All posts tagged Frank Bowling

Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945 to 1965 @ the Barbican

Layout

The Barbican gallery is a big exhibition space, spread over two floors. On the ground floor, as you come in, there’s the ticket desk and shop, then you walk through a doorway on your right into the ground floor display space. This is divided into three successively larger ‘rooms’, the third and final one being a fairly big atrium. You then emerge from these into a corridor which runs back alongside the atrium spaces back to the shop, and off which are three alcove rooms or ‘bays’.

Back by the shop there are stairs up to the first floor gallery which runs round the walls and allows you to look down onto the atrium space you’ve just left, so you can see paintings and sculptures from above. You can walk right round this gallery but there are only alcoves or bays on along two sides of it, four bays on one side and four on the other. 3 + 3 + 4 + 4 = 14 distinct display spaces.

14 rooms, 14 themes

So when the curators set out to design this exhibition of post-war British art they had 14 spaces to play with and have come up with 14 topics or subject areas, accordingly. Starting in room 1, the visitor walks through 14 themed aspects of post-war British art, which are also arranged in a loosely chronological order, starting just after the end of the Second World War and ending in 1965.

‘Cyborg collages’: First Contact by John McHale (1958) Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York © Estate of John McHale

The new

The curators have made one key decision which defines the entire show: believing that post-war artists had to cope with the aftermath of ‘a cataclysmic war that called into question religion, ideology and humanity itself’, they have consciously chosen to focus on THE NEW ARTISTS of the period. They have ignored artists who’d come to prominence between the wars (so no Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth, for example; no Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, no Stanley Spencer, Surrealists or Bloomsburyites).

Instead the curators have tried to catch the mood conveyed by The New Generation of young artists who emerged immediately after the war and set a new tone. The result is that, although the exhibition contains the huge number of 200 works of painting, sculpture and photography, by an overwhelming number of artists (48) it has a surprising unity of feel.

Leaving aside the (excellent) photographers, the paintings in particular demonstrate what you could call a kind of damaged abstraction. There’s a blurred, grey and brown, muddy quality to much of the work. There are lots of earth tones, earth grey, earth cream, earth browns.

West Indian waitresses by Eva Frankfurther (1955) Ben Uri collection, presented by the artist’s sister Beate Planskoy © the Estate of Eve Frankfurther

The war hadn’t pulverised a specific landscape, as in the images of the Western Front made famous during and after the First World War. It had ranged far more widely than that. Crucially, it had permanently damaged mankind’s view of itself.

It was hard to be optimistic about people or ‘culture’ or ‘civilisation’ after news of the concentration camps broke in May 1945, and then the atom bombs were dropped in August 1945. And then the H bombs and the start of the incredibly fearful and menacing Cold War. Many artists struggled to believe in anything positive and channelled their energies into devising novel ways to express their horror and despair.

With so many works by so many artists, there are some exceptions, but overall I’d say this is quite a grim, depressing exhibition, with much to be justifiably depressed about. If you put the (five) photographers to one side, then there’s hardly any figurative work, and when there is (Auerbach, Freud, Bacon, Bratby, Cooke, Souza) it is heavily stylised or deliberately distorted. There are certainly no landscapes. It is an accumulation of damaged psyches.

From murk to clarity

It occurred to me that you could arrange almost all the works along a spectrum from Murk to Clarity. Then you further could sub-divide these categories. What I mean is that the murky end of the spectrum could be divided into images which look like:

  • bodies melted in a nuclear blast (Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter King)
  • bodies eviscerated in some grotesque medical calamity (Magda Cordell)
  • people drowning in Holocaust concentration camp mud (Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff)
  • bodies blurring into hunks of meat (Francis Bacon)
  • bodies reimagined as abstract shapes, blots, drabs and dribbles of paint (Gillian Ayres)
  • bodies combined with inorganic materials such as metal to become ominous cyborgs (Lynn Chadwick’s semi-abstract sculpture of a demonic bird, John McHale’s robotic family, Elisabeth Frink’s menacingly humanoid Harbinger Birds and the St Sebastian sculptures by Eduardo Paolozzi)

The murkiest of the murk

I’ve always heartily disliked the paintings of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Both applied unbelievable amounts of paint to their canvasses to create nightmare brown meringues of mud. They themselves in interviews claimed they were seeking to get at the essence of the subject or to capture the fleeting nature of reality or some such. They obsessively painted London scenes such as two big muddy paintings here, of the Shell building on the South Bank and Willesden railway junction.

But for me the key fact is that both were Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and, to me, all their paintings powerfully, oppressively convey the feel of the grim Polish winter mud in which so many of their fellow Jews were worked to death, starved to death and exterminated.

‘Drowning in the mud of the Holocaust’: Head of Gerda Boehm by Frank Auerbach (1964) Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts © The Artist

Clarity

At the other end of the spectrum is what I’ve called Clarity, which can be sub-divided into maybe three rooms or artists:

  • artists in the Concrete room
  • Lucian Freud
  • Surface / Vessel room

In the room called Concrete are a set of surprisingly calm, clean, crisp, white abstract images. Victor Pasmore was a celebrate figurative artist when, in the late 1940s, he underwent a conversion to abstraction. By 1951 Pasmore had established a circle of younger artists who were equally committed to the cause of geometric abstraction, which they referred to variously as ‘Concrete’, ‘Constructionist’ or ‘Constructivist’ art, artists including Mary Martin, Adrian Heath, Anthony Hill, Robert Adams and Denis Williams.

Concrete is right next to the death camp vibe of the Auerbach room, Scars, and I really needed it. The white geometric shapes projecting from the canvas as Modernist friezes reminded me of Ben Nicholson (famous between the wars and so banned from this show).

Lucian Freud may seem an odd artist to group under the heading of clarity, but the exhibition features three of his earliest works which do, in fact feature this quality. Edgy, though. Distorted. The curators put it well when they say that ‘Freud’s forensic attention to small details suggests an uneasy vigilance, revealing anxieties just below the surface.’

‘Neurotic clarity’: Girl with Roses by Lucian Freud (1948) Courtesy of the British Council Collection © The Lucian Freud Archive/ Bridgeman Images, photograph

The third ‘calm’ room is titled Surface/Vessel. It features the paintings by William Scott and ceramic vessels by Lucie Rie and Hans Coper. What they have in common is the withdrawal of all bright colours and a return to the colour of canvas and clay, textured surfaces and irregular forms. I might have liked them because 15 years later they set the tone for the kind of abstract prints you could buy at Habitat and Ikea and my parents decorated my childhood home with reproductions of these kind of gentle, cream and earth brown soothing shapes.

Installation view of Postwar Modern showing two works by William Scott: Message Obscure I (1965) and Morning in Mykonos (1961)

Room guide

The themed rooms are:

1. Body and cosmos

The first three rooms are the three progressively bigger ones on the ground floor. Each is dominated by a big signature work. This first room is dominated by Full Stop by John Latham. This seems pretty meh in reproduction which doesn’t convey its size. It’s huge, monumental, 3.5 metres by 2.5 metres, a Mark Rothko of a painting, and a hypnotic image. Is it a solar eclipse, a black hole, an enormously magnified piece of typography. Something has ended – but what?

‘The death of colour’: Full Stop by John Latham (1961) Tate © the Estate of John Latham

Much smaller is the set of three prints by Eduardo Paolozzi, born in 1924 the son of Italian immigrants, so an impressionable teenager during the war. It’s impossible to make the prints out as heads because the images look eroded and decomposed as if by acid or, as wall label suggests, evaporated in the atomic blast so many around the world feared was coming.

2. Post atomic garden

The second room is bigger, contains more but is dominated by the mutant bird sculpture by Lynn Chadwick named The Fisheater (1951). It was commissioned for the 1951 Festival of Britain. It’s set on a slender tripod and aerial assembly, a slender outline of a bird made from thin metal rods and sheets of metal, looking a bit like the skeleton of Concorde, very slightly swaying in the ambient air, beakily looking down at us soft and vulnerable humans.

Installation view of Postwar Modern at the Barbican showing The Fisheater by Lynn Chadwick (1951)

Fisheater epitomises the combination of light, modern industrial elements with unnerving menace which is one of the threads which runs through the show, as in the Paolozzi robots and the robot-humanoid nuclear family grimly depicted in John McHale’s First Contact (above).

3. Strange universe

The third ground floor space is the biggest, lined with huge paintings by a variety of artists, but it is dominated by a signature work, three metal sculptures, about man-size mutant cyborgs made out of complex metal and engineering detritus, welded together and melting at the edges as if they’re robots which have been brought to a halt and slightly melted in the ultimate nuclear apocalypse. They’re by Eduardo Poalozzi who, I think, has more pieces than anyone else in the exhibition and emerges as its presiding spirit.

