Quay Art is a small gallery and shop in Blakeney, north Norfolk. It specialises in printmaking techniques including linocuts, etchings, collagraphs and woodcuts, but also showcases other formats including painting, ceramics, fused and kiln-formed glass, sculpture and artisan jewellery. What unifies all the works is that they are made by local artists and inspired by the Norfolk coast and countryside. I spent a happy half hour browsing round the pictures and prints and was taken by the work of three artists in particular:
Chrissy is a Suffolk printmaker and works using the traditional method of etching copper or zinc plate in acid to achieve an image. Once the etching plate is complete she starts to print the edition and hand inks each one in small batches.
This summary doesn’t begin to do justice to the beautiful precision and accuracy of Norman’s etchings. They all depict either landscapes from the Norfolk coastline or details of specific flora, sometimes flowers, but it was her portraits of trees which floored me with their precision of outline, detail, light and colour, wonderfully evocative outlines of plane trees, oaks or, as in this instance, a soaring, sunlit, spiky Scots pine such as form the forest cover around the vast expanse of Holkham Beach. You can smell the hot sunlight, the crumbly sand underfoot, the powerful scent of hot pinewood, and the occasional salty waft of sea breeze rustling the branches.
Looking Up by Chrissy Norman
There was also a subterranean Winnie the Pooh vibe going on, some of these trees reminding me of the vivid and timeless illustrations of Pooh or, more precisely, of the trees in the Hundred Acres Wood drawn by E.H. Shepard.
Rob Barnes
On Rob’s website he tells us that he taught etching, screen-printing, lino and related surface printmaking at Keswick Hall College and then the University of East Anglia, Norwich until 2006.
Whereas Norman uses lines which are so fine and precise they sometimes create the slight blurriness of actual vision before you’ve focused on something, or the softness of sea fogs, morning mist, summer haze, Barnes’s linocuts achieve the exact opposite effect. The lines are clear, thick and black, the colours bolder and simpler, and deployed to create strikingly simplified and vivid images. And whereas Norman focuses on the fine detail of one tree, or spray of blossom, or haystack, Barnes steps back to give us clear vibrant perspectives across entire landscapes.
I particularly liked this one, Over the fields, which, when you study it, you realise is composed of 4 parts. In the foreground is a flurry of wild flowers, including (I think) teasel, honeysuckle and poppies. In the middle ground four or so deeply rolling fields folding into each other. Beyond these and the barns (pun) on the immediate horizon, an entire secondary country disappearing into the hazy far-beyond. And fourthly, of course, the murmuration of stark black starlings in the sky, arranged in an artfully artless pattern which creates and defines the space of the sky, clinches and crystallises the landscape.
Some of his other works depict hares bounding across lanes or pheasants pottering over fields. They, also, are crisply conceived with thick black, defining lines but, in my opinion, lack the fourth dimension which makes this particular image so compelling to me, the sense of enormous space and openness created by the flock of free-flying birds and which, when you really look at it, I think, invites you into their ever-changing freedom of flight.
Over the Fields by Rob Barnes
Colin Moore
Colin Moore’s work is semi-abstract but in an interestingly different way from Barnes’s. Whereas Barnes simplifies the detail of his images in order to create a kind of storybook clarity, Moore sees more complex, abstract shapes continually emerging from the world around him.
He also, more consistently than the previous two artists, depicts not trees or country but the coast, the sea, the estuaries and inlets and marshes and cliffs and beaches of this part of the world, distilling from them images which are both simplified of the untidy clutter of real life but also infused with a kind of semi-abstract, almost baroque imagery.
The day before I saw this painting I had gone for a swim in the sea off Holkham, and you can trust me that neither the tidepools nor the sky there looked anything like they do in this painting. Moore has taken the original elements and distorted them with the aim of creating something new and otherworldly out of the familiar. Look at the ‘clouds’ at the top right. They look like ice floes in the Arctic Ocean. And the pools themselves look like patterns on a psychedelic t-shirt. The overall composition is recognisably ‘realistic’ but the individual elements have been stylised and colorised to produce a powerful, visionary, and yet precise and very controlled effect.
The British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings
The Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum contains the national collection of Western prints and drawings, in the same way as the National Gallery and Tate hold the national collection of paintings. It is one of the top three collections of its kind in the world and home to around 50,000 drawings and over two million prints dating from the beginning of the fifteenth century up to the present day.
French Impressions
This is a lovely FREE selection of prints from the age of the French Impressionists, a wide ranging selection of nearly 80 key works by artists including Manet, Degas, Cézanne, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec. It’s a golden opportunity to view rarely seen artworks by some of France’s most famous artists.
But the exhibition is more than just a selection of images: it presents a fascinating and authoritative history of print making and distribution in 19th century France.
Print production
The exhibition explains how prints – and in particular etchings – became markedly more popular in the 1860s among France’s growing middle classes, people with money but without the means to afford large oil paintings. At the same time artists became more interested in the expressive possibilities of print-making, a quicker, a more affordable, and a reproducible medium.
Prints reached a wider audience than ever before through the proliferation of illustrated journals and specialist magazines, as well as in portfolios commissioned and financed by enterprising print publishers such as Ambroise Vollard.
Manet
After some explanation about the difference between lithography, etching, woodcut and engraving, the exhibition settles into a tour of characteristic prints by the forty or so artists featured, starting with Manet. He is represented not only by several prints but also by a copy of the enormous illustrated volume devoted to the poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s translation of Edgar Allen Poe’s talismanic poem, The Raven, which was produced in a limited edition illustrated with Manet’s striking black and white images, and signed by the artists.
