Sue Hubbard

The Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke worked for two years with staff across the British Museum to select objects with which to explore the cultural impact of British Imperialism.

Locke, most well-known for his celebratory installation, The Procession, shown in the Duveen Hall at Tate Britain –  a stunning spectacle of figures reflecting the ebb and flow of cultures, people, finance and power and its links with the sugar magnate, Henry Tate, said “I try to …mix ideas of attraction and ideas of discomfort”..” The same could be said of his more curatorial role at the British Museum, where the focus is on British interactions with Caribbean, African and Indian cultures.

Museums have, in recent decades, been forced to face up to questions of post‐colonialism, social inclusion and multiculturalism, to engage in the pressing debate as to who owns a culture and its artefacts. Whether they like it or not, institutions such as the British Museum have been thrust into the 21st century, where they can no longer be neutral about the messages encoded within their displays and the social values and beliefs traditionally espoused by the dominant culture. Slowly (too slowly for some), black minority ethnic groups are seeing their histories entwined with other narratives to constitute a broader picture of our ‘national heritage’. Museums now like to see themselves as providing a space to explore difficult contemporary issues, as places where they can offer a modicum of reconciliation for past wrongs. The museum’s role is no longer restricted to reflecting a monolithic, monocultural view of society. The history of slavery has long been the neglected ghost story in the national narrative of these islands. From the great stately homes of England to Tate Britain and the British Museum, our institutions have been built on the commercial exploitation of human trafficking and slavery.

In 1753, an Act of Parliament created the world’s first free, national, public museum.  The British Museum opened its doors to ‘all studious and curious persons’ in 1759. Initially, visitors had to apply for tickets to see the museum’s collections during limited visiting hours, which meant entry was restricted to well-connected visitors who were given personal tours by the museum’s Trustees and curators. From the 1830s onwards, regulations changed, and opening hours were extended. The 1753 Act purchased the museum for the public. Using global networks created by European imperial expansion, the museum could collect materials from far-flung corners of the globe financed with an income partly derived from the enslaved labour on Jamaican sugar plantations.

In a video interview at the beginning of the exhibition, Locke makes it clear that there is no set route through the galleries and that objects and displays echo and mirror each other. Power, coercion, wealth, vulnerability and collusion form a complex historical palimpsest. On entering the gallery, a display of white (a nice irony?) Parian marble busts, including that of Queen Victoria, Princess Alexandra and Prince Albert Edward, souvenirs of the Great Exhibitions of 1851 and 1862,  are dressed in exotic gold-coloured headdresses. These seem to be asking us to reconsider our imperial past, along with the untold narratives of exploitative power that weigh down British history. Closely researched, the exhibition unpicks the distorting and, often, mendacious stories we tell ourselves. Stories supported by generations of imperialist writers such as Rudyard Kipling.

Boats are deeply significant in Locke’s work, not just as metaphors for life’s journey but as symbols of the cultural flow of goods and wealth that crisscrossed the Empire in a complex web. Miniature ships complete with sails and rigging show the vessels that set sail in search of bounty. Nearby, we come across a leather case of Murano and Bohemian glass beads. Beads were used in Africa as early as AD1000, but from the 1600s, European-made glass beads became part of the currency in the trade for ivory, palm oil and enslaved people.

Forgotten bits of history are winkled out in this exhibition. In 1660 Charles II, King of Scotland and Ireland, and his brother the Duke of York, along with City of London Merchants, founded the Company of Royal Adventurers into Africa. The term’ adventurers’ rather gives that game away. The ‘Dark Continent’ – to use the title of the explorer Henry M. Stanley’s book, ‘Through the Dark Continent and in Darkest Africa’ – was seen as a prelapsarian, ‘primitive’ continent ripe for European pickings.  The handwritten charter is chilling, revealing the formalised involvement of England in the profitable transatlantic trade of enslaved people. The popular view of Charles II is that of the stylish Restoration monarch, but as Locke says: ‘which history we remember depends on what’s been made visible to you’.

An old black and white photograph of Queen Mary and King Geroge V  shows them sitting on a platform in full regal regalia in India to honour their succession to the throne.  Proclaimed as Empress of India in 1877, Queen Victoria was the first British monarch to be honoured with a Durbar in Delhi, a lavish ceremony that drew on Mughal tradition. Such staged dramas were necessary demonstrations in the legitimisation of British rule, for as Locke says, ‘When you rule an empire, you’ve got to remind people constantly of your power’,

When slavery was abolished in the West Indies, it was not the slaves but the slave owners who were compensated. The graphic proof is presented in the handwritten document presented by the British government after emancipation in Essequibo, Guyana, in 1834. The categories, with their prices, are clearly delineated and include field labourers, head domestic servants, and inferior domestics.
Centre stage of this exhibition sits a replica of the Koh-I-Noor diamond. The world’s largest diamond had been held in the hands of a succession of rulers across South and Central Asia before it came via the East India Company to the British crown. “Any big gemstone”, Locke admits, “has its problems, “but this one has a world of problems. It’s been through lots of different empires, so it’s not as simple as saying ‘it should go back’, where should it go back to? As with lots of things in history, it’s complicated. I don’t think the diamond will, or for that matter should stay here forever; Empires fall”.

As more and more comes to light about our Imperial past, exhibitions such as this will have an important role in re-writing accepted historical narratives. Whilst highlighting the wrongs done by the British government over generations, the exhibition is subtle and imaginative and does not come up with trite solutions. The legacy of the British Empire is complex and endlessly debated, with some arguing that it spread technology and ideas of democracy, good governance and free speech, whilst others point to the suffering brought to millions in acts that violated fundamental human rights for profit. Hew Locke highlights this lattice of thorny questions in moving and thought-provoking ways. It is, after all, only when we ask the right questions that we will get anywhere near finding the right answers.

Hew Locke
What have we here?
British Museum 17 October 2024 – 9 February 2025

Judy Chicago Revelations, Serpentine North Gallery 23 May 2024 – 01 September 2024: It was in 1948 that the scholar and poet, Robert Graves, published The White Goddess, an unorthodox work, part invention, part research into pre-Classical cults and religions that reframed mythology from a feminist premise. According to Graves, The White Goddess was the pinnacle of a matriarchal order disposed by the later patriarchal gods of classicism. She combined not only the powers of love and destruction but was also the muse of poetic inspiration. In the 60s and 70s, feminists adopted the image of the goddess in reaction against the Abrahamic, male-dominated religions. This identification with and veneration for the divine feminine allowed women to explore gender and what it meant to be female in new ways. It was a trope taken up by poets like Sylvia Plath, Marge Piercy and Judith Kazantzis, as well as artists such as Judy Chicago. Goddess feminism became the metaphor for the collective confrontation of the patriarchy and the ecological injustices and suffering it causes.

I first saw Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party 1979 in a rundown warehouse in Islington. It was 1985, and I had only just started writing about art. I was a young poet, a single mother and had no degree in art history but was bowled over. I’d never seen anything like it, a bold, brave visual embodiment of the female experience. It seemed to speak to me directly. Arranged on a triangular banqueting table there were a total of thirty-nine place settings commemorating iconic women. Each hand-painted porcelain plate decorated with a central motif, part butterfly, part vulva. There were embroidered runners and gold chalices with the names of 999 other significant women. It remains the acme of Chicago’s work and, rightfully, has a permanent home in the Centre for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.

Now, some fifty years later, she has a major retrospective at Serpentine North entitled Revelations. The name of the exhibition is taken from an illuminated manuscript Chicago created in the early 1970s whilst simultaneously working on The Dinner Party.. For this show, the manuscript has been updated with new drawings published for the first time that draw on research into goddess worship and the retelling of creation myths from a feminist perspective. Organised thematically around five chapters, the exhibition focuses on drawing – the central practice in Chicago’s oeuvre – and moves clockwise around the gallery, tracing the artist’s career with previously unseen work that addresses birth and creation, masculinity, power and environmental extinction.

It is a strange experience to revisit this thinking. It’s not as if the issues she touches on are not still relevant – especially her concern with environmentalism – but that, in many ways, the imagery and language belong to another more innocent and committed century. Walking into the gallery, the viewer is confronted with a vast drawing, In the Beginning. It’s presented as a manifesto of sorts in its attempt to dismantle patriarchal structures by melding female forms of birthing with the earthly and the cosmic. Its luminous rainbow colours and fluid forms swirl across the wall like some enormous birth canal, spawning snails, newts and turtles among its fronds. In 1999, the critic Lucy Lippard noted in the Florida State University Art Museum’s exhibition catalogue that “Drawing is about beginnings…. about the layers of the creative process.” In the Beginning integrates texts in Chicago’s looping American script that say things like “Then from the chaos there emerged a sigh/ and the sigh became a moan/and this moan became a wail/ and this wail became a scream of birth.”  Part One of the manuscript that gives form to the exhibition is entitled Revelations of the Goddess, a long exegesis of the creation myth from a feminist perspective. And yet? So very powerful at its inception some fifty years ago, in these more postmodernism, cynical times, it seems to smack of essentialism: woman as nature, woman as earth mother, as the great I AM. The very thing that women were attempting to escape.

The minimalist and abstract drawings from early in her career, such as Grey Fan #4 1970, are structured by a system of gradient-coloured boxes that fan out from a central slit that makes them appear to pulsate, to open and close. While works such as the Great Ladies Series 1973 use biomorphic forms to suggest and symbolise female sexuality (a nod to Georgia O’ Keeffe?). where vulvae become mandalas, mandalas vulvae.

In the section The Yearning, Chicago explores the male-dominated field of pyrotechnics with a series of site-specific performances known as Atmospheres. Smoke was used to ‘transcend conventional artistic boundaries’ and create ‘expansive’ drawings in a ‘gesture of liberation.’ Plumes of coloured smoke merge with the landscape, ‘mixing it with the wind, the air and the sky’ in response to the ‘male-dominated’ Land Art Movement. In Northwest Coast Atmospheres 1970-75 and Women and Smoke 1971-72, staged in the Californian desert, the pigment–covered naked bodies of the female performers suggest shamanic rituals with the use of fire that can be read as alchemical and transformative.

Born in 1939 to a Jewish family (her name was originally Cohen), Judy Chicago was an undergraduate at UCLA in the late 50s, the era in which the poet Plath also grew up torn between being the dutiful daughter, the good wife who baked cookies and a fierce poet. Chicago was led to believe, whilst a student, by one well-known professor, that women had made no contributions whatever to European art history. Her early work, along with other feminist artists of her generation, was a protest against this invisibility. More recently, she made a series of banners for Dior’s spring-summer haute couture collection 2020 that posed the question, What If Women Ruled the World? made in collaboration with the Pussy Riot founding member, Nadya Tolokonnikova. The exhibition at the Serpentine culminates in And God Created Life 2023, the most recent work that proposes a concept of God that is neither male nor female.

There is no doubt that Judy Chicago was a trailblazer of feminist art, a voice that demanded that women’s lives, bodies, and art were put centre stage after centuries of invisibility. In many ways, it might be argued that she’s done her job, but, looking back, the language of goddesses, birth and fire appear to belong to another, more innocent age when things were more binary and calling that out was seen as a big part of the solution. Nowadays the world seems an infinitely more complicated place.

The title of this show of British women artists from 1520-1920 at Tate Britain is highly apt. ‘Now You See Us’ contains just the right amount of ironic sang-froid that it has taken the best part of half a millennium for women to become visible as professional artists, having been sidelined or judged inferior for most of that time.

At best, women were considered ‘gifted amateurs’ whose work was of less substance and significance than their male peers. Art history has primarily been written by men who sought to underline sexual differences and emphasise that women belonged to the domestic rather than the professional realm. The Royal Academy – that pinnacle of the artistic establishment ‘studiously ignored the existence of women artists, leaving them to work in the cold shade ‘ according to Ellen Creathorne Clayton in her two-volume work, English Female Artists, published in 1876. Women were excluded from art institutions from life classes and had to teach themselves the best they could by copying. ‘Imitation’ is what they were supposed to aspire to. Even then, only certain genres were considered suitable for the ‘lady’ artist: miniatures, flower paintings, watercolours and pastels. History paintings, battles and portraits of men were deemed inappropriate. Joshua Reynolds, the onetime president of the RA, saw pastels as a dilettante, ‘just what ladies do when they paint for their own amusement. In 1770, the Academy banned ‘Needlework, artificial flowers, cut Paper, Shell-work, or any such baubles’ from its exhibitions, but these ‘lower’ arts were the very ones by which women could most easily make their living. The Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, founded in 1754, offered cash prizes and medals for these ‘polite arts’.

Of course, as this exhibition shows in its chronological arrangement, women artists were there all along. Serious, committed, fighting double the odds of their male counterparts to make their way. The names of a few broke through – Artemesia Gentileschi (known as much for the prurient details of her rape as her art) and Angelica Kauffman, but many others remain barely known. Often, the women who ‘made’ it were brought up in artistic households with brothers or fathers who were artists. Maria Verelst may have been the daughter of the Netherlandish artist Herman Verelst, while Mary Moser, daughter of George Micheal Moser a founding member of the Royal Academy was, along with Angelica Kauffman, one of only two women among the thirty-six original members of the RA. It would be another 150 years  after its inception until a woman would again be elected. Like other eighteenth-century women artists, Maria Spilsbury also came from an artistic family and was taught by her engraver father, Johnathan Spilsbury. At the same time, Frances Reynolds was the sister of Joshua. The exhibition starts with one of four allegorical roundels representing the ‘Elements of Art’ that Kauffman was commissioned to paint for the RA’s Council Chamber; an unheard of honour. Here, ‘Invention’ is radically presented as a woman. Italian by birth, Artemesia Gentileschi arrived in London in 1638 – the daughter of a successful painter – already with a significant reputation, having been invited by Charles 1 and Queen Henrietta Maria.

In the seventeenth century, women writers, poets, and artists such as Mary Beale and Joan Carlile began to question their secondary status, arguing that it was lack of education and not ‘weak minds’ that limited their opportunities. Mary Beale mostly painted private portraits of family and friends, often at social occasions that included dinner. Her intimate informality can be seen in her charming 1660 Sketch of the Artist’s son Bartholomew Beale, in profile.

The Victorian age was one of spectacle, big exhibitions and World Fairs. New venues such as the Grosvenor Gallery were posing competition to the conservative RA, membership of which remained out of reach for women. This meant that the committees were made up of men and women were denied automatic exhibiting rights, But, bit by bit, they were achieving greater commercial recognition. The Romantic movement placed a premium on emotions like love, grief and pity. ‘Sentiment,’ played out in the Victorian poetry of Keats and Tennyson, became the mainstay of the visual arts. Mawkish pathos was considered a suitable arena for women. Sarah Setchell (1813-1840), who had hoped for a career as a classical history painter, was persuaded by her father to follow the road of ‘sentiment’, making her name with The Momentous Question, exhibited in 1842. The subject, taken from the poet George Crabbe’s popular Tales of the Hall 1819, depicts the melodrama of a poacher asking his sweetheart to save his life by marrying his brother.

Rebecca Solomon, the sister of two artist brothers, was the first Jewish woman to forge a career as a professional artist. It is up for dispute whether her scene of two middle-class white children reading with their India ayah and the young maid delivering a glass of sherry on a silver tray to her master mirror or critique middle-class Victorian life. Nonetheless, her domestic settings found favour with the English Women’s Journal, which approved of the ‘genre scenes of home interest, and domestic care, delineations of refined feelings and subtle touches of tender emotions.’

Modern industrial life began to make its inroads into paintings. The expansion of the railways in the later part of the nineteenth century allowed artists to work further from home in bohemian communities such as St. Ives, Cornwall. In Marianne Stokes impressive painting The Passing Train 1890, she captures the power of a steam locomotive, combining rural naturalism with the changes brought by modern technology.

The exhibition contains a section of photography that marked a significant shift in the art world from 1839. Although women could be members of the New Photographic Society of London, few attended meetings, as they were mainly in the evenings and required a chaperone. However, there are some beautiful Pre-raphaelite inspired photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron and Emma Barton exist. While Olive Edis’ photographic autochrome images and Kate Smith’s A Beautiful Weed 1910 seem to create wormholes of luminous light into the past.

From 1768 to the end of the 19th century, the RA schools were the principal and most prestigious place to study and the gate to ‘academic’ success, but they did not admit women. This left them to find alternative routes, such as The Government Schools of Design in South Kensington and other private academies such as Heatherley’s. From its inception in 1871, the Slade offered progressive training based on the French academy system, with women admitted on equal terms to men.

Easier travel allowed for the increasing freedom of expression by artists such as Laura Knight. In her plein air paintings such as The Bathing Pool, painted after her move to Cornwall in 1907 with her husband Harold, she depicts naked and scantily clad women freely and unselfconsciously enjoying the sunlight, rocks and water.

However, the First World War truly broke down the barriers for women in so many different realms. Women became printers and nurses, as shown by the paintings of Sylvia Gosse, while Anna Airy, the UK’s first official War Artist, painted some of the most powerful depictions of munition factories in her five seven-by-six-foot canvases. Women began to demand influence in all walks of life and the campaign for women’s suffrage became more militant. The artists’ groups founded from 1900-20 asked the question of what should women’s rights be and what sort of art should they paint. Vanessa Bell, Nina Hamnett and Dolores Courtney were all untied in a desire to make art that engaged with the ordinary and the everyday. Influenced by art on the continent, they re-envisioned the domestic in still lives, placing them at the forefront of the avant-garde.

Dame Ethel Walker was among the few female artists who achieved professional recognition in their lifetime. The exhibition ends with her classically inspired Decoration: The Excursion of Nausicaa 1920, a utopian scenario where nude women dance and lie around in a paradisal garden, bathing, feeding and nurturing each other. It is an idealised image, one greatly in contrast to the later 20th-century dystopian vision of female lives created by Margaret Attwood’s Handmaiden’s Tale. A parable set in a patriarchal, totalitarian, theonomic state known as the Republic of Gilead. Through this comprehensive exhibition, it is implied that there is an ongoing freedom for women. Attwood’s parable and the real overturn of Roe v. Wade in the United States sadly demonstrate that the fight isn’t over yet.

Yinka Shonibare, Suspended States, Serpentine Galleries: When I was a small child – many millennia ago – much of the world map was pink. At school, we were encouraged to believe these far-flung countries were lucky to benefit from our guiding colonial hand. At the end of the Christmas panto, we were expected to stand for the national anthem while our class made collections for Africa’s ‘poor’ children. Slowly, as the iconoclastic irreverence of the swinging 60s and the retro grunge of the 70s spread, it would begin to undermine the class and race hierarchies that, until then, had been the norm in British society, but it was slow going.

A century earlier, Africa had been seen as the unknown continent of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. A mysterious, ‘primitive’ land ‘discovered’ by explorers such as David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley, Africa provided a psychological counterbalance to the European psyche, creating a notion of a subordinate ‘them’ in relation to the superior ‘us’. We saw ourselves as the bulwark between the ‘civilised’ and the ‘savage’. Museums in Paris, Brussels and London displayed the artifacts of these far-flung societies, displaying what had been plundered but needed a true understanding of their socio-political or religious significance. Many of these objects had a profound effect on modernism and artists such as Picasso. The African mask in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon stood as a trope for all that was chthonic and sexually unfettered, a pictorial embodiment of Freud’s id.

Move on to the 2020s, and the 18-foot bronze statue of Edward Colston, the Bristol-born merchant, philanthropist and trans-Atlantic slave trader, was toppled from its plinth by supporters of Black Lives Matter and flung into Bristol’s harbour. The statue had long divided the city. This, of course, was one way to protest against the injustice and cruelty meted out to those thousands of people trafficked for profit. Still, Yinka Shonibare has, arguably, found a more nuanced, creative and thoughtful way of showcasing these historical injustices

Born in London in 1962, Shonibare moved to Lagos, Nigeria, at the age of three before returning to study at Byam School of Art and then Goldsmiths. For over 30 years, he has used Western art history and literature to explore contemporary culture and national identities through painting, sculpture, and photography. In 2024, he was nominated for the Turner Prize, and in 2010, his Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle was displayed as part of the series of Fourth Plinth Commissions in Trafalgar Square.

This exhibition, Suspended States at the Serpentine, is his first solo show in 20 years. His subject has not changed, but he has found new ways of interrogating how power systems proliferate and how the legacy and impact of colonialism and imperialism impinge on the contemporary world.

Decolonialised Structures 2022-2023 is an ironic take on the Colston debacle. With wit, panache and originality, Shonibare employs his signature use of Dutch wax print to highlight the complex relationship between European and African cultures. Assembled in the gallery are small-scale replicas of London’s public sculptures. They are so ubiquitous to the city that we probably pass them regularly without noticing them—the general on his horse. Clive of India holding a sword. All are painted in patterns of brightly coloured fabric inspired by Indonesian batik designs, which were mass-produced by the Dutch and then sold to British colonies in West Africa. These well-known figures, including Queen Victoria, Herbert Kitchener and Winston Churchill –built to valorise British colonial power – have been appropriated and ‘decommissioned’ by being submerged under these swirling African patterns.

The darkened central gallery of the Serpentine contains a series of architect’s models, replicas of both historic and contemporary buildings that have universally been seen as places of sanctuary for those fleeing persecution, From Greek and Roman buildings which gave protection to fugitives and enslaved people, to the great European cathedrals, these dark buildings of Sanctuary City are seductively lit from within to reveal brightly patterned walls. Shonibare has explained how he is interested in the way that we ‘think about the sanctuary in relation to homelessness, shelter for women and refugees’, a poignantly topical subject.

One whole gallery has been given over to a work called the War Library. The 5270 books lining the walls are all bound with Dutch wax print cotton. With titles such as the 1989-1992 Afghan Civil War, Romanian Revolution, Suez Crisis and Third Anglo-Maratha War engraved along the spines in gold lettering, they name conflicts and ensuing peace treaties resulting from imperial wars and conflicts. Other books appear with alternative names and in different languages, suggesting how conflict and peace are seen subjectively from very different viewpoints. Some of the spines have deliberately been left blank to suggest that, inevitably, there will be more to come. None of the powerful works in this show speaks so eloquently of the ongoing world conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine with their competing standpoints and narratives.

