[desperate] Romantics

9 August 2010 - 31 July 2011, Tate Britain

The current display in the Clore Galleries at Tate Britain is an exhibition entitled Romantics and is open until July 2011. The exhibition is a giant – presenting  countless works that loosely fit into the definition of ‘Romanticism.’ As you walk through each room you will encounter a very large amount of paintings, which tiptoe around a very loose aesthetic and historical interpretation of Romanticism. What the exhibition presents are endless variations on the same theme. For example, there were paintings by John Constable, J.M. W. Turner and David Wilkie and there were also works by artists from the 1940s labelled ‘Neo Romantics’ such as Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash and Leslie Henry.

Each room had its own vague thematic title that attempted to shroud the lazy curatorial input by proposing two contradictory ideas in which to view the paintings, such as “Hopes and Fears”, “Near and Far”, “Past and Present” and “Word and Image”. Most of the paintings could have been viewed under any one of these endlessly nebulous headings and there was little justification for those that were. Despite my despair at Tate’s general preference for tight, chronologically organised exhibitions I felt this would have made some sense of the thematic jumble that ensued.

There were seven curators who organised this exhibition, which was evidenced in the almost fragmented move from room to room. This was most painfully obvious in the last two rooms which included photographic work of twentieth and twenty-first century artists and provided little aesthetic, curatorial or historical explanation.  It felt as though the exhibition presented an idea of Romanticism from various different museum professionals’ perspectives all of which differed though without enough variation to make the exhibition of interest.

Jem Southam, 'The Pond at Upton Pyne, January 1997' (diptych), from the series 'The Pond at Upton Pyne'. © Jem Southam. From http://www.vam.ac.uk/images/image/26965-popup.html

At the very back of the Clore Gallery are two rooms which feature what I can only presume to be a contemporary response to the Romantic aesthetic. The jump from nineteenth-century works to twentieth-century ones is not explained and I cannot help but think it was a desperate attempt to update a boring exhibition and incite interest from a younger demographic. This sudden jolt from a foray into the dreamy, painted landscapes of Romanticism to the harsh photographic medium of ‘contemporary Romanticism’ is bizarre and yet there is something inspired in the inclusion of these works.  I found Jem Southam’s Upton Pyne January 1997 a contemporary take on Constable’s notion of Romanticism where subtle elements of discordance are evidenced in the landscape. But despite this tiny slither of hope in an exhibition where despair crept into the corner of every room through the auspices of the dull, over-textual labelling , the inclusion only made me yearn for what I felt was the notable absence of nineteenth-century photography.