Staying Power Black British Experience at the V and A

by Charlie Phillips

The Black British Experience exhibition at the Victoria and Albert brings home the exceptional, yet completely everyday, place of black beauty and experience in Britain. A history that is often misplaced in British life. The exhibition is a much-too-fleeting glimpse of photographs from the 1950s to the 1990s, all to do with aspects of black British experience. Hairstyles are just part of the equation. The exhibition shines a light on British Caribbean homes, black jewellery, street life, and celebrations. It takes its name and inspiration from Peter Fryer's 1984 book Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain.

Read full article at http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/amita-murray/african-beauty_b_6774526.html


Staying Power: Photographs of Black British Experience 1950s-1990s
Feb 16-May 24 2015
Victoria and Albert

The Black British Experience, at the V and A

From Series Black Beauty Pageants, by Raphael Albert, 1960-79

Hairstyles of Nigerian women, by JD Okhai Ojeikere

Diary of a Victorian Dandy, by Yinka Shonibare, 1998

Westbourne Park Tube Station, Charlie Philips, 1967

Call me stupid, but it took a passionate discussion of the relevance and place of hair and hairstyles as cultural markers from my black students, to bring it home to me just how complicated African hairstyles are. Actually, I still don't completely get it. But my lovely students explained to me and an open-mouthed, very diverse classroom, that if they let their hair grow out, it would simply grow out and up. That it takes taming, straightening, weaves, braiding, hair extensions, and many, many hours to create the beautiful, complex confections that they wear to class. It reminded me, too, of how normative ideals of white beauty continue to impact people of non-white heritage - the hair straightening, the face bleaching, the tucking in, epilating, waxing, narrowing, tweezing, anorexia, liposuctioning, lip-pulling in, that happen behind the scenes to conform to mainstream, capitalism-prescribed aesthetic and performative norms.

The Black British Experience exhibition at the V and A brings home the exceptional, yet completely everyday, place of black beauty and experience in Britain. A history that is often missed, misplaced, displaced, ignored, misunderstood, or simply turned a blind eye to in British life. 

The MF Husain exhibition at the Victoria and Albert

Maqbool Fida Husain, mourned in India as a “national loss” after his death in 2011, is supposed to have died in “self-imposed exile” in London – as the media like to put it. Yet, it is ridiculous to call it “self-imposed” exile. He lived outside of India because back in the country where he was born and where he grew up, he lived in fear of his life. He received regular death threats for offending religious feelings, for making paintings with themes from Hindu religion that were apparently profane because they depicted nudity and eroticism.

Read full article here
See more blog posts to do with art and books here

Hollywood Costume at the V&A

If you’ve never watched even one Marilyn Monroe film, you’re still likely to have a mental image of her in a flyaway white dress, standing above a vent, trying to keep the hem of her dress from travelling up to her neck. This was in the film The Seven-Year Itch. In another Billy Wilder film – Some Like it Hot – rumour has it that Monroe had to film one simple scene more than fifty times. All she had to do was knock on a door, enter a room and ask for a glass of bourbon with those seductive red lips of hers, but she kept getting it wrong. So, maybe she wasn’t the best actress in the world, but Monroe had such strong personal style that it takes only a few iconic accessories – a mole on the cheek, a blonde bob, and a white dress – to perfectly capture her look.

This is the alchemy of a good Hollywood costume designer. In a few simple strokes, they tell a character and a story. Think Ruby Slippers and you are instantly transported to the world of the Wizard of Oz. There were around fifteen ruby slippers created for the film, of which Judy Garland wore several, and the dead witch and the witch of the East wore others. A pair of these notorious slippers are now on view at the V&A, along with iconic costumes such as those worn by Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean), Rose DeWitt (Kate Winslet in Titanic), and of course Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark.) You can also buy a pair of ruby slipper earrings at the V&A store.

On display are interviews with actors like Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep, talking about the role that costume has played in bringing their characters to life. Streep, who remarks on how her strong opinions about her costumes can often make the life of a costume designer difficult, says, “On every film, the clothes are half the battle in creating the character. I have a great deal of opinion about how my people are presented. We show a great deal by what we put on our bodies.”

The exhibition is divided into three sections. The first deconstructs screenplays. It shows us how the simple directions – “he wears a leather jacket, a flapped holster and a brimmed felt hat” – are transformed into Indiana Jones. The second sections deals with the dialogue between actor and designer, and how putting on a costume makes the actor feel like their character. The third – the finale – is a smorgasbord of famous costumes. So, what costume gives you your very own Becky Bloomwood moment? The Bride (Uma Thurman in Kill Bill), Dorothy’s pinafore in Wizard of Oz, or Tony Manero’s white suit (John Travolta in Saturday night Fever)?

Published at http://www.thelondonword.com/2012/11/hollywood-costume-at-the-va/ 

Breakfast at Buckingham Palace

So, I had breakfast at Buckingham Palace the other week. I just thought I’d mention it. In fact, I’m thinking that from now on, I’m going to drop this titbit of information into random conversations whenever possible. For example, if anyone complains about the constant rain we’re having in London, I will nod thoughtfully and say, “Yes, but the morning I had breakfast at Buckingham Palace, it was really rather a splendid day!” Or if someone comments on the heaven that is pain au chocolat at Bagatelle Boutique in South Kensington, I will simper and say, “Almost as good as the ones from the Buckingham Palace kitchens, darling.”

