John Singer Sargent: A Dedicated Follower of Fashion

After three weeks of work on this portrait, John Singer Sargent described himself as a painter and a dressmaker. Lady Helen originally posed in a white dress; that was not quite the right look for Sargent. So he created a new garment in black. It shows you the lengths he would go to make sure that the sitter’s clothing-what it was made of, how it hung-was just right for his meticulously curated look. Sargent was the designer, draping fabric around her; a creative director, a stylist in today’s context. His brushstrokes were  like a tailor’s pins, darts and folds. By comparing himself to a dressmaker he reaffirmed the centrality of fashion to his art. Sargent painted this portrait of Lady Helen Vincent in Venice. You can just see what was  Grand Canal,  visible through the balustrade in the lower-left corner. Long arms and neck, emphasising her gracefulness, while the black fabric -a hint of fur trim at the bustline-highlights her milk-white skin, traditionally a sign of her nobility. As with 18th century grand manner portraits, her direct, but pensive gaze, suggests her intellect: she was a member of The Souls, a salon of prominent intellectuals that included  Sargent's friends, the writers Henry James and Edith Wharton. So, here’s this  fashionable, turn of the century   IT girl-portrayed by the most sought after stylist of the day- that would be a  winning combo for any 21st century influencer!

Lady Sassoon, (Aline de Rothschild),1907

Just look at the energy of this 1907 portrait of Sargent’s friend Lady Sassoon. She’s shown wearing a sweeping black opera cloak; it has been pinned and folded by Sargent in such a way as to expose the salmon pink lining- accents of colour which appear so spontaneous yet are carefully constructed by the master stylist. All that movement, you can almost hear the rustle of the crisp silk taffeta. Sargent was an artist who loved fabric and loved painting it.

John Singer Sargent,Self Portrait, 1906

Sargent was the consummate portrait painter to the rich and famous in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His international clientele included wealthy aristocrats, industrialists, presidents, politicians as well as nouveau riche society types, bohemian writers, artists and performers. A portrait by Sargent was your golden ticket to society. Born in Florence in 1856, his parents were ex-pat Americans who’d come to Europe in search of culture. In the words of one biographer: ‘they went to Europe and forgot to go home’. His father had been a promising Philadelphia surgeon, Mrs Sargent had a small family inheritance to help them along. They loved travel and like many Americans abroad at this time.they lived quite a bohemian lifestyle, flitting between Florence,Paris, Nice and the Alps, rootless but stimulating. This itinerant expat life made Sargent very ambitious to succeed.

He did not set foot in America until his was 21, arriving for the first time in 1876 (his family thought it was about time the children met their American relations). He was cosmopolitan-mid-Atlantic: European- American?American-European? British? All of it. He spoke Italian, French, German and English, although he always considered himself to be an American, or as he once wrote to his friend and fellow artist James MacNeil Whistler: ‘I keep my twang’. Above all he was Sargent, hovering over the the Paris Salon, the Royal Academy, and leading American art associations, tailoring his work to suit national tastes of his sitters. When he died in 1925 French, British and American art critics all claimed a part of him... 

How fitting  that this portrait should be in his birthplace-  the famous collection of artists’ self-portraits housed in the Vasari Corridor in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence; portraits  going back to Renaissance times. Many of the great names in European art are represented there and Sargent was one of the first Americans to be invited to contribute a self-portrait. He presents himself in formal attire proudly  wearing his Légion d’Honneur pin (represented by a small red dab on his right lapel )-France’s highest honour and a mark of his international success.

Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, 1892

Sargent was as adept at manipulating fashion as he was in handling his long paint- loaded brushes. He had leaned his technique from the French artist Charles Emile Auguste Durand-known as Carolus Durand. When Sargent enetered his studio in 1874,he quickly became his star pupil. Durand’s approach was radical for the time. He encouraged his students to draw straight from the brush-au premier coup- at first stroke. It was a technique in which new paint was applied over existing layers of paint while still wet. It was from this time that Sargent developed such remarkable self-assurance in handling paint.

Portraits like this were as much about the dress as they were about the sitter. For Sargent there was an entire  culture behind dress-the  costume. This is the time of haute couture- famous names like The House of Worth and Jeanne Paquin- and dresses like these were what the writer and friend of Sargent’s, Edith Wharton described as one’s ' social armour-the defence against the unknown and a your defiance of it'.

 At the height of his career Sargent charged 1000 guineas for a full length portrait or £500 for a three quarter; that’s about £120,000 in today’s money. Gowns like this one probably cost between £20,000 to £30,000 in today’s money.

Not everyone liked Sargent’s work: Walter Sickert dismissed it as the  ‘chiffon and wriggle of social portraiture’. D.H. Lawrence said ‘ Sargent’s portraits were nothing more than yards and yards of satin from the most expensive shops- having some pretty head propped up on top’

This particular pretty head was  Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, painted in 1892, (now at the National Gallery of Scotland). It was this work that  firmly established Sargent’s reputation in Britain. A celebrated dark haired beauty-Gertrude Vernon- she was in poor health at the time and so this was painted in just 6 sittings.

Madame X, 1883-84

Sargent is of course best known for this portrait, Mme X. If ever there was a dress and a portrait which caused a stir it was this one.  Mme X , Virginie Gautreau- (nee Avegno) , an American from New Orleans who moved to Paris in 1867 after her father died during the Civil War. She married a Paris banker and shipping magnate; she was known as a professional beauty. Every artist wanted to paint her and Sargent became obsessed with her after they met in 1882: ‘I have a great desire to paint her portrait , and have reason to think she would allow it and is waiting for someone to propose this homage to her beauty' he wrote, ‘you might tell her I am a man of prodigious talent'. He finally convinced her  to let him paint her. She probably didn't need that much convincing: a portrait by Sargent would fit in to her meticulous strategy of self-promotion. She’s portrayed in almost Mannerist style, as a quintessential  nouvelle femme Parisienne-just as she intended-sophisticated, perfectly groomed, elegantly dressed, modern and independent.

Sargent  originally painted the right shoulder strap sliding off her shoulder as shown in the Tate’s study below, but this was too much for the critics and after  the Salon show he re-painted the strap.

Both  these provocative depictions underscored a sense of 'foreign otherness' for the critics--the fallen shoulder strap exemplified poor taste from BOTH sitter and the artist-a mistake that no true Parisienne or Frenchman, would have made. So the portrait became  a symbol of BOTH  artist and sitter who, according to French critics, were upstart Americans  who threatened to topple long standing hierarchies in fashion, society and national identity. The colour black was as important to Sargent as white. During the 1880s he painted almost half his female sitters in black; the colour was so important to him that when he visited his friend Claude Monet he was unable to paint because Monet had no black pigment!

Mme X, study, 1883-4

Sargent  died in his sleep in 1925 age 69. His reputation went into freefall after his death.  Sargent’s  great nephew, the art historian  Richard Ormond,  blames  this mainly on the antagonism of his former friend, the influential critic Roger Fry, who came to see Sargent as irrelevant to 20th-century modernism-understandable perhaps in the context of the time, however  I think his society portraits are as relevant today as they were then. Sargent  has a central role in the social function of portraiture: the way it can manufacture identity -superficially AND existentially. Sargent was a dedicated PORTRAYER of fashion, a dedicated FOLLOWER of the fashionable, and an artist who made fashion and identity central and defining  elements of his painting.

Moffat Takediwa: The Art of Waste

I am in Zimbabwe at the moment and was very lucky to have the chance to see the work of Moffat Takadiwa (b 1983) at the National Gallery of Art in Harare. The exhibition is called Vestiges of Colonialism and showcases a variety of large scale sculptures which he makes from discarded objects- rubbish:the products of landfill which undulate and shimmer as they cascade down the wall or take possession of the floor…everything from computer keys to toothbrushes to the insides of ball point pens. He weaves together everyday detritus to make organic forms which embrace the possibilities of making something beautiful and permanent out of global waste. Beneath these hypnotic tapestries of waste lurk issues of exploitation, historically and in the present.

