Delft was Vermeer’s city. Stand in front of his small painting, The Little Street of 1658 and you will see cobbles and a gabled brick house with leaded windows, just as you still see all around you in the city today.
Unlike his contemporaries Vermeer was not interested in movement but in stillness – SH
A woman is sitting in a darkened doorway, sewing. Another stands in an alleyway, bent over a broom. In the foreground, a girl appears to be playing a game with a young boy on the pavement. Ordinary people going about their lives in the stillness of a Delft morning. There is a sense of order, of quiet domesticity in the red-bricked architecture and ordered rows of cobbles. Cleanliness appears, here, to be very close to Protestant godliness. The palette is constrained, our eye drawn to the central dark doorway by the white blob of the seated woman’s crisp bonnet and shawl. This is a whole world. Not the world found in Blake’s grain of sand, but in a morning of Dutch domesticity.
Not much is known about Vermeer’s life other than he lived most of it in Delft and that his father was some sort of art dealer. After his death, Vermeer married Catherina Bolnes, a young woman from a well-to-do, cultured Catholic family with whom he had fourteen or fifteen children, not all of whom survived. His output was comparatively small – he died in his early 40s – but he is one of those artists whose paintings, such as The Girl with a Pearl Earring, Women in Blue Reading a Letter or the Lacemaker, are almost more well-known than the artist himself. This wonderful exhibition, the first retrospective of Johannes Vermeer in the history of the Rijksmuseum, is not big. There are 28 paintings, (out of 36 in total) all beautifully hung in the darkly dramatic galleries.
Unlike his contemporaries Vermeer was not interested in movement but in stillness. Intense moments of revelation and quiet. A young woman in a dark room, lit only by the outside light spilling in from the window, fixes a row of pearls around her neck whilst she stares out into the larger world beyond. Inside and outside is a recurring theme. In the history of art, windows have a special significance as the painting itself is often seen as a ‘window’. In Young Woman with a Lute, a girl sits at a table tuning her instrument. Scattered in front of her are sheets of music. Others lie on the tiled floor next to a viola da gamba. Behind her is a large map of Europe showing the Netherlands’ place as a modern country interested in expansion and cartography. The young woman is dressed in a yellow silk jacket trimmed with ermine and is wearing a large pearl earring. (Though the fur may only be rabbit and the pearl, glass). The foreground of the painting is darkened, so in contrast, the girl’s face is highlighted. Her wide-eyed expression indicates that she is distracted by something going on outside that is much more interesting than tuning her lute. Elsewhere women write letters, sometimes watched over by a maidservant who, presumably, has greater access to the outside world and will be the person who will deliver the letter.
In another of Vermeer’s most celebrated paintings, The Milkmaid (or Kitchen maid), the slow stream of white milk being poured from her earthenware jug into a bowl, along with the highlights of her white bonnet and the reflected light on her bare, working girl’s forearm –again from a high window– give the painting its quiet spirituality. This is a libation. Her blue skirt and the blue tablecloth suggest the heavenly blue of more obviously religious paintings. You might almost be looking at an altarpiece by Pierro della Francesca.
There is the belief that Vermeer documented the domestic world of his time, but his is an invented pictorial world, an illusion of reality. Middle-class Dutch homes would not have had black and white tiled floors as in Woman Writing a Letter, with her Maid. His genius lies not only in the sensitivity of his compositions but in his ability to master perspective and to create optical effects with the sharpness and blurring of paint to reproduce different plays of light. Objects are created through colour and tonal values rather than graphically. Vermeer was the master of light. Yet however close you get to a painting, it’s hard to see the brush marks to discern how he did it. Lawrence Gowing described him as ‘all eye and nothing else….a walking retina drilled like a machine’.
Compared to our modern world, Vermeer’s would have been very quiet apart from the bark of dogs, the cry of playing children or a baby, the shouts of those selling goods in the market. You only have to look at Vermeer’s glorious View of Delft, painted between 1660-61, to see how empty and probably quiet the city was. A clutch of people stand by a boat; two women chat on the edge of the canal. The only sounds would have been their voices in the wind, the lapping water and the creaking of the wooden boats, broken hourly by a peel of church bells visible on the other side of the canal. But that comparative quiet would have been broken from time to time by music. Not only does Vermeer give us the girl with a lute, but we see the same girl playing a guitar. Elsewhere a woman stands at a virginal, while two other paintings show the young women seated at theirs. They look straight out at the viewer as if appealing directly to us and the world outside. These have been brought together for the first time in many a long year. One of these works comes from the National Gallery, London, the other from the Leiden Collection, New York.
So what is the huge appeal to us now of Vermeer? Why is he so popular? Perhaps it is because his work seems so modern. His subjects are not saints or heroes but family and close neighbours. His spare, minimal interiors are peopled by those with whom we can identify, ordinary people going about their daily lives, cooking, sewing, writing letters (love letters perhaps?), playing music, chatting, and being bored. Those in whom we can readily see something of ourselves and our own lives. And then, of course, there is the paint—Luminous, shimmering, almost otherworldly, applied by the hand of a master.
Words: Sue Hubbard
Photos: P C Robinson
© Artlyst 2023
Vermeer: Rijksmuseum Amsterdam 10 February – 4 June 2023 Daily 9 to 18h
When she first took to the streets her photographic landscapes, which included Time Square, Coney Island and the street fairs of Little Italy, were similar to those of her predecessors and contemporaries such as Paul Strand and Lee Friedlander. But her photographs, snatched through doorways and shop windows, display a dispassionate voyeurism, rendering her something of an urban anthropologist who objectively observed the strange customs and happenings that she stumbled upon. Through her eyes, the mundane became edgy, whether she was photographing an ample naked woman in a white bathing hat showering on the beach at Coney Island or, what looks like, one of Sweeny Todd’s potential victims through an ordinary barbershop window in 1957 New York. It’s as though she was on a permanent lookout for the odd and the transgressive. As she wrote to a friend in 1960, “I don’t press the shutter. The image does. And it’s like being gently clobbered.”
Her early chance encounters, which resulted in photographs such as Woman in a mink stole and bow shoes, N.Y.C 1960, and the image of a hirsute man in pork pie hat, boxer shorts and black shoes and socks standing on the beach in Coney Island, gave way to photographs such as Jack Dracula at a bar, New London Conn, 1961 in which the heavily tattooed young man sits in front of his glass of beer staring confidently at the viewer. From the ghoulish curiosity shown in a pair of Siamese twins preserved in a glass jar in a New Jersey carnival tent, Arbus’s role as a curious observer changed to one of privileged insider. She claimed: “I have learned to get past the door from the outside to the inside. One milieu leads to another.” There’s the sense that in The Human Pincushion, Ronald C. Harrion N.J. 1961 – where a middle-aged white man stands pierced with hatpins like some downtown secular Saint Sebastian – or the moustachioed Mexican dwarf striped to the waist beneath his little trilby in his N.Y.C hotel, are complicit in the making of the image. That Arbus’s half of the bargain was to make them visible and feel singled out from the crowd. There’s a strong sense running through all these images – particularly those of the many ‘female impersonators’ – that self-worth comes from being seen and recorded – even if harshly. But it often feels, despite her unerring eye, as though there is not much compassion in these photos. As she said: Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot…There’s a quality of legend about freaks….. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw’.
This wonderful exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, held to mark the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt’s death, is part of a yearlong celebration. For the first time, they are showing all 22 paintings, 60 drawings and more than 300 of the finest examples of the Rembrandt’s prints in their collection. It explores different aspects of Rembrandt’s life and works through a variety of themes. The first section is predominantly made up of self-portraits. The second focuses on his surroundings and the people in his life: his mother, his wife Saskia as she lies ill and pregnant in bed, as well as beggars, buskers and vagrants that illustrate Rembrandt had an ability to depict poses and emotional states with great empathy. The last section demonstrates his gifts as a storyteller. Old Testament tales inspired paintings such as the exquisite Isaac and Rebecca, more commonly known as The Jewish Bridge c 1665-1669, a work of such consummate skill in its handling of paint and one imbued with such deep tenderness that it takes the breath away, even after countless viewings.
Above all Rembrandt was interested in people. Not stereotypes or ideas but real living flesh and blood characters. Salacious depictions were hardly unknown in the 17th century, but his etchings of a man and a woman pissing go beyond mere voyeurism into a form of social realism. His wife Saskia is shown in numerous poses. His fluid lines suggest that often he drew directly onto the copper etching plates. He’d cover the plate with a mixture of resin and beeswax, then draw through that surface with a needle to expose the metal. The plate would then be immersed in acid, inked and put through a printing press. One of the most touching is a small etching of his young son, Titus as a 15-year-old, executed in a bare minimum of lines. Titus’s shock of hair and pensive gaze are particularly compelling. Etchings rarely came into being in a single session. In the early years, when still gaining experience, he might begin with the head, move onto the torso and finally add the background. A master of light and dark, he used contrasts to add emotional depth and range.
And what does he want the Summer Exhibition to look like? After all Michael Craig-Martin painted the walls pink. “Well I’m going to have a menagerie. There’s a tradition of animal painting from Stubbs to the more amateur cat paintings traditionally submitted to the RA summer show. Our interest in depicting animals goes back to our first image-making in caves. But the truth is that you don’t know what is going to be submitted and it’s a committee decision. This year’s committee is made up of: Stephen Chambers, Anne Desmet, Hughie O’Donoghue, Spencer de Grey, Timothy Hyman, Barbra Rae, Bob and Roberta Smith, the Wilson twins and Richard Wilson, so it’s quite a cross section.”
