All posts tagged The Royal Academy

Pre-Raphaelite Sisters @ the National Portrait Gallery

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) was an art movement set up initially by three idealistic young art students (John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt) in 1848 and lasted in its first form until 1853.

However, the initial founders were joined by followers, including the young disciples William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, who evolved a style of medievalising, idealising and spiritualising art which endured till the end of the nineteenth century. In the latters’ hands many of the PRB values evolved into the Arts and Crafts Movement which went on to influence craftspeople across the country and abroad.

Possibly the most memorable style associated with the original Pre-Raphaelites is the depiction of long-gowned, long-necked beautiful women with cupid lips and frizzy hair, brought to perfection in the later paintings of one of the founders and central figures, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Proserpine by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1877) The model is Jane Burden, daughter of a stableman, who married William Morris, became the iconic beauty of the movement, and for whom Rossetti developed an unhealthy obsession during the 1870s

The Pre-Raphaelite World

Reading about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood often reminds me of the the Bloomsbury Group, the group of writers, artists, critics, historians and economists which loosely associated before, during and after the Great War. The two groupings were:

  • a complex matrices of artists, writers, critics, friends and extended families, and wives and lovers, who all bring with them the complicated stories of their intertwined adulteries and affairs
  • many of the wives or children or grandchildren or greatgrandchildren capitalised on their connection to write biographies or memoirs, which helped to add to the ‘legend’ of the group as a whole

Both are characterised by the very pukka English trait of everyone in the group thinking that everyone else – their friends and partners and lovers – was a genius.

Of course this was partly because they all suffered from attacks by the brutal English critics and, quite naturally, sprang to the defence of the paintings / designs / poems / novels or whatever else, produced by their close friends, or bothers, or sisters, or lovers.

The result is that entering the PRB world, like entering the Bloomsbury world, is to quickly become aware of the legends and well-told stories surrounding each of them, of the way the commented on and supported each other’s work, and of a small industry of secondary and tertiary artworks and criticism and writing devoted to them, with a number of descendants working alongside devoted scholars, to pour out a never-ending stream of PRB-related material.

When you go into the shop (which you have to walk through on the way out, just as you have to walk through the shop on the way out of V&A or British Museum exhibitions) you realise that, in any case, this or that new book about the PRBs – in fact all scholarly or biographical writing about the PRBs – forms only a small subset of the wider merchandising surrounding the movement. Alongside the many biographies and memoirs are the posters and prints, reproductions, cards and label pins, fridge magnets, tote bags, scarves, pillowslips and duvet covers, and much more, much more, extending out to the huge range of William Morris-inspired designs you can buy at Liberty’s for wallpapers and carpets and tapestries and so on.

And that’s before you get to the talismanic geographical locations you can visit connected with the group, such as William Morris’s house in Hammersmith, the William Morris museum in Walthamstow, the Red House (now a National Trust property) in Bexleyheath, the remnants of the Morris and Co fabric factory at Merton Abbey Mills, the restaurant at the Victoria & Albert Museum decorated by Arts & Crafts designers, and so on.

So to engage with one or other of the Pre-Raphaelites is not just to go and see a bunch of paintings, it is to enter a large and complex and multifaceted imaginative world. I think this is part of what draws the PRB devotees: the fact that the PRB world is so large, so complex, there were so many of them, who produced so many works, that once you’re in, you can forget all about the actual world we live in and never come out again.

Georgiana Burne -Jones, long-suffering wife of adulterous Edward Burne-Jones, with her children Philip and Margaret in the background, painted by Edward Burne-Jones (1883)

The Pre-Raphaelite Women

As you might expect, many of the women connected to the Pre-Raphaelites – their wives and lovers and models and muses – have been extensively written about, and even had films made about them (for example, a quick search on Amazon shows that the first woman in this exhibition, the model Effie Gray, has had two books written about her, plus a 2015 movie based on her life).

But, rather surprisingly, this big show at the National Portrait Gallery appears to be the first exhibition ever devoted to putting the female point of view of all the women connected with the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, as a whole, as a group.

Specifically, the exhibition showcases the lives and works of twelve Pre-Raphaelite woman, bringing out the extent to which many of them were not passive models or wives-in-the-background, but were studio managers, businesswomen, promoters, mothers, sisters, lovers and muses, as well as – and this is the key revelation of the exhibition – often being notable artists in their own right.

Having pondered how to convey this information, I’ve fallen back on the actual layout of the exhibition as being the most objective, least subjective way of presenting it. The main NPG exhibition space is divided into 12 rooms or parts of rooms, each devoted to one of the twelve women they are showcasing. These are thumbnail portraits of the women’s biographies and achievements:

1. Effie Gray Millais (1828 to 1897) Model, wife and businesswoman

Euphemia (‘Effie’) Gray married the art critic John Ruskin in 1848. She was very beautiful and John Everett Millais used her as the model for the woman in The Order of Release painted during the movement’s first period, in 1852. This hangs as the centrepiece of the first room and we are drawn to the unusual realism of Effie’s face.

The Order of Release 1746 (1852 to 1853) by John Everett Millais

Millais went on a trip to Scotland with the Ruskins, during which Effie’s profound unhappiness became clear. The exhibition includes sketches made of the couple by other guests on the holiday. While Ruskin was totally absorbed in writing up the notes to his masterpiece about architecture. The Stones of Venice, Millais and Effie fell in love. In 1854, supported by her family, she brought a case to annul her marriage, and the following year married Millais. She became his business partner, helping with research, production and marketing of his artworks, researching locations, sourcing costumes, cultivating clients etc. She became Lady Ruskin in 1885 when her husband was made a baronet and there is a painting of her looking very haughty indeed.

2. Christina Rossetti (1830 to 1894) Poet

Christina was sister to the leading Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and another brother, the critic Michael Rossetti. They were all brought up in an intensely religious atmosphere which is conveyed, here, by the painting of the Annunciation which Dante made in 1850. In 1858 she started working in a home for girls thought to be sexually at risk, an experience which (apparently) inspired her most famous poem, Goblin Market, with its ripe sublimated sexual imagery.

Christina went on to publish three volumes of adult poetry, verse for children and devotional works, was recognised and admired in her time. Fans who gave her good reviews and promoted her works included Tennyson and Browning. (Hmm. You read that and think – ‘So all those times I read about the Victorian patriarchy repressing women and silencing their voices…’ – Here is an example where that is simply not true.)

Beside portraits of her by others, the exhibition includes some of her own drawings and illustrations, her notebook containing a sonnet on Elizabeth Siddal – In an Artist’s Studio – plus a funny cartoon by her brother of Christina having one of her famous ‘rages’, in the cartoon she is smashing up a Victorian living room with an axe.

There appear to be at least six biographies of Christina, plus umpteen editions of her verse and critical studies

3. Annie Miller (1835 to 1925) Model and muse

The daughter of a soldier, Annie grew up in poverty in the backstreets of Chelsea, close to the studio of William Holman Hunt, one of the three founders of the RB movement and, arguably, the most conventionally Christian. He was introduced to her and used her as a model for the woman in his astonishing painting, The Awakening Conscience.

The Awakening Conscience by William Holman Hunt (1853)

Hunt paid for her to be taught to read and write and good manners and deportment, with a view to marrying her. But then he went off to Palestine for two years (1854-6) to paint meticulously realistic Biblical paintings in the actual scenery of the Holy Land, and while he was away Annie also modelled for Millais, Rossetti, Arthur Hughes and others. On his return Hunt was disillusioned by her character which had become, he thought, lazy and addicted to luxury. He broke off the engagement and offered to send her overseas, but she preferred to stay in London and pursue a career in modelling.

By the early 1860s she had found herself an eligible husband, Thomas Thompson, a cousin of Lord Ranelagh, who she married. They moved to Richmond, had children, and in later life Annie was at pains to play down her association with disreputable bohemian artists.

There appear to be no books specifically about Annie.

4. Elizabeth Siddal (1829 to 1862) Model, artist and poet

The working class daughter of a cutler whose shop was in Southwark, Lizzie Siddal was plucked from the street to model for another Victorian painter, before gravitating into the circle of the PRBs and especially Dante Gabriel Rossetti to whom she became a passionate muse. Her most famous commission was as Ophelia in John Everett Millais’s awesome painting of her floating in full dress amid flowers.

But Lizzie was also an artist. She was the only woman exhibitor in an 1857 PRB exhibition which was held in America, the producer of a series of watercolours taking Tennyson and medieval legends as her subject. She also wrote poetry and the exhibition includes a manuscript of her poem, At Last.

After a long and stormy courtship Siddal finally married Rossetti in 1860, but the next year she had a stillborn son, and was lunged into such a deep depression that she committed suicide by poison. Distraught, Rossetti placed the manuscript of his poems in her coffin. A year later he was reluctantly persuaded to re-excavate the coffin, open it, and retrieve the poems, a taboo actions which oppressed him for the rest of his life.

5. Fanny Cornforth (1835 to 1909) Model and lover

Born plain Sarah Cox into a blacksmiths family in Sussex Fanny took her name from her sister who died in infancy. She encountered Rossetti, Ford Maddox Brown and Millais in the Surrey Pleasure Gardens in London and quickly began posing as a model for various paintings.

In 1860 when Rossetti married Siddal, Fanny married Timothy Cornforth, but it appears to have been a holding operation because, when Lizzie killed herself, Fanny moved in with the distraught Rossetti.

For over a decade she sat for many of Rossetti’s mature paintings of the classic pre-Raphaelite look – willowy dresses, long neck, strong jawline, cupid lips, billowing tressed hair, such as one included in the exhibition, The Blue Bower.

The Blue Bower by Dante Gabriel Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1865) The model is Fanny Cornforth, famed not only for her strong pre-Raphaelite jawline, but her sumptuous, tressed, blonde hair

Half-time thoughts

The obvious point about the exhibition so far is that, with the outstanding exception of Christina Rossetti, a notable poet in her own right, and maybe Effie Millais for her efforts as a businesswoman on her husband’s behalf, the women covered so far

  1. mostly do conform to the limited stereotype of model and ‘muse’
  2. are extremely well-known, having been on the receiving end of one or more biographies and even films, and featured in at least two BBC TV dramatisations of the lives of the PRBs

So that you begin to wonder a bit in what way this exhibition is overturning any preconceptions.

It’s in the second half that the show – or its polemical purpose – lifts off, with a raft of women who were clearly notable artists in their own right, and/or had much more to them than

6. Joanna Boyce Wells (1831 to 1861) Artist

Joanna was encouraged to paint by her businessman father, artist brother and sister. (Hmm. You read that and think – ‘So all those times I read about the Victorian patriarchy repressing women and silencing their voices…’ here is another example where that is simply not true.)

Her father paid for her to study art and her first exhibited piece was shown at the Royal Academy in 1855.

Elgiva by Joanna Boyce Wells (1855)

There are half a dozen other paintings and drawing by Joanna in her section, including The Boys Crusade and Head of a Mulatto Woman. Some of them are marvellous, some of them a bit more run of the mill. Difficult to get worked up about this head of an angle. It’s the kind of rather second-rate image you get on umpteen Christmas cards.

Thou Bird of God by Joanna Boyce Wells (1861)

Joanna married Henry Wells during a visit to Italy in 1857 to 1858, and set up a joint a artistic partnership when they returned to England, Lizzie Siddal being quoted approvingly commenting that Joanna was very much the head of the firm’. It was a tragedy when she died aged just 30 from complications of childbirth.

Up till now the exhibition had featured little more than paintings and drawings. Here for the first time was an object, the exact dress which Joanna wore for a portrait of her done by her husband, Henry. This was a fascinating object in itself, with asymmetrical patterns and the jet black Victorian exterior fitted inside with bright scarlet trim.

The presence of objects in the second half of the exhibition made it feel much more interested and rounded – with a dress, a pair of shoes, a handbag, medallions and so on giving a much fuller sense of the times, and of the range of artistic channels which were available.

7. Fanny Eaton (1835 to 1924) Model

Possibly the most striking revelation of the whole exhibition was the life of Fanny Eaton. She was black, born in Jamaica, came to England with her mother in the 1850s and married working class carter and cabman James Eaton.

By 1859 she had been discovered as a model and sat for Rebecca and Simeon Solomon and Albert Moore. She had a thin face and frizzy hair and one of the best things about this exhibition is the way it’s pulled together half a dozen paintings by different artists which use her as a model, along with her biography and a simply stunning pencil drawing of her by Simeon Solomon.

Fanny Eaton by Joanna Boyce Wells (1861)

8. Georgiana Burne-Jones (1840 to 1920) Wife and model

Georgiana is one of the core figures of the PRB myth. She was one of five MacDonald sisters who all went on to achieve fame and eminence, one of her sister’s sons, for example, going on to become the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.

Her main role in the mythology is a) long-suffering wife who b) suppressed her own talent in devotion to her husband. At the age of fifteen she was engaged to Edward Burne-Jones, who gave her craft and engraving lessons, and then was apprenticed to Ford Madox Brown.

She married Burne-Jones and moved into the core of the movement, getting to know Jane Morris and Lizzie Siddel, between them they discussed plans to publish a volume of illustrated fairy tales.

But the birth of her daughter Margaret put a temporary end to her own artistic aspirations. She was then dismayed by her husband’s very public infatuation with the artist Maria Zambaco. While he painted ever more torrid and sensual pictures featuring Maria as model, Georgiana found herself sidelined into the fate of motherhood, managing her husband’s studios and business, and Being There to comfort him when he returned from a series of infatuations and affairs.

A classic example of the wife as Mother and Martyr.

9. Maria Zambaco (1843 to 1914) Model, muse and sculptor

Maria Cassavetti was born to a wealthy Anglo-Greek businessman based in London, with patron connections with the PRBs. In 1861 she married a Paris-based doctor but the marriage failed and she returned to London with their children. Here she began modelling for Burne-Jones, an activity which quickly developed into ‘an intense love affair’.

Burne-Jones described her as ‘primeval’ and the siting of Maria’s section right next to Georgiana’s beings out Georgiana’s dowdy, proper Victorian demeanour and helps you understand why the uninhibited Greek beauty must have swept Burne-Jones into a new realm.

Georgiana Burne-Jones, née MacDonald (c.1882) photographed by Frederick Hollyer

Now compare and contrast the naked body of Maria, modelling for B-J’s astonishing painting The Tree of Forgiveness.

The Tree of Forgiveness by Edward Burne-Jones (1882)

This is one of three massive paintings which fill the end wall of the exhibition, the other two being Burne-Jones’ The Beguiling of Merlin, which also features Maria as model, and Proserpine by Rossetti. If you love PRB painting this is one wall with its trio of massive paintings are worth kneeling and praying to. They make you realise that at their peak, the works of Millais, Burne-Jones and Rossetti were of an other-worldly brillance in the sense that they are consummate exampes of the art of painting, but also that they successfully create an Otherworld of the imagination, vastly more rich and sumptuous and perfect and wonderful than the actual fallen world, in which Burne-Jones looked like a kindlier version of Rasputin and his wife looks like a tired childminder.

The world they all aimed to create utterly transcended this one to take us into a world of perfect bodies, perfect colours and shades, and uplifting stories of noble figures from the Bible, the Middle Ages of Greek legend.

Anyway, after the affair with Burne-Jones ended, Maria became a sculptor, studying with Alphonse Legros in London and Rodin in Paris. She produced figurines (none of which, alas, are in the exhibition) and also became an expert at portrait medallions and there are four spirited examples of portraits set in circular medallions. Apparently, most of them have been lost, these four survive because Maria presented them to the British Museum soon after they were exhibited at the Royal Academy.

Exhibited at the Royal Academy? I thought the nineteenth century was the age of the patriarchy when all women were forbidden from practising art or writing… apparently not.

10. Jane Morris (1839 to 1914) Model, muse and craftsperson

Jane Burden grew up in poverty and was destined for domestic service until she met the young Pre-Raphaelites who were undertaking a commission to paint a mural at the Oxford Union. Rossetti painted her as a tall elegant noble Queen Guinevere and Morris married her in 1859. She became his partner in what became Morris and Co., managing the embroidery commissions, and a close friend of the Burne-Jones family, whose children called her Auntie Janey. Henry James called her a ‘grand synthesis of all the Pre-Raphaelite paintings ever made’ and photographs of her as a young woman confirm that she had the super-strong features, the strong jaw, cupid lips and tressed hair beloved by the male painters.

Jane Morris at Tudor House (1865) photographed by John Robert Parsons

In 1868 she resumed modelling for Rossetti and they began an affair which lasted until his nervous breakdown in 1876, and inspired a series of his major mature works like Proserpine, above.

Jane was a renowned needlewoman, who also experimented with bookbinding and calligraphy and the exhibition features an evening bag sweetly designed and stitched by her.

11. Marie Spartali Stillman (1844 to 1927) Model and artist

Born, like Maria Zambaco, into the Anglo-Green community in London, Marie’s sister was painted by James Whistler and Marie herself was then asked to pose for the note Victorian woman photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. The famous Victorian woman photographer. (Hmm. You read that and think – ‘So all those times I read about the Victorian patriarchy repressing women and silencing their voices and preventing them expressing themselves…’ here is an example of that simply not being true.)

Spartali decided to become a painter and studied with Ford Madox Brown, who became a lifelong mentor and her first paintings were exhibited in 1867. (So she’s supported by her male father, by her male mentor, given an exhibition by a male gallery owner, and taken up by a male dealer.)

She married an American and went with him to Italy and Greece on business, painting all the while, for her male husband supported her career. She developed a particular style, ‘notable for colour harmony and evocative atmosphere’, depicting late medieval scenes from Chaucer, Dante or Petrarch.

