RA Magazine Summer 2014

Royal Academy of Arts Magazine Number 123 Summer 2014 radical geometry summer exhibition dennis hopper ra schools show

Royal Academy of Arts Magazine No. 123 / summer 2014 / £4.95

Radical Geometry

South America’s angle on abstraction Dennis Hopper

Photographs from a Hollywood icon Summer Exhibition

Discover the best of British art

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Jon Buck Without Words 9th June - 18th July 2014 Recent sculpture, prints & drawings A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition

GALLERY PANGOLIN CHALFORD - GLOS - GL6 8NT 01453 889765 gallery@pangolin-editions.com www.gallery-pangolin.com Matrilinear Jon Buck

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STEVE HURST: WAR TOYS

BIRDS & BEASTS

9 July - 23 August

images: Terence Coventry, Jackdaws on Chimney, Bronze and steel; Steve Hurst, Scarlet Major, Bronze

PANGOLIN LONDON, Kings Place, N1 9AG Tel: 020 7520 1480 www.pangolinlondon.com

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PANGOLIN

TERENCE COVENTRY 28 May - 28 June

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LONDON

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Neale Howells — It’s Nothing Without You

6 – 21 June 2014

John Martin Gallery 38 Albemarle Street London, W1S 4 JG

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80 Fulham Road London SW3 6HR

Film and catalogue at www.jmlondon.com

— It’s nothing without you. 2012 –14 acrylic, oil pastel, pencil on wood, 95 x 79 inches, 242 x 202 cm

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Julian Opie Collected Works —

21.05.14 to 14.09.14

The Holburne Museum Great Pulteney Street Bath BA2 4DB

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British & French Paintings, Drawings & Sculpture 11th June – 17th July 2014 Monday to Friday 10-5.30 Saturday 11-2.00

19 Cork Street London W1S 3LP Tel: 020 7734 7984 art@browseanddarby.co.uk www.browseanddarby.co.uk

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Anne Redpath (1895-1965), Daffodils in a Breton Jug, circa 1952, oil on panel, 24 x 20 in.

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g a l l e r y

Catalogue available on request

FRED CUMING RA

29th May - 21st June 24 CORK STREET London W1S 3NJ t: 0207 439 6633

New Paintings

24th June - 10th July London

12th - 26th July Bath Catalogue available

67 MORTIMER STREET London W1W 7SE t: 0207 580 4360 13 JOHN STREET Bath BA1 2JL t: 01225 480406

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The Scottish Colourist JD Fergusson 5 July – 19 October 2014 Pallant House Gallery, 9 North Pallant Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 1TJ www.pallant.org.uk This exhibition is a partnership between the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh and the Fergusson Gallery, Perth & Kinross Council

Exhibition Supporters J D Fergusson Supporters’ Circle

Headline Sponsor of the Gallery 2014

© Jeff Koons, Bear and Policeman, 1988

John Duncan Fergusson, Hortensia, 1910, Oil on canvas, The University of Aberdeen Museums, Scotland; bequeathed by Eric Linklater (1976), © The Fergusson Gallery, Perth & Kinross Council, Scotland

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the human fa c t o r The figure in contemporary sculpture

HAYWARD GALLERY 17 Jun 2014 – 7 Sep 2014

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British art at its very best 10 – 14 September 2014 Royal College of Art Kensington Gore, SW7 www.britishartfair.co.uk Proudly sponsored by

Mary Fedden OBE, RA (1915-2012) ‘Two Black Pears’, 2008, oil on canvas, 76 x 59.5 cms. From Beaux Arts London (new address 48 Maddox Street, W1)

See page 85 for Readers’ Offer

major show of Cornish seascapes

31 May - 21 June 2014

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Bruce McLean Tulbagia oil on canvas 172 x 182cm

Neil Pinkett - Shifting Skies & Seas

Neil Pinkett St Michael’s Mount oil on board 38 x 49cm

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artists influenced by Matisse

Gillian Ayres RA, Derek Balmer, Sandra Blow RA, Rose Hilton, Bruce McLean, Alice Mumford, Frank Phelan

28 June - 26 July 2014

fully illustrated catalogues available on request

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JOHN Bellany 12 JUNE - 12 JULY 2014

Beaux Arts London 48 Maddox Street, London W1S 1AY, 020 7493 1155 www.beauxartslondon.co.uk info@beauxartslondon.co.uk

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© z a h a HA D I D A R CH I T EC TS . © WOLFGANG TILLM ANS/COURTESY M AUREEN PALE Y, LONDON . T h e Hopper Art T rust/© D ennis Hopper /courtesy T h e Hopper Art T rust/ www. dennis h opper .com

Royal Academy of Arts Magazine No. 123 / SUMMER 2014

27 Plane sailing ‘The idea was to impose Malevich’s sculpture on an urban context to become architecture’ zaha hadid ra

Features 44 Minimalist migrations

Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro explains the impact of abstract art on South America

49 Intercontinental connections

John Carter RA spotlights two Buenos Aires artists who crossed the Atlantic

50 Turning the tables

As the 246th Summer Exhibition opens, Ben Luke explores how the Academy is changing

55 Artists’ ayes

Chris Orr RA reveals how Royal Academicians are elected

56 Rebel with a lens

50

Turning the tables ‘As artists working in new forms of media enter the Academy, this brings new challenges, particularly in the context of the Summer Exhibition’ ben luke

Jonathan Romney chronicles Dennis Hopper’s life behind the camera

60 Up, up and away

Brian Griffiths and Phyllida Barlow RA meet RA Schools students ahead of their final show

Regulars

11 Exhibition Diary 15 Editorial 16 Contributors 20 Preview UK

56 Rebel with a lens ‘These pictures don’t give us the sense of gazing into a distant past: they tell you that Hopper was there, and they make you feel that you’re there too’ jonathan romney

The First World War in paint; Abramović live; Bridget Riley; charting the history of colour; Malevich at Tate; Louis Kahn; American Impressionism; six degrees of separation in art 32 Preview Books

Michael Sandle RA on Britain’s first Afghan

war; Norman Ackroyd RA’s watercolours 35 Preview International

Emperor Augustus; the Mauritshuis reopens;

Art is Therapy; Georges Seurat 36 Academy Artists

In the Studio with Phillip King RA; Terry Setch

RA’s art epiphany; artist couples on show 64 Debate

The Question: Should there be positive

discrimination towards female artists? Kenneth

Clark; Rafael Moneo; Events & Lectures 75 Listings 85 Readers’ Offers 86 Academy News

Conservation uncovered; Stephen Chambers RA

in Istanbul; new Friends Board chair; in brief 98 Inside Story: Bill Viola

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What’s on at the Royal Academy this summer

Exhibition Diary

©M i ch a el Cr a i g-M a r t i n /Co u r t esy A l a n Cr is t e a G a l l ery. T h e H o p p er A r t T rus t/© D en n is H o p p er /co u r t esy T h e H o p p er A r t T rus t/ w w w. d en n is h o p p er .co m

Summer Exhibition

Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album

Main Galleries 9 June to 17 August The RA closes all day, 23 June

Burlington Gardens Royal Academy of Arts 26 June to 19 October

Sponsored by Insight Investment

Lead Series Supporter JTI. Supported by Nikon UK

The world’s largest open-entry exhibition shows works by leading contemporary artists alongside the best of Britain’s lesser-known talent.

This year the show, selected and hung by Academicians, features a room curated by Cornelia Parker RA with the theme of black and white.

Hollywood actor and director Dennis Hopper was also an accomplished photographer. This show of over 400 of Hopper’s photos found after his death in 2010 includes portraits alongside images of social and political events of 1960s America.

Friends Preview Days Fri 6 June, 10am-10pm Sat 7 June, 10am-8.30pm Sun 8 June, 10am-8.30pm Friends Extended Hours Tue 15 July, 8.30-10am Tue 29 July, 6-8.30pm

Friends Preview Days Wed 25 June, 10am-8.30pm Friends Extended Hours Mon 28 July, 6-8.30pm

Radical Geometry

Renaissance Impressions

Modern Art of South America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection

Chiaroscuro Woodcuts from the Collections of Georg Baselitz and the Albertina, Vienna The Sackler Wing Royal Academy of Arts Until 8 June The RA closes at 1pm, 4 June

The Sackler Wing Royal Academy of Arts 5 July to 28 September

2009-2016 Season supported by JTI. Supported by Christie’s Spotlight: NT At 50, 2013, by Michael Craig-Martin RA, in the Summer Exhibition

This show reveals the dynamic innovations made by avant-garde artists in South America from the 1930s to the 1980s as they challenged traditional painting conventions, creating new geometric abstract art.

Organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and the Albertina, Vienna. 2009-2016 Season supported by JTI. Supported by Edwards Wildman Discover the art of the chiaroscuro woodcut in this exhibition of 150 rare prints. Often based on designs by Parmigianino, Raphael and Titian, these ambitious works were the first colour prints, making dramatic use of light and shadow. Two extraordinary collections chart this pivotal development in printmaking.

Friends Preview Days Wed 2 July, 10am-6pm Thur 3 July, 10am-6pm Fri 4 July, 10am-10pm Friends Extended Hours Tue 29 July, 6-8.30pm Leon Bing,1966, by Dennis Hopper

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Exhibition Diary

Peter Fonda in conversation NFT1, BFI Southbank 2 July, 6.30–8pm Last admission 6.40pm

Development of a Triangle, 1949, by Tomás Maldonado, on show in ‘Radical Geometry’

The Schools Show RA Schools Studios Royal Academy of Arts 13 to 29 June The RA Schools closes all day, 17 and 23 June

RA Schools sponsored by Newton Investment Management This show by RA Schools final-year students is a rare opportunity to see work by a generation of new artists.

Dream, Draw, Work Architectural Drawings

by Norman Shaw RA Tennant Gallery Royal Academy of Arts 30 May to 26 October

Supported by Lowell Libson Ltd and the Collections and Library Supporters Circle The 19th-century architect, who designed country houses such as Cragside in Northumberland and

the Royal Academy’s own restaurant, was considered one of the finest draughtsmen of his time, as this exhibition of drawings reveals.

An explanation of Shaw’s work at Burlington House and a map of his London buildings are also on show in the Architecture Space.

Friends benefits Friends of the RA enjoy free entry to all of the RA’s exhibitions, with a guest (one family adult) and up to four family children under 16, and all-day access to the Keeper’s House. Friends can also view exhibitions before the public at Friends Preview Days, and they receive RA Magazine quarterly, in March, May, September and November. Friends also receive a monthly e-newsletter with regular information on exhibitions, events and news at the RA. For more details on Friends membership call 020 7300 5664, or visit www.royalacademy.org.uk/friends

To coincide with the RA’s show ‘Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album’, the British Film Institute at London’s South Bank hosts Peter Fonda, who discusses his career and his experiences of collaborating with his friend Dennis Hopper.

Fonda established himself as

Visitor information Royal Academy of Arts Burlington House, Piccadilly London W1J 0BD

For general enquiries, luggage restrictions and full visitor information, call 020 7300 8000 or visit www.royalacademy.org.uk Opening hours for the Royal Academy Mon-Sun 10am-6pm

(last entry 5.30pm) except Fri 10am-10pm (last entry 9.30pm).

The RA Shop closes 15 minutes before the galleries. The Tennant Gallery Tue-Fri 10am-4pm; SatSun 10am-6pm. The Restaurant Sat-Thur 10am-5.30pm; Fri 10am9.30pm (to book call 020 7300 5608). Early closures 1pm Wed 4 June; closed all day Mon 23 June.

The Keeper’s House Mon-Thur 10am-11.30pm; Fri-Sat 10ammidnight; Sun 10am-6pm. The Keeper’s House Restaurant

Mon-Sat 12-3pm for Friends and from 5.30pm for the public (to book call 020 7300 5881)

a leading screen actor in the mid1960s and his anti-establishment roles charted his journey towards becoming a counterculture icon, culminating in 1969 when he produced, co-wrote and co-starred in Easy Rider (above). The film, now a cult classic, introduces the BFI’s Dennis Hopper film season ‘Icon of Oblivion’, which runs throughout July. This event is in association with the BFI. Tickets £16/£12 reductions; online bookings via bfi.org.uk from 3 June or telephone 020 7928 3232 Access

Disabled visitors see pages 68-69. Visually impaired visitors can have access to large-print labels in the galleries and on the RA website.

Coming soon Anselm Kiefer

27 September to 14 December

Friends Preview Days Wed 24 September, 10am-6pm Thur 25 September, 10am-8.30pm Fri 26 September, 10am-6pm Giovanni Battista Moroni

25 October to 25 January 2015

Friends Preview Days Wed 22 October, 10am-8.30pm Thur 23 October, 10am-6pm Fri 24 October, 10am-6pm Allen Jones RA

13 November to 25 January 2015 Friends Preview Day Wed 12 November, 10am-8.30pm

co l ecci ó n pat r i ci a p h el p s d e cis n er os/© To m ás M a l d o n a d o. Co u r t esy o f B FI

Dennis Hopper Evening Event

12 ra magazine | summer 2014

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CONTACT matthew.bradbury@bonhams.com 020 7468 8295

LAURENCE STEPHEN LOWRY R.A. (1887-1976) Church Street, Clitheroe signed and dated ‘L.S. Lowry 1964’ (lower left) oil on canvas 40.9 x 30.8 cm. (16 1/8 x 12 1/8 in.)

Sold for £242,223 in November 2013

CLOSING DATE FOR ENTRIES 3 October 2014

MODERN BRITISH & IRISH ART New Bond Street Wednesday 19 November 2014 2014 bonhams.com/modernbritish

RAVILIOUS BEATON PASMORE SEURAT Image: © Hulton-Deutsch Collection / CORBIS

UNTIL 10 AUGUST 2014 #KENNETHCLARK

CONSTABLE RENOIR GIORGIONE DEGAS REYNOLDS MOORE ZURBARAN BELLINI PIPER HOKUSAI FREUD CÉZANNE

TATE BRITAIN PRESENTS

KENNETH CLARK

LOOKING FOR CIVILISATION

SUTHERLAND PALMER MAN RAY UTAMARO RODIN LEONARDO

2Oth Century British Art spring exhiBitiOn Fully illustrated catalogue available

patrick heron november 17, 1985 (gouache)

Opening hours: Monday to Friday 10am – 6pm saturdays and late viewing by arrangement pAisnel gAllery 9 Bury street, st James’s, london, sW1y 6AB 020 7930 9293 info@paisnelgallery.co.uk www.paisnelgallery.co.uk

Supported by The Elizabeth Cayzer Charitable Trust Image credit: Winifred Nicholson, Cyclamen and Primula, c.1922-3 (detail), oil on paper / board, 50 x 55 cm, Kettle’s Yard / © Kettle’s Yard / Trustees of Winifred Nicholson

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Introducing this issue

Editorial

Visible Ideal, 1956, by Waldemar Cordeiro

Co l ecci ó n Pat r i ci a P h el p s d e Cis n er os/© P r i vat e co l l ect i o n

Viewed from all angles The authority of the RA’s Summer Exhibition comes not only from the grand galleries in which it is held but from those who select the show. The world’s largest and oldest opensubmission exhibition is chosen by a group of Royal Academicians – the painters, printmakers, sculptors and architects who oversee the Academy – rather than curators, critics or administrators.

When a painter has a work hung on the RA’s walls, it is an acknowledgment by fellow artists.

As the make-up of the Academy’s Membership changes, so does the Summer Exhibition. This year’s show focuses on the large and varied number of artists and architects who have recently joined – their interests will no doubt shape the RA in the future.

But can it now be argued that the Academy is truly representative of the dizzying breadth of visual culture in Britain today? This is one of the questions Ben Luke put to RAs in this issue (page 50). The diversity of opinions he reveals is characteristic of the RA and it is perhaps this diversity – as a broad church of individual artists standing up for art – that allows this establishment institution to have radical potential.

When we consider the composition of the Academy, we must also look at its gender balance: only around one-fifth of Academicians are female.

This inequality is evident across the art world and notable, given that more women study art than men.

In this issue’s ‘Debate’ section (page 64) artist Eileen Cooper RA and Helena Morrissey, a business leader who campaigns for a better gender balance in boardrooms, question whether positive discrimination should play a role in enabling female artists to have more exposure.

If our history of art has overlooked women, as Cooper argues, then it has also prioritised European and American artists over those from other continents.

A challenge to this trend comes in the form of the RA’s ‘Radical Geometry’ show, which explores the rich tradition of abstract art in South America during the 20th century. As curator Gabriel PérezBarreiro explains (page 44), the show’s works from Uruguay, Argentina, Venezuela and Brazil – such as the exquisitely precise Visible Ideal (1956, left and front cover) by São Paulo’s Waldemar Cordeiro – were as indebted to the continent’s social, political and cultural circumstances as they were to any influence from the West.

The history of an artist’s career, like that of an art movement, is always open to reappraisal.

The actor and director Dennis Hopper, an incandescent if unhinged presence in films such as Easy Rider (1969) and Blue Velvet (1986), is uncovered as a virtuosic photographer in the Academy’s exhibition of a ‘lost album’ of his photos, discovered after his death in 2010. ‘His black-and-white images of America, created during an intensely productive period from 1961 to 1967, may well be seen by posterity as the firmest proof of his prodigious talent and unerring eye for the spirit of an age,’ concludes film critic Jonathan Romney (page 56).

We can imagine that a youthful Hopper had an eye for that posterity. But, in truth, young artists tend to focus on just what they are making, not how it will be viewed years after. An edited transcript in this magazine (page 60) documents a discussion between some RA Schools students, their tutor – the artist Brian Griffiths – and Phyllida Barlow RA ahead of their final-year show, on view in June in their studios at the Academy. I urge you to visit: you will encounter works across a wide range of disciplines, whose diversity is broadening art ever further.

— sam phillips, editor

EDITORIAL Publisher Nick Tite Editor Sam Phillips Assistant Editor Eleanor Mills Design and Art Direction Design by St Sub-Editor Gill Crabbe Editorial Volunteers Tara Contractor,

Maud Johnson

Proofreader Vicky Wilson Editorial Advisers Richard Cork, Anne

Desmet RA, Tom Holland, Liz Horne, Fiona Maddocks, Mali Morris RA, Chris Orr RA, Eric Parry RA, Charles Saumarez Smith, Mark Seaman, Giles Waterfield and Sarah Whitfield Digital content Kate Huckle, Amy Macpherson Special thanks Roger Howie, Roland Philbert Editorial enquiries 020 7300 5820; ramagazine@royalacademy.org.uk To comment on RA Magazine

reply.ramagazine@royalacademy.org.uk ADVERTISING AND PRODUCTION Advertising Manager

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Kim Jenner 020 7300 5658; kim.jenner@royalacademy.org.uk Listings Editor Catherine Cartwright 020 7300 5657; catherine.cartwright@ royalacademy.org.uk Classifieds Janet Durbin 01625 583 180 SUBSCRIPTIONS

RA Magazine is published quarterly in March, May, September and November and mailed to Friends of the Royal Academy of Arts as part of their Friends membership.

To become a Friend

£107 Standard Friends (£97 Direct Debit) £150 Joint Friends (£140 Direct Debit) £49 Young Friends (aged between 16 & 25) Friends enquiries 020 7300 5664; friend. enquiries@royalacademy.org.uk www.royalacademy.org.uk/friends To subscribe to RA Magazine

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Colour reproduction by Wings. Printed by Wyndeham Group. Published 26 May 2014 © 2014 Royal Academy of Arts ISSN 0956-9332 The opinions in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of the Royal Academy of Arts. All reasonable attempts have been made to clear copyright before publication

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Contributors

henry-moore.org/bodyandvoid

Rhead Subsection

norman ackroyd ra

is a printmaker. He presents an exhibition of etchings at Trinity Hall, Cambridge (27 Sep–9 Nov).

Christopher Baker

Echoes of Moore in Contemporary Art 1 May — 26 Oct 2014 Joseph Beuys Keith Coventry Tony Cragg RA Richard Deacon RA Antony Gormley RA Roger Hiorns Damien Hirst Des Hughes Anish Kapoor RA Richard Long RA Sarah Lucas Paul Noble Bruce McLean Bruce Nauman Paul Nobel Thomas Schütte Simon Starling Rachel Whiteread

is Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh.

Neil bingham is an architectural historian and curator of the RA’s Norman Shaw exhibition.

John Carter RA describes his work as a dialogue between sculpture and painting. He recently exhibited his drawings in the RA’s Tennant Gallery. eileen cooper ra is a painter and printmaker and Keeper of the RA, responsible for the RA Schools.

Richard Cork is an art critic, curator and broadcaster. He is author of The Healing Presence of Art.

The Henry Moore Foundation Perry Green, Herts, SG10 6EE Bishop’s Stortford

DAIWA FOUNDATION ART PRIZE 2015 Introducing British artists to Japan

Call for Entries Deadline for applications 30 September 2014 SELECTION PANEL Hideki Aoyama Richard Deacon Mami Kataoka Chris Orr RA Jonathan Watkins Enter online at www.parkerharris.co.uk

Maria Corte is an illustrator.

Her illustrations have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and BBC Music magazine.

Trevor Dannatt RA is an architect known for buildings such as London’s Royal Festival Hall.

He was formerly Professor of Architecture at the University of Manchester.

Richard Dawson is a portrait photographer who also works for magazines such as GQ and ShortList.

Chris Fite-Wassilak is a writer and curator and a regular contributor to Art Monthly, Art Review, Art Papers and Frieze.

Laura Gascoigne is a freelance writer and Art Critic of the Tablet.

Zaha Hadid RA has won both the Pritzker and Stirling architecture prizes. Her buildings include the London Aquatics Centre.

Emma Hill is the Director of the Eagle Gallery, London. She writes for publications including Print Quarterly and Printmaking Today.

Tom Holland is a writer and author of Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic.

He is currently writing a history of Augustus and his dynasty.

ben luke is Contemporary Art Critic at the London Evening Standard and Features Editor of The Art Newspaper.

Fiona Maddocks is a journalist and broadcaster. She is Chief Music Critic of the Observer.

Debra Mancoff is an author and art historian. Her books include The Garden in Art and Fashion in Impressionist Paris. helena morrissey is CEO of Newton Investment Management and founder of the Thirty Per Cent Club, which aims to achieve better gender balance in businesses. chris orr ra is a printmaker.

He has recently been elected Treasurer of the Royal Academy.

Hughie O’Donoghue RA is a painter and the co-ordinator of this year’s RA Summer Exhibition.

Sally O’Reilly is a contemporary arts writer and author of The Body in Contemporary Art. Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro

is Director and Chief Curator of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection in New York and Caracas. He is also co-curator of the Royal Academy’s exhibition ‘Radical Geometry’.

Jonathan Romney writes on film for the Observer, the American magazine Film Comment and Sight & Sound magazine.

Michael Sandle RA is an artist who translates his drawings into sculpture. His commissions include the award-winning Malta Siege Memorial (1992) – honouring those who fought in the Siege of Malta in the Second World War – at the Valletta in Malta.

Andy Sewell is a photographer with works held in the collections of the National Media Museum, the Museum of London and the V&A. David Vintiner is a photographer who regularly works for the Independent and the Sunday Times Magazine.

Simon Wilson is an art historian and columnist for this magazine.

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Hundreds of artists demonstrating their art

17 – 20 July

Waterperry Gardens, near Wheatley

TICKET OFFER – SAVE £10 Buy two standard adult entry tickets online for £22 and SAVE £10!

Go to www.artinaction.org.uk Promo code RMAG4A

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BASIL ALKAZZI AN ODYSSEY OF DREAMS: A Decade of Paintings 2003–2012 THE SHELDON MUSEUM OF ART, LINCOLN, NE MAY 16 – JULY 27, 2014 JUDITH K. BRODSKY, CURATOR Full color, 136 page catalogue, with critical essay by distinguished American art critic Donald Kuspit and in-depth interview by Professor Harry I. Naar, Professor of Studio Art and Art History, Rider University Published by Scala Art Publishers, Inc. www.scalapublishers.com

And Still You Whisper, Still I Wait, Yet Again III, 2010, detail, gouache on hand-made paper, 77 x 58 cm, 31 x 23 inches

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Jo Barrett ‘Still Life with Cherries and Bowl’ 80 x 120 cm oil on canvas

Still Life Paintings 10th June - 8th July Summer Exhibition

Established and emerging gallery artists 15th July - 3rd September Michael Bennallack Hart, Fog, oil on canvas 30 x 28” / 76 x 71cm

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Graeme Wilcox, Strange Weather, oil on canvas 60 x 48” / 152 x 122cm

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What’s new this summer in London, the UK and abroad

Preview Acts of remembrance Painter HUGHIE O’DONOGHUE RA contemplates art of the First World War, a century after its outbreak

Tread carefully as you go amid the dark trees and fallen branches with their faint scent of rusting metal. Nailed to a tree in Trônes Wood, inside a plastic bag, a fading photograph marked with handwriting tells you that it was here that Joseph Partridge from Portsmouth, born on 24 July 1891, became lost. He was killed in the battle for this part of the Somme and nothing remained of him.

This is a personal monument, a memorial and an act of remembrance, and it stopped me in my tracks as I walked in the wood and peered into the boy’s fading face. Like all successful monuments and works of art, it is unexpected but it connects – it speaks of love and loss.

This connection is explored in ‘Truth and Memory’, the largest exhibition of British art of the First World War ever assembled, which reopens London’s Imperial War Museum in July.

Included in the show is Paul Nash’s painting We are Making a New World (1918, right). In it we are confronted with an image of the wasteland that was the Western Front, the demonic world, a shell-holed wilderness of fractured tree stumps where the sun’s rays struggle to break through opaque brown clouds or perhaps an oncoming wall of mustard gas.

The title of Nash’s painting is ironic. But it is a literary irony, and one of the real legacies of the war for the visual arts was the development of visual irony, as exemplified by Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, his ‘readymade’ men’s urinal. Its date is 1917, when the war was possibly at its lowest ebb.

As men drowned in mud on the Ypres Salient established norms of civilisation had disappeared.

There was widespread disillusionment, certainties had gone and the world had become absurd, so Duchamp made an art of the absurd. Western civilization was in the toilet. But that was then, and the old irony of the war has since been transformed into the old irony of the now. Irony has permeated contemporary art practice to such an extent that it has become orthodox.

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We are Making a New World, 1918,

by Paul Nash

Trônes Wood, 2014, from the series ‘Seven Halts on the Somme’, by Hughie O’Donoghue RA

RIGHT

© I W M A R T 1146 . © T H E A R T IS T/ P H OTO F R A N CIS WA R E

BELOW

I find the irony in Nash’s title irritating. I feel it is telling me what I should think when I look at the painting, in a way that is not so different from the way picture captions in the war publications of the time led you by the hand – ‘On the alert for the furtive foe’ comes to mind. In contrast John Nash’s Oppy Wood, 1917, Evening is just that.

You are left to look and do the thinking yourself.

Since autumn 2013 I have been working on a group of new paintings, ‘Seven Halts on the Somme’ (above). These works share a geographical location with some of the paintings in ‘Truth and Memory’, but they are separated by the best part of 100 years and thus approach the subject from a different perspective. Our memory of the First World War is now cultural as opposed to personal, so my paintings are about remembering, putting flesh back on the bones of something, a creative act as opposed to simple recall.

Remembering and painting are close companions; both seek equivalents for something profound, a calling to mind of something not to be forgotten.

My paintings develop slowly; they grow in counterpoint to a meditation on their subject matter. As possibilities are explored and excluded, the painting gains in density, layers overlapping in a process of trial and correction. Sometimes dramatic changes occur but there is never a return to the blank canvas where one began. The memory of the painting’s gestation is there to be seen in its surface patination, a record of the struggle for, and the excavation of, its subject.

The series title ‘Seven Halts on the Somme’ refers to seven places where the army was stopped, people were stopped and I have stopped and paused for thought. The trees at Trônes Wood have now regrown and though their foliage is dense, sunlight can still penetrate the tree canopy and illuminate the ground. Something happened here that demands of us that we remember.

Truth and Memory: British Art of the First World War Imperial War Museum, London, 020 7416 5000, www.iwm.org.uk, 19 July–8 March 2015. Hughie O’Donoghue has two exhibitions: Seven Halts on the Somme Verey Gallery, Eton College, Windsor, by appointment only, 01753 671123, until 6 Dec, and The Measure of All Things Chapter House, Westminster Abbey, London, 020 7222 5152, www.westminster-abbey.org, 15 July–30 Nov To watch a video of Hughie O’Donoghue discussing his work relating to the Second World War visit http://roy.ac/hughie

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Find and buy silver with your family crest

One of a pair of silver dishes by Robert Garrard, London 1809, presented by the Royal Academy of Arts to architect and founding member George Dance R.A. (1741-1825) for his services as auditor.

Enquiries: Martyn Downer | martyn@myfamilysilver.com | 07708 667448 | myfamilysilver.com My Family Silver_Summer14_v1c.indd 1

02/05/2014 11:59

THE QUEEN’S GALLERY BUCKINGHAM PALACE

Open daily 10:00 –17:30 (last admission 16:30) www.royalcollection.org.uk 020 7766 7301 RC1230 First Georgians RA April AW04.indd 1

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Find and buy silver with your family crest

One of a pair of silver dishes by Robert Garrard, London 1809, presented by the Royal Academy of Arts to architect and founding member George Dance R.A. (1741-1825) for his services as auditor.

Enquiries: Martyn Downer | martyn@myfamilysilver.com | 07708 667448 | myfamilysilver.com My Family Silver_Summer14_v1c.indd 1

02/05/2014 11:59

THE QUEEN’S GALLERY BUCKINGHAM PALACE

Open daily 10:00 –17:30 (last admission 16:30) www.royalcollection.org.uk 020 7766 7301 RC1230 First Georgians RA April AW04.indd 1

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Preview UK

Self surrender As Marina Abramović Hon RA prepares for her latest performance art piece in London, SALLY O’REILLY spotlights key moments in her career RHYTHM 0, 1974

For Rhythm 0 Marina Abramović’s body became a temporarily inert ‘thing’ in what proved to be a bold social experiment, a personal trial and a provocation on the ethics of collective responsibility. The instructions were simple: ‘There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.’ As Abramović stood passively in a gallery in Naples (right) for six hours, the audience acted playfully at first, offering her a rose or kissing her, then more cruelly, cutting off her clothes, writing on her skin and piercing her flesh. The performance was eventually halted when a loaded pistol was pointed at her head. The artist has spoken since of the ease with which she became dehumanised, and how a patch of her hair turned white during the course of the evening.

THE GREAT WALL WALK, 1988

In The Great Wall Walk Abramović continued to test the physical limits of the body. The walk of over 2,000km along the Great Wall of China was performed with her lover and collaborator Ulay (he starting in the west, traversing the Gobi desert, and she in the east, passing through the Yangshan mountains) and was planned to culminate with their wedding at the middle.

Original sections of the wall were built along

the planet’s ley lines, and the couple sought connections between the energy of these lines, the terrain they walked and their mental states.

But rather than being affirming and restorative, the three-month walk, which took eight years from conception to completion with delays in obtaining permits from China, became a deliberation on separation and independence, since by the time they came to start the walk, their relationship had ended.

THE ARTIST IS PRESENT, 2010

More recently, Abramović has examined how we represent ourselves, through themes such as acting, dancing, glamour and the status of the artist. The Artist Rhythm 0, 1974, by Marina Abramović, at Studio Morra, Naples is Present enfolded this interest with the capacity for endurance experienced out-of-body sensations as she passed she explored in earlier works. Abramović sat through pain barriers, while intense emotions motionless during the entire time that New often surfaced in those who sat with her.

York’s Museum of Modern Art was open each day, for 64 days. Individuals were invited to Marina Abramović: 512 Hours Serpentine Gallery, sit opposite for as long as they wished. In all, London, 020 7402 6075, www.serpentinegalleries.org, 85,000 participants sat for 716 hours. Abramović 11 June–25 Aug

On the right lines P H OTO D O N AT EL L I S B A R R A . © B R I D GE T R I L E Y 2014/A L L R I GH TS R ES ER V ED

An exhibition tracks Bridget Riley’s return to the stripe at key points in her career, writes CHRIS FITE-WASSILAK

Lilac Painting 2, 1983/2008, by Bridget Riley

For more than five decades, Bridget Riley has been exploring the potential of the line in painting: fields of shifting boundaries that create disorienting optical effects and stark oppositions that ask us to look, as candidly as possible, at how our lives are immersed in light and colour. Her precise and impeccably executed geometric visions are suggestive, taut abstractions that, for Riley, are only a means to an end. ‘Perception,’ she once stated, ‘is the medium.’

This summer an exhibition at London’s David Zwirner gallery focuses exclusively on Riley’s stripe works, providing a unique perspective on her career. The show presents drawings and paintings since 1961, and includes several new works.

Riley’s first uses of the stripe can be seen in paintings of thick black lines on a white background that make evocative horizons. In a more explicit reference to landscape made in her

large-scale painting Prairie (1971/ 2003), diagonal blue lines suggest the slant of a bleak, windswept hill.

As she returned to the stripe, colour became increasingly important.

Often Riley’s canvases are playfully multi-coloured sets of dense, vertical stripes, where each painting follows its own logic. Despite the uniform thickness of each line, varying gaps between lines and unexpected colour combinations form distinct perspectives and a sense of restless tension. Lilac Painting 2 (1983/2008, left) places lilac strips alongside others in green, yellow, turquoise and white, sometimes inserting a double width of one colour. The effect is as if we’re looking through a set of yellow window bars to the colours beneath.

