Grayson Perry, Establishment Man

This post began as Grayson Perry at the NPG but providing the necessary context turned it into a wider review. 

In 2013 Perry was the BBC’s Reith Lecturer and in a series titled Playing to the Gallery he discussed “what makes him an artist and the limits of contemporary art”. The BBC website has downloadable pdf transcripts of his four lectures and also shows some drawings he made for them. In 2014 he authored a book, Playing to the Gallery: Helping contemporary art in its struggle to be understood (PttG) with additional material and images. It’s worth reading, not just to have Perry’s astute observations in a more accessible form, but also for some of the extra illustrations which are very amusing (eg page 69, ‘inspiration for the staff bedrooms’; page 90/91, a London art map; page 113, curation) but I thought one conveys Perry’s sardonic views particularly well:

On inspection, Map of Museum based on Interior of Curator’s Head might have been more appropriately titled Map of Art Gallery based on Interior of Director’s Head. But Perry, who regards himself as “a fully paid-up member of the Establishment” (PttG page 82), presumably knows not to bite other dogs . 

About a month after PttG was published, Perry was Guest Editor for the 10 October New Statesman magazine – “A special issue on the Great White Male - That’s the straight, white, middle-class men who dominate our culture (and our politics)”. In the issue’s The NS Essay, They walk among us, Perry bemoaned the fact that:

… white, middle-class, heterosexual men, usually middle-aged … [are] a group that punches far, far above its weight. 

They dominate the upper echelons of our society, imposing, unconsciously or otherwise, their values and preferences on the rest of the population.

and christened them Default Man. Though he had to admit:

I must confess that I qualify in many ways to be a Default Man myself but I feel that by coming from a working-class background and being an artist and a transvestite, I have enough cultural distance from the towers of power. I have space to turn round and get a fairly good look at the edifice. and then spent much of the rest of the essay in the fortunate position of having his cake and being able to eat it: When I am out and about in an eye-catching frock, men often remark to me, “Oh, I wish I could dress like you and did not have to wear a boring suit.” Have to! 

… Personally, working in the arts, I do not often encounter Default Man en masse, but when I do it is a shock. I occasionally get invited to formal dinners in the City of London and on arrival, I am met, in my lurid cocktail dress, with a sea of dinner jackets; perhaps harshly, my expectations of a satisfying conversation drop. I feel rude mentioning the black-clad elephant in the room. I sense that I am the anthropologist allowed in to the tribal ritual.

Just why post-industrial societies in general, not just the UK, are still dominated at their upper levels by men is not something Perry gives much consideration to. At one point he quotes Sherrie Bourg Carter:

Women in today’s workforce ... are experiencing a much more camouflaged foe – second-generation gender biases ... “work cultures and practices that appear neutral and natural on their face”, yet they reflect masculine values and life situations of men.

but he seems more interested in the wearing of suits than the raising of children. Only in The NS Interview, when Perry invites Martin Amis to his studio for a dialogue, does that aspect of reality begin to intrude:

MA You have to whisper it now that there are differences between men and women. There are, though. Women have children, you know. 

GP Yeah, but there’s also a much more encultured version of what it is to be a man and a woman. I sometimes characterise it as: males are defined by what they do and women are often defined by what they are. … 

GP I think that the male role is more heavily policed, in terms of constricting behaviours that are available to it. The male aesthetic is often about camouflage – because he then retains his ability to observe from a supposedly neutral standpoint. Women are one of the groups to be looked at. Everything is defined from that male gaze. Is it possible to unpick the white, male, middle-class, middle-aged, heterosexual effect on culture and take it out? Because they’ve become inextricably woven into what we call culture and “right thinking”. 

MA Males? 

GP Yes. How do you think men have branded the nature of intellectualism and seriousness?

MA It would take for ever to untangle that, wouldn’t it? …

Early on in The NS Essay, Perry reveals that:

In the course of making my documentary series about identity, Who Are You?, for Channel 4, the identity I found hardest to talk about, the most elusive, was Default Man’s. Somehow, his world-view, his take on society, now so overlaps with the dominant narrative that it is like a Death Star hiding behind the moon. We cannot unpick his thoughts and feelings from the “proper, right-thinking” attitudes of our society. It is like in the past, when people who spoke in cut-glass, RP, BBC tones would insist they did not have an accent, only northerners and poor people had one of those. We live and breathe in a Default Male world: no wonder he succeeds, for much of our society operates on his terms. 

