All posts tagged Goya

Spain and the Hispanic World @ the Royal Academy

Historical scope

This is a vast exhibition, almost intimidatingly, almost bewilderingly so. Not so much because of the number of objects – although the 150 artifacts it contains must be at the top end of anybody’s ability to really process and appreciate. No, it’s the scale of the subject matter. The poster and promotional material gives the impression that it’s largely an art exhibition but this is way wrong. In fact it’s more of a historical exhibition which aims to give an overview of Spanish cultural history from the earliest times, from around 2,500 BC, to the time of the Great War. Imagine an exhibition which set out to give an overview of British culture starting with the earliest finds at Stonehenge and going century by century through to the War.

But more than that, it also aims to cover the cultural history of Spain’s colonies in the New World i.e. central and South America. Imagine one exhibition which set out to cover the complete cultural history of Britain and its empire! That’s what I mean by the scale and scope of the thing being challenging.

So there are paintings, yes, lots of paintings, quite a few by masters of the Spanish tradition – but there is a lot, lot more besides, lots of other types of object and artifact. At places across the website the RA use the strapline ‘Take a journey through 4,000 years of art-making across Spain and Latin America’ and that’s closer to the mark.

The Hispanic Society

The key fact to understanding the exhibition is given in its sub-title, ‘Treasures from the Hispanic Society Museum and Library’. The Hispanic Society Museum and Library in New York was founded in 1904 by philanthropist Archer M. Huntington in a set of buildings commissioned specially for the collection and which remain its home to this day. It is home to the most extensive collection of Spanish art outside of Spain.

So this exhibition is by way of presenting the greatest hits of the HSM&L’s collection. It contains some 150 works, including:

  • masterpieces by Zurbarán, El Greco, Goya and Velázquez
  • objects from Latin America including stunning decorative lacquerware
  • sculptures, paintings, silk textiles, ceramics, lustreware, silverwork, precious jewellery, maps, drawings, illuminated manuscripts

The exhibition is divided into 9 rooms and because each one makes such huge leaps in place and time and culture this seems the most manageable way of summarising it.

Room 1. The Iberian Peninsula in the Ancient World

A glass case of fine silver torcs and bracelets and suchlike made 2400 to 1900 BC by the so-called Bell Beaker people. By the third century BC the peninsula was inhabited by the people the Romans called the Celts.

The Palencia Hoard by unknown artists (172 to 50 BC)

Quite quickly we’re on to the Roman colonisation, consolidated in the first century BC. The room contains a floor mosaic of Medusa and a breath-taking marble statue of the goddess Diana.

I was surprised there was no mention of the Carthaginians who colonised eastern Spain and exploited its famous silver mines, something I read about in Carthage Must Be Destroyed by Richard Miles (2010) among other sources.

Moving swiftly we beam forwards to the collapse of Roman rule in the 5th century AD and the arrival of the Visigothic tribes.  There’s a case with a lovely cloisonne belt buckle from the 6th century, reminiscent of the much better one from the Sutton Hoo horde.

Room 2. Al-Andalus

In 711 Arab and Berber invaders overran the Visigothic kingdom and installed their own Islamic governments. The territory came to be known as al-Andalus. In 756 Abd al Rahman I named himself Caliph and established a celebrated court in Córdoba. The peninsula remained under Muslim rule for the next 700 years with power moving between different dynasties and power centres. The room contains some stunning fabrics.

Alhambra silk from Nasrid, Granada (about 1400)

Among the most prized works by Muslim artisans from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries were ceramics and this room contains a lot of plates and bowls.

Deep Plate by an unknown artist (1370s)

This plate is made of tin-glazed earthenware and has been given an iridescent finish by applying a very thin layer of metal oxide. Potters would glaze with tin, lead, copper, silver, gold, or platinum, depending on availability and the desired outcome. For added extravagance, some of the dynamic patterns have been painted in vibrant (and very expensive) cobalt blue. In the centre is a coat of arms of one of the oldest aristocratic families in Catalonia, the Despujol. Designs like this were ostentatious showpieces for Europe’s rich and powerful. The two small holes at the top of this plate indicate that it was designed to be hung as art on a wall rather than piled with food on a table.

Locks and knockers

My favourite case in this room displayed eight or so fine metalwork door knockers and chest locks. The Hispanic Society’s collection of ironwork comprises some 300 pieces, including door knockers, pulls, locks and lock plates. I liked their medieval feel and especially the way they incorporate animals and imaginary beasts, such as a lizard, a wolf and a dragon, with intricate geometric designs influenced by Islamic tradition.

Two metal door knockers, on the left in the shape of a crab’s claw, on the right a bird with a long dropping neck (both around 1500)

The Reconquista

Throughout the Middle Ages Christian kings from the north fought the Muslim invaders, without much luck. The pace of military campaigning picked up from the 11th century onwards. This came to be known as the Reconquista and was the west Mediterranean equivalent of what, in the East, came to be known as the Crusades. Unlike the Crusades it was successful and in 1492 the last Muslim state, of Granada, was overthrown under forces led by the joint monarchs, Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon, whose marriage and joint rule marked the de facto unification of Spain.

Slavery

The Spanish pioneered the European slave trade from Africa. The ruthless and forceful displacement of Africans to the Iberian Peninsula began as early as the 1440s. Following the discovery of the Americas the majority of enslaved Africans were trafficked directly across the Atlantic where, throughout the American continent, they were forced to work on plantation and in the notorious silver mining industry. By the sixteenth century, it is thought that Spain had the largest population of enslaved Africans in Europe.

Room 3. Medieval and Early Modern Spain

Room 3 is the biggest in the exhibition and the overwhelming impression in entering is the arrival of painting. There are works by Spanish masters such as El Greco, Velasquez and Zubaran. But, as with the exhibition generally, there’s much more to it than painting. The room covers the period from the triumph of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile over the Moors in 1492. They began a programme of forced conversion and violent expulsion of Muslim and Jewish communities as they bid to unite their realms under the Catholic faith. The Catholic Monarchs were followed by Charles V (1500 to 1558) and Philip II (1527 to 1598).

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were known as the Age of Gold. This was funded by slave labour in the New World, and especially the gold and silver mined by forced labourers working in terrible conditions in Spain’s Central American colonies.

It was also the Age of the Counter-Reformation when first Charles V then Philip II took it upon themselves to reinforce the Catholic Church at its most fierce and repressive (these were the glory years of the Spanish Inquisition which became notorious across Europe). Spanish rulers commissioned art which emphasised a sickly, sentimental, reactionary form of Catholicism or produced lickspittle portraits of terrifying, brutish kings, politicians and generals.

The Penitent St Jerome by El Greco (1600)

The most prominent painters of the period included artists such as El Greco, who moved to Toledo in 1577, and Diego Velázquez, who was appointed court painter to Philip IV in 1623. I appreciate that El Greco (1541 to 1614) is a classic of European art but I have never liked him. The milky eyes of his sickly saints and martyrs staring up into Catholic heaven have always revolted me.

The room is packed with lots of other nauseating Catholic imagery including an ascension, an altarpiece, images of Mary and Martha, a Mater Dolorosa, crucifixions, mothers and babies, a Pieta, images of the Immaculate Conception. There’s a big painting of St Emerentiana by Francisco de Zurbarán which is dire. The depiction of the fabric is impressive in a stiff late medieval way, but the face is awful.

Revolting in a different way are the power-worshipping portraits by the likes of Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599 to 1660). There’s a huge portrait of Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares, who carried out negotiations with the young Prince Charles who came to Spain to sue for the hand of the Infanta in 1623. With characteristic arrogance Olivares insisted that Charles could only marry her if he promised to convert to Catholicism along with all the British court. This was a non-starter and explains why Charles went onto the court of France and won the hand of Henrietta Maria from the much more pragmatic Henry IV.

Spanish wars of repression

The huge wealth Spain creamed from its black slaves and the enslaved Aztecs and Incas in the New World paid not only for a re-energised and harshly reactionary Catholic Church, but for its wars of conquest designed to undo the Reformation and reimpose Catholicism on Protestant countries. It was with this aim that King Philip II launched the Armada in 1588 which was designed to defeat the English, overthrow their queen, Elizabeth I, who, along with most of the aristocracy would have been treated as heretics and executed, and then a foreign ideology (Catholicism) imposed on the entire population, anyone complaining being subjected to summary execution.

Luckily the English navy disrupted the Spanish fleet and the ‘Protestant wind’ did the rest. But the Netherlands was not so lucky. Originally under the control of the Dukes of Burgundy, with the end of their line the Netherlands fell to the house of Hapsburg, which itself inherited the Spanish throne. Largely Protestant the Netherlands rebelled against Catholic rule in the 1570s starting the prolonged period of rebellion which is known as the Eighty Years War. In 1567 Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba arrived with an army of 10,000 Spanish and Italian soldiers and proceeded to institute a reign of terror. As Wikipedia puts it:

Acting on orders of Philip II of Spain, Alba sought to exterminate all manifestations of Protestantism and disobedience through inquisition and public executions.

There was not a lot of difference between this and the Nazi conquest of the Low Countries 400 years later. None of this is mentioned in any of the wall labels. Spain’s role as arch enemy of free Protestant countries in the 16th and 17th centuries simply goes unmentioned.

The Duke of Alba in 1549 by Anthonis Mor, the man who ‘sought to exterminate all manifestations of Protestantism and disobedience through inquisition and public executions.’

Besides paintings testifying to the lachrymose religiosity of the Counter Reformation and the genocidal macho-ness of Spain’s generals, the room also includes:

  • many early maps of the Mediterranean, the Atlantic coast and the New World
  • a baptismal font, a pilgrim flask, a chalice, a reliquary cross, a pendant, a huge bishop’s brocade
  • a set of illuminated manuscripts including a Book of Hours
  • glazed earthenware, goblets and suchlike

My favourite piece was much earlier, a medieval wooden carving of St Martin on a horse from the late 15th century before the Reformation split Europe, before Columbus discovered the New World, before art became really professionalised – from a simpler time.

St Martin 1450 to 1475 by unknown artist

Room 4. Colonial Latin America I: People and place

A huge modern map on the gallery wall gives a sense of the breath-taking amount of territory Spain arrogated to itself after Christopher Columbus stumbled across the New World on his failed attempt to find a western passage to India. He had, in fact, landed on Guanahani, an island in the Caribbean which he renamed San Salvador (in modern-day Bahamas).

His mistaken belief that the natives were Indians condemned indigenous peoples in north, central and south America to be known as ‘Indians’ for centuries afterwards, despite belonging to a huge range of peoples, languages and conditions and explains why the Caribbean islands are erroneously referred to as the West Indies to this day.

The Spanish conquistadors promptly conquered the empires of the Mexica (Aztecs) and Inca, massacring them where necessary, setting the survivors to work as forced labour on huge plantations or in the silver mines which they discovered  in 1547 at Potosí in the southern highlands of Bolivia.

Spain divided its vast territories in the Americas into two viceroyalties: Nueva España (New Spain, modern-day Mexico and Guatemala), and Peru (which included Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador). Later, additional viceroyalties were created: Nueva Granada (made up of Colombia and Venezuela) and Mar de la Plata (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay).

Spain was to rule over this huge colonial empire until independence movements in the 1820s forced them to relinquish these territories allowing for the emergence of modern nation states.

Race rules – apartheid

The conquering Spanish implemented a strictly hierarchical society based on purity of bloodlines and skin tone denominating ‘casta’ (caste). Close ties to Spain and white skin elevated the status of the individual: ‘peninsulares’ (literally those from peninsular Spain) dominated the colonial administration; followed by ‘criollos’ (creoles), those of Spanish (or European) descent born in the Americas; ‘mestizos’, those of mixed parentage; and finally ‘indígenas’, those of indigenous descent. At the bottom of the pile were the hundreds of thousands black African slaves.

This room contains a lot of surveys and maps, for example several surveys of the new settlement of Mexico City, and including the famous World Map of 1526 by Giovanni Vespucci. This map was a copy of the padrón real, Spain’s master nautical chart which was kept in a secret location in Seville. It’s thought this ornate version was a gift for King Charles V. It includes decorative details such as ships in the ocean, camels and elephants across Africa, a collapsing Tower of Babel, and a Red Sea coloured vivid scarlet.

Detail of Giovanni Vespucci’s World Map (1526)

Room 5. Colonial Latin America II: Decorative Arts

In the decades after the conquest there was, surprisingly enough, a flourishing of the arts. Indigenous artists who were skilled with local materials, techniques and iconography adapted their work to satisfy European tastes and religious beliefs. As it was prohibitively expensive to import domestic objects from Spain there was significant demand for locally produced decorative arts. This gallery contains 20 or so examples of this hybrid art including a number of bateas or trays, vases, caskets, bowls and jars, and an impressive shawl.

Shawl (1775 to 1800) by unknown artist

A large rectangular shawl with fringed ends, the rebozo, is perhaps the most enduring of all traditional Mexican garments. It was first recorded in the 1580s, and is still worn by women across the country today.

Room 6. Colonial Latin America III: Religious Art

A room devoted to art and artifacts created for the Spanish Catholic church which moved quickly to lay out a network of ecclesiastical districts or dioceses under the jurisdiction of bishops alongside a far-reaching programme of church and convent building – all designed, of course, to convert the entire native population.

Not many Spanish artists volunteered to go and live in the New World so the religious authorities had to rely on converting and then training indigenous artists. These created fresco cycles, paintings and polychrome sculptures which were made in vast quantities, likewise fine ornamented silver and gold objects, and fabrics.

This gallery contains a range of religious paintings, sculpture and other objects from across the Americas that reveal how local artists used local materials and adapted traditional techniques, incorporating pre-Columbian symbols or other
local references such as flora and fauna in their work.

The room contains a number of dubious paintings of varying levels of amateurishness and kitsch, one incorporating fish scales into its surface. The objects, such as lamps, are more persuasive. But the standout item, and one of the highlights of the exhibition, is the set of four small sculptures of figures demonstrating the four states of people after death, namely a rotted skeleton covered in maggots, a flame-red soul burning in hell, a pale white naked person undergoing the torments of purgatory, and a dressed and serene personage enjoying the bliss of heaven.

The Four Fates of Man: Death, Soul in Hell, Soul in Purgatory, Soul in Heaven attributed to Manuel Chili, called Caspicara (around 1775)

Room 7. Goya

The Spanish are everso proud of Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746 to 1828) but visiting the National Gallery’s exhibition Goya Portraits back in 2015 destroyed my respect for him. That exhibition revealed Goya to be a shockingly bad painter, particularly of portraits. He looks like a bad caricaturist. At one point in that exhibition they had hung Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington alongside one British painter Sir Thomas Lawrence and there was no comparison. The Lawrence portrait is a brilliantly penetrating, superbly finished and completely convincing portrait. The Goya portrait is far more muddy, murky and unfinished.

In this room there are only six or so works, three big paintings and three small sketches. To my astonishment the Spanish curator of the exhibition, Guillaume Kientz, makes the wild claim that Goya’s portrait of the Duchess of Alba is Spain’s equivalent of the Mona Lisa, a lodestone, a high water mark of the art of painting. Really? I think it’s dire.

Francisco de Goya The Duchess of Alba (1797) © Courtesy of The Hispanic Society of America, New York

The Duchess of Alba by Francisco de Goya (1797)

The background is drab and dead, her posture is stiff, and her face! And yet the curators are so confident that this is a great European masterpiece that they made it the poster for this exhibition. The fact that she is pointing with her right hand to  the words ‘Solo Goya’ (‘Only Goya’) written in the sand only make it seem more clumsy, gauche and amateurishness.