Bridget Riley: The Stripe Paintings 1961-2014 David Zwirner, London, 020 3538 3165, www.davidzwirner.com, 13 June–25 July

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SIMON WILSON surveys a slew of shows, in London, Liverpool and Margate, that reveal the changing roles colour has played in art history By some weird functioning of my favourite phenomenon, the Zeitgeist, there are no less than four major exhibitions in which colour is key running more or less concurrently through the summer. The National Gallery’s ‘Making Colour’ is explicitly an exploration of the subject; Tate Liverpool’s ‘Mondrian and his Studios’, Turner Contemporary’s ‘Mondrian and Colour’ and Tate Modern’s ‘Henri Matisse: The CutOuts’ all focus on artists for whom colour was the primary instrument of expression.

The four shows are strikingly complementary.

The NG’s show surveys the use of colour by painters from the early Renaissance to Impressionism. It thus ends at what was merely the beginning of the liberation of colour that was fully developed by, surprise surprise, on the one hand Matisse and on the other, and very differently, by Mondrian. But ‘Making Colour’ is also a fascinating account of the materials of colour and how colours were made.

The phrase ‘the liberation of colour’ is a cliché in the history of modern art. What it means is simple. In painting before Impressionism, as we see at the NG, colour is indeed often used to ravishing effect. Yet it is always subordinate to the subject of the picture and confined, more or less, depending on the artist, to the drawn forms through which the subject is depicted.

Until Impressionism, subjects were predominantly religious, historical or mythological, and therefore particularly dominant in the work.

Impressionism changed that, first by ditching the attention-grabbing subject matter in favour of apparently inconsequential everyday subjects and then by increasingly substituting drawing with an all-over brushwork from which forms emerge. The Impressionists also discovered the science of colour, in particular the law of complementaries. These are the primary and secondary colours, red/green, yellow/mauve and blue/orange, which when juxtaposed ‘complete’ each other and are thus seen at maximum intensity.

The NG show ends with one of the most perfect illustrations of all this, indeed one of the most perfect of all Impressionist paintings, from the movement’s first full flush – Renoir’s delicious and haunting The Skiff (La Yole), of 1875 (below).

The whole composition revolves around the complementary clash of the deliberately heightened blue of the water and the bright orange of the skiff itself, no doubt in reality a warm brown. Colour has become the dominant element.

Picking up on Impressionism, in 1905 Matisse began to paint pictures in flat areas of primary and secondary colours, which seemed furthermore to have no relationship to the images they evoked.

This further elevation of colour to a leading role reached its final, full and astonishing realisation in the great cut-out works of Matisse’s last years, which can be seen at Tate Modern and which were discussed with an artist’s insight by Mali Morris RA in the previous issue of RA Magazine.

The Skiff (La Yole), 1875, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

BELOW LEFT

Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray and Blue, 1921,

by Piet Mondrian

BELOW

Matisse’s work, even at its most apparently abstract, is always based on his perceptions of the world. Mondrian would have none of this.

He wanted to go beyond nature to create what he called a ‘cosmic, universal’ beauty. He therefore restricted his palette to the three primary colours and the non-colours black and white, and reduced his compositions to the square and the rectangle and the vertical and the horizontal as seen in Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray and Blue (1921, above). Diagonals were not allowed. He thus reduced painting to its basic elements in their most irreducible form – a kind of absolute art. In some works he restricted the colours to one or two, or even none.

However, as the Margate exhibition in particular shows, he too started from nature.

Ultimately his vertical and horizontal configurations relate to a tree or a human standing vertically on the surface of the earth, and he saw the intersections of the vertical and the horizontal as embodying the great opposites of existence – male and female, positive and negative, life and death. The Margate exhibition traces the long, gradual process by which Mondrian reached his mature style and hugely enhances our understanding of it. In Liverpool we see more of this, but specifically how Mondrian’s studios became other-worldly environmental realisations of his vision of pure beauty, and a blueprint for an ideal architecture.

Indeed his influence on modern architecture and design has been as profound as on modern art.

Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs Tate Modern, London, 020 7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk, until 7 Sep Mondrian and Colour Turner Contemporary, Margate, 01843 233000, www.turnercontemporary.org, until 21 Sep Mondrian and his Studios Tate Liverpool, 0151 702 7400, www.tate.org.uk, 6 June–5 Oct Making Colour National Gallery, London, 020 7747 2885, www.nationalgallery.org.uk, 18 June–7 Sep

© T H E N AT I O N A L G A L L ERY, LO N D O N . CO L L ECT I O N GEM EEN T EM US EU M D EN H A AG /© 2014 M O N D R I A N / H O LT Z M A N T RUS T C/O H CR I N T ER N AT I O N A L US A

How colour became primary

24 RA MAGAZINE | SUMMER 2014

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PIMLICO TATEGALLERY @TATE

Until 19 October FREE ADMISSION

Supported by

TATE BRITAIN COMMISSION 2014

SUMMER SHOWCASE

Phyllida Barlow untitled: dock; stockadecrates (detail), 2014 © Phyllida Barlow Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

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Dissolution of a Plane, 1917, by Kazimir Malevich

The Peak Blue Slabs, 1982-83, by Zaha Hadid RA

Plane sailing

CO U R T ESY G A L ER I E GM U R Z Y NS K A . © Z A H A H A D I D A R CH I T EC TS

As a major Malevich show goes on view, ZAHA HADID RA reveals how her use of painting and drawing to develop buildings was inspired by the artist In 1915 Kazimir Malevich presented his abstract paintings at the ‘0.10’ exhibition in Petrograd (now St Petersburg). It was a revolutionary show that forged entirely new forms of experimentation and expression.

I became interested in these works in the 1970s, when I was a student at the Architectural Association in London. I think the dire economic situation in the West in those years fostered in us similar ambitions to those of early 20thcentury Russian artists: we thought to apply radical new ideas to regenerate society.

The 1970s were a critical time of investigation.

Although architects had little work, we were very productive with drawings. One result of my interest in Malevich was my decision to employ painting as a design tool. I found the traditional system of architectural drawing to be limiting and was searching for a new means of representation. Studying Malevich allowed me to develop abstraction as an investigative principle.

I used painting (see above right) to develop my proposals for the Peak Leisure Club in Hong Kong (1982-83), a building that was to be based on the landscape, and intended as a new man-made geology or ecology. The design evolved from my earlier projects such as Malevich’s Tektonik (197677), my fourth-year project at the AA. The idea was to impose Malevich’s sculpture Architekton Alpha (1920) on an urban context to become architecture. My project imposed it on London’s Hungerford Bridge on the Thames in a series of horizontal layers. My fifth-year thesis, The Museum of the 19th Century (1977-78), also researched ideas about juxtaposition and superimposition. The continuous line with many trajectories on the same surface evolved in my drawings and paintings at this time; I was using different perspectives to develop distortion.

Malevich’s Dissolution of a Plane (1917, above left) represents an important moment. His geometric forms began a conceptual development

beyond the planar, becoming forces and energies, leading to ideas about how space itself might be distorted to increase dynamism and complexity without losing continuity. My work explored these ideas through concepts such as explosion, fragmentation, warping and bundling. The ideas of lightness, floating and fluidity in my work all come from this research.

This system of drawing led to new ideas, such as layering drawings over one another – like a form of reverse archaeology – which led to literal translations in the buildings. Vitra Fire Station (1983) in Weil am Rhein, Germany, was key – the drawing became the project, when the lines became volumes.

It took me 20 years to convince people to draw everything in three dimensions, with an army of people trying to draw the most difficult perspectives. Now everyone does 3D on the computer, but I think we have lost some transparency in the process. Through painting and drawing, we can discover so much more than anticipated. It might take 10 years for a 2D sketch to evolve into a workable space, and into a building, but these are the journeys that I think are the most exciting, as they are not predictable.

Malevich Tate Modern, London, 020 7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk, 16 July–26 Oct

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DEBRA MANCOFF picks a must-see work from an exhibition this season

Sheer Kahn Architect TREVOR DANNATT RA pays tribute to Louis Kahn, whose poetic buildings are celebrated at London’s Design Museum Lovers of architecture will be heartened to know of the forthcoming exhibition of the work of Louis Kahn, which travels from Germany, landing at London’s Design Museum in July.

Kahn’s mytho-poetic life seems to follow the fabled rags-to-riches pattern. He was born in 1901 in modest circumstances in Russian-controlled Estonia. A few years later the family emigrated to the US. He was nurtured in Philadelphia and professionally trained at the University of Pennsylvania, where he followed the Frenchinspired Beaux Arts tradition – based on European academic instruction – which had a serious influence on his thinking.

There is perhaps a tendency towards the monumental in the Beaux Arts tradition and Kahn achieved it where appropriate. Otherwise, his buildings exhibit what I would call ‘due order’, following strict geometries, which in his work carry an inherent calmness and gravitas. These qualities are exemplified in the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art at Yale (196877), in which two full-height courts subtend the accommodation and on the top floor the basic structure of the building – six by ten square bays – is transformed into a breathtaking assembly of interlinked gallery spaces, each defined by natural light above the sloping sides of the ceiling coffers. Everything is detailed with consummate

feeling for fine materials, echoing the centre’s collection, the cream of British art.

Other buildings, notably houses and residential projects, show the same sensibility towards right materials in conjunction, the delights of the physicality of material, density, colour and texture – and eloquent combinations of opposites.

Kahn loved castles and was as fascinated by the spaces hollowed out within their massive walls as he was by the structure of castellar forms.

His ability to absorb and regenerate the archaic is outstandingly demonstrated in the National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh (196283, above), a vast complex of related spaces and areas for activities. The volumes suffused with light and shade are as expressive of human aspiration as temple, mosque or cathedral.

Yet Kahn died a lonely death in 1974 at a railway station in New York, having returned from the Indian Subcontinent where his magnum opus was only just rising out of the ground and water in Dhaka. He never saw it.

Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture Design Museum, London, 020 7403 6933, www.designmuseum. org, 9 July–12 Oct To read an extended version of this article and to see a gallery of Khan’s works visit http://roy.ac/kahn

Title Sunlight Artist Frank Weston Benson Date 1909 Exhibition ‘American Impressionism’,

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (19 July–19 Oct) Frank Weston Benson (1862-1951) explained his theory of painting to his daughter, Eleanor, in a single, telling sentence: ‘I follow the light, where it comes from, where it goes.’ And his sunbathed portrait of Eleanor, painted on North Haven Island in Maine, reveals his mastery of this method. As she looks out over the sparkling waters of Penobscot Bay, she shades her eyes from the noontime glare.

Her bright white gown shimmers with reflected light and shadow in delicate tones of yellow, violet, pink and blue. Benson has taken the iconic Impressionist subject of a figure in full sunlight and has made it his own.

Although Benson had painted en plein air since his student days in France, the play of light on North Haven Island where, from 1901 onwards, he spent many summers with his family at Wooster Farm, brought a richer luminosity and a lighter touch to his work.

In this personally significant setting, Benson conveyed the pleasures of a specific time and place, translating the French Impressionists’ perspective into an American vernacular: an intimate glimpse of a singular moment on a perfect, summer’s day.

© R AY M O N D M EI ER . I N D I A N A P O L IS M US EU M O F A R T

The National Assembly Building, Dhaka, 1962-83, by Louis Kahn

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08/05/2014 15:18

m a rt i n r a n d a l l t r av e l

Archaeology around the World, brought to life by experts.

Martin Randall Travel has a wider range of cultural tours and events than any other specialist. Among them are around fifty itineraries which feature some of the outstanding archaeological sites in the world, in Britain and Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, India, China, and the Americas.

At the heart of each tour is the expert lecturer, chosen for his or her depth of knowledge, and passion to inspire and enlighten.

‘A beautifully organised, thoroughly enjoyable, culturally uplifting and educationally enriching tour: all we had hoped for and so much more!’

Lands of the Maya 26 January–11 February 2015 with Professor Norman Hammond

Jordan Revisited 12–21 April 2015 with Jane Taylor

Walking Hadrian’s Wall 7–13 September 2014, 11–17 May 2015 & 6–12 September 2015 with Graeme Stobbs

Athens & Rome 5–12 October 2015 with Professor Roger Wilson

Cliff Dwellings & Canyons in the American South West 10–21 October 2015 with John M. Fritz

Roman Algeria 13–21 October 2014 & 2–10 November 2015 with Barnaby Rogerson 29 October–6 November 2014 with Anthony Sattin

Eastern Turkey 4–19 October 2014, 9–24 May 2015 & 3–18 October 2015 with Rowena Loverance

Contact us: +44 (0)20 8742 3355 www.martinrandall.com ABTA No.Y6050

5085

Left: Hieroglyphs in Palenque, Mexico, after a drawing by F. Catherwood, c. 1840.

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Six degrees of separation Connecting 21st-century installation to 18th-century portrait sculpture in six steps

3. GUSTAV METZGER

1. PHYLLIDA BARLOW RA

2. BARBARA KRUGER

The exhilarating work of Phyllida Barlow, such as Untitled: 11 Awnings (2013, above), is often made of simple everyday materials such as concrete or felt. Its latest manifestations include a towering commission for Tate Britain (020 7887 8888; until 19 October) and a brilliantly colourful installation that opens a major venue, the Hauser & Wirth gallery complex set in the Somerset countryside (01749 814060; 15 July–2 Nov). The installation is site specific, inspired by country fêtes and carnivals.

Born within a year of Barlow, American artist Barbara Kruger has since the 1960s made collages and installations based on advertising posters, in which famous phrases are twisted to expose the emptiness of consumer culture – ‘I shop therefore I am’ – or where bold slogans, such as ‘Don’t Shoot’ (above), reveal an ironic wit. Her work at Modern Art Oxford (01865 722733; 28 June–31 Aug) is as stimulating and salutory as ever.

4. JAMES MCNEILL WHISTLER

The artistic questioning of the Fluxus movement had its origins in the 19th century, when J.M. Whistler was redefining art, not least, as a public dandy and wit, introducing the idea of living life as art. He is therefore a suitable father figure for the Liverpool Biennial (0151 709 7444; 5 July– 26 Oct), where the Bluecoat Gallery has a survey show of his work. Paintings, such as Thames – Nocturne in Blue and Silver, c.1872-78 (above), so subversive at the time, are now part of the canon, making Whistler an enjoyable entry point to the more challenging contemporary art of the biennial.

6. ROUBILIAC’S PORTRAIT BUSTS

5. ART NOUVEAU

Whistler designed and often painted his frames to create a total visual object. This merger of high art and decoration was an origin of Art Nouveau, the subject of a compact show at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich (01603 593199; until 14 Dec).

It includes deliciously sensual posters of women

by Alphonse Mucha (above) that typify this style.

Art Nouveau revived elements of 18th-century French Rococo, such as undulating asymmetrical forms and motifs from nature. One of the most famous sculptors of that earlier era, LouisFrançois Roubiliac, found fame in London for his lively yet dignified portraits; his relationship with the poet Alexander Pope (left) is the focus of an exhibition at Buckinghamshire’s beautiful Waddesdon Manor (01296 653226; 18 June–26 Oct).

© P H Y L L I DA B A R LOW/ H AUS ER & W I R T H / P H OTO PAU L CR OS BY. © B A R B A R A K RU GER /S P RÜ T H M AGERS . GUS TAV M E T ZGER / M US EEE D ’A R T CO N T EM P O R A I N D E LYO N . YA L E CEN T ER F O R B R I T IS H A R T, PAU L M EL LO N F U N D, US A / T H E B R I D GEM A N A R T L I B R A RY. © T H E N AT I O N A L T RUS T/ P H OTO M I K E F E A R . A R WAS A R CH I V ES/ P H OTO P E T E H U GGI NS

Like Kruger, Gustav Metzger makes work that is highly political, questioning the values of commerce and the existence of art itself. Metzger was part of Fluxus, a loose affiliation of artists who pioneered radical new approaches to art and blended disciplines; for example, his liquid crystal environments, such as Supportive (1966-2011, above), inspired psychedelic light shows at 1960s rock performances. Now aged 88, his significance is growing, and a show at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge (01223 748100; 24 May–31 Aug) introduces a new audience to his exciting and dramatic work.

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Robbie Wraith The Artist’s Muse

Exhibition 28th May – 22nd June

R

obbie Wraith is an artist rooted in the tradition of fine art. Which is not the same as saying that his art is old-fashioned. On the contrary, it is infused with the spirit of today and he looks out on the world as a 21st century man. … Drawing is the bedrock of his art as it was for the painters of the past. His flowing line encompasses the subtleties of modelling and tone, light and shadow. He can draw with the utmost delicacy and finesse, and yet with a tensile grasp of form.

Richard Ormond Author and biographer

MessuM’s www.messums.com

Burlesque Portrait

oil on canvas

Messum's RA Mag. 27.3.14 (Wraith).indd 1

69 x 56 cms 271⁄8 x 22 ins

8 Cork Street, London W1S 3LJ Telephone: +44 (0)20 7437 5545

04/04/2014 12:19

Preview Books

A Twentieth Century Memorial, 1972-78,

by Michael Sandle RA

Game over?

MICHAEL SANDLE RA finds history repeating itself on reading an illuminating analysis of Britain’s first Afghan war William Dalrymple’s book Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, now in paperback, has already been justifiably praised to the skies, but as a visual artist with a lifelong interest in war as a subject I feel driven to comment on it too. Books can be life-changing and Ellen J. Hammer’s The Struggle for Indochina (1954) is an earlier example

of one that affected me. By reading it I discovered that the British and the Japanese fought side by side in Vietnam in 1945, during the Attlee period, to drive the Nationalist Ho Chi Minh into the jungle and into the arms of Communism, thus sowing the seeds for the Vietnam War. The book radically changed my views at the time of my first overtly ‘political’ work, A Twentieth Century Memorial (1972-78, above), which was directly inspired by that war. I first thought rather simplistically that the US was to blame, and therefore the title would be A Mickey-Mouse Machine-Gun Monument for Amerika. But after reading about the little-known involvement of the British I was forced to change the title to one announcing a more universal perfidy.

Reading Return of a King has made me feel that I am not the same person I was before I read the book. I have never bought into the Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori ethos – it is the horror, wastefulness and incredible stupidity of war that gets to me – and, until now, I imagined the First World War to be the absolute paradigm of this.

William Dalrymple’s description of the British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839 and subsequent defeat has changed this perspective somewhat, as it is such a convincing account of amazing stupidity, arrogance and cruelty by the British, and of even more incredible cruelty and treachery by the Afghan warring factions, who mostly became subsequently united by an implacable hatred of the invaders.

The description of the suffering endured after the British were routed in sub-zero conditions is the most harrowing I have ever read. It encompasses the fate of the large numbers of sepoys, Indian soldiers who, along with their women and children, died horribly in the snow.

Dalrymple’s description is like something out of a Grimms’ fairy tale – the corpses of British soldiers were preserved by the cold, their eyes pecked out, their bodies impaled on the holly oaks which the Afghans had cleverly used to block the Tezin Pass – except that this was brutal reality.

This forensic but immensely readable account of the ‘Great Game’ the British played in Afghanistan in the 19th century seems painfully topical now. We achieved so little at such enormous cost then – as is almost certainly the case now – and even our then rivals, the Russians, are rattling the cage again.

Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan by William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury Paperbacks, £9.99

Sea changes

My watercolours always start with pencil. I have a great set of Derwent watercolour pencils and as soon as the boat sets off from port, I use them to warm myself up, spraying water on the pencil marks so that their rich pigment runs, then using my fingers or brushes to draw with the paint.

I bind the books I use with a variety of different papers – different textures and different whites, and grey paper so that I can start with a mid-tone background. I also take the same watercolour box on every trip: I know by heart where the different

Rumble Wick and the Noup of Noss, 2012, by Norman Ackroyd RA

colours are placed, so I don’t have to look at the box while I work – it’s like playing the piano. I can sometimes produce 50 watercolours in a day.

I hire fishing boats and I attach all my materials to the table on deck with grips so that they stay in place when the sea is choppy. It’s exciting

painting in stormy weather and my marks begin to reflect the movement of the boat. What I hope for most when I’m painting is for all my rational thoughts to disappear: my eye, heart and hand become connected, and then I can distil the real essence of the landscape.

A Shetland Notebook by Norman Ackroyd RA, RA Publications, £16. For discount see Readers’ Offers page 85.

A limited-edition of 75 includes Ackroyd’s print The Noup of Noss, 2014, £350 A Shetland Notebook: An Exhibition of Watercolours and Etchings by Norman Ackroyd RA Eames Fine Art Gallery, London, 020 7407 6561, www.eamesfineart.com, 4–28 Sep

© M I CH A EL S A N D L E . © N O R M A N ACK R OY D

A new book of NORMAN ACKROYD RA’s watercolours captures the immediacy of the moment, as the artist explains

32 RA MAGAZINE | SUMMER 2014

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(Swedish)

Represented by The SavannahOne gmbh, Private Collectors Gallery, Switzerland. To view more of his work go to; www.benntbengtsson.com

BENNT BENGTSSON

“The Crucifixion” 2,10 x 1,40 m ( 2014 ) ( Mix Technique, White Oil Paint on Fine Art Print )

RA Summer_Layout 1 08/05/2014 13:57 Page 1

ROBERT E. WELLS RBA

PAMELA KAY

ARCA RWS RBA NEAC

1 - 29 MAY 2014

Llewellyn Alexander

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Preview International

Empire lines The art of self-promotion is celebrated in a show on Rome’s first emperor, writes TOM HOLLAND Two thousand years ago this summer, Imperator Caesar Augustus died. Born 77 years previously as Gaius Octavius, his career was the most remarkable and influential in European political history.

As a young man, he exploited the implosion of Rome’s republican form of government with such ruthlessness and skill that he was able to emerge from it the city’s undisputed ruler; as an autocrat, he veiled his own supremacy behind a show of traditionalism as dazzling as it was subtle, and lived to die

The Prima Porta statue of Augustus, 1st century CE

Going Dutch

© M US ÉES D U VAT I CA N , CI T É D U VAT I CA N . T H E R I J KS M US EU M , A MS T ER DA M

Philosophers reinterpret the Rijksmuseum, the Mauritshuis reopens and Seurat shines at the Kröller-Müller

in his bed. The man who had subverted Rome’s ancient freedoms also set its empire upon foundations so solid that it would endure for centuries after his death. Even today, the word ‘Augustan’ serves as shorthand for a golden age.

How did Augustus do it? An exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, which travels from Rome, gives as good an answer to this question as one could hope to find. The cultural riches that distinguished the decades of Augustus’ supremacy were not distinct from the brilliance and ambivalence of his political achievement, but fundamental aspects of it. The most celebrated of all the images from the Augustan age, the barefoot statue of Augustus (left) that was found in 1863 at Prima Porta, just outside Rome, perfectly illustrates this: majestically and beautifully iconic, it is for that very reason potently political as well.

What the exhibition also demonstrates, though, is a further

Art is Therapy

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Until 7 September www.rijksmuseum.nl What should art really be for? Alain de Botton and fellow philosopher John Armstrong pose this question in a striking new intervention at the Rijksmuseum, in which they have created new captions for 150 of the works in the museum’s collection, in a bid to challenge the conventions of how art is viewed.

The captions question visitors, inviting them to consider each work’s therapeutic potential. In one example, De Botton and Armstrong ask visitors to examine Vermeer’s View of Houses in Delft (c.1658, left), famously known as The Little Street, stating: ‘This painting is out of synch with its status because, above all else, it wants to show us that the ordinary can be very special...

It is an anti-heroic picture, a weapon against false images of glamour’.

Mauritshuis: The Building

View of Houses in Delft, c.1658, by Johannes Vermeer, at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Mauritshuis, The Hague 27 June–4 January 2015 www.mauritshuis.nl The Mauritshuis reopens in June after extensive renovations of its 17th-century building and the

paradox: that a tight control over Augustus’ own image did not inhibit displays of stunning originality and virtuosity by the artists employed to serve the interests of his regime.

This, for our age that prizes liberty over order, and individuality over the demands of the state, is a revelation not without its unsettling aspects, perhaps. But it does also give to the show, with its assemblage of ancient art, a biting contemporary edge. An exhibition devoted to Augustus that did not force us to question our own presumptions about the relationship between power and culture would not be one worth visiting.

‘I have raised a monument more enduring than bronze,’ declared Horace, friend and admirer of Augustus, in praise of his own poetry. This show demonstrates just how enduring was the image fashioned by Augustus himself.

I, Augustus, Emperor of Rome Grand Palais, Paris, www.grandpalais.fr, until 13 July

addition of a new exhibition space, the Royal Dutch Shell Wing. The opening exhibition pays homage to the history of the splendid palace and the building of the new wing. Then in February 2015 the new wing presents Old Master paintings and objets d’art from the Frick Collection, which travel outside of the US for the first time in the collection’s history.

Seurat: Master of Pointillism

Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo 23 May–7 September www.kmm.nl ‘Let’s go and get drunk on the light once more, that’s a consolation,’ Seurat once said, and a new exhibition of almost half of the artist’s entire output, including Le Cirque (1890-91), one of the treasures of the Musée d’Orsay, allows us to drink in as much of the French avant-garde painter as possible. Presented at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the picturesque De Hoge Veluwe National Park, the show also explores Seurat’s influence through around 60 works by Neo-impressionist painters.

Maud Johnson

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The RAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s painters, printmakers, sculptors and architects

Academy Artists

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In the Studio

Fit for a King FIONA MADDOCKS meets sculptor and former RA President Phillip King in his studio in a converted north London factory. Photograph by DAVID VINTINER Phillip King RA, internationally renowned sculptor and past President of the Royal Academy, made his earliest objects out of the sands of North Africa. Born near Carthage in 1934, his childhood playground was the Mediterranean coast, his boyhood horizons those Aeneas saw as he abandoned Queen Dido and sailed from the harbour in quest of Rome.

King’s own ambitions at that time were more modest but in their own way heroic. ‘I had a wonderful, free childhood,’ he recalls during my visit to his studio in London’s West Hampstead.

‘I had a close group of friends and we ran wild, getting up to terrible pranks. Our house was almost on the beach and the waves would lap against it in a storm. If you dug deep into the sand, after about two feet you found clay.’

That’s when King began making things.

As a boy, he also witnessed extraordinary events at the climax of the Second World War. Ships were blown up right outside the family home. His eyes, a striking bright blue, twinkle with animation at the memory. ‘Our house was strategically placed. It’s a wonder it wasn’t requisitioned. We had the Eighth Army coming down from Libya, and the Allies had arrived in Algiers and were sweeping to Tunis to squeeze the Germans out – all this right on our doorstep.

We left for England soon after.’

All this is a far cry from the ramshackle yet coherent space that is his studio, not far from the house he shares with his novelist wife, Judy Corbalis. Several small, interconnected rooms are used for displaying maquettes or keeping archives, as well as for making the work itself, while a space remains clear for the display of sculpture. There are signs of the innumerable materials King now works with: fibreglass, plastics, resin, steel, foam PVC, wood, bamboo, phosphorescent acrylic, concrete, slate, asphalt, tar, polystyrene and an array of other industrial products. The building, which he has had for ‘about 15 years’, was once a factory for making cast-iron stamping machines.

King’s ever evolving style – from the angled and delicately painted, to the robust outdoor, to the more traditional and figurative – has made him hard to categorise. ‘Abstract lyricist’ is perhaps the most accurate classification. As we sit in one of the upstairs rooms in his studio,

we examine the exquisitely made maquettes all around, particularly several small conical ones of dancing dervishes.

‘There’s plenty of northern light, which is especially good for looking at sculpture. I play around at making things, and I conceptualise ideas: it’s a dual process. I don’t converse with myself through drawing, rather through making.’

King had his first exhibition while at Cambridge University in the mid-1950s, and then decided he needed some formal tuition. ‘I was in Foyles bookshop in London and I asked if they knew anything about art schools. “You’re right next door to St Martin’s,” they replied. So I went next door and asked for the sculpture department.

The first person I encountered was Anthony Caro.’

The rest, in a manner too long to catalogue here, is history. For a time a pupil and for a much longer period a friend and colleague, King remained close to Caro and their work is often mentioned in the same breath. He followed in Caro’s footsteps as an assistant to Henry Moore and by the 1960s was becoming a highly influential figure associated with American Minimalists such as Carl Andre.

King loves being at the studio, still doing most of the heavy lifting work himself, as he always has done. Using machines for sanding, grinding, compressing and sawing remains a pleasure for him, as he approaches 80 this May. With three exhibitions imminent, his career is buoyant.

He missed this freedom during his years as President of the RA. ‘It was a time of immense challenge for the Academy, particularly regarding the finances, and it’s wonderful to see it now in such a good period, especially with the forthcoming expansion into Burlington Gardens.’ The best aspect of having been President, he recalls, was the way he learned to appreciate the work of fellow RAs. ‘You have to look in a completely open-minded way.

For that experience I will always be grateful.’

Phillip King Thomas Dane Gallery, London, 020 7925 2505, www.thomasdanegallery.com, 11 June–26 July.

King also shows in the grounds of Royal Hospital Chelsea for Masterpiece London 020 7499 7470, www.masterpiecefair.com, 26 June–2 July with his works on view until 29 Aug Phillip King Tate Britain, London, 020 7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk, 8 Dec–1 March 2015

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‘The greatest antiwar manifesto in the history of art’ roberT hughes

Goya: Disasters of War The first facsimile of Goya’s own prints in the Ceán Bermúdez Album, with a commentary by Mark McDonald Limited to 980 copies

+44 (0)20 7400 4200

limitededitions@foliosociety.com

TRACES OF WAR

MARTYN GREGORY

Landscapes of the Western Front

34 Bury Street, St. James’s, London, SW1Y 6AU An exhibition of 18th and 19th century British watercolours and drawings

11 June – 18 October

John William Buxton Knight (1843-1908) A view of deer grazing in parkland watercolour, 7 ¼ x 13 ⅛ ins (18.5 x 33.3 cm), signed and dated [18]90

We are participating in Master Drawings week, 4-11 July; our exhibition continues until 18 July.

RA 2014 issue Martyn Gregory tint.1.indd 1

Tel: 020 7839 3731 Fax: 020 7930 0812 mgregory@dircon.co.uk www.martyngregory.com

Peter Cattrell, Line of Trees, Theipval, Somme, France, silver print, 2000

4 - 18 July 2014

Gallery opening hours: Monday to Friday 10 am - 6 pm Saturday 5th July 10 am - 5 pm Sunday 6th July 12 noon - 5pm

13 Berkeley Street London, W1J 8DU

Tues – Sat, 10am–5.30pm Free admission

| 020 7042 5730 | www.flemingcollection.com

THE FLEMING COLLECTION

27/03/2014 21:02

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www.foliosociety.com/goya

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Academy Artists Epiphany

Life on the edge Continuing our series on artists’ epiphanies, SAM PHILLIPS meets Terry Setch RA on the Welsh beach that transformed his art.

Photograph by ANDY SEWELL The landscape inhabits Terry Setch RA. Since the London-born artist moved to Penarth in 1969, he has been utterly bewitched by the Welsh town’s coast, its rugged cliffs and beaches casting a heady spell over his art and life.

The Severn Estuary environment is more than just his subject: for over four decades these shores have provided the physical materials for his mixed-media works and acted, Setch tells me during a cliff-side stroll, as an ‘open-air studio’. The natural substances and man-made debris he finds on the beach – from sand and seaweed to plastic bags and corroded metal – are then often layered en plein air, amalgamated with acrylics and wax on board and canvas.

Works in progress are even dipped in the water.

Nature in this way becomes Setch’s unlikely studio assistant, and the results range from

representational images to more abstract accumulations, some of which are on show this summer at Flowers Gallery in London.

As we walk, I ask the Academician, now 78 years old, to cast his mind back to the year he was pulled into Penarth’s grasp. Why did the beach take hold of him? ‘The coast reminded me of where I was born. My dad was a welder who worked on the Thames, on the Isle of Dogs, and I had wonderful memories of the bending river. So in Penarth it felt that I had entered into entirely unfamiliar yet familiar circumstances, which was very liberating. I was immediately drawn to find a physical connection with that beach, which meant breaking completely with what I was doing.’ At that time what he was ‘doing’ was a cool and considered line of Pop art – the antithesis of his practice that followed.

‘The Severn has the second-highest tide in the world,’ he continues, ‘and when I first got here the shipping lane was still active. There was flotsam with jetsam – tyres, oil and tar slicks, rope, polystyrene crates. Incorporated into the paintings these metamorphose and become a part of my art language.’ A key moment came when he discovered an entire car marooned on the rocks, 40 years ago. ‘It was the violent intrusion of something grotesque at a time when I was becoming more politically conscious of waste and

pollution.’ Over months it was gradually stripped and ripped up by the tide, before Setch painted it and then set it alight. Burning has been a metaphor as well as a procedure in his work, a signifier of transformative processes in the natural world.

Somehow, through some strange alchemy of his own, Setch has pursued an art that borrows from but is not defined by movements, from the 19th-century landscape tradition to post1960s scenes such as Land Art, Action Painting, performance art and Neo-Dada. The artist he mentions most, however, is Alfred Sisley, the Impressionist who painted the very beach on which we walk. ‘I always want to break from the purity of a particular genre of art,’ Setch explains. ‘But I think people find it difficult that I connect artists who are not normally associated. I join tradition with modernism and it’s uncomfortable. I also share with nature, and that’s the way it should be – sometimes I think I should bring all my work down to the beach and let it be carried into the sea.’