The curators at Queen’s Gallery have put together a wonderful new exhibition called The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein, and their series of press views included an intimate breakfast-do for bloggers, and curators’ tours from two passionate women – Kate Heard and Lucy Whitaker – who know sixteenth-century portrait artists better than most people know their nephews. If you don’t think this exhibition is your cup of tea – if your idea of a historical painter is Andy Warhol, and you don’t do higher brow than David Hockney – then I would say, check out this exhibition. The paintings and prints are not only great examples of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century royal portraiture, but they also lead you from Brussels through Venice to London, as you watch the incredible journey of oil painting through Europe.

If you think of Leonardo da Vinci as a pioneer, think again. This exhibition charts the painters from the Netherlands tradition – like German-born Hans Memling (1430-1494) – that inspired the Italian artist and many after him. In fact, da Vinci was the first Master of the Italian Renaissance who painted in oils, a technique that travelled down from Memling, and his teacher Jan Van Eyck (1390-1441). The exhibition brings together royal portraits by court artists such as Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) and Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8-1543), and detailed ink-on-paper prints by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). A gorgeous snowy landscape by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, called Massacre of the Innocents tells a story of bloodshed and poverty. The original owner Rudolph II found the pathos of the painting so overwhelming that he had the massacre of children that was depicted in the work painted over.

The curators explain how lucky they are not only to have original paintings by the masters on display, but also a lot of preparatory drawings to show alongside. Kate Heard points to a copy of the Whitehall Mural (by Holbein the Younger) that depicts a bold-faced Henry VIII, accompanied by Henry VII, Elizabeth of York and Jane Seymour, and says, “Close your eyes and picture Henry VIII, and he will look something like this painting. Remember that we don’t know what Henry VIII looked like. We only know what Holbein tells us he looked like.” These artists were not just painters, but theologians, philosophers, scientists and life-long students of human psyche and morality.

Published at http://www.thelondonword.com/2012/11/northern-renaissance-buckingham-palace/

Pre-Raphaelite Supermodels

Mariana, John Everett Millais, 1851

Published on The London Word
http://www.thelondonword.com/2012/09/which-pre-raphaelite-supermodel-are-you/

A hundred and fifty years before Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, what you might call the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood modelled for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Their timeless beauty, made more luminous by the vision (and no doubt the sexual acrobatics) of the Brotherhood, is now on display at the Tate, in a special survey of the works of the Pre-Raphaelites and their many followers. The exhibition looks at the PRB’s work from the time they formed in September 1848 through to the works of artists influenced by their style and ideology. The exhibition is a delicious prequel to the V and A’s display of the Aesthetic Movement last year.

While the PRB’s hedonistic pursuit of beauty at any cost is well known, it is their worship of nature that is embroidered all through their paintings. At the exhibition, I stood in front of Millais’s Ophelia for a good fifteen minutes, staring at the pathos of Hamlet’s Ophelia, her supplication to eternity, the splashes of colour from the wildflowers that cling to her drowning body, the delicate twines engulfing her gown as she slowly sinks. While the PRB made no bones about the reproduction of nature as one of their main inspirations, what you note in their paintings is actually the blissful harmony of people (well, mostly women) and nature, a match so divine that both nature and humanity are elevated by it.

So, if you were a Pre-Raphaelite supermodel, which one would you be? Would you be Lizzie Siddal, the PRB’s favourite muse, immortalized by Millais’s Ophelia, a woman whose life changed one day as she walked out of the London hat maker’s where she worked when she was spotted by the Brotherhood? Her addictive personality, the enormous abyss of longing in her for beauty, self-fulfillment, and for Rossetti’s loyalty make her a haunting figure. She was the perfect muse – while Millais was painting Ophelia, Siddal modelled for him submerged in a bathtub, and she stayed mute as the water slowly turned ice cold. She was a painter in her own right and found a supporter of her art in John Ruskin, though her art never quite matured enough and looks a little unfinished and childlike, all the way up to 1862 when she died of a laudanum overdose at thirty-two years of age. While her own paintings feature at the Tate, it is paintings like Ophelia and Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix that really speak of Siddal’s lingering impact on modern art.

Would you be Fanny Cornforth, another of Rossetti’s many flings? Earthy, sexy and gloriously unself-conscious, Cornforth was a stark contrast to Siddal’s other-worldly, somewhat consumptive looks. Cornforth became Rossetti’s housekeeper after Siddal died in 1862, and had a relationship with him that lasted till his death in 1882. Paintings like Rossetti’s The Blue Bower and Monna Vanna of this red-headed beauty give the exhibition a special sumptuous light, and it is these paintings that helped Rossetti mature from a hankering amateur to a full-blown artist.

Or would you be Jane Morris – keenly intelligent, self-made, of an ambitious and steadfast disposition? Morris – born Jane Burden, daughter of a stableman – taught herself Italian and French, learnt the piano, and developed what were often noted as “queenly” manners. She was married to William Morris, but had an on-again off-again relationship with Rossetti all his life.

Besides these iconic paintings, the exhibition also showcases cabinets and stained glass works by people like Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. While the exhibition is quite yummy, I have to say I was expecting a Tate Pre-raphaelite survey to be full of excess. I thought I’d be running breathlessly from room to room full of panic about not being able to take it all in. There are some works missing like Rossetti’s Love’s Greeting or later works like John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shallot (1888). Still, if you are a fan of the PRB, the exhibition is not to be missed.

