The power grotto
A totally spoiling evening at Robin Birley’s 5 Hertford
Street was another reminder of just how civilised London can be. The club’s top-floor restaurant is a nereid’s grotto of swirling colours and softly gleaming lamps (old-school flattery for the complexion, I’ll take it). I’m old enough to mind when a waiter addresses the table as “you guys”, so the impeccable service and ambrosial food couldn’t have been finer balm to my chilly orange-streaked soul. I couldn’t possibly say who else was there, but Hertford Street is definitely still the centre of the capital’s power-broking.
The hogarth exhibition at Tate Britain is a fantastic show, expansive, observant and ingenious, not least because it re-contextualises the work of this most British of artists within the wider European practices of his contemporaries. Seeing his pictures against Chardin’s still-lives for example made them freshly alive, emphasising the technical flair so often neglected within the intense narrative qualities of the paintings.
The labelling of the show is however utterly infuriating. From the introductory explanation that “These Enlightenment ideas were mainly produced by, and benefited, White men from the upper and middle classes” to the positively cretinous misinterpretation of the Before and After duo, the notes suggest that the only purpose of looking at a work of art is its dour dissection for signs of racism, colonialism or sexism, which seems to have led to a wilful blindness when it comes to actually looking at the pictures.
The triple-crowned figure in the left corner of the Bedlam scene in The Rake’s Progress is emphatically not “a crazed Britannia”, it’s the Pope, holding a crozier, not a trident.
Hogarth does convey explicit prejudice, but it’s anti-Catholic and anti-Jacobite, neither of which was mentioned, let alone explained. The narrowness and historical provincialism of the labels tells us very little about Hogarth and far too much about a joyless judgmentalism which can apparently only assess art in terms of abuse.