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Is he worth it?

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 20th February 2008

Andrew Lambirth on the new exhibition of Peter Doig's work

Some of the paintings made in the early-to-mid 1990s have a more lasting presence, when the paint-handling works both with and against the rather banal imagery. When, in the later Nineties, he changed from thicker paint to thin washes, the complexity of the surface lost its unexpectedness, its variety of incident. If you’re going to rely on photographs for visual information then the weight of the painting has to be borne elsewhere — in the drawing, colour, design (pattern). Doig can be seductive with colour and adept at pattern, but the content is too light to anchor his work. The most recent paintings are among the flimsiest. It’s quite evident that Peter Doig’s international appeal is built upon clever marketing of work that demands very little of its viewers. The exhibition will tour to ARC/Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (26 May to 14 September) and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (8 October 2008 to 11 January 2009).

I have nothing against artists who use photography per se, and I’ve long been an admirer of the photo-based work of Walter Sickert. But then he was never led by the camera, and was far too wily and inventive an artist to be constrained by the limited information a photograph can provide. There are a number of very fine Sickerts in The Camden Town Group (soon to be reviewed in this column), another show at Tate Britain at this very moment, though none of his radical late works. Another artist who drew inspiration from photography, particularly the German expressionist kind, was Edward Burra (1905–76). Room 18 at Tate Britain is currently hung with seven of Burra’s paintings on the theme of New York’s Harlem, its street life and jazz.

Burra is a major figure of 20th-century British art, a maverick of the first water, whose paintings of the seamier side of human behaviour have a strength and originality lacking in most contemporary painters. There hasn’t been a proper Burra show for more than 20 years, and now all we have is one low-key room of archive material and a handful of small paintings. It’s not nearly enough to form an assessment of Burra’s peculiar subjects and remarkable skills, but at least it’s a taste of a very particular artist. My worry is that by mounting a display like this, the Tate will feel it has done its duty to Burra, and there won’t be another show of his work for decades. Much is often said about the scarcity of good English artists, yet the 20th century was particularly rich in them, and we hardly get a chance to see their work shown publicly — that’s left to the more enterprising commercial galleries.