Chris Huhne (60, Westminster, PPE Magdalen, self-destructively heterosexual), the Default Man we chose to interview for our series, pooh-poohed any suggestion when asked if he benefited from membership or if he represented this group.

Who Are You?, in which Perry “turns his attention to identity as he creates portraits - from tapestries to sculptures and pots - of diverse individuals who are all trying to define who they are”, was broadcast in three parts starting on 29 October. It was a successor to his 2012 Channel 4 series, In the Best Possible Taste, with its six large accompanying tapestries, The Vanity of Small Differences, which eventually went on a UK tour. This time the Who Are You? pieces are displayed among the National Portrait Gallery’s collection in London (below):

‘Vibrant’ art that working-class people might like – surely not 

There isn’t space here to describe all of the items, let alone reference the 140 or so minutes of video essential to their explanation – see next year’s book by Perry perhaps. But a few are worth mentioning, not least because Default Man turns up in the form of the Huhne Vase (below top). Why Huhne allowed Perry so close when he was in such dire circumstances (before imprisonment and subsequently on release) is a mystery. Later at the NPG, Huhne’s meeting with potter and vase, (which, according to the Guardian:

… was purposefully smashed by Perry and then repaired using an ancient Chinese technique which involves lacquer resin dusted or mixed with gold. The Huhne vase has been decorated with the motifs of Huhne’s face, his H11HNE number plate and a penis.  Perry said: “This is a riposte to the common Default Man’s defence that he is an ‘individual’ and his achievements and behaviour have nothing to do with group identity.  I have smashed the pot and had it repaired with gold to symbolise that vulnerability might be an asset in relationships to such a person.”)

was filmed for the first part of the series, an encounter which resembled that of water and a duck’s back, Huhne not being in the least fazed by Perry, who, he pointed out, was a RA and CBE*. I didn’t think Perry closed on Huhne, who, although he didn’t say so directly, seemed to regard Perry as just another player in the influence game** albeit one with an outré image.

Another item which attracted attention when the show opened was The Ashford Hijab (above lower), a portrait of young Muslim convert, Kayleigh Khosravi, from Ashford in Kent. Perry commented:

What does Islam offer to a young white woman in her twenties?  The answer, I found, appears to be a refuge from the nagging consumer pressures and constant, often sexual, scrutiny of women all pervasive in western society.  Conversion also offers a strong and supportive sisterhood within the congregation of the mosque.

Nearby in Room 31 is Wallis, Duchess of Windsor (1939) by Gerald Leslie Brockhurst, a portrait of a woman who had been on an even more remarkable journey. Whether this was an intentional juxtaposition, the visitor doesn’t know. But it was doubtless deliberate that The Line of Departure (below top), a tapestry in the style of an Afghan rug showing three wounded war veterans, is in Room 23, Expansion and Empire, near Florence Nightingale receiving the Wounded at Scutari by Barrett. I don’t believe the vets featured in the Channel 4 series, an omission which wouldn’t have surprised Kipling. [But see UPDATE 31 JANUARY below]

Probably the most memorable item was the Jesus Army Money Box (above lower), a ceramic in the form of a medieval chasse, a small enamelled chest containing a holy relic. This was inspired by the time Perry spent with a Christian group which helps the homeless.

In the few years since he was first mentioned here, Perry seems to have grown even more popular – no crime that. At the end of 2104 he used his Twitter account (@alan_measles) to keep followers informed, and patiently answering queries, about the construction and decoration of a large (one meter tall) vase:

Large, but not exactly breaking new ground. In the year that Perry became a RA, Brian Sewell wrote rather caustically about Perry:

In the quarter of a century that he has been making them [pots] they have remained essentially the same - perhaps bigger and more provocative in imagery and narrative, but they are so undeveloped that they demonstrate stultifying intellectual and aesthetic limitations. Meanwhile, Claire [*] has gone from strength to strength and it is for her tasteless and preposterous dresses, worn on every possible public occasion, that Perry is now notorious. 

[* earlier] … a female alter ego, Claire, who is now, in adult life, his public persona and has become not only much the subject of his work but the work itself, with the sedulous promotion of being Claire a constantly performed performance that more or less obliterates his unmemorable pottery.

But since then Perry has become a CBE and Reith Lecturer, and Claire engages with duchesses.

