New ways of looking

Since 2003, the National Gallery has been organising a series of annual exhibitions in partnership with Bristol’s City Museum and Art Gallery and the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle. (Readers will perhaps recall previous themed shows: Paradise, Making Faces and last year The Stuff of Life.) This initiative has proved so successful that the programme has been extended for a further three years, with Passion for Paint being the first in the new sequence. It has already been seen at Bristol and Newcastle, and now arrives in London minus the early Leon Kossoff painting ‘Children’s Swimming Pool, Autumn Afternoon’ (1971), which was shown at both other venues. The National is planning a Leon Kossoff solo exhibition from March to July 2007, so it was deemed better not to show him now as well. A pity, as the painting is a fine one from the Tate, but its exclusion is a tribute to the NG’s fair-mindedness.

The display opens with an ill-assorted trio in the foyer of the Sunley Room. A typically languishing Guido Reni portrayal of Mary Magdalene, with long flowing tresses, is hung with Rembrandt’s magisterial portrait of Margaretha de Geer, and (descending swiftly from the sublime to the ridiculous) a Glenn Brown (born 1966). Brown’s trademark is copying another artist’s look but achieving it by different means. Thus his picture here is in the molten and heavily impastoed style of Frank Auerbach, but disconcertingly rendered in flat trompe-l’oeil paint. It’s very clever, but meaningless and rather creepy. It represents the triumph of technique over all else. Its inclusion here is I suppose justifiable, but then so would be that of almost any painting. Painters do tend to be passionate about paint otherwise they would use some other medium. If they’re not passionate they’re likely to be bad painters. So the category is, by definition, a wide one.