Michael Glover

Picasso: the Mediterranean Years Gagosian Gallery, London - The Independent

2010-06-09T11:22:00.000-07:00

It is always quite difficult to know what to do with Picasso. We have seen too much of him already, almost everywhere. Our shelves are already groaning with brick-heavy catalogues. We think we know him already, top-to-toe, every period, thematically, stylistically. Our children paint like him every day. Can there be room for yet another major show of his work? Well yes, perhaps, because there is so always much of him. According to his biographer John Richardson, he made about three objects a day almost every day of his life. He worked all day almost every day, and often for most of the night. His advice to a young painter was: if you want to do something, do it. He was the exemplar of his own approach: he never stopped doing. Only death slowed him down, and the work he has created for his successors – critics, taxonomists, dealers, sexologists, bankers, criminals and forgers on every continent – has been enormous. Even when he was not at his best, he was interesting, turning over one idea after another, trying to quicken materials into life. The wonder is that he should have triumphed so often. The sadness is that he made so much, and tried so hard, that we are often obliged to stare at much that is only fairly good. That is the case with this show. It’s a Picasso taxonomist’s delight, and it deals with the relatively neglected decade and a half which culminated in his eightieth birthday. Yet another Picasso emerged after that, which has already been the subject of a major show at Gagosian.

This is a portrait of Picasso in the post-war years. Post Paris. Post austerity. Re-entering his own birthright beside the Mediterranean Sea (he was born in Malaga) in the south of France. Basking in the sunny warmth of his acclaim and success. And, of course, quite befittingly, the mood has changed dramatically. Much of the greyness has drained away from his palette; a new playfulness has entered into the making. He is creating different kinds of things too, including huge quantities of ceramics and sculptures, large and small. These ceramic objects and these sculptures are the best things in the show. Many of the paintings – the portraits of women, for example – are dull ‘revisitings’ (ie often rather poor near-copies) of his stylistic mannerisms of the past. But these sculptures! They have a reckless derring do about them – look at the gorgeous girl skipping, torso fashioned from an old basket, which faces you as you enter the main gallery, or the wooden sculpture, fashioned from sticks and blocks, so delightfully crude, of a mother winging her child up into the air. These are sculptures which seem to say: what have I to lose by making this at breakneck speed from the unpromising stuff that surrounds me in the studio or just outside? Or examine the wonderful baboon whose face has been made from a toy car. Who but Picasso would have pressed that car into service in this way? There is an intense preoccupation with children, for themselves, and at play. He paints children enjoying themselves with a reckless childishness, as they might have painted themselves had they been him. You spot it the moment you enter into the central gallery, children everywhere, represented in painting and sculpture. His own children – sleepy-eyed Paloma, for example. There were always so many to choose from. One or two were even legitimate. Always so much to do, always so many jismic marvels.

Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), The Independent, London

2010-06-02T08:13:00.000-07:00

She was the first artist to be invited to make something of the Tate Modern’s near impossibly unwelcoming Turbine Hall in the year 2000, and what she created was entirely characteristic of her art from first to last – a nasty, long-legged spider on a giant scale to keep watch over us from the overhead bridge, and three horribly impersonal steel watchtowers to keep us under surveillance at ground level. South Armagh meets a hair-raising denizen of the dense jungle, you might say.

Surveillance is a word which resonates when it comes to appraising the art of the extraordinarily long-lived and ceaselessly productive Louise Bourgeois. Usually it is the onlooker who appraises the work of art. After all, is it not the onlooker’s privilege, having paid the price, to do so? It was the opposite with Bourgeois. When you entered a room of work by her, you felt stripped bare all of a sudden, as if voices were shouting questions into your ears, demanding some explanation of why you had lived as you had lived. It seems almost surprising that death should have caught up with her at last, that she is no longer alive to jab the bony finger.

Another entirely fitting word would be a coining of Albert Camus’: dis-ease. Not unease. That would be too easy. Camus’s word means that we are somehow complicit in our own undermining, that we may have brought on our sufferings by being precisely what we are. No, you never felt comfortable in the presence of a work by Bourgeois.

You felt, somehow, that you were not only under scrutiny, but even that you were being played with, even terrorized, as Hitchcock so often played with you. Things could only get worse. The staging always helped – and the props of her installations, which often consisted of old doors, bits of shabby furniture, creaky beds, bleak, prison-perimeter meshing, often organised in strange, seemingly ever shrinking circles. Shabby old doors enclosed tiny moments of oppressive, shabby domesticity, dreams of a nightmarishly unhappy childhood perhaps. So little looked pristine. Almost everything seemed gimcrack, just off the skip, pressed into service against its will, unhappily re-livingg its own wailingly posthumous life. The whole effect was always so unsettlingly dramatic, almost ghoulishly filmic. There was always so much darkness, so many pockets of eeriness in which dread could be left to propagate. There would be deep thrusting shadows to witness, or strange corners to turn before you entered, in the case of her many ‘Cells’, the desolate, three-dimensional structures with which much of the exhibition space was filled at her last major retrospective at Tate Modern, which happened just three years ago, when she was already climbing the long hill, undaunted, towards her hundredth birthday.

She was female all right, but she never fell victim to that old cliché of the essential softness of the feminine. She was soft only in the way that well worn leather boots are soft. She wrenched the feminine about in her work; she made us feel on our pulses what it was to be a woman who suffers the excruciating physical tumult of childbirth. There was eroticism a-plenty, but it was an eroticism stepping out in conjunction with pain. Many of the objects she made looked like anthropological specimens, artefacts which threw back at us our own peculiar cultural habits. One entire gallery in that Tate show was organised to look like such a museum display. She picked us apart, bit by bit, and then sewed us back together again, with an ungainly lumpishness. She never held up the idea of the human for glorification or celebration. She was no female Michelangelo. Nor was she a surrealist, though she knew many of them, and she moved in their circles. For all that, her kind of psychological disclosure was theirs too: to expose the often repulsive underside of things, those secretly oozy that we can barely acknowledge about ourselves, the grossness of the human, the worm that ceaselessly turns in all our buds. Some of her most celebrated works were her soft sculptures – she inherited from her parents a love of sewing – made from fabrics and stuffing. She helped to dignify the idea of softness, to give it gravity and feeling.

She never ceased to change and change again. Her sculptures were such weird things, as much animistic as modernist. Her whole spirit seems to be summed up in this tiny extract from her diary, written when she was a mere 70 years of age, and with much of her long, wayward creative road still to travel: ‘The only access we have to our volcanic unconscious and to the profound motives for our actions and reactions is through the shocks of our encounters with specific people’. Such telling words. Those shocks she felt are the same shocks that we experience, time and again, when we come up against her bruising work.

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De Chirico, Max Ernst, Magritte, Balthus - Palazzo Strozzi, Venice - The Independent, London

2010-04-10T08:09:00.000-07:00

Giorgio de Chirico is one of those painters we know so well from all the reproductions we used to display on our walls when we were breathless students: those lonely, wind-swept piazzas, headless statues and tiny humanoids with their weirdly over-stretched shadows... In fact, as with so many other painters, his work often looks better in reproduction. The crudity of application is smoothed away. All we are left with is the strangely disturbing idea of the work itself, and – in the very best of his art - the bald, bold use of contrasting primary colours. Look at the poster created for this exhibition for example, or the laminated cover of the press pack. They are more arresting than the painting called ‘The Enigma of the Arrival and the Afternoon’ that they use as their starting point.

This exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence is an attempt to create a lineage of influence, to say that first there was De Chirico, and then along came others in his wake – Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, Balthus, Morandi and others. All these spirits were influenced by De Chirico to a greater or lesser degree, we are told. Is this true?

The answer is: well yes, in part, but… De Chirico’s most memorable works were created during the second decade of the twentieth century, the decade, it could be argued, when the world of the West changed irrevocably. The terrible blight of world war saw to that. Now De Chirico never painted war – but he undoubtedly painted the atmosphere of anxiety and incertitude provoked by war, the pervasive feeling that a mighty gulf had opened up, and that it would be the task of writers and artists to stare into that beckoning gulf, and to report on what they saw down there. They just couldn’t help it. Things were falling apart for everyone – and that included W.B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Georg Trakl, to name not artists at all but three poets, all kindred spirits of artists like De Chirico.

The fact is that everyone was influencing everyone else.

Of course there were De Chirico’s particular props – his mannequins, his towers, etc. Those props undoubtedly had an influence, and in fact the best part of this show is when you stop looking at De Chirico and turn your attention to two artists whose names are barely known at all, but certainly deserve to be. Those names are Pierre Roy (b.1880), who was a nephew of Jules Verne, and a Swiss German called Niklaus Stoecklin (b.1896). Stoecklin and Roy are the stars of this show, and the message they sing out is this: that around this time the way objects were painted seemed to suggest they had taken on a strange life of their own. Although they may have been painted side by side, objects look set apart from each other as if they are intent on dreaming their own dreams. Is this Surrealism? Is this ‘magic realism’ (a term coined by a German critic in 1925), or is this a result of being influenced by the ‘metaphysical’ style of De Chirico? We don’t care what it’s called. All we can see is that it is happening.

So in a wonderful, formally rigorous – almost academically rigorous - painting by Niklaus Stoecklin called ‘Games of Dominoes’ (1928), we see a game in progress. The pieces are set upright, facing each other. The empty wooden box from which the pieces were extracted yawns open like a catafalque. There are no players. Stoecklin was in the habit of making his own frames, and this one is particularly disturbing: the inner frame is gilded, cheerfully glistering; and the outer is black, funereal in mood. There are no players. But the game must go on. De Chirico, Max Ernst, Magritte, Balthus - A Look into the Invisible Palazzo Strozzi, Florence until 18 July

Lucian Freud at the Centre Pompidou, Paris

2010-03-10T00:05:00.000-08:00

Yes, it cannot be denied. There has been something problematical about Lucian Freud and the French public, Cécile Debray, the Pompidou’s curator of the first major survey of Freud’s work in Paris for almost a quarter of a century, tells me over Steack a la Sauce Bearnaise in the Pompidou’s sixth-floor Restaurant Georges, giving me her most winning smile. Freud was last exhibited here at the Pompidou in 1987, during the dog days of summer. The show wasn’t well attended. Such attention as it received was quite dismissive: one critic called it a species of kitsch.

Cécile finds it quite difficult to describe what the problem was - perhaps she is already tired of talking to mere journalists – but it has something to do with the fact that, for a long time, the French thought that he was practising an art whose time had come and gone: he was a figurative painter, practising the ancient art of portraiture. Why wasn’t this man into abstraction and conceptualism like almost all the rest? Why did he choose not to benefit by the lessons of Abstract Expressionism? Why did he have to persist in being a cussed, independent-minded individualist? Why had he chosen to leave modernity behind?

And so, unfortunately for the French, by that moment in 2008 when Freud became the world’s most expensive and collectible living painter, they seemed profoundly out of step with the rest of the world. French collectors had shown practically no interest in his work, and the Pompidou itself owned just one small painting, dating from the 1940s. And now, even if they wanted to buy them, they couldn’t possibly afford to…

Now, of course, he cannot afford not to be accommodated. And yet, and yet… even today, I feel, as I walk around this themed show of Freud’s work situated elsewhere on the 6^th floor of the Pompidou Centre, there is still something about the way it is presented which is seeking to intellectualise him in order to make the French public understand quite why they should be taking him so seriously. To intellectualise is to give status, credibility. That is the Pompidou’s gift to Freud. Yes, the French must have him on their own terms – and these are not quite the terms of the painter himself.

The exhibition consists of 55 works, spread across four galleries, which means that it is about one third of the size of the great Tate retrospective of 2003, and it has a theme: Freud and the Studio. The walls are two shades of grey, as is the floor. Visual austerity is the key to seriousness. As in the Giacometti retrospective of 2004, Freud is critically appraised in relation to his various studios, the crucible of his creations. The studio is a limiting, a framing space, behind closed doors, in which performances take place involving painter and that with which he chooses to surround himself – objects, plants, human flesh. The studio is a ‘metaphor’ for painting, not a real place with paint-smeared walls, heaps of old rags, a half-bust divan bed, and a tap drip-dripping into an old butler’s sink.

So this approach is both stimulating and limiting. It means that there are paintings here which are not first-rate. They’re here to illustrate a theme - or a sub-theme within that overarching theme of the studio. And there are others which fit oddly with that theme. Here is the argument of the exhibition. Freud is not first and foremost a figurative painter, feeling his way forward, doing what he feels compelled to do, by his gifts and his temperament. He is, above all things else, a painter who is reflecting upon the nature of figurative painting by painting figuratively. That is the great distinction here: he is reflexive. He is, in short, intellectualising as he works. If he were not, the charge of being an old-fashioned portrait painter could be levelled at him. And that charge needs to be avoided at all costs. If that happened, the French public would continue to disdain him, and the show would bomb. So it is simply not true that he merely belongs in a certain tradition. He is interrogating that tradition, testing the limits of is validity.

Now anyone who has read the few searching interviews that Freud has ever given knows that this doesn’t not quite square with the character or his working methods. This is not to say that Freud is not immensely thoughtful or that he has not spent much of his life looking long and hard at paintings – his own and other people’s. It is to say that he is not a conceptualist. He does not deal in ideas which then transform themselves, as if by some miracle, into paintings. At his best, he deals in the stink, the feel, the sheer immediacy of human flesh, the nowness of our brutish presences on earth. The Pompidou slightly begs to differ.

But the problem is a little more general than that. The trouble with Freud is that his spirit does not like to be pinioned. He is the arch-individualist. He is not easily compartmentalised. In fact, he is almost legendary for daring to be himself, quite uncompromisingly. In the past this has included fist fights, and roaring through the night with Francis and Muriel at the Colony. So when we read in one of the gallery’s extended wall texts that so and so forms part of what has become part of the evolution of an entire oeuvre, that word so beloved of the French, it strikes the wrong note altogether. Freud has never thought in those terms. His work may have evolved, but he would be the first to admit that there have been many significant failures, paintings that deserve to be forgotten. An oeuvre doesn’t make space for failure. It believes in a monumental totality. By conceptualising in this way, the account slightly falsifies. It also falsely aggrandises.

In the third of the galleries, Freud revisits the classics – which means Freud’s re-workings of paintings or motifs by Chardin, Cézanne and Constable. The Chardins are wonderful, the large reprise of the Cézanne is not. It is awkward and unresolved. The greatest of Freud’s re-imaginings of the classics, a large figure group after Watteau called ‘Large Interior W11’ (1981-1983), is not present at all – in spite of the fact that it should have been here because it figures prominently in the catalogue. We feel, once again, that the sub-theme is here to prove that Freud does not work intuitively, day by day, investing every precious moment. He is forever standing back and positioning himself, not only in relation to other painters, but in relation to other ideas about painting. This was never really true of Freud – and it is still not quite true of this man of 88, who continues to paint, when he can, with a kind of manic urgency. The fact is that he doesn’t like his own past, not all that much. As with any true maker, writer or artist, he lives and breathes for the unfolding riches of the present moment, for what he will achieve, not for what he has achieved.

Just one of the four galleries is an unqualified success, and that is the fourth gallery, which gives itself over to large-scale paintings of the most abundantly fleshy of Freud’s sitters. Here are figures in poses of total abandonment, Leigh Bowery from the front and from behind, or that gloriously fleshily abundant portrait of Sue Tilley, ‘Benefits Supervisor Sleeping’ (1995), cheek squashed up against the end of the sofa, breasts like great donging bells, which sold for $33 million in 2008. They sprawl, they wallow, about the picture space in states of extreme lassitude. No bed, no sofa is big enough to contain these bodies. The flesh looks so dense, so animal. Nothing seems to be in movement; time stands still. Flesh is nothing but dead weight. There is no refinement of any kind and no posing here. This looks like flesh felled in the way that a great tree is felled. These are not pre-arranged compositions. They are paintings which have emerged into being over time – sometimes the making process can be quite considerable - without any preparatory drawing whatsoever. Freud begins at the centre and works his way out towards the periphery. If it so happens that the composition is moving in the direction of an awkward shape, an extra bits gets added on. Paintings will prove to be what they prove to be. Freud’s job is to keep at it. As he said quite recently, ‘I want to go on until there’s nothing more to see.’ Atta boy.

Lucian Freud is at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, until 19 July

Kingdom of Ife - Sculptures from West Africa, The Independent, London

2010-03-04T05:42:00.000-08:00

There are so many Africas, and so many arts of Africa. Picasso and Matisse thought they had hit on the essence of Africa during the first decade of the twentieth century. The African masks and sculpture that influenced such works as Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1909) seemed to be the very embodiment of a youngish Spaniard’s priapic idea of the primitive: wonderfully, savagely stylized; bursting with a toe-curlingly alien erotic charge. How patronizing of Picasso to think that that’s what African art amounted to. Well, perhaps that’s a little unfair. The point was that Picasso, ever grasping, ever restless, was seeking out new ways of representing the female body.

Yes, anthropologists quickly began to prove that Picasso was either wrong or telling just one tiny part of an immensely complicated story. In 1910, the first major excavations took place at Ife, a site in what is now south-western Nigeria, not too far from Lagos. (The walled city-state of Ife, legendary homeland of the Yoruba, flourished for three hundred years, from about 1,100-1,400 AD). Thirty years later, in 1940, another great cull of objects from the same site hit the headlines again: ‘Worthy to rank with finest works of Greece and Italy,’ shrilled the Illustrated London News.

Many of the works that those anthropologists found are now on display in this major show of north-west African sculpture, and the works here do indeed lend credence to that headline writer’s claim. At the same historical moment that Andrea del Verrochio was doing his wonderfully painstaking, high-Renaissance drawing of a female head which can be seen elsewhere in this building, anonymous artisans in Ife were working with brass, bronze - yes, these Africans knew all about bronze casting long before the Europeans arrived to show them how - copper and terracotta to produce a series of exquisite heads that are not only the equal of Donatello in technical brilliance, but also just as naturalistic in their refinement. So much for African primitivism.

There is much more to see than heads, mere heads, in this show, of course - there is a gorgeous stone representations of a mud fish, lying so slyly low on its rather proper-looking maroon plinth (granite body; menacingly plug-like, iron eyes) and the scaly crocodile; there are intimidatingly indomitable monoliths from sacred groves; there are extraordinary terracotta sculptures of bodies disfigured by ricketts and elephantiasis (look out for the hugely swollen testicles); and there is also a wonderful top of a staff, which shows the heads of two male criminals, back to back, one young, the other old, their mouths gagged with rope to prevent them cursing their fate – but it is to the heads that we return, again and again. Such is their extraordinary visual seductiveness.

A typical Ife head is life-size. The expression is harmonious and beautifully serene, the surface extremely smooth, cheek bones often quite prominent, lips full, neck long. The face is likely to have vertical striations. The head may be adorned with a tiered head-dress or a delicate pill box hat, built up in concentric rings, simulating woven basketry. The abdomen is likely to be adorned with swags of beads. If a king is being represented, look out for rosettes, a beaded crown.

What were these heads for? we ask ourselves repeatedly. Were they memorials? Did they beautify altars? Were they made for coronation ceremonies? One of the most exquisite is described as the copper mask of Obdufon II, who was the Ife’s third king. In spite of the fact that it weighs in at five kilos, the mask was actually made to be worn by some long suffering devil – surely not the king himself. Below the eyes you can see small, crescent-shaped slits – the wearer would have been able to see through these slits. What marvels he would have seen – nothing quite so marvellous as himself though.

Kingdom of Ife – Sculptures from West Africa British Museum 4 March- 6 June

Paula Rego, Mat Collishaw and Tracey Emin at the Foundling Museum London - The Independent

2010-02-25T03:32:00.001-08:00

The Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury was created in the 18^th Century by a venturesome sea captain and shipwright called Captain Thomas Coram. It existed to alleviate the appalling suffering of the many wretched foundlings who were abandoned on the streets of London. Captain Coram’s hospital took some of them in – alas, not all of them by any means. The great hospital itself was swept away in the 1930s, but there is still a Coram Foundation devoted to the needs of deprived children, and a glorious open space where the hospital once stood called Coram’s Fields. One of the most entertaining public notices to be read in the whole of London is displayed at its entrance. This is not a public park, it reads. No adult is to enter unless accompanied by a child. We critics sometimes feel that way about exhibitions of contemporary art, that the sanity of a small child might help to refresh our eye.

And then, right at the back of Coram’s Fields and the little public park which abuts it, there is the Foundling Museum, first created in the 1930s – as a penance perhaps for having wantonly destroyed that finer hospital. It is in this building that Coram and his achievements as an exemplary philanthropist are memorialized. Here is panelling from one of the great hospital’s rooms, a replica of its picture gallery (complete with pictures), and many of the fine paintings and objects that were donated by teems of benefactors, which included Handel, Hogarth and many others. There is even a Handel Room on the top floor, which contains manuscripts, his books, and other fascinating memorabilia.

For the next couple of months three contemporary artists have joined the ongoing conversation here about the plight of children by displaying sympathetic works in various parts of the building. And even outside the building. It is often quite difficult to find their contributions. In fact, it proves to be a game of hide and seek, which is sometimes interesting and at other times exasperating. As you walk up the steps of the building, you spot the first artwork – Tracey Emin’s tiny bronze cast of a baby’s sock, painted a suitably grubby pink, and folded back as if about to be slipped onto a tender foot. The morning I visited, the sock itself was partially overshadowed by a bullying leaf.

The single most arresting intervention is Paula Rego’s huge ‘Oratoria’, which sits on the first landing, opposite a bench from which you can sit and contemplate its shockingly arresting display of miseries and horrors. ‘Ugh, scary!’ says a teacher as she hurriedly pushes past me, pulling at the arm of a small child. I couldn’t agree more. This is a huge tableau, with opening wings. Painted, papier-mache figures, life-size and tricked out in 18^th Century Foundling Hospital costumes, sit and loll around at its centre; paintings rise up at their back, and on its opening wings. It is just like something tiny grown nightmarishly large. An emaciated, puppet-like child hangs over the knees of a black nurse like some grotesque pieta. The figures have over-large heads; they have a demonic fairy-tale quality about them in common with so much of the work of Paula Rego.

In another room, amidst venerable portraits of beaming male benefactors, a rack of baby clothes, courtesy of Tracey Emin, waits patiently for a baby. Mat Collishaw’s ‘Children of a Lesser God,’ a giant, wall-mounted transparency blown up to the size of a portrait of an eminent benefactor, makes the flesh creep. Two ferocious looking wolfish dogs, surrounded by scraps of torn animal skin and animal offal, seem to be protecting two naked young babes inside a wire compound. ‘An image of paternal strength and pride,’ reads the exhibition guide. Hmm.

