All posts tagged Herbert Read

Linder: Danger Came Smiling @ the Hayward Gallery

Rewiring ideas of glamour and gender roles, Linder’s artworks engage in vibrant and powerful take-downs of male-oriented consumer culture.
(The official view)

Principle of Totality (Version I) by Linder (2012) detail © Linder

Linder and Mickalene

A word of explanation. The Hayward Gallery is currently hosting two exhibitions, one of the radical British feminist artist Linder, one of the radical Black queer American feminist artist, Mickalene Thomas. When I got there I mistakenly thought they shared the same main gallery space, with Mickalene downstairs and Linder upstairs. This was my mistake. Although you buy a joint ticket to both of them, the two exhibitions are completely distinct and you enter them by different doors. The Mickalene is situated in the Hayward’s main gallery with its huge rooms, while you enter the Linder by a different entrance into a series of smaller, more intimate rooms along the ground floor. This is a review of the Linder show. I’ve written a separate review of the Mickalene Thomas show.

Linder: Danger Came Smiling

It was 1976 and Linda Sterling, born in Liverpool in 1954, was coming to the end of her graphic design course at Manchester Polytechnic (now Manchester Metropolitan University) just as the pop culture storm of punk rock exploded like a bomb. It started in London with the Sex Pistols who were invited by founder members of the Buzzcocks, Howard Devoto and Pete Shelly, to come and play the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall. This they did, on a famous occasion, on June 4, 1976.

This gig is considered one of the most influential concerts of all time. Everybody who went on to become a name in the northern branch of punk claimed to have been there and had their ideas about not only music, but style and art, blown wide open. These included not only Buzzcock founders Devoto and Shelley but Morrissey (the Smiths) and the founding members of Joy Division.

Sterling was an instant adopter of the new, home-made, razor blade, torn t-shirts and aggressive attitude of the new movement, which chimed perfectly with her own style of satirical photomontage which she’d been developing on her course. Moving in the inner circles of the Manchester art-punk scene she was invited to create posters and flyers for Buzzcocks gigs and then the cover art of the band’s first single, Orgasm Addict. Here’s the song, with cobbled-together live footage.

And here’s Sterling’s iconic cover for the single.

Cover of Orgasm Addict by Linda Sterling

Notice anything? Yes, it’s a naked woman, one of the ‘depictions of nudity and images of a sexual nature’ which the Hayward thoughtfully warned us against. But it’s a naked woman who has had smiles from some glamour magazine tactfully pasted over her nipples and her head replaced by an iron.

You immediately realise that 1) this is what the professionals call photomontage and 2) it is a bitingly satirical feminist comment.

And this one image captures the artist’s entire style and worldview. By combining the sexy body with an everyday household appliance, Sterling is satirising contemporary stereotypes of women, whether the objectifying soft porn which was dominant in the 1970s or anodyne pictures of housewives in floral pinnies smiling at their husbands which filled a thousand Good Housekeeping-type magazines. And all using just a pile of glamour magazines, a ‘medical grade scalpel’ and some glue.

Here she is explaining her thinking.

‘At this point, men’s magazines were either DIY, cars or porn. Women’s magazines were fashion or domestic stuff. So, guess the common denominator – the female body. I took the female form from both sets of magazines and made these peculiar jigsaws highlighting these various cultural monstrosities that I felt there were at the time.’

It’s the same ‘Fuck off, sexist pigs’ attitude which drove Jill Posener to write her brilliant graffiti on the era’s sexist adverts, which were featured at Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt! exhibition.

Saw his head off by Jill Posener (1981)

Early on Sterling asked to be known by an art name or moniker, Linder, a slight adjustment to her given name. That’s how she’s referred to throughout the exhibition and how I’ll refer to her from now on.

Ludus

And inspired by all the boys getting up on stage, she set up her own punk band, Ludus, which ended up lasting for six years (1978 to 1984), playing numerous gigs, releasing half a dozen singles and two albums. They were produced by Linder’s boyfriend of the time, Howard Devoto who left The Buzzcocks to set up the much more art school band Magazine and, apparently, they influenced singer Morrissey, later of The Smiths, who remains one of the group’s most vocal fans.

Their most notorious moment came on 5 November 1982 when the band played the Haçienda club in Manchester and Linder came onstage wearing in a dress made from raw meat. Here’s their first album.

Notice the spare, black-and-white artwork? Linder did that. And can you spot the glossy lips and teeth cut out from a fashion magazine, same kind of lipstick smile as in the Buzzcocks’ cover, and in the Principle of Totality montage at the top of this review. Recurring motifs.

Feminist rebellion

Anyway, that, in a nutshell, is Linder’s brand. Take howlingly clichéd (and dated) images of women– either housewives or ‘glamour’ models – and subject them to photomontage transformation in the name of radical thingummy in order to subvert the blah blah. All very feminist rebellion, but also very funny, consistently signalling what curators call her ‘outrageous sense of humour’. And, in quite a few of them, surreally beautiful.

For nearly 50 years she’s been ploughing more or less the same furrow. There are forays into other forms. Three of the rooms have large installations. There’s a series of documentary photos of gay nightclubs from the early years. There’s some massive colour photos she did of herself and a friend covered in multi-coloured gloop from more recently. There are display cases (or ‘vitrines’) showing her early work on punk record covers. So there’s some variety, yes. But the core of this exhibition is four moderate-sized rooms containing about 80 A4-sized works in anonymous frames, almost all of them black and white photomontages.