Terry Setch Flowers Gallery, London, 020 7920 7777, www.flowersgallery.com, 12 June–12 July To see a video interview with Setch as well as more images, visit http://roy.ac/setch

Terry Setch RA walks in front of the cliffs of Penarth Beach in South Wales, where he gathers the materials for his paintings

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HESTERCOMBE GALLERY

Contemporary art in reclaimed spaces

David Batchelor, ‘Colour Chart Painting 33 (green) 20.06.11’, 2011

24.05.14 –14.09.14

Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England

ar•chi•tec•ton•ic ar•chi•tec•ton•ic ANDY BURGESS & TOM LEIGHTON 1 May – 1 June 2014 Site/109 109 Norfolk Street Lower East Side New York

MONDRIAN & COLOUR 24 MAY— 21 SEPT 2014

DOWNTOWN FAIR 8 – 11 May 2014 New York

Free admission Margate: Only 90 minutes from London

ART AT THE TOP 2014 May – July 2014 Ronnette Riley Architect Empire State Building, NY Viewing by appointment

ANDY BURGESS Green Wexler, Oil on canvas, 54 x 72 in. 2014

The Cynthia Corbett Gallery info@thecynthiacorbettgallery.com www.thecynthiacorbettgallery.com +44 (0)20 8947 6782 | UK +44 (0)79 3908 5076 US +1 773 600 7719 facebook.com/TheCynthiaCorbettGallery twitter: @corbettGALLERY

Image credit Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), Molen (Mill); The Red Mill, 1911. Oil on canvas, 150 cm x 86 cm Collection Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Netherlands © 2014 Mondrian/ Holtzman Trust c/o HCR International USA

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ART HAMPTONS 10 – 13 July 2014 Bridgehampton, NY

ART SOUTHAMPTON 24 – 28 July 2014 Southampton, NY

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10 YEAR ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION 2004 – 2014 23 – 28 June 2014 The Gallery in Cork Street, 28 Cork Street, Mayfair W1

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Academy Artists

Displays of love

© N I GEL H A L L / P H OTO CO L I N M I L LS . © M ANIJEH YADEGAR /PHOTO COLIN MILLS . © FIONA R AE /COURTESY TIMOTHY TAYLOR GALLERY, LONDON . © DAN PERFECT

Two Academicians take the rare step of showing alongside their partners this summer, reports RICHARD CORK Before the 20th century, artist couples were rare indeed. But everything has changed since then. Ben Nicholson married Barbara Hepworth in 1938, and soon afterwards other artists followed suit. Over in New York, Jackson Pollock married the painter Lee Krasner in 1945, and during the postwar period an artist as emancipated as Mary Martin flourished alongside her husband Kenneth.

But it is still unusual for artist couples to exhibit together, and Fiona Rae RA says that she feels ‘very privileged’ (it will, she thinks, be ‘quite a leap into the unknown’) to share a show of ‘fresh and up-to-date work’ with her husband Dan Perfect at Nottingham Castle this summer. They are both painters, and have studios in the same east London building. But the invitation to stage an exhibition together came as a big surprise.

‘We don’t want to merge and become a mushy conglomerate,’ Rae explains, ‘so my paintings will go down one wall and Dan’s will be on another.’

Perfect explains that he ‘plumbs the depths’ of his own psyche, searching in his big paintings for a ‘complexity and chaos’ analogous to the phenomenon of experience. Rae’s work is more improvisational, defining dreamscapes with lyrical virtuosity. ‘For me it would be a disaster not to talk about my work with Dan,’ says Rae. ‘I very much like input from a trusted person, and I know that Dan has my best interests at heart.’ While Perfect points out that ‘Fiona is keener to get my input on her work than the other

way round’, he has no hesitation in declaring, ‘I value her eye above all other eyes – she is a fantastic resource, such a great painter, and I love having an artist as my partner.’ They talk a lot about each other’s work, and have lunch together every day. But they travel separately to and from their studios. ‘We’re both aware that what we do is deeply strange – it needs an enormous and inexhaustible appetite for solitude,’ says Perfect.

Nigel Hall RA, who is sharing an exhibition with his partner Manijeh Yadegar at Galerie Andres Thalmann in Zürich, is equally fascinated by this unusual opportunity. ‘She’s a painter and I’m a sculptor,’ Hall says, ‘and she works where we live, while I travel all the way from Ladbroke Grove to my studio in Balham on the other side of London.’ Hall is clear about the differences between his work and Yadegar’s: ‘Her work is more atmospheric, often monochrome, and more smoky and textural. She came over to England [from Iran] when a child, and loves Chinese painting. But we are both interested in abstraction, and underlying that is an interest in landscape. We travel a lot together, go on walks in Switzerland, and we’re interested in each other’s work. She gives me good advice, works

steadily and I would like to show more with her.

She hasn’t exhibited a great deal, and she’s quite modest – too modest. But she doesn’t want to feel that she gets opportunities because of me.’

For her part, Yadegar says: ‘We always talk together, but our approaches are totally different.

Mine is very intuitive, whereas Nigel works a lot in his sketchbook. There’s a physical distance between us when we are in our studios. But it’s stimulating and very necessary, being oneself and alone. I didn’t start as an abstract artist, but Nigel helped me a lot to move on. And I’ve always longed to show in Zürich, because I am influenced by the Swiss landscape and colours.’ How does she feel about the idea of showing with a partner?

‘I’m always fascinated to see other couples’ work presented together. There should be more of these exhibitions, because there’s so much give and take between partners.’

Painter, Painter: Dan Perfect, Fiona Rae Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery, 0115 8761400, www.nottinghamcity.gov.uk/Castle, until 6 July, then Southampton City Art Gallery, 023 8083 2705, www.southampton.gov, 18 July–18 Oct Nigel Hall and Manijeh Yadegar Galerie Andres Thalmann, Zürich, www.andresthalmann.com, until 14 June

Southern Shade III, 2013, by Nigel Hall RA TOP RIGHT C19, 2013,

by Manijeh Yadegar LEFT Transporter, 2014, by Dan Perfect RIGHT See your world, 2013, by Fiona Rae RA TOP LEFT

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Academy Artists

Now showing Our guide to where you can see the art and architecture of the Royal Academicians

Architects ● David Chipperfield’s firm has

designed Museo Jumex, a new contemporary art space in Mexico City ● Peter Cook’s practice CRAB have completed two university buildings, one in Vienna and one in Queensland ● Norman Foster and Spencer de Grey have collaborated with architect Frank Gehry Hon RA on plans for a new mixeduse development at Battersea Power Station ● Nicholas Grimshaw’s company is responsible for the newly opened terminal at St Petersburg’s Pulkovo International Airport (below)

● Thomas Heatherwick’s studio has

built a pavilion to house a permanent exhibition on its London Olympic Cauldron, due to open on 28 July, at the Museum of London. The firm is also designing the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town ● Ian Ritchie’s firm has completed the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour at University College, London ● Alan Stanton’s firm Stanton Williams is designing the first phase of university student housing and amenities in north-west Cambridge ● Christopher Wilkinson’s firm Wilkinson Eyre has won the 2014 Civic Trust Award for its design of the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth.

Painters and Printmakers new Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai (5 July–5 Oct) ● Fred Cuming (below) shows at Adam Gallery’s spaces in London (24 June–10 July) and Bath (12–26 July) ● Anne Desmet’s exhibition is at Editions Ltd, Liverpool (26 June–19 July) ● Jennifer Durrant selects work for ‘artist of the day’ at Flowers, London (23 June–4 July) ● Stephen Farthing’s show ‘Titian’s Ghosts’ is at Ham House, Richmond (until 2 Nov) ● David Hockney is shown at Annely Juda, London (until 12 July) ● Gary Hume shows at White Cube Săo Paulo (24 June–23 Aug) ● Christopher Le Brun takes part in a group show at Galleria Bonomo, Rome (11 June–20 Sep) ● Ian McKeever shows at HackelBury, London (6 June–13 Sep) ● Barbara Rae shows work (above right) at Pallant House, Chichester (1 July–26 Oct) ● Jenny Saville has a solo show at Gagosian on Britannia Street, London (13 June–26 July) ● Sean Scully shows at Timothy Taylor, London (11 June–12 July), and at Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford (until 31 Aug) ● Bob and Roberta Smith’s film The Art Party is released on

GCSE results day (21 Aug) ● Wolfgang Tillmans shows in ‘Manifesta 10’ at St Petersburg’s State Hermitage (28 June– 31 Oct) ● Gillian Wearing has a show at the New Art Gallery Walsall (18 July–12 Oct) ● Anthony Whishaw has an open studio at ACME Bonner Road, London, on 28 June ● ‘Exciting as We Can Make It’ at Ikon, Birmingham, includes Gillian Ayres and Albert Irvin (2 July–31 Aug) ● Anthony Green and Leonard McComb take part in Richmond Hill Gallery’s Summer Show (19 June–31 Aug).

CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE

St Petersburg’s Pulkovo International Airport, designed by Nicholas Grimshaw RA’s practice; Associate, 2014, by Richard Deacon RA, on show at the Henry Moore Foundation; Cornish Sea II, 2013,

by Fred Cuming RA, on display at Adam Gallery; West. O.S. 22, 2013,

by Barbara Rae RA, on view at Pallant House

Sculptors ● John Carter’s solo show ‘Studies,

Prints’ is at Fondation Louis Moret, Martigny, Switzerland (until 8 June) ● Richard Deacon and Bill Woodrow present their collaborative works at the New Art Centre, Salisbury (31 May– 6 July) ● Richard Long has a solo presentation at Lisson Gallery, London (until 12 July) and shows the exhibition ‘Prints 1970–2013’ at New Art Gallery Walsall (until 22 June) ● David Nash’s solo show ‘From Kew Gardens to Meijer Gardens’ is at Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan (until 17 Aug) ● Cornelia Parker shows work in the Shenzhen Sculpture Biennial, China (until 24 Oct) ● The ‘Ikon Icons’ series of shows at Ikon, Birmingham,

includes those by Cornelia Parker (2 July–31 Aug) and Yinka Shonibare (10 Sep–9 Nov). Shonibare’s Wind Sculpture has been installed at Howick Place, London. His solo exhibition ‘Cannonball Paradise’ is at the Gerisch Foundation in Neumünster, Germany (until 19 Oct) ● Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon (who shows Associate, above), Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor and Richard Long participate in the group exhibition ‘Body & Void: Echoes of Moore in Contemporary Art’ at the Henry Moore Foundation, Perry Green, Herts (until 26 Oct) ● Richard Deacon, Wolfgang Tillmans, William Tucker and Rebecca Warren contribute works to ‘Somewhat Abstract’ at Nottingham Contemporary (until 29 June) ● Yinka Shonibare and Rebecca Warren take part in ‘The Human Factor’ at the Hayward Gallery, London (17 June–7 Sep).

© B A R B A R A R A E / P H OTO B I L L B R A DY. PHOTO Y U R I M O LO D KOV E TS . PHOTO GR AEME ROBERTSON/COURTESY THE HENRY MOORE FOUNDATION . A DA M G A L L ERY

● Tony Bevan’s retrospective is at the

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Construction in White and Black, 1938, by Joaquín Torres-García

ABOVE

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T H E M US EU M O F M O D ER N A R T, N E W YO R K . GI F T O F PAT R I CI A P H EL P S D E CIS N ER OS I N H O N O U R O F DAV I D R O CK EF EL L ER , 20 04/ P H OTO CO L ECCI Ó N PAT R I CI A P H EL P S D E CIS N ER OS

How does an art movement travel to a new continent?

As the RA’s ‘Radical Geometry’ opens, Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro maps the cultural and political changes that were crucial to the development of abstraction in South America

Minimalist migrations URUGUAY Concept Connecting

ancient Incan and modern geometries When 1930 and ’40s Who Joaquín

Torres-García founds School of the South

O

ur story starts in 1934 when a by-then old man, Joaquín Torres-García (18741949), disembarked from a ship in the harbour of Montevideo, his birth city, after a lifetime working in the major artistic cities of the world: Barcelona, New York, Paris. TorresGarcía returned to Uruguay with great ambitions and the conviction that South America would be the birthplace of a new Utopian art movement that would build on and renew the ideas developed in the European avant-garde.

In a missionary vein, Torres-García searched for disciples who would join him in his new ‘School of the South’ that would fuse ancient and contemporary art with a South American perspective. Although he had worked alongside Piet Mondrian and Michel Seuphor in Paris, Torres-García was as impressed by the geometry of Incan ceramics at the city’s Trocadéro museum as he was by the hard-edged Neoplastic compositions of these European artists.

Mondrian and the Inca shared the same sense

of composition, proportion and mathematical principle, and this led him to speculate that art could be a way of bridging cultures and fusing spiritual traditions. He developed these theories in several volumes that culminated in Constructive Universalism, published in Buenos Aires in 1944.

Torres-García worked with great energy in his native city, founding two artistic associations, publishing magazines and books, and hosting a regular radio show. His audience was the literate middle-class of a then-prosperous and highly educated country. Uruguay was known as the ‘Switzerland of South America’ in the 1940s and ’50s because of its tradition of liberalism (it was one of the first countries in the continent to give women the vote, separate church from state and recognise divorce). Yet Torres-García’s works were understood by few outside his group of disciples and he lived modestly.

Torres-García worked in a variety of styles and subjects, from more traditional still-life and landscape to fully abstract work such as Construction in White and Black (1938, left), in which the stacked geometric forms that stand out in relief recall stonework of Incan temples.

He is best known for his grid-like compositions filled with symbols and letters such as Constructive Composition 16, from 1943, in which we can see the sun, an anchor and even the letters that spell out the name Montevideo. In works such as these, Torres-García gave visual form to his aspirations that contemporary art should speak as much to the past as to the present, using the universal language of geometry to find connections between ancient and new, local and global.

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Irregular Frame No 2, 1946, by Juan Melé

RIGHT

ARGENTINA Concept Social revolution through experimental art When 1940s Who Arte Madí

and the Concrete ArtInvention Association

unsigned (to sign a work was considered a mark of bourgeois decadence), and often breaking the boundary of traditional painting supports, as we can see in Juan Melé’s Irregular Frames No. 2 (1946, above), in which the colourful forms seem to be pushing the frame into a bold geometric shape. As John Carter RA explains (see page 49), the irregular or structured frame was seen as a way to question the long tradition of paintings within rectangular frames, which since the days of Alberti in the Renaissance had been associated with illusionism: a window onto the world.

By creating irregular forms, or even separating shapes in space – as seen in Raúl Lozza’s Relief No. 30 (1946, see page 49) – the artists were attempting to create an object that no longer resembled a painting as it was then understood.

Arte Madí, founded by Kosice, Arden Quin and Rothfuss, took these ideas further by introducing physical movement into the works.

In Kosice’s Mobile Articulated Sculpture (1948),

the viewer was invited to pick up hinged metal bands and make their own composition.

The idea that artist and viewer could share authorship of an artwork became a feature of the South American avant-garde. Arte Madí also proposed a fusion of disciplines, and its exhibitions and magazines included architects, composers, dancers and writers. Many of these artists took on several pseudonyms, adding fictional members of a movement that sought to spread its influence internationally.

After a period of intense activity from 1944 to 1948, many of these radical artists became disillusioned by the hardening ideological positions of the emerging Cold War, and by the rise of Peronism. Some left Argentina for Europe – Tomás Maldonado, became a designer and philosopher in Germany and Italy – while others abandoned the extreme positions of their youth or even stopped making art. A few, like Kosice, continued to innovate in the field of Kinetic Art.

CO L ECCI Ó N PAT R I CI A P H EL P S D E CIS N ER OS/© ES TAT E O F J UA N M EL É

F

or a number of young artists in Buenos Aires across the Rio de la Plata in the mid-1940s, Torres-García was an old man, clinging to antiquarian notions of the past and to a romantic idea of painting and spirituality. These artists, in their late teens and early 20s, felt a compelling urge to make a radical new art that would reflect the ideological extremes of the Second World War and the fight against Fascism. For them, all previous art was a form of bourgeois elitism, and they proposed to use geometry as a universal language to make art objects that could be made and enjoyed by all people. In doing so, these artists – Tomás Maldonado, Gyula Kosice, Carmelo Arden Quin, Rhod Rothfuss and Juan Melé, among others – tried to revive the revolutionary ideas of Russian Constructivism which in the early years of the Russian Revolution had tried to create a new art of the people based on extreme geometry. Of course by the 1940s, the official art of the Soviet Union was Socialist Realism, but the Argentines chose nonetheless to promote a severe form of abstraction as a way of supporting class struggle.

In the mid-1940s Argentina was profiting from its own political neutrality and its grain exports during the Second World War, as well as from an influx of highly educated European refugees. But its political future was in the balance as right and left fought for power, creating the vacuum that was filled by the rise of Juan Domingo Perón, an ambiguous populist with strong ties to the unions, but who many suspected of being a closet Fascist. Against this backdrop, radical artists formed the Concrete Art-Invention Association in 1945 and Arte Madí in 1946, writing provocative manifestos in which they proclaimed their revolution in art as the vanguard for a social revolution that would remove all class distinctions. Their works were uncompromisingly geometric and severe,

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BRAZIL

CO L ECCI Ó N PAT R I CI A P H EL P S D E CIS N ER OS/© I M AGE R EP R O D U CT I O N P ER M I T T ED BY T H E F I A M I N GH I FA M I LY. CO L ECCI Ó N PAT R I CI A P H EL P S D E CIS N ER OS/© P R O J E TO H ÉL I O O I T I CI CA

CO L ECCI Ó N PAT R I CI A P H EL P S D E CIS N ER OS/© ES TAT E O F J UA N M EL É

Sectional No.1, 1958,

by Hermelindo Fiaminghi BELOW Painting 9, 1959,

by Hélio Oiticica

RIGHT

Concept São Paulo’s machine aesthetic and Rio’s redefinition of the art object When 1950s and ’60s

Who Ruptura and Neo-Concretism

U

nlike Argentina or Uruguay, Brazil was positioned to emerge as an economic superpower in the postwar years. The government of Juscelino Kubitschek from 1956 to 1961 heralded an era with the aim of building national industries to remove the country’s reliance on imported goods.

A clear symbol of Brazil’s new confidence was the decision to move the capital city away from the colonial splendour of Rio de Janeiro to a brand new city in the heartland of the country, Brasilía.

The enthusiasm for all things modern was felt across the arts, and Brazilian modern architecture and design is justly celebrated. For visual artists, geometric abstraction was a language that perfectly reflected the country’s industrial and progressive spirit. The creation of the São Paulo Biennial in 1951, following on the heels of two new museums of modern art in Rio de Janeiro

‘Oiticica’s black quadrilaterals, while still pure in their formal language, appear to be moving more organically across the surface’

and São Paulo, created a forum for Brazilians to see the best of international modern art, but also to present themselves as the vanguard within this international context.

The Swiss artist Max Bill was awarded the grand prize for sculpture at the first Biennial in 1951, and his hard-edged, mathematical and calculated style was to become a model for many young Brazilian artists. Waldemar Cordeiro, Geraldo de Barros, Hermelindo Fiaminghi (above), Judith Lauand and several other São Paulo artists were members of Ruptura, a movement that from 1952 posited a precise machine aesthetic, which, according to their manifesto, had ‘clear and intelligent principles’ and was ‘capable of practical applications’. In Cordeiro’s Visible Idea (1956, see cover), for example, we can see how mathematical principles were applied with a diagrammatic clarity in the

central interlocking spirals, painted with precision on a surface that seems industrially produced, although it was painstakingly made by hand.

Not surprisingly, many Brazilian artists also had careers as graphic or industrial designers, where these principles of clear, graphic communication could be introduced into a mass market.

In Rio geometric abstraction was to take a different path. In the early 1950s artists in the Neo-Concrete movement, such as Lygia Pape, Franz Weismann and Hélio Oiticica, made similarly reductive works. However, by the middle of the decade more organic and relaxed compositions appeared, although still within a very limited and rigorous vocabulary. For example, in Oiticica’s Painting 9 (1959, below left), the black quadrilaterals, while still pure in their formal language, appear to be moving more organically across the surface, as though floating on air or in water. The more relaxed lifestyle and exuberant nature of Rio, as opposed to the severe concrete of São Paulo, may have something to do with this change. Rio was also the hub of Bossa Nova, a new tropical jazz that came to represent a suave and refined aesthetic across the globe.

Rio was also home to some of the more radical proposals to emerge out of geometric abstraction in South America. In 1959 Lygia Clark made hinged sculptures that she collectively called ‘Bichos’ (‘Creatures’). These allowed the viewer to interact physically with the object, making a potentially infinite number of compositions.

Meanwhile, Hélio Oiticica’s interest in the slum cultures of Rio led him in 1965 to create a wearable geometric composition, the parangolé, that was used in the city’s Samba School, collapsing traditional distinctions between high and low culture. Both of these artists pushed the boundaries of the object, but still maintained (some would say renewed) abstraction’s original utopian and transformative aspirations.

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Double Transparency, 1956, by Jesús Soto

VENEZUELA Concept Optical effects and colour fields When 1950s and ’70s

Who Artists such as Carlos Cruz-Diez, Gego, Alejandro Otero and Jesús Soto

C

aracas of the 1950s and ’60s was, like São Paulo or Rio, a bustling and rapidly growing city, keen to establish a modern and forward-looking identity.

Major urban projects such as the University City, designed by Carlos Raúl Villanueva and inaugurated in 1954, expressed a vision of a tropical modernism that was sophisticated and

cosmopolitan. The public spaces of the University City included major artworks by American and European artists such as Alexander Calder, Jean Arp, Victor Vasarely and Fernand Léger, along with works by the new generation of local artists including Jesús Soto, Alejandro Otero and Mateo Manaure. Riding on the wealth created by enormous oil reserves, Venezuelans collected art, while large-scale public works created an urban iconography that was playful and optimistic on a scale that rivalled Mexico City’s famous murals.

For Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez and Alejandro Otero, the challenge of art was how to capture and generate the transitory effects of light and time. In works such as Double Transparency (1956, above), Soto superimposed grids to create optical vibrations as the viewer moved in front of the works. For Cruz-Diez colour was the central issue, and in his series ‘Physichromie’ (derived from ‘physics’ and ‘chromatic’) he made compositions that change colour depending

on the viewer’s position and the ambient light, generating immersive and unstable fields of colour. The delicate wire structures of Germanborn Gego (Gertrude Goldschmidt), such as her series ‘Esfera (Sphere)’, are geometric, while more like tree branches than mechanical objects.

From Torres-García’s School of the South to Cruz-Diez’s vibrant colour fields, geometric abstraction in South America above all gave visual form to different ideological and political positions. For the Brazilian critic Mário Pedrosa, it was ‘the experimental exercise of freedom’.

Radical Geometry: Modern Art of South America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection The Sackler Wing, Royal Academy of Arts, 020 7300 8000, www.royalacademy.org.uk, 5 July–28 Sep. 2009-2016 Season supported by JTI. Supported by Christie’s. See Events and Lectures page 68 For a video interview with co-curator Adrian Locke visit http://roy.ac/radgeo

CO L ECCI Ó N PAT R I CI A P H EL P S D E CIS N ER OS/© A DAGP, PA R IS A N D DAC S , LO N D O N 2014.

LEFT

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Intercontinental connections

CLOCKWISE FROM BELOW

Relief No. 30, 1946, by Raúl Lozza; On Either Side, 2012, by John Carter RA; Trio No. 2, 1951, by Carmelo Arden Quin

CO L ECCI Ó N PAT R I CI A P H EL P S D E CIS N ER OS/© EL I DA LOZ Z A . © J O H N CA R T ER /CO U R T ESY T H E R ED F ER N . CO L ECCI Ó N PAT R I CI A P H EL P S D E CIS N ER OS/© A DAGP, PA R IS A N D DAC S , LO N D O N 2014 G A L L ERY

Artist John Carter RA explains how his work resonates with Buenos Aires artists in ‘Radical Geometry’

There is some remarkable work in ’Radical Geometry’ and some famous artists appear in the exhibition: Carlos Cruz-Diez, Hélio Oiticica, Jesús Soto, Lygia Clark and others.

The two I am writing about in detail here are not necessarily the most significant ones artistically, nor are they well known in Britain, but their work has unexpected connections to my own interests and practice. They they are Tomás Maldonado and Carmelo Arden Quin.

My interest in the work of the Swiss Concrete artist Max Bill led me to the Argentine artist Maldonado. As Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro discusses (see page 47), Bill’s geometric art had had quite an extensive influence in South America, particularly in Brazil. In 1951 he held a major retrospective exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo, and won the international prize for sculpture in the first São Paolo Biennale. During that visit he met many of the continent’s artists and gave a series of very influential lectures.

This must have been an amazing time for Bill, because in the early 1950s he was also involved with founding the School of Design in the German city of Ulm. It was to become the new Bauhaus, establishing itself as the most influential design school of the postwar era.

Bill not only designed the school’s building, in a role as architect, but also became its first

director. While on that visit to South America he recruited Maldonado to join the staff at the school. Maldonado had already met Bill when he had visited Europe in 1948. He was later to succeed Bill in becoming the second director of the school, a role that he occupied for 12 years.

During this period he became internationally known as a designer and a philosopher of design – a surprising British connection is that in 1965 Maldonado delivered the Lethaby Lecture at London’s Royal College of Art. Maldonado was born in Buenos Aires in 1922 and studied at the city’s National Academy of Fine Arts. In 1944 he was part of a circle of radical abstract artists that collectively produced the art publication Arturo. As the ‘Radical Geometry’ exhibition shows, the Argentine capital during the decade was in a ferment of avant-garde activity. But in-fighting, which was characteristic of that swiftly changing world, caused a permanent rift in the circle.

In 1945 Maldonado co-founded the Concrete Art-Invention Association, a breakaway group, and artists including Carmelo Arden Quin established the group Arte Madí. There is dispute over the meaning of the name Madí: one possibility is that it stands for ‘Movimiento Artístico de Invención’, another is that it comes from the combination of the first two letters of the words ‘materialismo dialéctico’, the Spanish for dialectical materialism. Magazines were as important as the exhibitions to Arte Madí, as were performances, poetry readings and Dadatype activities. ‘Neither Searching nor Finding: Invention’ was a slogan from a 1946 manifesto.

Whereas the Concrete Art-Invention Association would return to the convention of painting on a rectangular canvas in works such as Maldonado’s Development of a Triangle (1949, page 12), Arte Madí continued its more radical programme by creating shaped canvases. They proposed that the edges of the forms themselves should determine the overall shape of the work.

There are strong echoes of my own approach in this idea; my recent work On Either Side (2012, above right) is an example. But my source in the 1960s was the American artist Frank Stella’s shaped canvases, from a different artistic lineage.

At that time I did not know about Arte Madí.

Arden Quin’s Trio No. 2 (1951, left) is typical of his work and of Arte Madí in general.

The concept of the shaped canvas was further

elaborated by Raúl Lozza when he grouped separated shapes together as one artwork, linking them with a curved metal rod in works such as Relief No. 30 (1946, top). Arte Madí catalogues were also made in non-rectangular shapes, sometimes with holes in, and their typography followed the same non-orthogonal principle.

Arden Quin came from Uruguay, but lived in Buenos Aires during these key years. Then he, like so many of the South American artists, moved to Europe after the Second World War to develop his career. Arden Quin arrived in Paris in 1948 and lived in France until his death in 2010.

The Madí itself, which he actively promoted, continued its existence in France, and continues today – with many international affiliations – especially in Italy. There is even a Madí museum in Dallas. It’s extraordinary to report that the late Academician Michael Kidner took part in two Madí exhibitions in 1998, and that I, myself, was asked to consider membership.

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Can an establishment institution like the Royal Academy be a radical force?

As this year’s Summer Exhibition focuses on an influx of newly elected Royal Academicians, Ben Luke puts the question to Members old and new

Turning the tables A remarkable influx of 11 newly elected Royal Academicians – who now make up around 10 per cent of the total membership – is set to make its mark on this year’s Summer Exhibition, when a room showcasing their work announces their arrival at the Academy. Look at the primary medium in which each of these artists works and you get a sense of their diversity.

Chantal Joffe paints psychologically charged and sensual figures; Mike Nelson makes sculptures and atmospheric, multiple-room installations using found materials; Tim Shaw combines politically charged subject matter

with traditional sculptural skills; Neil Jeffries produces painted metal sculptures that occupy a strange territory between abstraction and figuration; and Wolfgang Tillmans takes hugely various and often beautiful photographs, which he shows in innovative installations.

Bob and Roberta Smith creates brightly coloured text-based paintings with powerful social messages; Yinka Shonibare clads figures in colourful batik to create politically loaded sculptural or photographic tableaux; Thomas Heatherwick is one of the world’s leading designers, whose Olympic Cauldron fired

THIS PAGE The Royal Academy Selection and Hanging Committee, 1938, by Frederick William Elwell RA OPPOSITE PAGE Last Supper (after Leonardo), 2013,

by Yinka Shonibare RA

the imagination of viewers in the opening ceremony in 2012; Rebecca Warren fuses everything from the ideas of conceptual artist Joseph Beuys to the cartoons of Robert Crumb, creating vitrines and lumpy sculptural figures; Conrad Shawcross brings engineering and sculpture into collisions of mechanics, sound, light and space; and Louisa Hutton, of architects Sauerbruch Hutton, designs buildings with a flair for colour and material richness.

At times in its history, the Royal Academy has been criticised for being out of touch with the latest developments in art. So with this wave of

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new elections can it now be argued that the Academy is truly representative of the dizzying breadth of visual culture in Britain today?

Once Royal Academicians are elected (Chris Orr describes the process on page 55), they are placed in one of four categories – painting, sculpture, architecture, and a broad category of engraving, printmaking and draughtsmen.

But these classifications today may seem rather outmoded in the face of art’s shifting sands.

Tillmans, for example, who makes photographs, has been elected in the category of painting, but the German-born artist, who has lived in London for nearly 20 years (and now moves between there and Berlin), is wary of being pigeonholed.

‘I see myself as a picture-maker, just as I see painters, as well as other photographers,’ he says.

‘The frame of reference that I work in is not 175 years old – as is the age of photography – it’s 40,000 years old, or whenever the oldest cave painting is from.’ Tillmans argues that ‘these categories are left over from 200 years ago. But it should all be picture-making and there shouldn’t be departments of photography and painting and printmaking in museums.

Nowadays, you cannot divide these any more.’

However, Christopher Le Brun, the Academy’s President, remains convinced that while art is expanding beyond these traditions, the four-category system still plays a role. ‘At the moment it’s still working,’ he says, ‘and it hasn’t

got to the point where it’s urgent that we change it, because that would be a major shift.’ He thinks that the categories remain balanced in the current set-up. ‘What you don’t want is the Academy shifting entirely towards architecture or towards sculpture – that wouldn’t make for a good mix.’

As artists working in new forms of media enter the Academy, this brings new challenges, particularly in the context of the Summer Exhibition and how the works will interact with the Academy’s famous galleries. As Le Brun says, the show was originally designed ‘for easel paintings and plinth-based statuary and we’ve moved away from that in a big way recently’.

This presents a particular conundrum for installation artists such as Mike Nelson who, when he spoke to RA Magazine, was still mulling over what to show. ‘They are very grandiose, those spaces, and the context of the Summer Show is very particular,’ he says. ‘I am not quite sure, as yet how somebody like me can deal with that.’

Nelson’s installations are largely made on site, where he composes a wealth of material often gathered from flea markets, salvage yards and second-hand shops. ‘I don’t have a studio, and I don’t have a studio practice, so it’s not like there are works that are ready to go off and be put somewhere,’ he says. ‘I don’t quite know how I am going to deal with [the Summer Exhibition], other than taking on a larger space in the galleries, which might be possible at some point.’

When Nelson was invited to consider becoming an RA, he said that the fact that some Members were ‘great people who influenced me in college and beyond’ – among them Richard Deacon, Phyllida Barlow and Phillip King – helped to convince him that he should join. He was also attracted by knowing that the Academy is run by artists for artists. ‘You could potentially see it as quite radical in that sense, in the context of now, a world where curatorial and art management courses are everywhere,’ he suggests. ‘That was what turned my head, so I thought I would give it a try.’

The Academy’s autonomy also appeals to Tillmans. ‘In the old days it was much more about artists showcasing themselves, which is not so necessary now, because there is of course the entire commercial art world, which didn’t exist in the 18th century,’ he says. ‘But some idea of advocacy for the larger community, not just the 125 Members, is important. And given the current climate, where governments everywhere are thinking they can withdraw without harm from funding the arts, I think artists speaking together is a very important thing.’

This idea of advocacy is spelled out on the card given to Academicians: it says that the RA’s vision is ‘To be a strong, clear voice for art and artists’. Patrick Brill, whose artist’s pseudonym is Bob and Roberta Smith, says, ‘I could have written that. If the Academy really wants to live

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portrait The Royal Academy Selection and Hanging Committee, 1938 (page 50). ‘But then I find that, actually, the Royal Academy has really opened up and there are a lot of contemporary artists of my generation there now. So I think it’s very different from what it was even 10 years ago.’

He admits that, despite the fact that many among the recent influx of Academicians were only recently seen as enfants terribles, ‘the younger generation in their 20s probably see us now as part of the establishment. That’s just the way it goes.’

