All roads lead East
Andrew Lambirth on our continuing fascination with the Orient
Almost everywhere you look these days there’s an exhibition to do with China or the Far East. Tinselly young oriental artists are fêted as if they were better than their limp-brained occidental counterparts, and scarcely a considered brushstroke between them. The East is Big Business and there’s more than one specialist agent concentrating on bringing over Chinese contemporary art to deluge the already schmaltz-surfeited English market. The old-established dealers, such as Eskenazi (10 Clifford Street, London W1), are world-leaders in the field of Chinese art, and show historical work of the highest quality, such as the earthenware horse and rider from the Tang period or the exquisite sandstone panels of musicians (Tang — Five Dynasties period). These glorious objects will be part of their forthcoming show Chinese Ceramics and Stone Sculpture (30 October to 28 November), timed to coincide with the annual event, Asian Art in London, which brings together exhibitions, auctions, receptions and lectures on the subject. It’s not the historical work I have a problem with, it’s the intellectual and aesthetic poverty of the contemporary stuff I object to. We have enough of our own without importing more.
The main show of the summer at Tate Britain has been The Lure of the East, in the Linbury Galleries (until 31 August). This deals with British artist–travellers to the Orient from the 17th to the early 20th centuries, and how visions of the East changed and developed — or didn’t, as the case may be. It was the increasing availability of steamboat travel in the 1830s that really opened up the prospects. In those days, the East meant the Near East rather than the Far East, and consisted essentially of the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean — Turkey, Syria, Palestine and Egypt. The exhibition leaflet boldly asserts that the paintings in this show ‘cannot be viewed in isolation from their wider political and cultural context’. With this I take issue — oh, yes they can. Irrespective of creeping political correctness and whingeing anti-colonialism, these pictures can and indeed should be seen as works of art, not historical documents.
Has the Tate forgotten its primary role to care for and promote art? We don’t go to an art gallery for a history lesson or a political harangue. Sometimes history and politics are inextricably bound up in art, as in the great works of Goya, but these aspects remain secondary. (Rather as the study and collection of British coins can familiarise one with the sequence and dates of the country’s monarchs.) If you’re interested in the historical context of art, well and good, but don’t force it on the public who come to look at pictures. Historical theories change their spots almost as quickly as fashions in clothes; they are only temporary and often very personal interpretations. But the paintings remain the same whatever theory is spouted in their direction. Look at the pictures then, and marvel.
The show begins with a room of portraits, mostly of intrepid travellers in Eastern dress. The first picture is a strange little watercolour portrait by Richard Dadd of Sir Thomas Phillips reclining with a hookah. (It sounds more reprehensible than it is.) One of this exhibition’s strengths is its showing of poor mad Dadd, such a talented draughtsman and painter, who famously murdered his father and died in Broadmoor. It’s difficult in this section to avoid the evident charms and flashing eyes of that great blue-stocking, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose views on the harem as a liberating, exclusively female space, with its own culture and rituals, are distinctly refreshing. On the far side of the room is that tremendous portrait of Lawrence of Arabia by Augustus John, wonderfully played down for so dramatic a pairing of artist and sitter. Not too far away is Byron looking Byronic, wearing the costume of a Suliot or Albanian Christian. Also here is heftily bearded Holman Hunt’s self-portrait wearing a Palestininan robe, palette in hand, as frank and engaging as ever a Victorian artist could look.
Room 2 goes under the ugly title of ‘Genre and Gender’, the latter part of which really means pictures of girls, whether nude slaves by Gerome or the extraordinary skin tone of Holman Hunt’s ‘The Afterglow’, a beauty marred only by the tattoo on her chin. (Surely a fashion due for revival?) Compare the strangely disproportionate heads (too large) to bodies in Hunt’s Cairo street scene. Here too is a busy composition by that master of Eastern Promise, John Frederick Lewis (1804–76). ‘The Seraff — A Doubtful Coin’ is exotic in colour as well as content, with no cat (a Lewis trademark) but a donkey instead. Dadd appears again to very good advantage, with a portrait of a seated man, bearing a striking resemblance to the late lamented Dr David Brown, former Tate curator and art collector extraordinaire, and the delicately traced ‘Fantasie Egyptienne’ (1865). Then there are three pages from Dadd’s Middle Eastern sketchbook, showing in pencil studies of heads and figures what a power of line he could command.
In this room there are also a couple of attractive small paintings of courtyards by Lord Leighton and two remarkable watercolours by J.F. Lewis, who proves himself rather the hero of the exhibition. One is called ‘A Frank Encampment in the Desert of Mount Sinai’ and depicts the European traveller surrounded by the game he has slaughtered, portrayed in a cruel, hazy light; the other is ‘Interior of a School, Cairo’, in which a large and affronted cat eyes up a dove in the light from a latticed window. Holman Hunt also comes out well. In the next room, devoted to The Holy City, his famous ‘Scapegoat’ is hung next to his immaculately pieced and plotted landscape of terraces, ‘Bethlehem from the North’. There are a number of beautiful Lewis architectural studies in this room, but they don’t stir the heart like his ‘Commentator on the Koran’ does — another cat painting, with a hidden kitten greedily watching sparrows. There’s a treatise waiting to be written on the symbolism of cats in J.F. Lewis.
It’s a large show, of over 110 pictures, but it has a hole in the middle, where Room 4 is given over to maps and a slide show of black and white photos of Constantinople, Cairo and Jerusalem (1850–1920), and Room 5, the harem section, is too sparsely hung. This once again demonstrates the inflexibility of the Linbury Galleries for temporary displays: the exhibition has been spread rather thinly. Perhaps it will look better at the Pera Museum, Istanbul, where it shows from October 2008 until January 2009, or the Sharjah Art Museum (February to April 2009). Nevertheless, if you haven’t seen it, it is worth a visit, for the pleasures of the Edward Lears, the pink sunset hills of Cairo and the Mountains of Moab, William Blake Richmond’s fleshly ‘Libyan Desert’, Richard Carline’s aerial view of Damascus and the Lebanon Mountains, together with Sargent, Spencer and Bomberg.
As a coda, there’s a show called The Young Lion devoted to the early drawings of J.F. Lewis, in the Tennant Room at the Royal Academy (until 26 October, admission free, check opening hours). Anyone struck by Lewis’s vision in The Lure of the East will benefit from this pleasant exhibition, but it’s no substitute for visiting the Tate. Cat lovers will probably want to take a look. There are some really superb drawings and watercolours of big cats, as well as domesticated animals (he’s good at dogs and cattle) and even some human beings, but the lions do tend to steal the thunder.
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