ALL THAT REMAINS: A Curator’s Choice – Reviewed

How often do we really examine curatorial contributions – not simply to an exhibition, but to the care and display of collections? Mike Pinnington considers ALL THAT REMAINS: A Curator’s Choice at Victoria Gallery & Museum…

There was a period in the contemporary art world’s recent past in which serious questions where posed regarding the maybe and increasingly too-powerful position occupied by curators atop exhibiting hierarchies. But: how often do we really highlight and examine curatorial decision-making? Not just as reflected in one show, but in the longer-term health and accessibility of an institution and, in some cases, its collection. Rarely, I’d say, at least outside of quite specific circumstances and circles.

It’s interesting, then, to be able to identify so clearly such intent, in current Victoria Gallery & Museum show, ALL THAT REMAINS: A Curator’s Choice, which marks the culmination of Dr Amanda Draper’s time in the role there. For the recently opened exhibition (drawn from the University of Liverpool’s collection), Draper has cherry-picked some of her favourite works, as well as those by artists she believes have been, for whatever reason, overlooked.

With wall-space at a premium, across a relatively modest number of works, it covers a fair amount of ground – from a painting thought to be by Rembrandt’s last pupil to what one critic identified as ‘the most revolutionary event in post-war British art.’ Not bad at all for a gallery that, to my mind, currently fits all too snugly into the hidden gem category, especially when compared to Liverpool’s more central spaces.

Dedicated to earlier works, its first and smaller of two rooms feels, if I’m being honest, somewhat staid. Yes, it includes The Turkish Ambassador (c. 1680s), attributed to the aforementioned ‘Rembrandt’s last pupil’, Aert de Gelder. And the selection of 1892’s The Port of Liverpool by Parker Greenwood (above) means our journey has a nice, logical, departure point; and, while never for the sake of it, the city and its artists are well-represented here. But it underwhelms nonetheless.

Happily, ALL THAT REMAINS comes into its own as we ease, in a larger space next door, into modernism and those influenced and inspired by it. Cubism by Robert Colquhoun, Victor Passmore’s abstraction, and – local hero – painter and poet, Adrien Henri, rub shoulders with the underexposed and, no doubt for a fair few visitors, little known; such works, though, fair well by comparison with more established, not to say famous, names.

One of the first paintings encountered in this room is glorious: eye-catching, with details to hold attention beyond the plunging Battleship Potemkin-like steps, Mary Adshead’s aptly named The Steps, Fortuneswell (1953), offers a view to behold, leading the eye vertiginously down to Dorset’s Chesil Beach. In place of imperilled Odessa civilians, however, we find a picturesque scene of a milkman on his rounds. Still, there is something of the vortex about Adshead’s framing of the seaside vista, transforming an otherwise bucolic setting into one containing a nagging sense of unease.

Draper has declared – via one of her frequently illuminating captions – William Utermohlen’s 1968 painting, Trenchcoat (below), her ‘favourite in the collection.’ Because, she says, ‘of the bold colour and the enigma it poses.’ She’s not wrong – either in her admiration, or reasons for it. There’s a lot at play here; from the cubist rendering of the figurative sitter, Cuban writer Juan Arcocha’s clothes, to the red panels divided by the white vertical stripe behind him (which could pass for something by American painter, Barnet Newman). New to me, it’s a striking work that holds and rewards the gaze.

This mixture of representation, duelling and/or overlapping modernisms, and grades of abstraction (from cubist to fully fledged) emerges as a key feature of the room. The painter said to represent ‘the most revolutionary event in post-war British art,’ Victor Passmore, as so many before him, turned to abstraction immediately in the wake of visiting a Picasso and Matisse show. 1966’s Brown Development (Peat), while perhaps not the greatest example of his adventures in his newfound style (which would arguably come the following decade), illustrates the point nevertheless.

Nearby, Jack Coburn Witherop’s view of Portreath, Cornwall (1956), is stylised almost to the point of abstraction; while Jon Heritage’s A Cricket Match (c. 1980) finds horizontal and vertical lines demarking a strict grid. The ant-like cricketers at its centre are really all we have to identify its capturing a scene from life.

Euan Uglow appears similarly caught between abstraction and figuration in depicting the female form (below). Divided almost head to toe by a schema of horizontally placed arrows, the elegant if outsize nude both competes with and is augmented by those bands which, in fact, Uglow used to avoid distortion and inaccuracies in his representation of the figure.

The winner of the 1972 John Moores Painting Prize, Uglow’s Nude, 12 regular vertical positions from the eye (1967) had, for a long time if memory serves, occupied a place in the VGM’s corridor space outside this room. Not as ignominious as that sounds, it would be in good company today, with those same walls home to other permanent collection works (not included in this exhibition) by the likes of David Hockney, Yinka Shonibare, Lucien Freud, and Edward Burne-Jones.

For an exhibition given over entirely to a departing curator’s taste, this never feels like a navel-gazing exercise. In fact, the opposite is true, opening up understandings of collections – how they work, what they consist of, who gets to decide. By the same token, it cannot help but highlight historical oversights. You may have noticed, for instance, I’ve mentioned but one female artist here; there are few women included in the exhibition – fewer artists of colour (zero?).

I can’t be alone in finding its glaring lack of diversity face-achingly jarring, especially given the gallery’s moniker – that of Victoria – taking us right back to the bad old days of unchecked, unreconstructed Empire. But these are now issues for Draper’s successor to wrestle with (and wrestled with they must be). Collections – and the displays they produce – should not simply contain great works, but should also be reflective of society; its art movements, culture, make up and politics.

ALL THAT REMAINS, then, had us doing some reflecting, inspiring us to ask: given the same opportunity, what works would make the cut in our own show? How about you?

Mike Pinnington       

ALL THAT REMAINS: A Curator’s Choice continues at Victoria Gallery & Museum until 20 September

Images, from top: ALL THAT REMAINS installation, Mike Pinnington; The Port of Liverpool, Parker Greenwood (1892), ALL THAT REMAINS: a curator’s choice, Victoria Gallery & Museum, University of Liverpool; ALL THAT REMAINS installation, Mike Pinnington; Trenchcoat by William Utermohlen, 1968 © Estate of William Utermohlen; Nude, 12 regular vertical positions from the eye, Euan Uglow, detail (1967)