But to have had doubts before joining the Academy is nothing new. Le Brun recalls: ‘It was still a big decision for me, career-wise – would this damage my career or not?’ Painter Anthony Green, who became an RA in 1977, recalls: ‘I was told by people who knew probably better than I did that joining the Academy would probably ruin my career.’ But as it turned out, ‘Later, Phillip King joined, Barry Flanagan joined, Paul Huxley joined, and suddenly it seemed like

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misogynistic clubby thing, but I’ve also associated it with showing really great, radical art.’ He particularly remembers the RA’s Courbet show in 1978, the first exhibition he saw, with his father, ‘a left-wing sort of person’ who stood him in front of A Burial at Ornans (1849-50) and pointed out the power of Courbet’s depiction of a very ordinary funeral, ‘a reflection of working-class life’.

Yinka Shonibare echoes many of the new RAs’ thoughts when he says he was ‘genuinely surprised’ at being asked to join the Academy.

‘I had never actually thought about it. It’s a place with a lot of artists whose work I like and respect.

So to be in the same place with those people is a great honour.’ But he is acutely aware of the trappings of such recognition. He was awarded an MBE in 2004 and has worn those letters as an ironic badge of honour, since a core theme of his work is empire and colonialism.

Shonibare says his view of the Academy was of ‘a very establishment sort of place’, a comment which conjures Frederick William Elwell’s group

CO U R T ESY CH A N TA L J O F F E / V I CTO R I A M I R O, LO N D O N A N D CH EI M & R E A D, N E W YO R K /© CH A N TA L J O F F E . © B O B A N D R O B ER TA S M I T H .

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up to that, it has to be for all art and all artists.

I think it wants to do that, so there’s some purpose to it for me. It’s not just about joining a club.’

A discomfort with ‘clubbiness’ prompted Smith’s initial misgivings about becoming an RA. Invitations to join huge cultural or establishment institutions often trigger such reservations, but Smith’s reasons are perhaps more personal than most. ‘My parents were artists and my dad [the painter Frederick Brill], during the 1960s and 1970s, was principal of Chelsea School of Art. He was the kind of artist who would submit his paintings to the RA Summer Exhibition, and he would get them in occasionally,’ Smith recalls. ‘My mum was also a painter and she used to submit her paintings to the RA but she wouldn’t get them in. But then, instead of Deirdre Borlase, she started signing them “D. Borlase”, and got them in more often than my dad did.’ He adds that ‘in a strange sort of way, I have associated the Royal Academy with a slightly

New Academicians

From sculptor Rebecca Warren to designer Thomas Heatherwick, new Members of the RA are celebrated in a room of their own Black and white

Cornelia Parker RA curates a gallery of artists’ responses to the theme of ‘black and white’, including works by Mona Hatoum and Christian Marclay, as well as David Batchelor’s Colour Chart 74 (Black) 05.03.14, 2014 (below) James Turrell Hon RA

A light installation by the acclaimed American artist is one of many contributions by Honorary Academicians In remembrance © 2014 N EI L J EF F R I ES/ T H E P H OTO GR A P H ERS , F LOW ERS G A L L ERY. © WO L FG A N G T I L L M A NS/CO U R T ESY M AU R EEN PA L E Y, LO N D O N . P H OTO P E T ER W H I T E /CO U R T ESY DAV I D B ATCH ELO R , I N GL EBY G A L L ERY, ED I N B U R GH A N D G A L ER I A L EM E S AO PAU LO. CO U R T ESY O F T I M S H AW. © R EB ECCA WA R R EN /CO U R T ESY O F M AU R EEN PA L E Y, LO N D O N

CO U R T ESY CH A N TA L J O F F E / V I CTO R I A M I R O, LO N D O N A N D CH EI M & R E A D, N E W YO R K /© CH A N TA L J O F F E . © B O B A N D R O B ER TA S M I T H .

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SUMMER EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Memorial displays pay tribute to the late and great British Academicians John Bellany, Ralph Brown, Maurice Cockrill, Anthony Caro and Alan Davie

OPPOSITE PAGE , CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT

Self-Portrait Sitting on a Striped Chaise Longue, 2012, by Chantal Joffe RA; Portrait of Michael Gove, 2013, by Bob and Roberta Smith RA; ADA, 2013, by Conrad Shawcross RA; More things (To the memory of Honoré de Balzac), 2013,

by Mike Nelson RA THIS PAGE , CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT Pink Monster Wearing Sneakers, c.1990, by Neil Jeffries RA; Tukan, 2010,

by Wolfgang Tillmans RA; Detail from Soul Snatcher Possession, 2012-14, by Tim Shaw RA; BB, 2012,

by Rebecca Warren RA

a daring thing for a cutting-edge artist to do.’

The dismissive attitude had been a legacy from an earlier era, Green believes. ‘Henry Moore’s generation used to cross themselves and walk by on the other side of Piccadilly in case they got tainted or got a septic virus from us,’ he jokes. Green warns against ‘assumptions that the so-called body of Academicians were old-fashioned, conservative flat-earthists – in fact that’s never been the case’, and suggests that the reactionary views of modern art expressed

by Alfred Munnings, RA President from 1944 to 1949, who famously said he would like to kick Picasso’s behind, caused long-term damage.

‘We’ve had to fight very hard to live that down.’

‘It has taken a long hard slog to get back the respectability the RA has now. If you criticise the membership now, you’re criticising Gormley, Kapoor, Emin, Landy – and they are international names.’

However much the Academy might be more reflective of contemporary art than it has been

in the past, Le Brun is clear that it is not representative. ‘It’s vital that everybody is elected as an individual; following the logic of that, they represent no-one other than themselves,’ he says.

‘Even to the extent that they don’t represent the category of, say, painting, in which they are elected. This is really crucial and it gives the Academy its authority, because it’s a body of individual artists chosen on merit. As soon as you start moving towards representation – in other words, asking does this reflect the contemporary art world as we know it? – it distorts the decision about individual artists and architects, I think, in a really unhelpful way.’

Indeed, from its earliest incarnation, when Joshua Reynolds was President, the Academy has only ever partially reflected the contemporary art scene. As Martin Postle, Deputy Director of Studies at the Paul Mellon Centre and a specialist in 18th-century British art, points out, that first group of artists was ‘just like it is today, a loosely affiliated group of very strong-willed individuals’.

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The UK Pavilion at Shanghai Expo, 2010, by Thomas Heatherwick RA BELOW LEFT The interior of Immanuel Church in Cologne, Germany,

by Louisa Hutton RA

‘The Academy wants to be for all art and all artists… it’s not just about joining a club’

There was a struggle to attract leading artists, Postle says. ‘Reynolds writes to Gainsborough to get him on board, and Gainsborough’s not terribly interested and doesn’t feature in Zoffany’s painting of the first Academicians [1771-72, opposite page],’ he adds. ‘That painting

by Zoffany tells you so much about the way in which these blokes do and don’t get on together – they’re a bunch of individuals and egoists.’

One of the artists in the painting is the Welsh painter Richard Wilson. ‘Wilson is a key player in the Society of Artists a decade before but, by then, he’s a curmudgeonly, disgruntled figure who already feels he’s cast out into semi-darkness.

He stands out, leaning on the mantelpiece… and he’s not really feeling that he is at the heart of things,’ says Postle.

Of the great British artists of the later part of the 18th century – Gainsborough, Romney, Wright of Derby, Stubbs – none had a strong affiliation with the Academy, he adds. ‘Stubbs basically ignores it; Romney never really bothers with it, doesn’t become a Member; Allan Ramsay, George III’s painter, never becomes a Member.’

Though it still prompts healthy debate, the RA today is, on the whole, more harmonious, says Le Brun. ‘The interplay between the painters, sculptors and architects is a wonderful thing to see because the discussions are not on the level of professional rivalry, they are on a cultural level. And that’s where the RA provides something really special and it leads to the affection with which the Academy is held. Where else would you see all those senior architects, sculptors and painters mixing as equals?’

Being welcomed into this community has come as a surprise to the painter Chantal Joffe.

‘You spend a lot of your life as an artist feeling

outside of things,’ she says, ‘so it’s odd to be included in something.’ She says she has ‘always liked that thing of being a painter and being alone – that seemed to me why you did it, to be alone with your work, and that was the great privilege and beauty of it.’ Yet she admits ‘you do feel quite special’ joining the Academy.

Like many new RAs, Joffe is looking forward to seeing her work in the Academy’s grand galleries. ‘I think of “The Real Van Gogh” [in 2010] and I can’t think of a more astonishing show that I’ve seen in my life.

It’s always humbling to think about that.

They are astonishingly beautiful galleries.’

For Bob and Roberta Smith, the galleries are ‘much stronger for art to resonate against than white cube spaces… it’s a great thing to have your work respond to an architectural space. So I am really excited.’ And while, unlike his parents, he has never submitted to the Summer Exhibition, he has come to admire it. ‘One of the great things about the Summer Show – and no other institution does this – is that it’s a madly democratic thing,’ he says. ‘Anyone can apply and have their work looked over by their peers… It’s a kind of anticurator thing, because there’s this idea of the curator as a very powerful individual. If you have a free-for-all like the Summer Show, it’s an incredible catalyst of artist power.’

Summer Exhibition Main Galleries, Royal Academy of Arts, 020 7300 8000, www.royalacademy.org.uk, 9 June–17 Aug. Summer Exhibition and Summer Exhibition Preview Party sponsored by Insight Investment.

See Events and Lectures page 68 To see behind-the-scenes videos of the making of the Summer Exhibition visit http://roy.ac/summer

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Artists’ ayes

BELOW LEFT

The Academicians of the Royal Academy, 1771-72,

by Johann Zoffany RA BELOW The old voting box for RA elections which was in use until 15 years ago

Printmaker Chris Orr RA explains how Academicians are elected using a democratic system based on an artist’s individual merits

In June 1995 I was in my studio when the phone rang and I heard the surprising news that I had been elected a Royal Academician. My wife, an actor who was away filming, felt moved to buy everybody on the set a drink. Since then I have often been asked: ‘How does one become an RA?’ Since its inception in 1768 as ‘a Society for promoting the Arts of Design’, the Royal Academy has been governed by a set of laws framed by enlightenment principles and has elected its painter, printmaker, architect and sculptor Members at regular General Assemblies.

These take place in the John Madejski Fine Rooms at the RA, chaired by the President.

Currently the number of Members under the age of 75 is fixed at 80, while past the age of 75 years, Academicians become Senior Academicians.

Vacancies for election arise from progressions into the Senior Academician category or from the death of Members in the younger category.

The elections are the outcome of a generously democratic system designed to prevent rigging and skulduggery. Candidates must be supported by at least eight existing Academicians. A list of nominees is discussed and then a vote is taken using paper ballots, and only Academicians who are present at the General Assembly may vote.

The voting system has been designed to build consensus. There is a series of voting rounds, with the most popular candidates each time taken forward to the next round. In each round the Academicians present have the opportunity to transfer their past vote to a different candidate,

and the rounds continue until one nominee has a majority. A final ‘vote of acclamation’ is required to unite the General Assembly – all those present raise their hands to signify the acceptance of the candidate. Incidentally, before the invention of the telephone, runners would be dispatched to the elected artist’s studio to inform them and they could claim a guinea for their trouble – a bit of a problem with artists who didn’t reside in London.

Once the newly elected RAs have donated a work (known as a ‘diploma work’) to the collection, they receive a diploma, signed by the Sovereign.

Candidates who have not been not elected continue to appear on the list for future elections, provided each has the support of eight RAs. The system prevents cabals and pressure groups from skewing elections – and because artists are by nature individualists, the outcomes of elections are rarely predictable. Many who were desperate for the honour have never been within a whisper, while for others the news was like a bolt from the blue. Constable was nominated in 1811 but not elected a full Member until 1829.

Presentations about each artist are made to the General Assembly before elections and advocacy for candidates is usually carried out in an understated English manner of discrete conversations. The atmosphere is polite and Academicians discuss the merits of candidates in public rather than making negative comments.

There is a strong tradition of free speech, but free speech that does not degrade anyone.

The President, Keeper and Treasurer are also

elected by the General Assembly – I was elected to replace Paul Huxley as Treasurer when Academicians met in March. Academicians can also take part in the practical running of the institution, hanging the Summer Exhibition and guiding the committees that direct what is a £28 million business, while Senior Academicians have full voting rights but no duties.

Although from the start the Members came from a diversity of backgrounds, shamefully a woman was not elected (apart from Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffman, founding Members) until Annie Swynnerton in 1922. As Academician Eileen Cooper discusses in this issue (page 64), there are still far more male RAs than female.

There have been periods of doldrums and even decline at the Academy, in particular the period after the Second World War when the RA’s traditionalism hampered its appeal among artists.

But in the 1970s something began to stir as Britain underwent a creative explosion – and the Academy had to change or quietly fade away.

A succession of groundbreaking exhibitions in the 1980s helped turn the RA around and recent elections have begun properly to reflect the latest changes in the cultural world. The RA’s ‘Sensation’ exhibition in 1997 brought a whole new generation of artists to the Academy for the first time and subsequently Tracey Emin, Michael Landy, Fiona Rae, Gary Hume, Grayson Perry and Gillian Wearing have been elected, among many other eminent artists who might at one time have refused to be part of the place. The fact that Academicians of such quality and vision have been elected is thanks to the wisdom of the RA’s founders, who enshrined democracy in its laws.

To find out about the tradition of hand-printed RA diplomas, visit http://roy.ac/diploma

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Dennis Hopper was the epitome of 1960s American counter-culture.

As an exhibition of the actor and director’s photographs – including his iconic shot of Paul Newman – comes to the RA, Jonathan Romney assesses this diverse body of work to reveal an astute chronicler of the art, celebrity and tense American politics of the period

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Paul Newman, 1964,

by Dennis Hopper

I

f you remember the 1960s, the cliché goes, then you weren’t there. Dennis Hopper had more reason than most people to forget that period, given his penchant for fast living, and the intensity with which he crammed so many roles into a single decade – filmmaker, actor, photographer, face on the scene.

But he was there for sure, and busy documenting 1960s America extensively, as shown in the Academy’s new exhibition of his black-and-white photography, ‘Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album’.

Hopper, who died in 2010, is best remembered as a screen villain, in particular his terrifying performance as the demonic hoodlum Frank in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). Before that, Hopper had been widely known as the very incarnation of ’60s American counter-culture – the director and star of motorcycle road epic Easy Rider (1969), an unexpected box-office smash that momentarily seemed to prove that a generation of flaming youth had seized American cinema from the studio elders. That dream arguably died with Hopper’s follow-up, the free-form travelogue-cum-deconstructed-Western The Last Movie (1971), after which Hopper broke from directing films.

Later he would return to the screen in the guise of a spectre from the past – notably, playing the babbling Vietnam photojournalist in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). In his

latter years, he successfully projected the persona of the unsinkable survivor, the suave elder statesman who had seen it all and had plenty of stories to tell in interviews – and who also had a savvy reputation as an erudite art collector.

It would be easy to remember Dennis Hopper as primarily a wilder-than-life character rather than someone whose achievements added up to a coherent career. But there is a significant part of Hopper’s activity that is less widely known – his work as a photographer. His blackand-white images of America, created during an intensely productive period from 1961 to 1967, may well be seen by posterity as the firmest proof of a prodigious talent and an unerring eye for the spirit of an age.

Collected under the title ‘The Lost Album’, Hopper’s 1960s photos were taken in black and white on a Nikon camera, using Kodak Tri-X film, and they comprise a capsule history of America’s most turbulent decade. Over 400 photos were unearthed after the artist’s death in 2010, having last been seen in an exhibition at the Fort Worth Art Centre Museum in 1970.

They record Hopper’s travels and encounters through the ’60s, up to the shooting of Easy Rider, when he gave up still photography for the movie camera. The selection shows high life and low life, the private sphere and the very public. There are portraits of movie stars, pop groups, painters;

tableaux of the hippie scene and the biker underground; reportage of civil rights meetings; sorties to Mexico; plus assorted abstract images that show an unfamiliar contemplative side to Hopper’s imagination.

Born in Kansas in 1936, Hopper arrived in Hollywood in 1954 and briefly flourished as a screen actor, most famously acting with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Giant (1956). His rebellious streak caused him to fall foul of veteran director Henry Hathaway and left Hopper out of favour in Hollywood. In 1961 he married Brooke Hayward, daughter of producer Leland Hayward and actress Margaret Sullavan, and the couple’s Los Angeles home on North Crescent Heights Boulevard became a gathering spot for film people and artists alike, particularly artists associated with L.A.’s Ferus Gallery.

It was Hayward who gave Hopper his Nikon in 1961, and for the next six years, he used it incessantly. Photography – always in black and white, after initial experiments with colour – soon became his new profession, his work appearing in publications as diverse as Vogue and Artforum, and in exhibitions such as a 1966 group show alongside Ed Ruscha and others at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London.

Hopper’s photography covered a wide terrain, recording the essence of 1960s America much as Walker Evans had mapped the Depression and

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Robert Frank the 1950s. On one level, he was a documenter and celebrant of the counter-culture beau monde that he moved in. He took portraits of key West Coast bands – Buffalo Springfield, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane – but these pictures, with their staged compositions, owe much to the language of rock photography already established by the likes of Gered Mankowitz. More striking is a shot from 1965, of Ike and Tina Turner arranged against the artworks and exotica of Hopper’s own house, the duo’s animation and Ike’s confrontational look to camera making the cluttered bric-a-brac seem like an explosive extension of their music.

Another picture from 1964 (opposite page) has soul legend James Brown surrounded by fans in front of his private plane, under the logo ‘James Brown Productions’, showing the singer as both man and business phenomenon.

Hopper sometimes flatters his subjects by turning them into gorgeous icons – notably a bare-chested Paul Newman, the shadow of a wire fence making him look as if he is trapped in a net (page 57). But his portraiture is at its best when presenting subjects who, one feels, he saw as his people – artists, bohemians, outsiders.

There are, as you would expect, plenty of flower children here: the actor Robert Walker Jr appears shaggily bearded like a Greek philosopher after a night on peyote, a full-blown incarnation of

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Rally in Selma, Alabama (U.S. Historians), 1965 RIGHT Torn Poster (Elect), 1963 OPPOSITE PAGE

James Brown, 1964

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hippiedom as early as 1964. The art-world photos are brilliant vignettes of people’s styles of self-presentation: Larry Bell poses with cigar, looking like a Pop Art gangster in front of two street adverts, as if he had installed them himself; Ed Ruscha, square-jawed in front of a neon sign, looks uncannily as though he is screen testing to play Hopper himself in a biopic. Perhaps the most telling of this selection shows a wellgroomed Robert Rauschenberg sticking his tongue out, pleased as punch: the artist as a smooth-suited business type, a prototype for the corporate lifestyle that Jeff Koons would advertise two decades later.

Hopper is perhaps less confident when tackling large groups, or catching current affairs. His pictures of civil rights events catch striking faces in the crowd but don’t always carry a strong narrative charge; a notable exception, at a rally in Selma, Alabama, shows a cluster of bespectacled gents under the hand-drawn sign ‘U.S. HISTORIANS’ (1965, opposite, top). Also telling is a street scene in which a scowling line-up of burly white men, one holding a Confederate flag, prefigure the Southerners who turned lethally hostile towards Hopper and Peter Fonda at the end of Easy Rider.

The photographer’s emergence as a film-maker is hinted at in one or two dynamic series that resemble successions of stills from a movie’s action sequence: a suite of bullfighting images, and some horseplay going on (we can’t quite tell how playful or malign it is) among a group of Hell’s Angels.

It is in the use of walls and signs that the exhibition yields its biggest surprises, and reveals Hopper’s painterly sensibility (in an interview, he claimed, ‘I am an Abstract Expressionist and an Action Painter by nature’). Hopper’s interest in shooting flat-on, reducing depth of field so as to make the image ‘like a painting surface’, derived partly, he said, from living in Los Angeles: ‘I was very attracted to walls and the graffiti, because there’s only so much you can look at here.’ Hopper uses signage in a quintessentially Pop Art way, especially when incorporating it into his backdrops; among pictures taken at a billboard factory, painter James Rosenquist (a specialist in appropriating such smooth advertising images) is framed in dark glasses against a woman’s giant face placed on its side. A street scene – Downtown, Los Angeles (Comer & Doran) (1965) – shows leftovers of 1950s advertising, but resembles a geometric abstract painting, with no fewer than 11 clashing typefaces in different perspectives, and a woman’s two-dimensional head surveying it all from the frontage of a beauty school.

‘The fact that he uses black and white to shoot a period famed for its luridness gives these images a timeless sobriety’

The most surprising work in this mode comes from a rich vein of ‘found images’, little happenstance mundanities that Hopper turns into abstractions: cloth on a scaffolding, a closeup of blistered paint, ripped posters. The daubed portrait of a blonde woman peers from a mess of torn artwork; in Torn Poster (Elect) (1963, opposite) all that remains of a forgotten political candidate is the outline of a head, and letters from a Carnation milk logo where his face should be.

Many of Hopper’s photographs may strike us as historical documents first and constructed images second. But these more abstract pictures allow Hopper to stand back from the breathless rush of a decade; these images, in a long-standing Surrealist tradition of finding epiphanies in the banal, display a poetic concentration and a patient insightfulness that you don’t necessarily get from Hopper the often breathless movie director.

The travelogue quality of Easy Rider, and its use of non-professionals encountered on the road, no doubt stemmed from Hopper’s experience as a photographer – his awareness of the primacy of being there and of collecting whatever attracted him along the way. And when Hopper eventually returned to directing with Out of the Blue (1980), nine years after The Last Movie, it was as much as a sociologist as anything, documenting generation clash in a drama about a punk girl and a disreputable father from another era, played by

Hopper himself. He brought the same sociological perspective to Colors (1988), about L.A. gang wars.

This comeback as a director was widely considered the sign of an indestructible, dauntless survivor. And yet there was no getting away from the fact that Hopper, after the ’60s, was also fated to be forever considered a sort of cultural ghost, the living incarnation of a lost era. So the pure Dennis Hopper, if you like, is the Hopper before Easy Rider’s rueful farewell to a decade, for it is in his ’60s photography that he is most vividly alert to the changes in his era and his nation. The fact that he uses black and white to shoot a period famed for its luridness gives these images a timeless sobriety, making them more alive today than if they had been tinted with the hues of the time. Unlike much photography of that era, these pictures don’t give us the sense of gazing into a distant past: they tell you that Hopper was there, and they make you feel that you’re there too.

Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album Burlington Gardens, Royal Academy of Arts, 020 7300 8000, www.royalacademy.org.uk, 26 June–19 Oct. Lead Series Supporter JTI. Supported by Nikon UK. See Events & Lectures page 68 To see an image gallery of works from the exhibition visit http://roy.ac/lostalbum

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Daniel Lipp, Aimee Parrott, Brian Griffiths, Marisa J. Futernick, Ellen Macdonald and Julie Born Schwartz Coco Crampton, Phyllida Barlow RA, Alex Clarke, Ariane Schick, Gabriel Stones, Alice Theobald, Alex Chase White (seated), Hannah Perry, Paul Schneider, Paul Eastwood, Natalie Dray and Murray O’Grady

FROM LEFT

As students from the RA Schools prepare for their final show, what are their feelings about leaving after three intensive years of study? Overleaf, some of them discuss the issues they face with Schools tutor Brian Griffiths and Phyllida Barlow RA, who has been involved in art education for 45 years. Photograph by Richard Dawson SUMMER 2014 | RA MAGAZINE 61

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‘History helped build this place, but we fill it now and it becomes what we collectively make it’ Phyllida Are we, as artists, completely ruled by institutions such as art schools? And if so, do we need such institutions?

Brian Well, these are massive questions.

Phyllida Because you can’t be more institutional than the RA, can you? The RA would be up there with Tate, or the National Gallery, and I find the way these institutions can lead the process of being an artist quite scary. When you came to the RA Schools, did you think it was going to work some sort of magic for you as an institution, or did you want to work the magic?

Brian In order to discuss that, we should ask: why did you all apply here? Was there a particular reason? Was it because it’s free?

Daniel For me it was a lot to do with it being free. I had been out of art education for four years and by myself in a studio, and it was quite tough having to take time out of my studio to earn enough to pay for it. I also wanted to come here because it was small. I had been at Goldsmiths for my BA and, for me, that course was too big – there was one moment when I had to present my work to 50 people, and having a large number of responses didn’t help.

Marisa What was very attractive for me, and probably for a lot of other people, was the fact that it’s a three-year postgraduate course. That’s rare, and having had a lot of time out of education meant I wanted as much school as I could get.

Alex (Clarke) I also think the RA Schools felt a bit less like a brand than other art schools.

Even though it’s an old institution, it has changed very recently and how it is today is not a brand.

Marisa In a way, that makes it less institutional.

On the inside it feels to me a lot less institutional than other art schools. Because it’s small, it’s private, it’s independent – it can kind of do what it wants and things can just happen on the fly.

Phyllida Do they? That’s interesting.

Brian The course doesn’t have an exam, as we’re not affiliated to a university. In this country’s increasingly bureaucratic educational system, this independence allows the RA Schools to be more flexible, more responsive to the students who are here, or to the changing ideas in art.

Coco The course is also cross-disciplinary, allowing us privileged insights into each other’s processes of working. There are many different types of practice, some of which contrast greatly, others which cross over and have similarities.

Julie It has been important that we, as students, have suggested which artists could come in and talk to us. That has allowed our experience to be very varied over the three years.

Phyllida But why do you need interesting artists to come in and talk to you about your work? Why do you need an art school to approve your work?

Natalie Although the RA is globally recognised

as something that can value art, the process of actually making art here is never solely about approval. That only took place right at the beginning when I came for an interview, but I always had it in mind that I could behave in an antagonistic way once I was inside the building. There’s a weird negotiation, like a constant flipping between seeking approval and having an argument.

Aimee It’s a really complex thing – you’re not going to feel secure in this institution the whole time, you’re going to feel conflicted at points.

Phyllida What is the RA as an institution?

Is it this building, or the sum total of its history?

Brian It’s a multitude of shifting ideas and different perceptions. The perception in London of the RA is very different from, say, America.

Aimee And the RA is always changing. It has changed so much over the past 10 or 20 years.

Natalie But we’re approaching the whole idea of the institution from quite a critical angle here.

I love the romance, the history of old artists who I can’t relate to but who would have walked around the Academy having conversations that we can’t really imagine. There are splices of myths and fictions we can find within the building.

Brian It’s the Harry Potter of art schools, isn’t it? You bump into that idea here on a daily basis, whether it’s an Academician wandering past wearing a medal, or seeing an engraved list of the names of the artists who’ve studied here. The history of the place is very tangible.

Alex Because this history is acknowledged, it enables us not to have to worry about it. I think if this history was more invisible we would be more conscious of it.

Natalie The weight of the history could have been scary, overwhelming and crushing, but because you’re here for three years you have the time to get over it. You can see it as a challenge, and it helps focus and gives confidence.

Phyllida I would be the first person to admit I’m totally institutionalised, as I have taught in art schools for 45 years. But there are other highly institutionalised components that make up the art world – like Frieze Art Fair, for example – and on a personal level I’ve only come up against these recently. But ‘being institutionalised’ here is not seen as a negative thing?

Natalie That term assumes we’re not in control, like there’s no autonomy any more, and I don’t agree with that. The reason the Royal Academy has this status of being able to value new art is because of its history, which has been built by all sorts of individuals and probably by diverging and argumentative minds. We’re here now, having the chance to take part in that renegotiation of what an institution is, and others will too after us.

Gabriel We’re the institution, the 16 of us.

I see myself existing within this group on a day-to-day basis rather than being defined by the gold crest of an institution.

Natalie We’ve become this place. History helped build this place, but we fill it now and it becomes what we collectively make it.

Julie We can shape it.

Phyllida Can you? You say you become this place.

Natalie Or it becomes us. It is constantly changing and depends on how we each choose to act while we’re here, and what that produces when our different actions collide.

Aimee I think the scale of the Schools is important as well. Because there are so few of us, we can be individuals – we don’t each feel like we’re another number. Each year is different in terms of individuals, and that makes the Schools different from year to year.

Phyllida I’m still curious about why the word ‘course’ sends shudders through me. Why, after one has done a BA course, do you suddenly need another one, two, three years of yet another course? Could someone just go on a course like this for access to the studio space?

Marisa I think if someone just wants the space they can rent a studio.

Phyllida They can’t because it costs money.

Marisa It’s about more than just the space.

Julie It’s about the conversations between us.

Natalie We challenge each other. We’ve had to be together for three years and we can say provocative things to each other.

Phyllida What form does that take?

Gabriel In sessions called ‘crits’, where we talk about art and about one another’s work. They can take place as a group or one-to-one with each other, or with visiting artists.

Natalie These crits are quite impassioned, and it’s quite natural for us to fall out. But you grow to tolerate each other’s opinions and start to appreciate other’s way of seeing an artwork, and that kind of strengthens your own argument.

Phyllida What ambitions do you have for your work, now that you’re about to leave the Schools?

Brian I imagine some people here will be so focused on developing their art at the moment that they haven’t thought about showing at galleries afterwards.

Marisa In the past 10 years people in art schools have begun to feel that being represented by a gallery is a reasonable expectation. But that’s where everyone gets into trouble, when they expect that to be waiting out there – that sets you up for disappointment.

Aimee I wouldn’t have thought that’s the focus of most people at this point. You’re thinking about the show and how you’re going to operate outside of this group that you’ve been with for three

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‘What concerns me about leaving is just how to sustain some kind of momentum’ years: if you’re going to have a studio, who your new peers are going to be, who you are going to stay in touch with, and how all that is going to change your work.

Julie And how to survive – getting enough money but not doing too many jobs so that you can still have time for your own practice.

Natalie Being here for three years eliminates the financial pressures – it takes away all of those worries and lets you get on with making work.

Alex I think there will be a process of learning about what our aspirations are outside the RA. We’re in a situation now where it feels good to be making work, and talking and learning about art, and when that changes I wonder how our aspirations will change.

Marisa What concerns me about leaving is not just how to sustain a practice in terms of financial resources, but how to sustain some kind of momentum. When you’re in the Schools environment you have the interaction with peers but also with staff and visiting tutors – that intensity of conversation with many different voices moves your practice along much more quickly than when you’re on your own in a studio.

Brian So what are the questions you are setting yourselves for the final-year show? Your secondyear show, ‘Premiums’, was a group show, but the final-year show is made up of solo presentations.

That must entail a different way of thinking?

Daniel ‘Premiums’ is a proper testing ground.

You have time and a big space in the galleries in Burlington Gardens to test things out, and you see how certain things fall flat.

Marisa What’s nice about ‘Premiums’ is that you have another year-and-a-half at the Schools to hone your work while you digest that experience.

Natalie This show is making me do the things I’ve wanted to do that I know are difficult to achieve, things that I’ve put off. The fact there’s a show makes me feel it’s worth going through the hard work because someone’s going to see it.

Alex For the past three years I’ve been able to make propositions rather than works. Now, for the final-year show, I have to think about someone else’s encounter with the work.

Phyllida I’m interested in this shift from your private encounter with your work to how the work interfaces with the world beyond yourself.

Who are ‘the audience’? I’ve always had this huge ambivalence about the audience, where I’m meant to place them, and who are they anyway?

Brian An artist’s audience is often their community.

Murray I think it is possible to think about your community too much and take on too many opinions. There is a danger that you end up in too comfortable a situation, where you already

know how people will respond to what you are about to do.

Phyllida This is where the notion of the community starts to crumble slightly.

Brian So what audience or community, if any, do you have in mind in your final-year shows?

Gabriel Everyone will approach the show slightly differently. Some people’s presentations could feel like a solo show, which could easily be transposed to a commercial gallery space. Others won’t necessarily have that feel at all, and looking around their work, you wouldn’t necessarily know how that person would fit into the art world.

I don’t want to present myself as ready to slip straight into the art world as it exists.

Phyllida What is the ‘art world’? Could you describe it?

Natalie It’s not beyond us. I’d say we’re part of it.

Phyllida I would as well. I’m just curious about where it is, and whether there is a way after art school to work outside the art world. The work would be unprotected by institutions and in a different world, a feral state.

Ariane Where is the border between the two worlds?

Phyllida I’m not sure. Some people make things after art school but do not call themselves artists.

Is their art outside the art world? Their artwork often becomes very attractive to the art world that it’s antagonistic to.

Brian Isn’t that just capitalism just doing what it always does?

Marisa For me, the most direct relationship we have with capitalism at this point is rents. What’s really worrying is the way that artists are being driven out of London because of rising prices.

People are getting pushed further out of the city.

I do wonder how many of us will be able to stay here over the next couple of years.

Natalie London will still accommodate artists.

Julie Not if they can’t afford the rent.

Natalie Aren’t we capable of creating an income for ourselves?

Ellen We can cope with the problem of being priced out by thinking of ways to make money, but then that puts a certain pressure on our art practices. It’s not entirely optimistic.

Natalie You can’t take away money, it’s a thing that’s in the world. We have to engage with it.

Marisa People like us are going to leave. It’s an untenable situation.

Gabriel But there will always be privileged people who can afford to live in London as artists.

Natalie I moved to Peckham when it was cheap and it felt like a peripheral location in London.

