Shuimohua gallery blog

Challengingly at odds with the romantic

Leaves — Wed, 16 May 2012 19:14:58 +0000

Chatting in the opera house foyer beforehand, some of the audience speculated why Platel, renowned for his robust interpretations of baroque music, had been chosen to kick it all off. But, if they were scratching their heads to discern a link between his form of contemporary dance and the world's foremost sporting competition, their puzzlement was as nothing compared with that which had afflicted the choreographer himself about his choice as an "official element of the artistic and cultural programme to the 2006 Fifa World Cup".

"I don't know anything about football," he confessed the morning after his big match. "I remember the first meeting we had, and the first question was if I could explain the link between the piece I was going to make and football. I thought it was a joke so I started to laugh."

Anyone heading along to Sadler's Wells theatre in London next week when vsprs makes it British debut will see why Platel was moved to sniggering. Apart from the fact that at one point there are 11 dancers on stage, there is no evident link. This is categorically not a performance involving dancers in football strip mimicking the athletic movements of players, or even giving their interpretation of complex, choreographed goal celebrations. Rather, it is a jagged, dislocated work, in which several of the performers appear to undergo fits on stage.

Challengingly at odds with the romantic, gentle, religiously inspired music of Monteverdi, there are scenes of pain and contortion verging on the torturous, with, at its climax, what appears to be group masturbation.

Perhaps the only similarity it had with watching a football match was the extreme variation of response it aroused in the audience. While some in the circle booed and heckled the curtain call, the stalls echoed to thunderous applause and loud bravos. It was like the end of a game between Bayern Munich and Hertha Berlin: half the crowd were thrilled with what they had seen, half enraged.

"If some people are upset, well, it is not my intention," said Platel, who was clearly taken aback by the booing. "Maybe when you're younger you're into provocation; now, no, not really. It doesn't mean you should be bland, but I am not looking to provoke. The shame is, you never meet the people who don't like the show. Either they shout, or they write nasty e-mails. I would like to talk to them, find out why they hate me. I would like everybody to like it."

Like it or not, the piece is no easy thing to watch. Dancers twitch and shriek, some climb up the walls, others try to bury themselves into the stage. One contortionist manages to become entirely enveloped in her own trousers. All of them look as though they are trying to escape from some sort of pain deep within their own bodies. For much of the time, it looks chaotic up there.

"Yes, yes," Platel agreed. "I have always been fascinated by creating apparent chaos on stage. But it is not chaos. Choreography is about controlling movement."

What seemed to upset some of those in the audience, though, was the source of Platel's inspiration. It comes from a set of silent films he found in a Brussels museum of psychiatry. He had been looking for some time for a way to interpret Monteverdi's Vespers, and the moment he saw the flickering black-and-white images of damaged Edwardian psychiatric patients his search was at an end.

"What I see when I hear baroque music, which is very elegant, very beautiful, is something different," he explained. "The images I see are always contrasting, very arhythmic, involuntary. For me, they fit very well together. The beautiful and the ugly. It is an interesting way of expressing the emotions of the music."

Thus, instead of smooth, highly co-ordinated movement of the kind we might anticipate with this music, there is twitching, shaking and jerking; in short, this is baroque and roll.

"The movements seem uncoordinated, but, for me, the link is there between religious ecstasy and sexuality. I was a remedial teacher when I first left college, and I always was interested in the movements of my pupils. It is very delicate to say this, but I found them inherently dramatic. [The neurologist] Oliver Sachs made a documentary about a friend of his who had Tourette's Syndrome who defined it as a way of living, as a form of art. That was very inspiring."

Some in the Berlin audience, though, clearly found the whole experience disturbing and unsettling, worringly close to being a 90-minute freak show.

"No, this is not right," said Platell in answer to that charge. "We are not disrespecting mental illness. From watching those films, we saw how desperate the subjects were to get out of their body, there was such frustration with their co-ordination. For me, that is right to the heart of it. For me, they should not look like disabled or sick people, but normal people who have these moments. That is important. I think it is true that extreme moments are when you are most alive."

And there is no question that his dancers look alive on stage. It is an exhausting evening for most of them; the sweat is copious, the bruises real. However, the dancers can hardly claim that they did not know what they were letting themselves in for. Platel worked for four months with them on the choreography. As with the way the filmmakers Mike Leigh and Lars von Trier work, there was no script beforehand. Everything was arrived at through group improvisation.

"They are amazing, the team, amazing. Very powerful. They are not compromising on stage, not only in their personal way, but as a collective. This idea of what is a group and what is an individual within the group fascinates me. Something magic happens when the group comes together."