Takadiwa has about 30 helpers who scour public dumps along with studio assistants who help assemble his pieces

This was one of my favourite installations- Same Old Song. A dense forest of old tape reels and then in a clearing, what looks like a log…in fact made of vinyl records.

This installation looks like a delicate ceramic from afar…

Moffat Takadiwa was a founder and plays an active part in the Mbare Art Space in Harare which mentors the growing art community in Zimbabwe. He also has an ever growing international presence. The majority of his work uses a tapestry like format and as such none of my photographs can truly do them justice:they have to be seen to be appreciated. ‘I want to start a dialogue around colonial residue in Africa and how it is causing a lot of challenges in contemporary Africa and in Zimbabwe in particular’, he explained in a recent interview for Sculpture Magazine. These works are as multi-layered as the materials they are made from- addressing complicated and challenging legacies of historical western domination, on-going economic exploitation and cultural identities.

WORK OF THE WEEK: Alice Neel, Self Portrait,1980

‘LIFE BEGINS AT SEVENTY!’(Alice Neel)

Alice Neel, Self Portrait,1980,Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery,Washington D.C.

The American artist Alice Neel (1900-1984) was 80 when she finished her first painted self-portrait-one of only two she made. Neel stuck to portraiture at a time when Abstract Expressionism was all the rage, often depicting marginalized figures, the poor, her black neighbours in Harlem,New York, or political activists;  not the traditional subjects of mid-20th century America. One critic observed that in making portraits, Neel ‘hurls shafts that hit the mark but do not sting’. Her portrayals are psychological, penetrating and compassionate. They can make you smile and bring tears to your eyes in equal measure. This work took five years to finish -her cheeks are flushed because she said ‘it was so damn hard!’ With characteristic honesty and empathy, she chose to depict herself unapologetically naked, perching  on her striped  chair, with definite echoes of Matisse and Picasso. She depicts herself  as artist AND sitter-pretty radical for a woman in her 80s…ferociously biting  the historical hand of the idealized female nude. Neel presents us with her aging body in all its glory! She stares defiantly at both herself (behind the easel) and at us-one eyebrow raised in a mischievous challenge to us for looking. It is a celebration of her courage for telling it as it is.

WORK OF THE WEEK: Sir William Rothenstein, Parting at Morning,1891,Tate Britain

A partially dressed woman looks out at the viewer in this life-size chalk drawing. The verse inscribed at the bottom right is a quotation from a poem by Robert Browning with the same title as the picture. The morning after a brief sexual encounter:
And straight was a path of gold for him, And the need of a world of men for me.
The Tate’s display states: ‘Where the poem takes the woman’s point of view, the painting provides the perspective of the man’ … but does it? This is a work filled with ambivalence. The expression of the woman, with decidedly masculine features, is a mixture of defiance, exhaustion, anger and loss. What kind of sexual encounter has taken place- there is no hint of romance or passion, but rather something altogether more sinister and loveless.William Rothenstein was a 19-year-old student in Paris when he painted it.

Rothenstein was one of the principal artistic links between the younger, avant garde artists in London and Paris in the 1890s, and this is his most important surviving work from that period. He was a member of a circle which included the British artists Charles Conder and Arthur Studd, and the French artists Toulouse-Lautrec and Lucien Pissarro. In 1892, Toulouse-Lautrec persuaded the dealer Père Thomas, who specialised in Impressionist paintings, to put on a show of works by Rothenstein and Conder in Paris.. This work was included in the exhibition, it received some good reviews and apparently was much admired by Whistler and Degas.

I find the painting both compelling and troubling. Rothenstein apparently claimed that the model reminded him of a phrase by the writer Henry James – ‘the wanton was not without a certain cadaverous beauty’. What does he mean? That the woman possesses a beauty in spite of herself? The use of the word wanton with its hint of promiscuity undermines her identity. There is something so uncomfortable-unacceptable- about what clearly is an underlying masculine judgment about not only her ‘beauty’ but her morality.

Rothenstein's figure is literally uncovered, made vulnerable before the sight of the artist and of the onlooker and yet - her gaze is defiant, penetrating and strong.

Sexual desire, a hint of sexual violence perhaps, beauty, vulnerability and unhappiness fuse together in this enigmatic work, creating an unsettled and unresolved atmosphere. It is a work which draws you deep into her gaze-it is virtually impossible to look away.

KATI HORNA: THE SURREALISM OF WARFARE

Kati Horna (1912-2000) was an avant-garde Hungarian photographer who fled her country in the 1930s to live in Berlin-her contemporaries included Robert Capa and André Kertész. In 1933 she moved to Paris where she was influenced by Surrealist themes using photomontage to create unsettling and uncanny images. This photograph is from her time covering the Spanish Civil War for the Republican side. In the intensity of battle, an eerily disembodied face hovers above the two gunners. Far from depicting an heroic scene, Horna presents the ghost-like figure as a portent of the nearness of death. War at its most surreal.

Following the Spanish Civil War, she moved back to Paris, and then as the Nazis took over, she headed to Mexico where she was a central figure in avant-garde circles. Surrealist Leonora Carrington was a great friend. In Mexico she became a pioneer in photo-journalism, one of the country’s few women to do so at that time. She had an extraordinary career as an editor, photographer and activist, and yet in her lifetime very few of her images were ever credited.

Horna is one of the female photographers featured in my lecture ‘Reframing Photography’s History:Pioneering Female Photographers’.

WORK OF THE WEEK: VERONICA RYAN WINNER OF TURNER PRIZE 2022

Finally! After several years of banal, pretentious, over explained offerings, we have a Turner Prize winner who really deserves our celebration. Hooray! for Veronica Ryan, with her beautiful, soft, squidgy meditative and truly poetic sculptures- soft and stretchy, plumped up like pillows, arranged like shells or pebbles on a shelf, or hanging in net bags that stretch and bulge, like fresh produce from the veg market. They evoke found things, bits and pieces washed up on a beach or thrown away in a skip – but are artfully cast. Many of her sculptures are based on the flora of Montserrat, the Caribbean island where she was born in 1956: soursop skins and cocoa pods, glazed with the island’s volcanic ash. These vegetable forms suggest history, culture, life, AND place; from the fruit itself- unpeeling to reveal both cherished and painful memories. Her winning works included the giant Caribbean fruit sculptures that were unveiled in Hackney, in east London in October 2021 in tribute to the Windrush generation who moved from the Caribbean to the UK after 1948. It was the first permanent public artwork to commemorate the Windrush story.

Fruits, seeds, plants and vegetables are recurring motifs in Ryan’s sculpture – they function metaphorically for the artist’s own sense of dislocation and in a wider context, they refer to a history of trading across the globe amd the legacy of empire and exploitation.

Born in 1956 in Montserrat, she moved to the UK when she was a small child. Her interest in art developed during her school years. In particular, she remembers making a Christmas tree in infant school and being inspired by the creative use of materials in a minimalistic way. She also cites her mother's patchwork as an inspiration for her art.

Ryan was keen to break out of the mould of male-centric British modernism as it was taught in the seventies and eighties by drawing on a wider range of female sculptors and artists of colour. Among her earliest influences was the German-born American sculptor Eva Hesse, whose work she saw first-hand in 1979, at an exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. Around the same time, Ryan discovered the work of Louise Bourgeois. Another formative influence was British sculptor Barbara Hepworth.

Ryan completed her arts studies, which included Slade and School of Oriental and African Studies , at the beginning of the 1980s, a time marked by the rise of the British Black Art Movement. She took part in the ICA’s seminal exhibition The Thin Black Line (London, 1985) and From Two Worlds ( London and Edinburgh, 1986) and this connected her with a broader anti-racist movement although later she felt the need to stress that her work should not be pinned exclusively to race: ‘All along I have had various people be very critical of me because I did not fit into their politicized agenda,’ she said.

At 66 she is the oldest winner in the Turner prize's 38-year history. When her name was announced she shouted out ‘POWER! VISIBILITY!" You bet! For more than twenty years she has been in the shadows- ‘no one was paying attention to my work’ she said. Not a chance of that now. Many congratulations to Veronica Ryan!

