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Relating to Ancestors @ the British Museum

Walk in the main entrance of the British Museum, go through the central courtyard past the great round building in the middle and walk on through the archway into room 24. This room is titled ‘Living and Dying’ and contains cases exploring ‘how people everywhere deal with the tough realities of life and death’. There’s a number of display cases looking at particular aspects of this (big) subject via the customs and artefacts of First Peoples from around the world, a lot of them from around the Pacific, although some are from Africa. But four or so big display cases are devoted to artefacts and explanations about the culture of indigenous Australians, or Aborigines as we used to call them.

Indigenous Australian beliefs

Indigenous Australians understand that ancestral beings created the land, the oceans and all living things, passing on knowledge of how to live from, and care for, the land. People burn bush-land to maintain the fertility of species and perform ceremonies to mark important life stages.

Ancestral knowledge is passed from one generation to the next through painting, dancing and telling stories about the great ancestral beings. It is embodied in the designs and materials of both art works and functional, everyday objects, and these vary greatly across the continent, reflecting the great environmental and cultural diversity of Australia.

The AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia which attempts to represent the language, social or nation groups of indigenous Australia

Colonisation

Australia has been inhabited for at least 60,000 years, predating the modern human settlement of  both Europe and the Americas. Although William Dampier visited the north-west coast of Australia in the late 1600s, and Captain Cook mapped the east coast in 1770, the permanent British occupation of the continent only began in 1788 with the arrival of the First Fleet of convicts, which established a penal colony at modern-day Sydney.

The first whites came into contact with the native peoples from the first day and relations between the white interlopers and black natives were troubled and sometimes violent from the start. However, some native peoples managed to stay out of contact with whites until as late as the 1980s, 200 years after the first settlement.

Weaving ancestral knowledge

Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders believed that ancestral beings were transformed into animals and plants, and that the properties of plants embody ancestral knowledge. Maintaining land and sea resources, knowing how to use the different parts of plants, and creating objects from them, thus had a spiritual as well as practical side.

One case contains nine baskets demonstrating the wide variety of styles and materials used by the hundreds of different clans or peoples ranged right across Australia’s diverse environment.

Aboriginal dilly-bag (1925) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Dealing with death

Purukapali is a major ancestral being for the Tiwi people of Bathurst and Melville Islands. In accordance with ancestral law laid down by Purukapali, Islanders mark death with public funeral ceremonies called Pukamani, in which men and women sing and dance, and erect posts on the graves of the deceased.

Baskets called tunga are woven to hold the dead person’s possessions and payment for those taking part in the ceremony. Men and women adorn themselves with elaborate body decoration and wear specially designed armlets and other ornaments. The men dance holding carved and painted hardwood spears. The distinctive baskets are placed upside down on the grave poles.

This case displays some tunga baskets, a selection of ceremonial armlets for men and women, and some impressive multi-barbed spears.

Aboriginal barbed spears from the Tiwi Islands

Painting ancestral stories

Indigenous Australians often depict the great travelling paths of ancestral beings in their paintings. In the guise of humans, plants or animals, spiritual beings crossed the land, creating features such as hills and waterholes. Some of these ancestral journeys (or ‘Dreamings’) cover thousands of miles.

The places where the ancestors stopped or performed important deeds have great spiritual influence. Many of these sites and their associated stories are known only to men or only to women.  This picture, Kungkarangkalpa (Seven Sisters), depicts an important woman’s place near salt lakes in the Great Victoria Desert of Western Australia.

Kungkarangkalpa (Seven Sisters) painted by Anne Ngantiri Hogan, Tjaruwa Angelina Woods, Yarangka Elaine Thomas, Estelle Hogan, Ngalpingka Simms, Myrtle Pennington of the Tjuntjuntjara Community of Western Australia (2013) © The Trustees of the British Museum

The artists, all senior women of the Spinifex people, depict a story about ancestral beings that took place there. Seven sisters who are singing and dancing across the land are being pursued by a lustful man, Wati Nyiru. The women escape his unwanted attentions by launching themselves from a hill into the sky, where they become the Seven Sisters constellation. Here’s a schematic version of the painting explaining its various aspects.

Schematic explanation of Kungkarangkalpa © The Trustees of the British Museum

The Spinifex people

A number of objects on display in the museum were made by the Spinifex people. Many of the Spinifex people were moved off their land when the British carried out atom bomb tests in the 1950s and 1960s. After a long struggle their claim for native title to the land was recognised by the Australian courts in 2000.

Typical of their art is this painting made by senior men of the Spinifex people: Roy Underwood, Lennard Walker, Simon Hogan and Ian Rictor. It depicts an important songline (or ‘Dreaming’) relating to a place called Pukara and the travels of two ancestral men (Wati Kutjara) who travelled across the land, creating its features and customary law.

Pukara, collaborative painting by artists of Spinifex people (2013) from Tjuntjuntjara, Spinifex region of Western Australia © The Trustees of the British Museum

The museum provides another schematic explaining key elements in the painting.

Schematic view of Pukara © The Trustees of the British Museum

Interestingly, artists from the Spinifex people, in the last 30 years, have taken to painting their stories and country in a for suitable for sale to outsiders i.e. they have engaged with the white art market, not only at home but abroad. The result is that you can now buy Spinifex art at galleries around the world. This particular painting was created by the community-based Spinifex Arts Project and bought by the British Museum in 2013.

Artistic innovation

Inspired by ancestral land and traditions, Indigenous Australians are bringing artistic innovation to ancestral traditions.

Sculptural objects made from plant fibres have long been part of Indigenous Australian culture. Historically, woven fibre baskets and sculptural forms were made for practical or ceremonial use but since the 1970s an increasing number of fibre works have been produced for the fine art market. In Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, women create woven sculptures of ancestral beings and animals.

In Pukatja (formerly Ernabella) in South Australia, Aboriginal artists use a wide range of materials and techniques. These include batik, a method of producing coloured designs on cloth, by brushing or stamping hot wax on the parts not to be dyed. The textile designs are inspired by ancestral landscapes, local plants and animals. The display case shows three sculptures of camp dogs and three batik textiles.

Batik on silk textile by Nyuwara Tapaya (2000) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Women at Ernabella Arts in Pukatja, South Australia, began producing batik work after visiting Indonesia and seeing the technique being used there. The artists are inspired by the colours and forms of the ancestral landscape of the desert region where they live. Unlike some of the other paintings we’ve looked at, they don’t attach specific meanings to their designs i.e. they are purely decorative.

Torres Strait Islanders

The Torres Strait is the body of water which separates northern Australia from Papua New Guinea to the north. It is littered with a large number of medium-sized and small islands. Each of these was populated by Indigenous peoples, known collectively as the Torres Straits Islanders.

A map of the Torres Strait Islands showing the large number of tiny islands, by Kelisi (source: Wikipedia)

Although many islanders now live on the mainland they retain strong connections with their island homes. The sea, the sky and the land remain central to their identity and spirituality.

Before Christianity was introduced to the Torres Straits in 1871 the islanders held elaborate funerals involving masks and ceremonial dances. Often wearing turtle-shell masks, feathered head-dresses called dhari and pearl-shell chest pendants. Contemporary masks and head-dresses often incorporate new materials and forms but they are still inspired by ancestral beings and stories.

Thus the case displays a couple of traditional masks, a warup drum, dhari head-dress, stone-headed club and pearl-shell pendants. The Torres Strait drum known as the warup drum is shaped like an hourglass.  This one is carved from solid dark wood. The larger end represents a fish’s head with open jaws. On the top is carved a lizard and along each side run two projecting bands ornamented with cassowary feathers and seeds. Feathers and goa nuts are attached to each side and incised decoration is infilled with white.

But it’s not just about old and traditional artefacts. The British Museum has bought, and displays, plenty of works by contemporary Indigenous Australian artists. This head-dress was made by contemporary artist Alick Tipoti.

Kaygasiw Usul by Alick Tipoti (2014) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Tipoti is from Badu Island in the Torres Strait. The name of this mask, Kaygasiw Usul, means ‘shovel-nose dust trail reflected in the heavens as the milky way’. It’s made from fibre-glass stained with polyester resin to create the transparent effect of turtle shell, along with plastic, nylon and superglue fastening more traditional materials.

The mask represents an ancestral shark, the Kaygasiw Usul, whose tail fin stirs up an underwater sand trail that forms the Milky Way. The small mask on top represent ancient dancers and the mask inside the mouth symbolises the main dancer.

Note

As may be obvious, I have lifted most of the text of this post directly from the British Museum wall labels and captions.

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by Simon on May 8, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Australia
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Posted by Simon on May 8, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/05/08/relating-to-ancestors-british-museum/

French Impressions: Prints from Manet to Cézanne @ the British Museum

The British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings

The Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum contains 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 home to around 50,000 drawings and over two million prints dating from the beginning of the fifteenth century up to the present day.

French Impressions

This is a lovely FREE selection of prints from the age of the French Impressionists, a wide ranging selection of nearly 80 key works by artists including Manet, Degas, Cézanne, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec. It’s a golden opportunity to view rarely seen artworks by some of France’s most famous artists.

Divan Japonais by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1893) showing the dancer Jane Avril seated next to the critic Édouard Dujardin watching the singer Yvette Guilbert perform on stage, wearing her trademark long black gloves © The Trustees of the British Museum

But the exhibition is more than just a selection of images: it presents a fascinating and authoritative history of print making and distribution in 19th century France.

Print production

The exhibition explains how prints – and in particular etchings – became markedly more popular in the 1860s among France’s growing middle classes, people with money but without the means to afford large oil paintings. At the same time artists became more interested in the expressive possibilities of print-making, a quicker, a more affordable, and a reproducible medium.

Prints reached a wider audience than ever before through the proliferation of illustrated journals and specialist magazines, as well as in portfolios commissioned and financed by enterprising print publishers such as Ambroise Vollard.

Manet

After some explanation about the difference between lithography, etching, woodcut and engraving, the exhibition settles into a tour of characteristic prints by the forty or so artists featured, starting with Manet. He is represented not only by several prints but also by a copy of the enormous illustrated volume devoted to the poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s translation of Edgar Allen Poe’s talismanic poem, The Raven, which was produced in a limited edition illustrated with Manet’s striking black and white images, and signed by the artists.

Berthe Morisot

Next to Manet are works by two woman artists, Berthe Morisot (who Manet knew and often painted – there are two portraits of her by him) and Mary Cassatt. Cassatt was American and moved to Paris in 1874. In 1891 she went to see an exhibition of Japanese prints at the Musêe des Beaux-Arts which had a profound effect on her. She immediately started making a set of ten colour aquatints which combine thin but distinct lines and delicate washes of pale colour and flattened areas of decoration.

