Every year Tate commissions established artists to create installations for its two London galleries. The ones which fill Tate Modern’s huge Turbine Gallery tend to get a lot of press. Less attention is devoted to the commission to fill the long hall or central atrium of Tate Britain. This year’s commission was awarded to well-established Black British sculptor Hew Locke. With a certain inevitability, a Black artist decided to cover the topics of race, slavery and empire.
The result is a big bold piece which fills the central hall of Tate Britain with a parade of mannequins – of men, women, children, horses – dressed in a spectacular array of clothes and costumes, designed, stitched together, a surreal mish-mash of fabrics and colours and patterns, created just for this show, and titled ‘The Procession’.
Installation view of ‘The Procession’ by Hew Locke (2022) (Photo by the author)
Like most Tate shows this one is accompanied by a wealth – possibly a rather overwhelming wealth – of explanation and interpretation. You can read:
or watch the 8-minute video about its inspiration and creation
Introduction
To quote Tate:
‘The Procession’ invites visitors to “reflect on the cycles of history, and the ebb and flow of cultures, people and finance and power.” Tate Britain’s founder was art lover and sugar refining magnate Henry Tate. In the installation Locke says he ‘makes links with the historical after-effects of the sugar business, almost drawing out of the walls of the building,’ also revisiting his artistic journey so far, including, for example, work with statues, share certificates, cardboard, rising sea levels, Carnival and the military.
Throughout the long, busy work, visitors will see figures who travel through space and time. Here, they carry historical and cultural baggage – from evidence of global financial and violent colonial control embellished on their clothes and banners – alongside powerful images of some of the disappearing colonial architecture of Locke’s childhood in Guyana.
The installation takes inspiration from real events and histories but, overall, the figures invite us to walk alongside them, into an enlarged vision of an imagined future.
I must say I didn’t get any of this at all from actually walking round and along ‘The Procession’. The colours and the way some figures were riding on horses distantly reminded me slightly of Renaissance processions – a very ragtag, surreal distortion of one. But the main impression is of daunting, intimidatingly alien figures with masks or veiled faces or blank mannequin faces from a nightmarish horror sci-fi movie.
Installation view of ‘The Procession’ by Hew Locke (2022) (Photo by the author)
Exhibition guide
The exhibition guide explains that ‘The Procession’ is divided into into sections devoted to themes or topics, mostly about empire, colonialism and rebellion.
Carnival
Post-Colonial Trade
Ghosts Of Slavery
Environmental Disaster
Monuments To Empire
Revolution And Emancipation
These read like chapters from a book and that is very much what the guide turns the work into – a series of tableaux, each one exemplifying one of the themes listed above. Reading the guide you realise that an impressive amount of work has gone into selecting the themes, thinking about them and then crafting tableaux to represent them using an interesting variety of source materials.
Installation view of ‘The Procession’ by Hew Locke (2022) (Photo by the author)
Each element of each outfit, every bit of fabric, plus objects like the palanquin or banners or huge images of old share certificates painted onto fabric, each of these elements has a complex backstory. Some elements are from the white imperialists and business organisations which organised and profited from the slave trade and sugar production on slave-worked plantations in Guyana (where Locke grew up).
But others reference African culture, slave culture, and the post-slavery Black culture Hew himself grew up and experienced. All changed, transmogrified into a Surreal and often quite nightmarish vision of history collapsing in on itself. The friend I went with absolutely loved the workmanship of the fabrics, looking in detail at how different coloured fabrics, printed or painted with a bewildering variety of patterns, had been crafted, juxtaposed and so on.
But I was frightened. I found the whole thing ominous and nightmarish. Faceless figures threatening violent revenge.
Installation view of ‘The Procession’ by Hew Locke (2022) (Photo by the author)
The man below – one of two bearing a stake of wood from which hangs a small fabric basket containing the bust of a white man – he doesn’t look like he’s marching into “into an enlarged vision of an imagined future.” The small figures wearing veils of fabric in the first two images in this review don’t look like carefree toddlers in a playground; to me they look like the psychopathic dwarf in the movie ‘Don’t Look Now’.
