February 22nd, 2010 Mark Brown
Curator says first major exhibition devoted to British artist since 1988 will show that there is more to him than his female figures
Henry Moore, Britain's best known and most important sculptor, is often seen as a buttoned-up Yorkshireman whose work is as easygoing and safe as it gets. But a new exhibition opening tomorrow reveals his demons: this is a man much darker, edgier and more complex than we realise, say curators.
Tate Britain tomorrow opens the most important exhibition of Moore works for a generation. It hopes to surprise those who think they know Moore – and he is mostly known for his enormous postwar outdoor sculptures – as well as introducing him to a whole new audience.
More than 150 works, including stone sculptures, wood carvings, bronzes and drawings, have been gathered for what is also one of Tate Britain's longest exhibitions in recent memory – it will run for almost six months. A spokeswoman said it was "an experiment" and the hope was the show would attract more overseas visitors during the summer.
Chris Stephens, the show's co-curator, called it reassessment, or "a revisiting". He said the exhibition was setting out to show there is much more to the artist than his easily recognisable gently rounded female figures and abstract forms. Familiarity with the artist had almost bred contempt, he said. "We think we know Henry Moore because he is still so visible and recognisable and also still so popular."
Instead Moore was producing art that was informed by the trauma and horrors of the first world war. And when it came to sex, he was sculpting pieces that were wholly sexually driven and erotically charged. "The sort of things we accept without question about Francis Bacon or Picasso but they also run through Henry Moore's work as well."
Stephens believes Moore's first world war experiences – three quarters of his battalion died and was gassed at the battle of Cambrai – had a profound effect on his art. It brought a darkness and psychological complexity to his work.
Moore, son of a Yorkshire coal mining engineer, was always reluctant to talk specifically about what informed his art, he was from a class and generation who just did not go on about their emotions or their feelings.
After the war Moore became a superstar artist, creating huge works in places like Harlow and Stevenage that were emblematic of the new welfare state, of the reconstruction of Britain.
24 years after his death, he remains popular but not as regarded as some believe he should be. "The conundrum is that he is still incredibly popular, incredibly familiar," said Stephens, "and yet he somehow lacks a critical respect. We wanted to return to what was it about Moore that made him the most important sculptor of the modern age."
Moore may be one of Britain's greatest artists yet the last big show devoted to his work was a memorial show at the Royal Academy in 1988, two years after his death.
For exhibitions at the Tate – an institution Moore is bound up with and to which he donated a large amount of work – you have to go back to a drawings retrospective in 1977, his 70th birthday retrospective in 1968 and before that the 1951 Festival of Britain retrospective.
"It is a generation since his last major show yes and often it takes a generation," said Stephens. "You need a lapse in time sometimes, it allows you to bring new ideas and ways of looking at art."
Richard Calvocoressi, director of the Henry Moore Foundation, said: "It is no exaggeration to say that this is the most important Henry Moore exhibition in the 33-year life of the foundation. It is true that we've done exhibitions in the last three decades all over the world, in China, Brazil, the United States but this is unquestionably the most important show in the last 30 years. It is not a retrospective and it's all the more exciting and intelligent for that."
The exhibition also asserts that Moore, as Official War Artist during the second world war, produced drawings – known as the Shelter Drawings – that he claimed were made from his own observance when, in fact, they were copied from photographs in Picture Post.
While this makes it seem that Moore was a dissembler, according to Stephens the revelations enhance Moore's reputation even more. He might not have wanted it known but by reproducing the photographs he was using mechanical reproduction techniques that artists such as Bacon and Richard Hamilton used.
• Henry Moore, Tate Britain 24 February – 8 August
Posted in Art, Culture, Exhibitions, Henry Moore, News, Tate Britain, UK news, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 22nd, 2010 Mark Brown
Curator says first major exhibition devoted to British artist since 1988 will show that there is more to him than his female figures
Henry Moore, Britain's best known and most important sculptor, is often seen as a buttoned-up Yorkshireman whose work is as easygoing and safe as it gets. But a new exhibition opening tomorrow reveals his demons: this is a man much darker, edgier and more complex than we realise, say curators.
Tate Britain tomorrow opens the most important exhibition of Moore works for a generation. It hopes to surprise those who think they know Moore – and he is mostly known for his enormous postwar outdoor sculptures – as well as introducing him to a whole new audience.
More than 150 works, including stone sculptures, wood carvings, bronzes and drawings, have been gathered for what is also one of Tate Britain's longest exhibitions in recent memory – it will run for almost six months. A spokeswoman said it was "an experiment" and the hope was the show would attract more overseas visitors during the summer.
Chris Stephens, the show's co-curator, called it reassessment, or "a revisiting". He said the exhibition was setting out to show there is much more to the artist than his easily recognisable gently rounded female figures and abstract forms. Familiarity with the artist had almost bred contempt, he said. "We think we know Henry Moore because he is still so visible and recognisable and also still so popular."