‘Humanoid figures assembled from electrical scraps and castoffs’: Installation view of Postwar Modern showing Saint Sebastian by Eduardo Paolozzi (1957)

This room also features some enormous paintings by Magda Cordell which are splashed with red and orange and look like the freshly flayed and eviscerated carcass of a humanoid life form.

Figure 59 by Magda Cordell (1958)

4. Jean and John

The first of the bays off to the side of the ground floor corridor contains 8 or so paintings by the husband and wife artists Jean Cooke and John Bratby. Bratby’s stylised but basically figurative still lifes of their home, with boxes of cereals on the kitchen table, were nicknamed ‘Kitchen Sink’ art, presumably before kitchen sink drama came along. Although figurative and colourful, these paintings somehow bespeak the horrible, pokey domesticity of English life and it came as no surprise to learn that Bratby was jealous of his wife’s talent, destroyed much of her work and beat and abused her. See what I mean by grim?

5. Intimacy and aura

This is the room with the neurotic early paintings by Lucian Freud which I mentioned above.

But it also features the first of the photographers, Bill Brandt. Photography, with its figurative realism, comes as a big relief after four rooms loaded with paintings of bleakness, despair, mutant robots and huge abattoir paintings. But it is even more of a relief to discover that Brandt is represented here by a series of photos of female nudes. It’s not that they’re nude so much as that they’re studies of people who are young, fit and healthy. It is a sudden oasis in a desert of radioactive despair.

Apparently Brandt had been renowned in the 1930s for his photojournalism (thus breaking the curators’ self-imposed rule that no-one from between the wars has a place) but 1945 saw a radical shift in his practice as he began experimenting with nude studies indoors. Not only indoors, but in spare, spartan uncarpeted rooms. So, although fully realistic, these studies also have a strange, spooky, spectral mood. Arguably these photos, although entirely naturalistic, manage to share the same sense of nervy ominous as so many of the paintings and sculptures.

The Policeman’s Daughter, Hampstead, London 1945 by Bill Brandt © Bill Brandt Archive

6. Lush life

This room is a surprise. One entire wall is a hugely blown up photo of the interior of a new model home designed by the visionary architects Alison and Peter Smithson. It’s a photo of their stand at the 1956 Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition. It was titled ‘House of the Future’ and the furniture was created using plaster, plywood and paint masquerading as the moulded plastic they’d like to have used but couldn’t afford, the kind of new super-slimmed-down ideals for living designs which were being pioneered and mass produced in America and which featured in the Barbican exhibition about Charles and Ray Eames.

Installation view of Postwar Modern showing the wall-sized photo of Alison and Peter Smithson’s 1956 ‘House of the Future’, with just one yellow ‘egg chair’, made from moulded reinforced polyester, on the low dais.

The American theme is echoed in a series of humorous collages created by Eduardo Paolozzi (is he the most represented artist in the show?). It’s a series of A4 sized collages he created by cutting up images from glossy American consumer magazines, titling the series Bunk. Of course they’re meant to be ironic and subversive and whatnot, but what really comes over is the power and optimism of the original images. Particularly when set against the post-atomic, post-Holocaust nihilism of so much of the rest of the show.

Bunk! Evadne in Green Dimension by Eduardo Paolozzi (1952) Victoria and Albert Museum, © The Paolozzi Foundation

7. Scars

As described above, the Auerbach and Kossoff, drowning in mud, Holocaust despair room.

The room also has a little TV on which is playing a film of a 1961 event carried out by another Jew (the curators emphasis the common ethnicity of these three artists), Gustav Metzger. Metzger pioneered an art of ‘auto-destruction’ in the late 1950s, staging works that enacted their own disintegration, mirroring the violence he felt in a world hell bent on its own destruction. In the grainy old film Metzger is wearing a gas mask, with St Paul’s in the background, while he sprays acid onto canvas which promptly shrivels and dissolves. ‘Happenings’ had been happening in America among beatnik audiences art colleges throughout the 1950s. This appears to be Metzger’s variation on the idea which – as so often in this exhibition – accentuates the negative.

8. Concrete

As described above, a roomful of works by Victor Pasmore and his fellow ‘Concrete’ artists. I especially enjoyed the small-scale, abstract sculptures by Robert Adams. Calm and healing.

Installation view of Postwar Modern at the Barbican showing works by Robert Adams, being: Divided form (1951), Rectangular bronze form number 7 (1955) and Balanced bronze forms (1955).

9. Choreography of the street

More photography, thank God. The black and white snaps of Nigel Henderson and Roger Mayne who specialised in capturing children at play in the gritty, ruin-infested post war streets. Mayne’s most famous body of work was created between 1956 and 1961, capturing the working-class community of Southam Street in North Kensington, west London. One of his photos was used for the cover Colin MacInnes’s novel, Absolute Beginners (1959), a copy of which is here in a glass case.

Street scene 1957 by Roger Mayne © Roger Mayne Archive / Mary Evans Picture Library

Reminds me a bit of the photo of young toughs in Finsbury Park, 1958, which marked the start of Don McCullin’s career.

The lovely and hugely evocative photos of kids playing in bomb sites are interspersed with a series of collages by Robyn Denny and Eduardo Paolozzi (surely Paolozzi is the most featured artist in the show?). And alongside these, collages and in the radical print designs created by Henderson and Paolozzi for their company Hammer Prints Ltd (1954 to 1962).

10. Two women

The two women in question are German refugee painter Eva Frankfurther and home-grown Mancunian photographer, Shirley Baker. Baker documented the changing face of Manchester in the 1950s and early 60s as the old slums were demolished and cleared for high rises and social housing. She walked the streets with a camera always in her bag, taking wonderfully evocative black and white photos of wretched slums and the old-style, working class inhabitants. In 1965 she started experimenting with colour photography and some of her colour photos are feature here.

I was lucky enough to go to the Shirley Baker exhibition at the Photographers Gallery a few years ago – none of the colour photos here are as good as her black and white ones. In a funny kind of way, colour shots of this kind of scene look oddly older, more technologically dated, than the pure black and white ones.

Anyway, the point is… look at the rubble! And in 1965! Twenty years after the war, large parts of England were still struggling to drag themselves into the modern age.

Hulme 1965 by Shirley Baker © Nan Levy for the Estate of Shirley Baker

11. Cruise

The wall label in this room informs us that:

Cruising, or looking for a casual sexual encounter in a public place, was central to the expression and exploration of male same-sex love and desire in the postwar years…

And so it is that one wall features a couple of early works by David Hockney, large browny-black background with all kinds of graffiti, words, lines and squiggles drawn across them:

The title My Brother is Only Seventeen (1962) was derived from graffiti that Hockney read on the toilet walls of Earl’s Court station, a popular cruising spot.

My Brother is only Seventeen by David Hockney (1962) © Royal College of Art

But the real revelation of this room is arguably the best thing in the exhibition. In 1954 Francis Bacon painted a series of seven huge paintings depicting a man in a dark suit sitting at the bar of a hotel, although the background has been stylised to become the slender bars of some kind of cage set against a very dark background. Three of the series are hung here, side by side.

Man in Blue I by Francis Bacon (1954) Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam © The Estate of Francis Bacon

A photo like this doesn’t do the paintings any kind of justice. They are not only enormous but also, despite their stylised subject matter, have the depth and resonance of Old Master paintings. It took me a while to realise that, unlike all the other rooms in the show, the walls of this room are painted black, as if we are in a very old museum or gallery, and these three Man in Blue paintgins have the power and depth of Old Masters.

Black upon black, depths of blackness, inky impenetrability and ominousness. Possibly the best part of the entire exhibition was standing in front of these three enormous variations on a dark, baleful image and letting it soak right in to your soul.

12. Surface/vessel

As described above, a calming, peaceful room of the paintings by William Scott and ceramic vessels by Lucie Rie and Hans Coper.

13. Liberated form and space

Big colourful paintings by Gillian Ayres, Patrick Heron and Frank Bowling. From the reproductions I thought I’d like the Ayres, but in the flesh I found them a too big and I didn’t warm to her use of ‘dribbles, splashes and stains’ of paint, as the curators themselves describe her work.

‘A world of abstract shapes and dripping paint’: Break-off by Gillian Ayres (1961) Tate © the Estate of Gillian Ayres, courtesy of Marlborough Gallery, London

By the same token, I didn’t warm to the press release photos of paintings by Patrick Heron, but in the flesh found them to be some of the very few genuinely colourful, vibrant and life affirming paintings in the entire exhibition. The wall label explains that, like Pasmore and other post-war artists, when he moved from figurative to abstract painting Heron experienced a great sense of liberation.

