Date: 30-11-1999
Owning Institution:
Publication:     Sunday Telegraph Features  
Subject: Renaissance  19th Century    

The eminent equestrian painter Sir Alfred Munnings chose a spring evening in 1949 to give vent to his long bottled-up contempt for “so-called modern art”. The occasion was the annual banquet of the Royal Academy of Arts, when as outgoing President Munnings was due to make his retirement speech. On his right sat the Right Honourable Winston Churchill, a dabbler in oils who had recently been appointed Honorary Academician Extraordinary, and who on artistic matters was very much a man after Munnings’ own heart. Emboldened by such august company and by rather too much to drink, Munnings began his diatribe.

He denounced the perverted new styles of art fashionable in Paris: half-baked paintings of people with eyes where their noses ought to be, and the like. If taste for the work of foreign johnnies like Picasso and Matisse continued unchecked, it would mean the death of serious art. “If you paint a tree,” Munnings thundered, “for God’s sake make it look like a tree! If you paint a sky, for God’s sake make it look like a sky!” He gestured to Winston Churchill for support: “I know he is with me because once he said to me, ‘Alfred, if you met that Picasso coming down the street would you join with me in kicking his something something something?’ I said, ‘Yes sir! Yes! I would!’”

Munnings’s speech established him as the country’s principal spokesman of reactionary taste: a blimpish but undeniably entertaining character, much in demand as an after-dinner speaker. 2001 is officially British Art Year – marking the centenary of Henry Tate’s establishment of a national British art collection – so perhaps it is appropriate that it should begin with Sotheby’s large retrospective exhibition of Munnings’s work. He was after all the most rabidly British artist of the last hundred years.

Munnings is best known for his paintings of thoroughbred horses and their equally thoroughbred owners but the exhibition also includes his little known satirical picture, Does the Subject Matter? First shown in the RA Summer Show of 1956, it is, so to speak, the painted version of the infamous Academy Dinner speech of seven years earlier. Exhibiting confusion, amusement or grotesque aesthetic ecstasy, a group of connoisseurs are shown contemplating an indeterminate blob of a sculpture – probably meant to be one of Barbara Hepworth’s Picasso-inspired bronzes of the 1950s. On the wall behind them hang three paintings by the hated Picasso himself, several of whose works had recently been acquired by the Tate Gallery. To the right, as if to declare his own contrasting allegiance to the grander traditions of the past, Munnings has introduced a black dog, based on a very similar animal in Velazquez’s seventeenth-century masterpiece Las Meninas. It seems richly ironic, as exhibition organiser Kenneth McConkey points out, that Picasso himself was obsessively reworking Las Meninas at the time.

In the long run Munnings did himself few favours by continually tilting at the perceived excesses of modern art. The behaviour of his later years decisively shaped the way in which he was to be remembered by most historians of British painting (when they bothered to remember him at all): as a crotchety old man taking out the frustrations of his own failing career on the efforts of an avant-garde he could not even begin to understand.

But Munnings himself had been young once, and almost avant-garde. The Sotheby’s exhibition contains several of the pictures with which he first made his name, at the turn of the century: depictions of wandering gypsies with their horses, painted in a daring approximation of the still novel style introduced by the French Impressionists just a few decades earlier. Such works show among other things that Munnings was considerably closer in sensibility to his almost exact contemporary Picasso than he would later care to admit: Picasso’s Rose Period paintings also pay wistful homage to the vagabond life of gypsies and fairground entertainers. The young Munnings even went so far as to live a version of the existence he romanticised, taking to the road in a brightly painted caravan emblazoned with the name “Jasper Petulengro” – a celebrated early nineteenth-century Norfolk gypsy – together with a groom, a male gypsy model known as “Shrimp” and a small herd of ponies.

It was only during the years around World War I that Munnings came to specialise in equestrian subjects. His pictures of race horses and hunting scenes had a profound appeal in time of war, harking back to an old ideal of England as an unchanging pastoral idyll. Looking at Munnings’s art, people could forget for at least an instant the appalling loss of life and the shells exploding over the trenches in Normandy.

Eventually equestrian painting was to develop into what Kenneth McConkey calls  “a golden treadmill” for Munnings. He became artist by appointment to the Edwardian aristocracy and painted rather too many by-rote pictures of milords and miladies with their prize mares and stallions. Stephen Spender must have had Munnings somewhere in his mind when writing in 1951 that British art seemed to be full of “beautiful colts which cannot stay the course”. But although his later work did not live up to the promise of his youth, Munnings’ oeuvre as a whole is certainly worth a second look. At its best, for example Changing Horses of 1920 – a portrait of Munnings’s wife and groom with a grey mare and black colt silhouetted against a grey sky and a broad East Anglian horizon – it is surprisingly full of emotion, infused by an implicitly patriotic feeling for English nature and weather.