The coiffure – fourth and final state by Mary Cassatt (1891) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Japonisme

Which brings us to the influence of Japanese prints on French. As Japan opened up to the West as part of the Meiji Restoration, brightly coloured woodcut prints began appearing on the western market from the end of the 1850s. In 1872 the critic Philipe Burty coined the term ‘Japonisme’, meaning

understanding Japanese art, culture and life solely through contact with the art of Japan

The Japonisme section of the exhibition features a print of a crayfish, fishes and prawns by Utagawa Hiroshige from 1832, next to an earthenware platter decorated with a lobster by Félix Bracquemonde who made a series of 25 prints for the crockery service all based on Japanese designs.

Henri Rivière

Nearby is one of the treats of the show. Artist and designer Henri Rivière was best known for his shadow theatre performances at Le Chat Noir nightclub (as recently covered in the Barbican’s big exhibition about arty nightclubs).

Hokusai

He’s here because in the 1880s he conceived the idea of taking Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji as the starting point for his own series of views of the Eiffel Tower, as it was being constructed. Here’s the Hokusai print the curators have selected:

Tea house at Koishikawa. The morning after a snowfall by Katsushika Hokusai (circa 1830)

And here’s the Rivière: spot the influence! The Eiffel Tower prints chart the slow construction of the tower in thirty-six scenes, in all weathers including, as here, in heavy snow.

The Eiffel Tower under Construction, seen from the Trocadéro (1902) by Henri Rivière

You can see all thirty-six prints on this website:

Toulouse-Lautrec

If they’d been popular earlier in the century, prints underwent an explosion of popularity in the 1890s. Advances in colour printing paved the way for the brilliant designs of Henri Tolouse-Lautrec among many others. Lautrec made a living by producing illustrations for the proliferation of publications in the 1890s which sought to capture the glamour and glitz of the capital, as well as for the explosion of nightclubs which Paris witnessed.

La Revue Blanche

One of the most influential magazines of the period was La Revue Blanche founded and edited by Alfred Natanson, remembered mostly for its connection with literature, but it also included prints and illustrations, including the ones on display here by József Rippl-Rónai, Paul Ranson, Felix Vallotton and Maurice Denis.

Pierre Bonnard

There’s a selection of prints from Pierre Bonnard’s first series of twelve prints commissioned by Vollard in 1899 and some really evocative colour prints by Édouard Vuillard. They’re simple Paris street scenes but half abstracted into pleasing designs and patterns. It’s not Impressionism and not Abstraction, but a pleasingly decorative half way house between the two.

La Pâtisserie by Édouard Vuillard (1899) © The Trustees of the British Museum

There’s a whole wall of French artistic heavy hitters: in quick succession you can see prints by Degas, van Gogh, Pissarro, Puvis de Chavannes, Renoir and Cézanne.

Cézanne

The Cézanne is interesting: it is of Les Baigneurs (the Bathers), one of only eight prints ever made by the artist and a  variation on one of his most popular themes (see my review of Tate Modern’s Cezanne exhibition). In fact, the wall label tells us that Cézanne made at least 200 images of bathers, an obsessive reworking of a specific theme which is very characteristic.

Les Baigneurs (grande planche) by Paul Cézanne (c.1898) © The Trustees of the British Museum

I feel ambivalent Paul Cézanne. I loved him as a boy but the recent National Portrait Gallery exhibition of his portraits put me off him, and I’m not sure I really like this image, no matter how famous it is. Maybe it’s because it feels like an image designed for another medium (oil paint) which the impresario Vollard had to persuade Cézanne to make, unlike the Vuillard print which feels like an image which has been conceived and produced with the medium of print in mind.

Richard Ranft

In a different way, the image below is obviously designed to take advantage of the defined lines and vivid colours enabled by 1890s print technology. What’s not to like about this scene from the circus by the less well-known artist Richard Ranft?

L’Ecuyere by Richard Ranft (1898) © The Trustees of the British Museum

A Swiss artist and former student of Gustave Courbet, Ranft produced many images depicting the daily lives and diversions of fin-de-siecle Parisian society. He was also a painter and illustrator, contributing popular images to many of the new journals and magazines. The acrobatic circus horseback rider was a popular subject, and Ranft’s version of it appeared in L’Estampe Moderne, a series of print portfolios, in 1898.

Gauguin

There’s a brilliant double portrait by Gauguin – in the contrary experience to Cézanne, the recent big Gauguin exhibition at the National Gallery made me love him more and want to explore much more of his work.

Whistler

But I’ll end on a figure who is a little apart from all the other artists on display insofar that he was not only not French, he wasn’t even European. It’s easy to walk by the three black and white prints by the American James McNeill Whistler on your way to the more brightly colours Toulouse-Lautrec or Ranft posters, but these relatively small prints from Whistlers series of pictures of late Victorian Venice, are wonderful.

Whistler was, according to the curator, ‘the supreme master of etching and a key figure in nineteenth-century printmaking. Declared bankrupt in 1879, Whistler accepted the offer from the Fine Art Society to produce twelve prints of Venice over a three month period. A year later Whistler returned and made a further 50 etchings, hence the existence of a Venice Set from 1880 and The Second Venice Set of 1886.

This is from the second set and the delicate streaking of the ink in the upper and lower parts convey the shimmering reflection of the buildings by a typically Venetian canal, making it seem as if the sky is as liquid and luminous as the water.

Nocturne: Palaces 1880 by James McNeill Whistler (1886)

Reflecting on the Whistler’s subtlety and sophistication leads you to compare it with the highly stylised works of Toulouse-Lautrec, the fine art works of people like Gauguin or Cézanne, with the deliberately bright and popular art of Richard Ranft , with the dreamy and mysterious works of Nabis like Félix Vallotton, or the intimate scenes of half-naked women bathing and drying themselves by Cassatt or Degas. Wow. What a brilliant, exciting and enjoyable array of the best prints of some of the greatest artists who’ve ever lived, as well as a fascinating selection of works by less well-known figures which are equally and sometimes more beautiful.

Had you heard of Paul Helleu or Jacques Villon or Armand Séguin or Suzanne Valadon or Charles Maurin or Ker-Xavier Roussel or Angelo Jank before? Me neither, but all of them are good, and some of them are surprisingly vivid and modern.

Angelo Jank

This print is a startling image by Angelo Jank (1868-1940), a German animal painter, illustrator and member of the Munich Secession. He specialized in scenes with horses and riders.

It’s an illustration for Léo Desmarais’ work Les Miroirs, which is so obscure I can’t find anything about it on the internet. It’s a plate from the magazine L’Estampe Moderne which appeared from 1897 to 1899 as a series of 24 monthly instalments, each containing four original lithographs, like this striking one of a woman with a brilliant green parrot.

What is going on? Who is the blonde woman? Why is she holding an apple? And why is a brilliantly green parrot looming down at her?

La Femme au Perroquet by Angelo Jank (1898) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Strangely unlike anything else in the show and deceptively modern, it might be from the 1960s. The exhibition is like this, full of unexpected treats and treasures. And it’s FREE!

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by Simon on February 21, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on February 21, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/02/21/french-impressions-prints-manet-cezanne-british-museum/

Piranesi drawings: visions of antiquity @ the British Museum

To mark the 300th anniversary of the Italian printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the British Museum has created a landmark FREE exhibition displaying the Museum’s complete collection of Piranesi’s drawings.

Piranesi (1720 to 1778) is often reckoned to be the greatest printmaker of the 18th century. He was extremely prolific, producing hundreds of views or veduti, of Rome in particular, focusing on its ancient ruins, sometimes portrayed as monstrously huge and elaborately decayed, in other series shown as if restored to their former glories.

Into these elaborately staged and dramatic scenes he introduced groups of vases, altars, tombs and other baroque details that were never actually present in ancient Rome, in order to produce finely detailed, elaborate and often fantastical views. (Note the very small chariot and people at the bottom centre of this amazingly cluttered composition.)

Fantastical view of the Via Appia. Engraving by Giovanni Battista Piranesi

The Enlightenment taste for ruins

It is fascinating to learn that the taste for ‘views’ of Roman ruins was growing in order to cater for the growing numbers of rich northern Europeans making the Grand Tour of classical sites. To cater for this growing market, Italian artists developed and named a new set of artistic genres, including:

  • veduta – a highly detailed print of a cityscape
  • capriccio – a whimsical aggregate of monumental architecture and ruin which never existed in real life
  • veduta ideata – idealised and larger-than-life depictions of the ancient ruins in their supposed glory
  • veduta di fantasia – architectural fantasies

As this list suggests, the taste of the times was for the fantastical, the awe-inspiring in age and size, curly-cued with fantastical details and elaborations. In fact so exaggerated were the size of many of Piranesi’s images of Roman ruins that when Northern tourists actually arrived, they were sometimes disappointed to discover the actual remains were far more modest in scale.

Goethe is mentioned as one of many Northerners who formed their ideas about Rome from Piranesi’s fabulously successful books of prints and, on finally arriving at the Eternal City, being disappointed.

Interior view of the Flavian Amphitheater, called the Colosseum (1766) by Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Antiques dealer

Although he was born and educated in Venice, Piranesi came to Rome as a young man and made his career there. Not only a frustrated architect and very successful print-maker, Piranesi was also an antiquarian and antiques dealer. He not only dealt in the large number of Roman antiques to be found in and around the city (especially Hadrian’s Villa outside the city which was being uncovered during his lifetime) but he a) incorporated these vases and sarcophagi and reliefs and other detail into his prints and b) he restored many of the antiques to his idea of how they ought to look, often adding his own elaborations.

Thus there are a couple of pieces of sculpture in the exhibition (like the enormous marble horned lion emerging from a lotus) but the commentary also recommends you drop into the Enlightenment galleries back on the Ground Floor of the Museum to check out the two Piranesi vases there.

I’m glad I did, because they are vast, twice the height of a man and so monstrously heavy that, apparently, they simply could not be moved up to the Print Rooms and, if they’d tried, would have broken the floor.

The Piranesi Vase at the British Museum. The vase was discovered at the Villa Hadrian, then restored in Piranesi’s workshop, where other monumental elements were added. It is enormous.

Elements of Piranesi’s style

From below

Architecture is most impressive if seen from below, looking up, especially if features like arches loom over the viewer’s head, as they do in most of the Imagined Prisons pictures.

