January 30th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
There are many good examples of poetry in movies (On film, Film & Music, 29 January). One that springs to mind is Argentinian director Eliseo Subiela's 1992 film El Lado Oscuro del Corazón (The Dark Side of the Heart), where the main character, Oliverio, is a young poet living in Buenos Aires and making ends meet by selling his ideas to advertising companies. In the movie Oliverio is constantly reciting poems by Juan Gelman, Mario Benedetti and his namesake Oliverio Girondo. Needless to say, the film was a success in Iberoamerica, where it introduced these important Latin American poets to a younger generation.
Mario Lopez-Goicoechea
London
• A native, I've just returned to London after 26 years in New York City. While still in wonderment at how much richer London is now, I am also very aware of the economic turmoil in which it finds itself, along with much of the world. The Guardian's response to this in publishing summaries of the great poets of the English canon (The Romantic poets, 23-29 January) is simply inspiring. There is no other word I can think of for this act of defiance and resilience in the face of upheaval and austerity. Please continue to spread the word that art and beauty are what matter most, all else is dreck.
Michael Joseph
Hounslow, Middlesex
• Does the Guardian know what it is doing in publishing the Romantic poets booklets? Have you considered that they might find their way into schools, and breed a generation of subversive and revolutionary young people? It is hardly likely that Peter Mandelson and Ed Balls would welcome their appearance in schools – not least the Shelley and Blake selections.
Lionel Burman
West Kirby, Wirral
Posted in Art, Art and design, Books, Business, Culture, Ed Balls, Film, Financial crisis, Letters, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Peter Mandelson, Poetry, The Guardian, William Blake | Comments Off
January 29th, 2010 Kate Connolly
German museum once dubbed the most beautiful in the world set to welcome back artworks banished by the Nazis
On a visit in 1932, Paul J Sachs, the co-founder of New York's Museum of Modern Art, referred to it as "the most beautiful museum in the world", whose influence stretched way beyond German borders. But then one of Europe's first and finest public collections of contemporary art was declared "degenerate" by the Nazis, the Folkwang was brutally broken up and 1,400 of its works – including Chagalls, Picassos, Matisses, Kirchners and Gauguins – were strewn around the world.
This weekend the museum, in the western German city of Essen, will be returned to its former glory as a temple to modern art with the opening of the British architect David Chipperfield's much-vaunted new glass and concrete space.
The building, say critics, exudes calm. One described it as "resembling a meditation centre", another likened it to "snowflakes in a glass skirt", so weightless does it appear from inside and out compared with much of the Ruhr valley's heavy industrial architecture.
Summing up what he thought important about his design, Chipperfield – who beat other celebrated architects including Zaha Hadid and David Adaye to win the commission – said: "You want to lose yourself in it, as well as being able to orientate yourself."
The Folkwang building, a series of cubes whose windows are made out of recycled glass, reinforces London-born Chipperfield's status in Germany as a darling of modern architecture. It comes hot on the heels of his highly ambitious transformation of Berlin's war-torn Neues Museum.
The Folkwang redesign, which to the Germans' delight was completed on schedule and within budget, will come into its own in March with the opening of the exhibition The Most Beautiful Museum in the World. The show will bring together for the first time in more than 70 years the artworks that were stripped from the gallery's walls by the Nazis in 1936.
Among the returning treasures will be works by Oskar Kokoscha, Wassily Kandinsky and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Marc Chagall's vibrant Purimfest, a dusky self-portrait by Giorgio di Chirico, Paul Gauguin's Contes Barbares, as well as Grazing Horses by Franz Marc, currently in the Harvard Art Museum, will hang once again in Essen.
The Folkwang collection – the name derives from Hall of Freyja, the Norse goddess of love and beauty – was first established in 1902 by the cultural philanthropist Karl-Ernst Osthaus, whose vision was to anchor modern art in the centre of urban life. The Folkwang model subsequently inspired many art museums around the world.
The €55m reconstruction was made possible by Berthold Beitz, a philanthropist and former steel baron whose name is inextricably linked with the fortunes of industrial Germany and who initiated his Krupp Foundation to finance the project.
The 96-year old, who greatly plays down his little-known role in saving 800 Jews from the Holocaust by convincing the Nazis they were vital to the war effort, said returning the museum to its former status was his gift to the citizens of Essen. "My only wish had been that I'd be alive to see it, and now my dream has been fulfilled," he said.
