Monthly column on the arts

We had a family outing to London on the May bank holiday - a leisurely car trip, dropping off friends at Gatwick and then heading for Southwark and lunch in the venerable George Inn, one of London's most wonderful (and least-known) 17th-century survivors.

Southwark is a fascinating place, where ancient edifices hide behind ugly modern buildings that themselves jostle alongside some of the capital's most remarkable modern architecture. You can visit Sam Wanamaker's visionary rebuilt Globe Theatre, or stroll a hundred yards or so and see the site of the real Globe, marked out on a modern car park that now occupies the site - or visit the little museum at the Rose Theatre, where you can look down on the actual theatre foundations lying under water for preservation, waiting for a grant to excavate them properly.

But we were headed for Tate Modern, to pick up some postcards. Once again we marvelled at the experience of standing in the astonishing spaces and perspectives of the old Bankside Power Station, now a controversial art museum. Controversy there certainly is, but there's also an experience of the artworks that you can only get by being there. Postcards don't tell the half of it.

No substitute

I reflected on the way home that there is no substitute for actually seeing art. Books and reproductions can take you part of the way; of course they can.
But I well remember visiting a London Van Gogh exhibition in my twenties and realising that though I had a number of books with Van Gogh pictures in them, and even a Van Gogh print on the wall, there was a dimension to what Van Gogh was doing for which the reproductions had not prepared me at all. It was the impact of the rich colour, of the visible brushstrokes, the sense that one was watching somebody in a titanic struggle to make marks on canvas. The reproductions show a version of the result. The painting itself shows you the quality of the process of making.

Shock

The shock of seeing a painting 'in the flesh' can be a matter of size. Some of Salvador Dali's paintings are smaller than reproductions lead you to expect: conversely, although a book can show you the theory of Frank Stella's argument against boundaries, as the spaces within his paintings expanded to swallow up the space that contained them, you're going to see the paintings quite differently when all 25 feet of one of his canvases tower above you.

It can be a matter of details that get lost in reproduction: it would be an expensive reproduction that reproduced the multi-layer paint in a Jackson Pollock painting, which makes seeing the actual painting a voyage into a three-dimensional world. In a book, Jasper John's pop art renditions of the American flag look like photographs, but when you stand close to the painting you see how each strip is individually brushed, no stripe the same - significant? Maybe, maybe not, but there is more to the painting than you can see from a reproduction.

The difference

Of course art books and prints are indispensable as a way of keeping in touch with the heritage of art that we possess, whether it be old masters or the latest street fashion that may or may not endure. But it's worth reminding ourselves from time to time that the real thing is different. We're fortunate in this country that none of us lives very far from an art gallery of some kind and local arts associations make available to us all sorts of live art experiences. An occasional visit to look at some painting that one knows well from reproduction can give new richness to an old friendship. (As one who is rarely able to get to concerts, I could expand the thought to include the desirability of occasionally hearing live music, rather than depending on records all the time: it's said that a record collector was once taken to a live concert, and complained about the poor stereo). It's also worth considering buying the occasional original piece of art. I love the reproductions that hang in our home, but I also get immense pleasure from the originals we have (which tend to be by artists rather less known than the Rembrandts and others whom we own in reproduction, I have to say).

Return to the original . . .

Is there some lesson to be applied here, about the need to go back to first sources, to avoid living one's spiritual life on the basis of pale reproductions but to keep going back to the original in all its colour, richness, scale and detail? Far be it from me to over-egg the cake. But it does make me think ...

When did you last see your painting?

No substitute

Shock

The difference

Return to the original . . .

David Porter

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