Turner as you’ve never seen him

On Saturday I went to see “Turner and the Masters” at Tate Britain, which seems to have unanimously glowing reviews so far, and I am completely in agreement with them. I took pages of notes so will attempt to condense them here! The premise of the exhibition is that Turner engaged publicly with other “masters”, learning from them, building upon their work, testing the conventions of art and even competing with his contemporaries. His paintings are displayed alongside those of other artists including Rembrandt, Poussin, Claude and Constable, to name but a few, and the effect is remarkably enlightening.

Where Turner paints intentionally from a similar subject as another artist, such as Dutch Boats in a Gale, a companion piece for van d Velde’s 1672 Ships in a Stormy Sea, he demonstrates a modern-seeming boldness of light and colour which gives the picture not only its appeal but also a unique appearance of Turner-ness. Not that he always improves on the original; his companion piece to de Loutherbourg’s Glorious First of June, The Battle of Trafalgar, whilst emanating a sombre tone appropriate to the loss of life of the battle, also contains less life and movement than the original.

Even when actually copying a painting (the traditional Royal Academy method of learning) Turner’s versions remain entirely Turner’s. The exhibition is arranged so that one can see the effect of, for example, Rembrandt’s use of lit areas in gloom, in Turner’s works, and I was particularly struck by the pairing of Rembrandt’s The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (right) with Turner’s Moonlight: A study at Millbank (top left).

The exhibition shows, more than anything, Turner’s development as an artist, something which would not be possible without the inclusion of the picutres which influenced him. From Piranesi he learned perspective, we see; from Claude, classical structuring of his work, and from his contemporaries, he learned the importance of colour and simplicity. Turner was well-known for use the “varnishing days” at the RA to slightly alter his paintings, which is clear from the pairing here of Turner’s Helvoetsluys (left) with Constable’s The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, exhibited together in 1832 and reunited here for the first time, where it becomes obvious that Turner’s restrained use of colour (including the red spot in the foreground added at the last minute) and clean lines triumph over Constable’s detail. As he said himself, “atmosphere is my style”.

Conscious of the art of past masters, the work of his contemporaries, and even of his legacy, this is an exhibition which shows Turner the working artist in a new light. As John Ruskin, possibly his biggest fan, wrote, “consider for yourself whether there was ever any other painter who could strike such an octave. Whether there has been or not, in other walks of art, this power of sympathy is unquestionably in landscape unrivalled….”

 

Re-working myths

Yesterday I went into BMAG to have a look at Burne-Jones’ Perseus Series, currently on loan from The Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. This is the first time the whole cycle of paintings has been on display in the UK, and here it’s shown alongside 3 additional studies for the series, plus some works featuring the Persues myth by other artists. Burne-Jones was commissioned by Arthur Balfour in 1875 to provide a series to decorate his home, but the choice of subject was left to the artist. Burne-Jones was inspired by “The Doom of King Acrisius“, a version of the Perseus myth from Morris’ The Earthly Paradise.

The series depicts the myth in eight large paintings, but they do more than simply tell the tale. Burne-Jones’ interest in the male figure in action and the depiction of the female classical nude is prominent here. With the exception of The Baleful Head, above, in which Perseus shows Andromeda the head of Medusa against a Morris-type verdant background, the paintings focus on the figures set against sparse and unobtrusive landscapes. Looking around the room in which they are displayed, only the luminous flesh of the figures stands out against largely monotone backgrounds.

There is something strikingly modern about Burne-Jones’ figures, despite their obvious referencing of the medieval style and of classical nudes. This is particularly apparent in The Rock of Doom and The Doom Fulfilled, the paintings which show Perseus’ rescue of Andromeda and which bear a resemblance to the Pygmalion series. In the earlier pictures here, it is the composition of figures in the landscape which is paramount, however; how they fill the space and are placed and posed, particularly in Perseus and the Sea Nymphs.

