All posts tagged watercolours

Relating to animals @ the British Museum

Room 24

Room 24 at the British Museum is a large open gallery at the junction between the huge covered courtyard and the back of the museum. It’s a kind of portmanteau room titled ‘Living and Dying’, bringing together displays from around the world to consider how these fundamental aspects of human existence vary from place to place, and people to people. So, for example, this room has a big display of Australian Aboriginal art (which I’ve described in another blog post) and another display about Inuit peoples.

Relatively new is the display about ‘Relating to animals’ which looks at some aspects of life among people in Amazonia. I’m going to more or less quote the wall labels along with my own photos of the artefacts.

Amazonian apron from Peru, 1920s, made from feathers and beetle tissue. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Photo by the author

Amazonia

Amazonia spans nine countries in South America and is made up of tropical rainforests and savannas. This display shows contemporary and traditional artworks from across the region.

For many Amazonian communities, animals and people are fundamentally interconnected with their environment. This relationship is reflected in microcosms such as the veins in leaves, and in macrocosms, such as the constellations of the stars.

The artefacts on display reveal different ideas about the world and ways of living with the environment that have endured colonisation. These concepts today are communicated through a wide range of art forms.

Indigenous art has traditionally been associated with local craft and folklore, but many Amazonian artists also participate in global circles. In this way the indigenous knowledge expressed in their art works reaches beyond local communities to an international audience.

The display arises from work by the British Museum’s Santo Domingo Centre which builds relationships with heritage-related projects in Latin America.

Cubeo barkcloth

Costumes like these were worn by Cubeo people from the Tukano region for the onye or ‘weeping’ dance. After the death of a community member these masks were worn to disguise the dancer as animals and insects or eggs and larvae. The ceremony marks the transition between the worlds of the living and the dead as well as the importance of rebirth and regeneration. These dances are no longer practiced anywhere in Amazonia.

Cubeo barkcloth costumes (1960s, 1970s) © The Trustees of the British Museum. Photo by the author

The power of feathers

Feathers can be used to enable people with special ritual and intellectual knowledge to transform into birds. These clothes might have been worn for ceremonies celebrating this transformation.

According to traditional knowledge there are many ways in which people can acquire the ability to move through space and time and so heal and shape their community’s experience of the world. One way of doing this is to transform into a bird and transition between spatial dimensions. This usually involves dream states and powerful plants.

Apron

An apron from Jivaro, Ecuador, made in the 1960s from feathers, bark and bird tissue.

Apron from Jivaro, Ecuador, 1960s © The Trustees of the British Museum. Photo by the author

Head dress

Head dress from Brazil, made in the 1860s from feathers and plant fibres.

Head dress from Brazil, 1860s © The Trustees of the British Museum. Photo by the author

Back ornament

A back ornament from Jivaro, Ecuador, made in the 1960s from feathers, seeds, bird and beetle tissue.

Back ornament from Jivaro, Ecuador, 1960s © The Trustees of the British Museum. Photo by the author

Feather hammock

Europeans settled in many parts of Amazonia from the 1670s onwards. An increase in demand for feather-work led Amazonian people to invent new techniques and styles of production to cater for foreign tastes. For example, the natural colour of the feathers was modified and the design began to incorporate European-style floral motifs and coats of arms. This hammock was made specifically for a foreign collector.

Feather hammock (1910s) Unknown artist, Iquitos, Peru © The Trustees of the British Museum. Photo by the author

Contemporary Amazonian art: A story of the fish people

According to the oral histories of the Tukano people from northern Amazonia, humans originated from a journey on the serpent canoe of transformation. These narratives describe worlds in which people and animals can transform into each other and where time can alter dramatically.

This set of 12 watercolours are by Tukano Desano artist Feliciano Lana and they depict just such an origin story. Unlike most stories Lana’s narrative does not take place at on particular time – the events happen in both the present and the past. This temporal disorder is echoed in the story where time is experienced in radically different ways in the two worlds which Lana describes.

Installation view of ‘A story of the fish people’ by Feliciano Lana (2019) © The Trustees of the British Museum. Photo by the author

Here are two episodes in close-up, numbers 5 and 8. In number 5, at the top, shows the protagonist of the story, a fisherman, locked in a dark room and ordered to climb on top of a giant fish before many tucuxis or dwarves come in and tell him to escape.

