The birth of a long standing fascination with motion. 

(Written for The Hub Magazine.)

The Royal Academy’s landmark autumn exhibition is nothing short of rich. It is an accolade to Edgar Degas, an insight into the 19^th century obsession with movement, a venture into the early experimentations of photography, and a historical archive of ballet.

Edgar Degas, The Dance Lesson, c. 1879, Oil on canvas, 38 x 88 cm, Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1995.47.6. 

With its pastel hues and painted frills, Degas’s work on dance can be fleetingly branded as the stuff of chocolate boxes, calendars and stationery. And with ballet’s seamless entrance into popular culture in 2011, ‘Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement’ could be–put simply–an easy and pleasurable art viewing experience.

But distinguished curator Richard Kendall is determined to show the Parisian artist’s original way of viewing in its scientific and revolutionary contexts for the first time.

As a champion of the Impressionist movement in the late 1870s, Degas developed a fascination with capturing the realism of modern life, particularly through the walls of the Paris Opéra, the principle home of ballet. He divided spectators who viewed his work as intrusive and repulsive, or insightful, bold and original.

One of his earliest and most ambitious pieces on show is The Rehearsal. It captures the contrast between movement and repose in a studio. Photographs of famous dancers were widely available, yet photography at the time failed to capture ballerinas in their routines, where instead they held poses for lengthy periods and supported their arms with cords. Degas thus found fascination in his own ability to suggest movement on stage.

A centre point of the exhibition’s argument is the infamous Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, which Degas originally modelled in wax and dressed in real clothes–a scandal in 1880 because it looked so realistic. Surrounded by preparatory sketches that correspond to each angle of the figure, the curator suggests Degas was inspired by sculptor Francois Willeme’s earlier ‘Photosculpture’, where a subject was recorded using 24 cameras across a round room to project, trace, and incision images into clay to create highly detailed sculptures.

The exhibition is filled with exceptional examples of Degas’s study on dance, more notably Two Dancers on the Stage and The Red Ballet Skirts, but it simultaneously embraces the locomotive work of Eadweard Muybridge, Etienne-Jules Marey, and the Lumière brothers. It captures the transition of art as photography came into play, and is perhaps one of the earliest examples of the two existing simultaneously.

It’s cyclical structure–opening with a rotating ballerina projection and closing with a 1915 clip of Degas, now almost blind, walking past a new filmmaker on the street– makes this one of the fullest and touching tributes to Degas and his fellow pioneers in capturing motion. 

1) Take a bottle of water and please have some food before hand because once you get in there’s no easy way out, and it’ll be at least an hour and a half of observation. 

2) Invest in a pair of binoculars to view the works that are just below the ceiling and five paintings up.

3) If you are short for time quickly browse the index at the back of the ‘List of Works’ that they will give you with your ticket, mark the artists you would be interested in and sprint from room to room.

4) Eventually you will want to play the ‘Where can you imagine that?’ game. Behind a large corporate reception desk? In a footballers home? On an East London wall? 

5) A good way to filter through what is publicly popular or not is by looking at how many red sales dots a piece has, so it is often best to hold your visit until the latter weeks. Quentin Blake’s Life Under Water prints had an entire red ant line running along them. 

I walk in and the first thing I think is “I’m going to need those chairs”. The middle of the Central Hall is ironically ornamented with four steel-legged chairs, stacked by size – one on top of another. (It almost reminded me of the three little bears, as the big to small objects represent the absence of its owner or occupier.) Anyway the reason for this is because everyone knows this annual Royal Academy exhibition is one copious mess of churned out art. It is the world’s largest open-submission contemporary art exhibition – this year with 1117 works on show – displaying pieces in all styles and media, such as painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, architectural models and film. (It sometimes feels like the end of year A-level student art exhibition.)

The affair has been going since the Royal Academy opened in 1768, and the lure of seeing a range of famous works and up-and-coming artists under one grand roof is what I believe keeps it going. It’s prime purpose however is to draw revenue for the organisation and the art world, which is what the other half – or maybe a third – of visitors come for. For them it is a prestigious art market where you can make purchases ranging from anything between £25 to £108,000.

So how do you approach this colossal exhibition (for those of us who aren’t buying)? What do you look at and how long are you meant to dwell on each piece?  

Each room is divided by a theme so you could head for the one that interests you the most though you could easily slip past something worth looking at, which does make you think there’s no easy way through this exhibition than skimming through it all. For example, in gallery III, it is pretty much filled with abstract art (which isn’t often my favourite) but then you have five Ken Howard oil’s hung together of both interiors and exteriors. Note this is handily where the sofa bench is.

