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Thursday 4 December 2008

Dancing lines

Leon Kossoff: Unique Prints
Art Space Gallery, 84 St Peter's St, London, N1, until 21 June

Paintings of Stockport by Helen Clapcott
Stockport Art Gallery, until 28 June

This show has been brilliantly installed, and the next piece of hanging is particularly inspired. ‘From Degas: Combing the Hair (La Coiffure)’ — the earliest image here, dating from 1988 — is juxtaposed with ‘From Velázquez: Christ after the Flagellation, Contemplated by the Christian Soul’ (1993). Various rhythms and echoes are set up between these two drypoints, most especially in the way the drawing of the woman’s hair, combed out at full length, echoes Christ’s arms, stretched from the pillar to which they’re manacled. The exhibition is full of such felicities, and ends on a wonderfully resonant note in the double-height space at the other end of the gallery. Here are hung ‘From Poussin: A Bacchanalian Revel before a Term — For Euan’ (a drypoint and etching done in memory of Kossoff’s friend Euan Uglow), ‘From Constable: Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows’ and ‘From Poussin: Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’. On the end wall is ‘From Poussin: The Destruction and Sack of the Temple of Jerusalem’, a lovely wild image like the sea breaking against a bulwark. What a range of emotion. Kossoff has gone on record as saying, ‘I think of everything I do as a form of drawing’, and this exhibition is a triumphant reassertion of his belief.

Let me admit at once that I haven’t seen the exhibition of Helen Clapcott’s paintings of Stockport, but I’ve admired her work for years. I also live with one of her pictures and it never fails to bring me pleasure when I pause in front of it to refresh the eye. It may seem an odd thing to suggest, that a painting of urban dereliction can lift the spirits, but any artist worth his salt will be able to locate the beautiful in the mundane or even dreary. It is for art’s ability to transform — in all its manifestations, whether in the thickly built surfaces of a Kossoff painting or the dancing lines of one of his prints, or in the tinted luminosities of Clapcott’s exquisitely worked tempera surfaces — that we value it so highly.

Not everyone is an admirer of Stockport, but those who disparage the place are often those who don’t really know it. Helen Clapcott loves the town and knows it intimately. She observes it with a sharp eye that is shrewd but never unsympathetic. Her biting criticism is reserved for the lack of interest the city fathers show in Stockport’s rich past, the history so effectively presented through a whole series of superb industrial buildings, many of which have already been destroyed through the greed of developers. Clapcott documents the look of industrial Stockport before it vanishes for ever, gathering information in drawings and watercolours before returning to the studio to construct her beautiful tempera paintings, which are both a record of appearances and a transfiguration of them.

More articles from: Andrew Lambirth | this section

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