To celebrate the millennium, London's National Gallery invited 24 artists (25 counting one collaborative partnership) who had gained renown during the 20th century to make a work in response to a work of their choice from the Gallery, which houses one of the greatest collections of European art in the world. The results of that invitation are contained in Encounters: New Art from Old. The new works are displayed in conjunction with the old, sometimes directly adjacent to their source of inspiration, sometimes with just a reproduction for reference.
One of the myths of modernism was the notion of starting with a clean slate, of setting out to make the world anew. Set against this is the post-modern idea of endlessly reworking everything. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.
After all, Picasso, the pre-eminent genius in the art of the first part of the 20th century, was an inveterate borrower and reworker. Artists have always engaged in an ongoing dialogue with art of the past.
There is a difference, though, between artists assimilating something from an earlier age under their own steam, because it fits in with the logic of their own progress, and being commissioned to do so. This isn't to say that good work cannot emerge from commission - on the contrary, the bulk of great European art was commissioned by patrons of one sort or another. Yet, for whatever reason, it doesn't really happen here. Many of the British artists, for example, seem to have suffered something akin to a failure of nerve, and their work recalls Oscar Wilde's caustic description of "That curious mixture of bad painting and good intentions that always entitles a man to be called a representative British artist."
That may seem harsh given that nothing in the exhibition is less than competent. But nor is there much to suggest that the art of the present measures up to the art of the past. What does measure up mainly comes not from Britain, but from abroad, notably the German Anselm Kiefer, who is one of relatively few artists to really take up the implicit challenge of producing not just a tame tribute to a masterpiece, but using it as a starting point to produce a major work of his or her (strangely, there are only three women) own. Put simply, Kiefer really goes for it, where so many others do not.
Some do take on and meet the challenge, including the sculptor Claes Oldenburg, working with Coosje van Bruggen, the Catalan Antonio Tapies, Canadian photographic artist Jeff Wall, and American video artist Bill Viola. And, ever the showman, David Hockney, with a nod to Ingres, set about making portrait drawings of 12 National Gallery attendants, using an optical drawing aid called a camera lucida. This was by way of demonstrating his theory that Ingres had used such an aid to make his extraordinary portrait drawings. Hockney's drawings are very good and are proving to be hugely popular, though his argument about Ingres's technique, while interesting, is inconclusive.
Given that there is a certain gladiatorial quality to having contemporary artists slug it out with their illustrious forebears, several contenders square up to formidable adversaries and find they are simply outclassed.
Portuguese-born, British resident Paula Rego has a creditably ambitious go at a contemporary reworking of Hogarth's satirical cycle of paintings, Marriage A-la-Mode. While iconographically intriguing, her work is technically coarser and more harshly illustrative than Hogarth who, as well as being a brilliant satirist was a really fine painter.
Even more directly, Lucian Freud unwisely set out to make his own copy of a Chardin, The Young Schoolmistress. His and Chardin's paintings are hung side by side, with various related and ancillary studies, and the comparison is salutary. Freud is generally reckoned to be the finest figurative painter at work today, but his version of Chardin looks almost clumsy and maladroit next to the original, and his trademark thickly textured paint-work looks like a stylistic affectation.
He's not the only big name to be humbled. The enigmatic and reclusive Balthus, best known for his controversial paintings of pubescent girls, chose a sexy Poussin, Sleeping Nymph Surprised by Satyrs, and used it as the basis for his own A Midsummer Night's Dream in which a nude young woman, sleeping in the open, is illuminated by moonlight. It must be said that Balthus is in his 90s, and his painting is not bad, though far from his best - but there is nothing even resembling a contest.
Howard Hodgkin, a British painter with a rare zest for colour, decided to make a work that directly corresponds to George Seurat's celebrated pointillist Bathers at Asnieres. The catalogue mentions the "mysterious turbulence" of his painting, in contrast to the sleepy, sunny serenity of Seurat. But mysterious turbulence does not a great painting make, and on this occasion Hodgkin has missed the mark. So it goes on. Leon Kossoff (inconsequential studies of Rubens), Frank Auerbach (something he happened to be doing anyway), Ian Hamilton Finlay (a word picture - though the photographs of his garden look, as always, very good), Richard Hamilton (a convoluted, self-regarding homage to a stunning Pieter Saenredam church interior), Christopher le Brun (post-modern game-playing), R.B. Kitaj (a heavy-handed image of a rich art collector sitting in Van Gogh's yellow chair), Anthony Caro (in bombastic mode), Louise Bourgeois (laboriously rationalised and disappointing), Jasper Johns (a once great painter messing around), Francesco Clemente (the poor sap, hubristically pairing himself with Titian).
How is it that Antonio Tapies's use of Rembrandt as inspiration comes across as much less of a mismatch? His big, bold, confrontational This is the Body is in a different world to Rembrandt, but it makes a good case for itself. A cruel, in-your-face rendition of a savagely truncated body, it is a startling account of the human being as victim, and seems entirely apposite to our own, and any, age.
There is a similar, Christian quality to Jeff Wall's light-box transparency of a humble seaside donkey in Blackpool, envisaged as a response to George Stubbs's portrait of the Arabian stallion Whistlejacket.
Bill Viola, with one eye on Bosch's Christ Mocked, also takes the tradition of Christian iconography and, to his credit, sets out to make a great work of art. The Quintet of the Astonished, in which a group of five actors register a variety of emotions in slow-motion, is very like watching a Renaissance painting come alive and provides a genuinely compelling experience.
Kiefer responded to one of the most beautiful paintings in the gallery, Tintoretto's The Origin of the Milky Way, in which drops of milk from the breasts of the startled goddess Juno spray into the heavens as stars and onto earth as lilies. In a work displaying his sure instinct for textures and materials, and layered with references to his various alchemical and mythological obsessions - it is even painted over a faintly visible image of a Mayan temple - he constructs a starling image of galactic calamity.
Light Trap is a depiction of space in which the Dragon constellation is picked out against vast clouds of stars. In the foreground, scrawled numbers from a galactic atlas stand for individual stars. Hanging in the centre of the canvas is a big, rusty rat trap with oblong shards of glass jammed into it. They too are inscribed with star numbers. Perhaps, as the stars are sucked into the black hole of the rat-trap, we are witnessing the death of the Milky Way. But then, as it happens, there is the possibility that the collapse of one world leads to the creation of another - an appropriate millennial image if ever there was one.
Encounters: New Art From Old is at the National Gallery, London, until September 17th