Art

‘Love’ is a quirky summer show which occasionally produces the warm, fuzzy feeling itself, and does an interesting job of showing how love has changed over five centuries. Because for all its talk about depicting love’s emotional complexity and intensity, what ‘Love’ presents is really how the emotion emerges as a modern, secular ideal, away from the rigid religious and moral conventions of earlier times.

Although various Christian parables of pity occupy the Renaissance paintings, they mostly come across as pious and earnest, and love best takes shape in those human sentiments buried in religious genres, such as the relation of care between mother and child in Raphael’s ‘Madonna of the Pinks’, while Murillo’s ‘The Infant Saint John with the Lamb’ will put a lump in your throat with its unwavering tenderness. And while there’s a lot of nineteenth-century swooning over Greek myths of sundered lovers, these are mostly more interesting for their painterly scene-setting than their storytelling, though Holman Hunt’s pre-Raphaelite crowd-pleaser ‘Isabella and the Pot of Basil’ is more poignant when you read that his wife had died shortly before.

Where ‘Love’ hits the spot, though, is in the quirky seventeenth-century Dutch paintings of interiors and cheery couples, with their tentative symbols of sex and the barely veiled bawdiness of a newly emerging, recognisably modern private life. And not surprisingly, it’s in the twentieth century that love becomes a wholly individualistic gratification – works by David Hockney and Tracey Emin effectively celebrate the me-ness of loving you. As a fun coda, Yoko Ono incites the public to put up written Post-It notes to their loves: ‘I love my husband and my child’ reads one, with disarming simplicity. Art? Sometimes all you need is…