Press Office: Press Releases
2012 | Tate Modern
Infinite Kusama with Tate Collective
Press release: 7 February 2012
At Tate Modern on Saturday 24 March, 13:00 - 18:00
Online at www.tate.org.uk/infinitekusama to 15 April
15 – 25 yrs, free, full line-up below
Supported by Louis Vuitton
Infinite Kusama is a project that brings together young people aged 15 to 25 to experience and respond to the work of one of Japan’s most famous artists, Yayoi Kusama. Highlights include an immersive afternoon of drop-in art, fashion and sound workshops culminating in a UV silent disco at Tate Modern on 24 March and an online competition to win a trip to Yayoi Kusama’s studio in Tokyo initiated by the Louis Vuitton Young Arts project and REcreativeUK.com.
The centre piece of the day’s events on 24 March is The Hello Cube, a groundbreaking new interactive digital installation inspired by Kusama’s work that responds to both physical activity and Twitter commands and will conclude with a silent disco with DJ sets from Actress (werkdiscs), Lapalux (Brainfeeder) and Koreless (Pictures Music).
The Hello Cube has been created by innovative design duo Hellicar & Lewis and is inspired by Yayoi Kusama’s The Passing Winter – a work owned by Tate. As with The Passing Winter, in order to experience the work, the audience peer into an unassuming small box to view a dancing display of colour, movement and light. The Hello Cube differs from Kusama’s work in that it has been created to react to both social media and physical activity. For example, tweeting “@TheHelloCube next red sparkles” sets off a sparkling red pattern in the cube and sends a twitpic of the display to the person who tweeted the original message.
Infinite Kusama coincides with the major retrospective Yayoi Kusama at Tate Modern from 9 February to 5 June and includes the launch of a competition to win a trip to Japan to meet Kusama at her studio in Tokyo. Young people aged 16 to 25 are invited to create a work inspired by Kusama that takes the idea of obsession as a starting point. Many of Kusama’s works feature repetitive visual forms, most famously her immersive installations of dots and early infinity net paintings. Competition entries are to be submitted online by 15 April where they will be judged by a panel of Tate curators and REcreative editorial staff.
Since the 1940s, Yayoi Kusama has developed an extensive body of work. From her earliest explorations of painting in provincial Japan to new unseen works, the exhibition will reveal a history of successive developments and daring advances, demonstrating why Kusama remains one of the most engaging practitioners today.
Infinite Kusama is a partnership with Tate Collective, REcreativeUK.com and the Louis Vuitton Young Arts Project and supported by Louis Vuitton.
Infinite Kusama - Full line-up
13.00 – 15.00: Infinite Kusama Art, Fashion and Sound Workshops
Drop-in to free continuous workshops in locations around Tate Modern.
Hellicar and Lewis workshop (The bridge of the Turbine Hall)
Talk by designers of The Hello Cube, Hellicar and Lewis.
Kusma-rise (Clore Studio, Level 1)
Create fashion accessories inspired by Kusama’s art in a workshop led by fashion collective, Stooki. http://www.stooki.co.uk/
16mm Kusama (Schools and Families Room, Level 1)
Inspired by Kusama’s seminal film Self Obliteration, experimental film artist Rachel Rayns leads a workshop in drawing 16mm film graffiti. A film will be produced exploring accumulation and pattern and screened later in the day.
Textiles workshop with Willow and Bethany Mitchell (Seminar room or McAuley gallery, Level 1)
Led by artists Willow and Bethany Mitchell participants are invited to produce a textile cloud sculpture to add to an ever-growing installation throughout the afternoon.
Boom Nails (Star Foyer, Level 2)
Have your nails decorated in a Kusama style. http://boomnails.blogspot.com/
Sonic Kusama Music Workshop (East Room, Level 7)
Artist-led workshop exploring potential connections between Kusama's work and the creation and representation of new music and sound art through visual music interfaces, specifically the Toshio Iwai designed Tenori-on by Yamaha, used by artists like Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) and Jim O'Rourke.
15.00 – 18.00: Infinite Kusama Silent Disco on the bridge of the Turbine Hall
Dance to a silent disco with DJ sets from Actress (werkdiscs), Lapalux (Brainfeeder) and Koreless (Pictures Music) on the bridge of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.
In Kusama’s work I’m here, but nothing, the floor, walls, furniture and every object in the room are covered in florescent dots illuminated with a UV light. Similarly stickers, wristbands, nail varnish and balloons accumulated throughout the day and person of the silent disco dancers will help create a Kusama-esque environment.
Notes to Editors
The Hello Cube is a digital installation that combines interactive software with a physical object in order to create a unique digital experience for both online users and gallery visitors. The software integrates online and social media to create a unique digital interaction that becomes part of the physical installation on the Turbine Hall Bridge at Tate Modern.
Hellicar & Lewis is a partnership between Peter Hellicar and Joel Gethin Lewis, formed in 2008. They are interested in creating groundbreaking experiences that use art, technology and design to take people into the moment and impart lasting memories. http://www.hellicarandlewis.com
Tate Collective is an advisory group of young people, aged 15-25 years, who work collaboratively with artists and exchange new ideas, across art and new media, at Tate Britain and Tate Modern.
REcreativeUK.com is a website devised by young people in collaboration with the Hayward Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts, the South London Gallery, Tate Britain and the Whitechapel Gallery as part of the Louis Vuitton Young Arts Project. Launched in June 2011, the REcreative website has become a highly active online community which inspires greater involvement and interest in contemporary art. Young people can upload and discuss art works, watch exclusive video content, win prizes and get behind the scenes access to a range of arts professionals, artists including Tracey Emin and Grayson Perry, art critics such as Ben Luke and Oliver Basciano, and the publisher of Dazed & Confused, Jefferson Hack.
