All posts tagged Ingres

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love @ the Hayward Gallery

Mickalene and Linder

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 Mickalene Thomas show. I’ve written a separate review of the Linder show.

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love

‘The central place of my work, and my art, is from a loving space’

This is an outstanding exhibition, I heartily recommend it. Mickelene Thomas’s paintings, collages, photomontages, videos and installations start big and become huge, filling the cavernous spaces at the Hayward Gallery with bold colours, delirious patterns, glitter and glamour. And then there’s a soundtrack, a continual loop of chilled soul and jazz classics drifting through the gallery which makes the whole thing a lovely Saturday morning experience. And, for me personally, I got chatting to several of the (female) visitor assistants who answered my questions, drew my attention to all kinds of details, and significantly deepened my understanding and enjoyment of the show (see below).

Afro Goddess Looking Forward by Mickalene Thomas (2015) © Mickalene Thomas

A reproduction like this gives no sense of the scale of the original, which is nearly 3 yards wide and 2 yards high, completely filling a gallery wall, towering over you and, as you get closer, enfolding in its bright, warm, welcoming designs.

Theory or beauty, issues or love

Born in 1971, Thomas is a Black, queer woman and proud as hell of it. This is catnip to the world of straight white women curators who write lots of wall captions claiming that her work subverts all the usual stereotypes (gender, ethnicity, identity), questions social norms, interrogates the blah blah blah. Thomas is well aware of this, and freely draws on the tenets of Black feminist and queer theory. In fact the title of the exhibition derives from bell hooks’ 2000 book ‘All About Love: New Visions’. Thus every wall label sounds like this:

Thomas work challenges societal norms and provides a powerful counter-narrative to mainstream depictions of beauty and identity…

It may well do all of that, and you can certainly immerse yourself in a critical theory-level response to her art – but what that style of writing doesn’t convey is how beautiful her work is. It’s big and bold and stunning and full of LIFE, full of lovely details and full of LOVE. Don’t need no theory to understand that.

Mickalene Thomas biography

From her Wikipedia article:

Mickalene Thomas (born January 28, 1971) is a contemporary African-American visual artist best known as a painter of complex works using rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Thomas’s collage work is inspired from popular art histories and movements, including Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, the Harlem Renaissance, and selected works by the Afro-British painter Chris Ofili. Her work draws from Western art history, pop art, and visual culture to examine ideas around femininity, beauty, race, sexuality, and gender.

From the press release:

Thomas is a trailblazer of portraiture and collage, widely renowned for her large-scale paintings of Black women posed against boldly patterned backgrounds embellished with rhinestones. As an artist who fearlessly transcends creative boundaries, her artworks have also adorned album covers (Solange’s EP True, 2013) and emblazoned fashion runways (Dior, 2023).

Love, leisure, and joy

All true, but much nearer the point is the first sentence of the first big wall label:

Mickalene Thomas’s art is an exploration of love, leisure, and joy.

This is certainly the keynote for the works on the ground floor of this two-floor exhibition. They are big and bold and depict friends and lovers and family in a candid, open, vivid and delightful way. Here’s a portrait of her beloved mother, a former fashion model named Sandra Bush, fondly known as Mama Bush.

Mama Bush: (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher by Mickalene Thomas (2009) © Mickalene Thomas

Now clearly half a dozen things are going on in this piece so let’s try to unpick them one by one.

Family

Thomas’s paintings depict family, friends and (women) lovers.

‘My gaze is the gaze of a Black woman unapologetically loving other Black women.’

There are some installations based on her childhood home (see below). As you read about this in the wall labels, as you see the sweet furnishings of the family rooms, as your heart rate goes down to match the smooth jazz soundtrack. It all creates a sense of warmth and love.

Based on photos

Thomas’s creative process begins by photographing her muses in a variety of sets created in her Brooklyn studio. These photos then form the basis of paintings in oil, acrylic and enamel paint which are inlaid with lustrous multi-coloured rhinestones. Originally chosen by the artist as affordable substitutes for oil paints, these materials have since become her signature.

Fabrics

After I’d got over the size, and the bold design and colour, and the use of shiny rhinestones, I began to notice the role of fabric and fabric-style patterning in the works. The figures are almost secondary to the dazzling collage of fabrics of starkly clashing colours and designs.

Installation view of Mickalene Thomas ‘All About Love’. ‘Din avec la main dans le miroir et jupe rouge’ (2023). Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

The overall effect is dramatic but each of the works repays going up close to enjoy the detail of each of these fabrics.

Detail from ‘Naughty Girls Need Love Too’ (2009) by Mickalene Thomas in ‘All About Love’ at the Hayward Gallery

As mentioned above, the wall labels overflow with references to queer Black theory, and yet the exhibition can, sort of, be considered an adventure among fabrics. My wife knits, sews, crochets and is fascinated by fabrics and yarns and so, quite oblivious to all the critical theory, spent ages looking very closely at all these fabric designs.

Collage

According to the Tate website:

Collage describes both the technique and the resulting work of art in which pieces of paper, photographs, fabric and other ephemera are arranged and stuck down onto a supporting surface.

Quite clearly, then, the pictures are massive examples of collage in which the photos of friends and family form just the base layer over which she drapes patterned fabrics, cuts and rearranges imagery using the papier collé technique, and studs them with patterns of glittering rhinestones.

‘Collage is how I create form and composition. It’s a way to edit, disrupt, and dismantle – creating a space that is complex, by deconstructing the depth of the field of illusion.’

The wall labels reference a number of influences and even I could see the legacy of Henri Matisse’s cutouts in the more seaweed-shaped designs. But there are plenty of other influences including the Black woman artist Faith Ringgold, whose work we recently saw at the Serpentine Gallery.

The male gaze

‘My gaze is the gaze of a Black woman unapologetically loving other Black women.’

Before we move on to the other rooms, let’s address an issue which cropped up in the opening rooms with their enormous portraits, not least because it is mentioned ten or more times in the wall labels, our old friend The Male Gaze.

This concept crops up in more or less every exhibition about or which includes women artists. It is a standard accompaniment to any women’s art which includes depictions of female figures.

The male gaze was first articulated by British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, so it’s 50 years old this year. According to the Wikipedia page:

The male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world in the visual arts and in literature from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer… thus reinforcing a patriarchal visual narrative.

With the explosion of feminist and critical theory over the past 50 years, the male gaze is now detected in every medium whenever women are portrayed, in not just classical painting, but advertising, films and TV, social media, all forms of literature, you name it.

I get it and I agree with it. What I don’t understand so readily is how all these paintings of scantily-clad young women, generally exposing their breasts, can be said to subvert the male gaze. Surely – without wanting to – they cater to it.

Portrait of Marie by Mickalene Thomas (2015) © Mickalene Thomas

Now one of the reasons I enjoyed my trip so much was because I got into conversations with several of the (female) visitor assistants, who were extremely knowledgeable and very perceptive. I benefited a lot from their insights.

One of these visitor assistants was giving periodic tours of the exhibition. When she’d finished, genuinely puzzled, I asked her how lots of images of scantily-clad, attractive young women with their boobs out was meant to subvert the male gaze. Speaking as a heterosexual male, they seem to me to encourage the male gaze by playing up to every expectation of women as a) beautiful b) lounging on sofas and beds c) half dressed. The visitor assistant made the following three points:

1. Thomas starts a lot of her works with photographs then paints and assembles collages of materials over them. The relevance of this is that her sitters only pose for a few hours i.e. not for days and days on end. I.e. the relationship between artist is less hierarchical, less dominating and demanding.

2. This lack of a male-female power imbalance extends to collaboration. After discussing a backdrop and a pose and what to wear, the subjects then help decide which poses and shots are best, which ones they feel most comfortable with. So, again, less of a male master and woman servant relationship, more a collaboration of equals, and of women equals.

3. She went on to make the rather more obvious point how so much Western art of the beautiful-woman-half-dressed-on-a-divan type was commissioned by rich men to adorn their walls. Many examples of rich men commissioning titillating images of scantily-clad young women to decorate their homes, or even assemble semi-pornographic collections of them in private rooms, where they could be enjoyed (i.e. leched over) by other creepy men. In all of this the woman model had no control whatsoever but was paid a pittance to be converted into a sex object.

Now I understood all these points, and they deepened my understanding of the concept of the male gaze and how women artists depicting the female body operate in a different atmosphere with different aims, and of Thomas’s anti-male gaze ethic. But the assistant didn’t really address my core point which is… they’re still images of half-naked women. To paraphrase Taylor Swift, ‘Male gazers will malely gaze’ and how, in practical terms, are you gong to stop them?

But maybe I’m misunderstanding. Maybe this isn’t about changing society as a whole (stopping men malely gazing) and a much more limited term, an art world term, restricted to describing certain works by certain women artists.

Women at rest

Another apparent contradiction intrigued me. At several points the commentary deprecated the old male art tradition of showing women lying around on beds or divans, thus creating a sexualised boudoir atmosphere for easily aroused male viewers. There are so many paintings like this in the western tradition that it is a genre unto itself, the Odalisque.

The odalisque not only presents women as sexual objects but plays to the gender stereotype which associates The Male with Activity and The Female with Passivity. Active men doing things, bursting with agency. Utterly passive women lying around half-dressed like pets or sex objects, existing solely to please their male owners.

And that’s bad. OK. I get it. The contradiction comes in as you realise that so many of Thomas’s huge paintings show women, er, lying around on beds or divans, half undressed. Why is it sexism and misogyny when painted by men but the exact same subject, with the exact same visual result, is not only ‘reclaimed’ from the male gaze, but is actively liberating, when painted by a woman? Here’s how the curators put it:

Thomas’ celebratory and glamorous portraits put Black women front and centre. Their poses are restful, but filled with power, meeting our gaze and staring right back with regal force.

Or:

These works centre on repose, rest and leisure which, in Thomas’s handling, are shown to be radical acts.

You can see what the curators are trying to do here – to get round the contradiction by rewriting the terms, by changing the vocabulary, by asserting that these works by a woman artists are different from a male depiction of the same subject. But it does it fit the reality of what you actually see? Here’s one of the most notorious odalisques in western art, Olympia by Édouard Manet (1863).

Olympia by Édouard Manet (1863)

Is Olympia not ‘meeting our gaze and staring right back’? Whether or not with ‘regal force’ is for the viewer to decide, but the ‘meeting our gaze and staring right back’ is an undeniable fact. So the ‘meeting our gaze and staring right back’ does not distinguish Thomas’s works from the male work she is meant to be ‘subverting’. The real difference lies elsewhere.

Is it in a certain spirit of defiance in the expressions of (some of) the women sitters? Something in their pose and their expressions is markedy, definably different from the passive acquiescent expressions of the classic odalisque? Maybe I’m missing something obvious and you can help me. Anyway, I only dwell on it at such length because 1) this type of pose is the core subject matter of all the works on the ground floor, and 2) the make gaze and how Thomas undermines and subverts it is mentioned in more or less every wall label i.e. it’s a central feature of the curators’ commentary.

A Moment’s Pleasure #2 by Mickalene Thomas (2008) © Mickalene Thomas

Living rooms

Moving on, if you know the Hayward, you know that you then walk up a gently sloping ramp to the second main downstairs space. Here there are a few more massive rhinestone paintings, including her reworking of The Sleep, a painting by French artist Gustave Courbet, given the Thomas treatment. (Later on we meet a big bright reworking of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe by Eduard Manet. What with the visual references to Matisse’s cutouts, we are learning that Thomas has a fondness for modern nineteenth century French art.)

But more dramatically, here you find a couple of big installations. These are mock-ups or reconstructions of family living rooms Thomas remembers from her childhood. They are designed to transport visitors back to domestic settings of the artist’s 1970s and 1980s childhood. On the left is a room from the late 1970s during Thomas’s early childhood in New Jersey, a homage to her late grandmother.

