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.
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February 21st, 2010 Laura Cumming
Courtauld Gallery, London
What is a dream but a reel of images you can only see when your eyes are closed? Every other definition is subjective. Visions, visitations, the workings of the subconscious, the reliving or reordering of experience, yearnings and fears transformed into outlandish scenarios: whatever else they represent, dreams take the form of secret and inexplicably linked images. And though they seem a modern obsession, no artist has ever made their mystery more perfectly visible – turned it inside out – than Michelangelo.
Michelangelo's Dream, as it is known, is the centrepiece of one of the greatest (yet smallest) shows you will ever see. The drawing shows a winged figure alighting from the skies, blowing a soundless trumpet into the forehead of a sleeper; though at first glance this male nude seems more awake than asleep, for his eyes appear open. Beneath him is a box full of theatrical masks; propped at his back a rock-hard globe; around him a halo of spectral scenes materialising on the page like breath on a mirror.
But what strikes straight away is the incredible softness of the drawing and the strange weightlessness of the sleeper. So magnificently muscled and yet light enough to levitate, he might be a figment in himself; Captain Marvel minus his costume.
The bulging money bag proffered by huge hands, the old man gathered up by the scruff, flaccid as his own nightshirt, the thug about to brain his victim: the images radiating round the sleeper run all the way from the comic to the horrifying, erotic, incoherent and symbolic. Just like a dream, you might say.
But that only covers the content. What is so exceptional is the way these images are present without quite being defined, and defined without being altogether present. They fade in and out, diaphanous, unreal, scenically separate and yet continuously interlinked. Our stock analogy for dreams is cinema, but Michelangelo is closer to the truth: precise as they are, his pictures are already vanishing, as if escaping from memory.
The Dream was made around 1533 for Tommaso de' Cavalieri, the love of Michelangelo's life. The artist was 57 when they met, the young Roman nobleman somewhere between 13 and 20 but probably nearer to 13. Or so one hopes, given the embarrassing bathos of his response: "ben fatto", he writes back, "well made".
Every surviving gift from Michelangelo to de' Cavalieri is in this show: letters, poems, drawings in black and red chalk. Some have never travelled outside Italy before. You can try to make a love story from the images, as some scholars have, citing all these beautiful bodies in motion, striving, falling, surging, heroic; though in this respect they are pretty much indivisible from the rest of Michelangelo's art whereas the letters are openly adoring. Of de' Cavalieri's feelings little is known: he married and had children; he learned to draw from these works; he was there at the artist's deathbed.
But the drawings bring Michelangelo's mind far closer than the Sistine ceiling (or the letters) ever can, and here are the show's revelations. That Michelangelo is the greatest draughtsman who ever lived is a commonplace, even though his was an age of incredible performers on paper. And everyone knows that his figures excel, that his grasp of form and conflation of the real with the ideal are without parallel.
But it is much harder to catch the strangeness of Michelangelo's originality than its power. Standing close, you become intimate with its inflections here. What would it be like if a chariot and horses were tipped from the clouds, to decimate the doomed below? How might a torso look when solidifying into a tree? Is a satyr more comic than sinister? Nobody has ever seen such things, still less an eagle ravishing a boy or a corpse quickening into life, but Michelangelo makes the barely conceivable spectacularly real. To see the so-called presentation drawings all together is a dreamy, stream-of-consciousness experience in itself. Characters, motifs and ideas appear and reappear; each work seems to give rise to the next. Phaeton plunges from his chariot, Ganymede is snatched upwards by the bird, his helpless limbs spreadeagled; the winged spirit swoops to the sleeper, the spirit leaps skywards from the grave.
The same figure – Tityus, prone, shackled and about to be devoured by another eagle – even doubles as Christ rising from the tomb. Michelangelo simply flips the page, holds it to the light and resurrects the form, inspiring it with new life. The Bible story becomes a model for his art.
And the apotheosis of the show is one final uprush: Christ's stone-cold body returning to eternal life in a shiver of futurist motion. Which other artist could endow solid form with such supernatural lightness: Christ rises, but there is no visible source of force, within or without. Is this, the drawing implies, what divine power might be like?
It is a lightning strike of pure imagination, like the nearly-meeting fingers of God and Adam between which one imagines the sparks leaping. Michelangelo seems to intuit, and anticipate, electricity; and even the fluid continuities, if not the medium, of cinema. If this sounds far-fetched, compare Michelangelo with his peers in a special section of this superbly curated show.