Luckily, the room has a redeeming feature, which is a display of three small drawings from what came to be called Albums A and B. These small-scale sketches were to culminate in the better known series of sketches known as Los Caprichos. Goya’s depiction of faces in these is still dire, but the sketches aren’t about the faces, they are about striking and often unusual physical postures and positions, capturing the activities of everyday life of people and peasants with swift, vivid strokes.

This smudgy reproduction doesn’t do justice to the dynamic energy of the original sketch, the excellence of composition, the straining man’s calf muscles, the woman’s hauntingly blank face sketched in with ink. Million times better than the silly duchess standing on a beach.

Peasant Carrying a Woman by Francisco de Goya (1810)

Room 8. Sorolla, Zuloaga and the Hispanic Society

Now, at long last, after what seems like an immensely long and exhausting journey, we finally enter ‘recent’ history i.e. the twentieth century. This is the last proper room of the exhibition and it contains a dozen or so huge paintings, 3 or 4 of them by ‘the Spanish Impressionist’, the master of light, Joaquín Sorolla.

The wall label gives an account of Archer Huntington’s founding of the ‘Spanish Museum’ in New York which opened its doors to the public in 1908. Soon after, Huntington visited Europe, where he saw works by the contemporary Spanish painters Ignacio Zuloaga in Paris and Joaquín Sorolla in London. Archer immediately planned to exhibit their work at
the Hispanic Society the following year as well as setting about buying works by other contemporary Spanish artists including Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa, Isidre Nonell and José Gutiérrez Solana.

Sorolla and Zuloaga can be seen as presenting differing views of Spain, from the lovely sunlit world of Sorolla to the darker vision of Zuloaga which is why the curators have hung them on opposite walls.

After the Bath by Joaquín Sorolla (1908)

Sorolla is less like an impressionist than the Spanish equivalent of John Singer Sargent, but painting in a Mediterranean setting drenched with light. His paintings look best from the other side of the room where the details of the composition fade a bit and the main impact comes from the drama of light and shade.

Possibly my favourite painting in the whole exhibition was Ignacio Zuloaga’s ‘Lucienne Bréval as Carmen’ from 1908. Why? Because I think I’m right in saying that she is the only human being in the exhibition’s 60 or so paintings of people who is happy, who is laughing. After scores of black-clothed clerics, members of the Inquisition and brutal, exterminating generals on the one hand, and countless Immaculate Conceptions of the Holy Virgin Mary and El Greco saints looking milky-eyed up to a heaven pullulating with baby angels, how lovely to come across an actual human being looking like they’re enjoying being alive.

Lucienne Bréval as Carmen by Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta (1908)

As usual this internet copy isn’t a patch on the size and vibrancy of the original. The more I looked the more relaxed and happy I felt and so so relieved to have escaped the centuries of bleak Catholic oppression.

Room 9. Vision of Spain

More Sorolla. Following the success of the Hispanic Society’s exhibition in 1909, Huntington and Sorolla embarked on an ambitious project that would dominate the rest of the artist’s career. Huntington wanted him to paint a series of murals for the Hispanic Society’s main building. Originally he wanted scenes from Spain’s long colourful history but Sorolla demurred – he wasn’t that kind of painting. The project evolved into the idea for a series of fourteen monumental canvases depicting the peoples, costumes and traditions of different regions of the country and to be titled ‘Vision of Spain’.

Painted between 1911 and 1919, the panoramic series was opened in a purpose-built gallery at the Hispanic Society in 1926, three years after the artist’s death.

Now it would have been very impressive to end the exhibition with one of these finished panels but, for whatever reason, the curators haven’t. Instead, the final room is a long narrow gallery in which is hung a preparatory sketch for the panels.

The wall label tells us that Sorolla produced around 80 of these preparatory studies, painted in gouache. They display a more sketchy, expressionist approach than the final work along, with modern processes such as the collaging technique papier collé.

This is sort of interesting but not as impressive as the final thing would have been. In fact it’s an odd, parochial, anti-climactic way to end an exhibition which, in its central rooms, encompassed the military and religious history of one of the greatest empires the world has ever known.

Sketch for the Provinces of Spain: Castile by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1912 to 1913)

In-depth video

Thoughts

Two thoughts:

1. The end of the exhibition – and so, presumably, the Society’s collection – is strangely incomplete.  What I mean is, they have Goya, in 1797 and 1810 and then…Sorolla from 1908: what happened in between? What happened in Spanish art between Goya and Sorolla? There appears to be a big hole in the collection. In France we got reams of Salon art but also Courbet and then the amazing achievement of the impressionists and post-impressionists. Even in unartistic England we had lots of anecdotal and social art and then the pre-Raphaelites morphing into the ‘Olympians’ and then atmospheric fin-de-siècle art with outstanding individuals such as Aubrey Beardsley. Did Huntingdon not buy anything of 19th century Spanish art because he wasn’t interested, because there was nothing worth buying? It’s a big gap.

And then the 20th century. I appreciate Huntingdon was buying in the Edwardian period but…did the trustees of the collection agree not to purchase anything after his commissioning of Sorolla’s ‘Vision of Spain’, nothing from 20th century Spanish culture? For example, by Pablo Picasso or Salvador Dali? And, as I understand it, the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1938 was central to Spain’s modern history leading, as it did, to the fascist dictatorship of General Franco which only ended in 1975.

I don’t know what exactly you’d include in the collection or exhibition to cover this period – I’m just saying that the omission of artifacts from almost the entire 19th and 20th centuries feels very strange and surely undermine the collection’s claim to represent ‘Spanish culture’. The last two hundred years are, arguably, the most important part of any modern nation’s history and culture. Which brings me to a bigger question:

2. What is a nation’s culture? I know that the curators at the British Museum or Tate Britain would agree with the curators of this exhibition that a national culture is somehow captured or conveyed by rooms full of medieval ceramics, ancient maps, old paintings and church accessories. But is it? Would you say that the ‘culture’ of Britain would be adequately conveyed by Roman mosaics, medieval church artifacts, Jacobean paintings and some works by John Singer Sargent (the rough equivalent of Sorolla)? Pretty obviously, no. That would just be a collection of miscellaneous historical objects masquerading as a portrait of a culture.

Surely you’d turn to sociologists to learn what a real culture consists of – its language and religion, its human and physical geography, the climate, the agriculture and the traditional foods arising from it (beef and beer in England, tapas, paella and wine inn Spain), its laws and customs and traditions, the things that make it unique, and then how it survived the storms and disasters of the 20th century and has fared in the post-industrial, multicultural world of the last 30 years or so.

I understand the aims of this collection and this exhibition, I see its strong points, I marvel at its breadth and detail. But in a sense, isn’t a living, breathing culture, as lived by a nation’s people, precisely everything which is missing from this exhibition?

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Letters from Iceland by W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice (1936)

A golden age of travel writing

We’ve spoken about the 1930s as the Age of Auden, dominated by the left-wing politics of most of the young writers and poets, who were responding to the Great Depression (1929 to 1933) and then stricken by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939).

But it was also a golden age of travel writing. Posh Brits could wave their distinctive British passport and travel anywhere they wanted in what was, between the wars, the largest empire the world had ever seen, at its largest extent. There was a boom in high-end travel writing to cater for the well-heeled tourists who could travel in the new passenger planes or enjoy the new leisure concept of luxury cruises.

Almost by definition, though, the really adventurous types wanted to go beyond the usual itineraries and explore unknown parts. It’s no coincidence that they were buoyed up by the confidence of having gone to a jolly good public school, having networks of contacts and connections everywhere, and so knowing they could probably get themselves out of most scrapes with a quick phone call to cousin Algy at the Foreign Office.

Hence the ripping travel adventures of Peter Fleming (Eton and Oxford) in Brazil, Russia and China, or Robert Byron (Eton and Oxford) in Russia, China, Afghanistan and Tiber, or Patrick ‘Paddy’ Leigh Fermor (King’s School Canterbury) who, aged 18, decided to walk from London to Constantinople.

Hence the journeys Graham Greene (Berkhamsted and Oxford) undertook to Liberia and Mexico, or Evelyn Waugh (Lancing and Oxford)’s jolly journeys to Abyssinia, the Belgian Congo and British Guiana.

(Peter Fleming is actually name-checked twice in this book as the intimidating ideal of the modern travel writer who the authors are haplessly trying to live up to, p.159)

Letters from Iceland

In the spring of 1936 a chance conversation with one of his former pupils at the private school where he’d taught in the early 30s revealed that he and friends and a teacher were going to Iceland that summer. Auden was instantly excited at the prospect and suggested to his publishers, Faber & Faber, that they fund him to go there and he’d write a travel book for them. Auden leapt at the chance of going to one of his childhood holy places. His family had Nordic ancestry, his father had read him all the Norse myths, and as a boy he had read lots of Icelandic sagas with their stern unforgiving heroes.

So he made his arrangements – to go by himself for a month or so, then rendezvous with the party of former schoolboys, and he persuaded one of the gang, the Ulsterman Louis MacNeice, to also make the sea voyage and meet him there. So in June 1936 he set off, and spent a little over a month travelling round Iceland, mainly by local bus with jaunts on horseback thrown in, hiring local guides and staying at whatever accommodation existed, often local farmers.

He’d been in the country for some time, fretting about how he was going to write something to repay his publishers’ advance, when he suddenly had the bright idea of making the entire book a collection of letters, letters to friends, containing appropriate content for them (‘so that each letter deals with its subject in a different and significant way’, p.140) – sending some friends straight travelogue, some jokes, some a selection of historic writing about the place, and so on.

And once MacNeice arrived (they rendezvoused in Rejkyavik on 9 August 1936), they developed the idea of poetic letters and of deliberately experimenting with different types of poetic genre (lyric, epic, eclogue etc). Once the third element, the four schoolboys and their master arrived, the party set off for a riding tour of Iceland’s central mountain range, and MacNeice had the idea of describing their rather bizarre party (two scruffy poets, a bespectacled teacher and four keen young boys) into a satirical diary of the trip as if written from one jolly upper-class girl guides leader to another (Hetty to Nancy), complaining about the bullying leader of the trip, and the other teachers and the girls, my dear, the girls! This is either very funny or revoltingly cliquey, according to taste.

Thus the idea evolved to make the book deliberately bitty and fragmented, a collage of different types of text, an anti-heroic travel book, in that it wouldn’t hold back on the realities of the trip i.e. runny noses, smelly barns, recalcitrant ponies and so on.

The original mish-mash effect was enhanced by the authors’ photos which were deliberately amateurish and scrappy, as Auden gleefully points out:

Every exciting letter has enclosures,
And so shall this – a bunch of photographs,
Some out of focus, some with wrong exposures,
Press cuttings, gossip, maps, statistics, graphs;
I don’t intend to do the thing by halves.
I’m going to be very up to date indeed.
It is a collage that you’re going to read.

There’s even a passage where Auden gives us his thoughts on photography, namely that it’s the most democratic art form, specially given all the technical advances of his day (what would he have thought of today’s camera-phones?) (p.139). Alas the authors’ photos aren’t reproduced in the rather cheap-feeling modern Faber paperback version, though you can glimpse them online.

The Letters from Iceland format allowed them to get away from the pompous smoothness of traditional travel writers, although it did tend to add fuel to the fire of the large number of critics who accused the Auden Gang of being a self-satisfied clique of insiders. This is particularly obvious in the Last Will and Testament with its references to their chums:

Next Edward Upward and Christopher Isherwood
I here appoint my joint executors
To judge my work if it be bad or good…

To our two distinguished colleagues in confidence,
To Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis, we assign
Our minor talents to assist in the defence

Of the European Tradition and to carry on
The Human heritage.

For my friend Benjamin Britten, composer, I beg
That fortune send him soon a passionate affair.

Item – I leave my old friend Anthony Blunt
A copy of Marx and £1000 a year
And the picture of Love Locked Out by Holman Hunt.

Too chummy by half, it’s the one part of the book I didn’t like (and not just for this reason; it’s also just boring).

The most impressive letter, and binding the book together, are the five parts of a long poem by Auden titled Letter to Lord Byron. Again he explains his through processes in the text itself, telling us that he’d taken a copy of Byron’s immensely long rambling verse diary of his life, Don Juan, and had the inspiration of writing an updated version for his times. He liked Byron’s free and easy style, his ability to incorporate everything from thoughts about the meaning of life to the fact that he had a hangover that morning. He liked him because he was a townee i.e. urban, and heartily agreed with Byron’s dislike of the Wordsworth, nature-worshipping tradition which Auden cordially detested.

Part one of Letter to Lord Byron is the first thing you read and immediately establishes the chatty, witty tone of the book, starting by apologising to the shade of Lord Byron for bothering him.

Excuse, my lord, the liberty I take
In thus addressing you. I know that you
Will pay the price of authorship and make
The allowances an author has to do.
A poet’s fan-mail will be nothing new.
And then a lord – Good Lord, you must be peppered,
Like Gary Cooper, Coughlin, or Dick Sheppard,

With notes from perfect strangers starting, ‘Sir,
I liked your lyrics, but Childe Harold’s trash,’
‘My daughter writes, should I encourage her?’
Sometimes containing frank demands for cash,
Sometimes sly hints at a platonic pash,
And sometimes, though I think this rather crude,
The correspondent’s photo in the nude.

Light verse is difficult to bring off, but to sustain it over the 160 stanzas of the finished Letter To Lord Byron is a quite staggering achievement. Has anyone else in the entire twentieth century brought off such a sustained comic achievement in verse?

Besides this epic achievement, the book also contains quite a few other poems by Auden, including:

  • Journey to Iceland
  • a poetic letter to Richard Crossman (b.1907: head boy at Winchester then New College Oxford, went onto become a Labour MP and then cabinet member)
  • Detective Story – a sort of verse explanation of why we like and read thrillers
  • ‘O who can ever praise enough’ – a verse meditation on childhood books (note the characteristic us of ‘O’ starting a poem, a really characteristic Auden tic)
  • a free-verse letter to William Coldstream (painted, born 1908: private school, Slade Art School, met Auden at the GPO when they were making documentary films)
  • and a collaboration with MacNeice, ‘W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice: Their Last Will and Testament’

MacNeice’s contributions include:

  • a verse letter to Graham and Anne Shepard
  • an Eclogue from Iceland which contains lines describing the bitter enmities of MacNeice’s native Ireland and why he has fled them, along with speeches by Grettir which capture the spirit of the saga hero, bloody-minded and doomed, and who tells the poets that their task is ‘the assertion of human values’ (p.134)
  • a verse Epilogue

In between all this poetry there are chunks of prose, namely:

  • a prose section ‘For Tourists’, which is quite thorough and might actually have been useful to contemporary tourists
  • a sardonic selection of writings on Iceland by other authors, ‘Sheaves from Sagaland’, addressed to John Betjeman, chosen for their odd surrealist details, the best of which is a page-long description of a huge feast endured by one William Jackson Hooker in 1809, and an eye-witness account of the eruption of an Icelandic volcano in 1727 (incidentally, we learn that the title Letters From Iceland had already been used by Joseph Banks in 1772)
  • Saga Laws, the Formula of Peacemaking, the Law of the Wager of Battle, the Viking Law
  • two prose letters from Auden to ‘E. M. Auden’ (E.M. was Erika Mann: it needs to be explained that Auden – who was gay – agreed to a marriage of convenience with Erika Mann who was the eldest daughter of novelist Thomas Mann, cabaret actress and racing driver, in order to give her a nationality when the Nazis cancelled her German nationalist because of her writings against them: they were married on 15 June 1935, the only time they ever met) – these are some of the most chatty and candid pieces Auden ever wrote, joking about the appalling food but explaining some of the Icelandic verse forms, his dislike of modern art, his fondness for caricatures
  • a prose letter to Kristian Andreirsson, Esq.;

The longest single section is a series of supposed letters sent by the fictional ‘Hetty’ to her friend ‘Nancy’. These were written by MacNeice in a lampoon of contemporary posh girls’ fiction, wherein Hetty moans endlessly about the jolly hockeysticks enthusiasm of the leader of the exhibition, Miss Greenhalge, and her tent-mate, the insufferable Maisie (a girl guide version of Auden) and makes campy comments:

The road to Kleppur suffers from ribbon development and nothing, my dear, can look worse than a corrugated iron suburb if it is not kept tidy.

