Tag: art

Categories
Culture

‘Rodchenko & Popova’ at Tate Modern

I went to ‘Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism’ at Tate Modern today. I’ve seen quite a few exhibitions in the past few years that feature Aleksandr Rodchenko*, so I wasn’t really sure how much I would get out of it, but in the event I enjoyed it. Firstly I didn’t know anything about Liubov Popova, and also they had a couple of rooms of paintings, which I certainly hadn’t seen many of before.

I think they were much better designers than painters, mind you — the paintings look like rather generic examples of early geometrical abstracts, to me — but it was still interesting to see them. And the graphic design work they had on display seemed to be a different selection from what I’d seen previously. So that was all good.

The Tate’s exhibition website doesn’t have much stuff on it — I’ve used most of the pictures in this post — but curiously enough, when I was looking for pictures, Google threw up the Tate’s Immunity from Seizure page which, currently as least, is full of (rather tiny) pictures of work from the exhibition. If you’re curious:

Part 6 of the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007 provides immunity from seizure for cultural objects which are loaned from overseas to temporary public exhibitions in approved museums or galleries in the UK where conditions are met when the object enters the UK.

Or you could check out this page of Rodchenko stuff from Howard Schickler Fine Art in New York, or this from MoMA.

Incidentally, I was interested to note that they’ve started using touchscreen iPods for their multimedia guides. Last time I got an multimedia guide at the Tate, it was on a Windows Mobile-fuelled piece of crap of some kind and it annoyed me so much that I complained about it at some length afterwards. I didn’t try the guide today, so I can’t offer a comparison, but it seems like a move in the right direction.

* There was an exhibition of his photography at the Hayward; at one stage the Tate had a room displaying his photomontages for USSR in Construction; he also featured in the V&A’s Modernism exhibition and the British Library’s exhibition of printed material from the European Avant-Garde.

» both pictures from the Tate website; the top one is Liubov Popova’s Painterly Architectonic, 1918, and the bottom is Aleksandr Rodchenko’s design for an advertisement for the Mossel’ prom (Moscow agricultural industry) cafeteria, 1923.

Categories
Culture

The Unknown Matisse by Hilary Spurling

The Unknown Matisse is the first of two volumes, taking our hero from 1869-1908. I actually bought it some time ago on Jee Leong‘s recommendation, but it has taken me some time to finish, mainly I think because the simple physical size of it makes it slightly awkward to read in bed. It’s not that huge, but it’s quite a fat volume and printed on large format paper to make space for some colour reproductions of the work. Which are, of course, lovely and very welcome.

It’s fascinating to read about the outrage that greeted paintings which now seem, if not tame exactly, at least uncontroversial. Indeed the first time he shocked the Parisian public, it was with a painting (The Dinner Table) that now looks positively conventional.* Over the past hundred years, outraging the public has become an explicit part of the job description for artists; but how much more satisfying to shock people not by placing a sculpture of Christ in a glass of urine, or exhibiting a work consisting of a room with the lights going on and off, but with a painting of a woman in a hat.

Not that Matisse seems to have been temperamentally inclined to shock people for its own sake. Some of the other modern artists obviously rather enjoyed the opportunity to wind up the public: André Derain came back from a visit to London with a classically tailored English suit made fauvist by the choice of a green fabric, with a red waistcoat and yellow shoes. Matisse, though, was more inclined to respectability: partially because unlike most of his contemporaries he had a young family, which meant he needed at least enough saleable work to keep them in food. But also because (through no fault of his own) he was caught up in the most magnificently baroque financial and political scandal I’ve ever heard of — really, it would merit a book by itself — which gave him enough experience of public notoriety to last a lifetime.

It’s a fine book, readable, evocative, well-researched.  Or at least it gives the impression of being well-researched, which is as much as I have the expertise to judge.

* Although actually, in one of their periodic fits of cynical outrage about the Turner Prize, the Daily Mail held a ‘Not the Turner Prize’ competition, open to the public, and the work in that suggested that there are still plenty of people in Britain who feel that the highest aspiration of the painter should be photographic accuracy. Preferably of tigers. Or steam trains.