The Worpswede colony was very much part of the mood-music among late 19th century European artists who wanted to ‘return’ to nature. Essentially a Romantic movement, this nostalgia for a prelapsarian existence was precipitated by the growth of industrialisation and the effects of urban modernisation. Many believed these were destroying their relationship with the landscape and their folk traditions. When Paula arrived in Worpswede she too initially painted landscape but, as she grew intellectually, emotionally and artistically, she developed a different agenda. Her subject became people. She painted the old in the local poorhouse, breast-feeding women and the children of peasants with an empathy close to that of Van Gogh’s. It’s hard for us to realise just how radical such a decision was, especially by a young middle-class girl. Paula sought out the raw, the authentic and the marginalised in a way that was completely modern. There wasn’t a smack of the drawing-room sentiment anywhere to be seen.
“I was”, she says, “hesitant, mindful of the danger of placing myself alongside such a strong painter. I was worried it’d be seen as a form of self-aggrandisement, but I’m interested in the intimacy Paula creates. Personal feeling is always the main thing. That’s why I love her. There’s never anything unnecessary, nothing extra or extraneous. Only what is needed. The work’s so strong, so modern, so ahead of its time. My decision to go ahead was helped by the fact that she’s poorly known here and that maybe, through this exhibition, her work will become more celebrated. She’s just so good.”
Paula Modersohn-Becker had an uncanny sense that she was going to die young. Her quest, at the century’s turn, was ‘to become something.’ Her whole life was a struggle between the binaries of domesticity and artistic fulfilment, duty and self-determination, the security of home and the stimulation of adventure and new experience. She longed for a child. She would paint herself holding her stomach as if she were in a phantom pregnancy. She would then claim that she was actually pregnant with art. Despite Modersohn-Becker’s bourgeois upbringing, she had a restless sensuality which is mirrored in Joffe’s work. You can see it in her unsparing nude self-portraits that show her, for example, sitting naked on a striped chaise lounge. There’s nothing romantic about the dark circles under her eyes, her sagging breasts and stomach and the unflattering long black socks – the only things she wears. And, there is nothing flattering about the ¾ Length Self-Portrait where she stands against a barren, leafless tree like some menopausal Eve. There are also a number of paintings of pregnant women and women with children, and there’s an especial poignancy to those of her daughter, Esme, when we know that Paula died tragically at the age of 32 from an embolism – only weeks after giving birth to her own daughter, Mathilde.
There are also ‘portraits’ of Cy Twombly, Mario Merz, Claes Oldenburg, Merce Cunningham and the poet and translator, Michael Hamburger. Stillness and quietness run through these works. In the film about Hamburger, he barely appears at all. We mostly see his gnarled hands turning his collection of apples from his apple orchard in fractured English autumn light, as a poet might turn over single words. You can almost smell the withered musty skins.
She has said that she is interested in objects in the landscape and has included some wonderful paintings of 1814 by Thomas Robert Guest of Bronze Age and Saxon Grave Goods, excavated from a Bell Barrow in Wiltshire.. Her own passion for the painter Paul Nash is underlined by the inclusion of his Event on the Downs of 1934, with its gnarled tree stump and mysterious tennis ball, which has been set between her diptych Ideas for a Sculpture in a Setting, inspired by one of the many flints collected by Henry Moore and kept in his studio. Shot is black and white the object becomes part vertebrae, part talisman, echoing the rock formations and stone henges to be found in this part of the countryside.
And does the work really justify all this space in three public institutions simultaneously? Well, yes and no. Dean is an interesting artist. At her best quietly poetic, as in the painterly The Green Ray, 2001 where we can glimpse, if we are patient, the brief refractive green flash caused by the sun setting over the sea. Here she captures something atavistic, in real time, something sublime that could not be caught on anything other than film. Though her use of light she touches on the history of painting, on the primal and creates a sort of truth.
Elected an Academician in 2005, Chambers’s trajectory to Burlington House and his show The Court of Redonda, curated by the Eagle Gallery’s Emma Hill as a collateral event to this year’sVeniceBiennale,wasfarfromcertain.His mother was a book illustrator and his father a building surveyor, and Chambers was brought up in what he calls “the privileged bohemian west London of the sixties”. He went to school with Tony Benn’s son. Holland Park Comprehensive was much favoured by sixties intellectuals. “But I left with no exams. Just Art ‘O’ level, and not a very good grade at that,” he tells me as our drinks arrive. “I was a posh fat boy at the local comp and just fell behind.When my parents split up I was sent to a grammar school in Hampshire but felt out of my depth academically. I did, though, learn German.”
Redonda is, in fact, a tiny, uninhabited island in the eastern West Indies. “A round lump of rock,” according to Chambers, “that’s good for nothing.” Discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493, who claimed it for the Spanish Crown, it was named Santa María de la Redonda. In 1865, it came into the possession of a merchant trader, Matthew Dody Shiell, who claimed it as his own personal fiefdom and later crowned his fifteen-year-old son, Matthew Phipps Shiell (1865– 1947), as monarch. The latter subsequently moved to England, where he had some success as a science-fiction writer, popularizing the legend of his royalty to the level of an “alternative fact”. Before his death in 1947, Shiell decided that the crown should not be hereditary but passed down through a literary line, and appointed the English poet John Gawsworth as his succes- sor. He assumed the title of Juan I Gawsworth. “Nobody else wanted the place,” Chambers says. “It has no history of substance, no independent raison d’être.” Permanently impecunious, John Gawsworth discovered that selling Redondan knighthoods in a variety of London pubs was a good little money-spinner. He bestowed honours on numerous literary friends to create an eso- teric court of writers, poets and ne’er-do-wells.
He envisages them as a single work, an invitation to the viewer to speculate not only on the various relationships of those portrayed but a chance to create a silent communication between individual subject and viewer. Never didactic, Chambers wants them to act as cata- lysts for the fabrication of possible narratives. Executed in his hallmark style, they pay tribute, in their formal construction, to the flattened perspective of il Sassetta and the naturalistic expression of Masaccio, and reflect his many visits to Italy. Although he could, he says, have sold individual “portraits” many times over he has always refused. He’s chosen, he says, to show them behind glass in order to give them a certain gravitas. He enjoys that the glazed sur- faces induce a slight reflection of the viewer so he or she becomes a part of the work. Roughly lifesize, his cast of characters invite immediate eyeball-to-eyeball communion between viewer and viewed.
In Vase of Flowers, 1924, which includes as its centrepiece the green Andalusian glass vase purchased in Granada in the winter of 1910-11, also included in this exhibition, we find a number of Matisse’s favourite motifs: the open window, the sea and sky, a vase of flowers, patterned wallpaper, a striped cloth, and a net curtain flapping like a translucent veil emphasising the boundary between inside and out. The vase not only functions as a ‘souvenir’ of his travels but underpins memories of the Islamic interiors that had so impressed him on his visit to the Alhambra on the same trip. This sublime painting, full of Mediterranean warmth, air, and light, captures the prelapsarian mood created within his studio with its tapestries and paintings, flowers and furniture, such as his favourite Venetian chair that he painted on numerous occasions. But his studio was not only a sort of lost Eden but ‘a working library’ of objects that had an almost anthropomorphic relationship one with the other. “To copy the objects in a still-life is nothing; one must render the emotion they awaken…” he said. The object became an ‘actor’, so that his much-loved silver chocolate pot is alive to its neighbouring objects whose reflections are caught shimmering in its rotund belly. Based on dialogue and connection these objects cannot be seen in isolation but reflect an almost human sympathy one with another. The ‘reality’ is no longer a purely visual one, arrived at by copying. The object has become an emotional vector. As for Freud, Matisse’s objects reflect an inner mental and emotional reality.
During the mid-1930s Matisse’s art underwent a radical transformation, in which drawing played a crucial role. Here the energy seems to flow so that people and things appear to float within abstract space, rendering everything of equal weight and value. This dynamic freedom was further explored within the suggested rectangular grid cut-outs such as Panel with Mask, 1947. As he said in 1951 the cut-out became, “the simplest and most direct way to express myself.” With these flat, bright forms he created a series of signs, dependent not on the recognition of an object but on the emotional charge created through shape and colour.
“It might well depend on your age as to whether you experience this exhibition as an exciting vision of a tech-utopia or some sort of nightmarish dystopian hell.” Sue Hubbard visits ARS17 at Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma; a show that explores the digital present and a potentially terrifying future.
Dedicated to exploring the digital present, the exhibition also looks to the future with an exploration of state-of-the-art technology, images from the internet, and digital games. There are artists from thirteen different countries and three generations, from the children of the sixties to millennials born in the eighties who, unlike their older counterparts, have grown up in a burgeoning digital world and for whom the physical and virtual seem to merge quite naturally into a single reality. As I belong to the first age group, I experienced a good deal of what was on show with a sense of angst, as if I was seeing through a porthole into a post-human world. It might well depend on your age as to whether you experience this exhibition as an exciting vision of a techn-utopia or some sort of nightmarish dystopian hell.
Elsewhere the artist Julia Varela litters the gallery floor with broken, bent, and distorted plasma screens, which she describes as “an act or resistance”, a “hijacking”. Lying contorted and twisted they seem to evoke the end of something, as Joseph Beuys’s iconic work once signalled the End of the 20th Century. This detritus, only very recently used to do something–transmit information, news, and entertainment–is now presented as redundant, a collection of mediaeval relics as technology moves on its inexorable course.
Art has always posed questions and forced us to face uncomfortable verities, challenged the status quo, and smashed existing categories to question who and what we are. This new digital art explores the intersections between the personal and the corporate, along with ideas that surround personal identity as it exists within both actual and virtual physical space.
