The American Dream: Pop to the Present: prints by Helen Frankenthaler, Carroll Dunham, Ida Applebroog, Dotty Attie, Kiki Smith, Lee Lozano, Louise Bourgeois, Emma Amos and Kara Walker.
ISelf Collection: Bumped Bodies: Maria Bartuszovà, Huma Bhabha, Alexandra Bircken, Ruth Claxton, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Kati Horna, Sarah Lucas, Pippilotti Rist, Nicola Tyson and Cathy Wilkes
Killer Heels: shoe designers like Westwood and Hadid, and videos by Marilyn Minter, Leanie van der Vyver.
The London Open 2018: Rachel Ara, Gabriella Boyd, Hannah Brown, Rachael Champion, Ayan Farah, French & Mottershead, Céline Manz, Rachel Pimm, Renee So, Alexis Teplin, Elisabeth Tomlinson and Andrea Luka Zimmerman.
Performing for the Camera: photos by Hannah Wilke, Adrian Piper, Jemima Stehli, Carolee Schneemann, Dora Maurer, Sarah Lucas, Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman and Amalia Ulman.
Pre-Raphaelite Sisters: Effie Gray Millais, Christina Rossetti, Annie Miller, Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, Joanna Boyce Wells, Fanny Eaton, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Maria Zambaco, Jane Morris, Marie Spartali Stillman and Evelyn de Morgan.
The First World War ended on 11 November 1918. To mark the end of the conflict Tate Britain has been hosting an extensive exhibition devoted to the aftermath of the war as it affected the art of the three main nations of Western Europe – Britain, France and Germany.
Thus there is nothing by artists from, say, Russia, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Serbia, Bulgaria, nor from the white colonies, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, nor from America which entered the war in 1917. It is a Western European show of Western European art.
The show includes a staggering number of masterpieces from the era, interspersed with fascinating works by much less-well-known artists.
For example, room one contains the Rock Drill by Jacob Epstein, possibly my favourite work of art anywhere, by anyone. For me this hard brooding metallic figure contains the secret of the 20th century, and of our technological age.
The exhibition is in eight rooms which take you in broad chronological order:
Images of battlefields and ruins, early movies, and memorabilia (helmets, medals, cigarette cases)
The official War memorials of the three featured nations (statues, designs and paintings by conventional artists such as William Orpen and the sculptor Charles Sargeant Jagger)
A room devoted to images of disfigured and maimed soldiers
Dada and Surrealism i.e. the extreme irrationalist response to the war of Swiss, German and French artists – including signature works by George Grosz, Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters
A room of black and white prints showcasing series of lithographs and woodcuts made by Max Beckman, Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Dix and Georges Rouault
The ‘return to order’ in a revival of nostalgic landscapes in works by Paul Nash and George Clausen, sculptures of sleek femininity by Eric Gill and Aristide Maillol, neo-classical portraiture by Meredith Frampton, and the revival of a strange post-war type of Christian faith in the work of Stanley Spencer and Winifred Knights
Politics and pass-times – divided between gritty depictions of a newly politicised working class by socialist and communist artists, such as The International by Otto Griebel, and a rare opportunity to see an original ‘portfolio’ or pamphlet of lithographs by George Grosz – and on the other hand, depictions of the newly fashionable night-life, the craze for jazz dancing depicted in The Dance Club 1923 by William Patrick Roberts, cabaret clubs of the Weimar Republic, or the Folies Bergère as painted by English artist, Edward Burra
The exhibition ends with brave new world visions of technology, machinery, skyscrapers, Russian constructivist images by El Lissitsky, the geometric paintings of Fernand Leger, and the sleek new design and architecture of the German Bauhaus school
1. Images of the battlefield
First impressionistic indications of the appalling nature of the war. A display case contains an original infantry helmet from each of the three featured nations, one French, one German and one British. Oil paintings of corpses in trenches or hanging on barbed wire. A rare black-and-white-film shot from an airship shows the devastation
2. Memorials
In terms of memorials I don’t think you can do better than Edwin Lutyens’s Cenotaph in Whitehall, arresting in its monolithic abstraction. But the show includes three large memorial sculptures by Charles Sergeant Jagger.