The First meeting of Petrarch and Laura by Marie Spartali Stillman (1889) Note: this work has never been public displayed before so this is a rare opportunity to see it in the flesh

If this painting is anything to go by, her paintings are detailed, colourful and take colourful historical subjects. But they feel weak and underpowered. All the characters are limp-wristed and so are their poses, and the colouring, which is vague and wishy-washy on outline.

Sorry to be predictable, but compare and contrast with The Tree of Forgiveness by Edward Burne-Jones, which has a tremendous dynamism, and a pictorial excitement, by which I mean he has total command over the medium of oil paints to create a wonderfully dynamic and involving image.

Back in the Jane Burden section there’d been a painting of Kelmscott Manor, the Oxfordshire home of William Morris, painted by Marie and which, it seemed to me, suited her style more than human compositions – a landscape as if on a rather misty morning, the house and garden a little foggy and unclear, making it all the more poignant and expressive.

Kelmscott Manor by Marie Spartali Stillman

Apparently her landscapes like this sold well, particularly in America, where you can imagine them providing exactly the kind of idealised view of a picture postcard Cotswold England which rich American collectors warmed to.

Objects: The exhibition includes a pair of evening shoes designed and stitched by Spartali, who was an accomplished seamstress.

12. Evelyn de Morgan (1855 to 1919) Artist

Evelyn was born into an aristocratic family, the great-grand-daughter of the Earl of Leicester, her uncle was the Pre-Raphaelite artist J.R. Spencer Stanhope. She was a prize-winning student at the Slade School of Art. (Hmm. You read that and think: ‘So all those times I read about the Victorian patriarchy repressing women and silencing their voices and preventing them expressing themselves…’ here is another example of that simply not being true.)

She exhibited alongside Marie Spartali and others at the Grosvenor Gallery (hang on, I thought the Victorian patriarchy prevented women from expressing themselves, becoming artists or selling their work) before in 1887 marrying the noted ceramicist William de Morgan. Together they built a close professional and personal relationship, her art sales subsidising his pottery production.

She came a generation after the first PRBs and her style shows a kind of off-shoot of the style. There are several large paintings by her here and their obvious quality is a kind of cartoon simplification of the PRB style.

Night and Sleep by Evelyn De Morgan (1878)

This huge painting, Night and Sleep, is done with consummate skill, the figures, the faces and the drapery all extremely good. And yet, overall, the composition lacks a certain… vigour? Life? I can’t quite put it into words, but – placed amid so many other masterpieces – it didn’t quite do it for me.

Conclusions

1. The art

None of the women artists shown here are as good as the best of the male artists.

Maria Zambaco, Marie Spartali, Evelyn de Morgan and Maria Boyce Wells are often good, sometimes very good – but nothing they made matches the tip-top best of Rossetti, Burne-Jones or Millais. We could argue about this for a long time, but for me, walking from the pallid rather lifeless pictures of de Morgan back to the big works by Rossetti and Burne-Jones was to move from the alright, quite nice, so-so, to supersonic masterpieces.

The exhibition allows you to size up de Morgan’s painting of a dryad:

The Dryad by Evelyn de Morgan (1885)

And then stroll 20 yards back through the gallery to Burne-Jone’s Tree of Forgiveness, above, in order ot make a direct comparison of their treatments of a nearly identical subject.

It was obviously her artistic choice to treat the subject like this, but de Morgan’s painting seems to me thin and cartoony. Good, but… empty and undemanding. Almost naive art. Whereas the Burne-Jones painting has tremendous, muscular energy which lifts you up into the action, like a movie, like a good book.

BUT – all that said – the exhibition DOES work in showing us that these women were not just ciphers and sidekicks. Many of them really were good and notable artists in their own rights and, as new overviews and histories are written, hopefully their achievements will receive a more coverage and understanding.

AND it brings together into one place works that have either never been seen before like The First meeting of Petrarch and Laura by Marie Spartali Stillman or have not been seen in public for 25 years like Thou Bird of God by Wells, and the cumulative effect – especially in the more artist-focused second part of the exhibition – is to create a kind of communal critical mass where you realise that there were a lot of them, they were very talented, and they did have a lot to say.

2. The lives

In a different direction, the exhibition fleshes out the lives and achievements of the women it is easy to dismiss or overlook as ‘simply’ wives or models. Thus, even though they were only, in the end, quite small sections about each of them, I nonetheless got a much better feel for the lives, hopes, aspirations, achievements and frustrations of figures who had often been only names to me (not being a PRB or Arts & Craft completist) such as:

  • Annie Miller and Fanny Cornforth
  • Jane Burden and Lizzie Siddel
  • and a sad feel for the quiet mournful figure of Giorgiana MacDonald.

And the complete revelation of the character and importance of the black model, Fanny Eaton, whose life story is presented here for the first time.

The exhibition curator Dr Jan Marsh, writes:

When people think of Pre-Raphaelitism they think of beautiful women with lustrous hair and loose gowns gazing soulfully from the picture frame or in dramatic scenes painted in glowing colours. Far from passive mannequins, as members of an immensely creative social circle, these women actively helped form the Pre-Raphaelite movement as we know it. It is time to acknowledge their agency and explore their contributions.

I suspect people will continue for a long time to associate Pre-Raphaelitism with ‘beautiful women with lustrous hair and loose gowns gazing soulfully from the picture frame or in dramatic scenes painted in glowing colours’ – simply because that’s what the best of their paintings depict and are famous for depicting and nothing is going to change that any time soon.

If you’re already a fan of the PRB and the later Arts & Crafts movement this will already be a must-see exhibition. But even if you’re not, it turns into quite an eye-opening revelation as to the roles and work and achievements of many of the women who have only hovered on the periphery of the stories up till now. I don’t think it will turn the average person’s view of the movement upside down… but this exhibition marks a distinct shift of the dial.

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Reviews of other National Portrait Gallery exhibitions

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by Simon on December 16, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 16, 2019

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Helene Schjerfbeck @ the Royal Academy

This exhibition takes you on a strange and mysterious journey through the career of one of Finland’s most eminent artists, Helene Schjerfbeck, from entirely conventional late-Victorian naturalism like this:

Self-portrait by Helene Schjerfbeck (1884 to 1885) Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum. Photo by Hannu Aaltonen

Via a kind of haughty modernism like this:

Self-portrait with a black background by Helene Schjerfbeck (1915) Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum. Photo by Yehia Eweis

To the incredibly bleak, post-Holocaust self-portraits of her last few years.

Self-portrait with Red Spot by Helene Schjerfbeck (1944) Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum. Photo by Hannu Aaltonen

Synopsis

Helene Schjerfbeck lived from 1862 to 1945. She is one of Finland’s most eminent artists. This is the first ever UK exhibition ever devoted to her work. It contains some 65 portraits, landscapes and still lifes, selected from the estimated 1,000 works that she produced in a career spanning nearly seventy years.

Early career and studies

Helene was the third child of an office manager in the Finnish state railway’s workshop. The family were lower-middle-class Swedish-speaking Finns. At the age of 11 some of her drawings were shown to a successful painter who arranged a free place for her at the drawing school of the Finnish Art Society. Aged 11! She won a prize every year for the four years she was there.

In 1877 she moved to a private academy in Helsinki, learning to handle oil paints. In 1880 her painting Wounded Soldier in the Snow won a prize from the Finnish Senate which allowed her to go and study in Paris. She made friends and visited Pont-Aven the emerging art colony where Gauguin was later to work.

In 1887 she travelled to St Ives in Cornwall at the invitation of a fellow art student who had married an Englishman. She returned again a year later and made many paintings, enjoying the English coastal light.

The first picture in the show is Two Profiles from 1881, when she was just 18. It took my breath away. The oil paint is laid on in swatches and clearly visible strokes which give a bracing energy and dynamism to what is, on the face of it, a passive image. This reproduction is terrible. In the flesh it is much more bright and airy.

Two Profiles by Helene Schjerfbeck (1881)

All the other early paintings have a tremendous confidence with oil paint, she handles it in the loose expressive way I associate with John Singer Sargent. They all deal with light and sunny Cornish landscapes or healthy looking peasants and workers and family and friends. Chocolate box. The rural settings and confident if (when you look closely) roughly applied paint remind me a bit of the farm paintings of George Clausen.

View of St Ives by Helene Schjerfbeck (1887)

The largest painting from this early phase is The Convalescent from 1888. It is a rich slice of late-Victorian tweeness, complete with a blue-eyed little girl. It was exhibited at the Paris Salon of that year and bought by the Finnish Art Society. It is tremendously proficient. Look at the glass jar on the right of the table. What immense talent she had for this kind of naturalism.

The Convalescent by Helene Schjerfbeck (1888)

Travelling and teaching

There is then a hiatus in the exhibition. The next painting is from 1905. What happened in between? She travelled and got a job as a teacher.

Travel

In 1892 the Finnish Art Society commissioned her to travel to St Petersburg and make copies in the Hermitage Museum of Frans Hals, Diego Velasquez and other Old Masters for the Finnish Collection. In 1894 she visited the Austrian national museum to make more copies, then travelled on to Italy to make copies of Renaissance masters.

Teaching

Schjerfbeck got a job as a teacher in the Finish Art Society’s drawing school. She was, by all accounts, extremely exacting. Complete silence in the classroom.

Ill

Schjerfbeck was always unwell. As a child she had fallen and broken her hip leading to a permanent limp. She fell ill in 1895, took sick leave till 1896, and was again on extended sick leave in 1900. In 1902 she resigned her teaching job and went to live with her mother in the small town of Hyvinkää north of Helsinki. There is a series of portraits of her mother which hint at the psychological tensions between them. Nonetheless her mother’s small state pension meant she didn’t have to work.

Schjerfbeck ended up living in Hyvinkää for fifteen years, corresponding with friends and asking for copies of newspapers and magazines. During this time she used local girls and boys and men and women as models for her painting.

The mature style

All of this goes some way to explaining the radical change which came about in her art. Compare the two women and the little girl in the paintings above with the next one in the exhibition, from 1911.

Schoolgirl by Helene Schjerfbeck (1911)

The idea is that Schjerfbeck no longer needed to compete – to bow to current taste in order to sell things to the Salon or to compete for prizes or sales. Now she could experiment with her vision – and it is completely unlike anything from the 1880s and 90s.

Now the outlines of figures becomes misty and vague. The faces lose the precise features they formerly had. Detailed description disappears in favour of blocks of abstract colour. And the palette becomes deliberately more narrow, so that the compositions seem more aligned, more focused, creating a sense of luminosity.

Many of the paintings are deliberately unfinished, leaving patches of canvas showing through. And in many of them, she either scores the surface of the paint, or lets it dry then scrapes away at it, repaints a new layer, dry, and scrapes it back again – the idea being to mimic the aged and worn affect of the many frescos she had seen on her trip to Italy.

Flappers

The Great War came but didn’t greatly effect her art. Instead this rather misty style continues unabated into the between the wars period. Surprisingly, many of them reflect the fashions of the era. She subscribed to fashion magazines such as Marie Claire and was interested in the slender gender-neutral look of the ‘flapper’, and she also created fictional characters or types. Almost all her models were local working class people but she used them as the basis for novelistic ‘types’ such as The Skiier or The Motorist or, one of the most vivid images, the Circus Girl.

The Circus Girl by Helene Schjerfbeck (1916)

Note the vague unfinishedness of the whole image; the sketchiness of the outline; the sense that it has been scored or marked by charcoal lines; the tonal unity of the yellow background and yellow skin, the pastel top and golden choker. And note the unexpected surprise of the big red lips with their cartoon-style catchlight.

There are 20 or more paintings which are all variations on this theme, and in which the face is more or less stylised. In some it becomes a shield-shaped mask, verging on the abstract and obviously indebted to the experiments the great modernists had made earlier in the century, copying actual tribal masks held in museums of Ethnography.

A handful of other works deliberately reference El Greco who she particularly liked, he was, I suppose, another eccentric or outside-the-mainstream artist.

I love drawing, I love clear defined outlines, but I also love it when they’re not finished, incomplete and hint at a perfection they don’t try to achieve. I love the suggestion of struggle in a work of art. Hence I love lots of sketches and drawings by Degas. And hence I loved lots of Schjerfbeck’s misty, unfinished, gestural works. Is there some Picasso’s harlequin period in this one?

Girl from Eydtkuhne II by Helene Schjerfbeck (1927) Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum. Photo by Hannu Aaltonen

The self portraits

Schjerfbeck painted her first self-portrait at age 22 and her last at 83. The exhibition has a room devoted to them, with seventeen examples placed in simple chronological order, and they create quite a harrowing effect, as shown at the top of this review, progressing from sweet and gentle young woman, in her naturalistic phase, to the haughty modernist of between the wars and then, in the 1930s and 40s, to an awesomely bleak and unforgiving vision. During the 1930s the familiar lineaments of her face are subjected to distortions, her cheekbones melting, her mouth becoming a dark wound. The only colour is grey, shades of grey, grisaille, the only tones left when all the colours of life have drained away.

Self-portrait with Palette by Helene Schjerfbeck (1937)

But these turn out to be only the build-up for the final half dozen self portraits painted during the Second World War as Schjerfbeck, by now an old woman and ill with the cancer which would kill her, morphs into a gaunt, grey, death-haunted skull-face which foreshadows the era of the Holocaust, the atom bomb, and the harrowed writings of Samuel Becket.

Green Self-Portrait – Light and Shadows by Helene Schjerfbeck (1945)

What an extraordinary pilgrimage. And what a distinctive, individual, strange and troubling journey she takes us on. This is a remarkable exhibition.

Promotional video

Curators

Rebecca Bray, Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff, Sarah Lea.

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by Simon on September 16, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 16, 2019

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Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet @ the Royal Academy

This exhibition is a revelation and a treat. Valloton made lots of immensely pleasing, teasing, entertaining, beautiful and slightly puzzling images, enough to make it hard to leave the show. Normally I have half a dozen highlights from an exhibition, but I wanted to take twenty or thirty of Vallotton’s images away with me, wanted to be able to revisit them regularly, especially the woodcuts, and so I bought the catalogue (which is currently selling at the knock-down price of £12.50).

The exhibition is in six rooms so, rather than reinvent the wheel, I might as well follow the academy’s structure, with comments and observations along the way.

Early works

Félix Vallotton was born in 1865 into a Swiss Protestant family in Lausanne. At 16 he headed off for Paris, the art capital of the world, where he showed prodigious talent. He rejected studying at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts and enrolled in the more informal Academie Julian. His early works are realistic and figurative in a way which completely ignored the avant-garde of the day, the (by now) prevailing style of Impressionism, or the various post-Impressionist styles which were on the horizon. From the start he went his own way, and his style right to the end would be realistic and, in many ways, deeply conservative. (Note, by the way, the large plain background to this confident self portrait; we’ll come back to it later…)

Self-portrait at the age of twenty (1885) by Félix Vallotton. Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne. Photo © Nora Rupp

The early Nabis years

The Nabis was a group of French painters who rejected Impressionism in favour of lofty spiritual goals, and were more aligned with the late-nineteenth century movement of Symbolism.

The Nabis (from the Hebrew and Arabic term for ‘prophets’) were a Symbolist, cult-like group founded by Paul Sérusier, who organized his friends into a secret society. Wanting to be in touch with a higher power, this group felt that the artist could serve as a ‘high priest’ and ‘seer’ with the power to reveal the invisible. The Nabis felt that as artists they were creators of a subjective art that was deeply rooted in the soul of the artist. While the works of the Nabis differed in subject matter from one another, they all ascribed to certain formal tenets – for example, the idea that a painting was a harmonious grouping of lines and colours. (from the Art Story website)

The Nabis’ most famous members were Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard. Valloton became involved with the Nabis in the early 1890s and their ideas produced a dramatic change in his style, as he experimented with non-naturalistic ways of playing with colour, pattern and form to try and convey the higher spiritual ideas the Nabis aspired to. Some of these are wonderful, for example an exquisite small stylised painting of a beach by moonlight, and a highly experimental painting of Parisians ice skating to waltz music, their gyrations throwing up sparkly fragments of ice which shimmer with multiple colours.

Waltz by Félix Vallotton (1893) Musée d’art moderne André-Malraux (MuMa), Le Havre, France. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

By far the oddest of these paintings is Bathing on a summer evening which combines all kinds of influences (from Old Master bathing scenes to the Pointillism of his contemporary Seurat, and maybe something of the naive style of Le Douanier Rousseau) to produce something very strange and ‘modern’. The curators point out the influence on many artists of this time of classic Japanese prints, which liberated Western painters from Renaissance perspective and helped them rethink the picture plane as a flat arrangement of lines and blocks of colours.

Bathing on a Summer Evening (1892 to 1893) by Félix Vallotton © Kunsthaus Zürich

However, as the exhibition progresses you realise that early works like this are the exception rather than the rule. Or maybe that they were stepping stones towards his more mature and rather mysterious style. The oddity and ‘spiritual’ aspect of these Nabis works (if that’s what it is) become subsumed into a return to realism, but of a highly stylised variety.

Woodcuts

Valloton began making woodcuts in 1891 and quickly became an acknowledged expert in the medium, which was undergoing a revival across Europe. Changes in printing technology led in the 1880s and especially 1890s to a proliferation of illustrated journals and magazines.

(It was the proliferation of literary and popular magazines in London which led to the market for, and sudden florescence of, brilliant short fiction commissioned from the likes of Oscar Wilde, Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling. And in fact, Vallotton was also a writer, producing three novels and eight plays. He was also heavily involved in the theatre, designed stage sets, took photographs and made sculpture. In his best-known novel, The Murderous Life, the protagonist, Jacques Verdier, has a power which causes everyone in his path to die in a tragic accident. Vallotton illustrated the novel himself in the darkly humorous style of his woodcuts. All this is reminiscent of the black humour of exactly contemporary English works like The Picture of Dorian Grey or of Aubrey Beardsley’s black and white prints.)

