All posts tagged Modigliani

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

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/12/20/modigliani-doris-krystof/

Modigliani @ Tate Modern

His name is pronounced Mod-ill-ee-arn-ee – the ‘g’ is silent. This is the most comprehensive Modigliani exhibition ever held in the UK, bringing together a really comprehensive range of portraits, sculptures and the largest ever group of nudes (12) to be shown in this country.

Modigliani

Modigliani

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Amedeo Modigliani died very young, on January 1920, aged just 35. By that time he had developed a look, a brand, a style, which was instantly recognisable and has made him one of the most valued of ‘modern’ painters, with two entries in the top twenty-five most expensive paintings of all time:

No. 9: Nu Couché $170 million
No. 21: Reclining Nude With Blue Cushion $118 million

Art capital of the world

In the 1900s Paris was the acknowledged capital of the art world, full of artists who’d flocked there from all over Europe (for example, the Spaniard Picasso, the Romanian Brancusi). Modigliani moved from his native Italy to Paris in 1906, when he was 21.

The second room in this big exhibition shows an excellent five minute video montage of black and white photos and very basic movie footage of the Paris of the day, starting with grand scenes of the Eiffel Tower and the buildings left over from the Great Exhibition of 1900, then moving to the ramshackle buildings up the side of the hill of Montmartre, the white Sacre Coeur church still being completed, cabarets and theatres, the back alleys and tenements where the artists rented apartments and studios, and then shots of key figures of the time, Picasso, Brancusi, Gertrude Stein from the family of art collectors, Modigliani himself and some moving footage of workers manhandling lumps of the limestone he carved into sculptures.

Experiments in styles

With a good feel for the life and times of 1900s Paris we move on into a room which shows Modigliani experimenting with the variety of looks and styles on offer. Loose brushwork and abstracted figures testify to the pervading influence of Cézanne on everyone at the time. This is apparent in the very visible diagonal brushstrokes which draw attention to themselves of this early nude, or of his study of Brancusi, who soon became a good friend.

Sculpting

Between 1909 and 1911, heavily influenced by Brancusi, Modigliani went through an intense phase of sculpting. Like many others he was caught up in the fashion for exotic, non-European art, supposedly ‘primitive’ sculptures from ancient Egypt or from France’s colonial possession like Cambodia or the Ivory Coast. It had only been in 1906/7 that Matisse and Picasso both began to incorporate non-European masks and body shapes in their work. Two rooms are devoted to this phase, one showing the lovely preparatory sketches he made, showing Modigliani’s wonderful way with elegant curved but geometric lines, the other showing a dozen or so sculptures which are, without exception, faces, some squat square ones, but most a highly characteristic elongated, narrow face with a long pendulous nose ending in a little round pouting mouth.

The commentary tells the story that sometimes visitors to his studio at night found that Modigliani had placed lighted candles atop each of the sculptures. He told friends he planned to create a kind of pagan temple decorated with them. On a few occasions, at hashish parties, he was seen to embrace them.

In all, Modigliani made about 25 of these highly characteristic heads. A handful were included in the 1912 Salon d’Automne, the only time they were displayed in his lifetime. There are several theories why he abandoned sculpture in 1913 – possibly the constant dust of a sculptor’s studio exacerbated the childhood tuberculosis which he was always holding at bay. Possibly it was just too expensive compared to painting.

The Modigliani look

But the extensive sketches, and the really physical engagement with sculpture, had set in stone (as it were) what was now established as the Modigliani ‘look’ – elongated faces with swan-like necks and blank almond-shaped eyes were to characterise all his paintings from now to the end of his life.

This is already apparent in the many portraits he painted of fellow artists, mistresses, and the collectors and art dealers who were important in launching his career. The commentary gives a good deal of background information about each of them, for example about the several portraits of his dealer, Paul Alexandre, a leading promoter of African art. I particularly liked the ‘naive’ way Modigliani writes on the paintings: he writes the name of the subject (Picasso, Paul), his own signature, and then often writes a comment, for example writing ‘Novo Pilota’ – meaning ‘guiding star’ – onto his portrait of Paul Guillaume.

Portrait of Paul Guillaume, Novo Pilota (1915) Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris. Collection Jean Walter et Paul Guillaume

Portrait of Paul Guillaume, Novo Pilota (1915) Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris. Collection Jean Walter et Paul Guillaume

The elongated, cylinder-like neck, the perfectly almond-shaped face especially the pointed chin, the simple one-line depiction of the nose and eyes and eyebrows and especially the slate grey or blacking out of the eyes to emphasise the impassive mask-like effect – all these are apparent in his several portraits of his mistress-lover Beatrice Hastings who, the commentary tells us, was a British-born writer and editor who covered the Paris art scene for British magazines.