Berthe Morisot
Next to Manet are works by two woman artists, Berthe Morisot (who Manet knew and often painted – there are two portraits of her by him) and Mary Cassatt. Cassatt was American and moved to Paris in 1874. In 1891 she went to see an exhibition of Japanese prints at the Musêe des Beaux-Arts which had a profound effect on her. She immediately started making a set of ten colour aquatints which combine thin but distinct lines and delicate washes of pale colour and flattened areas of decoration.
Which brings us to the influence of Japanese prints on French. As Japan opened up to the West as part of the Meiji Restoration, brightly coloured woodcut prints began appearing on the western market from the end of the 1850s. In 1872 the critic Philipe Burty coined the term ‘Japonisme’, meaning
understanding Japanese art, culture and life solely through contact with the art of Japan
The Japonisme section of the exhibition features a print of a crayfish, fishes and prawns by Utagawa Hiroshige from 1832, next to an earthenware platter decorated with a lobster by Félix Bracquemonde who made a series of 25 prints for the crockery service all based on Japanese designs.
Henri Rivière
Nearby is one of the treats of the show. Artist and designer Henri Rivière was best known for his shadow theatre performances at Le Chat Noir nightclub (as recently covered in the Barbican’s big exhibition about arty nightclubs).
Hokusai
He’s here because in the 1880s he conceived the idea of taking Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji as the starting point for his own series of views of the Eiffel Tower, as it was being constructed. Here’s the Hokusai print the curators have selected:
Tea house at Koishikawa. The morning after a snowfall by Katsushika Hokusai (circa 1830)
And here’s the Rivière: spot the influence! The Eiffel Tower prints chart the slow construction of the tower in thirty-six scenes, in all weathers including, as here, in heavy snow.
The Eiffel Tower under Construction, seen from the Trocadéro (1902) by Henri Rivière
You can see all thirty-six prints on this website:
If they’d been popular earlier in the century, prints underwent an explosion of popularity in the 1890s. Advances in colour printing paved the way for the brilliant designs of Henri Tolouse-Lautrec among many others. Lautrec made a living by producing illustrations for the proliferation of publications in the 1890s which sought to capture the glamour and glitz of the capital, as well as for the explosion of nightclubs which Paris witnessed.
La Revue Blanche
One of the most influential magazines of the period was La Revue Blanche founded and edited by Alfred Natanson, remembered mostly for its connection with literature, but it also included prints and illustrations, including the ones on display here by József Rippl-Rónai, Paul Ranson, Felix Vallotton and Maurice Denis.
Pierre Bonnard
There’s a selection of prints from Pierre Bonnard’s first series of twelve prints commissioned by Vollard in 1899 and some really evocative colour prints by Édouard Vuillard. They’re simple Paris street scenes but half abstracted into pleasing designs and patterns. It’s not Impressionism and not Abstraction, but a pleasingly decorative half way house between the two.
There’s a whole wall of French artistic heavy hitters: in quick succession you can see prints by Degas, van Gogh, Pissarro, Puvis de Chavannes, Renoir and Cézanne.
Cézanne
The Cézanne is interesting: it is of Les Baigneurs (the Bathers), one of only eight prints ever made by the artist and a variation on one of his most popular themes (see my review of Tate Modern’s Cezanne exhibition). In fact, the wall label tells us that Cézanne made at least 200 images of bathers, an obsessive reworking of a specific theme which is very characteristic.
I feel ambivalent Paul Cézanne. I loved him as a boy but the recent National Portrait Gallery exhibition of his portraits put me off him, and I’m not sure I really like this image, no matter how famous it is. Maybe it’s because it feels like an image designed for another medium (oil paint) which the impresario Vollard had to persuade Cézanne to make, unlike the Vuillard print which feels like an image which has been conceived and produced with the medium of print in mind.
Richard Ranft
In a different way, the image below is obviously designed to take advantage of the defined lines and vivid colours enabled by 1890s print technology. What’s not to like about this scene from the circus by the less well-known artist Richard Ranft?
A Swiss artist and former student of Gustave Courbet, Ranft produced many images depicting the daily lives and diversions of fin-de-siecle Parisian society. He was also a painter and illustrator, contributing popular images to many of the new journals and magazines. The acrobatic circus horseback rider was a popular subject, and Ranft’s version of it appeared in L’Estampe Moderne, a series of print portfolios, in 1898.
Gauguin
There’s a brilliant double portrait by Gauguin – in the contrary experience to Cézanne, the recent big Gauguin exhibition at the National Gallery made me love him more and want to explore much more of his work.
Whistler
But I’ll end on a figure who is a little apart from all the other artists on display insofar that he was not only not French, he wasn’t even European. It’s easy to walk by the three black and white prints by the American James McNeill Whistler on your way to the more brightly colours Toulouse-Lautrec or Ranft posters, but these relatively small prints from Whistlers series of pictures of late Victorian Venice, are wonderful.
Whistler was, according to the curator, ‘the supreme master of etching and a key figure in nineteenth-century printmaking. Declared bankrupt in 1879, Whistler accepted the offer from the Fine Art Society to produce twelve prints of Venice over a three month period. A year later Whistler returned and made a further 50 etchings, hence the existence of a Venice Set from 1880 and The Second Venice Set of 1886.
This is from the second set and the delicate streaking of the ink in the upper and lower parts convey the shimmering reflection of the buildings by a typically Venetian canal, making it seem as if the sky is as liquid and luminous as the water.