From the side

Classical art and classical architecture liked to view classical buildings head on, emphasising the clarity and balance of their design, and Piranesi did just that in some of the earliest architectural drawings in this exhibition. But as he matured, Piranesi preferred to look at buildings from the side, creating a more dynamic affect. Here’s a fairly mild example, View of the Campidoglio from the Side.

View of the Campidoglio from the Side. Etching by Piranesi (1761)

You can see how the subject matter is overwhelmingly architectural. Piranesi trained as an architect and throughout his life produced huge numbers of architectural plans, some sensible, some wildly extravagant, yet only once was he actually commissioned to practice some architecture (between 1764 to 66 he carried out restoration work on the Santa Maria del Priorato Church in Rome). There are people in this print, but they’re in a rather disorganised heap at the bottom left and their main contribution is to being out the scale and monumentality of the architecture and the architectural composition.

Light in the distance

Another trick Piranesi used regularly was to make the foreground of an image dark and clotted with the middle distance light and airy. This gives the visual impression of size and scale, as if the building is rising up into a more sunlit region. It’s a trick he used in what are probably his most famous series, the Carceri d’invenzione or Imaginary Prisons, a series of 16 prints that show enormous subterranean vaults with stairs and awesome machines. (And look at the size of the tiny human figures shuffling along floor or gesticulating on various walls and platforms; it looks like an illustration for an H.G. Wells story about the distant future.)

Carceri Plate VI, The Smoking Fire by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1745)

The Imaginary Prisons series went on to inspire the Romantics and, a lot later, the Surrealists, with their sense of mysterious but looming forces.

People are small

So obvious it barely needs mentioning, but just review how minuscule the human figures are in the Appian Way or the Colosseum or the Imaginary Prisons: this is a monumental architecture of the imagination which is intended to dwarf and overawe mere mortals, including the viewer.

Defender of Roman art

It was fascinating to learn that during the 18th century a controversy developed among critics and writers and artists about the relative merits of ancient Roman and Greek art. More was being learned about ancient Greek architecture and ideas, and its defenders claimed it had greater purity and simplicity, and accused the later Romans of copying everything that was good about Greek architecture and then blowing it up to elephantine proportions and encrusting it with unnecessary details.

By his stage Piranesi had established his reputation as one of the great illustrators of Roman buildings and art, not least via the successful four-volume series Roman Antiquities. he had been elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquarians in London, and a member of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, so it was not, maybe surprising, that he found himself drawn into controversy with the French Hellenophile Pierre-Jean Mariette.

Piranesi defended the more advanced technology used by the Romans to build larger buildings; the awe-inspiring magnificence of their buildings; but also the Romans’ willingness to absorb motifs from other cultures: not just ancient Greek, but Etruscan and even Egyptian, creating a rich and original synthesis.

In other words, it’s fascinating to learn that his works aren’t just whims and fancies, but the putting-into-practice of a thoroughly worked-out theory of art and art history resulting in the conviction that borrowings from exotic sources and bizarre combinations are the paths to originality and creativity.

Piranesi’s drawings

All the foregoing is by way of introducing Piranesi, his main achievements, his interest in architecture and the fantastical, and his patriotic defence of Rome and its artistic legacy.

But this is not an exhibition of Piranesi’s famous prints. It is a comprehensive display of the British Museum’s entire collection of Piranesi drawings.

Throughout his career Piranesi made detailed architectural drawings, first as an apprentice draughtsman and then for all sorts of reasons: as preparations for the prints, as working sketches of antique pieces to either market them or as studies for larger compositions. Some drawings are huge and portrays vast, fantastical, imaginary scenes which he later converted into prints, while others are relatively small detailed studies of particular aspects, like the drawing here of a sword, or a vase.

The 51 drawings are placed in simple chronological order so the visitor can track Piranesi’s artistic evolution from sensible architectural draughtsman to impresario of the fantastical. Here he is in his early 20s, being sensible and factual.

A colonnaded atrium with domes by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1740 to 1743) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Ten years later, here is the source drawing for the hyper-fantastical vision of an Appian Way that I opened this review with, a helter-skelter surfeit of impossible buildings and exotic details.

The meeting of the Via Appia and the Via Ardeatina, seen at the second milestone outside the Porta Capena by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1750 to 1756) © The Trustees of the British Museum

If we compare this drawing with the print the differences are immediately apparent. The composition is the same but drawn with surprising freedom and vim, with multiple lines sketching out perspectives and shapes, and with a very loose colour wash creating light and shade.

This lightness of touch and freedom characterises all the drawings which have an expressive charm of their own. I particularly liked the early design for a temple he had drawn, along with careful notes on scale and aspect and then, right at the end, he thought ‘Blow it’ and added a pyramid to the composition.

‘If in doubt, add a pyramid,’ is not a bad rule for life.

When he came to Rome he adopted a yellow paper and washes (as opposed to the more factual white tonalities of his earliest Venetian work) and this palette is compounded in the many later drawings where he used red ink or crayon to really ram home the vibrancy of the composition.

A monumental staircase in a vaulted interior with columns by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1750 to 1755) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Although the exhibition features nine prints (including the ones of the Colosseum and the Side View of the Campidoglio and several of the Imaginary Prisons) to give context and show what some of the drawings were preparatory drawings for, many of the 51 drawings weren’t preparations for prints at all, but were finished works in their own right, or studies of details.

There’s are some of the scores of drawings he did of human figures (Standing man in profile), the detailed studies of a Roman sword I mentioned above, studies of ancient vases and what are called candelabra, multi-storeyed stone confections – and countless experiments in architectural fantasy, taken from a wide range of perspectives and points of view – as well as a selection of drawings he did when he visited the newly excavated ruins of Pompeii.

View of the Strada Consulare with the Herculaneum Gate in Pompeii by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (c. 1772 to 1778) © The Trustees of the British Museum

By the time of his death Piranesi was one of the most influential interpreters of ancient Rome. His prints and treatises were popular across Europe and his grand, and grandiose, visions of the Eternal City would define the idea of Rome for generations of travellers and armchair tourists.

This exhibition is a fascinating glimpse into the engine room of his creativity, a look behind-the-scenes of the brightly finished and smooth prints at the much more creative, extempore, roughly finished and, in many ways, more exciting drawings.

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by Simon on February 19, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, Art, European History, Exhibition, Fantasy, Prints
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Posted by Simon on February 19, 2020

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Pushing paper contemporary drawing from 1970 to now @ the British Museum

‘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:

  1. highlight the range and diversity of contemporary drawings
  2. 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?

Untitled (1984) by Grayson Perry © The Trustees of the British Museum

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?)

Ruchla by Jan Vanriet (2011) © The Trustees of the British Museum

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.

Untitled by Philip Guston (1971) © The Trustees of the British Museum

(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’.

Untitled (1962) by Gwen Hardie © The Trustees of the British Museum

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.’

Sovereign 3 by Hew Locke (2005) © The Trustees of the British Museum

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.

Some Interference 14.01.06 (2006) by Richard Deacon © The Trustees of the British Museum

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.

Mountain by Minjung Kim (2009) © The Trustees of the British Museum

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

Other British Museum exhibitions

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Posted by Simon on September 13, 2019

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Collecting histories: Solomon Islands @ the British Museum

The Asahi Shimbun displays

As you walk up the stairs and into the main entrance of the British Museum it’s easy to miss the room immediately on your right, hidden behind the tide of visitors pouring in and out.

Officially room number three, since 2005 this smallish room has been devoted to displays sponsored by the Japanese newspaper, Asahi Shimbun.

The idea is to showcase single or small groups of objects from the Museum’s vast collections, focusing right in on a particular object or set of objects or region or era. It’s a kind of lucky dip into the Museum’s bottomless store of treasures and wonders. Since 2005 the room has hosted more than 40 displays. My favourite was the mummified crocodile from ancient Egypt, which was displayed along with a fascinating explanation of the place of crocodiles in Egyptian mythology.

The Solomon Islands

The current Asahi Shimbun Display focuses on the Solomon Islands. There’s a map showing you their location in the Pacific, and wall labels describing their history before Europeans arrived, the story of their conquest and colonial administration, and then events since independence from Britain in 1978.

We learn that the Solomon Islands is an independent country of six large and many small islands, home to about 80 ethnic groups whose distinctive cultures are represented in many colonial collections around the world.

I was surprised to learn that, although the islands became steadily more enmeshed in patterns of global trade during the 19th century, it was only in 1890 that they became a British Protectorate. After 90-odd years of British governance, Christian missions and colonial plantations, the Solomon Islands became independent in 1978.

Many people these days have moved from the remote islands to the capital Honiara on Guadalcanal Island to take advantage of its jobs and facilities. Most Solomon Islanders are now Christians, children and grand-children of pagans successfully converted by European missionaries – but still very close to their tribal histories and traditions.

It’s because of this British imperial connection that the British Museum has such an important collection of native objects and historic photos from the Solomon Islands.

Objects from the Solomon Islands

The maps of the islands are good, the old photos are sort of interesting, but it is the half dozen or so native objects which fire the imagination. These include:

A bird net float

The Lau people, living on islands in the coastal lagoons, used consecrate bird floats on special nets to catch fish for festivals celebrating the ancestors. After use these powerful and dangerous objects were hung up in the priest’s house. Priest Kailafa of Ferasubua Island gave this bird float to Anglican missionary Arthur Hopkins in 1903, who later sold it to a collector, who then bequeathed it the museum.

Bird net float from the Solomon Islands, late 19th century

A large carved ‘figure of an ancestor’

This image of an ancestor belonged to a shrine at Munda in the New Georgia group of western Solomon Islands. People prayed to these ancestors for spiritual support and protection, so their memorials were sacred and precious. This figure was among artefacts taken from homes and shrines by the crew of HMS Royalist in 1891. The captain later sold it to the British Museum.

Figure of an ancestor, 1890s

Carved wooden canoe figurehead

During the colonial period the islands continued to export its a fairly narrow range of raw materials including plantation crops, timber and fish. But it was interesting to learn that before, during and after the British Protectorate, the islanders also made a healthy living selling visitors their hand-carved and decorated artefacts.

Trade boomed after the Second World War which saw the rise and rise of speciality tourism and then mass tourism. The islanders responded by producing increasing numbers of masks and sculptures carved in the traditional way and inlaid with pearl shell, to create striking designs such as this canoe figure-head. This example, made by the craftsman named Bala of Butana, was bought by a British Museum curator in an art shop in 2004.

