Maggi Hambling - George always

Reviewing an exhibition with only the catalogue isn't very satisfactory so perhaps this is really a book review. Although I do have an eye witness report from a visit to Liverpool which said this 'was not a patch on what we saw' at the Waves and Waterfalls exhibition in Piccadilly last year- to be fair, we did have the advantage of Maggi there that day as well as generous flowings of free champagne.

Whereas the waves and waterfalls were predominantly monochrome, these paintings of George Melly, Maggi's recently deceased close friend, are lurid and garish in their colour. Only in some of the more high-spirited laughter paintings has Maggi used quite such flamoyant colour before. And if at first it seemed a bit overstated and de trop one is soon thinking that understatement was never George Melly's way, and it isn't Maggi Hambling's either.

The paintings, as so often, are most memorable for the flourish and the relish of Hambling's art. She has painted her parents and her lover-muse, Henrietta Moraes from death and increasingly the borderline between life and death is blurred. The dead continue to live as presences in Maggi's memory and in the paintings while death is present in life, too.

The oil paintings here show Melly and the ghost of Melly in a series of lively poses- singing, dancing, drinking and smoking while the ink drawings are quieter studies of a crumpled figure reading, sleeping and also fishing. Melly's stomach is a recurring feature in many of the paintings, which used to arrive at the front door 'several minutes before the rest of him'. A waterfall triptych adds some of George's colour to the black and white waterfalls that were the highlight of last year's show; George inspects heaven is a regal composition of dark reds; George's ghost dancing, Last drink before Heaven, encountering a leaping fish and surrealist lecture all inevitably take the surrealism a bit further.

The problem with an appreciation of Hambling's work from a small book like this is that even the details don't compensate for the lack of an opportunity to get up close to the intensity of brushwork, the complex combinations of colours that form at a distance into the overall effect. Maggi Hambling's world ranges from the serious forces of nature to the huge laughter of vaudeville and camp and these paintings are from the robustly jovial part of her work. It is only in the drawings, in which Hambling's imagination is given a rest and her eye is concentrated on the life, that Melly becomes a vulnerable, frail figure, struggling to read.

It is to be hoped that increasing coverage of Maggi in the newspapers, whether over the controversial scallop shell on Aldeburgh seashore, over smoking and political correctness, or these paintings, isn't going to become a breakthrough from the art world into the category of general purpose personality and 'national treasure'. It would be best if she were allowed to continue her full-time commitment to her art which, even in these jocular paintings, is a serious business.