Goldmark 07

goldmark

WINTER 2017

Price ÂŁ10

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g winter 2017 NUMBER 07

Contents 2

Marino Marini - l’Album No 1

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Walter Keeler - Recent Exhibition

CONTRIBUTORS

10 Terry Frost - Lorca

David Whiting is an art critic and curator who has written extensively about studio ceramics. He writes regularly for magazines such as Crafts and Ceramic Review, and contributes to the Guardian. He has been external examiner to several leading ceramics courses, and is a trustee of the Anthony Shaw Collection at York Art Gallery. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a member of the International Association of Art Critics, and is on the editorial board of the Interpreting Ceramics electronic journal.

16 Anthony Gross - Fountain of the Spaiis

Ceri Levy is a filmmaker, writer, and gonzovationist who has made many music videos and documentaries and is wellknown for his 2009 film ‘Bananaz’, which documents the cartoon-band Gorillaz. Recently he has written the successful Gonzovation Trilogy of books with artist Ralph Steadman, comprising Extinct Boids, Nextinction and Critical Critters.

The outsider artist Scottie Wilson was a close family friend.

40 Jean-Nicolas Gérard - Square Platters

Polly Bagshaw is Goldmark’s social media manager, responsible for our cheery online disposition on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. An art history graduate, she has a particular interest in American Abstract Expressionism (and a newfound friend in driftwood magician and recent interviewee Sid Burnard!).

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Orange Street Uppingham Rutland LE15 9SQ 01572 821424 info@goldmarkart.com www.goldmarkart.com

18 Scottie Wilson - Scottie’s Path to Childhood 24 Brendan Neiland - Reflections 26 The Circus 34 Rembrandt - H L Basan Edition

42 Sonia Delaunay - New Exhibition 48 Antoni Tàpies - From the Void 54 Marc Chagall - Moses and the Tablets of the Law 56 Tea and Ceramics 60 Sid Burnard - The Curious Kingdom

Words: Max Waterhouse Except pages: 8 © David Whiting 18 © Ceri Levy 60 © Polly Bagshaw Photographs: Jay Goldmark, Christian Soro, Vicki Uttley Design: Porter/Goldmark, December 2017 ISBN 978-1-909167-49-0

marino Marini

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l’album No.1

In 1968, the same year l’Album No. 1 was issued, Marino Marini was interviewed about the new direction his art had taken. ‘I would like to express something tragic, almost a twilight of humanity,’ he replied. ‘You will notice [in my new work] that the horseman is incapable of managing his mount, and that the animal, in its restlessness ever more riderless, comes more and more to a rigid standstill instead of rearing.

I believe in the most serious way that we are heading towards the end of the world.’

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Though a multidisciplinary artist who worked successfully in the spheres of sculpture, painting, and printmaking, in subject matter Marini tended to a narrow range of universal themes: the Pomonas, earthly female nudes that invoke the Roman goddess of fruit and fertility; jugglers, dancers, and acrobatic performers; and, most especially, the horse and rider.

The latter dominates l’Album No. 1, as it had done most of Marini’s career. Historically it was a potent, even primal symbol of human civilisation, in which the taming of the first wild horse represented the subordination of man’s animal instincts.

It held significance for almost every ancient empire, from Assyria to Marini’s own Etruscan ancestors, for whom the horseman symbolised virility and vitality. But it was the horse’s power as a visual element – its long, straining muzzle, its elegant musculature – that first drew Marini to interpret its form in paint and clay: ‘At the beginning of my career I rented, by chance, a studio belonging to the owner of a riding school.

Consequently, I had an opportunity to draw and model horses every day; but at the time they were still far from giving me inspiration for a subjective or apocalyptic vision.’

With time, this fascination with form developed into one of allegory. In the horseman, an icon of epic and imperial strength, Marini foresaw an analogy with the militaristic hubris of the Second World War and the atomic age that proceeded it. The development of his own riders mapped this fall from the heroic to the tragic: at first stately and static, in the mould of a noble Marcus Aurelius or Napoleon on horseback, by the time Marini came to collate the l’Album No. 1 portfolio in the late 1960s, his riders had lost control. Their steeds bray and champ with mad rolling eyes, lips curled and hooves nervously pawing the ground: ‘The restlessness of my horses increases with each new work; the riders become ever more impotent, losing command over the animals.’

These are the horses that stand, transfixed, throughout l’Album, as if caught in a bright light. Despite its title, l’Album No. 1 was the second collection of prints Marini had published.

It contained a series of etchings, related only in subject, tone, and tenor, produced between 1950 and 1962. Marini first learnt to etch before taking up sculpture, embarking on a course in engraving while a student in Florence in the early 1920s. Though he is today known primarily for his threedimensional work, graphics frequently anticipated his monumental sculptures. He noted during his lifetime how every model he had produced had some preparatory drawing, painting or print from which it was developed. After the war,

etching became particularly important to Marini, a medium in which he could experiment and explore thematically before committing an idea to clay.

Etching offered a further advantage in that its plates could be worked on intermittently, picked up one month and put down the next. For this very reason the selection of prints contained in l’Album offers a fascinating insight into Marini’s development of the horse and rider theme: as well as charting his horseman’s downward spiral from early stoic warriors to madcap performers, we see Marini picking up plates begun some fifteen years earlier and revitalising old compositions with a new strength of vision.

Far from the pessimistic prophecy Marini offered as the conclusion of his horse and rider theme, in l’Album there pervades an atmosphere of restless twilight, what one critic has called the ‘tormented serenity’ of Marini’s art. In its collected scenes, Marini runs the theatrical gamut from heroic to tragi-comic. His host of characters are spectral; they hover, disintegrate, merge with the shadows, and explode into geometric form. Prints like Giocolieri – ‘Jugglers’ – show Marini at his most inventive. Patches of cross-hatching, usually used in etching to define the contours of a three-dimensional form, serve here as a mysterious backdrop; the figures remain flat and ghostly white, projecting out beyond the shadows.

In the absence of juggling balls, the heads of each figure transform into floating orbs that take their place, listing and rolling along their shoulders. Spaced across the plate from bottom left to right, their faces replicate a juggler’s throwing arc, four peaceful little heads tilting like moons in transitory orbit.

Marini exhibited a great many artistic strengths in his graphic work. In etchings like l’Invocazione, with a supplicant, Christlike figure atop a leering mount, he showed he could unite profound universal themes and present them with sadness, strangeness, and a kind of lunatic humour all at once. A local Tuscan boy born in the town of Pistoia, he attributed his archaic symbolism to his Etruscan descent: ‘My very self is born there, in that region. Those are my ancestors. It is a civilisation which even today comes up out of the ground, it is a root which still nourishes, which still lives. I feel extremely bound to this ground, to this sense of people, ancient, but so alive, so intelligent. I have it in my blood, I cannot rid myself of it.’ In l’Album No. 1 it is to this ancient root that he returns, to a time of myth and magic. He reimagines riders and circus performers, archetypes as old as civilisation itself, and somehow makes them both old and new; cosmic and arcane.

view more Marino Marini at goldmarkart.com

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Recent Exhibition

walter keeler

...broadening our perception of the potter’s art Walter Keeler has singularly transformed the face of British functional studio pottery, and what I have always loved about it is its Englishness.

In literally re-shaping the language of tablewares in the 1970s and ’80s, of giving it new and exuberant form, he has celebrated so richly its own history, from the 17th and 18th century salt glaze potters of Fulham and Nottingham to the tortoiseshell colours of Thomas Whieldon. Walter has brought to modern pottery so much of the expressive spirit of the English workshop and factory, a fascination with the design and mechanics of pots that goes back to his youth, riverbank-combing for clay shards on the Thames Estuary. Anyone who has examined his inventively improvised thrown and assembled pieces from the 1960s onwards will have got a very strong sense of other kinds of tradition, a delight in constituent parts, of junctions and joins, of extrusions, sections and so forth.

