The Last Time I Saw Richard

Alice Neel, Richard, 1980

 Oil on canvas. 111.8 x 76.2 cm, 44 x 30 in

⁣ © The Estate of Alice Neel.

The bright white light that falls from above directly on to his face and chest, the Mediterranean blue polo shirt and the stripey seat back, are all evocative of the positive mood that pervades Neel’s magnificent image of Richard… all around his form she paints a bright blue outline, like an electric blue current, containing him, protecting him, emphasising his presence in the world.

Dr Minna Moore Ede, quoted from the publication Alice Neel: There's Still Another I See, 2022

Really? OK, Mike, take a deep breath. Count to ten. Exhale... Maybe do it once or twice more.

So... I have borrowed the painting above, and the quote, from an email sent to me by the Victoria Miro Gallery, of London and Venice, announcing their participation in an upscale art market that goes by the name Art Basel Miami Beach (now there's a confusing car-crash of locations). This painting is prominently displayed as the lead image in the mail, so is clearly intended as a statement of the gallery's values, prestige, and sophistication. Alice Neel (1900-1984) is clearly having a (very) posthumous moment.

Now, setting aside any biographical stuff about Neel's career and troubled life (read the Wikipedia page if you want to know about that), is this indeed a "magnificent image", as declared by Dr. Minna Moore Ede? Or is it even a competent painting? Perhaps what would appear to be its cartoonish distortions of anatomical proportions, and disregard for conventions of paint handling and composition are actually precisely the features that make it magnificent?

As I'm sure you know, I am a scrupulously fair-minded man, who likes to give the new and strange a chance to sink in and do its thing, but I have to say, so far, I don't get it. I admit I have never understood the late style of Philip Guston, either, who seems to lie somewhere at the the origins of this particular approach to painting, which (if my grasp of the art-historical chain of influence is correct) has also led us to the deliberately "naive" work of highly-regarded contemporary artists like Eileen Cooper, Rose Wylie, Chantal Joffe, or Humphrey Ocean, Royal Academicians all. There is clearly something going on here – a rejection of the elitism of talent and mere skill? An expression of the "female gaze"? A celebration of the primary-school art-room look? – but I don't know what it is. Call me Mr. Jones. Actually, don't: he's coming up next.

Rose Wylie exhibition "Let It Settle", Gallery at Windsor 2020.

Let it sink in...

For me, Rose Wylie is something of a test case. Here's the opening paragraph of a review of a solo exhibition of her work in 2017:

This is how Rose Wylie paints the sun. She does a big yellow circle. Then she adds straight yellow lines around it. Underneath she does a couple of palm trees that are brown sticks with dollops of green on top. On the sea, she adds an outline of a ship with black smoke puffing out of it.

The teacher gave her a gold star and pinned it on the classroom wall. His name is Mr Hans-Ulrich Obrist and the nursery is called the Serpentine Sackler Gallery. The exhibition is called Quack Quack. Oh, and young Rose is 83.

Yup. That's about it. The reviewer, Jonathan Jones, should probably also have mentioned that her paintings are not "dolloped" onto a sheet of sugar paper, but fill enormous wall-sized canvases. But wait, here are two of his final paragraphs: 

Wylie is in no danger of the workhouse as her paintings are highly collectable. Several works here have been lent by wealthy Russians. Is it all a bit of a scam? She is not genuinely naive, let alone a child. She went to art college. Is this a terribly sophisticated put-on?

Anywhere but Britain, I might think so. Yet the sad truth is that we still need the shit kicking out of our staid, conservative artistic tradition. For all the Turner prizes and the Grayson Perry TV shows, when it comes to painting we still queue up to admire the correctly painted swimming pools of Mr Hockney. We still expect painters to do a proper, hard-working job.

Jonathan Jones, Guardian 29/11/17

I'm not a fan of the shit-kicking Mr. Jones, who strikes me as one of those commentators who thrive on a rather superficial and bitchy contrarianism. I'm not sure why he dislikes Hockney so much – lately more than willing to resort to this primary-school aesthetic himself – and I note that he's also a major fanboy of Tracey Emin (not sure whether he has reviewed the tea-towels?). So let's take another deep breath and have a closer look at all this.

You can see his point about the suspicion that it's all "a terribly sophisticated put-on", even if he doesn't think it is. It bears mentioning that Wylie's husband, Roy Oxlade, was also a painter in much the same slap-dash faux-naive style. As it says in Oxlade's obituary, "apparently wild, spontaneous brushwork, bold colour and improvised images characterise his distinctive style". Note the way that the writer has attached "apparently" to "wild, spontaneous" there. Perhaps to be taken seriously as Art, rather than just therapeutic fun, such mark-making has to be seen as intentional, and not really as wild and spontaneous as it might appear? How you can tell the difference I don't know, but admirers of this style seem to value precisely the contrast between a child-like spontaneity (or at least the appearance of it) and the more painstaking, more obviously accomplished sort of painting admired by those ignorant saps, the general public. Jonathan Jones again:

Painting is a wonderful, magic thing. That is why young children love doing it. Wylie has rediscovered in maturity the freedom with which we painted when we were kids.

