At the time I blamed this on the fact that Turks was, in some ways, such a richly annoying experience. On the day I visited, the rooms were so tightly packed with jostling pre-Christmas hordes, locked in all-absorbing battles with truculent audio-guides, that it proved impossible even to glimpse the more popular exhibits, let alone figure out what they were, or, indeed, why they were so popular. By way of consolation, I had only the 500-page, £50 catalogue to help clear up any minor questions once I’d fought my way free of the crowds and made my way home. And as for those perennial lurking doubts about the wisdom of serving up as a melange of art, education and entertainment a series of artefacts originally intended as something else altogether, much worried over on here — well, Turks did nothing to dispel them.

But with hindsight, there may have been more to my failure than a cocktail of misanthropy, laziness and the unweildy nature of that catalogue. If I’d actually written my review of Turks, I’d have noted that this was far less a conventionally didactic exhibition, or even a theatrical and crowd-pleasing one, than an exercise in the most naked and unabashed PR. Put simply, Turks showed every sign of displaying its artefacts solely in order to make a particular series of points: that the Turks are really very much like us (by which I mean cosmopolitan, reflexively liberal, apparently secularised Europeans), that Turkish culture has always been very similar to our own, and that, in short, whatever else the Turkish people may got up to over the past millennium or so, there is no reason to assume that they are necessarily scary Muslim fanatics, subsidy-hungry Third Worlders, or the sort of uncultured barbarians who might, within living memory, have had some serious problems regarding human rights, military coups and organised crime, not even to start to mention Armenia or Cyprus.

Turkish delight
Simplicity invariably requires hard work. Doubtless the presentation of such a streamlined, soothing picture involved a fair bit of editing, excision and ornamentation on the part of the exhibition’s curators. While items from halfway across the world were included — in part, I suppose, because they constitute some of the jewels of the collection of the Topkapi Saray Museum, which loaned generously for this show — explanation of the selection criteria was vague, if only because the alternative might have meant playing up the theme of far-side-of-the-Bosphorous ‘otherness’ at the expense of pan-European inclusion. So conflict and conquest were played down. Religion, certainly, was played down, except where it was polytheistic, syncretic or very, very tolerant. And where there was, unavoidably, a bit of difference, it was aestheticised as exotic and beautiful, rather than politicised as divisive and dangerous. At the same time, congruences between the court culture of East and West — of which there are, admittedly, many — were very much played up. Medieval Turks? Medieval Europe? What’s the difference?

No, the message could hardly have been more obvious had someone got round to putting it up in lights on the façade of Burlington House. The Turks, having been so very much like the rest of us for so very long, will make entirely proper and unexceptionable European Union partners.

Eastern promise
All of which may be perfectly fair, or alternatively, may be dangerously tendentious nonsense. The rights and wrongs of Turkish accession to the EU were not, however, the point of the review I was trying to write, nor are they really the point here.

When it came to writing that review, my problem was that the politics of Turks got in the way of everything else, leaving me with the feeling that those objects had, somehow, been badly served by the rhetorical function they were forced to perform. And this was a shame, if only because I felt so very ready for the sort of exhibition I wanted Turks to be. Having seen the stunning Heaven on Earth: Art from Islamic Lands at the Hermitage Rooms in Somerset House back in the bleak spring of 2004, I was left wanting more. For understandable reasons, Heaven on Earth had emphasised the complicated, fascinating interplay between Russia and its Islamic neighbouring states. Now, however, I was hungry to learn more about what happened when East met West, what took place at the margins where Christianity and Islam clashed and interlocked — not just as some sort of scrying-glass into which I might peer for news of the geopolitical future, either, although to be honest I probably wanted that too, but primarily as a tale worth hearing in its own right.

In retrospect, I probably should have paused, just for a moment, to wonder why I hoped that an art exhibition would be the venue for such high-powered enlightenment. But this question didn’t occur to me at the time. Instead, I simply regretted that the ‘message’ delivered by the show had been a crass and dubious one, rather than a sophisticated and compelling one. And so the review of Turks never got written, the catalogue found its own few inches of double-reinforced shelf-space somewhere in my study, and the RA turned its PR skills to the services of an infinitely more objectionable regime. It wasn’t a very satisfactory conclusion.

Make mine a Bellini, please
I was reminded of all this recently by the National Gallery’s Bellini and the East, showing in the Sunley Room until 25 June 2006. The exhibition is organised in conjunction with the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum in Boston, where it appeared last year.

If Turks was huge, tattered tapestry, its sporadic magnificence let down by intrusive modern ‘restoration’ and over-cleaning, Bellini and the East is more the delectable miniature, tiny but intense, all the better for attempting to concentrate its force. Like most exhibitions, obviously it has its flaws, and we’ll get to those in due course. Suffice to say, for now, that these are more than outweighed by its pleasures. If you haven’t already seen it, it’s well worth making the effort over the course of the next month.

The story around which Bellini and the East revolves is a compact one. In 1479, less than thirty years after the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, had fallen to the Ottoman Turks, an important painter named Gentile Bellini was sent from Venice to the strange, half-European, half-Asiatic city which the Turks had begun to call Istanbul. There, Bellini spent some time as a guest of that cultured, intelligent and highly successful jihadiste, Sultan Mehmed II, before returning to Venice. Bellini and the East focuses on that visit, during which Bellini produced (apparently) a handful of exquisite drawings as well as the strange, damaged yet weirdly compelling Portrait of Mehmed II, and the dreamy, engimatic Seated Scribe.

Yet perhaps because of its compact character, the sense of so much history packed into such a tiny space, Bellini and the East raised all sorts of broader questions as I started to make my way around the smallish Sunley Room. What can it have been like to witness that terrible thing, the death of Byzantium, and what legacy did Byzantine culture, our last direct link with the Classical civilisations, bequeath to Western Europe? And once Crescent overtook Cross, what was the result? What sort of conflicts, accommodations, compromises, borrowings and thefts began to connect the courtly culture of Istanbul with its equivalents amongst the republican city-states and princely courts of Europe?

Lions with wings
On and on the questions came, growing more complicated and improbable by the moment. Well, maybe it’s just me, but more or anything connected with La Serenissima sends my mind racing in this incontinent, irresponsible, thoroughly enjoyable way. But I don’t think it is just me, actually, because if it were, I doubt that the list of English-language books on Venice would be nearly as long as it is. Rather, it's a quality of Venice herself. There is something about Venice’s sheer peculiarity that seems to compel not only pleasure, but pleasurable speculation, too.

For as even the most incurious day-tripper soon discovers, Venice is the most magnificent of mongrels — a melting-pot that’s been stewing away for a millennium or more now. Venice is the hardy if odd-tasting fruit of intermingled faiths, linguistic groups, nationalities, ethnicities and ways of living almost beyond number. Even now, its ability to absorb sub-Saharan Africans with suitcases full of fake Prada bags, or the ambitious victims of Balkan conflicts, or indeed North Americans in pursuit of a particular strand of High Culture, never fails to astonish. In London, we tend to treat Venice as a theme-park of the elegantly moribund, but in fact Venice is at least as alive, even now, as our own great city. For is there anywhere else on earth that can swallow up anyone, anything, so voraciously, yet remain so resolutely herself?

And by the same token, it hardly takes brilliance to see that Venice’s architecture, the tangled network of canals, the whole texture of that man-made demi-paradise resembles nothing else in continental Europe — although even if it did, Deborah Howard would have explained it all to the rest of us in Venice and the East, an eye-opening book that’s as elegantly written as it is learned, which is saying a lot. Thus it was pleasing to discover that, along with exhibition curators Alan Chong (from the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum) and Caroline Campbell (now at the Courtauld Institute), Howard is one of the contributors to the well-illustrated if sometimes confusingly-organised catalogue of the National Gallery’s current exhibition.

For as I moved around the exhibition, trying to understand the connections between the various items on display, my thoughts kept turning back to Howard’s book. One of the main things I took away from Venice and the East was the notion that the cultural transfers which nurtured Venice were not the result of any single trading relationship or period of conquest, but rather, the consequence of a non-stop two-way traffic — ebbing and flowing in volume, perhaps, but persisting in various forms over many hundreds of years. After a while, under the force of such a narrative, distinctions between ‘East’ and ‘West’ start to dissolve. The result is that many items familiar not only from the paintings of Carpaccio or Giovanni Bellini, but from those of Van Eyck, Memling, Holbein and others as well, take on a double aspect. The ornate carpets, the glassware, the ornamental vessels of various sorts, the exotic robes and headdresses, even the cuspid arch — all these seem, in a very real sense, emblematic of ‘our’ Christian Middle Ages, yet all came from the East and would have reminded contemporary viewers of a Holy Land only intermittently freed from the control of the Infidel. Venetian words that are now a part of our own language — ghetto, arsenal — have Arabic roots, but their associations speak clearly enough of international conflict and tense relations between those of different faiths.

Complicating all of this even further is the love-hate relationship binding Venice with Byzantine Constantinople, one of the great Christian cities of the world, sacked with incredible ferocity by Christian armies — with Venice very much at the forefront — at the end of the Fourth Crusade. Again, there is so much of Byzantium in what we know of Venice — the Pala d’Oro, the four bronze horses on the façade of San Marco, countless relics, icons and treasure — that at times it becomes impossible to separate the two. If Venice is unthinkable without the Islamic world, it is equally inconceivable without the Orthodox Christian one.

In short, then, the tale told by Howard in Venice and the East is neither an inspiring one of irenic co-existence, nor a gloomy one of perpetual and inevitable conflict. Rather, it’s both at once, with Venice, for geographical and historical reasons, serving as a microcosm of what went on elsewhere, albeit to a less extreme degree. So instead of the simple and encouraging teleology of Turks, we have something denser and more ambivalent. And that, I thought to myself as I went round the exhibition, is the stuff of which Bellini and the East, too, is made. The realisation made me happy, because I very much admire Howard’s book. It seemed pleasing to think that I could slot the items before me into a story I already knew, while at the same time, expecting their presence to enrich, deepen and somehow validate the narrative.

Sailing to Byzantium
Bellini and the East is a seriously enjoyable exhibition. Throughout, the explanatory material is excellent — concise but intelligent — while the display of the objects and overall appearance is far more attractive, more visually aware, than in many past National Gallery shows. (Americans in Paris was also remarkably good-looking — have the National Gallery’s curators made a conscious decision to raise their institutional game in terms of sheer sensory appeal?)

Confined to a small space and hinging on a handful of works, the organisation of Bellini and the East is straightforward enough. First comes the build-up, with some very necessary scene-setting about Mehmet II and the fall of Constantinople to the Turks. Then comes a nod to cultural interchanges. We turn next, briefly, to Byzantium’s legacy. Finally, we arrive at the inner sanctum of the exhibition and stand contemplating, first, a case of bronze medals, and then, finally, the small group of works generally believed to survive from Gentile Bellini’s visit to Istanbul.

The thread running through all these various topics is Gentile Bellini himself. His work, or at any rate, work associated with him is adduced to articulate each of the main themes. Thus we have his rather stern and unlovely portrait of Caterina Cornaro; his cover for Cardinal Bessarion’s reliquary where, while the figures are pretty dire, the attempt to reach across visual traditions in order simulate an icon is fascinating; an enthroned Virgin and Child illustrates the architectural and decorative bonds between West to the East. What, then, to make of the artist whom the Venetian Republic sent to Istanbul, and who was sent back, with a glowing letter of recommendation from the Sultan, just over a year later?

Non-celebrity big brother
Extremely famous in his own time, Gentile Bellini is now to a great degree obscured by the shadow of his younger brother Giovanni, who not only left a relatively large quantity of first-class work, but who was also, famously, teacher both to Giorgione and to Tiziano Vecellio. Indeed, the careers of these three are so closely intertwined as to leave a few key works bouncing around, attributed first to one artist and then to another, and sometimes to all three at once. Linked so intimately with two of the most admired artists who’ve ever lived, Giovanni’s reputation remains an enviable one. Some historians go so far as to hand him the palm for inaugurating the High Renaissance in Venetian art — which, of course, has to be a Good Thing, as it places this calm, devout, decorous maker of altar-pieces and creator of interior decoration in the forefront of the militant avant garde of art’s progress — and what could be better than that?

Gentile, on the other hand, as if by some immutable law of contrasts, has been far less fortunate. As the head of the family art ‘firm’ (his father Jacopo was also an important Venetian painter, having studied with Gentile da Fabriano, who was one of the first Venetians to make an impact on the unshakeably parochial collective consciousness of Tuscany) Gentile tended to concentrate on official commissions, both for the Venetian republic and for Venice’s thriving scuole. Doubtless, during his lifetime this stirred up plenty of resentment and envy amongst his peers, as did the fame he achieved on his visit to Istanbul. But it’s also the case that very few of Gentile’s works have survived, and those attributed to him are often in wretched condition. His important paintings for the Palazzo Ducale, for instance, were long since reduced to ash. His paintings for the scuole are scattered, where not simply lost. Many other surviving works are suspected of being workshop copies. All of this, for obvious reasons, could hardly have failed dampen critical enthusiasm for him.

Perversely, then, those months spent in Istanbul — an anomalous sabbatical in the midst of a brilliant, successful career — have done more than anything else to keep Gentile’s memory afloat. Vasari, amongst others, was clearly fascinated by this liason between a culture that shunned the image, and another intent on propagating it. Nineteenth century Orientalists found in the visit a recipe for much romantic and colourful speculation. (Incidentally, in the present semi-secularised moment we are apt to treat the Islamic and Judaic prohibitions on images as odd aesthetic quirks, but to a fifteenth century Venetian the issues would have been marginally more immediate and interesting, not least as the schism between the Eastern and Western churches involved differences on the proper role of images. The sacred texts of all three great monotheistic faiths include warnings against the making of images; it’s less odd that Islamic societies sometimes banned the making of images than that Christian societies so very rarely did so.)

As we’ve seen, Gentile’s story also dovetails well with current preoccupations. That fabled meeting between, on one hand, a painter so closely tied into the central organising narrative of Western art history, and on the other, a Muslim conqueror who was, by all indications a sensitive consumer of European painting, is almost too good to be true when it comes to cross-cultural daydreaming. We see this, for instance, in a Richard Dorment’s review of the exhibition. There’s almost the sense, in some reviews of the show, that if we looked hard enough at these works we too might find a way of reconciling two sets of apparently inimicable ways of living. Clearly, I'm not the only one who finds it hard to look at little pictures without needing to extrapolate from them, by force if necessary, Big Conclusions.

Surface tensions
Before we worry about that, though, let us pause to consider a few of the individual exhibits. Of the works on show, the portrait of Mehmet II is one of the most memorable. It’s also, frankly, a mess. It doesn’t take an expert to notice that the condition falls short of, say, the hyper-real clarity of Giovanni Bellini’s Doge Leonardo Loredan. In places (portions of the turban, the sultan’s nose) the quality of the (re)painting is more or less what one might expect to find on any competently-executed pub sign. But all the same, there’s something a little bit magical about the way the head and shoulders emerge from the black background, about the arched frame and the cloth of honour in front of the figure, and certainly something in the sultan’s expression, which seems to combine a variety of emotions. Looking at it, I couldn’t help but feel that here was at least the wreck of a real, individualised, human portrait, combining — as the best works of Giovanni Bellini sometimes does — the sad reflectiveness of Flemish painting with the distinctive colour and emphatic rhythms of late fifteenth century Venetian art.

And then there are the drawings. The exhibition includes seven sheets, executed in dark brown ink, borrowed variously from the Louvre, British Museum and Stadelsches Kunstinstitut, Franfurt. More than anything — and much to my surprise — these reminded me of John White’s drawings of the British settlement at Roanoke, dating from the end of the sixteenth century.

Of course, there are vast differences. Bellini, as we have seen, was as skilled an artist as the Venice of his age had to offer, which is saying a lot. In contrast, White, from the little that is known about him, seems to have been a surveyor and administrator first, an artist only incidentally and rather controversially. So when it comes to visual sophistication, there’s hardly any comparison. But at the same time, much seems to connect the two. In each case, the result of their efforts is a sort of ethnographic record, produced centuries before the term was even invented — the fruit of curiosity about the outlandish sights and strange occupants of a distant and fabled land, coupled with a desire to document these wonders, to share that sense of wonder with friends and neighbours at home. Bellini seems to have been just as fascinated by the myriad ethnic groups, religious sects and otherwise oddly-costumed subcultures that rubbed shoulders in late fifteenth century Istabul, as White was with the aboriginal occupants of the Outer Banks of present-day North Carolina. Yes, one can easily imagine a practical side to this project, with Gentile intending to re-use these exotic figures in future paintings for many years to come. But leave ‘art’ to one side for a moment. Part of what appeals in each man’s work is the sheer freshness of that encounter with something unexpected, the pleasure to be had in discovering and, though drawing, capturing the previously unknown.

But neither, standing in the National Gallery in front of these seven drawings, can we forget ‘art’ forever. At their best, these drawings are almost inexpressibly satisfying. The mark-making is, much of the time, so feather-light and flawless as to seem hardly the work of human hands — elsewhere, so clear, definitive and unarguable as to look downright supernatural. The balance between meticulousness and economy rarely falters. There’s skill here, as well as something very like enchantment. We know very little about the subjects the drawings depict, or why they were executed, but their freshness is more or less unfailing. More than anything else in Bellini and the East, they looked like unproblematic evidence of Gentile’s genuine importance, not only as a near-accidental link between two worlds, but as an artist. And if doubts surface later, it happens hours afterwards, only once the spell cast by these fragile, powerful things had begun to fade.

Are you sitting comfortably?
And then, finally, there is the Seated Scribe, borrowed from the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum — in some ways the culmination of Bellini and the East, located right at the exhibition’s heart. A drawing with colour and gilding applied on top of it, this is an extremely strange work, and very hard to place. It helps to learn that the image was cut down, and that the Arabic inscription in the upper right-hand corner was added later, because the oddity of both of these features enhances their unfamiliar, non-European quality. But even after one makes the mental effort to strip away reality, to imagine a larger, inscription-free drawing, the image still seems a more plausible bridge than most between the visual traditions of the Islamic East and Christian West.

The artist — we’ll assume for the moment that this means Gentile rather than someone else altogether, although that’s far from clear — has depicted a lavishly-dressed young man with rather delicate features, seen in profile, sitting cross-legged on the floor, quill poised, ready to write or maybe draw on the tablet held on his lap. The young man wears a large white turban and a very opulent robe the colour of lapis lazuli, decorated with patterns in gold and silver. The robe is rendered in a flat, not particularly naturalistic manner, which, along with the very non-Western pose and the strangeness of the costume itself, gives the work an oddly hybrid appearance. Finally, it’s probably worth pointing out that this little work is only 18.2 cm x 14 cm in its present form — which is to say, very small indeed. It’s a feature that doesn’t come out in reproduction, yet actually matters quite a lot in real life, since it connects it more squarely with miniature-painting traditions rather than with the larger portraits it otherwise might be thought to resemble.

Very little is known about The Seated Scribe. We don’t actually know who, if anyone, it represents, or where it was made, or exactly why it was created in the first place. Wherever it originated, it seems fairly certain that by the mid sixteenth century, the drawing had migrated to the Persian Safavid court, where it was pasted into an album belonging to the youngest son of the Shah and admired as an example of fine European workmanship. Several Persian artists went on to copy it. One such Persian copy is on show at the present exhibition.

Human nature being what it is, the desire to make comparisons between the original image and the copy is irresistible. And there are, indeed, plenty of differences. The copy separates into big areas of strong local colour far more easily than does the original, where the garments tend to blend together into a single pyramid-type shape. In the copy there is no attempt at all to render the pattern of the fabric naturalistically where it falls into folds or curves around the body. The facial features of the figure are clearer, more distinctly drawn in the copy than in the original, where the modelling is very soft indeed. Whereas the original doesn’t show the scribe’s feet, the copy depicts a single foot poking out, at an angle that looks odd to Western eyes, from the bottom of the garment. And, in an alteration that seems less fascinating to me than it does to some observers, the tablet, which in the original is left bare, in the copy becomes a drawing, representing what looks like a male figure. The seated figure has revealed himself, not as a scribe at all, but as an artist.

West is best (or perhaps not?)
In a thoughtful essay by Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, brought to my attention here, Pamuk makes much of the way the copyist has changed the image from a portrait to a self-portrait:

In so doing [the Safavi copyist] reminds us how little Muslim artists knew about the western art of portraiture, and most particularly the concept of the self-portrait, and how they were beset by anxieties about their technical inadequacies in these areas.

And this, in a sense, starts to hint at one of the defects of Bellini and the East, or at least a defect in the way that some of us experienced it.

As was mentioned above, there is no particular reason to think that A Seated Scribe is in any sense a portrait. Nor do we really know much about who painted it, or where it was painted, or why. It seems fairly clear, in contrast, that the copy was made in about 1600, which is to say, more than a century after the original was probably executed — and the copy was probably produced in Persia, not Istanbul. Further, while Pamuk seems, strangely, to lump together ‘Muslim artists’ as if they constituted an homogenous body, this was hardly the case. After all, a Safavi painter, working at the start of the seventeenth century, would himself have been heir to one of the great traditions of miniature-making — a strongly Chinese-influenced heritage whose protagonists excelled in producing small, brightly-coloured evocations of people going about their daily lives.

Pamuk seems to suggest that the copyist, ‘beset by anxieties’, wanted to paint more like a Western artist. But why not assume that the copyist took pleasure in translating the older, Western-style work into something more agreeable and graceful within a different visual tradition? Why assume that a preference for naturalism is the direction in which all painting ought to aspire? Why assume that the best sort of portrait is one that replicates, camera-like, what the subject looks like, rather than representing his qualities in other, possibly equally sophisticated ways? And anyway, why assume that any vaguely plausible picture of a person must, of necessity, be a portrait?

Love amongst the ruins
If all of that suggests a degree of frustration with one particular take on Bellini and the East — and probably I should reiterate that Pamuk’s article is a thoughtful and thought-provoking one, well worth reading, even if the conclusion bothered me a bit — this in many ways admirable exhibition itself is not without a defect or two of its own. By far the most serious of these has to do with what it tells us about Bellini himself.

Gentile Bellini is, as mentioned above, the central lynch-pin holding the exhibition together, his work the linkage between its disparate themes, his journey to Istanbul the narrative impulse propelling the entire project. Unfortunately, however, virtually all the works included in Bellini and the East are either of questionable attribution, or have been restored extensively — or in many cases, both.

Walking around the exhibition, especially on a second visit, there was a strong sense of ‘change and decay / in all around I see’. For however much one trusts the attributions in the present catalogue, there’s a bleak sort of fun to be had in looking up the relevant works in, say, the National Gallery’s own older catalogue of the Earlier Italian Schools (first published 1951, revised 1961, most recently reprinted in 1986), and chart the gradual transformation of various relevant works.

From the older catalogue one learns, for instance, that the Virgin and Child Enthroned is ‘very much worn … extensively repainted … the flesh parts in their current state show little of Gentile’s style’. Sultan Mehmet II, for its part, is only listed as ‘ascribed to’ Gentile, with the following rather pessimistic comment: ‘There are now only traces of a very much worn and neglected old picture here, almost entirely repainted, especially in the figure …’ The self-portrait of Gentile may be neither a self-portrait, nor indeed the work of Gentile himself. Even The Seated Scribe has often been plausibly attributed to artists other than Gentile, as the exhibition catalogue itself makes entirely clear. On and on the list goes, raising a dozen new questions for every one it answers. The overwhelming impression is one of many damaged fragments held together by the mucilage of hope and faith. And although the foregoing are clearly theological virtues, they are not necessarily curatorial ones.

Yet whatever the exhibition catalogue may say, the labels next to the actual paintings in the National Gallery are almost entirely silent on the subject of destruction, doubt and loss. At the practical level one can see why this is the case. What if virtually nothing on view in the Sunley Room is actually, in its present state, the product of Gentile Bellini’s own hand? The result would, by definition, be an exhibition that tells us little about Gentile’s qualities as an artist, that lacks a strong connection with the whole Bellini and the East story, that can’t quite deliver the authentic frisson of close association with this most poignant, evocative and suggestive of cross-cultural encounters. And while the admirable Peter Campbell over at the London Review of Books feels that all of this simply delivers valuable information about the relevant workshops, I’ve got to admit that I, for one, would have gone away feeling just that little bit cheated if Bellini and the East had included nothing by the relevant Bellini, and not actually that much from the East, either.

For the East, per se, is not exactly over-represented in Bellini and the East. Yes, there are a few icons from Constantinople, which are well worth seeing — although, at the risk of reprising a weary old trope, one might pause here to wonder whether this demotion to mere works of art is not a source for sorrow. But what of the art of Islam? Perhaps this is a mistake, but I remember only a single work — that copy of The Seated Scribe — representing the entirety of the much-misunderstood riches of Islam’s visual traditions.

And this, too, is a problem. Deprived of context, deprived of Islamic build-up or Islamic follow-through, what are we to learn from this single, stranded item — an Eastern copy of a Western work — about the nature and potential of cross-cultural traffic? The problem isn’t that it tells us nothing. Rather, the message, however unconsciously articulated, is all too clear. Western art may have learned various things from the East, but what’s important is their novelty in Western art, not their rootedness in an alien culture of which we know little. The impact of Western art on the East is given even less attention. We leave the exhibition perhaps wiser about the Venice of the late sixteenth century, but no less ignorant about the Istanbul that was growing up out of what had so recently been Constantinople. We see Bellini’s drawings, the images he brought home, but are offered no Eastern images with which to compare them, meaning that we can know nothing of the biases and misreadings he may have brought to his account. One could go on, but there’s little point. The frustrations, at least, should be clear enough. True, Bellini and the East was meant to be a mini-exhibition, tightly focused on its topic. I do understand that. At the same time, however, it was disappointing to be offered not a lens, however small, but instead, yet another mirror. Bellini and the East had seemed to offer more than that. Or was I expected too much, once again, of an art exhibition?

By way of a conclusion
We have come a long way. Still, there’s one more point left to address, if only because it in some sense encompasses everything I’ve written above, as well as some of the awkwardness and uncertainty with which those things have, so obviously, been written.

The central theme of Bellini and the East was always going to be a difficult one to present. As we’ve seen, not an enormous amount is known about what happened during the few months that Gentile Bellini spent at Mehmet’s court, either, and what is ‘known’ relies almost entirely on second-hand reports. So there’s a limit to how deep that narrative can go. Whereas, in contrast, if one steps back for a moment from the smaller, more immediate story, the broader topics touched upon are potentially so vast that those fragile panels and sheets of paper sometimes seems to float helplessly on their surface, bobbing gently, waiting to be carried this way or that by arguments far removed from the circumstances of their actual making. Is it right, or at any rate, is it what was intended that the art should end up illustrating the history, rather than the history illuminating the art? I found myself worrying about this quite a lot on the way home from Bellini and the East.

And that, I suppose, is why exhibitions like Turks, or Bellini and the East, no matter how happy or hellish the act of viewing them may have been, turn out to be the least easy to review. More explicitly than most other exhibitions, they raise a question that I, for one, find persistently hard to answer: how are we meant to experience the works laid out for our curiosity and delectation?

Is it, for instance, enough — or indeed, is it even possible — simply to admire the miscellaneous items on show as ‘art’, with all that means and doesn’t mean, more than five hundred years after the fact? Well, I rather admire people who claim to be able to do this, but I am unable to emulate their achievement. Those stern bronze medals, the Florentine maiolica jug ambivalently celebrating the existence of the Great Turk, the slightly battered cover of a much-venerated reliquary — try as I might, I can’t quite make these things ‘work’ for me on a formal level, as opposed to a practical one — or rather, perhaps the practical one just seems marginally more important, more interesting.

And while the drawings and paintings might seem a softer target for ‘High Art’ exceptionalism than other species of artefact, for me, anyway, the problem still persists. The meticulously-constructed vertical rhythms and arching curves of Gentile’s The Virgin and Child Enthroned are beautiful, true enough — but I can’t help regretting that the painting is here in the National Gallery, briefly diverting the brighter sort of tourist, rather than ornamenting a consecrated altar in an ancient church, encouraging the faithful to pious contemplation and devotion, as its maker presumably intended. By the same token, as astoundingly lovely as Gentile’s drawings of Mehmet II’s court still look — and surely they were meant to be lovely, to delight and amaze as much as to record or inform — their loveliness is only a tiny part of what they were all about, merely an elegant means to a higher end. So did they ‘work’ — not in our usual vexed art criticism sense, but in terms of achieving Venice’s foreign policy goals, or boosting the Bellini family stock of eye-catching images, or to communicate some sense of personal fascination and excitement? Come to think of it, do we really even begin to know what they were meant to achieve? And more to the point, can we really drown out such questions, as we stand before those little sheets, with our exclamations at the delicacy and sureness of each line?

But on the other hand, the alternative position can seem equally unsatisfactory. If it’s possible to make a text mean almost anything you want it to do — and as someone with a 1990s-vintage PhD in history from Cambridge University, I can promise you that this is most certainly the case — then it really is child’s play to make an artefact turn somersaults in the furtherance of any fashionable case of your choosing. These things have all been ripped out of their original context, re-categorised in terms of origin, purpose and quality again and again, misunderstood in ever-new and different ways by generations of well-intentioned amateurs and specialists before turning up here, to speak about today’s particular preoccupation.

On one hand, the objects are themselves relics, talismans providing a reassuringly physical link with a past we need to remake again and again in order to validate our present. We love them for their genuine intimacy with the long-vanished at least as much as we admire their slightly ersatz and retouched present-day physical beauty. Mute and obedient under glaze and glass or in their climate-controlled cases, these objects provide our historical fantasies with something around which to coalesce, just as pearls eventually obscure the irritant grains of sand. Or to put it another way, reprising a point framed only as a complaint above, what we ‘learn’ from historical art exhibitions of this sort is to a great extent what we might learn from looking in a mirror. Our own questions are thrown right back at us — but because they are ours, we of course find them interesting, and only later realise how little we had by way of any answer.

Turks, with that strident special pleading, showed up all too clearly the defects of using art as illustration. In part, this may have had something to do with the defects of the argument thus illustrated. For several critics, Bellini and the East, in contrast, seemed to be making a much more subtle if even more soothing point. Yes, there will inevitably be conflict between different peoples and cultures, it seems to say — but art, above all else, offers a means of mediating that conflict. Even the most vicious differences can be dissolved with mutual curiosity, admiration for the best of each other’s traditions, shared styles, cultural transfers, the benign and modest triumph of syncretism. In that sense, Venice, that magnificent hinge connecting East with West, becomes a template for the world. Alteratively, another reading, marginally less cheery, might note the rather one-sided nature of cultural traffic as portrayed in the actual exhibition, plus a bit of inbuilt and perhaps unconscious Western triumphalism, and thus might further detect a fantastic vision whereby, just because the West accepted the number '0', astromomy and gunpowder from the East somewhere back in the Middle Ages, then the East ought to accept the onrush of evanglical, messianic liberalism today.

Or is that pushing it all too far? Almost certainly so.

Bellini and the East is, after all, a small exhibition, occupying a single smallish room. So perhaps it speaks only about a particular set of objects, encouraging us to look more closely at them and to think about how they relate to one another. Because after all, that’s the other problem with using art as illustration. Taken too far, it encourages us to do what we’re all too likely to do anyway, which is to note each item momentarily, file it away under some sort of categorical label (‘medal’, ‘altarpiece’, ‘old stuff’) and move on to the next big idea — or, if the exhibition is too crowded and uncomfortable, just move on.

The first casualty of such an approach is the experience of actually looking properly at the art; the next is the pleasure or at any rate intensity of emotion to be had from engaging with it; the third is the whole sense of an individualised encounter, a really personalised engagement, with something that someone else produced, perhaps quite a long time ago, for some purpose we’ll never fully be able to reconstruct, in circumstances we’ll never fully be able to understand. Sometimes, if we’re being honest, meeting an object at the level of aesthetic regard may, for all its imperfections, be a more realistic and satisfactory goal than any other. At Turks, probably I should have found an unpopular khaftan lurking in some lonely corner and spent time trying to get to grips with its design, execution and, well, beauty. At Bellini and the East, certainly, the happiest moments were those when I was shocked out of my theorising by a particular red enjambed against a particular teal blue. Hard lessons, these, for someone who not only can't remember whether the love for art or history came first, but who, worse still, still isn't quite sure that it's possible to distinguish between the two. At Bellini and the East, in any event, the conundrum is, at least, a thoroughly engaging one.

Bunny Smedley has recently been reading a bad biography of Clement Greenberg, which she hopes to review here soon.

Jacob van Ruisdael: Master of Landscape, currently showing in the Sackler Wing of the Royal Academy, provides a welcome reminder of Ruisdael’s remarkable skill, fluency, range and emotive force. It also demonstrates — and surely Burlington House is the perfect setting for such an insight — how very disparate are the lessons that later generations can mine from a single, if extensive and sometimes problematic, body of work. Yet because the curators have somehow failed to get to grips with presenting the work in a compelling, comprehensible way, the exhibition inadvertently raises a much larger question as well. In a culture that rewards above all else speed, shock, variety, evanescent celebrity, blink-and-you’ve-missed-it sensationalism, the new, the easy and the would-be ‘ironic’, do we still have what it takes to appreciate Jacob van Ruisdael?

Background, foreground
The sort of gallery-goer who wishes to fix the artist’s extant work onto an armature of incident, accident, sex, violence and controversy may find this exhibition hard going.

To put it mildly, not a lot is known about Ruisdael’s life. His father, Isaack van Ruisdael, was a modestly successful frame-maker who sometimes dealt in pictures and may even have painted a few himself. His uncle, Salomon van Ruysdael, was a landscape painter of some importance. It isn’t clear who, if anyone, encouraged the young Jacob to pick up a brush. By 1648, however, when he was about 20, he had become a member of the local painters’ guild and was already producing works of bracing proficiency, a number of which appear in the present exhibition.

In the early 1650s, while in his mid 20s, Ruisdael left his native Haarlem for the borderlands between the Netherlands and Germany, where he painted several versions of his Bentheim Castle. By about 1656 he had moved again, this time to Amsterdam, already in the midst of what would become its Golden Age. Ruisdael was a contemporary of, amongst others, Rembrandt, but there’s no particular evidence that the two men ever met. Instead, Ruisdael evidently appreciated the work of a painter called Alart van Everdingen who had travelled to Scandinavia and continued to paint that terrain long after returning to the Netherlands. Other than that, and his Haarlem upbringing, the influences on his work are mostly conjectural.

Ruisdael never married. We know nothing much about his professional relationships and little if anything about his personal ones. He died in 1682, aged about 54. But since art historians abhor a vacuum, many other things have been suggested about him over the years. It has been claimed that he practiced as a physician (not true), that he died penniless (not true either), or that he was prone to bouts of depression (impossible to prove one way or the other). Yet he was nothing if not prolific. If one is to trust his catalogue raisonné, he is supposed to have created about 800 paintings, some of them very major ones, in a working life of perhaps 40 years at the very most.

Haarlem renaissance
Despite his crucial importance to later artists, Ruisdael was by no means the first Dutch landscape painter of real significance. Even at the start of his career, he was following on in a strong tradition — not least, that of fellow Haarlem painters Jan van Goyen, Pieter de Molijn, Hercules Segers, Jan van de Velde the younger, Claes Jansz. Visscher, Cornelis Vroom and, of course, Salomon Ruysdael himself.

These were the so-called ‘tonal painters’, and while Ruisdael’s own painting would eventually feature areas of strong local colour, it is clear that he learned much from the subdued palettes and subtle atmospherics of this older generation. Meanwhile in Amsterdam, Ruisdael would have had access to one of the world’s great art markets. Hence he may have known not only the work of Dutch contemporaries like Aelbert Cuyp, working in a far more Italianate mode, but perhaps also art from France, Italy and beyond.

The point is worth making, if only as a reminder that the apparent ‘realism’ of Ruisdael’s most famous work was very much a matter of personal choice, not a naïve inevitability. He built on the work he knew best, as well as the actual landscape he saw all around him — but like the artists he would in turn influence, his borrowings were selective, personal and intelligent. He would also bring something new and unique to his strongest work, injecting into those images of the created world what later generations would go on to read as a moral and psychological significance hitherto undetected. Therein — in that flexibility, in that richness — lies his greatness.

A patch of yellow
About that greatness, I’ve long had no real doubt. For what it’s worth, I can even point to the actual painting that opened my eyes to this painter — that made him stand out from any number of his Dutch contemporaries and made him matter to me.

An Extensive Landscape with Ruins is a small painting, and in some ways, not outstandingly different from others in the National Gallery’s collections. The National Gallery owns, indeed, a rather similar painting by Ruisdael, Landscape with a Ruined Castle and Church, which, unlike An Extensive Landscape, is included in the present exhibition. And as far as that goes, there are also works by Philips Koninck, e.g. this one, that really don’t look so very different either. So what’s so special about this particular Ruisdael?

An Extensive Landscape is, like many of Ruisdael’s works, laid out on a squarish rectangle, the lower third of which is taken up with flat fields and low trees, whereas the upper two thirds are filled with a lowering sky that is slate-grey in places, but almost a dirty-brown in others. The oncoming storm has darkened the land beneath it, so that all incident — a little pond, a modest and scrappy ruin, some scrubby vegetation — blends together in the gloom. A church steeple, near the centre of the composition, is hardly even visible against the sky — or, rather, seems to matter little when compared with those mountainous clouds which, the true patriotic topography of this flattest of art-historical hegemons, rolling and swirling above. So in a sense, the subject of the painting is no more and no less than the tonal relationships out of which it is concocted: something to do with the balance of blue and brown, of foxy russet and a green so dark as to be almost a sort of ersatz black, leavened with the drama of the brush-strokes with which it was created, free and strong but very personal. Fantastically moody, potentially violent even, yet totally composed, there’s more real fierceness packed into this little painting than in whole square acres of theatrical baroque canvases elsewhere in the National Gallery — which is perhaps, although the choice is a hard one, the thing that I love most about it.

But then, I haven’t even mentioned yet the really extraordinary feature of the painting — not least, because it’s hard to find the words to do it justice. Along the right half of the horizon, just under the lowest of those clouds, Ruisdael has painted in a field in brilliant yellow. Well, if anything were going to do it, what that little patch of yellow wall did to Bergotte, Ruisdael’s canary-coloured field would do to me, because no matter how often I see it (the painting isn’t always on show, either) that flash of colour always leaves me slightly giddy. Having seen it, I feel ready to go home because, let’s face it, after that, there’s not much more that art is going to do for me today.

This effect is, among other things, a technical triumph. Yellow isn’t an easy pigment to handle. Titian, like Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione, knew the secret of making it work. Van Dyck had his moments of working magic with it. Artists within living memory who could do so are few and far between, although — strangely, perhaps — Pollock, de Kooning and Auerbach, all firm favourites of mine, spring to mind. For it’s harder than it might sound to avoid making yellow go all muddly, to give it the room it needs not just to exist, but to burst with real opulence and clarity from the surface of the canvas. In achieving this, Ruisdael has shown us something truly wonderful: a miracle taking place against the most uneventful of topographies.

That, however, isn’t the main point. What I am trying to say this simply this. As many have done before me — some of them, very great landscape painters in their own right — I really do love Ruisdael’s work, which is why I had great hopes for the present exhibition. These hopes were, however, not entirely fulfilled, and even a little disappointed.

A bit flat?
Ruisdael is not an enormous show. Packed into such a small space, however, it manages to look cluttered. About fifty paintings have been shoe-horned into four rooms, accompanied by some 36 works on paper — which might sound like quite a lot, until one remembers that Ruisdael’s catalogue raisonné of paintings runs to something like 800 entries. So at best it’s a survey, a tour d’horizon rather than an encyclopaedic account of Ruysdael’s achievement, let alone a rigorous and thorough examination of the man and his oeuvre.

Furthermore, although the genial, well-illustrated catalogue, written by Harvard emeritus professor and veteran Ruisdael scholar Seymour Slive, is illuminating in places and entertaining throughout, the background information available at the show itself is both patchy and, where it exists, confusing. The problem here may lie in Prof. Slive’s characteristic approach, which over the decades has tended to subordinate issues of iconography, historical context, patronage and the study of taste to what used to be known, without as much as curled lip, as ‘connoisseurship’.

Now, in deference to ERO’s own longstanding tradition of cheerful perversity in these matters, in a sense it would be all too tempting to welcome such an approach. Yet there are three reasons — three criticisms too nagging to be ignored — that ultimately prevent me from doing so.

Put out more paintings
The first of these brings us back to the point about the exhibition’s limited scope. There simply isn’t enough visual evidence here to engage with the basic issues of how Ruisdael’s work looks. Many of Ruisdael’s paintings appear in variant versions. It would have been fun, certainly, and perhaps even instructive to have been led through the evolutions of particular compositions, with hints about derivations, detours, meanings. For instance, I’d have loved to have seen the Detroit Jewish Cemetery, which travelled to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum a few years ago for The Glory of the Golden Age, placed next to the Dresden version on show here. It would have been interesting to have learned more about Ruisdael’s technique, which was evidently subject to considerable fairly dramatic shifts. It would have been informative to have been shown how some of his effects, so much admired and so widely copied, were achieved. And if the show had been held downstairs in the main galleries, rather than upstairs in the Sackler wing, there would have been more than enough space available to allow the display of works by some of Ruisdael's predecessors and contemporaries, just to show us all what he was, at it were, painting 'against'.

Finally, we could have done with hearing more about the way in which Ruisdael’s growing popularity spawned, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a host of copies, forgeries and the creeping transformation of plenty of dull old landscapes into bright new ‘autograph’ Ruisdaels. But then that particular line of enquiry rarely stirs much happiness in the hearts of curators, dealers, auction houses or private collectors — which, is perhaps, why the organisers of the present exhibition decided to steer away from it.

Lacking, however, as we do, their humane and practical inhibitions, this leads us, albeit rather indirectly and by gentle stages, to my next major objection.

Spot the difference
The best thing about the present Royal Academy exhibition is what it has to say about the breadth of Ruisdael’s achievement — how many other Ruisdaels there are, in a manner of speaking, beyond the poet of the flat fields outside Amsterdam.

No wonder that for centuries landscape painters continued to turn to this rather obscure Dutchman for inspiration. It’s impossible to wander through the four rooms of the Sackler Gallery without spotting seeds from which would later spring whole new landscape painting traditions. The Bentheim Castle from Dublin, for instance, perched adventurously on its not-very-authentic mini-mountain, reminded me hugely of the vedute of Bernardo Bellotto, seen most recently (by me, anyway) at Masterpieces from Dresden, here in these same Sackler Galleries, only a few years ago. Ruisdael’s seascapes are so compelling that one momentarily forgets he forged his reputation as a painter of dry (by Dutch standards, anyway) land. And The Jewish Cemetery made my jaw drop, not just because it’s such an astounding painting, but because it seems to have turned up in the wrong exhibition. Surely, this isn’t the stuff of staid, Calvinist, reassuringly burgerlijk Amsterdam, c. 1665? Surely, with that thunderous sky, the mouldering tombs, the crumbling ruins, the blighted tree, the whole landscape throbbing with sturm und drang — this has to be a stray from Gothic Nightmares, currently at Tate Britain? And then the graphic work is another thing altogether — as pleasing as anything in the show. With his unerring eye for the specific and his incredible facility with pen and burin, Ruisdael’s eloquence is enough to make Gainsborough’s copies seem crude.

But even within the bounds of similar subject-matter, Ruisdael can look surprisingly various. Compare, for instance, the near-monochrome Village in Winter, drawn in white on a very dark ground, with the warm midsummer colour of Two Water Mills and an Open Sluice, or the gem-like brightness of the Duke of Buccleuch’s Hilly Wooded Landscape with Cattle with the almost metallic golds and coppers of The Great Oak. Or compare the almost hyper-real intensity of The Great Oak, each kinking, curling branch observed with meticulous care, with the explosive, rather Turner-esque freedom of Waterfall with a Half-Timbered House and Castle. The light changes, the handling changes, the colour and tonality veer this way and that, the range of mood and atmosphere is virtually infinite.

There are moments, indeed, when it becomes hard to believe that these canvases all passed through the hands of the same young painter — however innovative he may have been, however driven in the development of his personal style, however supernaturally agile when it came to negotiating the transitions between his wildest and quietest modes of expression.

When is a Ruisdael not a Ruisdael?
For hard, actually, read ‘impossible’. And this is the second major problem with the exhibition. One of the basic points about connoisseurship is that, well, it helps to be sure who created the relevant works. And yet at least one critic — by which I mean, obviously, the Evening Standard’s brave Brian Sewell — has questioned whether several of the paintings included in the Royal Academy’s exhibition have anything to do with Ruisdael at all.

Who knows? Let's be entirely honest about this. Unlike Prof. Slive, I’m no expert on authenticating seventeenth century Dutch paintings, and unlike Mr Sewell, I lack the sort of training on which such expertise is built. Further, since even those who are experts seem unable to reach anything approaching consensus, it probably wouldn’t matter much if I were. On the other hand, however, one would have to be blind, or perhaps simply very inattentive, not to notice a certain lack of family resemblance in the works on show.

There could be all sorts of reasons for this. To state the most obvious, cleaning and conservation make a huge difference. Take, for instance, a very basic feature — the white of Ruisdael’s billowing, cumulous clouds. In several paintings, these have all the tobacco-golden lustre old varnish can confer on them, while in others, the surfaces look rather as if someone’s been at them with Lemon Cif and a scouring-pad. The impact of this difference on the whole atmosphere of the painting, the sort of weather indicated and the mood established, could hardly be greater. Meanwhile, some paintings have quite a lot of surface crackle while others have disconcertingly little; there are at least two that suffer from re-touching so blatant as to be downright distressing; a few simply don’t seem to fit in with the rest at all.

Perhaps they are all perfectly genuine works, scarred by such divergent histories as to mask or even erase their essential similarities. Or perhaps Ruisdael was simply that much of a chameleon, changing the most basic features of his art to suit unrecoverably altered circumstances. Who can say? All I know is this. After visiting the exhibition once, I went away with some doubts, but put this down to my mood, bad lighting, distractions, a naturally suspicious mind, visceral dislike of freshly-scrubbed Old Masters, pure ignorance — I can’t even remember what else, but really, I was making every effort to suspend some increasingly burdensome disbelief.

