Earlier this week I was in York and visited the city’s art gallery. I have to admit there wasn’t that much I saw that I found particularly memorable, I quite liked some of the ceramics on show but it was two very different 16th century paintings in the gallery’s collection of early religious paintings that have really stuck in my mind.
One painting was from the studio of an Italian painter. It was round and in the style of those Raphael paintings of the Madonna and child, which can seem a bit overly sweet nowadays but the skill of which is undeniable. The York painting was abysmal. The drawing was bad, the painting clumsy, the proportions of the figures were wonky, one of Jesus’ legs didn’t seem to be connected to his torso. There wasn’t much information about it, perhaps it was the work of a student, maybe it was recognised as incompetent when it was freshly painted. Now however its on a museum wall, representing Italian 16th century painting and more obliquely, the 16 century Italian art market, which judging by this result was fairly cynical and mainly concerned with making money rather than producing work of quality. Markets, plus ca change.
On the wall opposite the Italian painting is an English screen painting of the same period. Its much less sophisticated in its execution, more like a coloured drawing than an oil painting. Its been damaged, most likely apparently during the reformation. It’s rather dark and crude. However it seemed to me a much more honest work. I could have spent time looking at it and did try snatching a photo on my phone but it turned out all blurry. What interests me though and why I’m still thinking about these two very different paintings is my reaction to them and why the English painting is so much more powerful.
At the moment I’ve no idea really, except somehow the crude English work achieves a marrying of purpose and execution which the Italian painting lacked, it so clearly being a piece of hack work, intended to earn income and no more. I’m not religious but even I can see (or think I can see) that whoever painted the English scene did so in a sense of devotion or something similar and that this has made a crucial difference, now some 400 odd years later.
There was one other painting that caught my attention, an LS Lowry painting of bandstand and crowd. It was a fairly typical Lowry composition but he too had achieved a fusion of subject and execution so that the greys and ochres created a true alternative to the actual scene he must have sketched one day. The critic Peter Fuller used to write about paintings that transcended their material reality to create an alternative to the reality in which the painter existed and to dominant visual environment made up largely of advertising; proper painting?
martingollan 