The reality of things
Andrew Lambirth
The Stuff of Life National Gallery, until 2 October The Westminster Retable National Gallery, until 4 September The fourth in the National Gallery’s series of touring exhibitions (remember Paradise in 2003 and Making Faces last year?) comes to London after showing in Bristol and Newcastle. Entitled this time The Stuff of Life, it is a welcome excuse should excuse be needed — to look at a group of first-rate still-life paintings, and ponder on their meaning. The merest glance at this exhibition returns us promptly to the world of things, if we ever managed to escape it. Unenlightened materialism is poor sustenance for anybody, but it is important to live in the moment with the reality of things (what Sickert called ‘gross material facts’), with cabbages as well as kings, provided we keep in mind the possibility of deeper truths.
Plenty of cabbages in the four vast paintings of the seasons (or the elements) by the little-known Joachim Beuckelaer (c.1535–75). These stiff and stilted compositions, overwhelming and without subtlety, present an extreme of pictorial fact — a literal avalanche of it — without the spiritual leavening necessary to make it anything more than a clumsy catalogue of things. Compare the poignant delicacy of Zurbarán’s ‘Cup of Water and a Rose’ (c.1630), the shimmer of reflected light on the silver plate contrasting with the duller surface of the Seville ceramic, made into a visual poem by the placing of the pink and white rose on the left. This is mastery: the knowledge of what to leave out.
If many visitors will hie themselves to this display because it includes van Gogh’s ultra-famous ‘Chair’, there are better and less obvious reasons to seek it out. The Zurbarán is one, the glorious Meléndez another. He is unsurpassed in the exact sensual depiction of ordinary textures: oranges, walnuts and sweetmeat boxes. Not just the surface of these things is persuasively caught, but their volume also is successfully suggested. This painting is a quiet masterpiece.
The Spanish are pre-eminent masters of still-life. (Juan Sánchez Cotán, 1560–1627, is one of the finest, conspicuous here by his absence.) Look at the portion of Velázquez’s magisterial ‘Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary’ that is devoted to objects: it sings. Eggs, fish, pestle and mortar, garlic (its papery outer skin flaking separately), pepper and oil jug are disposed across the table top with all the satisfying accuracy of an equation. How much more real they seem than the cold, jewelled reaches of the Dutchman Willem Kalf’s ostentatious ‘Still-Life with Drinking Horn’ (c.1653). Even the deep reds of Courbet’s ‘Still-Life with Apples and a Pomegranate’, as irritable as an infection, don’t carry the same weight of conviction.
The range of exhibits is striking. To complement the 16thand 17th-century works are a couple of contemporary pieces: a video by Sam Taylor-Wood from 2001, and Peter Blake’s collection of miniature drink bottles in homage to Damien Hirst (2003). The video is of a decomposing hare, filmed over nine weeks and reduced to four-and-a-half speeded-up minutes of frenzied maggot-munching. It is titled ‘A Little Death’, which is supposed to be sexy and funny, I suppose; given the activities of the maggots, it could more aptly be called ‘A Whole Lotta Life’.
Far deader is the rather flat nautical still-life by Edward Wadsworth (1936), though it’s a good inclusion for comparison and variety. Of considerably more interest is Frederick Elwell’s 1929 Yorkshire interior, a meticulous study in the fall of light on objects as much as a potent slice of social history. Meredith Frampton’s portrait of the historian Sir Charles Grant Robertson, frozen in thought like some waxen image, is an example of that bizarre sub-genre of the academic as object rather than warmblooded person. There’s more life altogether in Cézanne’s dark little painting of his studio stove with its hefty cooking pot. It comes as no surprise to learn that Zola first owned this picture and used its realism in his novel about a failed painter, L’Oeuvre (1886), supposedly based on Cézanne. The friendship of author and artist did not survive publication.
The Westminster Retable, England’s oldest altarpiece, is currently on loan to the National Gallery from Westminster Abbey after undergoing half-a-dozen years of painstaking restoration. It is shown in a large room in the dreary basement of the main building, with a few information wallpanels for company, and not even a bench to sit on. It has been heralded as the ‘most important north European painting of its time’, so why could it not be displayed with the Wilton Diptych and something by Duccio? That would have set it splendidly in context, and made a more interesting installation. At present, there is not a lot to attract the public to this rather dry and subtle exhibition. Which is a pity, for what is left of the painting and decoration on these oak panels is impressive.
A ‘retable’ or ‘reredos’ is a frame enclosing decorated (often carved) panels above the back of an altar. This one was ‘almost certainly’ designed for the High Altar of the Abbey towards the end of the reign of Henry III. It has been dated to c.1270, and managed to survive the religious discords of the 17th century only to be substantially vandalised in the 18th century and partly painted over. In fact, it also declined rather severely in the 20th century (as early photographs of it in better condition show), so when the Dean and Chapter decided in 1992 that it should be conserved, it was not a moment too soon. Exacting conservation started in 1998, and has revealed some fine details long hid. For instance, what looks like enamel decoration is in fact a painted imitation covered with glass. Was this a saving of expenditure? Yet gold leaf was freely used.
The long golden panel is divided into five compartments, punctuated with three Gothic tabernacles, which alternate with squares of star-shaped medallions surrounded by gorgeous deep-blue glass. (The glass is backed with silver foil to increase its brilliance.) The best-preserved figure is of St Peter on the extreme left, holding the key of Heaven. In the centre is Christ blessing, clasping an exquisitely detailed globe depicting birds and animals, and surrounded with scenes from His miracles. But so much of the Retable’s surface is now blank, scraped quite clean of its sophisticated oil-painted imagery. Of the eight star shapes (wherein the miracles would have appeared), only three now contain even partial images. Of the flanking towers at either end, one is completely void. In many all-too-visible ways the Retable’s artistic presence is irreparably dimmed, whereas its spiritual resonance remains unimpaired. It belongs in a great church, not an art gallery. Appropriately, it returns to Westminster Abbey later this year.
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