I OFTEN feel guilty for living so near the heart of London and taking so little advantage of the amazing richness of spectacle that the capital offers. So I spent the London bit of the holidays trying to catch up on some exhibitions that I’d been meaning to see for months, which are now almost on the point of closing.
I went to the National Gallery’s Russian landscapes exhibition in the company of a friend from the shires, who made his way through the revolving doors of the Sainsbury Wing with the halting gait and rolling eye of a reluctant horse being chivvied on to an unfamiliar trailer and, once inside, took a resolutely agrarian line with the romantic 19th-century chroniclers of the Motherland.
“Shockin’ bit of fencin’,” said he, of one of Shishkin’s monumental forest interiors, in which a receding vista of moss-covered tree-boles forms a kind of natural cathedral whose grandeur eloquently dwarfs the contemptible human enterprise represented by a rickety barrier of wooden poles across a stream.
An expansive vista of the flower-filled steppe made him quite indignant. “Bit of Roundup soon sort that out,” said he crossly, stabbing a gnarled finger at an exquisitely painted thistle, while the gallery attendant nervously fingered his walkie-talkie. And he was appalled by Venetsianov’s sun-drenched vision of a farmyard at noon, filled with basking sows and serfs flirting among the abandoned harrows: “Dear oh dear, health and safety would close that down in no time.”
I thought he might like Levitan’s ravishing study of haystacks at twilight, but no, he couldn’t see the point of it at all. If he wanted to look at haystacks, he’d got perfectly good ones in his barn. Awful job, haymaking, anyway. On the other hand, he did quite like the enormous canvas of golden grain, stretching away to the infinitely distant horizon (“nice clean crop”). And he was very struck with Kuindzhi’s lurid green Moonlit Night on the Dnieper: “Jolly clever, all the little lights on in the cottages, d’you see?”.
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Anyway, we whipped round in about 20 minutes flat, andthen proceeded at a steady hunting jog to a nearby pub for sandwiches and beer, during which I attempted a post-exhibition debriefing. “Very nice,” he said firmly. “If you’re not going to eat that sandwich, I might just finish it up. Pity to waste it, eh?”.
The following day, with haystacks, rowan trees and Slavic ancients contemplating a slinking vixen still whirling inside my head, it was off to the Tate for the Art of the Garden. This time I went in the company of my son’s godmother, Pip, who is an artist and a good person to go to exhibitions with because she notices all sorts of detail that I would otherwise miss, and is adept at pointing it out without making me feel too ignorant.
Though the images at the National Gallery were mostly huge, emphatic and overpowering, while the ones at the Tate were generally small, domestic and intimate, there seemed an odd kinship between them. Both contained images in which real landscapes — the menacingly empty expanses of the Russian woods and plains, whose occasional human inhabitants seem almost crushed by their surroundings, and the contained spaces of the Tate’s highly cultivated suburban plots, where evidence of human activity or neglect is written in every annual and shrub — serve as metaphors both for a population’s relationship with its surroundings, and for a powerfully expressive sense of nationhood.
It was noticeable also that as soon as the artists addressed these topics directly, rather than obliquely, a veil of kitsch fell over the enterprise.
The Russian mystics and the British ironists both laboured, while their colleagues’ simpler virtues of observation, comedy and eccentricity effortlessly chart the ancient, complicated attachment between a nation and the land it lives on.