Perry with the Duchess of Cambridge

Is he “a fully paid-up member of the Establishment”? Peter Hennessy offered some relevant comment in a recent extended essay called Establishment and Meritocracy:

I reckon there is a permanent element at the core of the British Establishment - a kind of gyroscope - which embraces the grand old professions like the Law and the Civil Service (though the latter is a tad tattered at the moment), the House of Lords (especially sections of the crossbenches where sit the former Cabinet Secretaries, Law Lords, Chiefs of the Defence Staff and Queen's Private Secretaries), the Royal Society, the British Academy, the learned societies generally, the scientific and engineering institutes and the great medical colleges. The reach and clout of these institutions and tribes may fluctuate but they never truly fade, let alone disappear. While around this rooted, inner core there swirl the transient elements in the media, the financial world and the celebritocracy in constellations that vary from generation to generation who can have a powerful, if often passing influence on the mood music of political and economic discussion, and in the case of celebritocracy, the norms of our wider society. (pages 14-15)

So I think it's almost certain that Perry, if not "fully paid-up" and only transiently, is one of the celibritocrats within the British Establishment - will his knighthood arrive before or after Tracey Emin becomes a Dame?

Who are you? continues at the NPG until 15 March


* Respectively, Royal Academician and Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.
** In January 2015 Perry was included as one of the 24 most influential people in Art (alongside Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, David Hockney, Banksy and Iwan Wirth and Manuela Hauser, et al) in Debrett’s Britain’s 500 most influential people in 2015.



UPDATE 31 JANUARY

The London Evening Standard on 30 January carried an article by its owner, Evgeny Lebedev, describing how, as part of his paper’s ongoing campaign, he and Grayson Perry had met homeless veterans at a hostel in East London earlier in the month. According to the article, Perry has offered:

… to create a unique piece of art that would not only reflect the stories of those this campaign is helping but which we could also then exclusively auction to raise more funds for those who need it.

Also:

The CEO of Veterans Aid, Dr Hugh Milroy, was delighted by the visit. “Welcoming Grayson to New Belvedere House was a real pleasure,” he said. “The staff and residents warmed to him immediately. 

“Grayson’s empathy, humanity, humility and genuine interest shone through. We were stunned to learn that he was prepared to create an artwork for us and immensely grateful. Many of the veterans we help have an interest in painting, ceramics, photography or some kind of creative activity so there was great curiosity and enthusiasm when his visit was announced.”

UPDATE 12 APRIL – ESTABLISHMENT MEN AT WORK

On 11 April Grayson Perry wrote a piece in the Guardian, My hero: Neil MacGregor The retiring director of the British Museum transformed a stately institution into a cultural powerhouse.

… Neil was the major museum director’s major museum director. He is effortlessly learned, an astute diplomat and above all a lovely, lovely man. 

I sort of engineered our first meeting [in 2008] after I heard him talk to a small group where he gently berated the clergy of St Paul’s for charging entry fees. Afterwards we all went for supper at Pizza Express and I spotted an opportunity and sat down next to him. As casually as I could, I dropped in that I had an idea for an exhibition. Neil said: “Send me a letter,” and three years later my show, The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, opened. It is still my proudest achievement and its passage through the souk of fiefdoms that is the BM I’m sure was much eased by Neil’s initial enthusiasm. 

… I have just been appointed a trustee of the BM; …

Saving Van Dyck’s Self-portrait

Oh, the perils of social media – post in haste, repent at leisure. Yesterday on this blog’s Facebook page I remarked that I was:

Sending donation to @artfund #savevandyck but awaiting their response to Bryan Sewell

With a link to an article by Brian Sewell which had appeared in the London Evening Standard. Facebook turns posts immediately into tweets as can be seen below:

Not only had I misspelt “Brian”, but worse I hadn’t checked subsequent issues of the Standard for any responses. As you can see, this omission was pointed out by Sandy Nairne @Boathouseman who, much to my embarrassment, is the Director of the National Portrait Gallery. All I can offer by way of apology is to reproduce his letter to the ES (Wed 4 Dec, page 51) below:

I was glad to see that he thinks a system for matching auction bids, as Sewell suggested, might be feasible in the future. And this is the link that matters.

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.

