What links... Kenneth Clark, British Folk Art & Peggy Angus?

How's that for Folk Art? Lady Godiva Clock, Coventry, with tile mural by Peggy Angus

Hooray for Tate B. Not just one but TWO inspiring exhibitions on at the same time. I thought a show devoted to an art historian and cultural bigwig might be a bit dry, but far from it. Fascinating to see the work Kenneth Clark collected, all those delicate Cezanne drawings for example, and the pictures he was looking at during his formative years.

Here was a portrait of an art lover whose watchwords seemed to be refinement and modesty - a patron whose genteel good taste and position in the art establishment greatly assisted the careers of Henry Moore, John Piper, Graham Sutherland and other artists of equally rare sensibility.

A bit of a shock, then, to go from the world of 'Civilisation' to the multifarious oddities of British Folk Art, an exhibition which is probably more popular than its debonair rival but which must have been fairly nightmarish to curate. I mean where do you begin? What do you include? The curators seem to have taken a similar approach to Barbara Jones in her wonderful book 'The Unsophisticated Arts', in that they have gathered together work that shares certain characteristics but without trying to define it too closely or to include everything.

Buy the new edition from Little Toller!

Like the book, it's an eclectic, individual survey of figureheads and shop signs, textiles and amateur paintings - a display put together (it seems) by enthusiasts with a good eye for an object, rather than academics with a point to make. In the same way some of the artists championed by Kenneth Clark picked up on interesting or quirky objects or designs. Eric Ravilious loved weathervanes, shop emblems and junk of all kinds - you could put together a mini-folk art show from his prints and paintings. Edward Bawden too.

Eric Ravilious, 'Saddler' from High Street

And his model... white horse outside a Sudbury pub

But many of the most passionate artist-enthusiasts of the 20th century were women, notably Barbara Jones, Margaret Lambert and Enid Marx (authors of 'English Popular Art'), Olive Cook and Peggy Angus. Each no doubt had their own reasons for admiring folk art, but Peggy for one saw in it much more than quirky or original design. She believed that the beautifully decorated Romany caravans she saw in her youth represented the most authentic kind of art - art made not by specialists to be enjoyed by others, but by people for whom it was an integral part of life.

A work of art in itself... check out more wonderful illustrations here

Peggy taught art for more than forty years, gradually developing a curriculum that combined art history and practical training in a bewildering range of disciplines, and which took her pupils from the most primitive art forms, via the medieval and Renaissance periods, to the experiments of Modernism. Throughout she stressed the vital importance of patronage (which had been impressed on her when she visited the Hermitage Museum on a 1932 trip to Soviet Russia).

Great art, she would argue, requires both great artists and great patrons - people with taste, vision and money. At different periods and in different places patronage has been provided by monarchs, aristocrats, religious organisations and the state. Kenneth Clark pushed the British government into state patronage of the arts when he set up the War Artists Advisory Committee in 1939; Piper, Moore and Sutherland prospered.

Peggy's tile mural in the foyer of Lansbury Lawrence School, Poplar

These artists were employed for a purpose - to record the war in their own way (and provide propaganda images into the bargain) - and you could argue that the relationship between patron and artist is always like this. The artist has certain skills, and the patron a use for them. Whether we're talking about an anonymous carpenter creating a figurehead for a naval ship, or a famous painter depicting a bombed cathedral - or, as in Peggy's case, a designer creating a tile mural for a new school - this is the very opposite of 'art for art's sake'. 

Paintings & wallpaper by Mark Hearld, hung Peggy Angus-style at Towner

As far as Peggy Angus was concerned, art needed to serve a purpose. If you come along to the exhibition devoted to her life and work, which begins at Towner, Eastbourne, next weekend, you'll see the extraordinary things she achieved in her lifelong desire to be useful, from her unique art curriculum to tile designs for Heathrow Airport... And look out for hand-printed wallpaper, hung floor to ceiling in the gallery - much of it based on folk art designs. For a preview of what to expect, have a look at Rachel Cooke's feature in The Observer.

And when you've had a good look round her exhibition, head downstairs to Nathaniel Hepburn's elegant show 'Designing the Everyday', which brings together the work of numerous talented artist-designers. There are Ravilious ceramics that seem, on first sight, to be hovering against the wall with no visible means of support, some striking Shell posters, and, to bring us up to date, a room devoted to the talented designers of St Judes. Highlights include chairs upholstered in printed fabrics and Mark Hearld's wallpaper - the latter proof that, twenty years after Peggy's death, her spirit permeates British art and design.