Installation view of ‘I was born to do great things’, room 1, by Mickalene Thomas (2014) Photo by the author

Of these she says:

‘I created domestic settings primarily for fellow Black women – my muses – to spend time and have new experiences in familiar surroundings, perhaps resembling their mother’s or grandmother’s living rooms.’

Inside the installation are two artworks from early in Thomas’s career. The green one at the back is ‘Portrait of Mickalena’, a painted self-portrait in which Thomas performs her childhood alter ego, Quanikah. On the wall on the left is a photographic triptych of her mother from 2003, in which Sandra Bush poses in the style of actor Pam Grier, star of 1970s Blaxploitation cinema

One of the visitor assistants I spoke to was mixed race and she said the rooms triggered warm memories of her childhood. They feel sweet and comfortable and at least part of this is because is this is the source of the mellow soul and jazz music which permeates the ground floor, emanating from a genuine old-school record player and hi fi unit, with ageing record covers by The Supremes and such like, leaning against it at the bottom left.

This hi fi unit is in the second room which recreates a room from Thomas’s teenage years in the 1980s, a completely different vibe from the previous one, this is all shagpile grey carpet and Art Deco lampshades.

Installation view of ‘I was born to do great things’, room 2, by Mickalene Thomas (2014) Photo by the author

As to the curators’ commentary:

‘The living room is where we see black imagination made visual’, writes poet Elizabeth Alexander in The Black Interior. She suggests that the home holds a sacred significance for African Americans who have grappled with the impermanence of place perpetrated by enslavement, segregation and gentrification.

Remember what I was saying about the importance of fabrics, of Thomas collaging together wildly varying and disparate fabrics and patterns? When you look more closely you realise every piece of furniture in room 1 is made of crazy collages of fabrics, patched together, sometimes with very overt stitching. Is this something to do with relative poverty, with having to make do and mend? Or a purely aesthetic statement, in fact it’s a style statement. The visitor assistant I was chatting to made the point that none of the fabrics really ‘go’ with each other and yet, at the same time, because everything is made out of crazy patching, it all, somehow, does go. It makes a Gestalt.

Installation view of ‘I was born to do great things’, room 1, by Mickalene Thomas (2014) Photo by the author

Off to one side of the room is another installation, smaller, dinky, filled with bedroom bric-a-brac, reminding me of my teenage daughter’s bedroom. Takes as a whole the shape is reminiscent of a shrine and it is, in fact, titled Shrine. I’m guessing it is a shrine to her teenage self.

Installation view of Shrine by Mickalene Thomas (2024) Photo by the author

It’s packed with interesting and charming details. There’s a fridge magnet-style motto which reads: ‘I’m not opinionated, I’m just always right.’ Books by Black and queer authors. And I noticed, underneath a classic photo of Black activist Angela Davies, a picture frame which holds a list of names.

Detail of Shrine by Mickalene Thomas (2024) Photo by the author

Recognise the names?

Frida Kahlo, the Mexican painter and feminist icon
Kara Walker, the contemporary Black political and feminist artist
Georgia O’Keefe, woman painter of big bold flowers and scenes of the desert south-western USA

And she’s added her name to the list. Her lineage. Her heroines and herself.

Music

By far the majority of exhibitions I go to are staged in empty, church-like silence, a deadening white-walled sterility as antiseptic as an operating theatre which intimidates visitors into whispering or intimidated silence. The dozen or so sexy, soul music tracks, smooth jazz and soul classics, which play on a loop went a long way to taking the frozen edge off the gallery space and making it a nice place to be.

It made me feel warm and fuzzy about her art, about the rooms she grew up in, about her mum and friends and lovers, it made the whole thing feel warm and welcoming. It made a significant different. Here’s the track list:

Upstairs

Upstairs there are five more rooms, some big, some enormous, more installations, and a wider range of her works, including straight (no pun intended) photography, video installations, and more overtly political works.

The water lilies room

The biggest room features her largest collage to date, an absolutely massive work covering one huge wall (on the left here), in which are embedded ten or more smaller collage pictures. This towers over a lot of plastic rubber plants arranged in a grid pattern on a huge rectangular mirror.

Installation view of La Maison de Monet by Mickalene Thomas at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

I think this is titled ‘La Maison de Monet’ and dates from 2022. In 2011, Thomas took part in a summer residency at Claude Monet’s house and studio located at Giverny, in northern France. Giverny provided Thomas with the opportunity to reflect on Monet’s iconic depictions of gardens and the vibrant domestic spaces that he designed as places of inspiration and leisure. The grid of plastic pot plants represents the famous water lilies in Monet’s garden pond, the lily pond he painted so many times at the end of his life.

On the opposite wall are two more standard-sized works. These are noticeably different from the earlier works in two respects: although they still use jagged-edged collage the elements are mostly plain colour washes instead of intricately decorated fabrics. And no rhinestones. The one on the right reminded me of a record cover from the 1980s, though I can’t remember which one. Can anyone remind me?

Installation view of Mickalene Thomas: All About Love at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

A note on laminated flooring

It was only after I’d strolled around the room and looked at the massive wall collage a few times that I began to appreciate the importance of wood in it. On the left you can see photos of a number of wooden shelving units such as you might find at Habitat, while on the bottom right are black and white photos of what looks like laminated wood flooring. Hold that thought…

The wrestling room

Beyond the water lily room is the wrestling room. Here are half a dozen rhinestone and jagged collage-style images of two Black women in various wrestling poses. To quote the curators:

Thomas created her series of Wrestlers to explore multiple sides of herself. All the figures depicted in the paintings are representations of Thomas, featuring the artist Kalup Linzy as her twin. The paintings reveal only one face – the artist’s. The artist considers the series a form of self-portraiture, embodying internal conflicts between our multiple selves within society.

The figures, locked in an embrace, blur the boundaries between erotic pleasure and pain, struggle and affection, dominance and submission, all expressions of desire. The tiger and zebra print leotards worn by the wrestlers can be seen as a critique of the stereotypical and exploitative portrayals of Black women’s strength and sensuality.

Well, as I’ve said in my comments about the male gaze, does dressing Black women in jungle animal leotards (tiger and zebra) ‘critique’ stereotypes about Black women… or subtly confirm them? You, the viewer, decide.

Installation view of the wresting room at Mickalene Thomas: All About Love at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

I chatted with the visitor assistant about the bean bags. On the two times I visited the room nobody was sitting on them. Remember I mentioned the wooden shelf units and laminated flooring in the previous room? Well look at the walls here! The stripped varnished pine walls make it feel a bit like a shop, quite a clinical vibe.

Also, you only want to throw yourself on a bean bag if there’s something you really want to spend some time looking at and, I hate to say it, but these were probably the weakest set of works in the show.

But the visitor assistant, as so often, pointed out something I hadn’t noticed, which was the colour red. The bean bags are dark red because all the wrestling images who the two figures wrestling on a dark red blanket. Aha! More like interior decorating than art, the bean bags are visually tied in to the surrounding paintings.

Lastly, most visitors to most of the exhibitions I go to are old. Lots of grey-haired old men and women. I imagine no-one was using the bean bags because pretty much every visitor would struggle to get back to their feet. They’re appropriate to a younger crowd at a younger show and with something to really look at. (I vividly remember the beanbags in a projection room at the Victoria and Albert Museum show about So You Say You Want A Revolution, where you plumped down in a bag to watch excerpts from the rock movie, Woodstock.)

‘Me as Muse’

Round the corner from the lily pond room is a smaller installation, visually tied to it by the present of another clump of rubber plants and titled ‘Me as Muse’. It’s a multimedia video installation meaning there’s a bench and you sit on this and face

Installation view of ‘Me as Muse’ (2016) at Mickalene Thomas: All About Love at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

Now what I noticed first about this was the way the bench was made of Thomas’s characteristic patched fabrics. I really liked the bench, vivid and colourful. The wall is covered by a massive montage of mostly black-and-white photos of woods and forest, which are complimented, I suppose, by the rubber plants.

But obviously the centre of attention is the 12 TV monitors. What appears on these screens is a little complicated. The core image is a self portrait of Thomas lying naked on a divan, the classic odalisque pose which prompted all those questions about the male gaze and the history of art and so on, on the ground floor.

What happens then is that different monitors cut to other images, not all at the same time but so that fragments of images are juxtaposed against each other. These other images include two classic odalisque paintings from western art, one by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a more modernist one by Amedeo Modigliani. I think the point is to contrast the representation of Black or ‘exotic’ women in classical male art, with the body of a real Black woman (Thomas herself).

This process goes a step further when the monitors show us a photographic image of Sarah Baartman (1789 to 1815), a Khoikhoi woman from southwestern Africa who was displayed in colonial exhibitions across Europe in the 19th century. This obviously deepens things from just being an art history issue to showing its relationship to the wider world and to historic issues of colonialism, dehumanisation and so on.

So far, so very like an A-level exercise in gender and racial politics. Intercut with all this are clips from a BBC interview with Eartha Kitt in which the famous singer (apparently) speaks candidly about the abuse, suffering and racism she experienced throughout her life. This would have been more powerful if I could have heard anything she said. Maybe there were headphones or a QR code to use on my phone or something, but none of the other visitors who were in this area at the same time as me were listening to anything. Then again maybe the images of a Black woman talking but muted and silenced, were – in a presumably unintentional way – more powerful than hearing her words.

And it’s a collage, isn’t it, just in a different format (video instead of picture). Like the paintings, and the furniture, its basic idea is cutting up and juxtaposing elements from strikingly different sources.

This view shows the geographical relationship between the lily pond room and the TV room (in this photo you can see the Modigliani odalisque on the TV screens), and also shows how the rubber plants – and now I look closely, I can see how the use of black and white stripes and squares – bind the two pieces together. In fact it was only when reviewing my own photos that I realised that immediately behind the monitors are photos of… water lilies in a pond! Surely, they must be shots of Monet’s lily pond. In which case the two installations are really tied together.

Installation view of the upstairs rooms at Mickalene Thomas: All About Love at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

Eartha Kitt sings Angelitos Negros

Eartha Kitt crops up in another work, another multiple screen installation just along the corridor. It consists of four much bigger screens, each one divided into three sub-screens. On them we see face shots of several Black women all singing the same song. The singing feels notably non-professional i.e. like you or me singing in the shower, and it sounds like several voices singing together at once though not in any kind of professional unity or harmony.

Installation view of Angelitos Negros by Mickelene Thomas at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

It’s only when you read the wall caption that you realise one of the screens is showing Black singer and actress Eartha Kitt performing her 1953 song Angelitos Negros. In this the singer implores artists to paint Black angels in their religious paintings. ‘You paint all our churches, and fill them with beautiful angels,’ the song laments, ‘but you never do remember, to paint us a Black angel.’ As far as I can tell, in that original video Kitt starts crying so the tone of the music is obviously tearful, if not tragic.

So the other faces and voices are all of Thomas herself singing along. So that explains why there’s a kind of core track which sounds good (Eartha) accompanied by an impassioned by amateur rendition (Mickalene).

What I assume to be several takes of her doing this are cut and pasted into the different channels shown by the monitors, which continually change angle and distance. So it’s yet another example of Thomas’s use of collage, reusing, repurposing, juxtaposing original source material into new combinations.

In a way more striking than the piece itself is the fact that in front of it is something like the living room installations downstairs, a collection of armchairs place on a big carpet, with side tables piled with classics of Black and queer literature.

Installation view of Angelitos Negros by Mickelene Thomas at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

Note 1) the way all the furniture is made of patchwork fabric, like the bench in the other TV room, like the furniture in the two living room installations, echoing the intense use of fabric patterns in her rhinestone paintings. 2) Note the use of fake wood laminated tiles, such as you see in flooring shops, visually linking this to the images of cheap wooden furnishing and flooring in the previous installations. And 3) our old friends, the pot plants, also linking this with the other upper gallery installations. It’s not only paintings that can have recurring motifs, but installations too.