Tate Britain

September 12, 2012 – January 13, 2013

Tickets: £14

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/pre-raphaelites-victorian-avant-garde

Ophelia, John Everett Millais (1851-52)

So, the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition is finally here! Since it is a Tate exhibition, I admit I was expecting excess all the way. Like the Miro and Watercolour exhibitions last year, I expected something like fifteen enormous rooms filled to bursting with PRB paintings, and paintings and paraphernelia from their various followers, leading straight into the Aesthetic Movement, Art Nouveau and Art Deco styles. I thought I'd be running frantically from room to room clicking pictures and taking manic notes, while hyperventilating about all of the other rooms still left to visit. The anxiety about how much I was missing would make me sweat and later seek therapy. While what is on offer at the Tate this autumn is ripe and sensual as you would predict of a PRB exhibition, it does leave you panting for more. Well maybe that's the point. Still, I expect my full dose of hysetria when I visit the Tate...

Thankfully, my all time favourite Ophelia (1851-52) is on display. No PRB exhibition would be complete without that haunting masterpiece. With Lizzie Siddal as muse and model, Ophelia lays half-submerged in water, vines, rose leaves, wildflowers cling to her neck and hair, willow around her body and slowly drag her under. Like much of PR art, this masterpiece celebrates female beauty but gives it more than a hint of pathos and longing. It makes it one with nature - there is a little robin in the corner, a pink rose by the hem of her dress, she is surrounded by breathless and breathtaking foliage - and while doing so, it also tells a classic tale. Like other PRB work, the painting tells the truth about nature.

It was painted with Lizzie Siddal lying submerged in a bathtub. The artist - John Everett Millais (1829-1896) - got so thoroughly absorbed in the painting and Siddal was so committed to being the perfect artist's model and not interefere in the artistic vision of the painter that she lay in the water even as it got colder and colder to the point that she was shivering uncontrollably by the end of it. It is thought that Millais created the river scene at Hogsmill River at Ewell in Surrey.

Of course, you could say that this painting gives a premonition of Lizzie Siddal's life and death. Siddal was the PRB's favourite muse, but mere ten years after the painting of this classic, she died of a laudanum overdose. The poppies and violets so gorgeously painted in this work perhaps point to Ophelia's - and maybe Siddal's - death and loyalty. And there is a sense of the divine in the pose - the supplicating hands, the calm repose in the face, the fatalistic acceptance, the eternal merging with nature.

Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition at the Tate

Don't miss the Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition at Tate Britain
September 12, 2012 - January 13, 2013

Picasso Exhibition at the Tate

Published in The London Word http://www.thelondonword.com/2012/04/picasso-fashion-and-style/

If you saw the nature-inspired prints of Mary Katrantzou’s S/S 2012 collection at London Fashion Week and Issa’s silken fabrics, you may be forgiven for thinking that colour blocking is so 2011. Only die-hard enthusiasts of geometric fashion, like Yves St. Laurent, would keep on rehashing those stiff-point collars and pair colours like navy blue and purple, after all.

And you wouldn’t be wrong. The relentless trapezoids and octagons of 2011 – Prada, Celine, Balenciaga all followed where YSL led – have given way to the Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa feel of 2012. It’s exotic birds, clashing swirls, and exploding bubbles all the way this year. And in fact, even YSL can’t help going a little floral in their cruise line.

But if you think geometric prints are a throw back to the 1970s, look further into history. It was just over a hundred years ago in 1910 that the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso first exhibited his cubist paintings in the U.K. The reception from the art community was chilly. Only Picasso could look at a set of orange and yellow triangles and call it The Three Musicians. Only he could reduce nature and character to cylinders, spheres and cones.

Even as the avant-garde went into a fizz over Picasso’s insight into the human condition, the art critic GK Chesterton said of Picasso’s Portrait of Clovis Sagot, “a piece of paper on which Mr. Picasso has had the misfortune to upset the ink and tried to dry it with his boots.” Winston Churchill promised to give Picasso a kick in the rear if he encountered the modernist, and Evelyn Waugh ended letters with the words “Death to Picasso!”

Yet, Picasso’s odd ability to reduce the world into its most basic form continues to inspire art and what many would call art’s cheap younger sister – fashion – today. From Antonio Berardi’s relentless monochrome to DKNY’s horizontal stripes, 2011 runways were a cubist artist’s wet dream. Even 2012 trends with their exotic swirls recall some of Picasso’s later, more African-inspired paintings, like the Women of Algiers series with its interlacing of conical shapes with giant boobs.

Picasso himself took an interest in clothing when he designed the costumes for Sergei Diaghilev’s The Three-Cornered Hat or Le Tricorne in 1919. You don’t have to look further than Picasso’s costume for the Chinese Conjurer to see asymmetric blocks of colour. His Le Tricorne (1920) is the perfect mix of Victorian flounces and vertical stripes, while another costume for Diaghilev, with its red-and-black striped skirt and its tiered-cake hat, would not be out of place in a YSL collection.

