The Jackdaw

Category: Essays

  • Public art: Richard Wilson’s slipstream

    Richard Wilson’s 77-tonne, £2.5 million sculpture Slipstream in Terminal 2 at Heathrow looks better in small, professionally taken photographs. In the flesh it disappoints. Looking more like a plane crash or an imploded barrage balloon than the rolling Spitfire which is claimed to have inspired it, it is so huge and so easily disappears into the building that many passengers walk past it without noticing, which defeats its stated purpose to stop passengers in their tracks. Nobody breaks step to look at it not least because a busy airport is an inappropriate space for sculpture requiring not just attention but a walk around it. And if you spotted it, short of identifying a connection with aircraft construction, you would have to be told what it was there for and what it signified, for no way might you work it out from observation. Indeed it is too large for its space, and there is no one vantage point from which it can be understood clearly. At the blunt end its shapes seem unresolved even coarse. Like many new buildings, the Lowry Centre in Salford Quays comes to mind, the flimsy aluminium panels covering it are bent and rippled from being badly riveted together lending it an amateurish appearance. If nothing else it makes you realize how well-made aircraft are; the boilersuits of Seattle and Hawarden would laugh out loud if shown this effort. Formally it makes no sense and progresses randomly, on and on, from one passage to another.

    Like many oversized sculptures it implies the nasty decadence of an age impressed by scale in which demands for something more than the merely superficial are derided for their lack of brash ambition. This is an unpleasant object suspended in an atrium which would be more agreeable without it. With this work the elephant in the room is meaningless public art.

    Richard Wilson is a surprising artist, but this baggy mess defeated him. It landed stillborn and perhaps of all his works it is, unfortunately, the one which will last the longest.

    David Lee

  • Serpentine Gallery: charity begins at home

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    The ever so charitable Serpentine, which gives the public indigestible quantities of what it can’t stomach, held an annual summer bash for all its rich mates, and, blow me down, guess who deigned to show up. He’s probably not been at the gallery since last year’s hooley, but he broke into a heavy work schedule abroad – very heavy don’t yer know – in order to attend. After someone had reminded him where his desk was and the location of his private lavatory since the new building work, he had his picture taken (above) with co-director Dorelia Lipstick-Cleavage and some dwarf Bolivian gatecrasher caught panhandling the stars for change. We’re referring, of course, to Hans-Uber Obrist, who gets paid more than the director of Tate Britain to do fuck all except write unreadable books and curate exhibitions for continental galleries. You can tell by his specs he thinks he’s clever but someone really ought to teach the Swiss slob to eat without splattering food all over his suit – Sir Les Patterson finds his gob more easily.

    Typical, isn’t it, that the lazy bastard should finally turn up only to sup fizz in what, given the stick insects in attendance, must have looked like a very challengingly immersive conceptual art stunt about eating disorders. (They didn’t bother organising nibbles this time as last year cleaners were finding cocktail sausages behind the radiators for months afterwards.) And we have it on the best authority that the Obrist phaeton was waiting to rush him back to Heathrow for a red-eye special to Zurich, although he had trouble locating it among the cavalcade of other limos. What an exemplary giving enterprise the Serpentine has become.

    All of the above is, you know well enough, grossly unfair as the gallery’s summer party is a well-known fundraiser … for charity. It raises funds to, well, to put on exhibitions by the world’s wealthiest artists and dealers who couldn’t possibly afford to pay for the exhibitions themselves. And when directors are awarded 50% pay increases in a recession you need to devise ingenious methods to raise funds. And how better to do this than by rattling cans in front of celebrities so desperate to have their photos taken they’d turn up to the opening of a manhole. So let’s hear it for the philanthropic ethos of the Serpentine.

    See you next year Hans, if you’re not too busy.

    David Lee

     

  • BBC arts coverage (part 34)

    Two months ago, having been criticised for their useless visual arts coverage, which tends to be levelled at children and others of grotesque collective ignorance, the BBC promised us a raft of excellent arts programmes. Perhaps things were looking up.

    One of these has now hit the screen … with a splat. The organisation has clearly learned nothing from the criticism levelled against them. It’s more of the same; windmill-gesturing commentators mouthing repetitive mantras who emphasise their earnestness by raising the volume and begging to be believed.

    The programme – and the Jackdaw only watched the first episode (life being literally too short in his case for the following instalments) rehearses the now familiar territory of the women artists in art history who, women claim, have been neglected and overlooked because of some terrible male subterfuge refusing to admit their quality. Seemingly, there is now an annual television programme dealing with this ‘travesty’. We know the names of the women artists before they are mentioned, for they are always the same ones. The source manual for all these series is Germaine Greer’s original book, The Obstacle Race, published decades ago. Greer ought to receive a royalty from programmes like this. Honestly, based on the title you could have written down the shooting schedule for this series in under five minutes.

