National Galleries of Scotland - TL:DR (That's Long, DID Read)

a true state – cut and paste and the art of collage (Edinburgh, summer 2019)

2019 has, in many ways, not been a good year so far. But this summer, the National Galleries of Scotland had (well, has; they are still on) three particularly outstanding exhibitions that brought a bit of light and intelligence to a period of more-than-usual stupidity. At the National Gallery itself, there was the excellent, eye opening and brain-frying Bridget Riley exhibition (closes 22nd September), at the National Portrait Gallery the superb Self Evidence (closes 20th October) in which Francesca Woodman’s tiny, intimate, self-enclosed photographs vibrate balefully in their little corner, overshadowing (for me) the also (but in an entirely different way) intimate and at times frankly challenging monumental works of Robert Mapplethorpe* and, to a lesser extent, the brilliant but (I guess appropriately) don’t-quite-fit-in Diane Arbus portraits of the lives of people marginalised and made invisible by mainstream culture.

*though the Mapplethorpe pictures were the ones that moved me the least, they did provide the priceless spectacle of parents hurrying their curious kids past the notorious 1978 Self Portrait With Whip. They had been warned!

But for me, the highlight of the National Galleries’ summer programme is Cut and Paste: 400 years of Collage at Modern Two (closes 27th October).

Thanks to its inclusive definition of collage (which covers photomontage, traditional collage, plus bits of decoupage, pressed plant samples and even quilting) as well as its historical scope, the exhibition manages to be both focused and wide-ranging, and also (I found) surprisingly moving. What collage does, or at least amplifies – perhaps paradoxically given its use of found/ready-made materials – is that aspect of art that disappears most quickly in reproduction; the hand of the artist. This is art not only as a reflection/projection of culture but one that includes material culture itself.* There is, sometimes regardless of the picture/object, a poignant quality that comes from the materials used, in a way that doesn’t happen with paint, unless you are the kind of conservator who can isolate pigments used to specific periods (I’m not, unfortunately).

*I don’t think this is just pretentious bullshit; but you never know

Pablo Picasso, Bottle and Glass on a Table (1912)

I’m getting ahead of myself here, but a seminal collage that makes an appearance in the exhibition, Pablo Picasso’s Bottle and Glass on a Table (1912) is a classic/typical Picasso cubist/spatial experiment, but the use of newspaper – a very specific, dateable piece of ephemera (from Le Journal, 3 December 1912) – gives the work, instantly and inherently, a dimension largely absent in conventional painting. The feeling that the collage is both artwork and artefact; literally as well as figuratively multi-layered, makes a case for collage as a distinct and special art form, a feeling echoed by the Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi (represented by some outstanding works in the exibition), for whom the form offered clarification, where formal art training raised problems and questions: “Unlike the world of school where the universe was systematised in a certain order, the reassembly of this disparate material reflected a true state, both autobiographic and dynamic.” (quoted in the exhibition catalogue, p. 126)

So anyway; the exhibition is arranged chronologically, in the usual Modern Two layout; in various rooms, up the stairs, through the corridors etc, always I think a layout that makes for an engaging, surprising way of looking at art. Partly deliberately (there were too many people in the first room), I went around the exhibition in reverse chronological order and in retrospect that seems like a good decision. This meant that the exhibition opened with the Chapman Brothers’ The Disasters of Everyday Life (2017), a spectacular-looking wall-like object consisting of 80 of Goya’s horrific etchings, The Disasters of War, with of course added bits and pieces, sometimes powerful, sometimes deliberately absurd, I think (though I’d have to go through again the other way) it serves better as a kind of abstract for what is to follow than it would as a conclusion, where peering at a lot of small images might have seemed a bit anticlimactic.
I’m not going to mention every picture in the show, though I can’t think of anything that doesn’t deserve a mention. The first thing to have a major impact for me was Lucy Williams’ 2015 Crescent House, as much a piece of model making as a collage, a strange, small scale (just under a metre long) recreation of a bit of postwar architecture, but simplified and made more colourful, giving it a feeling of harmony almost like a kind of 3D Mondrian.

Crescent House captures something of the intended optimism of the postwar new town planning that’s most often associated now with neglect and urban decay. I don’t know if it’s a generational thing (Williams is around my age), but for me there was something powerfully bittersweet about the feeling of an abandoned, never-quite-attained future, heightened by the realness of the work as an object.

