Exhibitions Unblogged

I've been very bad at blogging this year, especially about some excellent exhibitions I've seen, so here is a catch-up bloggie to get them into the Plastic Bag. 

'Durer's Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist' at the National Gallery

Follow Durer on his journeys to Italy and the Low Countries through drawings, paintings and prints, the architecture and the strange animals he saw in zoos.  

'Surrealism Beyond Borders' at Tate Modern

I always think of surrealism as a European/American thing so who knew there was an active group of surrealists in Cairo and a thriving scene in Mexico. The exhibition does what it promises and shares the surrealist experience from around the world.

'Helen Frankenthaler: Radical Beauty' at Dulwich Picture Gallery

A real eye-opener in how to make prints. I still can't get my head around what I saw were really prints, even after watching a video of how she made the prints. Astonishing and beautiful. "No rules".

'Van Gogh: Self Portraits' at the Courtauld Gallery

A small but lovely exhibition of how Van Gogh saw himself throughout his painting career and how his painting developed.

'Virtual Veronese' at the National Gallery

Put on the virtual reality headset and you head back to the 15th century and see a Veronese painting in the chapel it was originally painted for, a very strange experience.

'Life Between Islands' at Tate Britain

A great selection of paintings, photographs and installations by artists with Caribbean heritage but associated with the UK

'Raphael' at the National Gallery

A wonderful romp through the artistic career of Raphael ending with his time in Rome before he died in 1520. Painting, drawings, bronzes, prints, designs for tapestries and even his architecture works. 

'Beyond Bloomsbury: Life, Loves and Legacy' at York Art Gallery

Lots of portraits of and by the Bloomsbury group of artists, forever painting each other, plus some lovely still lifes, a sampling of the Omega Workshop works and the ongoing legacy of Bloomsbury.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp at Tate Modern

Sophie Taeuber-Arp isn't as well known an artist as she should be and Tate Modern has put on the first ever retrospective of her work in Britain and it is a joyous celebration of her life and work. Born in Switzerland in 1889, she was educated and went to art school in Munich, met her husband Hans Arp (also an artist), became part of the dada movement, exhibited with Kandinsky and Sonia Delaunay and sadly died in Switzerland in 1943. I hadn't heard of her before this exhibition but she is now firmly on my radar.

Something I immediately noticed was that her works were relatively small in size and were created for the 'average' home. They weren't created as big public works that could be bought by the rich or public institutions, these are works for me and you. They are also very colourful and largely abstract. Apparently Taeuber-Arp came to abstraction through dissecting textiles and many, at least the early works, are quite linear in composition. She also used a wide range of materials in her work, using graphite, crayons, gouache, watercolour, oils and other media like wool to make 'appliqué paintings'. 

As you'd expect from a dadaist she was involved in lots of different things within the movement and turned her hand to most things. She created puppets for the Swiss Marionette Theatre and a series of 'dada heads' like hat stands and she turned the wood herself. One of the 'heads' is a portrait of her husband. I loved the puppets and it would be fun to see them in action (I think there's a video in the exhibition but I missed it). 

As well as being an artist Taeuber-Arp was also an architect and designer and some of her furniture is on display, all modular and functional and could easily be in a furniture shop today. There's also a gorgeous rug hung on the wall that she designed and made and it looked very deep and rich. She used her rugs and tapestries as the basis for creating other designs and there's a cabinet full of her experimental watercolour designs based on the rug. I like the idea of riffing on a design, developing it for a different work. 

As I walked through the exhibition I noticed that the colour palette became deeper and richer before becoming very sparse as I came to her later works. The works became more angular and geometrical as she delved deeper into her own abstraction. Some of the later works were simple line drawings in graphite and/or ink from during the Second World War when she didn't have access to a studio or lots of materials. There's also a gorgeous landscape drawn entirely in graphite that shows what a great draughtswoman she was. 

Sadly, Sophie died of carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty stove as she sheltered from the war in Switzerland in 1943 at the age of 53. It's very sad that we don't have her more mature works - who knows what she might have created after the war? Her friend Sonia Delaunay 'discovered' black in her 60s - what would Sophie have discovered?