On a second visit, however, the doubts doubled and trebled. Nor was my confidence in the work boosted in any way by the response of my companion to the first two rooms. ‘How many of these are fakes, then?’ he asked me, before nominating a few particularly dodgy examples.

There may well once have been a time when respect for authority was such that the inclusion of something in a serious exhibition, curated by acknowledged experts, stilled all such concerns. But for better or worse, that time has passed. The atmosphere of generalised distrust, however ill-informed and mistaken it may be, surely means that someone, somewhere, ought to have addressed the issue of attribution and, if possible, put our collective doubts at rest. Whereas in contrast, ignoring the problem only detracted from the entirely authentic delights of what is, in many ways, a worthwhile exhibition.

Second glances
The third problem with Jacob van Ruisdael: Master of Landscape is, in a sense, as much the fault of the world we inhabit as it is a defect of the show itself.

To return to a point raised several times earlier, Ruisdael has long attracted the interest and adulation of connoisseurs, collectors and painters alike. Prof. Slive’s catalogue is full of information on this topic, both in the general essays and in the descriptions of particular painters. Perhaps most memorable is his account of John Constable’s relationship with Ruisdael’s work. The practicalities of this convey us to a now-unimaginable age, before cheap colour reproduction and blockbuster exhibitions, let alone the mixed blessing of huge million-colour LCD displays and Google Images — back to an age where seeking to expand one’s visual horizons might mean, for instance, riding a long way in order to borrow someone else’s copy of an engraving of a far-distant painting by a long-dead artist.

For some reason we find it irresistible, now, to sneer at those aristocratic Grand Tourists, with their well-publicised superficiality and provincialism, without pausing to realise how literally impossible it was for most Englishmen, even those who cared about it most, to form any decent mental picture of the great art and architecture of France, the Netherlands, the Italian city-states and lands beyond. Whereas for us, the once-exotic has been domesticated to the point of banality. The tangled green fastness of Machu Picchu, the dusty magnificence of rose-red Petra, the famous inaccessibility of what’s left of Timbuktu — the few of us who haven’t passed through these during gap-years or interludes of personal crisis are doubtless nonetheless familiar with their every crooked enfilade and inscrutable stone, having been coaxed through these by Dan Cruikshank or Michael Palin on one of those many, many evenings when there was nothing good on television but cooking dinner in silence seemed too great an enormity to contemplate. And as for the ‘natural’ world, in which the hand of God was once seen to be particularly evident, it is now most easily observed through the agency of someone else’s long lens, in the weirdly aestheticised and depopulated ghetto of ‘wildlife photography’, where all those meerkats and snow leopards detain us briefly only as something halfway between art and entertainment, succeeding really, poor beasts, in neither capacity.

Hence the ever-accelerating devaluation of our visual currency in a century where images are too abundant to be valued much, and where anything that requires a degree of persistence and patience is likely to be elbowed out of the way by pleasures that, while seeming to offer more, demand far less. How, then, to ‘sell’ a painter like Jacob van Ruisdael to the world in which we live now?

Difficult loves
Whatever else may be said about Norman Rosenthal’s time at the Royal Academy — and personally, although this perhaps is just old-fashioned ERO perversity piping up again, I have to say that I’ve got quite a lot of time for Mr Rosenthal — he’s shown a strong stomach for exhibiting the unfashionable, the difficult and the downright hard-to-love. For every ‘Sensation’, for every loan of high-profile booty from a far-away country with a bad human rights record, there’s been something surprising, challenging but genuinely exciting. Who but the RA would have put on such a comprehensive Frank Auerbach retrospective — so much better, in every possible way, than Tate Britain’s embarrassing apotheosis of Lucian Freud? Who else would have given such full outings to Vuillard, Guston, Kirchner? Who would have reminded us of Sir William Nicholson, or coaxed those remarkable Russian Constructivist paintings out of their provincial collections, or come up with the 1900: Art at the Crossroads exhibition?

So in that sense, it isn’t surprising that the Royal Academy have chosen to host an exhibition of Ruisdael’s work, complemented with a small display of related work by past Academicians in the John Madejsky Fine Rooms. What is surprising, though, is that the curators haven’t somehow injected more enthusiasm into the project — that they haven’t made more effort to bring the exhibition to life — to help us and our contemporaries, with our gnat-sized attention spans and our addiction to the flashily superficial, to find a way into the windswept sand-dunes and crepuscular forests of Ruisdael’s art.

A blind spot
For as we’ve seen, the fit between Ruisdael’s visual culture and our own isn’t exactly a very neat one.

His preoccupations are not our own. Ruisdael’s art has neither the literalism of the point-and-shoot photograph, nor the lurid, self-conscious fantasy of the Surrealists. It’s not Baroque in the sense of being remotely flashy, extrovert or susceptible to adoption under the rubric of High Camp. It’s too skilful to be ‘primitive’ but too genuine to be ironic. Nor is there a sexy back-story. Ruisdael didn’t, so far as we know, murder anyone during a tennis match, or keep dozens of mistresses, or having interesting political views of a progressive and left-wing nature, or even keep a journal. Most hopeless of all, though, is Ruisdael’s subject-matter. He painted neither the super-rich, the scorned outcasts of polite society nor the beautiful and underdressed. He painted neither religious art capable of anachronistic readings as 'fantastic and imaginative' or 'richly psychologically revelatory' — nor stuff useful for illustrating volumes of social history. He didn’t even paint animals.

Instead, Ruisdael painted landscapes, always with some trace of human activity present — because Nature for its own sake presumably interested him as little as it did any of his contemporaries — yet often remarkably low on incident. Featureless fields, decrepit trees, unremarkable and indistinct buildings — this were the stuff out of which so many of his finest works were made.

Ruisdael painted the world he saw around him. His perception was shaped, as all our worlds are, by the visual culture in which he found himself, but still grounded in the knotty genuineness of sight, touch — habitual contact. Furthermore, he painted for a clientele that still knew how to look — not simply to scan an image for its meaning, as if it were a piece of roadside advertising or a corporate logo, but really look — with patience and persistence. Truly, hard though this may be to believe, Ruisdael’s contemporaries, like Constable’s, could lose themselves in an etching as fully as ours can vanish into an episode of Desperate Housewives or the non-stop rapid-fire action and gory yet painless deaths of a new generation video game.

But we can’t — or at any rate, so few still can, and those only with such a desperate expenditure of will or generous dollop of good luck, that the Royal Academy, unable to count on mass appeal, hasn’t even been able to garner much support from the usual tame flock of arts journalists. Oh, it’s not that the arts press doesn't like Ruisdael. It’s just that this show does nothing — tells them no story, gives them no new angle — in order to make their pulses race a little faster when contemplating him. Compare the number and length of the British reviews of this exhibition with those of other exhibitions in the Sackler Galleries, even the really unpopular ones, and you’ll see what I mean. The attraction, then, is all tick-the-box worthiness. Ruisdael is, after all, a certified Old Master. The pitch seems to be that if you like that sort of thing, come along and see it — but don’t worry much if you don’t.

Gnarled trunk, green shoots
Yet the final irony here is that, as has been mentioned so often above, Ruisdael has proved himself more than capable of appealing across the generations.

Samuel Palmer, for instance, writing from Shoreham in the mid 1820s, saw in Ruisdael’s ability to ‘draw from the visible creation’ a welcome antidote to ‘imaginative thought’, which provided ‘practice’ while refreshing a ‘mind tired with better things’ — by which, it’s clear from the context, Palmer meant the inventive frenzies of artists like Michelangelo and Blake. Ruisdael thus served, for Palmer, as a reminder of the importance of balance between God’s own creation and men’s flights of fancy. The latter might be fascinating — Palmer evidently found them so, and complained about the need to spend days drawing tree stumps — but without being grounded in the former, something was lost.

On the other hand, just to pick the example that springs to mind the moment Palmer is mentioned, Graham Sutherland also seems to have learned something from Ruisdael, in part, of course, via Palmer. But in this case the lesson could hardly have been more different. Wandering around Wales, spending weeks worrying over a mossy darkened lane or single twisted tree-trunk, Sutherland was following in Palmer’s footsteps, and thus by extension in Ruisdael’s. Yet for Sutherland, nature seems largely to work as a language in which emotional truths — in the late 1930s and early 40s, it must be said, usually pretty anguished ones — could find a sort of voice. Nature and man were thus in some sense inextricable one from the other, a mirror for each other’s convolutions and deformities.

By the same token, it’s easy to think of artists who have gone to Ruisdael primarily for lessons in colour, or composition, or for a host of other reasons. Nor are other painters the only ones who can play this game. Each of us who engages, truly and deeply, with his work will bring something unique to it, and hence has the potential to take something unique away.

In short, then, I don’t doubt that future generations will continue to find their own distinctive epiphanies in Ruisdael’s painting, drawing and engraving. I only regret that the present exhibition didn’t push harder in trying to encourage what will, clearly, happen anyway.

Instead, however, lacklustre commentary, a cluttered display of distractingly odd-looking works and a sort of take-it-or-leave-it attitude have the strange effect of making the work of this extraordinary painter seem so much duller and deader than it ought to do. Ruisdael, ultimately, deserves a better show than this. Yet this is doubtless the only one we’ll see for some time. For that reason, the Royal Academy’s exhibition is, for all its various defects, of course, unmissable.

Bunny Smedley was co-founder and arts editor of electric-review.com. Until very recently, she wrote about art for the website of the Social Affairs Unit.

Three centuries on, the passionate affair between the United States of America and France shows no signs of cooling. As is usually the case with affairs, this one has to no small degree proved an exercise in self-definition. Because for Americans, at any rate, France — and, in particular, Paris — has long been more than a place. It’s been an ideal, a standard against which Americans can test, shape and assert their national character.

There’s nothing new in this. For the ‘Founders’ such as Franklin and Jefferson, France was, above all else, a civilised place that at the same time was not, delightfully, Britain. For the age that followed, France was the other place that had recently dabbled in ‘revolution’, with all that meant and did not mean. Later, as the nineteenth century rolled on, France was the international capital of progress and cultural attainment, where the spectres of impacted racial hatred, civil strife and industrialised ugliness seemed, as long as one didn’t look very hard, agreeably far away. The France of Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and so forth restored to modernity a lustre that the carnage of the First World War might otherwise have tarnished indelibly. Next came, in no particular order, the German occupation, Camus, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Bridgette Bardot, 1968, draft dodgers, Foucault, Derrida, Euro Disney and Houllebecq. And indeed, on and on go the rows, the name-calling and the splits, as well as the interludes of ill-disguised desire and passionate reconciliation.

Most of all, though, France has allowed Americans who are that way inclined to say something intelligible about who they are, or at any rate who they wish to be. So for every American simmering with gee-whiz nativist contempt for all the things France might be seen to symbolise — which is to say, intellectualism, sensuality, frivolity and decadence, as opposed to the classic American virtues of practicality, decency, earnestness and healthy New World vigour — there’s another American who wonders, with varying degrees of guilt, whether an old Chateau Latour and a volume of Collette’s more feline stories might somehow have the edge on Garrison Keillor and a super-size helping of Liberty fries. Whisper it quietly, but — well, isn’t there something about those cheese-eating surrender monkeys that’s actually, when you come to think about it, pretty darned séduisant?

This land is your land
The present exhibition at the National Gallery reminds us of one particularly fruitful model of Franco-American rapproachment. Americans in Paris: 1860 – 1900 sets out to survey the experience of those American men and women who came to Paris in the latter half of the nineteenth century in order to study art there, seeking to examine not only at what they achieved whilst resident in the City of Light, but also how their time in Paris affected them once they returned, as most but not all of them did, to American shores.

In achieving this goal, it must be said, the organisers have not entirely succeeded. This isn’t surprising. The subject-matter, which superficially could hardly be more simple, is in fact fraught with hazards. How, for instance, to define ‘American’? As a nation largely peopled with immigrants of one vintage or another, it’s doubtless fair to include artists who weren’t born in the US but simply moved there at some point. It’s probably even fair to include those who were born in the US but chose to live and die somewhere else. There’s a bit of a difficulty, though, when three of the artists most central to Americans in Paris — Cassatt, Whistler, Sargent — were ‘American’ only in differently complicated, problematic ways. And if not, what on earth does it say about the experience described in this exhibition that none of these three showed much desire to spend time in America?

Come to think of it, though, ‘in Paris’ isn’t as straightforward a concept as all that, either. For while some artists stayed for a year or two, speaking American English to other Americans, attending their various American protestant chapels and generally entering into the swing of the so-called ‘American Colony’, others, in contrast, shunned their fellow countrymen, learned to speak good French, and lost themselves in a luxuriously thorough otherness. So there were very different ways of doing that, too.

Finally, since much of the work on show was painted outside France altogether, sometimes decades after the artist in question had last seen European shores, the organisational rigour stretches and sags in places. There’s a strong sense that the rules have been bent in every direction to license the inclusion of a handful of superstar works, whilst at the same time some fairly second-rate stuff has also been allowed in for the sake of scholarly completeness. In places the gaps between the strongest artists shown here, and the weaker ones, are almost distressingly vast. The result can, like any dodgy fusion cuisine, feel confused, indigestible — and sometimes more than a little unappealing.

American Beauty
All of this bothered me for about two minutes as I started to go round the exhibition. By the end, though, I hardly cared.

The National Gallery — by any sane standard, one of the world’s greatest art museums — holds, I think, exactly one American painting. (By ‘American’ I mean, incidentally, painted by an American in the United States. And if you want to defend the notion that Sargent’s great Lord Ribblesdale, perhaps the consummate statement of what an English milord ought to look like, should be considered ‘American’, this blog has an excellent comments facility — I can’t wait to see someone try to make that case.) Here it is. It isn’t exactly dreadful, but neither is very good. Certainly, lurking as it does in solitude and obscurity, it hardly testifies to the breadth or quality of American art. And while other British collections include a number of important American paintings — one thinks here of Tate Modern’s Rothkos — the emphasis is very much post-1917, even post-1939. It’s almost as if the art that Americans produced in the twentieth century came either directly out of Europe, or out of nowhere.

All of which matters for a number of reasons, not least because this narrative plays to the general British suspicion — long since implanted by Roger Fry, Herbert Read & Co — that most if not all worthwhile art made in the mid to late nineteenth century was necessarily created in France. As we shall see, British opinion was not alone in that particular delusion. But being reminded of the strengths of other national schools — what was happening, for instance, in the various places that are now Germany, Russia, Italy and the United States — is, if nothing else, a salutary prelude to discovering the real, serious strengths of Britain's own art history, still far less well known or loved than it ought to be, both abroad and at home.

Down, anyway, from that well-exercised hobbyhorse, and back to the topic at hand. Here’s the point. The real joy of Americans in Paris has less to do with Americans, or Paris, than it does with the opportunity to spend time with a handful of very striking paintings rarely if ever seen in London, as well as a host of other works which, if less exciting, still have the capacity to charm, impress or perhaps surprise. An American friend of mine, having heard me lavishing praise on this show, expressed surprise at my enthusiasm for ‘that sort of stuff’ — but then admitted that he himself, however much he might love it too, probably took it a bit for granted. And the truth is, he probably does, because he lives in a part of the States where American art, good and bad and indifferent, is everywhere around him. It’s different in London.

And yes — to address my friend’s other entirely reasonable objection — when compared to the best French painting, too often the American art of the 19th century lacks the lustre of the cutting edge, sometimes looking more than a little derivative, safe and sensible. But so does most art, most of the time. Why should that be a barrier to enjoying it? And anyway, a few paintings easily clear that particular hurdle through sheer force of brilliance. Yes, I do love ‘that sort of stuff’, and hope that this show will make that sentiment more general, over here, right now.

Over Here
Americans in Paris has been organised in conjunction with two major American collections, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City) and the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston). Both have been remarkably generous in their loans, as have other institutions, not only in the United States either, resulting in a large and sometimes spectacular show.

From the National Gallery (Washington D.C.) comes James McNeill Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (1862), while that much-admired, much-parodied classic, Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother (1871), borrowed from the Musée D’Orsay, occupies the same room. It’s an exciting conjunction — two compositions grossly self-congratulatory in their obsession with formal issues, yet utterly different in emotional temperature — the one all sensuality and breathlessness, the other so stern and dignified as to seem, even now, like a sort of reproach. Elsewhere the exhibition includes an amazing Whistler seascape called Harmony in Blue and Silver: Trouville, 1865, loaned by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston). It was apparently painted while Courbet was working at Whistler’s side, yet the work — and it’s typical Whistler, this — almost aggressively rejects every last shred of the older painter’s influence.

And that, in a nutshell, is the sort of juxtaposition that raises Americans in Paris well above any flaws in its overall coherence. Wherever Whistler’s national loyalties may have resided, whatever the influence of France (as opposed to Britain or Japan) may have been, these are canonical works by a serious artist. The London viewing public is, frankly, lucky to see them.

She worked with animals and children
And then there is Mary Cassatt. What to make of her? My own view varies. Sometimes I think that she’s a tedious second-rater, her reputation engorged by the crude biological fact of her gender far more than by her talent, and her popularity largely contingent upon the accident that her painting and prints make really good greeting-cards, exhibition posters and decorations for the better sort of paediatricians’ waiting-rooms. But come to think of it, such suspicions are at their strongest when I’ve seen too much of her work in reproduction which, by embracing its sweetness, rarely seems to do much of a favour for either its rigour or complexity.

But how else to judge her? Again, there isn’t much Cassatt work on show in Britain. Americans in Paris contains about a dozen of her paintings. Standing amongst these works — for there’s a little room more or less devoted to them — I was really surprised at how strong they looked, and how little effort it takes to imagine what Degas saw in the very proper, very determined Philadelphia lady who became his pupil, colleague and lifelong very good friend. True, her drawing wasn’t as tough as his, her forcefulness swaddled in the soft stuff of domesticity — but how many artists could bear the comparison? Here, if not all the brushstrokes genuinely thrill, at least many of them do. The colour clashes, reverberates, surprises. Cassatt’s way of filling a canvas is more full of boldness, in the flesh, than it is of easy charm. Those sleepy, cuddly babies function well as softly solid forms, not just as the icons of cuteness that they also, incidentally, are.

Sargent major
The third great star of this exhibition is John Singer Sargent. Britain is fortunate in its holdings of this infinitely elegant artist’s work, present in public and private art collections as well as in an excellent exhibition at the Tate in 1988. We’ve had access not only to his society portraits, but to his landscapes, genre scenes and war paintings. So we can hardly say that we don’t know what a good Sargent looks like, or claim to be surprised by his breadth or fluency. If anything, familiarity might lead, if not directly to contempt, then at least to a certain apathetic disregard en route to it.

All credit, then, to the organisers of Americans in Paris for pulling off the remarkable coup du theatre they achieve here. For one of the best things about this show is the degree of visual drama that underpins it — something more familiar to the Royal Academy than the National Gallery in recent years, but entirely appropriate for this particular exhibition.

There’s a handsome Sargent early on — a suave, voguishly monochrome portrait of that great dandy and self-promoter Carolus-Duran, whose studio offered a particularly warm welcome to rich, fashionable American art students. Painted in 1879, when Sargent was 23 years old, in a sense it effortlessly outshines everything else in the first room of the exhibition. Sargent’s confidence appears complete and, what’s more, well-justified. His ability to make a nondescript patch of taupe or umber flicker with interest looks back, meaningfully, to Velasquez, as does his contempt for the easy appeal of colour, or his ability to drive white into black, wet-into-wet, thus creating a cuff or a collar. What’s more, though, this last trick was one that Carolus-Duran particularly recommended to his pupils, whom he also encouraged to ‘draw’ directly onto the canvas with paint. (In the Luxembourg Gardens, also in this show, shows this strategy to full advantage.) So at several levels, then, this portrait of Carolus-Duran is a tribute to what France, or at any rate a single Frenchman, gave Sargent. At the same time, normally resident in Williamstown, Massachusetts, it’s a lesson for any complacent London viewer in what Sargent was doing before he took up painting the British aristocracy.

Room with a view
The real kick, though, comes a little while later. Two rooms on, turn to the right and suddenly the view through the long enfilade begins to register — it’s Sargent’s great portrait of the daughters of Edward Darley Boit, painted in 1882 in Paris.

As regular readers will perhaps remember, I am no great fan of the basement of the Sainsbury Wing — considering it eternally pokey, airless, incredibly badly lit, etc, etc — but this particular view is one of the few gifts its design affords the curators, and there’s little doubt that here they make the most of it.

The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) is a very large picture (87 3/8 inches x 87 5/8 inches, apparently), and because the image itself includes a view into another room — with a broad hint of Velasquez’s Las Meninas in the composition — the way the work is positioned encourages it to expand into something grander than either reality or its own richly mythic, symbolic status. Four little girls, kitted out in starched pinafores, each project an entirely distinctive personality, but are all the same made to share the space with a big Chinese carpet, an enormous porcelain vase, a hard-to-read item in Chinese lacquered red, as a half-lit doorway beckons beyond. Maybe it’s the throw-away elegance of the muted colour, maybe it’s the almost frightening formal power of the composition — or maybe, who knows, it’s the unrelenting, unsmiling faces of the three younger sisters, whilst the eldest half-turns away into the darkness, driving the viewer’s glance further across the canvas to the right, giving this painting a sense often present in Sargent’s best work, of something left unsaid. Over the years, much has been written about this painting. Standing in front of it, or indeed a few dozen yards away from it, one suddenly understands why.

The ugly American?
Sargent is also responsible for the painting chosen by the organisers as the symbol for what they evidently hope will be a crowd-pleasing blockbuster show. In a way this is fitting, as Sargent’s Madame X (1883-4) is a painting that says, in its own way, something particularly interesting, if not entirely positive, about the experience of Americans in Paris.

The subject, Madame Pierre Gautreau, society beauty and wife of a very rich banker, grew up in New Orleans. When Sargent showed Mme Gautreau’s portrait at the Salon in 1884, one shoulder-strap dangling down against her icy-white upper arm, the scandal that resulted was in part about the amount of bare flesh on show, and in part about rumours connecting her with a doctor whose portrait hung nearby, but was also in part rooted in anti-American feeling — resentment of the brashness, lack of subtlety and plentiful success with which so many rich Americans were launching themselves into the higher echelons of Parisian social life.

It would be easy, given the fame of this work, to feel a bit bored by it, were it not for the fact that the painting itself is, seen up close, so amazingly odd. Sargent usually laboured hard at making the most spectacular effects seem effortless. Here, though, everything has a strangely laboured, almost awkward quality. The most alarming feature of the work isn’t, as one might have expected, Mme Gautreau’s décolletage, but rather, her profile. It’s sharp as a newly-ground blade — hard, unfeminine, almost inhuman. Moreover, in defining its curves and angles, Sargent evidently worked and worked at the surfaces surrounding so that it almost seems to be carved, physically, out of the surface. Meanwhile the sitter’s eyes are strange, over-dark smudges, and her skin has the faintly livid quality of a newish corpse. Heaven only knows what Mme Gautreau looked like in real life, but what one sees here has more to do with determination than with beauty, more to do with nerve than grace. When the work was received badly, Sargent responded by leaving Paris for London and America, taking the painting with him. Later, when he sold it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1916, he called it ‘the best thing I have done’. It’s hard to agree, but at the same time, it’s equally hard to deny that this gifted, shy, brilliant painter captured something of importance here.

In the beauty of the lilies ….
Although quite a lot of Americans in Paris is taken up with works by Whistler, Cassatt and Sargent, this is in fact a generously-sized exhibition, including paintings by quite a wide range of American artists.

There are, for instance, a number of works here by Thomas Eakins. One of them — a huge, alarmingly life-like Crucifixion (1880) — turns out to be the fruit of sessions in which Eakins convinced a fellow-student to allow himself to be suspended from a life-sized cross while Eakins photographed and then painted the resulting image. There’s a cold-blooded Yankee literalism here that only gains from its proximity to a particular strand of scientifically-minded spiritualism, very much the creature of own Eakins’ time and place — and perhaps just a hint of guilty homoeroticism, too. Painted in America, it was rejected by the jury of the Paris Salon of 1890. An earlier work, however — Starting Out after Rail (1874) — shows another facet of Eakins’ ability. Here a small boat sets out under sail on a brisk, bright, slightly windy day. The subject matter couldn’t be more simple, but the colour is subtly brilliant, the composition stark — so much so, indeed, that a certain sort of critic, fond of lineages and national tags, might wish to connect it with a world of colour-field abstraction which, another sort of critic might argue, is entirely out of sympathy with anything Eakins might have intended. Still, it’s a startlingly effective painting.

And then there is Winslow Homer. Sadly, I remain, despite a certain amount of hard work, unable to understand exactly out how Prisoners from the Front (1866) is meant to relate to the governing theme of Americans in Paris, aside from the fact that when he eventually travelled to Paris, the American-born, Boston-trained artist-illustrator for Harper’s Weekly showed his picture at an international exposition there, where it could hardly have been flagged up more clearly as ‘American’ — not only by the context, of course, but by the painting’s then-topical subject-matter.

Prisoners from the Front is one of small handful of paintings in which American painters came anywhere close to making serious art out of the bleakest hours in the history of the Land of the Free. (Photography, in the main, did a better job.) And although the catalogue for Americans in Paris describes this work as ‘confrontational’, in truth, like the magnificent The Veteran in a New Field, it radiates ambivalence.

Homer’s painting doesn’t depict a famous assault, or a gallant defence, or the great actions of massive armies commanded by supermen. On the contrary, its scale — emotionally, as well as physically — could hardly be more modest. A frieze-like composition laid out against a background of muddy-gold fields and cloud-curdled sky, it pictures the moment when an youngish officer of the Army of the United States (a family friend of Homer’s, it turns out) confronts three recently-captured Confederate prisoners, fresh from the front at the battle of Spotsylvania. One’s a dashing young cavalryman, hair long, expression arrogant, hand curled defiantly on the hip where his sabre ought to have been resting; one’s a bewildered old veteran who’s seen many a fight before this last one; the third is the spiritual forefather of generations of redneck trailer-trash, too incuriously stupid to wonder what kind of mishap has befallen him this time.

Now, it’s easy to read this trio as stereotypes representing what’s wrong with the South, and hence why the North was right to crush its secessionist impulses — pitting obsolescence, arrogance and ignorance against progress, dignity and rationality, as personified by the Union officer. But it’s also possible to see in it an attempt to humanise and soften one of the world’s first mechanised, mass-conscription conflicts. The Southerners, for all their archtypical simplification, are by no means demonised. Rather, they are depicted with a degree of sympathy, understanding and kindness that argues more for shared humanity than for ongoing partisan hatred. Well, that’s my reading, anyway. What the Parisians of the late 1860s would have made of it is even harder to know. Homer, in a sense, stands at the other end of the spectrum from lifelong expats such as Cassell and Sargent. Although he lived for a while in Paris, he soon returned to his beloved New England, not very much altered, as far as I can tell, by his time away.

E Pluribus Unum
And this, in a sense, leads us directly to the major question raised by Americans in Paris. At what point does individual creative expression intersect with national identity? In other words, is there such there as an American way of painting, as distinct from a French way of painting? Was there something basically American both in what these young men and women brought east across the Atlantic with them, and in what, if anything, they ended up taking away from the ateliers of Paris?

In a word, no — at least on the evidence of this exhibition.

Part of this stems from the point made earlier, regarding the diversity of ways in which a person could be an ‘American’ spending time ‘in Paris’. There were so many different stories, different affinities and antagonisms, different frustrations and achievements. How to compare, for instance, Sargent’s story with that of Henry Ossawa Tanner, a skilful, learned and sometimes inspired painter of Biblical scenes, who at the age of 32 decided to make Paris his home — and in doing so, surely avoided at least some of the bigotry that an Afro-American artist would have suffered in his native United States? How to compare Cassatt’s trajectory with that of Elizabeth Jane Gardner? Having arrived in Paris in at the early date of 1864, this enterprising woman initially made a living by copying paintings in the Louvre for American collectors, all awhile dressing up as a man in order to attend men-only drawing lessons. She not only studied (as so many American did) with William Adolphe Bouguereau, but in fact ended up marrying this pin-up boy of academic classicism — a fact which, with the benefits of hindsight, could hardly be more obvious from the glossy surface of the faintly alarming Shepherd David, on show in the present exhibition.

The broad chronological sweep of American in Paris also tends to emphasise difference over similarity. The earliest works here are, I think, from the mid-1860s, whereas the later ones — including Frederick Childe Hassam’s spectacular Allies Day, May 1917, a riot of French and American flags which bursts through the time-constraints of the exhibition with triumphant aplomb — take us well and truly into a place from which we can glimpse the high peaks of Modernism before us. So the lessons these Americans internalised in the ateliers, the crowded salons and the summer sketching-holidays, all of which might have started out forming direct trans-generational links with the shades of Ingres and even David, came at last to encompass Impressionism and its offspring. The shifts in subject-matter reflect this, in an exhibition that takes in everything from the Orientalist fantasy of Charles Pearce’s The Arab Jeweler to the brashly skilful rendering of artificial light in Willard Metcalf’s In the Café and the Art Nouveau eroticism of John White Alexander’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil. These were, in other words, the work of different individuals attempting different things in different styles at various different times. Small wonder, then, that the overall impression is one of variety, not homogeneity.

French Connection
Yet despite this, it’s clear enough that in a very broad sense, the continuing artistic traffic between France and the Unites States was to have serious and lasting implications for American art history. Young Americans, seduced by the effortless self-confidence as much as the actual merits of French painting, were quick to convey their enthusiasm to the folks back home. Several of the artists included in Americans in Paris went on to advise American patrons on acquiring French art, which does a great deal to explain the wealth of first-class Impressionist paintings to be found in American collections, both public and private. The impact on taste, both commercial and critical, was immense. In a virtuous circle, all the feelings about France that had propelled those students to Paris in the first place ended up reinforcing a particular notion of France. In particular, the burden of all those gilded memories of riverside picnics, the cool halls of the Louvre, the raucous bonhomie of the smoky cafes and faces half-glimpsed amidst the throngs in the crowded boulevards only increased the sense that France, more than anywhere else, instantiated culture in the highest, most Apollonian sense — rather to the exclusion of has-been high-art hot-spots like the Italian city-states or the Netherlands, let alone places like Great Britain that, for whatever reason, have never needed to add art history to their arsenal of state-formation tactics.

And this, in turn, meant that when Old Europe seemed too tired out and torn up by war to sustain any longer the flames of artistic pre-eminence, the torch could only be passed to the United States, which was conveniently doing its darnedest at the same time to slip into the role of geo-political hegemon. Or something like that, anyway. Neat art-historical narratives, like the broader historical narratives in whose shadow they develop, trade not on the inconveniently lumpy stuff of individual lives — the sensitive and cultivated American, the boorish and Philistine Frenchman — but rather on the quality of their own relentless, remorseless streamlining. When they start to fall apart, there is something unappealingly messy and unsatisfactory in the result, however more ‘true’ it may be. So if there’s something slightly undigestible about Americans in Paris, it probably has as much to do with this, as it does with the exhibition’s breadth, variety and complexity. And that, in its own way, is a sort of recommendation.

Red, white and blue, what does it mean to you?
Yet it’s hard to untangle the knotted strands of art and nationhood, no matter how devoutly one might wish to do so.

After going round the exhibition, I stopped for a coffee nearby. I ended up chatting with a man — young, a bit trendy, quite ‘normal’ really — who’d been involved, in a marginal sort of way, with organising Americans in Paris. Well, the behind-the-scenes side of these things always interests me, so we spoke for quite a while about various aspects of the show — decisions about wall-colour, how high to hang a few key paintings, fiddly things that were done with the lighting.

Eventually, we even got round to the merchandise available in the National Gallery’s shop. He smiled ruefully, agreeing that this stuff would doubtless sell particularly well to the American tourists who were, he felt, the prime audience for Americans in Paris. I expressed surprise — surely British and European visitors would be interested, too? Especially when they so rarely have the opportunity to view American art of this calibre?

His reply shocked me a little, but on consideration, I think he was probably had a point. What he said was this: that it was a shame that the word ‘Americans’ had to appear in the exhibition’s title, because it would put far too many people off coming to see what are really, when one came to think of it, some pretty good paintings.

Well, be that as it may, whatever France or, as far as that goes, the United States symbolises to you, please don’t be put off seeing Americans in Paris — a show that, for its various flaws, is nonetheless both thought-provoking and beautiful.

Dr Bunny Smedley was born in the United States, but despite her admiration for American painting, now carries a British passport. She lives in London with her husband and young son.

Whatever its defects, The Welfare Show at the Serpentine Gallery is not short on grand ambition. Here’s the sort of scope the organisers promise us:

What is the welfare state? What has caused its decline? How socially responsible has it been? The Welfare Show by artists Michael Elmgreen (born 1961, Denmark) and Ingar Dragset (born 1969, Norway) uses sculptures, installations and an encyclopaedic style catalogue to focus attention on welfare systems in the Western world. Within this context, visitors are invited to consider such concepts as power, economic disparity, health care, immigration, the police state, and the social role of art.

Modesty is such an attractive virtue, don’t you think? Yet it was exciting to dream that by simply spending twenty minutes at an installation in Kensington Gardens’ old tea pavilion, and then perhaps a few more minutes leafing through the ‘encyclopaedic’ catalogue (texts variously in English, German, Norwegian and Danish, yours for £29.80), the casual visitor might hope to gain insight into so many of the Big Questions of contemporary social policy, in so pleasant and painless a fashion. For — as another reviewer here recently suggested — art these days has become increasingly self-referential and detached from real life. There’s much to be said for work that can see past its own navel to the wider world beyond.

So I made my way to the Serpentine on a bitingly cold winter morning, full of — well, if not hope exactly, then at least a degree of genuine curiosity. The Welfare Show had received, I knew, some very good reviews. Elmgreen and Dragset's contribution to Utopia Station at the 2003 Venice Biennale hadn't been particularly inspiring, but maybe they'd make more of a splash in a solo exhibition? And while — fair enough — I perhaps wasn't expecting answers, I did at least hope that the works might, at the very least, raise worthwhile, stimulating questions. These are, after all, crucial issues. It would be nice to think that art could play a role in our engagement with them.

Spot the difference
Unfortunately, The Welfare Show fell far short of its billing.

There are few congruences between The Welfare Show and the actual Welfare State — so few that it was often difficult to remember what the show was notionally ‘about’. For one thing, the Serpentine Gallery is extremely clean. There’s no rubbish, no graffiti, no foetid and ancient puddles of hard-to-identify bodily fluids. Instead, everything smells as galleries usually do, which is to say, of nothing except cleanliness, with perhaps a whiff of linseed oil from the colour reproductions in the catalogue. The loos are bright, spotless and well-maintained. The young woman at the reception desk was charm personified. The signage is not only helpful and accurate, but was composed with attention to grammar, punctuation and nuance. I didn’t have to wait around for anything at all.

Nor was there a sense of boredom, disorientation or fear, if only because during the time the visitor spends there, he knows perfectly well that he is viewing an art installation, and that he can exit whenever he likes. When I was ready to leave the exhibition space, two gallery attendants rushed to help me pull my son’s push-chair through a narrow pair of doors. ‘What did you think?’, one of them asked me, looking genuinely interested. You certainly don’t get all that on the NHS, nor on any other bit of the Welfare State with which I’ve ever made sustained contact.

But more to the point, the really important non-resemblance is this — although The Welfare Show is free at the point of delivery, it really is absolutely free, in the sense that I was not being asked, or rather forced, to convey a large portion of my earnings to it in order to keep in action something I neither want for myself nor wish to impose upon others. This, after all, is art, not life. Many of us can, by now, tell the difference.

Socks slavery
So, what happens in The Welfare Show? It isn’t hard to describe. The viewer, entering through double doors, encounters a featureless foyer, empty except for a sign offering socks at £1.25 a pair. In what will become a recurrent leifmotif of the show, however, there are no socks for sale — nor is it clear what socks and their pricing has to do with the welfare state, as I find it hard to believe that even in the most nostalgically socialist Scandinavian societies, the production of socks has been nationalised.

No, there’s a point of some sort being made here. Presumably, we are meant to think of the dismal sweatshops in which 12-year old subcontinental wage-serfs toil ceaselessly over their looms, manufacturing cheap socks soaked in the blood of the workers, for a parasitical capitalist superstructure of callous, exploitative sock-wearers. We are not, I suspect, meant to think about, e.g., frugal working people who might wish to buy cheap socks. Actually, though, in my case, it all went wrong, because it was only too easy to think of a class of gallery-goers who buy delicious Fogal tights at £21 a time, and then throw them away after one wearing — but who wish to act as if they mind very much indeed about these £1.25 socks. Real socks, on sale in the gallery, might have raised better questions, but would perhaps subsequently have been sold for inflated prices on eBay, thanks to having been part of an installation and thus no longer being socks at all, but rather Art, which is worth more. In any event, if this idea occurred to the artists, they evidently got cold feet about it. As it were.

On a roll
But enough of unfulfilled promise. Here’s a minor mystery. Turning the corner, I had to pass by another viewer, in this case one in a wheelchair, chatting with a member of the gallery staff. Or at any rate, that was what I thought I was doing. Like most people who travel with a toddler in a push-chair, I always read up on disabled access before going to art exhibitions, for the simple reason that any non-accessible show means relying on the generally fairly ropey kindness of strangers. The Serpentine, though, because it is situated on a single level, is incredibly push-chair friendly. This man, then, didn’t seem to need help of any kind. So I simply smiled politely at the man and the gallery attendant as I passed.

It was only later that I realised, reading someone else’s review, that the man in the wheelchair might have been part of the installation. But since he looked like a happy, comfortable, sociable and, well, if we are being honest here, actually rather attractive male fellow visitor, it didn’t actually occur to me to read his presence differently simply because he was sitting in a wheelchair. Now, however, I worry that he should have been ‘raising issues’ for me, rather than just chatting in some miscellaneous Scandi-language and looking pleasant. As it was, however, he was pretty much the most aesthetically satisfying feature of the show. So perhaps I shouldn’t complain too much.

Cash & Carry-cot
Turning the corner, then, past the chap in the wheelchair, I was confronted with what appeared to be an ATM.

Except that in keeping with the developing theme here, the object in question wasn’t an actual ATM. It didn’t even look much like a real ATM. There were no lights, no branding, no obvious functionality. And that, too, seemed like a missed opportunity, if only because in this day and age any minor villain seems to be able to set up data-stealing pseudo-ATMs on any street-corner in the part of the West End where I live, and to do so with a level of simulation good enough to wrong-foot plenty of passing custom. Whereas the ATM here wasn’t convincing at all. Would it really have been so hard to install a real one? But again, why set one up at all? For the Welfare State doesn’t set up cash points, any more than it sell or even prices down-market socks, or supplies galleries with men in wheelchairs. What, then, was the point?

Well, under the ATM there was a large plastic doll in carry-cot which was, again, I guess, supposed to make some sort of profound statement. Now, at present, whatever my other critical faults may be, I am not remotely short of maternal instinct. Indeed, when I hear a baby cry in the next aisle of my local Tesco, my hormones force me to roam the aisles until I have looked at the bawling baby in question and satisfied myself as to its wellbeing.

But at the Serpentine? Plastic dolls in carry-cots don’t do much for me. And why leave a baby next to an ATM anyway? The one thing you can say about ATMs is that people do seek them out, so if you were abandoning a baby and wanted someone to find it, there are probably worse places. However, why not read the display as one where the carry-cot has been put down for a moment so that the baby’s mother is free to use the ATM? Or a dozen other equally anodyne scenarios? If you want art that makes a more eye-catching comment on the power of automated banking, there’s a Banksy intervention on a cashpoint somewhere around the top of Farringdon Road. Passed in a taxi on a dark night at speed, it at least makes a sort of impression. This, however, did not.

Insofar, then, as this carry-cot display was emotive, what it evoked was, at best, mild irritation. Even my son was bored. He likes looking at real babies, or even real ATMs, with all their lights and funny noise. Neither of these, though, even registered a blip on his mental radar. Yet several critics, even a very good one, found the display ‘shocking’. And while every review repeats devoutly the belief that this mannequin replicates a ‘new born infant’, it doesn’t. Am I the only art critic alive who actually knows what a new born infant looks like? Apparently so. And yes, well, I guess most art reviewers stay in a lot, spending quality time with their critical texts.

Lights, camera, yawn
What next? A corridor of institutional-looking doors. One could look into a window and see neon lights, as if part of the set for a television programme called “The Welfare Show”. Presumably we were supposed to register outrage at the role of the media in something or other … or not. If Tom Paulin had been imprisoned in the room with Germaine Greer, Frank Kermode and one of those trans-Atlantic-accented, wholly interchangeable women who are given airtime in order to achieve quotas I might have watched a bit longer, but not with enormous interest. As it was, I moved on.

Qui custodiet ipsos custodes?
The high point of The Welfare Show was probably the small room staffed with half a dozen security guards. The artists had gone all out for big effects here. For rather than being represented by plastic dolls, the security guards were — and I know this purely because I read it somewhere; it’s by no means obvious just from looking — simply job-seekers hired to pretend they were security guards. Several pretended, in one case, convincingly so, to be napping at their stations. Another smiled so adorably as to make my son wave at him. And one rather dashing one yawned theatrically at me — but then winked. Again, though, it was hard to know what part of the Welfare State these people were trying to replicate. For in what bit of the Welfare State are there six guards guarding a small empty room? Presumably, we were meant to take away a message about the uselessness of their work, the emptiness of their daily activities.

Here, though, for a moment, I am going to be serious, if only because at this point the show intersected with my own life, and with that of my son.

Once, a year or two ago, when my son was in the Special Care Baby Unit there, I spent two months walking in and out of an NHS hospital several times a day. A high point of this largely miserable experience was one of the security guards. He was an old West Indian man with a lovely voice. He sang hymns to pass the time. Better still, though, he realised something that many of the better-paid staff did not, which is the importance of treating patients and their families like real human beings. So this man, who basically sat in a little cubicle all day, remembered who we all were, and said hello and goodbye, and smiled, and commented on the weather, and made little jokes, and kept on singing. In doing so, he boosted our sanity more than I can begin to describe. Sorry, then, if this sounds a bit boring, but the point is a real one: is the exhibition trying to argue that anyone who works as a security guard within the Welfare State is doing something vacuous, boring and ultimately pointless? Or is that only a reflection of the real character of this show, leaking out on what it seeks to depict?

Round and round we go
In any event, contemplating this question, we went through the room and turned another corridor. On the right there was a window into a room with a baggage carousel going round and round, with a single parcel on board. Beyond, a modernist staircase had neatly dissolved into ruin. Why? But there was no departure or landing board, no tired-out passengers — and in any event, once again, surely few Western states run airports as a facet of welfare provision? Meanwhile that single bit of luggage looked clean, well-handled, happy enough — unlike most that one sees in a similar situation. So what was the point? Oh, sure, I know — but you’d have to be a very stupid asylum-seeker not to carry hand-luggage only, and many don’t even have that. The airport code on the parcel was, after all, the one for Ibiza. Likely enough, it was full of nothing but sweaty, unwashed and otherwise dodgy clubbing gear, a few old Ministry of Sound cds and perhaps, if Customs was having a good day, the odd disregarded tab of E. One quite sees why no-one collected this bag. Fair enough. But what does the welfare state have to say about any of that?

Don’t worry, we’re almost done now.

A dead end
I walked into what turned out to be the final room. To the right was a door — we weren’t allowed to pass through — in which a mannequin lay on a hospital trolley. in what must be the cleanest, quietest, most peaceful hospital corridor on earth. Ahead there was simply another door we weren’t allowed to open. I really do not know what this was supposed to say to us. As ever, it didn’t seem to me to resemble any bit of the welfare state, if only because as I stood there, contemplating the final ‘no entry’ sign, there was a gallery guide with a walkie-talkie standing by in close attendance, ready to help me deal with any challenges raised this apparently momentous discovery. Oh, and there was a ticketing machine of the sort that I associate with the fish-counter at Selfridges, but as there was nothing to buy, nothing to wait for, I didn’t take a ticket.

And then finally, in the room beyond the hospital gurney, there was evidence of floor-cleaning. I have since discovered, through reading other reviews, that what I was supposed to have seen is ‘a pole dancer’s podium’. Having lived in Soho for half a decade, this would not have occurred to me independently. How helpful it is, then, that so many critics read their press packs — not available, alas, to the general public. Still, though — and for the last time — is there really a place where the Welfare State treats the provision of pole dancers as one of its basic functions? And even if there were, wouldn’t it be quite a good thing if the floors were kept clean?

A cheap holiday in other people’s misery
Readers who have made it this far may perhaps have detected a persistent note of bad-tempered impatience here. Rightly so.

Art that speaks only about itself may do very little good, but it is also unlikely to do much harm. Lives are not often ruined by a bad juxtaposition of yellows, or an allusion to Sol Lewitt that doesn’t quite come off properly. Whereas art that seeks to raise big questions opens itself up to criticism on an entirely different level. At the very least, when done badly, such art panders to the fantasy that wafting around a gallery for half an hour equates to serious engagement with the topics at hand — that by looking at an installation the viewer has somehow shared someone’s suffering, understood what caused it, and perhaps even made the world better in some way. All of which is, very often, nonsense of a particularly voyeuristic, solipsistic and nasty sort — the rancid half-life of the older idea that beauty, or at any rate art, can somehow make people better. A single example sums it up what I mean. Writing in the Guardian, critic Adrian Searle pronounced himself deeply moved by The Welfare Show: ‘it makes me want to weep’. So that’s that, then: the Welfare State and its ills reduced to material on which a Guardian journalist can be seen to exercise his exquisite sensibility.

To be fair, for those who wished to experience this exhibition at an even more profound level, the Serpentine, in conjunction with the Office for Contemporary Art, Norway, also offered a one-day conference — now, sadly, finished — as well as a talk by Tony Benn MP and other assorted treats. The conference apparently covered quite a lot of ground.

Topics include: content and form in the politics of art; the Scandinavian model of welfare as a socio-spatial form of experience; the current viability of the welfare state and its possible future forms; the architecture of welfare; and institutional critique and relational aesthetics.

Not having been there, it’s hard to judge, but my dark suspicion is that the programme mostly consisted of some very unexceptional middlebrow banalities given a minor grit-induced frisson through the admixture of some Old Left political content and marginally less stale postmodern language, and that everyone went away feeling particularly clever and socially responsible.

