Lichtenstein: A Retrospective

This retrospective manages to show what Lichtenstein was trying to do very succinctly: use a particular visual language to relate perceptions. Organised thematically, it shows how Lichtenstein tried this in a variety of areas: mirrors, still lives, other 'great works', landscape, nudes, 'low art', abstracts, Art Deco and so on.

This also shows that he didn't succeed in all of these. I think the romance and war nostalgia paintings work very well: the accompanying book describes an uneasy tension between low and high art energising these, and I felt this strongly. I couldn't quite get a grip on them; the colours and dots entice and fascinate, but the subject matter is funny or kitsch. The room is large so the paintings can be approached from close and afar, although looking at dots up close makes your head spin.

Likewise, the still lives struck me like Mondrian, almost ready to topple over off the wall and well-observed in line. The Still Life with Glass and Lemon worked spectacularly well as an optical effect in his visual idiom.

There are parts that I don't think work well now. The parodies are not great; sub-cubism or simply uninteresting. The mirrors were a huge fascination for Lichtenstein, but they are the equivalent of a scientist's notebook for us viewers now, merely a biographical quirk.

The Chinese scroll homages, too, serve to highlight just how good the originals are but don't strike with the force of the war/romance pictures.

The nudes are brilliantly unsettling. At this stage, it feels like he is subverting his own language, creating a portmanteau of critique and perception. I have a strong memory of them for their strangeness.

The curation of the show lets us get both close and far away to some of the mega-sized works which is crucial to look at some of these things, and keeps Lichtenstein's life in the background with a light touch on the info.

If creating a distinctive visual language and then synthesising pre-existing cultural ideas via this lens makes a painter important, then we might as well declare everyone from Basquiat to Vettriano the most important artists of the 20th century. Lichtenstein does this and in some of this best work makes it fun to look at and engages the mind in odd ways, so perhaps he is more important than most, and this makes the retrospective worth more than a fleeting look.

Bruges and the Medieval

For me, going to Bruges felt like a pilgrimage. I wanted to see Frank Brangwyn’s collection in the Arendthuis, one of the few places with significant Brangwyn holdings on display (a quick shout out here to the William Morris Gallery ,which is one of the others). Just going to Bruges recreates many of the feelings I think medieval pilgrims must have had, and many of these aren’t so positive. 

It is fair to say that Bruges exists only for tourists. There is nothing else other than places to see, eat, visit, and buy. Many of them are historical or quite marvellous, and many are average or second rate. Plenty are both.

The Church of Our Lady is one of them.  This has an incredible tower and a daunting interior space, a Michaelangelo sculpture, and the tombs of Charles the Bold and Mary of Burgundy along with the wonderful tomb-drawings within. The downsides are that the route is somewhat proscribed, most of the art in the church is very second rate, and the Michaelangelo sculpture can only be enjoyed from about 15 yards away and not in the round. It is also pretty pricey (they had knocked the price down when we were there as there were also scaffolding and other works).

This is a recurring theme- a plethora of places to see, each of them bleeding the pilgrim of cash slightly more than they probably should.

The museums have this same issue. the Groeninge Museum has some of the most colourful and striking pictures from the Flemish primitives- Gerard David’s Judgement of Cambyses, works by Van Eyck, Heironymous Bosch, Hans Memling and others amounting to a world-class collection. The later periods, however, are rather less copiously represented- the poster teases with a Ferdinand Khnopff, but it is the only Khnopff on display and there are a scant few symbolist pictures here. Although after the thrill of the primitives collection, anything else is a bonus.
The Old Hospital/Memling Museum is split between the activities on the site as history, and display of Memling and others works. I didn’t find the depth and breadth of context about the hospital particularly inspiring, but the artwork as part of this was. The Memling is awesome, particularly St Ursula, and there is a fine example of a polychrome wooden Johannisschüssel. The associated old apothecary has a wide collection of Ex Voto amulets which amused me.

The two actually religious main places, St Saviors Cathedral and the Basilica of the Holy Blood, are both free (with a little charge for the latter’s treasury), and the interest and quality in these eclipse most of the paid attractions.
St Saviours has more colourful and wonderfully evocative tomb paintings, and a treasury containing some fantastic goldworked embroidery and gravestones amongst other genuine treasures. The Basilica of the Holy Blood does actually have the holy blood, complete with attendent priest, and is heavily polychromed. Mentioning Morris again the whole place looks like it was wallpapered by the man himself. There is an intriguing pulpit in the form of a globe as map, and the treasury has more embroidery along with some painted glass.

