All tied up in knots

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5 April 2012

The Bernard Sunley Room of the National Gallery is shrouded in sepulchral gloom. In it and its ante-room hang seven pictures of white drapery, the stuff of shrouds, grave cloths and winding sheets. All but one are big, some more than two metres square, or two by three, or three by four, their subjects the knotted and the rumpled sheet, grossly enlarged. Some, in parts, suggest the illusion of bulging from their canvases; in other parts they remain resolutely flat and formless. All are painted with the dead hand of an intended verisimilitude that fails because the brushwork fails. Too small, too smooth, too featureless to match the monstrous scale; it implies neither the particular texture of a woven fabric — cotton, linen, canvas, silk — nor does it even speak of paint. The material of paint and the material recorded could as well be lemon sorbet or vanilla ice churned on an industrial scale.

These paintings are the two years’ work of Alison Watt as the National Gallery’s seventh Associate Artist. Miss Watt, born in 1965, sprang to notoriety in 1989 with a portrait of the Queen Mother commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery, a never-to-be-forgotten absurdity that will for ever dis-grace both artist and institution. In the 1990s she took to painting exceedingly contrived and mannered female nudes shaven of pubic hair, enormous of hip and thigh but small of head, excessively wan in tone and whimsically preposterous; the sane man sensed retreat into the safety of the formula.

Scottish, and persistently plugged by Scottish critics of provincial knowledge and experience, she was offered much nationalist exposure in Glasgow and Edinburgh; Scotland bought her pictures, gave her prizes and contributed much to what — but only at first sight — seems an impressively weighty bibliography. Convinced that her work was, in spite of its scale (she was long inclined to paint six-footers), slight and transitory, a gross cross between the illustrations of Laboureur and Dorothy Burroughs and at best a footnote in the history of a wretchedly provincial school, I wrote not a word about her, thinking it kinder to ignore so tiny a talent. Now, however, that her very recent work is exhibited by the National Gallery, promoted there by extravagant prose and poetry (yes, poetry) and presented as in some sense spiritually thaumaturgical — why else the gloom that recalls the shades of Tenebrae? — I feel compelled to record my response. Tenebrae, I hasten to remind passengers on the Clapham Omnibus, is not a place of Scottish myth and legend but the last service of Holy Week in which windows are obscured and candles extinguished.

The smallest of Miss Watt’s canvases, the first to be encountered by the visitor, is Eye — but it is less an eye than that part of the female body for which the most frequently used name, though of respectable Latinity, is utterly taboo, unprintable and unsayable in any society that thinks itself polite. I avoid confrontation by using the Latin rima, though the customary translations — cleft, slit and chink — seem more offensive than the word that none dare speak. But is it not absurd to see a rima in a study of white drapery? No, not at all, for Miss Watt is constantly concerned with what she calls the points of entry, points of entry into the composition and the subject, and this is blatantly just such a point. What, in this context, did she choose for stimulating company in the studio provided by the National Gallery? A reproduction of Courbet’s Origin of the World, that exquisite examination of a woman’s torso approached from between the thighs by a myopic heterosexual in 1866. The curator of the exhibition confirms the genital interpretation of Eye with his observation that the verticality of the rima provokes association with Courbet’s conspicuous and unambiguous point of entry.

Of the larger canvases one must argue that Phantom, Vowel and Root (she is given to mysterious titles of doubtful relevance) are all intended to sow the thought of the rima in our minds, but with far more complex rumples of drapery than in Eye, the multiple folds of fabric perhaps suggesting too the folds of flesh presented by fat women not much exposed to light. But what are we to make of Host and its anal insinuation? A variant point of entry disdained by laws both theological and secular? As for Pulse and Echo, in these the knot of drapery recalls the knot about the loins of Christ in much early Netherlandish painting, carefully contrived to suggest that, even in his death and entombment, an ostentatio genitalium declares a phallic manhood to match his evident divinity. Neither Miss Watt nor her apologist at the National Gallery has made such a claim, but in her obsessive study of drapery in paintings by old masters and her limitation of herself to it as her very own subject for the last five years or so, she must surely have seen many examples of such knots. Though clearly practised in the curatorial business of applying meaning to things meaningless, her curator may find this interpretation useful.

"By the end of the 1990s," he tells us, "Alison Watt had established her reputation as a painter of fabric. The depiction of fabric has been one of the defining characteristics of European art " I am inclined to dispute these two assertions. Miss Watt did indeed have an exhibition in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2000 devoted solely to her fabric paintings, but, bearing in mind the dutiful prejudice of that institution in favour of things and people Scottish, and the more general political correctitude of supporting women in whatever endeavour they pursue, no matter what their level of competence, an exhibition there established little north of Hadrian’s Wall and nothing south of it. As for drapery painting as a defining characteristic of European art, surely that can be said with greater justification of saints and heroes, still life and portraiture, landscape and every other common subject; defining is too strong a word for drapery, which was, in many a painter’s workshop, over centuries, the work of a journeyman assistant rather than by the master himself.