Installation view of Linder: Danger Came Smiling @ the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

Room 1. Grammar (35 works)

As you walk into Room 1 you are struck by a couple of big pieces before you get to the much smaller works on the walls. These are the massive blow-up of the artist (above) and hiding behind it, an installation of five mannequin heads adorned with BDSM masks hanging from the ceiling against a backdrop of gauze curtains. One of the visitor assistants told me the mannequin heads were part of her final year show at Manchester Poly though the wall labels didn’t confirm this. No doubt it’s meant to subvert something or other but this kind of thing is available at any branch of Victoria’s Secret or Lovehoney, crops up in kinky movies or is even mentioned and joked about in TV shows these days. Any sexy-shocking impact long ago vanished. Now the sensory vibe they give off is calm and peaceful.

On the walls are several series of satirical photomontages. Unfortunately for the purposes of identification, most of them are labelled ‘Untitled’. One series that is named is ‘Pretty Girls’ from 1977.

Pretty Girl 1 by Linder (1977)

As the curators explain:

Cyborg-like, with consumer products for heads, the ‘pretty girls’ in this series are the same woman, who has been photographed performing classic ‘pin-up’ poses in a simple domestic scene. The eroticised coffee pot, electric fire, record player and other items masking the model’s face remind us of how sexual desire is manipulated by advertising and redirected towards consumption. Masking the model’s facial expressions, these montaged elements remove any semblance of individuality and expose how the pornographic figure is likewise presented as a passive consumer object.

And:

Inspired by recent feminist writings, Linder’s work from the [late 1970s and ’80s] undermined traditional gendered associations of domesticity, romance and desire. Using a surgical scalpel, Linder cut out images of female bodies found in women’s magazines, romantic novels and soft pornography, and recombined them in photomontages that derail the usually dominant role of the male gaze in consumer culture, subverting it with satirical effect.

‘Derailing the male gaze.’ ‘Subverting consumer culture.’ Where have we heard these phrases before? In scores and scores of other feminist exhibitions, in fact in pretty much every exhibition by a woman artist I’ve ever been to, which is why my brain glazes over when I read them. They have become as meaningless as Boris Johnson promising to level up the country or Rachel Reeves promising to kick start economic growth or Donald Trump promising to make America great again. Yeah, right.

Feminism, especially dated white feminism like this, is one more jargon, one more discourse among so many competing for our attention in the endless mediascape, in the vast public Imaginary, in the sea of discourses which long ago reached saturation point, and now reproduce themselves endlessly in a place beyond satire or meaning.

If it’s never occurred to you before that women’s bodies in our consumer capitalist culture are used to sell things, that glamour magazines and pornography exploit women’s bodies, that a vast amount of the public imagery of women objectifies, sexualises and submits women to the dictates of the male gaze, then this show will come as a terrible shock to you.

If, on the other hand, you grew up with, or have been exposed to, the feminist critique of society for decades, then your main reaction will be exasperated boredom with the wall captions and their repetitive claims that this arts subverts, derails and interrogates anything at all.

Instead, in my view, Linder’s works are primarily justified by their style and humour. Lots of them made me smile. In a world hurtling towards destruction that is an important achievement. Far more important than repeating tired old political slogans, no matter how relevant they remain today (because they will be relevant forever, and so eventually become threadbare and completely ineffective). Whereas waspish humour and stylish design endures and pleases. This one made me laugh out loud.

Untitled by Linder (1977). Collection of Paul Stolper, London

To be fair this is probably the crudest, most explicit image in the show. The reversioning of gay porn photos are fairly naughty, but most of the other images are much more low-key and inoffensive than this.

White feminism

Incidentally, in case you think I made up the phrase ‘white feminism’, I didn’t, I’m citing a well-known concept in feminist theory.

Small

After the vast scale of the Mickalene Thomas work next door, you can’t help being struck by the relatively small scale of almost all the pieces (bar the three installations and a couple of images blown up to wall size). Why so small? Linder herself addresses the issue.

‘I often ponder the most minimal interruption that I can create to totally change the meaning of the original image. It’s non-monumental, intimate work made deliberately to draw the viewer in closer.’

So it’s a conscious decision to exercise her disconcerting cutting and pasting on an ‘intimate’ scale. It forces you to lean in and notice the details. It’s not quite the art of the miniature but some of the finer detailing is getting there.

Vitrine

Here’s one of the glass cases displaying her design work during the Ludus period along with photos of the band performing.

Vitrine showing art work for, and photos of, Ludus. Photo by the author

Room 2. Glamour (34 works)

Each of the rooms is assigned a one-word title, which is then explained in the wall label. Thus Glamour:

In the 18th century, to ‘cast a glamour’ meant to cast a spell of enchantment. Growing up in the northwest of England in the 1950s and 1960s, Linder was drawn to the ‘incredibly glamorous Liverpool women’ around her. Although their dress code of ‘lipstick and a bullet bra’ didn’t align with the aesthetics of feminist empowerment, their glamorous transformation of gender and social class had a subversive power.

You know the office cliché, ‘When everything’s a priority, then nothing’s a priority’. Well, when everything is subversive, nothing is subversive. The fact that all contemporary art is routinely described as ‘subversive’ goes a long way to explaining why it has no effect whatsoever.

This room contains her photographs of working class drag clubs in 1970s Manchester, small, black and white. And portraits capturing her own physical transformation through bodybuilding in the early 1980s. There’s a screen hanging from the ceiling on which is projected a film of her working out at the gym, rather dark and grainy. Maybe a woman working out at the gym is subverting something.

