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Turner and Constable at Tate Britain

Joseph and John

Joseph Turner was born in 1775, John Constable in 1776. In other words, it’s just about 250 years since their joint births. Tate owns big holdings of paintings, watercolours, sketches and related paraphernalia (paintboxes, journals, letters, sketchbooks) by both of them, so they’ve used the anniversaries to bring lots of this up out of the archives – plus substantial loans from other collections – in order to create a blockbuster exhibition placing two of England’s most popular painters side by side. The aim is to compare Turner and Constable’s differing origins, styles, subject matters and careers, and the way that, even during their lifetimes, they were pitted against each other as rivals, with rival visions of art.

Turner versus Constable: ‘The Golden Bough’ (left) by Turner, faces off against ‘Dedham Lock’ (right) by Constable, in ‘Turner and Constable’ at Tate Britain (photo by the author)

Obviously, it’s full of lot and lots of good stuff but I confess I didn’t really enjoy it. I finished it with a great sense of relief and couldn’t wait to escape.

Massive exhibition

I expected the exhibition to be packed and it was, but I hadn’t anticipated it being quite so big, thorough and exhaustive. It contains some 190 oil paintings, watercolours and sketches, as well as seven or eight display cases containing everything from their paintboxes and brushes to Turner’s dismantled fishing rod (!).

Four outdoor sketches by Turner along with his dismantlable fishing rod, in ‘Turner and Constable’ at Tate Britain (photo by the author)

Most exhibitions are in 7 or 8 rooms but this one stretches to 12, concluding with a set of videos by contemporary artists (Bridget Riley, George Shaw, Emma Stibbon and Frank Bowling) describing aspects of Joseph or John which inspire their own practice.

The wall labels are admirably thorough in introducing each of the 11 or so major themes which each room addresses, plus detailed captions for many of the paintings, watercolours, sketches and objects – but there are just so many that by the end I was full, I couldn’t read anything more, and I was relieved to give up the effort.

Also, heretical though it is to admit it, I don’t really like Turner, I never have; and I like Constable in small doses but here, faced with 80 or more works, the brilliantly glorious works are diluted by a lot of much more humdrum stuff. Exposed at such length, over so many works, the weaknesses of both artists become more and more glaring and – for me – began to drown out their strengths.

For example whereas Turner arguably came into his own in his later years, from 1830 onwards, the final room shows four of Constable’s last works from 1835 to 37, and I thought they were really dire: they look like his Hay Wain-style landscapes but put through a blender or painted by someone with serious eyesight problems (details below).

In the end I found myself equally put off Turner’s huge shimmering light experiments and Constable’s sometimes lovely but often very scrappy Suffolk landscapes, and found relief in the much smaller, lighter watercolours and sketches by both artists, although Turner was generally better at these (see below).

To put it another way, I came away from the National Gallery’s small, thoughtful, very focused exhibition about the Hay Wain liking and appreciating Constable more. Whereas I left this exhibition with a measurably lower opinion of him, and hoping I don’t see another Constable for a long time.

Main points

Constable focused largely on the English countryside, especially the Stour Valley in Suffolk, developing a distinctive practice of outdoor oil sketching to capture natural light, weather, and atmosphere with unprecedented immediacy. His textured brushwork, bright colours, and close study of skies challenged academic conventions and gradually earned critical recognition.

Turner, by contrast, was a prolific traveller whose work ranged across Britain and Europe. He explored dramatic subjects from the sublime forces of nature to modern technology, working across oil, watercolour, and print. His radical handling of colour and light, particularly in watercolour, pushed the medium to new artistic heights.

So Constable was, on the whole, a homebody, whereas there’s an entire room devoted to Turner’s extensive trip to Italy, displaying his sketchbooks, explaining the detailed preparations he made, showing preparatory sketches and some of the huge oils he did of dramatic Alpine scenery. For the rest of his life was liable at the drop of a hat to produce another enormous work set in Venice or Rome or the Alps.

Still, the early works produced soon after that trip can be breath-taking.

The Passage of Mount St Gothard from the centre of Teufels Broch (Devil’s Bridge) by JMW Turner (1804) © Abbot Hall, Kendal (Lakeland Arts Trust)

Room summary

Room 1. Starting out (8 prints, 10 paintings)

Eight paintings including Turner’s self portrait and two portraits of Constable.

Turner was born in London, the son of a Covent Garden barber, Constable to a prosperous family in the Suffolk village of East Bergholt.

As a teenager, Turner earned money alongside his art studies at the Royal Academy. He worked as an architectural draughtsman’s assistant and a watercolour copyist, which introduced him to a wide range of art. He was a commercially minded, fast-rising young star who first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1790 aged just 15.

By contrast, Constable was largely self-taught and undertook extensive sketching tours in order to perfect is artistic technique, not exhibiting at the Royal Academy until 12 years after turner, in 1802.

Both trained at the Royal Academy. Training at the Royal Academy centred on drawing the human figure. It aimed to produce painters of grand historical and mythological subjects. Landscape was far down its artistic hierarchy – so the main way both artists were innovators was in proclaiming landscape painting as a high genre in its own right.

It’s odd that the Academy focused on figure drawing when both Turner and Constable are dreadful, awful painters of human beings. It’s one of the things I dislike about them both. Any Turner painting with people in is going to be embarrassingly bad (see below). Constable’s figures are more superficially attractive until you go up close and see how gawkily the bodies are composed and how terrible the faces are, if he’s bothered with them at all. Constable’s clouds, ten out of ten. His faces, nil.

Room 2. Constable sketching outdoors (14 sketches, display case, chair)

Fourteen sketches and a display case showing his paintbox and palette. My wife and I both thought the most interesting thing in this room was Constable’s sketching chair.

Constable’s outdoor sketching chair in ‘Turner and Constable’ at Tate Britain (photo by the author)

Room 3. Turner in the Alps and Italy (4 big paintings, 7 sketches, 5 sketchbooks, display case)

A pause in the long war with France in 1802 allowed the 27-year-old Turner to travel to Paris, then on south to the Alps, Switzerland and the Val d’Aosta. Thirteen years later, when the wars finally ended in 1815, he went again. His extensive preparations for the six-month trip included reading guidebooks and making sketches of other artists’ views of key sites to visit. Turner was hungry for Italy’s scenic riches. He filled 23 sketchbooks five of which are on display here and came home with imagery that would underpin decades of finished paintings.

One of Turner’s extravagant fantasias from Italian history – Caligula’s Palace and Bridge by J.M.W. Turner (1831) Tate

Remember I was saying how poor Turner’s human figures are? From a distance they pass, they appear to fit in with the blurry mode of the paintings. But go up close and they’re embarrassing. Here’s a close-up of the most prominent two figures in this work.

Detail of Caligula’s Palace and Bridge by J.M.W. Turner (1831) Tate

The basket and hula hoop and kettle and the blue cloak at bottom right, yes. The two goats at top right, yes. But the two human figures on the left? The bloke’s legs, yes, but their faces? They look like Punch and Judy.

Room 4. Turner’s watercolours (6 watercolours, 10 sketchbooks)

Going back and forth through the rooms, slowly overcoming the sheer scale of some of the enormous paintings here, it takes the mind a little while to adjust to the scale of the smaller, more delicate sketches and watercolours. Eventually I came to think these were the works I liked best.

Turner at his most attractive: four (relatively) small watercolours, in ‘Turner and Constable’ at Tate Britain (photo by the author)

A contemporary critic wrote: ‘Another mused: ‘blended and sometimes delicately contrasted as [Turner’s] colours are – the effects are exquisitely tender, but not without sufficient force, from a certain magic arrangement, a graphic secret of his own’ and in many of them, you can see what he meant.

Room 5. Turner’s studio (9 paintings, 10 cloud studies)

Turner’s studio was a chaotic shambles. His landlady owned seven Manx cats and these are allowed to roam over wet paintings; we know this because their paw prints have been found. At his death it was discovered that he’d used his own paintings to block up gaps in the roof and had cut a catflap into one of them.

Room 6. Constable fields and sky (9 paintings, 10 cloud studies)

Most contemporary artists made extensive sketches on location then took them back to their studios to work up into finished compositions under controlled indoor conditions. In 1814 Constable began completing entire paintings on location, out of doors, and there are plenty of examples in the Hay Wain / Dedham Lock manner, as well as numerous preparatory sketches.

Taking this a step further, in 1819, Constable rented a house in Hampstead, then a village outside London where he started making rapid oil sketches of clouds, a practice he called ‘skying’. These works reflect Constable’s keen interest in weather.

Some of Constable’s cloud studies in ‘Turner and Constable’ at Tate Britain (photo by the author)

His preoccupation with the sky is evident in his dramatic 1823 depiction of Salisbury Cathedral, which became another recurring subject and is given the full Mona Lisa treatment in this show, complete with visitor bench to sit and gaze in awe.

Constable’s painting of Salisbury cathedral given the full treatment in ‘Turner and Constable’ at Tate Britain (photo by the author)

Room 7. Big is beautiful (5 Turner, 4 Constable huge paintings)

Both artists struggled to get noticed and one easy way to do this was to make their paintings big, really big, ginormous. Turner was already doing his huge classical and mythological paintings. In 1819 Constable joined him by exhibiting the first of his huge canvases (what he called his ‘6-footers’) ‘The White Horse’, and its appearance for the first time triggered comparisons with Turner. They were both now competing in sheer size – but what a complete difference in subject matter and style.

The White Horse by John Constable (1819) © The Frick Collection, New York (photo by Joseph Coscia Jr)

This feels like a great painting. If there had been just 4 or 5 works like this you’d have gone away inspired. It’s the fact that it’s accompanied by about 80 others, sketches, scraps and some decidedly bad works, which dilutes its effect.

Room 8. Fire and water (4 massive paintings: 3 JC, 1 T)

The rivalry was real. By the late 1820s Turner was the well-established master in all forms of landscape (oil, watercolour, prints). Constable only achieved official recognition in 1829 when he was finally made a member of the Royal Academy. To quote the curators:

Two years later, they came to blows. Artists hated being hung next to Turner in the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition because his paintings ‘caught your eye the instant you entered the room’. In 1831, Constable took up the challenge. As a member of the committee responsible for placement of works in the exhibition, he hung his Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows next to Turner’s Caligula’s Palace and Bridge. The arrangement gave Constable’s own painting prime position. At a dinner party, Turner apparently came ‘down upon him like a sledge-hammer’. One onlooker recalled dramatically that Constable ‘wriggled… like a detected criminal’.

Room 9. Late Constable: ‘beyond Constable country’ (9 sketches, 3 big paintings)

With election to the Academy in 1829, Constable moved to expand his subject matter, producing works set in Brighton and London, away from his home turf in the Stour Valley. He tackled coastal storms and grand neoclassical architecture. I didn’t like his Brighton paintings but some of the sketches of the beach were appealing.

Rainstorm over the Sea by John Constable (1824-1828) © Photo Royal Academy of Art (photo by John Hammond)

I was tickled to read that Constable didn’t like Brighton and dismissed it as ‘Piccadilly by the seaside’. Plus ça change, eh?

In this room the curators are showing a clip from Mike Leigh’s 2014 movie, Mr Turner, dramatising another famous moment in their rivalry, when both painters had work hung in the 1832 Academy exhibition and Turner (played by Timothy Spall) adds a last-minute red buoy to his painting Helvoetsluys: Fishermen at Sea in order to catch the viewer’s eye and distract it from Constable’s long-laboured over piece, The Opening of Waterloo Bridge – which triggered Constable (played by the stalwart character actor James Fleet) to walk out in a huff. At least it’s all very dramatic in movieland.

Room 10. Late Turner (9 paintings, 8 sketches)

Turning 60 in 1835, Turner could have rested on his financial position and slowed down but he kept up the pace. 1835 saw him take one of his most extensive and taxing European sketching tours and he continued to travel abroad for another decade. He made topical paintings of contemporary subjects, including the fire that destroyed the Houses of Parliament.

The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 1834 by JMW Turner (1835) Cleveland Museum of Art

Favourite locations like Venice and the Swiss Alps came back into focus with repeat visits. There’s a really dreadful giant monster of a painting depicting Juliet and her nurse in a typically gauzy, highly romanticised Venice when, of course, the play is set in Verona, 120 kilometres away.

On the other hand, some of these late watercolours are truly visionary, and the curators are right to single out The Blue Rigi, Sunrise (1842) as awe inspiring.

The Blue Rigi, Sunrise by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1842) Tate

Room 11. Landscape and memory (3 Turner, 4 Constable, 4 prints)

Constable died in 1837, by now accepted as a classic. But his last years were saddened by the absence of his dead wife. The curators suggest his late paintings are clouded by melancholy but optimistically claim they reverberate with energy. Well, the four they hang in the final room are awful. They revert to the Suffolk subject matter but as if someone had thrown a bucket of mud over them. The palette has lost all its brightness and sparkle, everything is black and grey and mud. A couple of them have sets of diagonal white slashes across them as if someone had repeatedly stabbed them with a knife. They’re so horrible I made a list to show you:

My wife wondered whether he must have been suffering from some eye problem, cataracts or something, which would explain their dirgelike darkness, their fevered, cluttered, murky feeling. But that can’t be true because alongside it the curators hang a marvellously limpid and detailed drawing of fir trees on Hampstead Heath.

Fir Trees by John Constable (c. 1833) The Higgins Art Gallery & Museum, Bedford, UK/Bridgeman Images

(Incidentally, you can see the join three-quarters of the way down the work; this is because Constable had originally drawn just the upper part of the tree but ended up devoting so much time and effort to it, that he glued on an extra strip of paper at the bottom so he could continue it down to the roots.)

Anyway, the point is that, if he could produce extremely clear, detailed and lucid drawings like this, then the dire appearance of a late painting like On the river Stour (1834) was an artistic choice.

By contrast with the murky Constable, this final room contains arguably the best Turner in the exhibition, certainly the one I liked best, Norham Castle, a work of pure luminousness, almost completely untainted by worldly subject matter.

Norham Castle, Sunrise by Joseph Mallord William Turner (c.1845) Tate

Room 12

This room is devoted to a big video screen onto which is projected an 11-minute-long film featuring interviews of contemporary artists Bridget Riley, George Shaw, Emma Stibbon and Frank Bowling, giving their opinions about T and C.

What’s really striking about this video is that it contains many tasteful close-ups of T and C’s works and these often make the paintings seem much more interesting and exciting and innovative than the complete, wider works do. It was a revelation to think of both their paintings like this, as collections of good bits which frequently impress more as inventive and wonderful details than they do as often contrived and stagey wholes.

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by Simon on December 21, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Painting

Tagged 6-footers, A Cottage in East Bergholt, art, art exhibition, Bedford, Bridget Riley, Brighton, Caligula’s Palace and Bridge, Constable country, Covent Garden, Dedham Lock, East Bergholt, Emma Stibbon, English art, exhibition, Frank Bowling, George Shaw, Hampstead, Hampstead Heath with rainbow, Helvoetsluys: Fishermen at Sea, Italy, J.M.W. Turner, James Fleet, John Constable, Joseph Mallord William Turner, Joseph Turner, Juliet and her nurse, Kendal, landscape, London, Manx cat, Mike Leigh, Mr Turner, National Gallery, Norham Castle, oil painting, On the river Stour, paintbox, Painting, Punch and Judy, Rainstorm over the Sea, Royal Academy, Salisbury Cathedral, sketchbook, Stoke by Nayland, Stour Valley, Suffolk, Swiss Alps, Tate, Tate Britain, The Blue Rigi Sunrise, The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons 16 October 1834, The Frick Collection, The Golden Bough, The Higgins Art Gallery and Museum, the Opening of Waterloo Bridge, The Passage of Mount St Gothard from the centre of Teufels Broch, The White Horse, Timothy Spall, Turner and Constable, Val d’Aosta, Venice, Verona, watercolour

Posted by Simon on December 21, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/12/21/turner-and-constable-tate-britain/

Royal Academy summer exhibition 2024

The usual procedure: tens of thousands of artworks submitted by members of the public and Royal Academicians (RAs) and then reviewed and chosen by a panel of eight or so RAs. Result: twelve galleries crammed from floor to ceiling with 1,710 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, architectural models, hangings, mobiles, photos and videos.

So, as usual, it takes a lot of time and effort to really focus on, assess and process so very, very many works. By less than half way through I was feeling overwhelmed. Doing the whole show properly requires stamina and determination.

