The Tate exhibition parades numerous chapters of his incompetence. Take a picture such as Te Poi Poi. From a distance, a vibrant splash of colour. But up close the painting falls apart; a mad rainbow in a blender.

Te Poi Poi, 1892, private collection

The woman in stark red (whom I presume is cleaning clothes in the river, but her unfortunate posture makes it seem as if she is relieving her bowels) provides some focus in the foreground, but all around her is a maelstrom of confused colour. The blurry morass of black, blue, green and white in front of the woman makes it unclear what is land, stone or water; where does she actually exist? Above her head, daubs of livid green form a tree, painted in a manner of a ten year old copying Howard Hodgkin. The river is a bizarre colour – a creamy white giving way to an unforgiving dark blue. Further back, nothing much happens – just more application of bright colours, with an ill painted stick figure on the other riverbank. What is this picture about?

Te Pape Nave Nave, 1898, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Gauguin’s insistence on using as many colours as possible detract from the paintings. There is no articulate use of the palette to encourage a particular emotional environment. Rather, he is like the primary school pupil let loose on the colouring set, a meaningless melange of reds, oranges, purples, yellows etc etc. Sometimes, the colours coalesce in a blackening mess. In Te Pape Nave Nave, the characters become lost; to work as as a painting, the characters need to be bigger and dominate the canvas; instead they are overwhelmed as the kaleidoscopic landscape prevails over them, reducing their presence to bystanders.

Of course it wasn’t Gauguin’s aim to create realistic or perspectivally true images. As contemporaries such as Cezanne and successors like Picasso would explore with far greater rigour, there was a lot painterly mileage in such investigations. And perhaps I am being unfair to him in criticising him for his obvious weaknesses as a figurative painter, when his oeuvre is part of the pathway to abstraction. You can see Gauguin in this exhibition (which really emphasises the experimental nature of his art, his constant dallying with different media and styles of depiction) trying to explore the ramifications of the flatness of the canvas he is painting on. But it becomes sloppy. So instead of the landscape spitting up and then reforming itself in renewed and different dimensions, the landscape itself just falls apart, leaving its unhappy combination of colour.

Arearea No Varua Ino, 1894, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

Arearea No Varua Ino is perhaps beguiling at first glance, but quickly becomes ludicrous. The woman leaning downwards has no facial features; she is a just a chunk of body, seeming to wash her hair in the inexplicable pink flames. The other woman, on the left of the canvas, is surly in expression, possibly under the malign influence of the totem behind. But it’s difficult to unpack why. Two figures in the background gesticulate aimlessly. As happens elsewhere, his characters lack in an emotional narrative – they become passive, shorn of activity and Gauguin ends up not painting individuals but cyphers. It is difficult to read, empathise or admire Gauguin’s paintings; any sense of drama evaporates in the coloured fuzz of Gauguin’s own view of paradise.

Overall, his treatment of women is ludicrous, reducing them to mutes with a squashed inner life (although, at least they appear – apparently men hardly exist in Gauguin’s world). They are sometimes sensuous, sometimes brooding, occasionally anxious, but nearly always one-dimensional. There are no clues as to why such characters are acting in a particular way. Do any of the women in Gauguin’s visual universe actually talk or interact? Or are they simply vehicles for Gauguin’s own narrow binary views about the innate goodness and badness of women, tarted up by some cliched myths? Despite the nudity and the presumed sensuality, his females lack much trace of tenderness. Closer inspection indeed reveals something a little more interesting, a touch more ambiguous – their eyes are often askance, hinting at a kind of suspicion of the world around them. The figure at the very left of The Bathers glances out of the canvas – as if berating Gauguin or the viewer for invading their territory. At least Gauguin had the gumption to include a degree of self reflection.

Ondine, 1889, Cleveland Museum of Art

Or perhaps it was simply the fact that Gauguin could not paint faces very well; providing the nuance of tone that would allow for the nuance of emotional expression was just beyond him. Have a look at the lumpen, boiled down profiles in the late paintings, Two Women and The Escape. He even resorted to turning females around to avoid painting their faces, such as in Ondine / In the Waves and The Bathing Place.

And yet Gauguin continues to be popular. His myth embodies the industrial dream of escaping to a personal and geographical Eden. The inclusion of text (always a handy anchor for those uncomfortable with the strangeness of the image) provide a faux philosophy to underpin such a myth, easy reference points for the cliched mind. The question “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where are we Going?” is not very original.

The exhibition does an intelligent job of deconstructing all this. Not only did Gauguin cultivate his own myth (Gauguin calls himself seduced by Tahiti’s “virgin land and its primitive and simple race .. the Eve of my choice is almost an animal”), but it blossomed after his death, Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and the Sixpence being only of many cultural productions that allowed the romantic notions of Gauguin to spin out of control.