Instead Moore was producing art that was informed by the trauma and horrors of the first world war. And when it came to sex, he was sculpting pieces that were wholly sexually driven and erotically charged. "The sort of things we accept without question about Francis Bacon or Picasso but they also run through Henry Moore's work as well."
Stephens believes Moore's first world war experiences – three quarters of his battalion died and was gassed at the battle of Cambrai – had a profound effect on his art. It brought a darkness and psychological complexity to his work.
Moore, son of a Yorkshire coal mining engineer, was always reluctant to talk specifically about what informed his art, he was from a class and generation who just did not go on about their emotions or their feelings.
After the war Moore became a superstar artist, creating huge works in places like Harlow and Stevenage that were emblematic of the new welfare state, of the reconstruction of Britain.
24 years after his death, he remains popular but not as regarded as some believe he should be. "The conundrum is that he is still incredibly popular, incredibly familiar," said Stephens, "and yet he somehow lacks a critical respect. We wanted to return to what was it about Moore that made him the most important sculptor of the modern age."
Moore may be one of Britain's greatest artists yet the last big show devoted to his work was a memorial show at the Royal Academy in 1988, two years after his death.
For exhibitions at the Tate – an institution Moore is bound up with and to which he donated a large amount of work – you have to go back to a drawings retrospective in 1977, his 70th birthday retrospective in 1968 and before that the 1951 Festival of Britain retrospective.
"It is a generation since his last major show yes and often it takes a generation," said Stephens. "You need a lapse in time sometimes, it allows you to bring new ideas and ways of looking at art."
Richard Calvocoressi, director of the Henry Moore Foundation, said: "It is no exaggeration to say that this is the most important Henry Moore exhibition in the 33-year life of the foundation. It is true that we've done exhibitions in the last three decades all over the world, in China, Brazil, the United States but this is unquestionably the most important show in the last 30 years. It is not a retrospective and it's all the more exciting and intelligent for that."
The exhibition also asserts that Moore, as Official War Artist during the second world war, produced drawings – known as the Shelter Drawings – that he claimed were made from his own observance when, in fact, they were copied from photographs in Picture Post.
While this makes it seem that Moore was a dissembler, according to Stephens the revelations enhance Moore's reputation even more. He might not have wanted it known but by reproducing the photographs he was using mechanical reproduction techniques that artists such as Bacon and Richard Hamilton used.
• Henry Moore, Tate Britain 24 February – 8 August
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February 21st, 2010 Laura Cumming
Courtauld Gallery, London
What is a dream but a reel of images you can only see when your eyes are closed? Every other definition is subjective. Visions, visitations, the workings of the subconscious, the reliving or reordering of experience, yearnings and fears transformed into outlandish scenarios: whatever else they represent, dreams take the form of secret and inexplicably linked images. And though they seem a modern obsession, no artist has ever made their mystery more perfectly visible – turned it inside out – than Michelangelo.
Michelangelo's Dream, as it is known, is the centrepiece of one of the greatest (yet smallest) shows you will ever see. The drawing shows a winged figure alighting from the skies, blowing a soundless trumpet into the forehead of a sleeper; though at first glance this male nude seems more awake than asleep, for his eyes appear open. Beneath him is a box full of theatrical masks; propped at his back a rock-hard globe; around him a halo of spectral scenes materialising on the page like breath on a mirror.
But what strikes straight away is the incredible softness of the drawing and the strange weightlessness of the sleeper. So magnificently muscled and yet light enough to levitate, he might be a figment in himself; Captain Marvel minus his costume.
The bulging money bag proffered by huge hands, the old man gathered up by the scruff, flaccid as his own nightshirt, the thug about to brain his victim: the images radiating round the sleeper run all the way from the comic to the horrifying, erotic, incoherent and symbolic. Just like a dream, you might say.
But that only covers the content. What is so exceptional is the way these images are present without quite being defined, and defined without being altogether present. They fade in and out, diaphanous, unreal, scenically separate and yet continuously interlinked. Our stock analogy for dreams is cinema, but Michelangelo is closer to the truth: precise as they are, his pictures are already vanishing, as if escaping from memory.
The Dream was made around 1533 for Tommaso de' Cavalieri, the love of Michelangelo's life. The artist was 57 when they met, the young Roman nobleman somewhere between 13 and 20 but probably nearer to 13. Or so one hopes, given the embarrassing bathos of his response: "ben fatto", he writes back, "well made".
Every surviving gift from Michelangelo to de' Cavalieri is in this show: letters, poems, drawings in black and red chalk. Some have never travelled outside Italy before. You can try to make a love story from the images, as some scholars have, citing all these beautiful bodies in motion, striving, falling, surging, heroic; though in this respect they are pretty much indivisible from the rest of Michelangelo's art whereas the letters are openly adoring. Of de' Cavalieri's feelings little is known: he married and had children; he learned to draw from these works; he was there at the artist's deathbed.
