CHANTAL JOFFE
CHANTAL JOFFE
Victoria Miro
Confessional Painting Gemma Blackshaw
Linda, you are leaving your old body now. It lies flat, an old butterfly, all arm, all leg, all wing, loose as an old dress. I reach out toward it but my fingers turn to cankers and I am motherwarm and used, just as your childhood is used.1
When asked how she might describe the images of mothers, daughters and poets that have preoccupied her this past year, Chantal Joffe talked of transitions – of ageing, and of painting as an attempt to mark the moments in a lifetime that are both intensely personal and reassuringly universal.2 Esme, her daughter, has just started secondary school; in the portraits she returns her mother’s gaze with a new boredom and suspicion, arms folded across her chest. Skirts, striped t-shirts and pointed shoes cover a body the artist is no longer permitted to depict, a loss of innocence and intimacy that is counted out in the piles of family photographs that cover Joffe’s studio surfaces – Esme by a paddling pool; leaning over a birthday cake; sucking on a straw. In her poem ‘Mother and Daughter’, Anne Sexton (1928–74) addressed the elder of her two girls, Linda, who had just turned eighteen, leaving her ‘old body’ (‘all arm, all leg, all wing’), her childhood and mother behind. Ignored, rebuffed, ‘pick-pocketed’ – Sexton reflects on the transition in their relationship, on what she has given and what she has lost. Joffe’s interest in the confessional poetry of Sexton, her friend Sylvia Plath
Sylvia at the Beach, 1993 Oil on canvas with paper collage 181 x 181 cm 71 1/4 x 71 1/4 in Anne Sexton and Me, 1994 Mixed-media collage 21.5 x 29.5 cm 8 1/2 x 11 5/8 in
(1932–63), and their tutor at Boston University, Robert Lowell (1917–77), stretches back to her time as a student, but in recent months it has deepened. Painting at a time of change – on the brink of her daughter’s teenage years – she has returned to this literature of confidences, experiencing its often-painful descriptions of familial relationships anew. Her exhibition at Victoria Miro gallery, London, includes the portraits of Esme, her cousins and friends that have become, over the years, so much a part of Joffe’s practice – their ageing a marker of her development as a painter. But these images appear alongside those of the American poets and their families: Anne Sexton embracing Linda (Anne and Linda, 2015); Robert Lowell with his wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick and their daughter, Harriet (Robert, Harriet and Elizabeth, 2015); Sylvia Plath, radiant at the side of Ted Hughes (Ted and Sylvia, 2015). In conversation, Joffe refers to these subjects by their first names – ‘Look at Anne with her cigarette (Anne in her Study, 2015); Sylvia – so happy...’ – and this reveals not only the intensity of her reading but also the intimacy of her relationship with people she has never met and will never know.3 In early 2015, in an interview with Sarah Howgate, Contemporary Curator at the National Portrait Gallery, London, Joffe described how, as a student at the Royal College of Art (from 1992–94), ‘I was always trying to inhabit other people, particularly other artists... I love them so much I want to be them.’4 In a series of collages dating from this period, she painted images of the female poets she had come to love: Plath at the beach, beaming in a white bathing suit; Sexton preparing for her suicide, locked in the car in her mother’s fur coat. Painting her own features over theirs, or sticking a closely cut photograph of her head and shoulders onto their heads and shoulders, Joffe represented both her identification with these writers and her determination to overcome the personal and professional conflicts they experienced – significantly, in the image of the suicidal Sexton, Joffe presents her ‘cheerful, young face’, smiling
