Newsnight Review discussed the exhibition of French and English paintings at Tate Britain.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

MARK LAWSON:
Constable to Delacroix at Tate Britain. Bonnie Greer, we had Colin Powell this week trying to prove links between Iraq and other countries, this tries to be prove rather more benevolent links between England and France in art. Did it sustain its case?

BONNIE GREER:
Oh I think so. I always think that sometimes when you look at a country's painters it will tell you more about it, sometimes, than its writers.

And this reminded me of this sort of deep strain of romanticism in British culture. It must have been really refreshing for the French "refreshing", as a manner of speaking for them after the French Revolution, the heavy intellectuality of that, to come to see English painting, which was about open spaces, about dreaming, about feeling.

It's a very, very beautiful show. And also shows, which surprised me, is how English painters, in particular, raised their art of water colouring to the point where the French actually learnt something from it and used it.

There's a painting there that Delacroix does, this after a Walter Scott story, in which we can see the kind of high, high, high English romanticism that the French connected on to.

It's a very, very beautiful show. A very, very literary show in the sense that you've got to read a lot, but after you've done that you can sort of sit back and enjoy the feeling of it.

LAWSON:
And several paintings were inspired by Byron.

GREER:
Byron's actually the unspoken hero of this exhibition, because Byron was the first superstar, first international superstar and that he was that in an age that wasn't mass communication, is what's epic. It's a very beautiful show.

LAWSON:
Mark Kermode, it's quite an odd show though, because Gericault, who dominates it with Raft Of The Medusa, he isn't in the title, because they can't actually get the actual picture and they have a reproduction of it at the end, but there's a whole room so it's quite confusing.

You go in the exhibition expecting Constable-Delacroix and then you're constantly distracted by others.

MARK KERMODE:
Well it's certainly, I mean I went there having looked it up, and think they do manage to make the connection.

Yes the English had this important influence, yes I believe all the literary stuff. But I felt that in order to really understand you'd have to spend three days there. And I have to say, it was all rather overshadowed for me by the Raft Of The Medusa, which isn't the original but a very good imitation.

Partly because, you know, growing up when I did, I mean for me, Raft Of The Medusa is the cover of one of the most famous pop albums of the 1980s.

It's The Pogues' Rum, Sodomy and the Lash, and consequently it's like a pop icon thing, and to see it, the reproduction, which is a massive great big painting and the room which has the paintings which led that painting to come together.

For me, that's an exhibition on its own. One problem, the two rooms are opposite sides of the exhibition. And in order to do a comparison you have to run up and down the corridor, which is not very easy to do.

But I would happily have gone to it just to see stuff in the background of the Raft Of The Medusa.

The other thing about the way it's presented, although it's not the original, they present it behind, almost like a proscenium arch, with these sort of theatre lights.

When it was first shown in Britain, apparently 40,000 people went to see it. Well that's not 40,000 units, that's 40,000 of the unwashed masses. I mean it was a populous, it was pop art at the time. And I love the way that they presented it, almost in this slightly tacky theatre environment. That, for me, was as much as I could deal with.

LAWSON:
Even so, people are going to feel cheated turning up to see this reproduction, I think. And you sometimes feel, with this kind of exhibition, that they can put in whatever they want, it's just some paintings we want to see.

MIRANDA SAWYER:
Yeah, I mean, I mean, I have to, I actually, you know, agree with you in terms of the Raft Of The Medusa, but I came from it from a different thing. I read Julian Barnes' A History Of The World In 10� Chapters, and hated it all apart from the bit about that painting, so I was desperate to see it.

But the painting is rotting in real life. You can't get it over there. So there is a slight disappointment. But I mean its fantastic and you should go and see it and it's great. But as for the rest of the show I found a lot of it, I have to say, a bit ropey.

GREER:
What does ropey mean?

SAWYER:
A bit kind of tacky. There's bits where they're doing stuff with animals and they put the twinkle of human light in the kind of, Napoleon's horse. It just makes me laugh.

LAWSON:
Miranda, isn't that, that I think that's one of the points they're trying to make, which is that painting can be influential, without necessarily being good. And so they're trying to show links, and some of the links may be bad.

SAWYER:
Yeah, I mean, there's a fantastic one where they show somebody, I can't remember his name, but he gets inspired by the Raft Of The Medusa and does his own copy before he's even seen it and it's rubbish. And I really like all that stuff.

But you have to work to find the jewels. There are some fantastic, really amazing paintings in here, but I think there are some that just, they kind of pass you by.

GREER:
Your eye has been jaded because we've seen this style of painting for hundreds of years, reproduced. Which is my problem with the Jericho, because the one, the real one looks nothing like that thing, that repro in there. It really, really doesn't.

And I didn't quite understand , that really, really freaked me out, and I didn't understand why they did that. But what it seemed to be about was, "Look how big this thing is and look at what it inspired," but that isn't the Raft Of The Medusa, it's not it.

LAWSON:
On the other hand in this kind of rag-bag exhibition there are revelations, I mean David Wilkie, who was only really a name to me, there are fantastic narrative paintings of Chelsea Pensioners reading the news of the war and then Knox preaching and all that.

And I thought he was a real revelation, that's the benefit of this kind of exhibition, where they throw everything in, that you will, you're more likely to find something that appeals.

KERMODE:
But again, I think that the point is, to actually do it justice, you either have to be very knowledgeable in the first place, or you have to have three days in which you can go in and do The Raft Of The Medusa on the first day and then go back and see everything else on the second and third days.

SAWYER:
I just have to say that I went in, and I was inspired to go out and buy The Journal of Eugene Delacroix, which is just fantastic.

Can I just read one bit? Go on, go on, go on please. Go on, go on, really, really quickly. Okay, he goes to see the picture of the Raft Of The Medusa, he says:

"That Constable did me a world of good, came home about five o'clock, spent two hours in the studio, a great want to have sex, I am utterly abandoned."

And he's just trying to live like Byron, he's fantastic.