‘Damn Braces: Bless Relaxes’ – the commoner against overweening power

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David Ecclestone feels suitably braced by the Whitechapel’s current show

This is a show worthy of your enjoyment, but if your mind-set is at all like mine, you might appreciate a little help. Enjoyment often involves managing expectations.  If, from an art exhibition, you hope for a little beauty (an outdated attitude, arguably) remember this is the Whitechapel: you may need to look for the beauty in the message rather than the objects.  It is a great deal more difficult now for pictures on walls to push boundaries than it was in the days when the Whitechapel gave us Guernica,   Pop art,   Mark Rothko and Frida Kahlo.  Fortunately, the message here is not unattractive: the commoner against overweening power.

So enjoy beauty where you can at the gallery.  The entrance facade to begin with: Charles Harrison Townsend’s 1901 design provides one of the loveliest 20th-century gallery entrances in London.  I was going to say ‘small gallery’ but with the incorporations of the adjacent Passmore Edwards Library building, the Whitechapel’s size has been doubled.  And then there is Gallery Seven, where this show is held.  A large, high-ceilinged, graceful room with a queen-post roof.  Subtly and flexibly lit, it is an ideal exhibition space.

There is a very clear historical and specifically East Anglian jumping off point for the curatorial message – the Norwich School and its encounters with enclosures in the early 19th century.  There is a facsimile of a watercolour by John Sell Cotman (1782–1842) titled Mousehold Heath, Norwich (1812) and tailored to be a ‘feelgood’ image, with a depiction of an enclosed area of land deleted. This area is clearly present in the version at the British Museum.  The burden of protest against the forced appropriation of common grazing land is represented in an image that is easily passed over: a tiny pencil drawing by Cotman of Kett’s castle, the local name for the ruins of St Michael’s Chapel, which had become emblematic of Robert Kett.  Kett was a landowner who had sided with the peasants against enclosure and was hanged at Norwich Castle for his pains.

It is worth lingering over a group of four watercolours by Thomas Harrison Hair (1810–75).  These have some of the compositional simplifications that also give Cotman’s work its appeal.  Images of industry in the rural landscape are rendered as aesthetically satisfying, even when the pumping gear for a colliery airshaft is the subject.  And if you want to be ‘braced’ rather than ‘relaxed’, to quote the curator, Helen Kaplinsky, there is the jarring and effective pair of photographs from Grayson Perry’s  ‘Charms of Lincolnshire’ series (2006). Here we see simply an antique couple ostensibly labouring in the fields at harvest time.  That is, until you pierce the obscurity of the sepia image and detect the tiny, lovingly carved funeral casket of an infant that is about to be buried in this unconsecrated cornfield.

The harvest theme is carried in the visual centrepiece of the exhibition, a large landscape that occupies the centre of the wall opposite the entrance to the gallery.  It is a large oil (1813–26) by Peter de Wint (1784–1849) of a Lincolnshire harvest scene and it painted with some of the legibility of shadows and shapes that bring to mind Gauguin in his Breton landscapes, even if the palette is more sombre and the composition less skilfully articulated.  It is a reminder that the show is sourced from public collections: Wint spent much of his life in Lincoln and a collection of his work is to be found in The Collection, Lincolnshire’s county museum.  He went on to pursue a distinguished career, painting in both watercolour and oils, and has paintings in the National Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate Britain.

The Lincoln collection also subsumes the collection of James Ward Usher (1845–1921), a Lincoln-born businessman, and this provides the link to the modern part of the Whitechapel show with the work of Oliver Lane (born 1981).  Lane is engaged in a project of scanning sculptural objects in the Usher collection and so making them available to anyone without regard to matters of intellectual property rights.  The commonality confiscated on Mousehold Heath is now the more readily defended commonality of the Internet.

I have delayed commenting on the title of the show, ‘Damn Braces: Bless Relaxes’ until the end.  This is largely because I found its relevance a bit marginal.  It is a quote from William Blake’s  The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c.1789) a copy of which was owned by Alfred, Lord Tennyson and is shown here.  If your expectations are restricted to this rather adventitious aphorism, you will not be disappointed.   You will be braced.  If, however, you go to shows in search of objects that will delight the eye and nourish the soul, then turn again as you leave the gallery and contemplate that facade.  You will still leave with a spring in your step.