February 22nd, 2010 Laura Barnett
'When I was up for the Turner, people talked about me in terms of the emperor's new clothes. I could see their point'
What got you started?
Not being able to decide what I wanted to study. I was interested in architecture, music, psychology and literature. In the end, I chose art school, because art seemed to contain all of these.
Who or what have you sacrificed for your art?
It's really hard to work, in every way. You sacrifice something every time you make a choice between one thing and another. But I work because it helps me to live: without my work, I'm an empty shell.
Is contemporary art misunderstood?
No, because I don't think there's anything in it to understand. Works of art are just arrangements of colours, or shapes: any meaning they have is given to them by the people who value them, or think they're beautiful.
What's your favourite film?
Gregory's Girl. It was filmed near where I grew up and came out when I was a teenager, so it's very much of my time.
Is there anything about your career you regret?
Getting sidetracked by having to deal with work I've already made, rather than concentrating on new work. If a gallery is mounting an exhibition of my work, I often have to deal with it personally. It's a bit like writing and recording a song, and then having to be present every time that song is played on the radio.
Is the art world too money-oriented?
No – I'd say it's probably less money-oriented than most worlds, because it's primarily about people trying to express themselves.
What one song would work as the soundtrack to your life?
I once wrote a song called I Don't Know What I Want, which always comes back to me. I guess it's true.
What advice would you give a young artist?
Do what you're scared of. Often people are scared of the things they really want.
Is there an art form you don't relate to?
No. Everything that everyone does is art, or at least a little creation. There's no difference between someone calling a friend or going down to the shops, and someone else waving their arms around and making marks on a canvas.
What's the worst thing anyone ever said about you?
When I was nominated for the Turner, a lot of people talked about my work in terms of the emperor's new clothes. I could see their point: my piece was just an empty room. But it was also a room where the lights were going on and off, like a mini theatrical production. No one would say that the lighting in a theatre was an emperor's new clothes situation, would they?
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Features, Interviews, Martin Creed, The Guardian | Comments Off
February 21st, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
All the stars of the Young British Art movement appear in this curator's memoirs
All the stars of the YBA movement appear in this former journalist's memoir, swearing and yelling as they go. Typical of Muir's approach is his description of Sarah Lucas's Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, which he describes as "a work of transformative genius", when the point was surely to mock anyone taking the idea of transformative art seriously. Muir describes punky daftness without seeming to know that is what he is talking about, and treats the art as if history had already decided it was up there with Michelangelo. If you know about the YBA phenomenon already, this book is superfluous, not because it's inaccurate (it isn't) but because it adds nothing to the existing mythology. Still, if you're a bright young student wanting an introduction to the art of the period, or a dinner party type who wants to bone up because one of your guests is in the art world, it's a neat package.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Biography, Books, Culture, Features, Reviews, The Observer | Comments Off
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 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 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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February 17th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
In one room, this sensational exhibition shows the greatest drawings that survive from Michelangelo's hand
The Courtauld gallery, that sombre, academic institution, dares to go where Irving Stone never went in his bestselling novel about Michelangelo, The Agony and the Ecstasy. It refutes, with all the authority at its command, centuries of bowdlerisation that have left the nude saints in Michelangelo's painting The Last Judgment still – in 2010 – emasculated by prudish drapes. It gives us the unmade movie Michelangelo in Love, pouring out his soul in art and verse to a handsome youth whose beauty crystallised all the longings inherent in Michelangelo's art ever since he carved his teenage masterpiece The Battle of the Centaurs, with its vision of life as a tumult of wrestling male bodies.
This is a sensational exhibition in more ways than one. It is the most intimate encounter with Michelangelo yet staged by a British gallery but, if you come for the story, you will stay for the art, for here in one room are the greatest drawings that survive from his hand. Most of Michelangelo's surviving sketches are just that, sketches for the sculptures, paintings and buildings that awe visitors to Italy: only a handful of his drawings were intended to be enjoyed as works of art in their own right, and he made most of these as love gifts for Tommaso de' Cavalieri. They are brought together here to release you soaring among winged, ascending and falling beings in the strange and wonderful atmosphere of Michelangelo's "chaste desire", as he described his passion for Tommaso.