Canoe figure-head (nguzunguzu) of wood with pearl shell inlay, 2004

This, in a way, was the most interesting learning. We all know that a lot of the artefacts in the British Museum were looted, stolen or swindled off the original owners. It’s a surprise, and goes against that whole narrative of colonial guilt and imperial injustice which is now received opinion, to learn that some of them were just…bought at gift shops 🙂

Summary

The display is not really worth a trip in and of itself. But if you’re passing nearby, or certainly if you’re visiting one of the museum’s big exhibitions, it’s always worth taking a moment to pop into Room 3 to find out what random objects and subjects the Asahi Shimbun display has pulled out of the British Museum’s bottomless trove of treasures.

Related links

Other British Museum reviews

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by Simon on July 29, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 29, 2019

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Manga @ the British Museum

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manga: a quick overview

To quote Wikipedia:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Modern origins

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

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

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

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

Visual techniques of manga

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

Reading direction

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

Fukidashi

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

Gitaigo / giseigo

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

Screen tone (tōn)

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

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

The profession of manga

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

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

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

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

The manga industry

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

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

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

Visitor demographics

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

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

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

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

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

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

Busy and immersive

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

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

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

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

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

Historical precursors

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

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

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

Style and gender

During the 1950s two styles of manga emerged:

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

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

Genres

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

Sport

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

Sci fi

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

Horror

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

Religion

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

Love and sex

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

Transformation

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

Education

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

Current affairs

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

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

Willow Tree by Hagio Moto (2007)

Comiket

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

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

Cosplay

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

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

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

Studio Ghibli

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

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

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

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

The frame

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A random Japanese young woman

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

Figure in manga style by Jez (2016)

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

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

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

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

The Guardian review

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

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

1. Manga versus the Old Masters

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

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

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

2. Manga and pornography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Curator

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

Related links

  • Manga continues at the British Museum until 26 August 2019

Other British Museum reviews

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by Simon on July 23, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 23, 2019

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

Edvard Munch: love and angst @ the British Museum

The fin-de-siecle

The last decade of the 19th century is famous for its fin-de-siecle, decadent, dark imagery. In Imperial Britain this was epitomised by the decadent sexuality associated with the notorious trial of Oscar Wilde and the Yellow Book magazine and the pornographic prints of Aubrey Beardsley. In France there was a reaction against Impressionism which took many forms including the urban posters of Toulouse-Lautrec and the swarthy nudes of Paul Gauguin down in the South Seas. All were well-known and public artists, working in cosmopolitan cities which were the capitals of far-flung empires – London, Paris. They were famous and playing on large stages.

In the other countries of northern Europe, however, one of the most powerful artistic currents was Symbolism.

As the exhibition notes:

Symbolism was a literary and artistic movement that rejected representations of the external world for those of imagination and myth. Symbolists looked inwards in order to represent emotions and ideas.

In Belgium, north Germany and the Scandinavian countries, artists developed a wide range of techniques and styles, but tended to fixate on a handful of themes, namely sex and death. Death awaits with his scythe. Empty boats arrive at forbidding islands. Youths waste away from frustrated love. Beautiful young women turn out to be vampires.

Sex and death and anguish and despair, these are all much more personal, introverted, emotions. Wilde was a flamboyant public personality, Beardsley’s art was defiantly clear and elegant, both were immensely sophisticated and urban and cosmopolitan, confident doyens of the largest, richest city in the world.

Whereas much of the fin-de-siecle art from Belgium, Germany, Scandinavia was much darker, more personal. Of course they produced urban and sophisticated art as well – the 1890s is characterised by an explosion of diverse art movements – but there was also a big strand of empty lakes and immense dark pine forests and brooding skies and agonised artist-heroes.

Edvard Munch

Munch is slap bang in the middle of this social and cultural movement. His most famous work is The Scream, which was first made as a painting in 1893 and then turned into a lithograph in 1895 which was reproduced in French and British and American magazines and made his reputation.

The Scream is probably among the top ten most famous images produced by any artist anywhere, and has been parodied and lampooned and reproduced in every medium imaginable (pillow slips and duvet covers, posters, bags, t-shirts). It featured in an episode of The Simpsons, clinching its status as one of the world’s best known art icons. It’s up there with the Mona Lisa.

The Scream (1895) by Edvard Munch. Private Collection, Norway. Photo by Thomas Widerberg

Why? Why is it so powerful? Well:

  1. It is highly stylised and simplified – it barely looks like a human being at all, more like some kind of ghost or spirit of the woods.
  2. The rest of the landscape is drawn with harsh single lines, whose waviness seems to echo the long O of the protagonist’s mouth.
  3. Thus ‘primitiveness’ of the technique of wood carving – with its thick, heavy ‘crude’ lines – somehow echoes the primalness of the emotional state being described.

The exhibition

This exhibition brings together nearly 50 prints from Norway’s Munch Museum, making this the largest exhibition of Munch’s prints seen in the UK for 45 years.

It also includes sketches, photos and a few oil paintings, not least a big haunting portrait – The Sick Child – of his favourite sister, Johanne Sophie, who died of tuberculosis when she was just 13. These are set alongside works by French and German contemporaries, to present a powerful overview of Munch’s troubled personality, the artistic milieu he moved in, and his extraordinary ability to turn it into powerful images conveying intense, primal, human emotions.

Vampire II (1896) by Edvard Munch. The Savings Bank Foundation DNB, on loan to Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo

Claustrophobic

The exhibition is up in the top gallery in the Rotunda, a relatively small space, which was divided into smallish sections or rooms, the prints hung quite close together on the walls, and the place was packed, rammed, with silver-haired old ladies and gentleman. It was hard to move around. More than once I went to move on from studying a print and found I couldn’t move, with people studying the next-door prints blocking me to left and right and a shuffle of pedestrians blocking any backward movement. Imagine the Tube at rush hour. It was like that.

Possibly, in fact, a good atmosphere to savour Munch’s work. Trapped, claustrophobic, slightly hysterical. it forced me to look up at the quotes from his letters or diaries which have been liberally printed up on the exhibition walls. Just reading these immediately gives you a sense of where Munch was coming from, his personality and the motivation for his art.

For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art. (1908)

I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted – and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there, trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. (22 January 1892)

The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born.

All art, like music, must be created with one’s lifeblood – Art is one’s lifeblood. (1890)

I would not cast off my illness, because there’s much in my art that I owe it.

We do not want pretty pictures to be hung on drawing-room walls. We want… an art that arrests and engages. An art of one’s innermost heart.

Sexual anxiety

There’s plenty more where this came from. The exhibition gives a lot of biographical detail about his early life, describing the Norwegian capital of Kristiana, how it was connected to the rest of Europe by sea routes, how it was a small provincial town whose every aspect was dominated by the stiflingly respectable Lutheran church, but how young Edvard was attracted to its small bohemian, artistic set of poets and writers and artists, how he conceived a massive sequence of works about love and sex and death which he titled The Frieze of Life –

The Frieze is intended as a poem about life, about love and about death. (1918)

How he travelled to Paris and to Berlin and scandalised respectable opinion with the exhibitions he held there, but created a stir and won admirers for the stark, elemental quality of his woodcuts and prints. (The exhibition includes a map of Europe showing Munch’s extensive travels during the 1890s and 1900s, along with a selection of Munch’s personal postcards and maps.)

We are told Munch was born and brought up in a fiercely religious and conservative bourgeois family which was horrified when he fell in with Kristiania’s bohemian layabouts. These bohos practiced sexual promiscuousness, had numerous affairs, and so were plagued by jealousy and infidelity and fights – all exacerbated by the way they drank too much, far too much.

It seemed obvious to me that Munch’s anxiety was caused by the crashing conflict between his extremely repressed bourgeois upbringing and the chaotic and promiscuous circles he moved in as a young man. On the one hand was a young man’s desire and lust, on the other were all the authority figures in his culture (and inside his head) saying even looking at a woman with lust in his heart would lead to instant damnation.

The scores of images he made of women as vampires and weird gothic presences and looming succubi emerging from the shadows, represent a repeated attempt to confront the epicentre of that clash – sex, embodied – for a heterosexual young man – by sexualised young women. They attracted him like a drug, like heroin – but all these compulsive thoughts about them triggered the terror of physical disease – the appalling ravages of syphilis for which there was no cure – along with the certainty of eternal damnation – and all these led to anxious, almost hysterical thoughts, about the only way out, the only way to resolve the endless nightmare of anxiety – and that was release and escape into death, the death which he had seen at such close quarters in the deaths of his beloved mother and sister from tuberculosis.

The obsessiveness of his sexual thoughts, and their violent clash with orthodox Christianity, is most evident in the hugely controversial Madonna, an obviously erotic image to which he blasphemously misapplies the title of the chaste Mother of God. And, when you look closely, you realise that those are sperm swimming round the outside of the frame, and a miserable looking foetus squatting at the bottom left. Sex versus Religion! It’s amazing he wasn’t arrested for blasphemy and public indecency. In fact his 1892 exhibition in Berlin so scandalised respectable opinion that it was shut down after just a week.

Madonna (1895/1902) by Edvard Munch. Munchmuseet

So Munch’s vampire women aren’t real women, of course they’re not. They are depictions of male anxiety about women, namely the irreconcilable conflict between the demanding, drug-addiction-level lust many young, testosterone-fueled men experience, whether they want to or not – and the multiplicity of feelings of shame about having such strong pornographic feelings and experiences, and regret at handling relationships with women badly, and anxiety that you are a failure, as a man and as a decent human being, and terror that – if there is a God – you are going straight to hell for all eternity.

Plus, as the wall labels indicate, there really was a lot of heavy drinking in his circle and by him personally, which led to chaotic lifestyles among the bohemian set, and Munch became a clinical alcoholic. And this addiction – to alcohol – will, of course, have exacerbated all the psychological problems described above.

Exposure to so many of Munch’s prints – alongside detailed explanations of how he made them, the Norwegian and north European tradition they stem from, and so on – really rubs in the fact that he was a great master of the form. It’s not just The Scream. Lots of the other prints have the same archetypal, primitive power, and the exhibition brings it out by setting Munch’s work beside prime examples by other leading printmakers of the time, in France and Germany (many of which are themselves worth paying the price of admission to see).

The subtle prints

It tends to be the extreme images we are attracted to – The Scream, The Madonna, the numerous vampire women, the worrying image of a pubescent girl sitting on a bed. But some decades ago we crossed a threshold into being able to accept all kinds of erotic and extreme images, so these no longer scandalise and thrill us in the same way they did their initial viewers, although they still provide powerful visual experiences.

But having had a first go around the exhibition taking in these greatest hits, I slowly came to realise there was another layer or area of his work, which is – in a word – more subtle. If the most obvious and impactful of his images are about stress and anxiety mounting to open hysteria – there were also plenty of images which were far more restrained. In which – to point out an obvious difference – the women are wearing clothes.

