Mixed bag
John McEwen
The importance of The British Art Show (Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield, 1 December to 27 January; Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, 15 February to 23 March; Arnolfini Gallery and Royal West of England Exchange. Bristol, 18 April to 24 May) may best be gauged by the fact that, despite its portentous title, the exhibition is not coming to London. And this is as it should be, because the show is not definitive in any way whatsoever but an all too arbitrary slice of the current cake. Before you leap on a train for Sheffield, therefore, be warned that the take-it-or-leave-it title of 'A British Art Show' would far better describe what you are going to see. This. of course, was not the intention — at least, I do not think it was.
The critic of the Financial Times, William Packer, was given complete freedom in his selection by the Arts Council but the contradictory words of his introduction read like the testimony — to use a Wodehouse analogy — of a much shot over pheasant. To seek out excellence was his brief but soon the excuses come thick and fast. their general drift being that anyone who has been left out should remain happy in the knowledge that they might just as well — but for time, but for the inadequacy of a single View, but for this and but for that — have been left in, and vice versa and versa vice. Still, one or,oNo sentences adequately describe what, in fact, we get: . . . my exhibition covers the. broad centre rather than the more experimental marches'. And, in a finale which describes the avant-garde as 'a fact of nature', a river, this preference for the broad centre is justified as exemplifying the estuarine characteristic of today's activity in general. 'But later still, in extreme old age, the river broadens and the current slows down; and before it reaches the sea its wandering course divides into many channels, all of them equally useful to the navigator.' Try telling that to your local lighterman.
This exhibition then, far from reflecting — as, to their credit, the Arts Council most unbureaucratically conceived it — the prejudice of an individual's selection, displays, on the contrary, all the compromised faults of a show strung together by a committee. The works of 112 artists vie for attention, the effect of the best nullified by the mediocrity of the majority, the numbers and shortages of space at times forcing the spectator to his knees. It can only be hoped that the idea survives such an abortive first attempt.
The Lefevre Gallery has risen to the occasion of the post-impressionist extravaganza at Burlington House with a prestige show of their own Important 19th and 20th Century Paintings (till 15 December). There is a charming, anecdotal picture by Boudin of the sea-front at Trouville, a very clear-cut still-life by Cezanne and a famously large but awkwardly composed Degas pastel. But best represented in terms of his oeuvre is Sisley, the most prosaic of the impressionists, with two beautifully observed aspects of winter light. One of a wet, grey day when skies and rivers seem to flow as part of a single flood, the other of a bright-lit morning, when blue sky and sunshine make the colours of a drenched landscape burn with unnatural intensity. Sisley is a bit dull. He never lets himself go, never imaginatively challenges what he sees, in the way of Monet, but his small mastery of the painting of weather, particularly winter weather, is unsurpassed.
David Carrit's latest exhibition, The Classical Ideal, Athens to Picasso, (David Carrit Ltd till 14 December) promises more than it is. The idea of showing artists of all periods whose work embodies the 'calm, the lucidity and the intellectual grandeur' which, for David Carrit, constitutes the Classical Ideal, is appealing, affording the inclusion — as in the present exhibition — of a Picasso drawing and a Greek vase, Cezanne, and his ultimate master, Poussin. But for the most part what we have is a show of odds-and-ends by important and not so important artists, bolstered at too few points by treasures such as the Greek vase, the painting on its side a rare example of an individually identifiable hand, in this case the ' 'Berlin Painter's'; an exquisitely finished drawing, 'Odalisque with a Slave', by Ingres and a third-century Roman portrait in tempera of a young girl wearing a pink dress by Schiaperelli. The rest, however, is mostly for people who ponder over the footnotes in the Burlington and ask each other up to see their etchings.
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