Art
Downstairs, upstairs
Evan Anthony
Although, admittedly, I was champing at the bit a bit to get to the Klee exhibition upstairs, the Hayward Gallery's other half of the bill, the British Sporting Painting 1650-1850, managed to keep me happily occupied below stairs for quite a while. It is an amiable history of a sort, through pictures bearing some relationship to 'sport' and, as such, ought to be of wide interest to, among others, racing fans and rat-baiters passing through London. While the excuse for most of the pictures appears to be one contest or another, the sporting angle is but one aspect of what is an exhibition of general human interest.
Perhaps it isn't all that perverse of me to have found the two most
interesting and entertaining pictures to be heavily loaded with people, in one way or another: Benjamin Marshall's portrait of the mountainous Daniel Lambert obliges a pause for reflection on how successful he must have been when he decided to put himself on show, charging a shilling a head for people to gape at his astonishing bulk (without, I daresay, so much as a hint that he could be considered an example of living sculpture) and an anonymous painting of 'A Rat Pit,' with scores of obviously well-bred and welldressed gentlemen watching a bull terrier killing rats presents a bunch of good sports, calm, almost bored, looking as much concerned with posing for the artist as in watching the slaughterous terrier.
There are, of course, the more orthodox sporting pictures, illuminating both the sporting interest and
the social response—sometimes with skill, frequently with charm, but rarely, oddly enough, with any sign of passion. The paintings are, by and large, stylised views of action; the artists, on the whole, don't seem to have captured the animal spirit. The horse, in particular, frequently the major subject, appears an elusive beast, and it is really only Stubbs who is able to give us a real horse, passively beautiful, anatomically dead right; which is not to say that the efforts of Wootton, Gilpin, Ferneley etc are not worth a look. There are any number of delightful pictures, and James Seymour's eccentric interpretations are among my favourites. He lends a surrealistic note to the show, with Rousseauesque trees and strangely thin horses whose faces bear remaikable resemblances to those of their riders. They do not so much gallop as give the impression of being lifted by invisible machinery, transporting them, stiffly, from one position to the next.
James Pollard's 'Doncaster Races: Horses Starting for the St Leger' is an exceptionally attractive topographical scene, with fine detail. Landseer's inevitable 'The Monarch of the Glen,' in the flesh, so to speak, survives familiarity to emerge as a marvellously durable cliche. John Mortimer's 'Broughton and Stevenson' shows those two nicely posed pugilists giving the animals a run for their money in this sporting life.
From the relatively uncomplicated horses and prize fighters to Paul Klee's The Last Years requires a sharp switch of gears from anyone choosing to take in both exhibitions on the same day. Felix Klee has again lent his father's pictures and we are in his dept for sharing his wealth with us.
We know of Klee's dismissal from Dusseldorf in 1933, of his enforced return to his native Switzerland when the Nazis branded his work 'degenerate,' and of his illness, which made him increasingly aware of his impending death. But it would be a mistake to insist upon this double tragedy as a key to reading the pictures in this collection and understanding them to be the result of personal misfortune. Klee was a master juggler — of images and ideas — and even when
a picture is given the title 'Struck from the List,' it must be appreciated that the connection with his dismissal from the Academy is only superficially its raison d'être. The idea is the beginning of the picture, but hardly the end.
In relating elements of any picture — shades, lines, colours, textures — Klee allowed subjects to suggest themselves. His ability to use the tools of the artist and produce original hieroglyphics is the cornerstone of his genius. Time has tested his work and it can safely be said that future generations will still find his experiments fresh and original — and durable. With Klee as well as Turner on show, London is exceptionally rich this season.
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