Nocturne: Palaces 1880 by James McNeill Whistler (1886)
Reflecting on the Whistler’s subtlety and sophistication leads you to compare it with the highly stylised works of Toulouse-Lautrec, the fine art works of people like Gauguin or Cézanne, with the deliberately bright and popular art of Richard Ranft , with the dreamy and mysterious works of Nabis like Félix Vallotton, or the intimate scenes of half-naked women bathing and drying themselves by Cassatt or Degas. Wow. What a brilliant, exciting and enjoyable array of the best prints of some of the greatest artists who’ve ever lived, as well as a fascinating selection of works by less well-known figures which are equally and sometimes more beautiful.
Had you heard of Paul Helleu or Jacques Villon or Armand Séguin or Suzanne Valadon or Charles Maurin or Ker-Xavier Roussel or Angelo Jank before? Me neither, but all of them are good, and some of them are surprisingly vivid and modern.
Angelo Jank
This print is a startling image by Angelo Jank (1868-1940), a German animal painter, illustrator and member of the Munich Secession. He specialized in scenes with horses and riders.
It’s an illustration for Léo Desmarais’ work Les Miroirs, which is so obscure I can’t find anything about it on the internet. It’s a plate from the magazine L’Estampe Moderne which appeared from 1897 to 1899 as a series of 24 monthly instalments, each containing four original lithographs, like this striking one of a woman with a brilliant green parrot.
What is going on? Who is the blonde woman? Why is she holding an apple? And why is a brilliantly green parrot looming down at her?
Strangely unlike anything else in the show and deceptively modern, it might be from the 1960s. The exhibition is like this, full of unexpected treats and treasures. And it’s FREE!
This beautiful exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery is celebrating the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt’s death in 1669 by bringing together 35 of his iconic paintings, etchings and drawings, including major international loans including:
The Pilgrims at Emmaus, 1648 (Musée du Louvre, Paris)
Philemon and Baucis, 1658 (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC)
Tobit and Anna with the Kid, 1645 and The Dream of Joseph, 1645 (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin)
The theme of the exhibition is Light and each of the six exhibition rooms focuses on different ways and different media in which Rembrandt showed his mastery of light and shadow.
Philemon and Baucis (1658) by Rembrandt van Rijn. National Gallery of Art, Washington
Before we look at any of the works in detail the curators introduce us to a couple of key ideas:
1. Theatrical
Apparently a new theatre opened in Amsterdam in the 1640s, and the curators quote its owners as pointing out that all the world’s a stage. There’s no direct link, apparently, between the new theatre and Rembrandt’s work except as a peg to bring out the theatricality of his conception. Once it’s pointed out to you, you realise how obvious it is that so many of Rembrandt’s paintings have been posed and staged and set and lit as if for a stage play or opera; that Rembrandt time after time chooses moments of great human drama to depict.
Hence the centrepiece of the first room is the enormous, square painting showing the moment the cock crows in the story of St Peter denying Christ, a moment of phenomenal psychological and religious drama.
This painting alone would repay hours of study. Suffice to point out the obvious, that most of the picture is in deep shadow or gloom, with the result that where light is portrayed it powerfully draws the eye – towards the mysterious glow behind the woman’s hand and onto Peter’s cloak. It was possible to spend quite a long time in front of it just enjoying the burnish on the soldier’s armour and elaborate helmet.
Reflections and jewels
In fact a kind of sub-theme of the exhibition, for me at any rate, was not only Rembrandt’s use of light so much as his use of reflections, especially off metallic surfaces and jewels. For me an exciting part of the Philemon and Baucis painting is not the light as such, but the way it highlights the gold filigree work on Jupiter’s chest and what looks like a band of pearls around Mercury’s head.
Philemon and Baucis (1658) by Rembrandt van Rijn. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Detail
Similarly, the exhibition includes Rembrandt’s famous Self Portrait with a Flat Hat, but among all the visual and psychological pleasures of this wonderful painting, I was attracted by the light reflected from the pearl necklaces around Rembrandt’s chest, on his gold bracelet, and his cheeky, dangling pearl ear-ring.
Light not only has a source and comes from somewhere, but also impacts, illuminates and is reflected backfrom its targets. What I’m struggling to express is that I didn’t just notice the cunning use of light sources in Rembrandt’s paintings, but the extremely clever, inventive and beautiful ways he uses these often obscure light sources to highlight, burnish and illuminate telling details in the compositions.
A word about reproductions
Back to The Denial of St Peter. What’s a little hard to make out in this little reproduction is that off in the background at the top right is Jesus, a shadowy figure with his hands bound behind him being led away and turning to look at the doleful scene of faithless Peter. Which brings us to a general point:
There’s a good catalogue of the exhibition but flicking through it you realise that all reproductions of Rembrandt are inadequate. No photographic reproduction can do justice to the subtlety and depth, the multiple levels of light and shade and darkness which he manages to achieve with oil painting.
One of the best paintings here is Landscape with the Rest on the Flight into Egypt.
Landscape with the Rest on the Flight into Egypt by Rembrandt van Rijn (1647) National Gallery of Ireland
In the flesh it is a marvel, with multiple layers of paint conveying a dark and stormy night, hills in the background and up on a distant hill the silhouette of some kind of building with tiny glowing windows, while down in the foreground the tiny figures of Mary and Joseph and a servant tend a fire which shines out in a darkness which includes multiple shades of grey inflected with the orange of the fire and morphing into a strange preternatural almost purple sky of dusk. But in the catalogue reproduction almost all of this is jet black.
