Quentin Blake - As Large as Life at the Foundling Museum

Quentin Blake - As Large as Life at the Foundling Museum

11 January, 2012
by: Tom Jeffreys

The Foundling Museum sheds new light on the work of everyone's favourite illustrator, Quentin Blake. Tom Jeffreys is delighted.

There's always a danger when putting something in a museum – the danger that, locked in glass vitrines and surrounded by facts and dates, the thing itself will wither and die before your very eyes. It's why the phrase “you ought to be in a museum” is not usually a compliment. This danger is even more apparent when you're dealing with the art of somebody like Quentin Blake, whose best work fizzes with exuberance and life. Still probably best known for his Roald Dahl illustrations, Blake is an integral part of this country's collective childhood, so even the slightest sense that he might not be as good as we all remember would be a national tragedy.

Thankfully, the Foundling Museum has aced it, and this exhibition is a triumph – one that celebrates the Blake we all know and love, whilst at the same time sensitively adding a few new layers of significance and poignancy.

Part of the success may well be down to the fact that the exhibition does not include any of the over-familiar illustrations from, say, James and the Giant Peach or The Giraffe, the Pelly and Me. Rather, As Large as Life focuses on four recent projects commissioned by hospitals in the UK and France. In this way, the works on show – all giclee prints to save on insurance costs for the hospitals – are already used to the institutional life. And if they can shine in the clinical misery of a modern hospital they can certainly shine in the historic and appropriate surroundings of the Foundling Museum (even if the downstairs galleries here are a little soulless).

The Foundling Museum has also succeeded, like Blake, in successfully appealing to both adults and children alike. The first thing one notices is that the works downstairs are hung lower than usual – at eye level for younger visitors who, I'm told, the museum expects to make up 50% of visitor numbers. The exhibition also shuns large chunks of wall text (always a good thing in my book) in favour of short, thoughtful snippets about the kinds of institutions the works were commissioned by and, interestingly, the tools used in their production. This is a new insight for me, as hitherto Blake's oeuvre had always seemed a bit homogeneous. This exhibition demonstrates that, on the contrary, Blake supplements his characteristically free application of watercolour with Indian ink applied, depending on the work, with a wide range of different implements.

This comparative lack of spiel allows one to do what Blake's work encourages – pause, look, wonder, speculate and imagine. The images are packed with the kind of richness and energy that you expect from Blake, but rarely come across in a hospital. A series for the children's ward at Alexandra Avenue hospital in Harrow is set on the typically exotic Planet Zog, where children freely interact with multi-coloured, four-legged alien creatures with amusingly elongated schnozzles. Another for young people with eating disorders sees Blake focus on the wholesomely ordinary and the everyday: children and young adults dig carrots, feed the ducks, peel apples and walk the dog. The third series downstairs sees a circus for the elderly – comedic depictions of an ageing pelican, a tightrope-walker, an old man on a scooter with a multicoloured cape, his pet parrot on its own scooter trailing along behind. A picture of a grey-haired fellow on stilts genuinely makes me laugh out loud – I think it's the slight look of panic across his face – whilst the depiction of a fire-breather showcases Blake's sumptuous mastery of watercolour.

Importantly, in all these images, Blake never preaches. Dissent is tolerated, even encouraged in a gentle fashion: we witness an argument in one picture, whilst, in another, an alien sits away from the main group of children, happily ensconced alone in his own newspaper. Likewise, where in the hands of another some works could end up like the sturdy peasants of Socialist Realism, for Blake these are “not propaganda”, as he explains emphatically in the excellent video interview that accompanies the show. “The issues are there,” he says, “but not in any spirit of crisis”. Free will is at the heart of Blake's vision, but it's a vision conveyed with a refreshing sense of mischief.

Upstairs are some of the more interesting images – not my favourites I don't think, but the most thought-provoking and poignant. Monochrome and loosely sketched with a reed nib, the series depicts mothers floating underwater with their newborn children. The works capture the intensity, the sense of joy, wonder and relief that characterises the relationship between a mother and her baby. But, these pictures are hung not just in the wards and the corridors of Centre Hospitalier Universitaire in Angers, France, but even in the room where a mother is counselled following a miscarriage. That knowledge alone adds something new and heart-breaking to these joyful, flexible, living works.

This is an excellent exhibition – fun, funny and surprisingly moving. At a time of massive public sector cuts and worries over frontline NHS services, the temptation (with some justification) is to focus on areas where medical success is something to be collated, quantified, analysed. But there is more to life than that. And Quentin Blake suggests perhaps that there might be more to medicine than the merely measurable.

Quentin Blake - As Large As Life is at the Foundling Museum until 15th April 2012.

Ooh, and check out the new Quentin Blake iPad app!

Click here to see all London exhibitions.
Click here for things to do in London.
Return to Spoonfed's London Art homepage.

All images: © Quentin Blake

Tom Jeffreys