All the same, it seems to me that the main defect of this sort of art isn’t so much an explicit political bias, as it is a failure to take sides — a failure to say anything very clear at all about the topic at hand. I have written here about Luc Tuyman’s habit of ‘dealing with’ controversial historical subjects in a manner so sleekly ambivalent as escape controversy altogether, and elsewhere about the tendency of war art these days to avoid saying anything much about war. In a way, both are symptoms of the same problem. Engagement anywhere is seen as a weakness, a lack of critical detachment, a failure of art. At the same time, it’s virtually impossible to create a work of art that doesn’t absolutely crackle with implicit personal commentary, in what it does and doesn’t say, about the world in which it was created. So the lack of engagement here is a stance in its own right, and not, in my view, a very constructive or admirable one. In a really excellent brief review, again in the Guardian, the marvellous Frank Field rightly draws a contrast between The Welfare Show and the nearby Albert Memorial. One of these works has something to say, the other doesn’t, and whether you agree with what’s being said or not, there is little question that one makes a stronger, clearer, and far more lasting impression than the other.

Insofar as The Welfare Show takes a view about its subject matter, then, it is, I think, this: that the Welfare State is grey, mysterious and obscurely unsatisfactory. And, err, that’s it. Anything else depends on what you bring with you — cynicism about the whole enterprise, a great desire to show off the tenderness of your feelings, a curdled Bennite romanticism for the future that never was, or perhaps something altogether. The exhibition itself, in contrast, seems to me robustly noncommittal. So the implicit message is that none of the detail really matters that much anyway — as long, that is, as ‘conventional notions’ are being ‘challenged’, the overall atmosphere is ‘disturbing’ or ‘unsettling’, and provided that no one is gauche enough to suggest anything resembling a solution.

Reality check
Elmgreen and Dragset are probably safe, though, because the sort of people who sniff out exhibitions like this are only too well aware of the rules, and play along accordingly. They also tend to be — and I don’t think this is remotely an unfair assumption — people whose experience of the Welfare State is limited, occasional and, when it does take place, relatively privileged.

Who won’t see The Welfare Show? Well, there’s Kerry, for one. I met her recently at a local toddler group, where her two-year old boy battled amiably over the toys with my slightly younger son. Kerry obviously has quite a lot of self-respect — she had put on makeup and was rather smartly dressed, although her platinum-blonde hair was showing salt-and-pepper roots. She also looked tired — not just the normal tiredness of a toddler’s mum, either, but more as if life had worn her down a bit.

We got to talking. Because her youngest son was in fact her fifth child — the oldest is now 18 — her local NHS hospital (the same one where my son was born, as it happens) decided that she was ‘an old hand’ and so left her to give birth absolutely alone, with consequences that left her boy in the Special Care Unit for a couple of weeks. The boy’s father was even less interested than the NHS, from the sound of it. Recently, Kerry had been moved to an ethnically homogenous estate where she and her son were the odd ones out, and were made to feel very unwelcome. A frequent trope in her stories, all of which were sad, involved calling out the police: ‘But they don’t do nothing until someone gets killed, do they?’ The toddler group that gave her the scope for conversation was, needless to say, sponsored not by the welfare state, but rather by a local Christian group, getting by on a wing and a prayer and attracting a genuine cross-section of the local toddler community.

Kerry, I suspect, knows as little of relational aesthetics as I do, and probably takes a similarly vague line regarding “the Scandinavian model of welfare as a socio-spatial form of experience”. In contrast, what she wanted was fairly simple. She wanted a flat where her neighbours wouldn’t come to the door and scream at her, or ring the police, every time her son had a tantrum. And she’d have preferred not to have had to give birth in conditions so bad that, as she and I reflected in unison, ‘you wouldn’t treat a dog like that, would you?’, that had left her son with serious, probably life-long difficulties.

In other words, what makes Adrian Searle want to weep when he sees it in a gallery is just the palest reflection of Kerry’s everyday life. And why go to a gallery to see that? Anyway, if her narratives are anything to go by, Kerry’s version of the Welfare State isn’t grey and featureless at all. It’s full of colour, distinct personalities, particular preferences and grievances and plans. The empty nihilism of The Welfare Show would, I think, have alienated Kerry, if only because to her, due to where she’s ended up in life, the actual Welfare State is the locus of such urgent, specific, persistent concern.

It was clear from everything about Kerry — the makeup, the clothes, the hair, the almost painful need to be seen to behave well and to be liked (because she helped clear up the toys, she lavished praise on everyone else’s children, she thanked everyone as she left, for all the world as if normal conventional courtesy was a favour she didn’t quite deserve) — that what she needed was, in fact, a bit of beauty, entertainment and distraction. In other words, some old-fashioned aesthetic pleasure might have done her a world of good. And yet in a sense I’d have loved to have gone round The Welfare Show with her. ‘Oh, I don’t know anything about art,’ Kerry had said, modestly, when we’d got round to the subject of what each of us ‘did’. But I strongly suspect she’d have seen through the vacuous nonsense of The Welfare Show in an instant, which is more than many art professionals seem willing or able to do.

Art failure
Art that talks only about itself may be tiresome, but at least it is talking about what it knows best. Whereas when artists attempt to engage with the world around them, they have a duty to do so intelligently, or, at very least, responsibly. Otherwise, there is something exploitative about the whole business that leaves a very unpleasant taste. Socially engaged art is one thing — shallow, pretentious, failed art is another.

The Welfare Show, in summary, does little to meet the preposterously oversized goals its organisers claimed for it. If you want a quick introduction to welfare — past history and present-day issues — read James Bartholemew’s accessible yet eye-opening The Welfare State We’re In and check out its related blog. Or keep up with the activities and publications of the excellent Civitas. Or, as far as that goes, follow the frequent contributions on this very website, many of which deal, from a variety of points of view, with welfare and related issues. The Welfare State, as it currently exists in this country, is ageing disaster that had already consumed far too much time, energy, wealth and self-respect from far too many individuals. Its problems, so complex and deeply-entrenched, deserve serious consideration, honest analysis and real solutions — even if all of this means challenging a few conventions or upsetting people. It really is that important.

If, on the other hand, you simply want to look at dreary installations, there is always The Welfare Show at the Serpentine.

Bunny Smedley has a doctorate in history from Cambridge University, and lives in central London with her husband and young son.

Strange to say, on the day after I’d been round the major Dan Flavin retrospective currently showing at the Hayward Gallery, I found myself in a DIY shop, staring at a display of fluorescent lighting.

For most of us, these days, fluorescent lighting is sufficiently ubiquitous as to have become invisible through sheer familiarity. This is a pity, because in some ways it’s surprisingly interesting. For one thing, as technologies go, it is a lot older than most of us might assume. Its origins stretch back as far as 1856, while by the 1890s recognisable forebears of the present-day models were already in production. In 1938 General Electric bought Edmund Germer’s patent and brought fluorescent illumination into widespread commercial use. The strip-light, and all that followed on from it, was born.

In doing so, it must be said, this unwieldy American mulinational helped to create the world we see around us. One of the practical distinctions between incandescent and fluorescent lighting is that the latter generates more light with less heat, and hence is cheaper to run over long periods. From this dreary sum follows the open-plan office, the call centre and the light-industrial building, the 24-hour shopping mall and the bright new hospital whose clever design cannot quite obscure its faint air of private tragedy — the cold, white, unforgiving light that illuminates each of these not only makes their existence possible, but colours their character, too, so that we cannot really imagine our lives without it.

Fluorescent light may affect us in other ways, too. Fluorescent lighting, especially as fixtures age and become faulty, ‘flickers’ in a way that incandescent lighting does not. Although this variation is rarely visible at the conscious level, people who suffer from photosensitive epilepsy, for instance, are advised to avoid fluorescent lighting. Whereas over at the more excitable end of the healthcare spectrum, intense fluorescent light has been blamed for everything from infertility and high blood pressure to hyperactivity and agoraphobia. Silly? Downright ridiculous? Well, possibly. Still, it worth reflecting how much of our indoor lives are presently observed in a series of tiny, intermittent, arbitrary vignette, rather than as a continuous totality. Who can say what this has meant, or whether the texture of modernity would have been different, somehow, perhaps incalculably so, had it been otherwise?

A bright idea
By the time of his early and diabetic death in 1996, aged a youthful 63 years, Dan Flavin knew quite a lot about fluorescent light — not its technical side, which never interested him particularly, but rather its potential as a high art medium. The New York-born artist’s career had not started auspiciously. In his early 20s he was drafted into the US Air Force, serving as an air weather meteorological technician in Korea. There was also a false start during which he studied for ordination in the Roman Catholic church. Both may have left a mark. By the late 1950s, however, he was back in New York, working as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim — and at the same time, attending the Hans Hoffman School of Fine Arts, art history classes at the New School for Social Research, and drawing and painting classes at Columbia University.

The start of the 1960s found Flavin experimenting with the use of electric light in a series of works he called ‘icons’. Only in 1963 did he achieve his breakthrough, with the Diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi) — an 8-foot long yellow fluorescent tube placed at a 45-degree angle to the gallery floor. To a great extent everything else that followed over the next thirty years would simply be an elaboration of this basic formula. Working with standard two, four, six and eight-foot fluorescent tubes in only ten colours — prefabricated industrial products, incidentally, all commercially available at the time in more or less any neighbourhood hardware store — Flavin carved out fo a place for himself alongside Donald Judd and Carl Andre at the (rather austere, presumably) summit of the Minimalist pantheon.

Now, it’s easy enough to make fun of an artistic oeuvre concocted entirely out of fluorescent tubes. Indeed, the basic juxtaposition of ‘art’ and ‘fluorescent tubes’ can be made to sound, with a bit of hard work from those seeking that end, self-evidently ridiculous. The estimable Hilton Kramer, for one, denied that Flavin was an artist at all, rather than simply someone who’d been given gallery space. Meanwhile the equally estimable Roger Kimball is scarcely more enthusiastic, singling out a particularly silly claim on the part of a former director of the Dia Foundation — the notion that Flavin is ‘as important as Michelangelo’, which he clearly isn’t — for particular derision. And the virtually infallible Brian Sewell recently pronounced Flavin ‘tedious’. Many of this website’s regular readers may instinctively agree with this eminent consensus of scorn and derision. Can something available in any hardware store in 1960s America really be considered art? Isn’t it just, well, a bunch of lighting fixtures given a boost by good PR in ArtForum?

Certainly, this is a respectable point of view. It is, in some ways, very hard to dismiss. Maybe what’s at the Hayward isn’t really art. And if there’s anyone out there who is still confused about the relative merits of Flavin and Michelangelo, this ought to set you straight.

High Art Light
On the other hand, there are plenty of things in the world that don’t quite measure up to Michelangelo — things don’t even count as ‘art’, as far as that goes — that are still worth having. All of which explains why I am not about to pretend that I didn’t enjoy the Hayward’s Flavin retrospective — why, in fact, I am happy to admit that I found parts of it genuinely beautiful.

It probably mattered that this wasn’t my first experience of Flavin’s efforts. The Hayward is publicising its current show as ‘the first comprehensive exhibition of the work of major American artist Dan Flavin’. While almost certainly technically true — the technicality here residing in the construction of that word ‘comprehensive’ — it’s a claim that may surprise those lucky enough to have visited the Serpentine in the late summer of 2001.

Not that anyone could confuse the two shows, or indeed, fail to notice the difference between the impact made by a massed exhibition of Flavin pieces versus single items stranded in far-flung survey collections. Flavin, as an astute art dealer friend recently commented to me, just doesn’t do well on his own. And while some might be all too ready to take this as yet another sign of Flavin’s heinous deficiencies as an artist, for the rest of us it nonetheless offers a key to understanding his work.

Here’s the crucial thing about Flavin’s installations. Most of us — the polite, gallery-going readers of art reviews — are used to viewing art, even three-dimensional art, very much as an object. We look at it, contemplate its surfaces and textures, shape and scale, masses and volumes. If we are feeling particularly energetic, and if circumstances allow, we might even make the effort to walk part way round a three-dimensional work, to see how its appearance changes when viewed from different angles. But the point about Flavin’s work is that the real drama takes place not on the surface of the work itself, but rather, everywhere around it. We may look at the fluorescent tube, but ultimately, it’s only the messenger. The message is elsewhere, radiating from the chemical reaction occurring deep within the tube, filtered through the coloured glass and then projected into the world beyond, so that everything near it — the gallery walls, the floor, the ceiling, other nearby works, even our own hands and faces and figures, are all implicated in the commentary of its insistent, artificial light.

This is why environment matters so much when it comes to experiencing Flavin’s work. The Serpentine show differed from the Hayward retrospective not only through being more selective, but because the whole atmosphere in the Serpentine Gallery is in every way so different. The Serpentine Gallery is, after all, a neo-Georgian tea-pavilion turned to new purposes, airy and light-hearted, offering views across the domesticated arcadia of Kensington Gardens. The Hayward, in contrast, is a windowless, Brutalist bunker, resembling nothing more than a concrete multi-storey car-park — albeit a very high-spec, slightly decadent one — where wood has been pressed into the concrete to give it a rich, grainy texture, and where the concrete or wooden floors are burnished to a soft, lustrous finish. Therefore the Serpentine gave us, back in 2001, a vision of Flavin as a conjuror of light entertainments, a strangely lyrical, even romantic figure capable of turning the greenest distant prospect an odd shade of gilded tangerine, while at the Hayward in 2006 we re-encounter a sterner, more serious Flavin, more interested in geometry and grammar and realism, less so in the more evanescent logic of pleasure.

And thus it’s the distance between the two Flavins — the one I glimpsed in 2001, versus the different one available now — that finally convinced me of the artist’s real merit. For someone who’s instinctively attracted to everything that’s most gestural, haptic and hands-on ‘human’ in art — a gross aesthetic prejudice that takes one all the way from Titian to Auerbach, which is quite a long way really, but that certainly doesn’t have much time either for Duchamp or his epigones — an oeuvre that could be passably replicated on a quick trip to Homebase can feel cold, alienating, ‘mechanical’ in the most perjorative possible sense, if only because it lacks the moods, the passion, the palpable risk-taking and occasional naked failure that speaks to us from that other, more explicitly handmade sorts of work. But I’ve learned that despite his limited, in some ways limiting materials, Flavin has enough scope to speak in different tones when his work finds itself faced with different situations and circumstances, and so can change and grow with each successive installation. No, Flavin’s not like Michelangelo, but why on earth should he be? Am I the only one out there who lives through moments far better suited to the low-key nostalgic glow of a Flavin than the full tortuous metaphysical force and scarcely contained fury of a mature or late-period Michelangelo?

Light fantastic
Needless to say, Duchamp, with his DIY superstore ‘readymades’, is often cited as a source for Flavin’s work. Two other more interesting links, which mattered to Flavin himself and which in fact show up in the titles of some of his installations, are with Russian icons on one hand, and with the work of Soviet Constructivist artists such as Vladimir Tatlin (himself once an icon restorer) on the other. From the icon-making tradition Flavin derived something about the undesirability of ego in the production of his works, and perhaps also (with a nod to his own truncated theological studies) a consciousness of the permeability of the physical world by the genuinely numinous. From Tatlin, on the other hamd came a more tangible inheritance — glass, tower formations, and a sense that ‘art’ might be revolutionary simply by being something accessible to everyone, rather than to a small, wealthy elite.

There are ironies here. A young friend of mine, having been dragged round the private view by his glamorous art-curator girlfriend, lamented plangently the lack of free drinks, but admitted that the show had at least given him some good ideas for cheap ways to decorate his new flat. In saying this, I suspect he was trying to be outrageous. Yet in some moods, Flavin himself would have very much agreed with the latter sentiment — indeed, perhaps with the former as well. A down-to-earth New Yorker by birth rather than conversion, Flavin occasionally, the weight of his high-art training notwithstanding, lapsed into a New Yorker-ish rhetoric of ‘it is what it is’ when speaking of his own art. In this, he was to some extent an emperor proclaiming his own nakedness whilst wearing a rather expensive body-stocking, because he knew his Tatlin as well as anyone. In that sense he’d perhaps have liked my friends to go out and buy some fluorescent tubes and make a work of art out of their London flat. He’d have enjoyed the democratisation of his practice that this would imply. This was, I suppose, part of the Revolution that Tatlin desired and that Flavin, by implication and hence through a sort of imperial beau geste, invoked.

And yet, and yet … revolutions in art, as well as politics, have a nasty habit of eating their own young. No matter how cleverly my friends made their credit card orders and installed their tubes, what they would have created wouldn’t have been a Flavin, any more than the Dia Foundation, which conserves and displays a great deal of Flavin’s work at a site in Marfa, Texas, could simply go out and raid their local hardware stores if they wanted to top up their collection.

And this, ultimately, is why Flavin’s democratic urges never quite bore fruit. I once read an unforgettable article, which sadly I have not been able to find online anywhere, about the conservation issues raised by Flavin’s work. For while it was all very well to create art out of what one could buy, in terms of fixtures and fittings, in any hardware store in 1960s urban America — well, it was quite another thing, in the early years of the 21st century, for anyone to repair them when they broke down, or to source replacement tubes when the brands and models in question had long since gone out of production. So the rich collectors tried to buy up the few tubes still out there with a bit of life left in them, and contine to look out for electricians who still understand the old ways, the old fixtures. Mostly, the article concluded, they just leave the works unplugged, so as not to wear them out. So the end of Flavin’s dream was, in a way, as poignant as the end of Tatlin’s, if far less serious — history, as Marx would have it, replayed a second time as farce. Will the last one who still believes in a truly revolutionary role for art please switch off the lights when he leaves the building?

The light fantastic
In the Hayward, of course, as we all would rightly expect, the Flavin pieces are shown off as precious relics, displayed to gain our attentive patience, respect and eventual reverence. Even this raises questions, though. If the quality of the individual installation is so central to how a Flavin work comes across, doesn’t it matter that Flavin has now been dead for a decade? Apparently not.The curators invoke Flavin’s sense that there was something downright liberating in the sheer unrepeatability of each installation — whilst belt-and-bracing this assertion with an assurance that each work in fact replicates earlier installations, was put in place by people who know and understand Flavin’s work intimately, and who thus can provide the requisite warmth of authenticity, alongside the bracing rigour of theoretical purity. Well, who could argue with any of that?

As I mentioned above, however, the result is of all this is often memorably powerful, and sometimes downright beautiful. For me, the high point came on the first floor, part way down a corridor. There’s a work called untitled (to Jan and Ron Greenberg) (1972-73) which is basically a small alcove full of tall, yellow fluorescent tubes with one green tube at the right-hand end. Gazed at frontally, it hurts the eyes a bit. But if one stands, as I did, close to the tubes but with one’s back to them, and looks outwards from the alcove, an extraordinary thing happens. There’s a nearby installation which throws its own sheen of luminous violet across a white wall, and thus where the ‘yellow’ wall of the first work meets the ‘violet’ wall of the second work, the result is amazing. Both walls, of course, are really white, so what one is seeing is reflected light, pure and simple, rather than mediated through earth-bound pigment. But since yellow and violet are what used to be called, back in pre-pixillated times, ‘complimentary colours’, the chance to view a real-life stand-off between the two is astonishing. As one traces the distinction between the two, the line separating them (which exists nowhere but in one’s own mind) seethes, trembles, boils. It’s hot, it’s icy, it’s alive and it’s moving somewhere — where, through? It’s mad and slightly scary and at the same time, totally enthralling. And there’s a purity about the experience that makes it all the more powerful. Who knows whether it’s what Flavin meant us to see, or what he’s have liked to have seen himself, but it was unforgettable. Oddly enough, there wasn’t a single ‘work of art’ in sight, yet it’s an experience I’ll treasure forever.

That, though, was a high point. Admittedly, not everything in the Hayward retrospective measures up to it. The show starts forcefully enough with untitled (to you, Heiner, with admiration and affection) (1973) which is basically a lengthy fence made up out of incredibly bright, green fluorescent tubes. It’s a clever piece of installation, because the fence itself is an unsubtle trope for liminality in the context of the High Art Experience (‘this is the world of Art, not the world of Life — we do things differently here’) yet at the same time, as charming and accessible as a fairground attraction, turning everyone’s faces a funny colour and making the Hayward look new.

Back in the normal world, though, there are also some works capable of projecting wit or charm. Smaller works like ”monument” for V. Tatlin (1964) have a delicate Art Deco charm. The upstairs room showing Flavin’s sketches, on the other hand, simply reminds us all how right he was to stick with the genre in which he ultimately made his reputation. There’s a sweet humility about the fact that he apparently always carried a little sketch-pad with him, because it connects him with a world where ‘artists’ could actually create illusionistic, representational works. But — well, he couldn’t draw, could he? There’s one handsome illuminated work here (Chamber Music I, no. 6 (to James Joyce (1959) that shows both Flavin’s reverence for literature, and perhaps even a weak affinity to Blake, which will make those of us happy who believe that Flavin was, for all his claims, ultimately a Romantic, capable of seeing angles in unlikely places and the warm patron of hopeless, discredited causes. But that’s about it, as far as drawing goes.

On the other hand there is always Gallery 3, which is a tour de force by any standard. Here the curators are apparently replicating a work installed at the Institute for the Arts at Rice University, Houston, Texas in 1972. Forget, for a moment, rigour and toughness. Forget that the Vietnam War is raging, or that in a year or two the weird liberal coup d’etat now knownas Watergate would be well underway, with all its rich penumbra of plumbers, naval heroes with guilty liberal consciousnesses, and unindicted co-conspiritors galore. Forget one of the most tedious and lengthy recessions in US history. For Gallery 3 is a different proposition altogether. Here, an arrangement of tubes around so-called ‘crossed walls’ melds together blue, apple green, a gentle pink and an orange which recalls to anyone who lived in America in those days the taste, smell and faintly scary synthetic ambience of a drink called Tang — apparently consumed by NASA astronauts, so those multitudinous, mysterious E-numbers that stained our mothers’ kitchen counters so imutably must have been quality ones.

But in all seriousness, if Marie Antoinette had wished to have a pleasure-garden executed in fluorescent lighting fixtures, she could hardly have done better than this amazing realm of slightly unlikely sweetness, this paradise of soft insistent colour and gentle lusciousness, this demi-paradise of highly artificial luxe et volupte. It’s like being cuddled by light, like being wrapped in a big warm duvet of colour and radiance and sleekly commercial softness. Be honest, now, you incidental voyeurs: have you never looked out an urban window and thought how lovely people tend to look when they are lit only, and all unconsciously, by the light of a huge and overbright television screen? If so, Gallery 3 is your chance to be like that consciously, for a few minutes, and to enjoy it to the full. I don’t think anyone has really lived fully in our own debased age until they have been briefly pink, radiant and insubstantially beautiful in the Hayward’s Gallery 3.

American Beauty
The unforgiving doctrine of science teaches us that our perceptual world is nothing but a slurry of more or less badly-reflected light, filtered out by whatever happens to be right or wrong about our own flawed brain-chemistry. Well, fair enough. At one level, Flavin simply brings us up against the limitations of a world in which chemistry is only just inflected by culture and perception. Why stand and stare in a gallery? Why admire there, in that peculiar context, something we’d most likely ignore elsewhere? Why give ‘art’ a space for looking, while in general we simply skim over most of the life around us, seeing as little as we can manage, detained by as little as we dare?

This, ultimately, seems to me the challenge posited, however involuntarily, by one of the greatest artists of America’s most affluent, most anxious, most self-doubting era. Flavin, like most of his left-wing peers, attempted to make art about the Vietnam War. An example is present in the current Hayward Exhibition. Monument 4 for those who have been killed in ambush (to P. K. who reminded me about death) (1966) was, apparently, meant as a gesture of protest. What is present today, instead, and however far in default of the artist’s intentions, was a gesture of abstract beauty. For the work in question isn’t about high humidity, strange food that gives you the runs, homesickness, fear that makes your bowels empty involuntarily, a bad smell in the air, a bad feeling, the sound of live fire, the sense that no one in your home town understands where you are or cares about the cause for which, in a few minutes’ time, you are just as involuntarily about to die — rather, the signal impact of this work is that, shown over a highly-burnished concrete floor, the extended jutting tubes sketch out half a prism which, once reflected back from the floor, assumes a fully prismatic form, half of which is ghostly and half of which is palpably real. As art, it’s simply and analytically beautiful — as a reference to boys who die, unwittingly, for a state that never actually gave them very much, it’s derisory. Do we blame Dan Flavin for this? Or do we blame whoever drove modern art into the cul-du-sac in which it’s presently enjambed?

No matter. Flavin is a full-force, A-list American artist. There will be other retrospectives, other pleasure-gardens. Tomorrow it will all look different. Infinite frangibility is the hallmark of this age in which we all live.

Death, premature and perhaps unnecessary, may seem a strange context in which to recommend this present Hayward retrospective of Dan Flavin’s work. So may romance, broken and lost and impossible. Still, to avoid this show is to avert one’s gaze from something important, significant if sometimes sad about The World That Is. The Hayward deserves credit for having staged an important show about an important artist. The Hayward’s Flavin retrospective has something to say to all of us, even here, even now. And, no, you can’t quite get this in your local DIY shop, no matter how fully stocked.

Bunny Smedley, who was born in the United States at the end of 1965, has a PhD in History from Cambridge University, and her toddler son apparently quite enjoys fluorescent lights.

“Loony! He’s a loony! Don’t you think he’s a loony?’

The oldish woman who said this to me at the press view of Jungles in Paris, the current Henri Rousseau exhibition at Tate Modern, hissed her words at me conspiratorially, as if imparting a momentous secret. My response was the conventional one. “Oh, um, absolutely,” I said, backing away slowly whilst maintaining eye contact — and not just because talking to strangers at press views isn’t really a sign of robust mental health, either. Ever since Hitler’s entartete Kunst exhibition, attacking art one doesn’t really like or understand by labelling its creator a nutcase has become a big professional no-no. Put bluntly, it tends to make one look like a Nazi. And since I harbour no desire to become the Louis Thoreaux of Tate Modern’s darker corners, I made my excuses and moved on to the next room, leaving the old lady mumbling quietly to herself amid her penumbra of overstuffed carrier-bags.

For what it’s worth, then, I am pretty sure that Rousseau was no madman. Certainly the story of his life speaks less of mental illness than of serial underachievement, leavened with a fair amount of deceit, squalor, self-pity and laziness — and then dusted with good luck and perhaps the tiniest hint of brilliance.

Rousseau was born in 1844 in Laval, a small market town in north-west France, where his father worked as an ironmonger. He attended the local school where, unlike many of his petit-bourgeois contemporaries, he remained until the mature age of 17. He then proceeded to get himself into a series of messes. A job with a local solicitor’s firm ended when it was discovered that he’d stolen a small sum of money from his employer; he joined the army, seeking to avoid a prison sentence, but ended up spending a month in prison all thsame. Despite what he was to claim later, he never in fact went to Mexico with his regiment. By 1868 he had moved to Paris. Here he got a job working as a clerk in a customs-house, hence his eventual nickname Le Douanier. He married and his family grew. Briefly, he seemed to have made a life for himself that was more or less respectable. So far, so dull.

By his late 40s, though, Rousseau started painting, not professionally but in an unremarkable, Sunday painter sort of way. The hows and whys of this remain obscure, although we do know that by 1884 he’d obtained a permit allowing him to copy pictures in the Louvre. Soon thereafter, although his work was rejected by the official Salon, he was allowed exhibit at the ‘Salon des Independants’. This wasn’t the end to his cultural ambitions, either, as he also wrote several unsuccessful play, gave music lessons and seemed to enjoy hovering on the edges of literary and artistic circles. In 1893, with his first wife dead, six of his seven children dead in infancy, and the remaining child packed off to an orphanage, he gave up the day job and took up painting full time. At a practical level, the decision was spectacularly unsuccessful. Before long he was running up debts, failing to win commissions or to secure official patronage. An attempted bank fraud soon had him back in prison. Freed, he was rejected in his efforts to seduce a middle-aged shop assistant with whom he’d fallen in love. He died in 1910, aged 66, of an infected leg wound. Only a few weeks later, the first Rousseau exhibition opened in New York, organised by Max Weber. The translation from laughable failure to misunderstood genius was well underway.

But could he paint?
Yet in a sense, we all knew the story would end, because in our own times Rousseau is a very well-known, even popular artist — the sort of figure, in fact, who merits major exhibitions at Tate Modern. The present exhibition takes Rousseau’s greatness as read, and it is probably right to do so. If nothing else, Rousseau created a set of images which are not only instantly recognisable, but which could be the product of no one but the artist himself. Say ‘Rousseau’ in the context of visual art, and except for the tiny elite whose thoughts turn instantly to the obvious other Rousseau, or even the less obvious other Rousseau, there it is — the image of that tiger leaping through the undergrowth as lightning flickers fitfully above, or perhaps one of the other jungle scenes, or even that dark-skinned gypsy sleeping by his mandolin, untroubled by the nuzzling curiosity of the nearby, benevolent lion.

Rousseau, in short, has made as much of an impact below the middle-brow snowline as he has above it. The dissemination of these images is the stuff of posters on the walls of undergraduate rooms, advertisements, album sleeves, carrier-bags and sofa cushions — indeed, because their success depends mostly on outline and pattern and not at all on painterly effects, they reproduce extraordinarily well. In a sense there’s nothing surprising about this. Rousseau’s most successful images are, as we shall see, largely harvested from popular culture, albeit the popular culture of our great-grandparents’ day, and it may be this, perversely, rather than any imagined ‘freshness’ or ‘innocence’ that gives them their easy accessibility. But anyway, there they are — once seen, hard to forget. For many, they seem less dated than Degas’ graceful dancers, and easier to love than Cezanne’s grave geometries. There is greatness of a sort in all of that.

A paradox
Those who like their art famous, then, will be reassured to discover that the present exhibition at Tate Modern not only opens with Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!) but also includes The Snake Charmer (from the Musee d’Orsay, Paris) and The Dream (the Museum of Metropolitan Art, New York), if not The Sleeping Gypsy. This is the Rousseau that everyone knows and expects. The real surprise, though, for many, will be the other paintings that make up the fifty-odd works on show. They show what Rousseau was doing when he wasn’t concocting imaginary jungles and their dreamily improbable occupants. They bring us closer to the late nineteenth century Parisian petty bureaucrat who read illustrated magazines and attended popular exhibitions, who hoped to secure official commissions to design murals in town halls, who strolled through the great parks and boulevards of the metropolis, who was marked by the poisoned politics of his age and also by its expansive and increasingly complex popular culture.

But they also remind us of something else, or demonstrate it to us if we didn’t know it already. Yes, Rousseau’s strongest images are powerful ones. It’s no great wonder that artists and critics including Alfred Jarry, Picasso, Apollinaire, Leger, Magritte and Max Ernst were all, in their various ways, drawn to them. But on those occasions, and there were many of them, where he didn’t somehow stumble onto something apparently inspired, his work is often awful — inept, fussy, repetitive, even boring. And that, then, is the paradox that animates Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris. While Rousseau was arguably have been an artist of some importance, he was a pretty hopeless painter.

Who are you calling naïve?
For many of Rousseau’s admirers, the ineptitude was precisely the point. It was the charm, the genius, the virtue of his lifetime achievement. Rousseau was perhaps the first painter to build a critical reputation based not on his skill, but rather, on his own supposed naivety.

On one level, he recognised this and even played on it. His art was once produced as evidence in court, entirely successfully, to prove his simplicity and guilelessness. And yet here’s another paradox. While the avant-garde artists who, in every sense of the word, patronised him seem to have viewed him as a sort of urbanised noble savage, as a visual idiot savant, Rousseau apparently thought otherwise. That licence to sketch in the Louvre shows he was no stranger to the conventions of Western art, while the painters he most admired were precisely the sort of Academicians — Cabanel, Bouguereau, Gérôme — against whom his modernist pals were explicitly reacting. Nor was he short of self-assured critical judgements about himself and his peers. Rousseau complained that Cezanne couldn’t draw. Rousseau later announced that he and Picasso were the greatest painters of their day: Rousseau in the modern style, Picasso in the Egyptian one. And a self-portrait in the present exhibition, Myself: Portrait Landscape (1890), could, for all its various deficiencies, scarcely be said to lack an aura of self-importance.

What, then, to make of all this? Ultimately, those who knew him well could never quite decide. Was the innocence genuine or cynical? Was the whole persona of Le Douanier a work of art in itself? Was he an idiot or a genius? Who, ultimately, was being naïve here?

Can’t paint, won’t paint
Of course, ordinary life is one thing, art history another. When it comes to the use of ‘naïve’ as a critical term, Rousseau’s paintings — the bad as much as the good — set the gold standard.

The very ‘badness’ of this art proclaims its freedom from the deadening conventions of the art school and the academy, from the heavy heritage of naturalism, of learned attempts to idealise a subject or to paint realistically. Rousseau’s visual language has a different grammar. Large areas are filled in with pattern or undifferentiated local colour, lending them a flatness that emphasises outline, not on volume. Detail is either eliminated or stylised out of all recognition. Scale has escaped the laws of perspective, handed down from the Renaissance onwards, and instead has everything to do with psychology, or whim, or maybe accident. Nor is there anything painterly about them — no brushstroke capable of giving pleasure, no juxtaposition of tones that makes one’s pulse go a little bit faster — and the unselfconsciousness of this makes them look less like paintings than some artefact created for another purpose entirely. So the result is that fin-de-siecle Paris, in some ways familiar to us through the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, takes on the demotic strangeness of folk art, or of the products of ancient or distant cultures we don’t properly understand, or perhaps even the art of children or of madmen.

From whence, then, did he draw his inspiration? One of the strengths of Tate Modern’s exhibition — and if one accepts that Rousseau is in any sense a significant figure, certainly this exhibition is a strong and important one — is the way in which it both introduces us to the visual culture that surrounded Rousseau, and shows how this fed his own visual vocabulary. On one hand, it provides the source-material for the jungle scenes. Famously, Rousseau had never stood beneath a genuine jungle canopy, nor felt the close and humid breath of a tropical morning. Instead, his jungles were cobbled together out of the entertainments available to a Parisian middle-brow audience trying to work out their feelings about colonial expansion. On show at Tate Modern are illustrated magazines, bits of film, relics of great exhibitions, records of zoological gardens and taxidermied scenes of predatory drama — as well as reminders of what other artists were making of this same source-material. The exhibition handles this material well, and offers up a wealth of it, which tells us something not only about Rousseau’s imaginative resources, but also about the reception of his work. Yes, his paintings were strange — but as their strangeness came straight out of a milieu that was familiar to their initial audience, in some sense they simply entailed the surprising juxtaposition of two known quantities — bad oil-painting and present-day popular culture — rather than anything wholly novel. From pop culture they came, and now, to pop culture they have returned.

The beautiful game?
As with children or indeed madmen, or indeed most people over most of human history — but unlike most of his Parisian contemporaries — Rousseau was less concerned with showing what something actually looks like than with representing it, in the faintly abstract sense in which a pub sign, or a pane of heraldic glass, or indeed one of today’s corporate logos transmits a particular bit of information visually without literally depicting it.

In a painting like The Football Players, for instance, the ground doesn’t recede because it’s enough that it simply represents the stuff on which the players are standing. The stripes on the players’ jerseys curve in a stereotyped, undifferentiated way, signalling fabric covering a three-dimensional form without actually producing a convincing illusion of space. Each leaf in the trees above is enumerated, one by one, meaning that the result looks far more like patterned fabric than anything that ever existed on an actual living branch. The players’ faces are as similar as those of mass-produced dolls. Meanwhile the players are frozen in stances as stylised, if less sturdily timeless, than the friezes on an Assyrian memorial stele, bearing no more obvious relation to their surroundings than cardboard cut-outs would have done. Only in the line of the trees themselves, carving a crudely recessed space out of the picture-plane, is there anything suggesting perspective — and the literalism of this scheme is such that a tall tree in the distance, far above the horizon, signals the ‘vanishing point’! In other words, where Rousseau roguishly introduces a bit of apparent art-world knowledge, he immediately undermines it. And where these games work, they do so largely because we, the viewers, are aware both of the rules and the fact that they are being broken. In this sense, at least, Rousseau was full paid-up modernist.

The good, the bad and the ugly
The paintings, as noted above, don’t always work. There is a very thin line between so-bad-it’s-good and plain old bad, and that line runs right through the middle of Rousseau’s oeuvre.

Wandering through the airy, white-walled, brightly-lit rooms at Tate Modern — and wondering, incidentally, how these works would have fared in the context for which they were painted, which presumably included a lot more patterned wallpaper, gleaming ormolu and overstuffed divans — it becomes clear that few of the canvases would have detained the curators had they been painted by anyone other than the creator of Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!).

As it is, the lesser works come to read like scene-setting background material for the greater ones. I had, for instance, long assumed that the uncomfortable tonal relationships between the greens in Tiger were the result of some sort of deterioration in the paints Rousseau used, whereas the present exhibition proves that Rousseau simply didn’t have much of an eye for tonal values. His paintings of Paris and its suburbs, in particular, combine a banal literal-mindedness with ambiguities stemming from a basic lack of technical ability, rather than anything more exciting. To play games with pictorial conventions is one thing — the result can be quite liberating for a picture or two — but after a few rooms of this stuff, it’s hard not to wish that Rousseau had simply been able to paint a little bit better than he did. Fatally, after a few rooms more, one starts to wonder whether any painter might eventually come up with a ‘masterpiece’ of sorts, given plentiful attempts, famous friends and a shrewd way with PR. Or perhaps he was helped a bit as well by a slightly insane self-confidence that simply blinded him to his own lack of evident merit?

It’s not a very nice thought, that, so I’m glad to be able to say that in front of a few works, anyway, accumulated doubts start to dissipate. Rousseau may be best known for his claustrophobia-inducing jungles, his great slow tropical rivers under sullen skies, his Noah’s Ark-toy wild beast and his enigmatic nudes. Yet the works here that impressed me most were, oddly, his history paintings.

War and peace
It’s worth remembering that Rousseau didn’t, as far as we can tell, see himself as some sort of proto-Surrealist, some poet of an arcane inner truth. He really did want to show at the more established salons, to receive public commissions — and not just because he needed the money, either. The signs are there that he would have loved to have achieved the high respectability of a proper history painter. So perhaps he pushed himself harder with the stronger historical and allegorical works here. The greatest of these is probably War (1894, Musee D’Orsay, Paris), where the crudity of the forms, the lurid colour and Apocalyptic violence deliver a charge of genuine violence that make the efforts of, say, Robert Motherwell, Leon Golub, Anselm Kiefer or the Chapman brothers in this direction look at bit silly and effete. There’s a directness that would, in fact, give Guernica a run for its money. The ugliness of the painting feeds into the ugliness of the theme. Perhaps at the end of the world is this cursory, brutal thing is all the art anyone could manage? Who knows? It is, at any rate, a brilliant thing that gains, as many of Rousseau’s paintings do not, from being examined at first hand, rather than in reproduction. I wish I knew more about what informed this image. Although the generally impressive catalogue features a chapter on this painting, War still raises as many questions as it answers, which is perhaps as it ought to be. The deadly colour, the stumpy forms, the borrowed religious imagery and lack of evident ‘artistry’ all speak for themselves.

The other painting that caught my attention was A Centennial of Independence (1892). It commemorates the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, and Rousseau had hoped to gain a public commission to execute it in some provincial town hall. As some readers may recall, I am not naturally in sympathy with its subject-matter. And yet despite this, there is something strangely compelling about the work. It’s a dream-scene, as far-fetched as any jungle fantasy, where a ring of timeless figures, each wearing the Phrygian cap, dances hand-in-hand under a line of colourful flags, as from the sidelines, a small group of aristocratic bystanders observes impassively the demise of the old order. Here it’s the sheer lack of naturalism that makes it all work. Areas are filled in, as if in a paint-by-numbers set, with local colour, but since Rousseau does not seem to have troubled himself unduly with the relationships between these patches of colour, the juxtapositions range from the sublime to the almost unbearable. This makes it into one of the strangest experiments with colour that I have ever seen. One might like to think that the prettiest thing about the work — the soles of the feet of the dancers — are cribbed from something by Poussin, but it turns out that they come from piece of contemporary commercial art instead. The faces of the figures are delineated much as the faces of badly-painted model soldiers, of the old lead-and-enamel school, might have been. The Liberty Tree is as frondy and flat as a pressed bit of fern. In short, if ever a work tended to undermine its own representational mission, if ever something conceived entirely for other purposes cried to be judged on wholly aesthetic, abstracted grounds, this is it. So, is that a triumph, or a failure, or what? Still the dancers dance, and still the jury is out. All I know is that I could hardly take my eyes off it.

It’s that ‘loony’ question again
And so we return to the old lady in the gallery, with her carrier bags and her accusations of lunacy. At one level, the question she asked was a rhetorical one, and probably deserved a sterner response than I could be bothered to deliver. For to write off visual art on the grounds of madness — as if we could really judge that at such a distance, as if we really could know what was going on in Rousseau’s mind, given that even his closest associates seemed so unsure about this — is as cheap a temptation as writing off art on the basis of any other strand of imputed intentionality.

True, such questions are interesting — but ultimately, not definitive. At the end of the day we are left with the work itself, and what it says to us — along with what we know about it — in the here and now. So if we smile today at a tiger that Rousseau yesterday wished to look ferocious, in the same way we might admire what was once a wonder-working icon for its formal values, or hang on the wall an African tribal mask of huge magical force because it goes well with an existing set of armchairs, then where’s the harm in that? Inanimate objects are, ultimately, ours to do with as we will. That goes for meaning, just as much as it does anything else. Certainly, however hard some may try, it is hard to imagine a realistic alternative.

Yet at the same time, it’s part of the whole mystery of ‘art’ that we want certain styles, certain approaches to encapsulate certain moral qualities. For just as surely as the stupider sort of Nazi, like the stupider sort of Soviet Communist, once viewed the reheated by-products of nineteenth century academic classicism as the acme of artistic achievement, for many of us there’s a countervailing tendency, however unconscious, to find in ‘primitive’ or ‘naïve’ art all sorts of admirable qualities — not least, innocence, directness and honesty. Some feel drawn to what they instinctively read as a lack of artifice, intellectualism and complexity. If they’re beset, as the British sometimes are, by a slight nagging worry that art might be mostly about deception and artifice, a bit of a confidence trick perpetrated by clever foreigners, they can relax before the work of artists like Rousseau, blanketed in the security that comes from slight condescension — not catching our breath, as it were, or looking back over our shoulders, but breathing a sigh of relief and smiling despite ourselves. How else to explain the success of Alfred Wallis away from the shoreline, L. S. Lowry outside the ranks of nostalgic Mancunians, or Beryl Cook with anyone?

Yet if the artist himself believes that his art was anything but simple, naïve and uncomplicated, then doesn’t that muddy the water? Surely ‘real’ simplicity would be better. Or does his madness, in not recognising what others saw in the work, actually make the work better?

In any event, don’t we need a certain state of mind on the part of the artist in order to legitimise what we think we see on the surface of the canvas itself? Sure, the result is just a fig-leaf — but as we all know, in civilised modern life, there are moments when fig-leaves matter enormously. Perhaps this is one of them?

So that, finally, is why it perhaps matters, at least a little, whether Rousseau was a loony or not. For what it’s worth, to reiterate something I implied at the beginning of the review, I think that Rousseau knew perfectly well what he was doing. I think he knew he was a bad painter yet had a thick skin and enjoyed the kudos of artistic success sufficiently to hang around the right circles no matter how badly or cynically he was treated, kept doggedly daubing away despite the criticism, and — crucially — preferred to be misinterpreted, rather than simply ignored, because fame mattered that much to him. One might pause at this point to wonder whether, in fact, this makes him godfather to Tracey Emin, Chris Ofili, Stella Vine and others — Jean-Michel Basquiat, even — the list could go on. Or is that simply being unkind? In any event, it is hard to deny that, mad or sane or somewhere in between, Rousseau is a figure of real relevance to the history of modern art. The current exhibition at Tate Modern does justice both to the relevance, and to the ambiguity. It is well worth making the effort to visit before the show closes next month, if only to try to judge this complex, contradictory character for yourself.

Bunny Smedley holds a doctorate in history from Cambridge University, and lives in central London with her husband and young son.

Every now and then — probably no more than a handful of times in anyone’s life — one stumbles over the sort of art exhibition to which the proper response isn’t so much respect, or admiration, or polite enthusiasm even, as something far more intense, personal and profound. The British Museum’s Samuel Palmer: Vision and Landscape is, for me anyway, one such exhibition. As compact, satisfying, modest, original and brilliant as the artist’s own strongest works, the show is at once an absorbing survey of Palmer’s own career, and a window onto nineteenth century British landscape art more generally. But for some viewers, perhaps, it will be even more than that. Put bluntly, I turned up at this exhibition liking Palmer’s work, not least because of its importance for Neo-Romantic artists such as Nash, Sutherland, Ravilious, Piper, Minton and Craxton who already meant a great deal to me — but by the time I left it was Palmer himself who had swept me off my feet.

Life and death
The facts of Samuel Palmer’s life are straight-forward enough. He was born in Newington, South London, in 1805. His father was a bookseller and Baptist lay preacher. A happy childhood ended suddenly, first with a miserable six months at the Merchant Taylors’ School in 1817, and then the death of his mother early in 1818. It was around this time that Palmer decided to become an artist. His family encouraged him, his skill was precocious and at the age of 14 his picturesque landscapes had been shown at the British Institution and the Royal Academy.

By 1822 Palmer had met several of the artists who would play an important role in his development: John Linnell, William Blake, George Richmond. Together with Richmond and others, he formed a society known as The Ancients, which its combination of religious serious-mindedness, artistic endeavour and mutual affection followed the Nazarenes and anticipated the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The group centred around Shoreham, a pretty village nestled in the Kent Downs, where Palmer lived, on and off, from 1826 until 1835. In 1837, having moved back to London, he married Linnell’s eldest daughter, Hannah, with whom he had three children, two of whom died young. In particular, the loss of Palmer’s son Thomas in 1861, aged 19, was a blow from which the artist never entirely recovered.

Prior to his son’s death, Palmer travelled extensively — to Rome and Naples, but also within England and Wales — in search of subject-matter for his paintings and drawings. Afterwards, however, he retreated to Redhill in Surrey where he became a virtual recluse, although he continued to work. He died in 1881, at the age of 76, with his old friend George Richmond at his bedside. He is buried next to his wife in St Mary’s churchyard, Reigate.