    The programme was presented by social historian Professor Amanda Vickery who repeated herself throughout in order to get across her four soundbytes whilst falling foul of the criticism she meted out to others. Instead of showing work which would convince us that this neglected artist was unfairly overlooked we saw the Prof’s decent little arse disappearing around corners, up aisles, down passages, climbing staircases. In many instances it was probably more of a work of art than most of the stuff we were prevented from seeing because of the director’s obsession with it.

    In the case of Properzia de Rossi (1490-1530), a Bolognese sculptor, we were shown a couple of crudely carved cherry stones and a relief carving of Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife (left). By the standards of Renaissance sculpture this is a so-so carving of the quality you might find in a side corridor at the back of the V&A, and I think Professor Vickery would have admitted as much if she had been any kind of expert on the subject. Arms revolving uncontrollably like a compass at the north pole, she indicated a crudely carved arm (marked on the illustration) and claimed it had the power of a Michelangelo carving. Even small on the screen this was embarrassing bollocks.

    The programme fell foul of the BBC’s usual problem of showing too much of an over-enthusiastic presenter forced to behave like a second-hand car salesman. In one instance the crew went to the Prado to show us a Sofonisba Anguissola portrait but focused on the presenter stood next to it. We didn’t get an opportunity to take in properly the whole picture. By all means have the presenter talking over the visuals but for heaven’s sake let us see the picture so we can make a judgement.

    One assumes the series went on to discuss Artemisia Gentileschi, truly an accomplished painter and a fascinating individual, but most  interested viewers would not have stayed around to find out.

    Art, not presenters, is important.

    It is essential when claiming neglect for certain artists that we are shown work of a standard disabusing us of unfair preconceptions. Some women artists deserve better than this annually served up nonsense.

    David Lee

  • Imperial War Museum North: the pitfalls of novelty

    In the first few years of the National Lottery, museums were built employing architects who had no interest in museums per se but instead limitlessly indulged their own vanity. Those who drew attention to the blatant unsuitability of resulting buildings were dissed as old-fashioned, traditional and behind the architectural times. The result of this defended process was that buildings materialised which were uniquely unsuitable. This building-for-appearances sake continues but, following numerous notable failures, sensible scepticism is growing.

    One might reasonably ask why museum trustees went along with this philosophy in the first place. Surely they should have realised at the time the unsuitability of structures such as the Imperial War Museum North. One supposes the commissioners of such a pisspoor building wanted to be seen as ambitious, forward looking, and willing to embrace the new even if it was fundamentally crass. They did not want to appear cautious or conservative: indeed, it’s a certainty they wouldn’t have been appointed as trustees if they were. And you can bet your pension that the Lottery, with its hand-picked State Art assessors, wouldn’t consider supporting any plan without the cutting-edge novelty added by one of its approved architects. During this process the basic intellectual challenge in any building, that originality of design should be matched to suitability of purpose, was waived.

    The Imperial War Museum North is a horrible failure. Twelve years after opening it is already dilapidated and its inadequacies depressingly apparent. Even in warm weather the attendant showing people to a concealed concrete entrance has to be dressed for the Pole because a vortex of cold wind rushes through an ugly, skeletal and empty tower. And so much of this building is also empty. Like many such developments it looks huge and unusual from a distance and cheap, jerry-built and cramped on arrival.

    The exhibition space is an asymmetrical, gloomy shed, high roofed and echoing, where it is hard to find bearings. Corridors are poky, meandering and seemingly ad hoc and there are no galleries for showing the pictures of the best collection of 20th century British art outside the Tate.

    Gilbert Rogers’s Ypres, 1915 (above), 11 by 15 feet, is being exhibited for the first time in a century. It shows the work of the RAMC and the British Red Cross tending wounded at a dressing station during the first battle of Ypres in 1914. You might have thought they would have exhibited this picture prominently, but instead it is stuck behind a staircase because they can just about wedge it in there, but nowhere else. You can’t see it comfortably. It was worth pulling out of store but they had nowhere to show it properly in a museum they had themselves commissioned. The fact that the IWMN displays, as currently organised, constitute an unordered, noisy ‘Visitor Experience’ of conflicting flashing projections in which every surface is ripe for films and animations is another serious problem. The place has more in common with a multiplex than a museum.

    With the IWM’s London headquarters unluckily closed for the first half of this WW1 centenary year, how easy it ought to have been to truck up to this outpost some of the great First World War pictures currently not on show. But there isn’t anywhere to put them. Indeed, the exhibition area is tiny compared to the overall dimensions of the site and the outer bluster of the structure.

    How did the trustees fall for this turkey of a stunt without asking obvious questions about its unsuitability? Doubtless they were intimidated by architect Daniel Liebeskind spinning them a line about the globe being shattered and the pieces being reconstructed in a way which would “emotionally move the soul of the visitor toward a sometimes unexpected realization”. That’s the sort of bollocks mouthed by the desperate in all professions. The fact is the trustees were sold a pup by a silvertongue. Thus was a worthwhile project sacrificed to the whim of an architect whose one London building on Holloway Road is the capital’s tackiest eyesore.

