The Eurostarry Night

Jackson Pollock, The Early Years 1934-1947 Musée Picasso. Paris

Une Année Révolutionnaire, 1793-1794, Musée Carnavalet, Paris

Caillebotte Painting Men, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, National Gallery, London

Trying to overcome my frustration - my train from Paris back to London last weekend was cancelled for no reason - I have enjoyed being a flâneuse in both cities over just the last few days. Whilst my own paintings were on the walls at the Royal Watercolour Society Gallery in Whitcomb Street in central London last month, I was assailed by the habitual sense of stasis and mental fog that accompanies having an exhibition. The idea of willingly going to another exhibition brought on feelings of nausea, even the Van Gogh show on next door, at the National Gallery, where the queues reached right round to Whitcomb Street.

  If only proximity to greatness was infectious…..

I am now over my squeamishness, and have much to celebrate as a gallery addict rather than as an artist. In Paris, I wore out a pair of shoes tramping my favourite arrondissements and consuming as much art as I could digest in two days. Making up for lost time. In search of lost time. À la recherche du temps perdu. First, I journeyed to the 20th century. A show about early Jackson Pollock and his relationship to Picasso at the Musée Picasso, made a convincing argument about the influence of mature Picasso on Jack the Dripper in his early years. Pollock became an abstract expressionist - or whatever you want to call him - via an interest in surrealism and Jungian analysis. I was completely foxed by who was who sometimes. Fascinating. Surprising. Revelatory. An idiosyncratic show, but the whole was greater than its parts. Each artist gains from the other. A conversation across the ages. Through Time.

After Pollock and Picasso, I left the 20th century and for light entertainment I time-travelled to the 18th century, and hastened round the corner to see a historical show about the French Revolution at the Musée Carnavalet, the museum of the city of Paris. I confess I emerged from this show as confused as when I entered. The downfall of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette is a familiar story, but trying to unpick the tremors of 1789 and onwards towards the coming age of Napoleon is not easy. The show has a soundtrack of revolutionary songs, and the vitrines exhibit documents, engravings and even the original clothes of the sans culottes. The narrative is as fascinating, moving, topical and worryingly unreliable as the post-truth times we live in now. The dramatis personae that people the doomed Revolution feel as volatile and problematical as Trump’s future cabinet. Robespierre, Marat, and Danton are great heroes who then fall from grace and end up dead. From the lectern to the guillotine in one not so easy swipe. There is a vitrine with the guillotine’s blade. Ouch.

The next day, I went forward a century to the gilded age of 19th century Paris and to the Musée D’Orsay to say hello to old friends - Degas, Bonnard and Courbet - but really to see the show dedicated to Gustave Caillebotte. Those who have been to my home know that there is a huge poster, from a 1994 show at the Grand Palais in Paris of a rainy scene in Paris, with top-hatted men and well-dressed Parisiennes negotiating the wet cobblestones. I totally love Caillebotte. He is retrogressive, bourgeois, stuffy and the most decadent of Proustian célibataires. Cigars, brandy, ties, suits and overly furnished rooms. Everything the sans culottes and (many of) the Impressionists disliked. Portraits, scenes of leisurely afternoons, rowing, smoking, sailing, drinking. This show is ostensibly about Caillebotte’s paintings of men, but there is an extraordinary surprisingly explicit nude of a sprawled, scrawny young model. This is as shocking in its genteel masculine context as Courbet’s scandalous Origine du Monde, hanging discreetly not far away in a dark corner of the museum.

And then, courtesy of Eurostar, back to Trafalgar Square, where I started, with Van Gogh next door. What a glorious, privileged finale to my peregrinations through time and space. This is Van Gogh in 1888 and 1889, after the failure of his naive dream to create an artists’ commune in Arles in the yellow house with Paul Gauguin. The painting of Vincent’s bed with two pillows and the two empty chairs and two coats on the rack is so eloquent and so tragic. These are the last two years before his suicide in 1890, and with the benefit of hindsight it is hard not to see these paintings, drawings and ink sketches in the light of his mental disintegration. At the end of his life, he is producing one very great painting after another, in a heightened state of ecstasy and mania. The trees are alive. The sky falls in. The stars are holes in the fabric of the universe. The ground undulates. The fields move. Flowers grow before one’s very eyes. Faces morph into masks. This is a glorious show. I am so glad that I have seen it, but now, no excuses. Back to the studio, footsore, mindsore, soulsore and somewhat daunted. But ready to get going again. Onward and upward.

Happy Holidays to you all.Over and out.

Robin Richmond, December 4th, 2024