Among others who saw the canvas as a stage for gestures and performances were Niki de Saint Phalle, who would shoot at her pictures with an air-rifle; the Japanese Gutai artists, one of whose key works was Hurling Colours, the result of Shozo Shimamoto standing on a department store roofand throwing jars of pigment at a canvas. The Vienna Actionists meanwhile used the body to create “living paintings” and recorded the procedure on film. Others painted with their feet. The curators stretch their inclusiveness to include the work of Cindy Sherman even though her self-portraits as different characters are photographic rather than painted
The antidote to A Bigger Splash is the British Museum’s Renaissance to Goya: Prints and Drawings from Spain which sets out to give the lie to the old saw that the Spanish weren’t interested in drawing. The artists drew alright; it was just that there were few connoisseurs to collect them. This is the third recent show to explore the theme, following ex- hibitions at the Frick Collection and the Courtauld Gallery, and many of the works here have never been ex- hibited before. Not all of them are Spanish; the exhibition also looks at those European artists who spent time in Spain, such as the Tiepolos, father Giambattista and sons Domenico and Lorenzo. There is real quality among some of the lesser-known names—Herrera, Cano, Coello, Paret and Roelas—even if the showstoppers come from the 17th-century Golden Age artists, from Velázquez (unfortunately only one but they are as rare as hens’ teeth) to Zurbarán.
All, however accomplished, are in a sense merely the scene setters for Goya. Technically and imaginatively he is sui generis and although he couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than Spanish his Disasters of War or the Bulls of Bordeaux prints have almost nothing in common with the artists who preceded him. He is also responsible for the true masterpiece in this exhibition—a red chalk drawing of the Duke of Wellington, c.1812. In the painted portraits that are based on it he smoothed and dignified the Duke. In the drawing though Goya showed a man with hollow cheeks and sunken eyes and, above all, the expression of a first-hand witness to those very same disasters of war.
