Visual Art

The panel discussed the years visual art.

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

KIRSTY WARK:
Tom, first of all, the big art blockbuster opened the year and it was Titian. Was that a highlight?

PAULIN:
It was indeed. I managed to slink in before it opened. I was just wandering round with almost nobody there. It was a great experience. I had studied Titian really through studying one of his greatest critics, William Hazlitt, some years ago, so I was fascinated to go back and see many of the paintings, ones I had never seen before. I mourn the fact that the Louvre doesn't lend out its paintings. There were all sorts of Titians I wanted to see that I knew Hazlitt had written about and copied and they weren't there. It was an extraordinary exhibition.

WARK:
Above a lot of other old masters, you had a sense of engagement with the viewer because you weren't clear what was going on but also your relationship with the painting changed all the time?

PAULIN:
Absolutely. As Hazlitt says,the eyes follow you around the room. It's just extraordinary genius.

GERMAINE GREER:
These were amazing pictures, many of which had not seen each other for 500 years, so it was amazing to see them together, this amazing gathering of the clan. But the thing about Titian that you sometimes forget is his extraordinary humanity. None of the pictures is quite what it seems to be. There is always a kind of comment that Titian is making, so that people who should look grand look vulnerable.

BONNIE GREER:
Everything Germaine, Tom said is true. And for me I had one of these things I think they call the Stendhal effect where you are suddenly overwhelmed with such beauty, because we were there alone, practically I was in the room surrounded by these. I looked at the little one with the little duke, who was in the clothes that were too big for him and I just burst into tears - it was so beautiful. The narrative that you can see in each frame. His relationship to paint, how he uses paint. His notion of perspective. But also the eyes. The other thing that's amazing about the eyes is that all of them are his in a sort of strange way.

WARK:
Away from London, in the country, and indeed in Scotland too, there were some really astounding exhibitions. There was the Whistler.

MORLEY:
The Whistler was fabulous.

WARK:
There was the Gormley at the Tate but there was also the Hepworth at St Ives, which was, for me, one of the very moving experiences.

MORLEY:
It was a very moving experience. Going out to see an exhibition they put first of all in the Tate there, where you see her sculptures. They are beautiful but they are trapped. What was interesting, it's that thing where you go to an exhibition and the pieces are caged somehow and they feel that they are hemmed in. Then you could go outside to a sculpture garden to see other of her great pieces. It's like they were liberated. Because it was in the open air and you actually see this wonderful kind of thing how her sculptures had come out of the landscape and they'd come out of the sea. You could see it within the landscape and you could see the sea. Also that fabulous thing I found out about Barbara Hepworth, she was indeed the first one to get to the hole and the inside became the outside. So you are seeing things that are inside and outside, then you go outside, and this wonderful movement from the sculptures being inside to being outside to the whole landscape around you, it was tremendously moving and almost hallucinogenic. It was fabulous.

WARK:
And Gormley and the connection he has now made with the north-east, that he has made in the Gateshead area. These figures that kind of shimmered and moved and yet people were identifying themselves.

PAULIN:
Yes. A great democrat, I think, in the sense of people's working lives. It was marvellous.

WARK:
What about the sun in the Turbine Hall?

BONNIE GREER:
When I went I went there with two fellow Americans and I said to them, "This is why I love England." The sun, but what was happening was some people had obviously gone to the loo and changed their clothes. They were lying on the floor with sunglasses underneath an umbrella with shorts. People were having their lunches there, as if this was a real sun. I thought it was just the most wonderful installation. And I must mention Gothic at the V & A. That was very moving show, for me. I thought it was quite, quite beautiful.

WARK:
Also, it was a summer of photography.

MORLEY:
Cindy Sherman, thinking about celebrity again and the way she has played about with celebrity. I was going to mention about how in the Andrew O'Hagan book, Personality, Lena Zavaroni sort of disappears at one point away from her fame, the person disappears and becomes nothing. Cindy Sherman has played around with that a lot. Her stuff at the Serpentine was gorgeous in that sense.