Equally, Gauguin suits the age of reproduction. His paintings and his colours often appear in print, on television. The actual paintings are so flat, with the paint to thinly applied on the canvas (Braque is another painting in this mode), that one actually loses little when the painting are printed in miniature – the bright colours fluoresce and attract the roving eye. Compare this to Van Gogh whose shares a richness of palette but whose fecund, passionate impasto becomes lifeless when printed in a book.

Te Faaturuma, 1891, Worcester Art Museum

Is there anything to save him? Occasionally, Gauguin achieves success when he reduces the complexity of his paintings – fewer figures, fewer colours, a more confined space. Te Faaturuma sticks out. By ditching the coloured foilage that pollutes most of his paintings, replacing it with solid planes of colour, Gauguin attains a must greater psychological impact – this is one of the exhibition’s paintings where the characters inner selves have much greater resonance – it’s interesting to note that Gauguin’s paintings set inside are almost always more powerful than those set out of doors. There is a closer link with abstraction, and the destination of Gauguin’s oeuvre becomes clearer. More broadly, the colours themselves are superficially attractive, and his experiments in colour are a part of the link between the Impressions and the Cubists. I can see an argument that says every gallery in the world should have a Gauguin. But I think one is enough.

I read with some relief that the Liberal Democrat MPs are now considering voting against legislation to allow universities to make dramatic raises to university fees. (http://exquisitelife.researchresearch.com/exquisite_life/2010/11/21/)

Can I take this opportunity please urge the Liberal Democrats to remain true to the principles underpinning their oft-trumpetted election pledge to “scrap unfair university tuition fees”? As a keen supporter of recent Liberal Democrat policies, I have voted for them at the last two general elections, secure in the knowledge that they have largely reflected my own opinions on the funding of higher education, as well as a number of other concerns. The current direction of the Liberal Democrat ministers betrays that trust in a most flagrant manner.

Allowing learners to incur debts of at least £30,000 by the time they graduate is not only immoral but will have serious impact on British society – restricting social mobility, dampening opportunity and reducing the richness of the UK’s higher education – currently one of the greatest in the world.

Therefore, can I please ask the Liberal Democrats to avoid voting for this change, thinking hard about the trust they have built up with the current supporters and the future of the British education and society? It is this which is important, not the glitter of a short period in power with the wreckers of the Conservative party.

Warm regards,

Alastair Dunning.

One of the great advantages the arts and humanities has is its relative low cost – a pen, a goodish library and an Internet connection and away you go. (1) Compare to other subjects – particularly lab based sciences and medicine – and the arts and humanities have an in built advantage. Given this, you would expect a+h subjects to have strategic strengths in the newly privatised higher educational world unfolding rapidly around us.

But two aspects of the proposals radically curtail this strength. Firstly, the government still want to provide teaching subsidies to a number of the expensive subjects, largely the ‘critical’ science, technology and engineering subjects. This has common sense appeal – “we need doctors more so let’s pay for them”. But, vice-chancellors have long been pointing out that this creates a false imbalance – current demand within society sees a lack of skills in the arts, business and the law rather than the science subjects. Moreover, some research highlighted in the Times Higher the long-term futility of trying to engineer societal change by meddling with subject areas. (2)

Secondly, the proposed government cap on the price of a degree further undermines the a+h competitive advantage. If universities are to be charged by the government for going over the £7k cap (a notion that seems crazy to me), then there will be a tendency to try and round out all courses at the same cost around this cap – again compare this with a proper free market solution where the arts and humanities courses could be offered at much cheaper rates. (3)

So the current arrangement proposed by the government is something of a mish-mash, stuck between officious government control and free market economics, and ending up being neither.

So, should we in the arts and humanities actually ditch our leftist banners and celebrate the free market? Well, that’s certainly a pragmatic option. One does not want to lose sight of the larger moral imperative – thousands of students graduating with debts over £30k is not good – but as it seems the coalition government is blind to this, what else can be done?

(Thanks to Tim Hitchcock for bringing these ideas to light)

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Footnotes

(1) Some courses are more expensive, however – doing archaeology fieldwork for example.
(2) http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=413171
(3) Although a recent story in the Daily Telegraph mentions this could be around £9k – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/8098534/Universities-get-power-to-raise-fees-to-9000.html

There has been a fair bit of lamentation in the arts and humanities community. I don’t actually think they have been singled out in particular, as there are plenty of other disciplines which will not be receiving funding – business studies, geography, media studies, psychology, economics (!).

The logic is much simpler than this – the arts and humanities don’t make big money, save lives nor provide any extra special interest that helps the country, so they do not deserve any extra support. Full stop.