But the drawings bring Michelangelo's mind far closer than the Sistine ceiling (or the letters) ever can, and here are the show's revelations. That Michelangelo is the greatest draughtsman who ever lived is a commonplace, even though his was an age of incredible performers on paper. And everyone knows that his figures excel, that his grasp of form and conflation of the real with the ideal are without parallel.
But it is much harder to catch the strangeness of Michelangelo's originality than its power. Standing close, you become intimate with its inflections here. What would it be like if a chariot and horses were tipped from the clouds, to decimate the doomed below? How might a torso look when solidifying into a tree? Is a satyr more comic than sinister? Nobody has ever seen such things, still less an eagle ravishing a boy or a corpse quickening into life, but Michelangelo makes the barely conceivable spectacularly real. To see the so-called presentation drawings all together is a dreamy, stream-of-consciousness experience in itself. Characters, motifs and ideas appear and reappear; each work seems to give rise to the next. Phaeton plunges from his chariot, Ganymede is snatched upwards by the bird, his helpless limbs spreadeagled; the winged spirit swoops to the sleeper, the spirit leaps skywards from the grave.
The same figure – Tityus, prone, shackled and about to be devoured by another eagle – even doubles as Christ rising from the tomb. Michelangelo simply flips the page, holds it to the light and resurrects the form, inspiring it with new life. The Bible story becomes a model for his art.
And the apotheosis of the show is one final uprush: Christ's stone-cold body returning to eternal life in a shiver of futurist motion. Which other artist could endow solid form with such supernatural lightness: Christ rises, but there is no visible source of force, within or without. Is this, the drawing implies, what divine power might be like?
It is a lightning strike of pure imagination, like the nearly-meeting fingers of God and Adam between which one imagines the sparks leaping. Michelangelo seems to intuit, and anticipate, electricity; and even the fluid continuities, if not the medium, of cinema. If this sounds far-fetched, compare Michelangelo with his peers in a special section of this superbly curated show.
Of the many contemporaries who copied The Dream, not one could help fixing the images and limiting the space. Even Dürer's equally mysterious Melancholia, with its morose angel in her junkyard of allegorical symbols, is earthbound and heavily defined. Whereas Michelangelo's visions appear to be still arriving on the page, while at the same time departing: their dimension not so much space as time.
The Dream makes the mind's motions visible (and, of course, those of the artist). The crux of the drawing is the dreamer's eye, open and yet unseeing. Even with a magnifying glass it is still not possible to determine the implied angle of vision. The pupil is barely discernible, a chalk particle, and the look is inward; inward looking – the very definition of a dream.
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February 20th, 2010 Robert Clark, Skye Sherwin
Kill Your Timid Notion, Dundee
There's likely to be nothing timid about this annual festival of music, art and film. KYTN defines its agenda as radically experimental and largely participatory. Projects by artists such as influential film-maker Morgan Fisher, Basque sonic provocateurs Mattin, and Sharon Lockhart's Teatro Amazonas are staged together just to see what happens. Yet the liberated spirit of free improvisation is countered by a precise accordance with quite absurdly systematised procedures. So Christof Migone will ask audiences to join him in beating the floor 1,000 times for a piece called Hit Parade. Then there's a screening of Tehching Hsieh's Performance 1980-1981, a six-minute film recording the artist punching the clock every hour on the hour for a year. Daft, yes, but so committed it's convincing.
Dundee Contemporary Arts, Sun to 28 Feb
Robert Clark
Ron Arad, London
Design objects have become familiar art gallery fodder in recent years. Meanwhile, spangly new labels like Design Art have sprung up to explain a particularly baroque brand of product design. Chances are, though, that Ron Arad doesn't care for classifications. In 1981 when he grafted Rover car seats to a steel frame, he found himself catapulted into the design limelight. He has since blasted his own path, exuberantly playing off form against function. This exhibition gives visitors the chance to test his innovations in fittings and fixtures for themselves. Bookcases roll, vases bounce and an LED light chandelier transmits text messages.
Barbican Art Gallery, EC2, to 16 May
Skye Sherwin
Jorge Pardo/Anne Tallentire, Dublin
Not only does Jorge Pardo use just about all fine art media, he adopts techniques from architecture and interior and furniture design for a fine art purpose. So this retrospective is presented in the form of an elaborate photo-mural wallpaper. Anne Tallentire's work uses video performance, photography and sculptural assemblage to present fragmented narratives of urban glimpses. She obliquely focuses our attention on such apparent banalities as a yellow "Stop" sign being painted on a tarmac road, so they appear like a moving and revealing vocabulary of urban life. "I use the frame to find out what lies beyond it, at the limit of the image," she says.
