In this complex and enthralling show, there is a gallery entitled Constructing Whiteness. It contains perhaps the most boring work I’ve seen at this gallery. Frederick William Elwell’s painting of the Royal Academy’s Selection and Hanging Committee in 1938.
Every one of them is a white, middle-aged or elderly man, sitting stiffly at a table after dinner. As the writer Alayo Akinkugbe says in the show’s catalogue, the artist Augustus John that year described “the predominant junta of deadly conservatism” at the Academy. Elwell’s picture embodies it.
