Bringing peace to the spirit
Andrew Lambirth Hockney on Turner Watercolours Tate Britain, until 3 Feb/vary 2008 Annely Juda – A Celebration Annely Juda Fine Art, 23 Doing Street, Wl, until 28 July If you enter Tate Britain via the side entrance on Atterbury Street, you will find five large new landscape paintings by David Hockney hanging above the stairs to the main galleries, to celebrate his 70th birthday. Each painting is composed of six canvases in two layers of three. All depict the same stretch of woodland in east Yorkshire, seen at different times of year. I am not an admirer of Hockney's recent landscape paintings, finding the colours insensitive and the drawing surprisingly inexact. His purples and oranges are not quite wild enough, while his greens lack all conviction. The light in these pictures is strangely uniform and uninflected (very unlike Britain), and when the trunks of trees cross from one canvas to another they frequently don't meet properly. This would be fine if it were done for some expressive reason, but it seems simply to be carelessness. However, if the display helps to focus attention on the beauties of the English landscape, then I'm all for it.
As an introduction to the major exhibition in the Clore Gallery, the uninspiringly titled Hockney on Turner Watercolours, it is less effective than the single Hockney watercolour in the exhibition itself. Approaching the Clore wing from the Manton staircase where the Hockney oils hang, you eventually find yourself in the first room of the Turner show, which is called 'From Architecture to Landscape'. Here hangs Hockney's 'Trees and Puddles, East Yorkshire, 3.11.04', which has an interest of shape and observation so often lacking in the bigger oils. It stands up remarkably well considering it's surrounded by Turners. To the left are a couple of Turner's sketchbooks in a display case. At once the viewer is ravished by genius. One book shows Wharfedale with geese in the foreground, the other a distant view of Whitby with a windmill against the sunset. The latter is so deliciously delicate yet robust, it insinuates into the soul. This is what Turner does: brings peace to the spirit. Not surprisingly the galleries were packed the day I went.
That first room of early work contains such quiet masterpieces as the sizeable watercolour and gouache 'Blair Atholl, Looking towards Killiecrankie', a bit Cotman-esque and full of large forms subtly rendered, and the small luminous gouache 'Loch Long, Morning'. There are some 160 Turner watercolours on show, in the largest display the Tate has yet mounted. It's quite superb and it has been immaculately installed. Move forward into the central hall of the exhibition, which contains the section entitled 'Beginnings', curated by David Hockney. Here is the most exciting and radical work of the show. Just one group gives the rich flavour of these experimental, almost abstract works: 'Landscape with Trees; Stormy effect', 'A Stormy Sea', and 'Figures in a Storm'. The natural world is dissolved in light and weather and reissued to us in veils of evocative colour and daring visual inventions. Here, in Turner's magical brush marks, are hints of skies and cliffs and rivers, cathedrals and castles, sunlight on ruins, Land's End. Hockney has chosen well: this is a fabulous room to linger in.
Off to either side are four other galleries, given over to particular themes — 'Nature and the Ideal' (c.1805-15), 'Home and Abroad' (1815-30), 'The Annual Tourist' (1830-40) and 'Master and Magician' (Late Work). These categories speak for themselves, but they don't begin to suggest the unquenchable optimism that lights up Turner's work. There are so many sublime things to be seen, whether the subject is ostensibly Venice or Gloucester Cathedral, hulks on the Tamar or Petworth House, that I can only encourage you to visit the Tate and make your own selection of favourites. Even the recently saved 'Blue Rigi' is here. A great and moving show.
Hockney is also one of the contemporary artists featured in the magnificent tribute exhibition to the gallerist Annely Juda, held in the beautifully lit galleries she presided over almost until her death last year. Over the years I visited her gallery, the quality of work was always remarkably consistent, and frequently it moved on to a very high level indeed. Leaving aside for a moment the distinguished living artists she showed, Mrs Juda was really the first to present to our startled eyes museum-quality works by the masters of Russian and Central European Modernism, hitherto largely unknown here. Why should it be a surprise to find such supreme works in a commercial gallery? Perhaps because so many dealers have relied on purveying kitsch junk or the scrapings of great studios. Few have held out for the best, but Annely Juda was chief among them.
On the top floor of 23 Dering Street the fruits of her connoisseurship and persistence are at once evident in the stunning loan exhibition of Modern Masters, all of them once sold by the gallery. Look at the luminous green stripe painting by Olga Rozanova, or the white diagonals on black by Rodchenko next to it. Opposite is a remarkably restrained and sinuous Picasso paired with a sizzling black and white on burnt orange drip painting by Pollock. There are two Mondrians flanking a Brancusi 'Fish' in polished bronze on a steel disc, atop a carved wooden column on a stone base. These are works of beauty and significance, complemented by a really lovely Suprematist Malevich and a Tatlin painting of angled shapes like an abstract palette and brushes. Among many items of interest in the small back room are a wrapped and strung package by Christo and an interlocking coloured bronze wall sculpture by Catherine Lee (born 1950). Some exhibits are for sale.
Downstairs, the feast goes on. There's a gloriously substantial yet skeletal charred yew sculpture by David Nash, contrasting with the subtleties of Edwina Leapman's intermitted blue horizontals on a brownyred ground. Yuko Shiraishi brings a boldness of colour to her controlled rectangles. Nigel Hall contributes a beguiling 'Venetian Twist' in pale polished wood. A strangely beautiful Alan Green painting of dirty-green discs on deep blue over brown has an unavoidable optimism, like so much of the art shown here. The combed and plucked surface of Manijeh Yadegar's painting chimes and contrasts nicely with the disruption and overlaying of pattern in Prunella Clough's 'Skittle'. The Annely Juda gallery is most closely associated with abstraction, but it also occasionally shows a figurative master such as Leon Kossoff, here represented by a Bacchanal based on Poussin. Both exhibits and visitors benefit from this change of approach.
Annely Juda had a firm grasp of the realities of dealing. As her son David, who now continues the fine traditions of the gallery with an enlarged and remodelled space on two floors, recounts in the handsome book which accompanies the show, his mother had sensible ideas about serving drinks at openings. She told him, 'Fill the wine glass up full for the collector, half full for the artist and get the whisky bottle from under the table for Lilian Somerville, the director of the British Council.' Although these days the artist and the director of the British Council are more likely to drink water, as ever we depend on the passionate enlightenment of collectors to guarantee the future of the great commercial galleries in London. Long may the quality hold.
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