WINTER 2017
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g winter 2017
Contents 2
Julian Opie
6
Buncheong Pottery of Korea
8
Albrecht Dürer - Small Passion
12 Ceri Richards - Lion Hunt 14 Sir John Tenniel’s Alice 18 The Humble Jug 24 William Scott - Blue Nude 26 Wifredo Lam 30 German Expressionism 36 R B Kitaj - In Our Time
Our new Winter catalogue is a well-travelled affair: in Europe, we skip from first edition Dürer engravings to rough hewn German Expressionist woodcuts; from there, the pochoir ateliers of Jazz-age Paris are just a page-turn away, while more adventurous readers may enjoy a surreal sojourn in the Cuban hothouse of Wifredo Lam. Wherever takes your fancy, we wish you a pleasant read and a Happy New Year.
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42 Augustus John by Jacob Epstein 44 Patrick Caulfield 48 Leonard Rosoman - Midlothian 50 Pochoir - Hand-Coloured Through Stencils 56 Anne Mette Hjortshøj 58 Christopher P Wood
Orange Street
Words by Max Waterhouse
Uppingham
except page 6 © Phil Rogers
Rutland
and page 56 © David Whiting
LE15 9SQ
Photographs by Jay Goldmark & Christian Soro
01572 821424
Design by Porter/Goldmark, December 2016
goldmarkart.com
ISBN 978-1-909167-40-7
julian opie
Twenty-six Portraits
Born in London in 1958, Opie studied art at Goldsmiths College in the early 1980s. This was a time of fragmentation in the art world: truth and originality were deemed dead and gone, subsumed by a pervasive anti-establishment fervour. Though he began his career at Goldsmiths locked away in life-drawing classes, Opie recalls how the restless atmosphere soon propelled him into sculpture, film, model-making, and the blending of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture: Our attitude towards art history, towards schools, styles, and “isms”, was quite aggressive. We wanted to manipulate them, to use whatever style we wished. A key technique that informed much of Opie’s work, and which is embodied in these screenprints, was the reduction of recognisable features to their barest and most essential. In early experimental animated drawings he had manipulated art like a lens, taking the individual features of a profile and subjecting them to an art-historical style: It was just a portrait of someone’s head but I turned it into an inventory of styles; so it would first be sharp-edged and spiky, like a Futurist portrait, and then it went soft and classical, and
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There are few places where Julian Opie’s art has not been: giant billboards; LED screens in airport waiting lounges; CD covers; road signs. He paints on steel sculptures. His line drawings become animations, become advertisements, become full-scale models and monumental officeblock illustrations. Traditional art boundaries mean little in his world of minimal faces and spaces.
then it would become broken up and Cubist. In these later portraits, each face is reduced to only the most easily identified of aspects – a hairline, or a brow – until the impact of the image becomes immediate. The result is almost paradoxical: on the one hand, each portrait is distinct and distinguishable from the next, capturing the essence of its subject; yet on the other, elements are stripped back to the extent that these images are matter-of-fact, universal. They are pictures of a specific somebody; and yet they could almost be pictures of anybody. What has characterised Opie’s work, from reactionary student days to these 21st century prints, has been openness and access, both in the image and the context in which it is placed. His best-known work, the cover art for Blur’s seminal Greatest Hits album in 2000, was distributed and viewed on millions upon millions of CD cases; those same band member portraits now also reside in the National Portrait Gallery. These screenprinted faces relay the same message, from generic outlines to the most particular of expressions: his is an art for all people and all places.
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Exhibition March 2017
Phil Rogers Painting with metal
Buncheong Pottery of Korea
Almost from the very beginning of my professional life as a potter I have been drawn toward Korean ceramics. Buncheong is a contemporary term that describes a dynamic, bold and strangely modern ceramic type that was made throughout the Korean peninsula during the first 200 years of the Joson Dynasty (roughly the 15th and 16th centuries). Buncheong has had a profound and lasting influence on Western studio pottery, largely because of the impact it had upon the works of Hamada Shoji and Bernard Leach. Both potters experienced the pottery being made in Korea at the turn of the 20th century while visiting with their Japanese mentor Yanagi Soetsu. The anonymous, inexpensive, utilitarian pots appealed to Yanagi who espoused similar thoughts about craft versus industrialisation as William Morris. Yanagi coined the word Mingei to describe just these kinds of handmade objects. At that time the pots they would have seen would probably have been Korean Ongii but the same unpretentious swiftness in the making was part of the Ongii tradition also. Leach and Hamada would have seen Buncheong in the museums in Seoul although by that time much of the best Buncheong had been looted to Japan. Japanese pottery in the broadest sense has been widely influenced by Buncheong. Japanese tea masters hugely admired Korean Buncheong rice bowls for their unassuming and modest character and saw them as perfectly suited to the tea ceremony. Korean potters who settled in Japan gave birth to the Karatsu kilns, whose pots owe a great deal to the decorative tradition. Buncheong pottery is typified by three elements in its manufacture: dark, iron-rich clay; white slip; and a clear,
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sometimes grey or pale green glaze. The slip was applied in a variety of ways: it could be brushed on with a coarse brush (Gyual or, as it came to be known in Japan, Hakeme); pots could be dipped to achieve an overall coating; or slip could be inlaid in stamped patterns and the impressed textures of cord rolled over the clay surface. Buncheong tended to be regionalised in its decorative treatments. One particular area was the spiritually important mountain region of Geryonsan, near the city of Taejon. Here, Buncheong with patterns painted in iron pigment became a signature decoration, drawn with exuberance and an unfettered, spontaneous approach. Stylised drawings of birds and animals, flowers, trees and plants adorned the pots with an innate sense of composition and placement. For me, of all the Buncheong made, these pieces are my favourite and in turn have inspired the new work illustrated here. I feel an extra special connection to the pots from Geryonsan as it was here, with the mountain in full view from my window, that I lived and made pots back in 1997. In making my new pieces I have tried to take the three important elements of Buncheong - dark clay, white slip, and a clear glaze - and devise my own vocabulary of iron painted motif. Those who know my work will appreciate that this is something of a departure from the decorative treatments I usually employ, working as I do into the surface of the clay. I haven’t left those techniques behind; but I hope this new approach will sit comfortably alongside as a further expression of my way with clay.
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Phil Rogers, 2016
These pots will be featured in Phil Rogers’ March 2017 exhibition.
Exhibition December/January
alBrecHt dÜrer small passion From the expulsion of man from the Garden of Eden to the final judgment of an ascendant Christ, Albrecht Dürer’s breathtaking Small Passion, widely considered the old master’s magnum opus, has moved viewers for over half a millennium.
The Nailing to the Cross
First Edition
Born in 1471 in the wealthy, commercial city of Nuremberg, Dürer apprenticed as a painter and printmaker before setting out on his own in the late 1490s. Travelling across Europe, he quickly garnered a reputation for his immense talents and natural charisma, becoming increasingly popular in Italy where he had lived and worked in the bustling town of Venice. By the 1500s, Dürer had turned his hand from oils to printmaking. Plagued by the pressures his newfound celebrity had placed on painting canvases, the grainy texture of printed ink and the economy of the press drew the artist to wood engraving. Cheap to produce and easily distributed, the woodcut lent itself to popular imagery that could be disseminated throughout the masses. Dürer’s first major project, and today his most celebrated, was the Small Passion, a suite of images depicting the final days of Christ’s life. The story that culminated in Jesus’ ascension was familiar territory for the artist, for whom there existed an already established iconography of the tale of the betrayal, crucifixion, and resurrection. Dürer’s 36 images, however, with their simple, direct compositions underscored by complex gradations of tone and shadow, offered a poignant innovation of this well-worn theme: beginning with the traditional fall of Adam and Eve, Dürer’s designs intersperse Biblical passages from Christ’s early years, anticipating the coming sacrificial saviour and lending the series a deeper emotional narrative.
