Tag: art

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Culture

Grayson Perry on contemporary art

This is from the Perry autobiography, when he’s been accepted at Portsmouth Poly to do an Art foundation course:

I thought I was OK as an artist. I knew I was able but I had no sense that I was especially gifted. I don’t think a gift is apparent at nineteen in a contemporary artist. Contemporary art demands a voice, though few artists have found their voice at nineteen. What is apparent in young work is the technical skill – Raphael drew like an angel at fifteen – as well as an aptitude for the more physical aspects of the work, but the voice and the emotional intelligence come later. I didn’t have that and my work was very derivative. I don’t think it was peculiar that nobody thought that I would do well in the art world and it was probably better for me than if I had been pumped up as a good artist. I was an average artist bumbling on.

I’d like to think that would be an interesting paragraph even to someone who disliked contemporary art. Perhaps that’s too optimistic.

Not that there necessarily has to be a choice between ‘technical skill’ and ‘voice’ and ’emotional intelligence’. There’s no doubt that artists like Velasquez, Rembrandt or [insert name here] had all three. But I think if people who were unsympathetic to contemporary art thought of it as art which favoured voice and emotional intelligence over displays of technical virtuosity, they might understand it better. They might still decide they didn’t like it, but at least they’d have tried to approach it on its own terms.

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Culture

‘Rebels and Martyrs’ at the National Gallery

I went to Rebels and Martyrs at the National today. Note to curators: white writing on mid-grey walls is just fucking annoying. I started wishing I’d picked up one of the folders with large-print writing for the poorly sighted because I was having to squint to read the info next to the paintings.

Having vented that particular annoyance: I’m afraid I can’t get very excited about the exhibition itself, either. To quote the NG:

The artist as a rebel battling against society, a tortured and misunderstood genius, has a powerful hold on our collective imagination.

This exhibition traces the development of this idea, from the birth of Romanticism through to the early 20th century and the avant-garde.

Bringing together works by many of the great artists of the period, including Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Rodin, Picasso and Schiele, it explores how they responded to Romantic ideas about creativity and deliberately cast themselves as outsiders and visionaries.

So it was basically a parade of artists portraying themselves and their friends as visionaries, tortured souls, bohemians, dandies, flâneurs, martyrs and prophets. The trouble with grouping together paintings whose common theme is the vanity and posturing of the artists is that all the pictures seem lessened by the context. There were some very fine pieces in the show, but somehow the theming discouraged you from seeing them as individual paintings; instead they all seemed like symptoms.

The portrayal of artists in C19th art should be an interesting and worthy subject for an exhibition, but it just felt like a focussing-in on an unattractive aspect of the artistic culture. Even though it was theoretically putting the individual works in a broader cultural context, somehow it just felt reductive.

On a more positive note, their next exhibition is Velasquez, which I’m really looking forward to. And since I’ve been on a Rembrandt kick lately, after looking at all those C19th poseurs, I popped round to see the NG’s Rembrandts again. Fuck me, they’re good.

EDIT:

It’s not that I think the artists were less admirable because they occasionally produced rather self-serving work. These [self]portraits are only a small part of their output, and not generally the most important part. That’s the problem with the exhibition; not that the observations it makes are untrue, but that the selectiveness is unfair on the artists as individuals. It demonstrates the ways in which the caricature is true without touching on all the ways that it is partial.

EDIT:

The caricature is at the expense of everything that makes the artists interesting. Perhaps it’s the antithesis of what makes them interesting.

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Culture

Grayson Perry: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl

I’ve just read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, which is the autobiography of Grayson Perry, the artist who won the Turner Prize in 2003. I quite like his art, but the main reason I bought the book was that I enjoy his columns for the Times (if that link doesn’t work, you’ll just have to go to their main site and search for yourself).

Perry is one of the more memorable Turner Prize winners, though not really for his work. I mentioned that I was reading the book to my mother, and she looked blank at ‘Grayson Perry’ but immediately knew who I meant by ‘the transvestite potter’. It’s a brilliant bit of branding. I’m quite certain he didn’t become either a transvestite or a potter to make himself more memorable, but it has certainly worked.

