All blockbuster exhibitions are exhausting, I find, particularly when they feature an overwhelming quantity of work by just one blockbuster artist, some of whose blockbuster pictures are so familiar – from posters, coasters, postcards, tea towels, key fobs, fridge magnets, and whatever other gift-shop tat can carry a reproduction of an image – that they have ceased being works of art and become a blockbuster brand, even recognisable by people who don't care about "art" at all. To be honest, I'd rather come across a few deservedly famous paintings when walking through a gallery, like bumping into old friends on the street, than navigate whole roomfuls of major and minor masterpieces which, however thoughtfully curated, is always more like attending a reunion or a wedding, where the meeting-with-people quotient of a "high-functioning introvert" like me gets stretched a little thin. "Hello, 'Trunk of a Tree', I believe you know 'View of Arles', we were at Montmajour together in 1888? Oh, do excuse me, but I've just spotted 'The Yellow House' talking to 'The Bedroom', and I must have a word..."
I mean, I enjoy a top-quality Constable or Turner as much as anybody, but to trudge through room after room after room of not dissimilar paintings, a good 80% of which fall somewhat short of "masterpiece" status, eventually becomes a negative experience. The first couple of rooms always feel revelatory – Good grief, Turner was sixteen when he painted that? – but thereafter most shows are bogged down by the curatorial desire to impose some thematic orchestration, in this case to construct a parallel narrative out of the lives of what were, in the end, two rather different professional painters trying to make a living in a very different world to ours. In those days you were entirely dependent on sales and patronage: there were no grants or lucrative prizes to reward your personal artistic "genius", not even for turning the lights on and off, or letting gallery visitors remove your clothes with scissors.
In the end, it can feel a bit too much like being trapped inside a catalogue raisonné, and I, at least, always find myself looking for small visual pleasures as a relief from the, um, bigger picture superimposed by the curators. Which Constable paintings show swallows skimming the water? for example. Or amusing trivia: I enjoyed the name of this particular donor, for example:
E. Farquhar Buzzard... Now there's someone who must have had some character-building experiences at school. Or, look, here's yer actual John Constable's collapsible sketching chair on a plinth:
Very nice... Don't think I wasn't tempted to hop up and give it a try.
Which is not to say that the exhibition didn't have an effect on me. On a very brief visit to Mottisfont Abbey on Saturday I seemed to be walking through a landscape of just the sort conjured up on canvas by the painters of that time. The light and the clouds were exhilarating – all four of these photographs were taken within a single 20 minute period – even though the meadows were very marshy underfoot, and almost impassable in places. What wouldn't the likes of Turner or Constable have given for a device that could sketch a view with such fidelity in just 1/200th of a second? But then, what wouldn't you give to be able to sketch like a Constable or a Turner?
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