February 9th, 2010 Christopher Masters
Sculptor whose work probed political and religious themes
The Austrian artist Alfred Hrdlicka, who has died aged 81, was a controversial, radical figure whose work was driven by his political beliefs and profound sense of humanity. His notoriety peaked in 2008 with the exhibition of his painting Leonardo's Last Supper, Restored By Pier Paolo Pasolini. Although the title alone spells trouble, the picture was initially accepted by the conservative Cardinal Christoph Schönborn for the show Religion, Flesh and Power at the Cathedral Museum in Vienna.
When Christians around the world expressed their anger at Hrdlicka's seething, homoerotic image, the Church authorities removed it, claiming that this was done out of "reverence for the sacred" rather than censorship. As Hrdlicka himself remarked, the only surprise was that they had agreed to display the work in the first place.
He was born in Vienna into a family of Czech descent. His mother and brother were both professionally involved in psychoanalysis, which later influenced Alfred, although he was never a full-blown Freudian. He inherited leftist convictions from his father, who was arrested for communist activities in 1934, four years before Austria was incorporated into the Third Reich. Only his age spared Hrdlicka from fighting for Germany during the second world war; his brother was killed in 1942 during the siege of Leningrad.
After an apprenticeship as a dental technician, Hrdlicka began his artistic training at the age of 18 under Albert Paris von Gütersloh, an exuberant, lyrical expressionist. Seven years later, Hrdlicka continued his education with the sculptor Fritz Wotruba, whose austere, geometric style exerted some influence on him during the 1950s.
Ultimately the younger artist came to see modernism as too remote from real life and began to concentrate on a more vigorous, carnal approach. Hrdlicka's hostility to abstraction produced the print cycle Roll Over Mondrian (1966) and an article with the same title, which he wrote in 1967. He also declared that "all power derives from the flesh", a belief that was powerfully illustrated by Friends (1964-65), a heavily textured marble relief of two naked women.
With their contorted, at times fragmented, figures, Hrdlicka's works were meant above all to express themes of oppression and alienation. His numerous statues of Marsyas, the mythical character flayed for challenging Apollo to a musical contest, are intended as symbols of anti-authoritarianism, while other pieces refer directly to the outsider in contemporary society.
These images are extremely varied. The prints known as Striptease in Soho, the result of a trip to London in 1966, examine the experiences of sex workers, while others drew on Hrdlicka's study of psychiatric patients, some of whom he subsequently interviewed in a TV documentary, in 1972. Many of these works are enigmatic and allusive, but all have a strong graphic style, with dramatic tonal effects created from pools of black ink.
Like his father, Hrdlicka was a lifelong Marxist. Although he resigned from the Austrian Communist party after the invasion of Hungary in 1956, he maintained cultural links with East Germany throughout the cold war, as well as collaborating with leftwing western artists such as the Italian composer Luigi Nono, for whom in 1992 he designed the set of the opera Intolleranza 1960.
He appeared in anti-fascist demonstrations, particularly during the election of Kurt Waldheim as Austria's president in 1986, when he made a grotesque wooden horse mocking Waldheim's attempts to distance himself from his past. Who was the Nazi: Waldheim or his horse?
Marxist or anti-fascist themes also inspired some of Hrdlicka's most accomplished sculptures, from the Friedrich Engels memorial (1981) in Wuppertal to the Memorial against War and Fascism (1991) in Vienna. With its bronze figure of a Jew coerced into washing the street, this monumental composition, in the Austrian capital's historic Albertinaplatz, attracted criticism for its unsentimental and anti-heroic imagery.
The work, which has also been vandalised several times by neo-Nazis, typifies Hrdlicka's stubborn disregard for decorum and correctness – as well as his intuitive feeling for poses and gestures that get to the heart of the matter, however uncomfortable that may be.
Despite his communist sympathies, Hrdlicka received significant commissions from Christian organisations, including a series of shocking, violent images for a Protestant community centre at Plötzensee in Berlin. In these contexts, Hrdlicka produced highly original variations on conventional subjects.
Hrdlicka's identification of Jesus with the murdered, gay film-maker Pasolini led not only to his infamous version of the Last Supper but also to sculptures, prints and pastels in which the Italian director adopts poses associated with Christ's Passion. These works reveal Hrdlicka's preoccupation with the creative outsider, one of the leitmotifs of his career, and exemplify his mastery of human anatomy.