There are very few artists making political art today, and few who do so with the seductive intelligence of Shonibare. Never didactic, never aggressive, he poses a series of uncomfortable questions about ‘human memory and amnesia’, luring the viewer into a honeyed flytrap of gorgeous pattern and colour only for them to find themselves caught in a complex web of history and morality at a moment in time when xenophobia and nationalism are again on the rise.

As much seems to divide the photographers Juliet Margaret Cameron and Francesca Woodman as unites them. The former was a well-bred Victorian English woman from a privileged colonial background; the other American, born some hundred years later, lived through the height of feminist debates around women’s role in art and society. What unites them is their pioneering photographic work executed in short but highly productive periods. Each woman encompassed a singular female vision that used archetypes and myths to explore not only the worlds in which they lived but also something deeper and, on occasion, darker.

Cameron (1815-79) was self-taught. Using a wooden sliding camera box placed on a tripod, she made albumen prints employing the wet collodion method. She was given her first camera when she was 48, a gift from her daughter and son-in-law, so the bulk of her work was created within fifteen years. The medium of photography was still very new and largely dominated by men, pioneers such as Louis Daguerre and William Fox Talbot. Although the principle of the camera had been known from ancient times and artists from the Renaissance onwards had made use of the camera obscura, the chemistry needed to secure an actual image wasn’t available until the 19th century. From the daguerreotypes of the 1830s with their radically reduced exposure times to the development in the 1880s of George Eastman’s dry gelatine roll film, photographic techniques were continually being updated and improved even though photography was rarely dignified with the term ‘art’.

Woodman (1958-79) came from an arty family. Her mother was a ceramicist and her father a painter and photographer who gave her her first camera. She attended art school, displaying a precocious interest in photography when, at 13, whilst at boarding school, she produced her first self-portrait. Her body of work spans a mere nine years as, tragically, she took her own life at 22 (as did that other female photographer, Diane Arbus).

Victorian ideas collapsed women’s art into the realm of nature and the chthonic. According to Griselda Pollack’s Old Mistresses, women were “present as an image, but with the specific connotations of body and nature, that is passive, available, possessive, powerless.” To a degree, this exhibition shows the push/pull these two artists displayed towards and away from such essentialist ideas. Structured thematically under the headings of Picture Making, Nature and Femininity, Models and Muses, The Dream Space, Doubling, Angels and Other Worldly beings, we find both of them encapsulating and rejecting these tropes.

In various cultural histories, angels have been seen as able to move between spiritual and earthly realms, the conscious and the unconscious. From the Virgin Mary to Rilke’s terrifying angel, angels have been symbols of something otherworldly, often appearing in dreams. Juliet Margaret Cameron was a Christian believer, whilst Woodman encapsulates something of that vague spirituality which dominated the 1960s and 70s. Both women explored the image of angels as a symbol of transformation and, less overtly, as a sublimated image of eroticism. Cameron’s models share many characteristics of the Pre-Raphaelite women painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Burne Jones: the flowing hair and the aloof virginal beauty. For the Pre-Raphaelites, women were often seen as sensual temptresses who challenged the viewer with their direct gaze. In many of Cameron’s photographs, eroticism and innocence are fused. A naked child wears a pair of feathery wings. Two little girls, all luxurious curls and white dresses cascading to reveal bare shoulders, kiss each other on the mouth. Cameron may have seen these as the epitome of unsullied childhood. Still, they are every bit as erotically charged as Sally Mann’s controversial 1990s images of her children photographed without clothing. Cameron claimed she was showing the ‘souls of her sitters’: cherubic children, sensitive melancholy female models, but to the modern eye, many of her images can be seen in a different, post-Freudian light.

There is also something of a charged eroticism about Woodman’s angels. In a bedroom full of shadows, a naked woman bathed in a stream of white light throws back her head, her mouth open as if in orgasm. It is reminiscent of the mouths of Francis Bacon’s subjects or that of the nurse in Battleship Potemkin. Underneath this image, Woodman has written in pencil: Angels. Haunting and ambiguous, this image conjures the well-worn tropes of women as hysterics, as carnal and primitive, held by nineteenth-century neurologists such as Jean-Martin Charcot.

Both artists are storytellers; Cameron favours the 19th-century taste for medievalism and borrows from Arthurian legends such as Viven and Merlin, while Woodman’s stories are more opaque. What is going on in the sexually ambiguous photograph of Charlie the Model, naked and kneeling, clutching his genitals beside a fuzzy female form? Or in the images of Benjamin Moore, who, for a number of years, was Woodman’s boyfriend and with whom she explored various creative concepts? Elsewhere, she flirts with (or turns on its head, depending on your interpretation) the essentialist trope of a woman being synonymous with nature by frequently locating her female subjects within the natural world.

If for no other reason, this exhibition is well worth a visit because of the sheer beauty of many of the photographs, though, at times, the links between the two women feel a bit tenuous and forced. Cameron’s images have the psychological certainty that befits a woman of her time, class, and Christian beliefs. Her gorgeous tableaux and allegorical images from Greek and Arthurian myths reflect the Romantic, bohemian 19th-century sensibility in Keats’ and Swinbourne, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt. Woodman’s work is altogether more ambiguous and more edgy. The 1970s were when old certainties about women’s roles were breaking down. Often, there feels a sense of dissolution, of things dissolving and coming apart, the world not holding and old conventions dying. That her life ended in suicide is, perhaps, not surprising.

Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream
National Portrait Gallery until 16th June 2024

The women in Chandon Fraser’s black and white photograph of the Women’s Liberation Conference at Ruskin College, Oxford, in 1970, look familiar. With their earnest faces, hand-knitted jumpers and unkempt hair, they are my generation seen through the grainy-grey lens of 50 years.

“Talkin ‘bout my generation” – The Who

I wasn’t at that first meeting because I was, at the time, an archetypal earth mother living in the country, looking after babies and a flock of hens. But their ideas were beginning to filter through even to my hippy rural idyll. There was a heady list of injustices faced by women at the time (particularly married women). Apart from not receiving equal pay, we could be dismissed from our jobs when pregnant, did not receive statutory maternity pay, nor were we protected by sex-discrimination law so that jobs could be advertised just for men. Classed as the legal dependents of our husbands, we were not entitled to claim benefits in our own names nor secure a mortgage or bank loan without the signature of a husband or father. The law did not protect us from rape or sex on demand within marriage, and there were no rape crisis centres or women’s refuges. A court order could not be obtained against violent husbands. Domestic abuse was considered a private matter. Divorce – with all its implications – was the only way out. For women of colour, the situation was even worse. The first Race Relations legislation passed in 1965 had no teeth.

Some of Fraser’s photographs show meetings and marches that include the occasional male sympathiser, all cigarettes, long, unruly hair and sideburns. But they’re rare. What she does capture is the camaraderie. Women sitting around in discussion groups. We see Sue Crockford with her perm, bouncing her baby in its homemade bonnet on her knee while laughing with Juliet Mitchell.

The Nursery Campaign, Hackney on Mother’s Day 1976, photographed by Christine Vogue, pictures a group of women holding homemade placards. They stand amid striped baby buggies, demanding the right to nurseries and childcare that offered them a road to economic independence. It was in this landscape of nascent change that the infamous 1970 Miss World contest took place, and the comedian Bob Hope wisecracked: “It’s quite a cattle market. I’ve been back there checking the calves. I don’t want you to think I’m a dirty old man because I never give women a second thought. My first thought covers everything.” For his pains, he was pelted with flour.

Brilliantly curated and one of the largest shows mounted by Tate Britain, Women in Revolt is a complete archive of the period. It begins in 1970 and, for me, is like dipping a madeleine into lime tea. It brings it all back: the anger, the pain, the optimism. The belief that, through protest, things could be better. Much of the work in the exhibition has little commercial value, but its historic worth is priceless. There are films, posters and magazines. Old copies of Spare Rib and Shrew, one with an ironic take on the infamous Allen Jones sculpture of a crouching woman dressed in leather, designed as a coffee table. Much of it feels ephemeral and makeshift, having been cobbled together on kitchen tables. It’s photocopied, collaged and stapled together. This is very much a pre-internet, do-it-yourself world. There are leaflets for handing out in the street and flyers for sticking on walls put out by the National Abortion Campaign, the Birmingham Women’s Liberation and the International Marxist Group.

The 70s was a colourless era. Several of the winters were freezing, while rubbish piled up in the streets as a result of the three-day week. Often, the lights went out. Capitalism was being challenged on every front, including the miners’ strike, which we see being supported by Hackney Greenham Women, photographed by Maffei Murray. The most high-profile women’s group was the Greenham Common Women’s peace camp, occupied from 1981 to 2000. Visiting on several occasions with my young children, I saw how the women there were incorporating DIY methods of art into their protests by weaving spiderwebs of wool and objects into the fence. Embrace the Base, 1982 by Brenda Prince, shows a group carrying a placard to the then Prime Minister that reads: “Dear Margaret, Here’s your Christmas cheque. Don’t spend it on bombs for the children. Love Mother xxx.”

As the exhibition moves through the 70s to the 80s, it incorporates more than the white middle-class women who were most visible at the first WLM meeting. Queer women and women of colour begin to demand visibility. In 1979, the first National Black Women’s Conference was set up by the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD). The front of one of their magazines boldly states in green letters: Black Women in Britain Speak Out. The female body was throwing off its pinnies and duffle coast to become more sexualised. In 1976, Cosey Fanni Tutti performed her Women’s Roll naked at the AIR Gallery. In it, she explored the sexual body, particularly within the context of the sex industry. Leaning on pop art, Margaret Harrison, a member of the Women’s Workshop of the Artists’ Union, made a series of drawings that challenged the portrayal of women in popular culture. Suggesting that society reduces women to domestic sites of erotic consumption, she presents, in Little Women at Home 1971, a warrior woman dressed in a breastplate with pointy pink nipples. Wearing stockings held up by barbed wire, the heel of her silver stiletto boot is crushing a box of Brillo pads.

Protest and politics elide in this exhibition. The London Women’s film group depicts women demonstrating outside their workplace for Fair Pay, while FOWAAD, the newsletter of OWAAD, asks: BLACK KIDS….who cares. Alexis Hunter’s The Marxist Wife (still does the housework) packs a punch even now, ironically depicting a female hand continuously wiping away the face of Karl Marx. The late Susan Hiller’s work, Ten Months 1977, is particularly potent. As befits this highly intelligent artist who once trained as an anthropologist, she maps and documents the mound of her expanding stomach during pregnancy in ten frames containing twenty-eight individual photographs. The anarchic influence of punk is seen in the nudity and painted bodies of The Neo Naturists, a performance art group formed by Christine and Jennifer Binnie, with Wilma Johnson, that was linked to various subcultures. Formed to counter the effects of Thatcherism, they performed in nightclubs, as well as galleries, to broaden their audience. Elsewhere, butch gays make out in a uniform of vests and Doc Marten’s on Hampstead Heath in work by the Californian photographer Del Lagrace Volcano, who wanted to “display a solidarity with gay male subculture…..and reclaim their sexuality from the patriarchal gaze.” There are also strong paintings by Lesley Sanderson, a Chinese-Malaysian British artist who challenges the eroticised stereotype of the ‘oriental’ women, and a fearsome version of the goddess Kali waving a machete and wearing a garland of severed white male heads (an inverse reference to Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness?) entitled Housewives with Steak Knives 1985 by Sutapa Biswas that undercuts narratives of colonialism and imperialism.

Time is needed to look at all this expansive exhibition has to offer. What seems to be clear, looking back to the early 1970s, is that while there were huge restrictions on women’s lives, there was also an optimism that things could and should get better, A belief that by making the personal political things would change. In these hardened and more cynical times, there’s still plenty to do be done to create opportunities for all women. Yet, somehow, the belief that change can be achieved through will and protest seems less certain, the progress made over 50 years more fragile in our own dystopian times.

Frieze London arrived in Regent’s Park two decades ago. In the ‘noughties’, it hit the London art scene running, bringing a new razzmatazz to the selling of art. On the opening night, anyone who was anyone was there. Even Anish Kapoor had to stand in the rain for an hour waiting to get in. London was buzzing with talent, and now that talent had a platform.

So what of Frieze, now, 20 years on? Well, it feels rather tired, a bit past its sell-by date, like a partygoer who doesn’t quite know that it’s time to go home. The opening day was packed, but everyone seemed to be on the lookout for other people rather than looking at the art. It’s still a hot ticket – Princess Beatrice was there in one of the many eateries having a late lunch with a group of friends – but the mood seems out of step with the times. In the early 2000s, Blair was still in power. The Iraq war and 9/11 hadn’t yet happened. Irony was still cool. Art was a mirror of aspiration and social change. But, now, walking around the hundreds of booths, it feels like being in a bubble, a parallel universe where art is piled high, money often speaks louder than talent, and you might never guess that Ukraine was at war with Russia, that there was a cost of living crisis and a conflagration in the Middle East.

The fair opens with Gagosian’s booth, replete with huge floral Damien Hirsts. It’s fashionable to say that Hirst is a rotten painter, but they aren’t bad. Still, then again, they aren’t really that good either, pastiches of numerous better painters and all rather safe from the artist who once stuffed sharks and preserved cows in formaldehyde. Altogether, too big, the fair takes time to find one’s way around and discover stuff worth looking at. Though if you’re prepared to look, it’s still there.

Over at Sadie Coles, there’s a lovely series of works in pastel, ink and watercolour by the Italian artist Isabella Ducrot that borrows imagery from folklore, textiles and weaving.

At the Blindspot Gallery in Hong Kong, Angela Su, who represented Hong Kong at the 59th Venice Biennale, is showing her embroidery works—drawings created with a single line of hair. ‘Sewing together my split mind’ (2019-21) represents the sewing together of body parts as a gesture in protest at the suppression of free speech.weaving.

Over at Victoria Miro, they’ve hung a Paula Rego next to a Chantal Joffe, showing the influence of the former on Joffe’s powerful painting. Some of the most interesting work is the quietest.

Barbara Chase-Riboud, for example, at Hauser & Wirth, is an American visual artist, sculptor, best-selling novelist and award-winning poet who creates different formations by using white silk thread to pierce and sew white paper. These spare and barely there artefacts suggest automatic writing and hieroglyphics. Born in 1939, she has almost certainly been influenced by the French cultural theory, l’Écriture Féminine of Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray’s, which aspired to create a genre of literary writing that deviated from the masculine norm, to examine the relationship between the female body and language and text.

At Edel, Asanti Julianknxx is showing Black Room 2023, that merges film, poetry, performance, and music to explore Western society’s dependence on the unseen labour of Black communities. There’s also a witty series by Marina Abromović.

Marina Abromović of digital pigment prints at the Viennese Krinzinger Gallery. Wearing a big pointy red Energy Hat (like a dunce’s cap), she’s seen in the garden doing the ironing in her dressing gown. In contrast, at Edinburgh’s Ingleby Gallery, there’s a lovely minimalist series (perhaps, by Frieze standards, rather old fashioned) of rondels by the Glasgow artist Katie Paterson, created with pigment made from the ash of 10,000 tree species, sand from deserts across the Earth, and salts collected from evaporated oceans.

But the most immersive booth must surely be Pilar Corria’s showing of the Margate-based German artist Sophie von Hellermann’s painted diorama, Dreamland. Inspired by Margate’s funfair of the same name, it’s a dreamscape of whirling Ferris wheels and carousel rides that spill across the floor.

The hot Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui is showing a large shimmery bright shield of recycled and repurposed metal, Silver and Gold Have I Not at the Jack Shainman Gallery, while Alvaro Barrington’s exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ is full of vibrant colour that celebrates the artist’s early memories of growing up in Granada.

Cross the park to Frieze Masters, and there’s a very different atmosphere. There’s more light and space, it’s quiet, and people look at the work. This ranges from a beautiful miniature Italian book of the Hours from c1500 at Les Enluminures to a fabulous 1965 Fontana with punched holes on an aluminium sheet at the Mazzoleni booth. Over at Annely Juda, there’s a stylish solo presentation of the 1950s pleated fabric sculptures by the Japanese artist Katsuhiro Yamaguchi.

Basically, Frieze is now whatever you want to make it. For many, it’s an annual corporate knees-up that attracts those with money to burn (who are not necessarily the same punters as the art lovers). Once an exciting event, it’s not much more than a supermarket for the super-rich. If you’re really interested in art, as opposed to being spotted in your designer togs and sipping the warm prosecco offered by a few galleries to those who count, then go and enjoy the quiet elegance of Frieze Masters. There is some beautiful work there.

Three More That Artlyst Liked:

If you see only one show in London this autumn, then go to see the much-postponed Philip Guston at Tate Modern. After the George Floyd murder in 2020, many art institutions in the US got cold feet about his depiction of Ku Klux Klansmen, perhaps fearing that many Americans are unable to recognise irony and would see them as an advertisement for the Klan rather than as a savage critique. But this powerful exhibition shows that his hood paintings, even when tinged with humour, are a ferocious attack on white supremacy and all things fascist. Klansmen ride in goofy cars, holding cigarettes in their fat, pink sausage fingers- both figures of fun and fear. Though painted in the middle of the last century, they could not be more relevant to our dystopian times.

Guston challenges us to ask difficult questions: why are we here? What’s our point and purpose, what constitutes morality, and what makes us human?

It has been said that what is overwhelming and unnameable is often handed down over the generations, what we cannot bear, bequeathed to those who follow us. Philip Guston liked to tell people that his family came from Odessa. In fact, his parents probably came from Poland. But Odessa may have stood in his mind for all those lesser-known parts of Eastern Europe where Jews were being persecuted at the beginning of the last century. Almost penniless, his father, Leib, set sail in steerage for Montreal in 1905, followed by his mother with their four children. The family settled in an impoverished Jewish quarter of the city. Philip Goldstein, their seventh child, was born in 1913. It would not be until 1937 that he’d use the name Guston. In Montreal, his mother, Rachel, kept kosher and sent the children to religious school, but his remote and depressed father objected to this religious education. In 1922, the family moved to Los Angeles. In Canada, Leib had worked as a boilermaker for the Canadian Pacific Railway, but now, in Los Angeles, he was reduced to being a ragpicker. Devitalised and angry, he would, in 1923, hang himself when Philip was only ten. Rachel claimed to have discovered him hanging from a rope on the porch. Though, later, her son would profess to have found him. Whatever the truth, the trauma, along with the family’s escape from the dangers of those Eastern European pogroms, would sear themselves deep into the psyche of the young Philip to re-emerge as some of the most potent paintings of the late 20th century.

In 1935, he travelled to Mexico and met the great Mexican muralists, Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros, going on to paint his own tondo of Guernica. Despite being a keen cartoonist at school, the surrealist-inspired early paintings from the 1930s show a prodigious painterly talent. But such work was not in tune with the post-war times, unsympathetic to figuration. Subsequent experiments with abstraction won him a place in the New York school of the 1950s, alongside Rothko and his old school buddy Jackson Pollock. Pulsars of thick paint throb in the middle of his canvases as if about to explode with energy. But in the ‘60s, he came to feel that “there is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we inherit from abstract art. That painting is autonomous, pure and for itself.”

So, going against the aesthetic shibboleths that made others heroes of American abstraction, he returned to figuration after more than a decade. His lexicon of cartoonish images would remain with him for the rest of his life. Perhaps he simply felt that what he had to say was too urgent, too raw and too painful for the inherent aesthetic purity of abstraction. Wracked with existential doubt, his imagination filled with the suffering of the death camps, his powerful paintings are entirely unlike any others of the period. Both an angry roar and a desperate whimper. It’s as if Giacometti and Sam Beckett had joined forces with Disney’s Goofy. Appropriating objects from the world around him – what he called crapola – trashcans, ashtrays, cigarettes – all become signifiers of angst and self-doubt in his hands. Over and over again, he asks: what would it be like to be evil? What separates me/us from those hooded Klansmen who ride around in their flash cars smoking big cigars, killing and terrorising? It’s as if humour and the cartoon allowed him to say what was unsayable so that the observer wouldn’t run away. Much affected by the Vietnam War of the 1960s, he endlessly worried: ”What kind of man am I, sitting at home…going into frustrated fury about everything then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?”.

Elbows, watches, and ashtrays litter his paintings. His props are the objects of everyday life. Though it’s impossible not to see his stubby ladders as a bid for freedom or the piles of discarded hobnail boots as a reference to the mountains of shoes abandoned by those destined for the gas chambers or the tangle of red legs as the twisted limbs of the corpses piled high at Auschwitz.

But it’s the last room at Tate Modern that makes the heart skip a beat. There, lying in bed on his side, his knees drawn up under him, one eye visible, its spider-like lashes splayed out on the red cover, his top lid appears to be sewn shut with a row of black stitches as if the world is just too unbearable to look at directly. In Couple in Bed, he’s curled up next to his wife, the poet Musa McKim, who has just suffered three debilitating strokes. His bony red shoulder pokes pathetically above the bedclothes as he clutches a bouquet of paintbrushes in one hand whilst desperately clinging to her with the other. It’s as if he is saying, in this poignant, tender painting, this is all I have: my wife and painting. Without them, I am nothing. Over and over, as you walk around the exhibition, he challenges us to ask difficult questions: why are we here? What’s our point and purpose, what constitutes morality, and what makes us human? In front of his unflinching images, he dares us to stand and look, not to blink and turn away.

Philip Guston, Tate Modern 5 October 2023 – 25 February 2024, £20, free for members

Visit here

Read more

The one thing I know about Ryan Gander before we meet to look at his new show at the Lisson Gallery is that he doesn’t want to be seen as a disabled artist. He just can’t walk. That, he says from his wheelchair, doesn’t define who he is. What does interest him are ideas.

“Language is his subject, and art is simply the medium he uses to discuss it.”