For more information
Jeanette Ward, Senior Press Officer, Tate
Call +44 (0)20 7887 8730 Email: jeanette.ward@tate.org.uk
Carla Filmer, PR Director, Louis Vuitton UK and Ireland
Call +44 (0)20 7399 4023 / 07818 068633 Email: c.filmer@uk.vuitton.com
Katie Haines, Marketing Manager, South London Gallery for REcreative
Call +44 (0)20 7703 6120 Email: katie@southlondongallery.org
Saturday, 3 March 2012
PICASSO & MODERN BRITISH ART - PRESS RELEASE
Press Office: Press Releases
2012 | Tate Britain
Picasso & Modern British Art
Wednesday 15 February – Sunday 15 July 2012
Admission £14.00 ( £12.20 concessions)
Press release: 13 February 2012
Sponsored by British Land, JCA Group and RLM Finsbury. Supported by The Picasso and Modern British Art Supporters Group, The Spanish Tourist Office and The Office for Cultural and Scientific Affairs, Embassy of Spain.
This year Tate Britain stages the first exhibition to explore Pablo Picasso’s lifelong connections with Britain. Picasso & Modern British Art examines Picasso’s evolving critical reputation here and British artists’ responses to his work. The exhibition explores Picasso’s rise in Britain as a figure of both controversy and celebrity, tracing the ways in which his work was exhibited and collected here during his lifetime, and demonstrating that the British engagement with Picasso and his art was much deeper and more varied than generally has been appreciated.
Pablo Picasso originated many of the most significant developments of twentieth-century art. This exhibition examines his enormous impact on British modernism, through seven exemplary figures for whom he proved an important stimulus: Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland and David Hockney. It is presented in an essentially chronological order, with rooms documenting the exhibiting and collecting of Picasso’s art in Britain alternating with those showcasing individual British artists’ responses to his work. Picasso & Modern British Art comprises over 150 works from major public and private collections around the world, including over 60 paintings by Picasso.
Picasso & Modern British Art includes key Cubist works by Picasso such as Head of a Man 1912 (Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris) which was seen in Britain before the First World War, when Cubism was first introduced to a British public through Roger Fry’s two Post-Impressionist exhibitions. It also includes Picasso’s Man with a Clarinet 1911-12 (Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid) and Weeping Woman 1937 (Tate), works which were acquired by the two most notable British collectors of Picasso, Douglas Cooper and Roland Penrose, both of whom were to become intimately associated with the artist and his reputation. Further key works loaned from public and private collections across the world include Reading at a Table 1934 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, US), Women of Algiers (Version O), 1955 (Private Collection) and Guitar, Compote Dish and Grapes, 1924 (Collection Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) among others.
While many British artists have responded to Picasso’s influence, those represented in this exhibition have been selected to illustrate both the variety and vitality of these responses over a period of more than seventy years. This is a rare opportunity to see such work alongside those works by Picasso that, in many cases, are documented as having made a particular impact on the artist concerned; in other cases, they have been chosen as excellent examples of a stylistic affinity between Picasso and the relevant British artist. For example, David Hockney is said to have visited Picasso’s major Tate exhibition (1960) eight times, starting a life-long obsession with the artist. A selection of various Hockney homages to Picasso are on show. In addition Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion 1944 (Tate) is compared with Picasso’s paintings based on figures on the beach at Dinard which first inspired Bacon to take up painting seriously.
The exhibition looks at the time Picasso spent in London in 1919 when he worked on the scenery and costumes for Diaghilev’s production of The Three-Cornered Hat. It assesses the significance of his political status in Britain, from the tour of Guernica in 1938-9 to the artist’s appearance at the 1950 Peace Congress in Sheffield. The final section also considers the artist’s post-war reputation, from the widespread hostility provoked by the 1945-6 V&A exhibition which re-ignited many of the fierce debates about modern art that first raged before the First World War, to the phenomenally successful survey of his career at the Tate in 1960.
After Tate Britain, the exhibition will tour to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. Picasso & Modern British Art is devised by James Beechey with additional contributions from Professor Christopher Green (Courtauld) and Richard Humphreys. It is curated at Tate Britain by Chris Stephens, Curator (Modern British Art) & Head of Displays, Tate Britain, assisted by Helen Little, Assistant Curator, Tate Britain. Special thanks go to Fundacion Almine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso. The exhibition is accompanied by a major new catalogue edited by James Beechey and Chris Stephens.
Notes to Editors
For further information contact Selina Jones / Victoria Willis, Tate Press Office
Call 020 7887 8732/4906 Email pressoffice@tate.org.uk Visit file:///\\www.tate.org.uk
2012 | Tate Britain
Picasso & Modern British Art
Wednesday 15 February – Sunday 15 July 2012
Admission £14.00 ( £12.20 concessions)
Press release: 13 February 2012
Sponsored by British Land, JCA Group and RLM Finsbury. Supported by The Picasso and Modern British Art Supporters Group, The Spanish Tourist Office and The Office for Cultural and Scientific Affairs, Embassy of Spain.
This year Tate Britain stages the first exhibition to explore Pablo Picasso’s lifelong connections with Britain. Picasso & Modern British Art examines Picasso’s evolving critical reputation here and British artists’ responses to his work. The exhibition explores Picasso’s rise in Britain as a figure of both controversy and celebrity, tracing the ways in which his work was exhibited and collected here during his lifetime, and demonstrating that the British engagement with Picasso and his art was much deeper and more varied than generally has been appreciated.
Pablo Picasso originated many of the most significant developments of twentieth-century art. This exhibition examines his enormous impact on British modernism, through seven exemplary figures for whom he proved an important stimulus: Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland and David Hockney. It is presented in an essentially chronological order, with rooms documenting the exhibiting and collecting of Picasso’s art in Britain alternating with those showcasing individual British artists’ responses to his work. Picasso & Modern British Art comprises over 150 works from major public and private collections around the world, including over 60 paintings by Picasso.
