Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900 - The National Gallery

Isidore Kaufmann, Young Rabbi, c1910

Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900 is at The National Gallery until 12 January 2014.  
Turn of the century Vienna was an extraordinary place: the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a cosmopolitan centre notable for the richness of its Jewish culture (to be all but wiped out by the rise of Nazism in the 1930s), avant-garde experiments in art, architecture and music, and the invention of psychoanalysis. It was the city of Sigmund Freud, painters Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, architect Adolf Loos, composer Arnold Schönberg, critic Karl Krauss amongst others.

This exhibition purports to explore the evolution of modern identity and individualism through the portraits painted in that city. Reviews suggest that the story it tells lacks some clarity and focus but that it includes  some very remarkable drawings and paintings. Laura Cumming, for example draws attention to Klimt's portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl - he died of a stroke before finishing it - and, 

most poignant of all is Schiele's sketch of his young wife (see below), six months pregnant, dying of Spanish flu in October 1918. The pencil carries the febrile trace of death inch by inch across her beautiful face; as the pulse slows, the features sink and the eyes lose their brilliant vitality. The terrible swiftness of this contagion is apparent from the few strands of loose hair caught on her moist brow: the rest is still just as she must have pinned it up so neatly only hours before. Schiele himself would be dead in three days.

Read reviews by Laura Cumming, Adrian Searle, RichardDorment and Brian Sewell; listen to a discussion about the exhibition on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Review (12.10.13)

Egon Schiele, Portrait of Albert Paris von Gütersloh, 1918

Richard Gerstl, Nude Self Portrait with Palette, 1908

Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl, 1917-18

Oskar Kokoschka, Portrait of Hans and Erica Tietze-Conrat, 1909

Egon Schiele, Self Portrait with Raised Bare Shoulder, 1912

Egon Schiele, The Family (Self Portrait), 1918

Egon Schiele, portrait sketch of his wife, 1918

Sarah Lucas - Whitechapel Gallery

Sarah Lucas: SITUATION Absolute Beach Man Rubble is at Whitechapel Gallery until 15 December 2013.
This retrospective shows Lucas to be the most impressive and polymorphously perverse survivor of the YBA (Young British Artists) generation. Much of her work is gloriously vulgar and funny; often, it is crude but simultaneously displaying a sophistication, wit and sureness of touch which marks her out as an exceptional artist. This combination is exemplified by Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab (below) which, for my money, is one of the great works of art of the C20.
Read reviews by Adrian Searle, Alastair Sooke, Jackie Wullschlager.

Sarah Lucas, Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, 1992

Sarah Lucas, Au Naturel, 1994

Sarah Lucas, I Might be Shy but I'm Still a Pig, 2000

Sarah Lucas, from the Nud series, 2009 (?)

Sarah Lucas, [bronze figure], 2012-13?

Sarah Lucas, installation shot of SITUATION Absolute Beach Man Rubble at Whitechapel Gallery

Francis Bacon / Henry Moore - Ashmolean Museum

Francis Bacon, Study for a Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1965

Francis Bacon / Henry Moore: Flesh and Bone is at the Ashmolean Museum until 19 January 2014.
Henry Moore, sculptor, (1898-1986) and Francis Bacon, painter, (1905-1992) were contemporaries and, arguably, through the 1950s and 60s the most successful and famous British artists of their generation. They were however very different men, as neatly described by Simon Wilson in the RA Magazine:

Henry Moore: dour, taciturn, down-to-earth, sober Yorkshireman and countryman, emphatically heterosexual, notably uxorious, draughtsman of genius, sculptor to his fingertips. His friend the poet Stephen Spender once noted how ‘normal as a man’ Moore was. Francis Bacon: garrulous, wasp-witted, champagne swilling metropolitan dandy, promiscuous masochistic homosexual with a taste for rough trade, painter of genius who claimed never to make drawings. Moore, sculptor of massively calm monuments of the earth mother in repose; Bacon, painter of grotesquely twisted humanity, writhing agonising in the void.

Though both artists can be seen to have drawn influence from Picasso the moods of their work seem polar opposites: in Alastair Smart's words, A case of existential howls and universal serenity. Nevertheless, this exhibition sets out to find common ground between the two artists: they were both, after all, obsessively preoccupied with the body. Rachel Cooke quotes Myfanwy Piper's perceptive observation in 1963, that Moore 'never forgets… the strength of the bone beneath the flesh' while Bacon 'never forgets that flesh is meat'.