FFI: Peggy Angus: Designer, Teacher, Painter at Towner, Eastbourne, July 12 - Sept 21
'Peggy Angus: Designer Teacher, Painter' by James Russell, Antique Collectors Club.
Designing the Everyday at Towner, until 31 August
Kenneth Clark at Tate Britain, until 10 August
British Folk Art at Tate Britain, until 31 August

Tate Britain Rehang, feat. Gwen John

Four female subjects; one woman artist

A mad dash around Tate Britain yesterday left me agreeing with the various critics who have come out in support of the new rehang. The building does indeed feel lighter, cleaner and more spacious, and the artworks feel more like national treasures as a result. There's something peculiar going on in the central hall involving rather alarming groaning noises but I'll have to go back and investigate as time was short.

The rehang has been praised as reactionary, but while there is an old-fashioned feel to the whole thing - no info panels, hooray! - I'm not sure this is right. I started off my tour with the spirit of John Berger at my side, lamenting the excessive numbers of rich men in fancy clothes - not to mention that terrible painting of the blushing maid with the melon, surely a candidate for a long spell in Tate Storage.

Things became more interesting as the 19th century opened up. How fun to see such different pictures next to each other; how great to have a Constable oil sketch opposite a finished painting, so you can look back and forth and wonder which gave him greater pleasure or shows his truest feelings. The mid-Victorian room is, as others have pointed out, a bit of a nightmare, with some much-loved pictures hung so high you'd need to hire a cherry picker to look at them properly.

Tate's highly-qualified curatorial team may have got off lightly in terms of label-writing, but they've still given us a carefully edited version of British art history. We're clearly meant to pay more attention to Nevinson and Gertler, for instance, than to some of the Pre-Raphaelites. And we're asked - without actually being asked - to look again at the role of women in art. It's unfortunate that  not all the work is the artist's best, with Frances Hodgkins for one represented by a very odd picture, but there are some lovely moments where the juxtaposition of different pieces encourages a bit of independent thought.

My favourite of these is shown above: three classic visions of women as seen by men, and one self-portrait. We have a lovely girl playing Eve, leaving Eden in disgrace, and a woman sitting meaningfully before a mirror (in which the artist is reflected), and a naked woman looking modest in a black hat - all, incidentally, beautiful and sensitive representations. Above them, gazing out over the gallery, is Gwen John. She isn't symbolising anything. She is neither beautiful nor ashamed. She is a serious person endeavouring perhaps to understand something of her life and condition through self-scrutiny. It isn't at all clear what she has learnt.

Pre-Raphaelite Moderns, or Trouble in Gallery IX

John Everett Millais, Isabella, 1849, Walker Art Gallery Liverpool

Love them or hate them, you have to say this for the Pre-Raphaelites: they have staying power. Year after year the shows roll out, each with its new take on the subject, and we dutifully read the reviews and trot along to feast our eyes on all that gaudy colour, the frocks that resemble an Austin Powers' suit and those lantern-jawed women who nowadays remind me of Rupert Everett playing the Headmistress of St Trinians.

This time around Rossetti and co. have been rebranded as Moderns, presumably on the basis that if Rex Whistler and John Betjeman can be Romantic Moderns then the Pre-Raphaelites can jolly well be Modern too. And why not? After all, the Pre-Raphaelites were new and exciting for a few years around 1850, although not in the same way as Manet a decade later. The powers-that-be in the Parisian art world launched tirades against 'Olympia' and 'Dejeuner sur L'Herbe' in part because of the subject matter but mostly because they hated the way Manet painted. What we now see as his distinctive style they saw as a dreadful departure from the proper way of doing things.

Rossetti, The Blessed Damozel

Adverse reaction to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood - or PRB - as they styled themselves, only erupted once it was revealed that they had formed a secret society (and this at a time when Europe was in revolutionary turmoil). When 'Isabella' was exhibited in 1849 it was widely admired, but once the whole PRB scandal kicked in there was a period when not even the supremely talented and not particularly radical Millais could do anything right. Incidentally, I read a wonderful piece in the Guardian the other day about phallic symbols in this painting, which I would urge people to read if only because it shows that the academic world is still merrily turning, even in these straitened times.

