Anglophiles share love of Brits, themselves

Yale, the mythical Aztlan of American Anglophilia, has, in the spirit of Paul Mellon, brought together the best British paintings in America in Great British Paintings from American Collections: Holbein to Hockney at the British Art Center. But this show definitely ain't Paul Mellon's Oldsmobile.

The show flawlessly interweaves paintings from Mellon's collection, the collection of Samuel Huntingdon, and those from a variety of other American collections and galleries into an 84-work exhibition that traces the development of British painting and America's consequential love affair with British art. The exhibition is unique in its willingness to recognize the Young British Artists along with the old masters, something that Mr. Mellon never would have expected when he was at Cambridge during the first half of the century.

When Mellon and Huntingdon first began collecting, British art meant Holbein, Thomas Lawrence, and Joshua Reynolds—frilly, static, stilted, and worthy of admiration and gasps of "how beautiful!" Now British art means Chris Ofili, Jenny Saville, elephant dung, genitalia, Papal malleability—worthy of awe and those little gasps you have before you throw up. Curator Malcolm Warner has crafted an exhibition that appeals equally to the raised-in-1950-by-a-British-nanny set and the dude-the-Tate-is-awesome-when-you're-high Anglophile nouveau.

The works that Warner chose to serve as the exhibition's bookends are representative of why Americans, young and old, are still flocking to British art. The show opens with Holbein's Portrait of a Man, a two-dimensional, monolithic figure drawn with strong, plodding line against a green background, eyes staring out into space. The portrait is beautiful in its simplicity. Jenny Saville's Juncture, overshadowed by Ofili's dung-draped donna at the Sensations show at the Brooklyn Museum last fall, is shocking in its simplicity. On a giant canvas worthy of Rubens, Saville has painted her flabby body, moles, skin-discolorations and all, curled up on bed. Her face is pressed up against the corner of the canvas, giving the illusion that she is a living being restrained by the boundaries of the canvas, which plays upon our sympathies. One museum patron entered the exhibition on the wrong floor, accidentally saw the Saville work first, shielded her eyes, and proceeded back out to Chapel Street. Cut to shot of Paul Mellon, spinning in grave.

There is a lot of ground to cover in between Holbein, and Saville and Warner's show treads over almost all of it. The exhibition proceeds chronologically from the reign of Henry VIII to the reign of New Labour. There are excellent works from all of the distinctly British movements, from portraiture, the pre-Raphealites, Turner and the proto-impressionists, orientalism, and op art. The exhibit strikes a wonderful balance between representing a variety of artists and giving attention to the oeuvres of a few.

Though the exhibition's title promises only `Great British Paintings,' much of the exhibition's strength lies in its inclusion of paintings that are not nearly as familiar to American audiences. Gerard Soest's Cecil Calvert, 2nd Lord Baltimore, a portrait of the founder of the Maryland colony, is a symbol of the power of the British empire, and the only work that depicts a distinctly American subject matter. Lord Calvert stands erect, his right arm extended toward a small, cowering African boy—English imperialism embodied. Lawrence Alma-Tadema's Women of Amphissa, unknown outside New York collector circles, couples pre-Raphaelite eroticism with Oriental mystery.

The British penchant for calling anyone who ever put brush to canvas in their country "a British artist" is obvious as well. Paintings by American-born Gilbert Stuart, John Singer Sargent, James A. M. Whistler, and the Swiss Holbein and Fuseli are included. Portuguese-born painter Paula Rego, whose The Cadet and His Sister, a suggestive allegory of incest and masculinity, is one of the exhibition's most unsettling, powerful works, is the latest addition to the cache of "sort-of" Brits. Warner is careful to point out the countries of origin of these artists on the placards, but in some ways, the exhibition would have benefited from a more jingoistic approach.

The exhibition, like the British populace, is not particularly friendly to visitors. Many of the works are hung on hideous, blood-red backgrounds, which change the way light interacts with the pictures. This blood-dimmed tide is loosed upon a number of Thomas Gainsborough portraits with negative implications; the prancing, preening aristocrats seem to be doing their prancing and preening in the middle of a Soviet flag.

But in a strange way, in this exhibition, the seemingly disparate elemenets of the British tradition come together. The zig-zagged black and white lines of Bridget Riley's op art and the strips of Stubbs' zebra merge together into something indescribably British. And Americans of all generations will love it.

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