Date: 05-05-1992
Owning Institution: Waddington Galleries
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999            
Subject:   20th Century          

AT WHICH London art gallery could you have seen, during the last five years, the following twentieth-century works of art? Picasso's Buste de Femme sur Fond Gris, 1943, Le Hibou, 1952, Femme de Profil dans un Fauteuil, 1956, Les Pigeons Perches, 1960, Nu Couche et Homme a la Guitare; Braque's Le Store, 1954-61; Gris's La Grappe de Raisins; Giacometti's Nature Morte dans l'Atelier 1950; Leger's Composition au Couteau, 1947; Magritte's L'Explication, 1952; Willem de Kooning's Untitled (Woman), 1966-7; Gabo's Linear Construction in Space No 2, 1957-8; Ernst's Enfant, Cheval, Fleur et Serpent, 1927; De Chirico's Evangelical Still Life, 1917.

The Tate might be a reasonable guess but the right answer is Waddington Galleries, where the con-tinuous, rolling display of gallery stock at 11 Cork Street has, for many years, offered an arguably better and certainly more varied education in the major modern art of this century than any of the country's public galleries. If you knew the answer, it is odds-on that you are either an artist, an art student, an art collector, a critic or a curator. Most other people, even those with an interest in art who will make a point of seeing Mantegna at the Royal Academy, Rembrandt at the National Gallery and Otto Dix at the Tate, are simply unaware of the great paintings and sculpture usually on display behind the plate-glass of this particular commercial art gallery. I should add at this point that it is my fault.

Well, not entirely my fault - but it is the fault of critics in general that so little attention has been called to the great works of art that are regularly shown at Waddington Galleries on their way from one (usually private, usually foreign) collection to another. Arts journalists have a fondness for ''events'' that can cloud their judgement, which means the temporary presence of, say, a couple of Picassos in a selling show is less liable to rate a newspaper article than an exhibition of new installation art at the Whitechapel. Never mind that the installation art might be terrible and the Picassos wonderful: one is an ''event'', the other is not, or is less evidently one.

There is also a largely unspoken disdain among critics for exhibitions that seem too nakedly commercial in intent. Waddington's stock shows, which are, after all, what the name suggests - exhibitions of stock that the gallery happens to hold, rehung every month - have certainly suffered as a result. Those in the know tend to find out about a particularly good hang at 11 Cork Street from the art grapevine, so the Waddington stock show has come to occupy a curious and somewhat regrettable position. It is one of the great institutions of cultural life in London, this constantly revolving free exhibition of major Cubist, Surrealist, Abstract Expressionist and other forms of modern art - yet it is also an institution that hardly anyone knows about.

Waddington's stock shows are better and more significant than anyone else's because, simply, Wad-dington's stock is better than anyone else's. This is particularly evident at the moment, since not just No 11 but two of the other galleries in Cork Street owned by Waddington (Nos 12 and 34) have been given over to one of the largest stock shows the dealer has mounted. This may have something to do with art being hard to shift at the moment: bad news for Leslie Waddington but not such bad news for everybody else. The show contains, among other things, 10 Degas bronzes, nine Henry Moores, a pair of Calders, a beautiful Joseph Cornell box and a major early Giacometti. This unusually large accumulation of exceptional but unsold work is evidence that when the going gets tough the rich don't always go shopping.

Evidence, too, that stock shows can be rather more than the naked exercises in art dealing they are sometimes supposed to be. One of the pleasures of these exhibitions (although it's a bitter- sweet sort of pleasure) derives from the knowledge that, since all the art here is for sale, it is pretty likely you will never see it again. The fact that the Picasso in the corner is probably going to spend the next 20 years in a Swiss millionaire's office makes you look at it more intensely than if you were seeing it in, say, the permanent col-lection of the Tate.

This isn't the only way in which Waddington's stock shows encourage a different kind of looking at art. That they are exhibitions of works that have been assembled with no specific curatorial brief in mind, with no exact argument to prove, gives many of their juxtapositions a liveliness and unpredictability that is both re-freshing and unique. They offer a way of experiencing art of museum quality that is to be found nowhere else, certainly not in museums.