Hrdlicka was predeceased by his wife, Barbara, in whose honour he made a memorial that was installed in 1995 at the Central cemetery in Vienna.
• Alfred Hrdlicka, artist, born 27 February 1928; died 5 December 2009
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January 28th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
Her leadership made Guildhall art gallery a London landmark
Vivien Knight, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 56, was the vivacious and unconventional head of Guildhall art gallery in London. Twenty-six years ago, she was appointed to head the Corporation of London's paintings collection. Most of the 4,500 works had been in storage since 1941, when the Guildhall's original art gallery had suffered bomb damage. With no other staff, Vivien threw herself into the task of compiling the collection's first complete catalogue, published four years later, and of showing the works at the Barbican under the title The City's Pictures.
Gems such as Constable's full-scale sketch of Salisbury Cathedral, John Singleton Copley's Siege of Gibraltar – commissioned by the City of London in 1782 – and portraits of the London judges who adjudicated on claims made in the wake of the Great Fire, were made visible after nearly half a century. Vivien went on to lead the building of the new Guildhall art gallery, establishing a team along the way, and shepherding the city's pictures into public view with characteristic verve and energy.
She was in many ways an incongruous figure to find darting between the Mansion House, the Old Bailey and other strongholds of the Corporation of London. Flame-haired, with a puckish wit and clothes that came from thrift or vintage shops, she seemed the antithesis of corporate power and authority. Yet her encyclopedic knowledge of the pictures in her care and her eagerness to share that knowledge with as many as possible – not only the City's grandees and aldermen, but also amateur painting groups, children and pensioners – has helped to transform the Guildhall, opened in 1999, into a significant landmark for London.
Born in Solihull, West Midlands, to parents who were both teachers – her father an art teacher – Vivien studied art history and fine art under Lawrence Gowing at Leeds University and, in 1979, joined Birmingham City art gallery as an assistant in the prints and drawings department. I was running it at the time, and when Vivien first appeared, she looked like a figure from a Burne-Jones drawing – a Brummie angel with corkscrew curls and an irreverent manner. On occasion, we would bring the stuffed penguins from Scott's Antarctic expedition – kept in the museum's natural history wing – into the print room as we worked on the pre-Raphaelite collections. Whether or not this initiated Vivien's lifelong fascination with Antarctica, it was surely the basis of her knowledge of everything to do with Victorian painting.
In 1980 she became a research assistant at the Whitworth art gallery, Manchester, where she met James Faure Walker, the painter and founding editor of Artscribe magazine. Within three weeks, they decided to marry, and what might have seemed to others to be a reckless romance turned out to be a marvellously happy partnership lasting nearly 30 years, with three much-loved children – Josie, Edward and Dulcie.
Vivien's instinctual nature, combined with a fiery determination, made her an unusual figure in the rapidly professionalised art gallery world. She was as comfortable negotiating the special requirements of door heights with the architects of the new Guildhall art gallery ("tall enough to let the pikemen through") as she was chivvying her employers into taking advantage of the discovery of Roman remains beneath the original site for the gallery by taking a lease on another, bigger building behind. Her thoughts always focused on the good of the collection.
At the same time, she was publishing and organising exhibitions. She wrote the first monograph on Patrick Heron (1988) and the definitive study of WP Frith (Painting the Victorian Age, 2006). She was equally proud of the seven themed books she published on the Guildhall's collection, with a range of subjects including London, Children in Art and Modern. They are models of clear and unpretentious prose.
Vivien is survived by James and their children.
• Vivien Knight, curator, born 9 November 1953; died 19 December 2009
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January 28th, 2010 Eamonn McCabe
Photographer who snapped Freud, Bacon and the bohemians of Soho
The photographer Harry Diamond, who has died from a brain haemorrhage aged 85, captured the "faces" of bohemian Soho in the 1960s and 70s. He frequented the London watering holes favoured by artists including Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, and soon became known as the "man in the mac" who was always carrying a camera.
