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Thursday 4 December 2008

Fluff and granite

Boucher and Chardin: Masters of Modern Manners
The Wallace Collection, Hertford House, Manchester Square, W1, until 7 September

Alan Green: Joan Miro
Annely Juda Fine Art, 23 Dering Street, W1, until 18 July 

In the beautifully lit top gallery at Annely Juda Fine Art is a tribute to the distinguished English abstract painter Alan Green, who died in 2003. Green is one of those English abstractionists like Ayres, Hoyland or the unfairly neglected Brian Fielding, who was born in the 1930s and experienced the full impact of American Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s. Green trained as a graphic designer and illustrator, but swiftly changed allegiance and made his name as a painter. He was at the Royal College in the mid-to-late 1950s when American painting first hit these shores, and would have experienced it then at full throttle, even if as a designer he avoided the theoretical discussions of the painters. In fact, Green became a painter very much involved with the language of his art, intent on making visible the process by which he arrived at his images.

This memorial exhibition focuses on ten late works from 1991 to 2002, a number of them painted in horizontal strips, like planking. This horizontal arrangement is sometimes qualified by a near-central vertical division, like an informal axis. Thus the paintings each posit a series of meetings: ‘intersections’ between forms, and the juxtaposition of different speeds, energies, movements and colours. Their surfaces are immensely varied in texture, from a brushy application to a more corrugated combed effect, and the colour is equally inventive. These are not the grey paintings they might first appear to be, but blue-brown, violet, green, lilac and translucent white; pictures with a marked physical presence.

There’s a small room off the central space containing a group of drawings of discs, some cut-out and collaged, some simply drawn or employing colour. This theme is extended in the back room of the exhibition, in Green’s final sequence of drawings made in hospital, and in paintings — particularly ‘Red over White’ (2001) and the masterly ‘Rise and Fall’ (2002). The imagery resembles log piles seen end-on or oxygen bubbles rising through a cylinder of water, but is really about putting paint on and taking it off (the white circles of ‘Red over White’ are where Green has scraped back to the canvas), and about imposing limitations and then transcending them. A remarkable exhibition.

On the floor below is a very different exhibition, a group of sculptures and drawings by the Catalan Surrealist Joan Miró (1893–1983). There are 14 bronzes and ten drawings in this substantial show, but it is the drawings which make it especially worth visiting. The juxtaposed found objects are too fragmentary and too determinedly jokey to hold together as fully realised sculptures, even though cast in bronze, but the drawings have the freshness of invention and the controlled wiliness which make Miró a master of line and imagined form.

More articles from: Andrew Lambirth | this section

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