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There’s a run of fine shows among the commercial galleries at the moment: perhaps they’re gearing up for the August recess, or simply facing out the recession. Whichever, there’s plenty to see, and a good place to start is with Browse & Darby’s 33rd annual exhibition (19 Cork Street, W1, until 24 July), a mixed summer show guaranteed to spring some surprises among the expected masters. There’s always a Degas and a Gwen John (I particularly liked the gouache ‘Flowers and Ferns in a Vase’), and usually something by Sickert (this year a memorable drawing of Pulteney Bridge in Bath). There’s a beautiful small square painting of a cactus by another artist we associate with B&D, William Nicholson; a Vuillard landscape and a moody Piper of Wales keep it company.
Among the other delights spread over the three floors of this townhouse gallery are a trio of crisp lithographic geometries by Robert Bevan, all studies of horse dealing, a powerful French landscape by Henri Hayden, one of Augustus John’s full-length, self-possessed ladies, a lovely early Victor Pasmore still-life, an interesting but rather Dufy-like illustrational Christopher Wood of Monte Carlo, and a magnificent Matthew Smith flower painting. This, for me, is the star of the show: glorious colour, sumptuous paintwork and a price to match. Smith is one of our most underrated artists at the moment. Now’s the time to buy him.
Round the corner at the old Museum of Mankind, currently leased by the Royal Academy to the Haunch of Venison gallery, is the second part of a mid-career retrospective of Keith Coventry (born Burnley, 1958). Coventry is a fascinating artist not least because he is so bewilderingly various. He has no one signature style, but operates as he pleases in half-a-dozen very different ways of painting and, as a result, devotees of one kind of work by him tend not to like the others. The effect of his current retrospective (covering the years 2002–9) is the closest to a mixed show by a single artist I’ve ever seen; it’s as if he’d brought the current pluralism of the art scene home to roost in his own studio. It certainly looks impressive in the splendid galleries at 6 Burlington Gardens, W1 (until 15 August), but I found myself only seriously interested in certain aspects of his wide-ranging production.
I quite liked the radical chic of the green, yellow and blue schematised interiors of the homes of early 20th-century Parisian art collectors, painted according to contemporary psychiatric theories about colour, which occupy the first gallery. But not the series of black paintings in which Coventry reinterprets Dufy’s Riviera scenes in thick black bandages of paint, or the depressing sequence of heads of Jesus in hideous shades from red to yellow to green to purple. However, in the fourth gallery is another series called ‘Echoes of Albany’, which recalls Sickert’s ‘Echoes’, based on popular prints of an earlier age. Coventry explores the inmates of Albany, the apartment block beside Burlington Gardens, in Sickertian manner. Here are such recognisable figures as Alan Clark, J.B. Priestley and Bruce Chatwin, together with prostitutes and drug-takers, as Coventry explores the cross-over between society and the sordid. The show ends with a room of colour-chart abstractions, black and white paintings and three bronzes of vandalised trees. A formidable and multifarious intelligence at work.
Bill Brandt (1904–83) is one of the few photographers I go out of my way to see, and the show at Chris Beetles (8 & 10 Ryder Street, SW1, until 18 July) is an excellent demonstration of his gifts of observation and recording. There are none of his distinctive portraits here, but plenty of his often highly staged but brilliantly evocative set pieces — spooning in the park, the lamplighter, the tic-tac men, the gent in top hat after a night out. And then the surreal nudes, distorted through deep focus, formally witty and disquieting. Brandt was German, but he certainly knew how to photograph the English. Wonderful.
In stark but pleasing contrast is a show of 1970s paintings and drawings by Jeremy Moon (1934–73), at Rocket Gallery, Tea Building, 56 Shoreditch High Street, E1, until 25 July. The paintings sound severe: grids and crosses on fields of a single hue. Actually, the rigid geometric structures are redeemed by colour in electric and compelling combinations — yellow and blue, pink and grey, sharper than you might think, and visually refreshing rather than tired and commonplace. The pastel drawings allow a greater freedom of handling and are very beguiling. Moon died tragically young but his work is as fresh today as ever.
And finally, a show I haven’t seen yet but am much looking forward to, Margaret Mellis: Envelope Drawings (Austin Desmond, Pied Bull Yard, 68/69 Great Russell Street, WC1, until 28 July). Mellis died earlier this year at the grand age of 95, and was a subtle collagist, painter and object-maker. This show, of her poignant flower drawings on opened-out envelopes, is a fittingly gentle tribute to a remarkable artist.
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