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The big secret: All 8 words of it revealed On my last visit to Tate Britain there was an unexpected surprise. Just inside the front portico to the left, in the nowhere aisle where they erect shrines to recently deceased meteors, was a bright altar. In pole position was one of the gallery's most instantly recognisable pictures, an established public favourite. An unfinished oil, it depicts an idealised geisha with glossed black hair, ad-red lips and a face of acid green in a expensive metallic finish. Next to it was hung one of the same painter's seascapes in which thunderous waves crash on a sandy shoreline across which mustangs race. These pound-shop originals beamed me straight back to the 1960s when the popularity of this artist exceeded any other and his pictures sold in reproduction as fast as England flags. Like The Beatles he was mobbed everywhere he went and, as artists do, he began to believe his own publicity to the extent that his bank balance was exceeded only by a visibly expanding amour-propre. No expence spared, the gallery's Chief Curator of Instant Memorials had placed on a low table a single pink rose in a glass of water, an echo of another of this much-loved painter's masterpieces. The sign read “In memory of Vladimir Griegorovich Tretchikoff 1913-2006” and alongside it was pinned a eulogy written by no less than Sir Nicholas Serota himself. It read: “It was with great sadness that I heard of the recent death of my friend the Russian Romantic artist, 'Tretch' Tretchikoff. I first visited his VI-ième studio in the late 1960s when he was at the height of his fame and powers and whilst I was researching the touring exhibition of his work for the Arts Council of Great Britain. This would later attract record attendances for a modern painter. We spent an unforgettable day strolling the Tuileries in the spring sunshine engaged in friendly argument concerning mortality and what was then the hot topical issue of popular Realism in the context of Tachism and the growing taste for the challenging art now universally dubbed Conceptual. I returned exhilarated and with the generous gift of a work for the Arts Council's collection. Years later in 1990 we would stage a selective retrospective of his pictures here at Tate as part of our acclaimed 'Art For Proles' season. The works seen here are among the finest for which he was known. As a lover of Tate and as a devoted visitor to Millbank on his many trips to London he donated these pictures to the gallery in recognition of the help and encouragement the British people had shown during the early impoverished part of his career. His loss is a blow to the solar plexus of popular culture. Wherever there are council houses and tattoos his art will be sorely missed.” Honestly though, why is the above mischief so unlikely? And if you're answer is “Because Tretchikoff was a slick painter of tasteless clichés” then I might agree. But Tretch's exclusion from the Tate, and every other museum, should surely not be based on anything as squalid as the personal taste of a few soi-disant experts with little discernible expertise. Ought we not to expect a degree of objectivity from those exercising judgement on our behalf? When it comes to the dangers of monotheistic tendencies we should learn wisely from the past. It is precisely this kind of 'expert' partiality, upon which we have no choice but to be over-reliant, which has led us to the current impasse where figurative art, as far as exhibition or purchase by State-run museums is concerned, is a no-go area. Should our art not be selected at least partly on the basis of popularity? Should we not preserve for posterity a Tretchikoff because it struck a chord with the British masses at a moment during the post-war birth of consumer society? Popularity alone seems to me a poor reason for collecting anything but it is precisely this criterion which applies in fashionable contemporary art circles. Damien Hirst's work, for example, is famous for the reason only that it gets in the papers and fetches silly prices. Each new work's instant status has nothing to do with irrelevancies such as aesthetic content, of which there is not a thread. Hirst is a marketing phenomenon, nothing else. Tretchikoff isn't any worse a painter to my eye than Hirst is with his spots or swirls, or indeed than Howard Hodgkin, whose entire oeuvre looks to me like at the very outside a week's work. And Tretch is certainly nowhere near as stylistically infant-like and inept as Hockney's new, dire Clarice Cliff landscapes done in't'Wolds. And whose work would I rather look at? Yet another all-over-white painting by that prima inter pares of boring arses Robert Ryman or the latest busty Zulu by Tretch? It's not that tricky a question: Tretch every time for me - at least he makes me laugh and his subjects are different. And for all his self-importance he at least spared us the tedium of pretentiousness. Why does a curator's definition of 'challenging' art not extend to Tretch? Tretch's work challenges us to understand, for example, what it was about his so-called Green Lady (right) that made one of my childhood neighbours, someone who had probably never knowingly visited an art gallery in her life, to spend an afternoon on a central Manchester pavement so she could catch a glimpse through the crowd of the Russian bloke who had painted the original of the reproduction she hung on the chimney breast over her copper-effect Gas Miser? Indeed, so proud of it was she that it was hung low so passers-by might catch a glimpse of this family treasure as they passed the window. To a 1960s schoolboy who had never been inside an art gallery and hadn't yet been told that he wasn't supposed to like this sort of thing, it looked like a striking enough picture. Mysteriously, inexplicably, popularity in art precludes its collection by the State, which has its sights trained on higher things, or so it is claimed. The State uses the same argument to damn other artists of mass appeal: David Shepherd, Robert Lenkiewicz, Beryl Cook, Jack Vettriano, Kenneth Webb, Russell Flint. In what passes for my mind, the siding labelled 'Thorny Ethical Concerns' is endlessly exercised by this