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The Fall of Man, (actual size)
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Particular scenes stand out for their pathos and arrangement: the close embrace of The Fall ofMan, delicately subverted as Eve, eyes turned toward her companion, offers the outstretched apple to Satan’s coiled serpent; the pain of The Agony in the Garden, in which Dürer walks a gossamer-thin line between overwrought sentimentality and rigid stoicism; and The Betrayal of Christ, where brooding sky, clamouring guards, and the wrestling figures of Peter and the soldier frame the tortured intimacy of the Judas kiss. Completed between 1509 and ’11, the engraving of the final set of images was undertaken by master craftsmen in Dürer’s workshop, apprentices working under the constant and fastidiously strict supervision of the artist himself. Many of the engravers wrote in later life of the ‘pitiless tyranny’ suffered at the hands of their master, who insisted on perfection in every meticulous cut of the block. The young Dürer had himself trained as a wood engraver, a practice in which he became so capable that he frequently overlooked or dismissed the very real limitations of the medium: wood is a notoriously uncooperative material to work with, its natural grain biting hard against the V of the engraver’s tool. Under Dürer’s punishing watch, and with his occasional contribution to the cutting, the translation of each image from pen drawing to woodblock was immaculate. Placed side by side, the printed reproduction is as near a facsimile of the original as could be conceived. First published as a complete set in 1511, the Small Passion became a huge success, prompting widespread distribution throughout pre-Lutheran Germany and propelling Dürer’s reputation into the latterday spotlight. A religious, artistic tour-de-force, the suite demonstrated the tremendous physical and mental energy of its author, as described by the artist and critic Nigel Lambourne: . . . the confidence and swaggering vigour of the cut is sustained in every illustration . . . when the variable and often indifferent quality of the woodblock is fully appreciated, these prints
may then be properly seen as unique technical masterpieces. Exceptionally composed and exquisitely detailed, it is little wonder that Dürer’s Small Passion captured the heart of 16th century Europe, and that subsequent editions have been produced right up until the early years of the 1900s. With the deterioration of the original blocks, few later reproductions can match the first edition for quality of image and inking. Prints as early as these remain extremely scarce; this collection offers a profoundly rare opportunity to own one of the old world’s greatest printing accomplishments.
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In the contorted composition of Ceri Richards’ Lion Hunt paintings, the major theme of his later work – the violent beauty of the natural world – was brought into sharp focus. A Welsh artist whose reputation has for years been unfairly overlooked in favour of contemporaries Francis Bacon and Graham Sutherland, Richards was nonetheless one of Britain’s most talented 20th century artists. His eclectic range of work, which drew upon his early days as a Surrealist, the abstract experimentation of the pre and post-war period, and his lifelong love of poetry and music, defied straightforward classification by critics, undoubtedly to the detriment of his status in the art world.
ceri richards lion hunt
of writhing lions and horseback hunters are blurred and blended together. To the left, a lion rears its twisted head towards a plunging sword, the crumpled body of a hunter held beneath its claws; below, a second lion savages a fellow hunter’s mount, its gnarled head and shoulders near indiscernible from intertwined prey. As the critic Mel Gooding wrote in his monograph on the artist, Richards’ masterful reinvention of the original material put the emphasis on the cyclical nature of the hunt, in which man and beast become symbolic of life and death: For all its potential as a subject for virtuosic variations, it was, of course, ‘the ferocity of the subject’ that had captured his imagination: the ‘Lion Hunt’ paintings are essentially workings of the perennial Richards theme of the perpetual dynamism and violence of the natural world. In its whirling, spiral composition, set off against the vivid hum of tangerine earth and cerulean sky, Richards’ Lion Hunt represents the artist at the peak of innovation, befitting his nickname amongst contemporaries as ‘the painter’s painter’. With original exhibition labels from the Marlborough (where it was first shown in 1965) and New London galleries, its provenance matches its power too.
Throughout the latter half of his career, Richards returned frequently to the idea of new ‘versions’ of paintings, improvising on and reinventing the compositions of former masters (a process he had inherited from his idol Picasso). In the Lion Hunt series of canvases, Richards looked back to Delacroix’s famed La Chasse aux Lions, itself a reinterpretation of a painting by Rubens. Self-consciously adapting an image that was itself a ‘version’ (and of which Delacroix had made numerous variations), Richards was reinvigorating a longstanding tradition in European painting that traced its roots to the Renaissance and beyond. In Richards’ new version, first begun in 1962, the busy brutality of Delacroix’s original is further confused as the forms La Chasse aux Lions by Delacroix
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sir j0hn tenniel’s alice in Wonderland
& Through the Looking-Glass
Iconic images of wit and wonder, Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the LookingGlass are as magical today as when first published a little over 150 years ago. An amateur artist himself (and, by all accounts, something of an egoist), Lewis Carroll had originally intended for his own illustrations to accompany his extraordinary text of Alice’s tales, and it was not without delicate persuasion by a friend of the author of his artistic deficiency that Carroll sought out a professional draughtsman. John Tenniel, lead cartoonist for the politically mischievous Punch magazine, had already established a reputation for classical precision in his sketches, in which humour, composition, and execution of the image were treated with equal respect. A keen reader of the publication, Carroll knew his work well, and before long the pair had agreed on a collaboration. Initially, their working relationship was fractious. A stubborn Tenniel found Carroll’s constant interjections during the first drafts
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of the illustrations tiresome and, as Carroll later revealed in correspondence, was unafraid of saying so: Mr Tenniel is the only artist, who has drawn for me, who resolutely refused to use a model, and declared he has no more needed one than I should need a multiplication-table to work on a mathematical problem! Eventually, and despite Carroll’s insinuations, Tenniel completed the 92 images to accompany both the author’s texts, drawn directly onto their boxwood printing blocks. So involved was the artist with the project that, upon its momentous completion, he seemed drained of further inspiration. Tenniel undertook almost no work in the subsequent years that led to his celebrated knighthood (the first for an illustrator) in 1893. When asked by Carroll to aid in a second project, he declined with the revelation that …It is a curious fact that with ‘Looking-Glass’ the faculty of making drawings for book illustrations departed from me… I have done nothing in that direction since.
