Arts
London and the Thames
Terence Maloon
The 'Fine Rooms' of Somerset House are open to the public for the first time since the Royal Academy moved out in 1836. They were the RA's headquarters in Reynolds' time, and now we have them restored to their original splendour. The current exhibition heralding the rooms' reopening should have been a momentous occasion. In fact it isn't. The exhibition is marred by the organisers' indecision as to whether they were mounting a show of documentary import or of artistic merit. They plumped for both, and so neither aspect is really satisfactory. The criterion for inclusion was that the paintings should show the Thames. Very few first-rate pictures have the Thames as their motif; a great many mediocre ones do, and the Fine Rooms contain a large space.
If the galleries were less handsomely proportioned,. less opulently decorated, unequipped with magnificent fireplaces, then the range of paintings might have seemed more impressive than they do. As it is, the environment overwhelms anything less than first-rate, reducing it to a subsidiary of the decor, an arbitrary punctuation in an tiverriding scheme. Bryan Robertson once argued that modern architecture imposed an unfortunate burden on contemporary art, compelling it to supplement a dearth of architectural decoration. In Reynolds' time architectural decoration was a (actor artists had to compete with. It provided an interesting challenge, and it's a shame the organisers of this exhibition haven't seen fit to respond to it, The Thames Through the Ages may be a silly theme, better suited to a TV documentary or a children's encyclopaedia than to an art exhibition. The exhibition does include, interspersed among much schlock, fine things by Monet, Turner and Whistler, and its real value is that it enables us to think about the light particular to this city. 'London Light', surely, would have been a more Promising theme for an exhibition where the selection might have been more adventurous by including contemporary abstract painters whose work also bears the kind of luminosity we find in representational landscapes of London. However indulgently we might be disposed towards Oskar Kokoschka, he can hardly be expected to end this Chronology on a triumphant note.
The English light has peculiar characteristics. Many artists represented in this sixlw have based their styles on Continental, specifically Mediterranean, mod els, with the result that their landscapes look as if they might have been painted anywhere but on the Thames. The PreRaphaelites, Canaletto and Derain are sitni
larly hopeless in this respect. In England, even on bright days, the contrast between light and shade is far slighter than in Mediterranean parts. A pervasive muzziness, dreadfully exaggerated by industrial waste, inhibits our sense of deep space, our appreciation of clear outlines, and withholds those 'given' designs of light and shade which are such a boon to landscape painters in other climates. Only under such a cover could the Victorians have perpetrated their architectural horrors. The late-nineteenth-century paintings at Somerset House leave us in ho doubt of that; rarely have painters shown such indifference to architecture, and rarely has this been so much to their benefit. The paintings also prove that the most convincing, 'natural' mode of representing the English light is a broad, generalised painterliness, where the artist makes no effort to clarify the middle ground, nor attempts to redeem an invisible horizon. Turner's and Constable's great contributions to English landscape painting lie largely in their scrupulous regard for optical realities, and their refusal to rationalise what they couldn't see.
Later in the century the Impressionists had even more pollution to contend with. Their notation, too, was faithful only to what they could see, save that they could see a good deal less. Their representations eschew any commonsense interpretation of what lay before their eyes. Monet makes no assumption of the integrity of objects that reach him only as scattered fragments:" In Impressionist painting the percepts swallow up the concepts, and the artist delights in his disorientation from the 'real', familiar sense of things. Objects become phantasmagoria: a mundane scene becomes a spectacle.
Monet's pictures of the Houses of Parliament and Waterloo Bridge are familiar to us through reproductions, reproductions as .common as the inevitable Van Goghs. They cannot be said to have been domesticated in the same way as the Van Goghs.(Lawrence Alloway's term for a painting's decline, through over-reproduction, into a cliché is `suntlowered'.) Despite the familiarity of these Monets, despite the colours' suggestion of boudoirs and sickly confectionery, Monet is immune to `sunflowering' and time has done nothing to dimin ish his pictures' mystery. They strike me as being among the weirdest things in the history of Western art, and they look as fresh and as crazily irrational today as they must have looked to the artist's contemporaries. The outstanding mystery is how these tissues of shot colour, of iridescent lilacs, azures, pinks should ever have been regarded as naturalist paintings.
Monet came to London with the express purpose of painting the fogs. I believe that this enthusiasm was fired by his friend the poet, Stephane Mallartne. Fogs play an important part in Mallartnes imagery, and London's fogs were not only thicker than fogs elsewhere, but they were artificial. Mallarmes recollection of London is strikingly similar in its morphology to Monet's scenes: 'Tout Londres, Londres tel que je l'ai vecu en entier a moi seul, il y a un an, est apparu; d'abord les chers brouillards qui emmitouflent nos cervelles' (The whole of London appeared to me .. . first the dear fogs which muffle our brains). The 'first' is important. Elsewhere Mallarme described the facade of Bruges cathedral gradually emerging from among swathes of heavy mist. The form of the cathedral is unfolded to the spectator, suggesting itself slowly, gradually separating out as an intelligible entity from its unintelligible ground. It is my hunch that Monet's paintings are conscious emulations of Mallarme's favoured method of presenting information, beginning with a unitary, obscure surface which 'refracts' into a multiplicity of attributes. Like Mallarme, Monet suggests his subjects obliquely, proffering them little by little, loving their mystery and relishing the iridescences he can simulate on the canvas.
Mallarme owned some pictures by Monet, and also some by Whistler. Whistler was a particular friend of his. Were it not for the exhibition at Somerset House, I would not have realised Monet's debt to Whistler. There is an azure Whistler in one gallery with sparse gold flecks along the shore-line. A Monet in the next gallery has virtually the same constitution, although it's an infinite improvement on the original. Whistler's status as an artist has suffered a strange fate. He was, I think, the supreme tastemaker for modern interior design. His paintings may have influenced Monet, the young Matisse (I suspect), Rothko and Olitski. Whistler's 'faded' gentility may seem to us now a kind of aristocratic pretension, a calculated artiness. The pictures on view make a fascinating group, however. The shades of gilt on individual picture-frames chime in perfectly with the colours of the paintings (such refinements of presentation were important to Whistler), and they are all pretty, sensitively painted, and strangely unmemorable.
Although I have carped a good deal at this exhibition, I look forward with interest to its sequels in high hopes that the conservative choice of exhibits will be less dominant in future shows. I hope the price of admission (£1 for adults, 60p for children and OAPs) will be lowered too.
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