Beatrice Hastings (1915) Private Collection

Beatrice Hastings (1915) Private Collection

There are three rooms devoted to his artistic peers, to colleagues, collectors and dealers, friends and lovers and patrons, featuring his portraits of such luminaries as Jean Cocteau, Juan Gris and the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. By the time war broke out in 1914 Modigliani was very well-connected, an ‘insider’ in the Paris art world, friends with the leaders of the avant-garde, beneficiary of regular commissions from the cognoscenti.

A people person

What these three rooms really crystallise is the fairly obvious point that he only painted portraits – heads or busts or full bodies, but only individual people. Landscapes such as had obsessed the godfather of modernism, Cézanne? None. Still lives such as absorbed the Cubists, Picasso and Braque? None. Cityscapes such as dominated the Futurists from his own native land, Italy (the first Futurist manifesto was published in 1909)? None. On the strength of this exhibition it seems that he never sketched, drew, painted or sculpted anything but the human form and face. And although highly stylised, they are always recognisable, with recognisable clothes (or not), in chairs or leaning on tables in a recognisable space.

Compared to the wild experiments going on around him (Fauves, Cubism, Futurism) Modigliani’s art seems – well ‘conservative’ is the wrong word, a genuinely die-hard conservative style continued to be produced by academic painters – but understandable, assimilable, acceptable.

Modigliani’s nudes

It was with this in mind that I walked into the big room displaying ‘the largest ever group of Modigliani nudes to be shown in this country’, 12 of them, to be precise.

The commentary would have us believe that these are ‘shocking’ and ‘provocative’ works and tells the story that the one and only exhibition of them – held at Berthe Weill’s gallery in 1917 – was closed down by the police on the grounds of indecency. Apparently, this was specifically because Modigliani showed his models having pubic hair and underarm hair.

Reclining Nude (1919) Museum of Modern Art, New York

Reclining Nude (1919) Museum of Modern Art, New York

To be honest, I found this a little hard to credit (not that the show was closed down, but that the works were particularly shocking or provocative). I’ve just read a book about the Fauves which included plenty of Fauvist nudes which a) are really wild pictures, sometimes difficult to make out amid the riot of colour; and b) where you can, quite routinely show depict pubic hair.

Compared with any of these works from at least ten years earlier, Modigliani’s nudes seem very tame – in terms of colour (which is very restrained and ‘realistic’ – the flesh is generally flesh-coloured), in terms of line (Modigliani’s nudes are all clearly defined by wonderfully crisp, curving outlines), in terms of facial features (which are stylised but not, actually, that much), even in terms of crudity, none of the Modiglianis are as in-your-face as that final nude by Camoin.

On the contrary – they all share a similar warm orange body, lovely curves, ample bosoms, pink nipples, all depicted with super-clear, well-defined black outlines. If they so show women’s pubes, they are as neat and geometric as their oval faces. Actual women’s pubic hair is a lot more unkempt and varied than Modigliani’s tasteful version.

No, what struck me about all of Modigliani’s nudes was their restraint, their tastefulness, and several of them really did strike me as deeply conservative, particularly the nudes where he is consciously referencing the European tradition, like this one which is based on Ingres’ famous Odalisque.

Reclining Nude (1919) Museum of Modern Art, New York

Reclining Nude (1919) Museum of Modern Art, New York

All four curators of this exhibition are women and so you have a strong feeling in the audio commentary that they feel duty bound to discuss how women’s bodies were a battlefield in the 1910s (prompting the thought, When have women’s bodies not been battlefields, according to feminist history?), but, at the same time, want to assert that the women Modigliani depicts are not helpless victims of ‘the male gaze’ – these women are strong independent women, as evidenced by their wearing lipstick, make-up and – in some of them – necklaces or ear rings.

The commentary compares the lot of the average model to the really grim lives of working class women slaving away in factories or as laundresses etc (Modigliani’s models earned about double the daily working wage for spending a day lying on a couch).

But none of this semi-political feminist interpretation really changes the fact that these are cartoons. The simple black outline, the stylised and fairly flat colouring – they could almost come from a Tintin cartoon, or from any number of subsequent comic strips. Compare and contrast with the genuinely experimental way nudes had been portrayed for at least a decade.

If the Berthe Weill show was raided and closed down it was, if anything, because the nudes were – in artistic terms – so conservative, so realistic, so figurative and so traditional in style – that they really did teeter on the brink of pornography.

No one could mistake the Matisse, Derain or Picasso nudes for soft porn, they are all very obviously far more interested in experimenting with new ways of seeing and new ways of painting than with titillation. You can’t really confidently say that about the Modigliani nudes. They are all pretty sexy and sexiness is their subject, although the curators prefer the more polite word ‘seductive’.

