Tate Britain - London, UK

23rd July 2013, Free

When you don't realise you've done a selfie

Since 2000, the name 'Tate' has generally come to refer to a gallery a little further down the Thames. Like Elvis circa 1964, Tate Britain has been superseded by a mop-topped upstart across the pond and been left a stuffy, out-dated relic, getting fat and starring in bad movies (RIP that metaphor). Upon the birth of Tate Modern, the rebadged Tate Britain has focused on British art through the ages, from the charred remains of a not quite so well dissolved monastery to some appalling 90s concept art. Much like UKIP: you don't have to be good to get in Tate, just British.

Unfair, I know. Tate aren't a bad lot, it just seems weird housing British Art in one place. British theatre: kabang! The British novel: kaboom! British art... erm. Some would expect their walls to be as empty as the French rock 'n' roll hall of fame. Since the protestant reformation, these islands focused on the word of God, not his image. The question is: can the nation of Turner be the nation of anyone else? 

Entrance - Duveen Gallery

The entrance to the building is impressive. The Duveen Gallery's a stout doric hall with a grand vaulting ceiling in clean, Georgian marble. Due to refurbishment, this wasn't my entrance. Instead, I was bundled through the side door like Elvis himself to be greeted, rather fittingly, by the cafe and toilets. The entrance gallery is famed for its installations: an aeroplane, a fella running through the hall, a Warhol print of, yep, Elvis Presley. We were treated to a video installation of the greatest pieces exhibited in the space in badly rendered CG (or, Now That's What I Call Tate). 

The video assumed we were all on nodding terms with exhibits of Tate past, which I'm not, and the strap line, 'Open your mouth. Close your eyes' felt painfully similar to some of my coursework for GCSE art. A suggested third sentence would read, 'Open your mouth. Close your eyes. Now stop it and grow up.'

17th Century and Before

Luckily, my arrival coincided with the beginning of a tour. I'm led to believe that Tate hire volunteer guides which, at first glance, sounds rather mean. However, as the guided, it often means we are treated to presentations done for passion alone and our guide (Annie) was no exception. She was engaging, intelligent and enthusiastic throughout with a lilting Australian accent. After a whistle-stop tour of British art up to the Pre-Raphaelites (*boak*), I wanted to tip her but understood she mightn't respond that well to a bald, northern waif waving a fiver at her. 

After the tour, I returned to the start of recorded British art (aka the stuff proceeding what Henry VIII destroyed so he could have sex with a lady for boy babies). The room's one of my favourites. The art isn't anything technically astounding, but it sweats charm:

Twins & Babies

Fruit & Boobs

The creepiest hanging since Michael Hutchence. That's his wife on her deathbed, their children on his right, his new (and later) wife sat down and their newborn in her arms. Everybody's wearing a po-faced, mid-distance stare. I hope this was never normal.

18th Century

When an empire garners wealth and confidence, arrogance is soon to follow, and the British Empire was no exception as reflected here. We are treated to country houses in Daily Mail countrysides that remind you just how unlike antiquity Regency England ever was. Hogarth is here, whose work tends to fall into either acerbic satire or stuffy jingoism. Guess where I'd put O The Roast Beef of England. There's a couple of middle-of-the-road Canalettos, who remains one of my favourite British arti... oh... nevermind. Of course, being a gallery in the UK, the examples of the Slowly Trinity are manifold. But who are the Slowly Trinity? Well, I know you already know, deep in your heart, but for the uneducated or ignorant, here we go: Reynolds, Gainsborough and Constable. 

'Oooh, look! A Georgian couple taking a stroll in their Sunday best.'

'Ooooh, look! A little shepherd boy drinking from a stream with a big shire horse next to him and a rainbow.'

'Oooooh, look! Three boring rich girls dressed up like boring bacchanals, doing a boring dance and being dead, dead boring.'

And you can keep George 'I can draw horses' Stubbs to boot.

How I really feel

Amid the hurly-burly is a painting by Joseph Wright that shines like a single source of light amid the darkness and noise of its surroundings (do you see what I've done?). It's a precious thing, although perhaps doesn't deliver quite the punch in the chops the National Gallery's Experiment on the Bird with an Air Pump does. 