Picasso & Modern British Art includes key Cubist works by Picasso such as Head of a Man 1912 (Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris) which was seen in Britain before the First World War, when Cubism was first introduced to a British public through Roger Fry’s two Post-Impressionist exhibitions. It also includes Picasso’s Man with a Clarinet 1911-12 (Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid) and Weeping Woman 1937 (Tate), works which were acquired by the two most notable British collectors of Picasso, Douglas Cooper and Roland Penrose, both of whom were to become intimately associated with the artist and his reputation. Further key works loaned from public and private collections across the world include Reading at a Table 1934 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, US), Women of Algiers (Version O), 1955 (Private Collection) and Guitar, Compote Dish and Grapes, 1924 (Collection Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) among others.
While many British artists have responded to Picasso’s influence, those represented in this exhibition have been selected to illustrate both the variety and vitality of these responses over a period of more than seventy years. This is a rare opportunity to see such work alongside those works by Picasso that, in many cases, are documented as having made a particular impact on the artist concerned; in other cases, they have been chosen as excellent examples of a stylistic affinity between Picasso and the relevant British artist. For example, David Hockney is said to have visited Picasso’s major Tate exhibition (1960) eight times, starting a life-long obsession with the artist. A selection of various Hockney homages to Picasso are on show. In addition Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion 1944 (Tate) is compared with Picasso’s paintings based on figures on the beach at Dinard which first inspired Bacon to take up painting seriously.
The exhibition looks at the time Picasso spent in London in 1919 when he worked on the scenery and costumes for Diaghilev’s production of The Three-Cornered Hat. It assesses the significance of his political status in Britain, from the tour of Guernica in 1938-9 to the artist’s appearance at the 1950 Peace Congress in Sheffield. The final section also considers the artist’s post-war reputation, from the widespread hostility provoked by the 1945-6 V&A exhibition which re-ignited many of the fierce debates about modern art that first raged before the First World War, to the phenomenally successful survey of his career at the Tate in 1960.
After Tate Britain, the exhibition will tour to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. Picasso & Modern British Art is devised by James Beechey with additional contributions from Professor Christopher Green (Courtauld) and Richard Humphreys. It is curated at Tate Britain by Chris Stephens, Curator (Modern British Art) & Head of Displays, Tate Britain, assisted by Helen Little, Assistant Curator, Tate Britain. Special thanks go to Fundacion Almine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso. The exhibition is accompanied by a major new catalogue edited by James Beechey and Chris Stephens.
Notes to Editors
For further information contact Selina Jones / Victoria Willis, Tate Press Office
Call 020 7887 8732/4906 Email pressoffice@tate.org.uk Visit file:///\\www.tate.org.uk
YAYOI KUSAME - PRESS RELEASE
Press Office: Press Releases
2012 | Tate Modern
Yayoi Kusama
Thursday 9 February – Tuesday 5 June 2012
Press release: 7 February 2012
9 February – 5 June 2012
Tate Modern, Level 4
Supported by Louis Vuitton
Open every day from 10.00 – 18.00 and late night until 22.00 on Friday and Saturday
For public information number please print 020 7887 8888
Yayoi Kusama’s (b.1929) pioneering work spans over six decades and this exhibition will highlight the artist’s moments of most intense innovation. Kusama is one of Japan’s best-known living artists and since the 1940s she has developed an extensive body of work. From her earliest explorations of painting in provincial Japan to new unseen works, the exhibition will reveal a history of successive developments and daring advances, demonstrating why Kusama remains one of the most engaging practitioners today.
Conceived as a series of immersive environments, the exhibition will unfold in a sequence of rooms, each devoted to the emergence of a new artistic stance. Much of Kusama’s art has an almost hallucinatory intensity that reflects her unique vision of the world, whether through a teeming accumulation of detail or the dense patterns of nets and polka dots that have become her signature. She is renowned for her ‘environments’, large-scale installations of dazzling power that immerse the viewer. A highlight of the exhibition will be a new installation conceived especially for the show, Infinity Mirrored Room - Filled with the Brilliance of Life 2011, Kusama’s largest mirrored room to date.
Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Japan in 1929. In her early career she immersed herself in the study of art, integrating a wide range of Eastern and Western influences, training in traditional Japanese painting while also exploring the European and American avant-garde. In the late 1950s, Kusama moved to the United States and during her time there worked tirelessly to position herself at the epicentre of the New York art scene. The exhibition will include a group of Kusama’s first ‘Infinity Net’ paintings from her early years in New York, canvases covered in endlessly-repeated, scalloped brushstrokes of a single colour. Kusama forged her own direction in sculpture and installation, adopting techniques of montage and soft sculpture which historians have seen as influencing artists such as Andy Warhol and Claus Oldenburg. The exhibition will include Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show 1963, her first room installation, and a significant selection of her classic 'Sex Obsession' and 'Food Obsession' Accumulation Sculptures dating from 1962-68.
As the 1960s progressed, Kusama moved from painting, sculpture and collage to installations, films, performances and ‘happenings’ as well as political actions, counter-cultural events, fashion design and publishing. The exhibition will include Kusama’s iconic film Kusama’s Self-Obliteration 1968, capturing this period of performative experimentation, and an extensive selection of archive material that reveal how Kusama’s artistic activity extended beyond the bounds of the gallery.
In 1973 Kusama returned to Japan where she continues to live and work today. The exhibition will include vibrant and evocative collages she created on her return, during a period in which she was also forging a parallel career as a poet and novelist. Major sculptural installations will be featured including The Clouds 1984, comprising one hundred unique black and white sprayed sewed stuffed cushions, and Heaven and Earth 1991, which features snake-like forms emerging from forty boxes. The exhibition will conclude with a series of works from the last decade including I’m Here, but Nothing 2000 -, in which a darkened domestic space is covered with fluorescent polka dots.
Yayoi Kusama is curated by Frances Morris, Head of Collection, International Art, Tate with Rachel Taylor, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern. The exhibition has been organised by Tate Modern in collaboration with the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The exhibition will be accompanied by a major new catalogue and the first English translation of Yayoi Kusama’s autobiography Infinity Net.