Irving Penn at the National Portrait Gallery - The Independent, London

2010-02-19T02:38:00.000-08:00

He is the only man here without a face. That is the first thought that strikes you as you are about to leave this extensive, 70-year-spanning retrospective of photographic portraiture by the late Irving Penn, one of the great American innovators of our time, at the National Portrait Gallery. We’ve seen Dietrich, Duke Ellington, Giacometti, Stravinsky, Nureyev, Nicole Kidman, Woody Allen tricked out to look like Charlie Chaplin and, last but not least, the swashbuckling portrait of Julian Schnabel which Penn took in 2007, not long before his death. But where, amidst all these artists, movie stars, painters, writers, musicians and ballerinas, is Penn himself? There is not a single image of him in this show. The photographer whose image – by Penn - we do see and remember here is that of his contemporary Cecil Beaton, the flamboyant society photographer, looking as loud, elegant, and wispily charmlessly charming as ever.

Penn’s tactics as a photographer could scarcely have been more different from Beaton’s. In the world of Beaton, Beaton himself was a large and raucous part of the glamorous society story he was telling. He was amongst the glamorous beauties he was offering up to the world on a sugary platter. Penn was never that sort of a man. He was gentle by nature, as self-effacing as his Rolleiflex, someone who preferred to notice rather than be part of what was noticed. And that is the reason for his greatness as a photographer.

Penn’s story begins in the 1930s, and it opens in spareness, austerity, a skilful use of economy of means, traits that would be forever associated with the Penn portrait. Pared back to their essentials, that is how Penn’s subjects always look when they are photographed in his studio. The studio setting itself is usually pared back too. There’s almost a sense of visual drought. Everything is in monochrome, from first to last. The walls look a drab, hazy, pocky grey; the floors have bits of threads adhering to them. You can occasionally glimpse a strew of cigarette butts or some rubble. The lighting is never fussy or stagey or glarey. It is either daylight or simulated daylight. There are scarcely any props. Rather than using a table for his sitters to sit at – tables of a certain kind do incline towards the distinctive, especially tables with fussy detailing – he would throw a length of carpet over a plinth, and let his subjects lean or lounge against it, or settle into it like swimmers beached amongst the waves. Or he would take a couple of theatre flats and enclose his sitters within them, as if they are being squeezed by two enclosing walls. So there is no glamour about the context, no baroque extravagance, nothing to distract from the matter in hand, which is, from beginning to end: dissection of character.

This intense focus upon the subject includes a minute degree of attention to the least little gesture – a movement of the hand, an inclination of the head. How hands work with faces is an enduring interest from first to last, how the hand is used to conceal or to lend gravity to a face. It is these things that we tend to remember about a Penn portrait; it is these tiny details which make them especially memorable, the way in which Peter Ustinov clutches his chin, or Le Corbusier his temple. And these small things seem to yield up a great deal. An entire characterization is gifted to us by the way in which Truman Capote is oddly hunched inside these two flats. Time and again, Penn seems to have captured character on the wing, unstudiedly, unlabouredly, as if the hidden inside of the human has, all of a sudden, become visible to the naked eye. Some of his subjects even look like more exaggerated and over-emphatic versions of themselves – see a portrait here of Duke Ellington for example, taken in 1971. If it were not a photographic image, you might be inclined to accuse it of being a bit of mischievous caricature.

The very first portrait in the show is an image of the painter Giorgio de Chirico, taken at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome in 1936. The young Penn had never met the man, but he knew what he looked like. And de Chirico allowed himself to be photographed by this eager, near-idolatrous stranger. The portrait is a marvel because of its humour – although Penn had a great capacity for humour, it was a weapon he used sparingly. De Chirico’s head seems to be enveloped in a wreath of leaves, as if he is a force of nature. Or perhaps he is wearing the laurel crown. Or he may be in the throes of being metamorphosed into a tree – as Daphne once was by Ovid – but this time by the magic of the photographer himself…All these possibilities are held in delightful and affectionate balance. As Penn once said: ‘We don’t shoot people…It’s really a love affair.’

Gillian Ayres at 80 Alan Cristea Gallery - The Independent, London 9 February 2010

2010-02-10T05:28:00.001-08:00

Late flowerings – that rage against the imminent dying of the light – are not especially unusual. Titian painted into his 80s; W.B. Yeats, late in his 70s, wrote, in the final stanza of a late great poem, of nymphs and satyrs copulating in the foam. John Cowper Powys wrote the finest of his huge novels during his 70s. Call it, if you like, a kind of manic exuberance before the shutters come down.

And so it is with Gillian Ayres, who suffered a terrible loss when many of her paintings of the 1980s were consumed in the MoMart warehouse fire in east London five years ago. It took her a long time to recover from what must have felt like a species of bereavement. Paintings, unlike poems, cannot be replicated. But now she is back, with a show which fills two large gallery spaces on Cork Street, and leaves you feeling almost giddy with pleasure.

Abstract painting is not much of a muchness, though many who are not especially over-fond of it are inclined to think so. It comes in many varieties, though, in essence, the kinds boil down to two: the austere and the not so austere. There is the abstraction which looks to geometry as the ground of its being. It feels austere, severe, as if, finally, it is the distillation of something neatly cerebral. It barely notices that it has been born out in a world of sweat and tears and fleshiness. The Constructivists were such artists. We don’t cry for joy when we see their work. We don’t readily embrace it as if we had reached harvest home. We stand back, rub our chins, and immensely admire it.

And then there are the abstract painters who are most of all in love with the tangibility of the world they observe and encounter every day of their lives. Their paintings are about a sudden, almost brutish coming-up-against the world, day after day. They make a kind of rich brew of all the world’s manifold ingredients - its sights, its sounds, its colours – and then they serve it up for our delectation. Gillian Ayres is this kind of an abstract painter.

Gillian Ayres doesn’t give titles to her paintings. She leaves that to her friends. Extract a few words, almost at random from these titles, and you have captured the mood of the work: flight, sparks, song, jumping, flying, shouts. The paintings are full of gorgeous colour and movement, swoopings, turnings, gliding, pirouettings. There are flame-like torsions. Movements feel arrested in full flight. They remind us in their crisply edged forms of the natural world - glancingly, you might say. A hint of a moon or a fan or a starfish or a jellyfish. For the most part, colours tend not to overlap or to merge. Patches of colour are discretely defined. Each colour feels like a strident statement of intent. Many of the paintings are grounded in a nocturnal blue, but it is a blue of cheerful, questing reverie, not a Munch-like blue of gloom and anxiety. Two forms are often set in juxtaposition – the upright, flower-like chalice on a stem, and a more yielding, limp-leaf-like presence beside it.

The title of one painting in particular, ‘The Seeds that Woke the Clay’, seems to best sum things up. That title has an almost biblical resonance, and the work too feels biblical in its distant roots. The forms seem to be erupting into a new kind of life, the kind of life which only this painting, this moment of worming, squirming witness, has managed to define. And here you have it again, in the shapes, a thrusting up into life, and a wilting, a dying, away, the two side by side, as if the artist is saying: this is the whole human gamut, like it or not. This is all there is. And, my good, it’s more than enough.

Giacometti's Walking Man hits £65 million at Sotheby's - The Independent, London

2010-02-05T01:01:00.000-08:00

It is not in the least surprising that a figure of a walking man by Alberto Giacometti should have broken all auction records for a work of 20^th century art at Sotheby’s. Giacometti, though diminutive in scale himself, was one of the giants of 20^th-century art. It was just a matter of time before the collectors noticed.

Giacometti worked in a variety of mediums - he painted, he sculpted, he drew, he wrote texts - at the tiny, austere studio in Montparnasse which he occupied for almost forty years, from 1926 onwards. But it was for sculptures such as this one that he will be most deservedly remembered. The fact is that these ghostly, over-stretched, attenuated figures, which seem like spectral essences of themselves, haunt the mind and the memory. The sculptures look fragile and lonely, as if they are operating on the extreme outer edge of themselves where only the coldest of cold winds blow. They lack the fuss and the essential sociability of detail. They look stony and bleak in their pared-backness. It is as if Giacometti has boiled man down to his godless essence – yes, don’t forget that he was at his most productive when Existentialism was at its most fashionable in the French capital, that lonely, bleak philosophy which tells us that there is nothing beyond the self which we choose to invent, day in, day out. There is no essence, and no spiritual being to rescue us, this walking man seems to be muttering. This kind of bleakness imbues Giacometti’s work from first to last. It represents a long, hard pitiless stare into the emptiness of all human life, a distillation of what it is to be a human being, now or then. All we can do is to walk and to keep on walking, ever restless, ever unsatisfied, hand in hand with Samuel Beckett.

And yet there is also an amusing paradox at the heart of all this. Giacometti was also gifted with a touch of worldly calculation. He would not have been entirely displeased, we feel, by what has just happened at Sotheby’s. He carefully cultivated the legend of his ruthlessly focused, monastic life from first to last. That hirsute appearance, that leaden, repitilian eye, were photographed by some of the world’s greatest photographers – Irving Penn, Robert Doisneau, Karsh. Were he being photographed today, he might even hazard a small smile of satisfaction.

2010-01-22T09:53:00.000-08:00

Chris Ofili at Tate Modern The Independent, London, 22 January 2010

2010-01-22T09:47:00.000-08:00

Many artists and writers have made bold attempts to define the nature of modernity, and have rashly speculated upon the possible date of its inception. The novelist Virginia Woolf, for example, once famously wrote that human character changed in 1911. Her statement was an apology for writers such as herself, of course, who were beginning to re-define the nature of the reality that they themselves were experiencing by writing about it, in wholly unfamiliar ways, in fiction and poetry.

The painter Chris Ofili has had to rise to quite a different challenge. It too concerns the nature of modernity, and how he represents it now, but it is one which would never have occurred to the likes of Virginia Woolf, immured as she was in her white, middle-class, Bloomsbury fastness. Her notion of A Room of One’s Own (the title of one of her greatest books) would probably not have encompassed the possibility of having the likes of Chris Ofili as her next-door neighbour.

As a black man born in Manchester and now living in Trinidad, half a world away from the endless machinations of the London art world and London’s art dealers, how has Ofili defined his own experience of being alive, and succeeded in establishing his own black cultural identity through his art? These are the most important issues in Ofili’s art, and they are ones which he has wrestled with from the very beginning. This major retrospective at Tate Britain will give us an opportunity to judge for ourselves to what extent he has succeeded in becoming anyone other than a stranger to himself.

First of all, let us ask a simple question: when did modern Brit art first begin? For the sake of argument, let’s fix that date at 18 September 1997. That was the day on which the ‘Sensations’ show opened at the Royal Academy in London. The exhibition caused near universal outrage. On display were works with which the names of the artists would forever be identified. There was Damien Hirst’s shark, Tracey Emin’s tent, Marcus Harvey’s ‘Myra Hindley’ and the Chapman Brothers’ lurid, tasteless re-creation in three dimensions of a Goya etching of corpses draped over a blasted tree. And then, a little off to the side, almost unassumingly so, there was a glitzily colourful painting of a black Virgin Mary, leaning against a wall, and supported on little globs of elephant dung, by a young artist called Chris Ofili.

When the exhibition then travelled on to the Brooklyn Museum in New York, it was Ofili’s work which was singled out for the most vehement condemnation. The Archbishop of New York, Cardinal John O’Connor, decided that it was probably an attack upon religion itself. Could that really be true? The work, when you come to look at it now, seems too joyously decorative, to be carelessly revelling too much in its own visual splendour to be grimly pigeon-holed as some godless man’s act of wanton provocation. On the other hand, the devil is often in the detail, and when you examined it closely enough, it was very easy to spot the tiny illustrations of female genitalia clipped from porn mag…

Some of Ofili’s most interesting early works had already been painted by the time the Sensations show opened. The first of his ‘Captain Shit’ paintings, in which he introduced a character who looked like a crazed, sinister Lord of Misrule – part drug dealer, part savant, part reggae gangster - dates from 1996. In this series of paintings Ofili is already trying to seek out ways of defining his own identity as a young black artist from Manchester. The answer, then and for many years to come, was to present himself as a provocative shape-shifter, as an artist who both seemed to be defining notions of ‘Afro-Beauty’, but also somewhat standing back from them. Playing with them and perhaps even caricaturing them to a degree.

The question is this: how does an artist with Ofili’s background avoid the feeling that he is somehow fated to define ‘the black experience’ (whatever that is), and to be always regarded as ‘the Voodoo King, the Voodoo Queen, the witch doctor, the drug dealer, the magicien de la terre, the exotic’, as he once put it? One way was to treat all human experience as a kind of great lumber room to be plundered, to let everything in willy nilly, the sacred hand in hand with the profane. The world is just one giant, teeming department store asking to be looted. ‘I always think of the work as coming out of hip-hop culture, which is an approach to making and looking at things with no hierarchy. Everything just gets everything.’

In 1998, Ofili snatched the Turner Prize. Outrage once again, with accusations of political correctness, sophisticated headlines from the red-tops such as ‘dung great’, and random references to ‘damned dots and spots’, mind-numbing triumphs of idiot industry, concentrated tedium, etc, etc.. By now the Ofili style was becoming quite recognisable. It consisted of intensely worked and layered surfaces which made use of a variety of different materials - from glitter pins to paint and collaged images - and, within the intensive discipline of all that careful making, a spirit of almost riotous abandon, in the course of which Ofili seemed to be snatching images from all kinds of sources, and then gorgeously smothering all that image-making in layers of resin.

But that elephant dung was proving to be a problem. It was too silly and too memorable, in part, too easy a thing to be known and caricatured by. Ofili should have stopped using it years ago. It was too steamily redolent of what the white-middle class audience would pigeon-hole as symptomatic of the colourful – which, ultimately, means ridiculous - exoticism of the non-white.

Four years later, Ofili showed a room-sized installation called ‘The Last Supper’ at the Victoria Miro Gallery in East London, which was later to be purchased by, and then installed, at Tate Britain to howls of controversy. Why? Because Ofili was by then an establishment man himself; in fact, he was a trustee of the very gallery which had bought his own work. Was that quite right and proper? Well, the work hasn’t been hasn’t shipped back to Wharf Road, and it will be on show at his Tate Britain retrospective later this month.

‘The Last Room’ is a quasi-religious, sacred and profane spectacle, from first to last. Ranged down the sides of the rooms, as if in procession, are giant, glittering paintings of rhesus monkeys, winking, glittering back at you. They look – such is the cunning with which the light sources have been embedded – as if they are iluminated from within. And then, at the far end, there is a far more indistinct image, of yet another monkey. The sheer spectacle of it all, the spacing, the pacing, together with the enveloping darkness, instil a mood of reverence. But why are we feeling reverence? Because this room has all the trappings of religiosity. And if we don’t see any Christian iconography here, what about the monkeys? Isn’t the monkey god Hanuman sacred to the Hindus?

Once again, there is a strange ambivalence at work here. How does the artist expect us to respond to this piece? Is this an example of spirituality-lite - or not? Are we to take it seriously? Or is he off on some gorgeous decorative riff of his own? This may be a fatal weakness at the heart of much of Ofili’s early work, that he didn’t really know whether he should be taking himself and his work seriously, and he instilled this mood of uncertainty in his audiences. In short, he often came across as an artist who was playing vaudeville with his own identity.

The installation at the Tate was created by David Adjaye, the architect who also re-fashioned the interior of the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2003, the year that Ofili was Britain’s official representative there – accolades were being heaped upon accolades.

Once again, things were very stagey. The fairly predictable, neo-classical interior was completely obliterated. Looking up at the ceiling, you saw strange, threatening jaggings of glass, which looked like weird references to exotic vegetation. You turned small, sharp corners, almost groping your way around a space that felt labyrinthine, hot, oppressive – and yet, thanks to the nature of the works on the walls, unexpectedly carnivalesque too. Where exactly where we? It didn’t seem to matter all that much. The works themselves were from the Afro series. They showed beautiful black lovers against a flat red ground smooching in lush, paradisal settings. Some were naked, others got up for a night of hot squeezes at the cabaret. It felt a bit like a whoozy Garden of Eden of the mind. A garden of Eden fabricated in London, where Ofili was them living, we need to remind ourselves.

Once again, these works seemed to be at odds with themselves, and at odds with the environment within which they were being displayed. They were pretending to be both serious and unserious simultaneously. What was the truth behind all this extravagant posturing? Or was the extravagant posturing as much the truth as anyone could know – even the artist himself?

Now much of that has changed. Ofili decamped to Trinidad four years ago, and his paintings have changed too – both in their subject matter, and in their manner of making. We need to joke no longer about elephant dung because the elephant dung has gone. Thank god. (Thank Hanuman?) They are no longer so layered or so labour-intensive. Now there are even moments when the canvases are left blank and unpainted. In the past Ofili showed us paradisal gardens of the mind. He seemed to be swimming amongst images, snatching them from the air. The were in service to a gorgeous kind of pattern-making. Now things have changed. He is working in relative isolation at last, far from any clamouring metropolis. He is, in part, recording his own raw experience of the nature that surrounds him. Yes, that is the word for the tenor of some of these recent paintings: rawness.

A new openness. A new and more immediate receptivity. And a new rawness. In short, a new absence of superficial, pop-culture lumber.

What exactly are these recent paintings like? Many of them are starker and simpler than we have been accustomed to. They often use fewer colours. They are less elaborate in their making. They are not so fussy in their details. Colours don’t jump and jive together to the same extent. They stand apart from each other, making their own individual marks…

In the past there has always been the feeling, behind all the labour, and all that immaculate layering, that the work was perhaps just a little too mannered, a little too muffled in its dense detailing, even a little too facile. What exactly does facile mean in this context? It means that Ofili seemed to be working from the surface of himself, that, too closely watched by dealers, buyers and museums from too young an age, he had not had the time or the space to dig more deeply into himself, and discover exactly who he was, who he is, who exactly he will become. ‘It got to a point where I felt the work was really known in a public sense, that the division between public and private was like a thin membrane,’ he said in Trinidad recently. ‘And I didn’t feel that gave me a greater sense of freedom. The public is not within my control, but the work is, and I wanted to make changes within the work. That couldn’t happen in an arena that was familiar to me.’

Yes, now that much of that bustle and bother has fallen away, we can see more clearly the nature and the extent of the talent he has been gifted with. Now he can perhaps contemplate the nature of his own blackness without being regarded as a precious, token talent who can dance, at any hour, for the delectation of the art world.

Art and Illusions: masterpieces of trompe l’oeil from antiquity to the present day - The Independent, London

2010-01-12T09:54:00.000-08:00

Every work of art contains a calculated element of deception. But the art of trompe l’oeil pushes deception to new extremes. It is flagrant, almost hubristic, in its wish to deceive, like some conjuror whose final hand is a risky act of sheer bravura at which he simply cannot afford to fail. Trompe l’oeil, in short, is optical illusionism overlarded with attention-grabbing special effects.

This big show, staged in a sixteenth century palazzo in Florence, tells the story of trompe l’oeil down the centuries, from the Roman times to our own day. It is a stagily staged show about an art of pure staginess. As we pass from gallery to gallery - these are often false galleries set within larger galleries - we find ourselves twisting, turning about, doubling back on ourselves, wondering whether at some point we will meet ourselves, perplexed, coming back. The gallery entrances are often tricked out to resemble picture frames. One long corridor looks like the three-dimensional re-enactment of a particularly effective piece of trompe l’oeil. Many of the paintings hang in recessed spaces, as if the framed object is being framed by the gallery itself.

The works themselves – the greater part of them are paintings, but there are also books, medical specimens, sculptures, fabrics, decorative wall tiles and much else – are often quite small, and very often they look smaller still because of their fussy attention to detail. What is more, the paintings often show us objects which are comfortably familiar, relatively unchallenging in their predictability. A game bird hanging from a hook. A vase of begonias. There are too many game birds reeking, upside down, in this show. We get a little tired of seeing them. There are also works in this show which should not have been here at all – these medical specimens from the 18^th century, for example. What have they to do with trompe l’oeil?

The show’s most interesting works are by Americans, and especially the paintings of a little known artist called Otis Kaye, who died in 1974. The subject matter of Kaye’s works is American money, the greenback, pinned to a board, hanging by a thread, tangible enough to be snatched at. Given the illusory nature of money, and what an act of deception it often proves to be, it is perhaps not at all surprising that trompe l’oeil should be employed to show it off at its slippery best. So real. So trickily unreal.

Art and Illusions: masterpieces of trompe l’oeil from antiquity from antiquity to the present day Palazzo Strozzi, Florence until 24 January 2010

Ellsworth Kelly – Early Drawings, 1954-62 The Independent 11 January 2010

2010-01-12T08:08:00.000-08:00

Middlesborough is quite a slow, grinding hike up England's East Coast Line at this miserably inclement time of year. The snow just never seems to stop flurrying against the carriage window. So think of your visit to see this fairly small, and very unusual, show of works by an American modern master of abstraction as a kind of new year pilgrimage.

Ellsworth Kelly is one of the most significant figures in the development of post-war American abstract painting. When the words America and abstraction are uttered together, you immediately think of Abstract Expressionism, that muscular, groundbreaking style of painting on the grand scale with which we associate the names of Motherwell, Pollock and Rothko. Kelly, though he began painting when Abstract Expressionism was helping to define New York as the new capital of world art, is not exactly a member of that school – in fact, he is not really a pupil or teacher of any school.

Consider the works in this show, for example. These are all drawings from the 1950s - in gouache, graphite, ink and pencil - when Kelly had a New York studio. But they don’t feel like the kind of works that would come out of a New York studio during the years when Abstract Expressionism was on its triumphal march. They are too fanciful, too quiet, too intimate, too sunny, too soft, too curvaceous, too engaged with the outside world, and too modest in size. Not a single one of them is more than one foot square. They don’t pressurise the onlooker, they don’t pose, they don’t posture. There is no wilfully aggressive brushwork, and in fact no sign of texture at all. They occupy a single, well-lit gallery on the first floor of the building, quite baggily too, as if to say: this is all there is, and it is quite enough. They are also very short on American machismo. Why do they feel so set apart when in fact he was in the midst of it all?

Because it was in 1954 – the year of the first of the 25 drawings in this show, which span almost a decade - that Kelly came back from eight years of living in Paris, where, having profited by the provisions of the GI Bill to study in Europe after the end of the Second World War, he had been learning to be an artist by looking at the likes of Matisse, Arp, Brancusi, Calder Picasso and others, and travelling around and visiting the great cathedrals and momuments of France. (Kelly served in a camouflage unit during the Second World War which, you could say, was also quite a good preparation for a career as an artist.) So when you look at a drawing in this show called ‘Study for a Palisade,’ and wonder why this specific combination of colours, and the particular way in which they are working together, remind you of the clerical robes that Matisse designed and had made for the chapel of St Paul de Vence at the beginning of the 1950s, you would be spot on. You will also notice that there seems to be the feel of European – perhaps even Mediterranean - light in these drawings. Yes, they feel European, tonally. What is also interesting to note is how different these works are in mood from the younger abstract artists from the USA who were so recently on view at the Saatchi Gallery in London. In the world of the young, everything is coming at you all the time. By comparison, Kelly seems to be moving at walking pace, as if plucking berries, one by one, from a bush. The choice is always his. He is not at the mercy of imagery.

In these works Kelly is teaching himself about colour, form and line. What happens when you put that particular blue against this particular green? What happens when a circular shape is squeezed or cropped by a rectangle, or when a bulgy black circle gets its edges shaved off? How close should a shape come to one that you half-recognise from the natural world – or to a shape that you glimpse down a microscope? What kind of sensuous energy does that inject? There is an ongoing tension between the shapes and how they are framed – straight line butting up against curve like a bull snorting at a gate.

