The Architectural Review is a monthly international architectural magazine. It was founded in London in 1896 and does what its title suggests, covering all aspects of the built environment.
Manplan
Just over 50 years ago, in 8 issues from September 1969 to September 1970, the Review ran a series of eight specially commissioned reports on the state of architecture at the end of the 1960s. It was to review not just architecture in the narrow sense but the entire state of town planning, in an age when old Victorian slums were being torn down to make way for gleaming new towns made of high-rise towers, medium-rise blocks characterised by lifts and concrete walkways, subways under sweeping new ring roads, nicely laid-out grassed areas and so on.
The Review’s editors called the series of articles ‘Manplan’ and hired leading photojournalists and street photographers to address a set of eight themes, being:
Frustration
Travel and communication (‘Society is its contacts’)
Town Workshop
Education (‘The continuing community’)
Religion
Health and Welfare
Local government
Housing
The result was a series of brilliant photos shot on a 35mm camera in a spirit of photo-reportage – vivid and dramatic black-and-white works which captured a nation in the midst of great social, cultural and environmental change. To the horror of some of its contributors and readers, the magazine turned its back on large-format, heroic photography of buildings and their details, instead embracing a grainy, 35mm black-and-white reportage aesthetic, where people were as, if not more, important than the places. In the words of The Royal Institute of British Architects, publishers of the Architecture Review:
The aim was to propose an alternative and more holistic approach to urban planning, which would look at all basic human needs as a whole. The photographs illustrating the issues were created in the spirit of photo reportage and often featured people inhabiting the spaces studied by the survey, thereby shifting the focus from the architecture itself to the human element within the built environment.
So it was intended to be polemical stuff. The photographers were:
Ian Berry
Tony Ray-Jones
Tim Street-Porter
Patrick Ward
Altogether the Architectural Review published about 80 photographs. Just 16 are on display here, but every single one of them is a masterpiece; there’s no slack. Each one is a densely packed, highly charged vignette. This exhibition isn’t big but it is packed with social history, with memories and nostalgia for a time within the living memory of many but feeling evermore distant.
Design and layout
On a separate wall is a display of the actual copies of the magazine which the photo-essays appeared in, along with the words and designs of ‘Manplan’ editor Tim Rock and designers Michael Reid and Peter Baistow. This section goes into detail about how the photographs were processed, reproduced and printed (using ‘special matt black ink’) along with analysis of the layout and typography. All a bit over my head but interesting for students of design.
The photographs
Private terraced houses on the Old Kent Road opposite Camelot Street Estate, London by Tony Ray-Jones (1970) part of ‘Manplan 8: Housing’, in Architectural Review, September 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections
Housing at New Ash Green, Kent by Tony Ray-Jones (1970), part of ‘Manplan 8: Housing’, in Architectural Review, September 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections
Low-rise housing, Tavy Bridge, Thamesmead, Greenwich, London, 1970 by Tony Ray-Jones, part of ‘Manplan 8: Housing’, in Architectural Review, September 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collections
Classroom windows in a school in Wales, 1969 by unknown photographer, part of ‘Manplan 4: The continuing community (education)’, in Architectural Review, January 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections
High-rise flats and multi-storey car park, Birmingham, 1970 by Peter Baistow, part of ‘Manplan 5: Religion’, in Architectural Review, March 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections
Chatsworth Street school and high-rise housing block overlooking the cleared site, Liverpool, 1969 by Tom Smith, part of ‘Manplan 4: The Continuing Community (education)’ in Architectural Review, January 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections
Salvation Army officers picnicking on the steps of the figure group Asia by J H Foley, Albert Memorial, Kensington Gardens, London, 1969 by Peter Baistow, part of ‘Manplan 5: Religion’, in Architectural Review, March 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collections
Unidentified primary school, 1969 by unknown photographer, part of ‘Manplan 4: The continuing community (education)’, in Architectural Review, January 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections
Thamesmead film
To one side of the 16 framed photos on the wall, is a TV monitor showing a film from around the same time (in fact the year before the project, 1968). So far as I can tell it’s not directly connected with RIBA or the Manplan project except for the slender link that one of the 80 Manplan photos happens to cover the same subject as the film, namely the new estate being built at Thamesmead. So it wasn’t directly related to the Manplan project but gives context to the kind of architectural and town planning thinking which was going on at the time of the Manplan project.
Directed by Jack Saward, this 25-minute public education film gives an overview of the history and construction of Thamesmead, a sort of new model suburb built down the River Thames from London on the site of the old Royal Arsenal, a site that extended over Plumstead Marshes and Erith Marshes.
Alas, to quote the introduction to the video on YouTube:
The ambition is commendable but it didn’t quite work in practise, with Thamesmead becoming a notoriously problematic estate and its architects perceived as exhibiting many of the faults of post-war planning, with communities being tinkered with from above like a real-life experiment. This is where utopia meets authoritarianism.
Hard to believe, but the planners that designed the place provided insufficient transport links with London, no way of crossing the Thames for 5 or 6 miles in either direction and – best of all – an almost complete lack of shopping facilities and banks. Lots of pretty little lakes but…nowhere to buy food. According to the label in the exhibition, the estate ‘was soon plagued by social problems caused by lack of facilities and public transport’.
The half-built estate won an unwanted fame when American film director Stanley Kubrick used parts of it as the setting for his notoriously violent 1971 movie, A Clockwork Orange, a vision of an alienated, dystopian society. Here’s the photo of it taken by the brilliant Tony Ray-Jones which provides a sort of coincidental link between the Manplan series and the film.
Thamesmead under construction, Greenwich, London, 1970 by Tony Ray-Jones in ‘Manplan 8: Housing’, Architectural Review, September 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections
Which do you prefer? Which do you think is telling the truth, the film or the photo?
The Robert Elwall Photographs Collection
All the materials for the Manplan exhibition, photos and old copies of the AR magazine, come from the Robert Elwall Photographs Collection. This comprises around 1.5 million images from the earliest days of photography to the present day. The collection includes photographic archives of individual architects and practices, travel and topographic images from across the world, press photographs from major architectural journals, and large bodies of work by some of the best known architectural photographers of the 20th century. The collection includes prints, negatives, slides, transparencies, photographically illustrated books and digital files. It is itself part of the larger Royal Institute of British Architects collections.
Conclusion
Flicking through some of the text on the walls is a dispiriting experience. These 1970 writers were raging against the soulless design of modern cities, the daily struggle of commuting to work on overcrowded public transport, against air pollution, excess traffic and the destruction of the environment, against the dominance of the car over human-friendly spaces, against the dehumanising effects of modern technology, against social inequality and the lack of social housing, against the prioritising of profit over people.
It’s as if, 53 years later, nothing has changed except we all have smart phones to share our frustration about how things obstinately carry on being rubbish. The Manplan writers’ rage and frustration is captured by this, the last entry in the exhibition.
Double page spread from Manplan 1. ‘Frustration’
It’s a copy of the original magazine, open to a double page spread showing a traditional Pearly King and Queen standing in front of the typically sterile, barren waste ground surrounding a clutch of looming, threatening tower blocks. Up in the top right is a text reading: ‘The richness of East End life is replaced by monotony and inhumanity.’
Yep. that’s the world I grew up into and which punk rock, with its angry nihilism, was a direct response to. Eternal shame on England’s architects and town planners.
Related links
A Brief Revolution continues at the Photographers Gallery until 11 June 2023
SURREALISM. Noun: Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, or otherwise, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral considerations.
(First Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924)
Surrealism is not a new or better means of expression, not even a metaphysic of poetry; it is a means of total liberation of the mind.
(Surrealist declaration, January 1925)
Introduction to surrealism
Surrealism is ‘a philosophical and artistic approach which violently rejects the notion of the Rational Mind and all its works’. For Surrealists, the True Mind, true human nature – ‘the true function of thought’ – is profoundly irrational.
The Surrealists thought the Rational Mind formed the basis of ‘bourgeois’ society, with its moral and sexual repressiveness, its worship of work and money, its fetishisation of capitalist greed, which had led both to the stifling conformity of Western society and to a series of petty wars over colonies which had themselves led up to the unprecedented calamity of the First World War.
In the Surrealists’ opinion, this entire mindset had proved to be a ghastly mistake. The Surrealists thought that we had to reject it lock, stock and barrel by returning to the pure roots of human nature in the fundamentally irrational nature of the human mind, liberating thought from all censorship and superficial, petty morality, seeking to capture ‘the true function of thought’ and creativity through the exploration of the fortuitous and the uncontrolled, the random and the unexpected, through dreams and coincidences.
The first Surrealist magazine was titled La Révolution surréaliste (1924 to 1929) not because it espoused a communist political line, but because it proposed that Surrealist writing and art would, by its radical dysjunctions and unexpectednesses, reveal to readers and viewers the true nature of unbounded thought and lead to a great social transformation.
Cadeau by Man Ray
Massive show, massive space
This is a huge exhibition containing nearly 350 objects, an overwhelming number, a flood of objects and information in the related wall captions.
Also, the exhibition space itself is big and capacious. Roomy. This allows for the display of lots of large objects, namely furniture, lots and lots of chairs and several striking sofas, mannekins wearing dresses, some enormous sculptures and so on. Not so many tables because tables tend to be enormous, but three or four petite coffee tables or tea tables.
Gae Aulenti by Tour (1993) Manufactured by FontanaArte, Glass; bicycle wheels. Vitra Design Museum
Of course this is because this is an exhibition about design rather than art or sculpture as such. The exhibition is about how the design of objects was impacted by the Surrealist approach and ‘look’ and style and fashion. Hence the need for more than paintings and photos (though there are plenty of these); of designed products.
Chronological
Surrealism was, for its first five years or so, from 1924 to 1929, a writers’ movement, led by the self-appointed pope or bully of Surrealism, André Breton. Only in 1929 when the Catalan Wunderkind Salvador Dalí joined it, did the visual arts come to play a more important role and, eventually, dominate the movement and people’s ideas about it.
The show, like almost all exhibitions, is chronological in structure covering nearly a century of Surrealism from the earliest automatic writing to its most recent manifestation in using artificial intelligence to create artworks.
Thus we start with Surrealism’s first writings and manifestos, and then the outburst of Surreal artworks in the 1930s led by Dalí but with scores of other visual artists, and there were so many of them – Hans Arp, Hans Bellmer, Brassaï, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, Wifredo Lam, René Magritte, André Masson, Joan Miró, Meret Oppenheim, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy and many more.
The strangeness of objects
The exhibition is divided into themes and begins with the importance of everyday objects. Surrealism took the revolutionary approach of investing the most everyday of everyday objects with an aura of mystery and strangeness.
.It starts with an examination of Surrealism’s beginnings from the 1920s and considers the crucial role that Everyday objects and interiors were embraced by the movement’s early protagonists, as artists sought to capture the aura or mysterious side of ordinary household objects. Cubism had looked at everyday objects – café table, newspaper, bottle of wine – from multiple angles. Surrealism looked at them from a sur-real angle, attributing them volumes of meaning never dreamed of by ordinary people, setting them in weird juxtapositions to jar us out of our everyday doze and jerk us into awareness of the strangeness of being alive and moving through this world of images and symbols.
What could be more normal and everyday than an apple, a businessman and a cloudy sky? Or, in the way René Magritte deploys them, more disturbing?
The Son of Man by René Magritte (1946)
These ideas took a while to be developed and fully expressed. It was only the ‘Second Surrealist Manifesto’ of 1929 that introduced the notion of ‘the Surreal object’ – using art or writing to reveal ‘the remarkable symbolic life of quite ordinary, mundane objects’. This inspired artists including Dalí, Magritte, Meret Oppenheim and Man Ray to experiment with an entirely new form of sculpture, by creating absurd objects from found materials and items, revealing the bizarre potential of the everyday.
Object by Meret Oppenheim (1936)
This is the point of Marcel Duchamp’s famous ‘readymades’, objects he noticed amid the bric-a-brac of ordinary life and carefully selected to be placed within a gallery setting, in an exhibition in a gallery, where they acquired completely new resonances, the cheapest of mass-manufactured objects acquiring a holy aura, its entirely practical aspects magically converted into profound and mysterious statements about shape and dynamism and meaning.
Bottle Rack (Porte-Bouteilles) by Marcel Duchamp (1914/1959)
He was to some extent mocking the idea of ‘art’ and ‘the gallery’; but he was also discovering the numinous in the quotidien which was to inspire artists ever since. But this gesture also, as the curators pithily point out, prioritised concept over craft and conceptual art has been with us ever since.
Paintings
There are cases containing manifestos and magazines, key works by Breton such as Amour fou.
There are early paintings by Dalí, Le Corbusier (who was a painter before he became an architect), the mysterious desertscapes of Yves Tanguy, a couple of weird paintings by the English artist, Leonora Carrington who came on the scene a bit later, in the 1940s.
There are lots of photos, maybe a hundred photos, performing its two functions, as documentary record and as artwork.
Among the documents are scads of photos of the founders and early protagonists, Breton and his Parisian colleagues, then the artists. There’s records of the famous 1936 Surrealism exhibition in London, of the Surrealist pavilion (the Dream of Venus’) Dalí created for the World Fair in 1939, and so on. There’s Max Ernst at home in his apartment surrounded by African and Oceanic masks and artefacts (a lovely photo by Hermann Landshoff). And so on.
In the section about ‘sex and desire’ (every art exhibition has to have a section about sex and desire) there’s a suite of photos of Surrealists cross-dressing or being deliberately androgynous, for example photos of Marcel Duchamp dressing as his female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, in 1921, and Claude Cahun’s calculatedly androgynous photographic self-portraits, from 1928.
There are photos of works of art, such as the still-disturbing fetishistic mannekins created by Hans Bellmer, or the room full of a mile of string created by Marcel Duchamp for a 1942 exhibition in New York.
And there are photos which are works of art, such as pretty much anything by the genius Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890 in New York but who changed his name and moved to Paris where he spent most of his career).
There are four or five films. There are early black and white silent Surrealist films, such as Entre’Acte by Rene Clair (1924), winningly described by the director as ‘visual babblings’.
Oddly, they didn’t have clips from the most super-famous experimental movies by Bunuel, Luis Buñuel’s ‘subversive’ early films Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or.
Later in the show there’s a few art films from a generation later:
But dominating one wall, not least because it has a loud musical soundtrack, is a screen showing Destino, a short Surrealist animated film which was an unlikely collaboration between Dalí and Walt Disney. It tells the love story of Chronos – the personification of time – and a shapeshifting woman. In fact the movie was never completed because war work took precedence, and the project was only revived in the 1990s when Disney animators competed it according to the original sketches and scenario.
The significance of the film is its indication of Dalí’s success and name recognition in the USA by the 1940s, and the way in which what, on the face of it, are a sequence of nonsensical absurd events, have been assimilated enough for a mainstream producer like Walt Disney to agree to it.
Partly this is down to the instant recognition of a relatively small number of surreal images associated with Dalí. The short 7-minute animation is a collection of greatest hits such as the desert landscape setting, melting clocks, ants appearing out of cracks, human faces or bodies moving into trompe l’oeil settings to cleverly morph into something else.
Also in America during the war, Dalí designed shop windows for the Bonwit Teller department story. Frederick Kiesler designed a new gallery for rich art collector Peggy Guggenheim in a Surrealist style with curving walls. Emerging designers like Ray Eames and Isamu Noguchi used the zoomorphic curves found in Surrealism to design more moulded products, such as chairs (Eames) and a chess table and baby monitor (Noguchi).
Was it during the war, when so many European artists were exiled in America, that Surrealism’s pre-war radicalism was neutralised and converted into one more among many styles and fashions?
Sculpture
There are some sculptures, especially from the early period, but not many and this is because of the focus of the exhibition which is not on art, per se, but on design. Therefore, instead of abstract art sculptures, what the rooms are full of is designed furniture.
Classic Surrealist furniture
If the 1930s was the decade when there was an explosion of Surrealist art and the movement broke through into the general consciousness via a series of well-publicised exhibitions (and carefully staged scandals and press events, such as Dalí attending the opening of the London exhibition wearing a deep-sea diver’s outfit) it was in the 1940s that designers began to incorporate elements of the style into their work.
The Surrealists themselves had led the way. If they started out by invoking the weirdness of everyday objects and thoroughly explored this in paintings, sculptures and photos throughout the 1930s, some had applied their deliberately, provocatively bizarre way of seeing to create bizarre household objects, tables, chairs, lamps.
The most florid early examples come from the joint venture between Dalí and the English collector and patron, Edward James. James had Dalí create an entirely Surrealist interior for his home at Monkton House, West Dean in Sussex, notably the famous sofa designed in a cartoon imitation of the lips of Hollywood actress Mae West.
Also on display is the famous lobster telephone, alongside less well-known objects such as the standard lamp made out of brass casts of a stack of champagne glasses (which ‘subverts’ the Victorian notion of a standard lamp); and, most obviously humorous, a carpet with human footprints cut out of it. These, we are told, were the footprints of his wife, the dancer Tilly Losch. When Tilly danced right out of his life, James commissioned a new carpet with the footprints of his dog in it, the dog making, he dryly remarked, ‘a more faithful friend’.
Other rich people commissioned Surrealist interiors:
Swiss architect Le Corbusier was commissioned by eccentric millionaire Carlos de Beistegui to design his Paris apartment in a style which combined fantastical elements with clean cut modern lines
clean Le Corbusier-designed furniture was included in Dali’s house in Portlligat, Spain
aristocrats Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles commissioned Man Ray to shoot a Surrealist film at their modernist pad on the Riviera
By the late 1930s the new surreal style of interior design had been given a name, Fantasy Modernism.
This suite of objects amount to some of the greatest hits of first wave surrealism but they weren’t alone. Meret Oppenheim produced equally imaginative and talismanic sets of surreal objects such as the fur cup and saucer mentioned above, and her birds-leg tables.
Occasional table (1939) by Meret Oppenheim
Modern Surrealist furniture
Once you turn the corner into the post-war period, you encounter two big rooms full of more contemporary interpretations of surrealist furniture, by designers from the 1960s, 70s, 80s and through on to the present day. These include lamps, chandeliers, some tables, but above all a lot of weird, wacky, and humorous chairs.
Hand Chair by Pedro Friedeberg (about 1962; this version 1965) Vitra Design Museum
I find it very revealing that this chair started life as a throwaway, joking remark of Friedeberg’s to a carpenter. He thought it would be funny to try and make a chair shaped on a human hand. For me this little anecdote is symptomatic of the way Surrealism stopped being subversive and became a type of visual joke, more like a branch of comedy than an art movement.
There’s:
a chair made out of burned carbon i.e. has been burned to a crisp – Smoke Thonet chair number 209 by Maarten Baas (2019)
Capitello chair by Studio65, a chair shaped like the capital of a classical column only made of comfy styrofoam instead of marble
Ruth Francken’s Man Chair (1971), shaped like a man’s body, the legs the shape of real legs, the arms effigies of two real arms
a chair made out of two thick jagged slabs of grass held together by thick steel springs
La Momma, a feminist piece by Gaetano Pesce (1973), the ball and chain referencing the oppression of women in a patriarchal society
There’s a chair by Sara Lucas, characteristically lowering the tone (not necessarily a bad thing) with its two boobs made of lots of cigarettes glued together. What I noticed was a) that’s a really basic, anonymous, institutional chair, the kind you get at a school or college, and b) the cigarettes are really nicely arranged, not just bodged together but arranged in a neat concentric circles which bring out what a visually pleasing thing a cigarette is, with its nice alternation between white tube and sandy brown filter; the brown matching the wood brown of the chair seat and back i.e. it’s a funny gag, ha ha, but it’s also a nice ensemble to look at, aesthetically.
