Drawn to Tate Britain
Isabel Andrews, Friday, 25th July 2008
Anyone wishing to idle away an hour or so would do well to visit Tate Britain’s current exhibition ‘Drawn from the Collection’ which gives an airing to a small selection of the thousands of drawings that Tate holds as part of the national collections of prints and drawings.
The show clearly aims to be a gentle crowd pleaser with themes such as ‘faces’ and ‘creatures’ (as opposed to ‘portraits’ or ‘anatomy’) and is very much about ticking the commendable box of airing works that are rarely or never before exhibited. The strength of the exhibition lies not just in seeing little-known works, but in the surprising juxtaposition of artists and periods: Joshua Reynolds’s pen and ink Self-portrait as a Figure of Horror (1784) hangs nearby Lucian Freud’s Narcissus (1948) in the same medium. Both drawings provide a beguiling insight to an inner dialogue of discontent, nearly 200 years apart.
Under the theme of ‘Town and Country’ there’s a particularly nice line-up of works. Leon Kossoff’s Christchurch Spitalfields (1990; above), a busy, strident composition of the church exterior in charcoal, sits next to Turner’s Ely Cathedral: the interior of the Octagon (1794) – a work so faint one is nose to glass just to make out the achingly delicate and precise lines of perpendicular fan vaulting. It’s a brilliant contrast. Further along is David Bomberg’s St Paul’s and the River (1945) and here soft smudges of charcoal suggest the mist shrouding the proud dome of St Paul’s and a gentle lap of Thames tide at the drawing’s edge. It’s more than ‘town and country’. It’s the jubilance and the quiet.
More strong contrasts appear in the ‘Modern and Abstract’ section where Ben Nicholson’s Oct. 55 (1955) – a graceful drawing that grows from the outline of a pear to encompass a jug, table, window and the city beyond in one seeming crescendo of a line – is hung by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s Eight Lines (1986), a mix of horizontal chalk lines, some straight, others undulating, that reminded me of standing on a beach looking out to sea.
I could go on, but the astuteness of the show’s selection is that there’s something for everyone here, be it J.M. Turner, Tacita Dean or Tracy Emin. And free from the aims of scholarship or blockbuster status, this show simply is a chance to see works that belong to us all. So, should you find yourself with an hour to spare…
'Drawn from the Collection' is at Tate Britain, London, until 1 March 2009.
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