Catching the light: a review of Without From Within

NVA Editor is illuminated by the new show at Lakeside Arts Centre

Every time I visit the permanent collection at Nottingham Castle, there are two pictures in particular I just have to re-view, whatever else I go to see.  One is Harold Knight’s magnificently melancholy full-length portrait of Ethel Bartlett and the other is Winifred Nicholson’s exquisitely simple Violas in a Window, 1922.  Nicholson’s painting – which is currently featured in the Castle’s Now For Tomorrow show of work donated to it by the Contemporary Art Society over the last 100 years – is a delicate minimalist mountain landscape viewed over a bowl of violas on the artist’s window-sill.  It formed a major component in a lovely exhibition, Influence and Originality, at the Lakeside Djanogly Gallery back in 1996, featuring a range of work by Winifred Nicholson, Frances Hodgkins and Ivon Hitchens.

The current show at the Lakeside, Without From Within, curated by Anne Goodchild, has similarities with Influence and Originality, not least the inclusion of works by all three of the artists featured in 1996.    Two crucial absences inform Without From Within.  One is Violas in a Window and the other - the touchstone from which the spirit of the show emanates - is Matisse’s Open Window, Collioure, 1905. 

Without From Within is, as its title suggests, a collection of paintings primarily looking out at an external scene through a foregrounded window or other opening. There is a lurking danger inherent in designing a show around the common subject-matter or common stylistic motif of a disparate group of works by different painters.  The danger is of descending into a random series of “did you realise that so-and-so painted one of these?” or “and here is another example” revelations.  Fortunately, Anne Goodchild largely avoids this potential curatorial weakness with great success.  Taking Matisse’s absent masterpiece as her inspiration, she proceeds to develop a highly coherent argument for the importance of the “without from within” motif as a key characteristic of 20th (and 21st) century art.

It is a truism that, like the film pioneers seeking out the perpetual sunlight of southern California, modernist artists in the 20th century consciously craved the light of the south - Dufy in his native Provence, the Fauvists and Cubists in Collioure and Ceret, the Newlyn and St Ives schools in Cornwall - both as the subject matter of their work and as the means to achieving it.  This exhibition, which (with one exception, Andrew Wyeth’s From An Attic Window, 1943) features entirely British and European work, understandably reflects that obsession with light.  1920s paintings by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell owe a clear debt to French influences, while Dufy’s Open Window at Saint-Jeannet, 1926-7 provides an archetypal spectacle of sun-bleached colour and landscape. 

Many Cornwall-based artists are featured, including both Winifred and Ben Nicholson (whose Window in Cornwall, 1946 is a stunning abstract landscape), David Jones (View From The Terrace, Portslade) and Patrick Heron (The Round Table, 1950).  Winifred Nicholson’s late work Glimpse Upon Waking, 1976 echoes the profound simplicity of Violas In A Window.  An extraordinary splash of Mediterranean primary colours fills Patrick Caulfield’s spectacular Santa Margherita Ligure, 1964, while alongside it David Hockney’s California Seascape, 1968 chimes beautifully with the recent retrospective at Nottingham Contemporary.

But it is interesting that – amongst these more obvious homages to light-suffusion – there are many more gloomy, or at least neutral, pieces.  For many of the artists, the division between exterior and interior is not significant.  Life goes on – or doesn’t – inside and out.  John Bratby’s realist Window, Dartmouth Row, Blackheath, 1954 celebrates the ordinariness of city life, whereas Victor Pasmore’s Window, Finsbury Park, 1933 shows a surprisingly verdant townscape bearing down on a bare window-sill.

One of the most poignant pieces is Eric Ravilious’s RNAS Sick Bay, Dundee, 1941, the empty bed and chair of the sick-bay room begging all sorts of questions as seaplanes prowl across the water outside.  Andrew Wyeth’s wintry war-time attic view, John Nash’s Snow Scene, Meadle, Bucks, 1928 and Paul Nash’s Dead Spring, 1929 and Harbour and Room, 1932 all convey sombre moods, which contrast with the more simplistic pleasures of, say, Ivon Hitchens’ Bay Through A Window, 1967 or Balcony At Cambridge, 1929.

The furthest room at the Djanogly Gallery houses a number of more modern or contemporary pieces.  George Shaw’s suburban snapshot Not Seeing Blossom, 2010 and Paul Winstanley’s almost architectural windowscape Villa, 2009 (both commissioned for the show) bring the traditions of Nash, Nicholson and Hitchens into a cool - or is it consciously bland? - contemporary context. 

On the other hand, two brilliant Howard Hodgkin works – Waking Up In Naples, 1980-4 (the only piece in the whole show to contain the representation of a human figure) and Rain, 1984-9 - sit either side of Marcus Harvey’s magnificent The Fuhrer’s Cake, 2009.  Taking a huge black and white photograph of an Alpine mountainscape (inkjet on canvas), Harvey has superimposed a thick black acrylic representation of a window and sill, with coffee and part-eaten cake.  The cosily romantic scene is seriously undermined as the resonance of the title sinks in. 

For me, this is the most striking work in what is a superbly varied, challenging and illuminating exhibition.  If doubts about the show’s premise linger at all - the insertion of just two surrealist pieces (Magritte's La Condition Humaine, 1935 and John Armstrong's The Open Door, 1930) certainly seems like a slightly jarring attempt at over-inclusivity - they are dispelled by the eclecticism of the artists, the high quality of the paintings and above all by the fascinating insight that Anne Goodchild’s choices tell us about the development of an important strand of British and European art since 1900.

The exhibition continues at the Djanogly Gallery, Lakeside till 3 May 2010.  Neil Walker, Gallery Visual Arts Office, will be leading a tour of the show between 1 & 1.45pm on 8 April.