Spring round-up | 10 March 2012

The fashion for museum-quality exhibitions in commercial galleries continues apace with two notable shows in Mayfair: Cy Twombly at Eykyn Maclean, and Julio González at Ordovas. Both galleries specialise in this kind of display, which must be more to do with impressing potential clients than with generating income, given that both are loan shows. I hope there’s also an altruistic motive here, however slight: to provide another forum for the public to view high-quality art they might not see elsewhere. Certainly these venues offer a new and welcome resource to the London gallery-goer, and should be better known.

Chistopher Eykyn and Nicholas Maclean, who both have many years of experience at Christie’s, deal in key Impressionist and 20th-century European and American artists. They already have a New York gallery, which is the destination of their Twombly show when it closes here after launching their new London gallery. Pilar Ordovas is another Christie’s-trained specialist dealer, who opened a gallery last year with an impressive exhibition of Bacon and Rembrandt.

Eykyn Maclean’s excellent Twombly show (30 St George Street, W1, until 17 March) is loaned from the Sonnabend Collection, which accounts for its focus and quality. Ileana Sonnabend (1914–2007) was an influential dealer and collector, the woman who requested a Matisse instead of an engagement ring when she consented to be Leo Castelli’s wife. She met Twombly through Rauschenberg and began to acquire his pictures with unerring skill. All 11 works in this show are both interesting and domestic-sized. (Most of the Twomblys one sees are huge.) All employ the characteristic swirling or angular scribble for which he was celebrated, some to better effect than others. ‘Triumph of Galatea’ of 1961, for instance, is rather florid, whereas ‘Untitled (New York City)’ of 1956 is altogether more painterly and mesmerising.