{"id":1170,"date":"2016-07-01T17:36:04","date_gmt":"2016-07-01T17:36:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/?p=1170"},"modified":"2016-07-02T13:46:52","modified_gmt":"2016-07-02T13:46:52","slug":"82-portraits-one-still-life-and-a-few-nice-loans-is-this-the-future-of-exhibitions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/2016\/07\/82-portraits-one-still-life-and-a-few-nice-loans-is-this-the-future-of-exhibitions.html","title":{"rendered":"82 Portraits, One Still-Life, and a Few Nice Loans – Is This the Future of Exhibitions?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\""LORD<\/a>

“LORD JACOB ROTHSCHILD, 5-6 FEBRUARY” 2014
ACRYLIC ON CANVAS
48 X 36″
\u00a9 DAVID HOCKNEY
PHOTO CREDIT: RICHARD SCHMIDT<\/p><\/div>\n

\"David<\/a>

David Hockney
“John Baldessari, 13-16 December” 2013
Acrylic on canvas
48 x 36″
\u00a9 David Hockney
Photo Credit: Richard Schmidt<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Two thought-provoking exhibitions have just opened in London. At the Sackler Gallery of the RA are \u201c82 Portraits and One Still-life by David Hockney\u201d; and at the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, \u201cPainters\u2019 Paintings: from Freud to Van Dyck.\u201d Each of these is at least slightly novel, and indicative of changes that must be afoot in the art world.<\/p>\n

None of Hockney\u2019s 82 portraits was commissioned by the sitter or anyone else. They were done by him, for himself, as a project in his California studio, starting in July 2013 and continuing until last February. The sitters range from the team who work with him to family, friends and acquaintances, and sometimes their children.\u00a0 Most readers will recognise at least one or two of the names of his subjects (who are not celebrities: \u201cI don\u2019t do celebrities, photography does celebrities\u201d) from among Larry Gagosian, Gregory Evans, John Baldessari, Martin Gayford, Jacob Rothschild, Maurice Payne, David Juda, Celia Birtwell, Barry Humphries, Frank Gehry \u2013 and the sharp-eyed and \u2013witted will notice that \u201cSir Norman Rosenthal\u201d alone is given his honorific.<\/p>\n

All have the same size canvas (121.9 x 91.4 cm, 48 x 36 in), and each subject is seated in the same, dining-room-style chair, against coloured backgrounds, on a coloured platform, using turquoise, a couple of blues and mauve, and painted in acrylics \u2013 though the colours get more saturated as the series progresses. It is displayed at the RA in chronological order of when they were painted. The subjects chose their own clothes and pose, and each sitting lasted two or three days.<\/p>\n

The word \u201cseries\u201d is here slightly misleading, as the artist says that it comprises a single work. Thus the show as a whole is<\/em> the work, and not the individual canvases.\u00a0 (Though we are told in the pamphlet that accompanies the exhibition that he made \u201cover 90\u201d of these portraits, editing out \u201ca number of portraits of sitters who had been painted more than once,\u201d says Edith Devaney, who curated the show for the RA. So perhaps what is on show is only a large fraction of the actual work of art?) \u00a0The sitter having installed himself in the chair, one of Hockney\u2019s assistants outlined the sitter\u2019s feet in charcoal, making it relatively easy to resume the pose. David then made a fairly rapid charcoal drawing directly onto the primed canvas, and proceeded directly to the painting.<\/p>\n

It certainly occurred to me at the press view that what I was seeing was a single work, not 83 individual works of art \u2013 and that though some were \u201cbetter\u201d than others, none was a conventional, stand-alone portrait.\u00a0 I also spotted a large number of echoes and tonal shifts in the background and platform colour-fields, made more evident by the tight hang. I felt the exhibition was as much about colour as about, say, faces, posture and body-language. What convinces me I am right is the inclusion of the single still-life, \u201cFruit on a Bench\u201d painted 6-8 March 2014, where the background is a darkish blue, the platform turquoise and the bench rendered in an almost electric blue. Bananas, lemons, an orange, a red pepper and darker red tomatoes (plus a blotchy yellowy-greeny mango or pear \u2013 I couldn\u2019t make out which) and two green leaves, were painted and (otherwise inexplicably) included in the exhibition, I feel certain, not just to demonstrate Hockney\u2019s mastery of colour, but because colour is part of what this provocative and exciting show is all about. The splendidly printed catalogue does justice to this aspect.<\/p>\n

