Mixed blessings

Summer Exhibition
Royal Academy, until 17 August

The Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, now in its 240th year, is still an event, even if visitors don’t dress up quite as ornately as once they did. For the first time I attended Buyers’ Day. The atmosphere is convivial but competitive, as people jostle to see exhibits and further thicken the crowds round the provenly popular. It’s not always easy to look at art in these conditions, but the acquisitive hum in the air almost compensates for the lack of calm. The more affluent, or relaxed, sip from glasses of champagne or Pimms while pondering their purchases, as the Academy offers its usual cross-section of contemporary art-making, though this steadily becomes more polarised between what people actually buy and the sensationalist exhibits that make newspaper headlines.

This year the show starts on the very highest note with Gallery I given over in tribute to R.B. Kitaj, whose tragic and unexpected death in 2007 shocked the art world. The room is divided into two, the first section containing six paintings which demonstrate unarguably what a fine and inventive painter he was, including one of his marvellous early ‘cowboy’ pictures, the classic ‘Jewish Rider’ and ‘Catalan Christ (Pretending to be Dead)’, a particularly moving image in this context. The second section includes a number of small recent paintings, a couple of Kitaj’s brilliant charcoal drawings and three of his poignant and evocative pastels, particularly ‘The Street (A Life)’ from 1975. Some of the 30-odd works are for sale, which seems unusual for a memorial display, while others have been borrowed from private and public collections as far away as Oslo. For the first time in my experience, with such a beginning the Summer Exhibition looks really serious. It’s beautifully selected and hung, unlike the sadly overcrowded tribute to Patrick Caulfield two years ago, and indeed this room on its own justifies a visit to the RA.