    We inhabit an age when it is impossible to expect a new museum capable of showing exhibits well. Why has it become impertinent to demand a building fitted to its purpose?

    David Lee

  • House of Commons art collection: hard bargains and money well spent

    What a kerfuffle occurred recently concerning how much the House of Commons has spent – £250,000 in 20 years no less – on portraits of its more distinguished and long-serving members. How shocking and self-indulgent was the general tenor of the response. Well, no actually. To get two dozen paintings for 250 grand suggests someone is driving a hard bargain on our behalf for once. What we have received for our money is generally accomplished if predictable, and dirt cheap. Don’t forget that the Tate recently paid half this total sum for a certificate which allows them to have a light being switched on and off in an empty gallery.

    To get a portrait by Stuart Pearson Wright for ten grand is a good investment, if nothing else. His account of ship-of-state Diane Abbott (above) is at least a painting not a photograph by an original artist. Likewise Phil Hale’s version of Blair (top right). These two painters are among our most interesting oddities in painting. Eschewing the obvious, they surprise and are of quirky, unpredictable intelligence. Look at Hale’s account of that slippery wretch Blair. As a character study of failure it’s as good as you’ll get. This is a picture of weakness, of a person cringing inside with pain and wrestling with an appalling legacy of foreign crimes, not to mention his fiddling in No 10 while his neighbour-from-hell bankrupted the country. Which picture would you prefer to be in the National Portrait Gallery, Hales’ or Adams’ (see opposite)?

    The Arts Council gets away with wasting tens of millions on white elephant buildings and no newspaper bats an eyelid, while this collection of portraits for a mere quarter of a million is slaughtered. Andrew Tiff’s photorealistic portrait of Tony Benn, which has long been on display in the NPG, cost a mere £2,000. What do these jerks in the dailies expect to pay for an oil painting? If anyone is worthy of a portrait it’s Benn, and to get a painting for the price of a photograph is deft business. The commissioners should in all honesty have offered Tiff more. We should all be celebrating the fact that skilful artists have been prepared to work for not very much.

    David Lee

  • Van Dyck self portrait: do we really want to pay £12 million for this?

    The self-portrait by Van Dyck is the subject of a deferred export licence in order to give British museums an opportunity to find the £12.5 million required to stop it going abroad.

    The NPG, where the picture is currently on show drumming up donations, has started a campaign to raise £12.5 million to acquire the picture. They have raised £1.2 million so far – only 90% to find then in the remaining eight weeks. The Tate turned down the offer of a joint campaign and joint ownership pleading depleted reserves, and the Sunday Times has had the impertinence to reveal that the NPG had previously turned down an offer to buy the picture for a quarter less than they are now apparently desperate to pay.

    The picture was bought at auction by London dealer Philip Mould in league with an American backer for £8.3 million in 2009, and it has now, they say, been sold to an American collector for £12.5 million.

    As is customary on these occasions the hyperbolometer has been yanked over to Full Steam Ahead – “Give us as much smokescreen as you’ve got Mr Stoker”. “Aye aye Skipper”. Everyone suddenly believes this is a masterpiece that must be “saved” at all costs.

    And yes it is an agreeable enough picture, a trifle tartily got up in its period frame, but it’s not worth the money and neither are we short of Van Dycks. Experts claim that the artist is depicting himself in the act of painting. Maybe so, but if he really is seeing himself in the act of execution, in order to get this view in a mirror he would have to be a left-hander and as his drawings demonstrate Van Dyck was no south paw.

    The head is precisely what we expect of a living, alert character study by Van Dyck. The silk doublet is not quite so convincing. Its attempted bravura handling falls short for an artist we know to be a master of the deft, silky flourish. Did Van Dyck perhaps complete the head and then pass it down the studio line? It is after all dated to the last year of his life. It could be that the only part completed on the artist’s death was the head, and someone else, not quite as classy, finished it off. When they sold it in 2009 Sotheby’s described it as a work painted “with the utmost bravado and confidence; each sweep of the paint brush breathtakingly effective despite its deceptive simplicity.” They also cite numerous ‘probablys’ and ‘possiblys’ in its provenance.

    The fact is we’ve been told very little about this picture: did it, for example, begin life as an oval? And where are the Tate and NPG 17th century experts with their considered analyses of this picture?

    David Lee

  • Graham Sutherland: exultant strangeness at Abbott Hall and Crane Kalman

    Few save masochists would venture as far as Kendal in order to see work by Bethan Huws, not least because unless you happen to have attended one of State Art’s indoctrination sessions you won’t have heard of her. A taste considered acquirable only by the starving, Huws is among State Art’s chosen apostles. Sadly, she is unmissable in Kendal for the wrong reasons.

