The Painting Space

Abstract paintings of Beatriz Milhazes, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin..

2011-10-27T17:18:00.002Z

There is something appealling about the work of Beatriz Milhazes, something on the edage of textile design yet with a traditional collage quality, symetrical shapes and interplay with the surface...last week at Galerie Max Helzler, Berlin

Noir

'Milhazes plays cultural cliché and tropicalist kitsch against the unyielding rationalism of hard lines, surrounding chaos with cool areas of unfettered colour. It’s an approach which lends her paintings a tension and dynamism that steers familiar iconography into less obviously charted territory. Geometric abstraction lurks behind flourishes of an unfettered brightness' wrote Jennifer Higgie, Frieze Magazine.

Carlyle

'Beatriz Milhazes’ work calls to mind cross-cultural references ranging from local flora, Rio's urban verve or Brazilian Baroque. Equally present are echoes of Henri Matisse's papiers découpés, Bridget Riley's early paintings or Brazilian Modernism established by artists such as Tarsila do Amaral in the late 1920s, which reworked and renewed external stimuli by incorporating them into the context of local history and culture.'

Ann Edholm, 'Where is the sky, where?', new Minimalist paintings, Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm

2011-10-21T23:39:00.000Z

Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, 'Where is the sky? Where?' Installation view

A new Malevich?...Ann Edholm 'Where is the sky? Where?' Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm. 'Here are a new body of paintings by recent Carnegie Art Award recipient, Ann Edholm. Working in extended series Edholm stages large, occasionally even monumental, paintings that straddle both geometric abstraction and subtle expressionism. The latter reveals itself in barely perceptible marks made by the brush or, more often, the palette knife, thus destabilizing the seemingly solid compositional patterns of basic geometric shapes.

Ann Edholm, 'Var är himlen? Var?' Oil and wax on canvas, 200 x 200 cm

With an elaborate network of cultural, religious and symbolic references Edholm meticulously merges classical painting with elemental geometric shapes and slight painterly gestures. The size of the canvases and the relationship between form, scale and colour in the compositions subtly define the meeting between viewer and painting.

Over recent years Edholm’s work has become increasingly autobiographical, tying in her mother’s experience of living through the bombings of Berlin at the end of World War II. The exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake is titled after a line in one of Paul Celan’s Romanian poems, the night before the deportations began. Here Edholm presents a group of paintings of varying sizes and proportions that take on the theme of psychologically and historically loaded site. The paintings are not narrative but deal more with a physical sense of presence in which site can be place, city, or the location of transfer or deportation.'

New paintings, Elizabeth Neel at Pillars Corrias, London

2011-09-28T20:20:00.000Z

'When I was three years old, a fox raided the chicken coop on my parent’s farm. The site of the massacre was strewn with evidence of its swift violence. One particular bird had only been partially consumed - almost perfectly bisected in such a way that it’s entire reproductive system was revealed. I could see a series of stages beginning with a yolk and ending with a perfect, shelled egg within that body - fixed at the moment of death in pristine order. This visual experience represented a turning point in my relationship to the world. I now see it as my first clear instantiation that life, and nature underneath it, is a baroque, mysterious thing that hangs precariously on a framework of elegant reason.'

Elizabeth Neel (Deitch)

Elizabeth Neel, 'Almanac' (2011, detail).
Photograph: Elizabeth Neel/Pilar Corrias Gallery/AP

Some intriguing works are on show at the Pillars Corrias Gallery, by the American artist Elizabeth Nee (and grandaughter of Alice Neel). There is a certain naivety to the paintings that are refreshing, what I mean by this is that there are some classic 'no-no's' from art school being totally ignored here, like using masking tape and to make it look like you are using masking tape. But there are some good exploratory works here that push paint around and produce interesting surfaces and juxtapositions of the picture plain's push and pull. Even though much of them are abstract paintings, there are also some that explore everyday domestic settings.

Elizabeth Neel, 'The Grounds', 2011, Acrylic on Paper72.4 x 59.7 cm, (c) Pillars Corrias

In these paintings there is an attempt at gravitas, at suggesting death, to me there remains a nihilistic quality, some of the paintings are based on real life disasters, there are the traces of Romanticism, of Abstract Expressionism and yet the Minimalism of Frank Stella and Ad Reinhardt..Already making a splash in New York, I think we have a future great artist here....

Pia Fries, Krapprhizom Luisenkupfer at Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe, Germany

2011-09-23T22:54:00.001Z

an interesting film from a show earlier this year...

Black paintings, 'Antumbra', Daniel Lergon, Galerie Christian Lethart, Koln, Germany

2011-09-13T20:02:00.002Z

It's time to 'darken the glim' with the fascinating black paintings of Daniel Lergon, 'Antumbra' at Gallerie Christian Lethart. These are reminiscent of the classic minimalist paintings of Frank Stella, Ad Reinhardt or Rauschenberg's painterly abstractions some 40 years ago now. However these have a slick contemporary feel to them, especially the yellow green paintings (see below) for more retrospective paintings click on Daniel Lergon link above.

Daniel Lergon 'Antumbra' oil on canvas, 2011

From the press release: 'For this year’s 'DC OPEN', the Galerie Christian Lethert is presenting a fourth solo exhibition of works by Daniel Lergon (born in 1978). Since beginning his studies at the Universität der Künste (UdK) in Berlin with Professor Lothar Baumgarten, in his painting, Daniel Lergon has been dealing with the correlative interplay between light and surface, and the optical effects and perceptions that result from this. Whereas in his early works, Lergon used color pigments within the range of the color spectrum, applying them to all kinds of transparent, reflecting, and absorptive material surfaces, he later also included colors at the very extremes of the spectrum into his work. His intensive study of the colors was thus always tied to the materiality of the painting’s ground and the question regarding this influence this would have on the viewer’s perception.

Since 2007, Lergon has been working without using color pigments directly, painting instead with colorless, clear lacquer on technical grounds. These initially grey, later white, retro reflexive materials behave unusually concerning how they reflect the light. By using them, Lergon creates a painting that dispenses with color pigments, and which essentially comes about in the special reflection of the light upon the varnish and painting’s ground.'

Daniel Lergon, 'cold fire', 2008, Aerea, Stockholm (not in the show)

'Antumbra'. Here, the theme of light has been linked to the notion of shadows. In his new, black works, instead of using bright, light, reflecting materials Lergon paints on a black ground, which, due to its consistency, reflects the light less intensively. The varyingly dense traces of the transparent painting lacquer yield extremely different intensities of darkness. Hence, the title of the exhibition, 'Antumbra' - a technical term that comes from astronomy and geometric optics and describes the area of a shining surface located behind the occluding shadow of an object.'

Robert Rauschenberg, 'Botanical Vaudaville' Inverleith House, Edinburgh

2011-09-07T21:11:00.001Z

Robert Rauschenberg 'Eco-Echo IV', 1992-3 (detail)
courtesy Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh/Gagosian Gallery.

Robert Rauschenberg is such an accessible and versatile artist, always surprising you with his juxtapositions of materials and ideas, questioning your thinking and approach to art and life. This show at Inverleith House, Edinburgh, is yet another example of quality curating in Scotland, especially after their Joan Mitchell exhibition. How great it would be to see such a show 'South of the Border' especially in London, can't believe it's the first show of his in the UK for 30 years, ho hum...Part of the press release for the show goes like this:

'The American artist Jasper Johns (b.1935) once said of Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) that he had invented more than any artist since Picasso. Rauschenberg has altered the cultural landscape and continues to exert a profound influence on contemporary artists. Robert Rauschenberg 'Botanical Vaudeville' is the first museum exhibition devoted to the artist to take place in the UK in thirty years – and it features thirty seven works made between 1982 and 1998.

Robert Rauschenberg 'Tropical Mill Glut' 1989.
courtesy Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh/Gagosian Gallery

During this time, Rauschenberg was exploring the reflective, textural, sculptural and thematic effects of metal, glass and other reflective surfaces in several series of works. All are represented here, and the paintings and sculptures on display vary from the highly polished glamorous metallic works from the 'Shiner' and 'Borealis' series that celebrate energy and motion, to the Kabal American 'Zephyr' and 'Gluts' series which represent Rauschenberg’s; fascination with the discarded object. He once stated: 'I think painting is more like the real world when it is made out of the real world. These works in particular benefit from being shown in natural light which is such a feature of exhibitions at Inverleith House, revealing their true colour - enhanced by multiple reflections of the viewer and garden which become part of the work.''

There are none of the big works like 'Monogram' (see below) or 'Bed' and the 'Combines', you have to go to Moma for them, however this looks like a an interesting exhibition because they are small, intimate and poetic works, in the way only Rauschenberg can make detritus look poetic.. Click below for that great interview where he discusses buying the goat for the 'Monogram' piece at the Guggenheim show back in the 1990's.

Robert Rauschenberg interview about 'Monogram' Guggenheim retrospective, 1990's

A re-interpretation of Rodin and the figure, Rodin Museum, Paris

2011-08-31T19:36:00.001Z

I love the Rodin Museum, but I must admit, I have'nt been for years..However, this is the last few days of a very interesting exhibition of works by a variety of artists entitled 'Work in Progress, Rodin and the Ambassadors' this exhibition is until 4th September.

Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro, Jean Fautrier, LucioFontana, Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, Willem De Kooning, Joseph Beuys,Marcel Broodthaers, Eduardo Paolozzi, Anthony Caro, Cy Twombly, Eric Cameron,Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, Haim Steinbach, Sophie Ristelhueber, UgoRondinone, Douglas Gordon, Urs Fischer...

Auguste Rodin, 'Etude de robe de chambre pour Balzac'
© Musée Rodin. Photo: Christian Baraja

'Works in Progress, Rodin and the Ambassadors' examines the way in which Rodin’s work is perceived and strives to show not only how his sculpture developed but also how it was and continues to be reinterpreted. The exhibition compares 100 or so works by Rodin (1840-1917) with about 30 post-1945, modern and contemporary works.'

Joseph Beuys, 'Infiltration homogène pour piano à queue; La Peau'
© Adagp, Paris 2011. Photo: CNAC/MNAM Dist.RMN

'This re-appraisal of Rodin’s work also owes something to art, eg. the production of several artists from the postwar period to the present day. Their preoccupations, not only with material and modelling but also with highlighting fragments or combining different components, have had repercussions on the manner in which Rodin is considered and contemporary art is viewed. From Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) to Urs Fischer (born 1973), each of these artists has become an “ambassador” for a certain way of looking at the world, at art, at present and past works.'...

Mondrian I I Nicholson: In Parrellel, Courtauld Gallery, London

2011-08-27T22:57:00.001Z

Ben Nicholson, June, 1937

An exciting exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, London, shall be taking place early next year (from February to May 2012), exploring the relationship between two enigmatic modernist abstract painters of the early 20th Century...

'The story of the creative relationship between the artistsPiet Mondrian and Ben Nicholson is largely untold. Yet during the 1930s theywere leading forces of avant-garde art in Europe.

This exhibition will be the first to offer a comprehensiveaccount of the parallel artistic paths charted by Mondrian and Nicholson duringthis remarkable decade. It will bring together an extraordinary group ofpaintings and reliefs to show how each artist was driven by a profound beliefin the potential of abstract art to attain the highest aesthetic and spiritualpower.'

I'll keep you posted of developments...

Exhibition of early abstractions by Kandinsky at Guggenheim Museum, New York

2011-08-22T20:59:00.002Z

I am not a huge fan of Kandinsky,but I understand his significance as an artist and what he brought to earlymodernist thinking. This exhibition at the Guggenheim, New York, from21st October until 15th January 2012 reunitesthe key early works Kandinsky painted. Thisparticular painting above, entitled 'Painting with White Boarder', wascompleted nearly 100 years ago. Inspired by a trip the artist took to Moscow atthe end of 1912. When he returned to Munich, hanging out with artists who wouldform 'Der Blaue Reiter' group and where he had been living intermittently since1896, Kandinsky searched for a way to visually record the “extremely powerfulimpressions” of his native Russia that lingered in his memory. Over a period offive months, he explored various motifs and compositions in study after study,moving freely between pencil, pen and ink, watercolor, and oil. After heproduced at least sixteen studies, Kandinsky finally arrived at the pictorialsolution to the painting: the white border.

From the Guggenheim: 'This exhibition,co-organized with the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., willreunite for the first time the Guggenheim’s final version of the painting fromMay 1913 with twelve related drawings and watercolors and one major oil sketchand will feature the results of an extensive conservation study of the Guggenheimand Phillips paintings. This study revealed a previously unknown paintingbeneath the surface of the Phillips’s 'Sketch I' for 'Painting with WhiteBorder' (Moscow). A rare glimpse into Kandinsky’s creative process, thispresentation reveals the gradual and deliberate way the artist sought totranslate his ideas into a bold new language of abstraction.

