{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-article-js","path":"/rose-wylie-the-picture-comes-first-royal-academy-review-jj-charlesworth/","result":{"data":{"wordpressPost":{"id":122736,"slug":"rose-wylie-the-picture-comes-first-royal-academy-review-jj-charlesworth","title":"Rose Wylie’s Bad Paintings","excerpt":"J.J. Charlesworth wonders whether anything is actually demanded of painting anymore","content":"\n

J.J. Charlesworth wonders whether anything is actually demanded of painting anymore

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It’s hard to tell whether or not Rose Wylie’s knowingly childish, seemingly amateur paintings are regressive. After all, what would be the criteria for such a judgement, since ideas of progress (in art and elsewhere) are long gone and contemporary painting tends to be seen by now as an anachronistic pursuit? But then historical dislocation and anachronism are defining motifs in the work of the ninety-one- year-old English painter (who, as the standard account tells, returned to making art during the late 1980s, after a long hiatus while she brought up her children), ensconced as it is in forms of picture-making – cackhanded handling, crude line, comic strip idioms, pentimenti – that are manifestos for unlearning and the joys of irresponsibility.

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In Wylie’s canvases subjects are rendered in thick, crudely brushed oil, on increasingly huge scuffed raw canvas, her figures either face-on and frontal or otherwise in profile, sliding sideways across the picture. Realistic images are nowhere to be seen, replaced by mid-twentieth- century cartooning. Compositions are simplified and schematic, wonky lines of text floated in as informational supplements.

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The show’s opening room presents you with paintings based on Wylie’s childhood recollections of the Second World War. The three-metre-high Wing Tips and Blue Doodlebug (2022–23) explains itself with script in a band across the middle – ‘history painting. early memory series’. Above this the top quarters are occupied by the opposing rounded corners of fighter-plane wingtips (we’d know this only if we know that German planes had black crosses on their wings, British ones the concentric red, white and blue ‘bullseye’); the lower half is occupied by a looming titular ‘doodlebug’ – the type of winged rocket bombs then used by Nazi Germany against Britain. It’s a blocky mass of mid-blue brushwork, stretching between the two lower corners, one marked FRANCE, the other ENGLAND, which tells us these weapons flew across the English Channel. Narrative is a diagram, and the drama is coded by the simple device of making the scary thing really big.

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Wing Tips and Blue Doodlebug, 2022–23, oil on canvas, 183 x 320 cm. Photo: Elon Schoenholz. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.
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Evidently, Wylie is no ingenue, and this deliberately low-resolution approach to what makes an image – more hieroglyph or icon than representation – serves a sort of militantly self-conscious naiveté. Subjects are steadfastly ordinary, playfully biographical, banal, cluttered with bathos and absurdity. A black slathered canvas is marked breakfast (Breakfast, 2020), in case the wobbly blue outline that might be a plate, on which are perhaps pieces of toast and some berries, imposed on by a dark spoon, doesn’t register. The nearly- seven-metre-wide Yellow Strip (2006) is marked up with football goal-zone markings at either end, while yellow-outfitted footballers with stick legs leap and dribble and bop about like wooden toys. Away from this boyish masculinity are paintings of women’s dilemmas and preoccupations that signal Wylie’s amused view of femininity; an unserious world of ballgowns and hairdos, such as the paintings based on a shot of Nicole Kidman at a gala event in a pink backless dress, including nk (Syracuse Line-up) (2014), which exaggerates its source into doll-like rigidness and confected blonde curls, painted in repeated versions, seen from behind and in profile.

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It’s a lazily feminist dig at beauty tropes, but then Wylie’s women often sport square tabs around their thickly drawn edges that signal that they’re like the cut-out-and-dress-up paper dolls of yesteryear. Tutued girls perch in the branches of a tree in Red Twink and Ivy (2002), while a weird, triangular-headed cat (Twink, a recurring character) stares madly out at us, perhaps the avatar of Wylie’s disapprobation.

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At one level Wylie’s deliberate rejection of pomp and seriousness, and her celebration of imagemaking entirely committed to her own biographical whim and fascination, can be seen as the cheery jettisoning of dead critical baggage. After all, Wylie really hit her stride during the early 1990s, the first decade of the putative ‘end of history’. Suddenly the postmodernism of ‘bad painting’, in the mode of German dissidents such as Sigmar Polke or Georg Baselitz, or American postmodernists such as Philip Guston, lost its political context and its edge, and everywhere in culture a more easygoing ‘everyday’ rushed in to fill the political void. ‘Deskilling’ became its aesthetic counterpart, and its own process to be pursued: it’s interesting to compare the recent Breakfast with the oldest work here, The Well Cooked Omelette (1989). In contrast to Breakfast’s schematic simplification, the latter renders the rich yellow-brown blob with a degree of modelling, plating up the foodstuff in a decorated dish, which is placed in something that might almost be illusionistic space.

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A Handsome Couple, 2022, oil on canvas, 175 × 184 cm. Photo: Jack Hems. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Edwin Oostmeijer and David Zwirner
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But, long term, such facility gets dumped for flattening and cartooning, a twee consciousness of painting as private space and personal affirmation, even as the canvases get ever bigger. Particularly grating are the ‘Film Notes’ paintings, their images drawn from movies such as Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003–04) and Inglourious Basterds (2009). Reducing the imagery of these virtuoso films to moments of private curiosity (the Nazis’ uniforms in Inglourious Basterds [Film Notes], 2010, the duel scene at the end of Kill Bill Pt 1 in Kill Bill [Film Notes], 2007), they’re nevertheless up against artworks made by artists who still cherish the technical potentials of their medium to fascinate and seduce, even as Wylie refuses to engage painting in such troubled ethics of technical mastery.

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After a while this complacent introspection and celebration of minor subjects becomes oppressive. In the last rooms of the show the more-than-five-metre-wide canvases are plonked with baby-book-like coloured silhouettes of elephants, cats, frogs, spiders, worms, butterflies and birds, with their names scrawled along the lower edge. These paintings offer little to look at, and not much to think about, though they compensate for this by their evacuated hugeness. Scale, after all, is still a claim to public status in art; here, that status is accorded to the minimal condition of being a painter and having experiences, since not much else is demanded of painting anymore.

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Rose Wylie: The Picture Comes First was on view at the Royal Academy, London, from 28 February – 19 April

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From the Summer 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.

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Read next Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art by Daisy Dixon, Reviewed

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