Instead of vampire women whose kisses are turning into bites, these tend to be of fully dressed, utterly ‘respectable’ late-nineteenth century types, set outdoors, in open air situations where… somehow, through the placing and composition of the figures, a more subtle sense of aloneness and isolation is conveyed. They capture the mood of a couple who are, for some reason, not communicating, each isolated in their brooding thoughts.

The Lonely Ones (1899) by Edvard Munch. Munchmuseet

Like the complex ways relationships between the sexes fail, become blocked and painful in the plays of Munch’s fellow Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen. (Munch, as a leading artist of the day, was acquainted with both Ibsen and the younger playwright, Strindberg. It crosses my mind that if Munch’s more hysterical images can be compared to the highly strung characters in a Strindberg play, the more subdued and unhappy images in some way parallel Ibsen’s couples.)

Having processed the extreme images of vampire women, sex and death in my first go round, on this second pass I warmed to these less blatant images.

I noticed that the naked women images are almost always indoors (as, I suppose, naked women mostly had to be, in his day). But that the more ‘respectable’ and subtle images were all set outside, and often by primal landscapes – namely The Lake and the Forest – the kind of primeval landscape we all associate with Scandinavia and which really was available right on Kristiana’s doorstep.

The exhibition ends with a set of prints which perform variations on his characteristically hunched, half-abstract human figures – characteristically, showing one man and one woman – but in this series hauntingly isolated, leaning on each other – or against each other – in something which doesn’t look at all sensual but more like the survival techniques of characters from a play by Samuel Becket.

Towards the Forest II (1897/1915) by Edvard Munch. Munchmuseet

Less striking than the vampires and naked women and girls, I thought these strange, half-abstract, ‘lost souls in the landscape’ images had a kind of purity and haunting quality all their own.

Breakdown and rebirth

It comes as no surprise to learn that in 1908 Munch had a nervous breakdown. His anxiety, compounded by excessive drinking and sometimes fighting, had become acute, and he was experiencing hallucinations and persecution mania. He entered a clinic and underwent a comprehensive detoxification which lasted nearly eight months.

When he left, he was a new man. Well, new-ish. His work became more colourful and less pessimistic and the wider public of Kristiania for the first time began to appreciate his work. Critics were supportive. His paintings sold. Museums started to buy his back catalogue. His life improved in all measurable ways. But in a textbook case of the artist who needs his anxieties and neuroses to produce great works, everything he carved and painted from then on – portraits of rich friends, of the farm he bought, murals for factories – lacked the intensity and archetypal power of his early years.

Years later all that storm and stress and hysteria seemed so distant as almost to be inexplicable.It is typical that, decades later, he told the story of how his famous painting, Vampire II, got its title. He himself had simply titled it Love and Pain. Pretty boring, eh? But Munch’s friend, the critic Stanisław Przybyszewski, and clearly a man with a flair for publicity, described it as ‘a man who has become submissive, and on his neck a biting vampire’s face.’ And, looking back, Munch comments:

It was the time of Ibsen, and if people were really bent on revelling in symbolist eeriness and calling the idyll ‘Vampire’ – why not?

A man in remission from alcoholism and mental illness, the older Munch can be forgiven for not wanting to revive unhappy memories, and for wanting to palm off the idea for lurid titles onto his friends. But the prints themselves, and all his early writings, don’t lie. The later work is interesting and decorative – but it is the unhappy period covered by this exhibition which produced the intense and troubled works which seem to take you right into the heart of the tortured human condition.

Older, wiser and sober. Munch among his paintings at the end of his life

The promotional video

Related links

Other British Museum reviews

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by Simon on July 22, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 22, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/22/edvard-munch-love-and-angst-british-museum/

Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece @ the British Museum

In my spare time I simply haunt the British Museum.
(Rodin, 1892)

Rodin and the British Museum

François Auguste René Rodin (1840 – 1917), known as Auguste Rodin, is widely seen as the godfather of modern sculpture. He visited London for the first time in 1841. On a trip to the British Museum, he discovered the so-called Elgin Marbles, the supersize Greek sculptures of men horses and mythical creatures which once lined the Parthenon in Athens – and was immediately captivated by their scale and power.

For this exhibition the Museum has had the strikingly simple and effective idea of borrowing a substantial number of Rodin’s classic works from the Rodin Museum in Paris, and placing them next to and among a generous selection of original Parthenon sculptures. Over 80 works by Rodin in marble, bronze and plaster, along with some 13 of Rodin’s sketches, are displayed alongside major pieces of ancient Greek art from the Museum collection.

Thus the exhibition includes a number of Rodin’s greatest hits, iconic sculptures which are part of the Western imaginarium, such as The Thinker, The Kiss, The Gates of Hell and the Burghers of Calais.

Years ago, when a teenager, I hitch-hiked to Paris, kipped in the Bois de Boulogne,and spent the days going on pilgrimages to all the art galleries and museums. I remember being bitterly disappointed by the Musée Rodin and that disappointment has lasted to this day. The exhibition was an opportunity to see if my largely negative image of Rodin stood up to the evidence or was just a personal prejudice.

The ancient Greeks

Between 1800 to 1812 workmen employed by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin – British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, or ‘the Sublime Porte’ as it was referred to in those days – removed about half of the surviving sculptures of the Parthenon, the vast temple to Athena in Athens, as well as sculptures from the nearby buildings Propylaea and Erechtheum. These were shipped to Britain and put on display but, even at the time, contemporaries were critical enough for Parliament to hold an enquiry into his actions. Seeing the way the wind was blowing, Elgin sold the marbles to the British Government who passed them along to the recently created British Museum where, despite vocal lobbying by the Greek government, they remain to this day.

Cavalcade from the north frieze of the Parthenon, by Phidias (around 440 BC)

Cavalcade from the north frieze of the Parthenon, by Phidias (around 440 BC)

Throughout the nineteenth century the art of ancient Greece, and especially the statuary, was seen as the peak of human creativity and art. Renaissance giants like Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo had attempted to recreate some of their magic in painting, but the Greeks remained the source of artistic ideas of Beauty, which were built around realism – the realistic depiction of the human and animal body, with accuracy, elegance and grace.

The Parthenon figures were carved to fill the triangular pediment at the west and east of the building, as well as to fill the metopes or square alcoves roughly above each of the 46 outer columns. There was also a set of inner columns supporting an inner wall, and above these ran a continuous frieze of figures carved in relief.

There was, in other words, a huge amount of space to be filled by more than life size carvings of gods and heroes and animals (mostly horses being ridden in battle). Hence the fact that, even though the Elgin Marbles only represent a fraction of the originals, they still fill a vast gallery at the Museum.

Because all the statues we have now are worn to a kind of perfect white, people forget that Greek sculpture was originally brightly painted, and sometimes had gold leaf applied. This is a fanciful imagining of how the Parthenon would have looked when new. At this end we can see the pediment filled with freestanding statues of gods, small in the narrow ends, growing larger in size to gesture up towards the King of the Gods at the apex. And underneath you can see a set of 14 metopes above each column, each with an individual carving of an incident from Greek myth.In the Museum the curators tried to recreate the effect of the arched pediment by placing the scattered fragments in their correct positions relative to each other, with the metope carvings placed separately. This is how Rodin saw and was overwhelmed by them.

The Parthenon gallery in the British Museum, about 1890. Photograph. © The Trustees of the British Museum

The Parthenon gallery in the British Museum, about 1890. Photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum

What is so special about the sculptures from the Parthenon? They were thought, even by the Greeks themselves, to be the peak of their artistic achievement. The sculptor in charge of the works, Phidias, was credited with a godlike power for realism, for his ability to summon the gods from Olympus, and heroes from the Elysian Fields, and place them before the viewer.

For me the important factors are:

  1. They are larger than life. They had to be since they were embedded 30 metres high on walls.
  2. As a result their gestures are clear and distinct. The overall positioning of all the figures creates harmonies and rhythms which are perceivable even at a distance.
  3. Counter-intuitively, maybe, there is a staggering amount of detail in the sculptures. Observed down at eye level in an exhibition like this (as they were never intended to be seen), you can see the amount of effort that has gone in to depicting the muscles, ligaments and veins of, for example, this wonderful horse’s head, with its flared nostrils and bulging eyes. It’s called the Selene horse’s head because it is part of a frieze depicting the moon goddess, Selene.
Selene horse's head, East Pediment of the Parthenon, designed by Phidias (c. 435 BC)

Selene horse’s head, East Pediment of the Parthenon, designed by Phidias (c. 435 BC)

There is therefore, to my mind, a kind of super realism about the figures. They are larger than life in both senses – the subjects are gods of heroes of legend, and the figures are all larger than life size – yet they include finely carved details which also work to ennoble, expand and aggrandise the figures. They are images of power, imaginative, political and cultural power.

Rodin

Rodin in his Museum of Antiquities at Meudon on the outskirts of Paris, about 1910 Photo: Albert Harlingue. Image © Musée Rodin

Rodin in his Museum of Antiquities at Meudon on the outskirts of Paris, about 1910
Photo by Albert Harlingue. Image © Musée Rodin

By the 1880s Rodin had made his reputation as a sculpture and was gaining public commissions. He had always been fascinated by the sculpture of the ancient Greeks, still in his day held up as the absolute peak of human artistic achievement.

He had already studied Greek sculpture from books, sketches and casts available to him in Paris (he never, in fact, went to Greece). After all the Louvre in Paris has a large collection of ancient Green sculpture. Where possible Rodin collected fragments of ancient sculpture when they became available, placing them around the garden of his property in Meudon. Apparently he moved and repositioned them among the trees and bushes to create changing artistic effects.

Eventually he amassed a collection of some 6,000 fragments and he never ceased sketching and drawing them, from all angles. The result is a vast archive of sketches, drawings, half-finished carvings and completed sculptures.

Rodin’s aesthetic

But Rodin wasn’t slavishly devoted to simply making copies of ancient Greek perfection. He had a more modern aesthetic than that. He came to believe that sculptures had a life cycle of their own, an inner artistic integrity. If many had been damaged, well, that was their fate, and their current damaged state was somehow ‘true’ to their inner destiny. Thus Rodin resisted various suggestions that ancient Greek statues be ‘repaired’. You can see what he’s getting at.

Rodin liked the way that powerful expression was conveyed through the fragmented bodies of the Greek statues. He even removed the heads and limbs from his own figures to make them closer to the broken relics of the past. By doing so, he created a new genre of contemporary art – the headless, limbless torso.