June Horizon by Patrick Heron (1957) Wakefield Council Permanent Art Collection (The Hepworth Wakefield) © The Estate of Patrick Heron

14. Horizon

The exhibition ends on an oddity.

We met Gustav Metzger in the Scars room, represented by a film of one of his auto-destructive events. Here, at the end of the exhibition is a blacked out room with half a dozen film projectors projecting onto two walls a series of abstract swirling shapes, which were to become super familiar in the Psychedelic movement and subsequently in the lava lamps of millions of suburban bedrooms. Metzger had moved away from the ‘auto-destructive art’ of the 1950s and towards what he now titled ‘auto-creation’, in which the work of art takes on its own life. This immersive room, complete with bean bags (but no spliffs) is titled Liquid Crystal Environment and was created in 1965 using heat-sensitive chemicals sandwiched between rotating glass slides in a projector.

It’s an odd piece to end on because it seems so out of synch with the rest of the show. It feels like a little bit of the Psychedelic Sixties which has got lost in an exhibition which is overwhelmingly about the grim psychic damage, the anxieties and angst of the early Cold War, with the long memory of the Holocaust festering under the shadow of nuclear apocalypse.

Maybe it’s meant to feel cheerful but it doesn’t, which might explain why the two or three times I walked past I didn’t see anybody on the numerous beanbags.

Immigrants

An impressive number of the artists were refugees from Nazi Europe (Auerbach. Kossoff, Metzger, Lucie Rie, Hans Coper, Eva Frankfurther, Magda Cordell). But the curators go out of their way to include artists from colonial backgrounds, non-white immigrants from what was still the British Empire. These include:

  • Francis Newton Souza (India), with his intimidating, highly stylised black Christs (1958) in the first room
  • Anwar Jalal Shemza (Pakistan) with a series of Islam-inspired abstracts in the same room as Heron and Ayres
  • Kim Lim (Singapore Chinese) with her delicate abstract sculptures

The Barbican’s birthday show

The curators point out that the exhibition has been timed to coincide with the fortieth birthday of the Barbican’s opening, for it was in the grim post-war period that the Barbican Estate was first conceived, to occupy what was at the time an enormous bombsite in the heart of London.

The Barbican itself, a grim, forbidding, concrete bunker, on an oppressive grey, rainy day, was the perfect setting for an exhibition about the damaged lives, damaged psyches and damaged country which – despite occasional bursts of colour – is what comes over so powerfully in this show.

Related links

Other Barbican reviews

2 Comments
by Simon on March 4, 2022  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Second World War
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on March 4, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/03/04/postwar-modern-new-art-in-britain-1945-to-1965-barbican/

Manga @ the British Museum

Wow! The British Museum sure knows how to put on an exhibition! This comprehensive overview of the history and variety of Japanese manga comics, characters and stories, is the largest show on manga ever staged outside of Japan, and an all-singing, all-dancing feast for the mind and imagination and the senses!

Higashikata Josuke, a hero from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure (1987 to the present) by Araki Hirohiko. Photo by the author

The long Sainsbury Exhibition Galleries at the back of the Museum’s main courtyard have been turned into lowlit funfair and phantasmagoria of all things manga, absolutely packed with a riot of ways of displaying, showing, highlighting, explaining, animating and enjoying all things manga. There are:

  • bookshelves packed with manga books (tankôbon) to take down and read
  • blow-ups of favourite manga characters in striking poses stuck to the walls
  • frames from manga books blown-up onto big canvases hanging from the ceiling
  • animated manga adventures (anime) projected onto screens all over the place
  • display cases examining scores of aspects and elements of the manga style
  • wall labels explaining the history and origins of manga
  • an long, painted theatre curtain covered with traditional Japanese characters from the 1880s, showing manga’s roots in theatrical costume and caricature
  • a huge model of a human head flayed of its skin to become a looming, muscled menace (a manga character, not an anatomical model)
  • footage of the enormous Comiket convention which attracts tens of thousands of manga fans every year
  • footage of a typical ‘cosplay’ festival where thousands of Japanese and foreigners dress up as their favourite manga characters
  • clips from some of the classic animated films produced by the famous Studio Ghibli projected onto a couple of big screens hanging from the ceiling
  • TV monitors which show interviews with famous and venerable practitioners of manga art
  • and all the way through, countless wall labels giving an enjoyable overload of information – either long ones giving you the history and development of the form, or shorter ones giving brief explanations of the huge variety of genres and subject matters which manga has covered

The press release explained that the exhibition is actually structured into six sections but it didn’t feel like that at all, and this review reflects the random, scattergun and sometimes repetitive experience of wandering around the big exhibition hall attracted to this or that image or TV interview or display or information label, sometimes several times, as I tried to get the facts and history and varieties of manga clear in my head.

Information panel early on in the exhibition. Photo by the author

Manga: a quick overview

To quote Wikipedia:

Manga are comics or graphic novels created in Japan or by creators in the Japanese language, conforming to a style developed in Japan in the late 19th century.

The term manga in Japan is a word used to refer to both comics and cartooning. ‘Manga’ as a term used outside Japan refers to comics originally published in Japan.

In Japan, people of all ages read manga. The medium includes works in a broad range of genres: action, adventure, business and commerce, comedy, detective, drama, historical, horror, mystery, romance, science fiction and fantasy, erotica, sports and games, and suspense, among others.

Since the 1950s, manga has steadily become a major part of the Japanese publishing industry. By 1995, the manga market in Japan was valued at $7 billion, with annual sales of 1.9 billion manga books and manga magazines in Japan (equivalent to 15 issues per person per year [the population of Japan is 127 million]).

Manga stories are typically printed in black-and-white, although some full-color manga exist. In Japan, manga are usually serialized in large manga magazines, often containing many stories, each presented in a single episode to be continued in the next issue.

A manga artist (mangaka in Japanese) typically works with a few assistants in a small studio and is associated with a creative editor from a commercial publishing company. If a manga series is popular enough, it may be animated after or during its run.

Nowadays Manga has expanded way beyond printed magazines and books to include animated films (anime) and a huge gaming industry.

Icaro by Moebius and Jirō Taniguchi (1997) describes the mind-bending adventures of a young man, Icaro, with the ability to fly and a young woman, Yukiko, who risks her life – and more – to help Icaro achieve his dream. Photo by the author

Modern origins

Manga developed from serialised cartoon strips in newspapers in the late 1800s. Political and satirical artists Kitazawa Rakuten (1876 to 1955) and Okomoto Ippei (1886 to 1948) are considered the first manga artist. Their work inspired the next generation, including manga legend Tezuka Osamu, creator of Astro Boy.

Osamu’s first manga book was New Treasure Island published in 1947, which blended influences of earlier manga, Disney cartoons and movies. It sold a sensational 400,000 copies, not bad for an 18-year-old and just after the war when the country’s economy was in ruins. Osamu went on to pioneer various manga ‘looks’, not least in his use of cinematic page layouts, casts of recurring characters, and imaginative stories.

Osamu produced manga aimed at both male and female readers, The Mighty Atom (1952) for the former, Princess Knight (1953) for the latter.

Some young visitors enthusiastically copying details about one of the many manga characters blown up and painted on the wall. Photo by the author

Visual techniques of manga

Manga has evolved a set of signs and symbols (manpu) which manga artists use to suggest actions or emotions.

Reading direction

Like Japanese writing manga is read from top to bottom and from right to left. The action is contained within frames called koma, which divide the page.

Fukidashi

Speech bubbles. The shapes of speech and thought bubbles change to reflect mood and content.

Gitaigo / giseigo

Sound effects are used to convey drama and to involve the reader in the action.

Screen tone (tōn)

The colour and texture and ‘tone’ of the background, or of the entire image, can be varied to reflect the mood of a scene.

Two characters from the women-only Princess Jellyfish series (2008 to 2017). Photo by the author

The profession of manga

There are about 5,000 professional manga artists in Japan and the number continues to grow. There are many routes into the industry: some up-and-coming artists submit manga ideas to publishing houses, some are spotted at fan conventions, some get work as editorial assistants and work their way up.

There’s a monitor showing footage of manga artists and scriptwriters working away in a modern studio, in almost factory, mass production, conditions. The books and magazines and stories are certainly churned out on an industrial scale.

Typical manga stories progress through fixed stages, from sketches and drafts, to a script and storyboard (neemu), to final pages approved by an editor for publication. Many artists write and illustrate their own manga, some use a scriptwriter. Others rely heavily on their editors for content and drawing.

Shelves packed with manga books and a bench to sit and read on. Note the nationality and age of the visitors. Photo by the author

The manga industry

Manga is big business. The total income of the Japanese manga industry in 2016 was about three billion dollars. Four of the top manga publishers – Hakusensha, Kodansha, Shogakukan and Shueisha – dominate the market. They are in constant competition, publishing new stories and characters, striving to keep popular manga artists on their books, and running regular competitions to discover new artists, while any new innovation is quickly copied.