Michelangelo's devotion is right there to see, in an amazingly slavish note he scribbled on a drawing of the hubristic Phaeton falling from the sky after he tried to drive the sun god's chariot: "Master Tommaso, if this sketch does not please you, say so …" It must truly have been an overpowering love to reduce Michelangelo, who refused to take orders from popes, to such servility. And what a drawing it is: horses sculpted in delicate black chalk fall in a nightmarish vortex towards twisting mourners whose grief is literally rooting them to the spot. Beside it his finished drawing of the same tragedy, presumably completed after listening to Tommaso's comments, portrays Jupiter high in the heavens hurling a thunderbolt from the back of an eagle. Images of eagles keep recurring, as if in a sex dream scripted by Freud. Michelangelo's most explicit present for Tommaso portrays the classical myth of Ganymede, the beautiful boy carried away by lustful Jupiter who has taken the form of an eagle to achieve his rapture; imagine being young Cavalieri and getting this gift from your famous, older admirer.
Love was in the air in Renaissance Italy, and Michelangelo's drawings compete with the heterosexual hedonism of Titian's paintings: his wonderful red chalk Bacchanal responds to Titian's Children's Bacchanal. But Michelangelo's drawings for Cavalieri are more personal and confessional than any other Renaissance renderings of saucy Roman myth, and what you are left with, as you contemplate the Courtauld's magnificent possession The Dream, which sums up all existence as a striving of bodies and a yearning of souls, is an immense love for this most courageous and human of artists.
Jonathan Jones's book about Michelangelo is published by Simon and Schuster in April.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, Features, Michelangelo, Museums, The Courtauld Institute of Art, The Guardian | Comments Off
February 15th, 2010 Rachel Cooke
Richard Hamilton invented the term 'pop art' 53 years ago and, from his 60s Swingeing London series to Tony Blair as a cowboy, he has been ahead of the curve ever since. On the eve of his new Serpentine show, he grants Rachel Cooke a rare interview
Once upon a time, pop art was new and young and exciting. But it isn't any more, and one way to remind yourself both of its great age and of its move to the establishment mainstream is to consider the case of Richard Hamilton, the artist most regularly described as its "father". For one thing, there is his face. Crikey, what a face. He looks like Abraham as depicted by a children's bible: the sprouting white hair, the magnificent high forehead, a set of teeth that resemble leaning tombstones in a crowded churchyard. For another, there is the fact that Hamilton will soon be the subject of a big new exhibition at London's Serpentine Gallery, one of 10 or 12 similar shows – he forgets how many exactly – that will take place around the world this year. Does all this attention still surprise him?
Hamilton considers a moment, and then says, with mock indignation: "It's getting a bit out of hand, actually." A low chuckle. "It's funny because, in the past, my exhibitions haven't by any means been greeted with praise. When I showed at the Tate in 1992 almost every critic hated it. At Christmas there was a thing in the newspaper: what's the worst exhibition of the year? I won! I suppose it's just that people are coming to realise that I've done some quite serious things over the past, you know, 50 or 60 years. That, and the fact that I've lived longer than all my peers. Joseph Beuys and John Latham are dead. Robert Rauschenberg is dead. Jasper Johns is alive, but when do ever hear about him?" From the corner of the room comes a smaller voice: "Jasper's younger than you, Richard." This is the painter, Rita Donagh, Hamilton's wife, who acts as his handbrake when the need arises.
We are sitting in a gleaming white box of a room at the Serpentine Gallery: me, Hamilton and Donagh, a woman even more amazing to look at than him. She has spectrally pale skin and long grey-white hair, and is wearing black dungarees. She is straight out of Paris Vogue. Later Hamilton tells me that, even after several decades together, he still tells her every day that she is beautiful, and I must say: you can't blame him. Anyway, they are a talented and single-minded couple, these two, and they have known an awful lot of famous people – the Beatles, René Magritte, Marcel Duchamp, take your pick – and yet the miracle of it is that they are not remotely precious, grand or prickly. As I am about to find out.