Picking up on the sofa theme set by Mae West, there’s a bang up-to-date piece, wherein a classic Chesterfield sofa, covered in trademark buttons, has been ‘released’, set free, and ‘melted’ out of shape and over the floor, in the manner of Dali’s melting watches – Pools and Poof! by Robert Stadler (2019).
There are several chandeliers, including this striking piece by Ingo Maurer. It immediately made me think of Cornelia Parker‘s famous exploding works, and made me wonder which came first.
Porca Miseria by Ingo Maurer (2019 edition of 1994 design) Vitra Design Museum
And dominating one of the rooms, a life-sized model of a horse, cast in black plastic and with an everyday lamp coming out of its head.
Horse Lamp by Front Design (2006), manufactured by Moooi BV, Breda /Niederlande, Plastic; metal. Vitra Design Museum
When you learn that this comes in a suite of animal furniture including a rabbit lamp and a pig table, you realise the original impulse has become washed out into a kind of homely humour. It’s become about as ‘radical’ as Ikea.
Fashion
One of the most high profile aspects of design is fashion, which holds shows around the world on an annual basis at which dress and clothes designers compete feverishly to outdo each other with new and outlandish ways to ornament the (tall, skinny) female body.
The world of Surrealism overlapped the vast ocean of fashion design, events and, above all, magazines, from the start of the 1930s when, as I’ve described, the visual side of the movement took over from the purely literary.
Thus several surrealist artists also worked as fashion photographers, including Lee Miller and Man Ray. Some, like Dalí and de Chirico, created covers for fashion magazines such as Vogue (some are included here). The exhibition includes fashion photographs and vintage copies of fashion magazines to highlight these connections
Dalí’s collaboration with the French fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli (who set up her haute couture house in 1927) resulted in several ground-breaking designs. Their first collaborative piece, the Telephone Dial Powder Compact of 1935, became very popular and was copied and bootlegged for the mass market.
Over in a side room is a dais with five shop-window mannekins sporting classic surrealist designs. One applies Schiaparelli’s signature pink to a minidress contoured to look like the chest and stomach of a very buff man. Another is a modern reworking of iconic Skeleton Dress. There’s a dress by contemporary designer Mary Katrantzou which, when you look closely, uses elements of a typewriter.
Typewriter’ Printed Silk Dress by Mary Katrantzou (2018) Courtesy of Mary Katrantzou
Alongside other designs by Maria Grazia Chuiri, Christian Dior, Iris van Herpen and emerging Afro-surrealist inspired fashion designer Yasmina Atta.
These are funny conceits well executed but I couldn’t help thinking they’ve reduced Surrealism to a gag, a gif, a meme, a one-liner. ‘Did you see the typewriter dress?’ ‘Yes, Wasn’t it funny?’
Generally, by the time something reaches the world of fashion its disruptive energy has, by definition. been neutered, for example punk. Nothing is disturbed. Everything remains in place, but with lolz for a million Zoolander clones.
From communism to consumerism
At around this point in the exhibition, where I encountered the absorption of the Surrealist impulse into the world of international jet-setting fashion, I began to have my doubts.
Breton wanted Surrealism to trigger a genuine revolution in society and perception. He thought bourgeois society could be smashed apart by ripping a great tear through reality and letting out deeper realities. He talked about ‘convulsive beauty’, he wanted a kind of stricken, epileptic aesthetic.
Breton and many other Surrealists became card-carrying communists during the wartorn 1930s. Their movement was a protest against a bourgeois industrial society which had reached the end of its useful life and needed to be torn down to create a free-er, fairer world.
Ironic, then to see the entire movement, the impetus for revolutionary change, utterly absorbed, neutralised, defanged, neutered and then absorbed into the world of the international haute bourgeoisie in the form of high fashion. For me high fashion is the acme of consumer capitalism with its relentless drive for novelty and new product to keep the profits rolling in.
Fashion is not only a forward post of consumer capitalism but at the cutting edge of unnecessary consumption, the epitome of built-in obsolescence whereby you simply have to buy this season’s must-have items and junk last year’s hideously out of date clothes, handbags etc. Epitome of the compulsive need to keep up, to buy the new thing, which we now know, without any ambiguity, is using up the earth’s finite resources and destroying the planet.
Nothing I say, do or write can dent the huge power of the destructive urge to buy buy buy ever-new stuff, but I despise it and, in a way, fear it, this hysterical need to use up all the planet’s resources in the neurotic pursuit of novelty. What will our grandchildren make of the urge to fly round the world from fashion show to fashion show, seeking endless novelty, encouraging the throwing away and junking of what we have, burning up the planet at an ever-increasing rate.
Is Surrealism dated?
Putting aside my antipathy to the world of fashion, by the end of the exhibition the plethora of objects had raised another, pretty basic question, which is: Does any of this shock and surprise any more, cause the kind of frisson of fear, unnerve the viewer, let the unconscious erupt from the conscious mind with shocking force etc, as the Breton’s manifestos hoped it would?
The short answer is, of course: No. No, it doesn’t. Surely Surrealism has been completely assimilated into our bourgeois, neo-liberal, consumer capitalist society. The famous icons, the lobster phone, the Mae West sofa, every painting by Dali, these have been around for nearly 90 years, and you see images of them in any number of art books or postcards in what my kids call bougie (pronounced ‘boozhee’) shops.
Take the series of plates by Piero Fornasetti which run variations on a wonderfully blank, idealised portrait of the Victorian opera singer Lina Cavalieri. I suppose if you were actually eating off one of these, then it might give you a frisson to scrape away at the mashed potato and slowly reveal an eye looking at you. But as an image and idea I feel I’ve seen this hundreds of times and, indeed, almost 400 variations exist, of which seven are on display in an appealing little set hanging on the wall.
Wall plates no. 116 from the series Tema e Variazioni by Piero Fornasetti (after 1950) Fornasetti Archive
In other words, surely most Surrealist art, these days, instead of conveying ‘the shock of the new’ is the precise opposite – reassuring and familiar. We smile or laugh when we see the lobster phone and go ‘oh yes’ with a pleasant feeling of recognition.
Art changes nothing. All art is swiftly assimilated into bourgeois society and loses the ability to shock or even make the viewer think. The simple act of being displayed in a gallery neutralises art, makes it into a mental commodity, to be discussed in highbrow conversations or namedropped to make you seem swanky. Or into an actual commodity, which can be safely hung on the walls of any investment banker or corporate lawyer, or bought by Arab or Russian billionaires and salted away in a vault in Switzerland as part of their diversified investment portfolio.
Thus, for example, the exhibition includes black and white photos recording the Surrealist display Dali created for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Apparently you entered the suite of bizarrely decorated rooms by walking between models of a woman’s open legs and through a wall-sized vulva into a ‘womb’ containing a predictable congeries of Freudian imagery, complete with numerous scantily clad models arranged in alcoves or sprawling on a bed amid unlikely ‘Surreal’ bric a brac. Looking at these photos now, they seem like a standard chorus girl show with added lobsters.
A lot of the exhibition, in other words, feels warm and nostalgic, pretty much the opposite of what Breton et al originally had in mind.
Up-to-date exhibits
The curators promise, and the exhibition title indicates, a review from the 1920s up to the present day i.e. covering just about a century of Surrealism, and nearly a third of the objects on show are from the past 50 years.
Thus there are a lot of works from more recent times, the 80s, 90s, noughties, generally by artists I’d never heard of. This is particularly true of the big items of furniture, mostly chairs, which dominate the last few rooms or sections of the show, including:
Gae Aulenti’s Tour (1993), a table made from a glass top supported by four bicycle wheels set in chrome forks
Sella (1957), by brothers Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, which is composed of a bicycle saddle mounted on a post fixed into a hemispherical base, blurring the boundary between furniture and art
video of how contemporary designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec use an intuitive, automatic drawing process to discover new imagery and forms
sketch furniture which is created using motion capture cameras to capture the movements of a designer’s hand in the air, save this as a digital file and then use 3D printing technology to print out the object the designer originally sketched out in the air; there’s a video of the process and an actual life-sized chair designed and created using this approach
Or simpler things, Surrealist objects like this absurdist hairbrush spouting hair, worthy of Magritte.
Beauty Hairbrush by BLESS (2019 edition of 1999 design) Vitra Design Museum
Maybe I’m being unfair, maybe I lack taste or sympathy, but I found most of the works in the second half of the show, from the 1960s onwards, far less engaging than the material from the first, classic, era. Take three examples from towards the end of the exhibition.
Björk
The famous musician, composer, performer, singer, songwriter etc Björk, is represented by videos of three fairly recent tracks. Visitors pop on swish earphones and listen to the track while you watch the video. They are:
Well, they’re very well made indeed, both the music and the videos – deliberately different, eschewing visual and musical clichés, consciously innovative and imaginative. And yet…and yet…Björk Guðmundsdóttir, born in 1965, has been Björking for 40 years now (her first single was in 1983). She has become a byword in the pop/fashion/music video businesses for her wildly inventive outfits and compellingly original videos etc. Her oeuvre demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of being a lifelong innovator in pop music. But whatever you think of her exactly, she doesn’t tear the veil of bourgeois convention from the world because thousands of pop and rock musicians and video makers have been doing similar or comparable things for decades.
Tilda Swinton
Over by the fashion mannekins are some photos of famous and award-winning actress Tilda Swinton wearing some bizarre / surreal jewellery.
Same as with Björk, Tilda, born in 1960, feels over familiar. She has been doing her brave androgynous schtick since she first appeared in Derek Jarman’s films in the mid-1980s i.e for nearly 40 years. Far from disturbing me, tearing the veil from my mad unconscious urges, Tim Walker’s photos of Swinton looked like standard Sunday supplement fashion shoot any time in the past 30 years, just with a particularly ‘arty’ kink.
Sarah Lucas
I went to the original Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts back in 1997 and it was a genuinely transformative experience, to see so much vibrantly exciting and innovative artworks, all by a young generation of artists reflecting the ‘modern’ world, all in one place. But it’s been some time now since Damian Hirst’s sharks in a glass tank stopped being subversive or world-shattering and became a kind of joke, common enough knowledge to be used in popular cartoons.
Sarah Lucas never reached Hirst-like levels of fame and notoriety, because she kept (I think) her visual metaphors to a much more modest scale and her works reek of laddish, pub culture, and schoolboy (or girl) jokes. Hence her cheap and cheerful work, Cigarette Tits.
Cigarette Tits by Sarah Lucas (1999)
Compare and contrast with Lucas’s fried eggs t-shirt which has become a popular postcard in the kind of bougie shops I mentioned earlier.
When has an art movement run its course?
This all raises the question: when do you recognise that – or admit that – a style has run its course, is worn out, has become pedestrian – has, in fact, become a cliché?
It’s a more relevant question for Surrealism than maybe any other art movement in history because Surrealism set out to be more shockingly subversive than any other art movement in history (with the possible exception, I suppose, of its parent, Dada).
So where are you, what are you to make of it, when the most deliberately bourgeois-bating, consciously ‘subversive’ art movement of the 20th century has long since arrived on the front of colour supplements, inspires high fashion dresses, is reduced to jokes and cartoons, has been done to death in TV, movies, comedy, in every channel of output, only to feature in calm and sedate and scholarly exhibitions like this one?
The curator’s view
Kathryn Johnson, the exhibition’s main curator, optimistically claims that:
“If you think Surrealism fizzled out in the 1960s, think again. This exhibition shows that it is still alive and well and that it never really went away. The early Surrealists were survivors of the First World War and the 1918 influenza pandemic, and their art was in part a reaction to those horrors. Today, in the context of dizzying technological change, war and another global pandemic, Surrealism’s spirit feels more alive than ever in contemporary design.”
Hmm. Are we in the midst of dizzying technological change? I mean, isn’t your laptop this year, or your smartphone, pretty much like the one you had one or five years ago? Maybe you can do a few more tricks on it, but isn’t it basically the same? And did the COVID-19 pandemic produce shattering changes in social structure and values? Not really. I don’t think so. And has the war in Ukraine turned Britain upside down, decimated a generation of young men, traumatised the western world? No, not really, not at all.
Like all curators, Johnson is paid to make the most powerful possible case for her show, and you can see how she’s roping in these adventitious historical events to try and do so, but…she doesn’t persuade me.
Did Surrealism have any impact on twentieth century design?
For the entire time I was at the gallery I was beguiled by the objects on display and spent all my mental energy reading the main wall labels, and then the many captions for each of the individual pieces. A labour of love or a fool’s errand, depending on your point of view.
It was only on the Tube home that something really struck me. The curators claim that Surrealism had a major impact on 20th century design but I’m not sure they prove it in this exhibition. They have gathered nearly 350 Surrealist exhibits, hundreds of which demonstrate how striking and powerful individual Surrealist objects, furniture, photos, films and so on can be. No doubt about it.
But whether Surrealist principles, the Surrealist aesthetic, actually impacted the broad range of 20th century design, that’s a lot less clear and the more I thought about it the less plausible it seemed.
Sure there were striking Surrealist chairs and lamps and chandeliers and some ‘Surreal dresses’, but…these are all one-offs. No-one is going to buy the melted Chesterfield sofa or the chair made out of two jagged slabs of glass, or the lamp sticking out of a horse (well, one or two wealthy people might).
My point is that pretty much all the designed objects in the show are one-offs, inspiring, amusing luxury artefacts or art objects, but…could any of them be mass produced and sold in significant numbers? Not really (the one notable exception is the Fornasetti plates, which have been mass produced).
The fad for adding Surreal elements to interior design was christened ‘Fantasy Modernism’ in the late 1930s, but how many homes did it every apply to? The curators name four. Not a large number, is it?
Compare and contrast with the impact of Art Nouveau or Art Deco. A glance at articles about them show that they mainly existed as styles of design: of lovely stained glass and furniture for cafes and restaurants for Art Nouveau; as an entire look in the 1930s which affected everything from blocks of flats to ocean liners.
Or take the impact of the Bauhaus. Without a shadow of a doubt the Bauhaus aesthetic of stripping away Victorian decoration to reveal the clean, geometric functional lines of everything from teapots to high rise buildings massively influenced mid-20th century design of everything, having a world-changing impact on, for example, the design of buildings all around the world for 50 years or so, from the 1930s to the 1980s. Nobody can doubt the profound impact the Bauhaus’s design principles had on all aspects of twentieth century design.
But Surrealism’s impact on design? Look around you. Is anything you can see in your house – interior design, table, chairs, sofa, workbench, laptop, sink, kettle, cups, or outside, the design of cars or bikes or buildings – does anything anywhere around you betray the slightest impact of the Surrealist impulse to yoke together the bizarre and the weird and the absurd? I don’t really think so.
Sure, there are a lot of Surreal works of art. Certainly a contemporary photographer or fashion designer can invoke or reference some aspects of the visual language worked out by Surrealist painters and photographers all those years ago. Movies can have Surreal dream sequences etc. But design? Mass market, mass produced, widely available objects which everyone could have in their house, mass produced styles of car design or architecture? No. Not at all.
Is the entire concept of design the opposite of Surrealism?
There’s a related point: designing anything and then converting the design into an actual object, especially an object produced through industrial manufacturing, obviously takes a lot of time, effort, precision of design and co-ordination of the manufacturing process.
Surrealism was committed to automatic writing, bizarre juxtapositions, spontaneous eruptions of the unconscious, savage breaks in reality. How could the weird, dissociative effects aimed at by Surrealism be reconciled with the careful calculation required of designing anything?
I wonder whether, by bombarding the visitor with 350 examples of Surrealist art works, photos, magazine covers, sculptures, paintings and so on, the curators somehow dodge the central point at issue. ‘Objects of Desire: Surrealism and Design 1924 to Today’ is a magnificent assembly of Surrealist works in all formats, and includes a lot of interesting, intriguing and amusing pieces from its origins right up to the present day. But does it make its case for the widespread influence of the Surrealist way of thinking on 20th century design. I was left wondering…
Top ten exhibits
The curators made a handy selection of top ten items. I might as well share it with you.
1. Lobster telephone by Salvador Dalí
One of the exhibition’s most iconic works and a key moment in Surrealism’s transition from art to design. Dalí designed it for the collector Edward James, and in the show it is positioned next to a Mae West sofa to bring to mind an image of James’ wild interiors. It is a fully functioning telephone, designed to give the impression that its user is kissing the lobster when speaking into the receiver. Dalí saw both lobsters and telephones as erotic objects, and his first designs for this object were titled the ‘Aphrodisiac Telephone.’
The cartoon animation collaboration with Walt Disney described above.
3. Porte-Bouteilles by Duchamp
A 1964 re-edition of Duchamp’s 1914 original Porte-Bouteilles or bottle rack. A ready-made sculpture, the original was bought at a department store in Paris. Duchamp didn’t think to keep it, and it was only when the piece became famous later on that he got an identical rack from the same store and remade it. Placing this mass-produced, industrial object in an artistic context was a hugely important gesture. It emphasised concept over craft, one of several gestures by Duchamp which in effect created ‘conceptual art’ which has been hugely influential ever since.
Bottle rack by Marcel Duchamp
4. Look 6 Haute Couture by Schiaparelli
Maison Schiaparelli’s shocking pink dress features a trompe-l’œil pattern embroidered by glass tubes, following the contours of a muscular (male?) body. This silhouette is echoed across Maison Schiaparelli’s Spring Summer 21 collection, and is modelled on Elsa Schiaparelli’s 1930s wooden mannequins – a pair called Pascal and Pascaline – that she showed in her shop window in Paris.
Look 6 Haute Couture by Schiaparelli (Spring/Summer 2021) Courtesy of Schiaparelli
5. Hay by Najla El Zein
Created by contemporary designer and sculptor El Zein, this is a piece of porcelain with hay inserted into the holes it to give the impression that it is growing out of the stone. Part of a series called ‘Sensorial Brushes’, this work plays with the transition between familiar and unfamiliar. El Zein’s imaginative use of materials, and the call to her audience to experience the world differently, places her firmly within the Surrealist canon.
Méret Oppenheim designed a fur-covered bracelet for Elsa Schiaparelli and reportedly wore the prototype when meeting up with fellow artists Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar at a Parisian café. They played with the idea that anything might be covered in fur, and Oppenheim soon afterwards created her widely celebrated Surrealist work ‘Luncheon in Fur / Object’ – a fur covered cup and saucer (see above) which ‘disrupts expectations’ by combining the domestic with the uncanny.
Fur bracelet by Meret Oppenheim
7. Cadeau by Man Ray
One of the first works you see in the show is called ‘Cadeau’ or ‘Gift’ by Man Ray. The story goes that Man Ray was on his way to one of the first Surrealist exhibitions in 1921 and needed to make a piece on the hoof to show. He went into an ironmonger and bought a flat iron and some nails, before proceeding to stick the nails to the flat iron with glue. Not only does it make the iron completely dysfunctional, it also has this aggressive, proto-punk edge. Instead of being a domestic tool for pressing clothes neatly, it becomes a weapon that could rip your clothes.
Cadeau by Man Ray
8. Sketch Chair by Front Studio
This ‘Sketch Chair’ is designed by literally sketching in mid-air with hand gestures. These gestures are captured using motion capture technology, then translated into 3D printed works. The 3D form captures the spontaneity and messiness of human movement in a functional piece of furniture.
It connects with Picasso’s light drawings, photographed by Gjon Mili, from 1949, shown in a photograph beside the Sketch Chair.
9. Photographs by Tim Walker
Tim Walker is known for using Surrealist imagery in his fashion photography. Both photographs in the exhibition featuring Tilda Swinton as a model are from a shoot for W magazine titled ‘Stranger than Paradise’. Walker and Swinton went to Mexico, to the architectural folly La Pazas, created by Edward James – the man who commissioned the lobster telephone and Mae West Lips sofa from Dalí.