These works may be called drawings, but they are often exercises in patchings and matchings of colour. The colours chime and rhyme melodically, sensuously; they seem to swim into almost effortless conjunctions with each other as if they have been feeling their way for quite a long time. There is patterning, but not patterning with the regularity of Frank Stella’s paintings of the 1960s. Kelly’s regularities always prove to be slightly wayward, slightly awkward, slightly irregular. And that makes you smile. They have a fluid, pared back shapeliness, a yielding sensuousness, about them. There is no spectacular trickery here, just attempts, time and again, to establish how a form establishes an identity for itself within a confined space. These works don’t have the sombreness, the anxious, Freud-oppressed, self-regarding sobriety of works by those Abstract Expressionists. In short, they lack onanism and braggadocio. In fact, they point the way forward to that jolly trickster, Robert Rauschenberg. And as you stare at them, you come to understand why Kelly kept them by him, why he needed to have them with him. These drawings helped to define his future as a painter. They are small-scale maps for ambitious future journeys. Yes, they are almost ready to be scaled up to ten times this size.

Why is this show of hitherto unseen drawings - yes, this is the very fist time in fifty years that they have left his studio as a group, and gone on international exhibition - by an artist in his eighty-sixth year who lives these days in Spencertown, Upstate New York here anyway? It’s not going anywhere else after this showing – except straight back to the artist’s studio. Which is where it came from in the first place. These are all works from Kelly’s private collection, stuff that he has kept by him for the past half century to learn lessons from; lessons in what to do next, and how.

And why are they being displayed here at MiMa in Middlesborough? Well, since it first opened its doors three years ago, MiMa has been establishing quite a track record as a place to go if you take drawing seriously. So this show of what you might describe as a series of small prototypes - in pen, charcoal, pencil, gouache and graphite - for a lifetime of paintings is a natural extension of what has gone before.

But Ellswothy Kelly won’t have all of them back. MiMa was recently given a grant of £1 million from the Art Fund to acquire works on paper, and Kelly agreed to sell two of the works which are currently on display in this show. So 25 arrived and 23 will be going back. Let’s hope he doesn’t miss them too much. Let’s hope that his future development as a painter isn’t put in jeopardy.

Ellsworth Kelly: Early Drawings, 1954-62 MiMa, Middlesborough until 21 February 2010

Turner Prize, 2009 - The Independent, London 8 December 2009

2009-12-09T07:20:00.000-08:00

All that glisters turns out to be gold after all. The least demonstrative, and the most unassuming, of this year’s Turner Prize nominees gets it for a painting-cum-drawing that covers one entire wall at Tate Britain – yes, that’s all there is, my friends (as Peggy Lee once sang), to Richard Wright’s show - and which is likely to disappear altogether when the show is over.

Those who thought that Enrico David might make it with all that noisily transgressive, slightly delinquent-feeling, vaudeville stuff were wrong. Those who thought that something ultra-cerebral by Roger Hiorns might do the trick were also wrong. No, the judges have once again opted for an art which pays homage to restrained, non-figurative patterning - as it did in 2006 when the prize was won by an interesting abstract painter called Tomma Abts.

Yes, Wright is into a kind of laboriously hand-crafted repetitive patterning that often makes for an almost invisible art – in a certain light over at Tate Britain, you can barely see it at all. Last time he had a show in London, I had to look hard to find the work at all. Why? Because there was nothing at all on the floor or the walls. The main piece was up on the ceiling, where I had forgotten to look, and another in a back room which you had to seek hard to find.

Where does it come from? You could say that its roots are in traditions of Islamic calligraphy; you could also say that its roots are in decorative fabrics – well, the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive, are they? How does Wright work? A little like Carl André, another man made famous by the Tate – in André’s case, it was for a configuration of bricks.

Like André. Wright goes into a space empty-handed, without finished works. He looks at it. He sizes it up. Then he draws, in situ, on its surfaces, responding to the shape of the space, its atmosphere, the context of what he has been invited to appropriate, engulf, characterize, re-define. But only temporarily. These drawings don’t go anywhere afterwards. Nobody tries to peel them off the walls. They remain for the duration, they are documented with photographs, and then they get destroyed.

Wright, like so many of his contemporaries, makes an art which comes and goes, and which perhaps is therefore making an allusion to the passing nature of life, and the necessary impermanence of art.

It’s not just that they come and go though. The whole enterprise, here on this wall, seems so tentative, as if it were a kind of effrontery to do more than he has done. And how exactly would you categorise this kind of art? Nodding again towards André, you could call it minimalist if you liked. But it is also, for all its thin and somewhat ethereal nature, quite luxurious in its way. But it’s a luxury that always threatens to pass away, and it does indeed pass away after a little while.

Design for Real Serpentine Gallery, London The Independent, London 30 November 2009

2009-12-05T07:04:00.000-08:00

The Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens exists to show off art. Art, as we all know, is perfectly useless. It exists to be admired. Now, all of a sudden, the Serpentine Gallery has had a change of heart. It has hired a curator with a mesmerisingly unpronounceable surname, Grcic, to assemble a show of forty-six objects which are useful. (I hear the man who is making the podcast for the Guardian newspaper first asking how the name’s pronounced, then taking several runs at it, falling back, and running again.) What is more, these particular objects are examples of their kind. There are variants upon them everywhere that we look. I am sitting on one of them now. Yes, everywhere we turn our heads these days there is a bed, a child’s bicycle, a plastic chair, the arm of a wind turbine flailing the air.

So what happens when we show off useful objects in an art gallery? We begin to relate them to the art experience. We just can’t seem to help ourselves. We look for beauty, elegance, singularity. We check out the colours for evidence of harmonious relations between one hue and another. We wonder why this bed, for example, seems, in part, to resemble an abstract painting, and whether it is a better, a more pleasing bed, for doing so. Most of all, we pause, and stop regarding them solely as objects of utility. We begin to respect them a little more. We begin to scrutinise them with a little more delicacy. We ponder upon the relationship between beauty and usefulness, and we speculate upon the fact that when a good designer gets it right, our lives are perhaps improved a little.

And that is the purpose of this rather delightful show, to make us reflect upon the nature of objects that are designed for our use, to speculate upon whether they are good or bad, ergonomically sound or otherwise, good for the world or not. The objects are well spaced and well displayed, often humorously so. Look at this perfectly gorgeous copper fishing lure, with its brazen feathered tail, and how it is mounted for our pleasure, behind glass. And then there is a plastic chair – oh that blasted modernist ideal! – which seems to hang from the wall, half way up, like one of those balloons we used to rub and rub on our arms, and then stick onto the top of uncle’s bald head for the sheer hell of living.

The central area is good too. It consists of a circle of 25 kg sand bags, heaped four high, across which we are invited to sprawl. A circle of tv screens spews out random facts about injection moulding, the usefulness of robots, etc. Computers invite us to explore more fully all the objects we have just seen on the show’s website: www.design-real.com. So what do we find out about the design and fabrication of objects such as these raise? Bicycle production outstrips car production world-wide three to one, for example. And some not so evident ones too, verging on the metaphysical: the speculation that lightness may be a human objective. Hmmm.

Hockney Makes Another Splash - The Independent, London

2009-11-22T09:39:00.000-08:00

How wise is it for a brand new art centre in a major provincial city such as Nottingham to open its doors with a show by David Hockney? Isn’t the Hockney story – and aren’t Hockney’s works in general - just too well known to deserve yet another outing? In part this must be true. We know too much about Hockney. We’ve seen too much of Hockney. There have been several shows devoted to his works which have opened in the past two or three years, including an exhaustive – far too exhaustive - survey of his portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery, a show of his recent landscape paintings at Annely Juda in London, together with a major museum show in Swabia.

The difficulty in part has to do with Hockney himself. He has always pushed himself forward as a big part of the story of his art. He still does. It’s the tale of the gutsy, cussed Yorkshire laddo with the dyed blonde hair who stormed London at the beginning of the 1960s, and then rapidly re-invented himself as a cool painter of Californian pool-side languor with a special homo-erotic charge. The fact is we always seem to know what he has been doing, and in the relatively recent past he has been as much partially failing as partially succeeding. Do you remember those awful brown paintings of his dogs? Or those weak re-paintings of Picasso? Why in heaven’s name did Picasso need re-painting anyway? And we can’t forget them very easily either because the abiding presence of Mr Hockney is always helping to draw our attention back to them.

So why Hockney again, and what’s new about this show? The new director answers the first question without a second’s hesitation. A new gallery such as this one can’t afford to take any chances and, well, Michael, who is as well known as Hockney? Isn’t he our first near-guaranteed crowd-pleasing, crowd-pulling blockbuster? There’s a bit more to it than that though, thankfully. This show brings back into the spotlight not only some of those first major encounters with California, but it also cleverly draws our attention to the way in which Hockney himelf was responding, in his very earliest paintings, to the fashionable art of his time, to minimalsm and abstract expressionism, for example. Hockney is not by instinct an abstract painter – he never has been – but he makes us aware of the ways in which various kinds of austere abstraction work on us. Then, quite suddenly, as if blowing a raspberry – Hockney has always been very good at blowing raspberries - he has a bit of a joke at its expense. And he often does it as a way of saying, with quite willful and undaunted pride, that he is a gay man in a country where homosexual acts would remain illegal for at least another half decade.

So you can read many of these early works as quite pointed acts of political defiance, not only finding a new way to paint modern, but also a new way to paint and point up a message. So some of these very early works, ‘Going to be a Queen for Tonight ‘(1960), for example, have a wonderful raw, sweeping energy which seems to draw on the muscular excess of gestural painting, but also lightens it, and even pokes fun at it, by adding bits and pieces of text or unexpected splashes of colour, and all this seems to be saying – more shouting than saying – that, yes, there is more to life than a kind of heady, self-enclosed spirituality.

And so, much to my surprise, to find myself looking at Hockneys such as these proved to be something quite special after all. The difficulty proved to be that after the brilliance of those early years, he then had to live with himself for the rest of his life, and that kind of thing is always difficult.

David Hockney: A Marriage of Styles is at Nottingham Contemporary until 24 January 2010

Jeff Koons at the Serpentine Gallery, London - The Independent

2009-07-01T05:07:00.000-07:00

What a mind-numbing spectacle have we here! This summer the Serpentine Gallery, those staid former tea rooms in Kensington Gardens, has been transformed into something that at first glance seems to have more in common with a cross between Las Vegas and Blackpool Pleasure Beach than a public art space for the usual gang of slouch-shouldered, frowny cerebrals.

Here you will find a riotous mixture of ready-mades and replicas of plastic toys of the kind you might find flung around a suburban pool and, on the walls, zappy, computer-manipulated images of soft porn and PopEye, with a few high-minded cultural references thrown in to add just a touch of spice to the mix. The juxtapositions are violent and strange enough to please even a proto-surrealist such as the Comte de Lautreamont, who wrote, in 1869, of ‘the chance meeting on a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella…’

The ready-mades include a step ladder, a stack of plastic chairs, and a rubbish bin. A brightly spotted lobster hangs in the air upside down like some circus strong man, supporting himself between a tippling chair and a wonky rubbish bin. Elsewhere, jug-eared monkeys with brightly slashed cartoon smiles hang down from the ceiling, lazily locked arm to toe. Inflatable beach toys lie around – or hang around from ferocious meat-hooks painted in gay yellows and reds. A multi-armed caterpillar with a green head and sweet, doey eyes eases its way – easy does it, critter! – between the rungs of an aluminium step ladder. A dolphin makes a mighty, arcing leap through the air. A noisy gaggle of pots and pans – all regular kitchenware - are suspended from its underside.

These over-size pool-side inflatables and kids’ toys are not the real things, of course. They are beautifully, painstakingly made replicas, usually in stainless steel and aluminium, polished and then painted, faithful to every last crease and fold of the original plastic. Amidst all the kiddy mock-innocence there are lots of side glances at S&M and raunchy hetero sex too – most of the inflatables are painfully worming their way through mesh of one kind or another. The artist from whose studio all this stuff has originated is an American showman called Jeff Koons. Yes, loony Koons is in residence in London all summer, presenting for our delectation a group of works loosely tied to the theme of Popeye and his gang of late 1920s’ miscreants. It is not only Popeye, exactly eighty years old this year as it happens, who is being remembered here. The works make many other references to the heroes that populate Koon’s pantheon – Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp and, more generally, the Surrealists and the Dadaists, with their zany, inconsequential humour.

Sometimes it is quite difficult to know whether to laugh or to cry at the work of Jeff Koons. It seems utterly preposterous, almost beyond the most absurd critical joke, that anyone should take this stuff seriously at all, or have the gall to stick the label of art on it. And yet they do, and the buyers come flocking. In 2007, A giant magenta ‘Hanging Heart, made out of stainless steel, sold for $23.6 Million dollars. M. Pinault is a big buyer. Koons’ ‘Balloon Dog’ – a giant, stainless steel version of the kind of dog that Uncle Harry would have made for you at your seventh birthday party, twisting it up and about, if you had had the presence of mind at such a tender age to hand him a long, partially inflated balloon – stood outside the Palazzo Grassi, overlooking the Grand Canal, when that museum opened in 2006. At the moment Koons is overseeing the fabrication of a giant replica of a steam train – which will be complete, when it’s finished, with intermittent chug-chugg-chuggs and woo-woo-woos. It carries a price tag of $25 million. Some museum on the East Coast of America is said to be hyper-ventilating at the prospect.

Down in his studio in Chelsea, New York, Koons employs up to 100 studio assistants at a time, making all those stainless steel replicas of inflatable toys with such loving care, beneath Koons’ ever attentive eye. Yes, he really cares about the idea of the perfectly burnished finish. But, really, what is the point when the work itself seems so fatuously pointless, so mind-numbingly tasteless, and so utterly superficial? And yet Koons himself does not see his work as tasteless kitsch at all. In fact, he is tremendously high-minded about it, always, almost messianically so. He takes himself tremendously seriously. The argument which he regularly deploys in defence of his artistic practice is as follows. My art is all about democracy, he preaches. The general problem with art is that people feel intimidated by it. They feel set apart from it, inferior to it. Koons wants to get rid of all that kind of old-fashioned guilt by making an art which is readily approachable, understandable and enjoyable. He wants to be entirely non-judgmental. He doesn’t want people to have to feel that they are nervously looking up at something that they don’t quite understand. He doesn’t want people to have to think and worry about pesky things like meaning. What you see is what you get. Koons brings us all together, in one big happy family. He makes us feel good about ourselves in the presence of art (which is definitely not Art). Here is how he puts it, in a nutshell: ‘They don’t have to bring anything with them other than exactly what they are, and they’re perfect for that experience because it’s about them…’ So: no training; no thinking; no work. Who needs a critical eye when you, the all-important one, are already fully empowered from the moment you walk in the door?

Can this grown man really believe such tosh?

Koons grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania. His father owned a furniture store. Young Koons admired the way furniture got displayed – lighting; positioning; juxtaposition. His father, as Koons confided to us at a press conference this week, taught him everything he needed to know about aesthetics. The young man also sold candy door-to-door to earn some pocket money. Koons himself, now 54 years old, with short-cropped hair and a ready smile, talks like a compulsive salesman for his own product. He’s eager looking, boyishly optimistic. What he says is often not quite comprehensible, but it sounds good – until you think back at what he has said and wonder, sheer banalities aside, whether it really means anything much at all. He is especially fond of the word transcendental. ‘Art is a vehicle that connects you to human history,’ he said this week. ‘I want people, when they look at my art, to have engaging moments. I want them to feel that everything about their lives is perfect – their history, their culture, their selves. Everything is in play. Everything is possible…’

Are these the statements of a man who is a serious artist? Or are they the easy bletherings of a flattering trickster? Up on the wall behind him, multiple computer-manipulated images of Popeye were swelling their engorged biceps in readiness to pop yet another can of spinach, and mouthing ‘I yam that I yam that I yam…’

Shani Rhys James - Two Ateliers Connaught Brown London W1 - The Independent

2009-06-17T04:56:00.000-07:00

If a work of art is too readily enjoyable, a pall of suspicion can hang over it. Perhaps popular means, oh lord, panderingly populist. Similarly, if something plays hard to get, if it’s only really understood when some kind of elaborate explanation has been offered in justification of its obscurities - think of much conceptual art, for example - it’s easy to overvalue it, and especially if you pride yourself on being more thoughtful than your clownish next door neighbour.

The Welsh painter Shani Rhys James belongs to the first category. The enormity and the sheer visual seductiveness of her talent hit you full in the face the moment it confronts you. I defy any reader of this newspaper not to be pretty enthralled by her new exhibition of twenty or so oil paintings in Albemarle Street – even when you are separated from them by the thickness of a robust glass window.

Rhys James paints women - most often herself, sometimes wary, sometimes brashly naked – and she paints still lives, often of fairly ordinary domestic things such as baskets, colanders and pots and pans, though in her most recent work, she has taking to painting rather elegant bits of French furnishings too – a rather delicately worked rattan-backed chair, for example - and this serves to introduce a new and almost sombrely classicising restraint, if not a certain politesse, into her work. She often paints the two in combination, playing the inanimate off against the animate. She is a tremendous colourist, and the vases of flowers she paints – these paintings are full of flowers – have a kind of riotously spiky and rip-roaring energy about them – a bit like those thistles in that poem by Ted Hughes which were always ready to ‘burst open under a blue-black pressure’. There’s something quite mad, wild and even thuggish about this work, such its total lack of restraint or decorum. It seems to be gulping at colour – oranges, flaring reds, brilliant yellows - like a cat going hell for leather at a great bowl of best Cornish clotted.

She lathers and slathers on the paint with a kind of unrestrained glee. No wonder the eyes of the model are always slightly bulbous with a kind of childish wonderment. They can’t really believe their eyes. They can’t really believe that the world of flowers is such a carnival for the eyes. And yet there’s something else in the way she paints eyes too, something which seems to set the human slightly at odds with what she is surrounded by. The face, often quite small, often peeks out, just off centre, from behind the jungle of flowers, as if it’s not quite worthy, or as if it’s not quite up to speed. There’s a touch of bewilderment in this female face, a note of self-apology. It’s not strutting in the way these flowers and these pots and pans are strutting. Even though it’s the brains around these parts, it feels, somehow, less, diminished, just a touch cast adrift. It can’t carry off its own identity with the same panache as a flower can. Flowers are just unapologetically themselves, non-stop, head-long. We gorge on them. We can’t believe that they’re quite this emphatic, quite this visually noisy. What’s a woman beside a flower? Who would have the temerity to contradict a flower when it’s in bloom to the extent that these flowers are in bloom?

Two studios. That’s the title of this show. And there is a difference of mood and manner between the works painted in her Welsh studio, and those painted in France. The Welsh paintings are dancing all night. It’s what they do. Over in France, the paintings go to bed earlier. They gnaw at their nails, they are more cerebral. They argufy. They look at books devoted to the masters of eighteenth century French painting, and they wonder about tradition, tonal values, laying black against grey and then what – o such abstract anxieties!

Back in the homeland, you paint as if you barely need to think at all. It’s just there, spurting. Everything comes out, wallop, just as it is.

Fernando Botero, The Circus Thomas Gibson Fine Art, London - ARTnews, June 2009

2009-06-09T06:15:00.000-07:00

There has long been a tremendous pathos associated with the idea of the circus. The comic and the grotesque, the brashly and the brazenly colourful – all these elements often seem to be the barest of disguises for sadness, if not tragedy. Columbian artist Fernando Botero continues this tradition of ambivalence in a new suite of oil paintings in London.

Botero’s trapeze artists, jugglers, uncicyclists and acrobats are full-figured, monumental, exaggeratedly pneumatic presences, more fantastical than real, gaudily tricked out in brilliantly colourful costumes, who seem to crowd out the pictorial spaces they occupy. They are often seen in full, reckless flight across the canvas, making boldly outflung sculptural shapes in the air. Their very monumentality makes the fact that they engage in such feats all the more remarkable. And yet, in spite of all this vigour, there is a strange and almost pitiful vulnerability about them too. The eyes are unusually small, watchful, and almost fearful. They are always unsmiling. The gaze is always distant, otherwhere. In spite of the occasional presence of an audience - always rendered at some distance, with loosely abstract dibs and dabs of paint – they seem to exist inside a terrible, arrested silence, within a mood of curiously frozen introspection. Their very monumentality helps to make the objects which they use all the more delicate, insubstantial, if not fantastical. A white pierrot strums a stringless ukelele. The stubby strumming hand moves almost mechnically, as if it is going through the motions of making music.

A great trumpeting of shape and colour seems to go hand in hand with an almost fathomless emotional emptiness.