The aesthetic of Crescent House – though that is far lighter in tone – makes me think of the late 70s work of Linder (Sterling), another exhibition highlight. Although similar in its reference points to the pop art collages of Richard Hamilton a couple of decades before (sadly his iconic 1956 collage Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing is not in the exhibition, though they do have a nice work by him, Desk from 1964), the feel of Linder’s work is far darker (it makes me think of the confrontational industrial work of Throbbing Gristle and COUM Transmissions around the same period) and the satire more pointed. Works like her Pretty Girl series(1977) exemplify a particular approach to collage. Using the detritus of everyday life; magazines, posters, advertising, it became a way of embodying in the art a criticism of the culture that it’s a reaction to as well as a product of. It’s a feminist criticism of the objectification of women that uses already depersonalised women (part of the problem) and merges them with actual ‘objects of desire’ from a patriarchal culture that above all else believes in commodification for its own benefit.

Craig W. Lowe, Bedroom Cupboard door covered with stickers, 1987-1997

Thanks to the exhibition’s open-minded and inclusive approach, there are some unexpected revelations (but aren’t all revelations unexpected? I mean, that’s obvious). While Craig W. Lowe’s bedroom cupboard door covered in stickers c. 1987-1997) may appeal most as nostalgia, the inclusion of Jamie Reid‘s original Sex Pistols Never Mind The Bollocks cover collage (1977; copyrighted image so I’d better not share) opens realms of not-previously-considered information (at least to me) about one’s record collection. Firstly, the collage is black and white, and secondly, it isn’t just a picture or a ‘file’, it’s an actual thing. Like, presumably all album cover art (and book cover art etc) before the digital age, the NMTB cover in all its yellow and pink (or pink and green) glory, taken for granted forever, is not a picture, it’s a photograph of a picture. In its final form it’s been overlaid with colours, but that object there on the wall in Edinburgh is the thing itself. A strange feeling, like looking at the inscription on a ten pound note and considering that it is a representation of something, rather than ten actual pounds.

The Sex Pistols cover primes the viewer (at least the viewer going through the exhibition backwards) for the various bits of Peter Blake’s Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band cover that are on show – and, great though they are (and I like Sgt Pepper quite a bit more than I like Never Mind The Bollocks), without that priming, the Beatles items wouldn’t have the same impact; perhaps because the cover itself is clearly a photograph of objects and cut-outs and seeing them is very cool but not really revelatory, the whole is too familiar and iconic to give the frisson of a moment captured. In fact, Blake’s superb, possibly slightly twee The Toy Shop (1962) is a far more vivid time capsule; clearly pointing to Sgt Pepper, its a conglomeration of bits and bobs familiar to children of the 60s – but also to children of later generations as belonging to the same family as the bits & bobs of their own youth (in my case, comics, football stickers, sweets, TV tie-in toys (He-Man et al), but also the odd antiquated throwbacks that still existed, like bows and arrows and balsa wood or polystyrene gliders which came with a weighted plastic propeller so they flew when thrown – do they still make those?). It’s hard to imagine that there will be a generation that can’t relate to The Toy Shop at all, however virtual entertainment becomes, kids will always like stickers.

But Blake’s pop art nostalgia – powerful though that is – is one of the few purely positive and joyous post-war works in the show. More typical are the mischievous collage book covers made by Joe Orton and his partner and eventual murderer Kenneth Halliwell. These were put on library books and returned to the library – an act that eventually cost them a six month prison sentence – and they exemplify the sense of the significant, perhaps subversive and illogical accident that drew the surrealists to collage a few generations earlier.

Kenneth Halliwell & Joe Orton – collage on library book cover (c.1960-2)

For the surrealists, collage was almost a manifestation of the galvanising quotation from Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (1869) where a boy could be described as being “as beautiful as a chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.” This aspect of surrealism is brilliantly captured in Max Ernst’s gothic ‘collage novels’ (one of the most exciting inclusions in the show is an unpublished picture from his 1934 collage novel Une semaine de bonté) as well as in beautiful works by Toyen and some of the collaborative exquisite corpse collages made by André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba and Yves Tanguy, where each artist could only see their own part of the work until it was complete. Again, what I hadn’t really anticipated was the difference it makes seeing these items in real life – for example, I had seen and liked (and own a postcard of) Roland Penrose’s untitled 1937 postcard collage, but seeing it, life size, and looking at the actual real postcards stuck to it, was a weirdly moving experience. But why? It’s something about the immediacy and associations of familiar things, the thought perhaps of Roland Penrose actually going into a newsagent and buying the postcards one day in 1937. Why that should be more moving than an artist using paint I don’t know, except that, like the scrapbooks owned by Tristan Tzara (very exciting to see) and the paper cutouts by Matisse (which until now I’ve never been a fan of) it brings the whole process of making art into an immediate, almost tangible one.

