Exit Through The Giftshop - Pictures At An Exhibition #23

More memories from viewings past...

1) BAPTISM OF THE NEOPHYTES (1427) - Masaccio

I bought this when I saw the remarkable frescos in the Brancacci Chapel within the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence.  The frescos can only be viewed on short timed visits, you enter through the cloisters next to the church, so the vibrant paintings are not damaged by constant visitors.  Masaccio began his frescos in 1425 but stopped when he had to travel to Rome in 1428 where he died aged only 27.  Filippino Lippi completed them 55 years later.  

St. Peter is seen baptizing believers in a river, a supplicant kneels before him as the holy water runs over his head, the river eddying around his knees.  Again, one is drawn to the remarkable cast of characters - the man who is waiting to be baptized who is obviously already freezing, the acolyte of Peter who is helping the man undress in the queue and, at the back, a man in a green tunic who really looks like he is thinking "What have I let myself in for?" as he looks nervously around him. 

2) LADY WITH CAPE AND HAT (1890) - Gustav Klimt

This was bought at the Royal Academy exhibition of drawings by Klimt and Egon Schiele from the Albertina Museum in Vienna in 2018.  The Albertina has for many years been the main research centre for the artist's life and work.  Klimt drew this haunting composition using black and red chalk aged 28.

Say the name Klimt and one thinks of art nouveau stylized, highly coloured portraits of glamorous women but this earlier drawing of a young woman in a black coat with high collar and a large hat is haunting in it's simplicity; her mournful expression beautifully caught as it is lit from the side.  Klimt was to embark on years of upheaval when in 1892 both his father and brother died and their families were dependant on Gustav for their well-being.

3) VIRGINIA AND LEONARD WOOLF'S WRITING LODGE (1934)

A very happy memory is visiting Monk's House on a sunny day in 2014.  Virginia and Leonard Woolf bought the house in an auction in 1919 for £700 and over the years, as they both became successful, they started making improvements to the rudimentary interior and garden.  They lived increasingly at Monk's House during the 20s and 30s due to Virginia's recurring mental breakdowns which were exacerbated by London life, and became a much-loved part of their life.  After Virginia's suicide in 1941, Leonard lived on at Monk's House until his own death in 1969.

The garden lodge was built in 1934 and, apart from being a place to store apples in the loft, it served as Virginia's writing retreat being only a short walk across the lawn from the main house.  Apart from her articles, she would have written the bulk of THE YEARS and BETWEEN THE ACTS here.  I blogged at the time "We were told that we were lucky that they had a full compliment of volunteers so the lodge was actually open to visitors and it was wonderful to stand there by her writing desk, her glasses and cigarettes still there waiting to be used.  The volunteer said sadly all we could do in there was look and breathe in the air.  That was fine for me."

4) SELF PORTRAIT WITH MONKEY (1938) - Frida Kahlo

Another of the great self-portraits by Frida Kahlo.  This was bought in 2005 at Tate Modern when they had a major retrospective of her work.  It had been a commission painting for the then-president of New York's Museum of Modern Art. Anson Conger Goodyear.  1938 was a pretty good year for Frida: she had made her first notable sale when the actor Edward G Robinson bought four paintings for $800 and she was invited to New York to hold her first US exhibition which, while dismissed by critics, was financially successful. 

She had met the Surrealist André Breton earlier in the year in Mexico who invited her to Paris to exhibit and famously described her art as "a ribbon tied around a bomb".  Frida stares out at us at an angle, coiffed and elegant, defiantly uni-browed and with a mousetache showing, against a background of large tropical leaves.  Her spider-monkey pet Fulang-Chang sits behind her with a protective paw around her neck, as if to guard her against the sudden explosion of interest in her and her art.  

5) PIETÁ (AFTER DELACROIX) (1889) - Vincent van Gogh

I bought this at the wonderful van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam: we wandered over that way one late afternoon and saw a smallish queue outside which we joined more as a dare to see how long we would stand there but to our delight it wasn't that long before we were shifting along and we were in, to discover the nooks and crannys of the modernist interior - and of course revel in the glorious paintings within.

