Is he worth it?
Andrew Lambirth
Peter Doig
Tate Britain, until 27 April Peter Doig has aroused much passion in recent months for the prices his paintings have started to fetch in the world’s salerooms. For many, he is not only the acceptable face of contemporary British painting, but also a buoyant export and bright international star. Even those who dislike painting and prefer less demanding forms of art such as installation and photography are prepared to make an exception for Doig, perhaps because he is easy on the eye. Ten years ago he enjoyed a fairly prestigious show at the Whitechapel, now he’s been given the main galleries at the Tate’s Millbank branch. The Whitechapel show left me unconvinced of his virtues though I remember liking one or two of the smaller pictures. Now we have the chance to see what all the fuss is about. Is Doig the brand really worth the millions it can now summon?
Eight museum rooms of paintings (including some drawings) by a single artist can be enough to sink a reputation. Doig, who looks quite strong in mixed shows of contemporary work, begins to evaporate here. He makes work which reflects upon his peripatetic life: born in Edinburgh in 1959, he grew up in Trinidad and Canada, came to London to study at Wimbledon and Central St Martins, went back to Canada in 1986 to work as a scene painter in the film industry, and returned to England for postgraduate study in 1989. He won the John Moores Prize in 1993 and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994. In 2002, he moved back to Trinidad where he now lives and works, though he teaches in Düsseldorf. Like so many younger artists he is constantly on the move, as if chasing some elusive grail.
Photographs are the compositional starting point of his paintings. Doig is apparently obsessed with memory, yet says nothing of value about it. He likes blurry photos that fudge the facts but are strong on atmosphere. He says ‘the photograph is really just an extension of memory’; actually, it is a very particular distortion of memory. He also calls it ‘a way of remembering shapes’. For Doig, it seems more a source of self-indulgent nostalgia. It’s revealing that early on he thought he might earn a living as a theatre designer: his work, mostly large-scale, is reminiscent of flats and backcloths, and is probably as ephemeral. It has a superficial charm and sweetness of palette that rapidly wears thin.
Some of the paintings made in the early-to-mid 1990s have a more lasting presence, when the paint-handling works both with and against the rather banal imagery. When, in the later Nineties, he changed from thicker paint to thin washes, the complexity of the surface lost its unexpectedness, its variety of incident. If you’re going to rely on photographs for visual information then the weight of the painting has to be borne elsewhere — in the drawing, colour, design (pattern). Doig can be seductive with colour and adept at pattern, but the content is too light to anchor his work. The most recent paintings are among the flimsiest. It’s quite evident that Peter Doig’s international appeal is built upon clever marketing of work that demands very little of its viewers. The exhibition will tour to ARC/Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (26 May to 14 September) and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (8 October 2008 to 11 January 2009).
I have nothing against artists who use photography per se, and I’ve long been an admirer of the photo-based work of Walter Sickert. But then he was never led by the camera, and was far too wily and inventive an artist to be constrained by the limited information a photograph can provide. There are a number of very fine Sickerts in The Camden Town Group (soon to be reviewed in this column), another show at Tate Britain at this very moment, though none of his radical late works. Another artist who drew inspiration from photography, particularly the German expressionist kind, was Edward Burra (1905–76). Room 18 at Tate Britain is currently hung with seven of Burra’s paintings on the theme of New York’s Harlem, its street life and jazz.
Burra is a major figure of 20th-century British art, a maverick of the first water, whose paintings of the seamier side of human behaviour have a strength and originality lacking in most contemporary painters. There hasn’t been a proper Burra show for more than 20 years, and now all we have is one low-key room of archive material and a handful of small paintings. It’s not nearly enough to form an assessment of Burra’s peculiar subjects and remarkable skills, but at least it’s a taste of a very particular artist. My worry is that by mounting a display like this, the Tate will feel it has done its duty to Burra, and there won’t be another show of his work for decades. Much is often said about the scarcity of good English artists, yet the 20th century was particularly rich in them, and we hardly get a chance to see their work shown publicly — that’s left to the more enterprising commercial galleries.
For an artist who really used paint creatively, and who was a marvellous colourist into the bargain, visit the Ken Kiff show at Marlborough Fine Art, 6 Albemarle Street, W1 (until 1 March). A whole group of previously unseen paintings and works on paper comes as a timely reminder (some seven years after his death) that in him we have a major artist, insufficiently appreciated.
I am a longstanding Kiff supporter — I knew him well, wrote the main monograph on his work and contributed an essay to the catalogue of the current exhibition — but I urge you to make up your own mind about his art. Go and see it: there is a gentleness and serenity to his imagery even though it probes the darker recesses of the unconscious. The draughtsmanship is exact and unfaltering, the colour compelling and joyous, the stuff of paint worked in ways which add meaning and fluency to the archetypal subject matter. Kiff dared to embrace fairytale as well as myth, the mundane and the heroic, and distilled from their convergence an original vision of startling relevance. Just the sort of artist who deserves a Tate retrospective. Can we expect one? We can hope.
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