Letters from Iceland is still hugely enjoyable after all these years, mainly because of the infectious good humour of both the protagonists. The advice for travellers is actually useful, albeit 84 years out of date. Auden says he paid 10 kroner for three days board and lodging and hire of horse at a farm in the north-west, but elsewhere tells us the exchange rate is 24 kroner to the pound sterling. So… did he get all that for 50p! Hiring a horse for the day costs 3 kroner i.e. 12.5p!

Last time I looked at a holiday in Iceland it was ruinously expensive, and packed with pre-arranged tours and photo opportunities by gushing geysers or bathing in hot springs i.e. it has been totally commodified.

There is a diagram of the highest mountains (we learn later that Auden pinched this postcard from an old lady who ran a home for decayed ladies, p.145); an extract from an 1805 parish register; bibliographies and suggested reading; there is a map showing new roads.

MacNeice struggles manfully to keep up with Auden’s super-abundant light verse:

So I came here to the land the Romans missed,
Left for the Irish saint and the Viking colonist.
But what am I doing here? Qu’allais-je faire
Among these volcanic rocks and this grey air?
Why go north when Cyprus and Madeira
De jure if not de facto are much nearer?
The reason for hereness is beyond conjecture,
There are no trees or trains or architecture
Fruits and greens are insufficient for health
And culture is limited by lack of wealth,
The tourist sights have nothing like stonehenge,
The literature is all about revenge.

(from Letter to Graham and Anne Shepard by Louis MacNeice)

10 out of 10 for effort, with some impressive hits:

The tourist sights have nothing like stonehenge,
The literature is all about revenge.

But Macneice can’t fully mask his more thoughtful poetic approach which tends to make for slower reading, a slight air of puzzlement: it is Auden’s poetry which overshadows the enterprise, The Letter To Lord Byron whose five parts tie the ragbag together, but also the short but wonderful Journey to Iceland, which captures in just eleven stanzas the appeal of the cold and bleak north to some of us, so unlike the lotus-eating lure of the sunny Mediterranean where most travellers went.

And the traveller hopes: ‘Let me be far from any
Physician’; and the ports have names for the sea;
The citiless, the corroding, the sorrow;
And North means to all: ‘Reject’.

And the great plains are for ever where cold creatures are hunted,
And everywhere; the light birds flicker and flaunt;
Under a scolding flag the lover
Of islands may see at last,

Faintly, his limited hope; as he nears the glitter
Of glaciers; the sterile immature mountains intense
In the abnormal day of this world, and a river’s
Fan-like polyp of sand.

Wow! If you read my post about the monotonous diction of the poetry inspired by the Spanish Civil War, you can immediately see in these lines a contrasting use of novel vocabulary and uncannily imaginative phrasing.

In traditional poetry, birds do not ‘flicker and flaunt’; why are the mountains ‘immature’? why is the day ‘abnormal’? I don’t know, but it seems strange and true, the result of a disconcerted perception, appropriate to the cold and the bleak. And the simple statement that the bare North means to all ‘Reject’ I find breath-taking.

In the short Foreword he added in 1965 Auden says:

The three months in Iceland upon which it is based stand out in my memory as among the happiest in a life which has, so far, been unusually happy, and, if something of this joy comes through the writing, I shall be content.

It does. It is a wonderful, funny, civilised book.

A few themes

In the pell-mell of poetry and comic prose it’s easy to overlook a couple of themes which emerge:

1. The He-man

The concept of the ‘he-man’ was relatively new in pop culture – the muscley, Mr Universe types which came, like so much marketing bs, from America. Because they went to jolly good public schools and went on to have jolly successful careers, it’s easy to overlook how anxious these young men were, particularly about their masculinity.

Peter Fleming is referenced because he had already made a name for himself with his heroic account of his travels in Asia and his newspaper reporting for The Times, whereas Auden is all too well aware that he is short-sighted, he easily gets colds, he likes his creature comforts, and the first time he tries to mount a pony he galls right over its neck and onto the ground, in front of a party of picnickers. He is not made of heroic stuff.

The Auden Gang were, at the end of the day, bookish intellectuals, more at home chatting about Dante than building fires. They’d despised all that Officer Training Corps stuff they’d been forced to do at school and now found themselves having to take it seriously.

It can’t have helped that lots of them were gay or bisexual and so felt doubly alienated from the tough-guy, heterosexual men they saw up on cinema screens, always getting the girl. This helps explain why they couldn’t get over a permanent sense of feeling ridiculous. And then feeling anxious about feeling anxious.

It’s a small by symptomatic moment when Auden finally gets the hang of horse-riding and manages to stay on quite a frisky horse he’s been rented. ‘I was a real he-man after all,’ he says (p.142).

He says it as a joke, but it reveals an anxiety and a theme which crops up throughout his poetry of the 30s, another way in which he captured the anxiety of a generation.

(Similarly, when Auden and Isherwood travelled to China in 1938, Isherwood can’t sleep in a hotel near recently bombed ruins while he listens to Auden snoring ‘the long, calm snores of the truly strong’ – Journey To A War, p.75. The ‘truly strong’. It’s a joke, but still…)

2. Sensitivity

Auden writes that traditional travel books are often boring but that there is a different thread to the genre, which consists more of essays on life prompted by things the traveller has seen. For him this is epitomised by the travel writing of D.H. Lawrence or Aldous Huxley, a style, writes Auden, which he is ‘neither clever nor sensitive enough to manage’ (p.140).

Now he’s being disingenuous when he says he’s not clever enough, he was a very clever man and he knew it. But I think he is being honest when he says that he was not sensitive enough. Sensitivity is not a word you associate with Auden. Cold, clinical detachment is his mode. He likes to categorise, he loves reeling off lists of things, from industrial equipment to types of civilian, from literary genres to psychoanalytical symptoms.

Thus it was Byron’s detached, urban and civilised irony which appealed to him, and when he deprecates Wordsworth he’s not joking.

I’m also glad to find I’ve your authority
For finding Wordsworth a most bleak old bore,
Though I’m afraid we’re in a sad minority
For every year his followers get more,
Their number must have doubled since the war.
They come in train-loads to the Lakes, and swarms
Of pupil-teachers study him in Storm’s.

For, oddly enough, although he spent three months travelling round one of Europe’s most unique landscapes, Auden doesn’t like landscapes. He likes people. He likes people and their cultures and ideas and attitudes and minds and histories and cultures. For him the landscape is just a backdrop to all this much more interesting stuff.

To me Art’s subject is the human clay,
And landscape but a background to a torso;
All Cézanne’s apples I would give away
For one small Goya or a Daumier.

It may be worth pointing out that Honoré Daumier (1808 to 1879) was a French artists and printmaker most famous for his caricatures of urban life. The Royal Academy had an exhibition on him not so long ago:

Several other anecdotes reinforce your sense that the human subject came first, second and third with Auden. On a trivial level, he quotes a well-known clerihew in a letter to a friend he’s made on the island, to clarify his position:

The art of Biography
Is different from Geography.
Geography is about maps,
But Biography is about chaps.

Or take a longer anecdote: After quite a gruelling bus journey (Icelanders always seemed to be sick on bus journeys, Auden was told by a bus driver) he arrives at Akureyri to discover all the hotels are full. Fortunately, the young guide he’s travelling with, Ragnar, has a friend who has a brother-in-law who’s a butcher who happens to be out of town, so they’re put up at his house for the night. Next day Auden goes swimming at an open-air pool heated by geysers. So far, so touristy. But that evening, he tells us, he hunkers down for the night with two books.

Borrowed two volumes of caricatures, which are really my favourite kind of picture, and spent a very happy evening with Goya and Daumier and Max Beerbohm.

While others are trying to work themselves up into poetic visions worthy of Wordsworth, Auden doesn’t bother. He’s much more interesting in the sight of the driver of the bus struggling to change a tyre. In the evenings he doesn’t go out roistering like Ernest Hemingway, he much prefers to be snuggled up with books of entertaining cartoons. It’s very sweet and very honest.

I’ve learnt to ride, at least to ride a pony,
Taken a lot of healthy exercise,
On barren mountains and in valleys stony,
I’ve tasted a hot spring (a taste was wise),
And foods a man remembers till he dies.
All things considered, I consider Iceland,
Apart from Reykjavik, a very nice land.

Credit

Letters to Iceland by W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice was first published by Faber and Faber in 1937. References are to the 1985 paperback edition.

Related links

1930s reviews

Saga reviews

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by Simon on June 17, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 17, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/06/17/letters-from-iceland-w-h-auden-louis-macneice/

Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light @ the National Gallery

This is the first UK exhibition in over a century of the painter who came to be known as ‘Spain’s Impressionist’, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida.

The 58 works on show have been loaned from Spanish and private collections to present the most complete exhibition of his paintings outside Spain so this is a unique opportunity to see, enjoy and judge for yourself. (A third of the works are on loan from the Museo Sorolla, ‘one of Madrid’s most dazzling small museums, which occupies the house and garden Sorolla designed and built for his family’. So next time you’re in Madrid…)

Sewing the Sail (Cosiendo la vela), 1896

Almost immediately you can see why Sorolla is known as ‘the master of light’. Room two contains what is surely the most impressive painting here, Sewing the Sail, which is a miracle of evocation. You can feel the harsh Mediterranean sun, you can hear the distant susurration of the sea and the laughing chatter of the women as they work, you can smell the scents from the profusion of flowers in baskets and jars.

It is also a big painting, an enormous painting, which takes up most of one wall. You are immersed in the visual experience. Of all the paintings here this was the hardest to tear yourself away from.

But the exhibition brings together works in an impressive variety of genres, large and small. Sorolla was prolific, leaving at his death over a thousand paintings and several thousand drawings and sketches. The exhibition displays a selection of works including vivid seascapes and bather scenes, studies of architecture and formal gardens, many of the portraits from which he made a lucrative living, a whole room of social conscience paintings, and some of the images he prepared for a vast mural depicting Spanish regional customs and dress.

The Return from Fishing (La vuelta de la pesca), 1894

Room 1. Early works and wife

The first room includes an arresting self-portrait of a man determined to make his way in the world. There are portraits of Sorolla’s wife, Clotilde, as well as his daughters María and Elena, and son Joaquín, who became the Museo Sorolla’s first director.

Sorolla married Clotilde, the daughter of his first major patron, in 1888. She remained his favourite model and, in his many portraits, barely appears to age over the decades. The strong family connection resonates with the painting of a rose bush from Sorolla’s house which, legend has it, withered when the artist passed away and wilted away entirely when Clotilde died.

But the room is dominated by this expressive nude of his wife.

Female Nude (1902) by Joaquín Sorolla. Private Collection. Photo Joaquín Cortés

Three things. 1. He is showing off his skill with oil paint. Look at the shimmer and the shadows and the numerous different shades of pink of the presumably silk sheet she is lying on. 2. He was consciously chanelling the Rokeby Venus, a masterpiece by probably the most eminent Spanish painter Diego Velázquez. Sorolla set himself up as Velázquez’s modern heir and incarnation and, like Velázquez, cultivated a wide circle of rich aristocratic patrons until he reached the social pinnacle of being commissioned to paint a portrait of the Spanish king..

3. How very, very traditional it is. By 1902 the Impressionists had been at it for 30 years, and we had had a decade or more of post-Impressionism, Gauguin, van Gogh and so on and were teetering on the brink of the Fauves with their mad garish daubs of vibrant colour. Not in Sorolla’s world. One of the features of the early rooms is the number of international exhibitions Sorolla sent his work to, and the number of prizes he won, in Madrid, Paris, all over Europe. This is the height of late-Victorian Salon art. Sorolla represents everything modern painting set out to overthrow.

Room 2. Social conscience

Sorolla trained in Valencia and studied in Madrid and Rome. He first won an international reputation for major works tackling social subjects. The second room focuses on the 1890s, when Spain witnessed a period of social unrest as well as the final collapse of its overseas empire.

During this period Sorolla launched his career with a series of monumental canvases depicting the realities and hardships of Spanish life. His first great success was Another Marguerite! which depicted a woman arrested for murdering her child and won great acclaim when it was exhibited in Madrid in 1892.

From there, Sorolla set about gaining an international reputation by sending his pictures to exhibitions across Europe. While Sorolla largely moved away from socially engaged subjects after 1900, the pictures had a lasting impact on the next generation of Spanish painter.

And They Still Say Fish is Expensive! (¡Y aún dicen que el pescado es caro!), 1894

Many of them are wonderful but they feel very old. A painting like this reminds me of the British artist Sir Luke Fildes who was painting grittily realistic depictions of working class life in the 1870s.

Room 3. Portraits

The third room shows how Sorolla positioned himself as the heir to the tradition of Spanish artists such as Velázquez and Goya, whose works he closely studied at the Prado in Madrid.

In his portraits, Sorolla often adopted their distinctive palette of blacks, greys and creams. He also sought to achieve the same psychological penetration and sense of human presence for which both painters were famous.

Lucrecia Arana and Her Son (Lucrecia Arana y su hijo), 1906

I wasn’t convinced. Like all his works I began to realise that they make a better effect the further back you stand. But I still found the three faces in this double portrait unsatisfactory. The boy’s face looks like the black eyed boys you seen in the countless kitsch paintings you can buy in sunny markets and harbours around the Mediterranean. The woman just looks flat and ugly, and the image of the painter at work in the mirror isn’t exactly inspiring.

Many of the portraits are large, portrait-shaped depictions of the grand and rich and naturally invite comparison with one of the most successful portrait painters in Europe at the time, the American John Singer Sargent who based himself in London. Here’s a characteristic Sargent joint portrait from the period.

Lady Adele Meyer and her children (1896) by John Singer Sargent

In my opinion the Sargent is better. It captures the expressions on all three faces with a kind of dainty realism, and the fabric of the woman’s dress, the son’s velvet suit and, above all, of the antique sofa she’s sitting on – all of these seem to me to be caught with a kind of shimmering accuracy which Sorolla can’t match.

Room 4. The beach and sunlight

Room Four celebrates Sorolla’s love of sunlight and the sea. Having grown up by the coast in Valencia, Sorolla began after 1900 to create a substantial body of work, painted out of doors, documenting the mixture of leisure and work he witnessed on beaches close to Valencia and further down the coast at Jávea. These scenes proved hugely popular especially in the United States.

Running along the Beach, Valencia (1908) by Joaquín Sorolla © Museo de Bellas Artes de Asturias. Col. Pedro Masaveu

The audioguide is very thorough and comprehensive and includes several photos showing Sorolla at work on the beach, a) wearing an amazingly thick, heavy, conventional set of clothes (waistcoat, hat) in what must have been sweltering conditions b) with his canvas protected by a windbreak and the easel held down with an elaborate system of ropes and heavy stones.

In my opinion these paintings are wonderfully evocative but tread a fine line just this side of kitsch. On the one hand the use of colours in a painting like Boys on the beach is masterful – the commentary highlighted how he creates shadow out of colours, not using black, but looking at the composition as a whole I was struck by how he captures the many colours of sand, caused by the changing depths of sea water and light refracted through it.

Boys on the Beach (Chicos en la playa), 1909

But some of them topple into kitsch and once I’d though of Jack Vettriano’s immensely popular paintings of people on beaches, I couldn’t get them out of my mind. I found it hard not to see the Athena Posters aspect of many of these beach works.