For a moment, in his eulogy about team work, Platel sounds as though he has been scripted by the Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho. Maybe, then, there is a closer connection to football than he realises.

In the grand surrounds of the Staatsoper on Berlin's Unter Den Linden back in early February, the 2006 World Cup got under way. Well, sort of. It was the opening night of an international arts festival planned to tie in with football's biggest carnival, and Berlin's cultural elite had gathered for a new show from the Belgian choreographer Alain Platel.

I flew to Berlin to take part in the city's contemporary art biennial

Leaves — Wed, 16 May 2012 19:12:33 +0000

After checking in, I went to the Kunstwerk gallery to look at my film installation, Drunk, a three-screen projection of street-drinkers that I filmed in 1999. It's the best installation of this piece that I have seen. There's a starkness to the room not dissimilar to the space in which I shot the work, and it feels like it belongs here.

Thursday

Up at 7am. I spent the day looking round the biennial. There are 84 artists spread over a number of locations - churches, cemeteries, apartments and an abandoned Jewish girls' school all down one street called Auguststrasse. The historic spaces added gravitas to a lot of the work. It's a great show, and also very moving. In the evening there was a party organised by Frieze art magazine in a disused, carpeted swimming pool. I love dancing; I just can't talk at parties.

Friday

Woke up feeling rough, then wandered around the biennial again but this time with a friend. Another perspective on the show. Biennials can be notoriously chaotic affairs, and they're rarely good, but this one will stay with me for a while.

Saturday

My friend wanted to look round Berlin's commercial galleries, where there was a predominance of painting and drawing. Then we queued in the cold to see Melancholy: Genius and Insanity in the Arts, the blockbuster at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie, which included everything from Dürer to Goya to Caspar David Friedrich. Later I met up with artist friends in the revolving restaurant in East Berlin's old TV tower. We couldn't see any of the city because it was foggy - it felt like being in an aeroplane caught in the clouds.

Sunday

Time to go home. It was 5pm before I got through my front door. I had to respond to e-mails (I was a secretary when I was younger, so I'm a fast typist). Then I went out with my partner Michael Landy for a curry in east London's Brick Lane. I felt tired from seeing so much art, but this was a good exhaustion.

I flew to Berlin to take part in the city's contemporary art biennial, called Of Mice and Men. I last visited the city in 1996 and, in the taxi to my hotel, I noticed how much it has changed. It's looking more and more conventional and has lost some of its fading, decadent facades.

Art galleries are under pressure nowadays to produce blockbusters

Leaves — Wed, 16 May 2012 19:09:26 +0000

Rembrandt, the chief of the northern Baroque and a good Protestant, never met the poster boy of southern Baroque, the classical genius and Italian Catholic reprobate, Caravaggio. The former was only four years old when the latter died, and, during Rembrandt's lifetime, there was only one autograph painting by Caravaggio in the whole of the Netherlands - Madonna of the Rosary, 1606-7 - which Rembrandt appears not to have seen. He also failed to visit Italy. Among his great, instinctive gifts, the Dutch painter had no anxiety of influence: he came to his great knowledge of world painting for the most part second-hand, while lesser painters and friends of his spent months or years in the dark corners of Italian chapels, copying, shading, revising, astonished.

His two teachers in Leiden had been to Rome and Venice. During the first half of the 1700s, the Netherlands became filled with copies of Caravaggio's work, drawings and paintings by Wybrand de Geest, Gerard van Honthorst, Lucas Vosterman and others, which the young Rembrandt is assumed to have seen. But the evidence is slim for any direct influence of Caravaggio on Rembrandt: each became a master of light and shade, a genius at catching the moral moment, the psychological essence, and each was addicted to the example of nature, using ordinary people as models and getting away from the idealised portraits of saints that were a hallmark of the Italian renaissance.

The show at the Van Gogh Museum, however, does not make a convincing argument for a relationship between the two - not for a relationship based on form or technique, anyhow, and repeatedly it falls back on incidences of a shared theme. Rembrandt is a deeply humane describer of the human face; he catches people at the moment of thought, bringing light into their eyes and some kind of movement to their souls, amid unimaginable layers of brown, green and yellow. Yet Caravaggio appears to us the great, near-cinematic realist; the older painter but the more modern, in which characters seem to achieve much of their vividness in contrast to the gloom surrounding them.

In many ways, comparing Rembrandt and Caravaggio is like comparing the delicious taste of marshmallow against the wonderful taste of curry: they are equally real, they are equally present, but in texture and effect they minister to different parts of the brain.

