A Crisis of Brilliance makes the trek to Dulwich worthwhile

This exhibition was dreamt up by David Boyd Haycock, a freelance writer and curator, following the success of a book he published with a similar title in 2009. The Crisis of Brilliance book focused on the early career of five Slade-trained artists and their relationship with the first world war. When I reviewed it at the time, I felt that Dr Haycock was simply retreading rather familiar ground, however agreeable his text, as all of the artists he chose to highlight had already been extensively written about. To the five artists of the book a sixth has been added for the exhibition: David Bomberg. This enables the show to include two large canvases by Bomberg that contribute considerably to the impressiveness of the display. Although I enjoyed Dr Haycock’s book, well written and researched as it undoubtedly is, his thesis works even better as a mixed exhibition. This show certainly makes the trek out to Dulwich worthwhile.

Outside the temporary exhibition space, in the main hall of the museum, currently hangs Bomberg’s great painting ‘In the Hold’ (c.1913–4), a vast gridded canvas diagonally subdivided. It looks totally abstract, and several contemporary critics thought it resembled a design for linoleum or a silk shawl rather than a figurative painting. Yet Bomberg insisted that it depicted ‘some men emerging from one trapdoor and entering another in the hold of a ship’, a subject close to the heart of the Jewish community in England, as most refugees arrived here in this way. Difficult to read or decode, this painting should perhaps have the preparatory drawing for it hung alongside, as this makes the abstracted structures of the composition much more decipherable. Instead the viewer is immersed in a kind of visual music, fractured and rhythmic, alternately jarring and harmonious, full of coloured facets from puce to icy blue, a whirling ordered confusion, which sets up certain expectations.