David Inshaw, Roland Collins... & Picasso at the Courtauld

David Inshaw: Bonfire, Tree, Moon & Firework, 2012 

Yesterday I finally got to see David Inshaw's unsettling masterpiece 'The Badminton Game' in person, hanging in its rightful place on a gallery wall. Meticulously painted with a crazy sort of pointillist-meets-pre-Raphaelite attention to detail, it transforms a summery moment into a scene that is both whimsical and ominous. This sense of something unknown lurking behind an otherwise beautiful scene gives David's best work its attention-holding power, and if you're a fan of British landscape painting, post-war art in general or just wonderful pictures, I would hightail down New Bond Street to the Fine Art Society and have a look at the exhibition.

The Fine Art Society, with Badminton Game and mink.

Some of the figures are good, particularly the triptych of a woman draped in a towel, but I think the countryside brings out the best in an artist whose work is in the great tradition of visionary British landscape painters. Like Paul Nash he has a peculiar feeling for trees, and like Eric Ravilious he finds imaginative ways to explore chalk figures - particularly the Cerne Abbas giant. Crows in flight, bonfires, cliffs and water-filled ditches are all presented coolly and without fuss, yet each motif is charged with ambiguous emotions.

15 Paintings by David Inhaw, Fine Art Society (a bit dark, sorry)

If you want to know more, have a look at what Andrew Lambirth has to say, visit David's website, or best of all go along to the show.

Meanwhile, in another part of the city... in fact just round the corner in Cork Street, Browse and Darby have an exhibition of work by Roland Collins, who at the age of 94 is enjoying a well-deserved popularity. After a sold-out show at Mascalls last year he has recently exhibited at the Rye Art Gallery, and now has this small but lovely London exhibition.

Roland Collins, Belgrave Mews

His are paintings that do better with fairly subtle lighting, so that the colours are more natural, and this is the case here. Rather than being dazzled you can focus on his wonderful compositions, the best of which draw the eye through the foreground into some half-hidden scene behind. This show also features watercolours from the early part of his career - in the late 1930s - so you can see how his work exploded into life after the war, when he loosened up and grew more bold.

Roland Collins, A Shore Off the Yacht Club, Whitstable

Meanwhile, in another part of the city... As I had a little time before going to Greenwich to talk about 'Ravilious: Submarine', I trotted along to the Courtauld Gallery - surely one of the most civilized places in London. In fact it's more or less the perfect art museum, being small, fairly quiet and full of interest. Trying to order a cup of tea in the cafe proved to be a bit of a challenge, but then I was able to sit outside and look up at the sky...

If you have a friend who is interested in art history but intimidated by the vastness of most museums, the Courtauld is the perfect place to start. Starting at the bottom and working your way up through the three floors you see examples of work from diverse periods in European art, from the 14th century to the 20th. It's unusual to see such a carefully selected group of pictures covering such a wide time-frame, and fascinating to chart developments and influences.

It struck me that the figures in the current exhibition, Becoming Picasso: Paris 1901, have much in common with the very earliest pictures in the collection, being simplified and expressive. The overwhelming impression, though, was of the Spaniard's sheer energy; accompanying photos show the maniacal light in his eyes, while the paintings themselves are bursting with life. One day, I think, people will look at Picasso's more grotesque work and wonder what all the fuss was about, but in these youthful paintings his brilliance, emotional power and vitality is clear to see.

View of the Courtauld, with melancholy barmaid

Still, the picture I spent longest enjoying was 'A Bar at the Folies-Bergere'. A couple were very earnestly discussing the fact that the girl's reflection isn't quite right - it should be directly behind, perhaps, rather than off to the side. Meanwhile, the barmaid gazed out, as she has done for more than a century, waiting without much hope for her shift to be over.