Venice Biennale 2009 - The Independent, London

2009-06-07T06:10:00.000-07:00

Film. Film. Film. It seems to have spread like a stain through the Venice Biennale this year. The Brits have chosen film-maker Steve McQueen as their official representative. The Welsh have John Cale, co-founder of Velvet Underground and newly into film, and Northern Ireland has opted for Susan MacWilliam, who makes films about the paranormal. Only Scottish artist Martin Boyce has demurred, choosing instead to fill seven rooms of the Palazzo Pisani with giant stepping stones, steel chandeliers and over 20,000 fake leaves. Elsewhere, Fiona Tan is showing films in the Dutch pavilion, film-maker Mark Lewis is representing the Canadians, and then there are the Poles and the Rumanians…
   The British Pavilion feels quite different from how it did when Tracey Emin was representing Britain in 2007. Then the whole, multi-roomed villa had painting and drawings on the walls, and it was opened up to the light. Now it's been transformed into a narrow, boxlike cinema space with fairly austere, tiered seating. Appropriate enough, you might think, for a man who takes film-making quite as seriously as McQueen does.
   The title of McQueen's triple-screen projection is Giardini, and it’s a moody, 30-minute rumination upon the nature of the very gardens in which the national pavilions are sited. What happens when the art world disappears?Everything gets dismantled. The gardens fall back into a kind of gentle dilapidation. Lean dogs scavenge amidst the debris. Birds and insects re-populate the space. McQueen shows this stripping away of identity. He also shows, primarily through sound, how the world of human kind is crowding around just beyond the trees. A cruise ship passes in the night, reminding us that the gardens are at the very edge of the lagoon. The roar of a crowd is heard, stage off. Venetian church bells bend in the air. Then, three quarters through the film, two men embrace in the darkness. This homoerotic strand - reminding us that the Giaridini, off-season, is a site of a rather different kind of transaction:sexual assignation - is left hanging in the air.
   Over on the Giudecca, in a former brewery, John Cale mistreats us to 46 minutes of fairly bemusing agitprop about his own tortured sense of Welsh identity. It is an oblique portrait of his mother country, spread across five screens which are positioned at irritatingly odd angles to each other. It is an even more oblique portrait of Cale himself, the Welshman who has spent so much of his life outside Wales. The film proceeds at snail's pace. It has fine visual moments. A phantom pianist slowly appears at the keyboard of an old upright piano. A stuttery, hand-held camera crawls across the floor of a disused slate quarry. At the end, Cale suffers waterboarding. Why such pain? The English. The English. But between these fleeting moments of dramatic interest, there are many long minutes of tortured and unforgiveably unfocused self indulgence, which include even longer minutes when the screens are entirely blank and we nod and pray for early release.
   Frenzied film-making aside, the outstanding work in the Giardini this year is to be found in the pavilions of the United States of America, Egypt and Spain. That mad man Bruce Nauman brings his own particular brand of wackily serious gusto to the usually rather staid looking American pavilion. The frieze of neon signs on the outside of the building heralds the serious playfulness to be found within. JUSTICE reads one. That sign is immediately overlaid by another in a different colour which reads AVARICE. The show is an anthology of works from the 1980s onwards. Water pours down onto suspended, upside down heads. A neon Double Poke in the Eye is exactly what it says it is. A clay hand slowly modulates into a mouth. A man in a black skull t-shirt circles me as I circle the room. That seems rather uncomfortably appropriate.
   Fifty metres away, the Spanish Pavilion is showing off the large-scale paintings of Miquel Barcelo. These robustly textured works feel like a mixture of desertscape and moonscape. The tenderest and most haunting work in the Giardini is way at the top of the gardens, in the little visited Egyptian Pavilion. Two artists, one a painter of monumental figurative works called Adel el Siwi, and the other, Ahmad Askalany, a maker of figures in straw, paint a picture of a society in transition, haunted by the ghosts of its past.
   Some of the very best work is to be found in Making Worlds, the enormous themed show curated by Daniel Birnbaum, the Biennale's director. I say that it is themed, but the only real theme is the fact that artists invent new worlds for themselves which are somewhat at a tangent to our own, and you could scarcely be more thematically banal than that. The show itself is spread across the various interminably long gallery spaces in the Arsenale, and somewhat hidden away at the back of what is now called the Palazzo delle Esposizioni within the Giardini itself. There are some wonderful works here. Tomas Saraceno has engulfed an entire room with the gossamer-like filaments of the Black Widow Spider on a disturbingly giant scale. A suite of watercolours by Allesandro Pessoli plays quixotically with Christian themes. And Nathalie Djurberg has made a room full of gloriously repulsive flower- and plant-like forms, larded if not drenched with colour, that menace just as much as they delight.

This year the single most spectacular addition to the Venetian cultural landscape is the transformed Customs House, known as the Punto della Dogana, at the very tip of the Grand Canal. This prow-like sliver of a building, re-modelled by Tadao Ando, now houses the pick of Francois Pinault's collection of contemporary art. No visitor to the Biennale should leave without seeing the likes of Rachel Whiteread, Jeff Koons and Sigmar Polke penned so elegantly between the Grand Canal and the Zattere.

Abstract America, Saatchi Gallery, London - The Independent, London

2009-05-25T08:14:00.000-07:00

There are two kinds of art. One has to do with looking at the world outside of us – the human form in all its horror and all its beauty; the terrible turbulence of nature. The second kind closes its eyes and responds to the world non-representationally. We call this second category, very loosely, abstract art, and it has been with us for thousands of years. Abstract art was in at the very beginning of sign-making. Abstract art was a way of expressing reverence for that which was unpicturable – the idea of the eternal, for example.

To see some fine examples of this second group, open up – very gingerly, lest it fall apart - your dog-eared copy of The Story of Art, a classic text by the late Sir Ernst Gombrich which was first published more than half a century ago, and is still in print to this day, and quite deservedly so. Here are two or three fine examples of abstract art from that book: a page from the Lindisfarne Gospels, dating from the seventh century; the carved lintel which once belonged to the house of a Maori chieftain; and Frater Ruffilus’s writing of the letter ‘R’, from an early thirteenth century manuscript. As these various examples make abundantly clear, there are many different kinds of abstraction. Some have their toe in the world – they seem, in part, to be abstracted representations of organic forms such as flowers and leaves; other examples – think of the long history of Islamic art, for example – look like pure patterning of a much more cerebral kind, more akin to mathematics than anything else.

This week a new show at the Saatchi Gallery in London will throw a spotlight on yet another manifestation of abstract art, and this one will consist of a group show of work – paintings and sculptures - by young artists from America who are responding to a form of abstraction that was invented there in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The story goes something like this. After the Second World War, dear old Paris, art capital of the Western world for almost as long as the ideas of taste, luxury and sexy connoisseurship had been in currency, suddenly lost the right to call itself the guardian of the newest of the new in art. Tired in spirit, humiliated by occupation, and with many of the artists and dealers either dead or fled, the torch, by the beginning of, say, the 1950s seemed to have passed to New York, where a group of individuals loosely labeled the Abstract Expressionists were beginning to make very loud claims for themselves. And, even more important, were beginning to have very loud claims made on their behalf. What was everyone shouting about?

Abstract Expressionism was, in part about spontaneity, lavish painterly gesture, the freeing up of the native American spirit. In common with the ambitions of Surrealism, it was an attempt to set free the creativity that was locked inside every human mind. The various artists associated with this group included Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko. In fact, they were making two quite different kinds of abstract art. One kind seems more like frenzied calligraphy, often on a giant scale. Pollock was the man whose spirit seemed to embody this first idea of Abstract Expressionism. He laid his canvases on the floor, poured paint directly on to them, and then danced around for as long as it took. It was pure, wild, colourful and undeniably expressive, from first to last. Pollock was America’s first Action Man. The plastic toys came limping after.

Anyone who wishes to experience what feels like a quite different variety of Abstract Expressionsm should spend a few hours wandering around the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, where some of the best known and most frequently reproduced images by the likes of Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt and others are often on display. This group of painters were making abstract marks in a very particular, if not narrow, way. This is soulful stuff too, but this variety of soulfulness is earnestly inward-looking, spiritually self-searching, myth-making, more inclined towards the quietly contemplative. There’s no whooping and shrieking here. In fact, some of these painters – not all by any means – make us feel as if their souls had been shriven by exposure to some terrible desert over a period well in excess of forty days. Their art is extremely severe and unyielding and unsmiling. We are suffering, it seems to say. Our work is being extruded from us with the utmost pain. We have reached down to the core, it intones gloomily, and it is hard and cold and lonely down here. These artists often work on a giant scale: tremendous, gaunt slashings and shiverings of black against white. Yes, many of them do not do colour – well, barely. They do not do exuberance either. They do not do frivolity or popular entertainment of any kind. They do not do the outside world, not at all. Any resemblance between what you see in their paintings and the living or the dead seems purely accidental. They do not welcome you in to their circle; in fact, that circle seems to be enclosed by an electrified fence. They say to you: life is an extremely severe discipline. Approach it – and us – with a respectful degree of wariness. We are the pitiless masters of an almost overbearing austerity. Embrace us at your peril.

Yep, an afternoon spent down at the Hirshhorn can leave you feeling rather dry-mouthed, spent, and even chastened.

And then, from the early 1960s onwards, came a second wave of abstract painters and sculptors, which included Brice Marden, Frank Stella, Carl Andre and Donald Judd. This second group were dubbed Minimalists by various enterprising art commentators, ever ready to neaten up and categorise the daily, pell-mell flux of things. The Minimalists lightened things up a little, but not too much. Here are some of what you might loosely call minimalist ‘doctrines’: be truthful to the materials you are using. Do as little as possible with what you are given. Change it barely at all. Be as anonymous as possible. Pretend to be a maker of something that could just as easily get made on the factory floor. Don’t make loud claims for yourself as that maker. Keep it pure, simple, true. Don’t try to imitate anything else. Matter may be sufficient unto itself. Dress and look like a blue-collar worker.

Carl Andre has that image to this day: he habitually wears the blue overalls of the honest artisan, this blighted man whose honest-john appearance is marred only by the fact that he may or may not have murdered his wife some years ago (he was finally acquitted). ‘Well, you see I’m a matterist really, not a minimalist. I didn’t invent that word.’ That’s what Carl Andre once said to me when I asked him why he did so little to the materials he used – he just organises them when he gets to a gallery. He has no studio of his own. He’s an itinerant. So if it happens to be bricks, and there’s a floor, that it’s, folks…

Now it is within the context of this almost surprisingly complicated, and almost self-contradictory, mixture, of self-abnegation and self-celebration within the various strands of post-war American abstraction that we need to view this new generation of young American artists. And, yes, they are doing abstraction all right, just like their artistic forefathers before them, but the spirit and the feel of this work could not be more different from what was happening in New York and elsewhere from the 1940s through to the 1960s. Is it correct then to call these young artists heirs to all those who went before? Well, it’s both true and misleading in just about equal measure. These new ones have been touched by influences unavailable to their predecessors, the most significant of which is cyberspace, whose manifold seductions we can fall a prey to at any time of the day or night, and where we can be everywhere and nowhere all at once. Cyberspace turns life into a non-stop collage of fleeting impressions, and the spirit and the intrusive cacophony of cyberspace spreads like a seeping red stain in a white linen suit through all this work.

Non-stop. That is a very important idea for these young artists. If you listened in on their conversational buzz, you would probably hear something like this. Well, yes, this is something I’ve made, but it could just as easily be something else, and it may well become so in due course. I call myself a painter now, but the fact is that I’m a multi-media guy/gal of whatever I choose to make, and what I choose to make it out of is what happens to become available to me when I start sniffing around here, there and everywhere…

This feels like work which is gloriously impure, and polluted by the world that surrounds it. It’s a kind of snatch-it-from-here-there-and-everywhere kind of work. Artists are natural scavengers – they always have been – but these artists are experts at it. This work contains elements of story-telling, something that would have been anathema to the Abstract Impressionists, who wanted to purge art of the superficiality of narrative in order to get to the very essence of stark sign-making. This is an art which has the capacity to laugh at itself and the art world of which it is a part. It feels looser and freer and, well, funnier too. It makes time for casualness and superficiality because life in part consists of those things. It does not feel sufficient unto itself.

Which brings us to another interesting issue which is seldom talked about by either art critics or artists because it is a very awkward one. It is, however, very pertinent to this show. What are you supposed to be thinking about when you look at an abstract painting? This is somewhat akin to the question: what are you supposed to be thinking about when you are listening to classical music? I once put the first of these two questions to the celebrated American abstract painter Brice Marden when we were staring together at a particularly gorgeous sequence of looping the loops. He laughed, slightly uncomfortably, and told me that he often thought about his daughters. Was he confessing to some kind of act of self-betrayal? But how do you think about patterning which, to some degree, seems to relate only to itself? How long does it take before you start thinking about your daughters?

The fact is that in this new show over at the Saatchi Gallery you are actively being encouraged to think about the fact that what you are looking at is out in the world because it is so often referring to what happens in the world, whether that be art making, commerce or popular entertainment. Sometimes it is a mixture of all three. A new pact seems to have been established here, whose terms are as follows: we are makers of abstraction in the American manner, but what that means has been changed irreversibly by what has happened in the world outside of us. We are no longer the monks of yesteryear. Nor are we the showmen. Nor do we feel reverential towards the materials that we use. There is no such thing as a material which is either appropriate or inappropriate. Everything is grist to our mill. We, the youthful scavengers of our frenzied world, are proclaiming a new doctrine: our art is constrained by what we choose to do. All ages are present to us. We make of it what we will, when we will, as we will.

TEN PROFILES

Kristin Baker makes works which seems to embody the thrill and the dash of the passing moment. She uses industrial materials, and she often looks as if she is engaged in sign-painting. ‘Excide Batteries Beer a Sphere’ (2003) is a typical piece of work – a rich, onrushing mix of media spectacle executed with a fine painterly flourish.

Matt Johnson

If you thought you knew what to expect from a piece of origami, you had not reckoned on the playfulness of Matt Johnson in a work entitled ‘The Piano’. Johnson has taken a giant piece of tarpaulin, folded it into the form of a pianist sitting, arms raised, at a grand pian, fin menacingly raised, and coloured it an exhilarating, Yves Klein Blue.

Elizabeth Neel

Neel’s work is a refined take on carnality and ferocity. The bloody, torn carcass of an animal falls away from a tree in a shattered, blood-soaked blur, having just been blasted by hunters to eternity. But the palette she uses is so luscious and seductive.

Ryan Johnson’s sculptures are made from a riotous cast of materials: casting tape, glass, plywood, cement, cardbosrd, spray paint. He makes comically grotesque walking or leaning figures, pathetic veterans of life or war – both? - with gouty feet and legs blown off. Political cometnary? You bet.

Chris Martin is the point at which outsider art meets formalism. His paintings consist of blobs, dots, lines joined-together like constellations, and all painted with a kind of gloopy innocence and crudity. It looks a bit like a physics text book which is being read upside down and then used as a child’s colouring-in book.

Mark Grotjahn

Mark Grotjahn paints recessive linear perspectives in colours which remind you of Cubist experimentation from one hundred years ago - geometric forms, with very thin lines, and closely worked in coloured pencil.

Dan Walsh is a natural heir to the grid-making of the Minimalists, though with a much quirkier touch. In ‘Red Diptych II’, two large-scale paintings hang side by side. One consists of solid blocks, the other of concentric tiles. As you look from one to the other, one seems to recede as the other advances towards you.

Bart Esposito's geometric paintings seem to be a mixture of curvaceous graphic design and pop art. The colours are groovy browns and oranges. The forms twist and twist impossibly, smooth as gum.

Amy Sillman’s work is as close as any of these young artists gets to the contemplative manner of some of the Abstract Expressionists. Rich, colourful, with shapes that seem to be dissolving into other shapes even as we look at them, they feel weightless and fragmentary.

Aaron Young’s work often seems to begin in Pollock-like scribblings –except that the marks on ‘Greeting Card 10a’ have been made by motorbikes roaring back and forth across the canvas. Pollock would surely have approved.

Transmission Interrupted Modern Art, Oxford - Art Review

2009-05-22T05:01:00.000-07:00

Political art so often shouts too loudly. Like most political poems, it knows where it’s going long before it gets there, so there is no element of real surprise or genuine imaginative engagement. This choice new group show at Modern Art Oxford, which exhibits works by fourteen young artists from around the world, is quiet and nuanced by comparison. This is political art as it should be made, wheedlingly purposeful, skilful, quietly memorable.

Take ‘Timeline: Romanian Culture from 55BC until today’ by Lia Perjovschi, for example. This piece runs riot around the walls of one of the first floor galleries, a kind of crazy, seething mass of scribbled notations on 40 sheets of paper, randomly placed photographs and incomprehensible crowdings in of information. It makes you laugh out loud to see it because it mocks the kinds of absurdities that historians and cultural commentators indulge in all the time, the rapid, pat analysis of the complexities of national history. Another equally engaging piece is an assemblage of objects displayed on a long, curving table by Michael Rakowitz called ‘The invisible enemy should not exist (recovered, missing, stolen series)’. Rakovitz has re-made a selection from the thousands of object that went missing – and remain missing - from the Iraq National Museum after the invasion of 2003. Except that he has made them out of trash – Middle Eastern product packaging, sheets of newspapers, glue. They are all solemnly displayed chronologically, as they might be in the British Museum. They are a powerful reminder of absent, priceless things, re-made out of trash.

We impose meanings from outside when we deal with cultures other than our own. What do we make of Mircea Cantor’s ‘Monument for the end of the world’? Once again, this piece works its way with use through humour. A table-top display shows us what resembles a scale model of something that looks somewhat akin to Macchu Picchu. Wooden blocks stand in for built structures – yes, it is a kind of scale model. Tiers of steps ascend to nothing more meaningful than a wind chime, gently stirring in the breeze, and suspended in the air by the arm of a crane. It has all the trappings, and all the strange atmosphere, of a sequestered place of hidden ritual, but its meaning is completely opaque to us, if not absurd. Once again, we are forced to stand on the outside and look in, abandoning our clever games of cultural appropriation even before we begin.

Downstairs, one entire gallery is occupied by the giant hulk of a blackened, burnt out car – except that it has been made in terracotta by Adel Abdessemed. This object which, out in the street, would create a frisson of fear has been tamed into a monumental piece for a museum of modern art. Some trace of a street war has been pleasingly aestheticised. No one need worry any more.

Royal Society of Portrait Painters Annual Exhibition 2009 - The Independent, London

2009-05-19T00:54:00.000-07:00

Portraiture is where art meets commerce head on. I notice that as soon as I walk into this lunchtime’s seething private view of the annual exhibition by members of the Royal Society of Portraiture down at the Mall Galleries, which is, appropriately enough, just a hop, skip and a jump from the Palace. An area is dedicated to something called ‘portrait enquiries’. There’s a table, a ledger (yes, it looks quite that high falutin’), pens, and prints of artists’ works on what look like storyboards. And this year, as ever, the walls are teeming with portraits, almost all of them smartly framed. (Portraits can’t afford to look scruffy.) Choose your style. Choose how you would like to see yourself. Then write down your name beside the portraitist of your choice and, gulp, ask him how much - for such and such a size - in these lamentably straitened times.

That is the thing about portraiture. It is immediately accountable to its subject, and to fairly traditional notions of what reality exactly consists of in a way that much contemporary art is not. Contemporary art tests reality until it bends and nearly breaks. People laugh at it. People mock it. Then some poker-faced Mr Anonymous in a city suit lays down a million or two by phone line, and the mockers fall silent, and the art critics start to pen long and difficult sentences.

No, commissioned portraiture just can’t get away with the wild levels of experimentation which characterised so much of the art of the 20th century. All those isms! People want to be reassured by their portraits, They want to recognize themselves in what they see, to know themselves as they believe themselves to be, and not only their own hands, faces and bodies, but the kinds of contexts in which they live and move and have their day-to-day being: The college they preside over with such strictly avuncular authority; the medals that shine, so richly deserved. And the portrait painter, by and large, needs to satisfy their needs so that money will shift relatively easily, and with more than a modicum of good will – another satisfied sitter, you might say - from patron to portraitist. It’s as simple as that. It always has been.

And yet there is a problem here. Much of the stuff on these walls is excellently painted - after all, these people are professionals at what they do. And yet much of it doesn’t stir us very much. It doesn’t have the excitement of work which is breaking new ground. We know it for what it is, for what it is expecting us to feel, almost without looking at it. It presses such familiar buttons. It is, for example, satisfying easy assumptions about class, respectability, eminence, correct behaviour. It is making a lot of people feel that this is how the dependable world works. It doesn’t court risks. It’s never nasty or slightly troubling. We look at portraits of comfortably prosperous families sitting on a chaise longue, and we recognize that this is exactly the kind of scene that Gainsborough would have painted for a similar family two hundred years ago. The price would have been high – as it is now. And the head of this memorialised family would have been hugely proud that they had the money to confirm their own status as a serenely prosperous family. Not all of it is like this, mind you, but a lot of it is.

The dreariest paintings are of human beings we know both too well and not at all: Mrs Thatcher, the Princess Royal. Now why do these paintings seem so tediously unlikeable and uninteresting? Well, they seem to be identikit – if not mulch - works, and not even especially good likenesses – we’ve all seen much better press photographs. They feel like general impressions which have had the reality wrung out of them. Public figures as visually edible as last months’s mouldering baguette behind the radiator. Or is it that we never really liked the idea of these women much anyway?

Jerwood Contemporary Painters - The Independent, London

2009-05-16T10:29:00.000-07:00

Who are the best young painters at work today? This group show of about thirty works is the choice of the Jerwood’s three judges, who are all practising artists themelves. Very few of these twenty-six young people are fresh out of college; they are not really, in that strange, queasiness-inducing locution, emerging. Quite a few of them are well established, and already represented by first–rate galleries. Take Ryan Mosley, for example, who two years ago had just graduated from the Royal College of Art, and was chosen by this newspaper as the talent to watch out for in 2008. His large canvas in this show, ‘Psycho Cubist Picnic’, is a kind of surrealist-cum-cubist-cum Gustonish act of zany, venturesome play with figures and things – or rather parts of figures and things. All the bits of the world seem to be falling and spinning apart in hilariously comic style. It seems to have been painted in a kind of wild, Picasso-like dash, and it’s full of a tremendous sense of vim and gusto.

And that, in fact, is the overall tone of this show – a kind of reckless, experimental joy in the use of paint on canvas, a rooted belief that the world is the painter’s oyster, and that if you should happen to choose to gild and prettify that oyster these days, it’s entirely your prerogative. There’s nothing hole-in-corner about any of this work, no feeling that the art of painting itself might be beleaguered, or under some kind of a threat from the newer media. It’s all very self-confident stuff that we see here; it’s work that often connects up stylistically with the recent – and even the distant past (look at Matthew Weir’s fascinating take on an Adam Elsheimer, for example), but it is also forging ahead into the future without any flinching or hesitation. And when it does pay homage to the past, it often does so playfully. The past is there for the joyous plundering. The past is there to give a kind of density, a kind of layering, to the present. It is playful and confident, seldom poker-faced, seldom over-earnest, always unconstrained. There is no evidence of any particular school or tendency, no dominating trend of any kind, no particular look-at-me brashness, no calculated wish to disgust us or to shock us. Instead, a kind of wilful eclecticism seems to be the order of the day. There’s a steady commitment to the idea of the importance of the art of painting. But most of all the show seems to be shouting back at us: Who can do it better than a painting? Painting is just as young and vibrant as it is old and venerated. In short, it’s here to stay – and, by the way, it always has been.

Is the work predominantly figurative or abstract? A variable mixture of the two. Much of the best work is abstract, but it does not have the severity of the pioneers of abstraction. It is does not set out prove that abstraction represents a kind of unassailable purity of vision, something which is set apart from, and disdainfully rises above, the mess and the muck of the world. This is an abstraction which is often within a jokey nodding distance of recognisability. Here, for example, is a piece by Sam Windett which looks, with its geometrical severity, like a take on Constructivism. But it’s only partially that. There’s too much cheekily understated colour washing about the work. What is more, the title gives the game away: ‘Mobile (white)’. And this is often the case with the abstract work in this show. Colour gets poured in to lighten and free up a mood, repeatedly – there’s none of the priestly poker-facedness of Abstract Expressionism about this confidently cheerful gang.

Some of the figurative work has a beautifully delicate tonal simplicity, a paring back to the essentials – look at David Webb’s representation of a Monarch butterfly, what he has made of the form, and how he has contextualized it within its painterly environment. It’s all very simple, beautifully judged and poised – just like a fecklessly evanescent butterfly, in fact.

Luke Fowler at Serpentine Gallery, London - The Independent

2009-05-16T10:26:00.000-07:00

Luke Fowler is a young, experimental (for want of a better word) film maker who won the first Jarman Award in 2008. This show at the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens is a kind of mini-retrospective of his major projects of recent years, and in part a documentation of those projects. This is what artists so often do these days. They make something, and then they scrupulously record the various stages they went through on the long and serendipitous journey towards its conclusion. They are both the creators and the archivists of what they have created, opening up their own inner workings, letting us see art as the process that it must inevitably be. Is this always interesting? Not at all.