But the themes they share are undeniable. In one room we see Caravaggio's Judith and Holofernes, a greatly sexualised picture in which the man's head is being severed by Judith in her revealing dress, all the light raking from left to right to illuminate her breasts and pick out the face of the old woman by her side, who seems to be egging her on.

Next to it, Rembrandt's The Blinding of Samson seems almost blurred. No less gory, no less dramatic, but a painting in which the design is less classical but more philosophical, the light pouring in from the mouth of the tent as if to drench the scene of Samson's blinding. The flesh of Rembrandt's characters seems to react differently to light: their skin almost seems distressed by it, and their emotions confused. But again and again, Caravaggio's subjects have flesh that seems luminous, as if their bodies themselves are generating light.

Each is a portrait of the downfall of a powerful man resulting from the exotic appeal of women. And each shows the artist's interest in narrative history painting in the period of the Baroque. But their attitude to light and to the application of paint might make them as different as Auguste and Jean Renoir, as different in their ways of catching the variables of light as Impressionism and cinema. It occurred to me while walking round the rooms for the second time that the show might be no less of a show - and no less cogent intellectually - if all the Caravaggios were replaced with Titians.

Still, a blockbuster is a blockbuster, and a double blockbuster affords the glamorous pleasure of seeing stacks of wonderful pictures that one would be happy to see any day of the week. Rembrandt's The Denial of St Peter glows with spiritual warmth: the colours are more graded and less slick than on The Betrayal of Christ by Caravaggio which hangs nearby, but each painting has a depth of dramatic power and subtlety of moral conflict. One might feel there is an affinity between the two artists in their having chosen to dress the soldiers in armour, but the way the armour is rendered offers a compelling essay on their differences: Rembrandt's reflects the light almost reluctantly, seeming to absorb as much as it deflects, while Caravaggio's deflects light with the blinding flash of the hyper-real.

Each artist was taken up with violence, but perhaps Caravaggio emerges from this show (as he did from the National Gallery's show last year) as a man more excited than appalled by violence. His own version of The Sacrifice of Abraham (1603) shows the angel intervening at the point of brutality, but the angel is somewhat un-angelic and Abraham holds his knife with a certain resolve and firmness of intent, almost with eagerness. In Rembrandt's picture of the same subject (1635), the angel dives out of the clouds as a herald of something Abraham had always hoped for, the sign of God's mercy. Rembrandt shows him dropping the knife, and his face, again, is wreathed so subtly with doubt and relief, the look of an old man who has, in an instant, had a terrible burden removed from him.

At first glances or on postcards (and too many blockbuster shows end up being about quick glances and postcards), the show at the Van Gogh Museum might appear to do a disservice to Rembrandt during his 400th anniversary, seeing him as the fuzzy, non-classical, rather too brown and rather too Protestant northern cousin of the very fashionable, fiery, crystal-clear southern eroticism of Caravaggio. But in fact one leaves the show with an increased sense, I think, of the wonder of each, and a lasting experience of each's commitment to excessive realism.

The thing about King Kong vs Godzilla is that the audience wants one of them to win. But there will be no winner from this show: together, Rembrandt and Caravaggio demonstrate as many differences as similarities, as many different virtues as different vices, and looking at their work in this context, one comes to feel that any argument each of them might have had was primarily an unending argument with their own genius. In Amsterdam, the darkness is audible, as these two masters continue to speak their own separate, related languages, whispering into paint and canvas the great arguments of their age and the numberless ways of being human and divine.

Art galleries are under pressure nowadays to produce blockbusters. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has the benefit of being a permanent blockbuster - the best of Van Gogh all year round - and it must have seemed reasonable for them to help celebrate the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt's birth by giving over some of their magnificent space to a double thriller in the spirit of King Kong vs Godzilla. And so we have Rembrandt-Caravaggio, a show that makes up in grandeur and spectacle for what it lacks in perfectness of argument.

When I first heard the proposal from Pinault

Leaves — Wed, 16 May 2012 19:06:41 +0000

On closer inspection, two concessions to hospitality reveal themselves. The first is a plaque inscribed with the name of Tadao Ando, one of the world's greatest living architects and the man whose studio lies behind this wall. The other is a small button marked "push". Press it, and a panel of glass slides aside, creating an open doorway. Step through that and you find yourself in a soaring atrium, lined with galleried walkways, and flooded with light pouring through a glass ceiling 10 metres overhead.

Although Ando is not yet a household name in England (a public square in Manchester is his only UK project to date), in his own country, and indeed throughout the ranks of his profession, this former boxer is revered. His studio gives a clue as to why. Like so many of his greatest buildings, it pulls off a remarkable illusion: the walls may be built from blocks of concrete, but, from the inside at least, the building feels as if its primary materials were light and air.