    For most the Lancashire town is distant and in previous decades only the likes of George Romney, who was born there, Sheila Fell, a landscape painter now forgotten but at her best worth travelling to see, and Thomas Bewick, father of English wood engravers, have attracted this paper to its fastness. All were worth the trip. Additionally, several decades ago the town’s Brewery Art Centre staged ambitious photography exhibitions, but no longer.

    The main event at Abbott Hall until September 15th is landscapes by Graham Sutherland, an artist once considered among the country’s finest artists but now relegated to the long list of those dismissed and, like Trotsky, as good as doctored from the record. Like his contemporary, the equally disregarded John Piper, Sutherland is considered the sort of parochial petit maître in which British art specialised during the mid-20th century.

    Until recently, of the Tate’s 56 works by Sutherland none was on display although three pieces have been dusted down for the Millbank rehang. Between 1935 and 1945 Sutherland was among the six most recognized artists working in Britain, each of whom was aware of what the other high flyers were up to. With knowledge of the latest Parisian isms, and especially Surrealism (this undoubtedly due to the well-promoted London surveys of this movement in the mid-30s), Sutherland explored form well beyond the conservatism of his instinct and training.

    This is an absorbing exhibition organized by those understanding of and sympathetic towards Sutherland’s direction. Among a small number of important works are pieces showing the inventions needed to arrive at an appearance, a feel, beyond the superficial and well distant from the topographical. Exaggerating natural forms which attracted him, his work is the equivalent to the experience of a country walk during which details and oddities are noted and accumulated. Like Piper, he found no idiosyncracy of natural shape uninteresting.

    The perfect accompaniment to the first room of the exhibition which traces Sutherland’s beginnings in detailed pastoral etchings inspired by Samuel Palmer’s bucolic prints (some are helpfully included), would be silence. Just as you need to listen to a landscape by Rubens or Constable an ear helps with these scenes too.

    Unfortunately, that possibility is ruined by noise from a Bethan Huws’s video installation. Called Singing for the Sea, and made in 1993, Bulgarian grandmothers wearing traditional costume stand wailing in a circle on a beach. Officially their singing is called ‘antiphonal’ whilst, unofficially, it is a bloody awful racket. (The piece was commissioned by Artangel and is on loan from the Tate – who doubtless, between them, also supplied the ‘masterpiece’ tag with which this pretentious guff is accompanied.) The grannies were flown to Northumberland to do their performance. Doubtless there was a very challenging and cutting-edge reason why this noise couldn’t have been recorded more cheaply on the Black Sea coast. The women moan and shout incessantly, loudly, near the tops of their voice. As an exercise in fatuity [I think you must mean ‘deeply spiritual ritual’? Ed] this takes some beating.

    The upshot is that because of these bellyaching peasants concentration on Sutherland is impossible. The few paying visitors present at the same time as The Jackdaw were all of a mind that this was an outrageous intrusion tantamount to deliberate sabotage. The price of having Huws’s ghastly piece in the gallery, inevitably described by the fools responsible for installing it as ‘unique’ and ‘haunting’, is the impaired appreciation of everything else. Can those who promote this species of material be so unaware that looking at pictures requires undistracted attention? Perhaps their experience originates solely in a period when painting was so unfashionable that they never mastered the art of looking at it properly. Some people now working in galleries don’t seem to understand that noise is a distraction which flies in the face of why a gallery should exist in the first place. There must be a venue somewhere appropriate to antiphoning Slavs but it isn’t anywhere close to a landscape painting.

    A few issues ago The Jackdaw noticed an exhibition of John Piper’s landscapes at Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester. In the decade after 1935 Piper, as was illustrated there, and Sutherland were aware on one another’s experiments, and their drawings exhibit a related sympathy. Their landscape pictures, the one working in Snowdonia, the other in Pembrokeshire, converse and compare notes. In both, for example, drama and threat are emphasised by daylight scenes appearing to take place in darkness. Though their aims and methods couldn’t be more different, the results are close in effect.

    In passing, it is fashionable these days to compare Sutherland unfavourably with Bacon on the grounds that the latter was more original. This exhibition, featuring works well in advance of Bacon’s post-war debut, gives the lie to that exaggeration. Bacon was well aware of Sutherland’s stylistic experiments to get beyond appearances and narrative logic.

    What is impressively illustrated in these pictures is the deliberate, intelligent progress they chart towards a way of depicting landscape so it is simultaneously recognisable and mysterious and its substance both solid and dissolving. In a work such as Rock Form in a Landscape (opposite) the style parallels closely what Piper was simultaneously attempting in Nant Ffrancon. In another work here (above), a commission for his war artist duty of depicting those working in mines, Sutherland’s knowledge of Moore’s drawings (particularly in the technique of using contour lines to emphasise solid volume) is apparent in the figures. It would seem that the more exploratory artists of this moment were working fully aware of one another’s advances while not being party to any movement.