Each work is accompanied by a wall label which just gives the work’s number so it’s well worth investing £3.50 in the little pocket catalogue because only by referring to this can you find out the work’s name, the artist and – subject of perennial fascination – its cost, because the majority of the works on display here are on sale. As far as I could see the cheapest work cost £100, the most expensive was a room-sized installation which could be yours for just £300,000.

I think it was the Guardian who accused this year’s show of being a chaotic jumble sale, but it always feels like that to me. And despite there being few real bangers (like the life-size sculpture of a gorilla made out of coat hangers or the life-sized sculpture of a tiger covered in red and silver Tunnocks teacake wrappers from former shows) there were a lot of really good things.

There’s always a chair of the curators, or chief co-ordinator, and they choose the show’s overall theme. This year’s co-ordinator was Ann Christopher and the supposed theme is MAKING SPACE.

As I walked very slowly through the rooms I marked up on my catalogue the works I really liked or were striking for one reason or another. Here’s my selection of personal favourites. She is quoted as saying:

“I plan to explore the idea of making space, whether giving space or taking space. This can be interpreted in various ways: to make space can mean openness – making space for something or someone, also making space between things. It is my belief that the spaces in between are as important as whatever those spaces separate.”

I think it’s fair to say I didn’t notice or recognise this theme anywhere in the exhibition and you could happily walk through the whole thing without being aware of any central theme, such is the range and diversity of the plethora of works on display.

A few Big Names are represented: the ones whose names I know are Rachel Whiteread, Ron Arad, Frank Bowling, Michael Craig-Martin, Anselm Kiefer, Mick Moon, Allen Jones. The only ones whose work I recognised unprompted were Michael Craig-Martin for the four or so big schematic paintings of everyday objects in room 3, because he has such a clear and recognisable brand and Allen Jones for the sculpture in room 9 because the heads on it had his very characteristic look.

The Annenberg courtyard

In the courtyard is a monumental textile sculpture. From a distance I thought it was a concatenation of chains and was going to be yet another reference to imperialism and slavery, the top subject of our times, but I was wrong. It’s by British artist Nicola Turner and is made of found organic matter, including horsehair and wool with the tips of each of the monstrous legs ending in old-style table legs on castors.

Apparently it is based on one of Reynolds’s own paintings, The Infant Hercules Strangling the Serpents and this explains why the slender tip of what turns into this monstrous rampage of rope emanates from the tip of Sir Joshua’s paintbrush. The work ‘explores the boundaries between life, death and the liminal spaces in between’.

‘The Meddling Fiend’ by Nicola Turner (Exhibit 1)

Room 1 (63 works)

Each room or set of rooms is hung by a member of the selection committee. The first two rooms were hung by Hughie O’Donoghue RA. Not to be too harsh, but both these rooms felt grey and dreary. It’s only in room 3 that things pick up. Apparently O’Donaghue was attracted to works that ‘displayed a painter’s sensibility in which the physical process of painting and a sense of the hard-won image were evident.’ I do, in fact, see what he means and my favourite pieces in this room do just that, show the process of painting making in a way I’ve always like, using or incorporating found materials, having a strong industrial vibe.

This is most clearly demonstrated in a hug work by O’Donoghue himself, ‘Channel’, which is not only dramatic but is painted on industrial tarpaulin complete with eyelets.

Channel (oil, mixed media on tarpaulin) by Hughie O’Donoghue RA £75,000 (32)

In the same spirit I liked Considerate Construction by Lee Maelzer, mainly for the dramatic gold and orange colouring but also for its industrial vibe.

Considerate Construction (oil and latex) by Lee Maelzer £16,000 (28)

In a completely different vibe, the friend I went with liked:

Love Myself (knitting wool and cotton filling)by Chunyoung Yang £500 (42)

Room 2 (77 works)

Also hung by O’Donoghue. Amid the jumble sale disorder of so many images a number were about the sea, which emerged as a theme in both his rooms.

High and Dry (woodblock and etched lino) by Ian Burke £380 (71)

There was a little area devoted to the works of ‘the late Mick Moon RA’ including this, which I think I’ve seen at a previous show, dramatic in its size and painted on rough industrial planking so right up my street.

Outward Bound (acrylic and mixed media) by Mick Moon £30,000 (111)

The Large Weston Room (242 works)

It comes as a visual and psychological relief to emerge from the first two rooms, characterised by grey and blurred images, and into room 3. This is curated by the fabulous Cornelia Parker who has themed her room round the seven colours of the rainbow and it immediately feels like it. This is the room with the four big Michael Craig-Martins with his trademark flat colouring, and you are also struck by several works with colourful vertical strips. Big relief after the first two grey rooms.

Orchid (by Sir Michael Craig-Martin £8,600

My friend is a birdwatcher and nature lover so she liked the clever Bird Colour Wheel by Jim Moir.

Bird Colour Wheel (pigment print) by Jim Moir £1,250 (149)

There was also the first humorous offerings, including a pair of 18th century paintings spoofed by having 21st century products collaged onto them, by Toby Holmes.

A Bottle of Dog (Newkie Brown) (digital collage; giclee print) by Toby Holmes £250 (188)

I like the woodcut vibe and loveliness of this fine image (in fact a linocut).

Traitorous Trueness (linocut) by Gerard McMenamin £250 (205)

In a similar vein I liked the strong cartoon outlines of this nude.

Untitled Nude 2 (linocut) by Morag Bassinthwaite £250 (256)

At about this point it dawned on me that maybe, faced with a bombardment of images, the mind prioritises the realistic, naturalistic images. Was that why I was liking recognisable naturalistic images? Is that why I liked this one so much, where Paul Stephenson has merged an original 1820 oil painting (of John Porter by William Bradley) onto an image of the calm flat infinite sea?

Reflets sous la pluie (ink on original oil painting) by Paul Stephenson £2,500 (211)

Remember I mentioned the tiger covered in Tunnock teacake wrappers. The famous tiger was done by David Mach (and there are a couple of smaller works in the same style in the penultimate room). Here’s a jokey hommage by Paula Martyr.

A Teacake Cat (collage) by Paula Martyr Not For Sale (NFS) (210)

When someone’s bought a print which comes in multiple editions, the gallery puts a round red adhesive label by it. I thought it telling that this Parker room has a whole stand devoted to twee and humorous images of cats and dogs which were festooned with red labels. People want art that is a) affordable b) makes you smile.

Resisting the appeal of winsome cats and dogs, I liked the casual gracefulness of this image by Julia Andrews.

In My Mind (five-later screenprint) by Julia Andrews £350 (266)

Small Weston Room (1 video)

The work in the Small Weston Room is by invited artist Carey Young. Filmed at SIGMA Corporation in Japan, ‘The Vision Machine’ captures the company’s female employees, creating a speculative fiction that suggests a lens factory run (and perhaps owned) by women. The factory is used as a metaphor for photography and cinema in a wider sense, and shows how women are framed within, and in relation to those fields. The piece pays homage to women as skilled makers and creators, whilst suggesting a female-centric vision, or perhaps a wider visual culture created by women.

There’s a page of stills from the film on her website. My friend – a woman and a feminist – walked in, watched the video for sixty seconds, and walked out again. Given our saturation with American TV and movies which are designed to grab and keep our attention for every second, it’s very difficult for any art video maker to compete.

Room 3 (63 works)

This room is massive, maybe three times the size of the previous rooms, so it needs big works to make an impression. It was hung by the exhibition’s overall co-ordinator, Ann Christopher who is a sculptor. Her aim (apparently) was to create contrasts of scale. A large collage of woodcuts by Anselm Kiefer (American), a new painting by Rose Wylie and a vibrant work on canvas by Sir Frank Bowling. Alongside are smaller works by artists such as David Remfry and Diana Armfield. Some sculptures are hung on the walls. Cornelia Parker ‘Psychobarn (Flotsam)‘ leans against a wall, while Honorary Academician El Anatsui’s intricate wall-hanging dominates one end of the gallery. I normally love Parker but didn’t react to her shed and the Anatsui is genuinely huge but left me meh. Richard Serra is ‘known for his large-scale abstract sculptures made for site-specific landscape, urban, and architectural settings’ which is why it was odd to see him represented by a painting, which admittedly had a nice Rothko-like abstract vibe (well, without the blurry edges).

Those are all big names but the actual works selected weren’t that exciting, for example a couple of drawings by Rachel Whiteread, who cares? It would have been much better to have one of her huge sculptures, specially for such a big space.

Maybe my favourite piece was the Bowling. There’s a reason why the famous guys are famous – at their best they have a certain something which lifts them above, in this case, the hundreds of other semi-abstract paintings on show. (Incidentally, I think the silver slipper is depicted in the central diamond, something which is much more obvious when you see it in the flesh, as it’s a whopping 3 metres tall.)

Silver Slipper (acrylic and acrylic gel with collaged canvas with marouflage) by Frank Bowling NFS (440)

Room 4 (71 works)

Room 4 was also curated by Christopher. I liked Horror Vacui by Paul Benney which is a digitally animated painting of a candle under a bell jar using up all the oxygen and snuffing out. There’s a slightly worrying big print of a naked man facing away from us by the famous Wolfgang Tillmans. It made me realise how relatively few nudes there were in the show and, as usual, mostly female.

Small but striking (maybe just because it reminds me of the photomontage pioneered by Peter Kennard whose show at the Whitechapel Gallery I recently visited) was this photomontage by Michelle Thompson.

Bomb (digital artwork) by Michelle Thompson £145 (520)

Room 5 (183 works)

Room 5 was hung by Hurvin Anderson and feels packed. Anderson is Black and it’s probably no coincidence that this room has the first real Black presence, for example the big (and not very good) portrait of Linton Kwesi Johnson and a multiple portrait of Bob Marley. (Having been reminded of Johnson I wrote this review listening to his 1979 album ‘Forces of Victory’.

There’s a vast messy colourful painting by Elizabeth Cope; I admired the colourfulness but not the design. My companion liked Storm Light by Leslie Dabson. Interestingly, this doesn’t reproduce at all well online; in the flesh it’s very small and compact and so gives a very strong vibe of a rainy evening in London’s Victorian terraces. One of the most vivid images is the hyper-naturalistic depiction of an abandoned car overgrown with vegetation by Geoff Archer.

440 (oil) by Geoff Archer £2,800 (631)

I really liked a couple of abstracts by Subai Zheng, 628 and 651. As far as I could tell every single one of the thousands of dots had been created by hand with a felt tip pen. The more I looked the more I was drawn into this mesmerising image.

Weaver: 30 Houses (felt tip marker and acrylic on canvas) by Subai Zheng £15,000 (651)

On the left-hand wall I surprised myself by liking Stone Pines Rome by Katharine Edwards, maybe because of its echoes of Piet Mondrian transitioning from naturalism to abstraction. Or just because I liked the design and the colours.

Stone Pines Rome (acrylic) by Katharine Edwards £4,000 (574)

On reflecton, it may also be because so many of the images have a rather dingy grey overcast feel. Maybe without realising it, the curators are biased by the simple fact of living in England to prefer works which are dingy, overcast, grey, or rainy i.e. like the English climate. Thinking about it, there are very few images depicting a fine sunny day let alone the light blue Mediterranean skies you associate with, say, the art of Raoul Dufy or Matisse.

Next to it another imagine I liked the more I looked at it was ‘Yellow Umbrella’ by Bill Jacklin. To me it felt romantic, like an illustration for an adventure novel, two huddled figures rushing through a snowstorm.

Yellow Umbrella (monotype with oil pastel) by Bill Jacklin £5,775 (623)

(See also his Sea at Night I in a later room.)

Room 6 (121 works)

Each year there’s an architecture room and I always amuse myself by calling it ‘the room of shame’. This is based on my lived experience of the vast discrepancy between the pretentious, high-falutin’ language of architects fantasising about building ecocities in Brazil or colonies on the moon, and the crappy, badly built, poorly insulated houses and flats most of us live in, the gritty streets dominated by big impersonal blocks which most of us hurry through against the gritty wind or dirty rain.

Anyway, this year exhibition co-ordinator Ann Christopher handed Room 6 over to Assemble RA with a view to making it ‘a space for making’. Who are Assemble RA?

Assemble RA is a collective based in London, who work across the fields of art, architecture and design. They began working together in 2010 and have described themselves as having between 16 and 20 permanent members. Assemble’s working practice seeks to address the typical disconnection between the public and the process by which places are made. Assemble champion a working practice that is interdependent and collaborative, seeking to actively involve the public as both participant and collaborator in the ongoing realization of the work.

And so Assemble RA transformed this room into ‘an industrial warehouse space, a creative’s store, full to the brim with an eclectic mix of models, machinery and curious objects. On the walls are photographs of interiors and artists’ workspaces, and works exploring different materials such as moss (720), 3d-printed sand and woven rush.

What with the shelves lining the walls and the shelf units displaying architects’ models etc this is the most cluttered and busy room. The standout piece for me was a set of industrial tools which have been remodelled to seem like giant metal monster claws.

Installation view of Room 6 at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition room 6 showing Nippers (812) by James Capper (photo by the author)

Among the earnest models of sustainable blah blah were a few humorous models such as friends used to make at school.

Amorgos Monastery (plywood, painted light plaster, tree bark and tree branches) by Vasilis Politis NFS (709)

My companion liked this, Vast Seas in Green to Grey by Julie Massie which consists of hundreds of thin fragments of coloured porcelain embedded in wood to create this beautifully shaded but slightly worrying relief.

Vast Seas in Green to Grey (porcelain on wood) by Julie Massie £800 (707)

Room 7 (256 works)

Gallery 7 is the first of two adjacent rooms hung by printmaker Anne Desmet. I recently visited the big exhibition of her work at the Guildhall Art Gallery, which is still open and well worth visiting. There’s a thread of architecture and buildings running through it. But straight off I liked a couple of humorous works by Laura Beaumont who’s gotten old Observer Books, carved a square hole in them and then created tiny dioramas using model railway figures and foliage.

Observers Dogs by Laura Beaumont £1,500 (829)

My favourite piece in this room was hung up high and so you craned your neck, appropriately, to look up at an image of a high rise block. This reproduction doesn’t do it justice. In the exhibition the paper is set on dark brown wood and creates the impression that it’s made of weathered copper.

Cottingley Heights On Oak (Three) (acrylic on oak veneer) by Nicola Rawnsley £380 (841)

In a different mood, I liked Blueprint by Peter Lawrence, maybe because it reminds me of 1950s jazz LP covers. It also links in my mind with the wonderful prints by the Yoshida family currently on display at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Blueprint (wood engraving) by Peter Lawrence £175 (872)

Lovely, minimalist and clean are Ian Ritchie’s etchings of foxes (926). For me the standout work in the room was a lovely etching of the BBC offices in Langham Place, possibly because they remind me of the wonderful exhibition of 1930s linocuts at Dulwich Picture Gallery a few years ago.

W1A – BBC AND All Souls Church, Langham Place (etching) by John Duffin £795 (977)

There are lots of images of London streets and buildings which are Desmet’s own subject, in all kinds of styles. I was impressed by the realism of this image of Oxford Street through a rain-drizzled window, presumably of a bus.

Oxford Street (acrylic) by James Condon £5,200 (1015)

Honourable mention Urban Beings V (1024) by Francesco Russo.

Room 8 (259 works)

Second room hung by Anne Desmet, this had a noticeable theme of trees along one wall, with all manner of seascapes on the far wall, many of which I liked. This impressive work is an etching made on sycamore leaves, presumably commemorating the chopping down of the tee in the Sycamore Gap of Hadrian’s Wall. It’s more impressive in the flesh than this reproduction

Acer pseudoplatanus L (etching on sycamore leaves) by Emma Buckmaster and Janet French £7,500 (1132)

In line with my general preference for woodcuts and works with strong outlines, I liked this simple but effective linocut, ‘Trees Beneath a Lemon-Yellow Sky’ by Paul Hogg £750.

Trees Beneath a Lemon-Yellow Sky (linocut) by Paul Hogg £750 (1140)

Twenty of more images of the sea captured it in all its moods, from a lovely print by John Mackenzie of shallow surf over a light sandy beach, to images of waves crashing against rocks, a batch of Norman Ackroyd‘s trademark etchings of remote Scottish islands surrounded by gulls.