Categories
Culture

Renaissance Faces at the National Gallery

Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian is an exhibition that does exactly what the title the suggests: it’s a selection of portraits by van Eyck, Titian, Raphael, Holbein, Botticelli, Dürer, Cranach and their contemporaries. Room after room of rather solemn looking people — no smiling for portraits back then — wearing their most expensive-looking velvets and furs and damasks. So if that’s the kind of thing you like, and on the whole I do, you’d probably like this show.

About half the pictures are from the National’s permanent collection, which sometimes seems a little bit like cheating; but there are some very good paintings they’ve borrowed from elsewhere, it’s interesting to see them all together, and it’s not actually a chore to have another look at van Eyck’s Arnolfini portrait, or the Bellini portrait of the Doge, or Holbein’s Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling.

For me the finest picture in the exhibition is the Titian portrait of Pope Paul III which normally lives in Naples. It really is one of those works which seems transcendent even by the standards of a great artist. The Pope sits there, engulfed in these huge robes, looking physically old but sharp-eyed and full of power. And they have it hanging next to the portrait of Pope Julius II by Raphael from their permanent collection, painted fifty years earlier and an important influence for Titian’s portrait. They are both marvellous paintings and they make a fascinating contrast, stylistically and psychologically.

» The Raphael is the one at the top.

Categories
Culture

Flemish paintings at the Queen’s Gallery

I went yesterday to see Bruegel to Rubens — Masters of Flemish Painting at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace. I wasn’t really sure what to expect; you have to love Bruegel, but I’ve always found Rubens easier to admire than to enjoy.

It turned out to be just the one Bruegel on show, with seven or eight paintings by Rubens and a variety of other artists: Teniers, van Dyck, Memling and so on. Or to be strictly accurate, only one painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder; there are a couple by Jan Brueghel the Elder as well. You can see all the paintings on the exhibition website I linked to above.

The Bruegel, Massacre of the Innocents, is a hell of a painting. The biblical story of the massacre ordered by Herod has been painted as set in a Flemish village, with the troops in Spanish costume, making it highly topical, apparently, because the Holy Roman Empire had been cracking down on the Netherlands in brutal fashion. The painting was then acquired by Emperor Rudolph II, who presumably for political reasons had the painting edited: all the massacred babies have been painted over to make the scene one of generic plunder.

So wherever you see a soldier slaughtering an animal, or a woman trying to hold on to a storage jar or a bundle of rags, you know that there was originally an infant. In some places, as in the detail above, you can almost make out what it originally looked like.

It really is one of those occasions when reality seems to be demanding to be used as a metaphor for something, but I shall resist.

The exhibition didn’t persuade me to love Rubens, or at least, not his mythological works or landscapes (though the painting Winter: The interior of a barn pleased me more than most). There were, though, two Rubens portraits which were really fabulous, particularly his self-portrait. Apparently an English nobleman bought a painting from Rubens, and Rubens, not knowing that it was actually intended for the king, fobbed him off with a mediocre work that was mainly painted by his workshop. The self-portrait was the piece he sent to the king as an apology.

It really is a gorgeous piece of work. It doesn’t make me like all those big pink women any more, but this painting at least is very very covetable.

» I got the pictures from this article about the exhibition. The Royal Collection’s website for the show is very good: all the paintings, I think, with commentary, so do check it out.

Categories
Daily Links

Links

Categories
Culture

Francis Bacon at Tate Britain

I went to see the Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain today. And I enjoyed it, if enjoyed is the right word for work which is quite so bleak. He was an atheist who made a habit of painting crucifixions; and without the theology, a crucifixion is just a man being tortured to death.

Study of a Baboon 1953

So there were lots of trapped, screaming, contorted and frequently eviscerated figures, brutally unflattering portraits, and distinctly unhealthy-looking flesh. Which makes the work sound like some kind of chaotic stream of consciousness, but actually it seems tightly controlled: figures isolated in large plains of colour.

» Study of a Baboon, 1953, © The Estate of Francis Bacon/DACS 2008. Digital image © 2008, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. James Thrall Soby Bequest, 1979. Taken from the exhibition website, which is excellent as usual at the Tate.