Sophie lived and created in one of the most artistically stimulating times - the first half of the 20th Century. Der Blaue Reiter were working in Munich when she was there and dada sprung into life when she was ready to create, just as with Sonia Delaunay. There's a lovely photo of Sophie and Sonia in beachwear that Sonia designed at the opening of the exhibition. Sophie exhibited over the years with Sonia and with Vassily Kandinsky so that's pretty good company to be in. She discovered her own form of abstraction and pursued it for the rest of her life. I assume she isn't more well-known partly because she died during the war so wasn't there to celebrate the peace and create more great works. I wonder how she would have responded to the Abstract Expressionists and their huge canvases.  

This really is a very good exhibition that provides a good selection of her works across her lifetime. When I was there it was busy with a steady stream of people but not crowded, and I liked that since I could linger over the details of paintings without feeling I was hogging them. It seems to have been an unexpected success since Tate has run out of catalogues and is having to get more reprinted despite it being open for another couple of months. I'll definitely go back to see it again after the school holidays to spend more time with this wonderful artist. I need to learn more.

'The Making of Rodin' at Tate Modern

The big exhibition at the newly re-opened Tate Modern is all about Rodin, particularly his work in plaster. The Musee Rodin in Paris has loaned a lot of works to help show Rodin's process of making sculptures. There are sketches (often in watercolour), small models of much larger sculptures, many versions of body parts to practice getting hands, for example, just right, and even nude plaster statues to get the stance of a model just right before adding the clothes. There are some fascinating pieces here. It's not the biggest exhibition but is well worth seeing.

The first exhibit is 'The Age of Bronze' in a room of it's own. A willowy young man cast in bronze. It's a gorgeous statue but it doesn't really fit in with the rest of the exhibition and I suspect it's there to say 'this is what Rodin was capable of doing', with it's smooth, elegant lines and surfaces before moving on to the rougher plaster 'sketches'.

The next room is big and has a load of works on a central display to walk round in the one-way route so you get a chance to see the front and back of the statues. 'The Thinker' is, of course, the first thing you see, but I think my favourites were the 'sketches' of figures Rodin produced to try out his ideas. There's a rather portly 'Balzac' and a few studies for a naked 'St John the Baptist'. There was also a lovely small statue (small? maybe three feet tall?) of one of the figures in 'The Burghers of Calais', naked here even though he wears a full-body robe in the actual finished work. This was Rodin working out what the stance should look like and it's quite clear when you look at both the study and the finished work which character he was working on. It just wouldn't occur to me to do a naked study to work out how a clothed figure should look. I was most impressed.

Moving along and there is 'The Burghers of Calais' standing on the floor rather than raised up so a lot easier to see the details. There's a bronze cast of this statue outside Parliament so I'm familiar with it but it was fascinating to see this original version and walk round it peering at the details. The Burghers were six leaders of Calais in 1346-47 who surrendered to King Edward III to get him to spare the city. They expected to be executed but were spared. It's a great work and I wandered around it several times looking at the details. Look at those legs, the feet and hands, the way the clothes fall ... it suddenly all made sense why he would model the naked bodies before adding the clothes.

There are, of course, many more works to see at the exhibition but these are my highlights. The exhibition only opened a couple of weeks ago so there's plenty of time to see it yet and it's well worth a viewing.

'The Kiss' is also on display but outside the exhibition and it's great to be able to walk all the way round the work. They're definitely into a full-on snog.

Andy Warhol at Tate Modern in a mask

The Andy Warhol exhibition at Tate Modern has been extended so I thought, 'why not?' and headed up to Tate Modern to join the queue to get in, enmasked of course. I suspect he would've loved masks for various reasons and I was a bit surprised there weren't any for sale in the exhibition shop.