Posted in Architecture, Art, Art and design, Culture, Germany, Museums, News, World news, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
January 28th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
Her leadership made Guildhall art gallery a London landmark
Vivien Knight, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 56, was the vivacious and unconventional head of Guildhall art gallery in London. Twenty-six years ago, she was appointed to head the Corporation of London's paintings collection. Most of the 4,500 works had been in storage since 1941, when the Guildhall's original art gallery had suffered bomb damage. With no other staff, Vivien threw herself into the task of compiling the collection's first complete catalogue, published four years later, and of showing the works at the Barbican under the title The City's Pictures.
Gems such as Constable's full-scale sketch of Salisbury Cathedral, John Singleton Copley's Siege of Gibraltar – commissioned by the City of London in 1782 – and portraits of the London judges who adjudicated on claims made in the wake of the Great Fire, were made visible after nearly half a century. Vivien went on to lead the building of the new Guildhall art gallery, establishing a team along the way, and shepherding the city's pictures into public view with characteristic verve and energy.
She was in many ways an incongruous figure to find darting between the Mansion House, the Old Bailey and other strongholds of the Corporation of London. Flame-haired, with a puckish wit and clothes that came from thrift or vintage shops, she seemed the antithesis of corporate power and authority. Yet her encyclopedic knowledge of the pictures in her care and her eagerness to share that knowledge with as many as possible – not only the City's grandees and aldermen, but also amateur painting groups, children and pensioners – has helped to transform the Guildhall, opened in 1999, into a significant landmark for London.
Born in Solihull, West Midlands, to parents who were both teachers – her father an art teacher – Vivien studied art history and fine art under Lawrence Gowing at Leeds University and, in 1979, joined Birmingham City art gallery as an assistant in the prints and drawings department. I was running it at the time, and when Vivien first appeared, she looked like a figure from a Burne-Jones drawing – a Brummie angel with corkscrew curls and an irreverent manner. On occasion, we would bring the stuffed penguins from Scott's Antarctic expedition – kept in the museum's natural history wing – into the print room as we worked on the pre-Raphaelite collections. Whether or not this initiated Vivien's lifelong fascination with Antarctica, it was surely the basis of her knowledge of everything to do with Victorian painting.
In 1980 she became a research assistant at the Whitworth art gallery, Manchester, where she met James Faure Walker, the painter and founding editor of Artscribe magazine. Within three weeks, they decided to marry, and what might have seemed to others to be a reckless romance turned out to be a marvellously happy partnership lasting nearly 30 years, with three much-loved children – Josie, Edward and Dulcie.
Vivien's instinctual nature, combined with a fiery determination, made her an unusual figure in the rapidly professionalised art gallery world. She was as comfortable negotiating the special requirements of door heights with the architects of the new Guildhall art gallery ("tall enough to let the pikemen through") as she was chivvying her employers into taking advantage of the discovery of Roman remains beneath the original site for the gallery by taking a lease on another, bigger building behind. Her thoughts always focused on the good of the collection.
At the same time, she was publishing and organising exhibitions. She wrote the first monograph on Patrick Heron (1988) and the definitive study of WP Frith (Painting the Victorian Age, 2006). She was equally proud of the seven themed books she published on the Guildhall's collection, with a range of subjects including London, Children in Art and Modern. They are models of clear and unpretentious prose.
Vivien is survived by James and their children.
• Vivien Knight, curator, born 9 November 1953; died 19 December 2009
Posted in Art, Art and design, Obituaries, The Guardian | Comments Off
January 28th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
Michael Landy has transformed the South London Gallery into a giant dustbin for other people's art
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Editorial, Exhibitions, Michael Landy, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
January 28th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
Numerous British artists of the 1990s haven't quite lived up to the hype. But we shouldn't worry: art carries on regardless
So another modern British artist bites ... well, not the dust exactly. But in comparison with the hopes once held for him, the reception of Chris Ofili's new show at London's Tate Britain is flat. Hey, these new works are interesting ... or are they ... hmm, they could be garbage, but we still like him.
I personally find Ofili's new direction intriguing, but I come from a different starting point: I do not think much of his Upper Room cycle or other early works. I did once, but I had a terrible moment of alienation after writing a big raving feature about him then seeing ... well, not much at all in the exhibition I had helped to puff. Ofili is a good and interesting artist, but the fame he won in the late 1990s was overblown and now there is bound to be a correction.
And that puts him in good – or perhaps we need to say so-so – company. The truth is that almost no talent of the British 1990s has endured. All were given a soft ride – and all are landing, with varying degrees of softness, back into the realm of reality. Gary Hume's latest works will be seen not at a snazzy London venue, but the New Art Centre, Salisbury. Damien Hirst ... but I promised to keep silent about him, Rachel Whiteread, Gillian Wearing, that guy who did the Tube map ... so many have fallen. Gently.