prejudicial omission. How is it justified that only the artistic taste of a self-perpetuating clique of bureaucrats is preserved for posterity? I'd like to think that in a century an exhibition of art from the 1960s might include Tretch and Cuneo alongside the kneejerk choices of State Art: for both are technically superior painters to most of the atrocious Pop Art daubers whose works look dingier by the week. Let us recap in order to get it straight: this is how British art operates... Galleries and museum's use taxpayers' cash to collect contemporary artists' work. The art chosen is selected by 'career experts' who, as we have been recently informed in an advisory Arts Council brochure, will only collect what they deem 'challenging'. The public plays no part in any process of selection or exhibition. Nothing conventional or traditional is bought, or shown, however excellent of its type or, worse, popular, or even worse, narrative, it may be. This means that an entire area of art is not collected by State galleries and museums because our all-powerful experts happen, as a cadre, not to like it. In fact these people are selected for their jobs precisely, it would seem, because they are unrepresentative of mere public opinion, which in private they deride. Two questions arise. Firstly, are the public always wrong? They think not because they know what they like, and some respect is due to them if only because they spend their own money. And second, are the experts always right? They are bound to make mistakes but there is little doubt that they make more than they need to. Will there ever be a time, for example, when there are queues for an exhibition of an obvious chancer like Martin Creed? All opinion is fallible, so would it not be wise for museum directors to collect the best of all styles of work, including figurative art and popular art, and be allowed the liberty later out to weed out the obvious mistakes? Doubtless, State Art drones believe they are driven by nobler motives than the rest of us could fathom. They believe that by showing us what they themselves have been indoctrinated to like, they might educate us to a more developed understanding of what is 'challenging' - incidentally, they always talk about art as though in order to be satisfying looking at it must be a sort of battle of attrition with life. Their major problem is that they first need to have us look at work which doesn't prima facie look up to much. Additionally, they don't tell us - at least in a language most of us can understand - what criteria they use to decide that a white job by Ryman - the Tate owns nine of them - deserves collecting more than, say, Tretch's Hindu Dancer, a swivel-bummed Indian houri with twelve snaky arms tipped by sharpened fingernails. The entire edifice of contemporary art collecting by museums is based, it would seem, on The Big Secret. This is that inside knowledge which places the bearer in the inner loop of State Art. I sometimes imagine that when, following graduation with their obligatory “good degree in a pertinent area of research and a developed knowledge of the international cutting edge”, the unsuspecting job applicant is awarded a post at the Arts Council or the Tate, they are quietly taken aside on the first day and presented with a slim black valise. This contains The Big Secret, contemporary art's equivalent of the nuclear attack codes. Having rote-learned its contents, which is hardly time-consuming given that it comprises a single sheet of paper on which is written “We make it up as we go along!”, they are considered inducted into the club. Regrettably for them, like those born into Islam, apostasy or other betrayal of The Big Secret means grisly professional death. The Big Secret must be taken to the grave. Why do we put up, seemingly without argument, with a system which is so heavily discriminatory but for which hardly anyone knows the rules? Critics write up weekly the magisterial range of emotions in yet another batch of Ryman whities, or whoever's turn it is this week, but they never write about Nicholas Williams, Peter Howson, Ken Currie, John Keane, Paul Read, Phil Hale, Craig Wylie, John Monks, the Singh Twins, Tom Coates, Peter Kuhfeld, Robbie Wraith, Anthony Williams, Harry Holland, Mark Ianson, and any number of other figurative artists, including many RAs, whose work is rarely collected by museums or the Arts Council. Why not? This system is self-perpetuating, no questions asked, decade after decade. State Art refuses to acknowledge that most Figurative Art exists, and I cannot work out why. It is an omission which stares those working in the visual arts daily in the face. It is the proverbial elephant-in-the-room. Many current exhibitions testify to this censorship. The Arts Council has been buying art since its foundation in 1946. Its collection now extends to 7,500 items by 2,000 artists, most of which are kept in store all the time and quite a number of which have never ever been exhibited. Doubtless the concept of an art collection which is not intended to be seen is the Arts Council's way of “challenging our preconceptions” of what a public art collection is. The high spots of this collection, those by the top brands of which they are so proud, we see time and time again. A committee selected from the usual suspects by the permanent member of the team convenes annually to spend £170,000. They say there is not an important artist who is not represented in the collection. As usual with State Art and its use of words it depends on how flexibly you define 'important'. Whenever small permutations of the collection are wheeled out - twice this year so far - it is said to represent the purchasers' perspicacity in securing the work of youngsters before they become expensive. There is some truth in this, particularly early on in the collection's history when selectors were of a higher calibre and, by the looks of it, so were the artists they had to choose from. In the recent tat that's been purchased there isn't anything that touches for poetry the Chadwicks, Hepworths, Moores and Paolozzis. Except for an enviable Frink raptor close on half a century old, the warehouse of stuff exhibited at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the