Perhaps this era's artistic lodestar was Turner - an artist I love with all my brains. The Tate's Turner collection is so (*spoiler alert*) fantastic I'll reserve my judgement for the review's closing.

NB: There was a free collection of Keith Arnatt's photography around this point called Sausages & Food. It was base, profound, honest, a little cynical and a lot twee - I loved it. 

19th Century

As concepts of Romanticism became embedded in the pre-Victorian consciousness, a Napoleonic adage became many of its artists' mantra: 'the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step'. The Tate address this with aplomb, but I do declare: they know how to hang a picture. Their showcase 19th century room, although quite ridiculous, delivers its art with cleanliness and order, the likes of which are rare. It also has much less in the way of lightbulb glare from the higher-placed paintings than almost anywhere else with work at such a height. 

According to John Martin, paradise looks 
a lot like a bad painting 

John Martin's landscapes show his intention of the sublime, and ridiculous execution, resulting in his work looking like fountains of shit spurting from one of his stupid volcanoes. Naturally, the gallery is chock-full of Pre-Raphaelites (*boak*) that turns me off like a death in the family. The Golden Stairs (below) 'suggests mood, not narrative'. Agreed, as looking at it put me in quite a mood.

If you cut the head off a snake, it dies.
Well... yeah.

I've been known to give the Pre-Raphealites (*boak*) a hard time. It's just every time I see one of their paintings I think 'The Moods of Enya - not available in the shops'. Even their name annoys me: 'PRE-Raphaelites', "Rembrandt and Carravagio? Who? That must be after Raphael." Well done, lads. 

Apparently, George Frederick Watts painted his Minotaur as an angry riposte to the child prostitution that was rife at the time and, thanks to him and his work, that's a problem that no longer exists in the world. At all. 

I should stop being a dick. What else can an artist do?

Roussel's The Reading Girl sent me to a place. It's that feeling of an early relationship. The girl and viewer are comfortable with her (and perhaps our) nudity but it's still beguiling and electric. I enjoyed it so much I forgot to take a picture of it. Sorry. I hyperlinked it... what?!

All, in all, the areas for this artistic epoch are arresting, vibrant, sometimes sublime and often ridiculous.

20th Century

From here, one witnesses a sea change in British art at the turn of the century with certain names taking on more international clout. With the best will in the world, the name 'Bacon' piques the public's interest more than 'Rossetti' ever could. 

Britain was fast becoming a less contentious place, with art starting to reflect the transition in attitude. The works of Gwen John and Winifred Knights are fine examples of these social changes and it was refreshing to hear a female voice among the erstwhile all-male choir. Crossing from the 19th to 20th century galleries represents the most profound tonal shift in art history and, despite not being the most fervent modern art enthusiast, it's one I welcomed. 

Winifred Knights - well done treacle

NBFAFN (Not bad for a fucking Nazi),
Wyndham Lewis

As the abstract movements took hold of mainland Europe, British art followed suit with luminaries such as Wyndham Lewis's abrasive spaces, Meredith Frampton's clean, photographic asthetic and Eric Gill's low-relief porno-theism. Gill's a funny one, and when I say funny, I mean a ghastly beast with talent. I don't want to bring the tone down with his crime sheet but his journals reveal a lot about his private life. I'll give you a minute to find out what he did... 

go on...

See...

But, yeah. 'Death of the Author' and that. I suppose.

Eric Gill, very nice but... I know
what you did

There's a welcome fluidity to the 30s work that's nowhere more apparent than Henry Moore's sculpture. Whereas Michelangelo saw a David waiting to escape a lump of marble, Moore tried to blend the human form with his stone so the viewer takes on the role as sculptor (a concept I in no way purloined wholesale from Gombrich's The Story of Art). These rooms have some great pieces. Spencer's Double Nude Portrait is one:

What, you've never done a shag
next to some raw meat?