The cutting of the blocks was undertaken by the ubiquitous Dalziel brothers, master engravers of the Victorian age who had worked alongside some of the 19th century’s greatest artists, notably the Pre-Raphaelites Millais, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones. Supervising their workshop of skilled apprentices, the Dalziels oversaw the preparation of the blocks with Tenniel himself, whose exacting standards demanded subtleties of line and nuances of shading in every facsimile before giving his consent to print. So fine were Tenniel’s lines, however, that the engravers feared the blocks would deteriorate before the large-scale printing of the books had been completed. They advised instead that these should act as the masters from which electrotype copies could be produced. These metal blocks would withstand greater numbers of printing runs, but at a subsequent loss of definition and tone. Exactly what happened to the original blocks in the decades between their casting and eventual rediscovery remains a mystery. Fortuitously, they appear to have been closely guarded, even to the point of relocating the blocks from London to a Suffolk print atelier throughout the Second World War, avoiding their potential destruction in the bombing runs of the Blitz. Of the original 92 woodblocks, only one has been lost: Alice and the Dodo, the sole illustration of this later set to have been produced from the surviving electrotype copy. How apt that it was the Dodo, of all the characters in Carroll’s menagerie, that was destined to disappear. In 1985 the original wood engraved blocks were found in deed boxes belonging to Macmillan, Carroll’s publishers, secured there by the publishing house’s postwar Art Director (whose name, by yet more bizarre coincidence, was also Lewis Carroll). Jonathan Stephenson of the renowned Rocket Press was awarded the prestigious task of printing 250 sets from them, the very first time that they had ever been used besides their initial proofing. The edition would be distributed worldwide and no further sets commissioned.
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Cut with pristinely clean, clear lines, the sheer quality of the wood engraving passed seamlessly from block to paper. As Dr Leo John de Freitas, leading authority on book illustration, has noted, the partnership between Tenniel and the Dalziel studio produced a definitive feat of printmaking: In the tremulously - as in the overtly - engraved passages of the Alice blocks there is a sculptural quality in which the refined craft skills that turned the beautiful sections of highly polished boxwood into fine printing surfaces can be experienced…These blocks are a delight to examine… Tenniel’s greatest and most enduring achievement, the Rocket Press’ reproduction of these illustrations from the original woodblocks restores a richness and clarity unachievable in the electrotype prints. Having stood the ultimate test of time, ranking even to this day among the world’s best-known children’s images, they will no doubt continue to delight for generations to come.
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Anne Mette Hjortshøj
the humble jug
One of the simplest ceramic forms with the most basic of uses
Jean-Nicolas Gérard
The study of functional ceramics can throw up many surprises. Objects we take for granted in their daily use – the simple mug, or a customary teapot – have, over the hundreds of years of their existence, gone through innumerable permutations, their forms still being reinvented today. The more we look, the further we go back, the more changes we see to these basic thrown forms. To take a single shape and trace its roots can prove an endless process of discovery. So, to the humble jug. One of the simplest ceramic forms with the most basic of uses, requiring only room for its liquid contents, a handle with which to pour, and a neck and lip that allow water or wine to flow unimpeded from within. With examples from the ancient Minoan and Chinese civilisations dating as far as 2000 BC and beyond, the jug remains one of the very oldest of pottery vessels. Its origins no doubt reach further back to our very first expansion into the world of clay. With ease of form and function comes flexibility in interpretation, and the jug has seen its fair share of innovations over time, both within and between individual cultures. Ancient Greek and Etruscan oenochoai – terracotta jugs used to serve mixed wine at evening symposia – were frequently decorated with intricate geometric patterns or scenes from epic poems, myths, and folkloric tales. Greater volume in the jug’s body, with swollen, rounded belly, gave the potter more space and scope to show off his decoration. These images would often provide a focal point for dinner guests to discuss, as well as a source of admiration and amusement for their owners.
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Nic Collins
By contrast, the medieval European Baluster jug – so named for its resemblance of a curved balustrade – is almost sculptural in its tall, rising form, with some jugs stretching to three or four feet high. Often used to carry ale or transport cooking water for kitchens, its height was more economical, preventing beer from going flat and taking up less room in cramped public houses. At the time of their conception, the shapes of these hand thrown forms, as with those of any latter-day potters, were chosen for purpose: for efficiency of use, and regard to display. Today, when such pieces are seldom used, found more often in glass cabinets than Mediterranean villas or on flagstone floors, they constitute a catalogue of forms with distinct characters derived from function and design: soaring and squat; intricate and unadorned; rustic and refined. As with almost any form in pottery, the language we use to describe jugs is deeply rooted in metaphor, particularly that of the human body: we look to where the lip meets the neck, the neck the shoulder, the billowing belly down to the foot at the base. There is a tendency amongst makers and critics alike to think and speak of the jug as a ‘feminine’ shape (something Picasso understood intuitively when he began to produce ceramic jugs and vases with painted nude models voluptuously mapping the curves of their clay form). Something of their natural rhythm and silhouette, from the upper rim that curves down into the neck only to swoop out and down once again in the curvature of the belly, is thought to recall the ‘natural’ hour-glass curve of the female figure. In truth, the malleability of the jug form and its adaptive line offers a plethora of personalities available to the thrower, from feminine to masculine and everything in-between. Anne Mette Hjortshøj’s tall-necked jugs, complete with extended throats to aid the flow of water, carry the air of a stately bird of paradise, its beak held proudly aloft; Lisa Hammond’s jugs are given an exaggerated lean, coaxed backward into their characteristic pose, that lends them a delicate sense of motion; and in the Devon type jugs of Nic Collins, harking back to the traditional, rounded shapes of the 18th century, full, graceful form is combined with the scorching effects of anagama wood firing to make work that is at once elegant, earthy, and daringly executed. It speaks to the universality of this type of pottery, and the power of the specific forms devised by potters of the past, that today’s jug makers still look back for inspiration, referring to shapes so typical of their time. From German salt-glazed Bellarmine bottles to earthenware harvest jugs, covered in honey-yellow slip and sgraffito motifs, few contemporary potters working in functional ceramics can ignore their forebears’ strength of profile. Though the jug has a complex history, filled with a multitude of arrangements of shape still reincarnated to this day, it has at heart retained a simple form made for a simple function: to aid in drinking, feasting, dancing and merriment. The jug is the pot of sharing and festivity; long may it stay on our tables.
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Lisa Hammond
Staff Pick
william scott blue nude When you work every day with beautiful things, it can take time to notice new pieces. On occasion something a little quieter, a little less obvious, makes its way through the gallery doors. So it was with William Scott’s ethereal Blue Nude. Born in Scotland in 1913, Scott is today celebrated for his momentous still lifes and abstract paintings of the early 1950s and beyond. Though principally known for his non-figurative work, the human form – and especially the female nude – remained a recurring interest throughout his career, taking centre stage in this screenprint and the sketches from which it originated. Blue Nude began life as part of a project organised between Scott and the writer Edward Lucie-Smith in 1970. Scott was to produce a series of drawings of the female figure which would be accompanied by Smith’s erotic poetry. His model, an art student called Sondra Cohen, remembers being asked to wear bright mascara, the pair eventually settling upon the distinct cobalt shade in which her portraits were then completed. Rendered in as few strokes as possible – just three make up this pose – Scott’s work cannot help but recall the Nus Bleus of Matisse. It is his restraint that gives this image its delicate energy: dreamily floating
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beside Lucie-Smith’s text like an imagined fantasy, these few lines replicate the tentative discovery in the poetry he is illustrating. The viewer is encouraged to ‘fill in the gaps’, to imagine the fullness of the figure whose impression Scott paints. As the title of the series states, these are the outlines of A Girl Surveyed. In touch, Scott demonstrated the same attention to texture that had characterised his earlier paintings. The brushwork, with its gentle bleed of ink into paper, lends an otherwise austere outline softness and sensuality. Its dusty quality, almost powdered around the edge, echoes his model’s faintly sexual eye shadow. In its simplicity, this is an image where the smallest details enrich, where the line is palpable and the eye is made almost to feel the paper as much as see the suggested figure. It offers an experience for the senses, as well as the imagination. Scott once said of his own work that drawing for me is exploring, not explaining, containing geometry, sex, distortion not correction, forms pure and impure. I can think of few better examples of this explorative way than the tactile lines of Blue Nude.