I'm not the biggest Warhol fan but I set up a Warhol playlist on my iPod to get me in the mood. 'Songs for Drella' (of course), some Velvet Underground, songs about him from Bowie and others, songs about New York and about art, all sorts of stuff. The first song to pop up was John Cale's 'Trouble with Classicists' from 'Drella' that seemed like a perfect start to the journey up to Tate Modern.

I got there a bit early but masked up and joined the short queue outside for the exhibition and then the longer queue inside on the third floor to get into the exhibition itself. It was all very efficient and safe so well done to the Tate and staff for making it so easy to get in.

The first room has a series of over a dozen line drawings of androgynous young men but the second room is where the blockbusters begin, with Marilyn, Elvis, soup cans, coke bottles and Brillo pad boxes. I stood there looking at the pile of Brillo pad boxes and wondered if they were in the right order, the right shape? And then decided that it didn't really matter, I'm pretty sure that Warhol didn't bother with a diagram to show how the pile of boxes should be put together.

As you'd expect for a media cult figure in the '60s and '70s, there are lots of photographs to look at and I really liked this photo of Andy and Lou Reed in the '60s - how young Lou looks. It's good to include exhibits like this in the exhibition to show how broad Warhol's ambition was and how he tried to connect all branches of the arts by wanting his own rock band to project his films onto. Weird stuff but that was the '60s for you. And, of course, the mandatory sunglasses.

On the opposite wall is the screen print of Elizabeth Taylor hung on a silver wall.

I did like the way the Tate has played out these rooms. Liz Taylor is hung on a wall covered in silver bacofoil, nice and shiny, and then later, the Mao screenprint is hung on a wall covered in Mao heads. I did wonder for a moment whether that was meant to be art as well and then decided it didn't really matter.

Most things were on a big scale so some rooms didn't have many works in them. In the current circumstances that seems very sensible indeed.

I didn't bother waiting in a queue to see the thin corridor that covered the time when Valerie Solanas shot Andy and all the smaller exhibits, like newspaper cuttings in glass cases, but walked straight through to avoid too many people. That room could do with a rethink, I suspect.  I did quite like the room full of 'drag and trans' prints that had a sign at the door that explained that 'drag and trans' had different meanings back in the late 60s and 70s, which I thought was quite sweet. It sort of reflects the people Warhol hung out with, an inclusive scene rather than anything else. Did he mean that as a political gesture or was it just that they were good subjects, or good fun at the time? Whatever, they're good to look at and there are some interesting experiments in colour and shape in his portraits. I wonder what they thought about being his subjects? Was it an honour or a pain or did they care at all?

I really liked Warhol's portraits of Lenin, the great Russian revolutionary, a perfect subject to enrage at the time. You can't see it in my photo but theres an electric blue outline around Lenin's face in the darker print. Lenin is relatively young in the photograph he copied for these large portraits and you can well imagine him being responsible for a revolution. I wonder how many of these prints he actually produced  before deciding that he was happy with the final versions?

In this room there's also a glass case that includes three of his wigs. They looked a bit scruffy and manky to me but he was happy to wear them.

There are his celebrity portraits, of course, epitomised by two prints of Mick Jagger and two of Debbie Harry. It's probably an age thing but I was more excited to see Debbie than I was to see Mick.  They are very simple as prints but it's obvious who they are.

Jagger is from 1975 (hence the slash of make-up) and Debbie is from 1980 when she was probably the most famous woman in the world, full-on pout and direct gaze.

The final room is darkened and has one work on show across an entire wall, 'Sixty Last Suppers', based on an old photograph of Leonardo's 'Last Super' in Milan. It's in black and white and shows a degraded version of the famous painting. The signage refers to his partner dying of an AIDS-related illness around the time he produced it and it is quite sombre but there's also the hope of the resurrection a few days later. I suspect part of the sombre tone comes from the subdued lighting rather than the subject matter. I admit to being one of those annoying people that gets too close to the work as I tried to identify what was different from this version to that version five prints along in the series.

I enjoyed the exhibition. I don't think I learned anything about Warhol from it but I've already booked another ticket to see it again. 

