Exhibition until 6th April 2008 @ Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery

‘LOVE’, a National Gallery touring exhibition currently in the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, is a paradox: it is a bad exhibition with really, really good pieces. How is that possible?

The experience of visiting ‘LOVE’ is close to miserable: a smallish, weirdly lit room with no capacity hosts some of the most beautiful paintings ever to be shown in Bristol by artists we will not see again soon. Lighting is not placed properly, making appreciation of the paintings, as a whole, very difficult; you either have to stand really far back and miss the details or really close and only see the details! The paintings exhibited– although not many – span an impressive period of five centuries, but the order in which they are presented makes absolutely no sense, chronological or otherwise.

If you disregard these shortcomings however, and just look at the artworks, you will see that LOVE is a collection of works which can speak to the viewers; it is a multifaceted, deep, interesting portrayal of a feeling and it is successful despite the exhibition’s disadvantages because it actually make you feel it. Every imaginable expression and form of love is present in the room. Vermeer’s Young Woman Standing at a Virginal is pure, calm, devoted, love in her heart takes her loneliness away. Perry’s God Please Keep my Children Safe is the prayer of a father who feels inadequate in the face of the fear of losing what is most precious in his life. Chagall’s Bouquet with Flying Lovers is a tribute to a love lost but never forgotten, whereas Sandys’ Medea is full of the destructive force brought by betrayal. And there’s more: love of pop icons, love in different cultures, bisexual love, religious love, it’s all there, alive and powerful.

It doesn’t matter that LOVE is a bit miserably presented – what it presents has a quality so rare that it doesn’t deserve to be missed: it makes anyone, no matter how much artistic knowledge they possess or lack, feel what art is all about.

www.bristol.gov.uk/museums

Anna Leon