More real art, please

Although I am an admirer of Dulwich Picture Gallery, and like to support its generally rewarding exhibition programme, I will not be making the pilgrimage to see its latest show, Norman Rockwell’s America.

Although I am an admirer of Dulwich Picture Gallery, and like to support its generally rewarding exhibition programme, I will not be making the pilgrimage to see its latest show, Norman Rockwell’s America. This is not just because it’s quite a hike to Dulwich for me, involving a bus, a train, another bus and another train (anything in excess of three hours from door to door), but also because I don’t think the trip will be worth it. I’ve been impressed by the series of monographic exhibitions Dulwich has mounted in recent years on English artists — Sutherland, Piper, Sickert and most recently Paul Nash — but the other side of the programme is an interest in American artists which I can’t always share.

Don’t get me wrong: I love the best of American art, and find it deeply exciting. But Dulwich is a small museum, inevitably of limited resources, and its ‘special relationship’ with American Art (to be applauded in theory) does not extend to a single disinterested sponsor who will pick up the bill for procuring only the finest examples of that nation’s artistic output. As a consequence, Dulwich has to cut its coat to suit its cloth and in effect take what’s available — corporate collections which reflect more glory on the corporation than on the artists represented, minor museum accumulations, or packages from wealthy American Foundations which desire the imprimatur of a prestigious English exhibiting venue. Oh, for the days when the CIA backed European shows of Abstract Expressionism in the cause of cultural imperialism!

I’m all in favour of an English Museum devoted entirely to American Art, and paid for by American largesse, and perhaps then we would see proper shows of such relative unknowns (in this country) as Wayne Thiebaud (born 1920), Milton Avery (1885–1965), John Marin (1870–1953) and Marsden Hartley (1877–1943).