Please stop the world. I want to get off.
In another painting from the same decade, In a Hotel Garden (1974) we can virtually feel the fierce midday sun pulsing beyond the suggested window frame, the patches of cool air circulating beneath the abstracted blue and white stripped awning, the filtered shadows penetrating the arched leaves of the palm tree. But Hodgkin isn’t a realistic painter. He doesn’t describe. He immerses himself in a particular time and place to recapture it later in the studio, like Wordsworth recollecting his emotions in tranquillity. In 1967, after several days spent in Delhi with the British Council representative and his wife, he painted Mrs. Acton Delhi (1967-71), possibly his most figurative painting. The odalisque-style figure of Mrs Acton, made up of spheres and curves, reclines languidly on the left hand side of picture space. It was during this period that Hodgkin decided to move from painting on canvas to wood, saying, “I want to be able to attack again and again and again, and the trouble with canvas is that if you attack it more than once or twice, there’s nothing left.”
Staged by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the aim of the original 19th exhibition was to promote technological innovation. This was met by riots from Chartist protestors in Birmingham’s Bullring. Frightened, angry and discombobulated by the rise in these new-fangled technologies, the Luddite riots reflected the uneasy economic split that was beginning to occur between old crafts and new industry. As I looked out of the ‘window’ of the virtual room into the virtual streets, policemen in white trousers were marching back and forth as Chartists with swords, pikes and flaming torches gathered and shouted, throwing eggs at the window. It was hard, during this immersion, to escape the parallels with today’s politics, where increasing unemployment is being generated by new technologies that render numerous jobs obsolescent. That many, today, blame ‘experts’ and the ‘intellectual elite’, seems little different to the emotions motivating the crowd hurling insults at Fox Talbot and his scientific friends ensconced in King Edward’s School.
This cultural duality is nowhere better illustrated than in two works, Aaron Douglas’s 1936 modernist painting, Aspiration, in which the silhouettes of two black men and a young woman look towards a city of skyscrapers set on a hill, like some golden Jerusalem. One of the men holds a set square and a draftsman’s compass. The group’s stance is confident and optimistic as they gaze into the brightly lit future. Below them, reaching from the subterranean darkness of the lower picture space, are the chained hands of anonymous black slaves. The implication, here, is that the past may have been tragic but that with talent and hard work a shimmering future awaits. This image stands in stark contrast to Joe Jones 1933 American Justice, in which a group of hooded Klansmen have just set fire to a homestead where, in the foreground, a traumatised, half-naked black woman lies beneath a noose swinging from a tree in a shocking visual illustration of Billy Holiday’s song Black Fruit. These works illustrate the two strands of 30s America: as the land of freedom and opportunity for all, and a nation of conservative values espoused by those who saw themselves as connected to the original settlers.
This is my first art review of 2017 and, in the last few months, the world has changed dramatically. It’s hard not to look at everything through the prism of Donald Trump’s election as leader of (for now, at least) the free world. Culture is taking on new metaphors and resonances. Optimism, hope and humour? Can there still be a place for them? Are such emotions still possible or even appropriate as we stand on the cliff top looking out, like stout Cortez on a peak in Darien, towards the stormy seas of the future?
Juxtaposing sections of Miro paintings with what the artist calls an image of ‘Life in General’ – black and white Hollywood film stills accompanied by single words such as ‘Reliable’, ‘Right’, ‘True’ and ‘Necessary’ – he creates rebus puzzles whose meanings remain tantalisingly elusive. In the 1960s and 70s obfuscation and cool were de rigour. Warhol talked of being a machine, while David Bowie assumed a palimpsest of different personae that never allowed us to discover the real man but acted as screen onto which his followers could project their wish fulfilments and fantasies. To be committed, to take a stand or be seen to care was just not very hip. Art became a game of dissembling, of ‘blurring boundaries’ and mixing media. A code, a puzzle, understood by some and vilified by others.
In 1933 the Belgium artist, James Ensor, met up with Einstein, when the latter was on his way to the States, for lunch on the coast near Ostend. Walking along the beach Einstein tried to explain the theory of relativity to the bemused artist. “What do you paint?” Einstein asked. To which the painter of masks replied “Nothing”. Whether this response was existential, bombastic or simply bloody minded it’s hard to say but it does illustrate something of the enigmatic complexity of one of Belgium’s most celebrated artists who, despite a British father, is barely known in the UK.
Ensor’s body of work is eclectic. A superb draftsman, as is obvious from in his many drawings, including the portrait of his aunt and the holly tree in his garden, he also painted still lives of the rich domestic landscapes he inhabited. A table packed with vegetables and a bunch of freshly picked rhubarb or the underside of a fleshy skate illustrate his sensual relationship to these subjects.
Ideas of shape-shifting are ancient. The possibility that a person can take the form of another being – usually an animal – can be traced back thousands of years, across diverse cultures, continents and religions. Shape-shifting appears in fairy tales and myths. In stories from Greek mythology, Zeus transformed into a swan, a bull, and an ant. The myths of the ancient Egyptians depicted gods with animal heads, such as Horus and the dog-headed Anubis, while those of the Norsemen showed the mischievous god Loki change into a giant and a woman, as well as various bestial forms.
Now, in a series of meticulously rendered watercolours, The Glorious Maid of the Charnel House, she continues to investigate the theme of metamorphosis, a world where the female body shifts between what is recognisably human to embrace elements of flora and fauna, as well as subvert notions of what is internal and external, what can be revealed and what must remain secret.
Other figures erupt in rivers of tears, in leafy fountains that pour from their guts. One, ceaselessly, bangs her head against a tower of bricks, while in the large charcoal and chalk work, Matrix, a woman sports an extravagant serpentine headdress fashioned from intestines into a Gordian knot. It’s as if there’s no room in her body for this burgeoning growth, which has been forced to extrude unnaturally through her head. In another scene a girl lies beneath a monstrous fury dog. Its presence is threatening and nightmarish, recalling the incubus in the 1781 oil painting The Nightmare by Anglo-Swiss artist Henry Fuseli.
Like many good ideas it is deceptively simple. The artist Mark Wallinger has installed a large mirror across the ceiling of Sigmund Freud’s iconic study in Maresfield Gardens. The effect is dramatic. Immediately the space is doubled, turned inside out so that top and bottom, reflection and reality all become blurred. What is real suddenly seems like an illusion. Everything is destabilised – the famous couch, the archaeological figurines and artefacts arranged on Freud’s desk, the leather books and densely patterned Turkish rugs. It is disorientating. Are we looking at an actual object or its doppelganger? With its heavy red velvet curtains and oriental drapes the room surrounds us like a womb and the couch, with its comfortable Persian cushions, and Freud’s chair at the head where he would have sat out of sight of his analysand, invites us to lie down and rehearse our infantile fantasies and dreams. As we look up we catch sight of our own small, isolated reflection peering into this complex double space.
Metaphors of doubling and reflection also abound in literature from Robert Louis Stephenson’s the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, to Sylvia Plath’s greedy annihilating mirror. While Jorge Luis Borges was terrified of mirrors as a child and remained afraid of their capacity for infinite regression that led to the “distortion of one’s own image.” The mirror is there, too, in therapeutic literature, philosophy and psychoanalytical texts. The implication being that the reflected image, either real or imaginary, helps to provide an insight within a clinical context. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Rorty wrote: “It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements that determine most of our philosophical convictions. The picture that holds traditional philosophy captive is that of the mind as a great mirror containing various representations – some accurate, some not – and capable of being studied by pure non empirical methods.” For Haglund (1996), “Part of the power of the mirror metaphor is that the single image captures many aspects of human development and human experience”. Shengold (1974) believed that the mirror was a metaphor for the mind, which reflected the image of self and others, while Pines (1984) described mirroring in group psychoanalysis as a process of objective self-reflection[1]. In western philosophies the psyche tends to be regarded as a mirror of reality, while in Buddhism, it’s the world that mirrors back who we are.
With his mirrored ceiling Mark Wallinger has embodied something of the fluidity of the mind that is capable of slipping between external reality and internalised fantasy. As we plunge into its depths we move from the rational controlling super-ego, though the considering ego to the chthonic, elemental id. Yet nothing is stable. All can be changed by the dark cast of a shadow or a sudden ray of sunlight from the garden door that offers an escape into an alternative, external domain. And beyond the door, outside in the garden, visible behind Freud’s desk, sits the sculpture Self, based on the letter ‘I’ like a statement of self-hood and identity.
England, for the Victorians, was a very different place to the irreligious, multi-cultural country we have become. Then we believed ourselves to be a ‘great’ Empire that would, forever ‘rule the waves’. It was a society where the majority still believed that God created the world in seven days, yet one in the midst of huge technological change where rural communities were leaving the land to work in Blake’s ‘dark satanic mills’, powered by new-fangled machines that threatened their traditional way of life. Steam, speed and noise came to represent modernity. It was a time of social rigidity as well as social upheaval, where the rich man sat back comfortably in his castle, while the poor man doffed his cap obsequiously at the gate. Fuelled by privilege, hypocrisy and secrets – as was evident in the treatment of women and children and its hidden sexual practices – Victorian society had not yet seen Europe torn apart by two World Wars. Yet death was an ever-present threat. It hovered over childbirth and the lives of infants who might, at any moment, be snatched away by infectious disease. That the Victorians were obsessed with death is, therefore, hardly surprising.
It is this milieu that produced Georgiana Houghton (1814-1884), a single woman from a respectable middle-class family who created some of the most extraordinary art of the mid-19th century, a body of rich, abstract, symbolic works that have largely been forgotten today which, in her own words, were “without parallel in the world”.