Valloton turned out to have a gift for woodcut as a form, being able to produce images which were entertaining, troubling, moody, artistic or humorous, as required. He became principal illustrator for the influential journal La Revue Blanche and, as such, came into contact with and befriended many of Paris’s artistic, musical and literary élite – Mallarmé, Debussy, Proust, Satie and so on.

‘This newcomer, who is not a beginner, engraved on blocks of soft pearwood various scenes of contemporary life with the candour of a sixteenth-century woodcut.’ (French critic Octave Uzanne describing Vallotton’s exceptional talent for printmaking)

The exhibition contains some forty of Vallotton’s woodcuts, arranged by series.

Paris life

I can’t find a figure for how many illustrations he created for La Revue Blanche but presumably it was lots. Included here are all kinds of street scenes including crowds caught in downpours and rioters attacking the police, schoolgirls laughing, swans in the park, a sudden downpour of rain, and so on. My favourite was a beautifully clear and precise image of a naked woman lying on her front on a highly patterned coverlet and reaching out to scratch a cat, titled Laziness.

Laziness (1896) by Félix Vallotton

Musicians

The Musicians series shows starchy Victorian ladies and gents playing the violin or piano or trumpet. The one that caught my eye was a man playing the flute but keeping a wary eye on a cat which looks like it’s about to pounce on him or his sheet music.

The Flute (1896) by Félix Vallotton

Worlds Fair

There’s a series of six woodcuts on the subject of the 1900 Paris World Fair, showing visitors gawping at jewels, having a picnic lunch, caught in a sudden rain shower, a recreation of a street scene in Algiers, a footbridge between displays, and, finally, a vivid woodcut depicting fireworks. All these illustrations are wonderfully vivid and characterful and fascinating social history.

Intimacies

Most famous is the series of ten graphic woodcuts he titled Intimacies. These portray the sexual mores of Parisians, and the moral and psychological intensity of late-Victorian affairs. Each one shows a scene fraught with sexual or psychological tension (I say ‘sexual’ – there’s no nudity; everything is implied).

Below is maybe the most striking and intriguing one, Money. What money, where? Is the man handing her money (doesn’t look like it) or offering her money verbally? For what? Sex? To buy her silence? Is she his mistress? Or an unhappy wife?

The curators point out Valloton’s striking use of black. It’s simple but extremely effective to have about two-thirds of the image, the whole right side, jet black. Thus the man doesn’t stand against a backdrop or shadow, but emerges out of the blackness. He is part of the blackness. All the others in the Intimacies series are just as strange and teasing and suggest complex psychodramas on which we are eavesdropping.

Intimacies V: Money (1898) by Félix Vallotton © Musées d’art et d’histoire, Ville de Genève, Cabinet d’arts graphiques

Vallotton’s extensive experience churning out woodcuts recording and satirising contemporary Paris life, fed over into his paintings. During this period they stopped being either the rather stiff portraits and still lifes of his first years in Paris, or the experimental paintings mentioned above like the Waltzers or Bathers, and became more like accompaniments in paint of the contemporary social themes he was depicting in the woodcuts. Especially the Intimacies theme of the complexity of male-female relations, the complex lies and deceptions of the Paris bourgeoisie as they go about their affairs and infidelities. One is titled Five O’Clock which, we learn from the wall label, was the time of day when the Parisian bourgeois left their offices and went to visit their mistresses for an hour of pleasure, before returning home to their wives and families. Another shows a naked woman curled up in a very red chair, in a sort of defensive or foetal posture. You can’t help asking why. Has something bad happened to her, has she received good or bad news, or is it her usual comforting position?

Uncertainties

This is the theme or feeling which is present in his earlier paintings but comes more and more to the fore during the 1890s – which is that, although his technique remained pretty conservative (especially if you consider what was happening around him in Paris, with Picasso and Matisse just over the horizon), nonetheless, there is a very modern sense of unease and ambiguity about his paintings from the 1890s.

A good example is The Visit from 1899. Three points: 1. What is going on in this painting? Has she just arrived? Are they dancing? Or is he pushing her towards the open door at the left which we can assume leads into a bedroom? So is it an illicit visit from a mistress?

The Visit (1899) by Félix Vallotton © Kunsthaus Zürich

2. Note the bold colours. This is what Valloton had in common with the other Nabis: it’s a figurative scene alright, but all the colours are too overbright and simplified. It is this overlit colouring which creates the unsettling mood as much as the composition.

3. As are the faces. You can see the influence of all those hundreds of popular woodcuts, which required often cartoon-like simplicity of faces, spilling over into a simplification of the faces and indeed the outlines of the bodies in his paintings. It’s a painting of a real scene but all done with overbright simplifications of colour and outline which bring to mind, say, the style of American painter Edward Hopper. The clothes and decor have changed but the mood of lassitude or ambiguity, the troubled atmosphere between a man and a woman, are very similiar and above all, conveyed by simplifying the shape and colour of the figures, and leaving their faces blurred and shadowed.

Room in New York by Edward Hopper (1932)

Marriage

In 1899 Valloton dumped the Bohemian mistress he had lived with during the 1890s, and married Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques. This was an excellent career move in two ways. 1. She was the widowed daughter of Alexandre Bernheim, one of the most successful art dealers in Europe, and her brothers still ran the immensely successful art dealership. 2. She was rich.

At a stroke Vallotton moved from a garret studio with a mistress into a grand city house with a wife and step-children. He entertained. He became a good bourgeois and family man.

And his style changed, too. For a start he stopped making the woodcuts which had provided his livelihood during the 1890s, and ceased working for La Revue Blanche. Freed from financial worries he concentrated all his energies on painting.

A lot of these new paintings feature his wife, in a variety of respectable family poses, on the family sofa, or at the family dinner table. These portraits show the enduring influence on him of one of his heroes, Ingres, the painter of crystal-clear nudes and women’s faces.

But alongside these respectable paintings are others, also apparently sensible and polite, which nonetheless exude a strange unease and sense of foreboding. It is as if the psychological tensions he had investigated so ably in the Intimacies woodcuts has been driven underground to become merely implicit, barely implicit, only just noticeable.

The curators single out one particular painting from this period, The Ball, which shows a little girl in a garden chasing after a ball. What could be more innocent? And yet, when you look at it in the flesh, there is something very eerie about the way the shadow is creeping across the grass from the left and onto the gravel drive – almost as if it’s reaching out for her. And the darker shadows lurking at the bottom of the shrubbery above the girl. And something a little uncanny about the two figures in the distance…

The Ball (1899) by Félix Vallotton © Musée d’Orsay

This unsettling effect is much more obvious in a brilliant painting titled simply The Pond. A realistic painting of a pond, what could be more plain and simple? And yet (once again, more in the flesh than in this flat reproduction) once you’ve noticed the way the blackness of the pond water is seeping weirdly towards you, it’s impossible not to be a little worried by it. It’s like a still from the Disney film Fantasia, it looks like the shadow of the mountain coming to life, with big devil’s horns, rearing towards you…

The Pond (1909) by Félix Vallotton

Nudes

Also, from about 1904 onwards, alongside the many fully clothed and respectable portraits of his wife and step-children, Valloton began to focus his energies on the nude, the female nude.

If you realise that Picasso and Matisse were just launching their careers at just this time, it is astonishing just how conservative and traditional Valloton’s style was. If you do a quick google search of Félix Vallotton+nude it is astonishing to discover that he did so many of them.

Many of the nudes explicitly refer to the great tradition of Old Masters from his favourite, Ingres, through to Manet’s Olympia. In all of them there is a cold, detached, calculating air. The largest of the half dozen or so on display here is the wonderful White Woman and Black Woman of 1913.

White Woman and Black Woman (1913) by Félix Vallotton © Fondation Hahnloser, Winterthour

1. The clarity There is hardly any shadow in the room. Everything is depicted in the exact crystalline light of Ingres.

2. The technical virtuosity Look at him show off his ability to paint folds of cloth, one of the litmus tests of the Old Masters stretching back to Titian.

3. Psychology In the Olympia of Manet the fully clothed black servant is bringing flowers to the naked prostitute Olympia, very obviously serving her. But what on earth is the relationship here, between the black woman who’s very casually dressed and – for God’s sake – smoking a fag!? All kinds of speculation is possible, the curators’ favourite one being that they are lesbian lovers, but it looks much more complex and weird than that.

4. The nude The depiction of the white woman’s naked body is quite simply stunning. It is a masterwork in the depiction of fleshtones, and the way they vary across the naked body, rising towards her flushed red cheeks. Why are her cheeks flushed and red?

You remember me pointing out about the first painting in this review, how the background is a flat, bare wash? Well, same here. Once I’d processed the lavish sensual appeal of the naked body in this painting, and then wondered about the relationship between the two figures, than I turned to consider a third level or avenue of approach, which is to see it purely as a composition of colours – and surely the most striking thing is the huge size of the aquamarine wall behind both figures. Against which is set the black woman’s brilliant orange headscarf. And then her bright blue wrap, for sure. If it is a virtuoso display of folds and shadows in fabric, it is also, on another level, an exercise in big blocks of colour. Once I’d noticed this fondness for slabs of colour, I began to notice it in many of his paintings, and also link it up with his decisive use of solid black in the woodcuts. It’s an entire visual approach to see things as blocks rather than broken up into the multitude of details.

Landscapes

In 1909, alongside his prodigious output of nudes, Valloton turned his attention to landscapes. As with so many of his earlier depictions of people, these were done in a simplified style which often brought out the basic shapes underlying messy nature and, as with the nude above, done in primary or elemental colours.

A good example is The Pond, above, with its radical simplification of pond, grass, shrubs and trees to create an almost cartoon-like image.

He called them composed landscapes. He had taken to using a box camera at the turn of the century and now it became a habit to take photos of a scene and then use that, once developed, to paint the scene from the simplified (black and white) photo and from memory. He dreamed, he said, ‘of a painting free from any literal respect for nature.’

The result was landscapes reduced to broad ‘zones’ or shapes of colour which recall the simplifications of the woodblock. And also hark back to the principles of the Nabis from a decade or more earlier, the idea that art needn’t be realistic, but was more a matter of finding the colours and patterns which replicated your inner feelings.

A late landscape which really got me was Last Rays painted at Honfleur where Vallotton spent many of his summers and where he made several versions of this scene of umbrella pine trees overlooking the Bay of the Seine. In its simplification and strong sense of design it subtly references the clarity of the Japanese prints which had so influenced him in the 1890s.

Last Rays (1911) by Félix Vallotton © Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper

A conventional artist?

But, also, looking round any of the rooms, I kept being amazed at how… conventional Vallottin is. It’s as if Impressionism or any other modern art movement had never happened. Towards the end of the exhibition, I began to realise why I’d never heard of Félix Vallotton before – because he stands so totally outside the classic narrative of Modern Art, and its core lineage from Impressionism thru Post-Impressionism, to the eruption of Picasso and Matisse, and then into Cubism, Futurism etc etc.

None of this seems to have had any impact on Vallotton, and if you look at his Wikipedia article, you do get the impression that many if not most of his paintings can be read as utterly traditional and ‘straight’.

Which set me wondering whether the curator’s attempt to rebrand Vallotton as the painter of ‘unease’ quite stacks up. There’s nothing particularly uneasy about the trees at sunset above, nor about many of the nudes which are just skillful paintings of naked women, often in not very flattering postures, but depicted with beautiful fluency.

Maybe it would be impossible just to stage an exhibition of Vallotton’s work ‘cold’ as it were; maybe it would come across as too conventional and, possibly, in some cases, kitsch, as reworkings of Ingres-style nudes and Flemish-style still lifes being painted in the 1910s.

Maybe the curators had to find an angle, some kind of modernist theme, to make him appear edgy and relevant.

The Great War

Then the Great War broke out. Vallotton was swept up in the patriotic fervour (he had become a French citizen in 1900) but was dismayed to discover he was too old (49) to enlist. Interestingly, the war sparked the decision to create a new series of woodcuts, a genre he hadn’t touched since 1900. Maybe he associated the woodcut with journalism, with the immediate depiction of a society’s life, with the everyday activities of its citizens, and so with the journalistic immediacy of the war and its horrors. In fact the images were copied from newspaper photos or articles before he worked them up into woodcuts.

The result was a series of six woodcuts, collectively titled This is War! and consisting of: The Trench, The Orgy (being a piss-up in a wine cellar), Barbed wire, In the Darkness, the Lookout, and The Civilians.

The Trench (1915) by Félix Vallotton © Bibliothèque de Lausanne / Cabinet de gravures et xylogravures

In their stylised simplification, all six are cartoon-like and almost comic. They remind me a little of the Great War cartoons of William Heath-Robinson. They certainly evince the kind of visual humour which characterised the woodcuts of the 1890s and which largely disappeared from his paintings after 1900. It’s interesting to think that it was there all along, this impish humour, but that he had consciously suppressed it in order to become ‘a serious artist’.

In 1917 Vallotton managed to secure a government commission to tour the trenches in the Champagne region, which led to paintings of the battlefields of Verdun, of ruined churches behind the lines and so on.

Haunted realism

In line with the curator’s thesis that Vallotton is the painter of quiet unease, they end with an image which combines everything we’ve learned so far. It is an astonishingly realistic depiction of peppers on a plate, summarising his prodigious gift as a draughtsman and colorist, and his reverence for the naturalistic tradition of the Old Masters. (Also, I note, the blank slablike colouring of the neutral background.)

But this dazzling work of photorealism was painted during the appalling blood-letting of the Great War, and the curators draw our attention to the knife. Nothing in the picture justifies the way the knife blade is half covered in something red. Is it blood, symbolising the immense bloodletting going on all across the once peaceful civilised continent of Europe? Or just a reflection of the peppers next to it?

Red Peppers (1915) by Félix Vallotton. Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Dübi-Müller Foundation. Photo © SIK-ISEA, Zurich

Disquiet or not?

Let’s weight the evidence.

The popular illustrative woodblocks he made for La Revue Blanche don’t display a trace of ‘disquiet’, they’re entertaining and very straightforward pictures of Parisians in parks or rain showers or at the Worlds Fair. But the Intimacies series of woodcuts are all about bourgeois guilt, hypocrisy and unease.

Some of the landscapes are just simplified landscapes stylised in the way he had made his own. But others, yes, some of the others are strange and a little… disconcerting.

And many of the paintings made during the 1890s definitely depict fully-dressed bourgeois couples in ambiguous situations. Or single individuals in rather… puzzling moods.

Of the half dozen nudes here, most are just paintings of women without their clothes on, highlighting the way women’s tummies or boobs can hang very unromantically downwards if they’re lying on their sides. But some of them hint at something a little more… mysterious and teasing…

So are the curators justified in labelling Vallotton ‘the painter of disquiet’? It’s hard to say. You’d have to review all 70 or so works on display here with this thesis in mind: maybe… And then are you allowed to review the rest of his works which are readily available online and most of which seem remarkably… un-disquieting…

All I can say with certainty is that this exhibition is a revelation of a painter I’d never heard of before – whose woodcuts are entertaining, charming and evocative – and whose range of paintings, from mysterious interiors to stunningly accurate nudes, through to the entrancing simplicity of the ‘composed landscapes’, from family portraits to slightly unnerving still lives – present an array of accessible, attractive, memorable and subtly haunting images. Wow. Very enjoyable. Well worth the price of admission.

Promotional video

Curators

Senior Curator, Ann Dumas; Assistant Curator, Anna Testar.

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by Simon on September 15, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Painting, Prints
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Posted by Simon on September 15, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/09/15/felix-vallotton-painter-of-disquiet-royal-academy/

Dalí / Duchamp @ the Royal Academy

‘To systematise confusion and thereby contribute to a total discrediting of the world of reality.’
(Dalí’s aim, stated in his book, The Putrefied Donkey, 1930)

This exhibition of around 80 works by ‘father of conceptual art’ Marcel Duchamp, and ‘larger-than-life Surrealist’ Salvador Dalí aims to ‘throw light on their surprising relationship and its influence on the work of both artists.’ It also brings together in one place a number of their classic works; you can either read the story of their friendship in minute detail, or step back and marvel at a handful of works which changed the face of 20th century art (or both).

Lobster Telephone (1938) by Salvador Dali and Edward James. Photo by West Dean College, part of Edward James Foundation/© Salvador Dali, Fundacia Gala-Salvador Dali, DACS 2017

Lobster Telephone (1938) by Salvador Dali and Edward James. Photo by West Dean College, part of Edward James Foundation/© Salvador Dali, Fundacia Gala-Salvador Dali, DACS 2017

What have they got in common? Well, their surnames both start with D. But they come from different generations (Duchamp born 1887, Dalí born 1904), Duchamp was cerebral, ironic, thoughtful, retiring; Dalí was garish, gregarious, turning himself into a preposterous showman. On the face of it, Tweedleduchamp and Tweedledalí.

But after a meeting some time in 1930 they evidently got on. In 1933 Duchamp visited Dalí in Spain, they worked closely together on the ‘sceneography’ of the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition, wrote essays and comments on each other’s work and after the war, every summer Duchamp rented rooms in near Dalí’s house at Cadaqués in north-east Spain.

The show displays a number of photos of Duchamp on the beach, along with Dalí and his devoted wife, Gala, as well as chatty postcards the artists exchanged.

Early works

One of the interests of the show is the handful of really early works by both artists, showing what conventional beginnings they had. They both did conventional-looking portraits of their fathers, Duchamp’s adopting the flavour of the post-impressionists, Dalí’s showing the impact of post-war neo-classicising Modernism.

And there’s an interesting cubist work by Dalí.

