The art is there somewhere; you just can’t see it.
This is an updated version of an article that I originally posted on Medium in August 2019.
Fifty years ago, the Hayward Gallery put on a major exhibition of the work of Vincent Van Gogh that apparently attracted 198,000 visitors.
The number surprises me a little. I saw the show and my main recollection, apart from the sheer quality of the work and the excellence of the catalogue, is how quiet the galleries were. I was able to work my way round from picture to picture at my own pace. Occasionally I would come to an item that was already ‘taken’; but all I had to do was jump ahead and come back when the coast was clear.
It was in stark contrast to my experience of Tate Britain’s 2019 exhibition Van Gogh and Britain. It took the best part of twenty minutes just to get through the entrance. And once inside, it was impossible to see the work for the zombie-like hordes shuffling along the walls.
I’ll leave it to the grownups to determine the exact psychological processes that occur when we stand in front of a work of art. My best suggestion is that paintings create a kind of liminal space in front of themselves, where the viewer is neither ‘here’ nor ‘there’, and where some sort of transcendence is possible. I think it may be something to do with the way that the marks left by the artist’s hand reproduce, like a recording, the mental, cultural and physical determinants of the painting’s manufacture.
Whatever it is, it’s an experience I have come to value. I probably felt it most intensely in the small Italian town of Sansepolcro, in 1977, in a building that housed just a single work: Piero della Francesca’s eerie Resurrection. But then my companion and I had the place entirely to ourselves.
Art may not demand absolute solitude; but it does require enough space to surrender yourself to the painting’s spell—to be drawn out of the everyday world into that perplexing cultural construct: the pictorial space (not, by the way, exclusively the product of representational painting). This simply isn’t possible if you’re fighting for a glimpse of the work with hundreds of art lovers, wielding audio guides and with their smartphones set to stun.
Recognising that Van Gogh in Britain was an exercise in futility, I whizzed round it in fifteen minutes flat (still some way short of my record of 7 minutes 35 seconds, set at the Bonnard show in Tate Modern the previous year), and wandered upstairs to the almost empty Frank Bowling retrospective, where the paintings were, at least, visible.
It is several years since I last visited the Louvre in Paris, and maybe things have changed since then. On that occasion, rather than join the mad scrum around the Mona Lisa, I headed for the surprisingly quiet French galleries and found myself alone in front of Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Embarkation for Cythera (there is a good hi-res here).
You have to give a great painting time. But after a minute or so, it reaches out to you and leads you into itself. In an age of blockbuster shows, gilded with corporate sponsorship, booked in advance and packed to bursting point, this magical experience is increasingly unattainable.
Art, sadly, has become almost invisible, eclipsed by the art lovers.
Donald Hounam 