Of course the knowledge that this was painted the year before his suicide makes one read more iinto the subject matter than one should, for most of the year Vincent was in the asylum in Saint Rémy-de-Provence where his access for inspiration came mostly from prints of other artists' work that he had with him as well as the grounds of the asylum.  He had always admired Delacroix and one day, when his print of his Pietá fell in some oils, Vincent decided to do his own.  Although based on another work, Vincent was working from a b/w print so the swirling and turbulant colour is his own imagination and memories of Delacroix's style.  I really love the colours: the many blues he finds in Mary's garments, offset against the paler tones of Jesus' skin and his sheet.  As usual when looking at his work you just feel sadness for the poor guy.

Exit Through The Giftshop - Pictures At An Exhibition #17

As museums and galleries are still locked down here are some memories from the past...

1) THE LAST JUDGEMENT (detail) (1435-1440) - Fra Angelico

I bought this at the Gemaldegalerie in Berlin where Fra Angelico's impressive triptych of the Day of Judgement is on display. The central panel is Christ triumphant surrounded by his sainted besties and on the left panel he shows those blessed with life eternal and on the right those being tortured in Hell.  It possibly needs renovating to bring the painting back to what one assumes was it's vibrant life.

The postcard features a detail from the left panel where those bound for Heaven are being led by dancing angels; the flowing robes are beautifully realised in such tiny detail and they really stand out against the dark background as do the tiny buds and shrubs.

2) THE ANNUNCIATION (1440 - 1445) - Fra Angelico

This came from the San Marco monastery in Florence which is the home of this fresco, one of Fra Angelico's two masterpieces showing The Annunciation, the other is in the Prado.  In one of the great moments of "art theatre" you ascend the wide staircase to the first floor of San Marco where the monks' cells are located and as you turn the corner, you see this large fresco facing you at the top of the staircase - a real wow moment.

Fra Angelico, through the held gaze between the Angel Gabriel and The Virgin Mary, creates a captured moment of being; there is nothing to distract from the intensity of that moment, you believe the world has stopped outside.  It is marvellous to stand and revel at it's detail: the intricate painting of the relief at the top of the portico's pillars which give the image a perspective that breaks with the traditional flat look of Gothic paintings, the vivid pink and gold of Gabriel's robe is contrasted against Mary's blue cloak and his lovely multi-coloured wings also contains intricate detailing.  It's interesting how the flat rendering of the garden is offset by the depths of the trees beyond the fence.

3) THE TOWNEY DISKOBOLOS (circa 2nd Century AD) - unknown

This marvellous Roman marble statue was discovered near Hadrian's villa in Tivoli in 1791 and later acquired for the British Museum.  It is based on a now lost bronze statue, sculpted in the 5th Century BC by the Greek artist Myron.

When it was found, the statue was missing it's head but when it was purchased by Charles Townley he was told that the head had been found nearby.  Down the years there has been much conjecture as to whether it actually was the original head as another marble statue had been found a few years before with the athlete's head turned looking at the discus. Whatever it's genesis, it is still a wonderful rendering of the athlete about to launch his discus into the void.

4) THE BROKEN COLUMN (1944) - Freda Kahlo

One of the most famous and revealing of Frida Kahlo's self-portraits, she painted it in 1944 after she had spinal surgery to correct the injury she received 19 years before in a trolley-bus crash   I bought this in 2005 at Tate Modern when they had a major retrospective of her work.

Frida stands alone, impassively staring out at the viewer in a landscape that is as broken and split as her body.  Her torso is cracked open to reveal a broken but still-standing stone column instead of her spine.  She wears the cumbersome harness that doctors had her wear to correct her posture and her body is pierced with nails as in her own crucifiction.  Although there are tears on her face, she is still standing, still surviving.

