ART: Still very much alive, thanks
The BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery
For a certain sort of cultural conservative, it is a matter of dogmatic certainty that no one can draw anymore (once upon a time, everyone could draw), that art schools teach cynical strategies for marketing but little else besides (they used to teach something much better), that public and private patronage turn a blind eye to anything that isn't conceptual art (patrons used to make the right choices all the time), that the whole business of painting a recognisable subject has been all but forgotten (pace the evidence of the market), and that anyone who actually attempts this arcane feat is doomed to languish in abject and underfunded obscurity (again, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding).
Yet believing that this is the case, the cultural conservative is thus absolved from having to visit galleries, public or private, that might show any sort of post-1900 art, because anything else (with a few nameable hand-picked exceptions) is bound to be 'modern' and hence beneath contempt; instead he relies for his information on either the mainstream media, whose shock-horror narratives of sharks and unmade beds are in any event fully attuned to his assumptions, or perhaps on a highly selective reading of Brian Sewell, whose meanings he misunderstands because unlike Mr Sewell, he feels no need to read, look and think extensively before condemning the art he believes he dislikes. And there is, it must be said, something satisfying about the neat and economical circularity of this system. Once synchronised with its rhythms, why on earth would anyone want to break free?
It is for these reasons that anyone who recognises himself in the preceding paragraph ought to avoid the BP Portrait Award exhibition which opened recently at the National Portrait Gallery. After 23 years at the NPG and 18 years' sponsorship by BP, the Portrait Award continues to provide generous prizes and a conspicuous public platform for artists, the majority of them aged 35 or less, who produce recognisable painted portraits in oils, acrylic or tempera. This year a staggering 858 artists submitted entries in the hopes of winning the £25,000 first prize — considerably more than the Turner Prize, in case anyone is counting — and if the resulting publicity does not blight the winners with immediate Hirst or Emin-gauge notoriety, that perhaps says more about the public audience for art and its practitioners, and what that audience demands in terms of celebrity misbehaviour, than it does about the state of art itself, which has always frankly been very much a minority interest. Anyway, though, if you want to hang on to your conviction that painting has been in a persistent vegetative state since 1914 or thereabouts, with its respirator switched off and all the feeding tubes removed, this is probably the point at which you should stop reading. Go back to your Munnings monographs. The past was better, really it was ...
For the rest of us, though, the BP Portrait Award exhibition offers a heartening reminder, if one were needed, that figurative painting continues to be alive and well and earning a decent living for itself on the margins of popular consciousness and art-historical narrative. Amongst the 51 works on show are a number of frankly impressive portraits, and if there are some relatively weak works hanging nearby, their faults are principally those of youthful misjudgement and bad influences. As for skill, patience and hard work, there is no shortage of any of these qualities here. It is enough to make any cultural conservative's sprightly bow-tie wilt with disbelief.
The winner of this year's BP Portrait Award is a 21-year old student named Charlotte Harris who is currently in her final year at Leeds Metropolitan University. The subject of the untitled work is the artist's 83-year old grandmother, Doris Davis. Executed in oils on a rather large, nearly square canvas (1220 x 1225 mm), the painting mimics — as do many others in this show — the sort of cropped, close-up composition so familiar from realist photography, and yet although the work is in many ways robustly 'realistic' — that parchment-like skin, the red blotches, the old blue dressing-gown — Harris brings qualities of sympathy and even tenderness to representation that photography would be hard-pressed to match. This is not the barbed psychological probing of Lucien Freud's studies of his aged mother, although it is perhaps worth saying that when it comes to haunting portraits of old women, Harris's painting could be set next to Freud's without undue embarrassment. This, though, is an infinitely kinder work, if an equally rigorous one. Freud seems to want to get behind his mother's averted eyes and inward-turning posture. Harris, in contrast, seems willing to respect this thoughtful, faintly wistful-looking old person's privacy, so that the result is more a sympathetic reflection on age and experience, and what these things do to a woman, than an attempt at clinical dissection.
So despite those arresting red blotches and deep wrinkles this is not, in other words, Ron Mueck's Dead Dad either, trading off freakshow verisimilitude, any more than it is a dreamy Jenny Saville-type treatment of rosy boneless flesh. Harris's grandmother has real flesh and bones, but she also appears to have a real personality, and a real relationship with the young woman who is observing, portraying and incidentally spending time with her. The flaw in the painting is the background, which simply doesn't work either formally or descriptively, but balanced against its successes, that hardly matters. The judges, I think, chose wisely and well. If Harris can build on this level of achievement, her future career will be a source of considerable interest to anyone who cares about British figurative painting.
One point in favour of Harris's entry was the lack of super-obvious influences. Elsewhere, in contrast, identification with a favourite artist led to works that, where they did not verge on pastiche, offered themselves up to unfavourable comparison with the real thing. It would probably be unkind of single out the worst offenders in this respect, and for that reason I'm not going to do more than a little of it, but for the sake of posterity one might as well note that Freud and Richter are still both casting ever-lengthening shadows (although Jason Walker's downward-glancing self-portrait, mirroring a very famous Freud, is a fine painting in its own right, as is Paul Denton's Richterish if scarily sexy Kate), with a single vote each for Tuymans (Victoria Wright's Dawn, with its chalky surfaces and bleached-out tonalities) and Auerbach (Kin Scouller's Eddie). Yet there was enough skill in all these works to make one hope that these artists will have the patience to fight through to find a style of their own. After all, it is not as if Richter or Freud, or even Auerbach or Tuymans, started out painting like the canonical 'Modern Masters' they have become.