Favourite Paintings: 'The Snail' by Henri Matisse

One of my favourite paintings isn't really a painting, it's a 'cut out' made by painting paper different colours and then tearing it up and carefully placing it to create a new image. There was a great exhibition of Matisse's 'cut outs' at Tate Modern a few years ago and I loved it, such amazing images the old magician created in his old age, using assistants to help place the coloured paper just *so*. 'The Snail' is a huge work and was the centrepiece of the exhibition but I go back a lot further with that particular snail.

I have two distinct memories of visiting the Tate for the first time in the early '80s, walking up those imposing steps into the foyer, not knowing what I'd find but expecting great art. And that's what I saw since the Tate has a really good collection. But my two memories are of seeing a big Mark Rothko for the first time and being mesmerised by it and also seeing 'The Snail', equally large and far more colourful, but where was the snail it was named for? I couldn't see it. I looked at it up close and from a distance but no snail. I saw it many times on subsequent visits and then the Tate split into two and Tate Britain and Tate Modern were born and 'The Snail' moved down river to be a star of the new Tate Modern.

At some point I finally saw a glimpse of a snail and then, suddenly, there he was and all I could see was a snail. So the old man wasn't playing a joke on us after all, he really had created a snail from his bits of colourful paper. He's an old friend now and I delight in seeing him and I always say 'hello'. It was lovely to see him at the exhibition surrounded by so many other cut outs, some much bigger and more colourful but none so special. He has a name, of course, but that's for me to know and for you to guess.

Favourite Paintings: 'The Snail' by Henri Matisse

One of my favourite paintings is by Henri Matisse, 'The Snail' in the Tate collection. It's a huge painting and  fills any wall it's hung on, one of Matisse's famous 'cut-outs' made from seemingly random shapes of paper stuck together on a canvas. Today it's on display in Tate Modern but I first saw it 40 years ago when it hung in what was simply known as the Tate (now Tate Britain) along the road from Parliament. I have vague memories of standing in front of this giant painting and puzzling over why it was called 'The Snail'. Now I don't puzzle at all, of course it's a snail and all he's looking for is a bit of lettuce to nibble on - what's wrong with that?

Late in his life that wily old magician, Matisse, started to create a series of works that came to be known as his 'cut-outs' where he assembles different bits of coloured paper in various layers to create astonishing works of art. His assistants assembled the pieces for him to his design and there's even video of him making pieces. Tate Modern held a big exhibition of these works a few years ago, a huge blockbuster of a show, some works were huge and some small. I loved that exhibition and saw it several times. I never got over my astonishment at how beautiful the works were, ragged bits of paper in many colours pulled together to create beauty. 'The Snail' had a wall to himself, rightly so since he was one of the stars of the show.

I most recently saw 'The Snail' last Friday when I wandered into a series of galleries in Tate Modern that I hadn't visited for a while and thought I'd see what was on show. And there he was, sitting on the wall waiting to say hello. He was surrounded by young children on half-term break from school and they seemed to be enjoying him immensely. I visited him again later when it was more peaceful to say hello. If you look carefully you'll see me reflected in the glass protecting the painting - I've been in that glass many times over the years, 'The Snail' is an old friend.

I once made a copy of 'The Snail' using Opal Fruits sweets while on the train to Chichester.  The sweets didn't last very long and it wasn't a very good copy but he is a bit of an inspiration.

Bonjour Monsieur Le Snail.

'Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life' at Tate Modern

Ever since I saw 'The Weather Project' (aka The Big Sun) at the Tate Modern in 2003 I've been interested in Olafur Eliasson. The Big Sun was an astonishing installation in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern and I still recall walking into the building on a cold winters day and immediately feeling hot from the intensity of the sun. I saw his fountain installation 'Model for a Timeless Garden' at the Hayward Gallery in 2013 and his 'Ice Watch' in the Place du Pantheon in Paris in 2014. More recently, I saw his collaboration with Wayne McGregor's ballet 'Tree of Codes' at Sadler's Wells and his 'Room for One Colour' at the National Gallery's 'Monochrome' exhibition in 2017. Eliasson is worth watching out for and now he has a full retrospective at Tate Modern called 'In Real Life'.