Diamond was always broke and would take photographs for artists, often of their work and sometimes their portrait, in return for a drink or a meal. The list of his subjects includes Freud, Bacon, Eduardo Paolozzi, William Coldstream, Richard Carline, Michael Andrews, Daniel Farson and Frank Auerbach. He was more famous for those he shot rather than for any particular style. He spent a lot of time with another man who hung around Soho with a camera – John Deacon, considered "a right little runt" by Bacon. One of Diamond's best portraits is of Deacon looking surprisingly upbeat.
A small but fit man, Diamond thought of himself as having been "born good-looking". Freud obviously agreed and had Diamond pose for him on three occasions. One painting became particularly famous: Interior at Paddington (1951), which was commissioned for the Arts Council's exhibition Sixty Paintings for 51, at the Festival of Britain. At the time, artists in London could rent or buy studio space in Paddington cheaply. The carpet in the portrait was bought by Freud from a junk shop in the Harrow Road. The window overlooks the Grand Union canal, and a boy can be seen on the pavement below, looking up at the window.
The Arts Council paid £500 for Interior at Paddington, which went to the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. In 1979 Diamond was commissioned to take photographs of buildings around Liverpool. While there, he told the staff of the Walker that the biggest complaint he had about being painted by Freud was being required to stand around posing for six months. When Freud painted him again in Paddington, in 1970, Diamond was seated.
Freud himself remembered Diamond's response to the 1951 portrait: "He said I made his legs too short. The whole thing was that his legs were too short. He was aggressive as he had a bad time being brought up in the East End and being persecuted."
Born into a Jewish family in east London, Diamond never moved out of the area. He first started photographing local buildings with his 35mm camera as he was upset at seeing so many of them being demolished. Although he captured the changing landscape of Bethnal Green in the early 1950s, he would spend a lot of time "up west", especially at Ronnie Scott's jazz club in Soho, where he once worked as a cleaner. He enjoyed the company of jazz musicians and had a great love of dancing, but was once barred from the 100 Club on Oxford Street for being too aggressive. He was also barred for life from the French House in Soho – a rare honour – for throwing a beer, and its glass, at the proprietor.
While working as a stagehand, Diamond met the Hungarian theatre photographer Michael Peto, who encouraged him into full-time photography in the mid-1960s.
Bruce Bernard, the former picture editor of the Sunday Times, found Diamond a complex and sensitive man, and always kept an eye on him. Before Bernard died, he made arrangements for Diamond to be looked after by their mutual friend, the artist Virginia Verran.
Diamond was nervous about publicity. He ducked the offer of a contract from Thames & Hudson for a book of his photographs in case the taxman came digging around. He never had a bank account. His printer, Steve Walsh, who Diamond used for years, was paid in rolled-up fivers that came out of different pockets – and even his socks.
After one late-night incident involving a hammer, he inevitably became known as "Harry the hammer". According to Walsh, talking to him could be dangerous as "he never spoke, he always shouted at you, and showered you into the bargain".
Pubs were his habitat. Roxy Beaujolais, the owner of the Seven Stars in Chancery Lane, knew Diamond for 35 years. He photographed her wedding, but not very well. She used to cut his nails and his hair, and remembers him as being "always well turned out, if a little shabby", and "a true observer who was always out and about, always on the move, especially on the buses. He knew every route across town."
Eight of Diamond's photographs are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. A brother predeceased him.
• Harry Diamond, photographer, born 25 August 1924; died 3 December 2009
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January 26th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
Journalist, painter and tireless champion of the arts in Scotland
Cordelia Oliver, who has died aged 86, was an indefatigable promoter of the arts in Scotland. In 1963, when her cultural commando friend Richard Demarco and Jim Haynes were making waves in Edinburgh with the Traverse theatre, Cordelia was offered a roving commission as the Guardian's arts correspondent in Scotland. For more than three decades she reported, often through pessimistic political times, the surge of optimism she felt in Scottish theatre, opera, music, painting and sculpture.
I first met her in the run-up to the Charles Rennie Mackintosh centenary exhibition at the Edinburgh festival in 1968. Cordelia, a most loyal Glaswegian, would have preferred the celebrations to be in the city of his birth. Unlike many in Glasgow at this time, she shared the considered judgment of German and Austrian architects who acclaimed the "Mackintoshismus" style. She had spent the war years at the Glasgow School of Art, not only as a student of painting by day, but as a volunteer firefighter by night. "If we painted in large letters: 'Glasgow School of Art built by Charles Rennie Mackintosh' on the roof," Cordelia remembered William Hutchison, the school's wry director, telling their nightwatch before dawn, "no self-respecting Luftwaffe pilot would ever think of bombing us."
