All posts tagged Edouard Manet

Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life @ the Courtauld Gallery

‘The laureate of the lunch counter.’

I know. Another American artist. And a very old one. The curators tell us that American painter Wayne Thiebaud had his big stylistic breakthrough back in 1961.

Still, according to the Courtauld, Wayne Thiebaud is ‘one of the most original American artists of the 20th century’, ‘one of the major figures of 20th-century American art’ and ‘ one of America’s most beloved artists’, although it’s a little hard to believe from this relatively small (21 paintings, two rooms) but beautifully presented exhibition.

Everyday Americana

Basically Thiebaud’s schtick, his brand, was realising that everyday objects of mid-century American life – bubble gum dispensers, fruit machines, cake counters in diners – could be painted with the same seriousness as the countless vases, flowers, plates of fish and so on painted by the Old Masters of the European tradition – still lifers from Chardin to Cezanne. Why not? As he put it, in a quote you come across several times in the wall labels, ‘Each era produces its own still life.’

In the mid-1950s Wayne was painting displays of food such as you see in delicatessens or butchers shops but, as the first couple of examples in this exhibition demonstrate, in a blurred and murky style which feels like it owes a lot to Francis Bacon and other Holocaust-haunted existentialist painters.

Meat Counter by Wayne Thiebaud (1956) The Kondos Collection

Then he had a Eureka moment. According to the curators:

In 1956 Thiebaud travelled to New York to meet the avant-garde artists working there. Willem de Kooning was especially inspirational and encouraged him to find his own voice and subjects as a modern painter. Back in Sacramento [Thiebaud’s home town], he began painting commonplace objects of American life, largely from memory, and soon crystallised his unique approach, isolating his richly painted subjects against spare backgrounds.

Thiebaud’s big breakthrough was to lighten up and get happy, to paint his subjects 1) with more clarity, accuracy and precision 2) against clean white backgrounds, in order to make them stand out more, in order to make them feel more like exhibits.

Pie Rows by Wayne Thiebaud (1961) Collection of the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation © Wayne Thiebaud/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025. Image: Wayne Thiebaud Foundation

1961 is the key date because it was in that year that he took this body of modern still lifes to New York looking for a gallery to show them.

Having been rejected by almost all of them his last stop was at a gallery run by a young dealer, Allan Stone. Stone understood what he was doing and took him on. The following year, Thiebaud staged his first solo show at the Allan Stone Gallery, which was an overnight success, propelling him into the limelight. Important collectors and institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, purchased works and the exhibition sold out. His career was set.

Five Hot Dogs by Wayne Thiebaud (1961) Private Collection © Wayne Thiebaud/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025. Image credit: John Janca

Thiebaud’s roots in graphic design

For me the key fact about Thiebaud’s art is that he began his working life as an illustrator and commercial art director. The curators tell us:

Thiebaud lived and worked almost his entire long life in Sacramento, California, and was a longstanding teacher at nearby University of California, Davis. In the 1940s and 1950s, before becoming a painter, he worked as an illustrator, cartoonist and art director, including a summer spent in the animation department of Walt Disney Studios and a role as a graphic designer for the US army as part of his military service during the Second World War.

So he spent years and years honing the ability to present commercial products to best possible advantage. This, it strikes me, has two consequences:

1) At some point he realised: all the effort and creativity devoted to designing adverts and promotions, why not transfer it into the realm of ‘high art’, ‘serious’ art? In a sense his career amounts to making that transfer, that move, from arranging everyday products for commercial photoshoots to arranging everyday products to be painted in a serious, fine art style.

2) It gave him a tremendous ‘eye’. Being a graphic designer means understanding the energy and impact of images within a frame, how to position them, how to create visual effects. Although he was not aiming for advert-level flashiness, nevertheless that eye for a product, a strong fundamental sense of design, underlies all his work.

Three Machines by Wayne Thiebaud (1963) Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco © Wayne Thiebaud/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025. Image: Photograph by Randy Dodson, courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Thiebaud and Pop Art

In the same year as his solo show at the Allan Stone Gallery, 1962, Thiebaud (born 1920) was included in two historic shows that established the Pop Art movement, alongside other artists of his generation like Andy Warhol (born 1928) and Roy Lichtenstein (born 1923).

Now on the face of it Thiebaud has the classic profile of a Pop artist: 1) a background in commercial design (like Warhol), 2) a belief in taking the everyday bric-a-brac of American consumer life as a subject for fine art, and 3) a predilection for presenting the objects in a sterile, formalised way, like exhibits. I.e. there are no people in them, there’s nobody serving behind his counters, there’s no crowds in the cake shop, there’s no-one pumping the fruit machines, all his objects are painted as if they’re exhibits in a sterile museum context.

BUT Thiebaud never considered himself part of the movement and the thing which sets him apart is this: most Pop Art rejoices in reproducing its objects on flat canvas, prints or silk screens, flat and slick and clean. By sharp contrast, Thiebaud’s work is painterly almost to the point of exaggeration. What this means is that he laid his paint on with a trowel. One of the main things about going to this gallery rather than just flicking through the images online is that online reproductions make them look and flat and clean whereas in the flesh you immediately realise that all the paintings are made of thick layers of paint laid on very heavily, with the brushstrokes big and heavy and deliberately visible.

Also, to emphasise the effect, instead of self-effacing matt paint, he used high shine gloss paint which, under gallery lighting, really brings out the swirl and contours of his brushstrokes. To be honest, after the first half dozen paintings of cakes, cake counters and cake displays, my mind began to glaze over a little. I found it more interesting to go really close up to the paintings and savour the thick, heavy, super-visible brushstrokes, that’s where the interest seemed to me. I took a number of close-ups to try and capture the effect. Note the thick heavy gloopy brushstrokes and the shiny gloss paint in this one.

Detail of cake by Wayne Thiebaud (photo by the author)

And the raw messiness of the paintwork in this one.

Detail of Cakes by Wayne Thiebaud (1963) (photo by the author)

This is what the critics mean by ‘painterliness’. They mean the deliberate application of the paint so as to leave each brushstroke and the squeezed out ridges between strokes as visible as possible. And it is this deliberate drawing attention to the paintedness of the works which distinguishes him from the cool, ironic and flat surfaces of all the other Pop artists.

Thiebaud and Abstract Expressionism

One last point. Remember how Thiebaud went to New York in 1956? Pop Art didn’t exist then. The dominant art movement was Abstract Expressionism, epitomised by the splat paintings of Jackson Pollock, all highly visible drips and dribbles. And the artist who encouraged him most was Willem de Kooning, a leading light of the Abstract Expressionist movement.

So you could say that Thiebaud’s achievement was to take an Abstract Expressionist sensibility and apply it to Pop Art subject matter.

Thiebaud’s limited subject matter

The curators make a deal out of how Thiebaud realised the everyday objects of American life were worthy of a high art, fine art, classical treatment, the modern-day equivalent of the great still lives of the European tradition, and they reel off a list of his subject matter: ‘quintessential modern American subjects’ such as cream cakes and meringue pies, hot dogs, candy counters, gumball dispensers and pinball machines.

Yes, but it turns out that these subjects fairly quickly pall. Seen one painting of slices of thick gooey iced cakes on a shop counter and, well, it quickly feels like you’ve seen them all. A moment’s thought makes you realise, that if you take the phrase seriously, we are absolutely surrounded by ‘everyday objects’: phones, cookers, fridge and freezers, pots and pans, tables, chairs, sofas, TVs and that’s just in the home, before you get to streets and cars and buses and taxis and advertising hoardings and street signs, phone boxes and letter boxes and so on, and that’s before you get to the huge variety of buildings you see in an urban environment. Cigarette packets. Chewing gum packets. Newspapers.

Some of this was depicted by the Pop artists or American artists of urban life but none of it is in Thiebaud, along with the other really glaring absence in his work, which is of any people. Looking round each of the two rooms it feels like a very, very restricted, self-imposed restriction of subjects. Here’s a complete list of the 21 paintings in the show:

Meat counter (1956-9)
Pinball machine (1956)
Penny machines (1961)
Cold cereal (1961)
Candy counter (1962)
Caged pie (1962)
Pie rows (1961)
Five hot dogs (1961)
Cup of coffee (1961)
Three cones (1964)
Pie counter (1963)
Boston cremes (1962)
Delicatessen counter (1962)
Delicatessen counter (1963)
Candy counter (1969)
Peppermint counter (1963)
Cakes (1963)
Three machines (gumball machines) (1963)
Yo-yos (1963)
Four pinball machines (1962)
Jackpot machine (1962)

As you can see from the number of counters in this list, the smart-alec critic who called Thiebaud the ‘laureate of the lunch counter’ was actually being very accurate.

Mind you, maybe it’s an artificial uniformity created by the curators. One of the wall labels from a late-60s work (Candy counter, 1969) tells us that by the end of the decade ‘Thiebaud’s work extended beyond still life and, during his long career, he was also famed for his figure paintings and cityscapes.’

Ah. OK. None of that is here. Shame. It would probably be optimal to see the cake works in the broader context of the figures and cityscapes, in other words to have a really extensive retrospective of his career. But the gallery visitor can only judge by what is presented by the curators.

Candy Counter by Wayne Thiebaud (1969) Private Collection © Wayne Thiebaud/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025

American graffiti

Nostalgia. Despite all the burning political issues of the day – the Cold War, the spectre of nuclear war, Civil Rights issues and many more – America was in fact enjoying an economic boom. The 1950s saw affluence spread among the middle classes. Thiebaud’s gloopy still lives, especially the many thickly decorated cakes, convey a sense of this new post-war abundance. A kid in the Depression-era 1930s, for young Wayne all these brightly coloured cakes and candies represented boyish joy and freedom.

Now we know that all these cakes and candies have contributed to an epidemic of obesity and heart disease across the western world. Speaking as a man on a low cholesterol diet, I came to feel surfeited and then a little sickened by the sight of all this sugary poison. We know too much.

But looking at these cake counters and fruit machines and gum machines now, and pondering their provenance from the early 1960s, before (for example) the Vietnam War ruined everything, they also feel like exercises in boyish nostalgia, reminiscent of the candy-coloured nostalgia of a movie like George Lucas’s ‘American Graffiti’.

Comparison with Manet

The curators recommend that we compare and contrast Thiebaud’s arrays of treats with an older work in the Courtauld Collection, Edouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, a painting Thiebaud greatly admired. If you look away from the dominant figure of the barmaid, you realise that this, too, is a depiction of a counter of treats. They’re mainly alcoholic ones in beautifully rendered bottles but seeing it through Thiebaud’s eyes made me notice for the first time the little pile of mandarin oranges in their shiny glass bowl. Yes, you can see the continuity of interests.

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère by Édouard Manet (1882) The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust) © The Courtauld

The most obvious difference is that, whereas the Manet is densely populated with the crowd at a popular bar and features the (rather gawky) interaction between the customer and a barmaid, the Thiebaud paintings on display here contain no human beings at all, not a trace, not in any of them.

Drawings and etchings

There are actually two exhibitions. The one of Thiebaud’s paintings is up in the third floor. A floor below (and easy to miss because of its small doorway) the small gallery devoted to drawings hosts a display of 17 prints and etchings Thiebaud made in the same period (the 1960s). It’s mostly black-and-white prints although four of them have been hand coloured. The display focuses on a portfolio of 17 prints which were published in a 1965 edition titled ‘Delights’.

Two obvious contrasts with the often fairly large paintings in the main display. 1) They’re small, generally A4 size or smaller. 2) They’re flat. They have none of the glossy, gloopy, brushstroke-dominated surface of the paintings. Instead they feel flat and chaste and restrained. Tidy. Sweet (in two senses, given the cakey subject matter).

But they’re almost all of the same very limited topics. Cakes and more cakes, mostly black and white, a few coloured in. An exciting exception is the plate of bacon and eggs.

I sort of liked them, or respected the craftsmanship. In their rather scratchy, sketchy approach they reminded me of the early drawings of David Hockney, which I don’t like very much. The one I liked most was the least characteristic because it was made using graphite i.e. had the warmth and shading of a charcoal drawing, the kind of thing I am more drawn to. It’s a depiction of salt and pepper shakers on a café table. I can’t find it anywhere online so here’s my terrible photo of it.