Installation view of ‘The Procession’ by Hew Locke (2022)
The Surreal fusion of white, Black, Western and African aesthetics didn’t strike me as Rainbow Nation liberation but reminds me all-too-much of the bizarre post-civilisation outfits worn by the many rebel guerrilla movements which have characterised Africa since independence – voodoo believers dressed in Man Utd shirts and toting semi-automatics. Cold-eyed killers wielding machetes while wearing garish wigs and women’s dresses. Scroll through the first five pages of this website to see what I mean. Or:
Torture, death and dismemberment have come to millions of Africans wearing bizarre outfits, wigs, handbags, kids’ toys, makeup, machine guns and machetes. The deliberate mashup of Locke’s work might be intended to make all kinds of points about resistance to Western imperialism and economic and social norms, but – unfortunately, and unintentionally – reminded me of the hundreds of descriptions I’ve read of mind-boggling violence in African conflicts.
Maybe my imagination has been damaged by reading too many accounts of too many African civil wars, but this installation gave me the willies. Instead of liberal guilt, which I assume is the desired output, I just felt fear, fear of a world which will – in light of inevitable global climate change, the collapse of Third World countries and the resulting mass migration (which, the guide tells us, Locke references somewhere amid these garish costumes) – become more and more like this, multicultural incomprehension, social collapse, people living amid the rags and tatters of the old civilisation, inventing new cults, practicing horrific violence.
Sorry. That’s how it felt to me. The friend I went with felt none of this and just loved the fabrics, the patterns, the designs and how they’d been cunningly assembled. Either way it’s a striking installation. Go and decide for yourself.
Mary Sibande (b.1982) is one of South Africa’s most notable contemporary artists, which makes it all the more surprising that this is her first solo exhibition in the UK.
Sibande calls herself a sculptor but she is also a very good photographer. In fact she mainly works with fabric, sewing her own fabric-based sculpture, and the friend I visited the exhibition with described her as a fabulous seamstress – hence, presumably, the show’s title, I Came Apart at the Seams.
For Sibande hit upon an idea early on in her career and has been producing variations on it for over a decade. The idea was to create life-size mannequins of herself, except
imagined as an alter-ego or avatar, who she named Sophie
to pose these sculptures in striking postures and activities
and to dress them in elaborate, sometimes fantastical, almost science-fiction garments
Over the years she’s used this simple-sounding idea to produce some quite simply staggering works of art. I’m amazed she’s not better known and hasn’t been snapped up by one of the major galleries. This is a FREE exhibition at Somerset House so if you’re passing along the Embankment or through Covent Garden it’s well worth making a detour to visit.
Blue
Long Live The Dead Queen (2008 to 2013) was the series in which we first met Sibande’s avatar, Sophie, conceived as a domestic servant – as Sibande’s mother and grandmother were before her. In various iterations Sophie is seen either as a sculpture or in enormous crystal-clear digital photos, transforming her servant costume (in one iteration she is embroidering the Superman logo onto it) in a series of dreams of escaping her lowly status and gender.
I Put A Spell On Me by Mary Sibande (2009)
Purple
Sibande’s next series was titled The Purple Shall Govern (2013 to 2017). In these Sophie is embodied as ‘The Purple Figure’.
The title is a play on words, making two references, mashing up the opening principle of the 1955 Freedom Charter of the African National Congress stated that ‘The People Shall Govern!’ – with the 1989 anti-apartheid Purple Rain protests.
During these, thousands of anti-apartheid protesters marched on the parliament building in Cape Town and the police sprayed the protesters with water cannon marked with purple dye so that they could be identified and arrested later. However, some of the marchers got their hands on the water cannon and turned it back onto the police and authorities, spraying them and thus symbolically equalising everyone.