In Fowler’s case, it is quite interesting because he has opened up the discussion to take in our assumptions of what exactly a film is, and what makes up its constituent parts. So much is up in the air for film makers these days. Film. Video. DVD. Isn’t it a bit passé to use film at all in a digital age? Not at all, say certain purists such as Tacita Dean. Fowler bring lots of different things together to create a kind of multi-layered filmic experience, which is part art film and part a kind of free-flowing and free-ranging approach to documentary making. Two films in particular in this show help us to see the direction in which he is heading. Pride of place – it occupies the entire central gallery - is given to Composition for Flutter Screen, the strangest and most recent piece of all.

Here is what you experience. Total Darkness. Then, a second or two later, a huge, white, fluttery taffeta screen is lit up by two lamps, trained to left and right of it. It’s a brilliant white, five-metre square spectacle, and the screen itself is overlaid by an additional strip of white light, curved like a scimitar wound. There’s a tremendous amount of agitation, and there’s noise too, not only the whirr of the projector, but also a sound track, which comes and goes, and the sound of the agitation of the screen itself which, unusually, is in a state of perpetual motion.

Why? Those two fans which stand on the ground, to left and right of it, are blowing air at it, causing wave-like ripple effects to flow back and forth, combing it, seaming it like a ploughed field. Is this then what we have come to see, the fluttering spectacle of a giant, ghostly taffeta screen? No. That’s just the beginning. The fact that the screen never stops moving disrupts our ability to see the image – when it comes…

Darkness again, and then a rectangle of the screen is filled with an image – a vessel brimming with water, meniscus bulging, or, later, a candle, doubled, with a strangely smokey bud of flame. The images are both vivid and partially unreadable, and when that projection faders, as it soon does, they leave a ghostly after-image of themselves…

From agitated painterly abstraction, to A Pilgrimage from Scattered Points, a film which is equally tricksy in certain technical respects, but this time you understand very well why it’s happening. Fowler has a fascination with various counter-cultural figures – elsewhere in the show there’s a film about R.D. Laing, that rebellious anti-psychiatrist.

Pilgrimage examines the life and slow death of the Scratch Orchestra, a phenomenon of the 1970s. Various musicians came together to make music, and to encourage others that music could be made by anyone. It didn’t have to be the prerogative of some elite. Cornelius Cardew was perhaps its most celebrated spokesman. And it was Cardew who helped to bring about the death of the experiment because of the degree of hatred he felt for the bourgeoisie. Regrettably, certain group members felt that they belonged to the bourgeoisie and, no matter how hard they searched their souls, they couldn’t find it within themselves to call themselves truly bad people.

Now all this fractiousness, and this musical experimentation, is caught in the way the film is made - rapid cuts and quick fades; odd blurrings; off-beat angles; interviews from then and now. The fact that it is so spasmodic and jumpily collage-like seems to mirror its subject matter perfectly. This is experimental film making at an unusually intelligent and focused level.

Gerry Judah at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Gallery Guide

2009-05-16T10:23:00.000-07:00

When is a painting not exactly a painting? Gerry Judah’s paintings occupy an uneasily anxious zone mid-way between painting and sculpture. Given that their obsessive subject matter - and Gerry Judah is nothing if not obsessive - is the terrible aftermath of conflict, this uneasy occupation seems to rhyme with their meaning. They hang from the wall, but they are built out from it, weirdly, and in a way that, when we look at them, and peer down into them, as if with the eye of a bird or a drone, almost induces a sickening sense of vertigo. They seem to be clinging to the surface of the canvas as if by some miracle. They show us an entirely shattered zone of conflict, human habitations which have been pulverized almost out of existence. We recognise bits and piece of tottering, leaning, listing shapes. These were once fairly drab municipal buildings or apartment blocks. None of these structures was an object of beauty. Paradoxically, they seem to have gained a little more magnificence, a little more grandeur, in their extreme decrepitude, in the way in which they seem to be crying out to us for pity. Look to the left and to the right of these collapsing buildings, and you see that the surface of the painting is pitted with fragmentary shapes, scorings of lines, odd ribbings, some circular, others straight. Is this evidence of earlier human occupation? As you look, you dig in with the eye of the archaeologist, combing the surface for fragmentary evidence of what may once have been here. Paintings usually have a flat surface and traffic, often quite easily, in the nature of illusion. There is nothing easily illusory here. Everything is a bit betwixt and between.

Yes, everything is ruined and posthumous here; everything represents some terrible, settled aftermath of the destruction of normality. This desolation on an epic, if not a theatrical, scale. And yet there are no people here to testify to what seems to have happened. There is no smeary blood letting of any kind. Apartment blocks lean into each other, as if for support in their tribulations. Smashed aerials and satellite dishes hang awry. The buildings are often so close together, so hugger mugger, that we can often barely see between them, and sometimes when we do try, we peer down into shafts of near-darkness. Things look fossilized, fused, almost buried in the canvas. And these battered and bruised fragments of buildings have to stand in for the complete absence of any evidence of human suffering.

Judah works in two colours only, white and black. Most often white. Any other colour, you feel, would not be right for what he is endeavouring to do. Colour, variegated colour, is often a mighty distraction. It draws us off in different, and often quite serendipitous, directions. It seems to be playing many different tunes simultaneously. It introduces thoughts of the decorative. It invites us to single out, and then to separate, one thing from another, to play off this against that. It encourages different kinds of playfulness and levity.

Judah wants none of this. He strives for a certain undistracted wholeness of vision, a sharp, unrelieved, singular focus. So white enshrouds everything. It is the colour of Pompeian dust. It is the colour of ghostliness. It is the colour of a shroud. Yes, this white is enshrouding everything which is unspeakable, and it feels so eerie and hushed and set apart from us.

The paintings are of two shapes, rectangular and circular. The rectangle suggests the customary idea of the landscape. When we look at a rectangle, we fall into the idea of landscape – such is our cultural conditioning. With the circle it is quite different. With the circle, the eye finds it more difficult to come to rest. It has to be pinioned in some way, and Judah has pinioned one of these circular paintings by creating a formation of buildings in the shape of the symbol of the cross. We still see the same remnants of human habitation here, but they are aligned, symbolically, on a north-south, east-west axis. The atmosphere of this circular painting is quite different from that of the others. It seems to occupy a different kind of space. It feels, because of its shape, more globally marooned, more rootless, more islanded, more symbolic than actual, more iconic than pictorial.

All these paintings begin in model-making – in Gerry Judah’s studio in north London you can see the models lined up, made from foam board, all beautifully detailed, one behind another, a whole series of what look like rather dreary Eastern European – or perhaps Middle Eastern - apartment blocks. But this work is not about model-making. Model-making is merely its point of departure. After the models have been attached to the canvas, Gerry Judah then begins to destroy them – on the day I visited, he suddenly showed me how, with his clenched fist.

Yes, this is only the beginning. Then comes the real work - of adding plaster, paint, rubble, glazes until, having passed through the influence of Tapies, Rauchenberg and others, we begin to move much closer to the idea of the re-invented painting. Yes, this is, finally, as much what the work is concerned with: issues of texture, light, painted surface. But let us not forget the overwhelming sense of menace.

Barry Fantoni: Public Eye, Private Eye Thomas Williams Fine Art, London W1 - The Independent

2009-05-05T10:54:00.000-07:00

Of a Saturday night, you can often catch him in the bar at the Chelsea Arts Club, swinging a tenor sax from side to side, blowing out his lungs. Today Barry Fantoni, veteran Private Eye cartoonist, is showing off half a century of paintings and drawings, large, medium and small – portraits of women, still lifes, landscapes, cartoons - in a high-toned, first-floor gallery overlooking Old Bond Street. There is no chronological arrangement about this show. You begin at the end, and end at the middle – which feels about right for this agreeably talented shapeshifter of a man. Some are on the walls, others are propped up on chairs. It all feels a bit sprawly and slightly raucously glass-clinking. The styles are all fairly casual mix’n’match too – it’s as if Fantoni has been moving from tailor to tailor in the past fifty-odd years, trying on things for style, finding out what suits the moment. Is it to be the replication of a Rubens today or a take on Mondrian? Well, how does it look out of doors?

In the 60s, Fantoni was part of the Pop Art scene, and here’s a painting of the Fab Four in 1963 to prove it – painted in that rather flattened, brash, commercial way that the pop artists made their own.

Sometimes Barry likes to sit back and contemplate the passing scene – there is a small series of bucolic looking Spanish roofs here, and another - one of the best paintings in the show – of a corner of Clapham Common and the Windmill pub, dominated by beautifully wispy trees. When he paints figures (usually women) in a room, he places them very carefully, slightly off centre, to give the tiniest edge of anxiety, and focuses our attention – in fact, gives exaggerated emphasis to - the seductive power of the eyes. Much of the show sees him responding to figures in the public eye, catching the mood of the times for the dailies – he had a spell as front-page cartoonist for The Times - keeping up with the relentless now, now, now of the present.

Here is Harold Macmillan sitting up in bed, rigid, looking like a startled puppet in desperate need of the absent puppeteer. Another drawing, of 1963, gently satirises that fierce, all-action queen of the ‘60s, the high-leather-booted Honor Blackman, sitting in front of a two-bar electric fire, wrapped in a shawl, reading a book called Acting for Late Starters, other books strewn carelessly about her feet – Yoga; How to Stay Young - while her husband, partially concealed from view, catches up with the ironing. The satire gets a bit fiercer when he turns his guns on a moustachioed Billy Butlin, king of the seaside holiday camp business - except that Fantoni has drawn him as a Nazi camp commander, with rolls of barbed wire and watchtowers at his back. Could it really have been as bad as that for all those holiday makers during works’ weeks?

And just around another corner, there’s a scene from the fag end of the ‘60s, when everyone had grown weary of the cynicism of old Labour politics. Yes, it’s Harold Wilson himself, on a Private Eye front cover, craftily bibulous, with a ‘sod the lot of you’ look in his pouchy eye, and a glass of tonic wine raised up high to toast us for our infinite patience over a decade of scheming and procrastinating.

Which is the real Fantoni? Where is his heart in all of this? You may well ask. It’s quite difficult to say. The really fine work is not located in any particular decade. There’s a lovely and slightly sombrely watchful self portrait from quite early on, and some quite tenderly meticulous early landscapes of London scenes, almost as small as pages from Constable’s sketch books. And a pleasing nostalgia-soaked scene of Brockwell Park Lido in the summer, teeming with skinny – that dates it – frolicking bodies. But Fantoni always wants to be off and away. There’s always another mountain to climb, always another riff to be blown or another fine suit to stride out in.

Hockney: Just Nature - The Independent, London 30 April 2009

2009-05-01T09:06:00.000-07:00

Now here’s a curious fact. If you want to really understand what David Hockney has been pouring his energies into these past several years, you need to visit a museum in a small, medieval town in Swabia. Why could this not have happened in England? The question hangs in the air, waiting for a collective response from the curators of England’s great cultural institutions.

It has to be said that Hockney seemed, for large tracts of time, to be off the boil during the '80s and '90s – think of those dreadfully garish, sub-Picasso abstracts, or the cringing, chocolatey paintings of his beloved dogs. There’s been a dramatic change in recent years though. A change of subject matter. And a change of location. The name Hockney no longer means the heat-struck langours of Southern California.

Hockney’s now back living in Yorkshire, his natal county, and he’s painting the East Yorkshire landscape en plein air just like those Impressionists used to do. He’s out at the crack of dawn, when the light’s at its best and the shadows at their longest, pootering along narrow, deserted, twisty country lanes in his old car. He’s living in the house in Bridlington which he once bought for his mother and sister, and he’s wrestling with his new theme with tremendous energy and gusto – especially for a man of 72. When you walk around this exhibition, which is occupying the entire two floors of this large museum in the little town of Swabisch Hall, you are astonished by how much work he’s painted over such a relatively short span of time. And it’s not only the works themselves, it is also the scale of these works – many of these paintings are multi-panelled. Some consist of six panels; the largest (which had an airing at the Royal Academy’s summer show two years ago) is made up of 50 – 50! – panels. For Hockney, painting a single canvas on this kind of scale is out of the question because once you’re up a ladder, you can’t get the same flexibility of handling. You’re always considering issues such as safety and balance. So – ever technologically astute - he makes a mock up of the finished multi-panelled painting on the computer screen, but only ever works on discrete bits of it. Then the whole thing gets assembled. The tragedy about the hanging of this particular work here - and it is in fact an ink-jet reproduction of the work we saw at The Royal Academy, and not the thing itself – is that it is hung at the bottom of a stairwell, which partially obscures it from view. (What also troubles us is slightly is the fact that it seems neither better nor worse in reproduction.)

Like the Impressionists also, Hockney wants to chart the changing of the seasons, and so we see several different views of the same triumvirate of great of trees or of the same rutty track, canopied like a chapel. Last Friday afternoon, he said how eager he was to get back to nature as quickly as possible because the next few days and weeks were crucial. ‘It’s action time,’ he said, with some evident frustration that he was stuck indoors in a smart grey suit. Then he went back to drawing on his IPhone – as he’s wont to do when faced by interminable questions from earnest German journalists.

But how good are these paintings? Has Hockney brought something distinctive to this hoary old subject? Yes and no. The paintings are at their best when seen from a considerable distance – say, about 40 feet away. Then you grasp the way in which he has dealt with space, and don’t get tangled up in too much detail. You see how much he is enjoying the sheer theatricality of nature, her tricksy habits. Close up, the brush work can look a bit globby and gloopy and laboured and clotted and crude. He is brilliant when he is being most rash with his colour contrasts, when he seems to be transforming the countryside into some tremendous set for the Metropolitan Opera, when he’s erring on the side of the Fauvishly fanciful. Some of his brashest and most successful paintings are of felled trees and tree stumps. ‘Totem Tree’, for example, looks like a stubby, indomitable sacred symbol. It’s painted in a glorious, full-frontally naïve manner, vividly anti-naturalistic, and not wholly unlike Van Gogh.

This curmudgeonly Yorkshireman is going to slosh on the paint till he drops.

The Turner Prize Shortlist - The Independent, 29 April 2009

2009-04-29T06:50:00.001-07:00

We have seen Enrico David’s work fairly recently outside Tate Britain and inside the Saatchi Gallery. At Tate, a gong fashioned to look like a chicken man, complete with a pretty stockinged foot for a base, just couldn’t wait to be smitten. His pieces posture and flaunt, fling themselves about exhibitionistically. They are loosely embedded in the tradition of commedia dell’arte, but they look crude and unsophisticated by comparison, too intent to hammer home tediously obvious points about gender politics. They are folksy – he is very fond of needlework and hand-stitching. They are also screamingly, if not jarringly, colourful in a way that rather makes you wince, but they lack any real delicacy or profundity. This man is keen to be applauded for being truly outrageous, and keen to make works that look swooningly pretty. This vamped-up, look-at-me-and-what-I’ve-done-sweetie manner palls after about five or six seconds of close – no need to get too close - examination. If David really wants to see how a great artist uses posture and colour, he should take a trip to the Kuniyoshi show at the Royal Academy.

Cambridge-born, multi-media artist Lucy Skaer recently gained some public attention for herself by secretly smuggling moth and butterfly pupae into London’s Central Criminal Court in the vain hope that they might hatch mid-session. What a futile and pointlessly attention-seeking exercise! In fact, the best of her work is much more interesting and deserving of attention than this bit of fatuous gimmickry might suggest. She bases a lot of what she does on found photographic images, as in a fine piece that was recently exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery called ‘Diagrams and Banners’. Here we stared at a curiously ghostly image of a dead man, with blood coursing down his face, and painted, fairly faintly and delicately, in red enamels. But this image – which seemed to be receding from us as we examine it - slowly melded with and merged into another image. The patterning of the face, as our eyes strayed down its length, turned into the patterning of a chinese bowl. So what began in a randomly chosen photographic source first of all changes into a painting, and then ended up as a kind of eerily shifting collage. It was work of real subtlety.

At least half of this shortlist – the half that isn’t fairly muted and quietly cerebral - is meant to razzle-dazzle us, to show us that contemporary art is all about hey! Whoa! And what is this! Roger Hiorns is certainly a spectacle man, an artist who believes in scooping us up bodily, and dumping us down somewhere other than where we would normally go. In ‘Seizure’, a recent Artangel project, he set about transforming a perfectly dreary modern flat at the Elephant and Castle, and turning it into a kind of glitzy, blinking and winking Aladdin’s Cave by coating all the walls in half a tonnage of blue copper sulphate crystals. It felt as if you were walking around the interior of a giant gemstone-encrusted cave – except that the walls and the doorframes were a bit too regular for a cave. Over at Tate Britain on another occasion, he played a slightly different alarming trick – a fire grate out in the street was suddenly seen to spout a jet of flame. The flames of Hades had risen to the surface! The only thing missing were the howls of the damned. So if art is about all-enveloping, in-your-face spectacle, and if the only truly thrilling and soul-stirring night of the year is Firework Night, Hiorns is your man. But is art really about nothing but no-holds-barred spectacle? Isn’t that really the role of popular entertainment?

Richard Wright, easily the oldest of the four contenders at the grand old age of 49, is the one truly oddball choice in this shortlist. In spite of the fact that he is the only artist to be represented by a gallery of international clout and reputation – Larry Gagosian – he is not at all a household name, and his face seems to be set entirely against all the noise and all the clamour of the pantingly youthful rest. Wright is a draughtsman who often turns up to do his work in situ. It’s not usually pre-conceived. He looks at a space – a large wall or a medium–size window embrasure, for example – and he sets to work, drawing and drawing with his hand, laboriously. And what exactly does he draw? It could be any of a great variety of things – baroque curlicues in a rhythmical formation, or a mixture of stripes or geometrical shapes overlaid with circles. He tries to impose a new rhythm upon any space where he works, to lead our eye differently, depending upon the nature of the drawn dance he’s proposing with a kind of shy, courteous delicacy. It’s all quite cerebral, and quite unemphatic - especially given the fact that the drawings often get over-painted after the exhibition is closed. So Wright is into evanescence, vanishing, ego suppression. How unusual! How un-Turner can you get?

Faces in the Crowd: the art of portraiture - The Independent, London

2009-04-25T01:33:00.001-07:00

What's in a face? This week the National Portrait Gallery in London announced its shortlist of three artists who will be in contention for this year’s annual BP Portrait Award. It contained a fairly familiar mix of subjects: an artist’s daughter, represented as a changeling by the English painter, Peter Monkman; an artist’s son, fleetingly caught between boyhood and manhood by Michael Gaskell in a manner which suggests that the painter has been looking long and hard at both Holbein and Botticelli; and a portrait of a friend, whose character looks intriguingly indefinable, by Italian painter Annalisa Avancini. The winners will be announced on 16 June, and the show will be on display throughout the summer.

The BP Award has been on the annual arts calendar for almost 20 years. It was set up in 1990 to encourage young painters to take figurative painting in general, and portraiture in particular, seriously as a medium at a moment when the more traditional disciplines seemed to be on the point of drowning beneath wave upon wave of new-media innovation. Once upon a time it was only for the young - you had to be under forty to enter. These days painters of any age can have a go. And they do. The prize is a fairly generous one. First prize was £10,000 when the award was established. Now it is £25,000, although that sum hasn’t budged for a decade.

The BP Award is highly popular with the general public, and increasingly so with artists. This year there were nearly 2,000 entries, which represents a ten per cent increase on last year. The reason for this popularity is a relatively simple one. The exhibition seems to prove that art, after all, can be about truth to our own experience of life. Generally speaking, the subject matter is familiar to all of us. These are the people that we know - or could easily know - and live with, and painted in a manner which strikes the viewer as companionable. There is no abstraction here. It is as if abstraction and whatever it may once have represented to the deluded few had never really existed at all, that it was just a tiny blip, a matter of laughable inconsequence, and that the world of painting has been set to rights, once and for all.

The popularity of the BP Portrait Award is indicative of a new interest in portraiture in general, which is itself stimulated by the number of competitions for portraiture, both painted and photographic, which now exist – flickr’s Portrait Classics Competition, for example; the annual exhibition by the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, and the ICCA competition for digital photos. The show of Gerhard Richter’s painted portraits, also on display at the National Portraits at the National Gallery and discussed more fully below, has been hugely popular.

Once upon a time portraiture was the exclusive preserve of those who had the means to commission such tributes - only the rich and the influential could be immortalized. Only their images would survive. Now it is open to all. We can all outlive ourselves. This is a portraiture without social boundaries.

The subject has been kicked into new life for a whole range of reasons, not the least of which is the ease with which the digital camera now captures images of us all and transfers them, instantaneously, to social networking sites. We are becoming increasingly accustomed to chronicling and snooping on every movement of our lives, and this interest most often manifests itself in portraits of each other at play. We simply can’t get enough of looking at ourselves and each other, drunk or sober, at any hour of the day or night, for better of for worse.

This kind of art, colourful and embraceable, has something to do with the democratic impulse, the wish to share, readily and freely, to incline us to agree that one person is the equal of another. There is no singling out of privileged groups here, no sense that we do not belong to the world that we are looking at, that it is somehow judging us or admonishing us, making us feel slightly small and cowed in its presence. A sign painter grins back at us, levellingly confident as any judge pounding his gavel from the bench.

All this makes us feel cheerful, as if we are all at the same party. It also provokes a slight feeling of unease, that we may after all be missing something, that life may after all be a bit more than this. Yes, something is not quite as it should be – in spite of the fact that we are all getting an equal share of the attention. There is, somewhere here, we often feel, as we look at all these paintings crammed together in these galleries (yes, there is always a feeling that as much has been crammed in as possible, and that we are strolling – or perhaps elbowing – our way through a kind of cheery, noisy, small-town market square rather than an exhibition with all those slightly old-fashioned rules of silence and set-apartness) an underlying wish on the part of the National Portrait Gallery not to make human experience seem too difficult, too painful, too obtuse, too hard to grasp, too complicated, too challenging.

And yet you could say that life is difficult, hard to grasp, painful and obtuse, and that work of this kind is, finally not only too easy on the eye, but also a way of not quite telling the entire truth about the deeper truths of what we are.

If this is the case, it would be consistent with much of the entire history of portraiture, which has been, from its very inception, the art of telling lies palatably.

Portraiture has been with us for at least five thousand years – the Egyptians excelled at it, as did the Romans. And there is nothing which tells porkies about the human condition quite so effectively as portraiture. This has always been the case. Human beings - and especially those human beings who rule over others - cannot bear too much reality. Reality is too imperfect, too messy, too much inclined towards ugliness, disproportion and disorder to be left to its own devices. Reality is, in short, staunchly asymmetrical when we crave the reassurance of symmetry.

Human beings in positions of influence do not want to confront these truths. If reality is like that, it needs to be adjusted. They want to be shown to be other than what they are. And the artisans who are responsible for creating these portraits are in the pay of those who commission them. A Pharaoh and a Pope have much in common in this respect. The Great one holds the purse strings. He is the puppet master, and the artisan a mere puppet in his hands. The Great One wants to continue to be seen to be great in the hereafter. It is he, finally, who is responsible for the manipulation of the image.

