The Anti-Turner Prize

In less than 24 hours, the winner of the Turner Prize 2010 will be announced. Traditionally, this is the moment for purists to wail that JMW Turner would be turning in his grave. This year’s shortlist - Susan Philipsz, Angela de la Cruz, Dexter Dalwood and the Otolith Group - is more than usually uninspiring.

It’s a dreary, empty exhibition. It makes you long for the halcyon days of Jim Lambie’s psychedelic canaries, Simon Starling’s Shedboatshed, and Rebecca Warren’s fleshly goddesses. 

This year there are deserted galleries piped with sound art, banks of video screens, sack-like and deflated canvases, and a meditation on the Death of David Kelly. Depressing stuff.

However, Turner needn’t roll in his grave just yet, for a bricklayer from Dorset is upholding the grand tradition of the Turneresque landscape.

Antony Spencer is the winner of this year’s Take a View landscape photography awards. The winning photograph scooped £10,000 and will be on display for six weeks at the National Theatre.

The photograph (top,) taken as the sun rises over Corfe Castle, is strikingly reminiscent of Turner’s great Romantic landscape Dolbadarn Castle (below.)

Dolbadarn Castle is one of Turner’s most important paintings. Sketched in situ in 1798, and later worked up and submitted to the Royal Academy in 1800, the painting secured Turner's election to the post of Academician. 

It’s the quintessential romantic landscape: ruined castle on distant promontory, figures dwarfed by the sublimity of nature, ravines, rocky outcrops, gathering banks of cloud. Turner even affixed some suitably heroic verse to the painting. The poem recounts the fate of Owain the Red,  who was imprisoned for twenty two years in Dolbadarn by his brother Llewelyn the Last:

How awful is the silence of the waste...

Majestic solitude, behold the tower

Where hapless Owen, long imprison’d, pin’d

And wrung his hands for liberty in vain.

Antony Spencer isn’t Turner. His photographs tend towards the pinky-purpley screensavery end of things. But it’s nice to see the English landscape tradition alive and well. In these soulless days of the crinkle-crankle static of sound art and the tortuous introspection of post-post-conceptual art, it is reassuring to find a photographer taking pleasure in dawn light, frosted gorse, green and pleasant fields and that old romantic chestnut: the castle on a cliff. 

In Vino Venustas: How Caravaggio became Marks and Spencer's new poster boy

Earlier in the week, I spotted this bottle of Pinot Grigio in the Marks and Spencer flagship store at Marble Arch. The painting on the label is Caravaggio’s The Musicians (1595.)

Three students of music are caught off-guard as they tune their instruments, consult their sheet music and generally limber up for a performance. Cupid makes this trio a quartet. He fusses with a bunch of grapes, giving them a prune before they're still-life ready. If music be the food of love, play on.

It's a great image for a bottle of wine. Cupid’s grapes are a small, but vital, detail. The painting says: company, love, music, and art, these are the important things in life, but a glass of wine is a fine addition.  

If you were being pedantic you might say that a Garganega wine from the Veneto would have been better illustrated by a Venetian artist. A nice Bacchus by Titian, maybe? But I like the contrast between a refined and rarefied northern wine and a hot-blooded southern painter. At Tesco and Sainsbury’s you can get a Garganega wine with a Canaletto on the label: a clean, bright white wine married with an immaculate and exacting Venetian artist.

Alas, the civilising M&S mission has stopped at one bottle of white wine. There is as yet no Rembrandt roast beef, no Salvador Dali Lobster Thermidor, and no Damien Hirst shark fin soup.

Meet the Ancestors: A Wills and Kate Special

Two weeks ago Prince William and Kate Middleton announced their engagement. While the rest of the country were snapping up Issa dresses, ordering replica sapphire rings from QVC and placing bets on the wedding date, I was searching the Royal Collection catalogue for details on the full length ceremonial portrait hanging above the St James’s Palace photo call.

