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But where is Kitaj? Not only did he spearhead (with Hockney) the move away from abstraction by tirelessly promoting figurative art when it was wildly unfashionable, but he himself practised an immensely distinguished brand of realist painting and drawing that makes him an inalienable member of the so-called School of London. It seems extraordinary to be mounting an exhibition of this calibre and seriousness without including him, yet personal selections are just that — personal. I’ve no doubt there are good reasons for excluding him, though I couldn’t find them in the catalogue. (A lavish hardback publication, priced £28, it includes a long essay by Lampert and a much shorter one by co-curator Tom Hunt, the latter dealing with the ongoing contemporary influence of the ten painters.) And while on the subject of exclusions, it will be noted that there are no women in this show, though Paula Rego is mentioned approvingly in the catalogue. Every selector would make a different choice, but I would have loved to see how Rego and Maggi Hambling would have added to the gathering.
The exhibition is a highly enjoyable celebration of the English preference for facts, experience and understatement. Whether the paint is thinly or thickly applied, and whether the distances and proportions are measured, approximated or deliberately distorted, here is a shared pursuit of pictorial truth based on the appearance of the world. As Uglow said, ‘Everybody’s trying to make an image, but we have different ways of getting at it.’ His monocular measuring marks articulate his own paintings like footnotes, and would be quite out of place in the immaculate designs of Caulfield or the living mulch of Kossoff’s deep paint. Bacon meanwhile constantly risked caricature (his vocal dislike of illustration surely masks a fear of it) in his stylish distortions and grand paraphrases. What a contrast to turn to the precise observations of Coldstream or the lyricism of Andrews.
The shared aims unite this disparate bunch. Here is Auerbach in 1971: ‘One tries to catch hold of the world of fact and experience at some point at which it hasn’t been caught hold of before, so that one remakes it in a sense which speaks to oneself directly — so that every mark, proportion and weight in some way conforms to one’s deepest desires without betraying its essence or identity — so that the stress of the real world and the stress on the newness of the painting are really a stress on the same thing.’ Good words to keep in mind whilst looking at this exhibition.
Among the works I particularly enjoyed were the Coldstream nude in the first room and the beautiful Kossoff oil after Rembrandt, ‘A Woman Bathing’. Here, too, are a couple of unexpected life studies in pencil and watercolour by Richard Hamilton, reminding us of the close connections of these artists, and their (in most cases) common art school training. In the middle room is a marvellous Hockney, ‘Man in a Museum (Or You’re in the Wrong Movie)’ from 1962, hung at right angles to Bacon’s ‘Study after Pope Innocent X by Velásquez’, and Uglow’s terrific ‘Massacre of the Innocents’, after Poussin. The large far room is dominated by one of Michael Andrews’s best paintings, ‘The Thames at Low Tide’ (1994–5), and three more brilliant and very different evocations of London: ‘Primrose Hill, Winter Sunshine’ by Auerbach, ‘Willesden Junction, Summer No 1’ by Kossoff and another Auerbach, ‘Study of Primrose Hill’. There’s also a powerful Kossoff self-portrait from 1972.
Upstairs are further exceptional paintings: Uglow’s Turkish landscape, ‘Mosque at Ciftlik Koyou’, and a couple of his poignant small still-life paintings; Caulfield’s ‘Coloured Still Life’ from 1967, a succinct and perfectly placed statement of line and colour, and his reworked ‘Red, White and Black Still Life’ (1966/1984), together with some of his rarely seen compositional drawings, described by Lampert as ‘ingenious thrillers that convey an air of expectation and sometimes menace’. In this show are paintings by artists of international stature, some of whom have yet to be given the wider acclaim they deserve. Meanwhile painting per se is of interest to more and more young artists, and has by no means been superseded by film or photography. Congratulations to all concerned for such a timely examination of the enduring strengths of the figurative tradition in England.
In Bath is a beautiful and intently focused exhibition of Gainsborough’s landscapes. This is the second show in the Holburne Museum’s new temporary exhibition space and it looks very fine. Gainsborough was a landscape painter manqué and would have infinitely preferred to spend his time painting woods and vales rather than the portraits by which he earned his living. This small display of just six paintings and a powerful group of preparatory studies projects such a concentrated feeling that it more than fills the gallery with the artist’s own delighted interest in his subject.
Chief among the paintings is the early Dutch-influenced ‘River Landscape with a View of a Distant Village’ (c.1750), a lucid evocation of animals and people in open country, with a couple of herons flying off to the right. The studies and drawings are generally more exciting than the oils, which always seem to need figures to justify their existence. But the way Gainsborough painted trees and organised the lie of the land makes one long for him to be able to let rip on pure, empty landscape. ‘Wooded Landscape with Figure and Cattle’, in watercolour and oil, is the most finished of the studies and more experimental than the big paintings, with a lovely soft expressive flow to it. I also liked ‘Landscape with Cattle and Castle Ruin’ in chalk enhanced with watercolour wash, ‘Wooded Landscape with Packhorses’ and the trio of rocky or mountainous landscapes. A most enjoyable exhibition.
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