Installation view of Untitled (Sugar, salt and pepper) by Wayne Thiebaud @ the Courtauld Gallery (photo by the author)

For Thiebaud completists, there’s a display case containing a first edition of Delights, with a list of all the prints it contained, alongside a display of his etching tools.

Display case containing a first edition of ‘Delights’ alongside Wayne Thiebaud’s etching equipment: note his magnifying glasses at centre back @ the Courtauld Gallery (photo by the author)

Related reviews

Courtauld Gallery reviews
Andy Warhol by Klaus Honnef (1990)
Pop Art Design @ Barbican (February 2014)
Robert Rauschenberg @ Tate Modern (February 2017)
The American Dream: pop to the present @ the British Museum (May 2017)

Leave a comment

by Simon on October 24, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in America, Art, Exhibition, Painting, Prints

Tagged 1956, 1961, 20th century American art, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Abstract Expressionism, Allan Stone, American art, American life, Americana, Andy Warhol, art, black-and-white prints, California, Candy counter, Cezanne, Chardin, civil rights, Cold War, commercial design, consumerism, Courtauld, David Hockney, Delights, Edouard Manet, engraving, etching, exhibition, Francis Bacon, graphic design, Illustration, Impasto, jackpot machine, Jackson Pollock, Museum of Modern Art, New York, nuclear war, Old Masters, painterliness, Painting, Pie counter, pinball machine, Pop Art, Prints, Roy Lichtenstein, Sacramento, Second World War, still life, The Courtauld Gallery, Three Machines, University of California Davis, Walt Disney Studios, Wayne Thiebaud, Wayne Thiebaud Foundation, Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life, Willem De Kooning

Posted by Simon on October 24, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/10/24/wayne-thiebaud-american-still-life-the-courtauld-gallery/

Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy

This is a massive, probably epoch-making exhibition, but which I found troubling and repelling for reasons I’ll try to explain later, in part 2 of this review. First I’ll try to give you all the information and as many images as I can so that you can make your own mind up.

Kerry James Marshall

Kerry James Marshall is, according to the curators at the Royal Academy, ‘America’s most important artist‘.

This huge exhibition of Marshall’s enormous paintings at the Royal Academy is the largest ever held outside the US and so the first chance for most of us Brits to experience his works in the UK.

Exhibition structure

The exhibition includes 70 works, primarily paintings, as well as examples of the artist’s prints, drawings and sculpture, from museums and private collections across North America and Europe.

It includes a dramatic new series of paintings made especially for the show.

The show marks Marshall’s 70th birthday (born 17 October 1955).

Marshall works in series and cycles. The exhibition brings together 11 groups of works made between 1980 and the present, displayed in 11 galleries.

For your information I’ll give the curators’ wall labels to each of the 11 rooms verbatim, distinguished from my commentary by being indented.

Gallery 1. The Academy

The works in this room feature scenes from art schools, studios and museums – places, like the Royal Academy, where artists study, create and exhibit their work. There is a deep fascination in Western art with the studio as the locus of production and the museum as the repository of wonders. Adding to this tradition, Marshall transforms it by centring Black figures as both producers and consumers.

The painters he depicts are masters of their medium and materials. The model in ‘The Academy’ strikes a pose reminiscent of the American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Summer Olympic Games. On the student painter’s table there is a preparatory sketch of the model as well as a ‘nkisi nkondi’ ‘power figure’. In ‘Untitled (Studio)’, a painter adjusts the position of her model to match the picture in progress.

Untitled by Kerry James Marshall (2009) Yale University Art Gallery © Kerry James Marshall

These works emphasise the decisions artists make in composing and completing their work: whether to paint precisely or loosely, whether to render objects flatly or with more volume, and how to arrange colours. Marshall uses various black pigments to depict skin colours, layering, or placing side by side, ivory black, Mars black and carbon black, mixing in other colours to render black fully chromatic. As he has said, ‘if you say black, you should see black’. While his blacks are complex, Marshall rarely attempts to depict the browns of real skin tones. His figures are at once individual characters and examples of an emphatic Blackness, real and rhetorical, and as such, provoke wider questions about the idea of Black figures in art.

The Academy by Kerry James Marshall (2012) Collection of Dr. Daniel S. Berger © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Gallery 2. Invisible Man

Marshall’s family moved from Birmingham, Alabama, to Los Angeles in 1963. In 1965 he visited the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on a school trip. In 1968 he was selected for a summer drawing workshop at the Otis Art Institute, where he first encountered the work of Charles White and committed to becoming a full-time student there after high school. He enrolled at Otis in 1977 and received his BFA in 1978.

The 1970s was a volatile period at Otis, and within the art world in general. Conceptual artists were abandoning painting; some artists associated with the Black Arts Movement were distancing themselves from European art traditions and devoting themselves to political works aimed at uplift and protest.

Not to be deterred, Marshall continued his pursuit of an education dedicated to maximising the knowledge and skills associated with the best results in picture making. When the time was right, these could be put to effective use. That time arrived after he read Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel ‘Invisible Man’. In the novel, the protagonist feels he is invisible because he is not seen as desirable in American society. This idea inspired Marshall to begin a series of works in which Black figures are set against a dark ground, so that they become almost invisible to the viewer. The first of these was made with egg tempera, a medium strongly associated with Sienese painters like Duccio, and later revised by artists like Ben Shahn.

In this first major cycle of images, Marshall also explored histories of racial stereotypes and caricatures, choosing to render his figures in black paint. From this point on, his figures function rhetorically, raising questions about Black absence and presence both in society and in art history.

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing two of the invisible man paintings – if you look closely you can see the white teeth and white eyes of the invisible man (photo by the author)

Gallery 3. The Painting of Modern Life 1

The two largest galleries are devoted to Marshall’s ambitiously composed, large-format paintings that record scenes of everyday life in Black America.

In the nineteenth century, French artists like Édouard Manet and Georges Seurat transformed the genre of history painting to render scenes of modern life on an epic scale. Made on unstretched canvases and secured to the wall with grommets, the paintings in this room date from the early to mid-1990s, when Marshall, having relocated to Chicago and settled into a studio, began to make his own paintings of everyday life: children playing, lovers dancing, families enjoying a day in the park.

‘De Style’ (1993), showing a group of Black men in a barber’s shop, was the first work of Marshall’s to be acquired by a museum, and is both an amalgamation of established art historical styles and a monument to Black style.

De Style by Kerry James Marshall (1993) Los Angeles County Museum of Art © Kerry James Marshall. Photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA

A year after completing it, Marshall embarked on the works in his ‘Garden Project’ series, three of which are shown here. These look back to the American public housing projects named ‘Gardens’ whose first residents included families, like Marshall’s own, who had migrated from the South and settled in the north and west of the United States from the 1940s. Made at a time when many housing projects were suffering from a lack of resources, the images convey the hopes of the past and the resilience of residents in the 1990s.

OR:

Deeply influenced by artists such as Edouard Manet, Gustave Caillebotte, Georges Seurat and other painters of modern life, and conscious of the absence of large-scale images of daily life in the work of many Black artists before him, Marshall depicts Black families picnicking in the park, lovers dancing, children playing in communal gardens, and friends hanging out in hair salons, for example in School of Beauty, School of Culture, 2012 (Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham (AL)).

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing three of the Garden Project paintings (photo by the author)

At the centre of this room hangs the vast Knowledge and Wonder, 1995 (Legler Regional Library, Chicago Public Library, Chicago), Marshall’s largest painting to date, exhibited for the first time outside of Chicago.

Knowledge and Wonder by Kerry James Marshall (1995) City of Chicago Public Art Program and the Chicago Public Library, Legler Regional Library © Kerry James Marshall. Photo: Patrick L. Pyszka, City of Chicago

Gallery 4. Middle Passage

The five paintings in this room were made in the early 1990s and constitute Marshall’s first attempt to address the history of the Middle Passage – the treacherous crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, during which many captive Africans died before reaching the slave markets in the Americas. It is a history understood in fragments, and accordingly, instead of making works functioning like costume dramas, Marshall composes paintings with disparate images, motifs and textures, incorporating symbols and diagrams derived from Yoruban religion, Voodoo and other syncretic religions that were practised across the African diaspora as acts of defiance as well as to maintain connections to Africa.

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing Great America (left) and Plunge (right) (photo by the author)

Before embarking on the series, Marshall completed a group of woodblock prints called ‘African Powers’, imagining six Yoruban orishas – divine spirits or gods.

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing the six African Powers woodblock prints (photo by the author)

He had also recently worked as the production designer on Julie Dash’s film ‘Daughters of the Dust’ (1991), for which he constructed sets including bottle trees and grave markers that were derived from African religious traditions. The dream-like structure of the film has an affinity with some of the paintings here.

A section bringing together imagined portraits of historically significant Black figures such as Scipio Moorhead and Harriet Tubman, question how historical portraits can be created in the absence of archives and earlier representations of individuals.

Gallery 6. Vignettes

For Marshall, every historical genre and style of painting is ripe for reinvention, and in a long-running open series he has looked back to romance pictures, challenging himself to make serious and layered paintings with apparently light-hearted subject matter. The first ‘Vignette’, dating from 2003, was a landscape in the manner of Henri Rousseau set in an American park, showing a naked couple wearing jewellery related to the Afrocentric movement. In the later ‘Vignettes’, Marshall reworked the compositions of French Rococo artists like Jean-Antoine Watteau and Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

By painting romantic scenes, Marshall produces images of resistance. ‘Breeding’, not marriage, was encouraged by some slave owners as a way of increasing their wealth and workforce.

Vignette #13 by Kerry James Marshall (2008) Susan Manilow Collection © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Although the paintings are filled with flowers and lovebirds, the various scenes are marked in other ways by signs of protest, including burning tyres and political flags. Surrounded by pink brushstrokes and presented as dream scenes, the works also raise the question of whether Black couples can really relax in public spaces or if this idea remains an illusion.

Central Hall. Souvenirs

In 1998, Marshall produced a suite of paintings, photographs, sculpture, prints and video for the exhibition ‘Mementos’ at the Renaissance Society in Chicago – four paintings are reunited here for the first time since their debut. The paintings are set in the middle-class houses of Marshall’s friends and relatives. One is the house of his mother-in-law. Decorations in their living rooms included tributes to the assassinated Kennedys and Dr Martin Luther King Jr. The works concern the ways in which the tumultuous decade of the 1960s, marked by unfulfilled optimism and political upheaval, might be commemorated in the 1990s.

Of the four large horizontal-format paintings in the group, the first two, in full colour, memorialise political and activist martyrs, who are silkscreened as a frieze across the top. The other pictures, rendered in grisaille, expand the tribute to recognise the importance of cultural heroes who died between 1959 and 1970, bracketing the 1960s. As well as thinking about glittery greetings cards, Marshall wanted to transform the genre of Renaissance Annunciation paintings, where the archangel Gabriel appears in Mary’s home to tell her she will give birth to Jesus. The angels in these paintings call on us to remember. They appear somewhat exhausted by the process of assessing the unrealised dreams or real achievements of these political protagonists and cultural heroes.

Lecture Room. The Painting of Modern Life 2

In the 2010s Marshall continued to construct powerful scenes of everyday life. The settings were parks, nightclubs, homes, city streets and art galleries. He often reworked arrangements and elements from famous paintings, none more prominently than when he transformed the anamorphic skull in Hans Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’ (1533) into a distorted Sleeping Beauty, disturbing the space of a salon in ‘School of Beauty, School of Culture’, a sister work to his earlier barber’s shop painting ‘De Style’.

School of Beauty, School of Culture by Kerry James Marshall (2012) Collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo: Sean Pathasema

Some paintings here refer to specific moments from the past, such as the crowning of Gloria Smith as the second Miss Black America at the height of the ‘Black Is Beautiful’ period in 1969.

Others provoke questions about Marshall’s own time: ‘Untitled (Policeman)’ (2015) was made shortly after the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement when protesters campaigned to ‘defund the police’. Together, these paintings express a wide range of Black experiences of and attitudes towards America, from deep joy to a profound, uneasy ambivalence.

