A summer at the Royal Academy

The Royal Academy of Art in London offers the possibility to see two exhibitions this summer: Sargent and the Sea and the Summer Exhibition.



John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) is an American expatriate painter, popular for his portraits. However this exhibition do not focus on this part of his life. Indeed, the aim of the exhibition is to “demonstrate the role that the sea played in Sargent’s early development. As it name implies, focuses on its works about seascape and marine, reminds me a lot of impressionists and Barbizon school, notably Eugène Boudin. Mainly because they painted the same subject: sea, coast and beaches and boats sceneries involving mainly fishermen and fisherwomen rather than bourgeois on vacation and the effect of climatic conditions on the seascape. Sea storms seem to have inspired him which is unsurprising given that Sargent’s inspirations have also included John Mallory Turner. His travels during his youth, in Europe, seem to follow a fashionable path amongst the painters of the time. He went in Brittany and Normandy, which were popularised thanks to the development of the railways, to Capri and Naples under the shadow of the Vesuvio and close to the buried Pompeii and through various ports and harbours like Venice in between. In addition, he also painted during his transatlantic travel which is more unusual. As I said earlier, if his style was reminiscent of previous and contemporary prestigious painters, the way he depicted the sea was something of a novel as he tried to avoid representing the limit between the sky and the ocean.

On a side note (slightly off-topic and probably ludicrous I reckon), paintings of naked kids brought to me the question: Does painting young naked kid would seem paedophile nowadays? I do not know if Sargent painted them directly on the beach or from memory, most likely in his studio, but I wonder how an artist painting that kind of subjects now would be criticised and worse, if he would be pursued for paedophilia. Yet, in this case it is art. I am not saying that paintings displaying that kind of explicit content should be banned but I find this discrepancy ironic. On a different subject, there was also an other exhibition at the Royal Academy and as I could get in for free, I did not mind checking it out.

The Summer Exhibition 2010 is quite a fun exhibition where unknown and more famous artists show their works of the year and where people can buy them. It is the world’s largest open submission contemporary art exhibition, now in its 242nd edition. A leaflet with the price is provided. There are works for the taste of everybody on various medium: painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, architecture and film. It is a rather large exhibition as it occupies a little less than a dozen of rooms which are defined by a common topic. Some artists are members of the Royal Academy and some are not. Although, most of them seem to be English by their name and their number, according to the Guardian, seems to reach 11,000 which seems a lot to me. 1,100 would be closer to the reality I suppose (here is a list of the exhibitor last year, I could not find it for this year.)




Overall , the Summer Exhibition is a good opportunity to see new things and to develop a taste in art that one would not be naturally drawn to. Some of them are really weird like this video of a woman licking some hair (i couldn’t figure if it was an animal or the head of someone..) for 3 minutes, and I think that the price was around £800. But that is what makes this display fun and entertaining.

-C