His pots have an engineering that is as suggestive of lathes and drills and metal components as of the potter’s wheel. It is no surprise that he draws on a much broader love of industrial and craft history and its objects, not just the long story of our pottery making. His work has a precision and crispness that owes just as much to the life and beauty of good factory wares as to the spirit of the studio. Like the potter there is an eternal youthfulness, a perennial sense of excitement about these pieces, whether we are looking at the comparatively austere (but always playful) salt glaze, inkwash and creamware shapes or the sumptuous spectacle of his baroque Whieldon ‘cut branch’ forms. Walter’s maverick work is so very humane, adding another dimension to our dining tables, to our shelves, to our lives. I have known him for thirty years, and in that time his pots have always looked so fresh, constantly moving and evolving, broadening our perception of the potter’s art.

David Whiting, 2017 art critic and curator

view more Walter Keeler at goldmarkart.com

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Terry frost lorca Sir Terry Frost, the flat-capped, silver-tached titan of British post-war abstraction, had a numinous sixth sense. He saw gods everywhere; sun gods and moons gods, black and white word gods, fish, tree, boat, land, sky and old song gods. Every poem, every experience, every moment of heat, cold, wind or colour could inspire in the artist a shiver of spiritual transcendence. But it was the poetry of Federico García Lorca, the symbolist Spanish poet infamously executed by fascist firing squad in the summer of 1936, that would become perhaps Frost’s greatest inspiration: ‘Lorca awakened something in me. I love black and Lorca, and the Duende and black envelop me.

Images wrestle with me when I read Lorca. He probes the distance between each emotion.’

Black was Frost’s first colour. He found it in Stalag 383 as a Prisoner of War, where he spent most of his four years of confinement learning to draw on scraps of paper and hacked-up pillow cases. With parcels of oil paints delivered by the Red Cross and ochre slipped to him by a kindly German guard, mixed with the oily residue of sardine tins, his palette soon expanded and, before long, he was making sketches and small portraits to trade for rations. He was quickly

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Black was Frost’s first colour. He found it in Stalag 383 as a Prisoner of War, where he spent most of his four years of confinement learning to draw on scraps of paper and hacked-up pillow cases.

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discovered by fellow detainee Adrian Heath, an established artist who encouraged Frost to take up art as a vocation after the war.

Demobbed in 1945, he decided to become an artist, to the great bewilderment of his working-class family, and enrolled at the Camberwell School of Art on a veteran grant.

It was in the German camp too, where tattered copies of Keats and Milton were ‘more plentiful than bread’, that Frost had found a love of the written word. Spurred on by the liberal tutelage of Victor Pasmore, himself in the midst of an epiphany of abstraction, Frost began to develop an emphatic visual language of shapes, circles and spirals in his own poetic canvases.

Flitting between London and St Ives, where

a commune of British artists formed by Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth had begun to abstract local landscapes and seascenes, Frost became a regular of the Cornish town. He began an assistant in Hepworth’s sculpture studio; by the late 1980s, he had become one of Britain’s preeminent abstract artists, his sense of form and colour purified to curvilinear blocks of vibrant, primary paint.

Frost discovered Lorca in the mid-1970s.

Or rather, he first discovered the Duende, what Lorca defined as those moments in reality that are so heightened, and felt with such intensity, that one is forced to confront the significance of the experience. For Lorca, it was to be so moved as to become aware of one’s mortality, to have to grapple from the very depths of the soul with one’s emotional response: ‘[It is] a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro say, ‘The Duende is not in the throat; the Duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.’…It is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation…everything that has black sounds in it, has Duende.’

Frost’s own Duende came to him in Spain in a fish market, where the stall-holders, draped in black – ‘My god, I thought, what are they all doing in black? I thought people would wear white for the heat’ – offered him their catch: ‘They slithered a great silver fish in front of me! Then they began to carve it up. What with the sound of the Spanish, which was beautiful to me, and then this silver fish – it was a magic moment.’

For fifteen years, Frost read and re-read Lorca’s poetry, in which he found a mirror of his Duende experience: ‘With Lorca I

view more Terry Frost at goldmarkart.com

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travel on a ride to no-man’s land. There I am; my emotions take on a new distance and the extent between life and death becomes forever.’ He began to paint what he read; not illustrations, but expressions of love. Lorca had commanded, ‘You must not read Goncora, you must love him’, and so he learnt to love Lorca, until the poet’s words became so ingrained that it was not specific lines or stanzas that he sought to represent but a tugging of the heart, a ‘total feeling’ encompassing word, image, and experience. To black and white he added red, the holy trinity of Frost’s prime colours: ‘Black and Red become a symbol for death and life, lust, passion, tenderness, fear, love.

The black and white of the words on paper become gods like the sun and the moon.’

By 1989, Frost had developed his Lorcan theme to the point where he wished to dedicate a whole suite to his poetry, an assembled box of printed images that would encapsulate his cohabitation with these words over the past two decades.

Eleven poems were chosen, with eleven etchings to accompany. In their sheer strength of colour, form, and harmonious arrangement, their technical complexity, involving multiple processes from handcolouring to embossing, they are undoubtedly the most accomplished and coherent of Frost’s many portfolios of prints.

Housed in a black leather Solander box, the suite opens with Lorca’s lament for the fallen matador Ignacio Sanchez Mejías: it is a catastrophically powerful first image, in which the bull’s horn – shaped not like a horn, but the familiar, Frostian hull of an underworld ferryman’s boat – gores the page, bespattering white paper with crimson blood under the faint halo of a pounding Spanish sun. As one turns each print over to the next, the intensity of Frost’s poetic Duende vibrates in each subsequent image. There is sophistication in the range of colour that shifts from flat black and red to deep, Delphian blues and greens in Es Verdad (‘It is True’) and Arbole, Arbole (‘Tree, oh Tree’). Frost’s signature arcs, circles and whirling spirals dance from print to print, finding their fullest resonance in the lush watercolour that supplements this edition (only 15 of all 50 portfolios were issued with such originals).

In Lorca’s poetry, colour and emotion are inextricably intertwined. ‘Colour is the eye’s music’, he once wrote; and if so, then Frost’s suite is the swansong he never heard, the echoing forms, the vital breath of colour that gives new shape to his phrases. It remains among the most intimate and affecting of the twentieth century’s livres d’artistes, confirmation – if any were needed - of Frost’s deserved place at the head of the British abstract canon.

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Anthony gross Fountain of the Spaiis

Though it demonstrates skill and sophistication in its every stroke of paint, Anthony Gross was just twenty-two years old when he made Fountain at the Spaiis.

In 1923, at the age of eighteen, Gross had enrolled at the Slade in London. An energetic young student, he leapt at every opportunity that presented itself: in the four years that followed, his movements were hectic as he travelled to study in Madrid at the Academia de San Fernando and Paris at the Académie Julian, punctuated by interim explorations in the south of France.

By 1927 he had decided to journey to North Africa, settling in Algeria where this work was painted. The scene is of an unknown location – perhaps a fountain on the outskirts of Bou Saâda, the small haven town just north of the Sahara where Gross stayed for three months. One of the earliest of his oils to have survived, it stands alongside a small number of paintings produced across the year that, in the words of Gross expert Richard Morphet, ‘Could hardly be less compatible with the careful approach enjoined by the Slade professor, Henry Tonks. They reflect not only his extensive European travels of the mid-1920s but also the competing influences of Post-Impressionism and the freedom of approach permissible in Parisian académies libres.’

Gross’ early Impressionist influences came via an American painter, Kay Scott, whom he met in Algeria. Gross recalled in a later letter how Scott, ‘Told me about Cézanne’s colours. Green distance, orange middle, and red foreground and kept blue for drawing. I have kept to this colour scheme most of my life.’

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Fountain offers one of the first experiments in this new colour scheme. The palette is beautifully restrained with shades of dust, sand, and ochre, their coolness set off by a fold of scarlet cloth in the foreground. Cézanne’s stricture of ‘blue for drawing’ is put into practice with the gaggle of figures, achieved in an exquisite economy of brushstrokes, while in the middle ground Gross anticipates his own colour theory of the mid1960s: ‘For light colours pale green or pale mauve or pink instead of yellow.’

Most impressive here, however, is Gross’ use of the brush. He would paint directly onto canvas at the scene, rather than recreate from pencil sketches: ‘I used to paint each picture at a single go. As soon as I ran out of canvas, I scraped them down and repainted over them. Some had several ébauches on them before the final picture.’ The result is immediacy and total immersion: the mark-making is inescapable, with a self-evident enjoyment of the physical qualities of paint. In the broad stretches of sky, Gross draws not with but into the paint; the natural combed lines of the brush hairs become integral to its sense of movement.

