Patrick Caulfield at Tate Britain

Tate Britain in its lower level galleries is showing retrospectives of Patrick Caulfield (1936–2005) and Gary Hume (1962- ) in parallel. Hume, Tate tells us, was one of the YBAs (Young British Artists) featured in the 1988 Freeze exhibition and is now “one of Britain’s most highly respected painters”. There are about 24 of his works on show, mostly gloss paint on aluminium sheet, including Tony Blackburn, first seen in 1993 at the Lucky Kunst show. Hume invented that show’s name according to Gregor Muir in his book - same title - on the rise and fall of YBA. However, it was Caulfield’s work that I wanted to see.

Caulfield was a contemporary of David Hockney and Peter Blake at the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s but despite this association (and being introduced to screenprinting by Richard Hamilton) rejected classification as a pop artist. As Clarrie Wallis (Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Tate) explains in her book about Caulfield for the British Artists series, he engaged with modern life but as part of the European artistic tradition, his work being influenced by Matisse, Gris, Dufy, Braque (Tate's own Braque Curtain 2005 above) and others, including Picasso (below). Looking at Caulfield’s interiors, it isn’t surprising to learn that the American artist he admired was Hopper, not Lichtenstein, despite their common use of black delineation of blocks of colour.

The Tate Britain exhibition is complemented by others at Waddington Custot and the Alan Cristea Gallery (both until 13 July). At the latter there is a chance to see Caulfield’s 1999 screenprint, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon vues de Derrière (above), which Wallis refers to but does not reproduce. I wish I had bought her book, which is an impressive explanation of the complexities of Caulfield’s work and his artistic development in terms accessible to the lay reader, before seeing the Tate show - therefore, ideally, another visit before it closes on 1 September.

 

Lichtenstein at Tate Modern

Tate Modern’s Lichtenstein: A Retrospective is a show that does what it says on the Warholian can. Roy Lichtenstein (1923-57) was the other central figure of American Pop Art in the 1960s and 70s and one of the best known artists of the last century. After showings in Chicago and Washington, 125 of his works, rumoured to be a worth a billion US$, have arrived at Tate Modern for an exhibition which is mostly chronological. So we see his first experiments with Ben-Day dots and then the renditions of comic book images writ large in blocks of primary colour. A roomful of some of the most familiar of these grouped as War and Romance include Whaam! (the Tate’s own) and Los! (below) and Oh, Jeff … I Love You, Too…But… 1964 in the banner above.

It is intriguing to see the original sources of these images, not least because of the opportunity to appreciate their size and construction. Two things struck me about reproductions of Lichtenstein’s works which, inevitably, are very much smaller than the originals. Firstly, in the 1960s he used a very pale grey ground which usually appears as white, and secondly, reproductions often fail to differentiate adjacent dark blues and blacks. The paintings are usually described as oil and magna on canvas, Magna being the brand name for the acrylic resin paint used by Lichtenstein for the broad black lines which delineate the monotone areas of his pictures.

After establishing his style, Lichtenstein produced variations on it for decades which are shown in the rooms which follow. His reworkings of Picasso, Mondrian and others, the massive depictions of artists’ studios (Matisse above), the late nudes (below) and the Chinese landscapes, all of which are on a near-white ground, are interesting to see but lack the innovatory impact experienced at War and Romance. The show ends where it might have begun with some of Lichtenstein’s early abstract expressionist pieces alongside small late paintings.

My only reservation about this show is the size of the captions on the wall adjacent to each canvas. These have been confined to a space about 8cm by 10 cm. By contrast, Nudes with a Beach Ball 1964 (above) is 301 cm by 272.4 cm, and so has over 1000 times the area of its caption. The positions which the viewer will find suitable for reading one and for appreciating the other are several metres apart. Now that many gallery-goers carry smart phones, is it not possible to design an app for them which, by accessing local wi-fi perhaps, delivers the appropriate captions to their screens? Then there would be no need to trot forward and back, the risk of collisions with other visitors would be eliminated, and, best of all, there would be more time to look at the pictures.

Lichtenstein: A Retrospective continues until 27 May.

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.