More interestingly, ‘glamour’ is also the euphemistic term coined by British pornographer Harrison Marks in the late 1950s to describe a certain kind of relatively restrained soft porn magazine. So there are sets of humorous photomontages where Linder’s taken classic ‘glamour’ shots and pasted on household appliances etc. The curators claim that these reveal ‘the misogynistic portrayal of women as passive objects of male pleasure’, as if anyone seeing a soft porn magazine wasn’t capable of working that out for themselves.

In Linder’s hands, these photographs are transformed with an empowered glamour of their own.

The ‘Magnitudes of Performance’ series applies the same technique to gay pornographic photographs from the 1970s, pasting over rude photos of men with advertising images of expensive watches, taps and furniture. these are predominantly funny but I can see that there is an interest in playing with the ‘erotic charge’ of these photos i.e. by stopping them being straightforward gay porn, seeing just how much deformation the images can stand and still have an erotic aura.

Across time, queer identities and their meanings shift, and so too does the reading of these erotically charged works.

This feels like the kind of thing the Surrealists were doing in the 1930s, most famously Salvador Dali, taking very sexy images and deforming and weirding them to invent a new type of erotic charge, maybe.

There’s a wall of selfies of the artist, in striking early ’80s styling interspersed with meaningful texts.

Installation view of Linder: Danger Came Smiling @ the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

There’s a series titled ‘Sordide Sentimentale’ which involve her holding, embracing, standing next to etc what looks like a styrofoam mannequin or part of one. Note the classic styling and framing which have a strong 1930s vibe, and which along with the slightly sepia colouring of the print, remind me of Man Ray.

Installation view of Linder: Danger Came Smiling @ the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

This is emphasised by the Art and Industry series which pastes onto athletic bodies taken from a folio published in Germany in 1939 images of industrial objects taken from art historian Herbert Read’s book, ‘Art and Industry: The Principles of Industrial Design’ from 1934. The juxtaposition of idealised bodies with sleek industrial products evokes (and undermines?) imagery associated with the fascist aesthetics of 1930s Germany.

Room 3. Seduction (26)

The next room has more small photomontages but is dominated by huge colour photos of herself and a friend covered in multicoloured gloop, and a big multi-fabric sculpture in the middle of the room.

Installation view of Linder: Danger Came Smiling @ the Hayward Gallery showing ‘Ritual Action of the Ancestors’ (2011). Photo by the author

Apparently:

Inspired by her discovery of a fetish magazine dedicated to the practice of ‘sploshing’, in which people are covered in food and everyday household substances, this series of photographs documents Linder and a friend as they smear their bodies with food and liquids. With mouths open in ambivalent expressions of pleasure or disgust, their sticky embrace blurs the boundaries between the self and other.

It often feels like art curators have to shoehorn gender and queerness into every aspect of every exhibition. They are beyond buzzwords, they are the sine qua non of contemporary art, they are as ubiquitous as gravity. It often feels like no contemporary art at all can be without its queer aspect or interpretation. Thus these swirling paint works:

In a series of photographs, which call to mind the messy, fetish practice of ‘sploshing,’ Linder and a friend are covered in the kind of liquid food that can be spoonfed. Brightly coloured, it transforms them into living paintings, queering the legacy of machismo Abstract Expressionism via the kitchen.

Do those gloop paintings ‘queer the legacy of machismo Abstract Expressionism’ for you?

Back on a small scale there’s a series of montages where she’s taken her standard glamour model base and pasted big flowers onto them. As a keen gardener I liked these a lot, funny and floral. The most vivid example is in the form of a lightbox i.e. on the surface of a box containing a light which illuminate the image, titled ‘The Goddess Who Lives in the Mind’ from as recently as 2020.

Installation view of Linder: Danger Came Smiling @ the Hayward Gallery showing ‘The Goddess Who Lives in the Mind’ (2020). Photo by the author

One of my favourite series is titled ‘Post-mortem’ and takes photographs of women from the book ‘Barron of the Ballet’ (1950) and splices them with b&w images of dissected marine specimens. These really feel like photomontages from the 1930s, the kind of thing Eileen Agar did.

Installation view of Linder: Danger Came Smiling @ the Hayward Gallery showing some of the ‘Post Mortem’ series. Photo by the author

Room 4. Cut (21)

In filmmaking, ‘cut’ marks the end of a shot or a scene. The term is taken from the physical cut made to celluloid film as it is spliced together in the editing room; a process not unlike Linder’s approach to working with printed images. For Linder the cut is a transformational act. By severing images from their original contexts she makes cuts in time, revealing links between the past and present.

In recent years Linder has, apparently, been exploring classic myths and fairy stories, notably the Cinderella story. The works in this room are far more complicated than previous images, with a multiplicity of coloured images elaborately interwoven, for example The Pool of Life.

Installation view of Linder: Danger Came Smiling @ the Hayward Gallery showing ‘The Pool of Life’ (2021). Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Of this image the curators write:

‘The Pool of Life’ is a repository for the diverse motifs Linder has used across decades of her work, including lips, eyes, flowers and animals. She describes the work as a love letter to her home city, especially the women and the queer communities that shaped her identity and visual language. The work is named after psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s 1927 essay of the same title, including a stirring dream in which it was revealed to him that Liverpool – a city he had never visited, nor ever would – was the centre of the universe, through which all lifeblood flowed.

Unexpectedly there’s a series of photomontages starting with photos of the stone busts of Roman leaders or emperors onto which have been pasted random and bizarre elements. But the room is dominated by another installation. These three figures are titled ‘The Ultimate Form’ from 2013. They are in fact ballet costumes designed by Richard Nicoll.