Mad Dogs by Jack Vettriano

Mad Dogs by Jack Vettriano

Compared to the threatening new style of the Fauves or the Cubism which was just being invented by Picasso and Braques, yes, I can well imagine that American millionaires bought this kind of thing by the yard.

Room 5. Studies for the mural

In 1911 Sorolla was commissioned by the Hispanic Society of America in New York to create a vast mural-like series of paintings entitled Vision of Spain.

As preparation Sorolla travelled extensively through Spain, documenting the country’s regional dress, occupations, and traditions. Local people, often provided by Sorolla with costumes and props, were depicted in situ in works which were painted between 1911 and 1919.

The exhibition includes four large-scale preparatory studies for Vision of Spain demonstrating the intensity with which the artist engaged in Spanish folk tradition. Sorolla also painted the landscapes in these regions which he then incorporated in the Hispanic Society paintings.

Bride from Lagartera (1912) by Joaquín Sorolla © Museo Sorolla, Madrid

Three things:

1. The audioguide explains that, because the subjects were not professional models, they had to be painted quickly. The audioguide emphasises a) the terrific skill this required b) the way the paint was applied very quickly, often direct from the tube, in squiggles across the surface, and it’s true, if you get up close the pictures become almost abstract and, the guide suggests, exercises in pure painterliness.

2. They’re not very good, though, are they? They are not a patch on the huge realist works from the start of the exhibition, from the 1890s and, even allowing for the fact that they were rushed and are only preparatory works, still, the overall effect is negative.

3. Shame there weren’t more big colour photos of the finished mural. This does look very impressive but was only available as tiny black and white photos on the screen of the ipod-sized audioguide. Shame.

Room 6. Landscape and gardens

The sixth room of the exhibition is devoted to Sorolla’s views of landscapes and gardens. From a panoramic vista of the barren mountains of the Sierra Nevada glowing in evening light to the medieval towers of Burgos Cathedral under snow, Sorolla had a gift for finding the viewpoint to best communicate the atmosphere and character of a setting.

On several visits to the south, he recorded the country’s heritage in views of the gardens of the Alcázar in Seville and the Alhambra in Granada. None of these paintings pulled my daisy as much as the big realist works in room two or some of the sunlight beach scenes.

Reflections in a Fountain (Reflejos de una fuente), 1908

Room 7. Family

The final room highlights Sorolla’s fascination with depicting his family in large canvases painted out of doors such as Strolling along the Seashore (1909) and The Siesta (1911).

These works are twenty years on from Another Marguerite! and And They Still Say Fish is Expensive! and Sewing the Sail, and in The Siesta in particular you can see him really exploring the possibilities of oil painting, but in a landscape saturated with light. The Impressionists often painted fog or snow, for the German Expressionists it was always stormy night-time, but for Sorolla – even when he is at his most experimental, verging on abstraction – it is always bright and dazzlingly sunny.

The Siesta (1911) by Joaquín Sorolla © Museo Sorolla, Madrid

The Siesta (1911) by Joaquín Sorolla © Museo Sorolla, Madrid

Conclusion

In June 1920 Sorolla suffered a stroke in the middle of painting a portrait which paralysed him down one side, effectively ending his career, and died on the 10th August 1923.

The downstairs exhibition space at the National Gallery includes a comfy little cinema where they were showing a fifteen-minute documentary about Sorolla, complete with extensive explanations from the show’s curator, Christopher Riopelle.

From this we learn that he was given a state funeral, as befitted the official portraitist of the king and the royal family, and one of the last public painters working in the great European tradition, before Modernism swept all that way forever.

Having walked around it a couple of times and listened to the audioguide, I couldn’t help making continual comparisons to the social realist paintings of a Luke Fildes or the much finer portraits of Singer Sargent and, on the couple of occasions Sorolla does statuesque women in bathing suits, I was immediately reminded of the much more precise and lustrous paintings of the late-Victorian Olympians like Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

But… some of the large scale paintings, notably Sewing the Sail, are really stunning, eye-opening exercise in the overwhelming power of painting, and many of the details of the beach and sunlight paintings are wonderful – there’s a way he has of capturing the fading sunlight as it’s thrown across rocks which reminds you of all the Mediterranean holidays you’ve ever had.

And his use of colour, his juxtaposition of shades and hues to create subtle visual effects, is often dazzling. The more you look, the more absorbed you become. The curator claims that ‘No one before or since has painted Mediterranean sunlight like Sorolla’ and this may well be true.

Young Fisherman, Valencia (1904) by Joaquín Sorolla. Private Collection © Photo Laura Cohen

Videos

Review by Visiting London Guide.

Curator’s introduction by Christopher Riopelle.

Related links

Reviews of other National Gallery exhibitions

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by Simon on April 2, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on April 2, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/04/02/sorolla-spanish-master-of-light-national-gallery/

Dorothea Tanning @ Tate Modern

This is the first large-scale exhibition of Dorothea Tanning’s work to be held in the UK for 25 years. It brings together 100 pieces from her seven-decade-long career (she lived to be an astonishing 101 years old, 1910 to 2012) across a range of media, including oil paintings, pencil drawings, ‘soft’ sculptures, lithographs, a massive installation, and a film about her. It is as comprehensive a survey of her artistic achievement as you could wish for.

Birthday (1942) by Dorothea Tanning. Philadelphia Museum of Art © DACS 2019

Birthday (1942) by Dorothea Tanning. Philadelphia Museum of Art © DACS 2019

Tanning was born in provincial America (Galesburg, Illinois) in 1910. As soon as she was able to, she moved to New York, where she soon afterwards saw the famous Surrealism exhibition of 1936. It was a coup de foudre which changed her life. She began painting in a boldly Surrealist style and in 1939 set off to Paris to meet the leaders of the movement.

Unfortunately, Hitler had other plans, and the advent of the Second World War saw her coming straight back to New York but, happily, so did half the Surrealist artists, fleeing the Nazis. These fleeing artists included one of the leading Surrealists, Max Ernst (b.1891), who she fell in love with and married in 1946.

Surrealist paintings

The exhibition features a generous selection of the Surrealist paintings she made from the mid-1930s to the end of the 40s.

Tanning said she wanted to depict ‘unknown but knowable states’ and the pictures show humans in strange postures, or morphing into inanimate objects, or bursting into flames, or standing in deserts littered with incongruous objects, or standing in bedrooms among strange and Gothic figures, or staring into sunflowers which are changing into mirrors, or standing in front of doors opening onto other doors.

Some of these are really powerful images, although many felt to me like they were channelling existing Surrealist artists, especially Salvador Dali, the man who had crystallised the Surrealist ‘look’ in the late 1920s, introducing an immaculate finish to his oil paintings which depicted random objects or events, melting watches, elephants on stilts, melting limbs propped up by crutches and so on.

In other works you can detect the influence of Giorgio de Chirico (b.1888) with his mysterious abandoned Italian squares and brooding neo-classical architecture. In some of them you can see the Magritte who painted a man in a bowler hat with an apple in front of his face.

For example the blue skyscape at the bottom of this Surreal image of a chess game, and its startling optical illusion it gives that the rest of the painting has been draped in front of a landscape, reminds me of the deceptively simple blue skies of Magritte paintings.

Endgame (1944) by Dorothea Tanning. Courtesy Gertrud V. Parker © DACS 2019

Endgame (1944) by Dorothea Tanning. Courtesy Gertrud V. Parker © DACS 2019

But all that said, many of Tanning’s paintings do have a unique and distinctive feeling.

The recurrence of women in the paintings is nothing special in itself, since the Surrealists as a movement thought of the female as being more instinctive, irrational, closer to the unconscious and an all-purpose muse figure – so Tanning’s depictions of women with bared breasts (or herself with bared breasts) don’t cover any new ground.

But I felt that her depictions of girls do capture something unique. Pre-pubescent girls are not such a common motif in male artists, who tend, all too often, to depict shapely, nude and nubile women.

I think Tanning’s depictions of pre-pubescent girls and the depiction of women not as sex objects but as individuals – I’m struggling to put this into words, but her depiction of girls and women – did have a different and distinctive feeling, capturing something genuinely strange about a girl’s experience of the world. I thought of Angela Carter’s retelling of fairy tales from a girl’s point of view.

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943) by Dorothea Tanning. Tate © DACS 2019

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943) by Dorothea Tanning. Tate © DACS 2019

Prismatic style

In the 1950s Tanning and Ernst moved to Paris and this marked a seismic, comprehensive reinvention of her visual language. It is signalled in the exhibition when you walk into the next room and are confronted with the massive and staggering painting, Gate 84.

Installation photograph of Dorothea Tanning at Tate Modern, 2019

Admittedly this is from a lot later, 1984, but Gate 84 captures the massive change in style which happened in the 1950s. It depicts two girls drawn in vivid graphic style with the use of strong border lines, emerging from a background of violent flaming yellow. Dividing the painting right down the middle is part of an actual door and door jamb which has been embedded into the canvas and sticks out of the picture plane. Both the girls are wearing thigh-length dresses, the one on the left is performing an acrobatic leap so as to hit the door with outstretched hand and foot; the one on the right is more lazily sitting, with her right leg outstretched, her foot pressed flat against the door as if keeping it shut.

I visited with my wife who said this reminded her vividly of the fights she was always having with her own sister, when they were kids. And she got talking to another middle aged woman standing in front of it, who agreed that it reminded her of her childhood with two sisters, rampaging and fighting. A very female sensibility capturing something vivid and dynamic about girls’ experiences of the world.

What struck me more than anything was the chunky realism of the legs, the muscular thighs and the weight and tension in the calves and feet. The entire depiction of the human body is utterly utterly different from the rather attenuated, pallid, doll-like figures in the Surrealist paintings.

And this proved to be true of all her paintings from this point onwards. They become a) much larger and b) much much more abstract, great billowing shapes.

And yet, paradoxically, the graphic element becomes clearer. Faces and bodies and fragments of bodies appear as if out of a rampaging fog and, when they do, are often painted with strict anatomical accuracy, or even a kind of super-accuracy, a monumental accuracy. The arms and thighs and bottoms reminded me of Michelangelo.

It is like the work of a completely different artist.

Dogs of Cythera (1963) by Dorothea Tanning. The Destina Foundation, New York © DACS 2019

Dogs of Cythera (1963) by Dorothea Tanning. The Destina Foundation, New York © DACS 2019

In Dogs of Cythera, at bottom left you can make out what might be an arm going round a woman’s breast, in the centre something like the top of a shaved black skull, at bottom right another arm bent at the elbow, leading up to a hand with splayed fingers.

So there are people, or people-like objects in the painting, but quite clearly something radical and massive is going on that utterly eclipses them, or only uses them as raw material in a bigger and bewildering process.

To quote the wall label, these works mark:

a more abstracted ‘prismatic’ style of painting, and her brushwork and compositions became much looser. Where her earlier work used precise realism to present fantastical scenes, in these paintings it is colour and light that bring imaginary worlds into being. The possibilities of her medium became more important to her.

‘In looking at how many ways paint can flow onto canvas, I began to long for letting it have more freedom.’

In Tanning’s Surreal works the human body, mostly female, is often stylised, thin, elongated – or given an eerie, science fiction otherworldliness, as in this disconcerting girl being covered in flowers. The subject is set in a recognisable space with perspective to create depth and often to draw the eye to some Surrealistically disturbing detail, such as the fireplace which opens onto clear blue sky.

The Magic Flower Game (1941) by Dorothea Tanning. Private collection, South Dakota © DACS 2019

The Magic Flower Game (1941) by Dorothea Tanning. Private collection, South Dakota © DACS 2019

In this later, ‘prismatic’ style, there is no depth or perspective, there is only a great storm of cloud happening right on the surface of the canvas from which parts of one or more bodies threaten to temporarily emerge into focus before disappearing again into the tumult. The paintings vary quite a lot in feel, some lighter and airier, others really dark and stormy – but all in the same immediately recognisable style.

Inutile (1969) by Dorothea Tanning. The Destina Foundation, New York © DACS 2019

Inutile (1969) by Dorothea Tanning. The Destina Foundation, New York © DACS 2019

There are over twenty paintings in this manner, it looks like most of her output after the mid-1950s was like this, and I loved them.

Many of the Surrealist works are wonderful, inventive and mysterious but I couldn’t help the nagging through that she was working – often to marvellous effect – but in someone else’s idiom. With the ‘prismatic’ paintings it seemed to me Tanning became completely free. I loved the tremendous sense of energy they convey, the sense of muscular, lithe bodies struggling, fighting, embracing, tumbling through clouds – as different as could be from the absolutely static, dream-like, frozen tableaux of the Surrealist works.

They reminded me of the last stanza of Yeats’s poem, Near The Delphic Oracle.

Slim adolescence that a nymph has stripped,
Peleus on Thetis stares.
Her limbs are delicate as an eyelid,
Love has blinded him with tears;
But Thetis’ belly listens.
Down the mountain walls
From where pan’s cavern is
Intolerable music falls.
Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,
Belly, shoulder, bum,
Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs
Copulate in the foam.

Bellies, shoulders and bums all appear momentarily our of the seething fog of these strange, visionary paintings. Some are sensual, even sexy. And in some the human figure entirely emerges to be given a surprisingly traditional and realistic treatment, like this one, Tango Lives, from 1977, which seemed to me to be channelling Degas’s studies of ballet dancers on a stage, strongly lit from below.

Tango Lives (1977) by Dorothea Tanning

Tango Lives (1977) by Dorothea Tanning

But many others convey bewilderment and confusion, and some of them seem genuinely dark and terrifying, visions of a weird hell where monsters are eating each other. More than one of the dark ones reminded me of Goya’s Saturn devouring his children in a swirling fog.

Soft fabric sculptures

And then – something completely different, again. In the 14-minute film about her – Insomnia – which runs in the final room, Tanning herself explains that at some point in the mid-1960s she just got sick of the smell of turpentine and, by implication, of painting as a medium.

So she got a sowing machine (she is shown in the film using a classic black Singer machine) and began making soft sculptures.

She used the machine to sew together strange shapes which she stuffed with wool to become free-standing sculptures. Like the prismatic paintings they hint strongly at bodily parts – not least because many of them are made out of flesh-coloured fabric – with long tubes which could be arms flung around bulbous shapes which might be bodies. Take Nue Couchée which is made from cotton textile padded with cardboard and filled with seven tennis balls and a load of wool.

Nue Couchée (1969-70) by Dorothea Tanning. Tate © DACS 2019

Nue Couchée (1969 to 1970) by Dorothea Tanning. Tate © DACS 2019

There’s one round pink shape with a wide crack open in the front which is lined with jagged pieces of wood, obviously a rather nightmareish face. And the biggest piece is a mysterious black pin cushion, studded with giant pins, containing strange pinnacles and spouts, as well as worrying orifices.

Pincushion to Serve as Fetish (1965) by Dorothea Tanning. Tate © DACS 2019

Pincushion to Serve as Fetish (1965) by Dorothea Tanning. Tate © DACS 2019

Tanning made it when she was living in Seillans, a hill-top town in Provence. From 1965 to about 1970 she made about twenty of these cloth sculptures.

By far the most dramatic work along these lines was an enormous room-sized installation which is in fact a life-sized model of a room, complete with open door and fireplace, but which is infested with cloth sculptures looming out of the floor and bursting from the walls – a three-dimensional, if rather dingy, homage to the Surrealist nightmares which shook her imagination all those decades earlier.

Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202 (1970–3) by Dorothea Tanning

Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202 (1970 to 1973) by Dorothea Tanning

Conclusion

There’s also a section devoted to her work for the stage, designing Surrealist sets and costumes for collaborations with the choreographer George Balantine – and a sequence of lithographs which, to me, smacked of the covers of 1950s science fiction novels, of the more abstract, harrowing, post-apocalyptic flavour.