from ear to ear.5 In communication about these early collages Joffe remarked, ‘I wouldn’t do them now...’ – in her new images of these women she is more concerned with empathy than identification.6 Understanding the indivisibility of these poets’ lives and works through her own history as an artist, mother and lover, Joffe’s recent paintings of Plath and Sexton are both more nuanced and more knowing. Working from family photographs reproduced in their biographies, collections of letters and verse, she paints their portraits without the need to include her own image, to ‘inhabit’. But her life merges with their lives, nevertheless, with her self-portraits, her paintings of Esme, their family and friends surrounding her images of the poets. As she moves back and forth between photographs and canvases – between images of families that include her own – her very practice becomes bound up with her representation of shared emotion and experience, across the twentieth and twenty first centuries. The relationship of Joffe’s paintings to the photographs they re-represent is more complex than it might at first appear. The unposed, unplanned ‘snaps’ that interest her – of families, children, and seemingly inconsequential scenes of domestic life – are, in her words, the images that enable her to achieve through the act of painting ‘a distillation of the everyday’.7 Joffe may paint quickly, but the working of oil on canvas is a much slower process than the pressing of a button on a camera and it is in these delays – these movements from the easel to the glass table top she mixes her pigment upon, these returns to the canvas – that she ‘distils’. Working both reflexively and critically, Joffe’s painting of the photograph is fundamentally different to the photograph itself: she colours and erases, extracts and distorts. Paint diluted with thinners runs down the canvas surface; primed in lurid green, violet, electric pink, this vivid ground grins through flesh tones painted with broad, bold sweeps of the brush (Birthday Self-Portrait, 2015; Phoebe with Andrew, 2015). Joffe’s mark-making draws attention to both the materiality of the paint and the physicality of her engagement
with it; she stands to work, crosses the studio floor, her arms moving expansively and this ‘dance’, as she describes it, is registered on the surface itself.8 Photographs, she remarks, are ‘all over’ – everything is reproduced in equal, often excessive detail – but in her gestural approach to painting, in what she purposefully omits, Joffe leaves a great deal to the viewer’s imagination.9 What do we imagine as we look at a portrait of a slender woman in a black dress, eyes downcast (Sylvia at the Beach, 2015)? We are unlikely to recall the photograph of Sylvia Plath it is inspired by, of the poet in a rowing boat, arms resting on a pair of oars, the straps of her sundress dangling under her shoulders – details that Joffe has almost entirely obliterated. Untraceable, unidentifiable, we might wonder instead about this woman’s relationship with Joffe, imagining her as a sister, a niece, a friend. The work of the confessional poets, which takes human emotion, sincerity and vulnerability as its ultimate subject, frames Joffe’s practice. But in this new body of work we see Joffe’s confessional painting framing the practice of the poets she has admired for so long. Portraiture, for Joffe, is an analogy for family – a family that extends to those artists one loves. Gemma Blackshaw is Professor of Art History, Plymouth University
1
Anne Sexton, extract from ‘Mother and Daughter’ from The Book of Folly (1972), republished in The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton (Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999), pp. 305-6.
2
Chantal Joffe in conversation with Gemma Blackshaw, 3 November 2015.
3
Ibid.
4
Chantal Joffe in conversation with Sarah Howgate, 25 February 2015 in Friendship Portraits: Chantal Joffe and Ishbel Myerscough, exhibition catalogue, London: National Portrait Gallery, 11 June – 28 September 2015.
5
Email correspondence between Gemma Blackshaw and Chantal Joffe, 14 December 2015.
6
Ibid.
7
Chantal Joffe in conversation with Gemma Blackshaw, 3 November 2015.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.
