RA SUMMER EXHIBITION 2018 AT BURLINGTON HOUSE, LONDON

RA SUMMER EXHIBITION 2018

AT BURLINGTON HOUSE, LONDON

ON THE 16^TH OF June 2018

The RA has once again managed to find an array of strongly contrastive work, each gallery is separately curated and this time the selection process was harder since there were more entrants than ever before.

Gallery 3, curated by Grayson Perry, has a painting of Coleridge looking high as a kite (161 Coleridge oil by Sonia Lawson RA) beside a photo shopped print of Donald Trump performing a visual investigation of Miss Mexico’s splayed legs as she gazes back at his gob smacked amazement (163 Trump and Miss Mexico, c-type print by Alison Jackson).  It’s as if Trump had never seen a woman before but the manipulation of the image lends it an aura of “fake news”, the soundbite coined by the addictive Twitter using President.  Satire is also present in this room, in works such as Laughing while Leaving (160 oil on linen by Roxana Halls), a cheery female couple make a bid for freedom as their middle-class bungalow burns behind them, or perhaps they are just Arsonists, implying the symbolical stronghold of property on our relations.  A bizarre concatenation of images is surreally tweaked by the presence of the work William Joyce and Friends (180 acrylic and charcoal by Mick O’Dea).  Looking like a still from the film 1984 William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw) and friends are depicted in austere fascist gear, simultaneously abrasive and seductive.  It was not clear what this image was meant to summon beyond its retrospective glance at a period now closed.  Maybe it is just easy to find audiences for such images, they are immediate crowd pleasers in Britain.  This multiplex exhibition implies that it is impossible to be everywhere and to know everything simultaneously.  Another work Nigel Farrage MEP (260 oil by David Griffiths) works in a way to make Farrage genial, approachable, a man in the pub with a beer rather than the remote ex-public-school boy he really is.

 

This year the RA is setting out its own retrospective too with a separate exhibition, The Great Spectacle, 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition, an acknowledgement of its own art importance.

The Royal Academy annual exhibition (now called the summer exhibition) was inaugurated in 1769.  Initially the galleries were in Pall Mall, then Somerset House.  Their next home was in a building in Trafalgar Square until they moved to Burlington House where they now reside.  The RA pays a peppercorn rent of £1.00 to the state for the premises although there were terms attached.  Various works, serious and satirical depict artist’s response to the annual exhibition such as The Exhibition ‘Stare-Case’, Somerset House, c 1800 by Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) (watercolour with pen and black ink on paper.)  In this work women expose their bodies to male onlookers as they tumble down a staircase, thus undermining the purported respectability of the original exhibition.  It implies that many onlookers came to leer or to be leered at or even to be picked up.  Other works such as A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881, 1883 by William Powerl Frith RA (1819-1909) (oil on canvas) details a cluster of well-dressed celebrity visitors including Oscar Wilde, Robert Browning, William Gladstone and Thomas Huxley.  The painting sets out the fashionable exteriors that comprised the allure of the annual exhibition.

The Great Spectacle gives details of the unfolding popularity of history painting which gave way successively to a fad for genre painting and then a celebration of landscape.  This evolution also implies the impact of external events such as the French Revolution of 1789, the Napoleonic wars and the Battle of Waterloo.  As British society took stock of these events, its artists turned away from depicting them and turned to a patriotic fervour for the British landscape given pre-eminence in the works of a new generation of artists such as J.M.W Turner, Thomas Girtin (both born in 1775) and John Constable, born in the following year.  Another reason for this new enthusiasm for landscape was the rise of the aesthetic of Romanticism which emphasized “nature” as opposed to “culture” in a reaction to Enlightenment values and the influx of Old Master landscape paintings that flooded the British art market following the outbreak of the French revolution.  The monumentalism of the landscape contrasted with the transience of external events is shown in Near Beddgelert (a grand view of Snowdonia) c 1799 (watercolour over graphite on paper) by Thomas Girtin (1775-1802).  The Welsh mountains touch the clouds, so that nature enfolds everything, a human presence is absent.  Works by Constable such as The Leaping Horse, 1825 (oil on canvas) and by Turner such as St. Michael’s Mount, Cornwall c 1834 (oil on canvas) are littered with or imply human subjects.

The art world changed suddenly as the foundations of its practise were questioned by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who began to examine and undermine the assumptions by which their forebears had practised art.  The RA’s annual exhibition became a focus for their work which foregrounded Medievalism, the impact of allegorical, religious and historical subjects, derived especially from the Bible and Renaissance art.  The PRB, as they were known, discovered another root of art in the works of artists who preceded Raphael, the so-called Florentine primitives of the 13^th century, artists like Cimabue and Giotto.  The late Victorian period was the heyday of the annual exhibition which attracted as many as 350,000 visitors.  A day specially for the press was now being set aside because of the crush of numbers and there was also a varnishing day when artists might touch up their works for presentation to the public.

Controversy marked the annual exhibition in the early 20^th century when, for instance, the Suffragette Mary Wood smuggled a meat cleaver into the exhibition in 1914, using it to slash John Singer Sargent’s portrait of the American writer Henry James.  The exhibition continued throughout the First World War but numbers attending it declined causing the RA to struggle financially.  In 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, the Selection Committee rejected Wyndham Lewis’s portrait of T.S Eliot prompting Augustus John to resign in protest, citing the ‘crowning ineptitude’ of the decision.  The furore that ensued the rejection implied that the RA was now remote, traditionalist, out of touch.  The decision failed to predict the continuing popularity and fame of Eliot’s writing which continues to be read on university and school courses around the world and, of course, also failed to predict the importance of the painting of Wyndham Lewis, who is now recognised as a formative British painter and who, like Eliot, was born in the New World.  A work by Winston Churchill (1874-1965) Winter Sunshine, Chartwell, 1924-25 (oil on millboard) was accepted under the pseudonym David Winter.  Churchill’s style evinces a clear visionary impulse and he was made an honorary member of the academy in 1948.

In the post-war period the annual exhibition was widely avoided by artists such as Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Francis Bacon who all refused to exhibit at the RA.  However, Stanley Spencer, Frank Bowling, Sandra Blow and Elizabeth Frink, all exhibited works at the summer show and perceived the Academy as a platform for new directions in contemporary art.  It must be said, however, that the names Spencer, Bowling, Blow and Frink hardly trip off the tongue or find a place in retrospectives of 20^th century British art whereas Moore, Hepworth and Bacon all attained international celebrity.  The perception, therefore, remained, that the Academy is a bastion of the Establishment and generally hostile to youthful, idealistic movements, preferring instead, the cash nexus perspective.

Paul Murphy, the RA, June 2018