In his baseball cap and cool black garb, he’s unashamedly intellectual. A conceptual artist who asks big questions about the modern world, about how we cope in societies driven by the need for constant economic growth and consumption. How we value our time when there are so many competing demands set against the continuous noise of the internet and social media. As we chat in the gallery surrounded by his work, I wonder if he’d have been just as happy being a philosopher as an artist. It’s not the making of artwork, per se, that captivates him, he says, but how he uses it to explore the nature of the self and how language plays a part in defining who we are.

Language is his subject, and art is simply the medium he uses to discuss it. He wants his work to be unexpected, to take people out of their comfort zones. He’s critical of the blue-chip nature of the art world and doesn’t want to make art just for the cognoscenti. To be elitist. I point out that he’s showing in one of London’s most prestigious galleries, but he assures me that he’s also about to show work on a boat and in a tattoo parlour.

Ryan Gander, Something that ‘is’ versus something that ‘occurs’, 2023 Acrylic lockers with different contents inside, bags, umbrella, items of clothing © Ryan Gander, courtesy Lisson Gallery

On entering the gallery, it might not, at first, be clear what his concerns actually are. A wall of Donald Judd-style Perspex lockers, all packed with umbrellas and other personal effects like office lockers, are the first thing you see. Each is identically arranged, reminding those old enough of Pete Seeger’s ’60s song: little boxes made of ticky tacky. Little boxes on the hillside. Little boxes all the same. A social satire on the conformity and aspiration of middle-class life. On one wall is a strange clock that merges two displays to create a sense of double vision. While across the room sits an unexceptional metal office desk and fan. Disconcertingly, there’s a distinct odour of damp and urine in that corner of the room. Hidden under the desk is a life-size, animatronic female gorilla – she’s called Brenda, apparently. With her moving head and darting eyes, she’s so engaging that I have to keep reminding myself she’s not real as she appears to be trying to communicate, using her fingers to count or figure something out. What that may be is not at all clear. The question posed here seems to be whether our closest, non-verbal relatives are able to understand language or count? Is an ability to do so the thing that defines us as human? Very touchingly, Ryan Gander tells me he has a four-year-old non-verbal autistic son. It’s quite clear that his child ‘understands’ what is being said to him even though he does not speak, forcing us to question and re-evaluate our understanding of language and communication.

Hung throughout the gallery are a series of steel plates that bear Gander’s poetic and typographic compositions. (I’m a terrible poet, he admits, on learning that I’m a published poet.) But ‘poetry’ is not really the point. You’re my best machine (Ee Ouw Arh 2003) presents the first sounds made by humans around 50,000 years ago, whilst a stainless steel door depicts different genres of language from official signage to graffiti.

It is linguistics rather than poetic imagery that attracts Gander.In one of the side galleries is a series made this year: Know not your place in the world. Here, two life-size bronzes of Gander’s eldest and middle children are dressed up in a collection of clothes and props. Their gaze is fixed on a couple of theatrical-looking masks painted in matt and gloss colours that have been strategically placed on the floor at their feet. This explores Gander’s interest in make-believe and play – those important devices in any artist’s toolbox –suggesting that if we don a mask, it allows us to present different versions of ourselves.

Among the most engaging pieces in the show is the re-worked documentary Only a Matter of Time. By wearing different hand-drawn masks inspired by Picasso – a reference to the 2017 exhibition at Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Faces of Picasso: The Collection Selected by Ryan Gander – Ryan Gander never has to reveal his true self. Like the heteronyms of the famous Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa, who wrote poetry in the guise of different poets, these masks allow Gander to be invisible and be whoever he chooses whilst conducting his interviews. He has, during his career, made work as eight other artists, including Aston Ernest and Santo Stern (an acronym). Some of these artists, he tells me, are more talented than he is. Others enjoy making deliberately trashy work. During the film, he explores the concept of the self/selves through that most contemporary of phenomena, the selfie. Narcissistic and always curated, the selfie encourages a discrepancy between who we say we are online and who we really are.

During the course of the film, he visits an Instagram influencer, and David Baddiel, who has a huge following on Twitter (now X), a man who cryogenically freezes the dead and another who is into trans-humanism and bionic body parts. He also visits Freud’s house in Maresfield Gardens to discuss the splitting of the self into the id, ego and super-ego. There is also a pilgrimage to a modern-day female hermit living in complete isolation in a hut in a Welsh wood. There, beyond the reaches of the technological world, she talks of connecting with the earth and blocking out the negative noise of contemporary society.Being enigmatic has long been part of the contemporary art game. It is, perhaps, what propelled Andy Warhol to fame. Ryan Gander is an exception among conceptual artists in that for him; there’s no disguising his moral alarm at the idea of being cryogenically resurrected like some Iceland Lazarus or his distaste at the endless narcissism of social media influencers being played out in this repetitive world of the present tense. In his film, he makes no bones that his empathy lies with the woman in her Welsh woods, cooking on an open fire and living close to nature. Despite the apparently playful, postmodern aesthetic of his work, Ryan Gander’s values, it turns out, are those of an old-fashioned, principled humanist.

Ryan Gander PUNTO!, Lisson Gallery, 27 Bell Street, London NW1 5BY,  Until 28 October 2023
Visit here

Lead image: Ryan Gander Only a matter of time, 2020, Video Still, video dimensions variable © Ryan Gander, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

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

The title ‘Making Modernism’ implies that the artists included in this Royal Academy exhibition were at the forefront of the avant-garde. That they were an essential component in breaking the boundaries of 19th-century academic art for new freedoms. They would probably be very surprised to find themselves seen thus. It has taken more than a century for their importance to be re-evaluated and appreciated. Why? Because they were women.

By focusing on ‘analytical’ self-portraits…. these women explored new relationships to the making of art.

At the beginning of the 20th century, for a woman to be a serious painter (not just an accomplished ‘lady’ who painted flower arrangements and pretty views) was a near impossibility. Art schools and academies were closed to them. No dealers were interested. Those on show here did not form a coherent artistic movement. Some were friends or acquaintances. Others did not know each other. But what they did have in common was a new way of thinking about how to be both a woman and an artist. Subjects rather than objects in charge of their own artistic and emotional destinies. The exhibition focuses on the work of Paula Modersohn-Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin, along with works by other German women in their milieu and for whom Expressionism – as this new art was to become known – allowed for an exploration of the self. By focusing on ‘analytical’ self-portraits, where their bodies were used as maps into their psychological identities rather than as objects for the sexualised male gaze, on children, landscapes and still lives, these women explored new relationships to the making of art. In so doing, they were beginning – consciously or not – to investigate what it felt like to be alive during a time of entrenched sexual, social and colonial hierarchies, yet a time when everything was also on the brink of change.

In 1888 the conservative Kaiser Wilhelm II acceded to the Imperial throne and reigned until 1888. As a relatively new nation, he was keen that Germany should have a coherent, well-defined view of itself and that German art should remain ‘free of so-called modern directions and influences’. By this, he meant the pull of Paris and its inescapable aura of modernity. For many of these artists, the French capital was a mecca of intellectual, artistic and emotional freedom — a place where they could break free from the constrictions of bourgeois German life. The term Expressionism was one coined by the artist and President of the Berlin Secession, Lovis Corinth, to describe an exhibition of Fauvist art held in Berlin in 1911 and artists such as Gauguin and Cézanne, who had broken with Impressionism. Central to many creatives – from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring to Picasso’s appropriation of the African mask – was a rising interest in ‘primitivism’. The belief that the child, the peasant and those from ‘far-flung’ cultures were more connected to what was ‘authentic’ and ‘real’ to their true visceral and sexual natures. The new ethnological museums in Paris, Dresden and Berlin gave access to objects that were the bounty of recent colonial plunder. Attracted by the simplicity of line and chthonic quality, most western artists were unaware that these stolen artefacts were being shown largely divorced from their spiritual or ritualistic contexts. It was in this cultural flux that Kollwitz, Modersohn-Becker, Münter and Werefkin were working. Though ‘privileged white women,’ nonetheless, they were enormously disadvantaged by their gender. Identification with the ‘otherness’ of the ‘primitive’ gave them a language that allowed for an exploration, outside the strictures of middle-class femininity, of alternative representations of both themselves and others. It’s no accident that this was the era of Freud and the nascent ‘science’ of psychoanalysis and the first rumblings of women’s rights.

Käthe Kollwitz is the most overtly political of the artists in the show. Growing up in a vehemently socialist family, they viewed her future as a history painter (an exclusively male domain at the time). After five years of private education, she moved to Berlin, where she participated in the city’s vibrant café culture and intellectual life. In 1890 she made the decision to reject painting and embrace the graphic arts, believing that they could better carry her social and political message. At the age of 17 she met the radical young doctor Karl Kollwitz and witnessed the harsh conditions of the urban proletariat. Her two sons and members of her family acted as models for her lithographs and etchings that expressed her socialist sensibilities and led her to make print cycles such as Peasants’ War (1901-08). The results were tender, sensitive pencil drawings such as Head of a Child in Its Mother’s Hands, 1900, and the emotionally potent, black and white etching, Woman with Dead Child, 1903, in which she used herself as subject cradling her son, Peter. Peter was to die in action in 1914, and Kollwitz, haunted by the support she gave him to enlist, became a pacifist. Her visceral pencil and charcoal drawings inform her prints and sculptures; while stripped bare of ornamentation, her woodcuts combine romanticism with social realism. In a stark black-and-white self-portrait from 1924, she might be posing as the model for Bertold Brecht’s Mother Courage.

Gabriele Münter is perhaps best known – as so many women of that period were – for her relationship with a man. In this case, Kandinsky. Born to German parents in the USA, where she lived during her early years, her family later returned to Germany. The premature death of her father left her independently wealthy, a position unfamiliar to many other of these female artists, such as Modersohn-Becker. After a summer spent working alongside Kandinsky, Marianne Werefkin and Alexei Jawlensky Kollwitz, Münter wrote: ‘All at once it ‘clicked’ and I felt liberated.’ Heavy impasto, applied with short brush strokes, gave way to fluid, swiftly applied paint that created bolder, flatter compositions. Colour was used to reflect her inner world. Her paintings of Kandinsky sitting at a table and Paul Klee in an armchair abandon graphic ‘likeness’ for atmosphere and mood.

Born into an aristocratic family in Moscow, Marianne Werefkin studied realist painting at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. A move, with her father, after her mother’s death, to St. Petersburg, where the academies were closed to women, led her to take private lessons and make connections with the city’s intelligentsia. During an unconventional relationship with the young painter Alexei Jawlensky, whose career she promoted, her own work took a back seat for a number of years. In her diary, she wrote, ‘I am not a man, I am not a woman, I am myself…. Being an artist does not mean possessing a faculty of combing lines and paints…but having a world inside oneself and individual forms to express it’. A meeting with the dancer Alexander Sacharoff led to a portrait, in 1909, of sweeping, stylised lines that reflected the current Japanese influence. With its simplified tonalities and mask-like face turned away like a geisha’s from a clutched flower, there’s more than an echo, here of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, which premiered at La Scala in 1904.

But it’s Paula Modersohn-Becker who declares herself as the most avant-garde and innovatory of the painters in this exhibition. During the research for my novel, Girl in White – based on her life – I went to Worpswede on the north German moors to visit what had been the artists’ community to which she had attached herself. There she met the poet Rilke and Otto Modersohn, an academic painter ten years older than her, who would become her husband. It would be there, too, that she would find her soul, even if it were one that was constantly pulled towards the modernity of Paris. Unlike other artists in this group, Paula had no independent means and struggled to make a way for herself, breaking many of the social codes expected of a young bourgeois German woman at the time. Her approach was daring, determined and brave when, after marrying Otto Modersohn and feeling emotionally and artistically smothered, she left without funds to live and study in Paris. In her diary, she wrote, ‘To strive for the greatest simplicity by means of the most intimate observation. This is greatness.’ This show includes some wonderful paintings such as Seated Nude Girl, Her Legs Pulled Up, 1904 and Portrait of an Italian Girl, 1906. Here, the children are not romanticised but painted in their vulnerable essence, so unlike later clichés of round-eyed, tearful urchins sold to tourists by street artists in Montmartre. Other of her paintings are visceral, tactile, closely cropped compositions. One focuses on a small child in a red dress fiercely clutching a struggling cat. (We do not see the girl’s face, everything is said in the force of her clenched arm), another zooms in on a baby’s head suckling at its mother’s breast, taken from Paula’s daily observations of Worpswede peasants. Influenced by the progressive ideas on education by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, this was the era of the child. With their matt surfaces, their textured paint and tonal compositions, Modersohn-Becker’s paintings are exercises not only in innovative ways to handle her medium but in empathy, compassion and new ways of seeing. Dead at the age of 32 from an embolism, six weeks after the birth of her daughter, one cannot help but wonder what she might have become had she lived for another 30 years.

Among the works of artists that make up the main focus of this show are those by artists such as Erma Bossi and a beautiful, intense (and, for the time, daring) study of a young girl, Beta Naked, by Otilie Reylaender, who also spent time in Worpswede. It has taken more than a century to acknowledge what these women brought to Modernism. To accept how the masculinised gaze of Gauguin and Picasso was given an alternative focus in these radical self-portraits and nudes that explore intimacy and self-hood from the inside out. Despite the many personal difficulties faced – grief, poverty and rejection – this exhibition re-evaluates (and not before time) the role of these female artists to create a (necessarily) revisionist history of Modernism.

Making Modernism: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin – Royal Academy of Arts 12 November 2022 – 12 February 2023

Yesterday I battled through the streets of London thronged with the Queen’s mourners to make my way to Asia House, where Lord Patten of Barnes was announcing the recipients of the Praemium Imperiale Awards. Asia House stepped into the breach when it became apparent it was not possible to hold it, as planned, at the ICA due to the vast crowds gathering in the Mall. The prize worth £500,000 has been awarded annually since 1989 to honour those working in the categories of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Music and Theatre/Film, fields of achievement not recognised by the Nobel Prize.

The list is selected by six International Advisors. This year they included Hilary Rodham Clinton, Lamberto Dini (former Prime Minister of Italy), Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, one-time President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, Christopher Patten, the last British governor to Hong Kong, and Jean-Pierre Raffin, one-time Prime Minister of France, and founder of the centre-right party UM. Past Laureates have included painters such as Cy Twombly and Anslem Kiefer, sculptors like Anthony Caro, Rebecca Horn and Christo & Jeanne-Claude. While the architects have included Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, and Zaha Hadid, music has thrown up such names as Pierre Boulez and Leonard Bernstein. Among those nominated for theatre and film have been Athol Fugard, Martin Scorsese and Judi Dench. There is also a grant for young and up-and-coming artists. This year it has been awarded to the Kronberg Academy Foundation – a cultural organisation offering advanced training to exceptionally gifted young musicians.

Those nominated for this year’s individual awards include the Italian painter Giulio Paolini who has lived most of his life in Turin. In his work composed of a range of media, including painting, photography, and sculpture, he creates poetic, introspective spaces, often turning his hand to playful and through-provoking theatre and opera sets.

The Japanese partnership of Kazuyo Sejima & Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA) is this year’s nominee for architecture. Fluid lyrical buildings full of light and movement, such as the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa (2004), are their hallmark.

Renowned for combining expressive originality with a clarity and precision, the Polish-born Krystian Zimerman has been nominated for music, in recognition of the new heights to which he has taken piano performances. Combining innate talent with bravura technical skills he unlocks new meaning in the works of the great composers.

Wim Wenders has long been considered one of the most important post-war cinematographers. A director, producer, photographer and writer, his films such as Paris Texas and Wings of Desire defined the mood of the age. While his documentaries, including his Oscar-nominated Buena Vista Social Club, have taken him to a wider audience.

Most of the nominees were not able to attend the ceremony, but the activist, artist and filmmaker Ai Weiwei, winner of the award for sculpture, was in conversation with Lord Pattern discussing migration and freedom of expression. The son of a renowned dissident poet Ai Qing, denounced by the Communist regime, the Chinese artist’s early years were marked by hardship. Now one of the world’s most prominent advocates of human rights, he was detained in 2011 and held in secret detention for 81 days after gathering the names of more than 5,000 children who had died after the collapse of corrupt and faulty building work, which he then integrated into a powerful series of artworks.

The Japan Art Association, under the honorary patronage of His Imperial Highness Prince Hitachi, younger brother of the Emperor Emeritus of Japan, is Japan’s oldest cultural foundation. Previously known as Ryuchikai, it was founded in 1879, just as Japan, which had largely been closed to the outside world, was beginning to open its doors to western cultural influence. The Praemium Imperiale Awards remain unique in their recognition of five of the major arts, while its list of past Laureates reads like a Who’s Who in the arts of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

Words and photos Sue Hubbard ©Artlyst 2022

The so-called swinging 60s didn’t really get going until the Summer of Love in 1967, when thousands of young people in an eclectic mix of hippie gear converged on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury to enjoy hallucinogenic drugs, sex and music against a background of anti-Vietnam War rhetoric. Until then, America and Britain, both recovering from the effects of war, were largely conservative, hidebound and patriarchal societies. This makes the work of the American artist Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019), now on show at the Barbican in the first major survey and the first show since her death, all the more remarkable. For before Feminism was even a thing, she was breaking artistic and social boundaries.

Before Feminism was even a thing, she was breaking artistic and social boundaries.

Born to a doctor and his wife in rural Pennsylvania in the 1930s, she had a conventional upbringing. Her parents wanted her to become a typist. But being able to draw ‘before I could speak,’ in 1952 she gained a full scholarship to Bard College in Upstate New York, only to be expelled two years later for ‘moral turpitude’. The college had no life models, so she made bold paintings of her own naked body. In 1954 she attended Columbia University and the New School for Social Research at a time when New York was a bubbling cauldron of new ideas. Work from this period shows the influence of both French post-Impressionism and American Abstract Expressionism (that mainly male movement of high modernism). Hovering between figuration and abstraction paintings such as Aria Duetto (Cantata No.78): Yellow Ladies c 1960-1 disrupt the surface of the canvas with rich gestural brush marks, displaying a visual panache that has all the confidence of de Kooning. Despite her later performative work, Schneemann always referred to herself as a painter.

As a child, she came across the term ‘gestalt’ in an art class. It was to become a ’60s’ buzzword, loosely referring to a unified whole that was more than the sum of its parts. Along with ‘happening’ – first introduced by the artist Allan Kaprow in 1959 to describe the theatricality of visual experiences that invited the viewer to be a participant as much as a viewer – it became a hallmark of the time. In 1962 to mark her emergence into New York City society, Schneemann hosted a ‘debutante party’ in her 21 Street loft. Later, she recalled ‘we celebrated anything/everything’ with ‘100 sweating rocking streaming rapturous stamping flying artists’ flitting between ‘rambling lofts’. Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol were all friends, and their influence can be seen in the introduction of kinetic elements, the incorporation of found objects and the performative elements in her work.

Cartesian philosophy had long taken (the very male) view that there was a split between mind and body. Long before the phrase was taken up as a feminist mantra, the personal became, for Schneemann, the political. Using her own body, she challenged the binary view of reason versus instinct, the Apollonian versus the Dionysian. Just to look at the titles of her books displayed at the Barbican: Jung, Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Wilhelm Reich and The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, is to be presented with a reading list of a sexual warrior from the ’60s. For Schneemann, engagement with the body linked to global politics, to female exploitation and the environment, and challenged how the lives and bodies of women were perceived. Her understanding that painting was a dynamic and physical act lead her to question whether she could be both image and image maker? As early as 1962 (a year before sexual intercourse was invented according to the poet Philip Larkin), she staged a performance in her studio among works in progress. Painting on her body, she became an element in her paintings. It was to be a turning point. Although conforming to the American stereotype of being young, thin, white and beautiful, she challenged the conventionally ascribed role of wife and muse, realigning herself as a point of action and knowledge—an active maker rather than a passive subject. A 1963 gelatin silver print from Eye Body shows her lying naked on the studio floor as two snakes slither over her. She might be a Minoan goddess.

Being a founder member of the Judson Dance Theatre – a group of choreographers, dancers, visual artists and musicians – allowed her to meld different art forms. Improvised and collaborative works were performed to experimental soundtracks in immersive, multi-media events. 1964 saw the debut Meat Joy in Paris. Untrained dancers, clad in feather and fur-trimmed underwear, tangled together in heaps of twisted limbs. As they rolled semi-naked around the stage, torn paper, raw fish, chickens, and hot dogs rained down, and buckets of paint spilt beneath them in a Bacchanalian orgy of movement and material. Yves Klein also used the female body, dragged across a flat canvas, to produce an image. But, here, for the first time, was challenging visual and physical theatre being created by a woman. Described by Schneemann as an ‘erotic rite,’ Meat Joy seems to hark back to an age of innocence before AIDS, when young people were throwing off the repressive shackles of an earlier generation in favour of free sexual expression.

Growing to artistic maturity during the era of Abstract Expressionism that promoted the myth of the male genius, Schneeman was one of the first to claim the female body as central to the painter’s process. No longer passive but carnal and erotic, it was shown as orgasmic, angry and sometimes broken. Long before such debates were common currency, her work challenged what it means to inhabit a gendered body and claim sexual freedom of expression, reminding us of what a pivotal era the 1960s were. Many other artists are echoed in her work – Eva Hesse, de Kooning, Warhol, and Yves Klein. But well ahead of the game, Schneemann’s groundbreaking practices paved the way for later female artists such as Mary Kelly, Tracy Emin and Sarah Lucas, who would focus on the female body and what living within that body means to be alive.

Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics, Barbican Art Gallery 8 September 2022 – 8 January 2023

The latest Serpentine Pavilion hunkers within the grounds of the Serpentine in Kensington Gardens like a dark grain silo transported from the prairies of the USA. But walk inside, and the eye is naturally drawn up to a circle of light. The open central dome frames the blue sky and scudding white clouds like a section of a Renaissance painting. It also brings to mind the Pantheon in Rome, a temple built by Hadrian, then turned into a Roman Catholic church dedicated to St. Mary and the Martyrs, where the light spilling from the central oculus invites us to contemplate the heavenly and the spiritual.

