Paul Klee at Tate Modern

A post here last year about the Bauhaus exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery mentioned three painters who had spent time in Weimar and Dessau: Paul Citroën, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Searching on Google, I can find no evidence of a recent retrospective of Citroën’s non-photographic work but Kandinsky is widely exhibited (eg currently at the Guggenheim in New York), and Klee almost as much (eg earlier this year in Rome). Nonetheless, a full retrospective is always worth seeing for any artist and The EY Exhibition: Paul Klee – Making Visible at Tate Modern is the first large-scale showing for Klee in London for over 10 years.

Klee was born in Bern in 1879 and moved to Munich to study painting when he was 19. He began to establish himself as an artist in his early thirties and the Tate exhibition shows 128 examples of his work from 1912 until his death in 1940. Klee produced and carefully catalogued about 10,000 paintings, drawings and other works. In 1911 Klee met Jawlensky, Marc, Kandinsky and others and joined the Blaue Reiter group (Landscape with Flags 1915, left). In 1914 he travelled to Tunisia and its colour, light and landscape would influence his subsequent work. From 1916 to 1918 Klee served with the German air force. His 1920 Aerial Combat (below left) is in sardonic contrast to Nevinson’s Futurist Spiral Descent 1915, seen recently at Dulwich, while his experience of the chaos of postwar Germany reflected in Memorial to the Kaiser (also 1920, below right) shares the viewpoint of his contemporaries like Grosz. Both these works were produced by the oil-transfer method, tracing over painted paper then transferring onto a blank sheet.

Klee joined the staff of the Bauhaus in 1921 at Weimar, moving in 1926 to Dessau. In 1922 in Berlin he encountered Russian constructivism in the form of works by Malevich, Tatlin and others. Klee’s work in his Bauhaus years involved colour investigation in both constructions and imaginative surreal pieces (Pictorial Architecture Red, Yellow, Blue 1923 and Around the Fish 1926, below left and right). In 1930 his work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and that year he left the Bauhaus to teach in Dusseldorf. In 1933 Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and within a few months the Bauhaus closed. Klee and his family left for Switzerland in December. In poor health after 1935, he died in 1940, the same year as his father.

Brian Sewell in the London Evening Standard liked the Tate’s catalogue but had reservations about both the exhibition and the artist, as did Andrew Lambirth in the Spectator, although of a different kind. Klee described himself as possessed by colour and since reproductions fail to do justice to the subtlety with which he used it, the opportunity to visit The EY Exhibition: Paul Klee – Making Visible and view source works is worth taking. The exhibition continues until 9 March 2014.

Laura Knight at the NPG

This is Laura Knight’s third appearance in a post here within a year. A touring exhibition of her landscapes, in the open air, was followed by Summer in February, a film set in Cornwall (SW England) before the First World War among the Newlyn group of artists which included Laura and her husband. Now the National Portrait Gallery in London has put on a small show of her portraits.

Almost the first painting in the exhibition is from her Cornish period, Rose and Gold (1914, above). Unexpectedly it had links to the last exhibition posted about here, A Crisis of Brilliance at Dulwich. Firstly, the painting probably shows the extent of the influence on Knight’s style of the Roger Fry Post-Impressionist exhibitions whose impact is so evident in A Crisis of Brilliance. Secondly, the sitter for Rose and Gold was the artist’s model, Dolly Henry, who was shot dead shortly after the picture was finished by her lover, John Currie. He then committed suicide. A Slade student, one of his paintings, Some Later Primitives and Madame Tiscaron (1912), is in the Dulwich show. Fans of Summer in February will probably like Lamorna Birch and His Daughters (1916, finished in 1933, below).

 

After Cornwall, the exhibition is grouped into areas which reflect Knight’s inter-war interests: theatre and ballet, (the concert pianist, Ethel Bartlett (1926) in the poster above) and gypsies and circuses. Another pre-war section, Baltimore, consists of paintings and drawings of black Americans made in 1927, when she and her husband worked in the USA. Between 1942 and 1945 she worked on commissions for the War Artists Advisory Committee (see A Balloon Site, Coventry (1943) in the earlier post on the landscape exhibition). I was pleased to see RUSI’s Corporal Elspeth Henderson and Sergeant Helen Turner (1941, left) again. The Imperial War Museum’s The Nuremburg Trial (1946) is doubling as a portrait after its outing as a landscape (again, earlier post).