Notice the discrepancy of dates, though. Duchamp was already a practicing artist when the Great War broke out, Dalí still a child. By 1913 Duchamp was fed up of painting. Even as the cubists were inventing new perspectives, Duchamp had concluded that the tradition of Western painting was exhausted. In his studio in New York he experimented with alternative ways of making art.

Retinal versus Modern painting

Looking back from 1954, Duchamp wrote that after Impressionism the visual perception required by all art movements stopped at the retina: Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Abstraction they are all kinds of retinal art, meaning that they are concerned only with visual perception. He was impatient with this. A cerebral man, he wanted art with a bit more thought.

Later, in 1966, he recalled that just before the Great War the great thing was what the French call patte, meaning the hand, meaning the direct involvement of the hand in painting, the handiness, the imprint of the artist’s brushstrokes, a testament to the directness of artistic creation.

Again, Duchamp felt he was reacting against this peasant primitivism. He thought there should be a role for mind and reason and intellect in art. This is the context for his experiments with objects picked up in shops and the street, the so-called ‘readymades’. They and his other experiments were attempts to overthrow or go beyond the hand and retina in art, in fact to go beyond the entire Western tradition of the artist as a ‘maker’ or craftsman.

The earliest readymade was Bicycle wheel (1913), assembled from two parts, a bike wheel mounted on a stool. In time he came to call these ‘assisted readymades’ because they did require some intervention, as opposed to pure ‘readymades’ which are presented exactly as found.

Bicycle Wheel (1913, 6th version 1964) by Marcel Duchamp. Photo © Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada/© Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017

Bicycle Wheel (1913, 6th version 1964) by Marcel Duchamp. Photo © Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada/© Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017

The first pure readymade i.e. an unchanged found object, was Bottle Rack (1914), an example of a mass-produced artefact owned by millions of French people. But this one had been selected and purchased by Duchamp, who indicated his intervention with a small inscription.

There’s a big display case in this exhibition which includes Bicycle wheel and Bottle rack and the most famous readymade of all, Fountain.

Fountain (1917 - replica 1964) by Marcel Duchamp. Rome, National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art. Photograph © Schiavinotto Giuseppe/© Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017

Fountain (1917, replica 1964) by Marcel Duchamp. Rome, National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art. Photograph © Schiavinotto Giuseppe/© Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017

Fountain (1917) is one of the icons of 20th century art, a mass manufactured urinal, placed untouched in a gallery except for the hand-written signature (in fact not Duchamp’s name, but one of his jokey, Dada alter egos, R. Mutt).

This begged the question, ‘What is a work of art?’ which people are still merrily asking to this day and will, forever. The practical answer is, ‘Anything a curator decides is a work of art and is worth buying and installing in a gallery’. Plenty of people think they’re artists and think they’re creating works of art and they and their friends and family might all agree – but only when a curator agrees, buys it, writes about it, displays it – does it enter the canon. Is it validated.

The commentary points out that the basic condition for choosing a readymade object was that Duchamp should remain aesthetically indifferent to it. He didn’t choose them because they’re beautiful. They’re not. The opposite: bicycle wheel, bottle rack, urinal.

The whole idea of the readymade was to get rid of taste, to dispense with the cult of the patte, the Artist’s Holy Hand.

The great irony is that it didn’t, did it? The Abstract Expressionists made a fetish of the visibility of the artist’s every gesture and stroke, and Jasper Johns – subject of a massive retrospective right next door to this exhibition – included hand prints in numerous paintings.

Duchamp’s readymades invented a place where artists (and viewers) can go, and gave rise to vast oceans of Conceptual Art. But it didn’t overthrow conventional art in the slightest. It just added a new wing to the old building.

The curators claim that these readymades ‘operate in a no man’s land between art and life’, which I thought was amusing.

a) Note the grandiose rhetoric

– ‘operate’ making them sound like secret agents, ‘no man’s land’ makes the whole thing sound like a World War One battlefield instead of a genteel, upper-class gallery.
b) They emphatically don’t. They are unmistakably works of art. I can tell because they are hanging in an expensive art gallery and, if I touched any of them, I would be warned, if I tried to take a photograph (banned) I would be told off, and if I walked off with one of them I would be arrested.
c) I.e. there can be no doubt whatsoever that they are extremely rare, precious and valuable works of art.

L.H.O.O.Q.

Less imposing is his 1919 work, L.H.O.O.Q. It’s a cheap postcard of the Mona Lisa on which Duchamp drew a moustache and beard.

L.H.O.O.Q. by Marcel Duchamp (1919)

L.H.O.O.Q. by Marcel Duchamp (1919)

It’s not exactly difficult to copy or reproduce, which is part of the point. Duchamp went on to produce numerous variations and version, including one with no beard or moustache and wittily titled L.H.O.O.Q. shaved.

I didn’t realise that the apparently obscure title has a simple explanation. When you say the French letters out loud they sound like ‘Elle a chaud au cul’, a slang expression literally meaning ‘She is hot in the arse’, or ‘she’s on heat’. The Mona Lisa was one of the jewels in the collection of Western art in the Louvre, venerated by the French bourgeoisie as embodying everything noble about French civilisation. So this wasn’t a small insult but a calculated subversion of an entire set of values.

This kind of shocking the bourgeoisie is what attracted both Dada and Surrealist artists to Duchamp. Dalí later wrote that L.H.O.O.Q was a fitting end-point to Western art. Except it wasn’t. The curators – with a kind of thumping inevitability – claim it is a work which questions ‘ideas of originality and authenticity and gender’.

Rrose Sélavy

This habit of schoolboy punning also explains the name he gave to his female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy. At various points Duchamp dressed in women’s clothes, put on make-up, attended functions or had himself photographed as this severe Parisian lady.

Again, if you pronounce the name slowly in French it has another meaning – ‘Eros, c’est la vie’, which translates as ‘Eros, that is life’, or more simply, Love is life, the love in question having a strong sexual overtone.

Duchamp’s distance

Although Duchamp spent the First World War in New York, news of his work spread among the Dada movement in Europe. He never joined the group but was admired for his anti-art stance – an admiration carried on into the Surrealist movement, founded by many of the former Dadaists.

However, Duchamp never joined the Surrealists either, though he became friends with many of them, as the photos by Man Ray suggest. He was probably too rational and controlled to join a movement which is all about the irrational and automatic. Nonetheless, the leader of the Surrealists Andre Breton saw Duchamp’s readymades as the first Surrealist objects and included them in an exhibition with that title.

Surrealism didn’t get properly going until the Surrealist manifestos were published in 1924. By that time Duchamp had cultivated the idea that he had abandoned art altogether in order to play chess professionally. This was far from the truth, as he continued making works of art well into the 1960s – but for most of this period Duchamp was the hidden man and when he was tracked down and interviewed, was very quiet, modest and sane.

The opposite of Salvador Dalí. Dalí enthusiastically entered into the spirit of Surrealism and in 1931 came up with the idea of the ‘Object of Symbolic Function’, an object which supposedly epitomises Surrealist ambitions of bringing unconscious dreams, desires, fantasies into the real world. A good example was his Aphrodisiac Jacket (1936), an ordinary dinner jacket with liqueur glasses sown into it.

Dalí’s discovers the inclined plane

Dalí was young. He came to all this late. He was 10 when the Great War broke out, 12 when Dada was formed, 14 when Duchamp made Fountain, and just turning 20 when the first Surrealist manifesto was written and published by the leader of the group, poet André Breton.

After the early experiments – the father portrait, messing about with Cubism – it was news to me that at the tender age of 24 Dalí considered abandoning painting altogether, declaring that the future lay in photography and film.

He wasn’t wrong but film and photography didn’t work out, so he returned to painting in 1929 with a work which broke with his previous pieces. It introduced an unrealistically smooth, deep, perspective on which he could sit all kinds of incongruous objects.

The First Days of Spring (1929) by Salvador Dali. Collection of the Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida. © Salvador Dali, Fundacia Gala-Salvador Dali, DACS 2017

The First Days of Spring (1929) by Salvador Dali. Collection of the Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida. © Salvador Dali, Fundacia Gala-Salvador Dali, DACS 2017

Apparently, this painting also contains elements of collage and textures included in it. But the blindingly obvious components are the huge, empty, sweeping plain conceived as a stage for realistically depicted figures and objects undergoing strange transformations or caught in peculiar alienated poses.

He had invented an entire aesthetic which he would mine for the next 50 years or so, which led to the production of hundreds of variations, including some later masterpieces included here.

Nonetheless, in a revealing comment his friend Man Ray said that Dalí didn’t really like painting and would have much preferred to be a photographer. Although his paintings are dominated by soft-edged, often melting, forms, it’s worth bearing in mind this comment, and rethinking his paintings as settings of objects which have been arranged and staged as if for a photograph.

Sex

Both men were heterosexual males and had lifelong obsessions with sex and the female body, Duchamp in a generally discreet way, Dalí in an unembarrassed, flaunting way.

Here is Duchamp, just before he packed in painting, doing nudes. As you can see he is far more interested in the idea of movement, trying to capture movement in art, than in tits and bums (this phrase is taken from the title of the 1973 Monty Python book, Tits n’ Bums: A Weekly Look at Church Architecture, featuring articles such as ‘Are you still a verger?’)

The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes (1912) by Marcel Duchamp. Philadelphia Museum of Art © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017

The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes (1912) by Marcel Duchamp. Philadelphia Museum of Art © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017

The curators call this section of the show ‘The Body as Object’, which is a typically curatorspeak way of pussyfooting around the subject. It includes pretty silly works by Duchamp, such as a plaster cast of a woman’s labia, and another sculpture which appears to be a jockstrap. Allegedly, Duchamp was interested in the erotic, but you wouldn’t really have guessed.

On display are sketches and preparatory work for his last great piece, Étant donnés (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas, French: Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau / 2° le gaz d’éclairage) which he worked on from 1946 till 1966 and wasn’t finally displayed until after his death, in 1969. It consists of a tableau, visible only through a pair of peep holes (one for each eye) in a wooden door, of a nude woman lying on her back with her face hidden and legs spread holding a gas lamp in the air in one hand against a landscape backdrop.

Not very erotic is it? More of a disturbing image. I’ve read the suggestion that the body is a corpse and the whole thing is a crime scene, but then how is it holding a lamp up? Certainly the body has a cold, lumpen appearance more like a corpse than a sex object.

Meanwhile, in sunny Spain, Dalí luxuriated in the erotic. He was often at the beach with his smiling wife, Gala. Photos of them at the beach show a handsome couple: she was good looking, but he was gorgeous.

Dalí had no inhibitions when it came to showing the erotic, or the pornographic, in art. Thus the show includes several versions of a sketch of Dalí ‘eating’ a figure of Gala while masturbating – which come to a head in a vivid painting titled William Tell and Gradiva. Near to it is a lovely ink-and-pencil drawing of two full length women in billowing gowns titled Gradiva, one among numerous examples here of what a bewitching draughtsman Dalí could be.

The name Gradiva rang a bell. I knew that Gradiva is a novella by the German writer Wilhelm Jensen which was made the subject of a 1908 essay by Sigmund Freud. Freud used it to give a detailed example of how his theory of psychoanalysis could be applied to unearth buried themes and ideas in literature, beginning the process whereby Freudian psychoanalysis would go on to become a major thread of literary criticism.

But I didn’t know that Gradiva was a nickname Dalí gave his wife, Gala – so these Gradiva paintings and sketches are very autobiographical. Nor that other Surrealists featured Gradiva in their paintings and that she became so much of a muse to various Surrealists that, when the Surrealist writer André Breton opened an art gallery on the Rive Gauche, 31 rue de Seine in 1937, he gave it the name the Gradiva Gallery. Nor that the iconic door into the gallery was designed by Duchamp.

That’s a lot of context to take in and appreciate for one painting and a few sketches.

The importance of context

Which leads into one of the biggest conclusions I drew from the exhibition, which is the importance of the intellectual and historical context of these works.

Alongside the paintings and sculptures and readymades are quite a few display cases showing magazine articles, newspaper pieces, manifestos, books, essays, catalogues, letters, notes and sketches and diagrams and post cards relating to them. Dalí wrote essays about Duchamp. Duchamp wrote manifestos and essays about his own work. Dalí wrote lengthy books of theory. That’s jungle enough.

But both of them were also surrounded by complex networks of other artists all clamouring about their own work, jostling for position, launching volleys of provocations and reams of interpretations.

As the hand-out makes clear, Surrealism was to begin with a movement of artists and poets – of writers. It was only later that visual artists got involved, which explains the time lag between the first Surrealist manifesto of 1924 and the dating of many Surrealist art classics to the 1930s.

My point is that all these works were conceived and created amid a tremendous tangle of texts, articles and manifestos, declarations of principles and aims and goals all of which have fallen away like flesh from a carcass, leaving the works stranded in the antiseptic space of these display cases, hanging from the white walls of the gallery like the bare bones of a whale on the beach.

These works have then been reconstituted, rehung, reintroduced and retold to fit contemporary concerns, interests and rhetorics, to reflect the interests, language and rhetoric of the modern world and contemporary academic discourse – the all-too-familiar ‘issues’ of gender, identity and desire, which almost all art – no matter what it looks like – turns out to be addressing in the view of modern curators.

The manifestos and other paperwork, which made sense of the works in their time, are certainly on display here, but you can’t really read them and you certainly can’t turn over the pages. In effect, unintentionally, they are censored. Only the snippets which support curatorial aims are cut and pasted into the curatorial discourse in which the works are embedded.

I think this partly accounts for the tremendous sense of loss which hangs round the works, especially Duchamp’s.

There’s another level of loss or absence, prompted by the obvious thought that all these texts are in French, and all this creative thought and activity took place in French, in France, embedded in the density of French culture and history – all of which are very different from our Anglo-Saxon tradition.

1. Boobs

1. Take boobs. The French are not as hung up about women’s breasts as we are (something I realised when my parents took me on holiday to the South of France and I couldn’t believe the number of French women walking about topless as if they couldn’t care less).

Compare and contrast the stress and neurosis surrounding women’s breasts in the Anglo-Saxon world, from the endless arguments about Page Three of the Sun to the contemporary ‘Free the Nipple’ movement to the fuss made about Janet Jackson’s top falling open to reveal her nipple during the 2004 Superbowl interval show.

Despite all efforts to the contrary, there continues to be something prudish, narrow-minded and uptight about the Anglo-Saxon attitude towards the naked human body.

2. France is a Catholic country.

From local curés to archbishops France’s official religious culture is more aggressively conservative and reactionary than our own ineffectual Church of England. This meant that desecration of religious imagery was hugely more significant in the French tradition. It also explains why the reaction to French Catholic culture and politics was that much more radical and extreme. The bitter opposition between Catholics and radicals has run through French politics and culture since the Revolution, through the Commune, the immensely bitter Dreyfus Affair, on into the tremendous power wielded by the French Communist Party during the 1930s and then in the decades after the second World War.

British politics and culture have just never been so polarised: we have an upper-class toff party or the party of timid trade unions to choose between. There have never been significant numbers of fascists or communists in Britain.

To summarise – these works have been subject to at least two translations:

  • They have been surgically cleansed of all reference to the intellectual support system which gave rise to them
  • And they have been translated from the intensely intellectual and more openly sexual atmosphere of France into the less reflective and more buttoned-up world of les Anglos

Texts

Anyway, back to texts. Duchamp was far the more cerebral of the two. He worked on the obscure and puzzling work, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, for eight years, from 1915 to 1923. The original was lost long ago but was reconstructed from photos and diagrams by Pop artist Richard Hamilton, and his reconstruction can be seen in Tate.

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915, 1965-6 and 1985) by Marcel Duchamp (reconstruction By Richard Hamilton) Photo © Tate, London, 2017/© Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915, 1965 to 1966 and 1985) by Marcel Duchamp (reconstruction By Richard Hamilton) Photo © Tate, London, 2017/© Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017

It is symptomatic, though, that Duchamp intended this big sheet of glass to be accompanied by The Green Box, a collection of texts, diagrams and explanatory notes. These are here, in a display case, but they aren’t really readable, or very much explained.

I experienced a profound sense of missing the point, as with several other Duchamp pieces in this room. Clearly something intense, carefully planned and important is going on. It took long enough to make, after all. But what and why? I’m guessing that some kind of pamphlet-length explanation is required, hence Duchamp’s wish for accompanying texts and explanations. In the absence of really detailed text or guide these odd works sit abandoned and inscrutable.

This is the exact opposite of Dalí’s paintings. The examples of his mature work in the final room as dazzling in their fluency, inventiveness and power. They were so widely reproduced and available in my boyhood, so much of the poster-world of art’s greatest hits, that it’s easy to take them for granted – but a work like St John is absolutely stunning, a huge towering presence, surely a masterpiece.

Christ of Saint John of the Cross (c. 1951) by Salvador Dali. Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection

Christ of Saint John of the Cross (c. 1951) by Salvador Dali. Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection

Optical illusions

The exhibition suggests they shared an interest in optical illusions. Hence the nude-in-motion paintings right at the start of Duchamp’s career. Hence the clever use of contradictory or paradoxical perspective schemes in the upper and lower part of Dalí’s St John crucifixion.

The exhibition also includes a number of very hand-made, amateurish panopticons or look-through-the-little-slots-at-a-fantasy-landscape pieces which Duchamp constructed, all of which can be seen as preparation for the puzzling final work, Étant donnés which has to be observed through a peephole.

Dalí’s experiments with perspective and other optical illusions are a key element in his paintings, as in another masterpiece in the show.

Chess

Duchamp loved chess. He spread the rumour in the mid-1920s that he had abandoned art altogether in order to concentrate on playing chess professionally (could you really make a living from just playing chess in the 1925?). A display case lingers on his love of the game, and features both the early chess set that Duchamp himself used and a later, surreal one, made by Dalí, in which the pieces are mouldings of fingers, fingertips for the pawns, the whole finger wearing crowns for the king and queen but, unexpectedly, salt cellars for the rooks.