Anyway, in Sibande’s hands the colour purple is the inspiration for a series of absolutely wild photos and fabric-sculptures, in which the Sophie figure is transfigured into a force of nature out of whose body and clothes and hair, wild dreadlocks or roots or tendrils cascade and explode in a twirling confusion.
A Terrible Beauty is Born (Long Live The Dead Queen series) by Mary Sibande (2013) Copyright the artist
The above is an enormous digital print which is a) of wonderful clarity and precision b) printed onto fabric not paper and hung across one whole wall and c) is totally wild.
The po-faced seriousness of the political commentary on her works – the references to apartheid and this or that protest – in no way prepares you for the wild, crazed, science fiction pullulation of her imaginings.
It is extravagant, operatic – dreams, nightmares or visions on an epic scale and all the more weird and compelling for having been made, created, carefully and time-consumingly sewn out of fabric.
One entire room in the show consists of an absolutely amazing piece of sculpture – the black woman Sophie wrapped in purple fabric, while her hair appears to be exploding backwards into a huge tangled skein which is itself intertwining to form something like the roots of a tree. It is as if the human being is metamorphosing into an awesome, phantasmagorical force of nature.
It’s one of the weirdest and most powerful works of art I’ve ever seen.
A Reversed Retrogress Scene 2 by Mary Sibande (2013)
Red
Sibande’s latest series is titled In The Midst of Chaos There Is Also Opportunity (2017-ongoing). In these Sophie has transformed into ‘The Red Figure’ – red to express the collective disillusionment and anger of many South Africans at the enduring poverty in post-apartheid South Africa.
So blood-red is for anger, but also the power to heal and restore – there’s something of the priestess and healer in the Red Figure. She is sad, she is angry – but she is also empowered by the legacy and memory of all those who gave their lives to overthrow apartheid.
Come, you spirits of the land and the skies by Mary Sibande (2019)
As I say, the commentators, the curators, and Sibande herself, are happy to describe her art in terms of South Africa’s apartheid and post-apartheid history, the struggle for liberation and the long disappointment that came afterwards, and so on.
Maybe that’s where her art starts. But in my opinion where it goes to is somewhere altogether different, somewhere weird, strange and entrancing, to a zone which is disturbing, upsetting, amazing and supremely memorable.
Look closely and you’ll see that Sophie’s eyes, in all her reincarnations, are always closed: she is dreaming, according to the curators, dreaming of freedom and equality etc.
But the way I read it, Sophie is having dreams far bigger than paltry ones about politics and justice – dreams which are far more disruptive and uncontrolled and weird and enthralling, about human nature itself.
A Terrible Beauty and A Reversed Retrogress show humanity morphing into something much bigger and more cosmic than petty concerns about this or that cause or country – in them the purple and red figures are becoming cosmic, entwining with the natural world, seizing power and going beyond the human into an extraordinary new realm of the imagination.
Related links
Mary Sibande continues at Somerset House until 5 January and is FREE
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.
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
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.
This exhibition is great fun, as close to pure visual pleasure as I’ve had in a gallery for years.
Biography
Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (1924 to 2005) was born the son of Italian immigrants in Leith, outside Edinburgh, making him two times over an outsider to the posh world of English art. Young Ed served in his parents’ ice cream shop as a lad, surrounded by glossy advertising and packaging for the new consumer products which were sweeping into ‘Austerity Britain’ from the States, along with a tidal wave of comics and magazines and new colour movies.
No surprise, then, that, after he’d gone to art school and got Picasso out of his system, he first made a real impact with a lecture given at the Institute for Contemporary Arts titled Bunk! and which consisted of a slide show of 40 or so collages featuring images cut out from pulp science fiction magazines, girly magazines, science and engineering books, newspapers and so on. It is, apparently, referred to as ‘the opening salvo of Pop Art’.
In the 1960s Paolozzi got interested in print making, the major result of which is the sequence of colourful large collage prints titled As is when (1965).
