Pictures from an Exhibition

Earlier today I dropped in on the National Gallery to have a look at the Corot to Monet exhibition. The magic name of Monet certainly seems to be drawing the crowds, so it's not exactly an intimate or contemplative experience, and it's downstairs in the gloom of those artificially lit galleries, which is never a good idea. It's also rather on the large side - four quite densely hung rooms - whereas these 'fresh look' exhibitions often work best on a small scale. This one is, in fact, an extension of last year's lovely little one-roomer called, I think, the Landscape Oil Sketch, and includes several of the same pictures, including an extraordinarily spare and luminous sketch of a (mostly sky and water) landscape near Haarlem by Andreas Schelfhout, and Thomas Jones's masterly A Wall in Naples. From Corot to Monet follows a line of mostly French plein-air painting from early days on the Campagna and around Naples, back to Barbizon, Fontainebleau and the artistic discovery of the French land(and river and sea)scape. It's certainly a must for Corot fans, with work from every period of his career, including a wonderful early view of Avignon and The Four Times of Day, a set of large painted panels which were a treasured possession of Lord Leighton. There's a monumental Millet, The Winnower, quite out of kilter with the rest of the Barbizon stuff, and a grand big Turner, The Evening Star. A powerful Beach Scene by Courbet (a throng of clouds, a streak of light, a turbid Lake Geneva) stands out, and there's a breezy, luminous Bonington, three interchangeable Boudins, and, yes, at the end, the Monets - four of them, including a fine early beachscape, La Pointe de la Heve, remarkably accomplished and hinting at things to come. And so it ends - with the Bathers at La Grenouilliere, a long way from the careful views on the Campagna with which the exhibition opens. The point is made.
Meanwhile, outside on the fourth plinth, a woman was sitting down on the edge, reading a book, when I went in. Nobody was taking any notice. When I came out, she'd been replaced by a grey-haired fellow with a placard reading 'Hello Park Road Year 6'. He was waving hopefully from time to time, but still nobody was taking any notice. How much longer is this going on?

Plinth Madness

So the Trafalgar Square plinth lark got hijacked by a protestor. No surprise there, though it was a pretty lame 'message' - Ban Tobacco & Actors Smoking. Hmm... It will get worse and nastier, especially as Gormley, no doubt putting a brave face on it, seems to have given the green light to any nutjob who cares to get up there and make his/her 'point' - he might live to regret that... Never mind, Gormley has more important things to do, such as appearing on The Archers, an imminent event excitedly discussed by the denizens of Ambridge this evening, ahead of an edition of Front Row much of which was devoted to the Plinth. O dear o dear... Let's get one thing straight. Such is the lamentable state of public sculpture, there was never any prospect of the empty fourth plinth being satisfactorily topped - the nearest of the various try-outs was Rachel Whiteread's ghostly inversion of the plinth itself, which could have stayed put as far as I was concerned. But no, all manner of fantastically dumb and/or fantastically badly executed ideas were tried out - and then the great self-publicist Gormley was allowed to take over with his crass notion of allowing 'ordinary people' their moment atop the plinth. The best moment in Front Row's plinth coverage was the contribution from the excellent Ben Lewis, who hailed the event as historic - in as much as it marked the most banal idea any artist was ever allowed to enact in a public space (or words to that effect). He's right of course, but what can you expect when art is viewed in terms of 'ideas' and novelty and entertainment value, as so many competing attractions in a consumer fairground? And how else would art be viewed in a culture that has lost touch with its roots? A truly modern art is always the product of a deep engagement, not with the present, still less the future, but with the past. The gods of literary modernism, for example - Eliot, Joyce, Pound - were steeped in the literature and culture of the past, rediscovering, reimagining, re-creating, knowing that there was no finding a way forward without going back, back, back. The art that consciously addresses the present rarely lasts. As Charles Peguy wrote, 'Homer is still new this morning, and nothing perhaps is as old as today's newspaper'. Or, God help us, today's art world stunt.