They used the folly as a set for a fashion shoot inspired by Surrealist artists, referencing works by painters like Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini. In the exhibition the photos are placed next to original paintings by Carrington (‘The old maids’, ‘The house opposite’) and Fini. Walker’s photography also features jewellery by Vicki Beamon, namely jewel-encrusted lips reminiscent of Dalí imagery.
Working in the spirit of the rapidly expanding Afrosurrealist movement, Yasmina Atta’s Kosmos in Blue – from her graduate collection – derives from the confluence of different cultures, including the designer’s Nigerian heritage and her interest in Japanese manga and Gundam girls.
The piece on display here is a set of embellished leather wings that move intermittently. The foam harness attaching the wings to the wearer’s body has an intentionally DIY-feel, as it was made in Atta’s studio over COVID lockdown when her access to materials was limited. She wanted the final product to reflect this experience of constriction, and as a result the wings represent a more personal and ready-made brand of couture.
This is a lovely FREE exhibition on the third floor of Tate Modern. It is the first UK survey to celebrate Dóra Maurer’s five-decade career, bringing together 35 works, ranging from:
her conceptual photographic series
the experimental films
her colourful graphic works
and the striking large geometric paintings
Potted biography
Dóra Maurer was born in 1937 in Budapest, capital of Hungary. She was a child during the Second World War and grew up in a society dominated by the Soviet-supported Communist Party. She came to adulthood just after the failed Hungarian Rising of 1956 led to Russian tanks being sent in to repress the uprising and demands for greater democracy.
It was during the 1960s that Maurer emerged as part of a generation of neo-avant-garde Hungarian artists who produced highly experimental work in parallel to the ‘official’ art system of the socialist regime.
Photographs
She trained as a graphic artist and printmaker in the 1950s and quickly began pushing the medium to its limits in her early works. She had an eye informed by questions of design and layouts.
From early on her main interest was in movement, displacement, perception and transformation. The exhibition includes a set of photographs she and a colleague took of each other across the courtyard of a tenement building as they moved along the gallery thus creating a series of variations. Another set shows a series of hand gestures: same hand, infinite variation of gestures, titled, in a suitably technocratic way, Reversible and Changeable Phases of Movements No.6.
She was interested in taking shapes and patterns and subjecting them to set changes and transformations, a fascination which resulted in probably her best known work, Seven Twists.
One room is devoted to five of her experimental films. This short clip gives you a feel.
She’d wanted to experiment with films since the late 1960s but didn’t have access to the equipment. Then in 1973 the state film organisation made its facilities available to artists and, voom! she was off.
Again she is playing with repetition, variation, and displacement. Relative Swingings splices together three separate strands of film to create a dizzying disorientation, shot in her own flat, some of the scenes more or less static, others made by lying on the floor and swinging the camera back and forth to create a blurred image of the ceiling.
Repetition with distortions
In 1974 she placed a coil of wire under a thin metal printing plate and pressed down so that it left a mark on the plate. The plate was inked and a print was made. The coil was then placed under the same plate and pressed down and a new print was made. Doing this in succession recorded what she called ‘phases of displacement’.
Traces of a Circle (1974) by Dóra Maurer. Tate
As her work became more geometric and abstract, Maurer explored system-based painting and the way in which geometric forms are affected by colour and perception. Some of these were exercises set for her students for she was now teaching in the Creativity Exercises Circle.
The third room explores her large-scale experiments with repetition and distortion. The most striking example is a set of four rectangular wooden panels suspended from the ceiling and part covered in mirrors, with a distinct gap between them, titled 4 out of 3. It’s the four panels hanging in mid-air at the right of this photo.
Installation view of Dóra Maurer at Tate Modern. Photo by Matt Greenwood
As you walk around, or as you observe other people walking round, they enter the reflective surface of the mirrors and leave them. It’s a simple, unpretentious and beguiling invention. Note its relationship with the coloured squares hanging on the wall behind it (5 out of 4), which clearly show the way Maurer takes a pattern and then subjects it to variations and displacements.
The Schloss Buchberg commission
In 1983 Maurer was awarded a commission for a site-specific project at Schloss Buchberg, near Vienna. For this she needed to think big, big spaces to cover, and an opportunity to play with colour. As she covered corners, curves and vaulted ceilings she began to appreciate the three-dimensional visual distortions they created on two-dimensional designs.
In the late 1970s Maurer had developed personal rules and techniques for producing varied shapes (such as 5 out of 4 and 4 out of 3, above) which included the strict use of just eight specific colours.
The Schloss Buchberg commission prompted her to expand her colour palette and experiment with three-dimensional affects, playing with perspective and perception. Thus some of her new works in the 1980s require the visitor to stand in just the right place in order to appreciate the optical illusion being created. In this respect she reminds me a bit of Bridget Riley’s Op Art.
Installation view of Dóra Maurer at Tate Modern. Photo by the author
The huge colour shapes
The show culminates in the fifth room with a display of Maurer’s most recent works, half a dozen enormous bright colour paintings with no frames, which are just coloured shapes mounted on the walls.
These are, quite simply, marvellous. Who would have thought there was still the scope to create objects which are, in a sense, so simple, but yet so inspiring. They are entirely flat – the impression of curving, of shape and shadow is created by varying the colours.
Stage II (2016) by Dóra Maurer. Photo by the author
Somewhere there’s a reference to Matisse’s late cutouts, but Maurer has reached this point entirely by herself, and by following a fascinating evolution through successive theories and experiments with shape and variation, with pattern and displacement, which the exhibition has traced so well.
Dora is still alive and producing new work at the ripe age of 82. May she long continue to do so. This is a really fascinating exhibition which leads to a completely unexpected and uplifting conclusion. Lovely!
Promotional video
Related links
Dóra Maurer continues at Tate Modern until 5 July 2020
This is the UK’s first ever retrospective of the Russian avant-garde artist Natalia Goncharova. It’s huge, bringing together over 160 international loans which rarely travel, including works from Russia’s State Tretyakov Gallery which houses the largest collection of Goncharova’s work.
The exhibition is imaginatively laid out with some lovely rooms, and it certainly gives you a good sense of her range of styles, not only in painting, but in lithographs, fashion and costume design, especially for modern ballet, posters, pamphlets and much more. But it also leaves you with a few nagging questions…
Goncharova was born in Russia in 1881. She grew up on her family’s country estates in Tula province, 200 miles from Moscow. Her family were impoverished aristocrats who made their fortune through textiles, in fact the name of Goncharova’s family estate, Polotnianyi Zavod, means ‘cloth factory’. From early childhood, Goncharova witnessed the rhythms the farmers’ lives – working the land, planting and harvesting – and also became deeply familiar with all the stages of textile production, from shearing sheep to weaving, washing and decorating the fabric.
Hence two threads to her artistic practice:
fabric design, which ran through the 1910s and led to her wonderful designs for the Ballets Russes in the 1920s and 30s, as well as commissions from fashion houses
a profound feel for the rhythms of agricultural labour, which she depicted in a number of early paintings (like Peasants picking apples, above)
The first room epitomises both threads with several paintings showing agricultural labourers, in a highly modernist style, alongside a display case containing an example of the kind of traditional costume worn by the peasant women on Goncharova’s estate.
Installation view of Natalia Goncharova at Tate Modern
Cubo-futurism
What comes over is Goncharova’s very quick artistic development from about 1908, when she was doing stylised but essentially traditional paintings of peasant subjects, to 1911 when she had transformed herself into one of the leading lights of the Moscow avant-garde.
Her swift development was helped by two Moscow industrialists – Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin – who had built up extensive art collections of leading European artists such as Cézanne, Gauguin, Picasso and Derain, and made their collections accessible to the public. These French works had an electrifying effect on young Russian avant-garde artists, which was accentuated by news of the new movement of Italian Futurism, which they could read about in international art magazines.
Goncharova swallowed both influences whole and became the leader of what contemporaries came to call Russian ‘cubo-futurism’. Various contemporaries are quoted commenting that she was the leader of the younger generation, not only in painting, but in self-presentation, creating an avant-garde ‘look’, as well as happenings, given walking through Moscow’s streets wearing stylised tribal markings on her face, or involved in volumes of avant-garde poetry published just before the Great War.
A work like Linen from 1913 seems to be a straight copy of Picasso-style cubism, cutting up an everyday domestic scene into fragments and pasting in some text, as if from a newspaper or advertising hoarding. The main differences from a cubist work by Picasso or Braques is that the text is in Russian, and the bright blue is completely unlike the cubist palette of browns and greys.
This exhibition feels logical and well designed, and features at least two particularly striking rooms. The first one is dedicated to recreating the landmark retrospective Goncharova was given in September 1913 at the Mikhailova Art Salon in Moscow. The 19193 show included more than 800 works (!) and was the most ambitious exhibition given to any Russian avant-garde artist up to that date. Goncharova was thirty-two years old.
The curators have brought together thirty big paintings which featured in the 1913 show and created a central column in the style of those circular bulletin boards you get in Paris, on which they have plastered copies of some of the posters and reviews of the original exhibition.
Here we learn that Goncharova’s fellow artist and long-time partner, Mikhail Larionov, invented the term ‘everythingism’ to describe her openness to diverse styles and sources, the way her paintings invoke all kinds of sources from the folk designs of her family farm, through to the latest ideas from Paris and Rome.
Thus the thing which comes over from the 30 or so works in this room is their tremendous diversity. There’s a striking female nude which reminded me of something similar by Matisse, there’s a pipe smoker at a table, a motif familiar from Cézanne, there’s a surprising work which looks like a dappled impressionist painting. It really is a little bit of everything and so ‘everythingism’ seems an accurate label.
You could claim this is as a positive achievement, indeed one of the wall labels praised the lack of ‘hierarchy’ in Goncharova’s diverse styles and I understood what they were getting at. There was the implication that it is somehow masculine to want to be the leader of the avant-garde, at the cutting edge, always one step ahead: and somehow a slave of capitalist or consumer culture to need to create a unique brand or style.
By contrast, Goncharova is praised for her more easygoing, unmasculine and uncapitalist stance – allowing herself to be open and receptive to all kinds of visual approaches, mixing Cézanne with Russian icons, or cubism with peasant designs, or futurism as applied to distinctly Russian cityscapes. She was presented as ‘a universal artist’.
You can see how, at the time, she seemed to contemporaries to be a one-woman explosion of all the latest visual breakthroughs and trends because she was covering so much territory.
The drawback of this approach is that Goncharova risks, in retrospect, appearing to be a Jill of all trades but a mistress of none. Lots of the works in this room were interesting but you found yourself thinking, ah, that’s the cubist influence, that’s the futurism, that’s a touch of Cézanne, and so on. They all had her mark, but not so many seemed entirely her, if that makes sense.
For me the most distinctive work in the room was the series of paintings she called Harvest, which was originally made up of nine large works which were designed to be hung together. Two have gone missing but Tate have hung the other seven together on one wall and the effect is stunning.
The palette of red, orange and tan runs across all seven paintings and gives them a tremendous visual unity. Also note the highly stylised, almost child-like depiction of the human figure, with simplified arms and legs and big simple eyes. The same big wide white eyes with huge jet black irises which appear in Peasants picking apples. This is maybe her core visual style.
Harvest uses Christian motifs. It was inspired by popular prints and the frescoes in Russian cathedrals and takes its images from the Book of Revelation in which the end of the world is presented as a symbolic harvest with the grapes of human souls being gathered and thrown into the winepress of God’s anger.
All in all, surprisingly religious, unironically religious, for an avant-garde artist. It comes as no surprise to discover that room six of the exhibition is devoted to just her religious paintings, featuring half a dozen enormous works she did on Christian subjects, notably four tall narrow full-length portraits of the four evangelists. I can see the way she has applied her distinctive cubo-futurist style to a very traditional Russian subject – I note her characteristic way with big white eyes – but I didn’t really warm to them.
The Four Evangelists by Natalia Goncharova (1911)
Fashion and design
Room four picks up the theme of Goncharova the fashion designer, showing work commissioned from her by the couturier to the Imperial court, Nadezhda Lamanova, in 1911 to 1912. This room also includes work commissioned from Goncharova after the war by Marie Cuttoli, whose design house Myrbor showcased carpets and fashion designs by famous contemporary artists.
There’s a series of sketches from the 1920s, haute couture-style sketches which make the women subjects look as tubular as a Fairy Liquid bottle, with no hips or waist or bust, which were utterly unlike her modernist paintings, and looked more or less like any other fashion sketches for stick-thin flappers from the Jazz Age.
But on the opposite wall was a piece which I thought might be my favourite from the whole show, a study Goncharova did for a textile design in the later 1920s. I loved the vibrancy of the colours and the primitiveness of the design. In fact it’s only one of a series she did using bird motifs but, to me, it was a standout piece.
In April 1914, Goncharova and Larionov were invited to Paris by the famous ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev to work on designs for his opera-ballet The Golden Cockerel. This was presented in Paris to great acclaim and the pair followed it up with an exhibition. But then the Great War broke out, and both were forced to return to Moscow. Larionov was called up for military service and sent to the front line, was wounded within weeks and invalided out of the army.
Goncharova responded to the crisis by creating a series of prints titled Mystical Images of War which brought together symbols Britain, France and Russia together with images from the Book of Revelation and Russian medieval verse. They use her trademark stylisation of the human face and eyes, and throw in the religious iconography which we’ve by now realised was a big part of her psyche.
The fourteen or so prints on display in room five are a really interesting mix of modern warfare and traditional Orthodox iconography, featuring angels wrestling biplanes, the Virgin Mary mourning fallen soldiers, and the Pale Horse from the Apocalypse. She chose to create prints in order to reach a broad popular audience with what are, essentially, patriotic rallying cries, which also feature patriotic heroes who defended Mother Russia against invaders.
Room seven is a narrow corridor between the conventionally-shaped rooms six and eight. As in other exhibitions, this corridor makes a good space not to hang works of art, but to place books, pamphlets, photos, prints and posters related to the artist under review, in the long rack of display cases lining the wall.
For this exhibition the curators have displayed artist manifestos, exhibition catalogues and a number of books of poetry which Goncharova was involved in writing or designing or illustrating. The later part of the case displays the ephemera she produced for a series of artists’ balls in Paris, including posters, tickets and programmes. There’s a speaker on the wall from which comes a Russian voice reciting some of the avant-garde poetry included in the pamphlets on display. (It is, apparently zaum or ‘transrational’ poetry, from ‘World Backwards’ by Alexey Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov, and Vzorval or ‘Explodity’ also by Kruchenykh.)
Cubo-futurism
Room eight is devoted to another series of cubo-futurist works, highlighting classic Modernist-style depictions of factories and machines and cars and bicycles, all those implements of power and speed which were fetishised by the Italian founder of Futurism, Marinetti.
There are some great pieces here, classic Futurist depictions of machines and factories, a big painting of a bicyclist, another titled Aeroplane over a Train, and a vivid depiction of rowers on the river (which reminded me of the similar treatment given the same subject by Cyril Powers, the British printmaker, twenty years later, as featured in the current exhibition of the Grosvenor School of Modern Art at Dulwich Picture Gallery).
Admirable though many of these paintings were, I began to be nagged or puzzled by something. Usually in a major retrospective, you are shown samples of the artist’s work throughout their career. Goncharova was established as a leader of the Russian avant-garde by the time of her huge exhibition in 1913, and lived on until 1962, producing works well into the 1950s.
So where are they? Where are all the later works? Here we are in room eight of ten and we are still… only at 1913?
The first eight rooms of this ten-room survey have all hovered around the years 1910 to 1914. Nowhere does the exhibition say so explicitly, but are we to conclude from this lack of later content that her golden years were a brilliant but brief period, from 1911 to 1914 or 1915?
Goncharova in Paris
Only in this, the ninth and penultimate room, do we learn what happened to Goncharova as a result of the Russian Revolution, namely that she and Larionov were on a tour with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes through Switzerland, Italy and Spain when the October Revolution broke out. The revolution, and then the civil war, prevented them from returning home, and in 1919 Goncharova moved into a flat in Paris that would remain her home for the rest of her life.
This penultimate room contains half a dozen works from the 1920s during which Goncharova received more commissions for ballet costume, some from fashion houses (as mentioned earlier) and a few funky commissions for interior design, including an impressive painted screen made in 1928 for the American patron Rue Winterbotham Carpenter. She did the interior designs for the Paris house of Serge Koussevitsky, exploring the motif of the Spanish Lady on a monumental scale.
When she had accompanied the Ballet Russe in Spain, Goncharova had become fascinated by the clothes of the Spanish women she saw, and ‘the Spanish woman’ became a recurring motif in her inter-war years, maybe because the vividness and ethnic distinctiveness of the outfits reminded her of the Russian peasant look she knew so well.
By far the most impressive work was a huge abstract work titled Bathers from 1922. It is immense, at least fifteen feet across, and reminded me of all kinds of other modernist abstract painters though I couldn’t quite put my fingers on who. First time it’s ever been exhibited in the UK and a coup for the exhibition organisers.
Bathers by Natalia Goncharova (1922)
Ballet designs
Anyway, the point remains – why isn’t there more of her work from the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s? You might have expected the last room in the show to cover the later part of her career but, instead, the exhibition takes an unexpected detour to make this final room, arguably the best in the exhibition.
It is a big space which has been specially darkened to create an atmospheric setting in which to review Goncharova’s work for the ballet and the theatre. Lining the walls are drawings and sketches for costumes Goncharova designed for productions of The Golden Cockerel (Rimsky-Korsakoff) and Les Noces (Stravinsky). There are some videos of her costumes and backdrops being used in revivals of the ballets, The Golden Cockerel footage is a silent but colour film of a production dressed in Goncharova’s costumes which toured Australia in the late 1930s.
But the highlights of the room are four or five of the actual costumes themselves, the costumes Goncharova designed for these classic ballet productions, which are featured in display cases around the room. They are all wonderfully bright and imaginative, drawing on the (to us) exotic and fanciful traditions of Russian legend and folklore.
And, last but not least, the room is filled with music, with clips from the famous ballet scores in question, wonderful Russian melodies filling the air as you stroll from wonderful costume to fascinating set designs, or stop to watch footage of actual performances using Goncharova’s colourful and vivid costumes.
The music, the darkened atmosphere, the videos of performances, and the glass cases of costumes – all make this room completely unlike the previous nine and a very evocative space to be in.
Summary
This is a major exhibition by a leading Russian artist who, for a period before the Great War, epitomised the avant-garde for her compatriots. She produced a lot of striking paintings, as well as pioneering designs for ballet costumes and sets, and a wealth of prints and posters and pamphlets and poetry books.
And yet I was left with two nagging questions: first, from such a profusion of images and designs, not that much really rang my bell. A lot of it was striking and thought-provoking and interesting – but possibly only the design with birds and flowers really set me alight.
The stylised human figures with those big eyes is the nearest Goncharova comes to having a recognisable ‘look’ and I liked it, but only up to a point. I actively disliked its application to the icons and evangelists and wasn’t, at the end of the day, that taken with the Great War prints, either.
Comparison with Käthe Kollwitz
Great War prints by a woman artist made me think of the epic prints created by the German woman artist Käthe Kollwitz. These are infinitely more powerful. Comparing the two made me think that maybe Goncharova was held back by her attachment to the Russian Orthodox tradition and its Christian iconography. Kollwitz, by contrast, has broken free of all traditional or religious straitjackets in order to create spartan images of humanity under stress which still speak to us today with horrifying force.
