The Mystery of Appearance, at Haunch of Venison.
“The Mystery of Appearance”, a new show at Haunch of Venison, curated by Catherine Lampert, explores the work of ten leading (and mostly deceased) twentieth-century British painters: Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Patrick Caulfield, William Coldstream, Lucian Freud, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Leon Kossoff and Euan Uglow. The show’s title is adapted from a statement by probably the most celebrated member of this decemvirate, Francis Bacon: “To me, the mystery of painting today is how can appearance be made. I know it can be illustrated, I know it can be photographed. But how can this thing be made so that you catch the mystery of appearance within the mystery of the making?”
Lampert imagines the artists, who all knew each other, asking each other such questions. Accordingly, her exhibition is presented as a series of putative pictorial conversations (or arguments) about the representation of reality in the post-war world. It opens with a sequence of images of the single figure: people in rooms, models, the artists themselves. Francis Bacon stares out gnomically from a self-portrait study of 1951 – pencil and charcoal on paper – that makes him look both victim and miscreant, stripped vulnerably half-bare, yet seemingly wearing a stocking over his face, like some melancholy catburglar. Richard Hamilton’s sketches of nudes worry away at the old Cezanne-Cubist conundrum – how to depict the human form in all its ever-shifting transience? – by turning people into fractured ghosts, doubled or tripled by outlines that multiply like whispered doubts. William Coldstream, among the first English proponents of this species of French pictorial anxiety, sinks the problem of looking, and representing, into the very texture of his art. As his Seated Nude looks out at the viewer with a quizzical expression on...