Esme in the Beach Hut, 2015 Oil on canvas 45.8 x 36 cm 18 1/8 x 14 1/8 in
Robert, Harriet and Elizabeth, 2015 Oil on board 30.5 x 40.7 cm 12 1/8 x 16 1/8 in
The Writer, 2015 Oil on board 61 x 45.8 cm 24 1/8 x 18 1/8 in
Red Haired Woman in the Garden, 2015 Oil on board 40.8 x 30.5 cm 16 1/8 x 12 1/8 in
Birthday Self-Portrait, 2015 Oil on canvas 182.9 x 121.9 cm 72 x 48 in
Phoebe with Andrew, 2015 Oil on canvas 40.5 x 50.5 cm 16 x 19 7/8 in
Paula in a Striped Dress, 2015 Oil on board 28 x 21 cm 11 1/8 x 8 1/4 in
Sylvia at the Beach, 2015 Oil on board 35.5 x 28 cm 14 x 11 1/8 in
Brocade Dress, 2015 Oil on board 182.9 x 121.9 cm 72 x 48 in
Emilia, 2015 Oil on board 25.5 x 20.5 cm 10 1/8 x 8 1/8 in
Blonde in a Black Sweater, 2015 Oil on board 61 x 45.8 cm 24 1/8 x 18 1/8 in
Paula in a Black Dress, 2015 Oil on board 28 x 21 cm 11 1/8 x 8 1/4 in
Brunette in Stripes, 2015 Oil on board 28 x 21 cm 11 1/8 x 8 1/4 in
Paula in a High-Necked Blouse, 2015 Oil on board 30 x 20 cm 11 3/4 x 7 7/8 in
Anne in her Study, 2015 Oil on board 40.8 x 30.5 cm 16 1/8 x 12 1/8 in
Esme in Haggerston, 2015 Oil on board 30.5 x 40.6 cm 12 1/8 x 16 in
Sheridan, Caroline, Ivana and Robert, 2015 Oil on board 27.9 x 35.5 cm 11 x 14 in
Assia, 2015 Oil on board 40.7 x 30.5 cm 16 1/8 x 12 1/8 in
White Collar, 2015 Oil on canvas 214 x 153 cm 84 1/4 x 60 1/4 in
Ted and Sylvia, 2015 Oil on canvas 50.4 x 40.8 cm 19 7/8 x 16 1/8 in
Jean and Robert, 2015 Oil on board 30.5 x 40.7 cm 12 1/8 x 16 1/8 in
Anne and Linda, 2015 Oil on board 40.8 x 30.5 cm 16 1/8 x 12 1/8 in
Esme in the Garden, 2015 Oil on board 30.5 x 40.6 cm 12 1/8 x 16 in
Self-Portrait in a Red Jumper, 2015 Oil on canvas 61 x 50 cm 24 1/8 x 19 3/4 in
FAMIL Y PICTURES
Esme in N.Y.C., 2015 Pastel on paper 37.8 x 47.8 cm 14 7/8 x 18 3/4 in
Vita, Esme and Nat, 2015 Pastel on paper 37.8 x 47.8 cm 14 7/8 x 18 3/4 in
Self-Portrait in Striped Trousers, 2015 Pastel on paper 74.6 x 59.4 cm 29 3/8 x 23 3/8 in
Esme in St Leonards, 2015 Pastel on paper 37.8 x 47.8 cm 14 7/8 x 18 3/4 in
Esme in Dungarees, 2015 Pastel on paper 37.8 x 47.8 cm 14 7/8 x 18 3/4 in
Esme in the Beach Hut, 2015 Pastel on paper 47.8 x 37.8 cm 18 3/4 x 14 7/8 in
Esme on the Green, 2015 Pastel on paper 47.8 x 37.8 cm 18 3/4 x 14 7/8 in
Esme in the Beach Hut (2), 2015 Pastel on paper 37.8 x 47.8 cm 14 7/8 x 18 3/4 in
Esme and Alba in Madison Square Garden, 2015 Pastel on paper 47.8 x 37.8 cm 18 3/4 x 14 7/8 in
Esme in the Beach Hut, 2015 Pastel on paper 47.8 x 37.8 cm 18 3/4 x 14 7/8 in
Self-Portrait with Arms Raised, 2015 Pastel on paper 47.8 x 37.8 cm 18 3/4 x 14 7/8 in
Esme – Large Head, 2015 Pastel on paper 74.6 x 59.4 cm 29 3/8 x 23 3/8 in
Acknowledgements Special thanks to Daniel Coombs, Esme Joffe-Coombs, Dayll Joffe, Rachel, Cat, Kathy, Emma, Anja, Victoria, Warren, and Glenn
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Chantal Joffe 22 January – 24 March 2016 Victoria Miro Mayfair · 14 St George Street · London W1S 1FE
Text by Gemma Blackshaw Design by Martin Lovelock Edited by Rachel Taylor and Cat Turner All works © Chantal Joffe All images courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London Photography by Stephen White and Robert Glowacki Printed and bound by PUSH Published by Victoria Miro 2016 ISBN 978 0 9931798 9 1 © Victoria Miro All rights reserved. No part of this book should be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording or information storage or retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. Distributed in the UK and Europe by Cornerhouse Publications www.cornerhousepublications.org
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