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I was completely convinced by their enthusiasm (one, I must admit, I already shared) and wholeheartedly joined the team, compiling enjoyable lists of artists and then remembering favourites inadvertently overlooked. The other two, carrying a greater weight of years and experience than your humble columnist, were the ones who approached the institutions we thought might be interested in such a venture, and it was they who repeatedly had to break the news that no one was prepared to take it on. Several people expressed interest, but it never went further than that. This was extraordinary, for we even had the promise of sponsorship to sweeten the proposal.
Why this wholesale rejection? You may well ask — as indeed did we. An answer was eventually volunteered by one eximious museum director, who agreed that the exhibition was a good idea and that it would be very popular with the public. The problem lay with the museum’s curators, who would not like it at all — and who would prove to be the stumbling block. I can understand the paid officials of an institution resenting the intrusion of freelance outsiders, but the issue is not one simply of competition. The curators would apparently not approve of our proposal because it had no argument.
Every museum exhibition these days is structured around a curator’s interpretation or theory, and quite often the art is made to fit the theme, rather than being the real reason for the show. Curators use exhibitions — and their weighty accompanying catalogues — to further their own careers, rather than serving art and the public. The idea of presenting a major survey and celebration of painting is thus anathema to them, for painting is centre stage, not a curator-controlled theory of what painting is or should be.
As you may have detected, I disapprove of the self-aggrandisement of curators who stand in the way of art. Of course, not all are like this, and some few are prepared to put art first. But the majority spend their time elaborating concepts to impress their colleagues and prospective employers, rather than searching out artists who’ve been unfairly neglected, or simply not seen for a while, and putting forward their work for reassessment. I would much prefer to see the Tate organising a whole series of small exhibitions devoted to individual artists, drawn largely from their own collections, rather than the endless programme of blockbusters that are usually too big to be either properly enjoyable or really instructive.
Yet this is precisely what doesn’t happen in museums. As a consequence, the commercial galleries have had to supply the shortfall, and the kind of high-quality focus exhibitions that public galleries should be arranging are being put on in the private sector. All praise to the galleries who manage to do this — very often by mixing museum-quality loan works with a smattering of items for sale to defray the costs of mounting such a display.
Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert (38 Bury Street, St James’s, SW1) is a gallery that has staged a series of such shows in recent years, including impressive displays of Lucian Freud and Barbara Hepworth. Currently they are showing (until 4 November) a sumptuous group of still-life and landscape paintings by William Nicholson (1872–1949), to mark the publication of the catalogue raisonné of his oil paintings. Besides borrowing famous works from private collections, they have managed to obtain loans from the Tate, the Towner Art Gallery and the Fitzwilliam Museum. Along with much-loved favourites there are a couple of paintings not exhibited for decades: ‘The Lustre Bowl’ and ‘Rose Lustre’. Inclusions such as these make the exhibition priority viewing.
In this column I have regularly lamented the lack of a museum focusing on modern American art, but at least the dealer Bernard Jacobson in Cork Street mounts exhibitions of distinguished American artists of the highest quality. His latest foray is Robert Motherwell: Works on Paper (until 26 November), and very good it is too. Motherwell (1915–91) was the youngest member of the New York School, and came to Abstract Expressionism through European Surrealism. Honouring Mallarmé’s dictum, ‘describe not the object itself, but the effect it produces’, he made wonderfully inventive drawings of great imaginative freedom, exploiting the surrealist strategy of psychic automatism, or ‘artful scribbling’. A revelation.
In November, Jonathan Clark & Co. (18 Park Walk, SW10) is showing early sculpture by Eduardo Paolozzi, dating from 1946 to 1959. This is arguably his best and most original work and any assessment of Paolozzi’s reputation must begin here. From a brief preview of the catalogue this looks to be a classic loan exhibition in a commercial gallery. Recommended.
William Nicholson also features among the 27 artists I have selected for A Critic’s Choice at Browse & Darby (19 Cork Street, W1, until 11 November). Limiting myself to British art 1900–1950, I have brought together examples by artists whose work I care about. This is a celebration of painting, drawing and printmaking (with a couple of sculptures thrown in) which makes a few links between the artists but has no thesis to propose or axe to grind, apart from my own passion for the art of the period. Thus I include very old favourites such as Paul Nash, Frank Dobson, Wyndham Lewis and Ivon Hitchens, neglected younger brothers John Nash and Gilbert Spencer, and more recent enthusiasms such as Algernon Newton and Allan Gwynne-Jones. Then there are the unjustly undervalued, such as Leon Underwood and John Armstrong, and the genuinely unfamiliar, such as Thomas Hennell (1903–45), friend and contemporary of Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious. The resulting mix is a very personal choice, but never intended as anything else. I hope you enjoy it.
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