But overall her career can be divided very broadly into these three threads

  1. Dali-like Surrealist paintings
  2. huge billowy ‘prismatic’ paintings
  3. mysterious and unnerving soft sculptures

In light of this, I think the curators have made an excellent decision which is to mix it up.

I suspect that if they’d hung the works chronologically it might have been a bit boring, each room would have risked being a bit samey. A couple of rooms of non-stop Surrealism, one of the strange 1950s lithographs and stage designs, a couple of rooms of just prismatic paintings, and then a room or two of just soft sculptures – each space would have been limiting and samey.

Instead the curators have mixed it up, with works from the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s all in the same room, huge oil paintings next to lithographs, early drawings next to Surrealist classics.

The net result is to create thought-provoking connections and juxtapositions of subject matter and style – in short, to foment the kind of rather dreamy, disconnected, unsettling effect which I’m sure Tanning herself would have appreciated.

Self Portrait (1944) by Dorothea Tanning © San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Self Portrait (1944) by Dorothea Tanning © San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

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by Simon on March 24, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on March 24, 2019

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George Grosz: The Berlin Years by Ralph Jentsch (1997)

This big heavy paperback is the glossy catalogue to a comprehensive exhibition of Grosz’s work which was held in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection back in 1997. The long and detailed text was written by Ralph Jentsch, who is ‘managing director of the Grosz Estate, author of a number of catalogues and books on George Grosz, and a well-known expert in German Expressionism.’

It is a massive compendium of works by Grosz in all media – cartoons, caricatures, book illustrations, oil paintings, watercolours, sketches, drawings, collages and so on, not just from his mature years but starting with his earliest surviving sketches of cowboys and Indians and the heroes of boys’ own adventure stories which he loved as a lad.

There’s also plenty of evocative black-and-white photos of Grosz during the first 40 years of his life (1893 to 1933), featuring lots of semi-private shots of him messing about in his studio or playing the banjo – and also photos which give context to the story, from a typical German pub interior of the 1890s of the sort his father ran, to street scenes in Berlin, where he made the first half of his career.

In total there are 410 numbered works and photos in the main text, plus an additional 67 b&w photos in the 16-page potted biography at the end. It’s a visual feast, as they say, giving you a real sense of the visual universe he inhabited and the one he created.

(This book is the first volume of a two-volume and two-exhibition project – this one covers the Berlin years, the second one covers his time in exile in America, 1933-1959. Later, they were combined into one portmanteau book, link below.)

I’ve summarised Grosz’s life story in my review of his autobiography, A Small Yes and a Big No, no need to do it again. Instead, I’ll just mention half a dozen or so themes, issues or ideas which arise from a careful reading of this big book.

Transition from soft to hard lines

The first thirty or so pages include still life sketches Grosz did in conventional pencil or charcoal using multiple lines and hatching to create light and shade. These go alongside a consciously different style he developed for commercial caricatures, still very formal and multi-lined with an Art Nouveau feel. He had a different style again for the pictures he was hoping to use to start a career as a book designer.

Among the multitude of early sketches there are pub scenes, brawls in the street, and some gruesome (imaginary) murders. The point is – they’re all done in a much scribbled over, blurry, multi-line style.

What’s fascinating is to see how, during the war, he quickly and decisively changed his style to one of spare, scratchy single lines. Stylistically, it’s the decisive move: before – smudgy, obscure, feverishly drawn and overdrawn figures; after – scratchy, one-line figures, buildings, objects.

Evening in Motzstraße (1918)

Evening in Motzstraße (1918)

It’s fascinating to read his own account of how and why the change came about.

In order to attain a style that reproduced the hardness and insensitivity of my subjects, I studied the most direct expressions of art: I copied the folkloristic drawings in the urinals; they seemed to me the expression and most immediate rendering of strong emotions. I was also stimulated by the unequivocalness of children’s drawings. So I gradually reached my knife-hard style that I needed to draw what I saw. (Art in Danger, 1925)

I wonder if any other major artists, anywhere, ever, has credited their style as being derived from the drawings in public lavatories?

This is just one revealing quote from the many which Jentsch gives us from Grosz’s own autobiography, from the prefaces to the books, to the justificatory notes he prepared for each of his court cases, and to the countless letters he wrote to all his friends. We learn that Grosz wrote a vast correspondence to all his friends and acquaintances, kept copies of it all (which survive) and expected long and detailed replies in return – or else the friends were liable to get a none-too-polite reminder.

Grosz is a really fluent and enjoyable prose writer – his descriptions of holidays on the Baltic or the threatening atmosphere of Depression Berlin are a joy to read in their own right.

America

Jentsch’s quotes very liberally from Grosz’s autobiography (it is, after all, extremely jocular and readable) in bringing out Grosz’s obsession with America and its pop culture. As a boy he devoured James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels, as well as the pulp westerns of Karl May, the detective hero Nick Carter, and loved everything American.

Having just read John Willett’s two books about Weimar art and culture, I can see that Grosz’s enthusiasm was part of a much broader cultural trend: the Germans loved American culture. Not only was there jazz which took everyone by storm, but the radio and gramophone were American inventions and everyone round the world fell in love with Charlie Chaplin’s silent comedies.

Later, for the avant-garde designers and architects which Willett’s book describes, America remained the beacon of all things modern, particularly the staggering efficiency of its industry and design. Henry Ford’s many books were bestsellers in Germany, as were the innovations of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s time and motion and efficiency studies.

I always think the most incongruous fan of America in this milieu was the Marxist playwright Brecht, who wrote loads of poems about a fantasy America, devoted a play to Chicago gangsters, as well as setting a number of plays and oratorios there, such as his oratorio about Lindbergh’s famous solo flight across the Atlantic. American jazz, cars, fashions and technology all stood for the exciting and new, liberated from the dead hand of Old Europe and its defunct empires.

Towards the end of his Weimar career (and in the depths of the Great Depression) Grosz’s attitude towards America (like Brecht’s) had become a good deal more satirical and critical. Now he sees all mankind as blindly greedily chasing after the consumer capitalism which America has perfected and exported to the world. But although the attitude has hardened – it’s still America which is at the centre of his thoughts.

Dreams, romantically dispensed and advertised a thousand times over: comfortable living, bath-tub, sports, utility car, and at best a weekend with cocktails and beauty queen. America has shown the way, we’re following after – due to war somewhat behind – in our naturally slow way. Even in Marxist Russia, America is the model and ardently desired goal. The goal is: rational exploitation of all raw material sources so as to procure comfort for the little man on the basis of mass machine production. (quoted page 135)

Just one year later – 1933 – Grosz was himself in America, beginning the long struggle to make a new career, which is described in his autobiography and in the second of these two volumes.

Alas, several of Grosz’s biggest most colourful fantasias on American themes (from the end of the Great War and featuring cowboys with six-shooters, wizened old trappers, gold miners and saloon whores) were confiscated by the Nazis and have never been found, so we only know them from old photos.

Misanthropy

Boy, Grosz hated people, he always hated people, he really hated people. Jentsch’s book clarifies that Grosz never saw action during the Great War, he had a nervous breakdown before he reached the front and ended up back in Berlin making sketches, caricatures and paintings which expressed his virulent hatred for people, for men, and for Germany in particular, for the state which had committed its young men to this suicidal folly and which had wanted to force him into the meat grinder.

It was a combination of loathing Germany and obsessing about America which made him change his name from the original Georg Groβ to the Anglicised George Grosz (just as his close friend and collaborator Helmut Herzfeld changed his name to the Anglicised John Heartfield).

Grosz’s misanthropy makes a mockery of his so-called communist beliefs. He joined the German communist party the day it was set up in November 1918 and played a role in the 1918 Berlin revolution, signing a revolutionary declaration published by a collective of revolutionary artists. But after his trip to the USSR in 1922 (where he actually met Lenin), Grosz quickly lost any political faith and lapsed into a universal contempt for mankind.

Hatred for humanity drips from the hundreds and hundreds of drawings from this era, and from the watercolours in particular, which show a relentless parade of corrupt and ugly old men, apparently surrounded by grim, half-naked prostitutes.

Before sunrise (1922)

Before sunrise (1922)

As Grosz wrote to his friend J. B. Neuman:

My drawings will naturally stay true – they are fireproof. They will later be seen as Goya’s work [is]. They are not documents of the class struggle, but eternally living documents of human stupidity and brutality.

Red

In 1916 to 1918 Grosz went through a red phase, lots of paintings done almost entirely in shades of blazing red. The house is on fire, the city is going up in flames. It didn’t last too long, but while it did it was very, very red.

Metropolis (1917)

Metropolis (1917)

A painting like this displays a raft of his characteristics. The knife-hard outline styling of all the figures is well established. Humans are caricatures with hardly any attempt at naturalistic shading or modelling. Perspective has been thrown away in preference for a crazy vortex of planes which gives the sense of a crashing chaos of urban architecture. Women are more often than not half or completely naked, with a little pubic bush in sight just to ram home the point. Corruption, sex, seediness. Everywhere.

Nudes

Grosz did a surprising number of nude studies, almost all of them unflattering or verging on the grotesque.

More surprisingly, he did a large amount of pornographic sketches and drawings, pornographic in the sense that they show men and women very explicitly and enthusiastically engaging in sexual practices, his misanthropy coming over loud and clear in the fat ugliness of everyone involved.

But there’s also something haunted about portraying men and women again and again at the feverish, pleasure-filled but somehow empty, tragic and futile copulations which obsess humanity, and to what end.

The obsessive reworking of the same theme (he liked women bending over and displaying their big wobbly buttocks) give the sense of a man questing, searching, trying to find the answer to the reason – why? Why are we animals? Why do we behave like farmyard beasts? What is behind this absurd farce?

The sex drawings cross over with a set of disturbing sketches and paintings of a cartoon character called ‘John the slayer of women’, who was much in his thoughts in 1917 and 1918. He claimed the set was inspired by a notorious murder of the time – or was it just a misogynist way to let off steam and vent the huge amount of anger he had permanently burning inside?

John, The Lady Killer (1918)

John, The Lady Killer (1918)

Dada and collage

Grosz was a central figure in the Berlin branch of Dada which got going about 1918. He formed a close working partnership with the Herzfeld brothers who set up a publishing house for avant-garde work – the Malik-Verlag – where Grosz was able to publish a series of ‘albums’ of lithographs throughout the 1920s (nearly all of which were confiscated and banned by the authorities).

He collaborated with Helmut Herzfeld aka John Heartfield in the invention and development of photo-montage i.e. cutting out objective pictorial elements like photos or text or headlines from newspapers or magazines and pasting them into grotesque and satirical combinations.

Grosz considered the painting below as one of his most important, and it had pride of place at the Dada exhibition in June 1920.

You can see the way any idea of perspective has been completely abandoned in the name of a potentially endless collage of objects, images and planes. The collage element of newspaper cuttings and magazine images is made particularly obvious on the table. There is the characteristically bitter satire of the so-called ‘pillars’ of the establishment at the bottom. And there is a naked woman with boobs and the characteristic hint of pubic hair to the left of the main figure.

Apart from anything else, there’s a ‘Where’s Wally’ pleasure to be had in deciphering all the visual elements in these, the most cluttered works of his career.

Germany: A Winter's Tale (1918)

Germany: A Winter’s Tale (1918)

Watercolours

Grosz had a number of styles – or a number of ways of deploying his basic vision. Thus the book juxtaposes the intense oil paintings (above) with the just as savage watercolours, but the latter have a very different feel. Watercolour makes the images lighter and Grosz has a very stylish way of letting the colour leach and bleed around the central subjects, something not possible in oils.

Waltz dream (1918)

Waltz dream (1918)

The nipples and bush of a scantily-clad woman/prostitute are probably the most prominent visual element, but what I like is the variety and inventiveness of the colours and the way they are arranged in patches or facets. Surprisingly decorative, isn’t it?

De Chirico vistas and mannequins

In 1919 and 1920 Grosz experimented with a series of works which combined receding vistas of perfect multi-story buildings, as developed by the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, with the photo-montage technique he’d been developing with Heartfield.

The result is uncanny, weird and grotesque objects made out of material cut from newspapers and magazines. The final, unsettling element is the omission of faces from the human figures, their heads instead the blank ovals of the shop-window mannequins of the day.

Republican Automatons (1920)

Republican Automatons (1920)

In a completely different style from the raging, red fractured cityscapes, here Grosz presents man as a faceless robot, a characterless shop-window dummy in a soulless landscape of factories and houses, a heartless automaton made up of interchangeable parts (as Jentsch puts it, on page 122).

To ram the message home Grosz stopped signing these automaton paintings and had a stamp made which said GEORGE GROSZ CONSTRUIERT, emphasising their machine-like quality.

Portfolios and collections

Drawing can be an effective weapon against the brutal Middle Ages and stupidity of man of our time, provided that the hand is trained and the will is clear.

As early as 1916 Grosz had a plan for a vast three-volume collection of drawings to be titled The Ugliness of the Germans. In the event he managed to get published the First George Grosz Portfolio and The Little George Grosz Portfolio in small editions. As you can imagine, original copies of these are worth a fortune today.

One of the great virtues of Jentsch’s book is that it includes nearly all the drawings from all his major collections, including the later ones which caused such a scandal – Gott mit uns (1920), In the shade (1921), The Brigands (1922), Ecce Homo (1923), The Mirror of the Bourgeoisie (1925) The New Face of the Ruling Class (1930).

This allows you to see what all the fuss was about and judge for yourself. It also lets you see each of the series in the context of the others, building up a cumulative effect.

Jentsch goes into detail about each of the trials, giving dates and places where Grosz and his publishers were arraigned and their punishments on each occasion (fines and confiscations). He devotes quite a few pages to a chronology of one of the longest court cases in the history of the Weimar Republic, the prosecution of Grosz and his publisher Herzfeld for some of the illustrations created for a stage adaptation of the classic novel, The Good Soldier Svejk, which started in 1928 and went through four separate trials on into 1932.

Grosz really was a thorn in the side of respectable society and it’s worth buying the book for the portfolios alone, which in their spare directness brutally convey seething his seething anger at man’s inhumanity to man.

Lions and leopards feed their young from The Brigands (1922)

‘Lions and leopards feed their young’ from The Brigands (1922)

Grosz was lucky, very lucky to happen to be offered a job in New York in 1932, and to persuade his wife and children to join him early in 1933, just two weeks before Hitler came to power.

He’d been taking the mickey out of Hitler for over ten years. On the day of Hitler’s accession SA troops broke into both Grosz’s flat and Berlin studio. If he’d been there he would have been taken off for interrogation, torture, prison and probable death. Lucky man.

Siegfried Hitler by George Grosz (1922)

Siegfried Hitler by George Grosz (1922)

And he was right when he compared himself to Goya. To later ages, to our age, his drawings and paintings are comparable with Goya’s, as ‘eternally living documents of human stupidity and brutality’.

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by Simon on January 30, 2018  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Biography, Books, European History, Exhibition, Great War, History, Politics, War
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Posted by Simon on January 30, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/01/30/george-grosz-the-berlin-years-ralph-jentsch/

Symbolist Art by Edward Lucie-Smith (1972)

Symbolist art does not depict nature as it actually exists, but brings together various impressions received by the mind of the artist, to create a new and different world, governed by its own subjective mood. (p.151)

Although this book is 45 years-old, I picked it up in a second-hand bookshop to compare and contrast with Michael Gibson’s account of Symbolism. Gibson’s massive books is packed with brilliant full-colour reproductions but, as I read it, I did increasingly find myself wondering where ‘Symbolism’ ended and where the simply fantastic or morbid or sensationalist began. So I read this book to further explore whether Symbolism was really a movement in a narrow definable way – or is just the word given to a kind of mood or feeling of other-worldliness apparent in a huge range of artists between about 1880 and 1910.

The World of Art series

Symbolist Art is a typical product of Thames and Hudson’s renowned ‘World of Art series’ in that, although there are 185 illustrations, only 24 of them are in colour. So you’re not buying it for the pictures, which can be better seen, in full colour, in numerous other books (or online); you’re buying it for the text.

Edward Lucie-Smith

Lucie-Smith was born in 1933 and is still alive (aged 84). Public school, Oxford, the RAF during the war, then freelance poet, art critic, essayist, author and curator, he has written over 100 books. His book comes over as significantly more learned and informative than Gibson’s.

Symbolism in Renaissance painting

He starts with a basic consideration of symbols in art starting back in the Renaissance. Renaissance art is packed with symbols – classical gods and goddesses are accompanied by their attributes, kings and queens are shown in allegorical paintings accompanied by war or peace or the triumph of the arts and so on.

To get the most out of Renaissance art you undoubtedly have to have a good eye for its religious, political and cultural symbolism. For example, spot the symbolism in this masterpiece by Rubens.

(In this picture the portrait of Marie de’ Medici – daughter of the Grandduke of Tuscany – is being presented to Henry IV, the king of France, and her future husband. The gods of marriage and love – Hymen and Amor (Cupid), to the left and right – hover in midair. From up in heaven the king and queen of the gods, Jupiter and Juno, look down in approval. Jupiter’s symbol, the eagle of war, clutching lightning bolts in his talons, is literally being squeezed out of the picture, to the left, while Juno’s symbols, the peacocks of love and peace strut (the male) and look down at the scene of love (the female). A pink ribbon symbolising their marriage binds them together. The chariot the peahen sits in bears a gold relief on the front showing Cupid standing on/triumphing over (another) eagle, and holding a garland (symbol of marriage). Behind Henry stands the personification of France, wearing French blue silk embroidered with gold fleur-de-lys (the coat of arms of the French monarchy). She is reassuring Henry that it is a good match for the nation. The burning town in the distance and the dark clouds to the left of the picture, beneath the eagle, symbolise War, as do the helmet and shield at the foot of the painting. These must all be abandoned so that Henry can concentrate on the lighter, feminine arts of peace, subtly emphasised by the light source for the whole scene coming from the right, the side of the Future, peace and harmony.)

Lucie-Smith draws the distinction between ‘closed’ and ‘open’ symbolism.

Open symbolism is the use of publicly available and traditional imagery. All of the symbolism in the Rubens picture is ‘open’ in the sense that any educated person could spot it.

Closed symbolism refers to ‘secret’ knowledge, available only to ‘initiates’. Renaissance and post-Renaissance art features numerous painters who included closed symbolism in their works: some has been investigated and explicated by later scholars; some remains obscure to this day.

Watteau

In other words, symbolism as a strategy or technique, is absolutely intrinsic to the Western artistic tradition.

What Lucie-Smith brings out is the strand of artists over the past few hundred years who brought something extra to the idea: who incorporated open symbolism or straightforward allegory (where x stands for y, where, for example, an hourglass stands for ‘Time’), but something else as well.

He takes an example from the wonderful Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721). On the face of it Watteau was painting fashionable fête galantes for the French aristocracy, scenes of dressing up and carefree flirtations in an idealised classical setting, thus:

Yet (apart from the fabulous rhythmic compositions, the draughtsmanship of the figures, the wonderful use of colour) what makes Watteau ‘magical’ is the sense he achieves of a deeper meaning which somehow diffuses a mysterious influence around itself. According to Lucie-Smith, Watteau:

had already abandoned conventional allegory in favour of a use of symbolism which was more pervasive, more powerful and more mysterious. (p.21)

Something else is conveyed above and beyond the ostensible subject and its over symbolism. Somehow it achieves a sense of mystery.

The Romantic roots of Symbolism

There follows a chapter about Romanticism, a movement which I, personally, find boring, maybe because I’ve read too much about it and seen too many times the same old paintings by Fuseli (The Nightmare), Goya (The sleep of reason produces monsters) or Caspar David Friedrich (The Cross in the mountains).

Lucie-Smith’s purpose is to show that ‘Romanticism’ is (quite obviously) the godfather to modern Symbolism – in its use of obscure but meaningful images, nightmares and dreams, scary women and looming monsters – in the use of pseudo-religious imagery which has lost its literal meaning but acquired a spooky, Gothic, purely imaginative resonance.

Victorian symbolists

The next chapter looks at symbolist currents in British art during the 19th century, starting with the self-taught mythomane, William Blake. It then moves on to consider the group of artists who claimed to be his followers and called themselves ‘the Ancients’, including Edward Calvert and the wonderful Samuel Palmer, with his strange visionary depictions of rural Kent (Coming from Evening Church).

Then we arrive at the pre-Raphaelites. Lucie-Smith identifies Dante Gabriel Rossetti as the most ‘symbolist’ of these young idealistic painters, not least because his technique was quite limited. Rossetti wasn’t very good at perspective or realistic settings and so his mature paintings often have a vague, misty background which helps to emphasise the ‘timeless other-worldliness’ of the main subject (generally cupid-lipped, horse-necked ‘stunners’ [as the lads used to call them] as in Astarte Syriaca).

Astarte Syriaca by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1877)

Astarte Syriaca by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1877)

Burne-Jones and Watts

Lucie-Smith credits Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98) with developing the medieval and dream-like elements of pre-Raphaelitism to their fullest extent and in so doing creating a stream of late works devoted to expressionless women moving through heavily meaningful landscapes.

Burne-Jones exhibited at the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1889, where he won a first-class medal. (Intriguing to think the Impressionists were almost entirely excluded from this show and forced to mount an exhibition at the nearby Café Volpini – as described in in Belinda Thompson’s book about the Post-Impressionists.)

French symbolist artists were well aware of Burne-Jones’s work. But the most overtly ‘symbolist’ of the late Victorian artists was George Frederick Watts. He was quite clear about his intentions and his own words give quite a good summary of the symbolist impulse:

I paint ideas, not things. I paint primarily because I have something to say, and since the gift of eloquent language has been denied me, I use painting; my intention is not so much to paint pictures which shall please the eye, as to suggest great thoughts which shall speak to the imagination and to the heart and arouse all that is best and noblest in humanity. (quoted page 47)

His many contemporary fans and supporters considered Watts a ‘seer’ and suggested his work be hung in a temple not a gallery (an ambition which sort of came true with the dedication of his final home and studio in the village of Compton, Surrey, to his work, a venue you can now visit – the Watts Gallery).

The dweller of the innermost by Watts (1886)

The dweller of the innermost by Watts (1886)

‘The dweller of the innermost’ is obviously someone important, and something very meaningful is going on in this painting – but who? and what?

Symbolism

All this background is covered in the first 50 pages of this 220-page book in order to get us to the Symbolist movement proper.

Symbolism in the narrow sense was a literary movement, embodied in the poetry of Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé in the 1870s and 1880s. They used real world images but set in shimmering, vague and allusive contexts. By the late 1880s this kind of literary worldview overlapped strongly with a revival of a so-called ‘decadent’ style, in both writing and painting. It was largely to distinguish between the two outlooks that the minor poet Jean Moréas in 1886 wrote the essay which introduced the term ‘symbolist’ and ‘symbolism’.

According to Moréas, both symbolism and decadence turned away from the oppressive mundaneness of the everyday bourgeois world but whereas the symbolists emphasized dreams and ideals, the Decadents cultivated heavily ornamented or hermetic styles and morbid subject matter.

Lucie-Smith asserts that the first phase of symbolism lasted from Moréas’s 1886 essay until he himself rejected the name in 1891. Its central figure was the poet Mallarmé. Lucie-Smith lists the qualities of Mallarmé’s poetry, and points out how they can also be found in the symbolist painters of the day:

  • deliberate ambiguity
  • hermeticism (i.e. closed to easy interpretation)
  • use of the symbol as catalyst i.e. to prompt a reaction in the soul of the beholder
  • the idea that art exists in a world separate and apart from the everyday one
  • synthesis not analysis i.e. while the Impressionists analysed light and its effects, the symbolists brought together elements of the real world – from tradition, myth and legends – into strange and new combinations or syntheses

An important element of synthesis was not only the unexpected combination of real-world elements, but the notion that all the arts could and should borrow from each other. Symbolism always hovered around the idea of a ‘total work of art’ which combines music, dance, art, even smells and touches. Everyone in the 1880s was entranced by Wagner’s massive operas which aspired to just this condition of being Gesamtkunstwerks or ‘total works of art’. The idea was very powerful and lingered through to the First World War – the Russian composer Scriabin composed works deliberately designed to evoke colourful fantasias and artists like Wassily Kandinsky in the 1900s theories about the closeness of painting and music.

Here’s a Symbolist depiction of the hero of one of Wagner’s massive operas, the pure and holy knight Parsifal.

Gustave Moreau (1826-98)

Moreau is the painter most associated with the first phase of Symbolism. He developed an ornate jewel-studded style of treating subjects from the Bible or classical legend.

Jupiter and Semele by Gustave Moreau (1895)

Jupiter and Semele by Gustave Moreau (1895)

Reviewing the Salon of 1880, the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans singled out Moreau’s work for being mysterious and disturbing. Four years later in his classic novel A Rebours, which describes a decadent aristocrat who retires to his country house to cultivate sensual pleasures and experiences, Huysmans singled out Moreau as the patron painter of his decadent lifestyle, using a lexicon of late-19th century decadent terms: Moreau’s art is ‘disquieting… sinister… sorrowful symbols of superhuman perversities’ and so on.

Of his own painting Jupiter and Semele, Moreau wrote:

It is an ascent towards superior spheres, a rising up of superior beings towards the Divine – terrestrial death and apotheosis in Immortality. The great Mystery completes itself, the whole of nature is impregnated with the ideal and the divine, everything is transformed. (quoted page 66)

That gives you a strong sense of Symbolist rhetoric.

Odilon Redon (1840-1916)

Huysmans also includes Redon in his short list of artists favoured in the country sensorium of his decadent hero, Des Esseintes. Redon seems to me by far the more symbolist painter of the two, and the polar opposite of Moreau. Whereas Moreau paints relatively conventional mythical subjects in a super-detail-encrusted fashion, Redon strips away all detail to portray the subject in a genuinely mysterious and allusive simplicity.

Redon wrote of his own work:

The sense of mystery is a matter of being all the time amid the equivocal, in double and triple aspects, and hints of aspects (images within images), forms which are coming to birth according to the state of mind of the observer. (quoted page 76)

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98)

Puvis wanted to revive the academic tradition and his compositions of figures in landscapes in one way hearken back to the posed landscapes of Nicolas Poussin (1594-1661). But he did so in a strange dreamlike way which pointed forward, towards the semi-abstraction of Cézanne. He wrote to a friend that he preferred low skies, solitary plains, bad weather – a temperament which resulted in melancholy often mysterious paintings.

I don’t like Puvis because of what I take to be his rather ropey draughtsmanship – his figures seem angular and uncomfortable, especially the faces.

Eugène Carrière (1849-1906)

Lucie-Smith doesn’t like Carrière much because he developed one subject – family members, especially mother and baby – and painted them over and over again, in a very distinctive way, as if seen through a thick brown mist. I can see how this would quickly grow tiresome, but in brief selections Carriere comes over as a powerful element of the symbolist scene.

At about this point in the book it struck me that a quick way of distinguishing between post-Impressionist and Symbolist painters is that the former were experimenting with ways of depicting reality, whereas the latter are experimenting with ways to try and depict what lies behind reality. Of the former, contemporary critics asked, ‘What is it meant to be depicting?’, of the latter they would ask, ‘I can see what it’s depicting – but what does it mean?’

Paul Gauguin and the Pont-Aven school

Gauguin the post-Impressionist is included? Yes, because in the several summers he spent painting at Pont-Aven in Brittany, Gauguin attracted young disciples who both inspired him to become more abstract and ‘primitive’, but also came back to Paris to spread his influence.

The young Paul Sérusier organised a group of like-minded young artists at the private art school of Rodolphe Julian, which included Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, and Maurice Denis – and christened them the ‘Nabis’ (Hebrew for ‘prophets’). Without really intending to, Gauguin found himself being lauded as a prophet to the Symbolists. When he set off for the Pacific he was given a going-away party by the Symbolists, presided over by Mallarmé himself.

Here’s a work from Gauguin’s South Sea period.

Lucie-Smith says it is symbolist work because it has mystery, ambiguity and is clearly an invitation to seek some deeper meaning lying beneath the surface. Well, yes… I find several works by other Nabis more convincingly symbolist:

Lucie-Smith devotes a chapter to the Salon of the Rose+Cross founded by Joséphin Péladan in 1892, which held a series of six exhibitions from 1892 to 1897 at which they invited Symbolist painters to exhibit. Featured artists included Arnold Böcklin, Fernand Khnopff, Ferdinand Hodler, Jan Toorop, Gaetano Previati, Jean Delville, Carlos Schwabe and Charles Filiger.

The Salon combined rituals and ideas from Medieval Rosicrucianism with elements of Kabbala and other aspects of esoteric lore. Charming and distracting though much of this arcane knowledge may be to devotees, it is also, at bottom, a profoundly useless waste of time and intellect. However, the Salon of the Rose+Cross’s practical impact was to bring together and promote a wide range of painters who shared the symbolist mindset:

More impressive are Soul of the Forest by Edgar Maxence (1898) and:

Orpheus by Jean Delville (1893)

Orpheus by Jean Delville (1893)

Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98)

An illustrator who created line drawings in black ink, Beardley’s big breakthrough came in 1894 when Oscar Wilde’s play, Salome, was published in a version with Beardsley’s woodcuts and caused a succès de scandale. Well aware of fashionable taste, Beardsley tackled favourite Symbolist themes like the medieval dreamworld of King Arthur, the femme fatale, Wagner’s operas, and pretty risqué pornography, as in his illustrations to the classic play, Lysistrata.

Beardsley’s clarity of line and hard-edged arabesques make him one of the founders of Art Nouveau.

Symbolists in other countries

This summary only takes us up to half way through the book which beings to risk – like Gibson’s book – turning into simply a list of relevant painters with a paragraph or so on each.

Part of this is because Symbolism was so thoroughly international a style, with offshoots all across Europe. Lucie-Smith makes the point that it was a little like the Mannerism of the end of the 16th century – the product of a unified and homogenous culture, and of a social and artistic élite determined to emphasise the gap between itself – with all its sensitivity and refinement – and the ghastly mob, with its crude newspapers and penny-dreadful entertainments.

Later chapters describe the Symbolist artists of America, Holland (Jan Toorop, Johan Thorn Prikker),  Russia (Diaghilev, Bakst and the World of Art circle), Italy (Giovanni Segantini, Gaetano Previati), Czechoslovakia (Franz Kupka), Germany-Switzerland (Arnold Böckin, Max Klinger, Otto Greiner, Alfred Kubin, Ferdinand Hodler, Franz von Stuck).

The kiss of the Sphinx by Franz von Stuck (1895)

The kiss of the Sphinx by Franz von Stuck (1895)

I particularly liked:

The books ends with extended sections devoted to James Ensor, Edvard Munch (who Lucie-Smith considers the most avant-garde painter working anywhere in the mid-1890s) and Gustav Klimt.

Modernists who had symbolist phases

Like Gibson, Lucie-Smith points out that a number of the great Modernists first passed through identifiable symbolist phases before finding their final styles.

Two great examples are Wassily Kandinsky, whose pre-abstract paintings are admittedly influenced by Fauve and Divisionist techniques but as, Lucie-Smith points out, depict undeniably Arthurian and medieval subject matter, and so qualify for the symbolist team.

The other is Piet Mondrian, the Dutchman nowadays known for his black-lined grids of white squares and rectangles, enlivened with the occasional yellow or red exception. But before he perfected the style that made him famous (about 1914), Mondrian had gone through a florid Symbolist period in the 1910s – in fact he was a keen theosophist (member of a spiritual movement akin to Rosicrucianism).

In a final, surprise move, Lucie-Smith makes a claim for Picasso to have gone through a Symbolist phase, before becoming the father of modern art.

He quotes Evocation, which does look remarkably like something by Odilon Redon (Picasso was only 19 at the time) and whose subject is a characteristically fin-de-siecle one of suicide and death. Or take Life, which uses a handful of meaningful figures to address this rather large topic, not unlike the confessional approach of Edvard Munch just a few years earlier.

Life by Pablo Picasso (1903)

Life by Pablo Picasso (1903)

Finale

As with Michael Gibson’s book, I felt that Lucie-Smith pulled in so many outriders and fringe symbolists that he watered down the core vision and essence of Symbolism.

Beardsley? Gauguin? Whistler? Ye-e-e-s… but no. Beardsley is an illustrator who anticipates Art Nouveau design. Gauguin is a post-Impressionist. Whistler is a type of Impressionist with little or no interest in ‘religion’ or ‘the beyond’…

But that is the difficulty with the Symbolism as an-ism, it is extremely broad and covers themes, topics, ideas which spilled over from earlier movements, spilled into contemporary movements, which touched artists (and illustrators and designers) of all types and genres. At its broadest, it was the spirit of the age. All we can say with complete certainty is that the Great War utterly destroyed it, and ushered in a new, anti-spiritual age, in literature, poetry, music and the visual arts.

And, turning back to the immense and beautifully illustrated Gibson coffee-table book, I’d say that if you were only going to own one of these books, Gibson’s is the one: Lucie-Smith’s text is thorough and informative but Gibson’s illustrations are to die for.

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Posted by Simon on December 28, 2017

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Modigliani by Doris Krystof (1996)

Taschen Publishing specialise in medium-sized art books (23 cm tall x 18.5 cm wide). They’re all originally written in German, this one was translated into English by Christina Rathgeber. I picked it up for a fiver in some art shop years ago, and dusted it off and reread it to coincide with visiting the big Modigliani exhibition at Tate Modern.

The text is eminently readable and it has 88 good quality colour reproductions, not just of paintings and sculptures by the man himself but of works by contemporaries like Picasso, Kirchner and Brancusi, as well as classic nudes by Titian and Giorgione, quoted to compare and contrast with Modigliani’s famous nude paintings.

It is a real visual treat just slowly flipping through the pictures and soaking them up.

Biography

The outline of Modigliani’s life is clear enough. Born in 1884 to an arty Jewish family in northern Italy (his mother translated poetry, wrote essays and book reviews), his creative tendencies were encouraged so that by age 14 he was studying at the art academy in Livorno. He studied from books and attended a life drawing class; he visited Rome and Florence and Venice where he revelled in the Old Masters. He attended the Venice Biennale of 1903 and stayed there two years.

By which point it was time to move on and he headed for the Mecca of modern artists, Paris, arriving in 1906. Quite quickly he made important friends, not least the Spaniard Picasso and the Romanian sculptor Brancusi. For the next few years he experimented with a number of styles, from Cézanne (who had died in 1906 and quickly had several exhibitions devoted to his late work) to Edvard Munch, who impressed everyone with the work displayed at the Salon d’Automne of 1908 – although he avoided the main new movement of the day, Fauvism (given its name in 1905 and which flourished for the next few years).

Similarly, Modigliani was well aware of, but avoided, the arrival of Cubism in 1908, pioneered by Picasso and Braque, which swept up many lesser talents. Instead, he pursued his core interest of depicting the human form using outlines of graceful arabesques.

From about 1909 to 1912 Modigliani devoted himself entirely to sculpture, heavily influenced by the new taste for ‘primitive’ art from Africa and Oceania which became modish from around 1905, and by his friendship with the modernist sculptor, Brancusi.

Although some of his sculptures are obviously influenced by (copies) of African fetish masks which were becoming popular in artistic circles, Modigliani was just as obsessed by the idea of the caryatid, the statue of a woman bearing the weight of a building which had been developed in ancient Greece. He produced scores of sketches and variations on this crouching, hunched-up, female shape.

Eventually Modigliani gave up sculpting, maybe because the dust was bad for his chronic tuberculosis, but his painting style was now purified of the earlier variety and experimentalism – the faces in particular from now on were all variations on the elongated, oval shape with schematic, one-line features (eyes, eyelids and mouth all drawn with a crisp elegant line) which he had perfected in the sculptures and in the numerous preparatory sketches he made for them.

He continued to paint a wide variety of portraits of friends, lovers, fellow artists, collectors and patrons, and in the middle of the Great War began to paint a series of nudes. These differ from the portraits in being really simplified – the skin tone is generally a consistent warm orange colour, and the facial features are purified down to a handful of lines. They sold well – what’s not to like?

Towards the end of the War, Modigliani was advised to head south by his dealer and set up shop in Nice, along with his mistress, Jeanne Hébuterne, mother of his daughter. Here he painted lots more portraits, but in a noticeably lighter style, and of ordinary people – instead of the rich and famous of Paris’s art world – of peasants, hotel cleaners, and even of children. These, along with the nudes, became his most popular images.

By 1919 he was back in Paris, and the final portraits of his mistress and patrons show a further tendency to elongate both the neck and the face even more, making each person even more of an abstract collection of lines and colours.

Modigliani died after a long decline in his health on 24 June 1920. Soon afterwards friends and acquaintances, lovers and patrons began writing their memoirs, and quite quickly the myth grew up of the handsome, charming Wunderkind artist, who endured great poverty in his undying devotion to his art. And his paintings began to sell.

The works

Early paintings

Having seen a lot of the ‘greatest hits’ at the Tate Modern exhibition, I was taken by the more out-of-the-way works included in this book, especially of the early works before he’d perfected the Modigliani ‘look’.

Sketches

From early on he developed a hyper-simplified line, which comes over in nude sketches and then very much in the sketches he made from African artefacts in the Louvre and the Museum of Ethnography.

Sculptures

He took up sculpture in 1909, nobody knows why. Perhaps because he had always revered the sculptural legacy of his native Italy, perhaps because his paintings weren’t selling, perhaps because he moved to a bigger workspace in Montparnasse, perhaps because he met Constantin Brancusi in 19090 and was hugely influenced by him. Or all of the above.

Brancusi (b.1876) had perfected a smooth highly stylised way of working in stone which anticipates Art Deco.

Modigliani’s sculptures are of two types, a squat square type, which could fit at the top of a column –

And the much-better known, highly elongated, ‘primitive’ mask like heads. Although the politically correct like to raise the issue of ‘cultural appropriation’ and the way so many of the avant-garde artists of the 1900s looked to sculptures from Africa or Oceania, the book points out that there are also strong European origins for this look, in the stunningly abstract heads carved in the Cycladic islands of Greece thousands of years BC.

Apparently he conceived of the sculptures, these stone heads, as all being together in one place, creating a kind of temple of beauty. This may partly explain their thematic unity, that they were designed to be displayed and seen as an ensemble.

Nudes

Krystof makes a simple but effective point that it’s not so much in the sculptures but in the sketches for the sculptures, and especially in the sketches of caryatids, that we see Modigliani really simplifying his technique, perfecting a way of depicting the human body entirely made up of simple, one-line, shallow curves – no sketching, and repeated lines or cross-hatching – just one pure line to create the body’s outline, another to distinguish to the two legs, meeting another curve which creates the loins, two simple curves, maybe a bit pointed, to indicate the breasts, a curve for the mouth, a long narrow triangle for the nose, two almonds for eyes – in many ways a child’s eye view of the human body.

She also makes the good point that these curves are consciously not like the focus on blocks and squares and diagonals and geometric shapes of the suddenly fashionable Cubists. It is in pursuit of shallow curves that Modigliani is at odds with the art of his own times, a one-off.

And so to the female nudes which make up about 10% of his output – about 30 nudes in total – and in their simple outlines, as well as their very simple orange flesh colouring, present a kind of cartoon simplicity and pleasingness.

He began painting them in 1916, helped by the important patronage of dealer and friend Léopold Zborowski, who lent the artist use of his apartment, supplied models and painting materials, and paid him between fifteen and twenty francs each day for his work.

The simple graceful outlines, the soft orange skin and pink nipples, the simplified facial features, and the tonal unity of the paintings (compare and contrast with the violent garish colouring of the Fauves) makes Modigliani’s nudes understandably popular even among opponents of modern art.

Krystof also takes some time to explain another reason for their sense of familiarity, the reason they seem so assimilable. It’s because the poses are often based on established classics of Western art.

Quite systematic copying or borrowing or pastiching, isn’t it?

Krystof makes another, subtler, point. In all the classic paintings above you can see the entire body – you, the viewer, are standing some way away. By contrast, all of the Modigliani nudes are cropped, at least part of the arms or legs are out of the frame – as if you were really close up to the model, not so much contemplating them as about to fall over them. Immediacy.

Portraits

But the 20 or so nudes mark a sort of apricot-coloured interlude in Modigiliani’s core activity during his final years, which was the obsessive painting of hundreds of portraits.

Krystof divides them into two categories – one of friends, lovers, patrons, fellow artists and named individuals – the other category of scores of anonymous models, peasants and children.

They are all rougher and harsher, in design and finish, than the nudes.

To get at the essence of the Modigliani approach, Krystof compares his portrait of Jean Cocteau with a portrait done at exactly the same time and place by Moise Kisling.

The immediate and obvious conclusion is the huge amount of clutter Modigliani has chucked out – the window, shutters, table, vase, stove, chair, dog and rug are all not there – and the way he has zoomed in to focus on the top half of the body to create an image which is much simpler, sparer and more intense.

Hence Krystof’s suggestion that Modigliani developed in his portraits ‘the art of omission’ (p.53)

The same technique – cropping sitters at the bust and showing no interest in the details of the backdrop – characterises many of the portraits, which are more varied and interesting than the nudes.

Flight south

In the spring of 1918 the Germans began a final offensive. Planes and Zeppelins bombed Paris and many feared the city would fall. Up to a million people fled the capital, including Modigliani and his mistress / common-law wife, Jeanne Hébuterne, who gave birth to their daughter in 1918. The young family spent over a year in Nice and Cagnes-sur-Mer, where Modigliani painted more feverishly and intensely than ever before.

The light of the South of France lightened his palette and the texture of the paint he used, the paint is thinner. Also the local people he got to model for him lack the specificity of the Paris portraits, becoming more generic – which may account for their later popularity.

Jeanne Hébuterne

Modigliani painted at least 25 portraits of the mother of his children. Photographs of her make her look absolutely stunning, in fact she has something of the long-tressed, full-lipped beauty beloved of the pre-Raphaelites.

In his last paintings of her, the neck and face are more elongated than ever, the background painted in with lighter sketchier colours than previously.

Conclusion

This is a really handy book, containing not only nearly 90 beautiful full-colour illustrations which give you an immediate and comprehensive feel for Modigliani’s unique style, but also a more thoughtful and insightful text by Doris Krystof, than is usual for Taschen books.

Possibly my favourite portrait comes right at the end of the book, one of the few Modigliani portraits which has even a hint of feeling and emotion, in this case a self-contained, winsome sadness.

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by Simon on December 20, 2017  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 20, 2017

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Goya: The Portraits @ the National Gallery

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746 to 1828)

Francisco de Goya Self Portrait (1815) © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado

Francisco de Goya Self Portrait (1815) © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes is often considered the last of the Old Masters. I have never been able to put him in the same class as Rembrandt or Vermeer, let alone the masters of the Renaissance, and this exhibition didn’t change my mind.

It is the first major exhibition of Goya’s portraits ever held. It was, according to the audioguide, ten years in the making as the curators negotiated the loan of works from major international galleries and many private owners, and I think we should be grateful for their efforts in bringing together an unparalleled 71 portraits, ranging from wall-sized commissions to tiny sketches and a set of family miniatures – all in one place as never before.

Biography

You can read Goya’s biography on his Wikipedia page. What was new to me was the detail the exhibition provided about Spanish politics of the second half of the 18th century and how Goya’s life intertwined with it:

After the glory years at the height of its empire in the 16th and 17th centuries, Spain had sunk by the 18th century into being a cultural and economic backwater. During the later 1700s a group of liberal thinkers and politicians, taking their lead from the Enlightenment in France, wanted to modernise Spain and Goya very much befriended and took part in this group.

At the same time he was fiercely ambitious in his chosen career. In the 1780s King Charles III appointed Goya Painter to the King, despite its name, a relatively lowly position. In 1789, following the death of Charles III and the advent of Charles IV, Goya was promoted to Court Painter. And in 1799 Goya was finally appointed First Court Painter ie top dog. Via persistent lobbying and creating a network of aristocratic contacts, he had arrived.

But he did so as the continent of Europe sank ever deeper into prolonged war. By 1804 Spain, allied with Napoleonic France, was at war with Britain. In 1808 Napoleon’s troops seized major Spanish cities and Napoleon appointed his brother, Joseph, to the position of king of Spain. Guerilla resistance to the French invaders and their reprisals spurred Goya to create his terrifying Disasters of War etchings.

However, the French were liberals after Goya’s own heart: for example they abolished the Inquisition with its legal right to torture and execute anyone who had insulted the dignity of Spain or the Catholic church. Goya made many contacts within the French regime and painted some of its members.

The Duke of Wellington portraits

But in 1812 the Duke of Wellington led the British army to victory over the French and expelled them from Spain. Goya was commissioned to paint the Duke’s portrait and it is included here and – seen close to – is a much more rushed and bodged looking affair than I remembered (look at the hanging right eye, look at the ineptly done mouth). Compare and contrast Goya’s amateurish work with the superb portrait of Wellington by British painter Sir Thomas Lawrence just three years later – a brilliantly penetrating, superbly finished and completely convincing portrait.

Alas for Goya and Spanish liberals, the restored Spanish king, Ferdinand VII, turned out to be as reactionary as the soon-to-be-restored Bourbons in France. He swiftly restored the Inquisition, its spies and secret police and Goya had to undergo inquisition and ‘rehabilitation’ for his earlier contacts with the French regime. Doubts about his loyalty persisted and in 1824 Goya was forced first to go into hiding and then to flee to France, to join the community of Spanish emigrés in Bordeaux, where he died in 1828.

The portraits

I thought the great majority of the portraits were amateurish, badly composed and badly executed. Even the audio commentary had to concede there are elements of ‘naivety’, ‘awkwardness’, ‘inelegance’ in many of the paintings. He was nearly 40 when he painted the group portrait below. The composition is clumsy. The commentary points out the table only has one leg. Perspective and colour emphasise flatness and not depth. Some of the faces seem in a different plane or level than others. The old bloke at the table is very badly done.

Francisco de Goya The Family of the Infante Don Luis de Borbón (1783-4) © Fondazione Magnani Rocca, Parma, Italy

Francisco de Goya The Family of the Infante Don Luis de Borbón (1783 to 1784) © Fondazione Magnani Rocca, Parma, Italy

Here is Goya, aged 40, doing a portrait of the king – the king – which looks like a cartoon and makes the king look like a rascally yokel. I don’t understand how this can be said to be the work of a ‘master’ of painting. The digs, the gun, the boots are typical of the period. But the face?

