Boxgrove Priory and Gwen John

I had a day out, making use of the £2 bus fares to visit Boxgrove Priory, of which I'd been only vaguely aware until being invited to a concert there that I probably can't go to but it looked worth investigating even without a choir in it. There's two of them, really. There's one of the ruins that Henry knocked about a lot and a newer one, notwithstanding my most favourite theme for a photo, a cemetery full of mostly time-worn and weather-beaten headstones that no longer record the names of those they were made to commemorate.

Inside, the organ was being maintained by a young organ builder and it's not every day you meet one of them. 

Idyllic, and modest, hidden away off the beaten track, it's hardly Wells Cathedral but if Wells is a big, strapping Beethoven symphony, Boxgrove is a tidy little miniature by Chopin in a village that presumably knows it's gorgeous but seems to go about its business like Camberwick Green.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 With time on my side, changing bus at Chichester, it was convenient to include the Gwen John exhibition at Pallant House, especially as this summer has found itself nominated as a deeper excursion into painting.

It was a surprise to find that the Corner of a Room in Paris is only about 10"x7", having become so accustomed to it at 19x16 in a print that came free with the Sunday paper many years ago that had been in the front room but now furnishes a corner of the new, blue room. Reproductions should really reproduce the scale of the original because the artist must have had their reasons but, no, we wants pictures to be the right dimensions for us and not how big or small they made them.

Gwen is more austere and muted than her brother, Augustus, and in a well thought-out show, comparisons were readily available with Whistler, who we might see as her most significant reference point if not mentor, Rodin and Sickert. But the highlight for me was the side-by-side, intertextual connection with Hammershøi. At first, from a distance, I thought, blimey, that one's a lot like Hammershøi, only to find that's exactly what it was when close enough to read the label. So there's not much wrong with what I know about the art I know about, it's just most of those written up by Vasari that I'm not so sure about.

It was busy in there considering it's been on for a while now. I don't know where so many discerning, vaguely bohemian types can come from. They don't live round my way. It wasn't because it's the first week of the school holidays because there were no children in there. Boxgrove Priory and Pallant House are places one can go to hide from them.

But one has to reserve top markings and superlatives for the likes of the recent Messiah because if one reports everything as being unbelieveably tremendous there's nothing left to say when something is even better.

Gwen John was a fine painter, quiet but not quite as quiet as Hammershøi. She belongs with Whistler more than she does with her brother. We are offered a few by Vuillard, by way of contrast, it seems to me. I'd rather have had more versions of the room in Paris aspiring to abstraction, of which there are a few - window open, window closed, it makes all the difference - than four versions of some of the same restrained portraits.

 

One has to be strict and not dish out Grade A's all over the place like an examiner who's been told to make it look as if the education system is working. It's an 8 or maybe 9/10 exhibition about a 7/10 painter, on a scale on which you need to be Vilhelm Hammershøi or Maggi Hambling to get an 8.

These are all very convincing poems but that is easier for them to do than it is for poetry whose words are expected to say what they mean.

 

Until October 8th.