Tracing Kandinsky’s working method through aroughly chronological display of twelve drawings and watercolors and one majoroil sketch related to 'Painting with White Border'. According to a May 1913essay Kandinsky wrote about the picture, later published in an album entitledKandinsky 1901–1913 (1913), the artist executed the first oil sketch (owned bythe Phillips Collection) “immediately upon my return from Moscow in December1912.” The orientation of his preliminary studies evolved from a vertical to ahorizontal format, and he used pencil, pen and ink, and watercolor throughoutthe many iterations.

Kandinsky explored key motifs reminiscent ofhis native Russia, including 'the troika' (a three-horse sled) and 'SaintGeorge'. Ultimately the artist executed more studies than he had for any of hisprevious paintings before resolving the composition with a soft, undulatingwhite border that he compared to a white wave. In his seminal 1911 treatise('On the Spiritual in Art: And Painting in Particular'), Kandinsky wrote thatthe color white expresses a “harmony of silence. . .pregnant withpossibilities.”

The conservation study supportsinterpretations of Kandinsky’s working method. For example, the directapplication of the brush to canvas of 'Sketch I' implies a more spontaneoustechnique as compared to the more methodical treatment of the final work,'Painting with White Border', in which Kandinsky used a graphite pencil to layout compositional elements before painting. Studies of microscopic samples ofpaint from both works show that Kandinsky created his own palette out ofcombinations of as many as ten different pigments per hue.

The conservation team also discovered apreviously unknown painting beneath the surface of 'Sketch I' for 'Paintingwith White Border' (Moscow). The underpainting, a representational landscapewith figures, has been attributed to the German artist Gabriele Münter, Kandinsky’scompanion from 1903 to 1916, based on its similarity to Münter’s gouache,Garden Concert on view in this exhibition, and a canvas on the same subject ina private collection. While there are few known instances of Kandinsky paintingover an existing canvas and no other known instance of him painting over a workby Münter, limited study has been done of Kandinsky’s canvases to date. Futureresearch and conservation analysis may better clarify the attribution of theunderpainting.'

Picasso painting 'Buste de Femme' in Palestine

2011-06-26T12:12:00.001Z

For the first time a Picasso painting entitled 'Buste de Femme' from 1943 has come to Palestine to be shown at the International Art Academy. It's a cubist deconstruction of a woman's face, dominated in grey. This exhibition was two years in the making and is a very exciting opportunity to build a new cultural international cultural dialogue in the occupied territory of Ramallah in Palestine. The Picasso painting costs £4.5 million and is on loan from the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. Only three people at a time will be able to see it to ensure the humidity, in the purpose-built viewing room, does not get damaged.

Van Abbe museum's employees hang Pablo Picasso's "Buste de Femme" on a wall at the International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah.

What is also interesting is how Picasso can still stir the waters. Why does a Picasso, who died in 1973, still have such resonance in 2011? Also, perhaps art can play a more central role in difficult world zones where conflict has become the norm and cultural life is in limbo. Could we see other paintings being loaned from other prestigious galleries and what works would they be?..

At a cost of £50,000 in insurance and transport, the project began when Khaled Hourani, the director of the International Art Academy in Ramallah, visited the museum in 2008 and suggested a loan. "This started off as a crazy idea to bring a European masterpiece to a war-zone but I was only half-joking, " he said.

Detail of Picasso's, 'Buste de Femme' (1943) , oil-on-canvas work. Photograph: Peter Cox for the Guardian

From the Guardian Newspaper UK: "I want this to appeal to people like my mother and art students. Picasso remains inspirational because his work is related to war, peace and freedom."

Hourani hopes that 'Buste de Femme' will not be the last masterpiece to be exhibited in the territory. "We want this to become a normality but it is the last time I will do it. It has taken two years to bring one painting but the taboo has been broken and it will be easier for someone else to do it," he said. "The journey here adds meaning to the painting. It highlights issues of the freedom of movement and political agreement."

Read more on Van Abbemuseum here and AL Arabiya News

Kurt Schwitters/MERZ updates, exhibitions and Merzbarn UK

2011-06-23T10:45:00.000Z

I have always been influenced by the work of Schwitters, since my first few days at art school. In the UK his influence is everywhere, in fact it is hard to 'sweat it out' as Hoffman, once said about Cubism. In British art, it seems a default setting in fine art practice..this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but his influence runs deep. So I thought I'd put a post together of the diverse 'Schwitteresque' goings on out there.

It is the last few days of the 'Kurt Schwitters: Colour and Collage' exhibition at Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey. This is an excellent exhibitions of small scale collage works and a recreation of the Merzbau, see below, runs until 26th June.

Kurt Schwitters, 'The Cherry Picture' 1921, hear an excellent audio guide from MOMA here.

'From now through, 2011, the Princeton University Art Museum this is the first survey of this pioneering artist's work in the United States since his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1985. The exhibition will provide an unparalleled opportunity to view Schwitters's experiments in depth, including a full-scale reconstruction of his groundbreaking Merzbau, which has never before been seen in this region.'

Born in Hannover, Germany, Schwitters (1887-1948) is one of the most influential artists from the interwar avant-garde. During a period of social and economic turmoil, he developed a unique practice, one that merged art and life, embraced disparate media and utilized found objects and printed materials, most of them the discarded remnants of everyday life. 'Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage' was organized by the Menil Collection in Houston, see my earlier Schwitters post on this. It's about time, there was show like this in the UK.

A recording of Schwitters performing his phonetic poem (1922-32), will also be highlighted at the exhibition, Ursonate listen to a version by the artists himself here.

There is a reconstruction of Schwitters's first Merzbau, destroyed by Allied bombs in 1943. In the UK, there has been an extensive project to restore the Merzbarn, in Elterwater, near Ambleside, in the Lake District. He was working on this before his death, see it here. Also there is Merzman, this an ongoing series of projects based in the UK that explores the infliuence of Schwitters, and is well worth looking at.


Kurt Schwitters, 'MZ 371' collage, 1922 (C) Menil Collection

Some background on Schwitters: In 1919, Schwitters named this body of work Merz-a neologism derived from the German kommerz (commerce)-which culminated in a series of collages, assemblages, experimental poems, prints and sculptures; the most famous being the Merzbau, a three-dimensional environment the artist began in the 1920s. Schwitters's work bridges some of the period's most important artistic movements, including Expressionism, Dada, Constructivism and Abstraction. Schwitters exerted a profound influence on artistic developments after World War II; Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, among others, considered him a source of inspiration, and contemporary installation art is inconceivable without the Merzbau. Schwitters was trained as a painter, and despite his experiments with other media, he never ceased painting. Indeed, painting informs almost all of his work, as witnessed by the passages of gouache, chalk, oils, paste and watercolor in his collages and assemblages-additions that transform the materials they cover.

Merzbau Reconstruction, see Tate Research Papers here.

'Cy Twombly & Nicholas Poussin: Arcadian Painters', Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

2011-06-17T14:45:00.003Z

This is a great opportunity to consider the work of Cy Twombly with one of his hero's Poussin at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London from 29th June until 25th September.

Cy Twombly, 'Hero and Leander' (To Christopher Marlowe) Rome , 1985

This is a fascinating insight into the different approaches both artists have to their work with over two centuries dividing them. Both artists have explored a sensibility to their work that retains a romanticism, mystic and enigmatic quality through the use of materials and paint.

'I would've liked to have been Poussin, if I'd had a choice, in another time.' Cy Twombly

Nicolas Poussin, 'Rinaldo and Armida', oil on canvas, c.1760

This exhibition will look at these two figures side by side for the first time, though they are separated by three centuries, the two artists nonetheless share remarkable similarities. The connections are highlighted through the key themes of Arcadia and the pastoral, Venus and Eros, anxiety and theatricality and mythological figures that are central to both artists' work.

As part of the exhibition, the Gallery is also extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to display Poussin's 'Sacrements' painted between 1637 and 1642 for his Roman friend and patron Cassiano dal Pozzo. As a set, Poussins 'Sacrements' represent a high point in Western European art.

A Conversation with Sir Nicholas Serota, July 19th 6-9PM

Sir Nicholas Serota, Director of Tate, talks to Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Curator of International Modern Art at Tate Modern and of the exhibition Twombly and Poussin 'Arcadian Painters' about his long involvement curating Cy Twombly’s work and the exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Eva Rothschild at The Hepworth, Yorkshire

2011-06-17T08:35:00.000Z

This is a powerful exhibition of an artist at the top of her game, Eva Rothschil, creates enigmatic three dimensional abstractions and is the first artist to be shown at the UK's new premier artspace in Yorkshire, The Hepworth... Celebrating the legacy of sculptor Barbara Hepworth.

Eva Rothschild, (c) The Hepworth, Wakefield

' 'Hot Touch' is a group of new and recent sculptures and photographs by Eva Rothschild. Her sculptures are made from a range of materials including fabric, leather and wood, bringing together the hand-made and the industrially produced. The works often combine the forms and strategies of modernist art; squares, triangles, holes and repetition, with an array of visual associations and symbols, such as totemic columns of piled heads and draped snakes.

This exploration of the power and meaning of objects produces an encounter between the minimal and the magical. Leaning against walls, suspended in mid-air, or balancing impossibly, Rothschild’s sculptures have an ambiguous and powerful presence, exploring universally recognised forms and symbols.'

The Hepworth, Wakefield, Yorkshire, England

The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication with an essay by Prof. Anne Wagner, author 'Mother Stone: The vitality of modern British Sculpture' (Yale University Press, 2005).

Egon Schiele: 'Women' unseen paintings and drawings at Richard Nagy, London

2011-06-10T10:02:00.003Z

Egon Schiele, painting on paper, gouache. c.1910. Richard Nagy Ltd.

Another powerful exhibition, not seen in London for some time, is currently on show at the Richard Nagy Gallery. Check out Jonathan Jones's article in the Guardian here, there are also more slides of the works on show. The work continues until 30th July.

For many, Schiele is still a controversial painter and his lifestyle still provocative. In my view, there are few painters from the twentieth century that are not controversial, from Schiele's contemporary Kilmt, to Picasso. Jonathan, states in his article:

'There is a definite sense of discovering secrets, trespassing on hidden private lives, at the Schiele show,...The exhibition collects nearly 50 masterpieces – fragile works on paper – that dealer Richard Nagy has sold throughout his career and has borrowed back from private collectors to mount one of the most spectacular Schiele shows ever seen in the UK.'

This exhibition exhibits drawings on paper in watercolour and gouache. He creates poses that are intimate and yet for public consumption, many of these poses reflect the wider feelings explored by German Expressionism and New Objectivity movements across Germany and Europe in the 1920's and 30's. In my ways he predicted the voyeuristic desire that is so prevalent in society since WWI. He died at 28 of influenza in 1918. There are some self-portraits in the exhibition, including the infamous 'Eros'...

Egon Schiele, Reclining Female Nude with Violet Stockings, 1910. Gouache, watercolour and black crayon on paper, 31.6 x 44.9 cm (12 ½ x 17 5/8 in). Private Collection, Courtesy of Richard Nagy Ltd, London.

Picasso, Miro, Dali-Angry Young Men: The Birth of Modernity

2011-06-04T12:24:00.001Z

This is a fascinating exhibition on the relationships between the Picasso, Dali and Miro, currently exhibited at the Foundation Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy until 17th July. This exhibition documents the influences each artist had on each other, the wider painting scene in Spain, and in turn, the legacy they left on the culture of the early Twentieth Century and the development of modernism. What is also interesting about this exhibition is how the strong political convictions are explored especially with regard to the early Picasso and Miro pieces, many not exhibited before. there is also some strong abstract, semi-abstract works by both artists. There is a walk through each room here. The show is curated by Eugenio Carmona, Christoph Vitali.

Pablo Picasso 'Harlequin and his Girlfriend' 1901, Pushkin Museum

'The exhibition is dedicated to the early work of Picasso, Miró and Dalí, which played a decisive role in the beginning of modern art in Spain. The exhibition concentrates on Picasso's pre-cubist period 1900 - 1905, whilst Juan Miró's works of 1915-1920 are presented along with Salvador Dali's from 1920-1925, both artists painting in the period before the discovery of surrealism. Each artist will be represented by 25 - 30 masterpieces selected to show aspects of the three artists in their earliest periods, works that are rarely shown in mainstream catalogues and exhibitions. For instance, Picasso's early work was often coloured by his strong political convictions.

