Art Exhibitions of the year 2023

 

Elias, Bodegon, 1933

This year, I’ve written about ten exhibitions, ordered in approximately reverse chronological order of viewing: 

• Frans Hals (National Gallery)
• Real Families (Fitzwilliam)
• Black Atlantic (Fitzwilliam)
• Rubens and Women (Dulwich)
• Morandi (Estorick)
• Labyrinth (Fitzwilliam)
• Sussex Landscape (Pallant House)
• Islanders (Fitzwilliam)
• Cezanne (Tate)
• Feliu Elias (MNAC, Barcelona)

Of those, my top three were:

Feliu Elias, a painter I’d never heard of before seeing this exhibition, and what a revelation! A painter who could move confidently between cartoons, and still lifes and portraits in oil, and impresses by the seriousness and thoroughness with which he approaches both. The most mundane, everyday objects, such as saucepans, are treated almost with reverence.  

Rubens, for his ravishing depiction of women – even his works of classical mythology end up having the same figure as his wife. I don’t think the TLS review of this show (by Breeze Barrington) did the exhibition justice. She complained that the women in the paintings are “not the focus”, and  “it would help to say more about who they [the women in the paintings] were in their own right”. Yet we don’t ask Frans Hals (or any portrait painter) to tell us all about the characters. The job of the portrait painter is to bring the sitter to life through their expression, their form. 

Frans Hals, whose paintings stand out so powerfully that you can recognize then at the other end of a gallery. If portrait painting is bringing a figure to life, then Hals reveals a whole living world. 

All in all, a great year for art, even if (as I noticed most in the Real Families exhibition) there is an increasing tendency to curate art exhibitions by criteria very different to quality of the artwork - a rather worrying trend.  

Frans Hals: the man who brings the seventeenth-century to life

 

Hals, Portrait of Catharina Hooft with her Nurse, 1619-20

Frans Hals, National Gallery, September 2023 - January 2024: What a wonderful show! Hals is so unlike the typical C17 Netherlands artist. Most painted details; he painted people, with little or no background. Most painted interiors or landscapes;  he painted almost exclusively portraits, and even his portraits are unlike any of his contemporaries. Nobody had Hals’ spectacularly bold use of brushstrokes, nor his ability to capture character in a face, both males and (exceptionally) females. So many of his female faces are real people rather than figureheads, representatives of a social class, demonstrating their wealth and social standing. Of course he painted the wealthy classes, but you feel he has caught something of their character, that he is almost presenting them as an equal. 

Frequently, he manages to capture both social status and character, as if to say “you commissioned me to paint this person, but the money is only a small part of it: I have captured who you really are." Frequently, the character is brought it to life by the angle of the sitter, or a leaning chair, or their hand on their hips, or, in one case, by introducing another person, as in the Portrait of Catherina Hooft and her nurse.

What really hit me on leaving this exhibition was how tame other painters are by comparison to Hals. I found myself in the Italian Renaissance gallery, and apart from some late works by Titian, none of the other painters had Hals’ focus on individual figures, combined with such carefree, lively brushstrokes. It may simply be the difference between two eras, Renaissance and Baroque, but what a difference! What unashamed concentration on the single figure, seeming to breathe in front of the spectator.

Hals, Portrait of Susan Baillij, c1645, detail of gloves

A very telling anecdote suggest that Hals was anything but subservient towards his sitters. He abandoned a group portrait after executing around half the individual portraits, because he no longer wanted to travel from Haarlem to Amsterdam – he wanted his sitters to come to him. They refused; he walked away from the commission (and it was completed by another painter).

Some of his best works are small-scale, children and everyday figures. Memorable is the portrait of Jean de la Chambre, a calligrapher, who looks as though he has just been interrupted at his work. 

Hals, Portrait of Jean de la Chambre

While I’m not very keen on the idea of an artist’s late works being an indicator of great profundity, there is an even looser use of the brush in some of Hals late works that is simply astounding to observe. You have to approach these pictures very closely to see just how free the strokes are. One of the greatest is a portrait of an Unknown Man, in the Fitzwilliam Museum, painted around 1660. The sitter may be unknown, but his character is revealed at a mere glance at the painting. 