This explains the prominence of process in Rodin’s own work. Many of his pieces seem to be emerging from the stone they are carved in, often with struggle. Similarly his ‘finished’ pieces often betray the work and effort required to make them.

The exhibition displays a massive male torso from the Parthenon next to a similar sized male torso by Rodin. The Parthenon one is smooth (though with pockmarks and gouges caused over time) but the Rodin one has a deliberately knobbly bobbly surface – at its core it is a realistic depiction of the male body, muscles and all, but in Rodin’s hands the sculpture also preserves the sense of effort which went into making it. The statue is not so much an image of Perfection as a symbol of the human effort to create Perfection.

Torso by Auguste Rodin

Torso by Auguste Rodin

On reflection, it is this deliberate favouring of a muddy, impure, less than precise, deliberately knobbly, bulgy, imperfect surface, which I don’t like about Rodin.

You see it in individual works and in his larger compositions.

The gates of hell

In the same year he visited the British Museum, 1881, aged 41, Rodin received his first big public commission, to create the bronze gates for a new museum of the decorative arts in Paris. Inspired by Dante, Rodin decided to create a set of gates on the theme of hell (‘Abandon hope all ye that enter here’ being the motto carved above the gates of hell in Dante’s medieval poetic epic, The Divine Comedy).

To this day I remember the massive build-up given to this piece at the Musée Rodin in Paris, and then my massive disappointment on seeing it. Instead of clarity and order – the clarity and rhythm you see so perfectly achieved in the Parthenon friezes – what I was immediately struck by was what a mess it is.

The gates of hell by Auguste Rodin

The gates of hell by Auguste Rodin

I defy you to figure out what is going on here. Your eye is drawn to the three figures at the top (themselves in a demoralising, broken backed huddle) then to the figure of the Thinker beneath them and beneath him? What the devil is going on in the two panels of the doors? And what is happening on the two columns either side of the doorway? I still find it as muddy and confusing as I did forty years ago.

The exhibition has a large section devoted to the gates. Rodin worked on it for decades, even after the planned museum was abandoned and the commission rendered redundant. He continued tinkering with all the small figures, taking many of them out of the gates and blowing them up into full-scale figures.

The most famous is The Thinker and there is a huge cast of it here. For me it epitomises Rodin’s strengths and weaknesses.

The Thinker by Auguste Rodin

The Thinker by Auguste Rodin

On the pro side it captures an archetypally human action in such a profound way that it quickly became an icon of Western art, and is probably among the half dozen most famous art images in the world (along with the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s David etc).

But, up close and personal, I don’t like it. It looks lumpy and unfinished. (Alas it reminded me a bit of The Thing from the Fantastic Four comics in the way the surface, though polished and shiny, is ridged and gnarled and patched with what look like strips of clay used to build up the figure, rather than the actual lineaments of cartilage and muscle.) It looks unfinished in exactly the way that the Gates of Hell look unfinished to me – muddy and indistinct.

This, I’m sure, is part of Rodin’s conscious aesthetic, a muscular, sculptural style which makes a virtue of flagging up its own effort, the struggle of creation.

Aesthetic of the unfinished

Among other aspects of this, Rodin encouraged the assistants and students who often helped him to carve his figures (he ran a workshop full of assistants) to leave secondary parts of the sculpture unfinished, and even to emphasise the physicality of the work by marking secondary areas with notches created by claw hammers and chisels.

This is perfectly obvious in Rodin’s other supersonically famous work, The Kiss of 1882. The exhibition curators a) are proud to have borrowed this larger-than-lifesize plaster cast of the kiss from the Rodin Museum. And b) make the ingenious suggestion that the pose of the two lovers (actually a scene from Dante’s Inferno of two adulterous lovers about to be discovered and murdered by the cuckolded husband) is based on the pose of two female goddesses, originally on the East Pediment of the Parthenon, one of which reclines luxuriously in the lap of her companion.

The Kiss by Auguste Rodin, large version, after 1898. Plaster cast from first marble version of 1888–98 © Musée Rodin

The Kiss by Auguste Rodin, large version, after 1898. Plaster cast from first marble version of 1888–98 © Musée Rodin

But for me the really dominant motif is the deliberately rough unfinished nature of the rock they’re sitting on. On the plus side I suppose the proximity of the gouged and hacked rock emphasises and brings out the luxurious smooth polished surface of the lovers’ two young bodies. But I still don’t like it.

To clarify further, here are two works which are directly related. The first one is a scene from the fight between the lapiths and the centaurs, which takes up a large part of one of the friezes on the Parthenon and is thought to be an allegory of the struggle between reason and animality. Note the clarity, even the stylised nature of the pose, and the clarity of line of each of the figures.

Lapith and centaur fighting from the Parthenon

Lapith and centaur fighting from the Parthenon

Next to it the exhibition places a sculpture titled The Centauress (1904), a figure Rodin expanded from a minor position on the gates of hell.

The Centauress by Auguste Rodin (1901-04)

The Centauress by Auguste Rodin (1901 to 1904)

I found this object particularly ugly and clumsy. The device of having the figure emerge from heavily-notched stone really doesn’t work for me at all. The way her overlong arms are merging with the pillar strikes me as some kind of horrifying physical deformity or mutation. It is not a very good depiction of either a horse’s body or a woman’s torso, and the less said about the unformed / melting head the better.

To summarise – Rodin’s attempt to assimilate the Greek influence and go beyond it to create a new ‘modern’ aesthetic of fragments which foreground the effort of their own creation has, in my opinion, very hit and miss results. Mostly miss.

His large masterpiece, The Burghers of Calais, is here – as a complete piece showing six larger-than-lifesize statues of the six men, alongside individual preparatory studies of some of the figures.

If you are a student of sculpture or a fan of Rodin this is a really thrilling opportunity to study his sketches, his inspiration, his working practices and the models which go towards creating a masterpiece. But for me, set among the light and clarity of line and design of the Greeks, they felt clumsy and hulking, their postures contrived and awkward.

Rodin:

The Burghers of Calais by Auguste Rodin

The Burghers of Calais by Auguste Rodin

Phidias:

Unmounted youths preparing for the cavalcade, block from the north frieze of the Parthenon, about 438–432 BC, Marble, © The Trustees of the British Museum

Unmounted youths preparing for the cavalcade, block from the north frieze of the Parthenon, about 438–432 BC, Marble © The Trustees of the British Museum

On the cusp of modernism

Rodin lived long enough to see the advent of full-blown Modernism. By 1905 Matisse and Picasso in their different ways were experiencing the influence of ‘primitive’ masks from Africa and the Pacific which were suggesting entire new ways of seeing and thinking about ‘art’.

Within a few years a new generation of sculptors would break decisively with the entire Western tradition and its indebtedness to the naturalism of the ancient Greeks – the ones that spring to mind being Jacob Epstein (b.1880), Eric Gill (b.1882), Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (b.1891) and Alberto Giacometti (b.1901).

I suppose it’s unfair to compare Rodin to what came after him, but for me this next generation of sculptors blow the world apart, open the doors to an infinity of possibilities, and are the true creators of modern sculpture.

For me, a piece like Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s Red Stone Dancer (c.1913) is worth more than everything Rodin did put together. I like clarity of line and design as against muddiness and vagueness, crisp geometry as against random lumpiness, and energy as against languid kissing, dull thinking and the hapless, demoralised postures of the Calais Burghers.

Red Stone Dancer (c. 1913) by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska © Tate

Red Stone Dancer (c. 1913) by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska © Tate

For me the Henri Gaudier-Brzeska is sensuous but with a virile, alert, energetic sensuality, the sensuality of athletic life.

Light and airy exhibition space

By far the most striking thing about the exhibition is that the Museum has opened up the big windows at the end of the Sainsbury Gallery in order to let light flood in.

The partitions between different sections of the show do not extend to the ceiling so the effect is not of separate ‘rooms’ – rather dark and gloomy rooms as they had for, say, the Scythians exhibition – but of light flooding throughout the space, showing the Greek works, in particular, in something more like the fierce Mediterranean light of their homeland.

Installation view of Rodin and the art of ancient Greece at the British Museum

Installation view of Rodin and the art of ancient Greece at the British Museum

I’m afraid this isn’t a very good photo, but enough to show how the individual statues are staged at the window end of the exhibition, building up to the full cast of the Burghers of Calais in the middle distance of the shot.

The effect of this natural light, and the clean lines and clarity of the modern floor-to-ceiling windows, are wonderfully uplifting. It was relaxing to just sit on the benches conveniently placed next to them, and to enjoy the precise, geometrical architecture of the Georgian houses opposite, and the bright patio space with its carefully tended shrubs and small trees.

The video

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by Simon on June 24, 2018  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 24, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/06/24/rodin-art-of-ancient-greece-british-museum/

Charmed lives in Greece: Ghika, Craxton, Leigh Fermor @ the British Museum

The British Museum is a vast maze and labyrinth full of treasures – that is part of its charm. Part of the embarras de richesses is that, as well as the two big exhibition spaces (at the back of the courtyard and on the first floor of the Rotunda) where you generally have to pay quite a lot to see the blockbuster exhibitions – there are a number of other rooms and spaces devoted to ad hoc displays and exhibitions, most of which are free.

Thus if you turn left immediately on entering and walk through the long narrow cloakroom, packed with schoolkids, towards room 6 (The Assyrians), you’ll come across the entrance to a free and lovely exhibition currently on in room 5, about the lives and work of three influential writer-artists, who lived and worked and loved in post-war Greece and, to some extent, created many British people’s austerity-era image of this beautiful sunlit country.

Study for a poster by Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika (1948) © Benaki Museum 2018

Study for a poster by Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika (1948) © Benaki Museum 2018

Charmed lives in Greece: Ghika, Craxton, Leigh Fermor examines the friendship between Greek modernist painter Nikos Ghika, English painter John Craxton, and English travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor.

All three made homes in Greece, writing, drawing, painting, and socialising. Hence the show brings together not only their published writings and plenty of their paintings, but memorabilia from all aspects of their lives, including letters and personal possessions, and lots of wonderfully evocative black and white photos.

Nikos Ghika

Which one first? How about Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika (1906 to 1994).

Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika in Hydra, 1960. Benaki Museum – Ghika Gallery, Athens. Photo by Suschitzky. © The Estate of Wolfgang Suschitzky

Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika in Hydra, 1960. Benaki Museum – Ghika Gallery, Athens. Photo by Suschitzky. © The Estate of Wolfgang Suschitzky

To paraphrase Wikipedia:

Nikos Ghikas was a leading Greek painter, sculptor, engraver, writer and academic. He was a founding member of the Association of Greek Art Critics. He studied ancient and Byzantine art as well as folk art. During his youth he was exposed in Paris to the avant-garde European artistic trends and he gained recognition as the leading Greek cubist artist. His inspiration was in the harmony and purity of Greek art, and he aimed to deconstruct the Greek landscape and intense natural light into simple geometric shapes and interlocking planes. Today in Greece he is celebrated as one of the most important modern Greek painters. His house has been converted to a museum and is run by the Benaki Museum.

