Moving vista
Andrew Lambirth
Joan Eardley The Fleming Collection, 13 Berkeley Street, London W1, until 20 December The interplay between realism and abstraction that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s in British art gave rise to a number of fascinating paintings as artists struggled to resolve the balance to their own satisfaction. The co-existence of these extremes in the art world had the effect of polarising opinion, yet some of the best solutions were supplied by those who could harness both drives and make them work in a single painting. Joan Eardley (1921–63) was one who mastered enough of both idioms to make an original statement, and who thus took the evocation of landscape to poignant new heights.
Born in Sussex, but moving to Glasgow when she was 18, Eardley based the rest of her short life in Scotland, and it is there that her reputation stands highest. The exhibition at the Fleming Collection has been produced in collaboration with the National Galleries of Scotland, which have loaned a number of works. However, this is a small show (though a welcome one), consisting only of a dozen paintings upstairs, and nine downstairs with a wall cabinet of drawings and a group of large photos of the artist. It gives only a taste of Eardley’s achievements. I admire what the Fleming Collection tries to do, but it must be said that the lighting in the gallery leaves a lot to be desired. Downlighters may be discreet, but they tend to leave great pools of shadow which don’t exactly elucidate the paintings.
The show begins with an early self-portrait from 1943, the paint very patchy and thinly applied. This understatement is surprisingly effective, though it was not a mode that Eardley pursued. Next to it hangs a typical mature landscape entitled ‘Field of Barley by the Sea’, constructed in heavily worked impasto, the paint driven hard in surging movements across the surface. There’s a strong sense of abstraction in the disposition of the masses and the colour relationships (blues and reds amid the more expected duns and greens). Next to it is the famous ‘Seeded Grasses and Daisies’ (1960), borrowed from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, with real flowers and stalks collaged into the paint. (You can’t get more ‘realistic’ than that.) This in turn is followed by the luscious paintwork of ‘Summer Fields’ (c.1961).
Sensibly, the hang upstairs focuses on Eardley’s landscapes and seascapes, which are what most people who know her work want to see. The chaotic sea paintings don’t look very marine, more like melting snow on high moors, particularly ‘Winter Sea III’ and ‘Summer Sea’. The best of this group is ‘The Wave’ (1961), a completely nonnaturalistic representation, like a long wall in its uncompromising horizontality. Here, Eardley attempts an equivalent image rather than anything overtly descriptive, and the result is highly effective.
Downstairs, there are three paintings of the street kids she liked to depict and a rather nasty picture of a naked man stretched out on a bed. The ink drawings in the wall cabinet have some of the vigour of early Bratby, particularly ‘Kitchen Sink and Cupboard’. The best paintings downstairs are the Cézannesque stove and the luxuriantly colourful landscape ‘Harvest’. Joan Eardley is not sufficiently well-known to contemporary English gallery-goers, but this exhibition will not change that. There needs to be a proper museum retrospective of her work, though I can’t imagine that happening given the present obsession with narcissistic youth and reheated conceptualism.
One painter who confronts landscape with a similar degree of colourful abstraction is James Judge (born 1958). I caught his latest show at the Adam Gallery in Cork Street, though it has now relocated to its branch at 13 John Street, Bath, where it runs from 13 to 28 October. His generalised landscapes, all horizons and distant incidents, marinate in synthetic hues. The further away from naturalism he gets, the more interesting, though this treatment makes the work look foreign. Not such rich, exotic colours on these grey shores, surely? But bold paintings guaranteed to lift the spirits, with a subtext of formal invention and subtlety that continues to intrigue long after the initial joyful response.
At Marlborough Fine Art, 6 Albemarle Street, W1, Allen Jones (born 1937), fresh from the success of his Chatsworth commission (see Arts, 23 August), shows new work (until 25 October). His exhibition is entitled Showtime, which is also the title of the most eye-catching piece here: a wavy bluegreen screen of glass-reinforced composite lined with leather, depicting a dancing female. Her outstretched leather-clad arm and a single red stiletto emerge from one end of this sexy, undulating form. All the rest is suggestion. Once again, Jones brilliantly crosses the line between sculpture and furniture, as he has done so controversially in the past. Also in the show is a vast two-part stainless steel reclining figure entitled ‘Juno’. Smaller sculptures, paintings and prints provide a substantial context for these glorious pieces.
Meanwhile at the Redfern Gallery, 20 Cork Street, W1, is an exhibition of new work by Danny Markey (born 1965), called Paintings of South Wales (until 30 October). He paints mostly small intimate pictures, reliably matterof-fact but enjoyably painterly. He is a poet of the suburbs, offering glimpses of gable ends, transit vans, lighted windows and the trail of sodium lights indicating a major road. ❑
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