Although what attracted both high and low was his sense of spectacle and his "man proposes, god disposes" themes, Martin was an accomplished artist on a less grandiose scale too. Some of his landscape watercolours have real freshness and spontaneity (which they lost when he turned them into overcooked Claudean visions) and as a printmaker he was both prolific and innovative — the billowing atmospheric effects of his paintings being condensed into more tangible form.
While he may lack the depth and subtlety necessary to make a great artist, Martin is more than just a good-bad painter. He was a phenomenon, the artist who best struck the authentic chord of his time, obsessed as it was with religiosity, money, empire and the fate of nations. It is for this reason as much as the visceral thrill offered by his work that he deserves to be looked at without preconceptions.
Alongside the Martin, Tate Britain is also exhibiting another original with popular appeal — the sculptor Barry Flanagan, who died in 2009. This show, however, barely features the bronze hares with which he made his reputation and which, with their primal energy and joyousness, are among the best-loved of all modern sculptures, but concentrates instead on his early career from 1965 to 1982.
Pre-hares, Barry Flanagan was more interested in land art and Arte Povera. He didn't take to the angular metal forms of one teacher, Anthony Caro, but was instead an inveterate experimenter with other materials. His works, all nonrepresentational, used wood, sand, hessian and other cloths in a variety of inventive manners: Bundle 2 is a pile of loosely filled sacks, Four Casb 2 '67 some lapis-blue cones with a rope weaving between them, Ring n a pile of sand with scoops taken out. There is little unity of theme or style, only in his quest to unite materials, thought and process. However serious-minded they may be, they are not always easy to like.
Perhaps Flanagan realised it too. He cast his first hare in 1979 after a damascene moment in which he saw the animal "unveil" itself, sloughing off the academic avant-gardism that had marked his career to date. There would, of course, be no hares without his earlier sculptural life — they leapt to life from this fascinatingly ragtag assemblage.