One of the architect's very first residential commissions once stood on this site. Fifteen years ago, he demolished the original structure, apparently without so much as a flicker of regret. "I am not in the business of building monuments," he explains in his unmistakable voice, at once gruff and gentle. "A building stands first for its use. Once it ceases to fulfil its practical requirements, it doesn't make sense to preserve it as it is."

The tension between progress and preservation lies at the heart of two very different Ando projects that were unveiled last month - the megalithic Omotesando Hills shopping and residential complex in Tokyo; and the renovation of Palazzo Grassi, in Venice, to house the art collection of luxury goods billionaire François Pinault.

"When I first heard the proposal from Pinault, I didn't really know what kind of building Palazzo Grassi was," he says. "So I went to Venice, and was shocked to discover it was such an exemplary piece of late 18th-century architecture. I knew immediately that no harm must be done to this building."

Ando's minimalist installations, designed to accommodate a rotating display of artworks, accordingly sit with great grace in the old palace. Rooms are lined with blank partitions placed a respectful distance from the palazzo's frescoed walls, and illuminated by rows of spotlights that flatter both the artworks and the exquisite vaulted ceilings.

The far more substantial Omotesando Hills development required a similar degree of delicacy. The earmarked site, on a grand tree-lined avenue in Tokyo, was previously home to the much-loved Dojunkai, a low-slung 1920s apartment block built to house survivors of the Great Kanto earthquake, but which had more recently accommodated trendy galleries and appealingly down-beat boutiques.

"Of course I was very fond of the old Dojunkai," says Ando, whipping out a small metal comb to tend to his fringe. "My original feeling was that the building should be preserved, but then I realised that there were too many problems with it: the ceilings were too low, the rooms were too small, it was no longer functional." Despite a public outcry, planning permission was granted and, in 2001, the Dojunkai was demolished. Ando's spectacular new edifice, in which shops and restaurants are arranged along a spiral walkway that snakes around a cavernous internal void, is worlds away from the old structure.

"In Japan, there is less a culture of preserving old buildings than in Europe," he says. "Japanese architecture is traditionally based on wooden structures that need renovating on a regular basis. Of course, we have since adopted concrete, steel and other durable materials, so the need to rebuild is no longer the same. But old habits die hard.

"With the Dojunkai, what was most important for me was to save not the building itself but the impression it made on the landscape." Despite immense pressure from the developers to come up with a much taller structure, Ando insisted that the height of his building would not exceed the tops of the stately zelkova trees that have lined the avenue for as long as anyone can remember. His solution was to embed four floors underground, creating a building that, tardis-like, appears far more modest from the outside than from within.

"Working in Tokyo has convinced me that, contrary to what people think, it is actually one of the world's most beautiful cities," says Ando. "Look at London or Paris: they're both filthy. You don't get that in Tokyo. The proud residents look after their city. On the other hand, architecturally, it is a real hotchpotch. I am determined to do something about that."

At 64, having long ago scooped all the profession's major prizes, Ando's passion for architecture remains as vital as ever. Throughout the interview, he sketches in pencil on a pad, drawing buildings as effortlessly as most people draw breath. He rattles off everything from plans for a new design museum to a replica of his first-ever architectural sketch: a proposal for an extension to his family house, which he devised when he was 14. "That," he says, "was the moment I realised that architecture could be interesting."

Watching such an instinctive draughtsman at work, it is easy to forget that Ando never had any formal training. "For various reasons, I couldn't go to university," he says, "so, like Le Corbusier, I decided to teach myself. I travelled to Europe to experience the greatest buildings in architectural history: the Parthenon in Athens, the Pantheon in Rome. I listened to the music of Mozart and Schubert."

And then there's the time he spent as a professional boxer. "What I learnt from boxing was that, when you are in the ring, nobody comes to your rescue," he says, his shoulders gathered into a pugilistic hunch. "You have to fight your own fights. It is exactly the same in architecture."

Ando believes that the strange richness of his past makes a crucial contribution to his designs. "Human beings are like that," he says. "You do many different things - sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident - but in the end all of these experiences fall together. I invest all of my own thoughts, my own strength, my own affection into everything I build. And that way I end up with a structure that could not have been made by anyone else."

Ando's buildings are indeed unique. Whether small shops or huge museums, houses or churches, they prioritise function while aiming for the very heights of great art. They are constructed out of the starkest materials - dimpled concrete slabs, iron girders, glass panels - yet pack a highly emotional punch. "In the way that an actor strives to move the audience through his acting," he says, peering up from beneath a fringe now straight as the horizon, "I want my buildings to touch people's hearts. If I can achieve that, then my job is done."