Drapery is too weak to stand alone other than as a study in preparation for its supporting role in a larger and more complex idea. It assumes symbolic significance as the cloth of honour in myriad representations of the Virgin enthroned, as the veil of St Veronica and as the background of some Crucifixions; it plays its part as Christ’s shroud in the Entombment and his Resurrection, and is a synecdochism for him in the empty tomb; it is the tactile habit of the monk and nun, the loose collar that releases a portrait from formality, the table cloth of a great feast, the tumbled bed of a dix-huitième French whore, the swag of curtain that lends swagger to a king. In all these and many more it cannot and does not stand alone even in the hands of infinitely more powerful painters than Miss Watt. Miss Watt herself proved that it cannot stand alone as the subject of an altar-piece when her unconvincingly flat and lifeless Still, sixteen square metres of it, was installed in an Edinburgh chapel as an object to encourage contemplation.

It is as such objects that the National Gallery presents these vapid images. We see them in the tenebrous conditions in which the Tate has always displayed its restaurant Rothkos, yet both those and these were conceived and executed in clear light (almost blinding light in Rothko’s case). This seems to me an attempt to condition our response, to suggest that we should genuflect and venerate, that we should respond to these canvases as we might to such holy relics as the chemise of the Virgin Mary, the loincloth of the Baptist and the Shroud of Turin, did we believe in their supposed antiquity. Miss Watt, however, is not a maker of relics and fetishes; her pictures are merely the best that can be done by a middle-aged woman so bereft of ideas that she must pursue this solitary one for a whole decade, emotionally besotted with the entry points that she sees in other paintings. She is welcome to whatever she imagines in the left armpit of Madame Moitessier, her obsessive fantasy. Ingres, the painter of that portrait, was more concerned with the intricacies of his sitter’s dress of brocaded Lyons silk, but Miss Watt ignores this formidable challenge to her infant skills. It is perhaps worth informing her that Ingres, much earlier, had anticipated Courbet’s Origin of the World with one of his own, surprisingly honest and even more hirsute.

What is the point of Associate Artists and their associated exhibitions? The foreword to the magniloquent catalogue has it that "the National Gallery is not simply a repository of old paintings, but a living collection that continues to inspire and amaze", which seems to imply some continuity between painting of the past and painting of the present, that by amazing Peter Blake and Ken Kiff, old paintings will inspire new, and wonderful works will suddenly appear, Blake the new Goya, Kiff the heir of Raphael. But of Miss Watt’s six predecessors I must argue that only Anna-Maria Pacheco gave us new work that was in any way connected with the ancestral values of European art, and that at the other extreme Blake and Kiff produced only pictures as tediously second-rate as those now inf licted on us by the scheme.

I can see no point in Associate Artists who are midway or later in their careers and well established or old and popular, supported by wealthy dealers in their wares — the National Gallery merely makes them a handsome gift of working and exhibition space and pushes up their prices, without any guarantee of quality in the consequent work, or fresh (or even intelligent) responses to pictures in the permanent collection. The only things that can be guaranteed are the hyperbole of the Gallery’s official reaction to the work, its overblown interpretation and, by association with great names and greater paintings, the gross inflation of a piddling artist.

It is not for the National Gallery to seek to prove a continuity between the art of the present and the art of the ancestral past; no artist now is as intellectually intelligent, as widely educcated, as well informed or as technically skilled as Rembrandt, Raphael and Rubens, and none could conceive or execute Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling. Today’s art world is inhabited by stoats and weasels, lorded over by a dozen toads, and hogs the patronage. It is for the National Gallery to consolidate and expand our knowledge of the past, particularly in those areas not represented in Trafalgar Square and of which we know little or nothing. There was some point in the long since discontinued exhibitions called the Artist’s Eye, chosen by painters of some eminence, for in these we saw in different contexts pictures from the permanent collection and the insights offered were sometimes extraordinarily acute — Bridget Riley’s the most telling and revealing — but there is no point in acting as yet another outstation of Serota’s empire.

Alison Watt: Phantom is at the National Gallery (020 7747 2885; www.nationalgallery.org.uk) until 29 June. Open daily 10am-6pm (Weds until 9pm). Admission free.

Alison Watt: Phantom
The National Gallery
Trafalgar Square, WC2N 5DN

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