Gross would return to Algeria some fifteen years later as an Official War Artist on the North African campaign. Though he would become best-known for his wartime watercolours, paintings like Fountain reveal that, even in his formative years, he could paint with enviable finesse.

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I have always had a soft spot for Scottie’s work. It reminds me of my childhood, and of weekends spent with Scottie and my parents in his flat in Kilburn and afternoon visits to the local Lyons teashop. My father, Mervyn Levy, was editor of the Studio magazine at the time and sought out artists to write about for the publication. He discovered Scottie’s work in the early ‘60s and they became firm friends until the day Scottie died. Dad was one of the few people to pick up on Scottie’s importance, championing his cause, co-ordinating exhibitions, writing about him as well as promoting and selling his work. This inevitably led to Scottie becoming part of my childhood fabric of memories and they remain strong to this day.

Our house was always festooned with Scottie’s drawings and I loved the brightness of them. Their simple beauty was beguiling. For a long time I had a beautiful large work in my bedroom and I would transport myself into Scottie’s dream world of butterflies and birds. In the real world he initially struck me as a very serious man whose accent was hard to penetrate, but his gruffness would give way to kindness (even though he never could say my name, calling me Tele not Ceri - I still have a Christmas card from him inscribed thus). He was mischievous and cantankerous but adored by my family and would often give me a wink whenever he had complained vehemently about something. It was as if he was letting me in on his game, making sure that I realised he was playing, just in a different way than I would. I understood him and our bond would remain. Often he would sit at the table in his room and draw while we kept him company. I watched him carefully filling in empty space with lines and colour and, as if by magic, his worlds would appear. I believe these encounters helped me to understand the power of the imagination.

Being an only child I was always inventing worlds and here was a man at the other end of life’s spectrum doing exactly the same. I liked Scottie a lot.

He would always plead he was penniless, although he died a fairly wealthy man, and often provided a list of

scottie wilson

Scottie’s Path to Childhood

by Ceri Levy

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provisions for us to bring on our weekend visits. Scottie thought of us as the artistic Red Cross, who provided a care package of food, drink, inks, paper and, most importantly, his much-loved Woodbine cigarettes. These never left his lips, and I watched in wonder as he talked and smoked without ever moving the cigarette from his mouth. He always wore a flat cap, a symbol of his working-class roots, and ironically, though he detested the upper classes, it appealed to his impish nature to buy his caps and much of his clothing and shoes from the most expensive outfitters of St. James’s. He enjoyed this subversive infiltration of high society but would vehemently rail against the snobbery of the establishment wherever possible, although his tune would change if his work were bought by one of them.

‘Birds, trees, fish, flowers, that’s me.’

This quote captures the essence of Scottie’s work for these are the elements constantly displayed within his dream worlds.

There is simplicity of thought and a clean line that runs through his work as he transports us to where he is happiest, the land populated with his colourful creations. But for many years,

‘evils and greedies’, human heads with upturned noses and sometime spiky hair, often threatened these vibrant landscapes. These strange creatures would disturb the peace of the idyllic world Scottie drew. He is termed as a visionary and mystic, but I would also say prophetic: he realised that man was a dreadful threat to the world around him and these pictures are the artist’s warning to the world that we are an ever present danger to ourselves and the beauty of our environment.

At the start of his career while living in Canada and inspired by the faces he saw on totem poles in the parks of Vancouver, Scottie drew similar faces, believed to be self-portraits, surrounded by his creatures. In later life, Scottie revisits this theme and draws heads over and over, surrounded by birds and fish, in an almost mystical protective way. Repetition is important in his work, as if he is working through a chant or a mantra; it focuses his mind and clears out the detritus of the imposing world around him. These portraits are his mandalas for later life and the animals give Scottie strength as he faces up to his mortality. As he grew older, he talked of

view more Scottie Wilson at goldmarkart.com

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his pictures becoming more tender and gentle. The threat to his beautiful worlds from the ‘evils and greedies’ was largely gone. They would appear intermittently through his latter years, but they too had grown older and lost some of their menace. The challenge now was purely metaphysical and he relied on his familiar cast to see him through the darkness of old age.

Jean Dubuffet and Picasso loved Scottie’s drawings, he exhibited with the Surrealists, and his work is held by the finest museums and collections in the world and yet he is still an artist who is new for many people. He is one of the best kept secrets who, once found, cannot be lost, and I see him winking at me every time I look at one of his joyous pictures.

My father suggested Scottie’s work is about reconnecting to his childhood, to a time when things were easier and perhaps more poetic. Many of us seek a way back to our past and in Scottie’s work perhaps we can move one step closer to it.

Scottie was an indelible part of my formative years. After he died, we were driving to the funeral in our old sky blue Ford Anglia and I looked up into the blue sky and saw clouds forming shapes. I scrunched my eyes and there was his round face, cap and a cigarette with smoke wisping away. ‘Look!

There’s Scottie!’ ‘He’s come to say goodbye,’ said my mother, and we all believed it.

Scottie’s work lives on.

Ceri Levy, 2017 filmmaker and writer

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brendan neiland Reflections

Light - more than anything, it seems - remains the focus of Brendan Neiland’s art: light shimmering and reflected on sheet-glass windows, shifting and rippling on the surface of water, or, more recently, buzzing in neon signs. It is a fascination that has held him since student days at the Royal College of Art, where he first developed the particular brand of realism for which he has become internationally admired, and which has seen him likened to the great chiaroscurist Vermeer.

Like his hero Léger before him, he found inspiration in the metropolis and its vaulting glass architecture: ‘So much of the city is observed through reflection. In a sense, it is far more real than the buildings themselves .. . It helps to give the feeling of movement and activity and life of the city.’

Observing the glossy, polished surfaces of the machine-bits and steel structures that caught his eye, he sought a painting method that would replicate their smooth finish, developing a technique using spray-guns and meticulous layers of delicate masks and stencils.

Completed in the early 1970s, Reflections originally hung in the boardroom of Mazda cars. It presents an extraordinary early example of the pioneering work Neiland made in his spray-gun process. Across the bonnet of a sports car, a blue sky with wisps

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of white cloud bends and refracts, distorting over the curved metal surface. Above, a sandy building melts into a Dali-esque desert; the surrounding sky becomes a Surrealist sea. Neiland has spoken of his love of reflections, where grid lines and industrial exactness balance the warp of light across their planes in a ‘play between the structured and the free’. Here, brutalist concrete dissolves into dream-land oasis an example of the strangeness to be found on even the most ordered of urban surfaces.

In a career that now approaches its fiftieth year, Neiland has continued to reveal the dance of light that plays out daily on the glass towers and cars that dominate our landscape. With the city as his canvas, every high-rise offers trick-of-the-light mirages; every dispassionate, corporate space its trompe-l’oeil delights.

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The

CIRCUS The circus, with its tumbling cavalcade of big-top performers, presented its audience with a riot of colour and stunning spectacle.

The circus, with its tumbling cavalcade of big-top performers, presented its audience with a riot of colour and stunning spectacle. In the pre-cinema years of the late 1800s, when the streets of Paris thronged with competing tents and traveling sideshows, the circus offered a major form of entertainment for working-class families and well-to-do aristocrats, with parades and acrobatic displays that catered to virtually every taste. The location of famous permanent shows, especially the Cirque Fernando, drew painters and poets alike to its displays. They inspired some of the greatest works of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; but alongside the bright lights and feats of daring strength and suspension, artists tapped into the darker side of circus life: alienation

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and grotesquery, the outsider lives of travelling performers without money or fixed abode, outcasts and freaks on the fringe of society.

Historically, the circus had grown from the theatrical features of the old Italian Commedia dell’Arte, the British harlequinade and French saltimbanques. It was, for a long time, essentially a rural touring show: ringmasters would have their sets put up on the outskirts of towns and villages, while performers drummed up local business with free sideshows, temporary stands outside the main tent where performers offered sneak peek routines from their upcoming acts. As suburban areas grew, cities sprawled, and modern-day life became increasingly busy, these outskirt shows were forced to offer

ever-more impressive performances to woo their crowds.