The sly way all these displays are tied together by these motifs is enjoyable to decipher and savour. Clever. Very clever, and fun. In the manner of all good art, you feel all these linkages are saying something, something important and meaningful, but can’t work out what. But that’s fine. Art isn’t a scientific thesis. Hints and echoes and implications are what it’s good at. Very clever. Echoes and re-echoes.

Incidentally, the paintings on the wall in the background of this photo are a departure from everything we’ve seen so far. They’re portraits of people right enough, but painted on big mirrors. In fact here on the upper floor there’s a much greater variety of works, a greater range of paintings plus a corridor of simple (i.e. uncollaged) colour photographs, nicely staged and shot.

A note on James Baldwin

The Black American author James Baldwin (1924 to 1987) is frequently encountered in the art world. Why? Because he’s Black, queer and a writer. I’m not being sarcastic or snarky when I say he ticks all the boxes. We live in a liberal culture which is concerned to tick all the boxes – literally in the case of many organisations’ legally binding commitments to diversity and inclusion. In a thoroughly feminist culture like the art world most straight white men are frowned on and excluded. In a backlash against thousands of years of white heteronormative domination, there is currently a wave of exhibitions by Black artists, and an ever-growing number of exhibitions by queer artists.

Baldwin’s writings often address his challenges with identity. When he came of age in the 1940s a man was meant to be white and manly, Clark Gable or John Wayne. Being Black exposed him to the massive race discrimination in 1940s USA, but being queer made him doubly an outsider, especially in his own Black community which was just as homophobic as the white world, if not more so.

After facing years of everyday racism and homophobia, despite the support of other Black writers who spotted his talent, Baldwin in the end fled America, travelling to France in 1948 where he lived for the rest of his life.

It’s not just that Baldwin ticks the boxes, he’s not just an empty figurehead. It’s that he wrote so eloquently about the challenges and complexities of juggling his multiple identities: American, man, Black, gay.

So it is no surprise that in our times, when progressive politics, art and literature are more than ever before concerned with questions of gender and identity, Baldwin is not just a symbol of these issues, but his often very eloquent expressions of them find themselves being quoted again and again, in texts, in documentaries and in countless exhibitions.

When I visited the contentious Masculinities exhibition at the Barbican, supposedly a comprehensive survey of art from around the world about masculinity, no surprise that the massive quotation written in big letters on the wall right at the start of the exhibition was by Baldwin. Not a British writer, a white writer or a straight writer. To define masculinity, to set the keynote in their huge exhibition about masculinity, the curators chose the writing of a gay Black American man.

Not long ago I was at the Photographer’s Gallery in Soho and discovered quotes from Baldwin being used in their exhibition of queer photos. And here in the Mickalene show, Baldwin is 1) referenced in the wall captions, specifically the one for the Money installation which aligned Baldwin’s flight to France with Mickalene’s stay there 60 years later. 2) In the Shrine and here in this Earth Kitt installation, when there are little piles of books to make the place look more homely, you can bet your house they’ll include works by Baldwin and guess what? They do. 3) And photos of him appear in Thomas’s series celebrating Black politics, ‘Resist’. He’s everywhere.

I’m not mocking. I’m pointing out that particular periods or eras in history are defined by their economic and technological substructure, and the cultures they produce are marked by particular anxieties and means of expression. So that in an era saturated in issues to do with race and gender, it’s almost inevitable that Baldwin’s eloquent descriptions of the interplay of these issues – not that commercially successful in his own time (the 1950s, 60, 70s) – have come into their own. This goes some way to explaining why his words or image keep cropping up in so many exhibitions I visit.

Sorry for this long digression.

The Black Lives Matter room

The last room I arrived at, the room beyond the Eartha Kitt room, is a cul-de-sac, a comparatively small space and the most ‘political’ room. It contains just three works and these are completely unlike the homespun, family-oriented, bright and joyful vibe of the rhinestone works. They all address the dire state of race relations in contemporary America. They’re examples of a series of works gathered under the collective title ‘Resist’, being:

Resist #12: Power to the People
Resist #6: Say Their Names
Resist #7: Guernica detail

Rather than rewrite them, I’ll quote the curators’ own words:

While Thomas’s art is fundamentally and radically political, this recent series of paintings is explicitly so, centring on Civil Rights activism from the 1960s to the present.

The central painting serves as a memorial to Black men and women who have lost their lives at the hands of U.S. law enforcement or while in custody, urging the viewer to remember the names of countless victims.

The two flanking paintings explore the central role of Black women within civil rights activism from the 1960s onwards. Thomas finds echoes of the past in the present, layering archival images from the Civil Rights era with images from recent protests and uprisings related to Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements.

Here’s that central work, the ‘memorial to Black men and women who have lost their lives at the hands of U.S. law enforcement or while in custody’.

Installation view of ‘Say Their Names (Resist #6)’ (2021) by Mickalene Thomas in Mickalene Thomas: All About Love’ at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

If you pull back from the specific names and focus on the dark grey outlines you can see that they echo or in fact repeat the shapes of the animals in Pablo Picasso’s famous painting, Guernica. As in her copies, pastiches of and homages to classic paintings by Ingres, Manet and Modigliani, you can see 1) her fundamental principle of collage at work, cutting and pasting and incorporating materials from other sources into her own art; and 2) in these particular instances, taking classic works from the canon and rewriting them for her own, modern purposes, to address contemporary social and political issues.

This is a very powerful room and you only have to start thinking about the long, dire history of race relations in America, about American slavery, the civil war, the Jim Crow era, the miserable segregation and racism Afro-Americans suffered for most of the twentieth century, the long battles of the Civil Rights Movement, the assassination of Martin Luther King, through various race riots of the 1960, ’70s’, ’80s and up to the present day with its ongoing litany of Black people killed by white cops and the vast numbers of Black men imprisoned in America’s incarceration complex, to feel yourself completely overwhelmed by the scale and horror of this terrible history and these ongoing horrible realities.

All of which has an undermining effect on the smooth jazz vibe of the ground floor, with its atmosphere of proud women and domestic happiness. This small room casts a long shadow over everything which came before it… But then, we are grown-ups and have to deal with the fact that the world is a troubled, complex and riven place. There’s really very little I can do to influence the community policies of most American police forces. But all the more reason to value the love, leisure and joy which she described at the very start of the show and which those first big collages convey so wonderfully.

Take-home

It’s big, colourful, inspiring, inventive, dark and troubling, all at the same time, all in one big complex feast. Go and see it.

Related reviews

Inspired by the East: how the Islamic world influenced Western Art @ the British Museum

European explorers

As John Darwin’s brilliant history of Eurasian empires, After Tamerlane, makes clear, in the centuries after the death of Tamerlane the Great in 1405, quite a few things distinguished European culture from the cultures of the other Eurasian empires (i.e. the Ottoman Empire based in Turkey, the Safavid Empire in Persia, the Moghul Empire in northern India, the Chinese Empire and the Japanese Empire).

Just two of them were 1) a readiness, on the part of the Europeans, to travel and explore, and 2) an endless curiosity which led to almost obsessive collecting and categorising and curating and exhibiting.

No Chinese explorers visited Europe during the 19th century and were so dazzled by its history and architecture and art that they made copious sketches and drawings, took photographs, bought up every quaint European curio they could get their hands on, and carried them all back to China to catalogue and categorise and trigger an artistic renaissance.

That kind of thing just didn’t happen because few Chinese travelled abroad. Very few wanted to, or had the means to, and anyway it was frowned upon because every educated Chinese knew that the Celestial Empire was the centre of the universe, the possessor of a perfect culture, which didn’t need or want to know anything at all about the outside world, overrun as it was by cultureless barbarians.

And Darwin shows how this complacent and self-centred attitude was echoed by the cultural and political elites of Japan, Moghul India, the Safavid Empire and the sprawling Ottoman Empire, for centuries.

No, the wandering, exploring, collecting bug seems to have affected Europeans on a completely different scale from any of the world’s other civilisations.

Thus it was that from the 1500s onwards a steadily increasing stream of travellers, explorers, soldiers and sailors, archaeologists and artists travelled all over the Muslim lands lining the North African coast and the Middle East – territory nominally under the control of the extensive Ottoman Empire – to explore and describe and paint and buy and plunder.

Inspired by the East

This ambitious exhibition delves into one aspect of this huge European enterprise by looking at the long and complex history of cultural interchanges between the Islamic Middle East and Europe from about 1500 onwards.

Not surprisingly several of the earliest objects are swords and helmets since the single most important fact about Islam is that it was a conqueror’s religion, spread by highly organised and zealous Arabs as they exploded out of Arabia in the 7th and 8th centuries to seize the Christian Middle East and North African coastline.

Gilt-Copper helmet, Turkey (about 1650) © Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia

The Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman dynasty which began its rise to prominence in the 1200s was itself just the last in a line of dynasties which had vied for leadership of the Muslim world since the birth of Islam in the 630s.

The Ottoman Turks rose to dominate the area we call the Middle East during the period 1300 to 1453 (the year when the Ottomans seized Christian Constantinople and made it into their capital, Istanbul). I’ve reviewed several books about the decline of the Byzantine Empire as it came under relentless pressure from successive Muslim rulers, until its eventual fall to the Ottomans.

The Ottoman heyday is usually dated from the year of the fall of Byzantium – 1453 – to around 1600, during which they extended their power across all of North Africa and deep into Europe. It’s salutary to remember that twice the Ottoman army besieged Vienna, in 1526 and 1683, and was only just defeated both times i.e. they could have penetrated even further into Christian Europe.

As it was, throughout this period the Ottomans ruled the extensive territory of former Christian Europe which we call the Balkans, as well as Christian Greece and Christian subjects in numerous Mediterranean islands.

Mainly Victorian

A handful of pieces and a few wall labels in the exhibition gesture towards this long and complex early history of Ottoman rise and conquest and domination, including the striking portrait of Sultan Bayezid I by a painter from the school of Veronese, which has been used as the poster for the show.

A Portrait of Sultan Bayezid I by a member of the School of Veronese (c. 1580) © Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia

But the exhibition really focuses on works from the much later period of the 19th and early 20th centuries, partly for the simple reason that the period 1800 to the outbreak of the Second World War saw a steadily increasing number of European travellers to North Africa and the Middle East.

Some of this was simply a function of continually improving transport, sailing ships giving way to steamships, the steady spread of railways, the industrial revolution creating a new leisured class, especially in Britain and France, who wanted to see the world, helped along by firms like Thomas Cook which launched its first cruises in the 1870s.

Many devout Victorians, such as the Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt, wanted to tour the Holy Land and see for themselves the places where Our Lord had stood. Flocks of visitors drew and sketched and painted watercolours and oils and bought all manner of souvenirs, carpets and clothes, tiles and glasswork. By the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851 the British public was highly aware of the extremely diverse and colourful cultures of the peoples it ruled over.

But the thesis of this exhibition is that the Islamic culture of the Ottoman Empire bore a uniquely close and fractious relationship with Europe, was the predominant colonial and foreign cultural ‘Other’ for Europe throughout the period – a kind of backward cousin, a slothful and declining ‘Orient’ against which we could measure our ever-growing knowledge, technology and power. And that a huge number of craftsmen and artists and metalworkers and glassblowers and designers and artists and architects were particularly dazzled and influenced and inspired by Islamic and Middle Eastern art and culture.

So this exhibition, Inspired by the East, aims to bring together a wealth of artifacts to show a) some of the original Islamic arts and crafts from the era and b) the impact Islamic architecture, designs and patterns had on European craftsmen, artists and designers through a large selection of European objects.