Houghton soon became part of an inner circle of influential spiritual practitioners. Those who became involved ranged from dabblers to those exploring spiritualism’s scientific significance. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was an aficionado and Queen Victoria was said to have tried to contact her dead husband Albert through a medium. For many female mediumship was seen as springing from the fevered imagination of an unstable mind, whilst for others it was a sign of female intellectual independence. Spiritualism appealed to suffragettes and bohemians alike, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and J.M. Whistler. Like many 19th century mediums Houghton was keen to show that the practice was compatible with her Christian beliefs, which were influenced by the Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) who claimed to be able to see the spiritual world directly.
Until this current exhibition at the Courtauld she’d largely been forgotten, her work not seen in this country for 150 years. Today less than fifty of works are known and the majority of these – for no documented reason – have ended up in the collection of the Victorian Spiritualists’ Union in Melbourne, Australia. An album, with a few further examples, is held by the College of Psychic Studies in London and a single drawing is part of the ABCD collection, a private ‘art brut’ collection based in Paris, with a further three in private hands.
It seems a long time ago since the Tate Summer party to celebrate the opening of the new Switch House adjoining the original Bankside Power Station. It was a different world then. On the 16th June, the date of the party, we were still in Europe. The architects Herzog & de Meuron, who did the conversion, are a Swiss firm based in Basel. They have worked with Tate for 20 years, originally to transform Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s power station. Since Tate Modern opened in May 2000 it has had more than 40 million visitors, many of them from abroad, coming to sample the unique cultural pleasures of this multi-cultural city. As a result of Tate Modern’s presence the surrounding area of the South Bank that includes Shakespeare’s Globe, has turned from a web of grey streets into a buzzing cosmopolitan hub filled with street performers and food stalls selling cuisine from around the world. It’s become a must-see landmark. To walk across the Thames on Anthony Caro’s lightening-flash of a bridge, with its vistas along the river east and west, is to feel that you are at the centre of one of the most exciting global capitals of the world.
Then, to look more closely at the new displays, I went back the day after the news broke that we were to about to leave the EU and suddenly all the optimism I’d felt seemed to belong to different age. The past, it’s said, is another country, where they do things differently. If we’d stayed in Europe I might have written about the building and the galleries in slightly different terms; certainly describing the interior of exposed raw concrete shooting up from the subterranean world of ‘The Tanks’, the sweeping concrete staircase and the perforated brickwork that allows for an extraordinary play of light, as sensational. But I might also have described it as bit hubristic and have suggested that the building often seems more dynamic than the art it contains. But now I haven’t the heart.
Now I just want to rejoice in what the new Tate represents, its multi-culturalism, its diversity, its passion. Seventy-five percent of the art on show has been acquired since Tate Modern first opened. All of it may not be excellent – time will tell. But in place of ‘the panorama of art history’ dominated by Western European and North American art, the collection now takes a broader view, sharing multiple histories that don’t just focus on the cannon of Western modernism. The displays mirror the shifts and changes of the contemporary world, the flux of movement and migration across continents. There are emerging artists from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe who embrace diverse religions and cultures not always sympathetic each to the other. But art is a language with fluid and permeable borders. Alternative histories and local narratives are reappraised through the prism of international awareness. Ibrahim El-Salahi, for example, who was born in The Sudan and studied at the Slade School of Art before returning to Khartoum, draws on avant-garde painters such as Picasso, who, ironically, borrowed from African primitive art, as well as from Islamic calligraphy. There’s also a good deal of work reflecting the nature of the modern city. In Kader Attia’s Untitled (Ghardaï) 2009, his cooked couscous citadel set among digital prints examines the social impact of colonialism through architecture. While Nil Yalter, who was born in Cairo but raised in Paris, investigates the sociology of ethnicity, identity, migration and class in his work Temporary Dwellings that explored, over a three year period, the lives of immigrant communities in Istanbul, Paris and New York.
There’s also a new and important emphasis on women artists with a powerful display of Louise Bourgeois’ matriarchal spiders and body parts, cages and womb-red drawings, along with a wunderkammer of her psychoanalytic fetishistic sculptures.
Despite making the first video installation to be bought by the Tate, SUSAN HILLER—an American long resident in the uk—says she has never quite felt ‘at home’ here. Likewise, her startling artistic investigations of the irrational and uncanny refuse to be domesticated or comfortably explained away. ‘If talking and thinking and working with ideas were enough,’ she tells SUE HUBBARD, ‘then why should we make art?’
First trained as an anthropologist (a fact that, if given too much weight, annoys her), Hiller displays the intellectual rigour and curiosity of the academic, counterpointed with the ‘irrational’ explorations of the artist. Her work poses complex questions about identity, feminism, belief and the role of the artist. Never cynical or market-driven, it remains uncompromising, erudite and complex. The sort of art that forces you to think. She describes it as ‘a kind of archaeological investigation uncovering something to make a different kind of sense of it’, focusing ‘on what is unspoken, unacknowledged, unexplained and overlooked’. She explores what, to many, may seem irrational, sidelined and marginal aspects of human experience. She is interested in the traces we leave behind, be they the automatic writing generated in Sisters of Menon, a work made in the ’70s that investigates the permeable boundaries between conscious and unconscious utterance, or the investigations in Lucid Dreams (1982), where the presence or absence of her own face, photographed inside a photo booth, underlines the fragile nature of identity and the transience of existence like a series of grungy, do-it-yourself vanitas paintings. For the J Street Project (2000–05), she searched for every street sign she could find in Germany that included the word Juden (Jew). A chilling reminder that these are places from which whole populations and histories have been erased.
Her sources are eclectic, ranging from arcane texts and psychoanalysis, to popular culture. In her 2002 lecture at the Edinburgh College of Art, she quotes Freud who, in 1921, wrote: ‘It no longer seems possible to brush aside the study of so-called occult facts; of things which seem to vouchsafe the real existence of psychic forces… which reveal mental faculties, in which until now, we did not believe.’ Freud, she writes, claimed ‘that an uncritical belief in psychic powers was an attempt at compensation for what he poignantly called “the lost appeal of life on this earth” and that the problem with believers in the occult is that they want to establish new truths, rather than scientifically “take cognisance of undeniable problems” in the current definitions of reality’.
Her Lisson debut, which occupied both gallery spaces, interwove these tensions between the scientific and the rational with our desires and instinctual drives, in four ongoing themes: transformation, the unconscious, systems of belief, and the role of the artist as collector and curator. The presence of rare and unseen early works from the ’70s and ’80s underlined her interest in alchemy and psychological transformation. The 1970–84 Painting Blocks—made from cutting up and reassembling old paintings into sculptural ‘books’, labelled with the dates and dimensions of the original work—were shown alongside the small, ash-filled vials of Another (1986). Packed with the remnants of burnt paintings, these illustrate the reconfiguring of objects (or identities) in a transmuted form, one that echoes the theories of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein on reparation and creativity.
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, Leo Tolstoy famously wrote in Anna Karenina. But what Tolstoy might, actually, have been implying is that the effects of happiness tend to be bland, the results ubiquitous. It’s those who are not entirely comfortable within the all-encompassing duvet of family life that prove to be interesting. Their quirks and idiosyncrasies lead them to become artists and writers or simply that awkward, interesting child who doesn’t want to join in but rather watch clouds, read a book, draw or make up stories. Tension and a degree of discord between siblings, between mother and daughter, father and son are meat to the creative juices. As the essayist and psychoanalyst, Adam Philips writes: “From a psychoanalytic point of view, one of the individual’s formative projects, from childhood onwards, is to find a cure for….. sexuality and difference, the sources of unbearable conflict… Adolescents,” he goes on to say, “are preoccupied by the relationship between dependence and conformity, between independence and compliance.”
The Blue Rider, Wassily Kandinsky, 1903
Javier Romero is an artist, a pilot and a practicing Buddhist. Perhaps the only one to have manoeuvred the controls of a light aircraft with his knees whilst taking photographs. He makes about 10-12 solo flights a year across the Atlantic, mostly from Spain to Chile, in his small single-engine airplane. Due to its limited speed and range the trip takes 4 days if the weather is good, flying for about 10 hours a day before landing for fuel and sleep. Usually the weather is clear, the skies and sea blue. But then he enters the Intercontinental Convergence Zone, a wall of permanent clouds and thunderstorms close to the Equator known, by sailors, as the doldrums. Of these spectacular cloud formations, which he photographs from the plane’s window, he says: “You’re alone with yourself. You could die at any moment. At night it’s even more intense. In the middle of the ocean it’s like being inside a black hole, without even the blue for company. And then the moon comes up over the sea, and is big, and blindingly shiny, and is the most amazing thing in the universe, and you feel like crying….” Nowadays he’s set up a tripod with a remote shutter cable so that he can take photos without putting the airplane in jeopardy. (He has had his share of scary moments).
Javier Romero started his education as a painter with the Nicolaides method at the Art Students’ League of New York. After working on oils, he moved to watercolour and acrylic. Now he uses photography as he’d use a brush on canvas to create Romantic, lyrical works. He believes that contemporary society has lost its way. “Deep inside,” he says, “we know it’s not right to spend our lives in an artificial place pretending to be ‘an architect’, ‘a doctor’, ‘a salesman’…. And things are getting worse, technology helps the body, not the mind”.
The Belgian filmmaker and artist Chantal Akerman died suddenly on October 5. It is said to have been suicide. Maybe it was her nationality, the nature of her death or her multi-screen installations with their themes of alienation, interiority, conflict and violence that drew me, in these complex de-centred times, to write about her now. A self-imposed death, whether of an artist or a suicide bomber, is always an enigma and the nature of her demise can’t but help colour our view of her work, which seems to echo the mood of these sombre days with uncanny prescience. 