Before long, the traditionally travelling showmen looked to set up permanent structures in which even greater acrobatic acts and wild animal processions could be accommodated.

Around the peripheries of Paris, land was bought and bigtops were erected, most famous of all the Cirque Fernando.

The circus offered obvious visual delights to the city’s artists.

From swooping, spangled trapeze artists to equestrienne acts, its shows brought dynamic scenes full of loud colour and whirling motion. Even the crowds, a sea of expressions from all walks of life, held painterly potential; its multicolour, pick-and-mix assortment of pink faces, feathered hats, patterned clothes and dancing performers must have had a

profound impact on the development of ‘divisionism’, the Neo-Impressionist pointillist style made famous by Seurat (himself a keen Fernando attendee). Established in the late 1870s and situated on the border of the old city, just outside the artists’ quarter in the district of Montmartre, the Cirque Fernando became the first choice of nearby painters and sketchers, from Degas and Renoir to Toulouse-Lautrec. Many befriended particular performers and negotiated free entry to big-top shows, a tradition that was to remain at Fernando’s well into the 20th century. One Fernando clown - Clovis Sagot – even retired to become an art dealer, having become acquainted with the many painters who frequented his performances.

Russell Reeve

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Fernand LĂŠger

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yellows, Rouault’s Cirque de l'Étoile Filante aquatint etchings (Circus of the Shooting Star) expose the melancholy of life in the troupe, a sadness made all the more poignant by its superficial cheer. Not all artists zeroed in on performers’ despondency or poverty: to Chagall, the circus became an emblem of dancing joy, full of whirligig acrobats leaping from prancing horse to swinging trapeze. Perhaps most celebratory of all was Léger, who found in the ring and its hurtling ensemble a metaphor for life and the vitality of the countryside. In Cirque, Léger’s magnum opus as a printmaker, he compared circus performance with riding a bike through woods and fields, writing of the primacy of the round and the curve in nature and finding ‘nothing as round as the circus’.

Accompanying his text was a series of lithographs in which bright colour abounds, contained only by Léger’s vigorous black line. Arabesques of birds and spinning performers

Marc Chagall

The proximity of Fernando’s to the usual haunts of the Belle Époque set meant that, with time, they came to experience the behind-the-scenes environment of the circus too. If it was the pageantry of colour and physical prowess that first drew them to paint and draw these performers, it was sympathy for their hidden lives that kept them coming back, and which grounded their depictions of high-wire performances in a kind of early social realism. Though now permanent, the circuses of Paris were still very much spaces on the margins of the city: they existed in ‘liminal’ zones, caught on boulevard corners between district thresholds. Like their traveller predecessors, circus performers skirted the edge of accepted society. Many of them were members of distinct minorities – black immigrants, disabled or disfigured ‘aberrations’, performers who in private were sexually ‘deviant’ or the victims of childhood trauma. To keep public audiences returning, they were required constantly to innovate routines, change personas, and pursue more dangerous stunts of derring-do. The trope of the sad clown – the exhibitionist performer who invests every ounce of his energy in entertaining his audience, but who is himself empty of the mirth he projects on stage – was already firmly established by the turn of the century. In the circus, some artists saw a reflection of their own suffering; of the emotional solitude of the artistic soul, disaffected and estranged from the rest of society.

By the 1900s, the Cirque Fernando had undergone significant changes as it struggled to keep up with the pace of modern industrialisation. After its last remaining family member nearly ran the circus into the ground, it was saved from bankruptcy by one of its own performers – Gerónimo Medrano, an ex-clown by the name of ‘Boum Boum’ who bought the big-top’s lease and renamed the circus after himself. The Medrano family were responsible for modernising their shows in light of the increasing competition from cinema and radio for audiences’ attention. In the interwar years they looked to hire back performers who had left circus life behind for the spotlight of variety stages and music hall, such as the famed clown Grock. Celebrity appearances from the likes of Buster Keaton kept ticket sales high, and the circus enjoyed a boom of trade at a time when it was becoming more and more difficult to sustain a ring in Paris’ prime real estate.

Many of the greats of 20th century art visited shows and took inspiration from Medrano’s electrifying performances.

For all their sumptuous colour, from dusty crimson to mustard

become symbols of spontaneity, their circular motion representative of the ‘dance’ of life.

Ultimately, the circus made accessible to local artists a carnival of colour and movement that offered an ironic blank canvas. Unlike the theatre or ballet, or, outside the performative sphere, modern and classical literature, the circus was a primarily physical experience: it championed feats of strength and agility over intellectual depth, and in its spectacular ease appealed to a wider audience. Onto its visual feast artists could project a multitude of personal readings, interpretations of each show that were alternately festive and forlorn. It is telling how many who did attend performances would rework the shapes and figures of the circus into images

Georges Rouault

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

of self-deception and autobiography: from Toulouse-Lautrec, who drew clowns from memory to prove his sanity while recouping from his rampant alcoholism in an infirmary; to Matisse, whose Jazz suite, a last hurrah in 1947, saw the artist creating cut-out images of twirling, twisting performers even as he sat immobile in a wheelchair, after an operation from which he would never fully recover. The illusory grandeur of circus life and its many marvels gave something for these artists to cling to; it was the embodiment of a dichotomy between momentary elation and hidden melancholy, between pure happiness and debilitating sadness. The big-top, with its bright lights, held a mirror to the artist’s soul.

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Henri Matisse

rembrandt

Of the old etchers, Rembrandt, as all acknowledge, is the sovereign prince.

P. G. Hamerton (1866), author of Etchers and Etchings

Though widely considered the greatest, and certainly the best-known artist of the Dutch Golden Age of painting, Rembrandt was exceptional in never leaving his homeland.

While countless Baroque painters in the Netherlands, from Rubens to the Utrecht set, flocked to the schools of Rome, Venice, Florence, and Bologna to train in the manner of the Renaissance masters, Rembrandt never left the Republic. His unparalleled fame spread across the continent not because he travelled, but because his work did: specifically his etchings, which, by the very fact that they could be reproduced and distributed, propelled his international reputation far beyond his equally astonishing paintings. Lauded by Baldinucci, a contemporary Florentine biographer, for his highly bizarre technique, which he invented for etching and which was his alone, Rembrandt’s graphic output would transform the world of printmaking forever – yet he died a pauper, buried in an unmarked grave, dispossessed and unremembered until the fortuitous reappearance of his famed etching plates.

The son of a successful miller, in his youth Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn must have been a disappointment to his father. Wealthy enough, despite his lower-class trade, to send his son to the local Grammar School, he had high hopes for the young Rembrandt’s academic future when, at the tender age of fourteen, he enrolled at Leiden University. An agricultural man, no doubt he would have wanted a better things of his son: a career in the courts, perhaps, or a professorship in Latin rhetoric at some flourishing school.

Instead, Rembrandt left the university after just a few months

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of study to become an apprentice painter. Had there been the early tell-tale signs of genius, the indication that here was the Netherlands’ next great master, the blow to his father’s dreams might well have been softened. But the prospects of any young, up-and-coming Dutch artist were now decidedly more precarious in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation. In the past the Catholic Church had employed local artists for commissions and offered patronage to individual painters, but with Protestant criticism of the lavish wealth spent on their iconography, painters and sculptors had to look to private patrons for their financial support.

Rembrandt’s own position of faith represented a microcosm of the religious turmoil of his time: his mother was a Roman Catholic, his father a Dutch Reformist, and his first wife a Mennonite, while Rembrandt himself remained – at least superficially – spiritually neutral.

Initially he apprenticed with a local history painter in Leiden before founding his own workshop and taking on his first pupils. Having cultivated a growing following in his home town, in 1631 he sought broader horizons and travelled to Amsterdam, swapping the uninspiring streets of his birthplace for the hustle and bustle of the Dutch port city.