Chess set for Marcel Duchamp by Salvador Dalí

Chess set for Marcel Duchamp by Salvador Dalí

Chess boards and pieces appear in numerous surrealist paintings. Chess is to European art what poker is to American culture, a kind of central reference point which epitomises the culture, thoughtful European intellectuals on the one hand, Wild Western rednecks ready to pull out a gun at the drop of a hat in the violent States.

Apart from all its other elements, chess is a study of time and movement. On reflection you can see that its highly stylised moves continue Duchamp’s abiding interest in movement and motion. In the small room devoted to the chess pieces, as well as related artefacts, there’s a video playing in which Duchamp explains the aesthetic interest of chess.

He declares that a shot of the chess board at any one moment isn’t particularly interesting. What is interesting is that the pieces are locked into moving in a limited number of technically restricted ways. Thus something about the idea of a game, the idea of the movement of a finite number of pieces according to strict rules of movement but through a potentially infinite number of moves – that is beautiful, that can be a work of art.

It’s very winning to see the same anti-art, elliptical, sideways sensibility alive and well in the 70 year-old man as it was in the thirty year-old who created Fountain.

Films and TV

The commentary suggests that Dalí was the first celebrity artist of the TV age. His early interventions may have been in arthouse movies with Luis Bunuel but by the 1950s he was appearing on U.S. gameshows (‘What’s my Line?’) on TV specials, starring in documentaries and news reports made about him, generally milking the apparatus of celebrity for all it was worth. Thus the show includes a very entertaining selection of moving pictures featuring the old shyster, for example in this 1941 newsreel of a party Dalí designed and held in the Bali Room of the Hotel Del Monte, Monterey, California as a benefit for European artists.

The older Dalí appears in a clip titled ‘The Honorary Bullfight’, which appears to be a bullfight held in his honour in his native Spain, for which he had constructed a life-size model bull covered in gold plates. At the climax of the festivities it exploded in fizzing fireworks. Dalí bows grandly to the applauding crowd.

The most dramatic clip is the 90-second dream sequence which Dalí designed for the Alfred Hitchcock thriller about a possibly deranged psychiatrist, Spellbound.

Presence and prescience

The fifth and final room is more like a corridor back out into the main landing of the Royal Academy building. At the 1938 International Surrealism exhibition Dalí and Duchamp collaborated on the design and ‘scenography’. One room featured 1,200 coal sacks suspended from the ceiling over a stove. In this shortish corridor the curators have recreated the effect with 60 or more grubby full-seeming coal sacks bearing down from the ceiling and a row of small stoves lined up along the wall. It is intense and a bit suffocating.

Now, as it happens, last week I was at the Curve, the free exhibition space at the Barbican, to see an installation titled Purple by British artist John Akomfrah. Part of it was a narrow stretch of the gallery where he had suspended several hundred white plastic water cans from the ceiling, with white light beaming down through them. The effect was high, white and light like a sort of cathedral – as compared to the low, dark and oppressive effect of the coal sack ceiling.

The coincidence of a contemporary British artist doing something very very similar to – maybe deliberately referencing – a work created just about 80 years earlier made me reconsider a phrase from the wall label introducing the exhibition. Here are the curators:

What fuelled this seemingly unlikely friendship was deeper than their shared artistic interests – amongst them eroticism, language, optics and games. More fundamentally, the two men were united by a combination of humour and scepticism which led both, in different ways, to challenge conventional views of art and life in ways that seem startlingly prescient today.

‘Startlingly prescient today’ suggests that they anticipated where we are, that their work is good because it anticipates our own wonderful achievements in art and culture, that the real place, the real achievement is here and they were lucky enough to anticipate it.

But there is a completely different way to read that phrase, to the effect that we are still living in the world they created; we have progressed no further in our art and imaginations than the ‘imaginarium’ which these dead artists conceived all those years ago.

Bizarre objects, visionary paintings, experimental films, overt erotica, naked women and masturbating men, objects hanging from ceilings, the unashamed use of celebrity (Warhol, Jeff Koons), blatant commercialism (Damien Hirst), performance art, installations, non-conformist, anti-bourgeois, anti-repressive ‘provocations’ – by pushing their imaginations to the limit, these guys invented all the apparatus of contemporary art nearly a century ago – and it is where we still live, imaginatively.

We are still inhabiting the territory they opened up and repeating the works, ideas and antics they got up to all that time ago.

Installation view of Dalí / Duchamp

Installation view of Dalí / Duchamp

In the coal sack ceiling room I chatted to another visitor. She really liked a photo of Duchamp playing chess with a young woman. When I mentioned this to my wife she said, ‘Let me guess – the young woman is naked’. Yes. It is as entirely predictable as that. An old man, fully-clothed, is sitting opposite an attractive young woman, completely naked.

What my fellow visitor liked was the sense that the photo represented the 1960s with its exciting new world of happenings and love-ins and non-conformity and rebelliousness, and that the quietly spoken, chastely dressed, old man, Duchamp, had lived to see it happen. She thought it was strangely moving that his (artistic) grandchildren were flourishing and developing all kinds of ideas which he had invented. As they still are, today.

Video

There are several videos supporting the exhibition, including this quick snapshot from the RA’s artistic director, Tim Marlow.

Related links

  • Dalí/Duchamp continues at the Royal Academy until 3 January 2018

Newspaper reviews

Other Surrealism reviews

More Royal Academy reviews

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by Simon on November 7, 2017  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on November 7, 2017

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Revolution: Russian Art 1917 to 1932 @ the Royal Academy

1. The historical context

The best book about the Russian Revolution I know of is Orlando Figes’ epic history, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891 to 1924. There is no end to the poverty, misery and bloodshed it recounts. Russia was an astonishingly backward, primitive country in 1917. On top of the vast population of serfs living in their primitive wood huts in a hundred thousand muddy villages, sat the class of landowners in their country estates, serviced by local doctors and lawyers. These bourgeois aspired to the fine things enjoyed by the upper classes in the handful of notable cities – Kiev, Petersburg, Moscow. They are the class portrayed in the plays of Anton Chekov (1860 to 1904).

In these big cities the fabulously wealthy aristocracy mingled with a small class of intellectuals – Russians called them the intelligentsia – who congratulated themselves on the flourishing of the arts which transformed Russian cultural life in the late 19th century, and was evolving quickly as the new century dawned. (Many of these artists, writers and impresarios were depicted in the wonderful ‘Russia and the Arts’ held last spring at the National Portrait Gallery.)

But when the weak Czar Nicholas II took Russia into the Great War in 1914, the weakness of Russia’s economy and industrial ability was painfully highlighted. Troops with few modern weapons, uniforms or equipment were quickly defeated by the German army. Among his many mistakes, the Czar took personal responsibility for the running of the war. There were soon food shortages and other privations on top of national humiliation at the many defeats. The surprise is that it took until spring 1917 for the Czar’s government to be overthrown and the Czar was forced to abdicate.

The provisional government which came to power in February 1917 was competing from the start against workers councils, or soviets, which claimed genuine authority, and were dominated by communists. The provisional government made the mistake of continuing the war and this, along with worsening privations and its own internal squabbles, led to its overthrow in October 1917, in a revolution spearheaded by Lenin’s Bolsheviks.

The Bolsheviks made good on their popular promise to bring the war to an end, immediately began negotiating with the Germans and signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. But it was only the end of one kind of violence, for a massive civil war broke out in Russia, with so-called ‘White Armies’ led by Russian generals, fighting against what became known as the ‘Red Army’, manned and staffed by everyone who wanted to overthrow the rotten old regime.

After initial setbacks, the Red Army became better organised and slowly crushed their opponents. In 1920 Lenin ordered part of it to advance westwards through Poland with the aim of linking up with communist forces in the post-war chaos of Germany, and spreading the Bolshevik revolution right across Europe.

The heroic Poles fought the Soviets to a standstill at the Battle of Warsaw (described in Adam Zamoyski’s excellent book, Warsaw 1920), forcing the Red Army back onto Russian soil and, for the time being, curtailing the Bolsheviks’ messianic dream of leading a World Revolution.

During these years of tremendous upheaval and turmoil, the liberal or left-leaning intelligentsia experienced a wave of euphoria and optimism. There was a tremendous sense of throwing off the shackles and restrictions of nineteenth-century, personal, subjective, ‘bourgeois’ art. Artists and theoreticians rejected all its aesthetic and cultural and moral values in the name of creating a completely new art which would be for the people, the masses, communal art, popular and accessible art which would depict the exciting possibilities of the New Society everyone would build together. This led to radical new ways of seeing and creating, the cross-fertilisation of traditional artistic media with new forms, an explosion of avant-garde painting, music, architecture, film, agitop theatre for workers in factories and so on.

It is perfectly possible to be amazed, stunned and overwhelmed at the outburst of experimentation and exuberance and optimism expressed by artists across all media in the decade after the revolution – but still to be uncomfortably aware of the sub-stratum of revolutionary violence which it was based on and, in some cases, glorified.

And also to be bleakly aware that the death of Lenin in 1924 set the scene for the inexorable rise of the tyrant Josef Stalin. In fact the revolution was characterised from the start by the criminal stupidity of Soviet economics and social policy, which almost immediately resulted in worsening shortages of food and all other essentials. But laid on top of this was Lenin’s deliberate use of ‘revolutionary violence’ to intimidate and often, to simply arrest and execute anyone opposing the regime – violence which was taken up and deployed on an increasingly mass scale by Stalin later in the 1920s.

It was the combination of incompetence and slavish obedience to party diktat which led to the horrors of the Ukraine famine in the early 1930s (graphically described by Timothy Snyder in his book Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin) and crystallised into Stalin’s mass purges of the 1930s and the creation of a huge network of labour camps across frozen Siberia, the infamous gulag archipelago. This economically incompetent tyranny was forcibly imposed onto the nations of Eastern Europe after the Second World War, and was then exported to China (which fell to Mao’s communists in 1949) and on into other developing countries (Korea, Vietnam) with catastrophic results.

It was the historical tragedy of countless colonised countries in the so-called developing world,  that when they sought their independence after the Second World War, it was in a world bitterly divided between a brutal communist bloc and an unscrupulous capitalist West, thus forcing them to choose sides and turning so many of the liberation struggles into unnecessarily protracted civil wars, covertly funded by both sides in the Cold War.

And then, after one final, brutal fling in Afghanistan (comprehensively described in Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979 to 1989 by Rodric Braithwaite), the entire Soviet Union collapsed, communism ceased to be a world power, and Russia emerged from the wreckage as an authoritarian, nationalist bandit-state.

2. Atrocity and accountability

This long, sorry saga started 100 years ago this year and we can’t un-know what we all know about its grim legacy – i.e the mass slaughter of the mid-twentieth century, followed by decades of repression and decline. And this exhibition is frank about that.

  • A whole section is devoted to the collapse of pure communism in the very early 1920s and the way Lenin was forced to reintroduce some elements of market capitalism in his New Economic Plan of 1922.
  • Later, a room is dedicated to the forced collectivisation of agriculture – and the discrepancy between the heroic posters and silent movies showing happy, smiling peasants swimming in lakes of milk and climbing mountains of grain – while the actual peasants were, of course, in many places starving, killing their livestock and eating their seed grain rather than have it ‘stolen’ by the state and its often corrupt agents.
  • And at the very end of the exhibition there is a gruesome conjunction of state propaganda films of healthy young men and women putting on acrobatic displays in Red Square – contrasted with a slide show of mugshots of some of the millions and millions of Russian citizens who were arrested, interrogated, tortured, dragged off to labour camps for decades or simply executed, mostly on trivial or invented charges. All overseen by the man who, by the end of the period covered by this exhibition, was emerging as the Soviet Union’s brutal lord and master, Stalin.

Russian revolutionary art, the exhibition

This is an epic exhibition about an epic subject, a huge and seismic historical and social event, the creation of the ideology which disfigured and scarred the 20th century, leading directly to countless millions of avoidable deaths. But nobody at the time knew that. The exhibition makes a heroic attempt to reflect the contradictions, capturing the huge wave of euphoric invention which swept through all the arts, alongside the doubts many artists and creators had from quite early on, reflecting the revolution’s early economic failures, and then the looming growth of Stalin’s influence.

For example, an entirely new form of typography was developed with new fonts laid in bands across the page, often at angles, with photographs which were similarly taken from new and exciting angles, especially of new modernist buildings and the paraphernalia of the second industrial revolution – steelworks, electricity pylons, steam trains.

Some of the most appealing exhibits are the clips from heroic black-and-white propaganda films from the period, depicting smiling workers engaged in bracing physical labour, in shipyards and coalmines and construction sites, on farms and factories. Propaganda it obviously is, but they still have a wonderful virile energy.

Films, lots of photographs, paintings, magazines and pamphlets, along with revolutionary textiles, fabrics and ceramics, architectural and interior design, it is all here in overwhelming profusion, and all are introduced with excellent historical background and explanation.

1. Avant-garde versus traditional naturalism

I knew that by the mid-1930s the doctrine of ‘Socialist Realism’ had triumphed as the official state-sanctioned form of Soviet art. But the exhibition for the first time explained to me how forms of realistic, figurative painting depicting heroic moments and the heroic leaders of the revolution existed right from the start – it wasn’t artificially created by Stalin and his henchmen, it was always there. Thus there were two main groups debating the fate of Soviet art throughout the period – futurists and traditionalists – and they co-existed at the same time.

The Futurists, many of whom had in fact been experimenting with abstract ‘formalist’ art since before the revolution, believed that the revolution required a complete break with the past, the deliberate abandonment of traditional aesthetic values and modes. ‘Death to art!’ wrote Alexei Gan in his 1922 book on constructivism. At the 1921 exhibition 5 x 5 = 25 Alexander Rodchenko presented three canvases, each of a single colour (red, yellow and blue), which he declared to be ‘the end of painting’. He abandoned painting in favour of photography and, even here, pioneered new forms of photojournalism, photomontage and book and poster design.

Not only was painting rejected on aesthetic grounds, but on moral and political ones, too. Old fashioned painting carried the connotation of subjectivity and individual genius, both of which were rejected in the name of capturing the new spirit of the people. Moreover, oil painting was also inextricably linked with the world of the ‘fine’ arts, wealth, power, patrons and exploiters.

By contrast, traditionalists believed in the ongoing importance of realistic representations of everyday life in a highly traditional figurative style, perhaps cranked up with a kind of heroic tone.

What’s fascinating is the way both traditions flourished side by side. Thus the exhibition opens with some big paintings depicting the unquestioned hero of the revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, as well as key historical moments such as the storming of the Czar’s Winter Palace and so on.

V.I.Lenin and Manifestation (1919) by Isaak Brodsky. The State Historical Museum. Photo © Provided with assistance from the State Museum and Exhibition Center ROSIZO

V.I. Lenin and Manifestation (1919) by Isaak Brodsky. The State Historical Museum. Photo © Provided with assistance from the State Museum and Exhibition Center ROSIZO

By 1928 the Soviet government was strong enough to repeal the New Economic Plan (a kind of state capitalism which they’d been forced to introduce in the early 1920s to stop the economy collapsing). The NEP was ended and 1928 was the year which saw the first of Stalin’s Five Year Plans. The resulting clampdown on market enterprises ended support for avant-garde fringe groups who found it harder to get sponsors or exhibit their works. Meanwhile, the realist artists found themselves enjoying greater official recognition and support.

This exhibition ends in 1932, the year the term ‘socialist realism’ was first officially used. The proletarian writer Maxim Gorky published a famous article titled ‘Socialist Realism’ in 1933 and by 1934 Anatoly Lunacharsky, the commissar in charge of art, had laid down a set of guidelines for socialist realist art. Henceforward all Soviet art works must be:

  1. Proletarian: art relevant to the workers and understandable to them.
  2. Typical: scenes of everyday life of the people.
  3. Realistic: in the representational sense.
  4. Partisan: supportive of the aims of the State and the Party.

It was the death knell of the entire innovative field of futurist, constructivist, supermatist and all other forms of avant-garde experimental art. It was the triumph of the philistines.

Bolshevik (1920) by Boris Mikailovich Kustodiev. State Tretyakov Gallery. Photo © State Tretyakov Gallery

Bolshevik (1920) by Boris Mikailovich Kustodiev. State Tretyakov Gallery. Photo © State Tretyakov Gallery

In fact, this exhibition is itself based on one that was actually held in 1932 in the Soviet Union. Titled Fifteen Years of Artists of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, it contained works from all the disparate traditions which had flourished between 1917 and 1932. Many of the works which appeared in that 1932 exhibition are being shown here. However, the Royal Academy show isn’t nearly as big as the original (some 200 works compared with the original’s 2,640 by 423 artists!) – and it also includes photos, posters, films, ceramics and so on – a far wider range of media – which weren’t in the original.

The 1932 exhibition marked the defeat of the entire futurist-modernist tradition in Russia. The same year saw the incorporation of all independent artistic groups and movements into the state-controlled Union of Artists. Private galleries were all closed down, replaced by State-sponsored exhibitions. From now on it was impossible to be an artist or make any money unless it was working on state-commissioned, state-approved projects. Many of the avant-garde saw their work banned, were thrown out of work or, at worst, were arrested, imprisoned or even executed.

One of the great poets of the time, Alexander Blok, had died in 1921, already disillusioned by the direction the revolution was taking. ‘Blok’s death signified the beginning of the end of artistic freedom in Russia.’ The hugely influential Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovksy, who had devoted so much energy not only to revolutionary poems but to a new type of agitprop poster (many included here) committed suicide in 1930. The curator of the 1932 exhibition on which this one is based, Nikolay Punin, was arrested and sent to a labour camp. Later the poet Osip Mandelstam was arrested and sent to a prison camp in 1938, where he died. The innovative theatre designer Vsevolod Meyerhold was arrested, tortured and shot by firing squad in February 1940.

