Exhibitions
Breath of the Mediterranean
Andrew Lambirth
Van Gogh and Britain: Pioneer Collectors Compton Verney, until 18 June The slightly warmer blustery weather of late March found me en route for Compton Verney, the charming Robert Adam house in 120 acres of Warwickshire park landscaped by Capability Brown. Purchased in 1993 by the philanthropic Peter Moores Foundation, it was sympathetically remodelled and opened to the public as an art gallery in 2004. Among the permanent exhibits are fine collections of German and Neapolitan paintings, British portraits, Chinese bronzes and a remarkable holding of British Folk Art. (The last includes an Alfred Wallis painted tin tray and a splendid three-legged dog with prongs, which is a large toasting fork made from a single piece of wood.) There are also substantial galleries for temporary exhibitions, in which van Gogh is currently fêted. Van Gogh occupies a unique place in the public’s heart, though it took us as a nation some considerable time properly to appreciate the Dutchman’s highly original, not to say disturbing, art. This show is devoted to the handful of avant-garde collectors, those independent and strong-minded individuals who bought van Gogh before it was fashionable even to like him. The first of the Dutchman’s paintings to arrive on these shores were gifts, like the portrait of the Glasgow art dealer Alexander Reid, who befriended Vincent and his brother Theo in Paris in the 1880s. Then came the first purchases. New research suggests that seven, or possibly nine, van Goghs had been acquired by inspired collectors by 1896. Eight further purchases were made before 1914, and many more in the 1920s, bringing the total to around 90 by the outbreak of the second world war.
Martin Bailey, this show’s curator, assures us that it is the largest van Gogh exhibition in the UK since the 1960s; numbers seem to matter nowadays more than quality. Actually, it’s a truly remarkable assembly of work, which includes several masterpieces and offers quite a good indication of the range of van Gogh’s work. In the anteroom to the show the depths of popular derision and ignorance are suggested by a blown-up reproduction of Frank Reynolds’s cartoon from the Illustrated London News of 3 December 1910. It commemorates Roger Fry’s infamous Post-Impressionist exhibition of that year, when van Gogh and others were introduced to a reactionary British public. The scene is set, and the visitor is enabled to feel reassuringly superior. (We wouldn’t make such a mistake, would we? Naturally, we’d recognise the quality of a contemporary van Gogh as soon as he appeared.) And so to the exhibits.
There are some 32 paintings, drawings and prints in this show — an excellent size for an exhibition, not too much to overwhelm, but enough to provide leeway for likes and dislikes to emerge. The display starts with two portraits of Alexander Reid, the first of him seated in an armchair, lent by a museum in Oklahoma, newly discovered to have been presented to him by van Gogh, and subsequently sold by Reid’s father for £5. Much better is the head and shoulders portrait next to it, which has some of the real van Gogh movement and magic to it, built around a red/green polarity. It’s a splendid portrait, and was for some time thought to be of van Gogh himself (he and Reid looked alike); it’s an excellent place to open the show.
A section devoted to the early years in the Netherlands, and including the wellknown ‘Head of a Peasant Woman’, a fine example of van Gogh’s ‘potato’ phase, when his subjects and palette were earnest but earthy, moves swiftly on to Paris and more exuberant themes. The ‘Restaurant de la Sirène at Asnières’ was an ordinary, expected sight for the Parisian day-tripper, but it makes a rather good painting for van Gogh: the building gay with flags, the foliage of the trees in centripetal patterning, the jagged dash of the brush across the foreground stabbing in the rough grass like sentinels. Next to it hangs a rather sweet scene of the Seine with rowing boats, 500 meters upstream from the restaurant, also painted in 1887 but nothing like as original. The third room is an archival display of early catalogues and documentary material about the pioneer collectors themselves. Take Michael Sadler (not to be confused with the novelist of the same name who wrote Fanny by Gaslight), an educationist, vice-chancellor of the University of Leeds and later Master of University College, Oxford. He began to collect seriously in 1909, in his forties, buying works by Gauguin, Matisse and Kandinsky, as well as the English Moderns. He was a collector of prescience. For instance, he bought one crucifixion and commissioned another from Francis Bacon in 1933, long before most people had even heard of him. He was also one of the earliest champions of the young Henry Moore. And his choice of van Goghs here confirms that he had a good eye. Go through into the second part of the exhibition to see what he bought.
This is what we’ve come for — the real heart and pith of the exhibition. Here are Sadler’s purchases, particularly the spirited and beguiling ‘Oleanders’, now in Moma New York, a true breath of the Mediterranean. The most beautiful painting in the show is ‘Peach Blossom in the Crau’ bought by the perspicacious Samuel Courtauld for £9,000 in 1927. The National Gallery’s ‘Wheatfield, with Cypresses’ is up there with the great and what a treat it is to see it here on white walls with plenty of space around it — as is ‘Farms near Auvers’, bought in 1910 by Frank Stoop, who bequeathed it to the Tate, and ‘Rain — Auvers’, a very late tough painting, originally bought by one of the redoubtable Davies sisters and left to the National Museums & Galleries of Wales. The exhibition, which was organised jointly with the National Galleries of Scotland, will be on show at the Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, from 7 July until 24 September. I just hope that all the talk of cash will not distract viewers from the aesthetic value of the works on show, for the best of these pictures are beyond price.
In another part of the building is a small focus show devoted to Francis Bacon (1909–92) and Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–83). It begins appropriately enough with Bacon’s ‘Study for the Portrait of van Gogh VI’, borrowed from the Arts Council, a nice bridge between the two exhibitions. Once again, as in the main show, there are handy benches in these light-filled galleries where one may sit and contemplate the art at leisure. A white plaster cast of Messerschmidt’s ‘The Yawner’ is juxtaposed with a lithograph of a Bacon triptych. In the final room are three more Messerschmidt heads — ‘A Grievously Wounded Man’, ‘The Incapable Bassoonist’ and ‘An ArchRascal’. As will be deduced from the titles, Messerschmidt was a sculptor of types, whose series of grimacing heads was originally carried out in alabaster and lead. The extremes of facial expression he depicted are utterly relevant to Bacon, the artist without equal of the scream and the rictus. (Munch comes nowhere near him.) Messerschmidt mixed realism with classical stylisation in a way that corresponds to Bacon’s interest in combining extreme bulletins on the human condition with history painting in the grand manner. It’s a subject which would make a fascinating full-scale exhibition. What we actually have is an apt and thought-provoking coda to van Gogh.
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