This was the case with the tomb sculptures of the Egyptians and the Romans. Those who were alive wanted, most of all, to align themselves with an immaterial world which would never pass away. And so their own images were not only juxtaposed with images of gods and other fabulous beings. They were also exalted and beautified in their turn, transformed into simulacra of themselves which looked much more serene and exalted than their mere counterparts in life.

The same habits continued down the centuries. Think of the Christian God and his virgin mother, and how yieldingly beautiful they look in the paintings of Raphael, how much they outstrip mere earthly perfections. All the more terrible then when this gloriously comely male image of the beautiful is harassed and scourged and crucified. We feel almost as much for the violation of a beautiful model as we do for the killing of a god. Perhaps even a little more. Titian strains to immortalise his human sitters too, to put them on a level with the pagan gods,physically, mentally, giving them a dash and a sense of indomitability. Another variant on the same theme occurred a little later, during the second decade of the seventeenth century, when painters from the Netherlands such as Van Dyck memorialised the doomed court of Charles I. Van Dycks’s portraits were intended to flatter their subjects into believing in their own greatness and courtly splendour.

To every rule there is also a cussed exception. Flattering one’s sitters was something which didn’t come naturally to Goya at the beginning of the nineteenth century – even when they were the royalty of Spain, and you happened to be in their pay as official court painter. With Jean Dominique Ingres, when he painted Napoleon in his study, ever wise, ever watchful, ever awake, we return to the same tradition of flattery. Lies, all lies, you might say.

And, as with the Egyptians, the living were shown alongside objects which enhanced their importance - symbols of earthly power, for example – or wore clothes whose splendour resonated with the awe-struck onlooker, so sad in his fustian. In short, every possible means was used to steer the viewer away from reflecting upon the awkward fact that beneath all this visual fanfare, there is that which is common to all of us - mere tremulous flesh and bone.

This is why when Louis Daguerre invented the daguerreotype in the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, some painters began to heave a sigh of relief, which was almost inaudible at first. Here was another medium, photography, which could do reality’s dirty work for them. Painting was now free to do as it pleased – if it so chose. One small group of revolutionaires – that group which came to be known as the Impressionists, for example – tried to paint light. What an impossible dream that was! Fortunately for them, light proved to be very pretty, and their works highly collectible. The revolutionaries became, in time, almost as popular as bread. Revolution had quickly joined hands with commerce.

So, in the aftermath of the development of photography, portraiture of the kind to which we were so long accustomed almost died away altogether for many of the painters whose work we most value. And it is simply not a medium with which we much associate the art of the twentieth century, except somewhat tangentially. Or, if artists did resort to it at all, it often seemed to be almost unrecognizably inhuman, to strain credibility. Why?

The painters of the twentieth century suffered the burden of living through times which saw more death and suffering than ever before. What is more, thanks to the fact that people could move about much more freely, and that, thanks to the marvels of telegraphy, information passed from place to place with a lightning swiftness, this suffering was known about and felt on the pulses with a terrible immediacy. Think of how Picasso responded to the terrible bombing of Guernica, for example. It was as if the speed with which the facts became known had to be matched by the speed with which he worked, night after sleepless night, at his studio in the Rue des Augustins. So reality, for many artists, became a terrible, fractured thing, almost unbearable – godless, pitiless, without redemption - and portraiture itself a terrible, twisted, pain-wracked thing. And it is this sense of terrible, almost unbudgeable oppression that enters into the portraiture – when the painters choose to paint portraits at all. Think of the portraits of Picasso or Bacon or Kossoff or Auerbach. We stare at almost unrecognisable human beings. It is as if the face has been pulverised and re-made in the tortured image of something so bleak that it is barely recognizable as a human face at all.

Yes, the face. Everything tends to pivot about the face in portraiture. It is the place towards which the eye naturally navigates in order to understand the full nature of what it is to be human. When we see the face, and the eye at the centre of that face, and all that reassuring symmetry, we breathe a quiet sigh of contentment. We are home at last. Yes, the face is the pole star by which our heart and our intellect naturally steer. Which is why we throw up our hands in horror when we see Picasso’s faces of his wives and lovers. They are often ravaged, twisted things, horribly wrenched awry, like a mouthful of well masticated gum. And yet all this distortion, those great masters would argue, was necessary because to do otherwise would be to deny the destructive truth of humans on the world, to soften, to sentimentalise the world in which they lived.

Is this still the case? Some would disagree. Portraiture is back again, they would argue. The enthusiastic response, year on year, to the BP Portrait Awards, is one proof of that fact. That pall of bleakness has rolled away. Or perhaps we have learnt how to live our numbed, cynical, hedonistic lives within its omnipresence. What we also notice though – at the annual BP exhibitions and elsewhere - is that painting has made accommodations with the art of photography in different ways, and that this has fundamentally changed the way in which painters paint portraits.

Without photography, for example, the silly taste for hyper-realism in painting would not have happened. This is painting trying to compete with photography, an attitude which seems to proclaim: I too can be as minutely particular as you. I too can dissect every square centimeter of what you have photographed with such painstaking accuracy and replicate it on canvas. Can there be any point to such nonsense? And then there is the unassuageable appetite for casualness - casual chat, casual pose, casual sex - which is everywhere. The documentary art of photography catches life on the wing. Everything is provisional, unfinished, ragged – a little like unedited reality itself. Painters have envied this instantaneous ability to capture unmediated reality, and they have sought to do likewise.

One of the most fascinating experimentalists in portraiture of recent years has been Gerhard Richter, whose painted portraits are currently showing at the National Portrait Gallery too. This is a grainy, fleeting vision of life on the wing as never before. It combines two qualites which feel as though they could never really be in combination – an extraordinary sense of the ephemeral and the random, together with something which is brooding, relentlessly cerebral and analytical.

What is most stimulating about Richter’s extraordinarily painstaking painted portraits – which look as if they had their beginnings in grainy, poor quality photographs – is the way in which they remind us of the fact that those earlier, time-honored traditions of idealized portraiture were extraordinarily rigid, and that this need not have been the case at all. They were rigid because of the rigidities of the conventions to which they were faithful. Richter’s images are grainy, grey, fleeting and blurry - and yet, paradoxically, they feel full of content. But that content is all about what they are not. That content seems to be in conversation with the sitters of many of those portraits of earlier centuries, and this is what it seems to be saying: the very fact that you may have wanted to be depicted face on in a very particular way, in those expensive clothes that you chose to wear, surrounded by those comfortable ancestral objects by which you chose to surround yourself, has nothing whatsoever to do with truth telling, and everything to do with the way you chose to present yourself in that society where you had been striving, life-long, to make your mark and where, yes, you did indeed make your mark, though not quite to the extent that you may have wished.

Some onlookers, slightly cowed and impressed, have taken it for the unvarnished truth about yourself, but they were mistaken. They could not see the wood for the tress. In fact, that image was nothing but a social construct, wasn’t it, made for a very particular purpose, which was to flatter yourself? Now go away and bear this in mind.

So when we next read that portraiture puts us in touch with the ‘perenially human’ or some such tosh, what we need to ask ourselves is this: to what extent is this the old, familiar game of self-flattery, played, as ever, to keep the wolf from the door?

Galileo: Images of the Universe from Antiquity to the Telescope Palazzo Strozzi, Florence - The Independent

2009-04-16T09:18:00.000-07:00

It is four hundred years since the Pisan-born Galileo Galileo found an object being sold as a toy in Venice which rather intrigued him. It consisted of a long tube with two magnifying lenses, one at either end. The possibilities which Galileo saw in this device led to the development of the telescope, and to accurate sky-gazing for the very first time – and, finally, to his condemnation by the Catholic Church for heresy, and house arrest until the end of his life.

Galileo’s own story is told in the final two galleries of this exhibition, which is being displayed in one of those ferociously indomitable-feeling Florentine palazzi. The rest of the show tells the story of the relationship between man and the heavens, from antiquity onwards. It is a vast exercise in brilliant, but slightly chilly and brain-numbing, no-holds-barred pedagogy, from first to last. There is always another wall text to read, and always another theme to wrestle with. Every room is crammed to the gills with objects: maps, books, cuneiform tablets, paintings, scientific instruments, star charts, astrolabes, orreries. The real rubs shoulders with the virtual. There are about two hundred and fifty objects here in all, but you wouldn’t know that from the arcane system used to number each one of them – which, incidentally, doesn’t seem to match the numbering system of the catalogue. Projections of the sky are projected onto ceilings. In spite of the fact that this is a sixteenth-century building, the show itself is contained – more constrained than contained - within a labyrinthine series of windowless, relatively low-lit and low-ceilinged rooms. Floors and walls are a glittery black. Everything feels pent and cornered and thrust forward, a-throb with scientific significance – like an unopened can of beans above a naked flame. The effect is dazzling - but also rather strangulatory. In spite of the fact that the spaces of the buildings itself have great processional possibilities – that was demonstrated quite recently in a show here devoted to objects from the T’ang Dynasty –here there is no sense of pacing at all, and when we do finally come across Galileo and evidence of his astonishing achievements in those final rooms, it comes as something of a shock – like suddenly meeting a human being on a corner in the middle of the night. We hadn’t known it was about to happen. And then, all of a sudden the exhibition ends, and you feel you have hit a brick wall, and are being kicked out into the street.

So, yes, Galileo himself is what, finally, sticks to us, and the objects associated with him, and his story, all of which are of enduring fascination – how he got the Medicis on his side, and then was finally forced to foreswear everything that he had ever done at the hands of the church. Here is the letter which describes his discovery of spots on the sun’s surface, and here is his objective lens, set within a wonderfully fussy frame of ivory, gilded brass and ebony. There is a touching element of bathos about this particular exhibit – the lens itself was dropped during Galileo’s own lifetime so, though stunning enough, you can see that it is in bits.

And yet, and yet, within a little over one hundred years, he was virtually a secular saint. A genius, when he falls, must rise again, some time. In 1737 his remains were exhumed, and his body moved to a monumental sepulchre in the Florentine church of Santa Croce. And his finger was placed inside a small glass reliquary. We can see that finger here, long, pointing upwards, leaning (like the tower of his natal place) and, understandably enough, somewhat shrunken. And then there is the telescope he used, beautifully embellished, and somewhat resembling a stout walking stick, and his letters and small, fussy, feverish calculations too, all in a quite dense brown ink. Undeniable traces of the real man. And then, on the wall, the text of what he said when he was finally forced, in 1633, to turn his back on himself, and everything that he had achieved in the name of knowledge, science and human understanding.

What could he have been thinking to himself when he read those words out loud to those stern-faced men who were so firmly faced away from the future?

New Poetry of 2009 - The Tablet

2009-04-16T08:02:00.000-07:00

The 20^th century gave us such a taste for lyric verse – poems on a relatively small scale that generally celebrated the exquisite emotions of the speaker - that it seems quite hard to remember that the Victorians excelled in story telling through poetry. Is story telling coming back into fashion amongst poets? Well, one fine collection of the new year is certainly firmly rooted in that tradition.

In Darwin – a Life in Poems (Chatto & Windus, £12.99), Ruth Padel has written what amounts to a condensed biography of the great scientist whose direct descendant she happens to be. The idea of a biography conjures up a terrible welter of often tediously superfluous detail. This is not the case with this book. It consists of a series of often quite short poems which focus upon key moments in the life of Darwin - call them small-scale epiphanies of self-discovery if you like. In spite of the fact that there are relatively few words in this book, it feels throughout much fuller than that because it seems to possess the emotional weight - and perhaps even the emotional resonance and the quite ponderous atmosphere - of a substantial piece of substantial Victorian fiction. A double-decker at the very least. Here is Darwin, warts and all, perpetually a prey to anxiety about his religious doubts, a situation whch was made all worse by the devoutness of his wife. This is a rich and very readable book.

When we think of the poetry of Northern Ireland which came to maturity during the decades of The Troubles, our mind immediately alights upon the name - and the fame - of Seamus Heaney. In fact, there is a near exact contemporary of Heaney’s who is quite his equal in talent and emotional and intellectual reach, and that is Derek Mahon. Mahon is, in the words of the late Michael Donaghy, the master of ‘the singing line’. He is an exquisite wordsmith whose poetry often seems inexhaustible. In his latest collection, Life on Earth (Gallery Press, 11.95 euros), the range of subject matter is as ever extraordinarily wide-ranging – from a poem which conjures up the atmosphere of Goa, to a meditation upon the life of his late friend, the novelist Brian Moore. The finest poem in the book is a beautifully crafted meditation upon insomnia, and it conjures up those lonely hours when the mind habitually roams and preys upon itself.

Sometimes it is appropriate to celebrate the staying power of a poet. Peter Porter, born in Australia, but for many decades resident in London, has been writing and publishing substantial collections of poetry for more than half a century, and his new book, Better Than God (Picador, £8.99), is his best in a decade. Porter writes intimately, but he is also breezily connected to the foibles and the passing fashions of the world. By turns satirist and elegist, he writes with a worldly crispness and deftness, and a delight in the small-scale absurdities of life.

Quite dramatically different in mood and manner is the poetry of Luxembourg’s Anise Koltz, whose first full collection to published in the United Kingdom – At the Edge of Night (Arc Publications, £9.99)- gives us the French text side by side with an English translation by Anne-Marie Glasheen. These are small, intense, spiky and emotionally vertiginous poems, full of fear, nausea and acute apprehension, in which the speaking voice of the poet often seems helpless in the face of both personal experience – some of the harshest words in the book are reserved for her own mother – and human wickedness. They are acidic, troubling and extraordinarily memorable.

David Constantine sculls us towards more visionary waters in Nine Fathom Deep (Bloodaxe, £8.95). Constantine is a poet who has always dreamt wayward dreams in his poetry – one of the best of his earlier books was a full-length recounting in verse of the tale of Caspar Hauser, that boy who was kept shackled like a beast for many years, and then appeared, all of a sudden, in a small German town, beating on the door of a house with his forehead. Oddities. Odd human behaviour. Strange, quasi-religious moments in which we seem to be winged, snatched beyond the realm of the day-to-day. This is Constantine’s poetic terrain.

Matt Stokes at 176 Gallery, London - The Independent

2009-04-15T23:37:00.000-07:00

Deconsecrated churches can be good places in which to stage exhibitions. That lingering odour of sanctity can often help a show along, give it a bit of spiritual uplift – even when it doesn’t deserve it, or when the very fact of that happening may seem a bit odd.

In this case, Geordie artist Matt Stokes, who has been doing a residency here, has to deal with a rather severe, early nineteenth-century, neo-classical Methodist chapel from which practically all the fittings have been stripped. Most Methodist chapels have always been unadorned places. This one feels more unadorned than most.

Stokes, like many other artists these days, is a multi-disciplinary fellow. He makes, but he also curates, organizes and orchestrates. He’s keen on getting communities to think about their heritage. He’s especially keen on looking at how music plays a part in the development of communities. He loves delving into archives and pulling out odd bits and pieces from the past that might help us to make sense of the present. Does this make him sound a bit like a Northern version of Jeremy Deller? Well, that’s exactly what he is. In part.

For this show, he has done lots of different things throughout the building, downstairs and up. There are two films for a start. One of them, The Gainsborough Packet, is showing in what would once have been the nave. The other one is in the room directly behind the nave, back to back with the first film. This second film makes a tremendous racket because it’s about the punk phenomenon in Austin, Texas. In fact, it almost blows you off your feet when you walk in the door and see the lead singer bent over and screaming at the lead guitarist - also bent over in some terrible, groin-grinding posture - for the sheer joy of being alive.

Stokes has also curated a selection of works, mainly photographic, from a collection of which this institution is the custodian. And, last but scarcely least, he is also transforming a large hall at the back of the building into a kind of all-purpose venue where music can be made, from baroque orchestras to your local punk band. (Punk had its beginnings in this bit of North London.) He has even made a table, benches and some banners for this room. Stokes is clearly a useful man to have around.

But he mainly stands or falls by a film called The Gainsborough Packet that is showing in the nave because this commission is brand new, and it has evidently cost a considerable amount of public money to make possible. The question which we need to ask ourselves is this: was it worth all that cash? Not really. The film is a small snippet – just 8.49 minutes of pure, early-nineteenth-century costume drama. Set around the time that this chapel was built, it’s about a Newcastle man called John Burdikins who once wrote a letter to a friend called Pybus, in 1828. Stokes found it when he was moseying through the archives.

The film consists of scenes which show us the marvelous exploits which Burdikins describes in his letter – he rescues a child from drowning; he puts out a fire on board ship. He’s a bit of an all-round marvel. Or perhaps he’s just a bit of a boaster. The tale of these exploits is sung by the young and handsome actor who plays the part of Burdikins – the film is one long folk song, with moving pictures. It’s a rousing folk song of the kind that might have been sung in those parts back then. It could even have been sung down in North London too, with equal conviction, because Cecil Sharp House in Camden is home to the English Folk Dance and Song Society. You didn’t know that? Nor did I until I read the helpful notes accompanying the exhibition.

Now this short film looks very glamorous - lots of money has been spent tricking out actors and locations to make the thing look as authentically of its time as possible. But, aside from the rousing song – which gets to be a bit repetitive the longer it is sung – what genuine tension and genuine interest is there in this little snippet of a filmed tale? Precious little. Is this tiny offering a feature film yearning to be born? Well, sadly, it’s not much else.

Palladio at the Royal Academy - The Independent, London

2009-04-13T23:49:00.000-07:00

Any visitor to London’s Royal Academy arrives charged with expectations that he will see shows which combine intellectual merit with visual panache. There have been many past triumphs, from the great show devoted to the arts of Africa, to the more recent survey of Western portraiture in collaboration with the Grand Palais in Paris.

Regrettably, this story of the life and work of the great Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio(1508-1580), whose villas, churches and other buildings we can see in Venice, Vicenza and the Veneto region, is a disappointment by comparison. In fact, it is a bit of a sad mess.

Things don’t augur well from the outset. Stand outside in the courtyard and you will see, to the left and the right of the entrance, two not very large, limp banners announcing the show’s opening, greatly outshone by the announcement for the Byzantium exhibition, which opened last year. Why so small? Why so limp? It can’t be today’s unremitting drizzle alone.

Now it has to be said that any exhibition which tries to present the story of the triumphs of an architect is up against it from the start. Why? Because, unlike paintings and sculptures, buildings cannot be readily transported from Vicenza to London. So you are left with all the, albeit fascinating, ancillary stuff. Who he knew and worked with – which means portraits of his famous contemporaries, which are usually interesting from a documentary point of view, but are not necessarily great works in their own right. Even the portrait of Palladio himself looks far better in reproduction than in this gallery. What else? Well, there are the things that proved he was generally hard at work – account books; bits of hewn stone; tools of the trade. There are also, lining almost every wall, scores of his own architectural drawings, some of elevations, some of facades, some of details of the antique buildings that he was seeing and, as he drew them, analysing. And then there are the architectural models, of churches and villas, for example. Some of them yawn open, like boxes, so that you can see into their interiors. There are many of these. In fact, there are too many, and in the second of the exhibition’s four galleries, the jamming together of architectural models makes it feel a bit like a lumber room. They also turn up again when you thought you had done with them, and had moved on to some other part of the show. It’s a bit like Piccadilly Circus in about 1911 or so, when they were just changing over from horse-drawn to motorised omnibuses. Now architectural models are marvellous things, but they do feel relentlessly low-tech these days. We know we can’t transport buildings by pantechnicon. But could not someone have produced at least one virtual tour of one of those great buildings to help us to feel our way around at least one of those extraordinary interiors?

But the greatest failure of all is a failure of design. There is no natural sweep and flow to this show – with the exception of the first gallery, which feels like an impressive beginning. After that the show flounders around, visually and thematically. The second gallery feels too full, the third too empty. Many of the drawings are mounted onto panels of grey wood which seem to lean against the walls, so that we see the original décor in messy combination with bits of temporary installation. In the third gallery we have pretty, Palladio-esque(ish) stencilling effects on the walls as visual background music. So why didn’t we have something similar in the second gallery rather than the bald clash of grey painted wood against the original red? Many of the wall captions are too stingily small, and they are often printed white against grey, which makes them almost illegible. Good job they were too small to read in the first place!

In short, the entire, over-ambitious enterprise feels badly under-funded, poorly thought through, and fairly sloppily executed. Palladio, that scrupulous genius, wouldn’t haven’t enjoyed this tribute.

Sickert in Venice, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London - The Independent

2009-04-10T12:59:00.000-07:00

Walter Sickert was already thirty-five years old when, in 1895, he painted the first of the many pictures of Venetian scenes that you can see in this exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. Although long resident in the capital, he’d spent much of his life outside England – in Paris, for example, where he had struck up a close friendship with the irascible Edgar Degas. The greatest influence upon his young life to date had been that of James McNeill Whistler, the American expatriate who had demonstrated to his young disciple, between bouts of watching him sweep out the studio, that anything, absolutely anything, could serve as a subject matter for a painting. There was no such thing as high or low. Everything was much of a muchness. Everything could be reduced to the pure transcription of sensation by the alchemy of the brush. Sickert, with his master’s words ringing in his ears, had already begun to develop a fascination for the low life of London, all those beery men and blowsy women who hung about on street corners or who rolled out of pubs in full, beery cry.
But by 1895 Sickert was on the move again, and this time it was to Venice, and he would go there again and again over the next several years, as this exhibition makes clear to us. In part, he was escaping the strangulating confines of an unhappy marriage, and in part he was in pursuit of new things to paint, and new ways to paint them. For Sickert, 1895 had been an important year. During that year he had seen an exhibition of Claude Monet’s great cycle of paintings of the façade of Rouen cathedral, each one painted at a slightly different time of the day, each one washed by a slightly different light. Sickert had been mightily impressed by what he saw, and when he arrived in Venice, he decided to do something similar there. He chose various spots that he knew would give him selling opportunities – as ever, he needed to make some money. What better place to position himself than directly in front of the facade of San Marco Cathedral, at the dead centre of St Mark’s Square? Could there be a more famous or more photogenic a spot than this? Wouldn’t the customers cone running? What is most surprising about the series of paintings we can see at Dulwich is both how like and how unlike Monet they are. The two artists undeniably share an obsessive interest in painting the same building, from the same angle of view, over and over again. But a Sickert feels quite unlike a Monet. There is an airiness and a lightness in a Monet that a Sickert never seems to possess. Sickert’s San Marco is leadenly, massily pinioned to the insecure earth on which is it is built – and this is in spite of the fact that Sickert is clearly striving to make the building look and feel fantastically airy, almost as if, as with Monet, he is seeking to demonstrate that it was light from which it had been conjured in the first place. What Sickert does in these paintings is to create a facsimile of a cathedral which looks like a great theatre set, something manufactured from glue and balsa wood, and marvellously artificially lit, front, sides and back. But wholly improbable as a thing that might actually be seen. The show divides neatly into two halves. The first has to do with representing the buildings and the sights of Venice, many of which will be known to us from the work of other artists. Very few of these are memorably quirky – of those that are, look out for a marvellous, tiny painting of window-lit apartments in the Venetian Ghetto. This one stands out head and shoulders above all the rest.

