Beauty & Power: Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes
Wallace Collection, Manchester Square, W1, until 25 July
Caravaggio’s Friends & Foes
Whitfield Fine Art, 23 Dering Street, W1, until 23 July
William Crozier: Early Work
Pyms Gallery, 9 Mount Street, W1, until 20 July
The temporary exhibition galleries of the Wallace Collection are in the basement, next to the lavatories, and while I was there more visitors came down for the purposes of relieving themselves than to acquire new knowledge and experience of Renaissance and Baroque bronzes. It’s a shame if this show is being overlooked, because there hasn’t been a display like it in England for more than 30 years, and there are indeed fine things to be seen. The majority of the exhibits come from the collection of the American architect Peter Marino, and it’s evident that considerable trouble has been taken with their installation.
The gallery spaces have been divided into three: a gold room and a Venetian red room for the Italian works, and a larger green room for the French. The visitor enters via the gold room to be greeted by a centaur twisting its hirsute head at you, before ‘Hercules and Antaeus’ catches the eye, a strongman act and fight to the death in anguished bronze. The struggling figures are brilliantly and evocatively modelled, all sweat-gleaming musculature and stretched tendons. In case the deadly nature of these combats is overlooked, a lion-headed falchion or sword hangs blade down between the nearby ‘Apollo and Marsyas’ and a rather effeminate-looking David triumphing over Goliath. Next to this is an altogether more martial Judith with the head of Holofernes. Not a woman to cross lightly.
Rather annoyingly, the exhibit numbers only sometimes coincide with the catalogue numbers, which does not make for clarity. The restricted lighting of the small red room does not entirely diminish the effect of Samson smiting the Philistine with the jawbone of an ass, a dramatic figure group in an exhibition of reach-for-the-sky gestures and extreme posing. To the left are a couple of elaborate animal set pieces, to the right five smaller sculptures, of which the River God and the Dancing Faun are the most engaging. The French (green) room is dominated by four marvellous reclining river gods, two pairs of Nile and Tiber, each bearing a cornucopia. There’s a wonderfully camp Mercury and a particularly beguiling Laocoon group, writhing with serpents, and Andromeda is chained (twice) to her rock. All the expected subjects are here, and so (by implication) is the debate about the relative merits of Renaissance over Baroque work, and whether these objects are seen as decorative or fine art.
Actually, I don’t find them easy to see at all. In fact, it has to be said that most of these works look better carefully lit and photographed as illustrations in the catalogue than they do in the gallery. Ironically, this substantial and scholarly publication (£25 in paperback) is a better tribute to the sculptures than the actual display. I don’t mean that a visit to the exhibition is not necessary — it is, to get a sense of the physical presence of the bronzes, their textures and scale. But so many of the smaller works are presented so low down in their display cases as to make viewing them difficult, and the lighting — which presumably aims at the theatrical — is murky enough to conceal more than it reveals. I wish I liked the show more: there’s so much skill here yet it somehow leaves me cold. I don’t think it is simply that the language is unfamiliar, so much as the emotional ambience of the work that I find unappealing.
An interesting comparative show at Whitfield Fine Art is called Caravaggio’s Friends & Foes. Caravaggio has been in the news again recently, with a big exhibition in Rome (just coming to an end) and a major new biography, so this collection of works by his contemporaries is timely. Including important loans from public and private collections, and accompanied by a hefty illustrated catalogue, like Beauty & Power it represents considerable scholarship but not a great deal of passion. Passion may be found in the best of Caravaggio’s paintings, but in the lipsticked epicene in Prospero Orsi’s ‘Lute Player’? Hardly. Nor in Guido Reni’s rather saccharine self-portrait. Nor am I convinced by the lurid eye-rolling drama of the sonorously named Antiveduto Grammatica’s ‘David Returning Triumphant with the Head of Goliath’. Much tougher is Ribera’s powerful portrait of Aesop, the dome of his head almost armoured and minatory-looking. I also liked ‘Mary Magdalen’ by Orazio Gentileschi, father of the better-known Artemisia, and it was fascinating to see the soulful-eyed portrait of Giovanni Baglione, Caravaggio’s first biographer, who bitterly resented his subject’s success.
For a complete contrast, try William Crozier: Early Work at Pyms Gallery. I recently reviewed a show of Crozier’s latest work at Flowers, but this second 80th-birthday celebration covers the years 1958–75, and explores his roots in European abstraction and expressionism. This work is little known and strikes now with the force of a revelation, particularly the period around 1959–60. Crozier was making abstracted landscape paintings at this point, having moved briefly to Essex. Then the different charms of Wiltshire broadened his landscape understanding when he took a job teaching at Bath Academy in Corsham. In Essex, he observed the stubble-burning and the subsequent charred and ravaged look of the countryside. His paintings, with their palette of predominantly earth colours (brown, black, green) lit with red and orange, changed over to a more high-keyed red and orange with touches of eau de nil. After 1963, and a prolonged exposure to Spain, Crozier began to develop into the vibrant colourist he is today. But I find most interesting the experimental earlier works, when he’s using oil on paper or household paints on board, as he summons forth a vision of landscape (not really specific to place) hillocky and rhythmic as sea-swell. I’m put in mind of something the Scottish poet William Soutar wrote in 1932: ‘As I lifted my eyes to the hillside I saw the trees waving like a wall of fire’. Crozier invents his own apocalyptic imagery, using landscape as a vehicle for expressing ‘intangible things’. Impressive.
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