Jane Bown, 1925 - 2014

Jane Bown, Samuel Beckett, 1976

Jane Bown died on 21 December 2014.
Bown worked as a staff photographer on The Observer from 1949 - in the course of her work she encountered many remarkable people and made many remarkable portrait photographs. According to her obituarist, Bown was noted for being genereally uninterested in camera equipment. She began her professional career with a Rolleiflex but later moved onto an Olympus OM1 - she owned about a dozen Olympus cameras, all bought secondhand. She always worked with natural light and, apart from a brief spell in the 1960s, in black and white. Her simple and direct approach allowed her to work quickly and quietly and without fuss. Interestingly, although she apparently was meticulous in her checking of her equipment before an assignment (which she carried in a shopping bag) she did little or no research about her subjects and so would encounter them without preconceptions.
Below is a selection of my favourite examples of her work (great pictures, great subjects). Click on images to enlarge; see more pictures here and here.
Read obituaries by Luke Dodd and Eamonn McCabe and in The Telegraph; read also a profile by Luke Dodd and a collection of articles in The Guardian, including: The Lady Behind the Lens, The Eye Had It, Jane Bown Remembered, The Final Image.

Jane Bown, Postman and Postwoman Having a Picnic, 1966

Jane Bown, American Tourists in London, 1968

Jane Bown, W.H. Auden

Jane Bown, Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1957

Jane Bown, Sir John Betjeman, 1972

Jane Bown, Francis Bacon, 1985

Jane Bown, Orson Welles, 1951

Jane Bown, Lucian Freud, 1983

Jane Bown, Bridget Riley, 1989

Jane Bown, David Hockney, 1966

Footnote.
It is sad to note that Billie Whitelaw died on the same day as Jane Bown; if Bown's greatest picture is of Samuel Beckett (see top of post) it seems fitting to conclude with her picture of Whitelaw who was the greatest interpreter of Beckett. Read an obituary for Whitelaw.

Jane Bown, Billie Whitelaw, 1976

Howard Hodgkin - Gagosian

Howard Hodgkin, Party, 1990-91

Howard Hodgkin: Indian Waves is at Gagosian (Davies Street) until 31 January 2015.
I have tended to fall in and out of love with Howard Hodgkin's paintings. It is almost 30 years since my first infatuation inspired by his exhibition Forty Paintings at the Whitechapel in 1985. Since then there have been times when over exposure to the vivid, sensuous richness of his colours has, like too much rich food, left me unable to face any more and in need of something more ascetic. Now, however, I am ready to be seduced again. The pictures in this exhibition are gouache paintings over prints (a blue wavy line with an arc of green above) made on hand made Indian paper. Made between 1990 and 1991 and inspired by one of Hodgkin's many visits to India they deploy an exhilerating palette of colours.

Howard Hodgkin, Border, 1990-91

Howard Hodgkin, Orange Sunset, 1990-91

Howard Hodgkin, Storm at Sea, 1990-91

Howard Hodgkin, Storm in Goa, 1990-91

Howard Hodgkin, Surf, 1990-91

Howard Hodgkin, Yellow Rainbox, 1990-91

Howard Hodgkin, Turbulent Waters, 1990-91

Howard Hodgkin, Sea Fog, 1990-91

Howard Hodgkin, Another Rainbow, 1990-91

Howard Hodgkin, Mumbai Wedding, 1990-91

The Forever Now - MoMA, NY

Matt Connors, Variable Foot, 2014

The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World is at The Museum of Modern Art, New York until 5 April 2015.

This looks interesting: a museum show of contemporary (largely abstract) painting. This is, perhaps surprisingly, a relatively uncommon event. Tate Britain did present Painting Now: Five Contemporary Artists November 2013-February 2014 - but, in my view, apart from Tomma Abts, it was underwhelming. This is a much bigger show (17 artists, some 90 or so paintings) with rhetoric to match. The 'Atemporal World' is a place  where... well, let me quote from MoMA's exhibition blurb:

... writer William Gibson [...] used the term “a-temporality” to describe a cultural product of our moment that paradoxically doesn’t represent, through style, through content, or through medium, the time from which it comes. A-temporality, or timelessness, manifests itself in painting as an ahistorical free-for-all, where contemporaneity as an indicator of new form is nowhere to be found, and all eras coexist. This profligate mixing of past styles and genres can be identified as a kind of hallmark for our moment in painting, with artists achieving it by reanimating historical styles or recreating a contemporary version of them, sampling motifs from across the timeline of 20th-century art in a single painting or across an oeuvre, or radically paring their language down to the most archetypal forms.

