The Summer Exhibition as barometer of 'what England is thinking now'

Visual Arts Patrick Reyntiens
IF THE ALBERT HALL is the village hall of the nation, the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (open until August 15) is the art that would be hung in it. The representation of the painters and sculptors on show is "what England is thinking now". The RA is as good a barometer of what levels of aesthetic awareness are operating in the country as any other — but, wait a minute — there is no other. This omnium inclusiveness makes the Academy unique.
The Summer Show is far better hung and placed than before. There is more space between the pictures. The South Rooms are largely divested of their clutter of small pictures and the painters of miniatures and fans, flabellipictors the latter, have been eliminated. The near majority of pictures hung on the walls are non-figurative and there are no municipal official portraits to be seen. There are a good few honorary Royal Academicians, painters of the '70s and '80s fame-trail such as Roberto Matta, Anselm Kiefer and Cy Twombly. Lumme, haven't we moved with the times? Then, as ever, the modem RAs include those who in their younger days would have been highly embarassed to have been in any way associated with the Royal Academy. Ken Kiff, Craigie Aitcheson, Albert Irwin and Terry Frost, all RAs. Even Chris On.
There are very few artists connected to the Establishment or the Church. There is a dearth of religious art altogether, and the Pope might be dismayed at the poor showing of Christianity. It is as though the final emancipation of the artist from the fabric of society has taken place. Many of the pieces in the exhibition are good in themselves but it is difficult to see where they would fit into the fabric of modem living except as something inside the most extravagant of penthouse suites. Perhaps that is precisely where they will end up. Sensitive painters (and there are a few) seem to be silenced by the tarantara of blistering colour in the bigger paintings.
In no place is the cacophony more raucous than in the Lecture Room — the penultimate gallery of the exhibition. Here David Hockney RA has exhibited six giant outsized panoramas of the Grand Canyon, which invest the whole room (and it is a very large room) with the gobsmacking ker-lang of actually being in the middle of the Grand Canyon itself. Twelvefoot mirrors in the corners of the room multiply the brobdignagian imagery and produce odd sensations of vertigo and nausea, as one would experience on site, presumably. The colour is heraldic in its intensity of reds. Scarlet, signal, vermilion, blood and maroon compete for the descriptive colour of the distant prospects of divides, cliffs and pinnacles. Meantime the earth at one's feet sprouts green shrubs and prostrate desert herbs of an intensity of various greens which is almost intolerable. Altogether these David Hockneys defy being placed anywhere except in a panorama building constructed especially to house them. Who knows; perhaps this is precisely what is going to happen to them. Actually the pictures, taken as a whole, would find their most sympathetic home in the reception area of a giant male sauna, something the size of the Baths of Caracalla. They have by the connotation of their colour, am affinity with the laconicum, but would survive better, perhaps, in the tepidarium. I hope they get there. It is sad that Hockney is painting so badly nowadays. I put it down to the influence of the early triumphs of his scenographic designs. Painters who undertake scenographic commissions grow the tendency to put easy answers into their painting subsequently. David Hockney, with the success of Glyndebourne and the Chicago Opera behind him, is no exception. If one's a painter, opera is bad for one's aesthetic health.
The sculpture was generally abysmally bad, but the architecture was rather interesting and stimulating. But if you want to make a fortune go for lithographs of nudes. One painter made upwards of 100,000 on two prints alone. Now that's serious.