Irish Museum Of Modern Art, to 3 May
Robert Clark
Gary Hume, Salisbury
Super-slick paintings featuring bland subjects – everything from blackbirds and flowers to Kate Moss – made Gary Hume the quintessential 1990s artist. With his bright blocks of colour realised with household gloss paint on thin, unyielding aluminium, this YBA's oeuvre was as knowingly soulless as the times, beguiling and frustrating in equal doses. In negotiating the bumpy transition of these themes into the 21st century, the last decade has seen the artist develop his play with surface through mediums as various as charcoal and luxuriant marble. New paintings on aluminium, in the candy-coloured pastel palette with which he made his name, offset works on canvas in darker hues: flowers in muted blues and oranges against an intense charcoal black.
New Art Centre, to 18 Apr
Skye Sherwin
Henry Tietzsch-Tyler, Gainsborough
There's an air of an interzone no-man's-land about Henry Tietzsch-Tyler's paintings. They are heavily shaded, dense with obscurities, and just about as abstract as abstract can get, despite their surface of worried gestures. While the artist is open about some of his sources arising from his Anglo-German origins, his statements of intention are more concerned to be painstakingly honest than accessible. As a handy reference he cites the term Zwischenraum, which he defines as "a space or place that has no meaning in itself but rather gathers up the meanings of those things that press against it". There's something almost petrified about this art; these are paintings in which expressive impulses are muted, images suspended in uncertainty, yet for sure it's serious stuff.
BendInTheRiver, to 13 Mar
Robert Clark
Kenneth Anger, London
The reputation that precedes Kenneth Anger's name is long and strange: godfather of avant garde cinema; occultist and Crowley devotee; Hollywood scandal-pedlar; prickly provocateur of pop culture. This show brings together two strands on which his taboo-busting cult reputation is based. The 1969 film Invocation Of My Demon Brother is a sexy, scary and wildly psychedelic plunge into the ominous vibe that marked the latter days of the 1960s. Mick Jagger provided the trippy soundtrack, while Lucifer was played by Bobby Beausoleil, a cohort of Charles Manson's later convicted of murder. There's also his neon work, Hollywood Babylon, a nod to Anger's infamous exposé of the same title, a book full of scabrous tales of the film industry's sinister side.
Sprüth Magers, W1, to 27 Mar
Skye Sherwin
Leo Fitzmaurice & Kim Rugg, Manchester
Leo Fitzmaurice has called himself a detourist who goes in for "design-bending". Cutting up and rearranging commercial catalogues, posters, flyers and cardboard packaging, his methods might seem basic, but their outcome can be amazing. He takes the detritus of consumer advertising and transforms it into a series of sculptural constructions that come on like maquettes for futuristic devotional architecture. Kim Rugg's cut-and-paste scrapbook aesthetic is targeted at more weighty media messages. With almost obsessive patience, she cuts out the printed letters and rearranges them into alphabetical or seemingly arbitrary order. The Guardian becomes "aaedGhinrTu". She has also chopped up postage stamps, stuck the tiny fragments onto envelopes, and successfully sent them through the post. It somehow makes you feel like cheering.
Castlefield Gallery, Sat to 3 Apr
Robert Clark
Henry Moore, London
Sometimes it feels like there's always a Henry Moore exhibition going on somewhere in Britain. This can dull his impact, alongside all that public sculpture he made. Yet Moore's reappraisal has been steadily building, thanks partly to a younger generation of artists peering into modernism's nooks and crannies. This Tate survey attempts to cut through the artist's over-familiar, conservative image, turning out one massive reclining figure or Mother and Child after another. Featuring 150 works, it's a definitive one-stop shop of a show which situates the artist's radical achievements against his changing times. Highlights include Moore's extraordinary, era-defining drawings of the Blitz.
Tate Britain, SW1, Wed to 8 Aug
Skye Sherwin
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Editorial, Exhibitions, The Guardian | Comments Off
February 20th, 2010 Robert Clark, Skye Sherwin
Kill Your Timid Notion, Dundee
There's likely to be nothing timid about this annual festival of music, art and film. KYTN defines its agenda as radically experimental and largely participatory. Projects by artists such as influential film-maker Morgan Fisher, Basque sonic provocateurs Mattin, and Sharon Lockhart's Teatro Amazonas are staged together just to see what happens. Yet the liberated spirit of free improvisation is countered by a precise accordance with quite absurdly systematised procedures. So Christof Migone will ask audiences to join him in beating the floor 1,000 times for a piece called Hit Parade. Then there's a screening of Tehching Hsieh's Performance 1980-1981, a six-minute film recording the artist punching the clock every hour on the hour for a year. Daft, yes, but so committed it's convincing.
Dundee Contemporary Arts, Sun to 28 Feb
Robert Clark
Ron Arad, London
Design objects have become familiar art gallery fodder in recent years. Meanwhile, spangly new labels like Design Art have sprung up to explain a particularly baroque brand of product design. Chances are, though, that Ron Arad doesn't care for classifications. In 1981 when he grafted Rover car seats to a steel frame, he found himself catapulted into the design limelight. He has since blasted his own path, exuberantly playing off form against function. This exhibition gives visitors the chance to test his innovations in fittings and fixtures for themselves. Bookcases roll, vases bounce and an LED light chandelier transmits text messages.
