Chocolate Box

…and so another new year begins.  But filled with the anticlimatical toporific lassitude that oftentides seems to accompany this particular chronological cusp, I don’t feel that I’ve yet managed to accumulate the sufficient reserves of psycho-spiritual momentum required to shift me out of my current customary yuletide hibernatory state and into the kind of more active inquisitive anticipatory exploratory mode needed to propel me out onto the streets in search of artistic engagement, enlightenment and entertainment.  And, that being the case, instead of any contemporary offering, today I thought I’d rummage around the files and come up with a sort or backwards tour d’horizon, revisting some of the highlights, lowlights and nolights of the previous demi-century’s worth of blog postings, the construction of which, invigorated and inspired, irritated and enervated in approximately equal measures.

 

And so, in the same way that the box of seasonal sweetmeats is traditionally and eagerly denuded first of its succulent sugary soft-centered attractions and only latterly are the tougher marzipan, nougat and hazelnut twirls identified and disposed of with more appropriate discretion, I propose initially to recall some of the more enjoyable treats of the previous year’s chocolate box of artistic assortments.  Starting off with the Royal Academy’s regathering together of some of the best bits of the collection that Charles I accumulated before his unfortunate decapitatory demise.  Best of all were the Van Dyck portraits but grouped together with various works by Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Mantegna and other assorted top name artists, the splendid show confirmed that even if the diminutive bearded monarch was perhaps unwisely obstinate when it came to matters of governance and political sensitivity, he had great taste in art and, for a while at least, sufficient stacks of his subjects money to be able to afford to decorate his palaces and castles in the style to which he felt he was so divinely entitled.

My other favourite blockbuster of the year was the Picasso show at Tate Modern which focused on a year in the life of the famous Spanish genius and adulterer.  And while I’m not sure that the chosen year of 1932 was really very much more significant than any of the other ninety-odd he lived through, the large selection of works created during that annus not particularly mirabilis reconfirms just was an incredibly, absurdly prolific and inventive artist Picasso was, churning out several series of clever Cubist portraits as well as dabbling in various sculptural forms, knocking out small sequences of landscapes, improvising some semi-religious ink sketches and also organising his own first full-scale retrospective.

Other worthwhile shows from the public or grant-funded sector included the Bomberg retrospective at Ben Uri; Dorothea Lange’s photographs at the Barbican; Christo at the Serpentine gallery and on the Serpentine lake; and two shows that are still ongoing, Klimt and Schiele at the Royal Academy, and Gainsborough’s Family Album at the National Portrait Gallery.  And, finally, I’m pleased to be able to report that the series of three separate but simultaneously running displays wherein Tacita Dean re-examined the genres of Still-Life, Landscape and Portraiture respectively at the National Gallery, Royal Academy and National Portrait Gallery made me revaluate my opinion of the artist in a positive direction.

As for the commercial sector, well, Joseph Beuys at Thaddaeus Ropac; Michael Kidner at Flowers in Cork Street; and Julian Opie (see above) at Alan Cristea all come to mind as particularly good one-man shows while the Conceptualist review at Simon Lee gallery and the hanging sculpture show at the Olivier Malingue gallery were both successfully interesting thematic surveys.

Outside of the capital I really enjoyed a first visit to the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate and thought their Arp (see above) retrospective showed the great Dada Abstractionist in a very good light and suggested that here is an artist who has definitely been unfairly underrated in the past and definitely deserves to be found a more prominent place in the pantheon of 20th century Modernists.  Other long distance trips to Manchester and Liverpool allowed for happy reunions with the permanent collections of the City Art Gallery and the Walker where there was also a very impressive exhibition of early works by Sean Scully.  And then there was also the expedition to the Baltic in Gateshead to see the Rasheed Araeen retrospective, a beautifully curated show enhanced by the happy inclusion of some items from my own personal archive.

Further afield, a brief trip to Paris meant the chance to revisit the marvelous Musee d’Orsay, L’Orangerie (see above), Pompidou Centre and Musee Picasso along with first time introductions to the Musee Gustave Moreau, Musee Marmottan Monet and the bizarrely outree Foundation Louis Vuitton.  And, of course, once again I made the mistake of spending another foolish half day of horror at the Louvre – having forgetten just what a noisy, crowded and unpleasant place this is – exiting early I repeated my vow to never to return to this grimmest of international repsoitories.

Two final honourable mentions go to the Chelsea Space, which very successfully continued its policy of staging an exceptionally eclectic selection of small but interesting shows, and the South London Gallery, which doubled its display areas by adding a very sensible, unflashy annexe to its main gallery space.

And if this last compliment should seem a bit unnecessary then it merely need be contrasted with a couple of other much less happy architectural interventions completed during the year, both of which illustrate what can go so very wrong when the designers, planners, funders and gallery directors all get together and start their scheming, dreaming and creaming.  First off comes the bizarre redevelopment of the Kettle’s Yard gallery in Cambridge which, as far as I can tell, managed at huge expense to actually reduce the overall square footage of its exhibition space by stuffing the place with a totally unnecessary shop and café.  And then there was the Hayward Gallery which finally re-opened after a two-year closure and refurbishment works costing several million pounds and yet still looked scruffy and shabby from the outside and utterly unchanged inside.  In fact, the main expenditure seems to have gone on the reintroduction of natural lighting to the upper exhibition space courtesy of an extravagant ornamental glass roof – a facility completely unused in any of the installations of the gallery’s first three very disappointing exhibitions.

Among the year’s other weak shows not really worth recalling were Tate Britain’s review of figurative painting All Too Human; Aftermath their look at the art of the period following the end of the First World War; and the particularly grim series of videos that made up the Turner Prize shortlist show.  Meanwhile down river at Tate Modern, Shape of Light, an exhausting review of abstract photography, was another stinker of a show; while their extensive tribute to Anni Albers (see above) bored me to tears, although I gather that mine was very much the minority opinion.  Other duffers of note were the Serpentine’s shows of dull abstracts by Tomma Abts and toddlerist scribblings by Rose Wylie.  And a final special mention needs to go to Grayson ‘ubiquitous’ Perry who coordinated the organisation of this year’s Royal Academy Summer Show and awarded himself the honour of having a special separate gallery filled up with portraits of himself.  What an egocentric tit.

On a more general blog related note, the Unvarnished website suffered a couple of minor technical glitches during the course of the year but just about managed to hit the self-imposed deadline of delivering a suitably fresh piece of rambling rant each Saturday morning.  Various promotional efforts were made to increase the subscriber base – an item linking the blog to a saucy Modigliani-style portrait of Mary Beard was placed in the Evening Standard diary; a revised extract of the blog reporting on the Royal Academy’s Duchamp debate between Waldemar Januszczak and Howard Jacobson was reprinted in Jackdaw magazine; and an Instagram account was set up linking daily picture posts to the weekly written blog account.  Yet, despite all these efforts, the small but loyal subscriber base remained just exactly as small and loyal at the end of the year as it had been at the start and my attempts to acquire masses of new false friends and fake followers and so become an influencer and somehow monetise my alliterative grumblings seems to be as distant and unlikely as ever.  Oh well, maybe things will change during the course of the year just started.  In the meantime, if you are among the current small but loyal readership, especially if you took the time and effort to add a comment to the end of any of the posts, thanks and have a happy new year.