Of the many contemporaries who copied The Dream, not one could help fixing the images and limiting the space. Even Dürer's equally mysterious Melancholia, with its morose angel in her junkyard of allegorical symbols, is earthbound and heavily defined. Whereas Michelangelo's visions appear to be still arriving on the page, while at the same time departing: their dimension not so much space as time.
The Dream makes the mind's motions visible (and, of course, those of the artist). The crux of the drawing is the dreamer's eye, open and yet unseeing. Even with a magnifying glass it is still not possible to determine the implied angle of vision. The pupil is barely discernible, a chalk particle, and the look is inward; inward looking – the very definition of a dream.
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February 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.
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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
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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 8th, 2010 Laura Cumming
Tate Liverpool
There is a work of such coruscating brilliance in this show that it overshadows most of the rest. No wonder it is saved until last. In a darkened gallery, preceded by a warning against explicit sexual content, what appears to be a silent movie unfolds to a score of speakeasy blues except that instead of actors there are shadow puppets performing in mordant black and white.
The film opens with a ship riding stormy waters from which bound slaves are being thrown. They drift to a desert island that turns into a gigantic head, swallowing and disgorging them in the American south. There, a male slave is forced – or is he? – into sexual union with a white man, the resulting baby tossed into the cotton fields by a midwife, where it grows into a sunflower and eventually a lynching tree. In between are many tragicomic scenes, each as complex as a Goya etching. Horror and sorrow are held in equal tension, violence intercut with tenderness throughout.
8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E Walker (2005) is controversial in America. Walker has been condemned for exploiting racial stereotypes, pandering to the white art world, even for marrying a white man. It is easy to see why her versions of history might offend because they are never clear-cut. Her marvellous graphic precision is used instead to spear the mind with images of the world turned upside down and inside out; her narratives have more in common with Flannery O'Connor than Uncle Tom's Cabin.
So Walker is definitely in the right room of this show, the one devoted to subversive originality. Though the curators have called it "From Post-Modern to Post-Black: Appropriation, Black Humour and Double Negatives" instead. From which you may deduce all you need to know about their unremitting academicism and dead-handed approach to art.
The subject of this chaotic, badly displayed but undeniably fascinating show is, in any case, ideas more than art, namely those of the eminent intellectual Paul Gilroy in his 1993 book The Black Atlantic. Or at least the central idea of the Atlantic as a kind of continent in negative, a place where cultures perpetually crisscross so that there is no dominant national tradition either in Europe or America; that black culture only means something to black people being as insidious an idea as that of European culture only having meaning for whites.
This is where modernist art comes in on cue: it's what cubism famously draws from African sculpture and, conversely, what African-Americans get from cubism. It's the surrealists with their ethnographic photos; it's Josephine Baker and art deco; it's the Guyanese-born Frank Bowling reprising Barnett Newman in the colours of the Rastafarian flag.
It is also, alas, paintings such as Edward Burra's Harlem and Palmer Hayden's Midsummer Night in Harlem, hung next to each other to show a painful convergence: the white Englishman and the black American producing equally awful variations on "primitivist" art.
Bowling excepted, this only takes the show as far as the 1930s. Thereafter, as it seems to me, Gilroy's ideas are harder to illustrate through art than music or writing. There are obvious two-ways: Lorna Simpson's Photo Booth of African-Americans which gets its commemorative aesthetic from Christian Boltanski; Glenn Ligon's stencilling of one of Richard Pryor's deadly race gags in the manner of a Richard Prince joke painting (with an overlay of Warhol gold). Would Prince ever dare?
But the theme peters out as the show goes in too many different directions at once. Naturally, it must include protest art (though there are noticeably few highpoints here other than David Hammons's 1969 Admissions Office, a glass door with a black face and hands pressed desperately against it like the traces of a scorched man).
And the curators don't want to leave out body art, gender art, identity art and so on, which introduces a whole slew of polemical work, some of which has no obvious place in this show. Why is the Cuban Ana Mendieta extensively represented when her ritualised performances with blood, earth and water surely speak exclusively to feminism when much more relevant artists such as African-Americans Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Kalup Linzy or Martin Puryear are not here at all?