That’s the point of going to art galleries. The real actual art is always, in the flesh, a thousand times more sensual, rich, deep and mysterious than any colour print.
2. Rembrandt’s house
The curators go large on the biographical fact that in 1639 Rembrandt bought a big house in the Jodenbreestraat in Amsterdam, where he lived and painted until he went bankrupt in 1656 (today the Museum Het Rembrandthuis). One wall of room two has an architect’s drawing of the building printed on it.
Rembrandt had his studio on the first floor with its big windows. On the floor above were the smaller studios where he supervised his students. Here, we learn, he set his students all kinds of challenges designed to broaden their technique. Draw or paint a composition with a light source above, to the side, beneath the figures. Make an image with two light sources, one outside the frame. Paint a scene at night. Paint a scene at dawn. Thus the exhibition features drawings by a number of Rembrandt’s students showing them working with light, or by the master himself.
This brings us to another notable aspect of the exhibition, which is the way it is laid out and staged. The curators have gone to a lot of trouble to make it a dramatic experience, with each room lit and arranged in a different way. But over and above the lighting, in the room where the drawing above is on display, they have recreated the scene by building into the partition wall high, latticed windows that you can see in the drawing, and above the windows a sheet of muslin or cotton has been hung in a kind of billow, while the lower tier of windows has been blocked off, either by fabric of wooden shutters.
The point, for understanding Rembrandt, is to show how carefully he arranged windows and fabrics in order to create light effects in his studios. The point, for visitors to this exhibition, is to be impressed by the trouble the curators have gone to to recreate this aspect of Rembrandt’s studio in the gallery.
Peter Suschitzky, cinematographer
Related to the care taken over the design and layout of the exhibition, is the fact that the two curators – Jennifer Scott and Helen Hillyard – have collaborated with the award-winning cinematographer, Peter Suschitzky, famed for his work on films such as Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back to create ‘a unique viewing experience’.
What this means is that, having established which works they were going to display, they collaborated with the lighting guy to really think about how to group them into rooms each of which has its own special lighting design and feel.
The most dramatic example of this is room five which is stripped back to its simplest essence with just one painting hanging in it, Christ and St Mary Magdalen at the Tomb (1638). All kinds of things are going on with light in this painting, as you can see for yourself.
The thing, the schtick, the gimmick or the stroke of brilliance cooked up by Suschitzky, Scott and Hillyard, was the decision to have one narrow spot light focused on this painting and have it set to very slowly fade away to nothing, and then very slowly come on again till it’s bathing the painting in full light.
As it fades and then returns, something really weird happens: at certain moments in the dimming and fading process, it really as if a ray of light from heaven is falling across the scene. In particular, there’s a certain pint when the face of Mary, the light lower left half, becomes briefly luminescent. And you can simply see why this experience required a whole room to really savour.
Draughtsmanship
The middle rooms contain the etchings and drawings, including ones from his pupils. I have to be honest and say I was underwhelmed by these. His capture of light and shade in the punishingly difficult medium of drypoint etching is marvellous; but his actual draughtsmanship isn’t. In fact sometimes it feels positively wonky.
A good example of this mixed impression is Woman with an Arrow, which is important enough to have an audioguide item devoted to it. Now I can see the dramatic contrast between the whiteness of her naked body and the deep gloom of the background. But.. but if you look at her right arm, at some point I think you realise it isn’t quite in the same picture plane as the rest of her body, has a kind of deformed look. It took me a while to notice there’s a face (presumably of a student drawing her) by her left shoulder. Not very good is it? Crude.
Woman with an Arrow (c. 1661) by Rembrandt van Rijn. The Rembrandt House Museum, Amsterdam
This kind of rather blodgy wonkiness with the human figure runs throughout Rembrandt’s work. Sometimes he rises effortlessly above it. But other times, I found it distracting. If you scroll back up to the painting at the start of this review – the painting captures the moment from the Greek myth of Philemon and Baucis when the old peasant couple welcome in two wandering strangers and go to the trouble of slaughtering their best goose to make a fitting meal. And at this point, the wanderers reveal themselves to be no other than king of the gods Jupiter and his messenger Mercury.
It is a typically dramatic moment, and the lighting effect is characteristically subtle, with the natural light coming from the little fireplace on the left eclipsed by the golden light now suddenly emanating from the heads of the visiting gods.
But look closely at those godheads and you might be disappointed by their wonkiness. Jupiter’s eyes in particular look uneven, almost making him look like a cranky Cyclops rather than a figure of majesty and awe.
Heartbroken tenderness
So I’m a big fan of very precise draughtsmanship, for me one of the great thrills of art is the way a handful of pencil or brushstrokes can create a world, and so I felt myself being brought up again and again by the apparent wonkiness of many of the images, viewed as pure exercises in draughtsmanship.
BUT, and it is an enormous but, Rembrandt’s paintings (especially) have a quality which supersedes and outweighs any strict concerns about linesmanship, and this is their immense human warmth. The catalogue quotes a letter van Gogh wrote to his brother in which he describes Rembrandt’s tenderness and then goes on to be more precise, praising the heartbreaking tenderness of his images.
Rembrandt in fact made a very large number of images – paintings, drawings and etchings – and you can see why it’s possible to argue – even on the basis of just the 35 works here – that he inhabited a number of different styles.