Joan Miro 'Poem Painting' c.1925

In Madrid in 1901, Picasso and his anarchist friend Francisco de Asís Soler founded the magazine Arte Joven (Young Art), which published five issues. Picasso illustrated the journal, mostly contributing grim cartoons depicting and sympathizing with the state of the poor. Miró too understood art as political, and Miró's oft-quoted assassination of painting is derived from a dislike of bourgeois art of any kind, especially when used as a way to promote cultural identity among the wealthy. Specifically, Miró saw Cubism in this way, and he is quoted as saying I will break their guitars, referring to Picasso and Braque's early Cubist paintings. Much younger than Picasso and Miró, Dalí was expelled from the Academia in 1926 shortly before his final exams when he stated that no one on the faculty was competent enough to examine him. His mastery of painting skills is well documented in his early works, such as the flawlessly realistic Girl at the window, which was painted in 1926. That same year he made his first visit to Paris where he met with Pablo Picasso, whom young Dalí revered - Picasso had already heard favourable things about Dalí from Joan Miró.'

'Zig Zag: Deliberations on construction, sequence and colour' @ Charlie Dutton Gallery, London

2011-06-01T23:53:00.054Z

Andrew Bick, Katrina Blannin, Isha Bohling, Patricj Howlett, Vaness jackson, Marta Marce, Jost Munster, Julian Wakelin

This is an innovative and diverse exhibition of new developments in abstraction. The exhibition which is opening this week at Charlie Dutton Gallery (Holborn Tube) Princeton Street, London from this Friday (Private View) 9th June-2nd July, 2011.

These artists have developed an understanding for the possibility of an ‘internal logic’ in their work; an idea which artists such as Mary and Kenneth Martin talked about in their teaching in the 1950s, as well as explore ideas of ‘colour interaction’ and ‘colour juxtaposition’.

Isha Bohling

'In her essay, ‘The Writings of Mary Martin’ 1990, Hilary Lane discusses Mary Martin’s idea that all ‘words’ or information needed to describe the artworks should be embedded in the work itself; that written language cannot always express or explain the processes and decisions made during their construction. Mary Martin wanted the story of how her work was made to be clear to the person when looking at it. And although proportion, rhythm and measurement were key she wanted to emphasise the unexpected and a need to remain inventive. Of the process of construction itself Martin wrote that it is: ‘a thinking making process, not necessarily in three dimensions. Internal logic is the key. The success of such a process is wholly dependent on a right choice of symbols. The choice is based on intuition and experience.’

Jost Munster, similar works in 'Zig Zag'

The work in this show examines how artists are still discovering new visual ideas, through the complex and technically challenging process of applying paint and other materials onto a ‘blank canvas’. It is hoped that through the process of contrasting and comparing an opportunity is provided for debate and discussion with regard to visual language: a small critical forum for artists and audience to consider these works and the concepts, methods or systems behind their construction.'

Otto Dix at the Institute of Foreign Affairs Gallery, Berlin

2011-06-01T13:12:00.010Z

There is an interesting exhibition of the works of Otto Dix, the fascinating German artist who worked in both Expressionism and Dada at the Institute of Foreign Affairs Gallery in Berlin, Germany. The exhibition Otto Dix : Social Criticism Prints 1920-1924, 'Der Kreig (war) Etching Set 1924 runs until 7th August.

Otto Dix, etching, circa 1920

'With more than 600 drawings from the years 1914 to 1918 were done at various theatre's of war in Belgium, France and Russia, in the course of his military service. These protocols of war, created on the spot and of high artistic value, together with his own memories of the horrors of World War I, also formed the basis of a later grandiose serial work entitled "The War", published in 1924 by Karl Nierendorf in Berlin.

The cycle, consisting of fifty separate drawings and often compared to Goya's 'Desastres de la Guerra', (Disasters of War) does not only give an authentic and horrifying portrayal of the terrible trench fighting that took place in the great battles of this first world war-it also unmasks the 'moloch' of war for what it truly is. This series of etchings, which ranks particularly highly among the main works of Dix's oeuvre, forms the center of attention of this exhibition.

Otto Dix, etching, c.1920

Dix never imagined that he could change people, i.e. humanity as such, by means of his works. But for these works, paintings and prints against war, he drew the rage and the hate, up to and including defamation, of the Nazi regime, which, after coming to power in 1933, removed him from his chair, as one of the first Academy professors to suffer this, and forbade him to exhibit.

The truth was important for Dix, also in his focus upon marginalized social groups of the postwar era, such as war veterans who had lost limbs, etc. and prostitutes; the collection included in this exhibition shows characteristic examples of such unfortunates. This inexorable drive to show the truth was already a source of agitation and protest among his contemporaries before the Nazis were in power.

'I will either be famous or infamous', he once said as a young man. He has become both.'

Abstraction: Thomas Muller @ Fruehsorge|contemporary drawings, Berlin

2011-06-01T11:10:00.001Z

Thomas Müller, 'Untitled' 2010, pencil chalk and ink on handmade paper, 160 x 115 cm

It's the last couple of days of Thomas Müller at Fruehsorge | contemporary drawings, Heidestrasse, Berlin, next to the contemporary art museum Hamburger Bahnhof. This exhibition will run until 3rd June 2011.

Muller is an artist who works in abstraction and only uses the medium of drawing, and I can't think of a better place for an exhibition than the Fruehsorge. He has shown at the New York Drawing Centre and in the exhibition “Linea, Linie, Line” at the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations extensive drawing overview in Bonn. His work is also present among numerous German and international collections such as Kunsthalle Hamburg, Pinakothek der Moderne München, the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France. In 2010 Müller was nominated for the Fondation Guerlain’s renowned “Prix de dessin contemporain”.

Müller's work explores 'the substance and nature of drawing and the drawing process itself, which materializes as a stroke or trace on the page and means the line doesn’t depict nor describe but becomes the subject matter itself.' What is also interesting is the use of such diverse materials such as chalk, ink, oils, acrylics, ballpoint pen, colour and led pencil and yet he retains a coolness to the final image in that he doesn't make that use of the materials the main thing about it. He explored the space of the picture plain with minimal markings in a rythmn of interwoven grids and wave-like structures, that have a zen like quality. Gorgeous..

‘A Sort of Night to the Mind, A KIND OF NIGHT FOR OUR THOUGHTS’ exhibition @ Arch 402 Gallery, London

2011-05-17T22:49:00.000Z

This is an interesting mixed show of contemporary painters in London at the Arch 402 Gallery, some abstract, some semi-abstract, figurative and cross-disciplinary. This is showing until 10 June, 2011 (gallery hours: Wed-Fri 11-6, Sat-Sun 11-3 PM).

Roger Kelly, 'Separator' 2011

Phillip Allen, Edwin Aitken, Andrew Bick, Simon Burton, Varda Caivano, Leigh Clarke, Nigel Cooke, Moyra Derby, Pamela Golden, Mark Hampson, Beth Harland, Mark Harris, Vincent Hawkins, Claude Heath, Paul Housley, Roger Kelly, Bob Matthews, Andrea Medjesi-Jones, Jost Münster, Martina Schmid, Joel Tomlin, Phoebe Unwin, Julian Wakelin

'A Sort of Night to the Mind, A KIND OF NIGHT FOR OUR THOUGHTS', an exhibition of twenty-three UK based artists engaged with painting. Curated by Moyra Derby and Bob Matthews, the exhibition will also host a series of talks and educational events led by some of the featured artists.

Two alternative translations of Honoré de Balzac’s description of illusion from the 1832 short story ‘The Purse’ provide the title for this exhibition. First shown at The Herbert Read Gallery at the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury, ‘A Sort of Night to the Mind, A KIND OF NIGHT FOR OUR THOUGHTS’ demonstrates the recurring relevance of illusion and in counterpoint, materiality. Illusion and materiality can be argued as so inevitable in the context of painting as to hardly warrant remark, but at the same time they muster such historically resonant responses and strength of feeling that they can feel like a prompt to take sides. However it is an interest in the productive play between these two qualities of a marked surface that has brought this group of works together, an acknowledgment of the imaginative potential of oppositions; “In the half light the physical tricks used by art to make things seem real disappear completely.... At that hour illusion reigns supreme; perhaps it comes with the night? Is not illusion a kind of night for our thoughts, a night which we furnish with dreams.'

Andrew Bick, oil on canvas, 2010

A few thoughts on abstraction/political art and 'Joan Miro: The Ladder of Escape' exhibition, Tate Modern, London

2011-05-16T22:30:00.000Z

We shouldn't underestimate the significance of Joan Miro, currently on show at Tate Modern, 'Joan Miro: The Ladder of Escape'. We can see the 20th Century unfold through his work, about 150 works on show, from early Fauvist pieces, through Cubism and into Surrealism. By the 1960's he was responding to the developments in abstraction taking place in both Europe and America. I wonder if we'd have CoBrA, Dubuffet, Tapies, the playfulness of Arte Povera and many other movements that have the same 'naivety' yet retain a strong political presence, if not for the likes of Miro. This work entitled 'Fireworks, I,II,II' is a great triptych about space and spontaneity, from a man in his eighties with fire in his belly.


Joan Miro 'Fireworks, I,II,III' oil on canvas, 1974 (c) Artobserved

Parallels to Robert Motherwell and especially his 'Elegy to the Spanish Republic' as well as his 'Zen' lithographs abound here, they almost echo each other across the Atlantic. Many of the critics in the British press have focused on the early Miro works as the most significant, but I think the curators (see BBC interview with Matthew Gale here and Marko Danie l) have done well in bringing a sympathetic understanding to the late works, showing his experimental and versatile approach to his art-making in the last few rooms of the exhibition.

Robert Motherwell 'Elegy to the Spanish Republic' oil on canvas, 1961. (c) Metropolitan Museum

Most poignant was the last painting in Room 13, entitled 'Tete' (Head) (I unfortunately can't find an image for it). It was a painting started in the 1940's and finished in 1974. It is a black, dark mass with one red beady eye in the centre and a hand in the top left, is it waving or drowning? It has a subtle power suggesting imprisonment, it reminds me of Paul Klee's 'Captive' or 'Embrace' from 1939, that echo a different oppressive era. This is where the strength of Miro lies, in his emotional and political sensibilities with paint as his tool.


Paul Klee 'Embrace' oil on paper, 1939

Downstairs we passed through the Turbine Hall and saw what remains of Ai Weiwei's 'Sunflower Seeds' being demounted and bagged up. There were signs reminding the public of his subsequent arrest and I thought how apt that last Miro painting of show was, but also how powerful abstraction in painting can be in such difficult times.

'I understand that an artist is someone who, in the midst of others' silence, uses his own voice to say something and who makes sure that what he says is not useless, but something that is useful to mankind.' Joan Miro


Ai Weiwei's bagged up 'Sunflower seeds', Turbine Hall, Tate Modern (c) David Moxon

Gillian Ayres exhibition at Arnolfini, Bristol

2011-03-07T12:05:00.001Z

May 12 -3 July 2011

There is to be a new exhibition of the artist Gillain Ayres at Arnolfini, Bristol. She was considered one of the most important British painters working in abstraction in the post-war period. Particularly noted for her wide variety of mark-making styles and use of rhythm and colour. Ayres exhibited at Arnolfini during its early days, and her painting 'Break-Off', 1961, painted the year Arnolfini was established, has been selected for this exhibition by Annabel Rees, co-founder of Arnolfini especially for our 50th anniversary programme. Break-off is presented alongside a new work that Ayres painted this year.

Gillian Ayres 'Break Off', Oil on Canvas, 1961 (c) Tate Gallery

See more of her paintings at the Alan Cristea Gallery

Modernist film and Talk: 'Franco Albini and Museums design in Genoa in the 1950's'

2011-01-19T10:21:00.000Z

'New Museum: Franco Albini and Museum Design in Genoa in the 1950s'
Tuesday 8 March 2011 at 18.45 (doors open at 18.00) at Estorick Museum, London

'New Museum' is the latest 16mm film by artists Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone.

Focussing on the radical, Modernist exhibition designs of Franco Albini and his collaboration with museum director Caterina Marcenaro in the early 1950s, the film features material shot in the galleries of the Palazzo Bianco and Palazzo Rosso in Genoa. The screening will be accompanied by a discussion between the artists and Professor Robert Lumley of University College London. Tickets £8 or £5 for full-time students and Estorick members.

Stills from New Museum

2011-01-10T00:06:00.000Z

Nam June Paik (1932-2006) was a truly visionary artist. He took Marshall McLuhan literally with regard to the 'Medium is the Message'. An early pioneer of video art and influenced heavily by John Cage as a performance artist and composer. Paik was one of the most innovative artists of the 20th century and Tate Liverpool, in collaboration with FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) are presenting the first major retrospective of his work since the artist’s death and the first exhibition of Paik’s work in the UK since 1988.

