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It’s so good to find an artist who knows and loves the great tradition of painting, and who doesn’t think — like so many conceptual artists — that they’ve just invented the wheel. Dukes’s fruitful dialogue with the Old Masters is evident here in the marvellous painting ‘A Church in Naples, after Thomas Jones’, and in such delights as his painted studies after Rembrandt. There’s also a whole tranche of modestly priced drawings (after Morandi, Goya, Veronese, Degas et al.), mostly hanging in the downstairs gallery. This is a lovely show, and particularly impressive in the way Dukes makes his subjects glow with inner life. For someone who paints still-life with such devotion, he manages to imbue his paintings with a remarkable degree of movement.
At Marlborough Fine Art (6 Albemarle Street, W1, until 26 April) is a Centenary Exhibition in celebration of that pioneer of British Modernism, Victor Pasmore (1908–98). Consisting of large paintings and much smaller prints all done in the 1990s, the show reminds us of Pasmore’s strengths as a colourist and draughtsman, mostly in the exploration of abstract yet organic form. (I hear good reports of the newly hung Pasmore room at Tate Britain, which offers a wider chronological range of his work.) Towards the end of his life, Pasmore began experimenting with the reintroduction of figurative imagery into his resolutely abstract compositions. So in some of the paintings here we see the outlines of birds and plants and even the suggestion of people. But the most powerful pictures are the abstract distillations of form, in oil and spray paint and pencil on board, such as the very last painting here, ‘Untitled’ of 1997. It is simply made from rounded shapes of a lambent duck-egg blue, with some pencil overdrawing and a couple of black elements edging in from the left. Immensely poised and satisfying.
For a complete change of pace and subject, proceed to Bernard Jacobson Gallery (6 Cork Street, W1), where new sculpture by Phillip King (born 1934) is on view until 3 May. One of our most distinguished sculptors, King has been out of circulation recently, having devoted himself instead to the presidency of the Royal Academy, and putting his own art on hold. He retired from the RA in 2004 and this exhibition features all new work made in the past couple of years. It’s excellent to see King back on form and prepared as ever to try out new things. No bronze here, nor ceramic pots. Instead a new material has seized his imagination: foam PVC which can be cut or cast according to what is required. It’s very light, takes paint well, and is highly adaptable. King has used it with the same kind of free-wheeling invention (and colour) that characterised the work that first made his name in the 1960s.
The show is entitled Living with Colour for good reason: the sculpture, though some pieces are quite sizeable, is domestic in intention and made for home or garden rather than museum. Walking into the gallery you might be forgiven for thinking you were in an adventure playground, with sculptures like a paddling pool (with propeller) or climbing frames. The largest piece is made of steel, but all the others are foam PVC. Here sculpture meets furniture. Downstairs is a hatstand and umbrella bin in red and black which is fully functional as well as being a homage to Malevich. There’s a ‘Little Miss Muffet Table’ (with spider-web patterns) and a ‘Red Apple Chair’. These funky objects surprise and intrigue as King readdresses the debate between form and function.
Quite a different artist is showing at the Fine Art Society (148 New Bond Street, W1, until 18 April) — John Linnell (1792–1882). This is the first show of Linnell’s work for 25 years, and yet he was enormously successful in his own lifetime and quite a figure in the Victorian art world. He was William Blake’s greatest supporter but his good name has suffered from his intemperate treatment of his son-in-law Samuel Palmer. It’s high time he was looked at again, and this small but select show inspires re-assessment. Particularly fine are a group of watercolours he made on a month’s tour of Wales in 1813 — pale, delicate, minimal notations that appeal to contemporary sensibility. The exhibition’s centrepiece is a large oil ‘The Storm in Harvest Time’ (1856), a grand and dramatic subject, superbly handled. But perhaps even more desirable is a smaller study of it in oil, more subtle and not so overbearing, the creamy grey cloud showing up the varied yellows, pinks, browns and greens of the landscape. Another oil study, this time for ‘The Rest on the Flight into Egypt’, has a rare luminosity which can only be called brilliant.
The Friends’ Room at the Royal Academy is often overlooked as a Central London venue, partly because it’s usually packed with RA Friends having coffee or lunch. However, it’s open free to the public every day from 4 to 6 p.m., and until 25 June a fascinating exhibition of paintings and drawings by Tristram Hillier (1905–83) is showing there. Hillier is one of those artists affiliated to the Surrealist movement, whose work was always more independent and individual than any ism could allow. A meticulous craftsman whose paintings are rigorously built on painstaking draughtsmanship, Hillier was influenced by Cubism before succumbing briefly to the lure of Surrealism. An early coloured pencil drawing ‘Object on a Beach’ (1935) recalls the Surrealist works of Picasso besides looking very like a John Banting. Hillier, like his near-contemporary John Armstrong, is really a classical painter rather than a Surrealist, and he was a master of crisp, rather chilly landscapes and coastal townscapes. They often look as if something is about to happen, and the mood can verge on the ominous. What peculiarities of temperament gave rise to Hillier’s glacial treatment may be gleaned from a new study of his work entitled Painter Pilgrim: The Art and Life of Tristram Hillier by Jenny Pery (Royal Academy, £25). This handsome and highly illustrated hardback should help to put Hillier back on the map: I look forward to reading it.
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