An interesting exhibition. Read reviews by Rachel Cooke, Alastair Smart, Simon Wilson.

Henry Moore, King and Queen, 1952-3

Francis Bacon, Second Version of Triptych, 1944

Henry Moore, Reclining Figure: Festival, 1951

Francis Bacon, Lying Figure in a Mirror, 1971

Henry Moore, Animal Head, 1951

Francis Bacon, Head II, 1949

MA Fine Art Degree Show - University of Gloucestershire

Herdi Ali Kardi

The University of Gloucestershire’s MA Fine Art Degree Show is at Hardwick Centre for Art and Photography, St Paul’s Road, Cheltenham, 18 -22 September 2013.

Course leader Nat Goodden writes:

The exhibition will feature the work by the graduating artists, Herdi Ali Kardi and Alice Leeman, who both have a strong concern for the human condition and what it is to suffer.

The prints and large-scale drawings exhibited by Herdi Ali Kardi reflect his exposure since childhood to the horrors of war and, as a Kurd from Iraq, to the experience of genocide. He is a story-teller who does not focus on his own personal experiences as much as on those of his people. He does not spell it all out (which could diminish its power to affect), but draws you in to the desolation of a people and their culture under assault, as it has been for his whole life, and with roots reaching back to the early twentieth century and beyond. Despair and courage, resistance and determination, lurk just out of sight. The poetry is there before your eyes.

Alice Leeman’s paintings reflect something much more private. She draws on her experiences as a close observer of fragile states of mind, and in particular of those who are susceptible to chronic anxiety. Her work analogises something that is neither physical nor visible, and takes the language of painting itself – the skin of the canvas, the bones of the stretcher – as a metaphor for the mind and body. Her deconstruction and destabilisation of the elements of painting is about as far as could be from a dry intellectual exercise; it eloquently represents something that may be in us all, in the fragile chemistry that shapes who we are, and how we respond to the world outside. 

MA Fine Art is a practice-based course taken as one-year full-time or two-year part-time study. All forms of contemporary practice are supported, and backed up by a programme of critical, theoretical and professional studies.

Alice Leeman

Albert Irvin - Plymouth Art College

Albert Irvin, Plimsoll, 1979

I have a soft spot for Albert Irvin's joyous abstract paintings, particularly his work of the 1970s and 80s. Albert Irvin: Plimsoll is showing at Plymouth College of Art Gallery until 14 September.
The selection of works for the exhibition come from throughout Irvin's long career - he will celebrate his 91st birthday during the course of this exhibition - but will be themed around the use of blue.
The images selected here are not (necessarily) from the show but are my own selection of favourites. See more at at the Albert Irvin website.

Albert Irvin, Flodden, 1978

Albert Irvin, Cathay, 1979

Albert Irvin, Boadicea, 1979

Albert Irvin, Mile End, 1980

Albert Irvin, Sul Ross, 1981

Albert Irvin, Linden, 1983

Art & Photography Playlist #12 The Band: When I Paint My Masterpiece

Songs about Art and Photography: a playlist. #12 The Band: When I Paint My Masterpiece (click to play; click here to play live version; click here to find version by Bob Dylan).

Bob Dylan, Two Sisters, 2008 (?)

Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble

Ancient footprints are everywhere
You can almost think that you're seeing double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs

Gotta hurry on back to my hotel room
Where I got me a date with a pretty little girl from Greece
She promised, she'd be there with me
When I paint my masterpiece

Oh, the hours we spent inside the Coliseum
Dodging lions, and a-wasting time
Oh, those mighty kings of the jungle, I could hardly stand to see 'em
Yes, it sure has been a long, hard drive

Train wheels are running through the back of my memory
When I ran on a hilltop following a pack of wild geese
Someday everything is gonna sound like a rhapsody
When I paint my masterpiece

Sailing round the world in a dirty gondola
Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola

Well, I left Rome, and landed in Brussels
On a plane ride so bumpy that I almost cried
Clergy men in uniform and young girls pulling mussels
Everyone was there to greet me when I stepped inside

Newspaper man eating candy
Had to be held down by big police
But someday every thing's gonna be different
When I paint that masterpiece 

"When I Paint My Masterpiece" by Bob Dylan from The Band: Cahoots, 1971.

The Band

Click on 'Art and Photography Playlist', below, to see all playlist entries; all songs on 'Art & Photography Playlist' on Spotify.