Tucked away in a backstreet of Osaka, Japan's big, unbeautiful second city, stands a grey concrete building five storeys high. Its austere façade, punctuated only by two small porthole windows and a central column of glass, seems designed to repel the nuisances of the modern metropolis: noise, traffic fumes, perhaps even visitors.

The Mother's Hand (1966) by Antanas Sutkus

Leaves — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:59:51 +0000

The image will appear in Sutkus's first solo show in the UK, at the White Space Gallery in London later this month. The exhibition features famous shots of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's Cold War visit to Vilnius, but the real highlights are Sutkus's wonderful, hugely moving portraits of children.

"Childhood is the most important platform for me as a photographer," he says. "Children are genuine, natural. They do not live according to 'our' laws."

Sutkus started taking photographs while still a child himself. "I was making a little money digging peat with my mother. I tried to save for a bicycle but didn't have enough, so I bought a camera instead."

More than 60 years later, his passion for photography is undimmed, although he now spends more time archiving old images than shooting new ones. "I have not got tired of taking photographs," he says, "but I find it ever more difficult to find my subjects. One has to love people in order to take pictures of them."

At a party, a little girl takes her mother's hand - a hand as large as her own face - and cradles it against her cheek like a giant telephone receiver. It is her one connection with the grown-up world bustling above her head; a comforting anchor in a daunting universe.

Antanas Sutkus, the great Lithuanian photographer, also attended the party, clutching his own prized possession - his camera. "I took the photograph the instant I saw the girl," he recalls. "I was touched by the tenderness of the moment."

At the heart of the exhibition is an event that changed the course of history

Leaves — Mon, 14 May 2012 17:16:19 +0000

The National Gallery's exhibition of Bellini and the East traces the artist and his contemporaries as they explore their fascination with Byzantine and Islamic culture

The exhibition examines images of Muslim and Christian civilisation produced by the great Venetian painters Gentile and Giovanni Bellini

In 1453 the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople, capital of the Christian Byzantine Empire...

...transforming European politics, culture and society

Gentile Bellini spent some time in Istanbul as the guest of Sultan Mehmet II, and was fascinated by the Sultan's court and city

The work in the exhibition reflects the artists' knowledge of and sympathetic interest in both Byzantine and Islamic culture

Much of the work also draws on Greek architecture and painting, which were the basis for Venetian art

The exhibition runs from April 12 - June 25 2006

Stopping in my tracks, I asked myself for the first time who could have commissioned such a powerful image, and whether it represents a moving prayer for reconciliation between Eastern and Western faiths, or strikes a note of Christian triumphalism.

Had I seen the National Gallery's Bellini and the East a decade ago, I don't think I'd have been as gripped by it as I was. Back then, its theme - the role of art in a world polarised between East and West - would have seemed remote and academic. Not now.

At the heart of the exhibition is an event that changed the course of history - the sudden fall of Constantinople to Ottoman forces led by Sultan Mehmed II in 1453. With the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, Islam had arrived at the gates of Europe.

More than any other Western state, Venice had good reason to feel threatened. Originally a colony of the Byzantine Empire, Venice not only faced East, but its economic survival depended on Eastern trade. And so Venice fought back, standing alone against Ottoman intrusions into both the Balkan peninsular and the islands of the Eastern Mediterranean.

After decades of warfare, in 1479 the Venetian government negotiated a peace treaty with the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed II. In concluding the treaty, the Sultan asked the Venetian government to send one of their painters to his court.

It is a measure of the importance the Venetians attached to cultivating good relations with the Turks that they complied by sending him not just a good artist, but one of their best, Gentile Bellini. For 18 months, Bellini was resident in the Sultan's court, where he became so friendly with Mehmed that on his departure the conqueror presented him with a golden chain and the Turkish equivalent of a knighthood.

Bellini's bust-length portrait shows the turbaned Sultan under an illusionistic archway in front of a parapet draped with a richly decorated cloth of gold. With his thin face, aquiline nose and carefully groomed facial hair, the Sultan is presented as a man of aristocratic refinement, very different from the burly former soldier we see in medals by other Italian artists of the period.

The delicacy of the detail and the linear precision here signal the importance of draughtsmanship in Bellini's art. During his time at the Ottoman court, he executed a number of drawings for later use, including carefully shaded pen-and-ink depictions of a seated Druze woman and a janissary, both as meticulous in the accuracy of their detail (including colour notations) as ornithological studies.

