A New show of Walter Sickert's work at the Dulwich Picture
Gallery in London sheds facinating new light on a great
artist.
By Richard Dorment, The Telegraph
10.03.09
What strange times we’re living in. When the Art Newspaper
reported recently that Tate Britain is expected to announce the
cancellation of a retrospective devoted to the 18th-century
portrait painter Johan Zoffany, I thought, well, these things
happen. Money is tight, sponsorship difficult to find, and Zoffany
isn’t as well known his contemporaries Reynolds and Gainsborough.
But then I read further. The reported reason for the cancellation
wasn’t money or sponsorship, exactly, but something much more
sinister. Apparently the gallery feels under pressure to mount
shows that attract more than the 80,000 visitors expected for
Zoffany. Let me repeat that figure: eighty-thousand!
Even a decade ago big guns like Tate, the V&A and the
British Museum would have been delighted with those visitor numbers
– especially for an artist who isn’t a household name. Such
institutions felt a moral obligation to alternate shows of broad
popular appeal with ones that attract fewer visitors but added to
the sum of human knowledge. In Britain today, the lumbering giants
need to rack up visitor numbers to make money and to justify their
existence to the government. That may be understandable, I guess —
but oh, so short -sighted.
Yet there is good news too. Far from being the
end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it, this obsession with blockbusters
has created remarkable opportunities for smaller venues, many of
which have moved quickly to fill what you might call the gap in the
market. Cézanne’s watercolours and Sickert’s nudes; American
paintings and British illustration; Renaissance majolica and
masterpieces by Chardin and Boucher: in recent years the Courtauld
Gallery, Dulwich Picture Gallery, and the Wallace Collection have
developed exhibition programmes that are every bit as lively and
often more adventurous than those of much bigger institutions. Then
too, these galleries take advantage of the artistic resources on
their doorstep, often putting together shows based on their own
collections supplemented by judicious loans from British
collections. The curators work on a much smaller scale, of course –
but smaller doesn’t mean dumber. All three galleries continue to
maintain the highest standards of scholarship.
A model of what a small gallery can do on a not very big budget
is Dulwich’s Sickert in Venice, which looks at a single creative
period in this remarkable artist’s long and prolific career – his
three visits to Venice in 1895-96, 1900 and 1901. Unlike in a big
retrospective, a show like this can explore a transitional decade
in depth. So if, like me, you thought you knew Sickert’s work well,
think again.
In his studies of the basilica San Marco at dusk, for example,
he views that filigreed façade from head on and from approximately
the distance you’d see it from the middle of St Mark’s Square. But
in each painting the building is irradiated by the light of the sun
setting at a slightly different time of day, so that in one the sky
is a saturated cerulean blue, in another pinkish-violet, and in a
third a poisonous shade of lime green. By showing these pictures as
a series in which the light changes from moment to moment,
Sickert’s debt to Monet’s cathedral facades has never been made
clearer. But unlike Monet, after painting the whole building,
Sickert then zooms in like a film director to make dramatic
close-up studies of details like the golden horses on the roof.
Likewise, at Dulwich you’ll find smaller, odder, more
experimental works of a kind you just wouldn’t see in more
comprehensive surveys. In his study of the high altar of the
baroque church of the Scalzi, for instance, he fills every
centimetre of the canvas with nervous, flickering touches of
purple, black, grey, and dirty yellow so that no area of the canvas
is more or less important than any other. Because the picture’s
tone is sombre and its subject fairly conventional, it is easy to
miss the significance of what Sickert is doing in it. For by
minimising visual distinctions between foreground and background,
top and bottom, and left and right he anticipates an aesthetic of
all-over abstraction that anticipates the art of Pollock and
Johns.
Remember, too, that in choosing to paint Venice Sickert was
following in the footsteps of giants like Sargent, Whistler and
Monet. The challenge therefore was to avoid imitation and to guard
against cliché. While he doesn’t steer clear of tourist views like
San Marco and the Salute, he is also adept at finding subjects no
other artist had ever treated before, as when he paints the Palazzo
Montecuccioli in the late afternoon, when sunlight still falls on
one side of the canal, but buildings and their reflections are
thrown into deep shadow on the other. (Until May 31).
A very different but no less thrilling exhibition at the Wallace
Collection looks not at the work of a single artist, but at a
single moment in time. In 1349, as plague swept through Europe, the
terrified populace turned against their Jewish neighbours whom they
accused of spreading disease by poisoning the drinking water. In
two communities of German Jews – one at Erfurt the other at Colmar,
wealthy merchants hid jewels before fleeing for their lives.
Whether they were murdered in cold blood or struck down by the
plague we don’t know, but they never returned to recover their
possessions.
Both hordes lay undisturbed for centuries, the first unearthed
in 1863, the other discovered as late as 1998. This is what we see
in Treasures of the Black Death You don’t need my help to
appreciate the superbly crafted gold rings and brooches, inset with
amethysts and studded with sapphires, pearls and garnets. But as
you examine them – and the exquisitely worked gold and silver
clasps, belts, buttons and hair ornaments – ask yourself the
following question: with what else in medieval art can these
objects be compared? The surprising answer is: nothing. Whereas
spectacular royal and ecclesiastical treasure from the middle Ages
survives, less showy jewels made to be worn by the wives and
daughters of wealthy merchants have disappeared. Most medieval
goldsmiths worked not for the highest ranks of society but for what
today we would call the middle classes. But in times of war,
poverty or persecution, this kind of metal work never survives.
And so, a vanished world comes vividly to life when you see a
solid gold Jewish wedding ring in the form of a tiny edifice that
looks like a miniature gothic cathedral. Inscribed “mazel tov”
(good wishes) it symbolises the Temple of Jerusalem and I’m
enchanted to tell you that if you were to pick it up you’d hear a
little rattle bouncing around inside.
There is a heartbreaking sense of ordinary lives interrupted, of
time standing still in the sight of a silver gilt belt decorated
with enamel inscriptions reading “Love” “Health” and the owner’s
name, “Annchen” (Little Anne). And until death came – violently,
suddenly – and took everything she had away, I wonder who owned the
love token in the form of a silver lock and key?
You discover, too, how sophisticated these communities must have
been. Shown with a silver gilt cosmetic set is a wad of cotton.
That might not sound exciting – until you recall that in Medieval
Europe there was no cotton: the wisps we see here, once soaked in
sweet perfume, must have been imported from Egypt. This quietly
unforgettable show runs until May 10.
Finally, at the Courtauld Gallery “Love and Marriage in
Renaissance Florence” looks at two important objects from the
permanent collection, wedding chests or cassone ordered in 1472 for
the marriage of Leonardo Morelli to a young woman of the Nerli
family. These elaborately carved and richly gilded chests are inset
with panels by Jacopo del Sellaio and Biagio di Antonio showing
scenes from Livy’s history of Rome. As in a conventional painting
of the period, the delightful, fairytale figures and animals move
across a landscape dotted with the crenulated towers on imaginary
hills shown in deep perspective.
Such cassone seem to have been fairly common, at least judging
by the number I’ve seen in museums over the years – and invariably
walked straight past.
You can’t do that here, because the chests are mounted on
plinths to enable us to examine the intricate, frieze-like
compositions from close to, and then to compare them to other
examples on show. For anyone seriously interested in Renaissance
painting this show breaks new ground. It probably won’t attract a
huge audience, but then that is precisely why the always admirable
Courtauld Gallery needed to do it. (Until May 17).