The second half of the show is more characteristically Sickertian, and it shows us an artist who is gradually transforming himself into the painter who, during the later part of the first decade of the twentieth century, will paint all those chilling, low-toned studies which we now know collectively as the Camden Town Murders series, and whose gruesome painterly mood once caused the crime novelist Patricia Cornwell to decide, somewhat fantastically, that Sickert himself had been the perpetrator of those terrible crimes. The second half of the show has to do with people. Sickert, as in London, was drawn to the low life of Venice - the prostitutes, the hopelessly emaciated old woman, the bar tender. The most successful of these paintings shows Sickert painting women, in pairs, in small rooms. These spaces are so simply, and so sparely furnished, with a bed and little else. Two women sit side by side on a sofa, leaning into each other. Or a woman leans over the end, teetering terribly, almost falling into bottomless space. Many of these women seem to wear black, tasseled shawls, which gives just a delicate hint of vampirism to the scene. Or a single woman lies back on a bed, staring appealingly back at us, looking out for some attention. The colours are low-toned duns, bruised blues, and blacks. Sometimes we have to peer hard just to see what there is to be seen, to differentiate figure from ground. Sickert wants it like that, we feel. He wants these scenes to be difficult to scrutinize. It adds to their creepy mystery. It makes us feel uneasy in their presence, as if we perhaps shouldn’t have happened upon them in the first place. Wasn’t the door locked after all? Perhaps not. Oh dear. There is a considerable erotic charge to some of these paintings but, as yet, the element which injects such horror into those very nasty paintings of the future has not yet appeared on the stage. Man, surly, taciturn, menacingly hob-nailed booted, still stands on the wrong side of the boudoir door. At least he does for now.

Dressed To Kill, Tower of London Independent, London 8 April, 2009

2009-04-09T03:28:00.000-07:00

Even before you reach the top of the wooden staircase which mounts up and up and up, ho hum, the outside of William the Conqueror’s White Tower, the structure by which the Tower of London is most readily identified, you begin to hear more than a bit of hullabaloo. Then, when you push through the swing doors, it hits you full in the face. This is the All-Action-Hero Henry VIII show – military man, sporting all-rounder, enduring icon of then and now! Sounds a bit over the top? You bet! In barrow loads
   The first glimpse of him you get, he is sitting astride a white charger, rearing over you, in top-to-toe dress armour, pent inside a huge glass display case set against a light box which flashes white, then blue, then white again. Curious, the horses in this show. They are all white, like strange, ice-stiffened soft toys. The presentation brings together several beguiling elements of our current civilization: a Selfridges windows display in those oozy, child-friendly days before Christmas; a CNN news flash; and the slinky, steamy glitter of the catwalk.
   Next door to Henry on horseback, there’s a bit of filmic virtual reality - huge men in mortal combat, bigger, and much more manly men, than you could ever hope to be. And to help the deliriously excitable atmosphere along, there are tremendous noises coming from everywhere – the rake and clash of sword on sword, the earthquake-like trembling of horses’ hooves. And then, of course, to top it all, there is the customary racket of school kids when they mooch around in packs, munching and jawing, pounding the bare boards of this ancient hall, which used to display part of the Royal Armoury Museum, now displaced, at a gallop, to Leeds.
   He spent so much money on warfare, this man – up to the equivalent of £1 billion in 2009 terms. Often not too well spent either. How many gains did he make for all that campaigning overseas. Well, there was, er, wasn’t there? But the armour, the swords, the jousting poles, these divine arquebusues, and all this gorgeous canonry! No, this man evidently wasn’t short of a Real Tennis box, as you can see if you examine the armour, even cursorily.
   Yes, it has to be said that all this money and all this bought in, European expertise helped him to amass some marvellous playthings, and many of them of we won’t have seen before because they are from museums overseas. What is more, we quickly begin to learn all the arcane, toothsome terminology of armoury, and so many of these words are so delicious to roll around the tongue: the nine-plate ‘crinet’ which would have protected the horse’s neck, the vambraces, the crossed ragged staves, the parade armet…
   But the problem with this show is that it’s too distortingly narrow in its focus. In trying to turn Henry into no-holds-barred action man, it loses sight altogether of most other aspects of his life and his reign. Religion? Forget it. Wife problems? What were their names? By making him larger than life, you turn him into s grotesque, small-scale caricature of his complicated self. The film on show at the end tells it all: it’s just a messy bringing together of contemporary images, clips from feature films, and other bits and pieces, to the ridiculous accompaniment of a bit of Gary Glitterish glam-rock noise. Who cares where truth ends and fantasy begins?
   Still, by the end – and the show goes on for two and a bit floors – I am thirsting to own something of my own, so when I spot the full-size foot combat armour down in the shop, a snip at a mere £4,209, I get into conversation with the sales assistant. No, she doesn’t work here, not exactly, she’s in marketing, she tells me, trying to distance herself from the mugs she’s busy with, but as far as she knows, they have sold a few sets. For example, just a few years back, there was that man who wanted two for his restaurant in Italy.
   So I ask the lanky lad on the till. Not since I’ve been here, he says. Something to do with transportation difficulties probably, he guesses. I put in a call to the wife all the same: muzzle the Bedlington, dear; enlarge the door frame.

The Key Is To Be Bold - The Independent, 1 April 2009

2009-04-04T03:00:00.000-07:00

Is this a good time to buy art? Of course it is! When money looks dodgy, what better way to secure your future than by investing in an unbudgeable object such as a painting or a sculpture? But if you don’t have a lot of money, don’t necessarily go for the more obvious things such as large-format oil paintings. Start by looking at something less fashionable – watercolour paintings, etchings, woodcuts, linocuts and ceramics, for example, are all good investments.

Try a place such as the Bankside Gallery, which is about 50 metres from Tate Modern, facing the river. It’s a marvellous place to rummage – works are usually stacked up the walls. Here are the names of a couple of artists who were selling excellent work there relatively recently: Royal Academician Peter Freeth, for example, who has a marvellous, haunting way with images of dogs, or the printmaker Anthony Dyson. Dyson makes wonderful homages to the Renaissance masters, beautiful, meticulous prints at very affordable prices – a print by him, framed, could cost you as little as £75.

A lot of the artists who exhibit at Bankside are also members of the Royal Society of Painters Printmakers or the Royal Watercolour Society, which sound a bit nose-thumbingly posh, but is often a guarantee of real quality. Check out their websites. Another way in is to go to poke around in one of the more enterprising younger galleries such as the Rokeby Gallery on Store Street. The Rokeby operates an excellent scheme in conjunction with the Arts council which enables you to get a modest loan to help you start your own art collection. There are some excellent younger artists amongst the Rokeby stable whose work will only grow in value in the coming years – look at the paintings by Sam Dargan or Simon Keenleyside, for example. In Dargan’s last show, he had a lot of very small paintings. Small is not necessarily always beautiful but, given the fact that many artists price their works by size, it is a way in to collecting first-rate names for a relatively modest sum of money.

Even the bigger galleries often display a range of prints. Check out Flowers East on the Kingsland Road, which usually has a huge range of prints on offer at good prices. Flowers’ stable of artists includes some very well known names - Maggi Hambling, for example – and it is worth remembering that Hambling’s works are still relatively modest in price. And they can only increase. A few weeks ago, Flowers was selling a work by her called ‘Sexy 2008’ (it was a rather lovely flower painting, of course) for £1,500 plus vat. Hambling currently has a big show at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool of her portraits of the late George Melly, so she is very much in the public eye.

Another artist from the Flowers stable who can only increase in value is the sculptor Glenys Barton, who makes haunting, seductive, highly finished portrait heads and entire bodies which always manage to possess an extraordinarily ghostly aura. A few weeks ago you could buy a sculpture by her for £2,500.

The key to all this is: be bold. Ask to see the stock. If there is an oil on the walls which is way beyond reach, but which has huge appeal for you, ask what else that same artist may have done. What about the working drawings? Are they for sale? If it’s a sculpture, what happened to the maquette? Be cheeky. You may well turn up something interesting. And as for ceramics, it is almost always possible to pick up a bargain in this area because the foolish rigidities of the art market mean that the medium of ceramics is still regarded as slightly less important than works made from other materials.

So go to Barrett Marsden in Clerkenwell, a gallery which specialises in glass and ceramics. Harrass them to turn out the cupboards. If Henrietta seem awfully snooty when you walk in, laugh at her to create a better atmosphere.

John Constable the Portraitist - National Portrait Gallery, London - The Independent, 31 March 2009

2009-03-31T06:07:00.000-07:00

Can an art critic necessarily dance the tango? Can someone be good at everything? In the case of the Suffolk-born painter John Constable, we approach this show of his portraits with our minds already made up. We know that, like J M W Turner, who came just after him, Constable was no good at people and that he was good – in fact, he was amongst the best - at landscape. In fact, his brilliant skills as a landscape painter – they are often as much moody sketches as paintings - helped to raise the genre to new heights of acceptability. And desirability.

So when we walk around this fairly modest show at the National Portrait Gallery – there are about fifty things to see in all, from the most hasty and impromptu pencil sketch of a soldier casually playing a guitar in front of an admiring female onlooker, to fully worked up, fully made-for-the occasion oils (the occasion was most likely to have been one of those ever pressing bills) of worthy burghers and burgheresses - we know that we are going to come away feeling just a bit disappointed.

Nevertheless, let us look on the bright side. What is there to be praised about this show? Well, it is firmly rooted in the artist’s own biography, as shows of portraits often tend to be, and it tells its story affectingly and entertainingly thanks to a welter of well written captions.

Were you aware that Constable was a delightful writer of English prose? You will be reminded of that fact as you read the various extracts from his notebooks and letters which keep popping up in these captions. Here, for example, is his comment upon an unsaleable etching that was based upon a portrait (executed by himself, and displayed here) of a senior member of the teaching profession called the Revd Dr John Wingfield: ‘No one will buy a schoolmaster. Who would buy the keeper of a treadmill, or a turnkey of Newgate, who has been in either place?’

And then there is the affecting story of John’s often difficult life – his parents’ extreme reluctance to support his wish to be a landscape painter; his long courtship of Maria Bicknell (due to prolonged opposition from the in-laws-to-be), which finally ended, defiantly, and after seven long years, in marriage, in 1816. And then those few brief years of love, which terminated in his wife’s death from tuberculosis, and a heart-rending legacy of seven young mouths to feed. It is all interesting, and humanly moving, and we are genuinely curious about all these things because Constable is a part of our cultural heritage.

But, oh dear, we do keep coming across reminders of the fact that quite a number of these portraits are very bad indeed, wincingly so, and at such times we also marvel at the skill with which the caption writer, seated at his desk in the Circumlocution Office, has managed to avoid quite saying so. Several portraits are described as ‘engaging’ for example, which means that you sort of quite like them, but you know that they are not really very good at all, not really. One portrait of a beefy faced female is praised for its ‘splendid truthfulness’, and we marvel at the length of the caption writer’s life. We look at a painting of a house at sunset, and we are reminded that it was at this very place that Constable made an avowal of love to his young life. ‘It is hard not to see it suffused with emotion’, comments the guiding hand, all a-tremble, of the caption writer.

So in what exactly consisted the incompetence of Constable when he came face to face with living and breathing human flesh? He paints children as if they are rouged dolls, often very stiffly and awkwardly. The worst of all is perhaps his portrait of Master Crosby, dated 1808. Goodness knows what age this boy is meant to be. His stomach has the broad-sweeping girth more appropriate to some fifty-something-year-old port-wine-bibber, while his hands are those of a woman pushing seventy. How many people was Constable staring at when he was scrutinising this boy with the hectic cherry lips?

Fortunately, there are some landscapes nestling amidst these portraits, where we can stand and marvel to our heart’s content.

The Whitechapel Re-Opens - The Times, London 30 March 2009

2009-03-30T11:45:00.000-07:00

The Whitechapel, one of London’s most important public galleries, re-opens next week after a two-year, £13.5 million refurbishment. By expanding into the building next door which used to be occupied by a public library, exhibition space has increased by more than three quarters, and the new gallery will now be able to accommodate a whole range of different kinds of shows, from site-specific commissions to displays of public and private art collections. The ten galleries are well lit, and flow easily into each other. The Whitechapel, which was founded in 1901, has been one of the most curatorially adventurous public exhibition spaces in London – it was the first to show a retrospective of Jackson Pollock, for example.

The re-opening kicks off with four exibitions, all eye-catchingly different from each other. One of them, an installation by the Turner-Prize-winning Polish artist Goshka Macuga, brings back to London a work which first went on show here seventy years ago.

It was in 1939 that Picasso’s Guernica, a painting he had made in his Paris studio in 1938 as a howl of anguished protest against the bombing by Franco’s forces of the village of the same name. Guernica, which had been painted on cloth as a huge banner, travelled to the Whitechapel Gallery in East London to draw the public’s attention to the Spanish Civil War. The painting itself now hangs in a museum in Madrid, too fragile to leave home any more.

This is not quite the same Guernica, but its impact remains almost undiminished. In 1955, Nelson Rockefeller commissioned Picasso to make a tapestry based on the original painting. And it is that tapestry, which usually hangs in a corridor outside the Security Council Chamber in the UN building in New York, which will be in London for the next twelve months.

In certain respects what we can see in London is better than what we experience in Madrid. It’s the same size, exactly. We can get up closer. We can scrutinise it face on. We can stand back to get a better look at this extraordinary, ferocious, collage-like depiction of human anguish. So many hands reach out, imploringly. So many mouths hang open...The tapestry does not have the range of colours of the original – it is woven in quite low, muted tones of browns and creams and blacks and beiges, but that does not in any way reduce the impact. In fact, if anything, it feels as if it helps to focus and to funnel all that raw anguish. The tapestry is the focal point of a room in which the visitor will be encouraged to meditate upon the nature of conflict: a UN-style, circular table at its centre will be used for debates; and other artworks include a Cubist-style sculpture of Colin Powell – the Guernica tapestry, for the first and only time in its history, was covered up before Powell dleivered his UN speech in support of the war in Iraq in 2003 – and there will be an ongoing programme of archival film about warfare.

In addition to Guernica you can also enjoy a retrospective of work by the German sculptor and installation artiste Isa Genzken, whose work moves from the sombre and intensely cerebral minimalism of her early youth to an almost crazed degree of exuberance as she matures, with the top floor showing her at her most rackety and hysterically kitschy and colourful.

Over in Gallery Seven you can see a selection of works bought by the British Council over a period of about three-quarters of a century, all penned into quite a small space. There are some gems here, from an early Lucien Freud – one of those bulbous-eyed young women, this one holding a flower as if it were an unexploded symbolic device – to a painting of Dalston Junction by Leon Kossoff, with the paint trowelled on thick and dense as treacle. Give it a lick.

The fourth show, The Whitechapel Boys, draws on the gallery’s own rich archives, and it takes us back to the very beginnings, when three local Jewish artists – Mark Gertler, Isaac Rosenberg and David Bomberg helped to found the Vorticist Movement in the former Whitechapel Library. One hunded years later, the Whitechapel is still powering on.

Dancing to the Precipice - Lucie de la Tour du Pin and the French Revolution Caroline Moorhead Chatto & Windus The Tablet, 28 March 2009

2009-03-28T10:48:00.000-07:00

Some biographers circle the same historical period again and again, vulture-like, picking over the bones. Such is Richard Holmes, who has written – and continues to write – so brilliantly on the era of Romanticism, with his exquisite studies of Shelley, Coleridge and, most recently, his exploration of the relationship between the writers of that period and scientific discoveries.

Caroline Moorhead is quite a different kind of biographer. She moves around, ever restlessly eclectic in her tastes and interests. Her subjects have included a study of refugees, a biography of the celebrated journalist Martha Gellhorn, an account of the life of the great short story writer Freya Stark (together with an edition of her letters), and a life of one the twentieth century’s most eminent philosophers and most glittering sexual predators, Bertrand Russell. All those subjects helped to define the cultural and intellectual life of the 20^th century, and to bless us with the children that we probably deserved.

Now she has stepped back almost two hundred and fifty years, to illuminate a period in the history of France which has been trampled over again and again by many great writers, like the ghosts of Napoleon’s great armies, from those who were alive at the time, to those who came after. It is the period between 1770, when the promise of revolutionary ferment was already in the air, and, eighty years on, the beginnings of the Second Empire in the middle of the nineteenth century. Those who witnessed it, helped to bring it about, or reflected upon it with great or lesser degrees of wisdom have included some of the celebrated writers of the last two hundred and fifty years: Goethe, Michelet, Voltaire, Carlyle, Chateaubriand, Rousseau... The list just goes on and on.

What new element can Moorhead herself bring to this oft told story? Moorhead re-tells the history of the period from the perspective of a an aristocratic woman called Lucie de la Tour du Pin. Lucie was born in 1770 and died in 1853, and so the span of her life exactly coincides with this period of extraordinary ferment, when France itself passed from absolutism to bloody anarchy, from empire to republic to constitutional monarchy, and then back to empire again. For a person of aristocratic birth to succeed in remaining alive throughout these decades required the canniness, the fortitude, and all the good fortune required to remain standing upright on Medusa’s Raft in the North Sea during a Force Nine gale. Lucie was such a woman, and this is her story.

Now the story of Lucie de La Tour du Pin is not a new one by any means - the celebrated volumes of memoirs which she began to write at the age of fifty have seldom been out of print since her death, but her name in the English speaking world is must less well known.

She was born in Paris, in the Rue du Bac, the pretty, precocious, only child of a well born soldier. She spoke good English. She possessed intellectual curiosity in abundance, and qualities of strength and fortitude upon which she would need to draw throughout her long and often fortune-blighted life. She witnessed the great turbulence of those years and suffered accordingly. She knew Marie-Antoinette and Napoleon at first hand. She was, in short, at the beating heart of things, an eye witness to half a century of unceasing political change .

Moorhead manages, in her book, to do two things at once, very expertly. She offers us an intimate account of Lucie’s thoughts and feelings as a player on this great stage, and she is also able to step back and set the general scene for us, from broad-brush accounts of civil turmoil, to descriptions of the course of battles, and to give us a general feel for the current of ideas within which all these things were happening, pell mell, and at such frightening speed. Occasionally she fails. When she writes ‘Consular Paris smelt delicious’, the brush stroke feels too hasty, too brisk, too superficial. Generally speaking though, her ability to summarise complicated arguments swiftly and cogently or to describe ever shifting scenes with clarity and forcefulness is expertly done.

And through it all moves this lonely, proud, confident woman. And we feel moved by her in our turn, saddened by her loveless childhood, and somewhat buoyed and cheered by the fact that she enjoyed a happy and long lasting marriage to a stubborn man of great integrity whose dearest and most profound wish was that France would settle, in the end, for a constitutional monarchy of some kind.

Alas, it was a wish never to be realised.

Picasso's Guernica Tapestry returns to London The Independent, 24 March

2009-03-24T01:59:00.000-07:00

Welcome back! Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, that supremely sombre evocation of the destructive powers of war, first went on show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1939, after it had been exhibited in Paris. It was there to help raise fighting funds for the Spanish Civil War. Pairs of boots were called for. Four hundred pairs were donated. The painting itself, a commemoration of the destruction of the small village of Guernica by Franco’s forces, had been made by Picasso in his Paris studio in 1938, in a furious outpouring of pity and anger.

Now a version of Guernica is back at The Whitechapel once again, as part of an installation by Goshka Macuga, to celebrate the re-opening of the gallery after a major refurbishment. This is not the painting you would have seen in 1939. That one is now permanently installed at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, too fragile to travel. What we can see at the Whitechapel over the next twelve months is one of only three tapestries that were made from the painting in the 1950s, executed by Parisian weavers. The other two are in France and Japan. The Japanese Guernica is blue.

In some respects, the installation at the Whitechapel is more impressive than what can be seen in Madrid. Here in London you approach it face on, and you can get up really close. In Madrid, you come at it side on, like a listing ship. There is no way in which you can walk directly back a pace or two to take in the enormity of the terrible message. The tapestry itself is woven in tones of brown and cream and black, which adds a strange degree of intensity to the image. When you look at it, you experience a near riot of movement and agitation. Nothing ever stops. Everything seems to be decomposing before our very eyes. Arms are reaching out. Impotent hands claw at nothing. A disembodied head floats. Mouths yawn open in inaudible screams. The heads of mythic beasts skew violently.

And we – the merest we - approach this monumental distillation of human suffering like petty-minded voyeurs. We are suddenly plunged into the midst of it, without introduction or explanation of apology, all this jaggedness, all this laceration, all this falling away and falling apart. Human experience seems to be scarified, to the bone.

At the Whitechapel, you approach it up the length of a curiously ceremonious blue carpet. It is the same blue as the curtains that hang behind the tapestry. This is close to the blue of the United Nations, where the tapestry usually hangs, and it is here to remind us of that moment in 2003 when some goon ordered that the great tapestry be covered over because Colin Powell was about to deliver a speech in support of the invasion of Iraq.

Did Picasso’s ferocious minotaur rage back in the muffled dark? Or did Colin Powell just dream that later?

The Blain Game - Haunch of Venison moves into Burlington Gardens The Independent, London

2009-03-22T03:39:00.000-07:00

Once upon time there was a great institution, tucked in just behind London’s Royal Academy, called The Museum of Mankind. For thirty years it showed off the British Museum’s extensive collective of ethnographical objects. About ten years ago it closed its doors, and the building’s been looking pretty woe-begone ever since then, used for just a few days once a year to house the Zoo Art Fair. Otherwise, it’s been empty and in serious need of refurbishment. Now a man called Harry Blain has brought it to life by leasing it from the Royal Academy and turning it into a private gallery. Except that it doesn’t look and feel like a private gallery. It has all the panache of a museum space.

Blain’s the name. Harry Blain. But who is this man? Harry Blain runs a gallery called Haunch of Venison, which until this week operated mainly out of an historic building in Mayfair’s Haunch of Venison Yard, a former home of Lord Nelson. A former stockbroker who was born in Australia and grew up in Surrey, Blain went into dealing in 1992. He operated out of a first-floor mews space at first, and then opened a gallery in Bruton Street.

In 2002 he went into partnership with a former Christie’s dealer called Graham Southern. Since then it’s been growth, and more growth. After London came galleries in Zurich, Berlin and, since last September, New York, in the Rockefeller Center on the Avenue of the Americas.

With growth came its natural bedfellow, controversy. Haunch of Venison got sold, lock, stock and barrel, to Christie’s in 2007. Is it right for a dealer to be in bed with an auction house? Whatever the ethics, the fact is that the billionaire French industrialist Francis Pinault, chairman of Christie’s, may be the real power behind the throne. Is the strategy deployed over at the Museum of Mankind Pinault’s, at least in part?

This is what Blain has been asking himself: in these tough times, how do you lure the collectors to Haunch of Venison and away from, say, White Cube in Mason’s Yard, or Larry Gagosian’s warehouse-size space in Britannia Street, or Michael Hue-Willams’ sassy Albion Gallery in that handsome Norman Foster building just beside Chelsea Bridge on the south side of the river? All these are just as big and brash as Haunch of Version, and stuffed full of big-name artists too. So what else do you need?

