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July/August 2009 Perhaps I’m jaded by superannuated high living but it seems to me that much stamina is required these days in order to find exhibited art which justifies the effort made to see it. Even competent work barely delivers on account of the exhaustion induced by trying to locate the remote stone under which it’s hidden. Why bother with yet another Richard Long show when you’ve seen it so often before you could probably knock it up yourself? Besides, the Ring of Brogar is just so much better in every way. If appreciation of portraiture has been groomed by half a century of weekly lessons from Vans Eyck and Dyck, Memling, Rembrandt, Bellini, Roubiliac, Bernini, Hogarth, Orpen, Goya, Spencer, and a score of other geniuses from ancient history, the annual exhibition of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters will only make you laugh heartily at the ineptitude of most of what’s on display. Do these people think we’re blind? Are they hoping we’ve never clapped eyes on a Titian or a Moroni, and if we have we’ve mistaken them for ... photographs, holograms or something else hors concours? Likewise Futurism at Tate Modern. On this evidence what limp painters are Carra, Boccioni, Kupka, Balla, Sonia Delaunay – they make Bomberg look like a galactico. And Severini must surely have cleaned up on the revolving stand for superior greetings cards. The mad manifestos are more entertaining than ever is the dead practice of their signatories, and you can read them free on the internet and save yourself a whopping £12.20 admission charge. For those well versed in art history, much of the figurative art of the last century is a shocking disappointment, and so very unadventurous. The day, for example, that the BP Portrait Award features a large canvas with more than one figure confidently positioned in a convincing space I’ll faint from the shock. Personally, I doubt if figurative art will now ever recover from the deep trap of incompetence and lazy lack of ambition into which it has voluntarily hurled itself. There is, however, one genre of figurative art which is a delicious exception to the surrounding sad spectacle. We are living through a golden age of political drawing at least the equal of Scarfe, Tidy and Steadman in the 1960s. Before newspapers die – and a recent jeremiah predicted that by 2015 there would be only two nationals left in Britain – we should enjoy and celebrate these stars while we can. I’m not alluding here to pocket cartoons, a niche in which Matt of the Daily Telegraph is non pareil. I refer instead to the elaborate set-piece caricatures now heading opinion and editorial pages in all quality papers. These are the most avidly anticipated paintings I encounter. The last ten years, with its introduction of colour presses, has taken the genre to new heights. All the papers now feature daily watercolours knocked up in a matter of hours in response to evolving political events and stories. Regrettably, the work of these artists will not have the same impact when featured on the increasingly popular internet news websites, as they have found ideal form on low-rent, absorbent newsprint. No screen will convey the flat, matt washes and mucky tints of these artists. Why aren’t Peter Brookes (The Times), Dave Brown (The Independent), Martin Rowson and Steve Bell (The Guardian), and Nicholas Garland (Daily Telegraph) members of the Royal Academy? Gillray and Rowlandson were. All are inventive draughtsman immeasurably superior to many of the figurative artists featured in the Academy. Undoubtedly this is, mistakenly, a class thing: they are perhaps considered mere jobbing tradesmen in ephemera, adequate for the moment but lacking the stamina required of the finest art. This is nonsense. I cut them out and collect them, file them alphabetically by artist, and frequently thumb through for another look. This very morning I flicked back to remind myself what Dave Brown had made of Joanna Lumley’s terrifying carnivorous choppers. And I can’t avoid Peter Brookes’s account of Snorter Brown conflated with doolally crooner Susan Boyle – it makes me laugh every time I catch it’s eye on the wall. My books on Daumier, Cruikshank, Rowlandson and Hogarth are all equally well used. I hope that at the very least the British Museum and the V&A are buying up the choicest of these artists’ efforts while they are still affordable. Each of these fellows has brought with him a uniquely individual approach to satire and has come into his own during the last year of successive political earthquakes. As Hitler found his nemesis in John Heartfield and Stefan Lorant, so corrupt and incompetent bankers, troughing MPs and talentless Ministers have been relentlessly exposed to savage ridicule by our most inspired illustrators. I would suggest that one reason for public apathy towards politicians is the abuse heaped upon them by caricaturists, the immediacy of whose works have ensured we can no longer look upon their victims sympathetically. Steve Bell is a surrealist and the most oblique of all of them, his left-field references occasionally obscure. He takes more looking at than most and requires inventive lateral thought whilst demonstrating that immediacy of message is not the be-all in this new genre. Amibguity of meaning is so often the gap through which art approaches. There is no mistaking Bell’s original take on otherwise common and overworked subjects. Martin Rowson puts in the most work with many tiny, throwaway allusions hidden in a gothic, Dix-like darkness. Dave Brown’s nervy grotesquerie is as wounding as Gillray’s. Nicholas Garland likes