If you were planning to experience Tate Britain without going back on yourself, good luck. I could've missed The Night Watch for all I know. On my meanderings through the 1940s I stumbled across a modern video installation, or what's known outside of the industry as 'a rubbish film'. In this dead-end room we were shown a film of an elephant stood in a different room. A dead end, indeed. Boom and tish!

This avant-guardery is surrounded by your typical paranoid, borderline propagandic, 1940s ennui with a frisson of Baconian bestial aggression that came from the grip and release of a Europe under fascism. I'm not one to judge but I'm glad I was in no way connected to Francis Bacon, platonically or especially erotically. I might have been able to flog some of his stuff but the force of human desperation and primal depravity would put the dampeners on any dinner party:

"This is Tom, Rob, Julie and that pope screaming at the end there's Innocent X."

There are a couple of really great Freud's here. Girl with the White Dog is all things to all Joes. At once mundane and sexually charged, ancient and modern, still life and This Life. 

By the 1950s and beyond, things really begin to freak out and my relationship with the art cools somewhat. Hey, that's just me. It was nice to see David Hockney's finest as there were now two Bradfordians in that room doing great things. 

I can tell I wouldn't get on with these two. Ok,
just him.

A section dedicated to Rose Wylie felt less A-grade than A-Level and her piece based on the notes of Inglorious Basterds (a film I loathed) brought me close to committing a bonfire of the vanities. 

There's a small space for the Chapman bros. towards the end. In a dim light, they have joss sticks burning, and what seem like Polynesian masks and sculptures on head-high pedestals. I liked the atmosphere these lads crafted until I took a closer look and noticed the sculptures are made from McDonald's paraphernalia. Satire! Geddit?... SATIRE!

Urgh, nearly the end. Who will rid me of this turbulent art? Well not Steve McQueen, I can tell you. His video installation (hurray) entitled Bear has two naked guys wrestling with a camera pointing up at their locked shoulders. We see a close-up of one man's cock, then the other, then the other, then the other. 

'It kind-of relates, y'know, to like, men's cocks and all the bullshit that Western society does to, y'know, hide the truth of nature from us all.'

I had to leave - although, at the end their British art timeline, was a portrait by Lynette Yiadom-Boayke called 10pm Saturday that had a Goyan/Sickertian emptiness to it that provided sweet, sweet succour from the 1990s gauntlet I'd just run.

NB. There's a Blake exhibition upstairs from the upcoming Turner wing that I wasn't sure where to place. I found it creepy in the wrong way. Christ blessing the Little Children's perspective is disturbingly misjudged and The Ghost of a Flea has power but in a 'heavy-metal art' kind of way. I find Blake's symbolic allegories more powerful on paper than canvas as typified by his series on Dante's Inferno in which he managed to make the nine stages of hell skull-crushingly dull. Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

Turner

Perhaps in fear of me carping on too much, the good people at Tate have provided a separate wing (the Clore Gallery) to show off their finest Turner plumage. Granted, not every one's a haymaker, but some of them are this:

Snow Storm, JMW Turner

There's something magical about Turner, especially his later work, when the lines get blurred and blotchy. His work creates the impossible from a static canvas: movement and music. But this isn't Bach and Nureyev. The music's a pulsating discordance, like dropping a piano from a lighthouse whilst moving in a toe-treading waltz. I don't fall in love with Turner, I just fall.  

The sheer breadth and depth of Tate's Turner collection shines and, barring one or two rogue Constables hidden in there, I was granted a second wind after a long time walking and standing. There are so many works from so many eras I lost myself in the staggering talent and canon of the fella. I timed my arrival with the beginning of a tour which, much like the previous one, was well worth the bother. 

Overview

And what a way to finish my little visit. Things got bad before they came to a happy ending, much like a bad movie. Tate Britain has highs and lows, but when it works it's so sexy it can only be filmed from the waist up. The tours are regular and informative, the exhibitions are of renown, the facilities are as good as they should be, the staff are willingly helpful without being invasive and, above all this, the collection occasionally sparkles.

Suspicious minds? This is the Graceland of British art.

Joe has left the building.