Part of the joy of Eliasson's work is the fun element alongside the serious message so I'll try not to spoil the fun for anyone going to the exhibition. I've already been to see it three times in the last 12 days and I've found something new to look at and experience on each visit. I don't recall seeing so many people actively enjoying an art exhibition in a long time, possibly ever, and that's a good thing - those people are more likely to try out another exhibition of art in future.

Something that saddened me a bit was that Mr Eliasson doesn't quite understand his role as alchemist and wizard and doesn't really know the names of his own creations. Clearly, the installation called 'Beauty' should really be called 'The Magical Moving Rainbow Room', 'Your Blind Passenger' should be called 'The Mystical Room of Shifting Mists' and 'In Real Life' is actually the 'Goth Glitter Ball' and covers the walls and ceiling of the gallery room in colours. I'd be more than happy to offer my services to Mr Eliasson for naming future projects.

Of course, there is a serious side to Eliasson's work, with 'Your Blind Passenger' really being about the migrant crisis and those brave people risking their lives for an unknown future is reflected in us walking through a room where our vision is clouded by coloured mists. Enjoy the exhibition (and I did) but don't forget the serious messages underneath many of the works.

It's an astonishing exhibition that takes up virtually the whole of the second floor of the new building at Tate Modern. Even the lift hallway is covered in a series of orange lights to make it plain to everyone that something special is happening on that floor.  Something very special indeed.

You get a leaflet on entering the exhibition that shows a suggested route for wandering round the weird and the wonderful exhibits. Whether it's a water pipe dripping water onto a long window or a single lit candle standing on the floor on it's own, there's something to wonder at all over the place. A wall of Norwegian moss? Why yes, why not? A massive kaleidoscope to walk through and see yourself in a million directions at the same time? Yes, bring it on. A small fountain in a blacked out room with a strobe light above it? Why not?

It started me thinking and wondering, not so much about how some of the installations worked, but how and why Eliasson wanted to create them in the first place. Why would you want to create a rainbow in water mist in a dark room in a gallery? What was the thought process behind it? Or did he simply wake up one morning and thought, 'I want an indoor rainbow' and set about creating one? I think I need to sit down with Mr Eliasson with a cup of tea and cake to grill him on some of these questions. I'm happy to pay for refreshments if that helps.

In the final room you can contribute to a larger creation but slotting together a form of Lego, lots of sticks in different sizes and colours, the kind of thing that mad scientists use to demonstrate the form of germs or other tiny things. It'll be interesting to see how large this becomes.

 If you get the chance, go and see this exhibition - it is great fun but with some serious messages. It was a delight to see other visitors to the exhibition wide eyed and laughing with wonder as they experienced this exhibits. I'll be going back again!

Natalia Goncharova at Tate Modern

The work of Natalia Goncharova is one of the big Tate exhibitions this summer and this one is at Tate Modern. I thought I didn't know who she was but then I realised that I'd seen some of her work at an exhibition at the V&A about Diaghilev eight years ago where her designs for 'The Firebird' ballet for the Ballet Russe were on show. I'm pleased to say that I saw some of the designs reproduced when I saw the Royal Ballet dance 'The Firebird' at the Royal Opera House a few weeks ago with Itziar Mendizabal dancing the title role.

Natalia Goncharova was born and educated in Russia but moved to Paris in 1921 where she lived for the rest of her life. She had her first exhibitions in Moscow and St Petersburg before the First World War and was part of the avant-garde in Russia, being a member of several artistic movements including Der Blaue Reiter in Germany and developed Rayonism with her husband Mikhail Larionov. She died in 1962. Her story reminds me of Sonia Delaunay, both marrying artists, both developing new theories of art, both moving to Paris, both working in abstraction, both designing clothes, etc. Sonia was a few years younger than Natalia and died a few years after her. I assume they must have known each other and must have met.

