Moving story
Richard Shone wanders round the art galleries in London Alast, something has happened for which I've been waiting for years. The Directors of the Tate and National Gallery have pooled their wisdom and come to an agreement as to when their collections, respectively, start and stop. 1900 was the unsurprising choice. This means all those remnants of Impressionism at the Tate will travel to Trafalgar Square and nearly everything there post-1900 — Picasso, Matisse, Klimt, for example, dotty purchas- es by a former Director — will go to the Tate..This was announced at a press con- ference at the Sainsbury Wing, Messrs MacGregor and Serota presiding. The topic was not disclosed beforehand and some of those attending may have felt mildly let down by the announcement and were certainly impatient with the art- history lessons to which we were treated by members of each gallery's staff. But it's just as well to spell out the differences between Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, a distinction lost on many a reporter, as the next day's newspapers showed.
Let's hope this rationalisation has some influence in the other major museums on who collects what, for instance. Twenti- eth-century works on paper, for example, are the province of the Tate, the British Museum and the V & A. Drawings by cur- rent sculptors such as Whiteread, Woodrow and Gormley have been acquired by the British Museum, yet they might well be more 'relevant' at the Tate and certainly not out of place at the V & A. Then there's the solitary Degas painting at the latter — surely it's time to put it on long lone to the National Gallery? Of course, in an ideal world, it would be sensa- tional if the Courtauld Collection of French pictures, grimly displayed at Somer- set House, could go to Trafalgar Square. What an astonishing show of Impression- ism and Post-Impressionism that would then make!
IT'S ODD how Augustus John's drawings, on show at Spink, should have ignited crit- ics of a certain age to indignation though not with the drawings themselves. No, they fume at John's current neglect and accuse the present generation of fail- ing to appreciate him. Surely he had enough adulation in his life-time to serve him for years after his death? I'm by no means anti John: I even published a short book about him. But, as time passes, it becomes clear, to me at least, that he added nothing to the language of painting and that the drawings, elegant and some- times good but not great, are ultimately sterile, leading nowhere. Place one sheet of Dorelia in clinging Romany skirts next to a Leonardo, as Brian Sewell has exhorted us to do, and John collapses in a welter of Prize-winning lines. Who now would want such impotent skill? Sewell calls him this century's 'most felicitous draughtsman' and John McEwen laments his neglect. I sup- pose the ersatz traditionalism John offers has its appeal to the disaffected.
PETER ACKROYD joined me to go to the opening party for the National Portrait Gallery's revamped rooms of 19th- and 20th-century portraits. We ran into Gavin Stamp who shared our misgivings on the new hang, wall colours, etc. The grouping of G.F. Watts's 'House of Fame' is one of the few bonuses of the re-arrangement. Astonished to see Swinburne was only about 30 when Watts included him in his otherwise elderly gang. Renoir-ish brush- work on Manning's head; sympathetic of Morris; Ellen Terry (Mrs Watts), sniffing her camelia — a scentless flower; others desiccated, their surfaces unpleasant. Browning has rigor mortis but then Watts thought he had the 'most ordinary appear- ance' of anyone he had ever met. How faithful are they? Lord Holland, who encouraged Watts to concentrate on por- traiture, wrote of his full-length of Mrs Fitzpatrick that it was 'extremely like, and yet will hand her down to posterity as very beautiful!!!' I suddenly saw Gavin as an excellent model for Watts; Peter too 18th century — Hogarth would have got him. The 20th-century gallery is like a parrot- house under water, a superior storeroom of glass screens. Mixing up paintings, sculp- ture, photographs and drawings is a diffi- cult business but not solved by this chi-chi aquarium. The best portraits are by real artists: what a relief to come across the images of themselves by Lewis, Grant, Roberts, Nicholson, Craxton. Sickert's Beaverbrook rather thrown away; acute yet flabby Lamb of Neville Chamberlain. Where are Dan Leno and Marie Lloyd? Never painted, I suppose, but pho- tographed, surely, a thousand times.
THE 20th-century British Art Fair is burst- ing the seams of the Royal College. This annual market-place for dealers fills nearly two extensive floors. The main gangway becomes impossibly crowded, mainly with people one has wanted to avoid since see- ing them at the last Fair; horribly stuffy, not helped by the smell of lunch creeping upstairs from the restaurant below. Although there seemed to be less rubbish on view than before, there was nothing that struck me as essential for the Tate, for example, to acquire. There was a grand still-life by Peter Coker, an oil study by Sickert for 'Ennui', a dazzling Bridget Riley, enticing drawings by Nicholson and Roberts; and a painting by William Scott to remind us how good he could be. Now there, pace John, is a neglected artist, though I see Bernard Jacobson has taken on his estate and that the enterprising Gor- don Cooke has put on a show of his lithographs at the Fine Art Society. First shoots of revival? But more memorable than the merchandise was the whiteness of Charles Saatchi's shirt and the superb hat worn by the inexhaustible Lillian Browse, doyenne of Cork Street. She's written her memoirs but can't fmd a publisher. No dirt.
STICKY moment at the Hayward Gallery in the display of purchases for the Arts Council Collection. Lord Gowrie said to me that he liked the big Basil Beattie painting best. This was unfortunate. I had just looked around the whole show and thought the Beattie abstract was the work I liked least. We're stuck with our taste and it's hard to revise early admirations or antipathies. I suppose in a few years time I shall seem completely gaga when I say I like the work of Gary Hume or Rachel Whiteread, both pre-eminent at the Hay- ward. I certainly felt long in the tooth the other day when a curator from the Gul- benkian Foundation in Lisbon recorded me on my memories of the London art world in the Seventies. My chief thought was of the number of swans who have since become dead ducks.
THE LAST war vividly evoked twice within 24 hours. Eileen Atkins reading on the radio from Virginia Woolf's 1940-41 diaries; and the opening at the Imperial War Museum of a beautifully arranged show of Paul Nash's work as a War Artist. Although a little Mrs Minerverish in tone, Atkins relayed both the ironic humour and the sense of visual impressions tumbling ahead of the pen. Enemy aircraft over the South Downs; crashed bombers; rationing; direct hits on Oxford Street and Blooms- bury; her house destroyed 'where we sat so many nights, gave so many parties'. Nash almost entirely rural, some of the water- colours like illustrations to the diaries though, unlike Woolf, devoid of people. `Bomber in the Corn', a symbol of waste and renewal, a ripe Home Counties under a blood-red sun, both surrealist and pas- toral. Most war art in England was illustra- tion; only Moore and Nash rose above it.
THE DAMP stone and musty smell of some northern cathedral describes the smell of Bankside Power Station, emptied now and ready for its transformation into the Museum of Modern Art (London must be one of the few capital cities without one). Nick Serota invited a group of people to look inside. There was some reluctance to put on the compulsory hard hat and vest — though one or two guests looked very fetching in them. The place is immense, reducing the Disney-Heritage Globe The- atre nearby to a mere toy. Three great floors of galleries are planned, with all the facilities attendant on a museum visit these days — baby-changing rooms, shops, etc. I like the idea of pleasure returning once more to Bankside, the red-light district of Plantagenet London (I wonder if the Power Station's architect, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, saw the joke of such an enormous brick erection on this particular site). As Peter Ackroyd wistfully remarked as we walked away, 'We're following in the steps of mediaeval prostitutes.'
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