5) PORTRAIT OF A GIRL WEARING A BLUE JERSEY (DORA CARRINGTON) (1912) - Mark Gertler

Bought at the marvellous CRISIS OF BRILLIANCE exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2013 which brought together six contempories who studied at the Slade Art School in the 1910s: Bomberg, Nevinson, Spencer, Nash and, as seen here, Mark Gertler and his subject Dora Carrington.

Through his arresting portrait you can feel Gertler attempting to capture the quicksilver modernity of Carrington, then aged 19, with her placid but determined stare, her self-cropped hair and the cool tones of her blue jersey against the sky. Gertler was to become obsessed with Carrington only to find that CRW Nevinson was also pursuing her.  Carrington, however kept them both at arm's length, wanting their friendship but not sex.  She later gave in to Gertler's persistance but it left them both unhappy and they kept a distant friendship afterwards.  Carrington committed suicide in 1932 in despair after the death of Lytton Strachey, the love of her life, and Gertler killed himself in 1939, lost in a swell of depression.

Exit Through The Giftshop - Postcards at an exhibition....

More bootiful booty from museum and exhibition gift shops...

1) FARM AT WATENDLATH (1921) - Dora Carrington

I bought this at Tate Britain which have Carrington's lovely painting in it's collection.  It is now 23 years since the last major exhibition by the most elusive of Bloomsbury-related painters so Tate Britain really needs to pull it's collective finger out.

I love how Carrington has the Cumbrian landscape, rearing up like a whale, echoed by the brick walls which surround the farm house which is dwarfed by the countryside.  The woman and child, who form a loose visual triangle with the house and the washing hanging on the line, seem frozen in awe of their surroundings.

2) ROSES SUR FOND NOIR (1932) - André Derain

This was bought at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris where Derain's striking still life is in the permanent collection.

I am not the biggest fan of still life paintings but I was struck by the lovely use of light in Derain's painting; he was one of the painters who embraced the 'Fauvist' style in the early years of the 20th Century and his use of colour here is still vibrant, particularly against the black background.

3) LE VERROU (1777) - Jean-Honoré Fragonard

We went to a Fragonard exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris but I found it all a bit underwhelming to be honest.  By far the best painting there was one of his most famous, "Le Verrou" or "The Lock" which usually is seen in The Louvre.

It was certainly the image of the exhibition as it featured on the poster and all the merchandise so I simply had to buy a postcard to get out!  It is certainly a striking painting, full of intrigue and passion: is the man locking the door to stop others getting in or the woman getting out?  Is it violent or romantic?  You decide... It would make a perfect poster design for LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES which was published only five years after Fragonard finished his painting.

4) RAMON CASAS I PERE ROMEU EN UN TÁNDEM (1897) - Ramon Casas

One of the jewels of the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Casas' large painting was originally created for the Barcelona cafe Els Quatre Gats, which was a focal point for the artists of the Catalan 'modernisme', a copy now hangs there.  The original in the museum however has been cut down by a third in the intervening years

Casas is seen at the front of the tandem pedalling into the future while the restaurateur Romeu looks out at the viewer grinning widely with the Barcelona skyline behind them. Romeu was financially backed by Casas and two other leading Catalan artists Santiago Rusinol and Miguel Utrillo.  I love Casas' spare design, almost as if he knew it would one day adorn merchandise!

5) The PARAKEET AND THE MERMAID (1952) - Henri Matisse

I bought this at the wonderful Tate Modern exhibition of Matisse's glorious cut-outs in 2014.  The  large work, measuring over 11' x 25', drew you into it's waving, magical world; a world of waving fronds surrounding the parakeet and the floating mermaid.  Suffering from failing health, Matisse still wanted to express his artistic vision so he turned to cut-outs.

Matisse painted paper with coloured gouache then cut out his individual shapes which would then be arranged by assistants until he was happy with the harmony of colours then glued them onto the white backing paper, so simple yet so vividly effective.  It's wonderful that only two years before his death, Matisse was still creating art and continuing his love affair with colour.  Another work of art I want to dive into!

Exit Through The Giftshop - Postcards at an exhibition....

