The Tudors: Passion, Power and Politics at the Walker Art Gallery.

History  On numerous occasions over the many (many) years, I'd have a good moan on here about how little of London's non-contemporary art takes a trip up North.  Here's a version of the rant and although much has changed in the intervening years, through Tate Liverpool having a slightly more relaxed policy to including pre-1900 as a feature of their exhibitions and a few paintings from private collectors being included at National Museums Liverpool shows, I eventually decided to take myself to the art and spent the best part of four or five years visiting the various galleries in London on a monthly basis including spending whole afternoons just visiting a couple of rooms at the National Gallery.

That obviously stopped when the pandemic began but I just managed to visit the National Portrait Gallery at the beginning of 2020 to see the Tudor galleries at the end of a day spent following a Shakespeare walk around London, the chronology of the British monarchy laid out in a series of faces humanising these historical figures, albeit in the propogandist painting style of the period mainly by unknown artists copying earlier paintings by other unknown artists of Hans Holbein.  These works were often created as part of diplomatic missions, often with a dating aspect like a mid-1500s Twitter in which swiping left led to war.

So you can imagine how deep my eye roll was when I read that ironically what potentially could be the contents of the Tudor gallery at the NPG was going to be visiting the Walker.  Finally, a selection of the nation's treasures on tour ... which I just happened to have seen for free relatively recently and in an exhibition I'd now have to pay for.  But having complained for years about these national treasures not going on tour it seemed churlish to not pay to see them again and add to the all important visitor numbers which my be impressive enough to lead to more of this sort of thing find its way here.

And this really is most of the Tudor gallery at the NPG in a different venue, as though a portal has been opening up into the space in London.  The rare opportunity for the paintings to go on tour has been facilitated by the temporary closure of the gallery for refurbishment and an imperative to keep them accessible to the public in some form.  Before the Walker, The Tudors: Passion, Power and Politics was at The Holborne Museum in Bath (or Barth) and perhaps the most impressive element is just how much of the exhibition is sourced from there.  This isn't an occasion when a few key works are padded out with elements from NML's own collection.

The lions share of the exhibition is themed around Henry VIII and Elizabeth I with Edward, Jane and Mary slotted in between.  At one end of the main room portraits of Henry's six wives are gathered and at the other end Elizabeth's "favourites" (fuckboys) so if you're interested in scandal, they're all here before so many of them lost their head before literally losing their head.  Although the exhibition includes the Walker's own world famous portraits of both, the Holbein copy and the Hilliard, there are multiple images of both monarchs from various, usually anonymous, hands.  But all of the key figures are represented.

If I had to make a recalibration in my expectations, it's that this isn't an art exhibition, its a history exhibition illustrated through painting.  Almost all of the portraits are accompanied by biographical information but very little that places them within an art historical context.  Obviously this is mostly to be expected.  Most these are works by unnamed artists and its the person who they depict which is of most interest.  But I would have preferred to see more of the kinds of information seen on the NPG's website about technique and attribution (although I could perhaps have simply had the website to hand via an ipad).

Plus this is my first proper exhibition in over two years (or indeed visit to an art gallery at all really) so I'm also a bit out of practice in navigating artworks and labels and other visitors.  Gallery fatigue set in quicker than usual which meant that when I reached the last of the three rooms, which looked at how the Tudors reflected out into the world, through exploration, slavery and culture its possible I could have spent more time absorbing the display.  But it's also true that once you've seen half a dozen roughly similar men in tights and ruffs and well appointed beards, they begin to blur into each other.

Unsurprisingly the advertised Shakespeare portrait isn't the Chandos - the painting with an accession number NPG 1 doesn't travel much - and I have it on my wall at home anyway (or a jigsaw at least).  The playwright is represented instead by the Martin Droeshout's engraving created for the First Folio (although this is apparently from one of the second or third editions).  But given how much of the collection is here, I'm very interested to know what the economics of the show were in terms of insurance and cost of travel.  The impressively massive Ditchley portrait of Elizabeth I is here which looks too big to fit through the doors.

So was The Tudors: Passion, Power and Politics worth the advanced price of £13.  Yes, I suppose, kinda?  I know that if I hadn't seen the paintings in London already on a couple of occasions and the Henry VIII show at the British Library in 2009 (with which this also shares a few items) I'd probably have been a bit less blasé about everything, indeed I know I wouldn't.  But it was nice to be in a space with these important treasures and to have them within walking distance of home (just about) (took me about fifty minutes) rather then three hour train journey (including the tube).  More please, and soon.

