Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy - review

Exhibition of the week: Anyone and everyone can do it, seems to be the message — and, alas, they have
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Brian Sewell9 June 2014

The Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition is in light mood this year — it is as though the Kennel Club has abandoned pedigree and thrown open its doors to every passing mongrel pup. Light floods the galleries and a thousand little pictures impudently leap and bound along their walls, yapping over hill and dale, the ancient formalities of hanging quite abandoned. Even the grave old dogs who every year weary us with the drab familiarities of their habitual realism and the flaccid gaieties of what they deem to be abstraction, have been restrained to smaller canvases and, disgruntled, growl at us from neglected corners.

There must be on view at least a thousand pictures that need no larger space to hang than a wall in the smallest loo. Is this sudden and proliferating reduction to sub-domestic size a response to the success of the annual Discerning Eye exhibitions and Edward Lucie-Smith’s current campaign, Polemically Small, to both of which the restriction of scale is fundamental? Could it even be an acknowledgement of my repeated observation on abstract paintings in the Academy’s annual summer beano that what at eight feet square is limp, flabby and impotent can, at eight inches square, make a neat and simple point?

“You have to paint large at the Slade or nobody notices,” said Derek Jarman as a student in that benighted school under the much-vaunted William Coldstream, when in 1967 he won a prize with a canvas nine feet by seven at the Tate’s Young Contemporaries show (where is it now, I wonder). Forty-five years later our art schools are still crowded with students who, taught little of drawing, less of perspective and anatomy, nothing at all of the material beauties of paint (though all these disciplines are the subject of professorial appointments — often notorious — at the Royal Academy’s Schools), are urged by their largely incompetent masters to labour on vast tracts of canvas in the mystical pursuit of self-expression, though few patrons ever wish to buy their pictures and fewer still have rooms large enough to house them.

There is no inherent virtue in great size; no work is necessarily better in quality or more profound in sentiment because it extends over half an acre or has inflated bulk — witness the hortative political art of communism, fascism and the new despots of central Asia and Africa, witness the bloated nothings of Gormley and Kapoor. Those who emulate such examples would do well to look back to the emotional and passionate intensity of Elsheimer, Samuel Palmer and the Renaissance sculptors whose small bronzes of the nude grew warm in the patron’s sensuous hand. The small can deal with nostalgia, sentiment (even sentimentality), sex and whimsy, when all these on a larger scale tend to become absurd and, lacking intimacy, have no stamina and do not reward the second glance, do not nourish the imagination; more important, the small can deal as easily and well as the large canvas when the painter’s subject is the grandeur of the human spirit, the wonderful or terrible — witness Goya’s horrors, and the compilation of tiny figures that, squeezed and pinched between Rodin’s finger and thumb, pieced together for him his great Gates of Hell.

Are we then to assume that the Academy is offering us a myriad minor masterpieces by the Goyas and Rodins of our day? Myriad is not quite the word for the increased number of acceptances this year, but the 1,140 and 1,117 of 2010 and 2011 have risen sharply to 1,474, increasing the number of exhibitors and giving encouragement to more artists, and instead of the customary cram of little pictures into the Small Weston Room, Gallery III, the largest of all the Academy’s rooms, is now surrendered to them. There, in the new rising and falling, swelling and shrinking, lolloping and gambolling hang, they look very well indeed. But look close, I beg you, and be critical. Diana Armfield and Bernard Dunstan offer benchmarks here and there — true painters both, content with ancestral tradition, content to be what they have always been, affectionate in their seeing, tender in its translation into paint. All the other paintings, however, are there because they fit this year’s political bill, explained to me as offering an opportunity to all those thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of would-be artists who have passed through art schools in the past half century (the number ever increasing towards absurdity) who cannot make a living as artists, who have no studios, no dealers and very little chance of exposure as they obstinately struggle to be artists in their bedsitting rooms by night.

Most of them have no business to continue the struggle unless as therapy for poor deluded souls. Their exhibits are small, neat, natty, dinky, doll’s house stuff, devoid of serious idea or intention, redeemed only by some innate sense of decoration or the craftsman’s dextrous touch. Most of them are silly little things, not worth the doing. But, I was assured, this is the new liberalism of the Royal Academy; it is not for Academicians to be critical, but to show us how things are —and this is the threshold of the bedsitter period of British art. Art is now to be made of apples sliced and dried, of accumulated chicken bones, of a thousand pegs that never pegged knickers to a line, or nails banged into a board and their heads painted different colours as though Hirst’s spots had grown on stalks — there is even something masquerading as a picture that appears to be made of sauce-stained macaroni. Where will it end? Shall we, next year, have every single example of the detritus justified by Tracey Emin’s bed neatly framed and hanging unmediated in homage to the founder of this great new school? I am wholly in favour of exhibiting as wide a range as there may be of artistic endeavour — but that, rather than its narrow orthodoxy and blatant favouritism, is the job of the Arts Council, not the Royal Academy. The Academy should set standards, not abuse them.

I bumped into a sculptor with whom I have crossed swords. “What do you think of the sculpture galleries?” he asked; “I’ve not reached them yet,” I replied. “Oh, but you have, you’ve just come through them.”

I retraced my steps into what I had taken to be an art jumble show set up by enthusiastic amateurs from Little Piddlehinton, tea-cosies and toys their specialities. Not one single three-dimensional object has the slightest originality or merit.

In the very last room Professor Emin ignores the plea to keep her painting small and offers a canvas roughly six feet square. The lower two thirds are grubby white and occupied by a vaguely drawn outline of what may be a recumbent figure (or two, perhaps?); the upper third is black with the word UPSET crudely scrawled across it. The price she asks is £165,000. Six inches square and hanging in the loo it might just seem wryly amusing, but as it stands it is a monument to vanity, impertinence and greed.

The Summer Exhibition is at the Royal Academy, W1 (020 7300 8000, royalacademy.org.uk) until August 12. Open Sat-Thurs, 10am-6pm; Fri, 10am-10pm. Admission £10, concs available.

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