But the ones we remember, the famous ones, the ones in the anthologies and you were shown at school all share his great and wonderful quality, a sense of almost superhuman sympathy and understanding with the poor weak vulnerable human animal. He liked painting old people because their faces convey the depth and ravages of experience and yet tremendous dignity. His own mature self portraits convey volumes about human experience which no words can match.
Which is why the sixth and final room of this exhibition is worth the price of admission by itself because it brings together half a dozen of Rembrandt’s greatest hits and the impression is overwhelming. There’s the Self Portrait in a Flat Cap, the Girl At a Window, a wonderfully sensuous and intimate portrait of a woman in bed. All of them convey that sense of immense, almost god-like tenderness which van Gogh described.
Maybe most tender of all is the famous painting of the woman wading into a stream, supposed to be a portrait of his mistress.
In line with my narrow (and maybe illiterate and philistine) views about Rembrandt’s abilities as a draughtsman, I don’t think the face bears too much scrutiny. But detail like that is beside the point. By this stage (the end) of the exhibition, we have been tutored to appreciate:
The theatricality of the image
Not a melodramatic moment from the Bible or classical myth, but nonetheless a very telling, precise and revealing moment of domestic intimacy and candour.
The human tenderness
The tremendous feel for the beauty of the exposed, trusting human being in a moment of vulnerability and honesty.
And – to bring us back to the main theme of the exhibition – to the importance of light in creating the overall effect. In a sense, it is only because he is such a master of light that you don’t really notice the importance of the light to the impact of the image until it is specifically pointed out to you, it is so totally subsumed into the overall composition.
The cumulative effect of looking closely at, and having explained to you, Rembrandt’s various ways and techniques with light is eventually to make you realise that rather startling fact that light alone can convey emotion. Light alone can create meaning in a painting. Light alone can shape images which prompt such powerful feelings of human sympathy and compassion.
The promotional video
Related links
Rembrandt’s Light continues @ Dulwich Picture Gallery until 2 February 2020
Laura Knight was the first woman to be elected to full membership of the Royal Academy of Arts (in 1936) and the first woman to receive a large retrospective exhibition at the Academy, in 1965. She was awarded a Damehood in 1929.
Born in 1877, Knight had a long life (passing away in 1970) and a long and successful career, working in oils, watercolours, etching, engraving and drypoint until well into the 1960s.
She never departed from the figurative, realist tradition of her youth and was, for this reason, in her heyday, one of the most popular painters in Britain.
Given Knight’s mid-century fame, and her role as a pioneering woman artist, it is a little surprising that this FREE display of some of her work is a) so small and b) tucked away in a dingy room through a doorway off of the main first floor landing. There was no signage, I had to ask an RA staffer where it was hidden.
If you google Knight or look at her Wikipedia article, you immediately see a series of highly realistic and vivid oil paintings, starting with the cracking Self Portrait with Nude of 1913, and including the evocative paintings she did during the Second World War (she became an official war artist at the outbreak of war, and her portrait of Ruby Loftus operating industrial machinery was picture of the year at the Academy’s 1943 summer exhibition).
As you explore further online you come across lots and lots of oil paintings of chocolate box scenes of the countryside, especially of the Cornish coast, featuring soulful looking ladies with parasols (before the First War) or in flapper style dresses and chapeaux (after the First War).
In this little display there are only three oil paintings on display here, although they include the very striking portrait of Joan Rhodes (above) and an equally realistic and sensual double nude, Dawn. (It is hard not to be struck by the firm pink bosoms in this painting, though maybe I am meant to be paying attention to the women’s soulful gazes…)
No, the bulk of this display is made up of display cases of Knight’s drawings and sketchbooks of which the Academy holds a substantial collection – small, monochrome, often unfinished sketches, which are – to be frank – of variable quality and finish, some were very appealing, some seemed, well, a bit scrappy.
The works are grouped into three distinct themes from Knight’s long working life – the countryside, the nude and scenes from the theatre, ballet and circus.
Countryside
Knight had several spells of living in the countryside – in the 1890s she moved to the Yorkshire fishing village of Staithes and painted scenes of the coast and life among the fishermen and their wives. In 1907 Knight and her husband moved to Cornwall and became central figures in the artists’ colony known as the Newlyn School. In the 1930s she and her husband settled in the Malvern Hills, where she remained for the rest of her life.
Thus the exhibition includes sketches she did of Mousehole in Cornwall, alongside sketches of a ploughed field, trees beside a river, Richmond Park, Bodmin Moor, two land girls in a field, seeding potatoes, and so on.
It was only later, when I googled her many finished paintings of Mousehole and other Cornish scenes that I realised where these sketches were heading, and what I was missing. I wish the exhibition had included at least one finished painting of this kind of scene alongside the sketches, to help you understand the process better, and the purpose of the sketches.
Nudes
We’ve already met the two dramatic nude women in Dawn. There are a small number of other nude sketches and studies on display, which I thought were a bit so-so. Like the countryside sketches, they strongly suggest that the ‘magic’ of Knight’s paintings was precisely in the painting, in her skill at creating an airy, light and luminous finish with oil paints.
This broad subject area contains the largest number of sketches and drawings. Knight sketched ballet dancers, and circus performers, there are drawings of boxing matches held among soldiers training during World War One, and ice skaters and trapeze artists and many other performers. The wall labels tell us that she even spent some months travelling with famous circuses of the Edwardian era, drawing and sketching every day.
They’re all competent. Some of them piqued my interest. But none of them seemed to me as vivid as the drawings of, say Edward Ardizzone, who had a comparable sketching style, using multitudes of loosely drawn lines to build up form and composition.