Palmer’s legacy
The success that Palmer achieved in his lifetime was real but in some ways modest. He was, first and foremost, a ‘painter’s painter’, which is to say, admired more energetically by fellow practitioners than by the market or the critics: in his own words,

designing what nobody would care for, and contracting, among good books, a fastidious and unpopular taste.

Ruskin, at least, wrote warmly about his studies of foliage, and Palmer was elected to the various societies of watercolour painters that flourished during his age.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, he was largely forgotten. Snobbery about the media in which he worked may have played a part, for instead of producing large oil paintings, Palmer focused on creating drawings, watercolours and etchings, occasionally even committing the terrible art-historical faux pas of engaging in commercial illustration. In any event, it was only in 1926, with a massive exhibition of his work at the Victoria & Albert Museum, that he came to be accepted as one of Britain’s pre-eminent Romantic artists, fit to be mentioned alongside Blake and Turner. In particular, his early landscape drawings, executed in brown ink and sepia, coupled with the few remaining gem-like painted panels from his Shoreham days and his moody late etchings, seemed to offer the young British artists of the 1920s — themselves keen watercolourists, graphic artists and illustrators — both a visual language near-magical in its freedom, very surprising but also very English, and perhaps even more importantly, the possibility of re-enchanting a threatened landscape with its cadences.

Not that Palmer’s gift to future generations was anything like a unitary, imitable style. Palmer’s own influences were diverse, the lessons he learned from them highly personal. Relatively unfamiliar figures such as Lucas van Leyden and Giulio di Antonia Bonasone mattered as much to him as did Titian, Durer, Rembrandt and Claude Lorraine — a point developed skilfully in the present exhibition. The collections of the British Museum, located round the corner from his home during his adolescent years, were another source of inspiration. And then there was the gravitational pull of his various contemporaries, including Blake, Linnell and Turner, the force of which can sometimes be seen in Palmer’s art, although never overshadowing his own highly personal line.

Perhaps inevitably, in a working life that spanned six decades, Palmer’s own working practice, subject-matter and mood changed considerably. A crude narrative of this progression might run as follows: precocious but unoriginal picturesque landscapes, followed swiftly by ‘primitive’, visionary and entirely original sepia drawings and small tempera panels, followed by larger, brighter, skilful yet once again more conventional watercolours of ‘romantic’ landscapes, foreign and domestic, followed finally by the late etchings which recaptured a measure of that early strangeness and utter distinctiveness. In other words, it’s a story of youthful inspiration ultimately recaptured in a moving late style infused with private loss. Given that Palmer did not succumb to the Romantic cliché of an early death, it is hard to see how his career could have run on more Romantically acceptable lines.

Yet what this sort of narrative never captures, with its tidy but false discontinuities, is the silver thread of individual sensibility running through all the phases, connecting them together with unmistakeable, sparkling coherence. Thus in bringing together such a large and varied collection of the artist’s work, the present exhibition, arranged by the British Museum in cooperation with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, not only provides a rare opportunity to experience the breadth and variety of Palmer’s achievement at first hand, but also to see his best-known work in the context of a long, fruitful career. Or to put it another way, if some of the more florid or cosy watercolours of the ‘Victorian’ Palmer have proved harder to love, either for us or for our grandparents, than either the early or late work, we can at least take pleasure in scanning them for sublimations of earlier obsessions, adumbrations of future concerns. Finally, the opportunity to see the works in the context of the life — for the exhibition is arranged along chronological, biographical lines — yields generous rewards. The Shoreham scenes start to mean more for what one can learn of Palmer’s idyllic early days there. The lonely tower — that haunting leitmotif of Palmer’s last work — means more when one understands its connection with the death of Palmer’s beloved son.

Doing justice to Palmer
The organisers of Samuel Palmer: Vision and Landscape, a event timed to coincide with the bicentenary of Palmer’s birth, deserve unbounded praise. It is, I imagine, harder than it looks to arrange an exhibition so that the subject stays in the foreground, with the organisers’ labours firmly in the background. Yet that is very much the case here. For while the exhibition provides a richly informative account of Palmer’s career — including, as we have seen, the artistic and literary sources that mattered to him, the media in which he worked and the reaction of his contemporaries — curatorial cleverness never gets in the way. The exhibition space — a curving, partitioned room suspended within the British Museum’s Great Court — works surprisingly well, both in terms of directing the flow of visitors, and in providing a warm, rich, sympathetic environment for the work. Perhaps basic professionalism should insist on both these things. But then there are lovely touches, too, like providing photos of Palmer’s various houses, or showing his old spectacles and engraving tools, which are so replete with sympathy for the subject as to transcend plain old competence altogether. The organisers have also secured some amazing loans from within Britain and from around the world, ensuring that the view of Palmer’s art is a comprehensive, virtually definitive one.

Meanwhile, the catalogue (William Vaughan, Elizabeth E. Barker and Colin Harrison, with additional contributions) is a model of its type, full of incisive essays addressing various facets of Palmer’s achievements, followed by full descriptions and illustrations of all the works on show. For those who come to Palmer knowing virtually nothing, it should provide an excellent introduction, while have much to offer even long-time Palmer enthusiasts. The bibliography is helpful, too. It is also a great relief to handle a catalogue that is so thoroughly practical, informative and illuminating, rather than bulked up with pointless theoretical padding and huge empty margins. It’s hardly surprising that the British Museum seem to have sold out of their first printing within a few weeks of the show’s opening.

Picturing Palmer
I started this review by writing that the effect of the exhibition had been not simply to make me appreciate Palmer’s art and his ongoing influence — which, to some extent, I did already — but rather, to make me feel drawn to Palmer himself. But although this may sound odd, is it really so unusual to think about artists in such terms? I once knew, for instance, an intelligent woman who couldn’t stand Picasso’s work because, as she told me more than once, she considered him an evil misogynist, and indeed I have to admit, oddly or not, that I disagree more with her account of Picasso, and perhaps with her intolerance of misogyny, than I do with the underlying logic of her position. From Vasari to the makers of every silly High Art biopic, the impulse expressed in such judgements is, if nothing else, a very human one. Ultimately, few of us are formalists of sufficiently robust and icy austerity to ignore the artist himself entirely when sizing up his work. And when the work is as intensely personal — informed by personal vision and personal experience, as well as by more public concerns — as is much of Palmer’s, ignoring the man behind the vision runs a real risk of ignoring the vision itself.

Practical difficulties, needless to say, often intrude here. Especially as one goes further and further back in time, it’s hard to get a very accurate sense of what an artist was actually like as a person. In the case of someone like, say, Uccello or Bosch, there’s not much to go on besides a trickle of stories, accurate or otherwise, heard inevitably in the shadow of the work itself, from which we are left — for such is the rather circular nature of this project — to conjure up a three-dimensional living human being. For more recent artists, in contrast, there’s much more biographical material to provide evidence, more divergent points of view, more exposure to present-day controversies. But then there are clearly fine critics out there who claim to be able to consider, say, Diego Rivera’s art without reference to his politics. At some level I admire the amount of rigid mental and emotional categorisation it must take to make this sort of self-denying ordinance work in practice. Oh, I know — there’s nothing very grownup or clever or elegant about what is, in effect, ad hominem art criticism. Needless to say, though, I couldn’t begin to stand back from it myself.

Palmer’s politics
As it happens, it is possible to know quite a lot about Samuel Palmer — and not just the subjective impressions one can glean from his magnificently luminous Ashmolean Self Portrait, either, with which the exhibition begins — although, having said that, there is nothing intrinsically offputting in the discovery that Palmer may have had tousled hair, lean yet handsome features, thoughtful, kind, slightly sad dark eyes and a rather lovely mouth. No, the real treasure as far as knowing Palmer is concerned lies in the letters that survive from him. They allow us to come very close indeed to hearing the artist’s voice, almost as one can in the letters of that other Christian artist with mystical inclinations, Vincent Van Gogh. As well as appearing elsewhere, including in at least one full collection, Palmer’s letters make up the heart of Geoffrey Grigson’s important biography, Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years (1947), a fascinating book not just for what it tells us about Palmer, but for the degree of distance its various obsessions, prejudices and elisions demarcate between Palmer’s times and those of Grigson himself — the Romantics versus the Neo-Romantics, as it were — as well, now, as the distance between Grigson’s times and our own.

What, then, do we know about Palmer? His Dissenting background and a long-term obsession with Sir Thomas Moore notwithstanding, his religion was Anglican, serious and more insistently orthodox as the years passed. His politics were High Tory. He distrusted ‘innovation’ and ‘progress’. He was capable of being earthy, playful, funny and downright silly. He was also capable of enthusiasms, evasions, irony, kindness, conviviality, loneliness and real sadness. He was, to all appearances, an affectionate husband and father. He was neither particularly desperate for worldly success, nor in any way dismissive of it. He enjoyed music and poetry. He loved cats. ‘Nature’ per se didn’t interest him so much as did landscapes that were tilled, grazed, built upon and peopled — a prejudice he would bequeath to his Neo-Romantic heirs and epigones. Warm-hearted good sense shines out everywhere from his letters. In short, as far as I can see, he was a very likeable man.

Reading backwards from this knowledge, our understanding of Palmer’s art alters slightly — but in all honesty, I do think it is possible to intuit a fair amount about Palmer from his pictures, too. Of the Shoreham period, we should know more, perhaps, had Palmer’s surviving son Herbert — the person, I should add right away, who probably did more than any other to conserve Palmer’s legacy and to make the 1926 exhibition possible — not chosen to burn so many of his father’s works in 1909, ‘knowing that no one would be able to make head or tail of what I burnt; I wished to save it from a more humiliating fate’. Possibly the dreams of a young Romantic were too challenging for an ageing Victorian to decode; alternatively — and with an eye, for instance, on the overt eroticism of fellow Ancient Edward Calvert’s drawings — perhaps decoding the work was all too easy. It’s a shame, though, not only because the panels that survive are, with their golden-honey surface and half-familiar, half-mysterious imagery, amongst the most arresting works of their period, but in particular, for the window they appear to offer into Palmer’s inner world.

And yet, as both the exhibition and the catalogue make clear, Palmer’s Shoreham paintings and drawings may speak as much about the public affairs of Britain in the 1820s and 30s as they do about Palmer’s private universe. Indeed, at some level the two are impossible to distinguish. Coming from Evening Church (1830) sums this up. The little painting shows a pastor and his flock of parishioners leaving their tall-spired parish church and stepping out into a landscape of cosy cottages, trees forming Gothic arches and an enfolding circle of curving hills, all awash with golden moonlight. The figures, many of them bearded, are dressed in timeless flowing robes, as if they had just come from one of Blake’s drawings. Yet the meaning could hardly be more alien to that other visionary painter’s enterprise, for what Palmer evokes here is not some abstract cosmic saga known only to a inspired Dissenter, but rather an ideal of Anglican community created at a time when both parish and community were seen to be under threat.

We know, too, that these threats mattered to Palmer. The concerns are present in his letters, but perhaps most spectacularly manifest in the pamphlet he wrote during the general election of 1832, in which he endorsed his local Tory candidate and denounced the recent Reform Act, ‘the importation of Yesterday, from poor, degraded, dishonoured, Atheistical France,’ whose supporters were, as Palmer put it, ‘Jacobinical hyenas’. There were more observations in a similar vein condemning the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, and defending the preservation of the tithe system. Palmer had held these views, as far as we can tell, consistently, but the immediate circumstances of life in rural Kent in the late 1820s and early 1830s brought them to the very much to the fore. These were, after all, the days of the ‘Captain Swing’ riots, the burning of barns and hayricks, the destruction of threshing machines and genuine fears of widespread, French Revolution type insurrection. Palmer’s criticisms, incidentally, are never levelled against the agricultural labourers themselves, but rather, against the Radicals who were manipulating them into calling for ‘reforms’ that would, as Palmer correctly intuited, do little or nothing to ameliorate their circumstances.

It is against this background, then, that a work like Coming from Evening Church starts to make sense as what it must have seemed to contemporary viewers, which is a combination of personal revelation and public exhortation. My companion at the exhibition has compared this little painting to an icon. The comparison works, I think, on several levels, for while there is something very icon-like about the intimate scale and the golden glossiness of the surface, there’s also a strong sense that the work condenses into simplified visual form a whole universe of belief, hope and faith, and that at some level what one is being asked to do is less to admire the skill and imagination behind the creation of the little image, than to respond directly to what the image instantiates. And to do this latter thing, I suppose, requires both a little knowledge of the world within and against which Palmer was painting, and also a little sympathy with Palmer himself. In that sense, of course, Coming from Evening Church is a very English icon indeed, insisting as it does on its own particularism and localism and unwilling to disentangle itself entirely from issues of personality, of politics, even private eccentricity. Yet if the Anglican tradition had ever encompassed the making of icons, might they have been so very different from Palmer’s mysterious, hieratic yet generous Shoreham works?

Palmer past and present
Even today, set against the towering reputations of Blake, Constable and Turner, Palmer’s name is still too little known even in his own country, let alone further afield. Maybe the present exhibition will change this, although it seems quite possible to me that it will not. Perhaps there will always remain something of a beautiful, precious secret about Palmer’s finest work. Perhaps the secrecy resides in the intimate scale of the sheets and panels, the necessity of drawing very near in order to see what’s going on in those strange, dark landscapes, the fields and folds lit only by the light of a low-hanging crescent moon. Perhaps it’s as simple as that.

Alternatively, though, perhaps this sense of a shared secret is somehow tied up with the nature of Palmer’s vision. His world is at once safe and weird, domestic and haunted, comforting and uncanny. Disregarded details — the moss on the roof of a rotting byre, the bark of an old oak — suddenly assume that stark lucidity only possible in dreams, while whole hills and forests drop away into black-shaded nothingness. Who else in this country has ever painted darkness so well? Palmer’s is an England of deep lanes and soaring church-spires, sheep in full fleece clustered together for company, tall corn the colour of gold or flames and hares casting shadows like sickles. It’s timeless, which is to say, it was perhaps no easier a fit with the age in which it was created than it is with our own.

Yet for all its peculiarity, Palmer’s vision has a way of seeping out into our world, as it did into world of the 1920s and 30s where its influence upon the Neo-Romantics was so formidable and important. Palmer’s ability to work on the viewer’s eye and heart is still very real. Emerging from the British Museum, having submerged oneself in the exhibition then surfaced again into the ordinary world, suddenly, at least for a little while, spires and skies and shadows really do all look different — richer in meaning, both more magical yet at the same time more real.

And that is, I suppose, why I ended up warming not simply to Palmer’s work, but to Palmer himself — or at least to the Palmer I think I met amongst the pictures, the biographical facts and the old correspondence. So much more than that of many artists, his work makes sense to me. I don’t think Palmer ever saw in art a substitute for religion, nor a way of changing the world, but rather, a talisman to be held up in the face of a life where change too often meant the end of something that mattered to him followed by the long slow adjustment to the fact of its unrecoverability. People he loved fell prey to death and disagreements, the England he loved was vanishing under the heavy-shod advance of industrialisation and commercialisation, and few seemed to understand the desperation these changes aroused in him. The religious faith, the friendships and family bonds that sustained him seem, for all the good they did, never entirely to have reconciled him to any of these things.

Art, though, may have helped a little. In his art — not just the Shoreham work either, but the caliginous ink drawings and late etchings, even the sweet-coloured watercolours – he conjured up a land beyond of all such deterioration. It wasn’t quite Heaven, because it was too much like England for that. All the same, it was a place exempt from the everyday tragedies of change and decay, bathed in a light that was kindly as well as strange — a landscape enchanted by Scripture, poetry and remembered happiness, peopled with timeless beings as much at home in the world of Virgil or Milton as in the Shoreham of the 1830s, their faces usually averted, as indeed the faces of the dead so often are in dreams.

This is, I suppose, precisely the sort of project that will bore, confuse or annoy at least as many viewers as it comforts or delights. Of course, people who wish their art to be ‘about’ light, or colour, or form, or meticulously literal verisimilitude, or a dozen other things along those lines may well find something that draws them to Palmer’s work. Palmer was, after all, an artist of considerable breadth, whereas in framing one particular view of an artist, as I have done here, with an emphasis on one particular period of a long working life, breadth is the first casualty. This account also suffers from something approaching a failure of tone, always threatening to impose on Palmer a nostalgic, faintly depressive seriousness which was really only one strand of a complex, dynamic, resilient, often endearingly playful personality. To that extent it’s inadequate. But then it’s never really easy to explain why one set of drawings and paintings and etchings strikes right at one’s heart, while another leaves one cold, any more than it is easy to explain the equivalent attraction when it happens with places or people. The only easy part is knowing that it’s happened. So in a world where it’s all too possible to feel a bit jaded about visual culture, a bit impatient with the claims that are made for it and the tiresome ritual trappings that surrounding it, the organisers of Samuel Palmer: Vision and Landscape are to be congratulated for reminding me, and perhaps others too, of what drew us to art in the first place.

Dr Bunny Smedley lives in London with her husband and young son.

Self portraits are, at best, paradoxical things. As I was walking through the National Portrait Gallery the other day, looking for the entrance to the new exhibition there, Self Portrait: Renaissance to Contemporary, I was stopped in my tracks by a massive painting — a grid filled with multicoloured lozenges that somehow added up to a portrait — that could only have been the work of an American painter named Chuck Close.

Close is, in many ways, an interesting figure. Having started his career looking back over his shoulder towards the great days of Abstract Expressionism — the fascination with surface, the all-over emphasis, the stubborn refusal entirely to abandon figuration — by the late 1960s he was working in a sort of photo-realism that became increasingly abstracted, distancing itself ever further from painterly mark-making. Over the past few decades, his subject-matter has been the human face. He works from photographs. The result of this practice has been a series of huge, often bright, usually slightly disorienting portraits, where recognisable features flicker in and out from a series of seemingly arbitrary colours and shapes. And since Close has painted, in the course of a long career, many self-portraits — and, it must be said, since I’d read a bit about Close and once watched a documentary about him — as I stood there admiring the National Portrait Gallery’s new acquisition, it didn’t take me long to recognise the large, cheerful-looking man, sporting a distinctive goatee beard and round-framed spectacles, sitting in a wheelchair beneath the painting. It was, of course, Chuck Close himself.

It turns out that this classic Close self portrait was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery for the present exhibition. When I saw him Close was, sportingly, allowing himself to be photographed with the new work. And as I went round the show, he was going round at the same time, so it was hard not to form some sort of impression as to his character. From what I could see, Close appears to be a good humoured, intelligent, practical, in some ways larger-than-life person — confident, certainly, but not overbearing — in short, a likeable man. All of which was odd, because this is exactly the impression conveyed by the self-portraits by Close that I’d seen over the years. There was something neat about this, and the neatness pleased me. Put simply, it was reassuring to see that those paintings had somehow told some sort of truth about the man who painted them. They had not only conveyed a physical likeness, although they had certainly done that — they had captured something else, too, about both the painter and the man, so that when I encountered both I felt as if I recognised the person I encountered. And what more can one ask of a self portrait than to do all that, and to look good, too?

Art and illusions
But as Self Portrait — 56 paintings, mostly in oils, arranged in roughly chronological order over five rooms — insistently reminds us, we virtually never have the opportunity to compare a self portrait with its subject (which is also to say, with its creator) even in the cursory way I did with Chuck Close. And whether we do or not, our relationship with a self portrait is usually mediated by some fairly persuasive wishful thinking. Yes, it’s lovely to think that somehow paint could forge a genuine relationship between two individuals, painter and viewer, conveying to the latter profound truths about the former. It’s lovely to think that a painter might sometimes speak to the viewer in a language he or she comprehends perfectly. It’s lovely to think that art had the power to smash down every boundary of chronological and cultural difference. And at its best, art can, of course, make the viewer feel as if all these things are the case.

But as our eighteenth century forebears were well aware, art and deception are closely related. Sadly, the hopes articulated for portraiture in the lines above are entirely deceptive. And yet one can’t deny their allure. Post phrenology, post Freud (Sigmund, not Lucian), post the ‘objective truth’ of analogue photography, living now in a world where inexpensive surgery can give virtually anyone a new and different face, most of us still believe — which suggests that we must want pretty desperately to believe it — that somehow a good portrait tells us something about what its subject is really like. At the extreme, this can extend to foretelling the future: c.f., among a thousand other possible examples, this note regarding Lucian Freud’s 1952 painting of John Minton. Here we are encouraged to believe that because Lucian Freud paints Minton with sad-looking eyes, it somehow follows that Minton will kill himself soon thereafter. The fact that most of Freud’s subjects look sad, yet (happily) do not feel compelled to follow Minton’s lead, is, apparently, neither here nor there — and certainly not to be construed as some defect either on the part of Freud’s painting, or exposure to his social skills over the course of one of those famously long series of sittings.

Yet Freud’s the perfect example here, because we do know a lot about his sittings, if only because people write about their interactions with this famously reclusive figure so very so often. We know that he paints his mother, (ex)wives, (ex)lovers, children, fellow painters, patrons (if such a word can be used about such a grand figure these days — I mean, basically, the late Duke of Devonshire), whippets, exegetes and friends. We feel indistinctly yet forcefully that in each of these cases, personal knowledge ought to deliver something by way of insight on the surface of the canvas.

We’d be less comfortable with the idea that paint might be used, habitually, to cover something up or to manufacture a myth more durable than the truth. By far the best (and most realistic) moment in Love is the Devil, that film about Francis Bacon, is the longish shot in which Bacon, getting ready for a night out, applies his makeup — his ‘paint’, no doubt, in the language of his Edwardian parents and nanny — with the same skill, seriousness and desire for creating illusion with which he produced his art. Confronted with the face he knew better than any other, Bacon was more than prepared to edit, conceal, improve. And who amongst us can blame him?

A preference for the Primitives
And that, really, encapsulates the paradox of self portraits. It’s not just that we are stuck with whatever partial account the painter gives to us of a third party, compounded by our own flawed understanding of that partial account — on top of that, we have to deal with all the issues of a personal agenda, too — as well as with the usual encumbrances of ignorance, misinformation and anachronism. Painting his own portrait, the artist is up against not only all his predecessors, contemporaries and successors, but everyone who knows him now, who might know him in the future, and of course posterity. Rarely can there be works of art that carry a heavier freight of complexity, obfuscation and sheer mystery. Or to put it another way, self portraits carry before them so many ‘issues’ that it’s a wonder that we can see them at all. No surprise, then, that the NPG’s current show is London’s first on this theme for decades. So many painters paint themselves, but to such different ends in such different situations, that a lack of focus comes with the difficult territory.

Insofar as Self Portrait has a problem, that encapsulates it. The evidence is there from the very beginning. Upon entering the exhibition, one of the first things the visitor encounters is a stunning panel by Jan Van Eyck. The work is dated 21 October, 1433 — meaning, rather movingly, that 572 years to the day separate its completion from the opening of the exhibition. This painting — Portrait of a Man, sometimes also known as Man in the Red Turban) — has for centuries, in part because of its punning inscription, been thought to be a self portrait. The fact that even this basic point can’t be established should tell its own story.

Yet the prominent place given to this Van Eyck is, among other things, a proclamation of seriousness on the part of the curators. The painting is, quite simply, a treasure. Its importance is beyond question, especially if one accepts the ‘self portrait’ tag. As one of the first, as well as one of the greatest self-portraits in oils, the little panel exerts a force out of all proportion to its modest size and apparent simplicity. Out from the darkness, beneath the fantastical crimson mass of that towering turban, stares a strangely impassive, calculating face of the sort one might still see today on the streets of Bruges or Ghent — a real face, perhaps one of the very first such faces in the history of post-classical Western art — with such a sharp look, meeting the viewer’s eyes, that no matter how many times one sees it, it still delivers a real jolt. The sense of one-to-one contact is all too real. The painting has the sort of presence one would attribute not to an old piece of wood, which is what it is, but rather to an actual living person.

In terms of art history, there’s plenty that later artists would come to borrow — the accumulation of detail as a signifier (however spurious) of accuracy, the featureless background focusing all attention on the face, or even the exotic costume as a display both of technical skill and perhaps a sign of something ‘put on’ about the whole enterprise — but in a sense, looking at Van Eyck’s amazing picture, art history is hardly the point. Here, at the beginning of a whole self portrait tradition, it becomes incredibly tempting to imagine that what we are seeing is, if only because the suppressed brushstrokes and the apparent lack of painterly self-advertisement encourage us to think so, something approaching reality. No wonder so many subtle and sensitive writers, from Schlegel to Burckhardt and Huizinga, claimed to detect in the work of the Flemish ‘Primitives’ truths that usually lie far beyond the scope of painting per se. Needless to say, however, the truths they found there were as various as the men who went looking for them.

What do we know?
For again, that’s the point about self portraits. It’s easy to admire them, but far harder to understand them, rather than simply to respond to them.

Much ink and ingenuity has been lavished on unpicking the minutiae of Jan Van Eyck’s life, so that we know much more about him than we do about most of his contemporaries. In fact, we know more about him that we do about most pre-modern artists, full stop. Yet at the same time, in some ways we know very little indeed about this tiny masterpiece that hangs at the moment in the National Portrait Gallery, and in general what we think we know turns out to be anachronistic and misguided.

Why did Van Eyck paint it? Who was it for? What was it for? Sadly, seriously, honestly, we simply do not know. All our art historical reading, all our gallery going, all our 21st century post-modern acculturation simply imprisons us in our own little narrowness. Whatever else we know about Van Eyck, we can be sure that our thoughts about this little panel are a world away from his — in our assumptions about verisimilitude, self-expression, creativity, originality, images, mortality, fame and, not least, in what we believe to be the case about ‘art’ itself — ‘art’ being a concept which would have meant nothing at all, at least in our present-day sense, to Van Eyck. Or to put it another way, we see Van Eyck primarily as an artist. Yet there is every chance he’d have looked in one of those small, convex mirrors and seen looking back at him a highly successful courtier, a diplomat and an effective all-purpose spin-doctor (to use a different anachronism) for Philip the Good.

All of which brings us back to the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Self Portrait: Renaissance to Contemporary. As we have seen, the 56 works begin with Van Eyck and end with Chuck Close. In between, there are paintings from Western Europe, North America and indeed Australia. The artists represented here include men and women, young and old, famous and fairly obscure, successful and less successful, reclusive and extrovert, alive and dead. The works were created in a correspondingly wide variety of social contexts, doctrinal climates and patronage structures, with very different levels of access to, inter alia, photography, the work of other artists, and whatever it is that critics provide. Nor are the works all self portraits in the most obvious sense of the term. Instead, several of the works fall into that category of self portrait called the friendship portrait; several simply include other people; one’s a family portrait, complete with maid, fruit, flowers and some miscellaneous allegorical statuary. Many were demonstration pieces, advertising the technical skill of a commercial portraitist in a cool, professional manner, while in a few, the desperate need for self-expression is so palpable as almost to ooze, thickly, from the surface of the canvas. The comparisons could run on for pages, but the point is clear enough. The ‘self portrait’ label is practically the only thing these paintings could, conceivably, be said to have in common, and even then it’s a bit of a stretch.

The problem, then, lies not in quality, exactly — for there are a number of very strong works here, as well as, admittedly, some puzzlingly weak ones — nor in lack either of good intentions or food for thought. Instead, such trouble as there is here lurks in the sheer variousness of the works on display. Oh, it’s a stimulating enough exercise as one goes around, making a little comparison here or being knocked off one’s feet by some masterpiece there. After one leaves, however, there’s a feeling of vague dissatisfaction, perhaps even of indigestion.

Insofar as the catalogue (written by Anthony Bond and Joanna Woodall, with essays by T. J. Clark, Ludmilla Jordanova and Joseph Leo Koerner) attempts to make sense of this embarassing profusion, it does so imperfectly. It’s all very well to write about ‘constructing an identity’ or ‘self presentation’ — be honest here, who hasn’t? — but however much academics may argue to the contrary, it’s rarely very long until they, and we, run into a brick wall of ignorance. For unless we are pretty sure of all sorts of things regarding the maker of a particular self portrait, the circumstances under which it was created and so forth, who are we to judge the success or otherwise of that ‘constructed identity’, the extent of ingenuity underpinning that ‘self presentation’? In short, unless we happen to see Chuck Close standing there beneath a painting he finished a few months ago and hence can compare the two, working within a cultural context with which we’re personally familiar, how much of what we end up saying is simply the stuff of forlorn, if harmless, fantasy?

Girls, girls, girls
It’s easy enough to believe, though, that this concern with ‘self presentation’ has played a part in the organisation of Self Portrait. Not least, the number of women painters represented seems frankly disproportionate to their historical significance.

A few of the works by female painters are extremely strong. Judith Leyster’s self portrait (a loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C, USA), for instance, is a brilliantly vivid, apparently rather offhand but actually highly skilful piece of work. Although Anna Dorothea Therbusch-Lisiewska is hardly a household name — at least not in any household I’ve encountered recently — there’s enough real flair in her handling of paint, and enough interest in her story, to make one glad of the inclusion. And despite my reservations about both of them, I suppose that Artemisia Gentileschi and Frida Kahlo are both now such well-established members of a certain sort of art-historical pantheon that they could hardly have been omitted. But I find it hard to justify, for instance, a typically slick, formulaic effort by Marlene Dumas, which comes across as nothing more than a sweetly-coloured amplification of a better painting by Gerhard Richter that hangs nearby.

Whereas possibly the only real reason to include Suzanne Valadon’s The Blue Room — not that it’s a bad reason — is the fact that the work is, intentionally or not, absolutely hilarious. Valadon, the illegitimate daughter of a domestic labourer, had come to Paris to work as a model, but eventually took up painting in her own right, encouraged by, amongst others, Degas. She went on to give birth to Maurice Utrillo. Her self portrait on show here is really quite remarkable. Present are many of the usual Post-Impressionist standbys – the cloisonnisme, the patterned fabrics, a model sprawled languorously across a couch — except in this case the model has somehow metamorphosed from some pretty girl into the Odalisque from Hell. Instead of some decorative creature, ready to shape herself to the daydreams of others, we see before us a bulky, fleshy, middle-aged woman, with thighs like hams and huge saggy breasts, her skin blotchy, her expression surly. She’s also got a cigarette clamped between her lips. In short, this is like a Guerrilla Girlz fantasy, or like Sarah Lucas transported back to Picasso’s Monmarte, fags and all. It’s a genuinely shocking painting, because it looks so much like a very broad parody and yet apparently isn’t. But in a sense that underlines the whole problem with ‘self presentation’. In presenting herself thus, what was Valadon trying to say? Did she like the way she looked? Did other people like it? Did the image look less peculiar then? Or more peculiar? What, exactly, is the point here?

Having stood spellbound by this challenging painting for several minutes, though, and having read about it later in the catalogue, I am not sure I’m any closer to an answer, even though the catalogue labels The Blue Room a ‘manifesto piece’ and claims it represents ‘a glamorous ideal of [Valadon’s] dual nature as model and independent creator’. Glamorous? Shocking modern, probably, with that pudding-basin haircut, the let-it-all-hang-out, full-fat figure and the cigarette, but hardly glamorous. It’s a painting of herself for herself, perhaps, but not an easy one to read today. It is not easy to capture the tone, to feel the distance between rhetoric and reality — and all of that, even though the work was painted within living memory! The truth is that, at least without a great deal of extra research, it isn’t really possible for us to know much about what Valadon was trying to say about herself — in the actual time and place and context in which she was saying it — let alone to compare it intelligently with the works that surround it. Self-creation may well being going on here, but who are we to spot the points where it begins and ends?

Instead, we are left responding to these things partially, anachronistically and superficially. The very breadth and variousness of the exhibition ensures that this remains the case. And knowledge, here, can be as much of a problem as ignorance. I have already mentioned my indebtedness to television films and to books when it came to knowing about Chuck Close. How much of what we know about that self portrait by Artemisia Gentileschi actually comes from her own ‘self presentation’, and how much from a half-remembered interview with Germaine Greer that took place a decade or so ago on Woman’s Hour? How much of our knowledge of Frieda Kahlo stems from her own ‘created identity’, and how much from a biography of Diego Rivera, and that film, and from the well-known art expert Madonna’s appreciative effusions?

Of nothingness, Nazarenes and nudity
All of which probably creates an unnecessarily negative impression of a stimulating, occasionally illuminating exhibition which ought not to be blamed for raising questions it cannot begin to answer. Not least, there are some excellent paintings here, including quite a few rarely if ever seen in London.

Where to start? Jacob Jordaens’ sumptuous family group (on loan from the Prado) is a pure, early modern, unselfconscious delight. So is Anthony van Dyck’s friendship portrait of himself and his old comrade and patron Endymion Porter (the work also a Prado loan), an elegant study in contrasts, where the confidence of the handling has to be seen to be believed. Velazquez’s brooding self portrait (like several works here, an early treasure borrowed from the Uffizi’s Collezionne degli Autoritratti) is at once magnificent and reserved, including one of the most stunningly vibrant, energetic backgrounds I’ve ever seen, featureless yet never less than mesmerising. Despite, or rather because of the apparent austerity of the work — and its fine condition plays a part here, with Prado works looking as fresh as Hermitage ones — one is reminded what a truly astounding artist Velazquez was capable of being. Whereas Sassoferrato’s self portrait comes as much more of a surprise. A crisply effective, luminous painting, it at once resembles his devotional works, yet is infinitely more easy to appreciate for a certain sort of protestant sensibility. (But for a fascinating discussion of the limits of good taste in religious art, see Professor Homan’s recent article on the Social Affairs Unit website.)

That impressive Sassoferrato is hardly the only surprise. Moving on through history a bit (and leaving out some very strong paintings along the way) there’s a powerful portrait here by Victor Emile Janssen, a B-list Nazarene. Dating perhaps c. 1829 (from the Hamburger Kunsthalle), it shows a young man wrapped in a cursory bit of drapery in front of an unmade bed, his hair tousled, his body stooped, intent, melancholy (apparently), possibly even consumptive. It’s a portrait of the artist as a young Durer, it’s canvas as a form of confessional — it’s the testament of someone who’d die at the Christ-like age of 38. It’s limpid, intense and sad. Whereas the much more famous Courbet’s Portrait of the Artist Called the Wounded Man is delirious moment of fantasy, executed with incontrovertible skill, somehow invoking (and this is what I mean about the impossibility of escaping our own limitations) that famous photo of Che Guevara as compellingly as it does the more contemporary yet indeed not entirely unrelated events of 1848. There’s a strong feeling that the bogus aestheticisation of terrorism and civil war starts here, right here, in front of this very canvas. It’s more than possible to admire this picture and deplore it, all at the same time.

And then, finally, there is Stanley Spencer’s Double Naked Portrait: The Artist and his Second Wife (better known as the Leg of Mutton Nude). As much as I disbelieve that one can learn much about an artist’s life from the visual language in which he reveals it or fibs about it, it’s hard to avoid the impression that the bodies are not the only naked thing in this picture. Confronted with Patricia Preece’s poignant old-woman breasts, her sagging flesh and with Spencer’s own sagging bits and pieces, the nature of his sexual obsession with this cold, unpleasant, deeply unfeminine woman seems ever more insistently unfortunate, as indeed it proved to be. But then there is a sort of creepy obsessiveness worked into the paint itself. It’s still rather alarming. The Spencer is not, however, illustrated in the catalogue. I wonder why? Surely the youth of today would not be unduly corrupted by the notion that most people, as the years go by, begin to look pretty discouraging once their clothes are off? Or is that simply one bit of ‘self presentation’ too far for the show’s organisers?

Present imperfect
With his slightly queasy collision of humility and exhibitionism, private religious conviction and very public adultery, tidy brushstrokes and warts-and-all nudity, Spencer’s painting seems to bridge the decades connecting our own present-day experience with a largely unrecoverable past. Elsewhere, though, the comparison between past and present is not necessarily a comfortable one. Put bluntly, there’s a distinct falling-off of quality in some of the more recent works. Forget, if only because there’s so little of interest to say about them, near-worthless efforts such as the Baselitz offering, which shows a badly-painted man not much improved by being displayed upside down, or Richard Hamilton’s contribution to the genre, which according to the catalogue ‘deconstructs the mystique of painting and originality in exchange for a very Duchampian visual conundrum’. (Yet it doesn’t, by the way, and in any event it’s hard to see why it would be a good thing if somehow, in a parallel world, it did.)

Forget, too, the paintings that are either not particularly fine examples of the artist’s work, such as a 1971 Bacon, painted long after the artist had slipped into the habit of slickly mannered and highly lucrative self-plagarism, or a 1989 Kossoff that similarly goes nowhere, mired in its muddy, self-congratulatory lack of direction, having forgot the lessons of Bomberg’s explosive orthogonals along with Kossoff’s own early and admirable force of convicition. And while we’re at it, let’s forget artists whose work I simply don’t much like, by which in this case I mean Warhol, represented here by a 1978 six-part image, which leaves me as cold as his oeuvre always does. I much prefer the big, prawn-pink Jenny Saville painting, depicting the artist naked, seated, from behind, which while not exactly up to the level of a Velazquez or a Courbet, is at least animated by a degree of scrutiny, effort, conviction and generous fleshy humanity.

No, the most discouraging comparison must, as it so often does, involve Our Greatest Living Painter himself. Freud, who paints self portraits with reasonable frequency, is represented here by a 1967 work called Interior with Hand Mirror (Self Portrait) (a loan from the Art Gallery of Western Australia). He’s lucky (but then isn’t Freud pretty consistently lucky?) in the choice of work, in that a number of his more recent self portraits have been a good deal worse indeed. For one thing, since he’s not very good at creating figures capable of supporting their own weight, his efforts to portray himself full-length, standing, invariably get bogged down by draughtsmanship so bad that any number of increasingly desperate expedients (painting himself nude, painting himself with a nude woman, etc) cannot entirely disguise it. In this case, in any event, Freud has avoided challenges of that sort by simply painting a small hand-mirror wedged into a window casement in some not-entirely-clear manner, in which the painter’s face can, just about, be discerned. It’s not so much a likeness as a sort of fleeting, broad-brush adumbration, but that’s all right, since by 1977 everyone who might conceivably care what Freud looked like had probably satisfied their curiosity on that point.

Freudian slippage
Instead, I fear, Freud’s self portrait is actually one of those ‘paintings about painting’. But the problem here is less the aspiration — in some sense Velazquez’s great Las Meninas might also be called a painting about painting — than the frankly inept execution. The relationship of the window sashes to each other is difficult to understand. The ‘mirror’ shows no sign of reflectivity. It might as well be a ping-pong paddle to which someone has affixed an indistinct picture of Freud’s face.

And then there’s the glass in the windows. It’s rendered, basically, as whiteness over a dark ground, applied with all the subtlety of a somewhat slap-dash housepainter applying a base coat to a bit of wall that no one is likely to see very much. These passages don’t read as anything — they are only intelligible in the context of the window sashes — but then neither are they beautiful as paint itself. And this simply won’t do. Unlike some of the contemporary painters represented here, Freud claims to paint in a great tradition, the visual language of Manet and Watteau and even Velazquez himself. Yet the sad truth is, if he still believes this to be the case, he must have lost the ability to see these painters’ work — and so must his various pet critics and curators. None of which would matter, even now, were the claims made for Freud’s greatness not so inanely overblown. Here, though, we see it once again. A few square inches of the Velazquez self portrait shown here, even the a few square inches of the featureless background, sdisplays a thousand times more life than do all the smeary, bleary, dead-looking surfaces that Freud has generated over the past three decades. When will the arts establishment accept that Freud may well have painted his last first-rate painting marginally before John Minton did? Or is there too much invested in Freud’s particular project for candour to have much appeal?

Chuck Close and personal
Compared with all of that, one turns with some relief to Chuck Close. As we have seen, unlike Freud’s long, demanding (for the subject anyway) sittings, Close works from photographs. And although there are obviously plenty of issues raised by the manner in which he chooses to convey the information, his paintings show every sign of being about likeness, about seeing, about face-to-face experience. At any rate, this is what Close himself says about them, and indeed, as I’ve seen from my own experience, it’s how they seem to work.

As Close says in the course of a genuinely interesting interview, printed in the catalogue,

I always thought that whatever has happened in someone’s life, there is evidence embedded in that face. If they have laughed their whole life they have laugh lines. And if they frowned their whole lives they have furrows.

We almost relate to someone in one of these paintings as we would related to someone that we would meet [ … ] I think this can also happen with my own image and I think that is why I’m so careful to present it so neutrally, so that I’m not bound to get just one reading: that everyone can relate to this image as they would relate to me ....

And this, of course, takes us right back to the beginning. Almost as if enacting Close’s own narrative here, I first saw his self portraits, and then saw him, and was pleased at how well the two parts of the jigsaw puzzle came to fit together in my hands. It’s not just about verisimilitude, either — it’s about mood, warmth, iconography, palette, scale, ambience — and, as often happens with intuition, there’s nothing very objective about it. Let’s be honest. I was surprised, when I saw Close, about the extent of intuitive truth his pictures, for all their glossy contemporary self-consciousness, had been able to convey. Could it be that some of the pictures in Self Portrait, read not seriously but intuitively, whimsically, fantastically, might actually carry more weight than I could have believed? Sadly, yet obviously, the answer can never be proved. All we can do is to look, wonder, smile, grimace and stare, and generally do the best we can.

Some of the most stimulating art history of the past generation has attempted to excavate the circumstances surrounding the creation of specific works in search of context, meaning, purpose. Yet these have proved elusive. Looking back at even the best of such works, what is generally most striking now is not what they reveal about the art in question, but rather the preoccupations, political and cultural assumptions, quirks and blind spots of each art historian — although the datedness of these, like the clothing of ours parents’ day, may radiate as much retro charm as anything else, and may indeed come back into fashion again from time to time. What all of this does suggest, however, is that there is quite a lot one needs to know about a self portrait before it is possible even to begin to understand much about it, let alone comparing it with another self portrait. Beyond that, the rest is lovely, consoling, unsustainable daydreams.

And what’s wrong with that, you might well ask? Very little, probably. In any event, there’s no harm in making your way along to the NPG within the next few months, if only in order to decide for yourself.

Dr Bunny Smedley lives in central London, and wishes that her toddler son liked Van Eyck or even Velazquez as much as he does Rachel Whiteread.

As with most things in life that ought by rights to come naturally, yet somehow don’t — radiant health, sustaining relationships, happiness, the speedy creation of sophisticated yet effortless-looking dinners for eight and so forth — there are lots of books out there on the subject of birth and motherhood. I had reason to discover this last year, when the subject began to develop an ever-expanding degree of personal relevance. Because, let’s face it, for some of us the printed word will always stand as the first line of defence against a reality that’s just that little bit too big to grasp all at once. It would be exaggerating, just, to say that I actually ran directly from that first positive pregnancy test to the basement section of Foyles’ — I am pretty sure I thought to ring my husband first — but in those first few months, the urge to research was still right up there with all those new hormonal urges that kept counselling me to eat ice-cream for breakfast, to feel drawn to anything acid-green and to sleep almost constantly. Also, buying books was something I knew how to do, unlike having a baby. So, snuggling back into the safety of my academic background, I began to ‘read round the subject’, conferred with experts — well, chatted with friends in possession of at least superficially acceptable children — Googled my way purposefully around the internet, and eventually built up quite a little library on this new research topic of mine. It felt for all the world as if what I hoped to deliver in nine months’ time was a conference paper.

Taking sides
The first surprise was the factionalism. Having cut my teeth on reformation history before graduating to the scarcely more appetising margins of Tory politics, I was nonetheless unprepared for the sheer degree of rancour, vitriol and pure sectarian bigotry that exists within the literature of motherhood. ‘You must buy Gina Ford’s Contented Little Baby,’ insisted one friend, running a sleekly-manicured hand over her couture-class lapel as we spoke after a business meeting — because as well as giving birth she had managed to make a success of her own company while at the same time coordinating a sprawling step-family, conducting a social-life of eye-watering rigour and working out with a personal trainer every morning. ‘And you must have a maternity nurse. Ours was wonderful.’ Her big dark eyes misted over at the memory. ‘It’s so reassuring. She knows just what to do. She takes your baby away from you and gives him a routine.’

Not having had a baby yet, I was unsure whether I wanted him taken away from me — let alone ‘given a routine’ by a salaried, live-in, dictatorial-sounding stranger. But I wasn’t allowed to contemplate this for long. ‘Don’t pay any attention,’ hissed another friend, as soon as we were out of earshot. ‘That Contented Little Nazi stuff is appalling! Do what they did when we were in Nepal — just wrap your baby up next to you in a cloth sling and get on with your life.’ This, in contrast, sounded too good to be true — surely one needed a bit more nursery kit than a lone pashmina, even in Nepal? Also, this other friend, while glamorous, was a spontaneous, bohemian wild-child who had never been seen without a cigarette in one hand and a strong coffee in the other and who was famous for emails beginning ‘Sorry, just back from two months in Sri Lanka …’. Come to think of it, she didn’t have children, either. Innocently, I resolved to read widely, consider carefully and make up my mind for myself.

The battle of the baby books
As the weeks went by, the literature began to resolve itself into a pattern. Just as once, in an allusion to ‘the Tudor reformations’ that single extra consonant would have signalled to me a world of historiographical alignment, or just as an eyebrow raised at the name of some minor Tory frontbencher would have been a gesture ripe with tribal significance, now a whole new universe of factional nuance began to open out ahead of me.

At one end stood the forbidding figure of Gina Ford — a nanny (famously, she’s never had children herself) who champions the rigid scheduling of naps, feeds, baths, lullabies, play, eye-contact, encouraging slices of toast for the breastfeeding mother and indeed pretty much everything, full stop. And at the other end stood — well, reclined, barefoot, probably on a beanbag chair while listening to an old Grateful Dead bootleg cassette tape — the laid-back ‘Attachment Parenting’ school. The respectable end of the movement was personified by Dr William Sears, with the wilder fringes well represented — where else? — on the internet, garnished with references to home schooling, slightly muddled libertarian effusions and the odd sprig of New Age mysticism. While the Fordists spoke of ‘routines’ and ‘training’, the Attachment types retaliated with a strange, sometimes alienating language of ‘demand feeding’, ‘sleep sharing’ and ‘baby wearing’. In between the two, there was every shade of variation and compromise, as well as special obsessions. Did I want a smart baby, an organic baby, a confident baby, a baby that was good at sleeping or feeding or possibly sums, yoga and water gymnastics as well? Apparently I could have each and every one of these desirable little creatures, if only I shelled out my £12.99 in the relevant direction, watched the right DVD and signed up to the right sort of ideological programme.