Which monarch would William align himself with on this most important of days? How about Henry VIII, famed for his matrimonial devotion and steadfastness? Or George IV who said of his wife Caroline of Brunswick that ‘it required no small effort to conquer my aversion and overcome the disgust of her person’? Maybe better to go with George III and Queen Charlotte who were married for nearly sixty years and had fifteen children together?

Prince William opted for a portrait of his namesake William IV by Sir Martin Archer Shee, the largely forgotten artist who succeeded Thomas Lawrence as president of the Royal Academy.  As matrimonial role models go, William is not the obvious choice. Before he came to the throne William IV spent twenty years living in sin with Mrs Dorothea Jordan, a comic actress with whom he had ten illegitimate children. 

The political satirists were merciless. ‘Actress’ was as bad as ‘prostitute’ and ‘jordan’ was slang for a chamber pot. A particularly vicious cartoon 'The Crack'd Jordan' by James Gillray has William disappearing headfirst into a large earthenware commode with much vigorous yahooing.  

William eventually settled down. At 53 he married the twenty five year old Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen. The couple had four children; none survived infancy. And so ended the Hanoverian kings. 

Shee's portrait of William IV was a strange choice for the engagement of William and Kate. The Jordan affair ended dismally with Dorothea, exiled to France to escape her creditors, dying alone and in poverty in a Parisian suburb. Adelaide and William suffered the death of two daughters and twin baby sons.

William and Kate might have done their homework. Both studied history of art at St Andrews (we’ll let Wills off because he did switch to geography) and should have been alert to any adverse symbolism lurking in their choice of backing painting.

I wish them well. I hope the satirists are kind to Kate, that their many strapping heirs inherit her hair and not his, and that when the time comes to announce the first Windsor/Middleton birth they’ll do it in front of something more appropriate. Court painter Johann Zoffany did a nice line in happy families. 

Savage Landscapes - Salvator Rosa at the Dulwich Picture Gallery

There is an embarrassing moment in Ann Radcliffe’s much-lampooned novel of 1794 The Mysteries of Udulpho when the author briefly loses track of her elaborate historical plot. The year, supposedly, is 1584 and the heroine Emily St Aubert is travelling through the sublime Midi-Pyrenees. The narrator provides a panoramic voice-over:  ‘This was such a scene as Salvator would have chosen, had he then existed for his canvas.’

It’s a clumsy anachronism. Salvator Rosa won’t be born for another thirty years. Radcliffe never went to Italy, never made it further south than the Rhine. The Italy of Udulpho, The Italian and A Sicilian Romance is a fantasy cribbed from engravings after Rosa’s paintings bought from a print shop in Bath.

The artist is there in Radcliffe’s wild and rugged landscapes, in the villainous banditti lurking beneath storm-blasted arches, the wiry ascetics meditating in the mountains, and in her crumbling bridges, precipitous passes, and subterraneous caverns.

Radcliffe wasn’t the only writer to rely on the Rosa effect. The first of the Gothic novels, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, reads like a series of set pieces from Rosa’s greatest hits. Walpole acknowledged the debt when he gushed in his alpine travel journal: ‘Precipices, mountains, wolves, torrents, rumblings – Salvator Rosa.’ The quote is etched on the walls of the Salvator Rosa exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

The exhibition explores the darkest recesses of Rosa’s macabre imagination. His heroes are outlaws and outcasts, naked witches and men of the hills. His paintings are haunted by brinded cats and wingéd skeletons, fenny snakes and gutted toads, strange hybrid rat-newts and owl-bats as big as a man.

His craggy landscapes provide the backdrop to the more strange and mystical events from the Bible and ancient history. Rosa revisits the grim fate of Atilius Regulus: imprisoned inside a barrel, struck through with nails, and launched down a hill. He takes a morbid pleasure in the tragic suicide of the philosopher Empedocles as he leaps from the jagged lip of Etna into the teeming, spitting lava below. In Rosa’s version of the prophetic Dream of Jacob the angels brawl on Jacob’s ladder, having a punch up over who stepped on which rung first.  