Installation view of Linder: Danger Came Smiling @ the Hayward Gallery showing ‘The Ultimate Form’ (2013). Photo by the author

The curators:

These three costumes – The Groom, The Bride, The Youth – were worn by characters in Linder’s 2013 ballet, ‘The Ultimate Form’. Linder created the work with choreographer Kenneth Tindall from Northern Ballet and fashion designer Richard Nicoll. Inspired by Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture ‘The Family of Man’ (1970), the work signified a shift in Linder’s role from performer to orchestrator. In these costumes, fabric, texture and pattern are used to create, as Nicoll commented, ‘a surreal sense of visual trickery,’ which Linder saw as an extension of the body and of the collaging of the self in real-time.

Summary

Linder is in her 70s now and this is her first London retrospective, so I suppose it’s about bloody time. Writing this review has made me realise there was in fact more diversity and range in the show than I picked up when I was there.

Although the curators make the usual claims for her subverting the patriarchy and overthrowing societal norms and queering the thingummy, I think this kind of discourse – the wall labels – have the very negative effect of making it seems if she’s just been doing the same old thing for fifty years. They narrow everything down to the same old issues around gender and identity. You can see why my (gay) friend Andrew has given up reading the wall labels at exhibitions. He just concentrates on what you can see.

And when you do that – look without reading – you realise that there’s more variety here than the harping on about gender suggests. Putting the big installations and the wall-sized photos to one side for a moment, you could see all the cut & paste works as an exploration of what’s possible within the genre of photomontage.

Pasting household appliances on the heads of glamour models, taking cheesy 1960s images of happy couples and pasting cookers and hoovers on them, yes that has the polemical humour of many feminist artists of the time, such as Jill Posener who I mentioned at the start.

But pasting lovely colour flowers over the bums and willies of men from gay porn magazines, is obviously taking it somewhere else. That’s not subverting the patriarchy, that’s exploring a different kind of effect. The curators, as always, want to restrict it to gender and queerness, but if you can escape from their narrow interpretation and really look at these works, you can see something else is going on, something strange which will mean different things to different viewers.

And the ones I liked the best, the sea creature ones – taking her standard b&w glamour photos but combining them with marine animals, shells and so on – that has definitely become a Surrealist move, which is more about the borders between the human and animal worlds than gender or sex.

And the bigger, much more colourful and complicated images in the final room, which are named after myths and fairy tales, they have departed altogether from feminist polemic into something much more interesting about history, culture and imagery.

Installation view of Linder: Danger Came Smiling @ the Hayward Gallery showing ‘The Bardo of Dharmata’ (2024). Poor quality photo by the author

‘The Bardo of Dharmata’ is bang up to date, from just last year, inventive and fun but at the same time it feels deeply nostalgic. The colour tones of presumably an old 1960s celebrity magazine, combines with the equally dated-looking photos of porcelain statuettes (?) of parrots to feel deeply dated and nostalgic.

Maybe the entire form of photomontage, the genre itself, is starting to feel old, dating (as I’ve indicated) to the collage mentality of Dada and Surrealism, back to the 1930s or ’20s, with Linder’s most forceful work in the form dating from the ’70s and ’80s.

Even the polemically feminist montages, all those glamour models with irons on their heads, deep down don’t subvert anything but trigger nostalgia for a simpler, more confident era, when you really could subvert public imagery.

Advice

So my advice is ignore the wall labels and respond to each image, picture, painting and installation as openly as possible. You’ll still get the feminist hit the early works clearly aim for but I’m just suggesting that, as she explores her chosen medium (the small and intimate photomontage) she uncovers a load of other aesthetic effects which are harder to name and categorise and should be enjoyed for their own indeterminate and strange impacts.

Related links

Related reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on March 16, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Feminism, Photography
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on March 16, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/03/16/linder-danger-came-smiling-the-hayward-gallery/

Lucian Freud: The Self-portraits @ the Royal Academy

‘By the turn of the millennium, Freud was widely acknowledged to be Britain’s greatest living painter.’
(Alex Branczik, Head of Contemporary Art for Sotheby’s Europe)

Contrary to the implications of the title, this exhibition does not include all of Lucian Freud’s self-portraits, nowhere near. Given that Freud was interested in self portraiture throughout his long career, the selection here is a only relatively small percentage. Also, contrary to the title, the exhibition also includes a number of portraits not of himself, in fact arguably the best room is the one devoted to portraits of other people.

Lucian and me

I didn’t use to like Lucian Freud. I associate him with Frank Auerbach and the other dreary, depressing post-war British artists, a kind of visual equivalent of Harold Pinter, who I was force-fed at school. Their dreary, depressed, rainy English miserabilism nearly put me off contemporary art and literature for life.

But this exhibition made me change my mind (a bit) for two reasons:

1. It is told in a straightforward chronological order, which allows us to see the quite remarkable evolution of his style over 60 years of painting. Stories are always interesting and, by stopping to investigate each stage along his journey, the exhibition does a good job of making his development interesting.

2. By luck I got into conversation with another visitor who happened to be an amateur painter and she, for the first time, made me understand how his journey had been one of technique. It dawned on me that, to use a cliché, he may be a painter’s painter. Certainly the last couple of rooms make you think that his paintings may well depict men or women, naked or clothed, including himself, as subjects – but the real subject is the adventure of painting itself.

And this made me go back and really examine the technique of the paintings in the last few rooms and come to respect, in fact to marvel, at the complex painterly effects of his mature style.

A brief outline

Freud was born in Berlin in 1922 and fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1933, coming to London. He held his first solo show as early as 1944. In the late 1940s he chose to make portraiture the focus of his practice.