A sacred space for the 21st century

Built by the Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates, a one-time urban planner turned artist, in collaboration with the award-winning British architect Sir David Adjaye OBE, Black Chapel sits somewhere between sculpture and architecture. A sacred space for the 21st century, it encourages multiple meanings, uses and interpretations. Though the initial catalyst, Gates claims, was deeply personal, for the building is a homage to his late father – a skilled roofer – and draws on memories of the years spent attending church as a young boy. ‘ I wouldn’t,’ he said, ‘make a chapel unless I liked chapels.’

Spare and minimal, with a severe beauty, it provides a space where in contrast to the isolation experienced during the recent pandemic, people can come together as they have always done in village squares and churches. Drawing inspiration from numerous architectural sources, from the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, to the Musgum mud huts of the Cameroon and Kasubi Tombs of Kampala, Uganda, from the industrial kilns of Stoke-on-Trent to the onion domes of Russian and Greek Orthodox churches, its circularity echoes the rituals of voodoo and of Roda de capoeira, a circular formation used in a number of Afro-Brazilian dance forms. Outside, the sonorous tones of a bronze bell salvaged from St. Laurence, a landmark Catholic Cathedral that once stood in Chicago’s South Side, calls audiences to performances and events.

During their recent talk at the Serpentine, Sir David Adjaye suggested that it takes thousands of years to build a city and that later buildings interweave themselves with the palimpsest of that past history. Both he and Gates wanted Black Chapel to create the experience of being emerged in a space without the constraint of the language of structural engineering, for each believes that architecture is more than the sum of its technicalities and ideas, that it can have a profound effect on how we experience the world. We all yearn, Gates suggested, for meaning and ritual, which despite the loss of confidence in organised religion, is contained deep within our DNA.

Taking a cue from the Rothko Chapel that houses fourteen of Mark Rothko’s paintings, Gates created seven new tar paintings for the space in celebration of his father’s roofing skills, using tar and a blow torch to create black seams in the shimmering silvery tabla rasa. Success, he suggested half-jokingly, would be if you could stand beneath them and they didn’t let in the rain.

Black Chapel forms part of The Question of Clay, a multi-institution project that has included exhibitions at the Whitechapel, White Cube and the V&A. Since its inception in 2000, the Serpentine Pavilion Commission has produced some extraordinarily innovative works from the inaugural design by Dame Zaha Hadid to those created by Janya Ishigami and Olafur Eliasson. These dreamlike structures have, over the last 20 years, become as much part of London’s summer season as Wimbledon, allowing innovative structures to be enjoyed and experienced by the many rather than just the few in the art world.

The pandemic has wreaked havoc on the art world. Fairs have been cancelled, galleries closed and artists confined to their studios. The London Art Fair, which was supposed to have taken place in January, finally opened its doors on the 20th of April. The private view was not as crowded as in previous years (perhaps because it has oddly coincided with the Venice Biennale), but there was a sense of relief that it was finally happening at all. Whether it is actually a slimmed-down version of previous fairs, I’m not sure. But there seems to be a new seriousness. More beauty and less frivolity with the lower floor mainly catering to British Modernism – and contemporary work that sits happily beside it – and the upstairs showcasing younger, newer galleries.

There seems to be a new seriousness. More beauty and less frivolity.

On entering the fair, I was delighted to see that this year’s Museum Partner is the wonderful Women’s Art Collection, Europe’s largest collection of art by women that is normally housed in the Brut modernist Murray Edwards College (previously New Hall) in Cambridge. The collection contains some 550 works by such iconic artists as Barbara Hepworth, Cindy Sherman and Faith Ringgold. On display at the fair is a rather strange Maggie Hambling, Hebe and her Serpent, 1979, a vibrant Eileen Cooper of two flagrant dancing women, Perpetual Spring, 2016 and an interesting early Tracey Emin (interesting because she is not the subject), a coloured lithograph from 1986, entitled Sixty A Day Woman based on a character met in Margate who reputedly smoked 6o cigarettes a day.

At Purdy Hicks, I discovered a couple of floral archival pigment prints by Kathrin Linkersdorff. The transparent Les Fleurs du Mal beauty has a sense of entropy about it. At Rebecca Hossack, best known for showing aboriginal art, there’s an abstract version of the Thames – part map, part abstract painting – by Barbara McFalane, London Cobalt, Teal and Emerald that, despite her Scottish name, shows the influence of aboriginal art in its mark-making. The Zuleika Gallery has a whole stand dedicated to the elegant minimal works on paper and sculptures by Nigel Hall, while Advanced Graphics has a delightful little Craigie Aitchison print, Crucifixion with Dog 2003, created in his bold colours and naïve style. There are Winifred Nicholsons, Sickerts and Prunella Cloughs to be had, and some real delights among the plethora of the mediocre. One gem was an early painting by my late friend Gillian Ayres. An uncharacteristically small work dated 1957, painted in ripolin on a small vertical strip of board in her early tachist style.

But it’s the upper floor that gives the fair its pizzazz. Now in its 17th year, Art Projects brings together international ventures – curated solo shows and group exhibitions. Domobaal has a fascinating series of unique photographic transfers on lime logs by Alice Wilson depicting woods, paths through forests, anonymous sheds and warehouses, alongside some equally enigmatic oil on wood works by Fiona Finnegan, including When the Levee Breaks, 2020, a black feathery eruption set against what might be a rosy sunset. Over at Ed Cross Fine Art, Tiffanie Delune uses warm colours to create exotic, playful images that depict her roots and family memories, while MADEINBRITALY artists have been fashioning their own ‘Hortus Conclusus,’ ‘an enclosed garden’ that functions as a space in which to ferment new ideas. At IMT Gallery, collaboration is the name of the game. Works by Paola Ciarska, Frankie Robers and Orphan Drift (Ranu Mukerjee and Maggie Roberts) are housed within a scaffolding structure that functions as a physical metaphor for the collaboration required to stage an exhibition.

Topical issues, especially Brexit, followed by the Covid pandemic, along with the global climate emergency, have informed Rodrigo Orrantia’s curatorship of Photo50. The first work encountered is that of a small sailboat with dark sails, which appears to be heading to the shores of some utopian paradise. This forms part of a powerful installation, Journey, by Esther Teichmann and is set alongside Alexander Mourant’s mesmeric A Vertio Like Self, made, originally, as a Super 8 film of a silent voyage by sea out to an island.

The second aspect of the exhibition, following on from the theme of water as a liminal space, focuses on Borders. These can be interpreted as both geographical limits and the space between the flat world of photography and the three-dimensionality of the sculptural object.

In its fourth edition, Platform, curated by Candida Stevens, presents 10 galleries whose artists have created new work that explores the intersection between the visual and music. There’s work, here, that makes reference to the improvisations of jazz, with its destabilised, off-kilter imagery, along with that by figurative artists who represent the process of composition, both in musical and visual forms.

Alongside all these different elements, the fair is presenting a series of talks that range from Artistate: Art, Death & Legacy: Managing Artist Estates in the 21st Century, to what promises to be an interesting panel discussion on The Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edwards College – A ‘Feminist’ Curatorial Model’.

The London Art Fair may not have quite the international fizz of, say, Frieze, but it has, over the years, settled into its own format. One displaying works by well-known names, alongside a healthy display of new and experimental work.

London Art Fair 2022, Business Design Centre, Islington London N1, 21-24 April 2022

If there is one image that Bacon made his own above any other, it is the mouth contorted in a scream or grimace. It is not Munch’s shrill scream of terror. Bacon’s mouth is cavernous, the lips curled in a snarl to reveal rows of potentially castrating teeth. Sometimes it is a gaping black hole, at other times a fleshy orifice. It is always sexual and often animalistic and dangerous.

“Birth, Copulation and Death. That’s all the facts when you come down to brass tacks. Birth, copulation and death.” T.S. Eliot Sweeney Agonistes

In this exhibition at the Royal Academy, brilliantly curated by the art historian Michael Peppiatt, the first image the viewer encounters is Bacon’s monochromatic head I painted in 1948 in oil and tempera on board. Thin white perspectival lines suggest an enclosed space. A dock? A prison? A figure dominates, its thick white neck poking from a torn garment. The top of its head is missing. Its face seems to have been torn off and is hanging, flapping almost, like a ripped mask, the mouth open to reveal an array of teeth. But these are not human teeth – there is a huge, bared incisor on display – and yet the shape of the figure is human. The pink lips appear smeared with froth or saliva. It’s a terrifying, ambiguous image. Who or what is this? Man or beast?

Born in 1909 to English parents in Dublin, the second of five children, Francis Bacon not only suffered asthma as a child but was beaten and abused by his sadistic, racehorse trainer father for whom he came to have inappropriate feelings. He also lived through some of the most turbulent events in history. The Irish Easter Rising. The First World War with its millions of dead in the mud of the trenches. The rise of Fascism and subsequent death camps. These were the backdrop that turned this one-time interior designer into a prophet of existential doom. As a young man, Hitler and Mussolini barked their speeches into microphones, their mouths contorted with hatred. While in 1925, the film director Sergei Eisenstein made an iconic film, the Battleship Potemkin, about the Russian Revolution where, in one of the most famous cinematographic scenes of all time, a screaming nanny, the glass of her Penz-Nez shattered into her bleeding eye emits, what Bacon described, as ‘a human cry’ from the black cavern of her mouth. The mouth, fringed with teeth, returns again in numerous other images throughout this exhibition – in the centre of a ghostly hybrid/human owl in Fragment of a Crucifixion, 1950, and the contorted and distorted figure of a ‘Fury,’ 1944 arched in an orgasmic scream gushing red roses from its throat, or in the studies of caged Baboons and Chimpanzees rattling their cages.
francis-bacon-man kneeling-artlyst

As a young gay man in London, when homosexuality was illegal, Bacon, conditioned to the sexual masochism instilled by his brutal father, explored the gay haunts of Soho. Rough sex was to his taste. Bodies were disposable. Muscles, flesh and available orifices were all that mattered. After leaving Ireland, he’d spent time in Paris and seen the meat markets and abattoirs, also discovering the visceral, fleshy paintings of Soutine. Like the French philosopher and theoretician Georges Bataille, Bacon came to explore the duality within man’s nature between the ‘irrational’ sacred and the ‘rational’ profane, that dichotomy of terror and awe within the human psyche. For Bataille, the ‘scared’ encapsulated ‘inner experience’ that disrupted order and incited both disgust and veneration. Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in Bacon’s 1960 painting Pope and Chimpanzee, where the gesticulating animal morphs into a pontiff with an ape-like face. Here, the normally subsumed animal nature of man hidden beneath the niceties of a red clerical gown is made visible. Bacon had been fascinated by seeing wild animals hunting since visiting, in 1951, his mother and sisters who had moved to South Africa. He haunted the streets of Soho like a predictor, the low-life drinking dens, the gambling salons, the queer pubs. Man Kneeling in Grass, 1952, a nude male, buttocks raised in an inviting sodomistic pose, takes on the quality of prey camouflaged by the zebra patterns of the savannah scrub and recalls William Blake’s mad and defeated Nebuchadnezzar crawling naked on his hands and knees, his wild beard dragging along the ground.

Myth played a central role in Bacon’s iconography. He incorporated echoes of the art and literature of the ancient world into his allusive imagery, such as his Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, 1981 with its blood-soaked reverberations, and the Second Version of Triptych, 1944. He once admitted that ‘The Furies’ often visited him. These vengeful goddesses seemed to function as harbingers of guilt, malevolence and destruction in his godless world. But Bacon never really explained his use of imagery and, like the great Egyptian art he so admired, held precise meanings close with the enigma of the sphinx.

Movement was another thing that fascinated him. Dogs, men having sex and the stark image of a Paralytic Child Walking on all Fours, 1961 were taken from Human and Animal Locomotion, the photographic studies made by Eadweard Muybridge in the 19th century. In Bacon’s hands, Muybridge’s wrestlers become men copulating, underlining Bacon’s penchant for violent sex. By the 1960s, his preoccupation with the body in motion had led to increasing distortions in the figures that he painted, including his few female studies of Henrietta Moraes. Among the most disturbing is the portrait of his lover George Dyer Crouching – he died of an overdose on the toilet two days before the opening of Bacon’s triumphant and career-making retrospective at the Grand Palais – standing on what looks like a diving board, enclosed in some strange circular pit like an animal waiting to be fed.

Towards the end of his life, Bacon became fascinated – like his hero Picasso had been – with the bullfight. In his late 1987 Triptych, he shows the wounded and bandaged legs of a nude matador, the wounds raw as sexual orifices, the bull’s horns a final brutal phallic symbol. The bull was to be the subject of his final painting. Unusually painted in monochrome, with dust added from the studio floor, the animal seems to be dissolving into the dark, merging with the void behind the white walls as it, finally, loses its power.

Words: Sue Hubbard Top Photo: RA Installation P C Robinson © Artlyst 2022

Francis Bacon: Man and Beast Royal Academy 29 January 2022 – 17 April 2022

Study of a Dog – After Francis Bacon – Sue Hubbard From Ghost Station (Salt) 2004

Beyond the date palm
and ribbon of hot sand,
the electric zip of blue sea
and strip of burning highway
where cars black as ants
flow liquid in the heat,
and petrol fumes catch
in the throat like rags,
the midday sun bleaches
colour from the concrete boulevard,
and a patch of back-street dirt
a brindled dog,
sinews taut, elastic,
turns and turns
in its own shadow,
red-prick tongue hanging
from frilled chops,
chasing its own tail.
Flea ridden, the stink of gutter
clotted in its fetid fur.
It is, behind its black snout,
and milk-filmed eye,
behind its helmet of bone
and knowledge of the human,
returning to what is
vicious, taboo, feral,
to what is dangerous.

She’s the oldest artist to have won the Turner Prize (she is now 67). Born in Zanzibar, Lubaina Himid returned with her Lancastrian, textile-designer mother to Maida Vale when little, after her African father died from malaria. They moved in with her aunt, a music teacher, who made sure that her niece could read by the time she was four, while her mother took her on trips to the V&A. Fast forward to Wimbledon School of Art, where she studied theatre design, only to realise that, in those days, ballet and opera were largely dominated by white men.

The exhibition as whole is rather baggy and lacks focus – SH

By the age of 36, she’d moved to Preston to what is now the University of Central Lancashire and eventually became a professor of contemporary art. Part of a generation of emigres who, for a variety of reasons, came to this country and wove their differently lived experiences into the warp and weft of post-war Britain, enlivening it with new music, food and ways of seeing, it was a shock to discover that the streets and institutions were blighted with racism. Art, for Himid, became political. Along with other young black British artists in the 80s, she used her platform to highlight these concerns. Unlike her contemporaries – the YBAs, primed by the 80s zeitgeist of Goldsmiths to learn how to appeal to the uber-collector of the day, Saatchi – these young black artists – many from the provinces – tackled subjects such as institutional racism and the lack of opportunities offered to talented black youth.

Now Tate Modern is presenting her largest solo show to date, giving her the chance to demonstrate that all the world’s a stage and meld her interests in theatre, opera, architecture and painting in the bunker-like spaces of the Blavatnik building. At the gallery, entrance are a series of banners designed to look like East African Kanga fabric, inscribed with phrases and homilies. Overall, they are entitled How Do You Spell Change? Painted in a frieze around the top of the wall in sugary pink are the words Our Kisses are Petals, Our Tongues Caress the Bloom. This, presumably, is to set the tone for the exhibition within. Credited with being one of the most powerful political voices in British contemporary art, my hopes were set high. Himid has woven a series of questions throughout the exhibition in which she asks us to consider how history and the built environment shape our lives. A form of visual Socratic questioning, the aim is to encourage viewers to engage with alternative discourses and challenge long-held prejudices and mindsets. It’s an interesting idea, but let down by the blunt lack of subtlety of the questions – as if there’s an easy, black and white answer to these complex issues.

As we enter the first space, we encounter Metal Handkerchiefs, a series of nine vibrantly painted metal sheets which appropriate the ubiquitous language of health and safety that so often dictates how we use architectural spaces.

Moving further into the exhibition, Jelly Mould Pavilions for Liverpool is an imagined competition to design public monuments for the city in order to celebrate the contribution of its African diaspora to the city’s history and wealth. Using Victorian jelly moulds as architectural models, she wittily reflects in her imagined cityscape the entangled web between the consumption of sugar, the slave trade and Liverpool’s prosperity. It’s a clever, engaging piece but not shown to its best advantage in the vast gallery. It demands a more intimate space.

And that’s much of the problem. The exhibition is simply too large and overblown -with paintings, installations and sound pieces – and, as a result, feels unfocused. In her sound pieces, Reduce the Time Spent Holding, Himid recites from health and safety manuals to the rhythm of tools and machines, while in Blue Grid Test, patterns from around the world are woven with memories of the colour blue, spoken in three languages. Then there’s the sound of the sea and creaking wood – presumably to remind us of slave ships – juxtaposed with a wave-like sculpture. But so many competing ideas simply dilute the whole. One wonders whether this is a bad curatorial decision or Himid’s choice. Many of the individual works are powerful, but less would have amounted to more.

Among her most striking works is A Fashionable Marriage, first shown in 1986, a cardboard-cut-out installation that revisits Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-Mode: The Toilette – a biting satire on the moral corruption of the elite and wealthy in the 1700s. In her witty reconstruction, one half focuses on the art world – the castrato becomes critic, the flautist, the dealer, while random other figures are artists, including the de rigueur feminist. The other half of the work includes political figures of the day: Thatcher and Regan, along with the National Front. On the floor is a little girl – who, like the boy in the story of the Emperor with no clothes, blurts out the truth that he’s naked. The little girl is saying to the artist: ‘Stop negotiating and being polite. We have to fight. We are part of a big political battle’. This is one of the works where Himid’s political message and the artwork potently meld to significant effect.

I wanted to love this exhibition. After all, who could possibly fault an artist of colour for wanting to point out what she and her generation have been up against it and that they had to battle to have any degree of visibility or a voice? But ethical sympathy isn’t enough. Yes, there are some potent works here, but the exhibition as whole is rather baggy and lacks focus. Everything has been thrown in, including the kitchen sink. Whether this is the Tate’s fault or Himid’s, I’ve no idea. It’s a pity because a tightly focused exhibition of her best work would have been a very potent thing, indeed.

Lubaina Himid Tate Modern Until July 2022

For reasons lost in the mists of time, the city of Coventry is where you’re purportedly sent when socially ostracised, as well as where the first British car was built by Daimler in 1897.

It’s also the city forever linked with the original Peeping Tom who, in the eleventh century as Lady Godiva reportedly rode on horseback naked through the streets in protest against her husband’s repressive tax demands, peeked while the other townsfolk turned away. In World War II, the city – it manufactured cars, bicycles, aeroplane engines and munitions – was decimated by German bombing. The 14th of November 1940 saw the single most concentrated attack on a British city in the Second World War. Hitler’s retaliation, it was said, for an RAF attack on Munich. The city lost its central library, market hall, hundreds of shops and the 16th century Palace Yard, where James II once held court. The fire at the city’s huge Daimler works was one of the biggest of the war in Britain. But, most devastatingly, the city lost its medieval cathedral.

The times reflect a national moment of togetherness, empathy and collectivism

In 1940 Sir Basel Spence’s great modernist replacement rose like a phoenix beside the ruins. It’s a glory of post-war art and architecture with its huge tapestry by Graham Sutherland, its dazzling Baptistry window designed by John Piper and constructed by Patrick Reyntens, a lectern in the form of an eagle by Elizabeth Frink and the huge candlesticks by the potter Hans Coper. This year Coventry has been voted the UK City of Culture and is host to the Turner Prize, now one of the world’s most celebrated contemporary art prizes established in 1984 to promote public debate around new developments in art. It has a lot to live up to in this city.

In a year dominated by the pandemic, it was decided not to award the prize to an individual but to a collective. Those chosen include the Belfast-based Array Collective that makes work around ideas of national culture, myth and folklore. B.O.S.S. who organise events focused on a collectively built sound system that brings together “queer, trans and non-binary black people and people of colour”, Cooking Sections, a London-based duo whose films and installations explore the ethical issues surrounding ecology and the mass production of food. Gentle/Radical, centred on Cardiff’s Riverside neighbourhood, that shares experiences of ‘culture’ in its broadest sense and Project Art Works, a Hastings-based enterprise that helps ‘neurodivergent’ artists develop their creative practices. All, we are told, “share a belief in art’s capacity to replenish our reservoirs of hope”.

This seems a tall order and one that the great thinker, George Steiner, disavowed when he suggested that intelligent Germans had been quite happy listening to Schubert in the evening whilst gassing Jews by day and that culture and art actually change nothing. But we live in different times. The Cultural Director of the Herbert Art Gallery – this year’s host to the prize – suggested that the times reflect “a national moment of togetherness, empathy and collectivism.” But is that really the case? Of course, the work takes us back to that hoary old chestnut, the question: ‘but is it art? Is political and social activism the same thing? It can certainly be creative and artistic but isn’t it, well, different? There’s a danger that art made by a collective rather than an individual undercuts the essential existential quest that’s a fundamental characteristic of most lasting art.

Gentle/Radical was established in 2017. A collaboration of activists, faith ministers and youth workers etc.., they have filmed monologues and conversations in which they discuss issues such as how to raise children beyond the nuclear family and they come together to sing Welsh Gorsedd bardic prayers, written in the 18th and lost to the colonising English culture. There’s no doubt it’s all very worthy, very heartfelt, but it seems rather the stuff of the documentary film, closer to Old Mass Observation projects than to art.