The Survivors by Käthe Kollwitz (1923)
Then again, maybe I’m comparing apples and oranges. Goncharova’s works were created at the very start of the war, when it was thought of as a religious crusade, and everyone thought it would be over by Christmas. Whereas Kollwitz’s haunting images were made nearly ten years later after not only bitter defeat, but collapse of the German state and descent into semi-civil war. So it’s not a fair comparison at all. But you can see why, if you set the two side by side – as we latecomers a hundred years later are able to – Kollwitz’s images are vital, a necessary record of a horrifying period; whereas Goncharova’s are an interesting and nice inclusion in a retrospective of her work, but have nowhere near the same importance or force.
Where is the later work?
And second, where was the work from the later years? Are we to deduce from its almost complete absence from this exhibition, that the curators consider Goncharova’s work from the 1930s, 40s and 50s to be poor or sub-standard? Or is it for some reason hard to borrow and assemble for an exhibition like this?
As far as I could see, the only work dating from either the 1940s or 1950s was one medium-size set design for Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird, which Goncharova drew in 1954.
I thought this was brilliant, vivid and fun, in a completely different style from everything which preceded it, like a highly stylised illustration for a children’s book. So is this what Goncharova’s work from the 1950s looked like?
Having devoted eight or so rooms to going over with a fine tooth comb the intricacies of her output from 1911 to 1915 or so, it’s a shame we didn’t get at least one room telling us what happened to her style in the entire last thirty years of her career.
Video
‘Visiting London Guide’ produce handy two-minute video surveys of all London’s major exhibitions. I include them in my blog because they give you an immediate sense of what the exhibition looks like.
This is the first major UK exhibition of Pierre Bonnard’s work in 20 years. It brings together over 100 paintings, sketches and drawings, photos and some rare film footage of the great man, many being loans from galleries abroad so that, for fans, this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to revel in Bonnard’s strange, entrancing art, and for those of us who are less familiar with his work, an opportunity to educate ourselves.
Although born in 1867, and a successful painter by the 1890s, it was only in 1912 that Bonnard undertook a major overhaul of his style, placing far more emphasis on colour and becoming much more relaxed about composition – hence this exhibition concentrates on the period 1912 to 1947.
Memory
Although there are some very early, tiny photographs of himself and his partner naked, back around 1900, and one or two later on which he used to help him with composition – the key thing to bear in mind is that Bonnard worked from memory, recreating scenes in his mind.
Long working
This is related to the way he worked on paintings over very long periods of time, sometimes decades; the commentary picks out works which were painted, then repainted, then worked over, then reconfigured, for years and years (he started Young Woman in the Garden in 1921 but revisited it in 1946, repainting a large section of it was was working on it at his death)
Domestic
Bonnard’s subject matter is unremittingly low key and domestic, homely and interior: about four subjects dominate the works – looking out an open door or window into a garden; people round a dining room table; his wife in the bath or washing in a tub; a naked woman reflected in a mirror
If writing this blog has taught me anything about myself it is that I like disegno, the art of drawing, the magical creation of shapes and forms and depth and weight on two-dimensional paper or canvas through the use of confident, incisive lines.
Therefore, I had to make a conscious effort not to judge Bonnard by what I like, but to relax and try and let him show me new ways to make painting. What I mean is, Bonnard is the opposite of my usual taste. There isn’t a straight line or regular geometric shape in sight. Instead the lines and frames are there in order to let the colour run riot.
If you look at Dining Room in the Country (1913) there are, in fact, quite a few geometric objects which ought to have straight lines – the door frame and open door, the window frame and open window. But quite obviously he is not interested in photographic accuracy – all the lines are there in order to create an illusion of three dimensional space, in which something else is going on.
I always listen to the audioguides at exhibitions. Sometimes they are bossy, sometimes briskly authoritative. I found the commentary on Bonnard’s paintings by curator Matthew Gale struck just the right note of hesitancy: something is quite clearly going on, but it regularly takes quite a lot of looking to figure out precisely what.
Gale tells us it is a characteristic of Bonnard’s paintings that the more you look, the more you begin to notice half-buried details. It’s not as if any of these provide the key, as if they were Renaissance works packed with arcane symbolism. The opposite. Nothing is arcane about them. A woman is lying in a bath. Not very difficult to parse or understand. And yet… her head is at an inconvenient angle compared to the rest of her body. Her right leg is unrealistically straight with, apparently, no knee. The tiles beside the bath display an amazing richness of colour, an embarrassment of gold and orange, and then the tiles beneath the bath have stopped being accurate representations of an actual floor and have become a pattern of turquoise squares with a pattering of gold towards the right.
Should you be put off the painting by the apparently ‘bad’ draughtsmanship of the human body? Or should you let yourself be dazzled by the gorgeousness of the colour and the entrancing half-abstract design?
That is the question I found myself asking again and again as I faced paintings with almost deliberately poor drawing and composition – and yet dazzling displays of gorgeous colour.
Possibly it could be put as an equation: where colour triumphs you are prepared to overlook dodgy elements in the design; but in other compositions the poor draughtsmanship predominates and so, on balance, I didn’t like.
Here’s an example which hangs in the balance, Coffee from 1915. Various elements are – judged purely by their accuracy, their verisimilitude, their anatomical or perspectival correctness – less than good, for example the right arm of the person putting something on the table, let alone his or her hand. Yuk. Clumsy. Gauche. The dog is sweet but not that well done. What’s happened to the woman in yellow’s left hand?
And yet… clearly this is a strong and powerful painting. it makes a big impression, for maybe two reasons: dominant is the red and white pattern of the tablecloth which sets slightly slapdash tone, in which colour and vividness is more important than accuracy; and then it is obviously catching a mood, the dog and the woman – although badly drawn – nonetheless conveying a calming, homely, domestic mood. These are the kind of paintings which led to him being called an ‘Intimist’.
So I think Coffee supports my thesis that, in Bonnard’s best paintings, colour and mood overcome weaknesses in depiction. And then there is that other element, which I quoted Matthew Gale referring to, the way that. The more you look at it, the more you become aware of odd details, the more drawn in you find yourself. Thus in the commentary for this painting, Gale candidly tells us that ‘no-one knows’ what the band of design down the right hand side of the canvas is: it doesn’t look like it represents anything ‘in’ the picture space; is it purely decorative?
Many of the paintings are cut off at edges like this, clipped at the edges and sides, creating the sense of something overheard and accidentally seen, helping to shape that sense of closeness and intimacy.
Mysterious moments in time
The dominance of colour and visual impact over strict, literal accuracy, brings us to the notion that Bonnard was interested in capturing moments in time, moments like (to describe the four paintings above) a woman looking in at an open window, a woman glimpsed fixing up her hair, lying in a leisurely cooling bath, or sipping a cup of coffee while the dog sits up at the table.
Certainly this notion, of intimate moments captured and then meditated on, turned over in the painter’s memory and converted, over a long period of time, into essays in colour and composition, fits the many, many paintings of naked women, and the recurring themes of – naked woman in front of mirror, naked woman in bath, dressed woman at table.
Nude before a mirror by Pierre Bonnard (1923)
Psychologising
And it’s about here that you need to know that Bonnard had a small but turbulent love life. For most of his life his partner was Marthe de Méligny. They lived together for thirty or so years before marrying in 1925. So far, so idyllic. But for the two years before the marriage Bonnard had been having an affair with Renée Monchaty, who sometimes modelled for him. They visited Rome together in 1921, an experience memorialised in several paintings. He even proposed to her in 1923, but then broke off the engagement. When Renée learned that Bonnard had married de Méligny, she killed herself. Hmm. Not quite so idyllic as it all first seemed.
And then we learn that de Méligny herself suffered from a number of psychological illnesses, some biographers interpreting it as a form of paranoia. Certainly she was reclusive and disliked company. Bonnard wrote to a friend in 1930:
For quite some time now I have been living a very secluded life as Marthe has become completely anti-social and I am obliged to avoid all contact with other people.
So the theme of domestic intimacy, of just the one figure in so many of the paintings, takes on a slightly more troubled tone.
Moreover, as part of the treatment for her complaints, or maybe a symptom of her compulsions, Marthe took baths and washed herself several times a day.
Ah. Now the countless paintings of a woman in a bath or a woman naked in front of a mirror fiddling with her hair take on a new and maybe troubling significance. Without much effort you can to interpret the mirrors as symbolic of a divided self, of a mind split into unhappy fragments, all the more so because of Bonnard’s habit of cropping the mirrors themselves (so you rarely see the entire mirror) and of showing the reflected image as itself cropped and ‘mutilated’.
So the scope is there, if you like psychological interpretations, to make quite a lot out of the ‘cramped’ interiors’, the woman divided against herself, the woman as passive object of the male gaze in the bath tub, and so on. (You might even notice, as I did, that more often than not the nude woman is wearing white high-heeled shoes. Everyone to their own fetish.)
But, in the painting above, Nude before a mirror, seeing it in the flesh, much more vibrant and garish than in this flattened reproduction, what grabbed my attention was the black circles drawn on the curtains at the top right. And it took me a while to realise that the green rectangle half way up the right of the picture is the end of a bed, and that the other colourful patches must be clothes placed on the bed.
In other words, once I had gotten over a) my standard heterosexual response to seeing a naked woman with a slender shapely bare legs and bum, and b) once I’d got over the unhappy squat shape of her head, and stopped worrying about the stumpy depiction of her left arm and hand (i.e. Bonnard’s shortcomings as a draughtsman) – then I was ready c) to take in the whole image as an exercise in colour, laid out in strange and beguiling composition (the picture is, once you start looking, really cluttered with angles and objects and stuff, which become slowly more puzzling and beguiling the longer you look at it.)
In other words, if you make the effort to overlook some shortcomings, if you suspend judgement, if you slow your mind right down, you find yourself becoming absorbed in the play of colour and composition, drawn in, absorbed and, if you really let go… entranced.
Gardens
But it wasn’t all baths and mirrors; Bonnard also painted gardens, of his home in the village of Vernonnet in Normandy and at his mother’s home at le Grand-Lemps in the Daupiné in south-east France then, from 1926, at the house he bought in the village of Le Cannet. From this date onwards he spent more and more time in the south, depicting the explosive impact of the Mediterranean light.
Take this work from late in his life, The Garden 1936. It is a dazzling explosion of colour and, once again, as Matthew Gale suggested, repays prolonged looking. As to trivial details, can you see the two pairs of pigeons, two brown at the back of the path, two white at the front? But it’s really the purely painterly elements, like the vertical tree trunk on the right contrasted with the green diagonal plant stem, or the strange almost square chunk of sand at the top right decorated with orange blobs. Words (as you can tell) can’t really convey the richness of the visual impact.
Because it is so comprehensive the exhibition has space to explore other themes (i.e. show a number of paintings of other subjects in other styles).
Self portraits
These include three or more of his later self-portraits which are sombre and grim, very unlike the blazing colour of the domestic interiors and gardens.
War and crowd scenes
There’s also a roomful of works from the Great War, showing a ruined village and some crowd scenes from Paris, which I thought were complete fails – where the drabness of the colours (brown and black) failed to compensate for his bad or ugly draughtsmanship. They have a room to themselves designed to show that he was more than just bathrooms and gardens: but they don’t really convince. When Bonnard goes wrong he really goes wrong.
The Fourteenth of July 1918 by Pierre Bonnard. Private collection
Bonnard isn’t consistently brilliant. Each painting needs to be looked at and absorbed on its ow merit, and since there’s over 100 pictures and sketches and photos, that’s a lot of time and a lot of attention required.
Half a dozen of them really made me stop, sit down, and just stare… and the more I looked, the more entranced I became. It is easy to criticise Bonnard’s weak points, but it’s harder to put into words the really powerful, strong, sucking impact the best of his paintings have.
Balcony at Vernonnet by Pierre Bonnard
I found that Bonnard’s paintings did something which virtually all curators claim for their artists but which few ever really do: they made me see in a whole new way; see, think and feel about paintings in a more open, receptive and joyful way than I’m used to. The best of them – the gardens, baths, open windows and women at mirrors – made me feel like I was seeing, experiencing colour and the world around me – an a completely new way.
I was converted.
Video
I’m getting into the habit of seeking out the video reviews made by Visiting London Guide. They are always longer (two and a half minutes) than the galleries’ official promotional videos (generally thirty seconds) and, with their hand-held style, they give you a better idea of not just what the pictures look like, but of the overall hang and the arrangement of the rooms.
Anni Albers combined the ancient craft of hand-weaving with the language of modern art.
This monumental, 11-room retrospective is the first major exhibition of Anni Albers’ work in the UK. It is a revelation and a fabulously calm, peaceful and enjoyable experience. The curators have somehow made all the rooms appear white and bright and open-plan. A couple of rooms are divided into sections partitioned off by translucent fabric stretched across Ikea-style pine frames.
The effect is to slow and calm you right down to a frame of mind which allows you to really soak up the beautiful and varied patterns of Anni’s fabrics and hangings, watercolours, prints and gouaches.
Installation view of Anni Albers at Tate Modern
The exhibition includes more than 350 objects from exquisite small-scale ‘pictorial weavings’ (her term for weavings which were not meant to decorate or hang, weren’t intended to have an architectural purpose, but to have the same importance and impact as traditional paintings), to the large wall-hangings and textiles Anni designed for mass production, as well as a generous selection of her later prints and drawings.
It opens with a big visual statement – with a room dominated by an actual loom of the type she would have used while a student at the Bauhaus. To match or balance this, right at the end of the show, the final room includes samples of cloth and fabric which we are encouraged to touch and feel, as well as a film showing a weaving loom in use, highlighting the complex interaction of hand and eye which was required to use one of these machines.
A 12 Shaft Counter March loom of the type Albers would have used at the Bauhaus
Biography
Anni Albers (1899 to 1994) was born Annelise Else Frieda Fleischmann in Berlin, Germany, to a bourgeois family of furniture manufacturers. In 1922 she joined the Bauhaus, the influential art and design school established by the architect Walter Gropius in Weimar, and enrolled in the school’s weaving workshop. It was at the Bauhaus that she met the artist Josef Albers, who she married in 1925. (I am going to refer to her as Anni to distinguish her from her husband.)
The early rooms display her student work alongside work by her tutors at the Bauhaus, including Paul Klee, and colleagues such as Gunta Stölzl and Lena Meyer-Bergner.
I couldn’t help revering the only Klee here, Measured Fields, a watercolour from 1929. Albers is quoted as saying that she didn’t learn that much from Klee’s teaching, but masses from the actual practice of his watercolours which experimented with laying blocks of (generally quite washed-out) colour next to each other.
Measured Fields by Paul Klee (1929)
Klee and Kandinsky were just the two most famous painters experimenting with colour and abstract design at the Bauhaus. Although he doesn’t get much mention here, Anni’s husband, Josef, was also thinking about colours and how they interact. The Bauhaus was an incredibly stimulating environment.
Anni completed her diploma in weaving in 1930 and succeeded Gunta Stölzl as the head of the weaving workshop the following year. However, in 1933 the Bauhaus closed under increasing pressure from the Nazi party, and the Alberses fled to America when they were invited by the American architect Philip Johnson to teach at Black Mountain College, an experimental art school in North Carolina.
Here Anni and Josef they initiated and led the art programme until 1949. That year, Anni Albers held her first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first solo exhibition to be dedicated to a textile artist at the institution.
In 1950 she moved for the final time in her life to New Haven, Connecticut, when Josef Albers was appointed to teach in the Department of Design at Yale University.
Anni Albers continued to hand-weave until the late 1960s when she began to focus on printmaking. On display here is a fabulous sequence of white prints on white paper. The effect is of embossed zigzag patterns on a plain white background which itself contrasts with the slightly stippled surface of the surround outside the main square. It sounds simple but they are tremendously evocative, in one way they were the most attractive thing in the show.
Mountainous I by Anni Albers (1978)
Six Prayers
In the mid-1960s Anni was invited to design an ark covering for a Jewish temple in Dallas, Texas. The result was Six Prayers which are given a room to themselves. Into the cotton and linen of the tapestries is woven silver thread, giving them a scintillating effect in the carefully gauged darkness of the room.
The pattern, when you look up close, invokes but doesn’t quite use, the Hebrew script, an effect which can be interpreted as a fragmenting of language and meaning or, more hopefully, a sense of the numinous, of silver threads of meaning, struggling to pierce through the weight of the everyday.
Six Prayers by Anni Albers (1966 to 1967)
The event of a thread
Room eight – titled ‘The event of a thread’ – explores how, in the mid-1940s, Anni began to explore knots. She was probably influenced by the German mathematician and knot theorist Max Wilhelm Dehn, who joined Black Mountain College in 1945 and became a friend of the Alberses.
Although not a painter, in 1947 Anni Albers began to sketch and paint entangled, linear structures. Later, in the 1950s, she produced a number of scroll-like works with celtic-style knots, and then the Line Involvements print series in the 1960s.
To be honest, I think I respond to painting and drawing more immediately than I do to fabric, and so I found some of these knot paintings absolutely mesmeric. They are as if someone has taken the beautifully taut and compact interlocking lines of classic Celtic patterns and… unlocked them, loosened them, shaken them up, set them free. My photo of them is awful but the real things are entrancing.
Drawings for a rug by Anni Albers (1959)
On Weaving
Next to this section was the space which most epitomised the tasteful design and layout of the exhibition – a room created of see-through partitions, devoted to Anni’s writings. She published two influential books: in 1959, a short anthology of essays titled On Designing, and in 1965 the seminal book On Weaving.
The extensive display cases in this space convey the tremendous breadth and range of this latter work, which took as its subject the entire 4,000 year long history of the practice, from right round the world.
While still a student in Berlin, Anni had become a regular visitor to the Museum of Ethnology and become fascinated by its collection of Peruvian textile art. Apparently, the ancient Peruvians never developed a written language, in the way we think of it. Instead their art, and most of all their textiles, served a sort of communicative purpose.
Anni’s ‘pictorial weaving’, Ancient Writing, from 1936, was the first in an occasional series of works whose titles explicitly refer to language and texts, such as Haiku (1961), Code (1962) and Epitaph (1968).
The Peruvian tradition was only one among hundreds of ancient techniques and traditions which Anni taught could be used to revitalise contemporary practice. The cases display the source material Anni gathered for the book, from images of works by contemporary artists such as Jean Arp, to fragments of woven pieces from Africa and Asia, Europe and the Americas.
These are accompanied by technical diagrams of various knotting techniques, as well as ‘draft notation’ diagrams which show the weaver how to create the different weave structures and patterns.
Although I didn’t follow the details, I did get a sense of how universal this art has been, practiced by all human cultures across a huge span of time. How there is something almost primeval about weaving and binding fabrics for human use.
Installation view of room 9, On Weaving, of Anni Albers at Tate Modern
In the 1970s Anni finally gave up the physically arduous task of weaving and switched her interest to printing techniques such as lithography, screen-printing, photo-offset, embossing and etching.
Printing allowed Anni to pursue her interest in colour, texture, pattern, surface qualities and other aspects of ‘textile language’, translating these concerns onto paper. She used simple grids and rows of triangles to create a wide variety of effects that reveal the influence of the pre-Columbian textiles and artefacts she collected and studied.
I’ve shown one of the white patterns which she came to title Mountainous earlier, but there are plenty more examples of her wonderful eye for geometric design and colour, an endless play of design and pattern.
This is an eye-opening exhibition in every sense. A lifetime’s output of beautiful objects, fabrics, rugs, hangings, paintings and prints by a consistently inspired and inspiring artist.
The guide tells me it was designed by PLAID Designs, so major respect to them for having laid all these treasures out in light and airy spaces. In her 1957 article, The Pliable Plane, Anni had imagined a museum where
textile panels instead of rigid ones … provide for the many subdivisions and backgrounds it needs. Such fabric walls could have varying degrees of transparency or be opaque, even light-reflecting…
Well, the curators and designers of this exhibition have come as close to realising Anni’s vision as is possible. There is much more I haven’t mentioned, about her involvement with specific architectural projects, about her innovatory use of hangings as room dividers or sound-proofing music auditoria, and an enormous amount about her wide-ranging experiments with fabrics ancient and modern, and with techniques from ancient Peru to modern America.