An Ocean to Swim (woodcut) (woodcut) by Trevor Price £580 (1189)

High up on a wall was a set of ‘London Heads’. This is small and cute in the flesh (40 x 40 cm) so doesn’t benefit from being blown up in reproduction.

London Heads by Sally Cutler £350

This might be the best room with a wide range of smaller but attractive and quality images. I liked the one of a single fern leaf, another painting of woodland floor all brambles etc. On the opposite wall were characterful images of individuals and groups. This one, also, was all the more powerful for being small (15 x 13 cm) like the illustration to an interesting novel.

Waiting For The Rain To Stop by Barbara Jackson £350

Funniest entries in the show might be the two jokey prints by Ceal Warnent.

Revolutionary by Ceal Warnants (photopolymer relief print on vintage book paper) £130

These prints had almost as many red labels on them as the cute cats and dogs in room 3 and you can see why. They would make you smile every time you look at them.

Room 9 (64 works)

Gallery 9 was hung by Ann Christopher and is dominated by the biggest piece in the show, ‘String Quartet’ by Ron Arad. This is a big carpet draped up the wall and across the floor, on which sit four chairs on which are placed the four instruments of a string quartet and over hidden loudspeakers is projected string quartet music which you can hear from the nearby galleries. It’s odd, really, how little modern art makes use of music or sounds of any sort.

The Quartet by Ron Arad (sculpture made of wood, steel, copper, silicon and cotton £300,000 (1408)

There’s another big showy work, a huge sculpture of a pair of black hands by Tim Shaw which I didn’t like at all. The curators comment ‘a pair of hands where the negative space forms part of the work’ – well, which sculpture does not create a greater or lesser space around it? On the plus side, some of the children visiting the show were enjoying pretending to shake hands with them or dancing in and around them which was fun to watch.

The Space Between (Does Not Come in a Vacuum) by Tim Shaw (sculpture of Painted foam) £35,000 (1410)

My companion the naturalist liked all images of birds throughout the show but particularly the strutting crow.

Strutting (acrylic) by Lisa Badau £645 (1384)

The Lecture Room

This room was hung by Veronica Ryan who had the bright idea of painting the wall turmeric ‘a colour inspired by the culinary spice which is known for its healing properties’. This turns out to be a very dynamic and enjoyable colour to stroll in. This room is full of sculptures, maybe it was unofficially ‘the sculpture room’ and Ryan has made the little innovation of replacing traditional white plinths with wooden shelves and trestle tables. This is cool but also brings out a strong village church jumble sale vibe as well. All kinds of things to admire. My photo of a battleship made of card shows the turmeric colour in the background.

Installation view of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2024 showing ‘Worship-Warship’ by Richard Wilson and, in the background, the orange turmeric colour of the walls and the bric-a-brac vibe created by the trestle tables (photo by the author)

Maybe the most striking piece is an oriental carpet out of which a tiger’s head is mutating, like the alien bursting out of John Hurt’s stomach. It’s life size and genuinely a bit disturbing.

Brown Tiger by Debbie Lawson (sculpture made from Jesmonite, carpet and wood)

There was, maybe, an understated feminist theme in this room, with some paintings of menopause medication by Sara Gregory (1429). I liked the sculptures using an image of a mother and child printed on a metal plate and surrounded by rooster feathers to create a kind of ‘native’ African shield effect.

Female Warrior Army, Motherhood 2 by Emma McGuire (photo decal on porcelain with rooster feathers) £3,500

In a related African vibe (on the same wall) are hung a couple of big prints by Yinka Shonibare CBE (1525, 1526) whose exhibition at Serpentine South you can still visit. I quite liked a lot of things in this room but not burningly so. I suppose this is quite amusing and many of the other sculptures were in the same category: quite good, quite funny. Possibly I was just exhausted by this stage of the marathon.

The Invader by Hannah Simpson (stoneware ceramic) £1,050 (1620)

Wohl Central Hall (81 works)

The Wohl Central Hall is the last room in the show and the second of Assemble RA’s two rooms. The idea is that they’ve ‘created a studio setting and explored the creative process’. This explains why there are random swatches of paint on the walls and a clutter of props including a drafting table and a joinery bench. The plinths in the gallery have been repurposed from waste materials such as discarded slabs from an industrial estate etc. Probably there was lots of interesting and stimulating work here but I was full. My companion, blessed with more stamina than me, and also much clearer about what she likes, liked the big mosaic of ‘Hackney Birds’ and spent a minute or two checking off the ones we see in our garden.

Some Hackney Birds by Hackney Mosaic Project (wall-based glass and ceramic mosaic) NFS

Maintaining the ornithological theme I liked this – maybe because by this stage I was on my last legs and only noticing the really bright obvious pieces.

African Phoenix: Coffin for Qm Nana Yaa Asantewaa by Elsie Owusu (carved wood, paint and glazes) NFS

Thoughts

Despite all the curators’ talk of themes and issues, the experience of visiting is massive, chaotic and exhausting. That said there are hundreds and hundreds of things to like if you have the stamina, determination and patience to look carefully at everything. I wrote this review the day after visiting and was surprised to realise how many works I really liked, including many I haven’t shown here.

After a dingy start in the grey murky opening rooms, and despite the absence of any real showstoppers (apart, I suppose, from Arad’s Quartet and Shaw’s hands, and maybe Parker’s shed and El Anatsui’s wall-hanging, none of which did it for me) there are lots of smaller, sometimes very small, gems, which are worth the effort of carefully reviewing everything in the room to find and cherish and marvel, feel and chortle at.

Tunnocks Maneki-Neko by Robert Mach (kinetic sculpture with confectionary foil on plastic and wood) £1,400 (1555)

Related reviews

More Royal Academy reviews

Entangled Pasts, 1768 to Now: Art, Colonialism and Change @ the Royal Academy

The Royal Academy has discovered that Britain used to have an empire, and that this empire and many other aspects of British culture and economy were deeply indebted to the Atlantic slave trade and wants to tell everyone about it! Those of us who have known, read and written about the British Empire and the Atlantic slave trade for a quite a long time are not quite as excited about these great discoveries as the curators of this exhibition are.

But then we don’t work for an organisation like the Royal Academy which, like a growing number of British institutions (banks, insurance companies, the Church of England, the National Trust) are coming under pressure to uncover, publish and apologise for all their institutional connections with slavery and imperialism.

Installation view showing ‘The First Supper (Galaxy Black)’ by Tavares Strachan (2023), commissioned specially for this exhibition

So that’s what this exhibition is about. It is a huge, dazzling and quite exhausting exhibition about the links between Slavery and the Royal Academy, ‘informed by our ongoing research of the RA and its colonial past.’ Featuring over a hundred works by around 50 artists connected to the RA, it is designed:

‘to explore themes of migration, exchange, artistic traditions, identity and belonging.’

A theme of our times

These, as anyone who reads my blog knows, are the same kinds of themes which dominate most contemporary art exhibition. Notable recent examples which focus on empire, slavery or the Black experience include:

Tate Britain’s exhibition about the British Empire (2016)
John Akomfreh’s installation Purple at the Barbican (2017)
the massive fountain sculpture commemorating slavery by Kara Walker at Tate Modern (2019)
Mimesis: African Soldier at the Imperial War Museum (2019)
the installation of work about colonialism by Hew Locke at Tate Britain (2022)
the exhibition of African photography at Tate Modern (2023)
El Anatsui‘s installation at Tate Modern about colonialism and the slave trade (2023)
the exhibition of Black artists at Dulwich Picture Gallery (2024)
half the exhibits in the current exhibition of political fabric art at the Barbican (2024)
plus, of course, more or less every exhibition at the gallery devoted to Black art, Autograph ABP

‘no world’ from ‘An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters’ by Kara Walker, Hon RA (2010) British Museum, London © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and Sprüth Magers

Mixing ancient and modern

Of all of these shows Entangled Pasts most resembles the 2016 Tate show which took a very straightforward view of the British Empire and colonial guilt, and mixed up classical works from the 18th and 19th centuries with bang up-to-date pieces by contemporary Black artists. Same here. Maybe the most striking thing about this huge show is the way that it deliberately mixes up past and present, into a sometimes confusing, a-chronological, thematic display.

Portrait of a Man, probably Francis Barber by Sir Joshua Reynolds PRA (around 1770) The Menil Collection, Houston Photo © Hickey-Robertson, Houston

So paintings by old masters like Royal Academy founding president Joshua Reynolds, John Singleton Copley and J.M.W. Turner are presented alongside works by what the curators call ‘leading contemporary British artists of the African, Caribbean and South Asian diasporas’, including by Ellen Gallagher, Yinka Shonibare and Hew Locke, Sonia Boyce, Frank Bowling and Mohini Chandra.

Installation view of ‘Woman Moving Up’ by showing Yinka Shonibare (2023) Courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry © Yinka Shonibare CBE RA

Exhibition premise

The exhibition starts from the fact that the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, at more or less the peak of the transatlantic slave trade. Some of its early members actually owned slaves, but most of them certainly painted portraits of rich people who derived their wealth from sugar or tobacco plantations which were worked by slave labour, generally painting their portraits in England or, occasionally, painting life on slave plantations in the colonies.

Britain banned the slave trade in 1807, although the legal condition of slavehood wasn’t abolished until much later, in 1833. So for the fifty years or so between the founding of the Academy (1768) and the final abolition of slavery in the British colonies (1833) people at all levels of British society continued to benefit from slave labour – at the low end of the social scale, workers in factories using raw cotton from American plantations, at the high end, rich plantation owners, merchants and companies which benefited from the profits of the slave triangle.

So the early part of the exhibition brings together lots of work by Royal Academicians which:

portray rich slave owners and their plantations
portray families in Britain who benefited directly or indirectly from slave labour
more generally portray Black people in the 18th and 19th centuries, many of whom have a backstory involving slavery and liberation

These early works provide an impressive and interesting range of paintings to look at, enjoy, and read picture captions about. In addition there are display cases containing relevant relics, such as early editions of memoirs by freed slaves such as Olaudah Equiano or Frederick Douglass, and correspondence about them with various members of the Academy.

As it happens, I’ve written for this blog a detailed summary of Douglass’s most famous work:

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass (1845)

But right from the first room, mixed up with all these classical works are a variety of much more modern pieces by predominantly Black artists, including bang up-to-date pieces and some works commissioned specially for the exhibition.

I was expecting to mostly like the classical pieces but was impressed by a lot of the contemporary work. Some was super-memorable, like Hew Locke’s installation of a fleet of model boats, created with loving attention to detail, and suspended from the ceiling to create an ‘armada’. As a keen model-maker, I really loved these.

Installation view of ‘Armada’ by Hew Locke (2017 to 2019) Photo by the author

The videos

What nothing I’d read had prepared me for was the impact of the two enormous videos. An entire room has been hung with thick red velvet curtains to create a heavy Victorian flavour and onto a big wall-sized screen is projected a nicely-shot and powerful 26 minute film by Isaac Julien about the African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass who, during his active years in the 1840s and 50s, was ‘the most photographed person in the USA’ and a tireless campaigner against slavery. Here’s a clip:

In my opinion moving pictures quite eclipse static ones in interest and imaginative power which is why I am prejudiced against films and movies – their appeal is too immediate and visceral and flashy. Watching a movie and then returning to a book or painting is like staring at the sun and then looking back at trees or flowers, you are too dazzled to register their much weaker but more profound content. In this exhibition the two videos were beautifully made, with powerful polemical messages but, in my opinion, tended to drain the impact of the paintings.

This was even more true of the second video piece, an enormous installation towards the end of the exhibition. This is ‘Vertigo Sea’ by John Akomfrah, which involves the projection of immaculate, high definition videos onto three enormous screens. The piece dates from 2015 and lasts a whopping 48 minutes.

The 3 or 4 minutes I watched contained awesome footage of whales cavorting in the southern seas (according to the wall label, the film incorporates footage from the legendary BBC Natural History unit) before introducing old black and white footage of whales being harpooned by whaling ships, dragged aboard and their carcases eviscerated. This was unpleasant enough but was intercut with shots of Black people in chains washed up on a beach, presumably intended to depict victims of the vast evil of the slave trade, so I could sort of see a connection, how an instrumental view of others – whether people or animals – leads us to brutality. But then, suddenly, there was black and white footage of an atom bomb going off in the Pacific, and this cut to footage of Japanese survivors of Hiroshima, looking very sick indeed.

So it felt like the whole 48-minute video was turning into a review of humanity’s worst actions and activities (after all, countries like Norway and Japan still pursue commercial whaling). It felt like a long powerful Feel Bad movie and, as someone who reads the daily news headlines, I really don’t need any more bad news to tip me over the edge.

Responses

This brings me to my responses to the exhibition. Well, I can see that the basic premise – a review of the involvement of the Royal Academy and leading individual academicians to the issues of slavery and empire and then, by extension, attitudes to race and ethnicity, from its founding to the present day – is valid and interesting. And many of the works from the classic period (18th and 19th centuries) had interesting wall labels which highlighted direct links between the grand, beautifully dressed sitters for various portraits and their involvement in the slave trade, members or the aristocracy and royal family, portraits of plantation life, and much more.

But when art curators write about history you start to get into difficulties. Art curators are not historians. They are paid to keep up with developments in art studies, they are not trained to undertake historical research or to assess new evidence and ideas in historical studies.

It is this, I think, which accounts for the way that this and all the exhibitions about slavery and imperialism I’ve been to feel – no matter how thorough their selection of works of art and how scrupulous the art historical research has been – from a purely historical perspective, shallow and superficial.

If we take ‘history’ to be the record of all human activity, then you can’t just take an enormously long period, from the start of the European slave trade around 1500 until the cessation of slave trading to places like Brazil in the 1900s – and make it all about just one issue.

1. A simplistic view of imperialism

It may be true to say that a good deal of the history of the European nations from the 1500s to the 1960s was affected by or heavily involved in, imperial and colonial activities, but the more you simplify that huge and multifarious history down to the two ‘issues’ of slavery and imperialism, the more you realise you are missing out on all the multiple complexities which make it ‘history’.

To take an obvious aspect, for most of that period, the European nations were at one another’s throats with an enormous number of wars, on mainland Europe and at sites around the world. If we focus on the period from the founding of the Academy, you have the Seven Years War, then the American War of Independence, and then the gargantuan Napoleonic wars between Britain and France. At the end of the period you have the two great conflicts of the twentieth century.

So both the trade and the broader activity of imperialism must be set against the complex, troubled conflicts between the colonial powers and the permanently shifting web of alliances they created, other people’s battles which the populations of Africa, in particular, found themselves caught up in (resentment against fighting in the white man’s wars is a recurring theme of the three novels by Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o which I recently reviewed).

Presenting ‘imperialism’ as just the One Bad Thing which characterises the history of Western Europe misses out on all the multitudinous complexity of imperialism in practice, and its complex embedding in a host of other historical, economic, social and military realms. The best introduction to this complexity that I know of are John Darwin’s brilliant books:

The first one, in particular, goes into great detail about the many types of imperial enterprise which came under the heading imperialism (commercial, military, territorial, legal and so on) and the more you read, the more vastly complicated and confusing the subject becomes.

It also makes the staggeringly obvious but often forgotten point that, for most of history, most human beings have lived under empires. Empires have been the usual way in which societies have been organised for as long as we have written records. Therefore, the European empire builders were simply expanding a mode of social organisation which can be found in the Chinese Empire, the Assyrian Empire, the Egyptian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Persian Empire, the Aztec Empire, the Inca Empire, the Mongol Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, and many others.

One of the interesting questions, from an intellectual or historical point of view, is how the European empires differed from the many, many empires which preceded them or existed alongside them. And that is the kind of question, triggering detailed and sophisticated analysis, which makes studying the concept of empire, as explained by professional historians, so rewarding – but visiting simple-minded, dumbed-down exhibitions like this so shallow and frustrating.

It’s not that an exhibition like this one which presents ‘imperialism’ as one thing, carried out by one group of people – ‘white people’ or ‘Europeans’ – with one sole aim in mind, which was the exploitation of all non-white peoples, is wrong, exactly – it’s just that it’s so simplistic. It doesn’t begin to capture the multi-layered complexity of everything that happened over such a long period of time.

2. A simplistic view of slavery

Similarly, the exhibition takes a very simple view of slavery, which is that it was something done exclusively to Black Africans by white European nations who were all as bad as each other and had no redeeming features. There are, of course, numerous caveats to this naive idea.

