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

More postcards from exhibitions and galleries...

1) UNVEILING COOKHAM WAR MEMORIAL (1922) - Stanley Spencer

I cannot remember if I bought this at the Dulwich Picture Gallery at their CRISIS OF BRILLIANCE exhibition or at the Stanley Spencer Gallery in his home town of Cookham.  That was quite a special visit as on the way there we visited the Memorial that is portrayed in his painting.

It was a bit quieter than the scene Spencer painted - his figures are squashed around the towering war memorial just after it has been unveiled with a billowing Union Jack being pushed out of the picture frame.  At the other side, young men lounge on the grass, almost deliberately ignoring the throng around the memorial, the people standing beside them look like they are in their best clothes and also seem to be ignoring the hubbub.  However Stanley draws our attention to the white-clad schoolgirls who are laying flowers at the base, doing their best to ignore the misbehaving schoolboys standing behind them although one of them is turning around to acknowledge them.  Oh and the bank of trees are in the distance?  That is now obscured by a large pub where we had our lunch!

2) LE DOCTEUR PAUL GACHET (1828-1909) (1890) - Vincent Van Gogh

This was bought at marvellous Musée D'Orsay in Paris.  Dr. Gachet not only knew a number of artists but was also an avid collector of their work.  Gachet's house was painted in a landscape by Cézanne and he numbered among his friends and clients Victor Hugo, Gustave Courbet, Camille Pissaro, Auguste Renoir and Eduard Manet.

Van Gogh's vibrant but turbulent painting of his doctor was one of his last paintings, completed only a month before his suicide.  The painter thought little of his doctor and Gachet's weary expression probably reflects his relationship with his troubled patient.

3) THE ARRIVAL (1913) - CRW Nevinson

Although this is a Tate postcard I suspect I bought it at the CRISIS OF BRILLIANCE exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery which celebrated the pre-world war class at the Slade School which included Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington, Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer and Christopher Nevinson.  It was an unhappy time for him; he fell in love with Carrington at the same time as his friend Gertler but she favoured the latter which ended his relationship with his friend, and he left with a lifelong grudge against his professor Henry Tonks who had advised him to give up painting.

In Paris just before WWI he met the Futurist painter Marinetti and immediately allied himself with the movement as well as it's UK spokesman Wyndham Lewis.  Their constant sniping at Bloomsbury and the British art world no doubt had been provoked by Nevinson's Slade experiences.  However, as is the nature of movements, their relationship foundered when Nevinson and Marinetti published a UK Futurist manifesto without consulting Lewis who in spite set up the Vorticist movement from which Nevinson was barred!  THE ARRIVAL however is a fascinating mixture of Cubist themes - the fractured planes of view, the numbers and lettering - but also the dynamic Futurist subject of the large ship looming into harbour and the streaming steam from the two tugboats in the foreground.

4) ANNE OF CLEVES (1540) - Hans Holbein the Younger

I bought this at a Holbein exhibition at Tate Britain in 2006.  All art misleads but sometimes it misleads famously.  Anxious to be married again, Henry VIII was urged by Thomas Cromwell, his feared advisor, to consider the German Anne of Cleves as a good prospect as her father was a staunch Protestant and could be an ally against the Pope.  Along with written accounts of her provided by Cromwell, court painter Hans Holbein was sent to paint several portraits of her.  Henry liked what he saw so it was full steam ahead.  On New Year's Eve 1539 the couple finally met - and the steam disappeared.

It turns out Holbein's full-on face portrait disguised her rather protruding nose as well as her pitted skin.  Holbein was not on the end of Henry's anger but Cromwell was.  The marriage was annulled as quickly as possible.  However Anne proved herself so amenable to the agreement that she had property and gifts lavished on her and was granted status as Henry's "beloved sister".  All of which left him free to marry Anne's previous lady-in-waiting Catherine Howard - on the same day that Cromwell was executed, a fate that Catherine suffered only 19 months later.  Anne's obvious common sense and pragmatism shines out from her infamous portrait.