It’s a simplistic, roundhead view of the world which has been gathering pace for many years. In some respects, I surprised it has taken this long to happen. Labour MP Charles Clarke made noises about medieval historians a while back.

More generally, the logic that underpins this argument has been in place for a while. Anything creative or reflective, anything that does not provide obvious tangible benefits, anything which provides difficult ideas that may question current orthodoxy, or anything that, say this quietly, may be related to pleasure and enjoyment in any sense should not be supported by the government, ie the tax paid by the ‘ordinary man on the street.’ If you want it, then you have to pay for it yourself.

But I also wonder if we in the arts and humanities have been too cavalier in our approach. Have we done all we can to fight for the arts and humanities? It may be due to the pressures of the REF and specialisation, but have there been too many scholars studying their own special interests and not painting a bigger picture? Too concerned with Edward Gibbons’ footnotes, with Dutch headdresses in seventeenth-century Leiden or with the changing notions of gender in the Spartan army. Valuable research, but without sight of the bigger picture it fits into, too isolated to convince the public of its worth.

There may also have been confusion over what the arts and humanities do and mean – the type of work done is actually much broader than the somewhat clichéd examples in the paragraph above.

But reputations in the world of education change slowly, and the undoubted enthusiasm of the humanist to seek out and analyse recondite knowledge still sets a tone that the roundhead mentality will struggle to comprehend.

What is / was needed then was this bigger argument. I see scraps of the (argument) all over the place; university brochures talking about the skills learnt as an historian, research council publications on the disciplines’ economic impact; the obvious evidence provided by the country’s love of family history, costume drama, its somewhat skewed sense of historical Britain

But there is never one big winning argument that would make you sleep more safely at night. There is no real voice for the arts and humanities as a whole in the UK (1). No one body or group presenting a dazzling argument as to the intrinsic nature of the arts and humanities to society.

It never seems to have punctured public consciousness that the arts and humanities might be a good thing. And therefore the reductive nature of the puritan argument – either save lives or earn money – has squeezed out the more nuanced arguments for the arts and humanities.

So what will this all mean? There is plenty of talk about the class divide being widened by the reforms of the universities, of the poor being left behind. I don’t think it will be as quite straightforward as that. Scholarships and hard work will allow (some of) the less well off to find lucrative careers in business, medicine and the law.

But what it will do is further divide the whole world of culture and the humanities. Unless you come from a very financially secure background, the prospect of running up c.£20k (2) debt in tuition fees (plus interest) and then another £25-30k in living costs will put off all but the very idealistic. (3)

Salaries for humanities graduates mean the debts will be a long-time burden, not something that can be ditched with the first few pay packets. It will not be an attractive proposition for those from non-wealthy background. Studying history or archaeology will become a further sign of wealth, of a certain class position. And therefore owning the knowledge related to those field will further become a sign of a certain class position.

The roundhead view of the United Kingdom already equates enjoying the arts, investigating others’ culture or questioning common sense as an indulgent middle class pursuit. This can only be heightened as the cost of the principle (although not the only) route to such knowledge is substantially raised.

What else might it mean. Well it’s difficult to predict the future and a market-driven Higher Education system may bring some odd surprises – the situation is not apocalyptic yet. But if we don’t start to fight and agitate about this then we run the risk of a whole range of problems – fewer well-trained musicians; fewer artists and actors (two fields in which the UK has been remarkably successful); fewer archaeologists to protect our heritage; (even) fewer citizens who can speak a foreign language; many academics, particularly those outside the wealthy Russell Group universities, will find their job security threatened; with such changes, there will be fewer people to correct mistakes and question commonly held opinions, there will be fewer experts on the cultures of others’ countries; there will be fewer people to teach students that not all they see in the media is true. When you tie this in with the fact that exactly the same is happening to the social sciences, you suddenly have a prospect in a vacuum in the whole democratic apparatus of considered and critical debate.

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Footnotes

(1) On the day of the Comprehensive Spending Review, the Arts and Humanities Research Council was remarkably silent. Its twitter account stated that “AHRC funded research has shown, thanks to isotope analysis, that York’s ‘Headless Romans’ had exotic origins” But the AHRC is in a very difficult position. It does not have true independence; to stand up and fight government policy would be biting the hand that feeds it.

(2) One chink of light – the arts, and especially the humanities are very cheap to teach, in the required infrastructure is a good library and an Internet connection. Perhaps tuition fees will be low … one can but hope

(3) And given the costs, wIll anyone ever do a Ph.D in the humanities again … ?!

The exhibition is dry. There are many drawing, prints and crinkly artifacts, which probably don’t do much to excite those new to architectural history. Neither will the beige models of his most famous buildings, however intricate and well proportioned their creation, fire the imagination. There was one innovation – a digital construction of Palladio’s rather heavy design for the Rialto bridge; but still how architecture shows cry out for more imaginative use of technology.