1. Slavery is a universal human institution. It existed in all the empires I listed above. The Romans exported slaves from Britain. the Vikings captured Saxons as slaves. When William of Normandy conquered Britain in 1066 an estimated 10% of the population were slaves. But there’s not much here about the Roman slave trade, the Viking slave trade or Saxon slavery because they’re the wrong kinds of slaves, white slaves.

2. About a million white Europeans were carried off into slavery by Arab raiders:

Many historical studies exist but you won’t find them mentioned in exhibitions like this. Wrong kind of slaves.

3. Slavery existed in Africa before Europeans ever arrived.

4. Slavery existed between Black people who. Before the advent of Europeans with their binary notions of ‘black’ and ‘white’, Africans divided themselves into numerous tribes, all of which were continually fighting and jockeying for power with their neighbours, some of which rose to becomes ’empires’, such as the Empire of Mali (1226 to 1670) or Greater Zimbabwe (1220 to 1450). But the history of Black imperialism and of Black-on-Black slavery are rarely if ever mentioned in exhibitions like this.

5. Long before Europeans arrived, there was a thriving Arab slave trade, the systematic kidnapping of Black Africans by Arab slavers who shipped them across the Sahara or up the East coast to the slave-hungry markets of the Arab heartlands. For a comprehensive description see Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora by Ronald Segal (2001). Segal cites scholars Ralph Austen, Paul Lovejoy and Raymond Mauvey who estimate the total number of black Africans trafficked into the Islamic world between 650 and the twentieth century was between 11 and 14 million i.e. directly comparable to the number trafficked in the transatlantic slave trade we hear so much about. None of this alleviates the guilt and responsibility for the Atlantic slave trade, it just puts it in wider, fuller historical context – but it is rarely if ever mentioned in exhibitions like this because the enslavers weren’t white, and this is an exhibition about white guilt.

6. Once the Europeans arrived, Black Africans conspired to capture and sell their African ‘brothers and sisters’ to the slavers. The full extent of the complicity of Black tribes and leaders in capturing and selling into captivity other Blacks is rarely if ever mentioned in exhibitions, nor how it continued long after the British banned slavery and tried to stamp out slave trading at its source in Africa.

All these omissions are glossed over and suppressed because exhibitions like this, and entire subject of imperialism and slavery in broader cultural discourse, in the media, in education, is less about these messy complexities and more about emphasising white guilt, British guilt.

Taken together, all these omissions build up an impression that only white Europeans are capable of evil and exploitation. The implication throughout, in every wall label, video and caption, is that no Africans or non-white groups ever did anything wrong, that all Black people were always and everywhere only the innocent victims of the appalling trade. It’s an impression encouraged by the complete omission of any reference to the Arab slave trade.

I’m not saying the Atlantic slave trade wasn’t a monstrous evil, a crime against humanity, a scar on European history, a scandal whose damning legacy we may well never escape from. I’m just making the fairly obvious point that like any other historical event which took place over hundreds of years, across two or three continents and involved scores of millions of people, it was a very complicated phenomenon, which breaks down into countless millions of smaller actions and events. The interest, for me at any rate, is precisely in the full historical complexity, not in simplistic naming and shaming.

To someone like me the interest of history is in the complexity of human affairs and the often counter-intuitive nature of people and events. That’s one of the things which I would have thought make art and literature valuable – their capacity to surprise us in the same way that people we know, even the ones we think we know well, sometimes surprise us. Unexpected twists. Strange ironies. Moments of humanity amid the darkness.

But in an exhibition like this there are no surprises. Empire bad. Slavery bad. White people bad. Britain bad. Anyone who disagrees with these uninflected sentiments runs the risk of being ostracised or cancelled because the conflation of empire and slavery, and a uniform, unquestioned condemnation of both, have become the new cultural orthodoxy, and nuance, complexity and contradiction, questioning and curiosity, are not welcome.

7. One last point, the guilt of the British (traders, businessmen, plantation owners, politicians, army, artists) is hammered home in wall label after label, caption after caption, for running this wicked, evil thing the British Empire. But something you rarely if ever see referred to is that, once the wicked British Empire had gotten round to banning the slave trade in 1807, the Royal Navy, the British Army, countless British missionaries and a good deal of British diplomatic activity was deployed to get other countries to follow suit – to ban slavery, to end the Arab slave trade in Africa, and to intercept ships carrying slaves across the Atlantic and set them free.

The naval campaign against slavery is documented in books such as:

But none of the slavery and empire exhibitions I’ve visited ever mention the huge cost in men, resources, time, money and effort which Britain devoted to trying to end the slave trade. Why not? Because these exhibitions aren’t about presenting a complete review of all the historical evidence, in its vast and confusing complexity – they are about making the simple-minded political points relevant to our present cultural concerns and anxieties.

After a while the systematic erasure and suppression of all these other strands and of the broader context starts to look more like propaganda than history.

Installation view of ‘I’ll bend but I will not break’ by Betye Saar (1998) which combines a white sheet as worn by the Ku Klux Klan with an ironing board showing the famous image of slaves packed into a slave ship (for the importance of this iconic image see Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery by Adam Hochschild). Photo by the author

Labels or works?

As I’ve mentioned lots of times, my friend Andrew the designer long ago stopped reading the wall labels at art exhibitions. He just strolls around responding to the art works as contemporary artefacts, reacting to shapes and designs, patterns and poses, colours and textures, as he finds them.

Unfortunately, I had a lot more of a literary education than him and am addicted to texts, so I’m the kind of visitor who reads every single wall label, sometimes several times, in order to orientate myself within the curators’ worldview and claims.

Very often I end up disagreeing with these labels because curators have only one job, which is to write just enough to justify their exhibition and their selection of works but nowhere near enough to deeply analyse and work through the issues which they routinely raise, name-check, and then leave hanging.

Art curators’ grasp of history is generally superficial and is always selective, carefully selected to make the kinds of points that will justify, market and promote exhibitions which are themselves responding to contemporary times and trends.

Art galleries (surprise surprise) have to make money. They need visitors and so have to wait until they think a blockbuster exhibition like this will be commercially viable i.e. until pretty much all the ideas in it have become common currency and widely accepted, in this case, by the kind of people who visit Royal Academy exhibitions. This is why so many of the big exhibitions tend to be on trend but rarely ahead of it.

And what could be more on trend, what is dominating the news and the political agenda these days more than issues of race and ethnicity, what with politicians and businessmen accusing each other of racism, and making outrageous slurs against Black and Asian people? (I am, of course, referring to the scandalous remarks allegedly made by businessman and Conservative Party donor Frank Hester about former Labour MP Diane Abbott, coming hot on the heels of former Conservative Party deputy chairman Lee Anderson’s outrageous comments about London mayor Sadiq Khan)

And these recent controversies involving (Conservative) politicians’ views about Black and Asian people come against the grim backdrop of the 7 October Hamas attack into Israel and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, which have, apparently, triggered an alarming rise in incidents of both antisemitism and Islamophobia.

Political, social and cultural problems or issues around race, and the role of the British Empire whose legacy, in the form of a deeply multicultural society we now live in, could hardly be more topical.

The way this kind of exhibition is following public opinion, not leading it, is clearly indicated by the press release for the show. This explicitly states that the curators were reacting to events and responding to public opinion, not shaping it.

The exhibition was programmed in 2021 in response to the urgent public debates about the relationship between artistic representation and imperial histories. These debates were prompted by the Black Lives Matter protests and the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol in 2020.

All of this, the responsive nature of the thinking behind this exhibition and the fraught nature of recent headlines about race and racism, all explain why the show feels in many places more like an extension of the news – illustrated by a selection of works from the Royal Academy archives – than an exhibition in its own right – because that’s, in a sense, what it is.

Then again, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the omission of the more complex perspectives I mentioned above (Darwin, Segal) rubbed me up the wrong way and gave me an unduly negative view of the whole thing.

Maybe I should be more like Andrew the gay designer, who strolls around the same exhibitions as me, but never gets cross or confused because he never reads the curators’ wall labels and so never takes issue with them. Instead he simply delights in the wonderful things that he encounters – an armada of model boats hanging from the ceiling (Hew Locke), a sculpture of a woman with a globe for ahead struggling up some broken stairs (Yinka Shonibare), beautifully realistic portraits of Black men, women and children from the 18th century (Reynolds, Copley), not one but two rooms full of life-sized cartoon cut-out figures of Black people in colourful costumes (Lubaina Himid), two enormous immersive film installations (Isaac Julien, John Akomfreh), and the many other visual and artistic delights this huge and dazzling exhibition has to offer.

Installation view of ‘Naming the Money’ by Lubaina Himid RA (2004) © Lubaina Himid. Photo by the author.

Warning

As the topics of race, imperialism, immigration, identity and gender become ever more dominant in the art world as in the so-called ‘real’ world, so, apparently, does the need to warn people about some of the exhibits found in these exhibitions.

Long ago in the 1960s and 70s the aim of radical art was to shock the staid bourgeoisie. Nowadays, the exact opposite is the case. Anything which might possibly shock or trigger any possibly type of visitor has to be flagged up in advance with multiple warnings.

Tate did it in their exhibition about the British Baroque because it contained some paintings of Black slaves in chains. This exhibition also comes with a general warning:

This exhibition contains themes of slavery and racism. Some works include historical racial language and violent imagery.

Accompanied by warnings at the entrances to individual rooms that you are about to be confronted with upsetting imagery depicting racism and slavery. We didn’t use to need these kinds of warnings. Now we do. They are straws in the wind indicating the huge social and cultural changes which we are all living through.

P.S.

I got chatting to Lee, one half of the gay couple who live opposite, just as I was heading off to the Summer Exhibition, which prompted him to tell me that he has cancelled his friendship of the Royal Academy because he’s so fed up up of being lectured and harangued about race. As he said half a dozen times, ‘OK, I get it, yes, I get it, I get it, slavery was bad, I get it’. When he goes to an exhibition he wants to see good works and be given enough useful context to enjoy them, not be presented with rooms of mediocre or bad art whose sole purpose is to hit the visitor over the head with the same points about the British Empire and the slave trade.

Interesting. He’s young. He’s gay. Part of the ‘diverse and inclusive’ audience the RA and other galleries loudly claim to be attracting. Yet he was so turned off by the incessant lecturing about race that he cancelled his membership. So it’s not just middle-aged straight men like me then.

Related reviews

Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945 to 1965 @ the Barbican

Layout

The Barbican gallery is a big exhibition space, spread over two floors. On the ground floor, as you come in, there’s the ticket desk and shop, then you walk through a doorway on your right into the ground floor display space. This is divided into three successively larger ‘rooms’, the third and final one being a fairly big atrium. You then emerge from these into a corridor which runs back alongside the atrium spaces back to the shop, and off which are three alcove rooms or ‘bays’.

Back by the shop there are stairs up to the first floor gallery which runs round the walls and allows you to look down onto the atrium space you’ve just left, so you can see paintings and sculptures from above. You can walk right round this gallery but there are only alcoves or bays on along two sides of it, four bays on one side and four on the other. 3 + 3 + 4 + 4 = 14 distinct display spaces.

14 rooms, 14 themes

So when the curators set out to design this exhibition of post-war British art they had 14 spaces to play with and have come up with 14 topics or subject areas, accordingly. Starting in room 1, the visitor walks through 14 themed aspects of post-war British art, which are also arranged in a loosely chronological order, starting just after the end of the Second World War and ending in 1965.

‘Cyborg collages’: First Contact by John McHale (1958) Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York © Estate of John McHale

The new

The curators have made one key decision which defines the entire show: believing that post-war artists had to cope with the aftermath of ‘a cataclysmic war that called into question religion, ideology and humanity itself’, they have consciously chosen to focus on THE NEW ARTISTS of the period. They have ignored artists who’d come to prominence between the wars (so no Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth, for example; no Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, no Stanley Spencer, Surrealists or Bloomsburyites).

Instead the curators have tried to catch the mood conveyed by The New Generation of young artists who emerged immediately after the war and set a new tone. The result is that, although the exhibition contains the huge number of 200 works of painting, sculpture and photography, by an overwhelming number of artists (48) it has a surprising unity of feel.

Leaving aside the (excellent) photographers, the paintings in particular demonstrate what you could call a kind of damaged abstraction. There’s a blurred, grey and brown, muddy quality to much of the work. There are lots of earth tones, earth grey, earth cream, earth browns.

West Indian waitresses by Eva Frankfurther (1955) Ben Uri collection, presented by the artist’s sister Beate Planskoy © the Estate of Eve Frankfurther

The war hadn’t pulverised a specific landscape, as in the images of the Western Front made famous during and after the First World War. It had ranged far more widely than that. Crucially, it had permanently damaged mankind’s view of itself.

It was hard to be optimistic about people or ‘culture’ or ‘civilisation’ after news of the concentration camps broke in May 1945, and then the atom bombs were dropped in August 1945. And then the H bombs and the start of the incredibly fearful and menacing Cold War. Many artists struggled to believe in anything positive and channelled their energies into devising novel ways to express their horror and despair.

With so many works by so many artists, there are some exceptions, but overall I’d say this is quite a grim, depressing exhibition, with much to be justifiably depressed about. If you put the (five) photographers to one side, then there’s hardly any figurative work, and when there is (Auerbach, Freud, Bacon, Bratby, Cooke, Souza) it is heavily stylised or deliberately distorted. There are certainly no landscapes. It is an accumulation of damaged psyches.

From murk to clarity

It occurred to me that you could arrange almost all the works along a spectrum from Murk to Clarity. Then you further could sub-divide these categories. What I mean is that the murky end of the spectrum could be divided into images which look like:

bodies melted in a nuclear blast (Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter King)
bodies eviscerated in some grotesque medical calamity (Magda Cordell)
people drowning in Holocaust concentration camp mud (Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff)
bodies blurring into hunks of meat (Francis Bacon)
bodies reimagined as abstract shapes, blots, drabs and dribbles of paint (Gillian Ayres)
bodies combined with inorganic materials such as metal to become ominous cyborgs (Lynn Chadwick’s semi-abstract sculpture of a demonic bird, John McHale’s robotic family, Elisabeth Frink’s menacingly humanoid Harbinger Birds and the St Sebastian sculptures by Eduardo Paolozzi)

The murkiest of the murk

I’ve always heartily disliked the paintings of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Both applied unbelievable amounts of paint to their canvasses to create nightmare brown meringues of mud. They themselves in interviews claimed they were seeking to get at the essence of the subject or to capture the fleeting nature of reality or some such. They obsessively painted London scenes such as two big muddy paintings here, of the Shell building on the South Bank and Willesden railway junction.

But for me the key fact is that both were Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and, to me, all their paintings powerfully, oppressively convey the feel of the grim Polish winter mud in which so many of their fellow Jews were worked to death, starved to death and exterminated.

‘Drowning in the mud of the Holocaust’: Head of Gerda Boehm by Frank Auerbach (1964) Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts © The Artist

Clarity

At the other end of the spectrum is what I’ve called Clarity, which can be sub-divided into maybe three rooms or artists:

artists in the Concrete room
Lucian Freud
Surface / Vessel room

In the room called Concrete are a set of surprisingly calm, clean, crisp, white abstract images. Victor Pasmore was a celebrate figurative artist when, in the late 1940s, he underwent a conversion to abstraction. By 1951 Pasmore had established a circle of younger artists who were equally committed to the cause of geometric abstraction, which they referred to variously as ‘Concrete’, ‘Constructionist’ or ‘Constructivist’ art, artists including Mary Martin, Adrian Heath, Anthony Hill, Robert Adams and Denis Williams.

Concrete is right next to the death camp vibe of the Auerbach room, Scars, and I really needed it. The white geometric shapes projecting from the canvas as Modernist friezes reminded me of Ben Nicholson (famous between the wars and so banned from this show).

Lucian Freud may seem an odd artist to group under the heading of clarity, but the exhibition features three of his earliest works which do, in fact feature this quality. Edgy, though. Distorted. The curators put it well when they say that ‘Freud’s forensic attention to small details suggests an uneasy vigilance, revealing anxieties just below the surface.’