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Max Waterhouse, Gallery Writer
wifredo lam Lam’s story is one shared by many of those caught between the inner circle and the periphery of influence that surrounded the giants of the 20th century art world - namely Picasso and Matisse - and whose legacies seemed forever cast under such far-looming shadows. Though an early disciple of their work, in truth Lam soon broke free of the shackles of imitation to paint images of his own intense, otherworldly vision. Only now, with a major retrospective currently on loan to the Tate, are the monster-gods of his creation being awoken from their slumber. In many ways, Lam’s multicultural life and career was the original archetype of the contemporary international artist. Born in Cuba in 1902 to an African Cuban mother with Spanish heritage and a Cantonese Chinese father, he travelled to Spain in the early 1920s after being awarded an arts scholarship by the local Havana Fine Arts School. From Madrid, where he fought against Franco’s forces, he made his way to the safety of Paris and Southern France, where he was adopted and nurtured by Picasso, Matisse, Miró, and the surrealist André Breton, before being thrust back to his homeland in 1941 in flight from the European advance of Nazi Germany. Though he remained in Cuba for only another ten years before leaving to establish a permanent studio in the Italian seaside resort of Albissola, he would return almost every year from the late 1970s onwards until his death in 1982. With such breadth of travel came equally widespread sources of
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It is telling that it has taken over a third of a century since the death of Cuba’s greatest artist in living memory, the shamanistic surrealist Wifredo Lam, for us to become alive once more to the power of his art.
inspiration. When the young Lam took his first step off the boat in Spain, he arrived a classically trained painter intent on becoming a portraitist in the tradition of the old master Velázquez. Later struck by the tragic loss of his first wife and son to tuberculosis, he was taken in by the heatwave building around the Civil War and the Republican resistance movement. Here he discovered the power of Goya, whose later works from the Black Paintings to the Disasters of War offered a narrative of nightmares, of strangeness and of suffering, mirrored and invigorated by Lam’s experiences of the current political upheaval. As the triumph of Fascism soon became a reality, and having sustained his own injuries in the conflict, Lam escaped to France in 1938, arriving in Paris with a written introduction to Picasso from an artist friend in Madrid. The friendship he developed with the great Spaniard, and the extraordinary company he kept, marked a pivotal point in Lam’s life as an artist. Though he had always been aware of the African customs that had embedded themselves in the religious and cultural institutions of Cuba, it was arguably Picasso who first brought the potency of his ancestral ‘primitive’ art to his attention: You should be proud of your people, he is said to have told Lam, pushing a hand-carved head mask into his hands. Your people made this. Those three years in France, between the Bohemian suburbs of Paris and the sun-baked port of Marseille, Lam spent as if in an
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artistic reverie, drinking red wine beneath the stars and painting late into the twilight hours. One might think such experiences, shared in such esteemed company of artists, writers, poets and thinkers, would spur him to greater heights in his work. In reality, so besotted was he with his mentors, so drunk with the pleasures of life, that he had little impetus to innovate. His work from this period, in truth, remains derivative of his great teachers. Though it offered so much, Lam’s period in France ultimately suffocated his art. It would take the shock of ejection from this daydream, alongside the diaspora of intellectuals who fled the war machines of Germany, and the sudden return home to inspire a new direction. It seems fitting that it was Havana, the place that first set Lam on his Odyssean voyage across the Atlantic, that became the catalyst for his best work. Picasso’s words had evidently stayed with him, as he revealed in an interview some years later: I refused to paint cha-cha-cha. I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country but by thoroughly expressing the Negro spirit, the beauty of the plastic art of the blacks. In this way I could act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters. Lam’s new style during this period, one which he sustained throughout the rest of his career, was wild and vital. It offered a syncretism between Surrealist dreamscapes and spiritual elements observed in the rites and rituals of Santería, a Cuban religion that mixes the mythic folk tales of West Africa with the fire and brimstone of Roman Catholicism. The resulting images burst forth from earlier experimentation, possessed by a power seeded in Lam’s homecoming and blasted out in exploding colour and form: bristling gods emerge from black jungles, surrounded by smiling, whooping, whirling diablitos cavorting around the voluptuous figures of feminine beasts. His work oozes with voodoo demon sexuality, conveyed in phallic spikes and hot shades of pink and orange. At the heart of this revitalisation was a desire to give strength to Cuba’s dispossessed: to the prostitutes forced to work on Havana’s prerevolutionary streets; to the African slaves who had had to smuggle their beliefs into the country under the veil of Catholic obeisance. His art rallied against Cuba’s history of racial inequality, abuse, and corruption. And though he remained an atheist from the late 1920s onwards, and left Cuba some eight years before Castro’s revolution, his faith in the vibrant, in the totemic, and in the ‘primitive’ never waned. My painting is an act of decolonization, he remarked: an act frightening, empowering, and deeply affecting. Lam died in Paris in 1982, having lived out his latter years from his studio in Northern Italy. It seems strange to think that in the thirty-five years since passed, work as emphatic and impactful as
his should have gone relatively unnoticed. His masterpiece, The Jungle, procured by MOMA in New York, was famously hung in the corridor to the museum bathrooms, hidden from view; painted on fragmented paper, it is now too fragile to move. As some commentators have suggested, his resurgence has perhaps come at a time when intercultural movement – between physical borders and intellectual ideas – is both more widespread than ever, and yet so fiercely attacked. A painter and printmaker of enormous energy, few artists of his generation can lay claim to images as enigmatic as his. As the art critic Jonathan Jones wrote of Lam’s work, reviewing the touring exhibition at the Tate, His art is the last tarot of surrealism and a tropical wonder of modern painting.
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Kurt Schwitters
german expressionism Whoever renders directly and authentically that which impels him to create is one of us. So began the manifesto of the German movement Die Brßcke, condensing to a single line the core essence of the Expressionist philosophy: to produce art of the emotions, of frankness and intensity of feeling, and of the deeply personal and spiritual. Emerging and evolving throughout the early 1900s right up to the interwar period and Hitler’s eventual ascent to power, German Expressionism was borne on a wave of resistance and reaction. Its members renounced the traditional values held in art institutions and society at large, and sought to establish an avant-garde movement that would cut a swathe through those elements of contemporary culture they saw as most destructive and damaging: the rise of the urban landscape and its mechanised industrialisation; the austerity and prudishness of state-sponsored art and religion; and, above all, the predominance of conventional representation in art and the ideology of realism.