Check out these and other paintings by Picasso at the Tate Britain this season. The exhibition, though it does not include some of Picasso’s classic paintings of musical instruments, does include a panorama of works by many artists – David Hockney, Duncan Grant, Francis Bacon – who are inspired by the great modernist.

Picasso and Modern British Art

Tate Britain

Till July 15, 2012

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/picasso-modern-british-art?gclid=CPSMyYHGua8CFcwTfAod5xTEhg

Disrobing the King’s Mistresses

The Whore's Last Shift, James Gillray, National Portrait Gallery, 1779

Henry Angels as Mrs. Cole in The Minor, Samuel de Wilde, National Portrait Gallery, 1792

Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn, William Hogarth, National Portrait Gallery, 1738

Mary Robinson - Perdita, John Hoppner, Natioanl Portrait Gallery, 1782

  

Nell Gwyn (1651-1687) throws you a deliciously superior glance as her robes fall off her shoulders and reveal a not-so-coy vision of her milky breasts. You can look, but you can’t touch, she says. King Charles II’s mistress, mother of at least two of his bastards, and one of the first actresses to perform at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden, Gwyn seems exclusively to be painted getting into or out of her clothes. As one of the visitors to the National Portrait Gallery commented, “This one seemed to be cursed with a series of wardrobe malfunctions.”

The First Actresses exhibition is a series of portraits by celebrated painters like Simon Verelst, Sir Peter Lely, and Thomas Gainsborough, of the first actresses to be allowed on the English stage. These were women who were desired and feared in equal measure for their bawdy, confident acting, their throw-it-in-your-face personal lives, and their decadent sense of style and fashion.

Many of the women combined a life as an actress and dancer with forays into the royal court. While this was most often as the chosen mistress of a king or a prince (like Nell Gwyn, Moll Davis, and Mary Robinson), women like Sarah Siddons (1755-1831) entered the royal threshold as reading instructor. Instead of displaying a quantity of rippling flesh, Siddons, in a portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence, is pictured standing next to a staid side table. A couple of weighty leather-bound founts of knowledge lie on the table, and Siddons’s carriage is made even more stately with a pair of serious eyes and a set of petulant lips.

Some of the choicest pieces in the exhibition are perhaps the ones least touted in the press. These are hilarious satirical etchings by artists such as William Hogarth and James Gillray. One titled Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn is a scene of dressers, seamstresses, half-dressed actresses, surrounded by a mind-numbing quantity of green room paraphernalia. Another, this one by Gillray, is simply titled The Whore’s Last Shift (1779).

While the 1660s allowed female actresses to perform on the stage for the first time, these women were considered disreputable and suspect, and easy prey to roving eyes and fingers. By 1737, only troupes with a royal charter were allowed to perform on stage. In this small but choice exhibition at the Royal Academy, portraits of these pioneering women are accompanied by lush caricatures of male cross-dressers. In The Minor, Henry Angels, in voluminous robes and apron, played the infamous role of Mrs. Cole, a woman who ran a brothel in Covent Garden and appeared often in an inebriated state. In this portrait by Samuel de Wilde in 1792, Angels combines a meaty bosom with a soured outlook. 

The First Actresse, National Portrait Gallery, Till January 8, 2012

http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/the-first-actresses/first_actresses_exhibition.php

Published http://londonfestivalfringe.com/general/post/?p=13883

Degas's Dancers

There is something exquisitely voyeuristic about Degas’s (1834-1917) peek into the lives of nineteenth-century ballet dancers. In a backdrop of frothy tutus, and a canvas of dancers posing in unison as they launch into an arabesque, a ballet dancer sits with her head in her hands. Her legs are splayed and a pedestrian wrap around her shoulders keeps her warm in the cold of a Parisian studio. Degas, in his lifelong rapture with a dancer’s movements, catches not only the magic of muscles working at their best, but brings to life the curse of a dancer’s body that does not behave exactly as it should. A body that crumbles. Injures itself. That fails. That continually seduces. And perpetually falls short.

The exhibition at the Royal Academy of Degas’s studies of the human body in motion spans his career from his early, realistic portrayals of dancers in rehearsal studies and dance classes, to his later, bolder, more impressionist work that he painted often in one dominant hue. Sumptuous aqua tones, throbbing reds, and canary yellows mark this period, and though he continued to refer to himself as a realist, there is a definite heightening of the squiggles and splotches that brand him as an impressionist, and a telling juxtaposition of humanity and wilderness. The challenge of catching human locomotion through art was a characteristic of Degas’s period, and scientists like Etienne-Jules Marey, with his forays into fixed-plate chronophotography, inspired Degas’s work, as did the realism of popular illustrators like Daumier and Gavarni. While Degas captures the magic and the disappointments of a dancer’s existence through his work, he steers clear of delving into the murkier corners of the psyches of his nineteenth-century subjects who, outside of the effervescence of their chosen profession, often lived lives of devastating poverty, utter dependence on the largesse of their patrons, and the painful reality of cold, bleeding feet. Degas, instead, catches a shoulder strap as it falls off a shapely shoulder and the strength of a pair of legs as they pas de bourree on a wooden floor on pointe. Despite such a compulsive engagement with human flesh, later in his life, Degas turned more and more into a recluse, believing that a social and personal life were in conflict with an artist’s need for a vivid inner reality.