Untitled (Policeman) by Kerry James Marshall (2015) The Museum of Modern Art, New York © Kerry James Marshall. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

Gallery 7. Africa Revisited

Made specifically for this exhibition, the paintings here concern challenging moments in the recorded history of Africa, not often represented by artists. Five of them address the slave trade, showing people kidnapping children, rowing captives in a canoe to buyers out of scene, returning with all kinds of booty, and celebrating their successful trades. As with his previous works, several of these new paintings present confident Black people acting with agency. These figures are shown having sold slaves, driven by their greed for the consumer goods that Europeans supplied in exchange. Another painting depicts the murder of Shaka Zulu by his half-brothers in Zululand in 1828. Together, these paintings disrupt a view of the African past, providing a fuller picture of a complex history.

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing three of the Africa Revisited paintings (photo by the author)

Two final paintings depict the so-called ‘white queens’ of Africa, Colette Hubert and Ruth Williams, at their weddings to Léopold Senghor, the first president of Senegal, and Seretse Khama, the first president of Botswana. These scenes, showing real unions but with the details reimagined by Marshall, disturb narratives about the post-colonial period on the continent.

Gallery 8. Wake / Gulf Stream

Marshall first showed these two works together in 2003 at the Venice Biennale.

‘Wake’ centres on a black ship on a pedestal that stands for a black sea. While recalling the journey made by enslaved Africans, the work also suggests the growing power of Black cultural expression. Each time it is displayed, Marshall adds more medallions, representing the proliferating achievements of African Americans. The idea of accumulation comes from the ‘nkisi nkondi’, a type of Kongo ‘power figure’ into which users drove iron nails to increase its spiritual potency.

The painting ‘Gulf Stream’ was shown in front of ‘Wake’ in Venice. In it, Marshall revisits a painting by the American artist Winslow Homer, also called ‘The Gulf Stream’ (1899/1906), which featured a shipwrecked Black sailor whose boat is surrounded by sharks. Set off the coast of America in the present day, the friends in Marshall’s yacht here appear to be enjoying their day sailing, but storm clouds are visible on the horizon, indicative of unpredictable times ahead.

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing Wake (the sculpture on the floor) and Gulf Stream (the painting on the wall) (photo by the author)

‘Wake’ also encompasses ‘black light’ photographs of a slave ship, and plates commemorating the first cargo of twenty Africans brought to America, as well as one for William Tucker, the first person of African origin born in America in around 1624. Marshall represents Tucker with a photograph of himself as a teenager.

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing the plate from wake commemorating William Tucker but bearing a photo of the artist as a teenager (photo by the author)

Gallery 9. Red Black Green

In the works gathered here, Marshall deploys the colours of the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) or Pan-African Flag, created by Marcus Garvey in 1920, as well as the imagery and slogans of the Black Panthers from the late 1960s. But rather than straightforwardly celebrating Black Nationalism, Marshall constructs cheeky and layered works that also reference the connected histories of painting and erotica. Artists from Titian to Goya and Manet made famous canvases of reclining nudes. Marshall exchanges their female figures for a Black man who hides his genitals with a flag. Similarly, struck by the lack of Black women in American pin-up magazines, Marshall decided to make his own images.

One of his imagined models here becomes a ‘Black Star’. The painting also references the ‘Black Star Line’ – the shipping company that Marcus Garvey founded in 1919 to encourage commerce with Africa and the voluntary return of Black Americans to the continent. Gripping a star like a ship’s wheel, the woman here looks back like a model in a photoshoot. We are left to ask whether Garvey’s creations are now just useful for making stylish and sexy images, or if his political project remains relevant today.

Pros

1. Visitors The friend I went with pointed out that an unusually large number of the exhibition visitors were Black, and also young. This was noticeable because, no matter how much galleries go on about diversity and inclusivity, most of the exhibitions I go to have few if any Black visitors and are overwhelmingly populated with old white people. So this is Success if you’re trying to attract a younger, more diverse audience.

2. Black art She went on to say that if you’re a little Black girl or boy, and interested in art and go to galleries, it must be alienating or dismaying to see nothing but white faces in all the art works. You might end up feeling art is a White activity for White people. Whereas Marshall’s works clearly rectify that notion and would make you feel that art can very much be a Black interest and activity, after all.

3. Black presence The size of the paintings, their confident mix of classical examples with modern subject matter, their sweeping range over Black history from the dawn of slavery through key moments of American history, up to his numerous portrayals of everyday life in Black communities – all these triumphantly achieve his goal of restoring and emphasising a Black presence in art. So it’s a triumph.

But do you actually like any of it?

That said, she didn’t actually like any of the paintings on display. Usually we play a game of getting to the end of an exhibition, having read all the wall captions and absorbed all the information – then stroll back through the show selecting one key work from each room, and explaining why we like it more than the others.

But in this huge show neither of us saw any one work we liked in any of the rooms (with the possible exception of the six African Powers woodcuts, which I liked, up to a point). Neither of us chose any of the vast paintings because we didn’t really like any of them. We didn’t really enjoy looking at Marshall’s art. Big, colourful, striking, and in a good cause, sure, but…

So I get the point of the works, and they certainly succeed in fulfilling Marshall’s aims and agenda. But I felt alienated and outside all of them. Why? I think it’s for three reasons.

1. Blackness

It’s no use denying that the paintings’ insistence on Black Black Black was a problem for me for the simple reason that I am not Black. I don’t object or dislike the Blackness, I just don’t feel included. It feels like it’s for a different audience than me, which is fine, but explains why I didn’t feel engaged.

What puzzles me is that I really like specifically Black art. The London art gallery devoted to Black art, Autograph ABP, is one of my favourite galleries, and I go out of my way to review its shows. I absolutely loved shows there by:

Wilfred Ukpong: Niger-Delta / Future-Cosmos (March 2024)
Omar Victor Diop – Liberty / Diaspora (November 2018)

To name a couple which really stick in my mind. I really liked Mary Sibande‘s brilliant show at Somerset House and who could forget the great Basquiat exhibition at Barbican? And I’ve really liked all the Afro-Futurism things I’ve seen, for example at the Barbican’s science fiction exhibition. So it’s not Black people or Black culture or Black art which troubled me, it’s something else.

2. American cultural imperialism

A big part of my abreaction is because it’s so American. In my opinion, British culture is super-saturated with American cultural products. In my youth we were exposed to a fair amount of Hollywood movies and TV shows, but this has now gone supersize with the explosion of streaming services, Disney, Netflix, Apple TV, HBO and hundreds of others. Then there’s the entire internet itself with its inbuilt bias towards American products and the American worldview. And then there’s American smartphones and social media which most people have willingly invited into their homes to record every aspect of their lives. And now we are about to be taken over by American artificial intelligence getting to know us better than we know ourselves.

In my opinion, the super-saturation of British culture with American products, ideas, technology and discourse ought to be resisted.

Instead of which British cultural curators and gatekeepers fall over themselves to promote American art and culture and movies and TV shows at every opportunity.

And, disappointingly, the same goes for academia where what used to be called Critical Theory has been superseded by various forms of identity theories (feminist theory, queer theory, Black theory, post-colonial theory) almost all imported from America, led by American academics (I was watching a video about Judith Butler recently, queen of Queer Theory) who speak to specifically American history and circumstances.

In my opinion this has two distinct negative consequences:

a) American culture swamps and obliterates British culture

The actual social and political and cultural situation of my country, England, gets swamped and lost in products, discourse and rhetoric which is and sounds American and stems from American history and politics.

So when I see yet another image of Martin Luther King or John fucking Kennedy, I just think, Fuck off. That’s your country, your history, your politics, your problems, you deal with them. I have my own country with its own history, politics and problems to deal with thank you very much.

b) Importing American culture means importing American politics

But there is a horrible historical inevitability here as well. In terms of social and cultural trends, America has often been seen as ahead of Europe; in some sense, America has often been seen as the future. So what do all these social, political and cultural trends get us? What is the shiny hi-tech America which British cultural guardians fall over themselves to promote, with its fabulous Oscars and Taylor Swift and woke activists, heading towards?

Donald Trump. Taken together, all the efforts of American feminists, queer and Black activists have ended up, through the mad irrationality of human society, handing power to an authoritarian moron and his henchmen. Fifty years of earnest American feminism has led up to… the revocation of Roe versus Wade and the ending of the nationwide right to abortion. All the Black Lives Matter calls to defund the police have ended up with… augmented powers for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) forces which now roam the streets like a semi-fascist militia, kidnapping and deporting people at will.

In other words, so many of these progressive causes in America, in the unique context of American history, politics, culture and society, have not only failed but triggered a huge and horrifying backlash.

My position is simple: I think of myself as left-wing. I support a woman’s right to abortion, I support LGBTQ+ rights, I sympathise with Black activists’ opposition to police brutality, and so on.

But I greatly fear that the wholesale importation of American cultural and political models and discourse into Britain risks triggering exactly the same white, heteronormative, masculine backlash here as has happened in the States, the followers of the new martyr Charlie Kirk. Why would we want to import the hugely conflicted culture wars which have brought America to the brink of some kind of civil war, into our own society?

And in fact it’s happening already. The rise and rise of Reform at the expense of the feeble Labour Party mirrors the rise of Trump’s MAGA movement within the Republican Party at the expense of the feeble Democrats.

It may seem grotesquely unfair to associate Kerry James Marshall with the rise of Donald Trump. All I’m saying is they both come from the same toxic culture. When I saw the images of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy I not only experienced a vast weariness with American pop history, but a premonition of how this all ends up.

I don’t want Reform, I don’t want the Conservative Party to adopt the tone and policies of Trump’s MAGA, and, in my opinion, one way to resist the rise of America-style authoritarianism is to insist on the difference between America and Britain. To insist on the specific Britishness of British social and political issues. To stop kowtowing before American cultural products and importing American discourse, with all its toxic resonances, into British culture.

3. The new figurativism

But just as impactful as all the above was that I was dismayed by the style of all these paintings, namely a return to a kind of naive realism, which I found dismaying. In the RA shop was a big expensive book about The New Figurativism. According to Google AI:

The new figurativism refers to the modern resurgence of figurative art, or art depicting recognizable subjects like people, in contemporary times, driven by a desire for greater artistic representation, a reflection of 21st-century realities, and a break from abstract art’s dominance. This movement allows for the exploration of social and personal identity, particularly for traditionally marginalized groups, and features bold, expressive styles often inspired by past movements like Neo-Expressionism.

Return to Representation: It marks a shift back to depicting the human form and recognizable scenes after a long period where abstract art was dominant.

Emphasis on Representation and Identity: A major driving force is a need for greater diversity and the ability to tell authentic stories from various perspectives, including those of people of colour, women, and LGBTQ+ individuals.

Relevance to Current Reality: The genre’s ability to capture and reflect the contemporary world makes it a potent tool for addressing social issues, expressing personal experiences, and engaging with contemporary culture.

Opportunity for Authenticity: It provides a powerful platform for artists to tell their own stories and to represent their communities in a way that abstract art cannot.

So on this definition, Marshall’s work is a prime example of the New Figurativism, both in style and very much in purpose, namely ‘to tell authentic stories from various perspectives, including those of people of colour’, in his concern to ‘represent his community’ and so on. As the Royal Academy curators put it, Marshall certainly:

makes visible those people who were so noticeably absent in the works that came before him.

But to [put my concerns in a nutshell, what is happening here is that woke political concerns are justifying a return to a deeply conservative, retro, anti-modern style of figurative painting. There are a few stylistic glitches and angularities which feebly gesture to the great innovations of the modernists a hundred years ago. But overall, it feels as if most of twentieth century art never happened.

I’ve just visited the van Gogh / Anselm Kiefer exhibition which is also playing here at the Royal Academy. I was thrilled by watching van Gogh develop his visual language and evolve his deployment of oil paint on an almost week-by-week basis; and dazzled at the enormous, thrilling innovations of Kiefer’s huge canvases clotted with surface detritus, stalks and twigs.

Coming from those thrilling and mind-opening innovations to Marshall’s deeply conservative, old-style, backward-looking figurativism felt like a big, big imaginative letdown.

Conclusion

As I said back at the start, Marshall’s art perfectly achieves his stated aim of putting the Black presence front and centre of his work, which has been enthusiastically taken up by galleries and commissions across the States and, I bet, will open doors for Black kids and teenagers and aspiring artists and just sympathetic gallery goers, to realise that they can do this, too, and that they have a voice and presence in the sometimes intimidating realm of ‘Art’. In terms of cultural politics it is an enormous success.