No Man’s Land (1919-20) by Charles Sargeant Jagger
3. The disfigured
The room of disfigured servicemen is hard to stay in. The grotesques of Otto Dix and Gorge Grosz are bearable because they have a cartoon savagery and exaggeration which defuses the horror. But the realistic depictions of men with their jaws shot away, half their faces missing, skin folding over where their eyes should be, and so on by artists like Heinrich Hoerle and Conrad Felixmuller, are almost impossible to look at.
The exhibition takes on a completely different tone when you enter the room of works by Dada and Surrealist artists – although the grotesques of the previous room make you realise how so much of Dada’s strategy of cutting up and collage, of rearranging anodyne images (especially from glossy optimistic magazines and adverts), to create incongruous and grotesque new images, is actually a very reasonable response to the grotesqueness of war and its dismemberments.
Here there are works by Kurt Schwitters, pioneer of cut up and paste art, as well as the stunning painting Celebes by early Surrealist Max Ernst.
Seeing a number of examples of post-war collage – works by Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, the English Surrealist Edward Burra and their peers like Hannah Hoch and Rudolf Schlichter all together – brings out the superiority of George Grosz.
It’s probably because I’m a longstanding fan but he seems to me to combine the best eye for design and caricature, with the best feel for how to create a collage of elements cut out from newspapers and magazines.
As well as a good selection of his biting political satires, there is an opportunity to see a reconstruction of the Dada-mannequin he created for the 1920 Berlin Dada exhibition.
Why be sensible? How could you be sensible and take any of the standards and values of the old order seriously? After what they had seen in the trenches? After that old order had brought about Armageddon?
In the print portfolio room it is interesting to compare the style of the four featured artists: Max Beckman was too scratchy and scrappy and cluttered for my taste. The Georges Rouault images are harsh but use shading to create an eerie, gloomy depth, as if done with charcoal.
By contrast Käthe Kollwitz’s series War is made from harsh, stark, pagan woodcuts, which exude a really primeval force. This set is a masterpiece. You can see the continuity from the harsh emotional extremism of pre-war German Expressionism, but here a widely used technique has found its perfect subject. Kollwitz is a great artist. Her images may be the most profound in the show.
The Survivors (1923) by Käthe Kollwitz
6. The return to order
After the physical and metaphysical gloom of the print room, room six is large, well lit and full of images of sweetness and delight. In all kinds of ways the European art world experience a post-war ‘return to order’, a revival of neo-classical technique, in music as much as in painting. It had quite a few distinct strands.
Landscape
One strand was a return to painting idyllic landscapes, represented here by a haycart trundling down a lane by the pre-war artist George Clausen, and a similarly idyllic but more modern treatments of landscape by the brothers Paul and John Nash.
Woman
After the disfigurements of the war and the parade of grotesques in the previous galleries, this one contains a number of images of complete, undisfigured bodies, particularly female bodies, used as celebrations of beauty, fertility, of life. These include the big, primeval statue Humanity by Eric Gill, alongside a more realistic depiction of a naked woman, Venus with a Necklace by Aristide Maillol. After such horror, why not? Why not unashamed celebrations of peace, whole-bodiedness, beauty, youth, fertility – a new hope?
Interestingly, this room contains three or four works by Picasso, portraits of women or a family on a beach, done in a kind of revival of his rose period, with the figures now more full and rounded.
Neue Sachlichkeit
Another strand was the particularly German style known as ‘New Objectivity’ which I’ve written about extensively elsewhere, not least because it was itself sub-divided into a number of strands and styles.
Amazingly, after such a cataclysmic disaster, many artists retained their Christian faith, although it emerged in sometimes strange and eccentric new visions.
These are exemplified by the English artists Stanley Spencer, who is represented by one of the many paintings he made setting Christian stories in his native home town of Cookham. And also by the strange and eerie vision of Winifred Knights, here represented by her unsettling vision of the Flood.
The Deluge (1920) by Winifred Knights
Not so long ago I saw a whole load of Knights’ paintings at a retrospective at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Seeing it here makes you realise the link to the stark geometric modernism of someone like Paul Nash. But also to the deliberately naive style of Spencer. It is a kind of Christianity by floodlights.
Portraiture
Separate from these varieties of self-conscious modernism was an entire strand of neo-classical portraiture. A style which had observed and absorbed the entire Modernist revolution from Cezanne onwards, and then reverted to painting exquisitely demure neo-classical portraits, generally of demure and self-contained young women. Exemplified here by Meredith Frampton’s still, posed portrait of Margaret Kelsey.