Enamelled glass lamp made by Philippe-Joseph Brocard, France (about 1877)

Thus the exhibition includes wonderful, ornate and beautiful examples from a whole range of media and crafts such as:

tiles
glasswork
ceramics
metalwork
jewellery
clothing
architecture
design

I was interested to learn there was a genre called ‘costume books’ which simply showed the costumes of all the new races and peoples Europeans had discovered as they expanded and explored from the 1500s onwards and which, of course, featured books devoted to the clothes and garments of the Middle East.

I learned that all kinds of products by Islamic artisans were prized in the West from early on, such as Egyptian metalwork and Persian ceramics. During the 19th century Western craftsmen could use developing technology to reproduce much of this work. The exhibition includes Arab-inspired ceramics by Théodore Deck, a leading French ceramicist who in the late nineteenth century created a range of pieces directly inspired by Islamic originals.

Nearby is a section devoted to Owen Jones, one of the most influential tastemakers of the Victorian era. His pioneering studies on colour theory, geometry and form still inspire designers to this day. Jones was an architect, designer and design theorist and was Superintendent of Works for the 1851 Great Exhibition. His masterpiece was Grammar of Ornament, a huge and lavish folio displaying stunning patterns, motifs and ornaments in 112 illustrated plates, many of which featured Islamic decorations and motifs. Some of the Islamic plates from the book are on display here.

But but but… I was struck by several obvious problems.

Number one was that most of the works on display are by Europeans. They are not original works by the Islamic craftsmen and artists who are so praised. They are European copies, displayed with the intention of showing how widespread the impact of Islamic styles and motifs was on the European arts. If you’re looking for a world of authentically Islamic arts and crafts you’d do better to go the V&A.

Number two was that, despite the beauty of individual works, it became difficult to avoid a sense of scrappiness, a sense that the curators are trying to cover a lot of ground, in fact an enormous subject – the impact of the Muslim world on the art and culture of the West – with a surprisingly small range of exhibits.

Take my home area, history: A few helmets and a sword are accompanied by a paragraph or two about the extent of the Ottoman Empire – but this, the military rise and dominance of the Ottoman Empire, is a huge, a vast subject, which I felt was barely scratched and whose omission made the entire show feel one-sided i.e. presented only the Europeans as aggressive colonialists whereas, as I’ve explained, it was the Muslims who originally conquered half the Christian Mediterranean.

Similarly, the friend I went with is mad about Islamic tiles so was pleased to see a display of half a dozen beautiful and ornate tiles – but disappointed that they turned out to be made by a Victorian British manufacturer using Islamic motifs – and that that was it when it came to tiles.

Islamic architecture is distinctive and beautiful and exists over half the world, but it was dealt with via just a few British buildings which used Islamic motifs, such as the well-known artist Lord Leighton’s famous house in West London which he had modelled inside to recreate some of the rooms from the Alhambra in Spain, namely ‘the Arab Hall’. Leighton had the place covered in Islamic tiles designed by William de Morgan. There are photos of the interior and a lovely wooden model but… is that it?

The single most dominant impression was made by the paintings, a few scattered in the early sections but then leading up to a huge wall displaying about 20 classic, late-Victorian, Orientalist paintings.

In the Madrasa by Ludwig Deutsch (1890) © Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia

Orientalism

This brings us to the several meanings of ‘Orientalism’, a word and idea which are raised early in the exhibition and then referenced throughout.

1. The word Orientalism was originally, during the 19th century and first half of the 20th, a value-neutral term applied to all or any scholars, linguists, archaeologists or artists who specialised in ‘the Orient’, a vague expression generally taken to be Islamic North Africa and Middle East but sometimes stretching to include India. It survives in this neutral sense in many places to this day, for example in the name of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

2. However, the term underwent a revolutionary change in 1978 when the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said published his academic study Orientalism. In this book Said subjected the so-called ‘scholarly’ works of 19th century Orientalist academics to in-depth analysis in order to support one big radical idea: that almost all the supposedly scholarly and academic books and ideas produced by European scholars about the Orient were the witting or unwitting handmaids of Western Imperialism.

Almost all the nineteenth-century Orientalists declared the Ottoman Empire corrupt and stagnant, Islam itself incapable of change. The people living there were stereotyped as somehow more primitive, dressing in loose but colourful clothing, slothful and lazy and corrupt.

Probably the most notable idea was the fascination the institution of the harem had for repressed Westerners who projected all kinds of sexual fantasies onto Oriental woman and painted no end of soft porn depictions of the sultan and his slaves and concubines and slave auctions and so on.

So powerful was Said’s critique that it spread and prospered in the academy, becoming the new orthodoxy and casting a critical shadow back over everything written or painted about the Middle East in the previous 200 years or more. Since its publication almost everything any European said, wrote or painted about the Ottoman Empire has been reappraised to appear in a much more sinister light, either furthering malicious racist stereotypes, aiding in imperial exploitation, or the shameless appropriation of a weaker culture’s art and designs.

Schizophrenia

Now the woke young curators of this exhibition are fully paid-up subscribers to Said’s unforgiving views about Western exploitation of the Middle East. This isn’t a guess on my part. They quote page one of Orientalism in the very opening wall label which introduces the exhibition:

The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant… The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture.

And every other wall label takes pains to remind us that the plate or vase or tile or translation of The 1001 Nights or any other cultural product which we’re looking at and which references Islam may well seem beautiful to us but, tut tut, we should be aware that it was part of the wicked European fashion to appropriate Islamic patterns for vases or the exploitative trend for mock Moorish architecture, or the thieving use of Arabic script in picture frames and so on.

And that behind all of this detail, all of these individual examples of cultural appropriation, lies the huge looming shadow of Western Imperialism!

Four tiles by William De Morgan & Co, Britain (1888 to 1897)

Cumulatively, these hectoring labels and panels created, for me at any rate, a strange sense of schizophrenia. In one and the same wall label the curators might both praise the craftmanship of a western tile maker or architect – and yet accuse them of being part of the general movement of cultural appropriation. Praise and damn almost in the same breath.

As so often in modern exhibitions, I began to feel that I got more visual and aesthetic enjoyment if I just stopped reading the hectoring labels – felt less harangued and nagged to feel guilty about things which happened 150 years before I was even born.

Orientalist painting

It’s probably in painting that the Orientalist issue is most obvious, or most familiar to most of us because the antique shops of the West are awash with third-rate late-Victorian depictions of the Arab world, of mosques, old men in long gowns with even longer beards, camels crossing the desert, Oriental markets, scantily dressed concubines and so on.

Said’s idea is that, although these images are fairly harmless looked at individually, taken together they become condescending, sexist and racist, depicting a fantasy world of harems and sultans, long-gowned scholars in picturesque mosques, colourful markets or the desert at dawn – all of which, taken together, creates a patronising distortion of the complex realities of the many peoples and tribes and ethnic groups and nations scattered across North Africa and the Middle East.

Moreover, taken together, they all tend in the same direction, promoting an ideology claiming that all these cultures and peoples might well be noble and beautiful, but were also backward and in decline, and therefore needed to be taken in hand, taken over, guided and ruled by us, the enlightened West.

At Prayer by Ludwig Deutsch (1923)

The big wall hanging of twenty or so massive Orientalist paintings which I mentioned earlier are obviously meant to represent a kind of ‘Wall of Shame’. Tut tut, we are encouraged to think: look at all these stereotypical markets and mosques and rugs and carpets. Look how oppressive they are.

However, I just didn’t feel the moral outrage I think the curators intend us to feel. The real impact of hanging so many Orientalist paintings next to each other was, in my opinion, to make you feel a bit sick, as if you’d been let loose in a sweetshop and eaten everything in sight. They are self-consciously opulent and gorgeous to the point of absurdity.

Another, more objective result of examining so many of these over-ripe productions was that, pace Said, most of them are not from the imperial nineteenth century, nor, surprisingly, were many of them produced by the classic imperialist powers who carved up the Middle East between them, France and Britain.

At least half of them were from the twentieth century, many from after the Great War (the two above are from 1913 and 1923). And quite a few were by either German or American painters, not by the cultural Anglo-French cultural appropriators. Neither the Germans nor the Americans had any colonial presence in the Middle East till well after the Great War and even then, not very much.

Orientalism or Romanticism?

As I read yet another wall label pointing out how the Orientalist painters fantasised and romanticised and embellished lots of the subjects they painted, as if this was a shockingly immoral and exploitative thing to do, a simple thought occurred to me: Didn’t all 19th century artists?

There are thousands and thousands of Victorian genre paintings which romanticise and glamorise all kinds of subjects, from their own working classes (cf the exhibition of cheesy paintings of Victorian children I saw earlier this year at the Guildhall) to windswept Hebridean crofters.

In other words, wasn’t the entire artistic movement of Romanticism about, well, stereotypically romantic subject matter – about mountains and storms at sea and heroic adventures and tormented heroes and shy maidens with heaving bosoms who needed rescuing from dragons (I’m thinking of the amazing late-Victorian fantasies of Edward Burne-Jones as recently displayed at Tate Britain).

The same exaggerated depiction of popular conceptions of subjects was applied to everything – I bet medieval knights weren’t as manly and knightly as they appear in Victorian paintings, that Highland crofters weren’t as proud and noble, or our brave soldiers quite as manly and beautifully kitted out, as they appear in those big hearty late-Victorian paintings.

Don’t all Victorian paintings depict extravagant stereotypes in lush and glamorous colours? In other words, there is nothing particular or exceptional about this hyper-romantic style being applied to ‘Oriental’ subjects: it was applied to countless other subjects as well.

The Guard by Antonio María Fabrés y Costa (1889)

The harem

I was especially looking forward to the section about the harem, not because I was expecting to be particularly titillated but because I was looking forward to the riot of outraged feminist commentary it would provoke.

After all, one of the most obvious and much-repeated claims of anti-orientalist literary critics, feminists and curators is that Western white men used the Ottoman institution of the harem as a pretext to concoct a vast number of soft porn, erotic fantasies which bore no relation to reality at all, but merely satisfied the gloating gaze of fat, rich, white, male collectors. Pale, male and stale. Gammons etc.

So a surprising single thing about this exhibition of Western depictions of the Orient is the complete absence of even one decent painting showing a classic, late-Victorian harem scene. Not one. No book about Orientalism is complete without a cover depicting a sexist Orientalist image or a chapter of objectifying Oriental women, so I was puzzled.

I thought I must have missed a room somewhere and went back through the exhibition to check, but eventually realised that the little collection of five or so chaste drawings and one painting – none of which show a nude woman, all of them very restrained – is all they have! There’s a tiny photo of one of the classic nude-in-a-Turkish-bath paintings by Ingres, but none of the thousands of huge colourful harem scenes by him or Eugène Delacroix or John Frederick Lewis or any number of their followers and copiers.

At some point it dawned on me the the feminist curators of the exhibition might simply have been enacting their own principles, and not hanging pictures they deplore. Maybe the absence of those kinds of stereotyped images was itself a statement of intent.

Off to one side there is one little drawing of a woman playing a musical instrument by a French artist we are assured, by the conscientious curators, was a notorious Orientalist. Does this image strike you as being offensively racist and sexist, stereotyping the Orient and providing visual underpinning for Western imperialism? Because that is the intellectual framework or ideology within which the entire exhibition exists.

Study of a girl playing a stringed instrument by Jean Léon Gérôme (1886)

This little sketch sort of raises a politico-aesthetic question, because the curators point out that the artists, Jean Léon Gérôme, was well known for the meticulous sketches and drawings which he made, preparatory to creating an oil painting. Which made me reflect: in what way can these artists be accused of peddling lazy stereotypes if they were carefully and meticulously depicting what they saw, what was actually in front of them?

The sex object bites back (or photographs itself wearing clothes)

The absolute of real killer harem scenes is all the more puzzling because it is meant to set up the final part of the exhibition, which is devoted to contemporary works by modern Muslim women artists.

