Exhibitions
Ian Davenport (Waddington Galleries, till 3 July) Towards a New Landscape (Bernard Jacobson, till 4 September) Carol Ann Sutherland (Mercury Gallery, till 24 July) Turner's Painting Techniques (Tate Gallery, till 10 October) Turner's Painting Techniques (Tate Gallery, till 10 October)
Paint's potential
Giles Auty
So far I have not visited either the new Tate of St Ives or the BT New Contempo- raries 1993 exhibition at the Cornerhouse, Manchester. In the first instance, I have deferred the trip for a week or so merely because it will prove now to be the first of many: I have just agreed to write a book about St Ives in the years 1939-79, which latter year is when I severed my own resi- dential links with West Cornwall.
In the case of the Manchester show, I am not encouraged altogether by a review by Andrew Graham-Dixon in the Independent entitled 'That Way Madness Lies', especial- ly since that critic has been a much greater enthusiast than I for an informal, conceptu- al, Goldsmithian approach to art. Joseph Beuys's view that 'everyone is an artist' has always struck me as no more likely to be true than that everyone is an orthopaedic surgeon. That those without aptitude, skill or training are encouraged by others to imagine what they produce is art of signifi- cance strikes me as tragic — for them as well as for us. The corollary to Beuys's assertion is that art can be made today from almost anything; no material is more suitable than another. But, given the histor- ical example of the great masters of previ- ous centuries, this is an attitude I find especially hard to understand. When one sees what Goya, say, could express through painting and etching, why is there such a compelling need now to look further — unless one lacks the dexterity and talent to use such demanding and revealing materi- als, of course.
What people imagine or imagined the activity of painting to comprise is illustrat- ed well at present by a range of exhibitions. At Waddington Galleries (12 & 34, Cork Street, W1), if only until Saturday, Ian Davenport displays the products of a kind of literalism about what painting means. Yes, here is paint of a kind on canvas, but 90 per cent of the medium's potential has
been abandoned gratuitously. Davenport has been made much of in certain quarters by those to whom such reductionism is clearly of no consequence. The artist pours and manipulates eddies of household paint to arrive at large, vertically striped canvases in colours which range from the definitively drab to those oddly reminiscent of Old Boys' blazers. The purpose of such exercis- es eludes me, in spite of a lengthy cata- logue essay by Richard Shone. Elsewhere gallery staff invoked two names in an attempt to confer historical pedigree on what was on view: Jackson Pollock and Bridget Riley. One sensed here that the lame .conclusion to a particular line of rea- soning so beloved of Private Eye — 'Er . . . that's it' — might be all that remained to say.
In the Eighties the Bernard Jacobson Gallery, now at 14A Clifford Street, Wl, was in the forefront of smart, successful and upwardly mobile modern galleries. Today the emphasis seems to have shifted, so far as patrons go, from the cutting-edge to the cutting-hedge type of buyer. By this I mean that English rural romanticism finds a bastion now chez Jacobson against many of the excesses of nearby Cork Street; indeed new enthusiasts for this genre may be drawn now even from such artistically unfashionable domains as the frondiose Home Counties. The present exhibition, due to last all summer, takes the theme that art based in landscape is still alive and well. Past masters of the genre are cited and those from more recent times wheeled out to help prove a point: Spencer, Nash, Sutherland, Bomberg, Hitchens, Burra,
Ben Nicholson. But since all of these last are dead, who carries the torch today?
The gallery suggests its own artists: Mau- rice Cockrill, William Tillyer, Wendy Con- nelly. Such a thesis hints that landscape painting should develop on what one might describe broadly as Modern British lines, but this is merely one approach to linking the rurally visible with the metaphysical. Slade-trained British artists such as Michael Andrews, Leonard McComb and John Wonnacott seem to me to have an approach that is certainly no less valid and possibly more truly personal. However, I salute the gallery for its enterprise and also for producing an excellent volume on the subject with illuminating essays by such as Margaret Drabble and Norbert Lynton.
Carol Ann Sutherland at Mercury Gallery (26 Cork Street, W1) shows yet another approach: the use of landscape as metaphor for personal feeling and circum- stance. To say that I cannot imagine a man painting her particular brand of Celtic poetry is meant entirely as a compliment. Her work grows tougher and better without losing one whit of its sensitive originality.
Finally, attention should be drawn to the important and often unsung work which goes on regularly at the Clore Gallery at the Tate. The current exhibition, based on an analysis of the techniques of one of Britain's great landscape artists, is of inter- est to more than scholars. All of us can learn from Turner, not least from his exploitation of materials in lifelong attempts to limn the ineffable. The true potential of paint could not be underlined more strongly.
'Coming Home', 1993, oil on canvas, by Carol Ann Sutherland
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