Manic Shadows (2013), a four channel video projection shot within the confines of a New York apartment, shows Akerman sorting domestic clutter for disposal into plastic bags, while the frenzy of the Obama election is played out in another section of the screen. The artist’s mother, Natalia, a survivor of Auschwitz who died last year, can be seen in the kitchen, whilst elsewhere Ackerman seeks sanctuary in her bedroom. Her voice-over intones her text, My Mother Laughs. The piece is full of poignant hiatuses and non sequiturs, unresolved longing, guilt, yearning and anxiety. Her mother’s presence, though seemingly marginal, is all encompassing and ubiquitous; yet the overwhelming emotion is one of isolation.
But the central work of the exhibition is the title piece, Now. Entering a black box in the middle of the gallery you cross a threshold of neon lights to be confronted by 5 screens filled with flickering images of rocky desert terrain and scrub. This seems to have been shot from a car window whilst travelling at speed. There is the sound of gunfire, of car breaks and wheels screeching, shouts in what might be Arabic mingle with animal cries The implication is that this is a war zone and this a high speed escape (or possibly attack). As we watch our adrenaline pumps and our hearts pound, though nothing ever happens, this endless frenetic movement creates both a sense of panic and exhilaration. Yet we don’t know the reason for this flight or even where this is taking place. No narrative is offered. Just raw sensation. Occasionally there are gaps between the harsh sounds broken by bird song.
From the young painter who, in July 1948, sold his canvases from the pavement in the LCC ‘Open-Air Exhibition’ on the Embankment Gardens, Frank Auerbach has become one of the most important and challenging painters on the British landscape. Despite his great friendship with the priapic and party loving Freud, Auerbach has, by comparison, lead the life of an aesthete; a monk to his chosen calling. He hardly socialises, preferring the company of those he knows well. He drinks moderately, wears his clothes till they fall apart and paints 365 days a year.
Born in Berlin in 1931, the son of Max Auerbach, a Jewish patent lawyer and Charlotte Nora Auerbach (who studied art) Frank was born into the maelstrom that was to be the Third Reich. In 1939 he, with five other children, was sponsored by the writer Iris Origo and sent to school in England. Though he’s never enquired exactly what happened to his parents (they perished in a concentration camp) Auerbach claims that he was happy among the collection of refugee children and offspring of conscientious objectors at Bunce Court, which had been started by a German Jewish-Quaker. There has, he says, never been a point when he wished that he had parents.
Giacometti, Beckett, Art Brut, Existentialism – the 50s was a period culturally overshadowed by the legacy of war and by questions about the futility and meaning of existence. “Life has no meaning”, wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, “the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.” Yet Sartre and Camus also believed that the absurdity of life could be given meaning through a freedom of will and the process of creativity.
By the 60s and 70s there was an explosion of colour – the citric yellows and futurist zig-zags of reds in Primrose Hill, Autumn Morning, 1968. There is huge energy as if he is wrestling with nature, trying with the umbrella spokes of the bare branches in the foreground of Winter Evening, Primrose Hill 1974-5 to fix and pin down the landscape. The winter light, with its juxtapositions of deep crimsons and greens is atmospheric, dark and moody, abbreviated only by the white blobs of the distant street lamps that pierce the gloom.
The Chinese artist, designer and architect, Ai Weiwei has come to be regarded as a creative figure of global stature, largely because of his personal bravery and strong social conscience in speaking out against the repressive Chinese government. He has been imprisoned for his pains and galvanised a generation of artists. On his return to China in 1993, after twelve years in America, his work began to reflect the dual influences of both his native culture and his exposure to western art. He cites Duchamp as “the most, if not the only, influential figure” in his art practice. As a conceptual artist Ai Weiwei starts with an idea – for example China’s relationship to its history – addressed in this major show at the Royal Academy by Table and Pillar, 2002, and made, as part of his Furniture series. A salvaged pillar from a Qing dynasty (1644-1911) temple has been inserted into a chair to form a totemic work. Having spent a month in China in 2000, I can confirm that Ai Weiwei has every reason to be concerned about the destruction of his cultural heritage which, when I was there, was daily being destroyed to make way for ‘modernisation’. Coloured Vases, 2015, further questions notions of value and authenticity by illustrating that fake antiquities are made with exactly the same techniques as authentic vases. In classic postmodernist style Ai Weiwei’s objects take on the characteristics of a Barthian ‘text’ to be deconstructed by those who are able to ‘read’ and decode them.
And this is the problem with Ai Weiwei. It is impossible to separate his biography from the way we view his art. But this is politics as art, rather than art as politics. It is, in the most sophisticated sense, illustration rather than a process of transformation and metamorphosis. A pair of jade handcuffs and sculptures such as Surveillance Camera and Video Camera, 2010 are the result of an idea rather than having grown out of a process of discovery. The result, for the viewer, is an intellectual rather than a felt experience.
Across town, at the Marian Goodman Gallery is another political artist, William Kentridge. Born in Johannesburg in 1955. Kentridge studied politics and African studies before doing fine arts at the Johannesburg Art Foundation, then studying mime at the famous Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris. Originally he hoped to become an actor; however was, he says, so bad that he was reduced to becoming an artist. Since then he has worked in theatre and in television as an art director and in 1999 won the Carnegie International Medal. Best known for his animated films, his evocative, powerful and disturbing works are constructed by a process of filming and drawing. A few years ago I was lucky enough to interview him. A fast talker, he has a formidable intellect. Born into a cultured Jewish family, his father was a well-known anti-apartheid lawyer.
The core of the show, More Sweetly Play the Dance, is a stunning eight-screen danse macabre that encircles the upper gallery. The African figures, seen in silhouette, move in a continuous procession across the screen against a bleak charcoal landscape. Priests swirl in voluminous robes, others carry wands of lilies. Women in 19th century skirts pull heavy wagons, melding the image of Brecht’s Mother Courage with that of a crusaders’ pageant. Some of the participants hold up drawings of heads mounted on sticks: a female worker, a miner, while men in dinner jackets gesticulate wildly. A black ballet dancer spins around on points holding a Kalashnikov. There are walking secateurs and machines made of crutches, along with a phalanx of invalids hooked up to saline drips that barley seem to be keeping them alive. They might be refugees or AIDS victims. It is impossible to know for sure. Meaning is slippery but what seems certain is that they are Everyman/woman who has ever suffered deprivation or loss. There is also a group of dancing skeletons and a brass band dressed in Ruritanian- style military uniforms playing a wailing, defiant anthem This is a post-apocalyptic vision – part pagan, part Christian – a cortege of dispossessed pilgrims on the march and on the move, to whom something cataclysmic has happened and who are attempting to create forgetfulness and meaning through this hypnotic ritual.
In praise of the Divine
Hepworth and Nicholson moved to St. Ives in Cornwall at the outbreak of the Second World War. It was to become a refuge for many international artists and provided Hepworth with light, air and an unmediated landscape. She was to live there until her death in a fire at her home in May 1975. The 1952 film, Figures in a Landscape, shown at the Tate exhibition, with its rather florid commentary by the poet Jacquetta Hawkes spoken by Cecil Day-Lewis, may not have been completely to Hepworth’s taste, but it emphasises, as the camera pans over megalithic stones and the sea pounds the Cornish coast to leave holes and abrasions in the rock, the atavistic influences of the landscape on her work, and the importance of harmony with nature.
Emphasising the relationship to carving the Tate exhibition opens with a number of works by Hepworth’s contemporaries. These include lesser known female sculptors, such as Elsie Marion Henderson, as well as Henry Moore, and her first husband, John Skeaping, who claimed to have taught her how to carve. Hepworth’s early carvings sit poised between figuration and abstraction. In her white marble Mother and Child, 1933 the figures can hardly be differentiated one from the other. Two crude heads emerge from the same lump of stone full of tender intimacy like those of Siamese twins.
A nineties graduate of Goldsmiths, unlike many of her contemporaries Rachel Howard has tended to eschew the limelight. Not that that has hampered her development or the steady growth of her reputation. ‘I feel happiest in a state of failure,’ she tells Sue Hubbard. ‘I need fire in my belly to get up in the morning.’
So we agree, as we chat over our coffee, that it feels rather odd to be doing a formal interview. I ask about her childhood and she tells me that she grew up on a farm in the north of England next to a now-redundant coalmine. ‘It’s been grassed over like Teletubbyland,’ she says, ‘as if it was never there. A whole culture wiped out by Thatcher.’ I wonder what it was like growing up in the country. ‘It gave me a taste for freedom and allowed me time to be bored, to be alone and understand what sets us apart from animals and makes us human.’ There she witnessed ‘birth, life and death. Blood, shit and guts.’ Sitting on the back of her father’s combine harvester, she could, she says, just be, just exist. ‘Nature makes you live in the moment. It just ticks away, doing its own thing.’
‘I loved that, or, more to the point, sticking with what I wanted and not changing to suit fashion. I feel happiest in a state of failure, having something to fight about. I need fire in my belly to get up in the morning. It seems ludicrous to have been a painter there at that time, but it was an incredible training ground because of the rigorous critical dialogue. I’ve never been anything other than a painter, so wasn’t in a quandary as to what medium to use. Though 24 years on, I’m now flirting with sculpture.’