The curators have chosen to interpret these contemporary Muslim women artists as responding to the despicable tradition of Western Orientalism. They are ‘speaking back to Orientalist representations of the east’. They are ‘subverting and undermining works by earlier European and North American artists’.

But alas the curators’ plan doesn’t really work because we have not seen any of the sexy, sexist Orientalist representations of the east which these contemporary artists are kicking back against. We pretty much have to imagine them, or remember them from other exhibitions or books.

In fact I thought all four of the women artists on display here were very good, very very good, in their way better than the rest of the exhibition. Best of the four was a triptych of images by Lalla Essaydi, part of a large series of works titled Women of Morocco.

In them Essaydi, or her models, adopt the poses of the scantily-clad women draped around in famous Orientalist paintings, only here the women are chastely and Islamically dressed and – and this is the distinctive thing, from a visual point of view – both they, their clothes and the studio backcloths are covered in Islamic script. I thought it was a brilliant idea, brilliantly executed, to produce really vibrant and exciting images.

Les Femmes du Maroc by Lalla Essaydi (2005) © Lalla Esaydi

Conclusion

Inspired by the East feels, in the end, like a rather thin exhibition.

Firstly, it claims to be a look at the interaction between East and West, so you’d expect it to be divided into two parts; How East affected West and how West affected East.

As noted, there’s plenty of examples of the way Westerners appropriated Eastern designs and motifs and patterns, architecture and design (although this felt like a much larger subject which really deserved to be investigated in much greater depth – All over London are buildings which incorporate Islamic motifs; if you add in tiling and ceramics and metalwork you have a huge subject).

But as to West affecting East, this section felt very skimpy indeed, with just one small room showing a couple of photo albums by pioneering photographers in Istanbul and a map or two. Is that it?

Secondly, there is the big shadow of Edward Said and his embittering theory of Orientalism threaded throughout the show, the premise that all depictions of the Middle East and all forms of appropriation of its culture were handmaidens to the wicked, Western imperial exploitation of the area.

But this rather harsh and inflexible approach militates against the more nuanced vibe of the ‘cultural interactions’ parts of the show. One minute the curators are praising Western craftsmen; the next they are berating the subtle cultural imperialism of copying Islamic designs.

Hence my comment about the unsettling schizophrenia I thought the show suffered from.

3. And when I got to the section on the harem and realised how tragically thin it was, it suddenly crystallised for me how skimpy the rest of the exhibition feels. It feels like it’s trying to address two or three really big issues and not quite doing any of them quite properly.

Alhambra vase, Spain 1800–1899 © Islamic Arts Museum, Malaysia

Writing versus art

I read Orientalism at university four or five years after it was published, when it still had ‘the shock of the new’, before it settled down to become the new orthodoxy taught to each new generation of humanities and art students.

And Said’s book is almost entirely concerned with Orientalist writing – with the supposedly factual works of Orientalist ‘scholars’ (who he systematically debunks) and with the Western literary writers who perpetuated stereotypes about the Exotic East (Byron, Nerval, Flaubert just for starters).

A lot of this kind of writing was produced in the nineteenth century and so Said had a rich vein to draw on, and was able to show how the supposedly ‘scholarly’ writing, and the literary works, easily morphed into official, governing and imperial writing, could be co-opted into government reports and assessments, how anthropological studies could be quoted in business cases for invading Egypt, say, or Iraq.

But it is much harder to divine a particularly patronising, racist or imperialist motive behind a set of porcelain which just happens to use an Islamic motif, or in picture frames which use Arabic script as decoration, or in glassware which incorporates Islamic patterns.

It’s easier to imagine that they were just one among the millions of other ranges of pottery and ceramics and frames produced during the consumer boom of the nineteenth century, which cannibalised motifs and patterns from all available sources – from India and China and Japan to name just a few – if it produced something which would sell.

To see most of the objects in this exhibition as part of an enormous explosion of art and crafts products which catered for the burgeoning middles classes as, to some extent, they still do today.

So my last thought is that maybe the bittiness and thinness of the exhibition is owing to the fact that the curators are trying to illustrate a basically literary theory with works of art and museum objects. And not nearly enough of them to really round out the argument.

Whatever the reason, for me this exhibition contained an entertaining pot-pourri of lovely objects, but didn’t really hang together either as history, or as a sustained exploration of the themes it purports to address.

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by Simon on November 13, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Architecture, Art, Exhibition, History

Tagged After Tamerlane, Antonio María Fabrés y Costa, Arabs, architecture, British Museum, Chinese Empire Japanese Empire, Christian Europe, Christian Greece, Edward Said, Eugène Delacroix, Europe, exhibition, France, Grammar of Ornament, India, Ingres, Inspired by the east: how the Islamic world influenced western art, Islam, Jean Léon Gérôme, John Darwin, John Frederick Lewis, Lalla Essaydi, Ludwig Deutsch, Middle East, Moghul Empire, North Africa, Orientalism, Orientalist painting, Ottoman army, Ottoman Empire, Owen Jones, Persia, Philippe-Joseph Brocard, pre-Raphaelite, Safavid Empire, School of Oriental and African Studies, Sultan Bayezid I, Tamerlane the Great, Théodore Deck, the Alhambra, the Balkans, the Great Exhibition, the harem, the Holy Land, the Second World War, tiles, Turkey, Vienna, William de Morgan, William De Morgan & Co, William Holman Hunt, Women of Morocco

Posted by Simon on November 13, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/11/13/inspired-by-the-east-islamic-world-british-museum/

Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet @ the Royal Academy

This exhibition is a revelation and a treat. Valloton made lots of immensely pleasing, teasing, entertaining, beautiful and slightly puzzling images, enough to make it hard to leave the show. Normally I have half a dozen highlights from an exhibition, but I wanted to take twenty or thirty of Vallotton’s images away with me, wanted to be able to revisit them regularly, especially the woodcuts, and so I bought the catalogue (which is currently selling at the knock-down price of £12.50).

The exhibition is in six rooms so, rather than reinvent the wheel, I might as well follow the academy’s structure, with comments and observations along the way.

Early works

Félix Vallotton was born in 1865 into a Swiss Protestant family in Lausanne. At 16 he headed off for Paris, the art capital of the world, where he showed prodigious talent. He rejected studying at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts and enrolled in the more informal Academie Julian. His early works are realistic and figurative in a way which completely ignored the avant-garde of the day, the (by now) prevailing style of Impressionism, or the various post-Impressionist styles which were on the horizon. From the start he went his own way, and his style right to the end would be realistic and, in many ways, deeply conservative. (Note, by the way, the large plain background to this confident self portrait; we’ll come back to it later…)

Self-portrait at the age of twenty (1885) by Félix Vallotton. Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne. Photo © Nora Rupp

The early Nabis years

The Nabis was a group of French painters who rejected Impressionism in favour of lofty spiritual goals, and were more aligned with the late-nineteenth century movement of Symbolism.

The Nabis (from the Hebrew and Arabic term for ‘prophets’) were a Symbolist, cult-like group founded by Paul Sérusier, who organized his friends into a secret society. Wanting to be in touch with a higher power, this group felt that the artist could serve as a ‘high priest’ and ‘seer’ with the power to reveal the invisible. The Nabis felt that as artists they were creators of a subjective art that was deeply rooted in the soul of the artist. While the works of the Nabis differed in subject matter from one another, they all ascribed to certain formal tenets – for example, the idea that a painting was a harmonious grouping of lines and colours. (from the Art Story website)

The Nabis’ most famous members were Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard. Valloton became involved with the Nabis in the early 1890s and their ideas produced a dramatic change in his style, as he experimented with non-naturalistic ways of playing with colour, pattern and form to try and convey the higher spiritual ideas the Nabis aspired to. Some of these are wonderful, for example an exquisite small stylised painting of a beach by moonlight, and a highly experimental painting of Parisians ice skating to waltz music, their gyrations throwing up sparkly fragments of ice which shimmer with multiple colours.

Waltz by Félix Vallotton (1893) Musée d’art moderne André-Malraux (MuMa), Le Havre, France. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

By far the oddest of these paintings is Bathing on a summer evening which combines all kinds of influences (from Old Master bathing scenes to the Pointillism of his contemporary Seurat, and maybe something of the naive style of Le Douanier Rousseau) to produce something very strange and ‘modern’. The curators point out the influence on many artists of this time of classic Japanese prints, which liberated Western painters from Renaissance perspective and helped them rethink the picture plane as a flat arrangement of lines and blocks of colours.

Bathing on a Summer Evening (1892 to 1893) by Félix Vallotton © Kunsthaus Zürich

However, as the exhibition progresses you realise that early works like this are the exception rather than the rule. Or maybe that they were stepping stones towards his more mature and rather mysterious style. The oddity and ‘spiritual’ aspect of these Nabis works (if that’s what it is) become subsumed into a return to realism, but of a highly stylised variety.

Woodcuts

Valloton began making woodcuts in 1891 and quickly became an acknowledged expert in the medium, which was undergoing a revival across Europe. Changes in printing technology led in the 1880s and especially 1890s to a proliferation of illustrated journals and magazines.

(It was the proliferation of literary and popular magazines in London which led to the market for, and sudden florescence of, brilliant short fiction commissioned from the likes of Oscar Wilde, Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling. And in fact, Vallotton was also a writer, producing three novels and eight plays. He was also heavily involved in the theatre, designed stage sets, took photographs and made sculpture. In his best-known novel, The Murderous Life, the protagonist, Jacques Verdier, has a power which causes everyone in his path to die in a tragic accident. Vallotton illustrated the novel himself in the darkly humorous style of his woodcuts. All this is reminiscent of the black humour of exactly contemporary English works like The Picture of Dorian Grey or of Aubrey Beardsley’s black and white prints.)

Valloton turned out to have a gift for woodcut as a form, being able to produce images which were entertaining, troubling, moody, artistic or humorous, as required. He became principal illustrator for the influential journal La Revue Blanche and, as such, came into contact with and befriended many of Paris’s artistic, musical and literary élite – Mallarmé, Debussy, Proust, Satie and so on.

‘This newcomer, who is not a beginner, engraved on blocks of soft pearwood various scenes of contemporary life with the candour of a sixteenth-century woodcut.’ (French critic Octave Uzanne describing Vallotton’s exceptional talent for printmaking)

The exhibition contains some forty of Vallotton’s woodcuts, arranged by series.

Paris life

I can’t find a figure for how many illustrations he created for La Revue Blanche but presumably it was lots. Included here are all kinds of street scenes including crowds caught in downpours and rioters attacking the police, schoolgirls laughing, swans in the park, a sudden downpour of rain, and so on. My favourite was a beautifully clear and precise image of a naked woman lying on her front on a highly patterned coverlet and reaching out to scratch a cat, titled Laziness.

Laziness (1896) by Félix Vallotton

Musicians

The Musicians series shows starchy Victorian ladies and gents playing the violin or piano or trumpet. The one that caught my eye was a man playing the flute but keeping a wary eye on a cat which looks like it’s about to pounce on him or his sheet music.

The Flute (1896) by Félix Vallotton

Worlds Fair

There’s a series of six woodcuts on the subject of the 1900 Paris World Fair, showing visitors gawping at jewels, having a picnic lunch, caught in a sudden rain shower, a recreation of a street scene in Algiers, a footbridge between displays, and, finally, a vivid woodcut depicting fireworks. All these illustrations are wonderfully vivid and characterful and fascinating social history.

Intimacies

Most famous is the series of ten graphic woodcuts he titled Intimacies. These portray the sexual mores of Parisians, and the moral and psychological intensity of late-Victorian affairs. Each one shows a scene fraught with sexual or psychological tension (I say ‘sexual’ – there’s no nudity; everything is implied).

Below is maybe the most striking and intriguing one, Money. What money, where? Is the man handing her money (doesn’t look like it) or offering her money verbally? For what? Sex? To buy her silence? Is she his mistress? Or an unhappy wife?