Nor does this mean art is in trouble. Actually things look quite good. I am optimistic that 2010 will see another excellent Turner prize shortlist. There are plenty of good and worthwhile artists to choose from, of all ages. But it is not what we were promised. It is not what seemed possible. It is, actually, business as usual. The dust has settled, and art in Britain in 2010 is much like art in Britain in 1987, or 1977. Interesting, varied, often surprising.
Undoubtedly, we are a nation with something to offer the art world - we always were. But when it comes to the really high stakes the Freuds and Auerbachs have nothing to fear from my generation, and they never did.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Blogposts, Chris Ofili, Culture, Damien Hirst, Painting, Tracey Emin, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
January 28th, 2010 Skye Sherwin
With his eye for old-fashioned collage – and his mean hand with a scalpel – Stezaker gives new life to images from our past
With a few deft incisions with his scalpel, John Stezaker reveals what is lurking beyond the glossy surface of postcards and publicity stills. Sometimes one picture is simply positioned over the centre of another, but in a series such as Marriages (2006), men and women are forcibly yoked together with a swift, decisive incision down the middle. In Bridges, Stezaker's ongoing series started in the 1980s, buildings are chopped and reconfigured. Elsewhere the silhouette of a figure is cut out; its ghost-like absence filled in by more landscape or someone else's body. The technique is stunningly straightforward, the effect profound. As strong-jawed men are spliced with B-movie glamour pusses, bodily forms with architectural ones, painstakingly posed promo material becomes unruly, disorientating and freakish.
Stezaker soaked up a variety of influences while studying at London's Slade School of Fine Art in the 1960s. His teachers included Ernst Gombrich, an iconic art historian and Richard Wollheim, the Freudian philosopher. During this time, in France, the Situationist group of artists were arguing that reality had been replaced by the endless flow of images in the capitalist mass media. It was an idea Steazker took to heart, using the most straightforward kind of cut-and-paste to question the meaning of images.
Stezaker doesn't use just any picture: his raw materials are long-forgotten B-movie relics from British cinema, dating back to his childhood in the 1940s and 1950s, or retro picture postcards full of quaint grottos, waterfalls and terracotta roofs. Thanks to Stezaker's weird conjunctions, however, these images seem alienated – cut off from culture, place and time.
His technique has been constant since the 1970s, but success arrived later in life. The past decade has seen extensive solo shows in the US and Europe, and his inclusion in major survey shows such as the 2006 Tate Triennial. Perhaps this recognition has come about because his psychologically charged, modestly-scaled work seems ever more relevant in our technologically supercharged moment.
Why we like him: For Masks (2005), a series in which actors' faces are replaced with postcards of Romantic landscapes. A dark cave, gushing waterfall or train tunnel merges with a perfectly coiffed head. A man's brow slides into a motorway bridge; a craggy rock face stands in for eyes and nose. These are disturbing, dreamlike forms that burrow their way straight to our subconscious.
Poster child: A 1950s billboard advertising Start-Rite shoes introduced the young Stezaker to the hidden meaning of images. Its depiction of children seen from behind as they walk down the long road of life – seemingly towards their death – haunted his childhood.
Where can I see him? John Stezaker's show, Tabula Rasa, is at The Approach , London E2, 29 Jan – 7 March.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Features, Modernism, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
January 28th, 2010 Eamonn McCabe
Photographer who snapped Freud, Bacon and the bohemians of Soho
The photographer Harry Diamond, who has died from a brain haemorrhage aged 85, captured the "faces" of bohemian Soho in the 1960s and 70s. He frequented the London watering holes favoured by artists including Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, and soon became known as the "man in the mac" who was always carrying a camera.
Diamond was always broke and would take photographs for artists, often of their work and sometimes their portrait, in return for a drink or a meal. The list of his subjects includes Freud, Bacon, Eduardo Paolozzi, William Coldstream, Richard Carline, Michael Andrews, Daniel Farson and Frank Auerbach. He was more famous for those he shot rather than for any particular style. He spent a lot of time with another man who hung around Soho with a camera – John Deacon, considered "a right little runt" by Bacon. One of Diamond's best portraits is of Deacon looking surprisingly upbeat.
A small but fit man, Diamond thought of himself as having been "born good-looking". Freud obviously agreed and had Diamond pose for him on three occasions. One painting became particularly famous: Interior at Paddington (1951), which was commissioned for the Arts Council's exhibition Sixty Paintings for 51, at the Festival of Britain. At the time, artists in London could rent or buy studio space in Paddington cheaply. The carpet in the portrait was bought by Freud from a junk shop in the Harrow Road. The window overlooks the Grand Union canal, and a boy can be seen on the pavement below, looking up at the window.