Technically, Rosa is not one of the greats. His female nudes are ill-proportioned. Their breasts sit either squintingly close together or practically under the armpits. They sport enormous biceps, manly hands, and hobbit toes. He’s more at ease with the dry, sagging, crepey bodies of his witches than he is with a nubile life-model posing for Fortuna.

Rosa is the original Goth.  He paints his sitters with sallow, graveyard skin and relishes the dirt under their fingernails. If there is a bridge to be crossed it may collapse at any moment, if there’s a path through the mountains it is lined with armed bandits, and if there’s a distant, hopeful light in the darkening woods, you can bet your last match that it comes from beneath a cauldron.  

The Talented Mr Regency - Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance at the National Portrait Gallery

Sex Sells. Celebrity Sells. Scandal Sells. Scholarship? Not so much. The traditional way to sell a portrait show is with an emphasis on celebrity sitters, studio liaisons, and social climbing from the garret to the court.

Stick a buzzword in the exhibition title: Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity (Tate, 2005.) Sprinkle the exhibition guide with words like ‘international,’ ‘glamorous’ and ‘fashionable’ (Gainsborough, Tate, 2003; Pompeo Batoni, National Gallery, 2008.) Use phrases like ‘master of spin,’ ‘manipulation of the media,’ ‘free publicity’ and ‘cult of celebrity’ (The Creation of Celebrity, endlessly.) Above all, don’t forget this ticket-selling phrase: ‘the Mario Testino of his day’ (all portrait exhibitions post-Mario Testino: Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, 2001.)

There’s something troubling about this insistence that portraiture must be sexed-up, made contemporary, made palatable to an audience raised on Heat, celebrity wedding spreads, and the red carpet photo call. Everything must be filtered through modern obsessions; the preoccupations and social conventions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are dismissed as dusty, ‘unrelatable,’ and drily historic.

In Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance the National Portrait Gallery has admirably bucked the trend. The temptations must have been great. Lawrence was a social lion hunter. His back catalogue includes George III and Queen Charlotte, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Devonshire, the Duke of Wellington and the CEO of Lloyds, heroes of the West End stage and the Palace of Westminster, a couple of Prime Ministers and a Pope. This one had ‘Mario Testino’ written all over it.

Lawrence doesn’t need sexing-up or gossip-column titillation. What the dignified NPG show demonstrates is that an enviable address book and an It-boy persona only take you so far. What really matters is: can you paint? And, boy, can Lawrence paint.

He doesn’t just make his sitters look rich, he makes them look expensive. He endows them with the clotted cream and cherry-cheeked complexions of the truly well-bred. Tans and care-worn foreheads are for farm labourers, Lawrence’s sitters have the dewy skin and clear, bright eyes of people who breathe a superior sort of air: the air of thousand acre estates and Portman and St. James’s Squares.

Lawrence shows us the long haired Etonian Arthur Atherley brooding over Windsor with his romantic locks blow-dried into tumbling Vidal Sassoon waves. His Lady Selina Meade wears four strands of pearls around her pale, powdered neck, threaded on gold cord, each pearl reflecting a fleck of light. Mrs Wolff poses in yard after yard of pristine ivory satin, extravagantly ruched and puffed in the latest Empire style. It takes a lot of servants to keep a dress that white.   

Lawrence paints like a Marks and Spencers’ advert: this is not just a trouser suit, this is a Thomas Lawrence crimson velvet trouser suit edged with crushed French silk. This is not just a soldier’s uniform, this is a gold-frogged, silver-embroidered, bronze-sashed, ermine-trimmed officer’s uniform topped with a brushed-fur Busby hat.

Criticism tends to fall on Lawrence’s portraits of children: too cloying, a bit cutie-pie and sweetie-goo. No one does a chubby knee or a tousle-haired moppet like Lawrence does. The NPG have been rightly sparing with Lawrence’s treacle-pudding children. Four canvases of plump nursery cherubs are enough.