Rupert Everett & Talulah Riley in St Trinians

The boys were young and feisty, and they weren't too keen on the more conservative elements of the art establishment. But it takes a leap of faith to call their response radical, either artistically or politically. Blake, Constable and Turner were all more interesting as artists, and if you want a sense of what Victorian politics was like at mid-century, have a look at Thomas Carlyle. Victorian society may have aspired to respectability, but 19th century cities were plagued by cholera and other diseases, by appalling labour conditions and abuse of the young (children over 9 could work, while the age of consent was 12), and by grinding, unrelieved poverty.

In this context, portraying Christ as the son of a lowly carpenter, as Millais did, was a fairly mild comment, even if it did arouse the ire of Charles Dickens.

But though the Pre-Raphaelites were, generally speaking, God-fearing, patriotic and conservative in their influences (I'm sorry, but Tennyson?), their work was and remains wonderfully, compellingly odd. Every provincial museum has (or ought to have) its Pre-Raphaelite, hanging among the tedious old landscapes and portraits like a camp elderly relative who has turned up for the wedding in a fantastic velvet tunic, clasping a lyre.

What I struggle to understand is how a group of artists set out to record nature, to represent only what they saw, and ended up producing pictures with the verisimilitude of 'The Wizard of Oz'. Whose idea was it to paint in those extraordinary colours? How are we expected to take seriously the plight of Mariana, take one example, when she's wearing such an outrageously gorgeous dress? 

William Holman Hunt, The Lady of Shalott, 1886-1905, Wadsworth Athaneum

In 1934, the Royal Academy held an Exhibition of British Art from about 1000 to 1860. Tasked with reviewing this mammoth show, a critic in The Times noted 'the extraordinary homogenousness of the exhibition as a whole'. Out of this vast enterprise, which included everything from medieval illuminated manuscripts to work by Gainsborough and Constable, only two rooms seemed not to fit, one of which was Gallery IX, the room devoted to the Pre-Raphaelites.

'To put into a sentence,' the critic wrote, 'the chief reason for the disconcerting effect of Gallery IX, as a whole, it is because decorative colour, at full pitch, is here applied to realistic modelling.'

I love the silent scream in that phrase 'at full pitch'. He went on, 'Most of the Pre-Raphaelite pictures would be improved if they were flattened out, a la Gauguin...'

Was John William Waterhouse included in Gallery IX, I wonder? To my mind he showed best what could be achieved by adopting the mood and subject matter of a classic Pre-Raphaelite picture but working with a less insane palette. I've loved his version of 'The Lady of Shalott' for years, since I studied Tennyson for A-level, while Holman Hunt's take on the subject could be retitled 'The Great Rococo Spaghetti Factory Disaster'. There's so much going on in Hunt's picture that the tragedy of the woman's plight is buried in incidental detail, whereas Waterhouse tones the decoration down and provides a sombre but beautiful background to the scene.

John William Waterhouse, the Lady of Shalott, 1888, Tate Britain

Anyway, I will definitely be making the trip to Tate Britain to revisit some old friends. In the meantime what I'd like to know is not how revolutionary the Pre-Raphaelites were, but what their real significance has been since those heady days of 1849. If a group of artists has a lasting importance then surely it will be seen in the work of those who come after them, so is it in this case? Is there a Post-PRB tradition? I'm going to try to find out, but let me know if anything comes to mind.

'Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde' is at Tate Britain. 

Mockford & Doig (plus new Ravilious date)

Harold Mockford, Eastbourne, 1958 (artist's estate)

It was great to see so many people at our talk in Eastbourne on Sunday - 150 or thereabouts, including an MP and the Mayor and his wife! Aside from a minor crisis in the biscuit supply chain, everything went very smoothly, and I managed to use a clip-on mic without sounding as though I were trapped inside a 1920s wireless... There was even a raffle, which came as a bit of a surprise. If you live near Eastbourne, join the Friends of the Towner! And visit the Harold Mockford retrospective, which runs until the end of the month and features a host of lovely, inventive landscape paintings.

Harold Mockford, The Long Man of Wilmington (artist's estate)

On the way home I stopped in at Tate Britain to see what was going on, and found a quite odd but interesting set-up in the main hall, with paintings like Paul Nash's 'Totes Meer' and Sutherland's 'Entrance to a Lane' presented salon-style with various related artworks, photos, etc. Unfortunately I didn't have time to work out exactly what it was all about, but it seemed like a good way to breathe new life into familiar paintings... By contrast the galleries of 20th century British art seemed a bit tired, although Peter Doig's 'Echo Lake' was fabulous. Here's an artist who manages to be both painterly and tuned in to our media-saturated world - I will definitely try and see this painting again before it vanishes back into the gallery's nether regions.