The work of the Dadaists (Hannah Höch was the main reason I wanted to see the show) is less self-consciously unconscious (well, that makes no sense) than the surrealist works, but the element of satire and sometimes bitter humour – especially in John Heartfield’s iconic anti-Nazi photomontages – make them the spiritual ancestors of the works of artists like Carolee Schneemann and Nancy Spero in the 1960s as well as Linder and even Terry Gilliam in the 70s. Highlights for me were the selection of works by Kurt Schwitters, whose own version of Dada, Merz, even had a collage-like genesis, the word itself apparently derived from a fragment of text relating to a banking firm (Kommerz und Privatbank). The fact that the word Merz also has echoes in the words schwerz (pain) and ausmerzen (to weed out or discard) adds to the sense that this was a movement (if you can call one person a movement) for which collage wasn’t an entertaining diversion, but a central idea. The cumulation of meanings and associations in works like Merz 229: Heet Water (1921) makes these small works with their train tickets, textiles, playing cards – pretty much anything that could be cut up and stuck down – powerfully evocative, as well as decorative in themselves.

John Heartfield – Adolf the Superman – swallows gold and spouts junk (1932)

Kurt Schwitters – Merz 229: Heet Water (1921)

The section on the birth of modernist collage features a group of Picasso works including the the aforementioned Bottle and Glass on a Table, which form year zero of modernist collage, alongside works by peers including Braque (who may actually be the first modernist collage-maker) and Juan Gris (whose The Sunblind, 1914 is a highlight) and then the ripples spreading outwards from that explosive group of works, including the Russian constructivists and suprematists, the Italian Futurists and even the Bloomsbury group in the UK; I was very impressed to come across a painting by Vanessa Bell (Portrait of Molly MacCarthy, 1914-5) that didn’t immediately wilt into insignificance when surrounded by the big names of European modernism.

It seems obvious to say that collage is comparatively egalitarian insofar as you don’t need to be able to draw or paint to do it – and it’s true that works by generally non-visual artists like Breton and Joe Orton have a similar energy and atmosphere as those by more conventional artists, but it’s also noticeable that, pre-modernism, although the idea of collage existed and there was sometimes that same element of playfulness, the work is more notable for its skill and ingenuity – especially in the Victorian photomontages – than for any disruptive or ironic qualities. But collage being what it is, it’s here that the sense mentioned earlier of the collage as actual material culture comes into play again, sometimes – especially for me in the small character pieces by George Smart from the early 19th century – powerfully so. Somehow, these little watercolour paintings adorned with carefully cut out and arranged pieces of paper and fabric (irresistibly reminiscent to me of the ‘fuzzy felt’ sets I played with as a child) bring us closer to the artist than just paint on canvas would do.

This is perhaps art history as human interest and association rather than as aesthetics (this is especially true in the case of the Victorian scraps and scrapbooks, perhaps because the ready-made nature of the scraps themselves makes the objects feel less like the works of an artist and more like a hobby; nothing wrong with that, but as the sort of things you see in auctions and junk shops they have the aura of being ephemera, rather than using ephemera to make something else; a false distinction perhaps), but for me this exhibition brings those two aspects of art – the human/historical and the aesthetic/technical together in a deep and very satisfying way.

I have no real criticisms of the exhibition; it is thought provoking, beautiful to look at and put together with care and imagination. It might have been nice to have had something by some of the other artists most strongly associated with collage, like Romare Bearden and Wangechi Mutu; but if an exhibition leaves you wanting more that can’t be a bad thing.

***POSTSCRIPT***

Since I mentioned the anyone-can-do-it aspect of collage, I might as well mention that I went through a phase, especially in my student days of making collages, and while they are nothing special, they do have a kind of diary-esque subtext which has only really become apparent over time. Since it’s my website and no-one can stop me, here are a couple of examples, plus a more recent one.

