BARTHOLOMEW BEAL
THIS GREAT STAGE OF FOOLS
Bartholomew Beal This Great Stage of Fools 18 January - 5 February 2016
The Fine Art Society 148 New Bond Street • London W1S 2JT • +44 (0)20 7318 1895 For sales enquiries please contact Sara Terzi • st@faslondon.com
Foreword
Sara Terzi
It is with great pleasure that The Fine Art Society presents the second solo exhibition at the gallery by artist Bartholomew Beal. Following the brilliant Heap of Broken Images based on T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland in 2014, this new body of works comes as an undoubted confirmation of his talent. I have personally known the artist for some years now and it has been a thrill to see his work develop and to observe how his distinctive style characterised by lonely and sometimes ghostly figures has taken a step forward in this show with an increasing evolution of his composition skills.
With This Great Stage of Fool, Beal takes inspiration from another work of literature – Shakespeare’s King Lear – to draw images that instantly evoke in the viewer an impression of visual poetry that lingers past the first glance. The paintings never fail to be immediate, powerful and evocative; they carry the conviction of presence, value and authority. You know this instinctively, even if you don’t know the specifics of its meaning – all of which can be discovered. And like all works of art which have been created by brilliant imagination, Beal’s are a point of real contact and are moments of intimacy that will captivate you.
Drawing on King Lear
Edward Lucie-Smith
Bartholomew Beal has chosen to base the images for his new exhibition on one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays – King Lear, first known to have been performed on St Stephen’s Day (26 December) 1606, at Whitehall, before King James I and his court. It was also first published in that year, with two other, somewhat different versions to follow: a Second Quarto in 1619, and an appearance in the First Folio, published in 1623. For much of its early life in the theatre it was not seen in the version or versions based on the original text or texts, but in a much altered version by Nahum Tate, which was provided with a happy ending. In the years of George III’s madness, from 1811 to 1820, it was not performed at all, as the subject matter was considered to be too controversial. The only two major professional theatres then active in London both presented productions in 1820, within three months of the king’s death. The great tragedian Edmund Kean played King Lear, using the original text, in 1823, but this failed, and after only three performances Kean reverted to Tate’s softened version. The original did not full re-establish itself until another great tragedian, William Macready, presented it at Covent Garden in 1838. Since then the play has been regularly performed, always according to the theatrical conventions of the time. Even with the tragic ending restored, the great actor-managers of the 19th century continued to show comparatively little respect for the playwright’s intentions. They invariably cut the text heavily. In 1892, Henry Irving’s version, with the strong
emphasis on pictorial spectacle common in the theatre at that time, before filmmakers showed that they could always out-do live theatre in this respect, cut 46% of the text. There was still, too, a certain squeamishness about the more brutal aspects of the play. Irving, for example, cut the scene with the blinding of Gloucester. The rise of ‘literary’ painting, from the mid-18th century onwards, and the already existing emphasis on narrative in European art, meant that artists, already attracted to mythological and Biblical scenes, and accustomed to depicting them, began to turn to Shakespeare for subject-matter. This was particularly true, inevitably, of artists who had English as their first language. Two major figures in the early Sturm und Drang period of the Romantic Movement, Benjamin West (1738-1820) and James Barry, (1741-1806) both painted ambitious compositions based on the play. In both cases the emphasis was on Lear’s relationship with his youngest daughter Cordelia. This emphasis continued throughout the 19th century. A number of members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood made paintings illustrating scenes from King Lear. Among them were Ford Madox Brown and John Everett Millais. Ford Madox Brown’s painting Cordelia’s Portion had a strong influence on the designs made for Irving’s 1892 production. Throughout this period of King Lear’s popularity as subject matter for artists, the focus was always on Lear’s relationship
with his daughter Cordelia. Very few artists ventured elsewhere, though there is a striking painting of King Lear and the Fool in the Storm by William Dyce (1806-1864), who came from a generation slightly earlier than that of the Pre-Raphaelites. This, however, is something of an exception to the rule.
VLADIMIR (impatiently) Yes yes, we’re magicians. The dialogue makes one think of an even crisper exchange, not between Lear and his Fool, but between two concerned spectators observing their interaction:
It is possible to see this focus on Cordelia as being part of the Victorians slightly creepy fascination with virginal young women, especially when seen in relationships with much older men.
KENT But who is with him? GENTLEMAN None but the fool; who labours to out-jest His heart-struck injuries.
