GLYN PHILPOT | FLESH AND SPIRIT

Two Muses at the Tomb of a Poet, 1937. Oil on canvas, 76.2 x 55.9cm, courtesy of Piano Nobile.

On the face of it, the Glyn Philpot show at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, Flesh and Spirit, tells the story of Philpot ‘going Picasso’ (as The Scotsman saw it), shapeshifting from a fashionable, traditional and hugely successful society portrait painter, into an experimental Modernist, after spending time in Paris and Berlin in the early 1930s (and suffering much critical disdain from the largely conservative press as a result).

The exhibition digs much deeper than that, though, and reveals Philpot to have been highly unconventional well before this epiphany, noticeably in his homoerotic portraits of regular muses, his predilection for painting dignified portraits of black subjects, and his idiosyncratic take on historical and spiritual themes.

There is certainly a big shift in his work in the 30s, though. As Simon Martin, director of Pallant House, curator of the show, and author of its eponymous monograph writes: ‘In his later works… his skills as a colourist, which had brought him such praise early in his career, are strongly evident albeit through an entirely different approach to the application of paint – often spare and dry in comparison with the rich glazes of the past’.

A case in point is Two Muses at the Tomb of a Poet (pictured), painted in 1937, shortly before Philpot’s sudden death from a brain haemorrhage, which Piano Nobile have lent to Pallant House for the show. In a recent ‘Insight’ essay, they describe the work as ‘co-exist[ing] in Philpot’s late mytho-modernist work with a motley cast of Muses, mermaids, the Fates, St Sebastian, and many other blank-eyed, pensive, sallow-skinned gods and demigods… These impassive figures defy formal iconography, with Philpot instead using them to evoke a subtle atmosphere of melancholy and introspection.’

The highly recommendable exhibition, which has garnered four and five-star reviews in the broadsheet press, continues until October 23 at Pallant House, Chichester. Piano Nobile will be exhibiting at Stand 2 of the British Art Fair, showing work by RB Kitaj, Frank Auerbach, Ben Nicholson, Leon Kossoff, Walter Sickert, Euan Uglow, Henry Moore, Jean Cooke, Damien Hirst and Craigie Aitchison.

Piano Nobile