Even more spectacular is Bellini's drawing of a youthful Islamic page or scribe seated cross-legged, concentrating on his work with a tablet and stylus. So refined is the drawing here that, if you step up close, you see peach fuzz on his upper lip.

After completing the drawing in pen and ink, Bellini used watercolour and gilding to capture the richness of the scribe's heavy blue and gold robes, purple collar and magenta sleeves in a technique frequently seen in Islamic art but not in Western.

And this introduces another of the exhibition's themes, the hybridisation of works of art during this brief period of cultural exchange and dialogue. We see it again in Bellini's use of an Anatolian prayer mat at the feet of the Madonna in a painting of The Virgin and Child Enthroned, and in a Venetian-made salver engraved and inlaid with silver arabesques of Islamic derivation.

But such cross-fertilisation was to be short-lived. Mehmed's successor, a more devout Muslim than his father, considered representations of the human figure to be un-Islamic, and so is said to have sold all of his father's Western works of art in the bazaar, where they were bought by Italian merchants. The great sultans of the 16th century just weren't as interested in Italian art in the way Mehmed was.

If Bellini's diplomatic mission to the Ottoman court represents the intersection of international politics and art, the rest of the show documents more mundane but no less fascinating contacts between 15th-century Venice and Syria, Byzantium and Egypt.

In a section devoted to trade and travel in the East, the organisers look at the Venetian presence in Damascus. The Reception of the Venetian Ambassadors in Damascus by a follower of Bellini, with its depiction of the Great Mosque, public baths, walled gardens and roof terraces is the first accurate Western depiction of an Eastern city in art, while the precisely described costumes of the Mamaluk authorities in their towering turbans walking among the camels, deer and monkeys that seem to have roamed free in the streets, brings the scene to life.

For all the show's many pleasures, if one of its aims was to rehabilitate the reputation of Gentile Bellini, it fails. This is because Bellini's most significant extant works, St Mark Preaching at Alexandria, The Miracle of San Lorenzo Bridge, and The Procession in Piazza San Marco could not be lent to it, leaving a gaping hole in its heart. But that was unavoidable, and it is the show's only failure. The beautifully written catalogue, by Caroline Campbell and Alan Chong held my interest from first page to last.

It's a sign of an outstanding exhibition that it makes you see pictures that aren't in it in a new light. As I was leaving the National Gallery, I happened to pass a painting I've know most of my life, Vincenzo Catena's A Muslim Warrior Adoring the Infant Christ and the Virgin of 1520-25.

We are the disinherited of Art

Leaves — Mon, 14 May 2012 17:07:06 +0000

"We are the disinherited of Art!" laments the American painter Theobald in Henry James's short story of 1873, "The Madonna of the Future". "We are condemned to be superficial! We are excluded from the magic circle. The soil of American perception is a poor little barren, artificial deposit." For anyone such as Theobald with a grain of ambition, there was only one answer - a trip to Europe.

What this exhibition specifically charts is the exodus of young American painters to Paris - as many as a thousand at a time were studying and working there. They formed a colony, with their own favourite shops, cafés and restaurants, their own association, newspaper and guide - Studying Art Abroad and How to Do it Cheaply by May Alcott Nieriker.

The main attraction was admission to the easel classes of academic masters such as Gérôme and Carolus-Duran, who taught draughtsmanship in the grand style. Despite the conservatism of these masters, the Americans graduated to explore all the modern trends: Courbet's and Manet's realism, the Barbizon school, Corot and Millet, and from the mid-1880s, Impressionism (there is still an American Museum at Monet's home in Giverny).

Although the exchange rate was favourable - you could survive on a dollar a day - it wasn't always easy. The atmosphere in the ateliers was highly competitive. Those who failed to learn adequate French tended not to stay the course. But Paris wasn't only the place that offered the best teachers and the wonders of the Louvre and the annual Salon of new work, it was also the heart of la vie de bohème, an environment that liberated those reared in Puritan New England under the shadow of the Civil War.

For women, the freedom was particularly exhilarating, and the exhibition is remarkable for the number of accomplished women painters: Cecilia Beaux, Mary Fairchild, Elizabeth Nourse, Ellen Day Hale (whose gamine self-portrait is not to be missed). The star of the show is Mary Cassatt, whose work has never been so extensively shown in Britain - a woman painting women, with a rich palate and warm sensibility that never becomes cloyingly sentimental.

From a perspective beyond the exhibition, one can draw some broader conclusions. The best of the bunch - Whistler, Cassatt and Sargent - never returned to the US, even though both the art schools and the market for painting there had vastly improved by 1900. Those who did go back - Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins among them - took their French lessons with them and never went any further. And they went back too soon to catch the radical formal experiments of Cézanne, van Gogh, Picasso, Braque and Léger.