This was the practical end of the spectrum. Beyond it, dispensing with any pretence of practicality, lurked the penumbra of books that simply commented on the whole business of motherhood itself — usually along the lines of, ‘here I am, a middle-class, mature, university-educated woman, and I’ve just had a baby — let me explain to you the unique significance of this experience, which no one in human history has hitherto understood.’ Naomi Woolf and Rachel Cusk were, in this department, only the prime offenders. Truth told, though, I mostly skipped these books — less out of principled disapproval, or even distrust of patently ropey prose-styles, than something more basic. Being a middle-class, mature, university-educated woman myself, there were limits to how much I wanted to know about what I was getting myself into. Surely, motherhood couldn’t be so ghastly that the only way to cope was to leave the baby with a nanny and write a book about it?

Does this baby come with an instruction manual?
Old habits die hard. Having endured a fair bit of ‘social history’ at university, I was also acutely aware — in those days before my mind deteriorated into a brightly disorientating kaleidoscope of cots, prams and nappies, full or otherwise — of the oddness of the times in which we live. For while there have always been books offering expert advice about the peaks and troughs of human experience — one thinks of those Tudor manuals explaining how to die a good death, or the seventeenth century memoirs of charismatic religious conversions, or that other historical oddity of more recent times, books explaining how not to eat too much — and while everyone from philosophers to theologians has had something to say about education, the explosion of books intended to teach women how to be mothers is largely a peculiarity of the past seventy years or less.

There are, after all, lots of aspects of culture that are perhaps most characteristically transmitted, not by formal training, let alone the written word, but rather through a thousand less formal and conscious channels. In most times and most places, motherhood has been one of these. It was women’s work, and although it was seen as important, generally men, with their impulses towards pointless systemisation, kept out of it. Within this female sphere, motherhood was taught by imitation, observation, shared experience, a bit of advice from grandma or a helping hand from a sister-in-law, an accumulated wealth of information, injunction and prejudice disseminated throughout a lifetime. This isn’t to say that fear, uncertainty and incompetence didn’t exist. On the contrary, they are basic to the experience of motherhood. It’s just that the means of dispelling them lay not in literature, but in life. Motherhood wasn’t book learning — it was just good sense and good luck, stiffened up with nonstop informal socialisation.

Times, however, change. Now that families are so often fragmentary, physically or psychologically distant, and now that the politics of informal intervention in neighbours’ lives have been complicated by a dozen other societal changes, the stream of information available through these informal conduits has slowed to an uncertain little trickle, and is poisoned by increasing amounts of social and stylistic variation. Those huge extended families, with their sloppy overlap of generations, are decreasingly likely to ensure that there are always babies around, somewhere, instilling a bit of parenting information into even the most unwilling friend or relation. And now that parenting choices are as much an expression of consumer choice as they are of cultural identity, there is little scope for assuming at a neighbour’s choices will have any congruence with one’s own. All of which is why, I suppose — along with increased literacy levels, increased spending power and the need to pass the long months of pregnancy doing something other than shopping for ever-larger brassieres and ever-stranger foodstuffs — there is an ever-increasing demand amongst women for published material about motherhood, its mysteries and magic. How else are we to find our way through the whole strange, daunting business of giving birth and bringing up our young?

In my need for more and better reference works, though, it must be said that my age and background were probably playing against me. For some mothers — the more docile sort of teenager still ensconced in the parental home, or those from ethnic communities still in possession of a bit of social and familial cohesion — the old rules may still hold. Some people may have been more fortunate than others when it comes to fitting in with the child-bearing patterns of their near and dear. And no matter how pleasant those fantasies about life amongst the aboriginal peoples of whatever-land may be, obviously no one who knows anything about comparative historical mortality rates would want to give birth at any time other than the present, or anywhere other than the First World. Thus it was that as the months passed, with what was left of the rational part of my hormone-bombarded mind, I could see that in all sorts of ways I was in an enviably fortunate position. Heaven knows, I didn’t want to become one of those middle-class, university-educated women who makes a living out of stylised self-consciousness and a spurious sense of victimhood. People have babies every day — surely there wasn’t as much to it as all that?

And yet this wouldn’t be an accurate account of the strengths and weaknesses of parenting books if I didn’t point out how little, ultimately, these books were able to do for me as those first months of my pregnancy passed, slowly but ineluctably, and the moment of truth drew ever nearer. I read the books’ advice, I poured over their soothing photos and I pondered their relative merits. Would I be a well-organised, clock-watching Fordist, I wondered, or a sling-wearing, co-sleeping Sears sister? Was baby massage worth the bother? And what, when it came to that, was ‘topping and tailing’? But what I really wanted to know was something that no book could tell me: What would it be like to become a mother, and could I handle it? For although I was scared, as every sane woman must be, of giving birth, much worse was the challenge posed by the 20-plus years that would, God willing, follow. Yet somehow it seemed impossible to discuss this central question with my super-competent friends, or with the harried NHS medical staff, or anyone else. Admitting to confusion and uncertainty seemed too dangerous, as if spelling out my fears could only make them come true. So back to the books I went, hoping that somewhere there, between idyllic photos of perfect newborns and challenging post-partum exercise regimes, was the scrap of information I needed to ensure that it was all going to be all right.

The answer, though, eluded me. And so it was that, pregnant, aged 38, surrounded by all the material comforts and physical security I could want, benefiting from a supportive husband and friends, and with some of the best medical care in the world on my doorstep, I had never felt so incompetent, unconfident or so lonely in all my life.

You mean there’s supposed to be a third trimester?
In the end, of course, nothing went by the book at all. So much for What to Expect …! For instead of the 38-week gestation promised by literature and hallowed by convention, my first son was born after a grand total of 28 weeks and one day. Nor, at about 3 lbs, did he look much like the babies in those glossy illustrations. With hindsight, I could have wished for sisterly advice identifying those ‘weird cramps’ in week 27 as the early stages of labour, or putting forth the terribly outmoded view that ‘taking it easy’ should not include, for instance, carrying cups of tea up several flights of stairs to the carpenters building new bookshelves for my study. Neither of these contingencies was, however, addressed in any of my various books. Well, we live and learn, don’t we?

But in the hours after giving birth, none of this mattered. I was simply ecstatic, overwhelmed, terrified, delighted and exhausted as I stared at that odd-looking little creature, covered in monitors and bits of wire and tubing, in the plastic incubator that dwarfed him so completely. Less than two months later I was allowed to take him home from the hospital’s Special Care Baby Unit. In the meantime, what happened during those two months wasn’t covered by any of the books I had read. Since when did ‘establishing breastfeeding’ mean hooking myself up to an industrial-looking milking machine every four hours, day and night, in order to express milk to be fed, via a naso-gastric tube, to my firstborn? Since when did ‘bonding’ mean the carefully-supervised, all-too-brief cuddle I was allowed once a day? And surely, by ‘developing a routine’, the books didn’t mean that whole sorry business of learning how to avoid the ward rounds, when all the mothers were kicked out of the Special Care Baby Unit in order to insulate them from the full details of what was wrong with everyone else’s baby, or how to schedule my brief lunch at Planet Organic so as to be back at cot-side while most of the other mothers were still out, so as to snatch a moment or two alone — except for the doctors, nurses and cleaning staff, obviously — with my little one?

Thus it was that necessity rescued me, at a stroke, from the various bland orthodoxies of book-learning. Arriving home with my son after those two months in hospital, my vision of motherhood was in retrospect a remarkably strange one. At first it seemed wrong and probably dangerous, for instance, to handle this child of mine without first scrubbing my hands with disinfectant, or — in keeping with another hospital routine — to change his nappy without first taking his temperature and afterwards conveying a list of nappy-related ‘observations’ to the duty nurse. Was it really safe to bring up a baby without a consultant neonatologist in the next room? Was it really permissible not to weigh him every day? It also took me a while to learn to look at my baby to see how he was doing, rather than turning to the monitors which were no longer attached to his increasingly large, healthy, authentically baby-type body. What would happen if something went wrong? There were times when the responsibility seemed unbearable. How could I possibly do, single-handedly, what it had taken a whole unit to do only a few days before?

And since, during those hospital visits, specialist knowledge had once again proved both a reassurance and a distraction from the occasionally bleak realities of the situation, I also came home speaking the secret language of prematurity: a lexicon encompassing CPAP and low-flow, PDAs and ROP, apneas and ‘bradys’. Like most parents in this situation, I ended up fretting not about wind or a touch of colic, but about ‘desaturations’ and a tendency to ‘recess’. Alone amongst my friends, I was not only able to guess my baby’s blood oxygen level based on his skin colour, liveliness and so on — doing so seemed the most ‘natural’ thing on earth. Motherhood? Was this what it was meant to be like? Sometimes it seemed as if my health visitor, GP and even my friends were talking about a completely different experience. And there was something strangely exhausting, not just about having a new baby at home — which, obviously, is pretty exhausting for anyone — but about the well-intentioned incomprehension of most normal people when it comes to premature babies. On one hand, I was super-defensive about my little boy: ‘What do you mean, he’s small? Don’t you realise that 3 lbs is absolutely huge for 28 weeks?’ But then on the other hand, their glibness — ‘he’s fine, now, isn’t he?’ — upset me too, even though in truth he does seem to be fine, if only because it seemed to downplay his amazing achievement in having done so well, having been born so very early. Sane parents, I suppose, never take their children’s lives for granted, but anyone who has been able to bring their baby home after months in Special Care has more to be thankful for than most.

Occasionally, though, now and then, I stumbled across someone who spoke my new language. For instance, while my son was still in hospital I discovered, quite by accident, that an acquaintance — a woman whose career achievements, flawless grooming, well-burnished social skills, high energy levels and general air of perfection had previously struck me as ever so slightly alienating — had herself had two premature babies who had each spent months in Special Care. Although both were now fine, big, healthy girls, her memories of that time were still raw. There was nothing, here, of the glib tones other friends had used when discussing their favourite baby books. The look on her face could only have been imposed by real life. ‘It was the hardest thing I have ever done,’ she said simply. And her words, in turn, gave me more reassurance than any book could have done.

A season in the NHS
What was toughest, in retrospect, was the brutal way in which prematurity removed even the possibility of doing what comes naturally. In my darkest moments, it sometimes seemed not only as if my son wasn’t really mine, but worse still, that whereas modern medical science was there to help him, my own interventions were so inept that they could only do harm. After all, I hadn’t even been competent enough to carry him for the full nine months, had I? The books that made great play of ‘bonding’ whispered reproachfully to the mother of a very premature baby. Although I visited my son for hours every day, I couldn’t be there at the hospital all the time — not at night, not at 3 or 4 am when I’d get up to express milk for him in his cold, quiet, empty nursery. And I had never really understood the meaning of jealousy until I came into the unit one day and saw a student nurse cuddling my baby. Was I a bad mother because I wasn’t cuddling him myself? Or was I an even worse mother because I resented the fact that this stranger was doing what I so desperately wanted to do in her stead, even though my little boy was obviously enjoying the cuddle?

All of which bathetic, faintly embarrassing stuff runs the danger of sounding like an offcut from one of those books denounced, quite rightly, above. Don’t worry, the Naomi Woolf pastiche stops here. The point is simply this. Banished from the world of pregnancy and birth advice books by my own fast-track approach to childbearing, I found myself a freakish outcast in the world of parenting books, too. Suddenly, despite my own lack of conventional childcare experience, I felt incredibly reluctant to take these authors’ advice about anything. What did they know? For on one hand, the slyly Darwinian world of the present-day NHS had, at least, allowed me to channel my thwarted maternal energies into pursuing my son’s best interests as best I could — scrutinising his records when I could get my hands on them, spotting mistakes in his treatment, gently encouraging higher standards of care and attention at every opportunity. (So, were you wondering why they let a three-month-premature baby go home after only two months?) This business of becoming a mother did, in all seriousness, excavate more hard-edged, decisive, ruthless side of my character than I, at least, had ever suspected existed. Also, those two months had given me the chance to discover something else — namely, my son’s innate strength, resilience, charm, determination and good humour. No matter how bad I might be at being a mother, he was clearly excellent at being a baby. And with all that going for us, and with the written word’s abject failure to be any use whatsoever during the first key moments of his life, who needed purpose-made parenting books?

A little learning
Still, in the months since my son’s been home it has proved almost impossible to avoid those advice books. They get everywhere. Cross-question a friend or ex-colleague who articulates a bland belief in ‘doing what works’ about what he or she means, and out comes a stream of steel-reinforced, generally book-taught doctrine attempting to pass itself off as the cuddliest sort of home-baked empiricism.

Here’s an example. ‘Is your baby good?’ When someone asks this, nine out of ten times she is not providing an incitement to sub-Augustinian chat on the nature of original sin, but rather — sadly — asking whether your little flawed mortal darling sleeps through the night, since these are the terms in which Gina Ford and her ilk have re-defined the metaphysics of morals. The ideal baby would, apparently, be one who drops off at 7 pm sharp and bothers no one for at least twelve clear hours, before resuming his dreary little hell, whoops, ‘routine’ of scheduled feeds, washes, changes, naps and the occasional moment of grudging yet necessary human interaction. Conversely, if another sort of person hears that a baby has been fed on breast-milk for nine months or more, she may claim that this, instead, is good, for all the world as if moral worth were a sort of enzyme or antibody, or for that matter as if every mother were able to spout forth an unfailing stream of nourishment, simply at will, for months or years on end. The idea that virtue might reside in some sphere beyond the minutiae of feeding strategies or sleep patterns is an exotic and possibly dangerous one, the province of zealots or scary people only. Yet baby-rearing, its language of good and evil notwithstanding, is at the same time treated as a science best conducted passionlessly, on some consensual middle ground of shared assumptions. And given how relatively narrow the market for such books is, the books may well have a point about this.

So if we’re all setting out our own belief-systems for snap inspection the very moment we set our little ones down for a nap or proffer a bit of raw, organic, British-grown apple rather than a tasty crisp, I might as well go ahead and make what I, at any rate, take to be a rather Tory point. Ultimately, as far as I can see, parenting hinges more on temperament and history than on anything more conscious or rational. The parenting books we latch onto persuade us, not because of what they say, but rather, because of the way in which their arguments and assertions resonate with what we already believe to be true. We seek in them a community of people like us, to give us the reassurance and sense of cosy inclusion so often unavailable elsewhere in this rather atomised contemporary world — the atomisation of which becomes all the more uncomfortable, the more we realise how little that world tolerates the powerful urges, hormonal and inescapable, that suddenly reorient a new mother’s life towards the needs of her young.

’So, are you working, or are you just a mother now?’
Thus it is that over the past year or so, I’ve noticed that my most hardcore Fordist friends are women who, even days prior to giving birth, enjoyed — and ‘enjoyed’ really is the mot juste here — high-powered professional careers. Having previously flourished in a world of computerised diaries, billable time, refereed articles, specialised expertise, highly regimented workplace relationships and evident peer-group respect, they now find themselves wrestling with seas of vomit, smelly nappies, a little person who feels that his needs should come first and a society where mothers are, generally, treated with a mixture of flippancy and condescension that becomes rancid faster than a bottle of expressed breastmilk.

Maybe it’s different elsewhere, in those parts of British society where women pass the time by scraping their hair back, perusing daytime television and balancing benefit cheques with the acquisition of fags, alcopops, tattoos and yet more out-on-remand boyfriends — or, alternatively, in some sort of sub-Scrutonian fantasia, where the daughters of baronets waft around their Agas in hand-me-down 1930s frocks, concocting nourishing purees from of their latest hand-reared Gloucester Spot while listening to choral evensong on Radio 3. Sadly, though, for the rest of us who live somewhere in the middle, the truth is all too obvious. The best kind of mother, apparently, is the woman who manages to provide offspring without allowing the whole messy, woefully biological business to impinge on her lifestyle in any way. Like becoming ill or ageing or dying, the physical imperatives of pregnancy and motherhood are regarded as a source of voiceless regret, if not outright failure.

Thus we live in a world where praise is lavished on women who contrive to work and play as if they weren’t pregnant even when they are, who recapture their pre-pregnancy (or, better still, pre-pubescent) figures within weeks of giving birth, who carry on with demanding careers whilst still bringing up a young family, and who make sure it’s the claims of the adults in their lives, rather than the babies, that come first. For while it’s unfashionable to say that children should be seen, not heard, in fact, many people are happier when not seeing or hearing much about them. So a new mother of vaguely professional background faces, along with the after-pains of labour and her strangely altered body, a stark choice. She can either sink to the bottom of society, dragged down by the weight of her responsibilities, increasingly urgent preoccupations and terminal sleeplessness — or she can, in the encouraging words of at least one of these parenting books, ‘do something about it’.

How, then, to render maternity acceptable? Gina Ford’s dogmas, like those of many of her followers, provide a superficially compelling solution. Professionalise motherhood. Rationalise it. Wrap it up in the grander trappings of medicine and psychology. Replace intuition with science, experience with theory, good sense with a made-up melange of timetables, menus and crude Skinnerian behavioural tricks that frankly for most of us went out with the Cold War — or better still, if you have the right sort of income, get a 24-hour nanny to do these things for you. Create a race of children willing to live within the boundaries placed by conference calls, meetings, someone else’s agenda. ‘Train’ them to moderate all their most basic bodily functions so that they won’t keep anyone awake, or spoil anyone’s dinner, or take up any time that might otherwise be spent on something more important. Dress all of this up in a modern version of ‘it’s for their own good’ — as if the ability to lie quietly for twelve hours in a silent, darkened room, alone, was of any use to anyone, except perhaps a specialised subgroup of depressives who, I can promise you, are perfectly capable of developing this skill for themselves in due course. Control, though, has somehow become the great desideratum of contemporary parenthood. Well, at least it enables mothers to go back to work, to achieve ever better consumer durables and to live up to the dictates of a particularly austere brand of feminist teaching while still keeping their boyfriends interested. This is called ‘getting your old self back’, and is highly encouraged.

What grates, here, is less some putative authoritarianism, though, no prettier on the left than it is on the right, than the stark sense of fear that underlies these expedients. They suggest not a generation of adults easily able to cope with their own young, but rather — and surely, more alarmingly — a generation of ageing would-be ‘yoof’ quaking in terror at the twin prospects of full-blown adulthood and permanent commitment. By packaging these two together, it is as if children constitute a threat so baleful that it can only be contained or neutralised under expert guidance. For the language of fear is everywhere in Gina Ford’s books, and in those of the marginally less strident Baby Whisperer and a dozen other clones, all full of narratives along the lines of ‘X and Y were a lovely couple, an arts director and a graphic designer, but darling little Z was making their lives hell until I intervened …’ — and indeed I suspect this is the fantasy of victimhood and rescue that underpins the Super Nanny television series, too. Quick, bring in the rules, the routines, the emergency exit to professional assistance! The idea that adults and infants might, between themselves, have the wit to evolve some functional, if not flawless modus vivendi is treated as outlandish. That, after all, might involve treating parenthood as if it were interesting, important, even fun in itself — which might suggest that there was something to life beyond youth, freedom from responsibility or a particularly arid notion of individuality. And it might also suggest that raising her own young is a subject to which an intelligent woman might wish to commit at least a few years, to some beneficial effect. But that wouldn’t do, would it, because even the stupid and poor and ordinary have children, and who would want to be like them?

Nobody’s perfect — unless they’ve bought the DVD
In case that putative ‘intelligent woman’ wants to rear her little ones her own way, though, back come the experts. Self-doubt, after all, sells books and videos and television advertising. So the experts start work as early as possible, before conception, with their worrying counsels to perfection — their detox programmes, their nutrient cocktails and their blood-curdling cautionary tales. It’s as the bump starts to grow, though, and once the disconcerting hormonal all-change is underway, that the injunctions really kick in. Positive pregnancy test? Congratulations — and by the way, you’d better have given up smoking, smoky environments, alcohol, caffeine, diet drinks, nuts, shellfish, raw fish, raw eggs, soft cheese, honey, loud music, fake tan, hair colouring, effective cleaning products and anything else you might wish to eat, drink, experience or smear onto nearby surfaces. Consume enough oily fish but not too much — exercise enough but not too much, and only in the right ways — and remember, don’t feel stressed — it’s bad for the baby! Once the little one turns up, the advice is just as forbidding, if increasingly contradictory as the weeks and months go by. Go organic! Breast-feed forever! Do baby yoga! Teach your baby to swim! Sing songs! Do indescribably creepy exercises! Talk in a weirdly mannered way in order to boost your baby’s language skills! Go to classes! Take lessons! Buy non-embarrassing — for which read ‘expensive’ — brands! Soothe your natural parental anxieties by spending lots and lots of money!

Failure to do any of these things will, of course, result in a less-than-ideal child who will doubtless go on to blame you for all the terrible disadvantages under which he or she will have to labour for a lifetime. (The fact that fashions in these matters change almost weekly is best ignored at this point. Science always knows best, and will know even better in a fortnight.) The notion that none of us is perfect — like the concomitant observation that most interesting people are actually quite alarmingly flawed — never gets a look in. Nor does the fact that human life is God-given and precious in its own right, however unlike our arbitrary and ever-changing models of ‘perfection’ it might be. Given all these discouragements, then, some more subtle than others but all cumulatively quite effective, is it any wonder that women increasingly wait for decades before getting up the nerve to take on the rather unappealing challenges of motherhood — and then are so often left feeling like failures once they do?

For it’s hard, faced with all this, to remember that conception, pregnancy, birth and parenthood are both some of the most natural activities in the world, and also some of the most universal. This doesn’t mean that these activities aren’t deeply inflected with culture, because their very centrality more or less ensures that they must be. What it does mean, however, is that there are issues of style, taste, status and clannishness operating that probably ought to be distinguished from the more urgent claims of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. And this is where real human advice, transmitted amongst friends and neighbours and kinsfolk, probably had the edge on advice books. For all their bigotry and superstition, old wives’ tales about the mechanics of parenthood, because they were based in a recognisable world of highly localised norms and values — and because at the margins they were, necessarily, negotiable — almost certainly presented a picture of childrearing that was at once more anecdotal, more recognisable and more achievable. By contrast, today’s parenting books — with their heavy burden of tacit assumptions about class, income and morality always threatening to break through the glossy coating of objective scientific veracity — conjure up a world that is idealised, a bit abstract yet often dauntingly at variance with real experience. For while parenting books are full of absolutes, parenting itself is, first and foremost, a non-stop progression of increasingly complicated, imperfect, inescapable compromises.

Of Mill and babyhood
Like all how-to books, parenting books are necessarily thick with the tidy stuff of generalisation. Yet to the novice mother, one of the most remarkable things about babies is their individuality. Even in the womb, babies find ways of expressing themselves with kicks, rolls and the odd unprovoked punch to the maternal rib-cage. And that’s only the beginning. Certainly, for me, the two months my son spent in Special Care were an education in the apparently infinite variousness of the newborn. The personalities of the tiny people who shared a room with my firstborn are as real to me — and, frankly, just as lavishly eccentric — as the personalities of my friends from university, publishing or politics. Which is to say, the young are no more similar than their parents, siblings or the domestic setups in which they’ll grow up. Once home, babies have to slot themselves into an established yet labile web of relationships, practical circumstances, styles of living. Parenting books occasionally make tokenistic nods towards non-standard situations — one-parent families, multiple births, infants who are disabled, premature or otherwise non-mainstream — but then go back to imposing their own preconceptions onto a million different complicated, messy, divergent situations. What happens, though, when the preconceptions simply can’t be made to fit?

Everyone’s different. Some babies, for instance, take to routines — some don’t — while some practically organise signed petitions and media campaigns requesting the wretched things. Much to my embarrassment, my son was one of the latter, his firm demand for a 7 pm bedtime at six months every bit as unmistakeable as my child-of-the-sixties disinclination to impose such burdensome, authoritarian strictures on him. And that, too, was an education for me — not because it proved that Gina Ford was somehow ‘right’, but conversely, because it brought home to me truth that parenting is very much a two-way conversation, and that just because one half of the conversation is mostly conducted at the level of gurgles and shrieks doesn’t mean that it ought to be disregarded. On the contrary, it really is worth parents’ time to become a bit more attuned to the gurgles and shrieks. Looking at a book, rather than a baby, to find out what that baby needs can be — as I learned — every bit as dysfunctional as getting hysterical over what the Special Care Unit’s heart monitor says when the infant in front of you is palpably pink, lively and fine. Books are fine as far as they go — but at best, that’s a limited distance. Ultimately, though, solutions marketed as ‘one size fits all’ end up wearing less comfortably, and less attractively, than the bespoke alternative. Looking at books is no good if you don’t also have the courage to face up to real life in its full, disconcerting untidiness and variety, before doing your best to deal with it.

Pace Tolstoy, even the happiest families are all happy in their own different ways. Each has its own rituals and conventions, its own set of hearth deities to propitiate. Here I can’t help recalling a libertarian couple I used to know many years ago now. Active advocates of home schooling and much else in that optimistically alternative vein, I once visited their house for some sort of worthy talk which I’ve now entirely forgotten. Their domestic arrangements, though, I remember vividly. Their toddler children (called, according to legend, Liberty and Lunacy, although I don’t think that can really be true) were lively, pretty, engaging — but more than a little wild, since their parents didn’t believe in curtailing their freedoms in any way — hence much ostentatious trampling over the sofas in dirty trainers, treading crisps and cake into the carpets, high-spirited shouting and so forth. It looked like fun, but was also, truth be told, loud and distracting — a bit red in tooth and claw for the childless amongst us, certainly, and not conducive to learned conversation. Strangely, however, once the speaker was due to begin his remarks, Liberty and her little sibling were encouraged to explore their freedoms in the garden, rather than the house, in the company of their father, whose freedom seemed to lead him, at exactly the same time, in the same direction. Or as my friend Brian sagely put it, all families have rules — they’re just different sets of rules, expressing different priorities. But then if Brian ever gets around to writing a book about parenting, it will, unlike most, be very much worth reading — even for those who aren’t parents.

The point, though, is this. What would have been dysfunctional chaos in other households more or less worked amongst my libertarian friends, if only because they had the wit, self-assurance and stubbornness necessary to create, maintain and periodically revise a style of parenting that was consonant both with their children’s personalities, and with the realities of how they, as a family, lived their lives. There was book-learning there — but the books weren’t parenting books, at least in any conventional sense, and the result was cross-checked frequently with real life. Perfect? No, but the result was workable, which is pretty much all one can ask of the science of parenting.

This isn’t to say, however, that all lifestyles are created equal. Clearly, ‘chaos’ founded on much mature reflection, carefully monitored and underpinned by carefully-chosen if wrong-headed quotations from John Stuart Mill, as well as lots of affection, is not exactly the same thing as the chaos that arises, say, from a bad smack habit, criminality and untreated mental illness. And here, a different set of memories come into play. Our hospital’s Special Care Baby Unit, as well as looking after small, early and sickly babies, cared for those whose mothers were addicted to crack, heroin and so forth. The result was like living in a Theodore Dalrymple article that just wouldn’t come to an end. I shall never forget the chain-smoking teenage traveller who told me, striking a distinct note of self-congratulation, that during her pregnancy she’d given up ‘everything except the methadone, ‘cause the baby has to come first, you know what I’m saying?’ There were always a lot of nurses on duty when she and the father of her child came in for a visit, as the couple used to help themselves, in a rare fit of enterprise, to painkillers and clean syringes. So while I’m not generally a great fan of the Social Services, I — like most of the Special Care nurses who saw fit to pronounce on the matter — was, if anything, relieved when I heard that the couple’s little girl had been taken into care. My own youthful libertarianism notwithstanding, there are some sets of rules and priorities which don’t really deserve to be handed on to the next generation.

All of which takes us some way, thankfully, from most parents’ experience. Both my libertarian friends and my Special Care contemporaries represent extremes of the child-rearing spectrum. Most of us, in contrast, exist somewhere in between, making our own accommodations with convention and necessity. And some of these accommodations, obviously, will be more successful than others, just as some people are just basically better at all sorts of things — keeping relationships going, say, or surviving on very little sleep — than other people are. There are issues of effort involved here, but also of aptitude and opportunity. Some people make parenthood look easy, while some people don’t. And sadly, past a point, no glossy hardback, complete with illustrations, useful tables and the obligatory celebrity endorsement, is going to be able to do anything about that.

Language and its limits
For in that sense, parenthood is simply a mirror of life itself, which perhaps is why middle-aged, under-employed, over-reflective types tend to fear it. Whether you’re an icy-veined control-freak who lives to make lists, or, alternatively, a warm-hearted if disorganised free spirit, having a baby shines a merciless spotlight on areas of your psychopathology which might otherwise have gone happily under-exposed. And while the parenting books you end up liking will certainly reflect whatever’s wrong with you, they are absolutely certain not to be able to change it.

Becoming a parent also brings to the surface childhood memories that had long been buried, and while for some this will be like greeting old friends, for others it’s more like excavating the scene of a particularly egregious and messy war-crime. To invoke, once more, the language of those tiresome Naomi Woolf-style professional victims, the layers of self exposed at moments like this can feel very raw indeed. And here lies the reason why certain parenting styles which, while they may work perfectly well for our friends and neighbours, will always be anathema. Whether it’s some quirk regarding breastfeeding, live-in nannies, raised voices, dressing little girls in pink, denying babies refined sugars or slathering on the high-factor sun-screen for every journey out to the corner post-box, it’s less a question of absolute right and wrong — because honestly, how much can most of this stuff really matter? — than an issue of horses for courses. And for most of us, like it or not, there’s always going to be a particular fence or brook, apparently innocuous to anyone else, that for our own good reasons, however inarticulable and mysterious, we cannot possibly cross.

And this, if nothing else, is reason enough never to be too censorious about other people’s child-rearing strategies, as long as they don’t seem to do any real harm. If parents sometimes seem at once insanely dogmatic and oddly inarticulate when it comes to their child-rearing decisions, this may arise less out of the arrogance it resembles, than out of a consciousness that they have never had to make such important decisions ever before, coupled with a guilty lack of certainty that what they are doing is right or even sensible. And the gravity of this situation is exactly what makes it hard to discuss. The issues involved in fostering a new life can seem too deep, too bound up in past and future, too all-encompassing to speak about directly. No wonder so many people resort to the shorthand of ‘Gina’ or ‘Dr Sears’ in order to explain and justify the decisions they make.

And anyway, even if they wanted to try, what is there to say? The solvents of reason, analysis and even humour fail to make much of a dent when they come up against the momentous facts of human reproduction. Words fail to meet the challenge, even when it comes to the most basic practicalities of parenting. What is there to say, for instance, about those nights, early on, where two consecutive hours of sleep seem at once the most sublime and improbable of all debauched, exotic, surreptitious fantasies? What is there to say about a life that has suddenly degenerated into an apparently endless process of feeding, watering, dressing and scraping the layers of accumulated rusk off another human being? What is there to say about suddenly having no time that’s your own, because when you’re not looking after your baby you just can’t stop thinking about him, even when you are far too tired to think properly about anything at all? Worst of all, though, is the impossibility of describing why, rather than being awful, this whole strange business is so clearly one of the most wonderful, rewarding experiences on earth.

But then it’s always the fate of love — any real love — to collapse into clichés the moment it touches language. And thus we fall back upon stock images — that little hand grasping a finger, the sleepy little sigh, that first-thing-in-the-morning smile that illuminates the universe — knowing that they will turn to sentimental stodge the moment they hit the paper. Does anyone else understand? Is it like this for anyone else? Does it matter?

In truth, though, there’s very little point even in attempting to talk about these things. If you try, you’ll find that experienced parents nod sympathetically, although actually their minds are probably elsewhere, worrying about what they are going to feed their little ones for dinner or whether they remembered to put the stair-gates in place. Your child, for all his various merits, certainly seems less interesting to them than their own. Meanwhile, your childless pals may pretend to listen, but are really secretly feeling nothing but rising contempt for your self-pity, laziness, deteriorating standards of grooming, lack of sparkle and the faint air of baby-vomit and desperation that accompanies you wherever you go. They resent the fact that you don’t have time for them any more, while finding they have less and less time for you. (And don’t pretend that’s not what the childless are feeling — I know, I used to feel it myself.) None of them, in any event, will be there to help you at 2 am with a baby who, despite having absolutely nothing visibly wrong with him, won’t stop expressing his discontents in the most pointed fashion — any more than they will fully share your delight at that first little tooth or garbled and slobbery phrase, more magical than all the greatest poetry ever written.

No, there may once have been a golden age of extended families, overlapping generations, large supportive communities and respect for the realities of procreation in which things were otherwise, but — well, not now. What, then, ought you, in the words of that famous book title, to expect when you are expecting? For what it’s worth, here’s my conclusion: that parenthood will be about a billion times harder than you ever imagined, but also a billion times more worthwhile. And what does it take to be a passable parent? Not much — just a combination of complete self-confidence and total, boundless humility. No wonder it’s so simple. No wonder so many people make such a great success of it.

Books and beyond
Finally, though, what about the books? The parenting guides I purchased over the last eighteen months have, as time has passed, met chequered fates. An elite few remain on the nursery shelf, there to provide an explanation whenever my son ingests or excretes something particularly unlikely, or to provide new ideas for things to puree, or to allow me a guilty peek, now and then, at those lists of ‘developmental milestones’ to see how he’s shaping up in relation to his various little peers. (The answer to this latter point is that he’s doing very well, thanks, although he does tend to develop in the patchy way beloved of babies, at least a few of whom probably parse good classical Greek and learn to dance Highland reels before they bother with anything as dreary as crawling, say, or playing peek-a-boo.) Most of those parenting books, though, are hidden away at the back of the nursery cupboard, behind the arcane paraphernalia of that long-retired hospital-grade milking machine and, last time I looked, a few ancient John Updike novels I meant to clear away during that lost third trimester. They lie there disregarded, unimportant additions to a house full of thousands of volumes on hundreds of subjects, their contents variously welcome and internalised, shunned or simply forgotten. Having validated my instinctive prejudices, while at the same time giving my own highly personalised experiences something to react against, their work is done. But then that hardly distinguishes them from most books, really, does it?

Faced with real life, parenting books are at best of limited use. Their worst flaw is one implicit in literature, which is a tendency to encourage readers to seek refuge in a parallel world that is neatly schematic, regulated to ensure the correct ratio of levity to gravity, securely under the control of some reassuringly persuasive, all-powerful authorial voice. Not least, in a society where too many have traded faith and tradition for the ever-inflating currency of unthinking liberalism, literature is a world that can feel very safe indeed. In writing this, I don’t mean to sound superior. Most of us end up seeking sanctuary there from time to time. Who hasn’t? It’s the world to which I retreated during those early days of pregnancy, when nothing in this world seemed very safe or certain at all, and yet where there was nothing I craved — not even avocados or ice-cream, or possibly both together — as much as safety and security.

Nor, it must be said, even in those days did I look exclusively to the likes of Gina Ford, Dr Sears and the Baby Whisperer. The parenting books were, in fact, little more than a hormonally-driven, short-term supplement to my normal diet of history, art criticism, biography, unpopular modernist poetry, the odd ghost story and much else. Books have seen me through plenty in my life. I couldn’t easily manage without them. Hence it’s no surprise that my son is growing up in a house that overflows with books. Already he enjoys them, chewing their covers and reducing dust-jackets to expensive confetti. But I doubt it will end there. Presumably in due course he’ll inherit, along with so much other worrying genetic baggage — right-of-centre politics, a weakness for neo-romantic painting, a fondness for cats — his parents’ more than slightly incontinent enthusiasm for the printed page, the wrongly forgotten author, the apparently infinite promise of the obscure provincial old bookshop and the dusty riches that lie within.

Yet the charm of books is exactly their problem, which is that ultimately they offer only an escape-hatch from life, rather than a route of access into it. The illusion of control they provide is spurious. The intimation of choice they imply is fictive. The neat dichotomies they construct won’t withstand the faintest breeze wafting in from the real world. The truth is that history, character, culture, instinct and accident govern our lives to a far greater extent than most of us might wish to believe. Books may throw up a layer of whitewash over these things, smartening up our prospects for the moment, imposing a sense of coherence on the scene, but the day always comes when experience — a love, a loss, a birth — washes the surfaces clean again. And it’s at moments like that when one remembers most intensely how important it is to have something more than books on which to rely.

Dr Bunny Smedley lives in London with her husband and their son, who will soon be one year old.

No one who keeps an eye on the British contemporary art scene will need a much of an introduction to Rachel Whiteread, the 42-year old artist whose massive installation, Embankment, currently occupies the east end of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Whiteread’s name has long loomed large in BritArt circles. Her work — mostly casts of ordinary, every-day objects — has already found a place in the text-books. As major figure in Freeze who soon attracted the notice of uber-gallerist Karsten Schubert, she was an early recruit to the senior ranks of the Young British Artists (or YBAs, to give them their marginally catchier, Saatchi-generated brand name) and if she seemed to stand aloof from some of her coevals’ more outrageous antics, she certainly received her fair share of the hype that now seems, in retrospect, to have been that group’s outstanding positive achievement.

Not least, as every proper YBA apparently was required to do, Whiteread achieved her very own success de scandal. In 1993 House (a cast of a demolished house, later itself demolished) in London’s East End, made headlines of the sort that at the time were de rigeur for anyone angling for central placement in the BritArt pantheon. Frankly, though — and it’s a point with some relevance to the rest of this review — it’s quite a challenge these days to remember quite what all the fuss was about, so grossly did Sensation inflate the shock-horror currency soon thereafter. In the same year Whiteread won a Turner Prize for her casts, whilst concurrently managing to emerge with dignity from a laboured Situationist prank on the part of the K Foundation, which might almost be seen as a tribute in itself.

In 1997 she represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale (various casts of things, deployed tastefully around the British pavilion) — the first woman to receive this distinction. Her work Plinth (a cast of a plinth) has occupied the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. Unlike the bulk of her fellow YBAs, she’s even made some impact beyond the limits of central London, having been commissioned, for instance, to create a Holocaust memorial in Vienna (casts of shelves filled with books, their spines turned inward). She is represented by Gagosian. Her work (casts, generally, but also drawings of past casts and plans for future casts) is held in all sorts of collections, public and private, here and abroad. She’s been profiled everywhere. In other words, when it comes to glittering prizes conferred by the international arts establishment, she has had pretty much all the ones going — the real things, too, not just casts this time.

Yet despite the terribly dated YBA label (sooo early 1997, darling) and the detumescence of the Saatchi bubble, Whiteread has somehow managed to retain a reputation for seriousness, sensitivity, hard work and formal rigour. She is eminently capable of securing praise, even genuine admiration, from quarters that other YBAs just don’t reach. Part of this is, I think, the fruit of circumspection. Whiteread comes across in interviews as a down-to-earth, practical, agreeably mumsy figure — far more at home in her studio, wearing jeans and covered with plaster dust, than in the glare of gala private views or at Shoreditch club openings. We know less of her extra-curricular hobbies, for instance, than we do about those of Damien Hirst; we are less familiar with her décolletage than that of Tracy Emin, and certainly less bored of hearing about her glamorous pals (assuming she possesses such things) than those of Sam Taylor-Wood. Whiteread’s work, in other words, is very public — the artist herself far less so. Which is appropriate, in that much of the meaning of her work is to be found in the interplay of surface versus content, inside versus out, what we see every day as opposed to all the many empty spaces that we discount, overlook or forget.

Casting doubts
Well, that’s the theory, anyway. But how much substance is there behind claims for Whiteread’s status as one of the greatest artists of her generation? Whiteread has evidently learned most of the obvious things which can be learned from Eva Hesse, minus Hesse’s pervasive air of creepy bleakness, as well as from the canonical 1960s minimalists such as Carl Andre and Donald Judd. She has mapped out a particular territory of concerns — the domestic sphere, including rooms and the things these contain — and turned it inside out through this persistent business of making casts. She has cast in a variety of media (wax, resin, plaster, rubber) and has a strong feeling for the sensual qualities of her materials. She also possesses a far better eye for colour than one might expect, achieved through the medium itself or through the play of light on a textured surface, and she’s not squeamish about using colour to achieve emotive, expressive ends. So it’s easy enough to see why she’s received the accolades she has. She does something that makes a sort of conceptual sense, and she’s learned to do it well.

But if one were setting out to make a case against Whiteread’s pre-eminent place in the contemporary art world, the materials would not be difficult to find. The main complaint would, surely, revolve around the somewhat repetitive nature of her work. When does the ‘persistent exploration of a theme’, or ‘refinement of a highly personalised technique’, shade into, well, laziness? Over at The Jackdaw, the reliably grumpy David Lee labels Whiteread a ‘one trick pony’, and while doubtless her admirers could enthuse for days on end about her merits, writing essays about them in all the most credible arts magazines, it has to be said that even her staunchest defenders might have a hard time identifying tricks number two, three and beyond. Meanwhile the sort of critic who gets worked up about issues of skill and facture might question the extent to which artistic ability per se — rather than one good idea plus a Filofax full of the telephone numbers for competent fabricators — underpins Whiteread’s work. (To be fair, though, many of the smaller works are actually executed by the artist herself, as well as designed by her.) Finally, there’s bound to be a hard core of doubters somewhere out there who would presumably raise the usual ‘what is art?’ questions with reference to Whiteread’s oeuvre, suspicious that making cast of things might not really have much to do with art at all.

Those, at least, are straightforward objections. All of them raise issues far outside the scope of a review. More to the point, though, none of them, to be honest, bothers me enormously. My own concern about Whiteread’s work is a rather different, more personal one. Here, strangely, doubts seem to flow from exactly those points where Whiteread’s work appears most successful. Compared with most of her YBA contemporaries, in whose work some notional flash of irony again and again fails to disguise a tediously predictable literal-mindedness, the evasive, non-literal qualities of Whiteread’s sculpture can easily be made to look enticingly deep — but in that company, what wouldn’t? Similarly, compared with the wilful ugliness of so much contemporary art, Whiteread’s casts are, whatever else one might say about them, sometimes very attractive — but does this mean that her qualities are purely relative ones? Or to reduce the charge to its most basic level — is Whiteread only any good because her BritArt contemporaries’ work is mostly so shockingly, culpably bad?

Absences, presences
We are all, I suppose, hapless victims of the circumstances in which we first encounter an artist’s work. Hence it probably means something that my strongest memories of the fabled Sensation involve Whiteread’s Untitled (One Hundred Spaces), a series of one hundred resin casts of the empty space under a variety of chairs and stools, set out, rank and file, in a room of their own.

The work generated a lot of comment at the time — not least from critics absolutely panting to discuss anything other than Hirst’s virtines, Harvey’s Myra, Ofili’s elephant turds and the Chapman brothers’ apparently inexhaustible bad taste. By contrast, in front of Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) there was much to be said about making the intangible tangible, about the ghostly and forgotten, about materialism and Thatcher’s Britain — and plenty of people ready to say it, too. Minimalism can be lovely that way, creating a vacuum into which oceans of prose are always attempting to flow. Art that doesn’t attempt to say everything immediately, that doesn’t wear its heart on its patinated surface, is so much more fun to write about than the other sort. Given the choice between Richard Billingham’s family snaps, Michael Landy’s creaking jokes and a mysterious mattress cast in rubber that looked like marble, who wouldn’t opt for the mattress?

But at the time I wasn’t thinking about writing. I was simply — insofar as there’s ever anything simple about it — experiencing the work. And yet what sticks in my mind from Sensation is, perhaps oddly, the sheer beauty of this particular example of Whiteread’s efforts — the slightly murky translucence of the resin, the delicately rhythmic variation of size and shape and surface, the purples and greens and ambers, so deliciously reminiscent of antique gemstones, old glass or, even more oddly, old-fashioned boiled sweets. For it has to be said that Whiteread’s minimalism is, unlike the minimalism of the 1960s from which it is in part descended, anything but cold and intellectual. Instead it can look sensuous, luxurious — romantic, even, with its appeals to a recent or perhaps ancient past. In any event, compared with most of what surrounded it in Sensation — all things lurid and lame, the porn, the gore, the tawdry unpleasantness, the desperate and febrile attention-seeking superficiality — it really did seem almost unbelievably effective. From that point on, then, despite all these reservations, I’ve had a lot of time for Whiteread’s work.

Doubtless, Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) was benefiting here from the company it kept. As sculpture goes, it’s not just that these casts didn’t add up to the wrecked magnificence of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, or the robust perfection of Donatello’s Gattamelata, or the Bernini confection of your choice — most obscure English parish churches probably contain handmade works of sculpture that could easily compete with Whiteread’s best efforts in terms of formal persuasiveness, technical skill and gut-level impact. But that’s hardly the point. No one was setting up those sorts of comparisons, and anyway, what one feels about those works inevitably has a lot to do with their context, too. Instead, at the time, standing there in the Royal Academy, surrounded by so much pointless rubbish making great claims for itself in terms of ‘art’, I was struck by the way in which Whiteread had created a tiny island in which a few older cultural values — a hint of detachment, a whisper of beauty, a shimmer of mystery if not quite revelation — seemed at very least not to have been entirely forgotten. It was easy to linger there, drifting back and forth amongst the candy-coloured resin cubes. Not just easy, either — it was pleasant as well. The experience was a powerful one. And so probably that way of viewing Whiteread’s work has never entirely left me.

Thinking outside of the box
I was reminded of all this last week, when Whiteread’s Embankment was finally unveiled at Tate Modern. The work, which is enormous, has a typically small-scale, almost cosy creation story. Apparently Whiteread, engaged in the sad business of clearing her late mother’s house, found an old cardboard box. The box had once contained Whiteread’s toys, and then was used to store Christmas decorations. All this happened at a time in her life when Whiteread was moving house, moving studio — when much of her life was in boxes.

Let’s allow the unshakeable authority of the Tate Modern press release to take over at this point:

The box had an emotional resonance for [Whiteread]. It prompted consideration of the associations with the box in our daily lives. She began to explore the universal quality of the box in its widespread use as she came upon them squashed in the street, stacked in the back of a lorry or used more inventively such as for solar ovens or children’s play houses. The box also has links to memory and loss, as well as having a latent familiarity. Massed together, the boxes invite parallels with the museum as a keeper of collective memory.