‘Neurotic clarity’: Girl with Roses by Lucian Freud (1948) Courtesy of the British Council Collection © The Lucian Freud Archive/ Bridgeman Images, photograph

The third ‘calm’ room is titled Surface/Vessel. It features the paintings by William Scott and ceramic vessels by Lucie Rie and Hans Coper. What they have in common is the withdrawal of all bright colours and a return to the colour of canvas and clay, textured surfaces and irregular forms. I might have liked them because 15 years later they set the tone for the kind of abstract prints you could buy at Habitat and Ikea and my parents decorated my childhood home with reproductions of these kind of gentle, cream and earth brown soothing shapes.

Installation view of Postwar Modern showing two works by William Scott: Message Obscure I (1965) and Morning in Mykonos (1961)

Room guide

The themed rooms are:

1. Body and cosmos

The first three rooms are the three progressively bigger ones on the ground floor. Each is dominated by a big signature work. This first room is dominated by Full Stop by John Latham. This seems pretty meh in reproduction which doesn’t convey its size. It’s huge, monumental, 3.5 metres by 2.5 metres, a Mark Rothko of a painting, and a hypnotic image. Is it a solar eclipse, a black hole, an enormously magnified piece of typography. Something has ended – but what?

‘The death of colour’: Full Stop by John Latham (1961) Tate © the Estate of John Latham

Much smaller is the set of three prints by Eduardo Paolozzi, born in 1924 the son of Italian immigrants, so an impressionable teenager during the war. It’s impossible to make the prints out as heads because the images look eroded and decomposed as if by acid or, as wall label suggests, evaporated in the atomic blast so many around the world feared was coming.

2. Post atomic garden

The second room is bigger, contains more but is dominated by the mutant bird sculpture by Lynn Chadwick named The Fisheater (1951). It was commissioned for the 1951 Festival of Britain. It’s set on a slender tripod and aerial assembly, a slender outline of a bird made from thin metal rods and sheets of metal, looking a bit like the skeleton of Concorde, very slightly swaying in the ambient air, beakily looking down at us soft and vulnerable humans.

Installation view of Postwar Modern at the Barbican showing The Fisheater by Lynn Chadwick (1951)

Fisheater epitomises the combination of light, modern industrial elements with unnerving menace which is one of the threads which runs through the show, as in the Paolozzi robots and the robot-humanoid nuclear family grimly depicted in John McHale’s First Contact (above).

3. Strange universe

The third ground floor space is the biggest, lined with huge paintings by a variety of artists, but it is dominated by a signature work, three metal sculptures, about man-size mutant cyborgs made out of complex metal and engineering detritus, welded together and melting at the edges as if they’re robots which have been brought to a halt and slightly melted in the ultimate nuclear apocalypse. They’re by Eduardo Poalozzi who, I think, has more pieces than anyone else in the exhibition and emerges as its presiding spirit.

‘Humanoid figures assembled from electrical scraps and castoffs’: Installation view of Postwar Modern showing Saint Sebastian by Eduardo Paolozzi (1957)

This room also features some enormous paintings by Magda Cordell which are splashed with red and orange and look like the freshly flayed and eviscerated carcass of a humanoid life form.

Figure 59 by Magda Cordell (1958)

4. Jean and John

The first of the bays off to the side of the ground floor corridor contains 8 or so paintings by the husband and wife artists Jean Cooke and John Bratby. Bratby’s stylised but basically figurative still lifes of their home, with boxes of cereals on the kitchen table, were nicknamed ‘Kitchen Sink’ art, presumably before kitchen sink drama came along. Although figurative and colourful, these paintings somehow bespeak the horrible, pokey domesticity of English life and it came as no surprise to learn that Bratby was jealous of his wife’s talent, destroyed much of her work and beat and abused her. See what I mean by grim?

5. Intimacy and aura

This is the room with the neurotic early paintings by Lucian Freud which I mentioned above.

But it also features the first of the photographers, Bill Brandt. Photography, with its figurative realism, comes as a big relief after four rooms loaded with paintings of bleakness, despair, mutant robots and huge abattoir paintings. But it is even more of a relief to discover that Brandt is represented here by a series of photos of female nudes. It’s not that they’re nude so much as that they’re studies of people who are young, fit and healthy. It is a sudden oasis in a desert of radioactive despair.

Apparently Brandt had been renowned in the 1930s for his photojournalism (thus breaking the curators’ self-imposed rule that no-one from between the wars has a place) but 1945 saw a radical shift in his practice as he began experimenting with nude studies indoors. Not only indoors, but in spare, spartan uncarpeted rooms. So, although fully realistic, these studies also have a strange, spooky, spectral mood. Arguably these photos, although entirely naturalistic, manage to share the same sense of nervy ominous as so many of the paintings and sculptures.

The Policeman’s Daughter, Hampstead, London 1945 by Bill Brandt © Bill Brandt Archive

6. Lush life

This room is a surprise. One entire wall is a hugely blown up photo of the interior of a new model home designed by the visionary architects Alison and Peter Smithson. It’s a photo of their stand at the 1956 Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition. It was titled ‘House of the Future’ and the furniture was created using plaster, plywood and paint masquerading as the moulded plastic they’d like to have used but couldn’t afford, the kind of new super-slimmed-down ideals for living designs which were being pioneered and mass produced in America and which featured in the Barbican exhibition about Charles and Ray Eames.

Installation view of Postwar Modern showing the wall-sized photo of Alison and Peter Smithson’s 1956 ‘House of the Future’, with just one yellow ‘egg chair’, made from moulded reinforced polyester, on the low dais.

The American theme is echoed in a series of humorous collages created by Eduardo Paolozzi (is he the most represented artist in the show?). It’s a series of A4 sized collages he created by cutting up images from glossy American consumer magazines, titling the series Bunk. Of course they’re meant to be ironic and subversive and whatnot, but what really comes over is the power and optimism of the original images. Particularly when set against the post-atomic, post-Holocaust nihilism of so much of the rest of the show.

Bunk! Evadne in Green Dimension by Eduardo Paolozzi (1952) Victoria and Albert Museum, © The Paolozzi Foundation

7. Scars

As described above, the Auerbach and Kossoff, drowning in mud, Holocaust despair room.

The room also has a little TV on which is playing a film of a 1961 event carried out by another Jew (the curators emphasis the common ethnicity of these three artists), Gustav Metzger. Metzger pioneered an art of ‘auto-destruction’ in the late 1950s, staging works that enacted their own disintegration, mirroring the violence he felt in a world hell bent on its own destruction. In the grainy old film Metzger is wearing a gas mask, with St Paul’s in the background, while he sprays acid onto canvas which promptly shrivels and dissolves. ‘Happenings’ had been happening in America among beatnik audiences art colleges throughout the 1950s. This appears to be Metzger’s variation on the idea which – as so often in this exhibition – accentuates the negative.

8. Concrete

As described above, a roomful of works by Victor Pasmore and his fellow ‘Concrete’ artists. I especially enjoyed the small-scale, abstract sculptures by Robert Adams. Calm and healing.

Installation view of Postwar Modern at the Barbican showing works by Robert Adams, being: Divided form (1951), Rectangular bronze form number 7 (1955) and Balanced bronze forms (1955).

9. Choreography of the street

More photography, thank God. The black and white snaps of Nigel Henderson and Roger Mayne who specialised in capturing children at play in the gritty, ruin-infested post war streets. Mayne’s most famous body of work was created between 1956 and 1961, capturing the working-class community of Southam Street in North Kensington, west London. One of his photos was used for the cover Colin MacInnes’s novel, Absolute Beginners (1959), a copy of which is here in a glass case.

Street scene 1957 by Roger Mayne © Roger Mayne Archive / Mary Evans Picture Library

Reminds me a bit of the photo of young toughs in Finsbury Park, 1958, which marked the start of Don McCullin’s career.

The lovely and hugely evocative photos of kids playing in bomb sites are interspersed with a series of collages by Robyn Denny and Eduardo Paolozzi (surely Paolozzi is the most featured artist in the show?). And alongside these, collages and in the radical print designs created by Henderson and Paolozzi for their company Hammer Prints Ltd (1954 to 1962).

10. Two women

The two women in question are German refugee painter Eva Frankfurther and home-grown Mancunian photographer, Shirley Baker. Baker documented the changing face of Manchester in the 1950s and early 60s as the old slums were demolished and cleared for high rises and social housing. She walked the streets with a camera always in her bag, taking wonderfully evocative black and white photos of wretched slums and the old-style, working class inhabitants. In 1965 she started experimenting with colour photography and some of her colour photos are feature here.

I was lucky enough to go to the Shirley Baker exhibition at the Photographers Gallery a few years ago – none of the colour photos here are as good as her black and white ones. In a funny kind of way, colour shots of this kind of scene look oddly older, more technologically dated, than the pure black and white ones.

Anyway, the point is… look at the rubble! And in 1965! Twenty years after the war, large parts of England were still struggling to drag themselves into the modern age.

Hulme 1965 by Shirley Baker © Nan Levy for the Estate of Shirley Baker

11. Cruise

The wall label in this room informs us that:

Cruising, or looking for a casual sexual encounter in a public place, was central to the expression and exploration of male same-sex love and desire in the postwar years…

And so it is that one wall features a couple of early works by David Hockney, large browny-black background with all kinds of graffiti, words, lines and squiggles drawn across them:

The title My Brother is Only Seventeen (1962) was derived from graffiti that Hockney read on the toilet walls of Earl’s Court station, a popular cruising spot.

My Brother is only Seventeen by David Hockney (1962) © Royal College of Art

But the real revelation of this room is arguably the best thing in the exhibition. In 1954 Francis Bacon painted a series of seven huge paintings depicting a man in a dark suit sitting at the bar of a hotel, although the background has been stylised to become the slender bars of some kind of cage set against a very dark background. Three of the series are hung here, side by side.

Man in Blue I by Francis Bacon (1954) Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam © The Estate of Francis Bacon

A photo like this doesn’t do the paintings any kind of justice. They are not only enormous but also, despite their stylised subject matter, have the depth and resonance of Old Master paintings. It took me a while to realise that, unlike all the other rooms in the show, the walls of this room are painted black, as if we are in a very old museum or gallery, and these three Man in Blue paintgins have the power and depth of Old Masters.

Black upon black, depths of blackness, inky impenetrability and ominousness. Possibly the best part of the entire exhibition was standing in front of these three enormous variations on a dark, baleful image and letting it soak right in to your soul.

12. Surface/vessel

As described above, a calming, peaceful room of the paintings by William Scott and ceramic vessels by Lucie Rie and Hans Coper.

13. Liberated form and space

Big colourful paintings by Gillian Ayres, Patrick Heron and Frank Bowling. From the reproductions I thought I’d like the Ayres, but in the flesh I found them a too big and I didn’t warm to her use of ‘dribbles, splashes and stains’ of paint, as the curators themselves describe her work.

‘A world of abstract shapes and dripping paint’: Break-off by Gillian Ayres (1961) Tate © the Estate of Gillian Ayres, courtesy of Marlborough Gallery, London

By the same token, I didn’t warm to the press release photos of paintings by Patrick Heron, but in the flesh found them to be some of the very few genuinely colourful, vibrant and life affirming paintings in the entire exhibition. The wall label explains that, like Pasmore and other post-war artists, when he moved from figurative to abstract painting Heron experienced a great sense of liberation.

June Horizon by Patrick Heron (1957) Wakefield Council Permanent Art Collection (The Hepworth Wakefield) © The Estate of Patrick Heron

14. Horizon

The exhibition ends on an oddity.

We met Gustav Metzger in the Scars room, represented by a film of one of his auto-destructive events. Here, at the end of the exhibition is a blacked out room with half a dozen film projectors projecting onto two walls a series of abstract swirling shapes, which were to become super familiar in the Psychedelic movement and subsequently in the lava lamps of millions of suburban bedrooms. Metzger had moved away from the ‘auto-destructive art’ of the 1950s and towards what he now titled ‘auto-creation’, in which the work of art takes on its own life. This immersive room, complete with bean bags (but no spliffs) is titled Liquid Crystal Environment and was created in 1965 using heat-sensitive chemicals sandwiched between rotating glass slides in a projector.

It’s an odd piece to end on because it seems so out of synch with the rest of the show. It feels like a little bit of the Psychedelic Sixties which has got lost in an exhibition which is overwhelmingly about the grim psychic damage, the anxieties and angst of the early Cold War, with the long memory of the Holocaust festering under the shadow of nuclear apocalypse.

Maybe it’s meant to feel cheerful but it doesn’t, which might explain why the two or three times I walked past I didn’t see anybody on the numerous beanbags.

Immigrants

An impressive number of the artists were refugees from Nazi Europe (Auerbach. Kossoff, Metzger, Lucie Rie, Hans Coper, Eva Frankfurther, Magda Cordell). But the curators go out of their way to include artists from colonial backgrounds, non-white immigrants from what was still the British Empire. These include:

Francis Newton Souza (India), with his intimidating, highly stylised black Christs (1958) in the first room
Anwar Jalal Shemza (Pakistan) with a series of Islam-inspired abstracts in the same room as Heron and Ayres
Kim Lim (Singapore Chinese) with her delicate abstract sculptures

The Barbican’s birthday show

The curators point out that the exhibition has been timed to coincide with the fortieth birthday of the Barbican’s opening, for it was in the grim post-war period that the Barbican Estate was first conceived, to occupy what was at the time an enormous bombsite in the heart of London.

The Barbican itself, a grim, forbidding, concrete bunker, on an oppressive grey, rainy day, was the perfect setting for an exhibition about the damaged lives, damaged psyches and damaged country which – despite occasional bursts of colour – is what comes over so powerfully in this show.

Other Barbican reviews

All my other Barbican reviews on the Art and Exhibitions page

2 Comments

by Simon on March 4, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Second World War

Tagged Adrian Heath, Alison Smithson, Anthony Hill, Anwar Jalal Shemza, atom bomb, auto-creation, auto-destructive art, Barbican, Barbican gallery, Ben Nicholson, Bill Brandt, Bunk, Cold War, Colin MacInnes, David Hockney, Denis Williams, Eduardo Paolozzi, Elisabeth Frink, Eva Frankfurter, exhibition, Festival of Britain, Francis Bacon, Francis Newton Souza, Frank Auerbach, Frank Bowling, Gillian Ayres, Gustav Metzger, Hans Coper, Holocaust, Jean Cooke, John Bratby, John Latham, John McHale, Kim Lim, Leon Kossoff, Lucian Freud, Lucie Rie, Lynn Chadwick, Magda Cordell, Mary Martin, modern art, Nigel Henderson, Painting, Patrick Heron, Peter King, Peter Smithson, post-war British art, Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945 to 1965, Prints, Robert Adams, Robyn Denny, Roger Mayne, sculpture, Shirley Baker, Victor Pasmore, William Scott

Posted by Simon on March 4, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/03/04/postwar-modern-new-art-in-britain-1945-to-1965-barbican/

Manga @ the British Museum

Wow! The British Museum sure knows how to put on an exhibition! This comprehensive overview of the history and variety of Japanese manga comics, characters and stories, is the largest show on manga ever staged outside of Japan, and an all-singing, all-dancing feast for the mind and imagination and the senses!

Higashikata Josuke, a hero from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure (1987 to the present) by Araki Hirohiko. Photo by the author

The long Sainsbury Exhibition Galleries at the back of the Museum’s main courtyard have been turned into lowlit funfair and phantasmagoria of all things manga, absolutely packed with a riot of ways of displaying, showing, highlighting, explaining, animating and enjoying all things manga. There are:

bookshelves packed with manga books (tankôbon) to take down and read
blow-ups of favourite manga characters in striking poses stuck to the walls
frames from manga books blown-up onto big canvases hanging from the ceiling
animated manga adventures (anime) projected onto screens all over the place
display cases examining scores of aspects and elements of the manga style
wall labels explaining the history and origins of manga
an long, painted theatre curtain covered with traditional Japanese characters from the 1880s, showing manga’s roots in theatrical costume and caricature
a huge model of a human head flayed of its skin to become a looming, muscled menace (a manga character, not an anatomical model)
footage of the enormous Comiket convention which attracts tens of thousands of manga fans every year
footage of a typical ‘cosplay’ festival where thousands of Japanese and foreigners dress up as their favourite manga characters
clips from some of the classic animated films produced by the famous Studio Ghibli projected onto a couple of big screens hanging from the ceiling
TV monitors which show interviews with famous and venerable practitioners of manga art
and all the way through, countless wall labels giving an enjoyable overload of information – either long ones giving you the history and development of the form, or shorter ones giving brief explanations of the huge variety of genres and subject matters which manga has covered

The press release explained that the exhibition is actually structured into six sections but it didn’t feel like that at all, and this review reflects the random, scattergun and sometimes repetitive experience of wandering around the big exhibition hall attracted to this or that image or TV interview or display or information label, sometimes several times, as I tried to get the facts and history and varieties of manga clear in my head.