But in terms of actual aesthetics, of the style and value of what you actually see, I feel Marshall’s art represents an enormous step backwards, to a naively realist approach which erases everything I love and value about modern art.

So that’s the fundamental reason why I really didn’t like this exhibition.

Coda: Kerry Marshall and David Hockney

To take the race element out of the equation altogether, I feel the same when I look at David Hockney’s works from last 20 years or so. In the RA shop, next to a book about New Figurativism and umpteen books about Marshall, was a pile of books and merch celebrating Hockney’s dayglo renderings of the Yorkshire Wolds.

I flicked through one particularly enormous coffee table book and was staggered at how many there are, hundreds and hundreds of huge, vivid, simplistic pictures, I wonder if he’s done over a thousand by now, rattling them off on his ipad.

And as I flicked dispiritedly on, I thought: It’s as if the last 100 years or artistic experimentation never happened. A guy with a great eye and a love of bright colours is creating a never-ending stream of entertaining, easy-on-the-eye figurative paintings of a subject he loves; in Hockney’s case, the landscape of his beloved Yorkshire, in Marshall’s case, Black people, history, art and so on – and in both cases I can see that they’re big [both artists produce very big paintings, which is another rather dismaying aspect of contemporary art], bright and confident but… I just don’t like them.

And found myself thinking that this is anodyne, easy-on-the-eye, deeply reactionary, backward-looking anti-art, an art appropriate for an age which has lost any belief in the future and looks back to multiple pasts with a kind of crippling nostalgia, in both content and style.

Untitled (Porch Deck) by Kerry James Marshall (2014) Kravis Collection © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, London

Related reviews

Royal Academy reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on October 11, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in America, Art, Black art, Exhibition, Painting, Politics

Tagged 1968 Olympic Games, Abortion, Africa Revisited, African Americans, African diaspora, African Powers, Afrocentric movement, Alabama, American art, Anselm Kiefer, art, Autograph ABP, Basquiat American cultural imperialism, Ben Shahn, Birmingham, Black Americans, Black art, Black Arts Movement, black history, Black Is Beautiful, Black Lives Matter, Black Nationalism, Black Panthers, Black Power, Black Star, Black Star Line, Black style, Botswana, Charlie Kirk, Colette Hubert, David Hockney, De Style, defund the police, Donald Trump, Duccio, Edouard Manet, erotica, exhibition, Feminism, Garden Project, Georges Seurat, Gloria Smith, Goya, Gulf Stream, Hans Holbein, Harriet Tubman, Henri Rousseau, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Invisible Man, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, John Carlos, John F Kennedy, Julie Dash, Kerry James Marshall, Kerry James Marshall: The Histories, Knowledge and Wonder, Kongo, Labour Party, Léopold Senghor, LGBTQ+, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MAGA, Make America Great Again, Manet, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Mary Sibande, Mementos, Middle Passage, Miss Black America, New Figurativism, Niger-Delta/Future-Cosmos, nkisi nkondi, Omar Victor Diop, Otis Art Institute, Painting, Pan-African Flag, power figure, race, Ralph Ellison, Reform, Republican Party, Roe versus Wade, Royal Academy, Ruth Williams, School of Beauty School of Culture, Scipio Moorhead, Sean Pathasema, Senegal, Seretse Khama, Shaka Zulu, slave ship, slave trade, Slavery, Somerset House, Taylor Swift, the new figurativism, Titian, Tommie Smith, UNIA, Universal Negro Improvement Association, van Gogh, Venice Biennale, Vignettes, Voodoo, Wake, white queens of Africa, Wilfred Ukpong, William Tucker, Winslow Homer, woke, wokeness, Yorkshire Wolds, Yoruba, Zululand

Posted by Simon on October 11, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/10/11/kerry-james-marshall-the-histories-the-royal-academy/

Michael Craig-Martin @ the Royal Academy

What happens if a style of art is so accessible as to become almost transparent? That you can look at it and process and understand everything there is to see, with no hesitation or resistance? Where there are no barriers whatsoever to understanding the work, no hidden meaning to uncover, no secrets to decode, where what you see is exactly what you get?

Untitled (corkscrew) by Michael Craig-Martin (2014) © Michael Craig-Martin. Photo: Mike Bruce. Image courtesy of Gagosian

This is one of the questions raised by this massive and hugely enjoyable retrospective of the career of super-successful and instantly recognisable artist, Sir Michael Craig-Martin. As you can see by these examples, at a crucial turning point in the 1980s Craig-Martin stumbled across the fact that there was mileage in depicting common-or-garden everyday objects in the style of a Tintin cartoon i.e. with clear strong outlines, with no shading or inflection on the object itself, set against a pure plain background with no attempt at perspective or depth, with both object and background painted in single strong plain colours. What would happen then?

Common History: Conference by Michael Craig-Martin (1999) Courtesy Gagosian © Michael Craig-Martin. Image courtesy of Gagosian

Turns out what happens is that we realise we are surrounded everywhere we go – from waking in a bedroom, to pottering round the house, to commuting to an office – by objects so humdrum and everyday that nobody really pays attention to them. So why not make them stars of their own paintings?

Craig-Martin spent the first 20 years or more in the States and you can see the debt to Andy Warhol’s depiction of iconic consumer products like the Campbell’s soup cans or Coca Cola bottles in two ways: one is to consider the object in the abstract, devoid of setting and background, like a kind of designer’s diagram. The second is to bring out the genius of their design, by depicting them in such a pure form, concentrating just on lines and outlines, as to bring out the purity and clarity, the design intelligence which has gone into so many of the man-made things which surround us.

Craig-Martin’s paintings make everyday objects thrilling and so make everyday life thrilling.

Starting at the beginning

Born in 1941 (so he’s now 83) Craig-Martin attended art schools in Paris, America and London before starting to create works in the mid to late 1960s, hence the curators’ claim that this represents a summary of a 60-year-long career. Although he’s overwhelmingly known for the object paintings he has in fact worked in sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, printmaking and digital media, creating works that fuse elements of pop, minimalism and conceptual art.

Examples of all these media and approaches are here in what amounts to the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of Craig-Martin’s work ever held in the UK.

The show has a very straightforward chronological structure so room 1 displays his earliest works. They are heavily conceptual in that late-1960s way, in a way which reminded me of Yoko Ono i.e. you have to read the wall label to understand the concept the objects in front of you are fulfilling.

But you also notice that, right from the start, he was interested only in ready-made everyday objects like buckets, milk bottles and clipboards. For example ‘On the table’ which inverts your expectation that a table should be supported by four legs, whereas here it is supported by the objects which are on the table. But the real point is the everyday nature of the table, buckets and rope.

‘On the Table’ by Michael Craig-Martin (1970) Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art © Michael Craig-Martin. Image courtesy of Gagosian

I particularly liked ‘On the Shelf’ for the dramatic sense of jeopardy it creates, the visual cleverness of making the different amounts of water in each bottle create a continuous horizon line, but also because they’re Unigate milk bottles, which I remember from my boyhood.

Installation view of Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy showing ‘On the shelf’ (1970) (photo by the author)

Other conceptual gags

I think of conceptual art as gags: what’s the joke, what’s the trick, what’s the gimmick, what’s the concept? Apparently by the mid-1970s he felt he’d reached a dead end with the purely conceptual pieces and so reverted to drawing and painting on flat surfaces but using tricks or gags.

Thus a series of ‘Pictures within Pictures’. By inserting paintings found in London flea markets into the top-left corner of blank canvases, he recontextualised the paintings in a way that ‘completely changed their meaning without changing them at all’.

In 1975 Craig-Martin began a series of ‘drawings’ in white neon, including ‘Reading Light’. His neon works were the first in which he drew rather than used real objects. As with his earliest pieces, the forms he used were primarily objects of daily use.

Installation view of Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy showing ‘Reading light’ (1970) (photo by the author)

To quote the curators:

As part of his exploration of the basic elements of painting, Craig-Martin returned to the use of readymades by using Venetian blinds for this series. The artist’s use of these objects plays with considerations of colour, form, light and space, with their rectilinear shapes and solid colours suggesting a proximity to Abstract Expressionist colour-field painting. They also offer a metaphor for painting itself, framing a window onto the world.

Installation view of Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy showing ‘Venetian blinds’ (1976) (photo by the author)

The invention of outlines

The curators:

In a 1978 landmark exhibition held at the Rowan Gallery, London, Craig-Martin debuted his large-scale wall drawings. Influenced by Marcel Duchamp’s use of prefabricated objects and Andy Warhol’s focus on pop culture, Craig-Martin continued to incorporate recognisable manufactured items that were, in his words, “more famous than famous. So famous that you don’t even notice them.”

He began producing drawings of ubiquitous items, using crepe tape on transparent acetate or drafting film, which were then projected and traced on the wall, again using tape. Through his choice of media, Craig-Martin sought to remove the artist’s ‘hand’ so as to reflect the impersonal character of mass-produced objects.

Installation view of Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy showing ‘Reading with globe’ (1980), made from black tape attached to the bare wall (photo by the author)

This method also enabled him to layer several drawings of objects, leading to complex compositions. Craig-Martin chose a three-quarter view, showing each object slightly from above to emphasise its three-dimensionality.

In the early 1980s Craig-Martin began turning his drawings into wall-mounted sculptures, using thin metal rods. The linear simplicity of these drawings and sculptures became his hallmark and the foundation of his work to this day.

Installation view of Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy showing ‘Seafood’ (1980) (photo by the author)

Eliminating style, creating a style

The curators:

Craig-Martin ‘draws’ with a particular type of crepe tape invented in the 1960s for electronic circuitry. As with his wall drawings, it allows Craig-Martin to achieve his ideal of making the works ‘styleless’, eliminating all trace of the artist’s ‘hand’. Ironically, in attempting to make his work style-free he has created a style that is immediately recognisable as his own.

The big room

All this is by way of explanation and foreplay before you walk into the enormous third room of the exhibition and are overwhelmed by the wall painted a solid Craig-Martin-ish green on which are hung ten ginormous works of his mature, object outline and plain colour paintings.

Installation view of the big green room in Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy (photo by the author)

Beginning with two vibrantly coloured installations in 1993 and 1994, Craig-Martin’s output came to be dominated by site-specific painted installations. By the second half of the 1990s, he brought what these projects taught him to the more traditional medium of paint, which has remained at the heart of his practice ever since.

The artist’s use of the computer from the early 1990s marked a creative turning point for him. It freed him to alter his drawings’ size and scale dramatically and gave access to an infinite range of colours. By the mid-2000s, as the world shifted from analogue to digital, he introduced depictions of laptops, mobile phones and memory sticks into his images, showing them from the front rather than from an angle.

Around that time, Craig-Martin moved from painting on canvas to using aluminium panels, the smooth surface allowing him to create flatter drawings and more even areas of colour.

Installation view of two paintings in the big green room in Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy (photo by the author)

In around 2000, Craig-Martin began painting crowded groups of objects, packed in ambiguous spaces. Here, objects are placed so close together that the background disappears. The use of non-naturalistic colours and changes in scale disrupt our sense of familiarity with each object and invites the viewer, as Craig-Martin explains, “to pass that first stage of recognition to some kind of second step of actually looking, to consider how things exist in conjunction with each other”.

A classic example being ‘Eye of the storm’ on the left here, painted in 2003 (next to ‘Sharpener’, 2002).

Installation view of two paintings in the big green room in Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy showing ‘Cassette’ (2002), ‘Eye of the storm’ (2003) and ‘Sharpener’ (2002) (photo by the author)

Variations on a theme

OK, so you’ve invented a striking, instantly identifiable look and brand which can be applied to more or less every domestic man-made object in the world. You could spend the rest of your life turning out thousands of these. Or you could play with what you’ve discovered and experiment with different approaches. And so:

Alphabet paintings

In the early 2000s, Craig-Martin embarked on a series of works in which he explored the relationship between text and image. He developed a ‘visual alphabet’ in which every letter was linked to an object, albeit with no apparent connection. For example, an umbrella represented the letter A, while a wine glass represented B and so on.

