Nobody paints the sea like Emil Nolde

In April, ten years after opening its gallery on the beach in Hastings, the Jerwood Foundation gifted the building to the local borough council. Thrown in at the deep end without a permanent collection, Hastings Contemporary, as it is now known, has to sink or swim on the strength of its exhibition programme. How to please local audiences while attracting outsiders? For a seaside gallery, nautical themes are an obvious answer: this summer’s offering is Seafaring, a dip into two centuries of maritime art from Théodore Géricault to Cecily Brown.

What’s the worst that can happen? Shipwreck. The show opens with three recent canvases by Brown inspired by romantic paintings of the subject. Landlubbers love a good disaster at sea: when Géricault’s ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ (1819) was shown in London in 1820, 40,000 rubberneckers came to gawp. The Hastings gallery has had to make do with a reproduction of the Louvre’s second most famous painting; in its place we have Turner’s ‘The Loss of an East Indiaman’ (c.1818), commemorating the sinking of the Halsewell in 1786. Panicking passengers throng the heaving deck, but massed humanity was never Turner’s strong point. Géricault took more trouble with his figures, making plaster models of friends such as Delacroix posing as the dead and dying. The example here on loan from a private collection is in some ways more macabre than the painting.

The mood lightens upstairs with vintage ads for transatlantic liners. Towering over us in a 1935 poster by Cassandre, the ‘pacquebot de luxe’ Normandie looks indestructible, though the title of Chris Orr’s spoof of the genre, ‘Small Titanic’ (1933), reminds us that nothing is unsinkable. Wrecks haven’t lost their dramatic appeal, but modern artists paint them on a less epic scale.