In the opening galleries, Afro Modern presents art in the culture of jazz, blues, du Bois and Baldwin. But this approach, so conducive to Gilroy's ideas, pretty soon fades away to expose the dry box-ticking of this show. There is no more point in showing Chris Ofili's Double Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars (1997) without referring to its obvious soundtrack in rap, for instance, than in propping it next to a Pan-African version of the stars and stripes in red, black and green. Displayed like this, they are just one variety of black art after another.
No show that includes works by Jacob Lawrence or the inspired collagist Romare Bearden can truly lack power. If you have never seen Bearden's strange and compelling images, made of scraps of high and low art, old masters and ads, African masks and cartoons, then Afro Modern is ultimately worth the visit. Bearden orchestrates his fragments like a street scene through which the eye moves, taking it all in on the go. His vision of country folk by a railroad watching for a train to come – and then go – is bleakly beautiful: catching the spectacle of life even as it departs.
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February 7th, 2010 Laura Cumming
Tate Liverpool
There is a work of such coruscating brilliance in this show that it overshadows most of the rest. No wonder it is saved until last. In a darkened gallery, preceded by a warning against explicit sexual content, what appears to be a silent movie unfolds to a score of speakeasy blues except that instead of actors there are shadow puppets performing in mordant black and white.
The film opens with a ship riding stormy waters from which bound slaves are being thrown. They drift to a desert island that turns into a gigantic head, swallowing and disgorging them in the American south. There, a male slave is forced – or is he? – into sexual union with a white man, the resulting baby tossed into the cotton fields by a midwife, where it grows into a sunflower and eventually a lynching tree. In between are many tragicomic scenes, each as complex as a Goya etching. Horror and sorrow are held in equal tension, violence intercut with tenderness throughout.
8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E Walker (2005) is controversial in America. Walker has been condemned for exploiting racial stereotypes, pandering to the white art world, even for marrying a white man. It is easy to see why her versions of history might offend because they are never clear-cut. Her marvellous graphic precision is used instead to spear the mind with images of the world turned upside down and inside out; her narratives have more in common with Flannery O'Connor than Uncle Tom's Cabin.
So Walker is definitely in the right room of this show, the one devoted to subversive originality. Though the curators have called it "From Post-Modern to Post-Black: Appropriation, Black Humour and Double Negatives" instead. From which you may deduce all you need to know about their unremitting academicism and dead-handed approach to art.
The subject of this chaotic, badly displayed but undeniably fascinating show is, in any case, ideas more than art, namely those of the eminent intellectual Paul Gilroy in his 1993 book The Black Atlantic. Or at least the central idea of the Atlantic as a kind of continent in negative, a place where cultures perpetually crisscross so that there is no dominant national tradition either in Europe or America; that black culture only means something to black people being as insidious an idea as that of European culture only having meaning for whites.
This is where modernist art comes in on cue: it's what cubism famously draws from African sculpture and, conversely, what African-Americans get from cubism. It's the surrealists with their ethnographic photos; it's Josephine Baker and art deco; it's the Guyanese-born Frank Bowling reprising Barnett Newman in the colours of the Rastafarian flag.
It is also, alas, paintings such as Edward Burra's Harlem and Palmer Hayden's Midsummer Night in Harlem, hung next to each other to show a painful convergence: the white Englishman and the black American producing equally awful variations on "primitivist" art.
Bowling excepted, this only takes the show as far as the 1930s. Thereafter, as it seems to me, Gilroy's ideas are harder to illustrate through art than music or writing. There are obvious two-ways: Lorna Simpson's Photo Booth of African-Americans which gets its commemorative aesthetic from Christian Boltanski; Glenn Ligon's stencilling of one of Richard Pryor's deadly race gags in the manner of a Richard Prince joke painting (with an overlay of Warhol gold). Would Prince ever dare?
But the theme peters out as the show goes in too many different directions at once. Naturally, it must include protest art (though there are noticeably few highpoints here other than David Hammons's 1969 Admissions Office, a glass door with a black face and hands pressed desperately against it like the traces of a scorched man).
And the curators don't want to leave out body art, gender art, identity art and so on, which introduces a whole slew of polemical work, some of which has no obvious place in this show. Why is the Cuban Ana Mendieta extensively represented when her ritualised performances with blood, earth and water surely speak exclusively to feminism when much more relevant artists such as African-Americans Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Kalup Linzy or Martin Puryear are not here at all?