A continuous chain of little inventions; art in Edinburgh summer 2018

Probably as much as I love any art movement, I love German Expressionism; most of all the artists of Die Brücke (I wrote at length about them here) and their (initially) optimistic quest to forge a new, forward-looking art which was distinctively German, drawing on native traditions (woodcuts, landscape etc), but also attempted to peel away the layers of staleness built up by decades, or even centuries of academicism, to reveal living art beneath. The art of Paula Modersohn-Becker, too, who was doing something similar in Worpeswede, is important to me too, but I also love the more anguished, personal kind of Expressionism that was reflected in the famous Expressionism of German silent cinema (see also Kirchner’s later works, and – not “German Expressionism” per se, but still German and expressionistic, early Dix and Grosz, Max Beckmann, Käthe Kollwitz).

So, even though Emil Nolde (1867-1956) is perhaps my least favourite of the major German Expressionist painters, and even though I had lots of qualms about it (see here), I was excited to see the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s exhibition Colour Is Life. And it really is good.

In comparison with the much younger artists of Die Brücke, which he joined for a year in 1906* Nolde’s art is just as vivid, but less vibrant (if that makes sense); his colours tend towards the bilious and acidic and his style, though ‘free’, often seems – even in landscapes – more frenzied and less harmonious than the works of the rest of the group. His deeply felt religious paintings, especially – and there is a really remarkable group of them in the exhibition – have an intense, anguished, alienated quality that is more like Munch atmospherically than it is his German contemporaries. It’s among his figurative (but not religious) works that my favourite painting of the exhibition, an enigmatic and slightly double portrait (that I can’t find online), which is smoother in surface texture than the religious pictures and imbued with an oddly menacing atmosphere.

*at which point Nolde was 39 and the group’s founders were in their early to mid twenties

I’m glad to say that although I felt like the information at the exhibition tended to downplay his vociferous Nazism a little, it at least acknowledged it – and although it is nowhere explicit in his art, there are some uncomfortably anti-Semitic-caricature-like faces in his paintings of people, including in some of the religious works. But whether I would think that if I didn’t know he was (extremely) anti-Semitic, I can’t say. Interestingly, for an exhibition called Colour Is Life, by far the most powerful works to me were Nolde’s woodcuts (including arguably his most famous work, The Prophet of 1912), where his compositions are remarkable for their economy and stark intensity.

Interestingly (perhaps not coincidentally?) the majority of Nolde’s most impressive work seems to have been done by the mid-1920s, but there is also a selection of his ‘unpainted pictures’ in the exhibition. These are little watercolours, incredibly vivid in their colours, which were made in secret during the period when his work was condemned/forbidden by the Nazi government which Nolde had, however, not only welcomed, but effectively campaigned for since the early 30s. Incidentally, around the time that Nolde was signing the Aufrufs der Kulturscha (1934) which supported Hitler as Fuhrer and joining the National Socialist Association of Northern Schleswig, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, one of the founders of Die Brücke, was writing “Here we have been hearing terrible rumours about torture of the Jews, but it’s all surely untrue…There is a war in the air. In the museums, the hard-won cultural achievements of the last 20 years are being destroyed, and yet the reason why we founded the Brücke was to encourage truly German art, made in Germany. And now it is supposed to be un-German. Dear God. It does upset me.”*

Head of a South Seas Islands woman (1914)

This was more than just the symptom of a generation gap between different artists; it’s at the heart of why Nolde’s art is, despite surface similarities, so different from that of the artists of Die Brücke; Expressionism is (obviously) about expressing; and yes, Kirchner and co expressed their anxieties, but their vision – at least at the time the group was at its most cohesive – was an optimistic one, accepting other influences as much as it rejected the status quo. To the 21st century, the way they were influenced by the art of other cultures, to simplify and brighten their own work can be uncomfortable; it has something of the ‘noble savage’ myth about it and their assumptions about the freedom and ‘naturalness’ of the tribal cultures whose work they studied in ethnographic museums were made from a viewpoint that now seems colonial and ignorant. But – the point of their own work is that it uses these forms and elements to describe something that is whole, natural and above all universal – the ‘otherness’ of the figures Nolde drew and painted on his trip to the South Seas (and even of his incredibly bold landscapes) just before WW1 is inescapable. His drawings of the people he encountered aren’t caricatures; they are brilliantly observed, but they are themselves ‘ethnographic’ in a way that Kirchner and co’s art strove not to be; Nolde is seeing and recording, not absorbing.