One of the features of her work, I suggest, is its physicality—from the suicide paintings to her abstracts in oozing red paint. ‘Thinking back,’ she says, ‘this visceral quality was probably embedded in me at Goldsmiths. I’m not at all interested in being shocking but I’m not afraid of saying what I want. Not having moved in very painterly circles, I don’t have any particular constraints. I’m free from any notion of how a painter should behave.’
This is the first time that she has curated a show in a major public space, and I wonder what it is that she’s hoping to achieve. ‘A sense of balance. Not unlike painting a painting or creating an installation where the eye keeps moving but finds intervals of rest. This is a show by a group of painters—some alive, some dead—who share a love for painting.’
Over the last few years Tate Modern has paid homage to a number of important women artists including, amongst others, Eva Hesse, Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Marlene Dumas and Sonia Delaunay. That the psychodrama of Frida Kahlo and Louise Bourgeois, the theatre of Kusama and the eroticism of Marlene Dumas should have had wide public appeal is not surprising. All provide the means for the viewer to identify with the artist, to ‘feel her pain’ and be drawn into her emotional maelstrom and visual world. But the current exhibition of work by Agnes Martin is an altogether more difficult affair. It makes demands on the spectator who, if willing to engage, will be rewarded by moments of Zen-like stillness and clarity.
It took a long time for Agnes Martin to develop her singular vocabulary. Deceptive in its simplicity, with its language of grids and stripes, she acknowledged that she borrowed much from the lexicon of her near contemporaries Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. This Tate show examines the two distinct periods that define her career. The first shows her rarely exhibited early work, begun during her brief stint as a student at Columbia University, New York, along with the biomorphic forms developed during her time in New Mexico, and the delicate geometric abstractions made in New York in the 1960s. With their duns and fawns, their colours of rock and stone, things are reduced to their elemental forms. Squares and circles become signs to which the viewer needs to bring sensibility in order to read and understand them. Found objects adhered to a piece of scrap board make incidentals meaningful as they are placed within a system that creates order from what is random. Elsewhere her insistent, stich-like marks, her dots and dashes, might suggest Morse code or Braille, or even an ancient language that could be decoded.
Born in Saskatchewan, Canada in 1912 to Scottish Presbyterian parents, Agnes Martin spent her childhood on a farm before moving to Vancouver in 1931. Calvinism ensured that even years after she had left it behind, her key themes continued to be humility, obedience and praise. As a child she had been introduced to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. She was also an admirer of William Blake and, like Blake, was influenced by the geometry of Plato and Pythagoras, who believed that the ideal is more actual than the real. It was only when she was 30, after training as a teacher, that she decided to become an artist and enrolled on a course at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (made famous in the paintings of the American Richard Diebenkorn). It was then that she began to explore a burgeoning interest in East Asian philosophy. For unlike the autobiographical solipsism of many other female artists such as Frida Kahlo, Martin insisted that her art was not about herself. “The value of art is”, she explained, “in the observer”. For her the work of art was not an object or an event but a state of mind. Like Walt Whitman she wanted a “sense of oneness with the universe”. The goal of art, she claimed, was happiness.
Her happiness, though, was, in many ways hard won. She did not like to talk about herself, her homosexuality or her encounters with mental illness. In the early 1960s she was found wandering the streets of New York, catatonic and was hospitalised and diagnosed with schizophrenia. After a period when she ceased to paint at all, she began again in the 70s, during her self-imposed exile in New Mexico. She was to find an organising principal in that modernist form, the grid. Used by friends such as Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt, by way of Mondrian, the grid represented what was non-hierarchical and egalitarian, though for Martin it primarily stood for innocence.
You really do wonder, sometimes, just how long some women artists have to be around before anyone takes notice. When asked by a callow journalist how she felt, in her 90s, at having recently become famous, the artist, Louise Bourgeois replied acerbically: “I’ve been ‘ere all along.” 
In 1906 she went to Paris where she discovered, with the help of her first husband the homosexual gallerist Wilhelm Ude, the Fauvism of Matisse, Vlaminck and Marquet. In 1910 she married the artist Robert Delaunay and later had a child. Fluent in several languages she was in her element among poets such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendras, with whom she collaborated. Exiled to Portugal and Spain during the First World War the Dalaunays became friends with everyone who was anyone, from Diaghilev to Tristan Tzara. Ruined by the Russian Revolution of 1917, she proceeded to open Casa Sonia that sold not only decorative household items but fashion. It was a move far ahead of its time.
Sonia Delaunay had an instinct for the new. Her experiments with technique and material, would, with her husband’s involvement, lead to the development of the theory of Simultaneism – a utopian fusion of abstract compositions that had its roots in Romanticism and created an equivalence between emotion and colour. “Abstract art,” she claimed, “is only important if it is the endless rhythm where the very ancient and the distant future meet.” She used these abstract forms and shapes in both her paintings and her decorative objects, the elevation of which to the status of art, was seen as radical.
It was an early spring morning. The sky deep blue and the wind cruel as journalists and international camera crews gathered for the unveiling of the tenth sculpture commissioned for Trafalgar Square’s empty fourth plinth. A stylish coffee vendor on a vintage bicycle, peddling for all he was worth to provide the necessary power, was producing very slow cups of coffee to the freezing press throng.
Born in Cologne in 1936, he has made paintings, taken photographs and written texts. He’s had solo exhibitions at the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, as well as in Berlin. His work has been included in four Documentas and numerous biennials. In 1993 he shared a Golden Lion Award with Nam June Paik for the best pavilion at the 45th Venice Biennale, while in 2000 he unveiled a permanent installation in the Reichstag, Berlin. Yet when the 78 year old artist, who has lived and worked in Manhattan for the last 50 years, was invited to submit a proposal he assumed it was a joke and that his often contentious work would never be accepted. However, the plinth project appealed to him and he began to work on an idea for a 13ft-high horse skeleton cast in bronze. He has stated that he believes inequality to be one of the major issues of our time, so was ‘flabbergasted’ when selected for the Trafalgar Square project. Particularly as his work has made no bones about exposing the clandestine interconnections behind money, politics and art. He has uncovered the Nazi background of prominent collectors and of the German Venice Biennale pavilion, revealed numerous links between art institutions, British Leyland and apartheid South Africa, tobacco and oil companies. As his work habitually draws on its location, Gift Horse’s references to the City of London are hardly surprising.
Chantal Joffe made her reputation as a painter with work inspired by pornography and fashion, based on images torn from magazines. She is friends with the fashion designer Stella McCartney, has painted Kate Moss and Lara Stone, collaborated with the fashion photographer, Miles Aldridge, painting his wife the model, Kristen McMenamy, in her Islington studio, while Aldridge filmed the process. She enjoys what clothes do to the body, the excuse they give her to paint zig-zags, polka dots and Matisse-like patterns. Her work, mostly of women, questions how images are constructed and presented, subtly challenging the objectification of the female form, wrenching it back from the traditional ‘male gaze’. Recently she’s moved more towards painting friends and family – her daughter Esme, her niece Moll and her partner, the painter, Dan Coombs. The results are works of disquieting intimacy. It’s no surprise to learn that she has long been a fan of the emotionally jagged photographs of Diana Arbus, whose studies she describes as having: “everything about the portrait of a human that you can ever want.”
The costal landscape provides the backdrop to many of Joffe’s portraits. But the horizon line and solid areas of sea, beach and sky trap and imprison rather than allow room to breathe. In Vita by the Sea, they emphasise the isolation of the subject with her defensive gaze, tight mouth and bruised watchful eyes, her androgynous, baggy, green checked shirt. In Brunette with Clouds the short-haired model stares out rebellious and passively aggressive. Is this a boy or a girl, hunched with hands in pockets? Brunette is a term usually applied to the female but a denim shirt open down the front might or might not be covering a flat chest or concealing breasts. While in Brunette by the sea, the subject stands against an unforgiving wall of blue sea, naked from the waist up, arms protectively clasped across their chest.
There’s a touch of Gwen John or Celia Paul in the wistful, slightly melancholy portrait of Megan in Spotted Silk Blouse. Though the application of paint is less ethereal, more assertive and visceral. The black and grey spots of Megan’s short sleeved blouse have been painted over a green ground, which has run down and dripped across the flesh tones of her bare arms revealing vulnerability. I read that Joffe is a great fan of the German painter Paula Modersohn Becker (1876–1907) about whom I recently wrote a novel, Girl in White. Immediately I can see the influence – the raw materiality and harsh brush strokes, the powerful, honest emotions, the distortions of scale and perspective for psychological effect. Joffe has said that ‘I paint to think’ and there’s a strong sense that her portraits are an exploration, not only of what it means to be a contemporary painter, but of the process of making an image of another person. Often executed on a large scale her works have a formidable presence.
BASIL BEATTIE IS OFTEN referred to as ‘a painter’s painter’, which marks the respect he’s held in by his peers. He is an artist who has kept to his vision without compromise. A show at Hales Gallery – Above and Below: Step Paintings 1990-2013 – followed hot on the heels of a successful exhibition at the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings.
Photography is quite, literally, a miracle. In this technological age we forget how much, forget what the world was like before we could capture the fleeting, the momentary and lock it with one single click of the shutter into eternal aspic. Before the photograph memories were just that. Memories. To look at old photographs is to have a direct worm hole into the past. They are not the same as paintings. There, in front of us, is often the actual living plant, view or person as they were, maybe, 150 years ago. That is the way the light fell on a particular day, those are the actual clouds or dirt under the fingernails. It is not so much an interpretation but a preservation. Even a re-incarnation, and it often seems magical.