While the Royal Academy does a good job of displaying many of Degas’s oils of dancers, some of his sketches and studies of the human body, and many photographs of the moving body taken by his contemporaries, the exhibition nevertheless leaves you with a not-quite-full stomach as you walk out of the last room. It is the paintings Degas did in his later years that are so captivating, and the show leaves you wanting more of this aspect of his work.

Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement, Till December 11, 2011, Royal Academy

http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/degas/

Published in London Festival Fringe http://londonfestivalfringe.com/general/post/?p=13877 

Miro: Up Yours to Genre

The Tilled Field, 1923-4, Successio Miro/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London

The Escape Ladder, 1940, Successio Miro/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London

Walking through a Miro exhibition may feel like an epiphany, or if you are particularly susceptible, an existential crisis. A mind-boggling mating of precise lines and cubic shapes, with ferocious intensity and an up-yours-to-genre kind of philosophy, seems to be Joan Miro’s (1893-1983) signature style.

It may be a little bit like deep sea diving. Pings of colour hit you from all sides. Men and women from a post-nuclear freak show sit around a table and discuss Goethe. Creatures are boiled down to their very essence, and pedestrian objects take on a life of their own. And you are left to loiter between an overwhelming desire to stare at his art forever, and an equally intense need to run for your life.

Born in Barcelona to a family of goldsmiths and watchmakers, and heavily influenced all his life by Catalan politics – the declaration of a Catalan Republic of Barcelona in the 1930s, and then General Franco’s dictatorship – Miro’s work shared many Surrealist ideologies. Stubbornly anti-bourgeois, and always in key with the life and work of Catalan peasants, Miro juxtaposed unexpected elements in his paintings and sculptures – a dog, a moon, a ladder, perhaps a woman who looks like one of the Twits, or maybe people with insignificant faces, stick-like bodies, and humungous genitalia.

Nevertheless, Miro steered clear of aligning himself to any particular school of art and continued to experiment all through his life. The exhibition at the Tate Modern shows continuous curiosity, an unwillingness to stick to any one style, and a fevered experimentation, so that each of the twelve rooms of the exhibition and each decade of Miro’s life seems to be a testament to a constantly evolving style. Influenced by Surrealist qualities, Cubist reintegration of geometrical shapes, and a Fauvist fascination with loud colour, Miro’s art stands outside the bounds of all of these schools. Yet, walking through the exhibition, and confronted with pointy breasts and monstrous vaginas, you ask yourself, yikes, did he hate women?

His works show not only towering skill and a strict precision of line and detail, but an utter lack of fear in breaking the “normal” confines of life and art. He blended folklore with philosophy as easily as cruel caricature with the workings of the subconscious mind. As Miro said, “The works must be conceived with fire in the soul, but executed with clinical coolness.”

A philosophy and exhibition not for the fainthearted.

Miro. Tate Modern, Till September 11, 2011

Review published on London Fringe

More Watteau

To go with the exhibition of Watteau's drawings at the Royal Academy, the Wallace Collection at Manchester Square, near Bond Street tube station, are showcasing Watteau's paintings, along with those of some of his followers. Scroll down to read review of Watteau's drawings, or go to London Fringe. All of the following pictures of the paintings housed in the Wallace Collection.

Fete Galante in a Wooded Landscape with the Sculpture of a Seated Nude Woman, 1719-21, Watteau

La Belle Greque, N.Lancret

Degas' Dancers

La Danse Grecque, 1885-90, Hon. Earle I. Mack Collection

Exhibition coming up at the Royal Academy of Arts in September 2011

Watteau: Of Wistful Faces and Satin Breeches

Three Studies of a Young Girl Wearing a Hat, 1716. Ann and Gordon Getty Collection

Flemish-born French artist Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), credited with the revival of baroque during the reign of Louis XIV, and flourishing in the use of a style that ultimately gave birth to rococo, had the knack of juxtaposing contradictory elements in his paintings and drawings, which show not only a sparkling wit, but an acute insight into human longing. Restless, unmindful of his future, and inspired by everything from Persian servants to travelling troubadours, Watteau’s artistic ego did not stop him from coming back to a drawing five years on and adding a disparate figure to completely transform his creation.

His simpler red-chalk drawings in the first decade of the eighteenth century made use of elaborately plumed and costumed commedia dell’arte figures to illustrate the performativity of high society. A Barber’s Shop (1709) evokes the social commerce of a hair-dressers, where men in their ornate coats and gloriously slim breeches (think Georgette Heyer at her Regency best) choose lushly powdered wigs and other paraphernalia essential to a gentleman’s comfort. This shop sign, though, is set on the proscenium stage, with tapestry curtains hiding the wings on the side. Many of Watteau’s drawings were not only an early reflection on art about art, but also inspired the popular imagination through decadent fashion plates, and garments named after Watteau.

These drawings gave way to a fuller bodied, more thoughtful, more intimate and probing study of his subjects. While these red-and-black-chalk body lines and postures show the maturing of Watteau’s skills, it is the exquisite expression in the faces of his subjects that really displays Watteau’s heightened engagement with humanity.