More postcards from exhibitions and galleries...

1) THE FOUNTAIN, VILLA TORLONIA, FRASCATI, ITALY (1907) - John Singer Sargent

This came from the recent marvellous National Portrait Gallery exhibition of portraits by John Singer Sargent.  In this atmospheric study, a woman has perched herself onto a stone ballustrade to paint her canvas, dressed for the outdoors in her veiled hat and white coat and dress with her brushes arrayed beside her.  Her companion relaxes beside her and Sargent has captured him either humourously regarding her painting or closing his eyes for a nap.  Behind them the fountain of the painting's title splashes away, matching the white of their clothes and contrasting with the lush green trees beyond.  A painting I could stare at for hours...

2) THE REBELLIOUS SLAVE (1513-15) - Michelangelo

From the Louvre in Paris, this is one of the two in Michelangelo's series of slave staues that is not unfinished and seeming to break free from the block of marble that surrounds it.  Here a bound slave - with the all-important swath of material over his groin - strains and twists to escape his fate.  The similarity facially to his David statue is very noticeable.

3) PORTRAITS OF BATTISTA SFORZA AND FEDERICO DA MONTEFELTRO, DUKE OF URBINO (1465-72) - Piero della Francesca

A double portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino with their city spread out behind them which is one of the many treasures in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.  Reality dictated their positioning as the Duke has lost an eye and was scarred on the right side of his face from a tournament which had also broke his nose.  The Duchess' jewels and brocaded dress accentuate her grave beauty.   Oddly the Duke and Duchess are also painted on the reverse on these double portraits in a different pose.

4) PORTRAIT OF GIACOMO DORIA (1533-5) - Titian

This imposing portrait by Titian confers on his sitter all the trops of power - the swaggering volumous black garment, the direct gaze of the merchant who was also a diplomat and the marble column he stands in front of.  This can be seen in Oxford's Ashmoleon Museum.

5) OH, JEFF... I LOVE YOU, TOO... BUT... (1964) - Roy Lichtenstein

One of Lichtenstein's classic Pop Art portraits in all it's garish Benday-dotted Magna colour, a picture that while celebrating the banalness of commercial art also holds it's own mystique.  Oddly enough, this exhibition felt unsatisfactory.

Vision... Henri Matisse, Stanley Spencer

In the past few weeks I have been lucky enough to experience close-up that particular joy of seeing the works of two men who were visionary artists, two men who Sir Kenneth Clarke surely was thinking about when, in discussing his personal beliefs, he said "Above all, I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible."

 

After an initial liking of his work, last year found me fully appreciating Stanley Spencer's idiosyncratic and uplifting art largely due to his inclusion in the wonderful exhibition CRISIS OF BRILLIANCE which set him within the context of his Slade art school contemporaries.

Earlier this year we saw the equally amazing exhibition at Somerset House of the site-specific WWI canvasses he painted for the Sandham Memorial Chapel so a week ago we decided to journey north-west to the commuter town of Cookham in Berkshire to visit the Stanley Spencer Museum, a few doors along the high street from the house where he was born.

  

The museum is in a converted Wesleyan hall where Spencer attended meetings in his youth and there is even a drawing in the museum from around 1937 called "Ecstasy in a Wesleyan Chapel" of a congregation getting the spirit.  It's a very odd experience to look at it in the very space that he was inspired by.

It's a bright airy hall with nothing to distract you from the paintings on display.  The museum seems to have different exhibitions twice a year and when we visited they were showing PARADISE REGAINED: Stanley Spencer In The Aftermath Of WWI, which ties in nicely with the centenary of WWI this year.

 

The War came two years after Spencer left the Slade and initially he resisted the call to sign up as he was establishing his career but the sight of his generation returning to the town from the front made him decide to join the Medical Corps. and after training in Bristol, he served in Macedonia.  The happiness of returning at the end of the War was tempered by the death of his brother Sydney two months before the armistice.

