Murals do furnish a room
Mark Glazebrook on how this form of painting can transform an interior
Amural can make or break an interior. It can transform a cave, a place of worship, a school, a hospital, a town hall or some other public building in a way that an easel painting cannot. It can enliven any building from a power station to an underground station, from a pub to a private house. And last but not least it can define the spirit of a restaurant. A mural should be, and normally is, site specific — to steal a phrase from the installation artist's vocabulary. A cave mural, of course, should be about hunting bison, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel should be about the Creation, a town hall mural should be about civic matters, a polytechnic mural should be educational and so on.
Many Egyptian. Greek and Roman murals have been lost. Others are not what they were. Leonardo da Vinci's 'Last Supper' began to deteriorate soon after it was painted, due to a technical mistake and the desire of genius to experiment. Despite such tragedies some of the greatest surviving works of European art are murals. From the Italian Renaissance, Giotto's 'The Scourging of Christ' in Padua's Scrovegni Chapel and Massaccio's 'The Tribute Money' in Florence's Santa Maria del Carmine spring quickly to mind, even though the latter was once painted over by Vasari. (Not a good omen for the profession of art historian which he is considered to have fathered.) In the 20th century, Picasso's historic protest against the bombing of a Basque town, `Guernica', is a mural panel — which was transportable and therefore was enabled to become more influential politically. Exceptional in an almost opposite way is the Matisse Chapel in Vence with its linear, austerely reductive 'Stations of the Cross' on white walls, drawn with a brush in black paint. By day these big Matisse drawings never look exactly the same because the light, which has been coloured so magically by his stained-glass windows, slowly changes direction as it is thrown onto wall and floor of this beautifully simple, and simply beautiful, building.
In England, despite our international reputation as a literary culture, there is a longer and more extensive history of mural painting than might be thought. Although masterpieces are in short supply, much skill has been expended and no doubt much pleasure and edification been received. A study on the subject by English Heritage in 1999 even came up with an illustration of a wall painting of water deities (about AD 75) in Lullingstone Roman Villa. Alas, it's very faint and only just about survives. The same is true of many mediaeval murals in churches, which must have been bright in colour when new.
Some good 18th-century ceilings have survived well. David Carrit cleverly discovered a Tiepolo ceiling in the Egyptian embassy in London when working at Christie's during the 1960s. It is now in the National Gallery. The murals and ceilings of Lord Burlington's Chiswick House, probably by William Kent, have been restored, although no one is certain for what this exemplary piece of Palladian architecture was intended, probably for throwing parties.
In the second half of the 19th century there was a revival of true fresco, which necessitates painting into wet plaster. William Dyce's 'Neptune Entrusting the Command of the Sea to Britannia' dominates the Grand Staircase at Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight. It's a striking example of true fresco — and of Prince Albert's combined interest in fresco and in Britain ruling the waves.
In the 20th century, royal patronage of the visual arts has been modest, in keeping with the monarchy's reduced constitutional role, although Prince Charles certainly does what he can, and from the heart. The same applies to the Church, which was for a long time the greatest patron of all. Significantly, Stanley Spencer's outstanding murals for the War Memorial Chapel at Burghclere, Hampshire, were not commissioned by the Church, but by the private patrons Louis and Mary Behrend.
In Mexico, of course, the state was a great patron of murals in the 1920s. Despite having known the successful Mexican painter James Kirkman since we were at the same Cambridge college in the 1950s — he is shortly to exhibit in Hoxton — I've yet to go to Mexico to see these works, but it is well known that the mural movement there, led by Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros, was an integral part of a social revolution. Rivera became so popular that he was able to carry on painting murals in numerous government-controlled buildings, even after the Obregon regime, which had commissioned them, had fallen. London's democratic and socially relevant outdoor mural revival of the 1970s, a lively alternative to graffiti, is beyond the scope of this article.
Patronage of murals has diversified. I am beginning to wonder now, given that cooks and chefs can suddenly become all the rage on television, whether restaurants could not become the new major mural patrons in London. If restaurants do become big in mural patronage then the old Tate Gallery at Millbank will have led the way. 'In Pursuit of Rare Meats', Rex Whistler's mural in the basement restaurant there, an archaising image on all four walls, painted between the wars, is a superb work of its kind.
The best 21st-century mural I've seen is on three walls of the dining-room of the recently built Charlotte Street Hotel, near Oxford Street. Kit Kemp commissioned a painting of contemporary life in London, reminiscent of the decorative works in restaurants and cafés which had been done by Roger Fry and his Omega Workshops in 1914 and 1915. He found the ideal artist in Alexander Hollweg. Hollweg's grandfather, Edward Wadsworth. who designed the modern mural for the De La Warr pavilion at Bexhill (the work of Mendelsohn and Cherrnayeff), had worked for Fry and then split with him to join Wyndham Lewis in the radical Vorticist movement. Hollweg manages to tell a story and to harmonise a mass of data from that period and now, from African art to mobile phones, from colourful Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia to the angularities of Vorticism. In addition, the whole thing glows like a Rothko. It makes the room — and it merits a detour.
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