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Art Exhibitions in London May/June 2018

This was our annual London extravaganza, starting with:

Rodin and Classical Greek Art

It was a common-place of the revues I read to marvel at this exhibition in toto but to assent (‘with civil sneer’) to Rodin’s ‘obvious’ inferiority to the Greek masters. Yet this didn’t cross my mind whilst there. The curation is subtle enough to provide opportunity for seeing the learning involved in Rodin’s tactile love of the Parthenon marbles without seeing a need for easy comparisons of purely aesthetic value, since aesthetic value is the least interesting way to compare these sets of sculptures. The texts from the poet Rilke helped here because they reflected the ways in which Rodin’s contemporary, and assistant, focused on the major differences in the ontology of art between the two exemplar sculptures. They are not the same thing at all – such that even shared monumentality has a different set of sensations and meanings attached to it in each case. Rodin’s fragments are self-conscious not accidental – the effect of past and passing time on culture and identity not just on the physical imprint of age and conflict on stone.

The effect of fragmentation (say of figures from The Gates of Hell) is that, in taking-on autonomy, they take on different identity and scale in freeing themselves of their context. The key to this is ‘The Thinker’, who separated from the gate on which he looks down is also severed from easy acquisition of any straightforward claim to ontology – as god or man, saint, sinner, angel, devil, artist, philosopher and so on. Alone and monumentally so he merely reflects and thinks the questions: What am I? Who am I? Do these questions matter?

Nothing in Greek art can go there, though it can evoke severance from a divine it once pretended to as ritual object, whilst articulating some kinds of very close perception of the feel of spirit, body and clothing and the relationships between them. Yet The Burghers of Calais are locked in distance from each other – unsure as a group as is each figure whether it is like each other figure, even in its reflection on itself and the others. They are even locked in their own private symbols as the comments from Rilke’s commentary show us. Having said this, I loved seeing the London Parthenon marbles in a context other than their rupture from any proper context within the clinical situation of the Duveen Gallery – that gallery of body parts divorced from any appropriate housing. For Rodin, the dispersal of the ‘marbles’ was inevitable consequence of the effect of a contemporary Imperialism that he just accepted grumpily after the manner of Zola.

Picasso 1932

You leave this exhibition unsure that you could have really seen such a magically haunting set of pictures from one year of Picasso’s life as painter, curator and self-reflector. What can one say?

These pictures are as terrifying as they are lovely. You feel as if it is difficult to divorce even feelings of revulsion from ones of awe and even humour – but revulsion certainly in the constant dissonance between animal and human, still-life stasis and motion, fertility and decay, water and stone, sexual parts and anuses – as well as ambiguous orifices that suck and bite and close and open, like eyes – even like the eyes of octopi (visitors to the exhibition will know to what I refer here).

The chances of seeing the like again as an exhibition are almost nil. But it can’t be reviewed, it must be seen. Strange how even the sparest of monochrome in-drawings can evoke other pictures whose affects you believed were mainly ones of colour and more solid illusory form. You go back to Picasso’s use of line with a new respect.

All TOO Human

What a massive multiplicity there is here – perhaps even too much to convince that the narrative progression of this exhibition is anything other than tenuous, whilst not wanting to complain because you were bowled over again and again in different ways by Bomberg, Bacon, Freud, Souza, Kossof, Auerbach (how much bowled over by him), Kitaj, and … By the time we reach Paula Rego, we wonder if the idea of the figurative isn’t far too wide to hold this all together. You come out needed to go in all over again --- and again!

This can have an unsettling effect of reducing some of the greatness you see here – particularly in neglected artists like Bomberg and Kitaj. It is fashionable to sneer at the latter these days and you do wonder that neglect by the art establishment and overt Jewish themes and meanings often seem to come together. Kitaj’s Cecil Court is a great picture, but I wonder if it belongs here other than to be submerged under the Bacon and Freud. It is a wordy story-filled picture, like Rego’s pictures are, where the stories are occulted and difficult to restore and insufficiently conveyed by visual impression, and its emotional-cognitive reflection, alone. Moreover, great pictures by Kossof and Auerbach here are not primarily important because of the figures created therein but because of the new spaces and underscapes that painting began to explore after the Second World War, particularly those of excavation and demolition. The more pictures took on narrative and/or ambivalent or liminal spaces, the less they seemed to belong here. Freud could suppress story by sheer volumes of visual effect – my favourite version of that effect being in the smaller portrait of the dying Leigh Bowery.

But I find it strangely perturbing how few visitors this exhibition welcomed unlike either Picasso or the Hockney exhibition last year. The Bacon paintings alone are worth seeing – the late George Dyer triptych for instance or, in comparison, is earlier wonderful dog and baboon paintings in an early room. See it – it won’t come together like this ever. In some ways this is because the curation is less than convincing but sometimes, as shown in the sample of Picasso’s curation from 1932 in the other exhibition, strange curation is compelling. When asked how he wanted to curate his retrospective he said ‘badly’. And in that bit of typical humour he cocked a snook at conventional art-history. So, see ‘All Too Human’ – like its title it implies both magnificence and a set of huge and irreducible limitations.

Monet, tomorrow! (click to open irreverence about Monet in a new window)