That was a choice I had to accept in pursuing an art career. Property prices in Peckham have started to spiral dramatically, but I can’t see why there can’t just be another Peckham.

Marisa The next Peckham will be Southend.

Murray And the situation never lasts long,

because the next Peckham will also become a desirable place to live. In 10 years’ time artists won’t be able to afford it.

Phyllida Where you are able to live has a huge impact on all sorts of things, like where you get work. It’s costing artists sometimes £50 a day just to travel to their part-time work. I think that is a major issue.

Murray And there’s also the mentality that commuting instills. It does have an effect.

Suburbia potentially creates a dangerous mindset.

Natalie But some people choose to live in suburbia and that’s fine.

Phyllida It depends on the kind of suburbia.

I’ve just been evicted from a studio and I had literally four days to get out. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. And that is property people coming in and saying, ‘We’ve moved the goal posts, you’ve got to get out’, and rents triple on these buildings that could have been available for artists.

Marisa Artists make an area valuable in terms of property and then they get priced out.

Phyllida Yes, and then artists stride out and hit Catford and Forest Hill and Tottenham. I know Tottenham well, and it’s becoming too expensive to get studios. So we go out to the next area, which is Edmonton and worse transport.

Ellen There’s an assumption here that London is the be all and end all.

Gabriel But there is a lack of an alternative, which is worrying.

Julie Well, a lot of people are talking about Brussels. There are a lot of cities that are coming up in art because of the problems here.

Phyllida Is there any positive to this situation?

Could it be something that could be turned to your advantage?

Aimee The positive is that we all still want to carry on doing it. We’re willing to struggle.

Coco For some of us, it’s going to be difficult to lose access to well-equipped workshops.

But through talking to people who have graduated previously to us, it appears that there is an increasing number of possibilities to share workshop facilities in London. There’s a positive attitude between students within the Schools – in the sharing of knowledge, opinions, equipment, space – and this kind of approach can go quite a long way outside the RA. RA Schools Show RA Schools Studios, Royal Academy of Arts, 020 7300 8000, www.royalacademy. org.uk,13–29 June. RA Schools sponsored by Newton Investment Management To find out more about life at the RA Schools visit http://roy.ac/schoolsshow

SUMMER 2014 | RA MAGAZINE 63

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Critical issues in art and architecture

Debate

ILLUSTR ATION BY MARIA CORTE

The Question Should there be positive discrimination towards female artists?

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ILLUSTR ATION BY MARIA CORTE

Yes… Art institutions need to prioritise women if we are to achieve gender equality this century, says EILEEN COOPER RA More women than men are studying art, but once they leave art school they are having less exposure and success. In 2011-12, 62 per cent of arts and design students in the UK were female. But in the same year, according to one audit, 31 per cent of London’s galleries presented work by women.

Of works by living artists acquired by Tate last year, 21 per cent were by women, and a similar proportion of the current 125 Royal Academicians are women. So unless you think women make worse art, you must conclude that the art world fails female artists.

This is not to obscure the many successes of female artists. As Keeper of the Royal Academy, I am responsible for the RA Schools and I am always very pleased to see the success of our female graduates, such as painter Lynette Yiadom Boakye, who was nominated for last year’s Turner Prize. We are lucky that the RA Schools attracts a large number of both male and female applicants, and there is consequently a rough gender balance in artists we interview and select for the course. This does not occur through any policy but through the quality of the applicants who are out there.

No… Positive discrimination is counterproductive, says HELENA MORRISSEY, who argues for other ways to encourage the exposure of female artists The gender imbalance in the art world is the same as that within the business world, and this is an issue that resonates with me for many reasons. As well as being Chair of the RA’s Corporate Board and the Chief Executive of Newton Investment Management – a company that sponsors the RA Schools – I am the founder of the Thirty Per Cent Club, a group of senior business leaders aiming for at least 30 per cent of FTSE-100 board directors to be women by the end of 2015.

Many disciplines are now working towards achieving a better gender balance – in fact it is now less a case of questioning whether it is important and more one of asking how we can achieve it. There are over 90 members of the UK Thirty Per Cent Club, mostly men who are working together with women to effect change.

We decided 30 per cent is a realistic objective

‘Our method is called soft power – persuading people to want the same objective, then working together’

We should, of course, think about the issues women of all professions face. But the art world has one unique challenge: art history.

Contemporary artists are in constant dialogue with art history and, as a generalisation, art history is overwhelmingly about male artists.

Although there is a very welcome, growing number of shows and books emphasising art made by women, the majority draw from the male canon. As we walk through the streets we are faced with art by men: in Westminster and the City less than one in 10 public artworks is made by a woman. No wonder our idea of an artist follows macho stereotypes – Renaissance man, tortured hero, the protean, philandering Picasso.

We can only do so much about the past. My worry is that unless we challenge preconceptions today as strongly as possible, in 100 years’ time younger generations will look upon 21st-century art as a male pursuit in the same way that we now regard earlier art. It is for this reason that institutions, including the RA, should consider some type of quota, formal or informal. As Chris Orr RA explains in this issue (page 55), the Academy’s artists elect themselves democratically.

There is no conscious discrimination, but people naturally tend to vote for those similar to themselves, and at the RA that often means men.

We need to find a way to break that pattern in terms of gender, and ethnicity as well, otherwise we will look like a gentlemen’s club. We need to prioritise women in our elections over the next few years. This doesn’t mean never voting

‘A short period of prioritisation would allow the achievements of female artists to be visible in the future’

(when we launched in 2010, representation was 12.6 per cent) and there is evidence that 30 per cent is a critical mass. Our work includes many initiatives to encourage women and change cultures in the workplace.

However, we have a policy against positive discrimination. I am against anything mandatory, all-women shortlists, or any kind of social engineering. I would be very reluctant to appoint a woman just as a way of balancing the numbers, as it would disadvantage men, which is just another kind of injustice. It would potentially be counter-productive to have women on boards who were not qualified or, in the context of the art world, women represented in exhibitions, collections or institutions who did not deserve to be there. I think that it could backfire and diminish British art. Norway legislated in 2003 to ensure at least 40 per cent of board members are female, but in 2014 there are no female CEOs in the country’s 25 biggest companies.

I’m after sustainable, meaningful change.

Our method is what you could call ‘soft power’ – persuading people to want the same objective and then working together to achieve it. An example of how this works was when a colleague gave me an all-male shortlist of candidates for a job. I said, ‘Were there no women who were qualified?’ And he said, ‘Well, there was one woman, but she has four children.’ I told him he was making assumptions about her ambition, enthusiasm and commitment that might not be true. He agreed and we interviewed the woman.

We didn’t think she was quite as good as one

of the men for the job – she was the runnerup. My colleague admitted afterwards that he had an unconscious bias and needed a nudge.

Art institutions should do a similar thing on a systematic basis, cross-checking that women have been treated at least as well as the men. The art world also needs to analyse what’s going on in detail, asking why there is a majority of women studying art but a majority of men becoming successful artists. What happens after art school, and what can be done to change circumstances?

In business we have seen specific programmes around maternity leave, assertiveness and mentoring – initiatives that have been necessary but not sufficient. Subconscious behaviour also needs to be addressed and we aim to change this with the support and involvement of men.

Our approach has seen a very accelerated pace of change since 2010. In March, representation on FTSE-100 boards was 20.8 per cent. Soft power works, but it is not easy. You need to access the levers of power, networking with the leaders in the field. Warren Buffett, a legend in the investment world, has written a very supportive endorsement of the recently launched US version of the Thirty Per Cent Club and that has encouraged other business leaders to get involved – people need inspiration from somebody they respect. There could be a Thirty Per Cent Club for art, comprising the major powerful figures in the art world, to create a movement for change.

for men, but it does mean aiming for a gender balance in the near future.

We should also consider gender in the RA’s exhibition programme, as our monographic shows are pretty much always by men. I’m sure there are worries that putting on an exhibition by a female artist, who may be less well known, is not financially viable, but this creates a vicious circle, as women artists will never become more well known if they are rarely exhibited.

Many will argue that positive discrimination would not select the best artists. That presupposes a lack of outstanding artists in the female half of the population – but outstanding women are overlooked and we need to work harder to bring them to attention. Some might see any positive discrimination as a tainted process, but the quality of the work would shine through and most artists would see the bigger picture.

A short period of prioritisation would allow the achievements of female artists to be visible in the future and help encourage us to present more art by women. Why wouldn’t you want actively to present alternative, female views of the world?

Wouldn’t it be more interesting if our exhibitions and collections were representative of all the issues and perspectives in this country?

What do you think? To post your comments on this article visit http://roy.ac/quotas

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Debate

A return to Civilisation The success of art historian Kenneth Clark, particularly as a broadcaster, is more significant than ever, says CHRISTOPHER BAKER Is the achievement of Kenneth Clark relevant today? Many would see him as a curiosity, an art-historical dinosaur, whose patrician manner and establishment credentials mean he has little to offer now. However, a rigorous assessment of his work and its impact, the subject of an exhibition at Tate Britain, suggests otherwise.

Clark felt passionately that great art should be universally accessible, that judgments of quality can be made and excellence celebrated. He also conveyed his breadth of knowledge with an extraordinary eloquence that inspired millions.

So perhaps we should consider him an innovator and exemplar against which subsequent public manifestations of art history can be measured.

Clark embodied 19th-century ideals, particularly as expressed by his hero John Ruskin, who advocated the discipline of close observation and the importance of art to society and humanity. Clark conveyed these, however, through the most persuasive of 20th-century media: television. His BBC Two series ‘Civilisation’, which was one of the earliest colour documentaries, was broadcast in 1969.

Its 13 hour-long episodes involved travelling tens

Kenneth Clark Tate Britain, London, 020 7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk, until 10 Aug What do you think? To post your comments on this article visit http://roy.ac/clark

Murcia Town Hall extension, designed by Rafael Moneo, completed in 1998

The Portuguese architect Rafael Moneo, who gives this year’s RA Architecture Lecture, has argued that buildings do not belong to their designers ‘The beautiful thing about the architect’s endeavour is the ability to divest oneself totally of one’s work… Does the same thing happen with a poem?

I’m not sure… The bonds that join the building and the architect are weaker than those between poem and author…

The architectural work is associated with the architect but buildings have their own life and establish a direct, immediate relationship with their users. It is only relatively speaking that an architect is owner of the building.’

Excerpt from an interview published by the Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, www.publicspace.org. Rafael Moneo delivers the Royal Academy’s Annual Architecture Lecture on Monday 7 July in the Main Galleries, 6.45–8pm, £18/£9 reductions. See page 69.

O R I GI N A L P H OTO GR A P H BY GER T Y S I M O N / R EP R O BY R O D T I D N A M / TAT E P H OTO GR A P H Y. R A FA EL M O N EO A R CH I T ECTS

Kenneth Clark at his home in Saltwood Castle, Kent, in front of a painting by Renoir

of thousands of miles and were aired in 60 countries, and the related book became a best-seller in Britain and America. It remains in print. In view of all this, it is perhaps unsurprising that the BBC is commissioning a new version of the series.

Clark was not a pundit emerging from nowhere and opportunistically harnessing new technology. His programmes were the distillation of half a lifetime of looking and thinking. He had published widely, producing a catalogue of the Leonardo drawings in the Royal Collection (1935), as well as highly readable surveys, such as Landscape into Art (1949) and The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956), which convey something of the natural cadence of his sparkling lectures.

Clark also championed artist contemporaries, notably Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland.

‘Civilisation’ built on all of this and was a masterly demonstration of his ability to distil complex ideas with ease.

Somewhat to his surprise, it became a phenomenal success, leading to him being fêted, but also to many people being newly exposed to a canon of art, architecture, philosophy and music. Perhaps with an eye on posterity and knowing that outlooks would inevitably change, ‘Civilisation’ was always promoted as Clark’s personal view. It was certainly Eurocentric and traditional, and so some of its emphases sit uneasily with today’s global perspectives, but it was a document of its time. The new version will no doubt set out to be a corrective to this.

The original was a statement of postwar confidence about the power of culture to inspire.

As such it can be seen as a natural progression from other British initiatives of the 1940s and ’50s that were intended as beacons of access to civilising art and discourse, such as the development of the Arts Council, the Edinburgh Festival and the South Bank Centre.

There has been, of course, since the late 1960s a great deal of exemplary arts broadcasting. But it seems today that the personalities of presenters are often forced between us and the subject under review, rarely does the camera dwell on a great work of art long enough for its qualities to be fully appreciated by the viewer, and narratives are wrapped up as ‘rediscoveries’, or the result of the work of ‘art detectives’. This is particularly the case with the visual arts; music and literature often fare better. Does this sound snobbish? If so, the snobbery is based on an unapologetic plea for a return of quality and ambition.

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Debate

Public Events and Lectures Further information on our events can be found at www.royalacademy.org.uk/events

INTER ACT AT THE R A

BSL Tour: Summer Exhibition

Sat 28 June An event for deaf, deafened and hard-ofhearing visitors – a BSL tour through the Summer Exhibition.

Meet at the RA; 11.30am–12.30pm; £3 ARCHITECTURE EVENT Sketching Tour

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ARCHITECTURE EVENT Yinka Shonibare RA: Looking at London

Mon 2 June In this evening hosted by writer and broadcaster Patrick Wright, Yinka Shonibare RA shares his experiences of London. Shonibare was born in the capital and moved to Lagos at the age of three. Returning to London to study, he has since become one of Britain’s leading artists. He discusses his new direction in public art following Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, his 2010 commission for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square.

Geological Society; 6.30–7.45pm; £14/£7 reductions RENAISSANCE IMPRESSIONS EVENING EVENT

early-to-mid stages of dementia and their carers, friends and family members. Join us for coffee and conversation to discuss artworks from our permanent collection.

Fine Rooms; 11am–12.30pm; £3

Meet at the Royal Academy; 2–5pm; £36/£18 reductions

ARCHITECTURE EVENT

INMOTION AT THE R A

Ian Martin: Looking at London

Mon 9 June Comedy writer and journalist Ian Martin offers his perspective as an outsider looking in on London. Martin was part of the writing team for the BBC series ‘The Thick of It’ (2005–12) and the Oscar-nominated film In the Loop (2009).

In this event with writer and broadcaster Patrick Wright, he discusses how he sees London as ‘a series of goat tracks that all seem to lead to Soho’.

Geological Society; 6.30–7.45pm; £14/£7 reductions

Classical Connections with Professor Mary Beard

ARCHITECTURE EVENT

Fri 6 June

Mon 16 June

Check our website for details.

The film-maker Patrick Keiller, whose films include London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997), discusses Nine Elms – home to Battersea Power Station – an area which is undergoing redevelopment, in this series of events examining the past, present and future of London.

Reynolds Room; 6.30–7.30pm; this event is currently sold out, but returns will be made on the door INMIND AT THE R A

Art in Conversation for People Living with Dementia

Mon 9 June, 21 July, 18 Aug, 15 Sep Artist and gallery educators facilitate these sessions for individuals living with How to book

● Visit www.royalacademy.org. uk/events, or call 020 7300 5839. You can also visit the RA ticket office, or complete the booking form overleaf and post to ‘Events and Lectures’ or fax 020 7300 8013. ● Booking is advised for lunchtime lectures. Unclaimed seats will be released at 12.50pm on the day. No admission after 1pm. ● Reductions are available for students, jobseekers and people with disabilities with recognised proof of status. ● RA Friends and carers go free to Access events; pre-booking is advised. Disabled parking spaces and wheelchairs can be reserved on 020 7300 8028.

Patrick Keiller: Looking at London

Geological Society; 6.30–7.45pm; £14/£7 reductions SUMMER EXHIBITION TOUR Summer Exhibition Edits

Thur 19 June–3 July The Summer Exhibition Edits are a series of 30-minute tours in which pacesetters from diverse fields share their personal highlights of the 2014 Summer Exhibition. Speakers include independent curator Susie Allen (19 June), fashion historian and DJ Amber Jane Butchart (26 June), and the BBC’s Arts Editor Will Gompertz (3 July).

Further speakers and dates are to be confirmed – please check our website for details.

Meet in the Summer Exhibition; 3pm; free with an exhibition ticket, no booking required SUMMER EXHIBITION SPECIAL EVENT

Midsummer Night’s Fête

Sat 21 June Celebrate summer with this special evening of events and activities that see tradition and the contemporary collide.

For more details visit http://roy.ac/fete

Dennis Hopper Exhibition Tour for Mobility Impaired Visitors

Mon 30 June An event for wheelchair users and mobility impaired visitors – an introductory tour of the ‘Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album’ exhibition, followed by coffee and conversation.

Meet in Burlington Gardens; 9–11am; £3 DENNIS HOPPER FREE LUNCHTIME LECTURE

Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album

Mon 30 June Curator Petra Giloy-Hirtz recounts the remarkable story of the recent discovery of actor and director Dennis Hopper’s archive of photographs from the 1960s, which lay hidden until after his death in 2010. She also examines the cultural and political subjects of Hopper’s camera.

Reynolds Room; 1–2pm; free (pre-booking strongly recommended) ARCHITECTURE EVENT

Lisa Jardine: Looking at London

Mon 30 June Lisa Jardine, one of Britain’s foremost historians, discusses the secrets of St Paul’s Cathedral with writer and broadcaster Patrick Wright. Jardine specialises in Early Modern Britain, particularly the intersections of science, architecture and intellectual history.

Geological Society; 6.30–7.45pm; £14/£7 reductions

July DENNIS HOPPER EVENING EVENT Peter Fonda in Conversation

Wed 2 July Hollywood star Peter Fonda discusses his experience of collaborating with his friend Dennis Hopper to launch a season of films at the British Film Institute accompanying the RA’s ‘Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album’. Fonda established himself as a leading screen actor in the 1960s, increasingly favouring more antiestablishment roles, culminating in 1969 when he produced, co-wrote and costarred in Easy Rider. This cult classic

Venezuelan Kinetic and Op artist Carlos Cruz-Diez gives a talk at the RA on 4 July to accompany the ‘Radical Geometry’ exhibition RIGHT

follows Fonda’s introduction to the BFI’s Dennis Hopper film season ‘Icon of Oblivion’, which runs throughout July.

NFT1, Southbank; 6.30–8pm; £16/£12 reductions; book online at bfi.org.uk or 020 7928 3232 (see page 12 for more details) R ADICAL GEOMETRY EVENING EVENT Carlos Cruz-Diez

Fri 4 July The celebrated Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez (above), a key figure in Kinetic and Op Art, discusses his experiments with colour and movement.

His work includes paintings, huge projects in public spaces and light installations (seen last year at the Hayward Gallery’s ‘Light Show’). In a conversation with Dr Joanne Harwood, Cruz-Diez reflects on the unstable nature of colour and his commitment to art that directly engages its viewers. He will also be signing copies of his book Reflection on Colour. This is an RA Schools event, supported by the David Lean Foundation.

Reynolds Room; 6.30–7.30pm; £16/£7 reductions (incl. exhibition entry), £12 (event only)

© CA R LOS CRUZ-D I E Z /A DAGP, PA R IS , 2014

June

Follow in the footsteps of the 19thcentury architect Norman Shaw RA and join architect and draughtsman Benedict O’Looney on a sketching tour of buildings by Shaw and his contemporaries near the Royal Academy.

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Debate

Family Fun

Royal Academy Talks

FAMILY STUDIO SERIES

New Friends’ Welcome Tours

Green Parks

2pm first Sunday of each month.

Curators’ Gallery Talks on collection displays are at 3pm on the first Tuesday of every month.

Sun 15 June

Beguiling Books

Sun 13 July

Caped Curators and the Puppet Parade

Royal Academy Tours

Sun 10 Aug 11am–2pm; free; no booking required SUMMER EXHIBITION FAMILY WORKSHOPS Wed & Fri: 23, 25, 30 July; 1, 13, 15 Aug Join us for creative workshops for parents and children, inspired by the RA’s Summer Exhibition.

11am–1pm; £15 adults/£5 RA Friends/£3 children 5 + yrs; pre-booking essential on 020 7300 5995

1pm Tue to Fri 3pm Wed to Fri 11.30am Sat Tours are free and last one hour; meet in the Entrance Hall.

EXHIBITION TOURS 45-minute introductory tours, free with an exhibition ticket Summer Exhibition

7pm Fri (13 June–15 Aug) Summer Exhibition Family Tours

2.30pm Sun (throughout July)

Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album

2.30pm Thur (26 June–9 Oct) Radical Geometry

2.30pm Tue, 7pm Fri (8 July–19 Sep) EXHIBITION SPOTLIGHT TALKS 10-minute talks on individual works from current exhibitions, free with an exhibition ticket.

3pm Thur ONE-TO-ONE ACCESS TOURS Tours for wheelchair users and audiodescriptive talks about our exhibitions and the permanent collection.

Call 020 7300 5732 for details

R A FORUM

Eric Parry RA

Fri 4 July Eric Parry RA explores the creative possibilities of working with practitioners from disciplines outside architecture, in the context of the Summer Exhibition.

Main Galleries; 7–7.30pm; free with an exhibition ticket, no booking required

American and European counterparts?

Curators of ‘Radical Geometry’ Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro and Adrian Locke explore breakthrough works in the development of the style known as South American Geometric Abstraction.

Reynolds Room; 1–2pm; free (pre-booking strongly recommended)

INTOUCH AT THE R A

August

Mon 14 July

INTOUCH AT THE R A

Audio Described Tour: Dennis Hopper

An event for blind and visually impaired visitors – an audio-described tour of the ‘Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album’ exhibition followed by a handling session.

Meet in Burlington Gardens, 9–11am; £3

ANNUAL ARCHITECTURE LECTURE LIFE DR AWING WORKSHOP

Rafael Moneo

Sat 5 July

For this year’s Annual Architecture Lecture, we welcome world-renowned architect Rafael Moneo (see page 66).

A winner of the prestigious Pritzker Prize, his designs include the Kursaal Congress Centre in San Sebastián, and Princeton University’s Neuroscience Institute.

Figure and Movement

Develop your life drawing skills and learn new techniques with Francis Bowyer, life drawing tutor at the RA. During this intensive day-long workshop, Francis helps you to explore movement, light, shadow and tone. The class is designed for those with previous experience of drawing the figure.

Meet at the RA; 10.30am–5.30pm; £85/£65 reductions R ADICAL GEOMETRY FREE LUNCHTIME LECTURE

Radical Geometry: An Introduction

Mon 7 July How did South American artists of the mid-20th century differ from their

Mon 7 July

Main Galleries; 6.45–8pm; £18/£9 reductions R A FORUM

Ian Ritchie RA

Fri 11 July One of Britain’s leading architects, Ian Ritchie RA discusses his work within the context of the Summer Exhibition.

Main Galleries; 7–7.30pm; free with an exhibition ticket, no booking required

INTER ACT AT THE R A

BSL Talk: Radical Geometry

Fri 25 July An event for deaf, deafened and hard-of-hearing visitors – a slideassisted BSL talk about the ‘Radical Geometry’ exhibition followed by entry to the galleries.

Reynolds Room; 6–7pm; £3 INMOTION AT THE R A

Summer Exhibition Tour for Mobility Impaired Visitors

Mon 28 July An event for wheelchair users and mobility impaired visitors – an introductory tour of the Summer Exhibition, followed by coffee and conversation in the Fine Rooms.

Meet in the front hall; 9–11am; £3

Audio Described Tour: Summer Exhibition

Mon 11 Aug An event for blind and visually impaired visitors – an audio-described touch tour of the Summer Exhibition, followed by an art-making session.

Meet in the front hall; 9am–12pm; £3

September INMOTION AT THE R A

Radical Geometry Tour for Mobility Impaired Visitors

Mon 1 Sep An event for wheelchair users and mobility impaired visitors – a tour of the ‘Radical Geometry’ exhibition, followed by coffee and conversation.

Meet in the front hall; 9–11am; £3

Look out for more Access events, including a Stagetext supported talk on 6 Sep for ‘Dennis Hopper’ and an audio-described tour on 8 Sep for ‘Radical Geometry’.

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Grayson Perry RA, Manifesto Napkin, 2012

Buy gift membership & get your very own Grayson Perry RA artwork

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Buy Friends of the RA gift membership and get a free Grayson Perry art manifesto napkin (60x60cm). You can then choose to have the napkin sent to you or whoever you are giving the membership to.

The napkin was created by Grayson Perry around the opening of the Keeperâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s House. We have framed our napkin which is currently hanging in the Keeperâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s House at the Royal Academy.

Join now royalacademy.org.uk/friends 0207 300 5664 #friendofgraysonperry

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Debate

Friends Events and Excursions These events are generally very popular. We recommend you post the booking form overleaf as soon as you receive the magazine. Remaining tickets will be sold online and over the phone from 16 June

How to book

Charterhouse

Mon 21 July and Tue 26 Aug Led by one of the Brothers of Charterhouse, our popular annual tour of this historic palace includes the Courts, Great Hall, Library, Great Chamber and Chapel. Over its 600year history, Charterhouse has been a Tudor mansion and Jacobean ‘hospital’.

It is now an almshouse hidden behind a square in London’s Clerkenwell.

2.15–4pm; £25 (incl. tea); Charterhouse Square, EC1 Buscot Park, Oxon

The Heaven Room at Burghley in Stamford, which Friends can visit on 3 Sep (see page 73)

Bonhams Private Views

Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Tue 1 and Mon 7 July Ahead of forthcoming auctions at Bonhams, Friends have the opportunity to tour its New Bond Street saleroom with the Heads of Contemporary Art and Old Masters departments, followed by a glass of champagne and a chance to learn about the history of the auction house. The Contemporary Art Sale on 1 July features works by Antoni Tàpies, Frank Auerbach, Adolf Luther and Wols.

As RA Magazine went to press the Old Masters sale (7 July) was set to include works by Fragonard, Guercino and Constable.

6–7.30pm; £22 (incl. champagne and nibbles); 101 New Bond Street, W1

Tue 8 July, Thur 7 Aug and Tue 9 Sep Friends privately visit the principal rooms of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London’s Whitehall, with historian Kate Crowe.

Completed in 1868, the FCO was designed by George Gilbert Scott after he won the commission in a public competition. The FCO building underwent a £100 million restoration, completed in 1997.

3–4.15pm; £24; King Charles St, SW1

Palace of Westminster

Fri 4, 11 and 18 July We tour the Palace of Westminster, built during the 19th century by the architect Sir Charles Barry, and learn about its social and architectural history.

We visit the 900-year-old Westminster Hall, the State Apartments, the House of Commons, the Lords’ Chamber, the Prince’s Chamber and the Royal Gallery with paintings by Daniel Maclise RA depicting scenes of the Napoleonic Wars.

3.30–5.30pm; £26; directions with ticket Stationers’ Hall

Mon 7 July Join us for an exclusive opportunity to visit Stationers’ Hall, led by the Clerk and Deputy Clerk of the Stationers’ Company. We hear about the history of the Company and view architectural highlights, including the Great Hall and the Court Room, as well as magnificent stained glass and historical portraits.

10–11.15am; £20; Ave Maria Lane, EC4

Royal College of Physicians

Wed 9 July and 17 Sep Our curator-led tour of the Royal College of Physicians explores both the architecture of the college and its collection of books, medical artefacts and portraits by artists including Sir Joshua Reynolds, Zoffany and Lawrence.

Friends also enjoy a private tour of the medicinal garden with the college’s Garden Fellow.

2.30–4.30pm; £22 (incl. tea); 11 St Andrews Place, NW1 Dulwich College and Christ’s Chapel

Tue 15 July Led by archivist Calista Lucy, Friends exclusively tour Dulwich College, founded in 1619, and its chapel. As well as viewing the buildings, there is the chance to see artefacts and archival material relating to some of the college’s famous Old Alleynians, including Ernest Shackleton and P.G. Wodehouse.

We then tour the College’s Christ’s Chapel, in the grounds of Dulwich Picture Gallery.

11am–1.30pm; £36 (incl. coffee); meet at Dulwich College, SE21

Tue 22 July Lord and Lady Faringdon personally host our visit to their beautiful 18thcentury home as we see highlights from the Faringdon Collection. We tour the house and collection, which includes works by Rembrandt, Rubens and Van Dyck, as well as Burne-Jones’s painting cycle ‘The Legend of the Briar Rose’.

We also visit the spectacular water garden designed by Harold Peto, and the Four Seasons walled garden. After lunch in the marquee at Buscot, we visit the nearby country home of the fashion designer Sir Hardy Amies and enjoy afternoon tea.

9am–7.15pm; £79 (incl. coach, lunch/glass of wine, tea) St Bride’s Church

Thur 24 July and Wed 10 Sep On our private tour of St Bride’s, designed by Christopher Wren and known as the ‘Printer’s Cathedral’, Friends are introduced to the architecture as well as the church’s literary associations. Virtually destroyed by a bomb in 1940, the church was restored to Wren’s original designs and still has the tallest steeple of any of Wren’s churches.

St Bride’s housed London’s first moveable printing press and is closely connected with Pepys and Milton.

3–4.15pm; £16; Bride Lane, off Fleet Street, EC4 Royal Geographical Society

Wed 6 Aug and Tue 2 Sep In celebration of the RA’s exhibition of the work of the 19th-century architect Norman Shaw, we visit Lowther Lodge – built between 1872 and 1875 – which has been the headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society since 1913. On this tour led by House Manager Denise Prior we see Shaw’s original design, as well as the recent extensions to the building.

10.30am–12.15pm; £23 (incl. coffee); 1 Kensington Gore, SW7 (entrance in Exhibition Rd) Ashburnham House

Mon 11 Aug Friends privately tour Ashburnham House, built for the Earl of Ashburnham in the 1660s by William Samwell and now part of Westminster School. Guided by the school’s archivist, we explore the unique features of this historic house,

● Postal bookings open now.

Post booking form overleaf to ‘Events & Lectures’, or fax 020 7300 8013. ● Friends may purchase a guest ticket to Friends Events. ● Friends Events booking forms are balloted; please list your choices in preference order. ● When an event is running on more than one day and/or time and you forget to choose a time, we will select one for you. ● Excursion coach leaves from outside the RA on Piccadilly and return times are approximate. ● There is no discount if you choose to drive instead of travelling by coach. ● For Friends membership enquiries, call 020 7300 5664 or visit www.royalacademy.org. uk/friends ● For queries about these events, please call 020 7300 5839.

which rarely opens its doors to the public.

Highlights include one of the finest grand staircases of the 17th century, an extraordinary columnar gallery and lantern, an original fireplace dating from 1599 and a fine Restoration ceiling.

11.30am–12.30pm; £23; 18 Dean’s Yard, SW1 Royal Automobile Club

Wed 13 Aug and 24 Sep Friends enjoy an extremely rare tour of the Royal Automobile Clubhouse in London’s Pall Mall, designed by Mewes and Davis and completed in 1911. An article in Vanity Fair described the Clubhouse as being ‘on a scale of grandeur absolutely unparalleled anywhere,’ having cost £250,000 to complete. We view the magnificent interior of the club, including the Great Gallery, Mountbatten Room and the stunning period swimming pool.

10.30am–12pm; £25; 89 Pall Mall, SW1 (dress code will apply) Bentley Priory

Thur 14 Aug Bentley Priory, in Stanmore, was the headquarters of RAF Fighter Command and was the base from which Commander Sir Hugh Dowding directed his men in the Battle of Britain in 1940.

In 2013, the Battle of Britain Trust opened the house as a museum following eight years of restoration. On our tour we learn about the fascinating history of the house, which is of considerable interest in its own right both historically and architecturally; it originated as a 12th-century Augustinian Priory, followed by an 18th-century re-modelling

by Sir John Soane.

12.45–6.30pm; £45; (incl. coach, tea)

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A-level Summer Exhibition Online 2014 A Royal Academy initiative for A-level students. Curated this year by a panel including Humphrey Ocean RA

9 Juneâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;17 August 2014 Experienc.e the artworks at alevel.royalacademy.org.uk Artwork exhibited in the A-level Summer Exhibition Online 2013 Rachel Wilcock, Re-laced. Mixed media, 45 ! 30 ! 12cm, Priestley College, Cheshire

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THE CLUB WITH A PASSION FOR THE ARTS The Royal Over-Seas League is a unique, not-for-profit, private membership organisation. For over 100 years we have encouraged international friendship and understanding through arts, social, music and humanitarian programmes. With membership benefits including accommodation and dining at our historic clubhouses in Green Park, London and Edinburgh, we offer our members a home away from home.

Contact ROSL for more information, quoting RA Magazine for special joining discounts. www.rosl.org.uk +44(0)20 7408 0214 (ext. 214 & 216) info@rosl.org.uk

London: Over-Seas House, Park Place, St Jamesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Street, London, SW1A 1LR Edinburgh: Over-Seas House, 100 Princes Street, Edinburgh, EH2 3AB

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Debate Friends Events and Excursions

Friends Worldwide Art Tours Oman: Land of Frankincense

Sur we have the chance to spot green turtles on the tranquil Ras al Junaiz beach. We finish in Salalah with a trip to the golden sand dunes of the Empty Quarter desert.