Wanted: Good Home for John Piper Mural

John Piper, An Englishman's Home (section), 1951 (Liss Fine Art)

 

Before street art there were murals, and in 20th century Britain numerous public and corporate buildings were decorated inside and out. From Rex Whistler's wall paintings in the dining room at Tate Britain to the Gordon Cullen mural at Greenside Primary School in Hammersmith, murals were a significant feature of our everyday cultural life; there's an evocative piece by Ben Pentreath on the subject here.

At the more humdrum end of the scale we have a mural at the end of our road in Bristol, a massive picture of a balloon floating over the landscape; it's painted on the side of a pub overlooking a green and, like murals everywhere, it is gradually fading. The Twentieth Century Society is currently campaigning to preserve what it can of the thousand-plus murals painted in the decades after World War Two.

An Englishman's Home fills one wall of the gallery at 22 Old Bond St

Given our climate and the upheavals of the past century it isn't surprising that so many murals have disappeared, but some have survived. Among the stunning pictures on show at the Fine Art Society are several large works commissioned for the 1951 Festival of Britain and painted on panels rather than directly onto walls. There were no doubt good practical reasons for this, but one perhaps unforeseen result is that the murals have been preserved.

There are dramatic pieces by Peter Lanyon, Edward Bawden, Barbara Jones and Alan Sorrell, but the mural that really steals the show is John Piper's epic architectural painting, 'An Englishman's Home'. As you can see from my rather poor photos, this is a fabulously huge picture, painted in oils on 42 panels. Exhibited in 1951 it subsequently languished in an Essex barn for years before being displayed for the Festival of Britain anniversary in 2011.

Right hand end with Brighton-Aquatints-style rooftops, chair included for scale

As the archetypal Romantic Modern, Piper has been enjoying a resurgence in popularity in recent years. But although good paintings from the first half of his career are hard to come by and expensive, no institution has yet come forward to buy 'An Englishman's Home'. This seems rather odd to me. Given the quality of the mural, its historical significance, its beauty and the standing of the artist who made it, I'd have imagined that art museums would be desperate to get their hands on those 42 panels.

Why has nobody come running, chequebook in hand? And how, if no major institution gets behind modern British murals, are the rest of us to be persuaded that it's worth preserving those pictures that still adorn the walls of schools, hospitals, restaurants and village halls around the country?

FFI: Fine Art Society
Twentieth Century Society

A Lost World Rediscovered: 20th Century Murals at the Fine Art Society

Colin Gill, Allegro, 1921 (FAS London/Liss Fine Art)

Around 90% of the murals painted in Britain in the last century have been lost; the work of some artists, notably Eric Ravilious, has suffered so badly from neglect, bomb damage and what have you that only photographs and studies survive. The remaining murals, meanwhile, languish in obscurity. I had no idea, despite living in Bristol, that there's a fabulous painted ceiling by Thomas Monnington in our post-war Council House. Murals tend, by their very nature, to be fixed to a particular place, and if you never visit that place you're unlikely to see the painting.

So how, I wondered when I heard about the Fine Art Society's new exhibition of 20th century British Murals and Decorative Painting (in association with Liss Fine Art), do you go about putting on a mural show? In 1969 the Hayward Gallery held an exhibition of frescoes rescued from damp and crumbling buildings in Florence; these pictures were removed in ingenious ways from the walls on which Renaissance artists had painted them and transported around the world. Would something similar happen here?

Mary Adshead, An English Holiday: The Village Inn (detail), 1928 (FAS London/Liss Fine Art)

The short answer, judging from the exuberant catalogue, is no. The works on display are either studies for wall paintings - which vary from small watercolours to large-scale oil paintings - or murals painted on canvas or wooden panels. So, for example, we have two beautiful pictures painted by Mary Adshead in 1928 for Lord Beaverbrook, part of a series called 'An English Holiday'; these large-scale oils were designed to fill the walls of the press tycoon's dining room, but in the end he cancelled the commission, supposedly because a friend persuaded him that he was bound to fall out with the various grandees who had modelled for the paintings, and then be stuck with them every night at dinner.