The Lion Tamer by Edward Ardizzone (1948)
Maybe I’m mixing up fine art (Knight) with book illustration (Ardizzone) and maybe I’m giving away my failings of taste in saying so, but I much prefer the Ardizzone. It’s more vivid, more evocative, more physically pleasing (more tactile), more fun.
Also, as with the nudes and landscapes, a quick search online reveals that Knight converted her sketches into scores and scores of paintings of the circus, and I immediately found the paintings much more pleasurable than the sketches – a little cheesy and old-fashioned, like vintage Christmas cards, but much more finished and complete than the sketches.
The introductory panel and all the wall labels exude what you could call the standard feminist spirit of grievance and offence. There’s a long list of offences to absorb.
The curators point out that Knight, despite her success with the public, was only granted membership of the Royal Academy in 1936! That she was the first woman to achieve this accolade (why so late Royal Academy)! But that, even then, she wasn’t invited to Academicians’ Annual Dinner until 1967!
We are told that, as a woman art student before the Great War, she was forbidden to paint or sketch from real naked models but had to work from sculptures and statues! It was only in the 1930s, in Newlyn, that she was able local people to pose nude for her! And so a work like Dawn can be seen as an act of defiance against a male-dominated art world!
I’m sure all of this, and much more along the same lines, is true and scandalous and we should all be outraged by it. But, seen from another perspective, all this righteous indignation amounts to a skilful evasion of the rather obvious question, which is whether Knight’s art is any good – or is of anything of other than antiquarian interest, dusted off and used as a pretext for the righteous anger of modern curators?
This tricky question is not addressed anywhere in the (very informative) wall labels, but, when you think about it, is amply answered by:
The Academy’s choice of location for this little ‘exhibition’ – tucked away in a dark and dingy side-room.
The fact that it is more of a ‘display’ of half a dozen notebooks, three paintings and a poster, than a full-blooded exhibition. An after-thought.
If Laura Knight is so eminent and so worthy of consideration, why didn’t the Academy give her a larger exhibition in a more prominent space?
Ironically, the curators who complain that Knight was overlooked and patronised in her own time, have done quite a good job of repeating the gesture – of displaying only a small and not very persuasive part of her output, in a hidden-away side room which nobody in a hurry to see the blockbuster shows on Anthony Gormley or Helena Schjerfbeck or Félix Vallotton is in too much danger of stumbling across.
Suggestion
In all seriousness, why not give Laura Knight a much bigger exhibition? If you look at the paintings embedded in the Wikipedia article or all across Google, it’s clear that she painted absolutely brilliantly, but in a straightforward naturalistic style which was completely outdated and provincial by the 1930s, let alone the 40s or 50s – in a style which carried on its Edwardian naturalism into the atomic age as if the rest of modern art had never existed.
But despite that – or more likely, because of it – Knight was very popular and successful with the public. Her paintings of Edwardian children playing on the beach or soulful ladies standing on clifftops sold by the dozen and – from a Google search of them – look immensely pleasing and reassuring in a lovely, airy, chocolate-box kind of way. And her wartime paintings perfectly capture the earnest heroism of the conflict, and of the social realism, the committedness, of the wartime artists.
To me this all suggests a whole area of investigation, an enquiry into why British artistic taste remained so isolated and uncosmopolitan for so long, which would reference:
the way the director of Tate in the 1930s could proudly say that Tate would only buy work by the young whippersnapper Henry Moore ‘over his dead body’
or Sir Alfred Munnings, the horse-painting president of the Royal Academy, addressing the academy’s 1949 annual banquet, delivered a drunken rant against all modern art, and invoked the support of Winston Churchill (sitting next to him) who he claimed, had once asked him: ‘Alfred, if you met Picasso coming down the street would you join me in kicking his … something, something?’ ‘And I said ‘Yes, sir! Yes I would!’
A big exhibition of Knight’s work would:
put to the test the curators’ claims about her importance and relevance
be very popular among the sizeable audience, who still like their art extremely traditional (think of the sales of prints and other merchandise!)
allow the curators to explore and analyse the long-lasting appeal and influence of the anti-continental, anti-modernist, anti-avant-garde tradition in 20th century English art of which, for all her skill and ability, Laura Knight appears to have been a leading example
This – the philistinism of English art, the determined rejection of all 20th century, contemporary and modern trends in art and literature in preference for the tried and tested and traditional – is something you rarely hear discussed or explained, maybe because it’s too big a subject, or too vague a subject, or too shameful a subject. But it’s something I’d love someone better educated and more knowledgeable in art history to explain to me. And I’d really enjoy seeing more of Laura Knight’s lovely airy innocent paintings in the flesh. Why not combine the two?
For once mount an exhibition which is not about a pioneer or explorer or breaker of new ground, but about a highly capable painter of extremely traditional and patriotic and reassuring paintings, and explain how and why the taste which informed her and her audience remained so institutionally and economically and culturally powerful in Britain for so long.
Related links
Laura Knight continues at the Royal Academy until 2 February 2020
This small but entrancing exhibition explores the impact that a radical new photographic means of reproduction (process engraving) had on the art of illustration at the end of the 19th century.
Through 50 or so drawings and 20 or so illustrated books and magazines, the exhibition brings together a treasure trove of images from what many consider the golden age of illustration which lasted from around 1890 to the early 1900s.
The Pilgrim stretched both of his hands up towards Heaven by Charles Robinson (1900)
Informative
As always the exhibition is in just the one room at the Heath Robinson Museum and looks small, but there are now fewer than 20 wall panels, some quite lengthy and packed with technical, historical and biographical information, so that reading all of them almost feels like reading a small book.