Installation view of ‘A story of the fish people’ by Feliciano Lana (2019) showing numbers 5 and 8 © The Trustees of the British Museum. Photo by the author

In number 8, at the bottom, a woman has told the fisherman to collect water from the river, at a specific place marked by a big stick. But when he gets there he discovers the stick is actually a big snake but he is the only one who can see it. When he returned empty handed the woman sent him back. This time he was able to climb on the back of the snake and so collect the water.

Summary

Room 24 is big, busy and confusing. In the centre are crowds walking from the main courtyard towards the back of the building, as well as all those taking the steps down to, or back up from, the Africa rooms downstairs. So it’s easy to blink and miss relatively small and niche displays like this. So, here it is for your enjoyment.

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by Simon on April 5, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Exhibition, Latin America
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Posted by Simon on April 5, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/04/05/relating-to-animals-the-british-museum/

The genius of nature botanical drawings by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues @ the British Museum

As well as its entrance fee-charging blockbuster exhibitions, the British Museum always has 3 or 4 or 5 much smaller, free displays on the go. There are always two or three at the back of the Museum, up on the third floor, in the print rooms. Currently there are no fewer than four separate little exhibitions on display here. This is the first of four reviews of each of them.

The genius of nature botanical drawings by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues

Le Moyne was one of the most gifted botanical artists of his age. He created remarkable watercolours of plants, flowers, fruit and vegetables.

Milk thistle and dragonfly, probably a mosaic darner by Jacques Le Moyne (1585) Le Moyne often used insects to dramatise portraits of flowers and plants

Biography

Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues lived from about 1533 to 1588. He was raised a Protestant in mostly Catholic France. The Protestant community, during the course of the 16th century, came to be known as ‘Huguenots‘.

As a young man of 30 or so, Le Moyne was chosen to accompany a French expedition to North America in 1564 to 1565, which planned to settle new Protestant colonies in Florida. The mission itself was unsuccessful but Le Moyne’s work as cartographer and artist is thought to have included some of the earliest Western images of the peoples and customs of Florida.

On his return to France he found it engulfed by the Wars of Religion and Protestant Le Moyne fled to London around 1580. He settled in Blackfriars, among a large community of fellow Huguenots.

It was here that he attracted the attention of a fellow explorer of North America, the poet and courtier Sir Walter Raleigh. It was probably Raleigh who introduced Le Moyne to other figures at the Elizabethan court, including Lady Mary Sidney, mother of the poet Sir Philip Sidney.

Apart from their striking verisimilitude, maybe the most striking thing about Le Moyne’s botanical drawings is the lack of fuss. The Renaissance in Britain and France was a period when art overflowed with symbolism, meaning and allegory. Le Moyne seems so fresh and contemporary because he had a much more modern, almost scientific approach. According to the curators this reflected the growing interest in Western Europe in scientific classification and identification.

Studies of insects and shells by Jacques Le Moyne (1585)

Although the album’s emphasis is on botanical study, Le Moyne also included numerous studies of insects among his plants. This sheet is the only page from the album devoted to insects and shows, clockwise from top left: a tiger moth, a small tortoiseshell butterfly, a female great green bush-cricket, a caterpillar of the leopard moth, a brown-lipped snail shell, an unidentified snail shell, a sawfly larva, a small grey snail shell, a caterpillar of the swallowtail butterfly, and a caterpillar of the tiger moth.

The images

The British Museum possesses 50 botanical drawings by Le Moyne. They derive from an album of illustrations the Museum bought in 1962. This small display presents a selection of 12 bright and detailed watercolours which look like they were painted yesterday. Isolated against blank backgrounds, surrounded by rectilinear painted frames, these images of plants, flowers and insects have, as the curators point out, the individuality of portraits.

Medlars (Mespilus germanica) by Jacques Le Moyne (1585) Medlars were a popular medieval and Renaissance fruit. Closely related to the apple they were often eaten with cheese or made into jelly. This apparently simple composition in fact allows the fruit to be seen from three different angles.

