Chance, Order, Change - Barber Institute of Fine Arts

Kenneth Martin, Chance, Order, Change 26, History Painting, 1983

Chance, Order, Change: Abstract Paintings, 1939 – 1989 is at The Barber Institute of Fine Arts until 8 May 2016.

Small, but almost perfectly formed, this exquisite exhibition of a mere 11 abstract paintings is a delight. One wall, featuring work by Sean Scully, Alan Charlton, Robert Ryman, Kenneth Martin and Ad Reinhardt, presents very fine examples of some of the most pure, rigorous and beautiful, abstract painting. On the opposite wall there are three works by Josef Albers: he is presented, here, as a key figure in the story of post-war abstraction on account of his experience as a student and teacher at the Bauhaus and thus in the vanguard of Modernist experiments in abstraction. When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933 Albers moved to the USA where he became an influential teacher, first at Black Mountain College and then at Yale. Albers’ series Homage to the Square (sustained over some 26 years) is a model of disciplined composition – an approach which is manifested in the work of all the artists included in the show. In addition to those artists already mentioned there are works by Bridget Riley and Victor Pasmore – in my view, Pasmore is the only weak link in the chain forged between the selected artists who, otherwise, constitute a splendid exhibition.

Josef Albers, Construction in Red-Black-Blue, 1939

Josef Albers, Homage to the Square: Affectionate, 1954

Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting. (NB the image here shows Abstract Painting 1960-66 - the work in the show is Abstract Painting 1957; both are black.)

Bridget Riley, Orphean Elegy 7, 1979

Robert Ryman, Courier, 1982

Alan Charlton, Ten Part Line Painting, 1984

Sean Scully, Red Painting, 1989

Performing for the Camera - Tate Modern

Sarah Lucas, Fighting Fire with Fire, 1996

Performing for the Camera is at Tate Modern until 12 June 2016.

The camera invites performance: the lens turned towards us compels, at the very least, an adjustment of expression and gaze. It may be that the camera doesn’t lie – but we do, when we create these little fictions for photographs. The contemporary apotheosis of this performance is the selfie where we become director, subject and audience. (I enjoyed David Bailey’s recent comments on the topic: … somebody said ‘what do you think of selfies?’... I thought it meant masturbation. And then they told me what it was, and I realised it is masturbation! – see short video here.)

The publicity for Performing for the Camera, featuring images by Romain Mader and Amalia Ulman, suggested that it was this narcissistic trope of the selfie that was the exhibition’s subject (albeit, that both Mader and Ulman self-consciously construct fictional identities). 

Amalia Ulman, from Excellences and Perfections, 2014

However, the exhibition is broader and more interesting than that, taking as its main focus the documentation of Performance Art as well as performance enacted for the camera.

The exhibition opens with Yves Klein’s well-known Leap into the Void (1960).  The photograph shows Klein in mid-flight from a first floor ledge with, apparently, nothing to prevent his inevitable fall onto the street below except for, presumably, his faith in immaterialism and transcendence - and the viewer’s suspension of disbelief. It is obviously a trick: a composite photograph – but very persuasively done. Here, however, it is ‘explained’ with the display of the photograph showing Klein’s friends waiting below with a tarpaulin to catch him. Klein (who died in 1962) was insistent that the trick should not be revealed, so it seems a little sad that is it so bluntly revealed here.  Once the ‘magic’ is explained – it is gone.

Leap into the Void is unequivocally Klein’s ‘work’; however, the photograph was made by Harry Skunk and János Kender; as were the many, many photographs of Klein gleefully directing his ‘living paintbrushes’ (naked women smeared with blue paint); in fact, one of the revelations of this exhibition is that the photographs of Skunk/Kender were key to much Performance Art of the 1960s and 70s – here we see their work with  Niki de Saint Phalle, Marta Minujín, Eleanor Antin, Yayoi Kusama, Dan Graham and Merce Cunningham, besides Klein; typically, in such instances, the photographer is effectively merely a technician in the archival process. Clearly this raises questions about who the artist is and where the art is – this is intrinsically problematic with performance given that, in these examples, it only really exists in the ‘live’ moment; another section of the exhibition looks at events/performance which is made specifically to be photographed. (Sometimes the point of the photograph is ambiguous – I looked with pleasure at Babette Mangolte’s gorgeous, misty rooftop view across New York dominated by that city’s, characteristic quirky water towers for some time before I realised that I was supposed to be attending to the individual figures from Trish Brown’s Dance Company distributed across the roofs.

