Galleries - December 2014

Meinhof’ series in Tate Modern’s 2011 show and still feel the intense waves of grief, pity and bewilderment they induced in me. This is all intensely subjective thinking on my part however – if you haven’t already, do go to see this, and the other shows, before they close at points through December and early January and make up your own mind . . . Celebrating a Change We didn’t highlight it editorially at the time but Belgravia Gallery moved from its long-time Albemarle Street space in September to join the growing number of galleries moving northwards up Bond Street to in and around Sotheby’s/Maddox Street ( Beaux Arts went a year or so ago) – and are celebrating this monthwithan interesting charitable co-operation between themselves, the World Citizen Artists organisation and the Playing for Change Foundation, a global art and music competition to promote peace in the run-up to Christmas. Emerging and established artists will be exhibiting their work there through December which will then also be featured by the Playing for Change Foundation – Academy. For Kiefer obviously it has been discussed, indeed the sense of political atonement implicit in his paintings is the first thing usually said about his work, almost to the point at which people often forget to see them as paintings rather than statements, but Constable and Turner in their own Romantic age, also imbued their work with powerful political over- or undertones. In Constable’s case the landscape, while more powerfully realist in spirit than before, a vehicle for intense personal, pantheistic emotion, was also one in which, in John Barrell’s interpretation, the agricultural poor were reduced either to specks in the distance or foreground pictorial devices to animate a view that would not offend his patrons. In Turner it was something else again, by the time of the late paintings, a profound meditation on the rise and fall of empire, light as metaphor for change, dissolution and decay of an intensely poetic and prophetic kind. In Kiefer the political, along withthe social, cultural and historical, is altogether more overt and I am not always entirely convinced that their unambiguousness allows them to work quite as powerfully as the paintings should, or most people say they do – I think back to Richter’s astonishing and profoundly ambiguous ‘Baader DECEMBER 2014 GALLERIES 17 operating a similar platform for young and established musicians – via their website and social media channels. The theme is, simply, “Peace”, withthe winning painters and sculptors being shown at the gallery from 11 December, the musicians being found performing on playingforchange.org over the same period. This seems to me an excellent way of bothusing the new media and encouraging collaborations across the art forms and I look forward to viewing (and hearing!) the results withreal curiosity . . . An Equal Music Curiously enoughanother intriguing art and music collaboration to report, this time from York, where that dynamo of the art scene there, Ann Petherick of Kentmere House, has organised an Artist in Residence scheme in association withthe celebrated York Early Music Festival, inviting London- based painter Alfred Huckett to hold an exhibition in the National Early Music Centre (6 to 20 December). It is a bit more than that though, Huckett having been involved withthe Festival twice before and a knowledgeable enthusiast for early music. And from left: Anselm Kiefer ‘Ice and Blood (Eis und Blut)’ 1971, at the Royal Academy JMW Turner ‘Ancient Rome: Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus’ 1839, oil on canvas, at Tate Britain. William Strang ‘The Eating House’ 1903, etching, at the Scottish National Gallery. Mary Newcomb ‘The Snake I Disturbed’, at Crane Kalman Gallery (see page 18) Peter Seymour ‘Yorkshire Baroque Soloists’ at Kentmere House Gallery