Week Eight : Exhibition Review (Finding and Reading Information)
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Exhibition Review (finding and reading information)
THE COURTAULD | Exhibition Review
Auriol Bishop 18 November 2022
For a gallery claiming to be the home of enlightenment, The Courtauld holds some pretty dark shadows.
https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2022/event/soheila-sokhanvari-rebel-rebel
Wild at Heart (Portrait of Pouran Shapoori), 2019, egg tempera with squirrel-hair brush on calf vellum
The Love Addict (Portraits of Googoosh), 2019, egg tempera on calf vellum
The Star, 2022, Perspex two-way mirrors, wood, metal, plastic and electronics
Earlier in the week of my visit, I had one of those unexpected encounters with art that reminds you just how powerful it can be. With half an hour to kill, I happened upon Soheila Sokhanvari’s commission for Barbican’s Curve Gallery (Rebel Rebel, 2022) and it was exhilarating. Patterns exploded from intricately detailed ‘jewel-like’ portraits framed simply in funereal black, extending across floor and ceiling, transforming the gallery itself into a work of art. Sokhanvari revels in her Iranian cultural inheritance and the collision of tradition with global modernity — a female artist celebrating female artists in what the exhibition guide is right to describe as a dizzying ‘kind of feminist delirium’. (barbican, 2022)
There couldn’t be a starker contrast with the chic serenity of The Courtauld. Self-proclaimed ‘home to one of the greatest art collections in the UK’ (courtauld, 2022) — it houses ‘few female artists’ (A Conversation, c.1913-16) and certainly inspires no feminist delirium. Fresh from a £50m facelift, the cantilevered stairway spirals upwards on ‘a journey of enlightenment’ (about the staircase, 2022) through a rich history of art from medieval to the twentieth century, via the European Renaissance and Neo-classicism.
Pierre-August Renoir (1841-1919), Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1908) Oil paint on canvas
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) Nevermore (detail) (1897) Oil paint on canvas
Cecily Brown (born 1969) Unmoored From Her Reflection (detail) (2021) Oil paint on canvas
The gallery is best-known for textiles industrialist Samuel Courtauld’s visionary collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings, now gathered together in the triple height Great Room that once paid host to the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition.
Many of these works are so familiar, and it is breath-taking to experience the detail of their artistry in the flesh (quite literally, in a collection so devoted to the female nude . . .). But on reading the exhibition labels a darker reality begins to emerge: that the young girl in Paul Gauguin’s ‘Nevermore’ may be what the caption euphemistically describes as his ‘companion’. That she was 15, and he was 49. And it is only if we take the trouble to look further into the story of Gauguin’s work, that we discover Pahura, the first of his many Tahitian lovers, was mourning the loss of their infant daughter. As Simon Schama says in his Great Gallery Tours for BBCR4 ‘It is nowadays very hard to look at this painting and not to feel . . . one’s stomach turn slightly.’ (Great Gallery Tours (2020))
All the labels and information have been rewritten for the 2021 reopening of the gallery, and in her review of the new space for BBCR4’s Front Row, writer and historian Subhadra Das hails it as ‘refreshing to see that level of honesty [about Colonial exploitation, the white male European gaze] in the interpretation’ (Front Row, 2021). But the carefully phrased sentences tucked into captions do little to banish the troubling sense of elitism and exploitation that hangs alongside so many of the paintings here.
While The Courtauld is an undeniably elegant exhibition space, for me the experience of the gallery is encapsulated not in its iconic Manets and Cezannes, but in Pierre-August Renoir’s portrait of Albert Vollard. In it, light bounces from the balding pate of a moustachioed gent in a suit as he cradles a marble statuette of a naked woman.
At the very top of the staircase, displayed where we encounter its full impact on our way out from the Great Room, is the contemporary artist Cecily Brown’s response. In Unmoored From Her Reflection (2021), the male body is the central theme. Though there is no mention of Gauguin in the gallery descriptor, in Brown’s YouTube interview for The Courtauld (Cecily Brown at the Courtauld, 2022) she describes her inspiration for the right-hand panel of the piece: “There was a painting by Gauguin that I loved a lot when I was a kid . . . but I’ve thought more and more in recent years about the reality of him going to Tahiti and sleeping with these young girls and I knew I wanted some kind of Gauguin-esque nude . . . I kind of really loved the idea of Gauguin beset by nymphs and being dragged down to hell perhaps.”
Just as The Courtauld Institute’s most notorious director (1947-1974), Anthony Blunt, maintained an impeccable double life (The Reunion: The Courtauld Institute (2011)) — he was knighted for his services as art curator for the royal family (Foussianes, 2019), before his devastating exposure as member of the most infamous spy ring in Britain — so there is much lurking beneath the surface in these grand rooms: ugly truths beyond beautiful first impressions.
Bibliography
About the Staircase (2022) display board at The Courtauld, London, November 2022
Barbican (2022) What’s On > Soheila Sokhanvari
Available: https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2022/event/soheila-sokhanvari-rebel-rebel
(Accessed: 18 November 2022)
Bell, V. A Conversation (c.1913-16) display board at The Courtauld, London, November 2022
The Courtauld Gallery: The Collection [Exhibition], Somerset House, London, permanent collection reopened November 2021, visit 12 November 2022
The Courtauld (2022) homepage
Available: https://courtauld.ac.uk/
(Accessed: 18 November 2022)
The Courtauld (2022)
Unmoored from her reflection — Cecily Brown at the Courtauld Gallery
Available at:
(Accessed: 18 November 2022)
Foussianes, C. (2019) ‘The Crown Got It Right: Anthony Blunt, Queen Elizabeth's Art Curator, Was a Soviet Spy’, Town and Country Magazine, November 2019
Available at:
(Accessed 18 November 2022)
Front Row (2021), BBC Radio 4, 11 Nov 2021
Simon Schama: The Great Gallery Tours (2020), BBC Radio 4, 13 Jul 2020
Soheila Sokhanvari: Rebel Rebel [exhibition], The Curve Barbican, London 7 October 2022–26 February 2023
The Reunion: The Courtauld Institute (2011), BBC Radio 4, 14 Aug 2011
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