AND ANOTHER THING
Daubers and barbarians rush in where Hogarth feared to tread
PAUL JOHNSON
When I first visited the Royal Acade- my in the 1940s it was the heyday of Sir Alf Munnings, the last president who was a painter of distinction, an outsize personali- ty and a national figure. The Academy was a dark, dingy and quiet place in those days. Nothing much went on, or so it seemed. Today it is a hub of fashionable activity. It is always full of people. There are crowded exhibitions, some of them, it is true, of dubious quality and one or two notorious disasters. But there are a lot of them any- way. The Friends and Patrons and so forth are active and munificent. A tasteful room is reserved for the Friends where you can have a nice cup of tea and cakes. Agreed, there was some trouble over money, but all that has now been put right. The bookshop is excellent, busy and coins money. In some ways indeed Burlington House is a delight- ful place to visit compared with those dark days when Munnings ruled and fumed. The only trouble today is that the paintings which most RAs produce and the ones they select to exhibit in their annual summer show are no good at all. No, that is an understatement. They are absolutely dread- ful.
The catastrophe which has threatened the RA ever since it abandoned its trust and sold the pass over `modern art' has now taken place. The annual show had been growing slowly worse for decades. Now it has suddenly tumbled into the abyss. The current show contains no portrait of the smallest distinction, no decent landscape, unless you count Robert Newell's formidable watercolour-gouache of Welsh rocks to be such, no genre painting of the least interest, no Problem Picture you want to scrutinise, no swagger or virtuosity, noth- ing to astonish by its power or imagination. The RA has always, since its inception, underdisplayed watercolours, the one medium in which England has led the world. But until recently the water- colourists still provided the best, if crowd- ed, part of the show. Now the ones who are any good exhibit elsewhere; they are sick of being associated with trash. There are only three works in the entire show I would give houseroom to and not one I would actually buy. I hate to say this, but the standard of the Summer Exhibition is now no better — some would say worse — than the repeti- tive mass-production on display in the Bayswater Road on Sunday.
There are a few RAs who are still corn- petent, like Ken Howard, but they churn out stuff we have all seen before. Competi- tion to excel or innovate or break barriers is non-existent. Some members have gone dramatically downhill. The RA did R.B. Kitaj no favour by giving him a whole wall to prove that his talent is exhausted, and display his bad temper at critics for point- ing it out. Poor David Hockney, whom I admire enormously as an artist and a per- son, shows a still-life so pitiful in execution that I could not bear to look at it for more than a few seconds. All the foul vultures of appeasement, betrayal and cowardice have finally come home to roost. The RAs, it seems to me — most of them anyway — no longer know how to paint a good picture themselves or how to distinguish between a good and a bad one when produced by any- one else. It is the final nemesis of official English art. If the Queen had any sense or taste, she would withdraw the royal prefix and turn the Academy loose to fend for itself. That is certainly what George III, who helped the founders to set it up, sub- sidised it, and knew a thing or two, would have done. Reynolds and Lawrence are writhing with embarrassment in their graves, but I have no doubt that the shade of Hogarth is delighted: he predicted no good would come of a state academy and he has finally been proved right.
You may ask, who cares, nowadays, what the RA does or does not do? Well, I care and so, I think, do thousands of other peo- ple. There are innumerable artists, profes- sional and amateur, scattered across the country, who try to keep up the old skills of draughtsmanship and painting technique, and make the most of the wonderful new opportunities offered by modern materials, who once looked to the RA as a standard- setter and exemplar. These people are dev- astated by what has occurred in recent years, as are hundreds of art teachers in the schools and specialist academies, not counting the ordinary art-lovers — and 'It's middlebrow, mainstream and non- cultural — we're on a winner.' patrons — who used to regard the summer show as the highlight of the year. They all feel betrayed. And it is no answer to say that pictures in the show still sell. So they do. You have to have something to hang on the walls of boardrooms and conference centres.
The tragedy of the RA is that there are still plenty of good artists at work in Eng- land, young and old, known and unknown, producing accomplished, painstaking and sometimes inspired work. My guess is that there are more than ever before. But one has to hunt them down, at commercial gal- leries or provincial shows or in their stu- dios, all over the country. The option of vis- iting Burlington House to get an overview of all that is best in English art is no longer open to us. And the individual artist's option, of seeking display, fame and for- tune in the summer show, knowing that he or she was competing with the best in the country, is no longer valid either. Good work is now simply drowned in the stagnant sea of mediocrity and fraud.
As it happened, in the same week the RA revealed it no longer has any vestige of its old authority, I was able to admire the work of two living masters in London. The Fine Art Society has a retrospective by James McIntosh Patrick, now aged 90, who is everything a British landscape painter should be — a touch of Old Brueghel and Constable and a gritty, chilly Scotch truth- to-nature which is all his own. The range and variety of his work are vast and his pre- war oil, `Glencoe', now owned by Texas Instruments, the lucky fellows, is spine-tin- gling. I also went to the new show, of male and female nudes and still lifes, by Michael Leonard, at Thomas Gibson Fine Art in Bond Street. Leonard is one of the most accomplished professionals at work today, almost at the Wyeth level, and he makes the RA people look amateurish. His `Aspara- gus' is by far the most beautiful painting on offer in London, a work to fill Chardin with envy, and I was amazed that it was still to be had at the end of opening day. I counted myself lucky to secure a superb graphite drawing, `Bather with Towel', with a diago- nal composition of great ingenuity and dash, before anyone else spotted it. Such artists — and there are scores of others, including youngsters of amazing virtuosity — convince me that art is still not just alive but flourishing in our country. But as for the RA, you can forget it.
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