The artistic equivalent of small talk
Laura Knight: A Panoramic View MK Gallery, Milton Keynes ★★★★★
Although, during her lifetime, the prolific artist Laura Knight enjoyed enormous popularity, so much so that her name once appeared as a crossword clue in a Scottish newspaper, her reputation nosedived after her death in 1970. A figurative painter to her fingertips, she was never part of the avant-garde, and, for all the brilliance and fluency of her draughtsmanship, her unfashionable realist pictures of circus performers and ballet dancers now appear garish and schmaltzy. So, I was surprised to learn that she would be the subject of a retrospective at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes featuring more than 160 works, including some of her justly famous wartime commissions of airmen and female workers.
Born in Derbyshire in 1877, she attended Nottingham School of Art, where she met her future husband, the portraitist Harold Knight. A group of charcoal studies in the first room reveal the extent of her talent. In her early 20s, she moved to an artists’ colony on the Yorkshire coast, where, working with a subtle, muted palette of browns and greys, she produced sombre oil paintings of local fisherfolk, as well as wonderful watercolours, inspired by Dutch art, which look like relics from the 17th century.
The impact, though, of the Knights’ decision to move, in 1907, to another artists’ community, this time in Cornwall, was immediate: she junked her miserabilist mode, and plunged into a carefree world of brightness and colour.
Her paintings of liberated, attractive young women, sunbathing naked and skinny-dipping like modern-day nymphs, or clambering in fashionable clobber over a granite coastline puckered with suggestive folds and creases, led later commentators to question Knight’s sexuality. The gallery, though, steers clear of this debate.
Throughout her career Knight would flit between subjects and genres, never alighting on a “signature” approach.
However, a surprising group of portraits of African-american women and children executed in Baltimore, where her husband had accepted a commission, show she was capable of great sensitivity. Nearby, we encounter several extraordinary wartime paintings championing women.
Throughout, Knight’s work is blighted by inconsistency: for every strong artwork, there are at least three stinkers.
Knight was blessed with astonishing skill, but, you suspect, never quite worked out what to do with it. Her paintings are the equivalent of small talk: cheery and pleasant, but offering little substance.