Alongside many other audiovisual displays, the exhibition includes half a dozen TV monitors showing interviews with current leading practitioners of the art, including:

  • Nahuma Ichirō, born 1963 and now editor-in-chief of Big Comic
  • Suzuki Haruhiko (b.1955) co-creator of the popular series Captain Tsubasa (1981 to 1988) and now Managing Director of Shueisha
  • Torishima Kazuhiko (b.1952) now chairman of Hakusensha, but who, as editor of the weekly Shōnen Magazine helped to create the popular Dragon Ball series (1984 to 1995)

Visitor demographics

The exhibition was heaving, absolutely packed. There were a lot of Japanese here, and I heard French and Italian being spoken. But what really impressed me was the age of the visitors. At Tate Britain’s Frank Bowling exhibition, which I went to last week, most of the visitors were the traditional older, grey-haired types – and, after soaking myself in manga, I popped upstairs at the British Museum to see the Edvard Munch show which was rammed with really old people, including at least three old men who were using sticks and moving very slowly – the oldest of the old – barely mobile.

The contrast between those shows of ‘fine’ art, and the crowd in the Manga show couldn’t have been more dramatic. Manga was packed with kids and teenagers and – mirabile dictu – even non-white people!

At the end of the show there’s an interactive gimmick where you stand on a white circle that’s been painted on the floor and a camera up on the wall captures you and projects it onto a computer screen where you can select a variety of manga backgrounds and even, I think, change your own appearance to become a manga character.

The point is there was a whole cluster of black kids doing it, pushing and joking with each other and clustered round the screen giving each other ridiculous appearances. From visiting well over 150 art exhibitions I can tell you that you never get groups of black kids at art exhibitions. Isolated black individuals or couples, maybe.

I smiled as I watched them larking about, genuinely having fun, and it crossed my mind that, if art galleries and museums are sincere about ‘reaching out to all sectors of the community’ and ‘promoting diversity’, the obvious way to do it is to put on shows on popular subjects. Trying to attract the street people I see everyday in Streatham and Tooting to an emotionally and intellectually challenging exhibition of woodcuts by the late-Victorian and chronically depressed Norwegian artist Edvard Munch is always going to be an impossible challenge.

Putting on a fun, interactive show, with plenty of moving pictures, animations, cartoons, TV clips and things to do, on a subject which lots of kids and teenagers can immediately relate to – that’s the secret of attracting more diverse and varied (and younger) audiences.

Busy and immersive

This is a terrible photo but it shows you how busy and visually immersive the exhibition is. At bottom is a huge video photo of a typically packed manga bookshop (it is in fact Comic Takaoka, in Jinbôchô Tokyo, one of the oldest continually operating manga bookstores in Japan).

Above it is one of several screens hanging from the ceiling on which are projected an animated version of Professor Munakata’s British Museum Adventure which the British Museum commissioned from leading manga artist Hoshino Yukinobu and which has gone on to be animated.

You can see loads of other blown-up images hanging like a forest in the background.

And off to the left, there is the enormous plastic sculpture of a flayed head, the Colossal Titan, maybe ten feet tall, from a manga story called The Attack on Titan (2012 to 2013). It’s like a fair.

Installation view of Manga at the British Museum. Photo by the author

Historical precursors

Manga as we know it emerged in the late 1800s, building on Japan’s long tradition of visual storytelling. Precursors of manga include narrative handscrolls and woodcut prints and cheap illustrated novels. The exhibition goes way back to display a picture handscroll dating to 1100, the so-called Handscroll of Frolicking Animals, which shows cartoon animals wrestling, playing and, well, generally frolicking.

Other examples of historical precursors are scattered through the exhibition but the most striking example of manga’s historical roots is the 17-metre-long Kabuki theatre curtain from the Shintomiza theatre in Tokyo which dates from the 1880s and depicts traditional Japanese folk characters and monsters. This repays some study and a slow stroll along it taking in the garish and grotesque characters and animals.

Shintomiza Kabuki Theatre Curtain (1880) by Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831 to 1889). Photo by the author

Style and gender

During the 1950s two styles of manga emerged:

  1. shōnen and seinen aimed at boys and young men, respectively and focusing on action and adventure
  2. shōjo aimed at girls and women, focusing on romance and relationships

In fact these gendered genres were created by, and read by, either sex indistinguishably. Around 1970 a pioneering group of women, named the Year 24 Group, brought a new stylishness and sophistication to shōjo stories.

Genres

In the latter half of the exhibition are loads of displays, each one highlighting the wide range of subject matter manga stories can cover. Each of them was accompanied by a couple of examples of storylines around that particular subject.

Sport

Packed with passion, competition, rivalry, and dramatic physical activities which forge lasting friendships, sport is a natural subject for manga and has even been credited with making certain sports like soccer more popular in Japan

Sci fi

An obvious area is science fiction, not least because the cartoon style gives scope for drawing any number of futuristic spaceships, gadgets and gizmos. An example is Toward the Terra (1977 to 1980) set in a future where computers controal all aspects of birth, life and death. Only the Mu, a mutant breed of humans with telepathic powers, question the oppressive status quo.

Horror

Arising out of traditional Japanese horror stories, the clever use of frames means the horrifying thing can be ‘off screen’ or only hinted at, while the reader only sees the characters’ terrified reactions

Religion

Japan has two belief systems, Buddhism and Shinto. the example given here was of a manga comic which imagines what would happen in Jesus and the Buddha were modern flatmates, an idea which made me burst out laughing

Love and sex

This is a huge area. Some titles are sexually explicit and so veer into pornography. Others are squeaky clean romances for younger schoolgirls. And everything in between, including high school romance, maternal love, and Boys Love, an odd term which apparently refers to gay love affairs. As with everything to do with sex – a basic element of human behaviour which no society has ever been able to understand or police – there are, apparently, ‘concerns’ about some of the depictions of sex, and the United Nations, no less, has apparently listed some manga stories and threads as violent pornography. Should it be banned in order ‘to protect women and children’? Discuss.

Transformation

Adventure stories are full of people or things which can transform shift shapes – think of all the superheroes who pop into a phone box to change from boring salarymen into saviours of the world. Then multiply that idea by a thousand themes and variations. They give the example of Cyborg 009 which ran from 1964 to 1992 and concerned nine cyborgs, forced to transform into weapons by the evil Black Ghost Corporation, but who gained superhuman powers and escaped to run off and have thirty years’ worth of colourful adventures. Cyborgs creator – Ishinomori Shōtarō (1938 to 1998) currently holds the world record for manga output, having created 770 titles and 550 volumes.

Education

Manga is incorporated into educational texts, to produce simplified introductions to all manner of subjects from Marxism to sex education.

Current affairs

Manga can be produced on current political affairs or traumatic national history. The curators give the example of Kōno Fumiyo’s moving story about a family living with the after effects of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which won international praise.

Among the scores of snippets from various manga plotlines and heroes which I read, the most memorable was The Willow Tree, created by Hagio Moto in 2007. The entire story was displayed in its entirety in a long glass case. A woman stands by a tree and a boy passes by, growing older in each passing scene. As the seasons pass the willow tree grows and the boy becomes a man. On the final page the man approaches the woman under the tree, and we learn that she is his dead mother who has been watching over him all this time. When he tells her that he knows she is there and that he is fine, she disappears. The changing appearance of the tree, and its falling and regrowing leaves, symbolise not only the passage of time, but the evolving nature of maternal love.

Willow Tree by Hagio Moto (2007)

Comiket

Twice a year there’s a Comiket convention-event which lasts three days and attracts hundreds of thousands of participants and visitors. A big screen shows a speeded-up video of the hordes of visitors arriving outside the convention hall and then circulating round the vast arena of displays and stands, intercut with interviews with fans explaining why they attend.

Lots of fans bring along their own manga comics which they’ve created, known as dōjinshi, often using well-known characters, the manga equivalent of fan fiction. There are about 35,000 dōjinshi groups in Japan.

Cosplay

Short for ‘costume play’, this simply refers to dressing up as your favourite manga characters. Another massive video display shows a montage of mainly young people dressed up as all manner of manga characters and fooling around for the cameras, some acting out entire scenes, some going as far as staging entire storylines.

The annual World Cosplay Summit began in Nagoya in 2003. Cosplayers attend from round the world and the event includes a parade and a competition to be crowned world cosplay champion.