    The exhibition is a reminder of Sutherland’s status as an explorer at a time when his reputation could scarcely be lower. The show could bear having more works in it. Looking through the 55 Sutherlands owned by the Tate and which are never on show, or ever likely to be, numerous other drawings (besides the three loaned to the exhibition) would have further amplified the journey Sutherland undertook during these years.

    David Lee

  • National Rail Museum

    The most elegantly streamlined of all British Rail’s steam locomotives was the Great North Eastern Region A4 class of which an engine called Mallard is the best known of the 35 built at Doncaster works. Designed in 1935 by Sir Nigel Gresley, whose earlier A3 class (of which Flying Scotsman is the preserved example) was in terms of classy looks arguably the apogee of the conventional un-streamlined locomotive, the A4s, or Streaks as trainspotters dubbed them, pulled blue riband expresses between King’s Cross and Edinburgh/Aberdeen. Few who have seen one will forget it because they represent the most dashing solution to their function. In terms of efficiency (especially if fuelled by the best Welsh coal) it was as reliable and as quick as Charles Collett’s ‘King’ class of the Great Western Railway, though far racier on the eye.

    Often over the 13 years of The Jackdaw an argument has been advanced that as a work of sculpture, of form, of beautiful workmanship, an A4 (or, indeed, a Collett ten-wheeler or a Stanier pacific) is immeasurably more stimulating than any lifeless metal behemoths by Anthony Caro or Richard Serra. Presented with a do-or-die choice between an A4 and a row of yellow tin lock-ups by Donald Judd the answer is a no-brainer.

    To celebrate the 75th anniversary of Mallard screaming down Stoke Bank between Grantham and Peterborough at over 126 mph on July 3rd, 1938, and thereby establishing a world speed record for a steam locomotive, the National Rail Museum has taken three years to arrange the delight of bringing together the six preserved Streaks, three of which are still in steam and one of which only a few weeks ago was breezing up the east coast main line pulling a long rake of coaches at close to a ton. Two of the six have been generously loaned from museums in Canada and the USA. It cost the NRM a great deal in money and ingenuity to achieve this feat of organization. One suspects the resulting exhibition has almost bankrupted them. But it was worth it. The record crowds smiling at the gleaming spectacle of their line-up parade is testimony to that.

    The Great Gathering, as it was dubbed, took place in July and was free to the public. Recently threatened with closure by its parent, the Science Museum, I fear the NRM missed a trick here. Nobody would have complained at paying a fiver or more for the privilege of seeing these engines together for what certainly will be the last time. And anyone attending would have realised immediately the crucifying expense involved in making this possible. The National Gallery is currently charging £15 to see in its basement an exhibition of pictures normally shown free of charge two floors up. In other walks of life we call this cheating but we live content with this sort of distasteful scam in the visual arts, while the NRM are obviously not up for such scheming dishonesty. As we have mentioned here before the NRM is among few museums which don’t seem to lie about their attendance figures. We have noticed over the years, for example, that the place is always well attended though it registers far fewer annual visitors than museums which give the impression of being empty almost all the time. It’s a fact that most museums lie about their attendance.

    So, there they all stood arranged on the spokes off the turntable in the engine hall, newly painted and buffed to a high shine by volunteers. The crowds of enthusiasts were delighted. Never would you see in any other museum such visitor attention to detail, such appreciation of refinement, as you get in the NRM. It’s one of those places where visitors could probably lecture the staff. The public love this place and they show it. Doubtless the sponsor, train set maker Hornby, was delighted that the six engines looked as spit-and-polished as a guardsman’s boots on parade, just like enlarged versions of their models. This perfection, however, presents a problem in the days of preserved locomotives because it renders the object tartily unreal, for in memory they were never like this. Engines were neglected and abused, especially after 1945 when most looked like vagrants. They were expected to work hard and get used to being caked filthy, which more often than not they were.

    One would have loved to have seen these six engines outside the engine house, dirty and simmering in air aromatic with the cocktail of steam, coal fire and sump oil. Here, they looked marvelous but it all seemed remotely decorative and lifeless. One would also have preferred to see them without their matching headboards bearing the sponsor’s name and the silly overblown legend, The Great Gathering. These inauthentic plates ruined the lines of the smoke box. It was as if BP had slapped their logo on the winning face in their annual portrait competition. When the Dwight D Eisenhower arrived from Green Bay in Wisconsin a few months before the event it was still in its working black livery, with rivets bursting and pressure-twisted, and with panels pitted as though recently returned from a war zone. It looked more the part then than it does now in its dashing green coat and frilly knickers.