 

The series is not just interesting for its visual qualities, but also for its use and reworking of myth. Though Burne-Jones uses Morris’ version of Perseus, he also draws on other sources, such as the version of Apollodorus, and he brings the figures to life in a way that is often unexpected. Moreover, the exhibition notice comments that: “Burne-Jones believed that Perseus represented the creative impulse in the fight against evil. The hero is the prototype of the artist who gains knowledge and skill to pursue his battle against the forces of materialism symbolised by the Gorgon whose deadly stare turns everything to stone. Andromeda represents beauty and truth saved from destruction.”

The exhibition is on until October and is well worth a look. If you want to read more about the Perseus cycle there is a commentary here on the Victorian Web.

Wild Cornwall

Penlee House Gallery in Penzance always seems to have something interesting to offer whenever I visit (plus they do the best cakes in the cafe!) This time, it was Wild Cornwall, to celebrate Darwin’s 200^th birthday by showing artists’ impressions of “the flora and fauna of Cornwall”. Great idea, lovely exhibition with plenty of informative stuff, photos as well as paintings, stuffed animals and other exhibits; but I did feel it needed some more signposting to make it more relevant to Darwin. The links are there, I see that, but it just felt like an exhibition about the Cornish countryside. And that’s fine, because it did that very well.

Paintings by the Newlyn school in particular of St Michael’s Mount, Land’s End and other local places are displayed side by side with stuffed herons and photographs of crustaceans. And there are some real gems here: I was especially taken with Breakers (1895) by David James, an oil painting of waves so real one could almost taste the salt spray. The colour, the shape of the waves – this seems to me to be perfected realism. Not that that’s possible, but anyway….

Harold Harvey’s pastoral scenes, verdant and somehow reminiscent of Virgil with their figures in the verdant landscapes, also feature throughout. By contrast, Charles Naper’s Towards Land’s End shows the rock formations as almost cubist, gesturing towards a manmade structure, something that many paintings of rock formations do, I’ve noticed. Perhaps the painting that most took my fancy, purely for aesthetics, was Frank Gascoigne Heath’s Madonna Lilies (1930), which foregrounds the flowers against the Cornish landscape in a blaze of white which transfixed me.

Sisley in England and Wales

The National Gallery has had some excellent free exhibitions this year, and this one is no exception. Sisley is frequently referred to as the English French Impressionist, though he was born and lived most of his life in France. This is a chance to see the work he did in Britain, though, mostly in later life, and it’s fascinating. He was hardly the most radical of the Impressionists, with none of the near-abstraction and little of the radical use of colours exhibited by others, but he’s still an interesting painter. 

I began my visit by watching a film in the Sunley Cinema Room about the use of light and shade and complementary colours, based on scientific work contemporary with Sisley, which heightened my awareness, when looking at the paintings, of his observation of light and shade, the shimmering light and deep, obscure shadows. This observation is part of the Impressionist interest in “reproducing nature with exactitude” – yet not in a Pre-Raphaelite “truth to nature” way, with every brush-stroke perfect, but rather reproducing their impressions of nature exactly.

Something I especially liked about Sisley’s paintings is how they draw the eye and seem to invite you in – so often one finds oneself looking down a road, or through a bridge, or a path to a river, particularly in his London pictures. The eye is clearly directed in Sisley’s work – a trait I seem to recall is one many of the Impressionists share.  In the Welsh sea-scapes, however, there seems to be more abstraction, of subject rather than style, especially in those of rocks, such as Storr Rock, Lady’s Cove, Evening, 1897, above.  In it, there is a tiny figure standing beside the rock, dwarfed by its size and almost irrelevant against the forces of nature – a traditional idea represented in a modern way.

