Unimpressed by the relentless barrage of blockbusters, Andrew Lambirth singles out some small-scale gems
Although it can’t be easy to run a major museum in this country, and balance the books as well as fulfil a remit to provide the best possible conspectus of past and contemporary art for the general public, our museums are becoming increasingly narrow in what they offer. The range of art on show in London, for instance, has shrunk alarmingly, as the Whitechapel, the Serpentine and the Tate pursue very similar programmes, vying to be the first to put on the same internationally fashionable artists. Big names are required to draw the crowds, but these do not seem to be balanced by smaller shows of lesser-known artists, and the Tate in particular is failing in its role to show the wealth of art currently being produced in Britain, and the considerable achievements of British art over the last century (not to mention the historical collections).
The out-and-out success of Hockney at the RA and Freud at the NPG will only spur museums on to repeat the recipe, and provincial museums are following the pattern. Unbelievably, an exhibition of ‘paintings’ by Rolf Harris opens this week at the once distinguished Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, entitled with the TV entertainer’s popular catchphrase Can You Tell What It Is Yet? Admission is free, so I can only assume getting large audiences into the building is the aim, as if this will encourage people to return and look at something a little more intellectually challenging or aesthetically nourishing than Rolf’s daubs. In the meantime, for many of us, the Walker’s credibility as a serious museum has been disastrously dented.
Down at the Royal West of England Academy (RWA) in Bristol, the attempt to lure the paying public continues (they had a dreadful show of David Shepherd’s animal pictures recently) with a drawing of the American singer Rudy Vallée purported to be a very early work by Andy Warhol, going on show in July; will this draw the punters? The RWA certainly did well with its Ravilious exhibition in March and April, but Eric Ravilious (1903–42) has rapidly become a national treasure, and his superb watercolours are now deservedly famous and widely popular. Mainstone Press has just published the fourth and final volume in a tetralogy of well-produced picture books about him, this one called A Travelling Artist (£25), while the V&A has cleverly issued an excellent but inexpensive reprint of the classic 1938 book High Street by J.M. Richards. Very scarce today, this book sells for thousands of pounds and is all too often broken up for its superb Ravilious lithographs. But you can now buy the V&A’s facsimile for just £20 — a shrewd marketing move. Meanwhile, at the other end of the publishing business, Fleece Press has produced a sumptuous limited edition volume by Mrs Eric Ravilious (aka Tirzah Garwood), called Long Live Great Bardfield & love to you all (£234).
It’s often not much fun being married to an artist, particularly if you’re also one yourself, and Tirzah was a talented painter, wood engraver and, it now appears, writer. This book is her autobiography from 1908 to 1943, with notes taking it to the end of her life a mere eight years later. It tells the Ravilious story from the other side, and makes fascinating and moving reading. To coincide with the book’s publication, the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden has mounted an exhibition of work by Tirzah and friends (including her husband), which goes on until 24 June. If you haven’t yet visited the Fry, I urge you to go — it is a gem of a small museum, packed full of fascinating work helpfully catalogued and arranged, with plenty of related books for sale as well as the occasional drawing. The main gallery space houses the latest hanging of the permanent collection, with a room off for temporary displays, which is where the Tirzah display is.
The Fry is a small independent museum that has not only carefully defined its role (to collect and exhibit the artists who lived and worked in north-west Essex) but also manages to fulfil it thoroughly. There are fine things in the Tirzah show — from her best-known images (the wood engravings of people, cats and interiors) to unfamiliar but impressive paintings such as ‘Hide and Seek’, a very green oil from 1950 looking down on a garden sprinkled with white blossom, the burgeoning ‘Harvest Festival, Loaves and Fishes’ and three strange jungly pictures of flowers and foliage. Ravilious was not the most faithful of husbands, and Tirzah consoled herself at one time with John Aldridge, an unexpectedly good realist painter, represented here by a striking self-portrait. Looking at Duffy Ayers’s rather lovely portrait of Tirzah, it’s easy to understand the attraction between them.
Another out-of-town venue that puts on ambitious and worthwhile exhibitions is Mascalls Gallery in Paddock Wood, Kent. Its current show (until 30 June) is devoted to gouache landscapes by the 93-year-old Roland Collins, whose art is enjoying a massive revival of interest. Collins works in the romantic topographical tradition of Ravilious, Piper and Bawden, but has his own manner and artistic personality. A new audience is very happily discovering his skills, and sales of these beguiling paintings have been more than brisk. If ever an artist deserved to be better known — on the grounds of putting in long years of consistently good work to very little acclaim — it is he; the success of his exhibition is heart-warming.
Another success story attends Ramiro Fernandez Saus (born Sabadell, Spain, 1961), whose work is increasingly sought after in this country, and whose current exhibition, Dreams in the Garden, at Long & Ryle, 4 John Islip Street, SW1, until 9 June, is almost a sell-out. The show was inspired by a stay in the Folly Garden at Stancombe in Gloucestershire, and although Ramiro rarely paints from life, this extraordinary place fired his imagination and began to feed into his visions. The centrepiece of the exhibition is a big painting entitled ‘The Artist’, depicting a monkey sitting on a table painting a birthday cake. As always, strangeness vies with humour, elaborate pattern with rich, bright colour. Ramiro may paint with wiggly outlines like icing on a cake yet his pictures are as rigorously balanced and adjusted as any more obviously rectilinear composition by an abstract master such as Ben Nicholson.
Commercial galleries are increasingly doing the job that museums should do in mounting informative shows about artists who deserve reassessment. A typical example of this can be found in Francis Davison: Collages 1973–83 at Austin/Desmond Fine Art, Pied Bull Yard, 68–69 Great Russell Street, WC1, until 31 May. Davison was an immensely distinguished collagist who rarely exhibited, but whose 1983 solo show at the Hayward Gallery impressed many, despite (at his request) the lack of labels and biographical information. This reclusive and difficult man was married to the artist Margaret Mellis, and was a great friend of Patrick Heron. His remarkable abstract collages, made entirely of torn, found paper, can be best understood initially within the context of St Ives modernism, though the best of them transcend that categorisation. A late series of small works, made from torn envelopes, is particularly beautiful and almost unbearably moving.
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