Hence Whiteread’s Unilever scheme, which involved casting ten ordinary cardboard boxes of varying sizes and shapes, then having some 14,000 of these commercially fabricated in semi-opaque white resin. Whiteread spent about five weeks stacking and gluing together the resulting resin forms at one end of the Turbine Hall. The building-sized stacks themselves vary in scale, shape and orderliness. Some are tidy, encouraging the viewer to appreciate the repetitive pattern made by their surfaces. Others are chaotic, random, precarious. Visitors are able to wander amongst the stacks, the tallest of which must be many dozens of feet high, or to observe the installation from the floors above. Special new lighting beams down upon the casts, creating strong shadows and producing an eerie silvery glow as the light reflects off the many slightly textured resin surfaces.

What to make of it all? In my book the only truly unforgiveable fault in a critic is to lie about his genuine reactions in the face of the actual work. Here, then, is the simple truth. I thought Embankment was perfectly delightful.

Preconceptions, lack of preconceptions, mood, surroundings, companions present and absent, incidental train of thought, the weather outside — they all play their part in the personal success or failure of a particular work. I first saw Embankment at the press view on a warm, sunny, suspiciously summery day last week. As sometimes happens at press views and on warm autumn mornings, there was something of a holiday feel to the whole enterprise. Coming down the big ramp from the West entrance to Tate Modern, it was just possible to glimpse something white just behind the central gallery. By the time I’d been handed my press pack I was sufficiently determined to see more that I quickly tucked the folder under my arm, unopened and unread, and set off to explore the installation. And so, because I didn’t yet know the story behind Embankment’s creation, I was under no pressure to unpack (as it were) the metaphor of boxes, their emotional resonances and symbolic freight. In fact, since I didn’t know that cardboard boxes were in any way associated with the work, boxes weren’t, oddly enough, on my mind at all.

Instead, I was thinking of archaeology. I have already mentioned that Whiteread’s Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) reminded me, with its murky lustre and faded colours, of old glass or ancient gems, but it’s also the case that Untitled (Yellow Bath), her rubber and polystyrene cast of a bathtub, resembled nothing more than an incredibly old sarcophagus cleansed of its bones and dust. Actually, the more one thinks about it, there turn out to be abundant references to archaeology in Whiteread’s work. The whole business of casting, for instance, has been associated with archaeology for a very long time, perhaps reaching its zenith in those terrible casts taken, from 1861 onwards, from the gaps left by the bodies of the men, women and children killed in the explosion of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD — some of the most upsetting things I’ve ever seen, by the way, if only because it is so tempting to read the indistinct, contorted, writhing forms as ‘art’ until one stops to realise what they actually are instead. (So you see, I’m no more immune to ‘what is art?’ quandaries than anyone else — they just strike us all at different moments.)

But casts are also what conveyed, in the main, knowledge of the high art of classical antiquity to much of the Western world; the Greek government’s refusal to display, at the Acropolis museum, casts of the Elgin Marbles reminds one of the issues casts are still capable of raising, even now, regarding absence and presence, loss and memory, simulacrum and real thing. All of which is a long way of explaining how, as I walked through the labyrinthine structures of Embankment, amongst what looked like outraged tombs or piles of broken stones, I felt that I was somehow wandering through some roofed-over portion of an archaeological site, in which some of the structures were still quite well-preserved and others a bit of a mess, such as one sees at Delphi, or Cumae, or indeed many dozens of other such places. Only of course the site wasn’t real, the heaped-up stones weren’t stones, and the feelings one always has amongst ruins were, obviously, completely spurious. In other words, ‘art’ managed to intrude, in the good old fashioned sense of something that’s a man-made thing, the result of human skill and enterprise — in this case, a sort of happy deception. The conceptual issues raised here were gentle, non-insistent, faintly romantic ones. Rather than being harangued by Embankment, as so often happens with contemporary art, I felt I was — to use another good, old-fashioned word — being diverted by it.

Meanwhile, others were reading the installation in their own ‘incorrect’ ways. Some, the reviews would tell us later, were reminded of blocks of ice, which is quite neat, as Whiteread recently undertook a journey into the Arctic Circle for some vague purpose associated with global warming. Many saw it as landscape, replete with peaks and ravines and non-insistent references to the Sublime. Best of all, a charming member of Tate Modern’s catering staff, while offering me a cup of coffee, opined that the structures, which she much admired, reminded her of piles and piles of sugar-cubes. The implied tribute to the Tate Gallery’s founder would have been a particularly apt one. But the main point here is that people — real people too, not just the air-kissing, back-stabbing press view crowd — seemed genuinely to enjoy the act of exploring the work. This turns out to be a markedly sociable experience, with visitors sharing smiles, and sometimes even comments, as they encounter each other round the back of some of the taller, more vertical structures. As I left the Turbine Hall a little while after the press view had finished, there were already children chasing each other around the stacked-up cubes, and couples strolling hand-in-hand around the outskirts, looking up at the towering forms — all illuminated by that strange, uncanny, milky white light. Whatever doubts I may still harbour about the genuine quality of Whiteread’s achievement, I felt happier for having experienced Embankment, and I think these other people did, too.

White cubed
Unilever’s Turbine Hall commissions are, famously, something of a poisoned chalice. Not every artist has what it takes to function on that enormous, industrial scale, so much in the public eye and so open to comparison with all that precedes and follows. Louise Bourgeois’s staircases and spider didn’t make much impact, whereas Anish Kapoor’s big ear-trumpet, or calla-lily, or whatever it was, succeeded mostly because the red he selected was such a ravishingly rich one, so saturated that it seemed almost to throb and pulse around the edges of one’s field of vision; having few expectations about Olafur Eliasson’s quirky Weather Project, most visitors ended up loving it, whilst the wretched Bruce Nauman, surely not even one of the better artists Fort Wayne, Indiana has ever produced, should have been made to give his payment back, so lame, lazy and annoying was his ‘sound installation’ offering.

Whiteread’s Embankment has, for its part, received mixed reviews. Most critics, of course, loved it — at least in the docile, sporting, uncritical way in which their species invariably falls in love when confronted with the combination of A-list artist and A-list arts institution. A few, though, voiced doubts — and not just the excellent Brian Sewell, either, although his accusations of ‘meritless gigantism’ must have delighted arts editors everywhere, if only for making it possible to claim that this entirely inoffensive work was somehow ‘controversial’.

Where there was dissatisfaction, it seemed to spring as much from the press release, or at any rate claims made for Embankment, as it did from the installation itself. One critic, for instance, wrote at some length about the whole notion of boxes, and the interpretation of the work as an enormous storehouse, alluding perhaps to the museum as a receptacle for our collective memory — or words to that effect. (I am paraphrasing, and not providing a link, because the actual article isn’t available online.) This critic felt — and it’s a reasonable point — that this didn’t quite work, because the polythene casts are so very clearly solid things, not boxes. They don’t open, and they are empty casts, so the viewer is perfectly aware that there’s nothing, not even ‘collective memory’, stored inside them. So the concept, and its apparent failure, got in the way of the actual experience of the work. Others simply weren’t impressed. Maybe they came with different expectations, or in a different mood, or with different requirements. Whatever worked for me, in any event, wandering in and out of the weird white-out ambience of Embankment, didn’t work for them. It’s as simple, and as difficult, as that.

So once again, my response to Whiteread remains ambivalent, and where it’s most positive, more than slightly guilty. Oh, I enjoyed Embankment, but I can’t help thinking that I did so more at the level of an entertainment of some sort — a variation in the routine of daily life, a brief and cost-free holiday from my everyday world — rather than in the way I’d normally expect to enjoy ‘art’. On the one hand, this may signal a defect in my understanding of what installations are meant to do. On the other, it may signal a defect in the boundary-fence that separates contemporary art and life.

As ever, my enthusiasm for the work may have something to do with all that it is not. Unlike some of the efforts elsewhere in Tate Modern, Embankment didn’t seem to have any very obvious didactic or polemical point. It didn’t even seem to call much attention to its own nature as a work of art. It isn’t transgressive, or disturbing, or even particularly disorienting. It’s pleasant enough to look at — certainly better than the ‘deranged Argos warehouse’ some papers have suggested — but hardly in a way that proclaims from the rooftops either the formal brilliance or the theoretical savvy of its creator.

Instead, whatever she may have intended, Whiteread seems to have produced a highly functional, fun, slightly dreamy space in which children can run round in circles, playing hide-and-seek, whilst adults wander here and there, radiating benign unconcern, or amusement, or occasionally something marginally more dynamic, eyeing each other up. Some of us have long suspected that Tate Modern’s true role, given its terminally flawed collection and odd acquisitions strategy, is in fact not as a museum at all, but rather as a nexus for ‘see and be seen’ activity — a kind of indoor ramblas or boulevard for a rainy, chilly nation. To the extent this is in any way the case, Whiteread has responded to the suggestion admirably, by dressing up the Turbine Hall with a sort of indoor pleasure-garden, a Winter Wonderland fantasia, bathed in bright light as if in defiance of the dark winter days that lie ahead of us. Thinking of Whiteread’s stature, it’s hard not to warm to the sheer practicality of the work. For despite its scale, it somehow comes across as modest and generous, where so many lesser artists might have been proudly, aggressively self-indulgent.

Is Embankment art? Is it any good? And insofar as it’s any good, is its goodness just the inverse of so much contemporary art badness? Embarrassingly, I’m still not sure. However much I enjoy some of Whiteread’s work in practice, many of the claims that others make for it strike me as silly and inflated. Perhaps, ultimately, it’s no more than a reflection of the aesthetically unambitious, dumbed-down age in which we live this is so. All I do know, however, is that I’m due to return to Tate Modern in a fortnight’s time — and I’m genuinely looking forward to experiencing this likeable, memorable creation once again.

There are plenty of British institutions which, having developed out of some unrepeatable melange of historical contingency, accident and the arbitrary whims of those long dead, and having acquired over the intervening years the inimitable patina of fond familiarity, are now, in their haphazard, unselfconscious perfection, the wonder of rationalists, systematisers and foreigners more generally. One thinks in this context of our great unwritten constitution, our legal system, the structures of our established church, even the rules of cricket.

And then — well, there is Tate Britain.

Not a pretty picture
The history of Tate Britain can be read as the story of many successive attempts to sort out a perceived problem, where the unifying theme is that all too often, the attempted solutions just make everything worse. The first such problem was the fact that the National Gallery, founded in 1824, tended to treat British art as the dowdy poor relation of its Italian, French and Low Countries holdings. Private bequests of British art to the National Gallery — or to South Kensington, Dulwich and regional collections — were all very well. So were the regular, enjoyable and sometimes even productive displays of contemporary art at the Royal Academy. As the century wore on, however — and as other countries began to showcase their own national art ever more aggressively, almost as if making claims for their generalised validity as nation-states — the cries for a purely British collection became increasingly difficult to ignore.

So it was that in 1897, built on the site of Millbank Penitentiary through the generosity of a Liberal autodidact sugar-magnate, the National Gallery of British Art — or, as it everyone had taken to calling it within a couple of months, the Tate Gallery — first opened its doors.

Even from the first, the Tate’s mission was a bit confused. In order to avoid clashing with the National Gallery, it undertook to show contemporary British art — but what was to happen once the new art grew old? No one was quite sure. And this was a problem that continued to avoid solution. Instead, what followed, for about a century, was a complex narrative of directors often incompetent and sometimes frankly deranged; administrative arrangements combining eye-watering complexity with incoherence; a lot of money frittered away not always to great effect; the acquisition of a strange and gappy body of work which included enough non-British art to thwart the founders’ intentions whilst at the same time never adding up to anything like a decent survey collection; floods and bombing raids; feuds and follies; Munnings’ half-cut after-dinner oratory and Carl Andre’s ‘bricks’; and, perhaps inevitably given all the rest, a confused and problematic relationship with the Royal Academy, National Gallery, the Treasury, commercial galleries, publishers, patrons, trustees, civil servants, critics, artists and the viewing public. If, in other words, the late 20th century Tate had not existed, it seems safe to assume that no one would have been in any rush to invent it, at least in its contemporary form.

But aren’t the old ones are supposed to be the best ones?
All of which discouraging stuff came to a head in 1997, a century after the Tate was founded. This was the year in which Nicholas Serota oversaw the quickie no-fault divorce between the two halves of the Tate’s operations — its collection of increasingly historic British art and its collection of international modern art — and the subsequent decampment of Tate Modern to its glamorous bachelor pad south of the river, while Tate Britain brooded mournfully on the old Millbank site. Tate Modern’s star-studded, hysterically-hyped launch in 2000 may yet prove to have been the swan-song of Cool Britannia. Meanwhile, Tate Britain was — what?

Alas, the sloppy dialectics practiced by the stupider sort of cultural critic meant that if Tate Modern, as visited by Kate Moss et al, was new and hot and exciting, then by rights Tate Britain had to be old, frumpy and — most culpably of all, apparently, for a major cultural institution — ‘not sexy’. But the saddest thing about this perception was less its intrinsic unfairness than the reaction it seemed to occasion within the institution itself. Vesti la guibba! Like a bereft Other Half putting on a brave show after being dumped for someone younger, Tate Britain began to commit embarrassing acts of would-be trendiness that in fact just reeked of desperation: the commissioning of a not very festive Christmas tree from Tracy Emin, say, or showing video art of absolutely cosmic dreariness, or simply failing to see that the increasingly silly Turner Prize really didn’t suit it any more.

The result of all this was a perverse situation where British art from every era was attracting interest in seminar-rooms and sale-rooms here and abroad, but where the institution responsible for displaying the last five centuries’ worth of British art seemed rather dismissive of any works older than the memories of its most junior curators. What, then, was to be Tate Britain’s equivalent of Botox, collagen lip injections and a slavish addiction to Fabric? One solution was to emphasise present-day art at the expense of the older stuff, so that the 1960s, for instance, would loom much larger than the entire sixteenth century. Another was to ‘sex up’ exhibitions with references to nudity, celebrity and so forth, as if such rhetoric were central to the reasons why the ordinary punter should wish to spend his or her time contemplating art. Finally, another related, yet slightly more subtle approach involved re-casting the older work in terms more acceptable to contemporary preoccupations. Why attempt a straight-forward, chronological presentation, when pictures could be re-framed in terms of gender, race, class or whatever sub-Marxist vocabulary came to mind? Why fulfil the role of a useful old text-book when the role of trendy, tie-less, Groucho Club-haunting media don was there for the taking?

All change
Such questionable expedients have, however inadvertently, been facilitated by the generosity of BP. The relevant grant, which dates back to 1990, funds the periodic re-hanging of the Tate’s displays of British art. The most recent such re-hanging was officially launched recently, with the usual well-orchestrated if generally pianissimo media fanfare.

Now, here’s a confession for you. Tory distrust of change notwithstanding, I always view these events with a degree of excitement, even enthusiasm. For in principal, there is a lot to be said for regular re-hanging. For one thing, human nature dictates that familiarity breeds, if not contempt exactly, then a certain lack of interest — whereas to shake up the familiar at least invites an element of freshness and engagement. And then there’s the sad fact that for reasons of space, much of the Tate’s collection lives in storage. What wonders will emerge from the vaults this time? Finally, there is always the happy possibility that a different sort of hang will throw up some new relationship between artists, some new revelation about influences or innovations, some new flash of understanding, whether at the historical level or at a purely aesthetic one. The rewards are, then, at least, potentially, there for the taking. So as I made my way down to Millbank, I did so hoping that on the way back, my mental map of British art would somehow have been improved with better standards of detail, accuracy and complexity — or, at the very least, that the new hang would be better than the old, which was not without its irritations.

So it’s sad to report that the 2005 displays are, with a handful of exceptions, rather disappointing. The first problem is one of coherence. The decision, more than a decade ago, to reject a faceless, chronological, would-be authoritative scheme of organisation in favour of personalised, rather subjective, thematic ones carries with it a heavy burden of implications. Not least, it puts great pressure on curators to make their chosen themes work, both intellectually and aesthetically. The trick here is to find strong, important paintings that fit in with the theme — and it’s not an easy trick to pull off. This sort of display scheme also demands something by way of shared approach, shared tone and shared assumptions about the interpretive capabilities (or otherwise) of the average viewer. Otherwise the result is a bit too much like some sort of nightmarish art-historical shopping-mall, its various concessions all waging style-wars against each other, the upmarket boutiques wedged in uncomfortably amongst their more demotic neighbours, the competition more confusing than enabling for the poor wretched consumer. Finally, a degree of enthusiasm for the works in question is, while hard to measure objectively, all-important. For if the curators’ sympathies don’t really run alongside the art in any evident way — shared delight in the subject-matter, admiration for the technical qualities of the work, a sympathetic understanding of the period in which the work was produced — the result invariably has something sour and sneery about it. Well, enough people have a poor opinion of British art already, without Tate Britain struggling to make them value it still less.

Yet as far as these issues are concerned, the present rehanging is all over the place. There are some rooms — and it’s worth stating this immediately — where the commentary is attentive to the subtleties of contemporary art history while at the same time genuinely helpful at the level of helping the viewer to understand and appreciate the art itself. “William Blake and John Flaxman” is one of these, “Edward Wadsworth” another. I learned a lot from each, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

But there are others where the wall-texts read like outtakes from My First Big Pop-Up Book of Arnold Hauser. In “The British Landscape”, for instance, faced with Stubbs’ formally brilliant, emotionally engaging The Reapers (1785), we are cautioned by the curator that ‘This picture greatly idealises physical labour …’ Leave aside, out of charity, the fact that most viewers probably could have worked this out for themselves. Since, actually, most pre-modern painting idealised pretty much everything — and, indeed, since the most gritty documentary footage of rural life in our own times rarely ventures out without its own raucous little brood of tiresome polemical grievances — one struggles to work out what the point of the curatorial comment could possibly be. Should we like Stubbs more because he painting something other than literal reality? Or like him less? Or what? If there was the germ of a worthwhile comment here, it got lost somewhere between the banality of its expression and the superficial level of the overall discussion. And the sorrow here is that the painting in question one of the greatest works by — to my mind, anyway, if not that of Prof. Christie Davies — one of Britain’s greatest artists.

The dog that isn’t allowed to bark
Meanwhile, nearby hangs another striking painting by Stubbs, Ringwood, A Hound. Here the commentary goes on for lines and lines, yet fails to mention one central feature relating to the reasons why someone might wish to paint, or commission, or indeed preserve a painting of this particular creature. Was Ringwood, well, a domestic pet? Or was this handsome painting simply some sort of ironic send-up of the portraiture conventions of its own time? Alas, though — and despite an excitable reference to ‘blood sports’ (not ‘field sports’) on a general panel nearby — that shocking four-letter word, ‘H-U-N-T’, may actually be one outrage too far for present-day Tate curators. It wouldn’t do, would it, to admit that the art of the countryside, exactly at the points where it seemed to give most respect and esteem to individual quadrupeds, is also the art of a hunting tradition dating back to the dawn of mankind? Or that “The British Landscape” (the theme of the room) would be hard to imagine without reference to the field? In the event, though, the effort to escape the world-view of a certain sort of metropolitan liberal elite never really gets off the ground. We end up learning far more about the blind spots of at least a few of the curators than we do about the art of the period.

Never mind. One might be tempted, at this point, to fall with some gratitude upon that familiar refuge of the cultural conservative hemmed in by flawed and foolish commentary, and to advise all visitors simply to ignore the comments and admire the art. But this raises another problem. The hang itself is, alas, startlingly ugly.

What’s wrong? Where do we start? The pictures are hung far too low — and since I’m only 5 feet 7 inches tall, if I had to look down a few times too often, heaven help the taller type of arts enthusiast! Worse still, the intervals between the works seem completely arbitrary, as if little human agency had been involved in their hanging. Given how well the recent Reynolds exhibition was presented, for instance, it’s amazing that no one seems to have noticed how bad all this looks.

Put out more paintings
Most regrettable of all, though, is the fact that that the works are hung very sparsely indeed. I’ve seen galleries in Eastern Europe where the ghostly marks of missing paintings — rectangles of faint colour punctuating the faded brocade on the walls — hint at losses through war, pillage, expropriation, institutional poverty and a catalogue of natural disasters, which at the same time give a greater sense of generosity in their hanging-schemes than does the present-day Tate Britain. What’s happened? The curators may feel that giving paintings a lot of (oddly proportioned) wall-space allows them to ‘breathe’ — this is, I think, one of those sub-Greenbergian tics still afflicting plenty of people who can hardly hear the words ‘formal values’ without coming out in a rash — to which I can only say that the paintings at the National Gallery, the Louvre, Dulwich, the Wallace Collection and so forth all seem to make do with the smaller amounts of wall-space surrounding them. And then there’s the practical point that if there were less space between paintings, more of the collection could be kept on show. All of which raises a few larger points about the purpose of Tate Britain, to which we’ll return shortly.

In passing, though, it’s worth singling out one of the sadder rooms, where there was much evidence of a good concept gone mysteriously, lamentably wrong. The room in question is the one titled “Romantic Painting In Britain”. Here, in a long gallery of typically over-the-top Duveen-funded proportions, the paintings had, up to a point, been double-hung — but apparently, by someone unwilling or unable to enter fully into the conventions, let alone the spirit, of an early 19th century hang. How, though, can that be possible, after the Courtauld’s brilliant Art On The Line show of 2001-02? Here, though, a few paintings drifted pointlessly above their marginally larger peers, as vast acres of pink space separated each work from its nearest neighbours. There was none of the exciting jostling, the competitive brio, the serendipitous cheek-by-jowl juxtapositions that ought to be shocking, delighting and amusing the crowds. There was no real additional information being generated about the context in which these paintings were meant to be viewed. The hang itself could have said something about how Romantic painting differed from what came before and after — but it didn’t. The opportunity came and went.

And it was a pity, because as well as the usual stars of the collection — great Constables, Gainsboroughs, Turners — there were some fascinating, even surprising works on show, both in this room and in others. It was good, for instance, to see Hogarth as the creator of unfashionably Baroque, ‘foreign-looking’ paintings in the room titled “In the Grand Manner” as well as the author of his more familiar works; good to see such splendid work by the still-underrated William Dobson in a “Civil War and Commonwealth” room (where, in fairness, the commentary could have been a good deal worse); easy to be stopped in one’s tracks by stray marvels such as Holman Hunt’s Cornfield at Ewell. These are the kind of thrills that Tate Britain can, and ought to deliver, breaking through the familiarity of British art and showing us how wrong we are in those moments where, consciously or not, we dismiss it as dull, invariably derivative or second-rate. It’s only a pity that there are not more such experiences to be found at Tate Britain right now, and that the heavy haze of irritations, slights and misjudgements does so much to take the shine off them whenever they occur. British art is, at its best, brilliant. Surely a better case can be made for it than this?

Why it matters
All this criticism may sound heavy-handed and a bit unnecessary — rather like firing off a cross 2,500-word letter to The New York Review of Books because you don’t really like the way your maiden aunt has redecorated the second guest bedroom — but there are, in fact, important issues at stake.

The first concerns the level of esteem expressed towards Britain’s art history by one of the major national institutions charged with conserving and displaying examples of historic British art. Put simply, there are reasons for thinking that recent or contemporary art is being ‘foregrounded’ (this hideous word is, sadly, so appropriate to the whole project described here that one can hardly avoid employing it) at the expense of older work. And yes, I know — this is a jeremiad dating back to the great days of Peter Fuller’s Modern Painters — but as is the way of jeremiads, repetition in no way softens its tone or curtails its terrible urgency.

One sort of evidence for this tinkering with priorities can be found — where else? — in an >interview that Sir Nicholas Serota recently granted to The Guardian. Many of his pronouncements were notable chiefly for their eye-watering banality:

”One of the most important things that has been happening in British art over the past 25 years is the way it has been steadily infused by artists who were perhaps not born here, but are working here, or perhaps who are second generation — such as Mona Hatoum, Steve McQueen, Chris Ofili and Veronica Ryan," he said.

Presumably the novelty of this situation would have astonished older British artists such as Holbein, Gheeraerts, Eworth, Mytens, Van Dyck, Hollar, Zoffany, Benjamin West, Sickert, Sargent, Wyndham Lewis, Epstein, Auerbach, Kitaj and Freud, to name but a few, and is in addition a good reason for assuming that the art of the future will be far more culturally complex, exciting and relevant than the art of the past. Happy days! But Sir Nicholas has broader ambitions for the institution entrusted to his care (and it’s quite clear he’s talking about Tate Britain at this point every bit as much as Tate Modern):

Sir Nicholas told the Guardian that in the future the Tate should be dramatically recast to integrate "graphics, film, photography and performance. Visual culture is so much more complex than painting or sculpture.

"The big idea," he said, "is that the old hierarchies between painting and sculpture and other forms of expression have evaporated.

"Artists are reflecting on the culture around them — club culture, or whatever it is — and the institution needs to reflect that in the way it shows, presents and buys art."

Again, once one has recovered from the breathtaking revelation that artists are ‘reflecting on the culture around them’ — clearly an improvement on whatever solipsistic malingering they were getting up to in the past — one is left pondering the practical implications of Sir Nicholas’ remarks. Does this sound like the words of a man who burns with a desire to fill in the blank spots in his institution’s collection of seventeenth and eighteenth century works? Who wakes every morning pondering how best to fix the gaps in the early twentieth century collection? Or, alternatively, does it sound like the sort of man who wants to spend £600,000 on recent work by Tate trustee Chris Ofili, presented in a purpose-build ‘architectural space’ (aka ‘partitioned area with over-emphatic lighting’)? Doubtless Victoria Miro, at any rate, must think he’s getting the balance about right.

Less spiritual than a roomful of monkeys
A word, though, in passing, about Chris Ofili’s The Upper Room, the Tate’s acquisition of which would perhaps have attracted more notice, had Mark Quinn’s grotesquely out-of-scale, slimy-looking Alison Lapper Pregnant not distracted the attention of the small minority who care about these things — and which has, even so, attracted some well-aimed criticism from the even smaller minority willing to speak out against polite consensus.

Now, as it happens — and as much as some readers of this publication may find this admission alarming — I am not someone who thinks that everything Ofili produces is nasty, attention-grabbing, sacreligous rubbish. He may not be the most profound artist ever, but at least at the time of his big 1998 Serpentine show, there was more than a little charm, playfulness and originality there to be seen in his work, so that one came out of the gallery into Kensington Gardens slightly happier, less earnest and more aware of the glitter and sparkle that’s there to be found in the world if one makes the effort to look for it. True, it wasn’t the Arena Chapel — but one can’t go through life expecting that level of soul-stirring impact from every passing work of art. I didn’t find Ofili’s use of elephant droppings particularly shocking. I didn’t even find his contribution to the Royal Academy’s ‘Sensation’ completely without merit, as unlike so many of his coevals there, he had clearly showed some interest in the aesthetic qualities of his efforts, rather than simply focusing on self-promotion and a desire to annoy. And when he represented Great Britain at the 2003 Venice Biennale, I found the result strangely sensitive to its Venetian surroundings, yet still blessed with a fundamental lightness of touch, a refusal to take itself too seriously. So really, by the standards of conservative art critics anyway, I actually quite like Ofili’s work.

The problem I faced at Tate Britain the other day was, then, less some sort of outrage at the content or presentation of The Upper Room itself, than an increasingly queasy suspicion that the Tate now believes it has acquired, in this work, an Arena Chapel pour nos jours. Some of the claims made for this installation — the phrase ‘profound spiritual qualities’ has been used by the Tate Press Office itself — would almost be funny if they weren’t so, well, wide of the mark.

For in truth, this is just more of the usual Ofili output, arranged slightly differently, with extra added hyperbole. Thirteen of the usual person-sized panels, propped up with the usual elephant dung, have been painted in the usual garish colours and flecked with the usual high-camp glitter. But this time, we are forced to make a short journey down a darkened corridor in order to see the result, which I guess is supposed to remind us of every penitential journey on the way to enlightenment — the way into the cave of the Cumaean Sibyl, for instance, or the long journey down to Houston to blink and yawn in the dusky depths of the Rothko Chapel — any anthropology textbook could possibly muster. And once we are in the room, standing amongst these objects, the most striking impressions are those made by the harsh, aggressive lighting, the over-generous spaces between the works, and a generalised impression of pomposity veiling emptiness. Under the circumstances, it would be easy to lose patience with Ofili’s demi-vierge teasing at blasphemy, except that the work just isn’t strong enough to be blasphemous — which is to say, with its rather pointless Christian allusions and total lack of visual charge, it couldn’t possibly hope blaptein anyone’s pheme, except perhaps that of the institution which spent so much to acquire and display it.

Present imperfect
But then that’s the thing about Tate Britain’s emphasis right now: all too often, sparkle seems to matter far more than does quality. For instance, in the context of the current rehang, I imagine that the treatment of F. N. Souza, who is given a room of his own, benefited from Sir Nicholas Serota’s self-proclaimed interest in immigrant artists. Although there’s nothing terribly wrong with Souza’s work, it’s far from clear why it should be where it is, displacing work that is both more central to the traditions Tate Britain exists to curate, and also, well, by most standards, simply better. And by the same token, offering John Latham his own large room seems a rather strange decision. We are told by the Tate Britain Press Office that Latham is ‘perhaps one of the most influential figures in post-war British art’, but it is hard to think who, other than the less successful sort of GCSE at student, has been deeply influenced by the facile symbolism of charred books, or of piranhas representing politicians and the press — not that this stopped the Tate from getting into a mini-row with the artist, who was left calling them ‘cowards’ and crying ‘censorship’. My advice to the Tate is this: when you’re engaging in special pleading, stick with dead artists. At least they can’t answer back.

Meanwhile, how many good Sickerts, Spencers, Spears, Sutherlands, Bacons, Weights, Bratbys and so forth are there to be found in the 20th century displays? At Tate Britain, rehangs are, ultimately, a zero sum game — every decision to display a work is, implicitly, a decision not to hang quite a lot of other works. Every decision to purchase a work is, implicitly, a decision not to purchase something else. And it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the would-be trendiness mentioned above — evident here as a desire to spice up press releases with lots of references to contemporary or otherwise right-on work, to display such work disproportionately on the Tate’s website or to flag it up in interviews to the exclusion of all else — is, in one form or another, governing too many of the decisions at Tate Britain, whether with respect to acquisitions, display or publicity. We can all see what Tate Britain is trying, so desperately, to look like. But isn’t that fundamentally in conflict with what Tate Britain is, and ought to be?

Mistaken identities
All of which takes us back to the beginning of this essay. The oddities of Tate Britain’s history have bequeathed to it a series of unenviable burdens and sporadically painful paradoxes. Not least, its central responsibility — the care and display of the national collection of British art, 1500-2005 — overlaps, sometimes maddeningly, with those of other institutions such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, regional collections the length and breadth of the land, and perhaps most of all with its old ex, Tate Modern, which of course still has some remit to deal with contemporary British art. (And let’s leave aside, for today, the whole issue of whether Tate Britain actually functions as ‘Tate Britain’ at all, or whether ‘Tate England’ would be more to the point.) Tate Britain’s collection includes masterpieces and irrelevances, curiosities and lacunae, the fruits of vanity and short-sightedness as well as generosity and inspiration. Looking to the future, Tate Britain obviously needs to continue to acquire new art, as well as to make the best of what it possesses already. And it needs to convey the excitement, enthusiasm and expertise that many of its staff virtually radiate in the presence of the art they are charged with displaying and interpreting. No one ever said that running Tate Britain was an enviable job. In some ways it’s a wonder that the place gets things right as often as it does.

Yet in order to overcome its many present-day problems, Tate Britain must, first and foremost, sort out the vexed issues of its own institutional identity. What’s the point of that bijou little jewel-box of a building, perched daintily above the Millbank foreshore, and of its contents? Titillating the jaded sensibilities of London’s gallery-going subculture may seem sometimes like the smart option, even the ‘sexy’ option — but when it comes to pleasing Sarah Kent, attracting the same crowds as a Haunch of Venison private view or, heaven help us, replicating the better club-nights of Ibiza in England’s green and pleasant gallery spaces, someone else is always going to be able to do it better.

In the long run, the wiser strategy may well be to embrace the Tate’s original remit, and try to act a bit more like an old-fashioned, historical, didactic, sometimes even flag-flying art collection — a well-thumbed reference work rather than an over-designed style-mag, as it were. Indeed, the time may have come to bring back more clearly chronological, art-historical displays, to put the emphasis on the strongest works rather than the weirdest novelties, to give space to demonstrably ‘important’ art rather than taking expensive punts on fashion trends that may not in fact wear very well. And embarrassing as it may sound, Tate Britain could well find a role for itself in trying to make a case for the international, ongoing importance of British art — the British art of the past, as well as the present, as the two lines of argument are more closely connected that some at Tate Britain seem to think.

To be fair, of course, there are countless cases in recent history where Tate Britain has done just that — in the excellent Michael Andrews exhibition of 2001, for instance, or even the recent Reynolds show, which is far richer and more rewarding than its slightly silly ‘Creation of Celebrity’ subtitle might imply. And there are also displays that work extremely well, and many generous loans to exhibitions and regional galleries, and much else to praise. But at the same time, as this most recent rehang suggests, there are other moments where Tate Britain seems almost embarrassed by some of its holdings, displays and responsibilities. All too often — and here the parallels with that bereft Other Half, trying to pass herself off as someone much younger and wilder and sillier than she actually is, come once again to mind — too many attempts to camouflage a sagging midriff or insufficient knowledge of grime, instead of obviating the central problem, actually draw attention to it.

Learning to love Tate Britain
My prescription, then, for Tate Britain’s next rehang is drawn less from the language of curatorial professionalism, than from the world of self-help literature. First of all, the apologies have to stop! For isn’t that what Sir Nicholas has been doing? Have another look, if you can bear it, at that Guardian interview. He’s sorry that Tate Britain’s artists are mostly white, male — British, even. He’s sorry that the past wasn’t always as right-on as the present. He’s sorry that Tate Britain’s paintings and sculpture are — well, paintings and sculpture, rather than video installations or performance pieces. He’s sorry Tate Britain is what it is.

But it is what it is, and that’s all there is to it. Here’s the bottom line. Self-pity is not an attractive vice. Like the best of us, Tate Britain has its historic strengths, as well as its flaws and limitations. Well, it should play to its strengths. Its strange collection includes startling gems as well as duds; many of its staff possess not simply great enthusiasm for the material with which they work, but unparalleled expertise too; its building is beautiful if sometimes intractable; it tells a story that no other institution could tell in the same way, and believe it or not, that’s a story that many of us are all too anxious to hear. At the same time, though, it should be quiet about its weaknesses. True, it needs to continue to collect relatively recent art, if only for the sake of its collection a century hence. But here, it should play it cool. It should try to look confident. If Tate Britain is a seriously important institution, surely young, healthy, living artists should run after it, begging to have their donated works included amongst Tate Britain’s collections, rather than vice versa? Surely, to do anything else only smacks of a desperation that is not only slightly embarrassing, but also counter-productive?

Most of all, though, Tate Britain should stop pretending to be the über-trendy thing that it so clearly is not. And anyway, who cares what Tate Modern thinks? Once upon a time — and a very short time ago it was — Tate Modern looked like London’s most exciting art space; these days, it’s a little bit too much like one of 2001’s hot ‘see and be seen’ rendezvous, now fallen out of favour with everyone except those who travel on the basis of out-of-date style guides. Because that’s the curse of trendiness — it always goes off in the end. Whereas true individual style, as any dreary, nannyish, unarguable summary of such things will tell you, never ages much, and self-confidence goes a long way towards being a self-fulfilling prophecy. Tate Britain must, in other words, start being itself, and being happy with itself, and must proceed on that basis. For until Tate Britain learns to love itself for what it is, how can it expect the rest of us to follow suit?

Bunny Smedley was co-founder and sometime Arts Editor of electric-review.com.

Each of us has, for better or worse, his or her own secret picture of Britain — the dog-eared mental snapshot we pull out when far away and slightly homesick, or the accidental vision that flashes across our thoughts whenever by the word ‘Britain’ appears in print or conversation. In a sense it doesn’t really matter whether we’ve even visited these islands.

Growing up in America in the early 1970s, long before I’d ever set foot on British soil, my own mental image of Britain was as compelling, to me at least, as it was eccentric. It was an odd confection, cobbled together from old children’s books, pictures in our local art museum, the odd BBC costume drama and who knows what else. Particularly significant, though, were two books, one produced in the late 1930s and the other in the early 1950s. They were titled, respectively, Romantic Britain and Literary Britain. My ignorance of photography is such that only a few minutes ago, seeking accurate titles, did I discover that the latter of these was largely the work of Bill Brandt. But in any event, far too many were the scorching North Carolina summer afternoons that I preferred to spend inside, pouring over those fading black-and-white photos of holy wells, Saxon chancels and lichen-spotted dolmens of mysterious origin. In Britain, I learned, there was no old tree so ordinary as to lack some heart-stopping literary reference, no old bit of masonry so dreary as to have avoided the historically-important siege or Cromwellian slighting, no rolling tree-lined lane that would not culminate in a sublime pairing of parish church and manor-house if one cared to follow it long enough. And so that, strange to say, became my image of the country in which, a little later, I would make my home. Nor am I certain that all those subsequent decades of British reality have provided me with anything as weirdly persuasive, as intuitively functional, as that initial vision.

Doubtless there are also clear-eyed, unsentimental folk out there whose vision of Britain is made up of nondescript suburbs or council estates, out-of-town super-stores and the grim strips of highway that connect them, or perhaps simply the vista stretching all the way from couch past curtained windows out towards the television set as it blares out yet another low-quality US sitcom — who can say? In keeping with our present-day prejudice that the more unpleasant a thing is, the more true it is, they would doubtless congratulate themselves on the unsparing, illusionless qualities of their vision. Well, they may possibly be right.

Up from realism
Such people will, in any event, sneer mightily at A Picture of Britain — a Tate Britain exhibition linked with the six-part BBC television series narrated by David Dimbleby and the obligatory spin-off book. It isn’t so much that the Dimbleby-inflected vision of Britain seems far more similar to Literary Britain and its 1950s ilk than to the contemporary world inhabited by the people who stay in a lot, watching Big Brother, although there’s certainly an element of that. Rather, it’s the fact that A Picture of Britain blanks the Big Brother world entirely.

For although the pictures that make up A Picture of Britain span the eighteenth century to our own, the Britain depicted, even when it’s being depicted by Richard Billingham or Richard Long, is very much the land of Wordsworth and Rupert Brooke, Constable and the old Shell Guides, Turner’s skies and the coolly denatured forms of the St Ives School. Rural labour is assumed to be natural, organic and largely agreeable. Industrialisation, out of vogue at the moment, is nonetheless allowed to show its most handsome face, revealing itself in the celebratory canvases of Joseph Wright of Derby or in Lowry’s cheerfully demotic, nostalgic daubs, as well as in Edward Wadsworth’s Vorticist Black Country. Modernity, when it can no longer be ignored, surfaces in Charles Cundall’s cheerful crowd scene of Brighton day-trippers, or Paul Nash’s haunting Totes Meer where the mangled Luftwaffe aircraft glimmer in the moonlight like the bare bones of ancient yet dangerous monsters.

Admittedly, Britain is not always presented as uncomplicatedly beautiful. What one is not shown, however, is a single towerblock or call centre, or the sprawl of cheap identikit postwar housing lapping now over so much of what used to be the countryside, or those antiseptic successions of shops that could be anywhere or nowhere. This, clearly, is a Britain of blue water, not of Bluewater. Go ahead, then, sneer if you like.

Postcards from the past
All of which means that there are moments where this exhibition reads like a flashback to a different age. This is much an issue of aspiration as it is of achievement. For whatever else it may set out to do, A Picture of Britain does not attempt to expose, reveal, disillusion, disturb, deconstruct, demolish, shock, critique, interrogate or transgress — except, perhaps, in the sense that to avoid setting out to achieve any of these now-conventional ends may well strike contemporary audiences as a slightly risky proposition. Instead, the tone of the exhibition, where not gently didactic, is rarely less than celebratory. At its heart there is a calm assumption that Britain’s historic landscapes are still a source of interest, wonder and delight, both to the British people and to visitors from abroad. On the day I visited the exhibition, it was not only rather crowded but evidently very popular too, generating plenty of conversation and close looking. So perhaps that assumption wasn’t so very far off the mark?

And if it is possible to detect, here and there, a fairly broad hint of anxiety about the survival of these landscapes, it should be remembered that it is exactly in the throes of such anxieties — in the depiction of monastic ruins, in the context of enclosure or creeping urban sprawl, in the leaping shadows of the fires of the Industrial Revolution or of the Second World War — that the greatest British landscape art has been produced. And if Britain is always at her most beautiful in the moments just before she might be expected to vanish forever, it is no wonder that a gloss of Romanticism coats these pictures as thickly as restorers’ varnish. Hence, perhaps, its obsessions and its blind spots. Why dwell on the begrimed and depressing suburban railway platforms, the interchangeable English high streets, the sad stretches of motorway or the unloved and forgettable urban spaces, when they are hardly likely to disappear any time soon? And indeed, why not treat our working country churches, water-meadows, field verges, mossy weirs, seaside resorts and unselfconscious rural architecture as timeless and eternal, especially as their time may well all too soon be up?

Landscape into art
Sharp-witted readers may, by now, have realised how very much I liked this exhibition and how I warmed to what reads in places as a considered, toughly reactionary stance. All the same, more or less anyone ought to find something of value and interest here, if only because of the astonishing diversity of the exhibition’s contents.

Organised thematically, the various rooms are filled not only with obvious ‘masterpieces’ — Gainsborough, Constable, Turner — but also with plenty of deeply unfashionable or forgotten works, each selected to make a point about the ways in which their creators and collectors imagined Britain. For landscape, it transpires, always speaks about something beyond the literal facts of topography. Its learned vocabulary, inherited in large part from the seventeenth century Low Countries and France but also receiving periodic boosts from other schools and individuals — everyone from Titian and Rubens to Corot, Cezanne and Picasso — carried along with it a heavy freight of associations and inflections. So did its history — for landscape is by no means ‘natural’. The habit of seeing the vista before us as a coherent and significant whole, worthy of comment and record, was a learned one, in which Romanticism, the cult of the Picturesque, the Napoleonic Wars, tourism and the railways, among dozens of other factors, all played a part. A Picture of Britain plays out these various strands with elegance and subtlety. It’s a reminder, among other things, of the complicated role that landscape still plays in everything from advertising to daydreams.

And then, of course, there’s the whole issue of content. Envisioning the British landscape could be a way of talking about the most public and general of concerns. More or less chief amongst these public concerns was religion — not just the pantheistic understanding of ‘the sublime’, either, or its bastard offspring, as seen in William Hague’s inability to distinguish between walking in the hills and believing in the risen Christ — but Christianity itself, whether Anglican or otherwise. (Not that this is any surprise — Dutch landscapes were always about Protestantism and nationhood, too.) Samuel Palmer, whose tiny and gem-like works, luminous and visionary, are still less appreciated than they ought to be, painted reports back from the frontier separating heaven and earth, which is to say from his local parish church and the land around it. To study these little paintings is to watch England’s religion of the Word struggling to develop a visual equivalent to George Herbert, and only just failing. Yet religion also permeated even apparently straight-forward works. The most feverishly mimetic of Pre-Raphaelite canvases, such as William Holman Hunt’s Our English Coasts, turns out to have been less a painting about ‘nature’ than a polemical essay on the dangers of heterodoxy and secularism.

Later, as the distinction between nation and confessional community continued to grow ever more self-conscious and less comfortable, the project of re-enchanting the environment with some sort of numinous quality, and not asking too many questions, became ever more urgent. Sometimes, as with Eric Ravillious’s Long Man of Wilmington, the line between public and private meaning disappears, so that the old chalk figure’s mythic and psychosexual significance becomes indistinguishable from the roles of genius loci, guardian of a besieged isle and psychopomp, capable of guiding modernity’s lost souls to some ultimate fastness, half-recollected yet urgently required. And it works, too. Anyone who’s caught an accidental glimpse of the Long Man from a train window as the railway sails past, down towards the South Coast, will realise how effectively the artist, whose father was a low-church lay-preacher, packed all of this into his vision, and how powerfully the resulting image — in the original watercolour, flanked with wartime barbed wire — now infuses its real-world referent.

Where has all the landscape gone?
By the same token, war turns out to have been another preoccupation of British landscape painting. The Napoleonic Wars forced a discontinuation of Grand Tours, encouraging the British aristocracy and their hangers-on to discover, inter alia, the Lake District, North Wales, the Highlands of Scotland and the romantic potential of Britain’s indigenous Gothic ruins. Soon a regular itinerary of picturesque and sketchable stops had been drawn up, complete with guide-books and on-site amenities. What began as an elite preoccupation soon permeated genteel society. As British landscape began to interest an increasingly broad swathe of the British people, its central images became familiar ones halfway around the world, too, so that knowledge of these, and enthusiasm for them, became yet another facet of British cultural identity. And so it was that daffodils, chaffinches, medlars, hedgehogs, willows, apples, loughs, burns, banks an’ braes became part of the inheritance of millions of children who might go on to live long lives without in fact seeing, hearing, tasting, climbing or otherwise interacting with any one of these things. The literary inheritance was followed up with the visual, aural and even sensory one. Britain had escaped its own geographical limits.

This was landscape in expansive mode. It prevailed for about a century after Waterloo. The 20th century, however, brought about a notable shift in inflection. The brilliant landscape art of the 1920s and 30s was both a response to Continental art movements, and an increasingly precarious appreciation of the beauties of islands under threat. The post-war period, however, saw pervasive high-cultural suspicion of romanticism, mysticism, sentimentality, figurative painting styles and anything that looked remotely like pre-war nationalism. And since landscape painting couldn’t, for perfectly good reasons, entirely extricate itself from any of these things — except perhaps in the abstractions of St Ives, where landscape was sublimated effectively if, it must be said, at the cost of quite a lot of intrinsic interest, or when caked in enough heavy irony — it fell out of fashion. So it’s to the credit of the curators of A Picture of Britain that they have managed to include in the exhibition enough striking, relatively recent offerings — works by Michael Andrews, Hamish Fulton, Richard Long and so forth — to invite informed speculation about landscape’s future within the visual arts. There’s at least the implication that landscape has an awful lot of life in it yet. The means of expression may change, and the preoccupations and elisions will inevitably shift with the passing of generations, but the urge to look around us and make something of what we see is probably an innate one. We haven’t seen the last of the land we inhabit, or its scope to stand in as metaphor for something else..

