Homespun and glowering
Picasso and Warhol at Phillips showroom, Mayfair
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Sometimes there’s too much to look at and it’s impossible to fall under the spell of anything in particular. Such is the situation at Phillips auction house in Mayfair, where 284 works on paper are on show before they are sold later this week. The roll call of artists here is daunting: Freud, Hockney, Hodgkin, and Basquiat, and many more. The loose theme means you have to find your own way through the show, different from other exhibitions which try to answer a question or set out an argument. The showroom context makes you feel like a child in a shop, running this way and that, searching greedily for a hit of art-aura and glamour. It’s a slightly disorientating experience.
Through it all, I spotted a little white plate made by Pablo Picasso shining in the sun. The face on it had a joyful and surprised expression.
It’s very hard to know why something holds your attention and other things can’t. To work it out usually involves a process of considering for a period something your unconscious brain understood within seconds. This earthenware plate’s bright colours delighted me, but also its homespun and handmade quality struck me too. It has that characteristic Picasso insouciance, that informality — crisp and passionate. If you watch videos of him at work, he is a master of the inspired flick of the paintbrush or pen to create pieces with personality and verve. I think he’s captured the antelope (if that’s what it is) perfectly here: that look of slight shock, but also a happy innocence, made more so by the light pastel colour palette.
Elsewhere at Phillips there are darker shades on show. Warhol’s work lends itself very readily to reproduction online: a lot of it is about graphical impact, not fine detail. But I understood something new about his famous Campbell’s Soup when I saw a version of it in the flesh. This edition’s sheer scale was powerful: the curators had given it an entire wall, and hung the cans high up — they tower over a viewer. The red branding of the soup seem to glower, and Warhol’s critique of capitalism became broader: it’s a violent and intimidating system, says Warhol, but also stupid and facile. Warhol’s soup can repetition points at the blandness of capitalism, the homogenizing and conforming effects it has on everything from sexuality to the urban environment. There’s a sort of impenetrability to the cans — they refuse interpretation with their pattern and their advertising-speak. Capitalism, Warhol says, exerts its power to deny and repress dissent.
That an exhibition can contain the homespun and the manufactured in its few rooms is an exciting event. Phillips is free to visit and doesn’t require booking. You can view all the works for sale here.
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