Veronica Ryan, picture courtesy of Hackney Council, 2021

Veronica Ryan, Along a Spectrum, 2021, Spike Island Gallery Bristol, photograph by Max McClure

WORK OF THE WEEK: KATHIE KOLLWITZ, WOMAN WITH A DEAD CHILD, 1903

The German artist Kathie Kollwitz (1867-1945) produced some of the most extraordinary art of the 20th century, and established herself in a world dominated by male artists, as a forceful female voice creating a powerful, unforgettable aesthetic vision centred on women and the working classes. Primarily a printmaker, she  was born into a progressive household in Konigsberg –in the eastern most edge of the Prussian empire-now in the modern day Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, on the borders of Poland and Lithuania

She was the daughter of a prosperous and politically radical businessman and the granddaughter of a Lutheran pastor-so from childhood she was consumed by issues of social justice.

For families with daughters at this time, the fear was they would remain unmarried, and so there was this push to have some sort of fallback. Kollwitz  was encouraged to learn how to draw-to be a TEACHER-as a means of supporting herself. In 1919 she became the first female professor at the Prussian Academy of Art. Actually Kollwitz's  father thought she PARTICULARLY needed this fallback as he did not believe she was pretty enough to marry. She did marry, her husband was a doctor in a working class area of Berlin, giving her first hand experience of the social costs of industrialisation. At a time when female artists were expected to produce floral paintings and still life, Kollwitz produced harrowing images of deprivation, suffering and grief.

In Woman with Dead Child, the mother grasps the lifeless body of her child….an image of such unbearable emotion. Kollwitz wanted to show what poverty and social unrest does to the individual and family.  She took herself and her son Peter as the models for this print- a chillingly prophetic image as her son was to die soon after he volunteered to fight in World War I. When war broke out he wanted to enlist but he needed permission from his father as he was just 17-his father said no- but Kathie persuaded him to let him go as he was so keen. Peter died just 10 days later in the trenches of Belgium. Kathie was overcome with grief and guilt---this was to determine the rest of her work; her creativity and artistic expression  were linked to her  mourning. She also became a fervent pacifist . Not for her the conventional heroic battlefield scenes of men fighting, but rather she showed the impact of war – a man’s war-on the women and children at home-the effects of war on the fabric of the family. A woman’s response to a man’s war- Kollwitz represented the overwhelming sense of personal loss felt by the German population –loss of sons, fathers, husbands, brothers , and lovers; the loss of an entire generation.

WORK OF THE WEEK: Walter Richard Sickert, Portrait of Victor Lecourt, 1921-4

British artist Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) was one of the central figures in avant-garde artistic groupings in late 19th and early 20th centuries. Best known for his figurative paintings of urban life and bawdy music hall scenes, both in England and France, he also produced, for the time, shocking, yet innovative and radical images of the nude showing unidealised female bodies. He was fascinated by popular culture and the potential notoriety of celebrity; he was even, falsely, linked to the Jack Ripper murders.

Portraiture occupies a minor role in his oeuvre, and his approach to portraiture says so much about him as a painter and a man and for this reason I have chosen this wonderful depiction of Victor Lecourt, a hotel proprietor from Dieppe in Normandy where Sickert spent many years working. Sickert is often referred to as a painter’s painter because of his fascination with the myriad approaches to manipulating paint enabling him to create almost abstract effects as he depicted the figure. This is a masterful exercise showing his visceral engagement with the expressive powers of light: the back of Lecourt’s suit and the outline of his beard almost seem like neon outlines, and light bounces off the gold patterns on the wallpaper motifs behind him….and look at the blazing mirror -like reflection of the sun on the table by the window.

Portraits for Sickert were more akin to stories on a tiny stage, with the real star being the power of paint. As the writer Virginia Woolf said: ‘Sickert always seems more of a novelist than a biographer’. Each element of this portrait is like a short story, unforgettable, and mesmerising.

WORK OF THE WEEK: Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Grand Pic Noir, 1894, Musée d'Orsay,Paris

Axel Gallen (1865-1931) took the Finnish sounding name of Akseli Gallen-Kallela in 1907. He is one of Finland’s most famous artists-born in Pori, a town in southwest Finland which was part of the Russian Empire until 1917. He was a consummate painter of immersive and meditative landscapes who was deeply influenced by Finnish mythology and legends and their deep connection with nature. His compositions were based on photographs and he would travel deep into the Finnish heartland, studying the forests and large lakes. In the winter he would ski up to 60 km a day, while in the summer he would walk or cycle to find the perfect subjects. He was particularly drawn to the in between seasons: the melting snows of spring and the tarnished tones of autumn.

Gallen-Kallela gained an established international reputation within the European Avant-Garde: he was made a knight of the Legion d’Honneur in France in 1902. Between 1901 and 19104 he exhibited at the Vienna Secession, and exhibited regularly in Paris

WORK OF THE WEEK: RACHEL RUYSCH, (1664-1750), BOUQUET OF FLOWERS IN A GLASS VASE ON A MARBLE TABLE, 1748 at Colnaghi, London

This exquisite work by the famed Dutch botanical artist Rachel Ruysch is part of an enchanting exhibition which focuses on female still life artists of the late 16th and early 17th century. Forbidden Fruit: Female Still Life at the Colnaghi Gallery in London shows us a long ignored body of work-much of it previously hidden away in private collections. Rachel Ruysch (1664 - 1750), contributed much to the advancement of science through her practice. This is a small oil painting on wooden panel and it is believed to be the very last of her works, painted when she was well into her eighties. We know this as she not only signed the work on the bottom right but also inscribed her age…twice…84 and then 85 which means she continued to work on this painting until her 85th year.

Rachel Ruysch was born in The Hague, the daughter of the botanist, physician and anatomist, Frederik Ruysch. Her family settled in Amsterdam when she was young and she trained there with the well known flower painter, Willem van Aelst, from 1679.

In the 1680s, Ruysch was influenced by the still life painter Otto Marseus van Schriek, who was famous for his representations of dark forest flora with insects and lizards.

Ruysch worked in The Hague from 1701 to 1708, where she was the first female member of the artist’s society, Confrerie Pictura. From 1708 until 1716, she was court painter to the Elector Palatine, Johan Willem, in Düsseldorf.

Forbidden Fruit at Colnaghi Gallery London, April 27 through June 24, 2022

WORK OF THE WEEK: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Infant, Breastfeeding, 1904

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) was a pioneer of modern art in Europe and possibly the first woman to paint a full-length nude self-portrait. With simplified forms, earthy colours, and visceral impasto textures, Modersohn-Becker painted landscapes, interiors, and still lifes, though for me, her most poignant works are of mothers and their children. I have recently become a grandmother and so this work of a mother breastfeeding has particular resonance in its extraordinary intimacy and tenderness. It is heartbreaking too, as Modersohn-Becker died in childbirth in 1907; she died of complications just 20 days after giving birth to a daughter. She was just 31 years old.

In the 15 short years when she was able to pursue her art, Modersohn-Becker produced more than 700 paintings and 1,000 drawings and prints. Despite selling only a few paintings during her lifetime, her distinct style, her perseverance in overcoming considerable barriers to women artists, and daring subject matter made her a leading artist of her generation. Undeterred by the paltry recognition she received, she felt she had made a major leap forward with her large-scale nudes and self-portraits, writing that through this body of work, “I will make something of myself.”

In November 2022 she will be one of the artists featured in the Royal Academy’s exhibition, Making Modernism, devoted to the trail-blazing women artists working in Germany in the early 1900s.

The 'Gutsy' World of Paula Rego

The Portuguese born,London based artist, Paula Rego has described her paintings as ‘gutsy’-a word which not only captures the brutal honesty and provocative spirit of her work but also something truly visceral in both content and technique. For me Rego’s strength and power comes from the fact that she really hits us, bludgeons our senses, challenges us to confront the painful truths of our society and history: war, poverty, sexual discrimination, and cruelty, all expressed with the most astounding painterly skill .  These are not images which you can just walk past-these are images which pull you in, toss and turn your emotions in both a painful and compassionate manner. Since the 1960, many of her works have originated in news stories as in the case of Julieta from 1964: a vibrant collage, so animated with acidic pinks and purples, it feels like a a child’s TV cartoon. When you get closer disembodied figures begin to appear: a ghost like figure hanging, almost in a crucified position So what at first seemed like a joyous display reveals something far more sinister. ‘Julieta’ is about a technician who was electrocuted while working on an electricity pylon. His wife witnessed the death.  It is a work filled with anger about the poor conditions and suffering of workers.