Array Collective is slicker. An imagined síbín (a pub without permission) has been installed in the Herbet. It’s wonderfully atmospheric with fags stubbed out in the ashtrays and packets of crisps on the round tables, along with all the nick-nacks associated with an Irish pub. Whilst sitting there, we’re invited to witness the Druthaib’s Ball – “a celebration of life and death, a wake for the centenary of Ireland’s partition”. There’s some evocative and melancholy traditional singing by a woman in floaty robes with a rather good voice and lots of storytelling, fiddle playing and dancing. Everyone seems to be having a great time. That Northern Ireland and the Republic have been scared by sectarian division is beyond doubt, but, again, the film feels like a documentary and there’s the sense that the viewer is an outsider, simply watching other people have fun.

The weakest offering in the show is Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S). Bringing together queer, trans and non-binary black people and people of colour, the exhibition features two distinct but connected spaces. The inner space is a reconfiguration of The only Good System is a Sound System, an immersive environment of film, light and sound, already shown at FACT for the Liverpool Biennial. The work claims to reflect “ways in which marginalised groups have developed methods of coming together against a background of repression and discrimination.” No one could deny that this is an admirable aim and of value to those involved in setting it up, but does such a ‘woke’ agenda produce good art or simply political or social activism? It’s a coldly techno piece, considering it’s about something with which so many feel passionately engaged. By making everything ‘art’, aren’t we in danger of making nothing art, of taking away art’s philosophical and existential core?

Perhaps the most slickly professional work is that produced by Cooking Sections made up of duo Daniel Fernandez Pascual and Alon Schwabe, who use food as a lens with which to explore the impact that commercial food practices have on both humanity and the environment. Beautifully presented in a darkened gallery space, an audio and film installation explores the environmental impact of salmon farms in Scotland. A series of round open-net pens are projected in big blue circles on the gallery floor. Excrement, drugs, synthetic colours and parasites billow out into the surrounding sea waters. CLIMAVORE is a long term project that questions how humans change the environment and the pair have been successful in persuading many restaurants to take farmed salmon off the menu. This would have been an important outcome in its own right, but the piece goes beyond activism. The words and images suggest allegories of human behaviour. These may be salmon they are talking about, but the work metamorphoses into an exploration of contemporary existence becoming more than its subject matter.

Project Art Works, based in Hastings, collaborates with people who have complex emotional and physical needs, challenging paradigms of inclusion whilst working towards a greater understanding of neurodiversity. A film showing a group of users in a bothy in Scotland is extremely moving as we watch them respond to the beauty of the wilderness despite their individual challenges. A number of their drawings and paintings are on display. By any standards, many are highly accomplished; in a Turner Prize built on notions of the collective, these unique voices, born out of individual struggle and a desire for expression, emphasise the fact that, in the end, art is a solitary act, not something made by a collective or a committee. As Gaston Bachelard suggests, it’s an process of daydreaming. Truth is a constellation of ideas, not a didactic statement, A way of discovering what we don’t know about the world and ourselves. An exploration. A journey. Not a political manifesto.

Words/Photos: Sue Hubbard © Artlyst 2021

Published in Artlyst

When the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, one of its key aims was to establish an annual exhibition open to all artists ‘of merit’ (as long, one might add, that they were white, male and mostly middle class). Held every year since the Summer Exhibition is the world’s oldest submission exhibition with works selected and hung by Academicians. Originally all work was figurative. Paintings were hung from dado to cornice, abutted and tipped towards the viewer and arranged symmetrically. History painting dominated, along with vanity portraits by artists of the day. Celebrity painters such as Joshua Reynolds got the best spaces, whilst the work of the lesser-known was hung almost at ceiling height. It was, also, coincidentally a period when Britain’s involvement with the slave trade was at its height.

The exhibition starts with a bang – SH

Since then, the exhibition has been a marker in the establishment’s social calendar, along with events such as Henley and Wimbledon. A favourite of ladies who lunch and those up for the day from the shires. For years it was the zenith for Sunday painters who’d religiously send in their cat paintings and flower arrangements. But, in the topsy turvy world of Covid, this year’s exhibition had to be delayed. This may not signify very much, other than that we’ve been in the midst of a pandemic, but with this shift, there’s been a further breaking of old moulds. The exhibition starts with a bang, mirroring the changes within contemporary society and the role played by those from diverse ethnic backgrounds.

This year’s show has been coordinated by Yinka Shonibare RA, who has stamped it with his mark, the explorations pursued in his own work into colonialism and post-colonialism, race, class and cultural identity. Marginalised voices have been restored, and many artists are showing here for the first time. There’s a strong visceral feel to the show, which includes quilting, knitting and sculpture made from non-art materials, as well as more traditional painting, and the parameters have been expanded to include sound works. There’s a sense of things finding their rightful place, of the marginalised finally being included and brought into the fold.

This year’s theme, ‘Reclaiming Magic’, not only celebrates the joy of making art but also its transformative potential, marginalised practices and ritual powers. The journey begins with the work of Bill Taylor, an African American artist born into slavery in 1854, who didn’t start making art until he was 85. Self-taught, his work inspired the idea of looking beyond the conventional boundaries of western art history. Shonibare has invited a number of international black artists to exhibit, including Michael Armitage and Betye Saar. Ellen Gallagher’s Elephantine, a map of Africa, has an elephant’s head embedded in the colours of the Belgium flag, while Kudzania Chuira’s single-channel film, We live in Silence (Chapters 1-7), is a cross between The Last Supper and a Bacchanalian orgy with militaristic overtones. One of the most disquieting works is an offset print by the black American artist Faith Ringgold, The United States of Attica. A red and green map of the United States, it is dedicated to the men who died in 1971 at the Attica prison for demonstrating against deplorable conditions. Written across each state are descriptions of various unspeakable acts – witch hunts and lynchings – that took place. At the bottom of the work is a direct appeal to viewers to update the poster.

This year’s curators include Humphrey Ocean and Bob and Roberta Smith, Vanessa Jackson and Eva Rothchild, and the energy remains high octane throughout with a shiny lipstick red painting by Gary Hume and a vast red and white floor-seated pineapple by Rose Wylie that has all the wacky playfulness of the outsider artist. There’s a great work by Frank Bowling made from what can only be called rubbish and strong paintings by British academicians such as Basil Beattie, Tony Bevan and Mali Morris, with some lovely little figures by David Remfry. But it is the energy of those artists who would have never got a look in during Joshua Reynold’s day, who’d have been serving the drinks to their bewigged ‘masters’, that gives this summer exhibition its freshness and vitality. Finally, it is they who get to go to Varnishing Day and the RA dinner – it’s almost grounds for optimism.

Photos: PC Robinson © Artlyst 2021

Published in Artlyst

Shape Chroma: Tension Fine Art London: Newton and Goethe famously disagreed on the genesis of colour. Most commentary assumes Goethe was wrong. But this is true only if you accept that colour can simply be described by physics and that psychological and conceptual components have no influence on the way that we see.

The highest goal a man can achieve is amazement – Johan Wolfgang von Goethe

Goethe was a philosopher who understood the drift of thought in 19th century Europe. He was a romantic who’d grasped an important flaw in empiricism: the impossibility of objectivity. In the 19th century, the art historian Charles Blanc explored the laws of ‘simultaneous contrast’, drawing from the theories of Michel Eugène Chevreul and Eugène Delacroix, to suggest that optical mixing would produce more vibrant colour than the traditional process of mixing pigments. Science, psychology and, particularly, contemporary technology have moved on since then, but the fundamental dichotomy remains. How do we see and respond to shape and colour? As Jules Olitski wrote in Artforum in 1967, “the development of colour structure ultimately determines its expansion or compression – its outer edge. I think…of colour as being seen in and throughout, not solely on, the surface”.

Shape Chroma is a ‘trialogue’ curated by the artist Caroline List between three painters: herself, Laurence Noga and Katrina Blannin, who bring these questions into the realm of contemporary aesthetics with different explorations into colour, shape and spatial illusion. No single issue has been more fundamental to modernist painting than the acknowledgement of flatness or two-dimensionality, but the power of the mark to suggest illusion and depth belongs not so much to painting as to the eye.

Exploring chromatic interactions, constructed and illusionistic space, each artist has created new painterly conversations in the light of Modernist abstraction and contemporary digital influences, highlighting the Goethe/Newton dichotomy between reason and the poetic.

Katrina Blannin’s meticulously layered geometric forms focus on complex systems of repetition and mathematics. Palindromic and isochromatic structures are used to produce paintings full of logical clarity that re-examine the history of colour theory and early Renaissance painting, which she explores within the context of 20th-century constructivism. Working with acrylic on a medium-textured linen, she generates fresh debates around the possibilities for the painted surface.

Nostalgia collides with a synthetic colour palette in the work of Laurence Noga, combining an industrial aesthetic with pure geometry. Layering collage, colour and mixed media, he plunders memorabilia from his father’s garage – tools, packets and washers – to evoke Proustian memories. An interest in the Bauhaus influences his choice of colour, setting up unpredictable surfaces and depths of field that draw the viewer into his discombobulating world.

Working on linen, board, paper and aluminium Caroline List creates luminous paintings full of sensuous hues that explore the spatial qualities of colour in relationship to form and ground, defined by their differing absorbances. Drawing on early 20th-century abstraction and virtual screen photography, her work implicitly refers to landscapes, organic shapes and atmospheric light. Using high key pigments and fluorescents full of transparency and opacity, her works, despite their sophisticated geometry, create links to the saturated colour fields of Rothko and the spiritual, otherworldly light of Caspar David Friedrich.

Colour is not ‘out there’ in the world – painted onto roses and snowdrops – but formed in our eye, mind and, even our hearts. Our perceptual apparatus creates colour filtered through our emotional state and cultural biases. An ambitious, visually intelligent show, Shape Chroma revisits art history to revivify what’s gone before in order to construct a new 21st-century grammar in which to re-examine these questions of colour theory and form. So whilst knowing physics is, undoubtedly, technically useful, it’s on the other side of perception that meaning and artistry reside, as is articulately illustrated by these three.

Shape Chroma: Katrina Blannin – Caroline List – Laurence Noga – Tension Fine Art – 17th September-16th October 135 Maple Road London SE20 8LP

Top Image: Caroline List, Oil & black gesso on linen, ‘Chroma Shape’ series (2020)

Tension Fine Art is a gallery dedicated to showcasing the work and raising the profiles of emerging and mid-career local, national and international artists. They show a mixture of contemporary & experimental art that questions what art is and what art could be.

Published in Artlyst

Few in the West will have been to Tehran. We are either likely to think of an exotic Persia full of sultans and hareems – the sort of orientalism debunked by Edward Said in his celebrated essay – or a modern-day Iran, a strict theocracy run by repressive Ayatollahs not too keen on our western ways. In fact, during the last century, few societies have experienced such a period of rapid modernisation as Iran. This is demonstrated by the rich flow of artistic ideas from within and without the country.

AB-ANBAR serves as a conduit between Iran and a broader global culture

In 2014 AB-ANBAR was set up in Tehran to create a platform for emerging cutting-edge artists and serve as a conduit between Iran and a broader global culture. The aim was not just to give voice to these artists but to create a dialogue with their occidental counterparts. In Tehran, the gallery’s primary audience consists of local artists and collectors, so the aim here is to introduce contemporary Iranian art to a wider world.

Situated at 4 Cromwell Place, AB-ANBAR’s current exhibition Cacophony is a showcase for four contemporary and modern Iranian artists, Sonia Balassanian, Majid, Fathizadeh, Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam and Timo Nasseri. The underlying concept is the inherent chaos and turmoil embedded within contemporary societies—the white noise of conflicting values and points of view. The wide range of work, from the chaotic painterly scenes of Fathizadeh to the experimental films of Balassanian and the modernist compositions of Timo and Vaziri, emphasise this diversity.

Sonia Balassanian is a multimedia artist living and working between New York and Armenia whose practice took a dramatic turn after the 1979 events in Iran, turning an abstract painter into a political activist whose work has evolved to address issues of identity, gender and cultural contradiction. Here, her work consists of two diametrically opposed forms: video and abstract paintings made up of layers of acrylic paint or mixed media marks on photographic paper that contain echoes of Agnes Martin. But whereas Martin or Balassanian ’s compatriot, the painter Shirazeh Houshiary explore the spiritual sublime and the ineffable, there’s a sense that Sonia Balassanian ’s marks are more an act of erasure, a cancellation of something much darker. A deliberate deletion or form of emotional redaction of what is unsayable. The stanza structure of her lines references her practice as a poet, implying both rhythm and metre. Alongside these are three powerful videos: Chain, 1995 that emphasises her interest in ritual with a tough black and white close up of a Shia adherent engaged in the repetitive act of flagellation; 1555, 2009 a cacophony of three intoning voices that speak of the Armenian genocide in Farsi, Armenian and English and Haghpat 2, 1999, a stark, grainy video of naked bodies emerging from deep ceramic pots buried in the ground that seems to imply disappearance and re-emergence.

The modernist works of Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam stand in stark contrast to this psychodynamic output. The large aluminium, wood and painted wall construct, Untitled 1968-2015, conjures the fenders of shiny American Cadillacs and speaks of the ubiquitous optimism of modernity during that period. It evokes a world of shiny skyscrapers, American diners and jukeboxes, of new buildings and new possibilities. In contrast, his aluminium and yellow-painted wall sculpture, with its Fontana-like slashes, castes subtle ribbons of shadow in the negative spaces, playing with notions of inside and out to create a severe minimal beauty.

Born in Berlin in 1972, the son of a German mother and an Iranian father, Timo Nasseri grew up between two radically different cultures. Living and working in Berlin, drawing lies at the heart of his practice. He uses the influence of Islamic art, mathematics and geometry to explore systems of patterning and the architectural structures within infinity and chaos. A series of small black magnetic cut-outs – the silhouettes of frogs, axe heads and bats – displayed in a group on a white wall have something of the ethnographic museum about them. Entitled The Order of Everything, it suggests some sort of arcane hieroglyphic language which, if only the code could be cracked, might reveal the mysteries of the universe. Repetition is a strong aesthetic stimulus in Nasseri’s work reflected in his steel towers held together only by magnets, one of which is suitably entitled Babel #3. While his ‘totemic’ paintings in flat blacks, blues and reds take their inspiration from the ‘dazzle’ camouflage used for warships in World War I.

Majid Fathizadeh is based in Iran and employs the language of European Old Masters to explore not only the disasters of war but of the destruction of the biosphere. Pool Table 2021 is a painting full of dark sepia tones and tenebrous shadows. At once, absurdist and bleak, his cast of Goyaesque characters crawl around upturned, broken pool tables wearing strange masks and what appears to be a dunce’s cap. While Tendon shows a rabble of figures – refugees or outlaws, it’s hard to say – huddled on a hilltop overlooking a benighted landscape that appears to be the city of Tehran. A highly skilful painter and draughtsman, he encapsulates the diversity and reaches of contemporary Iranian art.

Cacophony AB-ANBAR June 2, 2021 – June 13, 2021 An exhibition featuring the work of four contemporary and modern artists from their gallery programme; Sonia Balassanian, Majid Fathizadeh, Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam, and Timo Nasseri. Founded in 2014, AB-ANBAR is one of the leading independent galleries in Tehran.

Published in Artlyst

As a new young arts writer, I once went to Eileen Agar’s flat in Kensington. I honestly didn’t know who she was at that time. The flat was quite conventional, except for a few collages on the walls and her famous Bouillabaisse hat – constructed of cork and decorated with a large orange plastic flower, a blue plastic star, assorted shells, glass beads and starfish – sitting on a stand. Sadly, this was before the digital age and I’ve lost what I wrote about her. So, it was with real curiosity that I went along to the Whitechapel to see Angel of Anarchy and realised not only what an interesting artist she was, but how underrated she’s been.

Eileen Agar was one of the most adventurous of her generation.

Surrealism was not kind to women. Despite the creativity of the likes of Dorothea Tanning and Leonora Carrington, the work and even the names of many female surrealists are either lost or unknown. Surrealism was a man’s world despite its ‘high priest’, André Breton writing in 1944 that “it is high time for women’s ideas to prevail over man’s, whose bankruptcy is clear enough in the tumult of today.” Many talented female artists had to battle against their role as muses: Meret Oppenheim standing nude next to a printing press in a Man Ray photograph, the artist Unica Zürn depicted as a tied-up doll by Hans Bellmer. But women were fighting back, beginning to explore their own imaginations and psyches, refusing simply to be repositories for the male gaze and male desire.

Eileen Agar was one of the most adventurous of her generation. Born in Buenos Aires into a privileged family, a rebellious child, she was sent off at the achingly young age of six to board at Heathfield school in England. It was there that her teacher, Lucy Kemp-Welch RA, persuaded her to ‘always have something to do with art’. The rift with her parents grew and she took up a place at the Slade that was, at the time, the acme of traditional, figurative English painting. In 1929 she travelled to Paris, ripe for the conversion to Surrealism, and met André Breton and Paul Éluard, embracing the movement’s sensuality and irrationality, its explorations into the subconscious and the imaginative freedom it gave to explode existing norms.

The show at the Whitechapel opens with a series of stunning works on paper and board in watercolour and pencil, including Self Portrait 1927 and the previously unseen painting of her partner, Joseph Sleeping 1929, that show the influence of her art school education at the Slade. It was in Paris that she learnt the principles of Cubism which, along with Surrealism, were to become the hallmarks not just of modernism but of her future work. These influences can be seen in early works such as Autobiography of an Embryo 1933-4 and Quadriga 1935.

Collage and its sculptural twin, assemblage, were the two techniques that allowed her to collide unconnected images in ways that were witty, beautiful and at times insightfully disturbing. She became a magpie, rummaging in flea markets, and the collector of natural forms – shells, bones, leaves and fossils – that she used alongside cut-outs and drawn elements. “I surround myself”, she said, “with fantastic bric-à-brac in order to trigger my imagination. For it is a certain kind of sensitive chaos that is creative, and not sterile order”.

Fascinated with the natural world, she used this ‘sensitive chaos’ to juxtapose the manmade with the natural world to create provocative collages such as Erotic Landscape 1942. It is hard, now, to see just how radical some of her images would have seemed at the time. Attracted to the coastal rock formations “sculpted by the sea” when she travelled to France, these infiltrated her work in the manner of her contemporary Barbara Hepworth. A Rolleiflex square-format camera became her constant companion. This passion for photography led to some wonderfully intimate photographs of her relaxing on the beach with her surrealist friends, including Roland Penrose and a virile looking Picasso.

In 1936 Agar achieved overnight success when she took part in the first International Surrealist Exhibition in London at New Burlington Gardens, though the war was to interrupt her artistic output. A pacifist, she enlisted for war work in a canteen in Saville Row and as a Fire Watcher but “felt it impossible to concentrate on painting when you could turn to look out of the window and see a Messerschmitt flying low over the treetops.” After the war, she was ‘exhausted’ and visited both Cornwall and the Lake District in an attempt to replenish her artistic imagination. One of her most eccentric and charming works was her Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse. A black and white 1948 Pathé Newsreel shows her wearing it as she strides through Soho, past giggling delivery boys leaning on bicycles and gawping women with tight post-war perms and even tighter lips who can’t quite believe their eyes, all accompanied by a chirpy voiceover in BBC Alvar Lidell tones.

For the rest of her life, Agar went on experimenting, travelling in the ‘50s to Tenerife, a trip that was to become a watershed in her life. Later, she moved to a much larger studio that allowed her to paint on a scale she’d not been able to before and to work in acrylic. Although many of these later works show the characteristic Agar motifs -shells, fossils and silhouetted forms – they’re more deliberate and lack the verve and playfulness of her early work. Prolific until her death, she was a trailblazer with her experiments in Surrealist fashion design, modelling for Issey Miyake at the age of 87.

Surrealism both infantilised and empowered women. Male Surrealists often portrayed the female form as an object of violent erotic imaginings whilst idealising women as beautiful, mysterious muses. Eileen Agar was able to find her own way through this male terrain, relying less on the Freudian themes beloved by other female artists such as Meret Oppenheim and Leonora Carrington but rather on the opportunities that Surrealism gave her for playful and innovative visual juxtapositions. Long overdue, this retrospective at the Whitechapel will rightly secure her reputation, bringing her to a new generation of viewers.

Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy, Whitechapel Gallery until 29 August 2021

Published in Artlyst

It’s been quite a year for statues. Normally no more than street furniture that no one bothers to look at – old white men standing on plinths in all weathers extolling some arcane ‘victory’ of the Empire – statues have, recently, taken centre stage. First Edward Colston was toppled and thrown into the Bristol docks. Now Maggie Hambling’s homage to Mary Wollstonecraft is creating a furore on north London’s Newington Green.

A lumpen statue that is neither thought-provoking nor well-executed

Yesterday her breasts and pudenda were covered with gaffer tape by outraged feminists. Over 90% of London’s memorials celebrate men, so this addition is significant. The Wollstonecraft Society’s stated aims were: ‘to promote the recognition of Mary Wollstonecraft’s contribution to equality, diversity and human rights and promote equality and diversity in education and stimulate aspiration and thoughtful reflection’.

Public sculpture is always a problem. It has to do many things for many people and is generally art commissioned and approved of by committee, rather than the free expression of a single artist’s imagination. In this case, Jude Kelly, the one-time director of the South Bank, and Shami Chakrabati are patrons, among many other well-known supporters from the arts. Unfortunately, there seem to be several briefs going on at once and none of them is really being fulfilled. On a recent Newsnight, Emma Barnett – no art critic – seemed to get a schoolgirl thrill from repeatedly talking about ‘tits’ on prime time TV while, at no point, discussing the work within a serious context of other contemporary artworks or even art history.

Mary Wollstonecraft was born into a family of straitened means. Her violent father made her acutely aware of the vulnerability of women. She would receive only a scanty education when formal education for women was not considered a right, yet would go on to write extensively about education for girls, establishing a boarding school on Newington Green.

Her writing career consisted of translations, reviews and books for children, whilst her travel writing influenced a number of early Romantic writers. But it was A Vindication of the Rights of Women(1792) that was her most crucial work; the first significant feminist tract. During her life, she had two important relationships. The first with the American adventurer and spy Gilbert Imlay, with whom she had a daughter during the French Revolution, and the anarchist and thinker, William Godwin, who fathered her second child who would become Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein and the wife of the poet. Mary Wollstonecraft counted among her friends the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine who came to Newington Green when in London to attend the Unitarian Church. She was, without doubt, a heavyweight in the feminist pantheon.