The curators point out Valloton’s striking use of black. It’s simple but extremely effective to have about two-thirds of the image, the whole right side, jet black. Thus the man doesn’t stand against a backdrop or shadow, but emerges out of the blackness. He is part of the blackness. All the others in the Intimacies series are just as strange and teasing and suggest complex psychodramas on which we are eavesdropping.

Intimacies V: Money (1898) by Félix Vallotton © Musées d’art et d’histoire, Ville de Genève, Cabinet d’arts graphiques

Vallotton’s extensive experience churning out woodcuts recording and satirising contemporary Paris life, fed over into his paintings. During this period they stopped being either the rather stiff portraits and still lifes of his first years in Paris, or the experimental paintings mentioned above like the Waltzers or Bathers, and became more like accompaniments in paint of the contemporary social themes he was depicting in the woodcuts. Especially the Intimacies theme of the complexity of male-female relations, the complex lies and deceptions of the Paris bourgeoisie as they go about their affairs and infidelities. One is titled Five O’Clock which, we learn from the wall label, was the time of day when the Parisian bourgeois left their offices and went to visit their mistresses for an hour of pleasure, before returning home to their wives and families. Another shows a naked woman curled up in a very red chair, in a sort of defensive or foetal posture. You can’t help asking why. Has something bad happened to her, has she received good or bad news, or is it her usual comforting position?

Uncertainties

This is the theme or feeling which is present in his earlier paintings but comes more and more to the fore during the 1890s – which is that, although his technique remained pretty conservative (especially if you consider what was happening around him in Paris, with Picasso and Matisse just over the horizon), nonetheless, there is a very modern sense of unease and ambiguity about his paintings from the 1890s.

A good example is The Visit from 1899. Three points: 1. What is going on in this painting? Has she just arrived? Are they dancing? Or is he pushing her towards the open door at the left which we can assume leads into a bedroom? So is it an illicit visit from a mistress?

The Visit (1899) by Félix Vallotton © Kunsthaus Zürich

2. Note the bold colours. This is what Valloton had in common with the other Nabis: it’s a figurative scene alright, but all the colours are too overbright and simplified. It is this overlit colouring which creates the unsettling mood as much as the composition.

3. As are the faces. You can see the influence of all those hundreds of popular woodcuts, which required often cartoon-like simplicity of faces, spilling over into a simplification of the faces and indeed the outlines of the bodies in his paintings. It’s a painting of a real scene but all done with overbright simplifications of colour and outline which bring to mind, say, the style of American painter Edward Hopper. The clothes and decor have changed but the mood of lassitude or ambiguity, the troubled atmosphere between a man and a woman, are very similiar and above all, conveyed by simplifying the shape and colour of the figures, and leaving their faces blurred and shadowed.

Room in New York by Edward Hopper (1932)

Marriage

In 1899 Valloton dumped the Bohemian mistress he had lived with during the 1890s, and married Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques. This was an excellent career move in two ways. 1. She was the widowed daughter of Alexandre Bernheim, one of the most successful art dealers in Europe, and her brothers still ran the immensely successful art dealership. 2. She was rich.

At a stroke Vallotton moved from a garret studio with a mistress into a grand city house with a wife and step-children. He entertained. He became a good bourgeois and family man.

And his style changed, too. For a start he stopped making the woodcuts which had provided his livelihood during the 1890s, and ceased working for La Revue Blanche. Freed from financial worries he concentrated all his energies on painting.

A lot of these new paintings feature his wife, in a variety of respectable family poses, on the family sofa, or at the family dinner table. These portraits show the enduring influence on him of one of his heroes, Ingres, the painter of crystal-clear nudes and women’s faces.

But alongside these respectable paintings are others, also apparently sensible and polite, which nonetheless exude a strange unease and sense of foreboding. It is as if the psychological tensions he had investigated so ably in the Intimacies woodcuts has been driven underground to become merely implicit, barely implicit, only just noticeable.

The curators single out one particular painting from this period, The Ball, which shows a little girl in a garden chasing after a ball. What could be more innocent? And yet, when you look at it in the flesh, there is something very eerie about the way the shadow is creeping across the grass from the left and onto the gravel drive – almost as if it’s reaching out for her. And the darker shadows lurking at the bottom of the shrubbery above the girl. And something a little uncanny about the two figures in the distance…

The Ball (1899) by Félix Vallotton © Musée d’Orsay

This unsettling effect is much more obvious in a brilliant painting titled simply The Pond. A realistic painting of a pond, what could be more plain and simple? And yet (once again, more in the flesh than in this flat reproduction) once you’ve noticed the way the blackness of the pond water is seeping weirdly towards you, it’s impossible not to be a little worried by it. It’s like a still from the Disney film Fantasia, it looks like the shadow of the mountain coming to life, with big devil’s horns, rearing towards you…

The Pond (1909) by Félix Vallotton

Nudes

Also, from about 1904 onwards, alongside the many fully clothed and respectable portraits of his wife and step-children, Valloton began to focus his energies on the nude, the female nude.

If you realise that Picasso and Matisse were just launching their careers at just this time, it is astonishing just how conservative and traditional Valloton’s style was. If you do a quick google search of Félix Vallotton+nude it is astonishing to discover that he did so many of them.

Many of the nudes explicitly refer to the great tradition of Old Masters from his favourite, Ingres, through to Manet’s Olympia. In all of them there is a cold, detached, calculating air. The largest of the half dozen or so on display here is the wonderful White Woman and Black Woman of 1913.

White Woman and Black Woman (1913) by Félix Vallotton © Fondation Hahnloser, Winterthour

1. The clarity There is hardly any shadow in the room. Everything is depicted in the exact crystalline light of Ingres.

2. The technical virtuosity Look at him show off his ability to paint folds of cloth, one of the litmus tests of the Old Masters stretching back to Titian.

3. Psychology In the Olympia of Manet the fully clothed black servant is bringing flowers to the naked prostitute Olympia, very obviously serving her. But what on earth is the relationship here, between the black woman who’s very casually dressed and – for God’s sake – smoking a fag!? All kinds of speculation is possible, the curators’ favourite one being that they are lesbian lovers, but it looks much more complex and weird than that.

4. The nude The depiction of the white woman’s naked body is quite simply stunning. It is a masterwork in the depiction of fleshtones, and the way they vary across the naked body, rising towards her flushed red cheeks. Why are her cheeks flushed and red?

You remember me pointing out about the first painting in this review, how the background is a flat, bare wash? Well, same here. Once I’d processed the lavish sensual appeal of the naked body in this painting, and then wondered about the relationship between the two figures, than I turned to consider a third level or avenue of approach, which is to see it purely as a composition of colours – and surely the most striking thing is the huge size of the aquamarine wall behind both figures. Against which is set the black woman’s brilliant orange headscarf. And then her bright blue wrap, for sure. If it is a virtuoso display of folds and shadows in fabric, it is also, on another level, an exercise in big blocks of colour. Once I’d noticed this fondness for slabs of colour, I began to notice it in many of his paintings, and also link it up with his decisive use of solid black in the woodcuts. It’s an entire visual approach to see things as blocks rather than broken up into the multitude of details.

Landscapes

In 1909, alongside his prodigious output of nudes, Valloton turned his attention to landscapes. As with so many of his earlier depictions of people, these were done in a simplified style which often brought out the basic shapes underlying messy nature and, as with the nude above, done in primary or elemental colours.

A good example is The Pond, above, with its radical simplification of pond, grass, shrubs and trees to create an almost cartoon-like image.

He called them composed landscapes. He had taken to using a box camera at the turn of the century and now it became a habit to take photos of a scene and then use that, once developed, to paint the scene from the simplified (black and white) photo and from memory. He dreamed, he said, ‘of a painting free from any literal respect for nature.’

The result was landscapes reduced to broad ‘zones’ or shapes of colour which recall the simplifications of the woodblock. And also hark back to the principles of the Nabis from a decade or more earlier, the idea that art needn’t be realistic, but was more a matter of finding the colours and patterns which replicated your inner feelings.

A late landscape which really got me was Last Rays painted at Honfleur where Vallotton spent many of his summers and where he made several versions of this scene of umbrella pine trees overlooking the Bay of the Seine. In its simplification and strong sense of design it subtly references the clarity of the Japanese prints which had so influenced him in the 1890s.

Last Rays (1911) by Félix Vallotton © Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper

A conventional artist?

But, also, looking round any of the rooms, I kept being amazed at how… conventional Vallottin is. It’s as if Impressionism or any other modern art movement had never happened. Towards the end of the exhibition, I began to realise why I’d never heard of Félix Vallotton before – because he stands so totally outside the classic narrative of Modern Art, and its core lineage from Impressionism thru Post-Impressionism, to the eruption of Picasso and Matisse, and then into Cubism, Futurism etc etc.

None of this seems to have had any impact on Vallotton, and if you look at his Wikipedia article, you do get the impression that many if not most of his paintings can be read as utterly traditional and ‘straight’.

Gallery of Valloton images on Wikipedia

Which set me wondering whether the curator’s attempt to rebrand Vallotton as the painter of ‘unease’ quite stacks up. There’s nothing particularly uneasy about the trees at sunset above, nor about many of the nudes which are just skillful paintings of naked women, often in not very flattering postures, but depicted with beautiful fluency.

Maybe it would be impossible just to stage an exhibition of Vallotton’s work ‘cold’ as it were; maybe it would come across as too conventional and, possibly, in some cases, kitsch, as reworkings of Ingres-style nudes and Flemish-style still lifes being painted in the 1910s.

Maybe the curators had to find an angle, some kind of modernist theme, to make him appear edgy and relevant.

The Great War

Then the Great War broke out. Vallotton was swept up in the patriotic fervour (he had become a French citizen in 1900) but was dismayed to discover he was too old (49) to enlist. Interestingly, the war sparked the decision to create a new series of woodcuts, a genre he hadn’t touched since 1900. Maybe he associated the woodcut with journalism, with the immediate depiction of a society’s life, with the everyday activities of its citizens, and so with the journalistic immediacy of the war and its horrors. In fact the images were copied from newspaper photos or articles before he worked them up into woodcuts.

The result was a series of six woodcuts, collectively titled This is War! and consisting of: The Trench, The Orgy (being a piss-up in a wine cellar), Barbed wire, In the Darkness, the Lookout, and The Civilians.

In their stylised simplification, all six are cartoon-like and almost comic. They remind me a little of the Great War cartoons of William Heath-Robinson. They certainly evince the kind of visual humour which characterised the woodcuts of the 1890s and which largely disappeared from his paintings after 1900. It’s interesting to think that it was there all along, this impish humour, but that he had consciously suppressed it in order to become ‘a serious artist’.

In 1917 Vallotton managed to secure a government commission to tour the trenches in the Champagne region, which led to paintings of the battlefields of Verdun, of ruined churches behind the lines and so on.

Haunted realism

In line with the curator’s thesis that Vallotton is the painter of quiet unease, they end with an image which combines everything we’ve learned so far. It is an astonishingly realistic depiction of peppers on a plate, summarising his prodigious gift as a draughtsman and colorist, and his reverence for the naturalistic tradition of the Old Masters. (Also, I note, the blank slablike colouring of the neutral background.)

But this dazzling work of photorealism was painted during the appalling blood-letting of the Great War, and the curators draw our attention to the knife. Nothing in the picture justifies the way the knife blade is half covered in something red. Is it blood, symbolising the immense bloodletting going on all across the once peaceful civilised continent of Europe? Or just a reflection of the peppers next to it?

Disquiet or not?

Let’s weight the evidence.

The popular illustrative woodblocks he made for La Revue Blanche don’t display a trace of ‘disquiet’, they’re entertaining and very straightforward pictures of Parisians in parks or rain showers or at the Worlds Fair. But the Intimacies series of woodcuts are all about bourgeois guilt, hypocrisy and unease.