So the obvious reason to read the book, which covers his life up to the point where he sold his first work, is to learn either about the transvestism or the art, and he writes well about both. Actually, though, it’s an enjoyable book in its own right. It was written by a friend of his, Wendy Jones, based on taped interviews, and it has the intimate immediacy of the spoken voice. It would be an good read just as a memoir of growing up in Essex in the 60s and 70s, although the second half of the book, which deals with the time from when he left home to study art, is probably more immediately anecdote-worthy.

Here’s a semi-random extract, describing a summer-job:

Being a sugar factory where zillions of tonnes of sugar were stored, there was a constant problem with wasps. Wasps made their nests in the gounds, then zoomed in on the sugar: there were swarms of them hovering in the factory. There were jumbo insecticutors at the doors of the factory that went VCHKUFF-VCHKUFF-KUFF-KUFF the whole time. Employees were paid a pound if they found a wasp nest so the workers would spend their lunchtimes careering around the grounds after a wasp to find its nest in the hope of earning a few quid.

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Culture

‘Rembrandt & Co: Dealing in Masterpieces’ at DPG

‘Rembrandt & Co’ is on at the moment at Dulwich Picture Gallery, as part of the 400th birthday celebrations. Rembrandt’s 400th birthday was July 15th. To quote them:

Dulwich Picture Gallery explores, for the first time, the story of one of the most important art dealerships in 17th-century Amsterdam. The exhibition will show 19 Rembrandts from this period along with work by his contemporaries.

The idea presumably is to provide context for the Rembrandts, although a cynic might point out that it’s easier to persuade other galleries to loan you their Flincks, Ovenses and de Lairesses. They have got hold of some major works, though, most notably the portrait of Agatha Bas from the Royal collection and Man in Oriental Costume (“The Noble Slav”) from the Met:

 

I found this painting interesting because it’s so grand for what is basically just a character study – not a portrait of anyone in particular, or a historical or religious subject. It’s 5′ x 3′ 8″ and both very imposing and highly finished. I suppose there’s no reason why an important painting needs to be on an important subject, but it’s still slightly odd; almost as though it’s a quiet joke on Rembrandt’s part.

There were some nice prints as well, like this view of Amsterdam:

I always think it’s striking how much difference the medium makes. You can see similarities between Rembrandt’s prints and his paintings, particularly with the portraits and biblical scenes where the composition and the use of chiaroscuro is similar, but the feel is so different. You can see quite a few Rembrandt etchings and copperpoints on the Rembrandthuis website.

I didn’t find the context of the other artists’ work particularly enlightening, although it did emphasise the quality and distinctiveness of the Rembrandts. It also brings out the ruthlessness of time’s effect on art. These were all respected and successful artists in their day, but not many of the paintings offer much to the modern viewer. Some are quite attractive, but hardly any of them spark any kind of connection. For me, at least.

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Culture Other

The V&A online

The V&A seems to have put lots more of their stuff online since I last looked, and it’s all searchable. I wondered if there was a photo of the terracotta Virgin Mary and Child I wrote a poem about a few years ago, but it seems not. Lots of other good stuff though, like this C15th English alabaster carving of Saint Michael Attacking the Dragon and Weighing a Soul that was lucky enough to survive the vandalism of the Reformation.

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Culture

Dada, modernism and suchlike

I seem to have gone a bit link-happy over the past 24 hours, producing a daily links post which is far too long. So I’ll single out one of them in case you miss it: Charles Simic on Dada.

I always think of continental Europe as being the natural home of modernism. The Great War, the Russian Revolution and the growth of fascism provided the context for art of real ferocity. There always seems to be a disconnect between that and the work of British and American modernists like Eliot and Woolf. That’s a terrible simplification, of course, but still, you get an odd perspective on modernism if you learn about it through the lens of English-language literature.

Anyway. Read the Simic.