Nam June Paik at Tate Liverpool showcases around ninety works from all phases of his career, many shown in the UK for the first time, which we should realize is an important aspect of this exhibition, introducing Paik to a young technology savvy generation for the first time, may have long lasting creative consequences...

The exhibition celebrates Paik as the inventor of 'media art', mixing together through abstraction, diverse media from paint to technology, from low tech to satellite works. At a time when television was still a novelty, Paik foresaw the future popularity of this new and exciting medium. Thought provoking works like 'TV Buddha' (1989), explore the clashing cultures of East and West, old and new, while 'Video Fish' (1979-992) considers nature versus the man made, featuring both television sets and live fish in aquariums.

With artworks ranging from scores of early music performances and Paik’s involvement in the Fluxus movement to TV works, impressive robot sculptures and large-scale video installations; Tate Liverpool’s exhibition looks likely to be a memorable show.

The exhibition continues at FACT. Focusing on Paik's innovative use of creative technology, FACT will showcase the major laser installation 'Laser Cone '(1998) for the first time in the UK, along with sixteen single channel video works, including 'Global Groove' 1973 and groundbreaking satellite videos 'Good Morning Mr Orwell' 1984 and 'Bye Bye Kipling' 1986. The 21st Century is here at last....

See the Tate/FACT Nam June Paik trailor here

A similar post on Nam June Paik also appears on Abstraktion.org

Modern British Art in 'Restless Times: Art in Britain 1914-1945'

2011-01-08T22:30:00.002Z

This is an excellent exhibition of British art on show at the Millennium Gallery in Sheffield until 30th January. It explores the social impact of WWI on the wider society but also how modern art was attempting to break out of the the very conventional visual culture that existed between the wars. This exhibitions shows us through the sculptures and drawings of Henry Moore, the geometric abstract paintings of David Bomberg in his painting 'In The Hold', the famous 'Bird Swallowing a Fish' sculpture by Henri Gaudier Brzeska, and many others, how powerful these works remain nearly a century later.

David Bomberg, 'In the Hold' (c) Tate, London

We must remember how British modern art is a complicated response to our wider connection with the world. On one hand Europe and the other America. We have never totally embraced 'Modernism' as warmly as our European friends did in these intervening decades, we had to somehow 'translate' modernism into our own identity. Hence we have a fusion of styles and processes, from landscapes, figuration and social commentary, through semi-abstraction, a Surreal form of Realism (see below Evelyn Dunbar's, 'A Land Girl and the Bail Bull' 1945) and a strange form of 'British' Cubism that became our form of Abstraction. All these styles never seem to coalesce as a body of work, in the way our French or German counterparts do and yet through exhibitions like this one, we come to understand that this is the beauty of modern twentieth century British art, it is eccentric and eclectic, yet it's honest and innovative.


Evelyn Dunbar, A Land Girl and the Bail Bull, 1945 © Tate, London 201	0

From the devastating impact of war and a retreat from the harsh realities of life, to the celebration of the pastoral idyll and the embracing of new ideas and technologies, the exhibition examines how artists engaged with both the uncertainties and possibilities of the time.

We are, some hundred years later, beginning to appreciate our approach to modernity through our modern art, and for that reason this type of exhibition would have travelled well around the country. The Tate and its Great British Art Debate and the Millenium Gallery as well as other regional collections that have lent work, have done well in curating such an interesting and educational exhibition.


Clive Branson, 'Bombed Women and Searchlights' 1940 © The Estate of Clive Branson / Tate, London 2010

'Restless Times' brings together over 150 significant works drawn from national and regional collections including Tate, Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums and Museums Sheffield. other works on display are: Cyril Power, 'The Tube Station' (1932), CRW Nevinson, 'Twentieth Century', John Nash, 'The Cornfield' (1918), William Roberts, 'The Cinema' (1920), Clive Branson, 'Selling the 'Daily Worker' outside Projectile Engineering Works' (1937), Barbara Hepworth, 'Mother and Child' (1934), Henry Moore, 'Shadowy Shelter' (1940) and Ceri Richards, 'Blossoms' (1940). The exhibition will also include a number of contemporary works including a new commission by Hew Locke.

Again, it is a shame this exhibition is not touring across the country...

Drawing exhibition 'On Line' at MOMA, NY

2010-12-26T22:32:00.000Z

This is an interesting exhibition exploring the development of drawing in the Twentieth Century. Though this exhibition shows a diverse approach it also seems quite conceptual in nature..

Press Release: On Line explores the radical transformation of the medium of drawing throughout the twentieth century, a period when numerous artists subjected the traditional concepts of drawing to a critical examination and expanded the medium's definition in relation to gesture and form. In a revolutionary departure from the institutional definition of drawing, and from the reliance on paper as the fundamental support material, artists instead pushed line across the plane into real space, thus questioning the relation between the object of art and the world.

On Line includes approximately three hundred works that connect drawing with selections of painting, sculpture, photography, film, and dance (represented by film and documentation). In this way, the exhibition makes the case for a discursive history of mark making, while mapping an alternative project of drawing in the twentieth century. The exhibition includes works by a wide range of artists, both familiar and relatively unknown, from different eras of the past century and from many nations, including Aleksandr Rodchenko, Alexander Calder, Karel Malich, Eva Hesse, Anna Maria Maiolino, Richard Tuttle, Mona Hatoum, and Monika Grzymala.

This is a great gallery for an archive of a variety of 20th Century (and earlier) drawings, etchings and other works on paper. Spaightwood Galleries, USA.

Miro at Tate Modern, London, April 2011

2010-12-21T12:32:00.008Z


Joan Miro, Head of a Catalan Peasant, 1925

Press Release: Tate Modern

Tate Modern

Joan Miro: The Ladder of Escape

Thursday 14 April – Sunday 11 September 2011

Sunday to Thursday, 10.00–18.00.

Friday and Saturday, 10.00–22.00.

Last admission into exhibitions 17.15 (Friday and Saturday 21.15)

Tate Modern will present the first major retrospective of Joan Miró (1893–1983) to be held in London for almost 50 years. Opening on 14 April 2011, Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape will bring together over 150 paintings, works on paper and sculptures by one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists. The exhibition will draw on collections from around the world to represent the astonishing breadth of Miró’s output. It will also explore the wider context of his work, bringing to light the artist’s political engagement and examining the influence of his Catalan identity, the Spanish Civil War and the rise and fall of Franco’s regime.

Miró was among the most iconic of modern artists, evolving a Surrealist language of symbols that evokes a sense of freedom and energy in its fantastic imagery and direct colour. Often regarded as a forefather of Abstract Expressionism, his work is celebrated for its serene, colourful allure. However, from his earliest paintings onwards, there is also a more anxious and engaged side to Miró’s practice, reflecting the turbulent political times in which he lived. This exhibition will explore these responsive, passionate characteristics across six decades of his extraordinary career.

Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape will examine the artist’s varying degrees of engagement over his lifetime. These are rooted in the complex identity politics associated with Catalonia, as revealed through Miró’s representation of its landscape and traditions. These depictions range across images of rural life, such as The Farm 1921-2 which Ernest Hemmingway bought from the artist in Paris, to the masterly sequence of the Head of a Catalan PeasantAidez l’Espagne and Le Faucheur 1937, as well as more private and troubled responses disguised in the renowned Constellation paintings of 1940, made in the Second World War. The tensions that erupted with the Spanish Civil War in 1935-9 elicited Miró’s explicit protests in 1924-5.

This is in the Tate Collection and is likely to be in the show...

Joan Miro, Women and Bird in the Moonlight 1949

Under Franco’s regime, Miró worked in a kind of internal exile in Spain while cultivating a reputation abroad as a hero of post-war abstraction. Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape will showcase masterpieces from this era, including the sublime The Hope of a Condemned ManMay 1968 and Burnt Canvas II 1973, or creating euphoric explosions of paint in Fireworks 1974, Miró continued to reflect the political mood in his radical and pioneering practice. triptych 1973. The exhibition will also reveal how he captured the atmosphere of protest in the late 1960s. Whether blackening or setting fire to his works, such as

Joan Miró i Ferrà was born in Barcelona on 20 April 1893 and trained as an artist at the Galí Academy from 1912-15. From 1923, he spent part of each year in Paris and became a key figure in the Surrealist movement. With his young family he remained in France during the Spanish Civil War, but returned to Spain when the Germans invaded in 1940. Miró settled in Majorca and remained based there for much of the rest of his life, travelling for major commissions and exhibitions around the world. He died at home on 25 December 1983.

Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape is co-organised by Tate Modern and the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, where it will be seen in October 2011, before travelling to the National Gallery of Art, Washington in May 2012. The exhibition is conceived by Tate curators Matthew Gale, Marko Daniel and Kerryn Greenberg in collaboration with Teresa Montaner, curator at Fundació Joan Miró. Rosa Maria Malet, Director, Fundació Joan Miró, and Vicente Todolí, former Director, Tate Modern, are consultants.

Photographic essay: Wall Surfaces

2010-12-21T01:59:00.000Z

Mondrian in Paris at the Centre Pompidou

2010-12-21T01:19:00.000Z

Piet Mondrian, "composition en rouge, bleu et blanc II", 1937
© Mondrian / Holtzman trust, coll. Centre Pompidou, RMN

A new retrospective exhibition at Centre Pompidou in Paris, re-assesses the legacy of Mondrian and De Stijl. Amazingly this is the first exhibition of Mondrian to truly assess his influence on twentieth century art, especially with his ideas regarding Neo-Plasticism to be held in France. The exhibition explores his commitment to painting from the early years of the twentieth century, through his ground breaking developments with De Stijl combining his ideas on Theosophy with other artists, Theo Van Doesburg and Gerrit Rietveld. They created such a strong social understanding of the role art can play, especially abstraction, in society. His legacy remains not only in abstract paintings of a geometric and reductive style, but also in 'concret' sculpture, city planning, architecture, furniture design and graphic design. You may be interested in an article by Simon Schama, where he has written a review entitled 'Driven to Distraction' in the Financial Times on 17th December 2010. In this he explores the photographs of his studio taken by Andre Kertesz (see below), but also Schama states:

'But don’t go looking for it in this otherwise exhaustive and glorious show which is, after all, a heartfelt celebration of the modernist furnace that once was Paris – even if it took someone as resolutely Dutch as Piet Mondrian to distil abstraction from its fizzing alembic.'


Andre Kertesz, 'Chez Mondrian' 1926

The photo above is a well known photo, but the photo below shows his studio interior and his bed, it defines clearly the simplicity in which his life was lived, also expressed so clearly through his work.

Andre Kertesz, 'Mondrian's Studio' 1926

The exhibition runs through until 21st March 2011 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Modigliani exhibition in Prague

2010-12-09T23:42:00.000Z

All films on artists never work because they cannot catch the visceral nature of the artwork, especially painting, but Andy Garcia gives it a go, great atmosphere and contemporary music.

Modigliani in Prague is organised by the Gallery Vernon.

There is a new exhibition of Modigliani in Prague from December 2010. This which will be the first solo exhibition of his works in the Czech Republic, will be officially opened in Prague's Municipal House Wednesday. The event, which opens to the public on Thursday and it will run through February 28, 2011, is one of the most expensive exhibitions in Prague. The exhibition will present over 60 exhibits, including Modigliani's drawings and oil paintings along with photographs and other documents from his life. Among the most valuable oil paintings are 'Student', 'A Portrait of Marevna' (Russian cubist artist) from 1919 as well as the portraits of artist 'Celso Lagar' (1915) and 'Dr Francois Brabander' (1918).

Left, Modigliani, middle, Picasso and on the right Andre Salmon

Only a couple of Modigliani's paintings were displayed in the National Gallery in Prague in the past. Curator Serena Baccaglini said her aim was to present Modigliani in connection with the work of Czech-born artist Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957), a pioneer of abstract art. She was inspired by a photograph from a joint exhibition of both artists in Paris in 1912. The exhibition in the Municipal House will therefore also offer some paintings by Kupka from private collectors.

