February 10th, 2010 William Feaver
When he was found hanged in his shed at the age of 46 – or was it 44? – Arshile Gorky, a master or reinvention, was perhaps the greatest painter in America. His death left the field open for his rival Jackson Pollock, says William Feaver
Jackson Pollock was carrying on one night at Jack the Oysterman's fish restaurant on Eighth Street, blasting the lot of them, the art crowd partying there after Willem de Kooning's first solo show. But who to yell at particularly? Who needed harpooning most?
Spotting Gorky – Arshile Gorky – standing to one side, sharpening a pencil, he lunged across ("Arshile": what kind of name was that?) and let him know, right between the eyes, just what he thought of him and his paintings. Gorky barely blinked, just went on shaving his pencil, each stroke of the penknife ending closer to Pollock's straining throat as he thought what to say. Then it came. "Pardon me, Mr Pollock," he said, looking down at him. "You and I are different kinds of artist."
In the mythology of the New York school and the advent of abstract expressionism this was a freeze-frame moment. Pollock the contender was sticking it to Gorky who, being a generation older, an immigrant of obscured origins, represented the derivative, the unassimilated, the surrealistic and indeed, it could be sworn, the doggone un-American. Someone told Pollock to shut up and he went off, muttering. But the situation remained: native growth versus foreign taint. And as it happened, the one-man debut of Gorky's friend the Dutchman De Kooning, celebrated that April evening in 1948, was to be eclipsed if not outclassed the following year when a still scowling Pollock posed for Life magazine in front of the tumbleweed whorls of Summertime (1948) and was awarded the headline: "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" By then Gorky had been dead for a little over a year.
He was found hanged in a shed, leaving a note that read "Goodby all my loved" or, some said, "Goodbye My Loveds". His wife Mougouch had left him, taking the children; he had lost some paintings in a studio fire; he had cancer, he had had a colostomy and he had recently broken his neck in a car accident.
Gorky, dead at 46 (or maybe he was only 44: dates vary), died at the time when he stood as good a chance as any of being singled out as the greatest living painter in the land. His timing was lousy, from a career angle, dropping out as he did just when champions were needed to implement the idea of world-beating American painting falling into line with the cold-war vision of America's brave new free-world hegemony. Having spent two decades catching on to the coat-tails of style he had developed a tentative yet expansive originality. Certainly, had he survived his despair, he would have rated higher among the founding fathers of later 20th-century American art.
As it was, the basic difference between Gorky and Pollock was a difference of direction. Pollock had headed east from Wyoming through the dustclouds of US regionalism in the wake of that vastly gung-ho mural painter Thomas Hart Benton; Gorky, the Armenian immigrant, had sailed the ocean to New York, reinventing himself along the way: listed in the Museum of Modern Art's 15th anniversary exhibition Art in Progress, 1944, as "American, born Tiflis, Russia, 1904", his was, in all but essentials, an assumed identity.
He told people he was a nephew (or cousin) of Maxim Gorky, unaware presumably that the Russian Gorky had been born Alexei Maksimovich Peshkov. He himself was Vosdanig Adoian, born, most likely, not in 1904 (or 1905 as he also made out) but in 1902, and not in Tiflis nor in Kazan, or Gorki or Nizhni Novgorod, but in Khorkom, a village on Lake Van near the eastern border of Ottoman Turkey. His father had emigrated to the United States in 1908, leaving wife and children who in 1915 fled from the Turks to Yerevan in Russian Armenia. His mother died of starvation in 1919. In 1920, after a nine-month journey to Ellis Island by way of Athens and Constantinople, Vosdanig and his sister Vartoosh lived with their father, briefly. Within a year he moved on, began taking art lessons and took to calling himself Arshile Gorky.
Cultural handholds for someone suddenly landed from afar in Providence, Rhode Island, were not easy to grasp. Decades later Clement Greenberg, the pundit-in-chief of the 50s American art ascendency, talked about "the provincialism that had been American art's historic fate"; that being so, and having been dealt by fate a doubly provincial hand, Gorky resolved to identify not with Armenia, nor America in isolation, but with European influences. After an initial Sargent phase and a dash or two of impressionism he moved on to the moderns. Having come so recently from Over There, he had little difficulty in concocting an impressive provenance, letting it be known that, being "Russian", he had studied under Kandinsky and, progressive that he was, had trained widely within the School of Paris. Soon he was teaching.
Mark Rothko, a student of his at the New School of Design in Boston, found him bossy but not implausible given what seemed to be a pretty good working knowledge of, particularly, Cézanne and Picasso. That he painted apples and pears à la Cézanne and terracotta-coloured women in Picasso's statuesque style of the early 20s, was to his credit. You could learn so much from magazine reproductions. Having been "with Cézanne", he said in 1932, "now naturally I am with Picasso". By then he was deep into painting a series of double portraits, based on a photograph, showing his boyhood self standing beside the seated figure of his mother, paintings demonstrating not so much a coming to terms with tragedy as an iconic reconciliation of where he had come from with what he was now making of himself.