    The sense of elegy lurked heavily behind the thick gloss paint and gaudy souvenirs. Here was an example of genius in engineering and design, manufactured and cast from the steel of Scunthorpe and Teesside, and built by the boilermakers, rivetters and tradesmen of Yorkshire and Lancashire. How many schoolchildren have heard of Gresley, Stanier, Bulleid, Ivatt, Thompson, Collett or Churchward? Or Armstrong, North British, Vulcan, English Electric, Beyer Peacock, Metropolitan Vickers? Or emotive towns like Horwich, Newton-le-Willows, Crewe, Derby, Stratford, Swindon, Barry, Brighton and Eastleigh?

    The NRM will never be allowed to shut for lack of money because it is too genuinely popular. Enjoyment and surprise are visible on every face. Retired engineering blokes explain the workings of valve gear to one another and visitors young and old discuss and compare exhibits enumerating their favourites. You never see this happen in the National Gallery where the body language of corpulent tourists tells of universal drudgery and attendance under sufferance.

    The NRM deserve more than our thanks for arranging this smashing event – they deserve our cash. They desperately need donations. If you’re reading this and not short, and were perhaps in distant days a trainspotter, please send them a tenner.

    David Lee

  • Perming eight from twelve: Lowry and the painting of modern life at Tate Britain

    Perming eight from twelve: Lowry and the painting of modern life at Tate Britain

    Lowry deserves treatment as a serious artist, though more usually such an approach is denied him because of, firstly, his suspiciously wide popularity and, secondly, what is mistakenly characterised as stylistic primitivism. A strong whiff of the patronizing informed reviews of this exhibition, as though the work was a tad unsophisticated for critics used to rambling on for pages about the corners of conceptualism they prefer. The tongue-in-cheek reference in the exhibition title, Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life, didn’t help because it aligned the Mancunian to a story of modern art that doesn’t really apply to him – even the curators’ inspired casuistry couldn’t shoehorn a sui generis Lowry into any wider avant-garde narrative. Guys, Manet and Baudelaire are one thing, the experiences of a visually alert rent collector a lifetime afterwards quite another. That said, this is an excellent exhibition, intelligently, provocatively organized and with catalogue essays more elegantly written and thought through than the drivel customarily accompanying Tate advertisements for recent art. Even for those of us who met him and have often agonised over the real significance of his work, this exhibition helps us to see the Lowry phenomenon more clearly than ever we did before.

    Let’s put one fallacy to bed straightaway. If his pictures look hamfisted it was because he was happy for them to look that way. He knew exactly what he was saying with his style, was knowledgeable about events in both the art of his time and just before, and if his work appears mechanically simple then this was as deliberate as the simplifications and shortcuts informing much else in museum-approved Modern Art. His avoidance of clever-dick explanations when talking about his pictures, for example, is entirely refreshing in the context of unintelligible spoutings by the likes of the usual suspects.

    He attended art school for ten years, where he had a fine teacher whom he respected. Lowry’s personal solution to his own peculiar expressive needs arrived only slowly – as with Constable he was a late developer. And like many who discover an instantly identifiable personal idiom, he stuck to it because it worked, both for him and, more increasingly, for his rapidly developing and appreciative market. This ‘look’ said what he wanted and there is almost no stylistic development from first to last, except that as a pictorial formula it became tired and the execution slapdash. He must have been aware himself – perhaps even painfully – of this late tendency to self-parody. In the industrial scenes at least, his technique, brushwork and approach remained essentially unaltered for nearly fifty years. Painting conventional industrial landscapes, based on observation and spiced with a splash of ‘impressionism’, would not have spoken in the same way. In order to pack in the kaleidoscope of his observations he needed to invent and combine disparate elements, for his, more than most, is an imagined world inspired though it was by actual experience. The working class was for him amusing and impenetrable, a species apart to be observed with curiosity.

    Like Stanley Spencer, Lowry realized from an early age that his subject was all around him. So what inspired this new style? It is tempting to attribute the reason to the fact that his teacher, Adolph Valette (1876-1942), painted the concentration of industry and suffocating air of Manchester and Salford in a way which must have seemed startling to those for whom city scenes were suspect subjects for serious art. Clearly Lowry realised that Valette had exposed the potential of a vital new subject, at least to his eyes. He might also have been aware of Pictorialist photographs by John Dudley Johnson (1868-1955) showing the gloomy effects of a century of industrial revolution on inner Manchester and Liverpool. Both these guides demonstrated that ugliness and filth might be redeemed by beauty of form. Is it too fanciful a suggestion that, as a rent man, Lowry trudged about the city with eyes awakened by his tutors to the unique shapes inflicted on open spaces by heavy and uncontrolled industrial development?

    Lowry’s archetypal industrial ‘scene’ began to emerge around the First World War – a conflict in which he did not fight. From 1909 his family, though desperately aspiring to the middle class, lived modestly in Pendlebury, a working class suburb of north Salford overlooking the Irwell valley. As Ian Jack recently pointed out in the Guardian, this exact area was described by J B Priestley in English Journey in 1934 as having “an ugliness so complete that it is almost exhilarating … it challenges you to live there”.