'Red Nude' Modigliani, 1917. This is a classic, bit it's not in the show

What can you say about Modigliani? He is one of those artists that has become a myth, you either came out of Paris in the early Twentieth Century a star or in a coffin, and Paris was littered with those. Unfortunately, his success came after his death. There is a charged eroticism to his nude figures that still retains much of the Bohemian Paris that he was a part of in the Batou Lavoir studios in Monmartre. Along with Egon Scheile they somehow express an emotional representation of the artist's desire...? Modigliani died of Tubercular Meningitis in 1920

Modernist home for rent, anyone? High Cross House, Dartington, Devon, UK

2010-12-03T21:59:00.000Z

High Cross House, Dartington Estate, 1932

This modernist building called High Cross House, built in 1932 by the Swiss architect William Lescase for Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst (members of the Bloomsbury Group), the patrons who established Dartington Hall and the College of Art. This is one of the best examples of modernist architecture in the UK. Built in the grounds of the Dartington estate, in prime Devon countryside. Inspired by the De Stijl movement and Le Corbusier with Bauhaus furniture:

"Probably the most extreme instance in England of the functional type of house associated with the name of Le Corbusier." Christopher Hussey, Country Life, 1933

Dartington Hall was, for some time, a significant meeting point for the international avant-garde. Artists such as John Cage taught there and the Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Tobey came from the West Coast of the United States to Dartington Hall and along with the St.Ives ceramicist, Bernard Leach travelled to Japan, where Tobey spent a year in a Zen Monastary in Kyoto. A rich history....
.....and Now

It is currently for rent for £2,500 or £600 a week, but you will have to be a fan of such modernist buildings, there is plenty of space and glass in this 4 bedrooms, roof terraced and flat roofed home, originally built for the head masters. It has an Art Deco interior and a great study with a curved glass wall. Look for more information on themodernhouse.net

High Cross House by Michael Young

The building is for rent because Dartington College of Art has now merged with University College Falmouth.

James Turrell at Gagosian Gallery, London, UK

2010-11-27T10:47:00.001Z

Abstraction's evolution in the of James Turrell at Gagosian, London until 10th December 2010.


James Turrell, Sustaining Light, 2007 Wood, computerized neon setting, glass piece Aperture: 62 1/4 x 46 1/2 inches (158.1 x 118.1 cm) (C) James Turrell/Gagosian Gallery

'Through light, space can be formed without physical material like concrete or steel. We can actually stop the penetration of vision with where light is and where it isn't. Like the atmosphere, we can't see through it to the stars that are there during the day. But as soon as that light is dimmed around the self, then this penetration of vision goes out. So I'm very interested in this feeling, using the eyes to penetrate the space.' James Turrell

6-24 Britannia Street
London

WC1X 9JD
Hours: Tue-Sat 10-6

If you haven't seen Turrell's work here is a video:

Kurt Schwitter's: Still crazy after all these years...

2010-11-21T00:35:00.013Z

It is remarkable to see how influential Kurt Schwitters remains in the 21st Century. There are a number of contemporary exhibitions on the work of one of the 20th Century's most remarkable artists. He has influenced British art, and especially abstraction, a great deal.

Kurt Schwitters, Untitled, (c) The Menil Collection, Houston, USA

Schwitters, who helped to define avant-garde art through his work with German Dada in Hanover, (after a falling out with the Berlin Dadaists), brought Dada practices to a wider audience through his 'merz' constructions of collage, photo-montage and found objects, such as tram tickets, newspaper adverts and fashion illustrations. Also he created three domensional constructions, his most famous being known as the 'Merzbau' or 'The Cathedral of Erotique Misery' (see below). He also developed innovative experimental typographic design through his 'Merz' publications with the Constructivist El Lizzitsky and Theo van Doesburg of De Stijl.

Kurt Schwitters performing his 'Urlauten',/'Ursonate' c.1920's

The 'Ursonate', his phonetic sound poem from 1922–32 (a translation of the title is 'Primeval Sonata'), is still seen as an unusual and evocative performance piece, still performed around the world. Perhaps we have understood the influence of Schwitters more through the artists who have been influenced by him after WWII, such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Ed Ruscha, Damien Hirst, amongst many others.

Their are two shows/explorations currently exhibiting his work:

Exhibitioin in USA:

The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas, (the great American collection of modern art), this exhibition explores Schwitters use of colour and light in his work on both paintings and collage. Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage, is until 30th January 2011 and its emphasis is on the Merz works from the 1920s and 1940s.

Kurt Schwitters, 'For Kate',1947

This is the first show of Schwitter's works since the 1985 exhibition at MOMA. The exhibition will travel the US to Princeton University Art Museum March 26–June 26, 2011, followed by Berkeley Art Museum, Pacific Film Archive from August 3–November 27, 2011.

Exhibition in the United Kingdom:
The other exhibition or perhaps exploration and celebration of his work is the British organisation that has been set up to archive and preserve his little known works in Britain, where he was eventually interned and died in Ambleside, Cumbria. One of his last Merzbau's is celebrated on the website: http://www.merzbarn.net. This construction made in a remote barn in the Langdale Valley and was created during his stay in the Lake District, yet financed by MOMA in New York, is now preserved at the Hatton Gallery, University of Newcastle by the artist Richard Hamilton in 1965. You can see the documented reconstructions in 2007, of his Hanover Merzbau here from the Tate archive. This is a great organisation celebrating his art, preserving his legacy and raising funds for the upkeep of his last remaining Merbau. Schwitters died in 1948. Kurt Schwitters still crazy after all these years....

Kurt Schwitters,'The Cathedral of Erotique Misery', Hanover, Germany

Kurt Schwitters, 'Merzbarn', Cumbria UK

Patrick Heron by Janet Street-Porter on The Genius of British Art: Modern Times, C4

2010-11-05T12:51:00.002Z

It was great to see the broadcaster, Janet Street-Porter on The Genius of British Art on Channel 4, discuss how she came to understand modern art, meeting Heron's daughter Katherine Heron when studying architecture. There is a great moment on the programme where they cut between him in his studio at Porthmeor Studios, he died in 1999, probably in the early 1980's and her stitting there now some 30 years later remembering when she would sit and talk with him about art and watch him painting, it was really quite touching..

Yellow Painting: October 1958 May/June 1959 Oil on canvas, 1524 x 2138 x 30 mm
Purchased with asistance from Tate Friends St Ives 1999 (c) Estate Patrick Heron

Janet Street-Porter and Katherine Heron discuss this painting which has to be one of his most significant works, I believe this is in Tate Modern or Tate St.Ives...

The Genius of British Art, Channel 4

In the programme she went on to argue how Heron's work of that time was such an antidote to the the dull post war paintings of Lowry and Bratby. My frustration is that we have not understood that British abstraction and especially the 'St.Ives School' have never had the recognition for its significance, when considering how little was taking place in London at the time, which was 'kitchen sink' and a dull form of British (English?) expressionism. Street -Porter goes on to say how Heron's abstractions said 'bollocks to complancy'. It was a great little bit of British televison...

Painting against Mussolini: Art and the Fall of a Dictator, Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London

2010-10-29T13:05:00.000Z

Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London, from 22nd September - 19th December 2010

these dark painting from Mafai and Garelli are worth seeing. we are often more aware of the painting from this period of Max Beckmann and other New Objectivity paintings that stood against Fascism than Italian painting from that time. They should be appreciated more and still retain much of the original power all these years later worth a trip to North London...


Mario Mafai, Fantasia - Interrogation, 1941-43

Franco Garelli, Shooting, c. 1944

Floris Neususs 'Nudo-grams' @ Shadow Catchers exhibition, V&A Museum, London

2010-10-27T11:52:00.000Z

Watch Floris Neusüss Shadow Catchers video

This is a fascinating exhibition exploring the concept of shadows through a varirty of approaches. well worth looking at, it is a cross between 19th Century ideas in science and technology with a radical 20th Century experimental idea of art-making. this would be a good companion exhibition to the Eadweard Muybridge at the Tate in London.

Floris Neusüss

Born Lennep (Germany), 1937. Floris Neusüss has dedicated his whole career to extending the practice, study and teaching of the photogram. Alongside his work as an artist, he is known as an influential writer and teacher on camera-less photography.

Neusüss brought renewed ambition to the photogram process, in both scale and visual treatment, with the Körperfotogramms (or whole-body photograms) that he first exhibited in the 1960s. Since that time, he has consistently explored the photogram's numerous technical, conceptual and visual possibilities.

His works often deal in opposites: black and white, shadow and light, movement and stillness, presence and absence, and in the translation of three dimensions into two. By removing objects from their physical context, Neusüss encourages the viewer to contemplate the essence of form. He creates a feeling of surreal detachment, a sense of disengagement from time and the physical world. Collectively, his images explore themes of mythology, history, nature and the subconscious.

'Throwing Shapes' @ Coleman Project Space and Cafe Gallery, London

2010-10-07T22:02:00.002Z

7 October - 7 November 2010

This is an interesting exhibition of a group of diverse artists working with abstraction in London. Defining 'hard-edge' abstraction in its diverse forms from installation to raw canvas. Here's the blurb, not sure how much I believe... Coleman Project Space presents a two-venue initiative curated by Rebecca Geldard with Vanessa Jackson, Clare Goodwin, Alasdair Duncan and Kilian Rüthemann.

'Jan & Dan', Claire Goodwin, 68 cm x 50 cm, Medium: Mixed media, Catalogue No: CGP1259

'Throwing Shapes' is a group exhibition on the itinerant nature of abstract painting’s core motifs. The conversational starting point for this colourful dialogue between venues, and works in various media, is a large-scale wall-painting commission by Vanessa Jackson at CGP London’s Cafe Gallery.

While the title elicits the notion of sharply defined forms flung, or Modernist-indebted visual strategies, it also references dance and music. ‘Throwing shapes’, like the term ‘abstract’ for an art context, has become a generic expression. It is now synonymous with human movement to music/sounds of all kinds but was initially used to describe the repetitive physical actions associated with electronic dance music: a simple sign language for those under its influence.

Vanessa Jackson, Dimensions not supplied, Medium: Installation, Catalogue No: CGP1248

This sense of reduction and recycling of forms and trends - given the recent nu-rave revival traceable through music, art and fashion, for example - is key to the exhibition remit. 'Throwing Shapes' does not attempt to survey the new, however, or plot fixable paths between the past and present, rather identify some curious conceptual territories emerging from artists’ re-negotiation of these basic forms; locate points at which specific aesthetic languages shift, mutate or break down.

Alasdair Duncan’s “signs for the future” pitch the viewer between the language of propaganda, painting and the perfunctory signage of everyday life. The London-based artist’s colour-rich, optimistic motifs, borrowed equally from the Bauhaus as the Highway Code, will appear here in two site-specific vinyl and sculptural works at Coleman Project Space.

Zürich-based Clare Goodwin also mines the past in a strangely positive way, her human-titled paintings conveying both the gritty reality of an era and sense of nostalgia one can have for a time that is not their own. Seventies design graphics and Op-art strategies appear rudely cropped into seductively hard-edged, conceptually adulterous compositional unions.

It makes perfect sense that Vanessa Jackson’s ritual play on canvas with geometric systems should find its way onto public surfaces given her interest in the democracy of mathematical approaches to art. Where Jackson’s ambitious three-floor mural for Sadler’s Wells in 2008 provided a lyrical framework for the performative dimension of the site, here the big white box of CGP London will become test-cell for the optical and kinetic possibilities of forms placed “arm-in-arm, hip-to-hip” in space.

Swiss artist Kilian Rüthemann is known for his minimal, mostly temporary sculptural alterations to architectural spaces. For this, Rüthemann’s first London exhibition, the Basel-based artist will show a film in Coleman Project Space’s acclaimed Shed Space. Here, the virtual realm of the computer program provides the contextual fabric for his study of line and form as dictated by the flight paths of birds at sunset.

Times: Thursday - Sunday from 12 - 5pm.

Coleman Project Space

Gerhard Richter at New Walk Art Gallery, Leicester

2010-10-05T23:26:00.000Z

Gerhard Richter, Abstract Painting, 1994, 225 cm x 200 cm,

Any excuse to see a Richter show in the UK. Here is an interesting exhibition in Leicester. Have a read of the press release below:

ARTIST ROOMS
Epoch - Gerhard Richter
2nd October 2010 - 27th February 2011
New Walk Museum & Art Gallery
(In partnership with The City Gallery)

'The German artist Gerhard Richter is considered to be one of the most important living painters in the world. Over a career spanning more than half a century, Richter has exhibited work in every major gallery in the world from The Museum of Modern Art in New York to Tate Modern in London. His influence on the next generation of artists such as Damien Hirst has been enormous.

Much of his work has been an exploration of the ways in which photography has changed the nature of painting over the twentieth century. In some of his first paintings to become famous he created ‘photo-realistic’ images that reproduced the blurring of photographs.

This exhibition, entitled Epoch, is taken from ARTIST ROOMS, a new national collection established by the dealer and collector Anthony d’Offay, jointly owned by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland. The exhibition also includes a selection of the artist’s multiples, lent by Anthony d’Offay especially for this presentation.

