Andrew Lambirth

The fourth in the National Gallery’s series of touring exhibitions (remember Paradise in 2003 and Making Faces last year?) comes to London after showing in Bristol and Newcastle. Entitled this time The Stuff of Life, it is a welcome excuse — should excuse be needed — to look at a group of first-rate still-life paintings, and ponder on their meaning. The merest glance at this exhibition returns us promptly to the world of things, if we ever managed to escape it. Unenlightened materialism is poor sustenance for anybody, but it is important to live in the moment with the reality of things (what Sickert called ‘gross material facts’), with cabbages as well as kings, provided we keep in mind the possibility of deeper truths.

St Mary-at-Lambeth, built beside the walls of the Archbishop’s Palace, was once the parish church of Lambeth, until it fell into disuse in 1972. Thankfully, this handsome building was rescued from demolition some five years later by the foundation of the Museum of Garden History and the Tradescant Trust, appropriately named after the great family of gardeners. Three generations of Tradescants are buried in St Mary’s churchyard in an elaborately carved sarcophagus, while nearby is the tomb of Captain Bligh of Mutiny on the Bounty fame. John Tradescant the Elder (c.

Andrew Lambirth on Tate Britain’s exhibition celebrating our landscape art This summer seems to be developing into a season of British Art — with exhibitions of the quality of Stubbs at the National, Reynolds at the Tate and Sutherland at Dulwich, and now also with A Picture of Britain (until 4 September). This generously mixed landscape show in Tate Britain’s basement galleries is really an adjunct to the TV series of the same title, presented by Mr David Dimbleby, with which many readers will be familiar. I haven’t seen any of it, though I have delved into the sumptuously illustrated hardback book (a snip at £19.99) which accompanies both TV and museum shows.

In the first room of the Royal Academy’s Impressionism Abroad: Boston and French Painting — a strangely mixed and muted Impressionist exhibition — a Monet ‘Haystacks’ is flanked by two lively open-air scenes by Sargent, one of them depicting Monet himself at work. This group is obviously intended to set the tone and pace of the display, but it raises false hopes. Nearby, the pedestrian nature of William Morris Hunt’s gloomy copy of Millet’s ‘Three Men Shearing Sheep in a Barn’ sounds a knell of warning. Paintings by Boudin and Diaz help to rekindle the viewer’s optimism, but the show’s fundamental flaw is soon revealed.

George Stubbs (1724–1806) is best remembered as the dedicated anatomist of the horse, a man who would spend weeks alone in a room with a suspended equine carcass, gradually stripping away the muscles and recording what he learnt. Neither the stench nor the decomposition deterred him, for he was as resolute and methodical as a scientist in his pursuit of verifiable truth. In 1766 he published his findings in a beautiful book of 18 engravings, The Anatomy of the Horse, a substantial contribution to science (much consulted by vets and horse doctors), but intended primarily for the use of artists.

As a landscape painter, Graham Sutherland (1903–80) enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame through the 1930s and 40s, culminating in the Venice Biennale in 1952, a prestigious Tate retrospective in 1953 and the Order of Merit, Britain’s highest award, in 1960. His later years saw success as a portrait-painter to the rich and famous, and the scandalously destroyed portrait of Sir Winston Churchill. Yet there hasn’t been a decent Sutherland exhibition in Britain for more than 20 years, since, in fact, the rather-too-inclusive Tate retrospective of 1982. In the meantime his stock, once dangerously inflated by certain over-eager supporters, has sunk dramatically.

Frida Kahlo (1907–54) is apparently the most famous female artist in history (who is the nearest competitor, I wonder — Grandma Moses or Paula Rego? Probably not Artemisia Gentileschi), and as such, with a recent feature film dedicated to her legend, a hot commercial property. The merchandising angle alone is substantial. There’s never been a solo exhibition of her work in England, so, with her reputation at an all-time high, a show becomes a viable and desirable museum proposition.

Every 10 years, it seems, we are blessed or afflicted, depending on your point of view, with a major exhibition of the internationally acclaimed sculptor, poet and filmmaker Rebecca Horn (born 1944). The first show I remember was at the Serpentine in 1984. Then in 1994 she had the Tate and the Serpentine. Now it’s the turn of the Hayward. At the time of that first Serpentine show, I remember being intrigued and not a little fascinated by this strange artist who made occasionally functioning machines, wore custom-built bodystockings with strange appendages, and liked to be filmed disporting in long grass. At the Tate exhibition, her grand piano strung up from the ceiling jangled memorably from time to time. I was less impressed, and the technical inventiveness seemed a little lax.

