by AMIT ROY
ROYAL ACADEMY EXHIBITION FEATURES WORKS BY FAMOUS AND NEW NAMES
THIS year’s Summer Exhibition is the 250th in the two and-a-half century old story of the Royal Academy of Arts and, by common consent, is one of the best for a long time.
It has been coordinated by the flamboyant artist Grayson Perry, who called it “a joyful celebration of arts”. The theme of the exhibition is Art Made Now.
This year there were 19,800 entries from the public – of which between 700 and 800 were picked for display by Perry with the help of a “hanging committee”.
The rest of the 1,500 art works that made the final cut were from members of the Royal Academy or artists invited by Perry to make submissions.
He seemed genuinely surprised when Eastern Eye pointed out to him that this year there appeared to be many more paintings of black people – done presumably by black artists.
“That’s good, isn’t it?” he reacted, adding, “The Royal Academy is more diverse.”
To pigeon-hole India-born Sir Anish Kapoor as a BAME artist would be ridiculous for he is now a global superstar, but for British Asians it is encouraging that his monumental sculpture, Symphony for a Beloved Daughter – a mass of metal ingots against the backdrop of a giant red concave disc – has been given pride of place in the Annenberg Court in front of Burlington House.
Shanti Panchal is a regular, but this year his watercolour – Grenfell Pyre and the Rescued Family – is hung at eye level and not towards the ceiling.
Some other names worth noting include Idris Khan, who has a Pakistani father (ink and acrylic, The Pain of Others); Paramita Palchaudhuri (oil on paper, Black Swan); and Shivraj Singh (acrylic, Self-portrait: There’s More to Us than Meets the I…).
Big names this year other than Sir Anish are David Hockney, Banksy (he has priced his Vote to Love, created from a UKIP placard, tongue in cheek at £350 million), Antony Gormley and Mona Hatoum.
“There is a lot of politics, especially in this room, but the main thing for me was for it to be an aesthetic, sensory overload experience,” enthused Perry, standing in a large room whose walls he had chosen to paint a vivid lemon.
“I chose the colour before I had seen any of the art work – I took a punt really that lemon would work,” he said. “It’s a strong colour. The only paintings that don’t really work on the lemon are paintings with a lot of yellow in them.”
He admitted: “To play with a whole toy box load of art for a few days was absolutely the most joyful thing. I celebrate that, really.”
Nothing like the Summer Exhibition exists anywhere in the world. It has been held annually without interruption since 1769 and “provides a unique platform for emerging and established artists to showcase their work to an international audience”.
Over the past 250 years, the Summer Exhibition has shown thousands of works to millions of people. But curators Professor Mark Hallett and Dr Sarah Turner had the almost impossible task of selecting just 80 of the most memorable for a separate, but linked show, The Great Spectacle.
They selected landscapes and portraits by artists who have become household names, among them Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, JMW Turner and John Constable.
The Summer Exhibition “was the main crucible of British art through much of its history”, said Hallett.
Some works were so popular that they required police barriers to hold back enthusiastic crowds.
Hallett’s co-curator, Dr Turner, paused before a painting done in 1883 by William Powell Frith, depicting the private view of the Summer Exhibition two years earlier.
She drew attention to the fine detail of personalities in the painting – the “dedicated connoisseur with his eye glass; the fashionable elite, the artists and actresses of their day in their wonderful gowns dressed up for this event – here we have Oscar Wilde holding court and passing judgement. Everybody has an opinion; they love it or hate it”.
Dr Turner added that “artists, critics and the public have responded to the Summer Exhibition across its 250 years, often admiring it but also often poking fun at it”.
- The Summer Exhibition and The Great Spectacle are at the Royal Academy until August 19.