The largest work (48 Portraits) captures many of the themes of interest to Richter including history, painting and portraiture. This key piece is shown alongside several other significant works that show Richter’s diverse practice, from further portrait painting to more abstract images, photographs and prints.

Through this range of works, Epoch gives an insight into one of the most important artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Anthony d’Offay was brought up in Leicester with New Walk Museum & Art Gallery providing a place of inspiration during his childhood.'

The British painter Dexter Dalwood is nominated for Turner Prize 2010

2010-10-05T23:04:00.001Z

The fascinating painter Dexter Dalwood, who has always shown an original approach to painting, often using unusual political icons and their houses/rooms as a reference point in his work, has been nominated for the Turner Prize along with the painter Angela De La Cruz.


Dexter Dalwood, Greenham Common 2008, (c) Dexter Dalwood, Gagosian Gallery Associates. Photo: Prudence Cumming Associates

Dexter Dalwood was born in Bristol, England in 1960. He studied at Central St.Martins, London and at the Royal College of Art, London. Dalwood has been nominated for his solo exhibition at Tate St Ives which revealed the rich depth and range of his approach to making painting that draws upon historical tradition as well as contemporary cultural and political events.

Pretty in Pink-The paintings of Rick Butler of The Psychedelic Furs

2010-09-29T13:36:00.000Z

'Nature is Boring', A joint show by Richard Butler and the New York based sculptor Emil Alzamora is from Thursday 7th October to 1st November 2010 at Mauger Modern.

Richard Butler before forming the new wave band, The Psychedelic Furs in 1977, had originally studies fine art at Epsom School of Art and Design. You can't take art school out of a an aging rock star, and over the past ten years he has returned to it with a passion. His works explores a subtle understanding of figurative painting, seemingly light in atmosphere, almost Japanese in temperament, his paintings show an aware of developments in painting in contemporary art in the 21st Century. His cult celebrity status has ensured Butler has received some acclaim for his paintings, and has had gallery exhibitions in New York, Miami, Florida and Florence, Italy.

Maugar Modern, 81 Rochester Row, London SW1P 1LJ

Egon Schiele's troublesome paintings at 'Treasures of Budapest' Royal Academy, London

2010-09-21T22:58:00.000Z

Egon Schiele, 'Two Women Embracing', 1915, Pencil, watercolour, gouache. 48.5 x 32.7 cm.

Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

In his article on Schiele's paintings of nudes at the Royal Academy exhibition 'Treasures from Budapest'; Jonathan Jones explores some interesting ideas regarding modern art and sexuality. Click here.

'His work has a specific presence, aggressive, unignorable, practical. They are pornographic. They insist that the erotic is as great and heroic a subject as wars or religion. And they question whether art has to confine itself to representing life second-hand. That's what is extraordinary about Schiele's art: it does not comment on life, it takes part in life. It is not like pornography. It is pornography. It is also high and serious art, a doubleness that may only have been possible in Vienna on the eve of the first world war.'

Schiele's window on his erotic private desires was short lived. By 1907, while Schiele was still a student, Pablo Picasso, around 19 years of age in Paris, painted 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon', a full-frontal, jagged, spatially modern painting, exploring his own desires and also using prostitutes as modeIs. Within a few years abstraction was to establish itself as one of the major discoveries of the Twentieth Century. Marcel Duchamp's readymades, Kasimir Malevich's 'Black Square', the Dadaists and their use of politics and collage were to change how we use and think of the figure. In this context Schiele's paintings of sexuality look almost innocent.

An exhibition of paintings by Mali Morris, Royal Academy of Arts, London

2010-09-21T22:05:00.000Z

This is a great little exhibition of recent works of Mali Morris, one of Britain's leading yet not fully appreciated abstract painters, is in the Sir Hugh Casson Friends Room at the Royal Academy, pop in and see this show if you visit the exhibition of Hungarian art works in 'Tresures from Budapest' (see blog entry), the Friends Room is open to the public 4-6pm until 10pm on Fridays.

These are small scale works that explore the quality and subtly of the visceral lightness of touch of the pigment on the surface of the painting. Beautiful. Read more about her on Royal Academy website.

Mali Morris, 'Escape', 2009. Acrylic on canvas. Photo: David Webb. Courtesy of the Artist.

A Matter of Life and Death: The Paintings of Salvator Rosa at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

2010-09-21T21:34:00.001Z

Salvator Rosa, (1615 - 1673), Jason Charming the Dragon, (about 1665-1670), Oil on canvas, 78 x 66.5 cm, coll., The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Salvator Rosa: Bandits, Wilderness and Magic is at Dulwich Picture Gallery from 15th September to 28th November 2010. For details, go to dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk

A fascinating exhibition of one of the key artists who helped to shape many other painters from Romanticism, is at Dulwich Picture Gallery until November. In these works there are references to witches, murder, fantastical journeys, landscapes and portraits. These works also reflect on the popularity of superstition and fascination with death. You can see the influence on artists who were to follow Rosa some one hundred and fifty years later in the works of Francisco Goya, John Martin and William Blake.

Click here for an article by James Hall for the Guardian newspaper, which is very interesting.

2010-09-12T08:45:00.001Z

Post-War American Art comes to Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

Arnold Newman, Brian O'Doherty and Barbara Novak with their dog Flann O'Brien, 1984, black and white photograph, 32 x 26 cm, The Novak/O'Doherty Collection at IMMA. © Arnold Newman.

An exhibition of 76 artworks by many one of America's leading post-war artists which have been gifted to the IMMA Collection at Dublin by art historian Barbara Novak and artist Brian O’Doherty / Patrick Ireland opened to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 8 September 2010.

Post-War American Art: The Novak/O’Doherty Collection, donated in association with the American Ireland Fund, comprises paintings and sculpture and an extensive range of works on paper, including watercolours, drawings, photographs and limited edition prints, sculptures and multiples.

This collection includes works by Marcel Duchamp, Edward Hopper and George Segal, Joseph Cornell, Dan Graham, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Christo, Mel Bochner, William Scharf, Peter Hutchinson, Les Levine, Sonja Sekula, John Coplans, Arnold Newman, and Elise Asher.

The donation is particularly rich in works from New York of the 1960s and ‘70s; many the result of friendships and associations with the artists at this time. Through them we see that Barbara Novak and Brian O’Doherty were central figures in the art community of the 1960s and ‘70s and beyond.

Four important works, by Edward Hopper, Marcel Duchamp, George Segal and Jasper Johns, were gifted in 2009. The forthcoming exhibition celebrates the arrival of the balance of their collection to IMMA.

From Sickert to Gertler: Modern British Art from Boxted House@Brighton Museum

2010-08-18T08:57:00.002Z

Study from the Coutyard by Robert Bevan

This is an intriguing exhibition at Brighton Museum from the collection of Robert Alexander Bevan (known as Bobby to his friends) and his wife Natalie Bevan assembled at his Essex home. Bobby was the son of the artist Robert Polhill Bevan founder of the Camden Town Group in London (a British group of painters influenced by Impressionsim and Post-Impressiont painters such as Van Gogh and Gauguin, founded by Walter Sickert in 1911 and named after the seedy district of north London where Sickert had lived in the 1890s and again from 1907.) Bevan senior was also known as the painter of mauve horses. This exhibition shows a little of the type of styles that influenced these modern British artists in the early years of the Twentieth Century.

It is a very personal exhibition showing how the works were shown in Boxted House, which is interesting up to a point. There is an overdone quality to much of Bevan's work, still think Tate Britain has his best drawings.

Paintings by Walter Sickert, Mark Gertler and their associates may prove to be the biggest draw, but visitors should not neglect the collection’s fine works on paper, including powerful drawings by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and a Goya etching. Although Maggi Hambling remembered ‘the people and the gin more than the pictures’, this exhibition reinstates the art of Boxted House and the art of this time, to its rightful place.

This exhibition was originally shown at Scottish Gallery of Modern Art, via Gainsborough House in Sudbury. There are a number of exhibits here including postcards and letters from the trenches of 1915. The exhibition continues until 12th September 2010.

You may also wish to see the exhibition of Matthew Smith paintings at Victoria Gallery in Bath.

2010-08-11T08:21:00.001Z

Anish Kapoor returns to India with first major exhibition

London based artist Anish Kapoor, poses near one of his works as part of the exhibition 'My red homeland' at the Centre of Contemporary Art in Malaga. EPA/JESUS DOMINGUEZ.

Anish Kapoor is keen to claim following the announcement by the DCMS, that a new cultural agreement between Britain and India was signed during Prime Minister David Cameron's recent visit:

"While I am delighted the first major show of my work in India is going ahead, I feel I need to make it clear publicly that the planning of the show well pre-dates the election of the present Conservative government. We have in fact been working on this show for more than ten years."

Secretary of State for Culture Jeremy Hunt in India last week to coincide with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding on 'Cultural Co-operation' between the UK Government and the Government of the Republic of India. The exhibition was announced by Secretary of State for Culture Jeremy Hunt in India last week to coincide with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding on 'Cultural Co-operation' between the UK Government and the Government of the Republic of India.

The exhibition will be organised across two sites, the new galleries of the NGMA, New Delhi, and the Mehboob film studios, Bandra, Mumbai. This will be a major exhibition for Kapoor and nothing on this scale has been seen in India, it will feature a selection of sculptures and installations spanning the breadth of his career, from early pigment-based works of the 1980’s, to his most recent wax installations recently shown at the Royal Academy, which attracted over 275,000 visitors in less than three months, to become the most successful exhibition of a living artist ever held in London.

The exhibition in India is organised by the British Council, in association with the Lisson Gallery, see Kapoor's new works here Lisson Gallery London, the Indian Ministry of Culture and the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi. See review of Kapoor's Royal Academy Show at AbstractPaintingEngland

2010-03-21T22:00:00.009Z

Anni Albers
Anni Albers paintings and prints are at Alan Cristea Gallery in London, these are maze like patterns and eye popping geometric constallations that show she was a true original at the Bauhaus. There are a number of series on show across a long career in Europe and United States, helping to set up, with her husband the painter Josef Albers, after World War II, the Black Mountain College, that 'powerhaus' of avant-garde thought in art, music and performance that influenced the next generation of creatives emerging in the 1950's and 1960's.

'Orange Meander'
1970
Screenprint
Paper 80.8 X 60.9 cm
Image 42.0 x 42.0 cm
Edition of 75

Josef Albers, Homage to the Square, Guarded, 1952
Oil on masonite. JAAF: 1976.1.1341. 60.96 x 60.96 cm (24 x 24 inches) ©2003 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

For Josef Albers also see the following exhibitions:

Utopia matters: from Brotherhoods to Bauhaus at the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin. January 22, 2010 through April 11, 2010

Josef Albers: Innovation and Inspiration at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. February 11, 2010 through April 11, 2010

2010-03-19T13:47:00.004Z

I have just joined the Association of Art Historians

'The Association of Art Historians (AAH) represents the interests of those involved in all aspects of art history and visual culture, including art, design, architecture, film, photography, conservation and museum studies.'

RED, a play about Rothko, Donmar Warehouse, London

2009-12-10T14:02:00.001Z

RED

http://www.donmarwarehouse.com/pl103.html from 9th Dec until 6th Feb 2010.

RED-Alfred Molina as Rothko and Eddie Redmayne as Ken, his studio assistant.

A new play by John Logan has started at the Donmar Warehouse and has had a good review from Michael Billington in todays Guardian. He refers to the works success at picturing Rothko as a 'working visionary'. Set design by Christopher Oram, Production designer Michael Grandage. In the 1990's we had the great play 'Art' by Yasmina Reza, perhaps this is as good?

Re-defining Abstraction

2009-12-04T11:53:00.001Z

I have come across an interesting discussion on re-evaluating Colour Field painting, with an essay by Carl Belz from the book 'Color as Field-American painting 1950-1975' curated by Karen Wilkin which came out in 2007 by the FAA.
Sam Gilliam, 'Green Web' 1967

See slide show here. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/29/AR2008022900890.html

'..the paintings were radical in that they went to the root of painting as it was experienced by the artists who made them, by which is meant painting as it was practiced by the first generation of the New York school and by the old masters of the school of Paris before that. This entailed critically assessing painting's past achievements and taking from them the issues and ideas that were felt to be most vital in bringing painting into the present and sustaining its tradition. In this way the paintings were at once radical and conservative. You might say that what the paintings were about, then, was themselves-like art's sake-but I want to say the stakes were higher than that; I want to say they were about us. Think about what you value most in your past, think about how you'd like to extend that value into your present-think about these paintings as a model for lived experience.'