In the opening galleries, Afro Modern presents art in the culture of jazz, blues, du Bois and Baldwin. But this approach, so conducive to Gilroy's ideas, pretty soon fades away to expose the dry box-ticking of this show. There is no more point in showing Chris Ofili's Double Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars (1997) without referring to its obvious soundtrack in rap, for instance, than in propping it next to a Pan-African version of the stars and stripes in red, black and green. Displayed like this, they are just one variety of black art after another.
No show that includes works by Jacob Lawrence or the inspired collagist Romare Bearden can truly lack power. If you have never seen Bearden's strange and compelling images, made of scraps of high and low art, old masters and ads, African masks and cartoons, then Afro Modern is ultimately worth the visit. Bearden orchestrates his fragments like a street scene through which the eye moves, taking it all in on the go. His vision of country folk by a railroad watching for a train to come – and then go – is bleakly beautiful: catching the spectacle of life even as it departs.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, Features, Reviews, Tate Liverpool, The Observer | Comments Off
February 1st, 2010 Laura Cumming
Tate Britain, London
The retrospective of Chris Ofili's paintings now filling several galleries at Tate Britain is exactly what you might expect – opulent, glittery, dazzling, gorgeous. If you have seen even one of his works you can probably extrapolate the massed effects of 60 more. But what is surprising, and dismaying, about this show is just how indispensable these effects turn out to be when Ofili starts working without them.
An early star, not yet 30 when he won the Turner prize in 1998, Ofili is the most famous black artist in British history. This has nothing to do with the dung. Rudy Giuliani may have accidentally ramped Ofili's reputation by threatening to prosecute the Brooklyn Museum for showing his black virgin propped on dried elephant ordure, but the mayor ought to have observed that this Anglo-African Catholic was applying the identical substance to paintings concerned with slavery. The dung is innocent, evenly distributed. Over here, naysayers were more confused by the references to blaxploitation movies and gangsta rap.
But those days are gone. The controversial works now belong to museums, blue-chip collectors and history itself. Seventies centrefolds, Don King, Ice T, Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars, all mixed up with racial stereotypes in a manner commonly considered provocative: these look like period pieces of the recent past.
But are they provocative, humorous, ironic? Everything is kept in play. Ofili's even-handedness, anarchic to some, non-committal to others, is so accomplished that one visitor was troubled by the absence of anything to roil the sheer optical pleasures.
The Tate has them in abundance. Here is Ofili's fantastic Afromantic idyll, keyed in the red, black and green of Marcus Garvey's pan-African flag. An Eden of ganja, ripe bananas and heat glowing in a haze of glitter, the paintings are enormous, intricate, abundant, panoramic glorifications of love.
She reclines like an odalisque, a constellation of red and green dots bursting from one nipple like stars. The contours of his body twine with hers: behind, before, above, between, below. The scene pulses with rapture.
The method was laid down almost from the start. Beads, glitter, map pins, sequins, paint used like ink, batik, henna decoration; applied in African cave art dots. Teeming excess and all of it multiplied by the use of resin beneath which images appear suspended as if underwater or trapped in amber – and then Ofili would add another layer by painting on top.
You can see this put to tremendous effect in a work like Spaceshit (1995)with its planetary shapes formed of tiny dots, each semi-transparent so that the painting acquires spacey depths. From a distance, they come across as intergalactic drifts; nearer, they look like Monet waterlilies reprised for modern times and eventually like hard, bright particles. The closer you stand the more there is to see, until you lose sight of the overall picture. Each painting has its own prolific micro-life.
Precise yet stoned, sophisticated yet simple: that is the basic proposition, a dichotomy between the highly disciplined technique and the blatantly swoony effects. You have to wait for the physical appeal to fade (if it ever does) to get down to what is really going on. And most often it seems to be just that: something unresolved, ongoing.
For some, this is Ofili's great strength, this improvisational mix of all and every-thing, like an open-ended poem or song. But it puts everything on the same level. A painting may include afro heads rushing about like fireworks or tiny photographs of the murdered schoolboy Stephen Lawrence and yet the glorious gaudiness is the main event, the constant. It is not that one painting looks like another, for Ofili has quite a range of effects involving density, motion, brightness, mood; it is more that the tone scarcely varies.
And this is exposed, quite literally, in the recent works painted in Trinidad where Ofili now lives. Almost every distinguishing characteristic has been pared away – layering, resin, glitter and all – to leave nothing but unadorned paint; and images that have nowhere to hide. A couple of islanders strumming banjos in the blue-black night, Judas dangling from a noose apparently added as an afterthought; the raising of Lazarus in the style of Matisse; a deep purple nude accepting a sundowner in what appears to be a stylised cocktail ad.