But it’s the light and space of the show, in which countless examples of beautiful fabrics and prints hang suspended in their beauty and weightlessness, which make you leave the exhibition walking on air.
The promotional video
And this is one of Simon Barker’s videos showing how a handloom is used.
Related links
Anni Albers continues at Tate Modern until 27 January 2019
This is an extraordinarily packed, dense and demanding exhibition. The basic idea is deceptively simple. The show looks at over 40 artistic couples who were pioneers of early 20th century avant-garde art, photography, design and literature, and explores the stories of their sexual, emotional and artistic relationships, liberally illustrating the narratives with photos and art works, books and pamphlets, fabrics and ceramics, chairs and bookshelves, which one or other or both of them produced.
Women first
One central aim of the exhibition is to show that, more often than not, the women in these artistic relationships were as, if not more, important and influential (and creative in their own right) than the male artists and male critics of their time – and ever since – have acknowledged.
So, in a small but telling detail, in all the displays of couples, it is the woman who is presented first, the woman’s name which appears first and the woman’s work and contribution which is most explored.
Thus in the opening room we are told that the model Camille Claudel played a larger role in the career of sculptor Auguste Rodin than is usually credited, as well as being an interesting sculptor in her own right, with samples of her work to prove it.
The same goes for Maria Martens, who enjoyed a long and passionate working relationship with the more-famous Marcel Duchamp, but was a notable artist in her own right.
Later on we learn that Gustav Klimt’s lifelong soul-mate, and the model for some of his most famous paintings – Emilie Flöge – was more than just a muse and model, but a talented fashion designer who ran her own very successful couture house, the Schwestern Flöge (1904 to 1938), in Vienna.
Emilie Flöge and some of her dress designs c.1900
The exhibition works through scores of other examples, in each case showing that the women in each famous couple were often notable artists, sculptors, designers and business people in their own right, as well as contributing ideas, designs and artworks to what would nowadays be seen more as collaborative relationships than the old-fashioned story of an active Male Artist and a passive Female Muse.
Natalia Goncharova, the Russian Futurist artist, painter, costume designer, writer, illustrator, and set designer was every bit as innovative as her lifelong partner and founder of Rayonism, Mikhail Larionov.
Frida Kahlo, during the 1930s overshadowed by her husband, the famous mural painter Diego Rivera, has subsequently emerged as a powerful artistic figure in her own right.
Leonora Carrington has traditionally been seen as a ‘muse’ for the Surrealist artist, Max Ernst, during the three intense years of their relationship, 1937 to 1940, but she was a sculptor and painter in her own right, as well as the author of a harrowing account of her experience of mental illness, Into the Abyss.
Early in their relationship Georgia O’Keeffe was the junior partner to her husband, the famous New York photographer Alfred Stieglitz, but her career as a painter would go on to eclipse his reputation.
And so on.
In fact, the show at moments suggests that it was sometimes the men who were the muse figures for a woman artist, for example in the section on Picasso and how his image was crafted and shaped by his lover Dora Maar, in her own photographs and sculptures.
So, on one level, this exhibition is a massive, encyclopedic review of twentieth century avant-garde art as retold from the women artists’ perspectives. Redressing a balance. Restoring, or creating, a new feminist interpretation of many artistic relationships, from the super-famous to the sometimes relatively obscure.
Collaborations
But this theme – rediscovering and rethinking the importance of the women collaborators vis-a-vis often more famous male artists – is not the only one. It is complemented by explorations of the diverse meanings of the very ideas of ‘working relationships’ and ‘collaborations’.
Take homosexual partnerships. Alongside the long sequence of heterosexual couples, there are rooms devoted to gay, lesbian or bisexual couples, for example the passionate same-sex relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West which inspired Woolf’s novel, Orlando. Or the room devoted to the long-lasting artistic relationship between transgender couple Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore.
Other rooms expand the notion of ‘relationship’ beyond the idea of a simple binary couple, for example the relationship of the three Magic Realist painters – Paul Cadmus, Jared French and Margaret Hoening French – who worked together so closely that they attributed their works to a joint pseudonym made up from the first two letters of their first names – the PaJaMa collective.
Other rooms move beyond threesomes to explore larger groups of artists who collaborated and worked together during this exuberant period. Thus one room focuses on the community of lesbian writers and artists in 1920s Paris, while another explores the Surrealist idea of the ‘Chance Encounter’ in a room which brings together some ten or so artists, male and female, who collaborated together in loose and shifting networks of co-operation.
In other words, the exhibition starts off by exploring the notion of modernist artistic couples but quite quickly deconstructs, reconfigures, explores and rethinks what working artistic relationships actually meant in practice for a wide variety of artists.
It may begin with women who challenged conventional notions of female behaviour and the role of ‘the wife’ or ‘the mistress’ or ‘the muse’, but soon becomes an investigation of a number of types of artistic working relationships, between not only heterosexual and same-sex couples, but among larger and more fluid groupings.
Is modernism about love or the Machine Age?
But alongside the notion of the couple, the collaboration and the group, the curators make a bold assertion which I find hard to agree with, namely that artistic modernism was coterminous with ‘modern love’. To quote the introductory wall label at the start of the exhibition:
Modern art. Modern love. From the 1890s through to just after the Second World War, these two phenomena were interwoven and indelibly linked. Side-by-side, artist couples forged new ways of making art and of living and loving.
And in the scores and scores of wall labels which follow, there is much, much more along the same lines. All of the artists are given thumbnail biographies and these tend to focus as much on their love lives, on their bohemian rejection of bourgeois conventions around love, marriage, sexuality and so on, as on their actual artistic achievements.
Central to the exhibition is the claim that Modernism, or the 20th century avant-garde, was about love and sex and desire. Or, as the curators put it:
‘Modern Couples’ roots Modernism in the field of desire.
This claim, or assertion, allows the curators to present a coherent and persuasive narrative. Modern Art is about love and desire. 20th century women artists and authors invariably depicted love and desire. Therefore women artists are central to Modern Art.
Or: If love and desire are the core subject of Modernism, then women artists, who focused on love and desire, must be central to Modernism.
It is a circular, self-fulfilling and self-reinforcing argument.
Having established this axiom, the show can then settle down to ticking off a familiar checklist of feminist art concerns, demonstrating how these radical women artists ‘subverted’ traditional ‘patriarchal’ ideas of ‘gender stereotyping’ and explored ‘transgressive’ sexuality i.e. by having numerous lovers or by being lesbians.
By selecting love and ‘desire’ as the central theme of Modernism, the curators are able to pull together:
the heterosexual and homosexual relationships of women artists
women artists’ ambivalent roles as sexual objects and muses to men
women artists’ own sexual feelings and needs, expressed in infidelities, affairs and multiple partners
the fact that women artists sometimes got pregnant and gave birth
the way women artists explored and mythologised the condition of femininity and fertility
alongside the legion of lesbian artists, seen as social and political pioneers in the way they explored man-free notions of same-sex desire
All of these multifarious activities and interests can be pulled together as if they make up a single coherent movement, all saying the same thing, all addressing the same handful of ‘issues’, all united in the same aim.
And the way the same theme and subject – love, sex and the (generally female) body – is repeated on all the wall labels and is exemplified again and again in the artworks also contributes to this sense of a huge transcontinental network of artists, sculptors and writers all inspired by the same theme. Reinforcing the curators’ premise that ‘modern art’ is coterminous with ‘modern love’.
This strikes me as being very neat, very convenient and not completely true, for one very big reason.
At university I was taught that the huge array of new artistic and literary strategies which we call ‘Modernism’ was, at least in part, a reaction to the ongoing dominance of the Machine in modern life, and a response to the hectic pace of technological change which accelerated from the 1890s onwards.
Electric lights, bicycles, skyscrapers with electric elevators, motor cars and airplanes, the cinema and portable cameras, were just a few of the technologies which didn’t exist in 1890, were only just being developed in 1900, and which had become almost commonplace by 1910, in a few decades of dizzying technical and engineering change.
I was taught that T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land and James Joyce in Ulysses and Alfred Döblin in Berlin Alexanderplatz and John Dos Passos in U.S.A. use techniques of collage, parody and fragmentation to convey the disorientating experience of life in modern, fast-moving cities and the way it had uprooted sensitive people from their cultural and communal identities, producing a blizzard of fragmented experiences.
The City of Ambitions (1910) by Alfred Stieglitz. Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum
Same with the photomontages of Alexander Rodchenko and the Russian Constructivists, or the zealous machine-worship of the Futurists, or the angularities of the Vorticists, or the geometric forms of Fernand Léger, or the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich, or the shock close-ups and split screens and montages of Sergei Eisenstein, or the grid pictures of Piet Mondrian which began life as attempts to capture the energy of fast-moving traffic around modern city blocks.
I was taught that all of these undeniably ‘modernist’ books and artworks were first and foremost responses to what many artists felt was the disruptive impact of a host of new technologies on modern life. They have nothing – visually or intellectually – to do with love and desire.
So it’s a surprise to realise that this indisputably key element of Modernism – the hectic, alienating, urban, machine-riddled aspect of the Modernist movement – is largely absent from this exhibition. If it’s mentioned at all it is only to be quickly downplayed.
Thus when the exhibition describes the Futurist poet and provocateur, Marinetti it does so mainly in order to prove that his partner, Benedetta, was a pioneering artist in her own right, who feistily stood up to Marinetti’s misogynist rhetoric and co-wrote a lot of his most famous works.
Fair enough, but this perspective downplays Marinetti’s importance as (half-crazed) apostle of The Machine – of the new age of fast cars, planes and trains, a mania which influenced the Surrealists in Paris and the Vorticists in London.
Room 20, devoted to Russian Modernism, describes the artistic output of Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Lilya Brk and Osip Brik, and Vladimir Mayakovsky mainly in terms of their fluid relationships and collaborations i.e. in order to justify the curators’ central premise.
What is underplayed is the crucial importance of The Machine Age to their development of new styles of photography and photomontage, design, experimental film and so on – radical responses to the impact of new technologies on human life which were so acute and perceptive that many of them still influence us to this day.
A. Rodchenko and V. Stepanova descending from an airplane in a still for the film The General Line by Sergei Eisenstein (1926). A very rare appearance of a machine in an exhibition overwhelmingly devoted to bodies and desire. Courtesy Rodchenko and Stepanova Archives, Moscow
Some of the exhibition wall labels do refer to the new experience of the modern city, a bit, where absolutely necessary, reluctantly – but overall the exhibition systematically downplays or ignores it in order to focus on its core concern – with relationships, love, ‘desire’ and the female body.
For me, this is simply to ignore, underplay and obscure a vital element in early 20th century avant-garde modernist art and literature.
Moreover, if you think about it, the curators’ unrelenting focus on love, sex and (generally) women’s bodies leads to a deep irony.
By choosing to equate Modernism exclusively with love and desire, an exhibition which sets out to reject sexist stereotypes of women in a subtle way ends up limiting women to – the realm of the emotions, of love and desire.
An exhibition which ostensibly sets out to tell us that women were interested in more than just the stereotypical concerns of love and sex (they were also successful businesswomen and designers), paradoxically goes to great lengths to tell us in sometimes embarrassing detail about the love lives, partners and sensuality and eroticism of these same women.
Which tends to have the cumulative affect of confirming the stereotypical prejudice that women, at the end of the day, aren’t interested in wider ideas, social change, technology, science and engineering, in designing better engines, cars, planes and trains.
No, with a handful of exceptions, most of the women in this exhibition are described as being predominantly interested – in their lives and art and writing – in love and sex. The lesbians, gays and transgender people, too, are defined, categorised and interpreted in the light of their sexual preferences, not in any wider social or intellectual concerns.
[At a more remote level, for people who don’t give a damn about art or artists (90+% of the population), this exhibition confirms every philistine prejudice they’ve ever held about the art world, namely that it’s a Sodom and Gomorrah of sexual perversion, infidelity, adultery and pornography. (There is quite a lot of nudity on display, as you’d expect in an exhibition about desire and the body, lots of bare boobs and one or two naked penises. Visitors are warned that the room about the Surrealists’ ‘Chance Encounter’ has so much explicit content that it might not be suitable for under-16s. Oooh er.)]
Meanwhile, beyond the artists’ studios and bedrooms in the 1910s and 20s, there was an immense and exciting world – the world of motorbikes and racing cars and fast trains and ocean liners and skyscrapers and high speed elevators and escalators and department stores and cinemas and world wars and machine guns and tanks and airplanes, the world where people tested themselves against machines, climbed mountains, did solo flights across the Atlantic.
But all this is ignored, left out, omitted, elided and glossed over, in the curators’ keenness to assert that the essence of Modernism was… love and desire, marriages and mistresses, ‘transgressive sexuality’, ‘the queer citizen’, ‘women’s liberation’, ‘same-sex acceptance’ and so on.
It is difficult to read every word of all the wall labels, not only because there are so many of them, but also because so many of them end up saying the same thing. The circumstantial details of each artist and their relationships maybe be distinct and individual but so many of the labels take us to the same destination – explaining that so and so made ‘the body’ the centre of their practice or ‘the site of transgressive desire’ or an epitome of ‘queer citizenship’, and so on.
The explosively diverse and often fascinating works of many of these artists are time after time reduced, interpreted via the same handful of ideas which rotate obsessively around sex, ‘desire’, the body, and transgressing gender stereotypes.
It is, in my opinion, both a narrow view of Modern Art, and a very narrow view of the female, lesbian and gay achievement of the time, both in the art world and beyond.
A tsunami of information
So much for the core ideas of the exhibition, and my issue with some of them.
The actual experience of visiting Modern Couples is to be completely overwhelmed by a tsunami of names and stories. The two floors of the Barbican Gallery have been divided up into some 23 small rooms, into most of which have been crammed displays about at least two sets of couples, with each couple introduced and explained by sometimes lengthy texts on the wall, as well as scores and scores of key quotes from the respective artists and authors.
It’s a lot to take in – to read the explanation of each couple, and then try and match the quotes to what you’ve just read about their lives – and then to find the energy to look at the actual art works. To give you a sense of the scale and the deluge of information, here’s the list of the Artist Couples:
Aino and Alvar Aalto
Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry
Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant
Lilya Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky
Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore
Benedetta and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst
Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin
Nancy Cunard and Henry Crowder
Sonia Delaunay and Robert Delaunay
Lili Elbe And Gerda Wegener
Emilie Flöge and Gustav Klimt
Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí
Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov
Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici
Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson
Hannah Höch and Til Brugman
Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera
Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso
Alma Mahler and Oskar Kokoschka
Alma Mahler and Gustav Mahler
Maria Martins and Marcel Duchamp
Margrethe Mather and Edward Weston
Lee Miller and Man Ray
Lee Miller and Roland Penrose
Tina Modotti and Edward Weston
Lucia Moholy and László Moholy-Nagy
Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky
Winifred Nicholson and Ben Nicholson
Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz
PaJaMa: Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French
George Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescott
Lavinia Schultz and Walter Holdt
Varvara Stepanova and Alexander Rodchenko
Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean Arp
Toyen and Jindrich Štyrský
Marianne von Werefkin and Alexej von Jawlensky
Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West
Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf
Unica Zürn and Hans Bellmer
That’s a lot of biographies to read and digest, that’s a lot of names to remember.
Nude with Poppies (1916) by Vanessa Bell. Swindon Art Gallery
Here are the names, careers, art and writing of the ‘Sapphists’ featured in just one room, the one dedicated to ‘The Temple of Friendship’ i.e. the lesbian writers and artists of 1920s Paris:
Djuna Barnes and Thelma Wood
Natalie Clifford-Barney and Romaine Brooks
Natalie Clifford Barney and Rémy de Gourmont
Natalie Clifford-Barney and Liane de Pougy
Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien
Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier
Luisa Casati
Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge
Tamara de Lempicka
Ida Rubinstein
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas
And that’s before you get to the artists featured in the Surrealist ‘Chance Encounter’ room, namely:
Not only must the visitor assimilate this tsunami of names, relationships and diversity of artistic and literary practices, but every visitor to the exhibition is given a free handout, a ‘glossary’, which includes even more themes to think about.
For when the curators had collated this much information about this many people and assembled this many works all in one place – it turns to be an interesting exercise to detect all kinds of further links and connections between the huge diversity of artists, activities or artworks on show.
Thus the free handout suggests that, as you walk round the exhibition, you look out for the following themes:
Activism
Agency – ‘Feminism, agency and the desire for independence underpins much of the work by women artists in the avant-garde period.’
Breaking up
Businesswomen – Emilie Flöge, Sonia Delaunay, Aino Aalto
Chance encounter
Chloe liked Olivia – quote from Virginia Woolf epitomising ‘the new queer citizen of the 20th century’
Clandestine
Co-authored – or collaboration, one of the show’s central themes.
Communicating vessels – ‘Two different bodies, rubbed against one another, attain, through the spark, their supreme unity in fire’ – André Breton, 1932.
Collage
Daring – ‘What have I dared embark upon by entering your life?’ Dora Maar to Picasso, 1936.
Desire
Elegy – ‘Butterflies represent a scene of your life in which the dawn awakens on your lips. A star takes shape according to your design.’ Jean Arp remembering Sophie Taeuber-Arp after her death.
Escape to the country
Feminism – ‘We will be better than the wife, the mother or the sister of a man, we will be the female brother of the man’ – Natalie Clifford Barney
Gift
Homoeroticism – ‘The work that came out of Monroe Wheeler, Glenway Wescott and George Platt Lynes’s at times uneasy polyamorous relationship opened up a queer utopian space, away from 1930s American conservatism, in which the male subject could be liberated.’
Intimacy
Liberation – sexual liberation, liberation from Victorian clothing and Victorian morality, liberation from constricting fabrics and dull designs, liberation from boring interiors, liberation from artistic naturalism and even from language
Love
Mad love
Mirroring – ‘I am one, you are the other. Or the opposite. Our desires meet one another.’ Claude Cohun, 1930.
Muse – Dora Maar took photos of her lover Picasso in ‘a turnaround of gender expectations‘.
Mythology
Nest
Non-binary – ‘Gender fluidity, sexual empowerment, awakening, and the fight for safe spaces of becoming, were part of the avant-garde currency.’
Play
Printed word – ‘It could be a political text, a perfect branding platform, a token of love, a site of artistic collaboration or a platform for transgressive or erotic content.’
Procreation
Publishing – Many modernists experimented with setting up their own publishing company, most notably the Hogarth Press of Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
Pygmalion
Radical abstraction
Reinvention – The importance of the portrait, in art and literature. Claude Cohun and Marcel Moore, life partners for 45 years, and produced a huge body of work playing with ‘gender politics‘.
Revolution – Alexander Rodchenko and partner Varvara Stepanova’s revulsion for the West’s cult of ‘Woman as object’ and determination to embrace ‘gender equality‘.
Selfie
Sidelined – women sidelined by men, obviously, always, everywhere
Total work of art
Triadic
Two-people movements – Rayism invented by Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, the Mask Dancer movement of Lavinia Schultz and Walter Holdt, the Tactilism of Benedetta and Filippo Marinetti, the Orphism of Sonia and Robert Delaunay.
Utopia
War
X-rated – ‘Many artists in this exhibition used eroticism in their art as a way of fighting bourgeois conformity, propaganda and artistic censorship.’
Is that enough to think about yet?