A still from the film about the World Cosplay Competition. Photo by the author

Studio Ghibli

Studio Ghibli is a Japanese animation film studio based in Koganei, Tokyo. The studio is best known for its anime (or animated cartoon) feature films. It was founded in 1985, after the worldwide success of the anime, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984).

Six of Studio Ghibli’s films are among the 10 highest-grossing anime films ever made in Japan, with Spirited Away (2001) the second highest, grossing over $290 million worldwide, and winning that year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film.

Two big screens suspended from the ceiling play a montage of clips from the Studio’s greatest hits, and down at floor level there are monitors showing interviews with some of the studio’s leading animators, explaining their approach and how anime differs from manga.

Still from The Wind Rises (2013) directed by Hayao Miyazaki for Studio Ghibli. Photo by the author

The frame

In among this bombardment of information and entertainment, I came across one information panel which struck me as saying the most interesting thing about manga as a visual art form. Inoue Takehiko was commissioned by the Museum to create a manga triptych to conclude the exhibition, and has contributed large, blown-up portraits of three of the tough urban heroes from his series REAL. These are accompanied by clips from an interview with him in which he says:

For me it is all in the frame (koma). I think frames are set to take you beyond, and at the same time to confine, infinity within their confines…a good manga is composed of human figures drawn as if alive defined within an artificial environment defined by the frame.

The second part of this statement is not necessarily true. The human figures of manga are most notable for not looking remotely lifelike, but having highly simplified, open, innocent facial features (characterised by unnaturally large, doe eyes), and for being improbably athletic and dynamic.

But the first half touches on something really profound about all art, which is the power of the frame in limiting and defining the image. This is true of one-off paintings, drawings and prints. But is immensely important in the creation of all manner of cartoon strips, from manga to the French tradition of bandes dessignées through to Anglo-American comic strips.

It is not about the individual picture – although these can often be of stunning impact and beauty – but fundamentally it is about the dynamic experience of reading through a series of framed pictures. And, as Takehiko points out, the framing is vital in creating the mood and tone of each image; and the way successive frames are defined, creates a kind of visual narrative energy, over and above the logical content of the pictures, of their narrative.

It would be really interesting to learn more about the psychology of reading comic strips – how they affect the eye and the mind in a way that static individual images don’t. Wonder if anyone’s researched this subject.

In fact, now I reflect on it the day after visiting, I realise that the exhibition gave a lot of information about the various subject matters of manga, but maybe not enough analysis of that look. All the characters and stories have the same simplified cartoon style and all have the supersize eyes with big catchlights in them.

And, reviewing all the photos I took, and manga online, I realise another fact which is so obvious no-one comments on it. Which is that manga characters don’t look very Japanese. Here’s a photo of a typical Japanese young woman picked at random off the internet, after googling ‘Japanese girl.’

A random Japanese young woman

And here’s a manga of a young woman, from the Wikipedia article.

Figure in manga style by Jez (2016)

The real woman has brown or lightly tanned skin, the manga has pure white skin; and the Japanese has the characteristically narrow eyes of the Far East, while the manga figure has those alarmingly big, round catchlit, cartoon eyes.

It would have been good to have had it explained just how that look came about. Why – for over fifty years – it has stayed essentially the same. And why it denatures the ethnic Japanese appearance in favour of something more…generic and, often, more white and western-seeming. (I may be wildly wrong about this, I’m just going on the impression gained from studying the examples of manga on display here, in this particular exhibition. For example the lead figure in the still from The Wind Rises could be Harry Potter, there is absolutely nothing Japanese about his appearance. Why?)

Golden Kamuy (2014 to the present) is set in early 20th century Hokkaido, where young Sugimoto Sa’ichi leads a ragtag band on a dangerous quest to locate a stolen golden hoard belonging to the Ainu people

Anyway – this is a fabulous and hugely enjoyable exhibition. If you or your friends or kids are remotely interested in manga, this is a must-visit experience.

The Guardian review

The next day I read the review by the Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones.

Jones savages the exhibition, raising two issues: 1) the unnecessary comparison with Old Masters, and 2) the omission of the filth and the fury associated with Japanese art.

1. Manga versus the Old Masters

Seems like whoever took Jones round, knowing he was a critic of high or fine art, tried to justify the show by comparing manga with classical Japanese art. This leads Jones to dismiss the exhibition we have as unworthy of the British Museum’s purpose and to wish it had been a completely different show:

I’ve rarely seen a show whose catalogue is so much more interesting than the display in the gallery. Not only are the drawings in the book dirtier, but there are far more illustrations of classic Japanese art. Surely this is what the exhibition should have been. It should have used the contemporary allure of manga to draw us into a huge survey of Japan’s art history.

I think he’s wrong. An exhibition of classic Japanese art should be that, and just that, and not need any gimmicks. This is an exhibition of a worldwide visual and commercial phenomenon. It needs no other justification. Jones accuses the museum of pandering to popular tastes. As I discussed above – if you want to attract kids and young people to museums you have to reach out to where they are. If, on the way to the manga show, the walk past Egyptian mummies and Assyrian lions and Viking helmets, all the better. They are acquiring the museum-going habit, the air of elitism and snobbery which I know – from personal experience – puts so many people off visiting art galleries and museums, is being dispelled. Once they’ve been to this, it’ll be easier (less intimidating) to go to something a bit more recherché.

2. Manga and pornography

Jones’s article also mentions the fact that lots of manga is ‘dirty’ (an oddly old-fashioned choice of word) by which he means pornographic. This confirms a nagging feeling I had that associates manga with random pornographic images I’ve come across in years of surfing the web. Even googling just the word ‘manga’ produces results which include topless or bottomless manga schoolgirls, some with a variety of sex aids. And some of the comments at the bottom of Jones’s article go into greater detail, giving the types of pornographic manga that are readily available, along with the Japanese terminology defining them (for example hentai, which refers, apparently, to ‘any type of perverse or bizarre sexual desire or act.’)

Having read those comments, and looked up some of the images, two obvious points emerge, for me. One is that Japanese erotic taste is different from ours. They are casually explicit about some things we are shocked by, and, as anyone who’s met a Japanese knows, quite easily shocked and even insulted by the casualness of our Western manners.

Yes, folks, it’s almost as if they come from a strikingly different culture and tradition (something which is so easy to forget in our 24/7, internationalised, global culture). Having read all the Guardian comments, collected the pornographic terminology, and looked up some of the examples, there is a second easy point to make.

Which is that the Museum and its curator obviously set out to attract the widest audience possible, to attract visitors of all ages – I saw plenty of teenagers, and families with kids, sometimes toddlers, excitedly looking at the cartoons or filling in the Children’s Trail handout they’d be given. I stood by one wall label while a girl about 7-years-old read out the label to her sister who was too young to read. Should the curators have included hard-core manga pornography in the exhibition? Should that little girl have found herself spelling out the precise meaning of pornographic terms to her young sister?

Obviously not. As Jones points out, some of that stuff can be found in the catalogue, all exhibition catalogues generally going into more detail than exhibitions can, and no child is going to buy the catalogue.

So it was the right call. You or I can explore porno manga on the internet to our heart’s content, if we wish. It would have been a disaster to include any in this show, thus created an X-rated zone kids couldn’t go into and probably causing shock horror stories in the press.

This exhibition is about creating a family-friendly, child-safe environment in which a) to enjoy yourself b) to learn lots about manga c) to inspire kids and the museum-averse to coming more often. It’s a success in every way.

Curator

Professor Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, founding Director of the Sainsbury Institute and Professor of Japanese Art and Culture at the University of East Anglia.

Related links

  • Manga continues at the British Museum until 26 August 2019

Other British Museum reviews

1 Comment
by Simon on July 23, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Cartoon, Exhibition
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on July 23, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/23/manga-the-british-museum/

Frank Bowling @ Tate Britain

‘Just throw the paint, Spencer!’
(Frank Bowling to his assistant, Spencer Richards, as told by Richards on the exhibition’s visitor audioguide)

This is a really good exhibition. Bowling isn’t a genius – this show doesn’t compare with the van Gogh exhibition downstairs at Tate Britain – but he is a consistently interesting and experimental artist, who has produced a steady stream of big, colourful and absorbing paintings. I found it hard to finally leave, and kept going back through the rooms to look again at the best paintings in the show.

Frank Bowling

Frank Bowling is a black British artist. He is still going strong, painting every day at the impressive age of 85.

Frank Bowling. Photo by Alastair Levy

Bowling was born in Guyana in 1934 and moved to England with his parents in 1950, when he was 15. After experimenting with poetry, and doing his National Service, Bowling decided to pursue a career in art and studied at the Royal College of Art. His contemporaries were David Hockney, Derek Boshier, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj and Peter Phillips. In fact, at graduation in 1962, Hockney was awarded the gold medal while Bowling was given the silver.