In 1929 Gorky got to know De Kooning, his almost exact contemporary (assuming he was born in 1904), and they shared a studio for a while. His Portrait of Master Bill, in which the young painter sits back in "the creation chamber", as he called it, with an air of genial but byzantine detachment, sealed the association. "He knew lots more about painting and art," De Kooning recalled. "He had an uncanny instinct for all art . . . an extraordinary gift for hitting the nail on the head. We became very good friends." Both were attuned to cubism in all its varieties, but Gorky was the one to urge caution. When De Kooning tried for novelty Gorky would say, reprovingly, "very original". Gorky's idea was to help oneself, do likewise and pass it on. That way provincialism could be infiltrated. Similarly, when opportunities arose to earn a little working for the government-funded Public Works of Art Project, he talked of opening "new vistas" to people at large. His mural for Newark Airport (Administration Building), unveiled in 1937, was a hand across the ocean to his then exemplar Fernand Léger, a profusion of flattened tubes and vents.
Two years later, in May 1939, Gorky became a US citizen. In attitude however he remained resolutely internationalist. He spoke up for Picasso's Guernica when it was exhibited in New York that September and was foremost among the minority of artists who welcomed to New York fellow artists evading the war in Europe. Of these the surrealists were most resented. De Kooning, for one, objected to their cliques and airs and fashionability. Gorky, though, was charmed, especially by Roberto Matta, whose biomorphic vistas, busy with linear stuff shooting off in all directions, triggered a fresh and, at times, Disneyish spookiness in his work. This earned him the approval of André Breton, the self-ordained pope of surrealism, who saw in Gorky a well-versed recruit to the ranks of those who kept faith with the gospel of ambiguity in all things, not least rhetorical ambiguity. As he said, writing his equivalent of a character reference, "The marvels of the earth a hundred feet high, the marvels of the sea a hundred feet deep, have for their witness only the wild eye that when in need of colours refers simply to the rainbow."
Hitting the big time with Breton, Gorky was in his element, relating back to his sources and origins, imaginary or otherwise, loosening up, marrying myth and Connecticut. His "Garden in Sochi" series, he explained, harked back all the way to "The Garden of Wish Fulfillment and often I had seen my mother and other village women opening their bosoms and taking their soft and dependable breasts in their hands to rub them on the rock. Above all this stood an enormous tree all bleached under the sun the rain the cold and deprived of leaves. This was the Holy Tree. I myself did not know that this tree was holy but I had witnessed many people whoever did pass by that would voluntarily strip off their clothes and attach this to the tree." Besides spending weeks upstate, drawing vegetation, he began teaching camouflage at the Grand Central School of Art. It was perfect for him: the idea of an art of deception and concealment, forms dissolved or overlaid with perplexities for a greater good.
Even here there was deliberation. In Waterfall, 1943, an arrow sported by a figure straight out of Miró points downwards at an array of flows and obstructions, landscape turning sour and collapsing into gloriously unkempt profusion. "Opposed to this vision of destruction is the vision of creation," he wrote, echoing Victor Hugo's "appearances dissolve and re-form", the novelist's recipe for inky doodling that now translated into the surrealist fad of automatic writing.
"Gorky was a quite well known but rather derivative painter for 15 years before he found himself in about 1943," wrote Alfred Barr, founder-director of the Museum of Modern Art. That small waterfall he found on the Housatonic River, New Milford, Connnecticut, and the flowers and insects he came upon at Crooked Run Farm, Virginia, fed Gorky's appetite for animation within ground cover. Suddenly he flourished. But still he worked as though retracing his steps. Nothing was as spontaneous as he made it seem. As Cy Twombly, one of his most distinguished successors, observed, "Gorky would copy a drawing into a painting." Always, whatever the scale, however colourful the polymorphic hubbub in a painting might be, he had been there before with his sharp pencil, marking the score.
"As he is in no sense a draughtsman, they must be appraised as doodlings for psychological rather than formal interest," said Artnews, in March 1947. "The visitor will be fascinated or bored in proportion to what these very personal forms signify to him." Breton, for one, was in no doubt. The Liver Is the Cock's Comb, he said, was "one of the most important paintings made in America". Exhibited in the surrealists' swansong show (for the time being) in Paris, at the Galerie Maeght in 1947, it was, and remains, a wonderful mishmash of diverse origins.
Four years after the end in the shed in Sherman, Connecticut, by which time De Kooning, Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell and, most famously, Pollock were encountering success to an unprecedented degree, Art Digest ran an article: "Gorky: Was He Tops or Second Rate?" That's not the question. Where Pollock, especially, changed the game, drizzling and hurling his liquids, attacking the painting from all sides, stooping over its automatic complexities then hauling it off the floor to grace a wall, to me Gorky was more a Walt Whitmanesque figure, more the "Noiseless Patient Spider" that "launch'd forth filament, filament, filament out of itself", more the spinner of dreams, stood to one side: "Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them."