Le Moyne at the Victoria and Albert Museum

This British Museum display comes just two years after a much more comprehensive exhibition of Le Moyne watercolours which ran at the Victoria and Albert Museum from December 2020 to August 2021.

The V&A owns a different album of Le Moyne’s work. It acquired its album as long ago as 1856, mainly because of the exquisite quality of the 16th century book binding. On the web page below you can view every illustration in the V&A’s album.

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by Simon on December 31, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 31, 2023

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Impressionists on Paper: Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec @ the Royal Academy

This exhibition in is in the smaller set of three rooms at the back of the Royal Academy building i.e. it’s more of an amiable stroll through three rooms of relatively small drawings, rather than, say, the full-on assault course of the 11 big rooms of the extraordinary Marina Abramović show.

It does what it says on the tin, brings together 80 or so works by all the famous Impressionist and post-Impressionist artists plus quite a few I’d never heard of before, experimenting with different media on paper.

Exhibitions need an aim or project and this one aims to explore how Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists in late 19th-century France didn’t just use paper works as studies but radically transformed the status of works on paper. Previously, drawings were mostly conceived as preparations for paintings; in the hands of the Impressionists drawings, pastels, watercolours, temperas and gouaches were increasingly perceived as more than just preparatory techniques, and became autonomous works of art, claiming a shared aesthetic with painting.

Dancer Seen from Behind by Edgar Degas (c. 1873). Essence (diluted oil paint) on prepared pink paper. Collection of David Lachenmann

Who are we talking about? The eye-catching famous artists are: Mary Cassatt, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Eva Gonzalès, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Odilon Redon, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Georges Seurat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Vincent van Gogh.

Less well known are the likes of Albert Lebourg, Jacques Emile-Blanche, Armand Guillaumin, Frederico Zandemeneghi.

Impressionists recap

As the curators explain:

The avant-garde artists known as the Impressionists came to prominence during the late 1860s and early 1870s, first exhibiting in Paris as a group in 1874. They shared a concern to depict scenes from everyday life and to address contemporary issues, which encouraged them to challenge traditional attitudes to drawing and seek innovation. Vivid colour, a quick, loose touch, and daring viewpoints, together with a deliberate lack of finish, were their means of capturing the fugitive effects of nature as well as vignettes of modern life.

The portability of drawing materials greatly facilitated direct observation and the recording of scenes on the spot. The eight Impressionist exhibitions, held in Paris between 1874 and 1886, included a large number of works on paper and reflected their shift in status. This was also encouraged by dealers who recognised the economic advantage of exhibiting and selling works on paper.

Cliffs at Etretat: The Needle Rock and Porte d’Aval by Claude Monet (c. 1885). Pastel on wove paper. National Galleries of Scotland

What it’s like

The most striking thing, for me, was how the drawings faithfully echo the style of each artist’s paintings i.e. the way each of the artists have strong signature styles or vision no matter what medium they’re working in.

So you see a hazy landscape of cliffs by the sea and instantly know it’s Monet; charcoal images of ballet dancers posed at striking angles and know its Degas; a round-faced woman’s face smiling at some outdoors dance and know it’s Renoir; a grotesque, angular woman in an urban setting and you know it’s Toulouse-Lautrec; a light and airy landscape made out of cubes and rectangles of colour and you know it’s Cezanne.

So you can play an entertaining game of standing far away from the wall to try and identify the artist by their style, then stroll over to the wall label to find out if you were correct. For example, who would you think this is by?

Portrait de Marie-Thérèse Gaillard by Mary Cassatt (1894) Pastel on paper. Private collection. Photo © 2007 Christie’s Images Limited

In this case it’s a trick question. You might have thought Renoir, from the treatment of the face, but it is in fact by Mary Cassatt. Note the striking difference in finish between the face – expertly and completely rendered – and the clothes, rendered in a completely different, hurried, unfinished style, with the background wall hovering somewhere between the two.

What I liked

The most striking work in room 1 is the Portrait of Madame Henri Wallet by Jacques Emile-Blanche simply because of its size. It’s a John Singer Sargent-style and sized portrait of an elegant society woman, and so stands out in a room full of much smaller, much more hazy and impressionistic images.

