Michael Craig-Martin has already lived many lives: as a Dublin schoolboy taught by nuns, as a student at the Lycee Francais in Bogota, as the creator of seminal 1973 conceptual work, An Oak Tree, as teacher and mentor to Young British Artists including Damian Hirst. Now 72, the conceptual artist's latest gig is a show at Chatsworth House (screen double for Pemberley in many an Austen adaptation) which is half installation, half intervention.
Chatsworth has one of the most important private art collections in the country and its owners, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, a rich history of commissioning and showing art. When they asked Michael Craig-Martin to curate a show around their collection, he admits to feeling overawed by the size and scope of what he was taking on. Each room of the enormous family seat is more opulent than the next: laden with gilt, candleabras, tapestries, marble, oak - and that's just the soft furnishings. The collection itself, which began in the 1550s, takes in everything from drawings by Leonardo da Vinci to Egyptian statuary to a cucumber slicer designed by local engineer George Stephenson. No wonder Craig-Martin felt bamboozled. But the Duke encouraged him to let his imagination run free, and Craig-Martin came up with what I think is a rather brilliant idea. Like all the best, it's a deceptively simple one: to replace the wildly decorative plinths supporting the statues with plain magenta bases.
At first I found the magenta lurid, inappropriate, even a bit vulgar but Craig-Martin argued persuasively that no other colour would have worked so well to draw the eye straight to the sculptures themselves. There is something about its brightness, and "strange artificiality" (in different lights it pulsates red or blue) he said, that was perfect. And having looked around the exhibition I would have to agree.
In the sculpture gallery, the bodies of everybody from Canova's Endymion to the two huge lions that guard the door snap into focus, thanks to Craig-Martin's arresting trick. Elsewhere, in the small 'drawings room', Craig-Martin has pulled together a collection of Old Master head portraits from the Chatsworth archives while, outside in the glorious gardens, pop-arty line drawings of scissors, forks and high heels are realised as giant two dimensional sculptures that appear to float weightlessly above the smooth grass. As Mark Brown reported, Craig-Martin told us: "It is a challenging house. It is not easy to improve on it. It takes a bit of arrogance to change anything … I felt very, very nervous." But standing outside in the sun, watching a rainbow through the fountain, while Craig-Martin's orange, blue and purple umbrellas blow across the park, you have to say that he's made his mark.