For further information please contact Duncan Holden / Rose Dahlsen, Tate Press Office
Call 020 7887 4939/8731 Email pressoffice@tate.org.uk Visit www.tate.org.uk
Notes to Editors
Louis Vuitton has been a long standing Patron of the Arts and has established successful collaborations with some of the world’s most innovative and dynamic artists, increasing the points of exchange between art and fashion to an unprecedented degree. Louis Vuitton renews its commitment by supporting celebrated artist Yayoi Kusama in her highly anticipated exhibition at the Tate Modern. Louis Vuitton will also support a programme of activity for young people at Tate surrounding the Kusama exhibition and connecting the Louis Vuitton Young Arts Project and the ReCreative website.
2012 | Tate Modern
Yayoi Kusama
Thursday 9 February – Tuesday 5 June 2012
Press release: 7 February 2012
9 February – 5 June 2012
Tate Modern, Level 4
Supported by Louis Vuitton
Open every day from 10.00 – 18.00 and late night until 22.00 on Friday and Saturday
For public information number please print 020 7887 8888
Yayoi Kusama’s (b.1929) pioneering work spans over six decades and this exhibition will highlight the artist’s moments of most intense innovation. Kusama is one of Japan’s best-known living artists and since the 1940s she has developed an extensive body of work. From her earliest explorations of painting in provincial Japan to new unseen works, the exhibition will reveal a history of successive developments and daring advances, demonstrating why Kusama remains one of the most engaging practitioners today.
Conceived as a series of immersive environments, the exhibition will unfold in a sequence of rooms, each devoted to the emergence of a new artistic stance. Much of Kusama’s art has an almost hallucinatory intensity that reflects her unique vision of the world, whether through a teeming accumulation of detail or the dense patterns of nets and polka dots that have become her signature. She is renowned for her ‘environments’, large-scale installations of dazzling power that immerse the viewer. A highlight of the exhibition will be a new installation conceived especially for the show, Infinity Mirrored Room - Filled with the Brilliance of Life 2011, Kusama’s largest mirrored room to date.
Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Japan in 1929. In her early career she immersed herself in the study of art, integrating a wide range of Eastern and Western influences, training in traditional Japanese painting while also exploring the European and American avant-garde. In the late 1950s, Kusama moved to the United States and during her time there worked tirelessly to position herself at the epicentre of the New York art scene. The exhibition will include a group of Kusama’s first ‘Infinity Net’ paintings from her early years in New York, canvases covered in endlessly-repeated, scalloped brushstrokes of a single colour. Kusama forged her own direction in sculpture and installation, adopting techniques of montage and soft sculpture which historians have seen as influencing artists such as Andy Warhol and Claus Oldenburg. The exhibition will include Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show 1963, her first room installation, and a significant selection of her classic 'Sex Obsession' and 'Food Obsession' Accumulation Sculptures dating from 1962-68.
As the 1960s progressed, Kusama moved from painting, sculpture and collage to installations, films, performances and ‘happenings’ as well as political actions, counter-cultural events, fashion design and publishing. The exhibition will include Kusama’s iconic film Kusama’s Self-Obliteration 1968, capturing this period of performative experimentation, and an extensive selection of archive material that reveal how Kusama’s artistic activity extended beyond the bounds of the gallery.
In 1973 Kusama returned to Japan where she continues to live and work today. The exhibition will include vibrant and evocative collages she created on her return, during a period in which she was also forging a parallel career as a poet and novelist. Major sculptural installations will be featured including The Clouds 1984, comprising one hundred unique black and white sprayed sewed stuffed cushions, and Heaven and Earth 1991, which features snake-like forms emerging from forty boxes. The exhibition will conclude with a series of works from the last decade including I’m Here, but Nothing 2000 -, in which a darkened domestic space is covered with fluorescent polka dots.
Yayoi Kusama is curated by Frances Morris, Head of Collection, International Art, Tate with Rachel Taylor, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern. The exhibition has been organised by Tate Modern in collaboration with the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The exhibition will be accompanied by a major new catalogue and the first English translation of Yayoi Kusama’s autobiography Infinity Net.
For further information please contact Duncan Holden / Rose Dahlsen, Tate Press Office
Call 020 7887 4939/8731 Email pressoffice@tate.org.uk Visit www.tate.org.uk
Notes to Editors
Louis Vuitton has been a long standing Patron of the Arts and has established successful collaborations with some of the world’s most innovative and dynamic artists, increasing the points of exchange between art and fashion to an unprecedented degree. Louis Vuitton renews its commitment by supporting celebrated artist Yayoi Kusama in her highly anticipated exhibition at the Tate Modern. Louis Vuitton will also support a programme of activity for young people at Tate surrounding the Kusama exhibition and connecting the Louis Vuitton Young Arts Project and the ReCreative website.
Wednesday, 8 February 2012
YAYOI KUSAME RETROSPECTIVE AT THE TATE MODERN
YAYOI KUSAME RETROSPECTIVE AT THE TATE MODERN
Yayoi Kusame (1929-) was born in Nagano Prefecture in a hill town in the Japanese Alps about 130 miles west of Tokyo just before the second world war. She grew up in a traditional Japanese family with a traditional set of Japanese values that maintained that a woman should complete her education, then marry and have children. However, Yayoi possessed creativity and wanted to fulfill herself through her art rather than taking on a traditional role. This meant that she soon came into direct opposition to her family and especially her mother.
Her parent's business was marketing seeds and they were very opposed to Yayoi's artistic vocation. However she managed to complete one year of art school training in Kyoto in 1948 but the constraints of family, gender and being Japanese led her rebel against these constraints and to become familiar with contemporary American culture but also the legacy of French surrealism, experimental art and the techniques of frottage found in Max Ernst and the work of the Catalan artist Joan Miro. Her work is often a symbiosis of the vegetal, physical and human and it is often marked by her own experience of war and the defeat of her country in WW2.