Cordelia Patrick was born in Glasgow, the daughter of a merchant navy officer from the Mull of Kintyre. She attended the city's Hutchesons' grammar school, where she won the art and English prizes. At Glasgow School of Art, she won the Guthrie portrait prize and continued, after graduation, to teach evening classes there, along with her day job teaching art at Craigholme school for girls. As a prize-winning soloist she sang with Glasgow's Orpheus Choir. When that disbanded, she joined the Phoenix Choir, and sang at the first Edinburgh festival in 1947.
By the next year, Cordelia had married the writer and photographer George Oliver and left for London. But in 1950, when George became the art editor of a travel magazine, they moved to Edinburgh. As George's job gave him backstage access to Edinburgh festival productions, it allowed Cordelia to catch performers on the fly, in line drawings, many of which peppered her then anonymous reviews for the Glasgow Herald.
With George, a keen vintage car driver, Cordelia travelled extensively throughout Europe. In 1971 their destination was Bucharest, so she could write the catalogue for Demarco's Romanian art exhibition and encourage the artist Paul Neagu to emigrate to Scotland. Before long, Cordelia was presenting Neagu's television performance piece Going Tornado, in Aberdeen. Her ecstatic preview of the theatre-maker Tadeusz Kantor's The Water Hen, staged by Demarco in an abandoned poorhouse, helped launch it as the hit of the 1973 Edinburgh festival.
When Demarco invited Joseph Beuys and other Düsseldorf artists to stage their Strategy Get Arts exhibition, with its catchy palindromic title, at the Edinburgh College of Art, all hell was let loose among the Scottish arts establishment and there were tirades in the press. Now, 40 years later, George's photographs and Cordelia's perceptive reporting capture the excitement of this landmark event. Collaborating with Beuys on his later Edinburgh installations, George Wyllie was inspired to create his massive Straw Locomotive for the 1988 Glasgow Garden festival. When the flames of its Viking funeral died down, the silhouette of a giant question mark hovered in its burnt-out carcass. "Why," asked Cordelia, "has the National Gallery of Scotland never collected Wyllie's work?"
From 1970 onwards, Cordelia championed the creative troika of Giles Havergal, Philip Prowse and Robert David MacDonald who together, at a rejuvenated Citizens theatre, forged a drama unique in Britain, opening the whole spectrum of European theatre to Glasgow audiences. Cordelia wrote Magic in the Gorbals: A Personal Record of the Citizens Theatre (1999), and many books and catalogues on artists; her most revealing was on her student contemporary, the expressionist painter Joan Eardley.
George died in 1990. Towards the end of her life, Cordelia was taken off many arts organisations' press lists, probably on account of her age. Fortunately, Bill Williams's Artwork, Scotland's most independent arts newspaper, gave her the freedom to express her astute views right up to the week she died.
When the National Theatre of Scotland launched Gregory Burke's Black Watch in a variety of ad-hoc spaces, it endorsed everything Cordelia had campaigned for. "A Scottish national theatre is an activity," she wrote. "It has to start with a company, not a building." Who could have said that better?
Richard Demarco writes: Cordelia and her husband, George, were both artists and patrons who shared my belief, in the 60s, that Scotland's world of the contemporary arts should take advantage of the international stage provided by the Edinburgh festival.
They enjoyed the company of artists at their home in Pollokshields, Glasgow, where the conversation would inevitably be inspired by their international collection, which juxtaposed Scottish art with Romanian.
Cordelia supported the most demanding aspects of avant-gardism, notably expressed by the Polish artist and director Tadeusz Kantor and his Cricot 2 theatre productions, which explored the interface between theatre and the visual arts.
I recently organised an exhibition of work by Cordelia, her friend and fellow student Margot Sandeman and Archie Sutter Watt, whose Galloway landscapes they admired. We all celebrated the fact that Cordelia sold a still life of flowers, painted not long after she had graduated from Glasgow School of Art. The sale raised her long-cherished hopes of spending her final days as a painter.
• Cordelia Oliver, artist and critic, born 24 April 1923; died 1 December 2009
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