Back in those early years he was caught up in the expectation that he would be a ‘black’ artist and concern himself with colonial and post-colonial subjects – an expectation, he admits in modern interviews, that he at first played along with, doing a painting of African politician Patrice Lumumba and in 1965 at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, held in Senegal, winning the Grand Prize for Contemporary Arts.

It was only when he moved to New York in the mid-1960s that Bowling discovered the light and space and artistic freedom of contemporary American art. Encouraged by American critics, he changed his style, adopting the prevailing mode of abstract art, alongside the likes of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman.

As Bowling’s assistant, Spencer Richards, tells us on the visitor’s audioguide: ‘he didn’t want to be hemmed in by race and origins and that kind of stuff.’

This is the first major retrospective ever held of Bowling’s work in Britain. The gallery says it is ‘long overdue’ and seeing that he was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 2005 and awarded an OBE as long ago as 2008, it does seem extraordinary that this is the first major retrospective devoted to his work.

Nine rooms

The exhibition is in straightforward chronological order. It is divided into nine rooms each of which addresses a particular phase or style. But as I’ll explain later, in fact the show can be divided into two halves – flat surfaces, and gunky, gooey, three-D surfaces.

Room 1. Early work

This selection of early paintings includes works heavily influenced by Francis Bacon, the number one British artist in the early 1960s. Blurred figures trapped in cages look as if they’ve just been blasted by radiation.

Other early works use geometric patterns, referencing the Op Art (i.e. the playful use of geometric shapes) of Bridget Riley.

This room features some examples from a series he did using the motif of a swan, its neck and head realistic, but its body exploding, as it were, into abstraction, set against neat geometrical figures – note the orange and green concentric circles which have kind of melted, to the right of the swan’s body. If you look closely you can see that Bowling has mashed real bird feathers into the bloody, messy splurge of pain on the right. Unsettling.

Swan 1 (1964) by Frank Bowling © Frank Bowling

Room 2. Photographs into paintings

It was the Swinging Sixties. The room contains the original Observer magazine front cover of a Japanese model in a Mary Quant dress typical of the period.

Cover Girl (1966) by Frank Bowling © Frank Bowling. All rights reserved DACS 2019

Very reminiscent of David Hockney’s kind of ‘wrecked Pop Art’ of the period i.e. taking images from fashion and pop culture and kind of smearing and subverting them. More obvious is the ghostly outline of the house at the top. What is that? It is based on a photo of the big house which contained the Bowling family business (Bowling’s Variety Store) back in his home town of New Amsterdam, Guyana.

A friend sent Bowling the photo (the original is on display in one of the several display cases devoted to notes and letters and magazines and other ephemera which shed light on his career) and he used it obsessively in a whole series of paintings which contain the house motif superimposed on maps and abstract shapes. We can guess that this obsessive repetitiveness derives from a psychological need on the part of the artist to revisit the house, and by extension, the land of his parents. On the other hand – maybe it is just a powerful image or motif which he was interested in placing in different paintings, juxtaposing with other images to create the dynamism and energy of any collage.

Room 3. The map paintings

These are enormous. Suddenly we are in a huge white room on the walls of which are hung some truly enormously huge paintings. They are made of acrylic paint on flat canvas. In the second half of the 1960s Bowling was in New York and liberated by the scale and ambition of American painting, especially the abstract expressionists like Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still.

Just like them, the works are enormous and almost abstract, covered in great washes of paint, to create dynamic forcefields of colour.

Installation View of Frank Bowling at Tate Britain. Photo by Matt Greenwood

The gallery guide points out that almost all of them contain maps and that they mark ‘Bowling’s rejection of the western-centric cartography of many world maps’. I think this is wrong, and a typical attempt to shoehorn politically correct sentiment into the art. It stands to reason that many of the paintings feature a map of South America. Bowling is from Guyana which is in South America. And some of the others feature the ghostly stencilled outline of Africa. Ultimately he is of African heritage.

But quite a few of the others – like Dog Daze (1971, on the left in the photo above) feature a map of the entire world, laid out according to standard convention, exactly as you see it in any atlas or poster – with the Americas at the left, then the Atlantic, then Eurasia with Africa dangling down. Not subverting or rejecting anything in particular. I bought the audioguide to the exhibition and this contains quite a few quotes from the man himself, and Bowling makes it perfectly clear time and again, that his art is not about a ‘subject’.

Art is to do with painting colour and structure

If there are maps in the huge map paintings it is not to make the kind of politically correct, left-wing, political point which the curators want him to make. It is because they offer a motif around which the art can constellate and come into being. It enables the art. Its force is not political, it is imaginative.

For sure maps can be given meanings. I can paint an outline of Africa and declare it is ‘about’ slavery. Or empire and colonialism. Or oppression. Or poverty. Or the fight for independence. or about war. Or about dance and music. Or about anything I want it to ‘mean’. Then again, maps may just be shapes and patterns which are interesting and stimulating, as shapes, as a well-remembered shapes from schooldays, but which carry precisely as much freight and meaning as the viewer wishes to give them.

Some of these works are stunning, comparable to the Rothko room at Tate Modern, big enough for the visitor to fall into, to meditate on, to create a mood of profound calm and wonder.

At one end of the room is a stunning work titled Polish Rebecca, dating from 1971. You can make out the stencilled shape of South America at the centre and the wall label tells us that the Rebecca in question was a Polish Jewish friend of Bowling’s, and that the work is a meditation on the shared history of the African and Jewish diaspora – revealing ‘Bowling’s interest in the way identities are shaped by geo-politics and displacement’.

To me this is reading the liberal political concerns of 2019 back into a painting from 48 years ago. Maybe it is so. Maybe not. What’s not in doubt is that it is a stunning composition, dominated all the tints and shades of purple, the strange beguiling white feathering effect spreading up the west coast of South America, and the random swishes of green, blue and orange paint. In the flesh this enormous painting is utterly entrancing.

Polish Rebecca (1971) by Frank Bowling. Courtest of the Dallas Museum of Art © Frank Bowling

Room 4. The poured paintings

As if to prove that Bowling is more interested in art than in bien-pensant, liberal, progressive political theory, the next room is devoted to paintings with absolutely no figurative content. He set up a tilting platform that allowed him to pour paint from heights of up to two metres. As the paint hit the canvas it cascaded down in streams of mingling colour.

Ziff (1974) by Frank Bowling. Private collection, London, courtesy of Jessica McCormack © Frank Bowling. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019

Structured accident, not unlike the spatter paintings of Jackson Pollock and then the hundreds of random spurting spattering throwing flicking shooting artists of the experimental 1960s and 70s. The titles also became less meaningful, more accidental, referencing people who were in his thoughts or events during the day, totally random.

Room 5. Cosmic Space

Each new room has been marked by technical experimentation. In this once are works from the later 1970s where he began a set of further experiments. He began using ammonia and pearlessence, and applied splotches of paint by hand, producing marbling effects. He embraced accidents, which sometimes hardened into mannerisms. For example it was at this time that he took to leaving buckets of pain on the surface of the wet canvas, creating a circular ridge.

In Ah Susan Whoosh Bowling added water, turpentine and ammonia to the acrylic paint to create complicated chemical reactions. He poured the paint directly onto the canvas and then manipulated it with a squeegee. The technique forced him to work quickly, making strategic decisions to exploit the random combination of elements. It’s testimony to his skill that so many of these works, created under demanding conditions, with little or no planning, come out looking so haunting and powerful.

Ah Susan Whoosh (1981) by Frank Bowling. Private Collection, London

No reproduction can convey the shiny metallic tint of many of the colours, the sparkle on the surface of the paintings, which changes as you walk around them.

Three D

This brings me to the big divide in Bowling’s career which I mentioned at the start. The first four or five rooms are full of works where the paint lies more of less flat on the canvas. But in latter part of his career, from about 1980, and certainly in the last four rooms, Bowling’s canvases become thick and clotted three-dimensional artefacts.

He started using acrylic gel to create waves and ridges of colour and goo. And he started embedding objects in the paint. At first he used acrylic foam, cut into long strips, creating zoomorphic swirls and spirals.

In fact the ribbed nature of this foam reminded me a bit of fish skeletons, and the way some of these skeletal ruins emerge from a thick goo of paint, reminded me sometimes of the movie Alien. According to the wall labels:

Bowling also started to use a range of other materials and objects in his work. He applied metallic pigments, fluorescent chalk, beeswax and glitter to his densely textured surfaces. In several works, found objects such as plastic toys, packing material, the cap of a film canister and oyster shells are embedded within the paint. These items are rarely fully visible but add to the complexity and mysterious quality of the work.