    Lowry was daily aware of this mesmerising, infernal panorama as soon as he opened his front door. Additionally, his duties as a rent collector introduced him to the sights of even more disadvantaged areas than his own. Just as Charles Dickens and Frank Holl toured the East End of London in pursuit of hard-hitting subjects, so Lowry walked the east of Manchester to observe the raw desolation of the other half. Even within the working class itself, Lowry’s beat of Harpurhey, Ancoats, Miles Platting, Beswick and Newton Heath were renowned as a cut below the rest. As late as the 1950s, and my own experience, these were still scarily impoverished places. Lowry’s view of ragged, hopeless, exhausted people is more accurate than quaint. Luckily for him, social life took place outdoors. Few were the cars and, whenever possible, children especially tended to live in the street in preference to their dark, damp houses. It was impossible to walk around Manchester in the 1950s and not notice cripples, the mad and utterly destitute who were prominent on virtually every street. No             question there is a truth at the heart of Lowry’s vision.

    He tried to paint with originality what he knew, but there is no trace of political motive or social criticism in what he describes. He merely watches, fascinated. Factories, gasometers, coolers, ginnels, long viaducts, cobbles, collieries, bird-cage bridges, back-street bookies, chimneys, churches and classical chapels, and mill blocks interspersed with the incidents of daily life; brawling, death, arguing, evictions, accident, toil and chronic need… These are the elements used by the outsider to orchestrate his scenes with their syncopated verticals tiptoeing across the picture. Each is a complete world in itself. And it’s always grey, weather-free, even on Bank Holiday Monday.

    Immediately on entering the exhibition, you realize how draining and repetitive this all is, the mood unaltering, relentless. He painted the same picture with the same message in slightly different ways. And most of what comes after 1955 is the work of a retired, comfortable old gent with time on his hands. You also realise that the style doesn’t travel well. Specifics originated for one location look contrived when applied elsewhere. With few exceptions, perhaps a handful of scenes in Sunderland, his work depicting places outside Lancashire, is  unsuccessful, the effect half-hearted. They reek of tourism, of holiday art, of unfelt work which didn’t need to be made. The panoramas of South Wales, for example, are failures for being half topography and half ‘style’. Even the considerable natural gift, apparently effortless, for achieving compositional balance deserts him in these scraps and oddities. A more selective artist would have destroyed them. If you lived in Lowryland and were fortunate to escape it for a few days, when you returned it instantly struck home that nowhere else, anywhere, looked anything like this particular place.

    The exhibition shows us Lowry’s originality and his limitations. There is truth here, yes, about both the mental and physical conditions of the interwar populace, but it is hard to escape a conclusion that his descriptions, seen like this en masse, quickly arrive at decoration and formulaic pattern. Repeated mannerisms obstruct the emergence of something more profound from what was a horrifying subject.

    David Lee

  • Martin Creed: new definitions for ‘gift’

    Regular readers may recall from a recent editorial that when ‘we’ bought Yinka Shonibare’s Trafalgar Square bottle to stand outside the National Maritime Museum ten times more was paid for it than had ever been paid for a work by this artist at auction.

    That story of casual profligacy is now repeated in respect of inarticulate chancer Martin Creed, whose entire career is the creation of State Art. Without the life support machine of public patronage the likes of Creed would be stacking shelves.

    In September 2013 the Tate bought Creed’s work no. 227, the lights going on and off, for £122,000, to add to the twelve other works it already owns by him. In passing, one of these is an editioned sheet of paper with ‘fuck off’ typed on it, a masterpiece considered so significant the British Council also owns it; indeed, four of the five Creed works in the British Council’s collection are duplicated in at least one other of the Tate’s, the Government’s or the Arts Council’s holdings. The Art Fund contributed £40,000 of their charitable donors’ money to the acquisition of no. 227. The fact that the Fund had already contributed to seven other Creed ‘gifts’ to the Tate via the Artist Rooms Endowment and to another work for the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art indicates the now symbiotic relationship existing between The Art Fund and State Art – the Fund’s head is, of course, a former director of Tate Britain. To call this network an incestuous racket is to compliment it.

    Ownership of work no. 227 is in the form of a certificate bearing a terse description of the piece, which comes officially in an edition of two plus one artist’s proof. The idea of an ‘artist’s proof’ existing for a sheet of typed paper is, of course, ridiculous, a misuse of an otherwise important distinction. Sadly, this is the sort of mercenary scam we have come to expect from fashionable contemporary art. Work no. 227 is actually in an edition of 3. One of the other two pages was bought in 2005 by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, one of seven Creeds in their collection. MoMA won’t say how much they paid for no. 227 as they don’t “share information about the acquisition of objects”.

    £122,000 is a sum significantly greater than has ever been paid for any other work by Creed. It should have cost much less. A more financially savvy Tate could have bought at auction a similar work in July for a quarter of this sum.