His experiences in wartime and the return to his birthplace are reflected in his work, none more so than in his 1922 painting "Unveiling Cookham's War Memorial" which we had seen in the CRISIS OF BRILLIANCE show.  His busy canvas, teaming with life and good humour, shows the memorial seconds after the unveiling with the rows of onlookers crowding around.  It is interesting that the ones least interested are the young men who lounge on the green, ignoring the hub-bub, no doubt glad to be rid of the War as they were the ones who had to risk their lives.  Schoolboys misbehave with the schoolgirls dressed in white that stand before them while one girl moves the flag aside to find which name? - Father? Brother? Both?

 

After leaving the Museum we walked back up through the town and there was the Memorial, a bit more built up from that day in 1919 that Spencer immortalised three years later.  Indeed the wooded hills seen in his painting are now hidden by a very nice pub where we had our lunch!  Easily found among the memorial names is Stanley's brother Sidney, seen in the picture above, standing with Stanley beside their seated brother, Percy.  Stanley's clean-shaven and slightly wary gaze is also echoed in his excellent self-portrait in the museum from 1914.

Along with his allegorical paintings which are usually set around and about Cookham, the Museum also boasts a huge unfinished work called "Christ Preaching At Cookham Regatta" (1952-59) with Christ seated in a punt addressing the crowds on the bank of the Thames.  Spencer struggled to complete the work - a search for a sponser for the painting proved fruitless - and it is fascinating to see what he completed and what he left for another day which sadly never arrived.  Another delight were his paintings of trees and shrubs growing around houses in the area.

This small, delightful Museum also deserves high praise for it's well-illustrated and detailed exhibition catalogue as well as an extensive postcard selection - for once a Museum that knows what the public really wants!

I am looking forward to another visit when there is a new theme explored in this extraordinary but ordinary artist's life and work.

The biggest thrill of all however was our visit to the life-affirming HENRI MATISSE: THE CUT-OUTS at Tate Modern.

 

In 1941, after establishing himself as one of the most groundbreaking 20th Century artists, Henri Matisse was felled by the third of three momentous events.  In 1939, as well as the outbreak of the 2nd World War, Matisse had a bitter separation from his wife of over 40 years and now he had become incapacitated by an intestinal operation which even his doctors thought would extend his life by only three years.

Confined to his bed or a wheelchair, Matisse's urge to create burned as strong as ever and he utilised a technique that he had previously only used while preparing earlier paintings: he had used rough cut-out shapes to pin on his canvas and move around until happy with the composition of colours.  Why not just use the cut-outs now?

 

In 1947, he completed JAZZ a large book which included his cut-outs alongside his writings on them.  In the exhibition you can contrast the printed versions with the original designs and I knew exactly how Matisse felt when he saw the finished work, yes the designs stand out from the page due to their stark modernity but the sheer vibrancy of the colours are lost in the printing process.

It's hard to believe that Tate Modern has come up with another show to match their PAUL KLEE earlier this year but this too is a glorious exhibition.  Luckily we went to one of the Saturday late-night openings and while busy it was not crowded so it was easy to walk around and enjoy the cut-outs at leisure.

There were so many works to treasure: OCEANA, the underwater cut-out murals that Matisse covered his living room walls with as well as works from his studio which leap out and dazzle due to the colour combinations - sadly we do not experience them as Matisse and his helpers did as he pinned them loosely to the wall so they would undulate in the breeze.

There is a room dedicated to his work designing the Dominican Chapel of the Rosary in Vence.  He did it as a gesture of thanks to Monique Bourgeois, a young nurse who had helped Matisse recover from his 1941 operation and who had become a Dominican nun in 1946.  They maintained a friendship and when she asked him to design a window for her chapel, he instead took over the design of the whole interior, even down to the priest's vestments.

There is also a lovely work called The Bees that dazzles the eye with it's vibrant colour and modernist design.  Again, as with the Paul Klee exhibition, I was reminded of Seurat's thoughts of the harmony that can happen when the two right colours are placed together and THE BEES is a true harmony of colour and movement.