Spreadout Ron Kitaj (1984 to 1986) by Frank Bowling. Tate © Frank Bowling. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019

Spreadout Ron Kitaj is so named because the artist Ron Kitaj saw an exhibition of Bowling’s works in 1986 and got in touch. Bowling describes the strips of acrylic foam he embeds in the surface of works like that as ‘the ribs of the geometry from which I work.’ The painting also includes shredded plastic packing material, plastic jewellery, toys and oyster shells. It’s not one of the best works here – its effect is too dark and dingy for me – but it’s very typical of his modus operandi.

Room 7. Water and Light

In 1989 Bowling went back to his childhood home in Guyana, accompanied by one of his sons. He immediately noticed the quality of the light in South America.

‘When I looked at the landscape in Guyana, I understood the light in my pictures is a very different light. I saw a crystalline haze, maybe an East wind and water rising up into the sky. It occurred to me for the first time, in my fifties, that the light is about Guyana. It is a constant in my efforts’ (1992).

As you might expect, the trip resulted in works which try to capture the effect, using Bowling’s (by now) trademark effects of acrylic gel swept into ridges, themselves arranged in very loose box or square shapes.

Sacha Jason Guyana Dreams 1989 Tate © Frank Bowling. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019

From the later 1960s Bowling had studios in London and New York. His London studio is in East London and here he has made a series of paintings titled Great Thames which do just that – reference the mighty river Thames, invoking the long line of landscape painters who Bowling is well aware of – Gainsborough, Turner and John Constable.

In the way they adapt his by now trademark use of gel to create boxes and ridges, scattered with metallic pigments, scored and indented with all manner of objects found around the studio and pressed into the surface – nonetheless, the Great Thames paintings on display here prompt comparisons with Monet – not so much in technique or even in aim, but in the shimmering evocativeness of the finished product.

Great Thames IV (1989 to 1989) by Frank Bowling. Arts Council Collection, South Bank Centre © Frank Bowling. All rights reserved DACS 2019

Room 8. Layering and stitching

In the 1990s, Bowling continued to work with acrylic paint and gel and continued to experiment with incorporating different materials and objects into his paintings. He experimented with stitching canvases together and attaching the main canvas to brightly-coloured strips of secondary canvas, to create a distinct border to the work.

He took this further by cutting up earlier canvases, and stapling sections together, juxtaposing different paint applications and colours. Like the many found objects embedded in the gloop, this stitching is very evident and all tends towards emphasising the materiality of the work of art. And, in some sense, its contingency. It is like this. But it needn’t have been like this. Meditate not only on the work. But on the arbitrariness and contingency which leads to the work.

Girls in the City (2017) by Frank Bowling © Frank Bowling

Girls in the City was made by stitching together seven individually stretched canvases. You can still see the vaguely square, ‘brick’-like shapes he creates using raised ridges of acrylic gel. But to that element of boxness, is added a more literal boxiness created by the piece’s assemblage from smaller parts. He is quotes as saying the works from this period were ‘organised in the way people structure themselves, in the way we are’ – presumably, assembled from lots of disparate elements.

Room 9. Explosive experimentation

This last room is devoted to works made over the past ten years. My first reaction was I didn’t like them so much. Nowadays confined to a sitting position, Bowling has used assistants to help him, and has continued his experimentation. He uses washes of thin paint, poured paint, blotched paint, stencilled applications, the use of acrylic gels, the insertion of found objects, and stitching together of different sections of canvas.

This results in what, for me, are rather a departure from the work of the previous three or so rooms. In a work like Iona Miriam’s Christmas Visit To and From Brighton the stitching is very much on display, in the sense that the canvas with the great pink crescent on it has been roughly chopped in half and stitched onto another canvas underneath, which appears to consist of a regular pattern of coloured stripes which provide a striking ‘interval’ between the top and bottom halves, and also, when you come to look at it, a frame around the ‘main’ canvas. And that’s before you get round to processing the complicated imagery, the vibrant colours and the scoring and striking into the surface, which characterise the ‘main’ image.

Iona Miriam’s Christmas Visit To and From Brighton (2017) by Frank Bowling. Courtesy Frank Bowling and Hales Gallery, Alexander Gray Associates and Marc Selwyn Fine Art © Frank Bowling. All rights reserved DACS 2018

I think that I was still too in thrall to the box or square gel ridge shapes of the earlier works, still processing the effect of them, to really appreciate these more recent works. Maybe you need to visit the exhibition several times to really absorb Bowling’s variety and inventiveness. These last works seem to be going somewhere completely new. I hope he lives long enough to show us where.

Summary

The works in the first part of the show are interesting and good, but often feel very much of their time like the Swinging Sixties cover girl and other works which feel like mash-ups of Hockney, Bacon, Kitaj with patches of Op Art thrown in.

The enormous map paintings – some of them over seven yards long – riffing off the abstract expressionists, are very powerful and absorbing in their own right.

The poured paintings reminded me a bit of school art projects. An interesting idea but the results weren’t that great.

It is only when Bowling starts working with acrylic gel and metallic tints, and embedding foam and then all kinds of objects into the surfaces of his paintings, that something weird and marvellous happens to his works.

Words cannot convey the rich and strange results of these experiments. The dense gloop, the metallic tints, and the strange clotted surfaces, alive with all sorts of half-buried objects, create enticing effects. I walked back and forth through the show half a dozen times or more and each time one particular painting stood out more and more strongly – spoke to me.

Philoctetes’ Bow (1987) by Frank Bowling. Courtesy the Artist and Hales Gallery © Frank Bowling

This reproduction in no way conveys the richness of the colour of this huge painting (it is 1.8 metres tall by 3.6 metres wide; it would cover most of the wall of an average sitting room).

And also doesn’t convey the way the long curve along the bottom which dominates it, actually sits proud of the surface. It is a characteristic slice of acrylic foam which also looks like a long, thin strip of corrugated cardboard. It not only creates the composition, but it projects it forward off the wall, and into your imagination. I kept being drawn back to look at it again and again, to sit in the bench placed in front of it precisely so the visitor can let it permeate every cell of your imagination.

Wow! What an amazing body of work.

Demographics

When I arrived at 10.30 the exhibition was almost empty. When I walked slowly through it at 12.30, there were 38 visitors, including me – 12 men and 26 women. There were no black or Asian people at all. The only people of colour were two of the Tate ‘visitor assistants’. There were half a dozen or so teenagers who seemed to be on a school trip, and one or two 20-somethings. The rest of us were white, middle-aged, grey-haired old types. Which reinforces the impression I’ve gained from reviewing some 150 art exhibitions: the gallery-going public in London is overwhelmingly white, middle-class, old or retired, and predominantly female.

The promotional video

Related links

More Tate Britain reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on July 18, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on July 18, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/18/frank-bowling-tate-britain/

Soul Of A Nation: Art In The Age Of Black Power @ Tate Modern

Back to the 1960s, again

America again, after:

British art curators can’t get enough American art. And the 1960s again, after:

The 1960s is art curators’ favourite decade, a brief period when words like ‘radical’ and ‘revolutionary’, which all exhibition curators love to use about all their exhibitions, actually seemed to mean something.

Let’s just take it for granted that the averagely-educated person knows that the 1960s were a time of ‘turmoil and change’, especially in an America racked by the escalating tragedy of the Vietnam War which led to an explosion of student activism and widespread popular unrest etc.

Various key figures were assassinated – John Kennedy (1963), Malcolm X (1965), Martin Luther King (1968) – adding to the sense of permanent crisis. The counter-culture of drugs, folk, jazz, poetry, experimental theatre and film which had existed in tiny beatnik enclaves in the 1950s went mainstream, reaching a heady climax in the summer of love of 1967 by which time free love, LSD, flower power and all the rest of it were widely publicised in music, film, newspapers, magazines, TV and on the streets.

There was an explosion of experimentation in all the arts and especially in popular music, which is more enduring and accessible than any other art form – the songs of the Beach Boys, Beatles, Rolling Stones, through Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Cream and hundreds of other groups and singers – Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan – immediately recall for most people a decade and a time very few of us personally experienced, but which we have been exposed to again and again in celebratory documentaries, biographies, albums, movies and adverts as a kind of peak of creative endeavour.

Afro-American clichés

A major strand of the general outburst of popular culture and protest was the ongoing demand for equal civil rights by a wide range of Afro-American organisations, voices and artists.

As indicated above, it is pop music which endures longest in the collective imagination and so most of us are familiar with the brilliant achievement of countless black recording artists (and behind them the network of black writers, producers, agents, clubs etc) such as Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Otis Redding, the whole Motown stable as well as the amazing array of great jazz artists, the obvious ones being Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

Anyone with a TV will have seen the world-famous images of the Civil Rights movement as replayed over and over again in documentaries about the time (such as the video at the American Prints exhibition which gave a three-minute whistle-stop tour of America in the 1960s to a soundtrack of The Doors) – Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech, black teenagers being hosed down by Alabama cops, and so on.