Paula Rego, Julieta, 1964

It is not one of her better known paintings- it was the first time I had seen it- but it’s typical of Rego, an artist who deals in brutal storytelling, using fairytales, nursery rhymes and folklore to carry each message through. Every image is like a theatrical performance, each one packed with drama and for me, far more dramatic and powerful than anything Andy Warhol could come up with in his Death and Disaster series from the same period.

The magnificent painting War (2003) was inspired by the invasion of Iraq and a photograph Rego saw in the newspaper. It combines realism and fantasy in an almost surreal manner; the innocence of floppy toys and frilly dresses in a nightmarish conflation with death and destruction.

Paula Rego, War, 2003,Tate

The day I visited Tate Britain’s stunning retrospective of her work (Paula Rego at Tate Britain until 24th October,2021), lawmakers in Texas had just voted to ban abortions after 6 weeks-even in cases of rape or incest.

Paula Rago, Untitled,1998

Paula Rego, Untitled, (detail),1998

Paula Rego, Untitled, (detail) 1998

Rego’s harrowing abortion series was produced in 1998, made in response to a referendum in Portugal which failed to legalise abortion. A schoolgirl lies hunched on a bed, in agony after a backstreet abortion. Another clutches a cushion on the floor. A woman sits with her knees apart, face of rictus pain, mouth tight shut so she does not cry out as the plastic bucket awaits. The effect of this series was credited with helping to sway public opinion to run a second referendum in 2007 which finally legalised abortion. Seeing these now, in light of the ruling  in Texas, made my blood boil. One wonders if these images would ever have any impact upon the Texan right wing ideologues. These are tragic masterpieces and are testament to the power of art.

Paula Rego, Escape, 2009

It is unbearably prescient that this work, Escape, was chosen as the last work in this wonderful show of Paula Rego, an artist who has consistently made work that responds to and fights injustice, especially against women. From the massive assault on democratic rights of women in Texas to Afghanistan’s lurch into misogynistic tyranny, this image of a woman, glowing in a golden dress ,clutching her child, and striding forward, gives us some glimmer of hope that there might be an Escape, and some chance of justice for ALL women.

MAKER'S EYE: STORIES OF CRAFT AND THE WELCOME RETURN OF THE CRAFTS COUNCIL GALLERY

Just as the Crafts Council was opening it’s revamped space on London’s Pentonville Road, Covid struck and it had to close. How timely then to visit this wonderful new public space dedicated to craft. It’s been a time when many of us have discovered or re-discovered the joys of making; craft has become an important source of therapy, creativity and personal adventure in these challenging times of pandemic. The opening exhibition is called Maker’s Eye:Stories of Craft in which 13 makers were asked to consider the question: ‘What does craft look like and mean to you'?’. The show runs until 21 August 2021.

Throughout the year, the gallery has planned a programme of exhibitions and events designed to tell the many stories of craft and making. Craft is everywhere, from the clothes we wear to the cast of a toilet seat-there’s one on shaw from the Armitage Shanks factory in Staffordshire. This show enthrals as we are immersed in the art of making and the making of art.

Michael Brennand-Wood,Construct-Space Whispers,fabric,metal,beads,thread and ink ,2019

This is one of my favourite works on display:a reflection of the artist’s view of how distorted, twisted and fractured our society has become. We are looking at the imagining of a nightmare-a mess of tangled messages, governments’ ineptitude, emotional turmoil, and the shared vulnerability of life in the time of international pandemic. And yet, Brennand-Wood’s use of thread symbolises something more hopeful too-connection and repair in the midst of disarray. The work is inspired by a painting by Caspar David Friedrich from 1823, Sea of Ice which is shown below.

Caspar David Friedrich, Sea of Ice, 1823-24, Kunsthalle,Hamberg

Maker’s Eye:Stories of Craft at the Crafts Council on Pentonville Road. Nearest tube is Angel. Runs until 21 August 2021

Portraiture Miniatures: Tiny Treasures Close to Our Hearts

Portraiture miniatures-often hidden away in protective glass cabinets-you might just walk past what are exquisite, painted tokens of love or diplomacy, displaying extraordinary skill. Like this dashing Elizabethan lovestruck man, they are often steeped in mystery….

Nicholas Hilliard, Unknown Man Against a Background of Flames, c 1600, V&A

Intimate and oh so private, this man wears nothing more than an undershirt almost open to the waist, holding what must surely be another miniature, probably of his lover. The message is clear: the love they share is on fire! He stands against a background of flames. A private passion for her eyes only! But who might they be?

Early 19th century eye miniature by unknown artist set in twenty seed pearls and tiny diamonds as tears

The most intense and intimate of portrait miniatures were eye miniatures- the notion of the eye always looking at you, the window to your soul and to your love. Eye miniatures were a brief anomaly in miniature painting which came into fashion at the end of the 18th century. They were an extremely intense manifestation of what was already a highly emotionally charged art form

‘Miniatures:Tiny Treasures Close to Our Hearts’ is available as a longer lecture. Please contact me for more information

Hell is Other People?- The Future of the City

Here are a few images from one of my lectures ‘Picturing the City’. An opportunity to reflect as we slowly re-emerge after collective lockdowns…

Gustave Caillebotte, The Bridge of Europe, 1876, Musée du Petit Palais, Paris

What’s going to happen to our city centres? In the age of pandemic, shops, offices, and restaurants have been firmly off limits-city centres reduced to quiet retreats. Since 2007 more than half the world’s population now officially live in cities but it is tempting to wonder how this will change in a world which has become so traumatised by the effects of pandemic. Hell has certainly been other people, to take the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre’s phrase. So will we now shun the crowds of the city in favour of seemingly safer rural life?

Artists have long been fascinated by the city and city life-certainly since the 19th century the city has been used as a trope to represent modernity. Gustave Caillebotte’s The Bridge of Europe from 1876-a classic example of a modern life Parisian street scene.

Camille Pissarro, The Boulevard Montmartre at Night, 1897, National Gallery, London

The electrification of cities was a popular aesthetic for Impressionists like Camille Pissarro. Paris, like London, began to be electrified at the beginning of the 1880s creating a very different sort of urban experience from the more vaporous, hazy gaslights at the beginning of the century. This painting is alive with light: the repeated patters of flickering carriage lights, the street lamps, the shop windows. Streets which might have been dark and dangerous were now enticing and energetic.

John Atkinson Grimshaw, Liverpool Quay by Moonlight, 1887,Tate

John Atkinson Grimshaw was famous for his night scenes of urban landscapes-in particular these views of docks in northern cities such as Liverpool and Hull. The golden glow cast from the shops through the fog and drizzle reflected on the wet cobble stones created a new type of urban aesthetic. The divisions between inside and outside spaces-shop and street- were loosened through the mesmerising effects of electrical lighting.

Hatekeyama Naoya, display at Tate Modern, Night-time Tokyo

Night time images of Tokyo from the 1990s

Pierre Auguste Renoir, Dance at le Moulin de la Galette, 1876, Musée d’Orsay

Nicole Eisenman, Brooklyn Biergarten II,2008

Will the crowds return to our cities?

Giorgio de Chirico, The Enigma of the Day, 1914, MOMA

The empty streets of the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, painted in 1914 as Europe braced for what was to be a truly cataclysmic war-and one which was followed by the last world pandemic-the Spanish flu of 1918-1922.

Hey Ho! We can always rely on art to cheer us up!

