Gillian Ayres at 80
Alan Cristea Gallery, 31 & 34 Cork Street, W1, until 13 March
Claude Monet
Helly Nahmad Gallery, 2 Cork Street, W1, until 26 February
Birthday greetings are in order for Gillian Ayres, who has just celebrated her 80th with an exhibition of new work of undiminished vigour, inventiveness and sheer uplift. One of our leading abstract artists, Ayres manages to keep on surprising us with large-scale paintings of superabundant vitality despite her own poor health, and with images of pronounced joy. However, her work is not all high spirits. The celebration of colour which distinguishes it is made with the full and certain knowledge of personal extinction (though may that moment be long delayed). Her work shines with more depth for being produced in this context, like the Pole star in the night sky. Here is no indulgent self-expression but an inquiry after basic truths that will illuminate the human condition and with luck make life more bearable.
Although Ayres is an abstract painter, this does not mean that she lives in some rarefied ivory tower, unaware of the world around her. She has spent a lifetime looking, and the intense quality of her visual attention (a characteristic of all true artists) has fed back directly or indirectly into her art. The shapes in her most recent paintings have assumed more clearly defined edges — in some cases to the point of becoming geometrical — and are even beginning to look like recognisable things in the phenomenal world. If in her earlier work it was the relationships between things she had seen that filtered back into her paintings, now the actual things are appearing, though the overall impulse of her painting remains resolutely abstract. Thus we might discern triangles, circle-segments, fingers or pods of colour, kites, leaves or palm trees. Stars shine white as diamonds. There is even a hint of primitive tribal art, the markings found on totems and other carved objects of a sacred or symbolic import. But Ayres uses all these things visually: essentially they are only shapes (deprived of meaning) for her to orchestrate in her grand symphonies of paint.
She has created a substantial body of new work since 2007, not all of which is on show, even though both of Alan Cristea’s Cork Street galleries have been given over to this solo exhibition. (The bulk of it is, however, illustrated in the handsome hardback catalogue.) There are large paintings and small paintings, works on paper and prints. This is a show to glory in. At 31 Cork Street there’s a marvellous medium-sized painting called ‘Purled Air’, with unexpected colour combinations and paint textures of rare beauty. In this gallery also there are the works on paper, with a group of aquatint and carborundum prints of an exciting richness. Next door at No. 34 is the earliest painting here, a tall blue diptych called ‘The Sky is Good for Flying’ (2007–8). Here also is my favourite painting in the show: ‘Sang the Sun in Flight’ (2009), a reverberant red-brown exclamation of delight, unlike anything I’ve seen and deeply memorable.
In the catalogue essay, Ayres is quoted as saying: ‘The English love gardening. It’s probably the only broad thing that they understand in this way. They do know what you mean about gardening. And it’s delightful on every level that they do. But one would like it if it was art. Yes, one would.’ Perhaps Ayres at 80 will make new converts. She certainly deserves to, breaking new ground and adding immeasurably to the stock of joy in the world.
Across the road is another feast of light and colour, at the Helly Nahmad Gallery. It’s not often that a commercial gallery can muster a group of paintings which makes the visitor feel as if transported to one of the world’s great museums, but Mr Nahmad’s current Monet show does just that. The spacious gallery has been painted in Sanderson King’s blue, and against these sumptuously coloured walls a staggering selection of paintings has been arranged. One of the first pictures to strike home is of the distinctive rock formations at Etretat on the Normandy coast. Light falls on the triangular stack and on the beaky outcrop nicknamed The Nose, placed dramatically against foreground shadow. On the other side of the room is a painting of London, with Big Ben in blue shimmering and appearing to dissolve against the setting sun. Some 20 years separate the two paintings, but the continuity of interest is plain: how form is revealed and modified by light, the effects of which are conveyed to us by the inspired use of colour.
The exhibition is a Monet retrospective in miniature, bringing together 17 paintings ranging over 36 years, from the earliest which is a river view at Argenteuil, dated 1872, to the last, an evocation of buildings and water in Venice, from 1908. The works come from the Nahmad family collection, from other private collections and from the Kunsthaus, Zurich. Hanging next to Big Ben is a picture of Waterloo Bridge, the most abstract of the images here, the structure disappearing in a lilac-green mist, with a roughly triangular pool of light in the right foreground, composed of orange, purple and cream.
Venice also turns purple, the water streaked with turquoise, or shivers golden, or flames in the gorgeous ‘Le Rio de la Salute’. Against these fiery late works, the earlier landscapes of the Seine or Argenteuil with yachts have a beguiling placidity. ‘Le chemin de halage à Graval’ (1883) is a particularly appealing composition with the trees massed to the right and rearing over the riverbank. A richly impasted painting of stooks entitled ‘Les Demoiselles de Giverny’ (1894) features a dozen pink wigwams of grain-sheaves on a beautifully modulated green and pink field. The arrangement of shape, colour and pattern is not so far from what Gillian Ayres does today, though Monet includes a horizon line, which you won’t find in Ayres.
All the paintings at Helly Nahmad are interesting, and some are really distinguished. Where else can you find 17 Monets in an uncrowded, uncluttered environment in central London which is open to the public free of charge? An extraordinary opportunity.
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