For anyone with a serious interest in art, London at the
moment may be said to be enjoying the best of times and the worst of times. At
the top of anyone’s list of not-to-be-missed exhibitions is The Genius of Rome, 1592-1623 at the
Royal Academy of Arts. This is a sumptuous survey of what its curator, Beverly
Louise Brown, describes as “the confluence of artistic talent in Rome around
1600 that fostered what would become known as Baroque art.” It numbers some 140
paintings by 50 artists-among them Caravaggio, Rubens, Annibale Carracci, van
Dyck, Guercino, Elsheimer and Guido Reni.
At the bottom of my own list, alas, is an atrocity at the
new Tate Modern called Century City: Art
and Culture in the Modern Metropolis , which turns out to be only peripherally about art. (What this depressing
retrospective documentary on the 20th century is really about I shall get to
presently.)
Somewhere in between, at the British Museum, there is the
biggest-ever show of Rembrandt’s etchings, Rembrandt:
The Printmaker , a triumph of curatorial probity that gives us, among much
else, a profound and intimate account of the master’s draftsmanship. The only
problem in negotiating a visit to this splendid show (on through April 8) is
the horror of the new overscale entrance to the British Museum-a massive,
faceless, enervating structure that even Mussolini at his craziest might have
found too daunting to countenance. Fortunately, the show itself, when you
finally get to it after a mountain-climb up the endless stone steps, is
agreeably installed in the old human-scale galleries of the museum’s Prints and
Drawings department.
This it not to say that The
Genius of Rome exhibition, wonderful as it is, is itself entirely devoid of
problems. But its problems, beginning with its catchpenny title, are of another
kind. Is its title meant to be generic? If so, it is all but meaningless. Or is
it intended to focus on the starring “genius” role accorded to Caravaggio, the
celebrated “bad boy” of 17th-century Italian painting, whose brazen,
in-your-face realism can nowadays be counted upon to command attention and
generate gossip? Either way, the title is shamelessly misleading. As everyone
in London seems to be aware, it was decided by the top brass at the Royal
Academy that the word “Baroque” was too esoteric-and thus lacking the requisite
sales appeal-to be used in the show’s title, and so a major exhibition devoted
to the birth of the Baroque-the reigning style of the period-had to be called
something else, with Caravaggio pressed into service in all the advertising as
the show’s controversial star attraction.
But this, in turn, only
raised further problems. For not all of the 14 paintings attributed to Caravaggio
in this show are now accepted as authentic examples of his work. The very first
painting we encounter in the exhibition-the Young
Boy Peeling Fruit , circa 1592-is now thought to be a copy of the lost
original. And as all of the paintings attributed to Caravaggio are, like
everything else in the exhibition, arranged according to their subjects rather
than chronologically, it is left to the viewer to unscramble the story of
Caravaggio’s own pictorial development for himself. Thus does the current
marketing mentality in our museums undermine connoisseurship, even in an
exhibition of such remarkable quality and splendor.
Still, whatever its faults, The Genius of Rome is a thrilling exhibition for anyone with a keen
interest in the art of painting. Rome in the three decades under review in this
exhibition was the locus of one of the great flowerings of European art, the
place where many of the gifted and ambitious talents of Northern and
Mediterranean Europe joined in creating one of the most heroic periods in the
entire canon of Western painting. The exhibition remains on view in London
through April 16, and a somewhat different version of it will travel to Rome in
May.
To turn from the heroic achievements of Rome in the 17th
century to a global view of what is billed as “art and culture” in nine cities
in the 20th century-which is what an international cadre of 12 curators have
undertaken to do in Century City at
the Tate Modern-is to descend from the heights of artistic inspiration to the
lower depths of a highly politicized sociology in which mere works of art, even
where they are allowed to make a fugitive appearance, are all but buried in a
documentary phantasmagoria of culture high and low, but mostly just disgusting.
Century City is,
in other words, the elephantine offspring of the Cultural Studies movement that
has effectively destroyed the study of art, literature and other humanistic
disciplines in so many of our colleges and universities on both sides of the
Atlantic. It is essentially Maoist in its conception of art and culture and,
like Mao’s infamous Cultural Revolution, it represents the ultimate triumph of
ideology over both art and life. Mercifully, this movement is thus far lacking
in Maoist-type “re-education” camps for dissenters-yet under the current Labor
government in Britain, something akin to Mao’s “re-education” program is
already at work, as Colin Amery reported in a terrifying article called “The
Relentless Advance of the Culture Commissars” in The Daily Telegraph of March 6.
“Just as the thought police in China infiltrated everywhere,
in England today the commissars of culture are attempting to tighten their grip
throughout the kingdom,” Mr. Amery wrote. The entire article is worth tracking
down online, for current cultural life in Britain cannot be understood in
isolation from this ominous development.
Century City
effectively annexes the resources of London’s primary museum of modern art to
the untender mercies of this movement. Purporting to give us the cultural
lowdown on art and life in Moscow (1916-30), Lagos (1955-70), New York
(1969-74), Vienna (1903-18), Tokyo (1967-73), Paris (1905-15), Rio de Janeiro
(1950-64), Bombay/Mumbai (1992-2001) and London (1990-2001), Century City offers little more than a
parody of left-wing pop social history.
You might think it impossible to make Paris in the decade
preceding the First World War a nondescript subject for an exhibition, but the
commissars at the Tate Modern fully succeed in accomplishing this
impossibility. Some of the greatest Cubist collages of the period are hung in a
narrow corridor where they can scarcely be seen if three or four other people
are present.
New York in the early 1970’s is simply trashed, with a
“narrative” that reduces the art life of the city to the status of an art-starved
Third World disaster area, where the greatest artists are Linda Benglis, Vito
Acconci and Gordon Matta-Clark. One of the overscale wall texts in the New York
section quotes that eminent critic of urban culture, the late Nikita
Khrushchev, who complains about the lack of “greenery” in the city. London, on
the other hand, is treated as the art capital of the universe. As an account of
20th-century art and culture, Century
City is deconstructionism on a grand scale.
Don’t take my word for it. Century City was too much even for Waldemar Januszczak, the art
critic of London’s Sunday Times , who
can usually be counted on to lavish praise of anything far-out. I especially
recall an article of his a few years back, in which he took great delight in
announcing the death of painting. Yet here is the opening paragraph of his Times review of Feb. 4: “Oh dear. The
first exhibition at Tate Modern is a disaster. But in keeping with the
gallery’s innovative display policies, it is, at least, a new kind of disaster,
a progressive disaster. Most disasters have beginnings, middles and ends. This
one eschews old-fashioned narrative structures. It is a disaster all over the
place, all at once, around every corner, a massive, moneyed, international
mess.”As I say, London at the moment is enjoying the best of times and the
worst of times, and the Tate Modern is almost the worst that can be imagined.