17th century Amsterdam was a hugely wealthy city, an emerging hotbed of commercial trade which saw merchants across Europe converge on its busy docks. For a newly established artist it offered endless inspiration, and Rembrandt was enthralled. He drew everything he saw, from out-of-pocket traders arguing over stock to beggars and waifs in alleyways,

revelling in the spectrum of human life gathered in the city streets (of particular interest were the immigrant Marrano and Sephardic Jews who had fled to Amsterdam after their expulsion from Spain). Lodging with a local art dealer, Rembrandt also met his first wife here – Saskia, his well-to-do landlord’s cousin. Wedded in 1634, their marriage was plagued by the illness of their many young children, only one of whom (Titus) would survive infancy. Saskia became something of a muse to her husband, who etched her into his self-portraits and surreptitiously inserted her figure and face into his history paintings, as he did himself.

By the late 1630s, Rembrandt had made a name for himself as a portraitist and painter of historical scenes, courting commissions from some of the wealthiest families in the city. As well as painting oils and sketching in the streets, he had begun to experiment with the process of etching, a method of printmaking that had predominantly been used to reproduce canvases by Italian masters for distribution amongst artists, dealers and patrons. He soon excelled in the medium, making technical innovations within the burin, and drypoint processes that would shape the way modern etching and engraving is done to this day. To Rembrandt, this new method of depiction was as important as his many portraits: he saw etching as a vehicle for original artistic expression, not merely an instrument for reproduction, and he invested great time and energy into building up a portfolio of printed work that would see his genius known throughout Europe and further abroad.

Great praise was given especially to the treatment of light and shade in these prints, the chiaroscuro effects he had learnt from reproductions of works by Caravaggio and his later Dutch disciples. Often Rembrandt’s plates would be worked and reworked many times over, the artist repeatedly fiddling with

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minute aspects of the plate to get the breadth and depth of tone he desired.

Through manipulations of dense hatching and successive ‘bitings’ in the acid, he could realise extraordinarily dark, textured areas on the page; conversely, many etchings were left daringly spare, with delicate contrasts of daylight and shadow accomplished through deliberately not wiping the ink clear from the surface of the plate before printing. Biblical vignettes, bucolic landscapes, urban scenes and exquisitely designed portraits constituted the bulk of his work, which soon made its way into the hands of jealous German and Italian contemporaries unable to fathom how he had achieved such effects.

All would be well, were it not for Rembrandt’s extravagance. A keen purchaser of art, even when the auction price outweighed his purse, he was also known to spend vast amounts of money on props and paraphernalia, all for use in composing the next historical painting.

Despite inheriting Saskia’s sizeable fortune upon her death just a year after the birth of Titus, he was plunged into bankruptcy after the Netherlands suffered a major economic depression in the 1650s. Hounded by creditors, he declared a cessio bonorum, surrendering his goods (including a huge number of paintings and prints) to avoid imprisonment. The collection sold for next to nothing, leaving Rembrandt with little to his name. He died in 1669, six years after the death of his second wife, Hendrickje, and mere months after the sudden passing of his son, next to whom he was buried. No official announcement of his death was made, and the man who had once been the most famous artist in Amsterdam was quickly and quietly forgotten.

Somehow, Rembrandt’s copper etching plates escaped the clutches of his beneficiaries. For a time they were assumed lost or destroyed, before appearing in an

inventory of Rembrandt’s estate drawn up by a close associate, the print dealer Clement de Jonghe. From there they passed between several private collections until, in the latter half of the 18th century, they arrived in the hands of the Parisian dealer Claude Henri Watelet. A proficient etcher himself, Watelet not only retouched some of the plates but also undertook their first major posthumous impressions since their conception in Rembrandt’s studio.

Through Watelet’s project, the etchings of Rembrandt were reintroduced to a whole new audience. They also began to attract further publishers. In 1786 the printer PierreFrancois Basan purchased around eighty plates from Watelet’s estate, publishing his own collection three years later. Known as the Basan Recueil, Basan’s publication inadvertently revolutionised both the study of Rembrandt’s work and contemporary art scholarship: here, for the first time, printed from the original plates, was a bound presentation of Rembrandt’s etchings - his

first illustrated catalogue of prints.

Upon Basan’s death the plates passed to his son, Henri Louis, who published further collections of Rembrandt etchings between 1807 and ’08. The H. L. Basan edition, from which these illustrations are taken, very seldom appears for sale and is more often to be found in museum collections such as the Ashmolean in Oxford, making for one of the most exciting acquisitions the Goldmark Gallery has ever made.

It is said that during his lifetime and after his death, fellow artists could not believe Rembrandt had been able to make etchings of the quality he had without the help of some special power, a divinely inspired secret, perhaps, that died with him and would never be rediscovered. To even the greatest artists of the last three-hundred years he remains an unrivalled master, eulogised by Van Gough as so deeply mysterious that he says things for which there are no words in any language.

Rembrandt is truly called a magician…

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The Square Platters of

jean-nicolas gérard The French call their traditional slipware terre vernissée – ‘glazed earth’. It’s a poetic phrase that really has no English equivalent, distilling the fundamentals of pottery to a lyrical minimalism of two words: la terre, the very ground from which the potter’s clay is unearthed; and le vernis, the silky veneer of slip that glazes the earthenware body beneath.

Both terms find their fullest expression in the pottery of Jean-Nicolas Gérard, and most especially in his giant square platters. Clay is essentially mutable stuff, permitting innumerable metamorphoses, but in Gérard’s pots his rich red clay is made to look as if freshly dug from the Valensole hills. These huge dishes, with rumpled, up-turned edges, become vineyards or lavender fields in miniature: sgraffito scars mimic row upon row of grape vines; blue-green finger spots suggest clumps of flowers awaiting their lilac blooms.

Around their edges, glaze often breaks to reveal arid red clay beneath, a dusty imitation of the crumbling slopes that irrigate the local estates.

But it is Gérard’s glorious manipulation of slip, more than anything, that sings out on these square dishes. Some are cloaked in a thunderous black slip, the hot, smoky, black of a Provençal night. Others glow with bright yellow, a sheen that dips into Gérard’s undulating surfaces, blooming into patches of deep gold or glistening with bitter lemon.

There is an obvious temptation to compare these giant square dishes with the Abstract Expressionism of the likes of

Jackson Pollock. Like Pollock, Gérard ‘attacks’ his platters on the floor, pouring slip over slabs with an old saucepan, jabbing into the clay with fingers and thumbs. It is decoration with all the vigour and spectacle of the theatre, the square slab of clay his ceramic stage - and yet it is all done without pretence, with so little self-awareness or need to impress; each sgraffito line, drawn with the artful assuredness of a Matisse or a Picasso, is carved with the humblest tool of a rust-tipped teaspoon.

This is the double life that Gérard lives: ‘I think I am like an old artisan,’ he says modestly, and in his truth-to-materials approach to clay this is true; but his work has the sculptural and painterly heft of a major artist. These large platters embody that duality: with wires affixed to their backs, they can be hung on the wall, an abstract ceramic canvas that conveys a magnificent sense of landscape. Unhook them and place them on their four lumpen feet, they transform into a communal platter, a space for shared food and good company.

Faced with pots like these, the interminable questions of form versus function, art versus craft, seem so very meaningless.

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New Exhibition in January

sonia DelaunAY On her death in 1979, at the grand old age of 94, Sonia Delaunay left behind her an extraordinary artistic legacy. She had, as she said during her lifetime, ‘lived’ her art; a claim she could make more convincingly than any other artist of the 20th century. Like Kandinsky, whom she had translated as a student, she was the cofounder of a major avant-garde movement – the poetically named Orphism – and saw in art the basis of a universal language.

Her astonishing manipulation of colour was grounded in ocular science and her own aesthetic theories. But, more importantly, Delaunay would transcend the theoretical; in addition to producing some of the most important nonfigurative art of her generation, she designed costumes for the theatre and haute couture fashion. Her rhythmic circles and squares spilled from canvas onto textiles, furniture, film sets and fast cars. Art and colour infiltrated every corner of her life, from the poems and paintings that decorated her apartment walls to the coats and dresses she paraded in the streets of Paris.

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Little is known about Delaunay’s early youth. Born Sara Stern to Ukrainian Jewish parents in Odessa, 1885, as a child she was sent to live with her wealthy aunt and uncle in St Petersburg, whose named she adopted, becoming Sonia Terk. She was, judging by the few diaries and letters that survive from the time, a bright, cerebral young woman, quick to learn and eager to expand her experiences beyond the comfortable, cultured upbringing she had enjoyed in Russia. By fourteen she was already a polyglot, reading Voltaire, Goethe, and Shakespeare in their original languages.