There are eight or so examples here and I could happily live with any of them on my wall – happy, bright, fun, with an intrinsic and immediately understandable sense of design.
Sculpture
After art school he’d spent some time in Paris, soaking up the still lingering vibe of Surrealism, exemplified in metal sculptures of strange zoomorphic shapes like:
What links the collages and sculptures is Paolozzi’s interest in the spare change of engineering, nuts and bolts and screws and cogs and wheels and jets and wings and so on. These came more to the fore in his sculptures of the 1950s and won him his first real fame when displayed at the Venice Biennale.
Many of them look like robots or strange bits of machinery which have been melted in an atomic explosion or maybe found thousands of years after their lost civilisation collapsed. Either way, they played heavily to the fast-moving technical innovations of the 1950s (the jet engine) combined with the political paranoia and nihilism of the Cold War. (The first full scale thermonuclear test was carried out by the United States in 1952.)
The 1960s saw a major shift in his sculptures towards happy shiny pieces made of the funky new material of aluminium or even out of polished chrome e.g. Silk.
There’s a display case of these shiny objects, strange combinations of geometric shapes which have somehow melted. But his heart is still with knobbly would-be machinery, albeit with a Summer of Love psychedelic style. One of the most famous works from this period could be straight out of the Beatles cartoon Yellow Submarine (1968).
As early as 1954 Paolozzi set up a design company to create home furnishings from wallpaper and fabrics to ceramics. Examples of these, in particular a set of dresses he designed in different decades, is included in the exhibition, but didn’t have the same dynamic effect on me as either the sculptures or prints.
Revolutionary at the time was the incorporation of his brand of abstract designs into the very traditional medium of tapestry. The most famous work in this area is the four-metre wide Whitworth Tapestry (1967).
Apparently Paolozzi disliked the creeping engulfment of art by theory and curator-speak, and a room here is devoted to works which take the mickey out of the art world. These include a block of fake gold ingots made of aluminium and printed with the phrase ‘100% F*ART’.
The experimental portfolio General Dynamic F.U.N. consists of printed sheets of random text, abstract patterns and images designed to be rearranged and read by readers in infinite combinations. Maybe. But as hung on the walls of a gallery, the individual sheets look very much like more collages of comic and consumer magazine images from the 1950s.
More striking was a set of large prints of his characteristic engineer/machine imagery titled Calcium Light Nights (1974 to 1976) presumably because they all have a more washed out, pastel colouring than earlier prints.
The last rooms feature two very distinct but stylistically related types of output.
1. He found a new way of configuring the human body and head, basically taking a salami slicer to the human figure and sliding disconcerting sections of it forwards or back to create a strange angular vision of the human body, perfectly in keeping with his lifelong interest in science fiction and technology.
(Disconcertingly the show also features a couple of completely smooth, lifelike bronze busts, although even these have the sci-fi perfection of the automaton from the classic movie Metropolis.)
2. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s Paolozzi took on a number of commissions for large sculptures in public places. Some of these incorporate the salami sliced heads and bodies like the figure of Isaac Newton in the British Library or the Vulcan in Docklands; others are large castings of the kinds of intricate faux-mechanical friezes he liked throughout his career, like the cooling tower at Pimlico; others are purely abstract like the recently restored mosaics which cover the entrance hall, walls and walkways of Tottenham Court Tube station.
Bringing together an astonishing 250 works from collections around the world and spanning Paolozzi’s five decades of dynamic and varied work, this is a lovely, happy, creative and inspiring exhibition.
Related links
Eduardo Paolozzi continues at the Whitechapel Gallery until 14 May 2017
For once it is entirely appropriate that the gallery shop has lots of merchandise carrying Paolozzi imagery – I particularly liked the tea-towel with one of the As is when print designs on it. But also that it’s selling fabulous Robbie the Robot toys. What fun!
Books & Boots 