"I am glad that it is about impossible to get away from his powerful influence," De Kooning wrote in loyal reproof to the editor of Artnews a few months after Gorky died. "As long as I keep it with myself I'll be doing all right. Sweet Arshile, bless your dear heart."
Posted in Arshile Gorky, Art, Art and design, Culture, Features, Painting, The Guardian | Comments Off
February 9th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
I used to believe that Britain's best art should be in public hands, not owned by the Queen. How wrong I was
It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least hereabouts, that the Royal Collection should be nationalised. It's a disgrace that the Queen owns all these marvellous works of art ...
Or is it? I've been having subversive thoughts recently – subversive when it comes to republicanism, that is. I'm just not feeling offended by the Royal Collection any more; it seems to be doing a good job. Its catalogues of drawings at Windsor Castle are exemplary. It loans a lot of works, including for long periods to our public collections. And the Queen's Gallery does put on proper shows. What's to be cross about, really?
I still worry about security: should works precious to humankind be kept in an ancient castle? But apart from that, the Cromwellian passion has died. I don't really mind that the Queen has so many masterpieces. There's one thing I love in art more than anything else: mystery. It is good to be able to chance on treasures, to encounter works of art you never knew or to see old favourites when you don't expect it. And this is what old collections allow us. The sporadic visibility, eccentricity and sheer size of the Royal Collection make it hard to know in total. This means you can be surprised by it again and again.
The other day, I saw some erotic Renaissance paintings in a small room at Hampton Court. I also saw a supreme masterpiece, Holbein's Noli Me Tangere, displayed in the royal gallery above the palace chapel – a perfect and evocative setting. It's so unexpected, at least in Britain, to see a great religious painting actually in a religious setting. If Holbein's painting belonged to the National Gallery, we'd never chance up on it in Henry VIII's private prayer closet juxtaposed with a vista of the knobbly pendants of the chapel's late Gothic ceiling.
I don't want art to be smoothed into modern shapes, and I don't want collections to become the property of bureaucrats who keep everything in storerooms. And so the Royal Collection strikes me as an image not of snobs snaffling up the loot, but of history enduring and flourishing.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Blogposts, Culture, guardian.co.uk, Heritage, Monarchy, Painting | Comments Off
February 8th, 2010 William Feaver
When he was found hanged in his shed at the age of 46 – or was it 44? – Arshile Gorky, a master or reinvention, was perhaps the greatest painter in America. His death left the field open for his rival Jackson Pollock, says William Feaver
Jackson Pollock was carrying on one night at Jack the Oysterman's fish restaurant on Eighth Street, blasting the lot of them, the art crowd partying there after Willem de Kooning's first solo show. But who to yell at particularly? Who needed harpooning most?
Spotting Gorky – Arshile Gorky – standing to one side, sharpening a pencil, he lunged across ("Arshile": what kind of name was that?) and let him know, right between the eyes, just what he thought of him and his paintings. Gorky barely blinked, just went on shaving his pencil, each stroke of the penknife ending closer to Pollock's straining throat as he thought what to say. Then it came. "Pardon me, Mr Pollock," he said, looking down at him. "You and I are different kinds of artist."
In the mythology of the New York school and the advent of abstract expressionism this was a freeze-frame moment. Pollock the contender was sticking it to Gorky who, being a generation older, an immigrant of obscured origins, represented the derivative, the unassimilated, the surrealistic and indeed, it could be sworn, the doggone un-American. Someone told Pollock to shut up and he went off, muttering. But the situation remained: native growth versus foreign taint. And as it happened, the one-man debut of Gorky's friend the Dutchman De Kooning, celebrated that April evening in 1948, was to be eclipsed if not outclassed the following year when a still scowling Pollock posed for Life magazine in front of the tumbleweed whorls of Summertime (1948) and was awarded the headline: "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" By then Gorky had been dead for a little over a year.
He was found hanged in a shed, leaving a note that read "Goodby all my loved" or, some said, "Goodbye My Loveds". His wife Mougouch had left him, taking the children; he had lost some paintings in a studio fire; he had cancer, he had had a colostomy and he had recently broken his neck in a car accident.
Gorky, dead at 46 (or maybe he was only 44: dates vary), died at the time when he stood as good a chance as any of being singled out as the greatest living painter in the land. His timing was lousy, from a career angle, dropping out as he did just when champions were needed to implement the idea of world-beating American painting falling into line with the cold-war vision of America's brave new free-world hegemony. Having spent two decades catching on to the coat-tails of style he had developed a tentative yet expansive originality. Certainly, had he survived his despair, he would have rated higher among the founding fathers of later 20th-century American art.
