Light, landscape and Seville - mixed reactions

Reactions to the three very different shows I went to most recently really brought home to me how subjective exhibition-attending is.

Light Show at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank consisted of mixed-media installations from the 1960s onwards, primarily intended to "explore how we experience and psychologically experience colour". This show generally got a very positive response from the critics, and fellow visitors seemed enthusiastic, but I found myself far more dubious than I had expected. Although many of the pieces were wonderfully theatrical (theatre lighting was one of the inspirations for this kind of work), some were too much like something intended to catch the eye as a window display in a big store for me to take as seriously as I think I was expected to. Some pieces required the donning of plastic shoe covers and entering a pitch black area, which I eventually found irritating, missing out one piece altogether as a result. Not that there was nothing of interest, but apart from the three big names at the end of the show the only pieces that really engaged me were the series of rising suspended neon tubes by Brigitte Kowanz called Light steps, and Exploded view (Commuters) by Jim Campbell, which from most views is an attractive array of lights randomly blinking on and off, but from one angle produces shadowy images of people moving forward purposefully, thus being both abstract and figurative at the same time,.
  The "big names" were tucked away right at the end of the show, and one can't help feeling this was because they would have overwhelmed the other exhibits if one had seen them first. Anyway, since Dan's the man as far as I'm concerned when it comes to light art, I was relieved there was a Dan Flavin neon tube creation, not one of his best in my view but it still made a more substantial statement than most of the works on show - somehow his work just manages to be rather than knowingly drawing attention to itself (ironic given that it is made of an advertising material). The other two combined light with other elements, and were much stronger as a result: I did feel the show inadvertently showed the limitations of the use of art in light. Jenny Holzen's MONUMENT spelt out a political statement in a column of moving brilliantly-coloured LED lights while Olafur Eliassson's Model for a timeless garden consisted of strobe lights on jets of flowing water, creating a "frozen droplets" effect, shown in a half-lit room with a soundtrack accompaniment. This last was easily the most immersive of the show, almost as much as his sun/mist installation The Weather Project at Tate Modern some years ago. So was it worth the effort? Given I only paid a fiver because of Art Fund membership, yes, but left feeling rather deflated and underwhelmed.
 
Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the making of Landscape at the Royal Academy turned out to consist mainly of prints, of works by the likes of Claude, Salvatore Rosa and Dutch masters (early influences on English landscape painting) as well as famous and lesser-known English landscape artists. This show provoked a very mixed response, tending towards the negative, and at first the large number of prints did seem to make the title of the show a trifle exaggerated (all the works were from the RA's own resources). But it dawned on me that this was the medium in which most people would have seen landscape art, even if only in a shop window, and was thus more influential on public taste than oil or watercolour. Combined with some examples of the latter, the show did give a good idea of how English landscape art developed. I was also surprised at how well some of the black and white prints represented the feeling of a particular landscape, and the ones by Turner were something of a revelation. The show preformed an "art historical" function for me then, but the entirely non-trained Austrian-born friend I went with if anything found it more interesting than I did, so clearly the show had a non-academic appeal too. For me, this show demonstrated the value of being open to the unexpected (and the value of being a Friend, as the free entry makes it more likely that I will attend shows in which I have a limited intial interest). Incidentally, the remark by an American acquaintance that she did not like Constable because "his trees are too dark" both baffled me and made me realise that such a remark from an English person would seem almost unpatriotic - in English eyes Constable and the English landscape are pretty much as one, such is his influence.

Murillo and Justino de Neve: The Art of Friendship at Dulwich Picture Gallery intrigued me because of the press reports of the transformation of part of the gallery to an impression of the area in Seville Cathetral in which a series of Murillo lunettes originally hung. The show celebrates paintings commissioned or owned by Murillo's friend de Neve , a canon of Seville Cathedral, combined with Dulwich's own holding of Murillo paintings, the largest in Britain. The lunettes were certainly viewed at a height and angle so similar to their original surroundings that it gave a good idea of how the congregation saw them, but the real surprises came elsewhere. In Britain we associate Murillo with paintings of beggar children, which remain popular but lost favour with the critics in the 20th century because of their perceived sentimentality. It turns out these were painted for local Northern European  merchants, but Murillo's work for a Spanish audience was predominantly religious. This exhibition demonstrated that Murillo's work in this area was not only highly skillful, but demonstrated a sincerity which moderated their sentimentality. It also provided an unrepeatable opportunity to see the huge painting of the immaculate conception now in the Prado in its original elaborately carved and gilded frame (as much a work of art in its way as the painting it contained). In an act of vandalism, the painting was removed from Seville Cathedral by a French general during the Napoleonic wars, and remained in his family until it was sold to the Prado, but the frame remained in the cathedral. As there is evidence the frame may have been made for the painting, their separation is doubly appalling. Next to these paintings, the beggar children also seemed less sentimental, and a Gainsborough "fancy" painting of a poor rural child illustrated his acknowledged debt to Murillo. As this was a Friends' private view, there was the added bonus of an impassioned introduction to the show by the curator, Dulwich's Xavier Bray(curators are always impassioned). This show managed to combine information, innovation and sentiment in a way I have rarely experienced - in this case my experience and that of the critics happily coincided.

And finally....... talking of the Royal Academy (see above),  I picked this up from William Dalrymple's White Mugals: "The Frankfurt-born Zoffany lived in Lucknow for two and a half years.......On his way back to England (where he had settled in the 1750s) he was shipwrecked off the Andaman Islands. Lots having been drawn among the starving survivors, a young sailor was duly eaten. Zoffany may thus be said with some confidence to have been the first and last Royal Academician to become a cannibal." Zoffany is probably best known for his group portrait of the inaugural Academy members at a life class - I wonder if they knew!