Some of the landscapes are just simplified landscapes stylised in the way he had made his own. But others, yes, some of the others are strange and a little… disconcerting.

And many of the paintings made during the 1890s definitely depict fully-dressed bourgeois couples in ambiguous situations. Or single individuals in rather… puzzling moods.

Of the half dozen nudes here, most are just paintings of women without their clothes on, highlighting the way women’s tummies or boobs can hang very unromantically downwards if they’re lying on their sides. But some of them hint at something a little more… mysterious and teasing…

So are the curators justified in labelling Vallotton ‘the painter of disquiet’? It’s hard to say. You’d have to review all 70 or so works on display here with this thesis in mind: maybe… And then are you allowed to review the rest of his works which are readily available online and most of which seem remarkably… un-disquieting…

All I can say with certainty is that this exhibition is a revelation of a painter I’d never heard of before – whose woodcuts are entertaining, charming and evocative – and whose range of paintings, from mysterious interiors to stunningly accurate nudes, through to the entrancing simplicity of the ‘composed landscapes’, from family portraits to slightly unnerving still lives – present an array of accessible, attractive, memorable and subtly haunting images. Wow. Very enjoyable. Well worth the price of admission.

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by Simon on September 15, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Painting, Prints

Posted by Simon on September 15, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/09/15/felix-vallotton-painter-of-disquiet-royal-academy/

Modigliani by Doris Krystof (1996)

Taschen Publishing specialise in medium-sized art books (23 cm tall x 18.5 cm wide). They’re all originally written in German, this one was translated into English by Christina Rathgeber. I picked it up for a fiver in some art shop years ago, and dusted it off and reread it to coincide with visiting the big Modigliani exhibition at Tate Modern.

The text is eminently readable and it has 88 good quality colour reproductions, not just of paintings and sculptures by the man himself but of works by contemporaries like Picasso, Kirchner and Brancusi, as well as classic nudes by Titian and Giorgione, quoted to compare and contrast with Modigliani’s famous nude paintings.

It is a real visual treat just slowly flipping through the pictures and soaking them up.

Biography

The outline of Modigliani’s life is clear enough. Born in 1884 to an arty Jewish family in northern Italy (his mother translated poetry, wrote essays and book reviews), his creative tendencies were encouraged so that by age 14 he was studying at the art academy in Livorno. He studied from books and attended a life drawing class; he visited Rome and Florence and Venice where he revelled in the Old Masters. He attended the Venice Biennale of 1903 and stayed there two years.

By which point it was time to move on and he headed for the Mecca of modern artists, Paris, arriving in 1906. Quite quickly he made important friends, not least the Spaniard Picasso and the Romanian sculptor Brancusi. For the next few years he experimented with a number of styles, from Cézanne (who had died in 1906 and quickly had several exhibitions devoted to his late work) to Edvard Munch, who impressed everyone with the work displayed at the Salon d’Automne of 1908 – although he avoided the main new movement of the day, Fauvism (given its name in 1905 and which flourished for the next few years).

Similarly, Modigliani was well aware of, but avoided, the arrival of Cubism in 1908, pioneered by Picasso and Braque, which swept up many lesser talents. Instead, he pursued his core interest of depicting the human form using outlines of graceful arabesques.

From about 1909 to 1912 Modigliani devoted himself entirely to sculpture, heavily influenced by the new taste for ‘primitive’ art from Africa and Oceania which became modish from around 1905, and by his friendship with the modernist sculptor, Brancusi.

Although some of his sculptures are obviously influenced by (copies) of African fetish masks which were becoming popular in artistic circles, Modigliani was just as obsessed by the idea of the caryatid, the statue of a woman bearing the weight of a building which had been developed in ancient Greece. He produced scores of sketches and variations on this crouching, hunched-up, female shape.

Caryatid and Rose caryatid (1913-14)

Eventually Modigliani gave up sculpting, maybe because the dust was bad for his chronic tuberculosis, but his painting style was now purified of the earlier variety and experimentalism – the faces in particular from now on were all variations on the elongated, oval shape with schematic, one-line features (eyes, eyelids and mouth all drawn with a crisp elegant line) which he had perfected in the sculptures and in the numerous preparatory sketches he made for them.

He continued to paint a wide variety of portraits of friends, lovers, fellow artists, collectors and patrons, and in the middle of the Great War began to paint a series of nudes. These differ from the portraits in being really simplified – the skin tone is generally a consistent warm orange colour, and the facial features are purified down to a handful of lines. They sold well – what’s not to like?

Towards the end of the War, Modigliani was advised to head south by his dealer and set up shop in Nice, along with his mistress, Jeanne Hébuterne, mother of his daughter. Here he painted lots more portraits, but in a noticeably lighter style, and of ordinary people – instead of the rich and famous of Paris’s art world – of peasants, hotel cleaners, and even of children. These, along with the nudes, became his most popular images.

By 1919 he was back in Paris, and the final portraits of his mistress and patrons show a further tendency to elongate both the neck and the face even more, making each person even more of an abstract collection of lines and colours.

Modigliani died after a long decline in his health on 24 June 1920. Soon afterwards friends and acquaintances, lovers and patrons began writing their memoirs, and quite quickly the myth grew up of the handsome, charming Wunderkind artist, who endured great poverty in his undying devotion to his art. And his paintings began to sell.

The works

Early paintings

Having seen a lot of the ‘greatest hits’ at the Tate Modern exhibition, I was taken by the more out-of-the-way works included in this book, especially of the early works before he’d perfected the Modigliani ‘look’.

Head of a Young Woman, 1908 – the strong black outline feels like Toulouse Lautrec
Nude dolente, 1908 – a work which could have been Munch
Female nude with hat, 1908 – angular and misshapen, like early Expressionism
Portrait of Brancusi, 1909 on the Back of the Study for the Cellist – I love the very Cézanne-like blocks of colour, on the body, the background, and the intense black lineation of the face

Sketches

From early on he developed a hyper-simplified line, which comes over in nude sketches and then very much in the sketches he made from African artefacts in the Louvre and the Museum of Ethnography.

Nude, Nude Bending to Side, Nude on Divan
Standing nude, 1912
Blue caryatid– Modigliani made at least 60 sketches of the ‘caryatid’, the female nude structure used to support columns and buildings in ancient Greek architecture

Sculptures

He took up sculpture in 1909, nobody knows why. Perhaps because he had always revered the sculptural legacy of his native Italy, perhaps because his paintings weren’t selling, perhaps because he moved to a bigger workspace in Montparnasse, perhaps because he met Constantin Brancusi in 19090 and was hugely influenced by him. Or all of the above.

Brancusi (b.1876) had perfected a smooth highly stylised way of working in stone which anticipates Art Deco.

Modigliani’s sculptures are of two types, a squat square type, which could fit at the top of a column –

Head (1910)

And the much-better known, highly elongated, ‘primitive’ mask like heads. Although the politically correct like to raise the issue of ‘cultural appropriation’ and the way so many of the avant-garde artists of the 1900s looked to sculptures from Africa or Oceania, the book points out that there are also strong European origins for this look, in the stunningly abstract heads carved in the Cycladic islands of Greece thousands of years BC.

Apparently he conceived of the sculptures, these stone heads, as all being together in one place, creating a kind of temple of beauty. This may partly explain their thematic unity, that they were designed to be displayed and seen as an ensemble.

Nudes

Krystof makes a simple but effective point that it’s not so much in the sculptures but in the sketches for the sculptures, and especially in the sketches of caryatids, that we see Modigliani really simplifying his technique, perfecting a way of depicting the human body entirely made up of simple, one-line, shallow curves – no sketching, and repeated lines or cross-hatching – just one pure line to create the body’s outline, another to distinguish to the two legs, meeting another curve which creates the loins, two simple curves, maybe a bit pointed, to indicate the breasts, a curve for the mouth, a long narrow triangle for the nose, two almonds for eyes – in many ways a child’s eye view of the human body.

Caryatid

She also makes the good point that these curves are consciously not like the focus on blocks and squares and diagonals and geometric shapes of the suddenly fashionable Cubists. It is in pursuit of shallow curves that Modigliani is at odds with the art of his own times, a one-off.

And so to the female nudes which make up about 10% of his output – about 30 nudes in total – and in their simple outlines, as well as their very simple orange flesh colouring, present a kind of cartoon simplicity and pleasingness.

He began painting them in 1916, helped by the important patronage of dealer and friend Léopold Zborowski, who lent the artist use of his apartment, supplied models and painting materials, and paid him between fifteen and twenty francs each day for his work.

The simple graceful outlines, the soft orange skin and pink nipples, the simplified facial features, and the tonal unity of the paintings (compare and contrast with the violent garish colouring of the Fauves) makes Modigliani’s nudes understandably popular even among opponents of modern art.

Krystof also takes some time to explain another reason for their sense of familiarity, the reason they seem so assimilable. It’s because the poses are often based on established classics of Western art.

Quite systematic copying or borrowing or pastiching, isn’t it?

Krystof makes another, subtler, point. In all the classic paintings above you can see the entire body – you, the viewer, are standing some way away. By contrast, all of the Modigliani nudes are cropped, at least part of the arms or legs are out of the frame – as if you were really close up to the model, not so much contemplating them as about to fall over them. Immediacy.

Portraits

But the 20 or so nudes mark a sort of apricot-coloured interlude in Modigiliani’s core activity during his final years, which was the obsessive painting of hundreds of portraits.

Krystof divides them into two categories – one of friends, lovers, patrons, fellow artists and named individuals – the other category of scores of anonymous models, peasants and children.

They are all rougher and harsher, in design and finish, than the nudes.

To get at the essence of the Modigliani approach, Krystof compares his portrait of Jean Cocteau with a portrait done at exactly the same time and place by Moise Kisling.

The immediate and obvious conclusion is the huge amount of clutter Modigliani has chucked out – the window, shutters, table, vase, stove, chair, dog and rug are all not there – and the way he has zoomed in to focus on the top half of the body to create an image which is much simpler, sparer and more intense.

Hence Krystof’s suggestion that Modigliani developed in his portraits ‘the art of omission’ (p.53)

The same technique – cropping sitters at the bust and showing no interest in the details of the backdrop – characterises many of the portraits, which are more varied and interesting than the nudes.

Flight south

In the spring of 1918 the Germans began a final offensive. Planes and Zeppelins bombed Paris and many feared the city would fall. Up to a million people fled the capital, including Modigliani and his mistress / common-law wife, Jeanne Hébuterne, who gave birth to their daughter in 1918. The young family spent over a year in Nice and Cagnes-sur-Mer, where Modigliani painted more feverishly and intensely than ever before.

The light of the South of France lightened his palette and the texture of the paint he used, the paint is thinner. Also the local people he got to model for him lack the specificity of the Paris portraits, becoming more generic – which may account for their later popularity.

Jeanne Hébuterne

Modigliani painted at least 25 portraits of the mother of his children. Photographs of her make her look absolutely stunning, in fact she has something of the long-tressed, full-lipped beauty beloved of the pre-Raphaelites.

Photo of Jeanne Hébuterne

In his last paintings of her, the neck and face are more elongated than ever, the background painted in with lighter sketchier colours than previously.

Conclusion

This is a really handy book, containing not only nearly 90 beautiful full-colour illustrations which give you an immediate and comprehensive feel for Modigliani’s unique style, but also a more thoughtful and insightful text by Doris Krystof, than is usual for Taschen books.

Possibly my favourite portrait comes right at the end of the book, one of the few Modigliani portraits which has even a hint of feeling and emotion, in this case a self-contained, winsome sadness.

Young girl (1918)

Impressionists by Antonia Cunningham (2001)

This is a small (4½” x 6″) but dense (256 high-gloss pages), handily pocket-sized little overview of the Impressionist movement.