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Richard Seewald
Though by the later years of Expressionism’s chronology it had come to encompass the work of a number of distinct groups, individual artists, and stylistic schisms, its birth is generally traced to that of two major movements: Die Brücke (‘The Bridge’) first convened in Dresden in 1905 and figureheaded by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff; and later, in 1911, Der Blaue Reiter, formed in Munich by Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and the young Paul Klee. Both groups traced back their key themes to the Sturm und Drang literature of the late 1700s and the Romantic movement that soon followed it. In Romanticism, the all-important primacy of the individual and the spiritual power of the natural world were set against the proprieties of Church and State, a struggle Die Brücke and Der Blau Reiter readily took up. Their members would retreat to the Bavarian Alps, depicting themselves in harmony with their uncorrupted surroundings as they bathed in lakes or lay naked on hillsides like old-world peasant shepherds. Though the cityscape - particularly that of Berlin - offered vibrant colour, promiscuity, and the sordid allure of sex, drink, and dancing, in the midst of Germany’s accelerated industrialisation urban life seemed noxious and alienating. Life in the city was intoxicating, in the most literal sense of the word; nature, by contrast, was pure, physically and spiritually. Through the symbolism of each movement’s name - the ‘Bridge’ and the ‘Blue Rider’ - the Expressionists sought a brighter future: a crossing to a better land; a lone horseman leaving society behind. At its core, Expressionism was concerned with emotion and the individual experience in opposition to accurate, literal, realistic representation. Confronted with a landscape or a portrait, Expressionist artists sought to depict their experience of and response to the subject more-so than the subject itself, holding a mirror to the soul rather than the source of the illustration. Their art came from within, and to express this more abstract, visualised approach they naturally turned to more abstract forms of expression. In colour, they joined the Fauvists in using rich, primal, often clashing tones to elicit a more base emotional response from the viewer. In form, subjects were exaggerated, simplified, and emboldened in designs that took inspiration from unusual sources, such as African and Oceanic folk art. And in subject matter, they sought imagery that would tap into and reflect our unrefined human element, our hopes, fears, feelings and desires wrought out in stylised rural landscapes, portraiture, in nudes both sensual and innocent, and in religious iconography.
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
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Erich Heckel
Among the many techniques and processes employed within German Expressionism - oil paintings, etchings, lithography, drypoint - perhaps their most iconic remain their woodcuts. Preferred especially by Kandinsky and the Brücke group, the woodcut offered a medium that in every element of its production reflected the ethos of the Expressionist movement. Images produced in wood had to be forcibly excised from the tough surface of the block, echoing the artist’s extraction and expression of his inner emotional response. With a natural grain that lent the printed impression
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a visible texture and often limited artists to a more simple, dynamic composition, woodcuts forced the printmaker to make the very most of the carved block. The resulting images retain a natural, rough hewn intensity due in great part to the limitations of the material. Their stark quality would often negate the need for colour, relying purely on the strength of compositional elements and highly contrasting black and white forms. Though the German Expressionist movements were born of an essentially optimistic ideal, a desire to revitalise the stale world of art academies and the bourgeoisie and offer a spiritual balance to the sight of mechanised factories, their experiences of the First World War and the subsequent economic and political turmoil forced an inevitable redirection in their art. With many young artists having actively participated in the war, either drafted to the frontline or as medical orderlies tending the horrifically wounded, the imagery of the war left an indelible mark. Depictions of the conflict turned gas attacks and machine-gunned victims into troops of nightmarish ghouls and grim reaper skeletons heralding a coming apocalypse. Death becomes a dominating figure, both as wartime undertaker and as postwar political allegory, embodying the unthinking generals who sent millions of young men to their graves and the corrupt politicians who exploited the unrest that followed. Artists such as Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Käthe Kollwitz, and especially George Grosz took the visceral, emotional energy of Expressionism and adapted it to this new social narrative through antiestablishment posters, print suites, and satirical caricatures at a time when politicians and the judiciary were increasingly eager to silence their commentary. It is difficult to escape the stifling grasp of many of these wartime works, and indeed a number of the most iconic have become almost emblematic of German Expressionism as the movement’s most remembered images. Yet at its roots, and what paved the way for the anger and cynicism that became so vital a cause in Germany’s postwar social disintegration, were the founding principles of the early Expressionists: art that championed strength as much as solace, sexuality as much as spirituality, the purity of nature and the imperfect beauty of the human condition, and that would defy the rigid mores of a highly conservative society. It was, in hindsight, a remarkably modern and liberal vision, and one that seems increasingly relevant in today’s unstable world.
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Heinrich Campendonck
Covers for a Small Library After the Life for the Most Part
The written word and the beautiful volumes in which it was delivered were a constant source of revelation for R. B. Kitaj. As his first New York show opened in 1965, the artist was interviewed by the local New York Times on the presence of books in his work: I’m not afraid of the word ‘literary’. I feel in good company. You might say that books have meant to me what trees mean to a landscapist . ..
r b kitaj In Our time Painter and printmaker of equal import, the American born Kitaj emerged as one of the most influential artists of his generation. Emigrating to England in the late 1950s, as an ex-serviceman he studied at Oxford University’s Ruskin School with support from the G. I. Bill before applying to the Royal College of Art alongside contemporaries David Hockney and Allen Jones. Kitaj’s attraction to printmaking was first sparked as a student, and in 1962 he was introduced to the commercial screenprinter Chris Prater, with whom he would produce his finest body of prints. A self-confessed bibliophile, books frequently provided the impetus for Kitaj’s work, their torn covers appearing in early collaged prints alongside photographic negatives and hand drawn designs. In 1969, Kitaj worked closely with Prater to produce his most important meditation on literature yet: the major screenprint suite In Our Time. Universally regarded as his graphic chef d’oeuvre, the project involved selecting 50 book covers for facsimile reproduction, each text being carefully chosen from the artist’s ever-expanding library. Ever since student days spent rifling through the shelves of 4th Avenue bookstores, books had held a
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special, talismanic worth for Kitaj, both as sources of education and inspiration and as physical artifacts. The final collection, whittled down from countless volumes, showcased works Kitaj considered significant for their literary contribution, the intensity of their reading experience, and their enduring aesthetic appeal. Certain texts were remembered as fundamental to his personal maturation, as in Partisan Review, whose reproduction came to represent my soupcan, my Liz, my electric chair…a relic, as those are for someone else, but my own relic…; others became the conduits of intimate ideas and experiences, transporting us to Kitaj’s encounter with the text and their visual draw: I chose this cover because of its dark warm grey color and frail wisp of faded yellow title – transition, but there was much more to it… It’s like opening the tender, brittle pages of my book of life… As I fondle this issue, the spirit of 1927 Paris drives me crazy…to me [it] is pure magic. At the suggestion of the New Statesmen art critic Robert Melville, Kitaj appended the series title with After the Life for the Most Part. In the context of the idea of a book as ‘muse’ or ‘model’, the additional subtitle brought with it a number of associations: of literary works as the subjects of ‘life’ drawings or ‘still lifes’, paradoxically ‘living’ objects with a compositional and historical presence; but also, perhaps more importantly, of the life inspired and affected by their influence. The volumes chosen in the final edition were not just seminal works, formative in Kitaj’s development: these were intersections in his life, literal ‘chapters’ from his past, vessels carrying memories intellectual and visual in the tactile signposts of each book’s tattered edges, its waxed cloth bindings and water stains, weathered
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dust jackets and well-thumbed pages. In later years, Kitaj returned to In Our Time, reflecting anew on the strength of the series and what each volume now meant to him: Ezra Pound’s How To Read, the bastard antiSemite who was a cultural pathfinder of my unschooled youth; or China of To-day, an odd bird bought just for the look of it (a profound oblong of green) and its aura – which changes its own psychological, political resonance with the passing years. One particular account, of the cover of a book of plays by Euguene O’Neill, reveals just how viscerally such interactions were felt as he revisited his adolescence as a merchant sailor on a Norwegian freighter: This print represents a babble of remembrance: cheap, lonely Manhattan rooms while waiting for ships at union halls, the singular freedom of escape down to the sea in somehow unreal ships – ghostlike American merchantmen which would soon disappear, the transient shipboard comradery of men who would never see each other again after maybe one or two voyages, first sex in a brothel archipelago which would determine one’s whole life in its romance of the damned… Oh, there’s so much left after 40 years…not least dreaming of art, in the bow, straining to see ahead under the moon of the misbegotten on the 8 to 12 watch. In their simple power of replication, in the naked presentation of each time-worn jacket, Kitaj’s prints constitute a powerful document, a diary crystallising moments of social change and the changes within his own life. They penetrate to the core of our appreciation of books, as tangible objects as much as works of literature. This is a series that, through its unseen histories and implicit meanings, represents a remarkably personal vision of an age: of Kitaj’s time, as well as our own.