As it was, the basic difference between Gorky and Pollock was a difference of direction. Pollock had headed east from Wyoming through the dustclouds of US regionalism in the wake of that vastly gung-ho mural painter Thomas Hart Benton; Gorky, the Armenian immigrant, had sailed the ocean to New York, reinventing himself along the way: listed in the Museum of Modern Art's 15th anniversary exhibition Art in Progress, 1944, as "American, born Tiflis, Russia, 1904", his was, in all but essentials, an assumed identity.
He told people he was a nephew (or cousin) of Maxim Gorky, unaware presumably that the Russian Gorky had been born Alexei Maksimovich Peshkov. He himself was Vosdanig Adoian, born, most likely, not in 1904 (or 1905 as he also made out) but in 1902, and not in Tiflis nor in Kazan, or Gorki or Nizhni Novgorod, but in Khorkom, a village on Lake Van near the eastern border of Ottoman Turkey. His father had emigrated to the United States in 1908, leaving wife and children who in 1915 fled from the Turks to Yerevan in Russian Armenia. His mother died of starvation in 1919. In 1920, after a nine-month journey to Ellis Island by way of Athens and Constantinople, Vosdanig and his sister Vartoosh lived with their father, briefly. Within a year he moved on, began taking art lessons and took to calling himself Arshile Gorky.
Cultural handholds for someone suddenly landed from afar in Providence, Rhode Island, were not easy to grasp. Decades later Clement Greenberg, the pundit-in-chief of the 50s American art ascendency, talked about "the provincialism that had been American art's historic fate"; that being so, and having been dealt by fate a doubly provincial hand, Gorky resolved to identify not with Armenia, nor America in isolation, but with European influences. After an initial Sargent phase and a dash or two of impressionism he moved on to the moderns. Having come so recently from Over There, he had little difficulty in concocting an impressive provenance, letting it be known that, being "Russian", he had studied under Kandinsky and, progressive that he was, had trained widely within the School of Paris. Soon he was teaching.
Mark Rothko, a student of his at the New School of Design in Boston, found him bossy but not implausible given what seemed to be a pretty good working knowledge of, particularly, Cézanne and Picasso. That he painted apples and pears à la Cézanne and terracotta-coloured women in Picasso's statuesque style of the early 20s, was to his credit. You could learn so much from magazine reproductions. Having been "with Cézanne", he said in 1932, "now naturally I am with Picasso". By then he was deep into painting a series of double portraits, based on a photograph, showing his boyhood self standing beside the seated figure of his mother, paintings demonstrating not so much a coming to terms with tragedy as an iconic reconciliation of where he had come from with what he was now making of himself.
In 1929 Gorky got to know De Kooning, his almost exact contemporary (assuming he was born in 1904), and they shared a studio for a while. His Portrait of Master Bill, in which the young painter sits back in "the creation chamber", as he called it, with an air of genial but byzantine detachment, sealed the association. "He knew lots more about painting and art," De Kooning recalled. "He had an uncanny instinct for all art . . . an extraordinary gift for hitting the nail on the head. We became very good friends." Both were attuned to cubism in all its varieties, but Gorky was the one to urge caution. When De Kooning tried for novelty Gorky would say, reprovingly, "very original". Gorky's idea was to help oneself, do likewise and pass it on. That way provincialism could be infiltrated. Similarly, when opportunities arose to earn a little working for the government-funded Public Works of Art Project, he talked of opening "new vistas" to people at large. His mural for Newark Airport (Administration Building), unveiled in 1937, was a hand across the ocean to his then exemplar Fernand Léger, a profusion of flattened tubes and vents.
Two years later, in May 1939, Gorky became a US citizen. In attitude however he remained resolutely internationalist. He spoke up for Picasso's Guernica when it was exhibited in New York that September and was foremost among the minority of artists who welcomed to New York fellow artists evading the war in Europe. Of these the surrealists were most resented. De Kooning, for one, objected to their cliques and airs and fashionability. Gorky, though, was charmed, especially by Roberto Matta, whose biomorphic vistas, busy with linear stuff shooting off in all directions, triggered a fresh and, at times, Disneyish spookiness in his work. This earned him the approval of André Breton, the self-ordained pope of surrealism, who saw in Gorky a well-versed recruit to the ranks of those who kept faith with the gospel of ambiguity in all things, not least rhetorical ambiguity. As he said, writing his equivalent of a character reference, "The marvels of the earth a hundred feet high, the marvels of the sea a hundred feet deep, have for their witness only the wild eye that when in need of colours refers simply to the rainbow."
