Sir Alfred Munnings: An Artist's Life, Richard Green, W1

As the bold and beautiful paintings of Alfred Munnings play such a small part in the displays of public galleries, it falls to an art dealer in Bond Street to remind London of his brilliance
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13 December 2012

If Alfred James Munnings, KCVO and for the six years 1944-49 president of the Royal Academy, is remembered by the current art world of Arts Councillors, White Cubes, Serota’s proliferate Tates and satrapies, and, indeed the present instruments of tyranny in the Academy itself, it is not for his paintings but for a speech made at the dinner celebrating the Academy’s annual Summer Exhibition in 1949. In this he swiped at contemporary sculptors in general and Henry Moore in particular, at his fellow painters in the Academy whom he accused of “affected juggling” and “shilly-shallying ... in this so-called modern art,” at compliant critics, singling out Anthony Blunt, and at Matisse and all the School of Paris, reserving for Picasso the honour of having his arse kicked by Munnings himself and that notorious amateur, Winston Churchill, who was first to suggest the jape. With these sentiments he was at once transformed from worthy but irrelevant painter of horse portraiture in which mount and rider could at once be recognised into silly old fool and fascist reactionary.

He was neither, and should be remembered as an honest painter rooted in the ancestral skills and traditions of European painting, Stubbs his mentor, though he never matched that old master’s mastery of complex mathematics in interval and line. In his practice, when young, he was as modern as his older contemporaries Sargent, Brangwyn, La Thangue, Pryde, Laura Knight and all the Newlyn School, and when old, distinct from them and every other painter of his generation, his facture a synthesis distilled from 20 years of looking and learning, and 40 more of work. He was, in essence, self-taught. Born on the Suffolk-Norfolk border in 1878, the son of a prosperous and congenial miller of literary bent, at eight he took drawing lessons from the local vicar’s daughter, and at 14 was apprenticed for six years to a lithographer in Norwich involved in advertising and design. Eventually that company’s leading artist, travelling to trade fairs as far afield as Germany, he made time to visit museums and galleries — those of Munich left an indelible impression to which he made reference late in the notorious speech of 1949. There was also the influence of the Norwich School of Art at which he attended evening classes. By 1897, at 21, his litho-graphy apprenticeship completed, his draughtsmanship astonishingly swift, polished, stylish and accurate, he had become a lowly travelling painter at horse fairs and race meetings, living on what he could sell, and the owner of his first independent studio.

In 1902 he went to Paris for some months, painted the uncomely nude from life at the Académie Julian, a commercially run art school where teaching methods were undogmatic, paid attention to Degas and Fantin-Latour, and to his Spanish near contemporary, Sorolla — the Spanish Sargent — who had been hugely successful at the Paris International Exhibition the year before. There he painted a masterpiece without a horse — the interior of the studio in which he worked, the great north window curtained in green, through which light filters with the subtlety and brilliance of Menzel; I saw it in 1958 but have not seen it since — not altogether surprising, for there has been no retrospective exhibition of Munnings’ work since one at the Academy in 1956.

At this stage he was as retentatively absorbent as a sponge and yet remained absolutely English — as English as any member of the New English Art Club (founded in 1886 and no longer new), or of the Newlyn School, or even (dare I say it?) of the Glasgow School, his subjects the rural life of East Anglia, gypsies, farm labourers, the market place, the horse fair, the pet pony and the comfortable middle classes at their leisure. All these he could paint in full sunlight, skies blue, clouds kindly, but his bravest paintings — in that they courted financial failure in their gloom — were those in which daylight is giving way to darkness and figures and horses are illuminated by the last glimmerings of sunset and the little light reflected in a rippling stream. These were a response to the lively, even urgent, compositions and fluid brushwork of Heinrich von Zügel, a now forgotten animal painter long established in Munich, where Munnings was again in 1909; it should not be forgotten that Munich was then still one of the great European schools of painting, particularly of academic realism.