The atmosphere of Bartholomew Beal’s suite of paintings inspired by one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays is very different from that evoked by the much more literal 18th and 19th century images that I have just cited. The constantly recurring images are, yes, that of Lear himself, but also that of Lear’s Fool, who is presented as being in some way Lear’s alter ego. To complicate matters further, he is also, it seems, the alter ego of the absent Cordelia. This is in line with a modern theory that Cordelia (played by a boy according to the conventions of Jacobean theatre) and the Fool were both played by a single young actor, who doubled the two roles. The figure in the little head-and-shoulders painting entitled Much pined away is clearly androgynous, though the quotation applies only to the Fool, pining because, at this point in the play, Cordelia is absent. A much older version of the Fool appears in a larger painting called Little world of man, where he and his royal master seem like twins of the two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon - protagonists in a much later drama, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In this it is Estragon who suggests ‘Let’s hang ourselves immediately,’ and Vladimir who replies, a moment or two later, ‘You’re my only hope.’ Then, quite soon after, there comes a further exchange: ESTRAGON We don’t manage too badly, eh Didi, between the two of us? VLADIMIR Yes yes. Come on, we’ll try the left first. ESTRAGON We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?
The fact is that Beal’s paintings based on King Lear are not narrative in the sense that either Victorian theatregoers, or Victorian enthusiasts for Pre-Raphaelite art, would have understood that term. They are the visual equivalent of an echo-chamber – they represent the way in which the experience of studying Shakespeare’s text has created a series of echoes and re-echoes in the artist’s head. In this sense they are closely related to Bartholomew Beal’s series loosely based onT.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, previously exhibited in this gallery. From this, they mark a step forward, since they are consistently more ambitious and more complex, in keeping with the grandeur of the play. They do nonetheless have several things strikingly in common. One is a set of purely technical characteristics: for example, they often leave certain things to be filled in by the spectator. The paintings are in a state of movement as one looks at them – they seem to be evolving in front of one’s eyes. Look. Turn away. Look again, At this second glance, the image is somehow different. The other is the pervasive sense of irony, always present in The Waste Land, but perhaps more deeply buried in King Lear (where the Victorians pretty certainly failed to find it). It is not for nothing that the exhibition is entitled This Great Stage of Fools. That is a comment that applies not so much to the world that Shakespeare has imagined, but more directly to our own day. One particularly significant painting seems, at first sight, to have little or nothing to do with what one finds in the play.
Sweeten my imagination, 2015 Oil on canvas 105 x 85 cm
This feather stirs, 2015 Oil on canvas 25 x 35 cm
The title is This feather stirs, and it comes from a late moment in the play. Cordelia is dead, but Lear, holding her in his arms, refuses to believe it: This feather stirs; she lives! If it be so, It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows That ever I have felt. What the painting offers is simply a pair of hands, each holding a string, each string cut off at the lower margin. This is the puppet-master at work, controlling the destinies of men – who remain unaware of their inability to do or say anything than other than what the master commands. There are in fact two dominant sets of imagery in this series of paintings. One is to do with the idea of the Fool as the true hero of the play, rather than the King. Yet there is a consolatory element as well – the presence of nature, the background against which the tragedy of the clown is played out. Sweeten my imagination shows Lear, flowers and leaves in his hair, conversing with a wren perched on his hand. Yet the text of the play once again contradicts what is shown in the painting: There’s hell, there’s darkness, there’s the sulphurous pit, Burning, scalding, stench, consumption; fie, fie, fie! pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination: there’s money for thee. It is the oscillation of moods and images that gives these paintings their fascination and their strength. They make one look, and once one has looked, they have a tenacious hold on one’s imagination. Lear’s final enigmatic words in the play are, fittingly for an exhibition, ‘Look there, look there’. What does he see?