Hitting the big time with Breton, Gorky was in his element, relating back to his sources and origins, imaginary or otherwise, loosening up, marrying myth and Connecticut. His "Garden in Sochi" series, he explained, harked back all the way to "The Garden of Wish Fulfillment and often I had seen my mother and other village women opening their bosoms and taking their soft and dependable breasts in their hands to rub them on the rock. Above all this stood an enormous tree all bleached under the sun the rain the cold and deprived of leaves. This was the Holy Tree. I myself did not know that this tree was holy but I had witnessed many people whoever did pass by that would voluntarily strip off their clothes and attach this to the tree." Besides spending weeks upstate, drawing vegetation, he began teaching camouflage at the Grand Central School of Art. It was perfect for him: the idea of an art of deception and concealment, forms dissolved or overlaid with perplexities for a greater good.
Even here there was deliberation. In Waterfall, 1943, an arrow sported by a figure straight out of Miró points downwards at an array of flows and obstructions, landscape turning sour and collapsing into gloriously unkempt profusion. "Opposed to this vision of destruction is the vision of creation," he wrote, echoing Victor Hugo's "appearances dissolve and re-form", the novelist's recipe for inky doodling that now translated into the surrealist fad of automatic writing.
"Gorky was a quite well known but rather derivative painter for 15 years before he found himself in about 1943," wrote Alfred Barr, founder-director of the Museum of Modern Art. That small waterfall he found on the Housatonic River, New Milford, Connnecticut, and the flowers and insects he came upon at Crooked Run Farm, Virginia, fed Gorky's appetite for animation within ground cover. Suddenly he flourished. But still he worked as though retracing his steps. Nothing was as spontaneous as he made it seem. As Cy Twombly, one of his most distinguished successors, observed, "Gorky would copy a drawing into a painting." Always, whatever the scale, however colourful the polymorphic hubbub in a painting might be, he had been there before with his sharp pencil, marking the score.
"As he is in no sense a draughtsman, they must be appraised as doodlings for psychological rather than formal interest," said Artnews, in March 1947. "The visitor will be fascinated or bored in proportion to what these very personal forms signify to him." Breton, for one, was in no doubt. The Liver Is the Cock's Comb, he said, was "one of the most important paintings made in America". Exhibited in the surrealists' swansong show (for the time being) in Paris, at the Galerie Maeght in 1947, it was, and remains, a wonderful mishmash of diverse origins.
Four years after the end in the shed in Sherman, Connecticut, by which time De Kooning, Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell and, most famously, Pollock were encountering success to an unprecedented degree, Art Digest ran an article: "Gorky: Was He Tops or Second Rate?" That's not the question. Where Pollock, especially, changed the game, drizzling and hurling his liquids, attacking the painting from all sides, stooping over its automatic complexities then hauling it off the floor to grace a wall, to me Gorky was more a Walt Whitmanesque figure, more the "Noiseless Patient Spider" that "launch'd forth filament, filament, filament out of itself", more the spinner of dreams, stood to one side: "Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them."
"I am glad that it is about impossible to get away from his powerful influence," De Kooning wrote in loyal reproof to the editor of Artnews a few months after Gorky died. "As long as I keep it with myself I'll be doing all right. Sweet Arshile, bless your dear heart."
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective is at Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1, from February 10 to May 3. Box office: 020 7887 8888. www.tate.org.uk/modern
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February 6th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
From talking walls in Manchester to an Arshile Gorky retrospective in London, here's what's happening in art around the country
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Editorial, Exhibitions, Installation, Painting, Sculpture, The Guardian | Comments Off
February 5th, 2010 Jon Canter
If an artist's work is difficult, you might think those writing about it would want to make it more accessible. If only
On 14 March 1888, Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo about his latest canvas: "It is a drawbridge with a little cart going over it, outlined against a blue sky – the river blue as well, the banks orange coloured with green grass and a group of women washing linen in smocks and multicoloured caps."
Dear, oh dear. Little cart, blue sky, green grass, multicoloured caps: simplistic or what? When you go to The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters, currently on show at the Royal Academy, don't bother with His Letters. Vincent, a word in your unbandaged shell-like – this is the way you write about art. It comes from the online catalogue for Esther Shalev-Gerz's exhibition, opening next week at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. "Over three decades, Esther Shalev-Gerz has consistently performed a process of unravelling particularities." Now that's more like it. It certainly beats: "Over three decades, Esther Shalev-Gerz has consistently performed a process of painting a drawbridge with a little cart going over it."
I've never unravelled a particularity, or even ravelled one, which many consider the first stage in the particularity-unravelling process. But I have, for nearly 20 years, been married to a painter, so I appreciate the agony. Not the agony of painting but the far greater torture of writing about paintings, in order to attract people to see them. Art for art's sake? Forget it. What you need is artspeak for artspeak's sake. Let's return to that catalogue: "Shalev-Gerz mines the personal in order to address and interrogate the ways in which the present is understood. Drawing on the fictions of history and speculations on the future, she amplifies the ethics of being invited to speak and being invited to" – nearly over now, honest – "listen. Hers is a powerful artistic practice that complicates how we understand our place in the world."