At the age of nineteen, she left for Germany to study painting. Two years later, in 1906, she was already on the move again, this time to Paris, where she enrolled at the Académie de la Palette.

Delaunay travelled and read with a restlessness that was evident in her early paintings too. Within just a few years of study, she had assimilated the powerful, primitivist sense of form explored in German Expressionism, and in Paris came face to face with the violent colour of the Fauves.

Her first major works – provocative, angular studio portraits and posed nudes – were worked in virulent colour: hot pinks and sour yellow underscored by shadows of sea green, a palette that betrayed the strong influence of Gauguin. In 1908 she married the critic and collector Wilhelm Uhde, but the marriage was a sham; it secured Delaunay’s stay in Paris and provided Uhde, a closeted homosexual, with an out, but by 1910 she had met Robert, a young, aristocratic painter who seemed to share so much of her artistic vision. She divorced and remarried later that year, giving birth to their son in January of 1911.

For most gifted female artists of the early 20th century, the burden of a child and a painter-husband might mark the end - the subsuming of a promising career beneath that of her male counterpart. For Delaunay,

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this was just the beginning. Soon after giving birth to her son, Charles, she took up embroidery and fashioned for him a quilt for his cot. Its multicolour, chequered design was to change their lives forever: ‘I had the idea of making . . . a blanket composed of bits of fabric like those I had seen in the houses of Russian peasants. When it was finished, the arrangement of the pieces of material seemed to me to evoke cubist conceptions and we then tried to apply the same process to other objects and paintings.’

This was the birth of the abstraction and colour theory that would inform the two Delaunays’ art for the rest of their careers.

Their approach was founded in part upon the ‘Simultanism’ of Michel Eugène Chevreul. Chevreul had found that when two colours, contrasting or complementary, were placed beside one another – when they were ‘simultaneous’ – they were

experienced differently: a yellow, for example, might appear visually brighter on a black background than on a light grey one.

Published in the late 1830s, Chevreul’s theory had over time found its way into the hands of the Impressionists and their successors, who began not to mix paint to achieve certain hues but to place strokes of primary colour beside one another such that the eye performed the ‘mixing’ itself.

Delaunay was fascinated by colour. Like music, she saw in it the potential for a truly ‘universal’ expressive language, and even experimented with assigning vowels and other linguistic units specific shapes and shades. To the critic and poet Apollinaire, a close friend of the Delaunays who had stayed with them in Paris and wrote of how they seemed to ‘speak painting’, Sonia and Robert’s cubist applications of colour resonated with musical and poetic vibrancy: he termed this new art ‘Orphism’, in

reference to the mythic Greek singer whose song silenced Sirens, animated rocks and trees, and charmed even Hades himself with its beauty.

Delaunay swiftly developed her ‘Orphic’ style in loose, geometric paintings with concentric circles and quivering arcs that reflected the bright, bustling modernity of pre-war city living. She painted wooden furniture for their rue des Grands-Augustins flat and made ‘simultaneous’ suits and dresses which she and Robert wore to Parisian nightclubs, flaunting their new style on the dancefloor. Forced to flee to Portugal during the First World War, her predicament was made worse with the Russian Revolution in 1917, which effectively brought an end to her small source of family income. Ever the shrewd businesswoman, she seized the moment as both a financial opportunity and a way to disseminate her colour theories across a multitude of new media, creating

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her first boutique, the ‘Casa Sonia’, and later registering ‘Simultané’ as an official brand name.

Delaunay’s bridging of the divide between the rarefied spheres of modern art and the world of craft, fashion, and design was perhaps the most successful of any other artist of the 20th century. Her balance of colour and geometric pattern translated with ease to fabrics for clothing and upholstery. Designs for garments were produced as pochoir prints, a luxurious time and labour-intensive process in which colour was hand-brushed through successive layers of stencils to build up a final image. Initially these designs were presented in couture brochures, but Delaunay evidently relished the clarity and depth of colour attainable in the process: she continued to use pochoir in her many illustrated books, collaborating with contemporary poets such as Blaise Cendrars or illuminating the words of writers past, such as Rimbaud (with whom she felt a particular affiliation) in celebratory sweeps, dashes, and blocks of pure colour. Though almost exclusively abstract, she claimed her

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work was always rooted in reflection on the world around her, and not merely formal or intellectual: ‘Direct observation of the luminous essence of nature is for me indispensable…’

In the inter-war years, Delaunay’s output was phenomenal: her fabrics, produced in collaboration with the likes of famed textiles man Robert Perrier, were now sold worldwide. Theatrical projects included set and costume designs for Tristan Tzara and performances by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, as well as commissions for a host of French films. Most emphatic was her influence on the world of fashion, with a Vogue cover design in 1926 and outfits for members of high-society glitterati. Unlike other artists, whose attempts at straddling the art / craft divide dissipated into the overly decorative, Delaunay’s stylised fabric prints were as forceful and thought-through as her contemporary canvases. This was not a woman artist relegated to the ‘feminine’ worlds of clothing and interiors: Delaunay was a pioneering artist-designer, relocating

serious abstract art to the wider public realm and fusing modernism with the everyday; in this aspect, she proved far more adventurous than her celebrated husband.

Robert’s death in 1941 from cancer left her bereft, not just of a life partner, but one with whom she had shared an artistic vision from the very earliest months of their marriage. She would not paint for another ten years, returning once more to large canvases and illustrated books in the 1950s.

In 1964 she became the first living female artist ever to be afforded a retrospective at the Louvre, cementing her reputation as an outstanding modern artist, still exploring the harmonies of interlocking colour-forms even in her final years. A recent evaluation of her work at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris and the Tate in London reaffirmed that, far from diluting the power of her art through its diffusion across so many different projects, Delaunay’s multifaceted nature was central to her success. She would influence artists for years to come, from the social conscience of Vasarely’s Op Art to the creations of the modern-day catwalk.

Antoni Tàpies was not a man to shy away from the difficult questions. The fundamental nature of the Universe, explored through schools of thought as diverse as Zen Buddhism and quantum physics, informs every aspect of his art. The interconnectedness of things became his mantra, reflected in his creative process and expressed through his enigmatic ‘vision of reality, built like a web, out of nothing, from the void’. On his death in 2012 he was, alongside Miró, Catalonia’s most beloved artist of the 20th century: were he alive today, he would no doubt have brought the same themes of connection and separation to bear on the ongoing question of Catalonian independence.

antoni TĂ€pies From the Void

Political duty was something Tàpies always felt keenly, a concern instilled in him by his father, a staunch nationalist who worked for the Catalan republic in the 1930s: ‘I have always believed that a certain content of ideas - religious feelings, as well as political, together with social consciousness - must be present in art, though subtly so.’ In the post-war years he became indirectly linked with anti-fascist activists protesting Franco’s continued rule, and was even arrested and fined for attending a clandestine meeting with suspected subversives: ‘Franco’s dictatorship was very different from Nazism and Italian fascism. They didn’t consider modern art as dangerous; rather they wanted to use it to make the world believe Spain was a tolerant country. So my problem was to flee from these people who wanted to use me! The fact that I had achieved some distinction abroad granted me

protection. They kept a close eye on me, but they were also afraid to meddle.’

Recognition came early for Tàpies, who took up art quite by chance during a prolonged convalescence in the early 1940s. Confined to his bed with a lung infection for almost two years, he read voraciously, from Dostoevsky and Nietzsche to Japanese poetry, and began to draw, making sketches of visitors and countless self-portraits. His doctor was a friend of Picasso, and so introduced him to the great Spaniard; a defining formative moment from which there was no turning back. Though prompted by his father to follow in his footsteps and become a lawyer, Tàpies abandoned his course not long after it had begun and set out to become a full-time artist.

His early work was heavily influenced by the Surrealists.