Drawing

Drawing was central to Freud’s style from the late 30s through to the early 1950s. His drawings from this era are strikingly different from the later work. This is a rare opportunity to see a whole roomful of them together and they come from a different world. They have a graphic sharpness, an economy of line which makes them very like cartoons. Look at the careful shading in the ears and on the cheek, and the extraordinary attention he’s devoted to each individual hair. Critic Herbert Read called him ‘the Ingres of Existentialism’.

Startled Man: Self-portrait (1948) by Lucian Freud © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images

This clear style lent itself to illustration so it’s no surprise to learn that he illustrated a number of books, several of which are in a display case here, Cards of Identity by Nigel Dennis (1955) and Two Plays and a Preface by Nigel Dennis (1958) and that Startled Man was one of five illustrations for a novella by William Sansmon titled The Equilibriad (1948).

Apart from the strikingly clean graphic style, what’s obvious is how performative these pictures are – the male head in them is always striking a pose, adopting an attitude, sometimes with props like a feather, in one dramatic case posing as Actaeon for a book on Greek myths.

Back to painting

Around the mid-1950s Freud turned his attention from drawing to painting and for a period of seven years or so stopped drawing altogether. Initially he painted sitting down using fine brushes. This enabled a smooth finished graphic style, very much in line with the clean defined outlines of his drawings, and the people in them share the same slightly distorted, rather frog-like faces as many of the drawings, more like caricatures than paintings.

Hotel Bedroom by Lucian Freud (1954) © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images

The wall label tells us that Freud associated with fellow painters Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon. Like him they were figurative painters working against the grain of Abstract Expressionism and, later on, ignoring experimental and conceptual art. That, in a sentence, explains precisely why I don’t like them.

Bigger brushes

Anyway, Bacon inspired Freud to switch from soft sable-hair brushes to hog’s hair brushes which are capable of carrying more paint. This, it seems, was the physical, technical spur for the decisive change in his style. Between the late 1950s and mid-1960s his painting left behind the draughtsmanlike precision, so close to drawing, of paintings like Hotel Bedroom, and became far looser, a matter of large looser brushstrokes, which create more angular images, images made out of clashing planes and angles with an almost modernist feel about them.

Man’s Head (Self-portrait III) by Lucian Freud (1963) © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images

This is the third of three self-portraits which the exhibition reunites for the first time since they were shown together in 1963. You can see how the interest is now in structure more than likeness. There is no attempt to create a realistic background (his studio or a bedroom) which is now a plain matt surface. Similarly, his face has its familiar long, rather hawkish look, but here transformed into a semi-abstract mask.

Watercolours

Surprisingly, in 1961 he took up watercolours alongside paint. Both were ways of escaping from the linearity of pen-and-ink drawing. The exhibition includes a number of watercolours where he is obviously exploring the effect of broad washes, and the dynamic contrast that creates with more sharply defined faces.

In both types of work he drops the symbols and props which had abounded in the drawings. The subject matter is simpler and in a way starker. The paintings still feel pregnant with meaning but their force or charge is achieved by different means, purely by the arrangement of brushstrokes.

Mirrors

Mirrors have been used by artists since time immemorial to paint accurate self-portraits, and countless artists have gone one step further to include mirrors in their paintings to highlight the artifice and paradox or making images which, on one level, claim to be true, claim to be reality, but on another, are patent artifice.

Quite a few Freud self portraits include mirrors or depict himself from angles clearly designed to bring out the mirrorly artifice. When you learn that he did this increasingly from the mid-1960s it makes a kind of sense; you can see the echo of similar experiments going on in in contemporary film posters and album covers. This instance using a mirror on or near the floor is striking enough, but made disturbing by the inclusion of small portraits of two of his children perched ‘outside’ the main frame.

Reflection with Two Children (Self-portrait) by Lucian Freud (1965) © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images

In the studio

The penultimate room is the best and it’s the one which has no self portraits. Instead there’s two massive portraits of naked women on sofas, a huge standing male nude (his son, Freddy), and an eerie portrait of two fully clothed Irish gentlemen.

The wall label emphasises that by the 1970s Freud had established a definite approach. He painted people he had some kind of connection with, himself, some members of his family and friends, and sometimes people he met through chance encounters but who held a special visual importance for him.

They are all painted indoors, in his studios, not outside, not at their houses or in a neutral space. They are always in the familiar space of his studio, whose props and space and dimensions he knows inside out. This allowed him to focus on what he stated in interviews was his aim, which was to recreate in paint a physical presence.

So the obvious things about the paintings you see as you walk into this room of late works is that:

  • they’re huge, compared to what came before
  • they’re of other people
  • they’re full length instead of face portraits
  • they’re (mostly) naked

But, among this surfeit of impressions, maybe the most striking is the extraordinary poses and postures he has put his naked subjects in. In his mature works, this became his trademark – the rather tortured and certainly uncomfortable poses of naked women, which creates an uncomfortable, unsettling psychological affect on the viewer.

Naked Portrait with Reflection by Lucian Freud (1980)

What is going on? Is he torturing and exploiting these naked women, demonstrating his male power, as feminist critics have it? Or is he twisting their bodies round to create symbols of his personal unhappiness or anguish, as psychological critics might have it? Or had he stumbled across a new kind of motif, which he realised he could make uniquely his own, a ‘look’ which he could use to consolidate his ‘brand’ in the highly competitive London art market, as a Marxist critic might have it? (It is rather staggering to learn that this painting fetched over £11 million at auction in 2008. God knows what it’s worth now.)

Cremnitz white

But the wall label draws attention another, more technical feature of his painting from this period.