The King’s Marotte, 2015 Oil on canvas 45 x 35 cm
This Great Stage of Fools
Bartholomew Beal
Lear: When we are born, we cry that we are come To this great stage of fools. My paintings tend to explore solitary or contemplative figures, which is often remarked as a contrast with my more cheerful disposition. I use the painted settings within which I place the individuals to develop the nature of their predicaments or their mood. Literature has consistently been a key source of inspiration. My 2013 show Biscuit, I Gave You Half was partly a response to Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, where he poetically and wittily scrutinises dysfunctional characters. By contrast, during my year long residency in Derby, I immersed myself in local history and folklore. In my first solo show Saint Mondays - and Thereby Hangs a Tale I tried to capture the spirit of the place by depicting some of the larger than life characters and stories which have been immortalised in folk songs and myths. When preparing A Heap of broken Images (2014) I was drawing upon T.S.Eliot’s work, particularly The Waste Land, written partly as a response to the First World War. Eliot’s richly allusive poem includes borrowings from other writers to express the lack of cohesion and sense of loss. I found bearded figures, like The Drowned Sailor and the blind seer Tiresias, haunting my work. I suddenly realised that the tragi-comic quality of some of my subjects was informed by my familiarity with Shakespeare’s King Lear. I decided to dive into the play in the hope of producing a set of theatrical paintings. This proved to be an experience as daunting as it was exciting. I
did not want my paintings to be mere illustrations of the text but to use some of its powerful iconography as a starting point from which to examine ideas of human blindness, folly and disorientation. From that point forward these paintings started gaining some exciting momentum. King Lear, the Fool, Gloucester and Edgar are the focus of many of them, as their journey as homeless outcasts was what fascinated me most. The play is particularly poignant in 2016 when we have been daily confronted by media images of ‘unaccommodated’ men, women and children, their terrible suffering and yet their dignity and humanity. The story of King Lear is based on a series of relationships and this provoked me to start placing more than one figure in my larger paintings. When I am painting these larger canvases it begins to feel like the work of a stage director, pushing many different characters around the space to try to find that dynamic correlation between different shapes and colours, instead of relying upon my bearded lead in the centre of the stage My use of saturated colour, composition and definition in each work swings between blurred abstract shapes and tight, figurative painting, There is an element of the undecided in each piece, leaving ideas open for the painting to be completed by the imagination of each viewer. The archetype in the middle of each painting leaves much to be concluded and the surroundings provide hints and suggestions, but nothing final.
This Great Stage of Fools
This is the second exhibition of Bartholomew Beal’s paintings at The Fine Art Society, in collaboration with I.P. Arts. In the first, he became the youngest artist ever to have a one-man show at London’s oldest commercial gallery, demonstrating its continuing commitment to contemporary art. That exhibition had followed five other successful solo and duo shows throughout London in 2013-2014, also organised by I.P. Arts, subsequent to Barley’s graduation from Wimbledon Arts College with a Fine Arts BA with 1st Class Honours and commendations. Whilst still at art college, Barley received the prestigious Jonathan Vickers Fine Art Award which funded a year-long residency in Derby, culminating in a his first large-scale solo exhibition at Derby Museum and Art Gallery which took place in 2013, a year after his graduation. Our collaboration with The Fine Art Society greatly enhances our international reach, for collectors of Barley’s paintings are already located in a wide array of countries including China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, Saudi Arabia, UK, Austria, Greece, Russia, France, Germany, Spain, USA, Mexico, and Brazil. To date, Barley’s preferred studio practice is painting a large body of works simultaneously, stimulated by literature, particularly plays and poems, which have had a formative influence upon him. He enjoys working towards exhibitions but has also undertaken client commissions for I.P. Arts, with a waitlist of over 50 strong.
Jason Colchin-Carter
This new body of 25 works takes its title “This Great Stage of Fools”, from Barley’s favourite Shakespearean text King Lear which could be said to be in his DNA. This is not, perhaps, surprising as both Barley’s parents are teachers of English Literature and his father, in fact, taught him and his classmates King Lear as one of their A level texts. The canvases in this exhibition range in size from 25 x 35 cm to 225 x 180 cm. The paintings cover many different moods from the play and Barley’s thinking around it. As highlighted by Edward Lucie-Smith in this catalogue’s essay each of these works evinces links to words and lines in the Shakespeare’s great tragedy. Through these relationships, the viewer experiences something of the very real excitement of watching performances of King Lear as it moves from profound tragic intensity to candid comedy. While Barley draws upon lines and themes of King Lear in this series of works it is important to highlight the significance the artist places on Act III where Lear and his followers are cast out into the storm. Here they are removed from all the trappings of court and power and have to confront painful, and sometime redemptive, truths about themselves. Barley has loved theatre since childhood and finds one of the privileges of studying, and now living, in London is the opportunity it affords for theatre-going. Although he has been steeped in Shakespeare from having grown up in easy reach
of Stratford-upon-Avon, Barley is equally fascinated by twentieth century and contemporary drama. Indeed, one of his previous exhibitions explored elements of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. Recent spectacular London productions such as Ivo van Hove’s interpretation of Miller’s A View from the Bridge at The Young Vic and Ian Kelly’s Mr. Foote’s Other Leg directed by Richard Eyre at The Haymarket have encouraged Barley’s reflections on the theatrical nature of human existence. I.P. Arts and Bartholomew Beal express their gratitude to The Fine Art Society and are both keen to extend the collaboration with them. I.P. Arts and Jason Colchin-Carter also extend their gratitude to Edward Lucie-Smith whose essay so successfully encapsulates Bartholomew’s work and puts it in a historical context.