Word paintings

In the ‘Word Paintings’ gigantic letters spell out abstract concepts, such as ‘art’ or ‘death. They are then overlaid with the drawings of the objects that correspond to each letter.

Installation view of ‘Death’ by Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy (photo by the author)

In this spirit is ‘Painting’ from 2010 in which the letters are painting in bold capitals while the ghostly outline of his characteristic objects (handcuffs, coke can, safety pin) hover transparently over them.

In these paintings, the letters are filled with solid colour while the objects are outlines. This juxtaposition invites us to contemplate the relationship between abstract concepts and tangible things in our lives.

Untitled (painting) by Michael Craig-Martin (2010) Courtesy Gagosian © Michael Craig-Martin. Photo: Dave Morgan. Image courtesy of Gagosian

Sex, death, love, painting – to be honest, I found these themes or topics pretty banal. Then again, maybe that’s the point. The point is there’s almost nothing behind these works, there are no hidden meanings and when Craig-Martin and the curators talk about ‘eternal themes’ they really mean the most obvious, clichéd themes imaginable. Maybe there banality and obviousness is deliberate.

The only ones with a bit of wit were a series of three paintings making an image rhyme with the word depicted – so a portrait of a pair of pliers with the word LIARS written over the top, a picture of a glove with the word LOVE. I found these just that little bit more interesting than ones with just ART or DEATH painted on them.

Installation view Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy showing ‘Liars/pliers’ and ‘Love/glove’ on the left, with the more boring ‘Art’ on the right (photo by the author)

Riddle paintings

Craig-Martin creates playful visual puns by connecting a word and an object through rhyme. The so-called ‘Split Paintings’ invite the viewer to imagine a connection between two different objects that have been cut in half and placed alongside one another.

Installation view of two split paintings, being ‘Sardine tin/ handcuff’ and ‘Watch/sandal’, both from 2007, by Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy (photo by the author)

Referencing modern art

Still want more variations? OK. Let’s apply this hugely distinctive outlines-and-bold-colours approach to classics of Western art. And so enormous Craig-Martin remixes of classics such as Édouard Manet’s ‘A Bar at the Folies-Bergère’, ‘Olympia’ and ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe’, Georges Seurat’s ‘Bathers at Asnières’ and Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas.

Installation view of Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy showing Craig-Martin’s version of Édouard Manet’s ‘A Bar at the Folies-Bergère’, made in 2023 (photo by the author)

Two thoughts: 1) Craig-Martin has cannily chosen paintings which are themselves very strong in outlining and lack the swirl and confusion of thousands of other subjects. They’re half way to being Craig-Martinesque before he gives them the treatment.

Installation view of Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy showing Craig-Martin’s version of Georges Seurat’s ‘Bathers at Asnières’, made in 2023 (photo by the author)

2) These interested me as being more or less the only works in the show which I actively didn’t like. It’s not spoofing old classics that’s the problem… it took a while for me to realise it’s because they feature people. At a stroke I realised absolutely every other image in the show is inanimate. Even when he does flowers, a bit later on, they are cut flowers, as you’d find them arranged in a vase. For some reason (for me, at any rate) Craig-Martined people just don’t work.

For inanimate household objects, his approach brings out unexpected beauty, especially of the design and outline of these goods, adding, amplifying, making them bigger and rather wonderful. When applied to people it has the opposite affect, of flattening them and so of draining them of meaning.

Doing Duchamp

As we’ve mentioned a number of times, right from the start of his career Craig-Martin has been interested in domestic objects which can also be seen as ‘ready-mades’. Ready-made was a term invented by Marcel Duchamp way back before the First World War for his habit of finding intriguing looking objects and simply placing them in art displays and calling them art. The most famous is the white porcelain urinal but there were others, wine racks and bicycle seats and whatnot.

Here, near the end of the show, are a set of works paying hommage to Duchamp and to his other inspiration, Andy Warhol, him of the soup cans and coke bottles. Both predecessors in finding immense beauty in carefully designed but mass produced everyday objects.

And so there’s a little set of works pastiching the design of Duchamp’s famous late work ‘the bride stripped bare’. I don’t think this adds very much to the original. More fun is a set of split prints this time small enough to fit into one group.

In these he’s chosen a set of iconic chair designs to go at the bottom of each print, accompanied by a classic piece of modern sculpture at the top. It’s a Where’s Wally challenge – can you identify the iconic objects in the top of each section? Top left are the bricks by Carl André, then a mobile by Alexander Calder, a ready-made wine rack by Marcel Duchamp then… it’s over to you!

Installation view of Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy showing ‘Art and Design’ (2012) (photo by the author)

Interestingly:

Of all the objects the artist has drawn, Craig-Martin considers chairs to be the most varied in terms of design, material and execution. He says, ‘the role of designers is to invent; the role of artists is to
observe.’

And what a brilliant observer he is, in his own highly stylised, totally accessible and yet inimitable way.

Installation view of Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy showing ‘Watch fragment’ (2015), ‘Zoom 2’ (2024), ‘Percussion’ (2022), ‘Strings’ (2022) (photo by the author)

Cosmos

From this big red room we walk into a big darkened room hosting Craig-Martin’s first fully immersive digital work of art. It uses more than 300 images of objects the artist has made over the past 45 years, making it a fitting work for a retrospective. The animated video has been developed with Daniel Jackson and the accompanying soundscape with Benji Fox. This is a very enjoyable experience, and the room was full of young people sitting and lying around and oohing and aahing at the pretty pictures and the varied modern ambient soundtrack. As was I.

Central Hall site-specific

Craig-Martin started creating room installations in 1993. The Royal Academy’s Central Hall has four big arched doorways and over each of them he has created an entertaining trademark image beautifully and amusingly mapping onto the arches. Very stylish, very amusing.

Installation view of Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy showing the ‘headphones’ round one of the archways in the Central Hall (photo by the author)

Merch

Obviously there’s a load of merchandise in the shop, ranging from the stylish catalogue to a world of postcards, posters, tote bags and whatnot. But my eye was caught by these polished steel reliefs, titled (go on, guess) ‘Umbrella’ and ‘Book’ both designed and produced this year in a limited edition of 40. You can buy them to attach to your wall and impress visitors and guess how much? £5,400 each including VAT. Bargain. There’s your family Christmas presents solved 🙂

Metal

In the courtyard

Before you enter the show and after you emerge, a little dazed from all this dayglo brightness, in the courtyard to the Royal Academy stands a group of what the curators call ‘monumental sculptures by your man. Except they’re not monumental, are they? They’re actually the opposite of everything the word ‘monument’ suggests. They’re made in steel and painted with his trademark basic colours and were made this year, specially for this show. Designed to pose among and Instagram or Tiktok or Facebook yourself. What fun. What larks. Is this the most innocent art ever?

‘Umbrella’ and ‘Safety pin’ by Michael Craig-Martin in the Royal Academy courtyard (photo by the author)

Related reviews

Transience by Michael Craig-Martin @ the Serpentine Gallery (November 2015)
Michael Craig-Martin’s tour of his exhibition, Transience @ the Serpentine Gallery (November 2015)
More Royal Academy reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on October 12, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Painting, Sculpture

Posted by Simon on October 12, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/10/12/michael-craig-martin-royal-academy/

Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism @ Dulwich Picture Gallery

This is a lovely exhibition, the first major UK exhibition of the leading French Impressionist Berthe Morisot’s work since 1950, but it’s also much more than that.

At the Ball by Berthe Morisot (1875) © Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

It is also a sustained comparison of Morisot’s work with the 18th century artists she knew and loved, which means that about a third of the paintings on display (about 15 out of a total 45 or so) are not by Morisot at all, but by eighteenth century classics, such as Watteau, Fragonard, Boucher and, surprisingly, the Brits Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough.

A collaboration

How did this come about? Well, the Musée Marmottan Monet is ‘the world’s leading research centre for the work of Berthe Morisot’ and it turns out that Morisot was very influenced by eighteenth century art – the French eighteenth century work of Fragonard and Watteau and Boucher, but also the English eighteenth century art which she saw on her honeymoon to England in 1875.

And Dulwich Picture Gallery houses a celebrated collection of 18th century painting. So this exhibition is by way of being a collaboration between these two galleries – The Musée Marmottan Monet providing nine key examples of Morisot’s work (along with prime examples from international collections) and these are then juxtaposed with French and English eighteenth century paintings from the Dulwich collection and elsewhere – with the aim of demonstrating Morisot’s debt to the previous century, both in subject matter and aspects of her painting style.

Berthe Morisot potted biography

Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot (1841 to 1895) was a French painter and a founding member of Impressionism. In 1864, she exhibited for the first time in the highly esteemed Salon de Paris. Her work was selected for exhibition in six subsequent Salons until, in 1874, she joined the ‘rejected’ Impressionists in the first of their own exhibitions, a show which included Cézanne, Degas, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley. Morisot went on to participate prominently in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886 (she missed one in 1878, having just given birth to her daughter, Julie). In 1894 the art critic Gustave Geffroy as one of ‘les trois grandes dames’ of Impressionism, alongside Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt.

Morisot was well connected. She came from an affluent family who secured her painting lessons, first copying works in the Louvre, and then as a pupil to landscape painter Camille Corot, who taught her to make swift outdoor sketches.

She married Eugène Manet, brother of her friend and colleague Édouard Manet. Her sister, Edma, was also a painter. The Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarmé was a family friend. She was a member of the haut bohemien.

Room one

The exhibition is in four rooms. The first room contains eight paintings, designed partly to give you an introduction to her light and airy style, but almost all of the captions also draw attention to the fact that, even at the time, many critics spotted her closeness in spirit to eighteenth century painting.

Installation view of Room 1 of ‘Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery

What they meant was that something in the lightness and airiness of her style, something in the domestic intimacy of her subjects (almost entirely women), and even in her use of shades of white and silver, related directly back to the mood and tone of French Rococo painting.

‘Woman at her Toilette’ by Berthe Morisot (1875 to 1880). Image courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago, Stickney Fund

Take ‘Woman at her Toilette’. To quote the curators:

With its silvery palette and fluent brushwork, the painting appears as ephemeral as a mirror reflection. Reviewing it at the Fifth Impressionist exhibition in 1880, art critic Paul Mantz noted: ‘everything floats, nothing is formulated […] there is here a finesse like that found in Fragonard.’

Or:

‘The genius of the eighteenth century, but not its debauchery, lives again in these familiar and select images, which are animated by a kind of airy voluptuousness.’ (Henri Focillon)

Or take the painting at the start of this review, ‘At the Ball’. The woman in evening dress is holding an eighteenth-century fan, opened to display a picture-within-the-picture, a scene of outdoor courtship known as a fête galante, a genre invented by the eighteenth-century artist Watteau. (The fan belonged to Morisot and is included in the exhibition so we can admire its civilised 18th century style.)

Morisot was fond of making this kind of allusion to eighteenth-century visual culture and the connection proved attractive to collectors. The curators tell us that Rococo art had gone into a long period of neglect after the French Revolution but that, in Morisot’s generation, it underwent a revival. Exhibitions reintroduced eighteenth-century French art to the public and the Louvre opened new rooms devoted to the era.

So when Renoir declared her ‘the last elegant and “feminine” artist that we have had since Fragonard’ and Paul Girard, reviewing her summary exhibition in 1896 commented that her work was ‘the eighteenth century modernised’, it showed that she was very much on trend, and it was reflected in her sales. ‘At the Ball’ was bought from the Second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876 by art collector Georges de Bellio, to complement his existing collection of eighteenth-century art, and many of her works were sold to collectors with similar tastes.

Room two

The second room has the highest proportion of non-Morisot to Morisot, 8 or so works by other artists to her four. This is the room where the curators show a number of eighteenth century works and explore Morisot’s relationship to them. This turns out to be quite complicated, in the sense that she had a multi-levelled relationship with the artists of the preceding century, which evolved over time.

Engaging the classics

In her late teens and early twenties she had undergone supervised training which consisted of copying classic works at the Louvre. Over 20 years later, she returned to the Louvre to engage with the classics, no longer copying them but translating them into her own, loose, rough, late-impressionist style.

In her forties and fifties, Morisot engaged directly with grand mythological paintings in museum collections, translating elements of their compositions into her own Impressionist language. Unlike the copies that formed part of her own early training, these are original interpretations by a confident, mature artist.