By this, room 8 of the 11-room exhibition, it seemed to me that Modigliani had progressed far beyond his earlier experiments, incorporated all the stylisation he’d learned from studying ‘primitive’ art and sculpting, and had emerged to produce a really consistent brand of very quaffable female nudes. Their naive simplicity makes them extremely enjoyable and explains, I think, the extraordinary prices they fetch at modern auction, tasteful, soft-porn works which any self-respecting billionaire would be proud to hang in his luxury apartment in New York, Paris, Moscow or Beijing. (Nu Couché was bought by the Chinese billionaire Liu Yiqian for $170 million, Reclining Nude with Blue Cushion was bought by Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev for $118 million.)

The curators can use feminist tropes all they like to try and defend these nudes but there seems no doubt that they are now, as they were then, designed for the visual pleasure of rich men.

The warm South

Towards the end of the war Modigliani was sent to the Mediterranean coast by his new art dealer, Léopold Zborowski, as a precaution against increasing Zeppelin raids on Paris and also because of his worsening health. Modigliani was worried about leaving behind his well-developed network of friends and artistic accomplices, but in fact soon settled in to a new life, not least because he was accompanied by his mistress, Jeanne Hébuterne.

Again he painted nothing but portraits and, deprived of the network of professional models in Paris, took to painting local adults and then a series of children. He seems to have reacted to the far brighter light of the south by using warmed Mediterranean colours and also applying the paint much more thinly, both of which make these portraits seem light and airy.

The Little Peasant (c.1918) Tate

The Little Peasant (c.1918) Tate

Children and peasants. Is there not something a little, well, twee about some of these works? (Looking it up I see that ‘twee’ is defined as ‘excessively or affectedly quaint, pretty, or sentimental’.)

Again compare and contrast with his contemporaries or, in this case, with the Master, Cézanne. With the current exhibition of Cézanne portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in mind, we can see how Modigliani has learned the lessons of the old Frenchman v the patches of colour, the visible brush-strokes, the steep foreshortening of the subject and backdrop, the confrontational – full-on pose, but made it somehow, well babyish. Toy-like. Here’s a Cézanne.

Man with Pipe (1891-6) by Paul Cézanne. The Courtauld Gallery, London

Man with Pipe (1891 to 1896) by Paul Cézanne. The Courtauld Gallery, London

Comparing the two it seems to me the main difference is in the face. Not only does Modigliani use his simplified mask design, but, by this stage, he’s often painting his faces in a unified flesh tone (true of almost all the nudes) which gives them quite literally a baby-faced freshness. Again compare and contrast with the complex brushwork Cézanne has applied to the face of his old bloke with a pipe, let alone the wild blues and greens which the Fauves used in their portraits. Compared to all of them, surely Modigliania is tame.

In fact it’s only really the use of the mask motif which prevents his works toppling over into kitsch. In particular I felt it was only the blacking out of the eyes of the portraits (which gives them a weird voodoo science fiction vibe) which prevents them from turning into the kind of Modernism light paintings you see being hawked on the streets of any tourist trap European city.

Last works

The final room shows his last works, painted back in Paris after the war, depictions of more rich patrons and commissions, alongside a suite of portraits of his mistress, Jeanne Hébuterne, who was pregnant with their second child.

Jeanne Hébuterne (1919) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Jeanne Hébuterne (1919) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

It’s notable that the flesh tones have moved away from the warm pinks of the nudes, back towards a more ‘experimental’ colouring. But the most striking thing about these last paintings is that the almond-shaped face and swan neck are taken to new extremes. Some of the people look like giraffes.

The colouring is richer and denser than in the South of France paintings. But each work, no matter how varied the subject, is now totally identifiable as a Modigliani. Who knows how his work would have continued to evolve and develop; he was half-way towards the kind of crisp neo-classical feel which so many French artists would adopt after the war.

But we’ll never know. Modigliani died from tubercular meningitis on 24 January in 1920. In a grim note we learn that just a few days later, his mistress Jeanne, nine-months pregnant, committed suicide by jumping from the fifth floor of an apartment building.

This is a really enjoyable, carefully and thoughtfully curated overview of a wonderful artist, whose draughtsmanship is a joy to look at, from his earliest works, and whose mature geometric style produced painting after painting which fills the eye with pleasure.

Modigliani Virtual Reality

Towards the end of the exhibition is an ambitious innovation – a room where about ten visitors at a time can sit and have a visitor assistant clamp onto their head a kind of helmet with built-in 3-D goggles. These give you a virtual reality tour of a computer-generated recreation of Modigliani’s studio. It’s a bld new idea and a first for Tate.

Inevitably, there was a fairly long queue for this brave new digital experience, with an estimated waiting time of 25 minutes so I’m afraid I decided not to. Some of the content can be seen on the video screen outside the exhibition which is running a film about the making of the VR experience (which I’ve embedded, below).