Hamilton hands me a colour copy of a piece of new work that will hang at the Serpentine. It is a political piece, and consists of two maps: one of Israel/Palestine in 1947, one of Israel/Palestine in 2010, the point being that, in the second map, Palestine has shrunk to the size of a cornflake. I hold the image in my hands, and give it the attention befitting a new work by an artist of Hamilton's reputation. In other words, I look at it very closely, and I notice something: on these maps Israel has been spelt 'Isreal'. Slowly, my cogs turn. Hamilton loves wordplay. One of my favourite pieces of his is a certain iconic French ashtray subtly tweaked so that it says, not "Ricard", but "Richard". So presumably this, too, is a pun. But what does it mean? Is-real? Hmm. This must be a comment on the country's controversial birth. Either that, or he wishes to suggest that the Israel-Palestine conflict is a nightmare – can it be real? – from which we will one day wake up. How clever.
"So what are you up to here?" I ask. "Why have you spelled Israel like this?"
Hamilton peers first at me then at the image. "How is it spelled?" he asks. I tell him how the word should be spelled and how he has spelled it.
There is a small silence. "Oh, dear," says Hamilton. Rita Donagh gets up from her seat and comes round to look at the image over my shoulder. "Oh, dear," she says. The misspelling is, it seems, just that: a mistake. It's my turn now. "Oh, dear," I say. "I'm so … sorry." My cheeks are hot. Hamilton looks crestfallen. Donagh looks worried. "Can you change it?" I say, thinking that Hamilton works a lot with computers these days. "Not very easily," he says. Oh, God. On the nerve-wracking eve of his new, big show, I have just told the 88-year old father of pop art that there is a mistake in one of his prints (this one is an inkjet solvent print). Why? Why did I do this? And how on earth will our conversation recover?
After a moment of perplexity, though, Hamilton starts to laugh. "Oh, well!" he says. "I'm sure there's some way of sorting it out. Not to worry!"
Despite his huge influence, Hamilton is not famous in the way that, say, David Hockney is famous. No one is going to ask Richard Hamilton to edit the Today programme. But you will recognise his most famous work even if you can't quite put a name to its creator: his 1956 collage, Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? in which a naked woman sits on a G-Plan sofa wearing a lampshade; his paintings of Mick Jagger, and the art dealer Robert Fraser, in handcuffs following a drug raid (the Swingeing London series, completed between 1967 and 1972); his images of an IRA hunger striker (The Citizen series of 1981-3); his 2007 inkjet print, Shock and Awe, in which Tony Blair is done up as a cowboy, with double holster and boots. Or perhaps you own a copy of the Beatles' White Album, the sleeve of which he designed.
Part of the difficulty is that he is so hard to categorise. A lot of his work could easily be described as pop art – the bright colours, the iconic images, the found objects – but he is also much more political than, say, Warhol, and he is a brilliant draughtsman, one who spent 50 years illustrating Joyce's Ulysses (these enthralling prints were shown at the British Museum in 2002, and will probably never be bettered; he is to Joyce what Tenniel is to Alice in Wonderland). Even Hamilton seems unsure. "What I always say is: I do whatever I feel like. People don't seem to understand that an artist is free to do whatever he wants, and I've always relished that possibility." It was his friend Marcel Duchamp who made him realise this. "Duchamp was truly iconoclastic. This meant that he denied himself, that he knocked his own ideas out of the window. I thought: I should do the same – be careful, as he was, of repeating myself. In art, it's the mind, not the eye that should be active."