Expressionists and Picasso Ceramics in Leicester

Cultural affairs in the UK, apart from Scotland, are notoriously London-centric, and, of course, the visual arts are no exception. There are arguments for this state of affairs being desirable, for instance Brian Sewell writing in an article in 2007 about the British Art Show’s return to London:

It was damned silly of the Hayward Gallery, to which the show 'belongs', to let loose its grip and allow London to be deprived of it. I know all the arguments for sharing shows of every kind with the far-flung provinces and am wholly in sympathy with them, but London provides by far the largest audience and should never have been eliminated from the circuit. It is in London, more than anywhere, that continuity matters for both the artist and the informed critical audience. (Naked Emperors p28)

In the years since Sewell’s article, London’s national supremacy has become even more firmly established with its emergence as a major international centre for contemporary art. Louisa Buck explained in the autumn 2013 Art Quarterly how this came about, and where to find it at street level. 

However, even though most major exhibitions will always be in London, the establishment of Tate St Ives in Cornwall (South West England) and, more particularly, of Tate Liverpool has done something to redress the balance in England. The efforts made by the Public Catalogue Foundation to digitise the nation’s entire collection of oil paintings and the fact that their images have been made available through BBC Your Paintings are also steps in the same direction. There is also Christopher Lloyd’s In Search of a Masterpiece: An Art Lover's Guide to Great Britain and Ireland, which provides a helpful guide for art lovers as to what is worth seeking out and looking at outside, as well as inside, the M25.

In this spirit, this post will hopefully be the first of an occasional series about some of the good things to be found across England and Wales outside London, and not just in the South West.

Anyone with an interest in the origins of Expressionism, used as a blanket term for avant-garde German art from 1905 until the Nazi ascendancy in the 1930s, will find limited opportunities to see works in Britain. The Radev Collection, recently on tour, holds Blaue strasse c1916 by Jawlensky, a member of the Blaue Reiter group. Last year, the Richard Nagy gallery in London showed a selection from the Silverman Collection including works by Otto Dix, Luwig Meidner and George Grosz. But the best permanent collection covering Der Blaue Reiter and its predecessor, Die Brücke, is that of the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery in Leicester.  [Not on display until 2014]. The majority of the works are drawings and prints but particularly worth seeing is Franz Marc’s Rote Frau 1912 (left), “possibly the most important work by a German Expressionist to be found here [the UK]” according to Lloyd.

Lloyd does not mention that the New Walk Museum also holds the Attenborough Collection of Picasso ceramics, donated by Lord and Lady Attenborough to commemorate the members of their family who died in the Asian Tsunami in 2004. About 40 works (examples below) are on rotating display from a collection of 150 bought by the Attenboroughs from the Madoura pottery in Vallauris (near Antibes, France), starting in the mid-1950s.

 

Together, these ceramics and the Expressionist collection will make a visit to New Walk well worthwhile, once the latter element has returned in 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.

George Bellows at the RA

As soon as I walked into George Bellows (1882-1925): Modern American Life at the Royal Academy I had a feeling of déjà vu, or more accurately déjà vu all over again. Was it having seen a Hopper retrospective last year – he and Bellows were both pupils of Robert Henri at the New York School of Art? And then I remembered a small exhibition at the London National Gallery in 2011, An American Experiment George Bellows and The Ashcan Painters. That show, like the one now at the RA and Tate Modern’s current Lichtenstein retrospective, benefited from the support of the Terra Foundation for American Art. Their objective is “Bringing American Art to the World and the World to American Art” and hopefully the reach of their activities in the UK will spread beyond London in due course.

It’s the early parts of this exhibition (a version of earlier incarnations in Washington DC and New York which have been reduced to 70 works in London) which make the best impression on the visitor. Realist works like Stag at Sharkey’s 1909 (above and detail in the banner) and the wintry scenes of parks (Blue Snow the Battery 1910, left) and construction sites convey the energy and rawness of New York a century ago. World War 1 propaganda pieces like Massacre at Dinant 1918 (below) have little appeal to modern eyes forgetful of their context. The war had begun in Europe in July 1914 but the USA did not enter until April 1917 and then after a fierce national debate to overcome isolationist objections.
 

After the war Bellows and his family (the subject of late portraits like Emma and Her Children 1923 below) lived in an artists’ colony in New York State at Woodstock until his death from appendix-related peritonitis, not uncommon in the pre-antibiotic world (or, as we may discover, in a future post-antibiotic one). Perhaps if Burrows had lived beyond 42 and had ventured abroad to, say, Paris in the 1920s, his art might have developed in new and less retrospective directions. Not for the first time here, it is hard to disagree with one of Brian Sewell’s conclusions, in this case that “This exhibition is unlikely to convince an informed London audience that Bellows was a great painter.”

