Absolute bangers abound in Tate Modern’s latest show. In the show’s biggest room, with Marlene Dumas, Peter Doig and Luc Tuymans close by, is arguably David Hockney’s best painting, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), made in 1972. You surely know it: a depiction of his lover Peter Schlesinger looking down into a pool in which a man breaststrokes beneath the surface, with verdant French hills behind.
It’s the great summation of his Sixties and Seventies obsessions: pools and bathers, enigmatic double portraits, queer desire and longing, sardonic riffs on abstraction.
The split composition is daring: chlorine up close, chlorophyll beyond. The painting is also a marvellous exposition of the mechanics of its medium, from the glistering highlights on the stylised ripples in the pool, the subtly modulated colouring on the poolside tiles, and the inspired painterly shorthand for trees and mountains in the landscape.
Its significance in this show is its deep relationship with photography. Hockney conceived of the scene through a serendiptious spotting of a pair of unrelated photographs on the studio floor, which gave him the idea of the standing figure looking down on the swimmer. In the complex process of making the painting, he took hundreds of photographs that he then used in the two-week burst of activity that brought the painting to its completion.
I was expecting much more from Hockney in this show. He’s spent decades expounding on his theories of the relationship between the camera and the brush, the human eye and the photographic lens (including some controversial statements about the limits of photography), so a show exploring what it calls “the dynamic relationship” between the two disciplines would seem an ideal stage on which to explore this in depth.
But Capturing the Moment is emphatically not that kind of show. I imagined something exhaustive and exhausting; the kind of dense, comprehensive survey that has defined Tate Modern’s programme – dozens of rooms, a 500-page catalogue, a whole world of theory about mediated images and mechanical eyes. But while the show begins with a great Susan Sontag quote – “The painter constructs, the photographer discloses” – it’s largely pretty lightweight intellectually, with no catalogue, and a meandering thematic structure.
And while at the core of the show are a couple of rooms where photography is centre stage – including marvellous, vast pieces by Jeff Wall, key figures in the Düsseldorf School, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and Candida Höfer, and the cool calm of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seascapes – it’s mostly a show about painting that relates to photography. But even then, it doesn’t really analyse how. You could say it has a blurry focus.
This is in part because it’s effectively an introduction to a private collection, that belonging to the YAGEO Foundation, founded by the collector Pierre Chen, who runs an electronic components company in Taiwan. Chen must have deep pockets – the Hockney was briefly the most expensive artwork by a living artist when it sold for more than $90m at Christie’s in 2018 – and he’s assembled a collection that’s clearly rich in both photography and painting. So it doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to picture how they arrived at the shape of this exhibition, which accompanies the YAGEO holdings with works from Tate’s collection.
What it lacks in intellectual rigour, though, it makes up for in stonkingly great works. Early on, there’s a rare pairing of photograph and painting of the kind I wish we could see more often – two images of mid-century humanitarian turmoil, which aptly illustrate Sontag’s maxim. Picasso’s Weeping Woman (1937), that devastating picture evoking the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War, turns to face Dorothea Lange’s defining image of the Great Depression, made a year before Picasso’s painting, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California.
In both images, the woman’s hand is raised to her face, but Picasso can use the fractured forms of his post-cubist language to capture a shattering grief, while Lange had to find a precise moment in which to convey a similar depth of emotion. This pairing perhaps conveys a second meaning in the exhibition’s title most effectively – that of the different ways in which painting and photography represent the times in which they were made.
Similarly mournful is Lucian Freud’s portrait of his mother nearby, one of 18 he made of her following his father’s death, and among his most moving works. Freud, ever a painter from life, is one of the more unfathomable inclusions in the show – one senses he’s here to support his old mate Francis Bacon, whose work is one of the most remarkable explorations of how paint can respond to the photographic image. Bacon’s portrait triptych of Freud from YAGEO’s collection here is a marker of what he called the “violence” he did to his sitters, using photographs – Freud’s face is all sinew and bruised flesh amid a blood-red ground.
There are marvellously productive conversations between painters all through the show: Bacon opposite Marwan, the Syrian painter, whose painting of the writer Bader Chaker al Sayyab pictures the poet’s head with a slab of meat above it, seemingly about to crush it. Opposite the Hockney there’s a fantastic wall of British and US pop art using photographs – Pauline Boty’s wry comment on pin-ups in which the writer and artist Derek Marlowe sits cheerily beneath four bluntly severed portraits of Marilyn-esque women; a magnificent Robert Rauschenberg silkscreen painting, Almanac (1962); and a thrillingly austere Andy Warhol Brando painting. Two artists that could have commanded entire exhibitions with their relentless interrogation of the photographic image, Gerhard Richter and Wilhelm Sasnal, share a transcendent space.
A compelling subplot is Tate showing off its great collection of contemporary painters. Works by Michael Armitage, Lisa Brice, Christina Quarles, Laura Owens and Njideka Akunyili Crosby, among others – all acquired in the past decade – show how productively and distinctively artists are grappling with the photograph and the screen.
Tate should, at some point, do the great scholarly painting-meets-photography show I expected. If you want real insight into the tension between these two disciplines, you won’t get it here. But you will see dozens of out-and-out bangers, and that’s enough for now.