Ofili experiments with styles, experiments with inky blackness so that one sometimes has to peer into the surface to make out the forms. He makes an obvious verbal/visual pun on Der Blaue Reiter – two ultramarine horsemen in a midnight-blue forest – with Blue Riders. The colours remain rich, but the paintings are crude, mannered, struggling to make anything at all of their chosen content. They feel uniformly powerless and inert.
In the past, it has sometimes seemed as if imagery itself presented a quandary: not so much how but what to paint, hardly an unusual dilemma for an artist. Now Ofili seems to be fixed upon the latter, with these narratives, myths and local scenes, but uncertain with the former. Put politely, it's a bold departure.
But it sends you back to question the past. Did all those proliferating dots, swirls and patterns ever add up? Was it all as playful as people claimed? For answers consult the centrepiece of this show, The Upper Room (1999-2002), with its 13 magnificent panels arranged in a darkened chamber like the figures at the Last Supper.
Each depicts a monkey holding a cup, though the outline of the largest is dissolving in the golden surface, beneath a gilded dung clod of a halo. Each glows, quite literally, with its own luminous colour. Solemn and reverential, yet plainly tinged with the absurd, they keep a tension between monkey business and Bible story that defies explanation.
Rothko claimed that his numinous oblongs represented God; perhaps a monkey can stand in for Christ. Yet that does not seem to be what's going on in this spectacularly intense yet vague installation. The adoration of colour is obvious in each beautifully worked surface, the devotion is all there in the making. This is painting as an act of worship.
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February 1st, 2010 Tim Adams
The Foundling Museum, London WC1, until 9 May
The three artists chosen to collaborate at the Foundling Museum on the site of the original Foundling Hospital on London's Coram's Fields are, appropriately enough, a dysfunctional kind of family. Mat Collishaw and Tracey Emin and Paula Rego have history. Rego taught Emin for a while and was certainly an inspirational midwife to the violent angst of her art; Emin and Collishaw, meanwhile, were stormy lovers in the heyday of the YBAs, a six-year union that ended with Emin childless at 40.
The ghosts of some of this past seem to haunt the rooms in which they have displayed work, which responds in different ways to the already heavy history of this place. In the basement, Emin shows sketches she made during her pregnancy of 1991 that ended in a botched abortion: unknown hands clutching at her foetus, nightmares of labour and suckling, half-formed scribbles of a half-formed child who never was. This theme is picked up in her other contributions – the row of infant clothes she has collected and neatly hung on a rail but never used, the soft, woollen baby clothes her grandmother made for her, in the hope the maternal line might continue.
Outside are Emin's orphan mittens and socks, cast in bronze and left on railings, or on stone steps, in the forlorn hope of finding their twins. The inspiration might be Hemingway's suggestion for the shortest novel ever written – "Baby's shoes for sale. Never worn" – but the sentiment, mawkish, and self-absorbed, is all Emin's own.
Collishaw is more hard-headed in his response to the charitable foundation, which from its inception in the 1740s took in abandoned children, or those born out of marriage, or those who were the issue of rape, and gave them a rigorous upbringing and education. He shows a series of exquisite prints of Indian street children set against 18th-century backdrops – one young boy is framed by Ingres's bather, flesh on flesh – making the point that this museum is not all about oil-painted history: in some geographies, its concerns are very much of the moment.
Elsewhere, Collishaw muses on the mythic desperations of parenting, updating the Romulus and Remus legend in a large, backlit print that shows two naked cherub babies in the care of a pair of vast wild dogs on a knackered and bloodstained sofa.
There is little room for sentiment either in Rego's tableau Oratorio, which takes its tone from the scabrous moralising of Hogarth, one of the original hospital's champions (Gin Lane is included in the permanent collection). Her large-scale installation is a kind of altarpiece to the horror of rape and abuse of children; her sketches for it are full of witchy obstetricians and newborns with dislocated, doll-like limbs being weighed by the pound.
It's something of a relief after this to return to the section of museum that details the ways in which generations of discarded children were saved from the accidents of their birth, with the help of copperplate ledgers and worsted uniforms.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Features, Paula Rego, Reviews, The Observer, Tracey Emin | Comments Off
