Love
National Gallery, until 5 October
It’s that time of the year — some call it the Silly Season — when a themed exhibition visits the Sunley Rooms of the National Gallery, after previously showing at Bristol’s City Museum and Art Gallery, and the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne. This is the seventh in a series of collaborative exhibitions organised by the NG in partnership with Bristol and Tyne & Wear Museums, and this year the selection of exhibits relies very heavily on the National’s collection, with only one work each borrowed from Bristol and Newcastle. Happily, there is no restriction to sourcing loans elsewhere, so the show does not lack variety and strength. If anything, its diversity makes the theme a tenuous cohesive device.
It troubles me that through wall-captions and the accompanying booklet the public is always directed to the way the works of art gathered here tell stories. There is almost nothing about different ways of seeing or how an image is made, and yet the story can only ever be a pretext for the making of a visual image. It’s as if our museums and their curators would rather forget about the aesthetic, formal and stylistic aspects of the works on display. They are indeed far more difficult to write about, and perhaps they think that it can safely be assumed that such discussion is over the head of the average gallery-goer. If so, I take issue. I think people want to look at pictures as visual images, and, though they are curious about narratives as well, they need encouragement to concentrate on colours and forms.
Nowhere can this be more obvious than in the opening to the exhibition. In the foyer to the Sunley Rooms is Tracey Emin’s ‘Those who Suffer Love (Im OK now)’. Besides the rampant and deeply tedious egotism of the work, there is very little to see apart from some sub-literate ‘writing’ and a bit of stitching. The artwork here relies entirely on the power of Emin’s celebrity for its resonance. On its own, it has next to nothing to offer — a handful of old-fashioned embroidered flowers and some scribble. Compare this work with the painting by David Hockney just inside the main room. Entitled ‘We Two Boys Together Clinging’ (taken from a Walt Whitman poem), it has a strong autobiographical element to it, dealing as it does with male homosexuality. But where it parts company from Emin’s feeble effusion is in the quality of the art.
This painting is a magnificent example of early Hockney, in which the artist has drawn on all sorts of different visual sources from graffiti to Dubuffet’s ‘art brut’, and reinterpreted them to produce an image of much originality and considerable emotional range. Formally, the painting is a masterly combination of seemingly wild brushstrokes and textures actually very carefully controlled and organised to a deliberate aesthetic end. The stripes and scratchings, the loose gestural drawing, the use of numbers, letters and actual text are brought together and harmonised by a brilliant use of colour, juxtaposing warm and cool hues in a balanced and subtly gradated arrangement over the picture surface. There is pictorial wit and sophistication here; there is emotional warmth and humour.
The pictorial intelligence so inventively at work in Hockney’s picture is sadly absent in Emin’s self-obsessed tirade. What a treat to see Hockney’s painting again (on loan from the Arts Council), fresh and glorious more than 45 years after it was made. The autobiography or element of self-exposure in the Hockney is only part of the whole tough and radical image; in the Emin, the self-exposure dominates and attempts to compensate for the lack of any formal, aesthetic or intellectual rigour. In this it does not succeed: you have to be interested in Miss Emin before you bother to give this work more than a cursory glance.
Hanging near the Hockney is a Chagall of flying lovers — all right if you like bunches of generalised flowers and folkloric symbolism. I’d have preferred some of Jeffery Camp’s much more original flying lovers (original in drawing, colour, composition and emotional complexity), but to include a living underrated English artist seems beyond the remit of the exhibition. However, we should be thankful for the inclusion of such great (and still remarkably little-known) works as Stanley Spencer’s ‘Contemplation’ (1937) from ‘The Beatitudes of Love’ series, borrowed from the Spencer Gallery in Cookham. Here’s an artist who can play about with form (call it distortion if you like) and scale in a totally personal way and make something extraordinarily moving of it.
There’s a marvellous double portrait by Joseph Wright of Derby next to it, a harmony in pinks and blues which also happens to be an excellent representation of the newly married Mr and Mrs Thomas Coltman. It’s full of movement, from the over-arching line through Mr Coltman’s arms and shoulders, echoed in his wife’s right arm and the horse’s bent neck, to the returning curve of the dog’s back as it fawns at the horse’s knees. And all these localised surface movements are played off against the majestic diagonal thrust of the tree trunk.
On the other side of the room is a great trio: Vermeer’s serene ‘Young Woman Standing at a Virginal’, a hymn to blue and the power of light, Raphael’s ‘Madonna of the Pinks’ and Cranach’s ‘Cupid Complaining to Venus’. Interesting to compare how the Cranach differs from a medieval tapestry while pausing to admire the depth of eroticism he manages to infuse into this acceptable ‘classical’ subject. The hat Venus wears is in the height of 16th-century German aristocratic fashion and makes a much more lascivious image, being partially clad, than the purity of a completely nude figure.
Round the corner is a fabulous array of pattern-making by Holman Hunt, called ‘The Pot of Basil’, with the rather tacky inclusion of a lustre watering-can at bottom right, a strange and unexpected lapse of taste. Turner’s ‘Hero and Leander’ is next, an example of paint overpowering subject if ever there was one. The badly drawn eponymous figures are scarcely visible among the complex light effects and atmospheres Turner conjures up, the wisps and veils of gorgeous paint he invented for our delectation. But about love? Hardly at all.
Among the other exhibits are a couple of contemporary Indian miniaturists who specialise in a distinctive brand of Pop Art, a glazed ceramic long-eared rabbit by Grayson Perry bearing the repeated legend ‘God please keep my children safe’, an ironic conjunction when one considers that rabbits tend to eat their young in times of danger, a lovely blond-toned Tiepolo painting of Cleopatra, and fine things by Goya, Claude and Alma-Tadema. The subject of these paintings can only very loosely be described as love, but, as a theme designed to attract the punters and an excuse to pull together a lively and varied selection of mostly high-quality work, it succeeds. And if I want to think about love, I can always consult the poets.
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