fri 29/03/2024

Damien Hirst: No Love Lost - Blue Paintings, Wallace Collection | reviews, news & interviews

Damien Hirst: No Love Lost - Blue Paintings, Wallace Collection

Damien Hirst: No Love Lost - Blue Paintings, Wallace Collection

The most famous British living artist's paintings simply aren't very good

Damien Hirst's new exhibition at the Wallace Collection is evidence of a deal between nervous guardians of the past and a contemporary artist seeking to burnish his future historical credentials. It stinks. Entitled No Love Lost, Blue Paintings by Damien Hirst ­ - the clunking allusion to Picasso's Blue Period marks out the scale of Hirst's ambition -­ it presents 25 paintings that we are assured are actually by Hirst rather than a cohort of assistants.

The emphasis on these paintings as autograph works is rather sweet,­ pandering to those for whom certificated originality is the first hurdle to an appreciation of form, content or materiality, but herein lies the gap between ambition and delivery.

Hirst, 44, is the most famous living British artist and it is the fame that's got in the way, blinding the curators at the Wallace Collection and demonstrating the dubious nature of the publicity machine around him. The work simply isn't very good, and those investors who have committed substantial sums of money in collecting other products emanating from Hirst's company, Science, may be crossing their legs somewhat anxiously.

The act of exhibiting these paintings at the Wallace Collection, home to aesthetic discrimination of the highest order, ­is confessional in character ("Old art is really good and I'm paying homage to it") and thus a claim for authenticity ("Look, I can paint and here's how"). The trouble is that Hirst isn't baring his soul at all: he's far too canny to let us in there. Rather, this staging of the inner self is about a studious alignment of his work - his reputation ­- with the accredited masters of the past: Del Sarto, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Gainsborough, Poussin and the rest of the gilt-edged pantheon. In squeezing seat space between artists of universally acknowledged genius, Hirst is reaching into the past in order to secure his future place in history. It's all very "Back to the Future". Except that one suspects the future may not reflect on this exercise with great kindness.

damien hirst human skull in spaceThe paintings themselves, politely sized works on canvas,­ offer the usual exciting range of Hirst tropes - skulls, shark bits and pieces, paeans to Francis Bacon, the old modern master of beautiful bitterness, but without the bling, fishy smells or outré gay subtext. There are pinches of Salvador Dali (morphing forms), Philip Guston (a certain painterly scratchiness) and even John Tunnard (stringy meshes), but these are mere tickets to the surreal imagination, not the ride itself. (Pictured below, Human Skull in Space, 2009)

It¹s not as if he has been generous (or modest) enough to actually show his paintings alongside the work of the old boys in the Wallace Collection. Instead, the latter have been carefully removed from view (the comparison may have been too painful), with the relevant rooms temporarily re-lined with blue silk cloth (at a cost of £250,000, we are gleefully told, as if the amount of expenditure were a measure of his devotion to art history) and furnished in what can only be described as Marriott Hotel penthouse chic (some French chairs, a little light porcelain). Perhaps this is what he is now used to, what he calls home on the go, but it's a pathetic, even arrogant response to the much more considered, culturally intelligent and personal setting Richard Wallace and his executors left to the nation.

This solipsistic gesture should not be seen in isolation: we have had the infamous diamond skull (the mystery of its real value and ownership rumbles on), the spin (ha!) paintings, the anatomised animals, the pills, cabinets and of course the first-year essays in sacramental art (the Last Supper etc), all evidence of his increasing interest in the emotively rich arsenal of "old" art, with its frequently dynamic explorations of human frailty, defiance and hope. It's the false humility of this latest exhibition that smarts.

Think wistfully of Hirst's A Thousand Years, 1990, and you recall a clear language that employed contemporary forms and made us all shudder

It is as if the contemporary artist,­ maybe the contemporary world itself, ­has lost vigour and confidence and is now retrenching, moving towards the conservative, the previously validated, in a mood of sober reflection. But this is to suggest that one artist, however rich and brilliant in his projection of self, represents an era, which he doesn't, however hard he's trying to carve his name into the canon. Perhaps Hirst, with this public espousal of "heritage", really is a Tory: he's already got the country pile, the second (or third or fourth) home.

But think wistfully of Hirst's excellent A Thousand Years, completed in 1990, with its disturbing but keenly thought-out installation of a cow's head, maggots, an insect-o-cutor all set within a glass display case and you recall a clear language that employed contemporary forms and made us all shudder. What a pity.

Of course, that was all very "then", and, given the timidity of this latest offering, things are quite different now. The curators at the Wallace Collection, however, are slow to catch up and the allure of Hirst's previous success must have been impossible to resist. You can almost hear their thoughts: "If we get him in, it will bring people in hordes and, boy, will this build up our profile." It is an opportunistic if graceless strategy and one that ignores other, more sustainable and meaningful ways to communicate the intense singularity of Hertford House.

This affair also signals the naked pretension of Hirst's gallerists, who have doubtless calculated how this latest (but unconvincing) retrospective (or retrograde?) twist in the artist's dealings repositions him cleverly against the Gaderene forward rush of contemporary art. No love lost then, and it left me feeling rather blue.

  • No Love Lost, Blue Paintings by Damien Hirst continues at the Wallace Collection until 24 January 2010.

Share this article

Add comment

newsletter

Get a weekly digest of our critical highlights in your inbox each Thursday!

Simply enter your email address in the box below

View previous newsletters