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augustus john by jacob epstein With hair swept back like the mane of a lion, Jacob Epstein’s heroic bust of the devilishly charismatic Augustus John captured his ragged likeness better than any other portrait.
Epstein, the New Yorker who arrived in England from Paris in 1905 and set the proverbial cat amongst the pigeons of British sculpture, had known John since his arrival. By 1916, both figures had cultivated reputations of controversy: Epstein, for his sexually explicit and ‘Primitivist’ style of carving; John, for his immense drawing talents, bohemian dress, and sheer force of personality. For a sculptor whose visionary public commissions had been summarily covered in tarpaulin, coated in tar, and hacked at by offended ladies with umbrellas, John seemed the perfect subject for a bust. Parttime Romani and full-time brawler, he could be found alternately in calico shirts and paint-crusted overcoats or in rakish dandy
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garb, complete with well-groomed beard, fine tailored suits, and a jaunty felt hat. Augustus John was himself a famously argumentative portraitist, his sessions fraught with tension. Often he would manipulate models into ungainly poses as he attacked the canvas, his sittings frequently punctuated by harsh barks and outbursts as sitters tried to move into a more comfortable position. In Epstein’s bust, this dynamic was reversed, leaving it to the sculptor to take on his irascible subject with all his brooding energy: I had wanted to do a head of him for some time, and as he had made two etchings of myself and several drawings, I was eager to do him justice… John’s head had plenty of dignity, but there was much
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more to it than that, and I wanted to capture a certain wildness, an untamed quality that is the essence of the man… Completed in sporadic, interrupted sessions, the rapidity and looseness of Epstein’s modelling perfectly channels the vigour of his sitter. From a scrutinising right eye to unkempt hair and the suggestion of a broad, masculine shoulder, John’s character is enlivened with economy and ease. Neglected for a time, in recent years we have seen a return to interest in Epstein’s work, with sculptures selling for many tens of thousands of pounds. Limited to a tiny edition of just six bronze casts, this magnificent bust is a genuine rarity.
No artist of his generation has contemplated the comedy of life with greater intelligence, wit or courage than Patrick Caulfield. Mel Gooding
For the oblique work of Patrick Caulfield, the ‘Pop-Art’ label was a predictable misnomer. While in its flat planes of colour, its bold, black outlines, and the underlying influence of commercial graphics it typified much of that movement’s recognisable style, in subject matter Caulfield took the cynical flavour of ‘pop’ in an entirely new poetic direction. Born in London in 1936, like his father Caulfield left school at 15 to work in a factory before securing brief employment in the advertising department of the food producers Crosse and Blackwell. Though his time at the company was short (Caulfield enlisted early in the RAF, knowing he would be called up for mandatory National Service), it offered his first taste of the world of graphic design: of inks and varnish, stylised compositions, and the company of mature artists. Something of the experience rubbed off on the young Caulfield. Declining the possibility of overseas posts in exotic new countries, he instead stayed in London throughout his enrolment in the air force, taking up evening classes in life drawing and portraiture and spending his free time visiting his first exhibitions before applying to study at the local Chelsea School of Art and, later, the Royal College of Art. It was here as a student of the early 1960s, famously a year below David Hockney and R. B. Kitaj, that Caulfield first developed his distinctive style. While contemporaries looked to America, to New York’s Abstract Expressionists and the satirical gloss of Warhol and the Factory, Caulfield sought
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patrick caulfield order, formalism, and a visual language that reduced objects and scenes to their most essential modes. Above all other sources of inspiration, he found an early hero in the Spanish Cubist Juan Gris: What I like about [his] work is not that he’s dealing with different viewpoints, it’s the way he does it. It’s very strong, formally, and decorative… His paintings architecturally are so strong, without feelings of doubt. Channeling the certainty, if not the style, of Gris’ work, Caulfield’s first still lifes and interiors were reproduced in linear black silhouettes, each caged outline locking in blocks of pungent colour offset against neighbouring subjects. The execution of each image seemed underpinned by techniques observed in those early days varnishing chocolate advertisements at Blackwell’s and which were developed in his first terms at the Royal College, where Caulfield began in the Visual Design department before transferring, on the strength of his painting, to the Fine Arts. By the mid-1960s, and now a graduate, Caulfield’s individual approach to composition was beginning to attract gallerists and collectors alike. He took part in his first major exhibition at the Whitechapel in ’64 alongside fellow rising stars including Hockney, John Hoyland, and Bridget Riley, with a first solo show following a few months later. Significantly, this was also the year of his first print, the screenprint Ruins, produced at the renowned Kelpra Studio in collaboration with Chris Prater. Over the years Caulfield would enjoy a long and productive
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relationship with Prater, thought by many of the artists he worked with to have been the greatest technician of his generation. The silkscreen process and its rich, flat surface quality naturally lent itself to Caulfield’s imagery. Between its clarity of shapes and lines and the comparative ambivalence of his compositions – empty chairs, window frames, and abandoned tables – Caulfield combined melancholy and tension to powerful effect in the medium, capturing the unending stillness that pervades much of our everyday living and portraying it in lurid colour as if to heighten the mundane to the vibrant. Nowhere was this dichotomy more clearly felt than in the momentous ‘Laforgue’ suite, a limited edition livre d’artiste commissioned and published by the Petersburg Press and inspired by the free verse of the 19th century modernist poet Jules Laforgue. Caulfield explores Laforgue’s words as if he were a jaded Hergé describing in ligne claire the backdrop of a Raymond Carver short story: a tooth-jangling lemon yellow clock still ticks away the dull hours; the monotony of a kitchen cupboard, punctured by two cyan handles, throbs in crimson red. As he headed into the latter half of his career, Caulfield was confident enough in his painted and printed spaces to leave behind the now ubiquitous black outline. Light alone was necessary to enable the viewer to see each interior, deflected across a room to reveal dusky hints of objects within and suggest the slightest of perspectives. Edward Hopper, an artist for whom light, shadow, and distance were key compositional elements, had remained a favourite of Caulfield’s since the early 1950s. By the 1990 White Ware Prints series, illuminated throughout in minimalist whites and midnight blues, browns and blacks, Caulfield had taken the application of light and advanced it to its extremes. Though Caulfield’s art remained ‘figurative’ throughout his career, figures themselves are conspicuously missing from many of his images. Instead, his work hinged on the suggestion of absent people: cigarette stubs on a tiled floor; rays of light between vases and tasseled lampshades, intruding through the curtains of an unoccupied room. The omission was conscious and deliberate: It seemed to me that Picasso had pulled the plug on interpreting the human form… You can’t actually deal with the figure like that any more, except in an expressionist sense. In Caulfield’s art, the lights are on, the table set, yet no one is there. The effect can be disconcerting: through
manipulations of depth and perspective, and in the absence of a subject, it is the viewer who takes their place in these empty vignettes, as if inserted into the image itself. This was the power of those early prints and paintings, and which sustained Caulfield’s haunting work throughout his career: the ability to transport us into each strange and closed-off world he created. Since his death in 2005, Caulfield’s legacy - somewhat overshadowed during his time by the weight of contemporary personalities – has attracted serious critical attention, culminating in a recent retrospective at the Tate in 2013. Given the uniqueness of his work, its peculiar balances between light and shade, distinction and dispassion, the implicit voyeur and the explicit room, such interest should come as no surprise.
