Exhibitions
Winners and dogs
Martin Gayford
0 ne of the pleasures of the New Year, or, in some cases, anxieties, is perusing the programmes of forthcoming exhibitions. In advance, the likely winners stand out, as do those with less form that may even so come through on the day, and the almost certain dogs. The critic marks his card and awaits events. What does 1998 hold for the lover of the visual arts?
Well, the Tate Gallery has a promising stable of exhibitions — as it has had for the last few years — with first off Bonnard (12 `Self-Portrait, c.1889, by Bonnard, which can be seen at the Tate in February February to 17 May), which may prove among the champion sights of 1998. Bon- nard is a painter not as well known in this country as he should be — an observation which, unfortunately, applies to most of the great artists of the 20th century. He does not fit neatly into the progression of -isms that often passes for the history of modern art. Nonetheless, his distillation of the world into soft and sensuous patches of colour was of enormous influence on later abstract painters, not least on the subject of the next major Tate show, the pioneering British abstractionist, Patrick Heron (25 June to 6 September).
This exhibition — in which I have a cer- tain interest, as I have carried out a long interview in the catalogue — may, and I hope will, reveal Heron as a much more important painter than is generally thought. In the current Tate hang, a mid- dle-period Heron holds its own very well against works by American contemporaries such as Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko. The big autumn show at the Tate is John Singer Sargent (15 October to 17 January 1999), which for me comes into the catego- ry of dubious possibilities rather than prob- able stars. Personally, up to now I have found Sargent's work too gloss, too slick, too obviously tailored to please the rich and fashionable. But I may be wrong.
The Tate, as I say, is doing well these days on the exhibition front. The Royal Academy, on the other hand, which led the field in exhibitions in the Eighties and early Nineties, is visibly slipping. The 1998 pro- gramme looks distinctly thin. Apart from the obligatory Summer Exhibition (2 June to 16 August), it features first Art Treasures of England (22 January to 13 April), pre- senting a selection of work from regional galleries and museums. There's a dull idea if you like, though no doubt it will contain plenty of beautiful things (the municipal collections of Britain, like the country hous- es, are a treasure store). My objection is that grouping all the best bits in London for a season will spoil the pleasure of, and sap the will to visit, these splendid muse- ums.
Holy Russia: Icons from Moscow from 1400-1600 (Sackler Galleries, 19 March to 14 June) looks promising, although it is the second Russian icon show in London in recent years, and quite how good it is will depend on the quality of the icons the Rus- sians provide. Chagall: Love and the Stage (Sackler Galleries, 2 July to 4 October) is the second Chagall show the RA itself has staged — there was a large one in the Eighties — which suggests he is a big draw at Burlington House. Nonetheless, these pictures produced for the State Yiddish Chamber Theatre in Moscow in 1920 could be marvellous. Picasso: Sculptor and Painter in Clay (17 September to 27 December) sounds very much like the scrapings of the popular Picasso barrel — many 20th-centu- ry artists dabbled in ceramics, but the results were generally the weakest part of their output. Miro is another case in point.
Once upon a time, before the RA, the Hayward was the top exhibition venue. Those days are long past, but 1998 starts strongly on the South Bank with Francis Bacon: The Human Body (5 February to 5 April) selected by the critic David Sylvester. Bacon, admired by, among oth- ers, Damien Hirst, looks more and more like a key figure in British, indeed world, art. This is the first London show since the Eighties. Within the upper galleries comes an exhibition of the work of the French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson. Gen- erally, I don't get very excited by photogra- phy, but for Cartier-Bresson I make an exception (the National Portrait Gallery stages another Cartier-Bresson show from 20 February until 7 June). Next at the Hayward comes Anish Kapoor (30 April to 14 June), my own favourite of the new wave sculptors who came to prominence in the Seventies and Eighties. The Californian Bruce Nauman, who follows from 16 July to 6 September, is an artist we in Britain should take a look at, since he it was who first came up with many of the ideas now being recycled by Young British Artists (Rachel Whiteread's negative spaces go back to Nauman, for example). But the emphasis on contempo- rary art at the Hayward brings out an embarrassing fact: we have too many gal- leries trying to do up-to-the-minute shows at the moment, and not enough doing everything else. Soon the Serpentine, HQ of the avant- garde, will be reopening with the late Piero Manzioni (28 February to 26 April), an Ital- ian artist best known for tinning his own excrement — time capsules not yet, as far as I know, opened — then Cornelia Parker (12 May to 14 June), the Turner Prize run- ner-up this autumn who brought off a coup de thea'tre — or at least de publicite — by exhibiting a sleeping actress there a while back. The Whitechapel also leans to the contemporary, with the German sculptor Thomas Schutte (16 January to 15 March), preceding the painter Peter Doig, another Turner shortlistee. More intriguing is the show of the late Guyana-born painter Aubrey Williams (12 June to 16 August), because, as an artist active in Britain from the Fifties to the Seventies, he is a less well-known quantity. So we have a traffic-jam of galleries try- ing to get to the cutting edge. And not enough venues, for example, presenting major old master shows. In fact, currently, not any, since there hasn't been an impor- tant old master show at the RA — which used to fill this gap — since Poussin in 1995, and won't be another until 1999. The National Gallery do well, getting off to a flying start this year with a small van Eyck show (14 January to 15 March), which will contain paintings from Washington and Turin, as well as the National Gallery's own magnificent array. Next comes Masters of Light: Dutch Painting from Utrecht during the Golden Period (7 May to 2 August), which is one of those shows, devoted to a neglected corner of art history — the fol- lowers of Caravaggio in the Netherlands that might be marvellous, and might not be. Dulwich Picture Gallery also has a mouth- watering prospect in Pieter de Hooch (5 August to 25 October), one of the most delightful of 17th-century Dutch painters. Over the last few years we have had to travel to see Vermeer, De La Tour and Tiepolo. Next year we will have to do so again to see the eccentric genius of 16th- century Venice, Lorenzo Lotto (Academia Carrara, Bergamo 2 April to 28 June, Grand Palais, Paris 12 October to 11 Jan- uary 1999), and Late Delacroix, Grand Palais, Paris (from 17 April, travelling to Philadelphia). Nor do we get the monu- mental show of ancient, mediaeval and non-European art regularly offered to New Yorkers and Parisians (Maori, 27 June to 28 October, is the most enticing item on a quiet list from the British Museum).
Parisians are still benefiting from the two Palais, Grand et Petit, built for the exhibi- tion of 1900. For the millennium, of course, instead we are going to get the Mandelson dome, a sort of gigantic fairground booth which will be gone in a few years. A big, new, state-of-the-art exhibition venue is clearly something London badly needs.
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