How to see pictures and how not to

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Trotskyism Second edition of the opposition documents presented inside the WRP by the present leader.

ship of the Workers Socialist League Price £2.50 plus 20p postage and package from orkers Socialist League, BM Box 5277, kondo One Post Impressionism, at the Royal Academy-is a vast collection of mostly European art from the last two decades of the 19th and the first of the 20th centuries.

Some 500 paintings fill 14 galleries. The other exhibitionSecond Sight at the National Gallery -is of a mere two paintings, painted two centuries apart in 1648 and 1815.

Confusing

Infinitely more modest in its scale and approach to the presentation of paintings, this National Gallery exhibition is infinitely more satisfactory than the vast and confusing melee at the Academy.

The first problem with Post Impressionism is overcrowding. The pictures are overcrowded on the walls so that, even if you manage to get a look at them through the crowds of C1V 6XX. visitors, it is hard to look at any individual painting without the intrusion of the images of its neighbours.

Luckily among the exceptions-but only because it is so large--is the impressive painting of armed peasants called the Fourth Estate by the Italian painter, Pellizza.

(Ihis was the painting used so effectively in the credits of Bertolucci's film "1900").

The very scale of this picture forcibly raises the question as to what it is doing in the same exhibition as landscapes by Cezanne, pondscapes by Monet or even pictures of Tahitian girls by Gaugin.

There seems no coherent answer to the question.

As the exhibition's catalogue begins by saying, the lost Impressionist painters (unlike the Impressionists) did not With a new introduction define themselves as such-but were given the label by others.

As a result the exhibition's organisers seem to have felt tree to include anything painted over a thirty year period from 18801910.

Some painters are there because they acknowledged a debt to the impressionists, even called themselves neo-impressionists. Others are there "because" they reacted against the impressionists.

Incoherence

Yet others seem to be there without any particular reasons at all.

This incoherence which lies at the heart of Post Impressionism means that it is not so much an exhibition as simply a congested collection of paintings which are very difficult to see.

Yet many of these paintings are famous and many of them very fine and/or important in the history of painting.

How regrettable then that you are liable to emerge from this exhibition poorer by £2 (bankrupt if you buy the catalogue), aesthetically confused and reeling-less under the impact of visual beauty and excitement than under its main sensual impact, the smell of a thousand brands of deodorant and cosmetics.

The sense of uplift and enlightenment produced by Second Sight is a marvellous contrast.

Side by side It is the first of a new series of exhibitions at the National Gallery which select and juxtapose two paintings from the collection by placing them in a prominent place side by side and add a slide show with recorded commentary which analyses and comments on the paintings.

The first two paintings chosen for this treatment are The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba by the 17th century French landscape painter Claude Lorrain (normally referred to as Claude) and Dido Building Carthage by the 19th century British painter Turner.

The choice is particularly appropriate, since the two paintings normally hang beside cachother anyway as a result of a stipulation of Turner's will.

By asking for his painting to hang beside CIde's (one of the very tirst collection of paintings which formed the National Gallery in 1824), Turner clearly recognised his debt to the French painter.

And the similarities between the two paintings are extremely obvious both visually and in its subject matter.

Both depict legendary Queens of the ancient world involved in an event that brings them to a harbour bordered by large and ornate public buildings.

In both cases the paintings are dominated in the centre by the brilliance of the sun.

Turner many times acknowledged his technical debt to Claude in the capturing of sunlight in paint.

Essence

Yet despite the striking similarities at first sight, the essence of the pictures-as the excellent and provocative commentary and booklet by Michael Wilson point out-could hardly be more different.

Claude's is painted with self-conscious harmony, its structure meticulously balanced, its lines of perspective leading to a single vanishing point in the middle of the horizon.

The light is clear and radiant, the atmosphere ordered and dignified.

Turner has decisively changed all these features of the original. There is no balance, the perspective is disorderly, differences of scale are exaggerated.

The sun burns rather than illuminates. The atmosphere is chaotic-not ordered and idealised as in Claude's painting but, as Wilson says, more the disorderly scenes which Turner would have witnessed on the Thames near his own home.

And Turner's painting is full of menace and forboding.

The children in the foreground pushing a toy boat into the harbour foreshadows Aeneas' . later desertion of his lover Dido.

But more generally the Turner atmosphere of'the painting foreshadows the later degeneration of the ancient Carthaginian Empire-which for Turner was a symbol for his own gloomy expectations about the degeneration of Britain.

The circumstances in which the two pictures were painted point up these differences: Claude's was a commission for a wealthy aristocrat while Turner's - was an intensely personal statement which he THE TRANSITIONAL PROGRAMME IN TODAY'S CLASS Founding document of the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee Published in the International Discussion Bulletin No. 1.

Available, price 75p including postage from WSL, BM Box 5277 London WC1V 6XX. Claude kept hanging in his own home until his death.

Though Second Sight concentrates on these two paintings it refers to others by both painters which can all be seen in a neighbouring room.

Second Sight is recommended as a visually and intellectually satisfying way to spend an hour. It has the added virtue of not being overcrowded and of being free of charge!

Fourth International!

No. 1 Nov. 1979 INTERNATIONAL DISCUSSION BULLETIN

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SOCIALIST PRESS. minesia: " Fibrize DUSTRIAL REYS Page i!

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Gallery: admission free, show- ing February 14-April 13).