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.
Opposite is a large striped painting by Ian Davenport (born 1966). Vibrant verticals in green, orange, red, mauve and blue, it’s a bit like a more theatrical Bridget Riley painting, made from swaying pours of household paint, which seem to move like skirts or curtains in the wind. Further down the same wall there’s a richly textured Van Gogh, borrowed from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, a dark but resonant painting of light beneath trees. It’s painted in short dabs in very matt paint (the unprimed canvas has absorbed the oil), and writhes gently in a dense somewhat claustrophobic pattern.
Moving into the Sunley Room proper, the visitor is struck at once by the dazzle and glitz of Sargent, showing off his virtuoso paint-handling in the different fabrics worn by his sitters. The paintmarks are speedy, verging on the slapdash, but the sheer enjoyment of the medium is evident in the way Sargent has gone to town on the white satin dress and the large Chinese vase. His facility was enormous. Look at the way he represents the girl’s fan: edge-on in a daring shape which in less-assured hands might be difficult to read. The lustrous Van Dyck to Sargent’s right looks almost staid in comparison, with its quiet, artificial-seeming flowers.
After all that froth, Rubens’s great allegory of peace and war is a solid, sensual masterpiece, a dance of energies across the canvas. Next to it is a large square abstract by Gillian Ayres (born 1930), one of our finest non-representational painters. Her canvas is bumpy and hummocky with paint, great slabs and swathes of colour in inventive abstract shapes and patterns. Complex and intuitive, her painting is a grand enough statement to hang next to the grandest English painter of the past 100 years, Francis Bacon. Here I must take issue with the writer of the useful booklet (priced at £3.95) accompanying the exhibition, who maintains that Bacon’s treatment of paint was brutal. Not so. He was brutal to appearances, reinventing them without regard for conventional beauty, but he was not violent with paint. The paint in this small triptych of Isabel Rawsthorne is caressed on, swirled and curled and gently swiped, and, as usual, ravishingly beautiful.
A strange picture comes next, borrowed from the artist, an enamelled confection by Raqib Shaw (born 1974), a decorative Boschian nightmare, such as might afflict you when dozing over the marbled endpapers of a Victorian novel. The Degas next to it is in a class of its own, done in hot, potentially hellish reds, but curiously serene despite its bold treatment. Interestingly, Matisse once owned this painting. The cool Gainsborough next to it, with its impression of flickering movement, is more in keeping with the joyful informality of the little Murillo genre painting of a peasant boy close by. The next grouping is a fine one: Seurat’s study of the Seine at Asnières, focused on orange/blue and red/green polarities, and one of Constable’s loveliest studies, the immensely atmospheric ‘Weymouth Bay’, the pink sandy beach catching the light under a roiling grey sky.
Opposite is another excellent bit of hanging: Courbet, Turner and Bomberg. The Courbet, a sea painting called ‘Eternity’ from Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, I’d remembered as much larger. Its chief feature is the most extraordinary blue of the sky. Courbet, the arch-celebrant of the physical world, here approaches the spiritual. Next to it is another depiction of the infinite — Turner’s transcendent ‘Margate (?) from the sea’. The weather is so rough, you can’t tell whether it’s Margate or Middleton. Actually, the place is immaterial, for the painting depicts the weather of the soul. Against this glorious pairing has been hung a tremendous Bomberg sunset (from Newcastle), which looks equally as metaphysical, though more obviously material in its structure. Monet’s ‘Flood Waters’ comes almost as an anticlimax after that, and the Renoir is scarcely noticeable.
In many ways, Passion for Paint is the best of the series so far, which is saying quite a lot as they’ve all been worthwhile shows. It’s an excellent policy to tour selected items from the NG’s permanent collection to the provinces, and to get in return paintings of the quality of the Courbet and the Bomberg in London for a while. I’m all in favour of new ways of looking at old masters, and a change of context is certainly to be recommended. And it’s always good to see the Impressionists put in their place….
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