HUON MALLALIEU
CANALETTO & THE ART OF VENICE The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, to 12th November
Antonio Canal, il Canaletto (1697-1768), has long been Britain’s favourite nonBritish artist of the 18th century. Venice, his native city, was an essential stop on any Grand Tour from the 1720s until the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in 1756. Paintings of the Grand Canal were postcards or holiday snaps for the Milordi Inglesi (actually, many of the first Grand Tourists were Anglo-irish), and there was a thriving industry to supply them.
Canaletto’s nickname meant ‘Little Canal’, or ‘Canal the younger’, in deference to his father, Bernardo. A theatrical scene painter, Bernardo also produced views and had his son trained by the genre’s master, Luca Carlevarijs.
The pupil soon outstripped the master, and found the best possible agent in the merchant Joseph Smith, British consul from 1743-60 – a position that brought all Grand Tourists to his house, where they saw his collections and stock. When the war ended the supply of Grand Tourists, Smith encouraged Canaletto to move to London, where he worked for ten years. The British loved him all the more because he shone the light of Venice on the Thames and the new English, Palladian palaces.
Some art historians have sneered that his views were purely representational, the products Of a camera obscura without imagination, and it is true that he did a times employ mechanical means. Yet the research behind this show proves, by infra-red examination of the drawings, that Canaletto was happy to rearrange his compositions for better effect.
George III bought Consul Smith’s collection en masse, and these paintings, drawings and prints are the best possible examples of Canaletto’s work. The paintings are hung as if in Smith’s palazzo, and there are further examples by his Venetian contemporaries. This is a joyous show.
PORTRAYING A NATION: GERMANY 1919-33
Tate Liverpool, to 15th October
The key to much of Otto Dix’s painting is the stare. His subjects and sitters stare out at us, or across at something beyond the picture; they do not contemplate their inner world, as in so many other portraits. The point is well made in one of August Sander’s most striking photographs of Dix and his wife, Martha, whom he often painted. She stares directly at us. Dix, in profile, stares intently at her.
It is an inspired idea to pair Sander and Dix. Between them, they portray the Weimar Republic. Sander may seem to do so without comment, his sitters are mostly unidentified, and include the range of society, peasants, professionals, war-wounded, Nazis and the persecuted – Jews and political prisoners. One of those prisoners is his own son Erich, also a photographer. In a quiet, moving way, Sander (1875-1964) resisted.
The paintings of Dix (1891-1969) give us more of the spirit of Cabaret, but with the vitriol of his friend Georg Grosz. Dix was one of the ‘degenerate’ artists whose work the Nazis burned. He was under arrest for a while in 1939, and had to paint only landscapes.