Sussex Landscape – Chalk, Wood and Water review: A spirit of experimentation continues

Over the years, artists have chosen to depict Britain’s ‘most beautiful county’ in a fascinating range of ways, as a new exhibition at Pallant House Gallery attests

Duncan Grant’s 1920 artwork, bequeathed by Frank Hindley Smith in 1940 (Tate / Tate Images)

The London to Chichester train passes through water meadows, with the slopes of the South Downs rising in the near distance. It’s a profoundly English landscape. There are views of the English Channel from the rolling hilltops. Plentiful flints embedded in the chalky soil. Castles and hill forts linking the visitor back into the deep past. And it is, not entirely coincidentally, exactly the landscape explored in the exhibition I’m about to see.

Sussex divides people. It is without doubt one of Britain’s most “beautiful” counties, providing views of land and sea that have been “aestheticized and romanticised” (as this exhibition puts it) in art and literature to the extent we feel they “belong” to all of us. Sussex also represents southern England at its most affluent and, many would say, complacent; a place so snootily divisive it managed to conceive of itself as more and less desirable halves – the west and east respectively – as early as the 12th century.

These are, of course, only ideas about Sussex, a place whose reality lies at least as much in the scuzzier sides of Brighton and Hastings as it does in chi-chi bucolic villages. But as this exhibition on artists’ responses to Sussex makes clear, art, by its very nature, deals as much in ideas about places as their actuality.

Early painters of Sussex were looking to create English equivalents for the romanticised landscapes of Poussin and Claude Lorrain, then considered the acme of art. It’s an aim realised in George Smith’s 18th-century views of millponds and watermills bathed in golden “Italian” light. Turner takes this approach to another level in Chichester Canal (1828) a vision of sumptuous light on water – with the spire of Chichester Cathedral, and thus the area where Pallant House Gallery is located, just discernible in the background. It’s an effect created by shifting the position of the sun to the opposite of where it actually is.

In sharp contrast, Turner’s great rival John Constable is bluntly realistic in the minuscule Seascape Study (1824-28), with its two tiny figures staring at the implacable blankness of the sea from a stretch of gritty-looking beach. It’s an image little different in spirit from Simon Roberts’s photograph West Wittering Beach (2008), hanging on the opposite wall, which shows holidaymakers rather despondently at play on a very similar beach nearly two centuries later.

Indeed, one of the pleasures of this exhibition lies in seeing how much of our experience of Sussex today is evident in the art of the past, and vice versa.

William Nicholson’s tiny early 20th-century views of hill and cliffs around Rottingdean look a touch dull and ordinary at first glance, with their dish-watery pale greens and blues. Yet his pared-back, almost minimalist approach gets under the skin of that quintessential Sussex landscape. Looking at the curving brow of the bare hill in Whiteway – Rottingdean (1909), with its grazing cattle caught in the glint of the late afternoon sun, you can somehow tell – God knows how – that there’s a view of the sea on the other side.

A trio of garden views, by Bloomsbury Group luminaries Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry may be more substantial as paintings, but are notable more for their subtle departures from realism than for their illumination of Sussex. They were created in the group’s rural HQ at Charleston, near Lewes, but could in essence have been painted anywhere.

Two works by little-known artists, however, give us as much archetypal Sussexness as we could want. Charles Knight’s Ditchling Beacon was created in World War Two as part of the Recording Britain programme, which focused on landscapes believed endangered by war. It’s a painting that takes us back to the idea of Sussex as part of our collective birthright. There’s a brooding, elegiac quality to the way the evening shadows mould the rolling peaks of the South Downs. Ethelbert White’s Sussex Landscape with its busy farmer labouring in his steeply-pitching fields gives an almost medieval sense of the unchanging pattern of life and the seasons.

Eric Ravilious’s illustrative watercolours have been so widely exposed over the past couple of decades, and have become so associated with a greetings-card version of immemorial Englishness, it’s hard to take them quite seriously. Yet there’s no denying the sheer graphic skill of Chalk Paths (1935), and the effortless ease with which the twisting tracks convey the sculptural folds in the landscape as they snake away over the bare hills.

If Ravilious’s images always have a slight railway poster feel, Paul Nash’s The Rye Marshes, East Sussex (1932), was actually created for a Shell advertising campaign to encourage driving – barely imaginable today – under the slogan “Everywhere you go you can be sure of Shell”. Yet the image is so forceful and incisive with its zig-zagging waterways and bright, hard light, it not only utterly transcends its commercial origins, but makes just about everything else in the exhibition feel a touch woolly in comparison.

Paul Nash’s ‘The Rye Marshes’ from 1932 (Bridgeman Images)

Supposedly conventional Sussex proved fertile ground for Nash and his fellow Surrealists. Edward Burra’s The Harbour, Hastings (1947), with its belligerent-looking layabout fishermen conveys a rackety, anarchic mood, still very evident in the town today.

There’s a lot of really quirky, often surprisingly offbeat work here in a spirit of bohemian experimentation – and one that is very much ongoing, judging by two rooms full of current Sussex painting, sculpture and photography.

Among the best – and certainly the most telling – of these later works is Turner Prize-winning photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’ near wall-filling End of Land (2002), which shows a young woman lying at the top of Beachy Head, the highest chalk cliff in Britain. She peers nervously down at the waves, and thanks to the tilting angle of the image, we can practically feel them lapping around our feet. For all its gentility, Sussex is also the frontier, the often dramatically sudden edge, of England; Tillmans’ figure betrays a sense of unease, not only at her precarious position, but at what lies beyond the choppy sea and behind her on the rolling English downland. It may be 20 years old, but Tillmans’ image perfectly sums up the mood in Sussex, and Britain today.

Pallant House Gallery, until 23 April