Minors strike a chord
David Fraser Jenkins looks ahead to exhibitions both here and abroad
The only exhibitions worth putting on, and visiting, are of second-rate artists, because they contain a whole lot of things from people’s houses and museum stores, and provide a moment to think about and enjoy their work. Exhibitions of wellknown masterpieces are a menace, taking pictures off display for preparation and travel, and emptying the rooms of the host gallery, to show pictures that could perfectly well have been seen all the time on the walls of their ownergallery, and now cannot be seen at all because the rooms where they are shown are too crowded. Of course the only points of these shows are to make money from admissions, to pack the attendance figures with the otherwise bored tourists and home-county Philistines, and publish unreadable art-history in overpriced so-called ‘catalogues’ which are in fact books of essays.
A test case will be at the end of 2019, as the Louvre will show Leonardo da Vinci (24th October–24th February), which is bound to be less dreadful than our own National Gallery’s recent disgrace (too crowded with people, and in the cellars), but is unlikely to be anything other than a scrum. It might be worth visiting an hour, say, before closing time, at the beginning of the week; and before that there is the wonderful new display of the Louvre’s French painting. Remember that the galleries are closed one extra day each week which needs to be checked. Then go downstairs and maybe get a decent chance to look at the two versions of the Madonna of the Rocks together, which to my eyes could not possibly have been painted by the same artist.
For the new year it will be a pleasure to see Tate Modern’s Pierre Bonnard, the colour of memory (23rd January-6th May), being advertised as a case for ‘slow looking’, as if all paintings didn’t deserve to be looked at over a little while. This will be a challenge not to the artist, but to the galleries at Bankside, normally so hostile to paintings, though they have in the past been well adapted to show Morandi and Hopper.
But the second-rate artists will be rewarding. The National Gallery is showing Boilly: Scenes of Parisian Life (28th February-19th May), a kind of French Rowlandson, and just the kind of exhibition it can cope with. This visit could be combined with seeing Elizabethan Treasures: Miniatures by Hilliard and Oliver at the National Portrait Gallery next door (21st February-19th May). Time should be spent at the Estorick
Counterpoint (16th January-7th April), little known here but a most delicate sculptor in wire and draughtsman of mid-century. Modern Italian painting deserves a closer look altogether, and with luck the ‘Brera Modern’ will open in Milan in the autumn.
Pallant House in Chichester has become the Harvey Nichols of modern British art, and in the spring will present the brilliant
Harold Gilman, who made his landlady a commanding Mona Lisa of modernism. It’ll be better to see this before going to the Hayward Gallery, where there will be early
photographs by Diane Arbus, In the Beginning (13th February6th May), which are not really so much a freak show but moving studies of the characters on the fringes of society. Pallant House then later will show the underestimated and mostly charming Tracey Emin.
Then a few trips abroad, to Florence to see Andrea Verrocchio, the sculptor and painter who taught Leonardo (Palazzo Strozzi and Bargello, 8th March-14th July), to Vienna to see the art nouveau designer Koloman Moser (MAK, 19th December 2018–22nd April), and to Paris to see the creepy Belgian symbolist Fernand Khnopff (Petit Palais, 11th December 2018–17th March).
Natalia Goncharova is one of those artists one fears seeing a lot of, in case they turn out to be not as good as hoped, but the assessment of this Russian futurist should be enjoyable at Tate Modern in the summer (6th June-8th September). Then the minor shows are again a treat, especially Helene Schjerfbeck at the Royal Academy (20th July-27th October), the Finnish modernist painter of interiors and portraits with a strange and personal sense of colour, rarely shown outside
‘Natalia Goncharova is an artist one fears seeing a lot of, in case she’s not as good as hoped’