A self-portrait by Claude Cahun, subverting gender stereotypes. Courtesy of Jersey Heritage Collections
This is what the exhibition is like. Overflowing with texts, quotes, references, biographical data, artistic theory and, underpinning it all, emerging sooner or later in every wall label for every artist – the axioms of modern identity politics and feminism – gender politics, the body, gender fluidity, transgressive art, gender equality, and so on.
Numbers
I counted a total of 103 paragraphs of wall text – sometimes very long, densely factual paragraphs. It would take at least an hour just to read them, and that’s before the 50 or so quotes from artists’ letters, diaries and so on.
There are over 40 couples, but many more ‘couples-plus’ – groups and movements of artists and writers to get a handle on – with the result that the exhibition features more than 80 writers and artists in total.
And there are a staggering 600 objects on display, including paintings, sculptures, models, furniture, personal photographs, love letters, gifts, books – 35 first editions from Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press – magazines, rare archival material and much, much more!
Les deux amies (1923) by Tamara de Lempicka. Association des Amis du Petit Palais, Geneve. A portrait of two naked women painted by a woman!
In the event, this was simply too much for me to take in. I started off dutifully reading every wall text but quickly got tired, saturated, full up – I started skimming some and then just ignored others. I went round about five times, each time reading at new bits of text, toying with quotes here and there – above all, trying to let the actual art fight its way through the jungle of biography and interpretation and bitty quotations and make its impact.
I came to roughly two conclusions.
1. One is that, if you’re a student or have an educational motivation, this is a spectacular opportunity to see works great and small, by artists famous and obscure, by men, women, gays, lesbians and trans people, from what feels like all the most important art movements of the early 20th century.
(In fact it’s far from being a complete overview of early 20th century art – that would fill ten Barbican galleries – but it is an impressive stab at conveying a really comprehensive overview of important modern art asretold with women, gays and lesbians to the fore.)
2. The second point is that among the 600 paintings, books, photos and furniture on display there are some real masterpieces, many on loan from abroad, and so a rare opportunity to see many beautiful things in the flesh.
Small is not necessarily beautiful
In this respect – my response to the art – I found the smaller, more cramped rooms to be unconducive to aesthetic enjoyment.
For example, the small first room which is shared by the story of Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin, and the story of Maria Martins and Marcel Duchamp, included some plaster busts and faces by the former pair, and some bronze casts of Maria’s body parts (her buttocks and vagina) made by Duchamp. But it was so small, cramped and crowded that it felt more like a reading and learning space, than an art space.
The reduction ad absurdum of this shoehorn approach was the way that the no doubt complex and interesting working relationship between modernist designer Lilly Reich and her long-term partner and collaborator, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, was explained via one chrome and black leather chair and three paragraphs of text plonked at the bottom of the stairs to the first floor.
He claimed to be the sole designer of this classic and hugely influential chair. Only decades later did it emerge that she had as least as much input as he did into the design. What a beast!
Barcelona chair by Mies van der Rohe (1929)
Interesting story, but blink and you might miss it altogether.
The show is co-curated by Emma Lavigne, Director of the Centre Pompidou in Metz. The French connection made me think of some of the smaller displays as types of ‘bonnes bouches’ or ‘tasty bites’ – fleeting treats designed to add to the overall argument, but whose main function would be to inspire you to go away and find out more.
Big rooms where art can breathe
By contrast, I only really felt comfortable – and that I was really getting an aesthetic kick (as opposed to processing large amounts of biographical and art information) – in some of the larger rooms. There were plenty of other highlights, but I would single out rooms 14, 15 and 17.
Room 17
Room 17 displayed the work of two and a half couples: of the English artist Ben Nicholson, who 1. enjoyed a close working relationship with Winifred Nicholson (whom he married) in the early 1930s before 2. then partnering with the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. The wall labels quote letters they exchanged in which they spoke of becoming, literally, one person, with one taste and one artistic motivation.
In this same room, on the opposite wall, was a suite of work by Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. I found the juxtaposition of the sculptural abstractions of Nicholson and Hepworth with the playful abstracts of Arp really interesting.
But I was transfixed by the four or five 18-inch-high marionettes made by Sophie Taeuber-Arp for a puppet production of a folk tale about King Stagg. These possessed something almost nothing else in the exhibition did – which was charm and humour.
Marionettes by Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1918)
Room 15
Room 15 is a rare example of a room devoted to just one couple, in this case the wife-and-husband partnership between Sonia and Robert Delaunay (who were married from 1910 to Robert’s death in 1941). This married couple developed a movement variously titled Simultanism and then Orphism, in which different patterns of colours are set against each other to create disruptive effects.
The Delaunay room benefited immensely from being just about them, with no other couple squeezed in. It had more than twenty works hung around the walls, most of them – from what I could see – the calm, restful abstract designs by Sonia, mostly for fabrics and dresses. This made for a really absorbing and beautiful space.
Design B53 (1924) by Sonia Delaunay
But the room I found it literally hard to leave and, even when I’d left it, found myself walking round the entire ground floor in order to visit again with a renewed frisson of delight, was room 14 devoted to the overlapping artistic partnerships of Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky, and Marianne von Werefkin and Alexej von Jawlensky.
This foursome produced German Expressionist paintings of wonderful colour and vivid design at their self-styled artist colony at Murnau in Bavaria, in the years just before the Great War. Wow.
I liked lots of other things in the exhibition (the enormous painting of naked lesbians by Tamara de Lempicka, the thrilling Constructivist photos of Varvara Stepanova and Alexander Rodchenko, the dazzling photos of Lee Miller done by Man Ray, the couple of small but wonderful paintings by Gustav Klimt, some of the abstract paintings produced by Roger Grant and Vanessa Bell’s Omega Workshop, the wonderfully aloof portraits painted by Romaine Brooks), but for sheer visual pleasure, nothing beat this room of hyper-bright, vivid brushstrokes, bold childlike designs, and colour-drenched splashes and flourishes by this German foursome.
Improvisation III by Wassily Kandinsky (1909)
Probably I should have been reading up on how their work ‘subverted’ this or that tradition, and ‘challenged gender stereotypes’, or how the two women definitely contributed as much or more to their commune as the men.
But I switched off all that curatorial chatter, and just stood in awe of these wonderful, beautiful, transcendent works of art. No reproductions can do justice to the shiny vibrancy of the real thing in the flesh. Go and see them for yourself.
Conclusion
It must have taken an immense amount of effort by the four co-curators to bring together such an epic collection of objects and art works and to bring order, coherence and meaning to the multiple stories behind them.
If you are a feminist I can see how this exhibition of feminist artists lovingly assembled by feminist curators with scores of texts by feminist scholars would thunderingly confirm all your feminist beliefs. That’s what it’s designed to do.
And I wondered, as I left, whether this exhibition now and in the future, might be seen as a landmark show, a really massive rethinking of early 20th century modern art which reinstates women’s stories in all these important relationships, and often rehabilitates them as being as, if not more, creative than their male partners.
And also for the way it explores the idea that modern art was characterised, more than any previous type of art, by its collaborative nature, by the way it was produced by partnerships, by trios or quartets, by small groups working, thinking and making together.
It is a strong, well-argued, illuminating and very thought-provoking show.
But, that said, it’s hard to imagine that a lot of these artists and their stories won’t already be well known to the average gallery goer – the stories of Picasso and Dora, Frida and Diego, Virginia and Vita and the names of Dali, Ernst, Man Ray, Klimt, Marinetti, Nicholson and Hepworth are hardly unknown, and the notion that, ‘behind every great man there’s a great woman’, is hardly a radical thought – as indicated by the fact that there’s a centuries-old proverb on the subject.
Similarly, it’s hard to imagine that the fact that there were lesbian writers in the 1920s or gay photographers in the 1930s, will come as a great surprise to the average gallery goer. Homosexuality is not really news to most people. Most of the people the exhibition is targeted at will, I suspect, have heard of Virginia Woolf before, and will know she had a lesbian affair with Vita Sackville-West.
My position, after forty years of studying twentieth century art, literature and history, is that the Century of Catastrophes is too diverse and complex to be reduced to any one narrative or interpretation. From about the 1890s onwards there was (and still is) too much going on in an interconnected world of billions of human beings for any one narrative or story to hope to tell any kind of definitive ‘truth’.
For example, this is an exhibition, at bottom, about European and American white women, often very wealthy women (Nancy Cunard, Natalie Barney). You can immediately see that focusing on these often very privileged people tends to omit the stories of working class people of both genders in those continents. You could be forgiven for not realising there were things called the First World War and the Russian Revolution during the period the exhibition covers. Not enough ‘same sex desire’ to merit inclusion.
Similarly, there is precious little (surprisingly) about the black experience of modernity (there is one black person in the exhibition, the jazz musician Henry Crowder, who is included because of his influence over the immensely wealthy patron of the arts and writer, Nancy Cunard).
In fact, now I think about it, jazz is a crashingly obvious and central element of Modernism, from Stravinsky to Eliot, and is depicted in countless modernist art works. But it doesn’t fit with the curators’ insistence that Modernism be defined by couples, love and relationships, sex and partners and gender and desire and so… it isn’t here.
My view is that the ‘Modern’ experience of humanity, the bewildering catalogue of technological, scientific and cultural change which overwhelmed Homo sapiens in the early twentieth century – is too vast and multiform for any one narrative to encompass.
The curators make a powerful and persuasive case that Modernism was characterised above all by new thinking about love, eroticism, desire and relationships, much of which promoted the liberation of women (and trans people and gays).
I accept all their points as valid, and the body of evidence they’ve assembled is pulverisingly persuasive. And yet I still think that an equal if not more important element of Modernism was artists’ reaction to the revolution in everyday life caused by new technologies. And everyone’s world was turned upside down by the Great War. And the entire intellectual world was galvanised by the radicalism of the Russian Revolution. And I haven’t mentioned the famously disruptive discoveries of Einstein and others, undermining the static view of the forces of nature held since Newton. Too much was happening. No wonder the art from this period is so excited and effervescent.
Alternative interpretations
But I’m well aware that my own interpretation can itself be trumped by other competing narratives. That there are numerous ways of looking at this period of cultural history.
For example, arguably the most important aspect of the era was the collapse of the old European empires – the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires. The entire art of the period could be interpreted in terms of the breakdown of the ideologies, laws and customs which supported them, of which conventions about relations between the sexes are just a small sub-set.
Or there’s a Marxist interpretation which suggests that the era was characterised by unprecedented wealth derived from the West’s imperialist domination of the rest of the world – wealth which gave rise to a new class of super-rich collectors and connoisseurs who patronised ‘modern’ art and literature and experimented with new ‘decadent’ lifestyles. (VideNancy Cunard, Natalie Barney and the numerous other rich American women who populate the 1920s lesbian room).
Or there’s a strong post-colonial interpretation which says that the decisive impetus for Modernism and its revolutionary overthrow of 400 years of realistic art came from the cultural appropriation of the African masks and Oceanic art looted by imperial collectors, which were enthusiastically copied by Picasso and Matisse, and which had a transformative effect on everyone who followed them.
To give just a few of the most obvious interpretations of the art of the period.
This exhibition is an impressive and stimulating attempt to write one particular story about early twentieth century art. But it is only one interpretation among a sea of alternative stories.
The promotional video
P.S. What does ‘modern’ mean?
When I told my wife I was off to see an exhibition titled ‘Modern Couples’ she thought it would be a V&A-style celebration of contemporary celebrity pairs like Elton John and David Furnish, the Beckhams, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, and so on.
No, I explained. When art and literary critics say ‘modern’ what they mean is art from the 1900s, 1910s and 20s. They mean art and literature which is over a hundred years old. That’s what they mean by ‘modern’.
And even as I explained it, I realised how odd this use of the word ‘modern’ is. Eventually this stuff is going to be 150 years old. Will we still be describing it as ‘modern’ in 2050? At what point will someone have to come up with a better name? Or will Modernist art remain ‘modern’ forever?
Frida Kahlo (1907 to 1954) has a unique international appeal, as both an artist, personality and icon. Her image in oil paintings and photographs is instantly recognizable.
This is a beautifully curated and designed exhibition which left me with a much deeper understanding of Kahlo’s life, her work, her toughness in the face of terrible adversity, and the Mexican roots of her distinctive and powerful self-image.
The pretext or premise or prompt for the exhibition was the discovery of a treasure trove. After Frida died at the horribly early age of 47, her mourning husband, the famous Mexican mural painter, Diego Rivera, ordered all her belongings in the famous ‘Blue House’ they shared together, to be locked up and sealed away.
Rather incredibly, it was only in 2004 that this room was re-opened, to reveal a treasure trove of Kahlo-iana – including her jewellery, clothes, prosthetics and corsets, along with self-portraits, diary entries, photos and letters. Together they shed a wealth of new light on her life, personality, illness and endurance, on her art and on her extraordinary achievement in fashioning herself into an iconic image and brand.
The show is smaller than some recent ones at the V&A. Not so much a blockbuster, as an intimate portrait. It starts with a corridor-like room divided into small recesses, each of which take us briskly through a chapter in her early life, using black and white photos, a few early paintings and some home movies.
The key elements for me were that:
Her father was German, emigrated to Mexico in the 1890s and set up a photographic studio. She helped him and learned photographic technique, how to compose and frame a subject. No accident, maybe, that she is best known for her painted and photographic self portraits.
Her full name was Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón. She always preferred Frida because it her father’s name for her. I was mulling this over when I came to the section describing her marriage to the, by then, already famous Mexican mural painter, Diego Rivera, in 1928, who was a lot older than her, 43 to her 22. I.e. a big, reassuring father figure. Daddy.
When Frida was 6 she contracted polio and was seriously ill. She was left with one leg shorter than the other.
When she was 18 she was on a bus which was in a collision with a tram, resulting in her being both crushed against the window and having a piece of metal penetrate her abdomen. This accident and her long recovery put paid to the idea of studying to become a doctor. Confined to bed for months, she began to expand the sketching, drawing and painting she’d already been toying with.
In the late 1920s she developed a kind of naive, symbolic style, drawing inspiration from Mexican folk culture. After marrying Rivera, she accompanied him on a number of trips to the United States, where he had been commissioned to paint murals, socially conscious murals being a big part of 1930s American artistic activity.
Here’s a good example, from 1932. I don’t know if I like it. I understand the fairly simple ideas: on the left are images of Mexico, Aztec ruins and figurines, flowers and agricultural produce, with their roots in the good earth: on the right is Detroit, highly industrialised ‘Motor City’ (the name FORD is spelled out on the smoking chimneys), the American flag, skyscrapers, and growing out of the soil are not beautiful flowers but lamps and fans.
And in between is a self portrait of Frieda in a formal pink dress holding the Mexican flag. Between two worlds, eh? I get it.
Her naive symbolism matches the simple-minded ‘political’ attitude of Rivera’s murals. They both thought of themselves as communists and went on marches supporting strikers etc, but, nonetheless, liked visiting the heart of capitalism, America – or ‘Gringolandia’, as Frida called it. The money was good and there were lots of opportunities for Rivera to get commissions. And it was in New York, in 1939, that Frida held her first successful one-woman show. Capitalism is an awful thing – unless you can get money, commissions, promotions and sales out of it: the attitude of many 20th century artists.
One of the most interesting biographical facts is that Lev Davidovich Bronstein, known to the world as Leon Trotsky, having been exiled from the Soviet Union, was offered refuge by the revolutionary government of Mexico and came to stay with the Riveras, not for a few weeks, but for two years.
The exhibition includes a black-and-white film of Comrade Trotsky explaining, in English, how badly he has been treated by comrade Stalin. He insists he is really a man of honour – as anyone whose family was murdered by the Red Army he set up, would surely have testified.
Mexican roots
These early biographical roots are interesting but they are eclipsed by the power of the later rooms.
These start with the room on Kahlo’s Mexican roots. It explains that during the 1920s and even more so the 1930s, Mexico underwent a cultural renaissance. Part of this was the exploration and promotion of the country’s pre-Colombian culture, but it also included the first real appreciation of the folk customs and costumes of peasants and the poor around the country.
Interest in the country spread abroad, with American artists, photographers and film makers attracted to its sunny, bright and passionate culture. John Huston made films here. Even the young British writer Graham Greene made a tour of the country (he hated it) and then set his most powerful early novel here, The Power and the Glory. I’ve reviewed them both.
Frida and Diego were part of this revival of interest in Mexico’s culture and history. They both sought inspiration in the folk and workers culture of their country. In particular they were attracted to the area called Tehuantepec in the Oaxaca region. People here followed traditional ways, and the exhibition includes a whole wall of traditional icons of the Virgin Mary, establishing a link between these images of saintly femininity and Kahlo’s self portraits and explorations of her identity.
The dress room
The final room in the show is the biggest and I involuntarily exclaimed ‘wow’ as I walked into it.
Centre stage is a huge central glass case displaying some 20 of Frida’s dresses. Full length, made of colourful fabrics and bright designs, each one has been carefully displayed and annotated, giving a powerful sense of Frida’s sense of colour and dress.
Cotton huipil with machine-embroidered chain stitch; printed cotton skirt with embroidery and holaün (ruffle) Museo Frida Kahlo
There are only 10 or so paintings in the whole exhibition and six of them are in this room. They’re later works, when she had realised that she was her own best subject and that self portrait was her best medium.
Looking out at the viewer, flat and unemotional, her iconic features by now well established – the monobrow, the faint moustache on her top lip, her strong brown eyes, the sideways pose – she is flatly, unashamedly, blankly herself.
In the painting below even the tears don’t really affect the expressionless face. Or they appear as surreally detached embellishments of the fundamental design. Much weirder is the ‘ruff’ dominating the image. The exhibition explains that this is a huipil de tapar, a traditional Mexican item popular in Tehuantepec, designed to frame the face and extend over the neck and shoulders. There is another larger painting of her wearing the same outfit and a full scale example of a huipil de tapar on a display mannequin for us to compare and contrast reality with painted depiction.
Kahlo is, you realise, a perfect subject for the V&A because she was not only an artist, but someone with a fascination for clothes and costumes – in her case, of her native Mexico. The exhibition is less about the ar per se and more about how she drew heavily on these costume traditions and elaborated them into a highly colourful style of her own.
Hence there are more than twice as many dresses as there are Kahlo artworks. Hence, also, the display cases devoted to the heavy and ornate jewelry she wore, the elaborate ear-rings and thick heavy necklaces, set off against the bright and colourful hair ribbons.
In this respect it is fascinating to watch the 9-minute tourist film from the Tehuantepec region which is on view just next to the dresses and necklaces. Look at the colours and designs of the dresses, the heavy gold jewellery, and the brightly coloured ribbons in the women’s hair. In a flash you understand. Kahlo was a conduit for these traditional dresses, colours, fabrics and jewellery, into the international art world.
She gave it her own style. She combined it in her own way and, above all, gave it the imprimatur of her own face, of her very distinctive features (eyes, monobrow, moustache) and her unsmiling, detached, dream-like appearance.
But a great deal of her ‘look’ quite obviously stems directly from the traditions of the women of Tehuantepec.
The big dress room is the climax of the exhibition, in terms of dresses, design, jewellery, paintings and photos.
But arguably the biographical core of the exhibition is the room before it, entitled ‘Endurance’. In an imaginative but spooky display, the curators have commissioned the creation of six small four-poster beds and made each into a display case which, along with photos and text along the walls, give a quite harrowing account of Kahlo’s many illnesses, ailments, treatments, and lifelong suffering.
The polio left her with a limp. The bus accident left her with serious internal injuries. In the 1930s she began to experience back problems and underwent a series of treatments and operations to fix them. At the end of her life one foot became infected and then gangrenous, requiring the whole leg to be amputated. It’s gruesome stuff.
This room includes examples of the medical equipment she was forced to wear or endure. There are platform shoes for the shorter leg, a prosthetic leg made for her to wear after the amputation but, most evocative of all, a series of corsets, plaster casts and back braces to help support her failing spine.