Missed opportunities?
And so we move through the various thematically-organised rooms winding across Tate Britain’s low and windowless ground floor: the Romantic North, War and Peace, the Highlands and Glens, the Heart of England, the Flatlands and the Mystical West. The content shifts and swells and eddies, just as radically as does style or indeed basic painterly competence. Yet despite the rather uncharismatic setting, the hang has been carried out with a real feeling for atmosphere, humour and revelation. It may sound a stupid thing to say, but I do wish a version of this exhibition could be kept at Tate Britain permanently. As it will not, however, I shall just have to visit it as often as possible over the coming months.

A Picture of Britain is not, however, a perfect exhibition. It has three flaws, one of which matters much less than the others. The least important flaw involves the catalogue. As mentioned above, A Picture of Britain is a tripartite enterprise: Tate Britain exhibition, BBC television series, accompanying book. Unfortunately, it is not quite clear whether the book accompanies the exhibition or the television series. Since there is inevitably quite a lot of difference between the former and the latter, the confusion soon starts to tell.

As it happens, the television programme is a delightful business. In six episodes, it chronicles veteran broadcaster David Dimbleby’s barely sub-regal progress through a succession of beautiful and deeply emotive places, in which he is able to exude a mild beneficence undercut with the tiniest, if most necessary sliver of self-knowledge. In any event, the result is perfect. The production is flawless, the humour gentle, the coherence of the project absolute. If I say that during each of the episodes I have seen, I have, in fact, dozed off, it will sound like a criticism. But I don’t mean it that way! I mean it, rather, as an expression of trust, agreement and contentment — rather like motoring through the countryside in a well-conditioned Bentley driven by an old friend in whom one has the most complete confidence. Well, why not nod off occasionally?

The problem here, however, is that the exhibition and the television programme aren’t identical. How could they be? The images are different, the pace is different, some of the interpretation of specific works varies a bit — and the role of our genial host is rather greater onscreen than it is at Tate Britain, at any rate unless one visits in rather more exciting company than I did. The catalogue, however, attempts to span both. It does not entirely succeed. It isn’t that it is bad, exactly. It’s a handsomely-illustrated book featuring stimulating essays by Tate curators David Blayney Brown, Richard Humphreys and Christine Riding, as well as thoughtful and entirely enjoyable commentary from Mr Dimbleby himself. Although the book would make an excellent gift for aged relatives of nervous or liverish temper, it’s actually a far better piece of writing than this suggests. And in a sense, that’s the problem. Given the amount of unfamiliar, unfashionable or simply stunningly re-contextualised work on show in the exhibition itself, I do wholeheartedly lament the lack of a fully-illustrated, serious exhibition catalogue — complete with proper notes on each work — existing alongside this more popular, ‘accessible’ offering. The financial reasons why this didn’t happen are too obvious, and also too sad, to invite explanation. Still, it’s a pity. The result might have been a significant reference work that would give this important exhibition a half-life stretching on for decades. And if the organisers are serious about what really does look like a strong, positive message about landscape, the missed opportunity is a poignant one.

The British Problem
That, though, is simply a question of art and publishing, neither of which matters much. The second flaw is far more significant. It hinges on the whole concept of ‘Britain’. As those who are alert to issues of this sort may have noticed, in a few of the paragraphs above I was struggling slightly. When I wrote ‘Britain’, were there occasions when what I really meant was ‘England’ — or England with Wales and Scotland — or perhaps even a Britain that takes in Ireland too? Undoubtedly so. The exhibition organisers have chosen to call their creation A Picture of Britain. But it’s a picture with a very particular vantage-point. At the centre is England. Wales figures not much at all. And while Scotland looms large, and is the focus of much very interesting discussion — notably, the creation of the Highlands as a place as rich in myth as it is bare of much else — that’s about it. Insofar as Northern Ireland is concerned, it is at best treated as a sort of disreputable extension of the Scottish Highlands and at worst, as something so alien and discouraging as to merit averted eyes and richly meaningful silence.

So this is very clearly ‘Britain’ in the small, geographical sense, meaning the biggest of the British Isles. But if the Britain mentioned in the title means anything, it surely ought to mean ‘Britain’ in the big sense — the Britain that wins wars, built an empire and continues to disseminate its cultural and linguistic heritage across the face of much of this planet. It cannot, in any event, just mean England, which still gets the lion’s share of attention here. Obviously, the question of where England fits within an understanding of Britishness is a huge, serious, messy and contentious one. To do justice to its complexities would have required another whole exhibition — not an easy one to curate, either. But at the same time, there was no way of arranging the present exhibition without taking at the very least some sort of implicit stance about the place of England within Britain, and about the Britain projected out into the world.

So my complaint, in essence, is that the stance taken is the wrong one. If part of landscape painting is always about painting what ought to be — reforming the world to suit a particular vision — then A Picture of Britain should have squared up to the whole question of what its content says about its avowed subject-matter. Instead, those Scottish discussions notwithstanding, it implicitly underplays both the role of landscape art in creating national identities within the British Isles, and the role of landscape art in providing a shared identity that transcended local particularism just as it transcended topographical literalism. Both these strike me as important. Both are underplayed. Yet I am not sure the curators really fully made up their minds about these issues, since the inclusion of work by Sligo-born Jack Yeats (or ‘Jack Butler Yeats’, as it is strangely rendered in the exhibition catalogue) rather brings them to the fore again. And indeed, if you click ‘Belfast’ or ‘Londonderry’ on Tate Britain’s interactive map, you end up in ‘Highlands and Glens’. Enthusiast for the Union though I am, surely there are some basic geographical limits? Seriously, is that rather odd, or what?

It isn’t banned in galleries, you know
Let us move on rapidly. The third flaw is one that has become all too common these days — c.f. the forthcoming Stubbs exhibition at the National Gallery. Here, though, at A Picture of Britain, it is possibly even more upsetting. How can a show so blissfully free of political correctness in most aspects of its organisation have fallen so catastrophically at, as it were, the last fence?

For there are no hunting images in this exhibition. The longer one pauses to consider this omission, the more curious and regrettable it becomes. Hunting is, after all, one of the central ways in which individuals have, for centuries, experienced and understood the land around them — walls, coverts, hills, hedges, copses, brooks and banks. Its rhythms and rituals are almost impossible to disaggregate from certain areas of the British countryside. The hunting print was not only a mainstay of Britain’s imagined landscape, but also a visual form produced more effectively here than anywhere else. This is why from Paris and Amsterdam to Prague and St Petersburg and Kuala Lumpur, any English-themed space can easily broadcast its identity through the use of hunting imagery. Yet in A Picture of Britain, while farming, tourism, industry, recreation, worship and warfare all feature, the mounted hunt does not. So the silence of the hunting horn turns out to be the one of the few false notes sounded in this otherwise intelligent, delightful and inspiring exhibition.

Blue remembered hills
We all think we know what Britain looks like. Some, oceans away, will benefit from a vision unclouded by the annoying interventions of real life. Others, surrounded by the realities of Britain on a day-to-day basis, may find their vision cluttered with ill-considered light industrial premises, petrol-station forecourts on the journey in from suburbs now bled dry of even their faint Edwardian charms, or the unsubtle promptings of a thousand corporate logos shining out against a wet grey sky. Yet whether you are the sort of person who believes that art reveals hidden truths, or alternatively, the sort of person who believes that art exists to protect us from the truth, A Picture of Britain is an exhibition not to be missed.

Landscape painting’s relationship with realism has always been a sly and surreptitious one. Not least amongst the wonders of A Picture of Britain is John Crome’s Mousehold Heath (c. 1818-20). It shows that famous hill, bald and bare, upon which Kett’s rebels camped and campaigned for various rather inchoate demands before the full force of Tudor central government descended upon them. The handling is all Dutch — Ruysdael seems to hover over the landscape, waiting only to apply a flash of his signature gold before soaring away again — but the local appeal to a Norwich audience would always have been strong. The oddity, though — brought out well in the exhibition — is that by the late 18th century Mousehold Heath had been enclosed with fences and carved up with roads. It couldn’t have looked remotely like Crome’s version of it at the time he painted it. So what Crome painted was doubly a fiction. It’s a Netherlandish account of an East Anglian place that no longer existed other than in history and dreams. It’s a magical painting. Much of its magic resides in the pure fact of its freedom from real life. Crome was both recalling and creating a landscape. What he was not doing was recording topography. Topography, after all, changes as much as we all do, with results that invite regret as much as hope. Crome’s painting captures this well, giving his work the qualities both of an incantation and a lament. Landscape painting is, after all, at its best, generally both these things — acknowledging loss as much as dreaming fitfully of a happier, less precarious future. This is why we will always need it, all of us, whether we realise it or not.

Bunny Smedley was one of the founders of Electric Review. She lives in central London.

The British people do not love their own visual culture as much as they might. All the clichés of our national identity tell us to look elsewhere for Britain’s greatness. Ask a thousand people what it is that Britain has historically done as well or better than any other nation on earth: the answers, though plentiful and various — language, political institutions, legal systems, written literature, engineering, industry, empire-building, choral music, children’s television, self-deprecation, irony, whatever — will not include the visual arts. We are aware that our most feted artists — from Holbein and Van Dyck to Sargent and Freud — were born elsewhere, have rightly or wrongly regarded most of our native-grown products as mad or silly or both, and look out towards Italy, France or points farther west, our faces creased with a mixture of anxiety and condescension, for our measures of visual achievement. It is as if we still, at some level, need to define ourselves as a people of the Word rather than the Image — of reality rather than imitation — and are never really comfortable unless this is seen to be the case. Hence the jealous husbanding of ‘our’ second-rate Raphaels, the assumption on the part of the media that every arts story is humorous, and an ongoing inability to get to grips with even the most modest of public commissions — except, oddly, in wartime, when we do this rather well.

Ruined choirs, reused retables
These, anyway, are the reflections prompted by the Westminster Retable, just back from six years’ worth of painstaking conservation work and currently on show in the basement of the National Gallery. For most of its 750 years, this extraordinary object could be found about half a mile south, in Westminster Abbey. For although its history is more a matter of learned conjecture than of certainty, the best guess — and much has apparently been learned in the process of conservation — is that the Retable was created by Anglo-French artists around 1260. It may well have been commissioned by Henry III in the course of the pious project of rebuilding and decorating the Abbey as a fitting shrine to his royal predecessor, St Edward the Confessor, whose body was interred behind the abbey’s High Altar. The Retable’s dimensions, sophistication and splendour suggest that it could well have formed part of the High Altar itself. And if this were true, what we see before us in the National Gallery today was once a focal point of one of pre-reformation England’s most opulent and famous devotional destinations.

Less than three centuries after it was set in place, however, the Retable fell victim to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, which in 1540 transformed the Benedictine abbey into the cathedral church of the new Diocese of Westminster, and then in 1560 refounded again as a collegiate church. Like other popular pilgrimage sites, the Shrine of the Confessor was largely demolished. Although there was a brief restoration of St Edward’s cult under Mary, Elizabeth’s reign saw a reorganisation both of St Edward’s Chapel and of the Choir, where the High Altar stood. As so often was the case in the English reformations, however, this reorganisation was the stuff of matter-of-fact bureaucracy rather than hot-blooded iconoclasm. Some unknown administrator’s practical streak ensured that the Retable, rather than being tossed onto the bonfire or smashed into a thousand pieces, ended up, by the late seventeenth century, serving as part of a cupboard in which the wax funeral effigies of monarchs were stored. In 1778, the disregarded cupboard was modified once again so that an effigy of William Pitt the Elder could be displayed more attractively for paying tourists — a project that involved scraping down some of the surfaces and repainting part of the Retable in fetching shades of green, white and grey. More damage was done to the wretched object at this point than in the course of its entire previous history.

Only in 1827 did anyone apparently realise that the Retable was of any interest whatsoever — and needless to say, this being Britain, the ‘interest’ was antiquarian, rather than aesthetic. Nevertheless, a rescue was executed. The Retable then survived in varying degrees of general obscurity until 1998, when the Dean and Chapter sent it off to Cambridge’s Hamilton Kerr Institute for cleaning and conservation. And now for four months the Retable — Britain’s oldest major altarpiece, and undoubtedly one of the most significant survivals from the medieval art of the British Isles — is on display in the National Gallery, before returning to the Abbey. Public display may, perhaps, raise this magnificent, ruined treasure to a more elevated place in our national consciousness. More likely, however, indifference will prevail, followed swiftly by oblivion, if only because the object on show in the National Gallery constitutes, at some level, such an alarming departure from what we believe to be the truth about British art. Or to put it another way, while our seventeenth century forefathers recast the Retable as a cupboard and did so quite successfully, there are all sorts of reasons why our own attempts to remake it again as ‘art’ may prove a good deal less effective.

Moving images
What is there, then, to see in that rather dingy Trafalgar Square basement? At first glance, not much. The Retable is, at some level, even after all that restoration, a wreck. Over three yards long and perhaps a yard high, shaped like a long rectangle divided into five panels, the initial impression is of a mess of damaged gilding and missing inlay, blank surface where there should have been line and colour, omission and loss where there surely ought to have been something else. It’s hard not to wince a little as the reality sinks in. But then, stepping closer, some of that remaining line and colour starts to resolve itself into meaning. Yes, there’s damage and chaos and pointless violence. But here and there, fading in and out of sight like a vision on the point of embodiment or disintegration, there is also — one gradually begins to see — the most astoundingly intricate, delicate, elegant painting, executed in rich and jewel-like pigment on gold ground. This isn’t just a ruin — it’s a wonder, too.

Before discussing its significance, it’s worth spelling out the subject-matter of the work. The first panel, on the left, depicts St Peter. Moving from left to right, the next panel contains three damaged yet largely legible compartments featuring scenes of Christ’s miraculous interventions — The Raising of Jairus’s Daughter (Mark 5:22-43, Matthew 9:18-26, Luke 8:41-56), The Healing of the Man Born Blind (John 9), and The Feeding of the Five Thousand (Matthew 14:14-21, John 6:3-14). Finally, the middle panel — the last in which any painting survives — shows Christ standing under an intricate Gothic tabernacle, flanked by the Virgin Mary and St John the Evangelist. Christ is shown, not crucified, but rather standing whole before us, dressed in magnificent robes, one hand raised in blessing, the other gracefully supporting a tiny globe representing Creation, guarded and guided by His might.

Needless to say, the Westminster Retable was never meant to be a work of art. It was meant, instead, to do its job, which was to provide a fitting setting for the miracle of the Eucharist which took place daily before it. Perhaps, given its proximity to St Edward’s shrine, it also provided some sort of commentary on God’s ability to work wonders with the dull stuff of everyday life. For the imagery of the Retable is extremely unusual. So, too, is its opulence. It is, after all, a good deal more than just a painting, which is what most of us tend to think of anyway when confronted with that word ‘art’. Elaborately carved and gilded, some of the surfaces were once set with stained glass, while elsewhere glass has been placed over oil-based paint in order to simulate enamel. Originally the Retable would also have been decorated with simulated gemstones and cameos. When trying to reconstruct the impact the Retable must have made when new — its sheer visual firepower — it is worth thinking not just of the various thirteenth century altarpieces we now know as isolated panels, stranded in the secularising limbos of galleries and museums, but also of garish, exciting confections such as San Marco’s Palla d’Oro, which in terms of sheer magnificence is perhaps not unlike what Henry III might have wished to achieve, had he possessed the wherewithal to do so.

Get thee to the V&A
For we can’t escape those international comparisons, can we? Not least, conventional wisdom tells us that there’s far too little extant medieval British art with which to construct some sort of frame of reference. And when it comes to painting — ‘art’ in the sense of something that can be seen, looking through the appropriately teleological lenses, to develop over the centuries into museum-quality easel painting — this is, of course, true. How typical was the quality of, say, the Thornton Parva retable, stranded in rural Suffolk? How typical was the Coventry Doom? How mutually comprehensible, let alone consonant, were the visual rhetorics of the court painters and their country cousins? We’ll simply never be sure — and since these wall-paintings, by their nature, are scattered across all sorts of unlikely locations, we are unlikely to be troubled overmuch by such questions.

What we do know, however, is that English embroidery, stained glass, manuscript illumination and, in particular, the alabaster devotional sculptures produced in Nottinghamshire were at various points considered sufficiently desirable as to flow steadily into continental Europe. Unfortunately, however, we are particularly likely to ‘know’ this fact if we spend a lot of time poking around the museums and galleries of continental Europe. For what it’s worth, my first encounter with a Nottingham alabaster carving was at the Musee Cluny in Paris — and my first run-in with a really handsome set of English vestments may well have been in the museum of the Cathedral Chapter House in Siena, if not in Padua — certainly, though, Italian regional collections are full of the stuff.

The point, though, is this. Here in London, panels from altarpieces by Giotto di Bondone (maybe), Duccio di Buoninsegna, Hans Memlinc and dozens of others take pride of place in our National Gallery. At the same time, if you want to see medieval British art, you need to travel down to South Kensington to a museum which, for all its glories, was explicitly created to improve the quality of contemporary design and manufacture, rather than to display ‘art’. And there is, alas, still enough life in those old snobberies to provide a persistent undercurrent of commentary on the relative quality of home-grown visual culture, past and present. Or to put it another way, it’s possible to get rid of potentially troublesome objects without actually smashing or burning them.

Art and the Absolute
So, how to regard what’s left of our pre-reformation visual heritage? Stranded somewhere between art and objecthood, these relics — to use a loaded word — challenge us to categorise them.

In the finest British tradition, I was expecting the Westminster Retable to be — what? Interesting, maybe — or better still, to use that good seventeenth century word, ‘curious’, in the sense that I hoped the Retable might somehow tell me something about the devotional practice of 13th century Anglo-French court culture. What I wasn’t expecting, because we are not really accustomed to thinking of British medieval art in these terms, is the degree of aesthetic shock it would confer. The Retable’s beauty — and this time there isn’t really any other word that will do — literally made me catch my breath. The play of blood-bright reds against the dark greens and lapis lazuli blues is delicate, lyrical, intelligent. The flow of line is sinuous, playful, surprising. There is evident love for detail — the curl of a lock of hair, the twisting contours of outstretched fingers — but the demands of that love are never allowed to interrupt the formal imperatives of whole panels, or of the overall composition. There is sweetness in the faces, but also real vigour in the sway and balance of the figures. Naturalism isn’t the really point — but I can never for the life of me understand why anyone looks for ‘naturalism’ in a depiction of Christ in Glory.

Those who enjoy seeking some putative Englishness of English art in anecdote, decorative qualities and an ineffable yet present sweetness will find much to enjoy and recognise here. They may smile particularly on the tiny landscape — the most English, apparently, of artistic endeavours — captured, in schematic miniature, in the tiny orb Christ cradles in His hand. But anyone who might wish to move on from the Westminster Retable to, say, the work of Duccio or Simone Martini may be taken aback by the Retable’s sheer quality. No, it wasn’t meant to be ‘art’ any more than Duccio’s panels were — but there can be little question, even in its current, mangled form, that it can hold its own against the best products of contemporary Siena, Dijon or Paris.

The painted Word
Finally, those who suspect that a rather gentle, low-key, regretfully nostalgic Romanticism was always the authentic mode of English (in this case, not British) visual culture will perhaps suggest something further, which is that the terrible, ravaged nature of the surface of the Retable cannot honestly be disaggregated from our reaction to it. They would, of course, be correct. The chips, the yearning gaps, the achingly empty panels and the pointlessly brutal excisions underlie a thick varnish of known history, for which no degree of wilfully anachronistic aestheticisation is an effective solvent. The work might as well have ‘protestant reform woz here’ scratched across its damaged gilding. To that degree it is now poignantly about loss, change, unrecoverability. Those two long Tudor reigns which made ours a different country likewise made their marks, literal as well as figurative, on the Retable. All of which means that the post-Christian poetry of lost or failed beauty is powerful here — although it is by no means the only possible response to the Retable’s unmistakeable aura. It’s worth noting that both Paul Binski, the Cambridge University art historian who wrote the explanatory notes for the work, and a spokesman for the National Gallery have described the survival of the Retable as ‘miraculous’. Whether this strikes you as to any degree an odd choice of words is, if nothing else, a reliable index as to the subtle secularisation of your own intelligence.

All of which is quite a lot of reflection for quite a small area of extant pigment. Do, though, if you are in London over the next four months, do your best to visit the Westminster Retable in its dun-coloured, ill-lit, slightly depressing basement. It is not well sign-posted, and since the inexpressible delicacy of the brushwork requires extremely close-up viewing, there’s a certain amount of time spent standing behind dreary and self-important fellow Retable-spotters, craning for a glimpse of this extraordinary thing itself and often failing to achieve that glimpse. But it’s worth every bit of trouble you put into it, if only because viewing the Retable is sure to be so unlike any other gallery experience you will have had before, or are likely to have any time soon. There is, quite simply, nothing like it. For that reason alone, it deserves far more interest and engagement than I imagine it will receive.

No art, please, we’re British
Britain’s casual disregard for her nation’s artistic achievements is, no doubt, a sign of strength. Not for us the wistful resignation of the Italians or the Dutch, always looking back to an increasingly distant Golden Age when everything was so much better — nor the assertive boosterism of anxious places like Catalunya or Eire, or for that matter the USA in the mid-20th century, labouring under the historicist delusion that a strong artistic past might somehow imply an even stronger geopolitical future.

Britain, in contrast, is always wondering, admittedly without any great sense of urgency or seriousness, why her own art isn’t something else. We, for instance, have Hilliard and Oliver — instead of Tintoretto or El Greco. We have Dobson and Lely — rather than Watteau or Poussin or Claude. We have Thornhill — yet who visits the Painted Hall at Greenwich? Meanwhile our Reynolds kept talking to us about the sublime delights of Italy, and our Turner just swore and whored and kept on painting, and our Sickert was half-foreign anyway. By the time we come to the 20th century, what is there to say about British art? Picasso didn’t happen here, nor Matisse, nor Malevich. While the watery lager was flowing in the Cedar Tavern and America was lost in the throes of creating its own high imperial style, British artists were patiently adumbrating kitchen gardens, chalk figures and parish churches. The heroes of Abstract Expressionism played out their various drunken, messy endings with self-indulgent grandeur; in contrast, when our best artist of the 1930s died young, it was because he was shot down over Iceland while serving as an official war artist. We more or less invented Pop Art — a movement hard to read as anything other than commentary not on our own culture, but on someone else’s. And so on, and so on. Art history can be seen to move first in one direction, then another. Quite rightly, we are ambivalent about where we stand, as a nation, in regard to such movement. It must also be said, we also don’t really think it matters that much one way or the other.

On one hand, we do not see ourselves as successes in the field of art. On the other hand, we know perfectly well that political stability and mercantile success has ensured that Britain has better holdings of Italian, French and even Dutch art — let alone that of ancient Egypt, Greece or the Far East — than any other single nation on earth. We may have destroyed, in a low-key way, most of our own medieval art, but we’ve collected an awful lot of everybody else’s. We have provided a safe working environment for Warburg and Gombrich, although we have also nurtured Blunt and T. J. Clark. We would rather have launched the YBAs through the agency of a lazy sort of dole than any sort of concerted patronage of the arts. We quite like Tracey Emin, if only because she lives up to the sort of drunk, promiscuous, shambolic frivolity we’ve expected of artists, from Whistler and John to Bacon and early Hirst and beyond. And for that reason — to protect our sense of who we are, and what matters to us as a nation — we’d probably rather forget the aesthetic claims of the Westminster Retable, and what this strange, sad, horribly abused object says about us. Soon, of course, it will be back in the Abbey, which without doubt is a very good thing. That’s where it belongs. But for the next four months, we are going to have to work harder than usual to ignore the full complexity of Britain’s own visual inheritance.

Before she started writing about art, Bunny Smedley’s doctoral work at Cambridge University addressed the tensions between popular piety and official policy in the course of the Tudor reformations.

At the heart of any exhibition review, after one’s stripped away the informative, fun or rancorous bits, there is almost always a simple, yes or no question waiting to be answered: is it worth bothering to see this show? So I might as well come clean right away. Yes, Caravaggio: The Final Years, currently showing at the National Gallery, is worth seeing. The organisers have managed to bring to London a few paintings of extraordinary quality, interest and importance, most of which rarely leave their usual domiciles in southern Italy. One or two are truly unforgettable. And it hardly needs saying, at least amongst people who know anything at all about art, that Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) was a magnificently innovative, endlessly surprising painter whose influence was immense and who continues to be copied and name-checked now, centuries after his short life ended. So to experience any of his autograph work at first hand, even amidst the least encouraging of circumstances, is a boost to anyone's visual literacy. For that reason, if no other, it would be a mistake to miss this exhibition. In the end, after all, it's the art that stays lodged in the mind — not all the transient infelicities of this misguided, mismanaged exhibition, which is so very many ways ought to have been so very much better.

In the spotlight
Let’s start with the single worst misjudgement first. What’s the one thing that everyone knows about Caravaggio? And no, I don’t mean his homicidal turns, his energetic bisexuality, his gift for making enemies or any of the other colourful content of his turbulent life — what’s the one thing that everyone knows about his art? It hinges, of course, on light. Caravaggio’s chief legacy to his followers was a whole new vocabulary of light, in which the intense contrast between illumination and shadow could frame a moment of drama, add weight to a composition or simply speak for itself with a degree of expressive potency unparalleled in earlier art. This, coupled with the so-called ‘realism’ of Caravaggio’s work — his tendency to people his holy scenes not with ideal types cribbed from classical art, but with the all-too-human prostitutes and petty criminals who filled the streets of places like Messina and Syracuse — bundled up, it must be said, with the strange lithe sexiness of some of his figures — that is what contemporaries found most striking about his work. And indeed, it what we find most striking now. But over the course of his life, Caravaggio’s use of light changed. It seems clear that in those last years preceding his death, his treatment of light and darkness grew more extreme, more intense and more violent than ever before. So presumably, an exhibition focusing on Caravaggio’s final years should provide ample scope for examining the painter’s use of light — its development, and, to the extent that the chronology of works is clear, its ultimate conclusion. We should expect to learn a lot about Caravaggio’s light. And if we don’t, then something has gone pretty badly wrong.

Yet what we encounter instead, as we file with the rest of the throng down the stairs into the airless, charmless bunker that constitutes the Sainsbury Wing’s special exhibition space, has to count as one of the most bizarre and inexplicable mistakes ever perpetrated by a major art institution. What we see isn’t Caravaggio’s light — it’s the gallery’s light, and pretty darned strange it is, too. Somewhere along the planning process for the show, someone obviously decided that it would be a really good idea to keep the exhibition space extremely dark — dark walls, in oxblood and slate, as well as a generalised absence of illumination — while at the same time training spotlights on the paintings themselves. The result? As might have been predicted, this arrangement (more familiar from, say, the London Dungeon than the more upmarket reaches of the tourism spectrum) has the effect of making the usual unremarkable crowd of massed cultural consumers look marginally more like figures from Caravaggio’s canvases — while making the canvases themselves almost unreadable. The raking light tells us a great deal about the glaze layers and the overall condition of the upper few inches of the larger works, bleeds all the colour out of the centre of the work and inflicts strange patches of glare everywhere else. The larger paintings are simply impossible to see in their entirety. Did no one notice this before the exhibition began? Did no other critic notice it? The literal-mindedness behind this decision might be vaguely endearing had the show been organised by a team of enthusiastic six-formers. Coming from the curators at one of the world’s greatest art institutions, though, it is nothing short of scary. What next? Insisting that viewers can only enjoy Bruegel’s riotous kermesse scenes after consuming four or five pints? Refusing to show Turner canvases anywhere except outside, preferably in a thick fog? Making everyone strip off on their way into a Lucian Freud retrospective? Demand that only horses can see the forthcoming Stubbs show?

Down to our level
But then there’s other evidence afoot that, in the midst of organising all the loans and scholarship and hype, no one actually thought to look at the end result. For one thing, the large works are all hung incredibly low. Does this matter? Well, yes, in all sorts of ways.

Let’s take a simple example. One of the highlights of the exhibition is a magnificent Flagellation (1607), usually on show at the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples. It’s a spectacular work even in the company it encounters there, tall and commanding, powerfully emotive — a perfect painting to experience in the run-up to Holy Week. Christ, head bowed, figure painfully twisted, naked except for His crown of thorns and a brilliantly-executed strip of white cloth, is tied to a massive stone column, flanked by the figures of three of his tormentors — two framing Him, one just a little taller and one a little shorter, another crouched at His feet. It is this grid of bare, pale limbs — Persecuted and persecutors entwined together in the elaborate choreography of suffering and forbearance — that gives the composition its almost electric charge — that, and Caravaggio’s inimitably successful way of establishing complicated spatial relationships through gesture and illumination. In a canvas that divides neatly into three horizontal fields, it is the lower two in which all the action occurs, while the velvet black of the upper canvas is mostly there to bear down upon the actors, forcing down Christ’s head, pushing His tormentors in closer to Him. In some ways, in fact, the lowest third, while less obviously full of psychological force than the centre third, has the most vital part to play, for this is both the area that establishes most clearly the relationship between all the figures, and that gives the viewers that almost frightening sense of proximity to, or perhaps even complicity in the terrible scene unfolding before us.

Yet here, at the National Gallery, what do we see? Not what we would have seen in the church of San Domenico Maggiore, that’s for certain, where the painting once hung and where a replica version hangs today, high above a raised, consecrated altar in a relatively narrow transept chapel flooded with natural light — which is to say, leaving the liturgical context aside for a minute, an uninterrupted, clear, upward-looking view of this magnificent painting. Instead, in the Sainsbury Wing, we simply see a flock of dramatically-lit gallery-goers lost in the whispered confidences of their audio-guides, and then rising above them, the upper two thirds, or perhaps the upper half, of the Flagellation. Well, perhaps even half of something this good is better than nothing?

Notes and queries
Still, while waiting in the inevitable informal queue that develops alongside the smaller works in order to allow some sort of view of them — the handsome, sober Portrait of a Knight of Malta for instance, or the distinctly creepy Sleeping Cupid — there are plenty of minor puzzles to help pass the time. How, for instance, did it come to pass that a costly, purpose-built, contemporary exhibition space, created expressly for the display of Old Master paintings, suffers from a nasty, glare-afflicted lighting scheme that, while it might please conservators, plays havoc, again and again, with what we must assume to be the painters’ intentions? And given the tendency of these Old Master shows to include large altar-pieces — one thinks here of the recent Titian, El Greco and Raphael exhibitions — isn’t it unfortunate that London’s main Old Master exhibition space has such repellently pokey little proportions, truncated sight-lines and all the charisma of a particularly lacklustre underground car-park? And — here’s an old favourite — why is it every time the National Gallery shows its own Old Masters alongside those from other collections, the National Gallery paintings always look so flat, so lacking in depth and luminosity, in a word, so hideously over-restored? (At least the answer to this final, rather upsetting question is being explored to good effect elsewhere.)

So far, then, so bad. Time, perhaps, to give the organisers of Caravaggio: The Final Years a small dose of credit where credit is plainly due. There is one practical aspect of their work that deserves a generous dollop of praise. Having complained recently on this site about the usual dichotomy between the uninformative, free exhibition leaflet versus the unwieldy, far-from-free catalogue, I was delighted to encounter a neat response to this problem — a compact, free exhibition guide containing a brief introduction, a short description of each painting and a tiny bit of useful additional material. Although one could quibble about some of the content, this is, more or less, the right size and shape and complexity of thing to accompany most of us around an exhibition, answering the most urgent questions and providing a point of reference if we want to pursue more complicated points elsewhere. (The catalogue, while illustrated in admirably true colour and hence in some ways a better source of visual information about the pictures than real life encounters with them in the present exhibition, is otherwise an oddly hermetic affair, of interest to connoisseurs of Italian art-historical academic cat-fighting only.) Other institutions would do well to adopt this format, although curators might well argue that it is particularly suitable for shows featuring only a tiny number of actual works.

Qualitas quam quantitas?
For that is another curiosity of this exhibition. When Caravaggio: The Final Years first appeared at the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte in Naples, it was considerably more expansive, containing 19 accepted works, 9 copies of missing originals and 5 new proposed attributions. In London, by way of contrast, there are 16 accepted works — and that’s all. But the Italian show had another advantage. To crib a point made by Brian Sewell in his perceptive Evening Standard review of the London exhibition, Naples is so glutted with work painted by Caravaggio, as well as work profoundly influenced by him, that viewers can be assumed to know a lot, consciously or otherwise, about this painter, whilst visitors from Rome have the full benefit of all his earlier, more spectacular achievements there. By contrast, what do we have in London? The National Gallery’s Supper at Emmaus (1601), which is perhaps stretching the ‘final years’ concept more than a little, a Salome that Sir Denis Mahon bludgeoned the Trustees into acquiring, and not a lot else. All of which means that these 16 works, hung sparsely across the six dark, underlit rooms, are presented not only with very little context in terms of their original patronage, function or reception — the kind of lacuna we’ve come to expect by now — but also with very little context even in terms of art history. Or to put it another way, if you have the misfortune to enter this exhibition without any knowledge of what Caravaggio was getting up to before his ‘final’ years began, you’re going to emerge back into Trafalgar Square none the wiser. All of which is a bit odd, because surely half the point of the whole ‘final years’ tag is to make a distinction between earlier and later work, even to argue (however gingerly, given the bad teleological risks involved) for some sort of ‘late’ quality inherent in the work, some intimation of the end, perhaps something approaching a summation.

But it just isn’t here. How are we to recognise from this exhibition the distance travelled between the lush, overripe, gone-to-seed homoeroticism of his early work and, say, the very late St John the Baptist included here — coarse-featured, enervated, bled dry of fleshiness and physical appeal but perhaps more seriously invested with psychological insight? Or between the vivid colour of the earlier work and the near-monochrome rigour of David with the Head of Goliath — a really magnificent work, by the way, made all the more arresting by the suggestion that Goliath’s head was modelled on Caravaggio’s own? The overall effect is less a narrative of change and development than the evocation of one particular phase of a career. Yet even here, the chronology is still so hotly disputed, the number of works so small and the span of time over which they may have been painted so relatively large, that in the end, really, what is produced is more effect than argument — a show to experience with your eyes and heart and viscera, but not necessarily your intellect.

Spot the difference
There’s an exception to this, however. One of the high points of the exhibition is a comparison between two versions of The Supper at Emmaus — the National Gallery’s own painting and a loan from the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan. It is the one point at which the comparison between ‘early’ and ‘late’ becomes real, because there — assuming one can see past the crowds, the glare and the nasty finish on the National Gallery’s version — it is possible to look back and forth from one to the other, analysing what was gained and lost in the development of the image. This is the kind of totally engaging experience that perhaps uniquely justifies all the time, effort, cost and danger consequent on the organisation of an exhibition involving paintings of this quality. What a shame, then, that there are not more such experiences on offer here.

Here, in front of these two powerful yet divergent works, even the least experienced Caravaggio-watcher can chart out for himself the way in which a completely different mood, a completely different spiritual impact is achieved. He can see, as it were, the brilliant reds and golden yellows of the National Gallery’s version drain away — we have to assume that they were not all created by dodgy ‘cleaning’ — to become the sombre, umbrous tones of the Brera painting. He can watch the focus simplify from that rather elegant repast to a quasi-sacramental loaf and wine-jug and the circle of interconnected gazes. He can see how apparently minor shifts in the gestures of the figures transform the scene from one of high drama to one of wonder too deep either for exclamation or exertion. Movingly, he can experience a sort of nightfall between the two works, drawing in about the Brera piece as if to make this scene the only one in all the world, so that the viewer shares the uncertainty of the participants: ‘And while they yet believed not for joy, and wondered …’ For of the two — and doubtless familiarity plays its usual deadening role here — while the National Gallery version may be the more spectacular piece of painting, it is the Brera version that makes the more powerful spiritual point. And because Caravaggio is a painter who always seems, in a strangely modern way, to draw the conversation back to himself, one stands before this painting somehow imagining that the man who painted it must have felt in his own heart the appeal of the Emmaus story, with its promise of hope, even when hope seems most foolish and futile.

Is nothing sacred?
All of which brings us to a very basic problem — for once, not the problem of this exhibition per se, but of virtually all exhibitions of devotional art. No one would be barbaric enough, in these robustly civilised times, to suggest that a Cubist work by Picasso or Braque would look better with a thick layer of varnish. Nor would they suggest ripping the glass off one of Bacon’s Studies after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. And what is clearly the worst thing Clement Greenberg ever did? Not his self-centred mistreatment of lovers, colleagues and students, obviously, because that only hurt other human beings. No, his real sin was to encourage the loss of paint from the surfaces of some of David Smith’s sculptures. For these days there’s a general agreement that the artist’s intentions regarding a work are, if not literally sacrosanct, then at very least worthy of serious, scrupulous respect. Who, when hanging a Rothko exhibition these days, would ignore his well-publicised views about the height at which his works should be hung? Only someone who was purposefully making some sort of statement by doing so. It would be like hanging late Turners without frames, in order to make them look more contemporary — a tail-wagging intervention, soliciting approbation from critics and, mostly, other curators. It would not be done accidentally, not only without comment but almost without consciousness. If the edict were disobeyed, such a dandyish gesture would only call more attention to the edict, and to the importance of its conservation.

And yet such is, almost invariably these days, the fate of Baroque devotional art. Who cares if an altarpiece was designed to be hung at a certain height, to be seen from certain vantage-points but not from others, to be illuminated in a certain way and from a certain direction, and to be experienced in the context of particular surroundings — paintings, sculpture, architecture, whatever? While I have no idea whether Caravaggio is known to have made a great fuss over such matters, I do know for a fact that Titian, Tintoretto, El Greco, Raphael and others all did. What’s more, their patrons, critics and admirers were also demonstrably conscious of this sort of issue. Anyone who has ever yawned their way through any serious work on Renaissance or Baroque patronage knows the immense amount of tedious discussion surrounding scale, frames, harmonisation with other nearby work, visual puns, the overall impression made by a work once installed in its intended site — in other words, aspects of its visual functionality. Nowadays, however, it is considered perfectly normal — and like the present show, the El Greco and Titian exhibitions were perfect examples of this — not only to show unfinished, cut-down or otherwise damaged work, but to hang work low, more or less unframed, against gallery walls under artificial light. Is this really the best way to learn anything about an artist, though — even at the basic level of trying to understand how he wanted his paintings to look? Of course not. Instead, such hanging schemes bring the devotional hardware of other times and places down to the level of our present-day art, created for the tartish humours of public scrutiny in a shifting world of white-walled, anonymous galleries. And of course something is lost in this translation. No wonder these Old Master exhibitions so often have a strange, inexplicable air of sadness lingering about them.

God and man in Sicily
Inevitably, a lot of meaning is lost, too, in the decision to move a painting from a church into a gallery. Those who derive their knowledge of Caravaggio principally from broadsheet newspapers’ regurgitations of National Gallery hype, if not from that Derek Jarman’s film, may be surprised at the notion that Caravaggio’s work might have any religious meaning whatsoever. Surely a mentally-unstable bisexual murderer — for few artists have ever been luckier in their modernist, ‘misunderstood outsider’, creative credentials — couldn’t possibly have painted a ‘straight’, serious devotional work? Surely the hand that enthusiastically depicted all those pouting rent boys masquerading as St John, what with everything else it got up to, couldn’t have been connected to a self-consciously Christian soul? Surely these works, with all their drama, earthiness and patent genius must always have been mostly about art, or perhaps about the artist, and not about something as old-fashioned and dreary and unremarkable as actual Christian faith?

To be fair, Caravaggio is hardly the only painter who is burdened, again and again, with our baggage of anachronistic and frankly myopic secularist assumptions, although his bad-boy image makes him a particularly soft, receptive target. Goya is another, especially for those either unwilling or unable to understand the distinction between anticlericalism and atheism. For what, after all, is the point of painting something if you’re not out to undermine it, critique it or transgress against it?

It would, obviously, be foolish to ignore the amount of pride in his own workmanship, the sheer competitive zeal that must have gone into the scraping-into-life of Caravaggio’s most successful paintings. There’s a kind of wilful extremism in some of those compositions, in some of the schemes of illumination, that speaks as clearly as mute pigment can of the desire to push his medium just that little bit further than any of his contemporaries dared to go. The need to be at the cutting edge is one that we understand, although perhaps these days that understanding is intercut with a hint of nostalgia That is perhaps why the National Gallery is so keen to tout Caravaggio was ‘the first modern artist’. But I think we need to take seriously, too, the possibility that there was more than artistic ambition, coupled of course with the desire to make a bit of money, behind the creation of Caravaggio’s devotional work. It is all too easy, now, to read into those broad-featured peasant faces and dirty feet some sort of attempt to criticise the wealth and power of the ecclesiastical hierarchy or perhaps even to subvert belief, full stop — less easy, perhaps, to remember the desire of many Counter Reformation thinkers to develop an affective, personalised, down-to-earth style of religiosity both to wrong-foot protestant critiques and to improve the breadth and depth of public devotion. Surrounded by all the trappings of liturgy and faith, in the churches for which they were painted, we might at least have been able to explore whether this work might still speak to us at the level those who commissioned it, and perhaps even the artist himself, intended. In the Sainsbury Wing basement, however, it is hard enough for the paintings to function as art, let alone as anything more significant. And really, this should be a source of sorrow for all of us, Christian or otherwise, if only because it sets up a barrier between us and these magnificent, mistreated acts of creation.

Not in the South
Still — well, in the end, for all its faults, Caravaggio: The Final Years is still worth the admission fee. Several of the paintings are simply that good. I’ve mentioned, already, the Flagellation from Capdimonte and the David from the Galleria Borghese, Rome. Both are remarkable, yet what admirer of the Baroque won’t eventually find his way to a gallery in central Rome (no matter how eccentric its opening hours) or to the hills above Naples?

In that sense, the real wonders here are the three major Sicilian paintings which are much less well known to those of us languishing in London — the Burial of St Lucy from Syracuse, and the Raising of Lazarus and Adoration of the Shepherd from Messina. Of these, the St Lucy seems, at first, the easiest to dismiss, but is perhaps the greatest. It is a bit of a mess — thin in parts, with areas of repainting and a complicated, vexed history — and looks deceptively simple. But the longer one looks, the more there is to see in this strangely warm, earthy yet luminous work. The two gravediggers (what Leon Golub always tried to achieve, yet never did) seem too monumental to be ordinary humans, leaning inwards, their gigantic forms describing a sort of parenthesis within which much of the action occurs, while the almost scary foreshortening of the dead saint’s body provokes a sense of crisis, looking just that little bit too dead for comfort, and the cusp of the bishop’s mitre is picked out abruptly by the raking light. A blood-coloured cloth, near the centre, provides the only flash of colour. Meanwhile, the upper half of the canvas is occupied only by shadow and a mysterious double arch. The rhythms here repay protracted study — the composition is nothing short of amazing — but perhaps even more remarkable is the sense of age, mystery, gravity produced by this rather sketchy-looking, damaged marvel, which alone would have made entry to the exhibition worthwhile. It looks almost like an excavated fragment of classical Roman painting. It looks almost like some sort of artefact, a relic of something real, rather than just a painting, just a construct. The National Gallery speaks of ‘the first modern painter’ with the implication that this is a point in Caravaggio’s favour. Whereas in my own mind, Caravaggio may be the only painter other than Rubens to tackle the classical world more with lust and understanding than with deference. And what, in the first decade of the seventeenth century, could be more of a marvel than that?

But then the two Messina paintings are also, in their own ways, marvellous. Both share the reddish-brown cast and the low, wedge-shaped composition of the St Lucy. The Lazarus is laid out like a frieze, with Lazarus stretching his arms out in clear evocation of the Crucifixion, his right hand rising above the file of wondering mourners in order to connect, visually, with the imperative, pointing finger of a monumental Christ. The strange frightening light picks out bits of drapery, contours of flesh. Intuitively, the hot-blooded Caravaggio seems a world removed from cool, cerebral Poussin, yet at moments like this the two draw very close indeed. Meanwhile the Adoration is unlike any other treatment of this subject I’ve ever seen. It isn’t so much that all the actors are ‘ordinary’ — Netherlandish painting tended to cast those shepherds as very ordinary indeed — but rather, the psychology of the moment is evoked so unsparingly and perhaps so personally. Once again, much of the upper half of the canvas is lost in the dark — but in this case, rather than suggesting infinite space above, some sketchy rafters instead reveal how low are viewpoint is beneath the eaves of this low stable. Mary is lying on the ground, propped up on a feed box. She looks, frankly, exhausted — like a woman who has just given birth. She is nuzzling her baby, who reaches His tiny fat hand up towards her face. This, obviously, and correctly, is all she cares about — not the strangers kneeling in front of her, not Joseph, certainly not the indifferent bulk of the livestock, as impassive as statues, only a few feet away. It’s a very tender painting, but the sacramental still-life in the foreground lifts the tenderness above sentimentality, just as the emotive power pushes the composition far beyond mere artistic brilliance. It’s real and raw and beautiful. It’s the sort of painting that reminds us why Caravaggio is so easy to copy, yet so impossible to equal.

Ultimately, then, Caravaggio: The Final Years provides an odd sort of access to the life and work of one of Europe’s greatest and most influential painters. There’s no context, no sense of development, because the late work we see is contrasted with nothing. There’s no particular sense of why the work was painted, or what it was painted against, as it were — the work of Caravaggio’s predecessors and contemporaries, so richly represented only a few yards away in other parts of the National Gallery. The paintings are hard to see, while the lighting scheme and the overblown emphasis on the artist’s tempestuous life broadcast a pointless air of theatricality over the proceedings. Did the curators really believe that these paintings could not have made a case for themselves without all that regrettable ‘first modern painter’ bombast, the glaring spotlights and the melodramatic darkness? If so, they were bizarrely, inexplicably wrong. Viewed either at the level of stepping-stones in some narrative of learning how to make pigment on canvas do heart-stopping things — or, better still, as a particular individual’s highly distinctive meditations on the great truths of suffering, death and redemption — there’s enough here to make yet another grudging visit to London’s worst exhibition space entirely worthwhile. Despite itself, this is an exhibition worth seeing.

Bunny Smedley used to be Arts Editor of electric-review.com.

Gimmicky though it may be, the subtitle of the exhibition of Sir William Orpen’s work currently on show at the Imperial War Museum — ‘Politics, Sex and Death’ — has at least the merit of giving some sense of the show’s breadth, if not much indication of its subject’s relative attitude towards these three lodestones of human endeavour. For while there can be little question that Orpen enjoyed sex, both politics and death constituted unwanted intrusions into the ambit of a life based, apparently, on a combination of hard work (art), hard play (apart from art, his recreations were the only thing he took seriously) and an innate and ineradicable flippancy concerning virtually everything else. For some critics, this lack of seriousness consigned Orpen to terminal unimportance, even oblivion, and their opinion has held the floor for decades. Now the IWM is giving us the chance to judge Orpen, anew, for ourselves.

