Be selective
Andrew Lambirth
From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870-1925 from Moscow and St Petersburg Royal Academy, until 18 April Sponsored by E.ON
It is a salutary and instructive experience to forego the relatively civilised Press View of an exhibition, when only the denizens of the world’s press and assorted successful liggers are allowed in, and attempt to review a show amid the hurly-burly of an average open-to-the-public day. Especially when the exhibition has been talked up to the skies and punters are queuing to get in. Column inches had helped to create the unsatisfactory and uncomfortable viewing conditions in which I found myself last week, and here I am adding to them. While commending the contemporary appetite for culture, I do wish there were fewer people in the world. As usual these days we’re in danger of stifling the thing we love. Although I can’t quite agree with my esteemed colleague who called for his readers to boycott the Academy, I should warn you that this is a large exhibition but very uneven in quality: care has to be exercised in what you linger over, or exhaustion may set in halfway round and some of the best exhibits be missed.
The problem lies in the fact that this is not really a ‘curated’ exhibition, in the sense that it has not been rigorously selected to show only the best. In order to ensure the loan of a handful of famous and mostly French paintings, the Academy has had to accept a huge counterweight of less-than-excellent Russian art, on the basis of ‘you can only have that if you take this as well’. The high diplomacy of exhibition management is a complex art which in this case does not seem to have achieved the best possible outcome. The Academy show is not stuffed with great paintings, and it is essential to recognise this from the start. Even big names are no guarantee of quality. Here follows a radical selection of exhibits, a few pointers to the strengths and weaknesses of this peculiar but by no means uninteresting show.
In the first room is a splendid painting by one of my favourite 19th-century Russian painters, Isaac Levitan (1860–1900). Called ‘Summer Evening’, it’s an ordinary-looking landscape of fields with a trim of forest, but so energetically and boldly painted and so filled with light that it’s quite compelling. Next to it, for comparison, is hung Daubigny’s equally light-drenched ‘Banks of the River Loing’. They look very good together, an inspired and inspiring juxtaposition. Better than the more commonplace meeting of Corot and Théodore Rousseau nearby, for the comparison of the Russian Levitan with the Frenchman Daubigny may raise all sorts of wider issues of national style and temperament. In Room 2, the French Impressionists make their by now instinctual appeal to the mob, though a rather oatmealy Pissarro and Monet’s dayglo ‘Poppy Field’ are not the best examples of their kind. A Monet ‘Haystack’ has more strength and subtlety, but the real interest in this room is the group of five Cézannes, the best of which is a Mont St Victoire which has been rather badly damaged at top and bottom. This horizontal scrumpling probably occurred when the painting was stored rolled up, but it doesn’t affect its magnetism.
The main gallery is inevitably dominated by Matisse’s great painting ‘The Dance’, the much-trumpeted centrepiece of the show, a work commissioned by the collector Sergei Shchukin, and an image familiar from arthistory books. However important it is considered to be, I have to say that I prefer ‘Nasturtiums with Dance II’, altogether more demanding compositionally and colouristically, and infinitely more intriguing. It’s also strikingly juxtaposed with a cool analytical Braque landscape, ‘Castle of La Roche-Guyon’, hung to the right. A third Matisse, which hangs at right-angles to ‘The Dance’, is ‘The Red Room’, a much tougher painting, with its radical (if awkward) interplay of branching interior decoration and through-the-window landscape. Back at the beginning of this room there’s a solitary and rather marvellous van Gogh portrait, followed by a clutch of fabulous Gauguins, namely the radiant ‘Matamoe (Death) Landscape with Peacocks’. Among other fine things are the powerful Picasso nude, crumpling at the knees (in despair?), and the large Bonnard, less interesting in its narrative aspects than in the exquisite meeting of colours, applied with feathery, almost feinting precision. In the corner a quietly lucid Parisian riverscape by Marquet deserves more attention than its lousy neighbouring Vlaminck.
If you’re already beginning to flag, take heart, there’s quite a lot coming up that can safely be edited out. The cynosure of Room 4 is a hideous nude portrait of Ida Rubinstein by Serov; Bakst’s portrait of the impressario Sergei Diaghilev looks on suitably unabashed. There are too many Russian daubs here, the best of which is the wonderfully vulgar ‘Peasant Woman Dancing’ by Philipp Malyavin, gaudy but intense and vital. The next room, optimistically entitled ‘New Directions in Russian Art’, is mostly dead-ends. Robert Falk’s ‘Steamboat Landing’ has some invention, largely through its use of green, and Alexander Golovin’s ‘Pavlovsk’ has curiosity of pattern, but much of the rest is third-rate. In room 6, a change of pace and quality is at once apparent, with Tatlin’s eloquently minimal ‘Female Model’, a good Chagall (‘The Promenade’), Goncharova’s emblematic and frieze-like ‘Peasants’ and Larionov’s pictographic ‘Winter’, recalling our own Alan Davie (born 1920, and currently showing new work in London at Gimpel Fils and James Hyman Gallery).
Gallery 7 holds only a few not very good paintings of the Cubo–Futurist persuasion, eked out by a wall of photos, in contrast to Gallery 8 which features three magnificent Malevichs on the end wall. They hang there like deeply reverberant gongs: a cross, a circle and a square, black motifs on grey canvas with white frames, against a warmer grey wall, luminous and magical. To their right is also a Malevich red square. For these radical paintings alone this exhibition is worth seeing. They may not look as revolutionary today as they did in 1915, or even in the 1920s, when so much since has taken their message, elaborated on it and parroted it mercilessly, but these are images which mark a new world-view. The other experiments here towards abstraction rather pale into insignificance, though I enjoyed Ivan Punin’s violin and the fascinating failure of Kandinsky’s ‘Composition VII’ which simply doesn’t hold together, but is so good in parts. Exit through the Central Hall where a 2001 model of Tatlin’s famous tower offers a final monument to Constructivism.
With such great things to see and marvel at, it may be thought that the contingent of mediocre Russian art which comes with the package is just the price we have to pay to enjoy the masterpieces. Unfortunately, this isn’t quite the case: there’s a hefty £11 admission charge as well. So you’re also paying for a high percentage of dud material. My point remains: at least be careful to avoid wasting time on it.
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