George Bellows (1882-1925): Modern American Life continues until 9 June 2013.

Schwitters at Tate Britain

Schwitters in Britain at Tate Britain is comprehensive, chronological and, even better, turns out to be modestly titled. It is in fact a near-retrospective of Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), an artist who is not so popular as to guarantee that the show is unpleasantly crowded.

Although close to Dada and other avant-garde art movements in Europe after World War I, Schwitters, perhaps because of his relative isolation in Hanover, developed a movement of his own, MERZ. He alighted on these letters as a residue when cutting up a newspaper printed with the word COMMERZBANK and took them to mean art, sculptures or even buildings, Merzbauten, which could be assembled from anything. Perhaps not surprisingly many of the exhibits surviving from the years before he came to Britain are collages, often incorporating three-dimensional found objects. Inevitably, these do not reproduce well on the printed page (or LED screen) and have to be seen to fully appreciate the subtlety of their composition and colour - Merzbild 1a (The Psychiatrist) 1919, above.

Schwitters had decided to leave Germany for Norway in January 1937 before the exhibition in July that year of what Goebbels and others labelled degenerate art. He probably never wished to come to Britain but three years after arriving in Norway, the Nazi invasion meant that he, his son and daughter-in-law had to leave. The British authorities eventually interned Schwitters on the Isle of Man with many other mittel-European intellectual refugees until he was released in November 1941. After a brief sojourn in Paddington where he met his companion, Edith ‘Wantee’ Thomas, he spent the rest of the war in Barnes, SW London, at 39 Westmoreland Road, whose owners probably now have a good case for a Blue Plaque should they want one  (Relief in relief 1942-5 right).  During this period he made contact with old friends who were also refugees like Naum Gabo and encountered British artists like Ben Nicolson.

After the end of the war Schwitters moved to Ambleside in the Lake District where he started to construct the Merzbarn, the interior wall of which is now preserved in the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle. Its exterior was reproduced in the courtyard of the Royal Academy in 2011 as part of the exhibition Modern British Sculpture.

While happier making Merz collages and reliefs, Schwitters would turn his conventional artistic talent to more readily sold landscapes and portraits. Examples of the latter are Untitled (Portrait of Klaus Hinrichsen) 1941 (left), from his time on the Isle of Man, and Untitled (Portrait of Henry Pierce), painted in Ambleside in 1947, the same year as he made En Morn, detail in the Tate’s banner above.

Brian Sewell’s review of the exhibition is well worth reading and, among other things, draws attention to Schwitters as a link between Dadaism and the emergence of British Pop Art in the years after his death. Sewell suggests that the word MERZ to Schwitters was “irresistibly akin to the French merde, slang that he translated as rubbish or garbage, but that is better known as shit.” Certainly Schwitters served in the German infantry in the First World War and may well have picked up some French obscenities.

Schwitters in Britain continues until 12 May and will be at the Sprengel Museum Hannover from 2 June to 25 August.

Bauhaus at the Barbican

Over 30 years ago, just as postmodernism got going, Tom Wolfe wrote his critique of modern architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House,. He observed:

Every new $900,000 summer house in the north woods of Michigan or on the shore of Long Island has so many pipe railings, ramps, hob-tread metal spiral stairways, sheets of industrial plate glass, banks of tungsten-halogen lamps, and white cylindrical shapes, it looks like an insecticide refinery. I once saw the owners of such a place driven to the edge of sensory deprivation by the whiteness & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & spareness of it all. They became desperate for an antidote, such as coziness & color. They tried to bury the obligatory white sofas under Thai-silk throw pillows of every rebellious, iridescent shade of magenta, pink, and tropical green imaginable. But the architect returned, as he always does, like the conscience of a Calvinist, and he lectured them and hectored them and chucked the shimmering little sweet things out.