A brief history of Victorian illustration techniques
In the early Victorian era, book illustrations were mostly produced from steel engravings. Artists such as George Cruikshank (some of whose prints I was looking at earlier this week, in the Guildhall Art Gallery) and Hablot Browne were expert at etching on steel. However the process was expensive, requiring the illustrations to be printed on different paper separate from the text and then bound in with the rest of the book.
By the 1850s publishers preferred to use wood engravings, with the result that master wood-engravers developed large workshops which employed many engravers. The artist presented his picture on paper or on a whitened woodblock and would hand it over to the skilled engraver. The engraver then converted the picture into a woodcut, carving away the areas that were to appear white on the final print, leaving the raised lines which would take the ink, be applied to paper, and produce the print.
Thus the engraver played a major role in interpreting the artist’s work, sketch or intention, often superimposing his own character and style on the image.
Still, it did mean you could make illustrations without having to be a skilled etcher and among the first artists to take advantage of the new medium were the pre-Raphaelites, led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais.
They were followed by a second school of artists, sometimes called the ‘Idyllic School’, which included G.J. Pinwell and Arthur Boyd Houghton, who infused their essentially realistic works with intensity and emotion.
Job’s Comforters by Arthur Boyd Houghton (c.1865)
There followed in the 1870s and ’80s what the curators call ‘a period of dull realism’ which is not dwelt on. It was at the end of the 1880s that the technical innovation which the exhibition is concerned with came in, and transformed the look of British illustrations.
Process engraving
In the late 1880s process engraving replaced wood engraving. An artist’s drawing was transferred to a sheet of zinc so that areas to be printed in black were given an acid-resistant coating and white areas left exposed. The plate was then dipped in acid so that the white areas were eaten away. The plate was then attached to a block of wood which could be inserted into the block holding the type, so that illustration and text were generated together by the same printing process.
This new process required that the artist’s image be in pure blacks and whites without the kind of fine lines which had flourished in etching on steel or in wood engraving. Moreover, the artist could be confident that the line he drew would be exactly what would be presented to the reader, without the involvement of a wood engraver to enhance or (possibly) detract from it.
At a stroke, the older generation of artists who had relied on master wood-engravers to work up their rough sketches for publication was swept away and replaced by a new young generation of penmen who relished the clarity of line and space encouraged by the new technique.
The most dramatic proponent of the new look, who exploded onto the art scene like a small atom bomb, was Aubrey Beardsley (b.1872)
How La Beale Isoud Wrote to Sir Tristram from the Morte d’Arthur by Aubrey Beardsley (1892)
Beardsley was an illustrator of genius who had created an entirely new and personal visual world by the incredibly young age of 20. There are four prints and two drawings by him here, plus three book covers and books laid open to show his illustrations in situ. What a genius.
Having explained this major new development in print technology, the exhibition also explains several other influences which were swirling round at the time and contributed to the development of the ‘new look’. These included:
Japanese art
European Symbolism
Venetian and Renaissance art
with a dash of Dürer thrown in
Japanese
After the Harris Treaty of 1858 reopened trade links between the West and Japan, one of the many consequences was a flood onto the Western art market of Japanese woodblock prints.
Known in Japan as ukiyo-e or ‘pictures of the floating world’, the Japanese style was notable for not using perspective to add depth, or light and shade to create a sense of volume and space in the images. Instead the Japanese used ‘dramatic boundary lines’, i.e. clear, distinct, black lines – to create images – and then used colour, again not to create depth, but decoratively, filling in the shapes created by the lines with plain washes.
Japanese art had a profound influence on Western artists at a time when they were looking for ways to revive what had become tired traditions and to combat the rising challenge of photography.
Setting a Japanese print (in this case Nakamura Shikan II as Benkai by Utagawa Kunisada) next to the works by Beardsley allows you to immediately see the liberating impact that the Japanese habit of stylising the image has had for the European – allowing him to abandon almost all conventions of perspective and depth.
Actor Nakamura Utaemon Iii As Mitsugi’s Aunt Omine by Utagawa Kunisada (1814)
Beardsley’s best images float in an indeterminate space, bounded by extremely precise and clear lines which give his best images a wonderful clarity and dynamism. But Beardsley wasn’t alone. A greater or lesser element of simplification and stylisation characterises most of the artists working in the ‘new look’.
The last fancy of the contemporary buck for Pall Mall magazine by Edmund J. Sullivan (1900)
Symbolism
Symbolism was an art movement which swept northern Europe in the 1880s and, although its techniques remained largely realistic, in some case hyper-realistic, it applied these approaches to subject matter which was infused with obscure and semi-religious feelings.
Symbolism took images of death, yearning, loss and mystery, and showed them, no longer in the bright light of nineteenth century rationalism and optimism, but brooded over by a more modern sensibility and psychology. A drawing of Salomé by Gustave Moreau is used to exemplify the Symbolist effect.
Its influence can be seen in an illustration like this one by Charles Ricketts, which takes the well-worn subject of Oedipus and the Sphinx but drenches it in arcane symbolism – inexplicable figures and flowers adding to the sensual, erotic yet mysterious atmosphere.
Oedipus and the Sphinx (1891) by Charles Ricketts
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
The exhibition lists and explores other influences including the impact of a classic printed book from Venice titled Hypnerotomachia Poliphili or The Strife of Love in a Dream, published by Albertus Manutius in 1499, and regarded as a masterpiece of typography and design by collectors.