If there is a connection to be drawn between Lawrence and Testino it is this: they are both superlative flatterers. Lawrence paints with built-in Photoshop, slimming the thunder thighs and barrel chest of Lord Mountstuart and airbrushing the naked shoulders and décolletage of the Duchesse de Berry. In Lawrence’s hands his subjects are sexier, better, taller, stronger. Or even just cuter. 

Postcards from an Eighteenth Century Gap Year - Canaletto at the National Gallery

If you were a young and expensively educated nobleman in 1735, you didn’t take your gap year in Thailand or Brazil or India. You went to Italy. Instead of a Full Moon Party, you went to the Carnevale di Venezia and instead of Machu Picchu you climbed Vesuvius. Modern Gap Yahs come back with 1,200 photos destined for Facebook; their eighteenth century counterparts came back with a Canaletto.

Venetian view painters are often cast in a mercenary light. They are the purveyors of dead cert commercial hits. Why starve in a garret when souvenirs sell?  Canaletto was no maverick, no revolutionary.  He painted what the punters ordered: immaculate reproductions of Venice’s top tourist attractions for maximum bragging rights back home. Been there, done that, bought the painting.

The National Gallery’s autumn show Venice: Canaletto and his Rivals demonstrates that commercial success and genuine artistry can go hand in hand. It’s an unshowy exhibition: chronological, safe, uncontroversial, no radical reassessments here. It does however bring together fifty paintings by eleven different artists in such a way that the paintings are allowed speak for themselves. The advantage of such unobtrusive curatorship is that it encourages a certain amount of thinking for oneself. It’s an exhibition which emphasises looking over reading.

Canaletto doesn’t emerge as the uncontested hero. There's no doubt that he's superior to, say, Luca Carlevarijs who tends towards high camp festivities (his regattas would give the Notting Hill Carnival a run for its money) but pitted against a Michele Marieschi or a Francesco Guardi it’s a tightly fought contest.

Marieschi does mind-altering things with perspective. He twists bridges, canals and even entire islands into arrangements which would fox M.C. Escher. He goes in for bold lighting effects: the courtyard of the Doge’s palace cast into Stygian shadows or pink lightening flashing through storm clouds over the Rialto bridge.

Guardi is a wonderfully sinister artist.  Venice can be a creepy, choleric sort of place and Guardi paints the city at its dankest and most overcrowded. His is the Venice of Thomas Mann or Henry James. If you see a flash of red on the jacket of a boatman in a Guardi painting it elicits a Don’t Look Now shiver.

But it’s not all damp, consumptive gloom.  Canaletto, his pupil Bernardo Bellotto and Johan Richter all possess a wicked sense of humour. Richter punctures the ego of a vain gondolier when he has him clamber clumsily from a boat onto a boardwalk with his arse pointing into the air. Bellotto paints a snivelling child wiping his nose on his sleeve while his exasperated father drags him across the Campo. Canaletto crams his paintings full of incidental detail: a trawlerman scratching his backside, a toddler squalling on the ground, a cat licking its armpit, mongrels squaring up to fight.

Venice looks delicious. Palaces and churches are seen through a lattice of ships’ masts and sail ropes.  Pomaded Grand Tourists in full skirts and frock coats (and that’s just the men) promenade through the piazzas past beggars, fishmongers and novice nuns. From every balcony grandees admire the lagoon while housemaids beat dusty brooms from fourth floor windows. No one has ever made Venice look such a desirable holiday destination as Canaletto and his contemporaries. 

Kensington vs. The Vatican - The Raphael Tapestries at the V&A

What was your reaction to the state visit of Pope Benedict XVI? Elation? Apathy? Damascene conversion to Catholicism? Did you bask in the sunshine and reflected glory of the pontiff in Hyde Park? Or did you line up behind Peter Tatchell waving the banner for atheism?

Whatever your personal preferences, the visit of Pope Benedict has undoubtedly done good things for the Autumn arts calendar. For the Pope came from the South bearing gifts.