Kusame's work has often been compared to that of Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) and to her colleague Eva Hesse (1936-1970) and perhaps her real strength as an artist lies in her painting rather than her sculptures which do seem to resemble closely the work of Hesse, for instance. Kusame's works seem to reflect on an existence found somewhere between the mountains and the seashore since there are so many references to the maritime and the aquatic, to the sea's edge, to seaweed, tendrils, to underwater sea anemones that also resemble dildos, to floating sperm that might also be floating sea wrack, to roots that wind and wind around each other and disappear into the depths of the ocean or to the infinite horizon. Kusame has expressed her dread of both phalli and industrially produced foodstuffs hence the repetition of symbols of phalli and also mass-produced pasta which is literally stuck onto her canvases.
In 1957 Kusame moved to America at the behest of the artist Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) who she was previously in correspondence with. At first she lived in Seattle but eventually moved to New York where she became a colleague of the American artist Donald Judd, completed an important set of large abstract works presented here as the Infinity Net Paintings which were probably a response to the Abstract Expressionism of artists like Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), the then dominant aesthetic movement in America. Kusame joined the New York avante garde, her ambition was to rival the paintings of the great abstract expressionists. However she moved on swiftly from the public sphere of art museums and public competitions to the private realm of commerce, moving her preoccupations from high art to pop art. Her interests and activities embraced soft sculpture, installations, collage. By the mid 60's she had moved to the street, involving herself in 'happenings' which placed the artist at the centre of her own work rather than her earlier works which were more impersonal. She also worked on films, multi-part sculptures and eventually, by the 1980s and 1990s, to the brightly coloured phatasmagoric canvases which are the continuous diaristic renderings of what the artist sees today. She now works with acrylic paint, a temporary, fast drying medium which is the antithesis of traditional oil painting with its evocation of the work of the Great Masters.
Her sculptures evoke tentacular creatures as in Heaven and Earth (1991) and brittle mosaics as in her work Prisoner's Door (1994). Her artwork is typically eclectic, utilising a mix of mediums such as ink, ballpoint pen, watercolour, gouache and india ink. In her work Yellow Trees (1994) endless tentacles or roots are folding and unfolding through and around each other. In Sprouting (The Transmigration of the Soul) (1987) bubbling spermatozoa becomes a typical, synaptic patterning or Weeds (1996) with its infinite pattern, minimalist repetition and blank surface. The big acrylic canvases evoke brighter more buoyant work and a release from the dour abstraction of her repetitious collages of the 1970s which also summarise an entire decade of American pop art influence. The polka dot pattern that Kasume assumes throughout her work as a series of dots and nets as in I'm here but Nothing (2000/2012), a work which is a living room inverted through dim lights and the glistening coloured polka dots that cover everything.
Kasume returned to Japan in the 1970s and feeling herself unable to cope with the real world self-admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital where she lives to this day, although she somehow escaped its confines to be with us at the opening of her retrospective event at the Tate Modern, London, earlier this week. She apparently makes the journey from the hospital to her studio everyday, returning each evening. This begs a question, why did she return to Japan, to its conservative, sterile confines which were ultimately summed up by the walls of the hospital that became her home? A work like I Who Committed Suicide (1977) seems to evoke this period and Kusame said at some point that without her art she would have committed suicide. The last exhibit is the Infinity Mirror Room, an installation which she first utilised in 1965, evoking as it does the infinite regress of art that moves between the earliest memories of the artist to the very last. Perhaps that's a good place to end this retrospective because the faded remains of those artworks summarise a life lived richly in a period of vast transition and energy between two worlds. These imply both beginnings and endings, east and west, tradition and revolution, sanity and madness or better still, the sensitivity of the artist in a world desensitised to subtlety, ambiguity, carefully arranged revolutionary statements or happenings bypassed by the conduits of power summed up in her invite to have sex with President Richard Nixon in return for ending the Vietnam War. Nixon never took up the invite but he eventually had to end the Vietnam War anyway which might lead us to believe that he might as well have had sex with Kusame because as every fortunate scholar realises the truth of Robert Herrick's formula: 'gather ye rosebuds while ye may'.
Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, London, February 2012
Yayoi Kusame (1929-) was born in Nagano Prefecture in a hill town in the Japanese Alps about 130 miles west of Tokyo just before the second world war. She grew up in a traditional Japanese family with a traditional set of Japanese values that maintained that a woman should complete her education, then marry and have children. However, Yayoi possessed creativity and wanted to fulfill herself through her art rather than taking on a traditional role. This meant that she soon came into direct opposition to her family and especially her mother.
Her parent's business was marketing seeds and they were very opposed to Yayoi's artistic vocation. However she managed to complete one year of art school training in Kyoto in 1948 but the constraints of family, gender and being Japanese led her rebel against these constraints and to become familiar with contemporary American culture but also the legacy of French surrealism, experimental art and the techniques of frottage found in Max Ernst and the work of the Catalan artist Joan Miro. Her work is often a symbiosis of the vegetal, physical and human and it is often marked by her own experience of war and the defeat of her country in WW2.
Kusame's work has often been compared to that of Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) and to her colleague Eva Hesse (1936-1970) and perhaps her real strength as an artist lies in her painting rather than her sculptures which do seem to resemble closely the work of Hesse, for instance. Kusame's works seem to reflect on an existence found somewhere between the mountains and the seashore since there are so many references to the maritime and the aquatic, to the sea's edge, to seaweed, tendrils, to underwater sea anemones that also resemble dildos, to floating sperm that might also be floating sea wrack, to roots that wind and wind around each other and disappear into the depths of the ocean or to the infinite horizon. Kusame has expressed her dread of both phalli and industrially produced foodstuffs hence the repetition of symbols of phalli and also mass-produced pasta which is literally stuck onto her canvases.
