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Artistic diversity

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 27th August 2008

Love
National Gallery, until 5 October

Nowhere can this be more obvious than in the opening to the exhibition. In the foyer to the Sunley Rooms is Tracey Emin’s ‘Those who Suffer Love (Im OK now)’. Besides the rampant and deeply tedious egotism of the work, there is very little to see apart from some sub-literate ‘writing’ and a bit of stitching. The artwork here relies entirely on the power of Emin’s celebrity for its resonance. On its own, it has next to nothing to offer — a handful of old-fashioned embroidered flowers and some scribble. Compare this work with the painting by David Hockney just inside the main room. Entitled ‘We Two Boys Together Clinging’ (taken from a Walt Whitman poem), it has a strong autobiographical element to it, dealing as it does with male homosexuality. But where it parts company from Emin’s feeble effusion is in the quality of the art.

This painting is a magnificent example of early Hockney, in which the artist has drawn on all sorts of different visual sources from graffiti to Dubuffet’s ‘art brut’, and reinterpreted them to produce an image of much originality and considerable emotional range. Formally, the painting is a masterly combination of seemingly wild brushstrokes and textures actually very carefully controlled and organised to a deliberate aesthetic end. The stripes and scratchings, the loose gestural drawing, the use of numbers, letters and actual text are brought together and harmonised by a brilliant use of colour, juxtaposing warm and cool hues in a balanced and subtly gradated arrangement over the picture surface. There is pictorial wit and sophistication here; there is emotional warmth and humour.

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Roger W Quinton

September 5th, 2008 8:09am

I am so sad that Mr Lambirth has failed to feel the passion of Tracey Emin's words in her work at this exhibition. The work is much deeper than simply picture or structure, it has emotion burned into it. I know nothing about art, and I defer to Mr Lambirth in that respect, but perhaps I understand a little more about deep and true love and the pain involved - it is this that Ms Emin has displayed for all to see, and it is this that makes the two portions a work of genuine art (perhaps only for the masses - people like me).