Crowd control

Andrew Lambirth

Saturday, 11th June 2005

Why not split the show into two exhibitions of half the duration? One could be exclusively of RAs, to give them room to show their finest work, the other an International Open exhibition, encouraging the best painting and sculpture from around the world. Each could last for a month, and, if the Academy really put its heart into mounting such a double-decker extravaganza, the result could be exceptional. As it is, the Summer Exhibition stumbles into its 237th year with the usual mix of good, bad and indifferent hung a little more thinly (except in the Weston Rooms) than usual. One gallery, IX, has just over a dozen pictures and a couple of sculptures in it. It happens to be an elegant hang with some impressive works (I particularly liked the laced and laddered Alexis Harding abstracts and Humphrey Ocean’s minimally painted red skip with its interestingly grungy edges), but to hang so little is an unpardonable indulgence in an exhibition which supposedly has so much to show.

The exhibition doesn’t start well: Gallery I is the least punchy I’ve seen it for years. It’s full of mediocre work by internationally acclaimed artists who’ve been made Hon. RAs to bring the Academy kudos. James Turrell, whose work I have a great admiration for, is poorly represented by two hologram-type projections. Ellsworth Kelly, another impressive artist, shows eight black-and-white lithographs that might be worth pondering in a one-man retrospective, but look inconsequential here. Gallery II continues with the big names: Mangold, Bourgeois, Freud, and a truly horrendous Rosenquist lithograph. A trio of silkscreens by Chuck Close are nothing more than fancy posters. The room is saved by two Frankenthaler woodcuts and a thicket of thorny rectangles by Joel Shapiro. So far, the only RA (Hon. RAs like Baselitz don’t count) in two whole rooms is the sculptor John Maine.

If you proceed into the Large Weston Room, this rapidly changes, for it is hung floor-to-ceiling with prints by Academicians and non-members. There’s a huge variety of work to be seen, from Alex Calinescu’s lithograph of a fruit-like object to Paula Rego’s ‘Life Room’ studies to Glen Baxter’s meditation on Anglo–French attitudes. I liked John McLean’s monoprints and the posthumous meeting of those old sparring partners Terry Frost and Patrick Heron, screenprinted on to canvas by Leigh Clarke, gesticulating at each other on one wall. The Small Weston Room is packed with treats: notice Eileen Hogan’s sensitive oil studies of Lord Carrington, and the landscape delights of Camilla Shelley’s pink flints and Dorothy Dent’s harvest scene.