Domestic harmony
Andrew Lambirth Home and Garden: Domestic Spaces in Paintings 1960-2004 Geffiye Museum, Kingsland Road, E2, until 4 Febmaty 2008 The final part of a quartet of exhibitions devoted to the subject of Home and Garden, competently supported by a useful catalogue, is currently enlivening the Geffrye Museum in London's East End. It's a pleasure to visit: the Geffrye's permanent display of period rooms is always worth looking at, there's a garden and restaurant, and downstairs is the still newish space for temporary exhibitions.
The visitor is greeted by a pair of paintings at the gallery entrance: on the right, one of the best paintings in the show, Jean Cooke's striking psychological portrait of her husband John Bratby, and, on the left, the vertiginous hall-and-corridor spaces of Anthony Green's 'Dinner Party'. Unashamedly autobiographical, Green's imagery delves into his past as though it were a bran tub, and occasionally comes out with paintings of this strength and quality. The guests all seem to be smiling at an invisible photographer on the ceiling (or perhaps God) who's just cried 'Cheese!' Green's bird's-eye view suits the intimate but distant inspection of family members (himself included) that he offers. It's an elegant and memorable painting, an early Green masterpiece (it dates from 1966), and reminds us what a considerable artist he is.
Moving round to the left, we encounter a Carel Weight of an angel departing a suburban back garden. It could be called 'The Annunciation of the Crazy Paving', and is full of Weight's best brand of uneasy mystery, the unexpected happening in the respectable, even leafy, purlieus of Fulham or Putney. Next to it, by contrast, is the bold patterning of an early Howard Hodgkin interior, another dinner party, but more difficult to decode in naturalistic terms though it's certainly strong on mood. This area of the exhibition offers a crash course in styles for the next painting is a repellent photorealist depiction of the painter Maurice Cockrill with a girlfriend outside Roger McGough's house in Liverpool. It's by the Welsh realist John Baum, and at best has documentary value. Far more interesting is Harold Mockford's 'Sunday Afternoon' (1975), an aquarium-like interior in greens and pinks, featuring a languorous figure on a couch, and three tiny children like fry or tadpoles on the swimmingly aquatic green carpet.
John Lessore's large and magisterial painting of a woman writing a letter at a garden table in Peckham is an area of welcome stillness, before a pair of highly detailed pictures by Frank Stanton takes corner position in this part of the gallery. All the preceding paintings are hung under the rubric of Genre, indicating there's some narrative or drama afoot; Stanton's work heralds the Room or Garden as Subject section. His paintings are intensely linear and decorative, their packed and intricately worked surfaces just avoiding a cacophony of textures. In the painting of his Islington front room, plants vie with rug, wallpaper, Roman bust and furniture for pole position. In the garden picture, the foliage takes over and further flattens the space. Pattern is king, and very impressive it is too.
A rather quiet backyard in W6 by Victoria Crowe comes next, an expanse of concrete with 'pockets of vegetation', a precisely limited space in pale lemony green. An oasis in the exhibition and a real oasis of sorts in the wastes of conurbation where so many of us spend our lives. Opposite hangs a further group of Genre pictures, including another Anthony Green, this time a large exotically shaped painting like a folding screen, done 16 years later than his 'Dinner Party'. It's another instalment of life chez Green, a childhood Christmas, with the adult Mr Green represented by an articulated toy, his strings pulled by an aunt and his younger self. Again the picture space is treated inventively, concertinaed in overlapping panels, furniture and knick-knacks fluttering through the wings, the painting's format echoing the bevelled mirror over the fireplace. Next to this extravaganza is a small painting by Jiro Osuga, 'An Existentialist Day', a witty summation of life in a tower-block flat. Osuga paints himself four times — working, cooking, bathing, sleeping — epitomising a stayat-home insular existence when to go out is almost too much effort.
On this wall, too, is Timothy Hyman's 'Painting the Family', a moving but humorous depiction of the artist's relatives, made over a seven-year period. During that time, three of the protagonists died: Hyman's father, his mother and his twin brother (shown in a blue suit). The artist comments, 'It seems that only when our always-dysfunctional family had finally collapsed could the picture fully take shape.' It is a compelling monument to the 'many-headed monster' of the family, and is perhaps Hyman's masterpiece. The parents and siblings are grouped together, as they refused to be in life, and the many undercurrents of secrets, estrangements and private darkness are only hinted at. It's a powerful painting: curiously optimistic and affectionate rather than devastating. It says much about the nature of family life in mid-to-late 20thcentury England.
To return to the Rooms and Gardens section, there's another Carel Weight and an intriguing painting of brambles by John Pearce, and a fine black-and-white study of a wet winter's day by Eric Rimmington. Then the exhibition moves into its final theme, Portraits. Here is Olwyn Bowey's 'Rosie in the Garden', a piece of sensitive and enjoyable painting about what seems to be a complex state of mind. Opposite are a trio of horrors, by respectively Julian Bell, Michael Taylor and Vincent Yorke, which amply illustrates the parlous state of contemporary portraiture. Tim Wheeler's 'Portrait of Stella Newton', which hangs adjacent, comes as a welcome relief.
There's an interestingly fragmentary double portrait of the distinguished architectural historians John and Eileen Harris, by Dorothy Girouard, and next to it a refreshingly subtle group portrait of a family in a garden by Leonard Rosoman. (Rosoman, born in 1913 and still working, is a seriously underrated painter whose washy technique and translucent colours make quiet statements of decided intent.) There's another dreadful painting, this time by David Cobley, before we can return to Jean Cooke's great portrait of John Bratby. For sheer insight and understated pictorial drama, this painting takes some beating. Cooke, whose career will be celebrated in a solo show (at Piano Nobile Fine Paintings, 129 Portland Road, W11, 28 November to 15 December), deserves, like Rosoman, to be much better known.
Although the Geffrye Museum's space for temporary exhibitions is another basement with no natural light, it is a simple white space and, being smallish, has none of the oppressiveness of larger subterranean galleries like the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery. And it takes this size of exhibition rather well. Home and Garden, for all its unencouraging academic title, emphasis on methodology and determination to dissect the English urban middle classes, is an enjoyable exhibition. Art is actually to the forefront in this show, as it should be, and there are again some extremely worthwhile paintings to be seen, as indeed there were in the third part of the series back in the summer. Another triumph for the Geffrye Museum, putting it firmly back on the exhibiting circuit.
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