Information panel early on in the exhibition. Photo by the author

Manga: a quick overview

To quote Wikipedia:

Manga are comics or graphic novels created in Japan or by creators in the Japanese language, conforming to a style developed in Japan in the late 19th century.

The term manga in Japan is a word used to refer to both comics and cartooning. ‘Manga’ as a term used outside Japan refers to comics originally published in Japan.

In Japan, people of all ages read manga. The medium includes works in a broad range of genres: action, adventure, business and commerce, comedy, detective, drama, historical, horror, mystery, romance, science fiction and fantasy, erotica, sports and games, and suspense, among others.

Since the 1950s, manga has steadily become a major part of the Japanese publishing industry. By 1995, the manga market in Japan was valued at $7 billion, with annual sales of 1.9 billion manga books and manga magazines in Japan (equivalent to 15 issues per person per year [the population of Japan is 127 million]).

Manga stories are typically printed in black-and-white, although some full-color manga exist. In Japan, manga are usually serialized in large manga magazines, often containing many stories, each presented in a single episode to be continued in the next issue.

A manga artist (mangaka in Japanese) typically works with a few assistants in a small studio and is associated with a creative editor from a commercial publishing company. If a manga series is popular enough, it may be animated after or during its run.

Nowadays Manga has expanded way beyond printed magazines and books to include animated films (anime) and a huge gaming industry.

Icaro by Moebius and Jirō Taniguchi (1997) describes the mind-bending adventures of a young man, Icaro, with the ability to fly and a young woman, Yukiko, who risks her life – and more – to help Icaro achieve his dream. Photo by the author

Modern origins

Manga developed from serialised cartoon strips in newspapers in the late 1800s. Political and satirical artists Kitazawa Rakuten (1876 to 1955) and Okomoto Ippei (1886 to 1948) are considered the first manga artist. Their work inspired the next generation, including manga legend Tezuka Osamu, creator of Astro Boy.

Osamu’s first manga book was New Treasure Island published in 1947, which blended influences of earlier manga, Disney cartoons and movies. It sold a sensational 400,000 copies, not bad for an 18-year-old and just after the war when the country’s economy was in ruins. Osamu went on to pioneer various manga ‘looks’, not least in his use of cinematic page layouts, casts of recurring characters, and imaginative stories.

Osamu produced manga aimed at both male and female readers, The Mighty Atom (1952) for the former, Princess Knight (1953) for the latter.

Some young visitors enthusiastically copying details about one of the many manga characters blown up and painted on the wall. Photo by the author

Visual techniques of manga

Manga has evolved a set of signs and symbols (manpu) which manga artists use to suggest actions or emotions.

Reading direction

Like Japanese writing manga is read from top to bottom and from right to left. The action is contained within frames called koma, which divide the page.

Fukidashi

Speech bubbles. The shapes of speech and thought bubbles change to reflect mood and content.

Gitaigo / giseigo

Sound effects are used to convey drama and to involve the reader in the action.

Screen tone (tōn)

The colour and texture and ‘tone’ of the background, or of the entire image, can be varied to reflect the mood of a scene.

Two characters from the women-only Princess Jellyfish series (2008 to 2017). Photo by the author

The profession of manga

There are about 5,000 professional manga artists in Japan and the number continues to grow. There are many routes into the industry: some up-and-coming artists submit manga ideas to publishing houses, some are spotted at fan conventions, some get work as editorial assistants and work their way up.

There’s a monitor showing footage of manga artists and scriptwriters working away in a modern studio, in almost factory, mass production, conditions. The books and magazines and stories are certainly churned out on an industrial scale.

Typical manga stories progress through fixed stages, from sketches and drafts, to a script and storyboard (neemu), to final pages approved by an editor for publication. Many artists write and illustrate their own manga, some use a scriptwriter. Others rely heavily on their editors for content and drawing.

Shelves packed with manga books and a bench to sit and read on. Note the nationality and age of the visitors. Photo by the author

The manga industry

Manga is big business. The total income of the Japanese manga industry in 2016 was about three billion dollars. Four of the top manga publishers – Hakusensha, Kodansha, Shogakukan and Shueisha – dominate the market. They are in constant competition, publishing new stories and characters, striving to keep popular manga artists on their books, and running regular competitions to discover new artists, while any new innovation is quickly copied.

Alongside many other audiovisual displays, the exhibition includes half a dozen TV monitors showing interviews with current leading practitioners of the art, including:

Nahuma Ichirō, born 1963 and now editor-in-chief of Big Comic
Suzuki Haruhiko (b.1955) co-creator of the popular series Captain Tsubasa (1981 to 1988) and now Managing Director of Shueisha
Torishima Kazuhiko (b.1952) now chairman of Hakusensha, but who, as editor of the weekly Shōnen Magazine helped to create the popular Dragon Ball series (1984 to 1995)

Visitor demographics

The exhibition was heaving, absolutely packed. There were a lot of Japanese here, and I heard French and Italian being spoken. But what really impressed me was the age of the visitors. At Tate Britain’s Frank Bowling exhibition, which I went to last week, most of the visitors were the traditional older, grey-haired types – and, after soaking myself in manga, I popped upstairs at the British Museum to see the Edvard Munch show which was rammed with really old people, including at least three old men who were using sticks and moving very slowly – the oldest of the old – barely mobile.

The contrast between those shows of ‘fine’ art, and the crowd in the Manga show couldn’t have been more dramatic. Manga was packed with kids and teenagers and – mirabile dictu – even non-white people!

At the end of the show there’s an interactive gimmick where you stand on a white circle that’s been painted on the floor and a camera up on the wall captures you and projects it onto a computer screen where you can select a variety of manga backgrounds and even, I think, change your own appearance to become a manga character.

The point is there was a whole cluster of black kids doing it, pushing and joking with each other and clustered round the screen giving each other ridiculous appearances. From visiting well over 150 art exhibitions I can tell you that you never get groups of black kids at art exhibitions. Isolated black individuals or couples, maybe.

I smiled as I watched them larking about, genuinely having fun, and it crossed my mind that, if art galleries and museums are sincere about ‘reaching out to all sectors of the community’ and ‘promoting diversity’, the obvious way to do it is to put on shows on popular subjects. Trying to attract the street people I see everyday in Streatham and Tooting to an emotionally and intellectually challenging exhibition of woodcuts by the late-Victorian and chronically depressed Norwegian artist Edvard Munch is always going to be an impossible challenge.

Putting on a fun, interactive show, with plenty of moving pictures, animations, cartoons, TV clips and things to do, on a subject which lots of kids and teenagers can immediately relate to – that’s the secret of attracting more diverse and varied (and younger) audiences.

Busy and immersive

This is a terrible photo but it shows you how busy and visually immersive the exhibition is. At bottom is a huge video photo of a typically packed manga bookshop (it is in fact Comic Takaoka, in Jinbôchô Tokyo, one of the oldest continually operating manga bookstores in Japan).

Above it is one of several screens hanging from the ceiling on which are projected an animated version of Professor Munakata’s British Museum Adventure which the British Museum commissioned from leading manga artist Hoshino Yukinobu and which has gone on to be animated.

You can see loads of other blown-up images hanging like a forest in the background.

And off to the left, there is the enormous plastic sculpture of a flayed head, the Colossal Titan, maybe ten feet tall, from a manga story called The Attack on Titan (2012 to 2013). It’s like a fair.

Installation view of Manga at the British Museum. Photo by the author

Historical precursors

Manga as we know it emerged in the late 1800s, building on Japan’s long tradition of visual storytelling. Precursors of manga include narrative handscrolls and woodcut prints and cheap illustrated novels. The exhibition goes way back to display a picture handscroll dating to 1100, the so-called Handscroll of Frolicking Animals, which shows cartoon animals wrestling, playing and, well, generally frolicking.

Other examples of historical precursors are scattered through the exhibition but the most striking example of manga’s historical roots is the 17-metre-long Kabuki theatre curtain from the Shintomiza theatre in Tokyo which dates from the 1880s and depicts traditional Japanese folk characters and monsters. This repays some study and a slow stroll along it taking in the garish and grotesque characters and animals.

Shintomiza Kabuki Theatre Curtain (1880) by Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831 to 1889). Photo by the author

Style and gender

During the 1950s two styles of manga emerged:

shōnen and seinen aimed at boys and young men, respectively and focusing on action and adventure
shōjo aimed at girls and women, focusing on romance and relationships

In fact these gendered genres were created by, and read by, either sex indistinguishably. Around 1970 a pioneering group of women, named the Year 24 Group, brought a new stylishness and sophistication to shōjo stories.

Genres

In the latter half of the exhibition are loads of displays, each one highlighting the wide range of subject matter manga stories can cover. Each of them was accompanied by a couple of examples of storylines around that particular subject.

Sport

Packed with passion, competition, rivalry, and dramatic physical activities which forge lasting friendships, sport is a natural subject for manga and has even been credited with making certain sports like soccer more popular in Japan

Sci fi

An obvious area is science fiction, not least because the cartoon style gives scope for drawing any number of futuristic spaceships, gadgets and gizmos. An example is Toward the Terra (1977 to 1980) set in a future where computers controal all aspects of birth, life and death. Only the Mu, a mutant breed of humans with telepathic powers, question the oppressive status quo.

Horror

Arising out of traditional Japanese horror stories, the clever use of frames means the horrifying thing can be ‘off screen’ or only hinted at, while the reader only sees the characters’ terrified reactions

Religion

Japan has two belief systems, Buddhism and Shinto. the example given here was of a manga comic which imagines what would happen in Jesus and the Buddha were modern flatmates, an idea which made me burst out laughing

Love and sex

This is a huge area. Some titles are sexually explicit and so veer into pornography. Others are squeaky clean romances for younger schoolgirls. And everything in between, including high school romance, maternal love, and Boys Love, an odd term which apparently refers to gay love affairs. As with everything to do with sex – a basic element of human behaviour which no society has ever been able to understand or police – there are, apparently, ‘concerns’ about some of the depictions of sex, and the United Nations, no less, has apparently listed some manga stories and threads as violent pornography. Should it be banned in order ‘to protect women and children’? Discuss.

Transformation

Adventure stories are full of people or things which can transform shift shapes – think of all the superheroes who pop into a phone box to change from boring salarymen into saviours of the world. Then multiply that idea by a thousand themes and variations. They give the example of Cyborg 009 which ran from 1964 to 1992 and concerned nine cyborgs, forced to transform into weapons by the evil Black Ghost Corporation, but who gained superhuman powers and escaped to run off and have thirty years’ worth of colourful adventures. Cyborgs creator – Ishinomori Shōtarō (1938 to 1998) currently holds the world record for manga output, having created 770 titles and 550 volumes.

Education

Manga is incorporated into educational texts, to produce simplified introductions to all manner of subjects from Marxism to sex education.

Current affairs

Manga can be produced on current political affairs or traumatic national history. The curators give the example of Kōno Fumiyo’s moving story about a family living with the after effects of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which won international praise.

Among the scores of snippets from various manga plotlines and heroes which I read, the most memorable was The Willow Tree, created by Hagio Moto in 2007. The entire story was displayed in its entirety in a long glass case. A woman stands by a tree and a boy passes by, growing older in each passing scene. As the seasons pass the willow tree grows and the boy becomes a man. On the final page the man approaches the woman under the tree, and we learn that she is his dead mother who has been watching over him all this time. When he tells her that he knows she is there and that he is fine, she disappears. The changing appearance of the tree, and its falling and regrowing leaves, symbolise not only the passage of time, but the evolving nature of maternal love.

Willow Tree by Hagio Moto (2007)

Comiket

Twice a year there’s a Comiket convention-event which lasts three days and attracts hundreds of thousands of participants and visitors. A big screen shows a speeded-up video of the hordes of visitors arriving outside the convention hall and then circulating round the vast arena of displays and stands, intercut with interviews with fans explaining why they attend.

Lots of fans bring along their own manga comics which they’ve created, known as dōjinshi, often using well-known characters, the manga equivalent of fan fiction. There are about 35,000 dōjinshi groups in Japan.

Cosplay

Short for ‘costume play’, this simply refers to dressing up as your favourite manga characters. Another massive video display shows a montage of mainly young people dressed up as all manner of manga characters and fooling around for the cameras, some acting out entire scenes, some going as far as staging entire storylines.

The annual World Cosplay Summit began in Nagoya in 2003. Cosplayers attend from round the world and the event includes a parade and a competition to be crowned world cosplay champion.

A still from the film about the World Cosplay Competition. Photo by the author

Studio Ghibli

Studio Ghibli is a Japanese animation film studio based in Koganei, Tokyo. The studio is best known for its anime (or animated cartoon) feature films. It was founded in 1985, after the worldwide success of the anime, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984).

Six of Studio Ghibli’s films are among the 10 highest-grossing anime films ever made in Japan, with Spirited Away (2001) the second highest, grossing over $290 million worldwide, and winning that year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film.

Two big screens suspended from the ceiling play a montage of clips from the Studio’s greatest hits, and down at floor level there are monitors showing interviews with some of the studio’s leading animators, explaining their approach and how anime differs from manga.

Still from The Wind Rises (2013) directed by Hayao Miyazaki for Studio Ghibli. Photo by the author

The frame

In among this bombardment of information and entertainment, I came across one information panel which struck me as saying the most interesting thing about manga as a visual art form. Inoue Takehiko was commissioned by the Museum to create a manga triptych to conclude the exhibition, and has contributed large, blown-up portraits of three of the tough urban heroes from his series REAL. These are accompanied by clips from an interview with him in which he says:

For me it is all in the frame (koma). I think frames are set to take you beyond, and at the same time to confine, infinity within their confines…a good manga is composed of human figures drawn as if alive defined within an artificial environment defined by the frame.

The second part of this statement is not necessarily true. The human figures of manga are most notable for not looking remotely lifelike, but having highly simplified, open, innocent facial features (characterised by unnaturally large, doe eyes), and for being improbably athletic and dynamic.

But the first half touches on something really profound about all art, which is the power of the frame in limiting and defining the image. This is true of one-off paintings, drawings and prints. But is immensely important in the creation of all manner of cartoon strips, from manga to the French tradition of bandes dessignées through to Anglo-American comic strips.

It is not about the individual picture – although these can often be of stunning impact and beauty – but fundamentally it is about the dynamic experience of reading through a series of framed pictures. And, as Takehiko points out, the framing is vital in creating the mood and tone of each image; and the way successive frames are defined, creates a kind of visual narrative energy, over and above the logical content of the pictures, of their narrative.

It would be really interesting to learn more about the psychology of reading comic strips – how they affect the eye and the mind in a way that static individual images don’t. Wonder if anyone’s researched this subject.

In fact, now I reflect on it the day after visiting, I realise that the exhibition gave a lot of information about the various subject matters of manga, but maybe not enough analysis of that look. All the characters and stories have the same simplified cartoon style and all have the supersize eyes with big catchlights in them.

And, reviewing all the photos I took, and manga online, I realise another fact which is so obvious no-one comments on it. Which is that manga characters don’t look very Japanese. Here’s a photo of a typical Japanese young woman picked at random off the internet, after googling ‘Japanese girl.’

A random Japanese young woman

And here’s a manga of a young woman, from the Wikipedia article.

Figure in manga style by Jez (2016)

The real woman has brown or lightly tanned skin, the manga has pure white skin; and the Japanese has the characteristically narrow eyes of the Far East, while the manga figure has those alarmingly big, round catchlit, cartoon eyes.

It would have been good to have had it explained just how that look came about. Why – for over fifty years – it has stayed essentially the same. And why it denatures the ethnic Japanese appearance in favour of something more…generic and, often, more white and western-seeming. (I may be wildly wrong about this, I’m just going on the impression gained from studying the examples of manga on display here, in this particular exhibition. For example the lead figure in the still from The Wind Rises could be Harry Potter, there is absolutely nothing Japanese about his appearance. Why?)