There, at the end, is the message, loud and clear as an amplified ethic. Shalev-Gerz complicates. She's a complicator. Thank goodness for that. Complication is what artspeak is all about. It seeks to confer status and worth on an artist's work by insisting on its obscurity, which it conveys through a grey porridge of abstract nouns. The purpose of those unravelled particularities? "To reflect on the ways in which the generalities of history and memory are constructed." The overall effect? "This gathering of works interrogates assumptions and opens the space between understanding and perception." (That's it. No more extracts, I promise.) You might think that if an artist's work is difficult, those who write about it might want to make it more comprehensible. You might be wrong.
Artists, in my experience, are practical. They're earthy. They worry about money. They have interesting stains. Grayson Perry never fashions a sentence so obscure it shuts the space between understanding and perception and knocks them both on the head. Then again, none of the above artspeak was written by the artist herself. It's the work of a contributor to her catalogue. For all I know, Shalev-Gerz is an unpretentious woman who likes a laugh and always buys her round. As for her work, I'll never know. The artspeak has had precisely the opposite effect from the one intended – it's convinced me not to see it.
As a 16-year-old, I once read my poetry in a Hampstead pub called The Freemasons Arms. As I stepped onstage, I had an overwhelming urge. I was desperate to baffle the audience. I ached for them to be baffled by my poems and attribute their bafflement to the fact that my poetry was "deep". In the event, they giggled and that was the end of my poetry career. But at least I understand the adolescent impulse behind artspeak. I just don't understand why it's written by grown-ups.
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February 5th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
From patterns to posters, paintings to paper chains, a major new exhibition in London explores the works of modernist art collaborators Art & Language
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Editorial, Exhibitions, guardian.co.uk, Installation, Modernism, Painting, Sculpture | Comments Off
February 5th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
There's more to Japanese art than calligraphy. Robin Powell uncovers the capital's edgiest contemporary culture – from bathhouse paintings to an exhibition in a public loo
Like any world-class capital, Tokyo has its fair share of major galleries. The largest national and private collections, such as the National Museum of Modern Art or the Mori Art Museum, are up there with the best. But plenty of smaller Japanese gallerists, collectors and artists also manage to find a foothold here. From venerable buildings that have survived earthquakes and bombings to the boutique art houses where every inch of wall is a potential display space, Tokyo is a haven for art lovers in search of something a little different. So why not take an improvised tour of the city's lesser-known galleries, to find out what makes them tick? And how do they manage to survive in a crowded city where space is the most precious commodity of all?
I start my tour, perhaps surprisingly, slap-bang in the middle of the city's main shopping area, the Ginza district. But the sober, brown-brick structure I'm standing in front of couldn't be more different from the neon-clad consumer paradise just a stone's throw away. This is the Okuno building, constructed in 1932, one of the first sets of flats in the city to have mod cons such as a lift and telephones. It's now a rabbit warren for Tokyo's art scene, hosting everything from established galleries and antique dealers to first-time solo displays and design firms. No fewer than 20 galleries are based here – many in what were once small bedrooms, and even, in one case, a former communal bathroom in the basement. This last is occupied by Gallery Serikawa, a cosy space whose ancient plumbing betrays its origins.
Gallery Serikawa is currently showing works by the Japanese artist Kiyoto Maruyama, appropriately enough because he is one of the last surviving painters of so-called "hot spring pictures", large-scale landscape paintings often found on the walls of Japan's public baths. These tranquil, generic nature scenes are designed to put the mind at rest as the body soaks in the hot spring. Upstairs, though, things are far less serene. In room 511, high up in the building, I locate the tiny gallery A Piece of Space, displaying a sculpture by the Swiss artist Susanna Niederer – an elegant, dusted-bronze windchime with five bell-shaped chimes suspended from the ceiling. Elsewhere, lacquerware artist Tamaki exhibits decorative boxes and trays imprinted with gold leaf. A few steps down the corridor, I find the Y's Arts gallery, covered wall-to-wall in British and European antiques.
Next stop is yet another public bath enjoying a second lease of life as an art gallery: Scai the Bathhouse. Bordering one of Tokyo's most famous cemeteries, it's an elegant building with high ceilings and windows, flooded with natural light. The gallery specialises in Japanese and international contemporary artists; Anish Kapoor and Louise Bourgeois have shown here. I find myself hooked by a subversive animation by the Korean multimedia artist and sculptor Jeon Joonho, his first solo show in Japan. The 13-minute piece, entitled Welcome, shows the serene landscape depicted on a North Korean 50 won note being disturbed by a flotilla of helicopters, one of which crashes, turning the olive-green fields into a raging bushfire. As in a previous piece of political satire by Jeon – an animation of a US $20 note, during which a workman gradually paints over the windows of the White House – the artist seems to be attacking the symbols of statehood as well as satirising the fallout from military intervention.
