Beware: blockbusters ahead
Martin Gayford looks at what museums and galleries have to offer in 2002
In the art world, as in many other areas, the events of 11 September have so far made less difference than was initially presumed. Gone, it was rumoured for a while, was the international loan show, involving the jetting of massively valuable works of art hither and thither. But the blockbuster exhibition — that art-world dinosaur so often declared defunct for one reason or another — is still lumbering healthily along, as a glance at this year's schedules will show.
Moving into centre stage again in 2002 is the Tate, or rather, since its amoeba-like split, both Tates. The strain of the institutional parthenogenesis whereby the Millbank Tate — now Tate Britain — gave birth to its Bankside sibling (Tate Modern) seemed to knock out both organisations for a while. At least in terms of exhibitions there was nothing to equal the great shows of the Nineties, such as Cezanne and Pollock. But no longer.
Tate Modern has a heavyweight list of shows for 2002, leading off with Warhol (7 February-1 April). This should be a chance to take a new look at an artist to whom there is a lot more than just soup cans, Marilyn Monroe and a nicely off-hand sense of humour, This will doubtless be highly popular. So, too, should be the orthographically peculiar MatissePicasso (11 May-18 August), a true whambanger of an exhibition examining the rivalry and kinship between the two giants of 20th-century art — and consequently containing many masterpieces by both.
This show is evidence that the Tate, as Douglas Hurd once said of Britain in the foreign policy sphere, 'punches above its weight'. since we do not have that many great works by Matisse or Picasso as the other venues for the show — Paris and New York — do. Much the same could be said of the two autumn shows at TM which are devoted to the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd (19 September-5 January) and Barnett Newman (same dates), master of mighty abstractions cleft with a few vertical stripes. These are both on the austere side, but personally I am much looking forward to them.
Tate Britain, on the other hand, doesn't need to punch above its weight at all, since it owns the world's greatest array of British art, and is therefore entitled to show the champion British art exhibitions. It will do so again this year with a retrospective of Lucian Freud, the world's outstanding figurative painter (20 June-15 September), which promises to be marvellous, followed by Gainsborough (17 October-12 January 2003). The year on Millbank begins, however, with something different: American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States 1820-1880 (21 February-19 May), a sign that Tate Britain does not intend to be confined to the purely British. (Neither does the National Por trait Gallery, which is showing.Americans [4 October–February 2003], on loan from Washington, as well as George Romney [30 May-18 August). I predict a number of popular and critical successes at the Tates.
Over at the Royal Academy the tealeaves are harder to read. Last year, after a shaky start with Apocalypse, was a good one at Burlington House. This one begins with Paris Capital of the Arts 1900-1968 (26 January-19 April), one of those big survey shows which the RA likes to do. The novelty of this one is that it extends the School of Paris so late, including figures such as the American painter Ellsworth Kelly. The enigma is, of course. why Parisian art blipped off the screen in the Sixties, and the question is, will it ever come back?
The rest of the year has a non-European look, with the major items being The Return of the Buddha (Sackler Wing, 27 April-14 July), an exhibition of recently discovered Chinese sculptures buried for a thousand years, and Aztecs (16 November-11 April). The latter is a really big show devoted to the civilisation that the late E.H. Gombrich once told me was the one he found most chillingly remote and cruel in the whole of world culture. Ancient Mexican sculptures were good, however, even if their practices were nasty. This could well be a magnificent exhibition. Much of the rest of the year looks a bit quiet, though, at the RA.
The V&A, where exhibitions have been patchy for a decade, has received a shot in the arm with the opening of the new British Galleries, and Earth and Fire: Italian Terracotta Sculpture From Dowell° to Canova (14 March-7 July) may be equally wellreceived. It is certainly a big, serious treatment of a subject — sculpture before 1900 — which has been shamefully neglected in London for many years, as far as exhibitions are concerned.
I am looking forward to that one, as I am to Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation at the Hayward (17 January-1 April). Klee has slipped badly in the modernist hit parade in recent decades. This show, co-organised by the painter Bridget Riley, aims to put him back in the top ten. With this, and the shows at the Tates, London will be very well provided with 20th-century exhibitions. There is much less in the 19th-century department: but many will be tempted to visit Amsterdam for Van Gogh and Gauguin at the Van Gogh Museum (9 February-2 June). This is a show that deals with an artistic relationship a great deal more explosive than that between Matisse and Picasso — it culminated in the celebrated partial ear-amputation.
The National Gallery, which had a stunning 2001 with Vermeer and Pisanello, also seems to be flagging slightly. The forthcoming survey of work by the 17th-century Dutch landscape painter Aelbert Cuyp (13 February-12 May) may be a surprise success — he produced lots of cows and water, but exceptionally good ones. Later on the National Gallery is showing Fabric of Vision: Dress and Drapery in Painting (19 June-8 September) and Madame de Pompadour: Images of a Mistress (16 October-12 January). The former sounds a touch worthy, the latter potentially froufrou, but either might confound my expectations.
Dulwich Picture Gallery is presenting The Dutch Italianates 1600-1700 (22 May-26 August), a show focusing on a group of painters who have been unfashionable for a century at least — so may deserve another look. But all in all Old Master painting is the area in which the least number of appetising exhibitions are coming up in the next 12 months (after a splendid series of shows in 2001, starting with Rome at the RA). I suspect, though, that this has much more to do with chance than with 11 September.
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