The other powerful influence on these paintings, paradoxically, was the 'realist' photograph, not simply via the Richter-Tuymans lineage, either, but as a convention for seeing a person in terms of a close-up, closely-cropped facial shot. I suspect a labour-saving tendency to paint from photos rather than actual settings encourages this. Full-length portraits made up only a tiny minority of the works on show, as did paintings where the background was treated as anything other than as a screen in front of which a face could be framed — in each case, with mixed success. Brendan Kelly's The Actress, for instance, seemed to me to be one of the few failures in the show. Although technically competent, its ambitious conversazione three-quarters-length composition and stylised colours were distractingly contrived without managing to be commensurably exciting. On the other hand, Darren Coffield's engagingly camp portrait of Ivan Massow — kitted out in hunting dress, pixilated hound by his side, a bit of crazed scenery beyond, the whole confection presented in an Old Masterish frame — was as self-deprecating as it was self-assured. Its sheer unabashed silliness may well go on to earn it a footnote in volumes of cultural criticism for decades if not centuries to come. Phil Hale's River Road, with its sharp shadows, low viewpoint and brilliant blue ground, looked strong and lodged in the mind, while Juno Doran's tough Black Painting #9 (Rimbaud) — not, incidentally, titled No. 4 (Self-portrait after a week's sleep deprivation finishing a painting for the BP Portrait Award), as the NPG inexplicably and irresponsibly labelled it — conveyed something about its maker with a bold graphic confidence and skill.
There were, finally, a handful of weak paintings, redolent of all the laboured earnestness of A-level project-work, and a few more where a good idea was let down by inept execution or vice versa. I see little point in identifying them, though, since blame for their presence should perhaps be laid at the door of the rather oddly-chosen panel of judges (Lady Kennedy QC, Cathy de Monchaux, Sandy Nairne, Des Violaris (from BP) and Catherine Goodman) rather than the artists involved. There were also, I am assured, some impressive works that didn't make it as far as the exhibition stage. Here is the point, though: even with a fairly restricted field (all work submitted had to be painted after 1 January 2002, had to be 10 x 8 inches or larger, had to be executed in oils, acrylics or tempera, and had to be a portrait that shows 'the human figure predominantly') it proved possible to gather together at least 51 reasonable works, several of which were actually fairly impressive. Surely that, at least, offers some hope for the future of figurative painting?
Yet the cultural conservative (didn't I tell you to stop reading?) will be ready with his well-rehearsed objections. 'That is all very well, but I bet none of them paint as well as Holbein or Van Dyck or even Sargent!' Well, yes — but of course it is equally true that few if any of these painters' contemporaries painted as well as they did, or to put it another way, there never really was a happy age when every painter was somehow, through the efforts of enlightened patronage or rigorous teaching or even particularly stringent criticism, a painter of consummate masterpieces. 'But surely these painters are working against the current of contemporary art?' Well, no — if they were, why is it that their work seems to allude so frequently and insistently to so-called 'Modern Masters' such as Freud and Richter? If anything, the more derivative of these works simply remind one how strong the tradition of recognisable, figurative painting has remained in Britain and Europe, even in what have sometimes seemed to be its darkest hours. 'But they are not as famous as Damien Hirst; no one is building a Saatchi Gallery for them; conceptual artists get all the hype whereas figurative artists are ignored.' That, of course, is all true — at least if you consider a £25,000 prize and three months in a major, Trafalgar Square-based collection a form of woeful neglect, and if you forget the existence of private galleries, corporate and individual buyers and the exhibitions that never appear in the tiny space allowed for art in even the higher-brow broadsheet media.
Dull but true: there is more to contemporary art than what gets into Matt cartoons. The fact remains that the artists in the BP Portrait exhibition are mostly young, some of them shockingly so — can it really be true that people born in the 1980s are out of school already? — and so it would be odd if they had managed to consolidate reputations already. More to the point, though, is something that cultural conservatives seem strangely hesitant to grasp. It is simply this: that the world of art hype moves largely in distant parallel to the world of art practice, so that it is entirely possible to make a good living, end up in plenty of public and private collections and to secure some measure of art-world prestige without once being short-listed for a Turner Prize, being interviewed on Channel 4 or ending up on the front row of a Vivienne Westwood show. The media tells one story about the arts, which survives because it is a good story with good photos and human interest, but at the same time, there is another story which, because it is made up of hard work, independent commissions, connoisseurs' knowledge and so forth, would frankly, like most sorts of business, bore the pants off anyone not somehow personally engaged with it. From time to time, an event like the BP Portrait Awards opens a little window on that world, encouraging such engagement on the part of those outside this little world while providing a pat on the back for those within. And the rest of the time, it carries on quite happily of its own accord. If, however, this attractive and stimulating exhibition proves anything, it is how much those cultural conservatives are missing by staying at home with their comfortable old convictions. Painting's alive and well, thanks, whether they realise it or not.
The BP Portrait Award Exhibition runs at the National Portrait Gallery from 12 June - 21 September 2003. Admission is free.
Bunny Smedley, June 25, 2003 08:41 AM