Taste is also the issue at the Allen Jones exhibition at the Royal Academy. Jones, a contemporary of Hockney and Hodgkin, made his name specialising in girls in their smalls — furniture made of mannequins of women in high heels and fetish underwear, and paintings of shapely legs and stilettos. In the late 1960s and early 1970s his work seemed stylish and of its time; now, however, it looks irredeemably sexist and, much worse, dated.
It is hard to get exercised by feminist complaints about his art because his pieces don't objectify individual women but show creatures that conform to a blandly ersatz version of sexual deviancy, an S&M-lite that is neither properly dark nor, it seems, deeply felt by Jones himself. The real regret is that Jones hasn't moved on as a painter. He remains the purveyor of the stylish silhouette but, like silhouettes, his art is two-dimensional. Indeed, it has almost slipped from art into the vacuity of fashion. The similarities of Jones's work with that of the French fashion photographer Guy Bourdin (currently on show at Somerset House) reveal an uncanny similarity of style. The Bourdin exhibition is subtitled "image maker", a phrase that in the sense of "image only" neatly covers them both.
A more interesting artist can be seen at Dulwich Picture Gallery — the Canadian landscapist Emily Carr (1871-1945). From the Forest to the Sea showcases the work of a highly distinctive painter all but unknown outside her own country. Carr started as a Victorian maiden transplanted to Pacific coast Canada and ended a solitary writer-artist whose paintings captured British Columbia's wilderness and the artefacts of its indigenous peoples.
Carr's artistic training was global: she had spells in San Francisco, London, St Ives and Paris. Her travels left her well-versed in European post-impressionism and modernism but back in Canada, when she put them to use, her paintings were too avant-garde to find acceptance. Nor did the disjunction between her artistic provenance and her subjects help: "I was as Canadian-born as the Indian," she once said, "but behind me were the Old World heredity and ancestry." From 1913 for more than a decade, she barely painted at all, the result of both disappointment and poverty. Recognition was late in arriving.
Some of her paintings, in particular of totem poles and carvings and of the coastal forests where she would take a caravan and her pets and paint on her own, deserved better. There is an almost Vorticist movement to her trees as they twist and sway in the wind, while her totem pictures have a Gauguinesque sense of wonder at the mystery — and sometimes menace — of native American traditions. Her "nature" is not a safe place but full of potency, while her pictures of tribal carvings had an almost anthropological aim: "These things should be to us Canadians what the ancient Britons' relics are to the English." Her striking pictures are one of the reasons why her fellow-countrymen did indeed come to cherish them.
It is hard to get exercised by feminist complaints about his art because his pieces don't objectify individual women but show creatures that conform to a blandly ersatz version of sexual deviancy, an S&M-lite that is neither properly dark nor, it seems, deeply felt by Jones himself. The real regret is that Jones hasn't moved on as a painter. He remains the purveyor of the stylish silhouette but, like silhouettes, his art is two-dimensional. Indeed, it has almost slipped from art into the vacuity of fashion. The similarities of Jones's work with that of the French fashion photographer Guy Bourdin (currently on show at Somerset House) reveal an uncanny similarity of style. The Bourdin exhibition is subtitled "image maker", a phrase that in the sense of "image only" neatly covers them both.
A more interesting artist can be seen at Dulwich Picture Gallery — the Canadian landscapist Emily Carr (1871-1945). From the Forest to the Sea showcases the work of a highly distinctive painter all but unknown outside her own country. Carr started as a Victorian maiden transplanted to Pacific coast Canada and ended a solitary writer-artist whose paintings captured British Columbia's wilderness and the artefacts of its indigenous peoples.
Carr's artistic training was global: she had spells in San Francisco, London, St Ives and Paris. Her travels left her well-versed in European post-impressionism and modernism but back in Canada, when she put them to use, her paintings were too avant-garde to find acceptance. Nor did the disjunction between her artistic provenance and her subjects help: "I was as Canadian-born as the Indian," she once said, "but behind me were the Old World heredity and ancestry." From 1913 for more than a decade, she barely painted at all, the result of both disappointment and poverty. Recognition was late in arriving.
Some of her paintings, in particular of totem poles and carvings and of the coastal forests where she would take a caravan and her pets and paint on her own, deserved better. There is an almost Vorticist movement to her trees as they twist and sway in the wind, while her totem pictures have a Gauguinesque sense of wonder at the mystery — and sometimes menace — of native American traditions. Her "nature" is not a safe place but full of potency, while her pictures of tribal carvings had an almost anthropological aim: "These things should be to us Canadians what the ancient Britons' relics are to the English." Her striking pictures are one of the reasons why her fellow-countrymen did indeed come to cherish them.
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