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 - Pictures At An Exhibition #16

As museums and galleries close for another lockdown here are some postcards I have liberated from their shelves in the past...

1) PORTRAIT OF A GIRL (1912) - Mark Gertler

I bought this at the Dulwich Picture Gallery when it showed the CRISIS OF BRILLIANCE exhibition which celebrated the pre-WWI year at the Slade School which included Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington, Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer and Christopher Nevinson.  Mark Gertler was 21 when he painted this lovely study of a young woman in his final year at the Slade.

Gertler has painted her in a soft mauve blouse with a matching headress, which really pops against a dark green wall.  The bright red bead necklace which hangs loosely around her neck is gathered in her hand and she gazes coolly out at us like a Renaissance heroine. I really like the marriage of colours in this as well as the subject's impassive stare.  This is in the Tate collection.

2) THE TOMB OF FRA ANGELICO (circa 1455) - Isaia da Pisa

This came from the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva which is down the left-hand side of the Pantheon in Rome - you cannot miss it, there is a huge statue of an elephant carrying an obelisk outside! Although "a flower of Tuscany". the former Guido de Pietro died while working in Rome so is buried there.

In 2018 the full-length marble tomb stone was damaged by vandals so I hope it has been restored.  Next to the tomb is a lovely epitaph which sums up the humble Dominican Friar who was also one of the greatest of Renassance painters; it translates as:

When singing my praise, don't liken my talents to those of Apelles.
Say, rather, that, in the name of Christ, I gave all I had to the poor.

The deeds that count on Earth are not the ones that count in Heaven.

I, Giovanni, am the flower of Tuscany.

3) 'YO': SELF PORTRAIT (1901) - Pablo Picasso

This came from the Courtauld Gallery in 2013 when they mounted an exhibition of Picasso's work all from his pivotal year of 1901.  Picasso started 1901 in Barcelona but the end of the year found him back in Paris, painting the spare, emotive works of his 'Blue Period'.

Pablo emerges from a dark background, staring at the viewer: you can really feel the burning concentration in his eyes as he captures the moment in time and his place in it.  His jacket is sketched in with broad strokes, the main attraction is Pablo and he makes sure nothing distracts from it.

4) BUST OF QUEEN NEFERTITI (circa 1345 bc) - Thutmose (?)

Mona who?  The real iconic female artwork for the ages is the glorious bust of Queen Nefertiti, who reigns in serene, imperious isolation at the Neues Museum in Berlin.  After wandering - or running - through their Egyptian rooms, you are ushered into her presence a few at a time and take your place in history, walking around and around her, trying to find something unexpected.

It was discovered in 1912 by the German archeologist Ludwig Borchardt in the site of the workshop of sculpter Thutmose in the ruined site of the city of Armana which was the capital city of Akhenaten, Nerfertiti's pharaoh husband.  Mystery surrounds most of her life and the overthrowing of Akhenaten due to his wish to move Egypt from a multi-god belief system to one based around the sun, the Aten, would have helped her attempted erasure from history but how remarkable that her face is the eternal female representation of Ancient Egypt as the death mask of her son-in-law - and stepson - Tutankhamun represents the male.  She is glorious....

5) TORNABUONI CHAPEL, SANTA MARIA NOVELLA (1485-1490) - Domenico Ghirlandaio

The Tornabuoni Chapel is the main chapel in Florence's monumental Santa Maria Novella which is where this was bought; it can be a bit of a tight squeeze negotiating around the gothic altar to see the Ghirlandaio frescoes but it's worth persevering as they still look wonderfully intact.  He worked on the frescos with his students so Michelangelo's brushwork might be on them somewhere.

Giovanni Tornabuoni was, as usual, a merchant and banker whose sister was the mother of Lorenzo de Medici.  When the chapel was sold to him, he commissioned Ghirlandaio to fresco the walls with scenes from the lives of John The Baptist and the Virgin Mary.  They, of course. feature the Tornabuoni family and their powerful friends and relatives, among the many characterful faces on show.

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

Another selection of postcards that have grabbed my eye at exhibitions and galleries...