Abstract painting didn't die in the anti-Greenbergian backlash of the 1970s and 80s. Or rather, its corpse has been reanimated and has returned as (in the coinage of Walter Robinson) 'zombie formalism'. This idea has been elaborated by Jerry Saltz (Zombies on the Walls: Why Does So Much New Abstraction Look the Same?) and is invoked in his interesting review of The Forever Now - a review which is by no means unsympathetic.

The artists featured are: Richard Aldrich, Joe Bradley, Kerstin Brätsch, Matt Connors, Michaela Eichwald, Nicole Eisenman, Mark Grotjahn, Charline von Heyl, Rashid Johnson, Julie Mehretu, Dianna Molzan, Oscar Murillo, Laura Owens, Amy Sillman, Josh Smith, Mary Weatherford, and Michael Williams.

Apart from Julie Mehretu most of these are unfamiliar to me; however, in the US: The 17 artists represented here are all known, mostly market-approved entities familiar to anyone who follows contemporary art even casually. Nearly all the participants possess résumés dotted with solo shows in smaller museums and at blue-chip galleries, here and abroad; 12 of the artists are already represented in MoMA’s collection. (Roberta Smith in The New York Times.)

Read an article by Jason Farago, and reviews by Jerry Saltz, Roberta Smith.

Below is a sample of the work on show, in alphabetical order. Click on images to enlarge.

Joe Bradley, Man Made Dirigible, 2008

Matt Connors, Divot, 2012

Michaela Eichwald, Kunsthalle St. Gallen, 2012

Nicole Eisenman, Guy Capitalist, 2011

Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Circus No. 1 Face 44.18), 2013

Rashid Johnson, Cosmic Slop "The Berlin Conference", 2011

Julie Mehretu, Invisible Sun (algorithm 5, second letter form), 2014

Laura Owens, Untitled, 2013

Amy Sillman, Untitled (Head), 2014

Mary Weatherford, La Noche, 2014

Michael Williams, Wall Dog, 2013

Installation view of The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (featuring work by Kerstin Brätsch)

Joseph Kosuth - Sprüth Magers

Joseph Kosuth, Four Colors Four Words, 1966

Joseph Kosuth: Amnesia: various, luminous, fixed is at Sprüth Magers London until 14 February 2015.
This exhibition comes as something of a surprise: I have long been familiar with Kosuth's dryly witty conceptual art; I have, too, long been aware that he made work in neon; nevertheless, I have never really thought of him as a 'colourful' artist. Installation pictures of this show prove otherwise.
Kosuth is one of the pioneers of conceptual art: his 1969 essay Art after Philosophy is one of the foundational texts of the movement: All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually... Works of art are analytic propositions. That is, if viewed within their context – as art – they provide no information whatsoever about any matter of fact. A work of art is a tautology in that it is a presentation of the artist’s intention, that is, he is saying that that particular work of art is art, which means, is a definition of art. Thus, that it is art is true a priori (which is what Judd means when he states that “if someone calls it art, it’s art”).
Works in this exhibition include characteristic tautological propositions as well as meditations on the works of Sigmund Freud and Samuel Beckett.
Watch a short video about this exhibition featuring an interview with Kosuth; read a reviews by Waldemar Januszczak and J.J. Charlesworth.

Joseph Kosuth, What (Does This Mean?), 2009

Joseph Kosuth, Self-Defined Object (Green), 1966 (Wittgenstein Series)

Joseph Kosuth, Self-Described Twice (Cobalt Blue), 1966

Joseph Kosuth, installation view, Sprüth Magers

Joseph Kosuth, installation view, Sprüth Magers

Joseph Kosuth, installation view, Sprüth Magers