Kahlo decorated, painted and embellished as many of these as she could. The plaster casts, in particular, are painted with abstract patterns. The most elaborate one carries a painted hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union and, underneath, an image of the foetus she was carrying before she had a miscarriage in 1932.
Frida Kahlo wearing a plaster cast, which she decorated with the hammer and sickle (c.1950) photo by Florence Arquin
The record of her illnesses and, in her later years, the almost constant pain she endured, make for harrowing reading, but there are also two really powerful insights in this room.
1. Painting in bed
One is that she was, at various periods, confined to her bed, it being too painful for her to walk or even stand. (Imagine!) So she had a mirror rigged up in the canopy above her and an easel on the side of the bed. From here she could paint, but paint what?
The answer is dreams – surreal images based on dreamlike symbolism, repeated images of her or a body in a bed – and her face. Over and over again the face of someone in discomfort or pain, staring, blankly, inscrutably, down from the ceiling.
Photos show the actual set-up, with Frida lying in bed, beneath a big mirror, the easel right next to her, on which she is painting.
This sheds quite a lot of light on her subject matter, and lends a depth and dignity to the pictures. Modern critics, obsessed with feminism and identity, may well write about the paintings ‘transgressing’ this or that convention and ‘subverting’ ‘gender stereotypes’.
But they are also the image of someone in tremendous pain. Knowing this, getting the really deep feel for her physical suffering which the ‘Endurance’ room gives you – lends tremendous depth of character and meaning to the detached, slightly dream-like expression you encounter again and again in her paintings.
The Broken Column by Frida Kahlo (1944)
2. The construction of the self
The other insight is easy to miss. Off to one side is a set of three black and white photos taken of Frida topless. They were taken by Julien Levy, the owner of the New York art gallery where she had her first solo show in 1939 and with whom she had an affair.
The insight comes in the text underneath, where Levy is quoted describing Frida doing and undoing her braids. First she undid the braids, carefully removing all the objects which were in them and held them in place, arranging them all carefully and in order on the dressing table. Later, she remade the braids, carefully and meticulously taking the ribbons and clips and other elements from their place on the dressing table, and putting them back in just the right places to create just the right effect.
In the context of the ‘Endurance’ room, next to so much physical pain and discomfort and demoralising bad luck – this ritual takes on a whole new significance.
You realise it was a way of controlling and ordering her life, a life of illness and pain which might so easily slip into indiscipline, depression or addiction. Instead she maintained control by paying minute attention to every element of her self-presentation. There are several cases showing the lipstick, and makeup, and nail polishes and eye liner and other accoutrements she used to create her image. To make herself up. To control, create and bolster herself.
Might sound stupid, but this knowledge makes the dazzling inventiveness of her self-creation seem genuinely heroic.
3. Long dresses
That’s why she liked to wear long dresses – because they hid her polio limp. This explains why all twenty dresses in the dress room are full length, reaching right down to and covering the feet. It’s a very Victorian effect, in some of the photos every inch of her body is covered save for her hands and face. But a Victorian outfit on acid, blitzed with brilliantly coloured fabrics and designs.
Conclusion
If you like Frida Kahlo this exhibition is a dream come true. There was a long queue to get in and the rooms were quickly packed out.
That said, there is remarkably little about her art, as art. A few mentions of the influence of Rivera’s socialist murals, a bit about Mexican symbolism, mention that the Godfather of Surrealism, André Breton, heavily promoted her, writing at length about the more surreal and dreamlike of her fantasy paintings (none of which are on display here).
But all in all, surprisingly little commentary or analysis of the paintings as paintings, except for comments about the dresses she’s wearing in them, the hair, the jewellery, the way she presents herself in them.
Self Portrait with Braid ( 1941) by Frida Kahlo
A moment’s googling shows that Frida Kahlo painted hundreds of paintings. Only ten are on show here. This exhibition is much more about the creation of her image, all the exhibits inhabit concentric circles spreading out from that premise.
I found it hard to get very worked up about 70 or 80 year-old makeup sets (in the outer circle). Her dresses and fabrics are colourful and interesting but, at the end of the day, not really my thing – though I could see plenty of women visitors being riveted by their designs and fabrics. Kahlo’s mural-style, political or symbolic art is sort-of interesting – although murals aren’t a format I warm to – and I found them less compelling than comparable murals by Stanley Spencer or Thomas Hart Benton.
No, it’s only when I came to her paintings of herself that I felt a real power and forcefulness in the image, the way they bring out her stern, unsmiling expression.
But even more central than her self portraits, and – in my opinion – at the absolute heart of the exhibition are the contemporary photos of Frida. It is the photos which bring together all the elements mentioned above, her great taste for colourful fabrics, bright designs, adventurous headgear, stunning jewellery and vivid lipstick to match, her deep sense of Mexican folk art and culture – all this funneled, channeled and focused in a series of stunning and powerful photos.
Thus it was often the photos which impressed me most in any given room. And looking closely, it quickly became clear that the photos we know, the ones we’re familiar with, and by far the best ones, were taken by Nickolas Muray.
There is almost no information about Muray in the exhibition, which is a shame because his images are iconic. According to Wikipedia, Muray had a ten-year-long affair with Frida, from 1931 to 1941. (During this period she divorced, then remarried Rivera. And sometime in there, she also managed to have the affair with Levy, which led to the nude photos. Those bohemian artists, eh?)
The only flicker of recognition of Muray’s role in helping to crystallise the Kahlo brand is a wall label next to one of the portraits. Here Muray is quoted as saying
colour calls for new ways of looking at things, at people
This struck me as pointing towards something very profound. Most of Kahlo’s paintings are striking in composition (and for their generally ‘naive’ style) but are surprisingly drab, especially the earlier, political ones. the later paintings are marvellously colourful and inventive. But in a way it is these photos alone which do justice to the tremendous colourfulness of her self-presentation.
According to Wikipedia, Muray was:
famous for his creation of many of the conventions of colour advertising. He was considered the master of the three-color carbro process. (Nikolas Muray Wikipedia article)
In other words, Muray wasn’t just quite a good colour photographer – he was one of the inventors of colour photography for the modern age.
This knowledge goes a long way to understanding why Muray’s photos of Kahlo stand out from the other contemporary photos of her, done at the same time, by other photographers. The coming together of Muray and Kahlo’s bodies in their long affair is trivial compared to the coming together of their shared understanding of colour and design – with phenomenal results.
The (admittedly black and white) photo of her by Florence Arquin makes her look like a person, an ordinary human being, squinting in the sun. But the three photos I’ve included by Muray give Kahlo a feeling of power, self-control, majesty, an almost goddess-like calm. In Muray’s hands Kahlo becomes an icon to be worshiped.
You can imagine these images of Frida Kahlo carrying on being iconic for a very long time. Iconic of what, exactly? Whatever you want: our current cultural obsessions are with gender, sexuality, race, identity and so on. But I think her image transcends any one set of ‘issues’ and lends itself to infinite reformulation. Which is one of the characteristics of great art.
The movie
A film of her life was released in 2002. According to the trailer, Frida was ‘one of the most seductive, and intriguing women, of ours or any time’, and it features numerous clips of her jumping into bed with men and women, with little of no mention of the physical disabilities and ailments.
The merch
Kahlo was an ardent communist. Today she is marketed as a fashion icon, feminist saint, and, more to the point, the inspirer of a whole world of merchandise.
In the shop you can buy some 134 items of merchandise including at least 20 books about her, notebooks, greeting cards, pencils, lapel badges, earrings, necklaces, brooches, jewellery, sunglasses, scarves and shawls, t-shirts, handbags, tote bags ( I counted 20 different design of bag), a Mexican cookbook and ingredients, pillows and socks – yes, Frida Kahlo socks. You too can ive the dream. Here’s the full list of Kahlo merch:
Haven’t been to the Design Museum since it moved from its old location at Shad Thames and opened in its fancy new building at Holland Park at the end of 2016.
The Design Museum is the world’s leading museum devoted to architecture and design. Its work encompasses all elements of design, including fashion, product and graphic design. Since it opened its doors in 1989 the museum has displayed everything from an AK-47 to high heels designed by Christian Louboutin. It has staged over 100 exhibitions, welcomed over five million visitors and showcased the work of some of the world’s most celebrated designers and architects.
On 24 November 2016, The Design Museum relocated to Kensington, West London. Leading architectural designer John Pawson has converted the interior of a 1960s modernist building to create a new home for the Design Museum giving it three times more space in which to show a wider range of exhibitions and significantly extend its learning programme.
Both the exterior and interior of the new building are spectacular.
The museum is currently hosting two exhibitions, one about sculptor-turned-couturier Azzedine Alaïa, and the one I came to see, Hope to Nope.
Hope to Nope
The rise of graphic design
The idea is that the ten years since the global financial crash of 2008 have been especially politically volatile. At the same time, the rise of social media has changed the way graphic political messages are made and disseminated. Traditional media have been joined by social media, with its hashtags and memes – all of which means that the influence and impact of graphic design have never been greater.
This exhibition explores the numerous ways graphic messages have challenged, altered and influenced key political moments.
Have they, though? ‘Challenged, altered and influenced key political moments’?
Or are they just creative images, slogans and memes – millions of them, easy to make for anyone with a smart phone and a bit of flair – which are as enjoyable as TV ads or pop songs, but change nothing? I went along to find out.
Big and varied
This big exhibition cherry picks from many of the political protest movements of the past ten years all sorts of ephemera – placards, banners, posters, t-shirts, installations and art works – alongside film footage of political rallies, and a section devoted to the rise of social media.
Politically neutral
The curators are careful to say that the exhibition takes no particular political line and doesn’t necessarily support any of these causes, but I didn’t really accept that. One of the two ‘media partners’ is the Guardian newspaper and the exhibition is really a sort of three-dimensional Guardian. Among many others issues and events, it features:
a display case about the anti-capitalist Occupy movement
a wall-sized photo of the women’s marches in Washington, London and elsewhere
a big quilt, a protest video and other artefacts from the Black Lives Matter movement
opposition to Vladimir Putin, especially to his anti-gay policies
opposition to Tory Austerity and Brexit in Britain
opposition to Jacob Zuma’s corrupt regime in South Africa
opposition to the North Korean dictatorship of Kim Jong-un
opposition to the authoritarian Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
You get the picture. Lots of opposition movements.
Oh, and Donald Trump. Did I mention Donald Trump? It very very powerfully comes across that a lot of American artists, feminists, academics, writers and activists don’t like Donald Trump one little bit.
Banner from International Women’s Day. Photo by Steve Rapport
In other words, no surprises – all the usual movements are here and all the usual hate figures from the front pages of the Guardian and other bien-pensant publications.
Structure of the show
The exhibition is rather loosely divided into three parts: Power, Protest and Personality.
1. Personality
This is the clearest (and smallest) section – highlighting the way politics around the world has come to be dominated by strong personalities who provoke strong and divisive reactions v Trump, Putin, Erdogan and so on.
In this section we find Theresa May being pilloried in a set of very funny cartoons by Chris Riddell (of the Guardian). Jeremy Corbyn has a section to himself, which features a suite of satirical front covers from Private Eye, the glossy cover shoot he did for GQ magazine, samples from the Corbyn comic books which (apparently) proliferated when he was elected leader, and a striking Corbyn t-shirt – plain white with the Nike swoosh on it and the word Corbyn where ‘Nike’ should be. (Apparently, the designer and manufacturer had an injunction taken out against them and had to scrap the design, making this a valuable rarity.)
Corbyn t-shirt with Nike swoosh. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
But the award for the Political Personality Who Dominates Our Age and Who You Love To Hate goes to… Go on, guess. Well, he owns a tower and is called Donald.
There’s a wall-sized display of more than 50 news magazines (including The Economist, TIME and Der Spiegel) chosen because they all feature cartoons, lampoons, caricatures, spoof and doctored portraits of The Donald, from the moment he was selected as the Republican candidate to when he became President.
What does this prove, exactly? Mainly that there has been no let-up in the scathing satire and criticism Trump has been subjected to by the left-liberal press since he first entered the presidential race. And with what result? Did satirical cartoons and scathing articles prevent him becoming Republican candidate, or prevent him being elected president? Have they gotten him impeached and kicked out?
Nope. Fail. As about a million other commentators have pointed out, all this ridicule by the East Coast – or foreign, intellectual – élite only confirms the belief of his grass-roots supporters that Donald is their man, an outsider, someone who will stand up for their values, values they see being ridiculed on a daily basis across almost all the mainstream media. ‘We’ may hate him but ‘they’ just carry on loving him to bits.
Wall of magazine covers lampooning Donald Trump. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
2. Protest
The section on Protest is dominated by a wall-sized screen onto which are projected a few minutes of news footage from each of five countries showing protesters in action – marching, chanting, fighting with the police.
Hope to Nope film installation by Paul Plowman. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
This turns out to be an installation by Paul Plowman. In front of the big screen is a set of smaller screens on stands showing alternative images of protests, interspersed with the hashtags which were used in each of the different protests featured. The countries and events being:
Catalonia – street protests for independence
South Africa – street protests, speeches etc against President Jacob Zuma
Grenfell Tower in London – an angry crowd shouting ‘justice justice’
Turkey – street protests against Erdogan
The Women’s March in Washington
Nearby are posters mocking Vladimir Putin, a suite of posters from North Korea exemplifying the state-sponsored poster art of that country, some photographs showing a protester in China, a panel about the ‘Umbrella protests’ in Hong Kong in 2014, some examples of wall art and graffiti made by Iranian artists to protest what they see as the corrupt nature of the Iranian government.
One of the most striking things in the show is a two-metre-high replica of the inflatable duck from the 2016 protests held against Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff.
And there’s material from the 2015 Je Suis Charlie movement and the ‘Peace for Paris’ marches.
But I kept being drawn back to the enormous Plowman video installation, not least because it is very loud, with sounds of people chanting and yelling, the roar of police sirens etc.
I also liked the way the hashtags zoomed past on the smaller screens of the installation, hundreds of them. Maybe their sheer number is meant to shock and awe the viewer into realising how Mighty the opposition is, how many of ‘us’ there are, how global ‘the movement’ is.
But to me it powerfully conveyed the opposite, the sheer ephemerality of many of these movements, each with their fleeting moments on TV, and a few days trending on twitter, before being forgotten.
And when you see a load of hashtags all together, following in quick succession, you can’t help noticing how facile they are.
And so on, round and round like a hamster in a wheel.
Anti-capitalism
Also in the Protest section we learn that capitalism is a bad thing. We know this because of all the people who’ve used their Macs and Ipads (designed in America, built in China, delivered to your door by Amazon) to design graphics, cartoons and memes slagging off evil international corporations.
And also because of all the anti-capitalist protesters who use multinational corporations like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube to protest, organise and lobby against the way the world is run by multinational corporations.
The most notable example was the 2011 Occupy movement, active here in London, in New York and elsewhere. Display cases show their numerous anti-capitalist leaflets, booklets, posters and slogans, t-shirts and badges. And did they overthrow capitalism? Even a teeny tiny bit?
Display case of Occupy items. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
We also learn that some of these massive corporations tell fibs v videlicet a vast poster reminding us of the way Volkswagen comprehensively lied about the diesel output of its cars.
It’s next to art work criticising BP, which will be forever associated – by the kind of protesters this exhibition celebrates – with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
the art work is a sort of neck frill, not unlike the ones Elizabethan courtiers used to wear, made of green crepe paper designed to look like the BP logo. From the accompanying photo the idea is that you paint your face BP green, slip on the crepe BP logo, and go join a crowd protesting against wicked oil companies. Maybe you drive there, or organise a coach…
Protest web statistics
I work in website analytics. Until recently I worked as a Digital Insights Manager for a British government agency. This experience has taught me that you really can prove anything with statistics. Another way of putting that is how remarkably easy it is to bamboozle people who don’t use figures very often or aren’t at home with figures.
As a result I don’t really believe any statistics about anything I hear from anyone, not just governments, anyone.
This is relevant because the exhibition features a timeline dating the advent and rise of various social media platforms over the past ten years (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, all the usual suspects). They are the big red, blue and green circles you can see in the photo below.
Beneath these – under each of the black, red and blue smart phone icons – is an array of Fascinating Facts and Stunning Stats designed – I think – to show you just how Important and Relevant and Urgent contemporary protest is. Certainly how social media helps spread its messages at lightning speed to huge numbers of people.
Timeline of social media and protest statistics. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
Thus we are told that:
in 2011 450,000 accounts sent 1.8 million tweets containing #OccupyWallStreet
in 2012, in the week before he quit, tweets calling for the resignation of Egyptian president rose from 2,300 a day to 230,000 a day
in 2013 #OccupyGezi relating to the Taksim Square protest in Turkey was mentioned 160,000 times on Twitter
in 2013 #BlackLivesMatter jumped from 10,000 to 93,000 tweets after the Ferguson verdict not to charge a white police officer who shot dead a black teenager in the U.S.
in 2016 1 billion tweets were sent relating to the U.S. presidential election
in 2017 11.5 million tweets were sent containing #WomensMarch during global reaction to President Trump’s inauguration
For a start none of these figures are put in any kind of context. Yes 11.5 million is a big number, but a basic fact of the internet and social media is that it is awash with big numbers. What other topics were trending that day or week or year, to help us put these numbers in context? How did it compare with that day’s stats about Ed Sheeran or Beyoncé?
Numbers alone don’t mean anything. Numbers only mean something in a context and it’s humans who create that context.
32.
Is that how old I am or the temperature outside, the number of teams that started the Word Cup in Russia or the number of refugees who drowned in a boat off Libya?
At work, I create the context which makes the figures I present about my web service look really impressive, even though I know that putting them in a different context, with a different narrative, would show them up to be very poor.
Not forgetting that there are quite a few ways to give my numbers a context which would just be confusing, or would make them disappear by making them look like lots of other numbers, and so make any pattern at all difficult or impossible to discern. I could make them do whatever my boss wanted them to do.
Statistics are always created, and for a purpose.
Same here, in this exhibition. The curators have selected a handful of statistics to show how quick and massive social media responses were to key moments of ‘protest’. No doubt they were.
But what that means v how you should interpret the numbers, how they stack up next to other events on the same day, or to similar events happening at the same period or to the tweets and Facebook likes from the opposing point of view…. that context, those other points of view, a fuller picture… are not here.
The Hope icon for Barack Obama’s election campaign. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
Results
Oh and as one of my bosses said when I showed him a particularly dramatic graph I had concocted v ‘Fancy figures don’t pay our wages. What about results?’ Practical results which people outside your social media bubble might notice.
Did those 1.8 million tweets bring about the downfall of capitalism? Did #OccupyGezi topple Erdogan? Did those 1 billion tweets sent during the U.S. presidential election stop Trump becoming President?
10 out of 10 for impressive stats. 0 out of 10 for impact.
Global interconnectedness gives a misleading impression of the scale of political protest
I’m dwelling on the issue of numbers because democracy is a numbers game. To win power you have to build coalitions, often with people you don’t really like or share values with.
My view on the current situation is that the internet and social media have certainly made everything more global (and this exhibition is a good example), but that this is not necessarily the blessing it appears.
It now means that women protesting against rape in India can hook up with Reclaim the Night campaigners in America, or that anti-capitalist protesters all across Europe and the States can link up and co-ordinate their protests and publications. Fine.
All this activity (not to mention the relentless support of papers like the Guardian and the New York Times and their liberal avatars around the world, and artworks and installations and exhibitions like this one) gives the impression that it’s all coming together, that we have the numbers, that truth and justice are on our side so we must win, that we’re soooooo close to the tipping point, one more march, one more protest, and we will get our way and…
Capitalism will be toppled. The patriarchy will be overthrown. Trump will be impeached. Catalonia will win its independence. Turkey will become a liberal democracy. Putin will resign and name a gay video artist as his successor.