Then there are the works using just one colour such as the Blue Nudes which need to be seen "in the paper" where instead of just flat colour, you can see where Matisse added different pieces of paper built up to give the figures a real texture.  Also it is telling to recall that while he was creating these images of flowing, intricate, plastic movement he himself was increasingly frail and confined to his bed or chair.

The exhibition then has increasingly larger works - vast wall-size designs which again dazzle with the simplicity of the vision - until we reach their apotheosis, the massive work from 1953 THE SNAIL.

All his years of fauvism, post-modernism, his explorations into colour and into abstractionism have led him to this wonderful distillation of his vision.  It's fascinating to contemplate and also to observe up close, most of the large blocks of coloured paper have smooth edges while some are torn - you can almost see him tearing through the paper with his large scissors - and to see the tiny pinholes in the paper where his assistants have moved them to *just* the right place.

I was involved in a convoluted debate in an art class a few years ago over this painting, one guy simply refusing to give himself over to it and repeating "But why is it called The Snail"?  Because the man in the wheelchair says it is... that's good enough for me.

The year after completing THE SNAIL, Matisse suffered a heart attack, dying three days later aged 84.

Matisse said "By creating these coloured paper cut-outs, it seems to me that I am happily anticipating things to come.  I don't think that I have ever found such balance as I have in creating these paper cut-outs.  But I know that it will only be much later that people will realise to what extent the work I am doing today is in step with the future."

The cut-outs are not only ageless but they pulse with the energy and life of their creator.  A life-long atheist, he said he only believed in God when he worked.  Oddly enough, I only believe in God when I see his work and those of any artist of true vision.

For Art's Sake 1: "A Line Is A Dot That Went For A Walk"

Well, Constant Reader, here we are, halfway through the year so a good time to look back on exhibitions that I have held off blogging about.  Let's see how many of these I remember...

The first was the National Gallery show FACING THE MODERN: THE PORTRAIT IN VIENNA 1900 which set out to tell "the story of Vienna's middle classes - their rise and fall in political power, their hopes for the future and their claims to the past".  If that was the intention it was unsuccessful.

 

My memory of it is of the woeful lay-out: three large rooms led into a thin room made worse for being divided in two making it feel like a rat's maze - it was impossible to get a good look at any of the pictures on either side of the space due to the cramped corridors.

After a room full of dreary portraits of the monied classes in various poses of wealth or family groupings, the more interesting expressionistic paintings of Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl appeared.  What was interesting was the way these avante-garde painters were still courted by the middle/upper-classes to paint their portraits and the way the artists responded.

 

Saying that, one of the portraits I liked best was Klimt's uncharacteristically naturalistic Portrait of a Lady In Black (1884) along with Schiele's fascinating Self Portrait With Raised Shoulder (1912), Kokoscka's fevered Portrait of Hans and Erica Tielze-Conrat (1909), Gerstl's (in all senses) revelatory Nude Self Portrait With Palette (1908) - unhappy after a failed love affair, he stabbed and hung himself shortly after painting it - and Schiele's vibrant Portrait of Albert Paris von Gütersloh (1918).

1918 sounded the death-knell not only for the Austro-Hungarian Empire but also for two of it's artists.  In February Klimt died from a stroke while suffering from the deadly Spanish Flu pandemic which swept Europe at the close of the War and which, in October, also claimed Schiele's wife Edith and, three days later, Schiele too.  His last sketch, finished a few hours before Edith's death shows her staring resigned at the viewer as she almost swirls away in a charcoal scrawl.  Looking at these joyless and tortured works one can fully appreciate they were created in the same era as Sigmund Freud's explorations of the psyche.

The exhibition ended memorably with Klimt's Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl, unfinished in 1918 due to his death.  Amalia stares out of her status portrait at the viewer, secure in her wealth and successful marriage, facing the modern world and her future with an enigmatic smile. 

 

 

She died in a Nazi death camp.

On the same day as all that miserabilism we also saw the life-affirming HEAVEN IN A HELL OF WAR at Somerset House, an exhibition of Stanley Spencer's large canvas paintings which usually hang in the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Hampshire.