There are some well known pieces here, including John Piper's 42-panel epic 'An Englishman's Home', which he painted for the 1951 Festival of Britain, and Edward Bawden's 'The English Pub' (1949-50), which spent a quarter century adorning the First Class Lounge of the SS Oronsay. But you'll also find plenty of delightful surprises. I'm looking forward to seeing John Armstrong's design for the Telecinema Mural (also painted for the Festival) and Barbara Jones' astonishing 3-panel picture 'Out in the Hall', which features a giant bear standing in a hallway the walls of which are bright yellow with a design of large white polka dots.

Alan Sorrell, Working Boats, 1951 (FAS London/Liss Fine Art)

This is one of the murals discussed in depth in a new book published by Sansom & Company to coincide with the exhibition: 'British Murals and Decorative Painting, 1920-1970'. I haven't seen it yet, but it sounds wonderful, with an array of experts each focusing on a particular piece: Ruth Artmonsky on Barbara Jones, David Fraser Jenkins on Piper and so on. I'm interested to read what Alan Powers has to say about Alan Sorrell's delightful mural 'Working Boats from Around the British Coast' (1951), which includes the Norfolk Wherry but not, I was sad to see, the Severn Trow. With Stanley Spencer and Rex Whistler also featured, this book sounds like a must-have.

FFI: www.faslondon.com
www.lissfineart.com
www.sansomandcompany.co.uk

Edward Burra: Pallant House Retrospective

Edward Burra, Country Scene 2, 1970

Why do we neglect British artists so badly? When you think of the effort made by Kenneth Clark to employ painters during World War II, both as war artists and on projects like Recording Britain, you have to wonder what has gone wrong since. Look at Edward Burra, one of the most original and extraordinary painters of the century.

Edward Burra, Silver Dollar Bar, 1948

He worked from the 1920s to the 1970s, travelling widely and painting subjects as diverse as 1930s Harlem, the cafes and hotels of French ports and bizarre skulls and skeletons. Prolific and inventive, he brought to the world an eye that was neither Modernist nor traditional; in fact his vision doesn't fit any of the maps of 20th century painting. For that reason he ought to be celebrated as a true original but instead art historians (the map-makers) have skirted around him.

Burra doesn't even sound British, and his work certainly doesn't look British - where are we supposed to put him? What were his influences and who, in turn, did he influence? Where does he belong in the evolution of art? 

Visiting the recent Watercolour show at Tate Britain I was knocked sideways by a gigantic painting of a church interior. Surely it couldn't be watercolour?! It was too big, too bold. It stuck out among the gentle washes and topographical details like the sorest of thumbs. I didn't know then that the artist who made that picture was crippled, often barely able to use his hands. I didn't know that he painted in the strangest way, starting in one corner and working his way like a spider across the paper. I didn't know that he was born and raised in suburban luxury, just outside Rye, and lived his whole life either at his parents' house (which he hated) or in the town itself (which he didn't like either).

I did happen to know that he was a friend of Paul Nash and studied at the RCA during the 'outbreak of talent' that included Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Rex Whistler (Fine Art) and Ravilious and Bawden (Design). Burra appears in 'Paul Nash in Pictures: Landscape and Dream', accompanying the Nashes and their friend Ruth Clark on a disastrous 1930 trip to the Cote D'Azur...

Edward Burra, Valley and River, Northumberland, 1972

These few bits of information make Ed Burra seem all the more extraordinary, so well done to the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester for putting on the first major retrospective of his work in a quarter-century. Hooray! It starts at the weekend and runs until February, and personally I can't wait to get there. I'm particularly keen to see the late landscapes - there was one fabulous example in the Tate's Watercolour exhibition - with their lovely greens and idiosyncratic design.

A new monograph is being launched at the show, but I would also recommend Jane Stevenson's book and Burra's letters - his writing is as peculiar as his painting. You can also see the artist's work in 'The Strawberry Thief', Jeremy Deller's show at the Fine Art Society - which also features Deller's model of a Ravilious plant house.

For a slightly different take on the subject, look here.