Theatres of Life: Drawings from the Rothschild Collection, The Wallace Collection, Manchester Square, London W1, until 27 January 2008
Pop Art Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, until 20 January 2008, Sponsored by Lehman Brothers
Waddesdon Manor, the stately home of the Rothschilds near Aylesbury now managed by the National Trust, is lending for the first time a group of master drawings for outside exhibition. London’s Wallace Collection is the fortunate recipient, and some 75 high-quality drawings (mostly French 18th-century) are currently on display in the basement galleries of Hertford House in Manchester Square. Here is yet another example of the current fetish for subterranean galleries devoid of natural light. Revealingly, it’s the restaurant which is given the prime location upstairs (plenty of light and space), though it’s an oddly airless and not particularly pleasant place to eat. Once again, the priorities of our museums seem topsy-turvy. For culture, see below.
The exhibition consists of two rooms (the catalogue, published by Paul Holberton at £25 in paperback, is far grander than the show), of which the second room is the more interesting. The first contains a lot of drawings of theatricals and entertainments, the forerunners of fashion plates, along with a superb Wilkie of a Pierrot in brown ink and a typically ornate Bakst costume design. Sadly, these two works are hung far too high for ease of contemplation. The only other drawing in this room to hold my eye was the unusual ‘Design for a stage set with garden vista leading to a chateau’ in red chalk, depicting serried ranks of arboured loggias. Better to move through and linger in the second room.
Here an ink-and-wash drawing by that master of sentiment Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805) shows the strength of his vision beneath the trappings of symbolic moralising that usually obscure it. The energetic brown ink line zips through the masses of grey wash, passionately articulating the subject of an old man reproaching a youth. Nearby are Gabriel de Saint-Aubin’s fizzy, fluttery chalk drawing of ‘Figures Dancing’, and a strange Boucher ‘Flagellation’, an untypical subject for this painter of sensual delights. There are good things by Lancret, especially a red chalk drawing of a swing (a very 18th-century subject), and a charming Fragonard, a fluid and masterly wash drawing of an assignation at a window. For full-bodied colour, turn to Delacroix’s ‘Two Suliote soldiers by the sea’, while of the several architectural studies on display, note especially Charles De Wailly’s ‘Design for a Grand Salon lined with Mirrors’.
A very different use of brown ink and grey wash from Greuze’s may be studied in one of the few Dutch drawings in the show. ‘Garden Scene’ by Dirk Maas, from the 1690s, depicts a Mediterranean-style view, a stately garden with appropriate architecture, which may have originated as a tapestry design. It is altogether more consciously elegant in handling, vertical and airy in its principal emphases, rather than low and clustered like Greuze’s drawing. Its effect is less definite, less emotional, atmospheric in a vague way and immensely refined. The exhibition will tour to the Djanogly Gallery in Nottingham (12 April to 1 June 2008). Although interesting to see how it looks there, perhaps a visit to Waddesdon itself is more in order.
At the National Portrait Gallery is a show of pictures that couldn’t be more different in appearance and intention. Pop Art Portraits is a paying exhibition (£9 admission, £7 concessions) guaranteed to pull the crowds: the day I visited, it was mobbed by teenagers, some of them even making sketches from the works on the walls. Pop is by its very nature demotic, drawing inspiration from the imagery of mass culture, from advertising and commercial graphics, from the worlds of popular music and entertainment. It enacts a kind of homage to consumerism, to the lowest common denominator, and thus set about changing the traditional hierarchies of fine art, democratising it and making it more accessible. You could say that dumbing down began here.
This exhibition opens with a group of typically inventive and irreverent collages by the late Eduardo Paolozzi, backed up by Nigel Henderson’s monumental ‘Head of a Man’ and Richard Hamilton’s ‘Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?’, both from 1956, and all of them classic proto-Pop images. Opposite is Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Trophy V (for Jasper Johns)’, to bring the Americans into the equation. There’s much dispute as to whether the British or the Americans invented Pop Art, but it seems as if both strands evolved independently at pretty much the same time, with their own characteristics. The British version tends to be more subtle and pictorially more imaginative, the American more openly materialistic and concerned with simple fulfilment.
Peter Blake is one of the chief protagonists of British Pop, here represented by ‘Got a Girl’ and ‘The 1962 Beatles’. It’s good to see less well-known figures such as the American collagist Ray Johnson featured in such company. Room 2 contains some fine work, Larry Rivers’s portrait of the art critic David Sylvester looking like some mafia godfather leading the field. This vast though sketchy figure is a monument to what might be called un-finish, an appropriate way of depicting an arbiter of taste whose opinions were so subject to revision. In this room is David Hockney’s ‘I’m in the mood for love’, definitely not a portrait, but then so many of these exhibits can only be called portraits with considerable flexibility of the term. Not so the stylish and original ‘Self-Portrait’ by Allen Jones, an exercise in real colour and imaginative penetration.
Patrick Caulfield is represented by his well-known ‘Portrait of Juan Gris’ (a solo show of Caulfield is at Waddington Galleries, 11 Cork Street, London W1, until 21 December). Among other competing delights are Dick Smith’s witty abstract portrait of Marilyn Monroe, all luscious colour and brushwork, Colin Self’s surreal women and B52 bomber, Hockney’s great and lucid ‘Portrait surrounded by artistic devices’ and memorable things by Kitaj, Warhol, Hamilton and Pauline Boty. The show will tour to the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (23 February to 8 June 2008). It’s worth visiting if you’re unfamiliar with the icons of Pop Art (there’s a whole room devoted to Marilyn, for instance), or even if you’d just like to see a good selection of some of the most famous of Pop Art’s painters and paintings gathered together in one place. I’m not sure, however, that it makes any particularly profound points about the nature of either Pop Art or portraiture. But unless Pop revolts you, it does offer a quick fix on the way to something more substantial.
Allen Jones celebrates his 70th birthday this year, and there are various displays organised to honour the event. An exhibition of new work, both paintings and prints, is at Alan Cristea Gallery, 31&34 Cork Street, London W1, until 22 December. Before I say it’s an immaculate show, I must declare an interest: I’ve known and admired Jones’s work for many years and have written not only the latest monograph on him (published by the Royal Academy), but also the catalogue essay for this exhibition.
Jones is a deeply thoughtful artist at the height of his powers, whose international profile is far higher than his standing in Britain. (Another example of our tardiness in recognising our own.) Some amends are being made with a room devoted to his work at Tate Britain, showing a group of Sixties’ paintings juxtaposed with recent work. Particularly fine is the large painting ‘Man Woman’ from 1963, which illustrates Jones’s sophisticated understanding of human sexuality while being a powerful and intriguing design. There is also a s mall show of his watercolours — a medium in which he excels — at the Royal Academy. It’s high time for a big retrospective of Jones’s work, showing the full range of nearly half-a-century’s achievement. That would be something substantial.
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