5) MARIE ANTOINETTE A LA ROSE (1783) - Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun

Another court-approved painter, another Queen, I bought this at the marvellous Vigée LeBrun exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris last year.  Marie Antoinette, unhappy with the portraits that had been painted of her, turned in 1778 to the popular society painter Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun to paint her portrait for her mother Empress Marie Theresa.  Both women were only 23 years old and developed a friendly working relationship; Vigée Le Brun was soon the unofficial court painter to the Queen and her family.  Skilled at downplaying any obvious failings in her sisters, Vigée Le Brun's portraits also glow with a warm-hearted humanity

In 1783, with the Queen's help, the painter was accepted into the Académie Royale and exhibited in the Salon for the first time.  It was, of course, a portrait of Marie Antoinette but it caused uproar as Vigée Le Brun had painted the Queen in a white muslin dress, holding a rose and wearing a plumed summer hat and no jewellery, a style the Queen favoured when at her own palace La Petit Trianon at Versailles.  The horrified opinion was that this was *not* how a Queen of France should be presented so it was quickly withdrawn and Vigée Le Brun painted a replacement with the Queen still holding a rose but more 'appropriately' attired in grey silk, lace and ribbons, pearls, a gold necklace, rouged and wearing a powdered wig with plumes.  Ironic isn't it that one of the charges against Marie Antoinette was that she too extravagant?  Vigée Le Brun's changing the setting from an indoor to an outdoor one also gives the portrait a more classical Romantic feel.

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!

So... where was I?

Hopefully Constant Reader you are still there.
 
It's been a while.
 
It's a funny thing but when you lose faith in what you think of things then it is difficult to think that others will be interested too.
 
So I have not shared my thoughts on this, that and t'other and have wondered what might make me start again.  That production? That film? That gig? That exhibition?
 
Well no.  Not that exhibition.
 
But this exhibition has!

 
Yesterday afternoon Owen and I had an adventure and made our way to the leafy 'burbs of Dulwich.  It's like another world!  Hard to believe it's only 20-something minutes from Brixton by bus.  I presume it's twinned with Richmond.  You know, the kind of place where you wonder how did we ever lose an Empire.
 
Which was all very appropriate as we went to see an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery (I do like the use of the word Picture) which covered the years 1908 - 1922 in the artistic lives of six students of the Slade Art School: Paul Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, David Bomberg and, my own favourite, Dora Carrington.
 
It's not a huge exhibition but it does give you an insight into the six artists and in particular, their humanity.  Time and again your read their own comments on the changes they are living through - their struggles with what movement best represents them and in particular, the men's response to the all-encompassing impact of World War I.
 

 
I knew Carrington and, to a lesser degree, Gertler and Spencer, but it was good to get more familiar with the work of the other three, Nevinson in particular.  I had written him off as one of Wyndham Lewis' lot but was heartened to find out that they had fallen out.  His modernist works such as 'Dance Hall Scene' give way to the more, blocky woodcut-like paintings of the War years.  Along with Paul Nash's desolate paintings of the blasted Western Front, they make for sombre viewing,
 
It strikes me that Carrington is the most under-represented of the six artists while David Bomberg remains the most elusive to define.  The exhibition does leave you feeling oddly sad, as so few of them seemed to fulfil the genuine promise of their pre-war years.  Of the six, Carrington and Gertler killed themselves, Nevinson and Bomberg ended their lives in obscurity while Nash and Spencer thrived.  Spencer is the strangest case, his unique vision remains the most constant throughout the exhibition.  I wonder if this points to a reason for his more long-term success over his contemporaries.
 
Last year I had recourse to research more into Carrington's life so it was a joy to see her work again.  From her early pencil sketches - her study of Gertler is particularly fine - and a delightfully illustrated letter to Paul Nash, to her paintings, she reveals how she made the personal public.  None more so than in her hypnotic portrait of her beloved Lytton Strachey.

 
I stood looking at this picture for a long time, caught up in the intensity of her concentration, with, I don't mind telling you, a tear welling.  Entering the last room I read on the wall the entry she wrote 21 days after Lytton's death from undiagnosed cancer "Everything was for you... I see my paints, & think it is no use for Lytton will never see my pictures now, & I cry" and felt so sad.    

The exhibition is open until September 22nd so there is still plenty of time to experience it for yourselves - clicky on the image below:

Um.

It's good to be back x