Through Picasso he had met Joan Miró, who would become a great mentor and friend, and in the same year helped found the ‘Dau al Set’, the ‘Seven-sided Die’ group. His first paintings, naïve and childlike in their depictions of daemonic

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figures and dancing symbols, reveal an obvious admiration for Miró’s work, as well as Paul Klee and Max Ernst. Ernst’s materialist techniques, in which he scraped paint over textured objects beneath canvas or made rubbings on paper from coarse surfaces, would prove a vital source of inspiration: from as early as 1949, Tàpies was trialling his own use of materials, combining paint with cleaning powders, chalk dust, and dried clay – with mixed results – and creating thick, granular, impasto surfaces through which he scoured, scarred, and gashed with the end of a brush.

Impurities in the various admixtures he tested, which caused the drying oil paint to burst or split, led him to experiment with marble dust. The technique was both excitingly novel and steeped in tradition: Tàpies, alongside members of the New York abstract expressionist and Parisian art informel movements, was among the first to properly advance this

method of painting in the 20th century, though it had a historical precedent in the muralists of Ancient Rome, who had used layers of ground marble ‘fixed’ with lime in their frescoes.

Before long, Tàpies was fully immersed in developing a kind of pintura matérica, incorporating everything from non-artistic materials, such as synthetic resins, to everyday objects, from coils of rope to scraps of cloth, on assembled ‘paintings’. This materialist attitude was even taken into the print studio, where Tàpies produced astonishing editions of prints using embossed snippets of string and card in an effort to replicate the textural qualities that defined his work on canvas. His approach wasn’t merely stylistic, either; it offered a depth of meaning greater than the sum of its constituent parts: ‘If you look at the materials I use, they’re full of grains of dust. This grain of dust may contain the entire universe: this substance,

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which isn’t something unchanging, but in flux, morphing into organic forms. ..Some materials are quite liquid; when you pour them on the picture, they flow wherever they please. I just channel them a bit, and they turn into a foot or a shoe.

All these objects are created from the materials. I love this, because it shows that the universe is one; it is both unique and diverse simultaneously.’

This essential, paradoxical duality – between division and connection, uniqueness and universality, fullness and emptiness – would become the driving force behind Tàpies’ art. It was derived, in part, from a merging of Zen meditation and the philosophies of the Far East – ‘far more refined than our Western thought’ – with modern-day science: ‘The questions of quantum physics have revolutionised the very idea of the subject and the object. You think you are distinct from the things around you, but they couldn’t exist without you. So one keeps adjusting, and the work responds to this worldview.’ This idea was woven into the very fabric of the work: paintings and sculptures that appeared as one were, in fact, built up from many millions of particles or constructed

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from a collection of disparate parts. Moreover, each painting, print, drawing and sculpture was considered in relation to the next, as if part of a cosmic chain: ‘What I do is always connected to what I’ve already made. I’m already envisioning a collection. I make each piece separately, but I see them as part of a whole.’

In their façade-like texture Tàpies’ works appear as if formed over great periods of time, like volcanic sediment or crumbling plaster walls; in fact, he worked quickly, drawing into gritty paint or lithographic blocks at great speed. One critic likened his painting method to a traditional Japanese archer: rapid release, preceded by long periods of contemplation and reflection. In his enormous studio in Campins, in the aptly named ‘Vallès Oriental’, Tàpies would review multiple works together, aiming for a collective balance of tones and colours.

His palette was earthy: ‘Pure colours – yellow, red, green, blue – have been overused...I’ve used other hues, usually darker, but some luminous too, but with lots of white.’

Animating these muted surfaces was an esoteric language of signs, marks, letters and words, the earliest of which, and

He paints with his entire self, with all his soul, with all he’s got, and ultimately with great violence.

most frequently employed, was Tàpies’ recognisable cross.

Typically ambiguous, suggesting both Christ and the cruciform ‘T’ with which Tàpies signed his name, it infiltrates a great many of the artist’s paintings and prints, a cryptic symbol as pleasing in its visual strength as it is evasive in its significance.

In the final decade of his life, Tàpies spoke of his, ‘Contempt for everything pretentious, grandiloquent, and supposedly very important’ in the face of ‘that which is small and modest.’

A small and modest man himself, it was a message endorsed

by the many tiny scraps and sketches that pre-empted his vast, expressive, calligraphic works, and by his commitment to numerous graphic projects in addition to his better-known paintings and sculptures. His gallerist, Daniel Lelong, spoke of the difficulty in reconciling this silver-haired sage, ever a youthful twinkle in his eye, with the extraordinary energy of his output: ‘He paints with his entire self, with all his soul, with all he’s got, and ultimately with great violence. And this very quiet man, in front of the canvas, becomes a demiurge.’

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Original Poster

Marc chagall

Moses and the Tablets of the Law From his intuitive understanding of the marriage of text and image to his generosity of artistic spirit, Chagall brought to his posters, in the final words of Charles Sorlier, ‘a largesse of colour and joy; thanks to him, the walls of the whole world sing.’

Marc Chagall was, by Sorlier’s estimation, ‘destined’ to make posters. The great Russian Jew who brought folkloric life to the Parisian avant-garde, Chagall was in his mid-sixties by the time he first took on the challenge of designing his own exhibition posters. It was Sorlier, lithographer-in-chief at the esteemed Mourlot Frères atelier, who first taught Chagall the lithographic process in the early 1950s. Having produced numerous etchings across the 1920s and ‘30s, Chagall was already a naturally dexterous printmaker, but in lithography he found a rejuvenating lease of life: ‘When I held in my hand a lithographic stone. . . I believed I was touching a talisman.

It seemed to me that I could entrust them with all my joys, all my sorrows...It is possible to draw well and yet not possess in one’s fingers the lithographic touch; this is a matter of feeling.’

Within weeks of working together, Chagall and Sorlier developed a close bond that would last to the end of the artist’s life. Despite coming to lithography in his twilight years, in his output he was as sprightly as ever, producing over eighty posters in the last two decades of his life.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Chagall was adamant that he be as involved in their production as possible, rather than devolving their design to the studio. After hand-colouring proofs with gouache or watercolour, Chagall would meticulously test mixes of ink with Sorlier until an exact match

could be produced. Unusually, he also demanded total transparency of authorship; in those instances where Sorlier had prepared the lithographic block according to Chagall’s instructions, the artist insisted that Sorlier’s name accompany his own on the plate.

Twenty-one of Chagall’s posters were engraved wholly by the artist himself, of which Moses and the Tablets of the Law is one such example. Published in 1962 when Chagall was seventy-five years old, the image is as vital as those of his youth. Though the design of Moses receiving the commandments was entirely original, produced specifically for this exhibition poster, it was a subject Chagall had tackled before in various religious projects. From its spirited black line to its radiant touches of yellow and blue, Chagall lends the scene a commanding sense of the epic. The ‘talismanic’ power he felt emanate from the lithographic block is expressively echoed in the tablets handed down from heaven, the mirrored hands of God and Moses beautifully illustrating their divine connection through the stone.

Of the many posters Chagall produced, this must have been a favourite: once a lithograph has been editioned, the block is usually scrubbed clean to prevent further printing, but in this instance Chagall chose to keep the black plate to rework into a separate print – a highly unusual decision which he was to repeat only once in his twenty years of poster design.

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. . . everyone likes a cup of tea

tea and ceramics In his seminal 1975 publication The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, Warhol wrote of Coca-Cola as an icon of consumer egalitarianism: ‘What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.’

Had Warhol been British, he might well have said the same thing of tea. Granted, a milky brew in a greasy spoon isn’t quite the same thing as high tea in Windsor Castle – unlike coke, not all tea is created equal – still, the analogy stands in that tea has become, in the UK at least, something of a common denominator, a cultural leveller in a society that is still plagued with notions of class: after all, everyone likes a cup of tea (and those heathens that don’t may show themselves the door).

Like the Japanese, whose national character seems both teasingly similar and yet so wildly different to our own, we have constructed a sense of ritual around our love of tea. Unlike the Japanese, for whom this ritual is one of quasi-spiritual significance, a philosophical exploration of the impermanence of life and the natural world, facilitated through a series of strictly decorous movements both free and exact, ours is founded on the basic premise that almost all human interaction, social or otherwise, is innately and intensely awkward. Whether it’s a plumber stuck small-talking with you as he fixes a leak or a visiting aunt and uncle silently ensconced on the sofa, the instinctive ice-breaker is always the same: ‘Er, would you like a cup of tea?’