The modernist poet Anna Akhmatova – her first husband killed by the security services as early as 1921, her second husband and son imprisoned in the gulag – went into her long period of internal dissidence, during which she produced some of the great poems which captured the atmosphere of mourning and loss under the Stalin dictatorship.

2. Famous artists

The exhibition includes some marvellous works by painters we are familiar with in the West: there are several examples of the fabulous zoomorphic abstractions of Wassily Kandinsky (who had the good sense to leave Soviet Russia in 1920, moving to Germany to become a leading light of the famous Bauhaus of art and design).

Blue Crest (1917) by Wassily Kandinsky. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo © 2016, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Blue Crest (1917) by Wassily Kandinsky. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo © 2016, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

There are also a few of the wonderful dreamy fantasies of Marc Chagall, a kind of Douanier Rousseau of the Steppe (he hailed from the provincial town of Vitebsk in modern Belarus). Chagall was doubly fortunate – as both a Jew and an experimental artist – to survive Soviet Russia (he left for Paris in 1923) and the Holocaust (he fled France in 1941, one step ahead of the Nazis) and to live to the ripe old age of 97. A rare happy ending, which suits his gay and colourful paintings.

Promenade (1917-18) by Marc Chagall. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo © 2016, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg © DACS 2016

Promenade (1917 to 1918) by Marc Chagall. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo © 2016, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg © DACS 2016

3. Kazimir Malevich

In the 1932 exhibition which this show is based on, Russian avant-garde painter had an entire room devoted to him. The RA exhibition recreates it.

Malevich (as we learned from the fabulous Tate Modern exhibition in 2014, and the Black Square exhibition held at the Whitechapel Gallery in spring 2015) thought intensively about representation and art. He wanted to ‘free art from the dead weight of the real world’, and boiled all art down to a kind of ground zero – his famous black square, painted in 1915. A painting is no longer a window into anything, a view of anything: it is an abstract arrangement of shapes and colours which does its own work.

From this reductio ad absurdum he then built up a particular version of modernism which he called Suprematism, embodied in a series of works which use geometric shapes criss-crossing on the picture plane to generate purely visual feelings of dynamism and excitement. The colours have no tone or shading, so there is no sense of a light source or their existence in three dimensions. There is no perspective so no sense of how the objects relate to each other, if at all.

I liked the Kandinskys in the previous room, but for me they were eclipsed by the power and beauty of Malevich’s abstracts. These have a tremendous force and impact. For some reason to do with human psychology and perception, they just seem right.

However, as the doctrine of Socialist Realism took hold, Malevich found it expedient in the 1930s to retreat from pure Suprematism and to return to a kind of figurative painting. Figurative but with a very abstract flavour, not least in his use of blank eggs for heads, or very simplified heads painted in bright colour stripes. Socialist realism, Jim, but not as we know it.

The Malevich room here uses photographs of the 1932 hang to recreate it as nearly as possible, with the famous Black Square and its partner Red Square in the middle, flanked by suprematist works, with an outer circle of the strange 1930s automaton paintings, and then a set of display cases showing the white models, the skyscraper-like maquettes of abstract forms, which Malevich called ‘architektons’. It’s almost worth visiting the exhibition for this one room alone.

Here is one of Malevich’s later, semi-figurative works.

Peasants (c. 1930) by Kazimir Malevich. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo © 2016, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Peasants (c. 1930) by Kazimir Malevich. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo © 2016, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

4. Constructivism

But there are many, many more works here – exciting modernist newspaper, magazine and book designs; clips from quite a few black-and-white propaganda and fiction movies (there are several split screen projectors showing scenes from the epic films of Sergei Eisenstein); agitprop posters and pamphlets, including the revolutionary graphic design of El Lissitzky.

‘The Constructivists compared the artist to an engineer, arranging materials scientifically and objectively, and producing art works as rationally as any other manufactured object.’ (Tate website).

This aesthetic, based on industrial designs and materials and workers, underpinned much of the work of the period and spread beyond Russia, into Germany and France and some extent the USA, because an explosion of new industrial techniques, with new products and designs was part of the spirit of the age.

There are even fabrics and ceramics which carried revolutionary slogans and images; huge paintings; photos of leading artists, directors, theatre designers and poets from the era.

5. Photography

Photography was perhaps the medium best suited to capturing revolutionary conditions.

  • Obviously enough, it was faster than painting – a photo could be published in newspapers, posters or pamphlets the same day it was taken.
  • Also, photos are, on the face of it, more truthful and ‘realistic’ than painting, capturing a likeness or a situation with an honesty and immediacy which painting can’t match. As Alexander Rodchenko put it, ‘It seems that only the camera is capable of reflecting contemporary life’.
  • In the hands of constructivist or futurist photographers, photographs also turn out to be the perfect medium for conveying the geometric or abstract quality of industrial machinery, and the bold new architecture of soaring factories, apartment blocks, electricity pylons and all the other paraphernalia of a peasant society forced to industrialise at breakneck speed.

Thus swathes of propaganda photography showing men and machinery in dynamic semi-abstract images of tremendous power.

A little more traditional is the photographic portrait. There is a sequence of works by Moisei Nappelbaum, a fabulously brilliant portrait photographer, who was working before the revolution and managed to survive the new circumstances, eventually becoming Head of the State Photographic Studio.

But at the same time as it could convey a ‘realist’ vision of the world, photography during  this period turned out to be capable of all kinds of technical innovations and experiments. A leading figure in both constructivist design and experimental photography was Alexander Rodchenko.

6. Movies

The most famous Soviet director was Sergei Eisenstein so there are inevitably clips from his epic films about key moments in the revolution – Battleship Potemkin, The Strike.

But there are plenty of other examples of propaganda films. One of the most striking is Man with a Movie Camera, an experimental 1929 silent documentary film with no story and no actors, directed by Dziga Vertov and edited by his wife Elizaveta Svilova. Man with a Movie Camera shows city life in Kiev, Kharkov, Moscow and Odessa. From dawn to dusk Soviet citizens are shown at work and at play, and interacting with the machinery of modern life. The ‘characters’, if there are any, are the cameramen, the film editor, and the modern Soviet Union they present in the film.

The film is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov uses, including double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, stop motion animations and self-reflexive visuals.

The film was publicised with a suitably constructivist poster.

7. Less well-known artists

So far, so well-known. But completely new to me were the works of the artists working more in the Socialist Realist tradition, a whole area which is usually ignored in 20th century art history. Many, it must be said, are very so-so.

Probably the most impressive is Isaak Brodsky, who established himself as a kind of court painter to the Bolsheviks, and produced works which are both wonderfully accurate masterpieces of draughtsmanship, combined with great technical finish with the medium of oil – a kind of communist John Singer Sargent. I like Victorian realism and so I responded to the warmth and figurative accuracy of these works.

Brodsky flourished under the new regime and would go on to become Director of the All-Russian Academy of Arts in 1934.

Another figure who we get to know throughout the exhibition, is Alexander Deineka, according to Wikipedia ‘one of the most important Russian modernist figurative painters of the first half of the 20th century’. His paintings are big and are a unique and distinctive combination of figurative depiction of the human body in attractively abstract settings.

Deineka’s paintings aren’t exactly pleasing, but are very striking. This one, supposedly of workers in a textile factory, doesn’t look remotely like any real factory and the people are hardly the big muscular men of Soviet propaganda, but rather fey elfin figures (bare footed!). The whole looks more like a science fiction fantasy than a work of ‘socialist realism’.

Textile Workers (1927) by Alexander Deineka. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo © 2016, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg © DACS 2016

Textile Workers (1927) by Alexander Deineka. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo © 2016, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg © DACS 2016

Later in the exhibition there are more Deinekas, some depicting heroic war situations, others depicting sportsmen and women.

An entire room is devoted to 15 or so paintings by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, who is little known in the West. Petrov-Vodkin managed to combine a formalist interest in geometry with a recognisably figurative approach, a bit like the later Wyndham Lewis. He is included by the curators precisely to redress the balance away from the avant-garde artists we in the West tend to know about, and to present a better sense of the Russian culture of the time. His paintings are wonderfully attractive.

And towards the end there was a flurry of realist works by another big name of the day, Alexander Somokhvalov:

Somokhvalov is in the final room, which represents the triumph of Socialist Realism: Is it kitsch? Is it rubbish? Possibly. Is it valuable in its own right, or because it sheds light on the ideology of the time?

Taken together, these relatively unknown Socialist Realist painters certainly provide a different vision, a way of looking at the world aslant from the usual Western heroes of modernism we’re used to. Giving them space and attention is one of this fabulous exhibition’s main achievements.

8. Tatlin’s glider

The Royal Academy is a big building and they’ve really gone to town here, filling the space with some monster exhibits. One entire room is devoted to a lifesize recreation of one of the glider-cum-flying machines developed by futurist designer, Vladimir Tatlin, between 1929 and 1932. Tatlin dreamed of building a machine which would genuinely allow humans – all humans – cheaply and easily to – fly! Hard to conceive a more utopian dream than this.

The glider is suspended from the ceiling and imaginatively lit so that, as it slowly rotates in the breeze, a continually changing matrix of shadows is cast by its elaborate wooden struts onto the walls and ceiling, forming ever-changing shapes and patterns. It’s a darkened, quiet and calming room. Small children came into the room and looked up at this strange flying machine with amazement. It reminds you that quite a few of these artists’ output may look radical and revolutionary, urban and atheist, but that they themselves often came from a deeply spiritual place: Tatlin, Kandinsky, Malevich.

9. Revolutionary fabrics

Vast amounts of fabrics and textiles were produced which contained and distributed revolutionary logos and imagery, incorporating wonderfully powerful constructivist motifs.

10. Soviet women

There are lots of strong women in Soviet art (as in Soviet life). They often feature or star in movies like Women of Ryazan (1927) as well as in countless posters and paintings hymning the gender equality which was an important component of Soviet life.

My favourite, and a standout work in the whole exhibition, was this stunning piece, a huge painting of a woman tram ticket collector titled Tram Ticket Lady, by Alexander Samokhvalov (1894 to 1971). It is enormous and enormously compelling – a wonderful picture of female pagan power.

Conclusion

This is a huge, wide-ranging and awe-inspiring exhibition, which does a good job of capturing the excitement and terror of one of the most important periods in human history and one of the most innovative eras in Western art.

Artists to remember

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by Simon on March 8, 2017  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on March 8, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/03/08/revolution-russian-art-1917-1932-the-royal-academy/

Intrigue: James Ensor by Luc Tuymans @ the Royal Academy

James Ensor (1860 to 1949) is an oddity. He was born in Ostend, a windswept seaside ‘resort’ on the coast of Belgium in 1860 and chose to spend his whole life there. His parents kept a modest curiosity shop which made its money during the short summer tourist season, and the guide tells us that, once a year, Ostend had a colourful Mardi Gras carnival, where everyone wore masks. It is easy enough to make the connection between Ensor growing up among bizarre artefacts, experiencing this annual jamboree, and what was to become his trademark depiction of grotesquely distorted people wearing carnival masks…

The Intrigue by James Ensor (1890) Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten. Photo KMSKA © www.lukasweb.be - Art in Flanders vzw. Photography: Hugo Maertens / © DACS 2016

The Intrigue by James Ensor (1890) Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten. Photography: Hugo Maertens / © DACS 2016

The guide goes on to explain that Ostend had been the site of a lengthy siege and battle way back in the 17th century, and that all building works in the area tended to dig up piles of bones and skulls. Apparently there are photos of Ensor and friends holding mock duels on the beach using human bones (though not included in the show). All of which explains his other favourite subject of skulls and skeletons.

The exhibition could have stuck to an exploration of these themes but it is curated not by scholars but by fellow Belgian artist, Luc Tuymans (b.1958) who has always been attracted to his countryman’s work and sets out to show us that there is more to Ensor than just his best-known grotesque paintings. The show deliberately sets out to show us Ensor’s range and diversity, and so we are introduced to other major strands in his output, such as:

Early realist works

These include Bathing Hut (1876), painted when he was just 16 and showing a typical sight on the windswept beach, and Afternoon In Ostende (1881) showing his mother and sister in a grim muddy interior, indicative of the stiflingly conventional bourgeois the artist grew up in. This early naturalist style could hardly be more at odds with the style that made him famous. A good example here is the Self-portrait with a flowered hat (1883). OK he’s a bit of a dandy, but a very conventional one.

Self-portrait with Flowered Hat by James Ensor (1883) Mu.ZEE, Oostende Photo MuZee © www.lukasweb.be - Art in Flanders vzw. Photography: Hugo Maertens / © DACS 2016

Self-portrait with Flowered Hat by James Ensor (1883) Photography: Hugo Maertens / © DACS 2016

Satirical cartoons

One of the three rooms in the show features a long case showing maybe forty examples of the satirical cartoons he produced by the score, as stand-alones or in sets, satirising Ostend bourgeois society. No wonder he became so unpopular in the town of his birth.

Plague here, Plague there, Plague Everywhere by James Ensor (1888) Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. Photo KMSKA © www.lukasweb.be - Art in Flanders vzw. Photograph: Hugo Maertens / © DACS 2016

Plague here, Plague there, Plague Everywhere by James Ensor (1888) Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. Photograph: Hugo Maertens / © DACS 2016

Two large examples are hung separately:

  • The Bad Doctors (1892)
  • The Dangerous Cooks (1896) Ensor’s withering opinion of critics who are serving up his and a fellow artist’s heads on plates to be scoffed by porcine critics waiting at the table.

Ensor carried out a lifelong war against critics who didn’t like or value his work. This was the era when variations on Impressionism were still being produced and new movements from France, like Symbolism, were smooth and high-toned. Ensor was deliberately crude, clumsy, garish and, above all, satirical. It’s not a particularly good work, but the approach of the man seems to be summed up in The Pisser.

Religious art

Disappointingly for a man who considered himself a rebel and non-conformist, there’s a strong Christian thread through his work, represented here by a huge horrible painting of Adam and Eve being expelled from the garden of Eden. It is enormous and dominates one whole wall.

Apparently, his most famous work is Christ’s entry into Brussels, which is not on show here, combining his interests in the grotesque, social satire and religion into a ragbag which I’m afraid I don’t like at all.

The fantastic

Ensor produced hundreds of engravings, etchings and lithographs of very variable quality, many of them depicting scenes of fantasy and the grotesque. There is a series devoted to the seven deadly sins, which anticipate the deliberate ugliness of post-Great War satirists like George Grosz.

Both my children are at secondary school. In order to choose which secondary schools to send them to we went to open days of maybe a dozen schools in all. In every one, among other areas, you tour round the art rooms. Deliberately cack-handed, garish and obvious depictions of the seamy side of life – of ugly people, skeletons, skulls, alongside satire on religion or political leaders – depicted with the earnestness of 5th and 6th form teenagers is what these rooms are packed with. After looking at the 20th etching of a deadly sin or crowds mocking Christ or the troops at Waterloo it’s hard not to think of Ensor as a kind of patron saint of tens of thousands of clumsy, over-earnest adolescent imaginations.

Drawings

The show includes a lot of prints and drawings. What struck me is how powerfully naturalistic some of the early ones are before he discovered his talent for the macabre and grotesque. I much preferred these which have a depth and maturity which, paradoxically, his later deliberately sketchy satires wholly lack.

Still life 

In the room of grotesques one painting stood apart – a dazzling still life. This photographic reproduction completely fails to bring out the unnervingly oiliness and spookiness of the painting in the flesh. It is a far more intense and disturbing image than some of the overtly grotesque paintings. More subtly unnerving.

The Skate by James Ensor (1892) Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels / photo: J. Geleyns - Ro scan © DACS 2016

The Skate by James Ensor (1892) Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels © DACS 2016

Over by 40

Although Ensor lived to an advanced age, not dying until 1949, the excellent handout for the exhibition crisply points out that by the age of 40 (1900) his best work was done. He spent the next 40 years repeating the same motifs and, in his last years, developing a much lighter more gaseous style. The expert on the audio-commentary tries to claim these later works match the earlier ones, but they don’t.

Luc Tuymans

Because this is not a ‘scholarly’ exhibition but a personal selection of one artist’s works by another (Luc Tuymans) Tuymans mixes it up a little, adding other elements. Most notable are a couple of works by Tuymans himself, chiefly an enormous white carnival hat with billowing feathers, as worn at the Carnival de Binche in 2001, as well as five – to be honest, rather bland – carnival masks.

A bit more relevant is the self-portrait by Ensor’s Ostend contemporary, Léon Spilliart. Apparently it was seeing Ensor’s work that persuaded Spilliart to pack in being a lawyer and become a painter instead. Interesting story and I very much liked the intensity of this image, with the subject’s eyes in deep black shadow, and his reflection repeated in parallel mirrors to infinity. In fact googling this image shows that Spilliart did multiple self-portraits and comes over as an intense spin-off of the Edvard Munch school of northern depression.

But this one image, by itself, doesn’t really tell me much about Ensor or shed much light on the contemporary Belgian ‘scene’.

Conclusion

I knew next to nothing about Ensor before visiting, and so this exhibition is a useful overview of his life and achievement but, having got a grasp of his career, I would have liked to see more of his trademark weird mask and skull paintings, and/or more of the striking naturalistic paintings he did right at the start of his career.

There are only three rooms in this small exhibition and the majority of the space is devoted to drawings, prints and cartoons most of which just aren’t of the same quality as the grotesques/realist works. Imagine if the space had been full to overflowing with his paintings of garish masks and leering skeletons and green-faced women and men with pig noses – what a powerful experience it would have been!

