Galleries - December 2012

images among the 80 or so works on show. With the six prize-winners gettng a solo in the gallery in 2013/14 and a season ofexhibitions by other significant figures from the Outsider Art spectrum, Jean Dubuffet and Pat Douthwaite running parallel, that really is respect. From the Ashes . . . In April 1906 an earthquake struck San Francisco. In the resulting fires which destroyed much ofthe city, a young Scottish artist (George) Leslie Hunter, preparing for an exhibition, lost everything. Still, in a somewhat fragile life totally dedicated to art he went on to become one ofthe four famous ‘Scottish Colourists’ – painting (and illustrating, to earn his keep) in America and across Europe. The exhibition at The Fleming Collection until February covers his work from that fateful day through to his early death at 54. Beginning with Sunlit Avenue, Northern France (1907-10) in which light shimmers and floats through the shade ofan avenue oftrees to a little chalk drawing (a rare survival) Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco , over red roofed cottages ofFife and along heat- soaked coastal towns of Southern France, his magical canvases enrapture with the luminous colour for which he was so admired. CM its most promising young exponents – in the late 20s and then developed in all sorts of directions over the next three or four decades, to become one of the most complex and multi- faceted figures in 20th C. Italian Art. As he recognized, his Futurist past lay behind all his diverse media and disciplines from painting to photomontage, graphics, sculpture, film, film theory, Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, Abstraction and includes innovative technical breakthroughs with light spectrum work – all in this show. Meanwhile the National Gallery’s Richard Hamilton exhibition has, with his death the summer before it opened, turned into a remarkably upbeat memorial to an artist who, into his late 80s, was using modern photoshopping techniques to produce startling and profoundly disturbing contemporary imagery – and controversial too, his nude Virgin Mary stirring up 8000+ complaints to date! Outside In Credit must be given to Pallant House ’s pioneering approach to the subject of ‘art from the margins’, namely for proper institutional recognition to be given to artists whose careers have evolved outside the art school, ‘professional’ milieu. ‘Outside In’ is the third in a national triennial event and is full of remarkable, memorable Morris & Wood This enthralling exhibition – subtitled ‘A Forgotten Friendship’, at Norwich Castle Museum until 31 December, then travelling to Mascalls Gallery, Kent, and later Falmouth – explores the cultural kinship of two of the most invigoratingly original modern British artists. Christopher Wood died tragically at the age of 29 in 1930; Cedric Morris (b.1889) lived to be 92. Their intuitively sophisti- cated works (portraying, variously, artistic avant-gardists, Breton and Cornish fishing villages, Parisian cafés and, in Wood’s case, an afternoon of athletic homoerotic ease at a Turkish baths) have in common childlike awe, primordial immediacy of perspective and broodingly graceful colours. Both were inspired by Alfred Wallis, ex-mariner and self-taught painter (‘not a bad master’, as Wood said). Interestingly, Morris always claimed he knew Wallis’s paintings a couple of years before Ben Nicholson and Kit Wood’s famous first glimpse in 1928 through an open St Ives doorway. P hilip Vann 15. GALLERIES DECEMBER 12 from left Q uentin Blake ‘Girl & Dog III’ 2012 (detail) at Marlborough C edric Morris ‘Breton Landscape’ 1927 at Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery G eorge Leslie Hunter ‘Mill Dam, Fife’ c.1920 courtesy private coll. at The Fleming Collection Manuel Lanca Bonifacio ‘Mermaid’ at Pallant House Gallery Bruno Munari ‘Aeroplanes & Archers’ 1932 at Estorick Collection Peter Wrinch-Schultz ‘Curiosities - Man with Bees’ 1950s at Michael Hoppen