A Garden Scene from ‘Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’ attributed to Francesco Colonna (c.1499)
Copies of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili became available in England in 1888 and influenced Edward Burne-Jones, Walter Crane, Charles Ricketts, Aubrey Beardsley and Robert Anning Bell.
List of artists in the exhibitions
The exhibition includes works by all of those illustrators and more. I counted:
Aubrey Beardsley – 4 prints, 2 drawings and three book and magazine covers or pages
Alice B. Woodward – 2 drawings
Louis Fairfax Muckley – 1
Herbert Granville Fell – 2 drawings and a watercolour
Alfred Garth Jones – 2
Thomas Sturge Moore – 1
Laurence Housman – 5
Charles de Sousy Ricketts – 2
Paul Vincent Woodroffe – 1
H.A. Eves – 1
Harold Edward Hughes Nelson – 1
Byam Shaw – 1
Edgar Wilson – 1
Cyril Goldie – 1
Henry Ospovat – 1
Robert Anning Bell – 2
Philip Connard – 1
Jessie Marion King – 3
James Joshua Guthrie – 2
Edmund Joseph Sullivan – 2
Charles Robinson – 3
William Heath Robinson – 3
Arthur Boyd Houghton – 1
Walter Crane – 1
Books on display
Le Morte d’Arthur illustrated by Beardsley
Midsummer Night’s Dream ill. by Robert Anning Bell
The Kelmscott Chaucer ill. by Burne-Jones
Poems of Edgar Allen Poe ill. by William Heath Robinson
Poems of John Keats ill. by Robert Anning Bell
Poems of John Milton ill. by Garth Jones
The Faerie Queene ill. by Walter Crane
plus illustrated versions of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the Book of Job, the Yellow Book, and more
All the works were worth looking at closely, studying and mulling in order to enjoy the play of line and form. Many of the prints are wonderfully drawn and warmly evocative. Every one is accompanied by a wall label, and the twelve or so most important artists merit bigger wall labels which give you their full biography along with influences and major works to set them in context.
These biographical notes help you to make connections between different artists linked by having a common publisher, or working on a common publication or magazine, or who knew each other and encouraged, helped or shared ideas. The exhibition really does give you a sense of an entire generation excitedly inventing a whole new style of art.
Nostalgia
I think at least in part I respond so warmly to so many of the images is because, as a boy growing up in the 1960s, lots of the old books in my local library and the children’s books which my parents bought for me, contained just this kind of late-Victorian / Edwardian illustrations.
Looking at almost any of them creates a warm bath of half-forgotten memories of curling up in a corner and totally immersing myself in thrilling stories of Greek heroes and mermaids and pirates and pilgrims.
Tailpiece by Edgar Wilson (date unknown)
This is another wonderful, heart-warming and highly informative exhibition from the Heath Robinson Museum.
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
Disappointing. But then I’ve never liked Hockney. I’ve been to innumerable exhibitions, including the big one at the Royal Academy in spring 2012. Big, bright and empty, was my sad conclusion.
The show
It took 20 minutes to stroll through the half dozen small rooms at the DPG. In the first were the earliest prints from his 1960s student days. In the next room a series of etchings illustrating the homoerotic poems of Cavafy: Hockney’s Cavafy etchings. Drab. Passionless.
Elsewhere were big portraits of friends of the artist’s in early 1970s California eg Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. Ugly. Very English in their graceless lumpiness.
Some prints of flowers, one or two of which I liked. Hockney flower print. One of his two brightly coloured pet dachshunds. The last room contained massive overcoloured recent prints, very much like the vast paintings of Yorkshire landscapes which clogged up the RA two years ago, only without their naive landscape appeal. Several horribly garish prints of the atrium of a hotel in Mexico, some others with wackily-shaped frames.
Why Hockney bores me
What they all have in common, for me, is:
it’s all figurative; it’s all about conveying what he sees
but all done in a sketchy, distorted, 6th form/art school way; the figures are scratchy, unappealing, unattractive; the architecture is distorted, the swimming pools are… abstract, cold, empty. Only the dogs and some of the flowers bore an attractive resemblance to their subject
I struggle to think of another artist whose images of the human figure are so unerotic, unsensual, passionless and blank e.g. Portrait of Cavafy II
throughout the works are jokey references to other artists, including some tiresome homages or whatever to Picasso, all which serve to highlight how empty and subjectless Hockney’s own art is
which leads on to the blah in the catalogue and the interviews/articles always emphasising what a ceaseless explorer and pioneer and innovator he is: Polaroid art, computer art, ipad art and the rest of it – who cares: is it any good?
Define ‘good’. Well: passionate, engaged and engaging, exciting. Pretty much none of the works on display here engaged, excited, amused, entertained, stimulated, frightened or moved me. Or even made me look at them twice. Yep another horrible portrait from the 70s. Yep another so-so print of a vase of flowers. Yawn.
In the final room one of the better pieces Matelot Kevin Druez 2 is obviously, as a study, as a piece of representational art, good, very good. But would you buy it, would you have it in your living room, can you even be bothered to look at it for more than 30 seconds, do you want to come back and look at it again? No.
Is anything at all in this exhibition beautiful? No.
The video
The DPG’s video is a triumph of marketing: the use of rostrum camera and close-up on detail of the prints makes them all look much more powerful and attractive than they actually seemed, hanging limply on the big white walls of the gallery. Maybe his art is best seen in videos and TV documentaries…
Books & Boots 