Degas sketched and drew things around him so compulsively that his colleagues nicknamed him Monsieur Pencil and, appropriately, there are more works by him in this exhibition than any other  artists, 12 in total, all of which I liked.

I love sketches and drawings, I love art which is half-finished, ghostly, hinting at a half-grasped reality, which is why I’ve always loved Degas’ strange and mysterious Woman at a Window (1871), which used to be tucked away in a side room at the Courtauld Gallery. Here it is presented in all its pregnant mystery and an epitome, for me, of the power of paintings or drawings which are better left unfinished, full of hints and implication.

But I’d forgotten, if I ever knew, about Degas’s friend Frederico Zandemeneghi (1841 to 1917). Zandemeneghi was invited by the Impressionists to exhibit at four of their 8 exhibitions. He was particularly close to Degas. They shared an interest in depicting scenes of modern life featuring women subjects, seen from unconventional viewpoints, often cropping the image unexpectedly, and using vibrant colourful pastels.

This example has several of those characteristics in spades, namely the dramatic cropping which makes the subject feel really close-up and in your face. And the very bright colours, blue, yellow, orange, red, making the most of the range of human sight.

Study of a Woman from Behind by Federico Zandomeneghi (1890 to 1897) Pastel on cardboard. Galleria D’Arte Moderna, Milan. Photo © Comune di Milano

The show is in chronological order, starting with works from the 1870s. Room 2 contains works from the 1880s. The highlight for me was van Gogh’s ‘The Fortifications of Paris with Houses’ from 1887, made from a combination of graphite, chalk, watercolour and gouache. This reproduction in no way conveys the glowing brightness of the original. Then I liked the contrast between the architecturally accurate apartment block on the left and the vague ‘impressionistic’ grass in the foreground. Then I noticed the way the big fortification wall is not made of bricks but of hundreds of vertical dabs of orange and grey. And then I noticed the ghostly couple walking past in the foreground, ghosts of the millions of people who lived and died in the great cities of Europe, leaving barely a trace of chalk on paper. At which point I realised that there’s a kind of spectrum of solidity, from the super-solid apartment blocks on the right, to the more dabbed and impressioned fortifications themselves, and then to the human beings, the least permanent or impactful things in the picture or in history, hundreds of millions of us leaving less trace than walls or buildings.

The Fortifications of Paris with Houses by Vincent van Gogh (1887) Graphite, black chalk, watercolour and gouache on paper. The Whitworth, The University of Manchester. Photo by Michael Pollard

The exhibition concludes in room 3 with works from the 1890s and 1900s, which saw an ever-growing appreciation of works on paper and a proliferation of exhibitions of the medium. There’s a lot more Degas who emerges as probably the strongest and most consistent artist on paper. Off in one corner is a set of quiet, thoughtful, washed-out watercolours by Cézanne from late in his career. At the opposite corner of the room, both literally but also in terms of subject matter is a small set of three vivid, scratchy, angular images of the louche underworld of Montmartre by Toulouse-Lautrec.

But floating above this world of human troubles is the work I liked the best, a classic of what, during the 1890s came to be known as Symbolist art, the wonderful, visionary ‘Ophelia among the flowers’ by Odilon Redon.

Ophelia Among the Flowers by Odilon Redon (1905 to 1908) Pastel. The National Gallery, London

The Impressionists were trying to capture the truths of the modern world, applying light quick touches to capture the fleeting moment. Redon, by complete contrast, sought out ‘the light that never was on land or sea’, depicting images from the inner world of fantasy and dream. So I thought he was pretty out of place in an exhibition of impressionists. But his inclusion makes sense if we forget the exhibition’s main title for a moment and think of it more as a study of the evolution of drawing and painting on paper in France from the 1870s to the 1900s. From that perspective the inclusion of Redon makes sense for his technical prowess. The flowers are obviously the dominant element in the work, but after a while you realise that it’s the peculiar quality of the light in the top middle and right of the image which give it its haunting, apocalyptic quality.

Consequences

According to the curators:

The French avant-garde artists’ interest in drawing and the remarkable range of their production had far-reaching consequences. The hierarchical distinction made between painting and drawing ceased to exist. Freedom of execution and a laissez-faire attitude to materials provided an impetus that allowed the world to be depicted in more imaginative ways, leading to developments in 20th-century art such as Abstract Expressionism.

