{"id":1515,"date":"2009-04-11T20:44:19","date_gmt":"2009-04-11T19:44:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mcrrview.web.its.manchester.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=376"},"modified":"2016-01-24T19:52:47","modified_gmt":"2016-01-24T18:52:47","slug":"glenn-brown-at-tate-liverpool-george-always-portraits-of-george-melly-by-maggi-hambling-at-walker-art-gallery-liverpool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1515","title":{"rendered":"Glenn Brown at Tate Liverpool; George Always, Portraits of George Melly by Maggi Hambling<\/em>, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool"},"content":{"rendered":"

The paintings in room one of Glenn Brown’s exhibition at Tate Liverpool are versions of sci-fi sublime: science fiction landscapes with cities on planets, swirling gas-clouds and nebulae with space stations.\u00a0 These are huge wall-sized canvases; often enlarged from small air-brush cartoons in sci-fi magazines.\u00a0 Brown’s debts to the romantic sublime of John Martin are openly acknowledged in the painting\u2019s titles.\u00a0 But these first paintings are not the focus of this show.<\/p>\n

The bulk of the paintings here are portraits, and these are remarkable pictures.\u00a0 Brown appears to work with a thick impasto brush work with the oil daubed onto the canvas;\u00a0 he ‘appears’ to work like this but close-to the surface of the picture is quite smooth and matt.\u00a0 The portraits are done in swathes of paint:\u00a0 the forms of nose, cheeks and chin emerging from Brown\u2019s amazing control of perspective and chiaroscuro. In addition, Brown creates extraordinary backgrounds sometimes night skies, sometimes pure colours, greys and blues manipulated with ariel perspective.\u00a0 These backgrounds thrust the portraits out at the viewer.\u00a0 One such is \u2018The Holy Virgin\u2019 from 2003, in which a sad clown\u2019s face, and a happy clown\u2019s face emerge from an swirling mass of yellows, reds and white, with a perfect, air-brushed, pink nose for each clown.<\/p>\n

Brown often creates series of paintings using different palettes and subtly different perspectives.\u00a0 One group, \u2018New Dawn Fades\u2019, \u2018Little Death\u2019, \u2018The Marquis of Bredalbane\u2019 and \u2018The Real Thing\u2019, is based on the same Frank Auerbach head and shoulders.\u00a0 And Brown has a lovely way of both holding line and blurring it at the edge of the head – where the hair meets the background.\u00a0 In this series, the eyes and nostrils are strikingly simple,\u00a0 black absences in the face.<\/p>\n

The most striking portrait in the collection, \u2018Hunky Dory\u2019 from 2005, is a head and shoulders that harks back to the Dutch masters. The colour palette is limited to blues and white with a stark blue background.\u00a0 Brown creates the delicacy of a care-worn old man with white hair and white beard that contains much pathos.<\/p>\n

A problem is that Brown\u2019s work draws the viewer\u2019s eye to its technique in a relentless, somewhat cloying way.\u00a0 The technique is so bravura and so achieved that it leaves the viewer\u2019s imagination very little room for manoeuvre. There is some welcome relief in room seven where what the exhibition notes call \u2018anthropomorphic\u2019 blobs explore a much more ambiguous and ambivalent view of the human figure, where the relationship between eye and orifice is more strangely suggested, where, from the latter, roses may grow.<\/p>\n

Better, perhaps, to cross the city to the Walker Art Gallery, where Maggi Hambling\u2019s \u2018George Always:\u00a0 portraits of George Melly\u2019 is a wonderful, vibrant commemoration of the last years, death and beyond of \u2018Good Time\u2019 George.\u00a0 Hambling\u2019s portraits show a swaggering, yet infinitely sensitive man in his range of mad ties, as his braces barely keep his embonpoint from bursting over his trousers.\u00a0 The best of these is a large picture of Melly dancing with the figure of his beloved Bessie Smith behind him and, in front, a slightly crumpled, seated Melly, decked out in the robes of his honorary doctorate from Liverpool John Moores University.<\/p>\n

These are lovely, warm portraits, including a beautiful series in pen and ink of \u2018George Reading\u2019, \u2018George Sleeping\u2019 etc., and Hambling\u2019s imaginings of Melly\u2019s entrance to Heaven –\u00a0 a whisky in one hand and a cigarette in the other. In comparison to Hambling\u2019s other series of portraits of the dead and dying, of her mother and her \u2018muse\u2019 Henrietta Moraes, these are executed in a wide and vivid primary palette; deeply, deeply moving testaments to what must have been a profound friendship.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The paintings in room one of Glenn Brown’s exhibition at Tate Liverpool are versions of sci-fi sublime: science fiction landscapes with cities on planets, swirling gas-clouds and nebulae with space stations.\u00a0 These are huge wall-sized canvases; often enlarged from small air-brush cartoons in sci-fi magazines.\u00a0 Brown’s debts to the romantic sublime of John Martin are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[12,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nGlenn Brown at Tate Liverpool; George Always, Portraits of George Melly by Maggi Hambling, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1515\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Glenn Brown at Tate Liverpool; 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