Andrew Lambirth

Seeing the light

One of the more considerable pleasures of exhibition-viewing outside London recently was the Claude show at the Ashmolean. London exhibitions are becoming mobbed by crowds, and there is little enjoyment in shoving or being shoved in the supposed pursuit of artistic enlightenment, and absolutely no chance to contemplate individual pictures in the hurly-burly. As the devout will queue up to kiss the wizened toe of a saint, now the football fans of art will jostle to snatch the merest passing glimpse of a Leonardo or a Freud. The being there is all: the experience has very little to do with serious looking. Afterwards, you join the ranks of the blessed and tell your friends that you too were in the presence. There is apparently much comfort to be drawn from such sharing. What a delightful contrast it was at the Ashmolean to be able to linger in front of individual Claude paintings, or the exquisite drawings, and not be harried by a press of impatient culture-tasters.

I thought of that Claude exhibition, and I thought of last year’s Poussin and Twombly show at Dulwich, as I was going round the new show of Turner and Claude in the dungeons of the NG’s Sainsbury Wing. In theory I am in favour of comparative shows, because of the new understanding they can confer, but in practice one of the parties often suffers. At Dulwich, Poussin was rather overshadowed by the dash and scale of Twombly, and at the NG I feared that Claude would be overshadowed by Turner. (For some reason it is often the most recent master who seems to benefit from these comparative juxtapositions.) Turner himself wanted his work to be hung next to Claude. He left the NG his paintings ‘Dido building Carthage’ and ‘Sun rising through Vapour: Fishermen cleaning and selling Fish’ on the condition that they would be hung between two paintings by Claude: ‘Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba’ and ‘Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca’.

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