The Arts Council paid £500 for Interior at Paddington, which went to the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. In 1979 Diamond was commissioned to take photographs of buildings around Liverpool. While there, he told the staff of the Walker that the biggest complaint he had about being painted by Freud was being required to stand around posing for six months. When Freud painted him again in Paddington, in 1970, Diamond was seated.
Freud himself remembered Diamond's response to the 1951 portrait: "He said I made his legs too short. The whole thing was that his legs were too short. He was aggressive as he had a bad time being brought up in the East End and being persecuted."
Born into a Jewish family in east London, Diamond never moved out of the area. He first started photographing local buildings with his 35mm camera as he was upset at seeing so many of them being demolished. Although he captured the changing landscape of Bethnal Green in the early 1950s, he would spend a lot of time "up west", especially at Ronnie Scott's jazz club in Soho, where he once worked as a cleaner. He enjoyed the company of jazz musicians and had a great love of dancing, but was once barred from the 100 Club on Oxford Street for being too aggressive. He was also barred for life from the French House in Soho – a rare honour – for throwing a beer, and its glass, at the proprietor.
While working as a stagehand, Diamond met the Hungarian theatre photographer Michael Peto, who encouraged him into full-time photography in the mid-1960s.
Bruce Bernard, the former picture editor of the Sunday Times, found Diamond a complex and sensitive man, and always kept an eye on him. Before Bernard died, he made arrangements for Diamond to be looked after by their mutual friend, the artist Virginia Verran.
Diamond was nervous about publicity. He ducked the offer of a contract from Thames & Hudson for a book of his photographs in case the taxman came digging around. He never had a bank account. His printer, Steve Walsh, who Diamond used for years, was paid in rolled-up fivers that came out of different pockets – and even his socks.
After one late-night incident involving a hammer, he inevitably became known as "Harry the hammer". According to Walsh, talking to him could be dangerous as "he never spoke, he always shouted at you, and showered you into the bargain".
Pubs were his habitat. Roxy Beaujolais, the owner of the Seven Stars in Chancery Lane, knew Diamond for 35 years. He photographed her wedding, but not very well. She used to cut his nails and his hair, and remembers him as being "always well turned out, if a little shabby", and "a true observer who was always out and about, always on the move, especially on the buses. He knew every route across town."
Eight of Diamond's photographs are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. A brother predeceased him.
• Harry Diamond, photographer, born 25 August 1924; died 3 December 2009
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Lucian Freud, Obituaries, Photography, The Guardian | Comments Off
January 27th, 2010 Chris Wilkinson
As a recent debate at the ICA revealed, the real value of art lies in its capacity to be contradictory – even agonisingly boring
"What is the value of art?" That was the question Tom Morris asked his audience at a talk he gave last Saturday as part of the London international mime festival. It is a question which he has been mulling over for many years, and in order to answer it, he asked all of us to close our eyes and focus on one piece of artwork that had had a significant impact on us.
As we each remembered a particular sculpture, song or play, Morris asked a series of further questions: "was it simple or complicated? Did it feel private or public? Did it change you?" And so on.
After this he asked us to feedback on what we had discovered about those works of art that made them feel special. For some, art had provided them with a moment of "transcendence" or of "emotional purity". For others, the work had articulated perfectly a feeling or an idea they already had: as Alexander Pope put it, "what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed".
All of these responses make sense and are good reasons for valuing art. But for me, the answer to this question lies elsewhere. When I closed my eyes, the thing that immediately popped into my head was the National Theatre of Scotland's Black Watch. Given the enormous success the show enjoyed, this was hardly an original idea. But what surprised me, as I listened to Morris's questions and thought about the show, was that I realised it had affected me in a way I had not noticed before.
When I was a child, my parents would take me, every year, to see the Royal Tournament – a large military tattoo held at Earls Court in London. I have vivid recollections of these militaristic jamborees, and I realised that Black Watch, which itself takes the form of a tattoo, is now, in my mind, intimately linked to and subversive of these memories. So, for me, the experience of watching the show was both public and communal, but also private and individual.
And it is this capacity to be two contradictory things at once that I think gives great art its real value. So much of what I have seen that has really affected me has revelled in the pleasure of paradox. For instance, the very space that Morris was speaking in at the ICA was the same theatre where I had first seen Forced Entertainment perform when I was a sixth former back in 1997. Their show, Pleasure, had a formative impact on me. As a performance, it was slow – agonizingly, stupefyingly, slow – the show seemed to rejoice in its capacity to be boring. And yet it was because it was so "boring" that I ended up finding it so thoroughly absorbing and interesting.