Constable vs Turner is one of my favourite Tate games, almost as fun as Spot the Lowry. I always want to like Constable more because Turner was such a thoroughly unlikeable man, but this time 'Norham Castle' beat one of the Brighton beach paintings hands down. Obviously not in the mood for all that leafy green...

Peter Doig, Echo Lake, 1998 (Tate/ artist's estate)

Have just discovered that my talk on Rav and Paul Nash at the Rye Arts Festival later in the month has sold out, so sorry if you haven't managed to get a ticket for that. During October I'm going to be busy launching a new, updated edition of The Naked Guide to Cider, and also pressing apples for the Totterdown Press 2012 vintage.

Then on November 6th I'll be giving an illustrated talk on Ravilious for Hungerford Books, though I can't remember off the top of my head where in Hungerford it's going to be. The time is 7pm, and I'm sure you can get further info from the shop.

After that, we have the V&A Study Day on Sat 17th Nov, then I'll be in Devizes the following Saturday, 24 Nov. Finally, there's the St Bride evening on Weds 5th Dec. More info on all of these HERE.

Lowry's Milkman

Ian McKellen: Lowry fan

Last night's ITV special about the artist LS Lowry had some genuinely interesting things to say, not just about the man himself, but also about the gulf dividing public taste from that of curators. Lowry must rank among the most popular British painters of the 20th century yet, last year or whenever the programme was made, Tate Britain had none of his work on display.

The gallery's Head of Displays, Chris Stephens, made an interesting point when he explained that it was difficult to fit Lowry into a wider narrative. He wasn't a follower of any particular movement, nor did he belong to any school. Rather he pursued his own interests and explored his own vision of the world, using his position on the margins of the art world to good effect. He was an outsider, both in the way he chose to live and in terms of where he lived - in the provinces.

LS Lowry, Street Scene, 1935

Of course the same is true of countless artists and writers. What is perhaps unusual about Lowry is that he refused to conform in any sense. He didn't go to London to seek his fortune. He didn't affiliate himself to any group. Think of Paul Nash, his near-contemporary, who constantly approached and then distanced himself from groups and movements. Nash was an individualist, but he knew how to play the game; he not only associated himself with Surrealism and other modern movements but also talked about his own work in a wonderfully obscure way that helped cultivate his reputation as a 'serious' artist.

LS Lowry, A Lake, 1947

Lowry, meanwhile, kept on painting, enjoying idiosyncratic personal relationships and expressing himself secretly in a series of unsettling pictures of strangely-dressed ballet girls. It isn't unusual for the private life of an artist to raise eyebrows, but the pictures themselves are not his best.

Perhaps I've become too used to the heavily-populated scenes of urban life, but the paintings I woke up this morning thinking about are the empty, spacious, sometimes brooding pictures - landscapes and street scenes and coastal pictures. These may not belong to a school, but they fit within a tradition. The poetic interpretation of place, whether in words or pictures, is one of the great cultural achievements of this country.

LS Lowry, Derbyshire Landscape, 1954

So Lowry does fit into a wider narrative, but it has nothing to do with any of the Isms that art historians love to talk about. This story is long and continuing, and far from straightforward. It deals not with movements and schools but with individuals - visionaries and wanderers who look with their own unique eye on the world and into their own minds, and report what they find.

Many British artists, poets and writers, who cannot be easily squeezed into any of the available movements, have a place in this sprawling narrative: Emily Bronte and John Fowles, George Borrow and Edward Thomas, Powell and Pressburger, Eric Ravilious, LS Lowry...

This was an inspired programme, led not by an expert but by a fan, and introducing as witnesses Jeffrey Archer and Lowry's milkman. The milkman, who described an incident in which the artist asked him to throw away a milk-splattered canvas, and then lamented the effect of art ownership on the artist's housekeeper, stole the show.

Watercolour at Tate Britain: Highlights

I wasn't sure what to expect from Tate Britain's current exhibition, 'Watercolour'. Reviews were mixed, as was the feedback garnered by the museum from visitors. But though the show has some flaws, it also has quite dazzling highlights.

