This year’s show, which continues until Aug. 20, features esteemed members of the Royal Academy, like John Bellany, as well as rank unknowns (at least to me) like Gillian Golding. And most of the 1,326 paintings, prints and sculptures are for sale, at prices from £65 (about $122 at $1.88 to the pound) for Ms. Golding’s etching “Noodles” (in an edition of 160) to £80,000 ($150,400) for Mr. Bellany’s vibrant oil painting “Eternal Voyage.”
The works on show at the academy’s imposing headquarters on Piccadilly (44-20-7300-8000; www.royalacademy.org.uk) are the survivors of a rigorous selection process. A committee of artists (all members of the academy) sifts through more than 8,000 entries to come up with the almost-final choices. Then the curators haggle over what looks better hanging where, eliminating more works in the process (haggling is a tradition of the show; Gainsborough removed his paintings in 1874 because he didn’t like the way they were being hung). In an exercise as brutal as a television reality show, most of the submissions are voted out.
But not forgotten. The Royal Academy show has inspired its own version of the Salon des Refusés, the 1863 exhibition of paintings spurned by the official Paris Salon, at a gallery across the Thames on the South Bank. The Llewellyn Alexander Gallery (124-126 The Cut, 44-20-7620-1322; wwwllewellynalexander.com) is devoting its small white-and-purple building to a show it calls “Not the Royal Academy” (until Aug. 26), featuring hundreds of works that didn’t make the cut.
Art lovers, investors or travelers curious about all the fuss over contemporary British Art would do well to take in both shows. And they shouldn’t forget the galleries lining Cork Street right behind the Royal Academy. There you can find such academy exhibitors as Damien Hirst at the Robert Sandelson gallery (5 Cork Street, 44-20-7439-1001; www.robertsandelson.com) until July 29, and Peter Brown at Messum’s (8 Cork Street, 44-20-7437-5545; www.messums.com), which represents the artist. On the South Bank, art aficionados can amble from the Llewellyn Alexander gallery to the Tate Modern (Bankside, 44-20-7887-8008; www.tate.org.uk) to check out the recently unveiled rehanging of its permanent collection, which includes Matisse collages, Calder mobiles and Rothko’s “Red on Maroon” series.
Of course, the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy is the show, as you can tell from the 34-foot-high Damien Hirst bronze in the entrance courtyard. (“The Virgin Mother,” featuring a pregnant woman with her right side flayed open to show the fetus, is not for sale.) Inside, the scene resembles a modern version of Daumier’s engravings of the Paris Salon: crowds thronging the galleries —the Summer Exhibition attracts more than 120,000 visitors — and paintings hung from ceiling to floor. As each piece is labeled with only a number, browsers constantly refer to the “List of Works” booklet, which comes with the £7 admission price, to learn the name of the artist, the title and the price.
The range is impressive, from miniatures (like Frances Holland’s two watercolor-on-ivorine pictures of kingfisher birds, £325 each) to enormous canvases, such as “Sex in the City” by Ann-Caroline Breig, a first-year student at the Royal Academy Schools. (It sold for £2,300.) There are landscapes, portraits and abstracts, as well as architectural models and sculptures like “Fort (For Marie Antoinette),” a galvanized steel cylinder by Richard Wentworth (not for sale). One of the 14 rooms is dedicated to prints, another to building projects — Royal Academy membership extends to architects like Norman Foster, though none of his four works (three photographs and a pen-and-ink drawing) on display are for sale.
While the Summer Exhibition is pleasantly buzzy, the highest decibel levels are reached in the Small Weston room, where the most affordable paintings are displayed. Of the nearly 300 paintings by such artists as Ken Howard, Roger Dellar and Duffy Ayers, half cost less than £1,000. Even the profusion of red dots — symbols for “sold” — doesn’t dampen the enthusiasm. As a British father (tweed jacket, tie, custom-made shoes) said to his teenage son (white-collared shirt, jeans, sneakers): “Very nice, this room is.”
I should have told him that there was one quite like it at a little gallery on the South Bank, opposite the Old Vic theater. In fact, the Llewellyn Alexander has (or had, at last viewing) works by several of the same artists hanging at the Royal Academy — at prices about 25 percent less.
So, if you liked the Royal Academy’s quirky Susan Bower mixed-media picture of a wedding scene, “The Toast,” which sold for £1,600, you might consider her even quirkier painting of what came next, “The New Baby,” with a Llewellyn Alexander price of £1,250. Unlike the academy, the Llewellyn Alexander puts all the relevant information on its labels. Some mention that a work has a D-Notice, meaning that it passed the academy’s first round of judging (even though the D stands for Doubtful). One of these is “Afternoon Break,” a naïve work by Nadejda Tsakova showing a Dalmatian plopped on a fuzzy sofa, for £490.
Jillian Llewellyn-Lloyd, director of the Llewellyn Alexander, explained how the “Not the Royal Academy Show,” now in its 16th year, came about. An artist she knows had one painting — of three submitted — accepted for the Summer Exhibition and offered the Lewellyn Alexander the other two. Mrs. Llewellyn-Lloyd figured that a collection of such paintings would make a good one-time-only exhibition. It did. But in an editorial criticizing that year’s Summer Exhibition, The Daily Telegraph noted an alternative, declaring: “Now a Salon des Refusés has been established on the South Bank.” And, Mrs. Llewellyn-Lloyd said, “It became one of those London things.”
