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

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

The Importance of Being Yohji Yamamoto

Yohji Yamamoto’s signature style makes you stop, blink owlishly and ask yourself the question: is he kidding? His clothes often look over-sized. Seams are flagrantly exposed. And flaps of quilted or felt fabric that would look more at home in Heal’s than in a prêt a porter collection, look tacked on by safety pins. You turn up to a menswear line (like Fall 1998, modelled by Vivienne Westwood and Charlotte Rampling, amongst others), there isn’t a man in sight on the catwalk, and the female models are wearing flat Japanese shoes, long skinny skirts and swathes of chiffon. So, is he kidding? A little, yes. Is he ever serious? Yes, probably. In a kooky, ironic, finger-at-the-establishment, po.mo. kind of way, he is poking fun at the deadly seriousness with which the fashion world treats clothes, collections and bodies. Well, maybe. No one really knows.

Following hot on the heels of the Barbican’s Future Beauty, the Victoria and Albert’s retrospective of Yamamoto’s career spans thirty years, and mixes standard issue mannequin displays, with multimedia installations that tell you about Yamamoto’s life and work, and show the timeline of his collections. Peppered throughout the museum are further displays that share secret liaisons with the museum’s more traditional exhibits, from Trajan’s Column to Rodin’s writhing sculptures. In the main exhibition hall (which is for some reason lit and heated like a furnace) a quilted and be-furred Victorian-style jacket and long skirt nestles close to a sumptuously simple asymmetric red felt dress sewn together in skewed blocks. A gray-and-red chequered, two-tiered dress stands next to a canary-yellow frothy confection, shaded by a hat the size of Honduras. The gray-and-red strapless dress could be a mad person’s take on a business suit, but features instead in Yamamoto’s 1998 Sp/Su wedding collection called Playing with Tradition, where models walk with eye-popping solemnity down the aisle in their lampshade dresses, holding foamy bouquets made of net, quirking an eyebrow at the stereotypical sentimentality of wedding rituals.

Born in Tokyo in 1943, Yamamoto lost his father in the war, and grew up with his widowed mother, which some critics like to link to his penchant for using the deepest, darkest of blacks for his collections, ironically referred to as “post-Hiroshima” chic. He completed a law degree, then switched his attention to the fashion world, and launched his fashion label Y’s in the 1970s. He quickly became notorious for making garments that looked oversized and unfinished, and that too in the 1980s when everyone else was having an orgy with undersized Lycra. Over the years he has collaborated with filmmaker Takeshi Kitano and photographer Wim Wenders. Pina Bausch’s dancers wore Yamamoto’s clothes for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the dance company, and Yamamoto appeared on stage in a rare appearance as a karate aficionado. Both Bausch and Yamamoto’s work is inspired by the harmony between what should and should not be seen. Keeping with the wabi-sabi theme of his life and work, his company was declared bankrupt in 2009, a detail that the V and A exhibition chooses not to harp on.

Yamamoto is a designer whose clothes are often admired for two things. For being sensationally wearable (like his 2002 collaboration with Adidas to launch the Y-3 line), and intensely avant garde. The V and A collection is an effervescent selection of Yamamoto’s life and work, but it tries hard to highlight the deconstruction and theatricality of his clothes, often at the cost of the starkness of his style. It tries so much to be full of what Levi-Strauss would call “floating signifiers,” the glam and pastiche of post-modern clothing, and the lavishness of Yamamoto’s disregard for the fashion establishment, that it gives the retrospective a slightly un-tethered, pupils-dilated, frenzied look.

Read short review on London Festival Fringe. Longer article coming up in Radia magazine. http://www.londonfestivalfringe.com/indexposttag.php?slug=amita-murray

Exhibition, Till July 10, 2011, V and A

Anna Karenina: The Perils of Russian Loving

Photo: Robert Workman

Read short review on London Festival Fringe http://www.londonfestivalfringe.com/indexposttag.php?slug=amita-murray and longer review on The London Word

Helen Edmundson’s rapturous adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s towering epic Anna Karenina, brought back to life at the Arcola Theatre this spring, is as much about Levin’s idealistic love for Kitty as it is about Anna’s fatal attraction for Vronsky. Max Webster’s skilful direction and a considerably talented cast of actors and physical performers supports Levin’s journey from faltering, wrought declarations of his love to Kitty which she spurns, through the throes of unrequited love, to his eventual acceptance that love is not the perfect dream that he has imagined – that the reality both falls short of, and ultimately trumps, the fantasy.

Anna, meanwhile, satisfies her hunger for meaning in life by falling for Vronsky, a dashing Byronic military man and jockey, who heats her blood like her prosaic husband, twenty years her senior, with his righteous lectures on local politics and big offending ears never could. As Alanis Morissette would say, every hot blooded woman needs an object to crave, and Anna is no exception. Anna’s craving for Vronsky eventually leads her from the empty life of a social butterfly to complete social suicide.

