Viva Lewes Issue #151 April 2019

ON THIS MONTH: ART
Portrait of a Girl, 1912 by Mark Gertler. © Tate, London 2019
agree. Viva readers may remember the (very
colourful) cover she did for the February
2019 issue. In the accompanying interview
with Joe Fuller, she expressed a wish that
people would try wearing more colour, ‘because
it’s so life enhancing’. So perhaps we’re
not there just yet. But it would be wrong to
see the Charleston exhibition as any part of a
colour crusade. True, there are big bold pictures
just bursting with colour by the likes of
Terry Frost and Howard Hodgkin. It would
be surprising if they weren’t featured. But I
think Cressida Bell is trying to do something
rather subtler, choosing paintings where the
arrangement of colours, the patterns, the
colour balance are paramount. This might
explain the presence in the show of artists
such as Charles Ginner, Ethel Sands and
Sickert, especially Sickert, that you would
not associate primarily with colour. And as
she said in the Viva interview: ‘I’m trying to
look for works of art where you can tell that
the artist has superimposed colours on the
painting, rather than actually seeing them.’
This would apply, for example, to Stanislawa
de Karlowska’s At Churchstanton, Somerset.
What, I suspect, is of primary importance
to Cressida Bell is that we have a totally
unmediated response to the paintings. So,
for example, no distracting captions. If you
want to know the identity of the painter, the
name of the picture, where it’s usually to be
found, you have to refer to the printed handout.
Even on that, Cressida Bell’s thoughts
on individual paintings, and there are only
a handful of these, are so tentative as to be
positively endearing. It’s all tremendously
refreshing.
One criticism. The walls of the gallery have
been painted in four different colours, especially
for the exhibition. Far from enhancing
the paintings, it positively distracts from
them, from the colour in the paintings. A
disastrous decision? I think so, but perhaps
it wasn’t Cressida Bell’s idea. And maybe I’m
just wrong. David Jarman
info@charleston.org.uk
The Pond at Charleston by Vanessa Bell. Estate of Vanessa Bell
courtesy of Henrietta Garnett and The Charleston Trust
Oranges and Quinces by Robert Dukes.
Courtesy of Robert Dukes
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