So my advice would be to go the exhibition soon after opening (at 10am) and go straight to the queue for the VR, do it, and then go back to do the exhibition in order.

Seated Nude (1917) Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, Lukasart in Flanders. Photo credit: Hugo Maertens

Seated Nude (1917) Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, Lukasart in Flanders. Photo credit: Hugo Maertens

Videos

Introduction to the exhibition by curator Simonetta Fraquelli.

Video showing how the virtual reality experience was made.

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More Tate Modern reviews

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by Simon on December 19, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, France
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Posted by Simon on December 19, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/12/19/modigliani-tate-modern/

Merchandise and art

Exhibition shops are great for at least three reasons:

1. The books, posters, prints, postcards, ear rings, scarves, bags and so on are always beautifully made and genuinely tempting. I almost always buy a postcard of a favourite work to blu-tack up somewhere unexpected round the house, and always have to fight hard not to buy every book on display.

2. Exhibition shops very often shed new light on what you’ve just seen. Posters and prints in particular often make you see paintings anew. In the shop of the 2015 Inventing Impressionism exhibition, I was stunned by how brilliant the Monet posters looked. I’d just been looking at the same works a few moments earlier and, in the flesh, six feet tall, they’d seemed scrappy and unfinished. Reproduced into smooth flat prints and reduced to a foot or so in size, the images had been condensed and made consistent, all the scrappy brushstrokes and exposed canvas were elided out of it, they looked wonderfully bright and lively and fresh and airy.

Claude Monet, Poplars in the Sun (1891) The National Museum of Western Art, Matsukata Collection, Tokyo P.1959-0152 © National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo

Poplars in the Sun (1891) by Claude Monet © National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo

Next to them was a reproduction of a painting of the Thames by a Victorian realist painter which I’d really liked in the show. But once it was condensed and reduced down to print size, it was so dark that you could hardly make out any of the details which had added such mystery and atmosphere to the original.

St Paul's from the Surrey Side (1871-3) by Charles-François Daubigny © The National Gallery, London

St Paul’s from the Surrey Side (1871-3) by Charles-François Daubigny © The National Gallery, London

It was then that I had the simple insight that maybe one reason the Impressionists continue to be so all-conqueringly popular with gallery-going audiences and in middle-brow culture is because their light and bright and colourful works reproduce so well to a household scale – looking great as posters, prints, on biscuit tins, fridge magnets, jigsaws, cups and saucers and tea towels and oven gloves and so on – accommodating perfectly to our comfortable consumer society.

Popularity = reproducibility

3. Exhibition shops refute at a stroke all the utopian rhetoric from the curators of modern art shows claiming that such and such works are ‘revolutionary’, ‘subversive’ or undermine governing narratives of this or that.

Whatever the artists’ original intentions may have been and however revolutionary the works may have been in their day, even the most literally ‘revolutionary’ art, even icons of Lenin and Marx themselves, devoted to the violent overthrow of capitalism, are nowadays reproduced as posters and prints, lovingly listed in lavish coffee table books, adorn cushions, pillows, scarves and handbags, their original intent utterly assimilated into a world of bourgeois fashion and comfort.

That is where we are, that is who we are, that is what we are – denizens of the most advanced consumer capitalist culture in the world.

Whatever you throw at it, whatever you say about it, however much you despise and revile it – consumer capitalism eats it up and sells it back as t-shirts.

And this is the lesson of the exhibition shop.

Art show merch

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by Simon on December 17, 2017  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 17, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/12/17/merchandise-and-art/

Women and ethnic minorities in the art world

I’ve recently read a number of feminist critiques of the art world accusing it of being an all-male patriarchy which women can’t enter, of having a glass ceiling which prevents women from reaching the top, and of systematically underplaying or denying the achievement of women artists.

While I’m not really qualified to tackle all these issues in their entirety, the books did make me start paying closer attention to the gender of the artists featured in the London art exhibitions I visit, to the gender of the exhibition curators, and to the gender of the people running the main London art galleries which I frequent – with the following results:

Recent art exhibitions and their curators

  1. Oceania – Peter Brunt, Nicholas Thomas
  2. Heath Robinson’s War Effort – Geoffrey Beare
  3. Peter Pan and Other Lost Children – Geoffrey Beare
  4. Liberty / Diaspora by Omar Victor Diop – Curatorial Project Manager: Karin Bareman, Curatorial Assistant: Leanne Petersen ♀
  5. Learn the Rules Like a Pro, So You Can Break Them Like an Artist! – Cliff Lauson and Tarini Malik ♀
  6. Edward Burne-Jones – Alison Smith ♀
  7. Space Shifters – Dr Cliff Lauson
  8. Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-Garde – Jane Alison ♀
  9. Frida Kahlo – Making Herself Up – Claire Wilcox and Circe Henestrosa ♀
  10. Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Barrels and The Mastaba – Melissa Blanchflower ♀
  11. Aftermath: Art in the wake of World War One – Emma Chambers and Rachel Rose Smith ♀
  12. Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy – Achim Borchardt-Hume and Nancy Ireson ♀
  13. Vanessa Winship: And Time Folds – Alona Pardo ♀
  14. Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing – Alona Pardo and Jilke Golbach ♀
  15. I Am Now You – Mother by Marcia Michael – Renée Mussai ♀
  16. Devotion: A Portrait of Loretta by Franklyn Rodgers – Mark Sealy, Renée Mussai ♀
  17. Shirley Baker –
  18. Alex Prager: Silver Lake Drive – Nathalie Herschdorfer ♀
  19. Tish Murtha: Works 1976–1991 – Val Williams, Gordon MacDonald, Karen McQuaid ♀
  20. Monet and Architecture – Rosalind McKever ♀
  21. Print! Tearing It Up – Paul Gorman, Claire Catterall ♀
  22. World Illustration Awards 2018 – committee
  23. Killed Negatives – Nayia Yiakoumaki ♀
  24. ISelf Collection: Bumped Bodies – Emily Butler ♀
  25. The London Open 2018 – Emily Butler ♀
  26. Ed Ruscha: Course of Empire – Christopher Riopelle
  27. Thomas Cole: Eden to Empire – Tim Barringer, Christopher Riopelle and Rosalind McKever ♀
  28. Quentin Blake: Voyages to the Moon and the Sun – Olivia Ahmad ♀
  29. Tomma Abts – Lizzie Carey-Thomas (assistant curator Natalia Grabowska) ♀
  30. Enid Marx – Alan Powers, Olivia Ahmad ♀
  31. Edward Bawden – James Russell
  32. Under Cover – Karen McQuaid ♀
  33. Lee Bul – Stephanie Rosenthal (Eimear Martin, Bindi Vora) ♀
  34. Adapt to Survive – Dr Cliff Lauson
  35. AOP50 – Zelda Cheatle ♀
  36. Andreas Gursky – Ralph Rugoff
  37. Age of Terror – Sanna Moore ♀
  38. Neo-Romantic Book Illustration in Britain 1943-55 – Geoffrey Beare
  39. Charmed lives in Greece – Evita Arapoglou, Ian Collins, Sir Michael Llewellyn-Smith ♀
  40. Post-Soviet Visions – Ekow Eshun
  41. Made in North Korea – Olivia Ahmad, Nicholas Bonner ♀
  42. Ocean Liners: Speed and Style – Ghislaine Wood ♀
  43. All Too Human – Elena Crippa (Laura Castagnini, Zuzana Flaskova) ♀
  44. Lucinda Rogers – Olivia Ahmed ♀
  45. David Milne: Modern Painting – Ian Dejardin, Sarah Milroy ♀
  46. Living with gods – Jill Cook ♀
  47. Illuminating India – Shasti Lowton ♀
  48. Rhythm and Reaction – Catherine Tackley ♀
  49. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov – Juliet Bingham, Katy Wan ♀
  50. Women with Vision: Elisabeth Frink, Sandra Blow, Sonia Lawson – Nathalie Levi ♀
  51. Women of the Royal West of England Academy – Nathalie Levi ♀
  52. Cornelia Parker: One day this glass will break – Antonia Shaw ♀
  53. Opera: Passion, Power and Politics – Kate Bailey ♀
  54. Scythians – St John Simpson
  55. War Paint – Emma Mawdsley ♀
  56. Modigliani – Nancy Ireson, Simonetta Fraquelli, Emma Lewis, Marian Couijn ♀
  57. Soutine – Barnaby Wright, Karen Serres ♀
  58. Cézanne Portraits – John Elderfield, Mary Morton, Xavier Rey
  59. Van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites – Susan Foister, Alison Smith ♀
  60. Burrell Degas – Julien Domercq
  61. Lake Keitele: Akseli Gallen-Kallela – Anne Robbins ♀
  62. Monochrome – Lelia Packer, Jennifer Sliwka ♀
  63. Rachel Whiteread – Ann Gallagher, Linsey Young, Helen Delaney & Hattie Spires ♀
  64. Dali/Duchamp – Dawn Ades, William Jeffett, with Sarah Lea and Desiree de Chair ♀
  65. Jasper Johns – Roberta Bernstein & Edith Devaney ♀
  66. Impressionists in London – Caroline Corbeau-Parsons & Elizabeth Jacklin ♀
  67. Matisse in the studio – Ann Dumas & Ellen McBreen ♀
  68. Jean Arp – Frances Guy & Eric Robertson ♀
  69. Tracey Emin / Turner – Tracey Emin ♀
  70. Tove Jansson – Sointu Fritze ♀
  71. Basquiat – Dieter Buchhart & Eleanor Nairne ♀

