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