Munnings’ early travels in a gypsy caravan adapted as a studio were, with success, abandoned for more conventional circumstances, but he remained an open-air painter all his life, though it was an open air encounter with a thorn bush that deprived his right eye of its sight when he was only 20, the year in which he first exhibited at the Royal Academy. With only one functioning eye he was refused active service in the Great War but in 1917, aged 37, volunteered to play some part in the care of army horses; this led, the following year, to his attachment to the Canadian Cavalry as one of several painters working on a grandiose project (never completed) to record its part in the war. Of this a by-product was an equestrian portrait of General Seeley that sparked a demand for more, and with the burden of what were essentially society commissions here and in the USA, where he spent six months in 1924, came one from Queen Mary in 1925 to record The Ascot Procession in Windsor Park. With this there could be no doubt that he had found his form, his eventual presidency of the Academy inevitable.

As president he was among old friends — Brangwyn, Stanhope Forbes, Laura and Harold Knight — and at his ease in an institution that was already an anachronism in the world of 20th-century painting. More than a year had to pass before the war in Europe came to an end; then in October 1946 the Academy mounted its Winter Exhibition of the King’s Pictures with a young Anthony Blunt and other art historians throwing their weight about — a sore point brought up in that notorious speech, recalling that Blunt had told “some people that Reynolds was not as good as Picasso”. His loathing for Picasso had matured only months before in the winter when the British Council mounted at the V&A an exhibition of his work under Nazi occupation, in mood dark, extreme and melancholy, and still not easily understood — but as Munnings’ heart and mind were rooted in East Anglia, not the sophistications of London, in open landscape and high skies, in the beauty, elegance and movement of the horse, how else could such a romantic react to the painter of the anguished broken horse of Guernica?

Painting horses and their riders for so many years, Munnings had slipped easily from the social status of the miller’s son and become a country gentleman of the hunting and riding kind, and his knighthood as president of the Royal Academy he wore more easily than his presidency — his 1949 speech was also one of angry resignation, “... I shall not be here next, year, thank God!” In his retirement he continued to work in the open air — “the old irrepressible,” as one of his friends put it, “despite gout ... the rain and wind ... and despite the discouragement of the modern critic.” The Academy gave him a retrospective exhibition in 1956. At 80, in 1959, he died and his amiably dotty widow established their home in Dedham as the Sir Alfred Munnings Art Museum; it is a substantial loan from this that, for a month, forms the core of an exhibition at Richard Green’s Gallery, 147 New Bond Street.

Only the art dealers and sale rooms of London have sustained Munnings’ reputation in public. Though the original Tate Gallery owns three of his paintings, they were acquired not by purchase but by donation through the Chantrey Bequest in 1920, 1930 and 1937, and I cannot recall ever seeing them hung; I dare say that were one to utter his name in the presence of the present Tate panjandrums, they would shudder with distaste. Munnings was, of course, omitted from the Royal Academy’s survey of 20th century British art in 1987, and his current successor as president (himself a wretched painter of horses) and his many minions there must, in any recollection of so honest a painter, twitch their noses in disdain.

Munnings, however, exemplifies a genre of painting that was for centuries the backbone of British art, yet he was never old-fashioned; in the manner of his painting he was, in his day, thoroughly modern, his handling of impastose paint bold and certain, the strokes of the loaded brush always assured, whether long or flickering, and often a match for Sargent’s swaggering confidence. Munnings did what he did bravely and with great affection for his subjects, subtly acknowledging the influence of his peers as well as the past, but without intellectual theory to justify his work it proved too comprehensible and was swept aside by the obscurities of Cubism, Abstraction and their overwhelming consequences.

That he deserves better than this is proved by this exhibition. It demonstrates his abilities as a fluent draughtsman sketching with the brush, and as a painter, disciplining that fluency in such a formal set piece as The Presentation of Standards to the Household Cavalry, of 1927, but retaining its essential character. Between this formality and the impetuous sketch lies Tagg’s Island, in which, on a sunlit summer evening, he captured perfectly the post-war gaiety of 1920. Until the outbreak of the Second World War he was always a painter of his time, recognisably Edwardian, reflecting the mood of the class into which he graduated in the Twenties and Thirties, but this war he virtually ignored, though his Exmoor Snow of post-1940 suggests a suitably sombre mood. Dare I say that he was a truer painter of landscapes than Hockney, a truer painter of the horse than Freud?

Sir Alfred Munnings: An Artist’s Life is at Richard Green, Wl (0207 493 3939; richard-green.com) until December 14. Open Monday-Friday, 10am-6pm; Saturday, 10am-1pm; closed Sundays. Admission free.

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