As exciting as the decoration on a Cath Kidston mug
Summer Exhibition 2019 Royal Academy of Arts
After the party, the hangover. Last year, to celebrate the 250th Summer Exhibition, the Royal Academy pulled out all the stops by appointing Grayson Perry, its most popular and exuberant Academician, to make everything feel like a knees-up.
Happy to oblige, he gave the walls several licks of bright, gaudy paint, plonked a raucous, bulging woollen sculpture by Joana Vasconcelos, the Portuguese artist, in the octagonal central hall, and generally upped the levels of fun and pageantry. It was always going to be a tough act to follow.
Unsurprisingly, Jock Mcfadyen, the British painter who accepted the poisoned chalice of succeeding Perry as coordinator, cannot prevent this year’s Summer Exhibition feeling like a comedown. The colours of the walls are more subdued, the usually rumbustious jostling hang is, in places, surprisingly sparse, and in the courtyard outside Burlington House, Thomas Houseago, the British sculptor, presents a group of powerful but brooding downbeat figures – stooped and hobbling bogeymen, with skull-like grimaces. That’s how I feel the morning after a big night out, too.
In a passably witty joke at the RA’S own expense, Mcfadyen turns the central hall into a “menagerie”, playing on the well-worn idea that the Summer Exhibition – the largest open-submission art show in the world (this year, there were more than 16,000 entries, of which less than a tenth ended up on display) – attracts enough amateur animal paintings to fill Noah’s Ark. Here are pictures of fish, a gorilla and a rhinoceros, as well as lots of sculpted dogs.
Look up, and you will spot a model of the famous 17th-century Dutch painting of a pet goldfinch by Rembrandt’s pupil, Fabritius, its golden chain extending all the way to the floor. Is it cowering from the life-size tiger slinking nearby, by David Mach, the Scottish sculptor? Maybe
not: this big cat’s shiny, red-and-silver pelt is made from flattened foil confectionery wrappers from Marks & Spencer. Yum! Mach’s predator is really a sweet pussycat.
That M&S branding tells you everything you need to know about the Summer Exhibition, which is now as solidly middle-class as Elephant’s Breath by Farrow & Ball. Nothing wrong with that, you might say, except it makes for a bland viewing experience, offering about as much excitement and surprise as the decoration on a Cath Kidston mug.
Some find the expectable nature of the Summer Exhibition reassuring, the secret of its enduring strength. This year, though, really does feel like an exercise in going through the motions.
There’s the customary smattering of pictures by hoary Academicians, who keep churning out the same stuff year after year: Matisse once said an artist should never be a “prisoner” of a style, but several RAS seem positively to relish their incarceration.
Then there are the unknown artists plagiarising major talents. This year, Ed Ruscha and Sean Scully both get royally ripped off. Likewise, Ivon Hitchens, but at least he died in 1979.
Elsewhere, Cornelia Parker exhibits a ghostly, delicate sculpture, featuring antique silver-plated tableware suspended from metal wires. But, hang on, didn’t she offer something remarkably similar at the Summer Exhibition in 2011? This year is less a case of “the same but different” more, “same old, same old”. The impression is of visiting a large emporium offering deals on last season’s stock.
That’s fine if you’re shopping for something pretty and inoffensive to go in your sitting room – though I’d hesitate before splashing out £210,000 on Allen Jones’s Kind of Blue, a naked shop-window mannequin, slathered in red paint, wearing stockings and high heels, and striking a sexy pose while standing upon a stool, placed in front of a large canvas. Didn’t he get the Metoo memo?
At least Jones provokes a response. Amid the tundra of jollity and politeness, few artists dare to suggest the difficulties or complexities of our times. Banksy is an exception, offering a one-liner on Brexit in the form of a shuttered gate at customs, telling “arrivals from the EU” to “Keep Out”. While it raises a titter, it has less bite than most newspaper cartoons.
Having taken place every year without interruption since 1769, the Summer Exhibition is hardly going to run out of steam now. But I hope next year’s organisers muster a bit more energy and inspiration.