Hamilton had long been a fan of Duchamp; in 1960 he published a transcription of the notes in the artist's Green Box (1934) and in 1965 he reconstructed his Large Glass (1915-23) which had been smashed to pieces in 1926. But they didn't meet until later. "It was at a dinner party in Paris, at the house of the artist Bill Copley. I thought it was going to be a big party, but the guests were me, René Magritte and his wife, and Marcel and his wife. I didn't have two £5 notes to rub together at the time." What was Duchamp like? "Oh, he was the most charming person imaginable: kind and clever and witty. Eventually I became one of the family. His wife, Teeny, was fond of me. We were fully bonded. If I was with them in Paris, then I was with them all the time. When the first 'green book' came off the press he wrote me the most beautiful letter I've ever received. 'Your labour of love has produced a monster of veracity,' it said."
Hamilton was born in Pimlico. His father worked as a driver for Henley's, the West End car showroom. It was very far from being an "artistic" background. "I suppose I was a misfit. I decided I was interested in drawing when I was 10. I saw a notice in the library advertising art classes. The teacher told me that he couldn't take me – these were adult classes, I was too young – but when he saw my drawing he told me that I might as well come back next week. I used to follow him round like a dog. He was terribly kind to me, and by the time I was 14 I was doing big charcoal drawings of the local down and outs." At 14 he entered a children's art competition. Although his entry had mistakenly been ignored, the man who was to give out the prize was a Royal Academician who looked at his pictures and, admiring them, spoke to Sir Walter Russell, the keeper of the Royal Academy School. Two years later he enrolled there.
In 1940, however, the school closed because of the war. Hamilton became a draughtsman at an engineering company. By the time he returned to the school he was in his 20s; the Royal Academy had changed completely. "It was run by a complete mad man, Sir Alfred Munnings, who used to walk about the place with a whip and jodphurs. It was scary. One of my teachers said my work was looking quite like Cézanne. Oh, good, I thought. Then he said: 'Augustus John knocks spots off Cézanne.' Well, of course, I roared with laughter. He went red in the face. One day he asked me if I'd visited the Picasso exhibition. 'Yes,' I said. 'It was wonderful.' But he got more and more furious. 'They're not even good honest Frenchmen,' he said. 'They're a load of fucking dagos.' What could you do? It was an absolute joke!"
A few weeks later Hamilton received a note informing him that the president did not believe he was profiting from his instruction. His studentship was terminated, and he was dragged "kicking and screaming" to National Service. Being a "veteran", however, had its uses. When he was accepted by the Slade he was now eligible for a grant.
It was at around this time that Hamilton met Nigel Henderson, later a leading light in the Independent Group of artists to which Hamilton would also belong. It was Henderson who introduced Hamilton to Duchamp's Green Box, and to D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's 1917 book On Growth and Form which, for Hamilton, was to become a key text (the book advocates structuralism as an alternative to the survival of the fittest in governing the form of species). In 1956 Hamilton created Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? for the catalogue of This is Tomorrow, the Independent Group's historic exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. The show was a quasi-anthropological, semi-ironic look at the mass-market imagery of the post-war age.
In 1957 Hamilton wrote a note to the brutalist architects Alison and Peter Smithson, who had also contributed to This Is Tomorrow; they were in talks about the idea of another exhibition on similar lines. It was in this note that he coined the phrase pop art. "Pop art," he wrote, "is Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low Cost, Mass Produced, Young (aimed at youth), Wicked, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big Business." It was almost as though he had looked into a crystal ball, and seen Andy Warhol, in his fright wig, staring back at him. But the letter was not intended to be a manifesto. "I just listed the things I thought were most interesting," says Hamilton. "He [Peter Smithson] didn't even answer it. When he was asked about it later he denied receiving it." What about Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? How does he feel about this supposedly seminal work now? "I'm rather bored with it but it's a nice little earner!"