In 1957 Kusame moved to America at the behest of the artist Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) who she was previously in correspondence with. At first she lived in Seattle but eventually moved to New York where she became a colleague of the American artist Donald Judd, completed an important set of large abstract works presented here as the Infinity Net Paintings which were probably a response to the Abstract Expressionism of artists like Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), the then dominant aesthetic movement in America. Kusame joined the New York avante garde, her ambition was to rival the paintings of the great abstract expressionists. However she moved on swiftly from the public sphere of art museums and public competitions to the private realm of commerce, moving her preoccupations from high art to pop art. Her interests and activities embraced soft sculpture, installations, collage. By the mid 60's she had moved to the street, involving herself in 'happenings' which placed the artist at the centre of her own work rather than her earlier works which were more impersonal. She also worked on films, multi-part sculptures and eventually, by the 1980s and 1990s, to the brightly coloured phatasmagoric canvases which are the continuous diaristic renderings of what the artist sees today. She now works with acrylic paint, a temporary, fast drying medium which is the antithesis of traditional oil painting with its evocation of the work of the Great Masters.
Her sculptures evoke tentacular creatures as in Heaven and Earth (1991) and brittle mosaics as in her work Prisoner's Door (1994). Her artwork is typically eclectic, utilising a mix of mediums such as ink, ballpoint pen, watercolour, gouache and india ink. In her work Yellow Trees (1994) endless tentacles or roots are folding and unfolding through and around each other. In Sprouting (The Transmigration of the Soul) (1987) bubbling spermatozoa becomes a typical, synaptic patterning or Weeds (1996) with its infinite pattern, minimalist repetition and blank surface. The big acrylic canvases evoke brighter more buoyant work and a release from the dour abstraction of her repetitious collages of the 1970s which also summarise an entire decade of American pop art influence. The polka dot pattern that Kasume assumes throughout her work as a series of dots and nets as in I'm here but Nothing (2000/2012), a work which is a living room inverted through dim lights and the glistening coloured polka dots that cover everything.
Kasume returned to Japan in the 1970s and feeling herself unable to cope with the real world self-admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital where she lives to this day, although she somehow escaped its confines to be with us at the opening of her retrospective event at the Tate Modern, London, earlier this week. She apparently makes the journey from the hospital to her studio everyday, returning each evening. This begs a question, why did she return to Japan, to its conservative, sterile confines which were ultimately summed up by the walls of the hospital that became her home? A work like I Who Committed Suicide (1977) seems to evoke this period and Kusame said at some point that without her art she would have committed suicide. The last exhibit is the Infinity Mirror Room, an installation which she first utilised in 1965, evoking as it does the infinite regress of art that moves between the earliest memories of the artist to the very last. Perhaps that's a good place to end this retrospective because the faded remains of those artworks summarise a life lived richly in a period of vast transition and energy between two worlds. These imply both beginnings and endings, east and west, tradition and revolution, sanity and madness or better still, the sensitivity of the artist in a world desensitised to subtlety, ambiguity, carefully arranged revolutionary statements or happenings bypassed by the conduits of power summed up in her invite to have sex with President Richard Nixon in return for ending the Vietnam War. Nixon never took up the invite but he eventually had to end the Vietnam War anyway which might lead us to believe that he might as well have had sex with Kusame because as every fortunate scholar realises the truth of Robert Herrick's formula: 'gather ye rosebuds while ye may'.
Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, London, February 2012
Sunday, 27 November 2011
ANDREA HEWITT AT THE WIGMORE HALL
ANDREA HEWITT AT THE WIGMORE HALL
The internationally famous Canadian pianist Andrea Hewitt performed works by Claude Debussy (1862-1918), Gabriel Faure (1845-1924), Paul Dukas (1865-1935) and Albert Roussel (1869-1937) at the Wigmore Hall on Friday, 25th November, 2011. The Debussy works, including Suite Bergamasque (c.1890) and L'Isle Joyeuse (1904) all typify the impressionist style of music where there is no dominant key and harmony is the most important element.
Hewitt's performance was perfect in terms of tempo and was never circumscribed by critical or audience expectations. The works were played quite slowly so that the music should not become muddied and confused. Her interpretations of these works was warm, humane and forgiving, never machine-like or cold. She allowed few improvisations, however, which might have been appropriate in Golliwog's Cake Walk which needed a bit of jazzing up. Hewitt's attitude to the audience and the music was never calculating or cold but spontaneous and deeply felt.
Paul Murphy, Wigmore Hall, November 2011
The internationally famous Canadian pianist Andrea Hewitt performed works by Claude Debussy (1862-1918), Gabriel Faure (1845-1924), Paul Dukas (1865-1935) and Albert Roussel (1869-1937) at the Wigmore Hall on Friday, 25th November, 2011. The Debussy works, including Suite Bergamasque (c.1890) and L'Isle Joyeuse (1904) all typify the impressionist style of music where there is no dominant key and harmony is the most important element.
Hewitt's performance was perfect in terms of tempo and was never circumscribed by critical or audience expectations. The works were played quite slowly so that the music should not become muddied and confused. Her interpretations of these works was warm, humane and forgiving, never machine-like or cold. She allowed few improvisations, however, which might have been appropriate in Golliwog's Cake Walk which needed a bit of jazzing up. Hewitt's attitude to the audience and the music was never calculating or cold but spontaneous and deeply felt.
Paul Murphy, Wigmore Hall, November 2011
Thursday, 24 November 2011
IMAGINARY SYMBOLS OF END TIMES: THE SCULPTURE OF BARRY FLANAGAN 1965-82
IMAGINARY SYMBOLS OF END TIMES: THE SCULPTURE OF BARRY FLANAGAN 1965-82
Barry Flanagan at the Tate Britain
This is a retrospective of the work of the sculpture Barry Flanagan (1941-2009). Flanagan attended St Martin's School of Art from 1964-66 but his approach to sculpture isn't essentially very academic. He uses non-conventional materials such as sand, canvas, rope, sculpted cushions, installation-like assemblages resembling landscapes or even some organic entity or animal, a blue volcano topped with an aluminium object with blunted edge which may also be a face in profile (al casb 4 '67 & aaing j gni aa 1965)). A giant gourd may also resemble sagging testacles or heaped, coloured sand accompanied by two small sacks which may also be testacles stuck on an evaporating sand penis. There's also the influence of Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) and his Pataphysics, 'the science of imaginary solutions' and the work that made Jarry famous, his 'Ubu Roi'.