Much of this exhibition presents familiar material – given that reproducibility is a defining characteristic of the medium this is often a potential problem for photography exhibitions: when work is exhibited as small, framed black and white prints (as much in the first few rooms, here, is) I can’t help feeling that seeing them in a book (such as the excellent catalogue) would be more effective; when those pictures are arranged in rows that begin near to the floor and rise to considerably above head height (as with the display of Stuart Brisley) it is just irritating.

However, there is work here that looks fresh and work that is displayed at a quality and scale that makes the most of gallery presentation.

Work that I particularly enjoyed included David Wojnarowicz’s series Arthur Rimbaud in New York; Jemima Stehli’s Strip; Hans Eijkelboom’s creepy portraits of himself posing with other people’s families; and Samuel Fosso’s African Spirits (his self-portraits as Angela Davis, Malcolm X and other significant figures make a refreshing juxtaposition to Cindy Sherman’s more familiar Untitled Film Stills.)

I also loved the wall of Joseph Beuys posters!

Read reviews by AdrianSearle, Waldemar Januszczak,  Mark Hudson, Rachel Spence.
(Click on images to enlarge.)

Yves Klein, Leap into the Void, 1960 - photograph by Skunk-Kender

Yves Klein, Anthropometries of the Blue Period, 1960 - photograph by Skunk-Kender

Babette Mangolte, Trisha Brown: 'Roof Piece', 1973

Hans Eijkelboom, With My Family, 1973

David Wojnarowicz, from Arthur Rimbaud in New York, 1978-9

Francesca Woodman,  Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976

Jemima Stehli, from Strip, 1999-2000

Samuel Fosso, African Spirits: Angela Davis, 2008

Joseph Beuys, La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi, 1972

Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse - Royal Academy

Claude Monet, The Japanese Bridge, c1923-5

Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse is at the Royal Academy of Arts until 20 April 2016.

(The following review is published in Landscape Issues, Vol.15, Nos.1 & 2, May 2016)

Claude Monet is undoubtedly the star of this huge show – supported by a cast of some 40 other painters. Although the exhibition title signals a historical span bookended by Monet and Matisse, it is notable that the later giant of Modern art is represented by a paltry two paintings to Monet’s 35 or so.

It is, nevertheless, quite fitting that this should be so: given the premise of the exhibition, that many pioneers of modern painting were enthusiastic gardeners, and engaged in a productive dialogue between the possibilities of horticulture and painting, Monet is in a league of his own. Not only did his garden at Giverny become the exclusive subject of his painting, but the garden itself was a work of art. Monet was no mere Sunday-gardener, he was nothing less than a landscape architect. Over a period of 40 years, from 1890, he developed and extended a country garden into a 6-acre composition of foliage and flowers; eventually he was able to employ 6 gardeners and divert a local river to create the famous water garden with its iconic Japanese bridge. Monet declared that his garden was his studio.

The period spanned by the exhibition – roughly 1864 to 1928 – was, art historically, one of extraordinary invention and experiment. Modernism was forged in wave after wave of avant-gardism: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism. Broadly, this is a story of escalating ‘difficulty’ in painting – difficulty for the viewer, that is, as what was seen in paintings became increasingly disconnected from what could be seen in the natural world and increasingly engaged with psychology, abstraction and provocation, to say nothing of revolutionary politics.

