One black-and-white marvel after another
Exhibition Monochrome: Painting in Black and White National Gallery
As ideas for exhibitions go, Monochrome at the National Gallery sounds cussedly dull and joyless. A show restricted to painting in black and white? What an austere, hair-shirt proposition. How delightful to report, then, that Monochrome is, in fact, a smart and classy, fascinating affair, mostly faultlessly executed – and with a knockout twist. Those who look forward to the National Gallery’s autumn blockbusters, stately pageants of patient scholarship devoted to this or that Old Master, may grumble or feel disappointed that Monochrome offers something different: an enterprising, essayistic show that makes surprising connections between more than 50 artworks, created across seven centuries. But, despite its apparently gloomy, even forbidding subject matter, I sensed in the spirit of this Sainsbury Wing exhibition something original and energetic, a genuine freshness of approach.
The first surprise is how sensuous and alluring some of the selected objects are. The work that opens the show isn’t a conventional painting at all, but a piece of 14th-century French stained glass, brilliantly lit from behind to animate its delicate pattern of sprouting fleurs-de-lis.
Nearby is something I have never seen: a vast 16th-century indigo wallhanging, depicting Christ’s Agony in the Garden (after an engraving by Dürer), produced for a church in Genoa, where it was displayed during Holy Week. We also encounter a 15th-century winged altarpiece of the Virgin and Child by Hans Memling, with its wings almost entirely closed (an unusual sight in a museum), revealing on their exterior two “grisaille” (ie, grey monochrome) figures painted to resemble stone statues.
The art-historical point is that, from the Middle Ages to the 17th century, painting in black and white or grisaille had specifically sacred connotations. Monochrome was associated with meditativeness or penitence, and was often invoked by artists depicting Christ’s Passion or the martyrdom of the saints. Swiftly, though, Lelia Packer and Jennifer Sliwka, the curators, establish that artists in the Renaissance also started making preparatory grisaille sketches as “tonal guides” for finished paintings. And, in the third section, we become acquainted with the new taste for grisaille paintings as independent, finished works.
We learn that Adriaen van de Venne, the 17th-century Dutchman, was “the first artist to specialise solely in grisaille painting”. He is represented by one of his “grawtjes” or “little grey ones” (the delightful diminutive of grauw, the Dutch word for grey and grisaille), a boisterous scene of, as the un-pc title has it, “revelling cripples and beggars”.
Startlingly – and here I must check my notes to make sure I am not dreaming – this art-historical curio is presented alongside greyscale works by Van Eyck, Giacometti, and Picasso, who relished responding to the prevalence of black-and-white newsprint and newsreel footage. Oh, and Ingres, whose hypnotic Odalisque
in Grisaille, from the Metropolitan in New York, a reduced, black-and-white version of his Grande Odalisque in the Louvre, produced for Napoleon’s sister, commands a wall by itself.
‘How delightful to report then, that Monochrome is, in fact, a smart and classy, fascinating affair’
By suppressing the picture’s flashy eroticism (by, for instance, removing orientalising accoutrements, such as the peacock-feathered fan), and only hinting at the nude’s carnality (note the subtle yet irrepressible pinks that glimmer across her back and left shoulder, and around her eye), Ingres, paradoxically, manages to enhance her sexiness – providing a reminder that sexual desire is as much a product of the mind as of any other part of the anatomy.
Indeed, his grisaille odalisque is like Pygmalion’s beautiful ivory statue, imbued with the first blush of warmth, as she gently comes to life.
This, then, is exhibition-making as a sort of intellectual fireworks display, with ideas and connections rocketing up to illuminate the night sky of our minds. Admittedly, some sections are a little arcane, as the curators explore how artists used monochrome historically to assert the supremacy of painting over other mediums. In Italy during the Renaissance, this debate was known as the “paragon” – and Titian’s Portrait of a Lady (La Schiavona) of c. 1510-12, from the National Gallery’s own collection, is a fine example of it in action.
Then, for an entire gallery, we disappear down dusty byways and art-historical rabbit holes, as the curators explore the relationship between monochrome painting and printmaking. There is a bizarre interlude about the reception of a painting by Chardin that isn’t here, and too much emphasis given to the 16th-century printmaker Hendrick Goltzius. His The Great Hercules (1589) is a rippling, repellent monster, a proto-michelin Man who calls to mind Leonardo’s put-down about artists whose muscled figures resemble “a sack of walnuts”.
Thankfully, the rug is soon pulled from beneath our feet – and the National Gallery turns, unexpectedly, into Tate Modern. There is a great, and profoundly disturbing, painting by the German master Gerhard Richter, and then a brightly lit, white-walled gallery, offering a beautiful synopsis of 20th-century monochrome abstraction. Admittedly, it lacks an early cubist masterpiece or a great black-and-white abstract expressionist painting by, say, Jackson Pollock or Franz Kline. But the works that are displayed – a tough-talking Frank Stella, like a ziggurat seen from above; a scintillating, quivering early Bridget Riley; a couple of Cy Twombly’s elegantly dishevelled “blackboard” paintings, from 1970 – are satisfying.
The final work, like an emphatic full stop for the entire show, is Kazimir Malevich’s icon-like Black Square (1915), which he considered a sort of ground zero for non-representational painting. Except that, in fact, it isn’t the last work – since, behind it, en route to the exit, we find the exhibition’s actual finale: Room for One Colour (1997), a psychedelic installation by Olafur Eliasson, the Danish-icelandic artist. A set of powerful lamps, attached to the ceiling, irradiate the gallery with intense, sodium-yellow light.
After the suppression of colour in the preceding rooms, this chromatic wonderland offers a raucous, explosive, Dionysian sense of release. Yellow has never felt so palpable or thrilling – much more so than in the paintings of Turner. Upon entering, I defy you not to smile.
Oh, and because the singlefrequency lights cleverly suppress every other colour in the spectrum, everything in the room, including us, appears black and white. So, at the end of the exhibition, we become monochrome ourselves. What a coup.