‘Times have changed,’ I was told by one disgruntled Academician. Once the members were guaranteed to have their work hung ‘on the line’ (i.e., in pride of place at eye-level), and non-members would get the remaining positions if they were lucky. This year John Hoyland’s large paintings have been ‘skied’, and one of Craigie Aitchison’s screenprints (he refuses to send in paintings because the summer show is such a ragbag) has been hung ‘on the floor’. Jeffery Camp has declined to show anything at all because he’s fed up with his pictures being hung too high to be properly seen.

George Rowlett’s new paintings have wonderfully tousled, wind-rucked surfaces, the paint stirred and whipped up in moving emulation of the effects of the elements on water and landscape — his principal subjects. He paints the Thames and the seashore of east Kent; he also records the passage of the seasons on the landscape around Deal where he has a studio. In his latest solo exhibition, the groundfloor gallery of Art Space is dominated by a large and splendid painting called ‘Ramsgate from the Tidal Flats, Pegwell Bay, January’.

I had intended to devote this article to the subject of artists on film and in particular to a newish archive, the Artists on Film Trust, which was founded seven years ago by Hannah Rothschild and Robert McNab, and affiliated this February to the newly created University of the Arts, London. Under this inelegant umbrella (it used to be The London Institute) are huddled most of the capital’s art schools — Camberwell, Central St Martins, Chelsea and the London College of Communication (formerly the London College of Printing) — because university status is an essential means of self-protection and funding in an increasingly aggressive commercial world.

Leonard McComb (born Glasgow 1930, of Irish parents) is a figurative painter of rare particularity and achievement. He is also a sculptor and his work spans a broad range of utterance: polished bronze, oil on canvas, pastel, pencil and gold leaf on paper (in his affectionate portrait of fellow painter and friend, the late Carel Weight, for instance), meticulous line drawing and etching. He is represented in the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery, is an acclaimed teacher (he was Keeper of the Royal Academy Schools, 1995–8), and has shown regularly in mixed exhibitions since the mid-1970s. He doubted much of the work he did before that, and destroyed a great deal of it in a dramatic bonfire.

Peter Coker died in December last year after a long illness. He had been involved in the initial choice of material for this small but representative memorial exhibition, and would I think have approved of the final result, which succeeds in bringing together work from the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s. It’s a commercial show that has been six years in the making, as the gallery’s director, Robert Travers, gradually acquired good examples of the artist’s oeuvre. The most recent find was a superb still-life, ‘Fish with Grill’ from 1954–5, which brought to the show the required gravitas to enable it to go ahead, and was inevitably among the first things to be sold. There are no late paintings here.

Fate has not dealt kindly with Sir John Everett Millais (1829–96). For those who are not enthusiasts of the Pre-Raphaelites, this founding member of the Brotherhood tends to be categorised as the one who ‘went populist’ with such all-too-memorable scenes as ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’ (now in the Tate) and the notorious Pears Soap advert ‘Bubbles’. Or, if your mnemonic centres function best through the stimulant of scandal, you may recall that it was Millais who stole Ruskin’s wife Effie (Euphemia Gray, who modelled for his justly famous painting ‘Ophelia’), and duly wed her after her marriage to the famous art critic was annulled on the grounds of non-consummation.

Robert Crumb (born Philadelphia 1943) is variously hailed as a ‘virtuoso weirdo’, the ‘father of underground comics’ and ‘the Brueghel of the last half of the 20th century’. Robert Hughes is responsible for that final appellation and one can see his point, though Nicholas Garland has called this assessment ‘just silly’, and Crumb himself has refuted it in a cartoon ‘Broigul I ain’t...’ What he is, indisputably, is a draughtsman touched by genius and a no-holds-barred autobiographer of such whackiness as to require the invention of a new category. (Crumby? Crumbist? Crumbonic?

This is the fourth of the Holburne’s recent exhibitions devoted to 18th-century British portraiture, a series which has done much to put the Museum on the map of enlightened gallery-goers. Previous subjects have been Love’s Prospect (dealing with the marriage portrait), Pickpocketing the Rich (portrait-painting in Bath) and Every Look Speaks (portraits of David Garrick). Pictures of Innocence is a suitably contrasting subject and the first in-depth treatment of this particular aspect of child portraiture. It has been organised in partnership with Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal, where you will be able to view a slightly different version of the show from 12 July to 8 October, and the whole project has been made possible by a grant from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.

The Flowers emporium in Shoreditch, which does such a competent job of purveying art to the chattering classes, shows an eclectic range of artists, from the geometrically abstract to the photo-realistic. Dennis Creffield (born 1931) belongs to neither extreme, but fits into that fruitful expressionist middle ground where the quondam students of David Bomberg struggle with charcoal and pigment to discover the ‘actuality’ of a subject. Flowers must be heartily congratulated on having mounted a decent retrospective of Creffield’s work, for we have seen little of it in London (besides an exhibition of the Orford Ness pictures a decade ago) since the magnificent English Cathedrals show at Camden Arts Centre in 1990.