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leonard rosoman midlothian Midlothian is a unity of contrasts, roughness and sophistication, crag and city… Though these were the words of Shell’s guide to Scotland’s central shire, they could just as well be describing the eccentric style of Leonard Rosoman’s accompanying image. A student of the Central School of Art in the late 1930s, Rosoman first made his name as an Official War Artist during the Second World War, then as a well-known mural painter and teacher at the Royal College. Illustration lay at the heart of his work, and his offbeat approach to public commissions soon saw his talents sought out by major institutions. Asked by the gas giant Shell to produce a poster for their Guide to Midlothian, Rosoman responded with a bizarre capriccio of the county’s landmarks, a fantasy landscape that reorders the local topography and its cultural signposts. Shell’s text provides an insight into some of the unusual references in Rosoman’s picture: Edinburgh itself, clustered about its Castle Rock, seen here from the Pentland Hills, against the Firth of Forth. Foreground items speak of Edinburgh – Landseer’s portrait of Sir Walter Scott, born in the city in 1771; and an easel view of that shapely temple in Calton Old Burial Ground, designed by Scotland’s greatest architect, Robert Adam, and set up in 1778 to commemorate Edinburgh’s greatest philosopher, David Hume…the coloured earthenware bowls are carpet bowls, used in what is still (a counterpart to darts in England) Midlothian’s favourite game… In this strange patchwork of souvenir views, complete with humorous quirks (the umbrella propped up in the inevitable case of showers), Rosoman captures the Scottish heartland with a whimsy befitting the national character.
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ORIGINAL DESIGN FOR A SHELL COUNTY POSTER
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pochoir Hand-coloured through stencils Over 17,000 years ago in the labyrinthine caves at Lascaux, southwest France, Paleolithic humans made some of the earliest stencils known to mankind. Placing their hands up against the cave walls, the underground dwellers would blow pigment through reeds to create outlined patterns of fingers and palms. The stencilling technique has remained in our creative arsenal for tens of thousands of years, from those basic first cave paintings to the modern day screen print. But it was in the now-abandoned pochoir process, which emerged in Paris in the late 1800s and flourished for 30 years before its decline, that the art of the stencil was pushed to the very limits of printmaking. In concept, pochoir is a relatively straightforward form of reproduction: ink is brushed through a series of pre-cut stencils, each one representing a new layer of the image, until the final picture is complete. Predominantly used to recreate paintings and watercolours in remarkably truthful imitations, it also offered a flexible way to add colour to already existing black and white prints, such as lithographs, etchings, or engravings. The power of pochoir, and likewise the source of its many problems, was its emphasis on hand-colouring. Unlike traditional techniques of printing colour, in which different inks were added directly to a plate or block and imprinted on a sheet by the press, with pochoir colour was put straight onto the paper by hand, giving the craftsman total control of the way in which his ink could be applied. With large numbers of stencils, exceptionally complex images could be facsimiled with comparative ease, while more simple prints benefitted from greater depths and breadths of tone in their colouring.
Pablo Picasso
Entirely unmechanised, pochoir was both an intensive and highly luxurious way of producing images, one which suited perfectly the elegance and extravagance of the Art Nouveau and Deco fashion journals that were the source of its enormous popularity from the early 1900s to the glistening Jazz age. Artist-cum-designers, such as George Barbier and Sonia Delaunay, published their costume and textile designs in rich, luminescent pochoir folios, lending a lavish air of the haute couture to each new illustration, while everyone from bespoke furniture and wallpaper producers to high-end architects produced catalogues of exorbitantly expensive products for their endlessly wealthy clients. The quality and complexity of each pochoir print was limited only to the skill and experience of its craftsmen. They began by analysing the composition to be reproduced, observing the number and range of colours used within the original. The image would then be broken down into a number of stencils – between eight and fifteen for the more basic, and upwards of forty for the especially detailed – cut by hand by a découpeur. Using an extremely sharp straight-edged knife, each stencil would be cut from a material of the atelier’s choice – originally aluminium, zinc, or copper, though later plastics and celluloid were used – from a minutely thin sheet approximately a tenth of a millimetre thick. The stencils were then handed over to the coloristes, expert technicians who would apply watercolour ink or gouache through each layer with a variety of soft and coarse brushes. Using a range of pressures alongside the countless techniques available to them, from daubing to swiping, spraying, and spattering, almost any application and gradation of paint
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Paul CĂŠzanne
Such is the quality of these works that you would be forgiven for thinking that you had purchased an original.
could be imitated with near faultless fidelity. As the brushed ink would settle briefly against the sides of the stencil, each pochoir print would also be left with a slightly raised, textured print surface, discernible to the eye and to the touch. Of the many ateliers that specialised in the medium, none could match that of Daniel Jacomet for the quality of his finish, the breadth of projects he undertook, and the pre-eminence of the artists with whom he worked. Combining the manual processes of pochoir with the precision of collotype – a print process that accurately reproduces images by shining light through a photographic negative onto a plate prepared with a light-sensitive surface – Jacomet’s workshop could faithfully reproduce almost any work, even if it meant subjecting his enduring apprentices to as many as sixty individual stencils for a single image. Over the years Jacomet worked directly alongside some of 20th century’s greatest artists – Braque, Chagall, Picasso, and Miró, to name but a few – as well as producing exquisite portfolios after the works of past masters, such as his renowned suite of facsimiles of watercolours by Cézanne. Few other printmakers, let alone pochoir specialists, could lay claim to as many successful collaborations with such high-profile artists. Eventually, the pochoir process met its inevitable end as the mechanisation of printmaking and leaps in technology made manual production prohibitively expensive. The greatest traits of pochoir printing – the uniqueness of each image in its manual execution, the depth of its colour and the quality of its surface – were the result of its greatest weaknesses as a means of printmaking: its dependence on large numbers of highly-trained staff; its extremely time and labour-intensive methods; the great expense of its materials. In its heyday, hundreds of workshops were devoted to making pochoir prints in Paris alone. Today, only Jacomet’s atelier has survived: a shadow of its extraordinary former self – demand is not high for such work – nonetheless, it remains a relic of a bygone age in which craft and art combined to create astonishing feats of printmaking. As the art world comes to value more and more the images typical of this period – Dufy’s extravagant days at the races; Delaunay’s avant-garde designs, far ahead of their time – perhaps more courageous studios will dare to take up the stencil once again.