Is this a portrait of refinement and sensibility? Or is there an eerie absence in it, a sense of vacuum? Does it have all the careful self-control of someone recovering from a nervous breakdown?
7. Politics and pastimes
Room seven juxtaposes images of The People, The International and the proletariat – with images of jazz bands and people getting drunk in nightclubs. Which is the real world? The International by the German communist painter Otto Griebel faces off against William Roberts modernist depiction of a jazz nightclub (heavily influenced, I’d have thought, by Wyndham Lewis’s pre-war Vorticism).
By now it felt as if the exhibition was turning into an overview of artistic trends of the 1920s. A number of the works were painted 10 or 12 years after the end of the war. When does an aftermath stop being an aftermath?
8. Brave new worlds
The last room is devoted to technocratic visions of the machine age. Russian constructivists, French futurists, some of the old Vorticists, all the Bauhaus artists, looked to a future of skyscrapers, chucking out Victorian ideas of design and taste and creating a new, fully twentieth century art, architecture and design.
Fernand Leger perfected a post-cubist style based on brightly coloured geometric shapes suggesting a new machine civilisation, and the exhibition includes footage from the experimental film he made, Ballet Mechanique with music by the fashionably machine-age composer George Antheil. The Russian constructivist El Lissitsky devised an entirely new visual language based on lines and fractured circles. Bauhaus teacher Oskar Schlemmer is represented by an abstract figurine. Oskar Nerlinger evolved from pencil sketches of the war to developing a distinctive style of constructivist illustration featuring stylised views of up to the minute architecture.
Radio Mast, Berlin (1929) by Oskar Nerlinger
Now I like this kind of thing very much indeed but I feel we had wandered quite a long way from the First World War. Much of this last room struck me as having next to nothing to do with the war, or any war, instead being the confident new visual language of the hyper-modern 20s and 30s.
Wandering back through the rooms I realised the exhibition splits into two parts: rooms one to five are unambiguously about war, the horrors of war, trenches and barbed wire and corpses, moving onto war memorials and horrible images of mutilated soldiers, how those disfigurements were taken up into the distortions and fantasies of Dada and Surrealism and then extracted into a kind of quintessence of bleakness in the woodcuts of Kollwitz.
And then part two of the show, rooms 6, 7 and 8 show the extraordinary diversity of forms and style and approaches of post-war art, from nostalgic or semi-modernist landscape, through neo-classical if unnerving portraiture, Christianity by floodlight, from bitterly angry socialist realism to the frivolities of jazz bands and strip clubs, and then onto the Bauhaus and Constructivist embrace of new technologies (radio, fast cars, cruise liners) and new design and photographic languages.
Whether these latter rooms and their contents can be strictly speaking described as the ‘aftermath’ of the Great War is something you can happily spend the rest of the day debating with friends and family.
But there is no doubting that the exhibition brings together a ravishing selection of masterpieces, well-known and less well-known, to create a fascinating overview of the art of the Great War, of the immediate post-war period, and then the explosion of diverse visual styles which took place in the 1920s.
This is a fabulous opportunity to soak yourself in the life and achievement of a strange and haunting woman artist, Winifred Knights, born in 1899, active in the 1920s and 30s, but who had stopped painting well before her sudden, tragically young, death from a brain tumour in 1947.
Knights was in many ways a pioneer, being an award-winning student at Slade School of Art and then the first woman to win the prestigious Rome Scholarship in Decorative Painting. Knights was born into a liberal circle of Fabian socialists and female emancipationists and her artistic style and biography bespeak her lifelong self-possession and determination.
Childhood and the Slade
Knights was born in the south London suburb of Streatham and attended the very posh James Allens School for Girls, where she first showed her gifts as a draughtsperson. The show opens with pencil drawings of figures and nudes done when she was 17, 18, 19, all of which are very impressive. She won a place at the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art, in the Bloomsbury district of central London, at the alarmingly young age of 16 and studied there from 1915 to 1917. Among the drawings the standout piece is this breath-taking female nude.