Soup Safari #23: Sweet Potato and Chilli at The Walker Art Gallery Cafe.

Lunch. £3.50. The Walker Art Gallery Cafe, William Brown Street, Liverpool L3 8EL. Phone: 0151 478 4199. Website.

The Walker Art Gallery website updates the positioning of the opening hours and address details. It's good news.

Art You might remember a couple of months ago when I was in one my curiously cross moods I offered a survey of where the local museums and art galleries put their visitor information.

 Here is an update now that National Museum Liverpool have refreshed their website because I want to give credit where it's due. Here's what I said about their old site with a screenshot:



There we are, top right, opening hours with a link to "more visitor information" which goes into greater detail about closures and that sort of thing, though there are also some more clicks required to get to an address and transport links through a menu of links.  All of the NML websites use the same style sheet so all of them have a very similar navigation system.

Here's the new site:



Top right one box with the opening times in big bold lettering and below that another box with the address and a small image of a map and a link to the map. Well done you and well done whoever designed the website.  These details are in the same place for all the venues which share the same eye-catching style sheet.

I've two more suggestions if I may:

(1)  Make the image of the map itself a link the map too - it's more intuitive and was the first thing I tried to click and better to find the tip of your finger to if you're viewing the site on a tablet.

(2)  Create some mechanism, more links in the black bar at  the top ala the BBC website, a drop down menu, whatever, so that the user can shift between venues from the actual venue page rather than having to click back to the master page via the "Back to National Museums Liverpool" link at the top which feels like extra clicks.  I understand why you wouldn't want to.  Forcing the user through that route means you can introduce them to events and whatnot at other venues, but I'd actually be more inclined to simply Google the individual venue instead to get there.  With a link at least you're keeping them on the actual website.

Other than that, one down, seven (non-NML) to go.

Liverpool Biennial 2012: Walker Art Gallery (19)

Art My final brush with National Museums Liverpool is the Walker Art Gallery and a reminder of projects otherwise ongoing. It hasn’t escaped by noticed that the last Public Art Collections in North West England I’ve visited was Towneley Hall Art Gallery & Museum in the Summer 2010 (written up in 2011), and it must seem doubly strange to attentive readers that I haven’t yet approached what’s arguably the most local of the venue in Edward Morris’s book, especially since it’s not as though I’m out of the place. That’s because I’m purposefully leaving it to last, making it the finale, because it has such resonance for me and because frankly I know, or at least I think I know the collection so well, it seems fairer to regard the other venues first. Their time will come. Soon. Soon.

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Of the Biennial themed works at the Walker, the most accessible, certainly the most iconic in marketing terms is Patrick Murphy’s Belonging. From glancing through his website, we can see that Murphy trades in a large scale interventions and installations in bright colours, sometimes applying new architectural features to buildings or else creating massive projections of simplistic images. His Strata illuminated the windows of a disused council headquarters, perhaps the soberest of architecture in its modernist utility now with all the colours of the rainbow turning it into a cathedral of light both night and day. He's producing a design via web voting.  In promoting Barnsley’s bid to host the 2013 city of culture, he projected an animation of a whippet, a symbol of working class culture to the side of Cannon Hall.

Belonging looks to be a continuation of that and a series of works begun in 2008 featuring birds. For the Biennial, Murphy has produced a hundred and fifty brightly coloured plastic pigeons, which have been distributed across the exterior and interior of the building, most visibly near the main entrance and in the café and shop. Passing through the main entrance you can also hear them hilariously cooing, but just quiet enough that unless it’s pointed out to you, your sensibilities just turn them into part of the audio landscape. Like his whippets, pigeons are another stereotype of northern life, which is odd, because there are just as many in Trafalgar Square as there are anywhere else. But the title is obviously meant to indicate that these are homing pigeons, given sanctuary on this occasion by one of the houses of art.

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My love and hate relationship with the John Moores Painting Prize continues this year’s exhibition. I think I can admit now, with two year’s distance I didn’t think much of the previous edition, which is why it ended up being slipped in at the end of the infamous Day One post, apart from it genuinely being the last exhibition I saw that day. This year’s selection is better. There’s certainly more work which seems to have some original thought behind it rather than found its inspiration in the canonical painters, presumably because as one of the judges Alan Yentob explains in an accompanying video at the venue about the selection process, they were looking for work with some original thought behind it rather than found its inspiration in the canonical painters.