To coincide with the papal visit, the Vatican has loaned four of its Raphael tapestries to the Victoria and Albert Museum.  Britain has been home to Raphael’s original cartoons since Charles I, then Prince of Wales, purchased them in 1623 and the V&A exhibition has reunited tapestries and cartoons for the first time in almost 500 years.  

The tapestries are unbelievably beautiful. What artistry, what detail, what patience! Each hangs five metres high and nearly six wide, woven in wool, silk and gilt-metal wrapped thread with sometimes as many as twenty four wefts per centimetre. Designed to hang in the Sistine Chapel the ten tapestries depict scenes from Christ’s ministry and the lives of Peter and Paul.

Better than the biblical scenes proper are the exquisite embroidered borders. Those running along the base of each tapestry are imagined as bronze reliefs illustrating scenes from the lives of the Medici popes as if they were the epic deeds of the heroes of Troy.

The vertical borders contain sexier and more lugubrious figures. An allegorical portrait of the Four Seasons has Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter done up like burlesque dancers at a particularly racy harvest festival.  Another border depicts the three theological virtues Faith, Hope and Charity looking decorous and chaste in miniature classical temples. Any sense of modesty is scandalously undermined by a pair of buxom, bare-breasted sphinxes holding up the temple of Hope.

The V&A comes out rather well from the exhibition. Beautiful though the Vatican tapestries are they lack the muscular robustness and clarity of the original cartoons. For artworks entering their sixth century, the cartoons are in fantastic nick (there’s been a bit of restoration along the way) and the colours are wonderfully vivid.

These are the most peacock-inclined disciples in Western art. In the Miraculous Draught of the Fishes, Peter wears a tunic in Copacabana lime green, while in the Healing of the Lame Man, Peter (again, who knew the first Pope was such a clotheshorse?) sports cerulean blue and mustard yellow robes. By contrast, the tapestries are muted, washed-out, sun-bleached. The faces of the apostles lose their solemnity and solidity in the transfer from cartoon to tapestry. When the V&A gives the tapestries back at the end of the month they can feel smug that they get to keep the better half of the spoils.

After 500 years, the Raphael cartoons and tapestries stand as testament to the artistic ambition of Pope Leo X. What will Benedict XVI leave on the walls of the Vatican for us to remember him by? If the Popemobile is anything to go by, then papal taste is long due a new Renaissance.

Mad Men: Gin Lane and Lane Pryce

Mad Men is a show for trainspotters. The spotter may favour three piece suits and pencil skirts over anoraks but they are spotters none the less. Keen spotters will tell you which James Bond novel appears on the cover of Playboy in Episode 6 of Season 4 and which 1960s spy drama Sally Draper watches in Episode 5.

Spotters who are watching closely will have noticed a framed engraving on the wall of Lane Pryce’s office. Pryce is a late-comer to the series: a model of the stuffy, tweedy, conservative Englishman. He's the man who balances the books. Marooned on Manhattan Island, a long way from home, Pryce decorates his office with a reminder of the old world. His chosen artwork: the final plate of William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress.

Published as a series of eight engravings in 1735, The Rake’s Progress charts the decline and fall of a young man corrupted by money, women, booze and dice. He is aided in his descent by a cast of sycophants and toadies, prostitutes and card sharks, bailiffs and jailors.

At the beginning of the series, our anti-hero Tom Rakewell inherits the fortune hoarded by his miserly father. Coins spill from the rafters of his dirty living room with its cracked window panes and greying whitewash walls. Newly wealthy Tom is already being measured for a new suit.

In the second plate Tom is surrounded by salesmen. A landscape designer proposes a garden in the French style. A jockey presents the cup won by Tom’s racehorse. Maestros insist that hunting, dancing, fencing and music are indispensable to the man of taste and fortune.

Tom develops less refined tastes. In plate three, we find him in a bathhouse late at night canoodling with a syphilitic prostitute. He is drunk and slack-jawed. His socks have fallen down, his shirt hangs loose. The whore has stolen his watch.

