I went to London today, keen to catch Nash, Nevinson, Spencer, Gertler, Carrington, Bomberg: a Crisis of Brilliance, 1908 - 1922 at The Dulwich Picture Gallery. As exhibition titles go it's not the snappiest, but it has reviewed well, and concerns the early work of those six artists, united by the fact that they were all students at The Slade, and were to various degrees friends. It closes on 22 September, and we are on holiday next week, so if I didn't go this week I wasn't going to go at all.
I tried to persuade a friend to come with me a while back, but while she professed interest in the artists, and a desire to see the gallery which she had never visited, we failed to finalise a date, and then she said she couldn't leave her dog for the entire day. It is an elderly dog, and not all that well, but I think that in truth she just wasn't that keen. I'd have liked her to come, if she'd been up for it, but going alone has its definite compensations. I don't have to worry about how far or fast the other person is willing or able to walk, or whether they are enjoying the pictures or secretly bored rigid. There is no-one fret about the traffic and the glacial speed of the bus, or set off randomly in the wrong direction because other people are going that way, or because it is less crowded than the way we ought to be going, or demand to stop for tea when there is only enough time to see the exhibition before the gallery closes. If the exhibition is dull or stupid, lunch is horrid and the trains are shot to pieces, it is only my problem, and I am not responsible for someone else's disastrous day.
The Slade before the Great War had its own way of doing things. Tutors laid a great deal of emphasis on life drawing, and would rather that their students had not gone to see the exhibition of the still new Impressionists, which might corrupt their views. The students did, of course. I am all in favour of artists being able to draw, but it shows a sad lack of confidence to try and prevent them from being exposed to new ideas.
The Slade six met with mixed fortunes. Nevinson was advised by his tutor in 1910 to give up ideas of being a professional artist, before shooting to fame as a war artist, though never again enjoying that level of success after the war. He died in obscurity, as did Bomberg. Carrington and Gertler committed suicide, while Paul Nash became a famous and successful landscape painter and official artist of the Second World War, and Stanley Spencer ended his days as Sir Stanley. Death or glory. I wanted to go because I love Nash's landscapes, and admire his war art, and was curious to see some of his early works, and because I am intrigued by Spencer's mystical portrayals of Cookham. And because I am curious about the whole Bloomsbury and bohemian strand of society in the 1920s and 1930s.
The only disappointment of that part of the trip was that the cafe at the gallery is under new management and no longer does bagels with smoked salmon. I used to like those.
A morning trip to Dulwich combines surprisingly well with an afternoon in the West End, because of course once you are back at London Bridge you can hop straight on to the Jubilee line. Since I was in London I thought I'd go and see the Royal Academy's exhibition Mexico: A Revolution in Art 1910-1940. It closes on 29 September, so I thought that if I didn't go today I probably wouldn't go at all. The art critics in the papers have been rather muted about this, apart from grumbles that there are no murals, apparently the most quintessential form of Mexican art from the first half of the last century. Well, there wouldn't be. There are photographs of people, buildings and objects, including a bullet-riddled corpse described as being the first casualty of election day, and there are paintings, but only one teeny tiny one by Frida Kahlo. I really liked some of the photographs, the paintings not much so. Quite a few of them were by overseas visiting artists rather than Mexicans, and it was striking how many captions ended with the words 'He (or she) never returned to Mexico'. DH Lawrence bobbed up everywhere today, since he had his portrait painted in Mexico, and was a close friend of Mark Gertler.
I walked back to Liverpool Street, and toyed with the idea of calling at the Guildhall Art Gallery, which has just opened a new show in which contemporary artists reinterpret Victorian aesthetics, which sounds great fun, but I decided that two exhibitions were as much as my brain could take in one day. I felt a little stiff after the walk, proof that I've been pretty sedentary through the hot summer. Once we're back from holiday it will be a new regime of activity and fitness, if it doesn't rain all the time.
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