But I wonder whether it’s the very internationalism of the movement which condemns it to failure v because, although sizeable communities of protesters, objectors and activists can now hook up across regions, countries and continents, reassuring and encouraging each other – within their own individual countries they remain definitely in the minority. Within their own individual countries there simply aren’t enough of them to make the changes they want to see.
After all, despite the deluge of opposition across social media, mainstream media, despite all the street protests, t-shirts and badges, and all the TV comedians relentlessly mocking the other side v Trump won the US election, Brexit won the referendum, Putin was re-elected, Erdogan has just won re-election, Viktor Orbán has just won re-election, The Five Star Movement are in power in Italy, and so on…
Fancy t-shirts, stylish badges, clever hashtags aren’t enough, nowhere nearly enough, to begin to effect real social and political change.
Forlorn poster, t-shirt and other items promoting the Remain campaign. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
I had thought this was the message of the so-called Arab Spring. Bien-pensant liberals in the West thought ‘Hooray, Libya is going to turn into Switzerland, Syria is going to turn into Sweden, the whole Middle East is going to be transformed into socially progressive democracies’.
All the revolutionaries in Egypt, Syria, Libya and so on were excited by the online networks they were able to create among themselves, and the support they could give via the internet to fellow revolutionaries in the other countries, and the support they got from all well-meaning folk in the West.
All of which DELUDED them into thinking they were in a majority in their own country. But it was social media smoke and mirrors. The majority of the populations of Syria, Egypt, Libya and so on are NOT video artists and LGBTQ+ activists; they are illiterate peasants and vast numbers of under-employed urban youths who don’t have Facebook accounts, don’t particularly want political change or, if there is change, want to see strong nationalist leaders emerge who will give them jobs, keep their country together, and defend their cultural values.
It’s odd that the one of the biggest artefacts here more or less acknowledges this obvious fact. It reads:
SLOGANS IN NICE TYPEFACES WON’T SAVE THE HUMAN RACES
Slogans in nice typefaces won’t save the human races. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
To paraphrase: no amount of fancy design, diligent video journalism, snappy hashtags, witty placards and spirited street fighting will overthrow a regime. Only securing the support of (admittedly not necessarily the majority) but still a sizeable minority of the population, will lead to real and cultural political change.
Riots which escalate into the seizure of the presidential palace and the TV stations are often little more than coup d’etats which, as we have seen hundreds of times in the developing world over the past fifty years, generally end up with military dictatorships worse than the one you were trying to overthrow (as in Egypt), or with anarchy (as in Libya) or with prolonged civil war (as in Syria).
The net result of all these attempts to overthrow the wicked dictator is not a wonderful rainbow nation where everyone respects each other’s gender choices, but hundreds of thousands of people fleeing for their lives and drowning in the Mediterranean.
The role of graphics in political protest
Which brings us to the role of graphics in all this political protest. The curators assert at various points that the political activism of the past ten years has seen a particular upsurge in the use of graphics in political protest.
The exhibition aims to capture, depict, examine and display the political graphic design of a turbulent decade.
Alongside traditional posters and banners, the exhibition charts the rise of digital media and social networking, which have given graphic iconography an extraordinary new reach.
Graphic design in the form of internet memes, posters and protest placards is being used by the marginalised and powerful alike to shape political messages like never before.
This is a fascinating, entertaining and often unintentionally funny exhibition but I couldn’t decide whether its central claim was true or not.
On the anti side, the huge photos of the various Women’s Marches and the footage of protest rallies in Barcelona, South Africa, Turkey and so on seemed to feature people holding exactly the kind of home-made banners and placards which I can remember protesters holding from any time in the last 40 years.
I couldn’t see any evidence of a ‘graphics revolution’ in a hand-made placard reading ‘This Pussy Grabs Back’.
Wall-sized installation celebrating the Women’s March in Washington DC
On the other hand, it stands to reason that hundreds of millions of people (generally, we can guess, university-educated, middle-class people) now have access to personal computers which contain an unprecedented array of programs for writing, designing, colouring, typefacing, laying out, and printing all sorts of images, placards, posters, magazines, handouts and so on.
So without a doubt there is more protest material being created, and without a doubt more of it can be distributed over social media than ever before for the self-evident reason that social media didn’t really exist ten years ago. So I suppose it must be true that the internet/social media have given ‘graphic iconography an extraordinary new reach’.
But has it changed the look and impact of graphic elements in political protest?
This might be an impossible question to really answer. The world is a big place, so much is going on, and so many people are creating, publishing, printing and manufacturing so much stuff all the time that it would be pretty challenging to decide if much of it is new.
We made t-shirts and fanzines in the punk era of my youth, back in the 1970s. The Greenham Common women and any number of protesters against Ronald Reagan and Mrs Thatcher managed to make badges, t-shirts, posters and placards and banners and to print off magazines and broadsheets back in the 1980s, without any help from computers or the internet.
Occupy Wall Street t-shirt. Photo by Jason Lester
The speed and spread of visual content online is new, because the whole online infrastructure is relatively new and has expanded at a phenomenal rate. But the nature of that content, and in particular its graphic elements – snappy slogans, faces of hate figures humorously defaced, stirring images of suffering women or children, badges with a little slogan on them — is the graphic content of much of this protest material really new?
A morality tale
Two relatively small display cases placed at opposite ends of the exhibition were, I think, intimately linked and also, I think, tell a neat morality tale.
On the first wall by the entrance door there’s an interesting little display telling us that Hillary Clinton’s team brought in design consultant Michael Bierut from design agency Pentagram to develop a core campaign logo. His proposal was for a logo based round the first letter of her name – H – which would be infinitely ‘refreshable’, and easy for campaign team designers and supporters alike to reversion and use.
Fascinatingly, we get to see the notebook in which he jotted down his early ideas. You can’t help wondering how much he was paid for this great stroke of ‘genius’.
Notebook of Michael Bierut showing his notes on the idea of ‘H’. Photo by the author
Fittingly enough, right at the other end of the exhibition space we come across another display case showing this work of art.
Donald Trump campaign Make America Great Again baseball cap. Photo by the author
Recognise it? Yes, because it is very recognisable. It is in fact, possibly, of all the 300 or so objects on display here, the most successful and recognisable design icon in the exhibition – the red workers’ baseball cap which Donald Trump wore throughout most of his campaign.
And you know the most interesting thing about it? The curators don’t know who designed it. Almost all the other 300 objects, artefacts, t-shirts, badges, cartoons, pamphlets, videos, infographics and so on are carefully attributed to named designers or organisations.
Not the Trump cap. Nobody knows who came up with it. It’s a standard factory-produced cap, and (as the curators point out) even the Times Roman font used for the slogan text is as bog-standard, traditional and reassuring as it gets.
The everyday look of the cap struck a chord with Trump supporters from early in his campaign, helping to position him as an everyday guy, an ordinary Joe, a working class guy made good.
Unlike the social media stats which I read and forgot straightaway, possibly the most fascinating fact in the whole exhibition is that between June 2015 and October 2016 the Trump campaign spent more on producing and distributing these caps than on polling.
The moral of this little story would appear to be that expensive, fancy, East Coast design fails, whereas anonymous, everyday, easy-to-make, easy-to-recognise, easy-to-understand artefact and logo, succeeds.
Underlining my belief that, to win power in a democracy, you have to reach out to the greatest number of the electorate, with the widest possible appeal – not just to people who went to college like you, think like you, and have a refined taste in sophisticated graphics like you.
Curators
Hope to Nope is co-curated by the Design Museum and GraphicDesign&’s Lucienne Roberts and David Shaw, with Rebecca Wright. It is really imaginatively laid out, very interesting throughout, with very informative wall labels, some genuinely hilarious pictures, objects and installations, as well as some fascinating new infographics commissioned specially for the show.
It is an excellent, informative and thought-provoking exhibition. But it won’t change anything.
A video
Watch co-curator Lucienne Roberts being interviewed about the exhibition.
The House of Illustration has three galleries and three exhibitions on at any given time.
Just opened in the Main Gallery is an impressive retrospective of textile designer, printmaker and illustrator Enid Marx (1902 to 1998). Marx was at the Royal College of Art in 1922, where her contemporaries included Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden, and together with the latter in particular she helped to define the look and feel of mid-20th century commercial design.
The exhibition coincides with the 20th anniversary of Marx’s death and is the most comprehensive retrospective of her work mounted in the last 40 years. It brings together over 150 pieces from private and public collections, many displayed for the first time and is divided among the Main Gallery’s four rooms.
Room 4
Arguably the best way to start is to go to the smallest room (on the left) and watch the five-minute film about Enid which is playing in a loop and which features contributions from fellow print-makers, friends and art scholars.
The film introduces you to what I think are two important elements: she was not a fine artist working in oil or sculpture to make big depictions of the human condition or portraits or nudes; the reverse: she was first and foremost a textile or fabric designer who also tried her hand at designing book jackets, book illustration, posters, stamps, train seats and so on.
And this is the second thought – the diversity of her output. According to a friend in the film she was never happier than when drawing pen in hand, or using the tools to carve out of wood or lino a block for printing.
Room 1
Room one is dominated by a huge blow-up of a drawing of Enid’s studio at number 43 Ordance Road, St John’s Wood, made by her friend Eric Ravilious, which has been printed onto the gallery wall. This sets the tone of a kind of cluttered, homely workspace, of the makeshift setup of a young artist just setting out to forge a career.
Installation view of Enid Marx at the House of Illustration showing the wall-sized sketch of Marx’s flat by Eric Ravilious, wall cases of fabrics and a central display of tools. Photo by Paul Grover
The room introduces us to ten or so large fabric designs, mostly assembled (if I’ve understood this correctly) by carving the original pattern into a woodblock, then inking the block and imprinting it on ready-made fabric, then re-inking the block and printing the section of fabric next to it, and so on, to make repeat-pattern prints. This is a very laborious hand process which made the resulting fabrics quite expensive.
The first of the ten display cases in the exhibition contains the very tools that Marx used in her craft, including a folding holder for wood cutting tools, an ‘ogee’ and ‘spook’ wood block, as well as an invitation to one of her earliest shows, a studio card, a dye recipe book copied out laboriously by hand, textile samples, an order book and so on. All very practical, very business like.
Being a woman
Enid suffered various professional disadvantages from being a woman. At the Royal College of Art she was banned from the Design department where the wood carving equipment was kept, although Ravilious used to sneak her in after hours. She was refused a diploma at the painting school because she was considered too modern. At various points in later life she was blocked out of commissions or not given adequate technical information to fulfil them.
I expected an emphasis on this part of her story, given the domination of art scholarship and art curation by women who feel they have to bring out the grievances and injustices experienced by all women in the past.
Enid Marx working on a textile design post-1945
What was more interesting because less expected was the way one of the historians in the film pointed out that Marx benefited from the growth of women-led shops and businesses in the 1920s and 30s.
After the Great War women emerged more independent, with greater spending power. Thus shops with all kinds of domestic and fashionable goods sprang up to cater for this new market, and alongside them, a network of new women designers, craftspeople, businesswomen and so on.
Thus after leaving the Royal College of Art, Enid became assistant to Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher who were reviving the old technique of using hand-carved blocks of wood. Her work from the 1930s was popular with clients such as the women-led craft shops Dunbar Hay and the Little Gallery.
Her talent was eventually to become widely acknowledged. Among other accolades, she was the first female engraver to be awarded the title of Royal Designer for Industry.
This first room, then, gives us a basic introduction to her life, to some examples of the large, repeat-pattern fabric designs, explained how there was a new market for them in the 1920s, and shows us some of the tools of the trade.
Room 2
Room two is the biggest room and contains an impressive variety of her design output from the 1920s to the 1960s. Where to start?
In 1929 she made her first designs for the covers of books by Chatto and Windus, initially as wood engravings, then as lithographic or line-block reproduction in colour. She designed book covers for the Curwen Press throughout the 1930s and in 1939 won a contract to design the covers of some of the new King Penguins, starting with Some British Moths by Norman Riley in 1945.
Small and discreet and dignified, these stylishly patterned covers are objects of great beauty.
Book cover designs by Enid Marx
In 1937 London Underground commissioned young designers to submit ideas for new seating moquettes, ‘a thick pile fabric used for carpets and upholstery’. The design had to be woven into the fabric not printed on top of it, as Enid had previously done, so this represented a whole new set of technical challenges.
The exhibition includes a couple of big panels showing two of the fabrics she eventually designed and London Transport purchased. Imaginatively, the curators of the exhibition have embedded these samples in a wall-sized blow up of a black and white photo of an old Tube train carriage, showing them in situ.
Installation view of Enid Marx at the House of Illustration showing her designs for Tube train seat covers placed over an enlarged b&w photo of an old Tube carriage
In 1944 Enid was recruited to the Board of Trade Utility Furniture Committee to design curtain and seating fabrics to be sold at a fixed, affordable price to owners of bombed-out homes. She created 30 upholstery and curtain fabric designs using limited wartime supplies of yarn.
In 1951 she was invited to design the stamps to commemorate Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. Next to these rather staid creations, featuring an orthodox photobust of the Queen are displayed the much more funky set she designed 20 years later around the theme of medieval English embroidery.
Stamps designed by Enid Marx, 1976
In 1957 Enid was commissioned to design two London Underground posters featuring London Zoo and Whipsnade Zoo. Many of her earlier designs and illustrations had featured animals, birds and fish so this was a great pleasure for her. The results are funky sharp prints full of colour.
The end wall of room two features a dozen or so prints made from woodcuts showing she was a real mistress of this technique. Her woodcuts were used for book illustrations and covers, catalogues, book plates and repeat patterns. There are several impressive big woodcuts of cats and one of sunflowers. To my mind they echo the ‘primitive’ technique of some German Expressionists but utterly transformed into a world of charm and feminine tranquility.
The Main Gallery at the House of Illustration displaying Marx’s prints (on the far wall, left), London Underground posters (on the right wall) and books and children’s illustrations (in the display cases)
Some of the display cases give abundant evidence of the fun she had designing ‘chapbooks’ (cheaply produced booklets), quiz books, story books and so on for children. These were ideal for wartime rationing conditions. She created a couple of sheets of paper titled Menagerie which contained the outlines of animals which could be cut up and folded together to make 3-D toys. She designed a 1939 chapbook with animal stories attached to each of the 26 letters of the alphabet.
Envelope for Menagerie Cut Out Game, Royle Publications (1947) by by Enid Marx. Courtesy of Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections
She wrote a children’s story early in the Second World War titled Bulgy the Barrage Balloon, quickly followed by Nelson, the Kite of the King’s Navy; The Pigeon Ace and The Little White Bear.
Room 3
Room three offers an insight into Enid’s private life. In 1931 she met the historian Margaret Lambert and they were to spend the rest of their long lives together, known to their friends as ‘Marco’ and ‘Lambo’.
They shared an interest in British folk and traditional art, travelling far and wide and collecting a huge range of examples of popular and demotic art. This room is packed with charming and touching examples.
Installation view of some of Edith Marx’s collection of folk art at the House of Illustration
It led to the book English Popular and Traditional Art, published in 1946, which aimed to showcase ‘the art which ordinary people have created for their own lives in contrast to the “fine arts” made for special patrons’.
Enid hoped that folk art would suggest a way ahead for English art which would reject the coldness and brutality of Modernism in favour of an art of ‘gaiety, delight in bright colours and a sense of well-balanced design.’
It’s a lovely note to end on, democratic, open to novelty and eccentricity, profoundly English and deeply affectionate, quietly loving, charming and humorous. Next to this entertaining bric-a-brac are hung three lovely landscape watercolours by Enid. It would have been nice to see more of those.
Marx, Bawden and Ravilious
The exhibition guide – and other sources you read about Enid – laments that she is not as well known as Ravilious and Bawden, both of whose reputations are currently undergoing a revival.
Having just visited the fabulous new exhibition of Edward Bawden at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, I can suggest two reasons for this. One is that – putting aside any assessment of the quality of their respective work – Ravilious in the 1930s, and Bawden much more so on the 1950s and 60s, were lucky enough / proactive enough, to be involved in book-length projects which promoted their work.
Enid certainly did illustrations for, and wrote her own children’s books, as well as making charming woodcuts for nursery rhymes and the alphabet, all of which are in evidence here. But Ravilious produced a set of illustrations for the classic 1938 book High Street (text by the architectural historian J. M. Richards), as well as sets of illustrations like his project to do watercolours of all the ancient figures carved out of the turf on the southern Downs, which had real mass appeal.
An illustration from High Street by Eric Ravilious and J.M. Richards
The large number of gorgeous cartoon-like pictures he did of the English high street or countryside can to this day be repackaged into books, calendars and cards, every one of which is immediately ‘grabby’.
Or compare Bawden’s reinvention of himself after the Second World War as a master of linocut printing, especially of architectural subjects, producing not only attractively stylised images of Brighton, or London landmarks or markets – but sets and series of them, which could be packaged up into books such as Bawden’s London, which also lend themselves to the world of calendars, postcards, posters and so on.
By contrast, although everything she did is striking and attractive, Enid doesn’t seem to have produced the same kind of sets or series designed to accompany a general text, in the way that Bawden and Ravilious did. Maybe this is one reason why her work then, and now, is less easily accessible.
Reason Number Two might be something to do with the nature of commercial and abstract design itself, which is that it works very well in situ, in context, but – taken out of context – loses power and impact.
Patterns and designs by Enid Marx at the House of Illustration. Photo by Paul Grover
Each one of Enid’s designs was made for a reason and context (curtain, chair cover, book cover) in which it made a statement. Each one is certainly worthy of study and admiration (I noticed the number of visitors to this exhibition with their noses right up against the glass, studying the detail of the designs). But if you take large numbers of her designs and place them next to each other, it tends to dissipate the impact rather than augment it. For some reason a whole load of snippets of design patterns placed together tend to neutralise each other.
By contrast, if you place Edward Bawden’s six big linocut prints of London markets together they complement and empower each other, making a strong cumulative statement.
Covent Garden by Edward Bawden (1967)
Apart from the strong styling, each of Bawden’s illustrations has a kind of narrative – the element of human figures going about their work – which is both attractive, and builds up interest the more examples you see.
By contrast, Enid’s designs are not only subtle and small-scale (the book covers are only meant to be book sized) but mostly have no narrative or any kind of feature you can take and accumulate. Abstract patterns don’t tell a story.
Summary
To summarise, Enid a) mostly devoted herself to abstract designs, which, taken out of context as snippets, tend to appeal only to specialists, and don’t take well to being displayed en masse in a gallery. b) When she did do more figurative work – in her book illustrations and large prints – the illustrations were for books which remained obscure (wartime chapbooks, the children’s books which haven’t lasted) and the prints, lovely in themselves, don’t lend themselves to packaging up into books with strong themes or selling angles.
Her work, in other words, has a subtlety and understatement which doesn’t lend itself to the variety of commercial exploitation which that of Ravilious and Bawden does. And these may be some of the reasons why her work tends to be overlooked when 1930s and 1940s design and art is discussed.
Anyway, hopefully this lovely, uplifting exhibition will go a long way to raising her profile, winning her new fans and enthusiasts, and to making her name one to mention in the same breath as her contemporaries.
The House of Illustration
House of Illustration is the UK’s only public gallery dedicated solely to illustration and graphic art. Founded by Sir Quentin Blake it opened in July 2014 in King’s Cross, London. Its exhibition programme explores historic and contemporary illustration as well as the work of emerging illustrators, and is accompanied by a vibrant programme of talks and events.
Books & Boots 