* Kirchner, quoted in Kirchner Museum Davos Biography Ernst Ludwig Kirchner by EW Kornfield, & CE Stauffer (1992)

Still; the Nazi government didn’t care about this distinction, and the exhibition text tells us that Nolde had more paintings shown in the condemnatory Entartete Kunst (‘degenerate art’) exhibition than any other artist, which would be a cause for some schadenfreude if not for the fact that, after petitioning the government (he was on civil if not familiar terms with charming people like Goebbels and Baldur von Schirach) he was informed in late 1941 that any work he undertook should be presented before government officials before any kind of public showing, which is of course harsh and limiting by any normal standards, but surprisingly mild compared to what they were doing to other artists. But, as Nolde must surely have realised, for all their cultural protectionism and promotion of what they considered to be artistically wholesome and correct ideas, the Nazis really weren’t interested in art as art at all.

Julie Wolfthorn – Witch of the Woods (1899)

For some not very pleasant perspective, since I can; Nolde was prevented from making a living from his art for a few years, and had works confiscated (which he did eventually get back however), meanwhile his contemporary, Julie Wolfthorn (only three years older than he was), whose figurative, traditional, slightly folkloric art has at least an equal right to be seen as definitively German (or, far more right, to the anti-modernist authorities of the time), was, as a Jew, too dangerous to exist, and was murdered in 1942, at the age of 78, by the regime which Nolde did his best to be accepted by.

So yes, a beautifully curated and mounted exhibition; but one which leaves a slightly bitter taste.

So, that’s what I paid to see (and it is absolutely worth the price of admission), but in fact the bitterness faded quickly; aside from owning a Kirchner painting that is for me everything that Nolde’s work isn’t, the National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two) hosts a permanent (and free) exhibition Surrealism and the Marvellous, which was already great, but has been enhanced hugely by the acquisition of Toyen’s superbly enigmatic The Message of the Forest (1939) and Leonora Carrington’s diminutive but haunting (and at the same time kind of funny) 1939 portrait of Max Ernst, Bird Superior (1939).

Leonora Carrington – Bird Superior (Portrait of Max Ernst), 1939

I could spend (and I think have spent) hours in this room; even longer now, as the archive adjoining it is hosting Club Dada: Berlin and Beyond, a really exciting collection of books, pamphlets, photos etc (and a small Max Ernst painting) that focuses mainly on Berlin Dada but also has some great items from the original Zurich group. Much as one wants to pore over these artefacts, I don’t even mind too much that the books etc are in glass cases since my German is minimal and I can’t read French at all.

Raqib Shaw – The Adoration (after Jan Gossaert), 2015/6 © the artist

Over in Modern One, I nearly didn’t look at the (also free) exhibition Raqib Shaw: Reinventing the Old Masters, partly because part of me doesn’t really want them to be reinvented, and because I didn’t know Shaw’s work, and also because it was up the stairs and I’d been walking around for hours. But I’m glad I did; what a fantastic show! I can’t imagine anyone not being impressed by Shaw’s work, even if it’s not their cup of tea. The paintings (too simple a description; his huge panels are painted in shimmering enamels, but embellished with a kind of cloisonné effect, incorporating jewels, glitter, all kinds of things) are brilliantly drawn and dazzling in their richness and detail (and a bit over the top, which is part of the charm). Although the compositions of the pictures in this exhibition are inspired by ‘old master’ paintings (one of which is one of my all-time favourite pictures, Lucas Cranach’s enigmatic Allegory of Melancholy (1528), displayed alongside Shaw’s painting), the familiarity only makes the extravagant fantasy of Shaw’s works all the more dreamlike and affecting.