Next, I wander over to the Takahashi Collection, art bought by possibly Japan's most important private collectors, which has popped up at a variety of temporary spaces over the last few years, and is currently appearing in Hibiya, a faintly nondescript business district close to the imperial palace. A practising psychiatrist most of the week, Takahashi reserves Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursday afternoons for his hobby, and has amassed more than 1,000 works since 1997, shuttling them between different temporary spaces across Tokyo. The current space – open since April 2009 – will only be available until this December.
Takahashi tells me that he started buying work by contemporary Japanese artists such as Makoto Aida after hanging out at Ota Fine Arts, one of the most highly-respected private galleries in Tokyo. At that time, the work of Yayoi Kusama – a Japanese artist known for her multi-coloured, polka-dot designs – was a particular favourite. Takahashi concentrates on younger artists now, he says, but denies that he has ambitions to become the Japanese Charles Saatchi. "I don't have enough money to build a gallery," he smiles. "I spend it all on the art."
Perhaps he should follow the example of Tokyo's younger gallerists, who several years ago set up shop well off the beaten track, in the industrial Kiyosumi district to the east of the city. This nameless group – made up of gallerists and art dealers who made their name in the mid-1990s – brought their businesses under one roof in 2005 to create one of the largest gallery spaces in Tokyo. ShugoArts is here, one of the key forces behind the gallerists' collective, as is the groundbreaking Taka Ishii gallery. But the real heavyweight is the Tomio Koyama Gallery, which introduced the world to Takashi Murakami, probably the best-known Japanese artist working today.
But getting there isn't as easy as it sounds, as I discover. You take the metro to a rundown industrial area surrounded by warehouses; the galleries themselves – I have to ask directions – lie down a quiet road, opposite a cement factory. Once inside the building, improvised paper signs sticky-taped to the walls lead you to an industrial elevator. It feels rather like trespassing on criminal gang territory. And when I get inside, the galleries are largely deserted. The clean walls and bright lighting make for a flexible exhibition space – one of the largest in Tokyo – and there's a wonderful variety of work here, but the lack of visitors does nothing to improve the atmosphere. Tomio Koyama's current show is devoted to painter Atsushi Fukui and has the English title I See in You. Fukui has British connections, from an ongoing artistic collaboration with the musician David Sylvian, formerly of the 1970s rock group Japan. Fukui's mystical nature scenes, reminiscent of fairytales, hang alongside framed cartoon pages.
Impressive though Tomio Koyama is, however, when it comes to one-off galleries or bizarre spaces, few can compete with Design Festa in the trendy Harajuku district. Once a drab block of flats, four stories high, it is now a riot of pink scaffolding and garish murals. Every inch has been painted and decorated – and practically every inch can be rented out as well. It hosts the freshest art in the capital and attracts a young, international crowd. As I walk through, I find more than enough to catch the eye on the colourful walls: in one corner a manic cartoon, in another hundreds of painted cat designs. In another, a huge human face sculpted from concrete. Inside the gallery, students – who, drawn by the cheap rates, make up more than half of the artists exhibiting here – show off their latest creations: everything from video installations to cutesy knitware and keyrings, from portrait photography to manga-inspired sketches. I can't say that I love everything on display, but it's exciting nonetheless.
Design Festa is in fact two buildings merged to form one art complex, complete with restaurant and cafe. Its director, Takeshi Araki, shows me around. "Our smallest space is an 80cm square on the wall, which costs 525 yen [around £4] for a day," he says. "We also have a gallery in the toilet." Who could resist? I head downstairs for a closer look: it is indeed there, its walls crammed with small paintings, postcard-size pictures and sketches, all for sale. For one of the most crammed cities in the world, it's somehow fitting. "We like to have all genres, all ages, all kind of artists," says Araki. "We don't have any limits." You can say that again.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, Features, guardian.co.uk, Installation, Japan, Painting, Sculpture, Tokyo | Comments Off
February 3rd, 2010 Mark Brown
From cleaver-wielding suffragettes to a gun-toting delusional Edwardian, the National Portrait Gallery has played host to more than portraiture in its 150-year history
They are some of the forgotten stories from the last 150 years of the National Portrait Gallery: an Edwardian murder and suicide, a cleaver-wielding suffragette and a big rat problem.
The gallery announced today the posting online of an archive catalogue along with reports, letters and photographs which give a fascinating insight into some of the less well-known chapters in its history.
It comes after two years of cataloguing previously unseen material, a project that the gallery's archivist and records manager, Charlotte Brunskill, said they were about a third of the way through: "When I first started there was a 150-year backlog of stuff that hadn't been looked at."
One of the most dramatic stories in the gallery's history was a murder and suicide in the east wing in 1909. The newspapers were full of it, the Daily Express reporting on the well-dressed man, a 70-year-old from Hove "wearing a silk hat and a fur coat", who visited the gallery with his 58-year-old wife.