They also have a kind of coherence, in that these shows almost always come across as more than merely an accumulation of stuff that is for sale, but it is not the coherence of a conventional museum hang. This is not easy to explain, but a start can be made by looking at one juxtaposition in the current show of sculpture from the stockroom: on one side of the main gallery at No 11, you will find a Dubuffet sculpture from the late 1960s, a roughened white object with crazy-paving ink markings called L'Oiseau de Mer 11; on the other, there is an example of the American sculptor John Chamberlain's work, a bouquet of crushed car parts called Scotch Vapour from 1989. Neither, perhaps, is a masterpiece, but to see them together is to be presented with an interesting idea about the relationship between a certain kind of French and a certain kind of American art that rarely, if ever, are brought together in museums. It is to realise that the blue-collar toughness that runs through American art of this century is not quite as home-grown as some of its apolo-gists might argue - to realise that the roughened textures of Chamberlain's sculpture (or, for that matter, of Barnett Newman's or Franz Kline's painting) have their origins in a fundamentally European reinvention of the material aspect of art. What might be termed the sophisticated crudeness of modern American art has its roots in Europe.

There is no better place than Waddington's to appreciate the subtle strands of influence that link the School of Paris and the School of New York: but these are not the forms of influence that are easily formu-lated, because they come into play at an almost subterranean level of technique. Again, this is hard to ex-plain, but to visit Waddington's regularly is to see (for instance) just how much of the great art of this century stems from the technical innovations made by Picasso and Matisse at its beginning; it is to see how the richness and beauty that those painters found - in what, before them, would have been regarded as an unacceptably coarse handling - have been reincarnated in myriad different forms in much later American art; it is to see the extent to which even presumed all-American artists such as Warhol or Lichtenstein subscribe, in certain paintings, to a certain Parisian modernist aesthetic, to see how they strive for the beauty of the weathered surface, or of the brushstroke almost but not quite detached from its descriptive function.

The unusual juxtapositions of the Waddington stock exhibition can be embarrassing on occasion, and there is a good case of that in the present show, where Jim Dine's would-be classical headless Venuses in cracked and weathered green bronze look sentimental and merely picturesque close to a sequence of Degas bronzes of ballet dancers. Degas earns the right to his classical references, makes the classical language of the figure expressive of precarious balance, of beauty won through pain and concentration, whereas Dine just makes it expressive of his ambition to make it expressive, so to speak.

The willingness to juxtapose new art with great art performs a useful function - it rarely if ever happens in museums - and just about the best way of telling if a contemporary painter or sculptor is any good is to see their work beside that of the acknowledged masters. Again, this is not a type of juxtaposition that can very often be rationally defended, yet that is only because it goes too deep into the prime mystery of the visual arts, which is why one work should have presence and another not. This is the enigma around which almost all art criticism pirouettes; it is not something that can ever be quite accounted for. Picasso recognised this and always wanted to see his works beside those of the masters' to see how he was doing, so perhaps it is appropriate that his paintings, at Waddington, should so frequently hang beside those of much younger artists. It is a chance for them to test their strength, which doesn't always work to their disadvantage. To see a Hodgkin next to a Picasso (as in the last show at Waddington's) is to realise how good, in the barely formulable sense of what it is to make a painting work, Hodgkin really is.

Whether it makes good commercial sense to show your stock as prominently as Leslie Waddington does is questionable. The sort of people with the sort of money required to buy the art here (if you need to ask how much, as they say, then you can't afford it) are not likely to wander in off the street for their Cubist still life or Degas bronze. They will make an appointment, and there is a school of thought which holds that such collectors like to be taken into a quiet room, shown a few select things, and given the impression that they are the beautiful people for which those beautiful objects have been specially reserved.

This is presumably the philosophy that prevails at, say, the Marlborough and Lefevre Galleries, both of which have wonderful stock but hardly ever give the general public even the slightest sniff of it. So go, regularly, to Waddington's, and enjoy it, it doesn't cost anything, and it is a wonderful way of getting out from under the dead hand of the Identikit museum-of-modern-art approach to hanging pictures. It is a way of stepping away from all those stale, hand-me-down categories (Cubist, Futurist, Surrealist, Pop) and towards a richer and more unpredictable notion of the truth about art.

In this commercial gallery you come closer than anywhere else to looking at art as artists look at it - not as a succession of styles, but as a melting-pot.