At the Slade she was taught by Henry Tonks, a stickler for accurate depiction of the human body and so perfect for Knights, who he came to regard as one of his finest students. (The tall strict Tonks had taught the generation just before Knights, who featured in a previous Dulwich Picture Gallery exhibition, A Crisis of Brilliance.) Throughout her life Knights did beautiful depictions of figures clothed and unclothed. Even in the 1930s, when her style had evolved far from naturalism, she was still capable of producing sketches like this stunning:
From the start of her career through to the end she turned these talents on herself, producing scores of self-portraits and featuring images of herself in many of her paintings, sometime more than one image.
These self-portraits are all the more striking because Knights herself had very striking features – possessed of a long oval face which she accentuated with an austere hair-style, her long black hair parted in the middle and drawn tightly over her ears, revealing only the imaginative ear-rings she favoured.
The air of self-possession which comes over strongly in the photographs was emphasised or brought out by her long sweeping dresses, swathing her from throat to toes and covering the arms up to the wrists, which she made herself to her own designs from a variety of fabrics. She affected a big black broad-brimmed hat which features in many of the sketches and paintings.
Photo of Winifred Knights
Her own self-presentation was so distinct and striking that the final room in the show has a wall dedicated just to photos and portraits of her by other artists. These include:
Allegory by Colin Ginn, where Winifred is the tall figure in the characteristic high-necked blouse and her signature black Spanish hat, standing left
All this emphasis on her portraits and photos isn’t a peripheral matter, because Knights not only used herself in many of her compositions but based her increasingly stylised depiction of the human body on her own body shape – elongated, symmetrical, posed in geometric and formal attitudes.
Rural life and art
This move away from the sensuous curve of the life studies towards something more hieratic is apparent even in the first room.
Knight’s studies at the Slade were interrupted when she suffered a nervous breakdown after witnessing the vast explosion in the East End area of London’s docklands caused by a German zeppelin dropping bombs on a dynamite factory during the Great War in 1917.
She was sent to stay with her father’s cousin on the family farm in Worcestershire and this opened her eyes to a whole new world of rural life and work. The effect on her output was immediate, resulting in a piece like her Design for a Wall Decoration (1918). (She didn’t call her works ‘paintings’, she called them ‘decorations’ and had a lifelong interest in creating art which was decorative, more often than not commissioned to be placed in specific locations within specific buildings.) She meant the design for a wall decoration to be just that, a sketch for a much larger work to be painted onto a wall.
A work like Potato Harvest is surprisingly unlike the supple sensuousness of the pencil portraits. It is deliberately flat and angular, the figures almost deliberately amateurish and set against a backdrop which emphasises simple lines and shapes.
The show includes some very early book illustrations Knights did – specifically, this arresting illustration of Little Miss Muffet (note the use of her own self-portrait with the characteristic sharply parted hair and high-cut blouse) After returning to the Slade after the War she produced works like Leaving the Munitions Works.
It has the lightness of a book illustration, with the geometric sharpness of the walls and pavement and houses and the washed-out water colours. This little part of the show makes you wonder whether Knights couldn’t have had a very effective career as a book illustrator, or pursued it as a sideline; but it was not to be.
The exhibition never fully explained to me what ‘Decorative Painting’ is, but it clearly is more interested in lines and shapes and patterns for their own sake rather than the depiction of any ‘reality’. In her final year Knights won the Slade Summer Composition Prize for Mill Hands on Strike, the stylised fields in the background reminding me of the landscapes of John Nash.
The Deluge
In 1920 Knights won the coveted Rome Scholarship with her huge and most famous work, The Deluge. The competitors for the prize all had eight weeks to paint a work on the same subject. Despite losing time when she was ill for a week, Knights won the prize with this stunning huge work. A whole room in the exhibition is devoted to it, and also contains the full-size cartoon of the work and the many preparatory studies she did for it. Every detail was very carefully planned and worked over.
Only a few years after the slight amateurishness of TheMill Hands, her style here is astonishingly finished and achieved. Note the way all the women wear long robes of the kind Knight herself wore – in fact the figure in the front is a self-portrait of the artist, while some of the other faces are based on friends and families. (The central figure carrying a baby is Knight’s mother and Knight’s then partner Arnold Mason modelled for the male figure beside her and also the man scrambling up the hill).
But it isn’t the faces you look at, it’s the extreme stylisation of the landscape and the geometric posture of the figures. It is a kind of naive Modernism, a variation on the Futurism or Vorticism of the pre-war years, except far more open and clear and simple. Maybe it is the post-war return to classicism, which took place across all the arts, as applied to cubism-futurism-vorticism, and so bringing a kind of clarity and order to the more chaotic pre-war modernism. Whatever it is, the longer you look at it, the weirder – and more compelling and powerful – it becomes.
