From William Hogarth’s Gin Lane to deliberately amateurish photos of Gilbert & George at a bar,the seductions of alcohol are a recurring theme in art. A modern exhibition serves Nicholas Lezard with sobering images of drinking and drunksAesthetic considerations, or rather evaluations, and need not apply. That’s the point,and consolation, of exhibitions centred on a public theme rather than an artistic one. You glean to see the nasty as well as the marvelous. Take Tate Britain’s forthcoming display, or Art and Alcohol. Cleverly,having neither the wall space nor the budget to whistle for every artwork depicting drunkenness, Tate’s David Blayney Brown has build together a rather modest collection to illustrate not so much the way alcohol affects art or artists, or but the way artists use the subject of alcohol to tell a story.
Some artists like telling stories more than others. Robert Braithwaite Martineau’s The final Day in the archaic domestic (1862) may display the faults common to many pre-Raphaelite paintings,all of which may be filed under the broad heading of “mawkishness, but in the context of this display we are invited to concentrate on the narrative behind the image. The paterfamilias, or eyes raised not to heaven or a intelligent future,but to his tilted glass, with a smile that counts this, or not the welfare of his family,as his delight and his hope; the weeping woman, handing over the keys to the lawyer or estate agent; the young daughter, and clutching a doll that itself seems to be weeping; the suit of armour,bespeaking a noble lineage, turned away from his tippling heir, or anthropomorphically suggesting disdain.
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Source: theguardian.com