Picturing the City-How Artists Depicted the City is available as a longer lecture. Please contact me for further details

A Breath of Fresh Paint: A Revival of Figurative Art and the Changing Face of Portraiture

#mydressmychoice” (2015) by Michael Armitage (© Michael Armitage, photo © White Cube/George Darrell)

Who says painting is dead? The curators of a new show at London’s Whitechapel Gallery would have us believe that painting had its last hurrah in the 1980s. The stock market boom, powered by the wolves of Wall Street and Square Mile wide- boys, was bankrolling the neo-expressionist swagger of artists like Julian Schnabel, Georg Baselitz and Philip Guston. That “hurrah” was best exemplified by the seminal show at the Royal Academy in 1981, A New Spirit of Painting, which featured 38 artists—all, incidentally, white men—who broke free from the chains of minimalism and abstraction to champion figurative art.

Since then, according to the Whitechapel curators, representational painting has lost its appeal, is past its sell-by date, and has been largely overtaken by photography and video produced by ambitious young artists. In a century dominated by digital photography (a jaw-dropping 1.8 billion images are uploaded every day) how can painting ever compete?

For your answer, walk around Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium. Instagram selfies are so last year: this is a show articulating topical social issues with new energy, showing how the paintbrush is so much more powerful than the camera in its capacity to portray an inner psychological world, of the self, the body, race and gender. Reports of the death of figurative painting have been greatly exaggerated. Chris Ofili, Peter Doig, or Luc Tuymans, to name but a few established figurative painters, are not exactly languishing in obscurity, despite the ubiquitousness of the photography or conceptual art installations that continue to bemuse most gallery visitors.

Curatorial headline-grabbing aside, Radical Figures deserves attention. The Whitechapel’s director, Iwona Blazwick, says it highlights 10 of the “most exciting artists working in figurative painting today”. In stark contrast with the 1981 Royal Academy show, seven of the painters are women and four are artists of colour. The choice is inevitably subjective: who is to say there would not be 10 completely different “exciting” artists chosen at another venue? Well, the more the merrier. This is a truly enthralling vibrant display of young talent.

“Tarifa” (2001) by Daniel Richter (courtesy of Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, London)

The dialogue with art history is genuine. Tarifa (2001), by the German Daniel Richter, evokes the notion of the sublime and the terror of dramas at sea, referencing Theodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa and Turner’s The Shipwreck. Painted at the time when night vision technology started to be used by the military and the police, it is a harrowing and alarmingly prescient image showing a small inflatable raft tossed in a dark sea, overloaded with refugees huddling in fear.

Nicole Eisenman’s Brooklyn Biergarten II (2008)

Nicole Eisenman’s Brooklyn Biergarten II (2008), painted at the height of the 2008 crash, shows artists, hipsters and businessmen drowning their sorrows, echoing Édouard Manet’s masterpiece of Parisian bourgeois entertainment, Music in the Tuileries (1862); her Progress, Real and Imagined (2006), below, meanwhile, has clear references to Pieter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch.

But painters have always engaged in visual conversations with their predecessors. Turner was, after all, known as the “British Claude”.

Right panel of “Progress, Real and Imagined” (2006) by Nicole Eisenman (courtesy of Ringier AG/Sammlung Ringier, Switzerland)

Kenyan-born Michael Armitage uses social media videos as a source for his subjects. #mydressmychoice (2015) - see above-is taken from an incident in 2014 in which a woman was assaulted and stripped by a group of men while waiting for a bus in Nairobi. The attackers accused the victim, who wore a miniskirt, of “tempting” them with “indecent” clothing. The attack was captured on a video that was posted on YouTube and went viral. Thousands took to the streets in uproar, under the hashtag #MyDressMyChoice.

In this work, the pose of the woman is a direct reference to Diego Velàzquez’s Rokeby Venus, the mirror replaced by the “male gaze” of the attackers’ shoes. Armitage tells me that the fascination lies in the conflation of beauty with something truly horrible and violent. “Painting is still and silent, so it gives us more time to reflect on the full horrors of what this scene depicts”. Precisely because it consists of recognisable images articulated through paint, figurative work, Armitage claims, unlike abstraction or conceptual art, is a far more powerful way of engaging and reflecting life.

This reinvigoration of figurative painting has been especially championed among black artists, such as the British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s enigmatic portraits of imagined black subjects (a retrospective of her work was scheduled to be at Tate Britain from May 20 to August 31; the Tate galleries are now closed until at least June 1), and the Chicago-based Kerry James Marshall. In both cases it is figurative painting that lends greater potency to the representation of issues of identity and racial stereotyping.

Kehinde Wiley is a young African-American painter who is quite literally changing the faces of portraiture with his pulsating and political depictions of black men and women, ranging from young people he meets on the street (a process he calls “streetcasting”) to rap artists, and even Barack Obama, whose 2018 portrait now hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. Wiley has made his name with hyper-realistic, brightly coloured portraits, often with dramatic botanical backdrops. He challenges viewers’ preconceptions of people of colour and brings them into museums and galleries where they have, up to now, been largely excluded. His works are represented in every major museum in the United States.

His portraits give power to those without it, turning the privileged and elitist identity of traditional portraiture— the “field of power”—on its head.

Installation view of “Portrait of Melissa Thompson” by Kehinde Wiley. (© Kehinde Wiley, 2020. Courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Photography by Nicola Tree)

Wiley’s latest venture is a collaboration with the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow in London. Long inspired by the floral motifs of William Morris, he first came to know the designs while helping his mother sell bric-à-brac in South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s. In what must surely be a coup for the gallery, this is his first solo exhibition at a public institution in the UK. It is also the first time he features portraits exclusively of women, all of whom he met last summer in Dalston. Kehinde Wiley: The Yellow Wallpaper takes its name from the 1892 text “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The short story, much loved by literary theorists, is a semi-autobiographical and proto-feminist tale of a new mother confined to her bedroom after being diagnosed with “hysteria”. The room’s yellow wallpaper design takes on a monstrous life of its own, contributing to her paranoia. It is a consuming, psychological parable of the dangers of denying women their independence. In deliberate contrast, Wiley’s Dalston women break out of their yellow wallpaper like powerful warriors; they are palpably not objects of consumption for the male gaze or control.

Wiley’s work is right at home in a museum dedicated to Morris, the great socialist maverick who passionately believed that art and design could change people’s lives. These monumental East End women are immortalised in a Grand Manner style in an artform previously reserved for royalty, aristocratic landowners or simply the very rich and famous. Museums can no longer afford to ignore or exclude culturally the people who live their lives outside their doors. Wiley’s portraits address centuries of inequality and lack of representation with scintillating and empowering images that turn the genre on its head.

Installation view of “Portrait of Dorinda Essah” by Kehinde Wiley. (© Kehinde Wiley, 2020. Courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Photography by Nicola Tree)

“Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium” is at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and will run until August 30th. “Kehinde Wiley: The Yellow Wallpaper” was at the William Morris Gallery. The gallery is still shut due to Covid; please check website for reopening news

This article appeared in the March 2020 edition of Standpoint Magazine

Feast and Fast: Delectable Treats from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge

Can someone please explain to me why the concept of ‘tasting menus’ in fine restaurants ever caught on? These culinary journeys were inspired by the French notion of dégustation-primarily reserved for wine tasting- but they began popping up on menus at top restaurants around the world from the 1990s: each tiny course a delectable calling card, an edible CV, to showcase the talents of superstar chefs. At Per Se, one of New York’s most sought after restaurants, you can brace yourself for a 13 course meal for an eye (and no doubt mouth) watering $355 per person, not including wine. Your taste buds can romp through a list ranging from, to mention just a few of the courses, a dish called oysters and pearls, duck foie gras on a ‘condensed milk tuile’, butter poached Maine Lobster  and some veal ribeye; in case you were tempted, the ‘charcoal grilled miyazaki wagyu beef with Fukushu Kumquats, Cipollino Onions, gem lettuce and Anchoide’incurs a $100 supplement. To finish, there is aged gruyere and black winter truffles, because you’re worth it, and an assortment-aka lots and lots-of desserts. Don’t get me wrong, were I invited (reader please note, invited), to experience this extravaganza, I would accept with relish- excuse the pun. Far be it for me to dismiss such a gastronomic adventure as an indulgence. It all sounds delicious, although what it might inflict on one’s gastric juices does not bear too much scrutiny.   