All in all, it felt such a privilege to share the vision and insight of this remarkable artist, who brings to life his sitters like nobody else. 

Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (Tristram Hunt, 2004)

 

From the first page of this long book, where the author acknowledges over 20 people, to the last, we are aware that Hunt has read widely, and is familiar with the literature. However, that’s also part of the problem. Familiarity with the scholarship is not the only way to address the history of urban development. And quoting both sides in an argument does not establish that you are neutral. 

This book began life as a PhD thesis, although, to give credit to author Tristram Hunt, it reads much more fluently and entertainingly than a thesis. The book attempts is to pull together in one volume the growth and decline (the author’s words are “Rise and Fall”) leading to the garden city movement along with, and contrasted to, the municipal triumphs of the the big 19th century cities such as Birmingham and Glasgow. 

Where things start to go wrong, for me, is when what I call the casual historical style starts to disagree with me. The “casual historical style” is somewhere between a history monograph and a newspaper article. The author makes a statement, and provides sources to exemplify this statement. But far too  many topics are introduced with just one or two quotes by contemporaries to justify the argument. Cleverly, as a historian, Hunt can hide behind the quotes, as if to say, “Don’t complain to me, after all, I’m just quoting” – a technique which happens to be widely used by the populist right in the UK and the USA. 

Let’s look at a detailed example. Chapter Eight describes the triumph of what Hunt calls “The Municipal Gospel”, a phrase he uses as the chapter title. It’s only in a footnote midway through the chapter that he reveals that Asa Briggs, in his famous Victorian Cities, calls it the “Civic Gospel”, meaning the same thing. Chamberlain’s stunning success at buying out the municipal gas and water utilities for the common good are rightly celebrated. But abruptly, the tone changes as we move towards 1900 with “Municipal Socialism”, a switch from running the city like a corporation (under Chamberlain) to running the city like, well, a socialist ideology. The switch is cleverly characterised by Beatrice Potter rejecting Joseph Chamberlian as a suitor, and choosing instead Sidney Webb.

Beatrice’s amorous transition … can [] be read as an intellectual shift from the municipal  gospel of Chamberlain’s Birmingham to the municipal socialism of Webb and the Fabians. [Building Jerusalem, ch 8] 

Hunt is clearly less fond of socialism than of the corporatism of Chamberlain. he describes how Municipal Socialism was seen by many as a subterfuge for introducing, well, Socialism. 

Does the author remain neutral here? I’m not sure. The attack by business interests on councils is reported in quotes, but then as part of the author’s text:

The increase in municipal trading was threatening to crowd out private enterprise. Gas and water utilities had long since surrendered to the councils, but now electricity, tramway and omnibus companies were all threatened by municipal ambition. 

These are the author’s words, not a quote. Terms such as “crowd out”, “surrender” and “threaten” are emotive, and seem to me to reveal where the author’s sympathies lie, and they are not with the socialists. From our perspective in 2023, we are perhaps less concerned about bus companies threatened by municipal ambition; we have ample evidence of the result of private companies running competing  bus services. Recently I bought a one-day bus pass (“valid for all buses”) in Glasgow, only to find the number two bus I tried to catch was another operator’s number two: the competing bus companies use the same numbers, and don’t share ticketing. My all-day ticket was only valid for some of the buses. And nobody seemed too worried that there were several routes with the same number. 

But Hunt is too busy following his agenda to consider, I think, the people involved. Within one chapter we switch from private interests trying to prevent the incorporation of Birmingham, to Chamberlain implementing some of the finest municipal development of any city in the UK, then suddenly to venality and excess, including spending by councillors on cigars and champagne, as if this one example damned the entire municipal movement. 

