Thank God for private collectors. They follow their own tastes and enthusiasms, don’t have to listen to critics or follow fashion and, in buying the art they love, end up enriching us all.
Harry Hyams was that kind of collector. It has been revealed that this multimillionaire property developer – the man behind Centre Point, London – who died in December 2015 has left his art collection to the nation and dedicated £387m from his estate to pay for its maintenance and display. It is a collection that not only enriches us all, but offers a welcome corrective to the widespread and apparently growing ignorance of British art history that stops us valuing the real achievements of British artists down the ages.
Britain has become absurdly confused about the strengths and weaknesses of its own artistic tradition. Second-rate artists get huge amounts of attention while truly great ones are neglected. I am not talking about today’s art – let’s leave that aside. This is about the art from the past that speaks to us. I suppose all art speaks to someone. Yet I truly can’t hear what other people are hearing, see what they are seeing, when they get all moist-eyed about such second-rate British artists as Victor Pasmore, Dod Procter, Winifred Knights or Vanessa Bell.
What all these artists have in common, apart from the fact that they either had exhibitions this year or will have shows early in 2017, is that they worked in Britain in the early and mid-20th century. This is currently the hot period in British art history with academics and curators. Which just goes to show that some people can look at an awful lot of art without learning anything about it. Anyone who has any real feeling for and knowledge of art should be able to see that bigging up British art from the first half of the 20th century is a highly provincial distortion of the facts.
It’s funny – I’m fairly sure the pillars of the art world who promote such stuff all voted Remain in the EU referendum, and yet in a very genteel and nice way, claiming that Henry Moore and Paul Nash are giants of modern art is a narrow, nationalist perspective.
British art in the early 20th century was drab and staid in comparison to the modernist revolution on the continent. It’s not just that we produced no Picasso or Matisse. We nurtured no Mondrian, Ernst, Kandinsky, Magritte, Dix, Miró, Malevich, Braque, Leger, Boccioni, Duchamp … do I need to go on? Britain simply played no real part in the golden age of modernist art.
So why all the endless bigging up of these dreary British artists who failed to be revolutionary in a revolutionary age? Search me. That’s why I am grateful to Harry Hyams. Did Hyams fill his house with Moores and Hepworths? No, he bought The Bridgewater Sea Piece, one of JMW Turner’s most spectacular masterpieces, and loaned it anonymously to the National Gallery. The sea roils and vibrates in this incredible painting, so fluid and alive that it seems about to burst through the surface of the more than two-metre-wide picture and flood the room. It is not so much a ship in a bottle as the ocean in a jar, a wild beast barely contained. Turner painted it in 1801 at the zenith of the Romantic age. All the energy and dread of the revolutions and wars of his time can be felt in it. So can his youth, for he was just 26.
What am I saying – that we should all share the “conservative” tastes of Harry Hyams and look at paintings by Turner instead of British modernists such as Barbara Hepworth? Er, yeah, that is what I am saying – for it is Turner who is the real radical. The British version of modern art between 1900 and 1940 was pallid and mediocre, like an art teacher’s tame version of the creative mayhem going on in Europe at the time. Turner, by contrast, was at the forefront of European Romanticism and his art genuinely influenced the likes of Henri Matisse and Mark Rothko in the modern age. He still echoes in the art of today, from Anselm Kiefer to Olafur Eliasson.
And it’s not just Turner. Hyams also collected the works of the 18th-century Briitsh painter George Stubbs, a true genius of world art – and a disconcertingly modern one. The visitors of all ages who contemplate the profound, sensitive eye of a horse in his masterpiece Whistlejacket in the National Gallery can see this artist is something special. Stubbs can make you see the soul of a horse, in strangely isolating images that single out the mystery of being.
Like Turner, he was a true artistic leader of his age. That age was the Enlightenment, when people thought science and philosophy could change the world. Stubbs, both as a student of nature who dissected a horse and an eerily philosophical contemplative painter, is a visionary Enlightenment artist in the same league as his French equivalent Chardin. He speaks to us as all great artists do, across the ages – after all, nature transfixes us as it transfixed him.
In collecting Stubbs and Turner, Hyams was collecting British artists who truly matter and are truly relevant today, and tomorrow, rather than getting confused as so many supposed experts are by a fashion for very ordinary “modern” British art. Still, it can be hard separating jewels from dross in the patchy history of art in Britain. Hyams also owned Cherry Ripe by John Everett Millais. Ugh, ugh, take it away. Sickly sweet Victorian sentiment is a dark chapter all on its own.
Yet at least this collection keeps us in touch with our cultural identity. Who are the British? This is what we need to work out now Brexit is inevitable. For answers, I would rather look to Stubbs and Turner than the wan studios of the Bloomsbury movement.