In a well-designed space echoing the chapel's shape, the 16 canvases reflect Spencer's memories of being an orderly in a military hospital near Bristol then a soldier in Salonika.  Spencer painted them all from memory as he started work on the canvasses in 1926 and completed in 1932 and I wonder if that time between experience and representation gave him a chance to reflect more benignly on what he went though than if he had started them directly after 1918.

The works become almost a wartime stations of the cross which start with Convoy Arriving With The Wounded then Scrubbing The Floor, Ablutions, Sorting and Moving Kit Bags, Kit Inspection, Sorting The Laundry, Dug-Out or Stand-To, Filling Tea Urns, Reveille, Frostbite, Filling Water-Bottles, Tea In The Hospital Ward, Map-Reading, Bedmaking, Firebelt and Washing Lockers.

Apart from the sheer pleasure of seeing the works in a bright well-lit room, what made it such a pleasurable experience was to see everyone there - including Alan Bennett - looking about themselves with big smiles on their face, revelling in Spencer's humorous and humane art.

The canvases are filled with large figures that Spencer stretches and bends into each corner, filling them with life and a host of small details which made them fascinating to look at and return to such as in Washing Lockers where the orderly squeezed between the vibrant red tubs is Stanley himself, Tea In The Hospital Ward where a patient painstakingly combs his hair looking in a small mirror at his feet and in Bedmaking a patient lies swaddled in his blanket with his feet on a water-bottle while an orderly makes up his bed. 

 

In Map-Reading Spencer shows the only officer in the cycle, sitting on a large chestnut horse studying an unfolded map of Salonika.  Again it's full of clever detailing: the soldiers enjoying a moment's peace while laying on the grass or picking bilberries in billowing bushes as well as the doleful horse staring out under the edge of the map while enjoying a chomp on some oats.  He almost seems to be saying "So now I'm a table as well am I?"

The exhibition culminated in a small room with a 21 foot-sized projection of his altarpiece painting The Resurrection of The Soldiers which is painted onto the wall of the chapel.  In an explosion of movement, soldiers appear out of a cemetry, shaking hands with their collegues, looking about themselves bewildered while horses also rear up into life again, a young soldier gazes in sad contemplation at the figure of Christ on his memorial cross as behind him the real Christ collects crosses from the resurrected men like a teacher collecting sports equipment at the end of a game.

It was an exhibition that by turns moved, enlightened and made one happy.

Soon after this we went to the Ben Uri Gallery off Abbey Road - so tiny we walked past it once trying to find it! - to see UPROAR!, a celebration of the first 50 years of The London Group.

The London Group was formed in 1913 in opposition to the Royal Academy because the participating artists felt that the RA had become too conservative and sterile.  They were an uneasy alliance of painters - the Camden Town Group were an all-male collective joining forces with the Fitzroy Street Group which included female artists while, in another corner, the Vorticists continually bitched about the Bloomsbury contingency.

They had no collective style, they were only an exhibiting group staging their own shows but they also allowed open submissions from any struggling artists to be displayed alongside the Group member's paintings.  The first Ben Uri Gallery opened two years after the Group was formed and had a close association with it due to the large number of Jewish artists associated with the Group.

Coming so soon after Dulwich Picture Gallery's excellent CRISIS OF BRILLIANCE exhibition it was good to see some of the artists who had featured there - Gertler's The Creation of Eve (1914) made a reappearance while David Bomberg's oppressive Ghetto Theatre (1920), CRW Nevinson's modernist Returning To The Trenches (1915) and Paul Nash's spare, deconstructed King's Cross Station Northern Adventure (1929) were good to see.

Although the Ben Uri has the cramped feeling of a converted newsagents, they certainly filled it well with 50 works of art and although the quality was varied, on the whole it was an enjoyable experience - Hell, I even bought the catalogue as there were enough works that I wanted to know more about.