In 1975 he began using Cremnitz white, a heavy paint which, when mixed with other paints, creates a thick granular affect. Armed with this information, look again at the sprawling nude above. Look at the white highlights on her body. Two things:

1. Identifying the area of pure white prompts you to look closely at how they relate to the other colours around them. Obviously there’s a lot of pink but, when you look closely, there’s a lot of yellow and, looking more closely, brown and grey and even green. In fact, the more you look, the more entranced you become by the interplay of colours which make up her flesh, a panoply of creams and ochres and bistre tones.

It dawns on you that maybe Freud posed his naked women (and men, he painted a lot of naked men, too) in this contorted sprawling style and lying down rather than sitting up, because this way he exposes the maximum amount of flesh. Maybe these distorted poses have nothing to do with misogynist exploitation or twisted sexuality or psychological symbolism. Maybe they simply create the largest possible expanse of human flesh for him to paint.

2. Go up close, right up to the painting, and what becomes strikingly obvious is the immensely contoured, nubbly, grainy nature of the surface of the work. It is as if someone has thrown small gravel or stones onto the surface which have got embedded in the paint. It is immensely grainy and rubbly and tactile.

Here’s a close-up of the shadow along the right-hand side of the model’s body. You can see:

1. the lumps and bobbles of solid matter in the paint of the darker shadow near the middle of the image

2. the grooves of the thick brushstrokes moving up out of that dark patch to form her tummy or, at the bottom left, the long smooth but very visible and ridged strokes which create her thigh

3. the tremendous variety of colours and tints: granted, they’re all from the same tonal range of brown: but when you look closely you can see the extraordinary dynamism and interplay of shades. There’s barely a square inch of the same colour, but a continual variety, and a tremendous interest and even excitement created by the plastic, three-dimensional, raised and very tactile way different areas of colours stroke and swadge and brush, and daub and paste and are modelled and placed over and against each other.

Detail from Naked Portrait with Reflection by Lucian Freud (1980)

As I mentioned above, this was partly the result of chatting to the painter I met at the show. It was her enthusiastic description of Freud as a painter as a handler of paint, as the creator of such drama on the canvas, which made me go back and look at these last paintings in more detail.

Same thing can be seen in the other big nude in the room, Flora with Blue Toenails. Armed with this new way of seeing, what I noticed about this painting were 1. that the surface is so granular and lumpy you can see it even in a reproduction 2. the striking difference in timbre between her light torso and her much darker, more shaded legs. The keynote seemed to me to be grey. Follow the lines of grey. A solid line of grey goes from her cleavage, down her sternum and snakes around the top of her tummy almost creating a circle, where it almost joins to another long serpent of the same grey which snakes across her left thigh and curls round at her knee before reappearing across her right shin.

Flora with Blue Toe Nails by Lucian Freud (2000 to 2001)

My point is that, by this stage I was seeing these compositions as adventures in paint, as incredibly complex interplays of an astonishing range of colours, applied in a thick dense impasto, with heavy brushstrokes and entire regions raised and nubbled with grains and lumps of solid matter.

Here’s a close-up of Flora’s elbow, as transformed by Freud’s painterly prestidigitation. I found it quite thrilling to step right up to the painting and examine small areas in great detail, revelling in the adventures of the tones and surfaces – look at the myriad colours intermingling in the broad horizontal strokes at the top of her forearm, it’s almost like a rainbow, the multi-levelled mixing of colours is so advanced. And all this combined with the gnarly gritty, deliberately granular surface.

Detail of Flora with Blue Toe Nails by Lucian Freud (2000 to 2001)

Which meant that by the time I entered the final room, a collection of self-portraits from his final years, I wasn’t at all interested in either the biographical or supposedly psychological elements to them (‘ruthlessly honest, apparently) but instead was riveted by the extraordinarily vibrant, confident, sweeping, dashing painterliness of the things.

Here’s a medium close-up of the 1985 work, Reflection (Self portrait) which is a prime example of his thickly-painted and complex technique. Note the green – green blodges either side of his nose and the pouches under his eyes.

Detail of Reflection (Self portrait) by Lucian Freud (1985)

I became irrationally fascinated by the patterned edge to the image, to his shoulders which is presumably created by a spatula of some kind to model the border between the figure and the background, and which created the kind of crimping effect you see around the edge of pies.

Detail of Reflection (Self portrait) by Lucian Freud (1985)

But everywhere you look in the painting you see the same supremely confident use of paint, applied in apparently slapdash thick strokes and in a blather and combo of colours which seems almost chaotic when seen from really close up…

Detail of Reflection (Self portrait) by Lucian Freud (1985)

… but you only have to step back a few paces to see how these thick, spattered applications meld, at the ideal viewing distance, into extremely powerful, and even haunting, images.

Reflection (Self-portrait) by Lucian Freud (1985) © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images

So I’m still not sure that I particularly like Lucian Freud’s paintings, but now, thanks to this handy exhibition, I have a much better grasp of the shape of his career, and a completely different way of seeing and conceptualising his paintings – not as the grim and dreary products of a troubled claustrophobe with dubious psychosexual issues, but as thrilling and masterly exercises in painterly technique.

I am not very interested in him as a painter of portraits per se – I couldn’t care less about the various marriages or children which the wall labels tell us about. But this exhibition did help me see how Freud really was one of the greatest painters of human flesh who ever put brush to canvas.

Related links

More Royal Academy reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on January 6, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Painting
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on January 6, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/01/06/lucian-freud-self-portraits-royal-academy/

Being Human: An exhibition of modern sculpture @ Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

‘Can sculpture capture what it is to be human?’ That is the question posed at the beginning of this small but varied and high-quality exhibition at the Bristol Art Gallery.