While searching Ensor images on the internet I came across The Dejected Woman, was very impressed by it, and couldn’t help wondering whether a lot of the satirical drawings, sketches and cartoons which Ensor devoted so much effort to (for example, Christ tormented by demons) and which are given so much wall space here, were, in fact, a waste of a breath-taking talent.

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by Simon on December 24, 2016  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 24, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/12/24/intrigue-james-ensor-luc-tuymans-the-royal-academy/

Abstract Expressionism @ The Royal Academy

Abstract Expressionism

The term ‘Abstract Expressionism’ was coined by the art critic Robert Coates in 1946 to describe a large group of American artists who came to maturity just after the Second World War, mostly based in New York City. In 1958 New York’s Museum of Modern Art organised a big show of ‘the New American Painting’ which featured a lot of these artists, and the show travelled to Europe, appearing at the Tate Gallery in 1959.

This is the first large scale overview exhibition of the Abstract Expressionists since then, and it is an epic, awesome experience. As the commentary points out early on, the Royal Academy not has the space in terms of number of rooms to cope with this many artists, but also the size of rooms to accommodate works which are often very, very big.

The Eye is the First Circle by Lee Krasner (1960) Private collection, courtesy Robert Miller Gallery, New York © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2016.

The Eye is the First Circle by Lee Krasner (1960) Private collection, courtesy Robert Miller Gallery, New York © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2016.

The century of catastrophe

Born in the first decade of the century, these artists grew to maturity during the Great Depression and lived through the rise of Fascism, the Second World War, the revelation of the Holocaust, the detonation of the first atomic bombs and the beginning of the Cold War.

They almost all held a very intense tragic view of life, indeed the forerunner Ashile Gorky hanged himself in 1948 and the superstar of the movement, Jackson Pollock, died aged 44 in a car crash which many thought a form of suicide. The often stark, huge, bleak images address what one of the movement’s stars, Mark Rothko, summed up as the proper subject of Art – ‘ecstasy, tragedy, doom’. This was what the poet Auden christened ‘The Age of Anxiety’, life in the shadow of a rapid arms race and deepening Cold War.

Improvised or composed?

The commentary brings out the new freedom and expressiveness the painters felt and revelled in, and the emphasis on the artist’s gestures and physical actions, epitomised by Jackson Pollock twisting and splatting paint on the canvas, a necessarily big canvas. All this is a world away from the fine gestures at the wrist or fingertips which characterised traditional paintwork.

Some critics compared this big-gesture, expressive freedom with contemporary developments in modern jazz, the new style of be-bop or post-bop which provided a backdrop for flamboyant soloists like Charlie Parker or John Coltrane to fly off in ever-giddier flights of fancy. And, of course, like Abstract Expressionism, jazz was an entirely American form. To demonstrate, the audio-guide plays a clip from John Coltrane’s 1960 track Giant Steps.

Maybe. But:

1. Most jazz is in fact strongly bound by rules of harmony, rhythm, counterpoint etc which are all entirely European in origin. If you need a musical comparison, I’d compare these paintings to the stark,violent, unpredictable musical gestures of the post-war serialists, led by the two iconoclasts, Karl-Heinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez.

Figures-Doubles-Prismes by Pierre Boulez (1964/68)

2. If anything, the detailed analysis which the audio-commentary applies to about 14 key paintings tends to contradict this idea of wild improvisation. The reverse: the commentary spends some time detailing the care with which Pollock composed his late masterpieces – and when you get close to a huge work like Blue Poles you can in fact see the way successive layers of composition have been applied: first the grey background; then a maze of yellows and whites; then the poles, made by applying a plank lined with dark blue paint to create the work’s eight lines, poles which create an eerie, primitive, tribal sense of rhythm; and then a further layer of paint, particularly white paint, which laces and binds the poles into the composition. The more you look, the more complex it appears, and one of the joys of this exhibition is that you can get very close to the works and really appreciate the intricacy of detail.

Blue poles by Jackson Pollock (1952 ) Oil, enamel and aluminium paint with glass on canvas. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © The Pollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, NY and DACS, London 2016

Blue poles by Jackson Pollock (1952 ) National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © The Pollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, NY and DACS, London 2016

Same goes for the half dozen Franz Kline works. These look at first glance like instant if graceful, daubs, epitomising the phrase ‘Action Painting’, which was also applied to these artists. But once again the commentary helps you see that Klein made the big black gestures on white but then went back and carefully painted white over some of the black, to make the gesture sharper, and then repainted more black over some of the white, each time intensifying the image.

Vawdavitch by Franz Kline (1955) Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2016. Photo: Joe Ziolkowski

Vawdavitch by Franz Kline (1955) Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2016. Photo: Joe Ziolkowski

All-American art

Abstract Expressionism was the first wholly American art movement and there was no shortage at the time, and since, of art critics prepared to champion it and write at great length about it. America had emerged from the war the new world power and the deep anxiety of the intellectuals was accompanied, paradoxically, by an extraordinary boom in the economy, the birth of a consumer society which brought security, wealth and a host of life-enhancing appliances (fridge, hoover, TV) to this vast thrusting nation. The art market boomed, critics rose to prominence, the artists made big names and careers for themselves.

The Big Four

Early on the audioguide points out that although around 30 mostly New York-based artists are associated with Abstract Expressionism, there are four who stand head and shoulders above the others: Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Willem de Kooning. Accordingly, each one has a room devoted to themselves, while most of the other painters have to share hanging space.

Among the ‘sharers’, I liked Ad Reinhardt’s black squares. The commentary explained how a) they are in fact built up from other colours, which Reinhardt b) then used a technique on to drain the gloss or shine from, thus creating his very distinctively light-absorbing works, matt beyond matt. Reinhardt was an intensely earnest German, convinced that painting needed to be ‘purified of all other-than-art meanings’ and his quest led him to this logical conclusion.

Women artists

All this emphasis on ‘Action Painting’ and ‘Tragic Suffering’ went hand-in-hand with a Hemingwayesque tough guy pose among many of the painters, and certainly among their critical devotees. But the commentary emphasised that the movement not only included a number of women but that the male artists themselves respected their female peers, and many of them featured as complete equals in contemporary exhibitions. These included:

  • Lee Krasner, Pollock’s partner (see The Eye is the First Circle, above)
  • Janet Sobel, known for her ‘calligraphic fields’, much more controlled and interlaced (and smaller) works than many of the others
  • Joan Mitchell, who moved to France – her massive late painting Salut Tom, was a welcome splash of light yellow airy colour among a generally dark palette
  • Louise Nevelson was represented by a striking wall-sized installation made up of a kind of cabinet of curiosities with all sorts of odd-shaped shelves and objects inserted, displayed and hanging from it, all sprayed the quintessential colour of the movement, matt black – Sky Cathedral

Anti-Europe

Size mattered. A lot of these Yanks disliked the prissiness and fussiness and bourgeois finish of European painting. For example Pollock made a point of using normal household paint, as did Kline – real men didn’t use those prissy little tubes you have to buy in ‘art’ shops, Hell no. And why paint small, when you can paint BIG? Or MASSIVE? Room after room features enormous canvases. They had to be big to bear the Sweeping Gestures and Archetypal Forms and Primitivist Impulses of a generation determined to stamp their Tragic Worldview on an uncaring world, to make the Great American Painting, bigger and better than anything effete and devastated post-war Europe could manage.

Although a lot of the artists seem to have been depressive and liberal with statements about Tragedy and Despair, in fact the physical impact of room after room is of the sheer SIZE and brashness and confidence of the movement as a whole.

Mark Rothko

The anti-European feeling took many forms. The room devoted to Mark Rothko is wonderful, a shrine, a chapel to sit in and be filled with wonder, and admire the numerous ways Rothko reworked his trademark image, big canvases (naturally) with rectangles of colour fizzing and shimmering against a one-colour backdrop.

But it is also fascinating to learn that Rothko insisted that his paintings of must a) have no frames b) have no glass over them c) be hung low – the aim being to make them more enterable.

No. 15 Mark Rothko (1957) Private collection, New York © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko ARS, NY and DACS, London.

No. 15 Mark Rothko (1957) Private collection, New York © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko ARS, NY and DACS, London.

Clyfford Still

The big revelation of the show for me was the work of Clyfford Still, who I’m not conscious of having seen before. The commentary explained that Still resisted the New York art scene and stayed far away, based in Colorado and the West, and – crucially – only sold a handful of paintings in his lifetime, gifting 95% of his output to a purpose-built gallery in Denver where they are to this day. Hence we haven’t seen much of it.

The Still room, along with the Rothko room, made the biggest impact on me: the paintings are enormous, wall-size, and – liberated from all figurativeness – explore the effect of great jagged slabs of colour, often divided into two main tones but with flashes and flickers of other primary colours flaring at unexpected but somehow, totally appropriate locations. Almost all the ten or so huge paintings in his room felt, despite their deliberate rough edges and unfinished appearance, somehow marvellously composed and just right. Like Rothko and Pollock, he seems to have found a completely new visual language.

PH-950 by Clyfford Still (1950) Clyfford Still Museum, Denver © City and County of Denver / DACS 2016. Photo courtesy the Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, CO.

PH-950 by Clyfford Still (1950) Clyfford Still Museum, Denver © City and County of Denver / DACS 2016. Photo courtesy the Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, CO.

de Kooning

It’s not all fabulous. A fair proportion of the works here are pretty horrible. If the show highlights geniuses like Pollock, Rothko, Still and features attractive work by many others, it also shows how yukky, dismal and depressing a lot of the art of this period and of this movement could be.

I reacted very badly to the de Kooning room, which featured among others several of his ‘Women’ paintings’, to which phrases like ‘horror of the feminine’ were attached in the commentary. De Kooning was born in Holland, only moving to America when he was 23, and I think you can see in the horrible women paintings the strong influence of early 20th century European Expressionism, all those angst-ridden Germans sensing the advent of the Great War. De Kooning’s canvases are big alright, and very free with their paint strokes – but for me he doesn’t achieve the genuine breakthrough into an entirely new confident, achieved visual language which Pollock, Rothko and Still so obviously do.

Woman II by Willem De Kooning (1952) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller, 1995 © 2016 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2016 Digital image © 2016. The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

Woman II by Willem De Kooning (1952) The Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2016 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2016
Digital image © 2016. The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

David Smith

David Smith seems to have been the only major sculptor associated with the movement and the curators have very cannily placed one of his sculptures in almost every room or at turning points between rooms, with four big pieces dominating the Academy courtyard outside.

They are too diverse to effectively sum up, but the example below gives a feel for the way they make no attempt at figurative depiction, but use different tricks and approaches to explore the space which they create around themselves.

Star Cage by David Smith (1950) Painted and brushed steel. Lent by the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. The John Rood Sculpture Collection. © Estate of David Smith/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2016.

Star Cage by David Smith (1950) Painted and brushed steel. Lent by the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. The John Rood Sculpture Collection. © Estate of David Smith/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2016.

This is a massive, awe-inspiring exhibition, which allows you to wander around encountering masterpiece after masterpiece, working out for yourself how new avenues in painting were opened up, new visual possibilities explored, and deciding what works for you and why. Liberating and exciting.

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by Simon on October 22, 2016  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on October 22, 2016

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Rubens and his Legacy @ The Royal Academy

This is a large exhibition in terms of number of items, but a vast one in terms of scope. It sets out to track the legacy of the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577 to 1640), one of the most influential of all western artists, and makes large claims for his impact on a wide range of genres and painters in every European country.

As it is setting out to demonstrate his impact and legacy, the majority of the pictures (and sketches and engravings) in the exhibition are not by Rubens; in some of the rooms it feels like only 3 or 4 out of 20 items are by Peter Paul (PP). Most of them are by the contemporaries or later artists who followed in his footsteps. It might be possible to misread the posters and publicity and feel a bit cheated…

Nonetheless, as the exhibition proceeds, its curators’ intentions are to some extent fulfilled, insofar as you do start to genuinely see Rubens’s influence – in composition and colour and treatment – in a growing number of the paintings by other artists. You begin to have an intimidating sense of the breadth and depth of his legacy. (And, from the enjoyment point of view, many of the works by other artists are masterpieces in their own right, a pleasure to see whatever the context.)

The audioguide (26 items, 50 minutes) claims that without Rubens, no rococo, no romanticism, no impressionism. Bold claim: is it justified?

Poetry

The exhibition is divided into six themes. By ‘poetry’, the curators mean landscape. Early on the commentary makes an amusing statement of national stereotypes. Apparently, English painters took from Rubens his techniques in landscape, the French were interested in his treatment of love and eroticism, the Spanish copied his Counter-Reformation religious drama, and Germans liked the virility and pathos of his paintings. Each conforming to type, then.

The exhibition starts with ‘the English theme’, Rubens’s treatment of landscape. We are shown a Rubens landscape with carters and are told that the left side of the picture is in moonlight, the right side in sunlight, impossible in reality, but adding drama to an otherwise mundane scene. Near it the curators hang similar subjects by the English landscapists Gainsborough, Constable and Turner, among others – notably Constable’s full-size oil sketch for The Haywain. Rubens dramatised landscape, the moonlight-sunlight being an example. Another popular one was showing a landscape just after a rainstorm has ended, leaving a brilliant rainbow behind. There’s a Rubens showing just such a post-storm rainbow  and then a number of examples showing how English artists copied him. Constable, in particular, explicitly praised Rubens composition and colour in his notebooks. (Apparently Constable is famous for his use of red and the commentary says he copied this from Rubens). The section on Constable reinforced the impression gained from the recent Constable exhibition of how artful and calculating an artist he was.

Rubens to one side, I enjoyed many of the works by other artists on show in this room, including a wonderful sketch by Gainsborough, The Harvest Wagon, notable for its handling of the human figures, a cartoon, Daumier-like precision of shape and line and action. Also  very English  for its modesty.

The Garden of Love

Like many of Rubens’ larger paintings, the hugely influential Garden of Love is drenched in allegory and classical models: the elaborate architecture, the flying putti, the statue of Jove, queen of the gods, squeezing water from her ample breasts. Beneath them, in their shade and protection, these flirting mortals are featuring in one of the first ever scenes of contemporary people enjoying leisure time outdoors. Previously it was gods or military heroes or landscapes with peasants. Here are real people  albeit well-off people – but still real contemporaries, wearing contemporary costume, flirting and partying in the open air.

Peter Paul Rubens The Garden of Love, c. 1633 Oil on canvas, 199 x 286 cm Museo Nacional del Prado. Madrid Photo c. Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado

The Garden of Love by Peter Paul Rubens (c. 1633) Museo Nacional del Prado. Madrid

This painting bewitched the French painter Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684 to 1721) who went on to develop his own style of light-hearted love scenes set outdoors. The argument goes: Rubens invented Watteau who invented the fetes galantes, inaugurating the age of rococo art in France.

More examples of Rubens, such as Chateau In A Park, are set against numerous sketches and oil paintings by Watteau, including the wonderful La Surprise, as well as works by other 18th century rococo painters such as Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

Jean-Antoine Watteau La Surprise: A Couple Embracing While a Figure Dressed as mezzetin Tunes a Guitar, 1718-19 Oil on panel, 36.3 x 28.2 cm Private Collection Photo: Private Collection

La Surprise: A Couple Embracing While a Figure Dressed as mezzetin Tunes a Guitar by Jean-Antoine Watteau (1718 to 1719) Private Collection

Elegance

By which the curators mean portraiture. Rubens spent four years in Genoa (then a city made rich by trade in silks and fabrics) painting the wives of the richest bankers and merchants. The largest example of this period is the portrait of Marchesa Maria Grimaldi, and Her Dwarf – an ugly painting but, wow, the detailing of the gold cloth of her dress is amazing and lustrous in reality (reproductions completely fail to capture it). Note the classical columns (aren’t I classy) and the rich velvet curtain (aren’t I rich) and the bounding little dog (aren’t I sensitive).

The most direct influence of Rubens’s portrait style was on Anthony van Dyck, child prodigy and Rubens’s pupil, working directly under him in Antwerp before himself travelling to Genoa to make money. Van Dyck toned Rubens down, his portraits are cooler, more detached. In the Genoese Noblewoman and her Son, we have the classical architecture in the background and the luxury curtain (aren’t I cultured and rich) but the sitter is side on to the viewer, that much more self-contained, less revealing (aren’t I aloof). The boy is staring at us with the look of command and authority he is destined to grow into, and the dog is looking up at his future master. The thing is dripping with multiple layers of power and authority.

Sir Anthony Van Dyck A Genoese Noblewoman and Her Son, c. 1626 Oil on canvas, 191.5 x 139.5 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington, Widener Collection, 1942.9.91 Photo Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

A Genoese Noblewoman and Her Son by Sir Anthony Van Dyck (c. 1626) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Widener Collection

Van Dyck came to the court of Charles I (generally thought to have been the most genuinely cultivated of all British monarchs and who was rewarded for it by having his head cut off) and was knighted for his services to the crown and aristocracy. Van Dyck forged an image of Charles as the tall (he was short), wise (he was stupid), and authoritative (he alienated everyone who ever served him) ruler that he wasn’t.

The commentary made the striking claim that van Dyck invented the English gentleman which, if you’re familiar with his portraits of the English aristocracy, is at least plausible.

Back with PP, the exhibition is making the claim that Rubens is the father of the grand British portrait, and sets off to prove it by placing his huge portrait with dwarf opposite a selection of equally imposing portraits of rich people by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Thomas Lawrence, portraitists to the British upper classes from the 1770s to the 1830s. The examples here – say, Elizabeth Lamb Viscountess Melbourne with her son – are very large like the Rubens originals, they keep an architectural frame and a drape, but they are less sumptuous and rich, the colour is drabber, and the background is, in line with the English fondness for landscape, a realistic slice of countryside, presumably the estate of this rich woman.