And it gets worse. He is arrested in the street for non-payment of debts. He marries an ageing, cross-eyed dowager then squanders her fortune at the gaming house. In the penultimate scene he is incarcerated in the Fleet unable to pay even the beer-boy.

The final print which hangs on the wall of Pryce’s office has the Rake writhing on the floor of Bedlam Hospital for the Insane. The pursuit of ‘stuff,’ the company of whores, gin and cards has ended in tragedy. A salutary lesson for the womanising, whiskey drinking, salesmen of Madison Avenue?

Or just a clever pun at the expense of a Mad Man? 

Modern Art on the Dungheap

Last Summer I sat in the Tate Modern waiting for a friend. The Turbine Hall was in one of its fallow periods, between one Unilever installation and the next. It was early on a weekday morning and more or less deserted. The only other gallery visitors were a mother, with a baby in a pram, and a toddler. The toddler, a blonde and cherubic girl, gleefully rolled a ball up and down the Turbine Hall’s slope. It was the sort of thing to warm the cockles of the heart, a small child enjoying a museum, engaging with the architecture, forming a life-long engagement with art. This touching scene was somewhat spoiled when the mother produced a potty, set it down on the Turbine slope, and stood by with baby-wipes while her daughter relieved herself.

I only rehearse this unsavoury story, because effluent is very much on the cultural agenda – and would you believe it, on the cover of Vogue – this month. Tate Britain is hosting a mid-career retrospective of British artist Chris Ofili. Like his contemporaries Tracey ‘Unmade Bed’ Emin, Damien ‘Shark Tank’ Hirst and Grayson ‘Transvestite Potter’ Perry, Ofili comes with a convenient career-encapsulating sobriquet. Chris ‘Elephant Dung’ Ofili made his name and won his Turner Prize with paintings that recycled the outpourings of the elephant enclosure at Whipsnade Zoo. In his youth he staged ‘Shit Sales’ in Berlin and London, laying out his artistic wares on market stalls.

Before you chorus “modern art – what a load of…” let's speak for the artist’s defence. Ofili is a wonderfully talented and inventive painter with a sensibility to colour unmatched by any living British artist. He is a worthy subject for a retrospective, excrement or no.

The Tate have confronted the dung thing head on.  The exhibition opens with a room that showcases Ofili at his most elephantine. His Shithead sculpture of 1993 is the oddest of self-portraits: a spherical dung ball with Rastafarian dreadlocks and a grinning mouth of human teeth. Also on display are the monumental canvases 7 Bitches Tossing their Pussies Before the Divine Dungand The Adoration of Captain Shit. The exhibition, incidentally, does have a parental advisory warning, but there were dozens of children on the Saturday I visited. (Presumably the offspring of the sort of liberal parents who encourage their children go to the loo in museum foyers).  Ofili is not at his best in these early works, their titles, and the pornographic imagery which accompany them, are the mark of a puerile, underdeveloped imagination. But they are early examples of Ofili’s breath-taking colour combinations, beautiful, saturated Trinidad and Tobago colours.

The crowning glory of the exhibition, and of Ofili’s career, is the Upper Room, here re-created in its David Adjaye designed chapel. When it was first exhibited at Tate Britain in 2005, what should have been a triumph was undermined by an insider trading scandal. The Tate, with Ofili on its board of trustees, was heavily criticised for buying the works. It was a shame. Ofili-gate overshadowed what was the single most beautiful art work of the last ten years. The thirteen paintings, a Jungle Book recreation of the Last Supper, are iridescent jewels, magnificently rich in both colour and texture.

Ofili goes off the boil a bit after the rapture of the Upper Room. His move to Trinidad has been accompanied by a Blue Period. It’s a bit gloomy. Along with colour, he has abandoned his elephant dung. Trinidad is a long way from Whipsnade.

Maybe Ofili needs the dung. It’s his talisman and its absence from the later galleries, with their drowsy, melancholy, and monochrome canvases, is the elephant in the room.

This article first appeared at www.varsity.co.uk