Ancient Landscapes, Pastoral Visions

This exhibition, at Falmouth Art Gallery, was curated by Anne Anderson, whose work on the Brotherhood of Ruralists has recently caught my attention. This exhibition features Samuel Palmer, who in the 1820s turned his back on London and the urban scene to consider the countryside instead, surrounded by ‘The Ancients’, likeminded painters with a “back to nature” ethic. As the exhibition blurb points out, in the 1920s the painter Graham Sutherland did something similar, and in 1975 the Brotherhood of Ruralists (a name with a self-conscious echo of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) did something similar, retiring to Bodmin to paint, as did the PRB, “truth to nature”.
This exhibition combines the work of all of these painters, together with some wonderful Blake etchings. Indeed, Sutherland’s “Pastoral” (1930) is an etching which is remarkably resonant of Blake, in which the trees appear as if they could at any moment reincarnate themselves as monsters – the Gothic menace of nature is all around in this exhibition, whether more obviously, such as in Sutherland’s “Green Tree Form” (1940), left, where the tree seems to have an animal life, or hidden in the pastel fantasy of Graham Ovenden’s “Spring Morning, Wiltshire” (1984).
I was particularly taken with Robin Tanner’s “Christmas 1929″, a wintry village scene which manages to be both homely, familiar and comforting, and sinister, as though menace lurks in the rural hamlet. Indeed, there is a fairytale aspect to many of these paintings and drawings – perhaps when people concentrate on nature to such an extent, it becomes something quite other than what we first think it is. And the idea that nature is pastoral, calm, and even our right to appreciate, is one of town-dwellers, I suspect – “Nature red in tooth and claw” is much more the real thing.
Sir Peter Blake, acolyte of the Ruralists, only features once, with a print entitled “Faery”, which is simply a long-haired, naked girl in a field, but again there is something unsettling about this child apparently at one with nature – something in her eyes or stance, perhaps.
The common thread here is the engagement with the rural landscape, but it is a very mixed collection: many of the exhibits are very much of their time, displaying contemporary influences, and while some have a photographic precision (such as most of Graham Ovenden’s works), others seem largely representative (Paul Nash’s “Druid Landscape”, for example), and others more impressionistic. But there is much here to admire, and much to think about.

Gwen John at the Barber Institute

Last weekend I went to see Reunited: Gwen John, Mere Poussepin and the Catholic Church at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, and was surprised and pleased to find a different John to the one I had enjoyed at the Tate’s John retrospective a few years ago. The exhibition blurb explains the background to these portraits:
“Gwen John’s move to Meudon in France in 1911 marked the beginning of fundamental changes for the artist, in both personal and artistic terms. In about 1913, John was received into the Roman Catholic Church, and, in that year, was commissioned by the nuns in the town’s convent to create a portrait of their seventeenth-century founder, Mère Poussepin. This first commission developed into requests for five more versions — one for each room of the convent. In this exhibition, the Barber’s own version of the portrait—one of the most popular paintings in the collection — is reunited with other versions of the picture. These are complemented by a series of drawings showing women, orphans and schoolgirls in church, as well as sketches of nuns, priests and a cardinal — and even the Pope himself.”
John was given a prayer card with a portrait of Mere Poussepin, from which to paint the portraits. This she did painstakingly over 16 reworked versions, changing aspects of it along the way whilst retaining the “pure perfection” of the holy woman’s face. The earlier ones depict Mere Poussepin looking severe, or even slightly smug, sitting at a table with a book; the later ones are simplified (such as the one shown here), having done away with the props and with the beatific face of the nun radiating her divine beliefs.

The exhibition demonstrates John’s own convictions and her reverence for the spiritual life which she discovered after turning to Catholicism following the end of her relationship with Rodin. The paintings carried out in the French convent demonstrate a completely human face of the contemplative, devotional life which is spiritually uplifting. This little exhibition gives a totally different insight into John’s work than any I had had before, though I am not sure I endorse the comment of Charles Darwent in the Telegraph, who called these paintings “Austen for the eyes” – this is something far more reverential and divine – perhaps a visualised Christina Rossetti…

There is a small “virtual exhibition” on the Barber’s website if you want to see more.

The Pushkin Museum of Art, Moscow

The Pushkin Museum is devoted to European Fine Arts, and is the most amazing place, containing many paintings which are familiar to me but I had assumed they were in the Louvre, or somewhere in the UK. Paying particular attention to the nineteenth century (of course!), I managed to get lost here, but it was worth it!

