The Book of the Show
Jeremy Gardiner: South by Southwest – The Coast Revealed, St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery, Lymington
Anthony Whishaw: Works on Paper, Browse & Darby, London
Anthony Green: Printed Pictures, Chris Beetles Gallery, London
Maria Helena Vieira da Silver, Waddington Custot, London
Brought to Life: Eliot Hodgkin Rediscovered, Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire
More and more books are being written about Modern British art. And although interest in this area continues to grow, competition among publishers is brisk, and, in these days of fewer and shorter art book reviews, other methods are sought to publicise new publications. A favourite strategy is to launch a monograph with an exhibition of the chosen artist’s work, for there (with luck) you will have your core audience: either at the exhibition opening wanting a signed copy of the book, or visiting the show during its run. If they don’t buy the book, then something has gone wrong.
I caught Jeremy Gardiner’s latest show at the excellent St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery in Lymington where the accompanying book was supposed to be launched. Here I must declare a personal interest, for I am one of the authors who wrote an essay for this monograph. Sadly, the book wasn’t ready in time for the exhibition, as the artist, a stickler for detail, wasn’t happy with the cover. I don’t blame him for a moment, as this is a product that is supposed to carry the news of him and his work far and wide, and if the cover isn’t right, why should he okay it? After all, he’d contributed enough effort, time and money to getting the thing right. I recall an occasion when the late lamented Euan Uglow (1932-2000) vetoed an exhibition catalogue because some of his images had been cropped without consultation. He demanded that the entire print run be pulped and that the
printers pay for a new edition with uncropped images. They did too. Uglow was not someone to argue with.
So, we have had to wait for the appearance of Jeremy Gardiner: South by Southwest – The Coast Revealed (Sansom & Co, 176pp, £25), with essays by Christiana Payne, Judith LeGrove, Steve Marshall and myself, but it has been worth the delay, for the book is exceptionally handsome. (I wonder, however, whether sales have suffered. Gardiner gave an illustrated talk one evening towards the end of the run at Lymington, and by then the book had arrived, so at least some will have got copies. But the chance buyers? Those who might have bought on the spur of the moment in the heat of enthusiasm for the exhibition, warmed by the gallery’s wine – what of them? I suspect their potential purchases were lost, which is a pity.) The book is a pleasure to look at, by which I mean that the design by and large enhances the art (could the page margins have been marginally wider?), and the book’s horizontal format suits the predominantly landscape-shaped paintings. There are a dozen or so uprights, all watercolours, and even a few square pictures, but Gardiner generally works on rectangular poplar panels which he paints, invests with Jesmonite (a kind of acrylic casting resin which can be applied to build up the panels, and then sanded off again or textured in different ways), and attacks with gouging implements, drills and all manner of instrument to achieve the textures and layers he wants.
Gardiner (born 1957) is not a topographer, but he does engage with the appearance and spirit of particular places, aiming to present us with a new interpretation of the sea-coast. He paints the hidden structures of landscape, revealing, like an archaeologist or geologist, the layers of movement, compression, and sedimentation that create the laminar world on the surface of which we walk. He relies on the evidence of his own eyes but also satellite data and digital imaging techniques. His interest in new technologies, as instanced in his use of Jesmonite and LiDAR (a surveying method of measuring distance by pulsed laser light), is balanced by a fidelity to traditional methods such as paint and gesso, stencils and elbow grease. From this highly individual combination of past and present, and from a lifetime’s knowledge of the south-west littoral of England, Gardiner makes his remarkable paintings. They clearly have kinship with all sorts of other artists from Ben Nicholson and John Tunnard to Richard Diebenkorn and Frank Stella, but they have their own vigorous yet considered originality.
Interestingly, the paintings do not reproduce well, however attractive the book. They need too be seen: Gardiner’s exhibition tours to Falmouth Art Gallery (until 13th June), after which it will be in London at The Nine British Art (the gallery that represents him) from 24th June to 10th July.
In February at Browse & Darby in Cork Street, an exhibition of drawings by Anthony Whishaw RA, together with a book on the subject, celebrated his ninetieth year in some style. In 2016, Richard Davey, senior visiting research fellow in the School of Art and Design, Nottingham Trent University, where he is also the Anglican Chaplain, published a substantial monograph on Whishaw. Now he has written the texts for the new book, Anthony Whishaw: Works on Paper (Beam Editions, 176pp, £28), which is a kind of sequel. Although Whishaw for a long time thought of his drawings almost as incidental to the main activity of painting, the rediscovery of some 20 sketchbooks has revealed a tranche of exciting early work demonstrating the primacy of drawing in the first part of the his career. This well-produced volume is mostly given over to illustrations interspersed with pockets of text. Davey has done his best not to cover again the ground of his monograph, but inevitably there is some repetition, particularly as he begins his book on the drawings with a section about the target paintings.