Charlene Von Heyl paintings

2009-11-04T14:30:00.001Z

I like Charlene Von Heyl's recent paintings, New York

http://www.petzel.com/artists/charline-von-heyl/

A Good Read For Winter Evenings..

2009-10-19T22:00:00.001Z

Irving Sandler, A memoir: A Sweeper Up After Artists, 2008

Old Skool Painting:
I am currently reading this book, a light trawl through the New York art scene of the 1950's and 60's. Great annecdotes on conversations at the Cedar Tavern and the 'Club'. Some artists made the journey, others got lost along the way...(and not bad for a fiver!) This is an interesting article discussing these times by Peter Plagens.

This is another book I found interesting:

Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser by Harriet Vyner

It's an intriguing book about the life of Robert Fraser, the art dealer, immortilized by Richard Hamilton on the cover, handcuffed to Mick Jagger in the back of the police car being taken them to court...
This is a sad yet hilarious account of Swinging London in the Sixties and how Robert Fraser made the careers of Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, Bridget Riley, Jim Dine etc, great quotes from Jagger, McCartney and others such as Dennis Hopper, Kenneth Anger and Keef on the wider art, music and drugs scene at the time.

Both these books are documenting the social history you don't get in art history books...

The Artist's Studio

2009-09-02T19:04:00.000Z

Maev Kennedy review in the Guardian of the Artist's Studio exhibition at Compton Verney

The ‘necessary insanity’ of chaos in the studio

There is a lot discussed about how artists work in the studio and what it means metaphorically, as a space for creativity; a state of mind of the artist etc. but ultimately, it is just a working space. Some people have an office or a potting shed that they retreat to; artists gravitate to a studio, through need. Look at the exhibition currently on at Compton Verney about Artists Studio's Compton Verney exhibition.

I have come to think a little more about how I work in my studio as I have had to do some renovations to the outside, I can begin to look objectively at it as a working space, however, I’d never consider it in terms of a romanticised space for the creative act, as it usually stinks of turps and I have to clamber over stuff to get to the paintings being worked on, and am usually unhappy with what comes from it.

However, in the words of James Elkins in his book ‘What Painting Is’ (Read a review of the book) you would believe that the painter in his studio works like this:

‘Working in a studio means leaving the clean world of normal life and moving into shadowy domain where everything bears the marks of the singular obsession. Outside the studio, furniture is clean and comfortable, inside, it is old and unpleasant. Outside walls are monochrome or pleasantly patterned in wallpaper; inside, they are scarred with meaningless graffiti. Outside, floors can be mopped and vacuumed; inside, they build up layers of crusted paint that can only be scraped away or torn up with the floor itself. The studio is a necessary insanity. Perhaps writers have insanities of paper, or of erasers, but they cannot compare with the multicoloured dementia caused by fluids and stone.’

A ‘necessary insanity’. I had not considered this as a way of looking at what takes place in the studio an ‘insanity’, and what is produced at the end, but Elkins is right. The reason for this is that you are only there for one thing, to paint. It is not about appearances, unless you have an immaculate studio, which would suggest little work being done (unless you are an obsessive-compulsive minimalist?) studio’s should be ready for action, get in, pick up where you left off and start painting..

Elkins goes on saying:

‘Waking each morning and going into a room suffused with the penetrating sharp odour of turpentine and oil, standing at the same table so covered with clotted paints that it no longer has a level to spot for a coffee cup, looking at the same creaking easel spattered with all the same colours-that is the daily experience of serious painters, and it is what tempts insanity. Some artists try to keep the studio at bay by keeping it neat, or by putting their easel in the corner of a larger room, but the effect is like cleaning an infection: no matter how well swabbed the wound may be, it is useless to pretend it is healthy, or that the infection does not exist.’

Well I’m not sure how many contemporary artists use easels rather than the walls or the floor, but I think we can get the point. The main thing is to ensure that your time in the studio is spent taking you somewhere..

As Brice Marden suggests, it’s how you exist in the studio that creates the works anyway, its already there:

‘The paintings come out of these studios really reflect the places. It’s not as if you are sort of conceptualists, going around applying some idea. Your idea is coming from how you exist within where you are. That is in the painting, its part of the whole expression.’

What interests me is how we look at painting and especially abstract paintings during the process of painting. There are a number of artists who have explored this, too numerous to mention, but ultimately this is what we seek, a visceral other-ness coupled with a physical object that a painting is. On page 88 Elkins explores this:

‘..it may be that the human mind can only think of one aspect at a time: either a painting is what it represents, or it is a fabrication done on a flat surface. Or perhaps it is possible to think of both the surface and what seems to be behind it at once, in a ‘twofoldness’ of attention that takes in both equally.’

But that requires much manoeuvring through conscious and unconscious understanding of where we are in the process:

Gerhard Richter talks about this in ‘The Daily Practice of Painting 1962-1993’ (Review of book by MIT press) in his entry for 18^th May 1985, on page 121, he states:

‘When I paint an abstract picture, I neither know in advance what it is that I am aiming at and what to do about getting there. Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings-like that of a person who posses a given set of tools, materials and abilities and has the urgent desire to building something useful which isn’t allowed to be a house or a chair or something else that has a name; who therefore hacks away in the vague hope that by working in a proper and professional way, he will ultimately turn out something proper and meaningful..anthing goes; so why do I often spend weeks over adding one thing? What am I making that I want? What picture of what?’

But to counterbalance Richter’s despair, we know why we are there in the studio, as the remarkable photographer Joel Meyerowitz has questioned in himself:

‘What are we trying to get to in the making of anything? We’re trying to get to ourselves. What I want is more of my feelings and less of my thoughts. I want to be clear. Whether you’re making images, poetry, painting, music or love, you should be totally enraptured by that, by the experience itself. That’s what it is about-the location of subject, it’s about the passage of the experience itself, in its wholeness, through you back into the world, selected out by your native instincts. That’s what artists do. They separate their experience from the totality, from raw experience, and it’s the quality of their selections that makes them visible to the world. What is the art experience about? Really, I’m not interested in making ‘Art’ at all. I never, ever, think about it. To say the world ‘art’ it’s almost like a curse on art. I do know that I want to try to get to myself. The older I get, the more indications I have about what it is to get closer to yourself. You try less hard. I just want to be.’

With that in mind, I want more of my feelings and less of my thoughts, it’s time for the studio..seeya

Maev Kennedy review in the Guardian of the Artist's Studio exhibition at Compton Verney

2008-10-04T08:16:00.021Z

The ‘necessary insanity’ of chaos in the studio

However, in the words of James Elkins in his book ‘What Painting Is’ (Read a review of the book) you would believe that the painter in his studio works like this:

Elkins goes on saying:

As Brice Marden suggests, it’s how you exist in the studio that creates the works anyway, its already there:

But that requires much manoeuvring through conscious and unconscious understanding of where we are in the process:

Gerhard Richter talks about this in ‘The Daily Practice of Painting 1962-1993’ (Review of book by MIT press) in his entry for 18^th May 1985, on page 121, he states:

But to counterbalance Richter’s despair, we know why we are there in the studio, as the remarkable photographer Joel Meyerowitz has questioned in himself:

With that in mind, I want more of my feelings and less of my thoughts, it’s time for the studio..seeya

2008-09-15T22:47:00.006Z

Coming across some Patrick Heron prints in the foyer of Bedruthen Steps Hotel in Cornwall on a sunny January day.

I came across some of those classic 70’s prints at the Bredruthen Steps Hotel between Watergate Bay and Newquay on the North Coast. They were just inside the foyer, shaded from the bright white light of the January morning coming in from the beach with the tide.

The simplicity of these works is what we remember Heron for. They retain an intensity that suggest the colours, usually Cadmium Red, Vermillion and Dioxide Purple, actually vibrate next to each other in their organic lozenge shapes, tethered to their space, playing their part of the composition-oscillating colour!

This pair of modest sized prints had so much power compared to those of the landscape paintings of the coasts of Cornwall on the walls around them by other artists, in this lovely louche yet chic hotel. That these two prints should reflect so subtly the rocks, coves and pools that Cornwall is known and for it to be expressed so deftly in an abstract language by a master of British abstraction most probably unknown to many visitors who pass the prints on the way from the bar to the toilet and back to the bar again as we did. A distraction from the conversation, company, they retain your gaze, steady your balance as all good art should, they seem so aptly placed.

I have a soft spot for Patrick Heron and his paintings. There are few abstract painters in Britain of the last 50 years that achieved as much as he has as a painter, a critic, writer and educator. In post-war Britain, especially London, when Tate had a ‘the’ in front and wasn’t particularly Modern, there was little serious interest in abstraction, let alone in the work of the ‘fiddling rustics’ down in Cornwall known as the ‘St.Ives School’.

In a small way this began to change during the 1950’s and early 60’s, with the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the USA and a more sympathetic understanding in Europe of the significance abstraction played in modernist movements by artists such as Mondrian, Kandinsky, Albers, Masson and others. In time we have come to understand that they were the true modern painters compared with the figurative artists such as Bacon, Bratby and Freud always lauded so much by the British.

Heron kept plugging away, he had strong connections with Greenberg in America and many many American artists, as well as other European artists and movements such as the CoBrA Movement ( and he kept up a correspondence with with the enigmatic maverick Constant.) He was also a friend of Herbert Read and other writers, critics and dealers. As a critic himself, for the New Statesman among others, he was able to push ideas around abstraction to a level that had not been done before and is sadly still not as eloquently done by any of today’s contemporary painters.

Heron did much to blow his own trumpet and those of others, some his friends such as Peter Lanyon, William Scott, Terry Frost, Bryan Wynter and Willemina Barns-Graham.

He saw his generation of painters and especially himself, as following historically the modernist 'tradition' in painting after Braque, Bonnard, Cezanne and Matisse.

And so these subtle luminous prints go on oscillating, between the bar and the toilet, regardless of the temporary inhabitants knowledge of this truly British modern master.

(These two prints are from 1970 and are not from the Bedruthen Steps Hotel (they are however from the same print run and are courtesy of the Adam Gallery, Bath.)

Mel Gooding Lecture on Mary Fedden, ICIA, University of Bath

2008-09-15T22:27:00.009Z

This was a fascinating lecture on the artist Mary Fedden by the art historian and biographer Mel Gooding. In this lecture we were taken through the works of Fedden's long career with specific focus on the paintings she made in the 1950’s and 60’s.

For me she is one of those artists that sits between abstraction and figuration in a way that only the British can. Not quite committing, yet bringing fourth a metaphysical landscape instead. In her most successful paintings ‘Hopjes’ from the mid sixties, ‘Blue Still Life’ from 1969 and other simple table top still life paintings, she is able to express, through paint, what she is thinking beyond the simple objects in front of her.

She explores the colour and the space between the objects, but also something else. Something that makes you see them as shapes first, surreal yet familiar, (influenced by her late husband the painter Julian Trevelyan) sitting on arched plains that drop down the picture plane in front of you, neither real nor imagined viewpoints but found ones created through the process of each painting.

Gooding discussed the ability Fedden has in transforming scenes of objects ‘alchemically’. How she creates ‘the mythic from the commonplace object’. There is a deep understanding of colour taken from both Braque's late ‘Atelier’ paintings and Matisse’s ‘Red Studio’ of 1911; where space, perspective and ‘objecthood’ are questioned through the act of seeing through painting.

The University of Bath now has a Fedden Room at No.16 Lansdown Crescent at the Vice Chancellors Office. This now comprises of four paintings and one drawing, including a recent donation from Fedden herself called ‘The Feather’ of 2007. These were exhibited alongside nine other paintings from local collections. An impressive little exhibition full of vitality.

http://www.bath.ac.uk/news/2008/7/28/maryfeddenroom.html

2006-07-05T11:26:00.001Z

The significance of a 'lyrical' abstraction in painting by David Moxon:

Monet / Cy Twombly / Joan Mitchell / Patrick Heron

Rationale: This essay is responding to the way painting, especially abstraction, is being pumeled to death with the overloading of our senses with paintings of the ironic/Pop Art/icon style. My frustration is that these paintings are little more than paintings copied from photographs and filled in like a colour by numbers template . My concern is that any aesthetic consideration, when viewing paintings that are abstract in nature, is being starved of oxygen. These paintings require more than an intellectual response of a few seconds, they requires 'time', to reflect, to absorb and to respond...

'A single line, violent, passionate, broken, or beautifully calm, regular, uniform, conveys what we are feeling. It corresponds to what we are living through..' Hans Hartung

Painting. What is it about the act of painting that is so captivating? The process of painting, the creative act of placing pigment on canvas is an extraordinary experience..