Thus the exhibition shows us (a photo of) Apollo revealing his divinity to the shepherdess Issé by the great Rococo painter François Boucher:

‘Apollo revealing his divinity to the shepherdess Issé’ by François Boucher (1750)

And then shows us Morisot’s interpretation or translation or reinvention of the two embracing young women at the bottom left of the painting into her own hazy, light, unfinished style:

‘Apollo revealing his divinity to the shepherdess Issé, after François Boucher’ by Berthe Morisot (1892) © Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

Now this raises all kinds of questions. On the face of it, I prefer the Boucher, as I consistently preferred all the 18h century originals to Morisot’s ‘interpretations’ when they were laid side by side. There’s more depth, more perspective, more (wonderful) painting technique, more detail and more visual pleasure to be had by the works by Fragonard, Boucher and Watteau on show here. They look and feel like the luxury objects they were intended to be.

And yet, Morisot’s work is doing something different: its looseness, its rough finish, its lack of interest in realistic perspective or twinkly detail are the result of something else. There’s a lot of experimentation going on in the technique, namely the long, blunt, wide brushstrokes which can be seen in the green reeds. (And it’s fascinating to learn that Monet very much liked this feature of Morisot’s later style, and went on to use a similar combination of short and longer sinewy brushstrokes and pastel colouring in his paintings of water lilies.)

But, arguably, there’s also a psychological dimension at play. In the Boucher work, the embracing women are yet more examples of the kind of sumptuous sensuality which floods the painting. In Morisot’s version they’re still naked, and we can see the outlines of their bodies, and yet these bodies are being dissolved into or drowned or clambered over by the powerful green reeds, powerful green reeds which, on the left, swirl and curve, leading the viewer’s eyes into a background which isn’t magically alluring but is more unadorned and bleak. Humanless and troubling.

The female gaze

Something similar can be said of another direct comparison the show gives us. First, look at this characteristically sensual and saucy painting by Fragonard of a woman reclining, all pink nipples and soft porn confection:

‘Young Woman Sleeping’ by François Boucher. Fondation Jacquemart-André – Institut de France, Domaine de Chaalis, Fontaine- Chaalis

Pretty obviously this painting, and this entire genre of painting, was designed to please and titillate its male audience with what T.S. Eliot called the ‘promise of pneumatic bliss’. And here is Morisot’s reinterpretation:

‘Resting’ by Berthe Morisot (1892) Private Collection

Same subject i.e. head and shoulders of a topless young woman reclining on an ornamental sofa or bed and yet…the Morisot comes from a different world, both artistically and psychologically. On the painterly level, the Bouchard buries the outlines of the subject in a realistic depiction i.e. you see more or less what you would see in real life, maybe a little Photoshopped and improved, but the outlines are soft a gentle.

On the contrary, the Morisot makes a point of emphasising outlines. Note the strong green lines shaping her hair, particularly as it tumbles onto her shoulder, the outline of her right shoulder against the pillow, the outlines of her right boob and forearm and left handing resting on it.

This painting isn’t interested in realism; it is making a statement about the artificiality of painting itself. In this respect, several of her later (this is from 1892) works reminded me of Gauguin, who had long ago ceased bothering about ‘realism’ and become interested in simplifying patterns and designs using heavy outlines, shapes which refer back to objects in the real world but take them a long way towards a kind of primitive abstraction.

Morisot isn’t Gauguin, but I thought some of her later works had moved just as far beyond impressionism, but in her own distinctive way. Another vivid example is ‘Julie Manet and her Greyhound Laertes’ from right at the end of her life (1893 – she died in 1895)

The straight-on face and the black, very loosely painted dress, reminded me of Edvard Munch more than Renoir or the other classic-era impressionists.

And this brings me to the other aspect of the work, which is its psychological impact. The Bouchard woman, a sleek airbrushed imago, has been painted for male viewing pleasure. The Morisot picture for other reasons altogether. As discussed, it is, on one level, an exercise in painterly technique, in exploring the world beyond pure realism. But on a psychological level it is just as complex. This woman doesn’t exist to give any man pleasure. This isn’t painted for the controlling male gaze. She comes across as a real individual, with idiosyncratic hair, colouring, non-male-fantasy boobs; like a painting of a woman who happens not to be wearing a top.

And, as well, there is some kind of power radiating from t, a sense of psychological depth. She reminds me of the heroines of late Victorian fiction, of Hardy or Zola or Henry James, of women whose every transient thought and emotion and response is annotated and analysed in vertiginous detail over three or four hundred pages novels.

There are a lot of paintings of women in the exhibition but, in my opinion, there is quite a big gulf between Morisot’s pretty-pretty, dressed-up Victorian women from the 1870s and 1880s, which are often variation on Renoir’s delightful dancing ladies – and these later depictions, which are something altogether different. They anticipate the much blunter honesty and psychological complexity of much early twentieth century portraiture.

Working in pastel

Room three also contains a useful contrast in the medium of pastel. From the 18th century we have a stunningly beautiful portrait of an unknown man by Jean-Baptiste Perronneau. This is the kind of work that has to be seen in the flesh to be appreciated. A reproduction like this flattens and smooths it out. In the flesh you can see the amazing amount of work that’s gone into the pastelwork, for example the way repeated layerings of broad blue crayon create a rich sensual impression like you could reach out and touch it, whereas, the wall label tells us, the intricate detail of his neckerchief was achieved with a fine-nibbed pen. It looks pretty good in this reproduction, but it’s a wonder to stand in front of.

Portrait of a Man, Thought to be Louis Journu, Known as Montagny by Jean-Baptiste Perronneau (1757 to 1758)

And so, placed next to it is a very good pastel portrait of her daughter Julie by Morisot:

Girl carrying a basket by Berthe Morisot (1891)

Again, the Morisot doesn’t have the astonishing finish or visual depth of the Perronneau. And yet, in its very sketchiness, it indicates an infinitely more modern consciousness, a proto-modern sensibility made of gaps and fragments, the strange ellipses and leaps of consciousness which modernist literature was about to start exploring about a decade later (I’m thinking about the earliest works of Kafka and Joyce).

The French eighteenth century

So, as mentioned above, the exhibition is worth visiting to see not just works by Morisot, but also (an admittedly small) number of works by French eighteenth century masters. There’s a pretty poor portrait of a young girl by Fragonard but a dazzling work by Watteau:

Les Plaisirs du bal by Antoine Watteau (1715 to 1717) Courtesy Dulwich Picture Gallery

Completely different in style from those guy’s frothy confections and commedia dell’arte whimsy, there’s a lovely piece by the master of eighteenth century realism, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The Scullery Maid, a characteristically humble domestic scene of a serving maid getting eggs out of a jug surrounded by beautifully depicted bowls and servant-level bric-a-brac.

This leads off in another direction because it turns out that Morisot’s sister, Edma, was also an artist and she is represented here by just one work, a beautiful landscape in the manner of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot who both girls had studied under. These are all delights.

Landscape by Edma Morisot (1860s) D. and J. Waller

The English connection

But back to the English. The exhibition explains that Morisot spent her honeymoon (with Manet’s brother, Eugène) on a trip which took in the joys of the Isle of Wight and then London. In London she saw the huge collection amassed by Sir Richard Wallace, Marquess of Hertford, which has been preserved for the nation as the Wallace Collection.

It was here that she was introduced to the works of 18th century English masters such as Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough and George Romney. The exhibition takes a little detour to explain the different styles of these three men, and discuss some key works by each of them, and then how their styles or motifs found their way into Morisot’s work.

Gainsborough is the most obviously close to Morisot because of his light, feathery, sketchy approach, which drew criticism from the more grand and finished Reynolds, yet was precisely the quality that attracted the quick, sketchy Frenchwoman.

Installation view of ‘Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery, setting ‘Mrs Mary Robinson’ by George Romney (1781, on the left) against ‘Winter, or Woman with a Muff’ by Berthe Morisot (1880)

Summary

Not all of Morisot’s work is great. The fourth and final room contains only works by her and I have to admit I didn’t like most of them.

Installation view of Room 4 of ‘Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery

Worthy depictions of domestic interiors, of her growing daughter, intimate portraits of women outside in the Bois de Boulogne or out in a boat or resting on divans (clearly a full-time occupation for many Victorian ladies), I often found their style either washed-out (several of the supposedly sweet and intimate studies of her daughter gave her such a yellow-pale face she looked like a corpse, for example, ‘Children with a basin‘) or so quick and sketchy as to feel amateurish.

Very good amateurish, but in many of her paintings the multiple clumsinesses wherever I looked just stopped me really enjoying them, giving in, surrendering, saying Yes.

By contrast, I was enraptured by almost all the eighteenth century works (except for the ghastly, ugly Fragonard in room one), by her sister’s one work, and also by the massive work by a painter I haven’t mentioned yet, her contemporary James Tissot (The Ball on Shipboard), included because Tissot moved from Paris to London and made a great success of his career, so much so that, on her honeymoon trip, Morisot seriously considered doing the same and moving to London.

Even the 18th century ‘cartoons’ or preliminary sketches for big works like by Boucher (‘Vulcan’s Forge) delighted and enchanted with a depth and finish and wonderful technique, in a way that most of the Morisot didn’t.

For this reason I hardly think it the scandal of the century that Morisot isn’t as well known as many of the other impressionists. To be blunt, I don’t think she’s as good. Or definitely not on the strength of the works presented here, a handful of which are really good, some are pretty good, and some are positively poor.

But then again, it depends on your aesthetic. Did my general preference for the 18th century works indicate that I’m a peasant, a man of poor taste, a liker of pretty pictures and chocolate box art, who doesn’t appreciate more demanding (and hardly that demanding) art?

Here’s a test. Here’s the bold, take-no-prisoners self-portrait which the curators open the show with.

I get that she’s a strong independent woman, and that this comes over not only in the directness of her gaze but in the super-confidence with which she didn’t finish it. The French have an expression, ‘je-m’en-foutisme’, which translates as ‘I don’t give a damn-ism’ (or ruder, four-letter equivalents).

So, is the scrappy finish and the lack of immediate visual appeal outweighed by the strength of character and psychological depth of a painting like this? Your answer will determine whether you like Morisot, or at least the selection of 30 or so Morisot paintings to be found in this small but incredibly stimulating and hugely enjoyable exhibition.

The merch

I’ve made the point in previous reviews of Impressionist exhibitions, but one reason for the ongoing popularity of the Impressionists is simply that their paintings transfer so well onto posters and mugs and tea towels and jigsaws and the whole world of merchandise. Painting which, large and in the flesh feel half finished and scrappy, when reduced to the size of a coffee cup or tea tray, suddenly look finished, light and attractive. Never ceases to amaze me. As you can see from the full range of Morisot merchandise on sale at the Dulwich Picture Gallery shop:

Berthe Morisot merchandise

The promotional video

Related reviews

Impressionists by Antonia Cunningham (2001)
The Private Lives of the Impressionists by Sue Roe (2006)
50 Women Artists You Should Know (2008)
Women, Art and Society by Whitney Chadwick (2012)

More Dulwich Picture Gallery reviews

Dulwich Picture Gallery reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on July 28, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Art, History, Painting

Tagged 18th century art, Apollo, art, Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot, Berthe Morisot, Boucher, Camille Corot, Cezanne, Chardin, Degas, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Edma Morisot, Edouard Manet, Edvard Munch, eighteenth century, Eugène Manet, exhibition, fête galante, female gaze, Fragonard, François Boucher, French Impressionism, French Revolution, Gauguin, George Romney, Georges de Bellio, Gustave Geffroy, Hardy, Henri Focillon, Henry James, Impressionism, James Tissot, je-m'en-foutisme, Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Joshua Reynolds, Joyce, Kafka, Louvre, male gaze, Manet, Marie Bracquemond, Marques of Hertford, Mary Cassatt, Monet, Musée Marmottan Monet, Painting, pastel, Paul Girard, Paul Mantz, Pissarro, Renoir, Rococo, Salon de Paris, Sir Richard Wallace, Sisley, soft porn, Stéphane Mallarmé, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Gainsborough, Victorian fiction, Wallace Collection, Watteau, Zola

Posted by Simon on July 28, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/07/28/berthe-morisot-shaping-impressionism-dulwich-picture-gallery/

Inventing Impressionism @ The National Gallery

The commentary, booklet, audioguide and wall panels all emphasised how revolutionary Impressionism was and what a complete break it represented with official French Salon art (all true enough – there was some dull pre-Impressionist art here to compare it with). But nothing really addressed the more obvious point: why is Impressionist art so incredibly popular today? Why are paintings, once ridiculed as the inept daubs of idiots and incompetents, now sold for tens of millions and plastered over countless chocolate box lids, calendars, posters etc?