If I could do a "Supermarket Sweep" of the exhibition - a game Owen and I always play after an exhibition - as well as the four already mentioned, I would nab Gertrude Hermes' flowing walnut sculpture Butterfly (1937), Henri Gaudier-Brzeska's disturbing bronze Bird Swallowing Fish (1914) - he was killed the following year on the Western Front - Edward Wadsworth's evocative Rue Fontaine de Caylus, Marseilles, France (1924), William Roberts' claustrophobic At The Hippodrome (1920), Roger Fry's portrait of Nina Hamnett (1917) - Owen exclaimed "Suzanne Vega!" when he saw it - and, my favourite of all, Duncan Grant's wonderful Window, South of France (1928) where the cool interior of his room, with it's flowered wallpaper and cut flowers in their vase, are seen against the sunlit landscape of Provence.  Gorgeous.

I will end this blog with the truly wonderful PAUL KLEE - MAKING VISIBLE which was at Tate Modern.

What made it so special was that walking through the 17 rooms containing nearly 200 of his works, my eyes were opened to Klee's wonderous world of colour, light and the possibilities of the line - this is the man who wrote that "a line is a dot that went for a walk".

Born into a musical family in Switzerland, Klee switched between music and art as he grew up.  Playing violin brought in money but artistically he struggled to find his own language.  In 1911, he met the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky who was in the process of setting up Der Blaue Reiter, a group devoted to finding new ways to connect modern art to a freer use of colour.  Klee was in good company with fellow-German artists Franz Marc and August Macke.

A trip to France opened his eyes to the new Cubist painters and holidaying in Tunisia made him see colour and light in a new way: "Colour has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever."  The First World War brought the deaths in combat of his friends Macke in 1914 and Marc in 1916 and, a week after the latter, he too was drafted into the infantry.  But this coincided with an edict being passing whereby artists were given preferential postings so Klee never saw active service.  Oddly enough, the chaos of the War freed him and his work in abstract painting finally found him finding his own artistic voice.  The work poured forth: abstract paintings of small rectangles which create a harmony of colour, abstract landscapes and cityscapes, strangely drawn figures lost in an expanse of canvas, kinetic shapes suggesting fish or flowers circle each other - all the time making him an artist difficult to categorize.

In the early 1920s he was invited to teach at the Bauhaus where he was joined two years later by his old friend Kandinsky and by the mid 1920s his work was being praised by the Surrealists, Louis Aragon pointing out "the lightness, grace, spirit, charm and finesse that are his essential qualities".

 

 

But in 1930 Germany became a changed place. He resigned from the Bauhaus - the increased workload was stopping him painting - as well as because of the external political pressures on the school and he started to teach in Dusseldorf but two years later he was dismissed due to his being included in the Nazi's list of 'degenerate artists'.  He emigrated to Switzerland but by now had started to show symptoms of the degenerative illness that would eventually kill him.  

He continued to work on through failing health and his paintings during this decade are remarkably varied including experimenting with abstract pointilism.  I wonder how influenced he was by Seurat - I would like to think he was as Klee's musical sense would chime with Seurat's idea of colours side by side having there own harmony.  Inevitably his debilitating illness led to his art becoming more stark, his colour palatte becoming drained as his lines became heavier.  

The last room were sad to experience, the pure joy of 1938's Park Near Lu (with it's happy tree in the centre) and his largest canvas Rich Port giving way to the coiled, angst-ridden images of 1939 but these too give way to the last painting in the exhibition Twilight Flowers which was also Klee's last ever painting completed a few months before his death in 1940.  A row of flowers, different shapes and colours, stand defiant and in complete harmony.

I left the exhibition exhilarated to have seen Klee's genius at first hand - the colours, the simplicity, his tangible joy of life and the sheer breadth of his talent made it an incredibly moving experience.

Redgreen and Violet - Yellow Rhythms (1920), Static-Dynamic Graduation (1923), Fire In The Evening (1929), The Gaze of Silence (1932), Fire at Full Moon (1933)

Needless to say, I bought the catalogue!