Artists by gender and race

71 shows
43 about specific artists (i.e. not about general themes)
52 named artists, of whom –
22 (42% of 52) were women
Black or Asian artists 4 (6%)

Curators by gender and race

71 shows
110 curators and assistant curators
81 women curators (74% of 110)
29 men curators (26%)
5 Black or Asian curators (5%)

London gallery directors by gender

  1. Army Museum Director – Janice Murray ♀
  2. Autograph ABP – Dr Mark Sealy MBE 
  3. Barbican Director of Arts –  Louise Jeffreys ♀
  4. British Museum – Hartwig Fischer 
  5. Calvert22 – Nonna Materkova ♀
  6. Courtauld Gallery Director – Deborah Swallow ♀
  7. Dulwich Picture Gallery Sackler Director –  Jennifer Scott ♀
  8. Guildhall Art Gallery & London’s Roman Amphitheatre – Sonia Solicari ♀
  9. Hayward Gallery Chief curator – Ralph Rugoff 
  10. Heath Robinson Museum Manager – Lucy Smith ♀
  11. House of Illustration – Colin McKenzie 
  12. Imperial War Museum – Diane Lees ♀
  13. National Army Museum – Janice Murray ♀
  14. National Gallery – Gabriele Finaldi 
  15. National Portrait Gallery –  Nicholas Cullinan 
  16. The Photographers’ Gallery – Brett Rogers ♀
  17. Royal Academy of Arts President – Christopher Le Brun 
  18. Saatchi Gallery – Rebecca Wilson ♀
  19. Serpentine Gallery Co-Directors – Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Yana Peel ♀
  20. Tate Britain Director –  Alex Farquharson 
  21. Tate Modern Director – Frances Morris ♀
  22. Victoria and Albert Museum Director –  Tristram Hunt 
  23. Whitechapel Gallery – Iwona Blazwick ♀

Bristol & Margate gallery directors by gender

Recently I was in Bristol and visited the main art gallery and the Royal West of England Academy:

Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery Director – Laura Pye ♀
Royal West of England Academy Director – Alison Bevan ♀

And popped down to Turner Contemporary in Margate:

Turner Contemporary, Margate Director – Victoria Pomery ♀

Grand total of gallery directors

27 galleries/museums
27 directors
17 women directors (63% of 27)
10 men directors (37%)
1 Black or Asian director (Mark Sealy) (4%)

Conclusions

I accept that the selection of exhibitions I happen to have gone to is subjective (although it does tend to reflect the major exhibitions at the major London galleries).

The gender of curators similarly reflects my subjective choices of venue – but it has in fact remained pretty steady at around 75% women, even as I’ve doubled the number of exhibitions visited over the past couple of months.

The genders of the heads of the main public London galleries are objective facts.

Anyway, from all this very shaky data, I provisionally conclude that:

  1. Of exhibitions devoted to named artists (not about themes or groups) about 40% are about female artists.
  2. About two-thirds of the London & Bristol art galleries I’ve visited are headed by women.
  3. Significantly more art exhibitions are curated by women than by men (about 75%).
  4. It is common to hear talk about ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusivity’ in the art world, but not a single major London gallery is run by someone of black or Asian ethnicity, and none of the major art exhibitions I’ve visited were curated by blacks or Asians.

Visitors Also, hardly any visitors to exhibitions are black or Asian. At the Monochrome exhibition, there were no non-white visitors, but no fewer than five of the ‘security assistants’ were black. There were no black or Asian people in the one-room Lake Keitele show. There were no black or Asian visitors at the Degas, though all the women serving in the shop were Asian. Of the 170 people I counted in the Cézanne exhibition, there was one black man, and two Chinese or Japanese. In the Modigliani show, no black people – and so on…

From all of which I conclude that if there is an ‘absence’ or repression going on here, it is not – pace Whitney Chadwick and other feminist art critics – of women, who are in fact over-represented as heads of galleries and as exhibition curators: it is of people of colour, who are almost completely absent from this (admittedly very subjective) slice of the art world, whether as artists, administrators, curators or visitors.

Only the Basquiat show was about a black artist (and it attracted a noticeably large number of black visitors) but even this was curated (astonishingly) by two white people.

All of which confirms my ongoing sense that art is a predominantly white, bourgeois pastime.

Age And old. Every exhibition I go to is packed with grey-haired old men and women. It would be interesting to have some kind of objective figures for sex and age of gallery-goers (I wonder if Tate, the National and so on publish annual visitor figures, broken down into categories).

When I began to try and count age at the Cézanne show I very quickly gave up because it is, in practice, impossible to guess the age of every single person you look at, and the easiest visual clue – just counting grey-haired people – seemed ludicrous.