So the Hockney RA show is a different kind of monographic exhibition, one in which a single work is composed of 82 different parts, each being what, in a different context would be individual works of art, and open to the normal and usual judgement of quality. It is, indeed, hard to avoid passing critical judgement on the 82 canvases, as you cannot really keep yourself from preferring, say, the portraits of Celia Birtwell and John Baldessari to that of Lord Rothschild, merely on aesthetic grounds \u2013 as \u201cbetter\u201d paintings. But that does not seem to be appropriate here \u2013 how confusing. The National Gallery exhibition, \u201cPainters\u2019 Paintings\u201d is about painters as collectors, and purports to inform us about the contents of, and let us see examples of the collections of paintings owned by Lucian Freud, Henri Matisse, Edgar Degas, Lord Leighton, G. F. Watts, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Sir Anthony van Dyck.<\/p>\n

The inspiration for this show is supposed to be, what the catalogue calls Lucian Freud\u2019s gift to the British nation (in the shape of the National Gallery) \u201cin gratitude for giving his Jewish family a refuge from persecution in 1933\u201d: Corot\u2019s magnificent \u201cItalian Woman, or Woman with Yellow Sleeve (L\u2019I, talienne) c. 1870.\u201d Freud bought the large painting at auction in 2001, and it hung in his sitting-room with his tiny C\u00e9zanne and his small Constable paintings. At the NG it can be seen alongside a self-portrait and one of his very flesh-and-bones female nudes, both from about the time he bought the Corot.\u00a0 Are there connections? The position of the right-hand of Corot\u2019s Italian woman has nicely obvious similarities with Freud\u2019s right hand in the self-portrait. Is this enlightening? I\u2019m sure I don\u2019t know. The spaces devoted to Matisse and Degas include some jolly good paintings. It\u2019s always a thrill to see the NG\u2019s Manet \u201cThe Execution of Maximilian\u201d (c.1867-8) in Degas\u2019 reconstruction and it\u2019s a real treat to see Jasper Johns\u2019 also tiny C\u00e9zanne study \u201cBather with Outstretched Arm\u201d (1883-5), formerly owned by Degas. Nice to see Lawrence\u2019s Raphael and Guido Reni; Reynolds\u2019 Giovanni Bellini, his doubtful Michelangelo, his Jacopo Bassano, his Rembrandt, Van Dyck and Poussin; and Van Dyck\u2019s pair of Titians.<\/p>\n

However, these are all from the NG\u2019s permanent collection, where you can \u2013 normally \u2013 see them for free. Instead you\u2019ll be asked for about \u00a312 to see these, and some loans (as in the instances above), some but not all of which are masterpieces. Still, with cuts to arts subsidies and the ridiculous present political situation making everyone nervous about everything, you can see that all the national art institutions are going to have to find ways to produce revenue from their assets. If this means mix \u2018n\u2019 match and slap on an entry charge for a temporary exhibition, so be it \u2013 but it does have to be done in an intelligent fashion \u2013 which this does, but only just.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[contextly_auto_sidebar]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Two thought-provoking exhibitions have just opened in London. At the Sackler Gallery of the RA are \u201c82 Portraits and One Still-life by David Hockney\u201d; and at the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, \u201cPainters\u2019 Paintings: from Freud to Van Dyck.\u201d Each of these is at least slightly novel, and indicative of changes that must […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,36,1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1170","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-blogroll-2","7":"category-elsewhere","8":"category-uncategorized","9":"entry","10":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbv6zV-iS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1170"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1180,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170\/revisions\/1180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}