The Rome scholarship and Italy
The scholarship paid for Knights to go and study in Rome from 1920 to 1925. Here she married fellow Rome Scholar Thomas Monnington (1924) and toured the Italian countryside, soaking herself in her beloved Early Renaissance frescoes. The way the frescoes were designed for specific locations, particular buildings, their decorative element is what she took and applied to a series of large-scale works over the coming decade.
The second half of the exhibition dedicates an room to each of these works. After The Deluge comes The Marriage at Cana (1923).
Here again design and decoration are everything, the starkly geometric lines of buildings and doorways and benches and even hedges, emphasising the static postures of the bodies, lined up in rows. Eerily, the faces – once again – are of friends and family and the painting of course features at least two self-portraits. But the faces, although more realistic than in The Deluge, are eerily blank. The picture doesn’t contain a shred of religious feeling – instead conveys a peculiar and unsettling sense of stasis. The figures are almost like zombies.
Each of the rooms dedicated to these big works contains some of the many preparatory sketches, drawings, cartoons and paintings Knights made for them and I found myself warming to the sketches far more than to the finished works. The initial pencil depictions of the figures have the supple humanity of her earliest portraits, but the way they’re hung lets you see all the life being slowly drained out of them as they become part of a larger, more abstract, schematic design.
Scenes from the Life of St Martin of Tours
I found this especially true of her last big work, a series of Scenes from the Life of St Martin of Tours commissioned for the Milner Memorial Chapel at Canterbury Cathedral. She worked on these for five long years, from 1928 to 1933, demoralised at one stage by disagreements with Sir Herbert Baker who commissioned it, almost abandoning the scheme, but eventually returning.
More than ever the composition is flat and stylised like an early Renaissance fresco, and yet the flatness of the composition contrasts oddly, jarringly, with the highly realistic depictions of the faces – Knights herself is the woman standing to the left of the kneeling saint (who himself has the face of Baker, who commissioned it, just as Renaissance works included the image of the work’s patron). The faces are realistic but oddly blank. It is like a science fiction disaster has come over all the people in the picture, draining them of all expression and warmth.
By this stage (this is the last room in the exhibition) I was used to being much more attracted to the sketches and preparatory works than to the finished products, which I find cold, flat and distanced. Her works hold you at arm’s length – just as the precise clothes, the formal hat and the emotionless gaze in most of her portraits do; whereas many of the sketches are warm and wonderfully evocative; take for example:
There are three small rectangular oil paintings in the final room, which are very rough preparations for the St Martin work, in which the faces are just greyish-brown ovals, but which somehow – in their unfinished and rough state – have more energy and emotion than the highly cleansed and clinical final product.
Conclusions
There is a huge gap in Winifred Knight’s work between the warmth and sensuous immediacy of the pencil drawings, some of her preparatory sketches, and the landscapes dotted throughout the show (I particularly liked the landscapes done around Roydon in Essex and at Cuckmere Haven in Sussex) – and the deliberately static, arrested and detached feeling of the really big compositions – her large ‘decorations’.
For me The Deluge is the most successful of these because it is the closest to the dynamism of the Futurist-Vorticist tradition, whereas the later master-works – The Marriage at Cana (1923), The Santissima Trinita (1924 to 1930), Scenes from The Life of Saint Martin of Tours (1928 to 1933) – have become too ‘decorative’ for my taste, too like the cold detachment of her beloved Renaissance fresco work.
Last years
Knights struggled over long periods with these later works and then, after the birth of her son in 1934, found herself bogged down with the duties of motherhood. By the time was broke out in 1939 she had virtually stopped painting and the war itself was a further demoralising period of frustration and privation. Thus the final room in the exhibition has the patchy feel of covering a long period (1928 to 1947) during which not a lot was produced.
Because it contains a wall of photos and portraits of her the last room prompts the thought that in one way, Knights was her own most striking work of art – the austere, intense and ascetic image she recorded in her many self-portraits and which others were also moved to record in photos and paintings, leaving a more lasting and somehow more intimate impression than many of her strange and unsettling decorations.
Books & Boots 