Golden Kamuy (2014 to the present) is set in early 20th century Hokkaido, where young Sugimoto Sa’ichi leads a ragtag band on a dangerous quest to locate a stolen golden hoard belonging to the Ainu people

Anyway – this is a fabulous and hugely enjoyable exhibition. If you or your friends or kids are remotely interested in manga, this is a must-visit experience.

The Guardian review

The next day I read the review by the Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones.

Guardian review by Jonathan Jones

Jones savages the exhibition, raising two issues: 1) the unnecessary comparison with Old Masters, and 2) the omission of the filth and the fury associated with Japanese art.

1. Manga versus the Old Masters

Seems like whoever took Jones round, knowing he was a critic of high or fine art, tried to justify the show by comparing manga with classical Japanese art. This leads Jones to dismiss the exhibition we have as unworthy of the British Museum’s purpose and to wish it had been a completely different show:

I’ve rarely seen a show whose catalogue is so much more interesting than the display in the gallery. Not only are the drawings in the book dirtier, but there are far more illustrations of classic Japanese art. Surely this is what the exhibition should have been. It should have used the contemporary allure of manga to draw us into a huge survey of Japan’s art history.

I think he’s wrong. An exhibition of classic Japanese art should be that, and just that, and not need any gimmicks. This is an exhibition of a worldwide visual and commercial phenomenon. It needs no other justification. Jones accuses the museum of pandering to popular tastes. As I discussed above – if you want to attract kids and young people to museums you have to reach out to where they are. If, on the way to the manga show, the walk past Egyptian mummies and Assyrian lions and Viking helmets, all the better. They are acquiring the museum-going habit, the air of elitism and snobbery which I know – from personal experience – puts so many people off visiting art galleries and museums, is being dispelled. Once they’ve been to this, it’ll be easier (less intimidating) to go to something a bit more recherché.

2. Manga and pornography

Jones’s article also mentions the fact that lots of manga is ‘dirty’ (an oddly old-fashioned choice of word) by which he means pornographic. This confirms a nagging feeling I had that associates manga with random pornographic images I’ve come across in years of surfing the web. Even googling just the word ‘manga’ produces results which include topless or bottomless manga schoolgirls, some with a variety of sex aids. And some of the comments at the bottom of Jones’s article go into greater detail, giving the types of pornographic manga that are readily available, along with the Japanese terminology defining them (for example hentai, which refers, apparently, to ‘any type of perverse or bizarre sexual desire or act.’)

Having read those comments, and looked up some of the images, two obvious points emerge, for me. One is that Japanese erotic taste is different from ours. They are casually explicit about some things we are shocked by, and, as anyone who’s met a Japanese knows, quite easily shocked and even insulted by the casualness of our Western manners.

Yes, folks, it’s almost as if they come from a strikingly different culture and tradition (something which is so easy to forget in our 24/7, internationalised, global culture). Having read all the Guardian comments, collected the pornographic terminology, and looked up some of the examples, there is a second easy point to make.

Which is that the Museum and its curator obviously set out to attract the widest audience possible, to attract visitors of all ages – I saw plenty of teenagers, and families with kids, sometimes toddlers, excitedly looking at the cartoons or filling in the Children’s Trail handout they’d be given. I stood by one wall label while a girl about 7-years-old read out the label to her sister who was too young to read. Should the curators have included hard-core manga pornography in the exhibition? Should that little girl have found herself spelling out the precise meaning of pornographic terms to her young sister?

Obviously not. As Jones points out, some of that stuff can be found in the catalogue, all exhibition catalogues generally going into more detail than exhibitions can, and no child is going to buy the catalogue.

So it was the right call. You or I can explore porno manga on the internet to our heart’s content, if we wish. It would have been a disaster to include any in this show, thus created an X-rated zone kids couldn’t go into and probably causing shock horror stories in the press.

This exhibition is about creating a family-friendly, child-safe environment in which a) to enjoy yourself b) to learn lots about manga c) to inspire kids and the museum-averse to coming more often. It’s a success in every way.

Curator

Professor Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, founding Director of the Sainsbury Institute and Professor of Japanese Art and Culture at the University of East Anglia.

Other British Museum reviews

More British Museum reviews on my Art and Exhibitions page

1 Comment

by Simon on July 23, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Cartoon, Exhibition

Tagged Ainu people, animation, anime, Araki Hirohiko, Astro Boy, bandes designees, Black Ghost Corporation, Boys Love, Captain Tsubasa, Comic Takaoka, comics, Comiket, Cyborg 009, Dragon Ball, dōjinshi, Edvard Munch, exhibition, frame, Frank Bowling, fukidashi, giseigo, gitaigo, Golden Kamuy, Guardian, Hagio Moto, Hakusensha, Handscroll of Frolicking Animals, Hiroshima, Icaro, Inoue Takehiko, Ishinomori Shōtarō, Japan, Jirō Taniguchi, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, Jonathan Jones, Josuke, Kabuki theatre, Kitazawa Rakuten, Kodansha, koma, Kōno Fumiyo, manga, mangaka, manpu, Moebius, Nagoya, Nahuma Ichirō, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, neemu, New Treasure Island, Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, Okomoto Ippei, pornography, Princess Jellyfish, Princess Knight, Professor Munakata’s British Museum Adventure, seinen, Shogakukan, Shueisha, shōjo, shōnen, Spirited Away, Studio Ghibli, Sugimoto Sa'ichi, Suzuki Haruhiko, tankôbon, Tezuka Osamu, The Attack on Titan, The British Museum, The Mighty Atom, the Shintomiza theatre, The Willow Tree, Tokyo, Torishima Kazuhiko, Toward the Terra, tōn, Wikipedia, World Cosplay Summit, Year 24 Group

Posted by Simon on July 23, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/23/manga-the-british-museum/

Frank Bowling @ Tate Britain

‘Just throw the paint, Spencer!’
(Frank Bowling to his assistant, Spencer Richards, as told by Richards on the exhibition’s visitor audioguide)

This is a really good exhibition. Bowling isn’t a genius – this show doesn’t compare with the van Gogh exhibition downstairs at Tate Britain – but he is a consistently interesting and experimental artist, who has produced a steady stream of big, colourful and absorbing paintings. I found it hard to finally leave, and kept going back through the rooms to look again at the best paintings in the show.

Frank Bowling

Frank Bowling is a black British artist. He is still going strong, painting every day at the impressive age of 85.

Frank Bowling. Photo by Alastair Levy

Bowling was born in Guyana in 1934 and moved to England with his parents in 1950, when he was 15. After experimenting with poetry, and doing his National Service, Bowling decided to pursue a career in art and studied at the Royal College of Art. His contemporaries were David Hockney, Derek Boshier, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj and Peter Phillips. In fact, at graduation in 1962, Hockney was awarded the gold medal while Bowling was given the silver.

Back in those early years he was caught up in the expectation that he would be a ‘black’ artist and concern himself with colonial and post-colonial subjects – an expectation, he admits in modern interviews, that he at first played along with, doing a painting of African politician Patrice Lumumba and in 1965 at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, held in Senegal, winning the Grand Prize for Contemporary Arts.

It was only when he moved to New York in the mid-1960s that Bowling discovered the light and space and artistic freedom of contemporary American art. Encouraged by American critics, he changed his style, adopting the prevailing mode of abstract art, alongside the likes of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman.

As Bowling’s assistant, Spencer Richards, tells us on the visitor’s audioguide: ‘he didn’t want to be hemmed in by race and origins and that kind of stuff.’

This is the first major retrospective ever held of Bowling’s work in Britain. The gallery says it is ‘long overdue’ and seeing that he was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 2005 and awarded an OBE as long ago as 2008, it does seem extraordinary that this is the first major retrospective devoted to his work.

Nine rooms

The exhibition is in straightforward chronological order. It is divided into nine rooms each of which addresses a particular phase or style. But as I’ll explain later, in fact the show can be divided into two halves – flat surfaces, and gunky, gooey, three-D surfaces.

Room 1. Early work

This selection of early paintings includes works heavily influenced by Francis Bacon, the number one British artist in the early 1960s. Blurred figures trapped in cages look as if they’ve just been blasted by radiation.

Other early works use geometric patterns, referencing the Op Art (i.e. the playful use of geometric shapes) of Bridget Riley.

This room features some examples from a series he did using the motif of a swan, its neck and head realistic, but its body exploding, as it were, into abstraction, set against neat geometrical figures – note the orange and green concentric circles which have kind of melted, to the right of the swan’s body. If you look closely you can see that Bowling has mashed real bird feathers into the bloody, messy splurge of pain on the right. Unsettling.

Room 2. Photographs into paintings

It was the Swinging Sixties. The room contains the original Observer magazine front cover of a Japanese model in a Mary Quant dress typical of the period.

Very reminiscent of David Hockney’s kind of ‘wrecked Pop Art’ of the period i.e. taking images from fashion and pop culture and kind of smearing and subverting them. More obvious is the ghostly outline of the house at the top. What is that? It is based on a photo of the big house which contained the Bowling family business (Bowling’s Variety Store) back in his home town of New Amsterdam, Guyana.

A friend sent Bowling the photo (the original is on display in one of the several display cases devoted to notes and letters and magazines and other ephemera which shed light on his career) and he used it obsessively in a whole series of paintings which contain the house motif superimposed on maps and abstract shapes. We can guess that this obsessive repetitiveness derives from a psychological need on the part of the artist to revisit the house, and by extension, the land of his parents. On the other hand – maybe it is just a powerful image or motif which he was interested in placing in different paintings, juxtaposing with other images to create the dynamism and energy of any collage.

Room 3. The map paintings

These are enormous. Suddenly we are in a huge white room on the walls of which are hung some truly enormously huge paintings. They are made of acrylic paint on flat canvas. In the second half of the 1960s Bowling was in New York and liberated by the scale and ambition of American painting, especially the abstract expressionists like Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still.

Just like them, the works are enormous and almost abstract, covered in great washes of paint, to create dynamic forcefields of colour.

Installation View of Frank Bowling at Tate Britain. Photo by Matt Greenwood

The gallery guide points out that almost all of them contain maps and that they mark ‘Bowling’s rejection of the western-centric cartography of many world maps’. I think this is wrong, and a typical attempt to shoehorn politically correct sentiment into the art. It stands to reason that many of the paintings feature a map of South America. Bowling is from Guyana which is in South America. And some of the others feature the ghostly stencilled outline of Africa. Ultimately he is of African heritage.

But quite a few of the others – like Dog Daze (1971, on the left in the photo above) feature a map of the entire world, laid out according to standard convention, exactly as you see it in any atlas or poster – with the Americas at the left, then the Atlantic, then Eurasia with Africa dangling down. Not subverting or rejecting anything in particular. I bought the audioguide to the exhibition and this contains quite a few quotes from the man himself, and Bowling makes it perfectly clear time and again, that his art is not about a ‘subject’.

Art is to do with painting colour and structure

If there are maps in the huge map paintings it is not to make the kind of politically correct, left-wing, political point which the curators want him to make. It is because they offer a motif around which the art can constellate and come into being. It enables the art. Its force is not political, it is imaginative.

For sure maps can be given meanings. I can paint an outline of Africa and declare it is ‘about’ slavery. Or empire and colonialism. Or oppression. Or poverty. Or the fight for independence. or about war. Or about dance and music. Or about anything I want it to ‘mean’. Then again, maps may just be shapes and patterns which are interesting and stimulating, as shapes, as a well-remembered shapes from schooldays, but which carry precisely as much freight and meaning as the viewer wishes to give them.

Some of these works are stunning, comparable to the Rothko room at Tate Modern, big enough for the visitor to fall into, to meditate on, to create a mood of profound calm and wonder.

At one end of the room is a stunning work titled Polish Rebecca, dating from 1971. You can make out the stencilled shape of South America at the centre and the wall label tells us that the Rebecca in question was a Polish Jewish friend of Bowling’s, and that the work is a meditation on the shared history of the African and Jewish diaspora – revealing ‘Bowling’s interest in the way identities are shaped by geo-politics and displacement’.

To me this is reading the liberal political concerns of 2019 back into a painting from 48 years ago. Maybe it is so. Maybe not. What’s not in doubt is that it is a stunning composition, dominated all the tints and shades of purple, the strange beguiling white feathering effect spreading up the west coast of South America, and the random swishes of green, blue and orange paint. In the flesh this enormous painting is utterly entrancing.

Room 4. The poured paintings

As if to prove that Bowling is more interested in art than in bien-pensant, liberal, progressive political theory, the next room is devoted to paintings with absolutely no figurative content. He set up a tilting platform that allowed him to pour paint from heights of up to two metres. As the paint hit the canvas it cascaded down in streams of mingling colour.

Structured accident, not unlike the spatter paintings of Jackson Pollock and then the hundreds of random spurting spattering throwing flicking shooting artists of the experimental 1960s and 70s. The titles also became less meaningful, more accidental, referencing people who were in his thoughts or events during the day, totally random.

Room 5. Cosmic Space

Each new room has been marked by technical experimentation. In this once are works from the later 1970s where he began a set of further experiments. He began using ammonia and pearlessence, and applied splotches of paint by hand, producing marbling effects. He embraced accidents, which sometimes hardened into mannerisms. For example it was at this time that he took to leaving buckets of pain on the surface of the wet canvas, creating a circular ridge.

In Ah Susan Whoosh Bowling added water, turpentine and ammonia to the acrylic paint to create complicated chemical reactions. He poured the paint directly onto the canvas and then manipulated it with a squeegee. The technique forced him to work quickly, making strategic decisions to exploit the random combination of elements. It’s testimony to his skill that so many of these works, created under demanding conditions, with little or no planning, come out looking so haunting and powerful.

Ah Susan Whoosh (1981) by Frank Bowling. Private Collection, London

No reproduction can convey the shiny metallic tint of many of the colours, the sparkle on the surface of the paintings, which changes as you walk around them.

Three D

This brings me to the big divide in Bowling’s career which I mentioned at the start. The first four or five rooms are full of works where the paint lies more of less flat on the canvas. But in latter part of his career, from about 1980, and certainly in the last four rooms, Bowling’s canvases become thick and clotted three-dimensional artefacts.

He started using acrylic gel to create waves and ridges of colour and goo. And he started embedding objects in the paint. At first he used acrylic foam, cut into long strips, creating zoomorphic swirls and spirals.

In fact the ribbed nature of this foam reminded me a bit of fish skeletons, and the way some of these skeletal ruins emerge from a thick goo of paint, reminded me sometimes of the movie Alien. According to the wall labels:

Bowling also started to use a range of other materials and objects in his work. He applied metallic pigments, fluorescent chalk, beeswax and glitter to his densely textured surfaces. In several works, found objects such as plastic toys, packing material, the cap of a film canister and oyster shells are embedded within the paint. These items are rarely fully visible but add to the complexity and mysterious quality of the work.

Spreadout Ron Kitaj is so named because the artist Ron Kitaj saw an exhibition of Bowling’s works in 1986 and got in touch. Bowling describes the strips of acrylic foam he embeds in the surface of works like that as ‘the ribs of the geometry from which I work.’ The painting also includes shredded plastic packing material, plastic jewellery, toys and oyster shells. It’s not one of the best works here – its effect is too dark and dingy for me – but it’s very typical of his modus operandi.

Room 7. Water and Light

In 1989 Bowling went back to his childhood home in Guyana, accompanied by one of his sons. He immediately noticed the quality of the light in South America.

‘When I looked at the landscape in Guyana, I understood the light in my pictures is a very different light. I saw a crystalline haze, maybe an East wind and water rising up into the sky. It occurred to me for the first time, in my fifties, that the light is about Guyana. It is a constant in my efforts’ (1992).

As you might expect, the trip resulted in works which try to capture the effect, using Bowling’s (by now) trademark effects of acrylic gel swept into ridges, themselves arranged in very loose box or square shapes.

From the later 1960s Bowling had studios in London and New York. His London studio is in East London and here he has made a series of paintings titled Great Thames which do just that – reference the mighty river Thames, invoking the long line of landscape painters who Bowling is well aware of – Gainsborough, Turner and John Constable.

In the way they adapt his by now trademark use of gel to create boxes and ridges, scattered with metallic pigments, scored and indented with all manner of objects found around the studio and pressed into the surface – nonetheless, the Great Thames paintings on display here prompt comparisons with Monet – not so much in technique or even in aim, but in the shimmering evocativeness of the finished product.

