The radio and
TV ads for the The Impressionists exhibition use the same
actor to do the schmoozing voice-over that the banks use to entice
you into the anaesthetised world of secure investment. We are talking
assets here: comfortable and pacifying; we are talking nice
people and, if you have some spare money - E10 in the case of this
art - then this is the place to be. Nice people, your friends,
The Impressionists, down at the National Bank - sorry, Gallery
- and, if you're smart - and, of course, we know you are smart,
then we think you may be ready for this. It's so easy, no sweat,
it's simply just all working for you all the time. It is
a sweet feeling; it's like money in the bank.
The Impressionists.
Look what they've done to their song, An art/money/consumer
matrix has come to town, transformed, reinvented, branded and owned,
but you can look.The politics here are abysmal, but I am getting
fed up being 'fed up'. Something got lost and forgotten along the
way, but let's leave it to a tribunal and we'll all go to the pictures.
And yes, this exhibition is everything that nice adman told you
it would be. What he did not say - but you quickly get the idea
- is that this is French sex of a very high order. Eyes wide open,
no bogus glazing, amazing technique. These painters are so desirous
they fall in love with clothes. Renoir is all over his wife's voluminous
dress, the stroking of his trying to get in keeping him and us out.
She tolerates and indulges him and we get to sense what he knows,
i.e. that underneath this surfeit of lace and silk - this body
is wild (Schjeldahl). Dreadful old roué - très French.
And the light.
This has nothing to do with transcendence; this is getting blissed-out
on the world. No wonder we use these images on chocolate boxes.
This makes you feel like your eyes are eating. Yum, yum,yum. Cuisine,
palette, taste. Rarely has the etymology of art terms seemed
quite so transparent."Straight from Gay Paree." (See, that's
what I mean about how time and context can transform meaning. Now
it's an oxymoron, but it used to mean something else. And what that
was defies retrospection; the opacity of the medium occludes a past
while illuminating time present in tenebrous fluxions of conceptual,
historical and sensory emissivity.
Can we start
looking at the pictures now?
Of course.
Beauty, as aesthetic sensation, lasts only for seconds and its occasion
is here, not always, but often enough to make you nostalgic for
it. Was the world really so bright, once upon a time? Was everything
in the garden so lovely? Gardens and landscapes feature heavily
here, but don't look too long at the Courbet or the Monet Morning
on the Seine, near Giverny will begin to look just a little
too unreal, a little bit sheepish. Still, if you've painted Cap
d'Antibes, Mistral, or brought into the world a haystack the
likes of which the world had never seen before - Grainstack (Sunset)
- you're entitled. If you've attempted the impossible; to paint
'snow' and find a space for it on a picture plane that was never
intended to accommodate it, and still you left the traces of your
disastrous ambition to set a benchmark for painters thereafter to
ponder and despair - you're entitled.
Beauty, more
a sensation than a thing, floats through the new wing of the National
Gallery like a scent; flowers, beaches, grass and breezes, chalk,
linseed, charcoal, and gesso suffuse the senses until, at times,
a cloying heaviness seems to saturate the light. Now is the time
to look at that brisk Degas to cleanse the eyes. This is the old
light. Boudin gets this light too, but mostly to illuminate and
parade Fashionable Figures on the Beach. These people believe
that, yes, there is a best of all possible worlds and it's here;
it's French and we are it.
Degas' people
At the Races also give this impression, but his painting
is all about the baby; the baby's legs and luminous white blanket
to be precise. Even the black dog, which looks as if it could easily
eat the infant, is mesmerised. It is key to a blocking that brings
you across the umbrella down into the carriage to begin again. Or
you can climb down backwards from that dog's white collar, past
the lamps that look lit, but that's simply the double reflection
of the blanket, to slide down the infant's body, again into that
white, unless you use the black ribbon to rise into that congested
breathtaking tonal drama being enacted under the umbrella. This
is Rembrandt's small Nativity brought up and into the light
of day. No wonder the French 'got' jazz. This is a Monk riff at
its most
Ahem.
OK. There's
a painter here with the great name of Constant Tryon, and he's done
a sketch Fields Outside Paris that I cannot get past or,
getting past, keep coming back to. It won't reproduce, but he's
brought a green from right to left, you can sense the easy speed,
the madness of it, and turned it back on itself to 'be' in the three-quarter
distance. Except that where and how it turns lays it in another
plane; it's now in real space, as paint. (And as turning point
for painting, maybe, because it gets its impact by being set in
the classical recessive Poussin planes. It's a tension that, if
pushed, blows up. And maybe that was what Monet and Renoir could
not resist, and maybe that was a mistake. Fireworks, yes - a moment
- but darkness immanent. Us. The 20th century. Lights out.
Please.
By the by, on
the left of the Tryon landscape there's this little Sean Scully,
before its time;
two blacks, two whites, as houses. So sweet.
Ah shure,
don't be talking.
And another
thing...
No. We
mean it. Stop.
Noel
Sheridan is
an artist and the Director of the National College of Art and Design,
Dublin; see also his conversation with Brian O'Doherty, pp 32-34
