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Friday 22 August 2008

Shifting truths

Wyndham Lewis Portraits (National Portrait Gallery until 19 October)

Before getting down to a discussion of Wyndham Lewis and an exhibition I’ve been looking forward to for months, I want to register a protest about this year’s recipient of the Wollaston Award at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. This prestigious prize is worth £25,000 and thus ranks with the Turner Prize as a top art world award, and yet it receives very little publicity. Deserving past winners have included Robert Medley, John Hoyland and R.B. Kitaj, but this year it has gone to Jeff Koons. In my review of the summer show I pointed out that Koons should not be taking up space which could be more profitably used by others. This multimillionaire American was invited to exhibit at the RA (he’s not even an Honorary Academician), and has now been given the Wollaston Award, which is intended to celebrate the most distinguished exhibit in the Summer Exhibition. Koons’s high chromium stainless steel ‘Cracked Egg (Blue)’ is a pretty bauble, but hardly distinguished. The minuscule frisson caused by the deliberate banality of the idea clashing with its slick execution offers some slight justification for its existence, but really doesn’t merit serious artistic debate. Its presence in the Academy summer show highlights the divisive split between those obsessed with publicity and those who still wish to preserve the RA as a focus for artistic excellence. The publicity-hunters seem to be winning. The Wollaston Award is in danger of becoming yet another art world farce, a meaningless rubber stamp for the fashionable and vacuous.

Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) was no stranger to controversy at the Academy. In 1938, he submitted one of his best portraits, the masterly half-length of T.S. Eliot, to the RA. The scarcely intrusive phallic scroll to the left of the background upset the so-called guardians of public morality, and the painting was swiftly rejected. Augustus John was so outraged he resigned from the Academy, and Lewis’s own contempt for the institution was resoundingly confirmed. Amazingly, the portrait could find no public or private purchaser in this country, so blinkered and timid were those with any money, and it was eventually sold to Durban Municipal Art Gallery in South Africa for £250. Consequently, it is only rarely seen in this country — to our continuing loss for it’s a magnificent painting.

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