The downside of Bruges is not these places, but the rest of the place. Commercial tourism is not parasitic in Bruges- it is what binds these places of art together, but it is not pleasant. Surly waiting staff aggressively pushing massively overpriced set menus, constant thronging crowds and peculiarly unfriendly opening hours make much of the logistics rather unfun. Bruge’s commerce is a large high street the same as everywhere else, and the rest of the town seems to be chocolate shop/restaurant/lace shop with the occasional novelty beer sellers. Not exactly unexpected, and it doesn’t ruin the treasures, but it makes it hard to really enjoy the place when the normal price for a medium Coca-Cola is 9,75. I get the feeling that this tradition, of gouging pilgrims, is as old as the town itself.

Richard Hamilton: The Late Works in 300 words

This is another exhibition I only just got to before it finished, and I’m glad I did. I like his classic, canonical collages but knew nothing about what he did after that. This small but interesting exhibition at the National Gallery has answered at least some of that question.
‘Works’ is the correct term here: Hamilton uses painting, photography and digital images, often together, to explore painting and surface. The recurring tropes become obvious: the nude (mostly the same nude woman), religious homage/parody (particularly the annunciation), reflection and perspective (both painted and digital), self-reference (the same images are used in multiple pictures). To me, these point to investigation of the flat surface itself. Hamilton uses meticulous painted reflections combined with digital images to make us think about what is real and that we are looking at a flat surface. This is not a new thought, but it is executed with such a feeling of curiosity that it works, and works well.
I found this collection both funny and solemn; seeing what Hamilton is doing or a clever way of doing causes the laughter of recognition despite the scene itself. His clean use of the digital, particularly as architectural backdrops, shows constant innovation.
Perhaps the solemnity comes from the timing of the works: many artist’s late work changes in tone slightly. Perhaps the angels, afterlife and mortal flesh are Hamilton’s response, to push himself to try and capture this in a post-modern, self-referential format. His final, unfinished work (shown in tryptich) combines colours, photography and explicit references to other paintings. In all too, it is a puzzle decoding what parts are in what media. This, however, is a puzzle worth finishing; and the exhibition is a worthy tribute to the late Richard Hamilton.

Peter Lely: A Lyrical Vision

I caught the very end of Peter Lely: A Lyrical Vision at the Courtauld today. I have seen plenty of his Windsor and Hampton court beauties, and his presence loomed large in Hampton court’s excellent The Wild, The Beautiful and the Damned earlier this year, so I am pleased to have seen some of his work that is not related to 17th century ladies.

This isn’t a large exhibition; like most of the Courtauld’s temporary exhibitions it is in the space at the top of the stairs. Size certainly is no indication of quality in art (and often makes exhibitions trials of endurance rather than inspirational journeys), so the Courtauld’s focussed and well-curated exhibitions work for me. It is sympathetically curated too; the works have room to breathe and the viewer can get close and personal. The information never descends into biography and calls up other related paintings (I was pleased at the mention of Van Dyke’s Cupid and Psyche, also shown at Hampton Court and very relevant to Lely’s outdoor nudes). My only slight note was that the Rape of Europa looks like it should be hung higher up because of the elongated torsos, rather than at eye level.

All these works are intended to add some nuance to Lely’s life and our experience of him. We do see more of Lely, but this doesn’t show a parallel or different artist. There are still plenty of silk curtains in the wilderness, Grecian urns and classical fountains, and ladies with no tops (and no lack of bottom). This does bring out some of Lely’s themes of voyeurism and pleasure of the senses, and I couldn’t escape the feeling of imminent danger or life on the edge of decay. The Rape of Europa is the narrative moment before the rape; a moment where there is sensual enjoyment of the handsome bull, almost foreplay. This seems to be a recurrent theme: a lad views nude, still sleeping girls; a satyr waits to ambush lovers; Bacchus and his child friends drink but do not yet suffer for their pleasure. We the viewer also act as the about to interrupt voyeur, again for some nude girls. Perhaps this is me projecting the decadence of the time but I keep getting the whiff of fruit about to turn. Even the gender-ambiguous shepherd lad with his shaft-like crook and recorder has a sensual, coming of age ambience through his swirling hair and luscious drapery.

The lack of finish of some of the paintings is a divergence of the normal stately home Lely. He is normally so slick that seeing freely painted landscaping is a bit of a surprise, but a pleasant one. There is an early picture of children that I found very affecting. It is two children, heads only, and very sweet with little of the sickly fermentation of some of his later work.

There is also a less colourful twin exhibition a few rooms on. This is of a tiny proportion of the drawings and prints collected by Lely but gives a wonderful flavour of both his practice for the hands of Beauties, and his reference for their drapes. Again, it is small but provides both knowledge and aesthetic pleasure- a decent summary of the Courtauld Gallery overall in my experience.

Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde at Tate Britain

Writing about Tate’s Pre-Raphaelite exhibition (Victorian Avant-Garde) has proven frustratingly difficult for me- ironically, rather like the exhibition itself.

