The National Gallery has apparently had enough of masterpieces. You can see how its curators might be sick of seeing paintings by great artists such as Titian and Piero della Francesca wall-to-wall, day in, day out. So they’re treating themselves to the lowbrow fun of exhibiting a bit of nonsense by a painter who has been slighted for a century and on this evidence deserves to be slighted for several more.
Or so I am trying to rationalise the gallery’s mystifying attempt to redefine Edwin Landseer’s ludicrous The Monarch of the Glen as a great painting. It’s hard to understand how anyone can see this as anything but the lousy, lifeless relic that it is. Landseer’s mid-19th century painting of a stag posing majestically against a backdrop of Scottish mountains is trite in feeling and mechanical in execution. Far from a sublime romantic vision, it looks like an advert – and that is what it has often been used as. The accompanying book – does this little grouse-dropping of a show merit one? – reproduces a 1927 whisky ad among other uses of this painted answer to tartan golf trousers.
Landseer was the most renowned animal artist in Victorian Britain. He was also the best connected: there is a sketch here by Queen Victoria, who made a copy of his charcoal wall drawings in Ardverikie shooting lodge before they were destroyed in a fire. Yet for all his fame, this exhibition reveals that Landseer had a secret. He could not portray animals at all. Oh, he could get their glossy fur right, give them appropriate poses – like the Monarch of the Glen’s proud hilltop stance – and set them in rugged landscapes. He just could not make them come to life. His beasts have as much vitality as a hunter’s trophy head in some antediluvian gentlemen’s club.
The exhibition makes this painfully visible by including a drawing by a much greater animal artist, George Stubbs, who in the 18th century dissected horses to learn the secrets of equine anatomy. Landseer, setting out to be Stubbs’s artistic heir, purchased his dissection drawings, and one is exhibited here. It pulled me toward it like a magnet. It has the presence of a Rembrandt portrait. Its electric energy cruelly illuminates the emptiness of Landseer’s dull fumblings. The fussy, pedantic precision of Landseer’s archetypally Victorian brushwork ensures that all hints of true wildness are smothered in aspic. Honestly, after a while the room starts to turn brown, as if you were locked in Jacob Rees-Mogg’s brain.
Tragically, it may be the very hollowness and kitsch of Landseer that appeals to the National Gallery. As I say, they have got sick of true masterpieces like Stubbs’s Whistlejacket. Bad art and phoney images are the stuff of contemporary irony, after all. And they have paired Landseer with Rachel Maclean’s 2012 film The Lion and the Unicorn, which takes gleeful pleasure in the hokey national images of England and Scotland. Tartan and the Union Jack are spattered everywhere in Maclean’s brightly coloured romp. She plays all the characters, her face painted as a kid’s party lion or whitened as a marionette-like Queen – while the real Queen speaks in a sampled recording from an early Christmas broadcast. In another scene, the Lion and the Unicorn hilariously mouth the voices of Jeremy Paxman and Alex Salmond.
She could probably create a great TV show – Spitting Image meets the American surrealist Matthew Barney – but I’m not sure why her work needs to be in the National Gallery. Its weaknesses are exposed nearly as harshly as Landseer’s. Contemporary art should come into this space only for a good reason, and with its eyes firmly fixed on the challenge of being among all these greats. Artists of the calibre of Paula Rego and Cy Twombly have responded with passion and poetry to this collection. Why does it need to bring in a warmed-up 2012 video piece that deals with an already dated political situation?
The National Gallery seems insecure, confused and scared to stand up for its values in these two pointless little shows. It’s like being given a cheap blended whisky when we surely come to this place for its pure malts.
Landseer’s The Monarch of the Glen and Rachel Maclean: The Lion and The Unicorn are at the National Gallery, London, from 29 November to 3 February