Or take Thomas Lawrence’s Portrait of Mrs Arthur Annesley, a big slab of classical architecture, but with quite an extensive view over the estate on the right, and the painting dominated by sweet little darling children, appropriate to the Age of Sentiment.

Power

The previous rooms feel like they’ve been warming us up for the heart of the exhibition, two rooms dedicated to Rubens’s work as a propagandist of genius. It is staggering to be reminded all over again of his achievements completely outside the realm of art, for Rubens was also a diplomat, a spy and an antiquarian – a figure famous across Europe. Rather as with The Garden of Love, mentioned above, his achievement in political painting was to integrate classical mythology with everday reality, in this case with accurate depictions of living contemporary rulers, and to set both in a convincing space and tableau.

His masterpiece is the series of massive 24 paintings showing the career of Marie de Medicis and her husband, King Henri IV of France. A room is dedicated to a small selection of the numerous preparatory sketches Rubens made, and to an enormous screen projecting a video compilation of the finished paintings which currently hang in the Louvre. They are overwhelming, brilliant, vast, powerful in conception and in their myriad of details

Peter Paul Rubens The Triumph of Henri IV, 1630 Oil on panel, 49.5 x 83.5 cm Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1942 (42.187) Photo c. 2013. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource / Scala, Florence

The Triumph of Henri IV by Peter Paul Rubens (1630) Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Also in the same room and given the same treatment is the immense roof of the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall, London, which can still be seen today. It is covered in its entirety by scenes painted by Rubens and commissioned by Charles I to depict the power and glory of his father, King James I of Britain. It, also, is a commanding series of images, though less overwhelming than the Medici ones – and its impact slightly spoiled for anyone who knows that the paintings were still not complete when Charles I was led from that very room onto a scaffold built along the first floor of the building, to be beheaded. Absolute Monarchy, English style.

Hundreds of painters copied the example Rubens set of lending mythological force and dramatic mises-en-scenes to the depiction of contemporary rulers, from the Sun King to Hitler. The results are splendid but may be the most antipathetic to English taste…

Compassion

Or at least that’s what I thought till I entered the 5th room, which is about religion. Rubens was a devout Catholic and painter to the Counter-Reformation authorities. Ah. The largest Rubens in the room is the altarpiece Christ On the Straw, in which I found all the faults I dislike about most Christian art (and which I loathed in the recent Veronese exhibition at the National Gallery) – sentimental, lachrymose, stagey, inauthentic and banal.

There were lots of copies of this image, or something like it, by numerous subsequent artists, from David Wilkie doing the Grand Tour to Vincent van Gogh (!). Maybe the only one I liked was another sketch by Gainsborough, Descent from the Cross (after Sir Peter Paul Rubens). Seems to me Gainsborough expresses compassion in the shape and flow of the composition – the agony is implied, unlike the Rubens original where the white operatic faces are white with extreme emotion, the eyes drenched with tears and turned imploringly up to an angel-infested heaven.

Violence

Hell

Along with the sentimentalism it evokes around the story of the crucifixion, Christianity is also famous for the extreme violence of much of its imagery of revenge, and the weakest room in the exhibition is devoted to these images which take their cue from Rubens’ large and vividly imagined Fall of The Damned. Shame we couldn’t see the original, which is in a church in Germany to terrify the faithful. The engravings and copies here show the delight in a multitude of grisly physical tortures which always tickle the Christian imagination (Dante’s Inferno) but not the sense of falling into the picture and joining the devilish throng which the original was presumably designed to make you feel.

Rape

The violence of the religious imagination is set by the curators next to the popular of myths and legends about the rape or abduction of women in classical mythology, which Rubens depicted repeatedly, along with his copiers and devotees v The Rape of Proserpina, The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus. These compositions are stagey, operatic, full of carefully arranged violence, at the centre of which are plump women with their clothes falling off. Various reviews mention how uncomfortable the British have been with elements of Rubens’s legacy, and I personally dislike this and the religious iconography, both, for shamelessly exploiting the viewer. With a landscape I feel my aesthetic sense is being appealed to. With a painting of Mary bursting into tears or scantily clad women being abducted by musclemen in armour I feel much baser emotions are being aimed at.

The Hunt

Another room was dominated by Rubens’s very big painting of a Tiger, Lion and Leopard Hunt (1617) and around it hung works showing the way this scene v the full drama of the capture of a large, exotic, wild animal v was repeated with variations by painters like Eugène Delacroix and the Englishman Sir Edwin Landseer. It was Delacroix, apparently, who said: ‘Be inspired by Rubens, copy Rubens, look at Rubens.’

Lust

We arrive, exhausted with sensual overload, at the final room which has numerous paintings of scantily clad women being leered at, or just about to be seized by, a satyr. The women are notable for their large thighs, buttocks and bellies and relatively small breasts, as in the Pan and Syrinx of 1617.

Peter Paul Rubens Pan and Syrinx, 1617 Oil on panel, 40 x 61 cm Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, Gemaeldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel Photo: Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, Gemaeldegalerie Alte Meister/Ute Brunzel

Pan and Syrinx by Peter Paul Rubens (1617) Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, Gemaeldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel

The women are always painted as pink and light-skinned, symbolising their purity and innocence. The pans or satyrs are super-muscular figures, their sunburnt skins darkening towards their crotch, wherein lies the source of lust and the hellish pleasures which will buy their owners a one-way ticket to the Fall of Damned, mentioned above.

It was interesting to learn how Rubens used a variety of tints to create the appearance of flesh, including the use of blue or green tints to imply shadowed skin, next to unshadowed pink or white.

And it was interesting to see a roomful of works depicting the same subject by Watteau, Boucher, Renoir and Picasso – but whether this is due to Rubens’ influence or to the abiding interest in revealing the naked female body to the male artist’s male patrons and buyers, to the male gaze generally – is open to debate.

Certainly a room full of predatory, half-bestial men caught in the act of preying on exaggeratedly innocent, wide-eyed maidens left me feeling queasy and was maybe not the best final image to have of Rubens.

But this exhibition, exhaustive and exhausting, succeeds, and then some, in convincing you that Rubens was one of the most important and influential painters in western art.

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by Simon on January 27, 2015  •  Permalink
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Allen Jones @ the Royal Academy

Allen Jones was born in 1937. He attended the Royal College of Art alongside David Hockney and Patrick Caulfield, just after the generation of Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake i.e. in the heart of what was quickly labelled Pop Art, casting off the existentialist angst of Abstract Expressionism and rejoicing in the bright shiny surfaces or a new world of household appliances and in the flashy sexy images of TV and advertising.

This exhibition in the Burlington Galleries (round the back) of the Royal Academy is a retrospective of a career spanning over 50 years.

Sexy sculptures

The show features sketches and drawings from as early as 1959, but his breakthrough came in 1969 when he exhibited Table, Chair and Hat Stand. These caused a furore at the time and columnists who are paid to fill newspapers with anything they can dredge up were still pretending to be scandalised at the opening of this exhibition a few months ago. Really? In the era when 50 Shades of Grey is the fastest-selling paperback of all time, 20 years after Madonna wore her conical bra, 30 years after Robert Mapplethorpe‘s cock photos.

Another group which set out to subvert suburban society, its pinstripe trousers and bowler hats, its Mary Whitehouse repressiveness, made their debut in 1969 – Monty Python. Python also used references to sex and a rather tame vision of kinkiness to ‘shock’ and subvert. In the small first room of the show there were bits and bobs from Jones’s studio and I was struck to see this included some Eric Gill seaside postcards. Looking back, both Jones and Python seem provincial and tame compared with Mapplethorpe’s sophistication and with any of the bondage pornography which is only a click away on the internet.

Googling for images I’ve also come across some striking outfits worn by Diana Rigg playing Emma Peel in the TV series The Avengers, which anybody could watch on TV from 1965 onwards.

There were a few variations on the Table in the show, but not as many as you’d expect. The trilogy seem to have been almost one-offs – but Jones’s long career ever since has been overshadowed by their stunning impact. It’s less their sexiness (they are not very sexy in a cold clinical gallery) but the clarity of their design, combining the super-perfection of a shop window mannekin with the banality of their functionality – table, chair, hat stand – and the sleek lines of the leather boots and panties, which make them such design classics.

Painting

Moving swiftly on the show’s biggest room is dedicated to thirty or so paintings, showing how Jones’ style developed. The 1960s paintings have a few of the motifs of the era, arrows and decals, and details from the magazine world, but overall are rather drab, the muted greens and browns of camouflage.

It’s the paintings from the 1990s and 2000s which make an impact. They’re generally enormous and very simple in design – clearly drawn silhouettes of (mostly women’s) legs, sometimes upper bodies, and some men, set in big patches of bright colours, representing what appear to be night clubs, cinemas, a tryptych based round a piano with a man playing it and women in various stages of undress lying over it.

They are all stylised in the same way – there is no attempt to be realistic – the figures are drawn with cartoon-like strong outlines, the faces of men or women often left blank or not appearing. It is the silhouette, the outline of the human figure, particularly the lower half, the legs, and particularly women’s legs, which fascinate him.

Some of the paintings have an erotic element, some appear to be in sex clubs, or involve men and women in apparently sexual positions. But others are of fully clothed people dancing or in other fairly unerotic poses. What they all have in common is the cartoon-like draughtsmanship, the use of bright primary colours, and the way they left this viewer completely cold.

Steel sculpture

There is a room dedicated to Jones’s steel sculptures: they are slightly over life-size, two-dimensional ribbons of steel curved and cut and painted to have just enough likeness to human beings to be recognisable. Many of them are of dancing individuals or couples and, by this stage one is realising that dance – the human body he’s so fascinated by in lovely movement – is a major subject for Jones.

My wife liked some of the thin steel sculptures of men best in the show.

Mannekins

The final room has a set of a dozen or so mannekins, from the over-famous Hat Stand through a series of mannekins with the same small head and slim body, standing tiptoe in a variety of leather outfits. It includes paintings and photographs, including the stunning photo of Kate Moss wearing a metallic body suit. This adorned the cover of the RA magazine as well as GQ magazine and many others. It demonstrates the crossover in Jones’s work between fine art and fashion, glamour, photography etc, one he’s perfectly at home with but gives Daily Mail commentators and feminists such fits.

I didn’t like the stylised small head and expression of these mannekins. they were all minor variations on the same model, though wearing different style shoes and covered in different bright paints (as in the huge recent paintings) or with figure-hugging leather outfits.

In the same room were paintings with similar poses ie a single female. By far the standout piece and one of the best things in the exhibition is the painting of ballet dancer Darcy Bussell (1994). A reproduction doesn’t do justice to the painting’s size, its lightness and elegance, and the likeness of the face – one of the few faces anywhere in his work which shows genuine individuality. I also liked the small scurfs of paint in the yellow section and the bottom, brown section – I like paintings which leave some paint unfinished, which indicate their hand-madeness in a world saturated with perfect images.

Dégas

Looking at the Darcey Bussell painting made me think of Dégas. There was a painter and sculptor obsessed with the female form and its movement, who painted and sculpted the slender figures of ballet dancers over and over again. Realised there is a direct link between him and Jones – and how, because Dégas’s svelte female figures are dressed in tutus and pumps they are acceptable as Art, whereas, because Jones’s equally stylised and repeated female forms sometimes are wearing kinky boots, or elbow-length gloves or leather body stockings – they are dismissed as sexist exploitation.

Sketches

Easy to stroll through the small final room and exit without stopping to look at the pencil and charcoal sketches. These were there to demonstrate the care and thoroughness Jones brings to his large-scale paintings and sculptures. But in among the preparatory works were a couple of gems, showing the brilliancy of his draughtsmanship, and also that he was interested in individuality before the interest in homogenous or generic or blank mannekin faces came to predominate.

Head of Judy, 1959, had an angularity and rigour and individuality which reminded me of 1930s Wyndham Lewis, hinting at the lines and blocks and angles hidden beneath the skin.

Skull, 1978, was a drawing of a skull with a Dürer-like intensity of detail – but what lifted it was a swatch of light brown paint, just one broad brushstroke to the right of the skull, which perfectly counterpoised it. this was the best piece in the show, for me.

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by Simon on January 11, 2015  •  Permalink
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Dennis Hopper: The Last Album @ Royal Academy

Dennis Hopper (1936 to 2010) made his first movie appearances opposite James Dean in two classic films, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Giant (1956). Dean encouraged the young Hopper to pursue his interest in photography, a passion crystallised when his wife bought him a camera in 1961.

Throughout the 1960s he documented his life and travels not only as a Hollywood actor among other stars such as John Wayne, Dean Martin, the gorgeous Paul Newman…

Paul Newman (1964) by Dennis Hopper © Dennis Hopper, courtesy The Hopper Art Trust

Paul Newman (1964) by Dennis Hopper © Dennis Hopper, courtesy The Hopper Art Trust

… but also, as an amateur artist himself, in touch with the Californian avant-garde, as well as the New York pop scene of Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein.

Andy Warhol, Henry Geldzahler, David Hockney and Jeff Goodman (1963) by Dennis Hopper © Dennis Hopper, courtesy The Hopper Art Trust

Andy Warhol, Henry Geldzahler, David Hockney and Jeff Goodman (1963) by Dennis Hopper © Dennis Hopper, courtesy The Hopper Art Trust

As a well-connected bohemian Hopper was in a position to document (and take part in) some of the most interesting events of the 1960s, including the Civil Rights marches led by Dr Martin Luther King…

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1965) by Dennis Hopper © Dennis Hopper, courtesy The Hopper Art Trust

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1965) by Dennis Hopper © Dennis Hopper, courtesy The Hopper Art Trust

… as well as the earliest hippy happenings and festivals, and the show features a number of photos of the pop groups who provided the soundtrack to the Summer of Love.

Hippie Girl Dancing (1967) by Dennis Hopper © Dennis Hopper, courtesy The Hopper Art Trust

Hippie Girl Dancing (1967) by Dennis Hopper © Dennis Hopper, courtesy The Hopper Art Trust

Other subjects include: motor bikes and the Hell’s Angels (he was a keen biker himself), and shots of the poverty-stricken Mexico which attracted all bohemians for being so much the opposite of the rich, bourgeois US.

In 1969 all his interests came to a head when he co-wrote and directed the classic independent film Easy Rider, the story of a couple of long-haired bikers driving across some of America’s most spectacular desert scenery. It was as his writing & directing career took off that, by his own account, he put his camera down and never picked it up again.

Hopper scholars (there are scholars of everything and everyone nowadays) calculate he took some 18,000 photos during his active decade. Throughout the 1960s he exhibited photos along with art works at various small Californian galleries, but this exhibition is based on 400 or so pics he chose to display at a large show in the early 1970s which was intended as a definitive overview.

The photos

There are many really wonderful photographs here, well-framed and composed, capturing moments and people in that candid 1960s black-and-white way. The Hollywood stars look magnificent. The hippies look stoned. the pop bands look s oyoung. The bikers look hard. Mexico looks squalid. And many of the shots reek of that peculiarly American atmosphere of blighted urban locations, that urban rootlessness of freeways and billboards and motel signs and jaded women and raddled drunks at bars, Raymond Carver’s America.

Double Standard (1961) by Dennis Hopper © Dennis Hopper, courtesy The Hopper Art Trust

Double Standard (1961) by Dennis Hopper © Dennis Hopper, courtesy The Hopper Art Trust

The lost 60s

But overall the show made me desperately sad. The idealism of 1966, when the Loving Spoonful and Jefferson Airplane provided the soundtrack to clean-cut college kids rallying to the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King’s crusade for freedom, seems as remote to our time as the Middle Ages. In the early 1970s the spirit of New American Cinema and various alternative types of rock or folk lived on in art and culture along with the dream of somehow changing the world, of liberating our minds, of creating a new society – but by the mid-70s had declined into cocaine abuse and heroin addiction, flares and mullets, exploitation movies like Carrie, the scandal of Nixon’s resignation, American defeat in Vietnam etc.

The election of Ronald Reagan in the States and Mrs Thatcher in the UK in 1979 signalled a new era, the cutting back of state-funded welfare, the unleashing of unbridled finance capitalism, and inaugurated thirty years of neo-liberal economics which have entrenched in place a super-well-paid executive class looking down on a poverty-stricken underclass, have crushed cultural and artistic experimentation – except to titillate the jaded palates of the international oligarchy with marinaded sharks and diamond-encrusted skulls – done little or nothing about racial prejudice, not lifted a finger about rampant environmental destruction and wasted a trillion dollars turning Iraq into the beacon of freedom and democracy we see today.

Leon Bing (1966) by Dennis Hopper © Dennis Hopper, courtesy The Hopper Art Trust

Leon Bing (1966) by Dennis Hopper © Dennis Hopper, courtesy The Hopper Art Trust

Almost everything Hopper and his free-spirited pals thought they stood for has been crushed and defeated and that, to me, is what these often beautiful and evocative photos say. The freedoms to explore and experiment, to live and think and talk and create differently, have vanished like morning dew.

The romanticisation of a black and white hobo lifestyle now looks like a movement with its tiny origins in the Beat ethos of the 1950s, which became a nationwide craze in the later 1960s, died a long slow lingering death through the dreary 1970s, and is now an object of awed wonder to us late-comers, to later generations who not only enjoy Hopper’s often magical photos, but marvel at the hope and optimism of him and his subjects.

You should go and see it.

Related links

More photography reviews

More Royal Academy reviews

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by Simon on August 14, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in America, Art, Exhibition, Photography
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Posted by Simon on August 14, 2014

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/08/14/dennis-hopper-the-last-album-royal-academy/

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