Sonia Delaunay
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Joan Miró
Review
anne mette hjortshØj Hearing Anne Mette Hjortshøj talk of the great risks of being a potter, of the trauma of failed firings, gives that phrase 'putting all your eggs in one basket' an extra frisson. The commitment of being a functional potter makes this a stubborn breed. Anne Mette has that quiet self-belief that you need, that clear-mindedness and focus, finding your own pace as you set to making runs of forms; bottles, bowls and whatever else is in your repertoire, a tempo that involves many quiet deviations, of ‘playing with proportions’ as Anne Mette says. The first Goldmark exhibition (2012) and its accompanying film helped to make Anne Mette something of a celebrity. But the notice taken in her homeland of Denmark should come as no surprise in a culture that values the hand-made object so highly and where studio pots are shown alongside paintings and sculptures in museums. Denmark, rather like Japan, does not differentiate between disciplines to the extent that Britain does. Art, craft, and design are all on a par, closely interconnected as most of us (via William Morris and the Bauhaus) realise, but many curators in this country fail to grasp.
The Danish sense of form is a little different from our own. There is a concision that derives much from a Northern sense of colour and surface. In ceramics the textures are often grittier, the impression bold and powerful. From her flared bowls to her oval dishes and big round jars, Anne Mette’s forms are simple and unfussy, as clear-cut as the crisp light of Bornholm, the Danish island where she has lived and worked since coming here to train in the late 1990s. The jugs have a medieval quality tempered by a modern economy of touch. Incised and impressed decoration or brushed slip on bottles suggests a line of horizon, a minimalist landscape. Anne Mette can invoke history but still make pots that are about her own way of working. Such work enriches all the strengths of tradition while full of the imprints that make these pots her own. She is part of a strong functional language in Scandinavia, of making things fit for purpose but also beautiful to look at. Her local slips and glazes are applied with great freshness, such lightness of touch. Her sense of renewal illuminates. David Whiting, November, 2016
At the end of the opening day
Chris Wood confronts himself in a still from a recent film.
In Conversation
christ0pher p w0od Christopher P Wood calls his work an exploration of the interior world of the imagination. With a major new exhibition at Halifax’s renowned Dean Clough gallery to his name, we sat down with the artist to talk about his recent work.
GG: Perhaps you could start by telling us, on a basic level, what your art is about? CPW: One of the things that is of most interest to me, and which I’ve felt since I was a small child, is the idea of the imagination as being a key way in which to understand the world. Up to about 2011 my work had really explored the imaginative traditions of the Western world, stretching from Shakespeare and folk tales back to Plato and Greek mythology. It was an investigation that led me back to the origin of the Western mind, and a lot of the paintings I made were a kind of narrative on mystery and the imagination. For the last five years I’ve been working in a very symbolic, figurative way, and
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incorporating elements from renaissance painting, Indian painting, and all those great, expressive modernist painters that I admire, so it’s a real melting pot of ideas. One of the first things I did once I’d finished my postgraduate degree in London was to look around and try and find out what other poets, composers, what choreographers and dramatists were making work about. I found that art was beginning to reference art a little more than it was just dealing with ideas. I also felt it was impossible to make meaningful art unless you believed in the reality behind this reality, and that belief in the other world, an ‘other side’ or the ‘unseen’, is something that has endlessly fascinated me and remains the stimulus for all my reading and creativity.
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Is there a particular story you want to tell through the images you create? I’m never really trying to dictate to people what they should see in a painting of mine; they should sort of find their own way into it, and in that way I hope that I make very open images, where there’s a doorway which people can enter and find their own way through. Most of my paintings, particularly sequences of canvases, have a kind of narrative, but it’s not linear in the sense that it’s not a story that you start where there’s a beginning or an end; it’s a series of images in which the viewer can plot their own chart and their own journey, so that people can come to my work and find their own place in it.
I take a lot of my ideas from literary sources. Recently I’ve been interested in Dante and have been meditating on his Divine Comedy, which has inspired a way of working that is to do with allegory. It’s a way of dealing with complex ideas using symbols that are sort of understood and mean certain things, and in some respects it’s a way of not saying things absolutely explicitly, but allowing imagination or intuition to devour the meaning.
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In the past you’ve worked in a huge range of techniques and processes. What projects are you currently tackling? At the moment I’m working on several different things at the same time, so when I arrive in the studio in the morning the first thing I tend to do is just reacquaint myself with all the images that surround me. I’ve been producing a series of oils
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which show a range of different painting techniques in the same canvas, from highly controlled and highly measured bits of painting to gestural, very expressive elements, often drawn straight from the tube. It’s a case of bringing all these things that I love about the medium together: the fluidity of the paint, the oiliness of the paint, combined with that precise control that you can get. Over the last few years I’ve also made
large series of monoprints at the Goldmark Atelier. Monoprinting gives you a unique, one-off print, and offers a very intuitive way of making images; normally, in printmaking terms, one always thinks of multiples and editions, so it’s a very direct way of working. It’s exciting because the process is very, very quick. It’s a way of liberating images from the imagination, like working very quickly in a sketchbook. It’s extremely chaotic: there are brushes and rags everywhere, and we work very spontaneously. Even as the plate itself goes down on the press I start getting ideas and scribble away little bits, so even a second or two before the blankets go down you have the opportunity to alter your image. And you just never know what’s going to happen. That immediacy is the great joy of printmaking for me, to be able to never lose a sense of excitement or anticipation of what’s going to appear when the paper is lifted off the plate. These past few years have been a
particularly vibrant period for you; how have they shaped up into the body of work in this latest exhibition? This show has been a long time in the planning: we’ve been in discussions with Dean Clough and the beautiful Crossley Gallery here for a couple of years now. But the marvelous thing about these big public shows is that they give you the opportunity to display a whole range of work which you perhaps, in normal circumstances, can’t show when you’re in your normal exhibiting pattern of maybe 20 or 30 pieces. A few years ago I produced a series of paintings that were about selftransformation, paintings called ‘Birdman’, ‘The Man who Became a Bear’. At the time I felt there was a creative and personal transformation going on in my own life. The habits of painting had become a kind of straightjacket, so I decided to stop, which, having painted solidly for 25 years, was a momentous decision. I spent 18 months making
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collages, using largely things of my own, Mike Goldmark giving me tailpieces of Picasso engravings and John Piper prints which I subsequently ripped up and used as material, inventing them anew. With collage, you start off with something that is unknown and scattered, and slowly through the manipulation of composition and looking for those synchronicities you stumble upon something that has a meaning which is deeply resonant, that triggers something at a much deeper level because it’s poetic and mysterious. And in order to achieve that, I have to trust my instinct, I have to put things down in a collage or a painting that are completely mysterious to me, which I can’t predict, and then start trying to make those unpredictable things coherent. Out of that, you get something that is totally unique. I made a lot of collages and then decided to take that experience into painting, with images that had a very mythical, dreamy, fairy, folk-like kind of form. The result was the experimental, symbolistic paintings of the last twelve months. So that’s really the story behind the last five years and this exhibition of work: this abrupt change to collage, and all the wonderful things that have happened because of that process. What would you like viewers to take away from this show? I guess I have a very particular way of looking at the world, a very imaginative way, which intensifies my enjoyment and my experience of that world. It’s that that I want to communicate in all the pieces that I make, a great sort of joy, a great optimism, and a great sense of things that lie just beyond our reality, things which are extraordinary. If I can bring some of that into other people’s lives, then I would consider myself a very lucky and fulfilled artist.
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Cover: Winter landscape, near Mashiko, Japan. Photograph by Jay Goldmark taken during a visit to the studio of potter Ken Matsuzaki.
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