunnard Gallery in 1965. Pilar Ordovas is to be congratulated for putting on this small but very choice new show. It’s high time we saw more of Chillida’s work: its powerful sculptural presence combines a satisfying sense of geometry with a love of materials, investigates space and light in new ways and is as much to do with poetry as with construction.

By all accounts, Rory McEwen (1932–82) was a remarkable man, hugely talented in several different disciplines (artist, musician, writer) and very much loved by his friends. Grey Gowrie calls him ‘a spectacular human being’ and writes: ‘Even now, 30 years after his death, he lights up the mind of everyone who knew him.’ Renowned as a botanical artist, McEwen was also an exceptional musician, specialising in blues and folk, whose mastery of the 12-string acoustic guitar rivalled the legendary Lead Belly. With his brother Alexander, Rory toured across the USA in 1956, becoming one of the first British acts to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show. Back in London, Rory became the resident singer on the Tonight programme, later hosting his own late-night TV show.

In the wake of the Roy Lichtenstein blockbuster at Tate Modern comes Patrick Caulfield at Tate Britain, and what a contrast! Where Lichtenstein looks increasingly like a one-trick pony, an assessment driven home by the excessively large show, Caulfield emerges as fresh, witty and visually inventive. Undoubtedly this impression is fostered by the size of the exhibition: Tate Britain’s Linbury Galleries have been divided between Caulfield and Gary Hume, allowing each enough space for a highly focused solo exhibition. There are thus only 35 paintings by Caulfield spanning his entire career, and one leaves his show wanting to see more, not suffering from the usual museum overkill.

The Royal Academy’s biggest annual prize is the Charles Wollaston Award, worth £25,000, for the most distinguished work in the Summer Exhibition, this year won by the Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui (born 1944). Although his preferred media are clay and wood, El Anatsui has taken to making installations from found materials woven together like cloth, and has done rather well with them around the world. He was invited to make a hanging for the façade of Burlington House for the duration of the Summer Exhibition, and this junk curtain (composed inter alia of aluminium bottle tops, printing plates, copper wire and roofing sheets) now obscures or ornaments — depending on your taste — the Academy’s noble brow.

Paint is but coloured mud, pace scientists and conservators, and it can be said that the human animal comes from mud and goes back to it. Thus are the activities of painting and being human linked at a fundamental level, which can be raised by consciousness to impressive heights. As the philosopher T.E. Hulme wrote, ‘All the mud, endless, except where bound together by the spectator.’ This is an apt description of an exhibition by Leon Kossoff (born 1926). Kossoff paints thickly with much piling up of the mud of paint, which is trenched and seamed and dribbled across the surface of board supports.

The centenary celebrations for William Scott (1913–89) are well under way, and the retrospective of his work that started in January at Tate St Ives is currently in Wakefield. There are more works in its latest incarnation and more archive material, and the installation looks very impressive in The Hepworth’s riverside galleries. Scott has not always fared well in historical surveys of 20th-century British painting (he was famously excluded from the Royal Academy’s 1987 exhibition), and his reputation does not stand as high today as it might. In his lifetime, he was much acclaimed, represented this country at the 1956 Venice Biennale and enjoyed a significant degree of international esteem.

Forgive my ignorance, ladies and gentlemen, but I must confess that I had never heard of Saloua Raouda Choucair before the advance publicity of the Tate’s exhibition. She’s not in the Yale Dictionary of Art & Artists (always a useful reference book, but by no means infallible) and I don’t believe I’d ever seen her paintings or sculptures before this show. But I may have overlooked one somewhere in a mixed exhibition, for her work does resemble that of a dozen other artists of international Modernism, and even of a number of the British variety. So why does Tate Modern now devote a solo show to her? Could it be because she is Lebanese (and we don’t see the work of many Lebanese artists in this country), female and has reached the distinguished age of 97?

Between 1917 and 1923, Julian Trevelyan produced a map and an illustrated guide to Hurtenham, an industrial town on the Tees between Stockton and Darlington. You’ll search in vain for the place in an atlas today, as the entire town, with its warren of streets, railways, parks, public buildings and monuments to local luminaries, was the figment of a pre-teen imagination. But the wit and ingenuity of its conception — and its bird’s-eye views of an abstracted world — set the creative pattern for what was to follow. Born into a family of writers and intellectuals, Trevelyan was not destined for an artistic career. When he dropped out of an English degree at Cambridge in 1931 to study art in Paris, his uncle G.M.

Alexander Calder (1898–1976) needs no introduction. The master of the mobile — that poignant hanging arrangement of moving elements — he also invented the stabile (stationary) and the standing mobile. There was no one who could cut and shape sheet aluminium and suspend it from wire with quite the same wit, economy and shape invention. His imagery is primarily abstract and organises flat geometrical forms in contrasting planes through space: discs and triangles balance more biomorphic shapes and are linked by bent sprung wire into a multidirectional kinetic experience of colour and light. Calder mostly used black, white and red, supplemented with blue and yellow, his forms poised and counterweighted with supreme grace and the kind of intricacy that demands utter clarity.

In 1951, the artist and writer Barbara Jones (1912–78) organised an exhibition called Black Eyes and Lemonade at the Whitechapel Gallery celebrating the popular arts of toys, festivities, souvenirs and advertising, to reveal to a largely unsuspecting public the richness of vernacular art in Britain. The original exhibition was evidently an Aladdin’s cave of objects, from decorated pub mirrors to ships’ figureheads, horse brasses, corn dollies and needle packets. Jones crossed the boundaries of folk art, mingling the handmade with the machine-made, and the traditional with the contemporary and ephemeral. She wrote a book about the subject, published the same year and called The Unsophisticated Arts.

Nowadays, R.B. Kitaj (1932–2007) tends to be ignored by the critics in this country — like a bad smell in the corner of the room. It was not always thus: for years he was an admired, if somewhat controversial, presence, but then came his great retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1994. A large proportion of the British critical fraternity united to condemn and vilify him, to ‘take him down a peg or two’, as if he were an unruly schoolboy too big for his boots, too clever for his own good. This chorus of complaint (some of which amounted to abuse) was deeply felt by Kitaj, and when his beloved second wife, Sandra Fisher, died suddenly in the midst of what he called his ‘Tate War’, he was heartbroken and his love for England all but extinguished.