But from the very first things were not always quite what they seem. Many of the canonical images of early war photography turn out to have been staged. After arriving by horse-drawn carriage in the much shelled valley approaching Sebastopol, where the Charge of the Light Brigade took place, Roger Fenton organised a little additional scattering of cannonballs on the road for dramatic effect. Equally Henry Peach Robinson’s 1858, Fading Away, and his 1842 Wounded soldier have the air of being staged. This intervention can also be witnessed in the 1917 First World War scene of railway goodbyes by Francis James Mortimer, which is in fact a collage or Fred Holland Day’s depiction of himself as the crucified Christ. (A theme, incidentally, returned to some years ago in the mock crucifixion of the late performance artist, Sebastian Horsley). While Frances Frith’s self-portrait, in supposedly Turkish costume, underwrites Edward Said’s take on orientalisation of the exotification of the East by western artists. For Firth never actually visited Turkey. But there are other historic images, such as the Count of Montizón’s 1852 giant hippo reclining by its pool in the zoological gardens, or The Onion Field taken in Mersea Island Essex in 1890 that do take us directly into the past.
There are curiosities, too, such as Muybridge’s 1887 Daisy trotting saddled that went some way in revealing the true nature of a horse’s movement and the bizarre 1927 Content of an Ostrich’s Stomach by Frederick William Bond that includes a couple of handkerchiefs – one embroidered, one plain – various, coins, bits of rope and metal nails.
Writing this piece reminds me of the wonderful television drama, Shooting The Past, by Stephen Poliakoff about the threatened closure of a photographic archive. As it unfolds we become immersed in a world of memories. The past, we are reminded, is another country where they do things differently. As with the RPS collection, Shooting the Past tells the extraordinary stories of the lives of ordinary people, as well as those that became icons of their generations.
Some years ago I was commissioned by the Royal Academy magazine to write ‘a feminist appraisal’ of Allen Jones’ work. As an RA, Jones had the privilege of reading the piece before it went to press. Although he’s referred to himself as a feminist on a number of occasions he seemed uncomfortable with this perspective. He vetoed the article and it was never published. I decided, therefore, to take the opportunity to revisit the work of this 77 year old pop artist to see if my response was any different a number of years on.
In 1939 Salvador Dali was commissioned to create a display window for New York’s fashionable department store, Bonwit Teller. A claw-footed bathtub was lined with Persian lambskin and filled with narcissi floating in muddy water. Arms from disembodied white mannequins reached from the bath. Each held a hand mirror, tilted to reflect a turn-of-the-century wax mannequin with a doll-like features, about to step into the bath. Chicken feathers were glued to her naked body and her cheeks covered in blood stained tears. Her long blonde hair was crawling with artificial bugs. Shoppers were aghast. By noon the scandalous mannequin had been removed and Dali had pushed the bath tub through the plate glass window onto Fifth Avenue.
Alan Jones is part of a male generation for whom women were ‘chicks’, ‘birds’ and ‘bunny girls’. Like their animal counterparts these young women were seen as fair game. Sex was considered by many males as sport and a form of conquest. To speak of the 1960s as a sexual revolution is to misunderstand those times. A liberating period for men, women who slept around were described as ‘easy lays’ or ‘slags’. And, in those pre-pill days, were very likely to be left holding the baby.
Jones’ 1969 Chair and Table attracted a good deal of feminist ire when they appeared. The female figures are trussed and bound. The figure in Chair lies supine, her legs in the air. She wears long black boots, black gloves and little black leather pants. A seat is strapped to her thighs so that she’s contorted into a position of constant availability: a chair in more than one sense of the word. Table kneels on all fours on a white fleece rug. A sheet of glass is secured to her back to form the table top. She is staring down into a small hand mirror. I was reminded of Meret Oppenheim’s fur tea cup. But no irony or social critique is intended here. These pieces are what they always were: fetishistic objects fashioned for the male gaze. What’s interesting is that while I was walking around the exhibition I noticed how insouciant contemporary viewers appeared to be. There seemed little outrage. Most smiled indulgently. Whether this is due to post-feminist fatigue or sophisticated ennui, it’s hard to say.
She’s come a long way, our Tracey, from the days of teenage sex behind the beach-huts in Margate, the seedy Kent sea-side town where she grew up, famed for its 1960s beach battles between rogue gangs of Mods and Rockers and as JMW Turner’s hidey-hole, where he snuggled up to his landlady, Mrs Booth, in her seafront guest house.I first met Tracey in the 90s when I was at Time Out and interviewed her at the ‘shop’ she had started in Waterloo with Sarah Lucas. She was friendly and slightly out-to-lunch as she tripped around in, what I assumed, to be a state of post-prandial zaniness. Self-obsessed and rawly talented, she came across as both worldly and vulnerable. Since then she has repeatedly been in the limelight – for her tent enumerating all those she slept with, that drunken display on TV and, of course, her notorious bed that didn’t actually win The Turner prize but earlier this year sold for £2.2 million. But nowadays she’s not so much wild child as grande dame. There’s the very healthy bank balance, the M&S adverts with Helen Mirren modelling clothes for middle-England. The support for the Conservative party and the dresses by Vivienne Westwood. She is professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy. You can’t get much more establishment than that.Now she’s in the news again, not only for her exhibition: The Last Great Adventure is You, at White Cube, Bermondsey but because she recently announced that, for her, motherhood was incompatible with being an artist. “Having a child would be a substitute for my work”, she said. “There are good artists that have children…They are called men.” 
Of course, this is nonsense. We don’t live in the Middle Ages when that was certainly true. Barbara Hepworth had triplets, Nancy Spiro had children, as do many of Tracey’s contemporaries such as Eileen Cooper (Keeper of the RA Schools) and Jenny Saville. Rachel Howard has four and a very successful career. But such black and white statements attract attention. No one denies that having a child is an individual woman’s choice. But in this age of celebrity gossip what people love is to identify with Tracey’s Hello! life-style; her abortions, her hopeless love-life and, now, her concern with the onset of the menopause and middle-age. It’s not so much that her art has made her famous but like a one-woman confessional, her feminism-lite perfectly captures the narcissism and self-indulgence of our contemporary society. We love that she’s a bit like us – only richer and better dressed, that like many we know she’s not had the luck to find the right man and that now, after the abortions, it’s too late to reproduce. But we seem to have forgotten that in the 70s and 80s many women artists made genuinely ground breaking work about the body and womanhood: Judy Chicago, Mary Kelly and Ana Mendieta to name but three. All had much more radical social and political agendas that formed part of a universal dialogue and a collective struggle. Kate Walker even stitched her experiences into everyday domestic objects and made a work called ‘The Other Side of the Blanket.’ Who remembers that now? Little acknowledgement is given to the legacy of these pioneering women.
Despite looking elegant in the beautiful White Cube gallery with its acres of polished concrete floors, The Last Great Adventure is You only goes to underline Tracey’s solipsism. The large scale embroidered figures (done by assistants), the bronze sculptures, the gouaches, paintings and neon works are, despite the ‘you’ in the show’s title, as usual, all about her. The nudes are the result of life-drawing classes she’s been attending in New York, while the sculptures have evolved from recent lessons in how to cast bronze. Yet despite the years of public angst and the recent admission that she expects to remain single from now on, they feel curiously unemotional. Much of the work lacks her direct touch. The large-scale embroideries have been sewn by other hands so that they feel like expensive interior decorations rather than the heart-wrung expressions of a woman grappling with the meaning of life. Even the small paintings, which do have a certain charm individually, when seen in a group, become weak and formulaic, full of the same gestural marks and clichés. There appears to be little real emotional or artistic struggle here. You feel you could order one up to suit your colour scheme. What’s supposed to feel intuitive and expressionistic has become designed and calculated. It’s all rather polite and tame. All rather Sunday morning life-drawing class.
Tracey has made her name as a confessional artist. But the problem is that there’s actually not enough Sturm und Drang, not enough soul searching. Unlike Louise Bourgeois there’s no real psychological insight or like Chaïm Soutine or Munch not enough nail-biting angst. She asks us to ‘feel her pain’ but we are not able to do so either emotionally or in the raw execution of her materials that, in the end, give an art work its voice. If her work was taken out of the magnificent space of White Cube and shown without all the razzmatazz in some shabby student studio, would we still be interested? There’s something moribund about it, as if she’s still paddling in the same pond as 25 years ago and moving no closer to the shore.
Although Anslem Kiefer’s primary site of production is Croissy, near Paris, he moved to Barjac, a former silk factory in the South of France, in 1992. The land supplies many of the materials habitually used in his work. The sunflowers that grow seven meters tall from seeds especially imported from Japan, the thousands of tulips that are dried for their petals to be used in paintings devoted to Arab poets, the trees that are dipped in plaster and coated with clay from the estate. It is a strange place; with its sheds housing huge individual paintings, often covered in arcane text, and its vertiginous towers – a cross between Pisa’s leaning turret and concentration camp sentry boxes – constructed in concrete castes taken from shipping containers. There are overgrown paths and vast glass houses filled with sculptures of planes and books created from detritus and rubble, an underground crypt and a huge concrete amphitheatre reached by a labyrinth of tunnels like a catacomb. The place is mythic, hubristic, obsessive, extraordinary, profound and unique in its imaginative scope. A place of dreams, it attempts to give voice in visual language to the mood and cataclysmic shifts of the 20th century, as well as to the cyclical nature of existence itself. It’s as fantastical as Calvino’s Invisible Cities, as obsessed with the cycles of history as the writing of Kiefer’s late compatriot, W.G. Sebald, and is a matrix of the intellectual and aesthetic concerns that have obsessed the artist for half a century.