The ten-page introduction by Karen Hurrell is marred by some spectacular errors. In the second paragraph she tells us that Paris was ‘in the throes of the belle epoque‘ when the 19-year-old Monet arrived in town in 1859 – whereas the Belle Époque period is generally dated 1871 to 1914. She tells us that Napoleon Bonaparte had commissioned the extensive redesign of the city when she means Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, the great man’s nephew and heir, more commonly known as Napoleon III, who reigned as Emperor of the French from 1852 to 1870.

Thus cautioned to take any other facts in the introduction or the picture captions with a touch of scepticism, nonetheless we learn some basic background facts about the Impressionists:

Monet was inspired by the French landscape painter Eugène Boudin (1824 to 1898)

Success in the art world was defined as acceptance of your work into the biannual exhibition of the Paris Salon

Reputable artists were expected to train at the Académie des Beaux-Arts which was dominated by the classical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780 to 1867), who insisted on training in draughtsmanship, copying the Old Masters, using a clear defined line.

Edgar Degas (1834 to 1917) enrolled in the Beaux-Arts as did Pissarro.

Monet attended the Académie Suisse where he met Pissarro, then entered the studio of Charles Gleyre: here he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 to 1919). Alfred Sisley (1839 to 1899) and Frédéric Bazille (1841 to 1870).

Older than the others and really from a different generation was their inspiration, Édouard Manet (1832 to 1883). He sought academic success in the traditional style, attaining Salon success in 1861.

In 1863 the Salon refused so many contemporary painters that Napoleon III was asked to create a separate show for them, the Salon des Refusés. Manet stole the show with his The lunch on the grass showing a naked woman in the company of two fully dressed contemporary men.

The 1865 Salon show included works by Degas, Manet, Pissarro, Renoir, Berthe Morisot (1841 to 1895).

From 1866 Manet began to frequent the Café Guerbois, and was soon joined by Renoir, Sisley, Caillebotte and Monet, with Degas, Henri Fantin-Latour (1836 to 1904), Paul Cézanne (1839 to 1906) and Pissarro also dropping by, when in town. They became known as the Batignolles Group after the area of Paris the cafe was in.

Paris life of all kinds was disrupted by the catastrophic Franco-Prussian War and then the disastrous rising of communists during the Paris Commune, which was only put down by the official government with great bloodshed and destruction (July 1870 to May 1871). All the artists who could afford to fled the city, many to England and London – an event which was the basis of the Tate Britain exhibition, Impressionists in London.

From April to May 1874 this group held an independent art exhibition in the gallery of the photographer Nadar. The critic Louis Leroy took exception to Monet’s painting Impression: Sunrise (1872), satirising the group’s focus on capturing fleeting impressions of light instead of painting what was there, but the name was taken up by more sympathetic critics and soon became a catch-phrase the artists found themselves lumbered with.

It’s interesting to note that Degas was a driving force behind this and the subsequent Impressionist shows, single-handedly persuading artists to take part. He himself was not really an impressionist, much of his subject matter, for example, being indoors instead of painting out of doors, en plein air, as Impressionist doctrine demanded. Similarly, whereas the other experimented with creating form through colour i.e. using colour alone to suggest shape and form, Degas was to the end of his life a believer in extremely strong, clear, defining lines to create shape and form and texture.

In 1876 the group exhibited again, at the gallery of Paul Durand-Ruel. The role played by Durand-Ruel in sponsoring and financing the Impressionists was chronicled in the national Gallery exhibition, Inventing Impressionism.

There were eight Impressionist exhibitions in total: in 1874, 1876, 1877, 1879, 1880, 1881, 1882, 1886. The eight Impressionist exhibitions

From this point on we begin to follow the differing fortunes and styles of the group:

Monet

developed his mature style in the first half of the 1870s, letting go of any attempt to document reality, instead developing ‘a new vocabulary of painting’ in blobs and dashes of often unmixed primary colours in order to capture the essence of the scene. In 1880 Monet organised a solo show and submitted two works to the Salon. Degas called him a sell-out, but he was trying to distance himself from the group.

Renoir

developed a unique style of portraying the gaiety of contemporary Parisian life in realistic depictions of people dancing and drinking at outdoor cafés, with broad smiles, the whole scene dappled with light. He was to become the most financially successful of the group and you can see why: his uplifting works are popular to this day. In the 1880s he took to nudes and portraits rather than landscapes. He was always interested in people.

Degas

resisted being called an Impressionist – he painted mostly indoor scenes and never abandoned his hard outlines – but certainly was influenced by the Impressionist emphasis on the effect of light captured in loose brushstrokes. During the 1870s he began to produce the hundreds of oil paintings and pastels of ballet dancers which were to be a key subject.

Mary Cassatt (1844 to 1926)

American, Cassatt saw a Degas in a dealer’s window and realised these were her people. She lightened her palette, adopted the modern attitude towards light and exhibited at the successive Impressionist exhibitions.

Sisley

became dependent on Durand-Ruel. When the latter fell on hard times, Sisley and his family led a tough, hard-up, peripatetic life. Arguably he is the only one who never developed but carried on working in the same, pure Impressionist way.

Pissarro and Cézanne became firm friends, painting the same scenes side by side.

Cézanne

Even at the time commentators could see the difference with Cézanne applying paint in broad, heavy brushstrokes, and becoming ever more interested, less by light than by the geometric forms buried in nature, increasingly seeing the world as made of blocks and chunks and rectangles and rhomboids of pure colour – paving the way for Cubism and much modern art. His style diverged from the group just as Impressionism was becoming more accepted, by critics and public. He resigned from the group in 1887.

Neo-impressionism

The name given to the post-impressionist work of Georges Seurat (1859 to 1891), Paul Signac (1863 to 1935) and their followers who used contemporary optical theory to try to take Impressionism to the next level.

Seurat

developed a theory called Divisionism (which he called chromoluminarism) the notion of creating a painting not from fluid brush strokes but from thousands of individual dots of colour. Seurat used contemporary colour theory and detailed colour wheels to work out how to place dots of contrasting colour next to each other in order to create the maximum clarity and luminosity. The better-known technique of pointillism refers just to the use of dots to build up a picture, without the accompanying theory dictating how the dots should be of carefully contrasting colours.

There follow 120 very small, full colour reproductions of key paintings by the main members of the movement (and some more peripheral figures). Each picture is on the right hand page, with text about the title, date, painter and a one-page analysis on the page opposite. Supremely practical and useful to flick through. Here’s a list of the painters and the one or two most striking things I learned:

Eugène Boudin (1)

The landscape painter Monet credited with inspiring him to paint landscapes.

Manet (15)

I love Manet for his striking use of black, for his use of varying shades of white but he is not a totally convincing painter. His two or three masterpieces are exceptions. I struggle with the perspective or placing of figures in Dejeuner sur l’herbe, particularly the woman in the lake who seems bigger and closer than the figures in the foreground and is a giant compared to the rowing boat, and the way the lake water is tilting over to the left. He was awful at painting faces – Inside the cafe, Blonde woman with bare breasts. The body of the Olympia is sensational but her badly modelled head looks stuck on. In 1874 he began experimenting with the Impressionists’ technique i.e. lighter tones and out of doors, not that convincingly (The barge).

Frederic Bazille (2)

Bazille studied with Monet, Renoir and Sisley but on this showing never quit a highly realistic style – Family reunion.

Monet (16)

Without a doubt the god of the movement and the core practitioner of Impressionism, produced hundreds of masterpieces while slowly fascinatingly changing and evolving his technique. The big surprise was an early work, Women in the garden (1867) which shows what a staggeringly good realistic artist he could have been: look at the detail on the dresses! Of all the impressionist works here I was most struck by the modest brilliance of the water and reflections in The bridge at Argenteuil (1874).

Alfred Sisley (6)

The English Impressionist. Always hard up, he persisted in the core Impressionist style. I was struck by Misty morning (1874) and Snow at Louveciennes (1878).

Camille Pissarro (14)

Ten years older than Monet, he quickly took to the Impressionist style (an open-mindedness which led him, in the 1880s, to adopt Seurat’s new invention of pointillism). Pissarro is the only one of the group who exhibited at all 8 Impressionist exhibitions. I was bowled over by Hoar frost (1873). I too have walked muddy country lanes in winter where the ridges of churned up mud are coated with frost and the puddles are iced over, while a weak bright winter sun illuminates the landscape.

Renoir (15)

Everyone knows the depictions of happy Parisians dancing at outdoor cafés under a dappled summer light. Set next to the landscapes of Monet, Sisley and Pissarro you can see straightaway that Renoir was fascinated by the human figure and was an enthusiastic portrayer of faces. I like Dance in the country (1883) for the extremely strong depiction of the man, an amazing depiction of all the shades of black to be found in a man’s black suit and shoes. I was startled to learn that, in the mid-1880s, dissatisfied with Impressionism, he took trips abroad and returned from Italy determined to paint in a more austere classical style. The plait (1884) anticipates 20th century neo-classicism, and is not at all what you associate with Renoir.

Armand Guillaumin (2)

From a working class background, Guillaumin met the others at art school, exhibited in the Salon des Refusés show, but never had a large output.

Edgar Degas (17)

Having visited and revisited the Degas exhibition at the National Gallery, I am convinced Degas was a god of draughtsmanship. It’s interesting that he lobbied hard for the Impressionists and organised the critical first exhibition, but always denied he was one. Skipping over the obvious masterpieces I was struck by the faces, especially the far left face, of The orchestra at the opera (1868). It shows his characteristic bunching up of objects. And the quite fabulous Blue dancers (1897).

Gustave Caillebotte (3)

A naval engineer turned artist. The only link with the Impressionist style I can make out is his frank depiction of contemporary life. But the dabs and rough brushwork, leaving blank canvas, obsession with sunlight and creating form out of colour alone – none of that seems on show here. Street in Paris in the rain (1877). Very striking and distinctive but I’m surprised to find him in the same pages as Sisley or Pissarro.

Berthe Morisot (6)

On the evidence here, painted lots of women in quiet domestic poses. Young girl at the ball (1875). See her 2023 exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Mary Cassatt (5)

More scenes of quiet domestic life, some of which eerily prefigure the same kind of rather bland domestic style of the early 20th century. Young mother sewing (1900)

Paul Cézanne (16)

Yesterday I visited the exhibition of Cézanne Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, so those 50 or so portraits are ringing in my memory, along with knowledge of how he painted subjects in series, the style he developed of painting in kinds of blocks or slabs of colours, which bring out the geometric implications of his subjects, and his playing with perspective i.e. the three or four components of even a simple portrait will be depicted as if from different points of view, subtly upsetting the composition The smoker (1890). Among the brown portraits and orangey still lifes, a dazzling riot of green stood out, Bridge over the pond (1896) though it, too, is made out of his characteristic blocks of (generally) diagonal brushstrokes, clustered into groups which suggest blocks or ‘chunks’, giving all his mature works that odd ‘monumental’ look, almost as if they’ve been sculpted out of colour more than painted smoothly.

Seurat (2)

Nineteen years younger than Monet (born in 1859 to Monet’s 1840), Seurat was not an Impressionist, but exhibited with them in 1886. His highly intellectual theory of Divisionism divided the group, causing big arguments. Seurat produced some highly distinctive and classic images before dying tragically young, aged 31.

Conclusion

This is a very handy survey, a useful overview of 120 works which remind the reader a) how varied the Impressionists were b) who were the core flag-wavers (Monet, Sisley, Pissarro) c) who were the outriders (Manet, Degas) and above all, d) what scores and scores of wonderful, enduring masterpieces they created.

Nineteenth century France reviews

Nineteenth century France reviews

1 Comment

by Simon on December 11, 2017 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Biography, Books, European History

Posted by Simon on December 11, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/12/11/impressionists-antonia-cunningham/

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