Forming the backdrop are Anna’s brother Stiva and his wife Dolly who struggle to come to grips with Stiva’s chronic infidelity. A theme throughout the book and the play is the idea that though society a tickled by the sexual adventures of men, women pay the price for their own and their partners’ illicit passions – though the truth is, suggests the book, that women pay the price no matter if they follow those passions or not. Dolly chooses her family over her own feelings, and sticks it out with Stiva, even though she knows her happiness is threatened by the next housemaid in a short skirt or the Bolshoi’s next favourite dancer. Anna pays the price of giving up her son and losing the goodwill of the Petersburg gentry when she leaves her husband to travel with Vronsky through Europe. When they return, Vronsky carries on as usual, dining, drinking and cavorting with his friends, while Anna is refused entry into society. As always, Tolstoy gives us a weary view of the world.

Using a trendy theatrical devise, the actors change clothing and accessories to take on multiple personalities. They become abstract figures at times, and towards the end of the play they come together and transmogrify into the train that is to be Anna’s destiny. The set is transformed with zip and verve into the snowy Russian countryside, the streets of Moscow, a railway platform, a sparkling drawing-room, and a votive-lit altar. The scene where Anna and Vronsky dance in the street, as snowflakes flutter all around them, and later when spring blossoms, is bewitching. The Arcola’s new site, a nifty warehouse-conversion on

Ashwin Street

, with seats on three sides of the stage, and even a row of “balcony” seats, adapts well to the shenanigans of the cast. In one memorable scene, Anna is transformed into Frou-Frou, Vronsky’s horse, that he rides with so much thrust that the mare has to be put down.

No one can accuse Tolstoy of brevity, and the danger of adapting his work is not knowing when to stop. It is difficult to adapt something as looming as a Tolstoy novel, one that appeared as a serialized epic (1873 to 1877, The Russian Messenger.) This two-and-a-half-hour adaptation tends to drag a little, but despite that, it convincingly weaves multiple storylines with physical theatre, spiffy set direction, a dash of humour, and a lilting soundscore. Vronsky provides humorous interludes by performing a caricature of the love struck lothario, and cast members with a black mask on the face play Anna’s nightmare of death. This is not the first time Helen Edmundson has set herself the task of adapting a heavy duty Tolstoy epic. She adapted War and Peace for the National Theatre in 1996, and put her lightness of touch to George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss for Shared Experience Theatre. While she retains the dark passions of Tolstoy’s novels, she sprinkles joy and humour into the adaptation, that keeps the story from being entirely grim and cynical.

Anna Karenina

Arcola Theatre

Till April 16, 2011

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

Seductive "High" Society, Wellcome Trust

Read full article on Writing Raw literary magazine.

Doctor and Mrs Syntax with a party of friends, experimenting with laughing gas, T Rowlandson after W. Combe,Wellcome Library

The words “opium den” may conjure visions of backpacking across Thailand, or, for the more literary-minded, the first scene of Charles Dickens’ unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, where choirmaster John Jasper buries his savagely repressed feelings in a London opium den. Opium has not only inspired literary texts (think Georgette Heyer’s delicate damsels who are in constant need of revival through a laudanum tincture), but it has also started wars and destroyed empires. As the Wellcome Collection reminds us, it was the East India Company’s export of opium to China in the nineteenth century, in exchange for silk, tea and porcelain, that led to the Opium Wars.

'Allenbury's' throat pastilles, Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain

“High” Society is a collection of paintings, original manuscripts, objects, machines and videos that is simultaneously seductive, poignant and amusing. While a complex chart spells out the dangers of drug abuse, and tells us that the US has spent $2500billion on its War on Drugs in the last forty years, a series of haunting black-and-white photographs by Tracy Moffat shows us the relationship between a sinister maid, and her mistress who is hooked on laudanum. The mistress, in the grip of an overwhelming hunger, lolls naked on her bed, as her maid feeds her habit. While not as decadent or lascivious as Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Bottles that depicts his favourite muse Lizzie Siddal as a mere charcoal sketch in the background of the opium addiction that led to her death, Moffat’s stark pictures capture the tragic eroticism of being in the grip of a beast that is in the end all-consuming and much bigger than you.

The Bazaar of Constantinople, J.F. Lewis, Wellcome Library

Then there is “Drawing produced under the influence of hashish,” an eccentric ink-on-paper rendition by Jean-Martin Charcot from 1853, where strange figures that could be Jesus or the Pied Piper, walk across the page, while dancers with extensive plumage and tight skirts cavort with strangers. LSD blotters give us an exotic scene of a Japanese woman sitting next to a lantern, absorbed in her reading, and another of a Kama Sutra-like couple sharing a coy moment. These blotters are printed over a sheet of small perforated squares, and look like whimsical pictures on an Asian fan, but are, in fact, vehicles for the illicit production of LSD.

There are also artefacts of anti-drug movements. While a nineteenth-century Chinese pamphlet warns of the dangers of opium, fifty years later in Chicago, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union parades down the street with placards that read “Drinkers not drys make the gangster.” A nineteenth-century English flyer entices men to join High Shot House in Twickenham. “Established (in 1886) for the treatment of gentlemen suffering from Inebriety, the Morphis Habit and the Abuse of Drugs,” the Priory-like premises boast of “roomy and comfortable” accommodation, a recreation room with a billiard table, walks to Kew Gardens and Richmond Park, and all the “usual appointments.” The entrance fee is £1 1s, with additional weekly charges for a minimum of a thirteen-week stay.

Beware that you could spend hours trawling through this enchanting and very well-researched exhibition.

High Society

Wellcome Collection

Till February 27^th

Read my review on London Festival Fringe

Read review in The Playground soon.