Call 020 7873 5013 or visit www.coxandkings.co.uk/ra

9–17 Nov 9 Days / 7 Nights from £2,095 With more than 2,000 kilometres of coastline, mountains giving way to vast deserts and large oases surrounding medieval castles, Oman is perhaps the most beautiful country in Arabia. Starting in Muscat, we will follow the coastal road towards Sur for an exclusive tour of the Ras AlHadd archaeological project. While in Burghley, Lincs

Wed 3 Sep We return to one of Britain’s greatest non-royal palaces following a popular tour of Burghley last year. Built for Elizabeth I’s Lord High Treasurer Lord Burghley in 1555, the palace was endowed by later Earls of Exeter with magnificent painting collections and an opulent series of State Rooms, including the famous Heaven Room painted by Antonio Verrio (page 71). Following an introduction from the Head Curator Jon Culverhouse, we tour the State Rooms, the Great Hall and the vaulted old kitchen. After the tour we explore the grounds.

9am–7.30pm; £82 (coach, coffee, lunch, tea) St George’s Church, Bloomsbury

Mon 8 and 15 Sep Jonathan Foyle, Chief Executive of World Monuments Fund Britain, leads our Friends excursion to Nicholas Hawksmoor’s sixth and final London church, St George’s Bloomsbury.

Featured in Hogarth’s etching Gin Lane, the church was consecrated in 1731, but fell into disrepair. It reopened to the public in 2006 following a five-year restoration project undertaken by the World Monuments Fund Britain.

10.30am–12pm; £18; St George’s Church, Bloomsbury Way, WC1 Hiscox

Tue 16 Sep By special arrangement, curator Whitney Hinz leads our exclusive tour of selected works featured in the private collection of the insurance company Hiscox. During our visit to their London offices we see works by artists such as Peter Blake, Lucian Freud, Gilbert and George, Cornelia Parker RA and Sarah Lucas.

6–7.30pm; £27 (incl. glass of wine); 1 Great St Helen’s, EC3 Sandhurst, Camberley

Thur 18 Sep Representatives from the Sandhurst Trust, recently established to promote understanding of the history of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, lead our

Events booking form For Friends Events & Excursions, please list your event choices in preference order.

Number Event Date of Tickets Cost

Total Cost £ Reductions are available for students, jobseekers and people with disabilities with recognised proof of status. Please indicate your status if relevant

private tour of the UK’s foremost Army training institution. Friends visit the Academy’s Prestige Rooms and grounds; then by special arrangement, curator Dr Anthony Morton will lead a tour of the Sandhurst Collection – the Trust’s pictures, silver, decorative art and weaponry. It includes paintings from the Royal Collection Trust, works

by Richard Caton Woodville Jr and Ernest Crofts, and a painting attributed to Zoffany.

12.30–7pm; £47 (incl. coach, tea)

Student

Kenwood House

Signature

Thur 25 Sep Join us for a tour of Kenwood House, which reopened its doors in November 2013 after a £3.89 million restoration grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Several Robert Adam-designed rooms, including the Great Library, have been repainted in their original complex palette, resulting in a true recreation of Adam’s intended designs. Our tour includes the story of this major restoration project and looks at highlights from the Iveagh Collection, including works by Vermeer, Gainsborough and Rembrandt. Later we learn about Humphry Repton’s designs for Kenwood’s picturesque parkland and privately visit the newly restored dairy.

10am–1.30pm; £26; meet at Kenwood House, Hampstead Lane, NW3 Autumn in Derbyshire

Tue 21 to Fri 24 Oct We are delighted to offer this four-day tour based in the stunning Peak District in Derbyshire. We stay in the charming spa town of Buxton and visit a number of important houses including Hardwick Hall, Chatsworth and Haddon Hall.

We also visit the privately owned Renishaw Hall, and explore the stunning St Oswald’s Church in Ashbourne. We finish our tour in Manchester, where we see the architectural highlights of the city before visiting the magnificent John Rylands Library.

For a full itinerary and booking form, please call Sue Stamp on 020 7300 5811

Jobseeker

Disabled

Please note that reductions are not available for Friends Events & Excursions Please indicate any dietary requirements where relevant Please debit my credit/charge card number (we no longer accept cheques) Expiry date

Issue number/start date (Switch only)

First name Surname Address

Postcode Daytime telephone Friends Membership no.

Email address

Please indicate if you would like to receive Events & Lectures information (Your details will not be passed on to a third party) by post or by email The Royal Academy reserves the right to refuse admission to any event

● Some of the venues we visit occasionally offer tours to the general public. By purchasing a ticket through the RA, you are supporting the Friends’ Events programme and other Learning initiatives and we are grateful for your patronage. ● There is a handling charge of £5 for all refunds. We regret that refunds cannot be made less than 14 days before an event.

● All events are correct at time of publication but are subject to change without notice. ● Send or fax your completed form to the booking address: Events & Lectures Learning Department Royal Academy of Arts Piccadilly London W1J 0BD Fax booking line: 020 7300 8013

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THE ARTIST’S STUDIO

‘Steps To The Sea’. By Ann Gardner. Oil on canvas, 140 cms x 110 cms.

Ann Gardner, Victoria Achache, Jill Barthorpe and Lisa Micklewright Recent Paintings

Maria Kuipers Solo Exhibition

OPENING WEEKEND 21ST/22ND JUNE

Maria Kuipers will be deconstructing her studio in Brighton and reconstructing her working environment at the Thomas and Paul Gallery.

Presenting her new abstracts, this exhibition provides a rare insight into Maria Kuipers process. A mixed media artist who incorporates stitch, fabrics and collage into her oil paintings. The exhibition will run till 2oth July.

17th - 21st June 2014 Gallery 8

20 Bristol Gardens, London W9 2JQ Tube: Warwick Avenue | www.thomasandpaul.com

8 Duke St, London SW1Y 6BN, 020 7930 0375 Enquiries to: anngardner.paintings@hotmail.com Tel. 01273 472257

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THE LEFT: Lucien Freud: Portrait Head, 2006, etching edition of 46 RIGHT: Paula Rego: Turtle Hands, 2009, lithograph, edition of 35

12 JULY - 1 SEPT 2014

AN EXHIBITION OF WORK BY 6 INTERNATIONALLY RECOGNISED BRITISH ARTISTS:

brookgallery .co.uk

Summer Schools in London at Christie’s Education Summer 2014

. RB KITAJ . BRIDGET RILEY . PAULA REGO . LUCIEN FREUD . DAVID HOCKNEY . FRANK AUBERBACH

Fore St | Budleigh Salterton | Devon | EX9 6NH | 01395 443003 | art@brookgallery.co.uk

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• Impressionist and Modern Art 1860–1940 • London Art Now: A Contemporary Art Summer School • Photography Now: Summer Course in London • Art Business Summer School • Richard Strauss: Romantic Modern 1864–1949 • Wine Summer School Contact shortcoursesUK@christies.edu +44 (0) 20 7665 4350 christies.edu

22/04/2014 12:14 02/05/2014 12:33

Exhibitions in London and the rest of the UK

Art School Degree Shows THE ART ACADEMY

Mermaid Court, 165A Borough High Street SE1, 020 7407 6969 www.artacademy.org.uk Graduate Show 2014 Work by the talented emerging artists from the Fine Art Diploma, Fine Art Foundation and Certificate courses, 10-13 June CAMBERWELL COLLEGE OF ARTS

Peckham Road SE5, 020 7514 6302 www.arts.ac.uk/camberwell

Undergraduate & MA Conservation Summer Show BA (Hons): Graphic

Design, Illustration, 3D Design, Drawing, Painting, Photography, Sculpture; FdA Graphic Design, Illustration; MA Conservation, 16-21 June Postgraduate Summer Show MA Visual Arts: Book Arts, Designer Maker, Fine Art Digital, Illustration, Printmaking, 16-23 July CHELSEA COLLEGE OF ARTS

16 John Islip Street SW1, 020 7514 7751 www.arts.ac.uk/chelsea

ROYAL ACADEMY SCHOOLS

Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly W1, 020 7300 5650 www.royalacademy.org.uk RA Schools Show Postgraduate final year show, 13-29 June ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART

Kensington Gore SW7 and Howie Street SW11, 020 7590 4498 www.rca.ac.uk Show RCA 2014 Annual graduate exhibition – featuring contemporary art and design by postgraduate students across two campuses. Battersea: Schools of Fine Art, Humanities and Material.

Kensington: Schools of Architecture, Communication, Design and Humanities, 18-29 June (closed 27 June) THE RUSKIN SCHOOL OF FINE ART

The Green Shed, 1 Osney Mead, Oxford 01865 276940 Ruskin Degree Show 2014 The Fine Art finalists of Oxford University open an exhibition showcasing the best of their work, developed over three years of rigorous studio practice and theoretical discourse, 20-23 June

Undergraduate Summer Show

SLADE SCHOOL OF FINE ART, UCL

BA (Hons): Fine Art, Graphic Design Communication, Interior and Spatial Design, Textile Design; FdA Interior Design; Graduate Diploma Interior Design, 14-21 June Postgraduate Summer Show MA: Fine Art, Interior & Spatial, Graphic Design Communication; MRes Arts Practice, 6-12 Sep

Gower Street WC1, 020 7679 2313 www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/shows/2014 BA/BFA Show 2014 The annual Slade BA/BFA degree show, showcasing artworks by graduating students, 24-29 May MA/MFA Show 2014 The annual Slade MA/MFA degree show, showcasing artworks by graduating students, 12-18 June

CITY & GUILDS OF LONDON ART SCHOOL

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE FALMOUTH

124 Kennington Park Road SE11, 020 7735 2306 www.cityandguildsartschool.ac.uk Degree Show Fine Art, Painting, Sculpture, Conservation and Carving in Stone and Wood, 25-29 June MA Show, 10-14 Sep

34 Windmill Street W1, 020 7323 4700 www.curwengallery.com

Falmouth Campus TR11 / University Campus Penryn TR10, 01326 211077 www.falmouth.ac.uk/degreeshows Art & Design Degree Show Annual showcase includes BA (Hons) graduates’ work from The Falmouth School of Art studying Contemporary Crafts, Drawing, Fine Art, and Illustration, 13-17 June MA Show 2014 Graduating postgraduate students in Art & Environment, Fine Art (Contemporary Practice) and Illustration (Authorial Practice), 2-6 Sep

Selected graduates from the Northern Art Schools, 6-28 Aug

WIMBLEDON COLLEGE OF ARTS

CURWEN & NEW ACADEMY GALLERY COURTESY ROYAL ACADEMY SCHOOLS

© NIELS RANHEIMSAETER/COURTESY ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART. © DAVID KNIGHT/COURTESY UNIVERSITY COLLEGE FALMOUTH. © MELANIE GURNEY/COURTESY THE RUSKIN SCHOOL OF FINE ART. © AMY PETRA WOODWARD/

Listings

Northern Graduates 2014

Merton Hall Road SW19, 020 7514 9641 www.arts.ac.uk/wimbledon Undergraduate Summer Show

BA (Hons): Theatre & Screen and Fine

Art, 13-21 June 2014 (not Sunday)

Postgraduate Summer Shows MA: Drawing, Theatre Design, Digital Theatre, 4-10 July (not Sunday) MFA Fine Art, 5-12 Sep (not Sunday)

London Public BARBICAN CENTRE

Silk Street EC2, 020 7638 4141 www.barbican.org.uk UVA: Momentum A choreographed sequence of light, sound and movement, which responds to the unique space of the Curve, until 1 June The Fashion

Beestial Invasion, 2014, by Niels Ranheimsaeter at Royal College of Art

World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk, until 25 Aug Digital Revolution An interactive

exhibition of art, design, film, music and video games that pushes the boundaries of digital media, 3 July-14 Sep Shoreditch, 2014, by David Knight at University College Falmouth

DULWICH PICTURE GALLERY

Gallery Road SE21, 020 8693 5254 www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk Art and Life 1920–1931 Ben and Winifred Nicholson were at the forefront of the Modern British movement, and this exhibition, curated by their grandson Jovan Nicholson, provides a rare opportunity to see their views of the same landscapes, seascapes, still lifes and portraits alongside pieces by contemporaries Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis and the potter William Staite Murray, 4 June-21 Sep ESTORICK COLLECTION OF MODERN ITALIAN ART Emma, 2014, by Melanie Gurney at The Ruskin School of Fine Art

Canonbury Square N1, 020 7704 9522 www.estorickcollection.com The Years of La Dolce Vita

Photographic exhibition capturing the dolce vita enjoyed by Italian movie stars and Hollywood ‘royalty’ working in Rome during the 1960s, until 29 June Gerardo Dottori: The Futurist View

An overview of this fascinating artist, encompassing renowned flight-related paintings and later experimentation with abstract imagery, 9 July-7 Sep NATIONAL GALLERY

Trafalgar Square WC2, 020 7747 2885 www.nationalgallery.org.uk

Amy Petra Woodward’s installation, which was shown at the Royal Academy Schools Show 2013

Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice, until 15 June Building the Picture: Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting

Discover how architecture was employed to frame figures and construct space in pictures from the 14th, 15th and

HOW TO BOOK For inclusion in RA Magazine’s paid Listings section for public and commercial galleries in the UK call 020 7300 5657

or email catherine.cartwright@royalacademy.org.uk. Readers should contact galleries directly for opening times and ticketing queries

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Listings

Audrey Hepburn, Rome, 1961,

by Marcello Geppetti at Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art

TATE BRITAIN

Millbank SW1, 020 7887 8888 www.tate.org.uk

British Folk Art: The House that Jack Built First major survey of British

Cortivallo, Lugano, 1921-c.1923,

by Ben Nicholson at Dulwich Picture Gallery

Folk Art showing over 100 paintings, sculptures, textiles and objects from across the UK, 10 June-31 Aug Kenneth Clark Over 200 works and supporting archival material examine Clark’s role as a patron and collector, art historian, public servant and broadcaster who brought art of the 20th century to a mass audience, until 10 Aug

ALAN CRISTEA

CONNAUGHT BROWN

2 Albemarle Street W1, 020 7408 0362 www.connaughtbrown.co.uk

BANKSIDE GALLERY

48 Hopton Street SE1, 020 7928 7521 www.banksidegallery.com RE Original Prints Fine original prints

by Society Members, until 7 June LOOP 2014 Past graduates of Camberwell College display a range of prints and techniques, 10-15 June Through the Wormhole: Furniture Re-Imagined

48 Maddox Street W1, 020 7493 1155 www.beauxartslondon.co.uk John Bellany Scanning the remarkable artistic achievement of this renowned Scottish painter, 12 June-12 July

BEAUX ARTS LONDON

V&A

Summer Exhibition: Fresh Faces and Gallery Artists Presenting a group

Cromwell Road SW7, 020 7942 2000 www.vam.ac.uk

of new and well-established painters and sculptors, 10 July-30 Aug

architectural drawings for Horse Guards at Whitehall and landscape designs for Holkham Hall, until 13 July

19 Cork Street W1, 020 7734 7984 www.browseanddarby.co.uk British Prints By Patrick Heron, Victor Pasmore, Gerald Laing, Bridget Riley, Lucian Freud, Henry Moore, David Hockney RA, Peter Doig, Craigie Aitchison RA and Barbara Hepworth, until 6 June British and

William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain Over 200 works including

at Italian fashion from the end of the Second World War to the present day, until 27 July Wedding Dresses 1775–2014 Tracing the development of the fashionable white wedding dress and its treatment by key fashion designers such as John Galliano, Christian Lacroix, Vivienne Westwood and Vera Wang, until 15 Mar 2015 Disobedient Objects Examining the powerful role of objects in movements for social change, 26 July-1 Feb 2015

67th Annual Open Art Exhibition

31 & 34 Cork Street W1, 020 7439 1866 www.alancristea.com Mastergraphics Prints by Albers, Braque, Gabo, Matisse, Miró, Nicholson, Picasso and Villon (31 Cork St), until 7 June Ben Johnson, Time Past Time Present (34 Cork St), until 7 June Drawn to the Real Contemporary drawing by Emma Stibbon RA, Richard Forster, Marie Harnett, Jane Dixon and Miriam de Búrca (34 Cork St), 12 June-19 July Summer Exhibition, 24 July-6 Sep

This comprehensive exhibition brings together around 120 works, many seen together for the first time, in a groundbreaking reassessment of Matisse’s colourful and innovative final works, until 7 Sep

The Glamour of Italian Fashion 1945–2014 A comprehensive look

Guerrilla Girls in 1991 (detail), by George Lange at V&A

Painting and sculpture 19-23 June, (10am–7pm daily; Sunday 10am–5pm; final day 10am–2pm)

Bankside SE1, 020 7887 8888 www.tate.org.uk

Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs

Signals Gallery (Installation of Lygia Clark exhibition) 1966, photo by Clay Perry at England & Co

ADAM GALLERY

67 Mortimer Street W1, 020 7439 6633 www.adamgallery.com Fred Cuming RA New paintings, 24 June-10 July

A furniture exhibition by Andy Jacobs, 18-22 June Timeline Brenda Hartill’s first major retrospective exhibition, 9-20 July

TATE MODERN

CHELSEA ART SOCIETY

Chelsea Old Town Hall, Kings Road SW3, 020 7731 3121 www.chelseaartsociety.org.uk

BROWSE & DARBY

French Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, 11 June-17 July Contemporary Gallery Artists

Elizabeth Blackadder RA, Victoria Crowe, Robert Dukes, Anthony Eyton RA, Anthony Fry, Patrick George, James Lloyd, Andy Pankhurst and Charlotte Verity, 23 July-4 Sep

Post-Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary works of art: Dufy, Miró, Picasso, Renoir Ongoing CURWEN & NEW ACADEMY GALLERY

34 Windmill Street W1, 020 7323 4700 www.curwengallery.com

Illustrations by Albany Wiseman

As featured in the book Tommy Atkins in the Great War. Sculpture and drawings by James Butler RA and military cartoons

by Robin Ollington, 4-17 June Curwen Gallery Auction 2014 Live auction 15 July, online auction 2-14 July THE CYNTHIA CORBETT GALLERY

15 Claremont Lodge, 15 The Downs, Wimbledon SW20, 020 8947 6782 www.thecynthiacorbettgallery.com ar•chi•tec•ton•ic Tom Leighton and Andy Burgess, Site/109, 109 Norfolk St, Lower East Side, New York, until 1 June Art at the Top 2014 Ronnette Riley Architect, Empire State Building 74th Floor, until July 10 Year Anniversary Exhibition 2004–2014 At the Gallery in Cork Street (28 Cork St, W1), 23-28 June Art Hamptons New York, 10-13 July Art Southampton New York, 24-28 July EAMES FINE ART GALLERY

58 Bermondsey Street SE1, 020 7407 1025 www.eamesfineart.com The Art of the Poster Original posters

by Marc Chagall, David Hockney RA, Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, Richard Hamilton and others, 27 May-15 June Jason Hicklin: The End of the World

New etchings, drawings, monotypes and paintings of the Outer Hebrides and the Isle of Mull, 17 June-13 July Anita Klein: New Works Linocuts, lithographs and paintings alongside drypoints and woodcuts, 5-31 Aug ENGLAND & CO

90-92 Great Portland Street W1, 020 7436 1873 www.englandgallery.com Justin Almquist First solo exhibition in Britain, with concurrent display of selected works on paper by Colin Self, until 7 June

PHOTOGRAPHER NIK HARTLEY © GEORGE LANGE/COURTESY VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

St Martin’s Place WC2, 020 7306 0055 www.npg.org.uk The Great War in Portraits, until 15 June BP Portrait Award 2014, 26 June1 Sep Virginia Woolf: Life, Art and Vision Portraits and archival material exploring Virginia Woolf’s life and achievements as a novelist, intellectual, campaigner and public figure, 10 July26 Oct

London Commercial

© MGMC & SOLARES FONDAZIONE DELLE ARTI/COURTESY ESTORICK COLLECTION OF MODERN ITALIAN ART. © THE ARTIST/COURTESY ENGLAND & CO. © ANGELA VERREN TAUNT 2013/DACS/PHOTO TATE, LONDON 2013/

16th centuries, until 21 Sep Making Colour This exhibition will help visitors understand the history of the use of colour from the early Renaissance to the Impressionist movement, 18 June-7 Sep

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A n d re w L acey

DEBORAH STERN ARBS SCULPTOR

Back view

Guardian 1/9 Bronze l 52” x h 33” x w 22”

EXHI B I TI O N O F NE W S CU LPT U RE

Bonsai Tree1988. Bronze. Ed.of 1. 12” x 14” (30cm x 36cm)

8 - 22 JUNE 2014

A rare oppurtunity to view an exhibitionof sculpture by this renowned artist and independent scholar. Andrew’s work was featured in the bronze casting room at the RA Bronze Exhibition

staffordgallery in association with Wimbledon Fine Art

41 Church Road Wimbledon Vilage SW19 5DQ Tel:+44(0)208 944 6593 or +44(0)7939 048436 www.staffordgallery.co.uk or www.andrewlacey.com Please call the gallery for further information

To view this and other sculptures telephone for appointment in central London Telephone: 020 7262 7104 Email: info@deborah-stern.com Website: www.deborah-stern.com

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ELLEN TERRY

THE PAINTER’S ACTRESS 10 June - 9 November 2014

An icon of Victorian Art, Fashion & Theatre Watts Gallery, Down Lane, Compton, Guildford, Surrey, GU3 1DQ 01483 810235 / info@wattsgallery.org.uk

www.wattsgallery.org.uk Ellen Terry (‘Choosing’) © National Portrait Gallery, London

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Listings

Miguel Kohler-Jan: Works from the 70s and 80s Kohler-Jan’s vibrant oil

paintings incorporate numbers, letters and geometric shapes while his sand on canvas works hint at Pre-Columbian designs, until 6 June GALLERY IN THE CRYPT Junkie, 2014, by Neale Howells at John Martin Gallery

St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square WC2, www.smitf.org / www.renosart.co.uk My London by Renos Art Renos Lavithis creates his London works mainly on paper. These include Fleet Street, London’s green spaces, London’s historic landmarks and works inspired by the London 2012 Olympics (sponsored by pgdstrategy.com), 23 June-20 July HIGHGATE CONTEMPORARY ART

26 Highgate High Street N6, 020 8340 7564 www.highgateart.com Gohar Goddard: Words in Forms and Graffiti Awareness of her A Pair of Orioles at their Nest, c.1770, by Moses Griffith at Martyn Gregory

environment and the influence of her surroundings inform every painting, 28 May-21 June Summer Farrago A vibrant mix of gallery artists and new names and work, with over 100 paintings, 25 June-6 Sep THE ILLUSTRATION CUPBOARD

22 Bury Street SW1, 020 7976 1727 www.illustrationcupboard.com David McKee Celebrating 25 years of Elmer at Andersen Press, until 7 June The Summer Exhibition, 11 June-2 July Interpretations of Warhorse Featuring Rae Smith, Olivia Lomenech Gill and others, 6-30 Aug JOHN MARTIN GALLERY Roses and Three Apricots, 2013,

by Pamela Kay at Llewellyn Alexander

38 Albemarle Street W1, 020 7499 1314 www.jmlondon.com

Neale Howells: It’s Nothing Without You Howells’s immense panel

paintings, slowly built up over years, take on the aged appearance of the lid of an old school desk or faded urban wall, 6-12 June KINGS PLACE GALLERY

90 York Way N1, 020 7520 1490 www.kingsplace.co.uk

The Lost World of Norman Cornish

A product of the Spennymoor Settlement in the 1930s, Cornish spent 37 years working as a miner before becoming a professional artist, until 1 Aug Tom’s Midnight Garden, 1959, by Susan Einzig at Piers Feetham Gallery

THE LINDA BLACKSTONE GALLERY

23 Oaklands Road, Totteridge N20, 07808 612193 www.lindablackstone.com Twenty-eight years of exhibiting contemporary British and European art.

UK representative for Dganit Blechner, Paul Kavanagh, Bernard Saint-Maxent and Sebastien Levigne. Affordable Art Fair Hampstead Heath, 11-15 June LLEWELLYN ALEXANDER

124–126 The Cut SE1, 020 7620 1322/1324 www.llewellynalexander.com

Robert E. Wells RBA and Pamela Kay ARCA RWS RBA NEAC, 1-29 June Not the Royal Academy 2014,

10 June-16 Aug LONG & RYLE GALLERY

4 John Islip Street SW1, 020 7834 1434 www.longandryle.com History Recent work by John Monks (at 10 Gresham St), until 26 Aug Beyond the Book Su Blackwell and participating artists explore the transition of books, from bound volumes and photographs, to sculptures, installations and jewellery, 12 June-25 July Gallery closed 12-25 Aug MARLBOROUGH FINE ART

6 Albemarle Street W1, 020 7629 5161 www. marlboroughfineart.com John Virtue, until 31 May Juan Genoves, 3-29 June Beverly Pepper Small sculptures and works on paper, 1-31 July MARTYN GREGORY

34 Bury Street SW1, 020 7839 3731 www.martyngregory.com

18th and 19th Century British Watercolours and Drawings

An exhibition of works by David Cox, Edward Dayes, Sir Edwin Landseer, William James Muller, Thomas Rowlandson, James Ward and others, 4-18 July MEDICI GALLERY

5 Cork Street W1, 020 7495 2565 www.medicigallery.co.uk Still Life Paintings, 10 June-8 July Summer Exhibition Established and emerging gallery artists, 15 July-3 Sep

THE ORATORY

Brompton Road SW7, 020 7808 0900 www.bromptonoratory.com Art Salon 2014 Artists and students who have a connection with the Oratory are invited to exhibit their latest works.

The suggested but not mandatory theme is ‘The Land’ (contact Fr. Charles Dilke for more information on CDilke@aol.com).

The exhibition will be on display 19-22 July OSBORNE SAMUEL

23a Bruton Street W1, 020 7493 7939 www.osbornesamuel.com

Lynn Chadwick: A Centenary Exhibition Major retrospective, until 7 June 20th Century British Art Including sculptures by Kenneth

Armitage, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore and paintings by Paul Feiler, Peter Kinley, C.R.W. Nevinson and Keith Vaughan, 11 June-1 Aug Masterpiece London, 26 June-2 July PANGOLIN LONDON

90 York Way N1, 020 7520 1480 www.pangolinlondon.com

Terence Coventry: Birds and Beasts A range of animal forms

inspired by the artist’s years farming on the Cornish coast, until 28 June Steve Hurst: War Toys Exhibition of works by the sculptor and war historian, 9 July23 Aug PIERS FEETHAM GALLERY

475 Fulham Road SW6, 020 7381 3031 www.piersfeethamgallery.com

Aldeburgh Festival Exhibition At Hill Lodge, Church Walk, Aldeburgh.

Alice Mumford, Elisabeth Vellacott, Clare Packer, Caroline McAdam Clark and Susan Einzig, 14-23 and 27-29 June Susan Einzig Memorial exhibition of original illustrations, paintings, drawings and prints, 4-26 July Watercolour Exhibition to launch the book Basic Watercolour: How to Paint What You See by Charles Williams RWS NEAC. Includes work by Charles Williams, David Parfitt, Julie Held, Paul Newland and others, 29 July-2 Aug PINTA LONDON

Earls Court SW5, www.pintalondon.com

The Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art Show Europe’s

only art fair dedicated to modern and contemporary Latin American, Spanish and Portuguese art. Over 50 leading galleries from across Europe and the Americas exhibit established and emerging artists. PINTA Projects will focus on female artists, and hold a series of talks and events bringing together leading artists, curators, dealers and collectors, 12-15 June

© NEALE HOWELLS/COURTESY JOHN MARTIN GALLERY. © THE ARTIST’S ESTATE/COURTESY MARTYN GREGORY. © PAMELA KAY/COURTESY LLEWELLYN ALEXANDER. © SUSAN EINZIG/COURTESY PIERS FEETHAM GALLERY

GALLERY ELENA SHCHUKINA

10 Lees Place W1, 020 7499 6019 www.galleryelenashchukina.com

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1922 – 2009

MEMORIAL ExHIbITIOn

SWA

SuSAn EInzIG

The Society of Women Artists 2014

153 rd Exhibition Original illustration for Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce pen & ink 20 x 20 cm

A selling exhibition of original illustrations, paintings, drawings and prints 4th – 26th July 2014 PIERS FEETHAM GALLERY

475 Fulham Road, London SW6 1HL 020 7381 3031 www.piersfeethamgallery.com Tues-Fri 10-6; Sat 10-1

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26th June - 5th July Daily 1Oam - 5pm (3pm last day)

society-women-artists.org.uk View and purchase stunning works in all media by today’s leading professional women artists

MALL GALLERIES

The Mall, London SW1 Please support the Charity, Reg. No. 298241

02/05/2014 12:40

Rick Kirby ‘Broadside’

The Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden Ockley, Surrey Open 3rd May – 31st October Opening times and how to find us are available on our website

www.hannahpescharsculpture.com

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Aghla More to Errigal, Donegal, 2014, by David Tress at Beaux Arts Bath

REDFERN GALLERY

Ruth King Sculptural ceramic vessels,

BROOK GALLERY

20 Cork Street W1, 020 7734 1732 www.redfern-gallery.com

3-31 Aug

Fore Street, Budleigh Salterton, Devon, 01395 443003 www.brookgallery.co.uk

Paul Jenkins: On Canvas and Paper, 4 June-29 Aug

THE ART STABLE / KELLY ROSS FINE ART

THACKERAY GALLERY

Child Okeford, Dorset, 01258 863866 www. theartstable.co.uk

18 Thackeray Street W8, 020 7937 5883 www.thackeraygallery.com Michael Honnor: To the Sea

25th anniversary exhibition, 3-20 June Summer Show New work by Gordon Bryce RSA RSW, Judy Buxton, Vanessa Gardiner, Iwan Gwyn Parry RCA and Christine McArthur, 1-25 July Jennifer McRae: Fact & Fantasy New and unseen work by the highly acclaimed Scottish artist, 9-26 Sep THOMAS AND PAUL CONTEMPORARY ART

20 Bristol Gardens W9, 020 7289 6200 www.thomasandpaul.com

Maria Kuipers: Solo Exhibition,

21 June-20 July Thermal, 1960, by Peter Lanyon at Tate St Ives

WHITFORD FINE ART

6 Duke Street St James’s SW1, 020 7930 9332 wwwwhitfordfineart.com Caziel: Forever Yours Paintings and drawings 1948-1955, until 3 June

Belgian Masterpieces 1880-1930,

5 June-4 July

Garden Walk, 2001, by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham at Bohun Gallery

Rest of UK ADAM GALLERY

13 John Street, Bath, 01225 480406 www.adamgallery.com Fred Cuming RA New paintings, 12-26 July ANTHONY HEPWORTH

16 Margarets Buildings, Brock Street, Bath, 01225 310694 www.anthonyhepworth.com

Pictures from a Private Collection: An Adventure in Art that began in the 1920s Including paintings and

drawings by Henry Moore, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, David Jones and Helmut Kolle, among others, until 7 June Art Antiques London, 12-18 June At Home with Maria 2, 2011, by Julian Opie at The Holburne Museum

THE ART ROOM

8a The Strand, Topsham, Devon, 07718 480 604 www.theartroomtopsham.co.uk Patricia Volk Distinctive ceramic sculpture, until 8 June Richard Sowman Paintings of atmospheric interiors and Emily Myers Subtle forms in porcelain and red stoneware, 22 June-20 July Adrian Parnell Paintings that chart a continuing visual engagement with the landscape and

Robert Medley RA (1905-94)

Paintings and prints from the Estate, 7-28 June George Young New paintings, 5-26 July BEAUX ARTS BATH

12–13 York Street, Bath, 01225 464850 www.beauxartsbath.co.uk New Paintings by David Tress

David Tress vividly captures the bleak, beautiful landscape of Donegal, until 14 June New Sculptures by Anna Gillespie, until 14 June Artists of Renown and Promise Including Nathan Ford, Andrew Crocker, Kieran Ingram, among others, 23 June-30 Aug BOHUN GALLERY

15 Reading Road, Henley-on-Thames, Oxon, 01491 576228 www.bohungallery.co.uk Scottish Art Today Major show bringing together some of the bestknown Scottish artists today, including Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Elizabeth Blackadder RA, Marj Bond, Joyce Cairns, Victoria Crowe, Paul Furneaux, Donald Hamilton Fraser RA, William Littlejohn, Donald McIntyre, Jennifer McRae and Barbara Rae RA, 14 June16 Aug THE BOWES MUSEUM

Barnard Castle, County Durham, 01833 690606 www.thebowesmuseum.org.uk

Shafts of Light: Mining Art in the Great Northern Coalfield, until 21 Sep Hockney, Printmaker A

delightful overview of David Hockney’s graphic career to celebrate 60 years as a printmaker, 7 June-28 Sep Victorian Childhood Comparing the lifestyles of rich and poor through the themes of clothing, school, work, play and home life, 21 June-7 Sep BRIGHTON MUSEUM AND ART GALLERY

Royal Pavilion Gardens, Brighton, 030 0029 0900 www.brighton-hove-museums.org.uk

From Downs to Sea: A Slice of Life Seascapes by L.S. Lowry and

Jeffrey Camp; rural scenes by Peter Doig and Edward Burra; and urban images by Carel Weight and David Redfern, until 15 June War Stories:

Voices from the First World War

Bringing to life the wartime experiences of 15 individuals, 12 July-1 March 2015

The Biggest Names in British Art

An exhibition of work by: R.B. Kitaj, Bridget Riley, Paula Rego, Lucien Freud, David Hockney RA and Frank Auerbach, 12 July-1 Sep CAROLINE WISEMAN AT THE ALDEBURGH BEACH LOOKOUT AND ART HOUSE

31 Crag Path, Aldeburgh, Suffolk, 01728 452754/020 7622 2500 www.carolinewiseman.com

Aldeburgh Festival Exhibition

Artists Pauline Bickerton, Clementine Keith-Roach and Christopher Page, 1-29 June 25th Anniversary Exhibition Works by Royal Academicians and other artists who have shown with Caroline Wiseman over the last 25 years, 26 May1 Sep The Shock of the Brand New Every week a new artist in residence reveals their work, thoughout July and August CHALK GALLERY LTD

4 North Street, Lewes, East Sussex, 01273 474477 www.chalkgallerylewes.co.uk Transient Locations: George Antoni, 26 May-15 June Feeling One’s Way into the Human Form

Ceramic sculpture by Maria Zervudachi, 16 June-7 July Summer Exhibition Chalk artists in collaboration with the Rottingdean Writers, 7 July-17 Aug Down Our Street Chalk artists celebrate Lewes and its surroundings, 18 Aug-7 Sep CHRIST CHURCH PICTURE GALLERY

Christ Church, Oxford, 01865 278172 www.chch.ox.ac.uk/gallery

Sean Scully Encounters: A New Master among Old Masters

Exhibition juxtaposing paintings by this major contemporary master with some of the masterpieces of the 16th century, such as Jacopo Bassano’s Flagellation, 30 May-31 Aug DE LA WARR PAVILION

Marina, Bexhill On Sea, East Sussex, 01424 229100 www.dlwp.com Otto Dix: Der Krieg A major and rare loan of 19 prints from the Department of Prints & Drawings at the British Museum, until 27 July THE GALLERY AT 41

41 East Street, Corfe Castle, Dorset, 01929 480095 www.galleryat41.com

Dorset Art Weeks and Purbeck Art Weeks Exhibition Festival

exhibition showcasing a wide variety

© DAVID TRESS/COURTESY BEAUX ARTS BATH. © ESTATE OF PETER LANYON/COURTESY TATE ST IVES. © ESTATE OF WILHELMINA BARNS-GRAHAM/COURTESY BOHUN GALLERY. © JULIAN OPIE/COURTESY THE HOLBURNE MUSEUM

Listings

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Interpretations of Michael Morpurgo’s

War Horse

Rae Smith Olivia Lomenech Gill 6 - 30 August 2014 George Rowlett – Thames Barrier and Tate & Lyle Wharf from the jetty, overcast afternoon, 2008

Excavations & Estuaries: Behind Land George Rowlett - Judith Tucker - Harriet Tarlo 1st July - 17th August Muriel Barker Gallery, Fishing Heritage Centre, Grimsby Curated by Linda Ingham

Illustrationcupboard Gallery

Judith Tucker – No Through Road, 2014

Fishing Heritage Centre, Alexandra Road, Grimsby, North East Lincolnshire DN31 1UZ 01472 323345 · fhc@nelincs.gov.uk · Admission Free

22 Bury Street, St James’s, London. SW1Y 6AL www.illustrationcupboard.com

Arranged in collaboration with Art

Space Gallery Michael Richardson Contemporary Art, London www.artspacegallery.co.uk www.thenatureoflandscape.com

Standing To By Olivia Lomenech Gill

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‘World War I - Flight’ (detail of 5 roundels of World War I planes)

Lithograph, 2014

Anne Desmet RA City Sky Lines solo exhibiton at Editions

26 June-19 July Editions Limited 16 Cook Street, Liverpool, L2 9RF. tel 0151 236 4236 www.editionsltd.net info@editionsltd.net

UÊ ië iÊ À> } UÊ Ìi`Ê ` Ì Ê*À ÌÃÊ UÊ"À } > Ê ÀÌÜ À à see our website for current and forthcoming exhibitions

The Ruskin School of Art Fine Art Short Courses 2014

Eight non-residential courses in botanical drawing, anatomy, life drawing and watercolour painting will take place this summer in the Drawing Studio at the Ruskin School, shortcourses@rsa.ox.ac.uk www.ruskin-sch.ox.ac.uk/courses/short_courses University of Oxford.