So as we progress through the works in chronological order, we are not just witnessing the development of visual styles, generally away from figurativism and towards greater abstraction, but the evolution of the medium of drawing itself, as it prepares for the great lift-off of modern art at the start of the twentieth century.

It’s not all masterpieces. Some are not-great early works (for example, by van Gogh or Gauguin) which are of largely scholarly interest, others are wishy-washy landscapes which are a bit meh (Armand Guillaumin). But overall it’s a lovely civilised way to spend an hour, enlivened by a regular stream of masterpieces. It’s worth visiting just to see the 12 Degas works and the 3 or 4 pieces by Frederico Zandemeneghi and the van Gogh. But other visitors will find other works to marvel at and cherish.

Dancers on a Bench by Edgar Degas (around 1898) Pastel on tracing paper © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection

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by Simon on December 2, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 2, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/12/02/impressionists-on-paper-degas-to-toulouse-lautrec-the-royal-academy/

The Bauhaus and Britain @ Tate Britain

This one-room FREE display at Tate Britain celebrated the centenary of the opening of the Bauhaus School of Art and Design in Germany in 1919 with a display showing the interaction between Bauhaus ideas and exponents, and their followers and collaborators in Britain.

The Bauhaus aimed to promote modern art for a modern world and to demonstrate the practical use of all the arts to improve society. As part of this goal it set out to integrate disciplines including the fine arts, architecture, craft, graphic design and photography.

During its 14 year existence an astonishing array of some of the most creative 20th century artists, sculptors, designers, architects and photographers lived and taught and made wonderful things at the school’s Weimar campus.

K VII (1922) by László Moholy-Nagy. Tate

As soon as they came to power in 1933 the Nazis, who not incorrectly saw the Bauhaus as a hotbed of radicalism, shut it down. Many artists associated with the school came to Britain in search of safety and work and British artists with similar interests to those of the Bauhaus welcomed their émigré colleagues. Many key Bauhaus figures went on to the United States, opening the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937, but some remained in Britain, and this exhibition focuses on a) those who stayed b) the British periods of those who stayed for a year or two before moving on.

Ball, Plane and Hole (1936) by Dame Barbara Hepworth

So it is that the exhibition interleaved works produced by both Bauhaus and British artists and designers across a characteristically wide range of media. I counted:

Paintings by Ben Nicholson, László Moholy-Nagy, John Stephenson, Alastair Morton artistic director of Edinburgh Weavers who commissioned work from Nicholson.

Watercolours by Grete Marks.

Sculptures by Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo, who settled permanently in London and became a leading figure in the development of abstract art in Britain.

Atea service by Grete Marks and a teapot by Naum Slutzky.

Ceramics such as the vase by Grete Marks.

Carpets by Ben Nicholson.

Fabrics by Ben Nicholson.

Furniture i.e. streamlined modern chairs by Marcel Breuer.

A bakelite radio set designed by Wells Coates.

Photos of modernist blocks of flats (Kensal House, Kensal Rise) by Edith Tudor-Hart, and portraits by Lucia Moholy-Nagy.

Architecture Kensal House designed by Elizabeth Denby with architect Maxwell Fry, who had been English partner to Bauhaus director Walter Gropius during his sojourn in England 1934 to 1937.

A selection of jewellery, namely brooches, necklaces and rings – by goldsmith, industrial designer and master craftsman Naum Slutzky.

Dove brooch by Naum Slutzky

And books. There are several display cases showing old magazines from the 1930s by such earnest advocates of modernism as Sir Herbert Read, the dustjacket of whose 1934 book Art and Industry was designed by Bauhaus-trained Herbert Bayer. Read went on to try and create an inter-disciplinary art & design college in Edinburgh.

There’s a rare copy of The New Architecture and The Bauhaus by the Bauhaus’s founding director, Walter Gropius, published in 1937, one of the first books about the school in English. And of the 1939 Pelican Special A Hundred Years of Photography by Lucia Moholy-Nagy, László’s photographer wife.