The first couple of small rooms of the exhibition include the early works you'd expect to see in an exhibition but then you move through into the next room, very big and flooded with light. The room is usually divided into smaller spaces but opening it up like this was inspired and a nice surprise. One wall is dominated by the work called 'Harvest' (above) which was originally made up of nice panels but two are lost. This work was part of her first exhibitions in 1913 and 1914 and seems to be based on the tales of the Biblical Apocalypse.

The other walls contained a wide range of mainly larger works, some in her primitive 'cubist' style, others seem to be more along the lines of the Blue Rider and others were simply her own. I loved the bright green parrots, the gardens with graceful trees and flower beds and the paintings of flowers in bright and airy paintings. Part of a wall was filled with an impressive array of female nudes in very different styles.

Further into the exhibition I found this painting, based on Russian embroidery styles. I loved the colour and the repetition of the patterns, a very complicated and detailed design. 'Design with Birds and Flowers' was a study for some textiles she was producing in around 1925-28. Quite a lot of her work seems to have its roots in Russian folklore and folk art.

There are lots of different types of works in this exhibition, not solely paintings. There are dress designs and stage costume designs as well as drawings of stage sets, there are book illustrations and photos of Natalia as a young woman. There are also her modernist versions of traditional Russian icons that seemed to please no-one except herself, with the avant-garde not accepting them as legitimate works and the church not accepting them as icons.

The final, large room of the exhibition is given over to her theatrical work and designs for the Ballet Russe and others. I couldn't help but break into a huge grin when I walked in and saw the costumes in big glass cases while the walls were covered in design sketches and mock-ups. It was interesting to see peoples' responses when they entered the room, with some heading straight for the walls and the framed works while others headed to the costumes - I assume some were more interested in the textiles and how they were made up while others prefer exhibits on paper?

I didn't recognise the play or performance many of the set designs were for but I loved this one - imagine being on stage surrounded by all this wild colour and imagine being in the audience? I wonder if it was ever actually built? It looked like it was all great fun and some of the costume designs were totally over the top.

Something I recognised immediately was the backdrop to the final scene in 'The Firebird', the mythical town with its wild array of buildings going up and up towards the sky. I'd seen a reproduction of this a few weeks ago at the Royal Opera House and I saw what I think was the original filling an entire wall at the V&A years ago at the Diaghilev exhibition. It's gorgeous.

I now know a lot more about Natalia Goncharova than I did before visiting the exhibition. Now that I've had time to think about the works and the breadth of Natalia's talents, I think I need to go back to see it again and look at the works afresh with a better understanding. The exhibition is on until September and is worth a visit to Tate Modern to see.

Favourite Paintings: Sonia Delaunay 'Le Bal Bullier'

One of my favourite paintings is 'Le Bal Bullier' by Sonia Delaunay. It was painted in 1913 and is inspired by the tango craze that swept across Paris in the early 1910s. Sonia used to go to the Bal Bullier dancehall in Paris and sketched the dancers that ended up in this painting.

The painting is 12 feet long and the eye can't help but sweep from left to right as the dancers swirl across the painting. It's often cited as an example of the colour theory of Orphism, using primary colours against secondary colours - Sonia was very hot on colour theories and used them and experimented with them throughout her life in various media. I tend to respond to paintings on a more emotional rather than intellectual level. I don't see the theory, I see life and joy and movement and colour. I see the effect of that theory.

I saw this painting as part of the exhibition of Sonia's works at Tate Modern in 2015 and I visited it many times - I like colour. Each time I saw it I was drawn further into the dance. I stopped seeing blocks of colour and shapes and started to see couples dancing, enjoying the movement and the music and being together, and then started seeing movement as the couples danced across the dance floor. That's one of the magical things about painting - the painter doesn't dictate what you see. We all respond to art in different ways and that's a good thing.

I especially like that Sonia not only used the Bal Bullier dancehall as inspiration but she was part of it and designed her own dress to wear when she went there. That was included in the Tate exhibition.

'Le Bal Bullaire' is part of the collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris so I'll have to pay it a visit on my next trip to Paris.