To take another example, the only time I have ever been truly overwhelmed emotionally by a piece of visual art was when I saw Michelangelo's David for the first time. I was astonished by the sculpture's beauty – a perfect depiction of the perfect male form. But the more I looked at it the more I realised it was ludicrously out of proportion, with hands and feet that were far too large for the body. It was an image that was both true and false at the same time. And surely this paradox is inherent in any work of art – after all, we know that the characters on stage are merely actors and that David is just a lump of marble.
Perhaps the artistic importance of these contradictions is why I, like Anthony Nielson, feel so suspicious whenever I hear someone claim that a play should have a "thesis" or an argument. Polemic works well on the two dimensions of the newspaper page, but in the three dimensional world of the stage it can end up feeling hollow. And if paradox is the lifeblood of the theatre, then perhaps we can answer the question "to be or not to be?" with the statement "to be and not to be".
Posted in Art, Art and design, Blogposts, Stage, Theatre, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
January 27th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
How can London be the capital of global art when our celebrity culture makes it such a miserable place for artists to live and work?
Chris Ofili, whose retrospective has just opened at Tate Britain, is just one of the British artists who have chosen to live abroad to get away from the madness of art's celebrity culture – including such serious figures as Tacita Dean and Steve McQueen.
So here's a paradox. Constantly, the media tell us that London is this century's Manhattan or Paris, that Britain is the world's leading art capital. Yet I believe that in Manhattan in the 1960s you would actually have found artists living and working – and if Picasso had fled back to Barcelona, the Musée Picasso wouldn't have been in Paris. Art capitals are traditionally places where artists thrive. But what kind of artist really thrives on our brand of instant celebrity?
As a critic, you forget what celebrity means. It's seeing people coo over someone who seems very ordinary to me, such as Grayson Perry – someone I've sometimes been rude about, sometimes praised, but certainly never mistaken for the kind of artist I, personally, would go weak at the knees to meet.
Celebrity is such a small thing compared with real fame. For me, a famous artist is one whose works have secured them a true place in art history, whose talent is mysterious and personality elusive. Jasper Johns is famous; Perry is a celebrity.
A celebrity is someone who is "like us" – just watch all those talent shows on TV – which by definition limits their genius. A celebrity, to have democratic appeal, really has to be a bit second rung, a bit ordinary. It's quite a contradiction. You have to catch the eye and yet you can't intimidate people with supreme abilities.
The purest expression of modern Britain's celebrity art culture, and its logical conclusion, was Antony Gormley's participatory artwork on the Fourth Plinth. Here was the mediocrity of the celebrity culture made monumental – everyone an artist, everyone a star, not a trace of imagination in sight.
No wonder the real artists run for their lives.
Posted in Antony Gormley, Art, Art and design, Blogposts, Celebrity, Chris Ofili, Culture, Fourth plinth, Grayson Perry, Jasper Johns, Pablo Picasso, Steve McQueen, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
January 27th, 2010 Homa Khaleeli
Professional art restorers can work marvels with damage such as the 6in tear in Picasso's The Actor
An art student fell into Picasso's The Actor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York this week, creating a 6in tear. How can it be fixed? Modern-paintings specialist Michael Robinson, from conservators JH Cooke and Sons, explains.
There are many ways to repair a painting, but everything must be reversible: retouching will alter in colour at a different rate and over time the repair can grow obvious. The gallery would use a modern adhesive to join the tear, which is easy to use and non-aqueous (water can shrink a canvas).
This glue would be applied carefully by hand, with a very fine tool – maybe even a dental pick. The area would be under magnification so the restorer can see this delicate work. Or they might reweave the canvas; the individual threads twisted back together, under microscopic conditions – almost like doing surgery.
A suction table [which holds the picture down by creating a vacuum, and controls humidity] could be used if the tear stretched the canvas. This stretch could be "sweated out" on a suction table by turning up the humidity.
If the paint has crumbled it could be re-adhered with Isinglass – fish glue – under a magnifying glass, or a heat-activated adhesive. The tear may need support. You could line the whole of the back of the canvas but for such a special painting it's more likely to be patched. A piece of synthetic sail cloth would work.
To retouch the damaged area we would use a pure pigment in resin form, which is reversible – we can't use oil paints.
I have seen worse damage than a 6in tear – one man picked up a painting from us, and his child fell right through it. He handed it straight back. I think they may display this Picasso under glass from now on.
Posted in Art, Culture, Features, Pablo Picasso, The Guardian | Comments Off