Well, maybe. The "spontaneous wonderfulness of children's art" thing can be overdone. I admit I failed to learn to love the freedom with which our kids would make apparently wild and spontaneous crayon marks on the wallpaper, but it is also true that, like any proud parents of such self-evidently immensely talented children, we were sufficiently impressed by some of the work that came home from school that we framed several undoubted masterpieces:

In fact that last spontaneous effusion came home from nursery with its three-year-old maker and was taped to the back of the living-room door, thirty years ago, where it has remained to this day. But, let's be honest, fun as it might have been to make, and much as we love it, no wealthy Russian is going to be offering us thousands of pounds for it. There's more to "art" than uninhibited freedom of expression.

Besides, Alice Neel's portrait is hardly wild and free. If anything it's constipated, laboured over, as unfree as any Sunday painter's most painstakingly dull effort. Is it really pervaded by a "positive mood", as Minna Moore Ede claims? To my eye "Richard" exudes the sadness, repression, and anxiety of both artist and subject (her own son, I believe). In the words of Joni Mitchell's song "Edith and the Kingpin":

His left hand holds his right
What does that hand desire
That he grips it so tight?

Perhaps that's the whole point, but psychological insight in itself doesn't make for a magnificent, or even a good painting, any more than mere uninhibited freedom of expression does. I mean, take that peculiar seat. It appears to be constructed out of some sort of thick grey spaghetti, incapable of bearing any weight at all, and has been squashed awkwardly into the constraints of the canvas. Of course, this and all the other "defects" one might point to – that scumbled white area around the head and that blue outline, for example, and what the hell is is he hiding under that shirt? – may be, and probably are, a deliberate provocation. But to what end? If this is meant to be, in Jonathan Jones' words, an exercise in "kicking the shit" out of something, then it's a pretty feeble kick.

Now, call me ignorant, a typical untutored member of the British gallery-going public, but surely this is what a magnificent painting of an anxious man keeping a tight grip on something looks like, not to mention being, again in Jonathan Jones' curiously dismissive words, "a proper hard-working job":

Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir Thomas More (1527)

Look closer:

Wow. And compare:

Seriously? And here's a detail from Rose Wylie's "Cuban Scene":

So has the shit been kicked out of us and our staid, conservative expectations? If so, I think we can take it. Spontaneous the Holbein certainly isn't – there will have been many hours of sittings, taking up the time and patience of an important and busy man – but it is supremely accomplished, deeply insightful and, well, truly magnificent. Sadly, but not surprisingly, no child will ever bring something like that home from school. The other two, though? Well, yes, I can imagine that quite easily. Which, I assume, is the intention.

So is it the case that we can't, or that we won't make work of that stature any more? No more heroes, no more Shakespearoes, perhaps? Maybe the refusal of technical refinement is a cry of pain in a world increasingly running out of control? The Hopi have a word for it: koyaanisqatsi. But any comparison between a typical Holbein and the self-inflicted wound of this particular contemporary painting style surely seems to speak not just of different artistic priorities after 500 years, but of decline; desperation, even. What does it say about us, in the 21st century, that a painting like "Richard" is the centrepiece of a prestigious gallery's tempting offer to well-heeled collectors of art? Or, indeed, that wealthy Russians are collecting the work of Rose Wylie? It says quite a lot, I think, although my layperson's ears still can't seem to make out what it is, exactly, that is being said.

Obviously, skilful technique and realism can't guarantee a good picture, either. Few things are as tedious or as complacent as those photo-realistic pencil portrait drawings you see all over the Web, or yet another bohemian breakfast table rendered in tasteful post-impressionist dabs, or indeed any art whose ambition has stalled at the level of a greetings card [1]. It would be silly to assert otherwise. But surely the remedy for witless skill-for-skill's-sake or oh-so-tasteful retro-cliché is not pretending to paint like a mentally-disturbed six-year-old? Or maybe it was, for a while, but has now become just another off-the-peg style which happens to be in fashion with wealthy collectors, and is therefore peddled to them as "magnificent" by prestigious galleries and art influencers?

A lot of questions there, all going unanswered. So, to repeat Mr. Jones' own key question: "is this a terribly sophisticated put-on?" Well, as I'm sure those who prize spontaneity above all else would agree: first thought, best thought, Jonathan. When talented, highly-trained artists are producing simulacra of the work of untalented, untrained children, however sincerely, you know something resembling a terribly sophisticated dressing-up game is going on. Is this game the best, most representative, most expressive art of our times? I suppose, as always, only time and the cultural gatekeepers of the future will tell.

Anyway, rant over. And, yes, I do feel better now, thanks very much. And exhale...

And yet, like any choice of style, when it works, it works...

(Ben Hartley, "Woman and chickens")

1. I confess that I particularly dislike anything featuring hares. Hares are threadbare glove-puppets that say, "I'm a bit of a pagan, in touch with folkways, and the feel and flow of the land and its seasons. I'm earthy and yet spiritual, and my kitchen is filled with the smell of baking bread..." I mean, what could be more annoying?