From Ice Age beasts to Pop Art blondes

The new year’s most enticing exhibitions span millennia of artistic achievement, says Richard Dorment.
Nobody uses the word “unmissable” in real life. When it’s used by critics it usually means “good”. But every so often no other word will do for calling attention to exhibitions that will only be around for a few months and may never happen again. This year, a few exhibitions that fall into that rare category are coming to London.
The Royal Academy’s Manet: Portraying Life is the first show to look at Edouard Manet’s portraits as distinct from his scenes of modern life. Manet is the perfect artist to usher in the new year, a blast of fresh air who clears away the cobwebs and makes you sit up and pay attention (Jan 26 - Apr 14) .
And in the early spring the National Gallery stages one of those shows you’d think could not be done: a display of 16 major altarpieces by one of the most lovable masters of the Italian Renaissance, Federico Barocci. The scale and importance of loans that will be coming from the Marche region of Italy is so staggering that for a moment I wondered whether there hadn’t been some natural disaster that necessitated removal to London of pictures like his sublime The Last Supper from the cathedral at Urbino. (February 27 - May 19).
Then there is the mad and inspired project to temporarily repatriate the series of Old Master paintings sold from the collection of Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, to Catherine the Great in 1779. Now among the glories of the Hermitage, they will hang for the summer in their original setting – that most beautiful of all Palladian houses, Houghton Hall in Norfolk. (May - September).
More important than any temporary exhibition in 2013 are the opening of new or renovated exhibition spaces. After the scandal of its 10-year closure, on April 13 the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam will once again open its doors to the public. Here in London the elegant former munitions store that’s being renovated by Zaha Hadid in Kensington Gardens will open this summer as the Serpentine-Sackler Gallery.

Peter Blake: Pop-art ‘godfather’ still an outsider

 

 LONDON — Pop music loves him. The art establishment shuns him.

At the age of 80, British artist Peter Blake is revered for his celebrated Sgt. Pepper Beatles album cover yet at the same time dismissed as too “cheerful” to be one of the greats.

Stroking his wispy silver beard repeatedly and using a cane to walk around a central London gallery, the man dubbed the “godfather of pop art” still struggles to come to terms with his place in the world of contemporary culture.

“It’s a cross I bear,” he said of the fact that his art is not taken as seriously as that of some contemporaries.

“Perhaps it’s surprising that at my kind of age and with my infirmities I’m still cheerful,” he said at the Waddington Custot Galleries, where his latest show, “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” is on view.

Surrounding him are works ranging from some of his earliest watercolors, executed in 1948 when he was 16, to The Family, a sculpture he completed just a few days ago.

What is striking is how lively they are — plastic figures of Snow White and 30 dwarfs crowd outside a model of a Swiss chalet in one humorous work, and the 6-foot-long A Parade for Saul Steinberg is a model bursting with color and references to popular culture.

Blake concedes that he is often left having to defend his work in a world in which “serious” art is cherished above all.

“Painters all have a different reason to paint. It could be politics; it could be angst; it could be anger. My reason to paint is to make magic and to make cheerful things.”

The art market clearly ranks his peers above Blake, including David Hockney, whose Beverly Hills Housewife fetched $7.9 million at auction in 2009.

But more of a bugbear is being overlooked by Tate Modern, the most important British gallery for modern and contemporary art — which, ironically, gave a major retrospective this year to a much younger artist whom Blake helped nurture, Damien Hirst.

After uttering a few choice words in what he himself called a “rant” to a newspaper against influential Tate director Nicholas Serota, he sought to strike a more conciliatory tone.

“Oddly enough, Serota came in earlier to see the show,” Blake recalled.

What Serota saw was an artist still bursting with ideas in a phase of life Blake describes as an“encore” to the main acts of his career.

Blake named the show after the children’s game rock-paper- scissors, and childlike touches surface throughout.

Blake was producing art by 1945, at age 13, and in the 1950s and “swinging ’60s” emerged as one of the front-runners of pop art, which drew on popular culture and advertising to subvert the traditions of mainstream art.

He is best-known for designing the album sleeve for the 1967 Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, featuring a collage of famous figures behind the band members dressed in bright military-style regalia.

That album has led to a lifelong association with British pop music, including designing sleeves for the charity single Do They Know It’s Christmas? in 1984, the latest album by Madness and the Brit Awards statuettes last year.

 

 

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