Tag: art

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Culture

‘The Real Van Gogh’ at the Royal Academy

Not that rubbishy fake Van Gogh that other galleries having been fobbing us off with, then.

The exhibition’s full title is ‘The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters’. The inclusion of some of Van Gogh’s letters supposedly provides a bit of biographical-intellectual-psychological context for the paintings. Which is an interesting idea, but calling it ‘The Real Van Gogh’ is still ridiculous.

The show hardly needs a special hook to attract the public’s attention; it is, somewhat surprisingly, the first major Van Gogh exhibition in London for 40 years, and I’m quite sure that it will be packed for the whole run. And rightly so: it has a lot of marvellous paintings in it. Van Gogh is so universally popular that the bloody-minded part of me almost wants to argue that he’s overrated, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Quite apart from anything else there is to say about his work, there is just such a lot of straightforward pleasure to be had from it.

Looking at the late landscapes I found myself thinking of El Greco: the strength of colour, the tension in the distorted forms, the stretching of the possibilities of figurative painting without losing that connection with real objects. By which I mean: he doesn’t seem to have been heading towards abstraction in that way that, in Cezanne’s landscapes, the mountain sometimes seems to be fragmenting into patterns of light and colour. Van Gogh’s landscapes are full of the thingness of things.

So it is a marvellous exhibition which I highly recommend. On the other hand I thought the letters were a bit of a sideshow. Most of them were written to his brother Theo; in the relatively short sections which the curators have translated from Flemish or French, Vincent talks about what he has been doing, how his work is going, and provides little ink sketches of the paintings he has been doing. It’s quite interesting; you do get some sense of his personality, of how articulate and thoughtful he was. And some of what he has to say about the work is somewhat interesting. But even without buying into the Death Of The Author idea that the artist’s life is irrelevant to understanding the work, I do think there is a limit to its value. Artists’ comments about their own work always seem so vague and generic compared to the specificity and particularity of the work itself; which I guess is why they end up as artists rather than writers. And the awkwardness of putting too much text in an exhibition mean that you’re not getting that much of Vincent’s thought anyway.

Perhaps there is a particular value in providing this kind of biographical material for Van Gogh, since he is probably still widely thought of as the mad genius artist. The letters at least give a more rounded sense of a real human being, since he comes across in them as, well, fairly normal. Intelligent, good with languages and incomprehensibly good with paint, but certainly not frothing at the mouth. I guess that point is worth making.

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Culture

The Guildhall Art Gallery and Roman Amphitheatre

The Guildhall, for those who don’t know, was basically the town hall for medieval London; it is now the only surviving stone building in the City from before the Great Fire which isn’t a church. And, again for those who don’t know, when I say ‘the City’, I don’t mean ‘the city’; i.e. not the whole metropolis of London, but the City of London, the area within the medieval city walls, which now operated as its own special little fiefdom by the Corporation of the City of London. It’s the kind of place where you can’t throw a plate of tapas without hitting a banker or a lawyer.

The Guildhall Art Gallery is another gallery which I decided to check out because it’s on the Art Fund list and I’d never been there. Unlike the Guildhall, the gallery building is fairly new. The original gallery was extensively remodelled by the Luftwaffe in 1941 and didn’t reopen until 1999. And the building is rather grand — though if the City of London couldn’t grub together a few quid to build an art gallery, it’s hard to imagine who could.

The actual art was a bit underwhelming (or at least not my taste). Especially so at the moment as they are between exhibitions, so one of the large rooms was closed. What was left was a load of portraits of royalty and City grandees (Lord Mayors, heads of livery companies, yawn), some scenes of London, and a selection of Victorian/Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Some of their Pre-Raphs are rather famous, but still: really not my favourite thing.

The amphitheatre was quite interesting, although rather less spectacular than the word might suggest. Ephesus it ain’t. They didn’t even know it was there until 1988, when archeologists found it, and they decided to incorporate it into the building of the new gallery. So you go down to the basement and you can see a section that was the entranceway. Basically it’s a few traces of wall and some wooden drain, but it was interesting to see it.

» The painting is My First Sermon by John Everett Millais. The photo is of a bit of the 2000-year-old wooden drain from the Roman Amphitheatre. OPH 2008__0079_Guidhall.JPG is © king_david_uk and used under a CC by-nd licence.

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Culture

‘Mini Picture Show’ at the Bankside Gallery

I was given a membership of The Art Fund for Christmas. For those who don’t know, The Art Fund uses membership fees and other donations to help British museums and galleries to buy art for their collections; membership gets you discounted or free entry to a range of museums and galleries. So that was a nice present.

Anyway, they sent me a booklet with all the various participating venues in it; there are 78 in London. I’m familiar with quite a lot of them, but there are still plenty that are new to me. It occurred to me that it would be quite an interesting exercise to visit all of them; I’m not officially committing myself to that right now, but it’s certainly a possible project. I might as well get my money’s worth.

In that spirit, when I went to buy coffee today I glanced at the map to see if there were any galleries near Borough Market, and sure enough, there was the Bankside Gallery, just next to Tate Modern. I’ve been past the Bankside many times, but I’ve obviously been suffering from Curiosity Fail because I never went in. It turns out to be the gallery of the Royal Watercolour Society and the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers.* Or perhaps the shop of those societies, since the work was all for sale; except that places selling art have done an excellent PR job of making sure that we think of them as part of a subtly different category from places that sell fridges or mayonnaise. Their current line of produce is

Work on a small scale by Members of the Royal Watercolour Society and the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers. Original paintings and prints are immediately available, both framed and unframed, with prices from just £50.

Which I’m guessing is basically an exhibition aimed at the Christmas present market. And why not, after all. I actually rather like going around exhibitions where everything has a price next to it; it focusses the mind a bit.

