Art historians are rarely great artists. they are too in awe of their heroes, reduced to culling stylistic tricks from Michelangelo, Titian and Rembrandt. they are stifled by their own erudition, paralysed by a fear that we might mistake them for a garret artist, untutored, a splasher of paint, a follower of instinct. So they pepper their work with ponderous allusions: a nod to Caravaggio, a wink to Monsieur Manet. Academic authority cripples the art historian into becoming a servile copyist, digging through the remains of art history, resurrecting its choicest parts: a touch of Mannerism here, some Turner brushwork there. T hier work degenerates into an elaborate parlour game of spot-the quotation: it is all citation, and nothing new is created.
Tom de Freston, artist in residence at Christ’s, is an artist/art historian who wears his academic laurels lightly. He has wit enough to recognise the choke-hold of the ‘canon’ of Western art and the dangers of remaining in the shadow of the great masters.
His latest commission, a colossal painting for Christ’s MCR, is an extraordinary supermarket sweep through the highlights of Western art. De Freston’s re-imagining of the great heroic nudes of Classical antiquity and the Renaissance are handled with all due reverence for tradition but subtly tweaked and ‘bastardised’. All those preening self-important Apollos and pious St Sebastians are rendered ridiculous by their day-glo boxer shorts and matching socks, which half-preserve their modesty whilst simultaneously reducing them to stock comedy buffo characters. His Venuses wear white Commedia dell’ Arte masks, which strip them of all their come-hither allure. It’s a pandemonium of figures- naked, nude, some abashed, some triumphant.
The keen-eyed art historian can play the picture game to his heart’s content: The Death of Marat, Oath of the Horatii, Goya’s Third of May, and Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Mists have all been redrawn and wittily trivialised by de Freston’s brush. These are slapstick cannibalisations of ponderous history paintings in fluorescent colours.
The whole, however, is anything but trivial. Somehow the vastness of the canvas, the irresistible grand narrative of art history, the enduring power of the figures, however meanly recreated, add up to something greater than the sum of its parts. DeFreston observes that we can footnote his figures to our hearts content, build a catalogue of stylistic sources, perhaps divine that the artist has a penchant for Titian, but the painting stubbornly resists a pinning-down to meaning. He admits that there are themes. The clearest is the male nude engaged in his ‘heroic’ pursuits: raping goddesses, swearing oaths to war, boozing. The second is the female nude, eternally passive, eternally reclining, locked in a stalemate with the questing eyes of the viewer. The third and final section of the theme addresses “ fighters, murderers, martyrs and the dead”. If we have been on a journey, it has reached a bloody climax. Art history’s most violent, sadistic excesses are crowded together in claustrophobic proximity: Marat slumped, bleeding, in his bath; St Sebastian skewered with arrows; the survivors of the Raft of the Medusa, sprawled, hopeless on the decks; and, in the foreground, The Dying Gaul, suspended between life and death.
The procession opens with Adam and Eve reaching for the forbidden fruit and closes with their expulsion from Eden. Is this, then, a meditation on sin? On the moral depravity of the post-lapsarian world? De Freston maintains that the meaning of the painting is designed to be elusive: “as you piece together the codes, it falls apart”. Tease out one strand of meaning and the others disintegrate. Viewers have complained that painting is too heavy with sex, but de Freston points out that there is very little sex in the painting. There is nudity, yes, but only one couple, drawn from the Kama Sutra, are actually engaged in a sexual act. The painting runs on psychological inversions, sudden volte-faces which leave you at a loss to explain the recurring female figure bearing her water jug, and wondering whether, in the beauty pageant of the central panel, a dumpy fertility idol can hold her own against all those perfect ten Venuses.
It is a sexually explicit painting with barely any sex, a violent diorama of images borrowed from the most-bought postcards of Europe’s great museums. It is a desolate and barren painting, but crowded, studded with figures. It is bloody and comic, luridly fluorescent yet blanched with a draining sci-light. The painting’s greatest triumph is its transformation of scholarly allusions into something edifyingly rich
Laura Freeman
