Clemency suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

Drawing on experience

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 5th December 2007

Theatres of Life: Drawings from the Rothschild Collection, The Wallace Collection, Manchester Square, London W1, until 27 January 2008
Pop Art Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, until 20 January 2008, Sponsored by Lehman Brothers

Peter Blake is one of the chief protagonists of British Pop, here represented by ‘Got a Girl’ and ‘The 1962 Beatles’. It’s good to see less well-known figures such as the American collagist Ray Johnson featured in such company. Room 2 contains some fine work, Larry Rivers’s portrait of the art critic David Sylvester looking like some mafia godfather leading the field. This vast though sketchy figure is a monument to what might be called un-finish, an appropriate way of depicting an arbiter of taste whose opinions were so subject to revision. In this room is David Hockney’s ‘I’m in the mood for love’, definitely not a portrait, but then so many of these exhibits can only be called portraits with considerable flexibility of the term. Not so the stylish and original ‘Self-Portrait’ by Allen Jones, an exercise in real colour and imaginative penetration.

Patrick Caulfield is represented by his well-known ‘Portrait of Juan Gris’ (a solo show of Caulfield is at Waddington Galleries, 11 Cork Street, London W1, until 21 December). Among other competing delights are Dick Smith’s witty abstract portrait of Marilyn Monroe, all luscious colour and brushwork, Colin Self’s surreal women and B52 bomber, Hockney’s great and lucid ‘Portrait surrounded by artistic devices’ and memorable things by Kitaj, Warhol, Hamilton and Pauline Boty. The show will tour to the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (23 February to 8 June 2008). It’s worth visiting if you’re unfamiliar with the icons of Pop Art (there’s a whole room devoted to Marilyn, for instance), or even if you’d just like to see a good selection of some of the most famous of Pop Art’s painters and paintings gathered together in one place. I’m not sure, however, that it makes any particularly profound points about the nature of either Pop Art or portraiture. But unless Pop revolts you, it does offer a quick fix on the way to something more substantial.