Another display case shows magazine articles written by some of these artists, alongside personal photos of, for example, the Nicholsons at home, and postcards from Moholy-Nagy to the Nicholsons.

Ben Nicholson always features prominently in these exhibitions as one of the 1930s British artists who experimented most extensively with abstract and geometric shapes, in both painting and small sculptures and (as here) a carpet and fabrics.

I don’t quite know why, but he’s never lit my candle at all – I’ve always thought of him as a poor British cousin of the far more exciting and innovative Europeans. Here’s a typical piece of Nicholsonia. Its heart’s in the right place but… for some reason it leaves me cold…

Sculpture (c.1936) by Ben Nicholson. Tate

Nicholson lived in North London with his partner Barbara Hepworth (whose work I’ve always found much more interesting). They befriended their art historian neighbour Read among other arty types, and a number of the Bauhaus exiles settled in North London near them, forming quite an artistic colony, including exiles like Bauhaus-trained Marcel Breuer who designed book covers, tables and chairs, some of which are in the exhibition.

B9 table by Marcel Breuer (1927)

The exhibition even includes an entertaining film – Lobsters! It was co-directed by Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy, who was commissioned to work on the film with English director John Mathias. While in Britain Moholy-Nagy took on short-term roles in photography, film and commercial design. He designed ads for London Transport and collaborated on this short film depicting fishermen on the Sussex coast. The surprising angles and close-ups are attributed to Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhaus sensibility but I personally was more struck by the plummy tones of the commentary and the jolly score by Arthur Benjamin.

After a while I noticed that almost all the objects on display are owned by Tate, and it occurred to the cynic in me that the Bauhaus centenary was probably an opportunity for the gallery to dust off some of these rather dowdy antiques and given them an airing.

I’m not criticising. The insight just helped to explain why most of the exhibits were only so-so, or included sort-of interesting postcards and magazines, but lacked any real killer exhibits.

That said, not choosing to go to town on the centenary but limiting the celebration to a modest and FREE display made it in some ways feel much more relaxed and casual and accessible than it might have been.

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

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/11/22/the-bauhaus-and-britain-tate-britain/

Laura Knight: A Working Life @ the Royal Academy

Laura Knight was the first woman to be elected to full membership of the Royal Academy of Arts (in 1936) and the first woman to receive a large retrospective exhibition at the Academy, in 1965. She was awarded a Damehood in 1929.

Born in 1877, Knight had a long life (passing away in 1970) and a long and successful career, working in oils, watercolours, etching, engraving and drypoint until well into the 1960s.

She never departed from the figurative, realist tradition of her youth and was, for this reason, in her heyday, one of the most popular painters in Britain.

Portrait of Joan Rhodes by Laura Knight (1955) © The estate of Dame Laura Knight. Photo credit: Royal Academy of Arts

Given Knight’s mid-century fame, and her role as a pioneering woman artist, it is a little surprising that this FREE display of some of her work is a) so small and b) tucked away in a dingy room through a doorway off of the main first floor landing. There was no signage, I had to ask an RA staffer where it was hidden.

If you google Knight or look at her Wikipedia article, you immediately see a series of highly realistic and vivid oil paintings, starting with the cracking Self Portrait with Nude of 1913, and including the evocative paintings she did during the Second World War (she became an official war artist at the outbreak of war, and her portrait of Ruby Loftus operating industrial machinery was picture of the year at the Academy’s 1943 summer exhibition).

As you explore further online you come across lots and lots of oil paintings of chocolate box scenes of the countryside, especially of the Cornish coast, featuring soulful looking ladies with parasols (before the First War) or in flapper style dresses and chapeaux (after the First War).

In this little display there are only three oil paintings on display here, although they include the very striking portrait of Joan Rhodes (above) and an equally realistic and sensual double nude, Dawn. (It is hard not to be struck by the firm pink bosoms in this painting, though maybe I am meant to be paying attention to the women’s soulful gazes…)

Dawn by Dame Laura Knight (1932 to 1933) © The Artist’s Estate. Photo by John Hammond

No, the bulk of this display is made up of display cases of Knight’s drawings and sketchbooks of which the Academy holds a substantial collection – small, monochrome, often unfinished sketches, which are – to be frank – of variable quality and finish, some were very appealing, some seemed, well, a bit scrappy.