So I know that these stats are flawed in all kinds of ways — but, on the other hand, some kind of attempt at establishing facts is better than nothing, better than relying on purely personal, subjective opinions.

Now I’ve started, I’ll update the figures with each new exhibition I visit. I might as well try to record it as accurately as I can and see what patterns or trends emerge…

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by Simon on December 13, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Feminism
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Posted by Simon on December 13, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/12/13/women-ethnic-minorities-art-world/

Every room in the Courtauld Gallery

The aim of doing all the rooms in a gallery isn’t necessarily to look at every exhibit in the place. It is to:

  • discover the out-of-the-way corners where treasures are sometimes hidden
  • get a feel for the complete geography of a place, to understand how it fits together as a building
  • and understand how the works exhibited in it fit together to tell a story (or multiple stories)

Background

The Courtauld Gallery houses the art collection of the Courtauld Institute of Art, a self-governing college of the University of London specialising in the study of the history of art.

The Courtauld collection was formed largely through donations and bequests and includes paintings, drawings, sculptures and other works from medieval to modern times. It’s a kind of miniature National Gallery, following the same story of Western art through a much smaller selection of, in many ways more exquisite, pieces. It’s best known for its French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings; those rooms are always packed.

In total, the collection contains some 530 paintings and over 26,000 drawings and prints, displayed in 12 rooms over three floors reached via the charming old stone circular staircase.

The rooms

Room one:13th to 15th century

30 paintings and altar pieces, a big statue of the crowned Virgin Mary, 12 exquisite little ivory carvings, five caskets, a marriage chest and 12 pieces of Islamic metalwork. I liked:

  • The ivory Virgin and child with a chaffinch. I understand the symbolism, having seen the same subject at the V&A ie the chaffinch was thought to eat seeds from thorny plants, thus prefiguring the crown of thorns which the little baby Jesus was destined to wear 33 years later.
  • An ivory depicting ‘Scenes from the life of Jesus’, with an Ascension scene where the crowd are, Monty Python-style, looking up at a tunic and pair of sandals disappearing out of the frame (top left section).
  • What I liked about the medieval ivories is that the figures are cramped and packed into the composition, yet important ones, the Virgin in particular, are still willowy and sinuous; it’s the combination of cramped with willowy which is one of their appeals.
  • I discovered I like Robert Campin at the National Gallery: here, I liked his Seilern Triptych (1425). The most obvious thing is how dark it is; he uses an intense black to create variety or drama across the picture plane. On a separate level, I also liked the use of the grapes motif in the gilt background. And homely details like the handmade hedge in the bottom right.
  • Compare, in terms of light, with the nearby Coronation of the Virgin by Lorenzo Monaco, amazingly sumptuous and golden, but without the extremes of black, the density and drama of the Campin.
  • I realised at the National Gallery that I like northern European medieval and Renaissance painting for its concern for individuals. A good example here is the portrait of Guillaume Fillastre from the workshop of Roger van der Weyden (1430s)
  • Ugliest baby award went to Virgin and Child with angels by Quentin Massys

Mezzanine room: ‘Panorama’

Half-way up the stairs to the first floor is a small room which holds changing displays of prints. Currently it houses 14 drawings or prints on the theme of ‘the panoramic view’, including Canaletto, two Turners, a Towne etc. The wall label said the panorama derives from Dutch interest in landscapes, confirming my view of northern Europe as being humanist, interested in individuals and places, as opposed to Italy and Spain, home to countless images of the simpering Madonna, weeping saints and the limp corpse of Jesus, all set in rocky, barren deserts.

Room two: 16th century Renaissance Europe

19 paintings and some painted marriage chests, objects whose long narrow front panels are well suited to paintings depicting processions or battle scenes. There are also 23 Renaissance ceramics in an exhibition case, but the room is dominated by Botticelli’s Trinity with saints. As I discovered in the National Gallery, I like Botticelli as a cartoonist but not as a serious painter of the human condition.

Room three: 17th century Rubens and the Baroque

18 paintings, 11 of them Rubens, and a chest. My favourites were:

  • Cranach Adam and Eve (1526) for the medieval feel, the sumptuous northern flora, and the symbolic animals. Although it’s a well known story, the painting has a strange mysterious air, as if pregnant with additional, hidden meanings.
  • Hans Mielich Portrait of Anna Reitnor (1539) A typically north European, humanistic and individualistic portrait of a specific person. Compare and contrast with…
  • Rubens Cain killing Abel The wall label can go on about what Rubens had learned from his visit to Italy and his debt to Michelangelo – this still seems to me an over-muscled, deformed account of the human body, glorifying in a kind of murder porn.
  • Similarly, I disliked the nine sketches by Tiepolo, typified by St Aloysius Gonzaga. Words can’t convey the kitsch nastiness of this Catholic propaganda.