"When today we look for 'American art' we find it mainly in Paris," wrote Henry James. "When we find it out of Paris, we at least find a great deal of Paris in it." This remained true through the next generation. The aesthetics of late-19th-century France linger too long in American art - even in the 1930s, they still hang like a pall over its best painter, Edward Hopper. Only with the emergence of Jackson Pollock - and Walt Disney - could it be said that American art finally found its own identity.

On several scores, the National Gallery's new exhibition Americans in Paris 1860-1900 is a revelation. For one, it had never occurred to me that the gallery's permanent collection, intended to represent Western art, contains no example of American painting.

The show also brings one up short against the extraordinary turnabout in the status of American art. Since the Second World War, Europe has been obsessed, rightly so, with the idea that American imagery has come to dominate its visual culture - it has set the pace and defined the possibilities in film, cartoons, television and advertising, as well as nurturing two dominant mid-20th-century trends, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, and scooping up the majority of the world's Old Masters.

But in the period covered by the exhibition, America still bowed towards Europe in a position of "cultural cringe" (that regrettable but useful expression used when Australia discusses its attitude to Britain). The art it was producing at home - chiefly family portraits and romantic landscapes - may have acquired a certain quaint charm now, but by any standards it was crude. None of its great public collections existed - plutocratic America had not yet begun its gigantic shopping spree. There were no art schools of any distinction. A young artist would have had virtually nothing except copies, engravings and hearsay to learn from. All this led to a profound inferiority complex.

Drawings and prints

Leaves — Mon, 14 May 2012 17:04:11 +0000

Priced at £975, the image is available to be seen now. But, according to a gallery tradition, contenders to buy from its "selected group" displays must place their names in a hat. The winners are then announced on the first day of the following month - in this case March 1.

For as long as most can remember, Abbott and Holder has been a gallery that gives good value for money. Specialising in 19th- and 20th-century English paintings, watercolours, drawings and prints, it always seems to be brim full of fresh stock. Each month it issues a list of several hundred works, most of which are priced at less than £1,000.

At the moment, the gallery is offering six ink-and-gouache drawings by the little-known British painter, muralist and designer Roy Hobdell, previously owned by the photographer Angus McBean. Hobdell painted a number of highly stylised trompe l'oeil backdrops for McBean's photographs of stars of the stage and screen, including this work, which was used as a backdrop for the 1946 photograph of the actress Constance Cummings.

It is a myth that we have large cash reserves to wave like a fairy godmother’s wand

Leaves — Mon, 14 May 2012 17:01:14 +0000

It is a myth that we have large cash reserves to wave like a fairy godmother’s wand. Every penny in our bank account is allocated to projects that are under way. HLF is currently about £97 million overcommitted on its available resources – the maximum the trustees believe is responsible in present circumstances. Once, we could have bought the picture through the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the nation’s last resort to save our heritage under threat. But government input has been reduced and the fund has only £5 million for its commitments this year.

The decision on the Raphael needs to be seen in context. Since 1995, the HLF has awarded more than £2 billion to 12,000 projects across the UK. Historic buildings, museums, galleries and natural heritage have become dangerously dependent on our support. We have revitalised over 600 museums, made arguably the greatest investment in the cultural life of London for 100 years and supported the six cities shortlisted for European City of Culture 2008. We range from the enormous – £25 million to restore the Kennet and Avon canal – to £49,500 to keep alive traditional fishing skills essential to the economy of Grimsay in the Hebrides.

Ahead of us lies a mountain of demand for funding. Historic parks need £2 billion to restore them to their proper role in our cities. Eight-five per cent of archives fall below accepted standards and 63 per cent of museums currently make no educational provision. There will be other great pictures with a claim on our funds. The race for funding is competitive; applications far exceed the money available.

I have talked to people who think there is no argument: Raphael is a great master; this picture is a national treasure and to lose it would impoverish future generations and our National Gallery. I have met others who are aghast that such a tiny canvas, one of eight Raphaels in the gallery, should claim resources equal to the restoration of several historic parks or scores of churches.

I sat by the picture the other day watching people look at it. All looked long and hard and read the explanation of its importance and the appeal to “save” it. Two women came way with tears in their eyes. A group of Americans tried to work out the price per square inch. A Japanese girl dropped a coin into the appeal box. Who can say what effect it had on the hearts and minds of the others?

I hope that when our decision is made, people will feel encouraged to tell us what they think of it. Heritage value is not just a matter for experts. It is about what has meaning and importance from the past for all of us.