After this, Hamilton's career took off. He was able to give up teaching (he had worked alongside Victor Pasmore at Newcastle University, where Rita was "a favourite student of mine", though they did not marry until 1991) after Robert Fraser, aka Groovy Bob, then the most celebrated dealer in London, took him on. "We did three exhibitions, then the famous drug bust took place, the gallery closed, and his cheques bounced. But when the gallery was still open, it was terrific. He had these parties where you became acquainted with the Beatles and Mick Jagger. It was Fraser who suggested me as a designer for the Beatles' new album. I remember that Paul [McCartney] rang me. He was running the show then. So I went to see him. I was sitting there in an outer office, and it was quite amusing at first because it was full of girls in short skirts and long boots. But then I thought: I'll give him five more minutes. Anyway, finally, he was ready. He wasn't sure about my idea at first but in the end he was very helpful. He gave me three tea chests full of photographs to use in the collage for the poster inside." How much was he paid? "I was surprised how little we got! I remember Peter Blake telling me he'd only been given £200 for Sgt. Pepper. I couldn't remember what I'd been paid, but Peter said: You only got 200 quid, too. I thought that was a bit mean." He thinks it's possible that Yoko Ono was an admirer of his. Or maybe not. "I did contribute my bottom to her bum pic [he means her Film No. 4, better known as "Bottoms"] – not that I would recognise it now. That was our relationship: I was just a bum to her." He laughs.
In the 1970s he and Rita moved to North End, the Oxfordshire farm where they still live and keep their studio. His work began to grow more political, though he also moved briefly into industrial design (he loves computers, and designed two). It seems pretty obvious to me that Steve McQueen's film about Bobby Sands, Hunger, was inspired, at least in part, by Hamilton's paintings of the blanket protesters [the Citizen series], and you can see his influence in most contemporary art, whether the artist in question is aware of it or not (though Damien Hirst calls him "the greatest").
Hamilton admires Hunger but he has little time for the other Young British Artists. He can't imagine a conversation with Tracey Emin lasting more than five minutes – too tedious! – and though he was quite interested in Hirst's sharks, his paintings bore him half to death. He believes that this generation is "ignorant… they have no understanding of art history. [Their work] is a waste of time. So much of what they're doing has already been done, and not only by Duchamp, even. You think: you're 50 years too late, mate." Don't even get him started on Sarah Lucas and her antics with cigarettes.
He's tiring a little now. I wonder: is he surprised still to be working? Not really. Partly, as he has told me, the drive for reinvention has kept him going. But sometimes it has been anger. His paintings of the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell disguised as the Phantom of the Opera in 1964 were the result of fury: "When he refused to get rid of Britain's nuclear deterrent, I thought: the bastard!" And so, too, are his most recent works. The Hutton inquiry left him "angrier than I would like to be". He shows me another piece that will appear at the Serpentine. It's a medal of dishonour, commissioned by and first shown at the British Museum in 2009. The face on the metal disc is that of Alastair Campbell. Above his head is a Latin inscription. "That's the nearest we could get to the word 'whitewash' in Latin," says Hamilton, a bony finger tracing its outline. "And that, I'm afraid, is absolutely the product of my anger." He sounds fierce, but when I look at his face, he is smiling, kindly as ever.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Features, Richard Hamilton, The Observer | Comments Off
February 15th, 2010 Peter Conrad
Previously unseen images of wrestlers made in Bacon's studio demonstrate the artist's love of the visceral, writes Peter Conrad
Two bodies in a bare, drab room, experimentally trying all the things they can do to each other, from grappling, groping sex to choke holds and karate chops: here is a privileged, confidential glimpse of Francis Bacon's secret theatre, never seen before. It comes from a pile of contact sheets given by Bacon to an electrician who worked in his south Kensington studio; the collection was acquired by the dealer Michael Hoppen, who will be showing it at the art fair in Maastricht next month.
Nothing is known about this long session of polymorphous play. Who were the flabby butchers in the stained, straining pants, obliged to wear swimming caps that make them look like medical orderlies kitted out for surgery? Where was the room, which might be called clinical if only the sheet on the floor were cleaner and smoother? And who gave the orders, sitting behind the anonymous photographer and directing the two men as they showed off wrestling holds? That presumably was Bacon: he commissioned the photographs, and used a felt pen to mark the images he fancied, sketching a red cage around the hired thugs.