You make sure that the new work you are showing is in an historic building, with some fine detailing to remind you of its venerable history. Pinault did this when he acquired the 18^th century Palazzo Grassi in Venice, to show off his own collection of contemporary art. It feels as if Blain is doing much the same here.

An historic building, especially one still very much associated in the mind with a great museum, makes the collector begin to think not only that the work may be of museum quality, but that he himself could perhaps display it in a similar way in his own more modest home. Call it added gravitas if you like. You simply don’t get this when the walls are as seamless white, and the floors polished concrete.

The dealer is leading the collector by the hand. I saw it yesterday, in action. Harry was leading them round. Some of them looked pretty awe-struck. The staging is brilliantly persuasive - the lighting; the use of space; the careful deployment of intellectually high-toned wall texts by the likes of Sir Thomas Browne, alter Benjamin, Italo Calvino. The collector begins to think that he’s a bit of an intellectual too, that he’s buying into intellectual seriousness. The show comes with a hefty catalogue, in which parallels are repeatedly drawn between ethnographical displays of the kind that you used to see here, and what you can ogle here now. So contemporary art links hands with priceless objects from the past, and gets a corresponding lift in value, seriousness and credibility.

I ask Harry whether all the work is for sale. Practically everything, he tells me. Of the hundred or so, all but four. And what percentage of these artists do you represent? Between a third and forty per cent. The global turnover was ‘several hundred million’ this year, he lets out, under a certain amount of pressure. He was sorry that he couldn’t be more specific than that, but one has to be discrete about such things.

The big question that hangs in the air is this: is Blain, by this master stroke, now the most important dealer on the block? And what exactly would that mean anyway? All dealers are notoriously cagey about talking cash and collectors, and Blain is no exception to this rule. Consider these factors though. By occupying this institution, he raises his profile and his own credibility hugely. What is more, he has done it in partnership wit its owners, the Royal Academy, so he gains by a little reflected glory. The Royal Academy may even snatch the building back in three years’ time - that’s how long his current lease runs. On the other hand, they may not. It rather depends, at that point, how attractive the partnership is looking to them, and whether Blain is then in a position to make it an attractive proposition that he should stay on because he is, in some way, helping to raise their profile..

All imponderables of course, and light years away. But Blain has in some respects done better than all the others, even than Saatchi. The Royal Academy helped to pay for this re-furbishment, so the cost to him was less than £500,000 – which is little more than the cost of the staging of a major show. What is more, Saatchi’s new space in Chelsea, though handsome, doesn’t profit by its age – the building inside has been gutted. Only when we stand outside and look back outside do we really recognize that it was once a splendid nineteenth century pile. So Blain has been lucky – but he has one other advantage too, and this may be an odd one to mention, but it is undeniably true. He is more personable than Hue-Williams, Jopling and some of the other big, bad boys of this world. He doesn’t seek out media attention for his private affairs. He has none of that odious, Old Etonian swagger. He is surprisingly humble and even congenial to talk to – which comes as something of a shock. He doesn’t try to fob you off with half truths. When he doesn’t want to tell you something, you feel for his evident embarrassment.

Maybe a decent man has the capacity to make it all the way through this world of intrigue and nastiness. Let’s not wax too lyrical though. There’s still Pinault in the back room, watching his every move on the screens. And Pinault buys hugely from Haunch of Venison, which is an entirely independent subsidiary of course, hem hem..

Van Dyck and Britain Tate Britain The Independent, London

2009-03-21T02:09:00.000-07:00

The artist immigrants came pouring in from the Netherlands in the 1620s. Their role was to give brilliant visual definition to an English court which would soon collapse. The painting of royality before this time had had a strange stiffness and unreality to it. It had specialised in wooden, rather doll-like images. With the advent of Van Dyck and others, a new style, much more dashing, robust, supple and loose, was struck, which persisted, in various different manifestations, for centuries. Even John Singer Sargent, as this fascinating exhibition demonstrates, was still painting a la Van Dyck at the beginning of the 20^th century.

As with so many talented immigrants, Van Dyck, who had started out as a pupil of Rubens, soon learnt to play the game of being every inch the Englishman. You can see this happening in the gallery which shows off his great, formal royal portraits of King Charles II and his aristocratic retinue. And Charles rewarded him handsomely for his talents. Van Dyck became a courtier, a knight, official court painter, with ready access to the king. He lived in a fine house at Blackfriars. The king had a set of steps built up to the house from the Thames so that he could pay his courtier regular visits. All was set fair in a world of marvels.

And so it seems, in part, when we look at these portraits. The largest and most celebrated of these images shows the king on horseback, bursting through a triumphal arch as if into your own living room. It is a magnificent piece of political theatre. The king looks as kingly as you could ever imagine – a glacial aloofness proclaims the degree to which this armoured warrior is set apart from the mortals who can only stand and stare, awe-struck. Look around this room, and you see the same kind of atmosphere. The aristocracy of Britain stand here for our delectation, striking poses, supported and enhanced by objects of huge symbolic significance. You wonder. You marvel.

But, alas, you do not feel a great deal other than sheer admiration at the calculated, studied deployment of so much raw talent. Yes, this is the tragedy of Van Dyck, and even of those who came after and thirsted to emulate him. There is little intimacy here. There is an atmosphere of glacial, opulent brilliance, but we are not touched as we were, say, by the portraits of Holbein that were exhibited in these very same galleries relatively recently. With Holbein, we are in touch, always, with the vulnerable, beating heart of the person behind all the pomp and the mask of dignity. This is seldom so with Van Dyck. It is the look in the eye which so often defines the nature of the problem. The eye has no wish to engage us at all. It says: I am not you, and you will never be who I am, even though you may hopelessly aspire to such an elevated condition. There is a tremendous coldness and aloofness in the eyes of so many of Van Dyck’s sitters. They possess that cold glitter of the eye of the fish on the fishmonger’s wet slab. And Van Dyck himself has put it there. His role was to flatter and to raise up, to set apart a court which would be so magnificently aloof that it would soon be on a par with god himself. This king was a little like god himself in human form. And so the flattery is unrelenting, all this strangely unreal enhancement of earthly beauty. We see that in the way these aristocratic women are represented. We know that they were not like this in life, that they were rended shapeless and pitted by too much child-bearing and the pox.

And this is why Van Dyck, finally, fails as a great portrait painter. He was too, too keen to reflect back at his self-satisfied clients the image of themselves that they yearned to believe was true. He was, in short, a profoundly political animal who served his master to the best of his tremendous abilities.

Unfortunately, this is never quite enough. We seldom fully enter into these portraits. But remember: that is what they would have wanted, this gallery of the puffed up doomed. They do not crave intimacy. They ask only for awe and admiration. And that is what we give them. Then we pass on by.

A Countryman in Town - Robert Bevan and the Cumberland Market Group The Independent, London 19 March 2009

2009-03-19T14:31:00.000-07:00

Exactly a year ago, a large exhibition at Tate Britain – perhaps, on reflection, over-large, given the dismal quality of some of the works - reminded us all of the existence of the Camden Town Group of painters. Their art, urban in its subject matter to a large degree, represented a fairly low-key, British version of post-Impressionism, and it sputtered into - and out of - life just before the First World War.

One of the painters represented in that show was Robert Bevan. After the collapse of the Camden Town Group, Bevan and a handful of others set up another tiny faction, and they named it after a place called Cumberland Market, the London square, just to the east of Regents Park, where Bevan himself happened to live. This group – it consisted of Bevan himself, Harold Gilman, Charles Ginner and John Nash (younger brother of the much more famous Paul) – could loosely be described as neo-realists.

Bevan was a well-to-do, well connected countryman from a banking dynasty – his well appointed ancestral acres, all one hundred of them, were in Sussex – who was doomed to live the life of a thoroughly modern man in the racket and the stink of town, and photographs generally show him dressed as if still living in, and perhaps yearning for, the countryside. For all that, he was no gentleman ignoramus of a Sunday painter. He was not that kind of a countryman. He was very serious about his art, and in the 1890s he had spent some time with the Pont-Aven group in France. He learnt from the likes of Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne. You see it in the way he paints a wind-lashed, tortured tree (Van Gogh), the wonky angle of a roof (Gauguin) or an apple on a plate (Cezanne). He was keen to absorb the lessons to be learnt from what was then the newest of the new.

He was also a bit of a depressive, as you can guess from a broody and rather austerely quizzical looking self-portrait in this show, who agonised long and hard over how to make a painting. Each painting shows us a slightly different cast of mind, a slightly different way of absorbing and re-working his influences. There is no complacency about this work. Perhaps he had a temperament somewhat akin to L.S. Lowry’s, who once wrote: ‘Had I not been lonely, none of my works would have happened.’

This show, in the entirely suitable Lakelands setting of Abbot Hall Gallery, Cumbria, enables us to examine more of Bevan’s work than we have seen in one gallery for more than forty years, and it is well worth a long, slow look. Bevan was passionate about horses, and horses play a crucial role in some of his finest works. In a sense, Bevan was recording a world that was vanishing before his eyes – horse-drawn omnibuses were finally withdrawn from service in the London streets in 1911, and Cumberland Market itself, which existed to provide hay for the nags that needed to munch on it, was in terminal decline, and would disappear altogether not too long after the German bombers of World War Two had done their worst.

Bevan’s best works in this show are of horses – horses ploughing; horses in cab yards; horses being offered for sale at Tattersall’s - and they date for the most part from between about 1911 and 1916. One of these paintings, ‘Under the Hammer’ (1913), shows him at his best. A gaggle of men are sizing up the quality of a frisky looking horse. We see many of them from the back, in their long coats, which are often surprisingly bright in colour. The subject matter sounds potentially rather dour and grey, but Bevan has transformed it into the polar opposite of a dour, grey scene.

It’s a beautifully balanced and integrated composition, which perfectly fills the space allotted to it, and the colours, which have a lovely, airy lightness to them, quite unexpectedly so, give the scene an unusual grace and buoyancy. Dead centre stands a small girl in a blue coat and blue hat, the ends of her pigtails secured by a pair of rich red ribbons. That little detail, so tellingly right, makes the heart skip.

Dame Polly Syllabix appointed England's new Poet Laureatesse - The Independent, London 19 March 2009

2009-03-19T01:51:00.000-07:00

Oh woe is me, the wretched Poet Laureateship is up for grabs once again! Was not William Burroughs, that ghoulish, gun-toting Beat, right for once when he wrote: ‘A flawless poet is fit only to be a Poet Laureate, officially dead and imperfectly embalmed. The stink of death leaks out’?

But the rusting wheels of official procedure will crank on, have no fear. Some halitosis-breathed toady over at the Poetry Society will whisper a name into some runner’s ear, and that name will be whispered into the ear of the PM’s representative, and that same name - provided that it has not been misheard - will be written out in long hand for the Queen’s representative to squinnny down at through some horn-handled lorgnette...

Yes, When Andrew Motion throws in the damp, sweaty towel after ten ever lengthening years on some unspecified date later this spring, someone will step into those creaking shoes once occupied by John Dryden (he was the first, in 1670) and, later, by such tin-eared poetasters as Colley Cibber, Nahum Tate and the appalling Sir John Betjeman. Why would anyone agree to limpingly eulogise mewling royal babes about which they care not one toss?

Unsurprisingly, a great hue and cry has gone up this time about the 340-year-long exclusion of women from the frame. Surely they too deserve to have their talents prostituted! Some of the sane ones don’t – or at least they say they don’t. Fleur Adcock has ruled herself out. And Wendy Cope, with a kind of characteristically breezy sanity, has said this about the job: ‘the best way for a poet to serve the art is to remain free to get on with writing the poems that he or she wants to write.’ Quite so.

So what better way to greet the coming announcement than by sending the whole thing up? Last week, the official inauguration of The Bow-Wow Shop, an online, international poetry forum, took place at the Foundry in East London. Many poets read their poems on that night, including Dame Polly Syllabix, England’s very first Poet Laureatesse, a character I invented for the sheer hell of poking fun at the absurdities of the Laureateship game. I wrote a speech for Dame Polly, which she delivered on that night.

The question from the start had been: who could best embody the idea of such a ridiculous creature? Which actress had the comic panache to look and sound a bit like a combination of Edith Sitwell and Max Wall?

There was one natural choice: the great Fenella Fielding, veteran star of Carry On Screaming. I sent her the speech, and we met in her favourite café one Saturday morning in Covent Garden, where she does a dance class. She flew at me over our cappuccinos: ‘I just can’t do it,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how. How can I possibly combine those two?’ She was barking at me with tremendously engaging imperiousness. ‘How can I possibly be two people at once?’ I felt cowed, horrified, humiliated. Fortunately, she agreed to read the speech out loud in the café in order to get the tone of voice, that mixture of ludicrously deluded self-importance, tetchiness, vanity and soaringly misguided self-confidence. ‘Is there a near perfect congruence’ she declaimed, flourishing her arm to an ever swelling audience, ‘between the rutting of dogs and the antics of poets? I leave that question to hang in the air, tellingly…’

To judge for yourself whether Dame Polly Syllabix truly deserves to be the new Poet Laureatesse, whether that exalted position is robust enough to contain her superabundant talents, look at her performance on YouTube. Just tap in her name.

And now, having breathed life into this wonderfully impossible creature, Fenella tells me that she is quite keen for me to do more. She told me so, last Saturday, as we talked in the middle of Endell Street, defying the worst that the Saturday morning traffic could throw at us. I told her that I was now thinking of writing a full-length monologue for stage or television. ‘Do it,’ she said. ‘Just do it. While it’s hot!’ And now it’s done.

Mythologies - Haunch of Venison, London The Independent, 18 March 2009

2009-03-18T08:10:00.000-07:00

It is ten years since the Museum of Mankind in Burlington Gardens, that fabulous cabinet of curiosities which had served for almost thirty years as the repository of the British Museum’s extensive collection of ethnographical objects, closed its doors. Now they are open again, and, wow, the space has been brilliantly refurbished.

And something else unusual has happened here. A private gallery called Haunch of Venison has taken over the space – ten large galleries - in its entirety, and it is showing about one hundred works by a range of modern artists from all over the world. Some of them are very well known – Sophie Calle, Damien Hirst and Tony Cragg, for example – others less so. The small boys profit by being able to stand on the shoulders of their elders. It’s a cunningly curated show too, in so far as it extends the conversation about the nature and purpose of ethnographical objects that visitors to the old Museum of Mankind would have been having with each other.

When you conduct the re-furbishment of a space on this lavish scale, not only restoring the detailing of a fine historic building, but also putting in a great deal of additional gallery paraphernalia - false walls, well hung lights, plus a great deal of hard thinking about colour, darkness, the importance of sudden moments of illumination – you raise the value of the objects that are on show. In fact, you museum-ify them if you like. Why not though? This is a private gallery after all, even though it may look like a museum. Big collectors get a buzz out of such things.

This is exactly what has happened here. So the key question is: once you have set aside the brilliant seductiveness of its staging and setting, how good is the work which is on display here?

Some of it is not very good – we yawn over Hirst’s two skull panels (how many more skulls can we bear to see from Hirst before we die back to skulls ourselves out of sheer boredom?); Tony Cragg’s ‘African Culture Myth’ a huge, wall-hung fabrication of an African figure, made out of all sorts of broken bits of detritus, looks and feels unconvincing.

Some of the less well known artists, on the other hand, have made some very thought provoking pieces. Look out, in Gallery Ten, for a table full of haunting, voodoo-like sculptures, all very crude looking, made from scavenged bits and pieces of wood and metal from goodness knows, where by Haitian artist, Jean Herard Celeur. Cragg’s piece hangs on the wall very near to this table. Glance from one to the other. Cragg’s work looks as if he is faking something, as if, as its title suggests, he is satisfied with something which looks vaguely generic - and nothing more. Celeur is right inside his work, digging every deeper.

The further you go into the building, the better the show gets, and it reaches its high point with a series of cunningly manipulated photographs of what look like brilliantly colourful, nastily pinioned butterfly parts by Mat Collishaw at the very end of a gallery (5) devoted to a prolonged meditation upon the unnaturalness of nature.

In fact – and this is a serious planning error – the only serious one, as far as I can see - the only point where the masterplan fails is as we enter the building. The works which face us in the lobby as we sweep up the steps from the street need to make a tremendous impact. They need to say: this is what this show is all about, and this is as good as it will get. They fail miserably at this task. They feel too small, too insignificant, too imaginatively impoverished. In fact, their impact is wholly undermined by the splendour of the newly furbished entrance, with its sweeping double staircase.

Yes, an historic building can be potentially good for business - but it can also possess a donkey’s kick if you don’t stroke it in quite the right way.

Van Gogh and the Colours of Night - The Times, 18 March 2009

2009-03-18T07:55:00.000-07:00

In spite of all the torments of a life which ended, all too soon, in suicide, the painter Vincent Van Gogh enjoyed at least one, albeit intermittent, source of solace: the night, and what it represented. Call it, if you like, the comfort blanket of night.

There was something about the idea of the onset of darkness that nourished and calmed and also protected this so often tortured and febrile being. The fall of night set him to dreaming. When he was agitated, it served to calm him. It was a time to ponder and to reflect, to weigh up the happenings of the day just passed. Night too was a moment for the sudden bursting forth of creative energy – he often painted at night. And the extraordinary extent to which Van Gogh poured his creative energies into scenes of night and twilight is newly revealed in Van Gogh and the Colours of Night, a new show at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

What exactly was the matter with Vincent Van Gogh though? There was just one official diagnosis during his lifetime – that he suffered from epilepsy. But even as early as 1881 – ten years before he committed suicide - his parents were recommending that he go and see a doctor in The Hague because they were worried about his mental state. And what did Van Gogh himself think about it? ‘Well, he described his mental state in one letter as “vague,” Martin Gayford, a recent biographer, tells me. ‘The fact is that he behaved very oddly from early on in his life.’

After his death, and once he was proclaimed a genius, the theories came thick and fast, and they have never stopped coming. Madness. Terminal Syphilis. Alcoholism. Poison due to various ingredients in the paints that he used. Martin Gayford himself opts for a slightly different analysis. ‘I think that everything points to bi-polar syndrome,’ he told me this week. ‘Think of the range of his symptoms: hallucinations, depression, followed by exaltation and bursts of high energy, followed in their turn by troughs of despair, and spasmodic alcoholism. Yes, if he were alive now, perhaps bi-polar syndrome would be the diagnosis.’

Van Gogh speaks of the night time and time again in his voluminous correspondence. In a letter of 15 July 1888, written from Arles to his brother Theo (who himself died of syphilis within six months of the suicide of his brother), Vincent writes, lyrically, ‘there is hope in the stars…’. Here, as elsewhere, he associates the night with the afterlife. A little later on in that letter to which I have just referred, he speculates that after death, one might travel by celestial transport to the stars…

His reading – and he was, throughout his life, a tremendous devourer of books, and especially of poetry and fiction, in several languages – was often night-related. He sought out and often quoted in his letters, from fiction and poetry which speak of the night, and of its sweet and almost embalming influence. From quite early on in his life, his correspondence begins to refer to the night sky as a path or even as a map. He seems almost to be yearning to travel there. Similarly, buildings at night - a lone cottage in a hamlet, for example - with their tiny, welcoming lights, were, like the stars, a source of solace. Here is what he wrote in a late letter. ‘The sight of the stars always makes me dream in as simple a way as the black spots on the map, representing towns and villages, makes me dream. Why I say to myself, should the spots of light in the firmament be less accessible to us than the spots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star.’

Before he became an artist, Van Gogh had planned to become a preacher like his father before him, and some of his early letters imbue the idea of the falling light of twilight with religious significance. In a letter of 1877, having just made a references to the Gospels, the young man of 23 has this to say: ‘The twilight says such things to those who have ears with which to hear and a heart with which to understand and to have faith in God – blessed twilight.’ This is three years before Van Gogh decided to become an artist. He had already begun to define one of his abiding obsessions as a painter, which was to capture the painted reality of darkness.

By the summer of 1888, the urge to paint night had passed from being a source of inspiration. It had by then become an obsession. In two letters of April of that year, he wrote to his brother and to his friend Emile Bernard about these yearnings. And then, in June, he said it all over again in the following words: ‘But when will I do the starry sky, then, that painting that’s always on my mind?’ The writers that Van Gogh was reading thought the same way. They too were romantically infatuated by the idea of night. Here is a quotation from a story called Les Etoiles, by Alphonse Daudet, that Van Gogh would have known well: ‘If you have ever slept under the stars, you will know that a mysterious world awakens in solitude and silence as we lie sleeping.’

One of the portraits in the Amsterdam show is of his friend, the poet Eugene Boch. The poet, who, in the words of the painter, ‘dreams great dreams’ is shown against a rich blue night sky, complete with winking stars. The poet is set against the context of eternity. The presence of the night sky sweeps the poet up into a universal brotherhood of creative spirits.

But night was not always a source of peace, solace and nourishment to Van Gogh. The night could also be the hiding place of demons. In ‘The Night Café’, a painting made when Van Gogh was living with Gauguin at the Yellow House in the late Autumn of 1888 – the two men lived together for nine turbulent weeks - Van Gogh shows the harsh interior of a village cafe, peopled by drunks, and lit in the most garish of lights. He had stayed awake for three consecutive nights to paint it. It offered solace of a kind to those who needed it, but it was also a place ‘where you can ruin yourself, go mad, commit crimes,’ Van Gogh wrote. That interior possessed all the ‘ambience of a hellish furnace. It was meant to suggest the most ‘terrible human passions’.

Even more disturbing is a great painting called ‘The Starry Sky’, painted in that same year. Did Van Gogh really paint much out of doors at night? And, if so, how would he know how to differentiate one colour from another? ‘We don’t really know actually,’ comments Martin Gayford. ‘An early biographer talks of his having been seen out of doors with candles stuck in his hat, but later biographers have not necessarily endorsed that story...

‘The Starry Sky’ itself is a very disturbing painting. There is no evidence of peace, calmness or solace here. The sky is nothing but a whirling turbulence of hyper-activity. The terrible cypresses seem to be finger-jabbing heaven itself. ‘He did this painting at St Remy, working from his imagination in the manner advocated by Gauguin,’ Martin Gayford comments. ‘It’s straight out of his head. That church spire, and indeed even the landscape itself, don’t really belong to Southern Europe at all.

‘No, it’s not a calming image at all. In fact, I think he shouldn’t have worked in that way because it probably had a disturbing effect upon him. When he painted solid objects in front of him – such as a chair – that would be therapeutic. This synthetic image, straight out of a disturbed imagination, is likely to have opened a Pandora’s Box…’

Within a matter of months of painting ‘The Starry Night’, Van Gogh was dead. Night, so often a sweet and benign presence, had engulfed him at last.

‘Yes, and he himself ultimately didn’t think that those late paintings out of his imagination were very successful,’ adds Martin Gayford. ‘He was of the view that he worked better in front of a motif.’ Perhaps Van Gogh knew that it was better for him. Perhaps some part of him finally feared being sucked into the terrible, self-destructive maelstrom of himself.

2009-03-18T02:23:00.000-07:00

Nothing conceals like the truth.