There are very clear stylistic distinctions between the early observational work and the later drawings which were mostly done from memory and imagination, and thus more consciously invented, and it is interesting to compare them as if they were separate bodies of images. Although Davey makes many useful and perceptive points, he seems unwilling or unable to situate Whishaw’s achievement in the context of his contemporaries. He mentions the influence of the Belgian Expressionist Constant Permeke three times, but never offers a comparison with Josef Herman, Permeke’s closest colleague working in England. Nor does he reference any other near contemporaries such as Glyn Morgan or Jeffery Camp. One of the favourite early subjects of the latter was the dancers on the pier at Lowestoft, and when you consider that Whishaw painted dancers most evocatively, discussion in the nature of compare and contrast might have been both instructive and revelatory.
The subjects that I found most arresting in the Browse & Darby exhibition included dark dance studies from 1964, landscape variations from 1978-9
and still-life from 1983-4. Whishaw has tried all the genres and made their cross-over his own terrain: a kind of post-Cubist decorative space which mingles interior and exterior, often inhabited by figures. The discovery and continuing dialogue with abstraction has been one of the main drives of his work, mingled with an intellectual playfulness which is at the essence of the Modernist project. One of the best drawings in the book is an untitled pen and ink sketchbook study from 1959 which seems to have been based on a 1958 Whishaw etching entitled Carnage, showing a central horizontal spread, or seam, of piled corpses. In the drawing the forms are simplified and generalised, and thus allowed to be both more decorative and more abstract, and the result is an immensely strong rhythmical drawing of an ambiguous subject.
Despite some highly effective colour-block mixed media studies from the 1970s, like the rather beautiful Towards the Horizon series, my preference is for the 1950s and Sixties drawings, with their typical black and ochre, or black and white, colour combinations. The influence of Spanish art and Spanish culture is readily discernible in Whishaw’s work, for it has been a constant inspiration to him. One of the advantages of everyone living longer is to see artists advancing into their nineties full of determination to go on searching for truth and perfection. Besides Anthony Whishaw I can think of several nonagenarians at unremitting work today: Anthony Eyton and Diana Armfield among them. All power to their individual elbows.
The new book on the distinguished figurative painter Anthony Green (born 1939) was launched with an exhibition of prints in early February at the Chris Beetles Gallery in Ryder Street, St James’s. Focusing on his printed work from the 1960s to now, Anthony Green: Printed Pictures (University of Buckingham Press, 122pp, £30) by Paul E. H. Davis, is more biographical-artistic than art critical. It catalogues the collection of prints Green has given to the University of Buckingham (which amounts to virtually a complete account of his print editions), offering a readable introduction to Green’s life and work, with useful captions by the artist. With its documentary photos, comp. figs. and working studies all mixed in, it looks more like a scrapbook than a catalogue raisonné, but this is no bad thing, because the informality encourages engagement with the subject. And how refreshing it is to be reminded of Green’s uncompromising stance: ‘I passionately believe in figurative art and totally reject suggestions that it
has lost its relevance.’
A stalwart of the Royal Academy (for which he has stood twice for President), Green sees the RA as a way of keeping ‘the flag of civilisation flying’. Essentially a narrative artist, whether in paint, sculpture or print, Green is noted for his humanity and his generosity of spirit. Perhaps this is because he has made his own life, and especially his wife, obsessively and exclusively his subject, and has thus been encouraged to delve more deeply than most commentators into the meaning and implications of the primary human relationship. He may have been at odds with prevailing fashions, but his honesty and loyalty have sustained him, and his loving passion for Mary his wife has been his great motivation. With his trademark compound perspectives and polygonal forms, he has never painted pretty pictures but nearly always deeply appealing ones, which move us in unexpected ways, and make us laugh as well as sigh. By nature endearingly modest (he calls himself ‘a jobbing artist, but an original one’), Green writes that Paul Davis has ‘sensitively revealed an ordinary man behind the public artist’. Not so ordinary, in fact. There is no one like Anthony Green and nothing being done anywhere like his art: it is a distinctive, and instantly recognisable, achievement.
Maria Helena Vieira da Silver (1908-92) is not a name to conjure with in the UK as so few people have heard of her here, but in Europe (and she is quintessentially a European artist, I think) she is properly lauded. There she’s often considered to be a leading member of the European abstract expressionist movement known as Art Informel, but there are good arguments for not pigeonholing her thus. She was a highly independent and original painter of resoundingly unique vision, best seen as a bird of rare and beautiful plumage who strayed by chance into the nets of the art historians. Waddington Custot in Cork Street staged the second leg of a hugely welcome mini-retrospective of her work, after it had been shown in Paris and before it went on to New York (Di Donna Gallery until 29th May). The exhibition was accompanied by a large format hardback catalogue (price £34.99), full of gorgeous illustrations, so if you missed the show, do take a look at the book.