Barbican Art Gallery, EC2, to 16 May
Skye Sherwin
Jorge Pardo/Anne Tallentire, Dublin
Not only does Jorge Pardo use just about all fine art media, he adopts techniques from architecture and interior and furniture design for a fine art purpose. So this retrospective is presented in the form of an elaborate photo-mural wallpaper. Anne Tallentire's work uses video performance, photography and sculptural assemblage to present fragmented narratives of urban glimpses. She obliquely focuses our attention on such apparent banalities as a yellow "Stop" sign being painted on a tarmac road, so they appear like a moving and revealing vocabulary of urban life. "I use the frame to find out what lies beyond it, at the limit of the image," she says.
Irish Museum Of Modern Art, to 3 May
Robert Clark
Gary Hume, Salisbury
Super-slick paintings featuring bland subjects – everything from blackbirds and flowers to Kate Moss – made Gary Hume the quintessential 1990s artist. With his bright blocks of colour realised with household gloss paint on thin, unyielding aluminium, this YBA's oeuvre was as knowingly soulless as the times, beguiling and frustrating in equal doses. In negotiating the bumpy transition of these themes into the 21st century, the last decade has seen the artist develop his play with surface through mediums as various as charcoal and luxuriant marble. New paintings on aluminium, in the candy-coloured pastel palette with which he made his name, offset works on canvas in darker hues: flowers in muted blues and oranges against an intense charcoal black.
New Art Centre, to 18 Apr
Skye Sherwin
Henry Tietzsch-Tyler, Gainsborough
There's an air of an interzone no-man's-land about Henry Tietzsch-Tyler's paintings. They are heavily shaded, dense with obscurities, and just about as abstract as abstract can get, despite their surface of worried gestures. While the artist is open about some of his sources arising from his Anglo-German origins, his statements of intention are more concerned to be painstakingly honest than accessible. As a handy reference he cites the term Zwischenraum, which he defines as "a space or place that has no meaning in itself but rather gathers up the meanings of those things that press against it". There's something almost petrified about this art; these are paintings in which expressive impulses are muted, images suspended in uncertainty, yet for sure it's serious stuff.
BendInTheRiver, to 13 Mar
Robert Clark
Kenneth Anger, London
The reputation that precedes Kenneth Anger's name is long and strange: godfather of avant garde cinema; occultist and Crowley devotee; Hollywood scandal-pedlar; prickly provocateur of pop culture. This show brings together two strands on which his taboo-busting cult reputation is based. The 1969 film Invocation Of My Demon Brother is a sexy, scary and wildly psychedelic plunge into the ominous vibe that marked the latter days of the 1960s. Mick Jagger provided the trippy soundtrack, while Lucifer was played by Bobby Beausoleil, a cohort of Charles Manson's later convicted of murder. There's also his neon work, Hollywood Babylon, a nod to Anger's infamous exposé of the same title, a book full of scabrous tales of the film industry's sinister side.
Sprüth Magers, W1, to 27 Mar
Skye Sherwin
Leo Fitzmaurice & Kim Rugg, Manchester
Leo Fitzmaurice has called himself a detourist who goes in for "design-bending". Cutting up and rearranging commercial catalogues, posters, flyers and cardboard packaging, his methods might seem basic, but their outcome can be amazing. He takes the detritus of consumer advertising and transforms it into a series of sculptural constructions that come on like maquettes for futuristic devotional architecture. Kim Rugg's cut-and-paste scrapbook aesthetic is targeted at more weighty media messages. With almost obsessive patience, she cuts out the printed letters and rearranges them into alphabetical or seemingly arbitrary order. The Guardian becomes "aaedGhinrTu". She has also chopped up postage stamps, stuck the tiny fragments onto envelopes, and successfully sent them through the post. It somehow makes you feel like cheering.
Castlefield Gallery, Sat to 3 Apr
Robert Clark
Henry Moore, London
Sometimes it feels like there's always a Henry Moore exhibition going on somewhere in Britain. This can dull his impact, alongside all that public sculpture he made. Yet Moore's reappraisal has been steadily building, thanks partly to a younger generation of artists peering into modernism's nooks and crannies. This Tate survey attempts to cut through the artist's over-familiar, conservative image, turning out one massive reclining figure or Mother and Child after another. Featuring 150 works, it's a definitive one-stop shop of a show which situates the artist's radical achievements against his changing times. Highlights include Moore's extraordinary, era-defining drawings of the Blitz.