In his final years, along with an interest in female and male nudes caught in moments of pensive self-absorption, Watteau’s skill in drawing fete galante was at a peak. This was a style of art that displayed men and women of ton lolling in parks, and living a life of leisure, or, as in the case of The Remedy, a reclining, naked woman waiting for her maid to give her an enema. Yet even in his erotic drawings, and his depictions of noble life, Watteau seemed not to draw the physical beauty of a person, but instead penetrated their thoughts and feelings. It is in the wistful, shy, vivid and vibrant faces of his subjects that Watteau’s keen sensitivity to people, and his trend setting, though short-lived, talent really come to life.

Read review on London Fringe.

Watteau: The Drawings

The Royal Academy of Art

Till June 5, 2011

The Cult of Beauty: The Pursuit of Pleasure

Short review published in London Festival Fringe http://www.londonfestivalfringe.com/indexposttag.php?slug=amita-murray

I can’t get enough of Pre-Raphaelite art, or maybe it is their relentless pursuit of beauty and sensuality for their own sake, and pleasure in all things decadent (with a dash of addiction and paranoia thrown in for good measure) that is so intoxicating. The Victoria and Albert’s delicious collection of art from the Aesthetic Movement (1860-1900) reunites paintings from the second wave of the Brotherhood, which included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Edward Burne-Jones, with writers Oscar Wilde, and Algernon Swinburne whose poems were often inspired by paintings like Rosseti’s The Blue Closet (1857), and furniture by artists like Edward William Godwin.
Having faced all kinds of controversy in the 1850s about their art and their morals (or lack thereof), and the blinding rivalry and incestuous sharing of models within the group, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in its first avatar had petered out, and given way to this second group. This group shared many of the concerns of the first, and their goals and aims were in tandem with many other artists and intellectuals of the second half of the nineteenth century - to produce art that was free of pious moralizing and prudery, to create work that was not based on narrative, classic texts, commercialism, materialism or the ugliness of the Industrial Revolution and the Great Exhibitions, to follow and worship nature and feeling in their art, and to live life by those same ideals. The Brotherhood was interested in the form of a painting, rather than its narrative, and synasthesia was a common goal.

In 1862, Rossetti’s set congregated in Tudor House, Chelsea, like bees swarming around a pot of honey. They painted a bevy of flame-haired women, some pale-faced and consumptive, with an unconventional beauty that was enticingly out of reach – using models who looked like Lizzie Siddal, who died in 1862 of an overdose of laudanum, before Rossetti moved to Chelsea; and others who were riper and earthier, like Jane Morris, another of Rosseti’s obsessions, albeit married to one of his cronies. Not everyone in the set was in a single-minded quest for notches on their bedpost, however, or in helping models make the smooth transition from artist’s studio to bedchamber. Frederic Leighton’s black-haired Pavonia (1858-9) is an exquisite oil of a woman framed with peacock feathers, who he paints with haunting devotion and clinical detachment. A portrait of his favourite muse Nanna Risi, the painting communicates the movement's ideals of feminine beauty and sensuality, and indeed, peacock feathers.

Punch cartoonist George du Maurier satirized this heedless pursuit of pleasure. He found the Movement’s penchant for blue-and-white china, Japanese screens and ceramics, sun flowers and peacock feathers to be especially worthy of ridicule. Critics of the movement derided the main followers as aesthetes, dandies, people with no control, discpline, or substance, people who blindly followed ideals set by "the continent," and more locally, by Walter Pater in an infamous conclusion to his book that advocated that people live life with directness and intensity. There are links between many works of art produced in the height of the movement. Frederick Sandys's picture of an angry young woman with a trail of curly hair in her mouth (1868) inspired the poet Algernon Swinburne, an ardent follower of the ideals of the movement. Symphony in White No. 1: The White Girl (1860s) is perhaps inspired by Wilkie Collins's Woman in White. Aubrey Beardsley's The Toilet of Salome (1894) illustrated Oscar Wilde's controversial play.
The Movement was spurred by Baudelaire’s insistence on l’art pour l’art, by the literary set’s antipathy to writing literature that only inspired self-righteous moralizing, and by the ugliness of the Industrial Revolution, and it went on to inspire the Art Nouveau, Art Deco and the Art and Craft Movements. Some trace the influence of the movement in J.R.R Tokein's work.

Pavonia, Frederic Leighton, 1958-9

Choosing, George Frederic Watts, 1864

Bocca Baciata, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1859

stained glass, Edward Burne-Jones

The Cult of Beauty

Victoria and Albert

April 2-July 17, 2011

Watercolour

Review at London Festival Fringe http://www.londonfestivalfringe.com/indexposttag.php?slug=amita-murray

If you think watercolour is too airy-fairy for your tastes, and when you look at a contemporary watercolour you can’t tell if there is a painter behind it, or if someone had an accident with the beaker of water in which they clean their paint rag, well, think again.

One of the stars of this extensive exhibition is none other than Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones. While Burne-Jones’s artistry in the bedroom never reached the lore of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s, and his paintings don’t have the ravenous passions of his idol’s, Burne-Jones’s Clerk Saunders (1861) reveals Rossetti’s influence. Painted (though you wouldn’t believe it) with watercolour and gum arabic, the picture relishes browns and reds to display a relationship between two women that seems based on smouldering desire and crippling repulsion. The women may be two entities or alter egos, and bring to life the classic Pre-Raphaelite model – red-haired, other-worldly, melancholic, and fatally consumptive. Other contemporaries like Rossetti and John Ruskin feature in the exhibition.

