In Georgian London, there can hardly have been more opposite visual sensibilities than neoclassical idealist John Soane, architect of the Bank of England, and grassroots chronicler of the dissolute city William Hogarth. Yet Soane needed Hogarth: when he acquired the series of eight narrative paintings of “A Rake’s Progress” for Pitzhanger Manor, his country home at Ealing, the wickedly, garrulously detailed morality tale of spendthrift, spongers, prostitutes and madmen (produced in 1732-34) injected a burst of modern life into Soane’s sober array of marble busts, antiquities, architectural drawings and chinoiserie.
“The Rake” moved into Pitzhanger in 1802, presiding over the Small Drawing Room as Soane was transforming the place into his idiosyncratic version of a Roman villa — statue-topped columns, domed ceilings, triumphal arches — suffused with radiant effects from endless mirrors and skylights. But Soane’s life darkened, he departed with his collection for Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1810, and Pitzhanger languished for two centuries, until last year’s splendid restoration. Now, in a rare loan, the “Rake” returns, this time in rakish contemporary company, for the new exhibition Hogarth: London Voices, London Lives (from September 10).
“Tommy” is a skateboarder caught mid-leap in Harry Turner’s “Southbank” photographs (2017-18): glistening semi-nude bodies, dancers in space against concrete and railings — masculine disobedience diverted to something subversively heroic, collaborative and cohesive. So too with Pitzhanger’s on-site barber — Faisal Abdu’Allah’s “Live Salon” which, even if not offering free haircuts as planned pre-Covid, proposes the much-missed hairdressers as arenas for interaction, exchange of ideas. And, narrated in a disaffected male flâneur’s voice, a dystopian progress across town unfurls beauty from the blue dawn of Soho (“turned up jeans and turned up noses”, rotting fruit at Berwick Street market) to suburban wastelands (“rust never sleeps”): Nick Relph and Oliver Payne’s film Driftwood (1999).
With a weighty historic building but no collection, Pitzhanger Manor’s identity as a gallery has to turn on architecture — the chief reason to visit. In 2019’s inaugural show, Anish Kapoor’s mirror sculptures focused attention on the house’s formal and especially its reflective qualities. London Voices broadens the context to consider architecture and design as social construct. Hogarth, for whom no decor or setting is accidental, is the perfect shaping reference: in his series of paintings (which later became highly popular prints), “The Levee” shows preening, vain Rakewell framed by a painting of “The Judgement of Paris”; in “The Arrest”, his downfall begins as jumbled humbled figures collapse before a facade of classical buildings and St James’s Palace, rigid structures of order and control.
How do buildings confer authority? John Riddy’s superb urban photographs (2006-08) here include a trio of towering, elegant sash windows, backlit by a room of theatrical portraits — Johan Zoffany’s “David Garrick” and a silken-costumed performance of “The Clandestine Marriage” shine bright — in “London (Garrick)”, juxtaposed with three narrow illuminated doorways in a Southwark council block “London (Heygate)”. Each of the lit-up spaces stares out like eyes — one looking on the world through the exclusive atmosphere of the men-only Garrick Club, founded in Soane’s lifetime, the other from a 1970s brutalist estate, dilapidated but modelled on Le Corbusier’s Utopianism. Heygate was controversially demolished in 2011.
Pitzhanger itself encapsulates the story of architecture as power — it was Soane’s self-advertisement, model for his later, larger statements such as Dulwich Picture Gallery — but also as fantasy. Soane hoped to found a dynasty of architects in the house, but his two sons rebelled against its grandiose milieu and proved as feckless and disloyal as Rakewell — one, like him, ending up in a debtors’ prison. Deeply hurt, Soane abandoned Pitzhanger. As the story of overbearing ambition and disillusioned dreams, “The Rake’s Progress” has poignant resonance here.
September 10-December 31, pitzhanger.org.uk
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September 08, 2020 at 11:00PM
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On show — A Rake's Progress returns to its original home - Financial Times
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