After years of doing this, the only constant requirement I can find for being
a critic is that you must love the thing you criticise. I don’t think it’s
necessarily a help knowing lots about your subject — experts make
notoriously impenetrable judges. Neither is ignorance necessarily
insuperable — some of the best criticism is intuitive. But what you simply
can’t be is ambivalent. Only if you really care about something can you get
sufficiently infuriated when tasteless bastards traduce it, or sufficiently
enthusiastic when creative angels transcend it.
As Oscar Wilde might have said, each critic kills the thing he loves — and
I’ve had a stab at many things, from opera to sport. I began as an art
critic, but after a couple of years, I had to stop. I’d developed a livid,
suppurating, career-terminating hatred of public art. So it was with a
weather eye on the spinning wheel of life that inevitably whacks the smug in
the face with the haddock of irony that I went to review the National Dining
Rooms, the new restaurant in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery.
It wasn’t that I grew to hate pictures or even artists, though heaven knows,
they’re quite as noisome as chefs — it was the galleries themselves I
couldn’t abide any more. Until the end of the 19th century, no artist had
ever made a picture to be seen in an art gallery. If you care about the
natural habitat of animals and weep for bears in zoos, how can you not be
disgusted and righteously incensed by art in galleries — torn from its
context, labelled like meat, roped off like tarty celebrity? The big
national collections are the worst: tasteless, corpulent chocolate boxes
that advertise civilised nationalism and municipal taste, though, in fact,
they represent precisely the opposite. They’re warehouses of gaudy greed,
snobbery and licensed theft. The paintings are forced to perform like a
chimpanzees’ tea party. They’re cajoled to do trite and amusing things, hung
together to illustrate moments in history, movements and moods, a cacophony
of images made manageable for herds of obliged tourists and day
trip-dragooned kids. The pictures become icons, political and social
shorthand, chopped and changed into postcards and jigsaws, coasters and
jokey T-shirts, and teased without care or thought into easy-looking
comfort.
I’d forgotten how terribly sad and vibratingly furious these galleries make
me. I hadn’t been in the National for years, and as I waited for my lunch
guests, I gingerly stepped into a room. It turned out to be the Spanish
room: Murillo and Velazquez, the dribblingly stupid Philip IV looking like
Herman Munster in fancy dress, and the Rokeby Venus, Velazquez’s only extant
nude, a work of luscious beauty and lascivious self-idolatry. The label
doesn’t mention that it was slashed by suffragettes as a demonstration
against the objectification of women as goddess sex objects. You can still
just make out the dents in the canvas. I’m sure you can get it as a
pillowcase or pinny in the shop.
The restaurant in the Sainsbury Wing has just been done over by David Collins,
the Vasari of restaurant interiors. It’s an uncomfortable space that still
feels like an architectural offcut, lit with dozens of dull light bulbs and
divided between an all-day “bakery” and a grown-up dining room for
lunchtimes. The best thing about it is a complexly impenetrable mural by
Paula Rego. The room was packed with animated tables of folk who remembered
the pictures when they were still wet. There was a bobbing shingle of
mauve-rinsed hair that looked like a Tiepolo cloudscape awaiting cavorting
putti.
The menu is modern English, overseen by the estimable Irishman Oliver Peyton.
Modern English can go one of two ways: it can be the renaissance of Fergus
Henderson or the mannerism of Gary Rhodes. This one lurks with an uncertain
baroquishness betwixt and between. We started with a good watercress mousse
with button onions, an inventive and fresh alternative to the ubiquitous
“goat’s cheese with something” for vegetarians. Scallops with jerusalem
artichokes and bacon was a good combination of sweet and salt, but an oxtail
soup with dumplings was feebly Rhodesish: an anaemic meat minestrone with
boiled pustules.
Cod in parsley sauce was a shadow of its robust ancestor. They’d been
parsimonious with the parsley. It didn’t taste of much, except some
deep-fried tempura snot bits that were as insistent as they were unwelcome.
Much the same can be said of a sea bream with shrimp, cucumber and mace,
which was as odd as an East Anglian sea shanty. Pork belly with pease
pudding redeemed the main courses. Desserts were the now familiar
restoration of sticky English pride, joy and custard, though not as well
made as they might be. Steamed chocolate pudding was authentically prep
school and a treacle tart too lemony. Overall, if you want to eat in an art
gallery, this is as good as you’ll find.
The service was newly arrived and attentive rather than skilled. The waitress
didn’t know where the fish came from or where her tip went to. I asked an
insouciant manager. He conspiratorially said that the wages were £3-odd and
the minimum was made up out of the service charge — not illegal, just not
nice. There was a tronc for what was left over and the management took a
very reasonable 2% handling charge. “We made the staff three offers,” he
explained. “This is what they chose.”
How people chose to be paid less than the minimum wage is a ruse he might like
to take to the Institute of Directors. If you still want to eat here, have
the service taken off the bill and tip with cash. A publicly funded building
really shouldn’t allow staff on its premises to be paid in this shameful
fashion.
After lunch, I took a brief stroll through the early Renaissance. Of all the
reduced, belittled and martyred images of the collection, these seeds of the
West’s rebirth are the saddest. They come out of the worst moment of
civilisation: the black death, incessant religious and schismatic wars, the
collapse of old orders, horror and despair. European civilisation staggered
this close to the long drop, and these beautiful, intense images of devotion
and painful hope have been crowbarred, sawn and gouged from the smoky gloom
of altars and chapels in Tuscany to be brought here and nailed up in the
art-supermarket aisles. Even so, they are the most powerful images in the
place. They are still the light at the end of the tunnel.
And then I came face to face with St Eustace, painted by Pisanello. The saint
is in an improbably bountiful blue hat, riding through the darkness. All
around him are dogs, birds and beasts, and in front, a great stag with a
crucifix on its head. It is so strange, so full of portent and meaning
beyond language that, as it always does, it reduced me to secret snotty
tears.
God, I hate this place.
Restaurant: Thu-Tue, noon-3.30pm; Wed, noon-7pm