The exhibition ends with a selection of Knight’s portraits, often commissioned, which demonstrate her skill as a figurative painter (perhaps not at its best in the case of George Bernard Shaw (1933)). That facility was matched by her lack of interest in modernism and possibly helps explain the lack of interest in her work after her death in 1970. It is surprising, given her fight for recognition as a woman artist – the first modern woman RA – and her enthusiasm for portraying high-achieving women, that she never seems to have been regarded as an icon by feminists. Brian Sewell, who disliked this exhibition, calls her a “Very much the “anything you can do I can do better” sort of woman”, and describes at some length how little her work was fetching shortly after her death. Although he has little time for most of the works in the show, he ends:

That I quite liked Laura Knight seriously affects my view of this exhibition. I could have put together a show of paintings — her best in all her genres — that would not have disgraced her; it would not have been truthful, for it would have eliminated all the dross, but it would have been far more entertaining for the visitor to whom she is a stranger, and it would have honoured her. This shoddy little show is a disgrace.

He also comments:

Restricted to her portraits, this [exhibition] unwittingly demonstrates the damage that can be done to a forgotten painter’s reputation when only a single branch of a lifetime’s work is plucked from obscurity like this, and I am inclined to argue that the NPG has done Laura Knight a mortal damage, that no one to whom her name and work are new will ever want to see more of it.

Perhaps because of having seen the landscapes last year as well as these portraits, I am looking forward unreservedly to the Knight retrospective that Dulwich Picture Gallery are planning for 2015. Who knows, the curator may now be seeking Mr Sewell’s advice.

Laura Knight Portraits continues at the NPG until 13 October and will subsequently tour to the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle (2 November 2013 – 16 February 2014) and Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery (1 March – 10 May 2014) (SW England).

UPDATE 11 SEPTEMBER

Andrew Lambirth in the Spectator on 7 September took a much more sympathetic view of this exhibition than Sewell.

Christopher Menaul’s ‘Summer in February’

Christopher Menaul has been directing drama series and films for TV for over 40 years but Summer in February seems to be his first film for commercial release. I mentioned it last November in a post about the Laura Knight exhibition in Worcester. The film, “based on a true story”, is set in Cornwall (SW England) in 1913 and was scripted by Jonathan Smith from his novel of the same title about a love triangle among the bohemian community of artists working at that time in Lamorna. In the film Laura (Hattie Morahan) and her husband Harold (Shaun Dingwall) are onlookers as the young emerging artistic talent of the day, AJ Munnings (Dominic Cooper), and the much more conventional local land agent and army officer, Gilbert Evans (Dan Stevens), vie for the affections of Florence Carter-Wood (Emily Browning).

Summer in February is handsomely filmed against some of the finest coastal scenery in Europe and the period settings are as picturesque as some of the works in the Artists in Cornwall show earlier this year, or those to be found at the Penlee House Gallery in Penzance. However, I wasn’t totally persuaded by its characters’ behaviour, although well-acted. Would Laura and Harold have skinny-dipped in quite so unembarrassed a fashion in front of Gilbert and Florence? [See comments below] Would AJ have used f-words in front of women in 1913, Menaul and Cooper seemingly having decided to portray him as a YBA du temps? Did Munnings, notorious for his speech against modernism in 1949, have such a down on Picasso as early as 1913 – the latter’s style in AJ’s parody seems to belong to a later period? A useful, if not impartial, source of information about Munnings is provided by the Castle House Trust’s website. Although there is no mention of his first wife, their biography does point out that “he spent the first three years of the 1914-18 war mainly in Lamorna” and that “It was from Lamorna that he made his excursions to Hampshire where he had discovered, in the gypsy hop pickers, a wealth of painting material.”

Dr James Fox, in his recently repeated BBC4 series, British Masters, put Munnings into context and drew attention to his considerable skill as an artist. Actors aren’t expected to possess such skills of course, but have to look convincing when they take the part of artists (or, worse, musicians), as does the art they are working on (The Morning Ride, sold at Christie’s in 2000, right). The Spectator sent their art critic, Andrew Lambirth, to review Summer in February and he thought the problem had been handled well.

By an odd coincidence, there have been two period films released in the last two weeks, one set in SW France and the other in SW England, both dealing with the consequences for women of choosing the wrong husband!