Tate Britain, SW1, Wed to 8 Aug
Skye Sherwin
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Editorial, Exhibitions, The Guardian | Comments Off
February 19th, 2010 Robert Clark, Skye Sherwin
Gary Hume explores his dark side in Manchester, while in London Tate Britain gives Henry Moore a radical twist. Find out what's happening in art around the country
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Editorial, Exhibitions, Henry Moore, Installation, Painting, Sculpture, The Guardian | Comments Off
February 19th, 2010 Maev Kennedy
From office blocks to shopping streets, Moore's sculptures are part of the fabric of Britain – so much so that we no longer notice. A new Tate retrospective wants to make us look again
As a new Tate retrospective prepares to open, it can be difficult to judge the reputation of Henry Moore, in his own lifetime one of the most famous and wealthy artists in the world. It's not that Moore has vanished from the public stage in the years since his death in 1986 – far from it, in fact. Moore's problem is that he has become so ubiquitous as to become near-invisible.
Stand on London's Bond Street, just beneath a massive work by Moore – the four-panel Portland stone Time-Life Screen, installed in 1953 as part of the building of the same name – and you guess that of the thousands of people who pass by every day, barely one looks up, still less admires. The nice American couple I found waiting to have their photograph taken on a park bench between a bronze Churchill and bronze Roosevelt looked startled at being asked what they thought of the Henry Moore. "But that's not by him, is it?" the man said in surprise. "Isn't Moore the guy who punches holes through everything?" If only they'd looked up. Like so much of Moore's work, the Time-Life Screen has become so familiar as to disappear into the background texture of 20th-century British urban life.
It's the same story just down the road in Millbank, where smokers shelter behind the gigantic bronze Locking Piece, and use it as a windbreak. Half a mile away there's another thumping great bronze, the two-section 1962 Knife Edge, opposite the House of Lords – a site chosen by Moore for its high visibility. Half a mile again, and you find Moore's very first public commission, made when he was a teacher at the Royal College of Art, the singularly un-airy West Wind high on the facade of the London Underground block over St James's Park tube station. Take a train to Stevenage and you can locate his first family group – one of many made after the death of his mother and the birth of his only child, Mary, named after her – outside a school, and another that used to be out in the precinct but now takes refuge in the civic centre in Harlow.
An elegant interactive website maintained by the Henry Moore Foundation lists scores more works on public display across 30 sites in Britain alone, from the 1944 Family Group in Aberdeen Art Gallery to the memorial to his friend Christopher Martin in the grounds of Dartington Hall, and even more all over the world, in stone, plaster, bronze, wood, on paper, in tapestries – around 800 works in all.
As the Turner prize-winning artist Simon Starling writes in the catalogue to the new Tate show: "From the beginning, Henry Moore seemed omnipresent – a state-endorsed, global player, the first of his kind perhaps. His huge bronzes seemed to drop from the sky in great meteor showers and felt to my young mind rather clumsy and anachronistic, even provincial." Starling, who won the Turner in 2005 for pieces including Shedboatshed – the shed he dismantled, built into a boat, paddled down the Rhine to a museum and reconstructed as a shed – has also made work directly responding to Moore's, and not necessarily with an admiring eye.
In 2006–07, Starling created a work called Infestation Piece for the Toronto Art Gallery of Ontario, a museum and a city with a complex relationship with Moore. In the late 1950s, a go-getting mayor, Philip Givens, commissioned a major Moore sculpture, The Archer, for its new City Hall. Starling's Infestation Piece is a Moore replica, lowered into the lake until it became encrusted with an invasive species of mussels: a hint that the sculpture itself is a form of alien in the landscape.
The Toronto Art Gallery is the Tate's partner in organising this exhibition. Both museums have world-class collections that were acquired in Moore's lifetime, but Toronto's is much the larger – and the story of how that happened is a fascinating insight into attitudes to Moore in his lifetime. Moore donated major sculptures, drawings, maquettes and other works to the Tate, of which he was a trustee. In the late 1960s, there was discussion of creating a special Henry Moore wing at Tate Britain, which would certainly have attracted many more donations – but the project was seen by some artists as memorialising Moore himself, and attracted bitter criticism. One of the show's curators, Chris Stephens, has written of the episode in an article for the Tate magazine, and of what he terms the "final insult" when in 1968, the year of Moore's 70th birthday, a letter appeared in the Times condemning the proposed wing. It was signed by 41 artists, including his former studio assistants Anthony Caro and Phillip King; not much of a birthday present. Moore donated more than 900 pieces – including some of the works he must have intended for the Tate – to Toronto in 1974, before eventually making another donation to the Tate with no strings attached.
