Fluff and granite
Andrew Lambirth
Boucher and Chardin: Masters of Modern Manners
The Wallace Collection, Hertford House, Manchester Square, W1, until 7 September Alan Green; Joan Miró Annely Juda Fine Art, 23 Dering Street, W1, until 18 July Ican never visit the Wallace Collection without lamenting the filling of the erstwhile courtyard with an airless restaurant which scarcely does justice to the noble proportions of Hertford House. Meanwhile, temporary exhibitions are crammed into two smallish rooms in the basement, which just goes to show that apparently we value our stomachs over our hearts. Luckily, the Wallace regularly mounts high-quality exhibitions in its subterranean galleries (rather as the National Gallery occasionally does), and the current one is no exception. Boucher and Chardin are chalk and cheese, fluff and granite, but this show brings them together to considerable effect, and to our definite advantage. A series of loans from such eminent collections as the Frick in New York and the Hunterian in Glasgow makes this display an unmissable event.
If you take my advice, proceed through the first gallery without pausing, into what the Scots are wont to call ‘the body of the kirk’. In this main room are several surprises. On the end wall facing you are two Chardin paintings, possible pendants (i.e., painted to hang together), certainly reunited for the first time since the 1760s: ‘Lady Taking Tea’ from the Hunterian, and ‘The House of Cards’ from the Rothschild Family Trust at Waddesdon Manor. If that conjunction isn’t enough to justify the show, turn 90 degrees for Boucher’s ‘Woman on a Daybed’ (1743) from the Frick, the other focus of this display. A fine painting, but not nearly as sumptuous as the ‘The Milliner (Morning)’, the first panel in a projected quartet devoted to times of the day, lent by the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Look at the handling of drapery in this painting, it has a loving intricacy of surface and texture that is missing from the harder-edged and slightly more forced treatment to be found in ‘Woman on a Daybed’. For even more distinctions of quality, turn to the version of ‘The Milliner’ hanging nearby (from the Wallace’s own collection) and ascribed to Studio of Boucher. This is dull in comparison and has none of the beguiling delicacy of the Stockholm picture.
But this is not the end of the wonders in this room. On the same wall as the Bouchers is another Chardin, entitled ‘The Morning Toilet’ (1741), also on loan from Stockholm, depicting a little girl and her guardian about to leave for Sunday Mass. Chardin’s superb judgment of colours is evident throughout, especially in the winning combination of the little girl’s pale-blue shawl over a soft, salmon-pink dress. Boucher wouldn’t aim for such subtlety, being interested in more overtly splendid decoration or (at his worst) rococo whimsy. But he could certainly draw, witness the exquisite chalk portrait of Charlotta Sparre, done in three colours (red, white and black) on buff paper, a technique Boucher derived from Watteau, whose drawings he used to copy at the beginning of his career. (Incidentally, when not on loan this drawing is currently with Day & Faber, and is for sale.) On the opposite wall are two more Chardins, a pair of genre paintings from the world behind the fashionable scene: ‘The Cellar Boy’ and ‘The Scullery Maid’. Both are loaned by the Hunterian, and look tremendous together in this context, marvels of understatement, illuminated by the slow burn of the red bottle-carrier in ‘The Cellar Boy’. Also on this wall is a lovely little painting by Lancret, who pioneered a return to the reality of French life after the fantasies of Watteau. His subject chimes with the Boucher opposite, being another morning scene, intimate, charming and gently erotic. Now return to the first room for a comparison with Hogarth (his marvellous painting ‘The Western Family’, from Dublin) and a detailed study of one of the exhibition’s themes, the introduction of tea-drinking into society, here illustrated through literature and artefacts. A really enjoyable collection of pictures in a well-managed small exhibition. Recommended.
In the beautifully lit top gallery at Annely Juda Fine Art is a tribute to the distinguished English abstract painter Alan Green, who died in 2003. Green is one of those English abstractionists like Ayres, Hoyland or the unfairly neglected Brian Fielding, who was born in the 1930s and experienced the full impact of American Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s. Green trained as a graphic designer and illustrator, but swiftly changed allegiance and made his name as a painter. He was at the Royal College in the mid-tolate 1950s when American painting first hit these shores, and would have experienced it then at full throttle, even if as a designer he avoided the theoretical discussions of the painters. In fact, Green became a painter very much involved with the language of his art, intent on making visible the process by which he arrived at his images.
This memorial exhibition focuses on ten late works from 1991 to 2002, a number of them painted in horizontal strips, like planking. This horizontal arrangement is sometimes qualified by a near-central vertical division, like an informal axis. Thus the paintings each posit a series of meetings: ‘intersections’ between forms, and the juxtaposition of different speeds, energies, movements and colours. Their surfaces are immensely varied in texture, from a brushy application to a more corrugated combed effect, and the colour is equally inventive. These are not the grey paintings they might first appear to be, but blue-brown, violet, green, lilac and translucent white; pictures with a marked physical presence.
There’s a small room off the central space containing a group of drawings of discs, some cut-out and collaged, some simply drawn or employing colour. This theme is extended in the back room of the exhibition, in Green’s final sequence of drawings made in hospital, and in paintings — particularly ‘Red over White’ (2001) and the masterly ‘Rise and Fall’ (2002). The imagery resembles log piles seen end-on or oxygen bubbles rising through a cylinder of water, but is really about putting paint on and taking it off (the white circles of ‘Red over White’ are where Green has scraped back to the canvas), and about imposing limitations and then transcending them. A remarkable exhibition.
On the floor below is a very different exhibition, a group of sculptures and drawings by the Catalan Surrealist Joan Miró (1893–1983). There are 14 bronzes and ten drawings in this substantial show, but it is the drawings which make it especially worth visiting. The juxtaposed found objects are too fragmentary and too determinedly jokey to hold together as fully realised sculptures, even though cast in bronze, but the drawings have the freshness of invention and the controlled wiliness which make Miró a master of line and imagined form.
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