Jan Gossart – The Adoration of the Kings (1510/15)

I think we (no, I don’t know who I mean by ‘we’) are used to seeing and accepting things like Biblical scenes or Greek myths presented through the filter of the Italian (or Northern) renaissance, and this is similar but different. With the old masters we (them again) see familiar (or what were once familiar) scenes presented in a kind of fancy dress of anachronistic costumes/settings etc which were initially intended to heighten the relatable-to realism of the works, but which now add another layer of meaning and cultural baggage. With Shaw’s work, the ghosts of both the original meaning and the original treatment are seen as if through the eyes of someone from another, much more effervescent dimension. The dislocating, hallucinatory blend of familiar (and it isn’t just the source material that’s familiar; Shaw’s use of dazzling, opulent colours and ornate textures is, despite the fantastical elements, quintessentially Indian, to my western eyes anyway) and strange is exhilarating and strangely poignant.* To take my favourite picture; neither Cranach’s or Shaw’s Allegory of Melancholy is sombre exactly; but despite the centuries and world views that separate them, the same delicately wistful atmosphere pervades both pictures. It’s an impressive exhibition.

So, the moral of this is; go to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh if you get the chance. Oh, and the National Gallery of non-modern art too – aside from having an incredible permanent collection, they currently have a Rembrandt – who doesn’t like Rembrandt? – exhibition and have put a fantastic Jenny Saville painting (Aleppo) among the old masters in a way that works amazingly well and was gathering crowds of (especially young) people when I was there.

*Perhaps an obscure (and certainly a geeky) comparison; looking at Raqib Shaw’s pictures reminded me of reading Brendan McCarthy & Pete Milligan’s similarly post modern/immersive/multicultural/hallucinogenic comic strip Rogan Gosh in the 2000AD spinoff Revolver.

Brendan McCarthy & Peter Milligan, Rogan Gosh (1990)

Review of the Year – the paradox of realism

2017, like most years but somehow more so, was filled with unpleasant things, events and people. For me though, one of the more pleasant features of the year was that I made the effort to visit art galleries more often than previously, in particular to see the superb exhibitions held by the National Galleries of Scotland; after missing Modern Scottish Women in 2016, I was determined to see Beyond Caravaggio at the National Gallery and especially True to Life – British Realist Painting in the 1920s and 1930s at the National Gallery of Modern Art. Both of these exhibitions were excellent, but I am writing mainly about the latter. As curator Patrick Elliott was clearly aware (see also the essay What Sort Of Truth? British Painting Between The Wars by Sacha Llewellyn in the excellent exhibition catalogue), ‘realism’ is not a simple thing to define, and indeed it seems strange that (for example) the peculiar and highly artificial painting of Maxwell Armfield and the shockingly immediate work of David Jagger should be considered the same kind of art.

‘Pacific Portrait’ (1929) by Maxwell Armfield (left) and ‘The Conscientious Objector’ (1917) by David Jagger (right)

If ‘Realist’ at first seems a pretty simple and unambiguous description, the fact that many of the artists (Dod Procter, Meredith Frampton, Gluck, Glyn Philpott) and paintings discussed in the exhibition catalogue also appear, equally convincingly, in Edward Lucie-Smith’s book Art Deco Painting (Phaidon, 1990) demonstrates just what a subjective term it really is. What the word seems to denote in the context of this exhibition is something like ‘representational rather than abstract’, which admittedly is an extremely unwieldy and far too wide term.

In the period in which the art of the exhibition was produced (the title says the 1920s and 1930s, but a few earlier and later works were included, so roughly from the years of World War One up to the first half of World War Two), the word realism tended to have mainly negative connotations; for which see Billy Bunter author Frank Richards’ famous 1940 reply to George Orwell’s article Boys’ Weeklies; “They go grubbing in the sewers for their realism, and refuse to believe in the grass and flowers above ground – which nevertheless, are equally real!” This was and still is an aspect of a wider conception of realism that Orwell himself attacked occasionally in its more extreme political forms. Today, ‘realpolitik’ is used as a term of criticism, but in fact almost all political or social ‘realism’, even when respectable, is basically an excuse for people or governments not to act compassionately when it becomes unprofitable to do so. People who term themselves realists rather than optimists or pessimists tend (in my experience) to lean more towards the latter, but with an added smug quality as befits someone who is never surprised when bad things happen. While the artists of True To Life presumably held beliefs and opinions on a wide range of issues, these are by and large absent from their work as collected here. This is not the 1920s of the General Strike or the 30s of the Depression and The Road To Wigan Pier, let alone the 20s and 30s of Lenin, Mussolini and HItler, or perhaps more to the point, of Picasso, Matisse, or Dadaists and Surrealists.

