Art’s greatest hits – at a bargain price
Samuel Courtauld created two art collections, one very much better known than the other. Heir to and chairman of the Courtauld textile empire – long the world’s largest producers of man-made fibres – he began collecting Impressionist and Post-impressionist paintings in the early Twenties, with his wife Elizabeth, at a time when the works of Monet, van Gogh et al were still spurned by the art establishment and relatively inexpensive. What began as a glorified hobby led to one of the most famous collections of its kind, gifted to the Courtauld Institute, devoted to the study of art history, which Courtauld co-founded in 1932. Yet while there was notional public access, relatively few people saw this extraordinary array of masterpieces.
Back in the mists of time, the Courtauld Collection was housed in a grim Thirties block in Bloomsbury. You entered via a lift into what felt like a stark private apartment, where a couple of rather grouchy elderly ladies took an entrance fee that felt nominal even then – say 20p – and you had mega-works of the order of Cézanne’s The Card Players and van Gogh’s Selfportrait with Bandaged Ear (1889) pretty much to yourself. Marvellous for the specialist in the know, not so great for the general public.
All that changed when the Courtauld moved to palatial premises in Somerset House in 1989, becoming one of London’s principal art destinations, with a glitzy shop and café and entrance fee to match. Funny how the democratisation of art invariably involves the punters paying more, but at least they know it’s there.
What is much less well known is that Courtauld also created a trust to buy paintings for the nation, through which many of the great Impressionist and Post-impressionist works in the National Gallery and Tate were acquired. Now with the Courtauld Gallery closed for a £50million redevelopment, key works have moved several hundred yards up the Strand to the National Gallery, uniting the cream of Courtauld’s two collections for the first time.
Of the 40 paintings 26 are from the Courtauld, 13 from the National and one from Tate. The only significant omission is van Gogh’s Self-portrait with Bandaged Ear, which is on loan to Amsterdam’s van Gogh Museum.
The story told is the familiar one, starting with Manet and the first stirrings of a new way of looking and ending with Cézanne’s proto-cubist deconstruction of form. But with paintings of this calibre, why would you attempt the no doubt futile feat of trying to give it all a new twist? Anyway, that hoary story still adds up, because that is more-or-less how it happened.
Manet’s tight-buttoned, upper middle class Parisian world looks dour, until you notice the naked woman seated on the grass in the worldchanging Déjeuner sur l’herbe – a sketch for the finished work in the Musee d’orsay – and that the barmaid, looking blankly back at us in A Bar at the Folies Bergeres (1882) is in fact being propositioned by the man visible in the mirror to the right, who is standing exactly where we are. There’s a message here that still feels weirdly relevant in the age of #Metoo.
While Monet turns up the colour intensity in the exquisite Autumn Effect at Argenteuil (1873) and the glowing Antibes (1888), he’s upstaged by two of Courtauld’s particular favourites: Renoir and Seurat, whose Bathers at Asnieres (1884) is one of the show’s epic moments, a hazy vision of working class Parisians disporting themselves on the banks of the Seine, conceived on a truly monumental scale. Like van Gogh’s A Wheatfield with Cypresses (1889) – also shown here – it’s one of those Impressionist paintings we know so well, through free access to the National Gallery, that we tend to take them for granted.
But without Courtauld’s enlightened patronage they’d probably have been lost to American collections, and we’d know them only through illustrations in books.
But the best is saved till last with two wildly diverse inheritors of the Impressionist legacy. Gauguin’s sultry Tahitian nudes hang at one end of the room, with an array of superb Cézanne landscapes at the other. The show climaxes with Cézanne’s
The Card Players, which has become one of the world’s most admired paintings, a work in which you can see the history of 20th-century art, in the form of the cubism and other
If it wasn’t for Courtauld’s patronage, these famous paintings would probably have been lost to America
developments it inspired, being written before your eyes.
If you’re very familiar with the Courtauld and National Gallery collections, you’re unlikely to get any new revelations from this exhibition. Yet looking at those fabulously incisive Cézanne landscapes – four from the Courtauld, one from the National
– I was struck by how much his revolutionary vision was underpinned by the kind of intense manual dexterity that only comes with intense daily effort over decades.
Regarding these works en masse gives an inspiring sense of Courtauld’s contribution to Britain’s cultural life. I’m not a great one for paying homage to “generous” collectors: they have the pleasure of buying the stuff, and what collector doesn’t want to think of their acquisitions enjoyed in perpetuity by the masses? None the less, leaving this exhibition I did find myself feeling just a tiny bit grateful to Samuel Courtauld.
This show’s low price – ensuring you’re paying no more than you would to see the Courtauld Gallery paintings in situ – makes it something of a bargain. Throw in a free display of the National’s other key Impressionist paintings, and you’ve got probably the best-value Impressionist exhibition you’re ever going to see.
Until Jan 20. Details: 020 7747 2885; nationalgallery.org.uk