After completing his first tunnel he hit on the idea of the Seven Heavenly Palaces of the Jewish mystics and set about fashioning seven buildings and constructing a series of greenhouses connected by tunnels. What he has created is a sort of reverse archaeology, a psychic map, a form of visual philosophy that materialises the ideas of the Markavah in the Sepher Hekhalot that relate to man’s ascent through the Seven Heavenly Palaces. During this journey man’s hands and limbs are gradually burnt away until all that is left is his spirit. As he descends further he plunges into his own psyche. So, in Barjac, the viewer having wandered in darkness through this underground labyrinth, will come to a staircase that leads to a room flooded with light, where another stairway will lead to another tunnel and so on. There is nothing picturesque here. It is a harsh, elemental, magisterial place, like some archaic burial site. Industrial pipes and ducts connect the underground passageways. Their function is uncertain. As you wander you may glimpse daylight but there’s a danger of getting lost, of going back the way you came, of discovering yourself in a room with a pool and lead walls where no sound reaches and its gravity – the mass attributed to Saturn, the planet of melancholy – creates a sensory annihilation. Elsewhere you might glimpse, if you look up, what could be bookcases, paintings or jars – just lit sufficiently to feel their presence and experience them as abstract objects. 
Barjac is not an exhibition venue, a gallery or a workshop but a map of the imagination – a Gesamtunktwerk – that illustrates Keifer’s belief that the etymology of wohnen (to dwell) is derived from the ancient Germ baun/bauen (to construct or build). “Building and living are the same”, he says referring to Martin Heidegger. “Man can only dwell, that is exist, when he builds…..creation and destruction are one and the same”. Poetry and philosophical texts have always been a seminal influence. These have been as various as the poetry of Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, Jewish Cabalistic texts, Roland Barthes, Nietzsche, and tracts on alchemy. Kiefer’s domain is the liminal; the interstices in history and the psyche. The palette is a recurring motif, a symbol of the potency of art to bridge the external physical world and the internal world of the imagination. As T. S. Eliot says: “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
The current Tate exhibition tells the story of the development of art during these revolutionary upheavals and its dreams of creating a new social order. In a unique collaboration with the Khardzhiev Collection, Amderstam and Costakis Collection SMCA-Thessaloniki, along with drawings from public and private collections around the world, the show starts with Malevich’s early landscapes and mystical religious scenes. His 1908 Adam and Eve gouache on cardboard might almost have been painted by William Blake. There are Gauguin-inspired peasants and a self-portrait in which he looks like Valentino painted by Matisse. Moving through this range of styles it’s possible to trace his journey towards abstract painting and his iconic Suprematist compositions. The show includes most of the surviving paintings from the legendary The Last Futurist Exhibition 0.10 in St. Petersburg in 1915 hung as closely as possible to the original. Famously his Black Square was placed high in the corner of the room, at once nullifying ideas of Renaissance perspective and making reference to the icons hung in the holy corner of Russian Orthodox homes. It is in this iconoclastic void that Malevich presents a search for a new spirituality based on humanistic and artistic values.
It was a cold wet Bank Holiday Monday as I climbed the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral and made my way down the right hand aisle to the four screens of Bill Viola’s recently installed video, Martyrs, hoping, in the dank greyness, for a little spiritual nurture. I expected the screens to be bigger, more like those of his famous Nantes Triptych where the viewer is engulfed by the processes of birth and death being enacted out in front of them. Originally conceived to be shown in a 17th century chapel in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Nantes in 1992, it employs the triptych form, traditionally used in Western art for religious paintings, to represent through the medium of video, Viola’s contemporary spiritual iconography. But the individual videos in St. Paul’s, each based on the four fundamental elements and encased side by side in a simple metal frame like a modern altar screen, are much smaller, closer to the size of traditional paintings.
Encountering Bill Viola’s images within this bulwark of Anglicanism implies a certain ecumenicalism, as though the church no longer minds much whether art works are ‘traditionally’ Christian, so long as they are broadly ‘spiritual’. The canon chancellor of St. Paul’s, the Reverend Mark Oakley, describes the piece as “not explicitly Christian… but a Christian looking at it will find resonances”. A crucified man hangs upside down by his feet, as water pours over him, in the far right screen. St. Peter was crucified in this way and lived by water. The scene also suggests full baptismal immersion and subsequent redemption as the hanging figure ascends feet-first, arms outstretched like an angel’s wings. For non-Christians the image might elicit darker thoughts of water-boarding and torture. It’s a work open to interpretation by those of faith and those of no faith, and asks the prescient question: what is worth dying for?
Fire, Water, Air and Earth have long been used by neo-pagans and occultists to represent the forces of nature and spiritual aspects of ourselves and our relationship to the divine. Their physical properties were considered to be the outward manifestation of the Elements themselves. The human organism was supposed to contain all four elements. Disruption of their delicate harmony was believed to give rise to disease. These elements were also thought to form man’s character: choleric, sanguine, melancholic or phlegmatic. According to Galen, the prominent Greek physician, the four humours: yellow bile (fire), black bile (earth), blood (air), and phlegm (water) were used by Hippocrates to describe the human body. Fire was primarily hot and secondarily dry. Air primarily wet and secondarily hot. Water primarily cold and secondarily wet. Earth primarily dry and secondarily cold. This elemental system, was also adopted into medieval alchemy. The videos in St. Paul’s start in stillness. A crouched figure, reminiscent of Caliban, is hunkered amid a pile of earth. Slowly he stands up and unfolds like a flower as the soil blows off him. On the next screen is a woman, her feet and hands bound by rope. She wears a simple white shift. As a wind beings to blow she is wafted backwards and forwards by its force. In the adjacent video a black man sits on a chair. Gradually individual sparks drop down beside him before engulfing him in flames. Martyrs burnt at the stake as heretics come to mind, as do the cataclysmic events of 9/11 when so many died for so-called ideological beliefs. Ethnically motivated crimes such as the necklacing of South African victims during apartheid with burning rubber tyres are also invoked. As the video cycle concludes the inverted figure ascends into the air and disappears in a cascade of water, while the other three close their eyes and turn their faces heavenwards in beatific contemplation.
Siena, a mediaeval city of windy streets, dark alleys and red roofs is one of Italy’s jewels. It may now be full of school children and tourists eating ice cream as they wander amongst the stylish shops or stop to have a drink in the Piazza del Campo – which twice yearly is turned into a horse racetrack for that lunatic and partisan stampede, the Palio – but it was in the Middle Ages that Siena reached its zenith. Having been ruled by the Longobards, then the Franks, it passed into the hands of the Prince-Bishops. During the 12th century these were overthrown by Consuls who set up a secular government. It was then that Siena attained the political and economic importance that led to its rivalry with that other gilded Tuscan city, Florence. The 12th century saw the construction of many beautiful buildings: numerous towers, nobles’ houses, Romanesque churches, culminating in the construction of the famous black and white duomo.
In the 21st century we have largely lost touch with the avant-garde. In an age of rapid technological change, where the new is invariably seen as good, the shocks and surprises, the eclecticism and flattening out of postmodernism have become the new orthodoxy. No one is upset by a pickled shark or, for that matter, a pickled anything else being art. In-your-face and gritty is what we exare anymore, nothing much to lose, in a society where what is ‘shocking’ is mostly an ersatz construct quickly appropriated by the economic mainstream.
Employed as a pattern designer, creating illustrations, shapes and designs for Ullstein Verlag and its magazines, which were distributed to a new mass audience of young women interested not only in fashion but also in modern life styles, she was emphatic that the purpose of art was not to ‘decorate’ but to document the shifting values of a generation. Her early works show an inclination for composition, colour and form. And she had a penchant for embroidery. But it was embroidery as a feminist crie de coeur: “…you,…modern women, who feel that your spirit is in your work, who are determined to lay claim to your rights (economic and moral)…at least y-o-u should know that your embroidery work is a documentation of your era”
During the late 1920s she travelled round Europe and became friends with the likes of Piet Mondrian. She also began a relationship with the avant-garde female poet, Til Brugman, with whom she lived for ten years. Perhaps her unconventional Sapphic leanings allowed her to think outside the conventional box and explore the concept of the ‘New Woman’ within Weimer Germany, presenting debates not only about gender but also ethnic identity in a series of potent collages. Her photomontages from 1920s and early 30s Aus einem ethnographischen Museum (From an Ethnographic Museum) are unconventional and adventurous but, from a postcolonial standpoint, somewhat problematic. Her juxtapositions of European female bodies melded with appropriated African masks and other ethnographic objects appear, to modern sensibilities, rather ambiguous if not dubious. Her relationship to the ‘primitive other’ is far from clear. To give her the benefit of the doubt, perhaps she was groping towards some understanding of different cultures but, while original and visually exciting, her images often seem to symbolise something essentialist and chthonic, the exotic seen through middle-class western (and racist?) eyes. Her image Bäuerliches Brautpaar (Peasant Couple) 1931that includes the head of a black man in a homburg placed, without a body, on a pair of long leather boots beside the face of what is, possibly, a monkey in a blonde wig balanced on a child’s pair of socks and shoes, is really quite disquieting.
That Höch stayed in Germany (albeit working away in the quiet suburbs of Berlin) under the Third Reich raises complex questions about her relationship to the Nazis. That her work was discredited as degenerate does not necessarily exonerate her. So too were the paintings of that wonderful artist, Nolde. And he was, at one time, an active supporter of the Nazis. There is a temptation to sanitise Höch’s work in the light of modern feminism, to read the fractured images through postmodern eyes and talk of irony and fragmentation. But we can’t necessarily assume that to be the case. She was certainly an exciting artist but not all artists purport liberal ideals – look at Ezra Pound or Wyndham Lewis, to name but two.
