No Need For Narrative At YCBA

A stork dips its long beak into a deep green shell, dislodging something soft-bodied and gray that it’s going to eat for dinner. Just a stone’s throw away, an elaborate miniature of the Taj Mahal beckons from its glass case. In the next room, wild flowers bloom from a woman’s wide left eye, criss-crossing her face in a sort of floral map.

The three — all different media, which seemingly have nothing to do with each other — are brought together in ​“A Decade of Gifts and Acquisitions, the latest exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA). Planned in conjunction with the YCBA’s 40th anniversary, the exhibition highlights some of the past decade’s greatest hits, honoring donors while also feting purchases that the curators have pursued and made.

The exhibition opened June 1 and runs through Aug. 13.

The catalyst for the show was — and continues to be — dozens of ​“life interest objects” from founding donor Paul Mellon, promised in the original gift that jumpstarted the center 40 years ago. Several of these remained with Mellon’s wife Rachel (“Bunny”) until her death in 2014. This show is the first time ever that many of them appear together.

But that’s just the tip of it. Two adjoining galleries also pay homage to recently dead donors — artist-critic pals Joseph McCrindle and Brian Sewell, and then artist John Golding. The remaining galleries, separated into sections, are titled as Miscellaneous Historical Drawings, Pastels and Portraits, Modern and Contemporary Prints, Instruction with Delight (read: education), War and Conflict, The British Empire in India, The Inexhaustible Regions of Nature, Photography.

It’s a sweeping laundry list that sinks deep into British art history, with stops in Italy, France, the Netherlands, India, the U.S. and Barbados around the way. 

Therein lies the exhibition’s greatest problem, and greatest strength. Pulling from thousands of works to arrange the show, curators have devised a framework that is, by its very nature, arbitrary. Delightfully arbitrary, an amuse-bouche for the greater collection. Yet gallery headings and wall labels speak to a compulsive need to taxonomize art history; they’re overly broad as they try to impose order on a collection of works that has, in many ways, defied it. When a decade of things trickle into a museum, they’re not specifically going to make any sense. Or they’re going to totally make sense — but not specifically in temporal, or media-specific ways.

Not that the labels aren’t helpful. The label-free, super-clean white cube model — a British intervention on museum practice — isn’t for the YCBA. It’s too contemporary to be right, and that’s a good thing.The labels lend to the show a lot of helpful historical context, and even a bit of whimsy. The exhibition’s titled galleries, however, create conspicuous gaps when it comes to colonialism. Likewise, its ​“global outlook” on art and history only includes half of the globe. Each gallery is a spectacular mini-exhibition that relates only tenuously to the next.

Which begs the question: Does an exhibition need to have a narrative? Because this show, perhaps, is much better after you’ve discarded one, and let the art take you away all on its own.

If you like art, any art, between about 1650 and 2017, there will be at least one thing in this exhibition for you. Probably many more than that. As the show opens with Paul and Bunny Mellon’s final gift, the works strike a balance between unvarnished and humbly elegant, funny and moving. Beside a small, muscular and glistening Lion and Lioness by George Stubbs, a cartoonish King Charles Spaniel by Sir David Wilkie nearly barks as it scratches itself from the wall. A sweet sketch of Bunny falls open in a sketchbook a few paces to the right, to reveal her as a young woman, clad in bright color and unfinished on the white page.

There’s also a fun, quiet mix of works that greets viewers in a section called ​“Joseph McCrindle and Brian Sewell: Art and Friendship,” celebrating a publisher and art critic who inspired and encouraged each other in their collecting practices. A canvas heaped with orange and white paint winks across the room at a neat wall of academic sketches, with dimpled butt cheeks and undulating thighs aplenty. On another wall, a a man levitates above a white-clothed dinner table, his powder-blue coattails fluttering in the wind as pink clouds roll past. 

There’s intense pleasure in taking in the works as they are. For every fine, if sedate, 19th century pastel like Lady Pringle, née Emilia Anne Macleod (Archibald Skirving, 1815), there is an abstraction like Sir Howard Hodgkin’s mesmerizing printed Venice, Evening in show-stopping blocks of color, with fine aquatinted detail. Whole rooms are politically apathetic; others are charged and electric, such that you can feel it in the air. Richard Hamilton’s prints reimagining Ulysses knock the wind right out of the viewer, pulling references from the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and a rapidly changing Britain. Joscelyn Gardner’s extraordinary Creole Portraits, three large lithographs on mylar, bring it back in as they depict anthropomorphized abortifacient plants, woven with black hair and stunted with choke collars.

But it’s unclear, for instance, why Gardner’s prints are kept far from Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman’s vivid feminist cyanotypes — except for the fact that it would mess with the exhibition’s rigid categories, and encourage cross-disciplinary thinking (lest we mix our carrots with our peas!) that the exhibition isn’t really set up for. In another gallery, ​“The British Empire in India” is siloed off from images of warring conquest, with no mention to the intimate link between the two. 

Which is to say that the exhibition may have done well to go with the labelless model after all. ​“Decade” is better digested without a roadmap; the arbitrary nature of gifts and acquisitions leaves something for every viewer as it is. Around one corner sits a child’s box of odds and ends, an early British example of what play might have looked like hundreds of years ago. A poster that reads ​“EMPIRE NOW!” is both eye-catching and chilling. Among birds and bees in nature, Katharine Morling’s Nature Boy and Rummage & Gather tickle the viewers, pulling off a big surprise when their appearance isn’t what it seems: They’re meant to look soft, but are in fact porcelain. 

A number of cartes de visite make familiar the ​“Instruction with Delight” gallery, as does a display with early games. Letters home in the war gallery serve an archival-meets-living-history purpose. The colonialism gallery, while fairly flat-footed in its labels, pulls out a rhinoceros that’s a dead ringer for Durer’s, but in graphite and watercolor.

And throughout, the exhibition hints at where the YCBA’s collecting practices may be heading in the next years: photography, a medium for which it’s not historically been known. As the show ends on British Nigerian Yinka Shonibare​‘s ​“Fake Death Picture,” it suggests a bright future for the museum’s holdings.

“It’s an aspect of collecting we haven’t really done yet,” said Scott Wilcox, deputy director for collections, after a tour of the show. He added that he and other curators had an eye on thinking globally, and what it means years after Paul Mellon’s death.

“This is the Yale Center for British Art, so we’re not going to abandon that,” he said. ​“But I think we are sensitive to the ways that narrative develops. We’re hoping to deal with the way British art deals with, and is implicated in, the imperial process. Our desire is to take a clear-eyed view as to the story of British art.”

“A Decade of Gifts and Acquisitions” runs from June 1 to Aug. 13. For more information, visit the Yale Center for British Art’s website.