Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu
PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle 11th September to 26th February 2022
To pick a small nit at the outset, the title of this admirable show could mislead.
It is not an examination of one portrait of one artist, but a fascinating display of the ways in which a generation of artists saw themselves and one another.
I am an admirer of the husband-andwife dealership Liss Llewellyn, which has organised this exhibition. They have spent 30 years working directly with artists and visiting their studios, and the show is a distillation of that long experience. Their judgement and taste in modern British art is impeccable, but my faith was shaken for a moment when I received what I had been led to believe was the catalogue.
It contains over 380 paintings and drawings – enough for three shows at least. Had they been infected by Tate Exhibition Giganticism?
Luckily not. The publication is in fact more of an accompanying book of illustrations and very brief essays. And the show consists of a manageable 85 portraits, self-portraits and linked works by 20th-century British artists, illustrating their muses, studios, friends and ‘allegories of creation’.
Many of these artists knew one another as friends, lovers, teachers and pupils. I am a collector of portraits and self-portraits of the English watercolour school – generally rather earlier than these. But particular attraction is common to them all: a portrait may be not only of an artist one admires, but by another, often a friend.
Here, for instance, are a powerful, humorous pencil portrait of Winifred
Knights by Colin Gill and studies of him by her. They all probably date from a 1921 walking tour in Italy. There’s also one of Knights sleeping by her fiancé (they never married) Alfred Mason, and a Knights self-portrait as Little Miss Muffet. There is Frank Brangwyn by William Belleroche and vice versa, and a Belleroche of the dining room in a house he shared with John Singer Sargent.
Many of these artists are very well known; others less so, but certainly worth rediscovering. Percy Horton (1897-1970) and Charles Mahoney (1903-1968) are chiefly remembered as teachers, and they were good ones, but they also deserve to take centre stage for their own work.
Liss Llewellyn has an excellent record as champion of such overlooked figures, and also for promoting women artists – despite current orthodoxy, not always the same. Alongside Knights and others is Evelyn Dunbar, who had been a pupil of Mahoney.
This is the dealership’s second collaboration with the Laing this year, following a show of 50 watercolours, pastels and prints by women.