It reminded me of the rooms at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition where they stick all the small pieces, although the art wasn’t quite crowded together as it normally is at the RA. It’s the same mixture of stuff, tending toward the conventional, occasionally very covetable. Certainly well worth popping in and having a look round for the bargain price of free, and I shall do so again from time to time (to be clear, the Bankside has free entry for everyone, not just Art Fund members).

So, this may turn out to the be the first in a long series of posts about some of London’s more obscure museums and galleries; or it may not. We’ll see.

* The Royal Watercolour Society is the RWS; the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers is the RE. Obviously.

» The images are ‘Rikyu Tea Whisk’ and ‘Tea Bowl’ from the ‘One Hundred Views of MITATE’ series by Nana Shiomi. Which I really liked.

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Culture

‘The Sacred Made Real’ at the National Gallery

To quote their own blurb:

‘The Sacred Made Real’ presents a landmark reappraisal of religious art from the Spanish Golden Age with works created to shock the senses and stir the soul.

Paintings, including masterpieces by Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Zurbarán, are displayed for the very first time alongside Spain’s remarkable polychrome wooden sculptures.

By ‘polychrome wooden sculptures’ they mean things like this, Christ as the Man of Sorrows, 1673, by Pedro de Mena (I’ve had to take the picture from the Guardian, which has a good selection, because the NG has got no images on the exhibition website at all):

Sacred-Made-Real-Christ-a-016

I find this business of coloured sculpture intriguing, because of course if you’re aiming for verisimilitude it makes perfect sense; and yet, largely by historical accident, we have come to expect sculpture in the fine art tradition to be in the bare material, whether marble, bronze or whatever.

These works looks especially foreign from a Protestant perspective. And yes, I know I keep going on about being an atheist, but I’m clearly a Church of England atheist when it comes to my religious sensibilities. And the Protestant aesthetic of whitewashed churches and plain glass is explicitly intended to contrast with this kind of art; it is sculptures like these that are processed through the streets of Seville in Holy Week by masked penitents, which must be the apotheosis of the bells and smells side of Catholicism. Protestants over the years have found that either tawdry and vulgar or solemn, dignified and mysterious, according to taste, but one way or the other it has a fascinatingly exotic quality for those of us brought up with the tea and biscuits kind of Christianity.

My initial reaction to these sculptures was ambivalent; there was something spooky or creepy or just a bit odd about them. And I don’t mean the gore; the head of John the Baptist where the cross section of the neck looks like something from the butcher’s, or Christ bruised and dripping with blood. No, even the statues of saints and the Virgin seemed a bit creepy at first encounter. St Ignatius Loyola, with his dark robes, looks like something that might lurch out of the dark at a carnival ghost train.

I’m tempted to invoke the uncanny valley, but actually I think it’s mainly simple unfamiliarity. The sculptures only seem like something from Madame Tussauds — something other than fine art — because of my expectations. Eventually, once I had been in the exhibition for a while, that sense of novelty wore off a bit; and eventually I was able to stop overthinking it and start to respond to the works as pieces of art.

And once that happened I did start to appreciate them and find them quite effective. They are not my new favourite thing, and I’m still not sure I’d say I really like them, even. But I’m certainly glad I went. Thought-provoking stuff.

There are also some fine paintings in the show as well, incidentally, by Velázquez and Zurburán particularly; but those were more familiar and less interesting to me, except in the way they provide a context for the sculptures. It is interesting, for example, that although they are recognisably part of the same religious culture, the paintings are immediately and obviously ‘art’, while my reaction to the sculptures was so much more difficult.

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‘Pop Life’ and ‘John Baldessari’ at Tate Modern

Two superficially very different exhibitions at Tate Modern at the moment. One is Pop Life: Art in a Material World; to quote the blurb:

Andy Warhol claimed “Good business is the best art.” Tate Modern brings together artists from the 1980s onwards who have embraced commerce and the mass media to build their own ‘brands’. Pop Life includes Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and more.

Which is flashy, exhibitionist, loud — several rooms have music playing — and vulgar. I don’t mean to be snobby; much of it is intentionally vulgar. Not least Jeff Koons’ kitschy hardcore porn imagery.

The other is John Baldessari: Pure Beauty [which doesn’t have much of a website just yet… they may just be running a bit late]. The tone of which is much more Serious and Arty. Not that it’s humourless, there’s plenty of dry wit on show; but it’s all very restrained and low-key. Series of small photographs, made with an eye on content rather than beauty. Stills from black and white films with sections blanked out. Rather formally-constructed photocollages. The later work gets larger in scale, more complex and I think more human, in the sense that his collages refer more directly to emotions and issues and almost form proto-narratives; but it’s still very tightly controlled and visually restrained.

So stylistically, they’re quite different. It’s a distinctly different experience going round them: the Baldessari is much less likely to give you a headache, for a start. To some extent, though, I think it’s as much a difference of personality as of kind. Not everyone enjoys celebrity and celebrities, and money and noise and going to Studio 54 with Grace Jones — or whatever the equivalent was for Damien Hirst in the 90s. But if you were an art critic from Mars, or a few hundred years in the future, the similarities might seem more significant than the differences.

Though having said that, the artists brought together in the Pop Life show are themselves a slightly mixed bunch, so perhaps I should resist making any more sweeping generalisations anyway. I mean, Tracey Emin, Keith Haring and Jeff Koons don’t necessarily have a great deal in common beyond a talent for self-promotion. Perhaps the Tate thought it would be a bit blunt to just call the show ‘Masters of Hype’.

Incidentally, having been at school at the time when Keith Haring merch — bags, pencil cases, whatever — was all the rage, it seems odd to find him in the Tate. It’s like finding a room dedicated to seriously analysing the artistic importance of Hello Kitty. Or Thundercats.