artfirstprimo at the Tate Britain private view of the John Martin exhibition

Welcome back, here is a little catch-up on my recent activities. With the Vermeer exhibition now a distant memory, but the images still very much in my mind, also on December 6th I moved from the sublime to the extraordinary, because I was back in London in time for a private evening viewing of the John Martin exhibition at Tate Britain . John Martin's pictures are truly spectacular. However, they are, as one critic put it, 'A bold experiment in public taste'.  Martin's pictures are huge and full on technicolour. But big and more colour is not necessarily better, they are essentially bombastic and generic in their conception. Take Martin's epic painting, Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still Upon Gibeon has so much going on that it inevitably lacks a focal point.  Martin's Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, is again on a grand scale and mostly red to stand out from the crowd as if this was needed.  It would seem that in many of John Martin's picture everyone is doomed, death and destruction abound as in the expansive Fall of Babylon, and his demonic Pandemonium based on Milton's Pandemonium. Martin loves his thunder bolts, whenever there's destruction, there they are.  Martin's Eve of the Deluge reminds one of some of the truly awful science fiction air-brush paintings that feature on some sci-fi book covers.

I then sat in a room in the exhibition that has been appropriately arranged in a cinema like fashion to view Martin's great triptych. The images of the triptych are: The Plains of Heaven, The Last Judgement, and The Great Day of His Wrath. Martin's triptych is extraordinary and I remember being wowed by them on a school visit. But now I'm just in time for something that probably would not have been possible when I was at school; a special light-show and audio treatment given to Martin's triptych. It's a magic lantern spectacular in which individual parts of each of the paintings are lit, projected on with identical images, and virtually animated by this magical light show; also accompanied by Jeff Wayne-like War of the Worlds commentary.  It is quite a sight to behold, but is it art? Well of course it is, it's a kind of art that appeals to those who love a sense of fun and showmanship and don't take their art too seriously, and I must say I do like a bit of fun occasionally.

And so the John Martin exhibition ends with the appropriately ironic image by contemporary artist Glen Brown,The Tragic Conversion of Salvador Dali, a perfect way to end the show.