Class conscious - Andrew Martin tries to understand abstract art
Published 07 June 2004
My wife likes abstract art, I darkly suspect, because she's been to private school
To Tate Modern, and the Edward Hopper exhibition. Nine quid to get in. The same thoughts run through my head whenever I go to a gallery. Expensive. Why are there so many people here? Compare with the emptiness of churches. Art is the new religion of the middle classes. I read that in a newspaper and gave it a big tick in my mind.
I am the worst-dressed person here. And I am the only one not making a witty statement with my bag. It's just an ordinary cycle pannier; but there's a bloke carrying what looks like an American mailman's sack . . . and that woman's handbag is designed to look like a packet of Daz. Everyone is so beautiful and stylish, it's quite intimidating. Wait until they start talking about the art, though. That'll bring 'em down to size.
Remember the golden rule: art aficionados are impressive to the extent that they don't speak. Here we go. Artistic-looking woman in black, holding on to artistic-looking man's arm and staring at one of the bigger Hoppers: "Everyone in his pictures is so alone. It makes you think he must have been an incredibly lonely man." Just the tonic I needed.
Oh, here's another person who looks the part: grey-haired, professorial-looking man pushing an old boy in a wheelchair up to one of Hopper's countryside scenes. "See how the trees seem to threaten the house," says the professor. Mmm . . . quite an impressive observation. No, wait, I've heard that before. He's lifted that remark straight from the catalogue. And he's passing it off as one of his own - to a frail old man in a wheelchair!
Such are my jaundiced, chippy thoughts on visiting galleries. It's not good for me to go, and I usually do so mainly so that I can say that I have been. Only, I don't think there's much kudos attached to visiting the Hopper exhibition. He's a mere realist, after all. His younger, hipper admirers do their best on his behalf, claiming that in some of his works he appears to be "tending towards abstraction", but he obviously lacks the mystique of a Mark Rothko.
Abstract art is perhaps the biggest of the cultural stumbling blocks on my way to true middle classness. The art teacher at my secondary modern had abstract tendencies, and would lay a white piece of card against an orange one, asking: "Can you see that another colour seems to appear between the two?" The response was hardly overwhelming, a situation he rationalised by giving absolutely all of his pupils a "C" for art on their reports.
It was the start of a quest for me - a quest that took me recently to the Philip Guston exhibition at the Royal Academy. I was interested in Guston because he was a realist who turned to abstraction, which to me is the only permissible route. I am less inclined to dismiss as a well-connected fraud any abstract artist who has first painted a nice, accurate picture of, say, a house.
My wife was on hand, and she liked some of his abstracts but not others. She liked the "Monet-esque" ones. Later, I was talking to a friend of mine who actually is an abstract painter and he said, without any prompting: "Guston? Oh yeah, the stuff inspired by Monet is good." Now this was frightening. My friend had not been conferring with my wife, and yet they could both "read" abstracts in a way that escaped me - possibly, I darkly suspected, because they'd both been to private school.
I then went to an art supplies shop on the Archway Road, bought canvases and oils, and asked my sons, aged seven and nine, to paint abstracts. The younger boy produced a sombre piece that he entitled Water in Hell; the elder, a more cheerful work called Tellytubby Question Mark. Both, I could tell, were not quite as good as the abstracts of Guston or Rothko, which surprised me. And so my art education moved forward another notch.
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