Edward McKnight Kauffer – poster for the London Underground (1930)

Nevertheless, from the delicate figure studies of Dod Procter to James Cowie’s pastoral portraits, it is a window onto certain aspects of British art and life between the wars. Also, the painters’ rejection of the vocabulary of avant garde modernism should be seen in the context of the time; while abstract or semi-abstract art had been at the cutting edge of modernism in the years just prior to and during World War One, not only had the innovators of that era moved on (why not look at my article about Wyndham Lewis in the 20s here?), but the angular, dynamic language of modernism had infiltrated mainstream culture to the point that institutions as staid as the Royal Mail were using designers like John Armstrong and Pat Keely to give the Post Office a modern identity, while Edward McKnight Kauffer and others did similar work for the London Underground and, outside of the UK, fascist Italy, Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Union all utilised versions of modernist design to establish new national identities. In that sense, the idiosyncratic, apparently old-fashioned and above all individualistic styles adopted by British artists outside of the more radical movements can be seen as, if not revolutionary, then at least stubbornly dedicated to their own visions.

Although it may seem paradoxical or incompatible, the ‘realism’ of these artists is founded to some extent on escapism and idealism; but maybe that is truer of realism in a wider sense than at first seems to be the case. The definitive artistic form of realism (if we think of everyday life as ‘real’ – but I don’t really want to get into philosophical questions here as I’d like to finish this article at some point) nowadays is probably something like instagram, or on a slightly grander level, the documentary film, but the very nature of documenting reality – whether in film, photographs, painting or in writing – is necessarily selective, and in being so, tends towards some kind of commentary (and/or judgement) on its subject. One of the nice things about the True To Life exhibition was that both the grime-and-hardship/warts-and-all and the grass-and-flowers aspects of realism were represented – albeit mostly in a perhaps fairly superficial way. There was very little evidence of the documentary as protest – perhaps because, by the end of WW1, photography had become the obvious tool for this kind of work. That said, social commentary of a sort was present in Thomas Nash & Stanley Spencer’s idiosyncratic recasting of some of the Renaissance’s favourite religious scenes such as the Crucifixion & the Last Judgement in ‘modern dress’ and modern settings (and slightly generic ‘modernist’ styles). This use of realism was not uninventive, but was in essence just another way of looking back at the ‘old masters’; revisiting the groundbreaking realism pioneered in the 14th century. More interesting, (to me) was John Luke’s strange 1929 modern-dress version of one of the baroque era’s favourite Old Testament scenes, Judith and Holofernes, in which the story of the beheading of an Assyrian general is made even more unsettling by having a strangely surreal Agatha Christie/Enid Blyton aura.

Much as in Edward Lucie-Smith’s Art Deco Painting, the unifying factor in the exhibition’s disparate works was less a matter of style/school or subject than it was atmosphere; the paintings, as different as they are, belong definitively to the period between the wars, in much the same way as the very different works of Evelyn Waugh and Christopher Isherwood did (according to me, here).

If the term ‘realist’ in painting suggests the artist as eye (kind of an analog to (again) Christopher Isherwood’s fictionalised realism; “I am a camera”), the eye of the artist/writer is necessarily as individual as the brain it is connected to. For example, one might assume that realism and idealism were opposites, but there is a strong classicising element among some of the artists in the exhibition – but even then, individual artists seem to have reached a kind of classical serenity and monumentality via different routes.

Meredith Frampton – Sir Charles Grant Robertson (1941)

One of the stars of the exhibition for me was the portrait painter (George Vernon) Meredith Frampton (1894-1984). Frampton’s art was in some ways the most ‘realistic’ art in the exhibition, in the sense of being (by far) the most illusionistic and quasi-photographic. In a way, portraits like the stunning Sir Charles Grant Robertson (1941) are less ‘realist’ than than they are ‘corporealist’ – their accumulation of painstakingly rendered detail being in some ways closer to taxidermy than to the realism of a snapshot. In their almost eerie stillness, his portrayals of professional men surrounded by the accoutrements of their work, (another excellent example is Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1938, below) seem – despite the maximalist inclusiveness of the painting – closer to the carefully composed minimalism of a photographer like Lilo Raymond than to a more or less contemporary realist (or ‘objectivist’) painting like Otto Dix’s theoretically similar portrait of urologist Dr Hans Koch (1921). And yet, for all of their modern realism, both artists looked to the past; for Dix – who had experimented with Expressionist styles earlier in his career, the aim of the modern realist painter was to tackle the breadth and the often-unrecorded detail of modern life with the – to him – unimprovable techniques of the old masters. For Frampton, the source of his style is less the realistic tradition of the Northern Renaissance than it is the monumental, but still ‘realistic’ neoclassicism of Ingres.