The combination of French avant-garde influences with the sunlit environment of Greece resulted in the distinctive light and airy feel of his paintings immediately after the war.

Chairs and tables by the sea by Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika (1948) © Benaki Museum 2018

Chairs and tables by the sea by Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika (1948) © Benaki Museum 2018

Nikos (as his friends, and we, shall call him) lived in a grand 18th century mansion built by his great-great-great-grandfather overlooking the town of Hydra, a hilly port town, which provided the subjects for hundreds of paintings and sketches. To this grand setting he invited numerous friends, including, among others, Patrick Leigh Fermor and John Craxton who he had met, separately, on visits to London.

Paddy was given a room of his own for an extended stay during which he wrote his successful travel book, Mani. And Nikos arranged a studio for Craxton, who gave him support and encouragement: Craxton acknowledges his enduring debted to the Greek. For fifteen years after the war this mansion was Nikos’s base and he made it a popular venue for artists, writers and performers in all the arts to meet and mingle.

Evocative black and white photos on display show some of the celebrity guests who came to stay, to enjoy the wonderful climate, the great view and the stimulating company, including ballet dancer Margot Fonteyn, choreographer Frederick Ashton, critic Cyril Connolly, the poets Stephen Spender and Giorgos Seferis, the American novelist Henry Miller, and many more.

Nikos and Barbara Ghika, John Craxton, Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor on the terrace of the Ghika house, Hydra 1958. Photo: Roloff Beny © Library and Archives Canada

Nikos and Barbara Ghika, John Craxton, Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor on the terrace of the Ghika house, Hydra 1958. Photo: Roloff Beny © Library and Archives Canada

There are lots of examples of Nikos’s work. Broadly speaking, he is a figurative painter, in that his pictures always have a real-world object, but he gives everything a strongly geometric stylisation.

The Black Sun by Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika (1947) Courtesy of Rosie Alison © Benaki Museum 2018

The Black Sun by Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika (1947) Courtesy of Rosie Alison © Benaki Museum 2018

He himself said he was interested in ‘austere structures’, which he saw embodied in the higgledy-piggledy flow of white Greek houses down the hillside at Hydra, or in the stone walls zigzagging across the dry landscape. Where Craxton painted lots of people, Nikos tended to do landscapes; he is the more abstract of the two. His early works contain Picasso-like birds, and wibbly lines reminiscent of Miro. Later on his style gets thicker, as in 1973’s Mystras.

Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915 to 2011)

There’s an excellent 8-minute long video in which the English and Greek curators of the exhibition (it’s a joint effort) explain the relationships between the three men and – since Craxton was gay – between the wives of Nikos and Paddy as well.

Aged just 18 Paddy impressed his friends by setting off to walk to Constantinople. In 1977 he published the account of his trek, A Time of Gifts, sometimes described as the best travel book in English.

Paddy was a dashing figure during the war, spending two years working underground on Crete, helping the Greeks resist the German occupation. The highlight was his capture (with a fellow Brit and partisan help) of a German general, who he smuggled off the island to a waiting British submarine. When his second in command, Stanley Moss, wrote up the story in his book Ill Met by Moonlight in 1950 it made Paddy famous, redoubled when the book was filmed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger starring Dirk Bogarde as the dashing hero, and released in 1957.

Patrick Leigh Fermor at Ghika's house in Hydra in 1955. Benaki Museum – Photographic Archive, Athens © Benaki Museum 2018

Patrick Leigh Fermor at Ghika’s house in Hydra in 1955. Benaki Museum – Photographic Archive, Athens © Benaki Museum 2018

Having had such a heroic and glamorous war, Paddy was initially at rather a loss when it ended. Eventually he took up a post with the British Institute in Athens, and combined this with extensive tours of Greece. His extensive tours round the Peloponnese resulted in his travel book Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (1958), which was followed by Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (1966). As mentioned, Paddy spent a lot of time at Nikos’s house, becoming close friends with the Greek painter and that’s where most of Mani was written.

Eventually, in the early 1960s Paddy and his wife Joan discovered a crumbling house in an olive grove near Kardamyli in the Mani Peninsula in the southern Peloponnese. He commissioned local builders to create a modern dwelling, and there are splendid black and white photos of him supervising and even dancing (!) with the builders, as well as happy snaps of himself writing, strolling round the garden with his wife, and of the dazzling view across pine trees to the rocky bay.

View of the house in Kardamyli. Photo by Joan Leigh Fermor. National Library of Scotland, Joan Leigh Fermor Photographic Collection © Estate of Joan Leigh Fermor

View of the house in Kardamyli. Photo by Joan Leigh Fermor. National Library of Scotland, Joan Leigh Fermor Photographic Collection © Estate of Joan Leigh Fermor

Both Nikos and Craxton visited him here, painting the house itself and its beautiful view. Craxton shared with Paddy’s wife a love of cats, and in among all the letters and notes and postcards they sent each other, are some lovely sketches and paintings which Craxton made of Joan’s cats.

John Craxton (1906–1994)

Craxton first visited Crete in 1947 and was bowled over by the light, the clarity and also by the simple earthiness of the people. In his early years in Greece, he stayed regularly at Hydra with Nikos, meeting and becoming close friends with Paddy and Joan.

John Craxton painting in Ghika’s house in Hydra in 1960. Benaki Museum – Ghika Gallery, Athens. Photo: Suschitzky. © The Estate of Wolfgang Suschitzky

John Craxton painting in Ghika’s house in Hydra in 1960. Benaki Museum – Ghika Gallery, Athens. Photo: Suschitzky. © The Estate of Wolfgang Suschitzky

The exhibition features a lot of paintings by both Craxton and Nikos and it’s natural to compare and contrast them, and also to notice how their styles changed over the long period of their friendship.

Craxton is the more naturalistic of the two. He painted lots of Greek people, cats and goats. Craxton learned peasant Greek and was attracted to young men, sailors, goatherds.

Three dancers, Poros, 1953-1954 by John Craxton. Courtesy of Lincoln College, Oxford © 2018 Craxton Estate/DACS

Three dancers, Poros, 1953 to 1954 by John Craxton. Courtesy of Lincoln College, Oxford © 2018 Craxton Estate/DACS

Arguably his book illustration work from the 1950s is the most enjoyable, like the fabulous depiction of a fish market or of a carnival horse.

Installation view showing Fish market, Three dancers and Carnival horse by John Craxton

Installation view showing Fish market, Three dancers, and Carnival horse by John Craxton

He went through a phase of doing dark linear works in the 1960s, with a kind of harsh abstract horizon, epitomised by several paintings here, including Landscape Hydra 1963.

In 1960 Craxton discovered a crumbling house and studio on the Venetian harbour of Chania, Crete’s second biggest town. As with the other dwellings, the exhibition shows us photos of the house, the stunning view over the harbour, Craxton at work, and some of the paintings he made there.

The exhibition includes large-scale works from the 1980s which show how far his style changed and evolved in three decades. Compare two men in a taverna with works like Three sailors, Voskos or Reclining figure with asphodels (1983). They are much bigger, and often a bit more garish.

Still Life with Three Sailors by John Craxton (1980-85) Private Collection, UK © 2018 Craxton Estate/DACS

Still Life with Three Sailors by John Craxton (1980 to 1985) Private Collection, UK © 2018 Craxton Estate/DACS

The book covers

The friendship between Craxton and Paddy was crystallised when the writer asked the artist to do the covers for all six of his travel books, starting with Mani. The exhibition includes not only the original art works, but first editions with dedications to Paddy’s wife, to Craxton, to Nikos, to this close circle of friends which made his writing possible. (It even includes Paddy’s typewriter!)

The covers aren’t available to include here, so I’m linking off to the books’ Amazon pages, where you can see the Craxton’s cover art work which they retain to this day.

It’s a smallish exhibition but with quite enough to enjoy and admire. I kept going back round it to look at another atmospheric photo, to look closer at one of Craxton’s wonderful goat paintings, or Nikos’s geometric fields; to reread the snippets from Paddy’s clear evocative prose which are quoted liberally on the walls, to watch the video again, with its snippets of interviews by the three artists.

What wonderful lives they led! And what a privilege to share even at one remove their happiness and creativity.

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by Simon on March 15, 2018  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on March 15, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/03/15/charmed-lives-in-greece-ghika-craxton-leigh-fermor-british-museum/

Living with gods @ the British Museum

There are two major exhibition spaces in the British Museum, the big Sainsbury Gallery at the back of the main court where they hold blockbuster shows like The Vikings or The Celts; and the more intimate semi-circular space up the stairs on the first floor of the central rotunda.

The setting

This latter location is where Living with gods: peoples, places and worlds beyond is currently showing.

The space is divided into ‘rooms’ or sections by translucent white linen curtains, on which the shadows of exhibits and visitors are cast. At floor level hidden lights project shimmering patterns onto the wall. Low-key ambient noises – strange rustlings, breathings, the rattling of unknown instruments – fill the air.

All this sets the scene and creates a mood, because this is an exhibition not of religious beliefs, but of religious objects, designed to tell the story of the relationship between human beings and their gods, or – more abstractly – their sense of the supernatural, through rare and precious religious artefacts from around the world.

Terror mask Pende, Republic of Congo, 20th century This mask is worn to frighten away women and nosy pople from initiation ceremonies for yound men. © Religionskundliche Sammlung der Universität Marburg, Germany

Terror mask Pende, Republic of Congo (20th century) This mask is worn to frighten away women and nosy people from initiation ceremonies for young men © Religionskundliche Sammlung der Universität Marburg, Germany

Themes

The objects are grouped by ‘theme’, namely:

  • Light, water, fire
  • Sensing other worlds
  • Sacred places and spaces
  • Prayer
  • Festivals
  • The cycle of life
  • Sacrifice
  • Coexistence

There are brief wall labels introducing each theme. Personally, I found these rather weak and obvious but then it’s a tricky task to summarise humanity’s entire history and relationship with, say, Prayer, in just four sentences.

Very often these texts are forced to state pretty empty truisms. One tells us that ‘Water is essential to life, but also brings chaos and death’. OK.

Another that ‘Religions shape the way people perceive the world by engaging all their senses.’ Alright. Fine as far as they go, but not really that illuminating.