There are imaginary organic objects such as distended plants, a clothesline completed by brightly coloured fabrics. The play of light and shadow, the open spaces, cream walls and sand-coloured wooden floorboards of the Tate Britain become part of the sculptures. Ropes that undulate like giant snakes among indigo sub volcanic stacks but really elongated cushions stuffed with sand as in Flanagan's work rope (gr 2sp 60) 6 '67. Piles of blankets, a yellowing canvas shot through with a pattern of bullet holes that is both concentric and eccentric. Flanagan experiments with expectations of what the public defines as sculpture, creating fluid yet transitory shapes and images.
The recurrent spiral symbol found in works like vii 78 moonthatch 1987 is reminscent of the gidouille, the spiral on the belly of Ubu Roi, Jarry's Pataphysical anti-hero. Flanagan's travails to the continent also led him to northern Italy, to an artisan community which symbolised some of the ideals of his art but he also managed to work with the marble found in that region to create works like The Road to Altissimo (1973), Ubu of Arabia (1976) and Hello cello (1976).
There are also a great many of Flanagan's paintings and they are intense, child-like, hard-edged in a sculptural sense but always imbued with Flanagan's trademark humour and playfulness. They toy with great ideas in physics and mathematics but Flanagan also hardly appears to take them seriously. I'd question whether the sequence Cup drawings i-vi (1874) really needs to be here since the effect is not one of seeming naivety but of naivety. Flanagan is a primitive artist constructing the imaginary wigwams that children hide in and the real hares that they chase on moonlit nights. In some ways he seems to mock the pretensions of high art but his works rarely become legitimate artworks except by relating the most basic sense of child-like wonderment at nature and the natural world.
This exhibition only deals with the early Flanagan (1965-82) so it ends with his depictions of hares which he gained an interest in after reading The Leaping Hare by George Ewart and David Thomson which explored the mythical attributes of the hare through history. Flanagan clearly began to find a lucrative career for he now began to work in bronze, the typical, traditional medium of the sculptor, to make his Large Leaping Hare (1982). Since he then gained respectability the aura of an anti-establishment sculptor began to fade away slightly and these large scale sculptures are just a bit over-bearing but this is only part of a really enjoyable retrospective of Flanagan's work.
Paul Murphy, the Tate Brtain, November 2011
Barry Flanagan at the Tate Britain
This is a retrospective of the work of the sculpture Barry Flanagan (1941-2009). Flanagan attended St Martin's School of Art from 1964-66 but his approach to sculpture isn't essentially very academic. He uses non-conventional materials such as sand, canvas, rope, sculpted cushions, installation-like assemblages resembling landscapes or even some organic entity or animal, a blue volcano topped with an aluminium object with blunted edge which may also be a face in profile (al casb 4 '67 & aaing j gni aa 1965)). A giant gourd may also resemble sagging testacles or heaped, coloured sand accompanied by two small sacks which may also be testacles stuck on an evaporating sand penis. There's also the influence of Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) and his Pataphysics, 'the science of imaginary solutions' and the work that made Jarry famous, his 'Ubu Roi'.
There are imaginary organic objects such as distended plants, a clothesline completed by brightly coloured fabrics. The play of light and shadow, the open spaces, cream walls and sand-coloured wooden floorboards of the Tate Britain become part of the sculptures. Ropes that undulate like giant snakes among indigo sub volcanic stacks but really elongated cushions stuffed with sand as in Flanagan's work rope (gr 2sp 60) 6 '67. Piles of blankets, a yellowing canvas shot through with a pattern of bullet holes that is both concentric and eccentric. Flanagan experiments with expectations of what the public defines as sculpture, creating fluid yet transitory shapes and images.
The recurrent spiral symbol found in works like vii 78 moonthatch 1987 is reminscent of the gidouille, the spiral on the belly of Ubu Roi, Jarry's Pataphysical anti-hero. Flanagan's travails to the continent also led him to northern Italy, to an artisan community which symbolised some of the ideals of his art but he also managed to work with the marble found in that region to create works like The Road to Altissimo (1973), Ubu of Arabia (1976) and Hello cello (1976).
There are also a great many of Flanagan's paintings and they are intense, child-like, hard-edged in a sculptural sense but always imbued with Flanagan's trademark humour and playfulness. They toy with great ideas in physics and mathematics but Flanagan also hardly appears to take them seriously. I'd question whether the sequence Cup drawings i-vi (1874) really needs to be here since the effect is not one of seeming naivety but of naivety. Flanagan is a primitive artist constructing the imaginary wigwams that children hide in and the real hares that they chase on moonlit nights. In some ways he seems to mock the pretensions of high art but his works rarely become legitimate artworks except by relating the most basic sense of child-like wonderment at nature and the natural world.
This exhibition only deals with the early Flanagan (1965-82) so it ends with his depictions of hares which he gained an interest in after reading The Leaping Hare by George Ewart and David Thomson which explored the mythical attributes of the hare through history. Flanagan clearly began to find a lucrative career for he now began to work in bronze, the typical, traditional medium of the sculptor, to make his Large Leaping Hare (1982). Since he then gained respectability the aura of an anti-establishment sculptor began to fade away slightly and these large scale sculptures are just a bit over-bearing but this is only part of a really enjoyable retrospective of Flanagan's work.
