Viva Lewes Issue #123 December 2016

OUT OF TOWN: ART
Century
100 Modern British Artists
'The Blue Towel' by Euan Uglow © The Estate of the Artist. Courtesy Jerwood Collection
Century: 100 Modern British
Artists is the last exhibition
this year at the Jerwood
Gallery in Hastings, and runs
until 8th January. Originally
announced as Century: 100
Works of Modern British Art
from the Ingram and Jerwood
Collections, the show now
comprises no fewer than 150
works by the 100 artists in
question, and fills all but one
of the gallery’s exhibition
spaces. No out-and-out
masterpieces, perhaps, but the overall quality of the
exhibits is, nonetheless, gratifyingly high.
The exhibition is arranged thematically, but the
themes are rather arbitrary and imprecise, so it’s
probably best to engage with each work of art
on its own terms. The curator, James Russell,
has expressed the hope that the layout ensures
‘that boundaries between different periods and
movements are broken down, exposing intriguing
relationships and surprising similarities’.
Some of these ‘relationships’ are uncomplicatedly
literal. But while it’s of course nice that Mary
Fedden gets to hang alongside her husband, Julian
Trevelyan, it must be disappointing to Dod Procter
and Ernest Procter to find themselves separated
on different floors. Paul Nash and John Nash are
juxtaposed, but I’m not sure that the two pictures
chosen illustrate the exhibition’s (undoubtedly
true) thesis that the brothers developed along
markedly different lines, particularly well. I found
myself becoming unclear in some cases whether a
connection was intended or not.
A work by Nevinson is positioned next to a 1938
watercolour by Eric Ravilious, entitled Rye Harbour,
to show how both artists used a far-off vanishing
point to draw the eye into the picture. But is
Near Whitby, Yorkshire, a
magnificent late landscape
by Edward Burra, hanging
nearby because the same
artistic device is being
employed? Or because
Burra lived all his life in
Rye? Or for neither reason?
Is it significant that Ruskin
Spear’s charming The Curious
Cat, which includes a copy of
the London Evening Standard
(Headline: Patten’s threat
to second homes), is across
the room from John Piper’s Beach and Star Fish,
Seven Sisters Cliff, Eastbourne, the collage elements
of which are supplied by the rather more highbrow
reading material of the New Statesman or The
Listener? Are, as one of the gallery attendants said in
my hearing, the hands of Maggi Hamblings’ elderly
neighbour, Frances Rose, ‘twisted by arthritis and
decades of work’, meant to provide a contrast to
the porcelain hands of Dod Procter’s Lillian, which
hangs next door?
Opposite the Maggi Hambling portrait is a Sickert
painting of the Church of Saint Rémy in Dieppe.
One of the products advertised on the kiosk in front
of the church is the French soup cube marketed
as ‘Maggi’. When I remembered that Hambling
had been rechristened Maggi by her mentor Lett
Haines after the soup cube in question, I knew that
my mind was becoming addled. I went in search of
fish and chips, mindful of the Jeeves and Wooster
adage: ‘fish makes brain’.
But enough frivolity. Century is a splendid show,
supplemented by a single room devoted to Stanley
Spencer. The latter, carefully selected, display is the
sort of thing that Jerwood, with the minimum of
fanfare, does so admirably.
David Jarman
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