If nothing else, Maggie Hambling has succeeded in raising the visibility of Wollstonecraft among those who perhaps did not previously know of her existence. Speaking on Woman’s Hour today, she gave an articulate explanation of her work. But art is not a question of persuasive argument or language but of visual, emotional and intellectual impact. It has failed if it has to be justified in words. Language can only expand an artwork. In this case, the work needed to contain a sense of homage to its subject AND be a fresh and innovative artwork. It doesn’t really do either.

Today I went to Newington Green to see it for myself. It was a beautiful autumn day and I really wanted to like it ‘in the flesh’, so to speak, but it was worse than I expected. The problem is, not as many feminists seem to be objecting, that it incorporates nudity but that it is conceptually lazy, piling on cliché on well-worked cliché. A lumpen piece that is neither thought-provoking nor well-executed. If nudity is used, it needs to be the expressive language that carries the narrative weight of its subject. Think of the emotional charge of an edgy Klimt nude that no amount of linguistic explanation can replicate. It’s not the nudity that’s disrespectful to Wollstonecraft but that she’s been commemorated by the second rate.

From a distance, the oddly glitzy silver surface looks like one of those mascots that used to decorate the bonnets of posh cars or a chunk of amalgam recently extracted from a painful tooth. The sense of scale is off balance. The amorphous flow of ‘feminine energy’ leading to the tiny Barbie-doll figure standing on top like a sort of female Jack-in-a-box, crude. The simplified/idealised form with its gym abs and pert breasts carries no expressive resonance or historic charge. It’s not Everywoman, more Everyman’s wet dream. There is no sense of metaphor. No sense of history. Coming across it by chance it would offer up little of its point and purpose.

In his seminal text, Ways of Seeing, the late John Berger deconstructed the way that women were traditionally seen in art, suggesting that they were largely there to satisfy the male gaze. Revolutionary at the time, this insight meant that we could never go back to looking at a nude again without asking who it is for and what it is trying to say? That Maggie Hambling – who is really not a sculptor but a painter – should produce something so old fashioned and so ill-considered is a missed opportunity to put an iconic woman on the map. She might have chosen to make an abstract piece or a book on the lines of one of Anslem Kiefer’s great lead books or a realistic sculpture such as Gillian Wearing’s powerful commemoration of the Suffragette, Millicent Fawcett, in Parliament Square. Many have argued that the piece is being criticised simply because it’s new’ and that that is the fate of all ‘modern’ art. But that’s really not the case. It fails because it’s ill-executed because it doesn’t catch the spirit of Wollstonecraft and doesn’t employ the grammar and language of sculpture with originality, imagination or panache with the result that it looks rather more like something that’s just escaped from an up-market garden centre than a longed-for commemoration of a great historic heroine – and that’s a real pity.

Published in Artlyst

“I am re-writing a Black Queer and Trans visual history of South Africa for the world to know of our existence, resistance and persistence” – Zanele Muholi

Before you get too excited, this exhibition was set to open at Tate Modern 5th November but due to COVID19 restrictions will be postponed until a future date has been decided.

As a white, middle-aged, middle-class, heterosexual woman I am, perhaps, setting myself up to write about the South African artist Zanele Muholi. Yet, when I first encountered their (preferred pronoun) work, I was, without knowing anything of their sexual orientation or political activism, simply bowled over by their powerful, strong and beautiful images. That is how it should be.

Good art speaks beyond its target audience and touches something universal. Muholi’s black and white portraits of women emphasise the richness of their ebony skin highlighted by chalky lips, white lace mantillas and hair-combs, presenting them like great Kaberion goddesses (a site located several miles outside the Greek city of Thebes), where the African features of Hera, Minerva and Aphrodite regularly appeared on ancient Greek skyphos, a large ceramic cup used by ancient Greeks for the consumption of copious quantities of wine. For the Greeks, these faces were considered ‘exotic’. But, unlike the patronising otherness associated with this term within contemporary culture, they saw the exotic in nature as having great power, especially to ward off evil. The depiction of Olympian goddesses as African was a ‘positive’ form of the ‘radicalised other’. A view borne out by the pioneering scholar, Frank Snowden, [1] who claims that racial prejudice didn’t exist in ancient times but evolved only with the advent of slavery in the early modern period. Muholi’s formidable, self-decorated subjects stare out confronting the viewer with their white eyes set in jet black skin. Serpent’ ruffs’, bejewelled hairpieces and large beaded or raffia necklaces are worn like regal accessories. These individuals fill the picture space with all the presence of a Cleopatra or Queen of Sheba, undermining both the dominant male view and the colonial white gaze.

Zanele Muholi uses their photographs to create a Black History of Now. Often much of this everyday reality has gone unseen by the rest of the world. The emphasis on Black LGBTQIA+ culture, not as some fictional past but as lives lived and visible in the here and now, is a challenge to any latent complacency. South Africans (no doubt aided by the history of apartheid) have traditionally seen ‘black queer bodies as threatening, un-sacred and tragic’. Muholi documents these people and their stories to reconfigure ideas of history/normality/acceptability. In so doing, they not only challenge how the mainstream views’ alternative’ sexualities, but how this mirrors how we read and interpret the past, what is made visible and by whom, and what is given agency to be brought centre stage.

Not only a highly gifted photographer but a long time queer activist, Muholi asks in their images how far we are prepared/ able to go to detach Black (and queer) representations from the historic voyeuristic repository of the western gaze. They seem to be creating a new grammar outside the binaries of black/white, heterosexual/homosexual that more accurately depict the experience of individual lives. An emphasis on exteriority gives voice to hidden interiorities.

Not all the subjects are regal. Muholi depicts young women binding their breasts with bandages and having sex, naked bodies lying lovingly entwined on tousled beds and Black queer individuals – both trans men and trans women – taking pride in beauty pageants and photo shoots. A particular influence on Muholi’s work was that of Joan E. Biren, a photographer associated with the second-wave of feminism and gay liberation in the 1970s. Biren’s credo was ‘collaboration, not domination,’ an approach that defines Muholi’s own photographic position. There’s an insistence on ‘participant’ rather than viewing the other as a ‘subject’, of giving voice and agency to the lesbians, gender non-conformists and trans men who appear in these photographs. In this work, Muholi continues the slow repositioning of black women within the art arena championed by artists such as Maud Sulter and Lubaina Himid.

Christian missionaries implanted the belief that homosexuality was un-African. Research has shown that binary notions of gender and sexual relationships were, to some degree, enforced by colonial powers. For Muholi’s participants, seeing themselves portrayed has often been both healing and transformative, bringing lives that may have been lived unwillingly in the shadows into the light. Muholi’s unflinching eye challenges the dominant views that surround not only transphobia and racism but the lives of all those disenfranchised and pushed to the margins. In so doing this remarkable body of nuanced, strong and compassionate work re-writes the visual history of South Africa, as well as challenging how we look at art.

Zanele Muholi
5 November 2020 – 7 March 2021
Tate Modern, London

Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks Harvard University Press.

Published in Artlyst

London Art Fair’s Positive Spin On A Diverse Range Of Work

Being asked to write about an art fair is a bit like being commissioned to write about Waitrose and compare tins of baked beans with sardines or chocolate biscuits. These items have little in common, except they are all food and sold in the same venue. Pretty much the same can be said of the modern art fair if you substitute art for food. The variety is enormous from the good, the bad, to the merely ugly. Occasionally, if you’re lucky, you may come across something outstanding.

The 2020 London Art Fair Museum Partner is the Southampton City Art Gallery

For many years the London Art Fair, once the big hitter in town, seemed to suffer an identity crisis after the arrival of that parvenue Frieze. But over the last few years under the direction of Sarah Monk it has settled into a valuable role promoting Modern British Art, whilst also cultivating an interesting Art Project space on the upper floor – now in its 16th year and featuring 18 galleries from 5 countries – where younger artists and innovative dealers can exhibit.

There’s a diverse range of work this year. At the Eagle Gallery/EMH Arts, the painter on show is not young. Natalie Dower is in her 80s, but her work is worth looking at because it’s fresh and intelligent, embracing the vocabulary of Thirties Vorticism, along with colour theory and geometry. These have been hung in conversation with a range of younger artists that includes an abstract paperwork by Andrew Bick. At the other end of the visual spectrum, Standpoint is showing sculptures by Anna Reading. At once both familiar and odd, they sit somewhere between architecture and biomorphic forms. While in the Arts Project Screening Room the exhibition, Playtime, topically asks how we assess and commodify contemporary ideas of leisure.

This year Alister Hicks has guest-curated Dialogues, which pairs international contemporary galleries in conversation around the theme Talk! Talk! Talk! that focuses on the battle between text and image. Domobaal has included Christopher Hanlon. an interesting painter trained at the Royal College, who paints everyday objects, including stones and aspidistra. These have an uncanny feel. Rooted in the tradition of painting, they engage the viewer in a conversation that subverts the very genre in which they have been fabricated. In contrast, on Division of Labour’s stand, Rosie McGinn’s inflated figures bop up and down like demented, hipsters, challenging you to either love or hate them. The second edition of Platform, Threading Forms curated by Candida Steven, demonstrates the variety of fine art textiles with work that includes the hand-stitched and the machine-made, tapestry, deconstructed fabrics and collage. While Photo50, inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, focuses on three main issues: how women occupy space, the psychological effects of space, and how time affects space.

The 2020 London Art Fair Museum Partner is the Southampton City Art Gallery. Anyone interested in Modern British art is in for a treat. The works selected reveal the depth and variety of the collection, which has been ‘designated’ by the Arts Council of England as having ‘pre-eminent national significance’. It includes paintings from the Camden Town Group and St. Ives, through to works by Turner prize nominees and winners. Some of the gems on show here are Mark Gertler’s poignant The Rabbi and His Grandchild, 1913, C. W. Nevinson’s tautly modernist Loading Timber Southampton Docks 1917, and a gloriously ebullient Roger Hilton, Figure 61. In the commercial galleries, there are still a number of fine Modern British paintings for sale such as Ivon Hitchens’ Yellow Autumn from a Terrace 1948 at Osborne Samuel.

Other works that caught my eye as I wandered through the many booths were the fine seascapes by Irish artist Donald Teskey at Art First, and the exquisitely detailed pigment prints of trees by Santeri Tuori at Purdy Hicks. While at Giles-Baker Smith there were some rather beautiful tondos of imagined landscapes and cloudy moonlit nights, inspired by photography and English Romanticism, by Gill Rocca.

This is an art fair where, if you are a novice collector, you can still find things worth buying for under a thousand pounds. While for those of you feeling flush there are some very good examples of British Modernism to be had for your walls.

Published in Artlyst

In 1998 the first sales of the Dora Maar collection were put on sale in Paris. They revealed a life dedicated to photography, painting and poetry, executed in the city’s avant-garde milieu of the 1930s.

Like many female artists, she is best known for her biography as helpmeet to a more famous male artist

Maar’s friends included the poet Paul Eluard and the painter Balthus. At the time, the international art market was buzzing with excitement about the Picassos up for auction that season. In comparison, Maar’s work met with relative indifference. For most, her chief claim to fame was – with her dramatic dark hair and smouldering eyes – as a surrealist icon and the ‘muse’ to Picasso’s eternally lachrymose ‘weeping woman’. Like many female artists, she is best known for her biography as helpmeet to a more famous male artist and for her psychological and emotional difficulties. As a result, her artistic output has been overshadowed by Picasso’s giant oeuvre and personality.

This autumn Tate Modern redresses this art-historical redaction with the first UK retrospective of Maar’s surreal photographs, provocative photomontages, and paintings. Her incisive eye spanned six-decades of commercial commissions, social documentary and street photography, moving from Picasso influenced paintings through to abstraction.

Born Henriette Théodora Markovitch in 1907, she preferred to be called Dora. – Her father was an architect and her mother ran a fashion boutique. Raised between Argentina and Paris she had a cosmopolitan childhood, attending one of Paris’s most progressive art schools. In her 20s she turned to commercial photography, as it gave greater security than painting, sharing a darkroom with the photographer Brassai. Young and ambitious, her first photographic commission in 1931 was for a book by the art historian Germain Bazin, followed by publications in a range of magazines from the literary to the commercial. In 1932 she set up a studio with the respected set designer Pierre Kéfer, under the name Kéfer-Dora Maar.

Female photographers were rare between the wars. Maar was described as a ‘brunette huntress of images’. Such language classified women photographers as explorers traversing the boundaries of a society where their autonomy was still largely restricted. Beginning to compete for jobs in fashion, traditionally the domain of men, they were also breaking taboos to work in nude photography and erotica. When Maar entered the workplace, photography was replacing hand drawings in advertisements to promote shampoo and cosmetics such as Ambre Solaire, used for the newly fashionable pastime of sunbathing,

In these interwar years, the idea of the liberated modern women was promoted by advertisers and magazine editors. Maar liked to subvert the idea of a woman’s conventional role by slipping in imagery that was considered daringly modern, such as women wearing trousers or smoking. In two photographs taken for L’Art vivant, she uses photomontage and the insertion of a female model to destabilise the scale of the object advertised – a car – that most modern women could neither afford to own nor were able to drive. Her pictures were created by combining layered negatives to produce a single image that, according to the critic, Rosalind Krauss, ‘ensures that a photograph will be seen as surrealist…and always constructed’. Shots, such as those of Jane Loris, (Prévert) in a bathing suit doing callisthenics, or the erotic experimentations with the model Assia Granatouroff – the model who exemplified the 1930s nude – highlighted the growing interest in health and fitness that had been gaining popularity since the First World War.

The 1930s in Europe saw the worst economic depression in modern times. It was in this climate that photographers used their new art form to document the social deprivation they were witnessing. Some of Maar’s most affecting images were taken in Barcelona and London. Committed to left-wing politics, she not only showed compassion for a lot of those she photographed but had a keen eye for irony. This can be seen in her image, a city businessman down on his luck and looking for work while selling matches. Dressed fastidiously in cravat and pince-nez, holding a bowler hat, he might be off to his Mayfair club.

It was in the winter of 1935-6 that Dora Maar met Pablo Picasso who was emerging from the breakdown of his relationship with Marie-Thérèse Walter, with whom he had a child. He and Maar collaborated together in the darkroom, she teaching him specialised photographic techniques that enabled him to explore the possibilities of cliché verre, (painting combined with photography), while he encouraged her to paint. Her painting, The Conversation 1937, in brown and rust tones, addresses her relationship with Picasso’s former lover. The two women sit at a table. The blonde Marie-Thérèse, with whom Picasso remained close, facing the viewer, the brunette Dora Maar her back turned to them.

After learning of the attack on Guernica, Picasso began making preparatory sketches for his most famous painting, which Maar documented as a commission for Cahiers d’art. In contrast to her photography, her painting is much less known. In the dark war years, during which her father disappeared to Argentina, her mother died and her relationship with Picasso began to break down, she returned to painting, creating melancholy landscapes and still lives of jugs and pears, painted in grey and brown tones that mirrored the dreariness of her solitary life under the Occupation.

In 1945 Maar began to divide her time between Paris and a new home in the South of France. This saw a period of looser mark making and gestural impressions of nature made in ink, oil and watercolour. Though photography still interested her, the social documentation of the world outside her studio did not. She became more involved in seeing what she could create in the darkroom by laying household objects on photo-sensitive paper or tracing light across the surface. These works were only revealed after her death. In 1946, on the verge of making her name, she had stopped exhibiting. The psychic distress following her breakup with Picasso led to a decade long silence when she did not show her work, though she did continue to create in the privacy of her studio.

And how should we rate her now? While her painting is always in danger of being compared with the great talent of her lover Picasso, it is her witty, stylish and compassionate photographs that caught the zeitgeist of the times in which she lived, that are likely to be her true legacy.

Top Photo Dora Maar (detail) “The years lie in wait for you” (c. 1935). (Portrait of Nusch Eluard). Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper

Published in Artlyst

If you are planning an imminent trip to the Netherlands, there are two must-see exhibitions on at the moment. Pieter de Hooch in Delft: From the Shadow of Vermeer at the Museum Prinsenhof, Delft and Rembrandt-Velázquez: Dutch & Spanish Masters at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Known as the Golden Age of painting, the 17th century was artistically an enormously fruitful time

By 1650 the bustling, prosperous city of Delft had emerged as one of the country’s leading artistic centres. Among its residents were painters such as Johannes Vermeer, Carel Fabritius and Hendrick van Vliet. It was then that Pieter de Hooch, the son of a bricklayer from Rotterdam, moved to the city of his mother’s birth to begin a radically new tradition of painting. At the start of his career, he painted primarily soldiers. Guardroom scenes of drinking and card games in a muted palette, often with a serving girl in attendance. In these genre works, he paid little attention to defining the surrounding space and architectural elements – something that would later become his hallmark. Domestic interiors were often crudely depicted in brown and grey brush strokes, in contrast to the bright colours and details of the figures. In A Seated Soldier with a Standing Serving Woman, for example, the bright red of the woman’s dress and the reflections on the metal of the soldier’s cuirass, stand out against the indistinct dark background, demonstrating De Hooch’s growing skill of capturing the effects of light.

However, it was after 1655 that he began to portray the domestic life behind the facades of Delft houses. This was an innovation. He was 29 years old and producing stunning works of courtyards and interiors full of warmth and saturated light. What is so pioneering about these paintings is not, simply, the exact rendering of detail – the brick walls and tiled floors painted with separate brushstrokes as if to make his bricklayer father proud or the experimental perspectives and radiant light beaming into these spare, tranquil domestic settings through open doors – but the prominence of the feminine. Over and over again, De Hooch produces scenes of great tenderness where women and children are the central protagonists. A woman in a white bonnet holds the hand of a small girl. Their gaze is both sensitive and mutual — one of caring familiarity. A bucket and broom caste on the brick floor of the courtyard suggests ongoing domestic chores. The woman may have been a maid. In the left-hand of the painting is another woman – possibly the lady of the house – with her back to the viewer. She is standing in an archway that leads through to another courtyard flooded with light. On loan from the National Gallery of London, this painting is one of six dated 1658 and is, rightly, among De Hooch’s most famous works.

Along with The Mother, that depicts a woman unlacing her red bustier to feed an infant lying in a crib on the floor beside her, and A Mother Delousing her Child’s Hair, known as ‘A Mother’s Duty’, it shows an astonishing empathy with the lives of women. De Hooch presents 17th century Delft as a place where one would have liked to live. Life, here, is comfortable, bourgeois, unhurried and orderly. Dogs wander in an out. Men and women chat companionably. In A Mother’s Duty, the fur of the small mutt sitting on the brick floor staring out into the garden is illuminated by the light from the open door. He is both a doggy dog and a symbol of fidelity. It is, perhaps, not too far-fetched to say that in these mother and children scenes De Hooch presents a secular vision of Madonna and Child. Later, he was to move to Amsterdam and paint a more affluent clientele, in more opulent interiors. However, it is the paintings executed in Delft that created his reputation. The aim of this one-off exhibition is to bring him out from beneath the shadow of the more famous Vermeer, to restore his affectionate, beautifully observed paintings of light and perspective to their rightful place within the canon of 17th-century Dutch art.
Rembrandt Self Portrait

Over in Amsterdam, there is a special collaboration between the Rijksmuseum and the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid to mark the Year of Rembrandt, 2019 and the 200th anniversary of the Prado. The exhibition presents an outstanding selection of paintings by 17th century Dutch and Spanish masters including Rembrandt, Velázquez, Murillo, Hals, Zubarán and Vermeer. Known as the Golden Age of painting, the 17th century was artistically an enormously fruitful time for both the Netherlands and Spain. Although there was no direct contact between south and north, it is fascinating to see the stylistic and intellectual synchronicity between the different artists. Paintings of these masters have been displayed in pairs. This extenuates both similarities and divergences. Themes range through religion and faith, wealth and love, to the use of light and shadow.

Nothing tells us more about the personalities and differences of Rembrandt and Velázquez than their self-portraits. Velázquez with his handsome head of dark hair, waxed mustache and courtly white ruff sits beside Rembrandt with his beefy pug nose, in a black velvet beret and jerkin. Though they inhabited very different social milieus, their bravura artistic skill, along with their understanding of human nature, renders them supreme among artists of their time. Though, for my money, it will always be Rembrandt, with his existential gaze, which turns the emotional screws the tightest to bring tears to the eyes.

Catholic Spain and the Protestant north are exemplified by Zubarán’s symbol of Christ’s suffering, the ‘Mystic Lamb’, which is shown alongside a spare and sparsely decorated Protestant Church by Sendredam. Here iconoclasm is banished as the Word of God resounds from the pulpit. One highly imaginative paring is that of Zubarán’s St. Serapion, 1628 set beside the Threatened Swan 1650 by Jan Asselijn. The former shows the saint, his arms raised and bound in flowing white sleeves, sacrificing himself for his faith while the fluttering white wings of the swan become a symbol for Johan de Witt, who was assassinated in 1672 for his political beliefs.
Velázquez

Two outdoor scenes by Velázquez and Vermeer, View of the Gardens of the Villa Medici in Rome circa 1650 and Vermeer’s View of Houses of Delft circa 1658, illustrate their interest in the use of horizontal and vertical effects within the picture plane. However, if this was a competition, the Vermeer wins hand down for atmosphere and intimacy. Meditation and religious reveries are explored in a pairing of Murillo and Rembrandt. While Murillo shows Christ before his crucifixion as a Man of Sorrows, Rembrandt paints his own son Titus as a Franciscan monk bringing secular love into the work.

During this period Spain and the Netherlands were very different, though yoked together by war for much of these artists lives. Spain was a long-established Catholic world power, while the Netherlands was a nascent small Protestant republic, with an emerging middle-class. Nevertheless, for both these countries, the 17th century proved to be a Golden Age for art.