This is a serious moment for the National Gallery and a tough choice for the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF). But whatever the outcome of the trustees’ meeting, the crisis over the painting has sparked a rare and vigorous public debate about art, heritage and the value we attach to precious things from the past.

How do you weigh the public benefit of an Old Master against a wildflower meadow, a museum extension, vintage steam engines or a Tudor palace? That is what the Heritage Lottery Fund has to do every day. We try to do it in the light of clear and published criteria, but we don’t often have the benefit of public discussion of the sort this picture has aroused.

This is a once-and-for-all opportunity to keep this Madonna in Britain. Once sold, it is unlikely ever to come back on the market. It is a charming and significant picture from one of the great masters of European art. The National Gallery badly wants to keep it and has been admirably energetic in inspiring public interest and debate. The result has been massive media attention and, I have no doubt, many more people going to see the picture.

That doesn’t make the choice any easier for us, but it has contributed to one of our most important aims: to involve more members of the public in identifying what is important from our collective past – what merits the title of our heritage, and why.

I can’t tell you how the decision is going to go. The HLF has spent over £88 million on great pictures over the years. The arguments for and against this picture will be deployed in papers from independent experts and scrupulously assessed against our Lottery grant criteria. There will be extensive discussion round the board table. The wealth or status of the vendor of the picture will have no bearing on the trustees’ decision. The owner of the picture is perfectly entitled to sell it. Our only job is to decide whether the cost is worth it, in terms of the benefit to the British public.

Whether or not you believe that fashion is a form of high art

Leaves — Mon, 14 May 2012 16:55:09 +0000

I, for one, hadn't realised how many designers of genius there are at work in the world today. Rhodes has invited 70 of them each to choose a single dress by which they would like to be remembered and to explain why in a label displayed alongside the dress. If they played the game at all (and Saint Laurent, Gucci and Prada didn't), we hear the voices of some of the most talented people on the planet talking about their work in words that give us a remarkable insight into their creative processes.

To take just one example, Christian Lacroix, commenting on his wonderfully crafted, sublimely detailed ball-gown, calls it "a moving sculpture revealing the body by changing its silhouette (which is the aim of couture) and mixing the abstract and the baroque, the architecture and the decor, the minimal and the maximal". If that sounds pretentious, I can only tell you that when you are standing in front of the dress itself, it makes perfect sense.

Thomas Heatherwick's innovative design for the exhibition avoids the kind of static installation you find in the costume galleries at the V&A by suspending each dress on weighted wires. As the spotlit garments revolve slowly in the darkened space and you climb curving ramps to the second floor to look down on the dresses you were just looking up at, the experience is like sleepwalking through a Surrealist painting.

Ninety per cent of the designers have chosen to be represented by a ball-gown. That is unfair to those who submitted more modest garments. And so, I suspect that Diane von Furstenberg's simple wrap dress (first designed in the 1970s), made without fastenings of any kind, may well be more radical in its conception than many of the more spectacular dresses nearby. But it is hard for a practical dress that a woman could wear more than once to shine beside visions as radiant as the Renaissance-inspired wedding gown Jasper Conran designed in 1994 for Princess Margaret's daughter, or Bellville Sassoon's ultra-romantic ball-gown of 1989.

I suppose a sourpuss might object to the wanton expense represented by consumption this conspicuous. But surely the grace and elegance that the women who wear these dresses add to the world are also worth something: a photograph of Blaine Trump dancing with Mikhail Baryshnikov in her Sassoon frock would melt the heart of a Marxist revolutionary. These designers are selling dreams and fantasies as surely as their counterparts in Hollywood.

You have to go to this show with a friend, because among its many pleasures is discussing the success or otherwise of the dresses on view. Maybe it's because I'm an art critic, but my favourite dress in the show is a pistachio-green silk evening gown by the British designer Anthony Price, where the heavy folds of fabric looked to me like a minimalist sculpture by Robert Morris. I also thought John Galliano's 1995 fuchsia satin dress stood out, and a lace and chiffon cocktail dress by Alexander McQueen at once nifty and sexy.

But if I had to give a prize for the most beautiful garment in the show, it would have to be for that Lacroix ball-gown, complete with a bustle that would have delighted Proust's Madame Swann.

I don't know anything about fashion. What I do know is that London has a terrific new museum and that this entertaining show will take your mind off the heat wave.

Whether or not you believe that fashion is a form of high art, I guarantee you'll have a good time in My Favourite Dress, the inaugural exhibition at Zandra Rhodes's new Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey, east London. Apart from the beauty of individual dresses on display, the cumulative effect of seeing so many designs of such high quality together in one space is overwhelming.