1) THE RISEN CHRIST (1521) - Michelangelo

This was bought in the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva where Michelangelo's glorious statue stands between the main altar and the grave of artist Fra Angelo.  It is remarkable to be able to get so close to such a life-size wonder.

This is the second version of the statue that Michelangelo carved.  He had started the private commission in 1515 and had nearly finished it when he noticed the white marble had a black streak in it so stopped work on it and started afresh.  He created it in Florence and it was then moved to Rome.  The bronze loincloth was added later on, the bloody prudes!  The first version can still be seen in a Monastery near Viterbo in Italy although it was shown at the National Gallery in 2017.

2) SUNFLOWERS IN THE GARDEN AT PETIT GENNEVILLIERS (1885) - Gustave Caillebotte

 

This was bought at Madrid's Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza when I visited their lovely exhibition of paintings by the impressionist Gustave Caillebotte.  He is still under-appreciated, his best known works are evocative paintings of La Belle Epoque Paris.  He was not only a member of the original group of impressionists but also a patron of them.  Possibly his most famous painting is "The Floor Scrapers" showing three working men stripping the parquet off a Parisian apartment floor.

But Caillebotte also loved painting gardens and the outdoor locations around Petit-Grenevilliers, a suburb outside Paris where he had a house.  He moved there permanently three years after painting this rapturous painting of sunflowers crowding the foreground of his garden, you can almost feel the sun and the buzzing of bees.  Gustave came from a wealthy family and his painting slowed towards the end of his life as he found other interests to pursue.  Sadly he died of pulmonary congestion while working in his beloved garden, he was 45.

3) STROZZI CHAPEL, SANTA MARIA NOVELLA (1502) - Fillipino Lippi

Santa Maria Novella is the huge church which faces the main station in Florence and it was consecrated in 1420, 144 years after building started on it!  It's glorious marble frontage conceals many treasures within.

One being the Strozzi chapel that is beside the main altar which featues frescoes by Fillippino Lippi of scenes from the lives of the Apostles Philip and James.  Filippo Strozzi was a rich Florentine banker and statesman who commisioned this chapel and the Strozzi Palace near the Duomo but didn't live to see either completed but he is buried in the chapel. The paintings are very colourful and very Florentine!

4) GILBERT CANNAN AND HIS MILL (1916) - Mark Gertler

 

I bought this at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford to remember Gertler's wonderful painting of his friend, the writer Gilbert Cannan. The painting has the similar colours of orange, blue and whites that featured in his anti-war MERRY-GO-ROUND from the same year. Cannan had met Gertler through Lady Ottoline Morrell and, through him, also knew painters Dora Carrington and CRW Nevinson; Cannan later wrote a novel of the artists' complex love triangle. Cannan was living in the mill in Buckinghamshire at the time with his wife and two Newfoundland dogs Sammy and Luath.  

 

Think Luath looks familiar?  Cannan had been JM Barrie's secretary and in 1909 started a relationship with Barrie's wife Mary who felt neglected by him.  After a highly-publicized divorce case Gilbert and Mary married in 1910 - and Luath came along too.  Luath's claim to fame is she was the inspiration for Nana in PETER PAN.  In the same year, Cannan suffered a mental breakdown brought on by the stress of WWI and his marriage ended in 1918.  He suffered another breakdown in 1923 and spent the rest of his life in sanatoriums.  Gertler tragically killed himself in 1939.

5) THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON (1812) - Francisco de Goya

I bought this at the National Gallery's exhibition of Goya portraits.  I find Goya a bit tricky: overly florid and over-emphatic but I was taken with this simple chalk drawing of the Duke, possibly done as a run-up to his more detailed portrait in oils.  Wellington sat for Goya after he liberated Madrid through winning the Battle of Salamanca.

The drawing presents a Wellington different to the usual pomp and circumstance portraits of him, here he looks a bit more human, a bit more unprepared and natural, he was 43 at the time.  This is now in the collection of the British Museum while the oil painting is in the National Gallery collection.

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!