Goya, Monet, Manet, Corot, Whistler, Seurrat, Van Gogh, Cezanne – so many big names here, but the gallery proved a useful reminder that it’s not the names but the sheer amazingness of seeing the paintings, in the flesh (so to speak) that is important. For example, Corot’s Diana Bathing is so sculptural, so cold and yet lifelike, erotic and shadowy, and it’s hard to get a sense of that in a reproduction (see right). It should be a cliche, but somehow it isn’t.

It amused me somewhat to see Alma Tadema’s Queen Fredegonda at the deathbed of Bishop Praesextatus, so English, quasi-Pre-Raphaelite, and somehow unexpected! I was also pleased to see Toulouse-Lautrec’s Yvette Gilbert singing “Linger Longer Loo” (1894) (left) – it should be a caricature, almost silly, but it isn’t – such expression, it appeals to me. Oh, and so many Degas’ – ballet dancers, nudes – always less chocolate-box and more moving in the flesh, especially Dancer posing for a photographer – an interesting set-up. Of course, there were many artists I hadn’t heard of, such as Jean-Louis Forain, whose 1880 painting Leaving the Masquerade Ball at the Grand Opera particularly interested me – it should be just a society picture, but seemed much more than that, with a mysterious twist in that the women’s faces were obscured, not by masks.

Other highlights were Sisley, who manages to make French landscapes look so English (to my Anglicised eyes!), and Monet’s White Water Lilies, so verdant and much less clicheed than I usually think of Monet. Also, while I’m not usually than keen on Renoir, Girls in Black (1880) is contemplative, quiet, while his 1876 Nude (right) seems to me a triumph of female sexuality over the male viewer (discuss!) Van Gogh, always so exuberant and somehow surprising, managed to surprise me again – Red Vineyard is great but The Sea at Saintes-Maries (1888) I love – such thick paint, so reminiscent of the movement of the sea. Another delight was Pierre Puvis de Chavannes The Companion (1887), which seemed almost medieval in style, perhaps reminiscent of Burne Jones’s medievalism, while the male presence seems to contain a threatening sexuality despite the anodyne title of the painting. I hadn’t seen before, but liked, Buffet’s drawings of Notre Dame de Paris, which had an appealing symmetry, seeming to reference th draughtsmanship of an earlier age, reducing perfect architecture to a few lines without losing their beauty.

The Fauvist painter Albert Marquet was someone I hadn’t come across before (more info here). His industrial cityscapes have an amazing beauty all there own – it’s very much about “the painter’s eye” here – and he paints water – from sea to canal – amazingly, with a visible, believable thickness.

The highlight of the museum, though, must be the Matisses. There’s a whole room of them, wonderfully vivid still lifes, which test one’s perception of perspective. I still can’t work out why I find them so visually satisfying, but I do. The ones here were Corner of an Artist’s Studio (1912), The Pink Studio (1911) (left), Nasturtiums, La Danse II (both 1912), Goldish (1911) and Arums, Iris and Mimosa (1912) – a blaze of colour and movement. It’s worth going to Moscow just for these.