There aren’t many opportunities to see Vieira’s work in England. The Tate has three paintings by her, two of them currently on display at Bankside, but the Waddington Custot show offered 29 paintings in a
sensitive and elegant installation: the largest show of her work in the UK for too long. (Was the last major exhibition here in 1957 at the Hanover Gallery? Quite possibly.) Although Portuguese by birth, Vieira established herself in Paris before the Second World War, taking lessons with Roger Bissière at the Académie Ranson (as did Roger Hilton) in the early 1930s. During the war she sought exile in Brazil, settling in Rio, returning to Paris to the very same studio after the hostilities ended. There she became a complete recluse, living and painting with her husband the Hungarian artist Arpad Szenes. She also designed tapestries and stained glass, both media highly suited to her imagery. The labyrinth was a typical image, a net or organic grid to explore and entrap space; a labyrinth without a path through it, seemingly endless in its linear and spatial reverberations. Vieira said: ‘I believe I have lived in labyrinths my life long. That is my way of making sense of the world’.
The structures, or armatures, of her paintings are essentially urban. She was fascinated by the organisation of modern cities: the airports, bridges, subways and stations of contemporary life, and adapted their infrastructure and scaffolding to her paintings. Buildings are often seen at a great distance and man – if he appears at all – has grown tiny, no longer (thankfully) at the centre of the world, but in his rightful place, on the periphery. Vieira’s labyrinths, with their multiplicity of choices (unity in diversity?), mirror the rudderless state of modern man. But these are also paintings of memory, of longing. They are about enclosure but also exclusion. Memory is beyond our control: we remember only certain things, for little apparent reason, and some of our most treasured memories slip away. The deft editing and erasing conducted by memory is a fearsome thing and perhaps Vieira decided to build a series of bulwarks against it. Her paintings convey a strong sense of the unravelling of space, and a desire to hold everything together. I am reminded of the Indian myth in which the god ties a net over the world and puts a bell on each knot, so that nothing can move without him knowing about it. Vieira’s nets are there to contain the world, to offer some security in a world without certainty. They are also often incredibly intricate and beautiful paintings. Among my favourites at the London show were Sans titre and Composition aux damiers bleus (both 1949), La villa nocturne ou Les lumières de la ville (1950), L’eau (1962) and Le choeur (1971). Their colours and structures resonate in the mind.
One exhibition I completely missed was the retrospective of Eliot Hodgkin (1905-87), held at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire throughout the summer and into the autumn last year. But I do know his work a little from mixed exhibitions over the years, and from auctions, though the prices he now commands have risen substantially in the London sale rooms. The book accompanying the show is a very substantial volume, Brought to Life: Eliot Hodgkin Rediscovered (Paul Holberton Publishing, 144pp, £35), edited by Adrian Eeles, and is an essential purchase for all Modern British art libraries and private collectors. Beautifully produced and generously illustrated, it tells the story of a painter with a withered left arm, of independent means, who recognised the beauty of the everyday and wished to celebrate it. Born into ‘an exceptionally gifted and articulate family’, as Adrian Eeles notes, Hodgkin was taught art at Harrow by Maurice Clarke, who also encouraged Cecil Beaton, Edward Le Bas and Victor Pasmore. Hodgkin’s background was Quaker and inclined to science and medicine, but the painter Howard Hodgkin was a second cousin, and Eliot went first to study art at the Byam Shaw under F. E. Jackson, then to the RA Schools. He began his professional life as a mural painter in the 1930s, and painted his first true still-life – the subject matter for which he is now so celebrated – in 1938.
In 1947 he wrote that his principal aim was to take ‘quite simple things as though I was seeing them for the first time and as though no-one had ever painted them before’. He had a penchant for wonderfully mundane subjects: dead leaves, a bunch or radish or turnips, onions or Brussels sprouts. Lemons, which he also painted, look positively glamorous in such company. Hodgkin didn’t have a studio, preferring to paint in the corner of the bedroom. He used tempera on hardboard, an unforgiving and demanding medium, insisting that he didn’t use it for its own sake, but because ‘it is the only way in which I can express the character of the objects that fascinate me.’ Like his near-contemporary John Armstrong (1893-1973) he painted in oil as well as tempera, but I for one prefer the temperas. Also like Armstrong he had an obsession with flints. I’d like to have seen some comparison made between these two artists, but that can await another publication.
Hodgkin gave up painting in 1979, partly because his eyesight was failing and he could no longer see well enough for his finely-wrought
technique, but also partly because he felt he had done enough. Not many painters have the courage (or determination) to stop. He turned his full attention to collecting, a lifelong passion for him. Among the treasures he owned were works by Watteau, Ingres, Géricault, Delacroix and Degas. His taste ranged from Dürer to Morandi (he had a superb 1960 still-life painting by Morandi, now in the Tate) via Rembrandt, Goya, Vuillard and Henry Moore, not forgetting Utamaro and Hiroshige. He owned a fine red chalk landscape by Fragonard and a Corot oil painting of roses. Artists seem to be divided between those who collect, like Hodgkin, and those who only hang their own work on the wall. But for those who choose to surround themselves with great work by others, it must be a source of inspiration and challenge, a constant quickening of the blood. Perhaps that’s why Eliot Hodgkin did not paint ordinary still-life paintings, however quotidian the subject. Neil MacGregor has spoken of ‘the uncanny power of his paintings to reveal the numinous in the unregarded’, and there is certainly a spiritual component to the work that makes the current revival all the more timely.