In much the way that his public art now seems commonplace, it is easy to see Moore as invincibly nice and decent: the seventh of eight children of a Yorkshire mining engineer, a scholarship boy who never forgot his working-class roots, whose work speaks of home and family, peace and plenty, a man with socialist sympathies and a pacifist heart. When their London home was damaged in the blitz, the Moores moved to a modest two-storey rented farmhouse, Hoglands, at Perry Green in Hertfordshire – still a surprisingly remote and rural corner of the home counties. They eventually bought the house and the surrounding fields. Moore added workshops no grander than his neighbours' farm sheds, and extended the house slightly, but it has none of the grandeur you might expect of an artist who became a millionaire many times over while he lived there. Indeed, the Henry Moore Foundation, which now maintains the estate as a museum, archive and outdoor sculpture park, was established not just to ensure his legacy but to mop up some of the millions he would otherwise have spent in tax.
Visitors to Perry Green can tour the house, the handsome antique-filled dining room, the bright drawing room with Scandinavian-design modern furniture where grander visitors were received – and the claustrophobic sitting room where the Moores actually spent most of their leisure time, a space filled with rickety furniture that you wouldn't be surprised to see in a charity shop. The house reflects the popular image of the artist as "an easygoing, avuncular figure who produced an equally easygoing form of modern sculpture", as Stephens says – an image which the exhibition will attempt to destroy. There is, the curators aim to show, a lot more to Moore than monumental decency, despite his undergoing the national beatification which befell John Betjeman and has almost smothered Alan Bennett.
The exhibition will bring together more than 150 works, from the early white marble Dog carved in 1922, to a Reclining Figure in seductively polished elm, completed in 1978 when Moore was 80. There will be works in stone, bronze and plaster; working drawings and finished works on paper – including the famous blitz sleepers in London's Underground – and his cramped and contorted miners, who are given an archaic grandeur by the artist. Stephens sees anger, darkness and violence in many of these works – born, he believes, from the first-world-war experience that marked Moore for life: the artist was gassed at Cambrai and was among just 52 survivors from a 400-strong battalion. There is a sinister edge to many pieces, he argues, and a raw sexuality in all those holes and protruberances.
The elm reclining figures are exceptional. Moore himself never saw them together: the first was begun in 1935, and in his lifetime they were scattered across different collections. The surrealist painter Gordon Onslow Ford, who bought the 1939 version of the sculptures, wrote: "I felt that I was in the presence of the mother earth goddess." The critic David Sylvester was one of many who saw something almost menacing in its form – "the sacrificed and resurrected god of a fertility rite". Such views are a timely reminder that the artist was once seen as so threateningly modern that Roland Penrose's neighbours reacted in outrage when he put a Moore Mother and Child in his Hampstead front garden. And when an Essex new town commissioned a work entitled Harlow Family Group, it provoked a public demonstration by people fearful that the sculpture was an obscene jeer at Harlow's "pram town" nickname.
"In contrast to the dominant idea of Moore, we propose that he presented the body as abject, erotic, vulnerable, violated and visceral," Stephens writes. "They are part of a wider challenge to reason, of the redefinition of the human body as discontinuous, fluid and driven by deep unconscious forces, and of a world characterised by apprehension and anxiety, the uncanny and the absurd. Moore's is a troubled and troubling art that digs into the very essence of modern experience." That would be news to the tourists in Bond Street and the Millbank smokers – but maybe it is indeed time they looked again.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, Features, Henry Moore, Heritage, Sculpture, Tate Britain, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 19th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
Ackermann's exhibition at White Cube references century-old techniques but feels thrillingly contemporary
Recently I moaned about the abuse of the term "modern art" to describe the art of today. The joy of working as a critic is that every theoretical notion you may have is going to be contradicted by empirical reality. And lo and behold, I walked into an exhibition yesterday afternoon that proves art is still able to rise in an ambitious and intelligent way to the challenges posed by modern life.
Franz Ackermann (born 1963) lives and works in Berlin. His current exhibition at White Cube, Mason's Yard in London is a whirligig of ideas and impressions. If cinema director Michael Haneke tries to trace the connections of a globalised world in fractured narratives, Ackermann captures the fissions and fusions of our unmoored age through an art of kaleidoscopic energy.
At first glance, his paintings and the playground-like installations in which they are displayed are so bright and hard you begin to dismiss them as just another pop contrivance. But stay a moment. The gallery upstairs is given over to a spectacular, fizzingly theatrical installation where your mind finds it hard to settle on anything: to register the subtlety behind it you need to go downstairs where his paintings are more conventionally displayed and there's enough quiet to assimilate their complexity.
Pulses of colour that resemble computer graphics are interrupted by drawn perspectives; broken images of buildings and city squares judder across storms of energetic random marks. The aesthetic is new and yet it has a history: it responds to the confusions and liberations of contemporary urban life with techniques of fragmentation, explosion and juxtaposition that go back a century, to cubism.
Go back upstairs after taking in his paintings and you can properly appreciate the power and excitement of his installation called Wait. Its hybridisation of painting, sculpture and kinetic art amounts to a street-cultural grotto containing the possibility and menace of modern life: the modern life that we are living, now.