Understandably, there is little of that revolutionary ilk here – the section rather cornily labelled ‘avant-gardeners’ does present some of the major figures of that extraordinary period – Van Gogh, Klimt, Klee, Kandinsky, Nolde, Matisse – but, Nolde and Klimt, aside this fairly tame section feels like a distraction from the main business of supplying visual pleasure and, in particular, the pleasure of flowers.

The overriding aesthetic ethos of this exhibition is Impressionism. It is hard, now, to believe that Impressionism was ever shocking. Impressionism may have initially, and briefly, provoked a negative response – to a public and to critics weaned on polished, academic pictures, the brushy smudges of pure colour seemed unfinished and hard to ‘read’ – but, eventually, once the idea of a spontaneous response to the play of light on the natural world was grasped, the movement became, and remains, immensely popular. While more radical avant-gardism was intent on épater les bourgeois the Impressionists forged an art that was bourgeois to its core, intent principally on visual pleasure. Impressionism combined here with gardening is a cast-iron crowd pleaser.

The exhibition is, indeed, rich in visual pleasure for both the connoisseurs of painting and of horticulture – though, perhaps, less reliably so for the latter. The joy of Impressionism is that the painters played fast and loose with the visual sensations offered by the sunlit scenes before them so that flowers become sensuous smears of red, orange, white and blue rather than botanically accurate representations.

Overall, I think there is more to be learned here about the development of modern painting than about the ‘modern garden’ of the title. Highlights include marvellously ethereal paintings by Berthe Morisot (Woman and Child in a Meadow, 1882) and Edouard Manet (Young Woman among Flowers, 1879); Max Liebermann’s Flowering Bushes by the Garden Shed, 1928, rendered in thick, dense, glossy smears of paint; Joaquin Mir y Trinxet’s intense veils of colour in Garden of Mogoda, 1915-19; Emil Nolde’s slabs of deep blue, bright red, yellow and green forming a solid wall of blooms in Flower Garden (O), 1922; and Gustav Klimt’s cascade of flowers in Cottage Garden, 1905-07. Perhaps one of the oddest, yet most interesting, paintings is Henri Matisse’s The Rose Marble Table, 1917: the salmony-pink, octagonal table, stands against a predominantly brown ground relieved only by some dark green foliage; on the table’s perspectivally tilted surface is a small basket and three small green spheres of what might be fruit. The uncharacteristic gloom of this picture, by a typically joyful painter, is ascribed to then ongoing horrors of the Great War.

Finally, however, the show belongs to Monet. Three rooms are devoted to his paintings. In the first, situated in the middle of the exhibition, are paintings executed from around 1895 to 1905: some of his much reproduced paintings of the Japanese footbridge across the pond in his garden are so familiar that they seem like clichés; however, the paintings of water lilies and swathes of blossom are seductively subtle essays in colour and form. The other two rooms form the climax to the exhibition and are simply stunning. In the first of these The Japanese Bridge c1923-25 is a dense shimmer of deep, rich reds and greens dissolving the form of the bridge so that it is only just perceptible.

The final room is spectacular. On one side is the huge Water Lilies (after 1918) - a 4 metre-wide haze of pale yellow-greens within which occasional highlights of orange-red flowers glow. And opposite is the truly immense triptych, Water Lilies (Agapanthus), c1915-26, altogether some 12 metres wide: this stands not just as the apotheosis of Monet’s career as a painter but is pregnant with the then future possibilities of painting and abstraction. Magnificent.

Richard Salkeld.
(Click on images to enlarge.)

Edouard Manet, Young Woman Among Flowers, 1879

Gustav Klimt, Cottage Garden, 1905-07

Emil Nolde, Large Poppies, 1908

Emil Nolde, Flower Garden (O), 1922

Santiago Rusiñol, Glorieta VII, Aranjuez, 1919

Joaquin Mir y Trinxet, The Artist's Garden, c1922

Claude Monet, Water Lilies, after 1918

Claude Monet, Water Lilies (Agapanthus), c1915-26 (detail)

Claude Monet, Water Lilies (Agapanthus), c1915-26 (installation view)