The works are grouped into three distinct themes from Knight’s long working life – the countryside, the nude and scenes from the theatre, ballet and circus.

Countryside

Knight had several spells of living in the countryside – in the 1890s she moved to the Yorkshire fishing village of Staithes and painted scenes of the coast and life among the fishermen and their wives. In 1907 Knight and her husband moved to Cornwall and became central figures in the artists’ colony known as the Newlyn School. In the 1930s she and her husband settled in the Malvern Hills, where she remained for the rest of her life.

Thus the exhibition includes sketches she did of Mousehole in Cornwall, alongside sketches of a ploughed field, trees beside a river, Richmond Park, Bodmin Moor, two land girls in a field, seeding potatoes, and so on.

Mousehole Harbour, Cornwall, with Figures in Foreground by Laura Knight (mid-1920s or early 1930s) © The Estate of Dame Laura Knight

It was only later, when I googled her many finished paintings of Mousehole and other Cornish scenes that I realised where these sketches were heading, and what I was missing. I wish the exhibition had included at least one finished painting of this kind of scene alongside the sketches, to help you understand the process better, and the purpose of the sketches.

Nudes

We’ve already met the two dramatic nude women in Dawn. There are a small number of other nude sketches and studies on display, which I thought were a bit so-so. Like the countryside sketches, they strongly suggest that the ‘magic’ of Knight’s paintings was precisely in the painting, in her skill at creating an airy, light and luminous finish with oil paints.

Standing Nude with Her Arms Behind her Head by Laura Knight (mid-1950s) © The Estate of Dame Laura Knight

Theatre, ballet and circus

This broad subject area contains the largest number of sketches and drawings. Knight sketched ballet dancers, and circus performers, there are drawings of boxing matches held among soldiers training during World War One, and ice skaters and trapeze artists and many other performers. The wall labels tell us that she even spent some months travelling with famous circuses of the Edwardian era, drawing and sketching every day.

Trapeze Artists by Laura Knight (1925) © The Estate of Dame Laura Knight

They’re all competent. Some of them piqued my interest. But none of them seemed to me as vivid as the drawings of, say Edward Ardizzone, who had a comparable sketching style, using multitudes of loosely drawn lines to build up form and composition.

The Lion Tamer by Edward Ardizzone (1948)

Maybe I’m mixing up fine art (Knight) with book illustration (Ardizzone) and maybe I’m giving away my failings of taste in saying so, but I much prefer the Ardizzone. It’s more vivid, more evocative, more physically pleasing (more tactile), more fun.

Also, as with the nudes and landscapes, a quick search online reveals that Knight converted her sketches into scores and scores of paintings of the circus, and I immediately found the paintings much more pleasurable than the sketches – a little cheesy and old-fashioned, like vintage Christmas cards, but much more finished and complete than the sketches.

Grievance

The introductory panel and all the wall labels exude what you could call the standard feminist spirit of grievance and offence. There’s a long list of offences to absorb.

The curators point out that Knight, despite her success with the public, was only granted membership of the Royal Academy in 1936! That she was the first woman to achieve this accolade (why so late Royal Academy)! But that, even then, she wasn’t invited to Academicians’ Annual Dinner until 1967!

We are told that, as a woman art student before the Great War, she was forbidden to paint or sketch from real naked models but had to work from sculptures and statues! It was only in the 1930s, in Newlyn, that she was able local people to pose nude for her! And so a work like Dawn can be seen as an act of defiance against a male-dominated art world!

I’m sure all of this, and much more along the same lines, is true and scandalous and we should all be outraged by it. But, seen from another perspective, all this righteous indignation amounts to a skilful evasion of the rather obvious question, which is whether Knight’s art is any good – or is of anything of other than antiquarian interest, dusted off and used as a pretext for the righteous anger of modern curators?

This tricky question is not addressed anywhere in the (very informative) wall labels, but, when you think about it, is amply answered by:

  1. The Academy’s choice of location for this little ‘exhibition’ – tucked away in a dark and dingy side-room.
  2. The fact that it is more of a ‘display’ of half a dozen notebooks, three paintings and a poster, than a full-blooded exhibition. An after-thought.