Wonder toad China © Religionskundliche Sammlung der Universität Marburg, Germany

Wonder toad from China © Religionskundliche Sammlung der Universität Marburg, Germany

Individual information

The labels of individual exhibits are more specific and so more interesting. But here again, because artefacts from different cultures, geographical locations, religions and periods are placed next to each other, it is difficult, if not impossible, to get any real sense of context.

It may well be that:

Seeing out the old year in Tibet requires a purifying dance or cham. These lively masked and costumed dances are performed by Buddhist monks to rid the world of evil and bring in compassion.

Or that:

On 31 October every year, Mexicans remember the dead by staying at the graves of loved ones through the night. Theatrical processions symbolise fears and fantasies of the world of the dead. Judas, who denounced Christ to the Roman authorities, is displayed as a devil. Judas figures are also paraded and exploded on Easter Saturday.

But by the time you’re reading the tenth or fifteenth such snippet of information, it’s gotten quite hard to contain or process all this information. The whole world of religious artefacts for all known human religions is, well… a big subject.

Judas-devil figure, Mexico City © The Trustees of the British Museum

Judas-devil figure, Mexico City © The Trustees of the British Museum

So the weaknesses of the exhibition are its lack:

  • of intellectual depth – none of the room labels tell you anything you didn’t already know about the importance of light or water in religious belief
  • and of conceptual coherence – just giving each section a ‘theme’ and a few explanatory sentences isn’t, in the end, enough

Best objects

On the plus side, Living with gods is a rich collection of fascinating, evocative and sometimes very beautiful objects from all round the world. Because they’re so varied – from prayer mats to medieval reliquaries, from the tunics which Muslim pilgrims to Mecca wear to Inuit figures made of fur, from a statue of Buddha to a wooden model of a Hindu chariot – there’s something for every taste.

I had two favourite moments. One was the display case of African masks. I love African tribal art, it has a finish, a completeness, and a tremendous pagan primitive power, combined with high skill at metal working, which I find thrilling.

The other was a modern piece by Syrian-born artist Issam Kourbaj, called Dark Water, Burning World, a set of model boats made out of refashioned bicycle mudguards, filled with burnt-out matches, representing the refugee crisis. How simple. How elegant. How poignant. How effective.

Dark Water, Burning World by Issam Kourbaj

Dark Water, Burning World by Issam Kourbaj

I don’t quite understand how this latter is a religious artefact. It strikes me as being probably more a work of art than a religious object.

The show as a whole goes heavy on artefacts from the obvious world religions – Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Daoism, Shintoism – as well as the ancient beliefs of the Persians, Assyrians and so on, plus sacred objects produced by non-literate tribal peoples such as the Yupik of Alaska or Siberian tribes. It is nothing if not global and all-encompassing.

Shiva Nataraja Chennai, India (1800-1900) As Nataraja, Hindu deity Shiva performs a perpetual dance of creation and destruction. © Religionskundliche Sammlung der Universität Marburg, Germany

Shiva Nataraja Chennai, India (1800 to 1900) As Nataraja, Hindu deity Shiva performs a perpetual dance of creation and destruction. © Religionskundliche Sammlung der Universität Marburg, Germany

Static

Although the exhibition claims to ‘explore the practice and expression of religious beliefs in the lives of individuals and communities around the world and through time’, it doesn’t.

Most religions are expressed by actions and rituals, dances, prayers, blessings, festivals, processions and so on. A moment’s reflection would suggest that the best way to convey this – in fact the only way to really convey these events and activities – would be through a series of films or videos.

Downstairs in the African galleries of the British Museum there are, for example, videos of tribal masks being worn by witch doctors and shamen performing dances, exorcisms and so on, which give a vivid (and terrifying) sense of how the head dresses, masks and implements are meant to be used in religious rituals, how they’re still being used to this day.

There is none of that here. Nothing moves. No words are spoken, in blessing or benediction. It is a gallimaufrey of static artefacts – all interesting, some very beautiful – but all hermetically sealed in their display cases. I found the lack of movement of any kind a little… antiseptic. Dry.

Model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre Bethlehem, Palestine, 1600–1700 The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is one of the holiest places of Christianity and attracts many pilgrims. Souvenir models of the church are bought and taken all over the world. © The Trustees of the British Museum

Model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre Bethlehem, Palestine (1600–1700) The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is one of the holiest places of Christianity and attracts many pilgrims. Souvenir models of the church are bought and taken all over the world. © The Trustees of the British Museum

BBC radio series

The exhibition was planned to coincide with a series of 30 15-minute radio programmes made by BBC Radio 4 and presented by the former Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor.

MacGregor scored a massive hit with his wonderful radio series, A History of the World in 100 Objects, broadcast in 2010. The 30 programmes in the Living with the gods series were broadcast in the autumn of 2017. Quite probably the best thing to do would have been to listen to the series and then come to look at the objects he mentioned. Or to have downloaded the programmes to a phone or Ipod and listened to them as you studied each object.

You can still listen to them free on the BBC website.

MacGregor is a star because he is so intelligent. Without any tricks or gimmicks he gets straight down to business, describing and explaining each of the objects and confidently placing them in the context of their times and places, within their systems of belief, and in the wider context of the development of the human mind and imagination. Just by listening to him you can feel yourself getting smarter.

I recommend episode 4, Here comes the sun, as one of the most awe-inspiring.

The radio programmes score over the actual exhibition because, at fifteen minutes per theme, there are many more words available in which to contextualise, explain and ponder meanings and implications, than the two or three sentences which is all the space the exhibition labels can provide.

The individual fire-related items are fairly interesting to look at in the exhibition. But MacGregor can weave an entire narrative together which links the perpetual fire in the Temple of Vesta in Rome, the worship of Ahura-Mazda in Sassanian Persia, the great Parsi fire temple in Udvada, India, and the Flame of the Nation which burns beneath the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

His words bring to life exhibits which I found remained stubbornly lifeless in this hushed and sterile environment.

Religious belief as tame anthropology, drained of threat

Above all I bridled a little at the touchy-feely, high mindedness of the show, with its tone of hushed reverence and for its equation of all religious into the same category of cute Antiques Roadshow curiosities.

The commentary goes long on human beings’ capacity for ‘symbolising our thoughts in stories and images’, on our capacity for ‘love and sorrow’, on how ‘powerful, mystical ideas govern personal lives as well as defining cultural identities and social bonds’, and so on.

The commentary wistfully wonders whether human beings, rather than being labelled Homo sapiens shouldn’t be recategorised as Homo religiosus. Here as at numerous points in the commentary, I think you are meant to heave a sensitive sigh. It all felt a bit like a creative writing workshop where everyone is respecting everyone else’s sensibilities.

None of this is exactly untrue but I felt it overlooks the way that, insofar as religious beliefs have been intrinsic to specific cultures and societies over the millennia, they have also been inextricably linked with power and conquest.

To put it simply:

  • human history has included a shocking number of religious wars and crusades
  • religious belief and practice in most places have reinforced hierarchies of control and power

Rather than Homo religiosus, an unillusioned knowledge of human history suggests that, if man is anything, he is Homo interfector.

There is ample evidence that religion provides a way for believers to control and manage their fear and anxiety of powers completely beyond their control, the primal events of birth and death, natural disasters, the rotation of the seasons, the vital necessity of animals to hunt and kill and crops to grow and eat.

Central to any psychological study of religion is the way it provides comfort against the terror of death, with its various promises of a happy afterlife; and also the role it plays in defining and policing our sexual drives. Finding answers to the imponderable problems of sex and death have been time-honoured functions of religious belief.

On a social level, religion hasn’t only been a way to control our fears and emotions – it also has a long track record as a means to channel internal emotions into externalised aggression. You can’t have a history of Christianity without taking into account the early internecine violence between sects and heretics, which broke out anew with the 150 years of Religious War following the Reformation; without taking into account its violent conquests of pagan Europe which only ground to a halt in the 13th century or recognising the crusades to the Holy Land, or admitting to the antisemitism which is built deep into Christianity’s DNA. For every Saint Francis who wrote songs to the birds there is a man like Cistercian abbot Arnaud Amalric who told his troops to massacre the entire population of Béziers in 1209, claiming that God would sort out the good from the bad. ‘Kill them all. God will know his own.’

The history of Islam may well be a history of religious sages and philosophers, but it is also a history of military conquest. The Aztecs and the Incas practiced really horrifying human sacrifices. As did the Celts And bloodily so on.

My point is summarised by the great English poet, Geoffrey Hill, who wrote back in 1953:

By blood we live, the hot, the cold
To ravage and redeem the world:
There is no bloodless myth will hold.

(Genesis by Geoffrey Hill)

‘There is no bloodless myth will hold’.

Christianity is represented here by processional crosses and rosary beads and a beautiful golden prayer book. The other religions are represented by similarly well-crafted and beautiful objects.

But my point is that Christianity is based on the story of a man who was tortured to death to please an angry God. Blood drips from his pierced hands and feet. The early theologian Tertullian wrote, ‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.’ Shiah Muslims flagellate themselves every Muḥarram (I watched them doing it in the mountains of Pakistan. The hotel owner told me to stay indoors in case one of the inflamed believers attacked me.) As I write some 600,000 Rohingya Muslims have been forced from their homes by Buddhist populations.

My point is that religion isn’t all uplifting sentiments and beautiful works of art.

Religion does not show us what we all share in common: that is a pious liberal wish. Much more often it is used to define and police difference, between genders, castes and races.

Religion is just as much about conquest and massacre. And I’m not particularly knocking religion; I’m saying that human beings are as much about massacre and murder as they are about poetry and painting. And that poetry, painting and exhibitions like this which lose sight of the intrinsic violence, the state sponsored pogroms and the religious massacres which are a key part of human history give a misleading – a deceptively gentle and reassuring – view of the world.

Tibetan New Year dance mask Tibet © Religionskundliche Sammlung der Universität Marburg, Germany

Tibetan New Year dance mask © Religionskundliche Sammlung der Universität Marburg, Germany

I’m one of the few people I know who has read the entire Bible. Certain themes recur but not the kind of highbrow sentiments you might hope for. I was struck by the number of time it is written in both the Old Testament and the New Testament that:

Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10)

There are many very beautiful and very interesting objects in this exhibition but I felt that they were presented in an atmosphere of bloodless, New Age, multicultural spirituality. Put bluntly: there wasn’t enough fear and blood.

Some videos

Promotional video

Exhibition tour

Related links

Other British Museum reviews

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by Simon on March 11, 2018  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on March 11, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/03/11/living-with-gods-british-museum/

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