Rediscovering the old masters

Published: 26 May 2011

THE moment I turned the corner my eyes lit on a beautiful painting by Kandinsky of a horse in flight.  The colour flowing from the painting at the Edinburgh gallery mesmerised me.

A similar moment came recently when I stood at the back of a room at a San Fransisco gallery and became besotted by a painting of a woman by the German master of the 1930s, Beckman – I was a good 30 feet away but the colour coming out of the portrait remains unforgettable.

This week Tracey Emin’s new exhibition at the Hayward Gallery is drawing in its wake the usual quota of sycophantic publicity.  But is she an artist or simply a self-publicist?

If you want to see old-fashioned figurative paintings at their best go to the New End Gallery in Hampstead for a new exhibition of Ukrainian art.

It has been curated around light and colour so that most paintings throw off almost a dazzling beam – girls in a forest, young boys on the beach.

In the early part of the last century, painters in Ukraine studied how to emphasise light – it is a particular skill few artists mastered.

This led over the years to a kind of Impressionism, similar to the French masters, but anything experimentally beyond that was taboo under the Soviet rule of the 1920s and 1930s. Oddly enough, painters migrated to Moscow where a more bohemian attitude was encouraged, despite the culture police of the day.

Soviet art has gone full circle. Once decried as robotic and passionless, it is now eagerly sought after. 

Though the show at New End is more impressionistic than social realism, it beckons to an era whose appeal is being rediscovered.