Top Photo: King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands and King Felipe VI of Spain officially opened the Rembrandt-Velázquez exhibition. Photo courtesy Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Inset photos 2-4 by Sue Hubbard ©

Rembrandt-Velázquez: Dutch & Spanish Masters 11 October 2019 – 19 January 2020 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam – Pieter de Hooch: From the Shadow of Vermeer Museum Prinsenhof, Delft October 11, 2019 through February 16, 2020

Published in Artlyst

On my way to Tate Modern in the rain, last night, I smiled, thinking just how much Susan Hiller would have liked that there was to be an evening there in her honour. Susan could be famously grumpy and the last time we had lunch together she spent much of it complaining that the Tate didn’t support her or women artists. She was, justifiably, cross, too, that she’d never been made an RA’ ‘Some of my students have, but I don’t fit. I’m not part of the establishment.’ But this grumpy aspect was but a small part of her complex, generous personality. Erudite, eclectic, well-read and curious she was one of the most original minds I’ve had the privilege of knowing.

Her brilliance was both critical and aesthetic

I first met her in 1999 when I and the artist/critic Simon Morley invited her to be part of an ambitious touring show, Chora, which had the paradoxical goal of representing the unrepresentable and naming the unnameable, grounded in the Platonic concept of the chora as explored by Julia Kristeva. This notion sought to name a ‘receptacle of becoming’ or a ‘placeless place’ that was central to chart – using psychoanalytic methodology – a level of consciousness that lay beyond the ‘prison-house of language’.

Susan Hiller & Robin Klassnik, ‘Running on Empty’, 2017. Stills from single channel video on monitor with sound. Courtesy of the estate of Susan Hiller and Matt’s Gallery, London

Susan was immediately interested in the idea and offered us Study for Alphabets I, 1989. C-Type photograph on Agfa lustre. These luminous ‘graphisms’ (as Barthes called such ‘words’ in his writing on Cy Twombly) looked like delicate Chinese ideograms. Automatism was, for Hiller, a means of escaping the hierarchies of a male language system into a more ‘feminine’ ‘fruitful incoherence’. She was, to her core, a feminist and champion of the female voice. Language, gender and desire were the terrain of her work. Going where few artists of her generation and even fewer of the current generation dared go, she stretched boundaries between disciplines, ideas and concepts. The marginalised, the ephemeral and the everyday, were represented in ways that were strange, surprising and uncanny.

Her brilliance was both critical and aesthetic. An American by birth she studied at Smith College and did graduate work in anthropology. Having completed her PhD, she became disillusioned by academia and, during a lecture on African art, according to her friend the writer Lucy Lippard, began taking notes in pictures rather than words, an experience she called ‘an exquisite sensation’. Thus, began her exploration of the dialectics of inside and outside, her pursuit of both ‘analysis and ecstasy’ sought in the space between the ‘rational’ and ‘irrational.’ Inhabiting the ground between the spiritual and the mundane, she was continuously searching for a new language outside that of the dominant culture.

Dream and psychoanalytic investigations were of huge importance. From her Dream Mapping (1974) to her stunningly original installation From the Freud Museum 1992-94, (commissioned by the Freud Museum and later shown at the Tate). The Sisters of Menon, originally shown in 1973, was a received ‘dictation’ that arrived in a dream. Menon being an anagram for both ‘no men’ and ‘nomen’ or ‘name’.

Susan’s cultural interests were enormous, as was the range of materials with which she chose to make her work from photographs, films, videos, books and ashes. She played with the dynamics of a Punch and Judy show, investigated science fiction and UFOs. In Belshazzar’s Feast, the 1983 video installation acquired by the Tate, she explored through her tongues of flame – that in themselves resemble a form of automatic writing – the rehabilitation of a dormant collective imagination, whilst managing to evoke images of home and hearth and the holocaust.

Susan Hiller: Ghost / TV
25 September – 27 October
Matt’s Gallery London

Published in Artlyst

My favourite thing is to go where I’ve never been’ wrote the photographer Diane Arbus, the poor little rich Jewish girl who walked on the wild side. Though the journeys she took were not just physical adventures along the boardwalks of Coney Island or to gender-bending night clubs but those in which she explored the rocky terrain of self-definition. From the start of her career she saw the street as a place full of secrets and reflected her subjects – whether children, the rich or poor, it didn’t matter – as isolated and adrift, remote from society and the world around them, caught up in their own reveries and physical space.  Her caste of characters appear like metaphors for themselves; each striving to make him or herself the starring role in their own private psychodrama.

Arbus was one of the first to give equal weight and value to all her subjects

Born Diane Nemerov to a Jewish couple who lived in New York City and owned Russek’s, a famous Fifth Avenue department store, she was insulated during the 1930s Depression by their wealth. Raised by maids and governesses, with a mother who suffered from depression, while her father was mostly absent with work, her early years coloured her emotional landscape. At the age of 18, in 1941, she received her first camera from her husband, Allan Arbus, and started making photographs, which she continued to do sporadically for well over a decade. During the early years the couple were engaged in a moderately successful career in fashion photography—she as the art director/stylist, he as the photographer/technician—using the credit line “Diane & Allan Arbus.” In 1956, she left the business partnership and committed herself full-time to her own work.

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.”

For much of her working life she kept notebooks in which she recorded ideas and incidents gleaned from books and newspapers, tabloids and the telephone directory, incidentals that caught her imagination and could be used as potential subjects: morgue; freak at home; jewel box revue; roller derby women; dressing rm; women’s prison; weird women; paddy wagon; meat slaughterhouse; tattoo parlor; taxi dance hall-before hrs; lonelyhearts club; Happiness Exch.; lady wrestling; beggars-blind; place-waterfr. hotel; ladies room-coney-subway; daughters of Jacob dying. crime; despair; sin; madness; death; fame; wealth; innocence.

Alongside these jottings were extracted from a wide range of ancient and modern sources: Plato, Zen literature, Bram Stoker, Jean Cocteau (on Pablo Picasso), Fyodor Dostoyevsky, as well as Allen Ginsberg.

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’.

Today we’re used to public debates around gender, difference, race and sexual identity, used to the play between surface and depth, artifice and reality but Arbus was one of the first to give equal weight and value to all her subjects whether transsexuals, elderly matrons dressed in white furs, twins or Jewish giants. As early as the age of 16 she wrote that she had glimpsed ‘the divineness in ordinary things’. But, in truth, it is not ‘divineness’ that comes across but a transgressive solidarity with those that she saw as marginalised and reflected something of her own damaged psyche.

And her legacy? Arbus took us through keyholes to show the soft, vulnerable underbelly of other lives. She exposes the abject and the strange, the dull and the sad and, in so doing, finds fleeting moments of something akin to beauty.

Published in Artlyst

With his Bob Dylan mop of curls and pug nose, he looks every inch the rebellious teenager that he was. The second youngest of ten children, three of whom died in infancy, Rembrandt was the son of a Protestant miller and a Catholic mother. Despite being sent to the Latin School in Leiden during his early years, he was soon chomping at the bit against formal education and was, at the age of 15 apprenticed, in 1621, to Van Swanenburg from whom he received intensive artistic training. Rembrandt would go on to become an innovator and a provocateur who’d turn the Dutch Golden Age of art upside down.

With a few scribbles and scrawls, he caught the tiny dramas of everyday life

History painting was considered the highest form of art. The French theorist, André Félibien, claimed that the human form occupied the pinnacle of artistic endeavour because the painter reproduced ‘the most perfect work of God on earth and thus is God’s follower’. To capture the ‘passions of the soul’ was a painter’s greatest achievement. To this end, self-portraits were practised in front of mirrors. With his eighty or so works – drawings, etchings and paintings – Rembrandt held the title of the artist with the most self-portraits well into the 19th century.

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.

Walking into the first room of this exhibition, it’s easy to see why Rembrandt holds such appeal across the centuries. His acute observation is evident in the tiny etchings that depict him dressed in a fury cap holding down his rebellious curls, bending forward, shouting, frowning, and with a ‘broad nose’. By turns, he looks startled, wide-eyed and surprised. He seems to have possessed a substantial collection of headgear – caps, berets and even oriental headdresses – that he variously used as props. But these are no social portraits. Here is an artist who shows us what it means to be an individual. What it is that constitutes the idea of ‘self’. A self that was, during the Renaissance, being newly defined as uniquely human rather than the result of divine creation. And he made detailed drawings of animals. A lion, and a pig, possibly seen in an Amsterdam market, also show their unique individuality as sentient beings.

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.

Poem by Sue HubbardFrom the beginning of his career, Rembrandt took on pupils for a fee. An essential part of their training was drawing lessons. Students drew from plaster casts and live models. Rembrandt often participated in these sessions and many of the drawings and etchings on show here originated this way and give a unique glimpse into the daily practices of his workshop.

The big draw of the Rijksmuseum is, of course, the Night Watch. Painted in 1642 it portrays, in almost cinemascope detail, Amsterdam’s ‘militiamen’, the city’s civic guard, which was commissioned for their guild headquarters, the Kloveniersdoelen. That he depicts the crowd in action was exceptional. Until then the subjects of group portraits were either shown standing or stiffly sitting side by side. Again, we see that Rembrandt is the master of light and shadow, which he uses to emphasise the captain’s hand gesture. Light also floods onto the small girl in a white dress standing, with a chicken hanging from her belt, in the central part of the painting. This was added, no doubt, as was the drummer on the right and the running boy on the left to convey immediacy, tension and drama.

To look at Rembrandt now, nearly 400 years after his death, is to be reminded of his keen observations, his vitality and realism. With a few scribbles and scrawls, he caught the tiny dramas of everyday life: a street woman making pancakes, a mother lifting the tunic of her small child so that he can pee in the canal. Technically astonishing in the way he conveys lace and cloth or portrays a landscape, his greatness lies not simply in these bravura skills but in the compassion, humour and truth that he shines on our frailties and vulnerabilities that show us, with deep tenderness, what it is to be human.

Published in Artlyst

Jock McFadyen is late for our meeting in the Academicians Room at the RA. Very late. He was stuck on a bus. I’ve known him for more than 20 years and figure that if we don’t have time to talk now we can always meet up in his home in Bethnal Green where, for ages, a group of us met to watch films on a Friday night.

We’re here to discuss his selection as the overall coordinator of the 251st  RA Summer Exhibition. It’s an honour. A mark of having arrived in the hierarchy of the art world. But Jock is a maverick. Charming, mercurial, opinionated, witty, well read and a highly accomplished, original painter. A true Glaswegian, he has a wild streak. The RA may be in for a surprise. In Jock’s company sometimes you just have to hang in there for the ride.

“So, what’s going to be your theme”?

“Well, I want to show art that describes the world”. He mentions our mutual friend Trevor Sutton. “He paints very beautiful abstract paintings but they’re based on landscapes in Ireland. That’s what I mean. They’re engaged but absolutely concerned with paint. I hope to include John Davies’ piece that was shown at the Turner Contemporary and work by Kenny Hunter. I can’t name all the artists yet as they haven’t confirmed. But I’m interested in texture and form. People think I’m a figurative artist but I see myself as an abstract painter, someone concerned first and foremost with paint.”
Jock McFadyen RA with Sue Hubbard January 2019

Jock McFadyen RA with Sue Hubbard January 2019

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.”

I ask about the popular appeal of the Summer Exhibition. “Well,” he says controversially, “I don’t believe in art that reaches out, that talks down or that it’s the artist’s job to make art accessible. I think it’s our job to do what we do and seduce viewers into being interested. Back in Turner’s day it was all professional artists. It’s a difficult concept isn’t it? I don’t like amateur art. Being an artist is a job. You don’t have amateur architects or brain surgeons. Art is, as I think Clement Greenberg suggested, essentially a metropolitan activity. You need to be connected to the debates and the arguments if you are serious.”

“But”, I ask, “what about exceptions such as Alfred Wallis?”  “Well Wallis is wonderful. I suppose that’s what we are hoping for. The exceptions.”

Born in Paisely in 1950. His trajectory to Royal Academician was not a straight path. He was a bad boy, fearless and contrary. His grandfather, who was a boat builder, drew cartoons in his spare time. His father was a draughtsman in the Clyde shipyards and taught him to draw”. Both a Glaswegian edge and a visual curiousity are intrinsic to who he is both as a man and an artist.

He was rebellious at school. In those days art schools offered pre-foundation courses which you could start when you were 16. “Listen, if you say to a teenager – would you rather go to school in uniform or to art school with long hair, Cuban heels and motorbikes? – well it’s not much of a contest is it?”

When he was 15 his father got a job with the Michelin tyre factory in Stoke-on-Trent. Art school in Newcastle-under-Lyme was followed by a motor cycle accident. When he got better the course had changed to typography and graphic design. He wasn’t interested. “I wanted to make life drawings. So I made an effigy of the principal and set it on fire and was thrown out. I had a black mark on my file for ages that counted against me when I tried to apply for other courses. And my Dad went ballistic. He thought it was rubbish that I was doing art anyway: ‘All you do is sit around painting women’s tits.’ ‘All you do is make tyres, I replied.’” He also managed to fit in a youthful marriage, have a son and work as a dustman, before finally making it to Chelsea Art School where he rubbed shoulders with the likes of Anish Kapoor, Helen Chadwick, Shirazeh Houshiary and Christopher Le Brun.

But even being at Chelsea was not straight forward. He was living in a north London squat with his first wife. “It was really vile. Counterculture turned bad – Hells Angels, junkies, people riding motorcycles in an out. And at art school then, to be a painter meant you had to be an abstract painter. Figurative painting was an embarrassment.” But in 1978, after he’d finished, things started to go well. He had his first show – jointly with Peter Smith – at the Acme Gallery, then the following year got a dealer, Blond Fine Art.

It was when he had his solo show in 1991 at the Imperial War Museum, in response to the collapse of that Berlin wall, that I first met him. Already known for his portraits of the sad, the mad and the bad of East London he was the unanimous choice of the Artistic Records Committee to record that historic moment. The gritty images of the crippled accordion player, the woman in the puppet booth, the apparently three-legged prostitute in Savignyplatz took my breath away with their hard-hitting poignancy. Though I remember him saying with a typical forthrightness that he wasn’t interested in “wanky, sentimental, political-prisoner kind of art.” And he was, I realised, a wonderfully original sculptor. The rag-bag of human destitution that made up his cast of characters in Procession were put together from his old clothes and those found in East End markets, which he’d covered in wax and plaster. Slightly smaller than life-size this trail of somnambulant dwarfs might have escaped straight from Brecht’s Mother Courage.

Jock McFadyen  Kill Matthew Barney 2007-2008

He’s also a strong landscape painter – if landscapes you can call them. There is nothing of the pastural tradition about them. He paints what’s around him and has become known as a painter of the East End. But he dislikes being labelled a social commentator – he’s too much of a contrarian for that. Rather, like his friend the writer Ian Sinclair, he’s a chronicler of the down-and-out, the skinhead, as well as the Hawksmoor church and stray urban dog. He also paints remote Scottish islands, motorways and bits of road near his house in northern France. What he chooses is never the picturesque but rather the incidental, the marginal, the thing that until he paints it most people won’t even have noticed. In 2010 he started his After Sickert series: small erotic scenes charged with some of the shock of Sickert’s original paintings. He also designed sets and costumes for Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s last ballet The Judas Tree at The Royal Opera House.

It’s obvious that he’s enjoying his well-earned success but he’s critical of the commercialisation of the art world. Not that he is a purist. He needs to sell but, as he says, for his generation of art students what counted was critical rigour not ‘are we going to sell to Saatchi?’ I suggest that this commercialisation of art is dangerous, that it skews what is made. That it can stifle originality. He agrees there’s a hazard that art becomes of ‘no consequence’, that there’s a move to make it all too crowd-pleasing and curator-friendly. He expresses worries about the singularity of the art market and how it pushes artists to make signature works that sell.

Jock McFadyen is an artist who is not easy to pigeon hole. His work is eclectic, singular and raw. It reflects both the edginess of ‘real’ life and his intellectual concerns about the possibilities and fluidity of paint. He’s a rebel yet a conservative. A detail highlighted by the fact that he’s shown work in his East End Acme studio and at Wapping Project, as well as The National Gallery, Agnews and the Fine Art Society. He is that rare thing in the modern art world – an original. His vision is unique, idiosyncratic and muscular and reveals a detached humanity that throws light on the liminal and marginal aspects of the world we inhabit, which so many of us miss. As his friend Ian Sinclair says: ”the world is always static in the sense that you’re a mass observer and you can’t afford to care whether people are busy or not. You are a witness.”

This year’s Summer Exhibition is lucky to have Jock McFadyen to act as singular and fearless witness. It promises to be an interesting show.

A monograph on Jock McFadyen is due from the RA in May 2019.

Published in Artlyst

Yesterday the art world not only lost one of its finest and most loved abstract painters, but I lost a great friend. There will be plenty of well-deserved plaudits and obituaries for Gillian Ayres, who died yesterday at the age of 88, after a bout of illness. But I want to add something more personal.

I first met her in 1984 when, as a young arts journalist, I was sent to interview her in her Three Bears cottage in a remote glade of a Cornish valley. It was a long way to go, and I was invited to stay. Warm and chaotic, the place was full of animals, cigarette smoke and, I believe, followed the Quentin Crisp approach to housekeeping, which was that after four years the dust never got any worse. I found it amazing that Gillian was able to produce such an array of stunning, jewel-like canvases from her small studio. We hit it off right away. Feisty, opinionated, fiercely intelligent and well read, we discussed everything from art, to Shakespeare and religion, which she hated. And she cooked delicious meals.

Independent and feisty Gillian was, actually, very shy and hated to talk in any public capacity about her work

Born in 1930, she grew up in Barnes, then still semi-rural with its wooded common and market gardens where, many years later I, myself, was to live. It was a comfortable middle-class existence. She attended St. Paul’s Girls school where her best friend was the future politician Shirley Williams. She once sent me a photograph of them sitting on a haystack. With her long golden locks, she was a stunning teenage. But it was on a day in 1943, she told me, as she was going up to the school art room, that she discovered some illustrated monographs on van Gogh, Gauguin and Monet. Already well versed in poetry and music, she had excelled at drawing and painting since she’d been a small child, but this was the moment she knew she wanted to be an artist.

Gillian Ayres ‘Untitled’ Oil on Canvas – Private Collection – Photo: Courtesy Sue Hubbard

At St. Paul’s a social conscience was encouraged. Many of her teachers had been suffragettes. Just before D-Day, when she was 14, the brother of a friend who’d been serving in the army arrived ‘out of the desert’ and took them both for a treat to a Knightsbridge hotel. Previously Head Boy at Winchester, he was, as Gillian put it with characteristic understatement, ‘bumped off’. She remembered then, in the midst of war, thinking that art was all that we human beings leave behind.

Fiercely independent she determined, in 1946, to leave school early and go to art school, despite her head mistress’s portentous warning to her mother about the sort of men her daughter would meet there. Too young at 16 for the Slade, she gained a place at Camberwell—though her kindly parents would have preferred her to marry a respectable doctor. Having no grant and, though she received 30 shillings a week from her family, her need of money to fund her voracious smoking habit led her to model (nude) for the Camera Club. She never told her parents. She was, she said, pretty bloody-minded when young.

It was at Camberwell that she rejected what she referred to as the prevailing Euston Road ‘measuring thing’ and found her tutor, William Coldstream, dictatorial— ‘it was dot and dash and measure.’ So she began to attend Victor Pasmore’s Saturday morning classes where he talked of ‘feelings’ and embraced abstraction. In 1950, two months before her finals she walked out of Camberwell— ‘What should one have taken it for and for whom?’—and caught a train to Penzance where she spent the summer working as a chambermaid. Back in London she turned down an allowance from her father and an offer to go to Paris and did a series of uninspiring jobs. An opportunity to work at the AIA gallery gave her the chance to meet some of the most original artists of her day. It was there that she began to find her own creative vision.

It’s hard, now, in these artistically eclectic times, when anything goes, to understand just how hostile then the general public was to abstract art and how dominated art schools were by an academic approach. As Herbert Read said of abstraction, it was ‘met with almost universal resistance in England’. But the 1956 Tate exhibition Modern Art of Abstract Expressionism was a creative watershed. Gillian revelled in the freedom and energy of the Pollocks, the de Koonings and Klines and determined that from then on, she’d leave the traces of her painterly actions on the canvas and allow the paint to speak for itself. After this, she began to paint on the floor. It was at her last show at Alan Cristea, which even in her 80s, was a triumph of originality and invention, that she said to me: ‘I love obscurity in modern art. I don’t want a story. There are no rules about anything. I just go on doing what I do. I want to do nothing else.’

Gillian Ayres  ‘Untitled’ – Private Collection – Photo: Courtesy Sue Hubbard

I have so many Gillian stories. There’s the time I was staying at Tall Trees, and one of her dear (and I have to say very smelly dogs) died in the night from kidney failure. In the morning I came downstairs to find it lying stiff on its back in the wheelbarrow covered by the beautiful Persian rug it had peed on during the night before – and a very distraught Gillian. I remember, too, the wonderful week I spent at the British School of Rome as her guest and companion, much of it also in the company of her son Sam Mundy. We looked at art, we ate wonderful meals, saw friends in a remote farmhouse in the hills. She was always enormously generous, and I left Rome carrying a painting fresh from the studio which, in those days before security checks, I carried onto the plane still wet. When I got it home, I realised I’d pressed my thumb into a layer of thick turquoise paint. I rang Gillian appalled. Oh, don’t worry, she said, in that unpretentious way of hers, just squash it over. I did, and in so doing, went down to the next layer of pink paint. Of course, these many years later it has dried. My thumbprint now a part of its history. Then there was the time when my own mother died, and I received, through the post, two beautiful artist prints rolled up in a tube. I was overwhelmed. When I phoned to thank her, we joked that she could now be my surrogate mother.

