Sussex Landscape at Pallant House (March 2023)

 

Eric Ravilious, Chalk Paths, 1935

What a brilliant idea to assemble an exhibition of Sussex-related works of art, particularly in a Sussex gallery. There have been exhibitions of individual Sussex artists, but, the Pallant would have us believe, there doesn’t seem ever to have been a show about Sussex landscape art. 

For me, in practice, Sussex art means the Sussex landscape, and specifically, the South Downs, and the floodplains, both of which appear from this exhibition to have been celebrated for the most part from the end of the 19th century. There is no particular Sussex type of individual, no school of Sussex painters, as there was a Norwich school. You cannot imagine an exhibition of, say, Cambridgeshire landscape. While there are a few works in this show with a building or person as the main focus, the focus in this show is, quite rightly, on that amazing Downs scenery: the haunting lines of trackways, and the meandering rivers, and the cliffs. It’s all slightly unreal, to someone who does not live in Sussex; there are even, as you travel along railway line going back to London,  what appear to be castles in the landscape (Amberley), and meandering river channels along the flood plains. 

Now, while I love the Downs landscapes of Ravilious, I become perhaps greedy. I want to know more about it: why is this landscape so stark? It appears to show little sign of intensive agriculture, although the Downs landscape is apparently the result of intensive sheep grazing over centuries. Human created it may be, but it looks much more natural than the intensive cultivation of fields below the hills. Where buildings are shown, they are typically flint, as if a flint building somehow represents this natural landscape more than, say, brick or more elegantly cut stone. There is an essay on flint in the catalogue. 

Learning more about the Sussex landscape

There is one map of Sussex, a wartime piece by Women’s Institutes, which perhaps inadvertently reveals more about the landscape than the exhibition intends. The map celebrates the increase in agricultural land during World War II – without revealing that this resulted in the destruction of much of the grass landscape. Nothing else in the exhibition seems to celebrate agriculture. Sheep, where they appear, are simply background objects in the landscape. There is a pull towards tradition, which is revealed in the catalogue, for example quoting poor poems by Hilaire Belloc and Rudyard Kipling.

Constable, Cornfield near Brighton (engraving)

What seems to be remarkable is that capturing the specific quality of the Sussex landscape seems to have emerged so late. The curators provide the evidence, although they don’t seem to notice what they provide There is almost no indication of any specific attention paid to the Sussex landscape before about 1900. Although the exhibition includes token works by Turner, Blake and Constable, only Constable could be said to have responded specifically to the Sussex landscape. Turner at Petworth, and his view of the Chichester Canal, is not distinctively a Sussex view – Turner outrageously puts the sun in the wrong place in his depiction of Chichester Canal, and doesn’t appear to notice the South Downs. Apart from Constable, who created a few sketches on Brighton Downs, the first artist in this show to capture the bare outlines of the Downs seems to have been William Nicholson. 

William Nicholson, Cliffs at Rottingdean, 1910

Nonetheless, the show, attempting to be include as many Sussex artists as they can find, find space for painters such as Robert Bevan, a fine painter, certainly born in Sussex, but showing little evidence of the local landscape. Other outliers that have little connection with the theme are some of the surrealist works (Nash is the exception here, managing to create surrealist-tinged works with some awareness of the haunting quality of Sussex landscape). There is a nude photo by Bill Brandt, which has nothing to do with the theme. Many of the woodcuts seem to be more about woodcut-land than specifically about Sussex. Sadly, to my untrained eye, many woodcut landscapes end up looking like each other. 

Preserving the environment

The exhibition dutifully nods to the need to preserve the landscape, but the handful of contemporary works in the exhibition don’t really say a lot for protecting the landscape. Andy Goldsworthy includes a few flint pieces, with white stripes on them to denote chalk, and these rough stones do suggest the raw quality of the chalk and flint landscape – although they would be better without any intervention. Sadly, the piece of assembled discarded field fencing does not  suggest Sussex at all. 

What, then, are the highlights of this show? Too many to show here. For me, and probably for many others, it is the Ravilious Chalk Paths, 1935; the John Piper Beach and Star Fish, Robert Tavener’s Cuckmere Valley, 1966, and Jeremy Gardner’s Solar, Seven Sisters, 2019. But to sum up the exhibition in a single image, it has to be Edwin Smith’s photo of flint buildings and walls, 1961. 

Edwin Smith, Peggy Angus' House, 1961