John Dunstall: 'A Pollard Oak near West Hampnett Place, Chichester', c 1660

In the first room visitors are treated to John Dunstall's tiny but intensely animated drawing of a pollard oak, which is balanced by a giant parish map on which can be seen sometimes unfinished sketches of people and creatures. Critics have complained that the maps and the equally gorgeous illuminated books do not really count as watercolours, but I'm not sure it matters.

The curators of the show have evidently decided to broaden its scope and appeal as far as possible. Yes, you can argue that this policy results in a lack of focus - a lack of art historical narrative - but most visitors to art galleries are not art historians. What we ordinary punters want is something wonderful, or moving, or even disturbing, to remove us for a while from the humdrum of everyday life.

Mark Catesby: 'A blue grosbeak 
(Passerina caerulea) and sweet bay 
(Magnolia virginiana)', c.1728-9

The botanical and natural history paintings in the next room fascinated me. As a terrible draughtsman who can barely write a legible shopping list I was struck by the precision of drawings that were designed to act as scientific record rather than work of art. I was particularly interested to discover a drawing by Mark Catesby, one of whose ancestors had been involved in the Gunpowder Plot. Catesby was raised in Castle Hedingham, Essex, almost 300 years before Eric Ravilious moved there, and it rather appealed to me that their work should appear almost side by side in this extraordinary retrospective of British art.

In fact you'll find the sole Rav on offer - 'The Vale of the White Horse' (1939) in the next room, surrounded by other landscapes including Edward Burra's lovely 'Valley and River, Northumberland' (1972). If I'm tempted to carp about missed opportunities it's perhaps here, because the curators ought to have given us rather more to enjoy. The Ravilious is excellent, but why not include another piece by way of a contrast - the vibrant 'Lifeboat' of 1938, perhaps?

 The Vale of the White Horse (1939), conjured entirely out of cross-hatchings, strokes, dabs and striations of faint colour, frail contour against pale line, with the white page breathing airily in between, is almost nothing, a see-through dream. But it is uniquely strange, starting in reality and ending in its own radiant elsewhere. Laura Cumming, The Observer

Eric Ravilious: 'The Vale of the White Horse' (1939)  

Ravilious would no doubt have been pleased to see his painting in the same room as Francis Towne's 'The Source of the Aveiron' (1781), a watercolour that inspired him, but again we have to wonder why such an influential painter was given so little space. Ditto John Sell Cotman and... well, everyone will have their own list.

Still, if you're going to have one painting by an artist at least make it a good one, and while Cotman's painting of Norwich market isn't quite up there with the work he did in Yorkshire it is a wonderful, strangely modern piece. The same applies to Turner, whose painting 'The Blue Rigi' (1841-2) has to represent him pretty much solo. Perhaps the curators felt we'd all seen quite enough Turners...

Francis Towne: The Source of the Aveiron (1828)

I did enjoy seeing all the watercolour sets and so forth, particularly Paul Nash's sombre kit - fitting for a man who painted in the trenches of Flanders and a good introduction to the room devoted to war art. This mini-exhibition had some peculiar gaps (Ardizzone for one) but - and I think this is more important - did provide some thought-provoking images. The juxtaposition of Paul Nash's darkly exuberant 'Wire' (1918-19) and the frank, intimate watercolours of wounded men was particularly effective.

Samuel Palmer: 'A Hilly Scene', c1828

The remaining sections of the exhibition were marred slightly by the scale of the room, which is much larger than the previous ones. It was hard to focus on a small painting like 'A Hilly Scene' (1828), Samuel Palmer's pastoral treat, and all but impossible to concentrate on the modern work, which seemed (in memory) to involve large expanses of white paper with not much on it.

Again, I don't blame the curators for trying. These days museums and galleries have to get as many people as possible through the turnstiles, and if that means including some famous names then so be it (although you'd think that David Hockney would have lured in a few punters, especially since he curated an exhibition of Turner watercolours at the same museum in 2007...). Better a couple of dubious choices than no show at all.

Patrick Heron: 'January 9:1983:II'

And besides, if you look at what's there, rather than what isn't, you'll be in for a treat. Incidentally, if you're visiting the shop at the entrance to the exhibition, do look out for 'Ravilious in Pictures: Sussex and the Downs', and 'The War Paintings'...

Coming soon: NOT the Tate Britain Watercolour Show...