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The result of this bold initiative is a series of galleries filled with art, closely juxtaposed or widely spaced, which makes us look again at old favourites and anew at less familiar names. There are around 120 exhibits, including sculpture from Native American, Indian and African cultures, which supply the effective counterpoint and illumination for works of British make. The intrusion of what might be called ‘influential foreigners’ is one of the things that makes this exhibition so exciting — at least in its early stages.
The first gallery, the octagon, contains (just) a vast model of Lutyens’s ‘Cenotaph’, surrounded by photographic banners of Epstein’s ‘Cycle of Life’ sculptures, made for the British Medical Association in The Strand, and later shamefully defaced and bowdlerised. At once we are invited to consider public sculpture and the monument and their role in the community — a particularly important issue in this era of the Fourth Plinth and too much hideous fifth-rate junk masquerading as sculpture in public places. The second gallery is equally crowded with exhibits, but it contains so many brilliantly inspired pairings and groupings that I found myself almost continually smiling with surprise and pleasure.
Impossible to name all the lovely and eye-opening exhibits, so I shall content myself with a brief list. Good to see Maurice Lambert here, with a wonderfully camp Narcissus, also called ‘The Seed’, c.1932. Opposite, a tremendous John Skeaping seated figure carved in marble makes me yearn once again for a proper solo exhibition of this artist, but experts tell me there simply isn’t enough top-quality work. Henry Moore at his most abstract, with the rabbit-eared elmwood ‘Family’ of 1935, is next to Leon Underwood’s beautiful Gauguinesque ‘Totem to the Artist’. Underwood, who taught Moore and was a brave and innovative sculptor in his own right, is desperately neglected these days. Hereabouts are Barbara Hepworth’s slim African blackwood ‘Torso’ and Eric Kennington’s lavishly sensual ‘Earth Child’, also Charles Wheeler’s elongated but oddly compelling ‘Mother and Child’.
Interspersed are objects from British Columbia, Mexico, the Congo, Mesopotamia. The disadvantage of emphasising links with so-called primitive art, and thus skewing the selection, is that a formidable modernist such as F.E. McWilliam is represented by ‘African Figure’, one of his earliest wood-carvings, and not by something stronger and more typical. But, generally, the comparisons and juxtapositions pay off admirably. Neo-Assyrian reliefs only add to the greatness of Charles Sargeant Jagger, while helping to cast light on the sources of his own magisterial relief, ‘Belgian Peasants Assisting the British Wounded’. Frank Dobson’s succinct ‘Seated Torso’ carved in 1923 from Ham Hill stone may reveal the influence of Picasso and Chinese art (the sculptor visited Paris in 1922), but a lot more research needs to be done on Dobson, another cruelly neglected early modernist.
Room 3 is refreshingly empty, containing only two sculptures: a 1924 marble snake by Moore and Epstein’s magnificent alabaster ‘Adam’, which puts the entire 2009 RA show of Epstein, Gaudier and Gill in the shade. This single piece deserves as much detailed attention as you feel able to give it: not for its sexual power, but for the supreme potency of its forms released from the stone by Epstein’s uncanny skill in carving.
Room 4 contains a startling but immensely effective juxtaposition: Alfred Gilbert’s intricate bronze ‘Jubilee Memorial to Queen Victoria’ with Phillip King’s strangely tented ‘Genghis Khan’, a winged conical abstract in purple plastic. (A survey of King’s sculpture through 50 years is at Flowers, 82 Kingsland Road, E2, until 19 February.) Charles Wheeler’s ‘Adam’ looks on in open-mouthed disbelief, while Lord Leighton plays with his snake in the far corner. This is a room to shake up your preconceptions.
Room 5 moves the argument into ceramics, presenting Chinese ware against William Staite Murray, and bringing in sculptures by Paule Vézelay and Hepworth, and a couple of relief paintings by Ben Nicholson. (One, a tiny incised card relief, from Kettle’s Yard, is exquisite.) In Room 6, a mere two sculptures play out the dialogue between figuration and abstraction through the persons of Moore and Hepworth. An environmental construction takes up the whole of Room 7, recreated from a 1957 installation in the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, by Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton, in which coloured acrylic panels are suspended from nylon thread and articulate the space. It looks marvellous: infinitely fresher than so much contemporary installation art. Room 8 features a single painted steel and aluminium sculpture by Anthony Caro, ‘Early One Morning’ (1962), which also looks splendid. And there the exhibition should have ended.
The remainder is so thin and scrappy as to be embarrassing. One good Barry Flanagan and a Tony Cragg stack in the big gallery 9 cannot redeem or enliven these hectic conceptual wastes. Even Carl André’s once infamous bricks fail to make this room sparkle. Enter Damien Hirst in Gallery 10, in the dubious company of Jeff Koons (presumably Hirst’s ‘influential foreigner’, or equivalent of African sculpture). Bill Woodrow lights up a corner of Gallery 11, and Gallery 12 ends the show on a note of humour with veteran prankster Gustav Metzger going for Page 3 girls, and Sarah Lucas offering a ‘Portable Smoking Area’.
But the sense of let-down is palpable in the lack of significant sculpture in the last four rooms. Although it’s a great relief not to have to look at the overrated institutional art of Kapoor and Gormley, we are also deprived of beautiful and inventive work by the likes of Nigel Hall and Michael Sandle, Bryan Kneale and David Nash, Eilis O’Connell and Ivor Abrahams, not to mention substantial artists of an earlier generation such as Kenneth Armitage and Lynn Chadwick. The curators propose an alternative tradition: it’s one that disappears like so much hot air, leaving only the Cheshire cat’s smile.
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