Andrea Palladio, conjectural drawing of Baths of Agrippa, Bath

But if you are prepared to invest some time in them, the drawings are fascinating, intricate yet precise. His drawings of the Roman Baths of Agrippa convey a sense of the building’s architectural brilliance, but without any concession to flashy stylistic devices. Equally, the plans for his own buildings convey precision and grandeur without any added devices – Palladio lets the architecture speak for itself.

Andrea Palladio, drawing of Palazzo Chiericati, Vicenza: part elevation of the entrance facade and portico, 1550s/60s

In his studies, publications, observations and measurements Palladio belongs to a intellectual narrative different to the artistic spine constructed by Vasari and repeated with many variations by art history. Palladio seems to look forward to a more rational age; the impulses to study, measure and communicate makes me think more of a creature of the enlightenment. This is emphasised by his focus on the antique and the relative lack of religious motifs, thus divorcing Palladio the architect from the familiar religious context (the Council of Trent, the Catholic Reformation) of the time.

It’s also worth comparing his sparse clean designs – so different from the glamorous confusion of the baroque, a movement about to ferment further south in Italy. It’s not clear from the exhibition I don’t now how much spiritual passion Palladio had, but the clean grand lines that inform or even the interiors of churches, such as San Giorgio, seem a world away from the coloured marbles and gold leaf that would cover the churches of the succeeding centuries.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia, From the Heads Series, 2001

Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s chiaroscuro Heads were arresting images, not least because of their manner of capture. While artists through time have worked in the studio trying to create images that resemble real life, diCorcia has done the opposite, using hidden cameras and lighting to take secretive photographs on streets and pavements, then polishing the final versions until they look like studio portraits. But the images’ real strength is in the ambiguous emotional territory they open up, rendering the American adolescent as strong, yet confused and possibly dangerous.

It is also worth noting the influence of Hopper on DiCorcia, and indeed on a significant number of photographers, often American, in the exhibition. The long raking, wintry sunlight, picking out isolated individuals, lost in their own confused world, features in the work of more than one artist. One of the images in the exhibition created by the Swiss artist Jules Spinatsch, of Yassar Arafat’s chaffeur waiting in a car, is a tremendous example.

The exhibition ringfenced the photographs along related conceptual lines. For me the rooms on ‘Violence’ and ‘Survelliance’ were the most effective.

The section on violence was particularly good, where the moral position of the photographer, as someone witnessing the event but refusing to engage in altering it is magnified. You sense it was this effect that the curators were wanting to flow through the exhibition as a whole.

Letizia Battaglia, Dead Man Lying on a Garage Ramp

Letizia Battaglia’s Dead Man Lying on a Garage Ramp was particularly striking. Despite the bloody drama of the scene, there is a formal rigour to the design, the slope, tall walls and the position of the body having a precise geometry. All this serves to give the eye a clear sense of direction.

But it is the photograph’s narrative intrigue that raises more questions (although given that the photograph was taken in Sicilian Mafia heartlands, perhaps these are rhetorical questions). Who has been killed? Who are the murderers? Why is there fresh blood under the man’s head, and yet a stream of dried blood from much further up the incline? What is restricting the figures at the top from walking down the slope? How did the photographer gain access when others appear unable to? Who is the almost invisible figure on the right, shiny shoes upsetting the symmetry of the images?

The quality of the body itself has a grim fascination. The bullet mark appears to be a single shot in the back, yet the blood seems to flow and congeal from the head (and why does it not run down the slope like the other trace of blood?) The recently dead victim is already reduced to solely a corpse, as if the murderers had succeeded in erasing not just the man’s life, but his identity. One might also say that the photographer colludes in this, avoiding recording his face or any distinctive features. His body displays the none of the subjective emotion of death; the legs are lifeless, and arms tucked underneath the body. His posture, which becomes more unrealistic the more you look at it, seems like a dark reflection of an earlier Italian work of art.

Andrea Mantegna, Dead Christ, c.1490, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

The surveillance section continued the juxtaposition of aesthetic appeal with testing subject matter – an approach that, when successful, fuels much good photography. So we see Jonathan Olley’s documents of the grim monolithic fortresses developed by the police and military in Northern Ireland, and Sophie Ristelheuber’s record of the dark but sometimes beautiful scars left on the Kuwaiti landscape after the first gulf war. The pockmarked soil and bright flares of burning oil stand as a realist’s riposte to the ubiquitous environmental pictures by the French photographer, Yann Arthus-Bertrand.