The IWM’s decision to stage a monographic exhibition of Sir William Orpen’s work was certainly a brave one. Once very famous indeed, and despite the relatively recent publication of a serious biography, he is misunderstood where he is not simply forgotten entirely. Before this exhibition opened, Orpen existed in my mind as little more than a second-rate Lavery — which is to say, a fourth-rate John Singer Sargent — his auction prices and claims to art-historical significance inflated beyond credulity by the plangent special pleading of Celtic Fringe apologists, desperate for something to hang on country house hotel walls between the forgettable landscapes of Paul Henry and the smeary effusions of Jack Yeats. All of which is, I now learn, culpably unfair on all sorts of levels. Despite the immense prestige he enjoyed during the second decade of the past century, Orpen was probably, even at his best, a lucky painter rather than a great one. Yet his abundant technical gifts came wedded to a sensibility sufficiently fresh, fantastic and funny as to merit, richly, the retrospective exhibition he is offered here, while the background to his work — Ireland’s long nationalist nightmare, the Great War, the relation of modernism to all of this — raises more than enough pertinent questions to make this one of the London’s ‘must see’ exhibitions this decade.

Portrait of the artist
Given his recent obscurity, a quick biographical tour d’horizon is perhaps in order. William Orpen, the youngest of four sons, was born near Dublin in 1878. His father was a successful solicitor. Orpen grew up in a Gothick villa surrounded by pleasant gardens, the much-indulged baby of the family, and seems, by his own account, to have enjoyed an idyllic childhood. A precocious talent saw him admitted to Dublin’s School of Art at the age of eleven, and to the Slade School of Art in London seven years later. His facility across a range of media, his ability to mimic the Old Masters while allowing in just enough acid colour and ostentatiously flat surfaces to proclaim his equally sure grasp of stylish modernity, his evident if unpredictable charm: all of these conspired to make Orpen a phenomenally successful portrait-painter and a well-known figure both on the London and Dublin art scenes. Sargent praised him, all but anointing him as his successor. When the First World War began, Orpen initially did his bit by auctioning off blank canvases on which he’d paint portraits, all for the aid of the war effort. By 1915, however, his admiration for real fighting men won out, and he started pulling the string necessary to gain a commission, first within the Army Service Corps and then as a war artist. Given the rank of major and a place on the Official War Artists’ scheme, Britain’s most prominent society portrait-painter immediately became the celebrity recorder of Britain’s first mechanised, conscription-based, truly modern full-scale war.

There can be little question that Orpen’s experience of battle changed him. During his time as an official war artist, Orpen produced a number of well-received portraits and other paintings; he also courted controversy with several paintings relating to the Paris Peace Conference. Back in civilian life by 1919, he once again became a London-based superstar portrait-painter. But tastes were changing, and Orpen’s art had begun to look uncomfortable, squeezed between Edwardian gentility and cutting-edge modernity. (And indeed do we, even now, have much of an idea about what should be done with those artists like Orpen or Sir William Nicholson, whose recent retrospective at the Royal Academy was so full of surprises, who seem to represent a figurative tradition that while impeccably modern, still doesn’t fit neatly within any of our off-the-shelf narratives of modernity?) So Orpen wrote a couple of books, drank far too much, and in 1931 died in a nursing home, aged only 53, of what might or might not have been syphilis contracted in wartime France. For a while his name had currency, articulated in sorrowful tones, as a meteoric figure whose talent had been real but who had ‘sold out’ in pursuit of money and social success. In the 1950s the director of the Tate launched a personal attack on him from which he never entirely recovered. And then he was all but forgotten. It took the stubborn enthusiasm of a few individuals, a recent biography, plus the semi-indiscriminate hunger of the slightly mangy Celtic Tiger economy for collectable art of its own, to revive his fortunes. And here, at the IWM, a London audience can, for the first time in half a century, come to their own conclusions about this complicated, badly misunderstood painter.

A Long, Long Trail A-Winding
So what’s there to see at London’s least well-publicised, yet often most mesmerising exhibition space? The IWM Orpen retrospective, hung under the guidance of Tate Britain’s Richard Upstone, is very much a show of two halves. Within that framework, its intentions appear to be both narrative and apologetic. In one set of rooms we are introduced to Orpen, the fluent visual mimic, bon-vivant painter-about-town, lover of many women (only some of them married) and slyly subversive wit. There’s a smallish anteroom that prepares us for a scene-change. And then suddenly, we’re in the middle of the Great War, witnessing the gradual darkening of Orpen’s world-view, room by room, from pretty girls and playful ‘holiday snaps’ of the French countryside to something infinitely darker — a descent through blackening circles of hell culminating, at last, in a magnificent coup de theatre, in Orpen’s brilliant Peace Conference at the Quai d’Orsay where the acres of gloriously irrelevant gold-and-ormolu confectionary sailing over the heads of the world leaders lined up in the half-light below suddenly starts to read as an incandescently violent indictment of — well, something, although it is hard to know exactly what, since, like most of his contemporaries, he had not succumbed to the present-day myth that war is necessarily nothing but pointless waste and futile sacrifice.

More probably, if Orpen was protesting against something, as this hanging of the work hints, it was surely the distance, or disparity or something along those lines, between the blood, mud, cameraderie and bloated corpses there in the trenches, there where the real soldiers fought and died, and the gilded salons and titled sitters amongst whom Orpen’s future would lie once the war was over. In a later work, To the Unknown British Soldier in France (1921-28), where there’s a similarly spectacular contrast between ornate architectural setting and sombre reality, Orpen at first flanked the flag-draped coffin with the spectral figures of two dead ordinary soldiers — but then agreed, meekly, to paint them out, and to re-brand the work as a tribute to the recently dead Field-Marshal Haig, in order for the work to be accepted into the IWM’s collection. Well, he had great respect for Haig, gave to the IWM a large number of important works which might have fetched a lot of cash elsewhere, and left behind a painting arguably all the stronger for the fact that its more explicit symbols have long since been subsumed into art-historical myth. Given the choice between being flippant about his own dignity, or about wartime sacrifice, he made the sort of sacrifice too few artists today would dream of making, and repainted. Some things are, after all, much more important than art.

Home Thoughts
Needless to say, this powerful arrangement of the work comes at the cost, first and foremost, of chronology. A number of the society portraits in the first set of rooms were painted after the war. The hanging tends to imply a radical discontinuity between Orpen’s work as a war artist, and as a painter of civilian life, that for all its emotive power doesn’t quite work. And the reason for that has a lot to do with the first of that modish trinity conjured up by the show’s subtitle, Politics, Sex and Death. For the Great War wasn’t the only war that left its mark on Orpen’s life and work. It’s a matter about which the IWM is, for fairly obvious reasons, eternally a bit reticent. In this current exhibition it is the dog that, if not entirely silenced, instead of barking is only allowed the occasional low, unsettling snarl. What’s missing? Ireland, of course — the land of Orpen’s birth and buccolic childhood, and the place he would visit only for a single day between 1915 and his death. After its time at the IWM, this show will travel to Dublin, and it benefits from generous loans vouchsafed by Irish collections. Furthermore, civil wars, especially ones that don’t come to neat conclusions, are the ones that soldiers like least. So there are points that are addressed rather gingerly in Roy Foster’s catalogue essay — alternatively informative and more than slightly silly — and a lot that is frankly left out of the show itself. What, then, were Orpen’s politics, especially with regard to Ireland?

Dublin’s cultural firmament was, in the early years of the twentieth century just as now, hardly enormous. When studying in Ireland or, up to 1915, paying long visits, he moved in broadly the same circles as W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, and Augusta Gregory. His commissioned portraits for the National Gallery in Dublin included a painting of Land League founder Michael Davitt — Orpen would later write enthusiastically about the old man’s conversation, which admittedly included the advice to avoid all party politics like a curse — and another of T. M. Healy, who later became first governor-general of the Free State. As the catalogue notes, both men were, at the time they were painted by Orpen, more relics of a soon-to-be-mythic past than up-to-date nationalists. Was his heart in this commission? Probably not. Even less did this compulsively flippant man have any patience with the broader ‘Holy Ireland’ business— the swans, lake-isles, fairies, pointless complicated spellings and dreary epics and so forth, shading off all too soon into a world of green lager, franchised theme-pubs and Riverdance. Whether Orpen could see this denoument coming is unknowable. What is certain is that he never missed a chance to poke fun at Yeats’ high-minded idiocy, and refused to take up Lady Gregory’s kind invitation to paint the inhabitants of the Coole workhouse. Synge, on the other hand, he admired, not least because those who criticised Synge’s work most loudly were considerably more pompous than the playwright himself. For if anything is clear about the three rather opaque allegorical works Orpen produced between 1913 and 1915 — Sewing New Seed and and The Western Wedding are included in the IWM show — it is Orpen’s dislike of everything in the New Ireland that that took itself too seriously: the Catholic hierarchy (not on sectarian grounds, by the way — Orpen, brought up in the Church of Ireland, was a generously ecumenical creature by nature, and indeed later had an oratory built adjoining his London studio), the dogmatic political parties, the serious-minded institutions, the po-faced sexual Puritanism.

At the same time, there were moments when Orpen appeared, if not sympathetic to nationalist allegiances, surprisingly warm towards those whose nationalist sentiments were manifest. The IWM exhibition includes Young Ireland, Orpen’s Manet-influenced 1907 portrait of his friend and fellow art-student Grace Gifford, all wild red hair, girlish smile and Puckish high spirits. The titles makes reference to a romantic and mostly harmless nationalism that would later curdle into something considerably less pretty. We shall return to Grace Gifford later. But in passing it is also worth noting a few other portraits.

To me, at least, Orpen’s male portraits are somehow more persuasive than his female ones — did self-identification yield up richer fruit than simple physical attraction? Maybe. In any event, of the portraits on show at the IWM, several male ones stand out. One depicts Orpen’s friend Captain John Shawe-Taylor (1908), like Hugh Lane a nephew of Lady Gregory. Shawe-Taylor is shown casually seated astride a chair, dressed in hunting pinks, his stock neatly done up. Yet what works, here, is less the pose than the face, which is incontrovertibly handsome, but also tense, alert, more than a little guarded. Indeed, it would be easy for a certain sort of critic to see this as some sort of parable of Ascendency privilege and anxiety — were it not for the fact that Shaw-Taylor was already, at the time of sitting for this portrait, the architect of the proto-Zimbabwean, pointlessly destructive Land Purchase Scheme. Then, as if by way of contrast, there’s The Man from the West (c. 1915), a brooding portrait of Orpen’s sometime London studio assistant Sean Keating. Orpen appears to have been pulling out all the stops in this painterly, dramatic work, as if to impress someone who realised how difficult these effortless-looking effects were to achieve. But he was also making reference to Keating’s risibly wooden self-portrait, Men of the West (1915), in which the young nationalist depicted himself as an armed rebel. Unsurprisingly, when the First World War started Keating, increasingly extreme in his various discontents, tried to persuade Orpen to return to Ireland. For his own part, Keating was eventually to become a major artistic figure in the infant Irish state, producing such mawkish tributes to terrorism as his famous Men of the South (1921). Looking at them, even in reproduction, it’s not hard to guess why Orpen didn’t want to go back. This tributary product of socialist realism, minus the skill, was hardly an attractive idiom for a painter of any intelligence, sympathy or sense of irony. To his credit, Orpen was endowed with all these things, even if Keating wasn’t.

Not his finest hour
In fact — and it’s a point that needs to be remembered when wandering through the IWM exhibition — Orpen could scarcely escape Ireland and her vexed constitutional politics anywhere, try though he might. Orpen’s portrait of Winston Churchill (1916) was, by all accounts, perhaps the best likeness of Churchill ever painted, and certainly one of the subject’s favourites. Whatever else it might have been, it was a remarkable piece of painting, the velvety black of the background throwing the shirt-front, hands and that well-known face into dramatic prominence; it’s a work that transcends the society-portrait conventions of its time, perhaps even its subject. Here we see not the self-mythologising world historical figure of later years, but rather a slightly anxious, self-conscious politician staring out of the darkness, frown-lines creasing his high forehead, eyes frankly distrustful, measuring up the situation, almost as if worried about the impression he was making on the viewer. But then it’s far too easy to read things into portraits of famous people. What would Orpen have known about Churchill? Certainly, not the famous narratives of a career we all know too well, so that we see 1916 as a depressive dip on the way to ineluctable world-historical greatness (real or imagined). Orpen would, however, have known that Churchill, in his role as First Lord of the Admiralty, had been stumping around the country speaking up with characteristic aplomb for the 3rd Home Rule Bill; during the Curragh Mutiny, he’d advocated using the Royal Navy to shell Belfast in the event of armed resistance there to implementation of the Act; Britain was, in fact, on the brink of civil war, and if there’s a tendency today to talk more, in the context of this portrait, about the Dardanelles expedition and disgrace than Home Rule and Churchill’s increasing distance from Unionism, it’s a set of priorities we should not impose, anachronistically, on Orpen or his contemporaries.

There are two further portraits in the IWM exhibition that need to be mentioned with reference to that ‘politics’ subtitle. One is, perhaps, the finest portrait in the entire show. Count John McCormack (1923) [sic, as in any event McCormack didn’t receive this papal title until 1928] depicts the Athlone-born tenor more or less at the point where, due to a self-confessed lack of acting skills, he’d abandoned opera for a less prestigious yet infinitely more lucrative career as a superstar concert performer; even those who’ve forgotten his name today probably retain, however unknowingly, his renditions of It’s A Long War to Tipperary and There’s A Long, Long Trail Awinding as part of their mental backdrop to the carnage of the Western Front. But the connection with the Great War was, in a sense, rather paradoxical, because in 1914 McCormack took US citizenship, while his forthright nationalist made him, for a decade or two, an unpopular figure in much of Britain.

Orpen’s portrait, painted near the height of that unpopularity, is a minor masterpiece. McCormack looks, frankly, a bit of a mess. His collar is open, his cream-coloured suit is wrinkled and his hair is standing up, while his left hand, resting at his waist (the other holds a score) draws attention to his paunchy middle and badly-tucked-in shirt. It’s his face, though, that really draws our attention. For while there’s a sense of good looks overripe and on the turn, somewhere there amongst the jowls and growing corpulence, it’s the sitter’s shrewd, appraising yet slightly deadened eyes that really connect. There’s something disconcertingly fleshy, real and intimate about the image, not least in McCormack’s air of slight unease. And to be honest, I have no idea whether any of this was intended by Orpen. Yet it’s hard to imagine that the painter — still earning something like £35,000 per year, a minor fortune at the time, but increasingly depressed, dependent on drink and perhaps suffering from syphilis — failed to compare his career with that of his sitter. Both, in a sense, had set aside the claims of ‘art’ in favour of wealth, popularity and success. Both had the new-model Rolls Royces, the entertainment budget and cacophony of sycophantic friends to show for it. Did McCormack’s professional, if no longer domiciliary Irishness make it easier or harder for Orpen to identify with him? It’s an unanswerable question. The genius of the painting lies in making one wish, however ineffectually, that it were otherwise.

Taking sides
That leaves one final portrait to shed light on Orpen’s relations with Ireland. Unlike the others already discussed, it hangs in the wartime half of the IWM exhibition. Major A. N. Lee in his hut office at Beaumarie-sur-Mer (1918) is a large oil sketch, rather than a carefully finished studio work, and that shows in its very evident appeal — the sense of light, the fluency of the brushwork, the clear colour, the freshness of the entire scene. Major Lee sits at a cluttered desk, all but invisible amongst a pile of papers, speaking on the telephone, while through the window behind him one can make out a splash of bright countryside, there between the full shelves and the primitive stove. The painting has almost the air of a snapshot taken by a bored visitor, waiting for his friend to finish that call, in a room he knew well. And indeed, Orpen and Major Lee were friends, as the inscription in the lower-right corner of the painting makes clear.

Friendship had not, at first, been plain sailing. Major Lee, a Sherwood Forester, was responsible for overseeing matters related to press and propaganda, and in particular the work of the official war artists and photographers — a group who were about as tractable as the proverbial herd of cats, and in some cases equally productive — and in fact Lee’s occasionally censorship of their work still attracts the odd swipe from the sort of people who value an ill-defined ‘freedom of expression’ over the need to protect lives or win wars.

Flippancy is not an easy vice to curb, if only because the truly flippant can never understand why flippancy might be considered a vice at all. Orpen was one of Lee’s more turbulent charges. At first, Britain’s most famous official war artist didn’t seem to be doing any work — just ‘looking round’ — and then, when Lee’s superior officer reproved him for this, Orpen passed on his grievances to his old friend Philip Sasson, private secretary to Field Marshal Haig, culminating in a rebuke from General Headquarters to the unfortunate superior officer.

This pretty much set the tone. When Orpen had eventually looked, wandered and drunk enough to start translating the Western Front into line and colour and tone, he caused even more trouble for Lee. In the winter of 1917-18 he met Yvonne Aubicq, the young French girl who was to be his mistress for the next decade. Frankly besotted with her, in that unmistakeable ‘first few weeks of sexual passion’ sort of way, he could not prevent himself from trying to include not one but two pictures of the pretty blonde in a forthcoming official war art exhibition. One painting was titled Refugee, but Orpen’s mistake lay in the title of the second, A Spy, and the ridiculous story he concocted to explain it. Lee had Orpen recalled to London where the artist received a severe reprimand from the War Office; Lee, in fact, recommended that Orpen should be barred from France, but Orpen apparently arranged to have the relevant minute destroyed, and slipped back into France, illegally, in the company of some GHQ senior staff. According to his memoirs, he then sat prominently in Lee’s headquarters, waiting for a pre-arranged telephone invitation to dine with Haig in order to fix up a date for Orpen’s official return to France. The long-suffering Lee apparently, at this point, accepted the inevitable. The affectionate nickname ‘Orps’ resurfaced, drinks were poured, some laddish chat about Yvonne followed, and the two men became friends for life, corresponding throughout the 1920s up to the point where Orpen could write no more.

What, though, does this story reveal, other than yet more evidence of Orpen’s ability to tell tall tales, to get himself into fearful scrapes and yet to turn heads and win hearts despite it all? Only this. During their many long conversations, Orpen and his friend Lee could hardly have failed to discuss Lee’s posting just prior to his time in France, when — as brigade major — he took part in the suppression of the April 1916 Easter Rising. Although the Sherwood Foresters and their comrades fought with enormous courage, given the huge cost in human life of events on the Western Front, most of the men sent out to Dublin had been yanked out of Watford Barracks after less than three months’ basic training, lacked sufficient arms or a background of good intelligence, and in any event had yet to acquire the ‘fighting in built up areas’ experience that would be the sad inherited wisdom of their successors a few generations hence. Although the Rising was put down very effectively, the cost in terms of British military casualties (killed and injured) was something like 500. The centre of the city where Orpen had first made his reputation was burned and battered. Once peace was restored, Major Lee was one of those responsible for arranging the courts martial, including organising the executions of convicted insurgents. Amongst these was Joseph Plunkett, the husband of Orpen’s pupil, friend and occasional subject, Grace Gifford. All of which is a very long way of saying that by choosing to become an official war artist, by choosing to throw his sympathies entirely behind the plight of the British soldier on the Western Front, by choosing to drink warm whiskey with Major Lee, Orpen was saying as much as he ever would say about nature of his British and Irish identities. Ultimately, his Irishness was a regional inflection of a British identity that counted for more, and although he loved Ireland — why else call his 1924 memoirs Stories of Old Ireland and Myself? — by 1924 the way in which he had taken sides was pretty unmistakeable.

Exile
The personal and the political in Orpen’s life could entwine very tightly indeed, as when his erstwhile dear friend and travel-companion Hugh Lane, yet another relative of Lady Gregory and a major figure in the history of Dublin’s art institutions, went down with the Lusitania off the Cork coast in 1915, on his way back from selling a very great Titian to the Frick Collection in New York. Lane’s death may have nudged Orpen into taking a more active role in the First World War. But another violent death probably hardened something in Orpen’s heart with respect to what scholarship on this subject endlessly calls his ‘Irish identity’. The 1922 assassination by the IRA of Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, both an old friend of Orpen’s and someone whose wartime record Orpen admired deeply, came as a shock. (Apropos of very little, Sir Henry had just come from unveiling the war memorial at Liverpool Street Station when he was murdered; anyone who’s read much of Orpen’s writings and absorbed much of his attitude towards ordinary soldiers and the value of their sacrifice will see, immediately, what impact this juxtaposition must have made on him.) In any event, Orpen never again returned to Ireland, except once, for a few hours, between 1915 and his death.

Doubtless he had his reasons. Slightly buried in the catalogue to the IWM exhibition of Orpen’s work, one finds the suggestion that he may well have been warned off a return to the land of his birth and family. As late as 1929, writing to Lady Gregory, Orpen said that he would gladly return to visit her

when I am allowed to come to Ireland without danger — I most certainly will but at present — and for years past — it seems to me just taking a risk — of asking for it.

In truth, he’d made his choice. It’s a choice that the National Gallery of Ireland ought, in all decency, to acknowledge when the work of this ‘Irish painter’ returns ‘home’. When, in Tales of Myself and Old Ireland the ageing Orpen wished to link himself with some sort of Irish identity, it was very much that of a consciously ‘old’ Ireland: irrecoverable, a place of myth and memory already more than a little removed from geopolitical relevance. The last thing that would have attracted him was some troublesome upstart statelet, full of nationalistic claims, extravagant mythic bombast and all-too-real terror.

Orpen, whatever else he might have been, was far too sensible and pragmatic for that. Instead, it is likely that this talented, warm-hearted man felt, as his death approached, increasingly homesick for the Ireland of his childhood — which is to say, a place of tennis clubs and walking holidays, long drives (safe) and Georgian facades (unscarred), old friends and nostalgic comfort. But all too soon that became irrecoverable. And when it did, his sense of his own Britishness did not include enough of a tolerance for sanctimonious cant, vacuous fairy-tales and ever-present violence to allow him to discover whether the land of his youth still, somewhere, existed. Quite literally, after 1915, Orpen couldn’t go home again. He was neither the first nor the last Irishman to have experienced this plight. All the same, it makes his ongoing presence in Irish auction-rooms and state collections all the more poignant. An Irish artist? Given only a limited choice in the matter, Orpen made sure he was a British artist. Those who frame him otherwise, today, forget a lot about the choices he wasn’t allowed.

Vile bodies?
To the extent that we can separate the three, it seems fair to say that compared with politics and death, sex was a topic that appealed to Orpen. Probably he discovered it early at art school, and then effectively forgot it again in his grim last years, when, as syphilis took its toll, his relationships both with his wife and mistresses fell badly apart. Sex was there, often, in his pictures, sometimes very evidently so. Not for Orpen the icy academic nude, the female form as an exercise in mass and contour, a ironic art-historical allusion. Orpen really did love women, not as abstractions, either, but for all their physicality and flaws. And if it’s true, as suggested earlier, that his paintings of men were often better than his paintings of women, the reason may lie less in misogyny and objectivisation than in tact, kindness and the hope of an earthly reward for his efforts. There are paintings here that read like love-letters, albeit those of the most delightfully flippant, non-serious sort, and they form one of the most attractive aspects of Orpen’s ouuvre/

Sex isn’t everywhere, of course. On the Beach, Howth (1910), where his wife and young daughter are lying on the shingle beach in front of him, his daughter mostly asleep, his wife smiling and closing her eyes against the bright sun, seems more intimate than the Impressionist exercise in the painting of light that it in some ways resembles. (Parenthetically, though, how he must have missed his past, looking back at this painting years later!) It isn’t there in the extraordinary A Bloomsbury Family in which his friend Sir William Nicholson is portrayed at coffee with his wife and four children, where there’s as much tension in the air as in an Ibsen drama or a Vuillard interior; no wonder Sir William didn’t much like the work. And there’s only a strange sort of sex in The Vere Foster Family (1907), a really extraordinary commissioned work which reads like the most vicious sort of Sargent pastiche: idiot peer in checked breeches, his rifle knocked down into sad detumescence, his sad ghostly po-faced wife half-vanishing into the malign-looking infant at her side, while in front minces a fey elder sister, all lick-spittle blonde curls and tiny ankles, a key hung round her waste on a red ribbon, a fat fowl hanging from her hand in a gesture that would have appeared rather rude, or perhaps just inviting, in a seventeenth century Dutch painting, while behind, two donkeys ambled on in hapless stupidity, emblem and sign of the family of which they are so much a part. Indeed, once cannot help wondering whether Orpen meant this as a joke. It is a question that has often to be asked in the presence of Orpen’s work, often without a clear reply. But in this case, even the sitters themselves saw that something was wrong with this painting, with the thin paint and vacuous looks. So was it a mistake, or a parody — a Sargent that didn’t work, or a Goya that worked all too well? Alas, Orpen never said, and we shall never know.

And although there must have been something said, however elliptically, about sex in Orpen’s various portraits of Evelyn St George — the six foot tall, super-rich American-born married woman who was Orpen’s mistress from 1906 onwards, who gave birth to his daughter in 1912 and who continued to be one of his dearest friends thereafter — that something comes so encased in affection, respect and a degree of real awe that it is hard, a century on, to engage with it. Mrs St George was intelligent, knew what she liked and didn’t much mind whether she was considered eccentric — which was just as well, given that she received callers when lying in bed, and insisted on making her bedrooms the largest rooms in any house. The published portraits of her say a lot about her strong sense of visual drama, so perhaps it comes as no surprise that she was a sharp-witted critic of her lover’s work, hemming round the many commissions she offered him — each and every one a good excuse, no doubt, to see a lot of him without attracting comment — with playful restrictions regarding composition, palette or scale. Mrs St George appears in the IWM exhibition in a portrait of c. 1912, tall, elegant, more than a little haughty, encased in furs and pearls and satin. Perhaps unusually for Orpen, theirs was a relationship of equals, losing nothing in strength or seriousness as the years passed, whatever else was happening in terms of his marriage, his other mistresses or casual lovers — generally, quite a lot. Yet his letters to her, almost uniquely, offer tiny flashes of seriousness as well as the silliness, the mocking scribbled self-portraits, that heavy protecting veil of flippancy. But his portraits of her, for all their splendid period style and their evident warmth, lack intimacy, presumably for the paradoxical reason that there was real intimacy there which needed to be hidden. They are not his greatest paintings. Being a sensible man, he saved things for life that he didn’t expend on art. Perhaps that is why he has not managed to convince posterity that he was a great painter.

Nor is there much to do with sex in all the nudes that Orpen painted. The Studio (c. 1910-1915) and Sunlight (c. 1925) seem to me, anyway, to be as much about the effects of light as anything else, and indeed in the latter case carrying some slight trace of the way in which Orpen had learned to paint the flash of flares when he was at the Front. Yet Sunlight is an elegant exercise, with all its complicated relationships of planes hovering in space, and were it by the right sort of French painter, it would doubtless be a well-known masterpiece rather than an unknown daub, as it mostly is today. And The English Nude (1900) is largely stripped of any sexual connotation by being, so obviously, an attempt (a pretty good one too, it must be said) to transcribe the earthy semi-ugliness of Rembrandt into the here-and-now of Gay Nineties. If Orpen slept with this woman, though — and certainly, like his friend Augustus John, he seemed to have sex with many of his models, although it ought to be noted that he had a good reputation amongst them both for being an affectionate and companionable lover, and also for keeping them on a steady retainer — he would have been sleeping with a pot-bellied dream from a half-remembered Amsterdam, on sheets spun from flax that saw the suns of a seventeenth century summer.

It’s a haunting little painting. Orpen kept it until the end of his life. But the reason, I think, came less from its realism than from its escapist nostalgia. Ultimately, the real world was, in general, a boring let-down for a man of Orpen’s gifts and intellect. The English Nude was an attempt on Orpen’s part to metastasize real physicality into mythic permanence, and if it doesn’t quite work for us, perhaps it worked a little for him. So perhaps, ultimately, it was about sex, a little, in an odd sort of way. But anyway, it doesn’t carry with it anything like the charge of the really astounding nude in this exhibition, Early Morning (1922).

Old Masters and a Young Mistress
Because, admit it, at a monographic show it is quite an odd thing to move into a new room, see a painting and think, ‘wow, who on earth painted that?’ Yet this is the response that Early Morning elicited from me, anyway. For one thing, I’d never have guessed, even with that hair and the bee-stung lips, that this painting was finished in 1922. For it’s a strange, disconcerting thing — like something by Stanley Spencer, but only if he could have painted that elegant little silver coffee-pot, which of course was impossible, since one could practically count on one hand the numbers of British painters, post 1900, who might have done so. No, Early Morning is by Orpen — so maybe the shock is that, for a moment, pastiche is absent, and this vision is all his own. And a very intimate vision it is. Here’s Yvonne Aubicq again — still young, still with a tiny bit of lovely puppy-fat and delightfully rosy skin — naked, in bed, a robe thrown away somewhere, those letters disregarded, her coffee greedily finished, the upturned cup with the spoon erect in its void making a rude rhyme with something else, her plate empty nearby, her little breasts painted by someone who understood their weight and orientation at more than a technical level, the centrifugal nature of the composition ever and again drawing this nude back from being a studio confection towards being what it is, which is a painting of a naked girl, legs folded, viewed from above, finished with her breakfast, ready for …?

I don’t usually find myself paraphrasing that arch-liberal Robert Hughes, but — well, to ignore the sexuality in this painting amounts to not seeing the work. It’s there in that cup, that plate, the perky little spout of the teapot, the red satin folds of the irrelevant cloth at Yvonne’s curved heel, even that big fold of drapery in the upper right-hand corner. This isn’t a painting about ‘light’, or ‘mass’, or … well, who cares what it isn’t about? It’s a description of lust, pure and simple — a conqueror’s memoir of that well-known, pacified and proximate terrain, at the point where it will never again yield up a mystery but has not yet started to bore or decompose; in other words, it’s a painting about sexual love, perched that that fragile point a second away from tedium, disillusion and disengagement, replete to bursting with fullness of knowledge, but not yet spoilt with familiarity. It’s not about art history, theory or anything else. And if Orpen had been able to claim any stylistic descendents, this painting would be reckoned a masterpiece. As he can’t, it’s freak. It doesn’t fit anywhere. Why put it in any textbook? It’s not a necessary link in any developmental narrative, not a way of getting from art-historical A to B, neither the alpha nor the omega of any school or movement. Still, if it had been the only painting in this exhibition, I should not have grudged the taxi-fare. Early Morning isn’t what you think it will be, and is all the better for it. It may quite possibly be Orpen’s greatest painting. Perhaps, for once, the heat of his lust simply short-circuited his flippancy.

Who, me?
But before moving on, there is one other Orpen subject — one to which he returned throughout his career at a painter — that probably ought to be mentioned in this context — that is to say, the image of Orpen himself. Orpen painted, drew and doodled endless self-portraits. The IWM exhibition begins with a good run of these, while other self-portrait images occur in letters and sketches elsewhere in the show.

Orpen was not, in his own estimation, a very handsome fellow. He was short, with sharp features, pursed mouth and rather beady, appraising eyes. As Robert Upstone’s helpful essay in the catalogue makes clear, Orpen was more than a little self-conscious about this. In Tales of Old Ireland and Myself, he recalls overhearing — in the course of what he believed to be a very happy childhood — a conversation between his parents in which they discussed amiably why he was so ugly while the rest of his siblings were so good-looking. In later life, companions like the dashing Augustus John must have caused him to make similar comparisons. It was silly, really, because ultimately Orpen had more than enough charm, wit, talent and wealth to distract pretty much anyone from his perceived imperfections, and certainly he had no shortage of glamorous female admirers, elegant female friends or out-and-out mistresses. But in these matters, self-image counts for more than actuality. Thus it is hard to read the self-portraits as anything other than a sustained attempt, sometimes humorous and sometimes just desperate, to project an image of himself that measured up to what he felt, somehow, the world expected of him.

One solution was fancy dress, either literal or figurative. Orpen painted himself as a jockey, as a sportsman, as a man about town and even as Chardin — his costume, as it happened, at a Chelsea Arts Club fancy dress ball, for which he won a prize. Another was talismanic: the introduction onto the picture plane of the stuff of real life, like tickets and receipts and a page from his studio book, anchoring Orpen firmly into the world of sociability and friendship on which much of his self-image may have depended. In all of these, there’s a strong tendency for objects, dress, setting to press inwards, distracting attention from the sitter himself — or perhaps protecting him with their collective force? In his Ready to Start (1917) we see Orpen checking himself in the mirror before setting out into a French village, wearing a tin hat and fur gilet; the empty bottles and soda-siphon on the table in front of him telling their own story about the nature of his preparations. But the element of disguise, appropriation, call it what one will, is important, too. It’s worth remembering both how easily and subtly Orpen could throw on an adopted style, a borrowed persona — almost as easily as he could don the mask of flippancy which became more or less habitual.

Modern Love
It is equally easy, sometimes, to criticise Orpen for this reticence, this failure just to ‘be himself’, and to the extent that self-revelation has come to be seen as a positive quality in visual art, Orpen has suffered for his lack of it. John Rotherstein, sometimes director at the Tate Gallery and, oddly, Orpen’s own nephew, wrote twenty years after his death of Orpen’s ‘failure to describe what he felt most deeply’. Even if this were true, though, is it fair ? Complex, quick-witted, super-successful yet somehow never quite secure in his success, by no means always happy, Orpen seems to me, at least, at his most attractive when he’s at his most elusive. Orpen seems to have liked sex, to have needed it, but at the same time, like most things in life, it may well have unsettled him a bit, too. What was everyone else thinking? Did he measure up? The longer one looks, the more one notices that there’s a real, twitchy, palpably painful anxiety underneath even the dullest of Orpen’s paintings — and absolutely raw nerves apparent in his better ones. It is a shame, for this reason amongst to many others, that Orpen was allowed to fall out of the canon of modern painters, since there’s a quickness of consciousness in much of his work far more striking than in the apparently more ‘advanced’, less ‘Edwardian’ work of so, so many of his successors.

Paths of Glory
What, then, of death? The lazy view of the Great War, hawked about by the stupider sort of secondary school teacher or documentary maker, is that those who experienced its carnage, waste and mechanised brutality hated every moment, were scarred forever by it. The reality was, obviously, considerably more complicated. What can be said for certain about Orpen’s war was that it offered an intensity of feeling that civilian life afterwards was hard-pressed to match. War gave him a beautiful new girlfriend, a knighthood, sustaining friendships, a long holiday from the dull demands of everyday life, an adrenalin-pumping sense of purpose, and — because, other than having fun, art was virtually the only thing he took really seriously — a subject that tested to the limit his abilities as an artist, ultimately pushing him to moments of real achievement. The fact that several of Orpen’s paintings will be familiar to most people who have ever read much at all about the First World War — even if his name is completely unknown to them —speaks volumes. At its best, his work said something about that terrible, pivotal conflict that no one else, working in any medium, managed to say.

It’s worth remembering that at the point when Orpen decided that he wanted to take a more active part in the war than simply painting portraits for the benefit of the Red Cross and other charities, the whole concept of an ‘official war artist’ was still in its infancy. In fact, when towards the end of 1915 Orpen used the influence of his friend Sir John Cowans, at the time Quarter-Master General, to gain a commission, it was into the Army Service Corps. So it was the Britain’s most famous and best-paid artist began his time in uniform carrying out administrative duties Kensington Barracks. Whether he was any good at office work is unclear. In one of his many amusing illustrated letters to Mrs St George, mentioned here in the catalogue to the IWM exhibition, Orpen conjured up a scene in which a furious Colonel looms over him, asking ‘What can you do? What can you do?’ To which Orpen could only reply ‘Nothing, Sir, I’m an artist’. As usual, there was more than a hint of truth underpinning Orpen’s flippancy.

By the end of 1916, however, Orpen was able to pull various strings — both Cowans and Haig were friends of Mrs St George — in order to secure himself a place as an official war artist, reporting to the Department of Information. The official war art scheme, which included other artists such as Muirhead Bone, Paul Nash, C W Nevinson and Wyndham Lewis, was only just being developed. Roles remained slightly unclear. Were these artists there simply to provide useful material for newspapers and magazines to use, at a time when only two photographers (both army officers) were accredited by the Ministry of War? How could the demands of propaganda, good taste, military security and artistic self-expression all be reconciled? In fact, the artists’ role continued to grow and develop, sometimes amidst some fairly acrimonious argument, for the duration of the conflict — indeed, even in this age of embedded journalists, email and text messaging, blogging and so forth, it has not entirely been resolved. Here’s the point, though — when, in April 1917, Orpen arrived at the Western Front with a promotion from 2nd lieutenant to major, he had a certain amount of scope to shape his own remit, which his close connections to senior figures only enhanced. What, then, did he do?

The Horrors of War
At first, Britain’s most successful working portrait-painter set to work painting portraits of senior Allied officers such as Haig and Foch. In some cases, as with his civilian portraits, the joviality of the sittings resulted in something very like real friendship. Haig, for instance, made a very positive impression on Orpen. The resulting portraits sometimes have a warmth and sympathy about them that lifts them above the level of mere officers’ mess wallpaper. Later, however — following the contretemps described earlier in this essay, which almost saw him removed from his post altogether — Orpen was able to wander at will behind the lines, making drawings of individuals, scenes and landscapes that attracted his attention. In doing so, he benefited from a car and driver provided by the Ministry, as well as his own batman and private secretary. As his wartime memoir makes clear, Orpen was perfectly well aware that his experience of conflict was, in many ways, extremely comfortable, cushioned and convivial. If anything, though, this seems to have increased his occasionally almost sentimental regard for the ordinary soldiers he encountered, in whose drinking habits, black humour and even blacker cynicism he found inspiration. Later, in the summer of 1918, he returned to the shell-blasted landscape of the Somme and found it frightening, unnaturally beautiful — a place of treeless bleached soil, red poppies and white butterflies thronging together under a high azure sky. He painted this, exposed skulls and all.

The war changed Orpen. This is less apparent in the portraits than it is in the genre scenes and in the landscapes he produced. In the IWM exhibition one can almost watch Orpen rifling through every last shred of his own art-historical experience in order to come up with a visual language capable of keeping pace with the challenges total war threw at it. There had been hints in earlier works of Orpen’s interest in Goya, possibly dating from that early visit to Spain in the company of Hugh Lane — for instance, in Improvisation on a Barrel Organ (1904), which recalls Goya’s tapestry cartoons. In the war pictures, though, such as Armistice Night, Amiens (1918) and The Official Entry of the Kaisar (1918) the affinities with Goya are more than just stylistic. They have a lot to do with tone as well — the way in which both artists seemed almost to relish the macabre and the morbid, for instance, the bleak humour, the uncomfortable intimacy between sex and violent death. His palette, however, especially in his landscapes, took on a lurid, acid, unwholesome quality that was wholly of the twentieth century. In a painting like Changing Billets, Picardy — showing sex and death very intimate indeed — even the living have the livid flesh of a week-old corpse, while the landscape is bleached white and the light seems to signal the end of the world, like an El Greco canvas without the redemptive message. In Harvest, 1918, in contrast, the colour is just too sweet — all lurid pinks, clashing golds, muddy violet — for the grim content. The broad hint of hallucination in these paintings makes them hard to look at for long, and then hard to forget.

Self-expression for its own sake never much interested Orpen, which has earned him no favours from a posterity obsessed with it. Here, though, it didn’t matter. Confronted with war, for once, Orpen’s hard-won technical skill makes itself apparent, not as that bogeyman of modernist endeavour, ‘mere facility’, but rather as an impressive ability to frame, compose and execute a memorable scene. (For it’s one of the dirty little secrets of war art that not all war artists, then or now, had the technical means to say all they wished to — one thinks of Graham Sutherland, struggling to make the simplest military hardware look vaguely recognisable yet having to find refuge in drawing biomorphic caves instead, while at the same time the workmanlike, still disgracefully underrated Eric Ravilious got on with transforming aeroplanes and aircraft carriers into some of the most lyrical painting ever produced by English hands.) A lot of hard looking and drawing went into this (the reclining figure in Changing Billets turns up again in The Mad Woman of Douai (1918) which is that rare thing, a piece of official war art dealing fairly explicitly with the aftermath of rape), but so did a lot of accumulated expertise. After the viewer has finished registering the full horror of Dead Germans in a Trench (1918) there’s still time to reflect on the formidable skill that underpins its visceral punch — the apparently effortless foreshortening of the left-hand corpse, the stylised treatment of the trench itself, and the way the high view-point is established. Perhaps only someone who had built a career out of making rich people look beautiful — hence the high commissioning fees, the queue of Rolls Royces in front of his studio, the waiting lists and all the rest — could score such a hit when it came to making dead people look appalling.

Uneasy Peace
After the war came the armistice. For Orpen, who chose to say on and paint the peace negotiations, the sense of anticlimax was grim. The consequent depression makes itself felt in the paintings that followed, in which some heavy, looming, inhuman mass always seems poised to crush the tiny, self-important protagonists lined up below it. As was mentioned earlier, the IWM exhibition is hung in such a way as to gloss these paintings as carrying a sort of anti-war message, and certainly Orpen’s writing, both around this time and afterwards, shows the degree of contempt in which he held what he called ‘the frocks’, particularly when compared with the ordinary fighting men whom these same ‘frocks’ had sent to their deaths. But it’s hard not to read into these works, as well, a sort of monument and summation. As the well-known story of To the Unknown British Soldier in France (1921-28) makes clear, to some extent Orpen intended a literal monument to the men whose sufferings and bravery he had observed, if not shared. It is also striking to note how many war paintings he later gave to the Imperial War Museum. (While the Ministry of Information held copyright of all war artists’ new work for the duration of the conflict, after the war, the works reverted to the artists’ ownership. Given the prices fetched by Orpen’s paintings during his lifetime, his gifts were generous ones indeed.) The war had, if anything, boosted Orpen’s reputation. His exhibition of war art at Agnew’s in Bond Street in May 1918, opened by Lord Beaverbrook and covered by Pathé News, was visited by over 9,000 people in its first month alone. His international reputation was growing. Commissions came rolling in once again, with ever-higher prices attached. Orpen was still a relatively young man, apparently with decades of good work ahead of him. By any standard, he was a success — a fitting heir to Sargent, perhaps even fit to exist in the same universe as Manet or Velasquez. He had all the houses and automobiles and mistresses and friends he could possibly want. He could have asked for little more.

Yet by the end of 1931 Orpen was dead, his mind and body shattered by disease and overwork, and in the years that followed his reputation died away with him. John Rotherstein’s poisonous verdict of 1952 has largely held sway. In a world where being rich, or successful, or having a happy childhood, or working hard, or being bored by ‘ideas’ were all seen as anathema to the creation of serious art, Orpen became the prisoner of country house portraiture, the less popular rooms of Tate Britain, or at best a partisan hero of that airless little ghetto of figurative resistance known as ‘war art’. In terms of his nationality, he had the misfortune to be divided up between a place that takes its contributions to the arts far too seriously, and a place where the whole concept of art has historically been greeted with a mixture of distrust, distaste and hilarity. Mostly, though, Orpen simply slipped below the horizon of art-historical cognisance. Over the past few weeks I’ve enthused about the IWM exhibition to dozens of people of every possible age, background and degree of art world literacy. Only once or twice, though, have I been met with anything other than a faintly blank look. ‘Orpen? Who’s he? Wasn’t he Irish or something?’ Rarely, I think, can such a skilful, complicated, genuinely interesting and important painter have been damned with such a sad, confused little epitaph.

Envoi
One of Orpen’s more appealing traits was his habit, when dinner party conversations grew too long and boring, of getting down on the floor and wandering around the table on all fours, yapping like a dog, just to liven things up. Heaven only knows what he’d have made of this essay. The yapping would, probably, be all but deafening by this point. Still, that in itself might well conceal an element of double-bluff. Orpen would, I think, still be quite interested to learn how he measured up, what people thought, whether anyone still cared about him or liked him. And that, I suppose, is my excuse for writing at such length about him here. If nothing else, I hope I have conveyed something of my own enthusiasm at having discovered his work, and my gratitude to the IWM for the sort of exhibition that — as with that brilliant Ravilious show a couple of years ago — instead of merely reflecting art-historical argument, actually goes some way towards refining and reshaping it.

There are a few minor criticisms which might as well be mentioned, although they take little away from the overall importance of this exhibition. The first relates to the catalogue which, though excellent in many ways, refuses to follow the well-justified convention of numbering its plates from No. 1 onwards, and instead presents them in a completely random order, making it impossible, especially in the absence of an index, to use the first serious Orpen catalogue for generations as a work of reference. This is a waste and a pity. The second criticism relates to the IWM’s shop, which is missing a trick in its failure to provide a range of books relevant to the exhibition, rather than just the catalogue. And the third is simply the one raised earlier in this essay, which is to ask why the curators couldn’t have provided a little more detail and context in the interpretive material accompanying the show, rather than burying this in the catalogue. The fact that Orpen’s work is being shown at the IWM hints strongly that a purely formal or art-historical reading isn’t really the main point here — so why not provide a little more material to help the neophyte Orpen enthusiast on his or her way?

What else is there to say? Only something that ought to be evident by now, which is that Orpen deserves a better fate than he’s received. And so it’s instructive, somehow, that those who have rescued him from oblivion have to do so in the context of the IWM. For the IWM, unlike most art galleries, is forbidden by the logic of its foundation from viewing art as an end in itself, from seeing context as irrelevant or that strange web of narratives and genealogies known as ‘art history’ as being decisive. This, ultimately, is why Orpen has re-appeared now, and why he is shown to such great advantage here. Because if you believe that art is more important than anything else, an end in itself, Orpen will always be, in such a world, a second-rater. Yet if you value skill, sound workmanship, functionality, the frisson of historical and biographical context — and if you have the requisite patience with flippancy — then there’s a strong case to be made for this forgotten, misunderstood painter. Orpen? There’s scope for arguing that he was one of the important painters of the Great War, a portraitist of formidable ability and one of the greatest British artists of his age. Anything else? No, if not a simple line of reproach, however quiet, at the great premium that the narratives of modernism, for all their tendency to make a fetish out of irony, still put on high seriousness. Seriousness is not, ultimately, a very useful solvent either of politics, sex or death — and where art is concerned, its limitations are all too obvious.