Most of us like to look at a view, though not all are fortunate enough to live with one, in which case art can offer an alternative, a window on the world. Landscape is a great solace, and particularly refreshing for the tired urban spirit, but we want more than holiday snaps of foreign places briefly visited. We need the deeper exploration of art to feed hearts and minds, an investigation through the procedures of painting and drawing, a reordering of shapes and a fitting together, a showing again under other than a purely mimetic guise. With luck and application, through bearing witness to that process of recreating, we come to greater knowledge of our world and our place within it. As D.H. Lawrence said: ‘The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment.’
Looking at the View is a stimulating mixture of painting, photography, drawing, relief sculpture and film, a free display in the main galleries at Millbank. In the anteroom to the exhibition is a lovely theatrical Ivon Hitchens painting entitled ‘Winter Stage’ (1936), mixing inside and out in plunging perspectives and uplifting paint flourishes. At the opening to the main exhibition space, a witty acrylic by Patrick Caulfield (a taster for his solo show opening here on 5 June), entitled ‘After Lunch’ (1975), presents a photorealist view of the Château de Chillon set like a postcard within the painting, or like a trompe l’oeil panel set into the wall of the restaurant, a fish tank in front of it. To the right hangs Henry Lamb’s masterpiece — his portrait of Lytton Strachey (1914). To be honest, I’ve always been so interested in looking at the long drooping figure of Strachey that I’ve never really paid attention to the rather fine landscape background, seen through the window. Although it is the figure that still takes and holds the eye, the dialogue with external nature is also rewarding: consider the great bifurcated elms (compare Lytton’s legs) and the dense foliage cover (his beard). Thus a new context makes one look differently at an old favourite.
Of course there are terrible things here too, such as the ghastly fashionable 1930s portrait of Count Zouboff by Annie Louisa Swynnerton. Just compare this fop with Wright of Derby’s marvellously languid Sir Brooke Boothby, a follower of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and a man of profound philosophical bent. Joseph Wright’s painting is in a sense a society portrait too, but there is a timeless quality to this image, completely missing from the Thirties Count. Both these pictures push the boundaries of ‘view’ painting by focusing on the human individual within a more or less individualised rural setting.
For ‘pure’ landscape, notice the excellent Tristram Hillier, ‘La Route des Alpes’ (1937). There’s a slightly hallucinatory, even threatening quality to Hillier’s best paintings, perhaps deriving from surrealism as much as from the Flemish and Italian masters who inspired him. Here the pronounced colour contrasts promote a sense of heightened realism, and make an interesting comparison with the slightly unusual Lowry hanging next to it. This painting, ‘Hillside in Wales’ (1962), is another trailer picture — this time for the long-awaited Lowry exhibition at the Tate also opening in June — and offers a view of serried rows of cottages like a Roman amphitheatre or a Celtic monument, reminding us that Lowry was always more various than his stereotype suggests.
This is a rehang of the Tate’s permanent collection and a welcome reminder of the hidden wealth in the store rooms. We need to see more exhibitions like this: thought-provoking and intensely enjoyable. Before visiting the show I had feared that the great paintings of the past would sit uneasily with the more modern exhibits, and the contemporary work would look trivial and superficial by comparison. Often hanging photography with paintings shows the weakness of the photographs against the manifold richness of the painted images, but in this case I was (for the most part) pleasantly surprised. The works have been chosen with great care and sensitivity, and although there are some obvious and fairly feeble crowd-pleasers (Gilbert & George, Ms Emin), the hanging is generally so skilful that the juxtaposition of images reveals new things about both.
For instance, Graham Sutherland’s ‘Welsh Landscape with Roads’ (1936), with its high, non-naturalistic colour, looks splendid next to Dan Holdsworth’s large and richly coloured photo ‘A Machine for Living’ (1999). Structurally the two set each other off in a series of echoes and reverberations of forms and movement. Likewise, William Nicholson’s elegant and mysteriously lit painting ‘The Hill above Harlech’ (c.1917) gains something from being hung next to ‘Airport’ (1995) by Carol Rhodes, thus adding to our understanding of the importance of how a painting is structured, however effortless it may appear. Even Turner paired with Lisa Milroy looks surprisingly good.
One of my favourites here is ‘The Cornfield’ (1918) by John Nash. This has become such a popular image partly because it represents an ideal of the countryside we are now in danger of losing for ever, but principally because of the intensity with which it was painted. It has a visionary quality that suggests a new morning of the spirit, even though it depicts a field half-harvested touched by long evening shadows. The tranquil optimism that suffuses it arises from Nash’s mood when he was painting it. He’d just been released from terrifying frontline service in the Army in order to become an official War Artist, and he was surrounded by people he loved: his wife and his older (and more famous) brother Paul. That happiness is somehow transmitted to the thick expressive paint of ‘The Cornfield’, transforming it into a celebration of eternal truths. That’s what great landscape painting is about.
Other paintings to look out for include Arnesby Brown’s ‘Line of the Plough’ (1919), the inventive sky-shapes echoing the curves of the low hills; John Brett’s great panorama of the British Channel; ‘A Gleam of Sunlight’ by Algernon Newton (a strange and intriguing tree-framed prospect); a bravura Augustus John; ‘The Bridge’ by Philip Wilson Steer; Inchbold’s ‘Gordale Scar’; and the much-neglected William Townsend’s pale but interesting ‘Dungeon Ghyll’ (1956). And there’s a really exquisite trio of small paintings by Robert Bevan, Harold Gilman and Spencer Gore, all basically about stripes, and thus anticipating the American abstractionists by 50 years or more.
Very last chance to see an impressive exhibition of Danny Markey’s recent work at the Redfern Gallery (20 Cork Street, W1, until 27 April). Markey (born 1965) paints mostly small lyrical panels of the view from his home in suburban Wales. These are not obviously scenic subjects — housing estates, an overgrown playing field — but they embody the redemptive quality of art: the artist’s ability to find beauty in the ordinariness of the everyday. The night paintings are particularly fine: recommended.
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