Creative Media Institute for Film and Digital Arts Lion and Unicorn
T he National Gallery has apparently had plenty of masterpieces. You can run across how its curators might be sick of seeing paintings past great artists such as Titian and Piero della Francesca wall-to-wall, 24-hour interval in, day out. Then they're treating themselves to the lowbrow fun of exhibiting a scrap of nonsense by a painter who has been slighted for a century and on this evidence deserves to be slighted for several more.
Or then I am trying to rationalise the gallery's mystifying effort to redefine Edwin Landseer'due south ludicrous The Monarch of the Glen as a bang-up painting. It'south hard to understand how anyone can see this as anything but the lousy, lifeless relic that it is. Landseer's mid-19th century painting of a stag posing majestically against a properties of Scottish mountains is trite in feeling and mechanical in execution. Far from a sublime romantic vision, information technology looks like an advert – and that is what it has frequently been used as. The accompanying book – does this trivial bickering-dropping of a show merit one? – reproduces a 1927 whisky advertizement among other uses of this painted answer to tartan golf trousers.
Landseer was the almost renowned animal creative person in Victorian Britain. He was also the best connected: there is a sketch hither by Queen Victoria, who made a re-create of his charcoal wall drawings in Ardverikie shooting lodge earlier they were destroyed in a fire. Yet for all his fame, this exhibition reveals that Landseer had a secret. He could non portray animals at all. Oh, he could get their glossy fur right, give them appropriate poses – like the Monarch of the Glen's proud hilltop opinion – and set them in rugged landscapes. He just could non make them come up to life. His beasts accept every bit much vitality as a hunter'due south bays caput in some antediluvian gentlemen'due south club.
The exhibition makes this painfully visible by including a cartoon by a much greater animal creative person, George Stubbs, who in the 18th century dissected horses to learn the secrets of equine anatomy. Landseer, setting out to exist Stubbs's creative heir, purchased his dissection drawings, and 1 is exhibited here. It pulled me toward it similar a magnet. It has the presence of a Rembrandt portrait. Its electric energy cruelly illuminates the emptiness of Landseer's dull fumblings. The fussy, pedantic precision of Landseer's archetypally Victorian brushwork ensures that all hints of true wildness are smothered in aspic. Honestly, later on a while the room starts to turn chocolate-brown, every bit if yous were locked in Jacob Rees-Mogg's brain.
Tragically, information technology may be the very hollowness and kitsch of Landseer that appeals to the National Gallery. Equally I say, they have got sick of truthful masterpieces like Stubbs'due south Whistlejacket. Bad art and phoney images are the stuff of contemporary irony, after all. And they have paired Landseer with Rachel Maclean'due south 2012 film The Panthera leo and the Unicorn, which takes gleeful pleasance in the hokey national images of England and Scotland. Tartan and the Matrimony Jack are spattered everywhere in Maclean's brightly coloured romp. She plays all the characters, her face up painted as a kid's party panthera leo or whitened as a marionette-similar Queen – while the real Queen speaks in a sampled recording from an early Christmas circulate. In another scene, the Panthera leo and the Unicorn hilariously rima oris the voices of Jeremy Paxman and Alex Salmond.
She could probably create a smashing TV bear witness – Spitting Image meets the American surrealist Matthew Barney – but I'yard non sure why her piece of work needs to be in the National Gallery. Its weaknesses are exposed almost as harshly every bit Landseer's. Contemporary art should come into this space simply for a good reason, and with its eyes firmly stock-still on the claiming of being among all these greats. Artists of the calibre of Paula Rego and Cy Twombly have responded with passion and poetry to this collection. Why does it need to bring in a warmed-up 2012 video piece that deals with an already dated political state of affairs?
The National Gallery seems insecure, confused and scared to stand up for its values in these 2 pointless little shows. Information technology'southward like existence given a cheap blended whisky when we surely come up to this place for its pure malts.
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Landseer's The Monarch of the Glen and Rachel Maclean: The King of beasts and The Unicorn are at the National Gallery, London, from 29 November to iii February
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/nov/27/landseers-monarch-of-the-glen-review-national-gallery
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