Review by Conrad Magee – These gentle, blocky paintings are expressionism without expression | art

HIn the middle of this exhibition of the early 20th century Estonian painter Konrad Magi, I had to catch my breath. By that I mean I need to breathe in better art. I was worried that my responses might be off. How could I find this artist’s colorful works, with their echoes of Pointillism, Cubism, and other modernist movements, so dead? Was the problem inside me?

A few minutes of looking through Dulwich’s permanent collection reassured me that it wasn’t me. I found it more beautiful and beguiling than ever. This uniquely small art museum was founded over 200 years ago as home to a collection originally intended for the Polish royal family – hence its huge ambition, which includes Rembrandt, Rubens, Piero di Cosimo and Poussin, as well as an impressive selection of British art.

I was immediately struck by Guido Reni’s Saint Sebastian, his silvery flesh dangling in the dark, impaled by arrows in a stark, dramatic masterpiece that rivals Caravaggio. I was haunted by the face of Venice Stanley as she lay on her pillow, her head on her hand, seemingly asleep but depicted by Anthony Van Dyck “on the second day after her death.” Then there is Rembrandt’s portrait of a young man, perhaps his son Titus, looking at you with endless eyes.

The Dulwich Collection, which stops around 1800, is a collection of golden oldies dealing with sex and death, passion and loss. What more can you ask for from art? However, the gallery continues to present displays of 20th and 21st century art, to say to its audience, I think: “We have arrived at modernity.” But this doesn’t work if you choose a minor and derivative artist like Mägi.

I returned with real pain to Magee’s early landscapes in Norway. Painted in the 20th century, after he visited Paris and discovered the visions of the avant-garde, this work defined his future style of random colors and blown shapes. In the Norwegian landscape, there are orange-brown spotted shrubs on violet hills. If his contemporary Edvard Munch had painted this painting, it would be full of anxiety and horror, but Magee makes it gentle and decorative. This is expressionless. The reason these ancient masters are so influential and not forgotten is that they deal with urgent and serious matters. Van Dyck paints a dead woman. Rembrandt doted on Titus, who would die when he was only 26 years old. Where lies the pathos and purpose in Maggie’s landscapes?

At least they’re not as bad as his pictures. There’s a room full of these. The women with strangely similar faces and the self-conscious bohemian men are painted in a style that removes some of the perceptions that the Magi saw in Paris. His Portrait of a Woman, painted from 1923 to 1924, has vague Cubist blotches on her face and clothes – but they are so soft that the result seems crooked. Another portrait of a woman has hints of the expressionist Chaim Soutine, but in a normal and hesitant way.

The more I look at these pictures, the uglier and more vulgar they become. This is a farce of modernity. The modern movement of the early twentieth century was not a relativistic free-for-all. It produced geniuses such as Matisse and Picasso, Duchamp and Klee, distinguished originalists including Soutine and Chagall – and, inevitably, its own followers and followers, from London’s Bloomsbury Group to Magee.

Magee is not just very much a modernist. It puts a stylish veneer on the panels that are truly safe for faces and places. As you walk past cloud-filled, sunlit seashores and unforgettable purple hills, what strikes you is the lack of energy, the drift into empty pastoral poems. I even began to feel a little nauseous at an exhibition of bright, colorful paintings from twentieth-century Europe, a historically unparalleled slaughterhouse.

Turning the 20th century into a decorative escape fits well with the Dulwich ethos these days. Its grounds, once a simple green space that allowed you to contemplate the sombre architectural beauty of Sir John Soane’s Picture Room, are now a popular venue featuring two cafés and an adventure playground. fair enough. But all of this seems to evade and even avoid the high art that this gallery was founded to preserve. Will Dulwich betray herself and lose her soul and purpose? She must ask herself what to do with such a meaningless, contextless exhibition that wastes and mocks Swan’s contemplative poetic interiority.