The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

I know virtually nothing about Russian art – well, I know a bit more now. We had amazingly informative guides in Russia, who seem to be as knowledgeable about art criticism and history as they are about restaurants, palaces and everything else. The Old Tretyakov gallery gives a taste of Russian art up to the nineteenth century, and there’s too much there for me to do more that give a synopsis. This is a very shortened version of my notes!
The first painting I saw was a portrait of Pushkin by Orev Kiprensky, which immediately reminded me of Byron (the hair and swathed tartan) – it turns out that indeed this was Pushkin’s homage to Byron and Burns, who were his heroes (Byron I can understand; not so sure about Burns). I must explore the Pushkin-Byron connection – Onegin and Don Juan, anyone? In fact this is the only portrait for which Pushkin ever sat; other images were taken from memory or other pictures. Pushkin liked it so much he wrote a poem about it.
I was interested to hear about a serf, Argunov, who painted well, and thus was allowed by the family to have lessons and learn to paint professionally. After painting a remarkable portrait of the family – surprisingly sympathetically, I thought – Argunov was freed from serfdom and permitted to establish a career as an artist. This story, it seems, was repeated throughout history; many serfs were cruelly treated and died as a result of malnutrition and overwork, but some were also trained in various arts, and given their freedom as a tribute to their skill.
One of the central pieces in the gallery was Ivanov’s The Appearance of Christ before People. This is a huge painting, which took ten years to paint (1837-1857) in Italy. In its realist detail it’s both fascinating and slightly alarming! – Ivanov felt that he wanted to paint the most important event that had ever happened, and chose the appearance of Christ to ordinary people, taking in their responses, which range from overjoyed to sentimental to what looks like sceptical. In the foreground a man is sorting out clothes, perhaps foreshadowing the soldiers dicing for Christ’s clothes after the Crucifixion. In fact, that man is a self-portrait by the artist. John the Baptist also features, carrying a cross. It’s the kind of painting you can look at dozens of times and still see different things.
A painting which particularly appealed to me was Zelentsov’s Indoors Drawing Room, which I can’t find an image of but showed a typically Russian interior, reminding me that though there are some obvious parallels with European art of the same time, Russia was – and is – a very different place, and therein perhaps lies its attraction for me.
Speaking of European parallels, though, there were a surprising number of narrative paintings from the 1840s which are highly reminiscent of paintings frequently used to illustrate the covers of Victorian novels nowadays! The titles tell you all you need to know: The Major’s Proposal, The Fastidious Bride, The French Cavalier, The Young Widow, all by Fedotov, and almost Hogarthian in their sequential depiction of social life. Other paintings, such as Troika (Perov, 1866) are akin to nineteenth-century sentimentalisation of children.
I was pleased to see what is apparently the best portrait of Dostoevsky (left), also by Perov. This portrait, so sombre and muted, seems in its interiority to be as much a portrait of the writer’s mind as his face – as are all the best portraits. Actually I was rather taken with Perov’s work – Christ in the Garden at Gethsemane was also an interesting painting.
Another artist who appealed to me was Aivazovsky – follow this link to see more! He painted the Black Sea in all its moods and changes, as well as wonderful almost naïve paintings of St Petersburg showing the five buildings of the Hermitage. Many of these mid-19th century paintings of Russia are amazing – archetypal images such as cityscapes, sledging on the frozen Neva, battles, countrysides. There was a room devoted to war – the futility of it, the pointless loss of life, and in today’s political climate this was no less moving than when they were first displayed.

Finally, we saw many ikons – from the fourteenth century until the seventeenth century, since between those periods they were the only form of artistic expression permitted in Russia. Many of them are immediately identifiable as Russian Orthodox – the colours, the jewels, they might not appeal to everyone, but they are fabulous!

