If art suddenly has a new importance in London life, it is not simply a matter of bigness, or visibility, or skillful promotion. It is a citywide sense that not enough was being done with resources of which more could be made.
Within four or five weeks of its opening, and despite the fact that the footbridge across the Thames was not yet in use, the Tate Modern, an enormous building on the south bank of the river, face to face with St. Paul’s Cathedral, had welcomed its millionth visitor.
It was clear to this critic that every one of its multitudinous spaces was filled every day with people who had gone there in search of a major experience. It was also clear that many of them were getting it where they least expected it.
There was, as promised, a procession of major classics of 20th Century art. Painting and sculpture were there in super-abundance. But there was also a daylong awed attendance in a small dark room in which a video piece by the American artist Bill Viola was played continuously.
Many visitors had clearly never watched any of Viola’s work before, and quite possibly never heard of Viola. It was an awesome piece. On the left-hand side of the screen, a young woman was giving birth in close-up, second by second. It was a real young woman and a real birth. Her screams were real too. We were right there, inches away from her image.
On the right-hand side, an elderly woman was dying in bed. She, too, was seen in closeup, with her every struggle to breathe both visible and audible. Within a matter of long minutes we witnessed the two extremes of life — a birth and a death. All notions of preformed art were put aside.
But London itself also had to be redefined. After the end of World War II, the city set about squandering its ancestral advantages. It was blind to the dilapidated state of areas that would have been treasured in any other capital city. It had encouraged the growth of speculative office building that deadened all delight among those who had to work there or live there. It went almost unnoticed that the small industries that had meant so much to London were vanishing, one by one, leaving structures for which no imaginative use had been found. At the opposite extreme, there was the colossal scale of the London docks — mile upon mile of them, deep, broad and decaying — that spoke for an imperial hegemony that had gone forever.
After St. Katherine’s Dock was closed in 1968, more than a million square feet of solidly built storage space lay empty. A handful of gifted artists got permission to have studios there.
This was the beginning of a new and imaginative idea of what could be done with a London that was sadly run down. In no time at all, artists took over spaces that had never been used as studios before. They were were soon at home in neighborhoods in east London. Dealers followed.
It is in large part because of these migrations that visitors can now eat as well on Clerkenwell Green, where none of them would once have ventured, as in the four-star restaurants in the West End.
What once looked like almost derelict East End streets have turned out to harbor stately gallery spaces. Areas once famous for criminality and sweatshops look, on a fine summer morning, like country villages in which every window sparkles and every cobblestone seems to have just been hand-cleaned with a toothbrush.
Hoxton Square was built on land on which, in the 1680s, Ben Jonson killed a fellow actor in a duel. Now it has both a circus school and a fitness center. An Aston Martin or a Mercedes arouses no notice at lunchtime, though the area is said to be markedly less sedate after nightfall. New paintings can be seen, in abundance.
All over London, the words “make it new” have lately been applied to museums. Through Sept. 17, the National Gallery is presenting an innovative exhibition, scattered throughout its galleries, in which 24 living artists were invited to choose a painting from the gallery’s collection and take off from it in whatever way they liked. These are not “copies” or “versions,” but fancies brought to fruition.
It was a daring notion, fraught with possibilities of catastrophe. But the choice of artists was daring, too, with Balthus, Anselm Kiefer, Sir Howard Hodgkin, R.B. Kitaj, Louise Bourgeois, Jasper Johns and Richard Hamilton among them. I was touched and delighted by Frank Auerbach’s adaptation of a motif from Constable’s “`Hay Wain,” by Hodgkin’s majestic reinvention of Seurat’s “Bathers at Asnieres” and by Viola’s video variant of Bosch’s “Christ Mocked.” Every micromovement in the Viola had something valuable to say about human nature.
In terms of pure pleasure, the renovated Wallace Collection in Manchester Square has had few rivalsthis summer. It was always a voluptuous museum, with French 18th Century furniture and objects of art allied with a wonderful group of paintings by Watteau and, among much else, the Poussin “Dance to the Music of Time” that runs in and out of of Anthony Powell’s great 12-novel sequence.
But so much perfection calls for perfection of upkeep, and under its present director, Rosalind Saville, a $16 million overhaul has brought every object to a state approaching perfection. It is one of the more freakish facts of art history that Vincent van Gogh was much taken with a visit to this collection when he first came to London. His favorites were not ours, but they made a deep impression upon him.
Meanwhile, the question had arisen as to what should be done with Tate Britain, as the original Tate Gallery on Millbank is now named. Much of its collection is now on view at the Tate Modern on Bankside.
What to do on Millbank? It was decided among other things to make it clear that all six centuries of British art were in the Tate’s collections. It was further decided to present British painting in a way that owed nothing to chronology. British art of all sorts, sizes and dates would be there. There would be captions, but basically it was for the visitors to keep from being confused.
This was a combative notion, and it led off with a combative wall text by the French critic and philosopher Roland Barthes. “Beef is good for you” was the essence of what Barthes had to say. Though of doubtful relevance to the show Barthes’ remarks could doubtless be interpreted as a salute to Britain’s traditional habits at table.
Beginning with a 16th Century “Allegory of Man,” the Tate raced through the centuries, with everyone from Sir Joshua Reynolds to Zoffany’s “Cock Fight,” Holman Hunt’s “Awakening Conscience,” a well-deserved homage to David Bomberg’s part in the modern movement in Britain, and Kitaj’s masterly summation of life in Cecil Court, off Charing Cross Road, at the time of the Diaspora. The show is not always lucidly argued, but the message of this inaugural exhibition is, “Keep going! British art has more to show!”
A last word: It had long been a disgrace to London that the Holocaust had no permanent exhibition. This was righted when the Queen opened and toured, not long ago, “The Holocaust,” at the Imperial War Museum on Lambeth Road. It is a concise, imaginative and unsparing account not only of what happened during the Holocaust but also of what was thought, or not thought about it, among the Allies. The exhibition should not be missed.