The ‘I have a dream’ speech is played on a loop on a bank of TV monitors positioned just outside the exhibition, alongside information panels about black cultural icons of the time like Malcolm X and James Baldwin.

Here’s a clip from it, just in case you’ve never heard or seen it before.

Soul of a nation

So given our over-familiarity with the period and most of its obvious cultural products, it comes as a genuine surprise to realise the scale and breadth of black art during this period. For this exhibition turns out to be very successful at going beneath the popular images of the decade to exhibit the specifically Black art of the 1960s and 70s, and especially the work linked with the political movements for civil rights – from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Civil Rights movement, the Black Power movement, the Black Panthers and so on.

No fewer than 65 black artists feature in the exhibition, working across a bewildering range of styles and media.

Rather than attempting to summarise it, you’d best take a look at Tate’s own room-by-room guide to the exhibition. (Realising the importance of contemporary black music, this walk through the show includes recommended listening from contemporary musicians.)

The 12 rooms of the show range from a number of movements, galleries and artists in New York, to the very different feel of West Coast black artists.

There’s a room of black-and-white photos by a range of photographers: apparently Roy DeCarava was the big daddy of black photographers but plenty of others are on show; I especially liked the shots of jazz musician John Coltrane and his drummer Elvin Jones, since I’ve been a big fan of both since discovering them as a student. But there are also evocative b&w shots by plenty of other black artists, the terrific street scenes of Beuford Smith and the more politically engaged photos of Herb Randall.

Couple Walking by Roy DeCarava © Courtesy Sherry DeCarava and the DeCarava Archives

Couple Walking by Roy DeCarava © Courtesy Sherry DeCarava and the DeCarava Archives

There are icons of blackness in a room titled Black heroes. This includes a series of semi-naive figurative oil paintings by Barkley Hendricks.

Icon For My Man Superman (Superman Never Saved Any Black People-Bobby Seale) (1969) by Barkley Hendricks © Barkley K. Hendricks. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Icon For My Man Superman (Superman Never Saved Any Black People-Bobby Seale) (1969) by Barkley Hendricks © Barkley K. Hendricks. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

There’s a room dedicated to the work of Betye Saar, an artist who works in wood, found objects and carving with a primitive vibe. The more I looked, the more I liked.

Eye (1972) by Betye Saar © Beye Saar. Courtesy of the Artist and Roberts and Tilton, Los Angeles, California

Eye (1972) by Betye Saar © Betye Saar. Courtesy of the Artist and Roberts and Tilton, Los Angeles, California

At the start of the show many of the works are directly political, referring to specific incidents of police brutality or discrimination. A good example is Dana Chandler’s powerful sculpture of a life-sized bullet-ridden door to commemorate the shooting of Black Panther activist Fred Hampton in his Chicago apartment in 1969.

A number of photo-montages create a disconcerting sense of poverty, anxiety and dislocation, reminiscent in technique of similar cut-ups from the Weimar Republic back in the 1930s.

Pittsburgh Memory by Romare Bearden (1964) © Romare Bearden Foundation/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2017

Pittsburgh Memory by Romare Bearden (1964) © Romare Bearden Foundation/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2017

Anger and political activism, a refusal to take any more white racism, violence and discrimination leap from many of the exhibits, which commemorate both specific outrages and negative events as well as celebrating positive moments, political heroes and speeches and gestures of resistance.

Did the bear sit under the tree by benny Andrews (1969) © Estate of Benny Andrews/DACS, London/VAGA, NY 2017

Did the bear sit under a tree? by Benny Andrews (1969) © Estate of Benny Andrews/DACS, London/VAGA, NY 2017

There was a room of sculptures referencing Black African traditions, variations on the kind of wooden fetishes studded with nails which you can see in the British Museum. I liked the works of Noah Purifoy, including Totem and various untitled fetishes.

And hanging on the wall of room 4 (titled ‘Los Angeles Assemblages’) was a series of great twisted metal sculptures by Melvin Edwards.

I have nothing against political art – I enjoyed the exhibition of Peter Kennard‘s highly political art at the Imperial War Museum – and like a lot of the stuff here, but it’s also fair to say that looking at umpteen images of Martin Luther King or Malcolm X sometimes has the same effect as looking at the dusty old album covers in the V&A’s 1960s exhibition – it seemed to emphasise how long, long ago all this revolutionary fury was. And all this hope for change.

Repeated invocations in titles and works themselves of ‘the revolution’ and ‘revolutionaries’, references to the revolutionary writings of Malcolm X or the revolutionary activism of Angela Davis, all remind us just how dated hopes of some kind of social revolution along Soviet or Maoist lines now seem.

Black Unity (1969) by Elizabeth Catlett © Catlett Mora Family Trust/DACS, London/VAGA, NY 2017

Black Unity (1969) by Elizabeth Catlett © Catlett Mora Family Trust/DACS, London/VAGA, NY 2017

For as with all exhibitions from the 1960s, we now view these works over at least two seismic historical dividing lines – the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the start of the War on Terror in 2001. ‘Power to the people’ is a rallying cry from a long-distant time.

Revolutionary (1972) by Wadsworth Jarrell. Courtesy Lusenhop Fine Art © Wadsworth Jarrell

Revolutionary (1972) by Wadsworth Jarrell. Courtesy Lusenhop Fine Art © Wadsworth Jarrell

The curators raise, or mention, a number of ‘issues’ which were hotly debated at the time – ‘Is there a distinct Black aesthetic?’ ‘Should a Black artist’s work focus only on the Black struggle?’ ‘Should the Black artist address only a Black audience, or a universal audience?’ and so on. My son has just taken his A-levels and all these ‘issues’ have a kind of rounded, academic A-Level feel to them.

Certainly, many of the works here do focus on the Black experience, take Black people as subjects, try to create a Black art, an art of Black protest and an art of Black celebration, and so on…

But, on this visit, on a bright summer’s day, I ended up liking the far more abstract (and larger and more colourful) work to be found in room 7 (titled ‘East Coast abstraction’) and then room 10 (‘Improvisation and Experimentation’).

Some of these were huge and, if they had political or social undertones, they tended to be eclipsed by their sheer size and power as works of art. Very big, colourful works by Frank Bowling appear in both rooms 7 and 10.

Texas Louise (1971) by Frank Bowling. Courtesy of the Rennie Collection, Vancouver © Frank Bowling

Texas Louise (1971) by Frank Bowling. Courtesy of the Rennie Collection, Vancouver © Frank Bowling

Next to this one was an enormous work by Melvin Edwards (the sculpture whose Lynch fragments I liked earlier on). It is a huge curtain made from dangling strands of barbed wire, joined along the bottom by chains. A reference to slavery? Probably. But also just an awesome object in its own right.

Also in the same room was a huge canvas, painted abstract shapes and colours but designed to be knotted at the top differently everywhere it is hung. Doesn’t sound much but it is big, covering an entire wall.

Carousel Change (1970) by Sam Gilliam © Tate. Image courtesy David Kordansky Gallery

Carousel Change (1970) by Sam Gilliam © Tate. Image courtesy David Kordansky Gallery

Nearby sits a huge lump of ebony-black smooth wood, a sculpture titled Self by Martin Puryear. Ominous, absorbing light, filling the space, a meditation on blackness, a threat, a calming influence – make of it what you will.

There’s a lot of anger, the reminders of horrible atrocities, racism, murders and violence in this exhibition. There’s a lot of defiance and pride and rejoicing in black icons and heroes. There’s a lot of fist-clenching and right-on rhetoric about the revolution – I think the average educated person will know about these ideas or issues already.

Where this exhibition scores is in showing the sheer diversity, range and imagination of all these Black artists, creating art for all occasions, impassioned and political, or cool photographs of street life and jazz musicians, or huge awe-inspiring abstractions. There’s something for all moods and all personalities. Go see which bits you like.

Maybe part of the reason I like the bigger abstract works is because they suggest that the response to racist atrocity needn’t itself be full of anger and hate. Alabama is a piece of music John Coltrane wrote in response to a terrorist attack which shocked America, when four members of the Ku Klux Klan planted 15 sticks of dynamite and a timing device under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The resulting explosion killed four little girls and injured 22 others. How stupid, wicked and evil racism is. What extraordinary beauty Coltrane – and many of the Black artists on display here – managed to extract from it.

Related links

More Tate Modern reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on July 21, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in America, Art, Exhibition, Photography
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on July 21, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/07/21/soul-of-a-nation-art-in-the-age-of-black-power-tate-modern/

%d bloggers like this: