‘Can sculpture capture what it is to be human?’ That is the question posed at the beginning of this small but varied and high-quality exhibition at the Bristol Art Gallery.
Spread over two floors, Being Human shows a selection of very different twentieth century sculptors (and a brace of film-makers) have conceived, worked, shaped and reproduced the human body.
At the traditional end of the spectrum, there are female nudes such as Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s Small female torso (1910). Wearing its Greek origins on its (armless) sleeves, the hair braided like a statue of Aphrodite, looking demurely down, her diaphragm and belly button nicely defined, the nipples oddly burnished as if generations of gallery goers have touched them for good luck or other purposes.
La Jeunesse by Robert Wlerick (1935)
Whereas only a few yards away, and well on the way to the abstract end of the spectrum, is Ken Armitage’s Moon Figure of 1948. This was my favourite piece in the second room, although a moment’s reflection suggests it is less a bold leap forward into modernity than an appropriation of Cycladic art from around 3,000 BC – even down to the crossed arms, which feature in so many really ancient Greek statues.
Moon Figure by Kenneth Armitage (1948)
More thoroughly abstract were Yee Soo Kyung’s Translated vases number 8 of 2012. Yee has smashed up ceramics into fragments which she then reassembles using the traditional art of kintsugi, visible repairs in gold, to create something which is only vestigially ‘human’ at all in form.
In the first room is maybe the best, or my favourite piece, from the exhibition,Help by Bernard Meadows. It’s from as long ago as 1966, and is one of a series Meadows began to make in the mid-60s expressing ‘human fear and anxiety’. The idea is that crushed sphere is crying for help, and that the piece pays tribute to the harrowing existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. Does it, though? If you hadn’t read all that, might you not mistake it for a bit of sculptural fun by a jokey modern artist like Anish Kapoor?
Help by Bernard Meadows (1966) Tate
The wall labels tell us that at the core of the exhibition is a set of works associated with the so-called ‘Geometry of Fear’ school of British sculptors. According to the Tate website:
Geometry of Fear was a term coined by the critic Herbert Read in 1952 to describe the work of a group of young British sculptors characterised by tortured, battered or blasted looking human, or sometimes animal figures.
Read used the phrase in a review of the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale of that year. The British contribution was an exhibition of the work of the group of young sculptors that had emerged immediately after the Second World War in the wake of the older Henry Moore. Their work, and that of Moore at that time, was characterised by spiky, alien-looking twisted and tortured figures.
They were executed in pitted bronze or welded metal and vividly expressed a range of states of mind and emotions related to the anxieties and fears of the post-war period. The artists were:
Robert Adams
Kenneth Armitage
Reg Butler
Lynn Chadwick
Geoffrey Clarke
Bernard Meadows
Eduardo Paolozzi
William Turnbull
Of their work Read wrote:
These new images belong to the iconography of despair, or of defiance; and the more innocent the artist, the more effectively he transmits the collective guilt. Here are images of flight, or ragged claws ‘scuttling across the floors of silent seas’, of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear.
Possibly the most ominous figure here is one of Elizabeth Frink’s many space-age, sculpted heads, brooding and minatory.
Prisoner by Elisabeth Frink (1988)
To quote the wall label:
As a child in the Second World War, Elisabeth Frink witnessed falling planes and burning soldiers in the airfield near where she lived. On a holiday in Devon she had hidden in the bushes to avoid getting caught in the crossfire of a battle. These visions haunted her sculpture which examines the human capacity for cruelty. She was taught by Bernard Meadows, one of the postwar ‘Geometry of Fear’ artists. Frink added pity to their earlier generation’s images of alienation. Prisoner has a hypnotic vulnerability.
Maybe all this angst is true of half a dozen of the works on show here, but there are plenty of other utterly angst-free enjoyments of the physical heft and thews of the human body conceived as a big solid object in space.
Thus there is nothing particularly fearful about Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s bust of Horace Brodzky. Brodzky was an artist and critic, and Gaudier-Brzeska made the work as he was falling under the influence of – or influencing – the pre-war London movement known as Vorticism, which was much fascinated by planes and lines and angular shapes, cubes and squares.
Horace Brodzky by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1913, cast 1956)
And what could be more prosaic than a sculpture of a woman bending over to dry her feet, which combines a posture from degas with the clunky clayiness of Rodin’s sticky fingers.
Woman Drying her Feet by Hubert Dalwood (1955)
And the curators astonished me by singling out as one of the most sexy or erotic statues, this exercise in elongation by Reg Butler, one of the geometry of fear sculptors who didn’t let his existentialist alienation stop him from producing numerous sculptures of naked or nearly naked girls.
Girl by Reg Butler (1953 to 1954)
An example of post-war deformation, influenced by Alberto Giacometti’s walking stick people, her head worryingly disappearing into a blunt dollop, her bulemic pre-pubescent body scrawny with malnutrition… but sexy? Not to my mind.
Two films are included. What have they got to do with sculpture? Nothing whatsoever, that I can make out. A film is a film is a film, although they are both about ‘the body’.
Curators have to come up with themes and ideas for exhibitions, and ‘twentieth century sculptures of the human body’ is a reasonable enough theme – although it is odd to include a couple of very average drawings, and some completely off-the-wall videos into the mix.
But then its quirkiness is, maybe, the appeal of this small-ish exhibition. Coherence is over-rated. The very fact that the pieces are so disconnected and random creates more space for the visitor to wander around them and relate to each one individually, trying to figure out which ones you like, and why.
And, incidentally, hints at the extraordinary explosion in ways of seeing and conceiving and making art which occurred in the twentieth century and which this tiny but intriguing selection represents.
Laura Knight was the first woman to be elected to full membership of the Royal Academy of Arts (in 1936) and the first woman to receive a large retrospective exhibition at the Academy, in 1965. She was awarded a Damehood in 1929.
Born in 1877, Knight had a long life (passing away in 1970) and a long and successful career, working in oils, watercolours, etching, engraving and drypoint until well into the 1960s.
She never departed from the figurative, realist tradition of her youth and was, for this reason, in her heyday, one of the most popular painters in Britain.
Given Knight’s mid-century fame, and her role as a pioneering woman artist, it is a little surprising that this FREE display of some of her work is a) so small and b) tucked away in a dingy room through a doorway off of the main first floor landing. There was no signage, I had to ask an RA staffer where it was hidden.
If you google Knight or look at her Wikipedia article, you immediately see a series of highly realistic and vivid oil paintings, starting with the cracking Self Portrait with Nude of 1913, and including the evocative paintings she did during the Second World War (she became an official war artist at the outbreak of war, and her portrait of Ruby Loftus operating industrial machinery was picture of the year at the Academy’s 1943 summer exhibition).
As you explore further online you come across lots and lots of oil paintings of chocolate box scenes of the countryside, especially of the Cornish coast, featuring soulful looking ladies with parasols (before the First War) or in flapper style dresses and chapeaux (after the First War).
In this little display there are only three oil paintings on display here, although they include the very striking portrait of Joan Rhodes (above) and an equally realistic and sensual double nude, Dawn. (It is hard not to be struck by the firm pink bosoms in this painting, though maybe I am meant to be paying attention to the women’s soulful gazes…)
No, the bulk of this display is made up of display cases of Knight’s drawings and sketchbooks of which the Academy holds a substantial collection – small, monochrome, often unfinished sketches, which are – to be frank – of variable quality and finish, some were very appealing, some seemed, well, a bit scrappy.
The works are grouped into three distinct themes from Knight’s long working life – the countryside, the nude and scenes from the theatre, ballet and circus.
Countryside
Knight had several spells of living in the countryside – in the 1890s she moved to the Yorkshire fishing village of Staithes and painted scenes of the coast and life among the fishermen and their wives. In 1907 Knight and her husband moved to Cornwall and became central figures in the artists’ colony known as the Newlyn School. In the 1930s she and her husband settled in the Malvern Hills, where she remained for the rest of her life.
Thus the exhibition includes sketches she did of Mousehole in Cornwall, alongside sketches of a ploughed field, trees beside a river, Richmond Park, Bodmin Moor, two land girls in a field, seeding potatoes, and so on.
It was only later, when I googled her many finished paintings of Mousehole and other Cornish scenes that I realised where these sketches were heading, and what I was missing. I wish the exhibition had included at least one finished painting of this kind of scene alongside the sketches, to help you understand the process better, and the purpose of the sketches.
Nudes
We’ve already met the two dramatic nude women in Dawn. There are a small number of other nude sketches and studies on display, which I thought were a bit so-so. Like the countryside sketches, they strongly suggest that the ‘magic’ of Knight’s paintings was precisely in the painting, in her skill at creating an airy, light and luminous finish with oil paints.
This broad subject area contains the largest number of sketches and drawings. Knight sketched ballet dancers, and circus performers, there are drawings of boxing matches held among soldiers training during World War One, and ice skaters and trapeze artists and many other performers. The wall labels tell us that she even spent some months travelling with famous circuses of the Edwardian era, drawing and sketching every day.
They’re all competent. Some of them piqued my interest. But none of them seemed to me as vivid as the drawings of, say Edward Ardizzone, who had a comparable sketching style, using multitudes of loosely drawn lines to build up form and composition.
The Lion Tamer by Edward Ardizzone (1948)
Maybe I’m mixing up fine art (Knight) with book illustration (Ardizzone) and maybe I’m giving away my failings of taste in saying so, but I much prefer the Ardizzone. It’s more vivid, more evocative, more physically pleasing (more tactile), more fun.
Also, as with the nudes and landscapes, a quick search online reveals that Knight converted her sketches into scores and scores of paintings of the circus, and I immediately found the paintings much more pleasurable than the sketches – a little cheesy and old-fashioned, like vintage Christmas cards, but much more finished and complete than the sketches.
The introductory panel and all the wall labels exude what you could call the standard feminist spirit of grievance and offence. There’s a long list of offences to absorb.
The curators point out that Knight, despite her success with the public, was only granted membership of the Royal Academy in 1936! That she was the first woman to achieve this accolade (why so late Royal Academy)! But that, even then, she wasn’t invited to Academicians’ Annual Dinner until 1967!
We are told that, as a woman art student before the Great War, she was forbidden to paint or sketch from real naked models but had to work from sculptures and statues! It was only in the 1930s, in Newlyn, that she was able local people to pose nude for her! And so a work like Dawn can be seen as an act of defiance against a male-dominated art world!
I’m sure all of this, and much more along the same lines, is true and scandalous and we should all be outraged by it. But, seen from another perspective, all this righteous indignation amounts to a skilful evasion of the rather obvious question, which is whether Knight’s art is any good – or is of anything of other than antiquarian interest, dusted off and used as a pretext for the righteous anger of modern curators?
This tricky question is not addressed anywhere in the (very informative) wall labels, but, when you think about it, is amply answered by:
The Academy’s choice of location for this little ‘exhibition’ – tucked away in a dark and dingy side-room.
The fact that it is more of a ‘display’ of half a dozen notebooks, three paintings and a poster, than a full-blooded exhibition. An after-thought.
If Laura Knight is so eminent and so worthy of consideration, why didn’t the Academy give her a larger exhibition in a more prominent space?
Ironically, the curators who complain that Knight was overlooked and patronised in her own time, have done quite a good job of repeating the gesture – of displaying only a small and not very persuasive part of her output, in a hidden-away side room which nobody in a hurry to see the blockbuster shows on Anthony Gormley or Helena Schjerfbeck or Félix Vallotton is in too much danger of stumbling across.
Suggestion
In all seriousness, why not give Laura Knight a much bigger exhibition? If you look at the paintings embedded in the Wikipedia article or all across Google, it’s clear that she painted absolutely brilliantly, but in a straightforward naturalistic style which was completely outdated and provincial by the 1930s, let alone the 40s or 50s – in a style which carried on its Edwardian naturalism into the atomic age as if the rest of modern art had never existed.
But despite that – or more likely, because of it – Knight was very popular and successful with the public. Her paintings of Edwardian children playing on the beach or soulful ladies standing on clifftops sold by the dozen and – from a Google search of them – look immensely pleasing and reassuring in a lovely, airy, chocolate-box kind of way. And her wartime paintings perfectly capture the earnest heroism of the conflict, and of the social realism, the committedness, of the wartime artists.
To me this all suggests a whole area of investigation, an enquiry into why British artistic taste remained so isolated and uncosmopolitan for so long, which would reference:
the way the director of Tate in the 1930s could proudly say that Tate would only buy work by the young whippersnapper Henry Moore ‘over his dead body’
or Sir Alfred Munnings, the horse-painting president of the Royal Academy, addressing the academy’s 1949 annual banquet, delivered a drunken rant against all modern art, and invoked the support of Winston Churchill (sitting next to him) who he claimed, had once asked him: ‘Alfred, if you met Picasso coming down the street would you join me in kicking his … something, something?’ ‘And I said ‘Yes, sir! Yes I would!’
A big exhibition of Knight’s work would:
put to the test the curators’ claims about her importance and relevance
be very popular among the sizeable audience, who still like their art extremely traditional (think of the sales of prints and other merchandise!)
allow the curators to explore and analyse the long-lasting appeal and influence of the anti-continental, anti-modernist, anti-avant-garde tradition in 20th century English art of which, for all her skill and ability, Laura Knight appears to have been a leading example
This – the philistinism of English art, the determined rejection of all 20th century, contemporary and modern trends in art and literature in preference for the tried and tested and traditional – is something you rarely hear discussed or explained, maybe because it’s too big a subject, or too vague a subject, or too shameful a subject. But it’s something I’d love someone better educated and more knowledgeable in art history to explain to me. And I’d really enjoy seeing more of Laura Knight’s lovely airy innocent paintings in the flesh. Why not combine the two?
For once mount an exhibition which is not about a pioneer or explorer or breaker of new ground, but about a highly capable painter of extremely traditional and patriotic and reassuring paintings, and explain how and why the taste which informed her and her audience remained so institutionally and economically and culturally powerful in Britain for so long.
Related links
Laura Knight continues at the Royal Academy until 2 February 2020
‘Learn to draw, learn to see.’
(Established artist Eugène Boudin to the up-and-coming young Monet)
A travelling show
The British Museum houses the national collection of Western prints and drawings, in the same way as the National Gallery and Tate hold the national collection of paintings. It is one of the top three collections of its kind in the world, and houses approximately 50,000 drawings and over two million prints dating from the beginning of the fifteenth century up to the present day.
Of these 50,000 drawings, some 1,500 are by contemporary or modern artists. From this 1,500, the museum has worked with curators from other galleries around the country to make a selection of 56 drawings for this exhibition, which:
highlight the range and diversity of contemporary drawings
are designed to show how the entire concept of ‘drawing’ has been subjected to radical experiments and redefinitions during this key period, 1970 to the present
The idea is that after a couple of months on display in London, the exhibition will travel to the partner museums around the country, which will add works from their own collections to the display, thus creating a unique combination at each venue.
You can see how this will a) make the works accessible to audiences round the country and b) create a network of curators who are interested and informed about drawings, which could lead to who knows what consequences in the future.
What is a drawing?
Here’s one of the first works you encounter, Untitled by Grayson Perry, featuring an early outing by his transvestite alter-ego, Clare (note what seems to be a dog’s tail coming out the back of her skirt). So far, so gender-bending.
What’s really going on here, though, is the extreme stress Perry is applying to the concept of the ‘drawing’. It clearly contains elements of collage, with stereotypical photos from magazines tacked onto it, plus the diagonal colour washes and diagonal bands of glitter. Is it a drawing at all?
That is the question which echoes through the rest of the show. Some works are old-style figurative depictions of some real object in the world, for example this attractive portrait by Jan Vanriet (although I was a little puzzled whether this was a drawing or a watercolour. Is it a drawing which has been watercoloured? Is that still a drawing?)
It turns out to be one of a series developed from portrait photos of the Jews deported from one particular location in Belgium to concentration camps where they were all murdered. Kind of changes your attitude to the image, doesn’t it?
Drawing also contains the genre of satire or caricature or political cartoon, here represented by Philip Guston‘s unforgiving image of American president Richard Nixon, whose face seems to have turned into a penis and scrotum. To his left what I initially thought was his body is in fact a caricature of Vice President Spiro Agnew, who was addicted to playing golf, hence the clutter of golf clubs and balls. And the crab-like glasses on the right reference Nixon’s adviser Henry Kissinger.
(This caricature is a reminder to younger viewers that there’s nothing new about Donald Trump: America has a long, long, long track record of scumbag, murdering, lying presidents. Why, then, do the arbiters of culture give America so much weight and respect?)
And then there are what you could call artistic ‘deformations’ of real objects, specifically the human body, subjected to stylisation, morphing into abstract patterns, as in this drawing by Gwen Hardie, the tiggerish striping of the torso counterpointed by the stylisation of what are presumably female sex organs, the leaning-back posture a cross between a cave painting and a Henry Moore sculpture. Gwen is a woman artist ‘who has a longstanding preoccupation with the body and its perception’.
A striking ‘deformation of the actual’ is this work by Hew Locke, a British artist of Guyanese descent. According to the wall label, Locke takes the view that the Queen has been party to countless secrets during her record-breaking reign, and that this nightmarish image captures the corroding and corrupting effect all these secrets and lies have had on her, by the look of it, transforming her face into a mask of eyes against a backdrop of scores of little wiggly lime-green skulls. The image ‘asks us to question the Queen as a symbol of nationhood , as well as the power and history which she embodies.’
For those of us who were around during the punk Summer of Hate of 1977 – 42 years ago – this is nothing new. Taking the piss out of the Queen is an extremely old activity, in fact it made me feel quite nostalgic.
Sex Pistols album cover (1977)
According to the curators, the period from 1970 to the present saw a resurgence of interest in drawing. Previously it had mostly been seen as a format in which you practiced life studies, or prepared for work in a more demanding medium such as painting. The 1960s opened the box on this (as on so many other genres and practices) and freed up artists to be as playful and experimental as they could imagine. Thus:
Drawings in the exhibition encroach on territories traditionally associated with mediums including sculpture, land art and even performance.
‘Drawing’ spills out all over the place.
Five themes
The exhibition groups the works into five themes, ‘examining’:
Identity
Place and Space
Time and Memory
Power and Protest
Systems and Process
Personally, I felt these ‘themes’ rather limited and directed and forced your responses to works which often had nothing at all in common, and could each have stood by themselves. Except for the last one, that is: because a lot of the works genuinely are interested in systems and processes.
For example, there’s a yellow square by Sol LeWitt which is just one of countless of works the American artist generated from algorithms, from sets of rules about geometry, shapes and colours, which he created and then followed through to produce thousands of variations.
There’s a drawing of the tiles on a floor by Rachel Whiteread which comes with quite an extensive label explaining that a) she has always been interested in floors which are the most overlooked parts of a room or building and b) that it’s a heavily painted drawing, done in thick gouache onto graph paper, which points forward, or hints at, the vast casts of rooms and entire buildings which she was soon to create.
There’s a work by Fiona Robinson which juxtaposes two sets of vibrating lines which she created while listening to the music of John Cage, and then of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Related to these, insofar as it’s black and white and made of abstract patterns, is this charming drawing by Richard Deacon.
I found a lot of these ‘abstract’ works a lot more appealing than many of the rather obvious ‘messages’ in the ‘Power and Protest’ section. But maybe you’d prefer the latter. Different strokes. The whole point is, the exhibition has been designed to showcase the immense variety of images, formats and materials which can go into the making of ‘a drawing’.
The artists
What is a drawing? Well, this exhibition presents an impressive roll call of major contemporary artists all giving answers to that question, including:
Edward Allington
Phyllida Barlow
Louise Bourgeois
Stuart Brisley
Pablo Bronstein
Glenn Brown
Jonathan Callan
Judy Chicago
Adel Daoud
Richard Deacon
Tacita Dean
Michael Ditchburn
Peter Doig
Tracey Emin
Ellen Gallagher
Philip Guston
Maggi Hambling
Richard Hamilton
Gwen Hardie
Claude Heath
David Hockney
Andrzej Jackowski
Anish Kapoor
Anselm Kiefer
Minjung Kim
Marcia Kure
Micah Lexier
Liliane Lijn
Hew Locke
Nja Mahdaoui
Bahman Mohassess
David Nash
Cornelia Parker
Seb Patane
A R Penck
Grayson Perry
Frank Pudney
Imran Qureshi
Gerhard Richter
Fiona Robinson
Hamid Sulaiman
Jan Vanriet
Hajra Waheed
Rachel Whiteread
Stephen Willats
Apart from anything else, it’s a fascinating cross-section of the artistic practices and concerns of some of the most important artists of the last 50 years.
Pushing Paper is in room 90, which is right at the back of the British Museum and up several flights of stairs, in the Drawings and Print Department. It is varied and interesting and thought-provoking, and it is FREE.
Related links
Pushing Paper continues at the British Museum until 12 January 2020
Pablo Picasso. You might just have heard of him, since he is probably the most famous artist of the twentieth century. Picasso had a number of ‘great years’, years in which he made stylistic innovations which really did send ‘shockwaves through the art world’ and change the way that educated people see and think about art.
Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy has the simple idea of looking at one of Picasso’s Great Years in immense detail. It takes us month by month through Picasso’s life and output in 1932, ‘a time so pivotal in Picasso’s life and work that it has been called his “year of wonders”‘.
The exhibition includes more than 100 outstanding paintings, sculptures and works on paper to give you a flavour of Picasso’s prolific and restlessly inventive character. It includes an unprecedented range of loans from collections around the world, including the Musée National Picasso-Paris, as well as many works from private collection, reuniting some of Picasso’s greatest works of art, many of which are rarely shown in public, for the first time in 86 years.
What was happening to Pablo Picasso in 1932
In 1932 Picasso turned 50. He was married (to Russian dancer, Olga Khokhlova) and had an 11-year-old son Paulo. Many galleries were vying with each other to stage a retrospective of his works, a competition won by the Galeries Georges Petit, which staged Picasso’s first major retrospective in June 1932.
Picasso was the most famous living artist. He bought a big farmhouse in Normandy, created a studio in the barn and toyed with having an outdoor swimming pool built. He owned a luxury apartment in Paris and was ferried around in a chauffeur-driven Hispano-Suiza car.
Yet he was restless. He had been carrying on an affair with a sporty, outdoorsy 22-year-old blonde, Marie-Thérèse Walter. And the new flavour of the month in fashion-conscious Paris were the Surrealists, who in the 1920s had mostly been a literary movement, but whose visual experiments and confidence had been given a shot in the arm by the arrival of Salvador Dalí, who joined the group in the late 1929.
Some critics wondered whether Picasso was finished, a man of the past. He consciously set out to prove them wrong, with the result that 1932 marks an explosion of creativity and a restless set of experiments in oil painting, sculpture and drawing.
When I (and the curators) say ‘experiment’ something must be emphasised right from the start: the exhibition showcases Picasso’s stunning creativity and includes a dozen or more quite wonderful works – but at the same time you can’t help noticing the monotony of subject matter. Women. Women are his subject. Or rather, single women. A woman in a chair. Sleeping woman. Woman reflected in a mirror.
Later in the show there are several women playing on a beach. Or a man saving a woman from drowning. Or women lying around while being serenaded by fauns. But at the imaginative core of the work is one woman.
You don’t get far into the exhibition before you’re being told that the woman in question is Marie-Thérèse, the mistress. She was blonde and she had the kind of nose which is an extension of the forehead without a dent or kink, a Roman nose it’s sometimes called.
The obsessive repetition of the same woman, sleeping or sitting in a chair makes the visitor wonder whether there was some kind of a trade-off – that Picasso had to limit his subject matter to the tiny world of the studio, and his one, central muse figure – blanking out the entirety of the roaring, industrial, political, urban world of 1932, rejecting every visual thing in the universe except his blonde lover and a few studio props – in order to be imaginatively free to submit it to so many fantastic and brilliant variations.
Information
Each room is dedicated to a month or two, and the audioguide zeroes in on pictures often painted on a specific, named day.
The exhibition includes a huge amount of biographical information, a host of articles about what was going on in Paris at the time, about the fashionable popularity of Freud and Jung’s psychoanalytic theories, about the competition from the Surrealists and the launch of the Surrealist magazine Minotaur (first edition published June 1933 and devoted almost entirely to Picasso), about Picasso building the sculpture studio at his Normandy house, a detailed account of his comings and goings during the year, and the elaborate preparations for the retrospective exhibition.
So much so that it’s almost easy to lose sight of the art in the blizzard of explanations and timelines.
One way to approach them is via the room devoted to some of the black-and-white charcoal drawings on canvas which Picasso made throughout 1932. The commentary very usefully pointed out that the sweeping lines, the curves and arabesques of the charcoal lines, are like a preparation for the paintings. For in the paintings, the scholars tell us there was little if any preparation. Picasso rarely painted from life – he started from memory and imagination and created shapes and patterns by great sweeping curves of his hand.
The charcoal pictures show his hand and arm building up the technique of creating great sweeping curves first time, with no afterthought or adjustment, again and again depicting the kind of curve which, in the finished paintings, become a woman’s face or nose or arms or torso or bottom.
His habit was to mark out shapes and patterns in black paint and, once he was happy with the composition, to fill in the shape with colour, but quite happy to leave both elements (black lines and colour) unfinished, rasping the paint, letting undercolours or even blank canvas show through.
All of the paintings here benefited from looking at close up to see this technique up close. Colouring and setting varied a little, but the fundamental idea of the defining black line (almost, at times, the thick black line of a cartoon) is always paramount.
Wallpaper
It may sound trivial and the commentary didn’t mention it, but I was struck by the care with which he depicts the wallpaper behind the subjects.
The curator’s commentary dwells on the fact that these are paintings of a woman, and paintings of Picasso’s mistress. Either angle gives the opportunity for lengthy discussions of either his private life, or the long tradition of painting women in Western art. A woman near a mirror is bound to set off a small explosion of art theory referencing the long tradition of associating women with ‘vanity’.
Maybe. But when I look at this picture the first thing I notice is the dark blue patterned wallpaper and then the orange frame of the mirror, in other words the overall design of the composition, long before I notice the broad-nosed sleeping blonde with her ripe-apple boobs. And after processing her shape and curves, it is to the extraordinarily deep blue of the backdrop that my eyes returns.
In this concern for the decorative ancillaries to the main image a lot of these paintings reminded me of the purely decorative concerns of Picasso’s long-time frenemy, Henri Matisse.
The subject may be a female nude, it may be his hushed-up mistress, she may be passively sleeping and yet reflected, in a semi-surreal way, by the mirror. But the painting is also an arrangement of colours on a flat surface. It is a decorative object, whose subject you can almost ignore, if you will. It is first and foremost a big bright image and I think the viewer reacts immediately, either for or against the size and vibrancy of the colour and shape of the composition, long before you get round to thinking about the ‘issues’ of women and mirrors or marriage and mistresses.
Angles
Again, putting aside the subject matter for a moment, by the time I’d got to the end I realised Picasso had roughly three approaches or ‘styles’, at least in this year of 1932.
One is the curvy, ‘feminine’ style exemplified in the pictures shown above. But there was another, very different style – characterised by uncomfortable angles, distortions, harsh straight lines and geometric interactions. There are quite a few of them here and they feel completely different to the soft curvy sleeping blondes.
The most striking instances are a sequence of smaller works he made which are all variations on the idea of a woman sunbathing – but not a woman as you or I might conceive the subject.
The commentary points out that the small circle in the middle is the woman’s anus. Apparently, Picasso’s usual gallerist refused to exhibit the series because he said he didn’t want a load of ‘arseholes’ in his shop. But I think this rather typical obsession with sex and the body on the part of critic and seller is missing the more obvious point – which is the entire conceptualisation of the human figure which has, in a work like this, become fantastically stylised.
In the strange combination of the zoomorphic (i.e. curved shapes) with harsh geometry (the set of triangles and the table leg-style legs) there’s a lot of the influence of Surrealism, maybe of Max Ernst, influencing Picasso’s own abstracting tendencies.
But Picasso never actually becomes abstract – his paintings are always of something, almost always of people, and overwhelmingly of young nubile women.
Henry Moore
The closest he comes to pure abstraction is in the works of his third style, which kept reminding me of the drawings and sculptures of Henry Moore. In both the styles identified above – curvy and angular – the image is essentially flat. There may be token references to chairs or wallpaper but they don’t really create a sense of depth.
In the works where he does go for a sense that the picture is a window into the world, the effect is strikingly odd, for there’s a thread throughout the work of pictures made up of blobs and odd, curved shaded shapes, which look like the products of a pot-maker or clay modeller who’s gone mad.
Here the two balls in the middle, the curved object which seems to contain them, and the curving cowl up towards two tiny eyes in a blank monster’s face – all of them have shade and shadowing which give them the illusion of three dimensionality.
Can you see why I mention Henry Moore? They look like paintings of Henry Moore sculptures.
One room in the show is devoted to a rarely-seen sequence of thirteen drawings Picasso made based on the crucifixion section of the Isenheim Altarpiece by the German painter Matthias Grünewald.
The Crucifixion, from the Isenheim Altarpiece (circa 1512 to 1515)
The commentary goes heavy on the religious subject matter, but what struck me was how Picasso recast almost all his versions by breaking down the human figure into a sequence of Henry Moore-style blobs and craws.
The approach may also, possibly, owe something to the Surrealists Hans Arp or Yves Tanguy. It was very much a style of the age. But on the evidence of all these works it does look as if, when Picasso thought of depth and perspective, everything turned into shaded, blobby shapes.
Sculpture and landscapes
There are many more themes and subjects. It is, ultimately a staggering and exhausting exhibition. How did he manage to think and see and create so many different things in one short year?
There is a series of surprisingly charming landscapes of the view from his Normandy house over the nearby village, Boisgeloup, which could almost be illustrations of a children’s book.
There is an entire room dedicated to classic works from earlier in Picasso’s career – including Blue Period, Rose Period and Cubist paintings – to give us a flavour of the major retrospective of June 1932. Picasso was very careful in which works he chose to include in it and, most strikingly, he mixed them all up, eschewing chronological order in order to create a solid wall of art, all of it as relevant as any other.
And another room has been carefully arranged to recreate something of the atmosphere of the rough and ready sculptor’s studio he created in a barn at his Normandy house, with one entire wall of the room covered in a massively blown-up photo of the studio with its decrepit barn doors, a sequence of black-and-white photos made of the artist at work on his sculptures by the classic photographer, Brassaï, and a handful of actual sculptures – big, semi-abstract heads. (Notice the Roman nose – I wonder who this could be a bust of?)
But the exhibition ends with a turn to a completely new subject, something you wouldn’t have predicted at all from all the sleepy blondes or blondes in armchairs from earlier in the show.
1932 ended traumatically for Pablo when Marie-Thérèse fell seriously ill after swimming in the river Marne. During the illness she lost most of her iconic blonde hair. The result in his art was a series of paintings, large and small, showing the rescue of a drowning woman by a man – all heavily stylised.
Some of the variations take on a dark overtone with the male presence not rescuing but threatening the drowning woman, and at least one of them is titled The Rape.
Or there are variations like this one in which a woman appears to be saving the drowner. And who is the third figure at bottom right – a passing swimmer or a siren reaching out to drown the unwary? (And note the scrappier use of colour – in the earlier sleeping woman pictures the colours tended to be uniform within each section demarcated by a solid black line – in these last paintings the colours are more blotched and varied within each section.)
Here, in the last room, the commentary leads off into a load of history, explaining that only a month or so later, in January 1933, Herr Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and it was only 3 years later that General Franco rebelled against the Republican government of Spain, triggering the brutal Spanish Civil War. And then World War Tow. And the Holocaust. And the atom bomb.
Yes, yes, yes, I know that terrifying things were just around the corner, but I think a) nobody in 1932 had an inkling that any of that was going to happen, and b) the curators are over-politicising a painter who went to great lengths not to reference the contemporary world in any way at all in his art. Guernica was still seven years off and even then it is a thing of primitive people and horse. Not many planes, trains and automobiles in Picasso’s entire oeuvre. In this respect – in terms of subject matter – he was a very unmodern, a surprisingly conservative, artist.
Anyway, I had never seen any of the works in this room before so, in some ways, found it the most rewarding room of the exhibition. The many variations on The Rescue, although mostly done in the big, cartoony, boldly coloured style of the previous rooms, were nonetheless haunting and powerful.
For reasons I can’t put into words I found one particular painting in this room especially hypnotic and upsetting.
The Rescue by Pablo Picasso (1933)
It’s at the most abstract end of his range. Probably the ‘figures’ are women, but they really seem more like creatures caught in some agonising death dance and suddenly turned to bronze, against a crude sea and an eerily realistic sky.
Picasso almost never painted landscapes, certainly not intending to make them ‘realistic’ depictions. This reproduction doesn’t convey the incongruity of setting such a completely abstract, modernistic, sculptured shape against that extreme rarity, a realistic Picasso sky.
I don’t know if I was more upset, or scared, or touched by it.
Sometimes it is good to just be in front of a work of art, undistracted by curatorial talk about mistresses and wives, breasts and anuses, analysis of the male gaze, and the theme of the mirror, and rivalry with other painters, and the vagaries of the Paris art market, and the looming European catastrophe, and all those other issues and stories.
To just stand in front of a work and be awed and puzzled and confused and absorbed and transported.
Although the Heath Robinson Museum is a relatively small gallery, this is a major exhibition. It is the first time a substantial collection of work by the Neo-Romantic book illustrators of the 1940s has been gathered together in one place. With nearly 50 prints, drawings, paintings and lithographs, and over 20 original book jackets from the period, this is a unique opportunity to sample a special and distinctive moment in English publishing and art history.
Neo-Romanticism in England
To paraphrase Wikipedia:
In British art history, the term ‘neo-romanticism’ is applied to a loosely affiliated school of landscape painting that emerged around 1930 and continued until the early 1950s. It was first labeled in March 1942 by the critic Raymond Mortimer in the New Statesman. These painters looked back to 19th-century artists such as William Blake and Samuel Palmer, but were also influenced by French cubist and post-cubist artists. The movement was part a response to the threat of invasion during World War II. Artists associated with the initiation of the movement include Paul Nash, John Piper, Henry Moore, Ivon Hitchens and especially Graham Sutherland. A younger generation followed in the same vein, including John Minton, Michael Ayrton, John Craxton, Keith Vaughan, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde.
This new visual style was most obvious to the general public in the form of book and magazine illustrations, particularly during the Second World War. The spirit of romanticism – a focus on nature, emotion and individual expression – was in part a reaction against the gloom of the blackout and rationing (and, possibly, against the very urban and politicised art of the 1930s).
Neo-Romantic artists looked back to the tradition of English landscape painting, drawing inspiration partly from the mystical Kent countryside portrayed by Samuel Palmer, and from the heavily stylised illustrations of William Blake.
But it’s not that simple – they also subtly acknowledged the visual possibilities opened up by more recent European art movements such as cubism and surrealism.
Book illustration for Time Was Away by John Minton (1947)
Government sponsorship
The war itself played a key role. It cut English artists off from all contact with European art for six long years. And it forced many artists and writers to reconsider what it meant to be English, across all the arts (for example, George Orwell’s long essay on the English character, The Lion and the Unicorn, published in 1941).
This impulse received official support when, in 1940, the British government commissioned artists including John Craxton, Leslie Hurry, David Jones, John Minton, Paul Nash and Ceri Richards, to document lives in towns and villages across the country for a project called ‘Recording Britain.’ It was intended to boost national morale during the Second World War by celebrating the nation’s landscape and architecture.
In other words, a large number of artists in the 1940s became aware, through friendships, their own experiences and official commissions, that they shared certain values and artistic approaches to romantic ideas of English landscape, English culture, English art and English writing.
Neo-Romantic book illustration
Book and magazine publishers weren’t slow to pick up on the new look, seeing an opportunity to commission illustrations from this new wave of exciting illustrators in order to make both classics and new books appear up-to-date. The result is a very distinctive style of book illustration which is immediately recognisable, and powerfully evocative of the period (say 1940 to 1955), but hard to put into words.
The style is definitely figurative, not abstract – but the figures, the landscapes and buildings, have been through the wringer of Modernism and have emerged leaner, tauter, more stylised and simplified.
Depth and perspective don’t have to be depicted with punctilious precision, as in Victorian or Edwardian illustration. Hatching and shading, colour and tinting don’t have to be perfect, but can hint and gesture towards the subject.
Cover design for Vicky Lancaster’s novel Short Lease, by Eric Fraser (1950)
There’s an article about Neo-Romanticism on the Tate website which uses the word ‘sombre’ and I think this opens up one way of thinking about the style. It is often mysterious, sometimes a bit threatening, often psychologically intense. There is a lot of black in many of the illustrations, often a hint of menace, of threat.
Possibly this derived from the six-year-long threat of Nazi invasion, but it was there in the 1930s work of Graham Sutherland, one of the godfathers of the new look – a darkness, a blotty inkiness,and it spills over as a vague and disturbing presence in many of the illustrations here.
Of course, this ability to convey menace and mystery was perfectly suited to many modern books, of both poetry and fiction, or travelogue – somehow conveying the troubled mood of mid-century life. And not only adult books – the ability to conjure a sense of danger is intrinsic to many children’s books, particularly adventure and mystery books.
The exhibition
The exhibition contains work by about twenty artists, to wit:
Keith Vaughan (12 b&w prints)
John Minton (8 colour, 4 b&w illustrations for Time Was Away, 3 other prints and book covers)
Michael Ayrton (3 illustrations to John Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller)
Eric Fraser (4 big colour illustrations)
John Piper (one dramatic ink and watercolour of an Oxfordshire tomb)
Edward Bawden (5 original artworks for book covers)
Barnett Freedman (4 colour lithographs)
Robin Jacques (three fine pen and ink illustrations, two for Don Quixote, in a very different style from most of the other artists)
These are the big names. They each get a substantial wall label detailing their biography, artistic career, describing their style and the books which they illustrated or provided cover art for, and so on.
Also featured, but with less commentary, are:
Julian Trevelyan (two Gothic illustrations for a work by poet Kathleen Raine)
John Elwyn (2 small drawings)
John Bantin (1 book cover)
Bryion Winter (1 drawing)
Rigby Graham (three or four illustrations)
Leonard Rosman (two small pen and ink drawings for the Radio Times)
Henry Moore (four studies for illustrations to a book by Edward Sackville-West titled The Rescue, as well as a copy of the book open so we can see some of Moore’s characteristically lacerated mannequins in situ)
Several additional illustrators feature in the three display cases, which present vintage books in order to show the Neo-Romantic style of their cover art. Among them is an early edition of Mani, the travel book by Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose jacket was done by his good friend John Craxton. (Leigh Fermor and Craxton are the subject of a fascinating exhibition currently running at the British Museum.)
Display case of Neo-Romantic book covers
John Minton (1917 to 1957)
Minton emerges as the strongest presence and the exhibition features more examples of his work than anyone else. An entire wall is devoted to the colour illustrations he did for a travel book, Time Was Away, the result of a tour he made with the writer Alan Ross around Corsica in 1947.
Minton combines a kind of rough but keen descriptive line, which is then touched and dabbed by colour washes which:
a) are in a very distinctive and limited palette (mustard yellow, dull dark green, sky blue, orange-brown)
b) only partially colour the picture
The way his colour washes deliberately don’t fill the lines creates a sense of spontaneity and openness. ‘Scrappy’ isn’t the right word, but a sense of roughness. This deliberate lack of finish contrasts oddly with the actual lines of the drawing which are quite… stiff.
Both features are clear in the picture below. The drawing is highly figurative yet stylised, not quite ‘real’. The colour is a) deliberately unnaturalistic and b) only applied in patches or washes. And look at the pose of the boy – it isn’t fluent and graceful, it is somehow stiff and hieratic, almost clunky.
Oh, and Minton likes to draw people with Roman noses, I noticed a number of classic silhouettes in his pictures. The result of all these effects is an odd sort of classicism, hard to describe but instantly recognisable.
Minton was prolific, which may explain why he is the most represented artist in the show, which itself reinforces the sense of his art being one of the most memorable. There’s a copy of the edition of Treasure Island which he illustrated, open to the dramatic, full-colour, double-page illustration on the end papers.
And it was Minton who did the jacket covers for Elizabeth David’s epoch-making cookery books, which brought recipes from the Mediterranean into middle-class households across Britain. These are always cited in social histories as defining cultural products of the age, reminding grimly snowed-in Brits of the delights of sunshine and fresh fruit in far-off, exotic locations, such as Greece. A whole generation learned to cook (or at least fantasise about cooking) Mediterranean food from David – and visualised these luxury landscapes via Minton’s depictions.
Dust jacket illustration for Elizabeth David’s Book of Mediterranean Food by John Minton (1950)
Keith Vaughan (1912 to 1977)
Next to the Minton is a set of black-and-white illustrations by Keith Vaughan for the children’s novel The Spirit of Jem by P.H. Newby. According to the fascinating wall label, Newby wrote 17 books, as well as being a full-time senior manager at the BBC, eventually rising to become Managing Director of BBC Radio. (He was also the recipient of the first ever Booker Prize, in 1969.)
‘I wedged myself into a fork and waited’ from The Spirit of Jem, illustration by Keith Vaughan (1947)
The intense design of Vaughan’s drawings, like the one above – the wildness of the trees and the semi-abstract treatment of the leaves – remind me of Graham Sutherland’s intense landscapes, and reach back past him to Samuel Palmer.
You don’t necessarily need to know that Vaughan was gay and lived for some time with Minton, but it does shed light on the closeness of the artistic as well as personal relationships of the period.
Michael Ayrton (1921 to 1975)
Speaking of close friendships, Michael Ayrton shared a studio in Paris with Minton in Paris just before the war. Ayrton went on to illustrate over 35 books as well and worked for leading magazines of the day such as the Listener, the Radio Times and Penguin New Writing.
He’s represented here by some of the illustrations he made for Thomas Nashe’s Elizabethan picaresque adventure, The Unfortunate Traveller and by some book covers, including the cover art he did for a book called The Problems of Lieutenant Knap by the Czech writer Jiri Mucha, which really caught my eye.
In this drawing the moon appearing in a kind of flame of cloud reminds me of Paul Nash or Sutherland and harks back to Samuel Palmer’s rural visions, but whatever visionary element there is in that symbolism is obviously and brutally contrasted with the random piece of military equipment leaning against the doorway and the casual bored posture of the smoking soldier.
Barnett Freedman (1901 to 1958)
The son of poor Jewish immigrants, Freedman developed a really distinctive variation on the Neo-Romantic look, a compositional style which features curled scrolls or decorative borders around his often cartoonish and childlike illustrations. Take an example of both in this fabulous poster promoting cheese which he made for the Milk Marketing Board. Look at the houses, the church spire. Childish innocence.
Real Farmhouse Cheese poster by Barnett Freedman
The scroll and especially the font whose letters contain shading and decoration put me in mind of the posters and promotional material for the Ealing Comedies of this period, and the wall label points out that Freedman did, indeed, help to create the Ealing Studios look and logo.
Freedman also created a host of eye-catching book covers during the period, the most distinctive example being the cover for a complete edition of the nonsense verse of Edward Lear.
Cover of The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear designed by Barnett Freedman
One Freedman piece which stood out for me was a wonderful colour illustration, apparently for a Christmas card. For its precision, its gentleness, its warm vision of the English scene, and for its use of the gentle, understated palette which so many of these pictures used (was it a limitation of the printing technology of the day?) I found myself returning to this particular picture again and again.
Christmas card by Barnett Newman
Edward Bawden (1903 to 1989)
I’ll be writing at length about Edward Bawden when the retrospective exhibition devoted to him opens at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in May.
What the five book covers by him here bring out is something of the childishness of some of these covers. None of these illustrators were amateurs – the opposite, many of them made very successful careers as commercial artists. But many of the illustrations and covers deliberately accentuate a kind of hand-drawn, childish or naive style. This is one of the things that give them such a strong sense of nostalgic warmth and comfort – they are sub-consciously infantilising – you want to say ‘aaaah’ at so many of them. Atmosphere of the nursery. And the artlessness of the imagery deliberately connects them with an older tradition of English arts and crafts, foregrounding the hand-made and the hand-drawn.
Take this cover by Bawden for Richard Hughes’s novel A High Wind In Jamaica. Everything about it is deliberately hand made and naive – the very hand-drawn figures of the centaurs, the simplicity of the horizontal mustard-coloured bands representing the fields, but above all the highly decorative border round the main illustration, with its deliberately artless use of details i.e. sheafs of wheat or clumps of grapes woven into the composition.
Edward Bawden’s cover art for A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
What came next
In the second half of the 1950s, a new look came in. Book covers and magazines began to reflect the influx of new consumer goods into Britain, and the rise of consumer culture. Harsher covers using the language of Abstract Expressionism became popular and, by the end of the 1950s, imagery inspired by the shiny high gloss look of American advertising and movies.
The world became modern, shiny and urban – the exact opposite of Neo-Romantic imagery showing an underpopulated countryside or Mediterranean harbours or childish, hand-drawn figures – a shininess which went on to be celebrated and/or mocked in the plastic brightness of Pop Art.
The Neo-Romantic look was old hat by 1955 and quickly disappeared, surviving as dog-eared copies of beautiful old editions in the kind of provincial library where I first came across them as a boy.
Conclusion
This exhibition chronicles a relatively brief period of highly distinctive book covers and illustrations which, looking back, now seems classic, warm and overdue for a revival.
It has clearly been a labour of love on the part of exhibition curator, Geoffrey Beare, to track down and retrieve many of the prints and paintings, drawings and lithographs from public and private collections around the country, and bring them all together for our enjoyment. And it’s been a very worthwhile effort.
This is a lovely exhibition, which inspires you to explore further, to find out more about Minton, Craxton, Vaughan, Freedman – about this whole generation of wonderful and under-appreciated illustrators.
Note one: there is currently an excellent exhibition about Craxton and Leigh Fermor which features many examples of Craxton’s art and illustrations from this period, at the British Museum.
This is an almost square, thick, glossy art book (17.1 x 16.1 cm) whose 384 pages – after the brief foreword and introduction – contain nearly 200 colour reproductions of Surrealist works of art. Each work gets a 2-page spread, with the image on the right, the text giving the artist, title, medium and some interpretation, on the left. It’s kind of flip book of Surrealist painting, divided into four sections: Movement overview, Influences, Styles & techniques and Places.
The left-page analyses vary widely in quality, some telling you really insightful things, others little more than recaps of so-and-so’s career or an anecdote behind the picture. There is an obtrusive political correctness in many of them – Robinson is the kind of white man who has to make it quite clear he is on the side of feminists in their struggle against the patriarchy, and regrets the cultural misappropriation of colonial exploiters like Picasso, Matisse and the rest of those awful white men.
Here he is discussing Meret Oppenheim’s Occasional Table (1939):
Occasional table (1939) by Meret Oppenheim
In this work Meret Oppenheim continues with a number of Surrealist preoccupations, the most significant of which is the preconception of specific gender roles and stereotyping in a patriarchal society. At first this object may appear as an opulent or even decadent excess of Art Deco design for the bourgeois market, particularly in its use of gold leaf. Oppenheim is, in line with Dada and Surrealist ideals, commenting on bourgeois excesses, as well as on gender stereotypes.
Let’s just stop here and ask if you, the reader, can identify specifically how this work of art is tackling ‘the preconception of specific gender roles and stereotyping in a patriarchal society’. Spotted it? Good. Now, read on:
As a (male) viewer one is drawn to the legs to consider their shape before considering their functionality. There is an obvious parallel here with women being viewed in the same stereotypical manner. The viewer is also being denied access to the rest of the body, emphasised by the flatness and width of the table’s top. (p.224)
So, if I’m reading this correctly, Robinson is claiming that if you are struck by the fact that an ordinary-looking table is being supported by a pair of bird’s legs, this is not because it’s rather unusual and incongruous – in the deliberately disconcerting Surrealist/Dada fashion – it’s because you are always looking at women’s legs and sizing them up, because you are a misogynist member of a patriarchal society guilty of gender stereotyping. Unless you are a woman. In which case you just see a pair of bird’s legs.
Here is Robinson preparing to talk about a work by Wifredo Lam:
At the turn of the nineteenth century many modernists adopted and adapted ritualistic or totemic motifs from Africa, the Indian subcontinent and Oceania – in fact from most places that were European colonies. The use of these misappropriated motifs can be found in the so-called ‘primitive’ aesthetics of Paul Gauguin’s Post-Impressionism, the Cubism of Picasso and Georges Braque, much of German Expressionism and some of the Fauvism of Matisse. However, Surrealism differed in this regard thanks largely to the multi-ethnicity of its group and a genuine interest in anthropology. (p.184)
Will all those white European artists who ‘misappropriated’ motifs from non-European cultures please stay behind after school and write out one hundred times ‘Michael Robinson says I must only use subjects and motifs from European culture and not misappropriate motifs from any other source’. Naughty Picasso. Naughty Matisse.
Your use of non-European motifs is cultural misappropriation; my use of non-European motifs is valid because I have ‘a genuine interest in anthropology’.
Some notes
The sheer number and variety of art and artists in the book tell their own story about the Surrealists’ broad-spectrum dominance of the inter-war period.
First conclusion is there were so many of them – Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Jacques Baron, Max Morise, Pierre Naville, Roger Vitrac, Gala Éluard, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, Hans Arp, Georges Malkine, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Antonin Artaud, Raymond Queneau, André Masson, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, and Yves Tanguy – just for starters.
Surrealism followed on from Dada, founded in 1916 in Switzerland as a really angry response to the pointless barbarity of the Great War.
By 1920 a lot of former Dadaists had gravitated to Paris and were experimenting with Freud-inspired ideas of accessing or depicting the unconscious via stream-of-consciousness prose or automatic writing. One of them, the bullish, domineering poet André Breton, decided the trouble with Dada was it had been too anarchic, chaotic, unfocused – which had led to its eventual collapse.
Breton decided to form a real movement, not just literary or artistic, but with social and political aims. This led in 1924 to the publication of the first of numerous Surrealist manifestos.
It was primarily a movement of writers – poets and novelists – not artists. Artists came later. Ironic, because now we are soaked in the artists’ imagery and I wonder if anyone reads the old surrealist prose works or could even name any.
And Surrealism was political, designed to undermine and overthrow the existing scheme of things, opposing traditional bourgeois values (kinder, küche, kirche), religion, the rational, the scientific – all the things which, it was claimed, had led Europe into the inferno of the Great War.
Breton conceived of Surrealism as a philosophy and a way of life, as rejecting the stifling repression of bourgeois society, setting free our deep inner selves. It wasn’t just teenage rebellion for its own sake. Breton and many of the others thought that Western society was really seriously crippled and doomed by its steadfast refusal to acknowledge the most vital part of the human being – the unconscious, source of all our creative imaginative urges, which can only be accessed via dreams and other specialised techniques.
Only if we can tap into our unused creativity, into our irrational minds, into the sensual part of our psyche, can we ever hope to change the repressed, uptight, bourgeois, scientific, technocratic society which is leading us to destruction.
You can see why this genuine commitment to radical social change led many Surrealists, as the 1920s turned into the Fascist 1930s, to declare themselves communists, and how this led to numerous splits and bitter quarrels among them.
In the sets of ‘rules for surrealists’ which Breton was prone to drawing up, he declared that surrealist writers and artists (and film-makers and photographers) could work in any medium whatsoever, depicting any subject whatsoever, with only one golden rule – it must come from inside, from the unconscious, from the free imagination untrammeled or restricted by conscious thought or tradition. You could use realistic figures and objects from the real world – but only in the service of the unconscious.
Of the scores of artists connected the movement, probably Dalí and Magritte created the most widely recognized images of Surrealism. Dalí joined the group in 1929 (after his brief abandonment of painting for film and photography) and played a crucial role in establishing a definitive visual style between 1930 and 1935.
Assuming we’re all familiar with the usual suspects – Dali, Miro, Ernst, Arp, Magritte, Ray – one of the interesting facets of this book is how widely it casts the net, to include artists never part of the official movement but clearly influenced by it. I enjoyed the inclusion of English artists like Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth and, especially, Roland Penrose.
There were quite a few women surrealist artists and it was genuinely interesting to a) learn about them and their work, considered purely as artists b) to learn how many of them really were feminists, how they disliked the bullying male environment created by Breton, how many of them tried to develop an aesthetic which escaped male stereotyping and the sexualising of women’s bodies. From a crowded field I think Dorothea Tanning stood out for me.
Lee Miller was an important muse for many of the male Surrealists. She had an intense affair with the photographer Man Ray, who taught her photography as well as making her the subject of many of his greatest works. Later she married Roland Penrose, the English Surrealist painter. His painting, Bien vise, above, depicts her naked torso. But Miller also painted, created surrealist objects and took surreal photos in her own right (as well as her later, awesome, war photos).
The gender issue with Surrealism strikes me as simple enough: all these men thought they had a duty to express the unconscious; the dominating master and ‘discoverer’ of the unconscious was a man, Sigmund Freud; Freud insisted that the unconscious was drenched in repressed sexuality (only later adding aggression and violence in the form of the Death Wish); which meant that this large and influential group of male artists felt it was their moral and artistic duty to be as frank as possible about sex and sexuality, to be as shocking and provocative as they could be; and so they saturated their works with erotic images and symbols; and, being men, these tended to be images of women, their own objects of desire.
And almost all the women, in one way or another, reacted against this use of women as sex objects, as objects of desire, in male painting, and tried to redress the balance by painting women fully dressed or in poses where they obviously dominate men or as girls on the cusp of adolescence (or abandoned figuration altogether to paint abstracts).
The really interesting biological-anthropological question is about the difference in ‘desire’ which this tends to bring out. Men paint women, but women paint women, too. Everyone seems to take ‘women’ as a fit subject for painting. Very few of the women artists paint pictures of big naked men or fixate on the penis in the same way that men paint countless breasts and vulvas. Why?
Broadly speaking, feminists from de Beauvoir onwards say that gender differences are entirely due to social conditioning; the vast majority of the population and all the biologists and evolutionists I’ve read point out that there are certain unavoidable differences in DNA, physiology and behaviour between males and females of almost every species: why should we be any different?
All that said, I’ve just flicked slowly through the nearly 200 images in this book and only a handful of paintings – about ten – actually depict realistic images of naked women (and some of those are by women, for example, Dorothea Tanning’s Birthday; among the men Paul Delvaux had the most persistent in (admittedly dreamy zombie) naked women, for example, The Sleeping Venus).
If you go looking for naked women to support this thesis, they are in fact surprisingly absent from the classic surrealist images (by Magritte, Dali, Ernst).
Surprise
I had no idea that Desmond Morris, author of the immensely popular Naked Ape/Manwatching books, was an official member of the Birmingham Surrealist group while still an undergraduate studying biology. This work, painted when he was just 21, is immediately pleasing, in colour, design and the formal symmetric arrangement. It also demonstrates the general rule that Surrealism, which set out to turn society upside down, ended up producing charming and delightful images which could safely hang on the walls of any investment banker or corporate lawyer. Art changes nothing.
This book is a useful collection of the classic Surrealist images, but its real value is as a stimulating introduction to a far wider range of less well-known artists.
Credit
Surrealism by Michael Robinson was published by Flametree Published in 2005.
Tate Britain is dedicated to exhibiting British art from 1500 to the present day.
It is housed in a striking neo-classical building (opened 1897) complete with columned portico and grand steps leading up to the entrance, which faces out onto the river Thames. To the left of the main entrance a ramp and steps lead down to the lower floor, which holds a large exhibition space (currently showing Artist and Empire). To the right of the main building is the Clore Galleries (opened in 1987) – nine rooms on the ground floor housing the gallery’s enormous collection of JMW Turner paintings, watercolours, sketches etc, along with a room of Constable and, upstairs, a room of pre-Raphaelite drawings/paintings, and a small room of William Blake engravings and paintings.
If you enter up the grand steps through the main entrance you arrive at a long central hall, home to changing displays and currently housing Susan Philipsz’ War Damaged Musical Instruments, an entirely audio display, tannoy speakers emitting the mournful sound of brass music played by instruments damaged in war, which she has rescued and refurbished. Haunting, scattered sounds drift through the galleries as you saunter through the history of British art.
The west wing contains ten rooms covering British art from 1540 to 1910. Then you cross the entrance hall to the east wing and pick up the story in 1930, to walk through another ten rooms containing the twentieth century exhibits.
Off to the side of the main chronological sequence are seven or eight single rooms dedicated to ad hoc displays of art ancient or bang up to date.
The rooms:
1910
I left off my coverage of every room in Tate Britain (part one) with the advent of the Great War, half way through the 1910 room. The second half of the room includes post-War art:
Alfred Wallis St Ives (1928) Wallis was a ‘naive’ artist, a retired sea captain who took up painting on scraps of cardboard or wood he could scrounge. He was discovered and taken up by professional artists Ben Nicholson, was exhibited in London and became a sensation.
Eric Gill The East Wind (1929) Gill was commissioned to create relief sculptures for various public buildings including the BBC building in Portland Square. This is a scale model of one of a series commissioned for London Underground headquarters. I venerate it for its combination of medieval and modernist influences.
Stanley Spencer The Resurrection (1927) From my visit to Cookham and the Stanley Spencer gallery there, I got a powerful sense of Spencer’s very English, eccentric reverence for his birthplace, which he saw as an earthly paradise suffused with God’s presence. Thus his resurrection is placed in the homely graveyard of Cookham church.
Frank Dobson Sir Osbert Sitwell, Bt (1923) Both Dobson and Sitwell were part of the packed but somehow second-rate literary and artistic world of the 1920s. This is modernism watered down to become Art Deco.
Charles Sargeant Jagger No Man’s Land (1919 to 1920) The wall label makes the interesting point that in the immediate post-war years there was a flood of memorials. Jagger served and was wounded twice. His most famous memorial is the stunning Royal Artillery memorial (1921 to 1925) at Hyde Park corner.
William Roberts The Cinema (1920) Typical of the way the Futurist and Vorticist experiments on the eve of the war were turned into a formula afterwards.
Wyndham Lewis Edith Sitwell (1923 to 1935) I’ve loved Lewis for thirty years. This comes from his later ‘portraits of poets and writers’ phase, when the harsh Vorticism of the pre-War had been softened right down to create realistic though still beautifully stylised portraits. Apparently the sittings were fraught, with Lewis unable to conceal his growing contempt for Sitwell and her brothers and the shallow English dilettantism he thought she epitomised.
Just in this one room I think you can see the damage the Great War did. On its eve there was a tremendous sense of excitement and anticipation as the European figurative tradition was rejected and transcended by artists in Paris and London and Rome and Moscow and Berlin and Vienna. But, apart from killing off many of these artists, the War somehow damaged Modernism. The post-War saw a great retrenchment and retreat from the heady visions of its eve. Moscow was taken over by revolutionary utopianism; Berlin was characterised by the bitterness of the losers, Grosz and Dix; Paris saw a bewildering confusion of styles; and here in England, although Modernist mannerisms and styles dominated, they somehow feel secondary, lacking the first fine careless rapture. Compare and contrast the phenomenal excitement of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s Red Stone Dancer (1913) with the smooth professionalism of Dobson’s Sitwell (1923).
Related maybe to Spencer’s naive view of the English landscape but rerouted into an uncanny proto-surrealism is the work of Paul Nash, demonstrated here by Landscape at Iden (1929). The discretely placed, carefully spaced, unconnected objects are reminiscent of the strange dream landscapes of Giorgio de Chirico, only in a bucolic Sussex landscape not the Italian’s eerily emptied Renaissance piazzas.
Henry Moore
There are two rooms dedicated to Henry Moore, one of England’s most famous twentieth century artists, one of the most successful, prolific and easily recognisable. Typifying the philistinism which crippled the nation’s art collections in the 1920s and 1930s, the Tate’s then Director, JB Manson is quoted as saying in 1938 that Henry Moore would enter the Tate over his dead body. The wall label quietly crows that Tate now owns 634 works by Moore, who ended up a director of Tate, as well as a Companion of Honour and Order of Merit. The first three acquisitions were:
It may be blasphemy but seeing two rooms full of his work assembled like this gave me the overwhelming impression how morbid and dated Moore is. His international reputation was sealed when he won first prize at the 1948 Venice Biennale and from then onwards commissions flooded in and work poured out. The first room is long and narrow, with half a dozen smaller works and some of the wartime sketches of Londoners sheltering in the Tube during the Blitz. The second room contains a video of the artist at work and half a dozen enormous sculptures such as Draped seated figure (1958). Je n’aime pas.
One of the wall panels shows how one of his works ended up on the windswept Stifford council estate in Stepney and photos of the proud councillors in suits and ties and pearl twinsets and horn-rimmed glasses standing nervously around this object from another planet. The recent Barbara Hepworth exhibition included sections showing how Hepworth, Moore and their contemporaries’ work was in part driven by utopian hopes for a new, more egalitarian or even socialist society, after the sufferings of the Second World War. Their sculptures are part of the world, the mindset, the culture of the exciting new high-rise flats of the 1950s and 60s. Is the art as much of an optimistic failure as the utopian and now discredited architecture?
1930
Edward Burra Snack bar (1930) Burra is undervalued, an English combination of the strange detachment of surrealism – then flourishing in France – with the biting social satire of a Georg Grosz.
There are several examples of Ben and Winifred Nicholson’s pallid white relief sculptures.
Gerald Leslie Brockhurst’s Portrait of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll (c.1931) A traditional technique applied in unpropitious times, the darkness of catastrophe creeping in from the East. It’s an oddly haunting image.
The room is dominated by Jacob Epstein’s Jacob and the Angel (1940 to 1941), the other works barely exist next to it. Monumental primitivist sculpture is one of the enduringly successful strands of the first half of the century of catastrophes, as practiced by Gaudier-Brzeska, Gill, Epstein.
1940
In my opinion something bad happened to English art during the 1930s and 1940s and lingered on into the 50s. Although there is a wide range of works on display, most by people I’ve never heard of, the main works by the main figures all seem to me depressed, dark and murky. The overcast climate, the windswept streets, the London fogs become part of the terrible political situation, which went rapidly downhill into the horror of the Second World War, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, in a vortex which seems to have dispirited and demoralised so much art from this period.
Graham Sutherland Green Tree Form: Interior of Woods (1940) the reproduction makes this picture appear more interesting than it is, in a science fiction-y kind of way. In fact it is a good specimen of Sutherland’s horrifying distortions. I like his portrait of Somerset Maugham (not on display). It’s fitting that Churchill’s wife destroyed Sutherland’s portrait of her husband, it was so revolting. But much of his painting seems damaged, stricken, scary.
David Bomberg Bomb store (1942) Compare and contrast with the same artist’s phenomenal Mud bath from 1914. Hasn’t there been a tragic decline from clarity and excitement into static murk?
Alan Davie Entrance to Paradise (1949) You can’t blame them for being depressed but a lot of the English work from this period is black, psychologically and pictorially. Paradise looks like this?
Francis Bacon Study for three figures at the foot of the cross (1944) It may be a masterpiece and Bacon a vast presence in post-war English and international art and it’s hard not to respond to its power and horror. But I don’t like it. It adds to the circumambient murk the added flavours of despair and nihilism.