Jonathan Olley, Golf Five Zero watchtower, 1999

Sophie Ristelheuber, one image from FAIT, 1992

One of the last images in the surveillance section is particularly effective. Shai Kramer’s wide panorama begins as an Arab town in barren scrubland. A colourless, concrete town of compact, featureless apartments blocks, punctuated only by green neon lights on the (somewhat phallic?) mosques.

Shai Kramer, Urban Warfare Training Centre, Panorama, Tze’elim 2007

But closer inspections reveals something different. The buildings are just concrete shells, with no window panes, no decoration, no furniture, indeed no trace of people actually living there. There are no shops, houses, offices, hotels, restaurants. There are no cars parked against walls, no dogs curled up in doorways, no stalls of fruit, trees, no flowers, very few signs, and only the occasional Arab word pasted on a wall.

The only figures seen are troops, sometimes as units milling around, sometimes as individuals.

Obviously, the city is meant as a training ground for military. The title, Urban Warfare Training Centre, Panorama, Tze’elim 2007, tells of its Israeli heritage. Visual context provides some more information – an ugly corrugated fence surrounds the town, in the distance, an airbase.

Given this background, it is easy to see why the city has been built like this, with an emphasis on how a soldier might negotiate stairways, doorways, broken walls (are the holes in the walls six-sided stars?) , dark alleyways, sudden open spaces. Why should a military training ground include details like shops, colour, decoration, citizens? But it’s hard not to see this realist photograph as a larger allegory of how Israel sees Palestine (or perhaps how any military considers its rival) – simply a territory with a faceless population, who do not engage in the everyday activities of sleeping, eating and living and where the only defining architectural feature is the mosque. Within Tze’elim, the whole of Arab culture is signified by the mosque, as if religion were the single point of indentity and difference, to the exclusion of any thing else.

And was it my imagination or had the tiny figures of the troops, massing in nonsensical groups, been airbrushed? Reduced to figures in dark, heavy military gear? Were there identities being protected? Or were indeed they being homogenised just as the ‘Arab town’ around them had been reduced to a cipher of an enemy’s territory? As with all the interesting works of art in Exposed, Shai Kramer’s image raised more questions than it asked.

His little piles of powder are intensely beautiful in colour. And yet …

The reflective perfection of the mirrors is a joy to behold. And yet ..

The buzz of expectation in waiting for the cannon to eject its barrel of bloody wax is palpable. And yet …

And yet I’m not quite sure what is all adds up to. I can’t deny that there is a sense of wonder in walking around the Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Royal Academy. But what I struggle to find is some lasting argument within the exhibition, some defining narrative that makes me alter how I see the world. The works are full of allusions, but have very few reference points. One can feel the exhibition, but what do you take away? It’s clear that the the body, sex, defaecation, the universe, the self and the art gallery itself are all part of the thematic make up of his oeuvre. He makes us aware that sex is ubiquitous; and that the spiritual is just the flip side of the scatological.

Svayambh, Royal Academy, 2009

Is that Kapoor stretches too far, whirring through an endless panoply of tricks, without ever stopping to work through the deeper ramifications of what he is saying. Or is that that we are tricked into such reactions? The artist’s hand is often non-existent (all metal and mirror in the larger works) and the exhibition therefore leaves a sense of dislocation between the atmosphere of philosophical eloquence and the mechanical, soulless way in which such a sensation is created. Do we yearn for a voice to shine through the light?

I doubt, of course, Kapoor will care. He may indeed point to entirely different genesis for his work, drawing on traditions far removed from the sources that inform much western art. Kapoor’s oeuvre is more closely aligned to a Buddhist world where everything and nothing is said; where life is perceived rather than interpreted. There is little of the fetishising of intellectual complexity that Christian art, and much of the western art tradition, demands. Kapoor may occasionally reference other texts or myths, but the creation of the huge abstract gestures that fill and take control of the Royal Academy galleries negate the need for such contexts.

I think Anish Kapoor is great for the art world. He produces grand, spectacular art that draws in believers and non-believers. He gets attention. He makes art exciting. Yet I would fervently insist that he is not seen as the pinnacle of achievement. There is much more that art can achieve.

For the connoisseur and the art historian this is a brilliant exhibition. It shows how British art became European. How the stiff Dutch and oblique British painters of the sixteenth century gave way to the flowing, regal style of the seventeenth. How we got from the Cholmondeley Sisters to Kneller, Lely and beyond.

