If you’ve seen the amazing multicoloured ceramic elephant on the poster for this show and thought: ‘Oh, I might go to that for a laugh’, be warned. Nelly, while a beauty, is not characteristic of what’s on display. This is an exhibition about the triumph of industry over taste, as art and manufacturing became intertwined, and artists cottoned on to mass-production. Hiram Powers’ ‘Greek Slave’ of 1844 was reproduced in its thousands. Coyly suggestive, it’s a strange version of antiquity. Powers, an American, was criticised for sanitising slavery while it still existed in his home country, but the piece was a smash with the public.
Unlike those in the Tate’s brilliant ‘Folk Art’ show last year, the artists here are perfectly self-confident that a) what they’re doing is Art; b) that it takes all the best stuff that’s gone before, and improves it with modern science and materials; and c) that the results are beautiful. The results, almost without exception, are exceptionally ugly: either accretions of fiddly-widdly little elements, as in Edmund Cotterill’s ‘Eglinton Trophy’ (1843), or whopping great figures like John Bell’s cast-iron ‘Eagle Slayer’ of 1851. Sometimes both: William Reynolds-Stephens’ ‘A Royal Game’ might have arrived after the Victorian age, but it has all its hallmarks and then some. Elizabeth I and Philip II of Spain play out the Armada as a game of chess, elevated on a massive plinth, so you can’t see what’s going on.It’s bizarre and frightful, whimsy executed on a colossal scale, but it hints at what lies ahead: a country walking into a war where the machine is king and it destroys indiscriminately, factory worker or artist. This is the art which inspired the stuff you see on ‘Antiques Roadshow’: gloomy, self-important, and hard to dust. We are not amused.
Chris Waywell