Meredith Frampton – Sr Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1938) and Otto Dix – Dr Hans Koch (1921)

The more usual classical influence on British art of the period was the modernist route via Picasso and cubism; in the case of painters like the ex-Vorticists William Roberts and Edward Wadsworth (also Edward Burra, whose expressionistic 1930 painting The Snack Bar was included in the exhibition), the angularity of Vorticism became a kind of stylistic shorthand that marked out their otherwise fairly conventional/traditional art as ‘modern’. Several other artists in the exhibition, such as Gladys Hynes and James Walker Tucker seem to have used modernist stylistic traits in the same way; to heighten the clarity and monumental qualities of their work; a kind of ‘realism’ as simplified solidity and a classicism that couldn’t be easily written off as old fashioned.

Gerald Leslie Brockhurst – By the Hills (1939)

For society portrait painters like Gerald Leslie Brockhurst and Sir Herbert James Gunn, realism – if explicitly not ‘gritty’ realism – was a necessary part of their trade. The glamour and drama of portraits like Brockhurst’s By the Hills (1939) is what made the artist in demand for fashionable sitters, but their effect – despite relying on a similar sense of heightened photo-realism for their success – is almost the opposite of Frampton’s still life approach. This kind of art was, despite its use of traditional techniques (and even, in the case of By The Hills, a Renaissance-influenced landscape in the background) resolutely of its ‘modern’ age, referencing Hollywood and the world of contemporary fashion, but not really any of the ideas that had affected the visual arts since the mid 1800s.

The same is true of the slightly creepy empty street scenes of Algernon Newton; despite their passing resemblance to the post-impressionist work of Maurice Utrillo, these brilliantly realised townscapes are depictions of the modern world, but not interpretations of it. While the artist captures the melancholy charm of the slightly shabby suburbs he painted, their spirit is more like restrained romanticism, rather than being invested with the revolutionary sense of psychogeography that the proto-surrealist works of Giorgio de Chirico had pioneered two decades earlier. That said, because of the role of artist – not just as a ‘camera’, but also as processor and interpreter of experience – his paintings are something more than a documentary photograph of an empty street.

Algernon Newton – The Outskirts of Cheltenham (1932)

Pietro Novelli – ‘Cain Killing Abel’ (1625)

In fact, what True To Life highlights, is the extent to which the vast majority of art, until fairly recently, had as its aim something that could be called realism; the National Gallery’s Beyond Caravaggio exhibition likewise showed Caravaggio and the artists of the late 16th/early 17th century trying to make their art – both in religious/mythical and modern genre paintings – more immediate & vivid through a kind of dramatic heightened realism. Impressionism broke away from the staid, schematised world of academic painting to capture something closer to the experience of both the artist and viewer, Expressionists tried to infuse their works with the feeling of events as experienced, Futurists tried to capture the violence of the 20th century where traditional techniques tended to distance it… And in that sense, much of the work labelled ‘realist’ in this exhibition works for us now in a way that it possibly didn’t at the time; to a modern audience the work in True to Life is almost all imbued with a between-the-wars ‘period’ quality that seems to capture the zeitgeist of that troubled era, even while sidestepping most of the troubles themselves.

It is with that last point that the artists – without doubting the depth of feeling they put into their work – mainly succeeded in recording (limited aspects of the) reality of their era in a relatively superficial way. As an example, Clifford Rowe’s The Fried Fish Shop (1936) depicts what the interior and clientele of a fried fish shop of the 30s presumably looked like; as such it has sociological and historical value, as well as being a fine, faintly modernist painting. On the other hand, a slightly earlier and in some ways comparable painting like the Vorticist-inspired Rain On Princes Street (1913) by Stanley Cursiter (it’s quite surprising that none of Cursiter’s fashionable work of the 20s & 30s was included in the exhibition), despite its fractured, faceted and in that sense ‘unrealistic’ modernist appearance, not only captures in its stylised way a glimpse of late Edwardian metropolitan life, but also the feeling – still the same over a hundred years later – of being on Edinburgh’s Princes Street on a busy, rainy day. So in the end I suppose which painting deserves to be called ‘realist’ is as subjective as reality itself.