    In 2001 Creed won the £20,000 Turner Prize. He was nominated for a touring retrospective – he was the grand old age of 32. His Turner exhibition party piece was, famously, work no. 227, which was ‘made’, typed presumably, the year before. It caused the kind of concerted debate which instantly projects a merely notorious work to the status of modern classic. Creed became famous overnight. Before the Turner parade, the Tate could have bought no. 227 for well under £10,000.

    When tracking sales of such works the process is confused because there are at least two durations of lights, of five seconds (work no. 227) and thirty seconds (work no. 127), which are sold as different pieces. Then there are other works in which lamps go on and off and buildings in which all the lights are turned on and off at the same time. It is symptomatic of State Art that once a line of merchandise becomes established in the canon, its secure infamy can be milked for profit: perhaps the best example of this is that there are now no fewer than nine pickled sharks.

    In 2010 Creed gave an interview to The Independent in which he stated that he had given the lights going on and off (in its Turner Prize manifestation of five seconds duration), worth, he claimed, £110,000, to the Tate. This was among seven other works, also ‘gifts’, which he claimed were worth £162,000. At this time he refers to the lights being in an edition of three with the other two being in “private collections”. ‘Private collection’ is a curious way – is it not? – of describing MoMA New York.

    In fact, this was all my eye and Peggy Martin, the on-off light was not included in any ‘gift’ otherwise the Tate wouldn’t have had to pay over the odds for it in 2013. And of the seven other works in the Tate’s collection which are said to have been gifts, all are stated on the Gallery’s website as having been contributed to by the Artists’ Rooms Endowment, the Henry Moore Foundation and Tate Patrons. When this group were exhibited at Tate Liverpool in 2012 they were described in publicity material as ‘gifts’. Demonstrably this is nonsense. I have been unable to ascertain – not least because none of the parties will tell me – what proportion of this group acquisition was a genuine gift. We should all be interested to know, if only because the value of these works stated by Creed – £162,000 – is a colossal misrepresentation of their real market potential. Of the seven works ‘gifted’ four are watercolours – crude ziggurats painted in diminishing horizontal blocks of different colours – from a series which until recently fetched between £350 and £1,700 each at auction. For some reason these scraps are very popular with State Art; the British Council and the Government Art Collection also have one each. The other three works ‘gifted’ might have fetched fifty grand on a good day. £162,000 for this stuff is daylight robbery.

    On July 1st in Christie’s evening sale – i.e. a sale usually reserved for blue chip material – Creed’s no. 127 was offered. It was No. 2 in an edition of 2 (also actually 3!). This work had sold first in 1995, then in 1996 for £3,000, and in 2006 at a Kentucky auction for £22,000. The estimate this time (based no doubt on the common knowledge of what the Tate had forked out for their five-second version) was pitched at £50,000 to £70,000, doubtless in the hope that with some fancy footwork an auctioneer might edge the hammer price towards the magical six figures. Christie’s pulled out all the stops, praising its “minimal elegance and formal drama”. They went on: “By redefining the parameters of the viewer’s experience and rupturing perceptual norms, Creed forces us to engage with our surroundings in new and provocative ways.” Naturally, they didn’t bother explaining how our ‘perceptual norm’, whatever that is, had been ‘ruptured’ and what exactly ‘provocative’ might mean in the context of a light being switched on and off. Even had it sold for its high estimate, no. 127 would have been the cheapest work in the auction by four times. On the big night bidding never got beyond £32,000 and it didn’t sell. Not even the artist’s dealer, Hauser and Wirth, was prepared to underwrite the low estimate price, which is unusual in an evening sale where a conspicuous failure can fatally wound a reputation. This showed a distinct lack of faith all round in Creed’s market viability. Christie’s won’t answer questions on this fiasco and mention of it was left out of post-sale results. And as far as the auctioneer’s website is concerned no. 127 has ceased to exist. Rest assured we won’t be seeing a work by Creed feature in a flagship auction any time soon.

    At Christie’s the day after no. 127 failed, another Creed, a watercolour ziggurat from the same series as four of the seven works ‘gifted’ to the Tate said to be worth £162,000, sold for £2,500 – the lowest sum achieved in the auction. The day before at Sotheby’s a large neon work, also akin to one in the £162,000 ‘gift’ sold for £10,000, which was 25% below its low estimate.

    In the context of this embarrassing rejection, the Tate’s acquisition of no. 227 for £122,000 looks like a reckless waste not only of their own money but of The Art Fund’s and the work’s other donor, a dodgy Ukrainian oligarch. They were all taken for a ride.

    If they must buy fashionable trash like no. 227, the Tate should be instructed to do so at auction instead of buying expensively elsewhere. We should also be told what is their working definition of a ‘gift’. And I’ve mentioned many times before the wastefulness of State Art’s main collections buying the same stuff.

    David Lee