Ackermann's dynamism and colour capture something about the contemporary. Is the exhilaration he depicts that of a new democracy or an impenetrable chaos? It's a great place to visit, Franz Ackermann's 21st century. But would we want to live there?
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February 18th, 2010 Mark Brown
Exhibition by trailblazing Israeli-born designer, architect and artist opens in London, his hometown for more than 35 years
There are bookshelves that bounce and roll, cutlery that pirouettes, a chandelier that you can text and chairs. Lots and lots of chairs. In what may be one of the most comfortable exhibitions of recent years, Britain's first major Ron Arad retrospective opens tomorrow.
The Barbican's art gallery in London is following up major shows it has held on Corbusier and Alvar Aalto by devoting three months to a designer, architect and artist still very much alive and working. Arad, who was born in Israel but has been based in London for more than 35 years, said he hoped anyone "interested in things" would visit.
The head of art galleries at the Barbican, Kate Bush, said: "We want to pay tribute to Ron Arad's very special place in the world of design. He is an incredibly important figure and this exhibition lays out his vision and his process as it has evolved over 30 years."
The show is divided into sections with names such as Volumising, Rolling, Superforming and Scavenging, where one of Arad's most celebrated chairs – the Rover chair, which uses a car seat salvaged from a scrap yard – is exhibited.
Then there is the Failing section, displaying designs that weren't taken up, or were misconceived. That includes the "table that eats chairs" in which chairs can be folded underneath the table top. "I think it was too complicated for the manufacturer," said the show's curator Lydia Yee, "but Ron's still confident that someone will come along."
There have been recent Arad shows at the Pompidou in Paris and Moma in New York, but the one in London was completely different, said its curator, Lydia Yee. "Ron wanted to do something new in his home town and we wanted … to show his interest in new materials and in new technologies."
There is a crystal chandelier called Lolita which has more than a thousand embedded LED lights and its own mobile number to which one can send texts, which are then displayed.
Arad and his studio have also created mechanical tricks to show off some of the pieces such as a long moving platform for bookshelves called "reinventing the wheel". The idea is that you can roll your bookshelves where you would like them – perfect for the indecisive – but there is a wheel within the wheel so the books remain upright.
For many, Arad will be best known for his chairs, many of which are on display and which are most definitely not for sitting on. A large section of the gallery will, however, contain chairs where visitors can take the weight off their feet and – should they wish – play table tennis on a stainless steel ping pong table designed by Arad to suit his game.
Posted in Architecture, Art, Art and design, Culture, Design, Exhibitions, Installation, Life and style, News, Sculpture, The Guardian, UK news | Comments Off
February 17th, 2010 Skye Sherwin
Behind Schorr's seductive photographs of beguiling, budding manhood lie politically pointed themes
Collier Schorr's photography sets out to seduce. Young athletes sweat and strain in machismo display. A teenage boy strikes an apparently girly pose. Adolescents play dress-up in soldier's uniforms. As attractive as this visual feast is, it asks serious questions about how identity is performed and framed. Schorr, who is an American-Jewish lesbian, typically photographs people who appear to be her exact opposite.
Perhaps Schorr's greatest voyage into the unknown has been her project in Schwäbisch Gmünd, a town in southern Germany. She has travelled there every summer for the last 18 years, photographing the life of a small town whose history could scarcely seem more alien. While many of these images feature pastoral idylls and dreams of regeneration, others push notions of otherness to the extreme. Among her series depicting boys dressed as soldiers, one image – entitled Traitor 2001–2004 – is a winningly romantic portrait of an angel-faced, flaxen-haired young man in Nazi uniform. He is, of course, the artist's invention: a present-day German teenager in costume for the camera. The picture might enable Schorr to address the country's painful past, but it also connects with Germany's present, where it remains illegal to display Nazi insignia. Just as significant – if no less troubling – Schorr shows us an image of youthful innocence, far from a movie-stereotype ogre.
While boys are her favoured subject matter, Schorr blurs the boundaries in beguiling if unsettling ways. Her boys frequently look girlish, while girls are to be found masquerading as boys. In Schorr's politically pointed photographs, ambiguity piles up.
Why we like her: Schorr's 2007 exhibition, There I Was, focused on drag-racing star Charlie "Astoria Chas" Snyder, who had been photographed by her father – who worked as a photojournalist – before dying in Vietnam. Seeking to engage with Snyder's life, Schorr turned to drawing, sketching imaginary scenes from a life that was cut brutally short.
Strangers on a train: One of Schorr's most celebrated series happened entirely by chance, after she met a German teenage boy on a train and asked him to model for her. The images that resulted, Jens F, explore the artist/muse relationship through the filter of American artist Andrew Wyeth's paintings of his German neighbour, Helga. Schorr's photographs, created over several years, feature the boy restaging Helga's poses.
Where can I see her? Collier Schorr's exhibition, German Faces, is at Modern Art gallery in London from 19 February to 20 March 2010.
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