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Of the many handmade ceramic forms that can enrich one’s day-to-day life, few are as simultaneously humble and enhancing as a handmade mug for tea

It’s easy to trivialise the British recourse to hot drinks as a cure-all – and that’s another thing we love to do: to parody our ludicrous love of tea, much as we do our preoccupation with the weather – but it speaks to a welcoming spirit of open hearth and home that seems more important than ever at a time when closed-mindedness tells us to shut the door on those more hard-pressed than ourselves. In ancient Greek culture, hospitality was thought a sacred obligation, a twoway relationship in which host and guest were bound through mutual respect. So important were its codes, that it was a bond overseen and guaranteed by almighty Zeus, father of the gods. Though I’d like to think we have a somewhat more relaxed attitude to hosting, its fundamental values of kindness, generosity, and compassion are – like a good cuppa – to be treasured.

So, to tea, and what to serve it in. Of the many handmade ceramic forms that can enrich one’s day-to-day life, few are as simultaneously humble and enhancing as a handmade mug for tea. At last count, there were more than thirty in my own cupboards, over half of them by one potter alone (the brilliant Anne Mette Hjortshøj, in case you were wondering). Despite seeming an absurd number to own, I have found that, without consciously trying, each and every one is nonetheless used on a regular basis. There is a simple joy in the daily rotation from cup to cup; slight variations in the pull of a handle that settles the vessel in the nook of a finger, or the crest of a lip that matches your own. Even the subtlest changes affect the way I might nestle a mug into my left hand: one day a cup nurtures and warms, begs to be cradled; the next, a new arrival demands posture and

attention, a stiff brew to blow away the cobwebs of a restless night. With time, certain cups seem even to change the very taste of the tea – something even those who do not use handmade pottery can attest to, when drinking from a favourite mug.

If hand-thrown cups bring a kind of gentle satisfaction to the daily routine of morning and afternoon tea, a handmade teapot elevates those moments to something deliciously special. Teapots are a favourite among potters: their assembled components, from handle to spout, lid, and body, offer endless reinvention and combination, a sense of creative scope that makers like Walter Keeler have particularly singled out. Something of their subsequent peculiarity – their unique arrangement of assorted elements – lends their use a wonderful feeling of occasion (even if the occasion is just a pot for two on a rainy afternoon). For their makers, they can also be a source of eternal frustration: the teapot requires not just throwing aptitude but an understanding of physics, a balancing of weights and angles that allows hot water to pour with ease and without spattering over an unsuspecting user. It is a delicacy of engineering that even most industrially produced teapots lack; to find a good ‘pourer’ is a rarity, and a sign of true craftsmanship.

Tea and fine ceramics have gone hand-in-hand ever since they first arrived on our shores some four hundred years ago, the Chinese leaves packed tightly into the imported teapots that so informed our British development of form in the centuries that followed. They remain one of the most accessible luxuries available to us – with the company of a friend, we could do worse than to indulge in it.

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Staff Pick The menagerie of characters in Sid Burnard’s ‘Curious Kingdom’, to use his choice of phrase, immediately puts you at ease. I dare you to look at ‘O.A.P.’ or ‘Jaws Truly’ and not even crack some semblance of a smile. Their playful postures and personalities are all characterised with such entertaining names, from ‘Fiddler on the Roof ’ to ‘Fowl Play’ and the tongue-in-cheek ‘Pole Dancer ’. A conversation with Sid is much the same as engaging with his work; you can’t help but smile.

I’d been tasked with interviewing this assembler of birds and beasts for our upcoming Winter magazine. Before chatting with Sid, I spent some time reading his published diaries and watching Goldmark’s feature film to get a sense of the man behind the work (I recommend you do the same). Two things struck me. First, the particular way that he talks about his creatures. He isn’t simply making a bird by combining two

The Curious Kingdom of

sid burnard pieces of wood; he’s committing a head to a body. None of the pieces that make up Sid’s various constructions are altered: they remain as found from one of his many days spent beachcombing along the west-Wales coast. Pieces of driftwood and all manner of manmade objects are to Sid exceedingly valuable: ‘It is my treasure, my currency and it’s precious.’ Sid introduces pieces to each other, as if they are long-lost friends. They ‘meet’, become a part of a greater whole and live out the rest of their days together. What began often as litter is transformed, all thanks to his wonderful imagination.

Yet, these creations are produced by a man who gives the sea more credit for his ingenious work than he does himself.

Sid’s humility was palpable before our conversation even began. When asked if he views himself as an artist he replied: ‘I see myself as an interpreter of found objects. The true artists are the elements: sea, wind and sun…I certainly have a great sense of wonder at the natural world. I’m a celebrator who likes to share.’ Upon learning the lengths that he often goes to in creating his pieces, one wonders if perhaps he is underselling himself…

At some point during the beginning of our conversation I remark how his creations are, ‘So full of humour, and so easily achieved’. As soon as the phrase left my mouth I realised that ‘easy’ was entirely the wrong choice of word. Sid has beachcombed his entire life; it is something he determines is deeply rooted in his DNA. It seems idyllic, walking along the coast with his family, collecting his ‘treasure’ of driftwood and abandoned junk. But Sid beach-combs whatever the weather, lugging heavy pieces of freshly landed driftwood over considerable distances. As he points out, ‘windswept, rainlashed beaches are not for the faint-hearted.’ Not one to take himself too seriously, he jokes that it’s a good thing he is short in stature: he doesn’t have so far to fall when carrying his prizes. At 69 his energy and enthusiasm for his work is clearly unwavering: ‘As long as I can bend down to pick things up then I can keep going.’

The assembling of creatures that follows is by no means an easier task. This is perhaps due to the pressure that Sid

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puts himself under. He currently has a collection of at least two thousand beach-combed items and, ‘Each and every one is not just rare, it is unique.’ He believes he, ‘Owes it to each item, organic or man-made, to bring his imagination and very best efforts to interpreting them.’ Thus, he remains slow to use his material, ensuring it is used to the very best of his ability. Conscious not to ruin any of his treasure he uses only a hefty drill and iron rods in order to construct his imaginings.

There is no second chance: drilling a hole in slightly the wrong position can completely change how one piece balances on another, thus throwing off the whole composition. This isn’t a precise art, and Sid does it all by eye, estimating to the best of his ability; then, as he declares, it is a matter of sheer hope, a leap of faith. He laughs, and explains that he always says, ‘When people buy a piece of mine they’re buying a little bit of my pain too!’ When asked if it had become any easier over time he answers, ‘If anything it’s harder.’ He likes to challenge himself, push himself further because it is ultimately more rewarding. I couldn’t have been more wrong when I suggested his efforts were ‘easily achieved.’

Despite the intensity with which he works, fun and a sense of humour are essential. With nature as his inspiration his imagination knows no bounds because, as he points out, ‘No matter how extreme or far-fetched a creature emerging from my ‘Curious Kingdom’ might appear, nature will have conceived a far more outrageous character’. He never sets out with a particular character in mind; rather ‘the material leads me’: ‘I'm a great observer of people and animals.

Situations can be pure theatre. Postures, stances, gesticulations, faces and emotions reveal so much. These natural performances have been subconsciously stored up in my memory, ready to surface into compositions.’ Take for example, the ‘Yellow Booted Dumbstruck’, a bird that came into being thanks to all three members of the Burnard family - a team effort. Each piece, from ridiculous plastic rake feet to protuberant wire-cutter beak, has contributed to creating a whimsical whole, so aptly named, as only Sid can, that all you can do is grin. If he can make people smile, he says, then he is satisfied.

The very personal nature of Sid’s work means that, ‘Every piece that leaves is missed. They include a part of me. Some take my breath away. If I meet them at a later date, I always smile; recall where or when we first met, and how exhausting

and difficult it was to join the parts. And they seem to thank me for finding them a new home.’ Sid has some 50 new pieces ready to be rehomed, all of which will surely be a product of his care, humour and attention. His skill makes disparate pieces appear as if they were destined to be together, so much so that it may seem effortless. But, whenever you are looking at a creature from Sid Burnard’s ‘Curious Kingdom’ remember that they are no accident: they exist because of their maker and his extraordinary commitment to his craft.

Polly Bagshaw

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Cover: Rutland Water.

Photograph Š Jay Goldmark.

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