spring looked to be a job lot of thin material unworthy of a second look. That exhibition was a monument to the trivial inconsequentiality of most recent sculpture, a feeble accumulation of oddments adding up to nothing at all profound. So often with the Arts Council collection one is left pondering that if this is the cream no wonder they keep the rest under wraps - those 7,350 works they seem never to show and for which they don't even have an online catalogue. The Arts Council rarely collects more conventional figurative art, and if it does it certainly never shows it, for that would give the wrong impression. In what it claims represents '60 Years of British Art', currently on show at the Hayward Gallery (and to charge £7 to see works the public has already bought is taking the mickey) there is not a single recent piece of the more traditional type. The show should be called '60 Years of State Art' because it's surely a misrepresentation of the diversity of British Art most of us have known since the 1950s. Virtually everything recent on display is by a Turner Prize nominee, much of it catchpenny, sprawling, spiritless trash, the wreckage of a decadent and soulless era. Topicality supplies the perfect example of an unforgivable omission from the collection. The recently announced first prize winner in the Sunday Times/Singer and Friedlander watercolour competition, David Gluck, has been printmaking and painting watercolours for fifty years. There is no work by him in the Arts Council collection. His work is not in any way 'challenging' and he's too modest to make farfetched claims about it, but at its best it has a little something, a deftness, a twinkle of insight into how the sun describes what it illuminates and warms. There were at least seven other damn good painters in the watercolour exhibition (which continues at the Sculpture Hall, Manchester Town Hall from October 11th-21st); David Firmstone, Matthew Gibson, David Gleeson, Arthur Lockwood, Rob Piercy, Michael Porter and Leslie Worth. Why aren't these artists in 60 Years of British Art? They're good enough. They deserve to be. And so to do the still lives of Eric Rimmington, who has been painting for a mere 60 years and whose recent fine still lives are currently on show in Henley. Of their genre there are no better anywhere. Despite his conspicuous accomplishment he's not represented in the Arts Council collection. Why is there no place in the State's collecting of contemporary art for moments of subtle observation and poetic reflection? Instead, at the Hayward all the familiar brand names of State Art are trotted out for the umpteenth time. We should have no objection to the Arts Council collection owning a stone circle by Richard Long, after all everyone else has got one. But why isn't this balanced by a traditional approach to landscape by the best artists in a complementing genre? National collections and the Arts Council should not be partisan tastemakers. But from top to bottom they are. The Contemporary Art Society (which passes itself off as independent but which is a fully incorporated subsidiary of State Art - its total surrender is, for the record, assuaged by an £80,000 a year dole from the Arts Council) has also recently been trumpeting its own successes in spending £3 million of Arts Council lottery money on works to be distributed to regional collections. This is the devious ruse by which means provincial museums are not given money to spend by themselves (presumably they can't be trusted not to buy work by the wrong kinds of artists), but by which they must choose from a pre-selection of, once again, mostly Turner Prize nominees, wannabes and their foreign counterparts. The CAS has published a lavish book full of self-congratulatory words and has mounted a display at Walsall Art Gallery comprising a selection of what it bought. No surprises, it's the same stuff the Arts Council buys. It bought 610 works by 313 different artists and not a conventional easel picture or sculpture in sight. Why this silly apartheid? As is demonstrated by the John Moores exhibition just opened at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool (until November 26th), there are a number of painters who are in no way conventional but who nevertheless arouse interest and deserve their exposure. It's a better exhibition this time than in recent years when there's been a preponderance of pastiches, bad painting, scribbling, graffiti and feeble jokes, and the winners have been nonentities whose selection insulted the majority of painters. I picked out nine this year whose works in a variety of styles were well enough executed to hold me. They were by Matthew Burrows, Eliza Meath Baker, Emily Wolfe, Emma Bennett, Hugo Platt, Cavadonga Valdes, Andy Harper, Andrea Medjesi-Jones, Gunther Herbst and Gordon Cheung, who should probably have won. There were no painters of the more straightforward observational genres and the £25,000 winner, by Martin Greenland, which has its passages of interest, was an unresolved skit of 17th century Dutch painting and included the sky from Vermeer's A View of Delft. It didn't hold together spatially and the touch was clumsy and unconvincing in places, especially in the foliage. The suburb of a town in the middle distance was convincingly depicted, no hesitancy there. Greenland - I'd never previously heard of him - is certainly a painter to look out for. A curious inclusion in the Moores indicated the full circle painting has come under State Art. Among the work of the pedestrian ironists and cackhanded figuratives was a small portrait of a weeping woman by Goldsmiths graduate Ben Spiers (left). It was knowingly 'bad' and sentimental in subject, indeed every inch kitsch enough to be comparable to Vladimir Griegorovich. Shown anonymously alongside a similar Tretch on Bayswater Road railings, few would know the reason why one painter is acceptable to the arbiters of State Art whilst the other one is not. I look forward to the day when the John Moores will show the best of all styles of painting, both traditional and experimental. This will only happen when all painters feel they have an equal chance of acceptance. | |||||
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