Sometimes, an exhibition can be good despite itself. And Saatchi Yates’s show about the subject of bathers in art history manages to be annoyingly worth visiting despite absolutely bodging its own theme.
Artists have painted bathers for centuries. It was an excuse to flash reclining skin, to tantalise viewers with skin, to explore myth and history. It’s there in Titian and Guercino, in Gainsborough and Cezanne. Mounds of flesh, all freshly dipped.
This exhibition doesn't really have anything to tell you about the significance of the subject, what it means, represents, or how it has evolved. But what it does have is a handful of loans that are genuinely unmissable.
There’s a tiny, explosive, bizarre Picasso of a nude star-shaped body rendered as nothing but bits and holes. There are two beautiful, calm, ultra-sensual Hockneys that ripple with heat and lust. There’s the big green solitary calm of Neil Stokoe’s swimmer. There’s a messy, minor Cezanne (one of art history’s great bather-lovers) and a twisting, awkward, beautiful Rodin sculpture.
Mounds of flesh, all freshly dipped
Lots of the more recent works are good too: the menacing, vile threat of Eric Fischl’s suburban pool scene, the glowing haziness of the little Peter Doig painting, the brilliant, surreal technicality of the Benjamin Spiers Baywatch image, the full frontal gooeyness of Angela Santana.
But there’s a lot that doesn’t work too. The Damien Hirst sharks are silly and throwaway, the Alex Katz features no discernable bathing and the (very good) Hurvin Anderson feels totally out of place. The show hasn’t engaged with the subject, just whacked a bunch of paintings in a room, and when you do that a lot of it is going to fail.
But then there’s my whole reason for coming: a glimmering, overwrought, ludicrous, ridiculously sexual, stupidly wispy, utterly perfect painting by William Adolphe Bouguereau. He was a nineteenth century French classicist who fell out of fashion when the impressionists showed up. But his crystal clear, gorgeous vision of a smiling nude woman about to be hit by a wave is so over-the-top, so erotic, so chintzy, so desperate and so god damn beautiful that it’s genuinely unforgettable. Bouguereau had such a stunning compositional style, he was so precise in how he painted, he was so stupidly enamoured with flesh. He might just be art history's horniest guy. It’s a bit like watching a b-movie but directed by Scorsese. It’s kitsch, overblown, but still somehow perfect.
We need the National Gallery to put on a whole Bouguereau show. That way we can do more than just dip our toe in, we can properly bathe in his work.