Klimt

On Thursday I went up to Liverpool for the day to see the Klimt exhibition before it closes (which it now has done). – Incidentally, I was very taken with the Walker Gallery – hadn’t been there before; lots of 19th century paintings including DG Rossetti’s Dante’s Dream, lovely. Anyway, I didn’t know much about Klimt, and am not sure how much more I know now, but I’m glad I made the effort to go. If you don’t know much about Klimt either, here is a good place to start. I did know a little about his involvement with the Wiener Werkstatte and the Viennese Secession, and this exhibition shows Klimt in context, including interiors and designs as well as paintings and drawings.
Amazingly, I’d never even seen a reproduction of the Beethoven Frieze before, but it was one of my favourite exhibits here. What caught me by surprise, though, is how much some of it looks like a kind of stylized, Art-Deco-esque Pre-Raphaelitism (feel free to argue) but look at those women on the left here – they even have red hair! Similarly, Girls with Oleanders has a wonderful medievalism that both looks back and forward, and Fable seems to me to reference Cranach’s Adam and Eve – or so I wrote in my notes at the time, though looking at it again now I’m not so sure; but it does seem to refer to the Old Masters rather than contemporary painting.
I was taken with Klimt’s landscape painting. I notice the brochure says that his landscapes are “now a highly admired aspect of his oeuvre”, but to the layman (me) landscapes are not what I associate with his work. However, I loved them – busy patchworks of nature, yet the images are representative rather than natural – no Pre-Raphaelitism here! Garden Landscape with Hilltop, for example (section of it is on the right) seems almost medieval in its profusion, yet is reminiscent of Van Gogh. (As you may have noticed, I’m quite interested in aspects of influence in art as well as writing, and how an artist recreates earlier artistic ideals to his or her own ends.)
What I haven’t got to grips with yet is Klimt’s depiction of women – some are challenging, looking directly at the viewer and exuding an independent life of their own, such as the femme fatale depicted in Judith II (Salome) while others seem passive, overwhelmed by circumstance and the (male) gaze of the viewer. Of course, as the exhibition notes point out, this was a time when “Sigmund Freud’s theories positing sexuality as a liberating force were highly influential, contributing to an overarching atmosphere of eroticism”. True, but liberating for whom? Not many of these women look very liberated; it’s the male artist who can paint them who seems to benefit here! And Ria Munk on her deathbed strikes me as a prime example of the nineteenth-century aestheticised dead woman – beautiful, but unable to talk back. Of course, it also channels Ophelia in her many guises – mad, dead, and surveyed best when silenced, apparently.

Laura Knight at the Theatre

Since my knowledge of Dame Laura Knight’s painting has been limited to her self-portrait at the NPG and some reproductions in a biography of her which I recently read, I’ve been really looking forward to the exhibition at Nottingham Castle on her theatre paintings, and it didn’t disappoint. There are two fairly large rooms of her work, mostly of her ballet paintings but also some theatre and one or two theatrical portraits. Clearly she liked to paint people – interesting people, or people doing interesting things, and her sense of the dramatic comes across in all her work. She had an enormous output, painting circus people at work, being official artist for the Nuremburg trials and commissions by the government during the Second World War, among other things, but her paintings are all very much of their time – her career pretty much spanned her life (1877-1960, I think) and she manifestly moved with the times, remaining contemporary and vital, never stale or boring. I can’t remember when I last enjoyed something visually so much as this.
The ballet paintings are bound to appeal to me, since I have a passing interest in ballet, but I am somewhat sceptical of the prettified 1950s paintings of the ballet; a few here were reminiscent of them, but in the 1930s, before it became a cliche, and they’re beautiful. Moreover, she knows dancers, and dancing – she paints them not just performing, but in class, in the dressing room, in the wings, and she gets the angles of their bodies exactly right – legend has it that when she painted dancers in class the teacher would use her sketches to show the dancers what they had done wrong!

The exhibition is a mixture of sketches and oil paintings, and both are a delight, but in very different ways. The technical skill, the colours and vitality of the oils appealed to me, but her ability to catch a dancer’s poise and movement in a few lines in her sketches is amazing. Her love of the theatrical life shines through her work. To get an idea of the breadth of her work, there are some examples of her work here. Interestingly, she is often described as an Impressionist painter, but I’m inclined to disagree with this, since her work changes medium and styles, with some of the oils – for example, the painting of Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies as Juliet – seeming almost Pre-Raphaelite in style. However, such labels aren’t helpful; her subjects, not her style, was clearly her own preoccupation.

A critic of one of her exhibitions during the 1960s suggested that she painted what she saw, not what she felt – that her work wasn’t cerebral enough, perhaps. For the viewer, I think it’s difficult to disentangle seeing and feeling anyway, and these paintings are a visual delight; I found myself smiling as I looked at them. There isn’t one painting there I wouldn’t have liked to take home with me, and her joy in the visual, in the nature of spectacle, is enough for me; I don’t really want to analyse it, just enjoy it (which is unlike me!)

An exhibition which will include some of Knight’s work is coming to one of my favourite small galleries, Penlee House, later this year, and I shall definitely be going to see it.