Arts
Exploding the myth
John McEwen
Post-Impressionism (Royal Academy till 16 March) is an exhibition in the grand manner, choc-a-bloc with insights and masterpieces and displaying a noble disregard for economies, financial and academic alike. It has gusto, and the mood infects the bustling crowds which already average 4,000 a day and appear set to break records. Now is the time to go. By Christmas you may have to queue. In this context it is worth mentioning the advantages of enrolling as a Friend of the Academy. The adult entrance fee to the present show is £2. As a Friend, for an annual subscription of £10, you can visit all exhibitions free with a guest or husband/wife and children under 16 as many times as you like, plus enjoying various privileges and comforts too numerous to list. But, to the show, . .
What Post-Impressionism exposes above all else is the fatuity of catch-phrases. Everyone knows that catch-phrases are fatuous, of course, but we nevertheless become dependent on them and, in time, such dependence establishes lazily unquestioned fact. So it has been with 'postimpressionism': a neologism, first coined exasperatedly by our own Roger Fry, to satisfy the demands of a young journalist who had been roped in to do the publicity for the subsequently famous exhibition of French painting organised by Fry at short notice for the Grafton Galleries in 1910. As Desmond MacCarthy testified: 'Roger first suggested various terms like 'expressionism', which aimed at distinguishing these artists from the impressionists; but the journalist wouldn't have that or any other of his alternatives. At last Roger, losing patience, said, 'Oh, let's just call them postimpressionists; at any rate they came after the impressionists.'
Thus was born the myth, aided by Fry's selection, that 'Post-Impressionism' was a unified school that differed radically from the 'Impressionism' it succeeded, and that everything worthwhile done in painting in the late 19th century was French or, at least, as a consequence of the French. The Academy calls Fry's bluff by taking him at his exasperated word and showing a sample of everything that did come after the decade of the 'impressionist' shows. The exhibition is subtitled 'Cross-currents in European Painting', and cross-currents, sometimes all too bewilderingly, is what we get.
Paris was indisputably the capital of painting at the time and accordingly the French dominate the selection, but the argument nevertheless has been diversified, with individual galleries allotted to the contemporary painting of Germany, the Low Countries, Italy and Britain; and French painting itself subdivided to emphasise the variety of its tendencies. Our minds are stretched to accommodate everything, from a blank piece of paper entitled 'First Communion of Anaemic Young Girls in the Snow' by the anarchist Allais, to salon celebrations of Brittany worthy of Woolworth's —all of it, however tenuously, linked by the general pictorial drift from 1880 to 1905, and beyond. It is a discursive treatment, entertaining, gloriously unacademic but over-loaded and brazenly misleading: not one exhibition at all, but 50 in one.
The most glaring fault is proportional misrepresentation. This is partly due to lack of space, partly to withdrawals of support and, most questionably, to the preferment of British art as a sop to a home audience. Spain, America, the Austro-Hungarian lands, Scandinavia have all had to be largely overlooked, while the Russians would not cooperate because of the Academy's refusal to lend them the Michelangelo 'Tondo'. As for the allocation of two main galleries for British painting, it can only be hoped that such over-exposure will at least open a few eyes to the abject enslavement of our artists in these years to the French. An attitude, of course, which gave rise to the critical distortions which the exhibition now belatedly attempts to rectify. For too long we have had a cosy regard for Sickert and the Camden Towners, even, lord help us, the unfeeling compromises of the young Wilson Steer, here shamelessly promoted. Suffice to say they look as out of depth in this company as a British ski team at a Winter Olympics, and would certainly find no national place in a reciprocal survey of the period from a continental point of view. Elsewhere, certain figures, notably Cezarme, are not quite grandly enough represented, and the selection ends on a weak and particularly arbitrary note. But these shortcomings are definitely outweighed by the exhibition's achievements.
A general and easily anticipated division is shown to mark the psychological obsessions of Northern artists such as Munch and Ensor from the more painterly, lightobsessed interests of the Southern, but it is the internal difference between the chromatic interpretations of French Pointillism and Italian Divisionism that is the revelation of the show. Everyone has heard of Seurat but how many of Guiseppe Pellizza? His academically composed but superb political painting 'The Fourth Estate' has more relevance to the most vexed pictorial question of today — how, that is, pictures can be made that are once again repositories of spiritual and philosophical enlightenment — than anything done by Seurat even at his most inspired, as here in the form of `Le Crotoy, Looking Downstream'. And Pellizza is not alone. The Italian room in general justifies the premiss of the entire exhibition. For the rest the selection is most notable for its scope and some extraordinary loans from private collections. Seurat has never been seen in England on this scale before, and the representations of Gauguin, in particular, and Van Gogh are hardly less spectacular. But the key to the show, symbolising as it does the confrontation, albeit somewhat jovial, to French domination, is the artfully hung opposition across three galleries of Pellizza's advancing cohort of peasants to Gauguin's Tahitan masterpiece 'Anne Assise'.
It should not go without saying that these riches have been brought to us thanks to the patronage of IBM and a Government indemnity. Between them they return the Academy to its rightful position at the centre of English art affairs. It must be 'hoped that similar benefactions will now be forthcoming to see that it stays there.
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