Is it because: Impressionist art is colourful and naive, it doesn’t require a knowledge of classical myth or history, it doesn’t depict the intimidatingly rich and powerful, and it is mostly set in a generalised rural idyll – sunshine on fields of poppies and ponds full of lilies? Because it is an escape from anything solid, defined, intellectual or demanding?

Pierre-Auguste Renoir Two Sisters (On the Terrace), 1881 Oil on canvas 100.4 x 80.9 cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection 1933.455 © The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois

Paul Durand-Ruel

The show isn’t actually about Impressionism the art movement: it is about one man – the Paris art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. A pretty convincing case is made for him being the inventor or godfather of Impressionism, the man who bought up the early works of all the major Impressionists, as well as organising one-man shows for the artists, opening galleries in Paris and later, America, to showcase their works, paying the poorer ones salaries to allow them to work, whose efforts pretty much single-handedly enabled many of the painters to survive and flourish, who helped to create the narrative that Impressionism is the founding movement of Modern Art and who, along the way, invented many of the methods which underpin the modern art market. A really impressive achievement.

Thus the first room features large wall-size photos of Durand-Ruel’s living room in Paris, liberally hung with the great paintings he owned, and the curators have tried to reunite as many of these paintings as possible in order to recreate the scene. Similarly, the last room contains photos of the key 1905 Grafton exhibition in London and, again, the curators have tried to hang a lot of paintings from that exhibition in the same space.

This exhibition is not a history of the theory or practice of Impressionism. It is about how one man more than any other spotted it, identified it, funded and sustained it, marketed and promoted it, defined and made it what we think it is today.

Paul Durand-Ruel and the Modern Art Market

To quote the guide, when Durand-Ruel took over his father’s art dealership in 1865 he immediately began applying the techniques of high finance: he found backers and partners for his purchases, sought exclusivity deals, worked to push up prices at auction and brought his product before the public at carefully staged group and one-man shows.

For example, when he was introduced to Manet in his studio, he bought all the available paintings on the spot – 23 paintings in one day – for 35,000 francs (nearly 40 times the pay of the average French worker). By cornering the market (in admittedly unpopular artists) he realised he could leak them onto the market at inflated prices.

I didn’t like any of the Manets on display here – Moonlight at the Port of Bolougne or The Battle of the USS Kearsarge and the CSS Alabama. The audio commentary itself pointed out there is something wrong with the perspective and details of the still life The Salmon. Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862) looks, to me, cramped and badly composed, excessively black and, when you look closely, really badly painted.

Edouard Manet, Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862) The National Gallery, London, Sir Hugh Lane Bequest, 1917 © The National Gallery, London

The one-man show

In 1883 Durand-Ruel pioneered the idea of the one-man art show, staging a series of month-long, solo exhibitions by Boudin, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley. He ensured they were retrospectives i.e. showed the progression or evolution in the artist’s style, and accompanied the shows with advertising campaigns, provided images for the Press to print and publicise, and hosted lavish private views to encourage wealthy buyers.

Selling the ‘series’

This led naturally to collaboration with Monet on his ‘series’ paintings i.e. when Monet set about painting series of versions of the same subject. One of the first was the Poplar Series, 24 canvases of a set of poplar trees on the bend in the Epte river. In February 1892 Durand-Ruel displayed 15 of them in his gallery, facilitating their critical reception and their sale. Five of Monet’s poplar paintings are brought together here, in one of those recreations beloved of curators.

30 years ago I hitch-hiked to Rouen just to see the facade of the cathedral which Monet had painted in a series of paintings which I worshipped as a schoolboy. The paintings magically capture the imposing Gothic architecture in the differing light of different times of day. But now, all the poplar tree paintings in this exhibition left me cold. Either I’ve changed or this poplar series is just not as good. The reproduction below makes the source painting seem much smoother and more finished than it is in real life. In the flesh all the poplar paintings seemed to me lumpy and bumpy and unconvincing.

Claude Monet, Poplars in the Sun (1891) The National Museum of Western Art, Matsukata Collection, Tokyo P.1959-0152 © National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo

Apart from all the other factors – could the enduring popularity of the Impressionists have something to do with the fact that the reproductions – in posters, calendars, chocolate boxes, biscuit tin lids etc – render small and smooth and seamless images which, when seen in the flesh, and much much larger, are surprisingly pock-marked and blodgy?

Bad paintings

In fact, the show contains an unusually large number of bad paintings. I certainly learned a lot about Durand-Ruel and the birth of art marketing, but an unintended outcome of the show was to make me feel quite a lot of sympathy for the early critics of Impressionism. Quotes from these poor benighted souls are printed large on the walls and included in the wall panels for our derision: what philistines! How could they not recognise the shimmering wonders of Monet’s water lilies?

Well, because a lot of the recognised masterpieces of Impressionism weren’t created for another 10, 20 or 30 years after the critics wrote these words. All the critics could do was react to the paintings put in front of them in 1872, 1874, 1876 – and, as this exhibition conclusively proves, a lot of these were genuinely poor, in terms of composition and technique.

Even the audioguide admitted that at first glance Green Park, London by Claude Monet looks so bad it might have been painted by a child. Hanging Out The Laundry To Dry (1875) by Berthe Morisot: is this not an amaterush ‘daub’? I thought I was an unquestioning fan of Dégas – the show features the fabulous Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando and a number of so-so ballet studies – but this show revealed how many bad and awkward paintings he made, as well: Horses before the stands may be famous but I find it gawky and unappealing; and surely Peasant Girls Bathing In The Sea At Dusk is just really bad.

Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, Peasant Girls bathing in the Sea at Dusk (1869-75) Private Collection, Ireland © Photo courtesy of the owner

Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, Peasant Girls bathing in the Sea at Dusk (1869 to 1875) Private Collection, Ireland © Photo courtesy of the owner

The final room is dominated by a full length portrait of Eva Gonzalès, herself an artist, by Manet (1870). I’ve been spoilt by recently visiting exhibitions of portraits by John Singer Sargent and beautiful late-Victorian female portraiture at the Leighton House Museum – in comparison with those artists, I thought this was a poor painting

Nineteenth century France reviews

Nineteenth century France reviews

look at the face, the heart of any portrait, look at those bug eyes.

Nonetheless, Eva Gonzalès starred in a ground-breaking exhibition Durand-Ruel organised at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1905. It was curated with his usual entrepreneurial flair, arranged to tell the story of how the movement evolved from tentative early steps, then burst into maturity with masterpieces by Dégas, Morisot, Pissarro, Renoir et al.

The 1905 show had far-reaching influence in this country, helping to popularise the loose sunlit approach to subject matter and style, and establishing Impressionism as the forebear of all Modern Art. I know people who not only loathe Impressionism but hate the way its continuing dominance overshadows far more interesting developments which took place in other European countries, specifically Germany and Scandinavia.

Good paintings

I found a lot of the Impressionist works on display here surprisingly poor. Many of them really did look like the unfinished daubs contemporary critics castigated. But with around 80 paintings on show, there were, of course, plenty of others which are a joy to see.

I think Renoir emerged as the most consistent artist here: he crystallised his vision early on and thereafter poured forth an apparently limitless number of chocolate box people in sunny settings. His Parisians socialising in the open air, his portraits of smiling women and children, his dancing couples, all have an indisputable joie de vivre to them.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Dance at Bougival (1883) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Picture Fund © 2014 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Impressionism was about taking the train out of Paris to the still-unspoilt suburbs with newly-available tubes of ready-mixed oil paints, and painting in the open air, and so there are a lot of depictions of Paris’s suburbs, maybe touched with slight signs of industrialism, with railway bridges or distant factory chimneys. Not too much, though.

This work by Sisley, daub or not? Does the light airy sunlit feel compensate for the lack of finish and draughtsmanship? Does the blue sky compensate for the bridge looking wonky? I like clear lines and solid draughtsmanship so, for me, No. For other people, who respond to the overall feel and warm impression an image evokes in them, well, Yes.

Sisley, Alfred, The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne (1872) Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ittleson Jr., 1964 © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

And there were plenty of blurry landscapes by Pissarro or Monet, including several old favourites which are part of the National Gallery’s regular collection, a number depicting London during the artists’ exiles here to escape the catastrophic Franco-Prussian War (1870 to 1871). Easy-going nostalgic reminders of what London looked like in the halcyon fantasy-land these artists created and which so many of us hearken back to.

Camille Pissarro, The Avenue, Sydenham (1871) The National Gallery, London, Bought, 1984 © The National Gallery, London

What I liked

Ezra Pound said that, at the end of the day, all a critic can do is point at something and say ‘I like that’ and then attempt to explain why. I was surprised how many of the paintings on display here I actively disliked. It was a genuine revelation how poor some of the paintings by all these famous names turn out to be.

More or less the only work I really liked – that I could imagine having in my house and seeing every day – was St Paul’s from the Surrey Side by Charles-François Daubigny (1817 to 1878), a predecessor of the Impressionists. Not a blue-skied escapist landscape but the big bad city under no illusions. Below is a dark and rather misleading reproduction of it; in the flesh it felt deeper and more evocative. It looks forward to Whistler‘s later impressions of London.

Though blurry, though painted en plein air, it still has an underlying accuracy of draughtsmanship and confidence of line which is what I enjoy in art and found missing in so many of the other paintings on show here.

Charles-François Daubigny St Paul's from the Surrey Side (1871-3) Oil on canvasThe National Gallery, London Presented by friends of Mr. J.C.J. Drucker, 1912 © The National Gallery, London

Could the success of the Impressionists not only be down to the fact that their paintings reproduce very well across the range of products and channels the twentieth century invented – but that their rivals and predecessors, the official Salon artists’ works, reproduce very badly, often looking as dark and dingy as the misleading reproduction above?

Promotional video

Reviews

Nineteenth century France reviews

Nineteenth century France reviews

Reviews of other National Gallery exhibitions

More National Gallery reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on May 9, 2015 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, France

Tagged art, Camille Pissarro, Charles-François Daubigny, Claude Monet, Degas, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, exhibition, France, Impressionism, Inventing Impressionism, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, The National Gallery

Posted by Simon on May 9, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/05/09/inventing-impressionism-the-national-gallery/

French artists during the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune (1870 to 1871)

I have written elsewhere about:

These combined calamities seared the minds of a generation of Frenchmen and marked a watershed in the lives and careers of many of France’s most famous writers, artists and composers. Considering who and how and why is like taking a snapshot of an artistic generation, an X-ray of a nation’s artistic soul:

Victor Hugo (1802 to 1885)

Best-selling author of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862), Hugo had spent the Second Empire period (1852 to 1870) in exile in Jersey. Now he returned to be elected a member of the National Assembly, make impassioned speeches, write windy pamphlets and publish bombastic poems. When the Commune was declared, he wisely went back into exile (in Brussels) where he wrote the moving poem, Sur une barricade, on June 11, 1871.

Honoré Daumier (1808 to 1879)

Satirical cartoonist under the Second Empire, Daumier stayed in Paris throughout the siege and continued to publish bitter and highly political images. He was drafted onto Courbet’s Federation of Artists in September 1870, then onto the Commune’s Committee of Artists in April 1871, though never a Communard.

Appalled at the Heritage by Honore Daumier

Théophile Gautier (1811 to 1872)

An established poet and critic, Gautier made his way back to Paris upon hearing of the Prussian advance on the capital. He remained with his family there throughout the invasion and the aftermath of the Commune.

Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet (1819 to 1877)

A notorious radical and freethinker, Courbet was the hugely influential ‘Father of Realism’ in Art in France. He established a Federation of Artists when the Empire fell, and went on to set up a Committee of Artists under the Commune. Although he managed to save Paris’ art museums from looting mobs, Courbet was a moving force behind demolishing the Vendôme Column in the square of the same name. Once the Commune was crushed, Courbet was sentenced in September 1871 to six months in prison and a fine of 500 francs. When it was proposed to recreate the Vendôme Column Courbet was condemned to pay the exorbitant costs. He fled to Switzerland where he continued to paint, and died of liver disease just as the cost of the re-erection was settled as 323,091 francs. Surprisingly, he didn’t leave any paintings or sketches of the war or Commune.

Gustave Flaubert (1821 to 1880)

The most famous literary novelist of his day, during the Franco-Prussian War Flaubert’s home was occupied by Prussian soldiers and he suffered a nervous breakdown.

Maxime du Camp (1822 to 1894)

Literary journalist and travel writer, du Camp was elected a member of the French Academy in 1880 mainly due to his history of the Commune, Les Convulsions de Paris (1878 to 1880).

César-Auguste-Jean-Guillaume-Hubert Franck (1822 to 1890)

Organist and composer, Franck and his family suffered during the siege and Commune. Afterwards he was a leader of the movement to create a truly French art, an Ars Gallica which explains the tone of much of his music. In part this was a patriotic reaction against the heaviness of the music of the invader.

Camille Pissarro (1830 to 1903)

At the outbreak of war the painter Pissarro moved his family to Norwood, then a village on the southern edge of London. His early impressionist style did not do well but he met the Paris art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in London, who helped sell his art for the rest of his life. Durand-Ruel put him in touch with Monet, who was also in London during this period.

(In the spring of 2015 the National Gallery put on a blockbuster exhibition of Impressionist art as a tribute to Paul Durand-Ruel, the man who invented Impressionism.)

Monet and Pissarro both went to see the work of British landscape artists John Constable and JMW Turner, which confirmed their belief that their style of open air painting gave the truest depiction of light and atmosphere, an effect that couldn’t be achieved in the studio alone.

During his stay Pissarro painted scenes at Sydenham and Norwood at a time when they were semi-rural and had only just been connected to London by railways. Twelve oil paintings date from his stay including The Avenue, Sydenham (now in the London National Gallery), Norwood Under the Snow, and Lordship Lane Station.

The Avenue, Sydenham by Camille Pissarro

Pissarro is often credited with inventing Impressionism, the rough use of paint to capture plein air affects. He had produced some 1,500 paintings over the preceding 20 years, works which amounted to documentary evidence of the birth of Impressionism. But, tragically, when he returned to France after the Commune, Pissarro discovered that out of this huge oeuvre, only 40 had survived! The rest had been damaged or destroyed by the soldiers, who used them, among other things, as door mats or to wipe their boots with.

Back in Paris Pissarro got back in contact with the other artists of his generation – Cézanne, Monet, Manet, Renoir and Degas – and helped establish a collective called the ‘Société Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs’. In 1874 Pissarro was the driving force behind the group’s first Exhibition, at which the critics ridiculed them for their ‘impressionism’ – and the name stuck.

Edouard Manet (1832 to 1883)

Godfather of the Impressionists, the thirty-eight-year-old Manet was in Paris during the Prussian siege and conscripted to be a member of the National Guard. As soon as the siege ended (in January 1871) he left town. In his absence his friends added his name to the ‘Fédération des artistes’ of the Paris Commune but he stayed away from Paris until after the semaine sanglante. He published some harrowing sketches of scenes from the war.

Civil War by Edouard Manet

Edgar Dégas (1834 to 1917)

At the outbreak of the War Dégas enlisted in the National Guard, where his duties left him little time for painting.

Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns (1835 to 1921)

The organist and composer Saint-Saëns was relieved from fighting duty as a favourite of a relative of the Emperor Napoleon III. He fled to London when the Commune took power, as his fame and Society connections made him a possible target. Later that year he co-founded with Romain Bussine the ‘Société Nationale de Musique’ to promote a new and specifically French music. After the fall of the Commune, the Society premiered works by Fauré, César Franck, Édouard Lalo and Saint-Saëns himself, who became a powerful figure in shaping the future of French music.

Émile Zola (1840 to 1892)

Father of literary Realism, Zola published his only historical novel, Le Debacle, about the war, in 1892.

François-Auguste-René Rodin (1840 to 1917)

When the war started Rodin was called up for the National Guard but he was soon released due to his near-sightedness. At the time he was working as a decorative sculptor and, as work dwindled due to the war, he took up an offer of work in Belgium where he lived for the next six years. None of his work refers directly to either the war or Commune.

Claude Monet (1840 to 1926)

On the outbreak of the war Monet and his friend Pissarro fled to England. While there he studied the work of Constable and Turner and met the art dealer Durand-Ruel, who was to become one of the great champions of the Impressionists.

After the Commune had been suppressed (May 1871) Monet went to Holland for a spell, and then returned to France at the end of the year, settling in Argenteuil, a village on the Seine near Paris. The next year he painted Impression, Sunrise (depicting Le Havre) which was shown in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. When critics used the title to deride him for his ‘impressionism’, he and his colleagues adopted the term as the name for their movement.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 to 1919)

During the Commune some Communards found Renoir painting on the banks of the River Seine, thought he was a spy and were about to throw him into the river when one of the most bloodthirsty leaders of the Commune, Raoul Rigault, recognized Renoir as the man who had protected him on an earlier occasion. Rigault intervened and vouched for him. By this slender thread, Renoir was saved to go on to become one of the giants of Impressionism.

Paul Verlaine (1844 to 1896)

At the proclamation of the Third Republic the poet Verlaine joined the 160th battalion of the Garde Nationale, turning Communard on 18 March 1871. He became Head of the Press Bureau of the Central Committee of the Paris Commune. He escaped the deadly street fighting and went into hiding in the Pas-de-Calais. Verlaine returned to Paris in August 1871 and, in September, received the first letter from the boy poet Arthur Rimbaud with whom he was to have his passionate and ill-fated affair.

Gabriel Urbain Fauré (1845 to 1924)

On the outbreak of war Fauré volunteered for military service and saw action at Le Bourget, Champigny and Créteil, for which he was awarded a Croix de Guerre. During the Commune Fauré escaped to Rambouillet where one of his brothers lived, and then travelled to Switzerland, where he took up a teaching post. Though some of his colleagues – including Saint-Saëns, Gounod and Franck – produced elegies and patriotic odes affected by the events, Fauré’s compositions from this period don’t overtly reflect the conflict. However, according to his biographer, his music does acquire ‘a new sombreness, a dark-hued sense of tragedy…evident mainly in his songs of this period including L’Absent, Seule! and La Chanson du pêcheur.’

Guy de Maupassant (1850 to 1893)

On the outbreak of war, 19-year-old Maupassant abandoned his law studies to volunteer for the army. He served first as a private in the field, and was later transferred through his father’s intervention to the quartermaster corps. Many of the short stories he published throughout the 1880s describe brutal or haunting episodes in the war.

Related review

Nineteenth century France

2 Comments

by Simon on November 27, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Books, Classical music, European History, French literature, History, War

Posted by Simon on November 27, 2012

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2012/11/27/french-artists-during-the-franco-prussian-war-and-the-commune/

Search for:
Follow

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Email Address:

Join 744 other subscribers
Topics
Africa America Ancient history ancient Rome art book British Empire British Museum China Christianity Cicero Cold War colonialism comedy Communism drama Egypt English literature exhibition Feminism fiction First World War France Freud Germany Great War H.G. Wells history Hitler imperialism India Italy Julius Caesar literary criticism Literature London love murder narrative Nazis New York novel Oscar Wilde Painting Paris photography Play poetry Politics religion Roman Empire Rome Royal Academy Rudyard Kipling Russia Samuel Beckett Satire science fiction sculpture Second World War sex Shakespeare Sherlock Holmes short stories Slavery South Africa Spain Stalin suicide Surrealism Tate Britain theatre thriller Translation war
Categories
- Adventure (148)
- Africa (118)
- America (105)
- American literature (32)
- Ancient history (145)
- Anglo Saxon (24)
- Antisemitism (4)
- Archaeology (3)
- Architecture (27)
- Art (620)
- Australia (11)
- Autobiography (32)
- Biography (85)
- Biology (10)
- Black art (6)
- Books (779)
- British Empire (19)
- Buddhism (2)
- Cartoon (14)
- Chemistry (4)
- Childrens (22)
- China (15)
- Christianity (77)
- Classical music (20)
- Comedy (194)
- Communism (27)
- Concert (15)
- Contemporary classical music (21)
- Cosmology (4)
- Crime (32)
- Crusades (9)
- Design (7)
- Detective stories (70)
- drawing (5)
- English literature (182)
- Environment (9)
- Essays (31)
- European History (176)
- Evolution (4)
- Exhibition (585)
- fairy tale (3)
- Fantasy (32)
- Fashion (6)
- Feminism (48)
- Film (23)
- Flowers (4)
- France (64)
- French literature (54)
- German literature (4)
- Germany (26)
- Graphic novel (3)
- Great War (77)
- History (482)
- Holocaust (15)
- Horror (12)
- Illustration (13)
- imperialism (28)
- India (8)
- Irish literature (36)
- Islamic terrorism (8)
- Italy (4)
- Japan (18)
- Latin America (13)
- Latin literature (3)
- Law (4)
- Literary criticism (97)
- Literature (173)
- Marxism (1)
- Mathematics (6)
- Mexico (14)
- Middle Ages (72)
- Middle East (16)
- Museum (14)
- Music (1)
- Mythology (18)
- Nature (8)
- Noir (18)
- Novel (704)
- Novella (12)
- Old English (23)
- Opera (1)
- Painting (65)
- Philosophy (45)
- Photography (133)
- Play (130)
- Poetry (103)
- Politics (115)
- Prints (12)
- Psychoanalysis (19)
- Psychology (5)
- queer (1)
- Radio (3)
- Rock music (6)
- Russia (19)
- Russian literature (18)
- Saga (39)
- Satire (1)
- Science (29)
- Science Fiction (130)
- Sculpture (57)
- Second World War (111)
- Sex (42)
- Short stories (167)
- Slavery (48)
- Spain (2)
- Spy novel (71)
- Sweden (4)
- Theatre (141)
- Theology (4)
- Thriller (239)
- Tragedy (2)
- Translation (93)
- Travel writing (18)
- Turkey (3)
- TV (11)
- Uncategorized (11)
- Vietnam War (7)
- Walks (14)
- War (267)
- World War One (19)

Books & Boots

All posts tagged Edouard Manet

Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life @ the Courtauld Gallery

Everyday Americana

Thiebaud’s roots in graphic design

Thiebaud and Pop Art

Thiebaud and Abstract Expressionism

Thiebaud’s limited subject matter

American graffiti

Comparison with Manet

Drawings and etchings

Related links

Related reviews

Share this:

Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy

Kerry James Marshall

Exhibition structure

Gallery 1. The Academy

Gallery 2. Invisible Man

Gallery 3. The Painting of Modern Life 1

Gallery 4. Middle Passage

Gallery 6. Vignettes

Central Hall. Souvenirs

Lecture Room. The Painting of Modern Life 2

Gallery 7. Africa Revisited

Gallery 8. Wake / Gulf Stream

Gallery 9. Red Black Green

Pros

But do you actually like any of it?

1. Blackness

2. American cultural imperialism

a) American culture swamps and obliterates British culture

b) Importing American culture means importing American politics

3. The new figurativism

Conclusion

Coda: Kerry Marshall and David Hockney

Related links

Related reviews

Share this:

Michael Craig-Martin @ the Royal Academy

Starting at the beginning

Other conceptual gags

The invention of outlines

Eliminating style, creating a style

The big room

Variations on a theme

Alphabet paintings

Word paintings

Riddle paintings

Referencing modern art

Doing Duchamp

Cosmos

Central Hall site-specific

Merch

In the courtyard

Related links

Related reviews

Share this:

Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism @ Dulwich Picture Gallery

A collaboration

Berthe Morisot potted biography

Room one

Room two

Engaging the classics

The female gaze

Working in pastel

The French eighteenth century

The English connection

Summary

The merch

The promotional video

Related links

Related reviews

More Dulwich Picture Gallery reviews

Share this:

Inventing Impressionism @ The National Gallery

Popular

Paul Durand-Ruel

Paul Durand-Ruel and the Modern Art Market

The one-man show