Bacon admired photographer Eadweard Muybridge's studies of bodies in motion, which treat the physique as an apparatus with elegantly calibrated, agile parts. But his own version of those athletic displays is perverse, an exercise in abstracting the body by force. Picasso would have appreciated the frames in which the two men, wrestling or perhaps sexually coupling, merge into a monstrous quadruped with a pair of arses, one trailing dislocated arm, and no head.
They have come together to cause each other pain: a wrestling bout is the spectacle of physical agony, accompanied by grunts, groans, cries of excruciation. Unlike boxing, wrestling has no neatly aimed knock-out blows, no strict sporting etiquette. Here tThe coup de grace is delivered with an elbow or the back of a hand, after which one man shoulders the other and carts him off like dead meat. Bacon was a connoisseur of abbatoirs, and all that's missing in these photographs is blood, although the scrap of tape on the corner looks like the trace of some intimate, dried-up fluid. Or does this stand for the imprint of Bacon's thumb, gripping the page and depositing an equivalent to the smudges left on the floorcloth by the soles of the wrestlers' dirty feet?
Like Greek tragedy, it is all a performance, as the men demonstrate when they forget their feud and start to jump and skip or dive into a non-existent pool. Opposed moods chase each other across the page like black and white, the two extremes of the photographic spectrum. Brutality at the top left changes to friskiness at the bottom right. But the change happens imperceptibly: sex often looks, and almost always sounds, like murder.
The detail that intrigues me most is the light socket halfway up the wall. It seems quaintly foreign, which suggests that the photographs may have been taken in Paris or New York, where Bacon spent time in the 1970s. Apart from any clue it might give about time and place, it functions, like every object in a Bacon painting, as a memento mori. In this impromptu gymnasium, energetic life goes through its paces, and soon enough confronts death; the light that floods the scene is raw and harsh, but the current can be turned off in an instant. Then perhaps an image will materialise in that dark, empty square at the centre. Some photographs – the nastiest, the most cruelly truthful – have to be looked at with your eyes closed.
The contact sheets will be shown for the first time at the European Fine Art Fair, Maastricht, Friday 12 March to Sunday 21 March, 2010. See www.tefaf.com and www.michaelhoppengallery.com
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Features, Francis Bacon, Photography, The Observer | Comments Off
February 14th, 2010 Laura Cumming
The first Gorky show in Britain for a generation shows a life scarred by unthinkable anguish, transformed into radiant, exhilarating art
If you think the art press has only turned spiteful in recent years, then think again. Consider the December 1948 edition of ARTnews. Barely five months after the Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorky hanged himself in a Connecticut barn after a year of incalculable agony – rectal cancer, a studio fire that destroyed much of his work, separation from his wife, a car crash that snapped his neck and paralysed his painting arm – the world's oldest art magazine chose to publish not a posthumous tribute but a derisively brief dispatch of his final show.
Among its insinuations was the claim that Gorky was an acolyte of the more successful Willem de Kooning, who immediately protested that the opposite was true. His letter remains the best of epitaphs: "When, about 15 years ago, I walked into Arshile's studio for the first time the atmosphere was so beautiful I got a little dizzy, and when I came to, I was bright enough to take the hint immediately... I come from 36 Union Square."
Gorky's studio in Union Square, Manhattan, appears the only fixed point in his adult life. From his name (assumed) and age (uncertain) to the tales he wove to obscure a devastating past, there are so many inconsistencies that the myths have become almost as familiar as the work. In Britain, where Tate Modern owns only one canvas, it often feels as if there are more biographies in print than paintings on permanent display.
Since this is our first show in a generation, it can hardly help but take the life and suicide into account. But Gorky, heralded as the father of abstract expressionism, is no Rothko aiming for the tragic sublime; nor is his art a chronicle of death foretold. The revelation of this tremendous show is, instead, the astonishing atmosphere his paintings exude and sustain.
Gorky died at the age of 44 – or 46. Of all great artists, he may be the slowest off the mark. It takes nearly 20 years (and four galleries) for Gorky to snail his way through the lessons of Cézanne, Picasso and Miró, emulating his masters stroke by stroke. Move briskly through, noticing his powers of concentration, his passion and physical relish even here, and you will still have absorbed something of his spirit before the exhibition proper starts.