If Laura Knight is so eminent and so worthy of consideration, why didn’t the Academy give her a larger exhibition in a more prominent space?

Ironically, the curators who complain that Knight was overlooked and patronised in her own time, have done quite a good job of repeating the gesture – of displaying only a small and not very persuasive part of her output, in a hidden-away side room which nobody in a hurry to see the blockbuster shows on Anthony Gormley or Helena Schjerfbeck or Félix Vallotton is in too much danger of stumbling across.

Suggestion

In all seriousness, why not give Laura Knight a much bigger exhibition? If you look at the paintings embedded in the Wikipedia article or all across Google, it’s clear that she painted absolutely brilliantly, but in a straightforward naturalistic style which was completely outdated and provincial by the 1930s, let alone the 40s or 50s – in a style which carried on its Edwardian naturalism into the atomic age as if the rest of modern art had never existed.

But despite that – or more likely, because of it – Knight was very popular and successful with the public. Her paintings of Edwardian children playing on the beach or soulful ladies standing on clifftops sold by the dozen and – from a Google search of them – look immensely pleasing and reassuring in a lovely, airy, chocolate-box kind of way. And her wartime paintings perfectly capture the earnest heroism of the conflict, and of the social realism, the committedness, of the wartime artists.

To me this all suggests a whole area of investigation, an enquiry into why British artistic taste remained so isolated and uncosmopolitan for so long, which would reference:

  • the way the director of Tate in the 1930s could proudly say that Tate would only buy work by the young whippersnapper Henry Moore ‘over his dead body’
  • or Sir Alfred Munnings, the horse-painting president of the Royal Academy, addressing the academy’s 1949 annual banquet, delivered a drunken rant against all modern art, and invoked the support of Winston Churchill (sitting next to him) who he claimed, had once asked him: ‘Alfred, if you met Picasso coming down the street would you join me in kicking his … something, something?’ ‘And I said ‘Yes, sir! Yes I would!’

A big exhibition of Knight’s work would:

  1. put to the test the curators’ claims about her importance and relevance
  2. be very popular among the sizeable audience, who still like their art extremely traditional (think of the sales of prints and other merchandise!)
  3. allow the curators to explore and analyse the long-lasting appeal and influence of the anti-continental, anti-modernist, anti-avant-garde tradition in 20th century English art of which, for all her skill and ability, Laura Knight appears to have been a leading example

This – the philistinism of English art, the determined rejection of all 20th century, contemporary and modern trends in art and literature in preference for the tried and tested and traditional – is something you rarely hear discussed or explained, maybe because it’s too big a subject, or too vague a subject, or too shameful a subject. But it’s something I’d love someone better educated and more knowledgeable in art history to explain to me. And I’d really enjoy seeing more of Laura Knight’s lovely airy innocent paintings in the flesh. Why not combine the two?

For once mount an exhibition which is not about a pioneer or explorer or breaker of new ground, but about a highly capable painter of extremely traditional and patriotic and reassuring paintings, and explain how and why the taste which informed her and her audience remained so institutionally and economically and culturally powerful in Britain for so long.

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by Simon on September 17, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Painting
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Posted by Simon on September 17, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/09/17/laura-knight-the-royal-academy/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transition from soft to hard lines

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

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

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

Evening in Motzstraße (1918)

Evening in Motzstraße (1918)

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

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

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

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

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

America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Misanthropy

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

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

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

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

Before sunrise (1922)

Before sunrise (1922)

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

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

Red

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

Metropolis (1917)

Metropolis (1917)

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

Nudes

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

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

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

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

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

John, The Lady Killer (1918)

John, The Lady Killer (1918)

Dada and collage

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

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

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

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

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

Germany: A Winter's Tale (1918)

Germany: A Winter’s Tale (1918)

Watercolours

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

Waltz dream (1918)

Waltz dream (1918)

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

De Chirico vistas and mannequins

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

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

Republican Automatons (1920)

Republican Automatons (1920)

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

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

Portfolios and collections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Siegfried Hitler by George Grosz (1922)

Siegfried Hitler by George Grosz (1922)

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

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

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