Not many of ‘Our Houses’ in Britain are truly modernist, although one of the first was at Dartington in SW England (top, right) and a post here earlier this month mentioned a more recent Mies van der Rohe-style home in Wilmslow. But whether they find it a homely style or not, anyone who wants to learn more about one of the sources of modernism should visit Bauhaus: Art as Life at the Barbican Art Gallery, a show which mostly lives up to its official description:

The biggest Bauhaus exhibition in the UK in over 40 years presents the modern world’s most famous art school. From expressionist beginnings to a pioneering model uniting art and technology, this London exhibition presents the Bauhaus’ utopian vision to change society in the aftermath of the First World War. Bauhaus: Art as Life explores the diverse artistic production that made up its turbulent fourteen-year history and delves into the subjects at the heart of the school: art, culture, life, politics and society, and the changing technology of the age.

Carpingly, I thought that an exhibition in London might have described the influence of the English Arts and Crafts movement on the Deutsche Werkstätte and Werkbund which preceded the Bauhaus. (I couldn’t see an explanation of the word bauhaus – construction house, literally, I think.) Also, among the later influences, there was enough information to deduce something about that between De Stijl and the Bauhaus, but the links to Constructivism weren’t at all clear. The large model of the Dessau building (top, left) lacked any indication of the direction of north – relevant to natural light in studios. I would have liked to have seen more Bauhaus-influenced objects, even if that meant showing fewer photographs. Finally, there was no rationale for the omission of the German Pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona Exposition and its famous chair, although their co-designer, Mies van der Rohe, was the Bauhaus director of architecture at the time. However, there is much of interest and the show provides an opportunity, rare in the UK, to see works by Wassily Kandinsky (Circles in a Circle (1923) below, right) and Paul Klee, as well as Paul Citroën’s Metropolis (1923) (below, left), apparently the inspiration for Fritz Lang’s film.

The exhibition concludes at the point when the Bauhaus was in effect closed down by the Nazis in 1933. The subsequent achievements of its leading lights, Gropius, van der Rohe and others, many of whom emigrated, are well-known. But it would have been interesting to learn about the careers of its young graduates, whose student days feature in so many of the photographs (‘young people come to the bauhaus’). One imagines that from 1933 to 1945 having trained at the Bauhaus would hardly have enhanced a CV. But presumably those graduates who survived the war, particularly the Holocaust or the Eastern Front, would have played a role in German post-war reconstruction and the Wirtschaftswunder. Was it their influence that we still see in the clean lines and typefaces associated with German products like Bosch, Braun and Neff, and extending to the modernist showrooms favoured by BMW, and VAG? What happened to the Villa Sommerfeld? And very oddly, why is there no mention of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation which preserves the buildings and has restarted the bauhaus magazine?

Railing against exorbitantly-priced exhibition catalogues, I can only advise anyone who has to buy a copy to look for it on Amazon where, at £24.50, at least it’s 30% off. For most of us, Magdalene Droste’s Bauhaus 1919-1933 (a Taschen 25th anniversary bargain) will be more than adequate – just make sure you get it in English! In his review in the London Evening Standard (far more worth reading than anything I’ve got to say), Brian Sewell remarked that:

I have only one adverse criticism, and this is of the catalogue: thirty-eight essays are all very well, but the newcomer to the Bauhaus needs the more basic instruction of a chronology, not only of the Bauhaus itself, but of related or parallel movements and the German politics of the day; he also needs brief biographies of the participants; and with the catalogue in its present form he needs, above all, an index.

If nothing else, the Barbican’s Learning Resource for the exhibition provides brief biographies and can be downloaded for free.

Bauhaus: Art as Life continues until 12 August. Despite some of the remarks above, my 'Anticipointment Index' mark out of 5 is 2, pretty good – the higher the mark, the worse the anticipointment.

ADDENDUM 30 June

1926 footage of Wassily Kandinsky at work filmed in Berlin.

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.

Modern British Sculpture at the RA

Having enjoyed last year’s Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Gill at the Royal Academy, and being an admirer of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth and other 20C British sculptors, I had

Henry Moore's Sheep Piece at Perry Green

high hopes of this exhibition. It got off to a good start but then rapidly went downhill - Andrew-Graham Dixon and Brian Sewell say it all. There are some things worth seeing, but £11 is a lot to ask. There could have been so much more, and far better.  I'm too unsophisticated to appreciate the irony or whatever of a few 'Page 3s' from The Sun pinned to a wall – passé in a back street garage these days. So enjoy this instead from last year’s on form exhibition:


Anthony Turner Seven sweet peas

Connemara marble

50 x 100 x 20 cm