So, just to be perverse, I’m going to look at a painting not in the exhibition itself, but in the Tate- Millais’ The Knight Errant (on the Tate’s website here: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/millais-the-knight-errant-n01508).

So this is tagged as a pre-raphaelite, and by a member of the PRB- so why isn’t it in this exhibition? This question (to which I don’t know the answer) highlights the difficulty of this new exhibition. It shows work by the PRB members (except when it doesn’t), and the art on show is pre-raphaelite in style (except when it’s not). It’s a slice of the PRB by lofty Victorian themes rather than a story of the brothers.

And, it mostly works. The themes are pretty loose, but it does let the art play off each other and the info is kept to a compact minimum. The art comes off as surprisingly shocking- a garish blast of colour (Holman Hunt), size (Burne-Jones), gilded frames and poetry (Rossetti), along with the sentimental, the slightly amateurish and the highly personal. The style is always going to excite joy or revulsion- personally, I like it with my Marmite on toast.

I felt the exhibition really comes alive in the last couple of rooms- I find Morris’ work constantly interesting, and the massive carpet and May Morris’ bed embroidery were highlights. I also can’t get enough of the massive later works of Burne-Jones, and it’s fantastic to see King Cophetua in the same room as Perseus.

On the down side, I’m not sure the exhibition shows us what pre-raphaelitism actually is, compared to other 19th century paintings. If you come with no PRB knowledge, you’ll probably go away with a good idea of what their work looks like, but not necessarily how or why. Likewise, if you already know the stories well, this will only illustrate and not add to them. If you know a bit about the brotherhood and associates though, then this exhibition will give you a lot. Also, the exhibition book’s fine essays do fill in the scholarly holes missing from the exhibition itself, particularly about the techniques.

I think the premise, that the PRB were avant-garde (at least early on) is a sound one. What is good to see is a thematic, questioning approach to the choice of display- it is a slice of the 19th century visual arts rather than a beginning to end survey of the PRB.

Is this a defining exhibition of the pre-raphaelites for this generation? Probably not, but the questions, juxtapositions and frustrations exposed may well be.

Death: A Self-portrait at the Wellcome Collection

Introducing the cast members of this exhibition is a quick roll call: the Grim Reaper himself. This exhibition isn't literally about representations of Death personified, it also features dead people, things made of bones, things made to look like dead people (or parts of), bookplates (ex libris) and a variety of other thematic parts.

As is the Wellcome's wont, it mixes art/science and historical/contemporary. This collection uses Richard Harris' collection as the mainstay here- he was an antique print dealer, so there are a particularly large selection of those included. It's thematic, barely, but the main theme sledgehammers the smaller room themes out of the way.

And what an inclusion the prints are- there are three large series of prints (one by the criminally underexhibited Otto Dix, along with Goya and Callot), and a good number of Durer copies- although the originals of some of these are on at the Northern Renaissance exhibition at the Queen's Gallery.

Aside from these, there is a great set of other objects to look at. The contemporary sculptures are very interesting; there are also some fine Dutch paintings including a Vanitas, some netsuke, medical pictures, Day of the Dead items, and random death-themed photographs.

Morbid is not the mood that this exhibition engenders either, it is surprisingly light despite its often grisly premise.

Bronze at the Royal Academy

This exhibition does what is says- it consists of objects made of the alloy bronze, and information on techniques. It’s a valuable curatorial theme, as it lets items from Picasso’s baboon to ancient Luristanian objects be displayed in the same space, with the same focus.

Sure, there are plenty of Classical bronzes here, but the strata the RA is excavating is not chronological but by taxonomy (figures, animals, objects, reliefs, gods, heads). This means we get exciting juxtaposition, and get to see work from many continents.

This is a curious haul for that reason- many of the items don’t have known artists or exact timescales, so instead of the biographical focus we get archaeology instead. The Dancing Satyr ( displayed in the gloomth of the first room so it can be seen in the round) is a perfect monument to discontinuity, covered with the patina of age and now only to be interpreted formally. Many other objects are the same, and the information has a light touch (unlike the exhibition catalog, which is formidable historical scholarship, sliced up by region).

These odd relics bring the more modern work into focus, and provide some of the jewels in this collection- the Seeland chariot with its sun disc, the Ife leopards, and the head of a king from Thrace and the tiny figure of Ptah. There is a lot of metal on display too- much Classical nakedness (like Bellini’s relentlessly misogynistic giant Perseus, a very homoerotic Hercules, and a bronze Laocoon) and some actual pornography, in the form of satyrs in a surprisingly athletic embrace.
 
A brave break from the normal biographically centred approach from the RA, and one that has yielded results.