When they got to Room 27 the man pulled out a revolver and shot his wife before turning the gun on himself. Two young women on a day out fled in terror. It later turned out the man was "delusional with a persecution complex" believing he was being pursued by someone not identified.
An internal report on the incident includes the detail: "Three attendants remained after the gallery was closed to clear up in Room XXVII. Men were sent from HM Office of Works to remove by scraping such stains as remained in the floors after they had been washed over by the Gallery charwomen."
Many documents relate to an incident involving a suffragette in 1914. A woman who later gave her name as Anne Hunt, a "well-known militant" as it turned out, visited the gallery with a meat cleaver hidden in the folds of her dress. When she got to a Millais portrait of the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle – "I think they particularly didn't like him," said Brunskill – she smashed through the glass and ripped his face, shouting that it was "a protest against the re-arrest of Mrs Pankhurst."
A report said an attendant had seen the woman a few days earlier and taken her to be American "from the closeness with which she then examined the pictures". When she turned up again on the Friday he thought he must be wrong as "no American would have paid the 6d entrance fee twice over". She looked suspicious enough for him to follow and grapple with her when she attacked the Millais, possibly preventing further damage.
The gallery had no paintings during the second world war – they went secretly to Mentmore, a mansion in Buckinghamshire – but did have rats. They were everywhere, it seems, and their extermination was formalised in rat reports saying where they were killed and trapped, along with "killers' remarks". A typical entry might have read: "1 Trapped in library" - "drowned by Pitkin." Or another in the library that was "speared by Pittock with poker after it had escaped, with great excitement."
The gallery also said it had received a grant to catalogue the papers of the first director, Sir George Scharf, covering years when the gallery had no permanent home. It was originally in a private house in Great George Street, then South Kensington and briefly in Bethnal Green before moving in to its present home in 1896.
Some of the most interesting material are Scharf's pocket books packed full of drawings, including some from his visit to Blenheim palace and one of an infant Winston Churchill.
Brunskill said a lot of Scharf's diaries covered his obsessions with the weather and his health but he was also a committed campaigner against the "national disgrace" of the gallery not having a permanent home. Sadly he died shortly before the gallery moved to its home in St Martin's Place, near Trafalgar Square.
The archive also touches on the 1960s and the groundbreaking Cecil Beaton exhibition of 1968 which the gallery clearly wanted as a happening, swinging event. It was more like a concept album and there was music and incense and it was all a bit too much for a Mr Steer from Barnes who wrote a letter of complaint.
The gallery's then new young director, Roy Strong, wrote back defending the show, but adding: "You may like to know that both the next two exhibitions will have no music or smell."
Posted in Art, Art and design, guardian.co.uk, Internet, Museums, National Portrait Gallery, News, Painting, Technology, UK news | Comments Off
February 3rd, 2010 Lindsay Poulton
In exclusive footage filmed inside his studio and during the installation of his new Tate retrospective, the artist reflects on how being in the Caribbean has helped him to find a new fluidity in his painting
Posted in Art, Art and design, Chris Ofili, Culture, Editorial, guardian.co.uk, Painting, Tate Britain | Comments Off
February 3rd, 2010 Adrian Searle
Saatchi Gallery, London
The Empire Strikes Back is a wet punch. One might expect Charles Saatchi to show just the sorts of things that are presented: a stuffed camel in a suitcase, a taxidermied dog morphing with a furry vacuum cleaner, photographs of veiled women whose burkas turn out to be pixelated with tiny porn shots, yet more of Subodh Gupta's over-familiar sculptures made from cooking utensils, a black medical cot piled high with tarry mattresses that breathe wheezily to the power of compressed air. There are painted gags about Jasper Johns, dystopian jokes about technology, including a rattling old Xerox machine with half its gubbins missing, and an army of figures made from old floor lamps, neon tubes, discarded bits of plumbing. I see a GCSE-level art project coming on.
This isn't to say that The Empire Strikes Back is all bad. Some pieces are worse than bad, others just obvious. A speech by Gandhi spelled out in bones adds nothing to any argument. It just took a long time to make. T Venkanna's reworked versions of Douanier Rousseau are fun and sexy, and so is Chitra Ganesh's cartoon of a liberated Indian superwoman. Rashid Rana's pixelated view of an endless sea of rubbish is queasily beautiful, and – best of all – Yamini Nayar's photographs of half-abandoned rooms take us somewhere strange and oddly threatening.
A lot of the work looks exoticised for the gallery, the artists playing up their post-colonial otherness as a gimmick, rather than making art of substance. This exhibition gives us no clearer view of the art of a subcontinent than did a recent Serpentine gallery exhibition. There's also no film or video – areas where some of the best work is made.
Rating: 2/5
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, India, Installation, Painting, Reviews, Saatchi gallery, Sculpture, The Guardian | Comments Off