Gillian worked enormously hard. She more or less supported her two sons when they were growing up through teaching at St. Martins, where she was appointed Head of Painting in 1978, the first woman in this country to hold such a post, and teaching at Winchester. Always one to live by her own rules, with no regular income, she ended up living in a rambling 18th rectory in Wales in a complicated ménage a trois with her husband Henry Mundy and lover, the Welsh painter, Gareth Williams.

In 2004 she rang me to say that there’d been a fire at the Momart warehouse and that much of her middle period work, along with that by painters such as Patrick Heron and Barry Flanigan, had gone up in flames. Not only was this a huge financial loss but it left a big hole in the narrative of her life’s work. But with characteristic fortitude Gillian made very little of it. She was never one for self-pity.

Independent and feisty she was, actually, very shy and hated to talk in any public capacity about her work. Yet her life-affirming paintings, with their references to Shakespeare, music and Egyptian art, continued to push against their own limits to speak, not only of a passion for paint, but of the light, lyricism and sensuality of the natural world. ‘The act of painting,’ she once said to me with total conviction, ‘is an act of belief.’

Through my friendship with her, I had a vision of a fast disappearing bohemian world. One where one did what one did because of passion and love and not career choices, where what other people thought just didn’t matter. Gillian Ayres changed the face of British painting, and I shall miss her greatly. It was a privilege to know her.

Published in Artlyst

Film is Tacita Dean’s medium. Not that catch-all of so many contemporary artits, video, but analogue film with all its implicit nostalgia and history. Although Tacita Dean emerged in the 90s, at the height of conceptualism, she’s always been essentially a Romantic. She’s the daughter of a circuit judge and granddaughter of Basil Dean, the theatre and film director and producer who founded the first sound studio in Britain in Ealing in 1931. Landscape has always been central. Her beautiful anamorphic film, Disappearance at Sea, 1996, measures time by the regular clank of the revolving lighthouse lamp at St. Abb’s Head, in Berwickshire. It’s a mediation of sorts, slow, rhythmic and primal. She doesn’t do slick. She doesn’t do fast. There’s a ritualised magic about such works where the film frames are composed like paintings. A branch of a tree lifts in the wind; the sun slowly turns orange on a far horizon. Now she’s been offered what few artists have achieved, unprecedented simultaneous exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery, The National Gallery and, later in May, The Royal Academy. This has given her the opportunity to explore the different genres of portraiture, still life and landscape. It’s a big ask.

These two exhibitions, despite some engaging moments, feel drawn too thin

Walking into the National Portrait gallery, you enter a small claustrophobic space where there’s a film of David Hockney smoking. Smoking is intrinsic to his creative practice, and he’s often been a grumpy and staunch defender of his right to continue the practice. In the sixteen-minute film taken in his Los Angeles studio, surrounded by a series of portraits he did for his 2016 exhibition at the RA, he puffs away on five cigarettes as he thinks about painting. Occasionally he laughs a little uncomfortably as the camera lingers over his face. This is accompanied by the rackety sound of the film reel that made me think of being a child, sitting in the dark and watching those jerky family holiday ciné films when the picture would suddenly run out, and only a whir in the blackness would remain.
Tacita Dean

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.

The multi-screen piece of Merce Cunningham is even stiller. In six films of six different ‘performances’ he hardly moves, while elsewhere Claes Oldenburg is shown organising and fiddling with objects and artefacts in Manhattan Mouse Museum. Upstairs, in the Stuart room, among the sublime Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver miniatures, Dean has placed a tiny film diptych. The title is taken from a line of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, His Picture in Little. It depicts three actors of different generations, David Warner, Stephen Dillane and Ben Wishaw, all who have played the Danish prince. The miniature anamorphic film pays homage to the new ideas of the Renaissance. Through the use of special stencils, slipped into the camera’s aperture that exposed different parts of the film frame, Tacita Dean was able to invite the actors to sit side-by-side without them having to meet. It is the most successful piece in the show. Less successful, for my money, is the display of still photographs GAETA, fifty photographs plus one, 2015 taken in Cy Twombly’s studio. It is the distilled presence of Cy Twombly that gives them power, rather than anything intrinsic in the images.

Over at the National Gallery, Dean is primarily a curator. In STILL LIFE she has organised work ranging from 17th-paintings to recently completed pieces in a variety of media by contemporary artists. Among the Gwen John bird cage and Roni Horn’s Dead Owl, she has placed, high on the gallery wall, Ear on a Worm, her film of a small bird flickering in a square of painterly blue sky as it sits chirping on an overhead wire.
Tacita Dean

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.

LANDSCASPE, which opens later in the spring at the RA will be the first exhibition to be held in the new Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries since the redevelopment of the gallery and will explore landscape in its broadest sense, from botany to cosmography. With an eye on the traditions established by landscape artists such as Constable, Gainsborough and Turner, who championed the genre, Tacita Deane has created works for these new spaces, including a large-scale photogravure, Forty Days, a series of cloud chalk-spray drawings on slate and a monumental blackboard drawing, The Montafon Letter. The exhibition culminates in an ambitious new 35mm Cinemascope film, Antigone.

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.

But these two exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery and The National Gallery, despite some engaging moments, feel drawn too thin. One intense exhibition would have been enough, though it will be interesting to see the third show at the RA. Still, you have to be very big to carry the weight of these three august institutions and good as she is, she is, after all, not the only show in town.

Tacita Dean Landscape, Portrait, Still Life The National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, And Opening In May At The Royal Academy

Published in Artlyst

The artist’s studio is both a practical workshop and the workshop of the mind, a place of reflection and play, of doubt and hard work. At first a modest collector of modest means, Matisse filled his studio with objects collected on his travels to create a stage-set of languid sensuality, returning to the same paintings, prints, sculptures and textiles for inspiration over and over again like old friends, each time finding new points of stimulation. It was in 1917 when he moved to Nice that he began to feel frustrated with the lack of sensuality in his work. Nice provided the perfect backdrop for a reappraisal. His purpose became “to render my emotion. This state of soul is created by the objects that surround me and that react in me: from the horizon to myself, myself included…I express as naturally the space and the objects that are situated there as if I had only the sea and the sky in front of me; that is to say the simplest thing in the world.”

The objects Matisse collected from Asia, Africa and the Middle East emphasise Modernism’s global reach

There’s an alchemy created by the objects he collected. The Roman torso, the African masks, and Chinese porcelain were the props he used to explore the theatre of his creative imagination.  Walking around this wonderful exhibition at the RA I was reminded of another famous room full of oriental and African antiquities, Freud’s study. Freud too had a passion for collecting, seeing archaeology as a metaphor for psychoanalysis. For Matisse, the ‘primitive’ art of Africa and the Orient gave him a means of escaping the strictures and academicism of Western culture. The practice that dominated in the École des Beaux-Arts, at the time was dominated by copying and an illusionistic realism. African art seemed to offer spontaneity and sensuality, hedonism and authenticity. The objects Matisse collected from Asia, Africa and the Middle East emphasise Modernism’s global reach. Without colonialism, there may well have been a very different form of Modernism. For despite the gorgeous abstract patterning and sensuality of colour, so essential to our narrative about western modern art, Matisse (and Picasso) really understood very little about the cultures from which they were appropriating objects, about the lives and traditions of the faceless makers of these artefacts. For Matisse tended, as did other western ‘Moderns’, to homogenise non-Western cultures in ways that now seem both essentialist and politically incorrect. Often the relationship between pornography and the ‘primitive’ was uncomfortably close. Yet African and Oriental art was to provide energy, vitality and new ways of seeing that changed the face of western art.  His nudes bristle with languid sensuality and sexual energy. What he created were works not only of delicious colour and abstract design but ones that perhaps, inadvertently, emphasised racial, sexual and cultural difference.

Matisse believed African art offered access to hidden realms of human individuality, that it somehow tapped into a “deep gravity.” The African masks he collected thus had a profound effect on his own portraits, where he simplified and peeled away layers to get to, as in the case of Marguerite 1906-7, or the 1913 Portrait of Madame Matisse with its empty mask-like eye sockets, to the subject’s ‘true’ self. While the richly patterned textiles he collected allowed him to create theatrical mise-en-scène, full of chromatic intensities and kaleidoscopes of decorative patterning in which perspectival space dissolves around his Odalisques.

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.

From 1906 still life became the focus of interest in Matisse’s decorative painting, which played with a concept of ‘democratic’ all-over space as in his Interior with Young Girl Reading 1905-6. This approach was influenced by his interest in Islamic art and Oriental aesthetics. This is immediately evident in the blue arabesques of Still Life with Blue Tablecloth, 1909. “It’s the relationships that interest me – me, my model, this or that object”, he wrote, “they all form little worlds that have to be in tune.” Yet unable to find a satisfactory solution to bring together diverse objects in a single composition, he cut out coloured shapes, which he moved around and held with pins.

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.

The beauty of this exhibition is that it can be enjoyed simply as a box of sensual delights in which we can wallow in these wonderful paintings full of light, pattern and colour, or we can begin to unpack some of the debates around the origins of ‘modern’ western art. However we choose to look at it there is a greedy hunger in Matisse for the sensory, for the life affirming. It’s this appetite, this passion that he had till the end that makes him so irresistible.

Photos P C Robinson © Artlyst 2017

Published in Artlyst

Everyone has a “somewhere else” in their lives Howard Hodgkin said in 1992. “My somewhere else is India”. Howard Hodgkin was 32 when he first visited that vast country. At Eton, he’d been shown a 17th-century Mughal painting by a teacher and in his 20s had become, despite modest means, something of a collector of Indian art. A meeting with Robert Skelton, then the Deputy Keeper of Indian Art at the V&A, led to his first visit in 1964. India was the place he continued to go back to until his recent death, a place that fed his visual imagination and become an increasingly important part of his painterly vocabulary.

One of this country’s great colourists Hodgkin has not always been flavour of the month, being too decorative, too gorgeous and too painterly for many postmodern tastes. His are greedy paintings. They’re greedy for life, for colour, for sound, sense, touch, and smell. For the tactile experience of being alive. There’s a profound eroticism in the movement of his paint and the sensuality of his colour. At The Hepworth Wakefield, where the work is displayed in chronological order – the first gallery being dedicated to some of his collection of Indian art so that we can see the development of his visual thinking –  it is shown to full effect against the white walls of the Chipperfield building. The sandy browns and oranges set against the sage green, the undulating chestnut haze that seems to shimmer in the heat, bleeds into the saffron yellow horizontal of Bombay Sunset (1972-73) so, as viewers, we become totally immersed in the experience.  In 1987, Hodgkin said “I think the striped ocean and the dotted sky… is simply part of the language that I was trying to evolve for myself, using very simplistic means…A sunset in Bombay really does – curiously enough – look like that… It’s the only thing I can think of in any of my pictures which has a specific likeness to an Indian miniature”

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.”

By the 1980s he had travelled to India more than a dozen times. His friend the travel writer Bruce Chatwin noted that “India became an emotional lifeline.  Each winter he travelled all over the subcontinent, sopping up impressions – of empty hotel rooms, the view from a railways carriage, the colour of cowdust in the evening, or the sight of an orange sari against a concrete balustrade…” Slowly the paintings of this decade became much less what he described as ‘voyeuristic’ paintings’ and more reflective. Intangible feelings, emotions, and sensations are conjured to become metaphors for his state of being. Equivalences of emotional moods. In the Studio of Jamini Roy (1976-79) the ‘pointillism’ of the sand-coloured dots set against the black ground achieves an apparent harmony that once arrived at seems as if it could never have been any other way. The brushstrokes become increasingly gestural. This immediacy was facilitated by the adaptation of Liquin, a quick drying medium which allows multiple layers to be applied in quick succession and permitted him to create glazes, adding a sense of transparency. Sweeps of colour evoke times of day and atmospheric conditions.  Some of the fiery intensity of Turner pulsates in the small painting Nightfall 1995-96. Here the deep furnace-red that spreads right over the picture frame appears to be slowly obliterated by the descending blackness of night. Only a thin sliver of green remains along the inner edge of the picture frame. While in Afternoon, 1998-99 there’s the sense of entering through a proscenium arch into the deep perspective of gathering heat.

As Hodgkin grew older and painting became more physically demanding much of the thinking took place primarily in his mind. Even so, he managed to produce some emotionally powerful paintings where the mood is suggested in a just a couple of judicious strokes. What we are presented with is the artist’s mind turning over and processing thoughts, feelings, and moods. These works are aimed beyond what we see in the everyday world. They transform experience into something that transcends knowing and feeling to some intangible awareness that is the catalyst behind so much important art. The monochrome immediacy and the lack of decoration of Night Thoughts (2014-15) suggests the bleak existential despair of a sleepless night, and the process of aging.  While Over to You (2015-17) recalls Stevie Smith’s ironic poem Mr. Over:

    Mr Over is dead
    He died fighting and true
    And on his tombstone they wrote
    Over to You.

In an essay I wrote about Hodgkin some years ago, I mentioned Edward Said’s essays, On Late Style and considered how they “examined the idea that late artistic works are not always serene and transcendent but, on the contrary, often unresolved and contradictory. Not so much a pipe and slippers summing up, but a ‘raging against the dying of the light’”. Looking at these final paintings in Wakefield this seems even truer, now, after Hodgkin’s recent death. There’s a savage ‘raging’, a refusal to put down the brush, a determination to go on thinking and recording the human condition, his human condition, to the very end through his chosen medium, paint.

Credits

The artist and Hepworth Wakefield © 2017
Top: Howard Hodgkin In the garden of the Bombay Museum, 1978–1982
Middle: Summer Rain 2002 – 2013

Published in Artlyst

Desire is at the basis of most human behaviour from sex and procreation to the pursuit of beauty and death. According to Freud our psyches see-saw between the two conflicting points of Eros and Thanatos. Mat Collishaw has always been interested in origins and in what goes on behind the veil of social givens and norms. He understands that what enchants also ensnares, that the sublime is bedfellows with the abject. Whether taking on subjects like an inmate’s last meal on death row or crushed butterflies, there’s always a formal Gothic beauty to his haunting work, even when dealing with the most profane of subjects.

In 2011 his installation, Shooting Stars, appropriated found images of Victorian child prostitutes in vulnerable, yet alluring poses, projected onto the gallery walls. Fired onto phosphorescent paint they flared briefly before fading from view, suggesting fragile lives cut short by violence and disease. Not only did the installation underline his interest in history and the complex truths behind its public facade, but it also signalled his interest in photography.

This spring he has turned his attention, once again, to photography with a new exhibition, Thresholds, at Somerset House from 18th May- 11th June, which will celebrate the work of the early photographic pioneer, William Henry Fox Talbot. Although a member of the YBA generation Mat Collishaw has never favoured easy irony or the sassy one-liner. His work is informed by research, an interest in the past and a search for existential meaning.  Using cutting-edge VR technology he’s created a virtual reality portal back into 1839, when Fox Talbot, the British photographic pioneer, first presented his innovative photographic prints to the public at the King Edward’s School in Birmingham, a high Victorian edifice designed by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin.

Visiting Mat’s Collishaw’s south London studio, housed in an old pub, to see the installation, I donned headset and goggles to be immediately transported not only to a different city and century but, to experience in full sensual detail the architectural features of the original room in King Edward’s School. There were the vitrines containing Fox Talbot’s light-faded prints, the glass cases full of scientific instruments, even the heat and sound of a coal fire burning in the grate. Infrared sensors tracked the movements of others in the room. These ghostly avatars not only stopped people bumping into one another but also enhanced the feeling of travelling back through time, conjuring the countless dead who have inhabited the space.

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.

The atmosphere in the virtual room was palpable. Moths flew towards the light of the chandeliers, a reference to the presence of moths in Collinshaw’s previous work, as well as a metaphor, perhaps, for the self-destructive behaviour of the Chartists. The virtual vitrines, full of new-fangled technological instruments, such as magic lanterns and microscopes, only served as a reminder of the inevitability of technological advance. Within this informed and innovative work, Collishaw has created layers of reality. A historic palimpsest where those outside watch those inside, as they, in turn, look back into the past at a painting of King Edward as a child.

Until the 27th May, Mat Collishaw is also showing work at Blain Southern. In The Centrifugal Soul, he draws, yet again, on forms of illusion and truth. Working with the evolutionary psychologist, Geoffrey Miller – who believes that the origins of art stem from natural instincts of courtship and reproduction – he has created a zoetrope with stroboscopic light that animates the mating rituals of bowerbirds and birds of paradise and emphasises our insatiable appetite for exotic visual stimulation.

On the walls of the gallery are 12 trompe l’oeil paintings of British garden birds –blue tits, bullfinches, sparrows, and a robin – all tethered by small golden chains to their perches in the manner of Carel Fabritius’ The Goldfish (1654) – also the subject of Donna Tartt’s prize-winning novel of the same name. Set against the graffiti-tagged walls the birds struggle to differentiate themselves from the manmade decoration that seems to confuse their sexual signalling.

Central to the show is a mythical new installation: Albion that takes as its subject the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest, Nottingham. With its hollow core, the centuries-old tree has, since the Victorian era, had its spreading branches supported by a system of scaffolding and been voted Britain’s most loved tree. Legend has it that was here that Robin Hood took shelter with his band of Merry Men. Weighing some 23 tonnes, it has a girth of 33 feet and a canopy of 92 feet and is estimated to be between 800-1000 years old. Albion is a literary term used for Britain, particularly England in ancient times.  A name made famous by the complex mythology of artist, poet and seer, William Blake. The word is presumed to be of Celtic origin and related to the Latin albus ‘white’ (an allusion, perhaps, to the white cliffs of Dover). Beautiful, evocative and ghostly, this iconic work subtly asks questions about what it means, in these post-Brexit times, to be English, if the concept continues to have any validity.

Employing a diversity of media, Mat Collishaw continues to make work that is fresh, meaningful and insightful. Using the latest technological innovations he asks complex and prescient questions. It might have taken him a while longer to come to prominence than some of the other YBAs but the slow burn has been well worth it.

The Centrifugal Soul Blain Southern until 27th May
Thresholds Somerset House 18th May-11th June

Published in Artlyst

The other night I went to the private view of Lucy Beech and Edward Thomasson’s performance that forms part of Tate Britain’s Art Now, an ongoing series of contemporary exhibitions.

Performance art was the starting point for some of the most radical ideas that changed the way we think about contemporary art. Artists turned to performance as a way of breaking down accepted categories and exploring new ideas and directions that could not be expressed through conventional means. As the artist Allan Kaprow suggested:  “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible.” The roots of performance art are to be found in the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, particularly the anarchic movements of Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism and Fluxus. A discontent with painting and traditional forms of sculpture led artists to use performance as an alternative form of expression and protest, often presented outside the confines of the conventional gallery. The 1960s, that decade of upheaval and change, saw a flowering of performance art that mirrored the loss of faith in modernism and Abstract Expressionism.  Primarily focused on the body it reflected the mood for the “dematerialization of the art object,” and a flight from traditional art materials that reflected the political ferment of the time. Central to its heart were feminism, with its merger between the personal and political, and anti-war activism, often centred on protests about Vietnam.

Performance art sought to challenge accepted aesthetic as well as political conventions. Its seeds often lay in other activities such as ritual or, in the case of Dada, cabaret and vaudeville. Joseph Beuys liked to call his performances ‘actions’, a term that distinguished his shamanic performances from more conventional kinds of theatrical entertainment. The label could be said to be something of a reinterpretation of the phrase “action painting,” in which the object of art was no longer to paint on canvas, but something else – often the use of the artist’s own body – as in the case of Yves Klein or Yoko Ono. Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, first performed in 1964, was a direct invitation to the audience to participate in the unveiling of the female body, much as artists had been doing throughout the history of painting. During this live experience, Ono hoped to erase the neutrality and seeming indifference associated with society’s objectification of women in both art and life. Instead of providing entertainment, the intent of performance art was to challenge the viewer, often provoking them to participate in a way that made them uncomfortable and, therefore, becomes a part of the work. Since the 1960s the genre has been absorbed into the mainstream and welcomed into museums and galleries from which it was once excluded, largely castrating its purpose and function.

It is against this background that Tate Britain have just unveiled Lucy Beech and Edward Thomasson’s new performance project that claims to “explore ideas of cooperation and independence through new live work”.  And what a dreary thing it is. In a bright studio, the audience sat in rows opposite a blank white screen where there were 8 performers, paired off in couples, all mic’d up and wearing knee-pads. A woman with short hair and a Cheshire-cat-grin finger-clicked the mic of another performer, which she recorded. Then, continuing to beam, she announced that she was going to play this back to us with the forced enthusiasm of a kindergarten teacher.  What then ensued was a series of moves that resembled an elementary Pilates class. There was the oyster, the sideways sit-up and down-dog. But these were no Ballet Rambert dancers. These moves were then followed by a number of pantomime actions: simulated slappings and kickings that mimicked aggression and violence, accompanied by some chirpy disco music. The supercilious grins never left the performers faces.

I don’t often quote press releases in reviews but the Tate’s claim that the: “performers construct a safe space where they can reject social standards and express unspoken feeling…..As their actions play out, the gradual build-up of theatrical illusions seems to operate as a therapeutic exercise.” Really?

Two minutes in it was obvious what it was about. The ‘normalisation’ of violence. It didn’t need another 20 minutes to illustrate this single point. The piece had not grit, not edge, no frisson. It posed no questions. If it had been done by a GCSE drama group, you might have said: good effort. This was performance art-lite. The performance with its teeth pulled, without any social or political backbone. We are living in a time of extreme political ferment. Fascism is on the rise, the planet is warming, there is global mass migration. Now is the time to be making passionate, visceral work that pierces the participant/viewer in the gut in line with Barthes notion of the punctum; that moment of stabbing recognition when a work strikes a nerve. There was nothing outré or avant-garde here. Just a rather pale corporate shadow of a once anarchic practice. In these worst of times, young performance artists should be shouting from the roof tops, challenging and engaging their audiences, making the hair stand up on the back of our necks. The Tate should be offering better than this.

Photo: Alice Rawsthorn,‏ Art Now via Twitter

Published in Artlyst