Paradise

Newsnight Review discussed Paradise, an exhibition at the National Gallery in London - the second in a new series of shows grouping artists from centuries apart under one theme.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

MARK LAWSON:
John Carey, no-one is going to object the stuff that's hung here, once you have Monet, Rothko, Spencer, Gaughin. Does it all hang together?

PROFESSOR JOHN CAREY:
I don't think it does. A lot is left out. Most people who know the National Gallery will have seen these pictures anyway. What's left out is paralysed in Christian thinking means afterlife, as well as the Eden myth. What happens afterwards. This is an important political question now, with Islamic fundamentalism and martyrdom. There is nothing about that at all. The painting that comes out of this as great to me, in contrast to the others, is the Stanley Spencer, which is the painting of the resurrection of the dead and a dustman in the arms of his wife. She is relishing the bliss of his corduroy trousers, says Spencer, and the jam tin and things are being resurrected. He realised that paradise is ordinary life if you see it as paradise. That painting seems to me way ahead of the glowing landscapes.

BONNIE GREER:
As I saw the package, I started to realise that a lot of it started with the city itself becoming something, so that the countryside, the rural landscape, began to be the place for people to define themselves as human beings and they could feel on an unconscious level that they were losing parts of themselves to this big city. As that city began to encroach, you had to take that paradise inside yourself because there was no more paradise. It's quite touching when you look at the beginning of it and you see the paradise is the rural setting. The sun, the clouds, the trees, and that it goes inside yourself, as the Rothko and Spencer.

MARK LAWSON:
I did wonder what Monet was doing there. It got too general for me.

KWAME KWEI-ARMAH:
I don't know. I can't get enough of that, honestly. I just love that piece of work. I suppose my favourite was the Rothko. Although I didn't weep, as he has said he would like people to do, at the kind of religious experience of it, I was moved spiritually by it. I looked at it and I found myself drifting into a world that wasn't prescribed, that was an inner paradise. I was so moved by it, I just simply adored it. I loved the exhibition because I went with my three children, and we sat there and we heard the video. Then we went and looked at all of the pictures and we talked about them thematically. They really got into it as well. I think it's very successful on that level.

MARK LAWSON:
This is a popularising project. It's been to Bristol and Newcastle. 160,000 people, doubling what they would have expected normally in those galleries. They are really saying, "Here are 20 or so pretty good paintings, with some dreadful ones as well, of different things." I thought for those who are frightened of art, it's a good introduction.

PROFESSOR JOHN CAREY:
It is. There is also a very good video. What I found lacking was, sometime ago at the Barbican, I saw a picture called Paradise. I have been trying to track it down. Painted about 1900. It was a park scene, a city clerk holding a big umbrella looking into his girlfriend's eyes. It was called Paradise. It may be trite, but a lot of people find paradise of course in another person. That was completely missing from this exhibition.

MARK LAWSON:
But paradise, if you stretch it widely, could become almost anything. It could be sex, drug-taking, anything. That's the problem, that you start stretching it.

BONNIE GREER:
One of the problems as well is that our eyes have been so kitschified by these images we can't look at the pictures and really see what's going on, so this notion of paradise does become inner. Like the Offili which is magnificent.