The show-stopping tasting  menus of today remind me of the 17thcentury Dutch Golden Age binges on canvas: still lifes of overladen tables filled with food intended to focus our minds on economic abundance (it wasn’t  called the Golden Age for nothing), temptation , and a soupcon of sex versus morality. Mounds of costly foodstuffs, as shown in Pieter Claesz’s Still Life with Peacock Pie (above)  or Joris van Son’s Still Life with Lobster  (shown below) were genuinely served up in reality. These images are part of more than 300 works on display in Feast and Fast, a remarkable and highly entertaining exhibition exploring historical customs surrounding western eating at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. 

Joris van Son, Still life with a Lobster, 1660, Fitzwilliam Museum

The exhibition’s curators explain how the bills of fare of great Baroque feasts often read like inventories rather than menus. Take, for example, that for James II’s  coronation banquet  in Westminster Hall in 1685. We learn that the king and his new wife, Maria di Modena, sat down alone(!) to a table laden with 170 different dishes. One dish consisted of ‘twenty four puffins, cold’ and another of ‘four fawns, two larded’. Although van Son appeared satisfied with a single lobster on his still life table, and  Per Se in New York offers just one morsel of Maine lobster on its tasting menu, their majesties had twelve on theirs.

 The exhibition is a curated cornucopia overflowing with paintings, prints and objects from the 15th to 18th  centuries, demonstrating how food was as much about power, status  and morality as filling an empty hole. There is certainly no lack of bedazzling dining room bling, whose craftsmanship not only astounds but also makes one feel a tad queasy at the unbridled flaunting of opulence. Tableware wrought in gold and silver, known as plate, was a perfect way to show off in elite circles for the sheer hell of it. One object stands out as particularly outlandish:  a spectacular cup which was created in London  in 1585 by an Antwerp goldsmith. It was made out of an exotic nautilus shell from south east Asia, encased in an elaborate silver gilt setting. A figure of Neptune, bronco-busting a dolphin, forms the stem; and as if that were not enough, a giant silver lobster crawls inside the cup, ready to stick his frightful pincers up your nostrils. Setting aside such nightmarish ostentation, there are delightful examples of table paraphernalia, designed to amuse or surprise. This porcelain soup tureen was made in Chelsea in 1755. {IMAGE BELOW} The manufacturers stressed the rabbit should be ‘as large as life’, the idea being that when placed on the table, diners would be deceived into thinking that a cuddly rabbit, daubed in lilac-brown glaze and munching a cabbage leaf, was real. Well why not?

Tureen and Cover in the form of a Rabbit,Chelsea Porcelain Manufactory,London, c1755,Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

The prize for sheer inventiveness must surely go the bizarre tureen and cover in the form of a trussed roast capon. In the late 1790s, due to war with France and several failed harvests, flour was in short supply and the Royal Household forbade its use as pastry. Staffordshire potters rose to the challenge by making stoneware dishes to mimic pie crusts. This tureen would have been made to hold a poultry or game pie.  The attention to detail is extraordinary if not a bit weird: the makers even included holes to show where the ‘bird’ had been removed from the spit, as well as giving it a golden-brown roasted glaze.

Tureen and cover in the form of a trussed and roast capon, Staffordshire,c1800, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Eating made our ancestors anxious, although perhaps not in the same self-absorbed, Instagrammable ways of privileged 21stcentury  ‘influencers’ and celebrity chefs. Gluttony was a deadly sin, and as the curators point out, in this early modern period,  people had to  fast because the Church told them to. It makes the current 5:2 diet craze seem a bit lame. Incidentally, servants were always forced to fast-no meat, no dairy- but if you were rich enough you could pay your way out of abstinence with a small fine.

 In 1691 the writer and merchant, Thomas Tryon advocated veganism as the way to have a long, happy  and by implication, devout life: in his view God created the earth along with Adam and Eve, and animals were created to keep them company, so man, as created by God, was originally a vegan!

 A 17th century drawing by Jacob III de Gheyn shows a duck, plucked alive and hung up by its neck and one leg. Another from the 1550s shows the barbaric practice of hunting cranes, (a delicacy), which involved luring the poor birds to stick their beaks into paper hoods smeared with sweet tasting glue; the hunters hide behind a tree waiting to trap them. This, according to the curators, is the origin of the word hoodwinked. 

Jacob III de Gheyn, A Plucked Duck suspended by its Neck and One Leg,c1620-41,Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Jan van Straet, Trapping Cranes near Pisa, c1556, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

 It is not too far-fetched to see these as a form of protest art which expressed uneasiness about culinary cruelty to animals. My favourite is a tiny print from 1530 (a magnifying glass is provided),  showing animals getting their own back. Entitled The World Turned Upside Down, it portrays some feisty hares who have captured a hunter and his dogs and are roasting him on a spit ,and boiling his dogs alive. 

Whether deliberate or with an eye to cost, there is a nod to another of our contemporary concerns about food miles and the campaign to ‘shop local’. This is a show which curates local: most of the works on display are from Cambridge, either from the Fitzwilliam’s own extensive collection or from the rich pickings of neighbouring  university colleges.

There are elaborate displays by the food historian Ivan Day including historically accurate recreations of a sugar banquet, with edible playing cards made specially for an English Renaissance wedding and an enticing shopfront window of a Georgian sweet shop in London. These are works of art in themselves, but I prefer the real things which are infinitely more eccentric and surprising. After such a visual tasting menu I came away longing for a succulent roast and suffering from a severe case of tureen envy. 

Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500-1800

Fitzwilliam Museum, until 26 April, 2020

A version of this review appears in the February 2020 edition of Standpoint Magazine



Pieter De Hooch: From the Shadow of Vermeer

On Monday October 12th1654, shortly after half past eleven in the morning, the Dutch city of Delft ‘exploded’. ‘The Delft Thunderclap’ , as it became known, was caused when  a gunpowder store-all 40 tonnes of it , blew up. So powerful was the blast, it was heard 150 kilometers away. A quarter of the city was destroyed, hundreds  were killed, including the artist  Carel Fabricius, ( he of The Goldfinch).  Trees were sheared off to stumps, houses were razed down to heaps of ash. In such a God fearing 17th century Calvinist society, many naturally believed it was the end of the world, with the gates of hell opening, and God’s wrath cascading down on the town. But out of devastation came a new way of seeing the city. Where buildings had collapsed and disappeared, new sight lines were created and in turn, completely new perspectives. So while part of Delft may have been left in ruins, the way the city was depicted by artists began to change as a new cityscape was redefined. Painters like Egbert van der Poel (see above) began to produce cityscapes, which created a powerful identity, and civic pride expressed by the prominent church towers left standing.

One artist in particular, the 17thcentury Dutch Golden Age painter, Pieter de Hooch, opted for a unique approach. An exhibition recently opened at the Museum Prinsenhof  in Delft, where he worked throughout the 1650s, makes an intriguing connection between this new genre of the public cityscape and the private surroundings of the home. Like his contemporaries de Hooch (pronounced De Hoak), included the familiar towers, but incorporated them into people’s private surroundings: courtyards, alleyways and gardens, which were hidden from passers by, now bathed in new sources of light from the blasted skyline. This innovation, according to the curators, was entirely new, a ‘spectacular innovation in painting’ no less. It’s as if the outside presence and authority of Delft’s public landmarks somehow gives us license to venture into the inside private lives of its citizens, and turns their mundane routines into symbolic and integral parts of the well-ordered state.  