I am thinking beyond any romantic ideas about the smell of linseed oil or turpentine in the studio or the image of the artist out on some kind of action-painting bender; drunk on the stuff in a Pollock-like fury.

Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock in his studio

I am interested in paintings and not pictures. Paintings that require some thought beyond a merely visual reading of the subject matter. Perhaps, I am thinking about the 'letting go', that is required from us as a ‘viewer’ to go beyond just looking. For me painting and especially abstraction, is an activity that coalesces the engagement between thought, material and action. A process that responds to the 'feel' of the painting.

There is something of the epic, of Renaissance heroicism, in the large painterly canvases of Pollock, De Kooning, Rothko and Kline. The power these paintings reflect through there size is important to painting in the second half of the twentieth century. We read these paintings through the physiological effect that they exhude. This can only be received when standing in front of one of them, yet we know them best through tiny images in books. When was the last time you stood infront of a Pollock?

There is an energy in the use of the large expanse of space that these painters brought to modern art, through the interaction of colours, the shapes or gestures that remain on the picture plane. In this age of instant gratification, perhaps something is being missed here when not standing in front of a real painting. We can learn a lot from looking at developments taking place little over a hundred years ago by Monet. A debt of gratitude that the art historian Jed Pearl in his article, 'After Monet', Modern Painters, Spring 1993. He suggested many artists have followed in the direction of Monet, perhaps indirectly, and with specific interest in the late and large series of paintings entitled 'Water Lilies’. These are now in the Musee de' l'Orangerie, Paris, at MOMA, New York and London's Tate Modern, to name a few.

Claude Monet. Water Lilies. c.1920.
Oil on canvas, triptych, each section 6'6" x 14" (200 x 425 cm).The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund. (Photograph ©1997 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, by Kate Keller/Erik Landsberg)

This is often where there is a concern with the modern artist and his/her choice in subject matter. Good painting doesn’t need subject matter. How important is it that something is from reality or non figurative? The interest for me, lies in what response we receive from the painting, for instance, as a subject matter how interesting are water lilies on the surface of a pond? Is it the way the water lilies are painted that we pick up on or is it the transference of the water lilies into paint onto the surface of the canvas that we some how receive visually? In this way good painting transmits a signal that requires more than just an intellectual response, surely it triggers your visual experience, and that subsequently triggers your emotional response, just like music can.

When visiting the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as a student, I stood in a large room of Clifford Still paintings, they were the large, black, red, yellow and brown paintings from the late fifties, they opened up the room in terms of colour and space, they jumped back and forth, what Hans Hofmann called the ‘push and pull’ of the picture plane. These paintings came alive in a way that was not just visual, especially those jagged fault lines of Stills; compressed next to each other like the surface of a cliff (no pun intended). It was a defining moment for me; I then went around the museum, looking at the paintings through this understanding of a perceived depth, trying to decipher the paintings through this 'visual experince' which could actually be called 'sensation'. The funny thing was, I was not even fond of Still’s work, but the concept of painting in that way, in that size, worked, it could equally have been Pollock, Rothko or Kline, or any of the others come to think of it..

The painting of Cy Twombly work in a similar way. His paintings are the ultimate in ‘epic’ sized ideas, especially in An Analysis of a Rose as Sentimental Despair a triptych from 1985, Twombly is transmitting something powerful, a subdued act. It echoes what Harold Rosenberg suggested in the 1950's:

At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American after another as an arena in which to act...What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.

Cy Twombly, Untitled panel V of V
(An Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair)
(the colour is more subtle on the original painting)

Few artists seem to communicate in this strange energised frequency that Twombly maintains, yet Joan Mitchell comes close. For these artists abstraction is not just somewhere to explore and experiment with gestures, marks and forms. Nor is it a safe platform for visual communication, good abstraction, occupies an arena that is constantly moving, vibrating with energy and restlessness. It should draw in some other element; an unexpected spontaneous response through marks, a deliberate choice of colour that creates an awkwardness to the painting etc, to ensure that it does'nt fall into an all too easy parody of beauty. A number of works stand out as powerful evocations of this ‘arena’.

The large triptych at the Whitney Museum entitled Clearing by Mitchell, is one of them, with its large echoing black lozenge shapes and mauve ringed areas, and a later one ‘Untitled’ a diptych from 1992, that hovers in the centre of the paintings like the boughs of two trees in a Japanese garden.

Joan Mitchell, Clearing, 1973, oil on canvas, triptych, 9' 2 1/4" x 19' 8”

This painting can be traced back to Monet and his energised responses to the water lilies at his house in Giverny, France, towards the end of his life. Even if Mitchell is unaware of it, the influence is there. Monet’s paintings were shown later in New York after World War II, and bought by MOMA, seemed to have meant more to Abstract Expressionists, than any other artists in Europe at the time, except perhaps the artist Patrick Heron, who followed the modernist cause from Monet through Bonnard and Cezanne to Matisse and Braque, but didn’t expand his paintings on the scale of the American painters, until the sixties and seventies, but I'll be discussing him later.

Where else can we see the influence of Monet?

At the Whitney retrospective exhibition of Mitchell’s work, an essay in the catalogue brings forward the significance of the series of paintings, twenty-one in total painted in 1983–84 called 'La Grande Vallée'. Their is an essay by Whitney curator Yvette Y. Lee devoted to the series. Unfortunately, only three of the paintings are in the show, which makes it impossible to assess the impact of a body of work ideally seen as an environment. These lush, abundant paintings are landscape impressions, predominantly floral in feeling. They clearly echo Monet's 'Water Lilies' and other garden subjects like 'The Japanese Footbridge', and the 'Grande Vallée' cycle is deeply indebted to the Impressionist master, never mind the repeated denials by the catalogue authors.

But lets look at the processes used by Joan Mitchell in her painting:

Her paintings are about the very materiality of paint; slashing strokes, colour over colour and scratchy, tangled lines characterize these early works from the fifties.

Mitchell worked to a distinctive palette and personal vocabulary of marks from beginning to end. Green, blue, orange, black, and white are favoured colors. According to Brenda Richardson's essay for the Whitney Museum Retrospective, her marks include:

• choppy vertical smears, rather like a color test, usually in pairs,
• thin "washes" of pastel hues (lime, flesh, rose, slate blue)
• daubs of impasto, almost always on top of other paint
• slashing strokes, long and stiff, vaguely scimitar-like
• eroding or "melting" once-geometric rectangles, mounds, or blobs and drips

Nearly all her paintings use nearly all her colours and all her marks in some combination; the paintings are almost always all-over mat in finish (glazed bits appear only occasionally). A painting like 'Low Water', 1969, is absolutely classic Mitchell, combining all of the above in hieratic descent.

Joan Mitchell, Ici, 1963

Mitchell first visited Paris in 1948 and was to stay there from 1955 until she died in 1992. During this time she met the Canadian-born French artist Jean-Paul Riopelle; they remained close for the next 25 years, lived together from at least 1960 to 1979. There was a close dialogue between his Surrealist-influenced "action" painting and her own Abstract Expressionist oeuvre. There are also in Mitchell's art the impact of contemporaries like the German abstract painter and theorist E.W. Nay, who developed the theory that "to paint is to form the picture from colour." A similar approach adopted by Patrick Heron at around the same, this is discussed later in this essay. Mitchell lived on the banks of the Seine at Vétheuil from 1967. Paris was only thirty-five miles away; here was the cannon of European modern art, the Courbet and the Impressionists at the Museum D’Orsay and Monet’s ‘Water lilies’ at the Orangerie.

As for contemporary artists of the time, she presumably had the opportunity to consider the work of Europeans of shared sensibility, artists like Mathieu, Soulages, de Staël, Vedova, and even Alechinsky and Jorn of the CoBrA group who would have often exhibited in Paris. The CoBrA artists believed in spontaneous painting, what one writer described as "pure psychic improvisation," this view was shared by Mitchell, who said she never planned her paintings, never thought about them, never did preliminary sketches or laid down any "starter" outlines on the canvas. She insisted she just painted what she felt.

What other influenece are there on her work? You could add Phillip Guston’s early abstractions of the fifties and Sam Francis on a good day, Deep, Orange and Black from 1955, in particular. As well as having strong friendships with Philip Guston, they lived in the same apartment block in New York. It was the work of Sam Francis which Mitchell took most creative influence from. What these artists retain in their paintings is a quality that engages your senses rather than your intellectual powers. They state almost immediately a familiarity in their forms that suggests nature, but it is painting imitating nature, a virtual reality drawn from nature, existing in colour pigment, gestures, the use of space or the resonance of the forms on a surface, what Irwin Edman stated in ‘Arts and the Man’ back in 1928:

A painting is not a design in spots, meant merely to out do a sunset; it is a richer dream of experience meant to outshine the reality

The subject matter could be trees, it could be a wood, could be an old wall or ruin, it could be anything, but it’s paint responding to the artists physical movements and sporadic hand gestures on the surface of the canvas. the paintings success is at the whim of the artists feeling or his sensations. It’s paint in its most dangerous and potent form…

Another artist who took the large scale painting from Monet was Patrick Heron. Consider, the late Heron paintings from the eighties, that he called ‘Garden’ paintings. They retain a freshness and vibrancy still. when looking at these paintings are we meant to perceive these forms squeezed straight out of the tube across the canvas or the blobs of pigment as specific native flowers from Australia, where many of the paintings were made? Or like the Clifford Still paintings do they respond physiologically? Again that feeling of space is present, of a space made from colour. Heron did suggest that the time has come to give up 'to truly sensational painting.’ Here he is not copying nature but evoking it.

Let's look at Heron in more detail:

Patrick Heron,Big Purple Painting: July 1983-June 1984

Big Purple Garden Painting: July 1983-June 1984…This painting has similarities to the paintings of Mitchell’s, as a horizontal canvas that echoes Monet’s late paintings. On Heron, Mel Gooding referred to reading 'Big Purple Garden Painting', through the lateral scanning across the canvas:

..a process of continuous apprehension that moves across the surface, from left to right and back again as the eye is enhanced by the flicker of light, and then caught by the space of the experienced world, and the eye seems to glide into an indeterminate distance, potentially infinite.

But as Gooding continued to discuss, there are obvious differences, Monet, being a nineteenth century painter, is interested in the ‘descriptive’ qualities of paint and Heron, being a late twentieth century painter who’s raison d’etre is ‘paint as colour, colour as paint’.

But again we have this interest in the ‘visceral’ qualities of paint, where the transformation from an observed and lived experience like Monet to the more ‘sensed’, in Herons words, to ‘translate sensation into terms of aesthetic emotion’.

What is interesting is considering Heron in the same light as Twombly and Mitchell as a lyrical abstraction painter. I believe we have a series of paintings that emerged in the early eighties from Heron’s Porthmoer studio in St.Ives, Cornwall that will be seen as a highly significant body of work, that should be considered with Twombly and Mitchell's oeuvre.

Alongside Big Purple Garden Painting: July 1983-June 1984, there is Red Garden Painting: June 3-5 1985, White Garden Painting: May 25-June 12, and Pale Garden Painting: July-August 1984. To me these are the embodiment of what painting is about, they sit individually as explorations of paint on a surface tracing the artists movements in front of the canvas, transformed to spontaneous actions on its surface. These evocations could refer to a real landscape but this never really emerges, they exist as an alternative landscape transformed through ‘sensation’.

Patrick Heron, Red Garden Painting:June 3-5, 1985

Patrick Heron, Pale Garden Painting, July-August 1984

Joan Mitchell, Cy Twombly and Patrick Heron are still painters that retain a fragility, a concentrated energy in their work, a possibility of what painting can achieve.

To sum up, in 1958, Cy Twombly he wrote in the magazine L'Esperienza Moderna:

'Action must prove from time to time the realisation of life. Act is therefore the primary sensation. In painting act is the formation of the image, the mechanical action of its evolution, the direct or indirect impulse brought to exasperation in this high act which is invention'

Bibliography:

Jed Pearl, After Monet, Modern Painters, Spring, 1993
David Sylvester, Cy Twombly-Theatre of Operations, Modern Painters, Issue 7, 1995
Mel Gooding, Patrick Heron, Phaidon, 1994
Richard Green Galleries, Patrick Heron: The Shape of Colour, Exhibition catalogue, May 2006
Siri Hursvedt, The Mysteries of the Rectangle-Essays on Painting, Princeton Architectural Press, 2005
Alan Gouk, Article: An Evening with Patrick Heron: 1998, State of Art: Notebook
James Elkins, What painting Is, Routledge, 2000
Brenda Richardson, Review: Joan Mitchell exhibition, Whitney Museum, 2002