I have a modest proposal to put to the Royal Academy. Every summer, there is a strange imbalance in its galleries. The vast salons on the main floor are given over to the RA summer exhibition. Superannuated sculptors, paltry painters and a ragtag of would-be titans have their day, for months. The public comes, for its sins. Critics try to find the good in it, and retch and redden in the courtyard, disgusted by this rite of mediocrity (I would have liked a link here to the Sunday Times review of this year's instalment but, owing to the paywall, that isn't possible – so here is me on last year's show.)
Meanwhile, upstairs, some great artist is given an insultingly slight and partial show in the diminutive Sackler Galleries. This summer, it is the turn of John Singer Sargent, a painter who richly deserves a great big blockbuster show to remind this century of his strange brilliance. Sargent's portraits are glitteringly double-edged: they possess a provocative ironic grandeur that both flatters and, like a reflection in a golden bowl, glamorously exposes the reality of high life in late Victorian and Edwardian England, America and Europe. He is a great observer of wealth and brittle glamour in an age of empire.
The Royal Academy's little squib of a show, called Sargent and the Sea, does him a disservice. It isolates a fairly minor theme in his work and loses the thread of even that, as if they realised halfway through that it was all nonsense – for "marine painting" does not offer an insight into Sargent at all. Newcomers will not be switched on to his genius. Fans will feel short-changed.
Now a big Sargent show at the RA, that would be something else. So here is my proposal: in future, the Royal Academy should cram its entire summer exhibition into the Sackler Galleries. They must admit the truth: there is barely enough worthwhile art in the summer exhibition to fill this cramped attic space. They could either select the handful of moderately good works and hang them – it would be a nice, spacious little exhibit – or just leave everything stacked and heaped around the floor, and let people sort it through as if at a jumble sale.
Meanwhile, next year, give Sargent the exhibition he deserves in those generously proportioned salons downstairs. Their grand spaces suit his style perfectly. It will make up for the betrayal inflicted on him this summer.