The key is to look for the infamous gems and then the funny and queer entrees which will be the talk of the show:

*THE GOOD*
Ken Howard, No. 48-52 in Gallery III.
Venice, London and the studio are his favourite places to paint, and this is a wonderful insight into the brush strokes and great sense of light he captures time after time.

Bill Jacklin, ‘Calle V’ No.154 and ‘Crossing the Square in the snow VI’ No.155 in Gallery II.
One of my favourite artists, he is the master of silhouettes and people in cityscapes and this is work looking out for.

Rob Ryan, ‘Look closer and closer’ No.193 in Gallery II.
The contemporary papercutting and print artist who shot to fame for his sentimental pieces (you can buy them on mugs, plates and cards). This showcased print shows his trademark silhouettes with the words reading: “Look closer and closer and look further and further and listen harder and harder to the noise of the Earth and the silence of the stars and what you will hear is a small voice that whispers – don’t try to get, try to give”.

Tom Phillips’s A Humument pieces No. 230 and No.231 in gallery II.
I am a big fan of his portrait drawings but these small works are from one of the most important parts of his large body of work. ‘A Humument: A treated Victorian Novel’ is a forgotten 1892 book titled ‘A Human Document’ that Phillips cut, pasted and altered and then republished first in 1970, to tell new visual and verbal tales. Here is an insight into that little creative story and what he did to those pages.

Gavin Turk’s ‘Turk Love’ screenprint no. 212 in gallery II
In the internationally known style of Robert Indiana’s Love

Frederick Cuming, ‘Etna’ No. 254 and ‘Thaw’ No. 260 in Gallery I
Cuming is an exceptional landscape artist. 

Gillian Wearing, ‘Self portrait as my mother Jean Gregory’ No. 1041 in the Lecture Room. 
Winner of the Rose Award for Photography. 

*THE QUEER*
‘Credit Crunch’ by Eddie Farrell
This is a cereal box with cut out type reading “credit crunch”.  

‘Untitled’ by Anish Kapoor, No. 1046 in the Lecture Room. 
An odd bell shaped large vase made from fiberglass and paint.

*(and) THE UGLY*
‘Coffin “To Die For” by Olu Shobowale, No. 723 in Gallery V
In my opinion there were many pieces that fit this but this one topped them all.  It is a coffin made of animal bones. 

For the first time when I walked into the BP portrait award exhibition, the fact that it was sponsored by BP, hung with me. It’s strange, a corporate oil giant sponsoring painting. It has been doing so for 22 years. I’ve been visiting the annual National Portrait Gallery exhibition for 6 consecutive years, and not once did I compare it to steel and grease. Neither did activists actually, until the commencement of this years opening - a year after the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico – who lined outside holding 14 portraits by Gulf Coast residents. The ‘BP facing the Gulf Portraits in Oil’ campaign hoped that by submitting the portraits for award consideration, it would compel them to “to Face the Gulf as it is for the people who live there and for all who care.” None of them did get through though.

Nevertheless this year’s run of portraits fell no less short of the cornucopia of faces I expected to see. As the government’s art funds take the recession blow, it seems such sponsors are the only way to keep art awards going (Especially this one, which accepts submissions from anyone. You don’t have to be experienced of qualified though it helps).

Every winning candidate has shown the ability to paint exceptionally and capture genuine human emotion. This year however every one of the five winning portraits tell a story, quite literally (none of that read into the eyes and the colours). One holds a pencil holding a wall, one is nude with her arms tide above her to a tree trunk amongst rocky mythical surroundings, one holds a knife with washing up gloves and curlers in her hair, and another stands in her fully painted bedroom. These represented personalities are a lot more explicit than you usually expect of winning portraits, and I wasn’t too sure how much I liked it. Sometimes the best portraits work when the individual is stripped bare of their normal surroundings, but you can still feel their essence and persona.

I am however by no means shunning these winning artists. The work this year continued a pledge to make contemporary portraiture valid in modern world (as it stands on the opposite end of the Glamour of the Gods Hollywood photography exhibition). In our instant photography era, one of the biggest lures for the mass crowds was to see how a painting looked so much like a large printed photograph. It just attributes to the power of paint and the human hand. Have a look at my favorites: ‘Six Decades’ by Matthew Schofield, ‘Jade (The Rehearsal)’ by David Elchenberge, and “Adi” by Nathan Ford. They are all painterly but no less cinematic.