Tate Britain brings together paintings that span the last eight hundred years of watercolour – a fiddly, time-consuming medium that has been used to illustrate new species, maps, manuscripts, moods, and exotic locations. Walking around the exhibition, it is just as likely that you will bump into a detailed and precise illustration simply titled Figs (by Jacques le Meyne de Morgues, from the sixteenth century) as you are to stumble across a decadent fantasy titled Hhareem Life, by John Frederick Lewis (1857), a man who would certainly never have been allowed inside a harem in all his years living in Cairo.

In the early nineteenth century, watercolourists decided they had had enough of the art world’s oil snobbery, and launched the Society of Painters in Water Colours and the New Society, to proclaim their equal standing as artists.

Clerk Saunders, 1861, Edward Burne-Jones (Tate)

Hhareem Life, Constantinople, 1857, John Frederick Lewis, (Laing Art Gallery, Tyne and Wear Archive Museums)

Hoppe Portraits: Fair Women and Flappers

                  Tilly Losch, 1928. 2011 Curatorial Assistance, Inc/E.O. Hoppe Estate Collection

Regent Street, London, 1934. 2011 Curatorial Assistance, Inc/E.O. Hoppe Estate Collection

A robust matron wrapped snugly in a wool coat, fox tail draped with a singular lack of irony around her neck, chest proud and hips thrust out at the commuters behind her, waits to cross a street in her West End shopping spree (1934). She clutches her handbag tightly to discourage the London pickpocket. A waitress Miss. Vyse, the first “Nippy” to have starred in J. Lyons and Co. advertisements, looks the picture of kindly but promising virginity, as she stands poised, balancing an empty silver tray in one hand (1925). “Sandwich Board Man Advertising Shafi Hindustan Restaurant” grins at the camera, with a billboard around his neck in war torn Britain (1945). These are just a few of E.O. Hoppé’s sensitive, droll and unsentimental snapshots of city life in London between the two world wars.

It was the end of the British Empire, the loss of innocence brought on by a savage First World War that yet had no premonition of the horrors of the second, and a time of blatant appropriation from the colonies of the “Orient.” Yet it was also the era when young women shed their beribboned corsets, unshackled their zippy bosoms, and demanded the right to work and vote, and artists and intellectuals lounged in smoking rooms and artists-only soirees, and theorized about sex, psychology, and the cavities of the human mind. Hoppé’s invaluable archive of this lost time period is one of the most probing and influential of the modernist photographers, yet the collection was all but lost to posterity when Hoppé in a feat of spell-binding self-deprecation sold his collection to an anonymous London library in 1954, where it was catalogued by subject and scattered in dusty, lightless hallways, till it was reconsolidated forty years later. Though his work was more often published and written about in the early decades of the twentieth century than that of his contemporaries like Alfred Steiglitz and Paul Strand, for many years his name was not listed as one of the great modernists.

His portraits show serious-browed shaggy-moustached young men with thin, frowning faces; languishing flappers in Grecian sparkly dresses ready to break into a Charleston if they can but lift their boneless limbs from the lusty Oriental couch at their side, like Teddie Gerard (1915) who wowed London audiences at the Hippodrome in Hullo, Ragtime!; and lavishly costumed Russian dancers like Vaslav Njinsky as the Spectre de la Rose (1914), a flower child sewn with dying rose petals.

Scornful of the idle rich, Hoppé was clear-sighted in his interest in women who were thinkers and doers, women who would plot the course of the early feminist movements. His own wife Marion was an enterprising woman and ran a London dressmakers. She helped support the couple after Hoppé left his bank job to become a professional photographer. Yet, despite his enlightened views on femininity, Hoppé was very much a man of his times. While many of his portraits are etched with glittering captions – dancer Ted Shawn (1922), the haunting actress Tilly Losch (1928) with her uncontainable beauty, Frederick Ashton’s favourite muse Margot Fonteyn (1935) when she was a mere sixteen-year-old chit, others are simply and with spectacular generality and arrogance titled “Cuban Beauty” or “Haitian Beauty.” At the same time, a portrait of Madame Wellington Koo (1921) is suffused with a mystical and other-worldly fog, and accessorized with the tiny generic figure of a robed Chinese man.

Like other intellectuals of the early modernist period, Hoppé was deeply interested in personality type, and strived in his portraits to find the meaning behind the face. Besides his pursuit of “Fair Women,” Hoppé photographed many celebrated men like Albert Einstein, sexologist Havelock Ellis, playwright George Bernard Shaw, New York intellectual Paul Robeson, and the Duke of York before he made his now-Oscar-winning “King’s Speech.”

The only danger with consuming this exhibition is that it is like eating dark Swiss chocolate with a glass of bubbly – once you start, you just can’t stop.

Hoppe Portraits: Society, Studio, Street

National Portrait Gallery

Till May 30, 2011

Read short review at London Festival Fringe http://www.londonfestivalfringe.com/indexposttag.php?slug=amita-murray

The Joys of Spring

Joys of Spring is an Outline Editions exhibition of prints on Berwick Street.

It features works by Beyond the Valley designers, David Foldvari, Morag Myerscough from the London Design Festival, Emily Forgot, and others.