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I see it feelingly, 2015 Oil on canvas 45 x 35 cm
Every inch a king, 2015 Oil on canvas 35 x 25 cm
Horns without a case, 2015 Oil on canvas 30 x 30 cm
My master calls me, 2015 Oil on canvas 65 x 50 cm
The Fool’s Marotte, 2015 Oil on canvas 45 x 25 cm
Fool (study), 2015 Oil on canvas 35 x 25 cm
Little world of man, 2015
Oil on canvas 75 x 115 cm
I want no eyes, 2015 Oil on canvas 225 x 180 cm
The standing pool, 2015 Oil on canvas 180 x 125 cm
Idle weeds, 2015 Oil on canvas 65 x 50 cm
Much pined away, 2015 Oil and acrylic on board 35 x 30 cm
Sunshine and rain at once, 2015 Oil on canvas 77 x 61 cm
The eldest have born most, 2015
Oil on canvas 225 x 180 cm
Elf all my hair in knots, 2015 Oil on canvas 45 x 35 cm
The way to Dover, 2015 Oil on canvas 65 x 50 cm
The Eldest, 2015 Oil on canvas 35 x 25 cm
Turlygod, 2015
Oil on canvas mounted on board 50 x 30 cm
Yet have I ventured?, 2015 Oil on canvas 65 x 50 cm
I stumbled when I saw, 2015 Oil on canvas 105 x 85 cm
Bartholomew Beal
EDUCATION 2009 - 12 / BA Fine Art Painting, Wimbledon College of Art 2007 - 08 / Foundation in Art and Design, University of Gloucestershire SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2015 / Bartholomew Beal – Temple, I.P. Arts, London 2014 / A Heap of Broken Images, The Fine Art Society, London 2013 / Saint Monday and Thereby Hangs a Tale, I.P. Arts in collaboration with the Derby Museum and Art Gallery, Derby Biscuit. I’ve kept you half, I.P. Arts, Mall Gallery, London (with Eleanor Watson) GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2015 / Art Miami 2015, I.P. Arts with Cynthia Corbett Gallery, Miami Farfetch, I.P. Arts, London Young Master Dialogues, I.P. Arts with Cynthia Corbett Gallery, London and New York Young Masters Prize, I.P. Arts with Cynthia Corbett Gallery, London Royal Arts & Fashion, I.P. Arts, Middle Temple Hall, London Summer Exhibition, I.P. Arts with Cynthia Corbett Gallery, London
Art15, The Fine Art Society, London Scope Art Fair 2015, I.P. Arts with OS Gallery, New York Signature Art Prize Finalists exhibition, London 2014 / What Marcel Duchamp Taught Me, The Fine Art Society, London Art14, The Fine Art Society, London 2013 / Memory and Desire Part 1, Theobald Jennings Gallery, London 2012 / FLOCK 2012, GX Gallery, London Wimbledon College of Art Degree Show, London RedEarth Spring Exhibition, Bickleigh, Devon 100outof10, Vyner Street Gallery, London The Perfect Nude, Wimbledon Space | Exeter Phoenix | Charlie Smith Gallery, London Hans Brinker Prize Exhibition, Amsterdam Affordable Art Fair, London 2011 / Drawing Projects: an exploration into the language of drawing, London Last Orders, Redgate Gallery, London Seven Acres, Brick Lane Gallery, London Baker’s Dozen, Acquire, London RESIDENCIES AND AWARDS 2012 / Jonathan Vickers Residency, Derwent Valley MIlls World Heritage Site (Oct 2012 - Jul 2013) Landmark Plc Fine Art Award 2011 / Finalist of the Hans Brinker Student Painting Prize, Amsterdam
Published in an edition of 1000 copies for the exhibition This Great Stage of Fools 18 January - 5 February 2016 Catalogue © The Fine Art Society Design by Sara Terzi Text © the authors Images © Bartholomew Beal, courtesy of I.P. Arts Printed in the UK by ArtQuarters Press Front cover: I stumbled when I saw, 2015 ISBN 978-1-907052-62-0 With thanks to Jason Colchin-Carter and I.P. Arts
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