Gillian Ayres in Bath and on tour

Andrew Lambirth recently expressed his disquiet at David Hockney’s being designated as our Greatest Living Painter following the death of Lucien Freud:

If there must be the title of Greatest Living Painter, then award it to someone who actually uses paint in an inventive and interesting way: to Leon Kossoff, Gillian Ayres or Frank Auerbach. The publicity-hungry Mr Hockney does not deserve it.

Now there is an opportunity to assess Gillian Ayres’ work in the form of a selection of prints (and a small number of paintings) making up a selling show at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath, Gillian Ayres RA Paintings and Prints 1986 to 2011. The boldly colourful abstract pieces on show (Song Beneath the Stars, below) are probably too narrow in range to be able to bear out Lambirth’s suggestion, certainly by comparison with those in the Tate’s collection.

Ayres, who was born in London in 1930, has strong links with SW England having taught at the Bath Academy of Art (at Corsham Court) in the 1960s and lived in north Cornwall since 1987. Not long after arriving there she was interviewed by Art Cornwall, and in their film provided some interesting views on her form of Abstract expressionism which introduces representational forms. She collaborated with a local printmakers’ collective, 107 Workshop in Melksham, Wiltshire, to produce the limited editions on sale.

Gillian Ayres RA Paintings and Prints 1986 to 2011 continues at the Victoria Art Gallery until 21 March. Bath is the first stop on the exhibition’s tour and the Alan Cristea Gallery website will no doubt have details of the later venues in due course.

David Hockney at the RA

So bad is the economy round here that even the second-hand bookseller has been having a sale – all stock £2 – so I bought a copy of David Hockney’s paper pools, published in 1980 when he was 43. This is an account of his experiments in a workshop near New York with compressing brightly coloured paper pulp to produce swimming pool images composed from six (three by two) or more sheets. As well as pen and ink drawings of his co-workers, the book includes photographs of the processes involved, taken with colour Polaroid which had become popular in the 1970s.
 
Hockney is an enthusiastic adopter of technology and around 1980 made use of collages of multiple Polaroid images (“joiners”) for portraits and landscapes. In the late 1990s he put considerable effort into investigating the use of cameras obscura and other optical devices by the Old Masters, although the arguments he advanced in his 2001 book, Secret Knowledge, remain contentious. Most recently he has taken to using an iPad with the Brushes app.

In the last ten years many of his works have been landscapes, particularly of his native Yorkshire. In the winter of 2005/06 I saw his Midsummer in East Yorkshire 2004 (made up of six by six works) on display at Somerset House. This met with a slightly condescending reception from the critics, for example, Serena Davies in the Daily Telegraph:

… although 2004's summer was one of exceptional heat, one distrusts the effect here: everything seems a little overexposed, steeped a little long in Hockney's pot of nostalgia. … these are images painted with consummate ease, but they don't strike one as works of genius. Pretty, decorative, joyful, not a lot more. It's a struggle to see them as a call for watercolour landscape to be taken seriously: they are too personal. But if they are left as something humbler - an artist nearing 70 painting what he loves - they are delightful.

and Caroline Boucher in the Observer:

Never one to stand still stylistically, David Hockney, having dismissed his photographic phase as too limiting, spent the summer of 2004 in his native Yorkshire painting watercolours. The irony of returning to this most traditional and neglected of English painting traditions will not have been lost on him.
So here they are, 36 equally sized pictures displayed on one wall in neat rows of six. We can see from the little video playing on the opposite wall that Hockney painted both plein-air and from the front seat of the car, that he used mixed paints from pots and quite often smoked at the same time.
… They're lovely watercolours from a talented man, but if one came up in an auction next year, you'd be hard pushed to recognise it as a Hockney.

Hockney moved on to oils and the RA Summer Exhibition in 2007 gave a wall over (above) to Bigger Trees near Warter, or/ou Peinture sur le Motif pour le Nouvel Âge Post-Photographique, made up from 50 canvases. The current RA exhibition, David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture, is largely given over to his Yorkshire landscape works, but frames these with some earlier and some very recent pictures made in the USA.

Winter Timber 2009 (oil on three by five canvases)

I preferred the 2004 watercolours and the oils from a year later to some of his latest, larger and more brightly coloured works (at the extreme, The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven), described as an oil on 32 canvases … one of a 52-part work - see the RA banner above). The preparatory charcoals on paper (Big Trees near Warter, 2008) demonstrate Hockney’s skill at drawing. His variations of Claude’s Sermon on the Mount are perhaps best-regarded as an opportunity to observe the way in which he explores one of his enthusiasms, and to envy the energy he brings to bear on them in his 70s. But I’m not sure any digital technique can remove black from an image (of the fire-blackened original in the Frick), as the RA description states, without some human judgement as to its replacement. Some of the enlarged iPad prints work better than the others, as might be expected when a new medium is being explored. Again, Hockney is generous in allowing the public to observe him undertaking the hard work of innovation, rather than providing a polished fait accompli.