But it’s more than just transformation in the history of art. Van Dyck developed not just a pictorial manner, but a whole visual concept of nobility and royalty emanated from his workshop. The portraits of Charles I would become a touchstone for depicting kings and queens, or indeed for imbuing any sitter with a sense of majesty. And because Van Dyck has been so influential, because we are so used to a certain type of regal portrait, it is Peake’s painting that leaps out (here compared against Van Dyck’s painting of the future Charles II)

Robert Peake, Henry, Prince of Wales and Sir John Harington in the Hunting Field, 1603, Metropolitan Museum, New York

Anthony Van Dyck, Future Charles II as Prince of Wales, c.1637-8, Private Collection

And just as Van Dyck canceled out a whole aesthetic, removing not just the painted stiffness, but he clarified what a painting is, a recording of the visualised world which suspended disbelief.

So in Peake’s canvas, there still remain the artificial elements which would leave a viewer to question its visual authenticity. The studded colouration on the saddle, giving the canvas a tactile presence, the two crests dangling from the trees or the text at the bottom left or etched on the trees. Such devices were relics of a mode of visual communication which thought not of painting as simply representing the visual world but providing a more heterogeneous mode of communication, which documented abstract values in more concrete fashion.

In Van Dyck’s oeuvre just about any device which distracts the illusion of verisimilitude is eliminated; the Fleming has such belief in the rhetoric of his style that he is not need to bolster the message of majesty with other symbols and icons. The paintings speaks for itself. And once Van Dyck had made this transformation Britain, or perhaps more correctly England, could no longer be insulated from southern as well as lowland Europe.

How did he do this?

Anthony Van Dyck,Lord John Stuart and his Brother, Lord Bernard Stuart, c.1638, National Gallery London

Van Dyck creates sitters that are effortlessly relaxed. The splendid clothes (probably done by assistants as well as Van Dyck) show an absolute mastery of the textures of silk and satin – close-ups of trousers and skirts form their own abstract symphonies.

Detail of Stuart brothers painting above

Each item is unsullied and loudly declares that their wearers need not work nor labour.

William Killigrew, 1638, Tate Britain

Emotions are calm and restrained, showing the sitter’s absolute control of any internal sentiment and often stand in contrast to the more tempestuous weather in the background (for example the portrait of William Killigrew) And while there are dark greens and browns in the background, the lead characters are illuminated by a clean, pure light.

Details of noses

And with the poses themselves, the way the sitters organise themselves within the space around them, that each characters asserts his regal bearing. Van Dyck’s characters are often (although not always) haughty in their attitude, carrying their arrogance before them. The gaze of the viewer is disdained. Sitters either look askance, bearing acknowledging a spectator’s presence, or simply look through the viewer. This is no level playing field; the spectator is clearly in the presence of superiors The phrase ‘looking down your nose’ seems a perfect fit for Van Dyck’s sitters. The fingers too are worth noting, long graceful digits that add to a sitter’s elegance.

Details of fingers

Yet all the while that Van Dyck was concocting the new regal approach, the English political scene was fermenting – the Civil War would explode in the year of Van Dyck’s death. Does the exhibition blindly ignore all the fault lines cracking open in English society, the gaping ideological differences which would result in twenty years of trauma? Well, in a sense yes. There is little or no mention of politics in the labels, and there is no contextual visual documentation to place Van Dyck in the society in which he worked. We learn nothing about this history. But at the same time, Van Dyck gave the contemporary curator very little to work with. Van Dyck’s visual world, entirely focused on the world of the cavaliers rather than the roundheads, offers no indication of the friction and strife that would follow. Is that really a surprise? Patrons did not commission paintings that reflected doubt. I suppose the political interpretation is in the very absence of politics in Van Dyck’s oeuvre, showing a mindset that was desperately trying to close itself off and develop in splendid isolation. The great antagonisms of the Civil War were everything Van Dyck’s leisured, majestic world was not.

The Barbican has hit on a good compromise. Include the big name (Capa and his partner Gerda Taro) but mix it in with a contemporary subject (Iraq, Afghanistan) and some contemporary artists. The result is one of the most surprising and powerful exhibitions of 2008, a demonstration of the intimate relationship between artistic creation and its political context.

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There was a misty point in time when a photo-journalist’s pictures were taken as gospel – visual reports from the Spanish Civil War or from the D-Day beaches that stood testament to not only the personal challenges of a soldier, but represented a whole set of democratic values that many believed in. But as wars faded from public consciousness, or at least became messy, ambiguous affairs that happened in far away lands, the status of such work was very much under question.

And, intellectually, the whole postmodern turn re-evaluated and then tore down the authenticity of the image. Photographs like Capa’s Fallen Soldier were questioned, perhaps even ridiculed. Robert Capa (real name: Andre Friedmann) no longer carried symbolic value. Cynical viewers lost their faith.

This then is the intellectual landscape that contemporary artists have inherited, and are replayed in the Barbican exhibition. In particular, Omar Fast’s The Casting, was an exceptionally enlivening piece of work that embraces and extends the mutual inheritance of the photo-journalist and the visual artist.