The icebreaker is The Artist and His Mother, one of the most powerful portraits of the 20th century: heart-rending, irreducibly beautiful. The young Gorky stands next to his mother like a bridegroom, clasping a posy that seems to have sprung from the blossoms on her apron; she sits erect and contained in the halo of her own outline, archaic as a Byzantine icon. Spectrally pale, their ghosts haunt the picture, traces of life and innocence lost when she starved to death in his arms after the Armenian genocide.
Even if you did not know the painting began with a photograph taken as proof (or reproof) to Gorky's father in America of a family waiting behind, you would have the sense of a relic reverently preserved. It is well known that Gorky reworked the painting over and again, sanding the surface like a man scouring for clues, trying to reach the past; he even began another version, never letting go.
And what is so remarkable is that the very loss at its core – a portrait is a person here, but not here – is countered by the slow lyricism of the work: Gorky's mother is brought back from annihilation, held in the bounding contours and gentle colour, her momentary image indelibly fused with the painting's hard-won surface.
The portrait drawings in the same room put Gorky with Ingres and Picasso as a master of concision. He has to master figuration before stepping away, and even when he does, images continue to suggest themselves as irresistibly in his art as in clouds. But the release into abstraction after his marriage is absolutely euphoric: the paintings begin to breathe, stretch and unfurl.
The pivot in this show is rural Virginia, where Gorky goes wild for the landscape. The sun's a flying saucer surrounded by rays of elation, foliage throbs, every little cricket, cottage and cow becomes an excited hieroglyph in a leaping black tracery. Colour suffuses the canvas like a blush, or gathers like condensation on glass, changing the picture's mood and temperature.
There is so much exhilaration here: The Plough and the Song, with its furrowed gold below a cobalt high noon; the rustling depths of Water of the Flowery Mill. Even when tragedy returns, when black becomes both teller and tale as in Charred Beloved, where Gorky reprises a burnt painting from memory in sombre tones, the effect is of resurgence – life (or love?) brought back from the ashes.
People find autobiography in the art – ploughs and palettes, his father's orchard, his mother's apron – that the poetry of his titles does nothing to discourage. But whatever the paintings absorb from his anguished life they also transcend.
And what increases the joy of them, to me at least, is that the source of this remains mysterious – not much apparent in either form or content. You can isolate the elements of a great Gorky: the decoupling of colour from line, the trademark shapes, from winged biomorphs to quirky triangles, their points on the verge of bursting open; the sense of being nose-deep in a scene that might be scaled to an insect or a giant, being equally intimate and epic; of teeming incidents held in nebulous space. The way his paintings are voluptuous yet august. But when you are in front of them, their open effects feel very secretive.
How does he get such cold colours to thaw, how can the paintings be so speechless yet eloquent? The hues shift and glow like St Elmo's fire, the tones may be discordant, the lines stringent, and still there is this radiant ambience. It seems to be a matter of atmosphere, as de Kooning said, of something beautiful in the air.
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February 13th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
My hero is Goya – hard to explain when so little is known about him, his very few extant letters being so flat (like those of a cabinet-maker, someone said). And given a "fact", such as that he knew French, because he once signed a letter written in that language, it is promptly contradicted by an old friend of his who said he arrived in Bordeaux as an old man "without a word of French". But we do know that when near death he made the splendid statement: "And still I learn." And his work never ceases to demonstrate his loathing of cruelty and stupidity. Never does he romanticise horror, he is not frightened, he is disgusted almost (but, heroically, never quite) beyond expression. And when he loves – oh, the life quivering in his portraits of the doctor who saved him, his friends Sebastián Martínez and Tiburcio Pérez y Cuervo and, above all, in that exquisitely tender portrait of the young and pregnant Condesa de Chinchón, first caught by him as a charming child peeping out of a family group. When I think of that I have to say that perhaps he is less my hero than my love.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Books, Culture, Diana Athill, Features, Francisco de Goya, Painting, The Guardian | Comments Off