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Listings

of work by Dorset-based contemporary painters and sculptors, until 14 June Summer Exhibition A changing show celebrating the beautiful World Heritage coast and countryside of Dorset, 25 June-6 Sep GALLERY PANGOLIN

9 Chalford Ind. Estate, Chalford, Gloucs, 01453 889765 www.gallery-pangolin.com Jon Buck: Without Words Recent sculpture, prints and drawings, 9 June-18 July Lynn Chadwick: The Maker’s Studio, 14 June-13 July THE HANNAH PESCHAR SCULPTURE GARDEN

Exhibition Paintings of the coast of

Scotland and Ireland and the mountains of the Lake District, 12 July-30 Aug Contemporary Ceramics Including work by Peter Swanson, 12 July-30 Aug MOMA WALES

Heol Penrallt, Machynlleth, Powys, 01654 703355 www.momawales.org.uk

Aberystwyth Printmakers: 10th Anniversary A diverse range of artists

using a variety of printing techniques, until 28 June NORTH HOUSE GALLERY

The Walls, Manningtree, Essex, 01206 392717 www.northhousegallery.co.uk

Black and White Cottage,Standon Lane, Ockley, Surrey, 01306 627269 www.hannahpescharsculpture.com A changing collection of contemporary sculpture in this stunning garden. Open until 31 Oct

Jonathan Clarke: Sculpture & Reliefs New work in cast aluminium,

HAYLETTS GALLERY

House Gallery 15th Anniversary Show, 19 July-13 Sep

Oakwood House, 2 High Street, Maldon, Essex, 01621 851669 www.haylettsgallery.com

Charles Bartlett PPRWS, RE, ARCA: Past and Present A rare

opportunity to view Bartlett’s early oil and watercolour paintings, 31 May-28 June Buy off the Wall Summer Exhibition This show reflects an East Anglian and coastal theme, 5 July-30 Aug THE HOLBURNE MUSEUM

Great Pulteney Street, Bath, 01225 388569 www.holburne.org Julian Opie: Collected Works This exhibition brings together Opie’s own works, alongside pieces from his private collection, and explores the links and resonances between the two, until 14 Sep JENNA BURLINGHAM FINE ART

2a George Street, Kingsclere, Nr Newbury, Hants, 01635 298855/07970 057789 www.jennaburlingham.com Modern British and contemporary artists including Sandra Blow RA, Mary Fedden RA, Elisabeth Frink RA, Peter Greenham RA, Ivon Hitchens, Peter Joyce, Ffiona Lewis, Victor Pasmore RA, Keith Purser, William Scott, Edward Seago, Julian Trevelyan RA, Keith Vaughan and John Piper LINTON COURT GALLERY (GAVAGAN ART)

Duke Street, Settle, North Yorkshire, 01729 824497/07799 797961 www.gavaganart.com

Sam Dalby RP: Portraits, Still Life and Life Drawings Solo show of recent work, 7 June-5 July Chris Rigby: Solo

some with gilding, until 7 June

Michael Horn & Jane Lewis: Complementary Painters Work

by two very different but sympathetic abstract painters, 14 June-12 July North

NORTH YORKSHIRE OPEN STUDIOS

Various locations across North Yorkshire www.nyos.org.uk North Yorkshire Open Studios

The 2014 event features 123 artists and makers opening their studios to the public over two weekends, 8-9 June and 15-16 June (10:30am–5:30pm) RABLEY CONTEMPORARY, RABLEY DRAWING CENTRE

Rabley Barn, Midenhall, Marlborough, Wilts, 01672 511999 www.rableydrawingcentre.com Eileen Cooper RA: Wildwood New drawings and linocut prints inspired by myths, nature and folklore. The protagonists take centre stage in lucid images of fated lovers, the hunted and the beautiful, until 20 June ROYAL BIRMINGHAM SOCIETY OF ARTISTS

4 Brook Street, St Paul’s, Birmingham, 0121 236 4353 www.rbsa.org.uk Prize Members of the Royal Society of British Artists decide who will win the £1000 prize provided by the GMC Trust, 12 June-12 July Print Biennial Open exhibition exploring the variety of approaches to printmaking by artists from across the UK, 16 July-23 Aug Birmingham Art Circle Showcasing an eclectic mix of work, 25 Aug-6 Sep SCULPT GALLERY

Braxted Park Road, Nr Great Braxted, Colchester, Essex, 07980 768616 www.sculptgallery.com

Wild A two-man exhibition of animal sculpture featuring new equine sculpture by Maurice Blik PPRBS and bronze birds by Barry Woodcraft, 7-29 June People & Pots Abstract figurative sculpture by John Brown together with large pots by Chris Lewis.

Smaller works by Neal French FRBS and Stephanie Wright, 19 July-31 Aug SLADERS YARD

West Bay Road, West Bay, Bridport, Dorset, 01308 459511 www.sladersyard.co.uk Dorset Now Work by Marzia Colonna, Vanessa Gardiner, Andrew George, John Hubbard, David Inshaw, Alex Lowery Boo Mallinson and Clare Trenchard with Petter Southall furniture and Richard Batterham ceramics, until 29 June. Dan Llewellyn Hall Recent paintings, 5 July-14 Sep THE STANLEY SPENCER GALLERY

High Street, Cookham, Berkshire, 01628 471885 www.stanleyspencer.org.uk

Paradise Regained: Stanley Spencer in the Aftermath of the First World War To coincide with the

centenary of the First World War, this show examines the effect this momentous event had on Spencer’s art, until 2 Nov THE SUNBURY EMBROIDERY GALLERY

The Walled Garden, Sunbury-on-Thames, 01932 788101 www.sunburyembroidery.org.uk British Landscapes: John Allen Touring Exhibition A series of hand-

woven carpets in wool and silk, 8 July-3 Aug Mother and Child: Paintings by Renzo Galeotti A solo exhibition on a theme that has always interested the artist for its timeless content and exploration of human emotions, 2-28 Sep TATE ST IVES

Porthmeor Beach, St Ives, Cornwall, 01736 796226 www.tate.org.uk/stives

International Exchanges: Modern Art and St Ives 1915-1965 Exploring

the wider national and international contexts that shaped art in St Ives in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, including work by Peter Lanyon and Patrick Heron, until 28 Sep TURNER CONTEMPORARY

Rendezvous, Margate, Kent, 01843 233000 www.turnercontemporary.org Mondrian and Colour 70 years after Piet Mondrian’s death, get beneath the grid and trace the artist’s journey to abstraction through colour, with over 50 works on display, until 21 Sep Spencer Finch New and recent works, all of

which reflect on the changing coastal light of Margate and other sites, until 21 Sep Edmund de Waal: Atmosphere This new work, commissioned specially for the ground floor gallery space overlooking the North Sea, has been created in response to the changing landscape and clouds viewed from the gallery and the architecture of the space, until 8 Feb 2015 UNIVERSITY GALLERY & BARING WING

Northumbria University, Sandyford Road, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, 0191 227 4424 www.northumbria.ac.uk/universitygallery

Andrew Gifford: Cities of the North East A series of atmospheric paintings, 30 May-4 July The Newcastle Connection Richard Hamilton, Sean

Scully, Victor Pasmore, Ian Stephenson and Kenneth Rowntree, 30 May-4 July

Keith Vaughan: Figure and Ground

Drawings, prints and photographs on the theme of the human figure and landscape, 18 July-12 Sep WATTS GALLERY

Down Lane, Compton, Guildford, Surrey, 01483 810235 www.wattsgallery.org.uk

John Ruskin: Photographer and Draughtsman This exhibition explores

the fascinating relationships between Ruskin’s art, his photography and his books. It provides a compelling new view of this prophet of our modern ideas of heritage and sustainable living, until 1 June Ellen Terry: The Painter’s Actress The exhibition marks the 150th anniversary of the young actress’s marriage to George Frederic Watts in 1864, 10 June-9 Nov YORKSHIRE SCULPTURE PARK

West Bretton, Wakefield, West Yorkshire, 01924 832631 www.ysp.co.uk Ursula von Rydingsvard YSP presents the first large-scale survey of work in Europe by this highly acclaimed American artist, until Jan 2015 Hester Reeve: Ymedaca, until 15 June Fiona Banner: Wp Wp Wp Exhibition featuring an ambitious new project Chinook, 19 July-2 Nov ZILLAH BELL GALLERY

Kirgate, Thirsk, North Yorkshire, 01845 522 479 www.zillahbellgallery.co.uk The City & Guilds of London Art School Contemporary prints by past

and current scholars and tutors, until 7 June Peter Hicks Exhibition by contemporary landscape painter Peter Hicks, 4-26 July Important States Blair Hughes Stanton Engravings (1929-1933) Norman Ackroyd CBE RA Etchings (1966-1968), 1 June-31 Aug

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Otto Dix Der Krieg TEXT BY John Duncalfe & Dr Hilary Diaper.

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Readers’ offers are open to all RA Magazine readers when they show a copy of this magazine

Readers’ Offers Ticket Offers

Membership

Art in Action 2014 (17-20 July) at

Throughout June, July and August De La Warr Pavilion is offering joint membership (usually £50 for two people at the same address) for the price of a single membership (£35). Members receive advance information on exclusive members’ events, priority booking and 10% discount on most items in the shop. Call 01424 229111 quoting ‘RA Magazine’. See advertisement on page 83

Waterperry Gardens. Over 180 artists and crafters including several war artists will demonstrate ceramics, jewellery, painting, printmaking, sculpture, textiles, and more. Emma Kirkby will be singing.

Buy two standard adult entry tickets online for £22 and save £10. Visit www.artinaction.org.uk and enter code RARF4R. See advertisement on page 17 The Holburne Museum is offering a discounted rate of £5.50 (reduced from £6.95) for their exhibition ‘Julian Opie: Collected Works’ (until 14 Sep). See advertisement on page 4 Turner Contemporary is offering a 10% discount in shop and café during ‘Mondrian and Colour’ (until 21 Sep).

See advertisement on page 40

The Royal Over-Seas League, located

close to the RA, provides comfortable bedroom accommodation, fine dining and a private garden. ROSL offers readers a discounted joining fee, and prorata subscription rates for 2014. For more information visit rosl.org.uk or telephone 020 7408 0214. See advertisement on page 72 Astoria, 2006, by Albert Irvin RA, from Paisnel Gallery, at 20/21 British Art Fair

2-for-1 Tickets Dulwich Picture Gallery ‘Art and

Life 1920–1931’ (4 June-21 Sep).

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Eating Out

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is offering a 10% discount on breakfast, morning coffee, lunch, afternoon tea or dinner. See advertisement on page 67

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SUMMER 2014 | RA MAGAZINE 85

08/05/2014 11:37

The latest developments in and around the RA

Academy News

Looking good on paper

Conservators Graeme Gardiner and Karine Bovagnet check The Triumph of Julius Caesar: Musicians and Standard Bearers (‘The Musicians’), 1599, by Andrea Andreani, after Mantegna, now on display in the RA’s ‘Renaissance Impressions’

With so many rare and valuable works of art being transported to and from the Royal Academy for its exhibitions, it is essential that they travel first class. From the moment a work leaves the lender’s wall, everything is done to maintain the perfect environmental conditions for its preservation.

The Academy’s exhibition ‘Renaissance Impressions’ in the Sackler Wing of Galleries (until 8 June) – comprising rare woodcuts from the Albertina, Vienna, as well as those from the collection of artist Georg Baselitz – was a case in point. Once the loans had been agreed with the Austrian museum, a meticulous examination of the works was made by the Albertina’s conservators before transit, with the smallest marks, smudges and tears noted in a detailed inventory of each piece. A great degree of care was then required to transport these fragile prints.

‘It was crucial to build crates that protect such works against impact and vibration,’ says Idoya Beitia, the RA’s Exhibitions Manager.

‘Dramatic changes to a work’s environmental conditions can result in irreparable damage.’

For ‘Renaissance Impressions’ state-of-theart crates were constructed with several layers of hi-tech foam to soften any impact from bumpy roads while in transit and to insulate each work. The crates contained gauges to monitor temperature and humidity in order

P H OTO © B EN ED I C T J O H NS O N

How does the RA ensure the works of art it borrows remain in exemplary condition? ELEANOR MILLS charts the conservation challenges of bringing the woodcut prints in ‘Renaissance Impressions’ to the UK

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News

In brief NEW APPOINTMENTS Tim Marlow has been appointed in the new role of Director of Artistic Programmes at the RA. Ai Weiwei, El Anatsui and Peter Zumthor have become Honorary RAs, and Svetlana Alpers and Nicholas Hytner Honorary Fellows. Michael Landy RA has been elected Eranda Professor of Drawing at the RA Schools, and Chris Orr RA the RA’s Treasurer, taking over from Paul Huxley RA from September.

IN MEMORIAM As RA Magazine went to Press the sad news arrived of the death of Alan Davie RA. A full obituary will appear in the next issue, published 1 September.

to eliminate the risk of mould germination and chemical instabilities. A customised fineart truck, the conservation equivalent of a topof-the-range limousine, then transported these fragile artworks to the airport. The truck was climate controlled and benefited from supersoft air-ride suspension and a security guard watching the cargo around the clock. Once the crates were placed into the aircraft, the climate-control features came into their own on the flight to the UK, protecting the works from the extreme temperature changes.

‘Once transferred to the Royal Academy’s galleries, the works sat in the spaces for 24 hours to acclimatise to their new environment,’ explains Beitia. The prints were then unpacked by the Academy’s art handlers, under the scrutiny of the Albertina’s Conservator Karine Bovagnet (opposite, right) and the RA’s exhibition management team.

Each woodcut was then checked against the initial condition report. ‘During this process we identified any areas of instability that could worsen during the exhibition,’ says RA conservator Graeme Gardiner (seen with Bovagnet, opposite).

‘We assess the extent of possible movement within the frame of each print, because even under the tightest environmental controls, paper can expand and contract in response to minute changes in the air,’ he says.

‘As conservators, this is something we are at pains to anticipate.’ To guard against such tiny changes, Gardiner usually checks every paperbased work in a show once a week to ensure that it does not react negatively to being on display. ‘If it has been mounted and framed

‘We assess the extent of possible movement within the frame of each print, because paper can expand and contract in response to minute changes in the air’

for the exhibition, the paper might move as it adapts to its new environment, which can result in creasing or tearing, or damage to loose and fragile pigments,’ he explains.

The ‘Renaissance Impressions’ prints, however, arrived in sophisticated frames that maintained specific atmospheric conditions suitable for each work, making Gardiner’s job more straightforward.

Once the exhibition was hung, the baton was passed to Engineering Manager Steve Watson, who checked the temperature and humidity of the galleries early every morning, looking back over the previous night’s readings to ensure there were no unexpected fluctuations. The RA’s Sackler Wing now benefits from a new air-conditioning system that has changed everything for Watson and his team. ‘The old air-conditioning plant was 20 years old, labour intensive and relied on ozone-depleting gas, which was not environmentally friendly,’ Watson explains.

‘Repairs would typically take a week and depended on good weather. The RA has a complex exhibition schedule, so if a repair was needed it would have been difficult to organise without disrupting the public’s enjoyment of the art on show.

‘Now works are protected to a much finer degree, with the galleries regulated at a steady 20 degrees Celsius, 50 per cent humidity,’ he continues. The new plant cost £7 million and a further £10m is being spent on upgrading air-conditioning equipment across all of the RA’s galleries by 2018. The refurbishment of the Weston Rooms’ airconditioning was completed in May, and the largest of the RA’s Main Galleries – Gallery III – will be upgraded by September, in time for the major survey show of Anselm Kiefer Hon RA’s work this autumn. The new equipment sets benchmarks in terms of environmental sustainability and, while whirring away unnoticed by visitors, ensures priceless artworks – the real VIPs of the art world – are preserved for future generations.

GREAT SCOTT The RA Shop’s William Scott rug (£995, above) has been awarded Best Licensed Product by the Association of Cultural Enterprises and is available exclusively from the Academy.

Visit www.royalacademy.org.uk/shop SING YOUR ART OUT Why not visit the RA from 6 to 8pm on 20 June, share a Pimms, and listen to choirs singing in the Courtyard? The RA stages a Summer Singing event with its own office choir performing alongside those from the British Museum, UBS, Channel 4, Selfridges, the Telegraph and BNP Paribas.

SUMMER EXHIBITION PREVIEW PARTY A glamorous evening of champagne and canapés takes place on 4 June (7-9.30pm) at the Summer Exhibition Preview Party. Tickets start at £245 and all funds raised from the event support the RA Schools. To book, call 020 7300 5762 or email fundraising. events@royalacademy.org.uk AMERICAN ASSOCIATES VISIT The American Associates of the Royal Academy Trust visit London (1720 June) for tours of private collections and exhibitions, and an exclusive trip to Chatsworth House. For information on membership and future events, email info@aarat.org, call +1 212 980 8404 or visit www.aarat.org.

SPECIAL CLOSURES The RA closes at 1pm on Wednesday 4 June and all day Monday 23 June. The RA Schools are closed all day 17 June.

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Academy News

West meets East The RA is curating a major exhibition in Istanbul of prints and paintings by Stephen Chambers, including his giant screen print shown at the RA in 2012, writes EMMA HILL abounds with vignettes about departures and meeting points. These pictorial representations will doubtless strike a chord in a city founded on the ancient trade routes of Byzantium. Hung throughout one floor of the five-storey building, the print is related to Chambers’ early canvases, etchings and monotypes, as well as two series of panel paintings in which the artist revisits works

by William Blake and Brueghel the Elder.

Chambers often describes his images as ‘ignition points’ for the imagination and a rich tapestry of references has been woven into the exhibition. Paintings including Amongst Rabbits (1993) and St Ursula (with hound and love), from 2006 – which look to the 15th-century painters Dieric Bouts and Carpaccio respectively – illustrate how he often draws from art of the past as a catalyst for image-making. Elsewhere, monotypes from the series ‘The Martyrdom of St Ursula’ (2006) link Venice and Istanbul as ancient gateways between East and West. By focusing on the migratory paths that art and storytelling both take, this exhibition finds common threads between cultures.

Stephen Chambers RA: The Big Country and Other Stories Pera Museum, Istanbul, www.peramuzesi.org.tr, until 20 July To watch films about the making of Chambers’ The Big Country, visit http://roy.ac/chambers

Keeping it royal HRH The Duke of Edinburgh visited the recently restored Keeper’s House this spring in his capacity as Patron of the Royal Academy’s Friends. The Duke met (above, from left) RA President Christopher Le Brun, William Bowyer RA (seated), Keeper of the RA Eileen Cooper, and Secretary and Chief Executive Charles Saumarez Smith, with other Academicians, the Friends Board of Trustees, staff and volunteers who have been Friends since the early days of the scheme, begun in 1977. As well as viewing the new interiors designed by David Chipperfield RA, the Duke also went behind the scenes. ‘He asked to see the kitchen to the slight bemusement of the cooks who were preparing lunch,’ writes Saumarez Smith in his new blog (sign up at www.charlessaumarezsmith.com). Gill Crabbe

An installation view of Stephen Chambers RA’s print, The Big Country, from his ‘Artist’s Laboratory’ show at the Academy in 2012

© S T EP H EN CH A M B ERS . R OYA L ACA D EM Y CO L L EC T I O N . © R OYA L ACA D EM Y O F A R TS / P H OTO: P RU D EN CE CU M I N G AS S O CI AT ES LT D. © R ACH EL W I LCO CK

The RA has collaborated with the Pera Museum in Istanbul to present a major exhibition of Stephen Chambers RA’s work, one of the first occasions an international show of an Academician’s work has originated at the Academy. The RA’s curator Edith Devaney has brought together over 100 works on paper with selected paintings to reveal Chambers’ versatility in different media.

The Pera Museum, which opened in 2005, is a fitting venue to view the work of a British artist whose influences are drawn from many cultural and historical sources. Its programme encourages dialogues, combining international exhibitions with a permanent collection of Orientalist paintings, Anatolian weights and ceramics from the Kütahya region of Turkey.

The exhibition focuses on The Big Country, an enormous print Chambers made for his ‘Artist’s Laboratory’ exhibition at the Academy in 2012 (below). When Ozalp Birol, the Pera’s Director, saw the work’s scale and ambition at the RA, he thought that it could reveal many aspects of the traditions of European printmaking to a Turkish audience. Chambers’ show in Istanbul runs alongside a display of Warhol prints in a curatorial move to emphasise the importance of print practice in contemporary Western art.

The Big Country pays homage to the vast landscapes of the American Midwest and

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© S T EP H EN CH A M B ERS . R OYA L ACA D EM Y CO L L EC T I O N . © R OYA L ACA D EM Y O F A R TS / P H OTO: P RU D EN CE CU M I N G AS S O CI AT ES LT D. © R ACH EL W I LCO CK

Academy News

Making Shaw One of the most brilliant and influential latenineteenth-century British architects, Norman Shaw RA (1831-1912), made his mark as the designer of great country houses such as Cragside in Northumberland (now a National Trust property), powerful public buildings such as the turreted New Scotland Yard on London’s Embankment, and the elegant staircase outside the RA Restaurant, now named in his honour.

As a master of architectural drawing, Shaw made perspectives that were often the sensation of the RA’s Summer Exhibitions, but the architect also worked with his team to make superb office

drawings, on show this summer in the RA’s Tennant Gallery (30 May–26 Oct; supported by Lowell Libson Ltd). This is an opportunity to examine a now lost world of design, when traditional architectural skills and techniques were governed by drawing instrument, ink and paper. A perfect example is the working draft made by Shaw’s chief assistant William Lethaby (detail below), its edges frayed and missing, the paper groundin with Victorian soot. It instructs a craftsman precisely how to make a wooden balustrade, part of an ornamental screen Shaw designed for the drawing room of shipping magnate and art collector Frederick Leyland. Neil Bingham

Re-laced, 2013, Re-laced

by Rachel Wilcock LEFT

Young at art

Working drawing of a balustrade for a wooden screen (detail), 1880, office of Norman Shaw RA

Your friend in high places Chair of the Friends Board of Trustees Denise Wilson talks to SAM PHILLIPS about her role at the Academy

Global transformation, change analysis, field force delivery: these may sound like the themes of a contemporary art installation, but they describe just some of the many projects Denise Wilson has managed in her decades of executive experience in the worlds of oil, gas and high finance.

Readers may not be aware that their annual subscription is paid not to the Royal Academy of Arts directly but to a separate charity: the Friends of the Royal Academy, an organisation that since the 1970s has supported the RA’s wideranging activities. Like all charities, it has a board of trustees, and this year Wilson has become the board’s Chair after six years as a trustee.

‘The board looks after the interests of our near 90,000 Friends,’ explains Wilson. ‘Their subscriptions represent £10 million, roughly, each year, which contributes around one-third of the operating profits of the Academy, so it is through each Friend’s generosity that the RA can continue its work. We make sure that those funds are spent well and on causes that are beneficial to Friends.’

Wilson’s expertise in finance, governance and customer delivery complements skills of others on a board that includes artists and academics.

‘I have worked with engineers and accountants

Young artists who submitted their work this spring to the RA’s A-Level Summer Exhibition Online will soon find out if they have been selected. Set up by the RA’s Learning Department, and running concurrently with the Summer Exhibition in the Main Galleries, this online showcase provides a prestigious platform for 16-18 year olds to show their artwork. The exhibition demonstrates the RA’s commitment to engaging and encouraging artists who are still studying, and last year the competition attracted nearly 1,200 submissions, including Rachel Wilcock’s highly inventive sculpture Re-laced (2013, above). This year, the works are selected by a panel including painter Humphrey Ocean RA, and can be viewed online, 9 June–17 Aug, at www.alevel.royalacademy.org. GC

‘Friends’ subscriptions represent £10 million, roughly, each year, so it is through each Friend’s generosity that the RA can continue its work’

during my career, so it is wonderful to work with artists and art lovers for such a culturally rich cause.’ She regards the opening of the Keeper’s House as the most significant step during her time as a trustee. ‘We’ve built a space that is unique and feels like a great place to enjoy. It has an excellent restaurant, a fabulous cocktail bar, a wonderful garden.

A very traditional, under-used space is now a destination in itself for our Friends.’

All this bodes well for the expansion of the RA’s Burlington Gardens building in 2018. ‘We will serve our Friends on a much larger footprint, from Piccadilly to New Bond Street, with more exhibitions, improved facilities and a world-class lecture theatre.’

SUMMER 2014 | RA MAGAZINE 89

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Give a gift that will last forever

John Flaxman RA Apollo and Marpessa (detail), c. 1790-94 Marble relief, 48.40 x 54.80 x 6.90cm Photo: Š Royal Academy of Arts, London

Approaching its 250th anniversary, the Royal Academy has a story like nowhere else. Led by an extraordinary group of artists, we have been making, debating and exhibiting art since 1768. Help us write the next chapter in our history by leaving a gift in your will.

To find out more and request an information booklet, please email Emma.Warren-Thomas@royalacademy.org.uk or call 0207 300 5677 www.royalacademy.org.uk/legacies

Your support is our future The Royal Academy Trust is a registered charity with Charity Number 1067270

Legacy V2 April 2013.indd 1

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Hidden just around the corner from the RA, a local resting place for weary art lovers and gourmands for over 98 years.

Trading from Midday to Midnight, Champagne and native oysters, traditional fish and chips or for those who care not for the mollusc beautiful lamb or a simple slab of steak. A best of British menu, designed by the incorrigible, controversial and twice Michelin awarded Chef Richard Corrigan.

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Restaurants 1

AL DUCA

Serving modern Italian cuisine, Al Duca focuses heavily on bringing out the very best elements of what is one of the most acclaimed gastronomic regions of the world.

The menu at Al Duca emphasises the use of simple fresh ingredients skilfully combined to bring out the best of a wide range of traditional dishes offered both in classic style and with a new twist, all following Pulze’s ethos to offer reasonably priced good Italian food. Now serving breakfast.

summer months. Amaranto presents a modern Italian cuisine with an innovative combination of classical and traditional dishes, while Amaranto Bar offers a wide range of fine wines and cocktails with fireside seating.

Hamilton Place W1, 020 7319 5206 www.fourseasons.com/london/ dining

coffee, lunch, a glass of wine, or afternoon tea – in tandem with an inspiring gallery visit, to meet friends, or whenever you need to escape the frenetic pace of the West End. 6 Burlington Gardens W1, www.ateliercafe.com 4

THE BALCON

The Balcon is an all day dining destination combining innovation with French and British traditions. Perfect for breakfast, lunch and dinner, it is also ideal for an afternoon tea or a tasty plate of charcuterie. Flooded with natural daylight and separated by silk curtains, giving the opportunity to enjoy the atmosphere of the restaurant, The Balcon has its own private dining room seating up to 16 guests. Opening Hours: Monday-Saturday 6.30am – 11pm Sunday 7am – 10pm

4-5 Duke of York Street SW1, 020 7839 3090 www.alduca-restaurant.co.uk

8 Pall Mall SW1, 020 7389 7820 www.thebalconlondon.com

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ATELIER CAFE

AMARANTO RESTAURANT

Amaranto Restaurant comprises an elegant dining room, a contemporary glass conservatory seating area overlooking the garden, an intimate private dining room and outdoor dining on the private terrace during the

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BUSABA EATHAI

Conceived by Alan Yau, Busaba Eathai is a modern Thai eatery. Delivering a much coveted, flavoursome selection of freshly prepared salads, stir fries, noodles and Thai curries, the menu also offers an extensive list of Asian-inspired juices and a simple yet selective wine list.

Renowned for its core cult following, stylish interiors and bustling atmosphere, 15 years on Busaba remains one of London’s hottest tables.

35 Panton Street SW1, 020 7930 0088 www.busaba.com

A studio café where food and drink of outstanding provenance is served in the light, airy surrounds of the Royal Academy’s Burlington Gardens building.

Bellini on the terrace, breakfast, morning

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11-15 Swallow Street W1, 020 7734 4756 www.bentleys.org

5 BELLAMY’S RESTAURANT & OYSTER BAR

Situated in central Mayfair next to Bond Street, Bellamy’s offers a classic French brasserie menu with an affordable famous name wine list. Patron mange ici. Open for Lunch Mon to Fri. Open for Dinner Mon to Sat.

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Restaurant & Shopping Guide 8

BUTLERS RESTAURANT

Butlers home of “the best Dover Sole in London”. A warm and intimate restaurant offering elegant dining, delicious food and impeccable service. Located in the heart of London’s most exclusive district, Mayfair, near the Royal Academy it is as popular with local residents as it is with hotel guests.

Offering British cuisine tempered with international touches of chef Ben Kelliher, to include a pre-theatre menu and traditional afternoon tea served daily.

35 Charles Street W1, 020 7491 2622 www.chesterfieldmayfair.com

Foxon only uses the finest and freshest ingredients and loves creating alchemy in the kitchen, where everything is homemade – from smoked fish to butter, not forgetting ice cream.

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11 FISHWORKS RESTAURANT & FISHMONGERS

The perfect meal in a stylish seafood restaurant with a traditional wet fish counter. You can select any fish or crustacean and have it cooked there and then to your liking! The classic a la carte menu includes Devon Ray with black butter & capers or a piled-high Fruit de Mer...

The blackboards display daily landings such as line-caught Dorset Wild Sea Bass, simply grilled Falmouth Bay Plaice and more! Please book and mention ‘The Royal Academy’ to get an exclusive 15% off* your total bill (*available daily until 7pm).

