A freewheeling liberation of expression Alastair Sooke is thrilled by a new gallery showcasing the unsung heroes of modern British art
‘Ihate the fact that prices are attached to artworks,” says the 88-year-old art historian and former Tate director Alan Bowness. “Poems don’t have values. I’ve always felt embarrassed by the values of the pictures that I own. And now it’s time to give something back.”
Bowness is doing this by lending his personal collection for the inaugural exhibition, Generation Painting, of a new modern art gallery for Cambridge, the Heong Gallery. The gallery is set within the grounds of Downing College – where Bowness himself arrived as a freshman to read modern languages 66 years ago – and it is a significant addition to the city’s cultural offering.
The space has been designed, at a cost of almost £1 million, by Caruso St John, the architectural firm responsible for the spectacular refurbishment of Tate Britain, as well as Damien Hirst’s vast free public art gallery, which opened in Vauxhall in south London last October.
The Heong is smaller than either of those mammoth projects, yet Adam Caruso, who also refurbished Downing’s dining hall, which reopened in 2009, has brought his flair for elegance and simplicity to bear upon the gallery, which occupies the college’s former stable.
This brick building, which was being used as a kind of storehouse-cum-workshop, is now an intimate and immaculate space, boasting an abundance of natural light, tailormade for the display of modern art.
Everything is tastefully understated: to complement the whitewashed walls, Caruso chose natural oak for the windows, doors and furniture, and slate-grey encaustic floor tiles from Ironbridge. Even the keyless “smart” lock is artfully hidden behind the buffcoloured exterior façade of Cambridge stock bricks.
Free to the public for at least its first three years, the gallery is a muchneeded addition in Cambridge. Aside from a couple of rooms in the Fitzwilliam, the only other place where 20th-century art of any significance can be seen in the city is at Kettle’s Yard, which is currently closed for renovation.
The gallery’s aura of domesticity feels appropriate for the Bowness show. Most of the works, many given to Bowness by the artists when he was establishing his reputation as a critic and curator, are modest in size, and have hung for decades in the London home that he shares with his wife, Sarah, the daughter of Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth.
Surprisingly, the exhibition does not include any artwork by either of Sarah’s parents: “That’s my family connection,” says Bowness, modestly, “and I’ve always kept it separate. This is, as it were, my collection – a nice, compact group of work from the particularly exciting post-war decade from 1955 to ’65, which I think is one of the great periods of British art.” He adds: “Since then, painting has suffered, and now there are so few really interesting painters. It’s pathetic, really.”
Looking at the Heong paintings, it is sobering to reflect that several of the heroes of this crucial period in postwar British art remain unsung.
Yes, there are big names here, such as David Hockney, represented by an amusing pencil-and-watercolour sketch, from 1965, of a row of assorted trees that resemble a police line-up. There are also three wonderful abstract paintings by Peter Lanyon, including the sexy Drift (1961), and Loe
Bar, from 1962, in which a dramatic swoop of red and a small trapezoid of ultramarine interact against swirls of white and sky-blue.
Then there are two significant paintings by William Scott – a straightforwardly attractive blue-andwhite still life and a bigger, more mysterious abstract canvas called
Ocean – as well as a pair of richly colourful paintings by Patrick Heron. The earlier picture, from 1957, a set of horizontal coloured stripes and rectangles recalling Rothko, is more tentative than the later composition in orange and red from 1965, which is self-confident and resolved.
Yet it is the insufficiently recognised artists whose work is most memorable. Roger Hilton’s pictures, according to Bowness, “don’t appeal immediately”, but April 1961 is animated by the frisson between opposing elements: bare canvas, frenzied charcoal, sensuous white paint, and a delicious strip of red. Overtly abstract, it is also slyly redolent of the human body, imbued with a potent erotic charge.
Nearby is a masterwork by a forgotten great of 20th-century British painting: Richard Smith. His Alpine (1963) is an exciting, unusually shaped canvas that buckles outwards from two dimensions into three, so that it appears to concertina and unfold before our eyes.
Occupying a slippery position between abstraction and Pop Art, it is also witty and intelligent: the mountain peak of the Alpine logo provides a tongue-in-cheek “Pop” take on a time-honoured subject – the landscape of Romantic art.
Bowness says that he is attracted to pictures that “have secrets that are only slowly revealed”. He also acknowledges a puritan streak: “I like my colour subdued, often monochrome, the artistic gestures restricted and the eroticism present but hidden.”
I’m not so sure. The spontaneity, freewheeling invention and liberation of expression on display throughout this exhibition ensure that the poetic pictures he has collected are uniformly compelling. Lucky Cambridge.