Monochrome and Lake

Yesterday I gravitated again to the National Gallery, this time to have a look at the Monochrome exhibition, which consists largely of pictures painted in black and white, shades of grey, or shades of another single colour. It's a fascinating study, illuminating just how effective monochrome can be in exploring the subtle play of light on complex forms – as in the striking Ingres odalisque above.
 There's some fine work on show – all the way from Van Eyck and other Flemish and Netherlandish painters to Gerhard Richter's haunting Gelda Matura and Her Fiance and some rather dreary abstract work. A tiny black and white Tempest by Peder Balke and a large fragment of a Giandomenico Tiepolo wall painting also caught my eye, as did a wonderful Durer study of a Woman in Netherlandish Dress Seen from Behind [below]. There was some remarkable trompe l'oeil work too – including a Chardin copy framed behind trompe l'oeil broken glass (it had me fooled) – but it's not the kind of exhibition that delivers deep aesthetic pleasures. At least it didn't for me.

 It ends with a mighty flourish, though – an entirely different form of monochrome, created by Olafur Eliasson: an interior lit entirely by intense monofrequency sodium lighting. The effect of this blaze of flat yellow-orange light after all that subdued black and white is dramatic. The sodium light wipes out whole swathes of colours, replacing them with new unearthly tints, a kind of after-image of colour where none was before. To walk back into the monochrome exhibition after an immersion in this sodium light is to experience, temporarily, a strange new world of colour in what is ostensibly black and white. And to exit from the sodium into the body of the gallery is to wander for a while dazed and blinking and in need of the familiar polychrome world.
 As it happened, I had some time to kill before the gallery closed, so I went up the grand staircase to see what was in Room One. It turned out to be a lovely little exhibition built around one of the National Gallery's most popular paintings – Lake Keitele by the Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kalliela. The much-loved painting appears here in four subtly different versions, along with a range of other equally attractive lakescapes, one of them a brilliantly executed large pastel. There's also an interesting stained-glass work (one of Gallen-Kaleila's other lines) with the title 'Rouse Thyself, Finland!' Well, quite.
 Those fresh plein air blues of Lake Keitele were the perfect antidote to sodium and monochrome.