Room four: 18th century Enlightenment

As at the National Gallery, it is a great relief to walk from rooms full of tortured saints, crucified Christs and weeping Maries into the common sense, calmness and reason of the English Enlightenment. This rooms contains a pleasant selection of comfortable, bourgeois paintings by Romney, Ramsay, Gainsborough and display cases full of silver plate, cups and so on. I liked:

Room five: 19th century Early Impressionism

And now for something completely different, the rooms the Courtauld is famous for, this one holding 6 paintings, 2 sculptures. I liked:

  • Degas Two dancers on stage (1874) He did hundreds of studies and oils of this subject, this one is good.
  • Renoir La Loge (1874) When I went to see the Inventing Impressionism show at the National Gallery, Renoir emerged for me as the most consistent of the Impressionists, finding his style early and sticking to it, in paintings that look more consistently finished than his colleagues’ ones.
  • Monet Autumn effect at Argenteuil (1873) Exactly the kind of Monet which looks better compacted onto a computer screen or chocolate box, than how it appears here, in the flesh, where it is much larger, much blurrier and wispier.
  • Compare and contrast with Manet’s Banks of the Seine at Argenteuil (1874). The wall label says this is the most impressionist painting Manet ever did, made while he was staying at Monet’s house at Argenteuil. Although using the same short dabs of paint and showing the same hazy disregard for detail, as his friend, the striking thing is the quality of the black in the painting, a really deep, intense, black black, there in the boat but especially the woman’s hat, and giving the other colours, especially the blue, a darker hue. This gives the whole painting a greater intensity. It kind of roots it into a starker world, a firmer world, than anything in the pink and yellow creations of Monet’s which are hanging near it.

Room six :19th century Impressionism and post-impressionism

  • Manet The bar at the Folies Bergers (1880) This isn’t a very good reproduction, but again it highlights the importance of black in Manet’s compositions.
  • Cézanne The card players (1896) The stylisation of the human form is completely convincing.
  • Cézanne Mont St Victoire (1887) Characteristic deployment of the blocks and rectangles of colour which anticipate cubism.
  • Gauguin Te Rerioa (1897) I didn’t like Gauguin when I was young. I think exposure to lots and lots of tribal and native art has helped me ‘read’ him better, so that now I just accept and enjoy the whole composition.
  • Gauguin Nevermore (1897)

Room seven: 19th century Post-impressionism

Just seven paintings, the standout specimen being Self-portrait with a bandaged ear by Vincent van Gogh. I like the strong back lines and the forceful, not necessarily realistic colouring.

Room eight:

An exhibition room this is currently dedicated to Bridget Riley: learning from Seurat.

Room nine: 20th century French painting

12 paintings and statues by among others Derain, Braque, early Matisse, Vlaminck.

Room ten: 20th century French painting 1905 to 1920

12 paintings, including specimens by Dufy, Bonnard, Picasso, Léger, all dominated by the Modigliani.

  • Modigliani Female nude (1916) Perfectly and completely itself.

Room eleven a: Late 19th-early 20th century painting

8 paintings.

  • Cézanne Route tournante (1905) a) Unfinished, so I like it. b) Even more of Cézanne’s characteristic cubes and blocks of paint, creating a powerfully dynamic image.
  • Degas Woman at a window Unfinished and with strong black lines, a wonderful visionary image.

Room eleven b: 19th century

Seurat sketches. A small room with 8 tiny paintings by Seurat (died 1891)

Room 12: 20th century German Expressionists

A bit of a relief to emerge from the fuzziness of France into the bright, barbarian virility of strident German expressionism. 12 big bold crude paintings.

Room 13: 20th century British painting

Half a dozen big horrible paintings by Leon Kossof and Frank Auerbach, with an early Lucien Freud to brighten the gloom.

Rooms 14 and 15

Devoted to temporary exhibitions, earlier in the year Goya’s Witches and Old Women Album, currently the wonderful show of Peter Lanyon’s gliding paintings.

Conclusions

If I didn’t know before, spending three hours walking slowly through these wonderful rooms packed with treasures, made me realise a few simple things about my taste:

  • I like unfinished paintings, sketches and cartoons, where the image/work/composition is struggling to emerge, struggling to create order and beauty from the chaos of perception, or has the pathos and fragility of incompletion.
  • I like firm lines which define the subject, especially the human subject, as in Degas or van Gogh.
  • I like works which contain deep black blacks: for some reason its presence makes the entire work seem deeper, as if the spectrum from a really deep black to the light which illuminates the object is wider, and so makes the experience of the colours on the canvas or wood, deeper and richer.

Related links

Every room in other museums and galleries

Other Courtauld Gallery reviews

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by Simon on January 9, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Art
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on January 9, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/01/09/every-room-in-the-courtauld-gallery/

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