Pieter De Hooch, A Dutch Courtyard, c 1658-60,National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C, with the tower of the Nieuwe Kerk rising above the wooden fence

Pieter de Hooch, The Bedroom, c 1660-62, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

De Hooch’s paintings from his Delft years are quiet, intimate captured moments of the household where nothing seems out of place, even the courtyards are free of clutter. Sunlight streams through regularly cleansed panes; shafts of light discreetly illuminate one or two damp floor tiles, freshly washed. Home is where the mop is. Cleanliness in Calvinist Delft is next to Godliness, if in doubt, look up at that church tower for proof.  Simon Schama, whose insightful study of Dutch culture in the Golden Age, The Embarrassment of Riches, is particularly revealing about the Dutch obsession with what he describes as ‘militant’ cleaning. A clean home was the social and political bedrock-‘the saving grace of Dutch culture’. Pieter de Hooch’s depictions of tidy courtyards and pristine interiors are stilled lives, testaments to that Dutch 17thcentury obsession with the home as a window into greater themes of morality and patriotism. Marie Kondo, the self-styled ‘organizing consultant’- has made millions telling people how to de-clutter their life with her publishing sensation, ‘The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up’. De Hooch’s domestic goddesses of Delft were way ahead of the game.

 De Hooch turned daily routines into enigmatic atmospheric dramas, bathed in such light as to make them devotional in quality. Domestic virtue equals religious conviction. In Mother’s Duty, shown below, a woman sits quietly with her daughter’s head in her lap, buttery sunlight illuminates her starched collar and smooth forehead, as she carefully delouses the girl’s hair. The details of the space are understated but breathtaking. Each room in the painting has its own illumination and reflections of light, but not a speck of dust! A small dog gazes out, inviting us to look to the sunlight that drifts through the doorway of a smaller room with an open window; you can almost smell the freshness of the air. More light from the high window on the right allows us a glimpse of the bed with starched linen covers on well-plumped pillows.  His colours are rich and velvety; this is comfort  food from a painter’s palette.  Who knew nit check could be so beatific? An ordinary, and as every parent knows, loathsome task, becomes extraordinary.

Pieter de Hooch, A Mother Delousing her Child’s Hair, known as Mother’s Duty, c 1660-61, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

  For an artist who produced some 160 works in his lifetime, (Vermeer produced 35), there is surprisingly little known about his life. He was born in 1629,in Rotterdam, just 15 km from Delft, the son of a bricklayer.  He settled in Delft in 1652, where he most probably would have met his younger contemporary, Johannes Vermeer, a colleague at the painters’ Guild. Vermeer is the obvious comparison here and the curators of this current exhibition want us to reassess De Hooch not in the shadow but from the shadow of Vermeer. Probably it was de Hooch, the slightly older artist, who inspired Vermeer into taking the art of domestic stillness into something altogether more mesmeric. But let’s not underestimate de Hooch. While Vermeer’s subjects were more entrancing and subtly composed, and yes, he probably was a better painter, de Hooch welcomes us into interior scenes, which are infused with touching naturalism; it is hard not to feel emotionally immersed. 

  Delft was the city that shaped his artistic identity, and it is where he did his best work, so it seems astonishing that this is the first retrospective to be held in the Netherlands, let alone mainland Europe. The last solo exhibition was held at London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery more than twenty years ago. In the Prinsenhof show, a collection of 30 paintings, trace de Hooch’s artistic development, from his early, rather clichéd images of soldiers living it up in taverns and guardrooms, through to the atmospheric courtyards and front rooms of Delft, to aspirational Amsterdam where he moved to in 1662. There his style changed again, and not for the better. The wealthy burghers of northern Europe’s prosperous banking centre look bored and disengaged with their luxurious drapes and marble floors. Their homes are showcases not nurturing nests and de Hooch is clearly more engaged with the accoutrements of frugal domesticity. 

  De Hooch’s most compelling works hold narratives in front of us so we can choose to fill in the gaps and yet the end of his life remains a mystery with many gaps yet to fill. By the 1670s prices for paintings in Holland began to stagnate and de Hooch, along with most of his colleagues, must have been facing financial hardship. Compared to his contemporaries, his paintings never commanded particularly high prices, but with large parts of Holland occupied by French troops by 1672, the economy and therefore the art market collapsed. It had been thought he ended up in a mental hospital, but recent research has established it was his son, also called Pieter, who was committed in 1679, aged just 24.   After that there is no trace of de Hooch, his wife or his remaining 6 children. We don’t even know where he is buried. 

  De Hooch presented us with comforting, non-threatening glimpses of everyday life in 17thcentury Holland, which however much they may have been contrived or imagined, still speak to us in a visual language we can understand. With de Hooch, there truly is no place like home.

A version of this article also appears in the forthcoming edition of Standpoint Magazine

Pieter de Hooch:From the Shadow of Vermeer,Museum Prinsenhof, Delft October 11th, 2019-February 16th,2020.

William Blake:Method in his Madness. Tate Britain's Magnificent Exhibition Celebrates the Extraordinary imagination of a truly visionary artist

‘He that has never travelled in his thoughts and mind to heaven is no artist.’  No sketching tours and sojourns spent at aristocrats’ country piles for William Blake. No sublime landscapes of Cumberland or the West Country-the furthest he ventured out of London was a three-year stint in Sussex. Blake had more adventurous journeys in mind –literally- mysterious, enigmatic, terrifying encapsulations of visions, which apparently came to him at night from the age of just eight years old.  Some argue he had what is known as eidetic memory which means you think that what you imagine is actually there. The ‘he’ referred to above was Sir Joshua Reynolds, the founding president of the Royal Academy, whom Blake described as being ‘hired to repress art’. It was hardly surprising then that the art establishment viewed him as, at best eccentric, or at worst a madman, and his talents remained largely disregarded during his lifetime.

Blake was certainly complicated, and even now his works continue to divide, befuddle and dazzle all at the same time. I confess my views have, in the past, been hijacked by a turgid English teacher in year 8, and ubiquitous poster reproductions of bearded longhaired prophets with six packs, bluetacked onto college bedroom walls. There is something a bit, dare I say, trippy about Blake, and to enter into Tate Britain’s latest show is to enter into the world of an artist who eschewed convention in favour of a seemingly boundless and fearless capacity to invent. 

William Blake,is the most comprehensive exploration of the artist for a generation. It includes more than 340 works: paintings, drawings and prints, illuminated books as well as contributions from his contemporaries. It also provides a fascinating new focus on the significant role his wife Catherine played in Blake’s career; she helped him with printing his designs, colouring his prints, looked after the household and finances and, according to one friend, regularly ‘sang ‘sweetly’ to him.

 In an unfashionable, yet most welcome chronological layout, the curators trace the life of Blake the poet, the painter, the engraver, and the Londoner, born in 1757, the son of a Soho hosier, who died  seventy years later in squalid cramped rooms off the Strand.

William Blake, possible self-portrait, c 1802

His was truly revolutionary art, working against the backdrop of the social and political convulsions of the American and French Revolutions and the European wars which followed. In his own very particular and eccentric way, he projected the hopes and fears of his age. 

What one is reminded of throughout the exhibition is how very small most of his works are, they were books after all. Vibrant illuminated manuscripts, which can be cradled carefully in the palm of a hand, full of fury, zeal and terror. Make sure you bring a magnifying glass. This intimacy draws us into Blake’s world, his other- worldly figures begin to make sense in this world, in ourworld: division, hypocrisy, faithlessness, faithfulness, Blake manages to get into the very depths of the worst and the best of us.

The exhibition brings together the highlights of Tate’s collection with many of his most famous pieces from other British collections along with some rarely seen international loans. In the best room, which arrives halfway through, we find some of his most famous images, his enigmatic cycle of 12 so-called “Large Colour Prints”, including Newton and Nebuchadnezzar,commissioned by one William Butts, a   civil servant whose main job was to make sure the army had enough uniforms, but who had a sideline as a coal merchant and ran a girls boarding school with his wife. Picture the scene: Mr and Mrs Butts and the visual equivalent of heavy metal on the walls of their modest Soho house.

William Blake, Newton, 1795-c1805, Tate

Blake depicts Isaac Newton both as a man of science and a tyrannical figure, the architect of a clockwork universe, which Blake found so repellant. Newton’s scientific laws measured our world and therefore restricted humanity. His ‘science’ produced the miseries of the Industrial Revolution and the ‘dark satanic mills’ of Blake’s most famous poem, Jerusalem.. Yet Blake’s image has been reclaimed as a universal symbol of knowledge, appearing on the covers of science textbooks. Eduardo Paolozzi recreated it as a sculpture in 1995 to grace the forecourt of the British Library. Is this Blake’s ironic version of the perfect man, classical rippling muscles bursting from his marbled torso, responsible for all the ills of 18th century society?

