A year after its grand reopening following extensive renovations to its historic Louis I. Kahn-designed building, the Yale Center for British Art finally seems to be getting back to normal.
After a series of lavish, elegantly and innovatively displayed exhibits of everyone from William Blake to Tracey Emin to Hew Locke, the museum is now settling into a traditional summertime vibe of loosely themed works from its permanent collection. The title is “Going Modern: British Art, 1900-1960” and it’s a grab bag of British artists whose work still looks forward-thinking decades (or over a century) later.
The thesis, as stated in text on the wall at the entrance of the exhibit, is that there was no “single, unified movement” toward Modernism in Great Britain. There were instead smaller groups of artists putting their own twists on other European movements such as impressionism, surrealism, Futurism, abstract art and more. These artists were also reacting to world events, including two world wars.
Areas of “Going Modern” gather artworks into very general categories like “Significant Forms” (where you’ll find one of the few female artists in the exhibit, Barbara Hepworth) and “The Enduring Body” (the latest place the YCBA has hung Wyndham Lewis’ angular portrait of John MacLeod, which has graced a number of exhibits over the decades). These vague groupings make more sense than a chronological accounting, since many of the artists on view grew and changed over rather short periods of time. Trying to shoehorn them into a given timeframe or movement makes little sense.
The lack of a center for an overview of British modernism is historically accurate and academically admirable, but it makes for a rather uneven exhibit. Some artists and movements are far better represented than others. In fact, this exhibit covering dozens of artists could also be considered a crash course on just one: Walter Sickert, the German-born artist who lived most of his adult life in England and died in 1942 at the age of 81. Sickert is showcased here for both his impressionistic instincts and his portrayal of previously taboo art subjects such as prostitutes and the impoverished. Some of Sickert’s paintings, like the darkly lit “What Shall We Do to Pay the Rent” aka “The Camden Town Murder,” are gritty and realistic, others, like two oil paintings inspired by Shakespeare plays, have a deliberately out-of-focus, nearly pointillist feel that make them look like they were quilted rather than painted.
Other artists who dominated the YCBA’s take on British modernism include Roger Fry, whose colorful “The Artist’s Garden at Durbin, Guildford” is like a beacon in an exhibit that can be fairly drab in some corners, the sculptor Henry Moore and the painter/muralist Ben Nicholson, whose refined abstract experiments influenced not only other modern painters but designers and artists from other media.
Moore, Nicholson and others in this exhibit lived into the 1980s. Their careers lasted from the early years of modernism through pop art of the 1960s and beyond. Stanley William Hayter is represented here with a so-titled “Work in Progress” that was part of the 1936 International Exhibition of Surrealism in London. Hayter was born in England but spent most of his life in France and the U.S., founding the Atelier 17 printmaking/graphic arts studio that served artists from Max Ernst to Salvador Dali to Jasper Johns.
While “Going Modern: British Art, 1900-1960” makes a credible case that the artists it highlights were generally isolated from or unrelated to each other, it also exposes gallery-goers to talents who lived all or most of the six decades covered in this exhibit. Artists who experienced and even inspired major shifts in art and culture during that time.
It’s a shame that “Going Modern: British Art, 1900-1960” is such a stodgy, old-fashioned display of paintings hanging on walls and sculptures on pedestals compared to some of the dynamic arrangements of other exhibits at the YCBA since it reopened. You can go upstairs in the museum and see many of the same artists on display in the current arrangement of selections from the same YCBA permanent collection that “Going Modern” is drawn from. But while “Going Modern” is rather conventionally displayed, the permanent collection display on the top floor was elaborately rethought for the YCBA’s reopening, with whiter walls than the darker ones from the past and a new airiness and openness to that area in general.
In terms of eye-popping artistic oomph, the “Going Modern” exhibit is shown up in style by the extravagant immersive art installation “Take me, take me, take me . . . to the Palace of love” by the Indian artist Rina Banerjee in the museum’s main lobby. This imposing bright red multimedia modernist model of the Taj Mahal seems both fragile and a feat of artistic engineering, translucent yet solid. Its sense of one of the most famous buildings in world history is romantic, fantasy filled and illusory.
Banerjee, who was born in 1963, offered an effusive epilogue to the modernist exhibit, exploring dimensions, textures and scale that many of her artistic forebears could only dream of. Her work is like a gateway into the history found upstairs, not just “Going Modern” but the YCBA’s “Painters, Ports and Profits: Artists and the East India Company 1750-1850” exhibit which opened in January and runs through June 21. That exhibit looks at India through the eyes of colonists and corporations. Banerjee’s focus is on the ethereal endurance of Indian art and culture. But all these shows, whether staid or sensational, are confronting tradition and coming out on top.
Rina Banerjee’s “Take me, take me, take me . . . to the Palace of love” is installed through Sept. 13 and “Going Modern: British Art, 1900–1960” is on view through Aug. 9 at the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel St., New Haven. Visiting hours are Tuesday and Wednesday from 10 am. to 5 p.m., Thursday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. britishart.yale.edu.
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