Summer Exhibition
Royal Academy, London

Like the House of Lords and the Anglican Church, the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition is a classic English compromise that works, for all its conservative values, because it slowly but inexorably limps towards modernity. In the past half-decade, it has become more daring in its range of work, risked overarching themes – “Manmade” this year, “Light” in 2007 – and, in the mid-career displays that form its substance, demonstrated the taming of former enfants terribles such as Tracey Emin, Jenny Saville, Fiona Rae and Gary Hume into unlikely Academicians. The result in 2008 is a show that reflects some of the crazy pluralism that is 21st-century visual culture at a time when boundaries – between artistic media, cutting-edge and traditional, centre and peripheries – are everywhere dissolving.

The opening is as smartly cosmopolitan, as light-headed yet weighty, as any this century. You negotiate your way past the five grey-green steel cylinder and half-disc towers of Anthony Caro’s “Promenade” in the courtyard, hit Jeff Koons’s glimmering, fantasy-blue giant stainless steel “Cracked Egg” in the central hall, and emerge in Gallery I into a gravely compelling memorial show of paintings by R.B. Kitaj. Three significant, controversial artists – shapers respectively of abstract sculpture, post-pop installation and the renaissance of figurative painting – thus immediately clash in your mind and remain as markers as you progress through a show whose raggle-taggle hang deliberately resists theories or schools.

Tony Cragg's bronze 'Slanted Faces'
slanted faces sculpture © Financial Times

Like Max Beckmann or Chagall, the American-British Kitaj is an uneasy artist against whom accusations of “literary” or anecdotal painting never quite go away, in spite of his outstanding draughtsmanship, rich surfaces and translucent colour. The work here is fraught with intellectual interest: the politically charged “Juan de la Cruz”; the monumental contemporary history painting “Pacific Coast Highway”; the masterly portrait “The Jewish Rider”, whose references to Rembrandt offset the narrative of a comfortable train ride, with oblique view of burning chimney and cross, retracing earlier Jewish rail journeys to hell. Gracefully installed by Marco Livingstone, this display alone makes the Summer Exhibition worth visiting.

Two other galleries stand out for cohesive, striking, independent-minded curating. In the Lecture Room, Tony Cragg’s elegantly sparse arrangement, including his own tumbling, dynamic, heavy/light bronze “Slanted Faces” (left), Philip King’s pink-framed, latticed “Tunis Rak”, David Nash’s surging, prehistoric-looking wood “Red Well” and Barry Flanagan’s hares dancing across New York in “Empire State with Bowler”, stimulates several high-key dialogues. And Gallery VIII, with its quaint warning sign that some works may shock, shows that just as Tracey Emin’s fragmentary, hesitant draughtsmanship has a beauty despite itself, so as curator she may aim to outrage but cannot help producing an aesthetically gripping display.

Emin’s room, dedicated to the provocatively or subversively erotic, divides in quality on gender lines. She is sensitised to the nuances of female art-making: rigorous, witty, suggestive sculpture from Louise Bourgeois and Rebecca Warren, Emin’s own delicate, lilting oil pastel and pencil drawing, with its hints of broken bodies and messed-up minds, offbeat ceramic totemic portraits by Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez. But her judgment collapses in the face of testosterone-charged, bombastic bores such as Matt Collishaw’s wooden and metal copulating zebra and girl “In The Old Fashioned Way”, or “Japanese Girl”, a schmaltzy canvas by Julian Schnabel, who, reads Emin’s schoolgirl caption, “does my favourite paintings in the whole world”.

The pleasure of the Summer Exhibition is always the mood swings between such individualised, focused spaces and the rambling galleries where you can look, search and wander. The smallest, the six-picture-deep Small Weston Gallery, is particularly skilfully hung this year. The largest, the American Associates Gallery, balances among some 60 works Michael Craig-Martin’s deliciously crisp, acrylic-on-aluminium sugar-pink and smoke-grey word paintings “Lust” and “Death”, the latter full of traceries of colour and playful motifs of metronome and fire extinguishers; bold narratives by Eileen Cooper; traditional representation in Bill Jacklin’s velvet-soft “Snow, Times Square II”; a DayGlo fish-tank by Lisa Milroy (“Tuesday Afternoon”); politically incorrect late pop by Allen Jones (“London Derriere”); and lovely, saturated abstractions from Frank Bowling and lyrical, fluid ones, rushing like rivers, from Maurice Cockrill: a vibrant, diverse, generous vision of art now.

To August 17, tel 0870 848 8484

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