CUT AT 45 PARK LANE

45 Park Lane, Mayfair, W1, 020 7493 4554 www.dorchestercollection.com

GETTI

12 THE FOX CLUB Our Dining Room is one of London’s best-kept secrets and for those in the know, a lunchtime essential. Our menus offer refined excellence without being pretentious. The modern Eurpean menu changes on a weekly basis. The Fox Club now offers a delightful afternoon tea from 3-5pm. To avoid disappointment it is best to make a reservation.

CRITERION RESTAURANT

Our breathtaking ceiling, professionalism, modern European menu and most central location make the Criterion restaurant the perfect address to enjoy a delicious late lunch, an amazing champagne afternoon tea, a romantic dinner, or just a relaxed drink after work. Head Chef Matthew

16 GREEN’S RESTAURANT & OYSTER BAR

“In a fast changing world…. Green’s is a bastion of calm” Runner up, Test of Time Award (for the most consistently excellent restaurant), Tatler 2013.

Inspired by Seasonality we are renowned for classic British fish, meat and game dishes. An essential part of your visit to London and a stone throw away from the RA. Please quote RA when making a reservation or on arrival and receive a complimentary Summer Cocktail.

36 Duke Street St. James’s, SW1, 020 7930 4566 www.greens.org.uk

A modern Italian restaurant at the fastpaced heart of London’s West End, Getti Jermyn Street is an authentic Italian dining venue in London’s historic tailoring district, dedicated to offering a traditional and memorable Italian dining experience.

A splendid destination for London locals and tourists alike, Getti Jermyn Street focuses on serving simple, regional dishes from mainland Italy. Private dining available.

16/17 Jermyn Street SW1, 020 7734 7334 www.getti.co.uk

46 Clarges Street W1, 020 7495 3656 www.foxclublondon.co.uk

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61 Jermyn Street SW1, 020 7499 2211 www.francoslondon.com

224 Piccadilly W1, 020 7930 0488 www.criterionrestaurant.com

7-9 Swallow Street W1, 020 7734 5813 www.fishworks.co.uk

Created by internationally-acclaimed chef founder Wolfgang Puck, CUT at 45 Park Lane is a modern American steak restaurant, and his debut restaurant in Europe. Enjoy delectable prime beef, succulent pan-roasted lobster, sautéed fresh fish and seasonal salads.

Outstanding cuisine is accompanied by an exceptional wine list of over 600 wines, featuring one of the largest selections of American wines in the UK. Breakfasts are another highlight and on Sunday’s relax with brunch as you listen to live jazz.

dishes.

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THE GREENHOUSE

The Greenhouse’ Executive Chef, Arnaud Bignon combines his traditional French training with contemporary techniques. He applies a philosophy of perfect harmony and balance to all his dishes. This is accompanied by an exceptional wine list of approximately 3,300 bins, which has won the Wine Spectator Grand Award every year since 2005. Special offer: 3-course set lunch and coffee, £30. Quote Royal Academy of Arts when booking. Open for lunch 12-2.30pm, Mon-Fri; dinner 6.30-11pm Mon-Sat.

17 GUSTOSO RISTORANTE & ENOTECA

Ristorante Gustoso is moments from Westminster Cathedral and Victoria Station. Gustoso is the ideal place to unwind after work, with friends or to enjoy a little romance. Cocktails are professionally served from the well stocked bar and the menu is based around the Italian classics, cooked using authentic ingredients to recipes passed down through the generations of Italians.

There is an extensive wine list and an unrivalled collection of grappas. Open Mon-Thu: 12–3pm, 6.30–10.30pm Friday/Sat: 12–3pm, 6.30–11pm Sun: 12.30–9.30pm 35 Willow Place SW1, 020 7834 5778 www.ristorantegustoso.co.uk

27a Hay’s Mews W1, 020 7499 3331 www.greenhouserestaurant.co.uk

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FRANCO’S

Some believe Franco’s was the first Italian restaurant in London, having served residents in St James’s since 1942. Open all day, the personality of Franco’s evolves and provides a menu for all occasions. The day starts with full English and continental breakfast on offer. The à la carte lunch and dinner menus offer both classic and modern

18 HIX MAYFAIR Situated close to the Royal Academy, this fashionable restaurant offers an outstanding menu of classic British dishes, using local seasonal ingredients. Mark Hix and Lee Streeton offer a full a la carte menu alongside a special set lunch, pre-theatre and dinner menu of £27.50 for 2 courses and £32.50 for 3 courses. HIX Mayfair is also home to an amazing collection of British art including pieces by Tracey Emin

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Restaurant & Shopping Guide RA and Bridget Riley.

Brown’s Hotel, Albemarle Street W1, 020 7518 4004 www.hixmayfair.co.uk

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MAHARANI SOHO

Open all day and situated in the heart of Soho this family run restaurant established 42 years ago offers the best cuisine that the north and south of India has to offer, with our own little twist.

All our dishes are cooked fresh to order, using free-range meat and locally sourced vegetables. We offer a special set lunch menu at £6.95 which runs to 5pm, or you can choose from our mouth watering à la carte menu which offers excellence without pretension, leading us to be counted as one of the best Indian restaurants in London.

To avoid disappointment it is best to make a reservation. Last order 11.30pm.

77 Berwick Street W1, 020 7437 8568 www.maharanisoho.com

opened in the heart of Mayfair, Matsuri St James’s introduced not only traditional Japanese food, such as Sushi and tempura, but also a new style of Japanese cuisine - Teppan-yaki and the art of “live cooking”. Food and wines or sake tasting courses bring together the best possible ingredients that we select from the market, with a well-balanced list of wines, champagnes and sakes in order to maximise your dining experience, from aperitifs to starters to dessert.

15 Bury Street SW1, 020 7839 1101 www.matsuri-restaurant.com

20 Savile Row W1, 020 7534 7000 www.sartoria-restaurant.co.uk

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WILTONS

Established in 1742, Wiltons enjoys a reputation as the epitome of fine English dining in London. The atmosphere is perfectly matched with immaculately prepared fish, shellfish, game and meat. Choose from an exclusive wine list. Open for lunch and dinner, MondayFriday and dinner Saturday. To secure your reservation please quote RA Magazine.

55 Jermyn Street SW1, 020 7629 9955 www.wiltons.co.uk 28

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PETRICHOR

The Essence of Nature Boasting two AA Rosettes, Petrichor at The Cavendish London offers a high-end take on classic British cuisine complimented by an extensive wine list. Set in the heart of the West End, the luxurious Petrichor dining room features rich velvet furnishings and glossy black lacquer, whilst expansive prints offer a splash of colour. To book a mouth-watering lunch or dinner email petrichor@thecavenendishlondon.com and quote “RA Magazine”.

81 Jermyn Street SW1, 020 7930 2111 www.thecavendishlondon.com

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uncomplicated Italian food and showcases a different regional special menu each month, and Head Sommelier Michael Simms is on hand to recommend the perfect Italian wine. Quiet confidence in the kitchen is complimented by warm, friendly and attentive service, whilst the stylish bar is a fashionable spot for a light lunch, an espresso or classic Negroni.

Sartoria is open for lunch Monday to Friday and for dinner Monday to Saturday.

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UMU

Umu prides itself on the provenance and integrity of ingredients, serving timeless Japanese cuisine in the heart of Mayfair.

Michelin-starred Chef, Yoshinori Ishii, has designed an innovative menu with both the traditional Japanese restaurant goer and the contemporary Japanese food lover in mind. The wine list consists of over 500 references, and there are also 150 different types of sake available. Enjoy a Michelin-starred lunch from £26 with a selection of seasonal shokado bento boxes.

Lunch 12–2.30pm (Mon-Fri) Dinner 6–11pm (Mon-Sat)

THE WOLSELEY

A café-restaurant in the grand European tradition and located just a few minutes’ walk from The Royal Academy, The Wolseley is open all day from 7am for breakfast right through until midnight.

Its all-day menu means it is possible to eat formally or casually at any time, whether a full three course meal or just a coffee and cake. Whilst booking in advance is advised, tables are always held back for walk-ins on the day.

160 Piccadilly W1, 020 7499 6996 www.thewolseley.com

14-16 Bruton Place W1, 020 7499 8881 www.umurestaurant.com

MARANI

Marani is a traditional family-run Georgian restaurant that recently opened in the heart of Mayfair.

With “supra” feasting and hospitality at its heart, Marani offers modern interpretations of classic supra dishes

by Chef Tekuna Gachechiladze, who has created a menu that celebrates Georgia’s legendary cuisine and ancient wine-making traditions. Respected Georgian artist Tamara Kvesitadze provides an insight to Georgian culture with dramatic hand-painted murals throughout.

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RICHOUX

A unique traditional restaurant open all day, serving coffee, all day breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, supper and dinner from 8am to 11pm daily.

172 Piccadilly W1, 020 7493 2204 www.richoux.co.uk

54 Curzon Street W1, 0207 495 1260 www.maranilondon.co.uk

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VILLANDRY ST JAMES’S

Welcome to Villandry St James’s, between Piccadilly Circus & Pall Mall. We have created a beautiful all day French Mediterranean Café and Restaurant: a great spot to enjoy breakfast, lunch, a delicious afternoon tea, a pre-theatre or a romantic dinner. At weekends choose one of our inclusive brunch menus. We also have private dining rooms (30 covers and 12 covers). We’re open 7am -11pm (Mon-Fri), 9am – 11pm (Sat) and 9am – 6pm (Sun).

YOSHINO

Restaurant Yoshino is serving Healthy, Beautiful, Original authentic and innovative Japanese food. Situated at 3 Piccadilly Place where it is the only restaurant on this alleyway and close to the RA. There is no surprise that Yoshino continues to receive the highest accolades for its products and standards and our reputation for fresh, quality food is second to none. Open from 12–21:30 (Last order) Mon to Sat. 3 Piccadilly Place W1, 020 7287 6622 www.yoshino.net

12 Waterloo Place SW1, 020 7930 3305 www.villandry.com

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MATSURI ST JAMES

Matsuri St James’s was opened in 1993 and is the icon of authentic Japanese food in London. When the restaurant

SARTORIA

Sartoria is an elegant Milanese-style Italian restaurant located on the corner of Savile Row and New Burlington Street, behind the Royal Academy of Arts. Head Chef Lukas Pfaff creates refined yet

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Restaurant & Shopping Guide Shopping 1

DR HARRIS

Situated in St James’s Street for over 200 years, D. R. Harris is London’s oldest Pharmacy and has been owned by the original family since 1790. D. R. Harris are renowned for their range of quality products for men and women including soaps, colognes, bath and shaving preparations. The majority of products are still produced by traditional methods in the UK. The main shop and pharmacy are temporarily located at 35 Bury Street for 18 months whilst works are done at 29 St. James’s Street. The full range is also available from 52 Piccadilly.

35 Bury Street SW1, 52 Piccadilly W1, 020 7930 3915 www.drharris. co.uk

Boutique at 147 Ebury Street, Belgravia 89 Jermyn Street SW1, 020 7930 2885 147 Ebury Street SW1, 020 7730 0304 Mail Order: 0845 702 3239 www.florislondon.com 4

writing, for just £32 and receive Granta 127: Japan as a gift. www.granta.com/RAJapan

62-66 Bermondsey Street SE1, 020 7403 2800 www.londonglassblowing.co.uk

FOSTER & SON

Founded in 1840, Foster & Son is the oldest established London bespoke shoemaker, with its workshop in Jermyn Street .Renowned for exquisite bespoke and ready-to-wear boots, shoes and slippers, Foster & Son also has a longstanding reputation for handcrafted English leather goods, including custom made luggage, cases, portfolios, backgammon boards and small leather accessories such as wallets, belts and cardholders. Each item can either be bought in store, or commissioned to meet an individual’s specifications, and all Foster leather goods are supported by a top quality repair service.

83 Jermyn Street SW1, 020 7930 5385 www.foster.co.uk

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HILDITCH & KEY

100 Years of Excellence. Hilditch & Key has long been recognised as London’s leading Jermyn Street shirt maker with a reputation, among the discerning, for the finest gentlemens’ shirts, knitwear and clothing as well as an increasingly popular ladies shirt and knitwear collection.

37 & 73 Jermyn Street SW1 020 7734 4707 & 020 7930 5336 www. hilditchandkey.co.uk

2 EMMETT LONDON Founded in 1992, Emmett London seek to find the very finest fabrics in the world for its luxury shirting collections. Using unrivalled tailoring standards, their shirts are hailed by many as the best in London and indeed, in Europe. Combining traditional English tailoring, with contemporary, European style, Emmett London is a shirtmaker unlike any other.

Emmett shirts are available at Jermyn Street, near Piccadilly. Shops also situated on the Kings Road, Eldon Street and Canary Wharf.

112A Jermyn Street SW1, 020 7925 1299 www.emmettlondon.com

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FLORIS

Floris is delighted to announce the launch of their brand new fragrance line ‘Soulle Ámbar’. A warm sensual fragrance with jasmine and geranium, warmed by soft vanilla and amber, and lifted by a modern green accord. To receive a complimentary sample of ‘Soulle Ámbar’ please visit the Floris Perfumery at 89 Jermyn Street or the new Perfumery

Paradiso, one of Peter Layton’s signature series. Its vibrant colours and dynamic gestural markmaking achieve brilliant new levels of exploration and invention.

25 Burlington Arcade W1, 020 7629 4977 www.matthew-foster.com

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GIEVES & HAWKES

Gieves & Hawkes has been located at No. 1 Savile Row, a short stroll from Burlington House, for over 100 years. With a tradition of military and fine bespoke handwork, the firm has enjoyed the continuous patronage of royal families both at home and abroad over three centuries. Today No 1 Savile Row houses the company’s bespoke workshops, Private Tailoring suites and flagship ‘ready to wear’ store selling stylish British menswear. Do pay us a visit.

No.1 Savile Row W1, 020 7432 6403 www.gievesandhawkes.com 6

GRANTA

Granta 127: Japan. Everyone knows this country and no one knows it. Here are twenty new Japans by its writers, artists, residents, visitors and neighbours.

Subscribe to Granta, the magazine of new

LOCK & CO.

Choose from our wide range of summer headwear: fine quality hand woven panama hats, foldable travel and safari hats, linen and cotton caps. For those unable to visit we provide a mail order service orders can be made on line or ask for our catalogue.

MATTHEW FOSTER

Established in Mayfair since 1987, in addition to our collection of Art Deco and period jewellery we now offer a selection of Art Deco period Objets d’Art, sculpture, mirrors and lighting. Our jewellery and Objets d’Art collection covers a wide price range suitable for all occasions, each piece carefully selected for its quality and style.

PENFRIEND

Founded in 1950, Penfriend is renowned worldwide for its wide selection of contemporary and vintage writing instruments. All of our vintage pens have been fully restored by our workshop, which also undertakes repairs for our clientele. But most of all, we pride ourselves in offering expert advice so our clients can find the pen that suits their individual handwriting.

34 Burlington Arcade W1, 0207 499 6337 www.penfriend .co.uk

6 St James’s Street SW1, 020 7930 8874 www.lockhatters.co.uk

12 RICHARD OGDEN

9 LONDON GLASSBLOWING STUDIO AND GALLERY

Peter Layton’s London Glassblowing Studio and Gallery is one of Europe’s leading studios focussing on creating and exhibiting individual pieces of contemporary decorative and sculptural glass art. The studio, which is renowned for its painterly use of vibrant colour, texture and form, welcomes visitors.

Arabesque is a stunning new version of

In Medieval times signet rings were used to seal and authenticate letters and documents, using crests taken from family heraldic shields. The impression these rings made when pressed into wax seals would represent the authority of the wearer, a tradition which continued well into the 20th century. Nowadays signet rings are often presented to celebrate a 21st birthday or a graduation. We keep a copy of Fairbairn’s Book of Crests at our premises and can help you find your own family crest.

28 Burlington Arcade W1, 020 7493 9136 www.richardogden.com

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Classified The RA Magazine is published quarterly and has a circulation of 100,000 making it the most widely read art magazine in the country. To advertise in this section please contact Janet Durbin on 01625 583180

Artists’ Websites JOAN DOERR Paintings inspired by the elemental impact on the environment www.joandoerr.com JACQUIE GULLIVER THOMPSON Memories in oil paintings of Mexico, Byzantine Greece, Yemen & the Sahara www.jacquiegulliverthompson.com JUDY LARKIN Contemporary organic, abstract and figurative sculpture in alabasters and limestones for interior and garden spaces. www.judylarkinsculpture.com OWL ART STUDIO Woodcarvings and printworks.

A mythology of one’s own www.owlartstudio.net ULLA PLOUGMAND Paintings. Unique female forms, landscapes, flowers and, latest, ‘My Colourful Cosmos’ www.ulla-art.com

NICOLA SLATTERY Thoughtful, peaceful art from the imagination www.nicolaslattery.com ANGELA WAKEFIELD Contemporary urban landscapes of New York, London and Europe www.angelawakefield.co.uk JO WHITNEY Oil paintings; sea, sand, city life.

Venice; Nice; Cornwall; Plymouth www.jo-whitney.co.uk MARJANA WJASNOVA Symbolic, abstract, spiritual artist www.wjasnova.com

Art Services Artefact Picture Framers Bespoke Framing, Conservation and Museum Standards Art & Frame Restoration, Mirrors, Canvas Stretching, Installation 36 Windmill Street, London W1T 2JT www.artefactlondon.co.uk T: 020 7580 4878

JULIAN COX ARBS

HILARY ROODYN Capturing the personality. Portrait sculptor London www.hilary-roodyn.squarespace.com

SABRINA ROWAN HAMILTON www.sabrinarowanhamilton.co.uk www.srhprints.com

INK DRAWINGS

www.juliancoxartist.co.uk e@juliancoxartist.co.uk m. 07814 556936

Bespoke Artists Canvases

Canvases & Stretcher Bars Made to Measure Professional Quality Hardwood Stretchers 10oz, 12oz, Superfine and Claessens Linen Fabrics Online Ordering & National Delivery www.harrismoorecanvases.co.uk

Books

We are always pleased to buy

good quality second-hand & older books for our shop. Aardvark Books Manor Farm, Brampton Bryan, Shropshire, SY7 0DH Tel: 01547 530888 Email: aardvaark@btconnect.com

Commission Art

Portraits, house portraits and animals

by experienced artist, reasonable fees.

John Wilkinson. R.A.S., R.B.A. Tel: 01425 656048

Courses

Half Day Art History Courses special themes followed on Mondays am/pm in informal atmosphere in south west London. Lectures with slides by highly qualified speakers and guided visits.

Tel: 020 8788 6910.

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Classified THE LONDON SCHOOL of PICTURE & FRAME RESTORATION Courses range from 1 week Introductory to 2 years Diploma, and are both part time and full time. City & Guilds Qualification available. Subjects include cleaning, relining, retouching and gilding and are suitable for beginners.

Limited class sizes ensure personal tuition.

An exciting range of art courses for all abilities in relaxed surroundings.

See our website for more details or contact us to receive a brochure.

New House Farm Barns, Ford Road, Arundel BN18 0EF. Tel: 01243 558880 office@themillstudio.com www.themillstudio.com

Galleries for Hire

36 Lancaster Park • Richmond • TW10 6AD • U.K. Telephone: 020 8940 6008 www.pictureconservation.com

BANKSIDE GALLERY 48 Hopton

Street, London SE1 9JH Airy & welllit. Beside Tate Modern. 200m sq space.

Competitive rates. t 020 7928 7521

Weekend Art Courses with Nicola Slattery

e-m info@banksidegallery.com www.banksidegallery.com

learn to paint with acrylic, discover printmaking, create art from imagination.

Asia House 100 sq m gallery in the heart of central London. Full technical support available. For further info. contact Philip Woodford-Smith

Fine Art Courses & Private Tuition for 9 yrs to Adults Scholarship preparation, GCSE & A Level booster tuition Untutored/Tutored Painting Holidays Located on idyllic North Oxfordshire Farm

www.georgeirvinefineart.co.uk Buttermilk Stud Farm, Barford St Michael, Banbury, OX15 0PL Tel: 0754 915 7855

Black Mountains Wales Nr Hay-on-Wye Painting, drawing, life classes, landscape, 2-3 day courses. Beautiful surroundings, very spacious studio. Excellent food www.artcourseswales.com tel 01874 711 212 Quote RA14 for RA Friends discount

Tel 020 7307 5454 or email philip.woodfordsmith@asiahouse.co.uk

LIFE PAINTING AND DRAWING with Rachel Clark

Highly recommended. Small classes.

Week/Weekend/Saturday/Private Tuition.

T: 07528 674389 www.rachelclark.com

www.creteart.co.uk Residential Art Courses in Crete with Ron Bowen,

Reader Emeritus Slade School of Fine Art.

Drawing, painting, landscapes, life classes to all levels, min age 17.

Spectacular setting, superb accommodation, optional extra activities and partner’s programme available

September / October 2014 info@creteart.co.uk TEL 07956 423321

Saturday Life Classes All Media, all levels with professional tutoring Long and short poses Experienced portfolio advice for students Elianor Jonzen tel: 020 7221 4525

PORTRAIT SCULPTURE COURSES

The Framers Gallery Unique Space, Great Location, No Commission, 36 Windmill Street, London W1T 2JT T: 020 7580 4878 www.theframersgallery.co.uk 508 KINGS ROAD CHELSEA SW10 0LD Lovely south facing location

with floor to ceiling windows at Worlds End near Lots Road/Chelsea harbour triangle. Group hire or solo exhibitions. Parking/unloading at rear and kitchen facilities. Helpful, experienced management and support who have run galleries for 15 years. www.swanngallery.co.uk E Mail: info@swanngallery.co.uk Tel 07850 342 850

Gallery 8 Splendidly maintained gallery in prime location – helpful, experienced management and full facility support – 8 Duke Street, St. James’s, London SW1Y 6BN e: gallery@8dukestreet.co.uk web: www.8dukestreet.co.uk t: 020 7930 0375 and 07973 292958

Near Alton, Hampshire

Susan Bates Little 01420 561034 www.susanbateslittle.com

CD-ROM and downloadable course by top professional. www.cartoonworld.org/courses

For full details and a Prospectus contact: The London School of Picture & Frame Restoration

Telephone: 01986 788853 www.nicolaslattery.com

Draw Cartoons and Caricatures!

For Sale

Twitter: @SBLart

Royal School of Needlework

IllustrationArtGallery.com

The world’s largest gallery of illustration paintings and comic strip art

Learn traditional hand embroidery techniques

RSN Certificate & Diploma at Bristol, Rugby, Durham, Glasgow or Hampton Court Palace Also in USA & Japan Day Classes & Degree Programme www.royal-needlework.org.uk/learn T: +44(0)20 3166 6938 RCN 312774

GREAT COURSES IN SOMERSET Discover an amazing range of residential courses in a fabulous and glorious setting. Five Star rated! www.dillington.com

Over 10,000 paintings & drawings for sale

www.illustrationartgallery.com Email: art@iartg.com Tel: 020 8768 0022

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Classified

Artistic Flare

Affordable art for the home and office Tel: 020 7736 7921 Mobile: 07854 734 290 Website: www.jacquelinemidgen.wordpress.com Email: jackiemidgen@hotmail.co.uk Visits to studio by appointment only

For Sale Exceptional Opportunity Close to the village 240 sq.m. Modern House Plus 90 sq.m. Art Gallery Plus artist studio & cave 1500 sq.m. sculpture garden Established 10 years Annual sales I.R.O. €25,000 £790,000 Freehold

Seillans, 83440, Var

Foundries FINE ART FOUNDRY LTD

Fine Art Bronze Casting Welding – Patina Specialists Ceramic Shell Contact: AB or Jerry 1 Fawe Street, London E14 6PD Tel 020 7515 8052 Fax 020 7987 7339

Holidays Marrakech. Chic, elegantly restored

18th century riad in Medina. 4 dbl. bedrooms, seductive baths, cook & housekeeper. Tel: 07770 431 194. www.riadhayati.com VENICE CENTRE s/c apts in charming

15th C palazzetto, sleep 2/5. www.valleycastle.com PROVENCE LUBERON Vineyard

cottages 2-4 pers. Pool. Also off season long lets at discounted prices.

Tel 00334 90 76 65 16 or www.cottagesfaverot.com

LANZAROTE

Restored C17th rural Canarian farmhouse which has a private pool, 3 double bedrooms – all ensuite. Exclusive use of the large separate artist’s studio. Recommended by Alistair Sawdays and featured in The Times (Nov 2013). Wi-Fi available .

Discount for RA Friends.

Owner paulbdrummond@hotmail.com www.fincalagranja.com

ITALY Tuscany/Umbria Farmhouse

and barn: pool, views, gardens, art, walks. Piero, Donatello, Burri, etc minutes away. Sleeps 4 to 16+ (sliding scale), all ensuite. 020 7059 0278 www.lafoce.co.uk SPAIN: ANDALUCIA.

Spacious apartment. Mediterranean views. Year round sun. Three bedrooms. Large private terrace. Pool, gardens. Secure parking. Ideal for Granada, Cordoba, Seville. 0777 5657 333 www.andalucia-apartment.com

Contact Nigel & Tessa www.theorangetreegalerie.com FRANCE: MENTON 2 bedroom house

in grounds of 1860’s town villa; pool Beautiful views of sea and old town charming courtyard with lemon trees; Easy walk to covered market, sea, train and bus station. Off street parking available. tel: 07900 916729

pattiebarwick@gmail.com www.mentonsejour.com MENORCA, unspoilt fishing village

of ES GRAU in Biosphere Reserve.

A retreat for two, delightful studio apartment set in large shady courtyard, 45 seconds to beach. +34629381601

VENICE heart of the city. Pretty apt in small courtyard 1 dble bedrm. Sleeps 2 reasonable rates 3nts+ Tel 07796 957579

Salcombe, Devon Beautiful waterfront

churchillalipaintings@gmail.com Cap d’Antibes Quiet 2 bedroom house

patricianolan@btopenworld.com

Holidays UK

Barbara 07885 269029 Barbara@butterfly-group.co.uk

2 terraces, garden, shared pool, 4 min sandy Monet beach. Walk to Picasso.

From £300pw 01707 322527 FRANCE: NICE. Stunning view over roofs of old town. Quiet sunny 2 room balcony flat. Sleeps 2/3. 30 mins bus to airport. £485 p.w. Tel: 020 7720 7519 or 01736 762013.

TUSCANY near LUCCA Unique hamlet

restored by a sculptor offers various s/c accom sleeping from 2 to 8. The ambience inspires, the place is beautiful, the views outstanding. Pool. Also ideal for groups (18 bedrooms) Creative Writing Course: Sept. 13 to 20

house with amazing estuary views and own mooring, sleeps 6-8.

SEE NEW WEBSITE: St Ives, 2nd floor flat. Views, sleeps 2, stylish, light,spacious open plan living. www. fifteenthedigey.co.uk 01223 295264 Scottish Borders – magical, spacious,

secluded farmhouse & garden, stunning hill views. Sleeps 10. Large kitchen with Aga. Games barn. Wood-burning stoves.

Barn owls. Fabulous walking. 07957 396 232 www.middleholms.com

T .+39 0584 951 230. www.peraltatuscany.com

Personal

UMBRIA nr. TODI. Art lovers’ paradise,

stunning villa, sleeps 10, large pool, every comfort, easy drive to major art treasures. Generous discounts for RA Friends. Details at: www.usignolo.net

HARRY BUSH (1883-1957)

Merton artist. Academic seeks any information, letters, paintings. Dr Peter Quartermaine pquart@tiscali.co.uk

Contact: pgagliani@gmail.com

SYDNEY Balmoral Beach SUPERB SEA VIEWS two bedroom apartment on the beach sleeps 4 email laura@ellenberger.net

Branscombe, Devon – The Retreat:

Accessible Eco-home in beautiful coastal Devon, sleeps 4. Area of outstanding natural beauty appealing to artists and environmentalists alike.

Pets welcome. 07949 593463 www.homeaway.co.uk/p1115058 Discount for RA friends.

01392 270588.

Sculpture STONE SCULPTURE from

ZIMBABWE all important artists represented.

The Contemporary Fine Art Gallery (Eton) 31 High Street, Eton, Near Windsor, Berkshire.

Tel. 01753 854315

7 days a week 10.30-5.30 p.m.

The Mercury Journal, USPS 009/065, is published quarterly, March, May, September and November. Periodicals Postage Paid at Rahway, NJ. US agent: Mercury International, 365 Blair Road, Avenel, NJ 07001 POSTMASTER: Address change to THE MERCURY JOURNAL, 365 Blair Road, Avenel, NJ 07001

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Inside Story or another, embedded within the human condition or latent in the cosmos.

How do you feel about creating devotional art for a Christian congregation?

I don’t set out to make art for any particular audience. My works are open to interpretation.

I feel that the works are completed when the viewers are present – they bring to the work their own emotions, thoughts, feelings and interpretations.

You have a big show at the Grand Palais in Paris. What’s the difference between exhibiting in a gallery and showing work in a place of worship?

They are not so different as you might think.

People come to a gallery for many of the same reasons that they go to a place of worship.

Some seek comfort, others seek inspiration, others want a quiet place to meditate with beautiful art, or to spend time looking inwards.

Of course, a cathedral has its own history of use and prayer. It is amazing to feel the resonance that is created when art inhabits this kind of space – a whole new conversation takes place.

You were involved in political activism when you were a student at Syracuse University. Did the Occupy protest outside St Paul’s in 2012 affect you?

The Occupy protest in London did not have any impact on the work itself, but changes took place within the cathedral community that may have helped to move the project forward.

Are you a crusader for ‘slow art’ in a fast-spinning world?

I use slow motion in my work to help see details of an event or an image that I would not normally notice. It allows you to look at the whole image and not just part of it because it is going by too fast. It slows us down long enough to experience something in the present, in all of its expansiveness.

Bill Viola The pioneering video artist talks to LAURA GASCOIGNE about mystery, compassion and sacrifice in art, as the first of his two altarpieces commissioned by St Paul’s Cathedral goes on permanent display Fire and water are recurrent images in your work. Do they feature in your altarpieces for St Paul’s Cathedral?

Martyrs, the first work in the commission for St Paul’s, comprises four vertical plasma screens mounted side by side. Each depicts a person passing through their final moments of life, represented by their interaction with four key elements – earth, air, fire and water. The second work, on the theme of Mary, is still in progress.

Kira Perov, my partner and collaborator, has been essential in helping to realise these works.

These subjects suggest compassion and sacrifice.

The act of sacrifice exists in all cultures and

can be expressed by all human beings. Everyone knows what it is like to make a sacrifice, large or small, and Martyrs depicts the ultimate sacrifice of the giving of your own life. Yes, compassion and sacrifice are present in the works, but in my mind the pieces also represent birth and death. These fundamental elements that are at the opposite ends of human existence unite the works.

Since Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art was published in 1912, the spiritual has fallen out of artistic fashion. Are you leading a revival?

Actually, I have never tried to revive the spiritual in art. It is already there in one form

No, I had no idea when I was experimenting with video in the early 1970s that the work would lead to these kinds of possibilities.

However, already in 1986 I was showing installations in places such as La Chartreuse in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, a beautiful former monastery that had wine cellars with dark spaces.

How important is mystery in art? Is art about making the invisible visible?

That is only one part of it. Mystery is all of the things we have yet to experience, and those that we have experienced but are not aware of at the present moment. This is precious and essential for all of us to recognise, for these hidden moments that are tucked away will continue to nourish us throughout our lives.

Bill Viola: Martyrs can be seen at St Paul’s Cathedral, London, 020 7246 8350, www.stpauls.co.uk, from 22 May. Bill Viola Grand Palais, Paris, www.grandpalais.fr, until 21 July

H U B ER T FA N T H O M M E / PA R IS M ATCH /CO N TO U R BY GE T T Y I M AGES

Did you ever dream when you started out as an artist that you would be making videos for Europe’s great cathedrals?

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Art Tours Worldwide Art • Archaeology • Architecture 2014

Cox & Kings is the travel partner for the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) and our programme of small-group tours has been specially created with the Friends of the RA in mind.

The 2014 collection focuses on the art, architecture and archaeology of many of the world’s most culturally-rich destinations. The tours are accompanied by expert lecturers who help to design the itineraries, give talks along the way and, in many cases, open doors that would normally be closed to the general public.

2014 Highlights Bruges & Ghent: Flemish Art & Architecture With Clare Ford-Wille 23 Sep – 4 nights from £1,275 The Masterpieces of Dresden, Berlin & Potsdam With Thomas Abbott 17 Oct – 7 nights from £1,975 India: Mughal Art & Architecture With Diana Driscoll 1 Nov – 10 nights from £3,195 Oman: Land of Frankincense With Konstantine Politis 9 Nov – 7 nights from £2,095 Spain: The Art of Madrid & Toledo With Colin Bailey 17 Nov – 4 nights from £995

ATOL 2815 ABTA V2999

For reservations, please call 020 7873 5000 For detailed itineraries and prices, please request a copy of the 2014 RA Worldwide Art Tours brochure by calling 0844 576 5518 quoting reference RAARTS, or visit www.coxandkings.co.uk/ra Statue: Menelaus, Loggia della Signoria, Florence, Italy

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JANKEL ADLER Paintings & Drawings from 17th May

An exhibition devoted to Jankel Adler's achievement is long overdue.

I am delighted that a show focusing on his final period in Britain, where he reached full maturity as an artist, has now arrived. Richard Cork

goldmark 14 Orange Street, Uppingham, Rutland, LE15 9SQ 01572 821424 goldmarkart.com catalogue by Richard Cork