ARTS
Iam influenced, you are influenced, the American video artist Bill Viola is influ- enced, as he acknowledges: `I think we exist on this earth,' he says, `to inspire each other, through our deeds and through who we are. We are always borrowing. I think it's a beautiful, wonderful thing.'
Encounters: New Art from Old (until 17 September), the current exhibition at the National Gallery — in fact practically all over the National Gallery, filling four exhi- bition spaces, with an additional Richard Hamilton on the landing and a Howard Hodgkin among the Impressionists — is all about influence and borrowing between artists of the present and artists of the past. Or, to be more precise, it concerns the reactions of 24 major contemporary artists from around the world to works in the National Gallery's own collection.
This kind of thing goes on informally, of course, all the time. Picasso spent a consid- erable part of his last quarter-century pro- ducing his own versions of paintings by Velazquez, Delacroix and Monet, among others. Artists are often affected by the most surprising predecessors — Jackson Pollock by Tintoretto, for instance; Bridget Riley by the architects of Siena Cathedral. What is unusual and potentially hazardous about Encounters, however, is that the artists were invited to perform to order, and for a special occasion.
The artistic imagination, above all things, is a wind that bloweth where it listeth. Con- sequently, orchestrated Interventions' and the works of contemporary `artists in resi- dence' can be dire. But on this occasion dis- aster has not occurred. Not all the exhibits are successful by any means, and some are complete failures, but a respectable number are interesting and quite a few are absolute- ly terrific. For an exhibition of this kind, that is not a bad score.
There are all sorts of ways in which the art of the past may trigger some- thing in the mind of an artist today. The Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, for example, responded to George Stubbs's `Whistle- jacket' by producing an equine image as opposite as possible to the original. Stubbs's stallion is rearing majestically in an abstract neo-classical void. Wall's docile, female seaside don- key was photographed in her humble stable in Blackpool. The huge trans- parency, illuminated from
Responses to the artists of the past
Martin Gayford on a thought-provoking exhibition at the National Gallery behind, has something like the authority and presence of an oil painting. But no art historian of the future who had not been given the necessary clue could possibly guess that there was any connection between the Wall and the Stubbs.
Similarly, it would be a bold, even reck- less conjecture to imagine that there was a relation between Euan Uglow's nude `Nuria' and Monet's Waterlily Pond'. Indeed, the link is entirely formal, confined to the arching shape formed by the model's body and the stool she is lying upon. The result, however, is a good Uglow. (It is a problem for art history that it can detect obvious influences but not unobvious ones, such as this.) Of Patrick Caulfield's starting-point — a Zurbaran still life — for his painting 'Hem- ingway never ate here', nothing remains but a cup and a pewter saucer. Plus, that is, an Hispanic ambiance indicated by a bull's head on the wall. Otherwise this has become one of Caulfield's marvellous late restaurant/bar interiors, two more of which can be seen at Tate Modern, easily holding their own against Roy Lichtenstein 'Seurat's Bathers', 1998-2000, by Howard Hodgkin in one of the most successful rooms.
Should one conclude, then, that the best works have the most free and indirect rela- tion to their originals? Not necessarily. Jasper Johns's `Catenary (Manet-Degas)' has an extremely loose connection with the Manet from which it derives. The only visi- ble resemblance is in the patchwork of shapes on the blue-grey surface that echo the fragments of canvas into which `The Execution of Maximilian' was cut. But it's still a dullish picture by Johns's own stan- dards or any others. Clemente's take on Titian is oblique enough, but also just ghastly.
On the other hand, in the most intense and long drawn-out of all these reactions to past art, Lucian Freud has taken the oppo- site of an indirect path with his chosen painting, Chardin's `Young School- mistress'. He has almost, but not quite, copied it. Perhaps it would be more accu- rate to say, though, that he has worked it and reworked it as if the Chardin had been a living model. The results are quite evi- dently Freuds, not Chardins, but they are close likenesses of the original.
None of his versions has the same dimensions or the same spacious composi- tion as the `Young Schoolmistress'. All three Freuds — two paintings and a large, splendid print — are, so to speak, close- ups. The smallest, earliest painting dwells tenderly on the faces of the schoolmistress and her pupil. By the culminating print, a weird tension between the two has devel- oped, or been discovered.
Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen have come up with a delicious joke, a tableau based on Vermeer of a soft viola da gamba in an erotic relation- ship with cupid's bow. This, to my mind, is the most successful of the three-dimensional works — others are by Stephen Cox, Anthony Caro and Louise Bourgeois — perhaps because it is the most like a painting.
I don't know whether many people, art historians or not, would spot the derivation of Bill Viola's video piece, 'Christ Mocked' by Hieronymous Bosch. But in 'The Quin- tet of the Astonished' he has come up with something oddly like an old master oil — but an old master oil which, disconcerting- ly, moves from time to time. Five actors stand in postures of frozen emotion, just like the participants in 'Christ Mocked', and many another masterpiece in the National Gallery. Then, slowly, one slips from one posture to another. This thoroughly contemporary piece emphasises the artificiality and, at the same time, the centrality of the great tradition of painting. It is part of the warp and weft of our culture. That is the premise of this exhibition, and it is perfectly true. But, con- versely, the way artists today respond to the past may be surprising and strange. For that reason those who believe old master painting is largely a matter of craft, and decry contemporary art, will denounce this exhibition. But that is because they misun- derstand old art and new alike.
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