William Blake, Nebuchadnezzar,1795-c1805,Tate

Hanging next to Newton in the exhibition is the bedraggled leonine King Nebuchadnezzar, driven mad and forced to live like a wild animal as a punishment for excessive pride. Perhaps these two breath-taking images were designed a a pair: Nebuchadnezzar a slave to emotional weakness, Newton a slave to Reason.

Around 1788 Blake invented a new form of printing in colour, combining text and image, painter and poet. He described it as his ‘infernal method’, which he claimed he had learnt from the ghost of his dead brother Robert. So his art came as a sort of added bonus to his verses neither of which gave him establishment kudos. He earned what little he did as an engraver, and sold his art to a small coterie of friends and supporters who were seduced by his fantastical, and for a time, risqué images. The earliest owners of Blake’s illuminated books included a number of rare book collectors, some of whom were dubbed ‘The Lunatics’. Another owner of Blake’s books, Isaac Disraeli, the father of the future prime minister, Benjamin, described how his guests would ‘desport’ themselves with Blake’s books,’beneath the lighted Argand lamp of his drawing room’ delighting in his engraved images of ‘angels,devils,giants,dwarves,saints,sinners,senators and chimney sweeps’. As T.S. Eliot later wrote in 1921, Blake was a ‘wild poet for the super-cultivated’.

William Blake, TheAncient of Days,1827

The exhibition ends with one of his most powerful images, The Ancient of Days,(1827), a figure from his imagination, Urizen, the man who measures the world at the moment of creation. Naked, bearded and sinuous, the old man leans out from the sun with vast compasses; a grim scientist measuring the world at the moment of creation, measuring what can never truly be measured. This work was coloured in the last days of Blake’s life and he declared it to be ‘the best I have ever finished’. He died in August 1827. An obituary in the Literary Chronicle exposed the conflicted contemporary view, that he was ‘one of those ingenious persons…whose eccentricities were still more remarkable than their professional abilities’. Blake would not have cared. In 1809, following a disastrous one-man show in London,he had written that ‘if a man is master of his profession, he cannot be ignorant that he is so; and if he is not employed by those who pretend to encourage art, he will employ himself, and laugh in secret at the pretences of the ignorant’

The genius of this Tate show lies in highlighting Blake the artist, who happened to write poetry on the side. The images unravel allegorical stories, like some elaborate graphic novel. He aspired to be a British Michelangelo but instead delved inwards into a furnace-like phantasmagoric world based on the Bible and his own poetry. His was not the art of his contemporaries such as Constable and Turner:poetical and atmospheric collaborations of clouds and sunlight on English landscapes. Blake’s oeuvre, instead, is of a man with an imagination on fire,struggling against the realities of being an artist in a commercial world and and trying to make sense of social and political changes way beyond his imaginings

A version of this article appears in the November edition of Standpoint Magazine

William Blake is at Tate Britain until February 2, 2020

The Artist Formerly Known as Mrs Pollock

Have you heard of Jackson Pollock? Most probably: archetypal male, drink fuelled bohemian artist who splattered his way through the Abstract Expressionist movement dancing around his canvases, flinging pots of paint. He was to die in a car crash,having taken the wheel while drunk in 1956 at the age of 44.

Have you heard of Lee Krasner? Well I suggest that many of you may not have. Her story is a lesson in the way women have so often been airbrushed out of the story of modern art. A show at London’s Barbican Art Gallery, the first Krasner exhibition on this scale in Europe since the 1960s, sets the record straight. Krasner’s huge contribution to abstract expressionism was long overshadowed by her husband Jackson Pollock, but once you’ve seen this show I am sure you will come away convinced that she was just so much better.

Lee Krasner, Self Portrait c 1928,The Jewish Museum, New York

In 1928, when she was just 19, she nailed a mirror to a tree in the garden of her parents’ home in Long Island, New York and set about painting herself against a backdrop of woodland. It’s a captivating portrayal of a young, highly serious, painter at work. She had just graduated from the Woman’s Art School at Cooper Union in New York City and was due to begin studying at the prestigious National Academy of Design-she was rather hoping that this self portrait would get her into the prestigious and highly selective life drawing classes. During her interview the assembled panel of male interviewers refused to believe she was capable of such detailed and accomplished plein air background. She said ‘they took one look at my painting and said ,”that’s a dirty trick you played-don’t ever pretend that you painted outdoors”’. She stuck to her guns and was accepted into the life drawing class but it’s an anecdote which highlights the struggles she endured throughout her career to gain recognition.

Born in New York in 1908, the daughter of Russian Yiddish speaking Jews who had fled the pogroms, she was named Lena Krassner, but in 1922 she adopted the more American ‘Lenore’ and later this would become the androgynous ‘Lee’. She also at some point dropped the second ‘s’ from her surname, not unusual in itself to change your name, but an element of reinvention in the pursuit of her artistic career. She wrote that her parents ‘didn’t encourage me, but as long as I didn’t present them with any particular problems, neither did they interfere’

Lee Krasner, Nude Study From Life,1938, Pollock-Krasner Foundation

In 1937 Krasner was awarded a scholarship to attend classes at the Hans Hofmann School on West 9th Street in New York City. Hofmann was a German modernist who had lived in Paris and worked alongside two of Krasner’s artistic heroes, Picasso and Matisse. Hofmann taught Cubism and was a teacher who was dynamic and unforgiving in his style and in his methods. He was known for making corrections directly onto students’ work-no room for discussion there! The charcoal drawing above shows how Krasner was making her first foray into abstraction at this time. Hofmann’s response? He said her work was so good ‘you would not know it was done by a woman’.

We know that Jackson Pollock was self-destructive, but Krasner was not. There are no stories of her drinking, as there are of other Abstract Expressionists. There are no tales of her losing control. Known for being highly critical of her own work, and for destroying many of her works, Krasner changed paths a number of times throughout her career, an arc that has divided critics but which makes her work exciting, enthralling and original.She didn’t internalize destructiveness, she externalised and embraced it, which goes against our romantic view of the angst-ridden Abstract Expressionists and their hard-drinking ways.

In these collages, Krasner’s decision to cut up examples of early work is both original and distressing. She refuses to be nostalgic. They are collages on a huge scale, and they are not collages at all, at least as we think of them. They explore the figure-ground relationship, they dance across our vision in ways which are unpredictable and exciting.

Lee Krasner, Untitled, 1954,private collection

Krasner married Jackson Pollock in 1945. He was like a thunderbolt. She wrote later that when she saw his paintings, ‘I almost died. They bowled me over, then I met him and that was it’

Lee Krasner with Jackson Pollock in Springs,Long Island, 1949

Living with Pollock must have been like living on top of a powder keg. Krasner looked after him, respected him-the only thing she ever really refused him was the child he claimed he had always longed for. He was her child. After his violent death it was as if she was set free. Though Pollock and Krasner had by then become somewhat estranged, she was overcome with grief. Yet she went on to produce some of her finest and emotionally charged work. ‘Painting is not separate from life’, she wrote, ‘It is one. It is like asking-do I want to liv? .My answer is yes- and I paint’

Lee Krasner, Prophecy, 1956,private collection

Lee Krasner, Icarus, 1964Thomson Family Collection,New York

Lee Krasner, Palingenesis,1971, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation

Lee Krasner, Imperative, 1976,, featuring cut-up earlier drawings. Photograph: The Jewish Museum

Krasner wasn’t interested in a signature style. She had the courage to be critical of her own works, experimenting, innovating and destroying along the way. It was tough enough to be a woman artist amid the first generation of abstract expressionists. Maybe Pollock would have done the same, but he died before he could emerge out of his alcoholic impasse. Krasner kept going, making the work she felt compelled to make, never repeating herself, constantly exploring new directions.

It is an unmissable exhibition.

Lee Krasner: Living Colour is at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, from 30 May to 1 September.