This green and pleasant land
Andrew Lambirth on Tate Britain’s exhibition celebrating our landscape art
This summer seems to be developing into a season of British Art — with exhibitions of the quality of Stubbs at the National, Reynolds at the Tate and Sutherland at Dulwich, and now also with A Picture of Britain (until 4 September). This generously mixed landscape show in Tate Britain’s basement galleries is really an adjunct to the TV series of the same title, presented by Mr David Dimbleby, with which many readers will be familiar. I haven’t seen any of it, though I have delved into the sumptuously illustrated hardback book (a snip at £19.99) which accompanies both TV and museum shows. The immediate impression conveyed by the book is that landscape, taken with an admixture of poetry and history, can make painting really quite palatable and interesting...
The British are good at landscape. We like looking at it, and although we are being speedily deprived of our birthright of green fields, copse and glen by the greed of developers (so much so that Mr Dimbleby refers to landscape as ‘a luxury’, when it should of course be an essential), some even profess to love it. And, let’s face it, it’s often a lot easier to love a tree or a mountain than your neighbour. Our artists also respond well to it, and have been busy reinventing the British landscape for our pleasure and consolation (sometimes for our gloomy excitement) for the past 300 years and more. The Tate’s current show is designed to demonstrate the richness of our landscape art: it makes a middling job of it.
One problem is the TV concept, and the inevitable focus on the filmic and photogenic. Another problem is the over-reliance on the Tate’s collection for ‘representative’ examples of British landscape art. Although some things have been borrowed in, too many scarcely relevant pictures have been wheeled out. And in some cases the Tate has even bor rowed pictures which have no place in a landscape exhibition. For example, Sickert’s ‘Brighton Pierrots’ (1915): lovely painting, but shouldn’t be here. And a third problem is the curious imbalance of the show, in favour of some artists — such as Joseph Wright of Derby, who is represented by four large paintings, or the relatively minor Norwich School painter John Crome — at the expense of such artists as that genius in watercolour, John Sell Cotman, represented by one unimpressive picture at the Tate and passed over in a single line in the book.
Perhaps the real problem is (yet again) too many curators, all desperate to grind axes. If only Mr Dimbleby had made a small personal selection of British landscape art, that would doubtless have been a better show than this farrago. The exhibition, though divided into six sections or regions mirroring the episodes of the TV series, is too big and unwieldy. The only time it approaches concision is in the spare grouping of modern St Ives artists with which it ends. Yet there are lots of fine things to be seen, if you can disinter them from the wreck of art-historical fashion and theory that loosely girdles them. In one of the first rooms is Julian Cooper’s splendid recent painting ‘Large Honister Crag’, which explores the meaning of landscape in a thoroughly modern way, in terms of closeness (as seen by the eye of the climber) and distance, to provide perspective and sense. Next to it is a perfectly frightful daub from the Tate’s collection by William Townsend: a crassly insensitive piece of hanging.
Scotland is poorly represented, with too many pictures of people instead of landscape. In the so-called ‘Heart of England’ section, De Loutherbourg’s ‘Coalbrookdale by Night’ is always worth a long look. Compare it to Wadsworth’s post-Vorticist drawings of the Black Country. The Tate’s relatively new acquisition, Constable’s large oil sketch for his indelibly famous ‘Cornfield’, is a beauty. Richard Billingham’s Norfolk photographs are memorable, and it’s a treat to see Arnesby Brown looking so fresh. Notice the interesting juxtaposition of Eric Ravilious’s ravishing watercolour ‘Vale of the White Horse’ with Paul Nash’s strange ‘Equivalents for Megaliths’ and Thomas Guest’s wonderfully surreal composition ‘Grave Group from a Bell Barrow at Winterslow’ (1814). Or the intensely romantic profiling of Snowdon and Cader Idris by Richard Wilson. You can even learn about ley lines from Alfred Watkins. But how many of us, I wonder, will be encouraged by this exhibition to share Coleridge’s touching belief in human perfectability: ‘The pleasures which we receive from rural beauties are of little consequence compared with the moral effect of these pleasures: beholding constantly the best possible, we at last become ourselves the best’?
Last chance to see a piquant exhibition of war work from the Ministry of Defence Art Collection at the Banqueting House, Whitehall, SW1, commemorating the 60th anniversary of the end of the second world war. There was almost no publicity surrounding Warriors for the Working Day (until 4 August), which seems rather a pity, and I wouldn’t even have heard of it but for the good offices of Radio Four. (If you do venture forth to see it, it’s worth ringing first: the Banqueting House has a habit of closing early for evening functions.) There have been various exhibitions of war artists over the years — think of the great Ravilious show at the Imperial War Museum in 2003/4 — but none with such a refreshingly modest remit. This display seeks to highlight the work of a number of lesser-known artists who made images of people working in front-line support, including workshops and operations rooms. Many exhibits have not previously been shown in public, and hail from offices and regimental collections, or from the reserve collection of the Royal Air Force Museum. It’s an odd and unusual selection, but worth seeing.
The unexpected star of the show is Roland Vivian Pitchforth (1895–1982), a watercolourist of great distinction and delicacy, who is largely forgotten nowadays, though an influential teacher and popular landscape painter. His work as a war artist is surprisingly powerful: look at the strong drawing in his descriptions of ship-building (‘In the Workshop’), the ‘Observer Corps’ or ‘Flying Control’. Particularly impressive is his study of parachutes being tested, which has an aerial fluency and gentle optimistic drama entirely suited to its subject. His doughty ‘Escort Carrier in Heavy Weather in the Atlantic’ makes use of the white of the paper to suggest heavy waves and spume with considerable economy of means.
Other notable works are by Richard Eurich (a lovely small oil of Portland Bill), James Gunn’s portrait of the Fany Miss Eileen Harwood, and Eric Kennington’s striking pastel portraits of P.J. Grigg, Secretary of State for War, and a Polish squadron leader. Ravilious contributes a tough watercolour, ‘Dangerous Work at Low Tide’. (Its original title, ‘Rendering Mines Safe’, was prohibited by the official censor.) Stephen Bone’s oil of the wet flight deck of HMS Pursuer is a good action picture, and I liked Bernard Hailstone’s ‘Merchant Ships at Anchor in the Grand Harbour, Malta’, Norman Howard’s ‘Mulberry Harbour’ and John Edgar Platt’s studies of marine craft on the Thames. The last three are artists unsung, as are many of those on show: stalwart recorders of vicissitude and such mundane tasks as sewer-mending. Altogether a good reminder of what the critic Eric Newton, writing in December 1940, called ‘poetry wrung from the bowels of destruction’.
Previous page