Room 8. Layering and stitching

In the 1990s, Bowling continued to work with acrylic paint and gel and continued to experiment with incorporating different materials and objects into his paintings. He experimented with stitching canvases together and attaching the main canvas to brightly-coloured strips of secondary canvas, to create a distinct border to the work.

He took this further by cutting up earlier canvases, and stapling sections together, juxtaposing different paint applications and colours. Like the many found objects embedded in the gloop, this stitching is very evident and all tends towards emphasising the materiality of the work of art. And, in some sense, its contingency. It is like this. But it needn’t have been like this. Meditate not only on the work. But on the arbitrariness and contingency which leads to the work.

Girls in the City was made by stitching together seven individually stretched canvases. You can still see the vaguely square, ‘brick’-like shapes he creates using raised ridges of acrylic gel. But to that element of boxness, is added a more literal boxiness created by the piece’s assemblage from smaller parts. He is quotes as saying the works from this period were ‘organised in the way people structure themselves, in the way we are’ – presumably, assembled from lots of disparate elements.

Room 9. Explosive experimentation

This last room is devoted to works made over the past ten years. My first reaction was I didn’t like them so much. Nowadays confined to a sitting position, Bowling has used assistants to help him, and has continued his experimentation. He uses washes of thin paint, poured paint, blotched paint, stencilled applications, the use of acrylic gels, the insertion of found objects, and stitching together of different sections of canvas.

This results in what, for me, are rather a departure from the work of the previous three or so rooms. In a work like Iona Miriam’s Christmas Visit To and From Brighton the stitching is very much on display, in the sense that the canvas with the great pink crescent on it has been roughly chopped in half and stitched onto another canvas underneath, which appears to consist of a regular pattern of coloured stripes which provide a striking ‘interval’ between the top and bottom halves, and also, when you come to look at it, a frame around the ‘main’ canvas. And that’s before you get round to processing the complicated imagery, the vibrant colours and the scoring and striking into the surface, which characterise the ‘main’ image.

Iona Miriam’s Christmas Visit To and From Brighton (2017) by Frank Bowling. Courtesy Frank Bowling and Hales Gallery, Alexander Gray Associates and Marc Selwyn Fine Art © Frank Bowling. All rights reserved DACS 2018

I think that I was still too in thrall to the box or square gel ridge shapes of the earlier works, still processing the effect of them, to really appreciate these more recent works. Maybe you need to visit the exhibition several times to really absorb Bowling’s variety and inventiveness. These last works seem to be going somewhere completely new. I hope he lives long enough to show us where.

Summary

The works in the first part of the show are interesting and good, but often feel very much of their time like the Swinging Sixties cover girl and other works which feel like mash-ups of Hockney, Bacon, Kitaj with patches of Op Art thrown in.

The enormous map paintings – some of them over seven yards long – riffing off the abstract expressionists, are very powerful and absorbing in their own right.

The poured paintings reminded me a bit of school art projects. An interesting idea but the results weren’t that great.

It is only when Bowling starts working with acrylic gel and metallic tints, and embedding foam and then all kinds of objects into the surfaces of his paintings, that something weird and marvellous happens to his works.

Words cannot convey the rich and strange results of these experiments. The dense gloop, the metallic tints, and the strange clotted surfaces, alive with all sorts of half-buried objects, create enticing effects. I walked back and forth through the show half a dozen times or more and each time one particular painting stood out more and more strongly – spoke to me.

This reproduction in no way conveys the richness of the colour of this huge painting (it is 1.8 metres tall by 3.6 metres wide; it would cover most of the wall of an average sitting room).

And also doesn’t convey the way the long curve along the bottom which dominates it, actually sits proud of the surface. It is a characteristic slice of acrylic foam which also looks like a long, thin strip of corrugated cardboard. It not only creates the composition, but it projects it forward off the wall, and into your imagination. I kept being drawn back to look at it again and again, to sit in the bench placed in front of it precisely so the visitor can let it permeate every cell of your imagination.

Wow! What an amazing body of work.

Demographics

When I arrived at 10.30 the exhibition was almost empty. When I walked slowly through it at 12.30, there were 38 visitors, including me – 12 men and 26 women. There were no black or Asian people at all. The only people of colour were two of the Tate ‘visitor assistants’. There were half a dozen or so teenagers who seemed to be on a school trip, and one or two 20-somethings. The rest of us were white, middle-aged, grey-haired old types. Which reinforces the impression I’ve gained from reviewing some 150 art exhibitions: the gallery-going public in London is overwhelmingly white, middle-class, old or retired, and predominantly female.

The promotional video

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Soul Of A Nation: Art In The Age Of Black Power @ Tate Modern

Back to the 1960s, again

America again, after:

American Prints at the British Museum
America after the Fall at the Royal Academy
Abstract Expressionism at the Royal Academy
Rauschenberg at Tate Modern
Georgia O’Keeffe at Tate Modern
Alexander Calder at Tate Modern

British art curators can’t get enough American art. And the 1960s again, after:

The World Goes Pop at Tate Modern
You Say You Want A Revolution at the V&A

The 1960s is art curators’ favourite decade, a brief period when words like ‘radical’ and ‘revolutionary’, which all exhibition curators love to use about all their exhibitions, actually seemed to mean something.

Let’s just take it for granted that the averagely-educated person knows that the 1960s were a time of ‘turmoil and change’, especially in an America racked by the escalating tragedy of the Vietnam War which led to an explosion of student activism and widespread popular unrest etc.

Various key figures were assassinated – John Kennedy (1963), Malcolm X (1965), Martin Luther King (1968) – adding to the sense of permanent crisis. The counter-culture of drugs, folk, jazz, poetry, experimental theatre and film which had existed in tiny beatnik enclaves in the 1950s went mainstream, reaching a heady climax in the summer of love of 1967 by which time free love, LSD, flower power and all the rest of it were widely publicised in music, film, newspapers, magazines, TV and on the streets.

There was an explosion of experimentation in all the arts and especially in popular music, which is more enduring and accessible than any other art form – the songs of the Beach Boys, Beatles, Rolling Stones, through Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Cream and hundreds of other groups and singers – Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan – immediately recall for most people a decade and a time very few of us personally experienced, but which we have been exposed to again and again in celebratory documentaries, biographies, albums, movies and adverts as a kind of peak of creative endeavour.

Afro-American clichés

A major strand of the general outburst of popular culture and protest was the ongoing demand for equal civil rights by a wide range of Afro-American organisations, voices and artists.

As indicated above, it is pop music which endures longest in the collective imagination and so most of us are familiar with the brilliant achievement of countless black recording artists (and behind them the network of black writers, producers, agents, clubs etc) such as Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Otis Redding, the whole Motown stable as well as the amazing array of great jazz artists, the obvious ones being Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

Anyone with a TV will have seen the world-famous images of the Civil Rights movement as replayed over and over again in documentaries about the time (such as the video at the American Prints exhibition which gave a three-minute whistle-stop tour of America in the 1960s to a soundtrack of The Doors) – Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech, black teenagers being hosed down by Alabama cops, and so on.

The ‘I have a dream’ speech is played on a loop on a bank of TV monitors positioned just outside the exhibition, alongside information panels about black cultural icons of the time like Malcolm X and James Baldwin.

Here’s a clip from it, just in case you’ve never heard or seen it before.

Soul of a nation

So given our over-familiarity with the period and most of its obvious cultural products, it comes as a genuine surprise to realise the scale and breadth of black art during this period. For this exhibition turns out to be very successful at going beneath the popular images of the decade to exhibit the specifically Black art of the 1960s and 70s, and especially the work linked with the political movements for civil rights – from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Civil Rights movement, the Black Power movement, the Black Panthers and so on.

No fewer than 65 black artists feature in the exhibition, working across a bewildering range of styles and media.

Rather than attempting to summarise it, you’d best take a look at Tate’s own room-by-room guide to the exhibition. (Realising the importance of contemporary black music, this walk through the show includes recommended listening from contemporary musicians.)

Soul of a nation sound guide

The 12 rooms of the show range from a number of movements, galleries and artists in New York, to the very different feel of West Coast black artists.

There’s a room of black-and-white photos by a range of photographers: apparently Roy DeCarava was the big daddy of black photographers but plenty of others are on show; I especially liked the shots of jazz musician John Coltrane and his drummer Elvin Jones, since I’ve been a big fan of both since discovering them as a student. But there are also evocative b&w shots by plenty of other black artists, the terrific street scenes of Beuford Smith and the more politically engaged photos of Herb Randall.

Couple Walking by Roy DeCarava © Courtesy Sherry DeCarava and the DeCarava Archives

There are icons of blackness in a room titled Black heroes. This includes a series of semi-naive figurative oil paintings by Barkley Hendricks.

Icon For My Man Superman (Superman Never Saved Any Black People-Bobby Seale) (1969) by Barkley Hendricks © Barkley K. Hendricks. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

There’s a room dedicated to the work of Betye Saar, an artist who works in wood, found objects and carving with a primitive vibe. The more I looked, the more I liked.

Eye (1972) by Betye Saar © Beye Saar. Courtesy of the Artist and Roberts and Tilton, Los Angeles, California

At the start of the show many of the works are directly political, referring to specific incidents of police brutality or discrimination. A good example is Dana Chandler’s powerful sculpture of a life-sized bullet-ridden door to commemorate the shooting of Black Panther activist Fred Hampton in his Chicago apartment in 1969.

A number of photo-montages create a disconcerting sense of poverty, anxiety and dislocation, reminiscent in technique of similar cut-ups from the Weimar Republic back in the 1930s.

Pittsburgh Memory by Romare Bearden (1964) © Romare Bearden Foundation/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2017

Anger and political activism, a refusal to take any more white racism, violence and discrimination leap from many of the exhibits, which commemorate both specific outrages and negative events as well as celebrating positive moments, political heroes and speeches and gestures of resistance.

Did the bear sit under the tree by benny Andrews (1969) © Estate of Benny Andrews/DACS, London/VAGA, NY 2017

There was a room of sculptures referencing Black African traditions, variations on the kind of wooden fetishes studded with nails which you can see in the British Museum. I liked the works of Noah Purifoy, including Totem and various untitled fetishes.

And hanging on the wall of room 4 (titled ‘Los Angeles Assemblages’) was a series of great twisted metal sculptures by Melvin Edwards.

Lynch fragments by Melvin Edwards

I have nothing against political art – I enjoyed the exhibition of Peter Kennard‘s highly political art at the Imperial War Museum – and like a lot of the stuff here, but it’s also fair to say that looking at umpteen images of Martin Luther King or Malcolm X sometimes has the same effect as looking at the dusty old album covers in the V&A’s 1960s exhibition – it seemed to emphasise how long, long ago all this revolutionary fury was. And all this hope for change.

Repeated invocations in titles and works themselves of ‘the revolution’ and ‘revolutionaries’, references to the revolutionary writings of Malcolm X or the revolutionary activism of Angela Davis, all remind us just how dated hopes of some kind of social revolution along Soviet or Maoist lines now seem.

Black Unity (1969) by Elizabeth Catlett © Catlett Mora Family Trust/DACS, London/VAGA, NY 2017

For as with all exhibitions from the 1960s, we now view these works over at least two seismic historical dividing lines – the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the start of the War on Terror in 2001. ‘Power to the people’ is a rallying cry from a long-distant time.

Revolutionary (1972) by Wadsworth Jarrell. Courtesy Lusenhop Fine Art © Wadsworth Jarrell

The curators raise, or mention, a number of ‘issues’ which were hotly debated at the time – ‘Is there a distinct Black aesthetic?’ ‘Should a Black artist’s work focus only on the Black struggle?’ ‘Should the Black artist address only a Black audience, or a universal audience?’ and so on. My son has just taken his A-levels and all these ‘issues’ have a kind of rounded, academic A-Level feel to them.

Certainly, many of the works here do focus on the Black experience, take Black people as subjects, try to create a Black art, an art of Black protest and an art of Black celebration, and so on…

But, on this visit, on a bright summer’s day, I ended up liking the far more abstract (and larger and more colourful) work to be found in room 7 (titled ‘East Coast abstraction’) and then room 10 (‘Improvisation and Experimentation’).

Some of these were huge and, if they had political or social undertones, they tended to be eclipsed by their sheer size and power as works of art. Very big, colourful works by Frank Bowling appear in both rooms 7 and 10.

Texas Louise (1971) by Frank Bowling. Courtesy of the Rennie Collection, Vancouver © Frank Bowling

Next to this one was an enormous work by Melvin Edwards (the sculpture whose Lynch fragments I liked earlier on). It is a huge curtain made from dangling strands of barbed wire, joined along the bottom by chains. A reference to slavery? Probably. But also just an awesome object in its own right.

Curtain (for William and Pete) by Melvin Edwards

Also in the same room was a huge canvas, painted abstract shapes and colours but designed to be knotted at the top differently everywhere it is hung. Doesn’t sound much but it is big, covering an entire wall.

Carousel Change (1970) by Sam Gilliam © Tate. Image courtesy David Kordansky Gallery

Nearby sits a huge lump of ebony-black smooth wood, a sculpture titled Self by Martin Puryear. Ominous, absorbing light, filling the space, a meditation on blackness, a threat, a calming influence – make of it what you will.

Self by Martin Puryear

There’s a lot of anger, the reminders of horrible atrocities, racism, murders and violence in this exhibition. There’s a lot of defiance and pride and rejoicing in black icons and heroes. There’s a lot of fist-clenching and right-on rhetoric about the revolution – I think the average educated person will know about these ideas or issues already.

Where this exhibition scores is in showing the sheer diversity, range and imagination of all these Black artists, creating art for all occasions, impassioned and political, or cool photographs of street life and jazz musicians, or huge awe-inspiring abstractions. There’s something for all moods and all personalities. Go see which bits you like.

Maybe part of the reason I like the bigger abstract works is because they suggest that the response to racist atrocity needn’t itself be full of anger and hate. Alabama is a piece of music John Coltrane wrote in response to a terrorist attack which shocked America, when four members of the Ku Klux Klan planted 15 sticks of dynamite and a timing device under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The resulting explosion killed four little girls and injured 22 others. How stupid, wicked and evil racism is. What extraordinary beauty Coltrane – and many of the Black artists on display here – managed to extract from it.

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Joseph and John

Massive exhibition

Main points

Room summary

Room 1. Starting out (8 prints, 10 paintings)

Room 2. Constable sketching outdoors (14 sketches, display case, chair)

Room 3. Turner in the Alps and Italy (4 big paintings, 7 sketches, 5 sketchbooks, display case)

Room 4. Turner’s watercolours (6 watercolours, 10 sketchbooks)

Room 5. Turner’s studio (9 paintings, 10 cloud studies)

Room 6. Constable fields and sky (9 paintings, 10 cloud studies)

Room 7. Big is beautiful (5 Turner, 4 Constable huge paintings)

Room 8. Fire and water (4 massive paintings: 3 JC, 1 T)

Room 9. Late Constable: ‘beyond Constable country’ (9 sketches, 3 big paintings)

Room 10. Late Turner (9 paintings, 8 sketches)

Room 11. Landscape and memory (3 Turner, 4 Constable, 4 prints)

Room 12

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The Annenberg courtyard

Room 1 (63 works)

Room 2 (77 works)

The Large Weston Room (242 works)

Small Weston Room (1 video)

Room 3 (63 works)

Room 4 (71 works)

Room 5 (183 works)

Room 6 (121 works)

Room 7 (256 works)

Room 8 (259 works)

Room 9 (64 works)

The Lecture Room

Wohl Central Hall (81 works)

Thoughts

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A theme of our times

Mixing ancient and modern

Exhibition premise

The videos

Responses

1. A simplistic view of imperialism

2. A simplistic view of slavery

Labels or works?

Warning

P.S.

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Other posts about slavery and racism

Origins

The Islamic slave trade

The Atlantic slave trade

The American civil war and slavery

Slave accounts

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Layout

14 rooms, 14 themes

The new

From murk to clarity

The murkiest of the murk

Clarity

Room guide

1. Body and cosmos

2. Post atomic garden

3. Strange universe

4. Jean and John

5. Intimacy and aura

6. Lush life

7. Scars

8. Concrete

9. Choreography of the street

10. Two women

11. Cruise

12. Surface/vessel

13. Liberated form and space

14. Horizon

Immigrants

The Barbican’s birthday show