Playful images
Martin Gayford wanders round some London art galleries Artistic reputations don't just rise, or fall, for good and all, Over the years, they soar and flop like a graph of the Dow- Jones index. Almost none — except the high ratings of Michelangelo and Apelles — seems fixed in perpetuity. The assess- ment of the late Roy Lichtenstein — some of whose very last work is on show at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Dering Street, W1 until 27 November — is a perfect case in point.
Lichtenstein, who died suddenly this September, was one of the best-known artists in the world — up there with David Hockney and now, I suppose, for the moment, Damien Hirst. With Andy Warhol, Lichtenstein was the most cele- brated of the major American Pop artists; images such as the Tate Gallery's `Wham!!!!' are among the few 20th-century paintings that everyone knows. Among many critics and art world observers, how- ever, his stock had been waning for decades. Robert Hughes, for example, in American Visions — the big, thick book of the television series, which I am reading at the moment — has this to say (while paying tribute to his early work):
Lichtenstein, in fact, has become the aca- demician of Pop — the equivalent of the English Royal Academicians a century ago, like Sir Edward Poynter or Sir Laurence
Interior with Woman' by Roy Lichenstein, 1997, Anthony d'Offay Gallery
Alma-Tadema, but far more monotonous . Thus his pseudo-Deco mural in the Equi- table Building in New York (1984-86) gives an insurance company the glamorous aura of artistic fame. It advertises patronage, and has no point beyond that. It is empty, pharaonic post-modernism.
Pretty damning, and I personally would have assented to every word — until I visit- ed the current exhibition. Lichtenstein's numerous parodies of other painters from Picasso to Monet's waterlilies — in his patented comic-book idiom always seem unbearably dull, like all art about art. The big picture he exhibited at the RA Summer Exhibition a few years ago looked just as Hughes describes: a weak, empty repetition of his early Sixties style.
But these new paintings are too stylish to write off, Admittedly, they are empty of any obvious emotional content. All large, all interiors, they revisit the territory of many classic French paintings of the interwar period — by Matisse, Leger and Braque particularly — but translated into Lichten- stein's own visual language. A few pieces of furniture, a view through a window, or a picture, a potted plant, a bowl of fruit, a woman, or a picture of one — these are the subjects.
They are depicted in a wilfully playful fashion. The outline around a bottle or a chair changes quite arbitrarily from one bright colour to another — yellow, green, blue —like the lines in a late Mondrian. A tree trunk is set down in vigorous zebra- stripes. Everywhere, in different colours and sizes, are those dots (called `benday' dots in the trade after their inventor).
These pictures are a reminder, if one needed reminding, that Lichtenstein was always, first and foremost, a formalist. The Captain Marvel content and manner of his work was misleading. From the beginning, he was concerned pre-eminently with pro- portion, balance and visual elegance, the mass culture material allowed him to pur- sue those eternal interests in a compelling- ly new way. Similarly, all those parodies permitted him to follow Picasso, Monet et at without being a slavish imitator.
In these late paintings, something strange happens. The feeling of parody falls away, you even half forget the origins of the dots and stripes in the world of Superman and Lois Lane, After 35 years, this weird blend of commercial illustration and high art abstraction — Lichtenstein started out as an abstract painter — was simply the way he painted. And the pic- tures just look joyous, calm and classical exactly like Leger. Or that's how they look at the moment, anyway.
Christopher Couch, whose work is on show at Marlborough Fine Art, Albemarle Street, W1 (until 29 November) is a strange and reclusive artist. This is his first exhibi- tion for nearly a decade. Earlier in his career, one gathers from the catalogue, he gave up art for a while to join a religious community. It is easy to believe this was so, because, although there is nothing ostensi- bly religious about these paintings, they have a memorable, quietly disturbing charge.
Roughly, one might describe the feeling as between Zen and Francis Bacon. They have a Baconian bleakness, bare floors, empty rooms, a sense of living in an exis- tential cage. But the agonised human sub- ject is generally not there. Most of these large pictures contain nearly nothing. One shows just a stretch of wall, skirting, and on the carpetless boards, a shadow. Several are variations on the theme of a deserted room with a pile of discarded clothes (these, according to the catalogue, were touched off by the deaths of people known to the artist). Where a human figure does appear, he is not agonised in the Bacon manner, but contemplative, withdrawn.
Those readers who are quick off the mark, and get their Spectator early, have just time to take a look at two other exhibi- tions of work by original and distinctive fig- urative painters. At the Albemarle Gallery, Albemarle Street until this Saturday, 22 November, paintings and drawings by Antony Williams are on show (and in which I should declare a kind of interest since I wrote the catalogue essay).
Williams attracted a degree of notoriety with his portrait last year of the Queen. But that brouhaha, which focused on how fat Her Majesty's fingers actually are, failed to draw attention to Williams's qualities as a painter. The paintings on show divide sharply according to medium: the oils are loose and rapidly executed, the temperas extraordinarily considered and meticulous. Both are good, but the temperas show a highly individual sensibility, receptive in still-lives to such things as nuts and husks, the papery dryness of garlic skin and the membranes around Chinese gooseberries. In the case of human skin, he shows a heightened awareness of every wrinkle and pucker, mapping the surface of the body, inch by inch.
At Browse and Darby, 19 Cork Street, Wi, paintings, etchings and drawings by Thomas Newbolt are on show, also until 22 November. A romantic, Newbolt tends to focus obsessively on a certain motif. In this exhibition many works are dedicated to that subject — dear to Gericault and Delacroix — the horse, standing, rearing, shying. Newbolt's horses, impulsively slashed in, often against thunderous blues and mulberries, transmit high-key emotion- al drama set free of any story-line (although they were touched off apparently by a Rubens `Death of Hippolytus'). The smaller ones and the drawings especially have a bit-chomping, hoof-stamping ener- gy, just reined in, that is a compelling sub- ject in itself.
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