Most of the critics seem to be more enthusiastic about this show than the two above were six years ago. I don’t always accept Brian Sewell’s views in the Evening Standard (for example his acerbic opinion of Grayson Perry at the British Museum) but I can see why in this case he takes the stance he does. The reservations expressed by Andrew Lambirth in his Spectator review certainly deserve consideration. There is an argument for putting Hockney in the mainstream of British landscape painting as the comparison below with the Harold Gilman, (in the Exeter museum, SW England) suggests.

David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture continues to 9 April and then moves to the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (May to September) and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne (October to February 2013). Tickets are £14, full price, but the RA has ensured that the exhibition is not over-crowded.

My Anticipointment Index rating (out of 5, the lower the better) is 4, perhaps 3 recognising the quantity of work displayed. There has been much advance coverage of this show (on BBC1 in particular) and David Hockney seems to have acquired ‘national treasure’ status, together with his OM and CH, which probably exempts him from the expression of criticism.


UPDATE 21 OCTOBER 2013

David Hockney is now back in California - post here.

The Spectator’s Andrew Lambirth on Susan Hiller

The art critic of The Spectator, Andrew Lambirth, recently reviewed (19 March) Susan Hiller’s exhibition at Tate Britain which I posted about last month. Although Lambirth seems to have been impressed by Hiller’s work in the past, it didn’t work well for him this time:

… ‘Witness’ (2000), a potentially beautiful and intriguing installation of 400 dangling speakers murmuring multiple reports of UFO sightings, makes the wrong impression here, and has none of the eerie magic it had when first I encountered it in The Chapel in Golborne Road, W10. In the Tate it descends into banal cacophony. Context, with Hiller’s work, is quite clearly of fundamental importance.
So much of this exhibition comes across as sanitised, portentous and oddly dreary. However, it is quite literary in conception — which encourages commentators to write reams of pretentious verbiage about it — and this tends to reassure the word-loving English. Text is everywhere, in fact, and art scarcely gets a look-in. This is the stuff of school projects blown out of all proportion. The exhibition does no service to Susan Hiller: clearly it should not be on show in the Tate.

His experience of the Hiller show led to wider thoughts:

Since pluralism in the arts became the order of the day, categories have been bursting at the seams, and the old definitions have lost validity. No longer does visual art denote painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing, but all manner of extraneous and tangentially linked activities as well. Film, installation and performance are crammed in under the same umbrella as Michelangelo, Dürer and Monet, when it’s painfully clear they have almost nothing in common with such illustrious forerunners.
In fact, it’s extremely doubtful whether much of the stuff that currently parades under the banner of art has any justification for being there. Quite obviously, all film and photographic work should be removed to galleries of film and photography, performance should go back to theatre whence it came, and installation could profitably be confined to empty office buildings, where much of it would blend in nicely. Our great national art museums and galleries should be kept for their original purpose — the preservation and display of art.

By this definition of art, one of Hiller’s works which impressed me, The J. Street Project, would be sent off to a cinematheque. Applying it more widely, presumably the Tate curators would have to turn down offers of works like Duchamp’s Fountain or Epstein’s Rock Drill, should the originals reappear.

So how to decide what should be in and what out? Another distinction between the non-arts like installation and performance and “art” might be provided by Lambirth’s comment “Context, with Hiller’s work, is quite clearly of fundamental importance.” Presumably this wouldn’t apply to Michelangelo, Dürer and Monet? But was the experience of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in Washington in 1963 the same as in the Louvre, then or now? That loan is the subject of Lisa Liebmann’s article in Tate etc - worth a look, especially for Robert Knadsen’s photograph (which might or might not be regarded as art?).

After reviewing the Hiller show, Lambirth's article turns to what he calls a splendid exhibition of portraits in the Dorset County Museum:

"I haven’t seen the exhibition yet but the merest glance at the highly informative and fully illustrated catalogue (paperback, £15) makes it look fascinating."

- which could lead into another quagmire about the relationship between works of art and their reproductions, and what judgements on the former canlegitimately be drawn from the latter.