Childishness became a desirable quality in art with the arrival of modernism at the start of the 20th century. As Picasso famously quipped: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” And it wasn’t just Picasso. An entire generation of modernists — Klee, Miró, Kandinsky — came to value, or overvalue, the appearance of naivety.
It was, of course, a form of escapism. As the world darkened, grew mechanised and bleaker, as war became an unstoppable international impulse, some artists fled to Tahiti, but others stayed put and let their minds do the wandering: back to a state of innocence, back to an unproblematic reality, back to a world of happy colours and simple outlines, back to the kind of art that Yoshitomo Nara is churning out in his extraordinarily infantile display at the Hayward Gallery.
Nara was born in 1959, which makes him 65. Yet he paints, deliberately, like an eight-year-old. A typical Nara picture will show a cartoon kiddie on a plain background looking wide-eyed and soulful. Sometimes the kids appear angry. Sometimes they sport a tear. But so reduced are the psychological possibilities here, so caricatured and restricted the style, that you basically get sad or mad, with no subtle developments between the two.
In what I can only put down to a huge act of faith, the Hayward Gallery has devoted the whole building to Nara and his Japanese kiddie pictures. Ten galleries of cartoon infants surround us with their Bambi sadness and threaten, occasionally, to throw their toys out of the pram. After the first few rooms I started to get Midwich Cuckoos vibes. Help. I think they’re going to eat me.
If you’ve been to Japan, you will recognise these flavours instantly. When it comes to infantilism, nobody does it better than the Land of the Rising Sun. The Japanese word kawaii, meaning cute or childishly charming, has become the dominant mood in Japanese popular culture and has spilt out into the world.Last Christmas my daughters gave my wife a pair of Crocs sandals into which you can insert cute plastic emojis that individualise your feet. Not only did she accept the present, she wears the damn things!
Nara’s show serves up those kinds of moods, inflected with feelings of intense nostalgia for what was clearly a lonely and self-obsessed childhood. The first gallery features a wall of album covers from his record collection (mostly from the 1960s) and a recreation of the small wooden hut in which he used to sit and listen to lamenting folk music and psychedelic rock, with only his cat for company.
It turns out to be the best moment in the show, not only because it has more in it than paintings of kiddies but also because the music is playing loudly on the speakers. So you don’t need to tune into Sounds of the 60s to hear Donovan’s Universal Soldier or Somebody to Love by Jefferson Airplane.
The paperwork stresses the impact of this wooden hut childhood on Nara’s output. He is the archetypal sad kid who found solace in art. The cartoon infants he paints, in pictures that grow larger and larger as we climb the Hayward, are intended as surrogate self-portraits: curiously asexual girlie-boys or boyish girlies, with wide eyes inherited from that friendly cat.
Much is also made of the fact that the Vietnam War was raging when he was growing up, and that the music he was listening to was being played on forces radio by American troops stationed near his home city of Hirosaki. The recurring anti-war messaging that pops up throughout the display, particularly in his scratchy drawings, is both a Japanese artistic trope — think Yoko Ono — and an unstated recognition of something we forget too easily in the West: that we dropped two atom bombs on Japan to fast-forward the end of the Second World War, and that this racist assault would never have been inflicted on a European nation. What we have here is kids v annihilation.
It’s certainly true that there’s more to Nara than meets the eye and that the relentless childishness of his art has deeper meanings. But it’s also true that childishness is childishness, and that there comes a time in the affairs of man and woman when the nappies need to be stashed.
At Tate Britain, an outpouring of mystical art by Ithell Colquhoun (1906-88) is unstoppably, dramatically, magnificently adult. Weird, yes. Unbalanced, certainly. But in a complex, grown-up manner that traces an arc of increased nuttiness.
She was born in India, a colonial child of wealthy parents who was sent back to England to study at the posh Cheltenham Ladies College, where she discovered the writings of Aleister Crowley, satanist and crackpot. By the time she entered the Slade School of Art in 1927 she was already a diehard occultist and would remain so for the rest of her long life.
At first, it did good, and even great, things to her art. The opening room has her attacking old master subjects with paranormal confidence and verve. In her fabulous version of Judith Showing the Head of Holofernes she fills the scene of biblical savagery with astral moods, as if the players have stepped straight over from a production of Twelfth Night. In The Judgement of Paris she reimagines the goddesses Athena, Aphrodite and Hera as the cast of an am-dram production, naked, on this occasion, but with real-life jobs as newsagents or the vicar’s wife: Midsomer Murders meets The Iliad.
This English rethinking of the Classics is so tangibly wacky it comes as no surprise when she goes to Paris and begins to identify as a surrealist. It was, you feel, her natural state. In a set of enlarged flower paintings she stares her way to strangeness — if you look at anything for long enough it begins to appear otherworldly — but she comes into her own, and edges into the realms of greatness, in the eerie landscape pictures in which surrealist viewpoints are given a feminine twist.
In Scylla, from 1938, what seems at first to be a scene of rocks poking out of the sea is also a pair of feminine thighs poking out of the water in the bath. The clump of coral is pubic hair. In her masterpiece, La Cathedrale Engloutie, from 1952, she repeats the trick but this time with a poked-out knee and French standing stones.
Most of the show, too much of it, is spent trying to decipher the scraps of occult abstraction that clog up her achievements like the remains of a dinner party. But if you magic all that away, and focus only on the dozen great paintings she produced, you have one of the most inventive presences in British art.
Yoshitomo Nara, at the Hayward Gallery, London, to Aug 31; Ithell Colquhoun, at Tate Britain, London, to Oct 19