New Art from
Old
Published as “A Contemporary
Touch” in RA Magazine (Summer 2000)
About that serial killer of old masters, Picasso, John Richardson once asked: "Why did he lock horns with one great painter after another? Was it a trial of strength like arm wrestling? Was it out of admiration or mockery, irony or homage, Oedipal rivalry or Spanish chauvinism?”
Each of these reasons and more might explain the diversity of motives and impulses of the two dozen contemporary artists who have responded to the invitation of curator Richard Morphet to rework a painting of their choice in the collection of the National Gallery in London (with only Tapies, presumably, capable of “Spanish Chauvinism”). Immediately, though, a fundamental distinction suggest itself: for some of these artists, “locking horns” with the old masters is integral to what makes them tick. Auerbach says he goes to the National Gallery whenever his painting gets stuck. For others, it seems, Mr. Morphet’s invitation has added an unexpected twist to their creative lives.
Transcription – a creative strategy that lies somewhere between copying and cannibalising – is one of the main-stays of the School of London, indeed the strongest link between in many ways very different painters like Bacon and Freud, Kossoff and Kitaj. These latter three, with Uglow and Auerbach, are all included in this show. In Kossoff’s drawings we see a bid for the compositional energy, the tight and compelling design, of painters whose touch and visual sensibility could not be more remote from his own frenzied painterly expressionism. Poussin, for instance, seems Kossoff’s very antithesis in his classical calm and refined composure. Yet there is a whole show touring the United States now of his drawings after the French master. For the National Gallery, Kossoff has left Poussin to Balthus and copied instead Poussin’s great historic rival, Rubens. It is disconcerting how identitical Kossoff’s touch is regardless of which of these painters he approaches.
For Kitaj and Freud, famous old images are less touchstones of quality as springboards for association and plays of meaning. Virtually every Kitaj canvas makes some (or several) reference(s) to other art. For this show, humour wins out over headiness, as he depicts a billionaire collector reclining in poor Vincent’s cane chair. Freud has put away the high jinks of his appropriations of Ingres, Courbet or Watteau on this occasion to make a literal copy of Chardin’s touching portrait of a schoolmistress and her charge. He understands perfectly how the poignancy of the original rests as much in the negative space between the figures as in the absorbtion and poise of the individuals. The connection and yet remoteness of the sitters is an extraordinary metaphor for Freud’s own involvement with Chardin; the closer he gets, the more yawning is the gulf of time and sensibility between them.
And yet, many of the other artists in this show seem not gulfs but worlds apart from their sources. Jeff Wall interprets Stubbs’ sublime Whistlejacket with a photo of a donkey in a barn. The Canadian photographer is famed for his crystalline surfaces, but this strategy seems like an inadvertent advertisement for the plodding lameness of his chosen medium. Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s camp assemblage of props from Vermeer’s Young Woman at her Virginal inspires similar despair. In contrast, Hockney has been inspired by Ingres’s portrait of a worthy contemporary to muster his own skills at humane representation to offer a dozen portraits of gallery guards, the NG’s overlooked living fixtures. And the sculptors in this show, Bourgeois, Cox, and Caro, seem completely deft and unforced in their regard for the structural qualities in their chosen canvases, by Turner, Piero and Duccio, respectively.
But do only middle-aged artists look at old masters? Excluded from this show are the YBAs and yet the Chapman brothers and Sam Taylor Wood are as obsessed with art history as the School of London painters. There has been a scramble in this show for international celebrity, and no doubt it is a coup to secure contributions from the likes of Johns and Kiefer among the other stars, but a more thoughtful conclusion to this show, in my opinion, would have been an emerging painter like Merlin James who a few years ago exhibited a stunning set of Poussin variations at the National Museum of Wales.