Read review on London Festival Fringe

“London born, London bred, then I die, then I’m dead,” reads Morag Myerscough’s photographic print of a woman in a polka-dot dress, black tights and white trainers, who is peering through a shop window at a summary of her own life. Featured in the V&A’s 2009 London Design Festival, this print is a part of an exhibition of spring-themed prints on display in Outline Editions’ The Joys of Spring. A lecturer at Central St. Martin’s, Myerscough describes herself as a label-hating gal who likes to cause outrage.

Another featured artist with little charity for labels – the ones people stamp on us, and the ones in which we confine ourselves – is David Foldvari. He creates prints of personalities as widely divergent as Mickey Mouse and the turbaned Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, caught in moments of freedom or constraint, release or crippling debt. In one print, a red-breasted robin sits at a crossroads, looking hopefully away from the road signs that point to rain, wind and misery. On his blog, Foldvari warns design students to stop looking at him for inspiration, and to look, instead, at their personal and cultural history.

Many of the featured artists turn for inspiration to an idiosyncratic and glorious interpretation of nature. The Beyond the Valley series of prints and clothes showcases richly-plumed birds, four-headed lions, and two-necked peacocks that could be the result of a nuclear experiment gone horribly wrong, or an absinthe-generated midsummer night’s dream. Another print, though, turns to less otherworldly locales. In a black-and-white sketch, a woman displaying an expanse of décolletage, and adorned with ostrich feathers, waits on the periphery of an area that could be Soho. The neon signs invite the clientele to delve into the delights of a non-stop sex shop, bum gravy, horsemeat and a sex dwarf.

Read full review at http://www.londonfestivalfringe.com/indexposttag.php?slug=amita-murray

Banksy and the street artists

Originally published in Radia magazine...
http://www.radiamagazine.co.uk/index.php?id=133

“I wouldn’t Banksy on it.”

(quote from Banksy’s film Exit Through the Gift Shop)

I won’t say that Banksy’s pop-up shop on

Berwick Street

was teeming with people breathing down each other’s necks on a Monday afternoon, but there was a steady in-flow of young women with slanting razor-cut fringes and trendy trainers, and bearded, bohemian arty types, despite the Winter Wonderland that is London this December. If you’ve had enough happy-sappy Marks and Spencer’s ads that are more an advertisement for Christmas than for clothes or food, and incessant reruns of the Nutcracker at every theatrical venue just make you want to scream, then street art may be just the right medicine.

This autumn, the pop-up shop featured works by Toulouse-born artist Dran, bringing with it the usual features of Banksy’s art: a dry, subversive, hand-on-the-crotch kind of humour, and beautiful, lonely characters that do what you’re thinking but are too afraid to say. The shop, called Marks and Stencils, was home to an exhibition of pictures, installations, postcards and objects and it was organized by Pictures on Walls, an independent collective, founded in 2001, of self-proclaimed “disaffected (meaning failed) young artists unimpressed by the art world’s obsession with pretentious waffle and warm wine.” Hmm, I don’t know about you, but I have nothing against a seasonal glass or two of glogg…

Earlier this year, rumour had it that one of the Turner prize judges, Andrew Nairne, had been heard to offer praise for Banksy’s art. He said he found it “twee” (he should watch Larkrise to Candleford if he finds Banksy twee) but also “funny” and “original.” Of course, it’s a long cry from praise to actual nomination, and as the spring-time nominations revealed, despite Banksy’s successful Bristol show and his self-deprecating film Exit Through the Gift Shop, there was no Banksy in the mix. But the question is, if ever nominated for the Turner prize, would Banksy still be Banksy? Would Banksy maintain his power to be the anonymous, dissident voice in British art, or would the art world appropriate him and make of him the prodigal son?   

There is nothing of the prodigal son about Dran, or at least, his characters. His pictures feature Scribouille, a homeless puppet who lives only for his art. Dran’s characters look forlorn and fragile, living on the margins of society, picking pockets or making art for a living – two careers that perhaps figure as one and the same in Dran’s caustic view of capitalist society. One picture, called Tame the Fear, is of a little girl offering sheaves of grass to a wooden horse suspended on a spring. Camouflage, a picture and an installation, oddly features a polar bear that looks like the sinister animal in the Birds Eye advert, that is always watching you to see if you’re eating the right kind of frozen peas. Unlike street artists such as UK-based Dan Baldwin, or the Graffiti Kings, whose art often looks like a hallucinogenic flashback with whirling stabs of colour, Dran’s art shows a person caught in a moment of discovery or longing.

Dran has been making art since 1995, and in that time he has published six books about his art, and featured his murals and pictures in many exhibitions – thereby becoming an oxymoron, a successful counter-culture artist. Dran calls his work “My Everyday Life,” the name given to the first of his exhibitions with Pictures on Walls. And as Pictures on Walls reveals, Dran’s work is not only his everyday life, it is something he does practically twenty-four hours a day. His pictures are oddly endearing, beautifully drawn, and full of wit. Street art or not, he is considered one of the most important artists of the century and he is being drawn from the margins and placed bang in the centre by galleries keen to capitalize on the growing celebrity of kooky, non-mainstream artists.

To get your regular dose of street art, pop-art, graffiti and counter-art, visit London’s non-mainstream galleries such as Elm Lesters Painting Rooms, Brick Lane Gallery, and Paintings on Walls in the new year, or just hang out in the East End and wait for a skinny, shifty, matted-hair guy or gal in a hoody to walk by with a spray can.