The Casting is very much a single work, featuring multiple stories and multiple screens. As the video commentary below explains, it gives perfect voice to the idea “there are two sides to every story” (or even more).

A superficial review of the work could view it as a piece of postmodern trickery. Certainly, there is no attempt to present the work as documentary truth. Rather a series of narrative devices first confuse, and then admit to the fact that this is a created work of art.

So we hear the narrative and the accompanying images switching between the story of the American solider and the German girl, and the American solider and the Arab shooting; we see the characters suddenly breaking off the narrative as if frozen in their roles; we see other characters looking directly at the soldier recounting his story(s), emphasising its first-person, subjective nature (and maybe also reminding the viewer of the presence of the cameras).

And then, later on our visit to the gallery, we chance upon a room with the other side of the screens, where we hear the same soundtrack but witness an entirely different visual scene – a scruffy journalist interviewing a young, burly solider, and we think the true source of the story of the German girl and the Arab family is revealed. But then this document falls apart again: the image keeps jumping around, showing the journalist and the soldier in different poses, different clothes and with different attitudes; the video and the soundtrack have been spliced together from several interviews. The whole thing has been (re)arranged for artistic consumption.

The Casting works hard to admit the transparency of its fiction, and yet we do not react with cynical withdrawal. Emotion is invoked with the initial set of stories – the soldier’s confused relationship with the German girl, but it is the impulsive shooting of the Arab family member in the battered car that provokes a response. There is clear emotional distress here, but the precise nature, cause and fault of such distress are not clearly articulated with an reliability. There’s a story here, but the details are smudged. The fact that both narratives are recounted by the soldier, thereby not offering even the Germans or the Arabs a voice, assists this notion. We feel for the victims (and the victims could also include the solider, at the centre of events he cannot comprehend) and the confused narrative urges us to discover more – what is the truth of the story?

The Casting demonstrates the mutable nature of war art, but also clamours for its accurate documentation. In the context of recent western ‘adventures’ in the Middle East, its images and its reporting (‘weapons of mass destruction’, ‘rendition flights’, Abu Gharaib), The Casting serves as call to acknowledges the foibles in communicating war but also highlights the need to surpass them. The viewer is forced into seeing the absolute need to restore credibility to the image.

The subtlety with which Omer Fast reveals the fragility of the image as a carrier of truth leads us back to the work of Capa.

A Fallen Solider, 1936 (?), Robert Capa

Exhibition shot of Capa’s A Fallen Solider with other photos from same film. The Fallen Solider is at the bottom of the middle column. (Thanks to Paul Carvill for the original picture.)

The curators have made an excellent effort to respond to the fluctuations in Capa’s reputation. The status of Capa’s republican icon for the Spanish Civil War, The Falling Solider, has withered since its creation, critics providing a variety of evidence to undermine its reputation as an authentic, spur-of-the-moment portrait of heroism and individual pathos. So the curators have presented not just the single image, but all the shots from that film, shots that re-establish (but probably do not quite confirm) the original argument that the event was a sudden dramatic event in the midst of some routine photograph. We see how the image, with the passage of time, became gradually separated from the other photos that provided evidence of its genesis.

The exhibition is equally good for works in similar positions, concentrating not on single images from Capa’s oeuvre, but providing the photographic and historical context. The story of the D-Day landings is recounted; what films Capa took with him; what images he took; where he was when he took them; how the films got transported to London (and how some got damaged); what the editors of the publications thought about them; what the technical staff did (and what they messed up) with the images; how the images were presented in the final publication.

American Soldier Killed by a Sniper, Leipzig, 1945, Robert Capa

This works particularly well for another dramatic Capa image, that of the American solider killed by a sniper’s bullet in 1945 Leipzig. By itself, it’s a powerful image. The ugly sprawl of the soldier, trapped between inside and outside, and the rich, telltale river of blood. But the exhibition shows not just this, but the other images taken by Capa at the same time – the soldiers casually chatting on the balcony, the sudden rush inside, the silent confusion of the other soldiers after the event. One gets a better feeling for the the hows and whens – where was Capa standing; how did he take this picture; and, perhaps most potentially fall, which of the soldiers was killed.

Nevertheless, the contextual information does not deaden the image with scholarly context, but provides a shocking reminder of war’s bleakness. Two soldiers are chatting idly on a balcony, smoking cigarettes, perhaps discussing the end of the war. The photo seems everyday, mundane. And then seconds later, there is a shot, a frantic rush to safety indoors, and Capa captures the infinite tragedy of death.

Any proselyter for modernism will face their biggest challenge with Cy Twombly. The rough scribbles, messy blobs of impasto, uncontrolled drips of paint, simplistic representations of the world and smudged fingerprints are all strongly redolent of the nursery; Twombly seems to embody that disdainful phrase of the anti-aesthete: “My child of four could do that”.

Ferragosto V, 1961, Private Collection

And, indeed, I couldn’t quite escape the feeling that Twombly’s most iconic paintings were something of a rip-off. Even where there are astonishing bursts of colour as in the blood-red Ferragosto, it all seems too random and uncontrolled to really merit serious praise. There is so little apparent meaning in them and so little painterly depth … great stretches of the paintings are merely just primed or lightly washed canvas, and then there are areas of random splurges and curved scribbles. Meaning drifts in and out, but it again seems too superficial – rather than being visual retellings, the references to Greek or Roman myth seem like lazy gestures to add pathos, a kind of intellectual name-dropping.

A contrast with Jackson Pollock is useful. Whereas Pollock’s greatest paintings are full of tactile warmth, glistening like a phosphorescent cave and seem to possess their own pulsing, inner life, Twombly’s paintings just don’t reach that same transcendence – the artist’s hand is too transparent, the lack of coherence too jarring. The build up of paint, the construction of layers that gives any painting its richness does exist in Twombly but in a superficial way, with everything reduced to raw, jagged gestures.

Given all that there is something that still draws me to Twombly’s work. The sheer freedom with which he paints and expresses himself is a classic statement of artistic (and emotional) liberation. But I’m not sure that’s quite enough to create great art – it too easily ends up as the indulgent outpourings of the patient on the couch.

Indeed, there a plenty of connections between the exhibition and the art of psychoanalysis. The presence of forced deletions corresponds with the patient’s conflicting desire to both repress and recall a traumatic incident; the return to primordial sexual matters, and of course, the rough, ghostly outlines of genitalia in Twombly’s work represent the As in the work of De Kooning, primordial symbols float around like Jungian archetypes. Painting as a grand spiritual express of some cosmic essentialism.

And yet, as the exhibition progressed, a different Twombly began to emerge, one that was perhaps more comic, more ironic, more referential; an artist more suited for postmodernity, even if trapped amongst the frame of the modernist canvas.

Take for example, the suite of four paintings entitled Nini’s Paintings. At first glance, they seem modernist monoliths – fully abstract paintings, working to their own sealed logic. But in actual fact, not only do the canvases seem to take a naturalistic life of their own, depicting a flotilla of shimmering waves, there are echoes and references to earlier styles and artworks. Maybe, Twombly is not such a hardcore modernist after all.

Monet seems to be a particular reference point. Firstly, they recall series of paintings such as the Haystacks or Rouen Cathedral where the same subject is painted under changing light over time.

Nini’s Painting, 1971, Kunstmuseum Basel

Claude Monet, Water Lillies, 1916, Tate Modern

But they also reference Monet’s late paintings, those splurges of colour that form the lilies drifting on the ponds at Giverny. Not only is there the same engagement with paint, hovering close to the no-man’s land where abstraction and representation blur, but there is the same insistence on thrusting the viewer into the middle of the space. At the bottom of the canvas there is no platform, dias or fence to block the viewer’s line of sight and so she becomes embedded in the painting, immersed in the encircling waters.

But there is also something faintly comic as to how the serpentine forms, traced in childish pencil, can build up to some misty melancholic state. Look closely at the badly drawn sine curves and the painting seems a like a childish stab at repetition; stand further back and the waves coalesce with the sombre background colours to give off a rather haunting glow. The low-brow and the high-brow blend together.

In other places, the references are more reverential. The triple set of paintings that Twombly based on the story of Hero and Leandro have strong echoes of late Turner; again, that deep painterly immersion in fluid brushstrokes, providing a strong sense of aquatic movement.

The series of water paintings (Untitled (A Painting in Nine Parts) throw up other visual echoes, most noticeably in the elaborate shapes of frames that mimic those used by extravagant rococo painters. The reference starts off as comic; the level of abstraction in Twombly’s work and the chromatic reduction to just two colours – his favoured white and a mossy green – seem to mock his the many-hued palates of his antecedents. But the intensity with which he homes in on the details of, say, a fast stream by a bank (again, close-up and immersed like Nina’s paintings), reveal a passion for his subject matter, for the simple fact of moving water.

Quattro Stagioni (A Painting in Four Parts), 1993-5, Tate Modern

This is not to say that Twombly was some crypto old-style Romantic. The towering Quattro Stagioni follow on from the mossy green water paintings, emphasise his modernist credentials and remind us of the overarching thrust of his oeuvre. Some critics love them. I remain to be convinced that the deliberate of use, conjuring up a world of angrily beautiful but failed articulation is the great moment of American modernism.