Stanley Spencer Double Nude Portrait: The Artist and his Second Wife (1937) Spencer had the same naive approach to painting himself, his wife or mistresses naked as he did to painting Jesus preaching in Cookham. But I find it depressing that even he shares in the ‘human beings are hunks of meat’ mentality epitomised by Francis Bacon’s screaming, tortured beasts. There was something dehumanising about the times, which light, politely experimental pieces like Ben Nicholson’s white reliefs struggle against in vain eg White relief (1935)
1950
R.B. Kitaj Erasmus Variations (1958) Kitaj, an American, moved to Britain in 1958 to study art after serving in the US Army. This is, therefore, a very early work. Interesting, but unrepresentative of what was to follow.
F.N. Souza Crucifixion (1959) Born to Catholic parents in the Indian state of Goa, Souza moved to Britain to study art. 1. It’s noticeable that there is more explicitly Christian art in the Tate’s display of the 20th century, than in the displays of previous 400 years. 2. This is actually a strikingly modern work, with its consciously third World feel. Alternatively, you could say more recent works by artists from former colonies haven’t progressed much beyond where Souza was in 1959. Dark, though.
Lowry The Pond (1950) Last year’s big Lowry exhibition crystallised why I don’t like him. For some reason people in the North see him as some kind of advocate or champion of their culture, when the art very obviously embodies a faceless, anonymous, grey-skied, depressive worldview, fully reinforced by interviews with the miserable old so-and-so.
Peter Lanyon St Just (1953) This painting is darker, murkier in the flesh. I’d have dismissed it as another 1950s abstract in the dirty greens I associate with Graham Sutherland, but for the lucky coincidence that I happen to have visited the smashing exhibition of Peter Lanyon’s gliding paintings earlier this week and saw how his work would evolve into bigger, brighter, happier pictures.
1960
An explosion of talent, which contemporaries must have experienced with tremendous excitement.
Anthony Caro Early one morning (1962) His unashamed use of industrial materials must have blown a few minds.
Bridget Riley. My understanding of Riley was recently improved by the exhibition of her early work at the Courtauld Gallery, so that I enjoyed and appreciated her two works here as among the most original and exciting in the 1960s room: Hesitate (1962) and Late morning (1967-8), both examples of her interest in optical effects or Op Art.
John Hoyland 28. 5. 66 (1966) A kind of missing link between Riley’s clean and precise line paintings and the shimmering blocks of colour made by Mark Rothko, which I recently saw at Tate Modern.
Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) Born of Italian parents, Paolozzi was a sculptor, collagist, printmaker, filmmaker and writer. The Tate search engine suggests they have nearly 400 of his works. He’s represented here by Konsul (1962) a big, impressive abstract sculpture, reminiscent of the found materials used by the Italian Arte Povera artists.
David Hockney is here of course, represented by the early Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style (1961) which is Pop but ruined by a very mid-century urge to deform the human figure, and the later A bigger splash (1967), one of his countless California swimming pool series.
John Latham Film Star (1960) The books are stuck to the surface of the canvas and stick out prominently. I like art with stuff stuck to the surface, from the cubists onwards, as if the art is enacting the struggle to emerge from the actual world of junk and rubbish which surrounds us.
Patrick Heron Azalea Garden : May 1956 (1956) I don’t know much about Heron but this was a welcome relief from so many dark images.
Peter Blake is associated with happy shiny Pop Art so it comes as surprise to see just how dark are works like On the balcony (1955 to 1957) and Self portrait with badges (1961). Very dark. Painted at night.
1980
Gilbert and George England 1980 Either you like G&G or you don’t. I find the scale, the brightness and the humour of their stuff a terrific relief from the murk and darkness and nihilism of so much of the painting of the 1940s to 1970s.
A case in point is Leon Kossoff. This reproduction of Booking Hall, Kilburn Underground (1987) in no way conveys the three dimensional nature of the painting, with its gloops and loops of oil rising above the surface like muddy waves in the North Sea.
Prunella Clough Wire and Demolition (1982) One of the stories of these rooms is the steady increase in the number of women artists. I know nothing about Clough but I liked the brightness and kookiness of the composition.
Richard Long has been making walking art for decades, either creating art works along the way of his massive hikes across the UK or in remote foreign locations, then photographing them; or bringing raw materials back from his trips and creating generally simple geometrical shapes with them. The sculptures are genuinely connected to the source locations. In the middle of the 1980s room is Red Slate Circle (1988) and very wonderful it is, too.
1990 and 2000
After a series of same-shaped rooms, the space devoted to the 1990s and 2000s is much larger, irregularly shaped, brighter, with bigger sculptures and installations as well as bigger, more brightly coloured paintings and several videos.
Damien Hirst Forms without life (1991) One of his many vitrines or cabinet pieces. There it is. Hirst is the Henry Moore or David Hockney of our generation, an initially exciting and liberating presence who has turned himself into an international brand amid an unstoppable torrent of output, of never-ceasing product.
Jane and Louise Wilson Blind landings (2013) These sisters produce black and white photos of ruined buildings and sites. I learned about them via Tate’s exhibition of Ruin Art, which featured their massive and hugely evocative photos of abandoned Nazi defences on the Normandy coast. What’s not to like, indeed love, about their beautifully framed and shot and composed images of architectural desolation?
Howard Hodgkin Porlock (2012) Born in 1932 Hodgkin has been a presence in English painting for 60 years. Lots of his work is big and bright and colourful so it’s disappointing he’s represented by this brown and grey daub.
Martin Boyce Suspended fall (2005) Anyone who’s visited Tate Modern’s Alexander Calder exhibition will know about the history and evolution of the ‘mobile’. Instead of lovingly crafted organic shapes, Boyce has smashed up a modern chair and suspended its pieces from metal brackets. An apt image of English vandalism.
One-off rooms
Charlotte Moth Downstairs, next to the cafe, is the Archive display room. This is currently given over to a display by Charlotte Moth, born in 1978. According to the wall label Tate has over 1 million items in its archive and 800 full collections. Moth was given free run of it and came up with a show titled ‘Inserts 2015’. It consists of 10 vitrines ie glass-fronted cabinets displaying photos, magazines, newspaper cuttings and other ephemera from the 1930s to the 1960s, inspired by and often depicting the staging and positioning and unveiling of sculptures by Barbara Hepworth. Plus a ten-minute video, Filmic sketches, taken in places mentioned in the cases. My favourite was a b&w photo of a clutch of civil dignities uncomfortably posed around a lean modernist sculpture in front of a new red-brick civic centre. Standing there in their black suits and ties and twin pearls and horn-rimmed glasses, how they hope it will all somehow make sense. But it won’t. 15 years later, the Sex Pistols will be playing in that civic centre, the failure of the post-war dream converted into sonic fury.
Bruce McLean This room is dedicated to a a 23-minute black and white film McLean made in 1970 titled In the shadow of your smile, which consists of the artist sitting behind a desk with bits of studio bric-a-brac in vision, talking into a microphone about how he is struggling to create work in the shadow of his art school teachers Anthony Caro and such like, with deliberate bad edits, sound interference, drifting in and out of synch with shapes or tape damage appearing in the image. Phenomenally dated.
Gustav Metzger (b.1926) Metzger was born of Polish Jews in Nuremberg. He was lucky enough to get out of Germany on the eve of World War II but, obviously, a lot of his family will have been murdered along with tens of millions of others between 1939 and 1945. This room is devoted to the idea of Auto-Destructive Art which Metzger developed right at the start of the 1960s, art made on transient, destructible media like wood or cardboard. He was a vociferous political activist who managed to get arrested a few times. The act of making things and then destroying them is as important as displaying them, so there are photos and pamphlets and brochures about his work. Images of auto destructive art.
John Gerrard The room is devoted to Sow Farm (near Libbey, Oklahoma) (2009) consists of one continuous tracking shot around the Sow Farm of the title, an industrial buildings isolated in a perfectly flat landscape, looking like… well, you can bring your own associations to this flat, silent, eerie moving image.
Tracey Emin This small room contains My bed (1998) looking as dirty, unmade and surrounded with detritus as ever, along with several Francis Bacon paintings which she’s chosen – Study of a dog (1952) and Reclining woman (1961), and some of her drawings, apparently of a female nude. To quote the wall label: ‘By virtue of bringing the domestic into the public sphere, without directly representing specific events, the installation is forcefully and compellingly suggestive of personal narratives.’
Art Now: Vanilla and concrete In a room off to the side near the main entrance is an exhibition of contemporary art, comprising works by three women artists:
Marie LundStills What look like big brown abstracts but, on closer investigation, turn out to be four large canvases painted to convey the effect of curtains. Raising the vessel, a couple of attractive bronze plates each with what looks like the impact of a meteorite denting them. Loads a bunch of sacks cast in concrete with polyester sewing. Not so impressive, rather like Rachel Whiteread’s concrete casts.
RallouPanagiotou A Pop Art-ish interest in mass-produced everyday objects. These made me smile, what a relief after the murk and Bacon pieces of meat. Liquid Degrade white is a straw and lessons in eye liner is two eyebrow shaped black swirls stuck to the wall.
Mary Ramsden Her work, according to the wall label, is inspired by the smears and traces left by fingers on touch screens and smart phones. Hyper modern subject matter, but I felt I’d seen many, many abstract works in the preceding galleries which looked just like her paintings, so I liked her least of the three.
Books & Boots 