Becoming a one man judging panel, the piece I’ve chosen for the people’s vote is Bernat Daviu’s Overall Paintings. It’s displayed near the entrance to the exhibition, presumably because it looks like nothing else in the exhibition and like seeing an amazing actor in a first audition then realising you have three weeks of other candidates who you know won’t be as surprising, I knew it would be my favourite right through until the end. That’s why the whole process of art in competition is unfair. One person’s sensibilities may be a photo realistic imagine of a war zone or another’s the silhouettes of a police riot team painted on the side of a coke can or another person might love the reproduction on canvas of a typed letter from an artist to himself commission the creation of the work for the competition.

But none of them have the bare faced cheek of submitting what amounts to a sculptural work to a painting price which has traditionally, predominantly been two dimensional. Liz Elton’s Twisted could equally be put in that bracket, but as the artist explains in her notes (an edited version of the catalogue is available as a pdf), that’s the remains of what was really a performance piece utilising what we must assume was a relatively traditional work. Daviu has created something which has to be hung from a clothing rail on the wall of the gallery, making it an installation too. It might not be my favourite John Moores selection ever, but it’s certainly one of the most perverse. As I stood in front of it, I imagined Yentob grinning and stroking his beard and considering if he could convince the BBC to let him have an hour of imagine... to justify their decision.

What we have here is three brightly coloured painted boiler suits hanging from wooden coat hangers. There’s a yellow one, a red one and a blue one and they’re arrange in a haphazard way as though they've been left behind by workers at the end of a day. At first I thought they really were boiler suits, but the information card indicates we’re “simply” looking at acrylic on canvas which indicates they’re unwearable clothing created using an artist’s traditional trade tools. There’s not much more to them other than the choice of colours which bespeak of old posters and old printing methods which were incapable of producing realistic shades. This is rather a dirty yellow of the kind which would appear when inks from darker colours had accidentally bled in on a newspaper advertisement.

The artist explains in his statement that in his paintings, he reduces everything to their most abstract forms which he sometimes later turns into garments. Daviu’s chosen this form because “both the Monochrome and the boiler suit are emblems of the Modernist utopian project in Russia after the Bolshevik revolution (1917), in which art was to become a functional and practical tool for the construction of a new democratic society. The Overall Paintings represent historical relics of a previous era, as well as pictorial symbols open to performative interpretations.”  In other words, contrary to the prevailing mood, the artist has chosen a historical perspective. Another artist might have taken the easier to decode option of simply painting them all bright orange, but instead it’s an abstract painting glancing back a hundred years for its inspiration.

Review: High Kicks & Low Life: Toulouse-Lautrec prints at the Walker Art Gallery.

Art I spent this morning amongst this selection of surprisingly rare poster art in lithograph form mainly from the mid-1890s. Like anyone else who’s visited Paris I have a Toulouse-Lautrec postcard on my wall but I’ve always been very aware of him. My secondary school art sketch book contains a rather duff pencil copy of one of his Yvette Guilbert portraits (one of the examples in this exhibition I think) so I must have seen this work in my teens and his famous portrait of Aristide Bruant with the bright red scarf was the model for Tom Baker’s first costume in Doctor Who.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s technique is deceptively haphazard. At a distance many of his images don't make much sense.  Only on looking more closely do you see that what he's doing is creating startling impressions of movement using single, deliberate lines. But the forms are all there and clearly defined and haven’t quite reached a Picasso level of abstractness, were the position of objects becomes irrelevant. Often prints like Divan Japonais or May Belfort will be dominated by a single colour but some, like Marcelle Lender en Buste (pictured) include eight different shades which at that time required eight different stones and an intense level of concentration from the printer so that the mix of red, pink, orange and green did not lose definition.

As ever, it’s only when confronted with a brace of a man’s work that you can really appreciate his accomplishments. Like the best of the post-Impressionists, he’s somehow able to capture the essence of a scene and the people within it without slavishly presenting every aspect. Over and over again he places dancers like Jane Avril at the centre of the picture, in vivid motion or calm rest, in evening ware and surrounded by elements of whichever club or theatre is being advertised including a somewhat sleazy bearded man of some description.  The viewer is immediately transported to that place and in hindsight, time.

Perhaps the most impressive and suprising images are those created for Elles, a collection of drawings of the local prostitutes. As the accompanying information notes, he deliberately ignores the lascivious in favour of presenting those moments the men that visit them don't see, the preparation for their call, applying make-up, straightening hair, the sagged shoulders and disappointment of the final cash transaction and the moments before going to bed. I hadn't otherwise considered that a figure like Lautrec might have been an early feminist, but the empathy presented in these drawings suggests that might just be possible.