Francisco de Goya Charles III in Hunting Dress (1786-8) Duquesa del Arco

Francisco de Goya Charles III in Hunting Dress (1786 to 1788) Duquesa del Arco

The Duke and Duchess of Osuna and their Children is a terrible picture, isn’t it? The stagey pose, the inability to draw the human figure or face, the ineptness of the children’s poses and faces. This is one of the exhibition’s coups, a loan from the prestigious Prado in Madrid. It looks like some of the primitive American colonial art I saw at the Brooklyn Museum last year.

Francisco de Goya The Duke and Duchess of Osuna and their Children (1788) © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado

Francisco de Goya The Duke and Duchess of Osuna and their Children (1788) © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado

Below is a well-known self portrait from the 1790s. The commentary points out that the window may or may not have existed in this form in Goya’s studio, but it is anyway symbolic of the light flooding in from the 18th century Enlightenment. Maybe so, but close up you can see the shakiness of the brush strokes throughout and the indecisiveness of the features.

Francisco de Goya Self Portrait before an Easel (1792-5) © Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid

Francisco de Goya Self Portrait before an Easel (1792 to 1795) © Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid

The Duchess of Alba was an important patron and the work below is a famous painting, chosen to head the National Gallery’s twitter feed. But the background looks unreal, there is no connection between the background and the figure dumped in it and her face is dire, oddly modelled and blank. She is pointing at an inscription in the sand which says ‘Solo Goya’ ie ‘Only Goya’, which sentimental old art historians used to think proved she and Goya were lovers. More realistic modern critics think it is simply a reference to Goya considering himself the best portrait painter in Spain.

Francisco de Goya The Duchess of Alba (1797) © Courtesy of The Hispanic Society of America, New York

Francisco de Goya The Duchess of Alba (1797) © Courtesy of The Hispanic Society of America, New York

Charles III died in 1788 and his successor, Charles IV, promoted Goya to be court painter. Goya, presumably keen to display his absolute powers, produced this portrait of the king as hunter. A reproduction makes it look much more finished than it is in real life, especially the repainting around the dog’s head to make him look more adoringly at his master.

Francisco de Goya Charles IV in Hunting Dress (1799) Colecciones Reales, Patrimonio Nacional, Palacio Real de Madrid © Patrimonio Nacional

Francisco de Goya Charles IV in Hunting Dress (1799) Colecciones Reales, Patrimonio Nacional, Palacio Real de Madrid © Patrimonio Nacional

The portrait of the Marchioness of Santa Cruz reflects the early 19th century fashion for portraying sitters – generally women – as classical personifications. Here the marchioness, with her hand on a lute, is portraying a classical muse. This reproduction smooths out the rough brush strokes and makes the silk dress and fabric of the couch look well done; they look a lot less so in real life. Her face is as blankly expressionless, as bereft of life, as the Duchess of Alba’s.

Francisco de Goya The Marchioness of Santa Cruz (1805) © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado

Francisco de Goya The Marchioness of Santa Cruz (1805) © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado

After the defeat of Napoleon, King Ferdinand VII was restored to the Spanish throne and brought back all the reactionary institutions of his forebears. Despite Goya’s known sympathies for the French regime, Ferdinand kept him on as court painter, though appointing a more traditionalist painter (Vicente López) to accompany him. It is hard to understand how a proud and dignified king can possibly have accepted this official portrait from Goya without insisting it was burned. It makes him look like a tubby cretin.

Francisco de Goya Ferdinand VII in Court Dress (1814-5) © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado

Francisco de Goya Ferdinand VII in Court Dress (1814 to 1815) © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado

Some good paintings

It is unfortunate that the first room, full of early works, rather overwhelms you with how poor Goya was as a draughtsman and painter. Thus prepared it was easy to see faults in everything which followed. But I was pleasantly surprised to see about half a dozen works I thought were good, and one or two that might be very good, that almost stand comparison with Gainsborough, Reynolds or Thomas Lawrence.

This portrait of the Count of Altamira has a unity of colour and composition which I found uncommon in most of the other exhibits, although the audio commentary chose it as an example of the way that Goya almost always has something quirky or ungainly or clumsy in his paintings (I couldn’t agree more). In this case the chair is evidently too small for the table and the sitter’s body isn’t quite sitting on it, but sort of hovering just above.

Francisco de Goya The Count of Altamira (1787) Colección Banco de España P-132 © Colección Banco de España

Francisco de Goya The Count of Altamira (1787) © Colección Banco de España

The portrait of the Countess-Duchess of Benavente reminded me of Gainsborough. She was, apparently, an intellectual in her day, famous for her salon, but the commentary went on mostly about her hair and how the four large folds at the back were probably created using a sort of cardboard onto which human hair was stuck before the assemblage was attached to the back of her head with hairpins. Once they’d drawn attention to this area it became impossible not to notice the way the hat isn’t really sitting on her head, but looks tacked on behind it.

Francisco de Goya The Countess-Duchess of Benavente (1785) Private Collection, Spain © Joaquín Cortés

Francisco de Goya The Countess-Duchess of Benavente (1785) Private Collection, Spain © Joaquín Cortés

Others I liked include:

Goya’s friends

The exhibition very much follows the highs and lows in Goya’s personal life, dwelling on the illness in the 1790s which left him profoundly deaf, and referring to the albums of cartoons and sketches in which he kept satirical images of the court and of humanity in general. It has two rooms devoted to portraits of family and close friends which, as with anyone’s life story, introduce an element of pathos.

  • Antonia Zárate (1805) A close friend of the artist, her face has the same blankness of many other female portraits, there’s something wrong with the top lip and the dress hangs oddly on her bust and shoulders but still, a striking pose.
  • Friar Juan Fernández de Rojas (1800?) A personal friend of the artist and progressive theologian, this is one of the few really persuasive portraits in the show.
  • Martín Zapater (1797) Goya’s lifelong friend and correspondent, this portrait has more depth than all the kings put together.

The commentary told us about his relationship with Dr Arrieta, who nursed Goya through a severe illness in 1819. These and the other moving stories about his wife’s death, about the loss of most of his children, may all be true and raise some sympathy. But surely none of that stops Goya’s painting of himself and Arrieta from being anything other than embarrassingly amateurish. The idea of fellowship, care and support may be humane and worthy – but the execution…

Francisco de Goya Self Portrait with Doctor Arrieta (1820) Lent by The Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Ethel Morrison Van Derlip Fund © Minneapolis Institute of Art

Francisco de Goya Self Portrait with Doctor Arrieta (1820) © Minneapolis Institute of Art

I am grateful to the National Gallery for assembling all these works in one place and allowing us to take a really detailed overview of Goya’s career. But I would expect a ‘master’ to have created at least one ‘masterpiece’, a work you can only marvel at, a work that seems created by angels, that you could stand anyone in front of and say, ‘There! That is Western Art at its finest’. Although there are quite a few ‘interesting’ portraits and a handful of fairly good ones, there are no paintings here that take your breath away.

The video

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by Simon on November 18, 2015  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on November 18, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/11/18/goya-the-portraits-the-national-gallery/

Goya: The Witches and Old Women Album @ The Courtauld Gallery

Introduction

In my opinion Goya is not a great artist in terms of technique: his portraits of the Spanish royal family or our own sainted Duke of Wellington are pretty flawed, are not figurative painting of the first order. His large body of work is very uneven.

What he does undoubtedly have is an extraordinary intensity of vision. This is why he is more remembered for the famous Disasters of War series than any of his ‘official’ works – they have an intensity and inwardness, a sympathy with the grotesque and horrifying, an obsession with experiences at the border and over the edge of what it means to be human, which have echoed down the ages to our own violent times.

Regozijo (Mirth) byFrancisco Goya. 'Witches and Old Women' Album (D), page 4 c. 1819-23. Brush, black and grey ink with traces of red chalk and scraping. New York, The Hispanic Society of America, A 3308

Regozijo (Mirth) by Francisco Goya. ‘Witches and Old Women’ Album (D), page 4 c. 1819 to 1823. New York, The Hispanic Society of America, A 3308

Potted biography

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes lived from 1746 to 1828 i.e. a long life, dying aged 82. Professionally, he was a great success, rising to become official Painter to the Spanish Court in 1790, aged 43.

In 1793 he suffered an unknown illness from which he recovered but which left him profoundly deaf. In his convalesence he began to paint small pictures for himself, exercises of the fantasy and invention which could find no outlet in the formal portraits he was commissioned to make. He also began to create albums of drawings, small intensely-felt images of people, which he was to keep up for the rest of his life. We know about eight of them. Rather than conventional sketchbooks which might contain quick sketches of things observed for later use, angles and aspects of the world, the albums explore thoughts, ideas, feelings and fantasies in fully-finished images.

The Witches and Old Women album was the last one he made, between 1819 and 1823, when he was aged 73 to 77. An old man. After his death, the albums were cut up and the images filed into larger books, before being sold off in job lots by his descendants and scattered to the winds.

This is the first time all known 23 images from the Witches and Old Women album have been gathered in one place; in fact, it’s the first time the complete contents of any of the eight albums have been reunited for 150 years. It is a triumph for the patience and scholarliness of the curators involved.

There are just two rooms in this small exhibition.

Room one sets the scene, using 20 or so images from other albums and sources, images of nightmare and fantasy including Goya’s greatest hit, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters from the album Los Caprichos, to give context to the Witches.

The second room contains the 22 images from the Witches album, complete with page numbers and titles written in by Goya himself – alongside another dozen or so images from other albums, and lithographs from other sources, to give ongoing context.

The Witches and Old Women album

For a start they aren’t all witches or old women, there are a number of old men too and a number of figures who could be either sex. The title was given to the images well after Goya’s death and, I think, restricts ways of responding to works which are much more varied and strange than it suggests.

A large amount of scholarship has gone into analysing the album and the individual images, evident in the notes to each image and in the exhaustive book of the exhibition. As an amateur trying to make sense of what I saw in front of me, I divided the 23 images into four groups:

  • Visionary (people flying)
  • Humane (the pity of old age)
  • Types (stereotypical types eg the miser, the crone, the madman)
  • Horror (eating babies)

My view

For me the dynamic flying figures are best. They convey a ballet of grotesques, visions of dynamically interlinked flying human forms. Goya is great at depicting the human figure in movement and your eye is drawn to the attractive patterns and shapes of moving bodies (as in number 4, above, or number 1, below) – to their energy and strange grotesque enthusiasm.

Bajan riñendo, (They descend quarrelling) by Francisco de Goya. 'Witches and Old Women' Album (D), page 1 c. 1819-23. Brush, black and grey ink. Private Collection

Bajan riñendo (‘They descend quarrelling’) by Francisco de Goya. ‘Witches and Old Women’ Album (D), page 1 (1819 to 1823) Private Collection

Conversely, the more static the image is, the more it reveals Goya’s shortcomings as a draughtsman, especially as a depicter of human faces. I’d rank number 15, below, as one of the three or four ‘Horror’ images, in which babies are being taken away to be sacrificed, tortured or eaten (we know this because other images show an old woman preparing to eat a baby).

Obviously the image is gruesome and macabre – my point is that it’s also a bit cack-handed. Look at the woman(?)’s face, typical of a range of badly drawn faces throughout the exhibition.

Sueno de buena echizera (Dream of a good witch) by Francisco Goya. 'Witches and Old Women' Album (D), page 15 c. 1819-23. Brush, black and grey ink. Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Preussischer, Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett, kdz 4396

Sueno de buena echizera (‘Dream of a good witch’) by Francisco Goya. ‘Witches and Old Women’ Album (D), page 15 (1819 to 1823) Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Preussischer, Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett, kdz 4396

Look at all the faces in the half dozen images in this review: they are very hit and miss, but I think they miss most often in the static images where the poses are simpler, boring almost, and therefore you look for human expression and human meaning in them, which they often don’t provide.

Sexy?

In one or two places the commentary on the wall labels by each image seemed to me to incongruously and inappropriately raise the issue of sex.

In one image two figures are shaking tambourines, one of them with a dark blotch in the middle, maybe string or dirt or simple damage. The commentary says: ‘The hole in the tambourine may allude to sexual penetration.’ Really?

In image 20 an old woman seems to be carrying two skinny old men entangled on her shoulders. It strikes me as another variation of Goya’s obsessive theme of poor, decrepit humanity contorted into bizarre shapes of suffering or torture. Images which are deeply personal expressions of his unknowable but obviously bleak and comfortless thoughts and feelings. The commentary surprised me with another sexual interpretation: ‘This unwieldy tower evokes a circus act but the figures’ energy may also suggest lasting sexual vitality.’ Hmm.

Pesadilla (‘Nightmare’) by Francisco Goya. ‘Witches and Old Women’ Album (D), page 20 (1819 to 1823) New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 19.27

Similarly, number 3 is a strange image of an ugly middle-aged-looking woman playing a guitar and howling while levitating over another figure, an old woman. Strange, grotesque and – in my opinion – badly done, not one of the ‘good’ images. Anyway, the old lady on the ground is looking up and holding her nose. I would have thought this is because of the awful smell emanating from under the levitating woman’s skirts – a rare outbreak of human reality in a ‘work of art’ and quite a comic image in a Chaucerian vein.

The commentary says: ‘The object on the ground might be a bowl with a spoon, implying that the woman’s levitation is caused by magic. It could also refer to a mortar and pestle, underlining the sexual dimension of the upward gaze.’ Is that the main thing going on here?

Cantar y Bailar (Singing and dancing) by Francisco Goya. 'Witches and Old Women Album' (D), page 3. c. 1819-23. Brush and black and grey ink with scraping. London, The Courtauld Gallery, Samuel Courtauld Trust, D. 1978, PG256

Cantar y Bailar (‘Singing and dancing’) by Francisco Goya. ‘Witches and Old Women Album’ (D), page 3 (1819 to 1823) London, The Courtauld Gallery, Samuel Courtauld Trust, D. 1978, PG256

Unless you’ve spent time caring for elderly relatives or working among the very old it is maybe difficult to grasp the misery and shame of being doubly incontinent, impotent, paralysed – the horror of being trapped in an utterly derelict, malfunctioning body.

Literary theory, certainly, and art theory, maybe, are saturated with psychological or psychoanalytical interpretations which dwell on sex, images of sex, wishes about sex, denials of sex, unconscious revelations of sex, as well as plenty of biographical scandal about the artist’s sex lives, all of which are immediate and present issues to the people in their prime who are the leading academics in these fields.

But being 70 years old in the 1820s must have meant something a lot different and a lot worse than being 70 in 2015, and Goya knew it and felt it and depicts it in these images.

No doubt there is much interesting interpretation to be written about the stereotyping of old women or about the long lineage of the way the figure of ‘the witch’ was used to define, control and demonise old women – and, from another angle, the album certainly also includes images of horror which are direct descendants of the famous Disasters of War and speak to us about man’s inhumanity to man.

But this time round, on this viewing, I was:

  • delighted by the half dozen images of figures flying, falling, twisting and dancing through the air (as in Regozijo and Bajan riñendo, above), which I found uplifting
  • and moved by the stoic images of poor suffering humanity, which I found humbling

Does the final plate, number 23, depict an old woman or a man? Surely it doesn’t matter. Surely the point is that it’s a deeply sympathetic image of old, old age and the burden and weight and frailty and pathos of suffering humanity. A burden more people in my generation are going to experience than any previous generation in history…

No puede ya con los 98 anos (Just can't go on at the age of 98) by Francisco Goya. 'Witches and Old Women' Album (D), page 23. c. 1819-23 Brush, black and grey ink. Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, 84.GA.646

No puede ya con los 98 anos (‘Just can’t go on at the age of 98’) by Francisco Goya. ‘Witches and Old Women’ Album (D), page 23 (1819 to 1823) Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, 84.GA.646

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by Simon on March 28, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, European History, Exhibition
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Posted by Simon on March 28, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/03/28/goya-the-witches-and-old-women-album-the-courtauld-gallery/

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