Spread over two floors, Being Human shows a selection of very different twentieth century sculptors (and a brace of film-makers) have conceived, worked, shaped and reproduced the human body.

At the traditional end of the spectrum, there are female nudes such as Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s Small female torso (1910). Wearing its Greek origins on its (armless) sleeves, the hair braided like a statue of Aphrodite, looking demurely down, her diaphragm and belly button nicely defined, the nipples oddly burnished as if generations of gallery goers have touched them for good luck or other purposes.

La Jeunesse by Robert Wlerick (1935)

Whereas only a few yards away, and well on the way to the abstract end of the spectrum, is Ken Armitage’s Moon Figure of 1948. This was my favourite piece in the second room, although a moment’s reflection suggests it is less a bold leap forward into modernity than an appropriation of Cycladic art from around 3,000 BC – even down to the crossed arms, which feature in so many really ancient Greek statues.

Moon Figure by Kenneth Armitage (1948)

More thoroughly abstract were Yee Soo Kyung’s Translated vases number 8 of 2012. Yee has smashed up ceramics into fragments which she then reassembles using the traditional art of kintsugi, visible repairs in gold, to create something which is only vestigially ‘human’ at all in form.

In the first room is maybe the best, or my favourite piece, from the exhibition, Help by Bernard Meadows. It’s from as long ago as 1966, and is one of a series Meadows began to make in the mid-60s expressing ‘human fear and anxiety’. The idea is that crushed sphere is crying for help, and that the piece pays tribute to the harrowing existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. Does it, though? If you hadn’t read all that, might you not mistake it for a bit of sculptural fun by a jokey modern artist like Anish Kapoor?

Help by Bernard Meadows (1966) Tate

The wall labels tell us that at the core of the exhibition is a set of works associated with the so-called ‘Geometry of Fear’ school of British sculptors. According to the Tate website:

Geometry of Fear was a term coined by the critic Herbert Read in 1952 to describe the work of a group of young British sculptors characterised by tortured, battered or blasted looking human, or sometimes animal figures. 

Read used the phrase in a review of the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale of that year. The British contribution was an exhibition of the work of the group of young sculptors that had emerged immediately after the Second World War in the wake of the older Henry Moore. Their work, and that of Moore at that time, was characterised by spiky, alien-looking twisted and tortured figures.

They were executed in pitted bronze or welded metal and vividly expressed a range of states of mind and emotions related to the anxieties and fears of the post-war period. The artists were:

  • Robert Adams
  • Kenneth Armitage
  • Reg Butler
  • Lynn Chadwick
  • Geoffrey Clarke
  • Bernard Meadows
  • Eduardo Paolozzi
  • William Turnbull

Of their work Read wrote:

These new images belong to the iconography of despair, or of defiance; and the more innocent the artist, the more effectively he transmits the collective guilt. Here are images of flight, or ragged claws ‘scuttling across the floors of silent seas’, of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear.

Possibly the most ominous figure here is one of Elizabeth Frink’s many space-age, sculpted heads, brooding and minatory.

Prisoner by Elisabeth Frink (1988)

To quote the wall label:

As a child in the Second World War, Elisabeth Frink witnessed falling planes and burning soldiers in the airfield near where she lived. On a holiday in Devon she had hidden in the bushes to avoid getting caught in the crossfire of a battle. These visions haunted her sculpture which examines the human capacity for cruelty. She was taught by Bernard Meadows, one of the postwar ‘Geometry of Fear’ artists. Frink added pity to their earlier generation’s images of alienation. Prisoner has a hypnotic vulnerability.

Maybe all this angst is true of half a dozen of the works on show here, but there are plenty of other utterly angst-free enjoyments of the physical heft and thews of the human body conceived as a big solid object in space.

Thus there is nothing particularly fearful about Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s bust of Horace Brodzky. Brodzky was an artist and critic, and Gaudier-Brzeska made the work as he was falling under the influence of – or influencing – the pre-war London movement known as Vorticism, which was much fascinated by planes and lines and angular shapes, cubes and squares.

Horace Brodzky by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1913, cast 1956)

And what could be more prosaic than a sculpture of a woman bending over to dry her feet, which combines a posture from degas with the clunky clayiness of Rodin’s sticky fingers.

Woman Drying her Feet by Hubert Dalwood (1955)

And the curators astonished me by singling out as one of the most sexy or erotic statues, this exercise in elongation by Reg Butler, one of the geometry of fear sculptors who didn’t let his existentialist alienation stop him from producing numerous sculptures of naked or nearly naked girls.

Girl by Reg Butler (1953 to 1954)

An example of post-war deformation, influenced by Alberto Giacometti’s walking stick people, her head worryingly disappearing into a blunt dollop, her bulemic pre-pubescent body scrawny with malnutrition… but sexy? Not to my mind.

Featured sculptures

Drawings

Films

Two films are included. What have they got to do with sculpture? Nothing whatsoever, that I can make out. A film is a film is a film, although they are both about ‘the body’.

Conclusion

Curators have to come up with themes and ideas for exhibitions, and ‘twentieth century sculptures of the human body’ is a reasonable enough theme – although it is odd to include a couple of very average drawings, and some completely off-the-wall videos into the mix.

But then its quirkiness is, maybe, the appeal of this small-ish exhibition. Coherence is over-rated. The very fact that the pieces are so disconnected and random creates more space for the visitor to wander around them and relate to each one individually, trying to figure out which ones you like, and why.