Gillray too but his own precise treatment and even washes incline more towards the wistful, melancholy charm of Daumier. He is the most unpredictable and the most art historically conscious of all of them and in a matter of days can be found quoting Gainsborough, Freud, Wyeth and Rubens in rapid succession. Peter Brookes, my own favourite, is fond of sequences. His recent hilarious six-parter in which Gordon Brown tries, and fails, to erect a deckchair is a masterpiece, and his ‘Nature Notes’ series is erudite, gentle and gentlemanly in its vicious observations. All five have advanced their genre whilst tipping their hats respectfully to the great practitioners of their tradition. I can imagine Gillray in his deranged dotage recognising the deluge of historical allusions in a Dave Brown and banging the table: ìCrappe! Whie didn’t I thynke of thatte?’. Over the years Steve Bell has conditioned the way I look at politicians. John Major will always be the ill-educated but amiably honest buffoon who wears his piped y-fronts over his trousers, just as ‘Dubya’ will always be a cross-eyed ape spluttering amusing guff about ‘The Axle of Elvis’. Whenever I catch Gordon Brown on the television he always metamorphoses into Bell’s characterisation of him as The Arse. And I can’t now look at that dour, Scottish fiddler Alistair Darling without seeing Dave Brown’s account of him grinning paddleless from a sinking canoe while it drifts up a creek of shit towards the Niagara Falls. Peter Brooke’s parody of a butcher’s chart showing Gordon Brown as a pig marked up for the chain saw ... Martin Rowson’s ‘Telegraph’ shooting apples in a barrel... These are spontaneous, clever, inventive, economically drawn and, best of all, they don’t need an artist’s statement or some Dorment to explain what ‘notions’ or ‘challenges’ they might be ‘exploring’ ever so ‘innovatively’ y’know. These guys are among the best artists we’ve got, skilful, topical and understandable by all. So, j’accuse! Where is the Hayward Gallery’s touring exhibition of Steve Bell or Peter Brookes? I wouldn’t normally entertain a word of criticism against the British Museum print room, which has educated me for free across the decades, but where’s their survey of these splendidly nasty boys? I want to see the originals, have the process explained in detail and follow the stylistic development of their careers. And do try to get hold of Dave Brown’s hairshirted Gordon Brown stood at the despatch box with his hands in the till, surrounded on all sides by rows of similarly mangled fingers (The Independent, May 14th). A recent BBC4 programme about the South Sea Bubble that is the market for State Art set out with big intentions, none of which was realised. Most of the research was ancient history and we learned nothing we didn’t know before about the dubious workings and furtiveness of the fashionable art trade – a trade whose lingua franca when it isn’t downright lies is calculating misinformation. One telling aspect of the pictures, at least for this viewer who isn’t used to seeing televised auctions or indeed any television at all, was that the stage-managing of these sales has become indistinguishable from the tackiest of afternoon game shows. A Sotheby’s auction is now a sort of sordid Who Wants To Spend A Million? stage presentation presided over by histrionic MCs. ìYou sir! Yes you! Come on down!î I wouldn’t put canned applause past Sotheby’s. The programme wasn’t brave enough and its research not nearly exhaustive or lucky enough. It was also a show whose focus rather too obviously kept altering as circumstances overtook it, so it ended up being neither one thing nor the other. One has a certain sympathy with the producers because the art world is shrouded in secrecy and its characters are so obnoxiously slippery. My word what a seedy, conceited bunch of hucksters they looked. The fact than none of the main protagonists – whether dealers, artists, auctioneers or the Tate’s very own President-For-Life – would co-operate with the programme’s makers spoke more loudly of something to hide than anything actually stated in the programme. In the end, the art business must have been delighted to have got off so lightly. Why such a mediocre effort is worth mentioning here is that this represents yet another lost opportunity in illustrating the part played in the underwriting of market values by publicly funded bodies who have no business spending our money promoting selective, tendentious personal whims. The programme focused on auction houses but underplayed the fact that both major auctioneers actually operate as dealers in their own right. At one point recently a director of Sotheby’s sat as a trustee at the Tate, which happened at the time to be organising a major retrospective of an artist, Peter Doig, in which the same auction house had a defining financial interest. The incumbent trustee resigned soon after we exposed this disgraceful conflict of interest – which, incidentally, the auctioneer threatened to sue us over if ever we mentioned it again. Nice try but piss off! Another major failing of this failed exposÈ – and it is alas a common one among arts programmes – concerned the over-prominence of the presenter who too frequently got in the way of the subject. He was as obviously vain and self-promoting as many of his interviewees were complacent and arrogant. Nowhere in the programme, incidentally, did any of the moneymen, who were naturally claiming to be so thoroughly absorbed by their blue chip investments’ profundity, mention one single quality of one single work of art. David Lee | |||||
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