But the narrative doesn’t stop there. A few pages further, and we are in a section called “Fleeing the City”. By page 386, “the city was decreasingly regarded as an arena to be celebrated … but instead as a  mode of existence best rejected altogether” and we move at top speed to the garden city ideal. The justification for the move out of the city comes from some appalling quotes by Social Darwinists, on the deleterious effects of city life on “Anglo-Saxons” (by which is presumably meant the indigenous city-dwellers): 

Finding himself at a disadvantage in competition with the immigrants, he goes through many stages before he is finally eliminated. Irregular labour, odd jobs, sweaters’ dens, prostitution, subsistence of charity … are only some of the struggles of the dying Londoner before he pays the debt of nature, whose laws he has no power to obey”. [p398]

Presumably the “immigrants” described here are the Jews, the Irish, and the country dwellers who move into London in search of work. Weirdly, Hunt quotes this contemporary writer without comment, as if this lurid, offensive argument, similar to some of the rabid right-wing Republican sentiment around Trump, somehow justified. In practice, many of the people who moved out of London to new towns such as Harlow and Stevenage had little choice in the matter. They didn't change their opinion about cities.  

I think this demonstrates how Hunt’s text reads well – there are always plenty of vivid quotes, and the narrative zips along – but, perhaps in an effort to includes all his reading about a vast subject, the author is  responsible for abrupt changes in tone which don’t seem to me to be justified. Perhaps for middle-class commentators, and for a present-day academic working in a library, such instant transformations might be feasible, but real lives were very different. I’m less and less convinced by the author’s rather superficial pulling together of a vast range of opinions about city life and urban planning, while maintaining what appears to be a neutral stance. He points out how central government, then as now, did everything in their power to prevent local government tackling the problems of poverty and inequality, by, for example, attempting to prevent the city of Glasgow building houses directly (and by so doing “preventing” private enterprise from its normal business) (the so-called Cross Acts, p360). Today, it is clear that private house-building companies act to maximise their profits by hoarding land rather than building on it immediately, yet councils are prevented from building any new social housing. The situation seems worse today than it was a hundred years ago. 

Yet from this text, the references to the present-day suggest that Hunt is happy with the privatised state of affairs we live under today in the United Kingdom. For me, a historical examination of the Victorian city is in many ways a stunning demonstration of what can be achieved with an effective local authority. 

Water provision in the UK: a historical parallel

 

The Goyt Valley Reservoir, Derbyshire (Photo: MU)

The provision of public water in the UK is, today, an acknowledged scandal. Some years ago (actually 1989, under a Conservative government) the UK water industry was privatized. The provision of a monopoly, the water supply, passed debt-free to private equity, which saddled the water companies with debt and failed to improve the water supply, in fact worsened it. 

All this is widely known and has been known for some years. The centre-right Financial Times has called it a scandal, that is not in the public interest (see, for example, “Privatising Water was never going to work”, FT August 19 2022). There is an increased public awareness of the situation, with questions asked by MPs, but no call, as yet, as far as I know, to renationalise the water industry. 

All this bears an uncanny relationship to the situation in the 19th century, as revealed by an interesting book, Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City, by Tristram Hunt (2004).  Hunt relates how Joseph Chamberlain, newly elected Mayor of Birmingham, carried out “gas and water socialism”: he took the gas and water utilities into municipal ownership, and used the profits to fund civic improvements. The idea was stunningly successful. Success was  measured by improved health – the Birmingham death rate dropped by 20%. Hunt stresses how this was not socialism so much as social capitalism: running the utilities to be profitable but with profits used for the public interest. 

Admittedly, Chamberlain increased the council’s debt, but the revenue from gas and water was sufficient to repay the debt in the long term, and allow for other improvements as well. The Birmingham gas supply passed to municipal control in 1875, and the water supply in 1876. 

This stunning example suggests, as so often with history, how generations seem to manage to forget the progress made by our ancestors. How did the UK ever move backwards from a utility supply in the interests of the populace  to control for the benefit of a few investors? And why is there no commitment by any of the major UK political parties today (2023) to take water and gas back into public ownership? It suggests to me the theme of reading about how the municipal vision faded during the 20th century. Margaret Thatcher was undoubtedly on influential agent, but no doubt there were others before and after her. The existence of historical parallels such as that of Chamberlain and Birmingham makes the current situation all the more galling.