And, incidentally, hints at the extraordinary explosion in ways of seeing and conceiving and making art which occurred in the twentieth century and which this tiny but intriguing selection represents.

Related links

Other Bristol reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on November 26, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Sculpture
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on November 26, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/11/26/being-human-modern-sculpture-bristol-art-gallery/

The Bauhaus and Britain @ Tate Britain

This one-room FREE display at Tate Britain celebrated the centenary of the opening of the Bauhaus School of Art and Design in Germany in 1919 with a display showing the interaction between Bauhaus ideas and exponents, and their followers and collaborators in Britain.

The Bauhaus aimed to promote modern art for a modern world and to demonstrate the practical use of all the arts to improve society. As part of this goal it set out to integrate disciplines including the fine arts, architecture, craft, graphic design and photography.

During its 14 year existence an astonishing array of some of the most creative 20th century artists, sculptors, designers, architects and photographers lived and taught and made wonderful things at the school’s Weimar campus.

K VII (1922) by László Moholy-Nagy. Tate

As soon as they came to power in 1933 the Nazis, who not incorrectly saw the Bauhaus as a hotbed of radicalism, shut it down. Many artists associated with the school came to Britain in search of safety and work and British artists with similar interests to those of the Bauhaus welcomed their émigré colleagues. Many key Bauhaus figures went on to the United States, opening the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937, but some remained in Britain, and this exhibition focuses on a) those who stayed b) the British periods of those who stayed for a year or two before moving on.

Ball, Plane and Hole (1936) by Dame Barbara Hepworth

So it is that the exhibition interleaved works produced by both Bauhaus and British artists and designers across a characteristically wide range of media. I counted:

Paintings by Ben Nicholson, László Moholy-Nagy, John Stephenson, Alastair Morton artistic director of Edinburgh Weavers who commissioned work from Nicholson.

Watercolours by Grete Marks.

Sculptures by Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo, who settled permanently in London and became a leading figure in the development of abstract art in Britain.

Atea service by Grete Marks and a teapot by Naum Slutzky.

Ceramics such as the vase by Grete Marks.

Carpets by Ben Nicholson.

Fabrics by Ben Nicholson.

Furniture i.e. streamlined modern chairs by Marcel Breuer.

A bakelite radio set designed by Wells Coates.

Photos of modernist blocks of flats (Kensal House, Kensal Rise) by Edith Tudor-Hart, and portraits by Lucia Moholy-Nagy.

Architecture Kensal House designed by Elizabeth Denby with architect Maxwell Fry, who had been English partner to Bauhaus director Walter Gropius during his sojourn in England 1934 to 1937.

A selection of jewellery, namely brooches, necklaces and rings – by goldsmith, industrial designer and master craftsman Naum Slutzky.

Dove brooch by Naum Slutzky

And books. There are several display cases showing old magazines from the 1930s by such earnest advocates of modernism as Sir Herbert Read, the dustjacket of whose 1934 book Art and Industry was designed by Bauhaus-trained Herbert Bayer. Read went on to try and create an inter-disciplinary art & design college in Edinburgh.

There’s a rare copy of The New Architecture and The Bauhaus by the Bauhaus’s founding director, Walter Gropius, published in 1937, one of the first books about the school in English. And of the 1939 Pelican Special A Hundred Years of Photography by Lucia Moholy-Nagy, László’s photographer wife.

Another display case shows magazine articles written by some of these artists, alongside personal photos of, for example, the Nicholsons at home, and postcards from Moholy-Nagy to the Nicholsons.

Ben Nicholson always features prominently in these exhibitions as one of the 1930s British artists who experimented most extensively with abstract and geometric shapes, in both painting and small sculptures and (as here) a carpet and fabrics.

I don’t quite know why, but he’s never lit my candle at all – I’ve always thought of him as a poor British cousin of the far more exciting and innovative Europeans. Here’s a typical piece of Nicholsonia. Its heart’s in the right place but… for some reason it leaves me cold…

Sculpture (c.1936) by Ben Nicholson. Tate

Nicholson lived in North London with his partner Barbara Hepworth (whose work I’ve always found much more interesting). They befriended their art historian neighbour Read among other arty types, and a number of the Bauhaus exiles settled in North London near them, forming quite an artistic colony, including exiles like Bauhaus-trained Marcel Breuer who designed book covers, tables and chairs, some of which are in the exhibition.

B9 table by Marcel Breuer (1927)

The exhibition even includes an entertaining film – Lobsters! It was co-directed by Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy, who was commissioned to work on the film with English director John Mathias. While in Britain Moholy-Nagy took on short-term roles in photography, film and commercial design. He designed ads for London Transport and collaborated on this short film depicting fishermen on the Sussex coast. The surprising angles and close-ups are attributed to Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhaus sensibility but I personally was more struck by the plummy tones of the commentary and the jolly score by Arthur Benjamin.

After a while I noticed that almost all the objects on display are owned by Tate, and it occurred to the cynic in me that the Bauhaus centenary was probably an opportunity for the gallery to dust off some of these rather dowdy antiques and given them an airing.

I’m not criticising. The insight just helped to explain why most of the exhibits were only so-so, or included sort-of interesting postcards and magazines, but lacked any real killer exhibits.

That said, not choosing to go to town on the centenary but limiting the celebration to a modest and FREE display made it in some ways feel much more relaxed and casual and accessible than it might have been.

Related links

Other Weimar Germany-related reviews

Art and culture

History

More Tate Britain reviews

1 Comment
by Simon on November 22, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Germany
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on November 22, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/11/22/the-bauhaus-and-britain-tate-britain/