Paul Murphy, the Tate Brtain, November 2011
Wednesday, 2 November 2011
JOHN MARTIN: APOCALYPSE at the TATE BRITAIN
JOHN MARTIN: APOCALYPSE at the TATE BRITAIN
John Martin (1789-1854) was a British artist born in Newcastle into a working class family. Martin's work contrasts with that of contemporaries William Blake (1757-1827) and JMW Turner (1775-1851). Technically he was compared to Turner and his subject matter overlaps strongly with that of Blake. His reconstructions of biblical scenes offer a great urge towards verisimilitude even if there's always a hotch potch of details as in his painting The Fall of Babylon (1819). Ancient Babylon with 18th century-style ships, Babylonian soldiers in Roman uniform climbing into Victorian carriages under what seem to be Japanese bonsai trees. However, Martin wanted to be taken seriously and often provided keys and appendixes to his paintings demonstrating their links to actual history. He sought to engage with Victorian populism, which was very unfashionable among the intellectual elites but also dearly wished to be taken seriously by the art establishment.
Contemporary critics were often uncertain about Martin's art even though the general public uncritically endorsed it. Martin was also endorsed by aristocratic patrons like Prince Albert. However the Royal Academy never opened its doors to him and probably disdained the mix of populism, biblical apocalypse, sensationalism and what William Hazlitt called the 'gaudy panoramic view'. His skills are not those of the oil painter either for he commits many errors especially in using non-naturalistic colour, laying down inert blocks of paint alongside his trade mark and oft repeated lightning bolt. However, Martin was a technician with visionary scope. His basic training was in craft painting, for he had been apprenticed, but not in fine art. It's easy to see then the reasons why his art was never accepted critically but for all that Martin made a fortune, then managed to squander it.
Martin's art is grandiose, sensationalising subject matter and quasi-biblical apocalypse in his blockbuster period which began after his period of early development (1807-1820). The height of his success can be traced to the years 1816-1824 in a series of blockbuster paintings which include Belshazzar's Feast (1820), Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand still upon Gibeon (1816) and The Fall of Babylon (1819). He didn't always choose biblical subjects but even idiosyncratic or odd choices of thematic material based on popular public poetry of the time such as James Ridley's Orientalist popular fantasy Tales of the Genii (1764). He never really matched Turner in terms of technique, his approach to his subject matter pre-dates yet anticipates photography but moreso cinema. It also offers a contrast to Blake's idiosyncratic yet vivid, primitive approach. Martin seems to be like D.W.Griffith who made 'Birth of a Nation' then realised that public opinion viewed the film as racist then made 'Intolerance' which demonstrated that the film maker was actually a liberal interrogator of history. In fact Martin's painting The Fall of Babylon can be seen as an adumbration of 'Intolerance'. Because of Martin's technical failings but visionary scope he seems to anticipate the blockbuster films of our era but, as the exhibition demonstrates Martin was a showman who went out to create works for the public imagination which then went out of fashion as contemporary culture changed. Martin's work was immensely popular and large chunks of it went on travelling shows throughout Britain. The later mezzotints also ensured that his work was seen all over the world. Martin constantly circled his subject matter, endorsing then distancing himself from it. Biblical topics provided him with a good deal of his subject matter but also Milton's 'Paradise Lost' which he illustrated but he would also depict other kinds of apocalypse such as his work The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum (1822). This is an undoubtedly portentous work. It's hard not to attach the tag 'great' to it with its depiction of the death of Pliny the Elder against the backdrop of the catastrophic destruction of Pompeii in a swirl of boiling hot reds. This is great panoramic painting achieved with immense talent and obvious showmanship. For all that it encountered criticism for its populism and bad taste.
Martin experienced financial vicissitudes as the public lost interest in his work but later on managed to re-invent himself. He was therefore palpably capable of a degree of self-criticism. Martin's re-inventions were mainly in terms of technique, abandoning oil painting in favour of mezzotint from 1824-37. Mezzotint was a form of printing popular in the early Victorian era. It preceded photography but offered a similar range of effects. Martin had real dramatic, narrative skills although only one theme, destruction, or damnation, and, concomitantly, salvation. There's no evidence of a neutral middleground or even the sublimity evident in Turner's painting. Martin was an artist with one grand theme that he circled endlessly. Martin depicts crowds effectively, whether vast armies, hordes or banqueteers but seems to ignore portraiture or the individuated subject. Martin's figures are always part of a vast homogenous crowd. He therefore seems to have no interest in the individual but only in stirring, sensational public effects which deliberately worked upon an enormous God-fearing public who had a seemingly endless appetite for his work. Once Martin found his blueprint he stuck to it unlike the great masters who were capable of self-criticism and of instigating new periods throughout their lives.
Martin's key innovation was undoubtedly his work in mezzotint but he eventually abandoned these to work on vast engineering schemes which included the reform of London's sewage and transport systems. However, these ultimately came to nothing and were probably blocked by then prevailing interest groups. Martin was a reformer but also a commerical artist, a contradictory figure who summons up all the sublime, slightly tragic tropes of the era: immense endeavour, incredible energy, fervent moralising, apocalypse or salvation. He had many flaws but it is still impossible to pin down exactly what he was although he was undoubtedly an important Victorian reformer and prophet.
Eventually Martin returned to oil paint and his favourite topics which became ever more extravagent, garish and absurd. Two works depict the flood, The Eve of the Deluge (1840) and The Assuaging of the Waters (1840). The first painting was criticised for its garish colouring and artificial effects but was bought by the Prince Consort. Martin was extremely proud of the connection with the Royal Family and of his other achievements. He seems to have been extremely vain yet inherently decent, an odd combination. At the same time he painted his only realist painting, Queen Victoria's coronation in 1838, depicting a real-life moment of crisis when a peer tripped on the red carpet. Victoria is humanised by her instinctive attempt to help. Martin wanted to celebrate the new monarch who turned out happily to be an improvement on the previous two.
Martin lived in a pre-Freudian era, his work The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (1852) undoubtedly underline the brilliant qualities of Martin's art alongside the tripe, the populism, the bad taste. It's hard to see such a work being presented in our own era without a great deal of ensuing laughter but Martin was painting in the mid-Victorian era when biblical concepts of judgement (and populist homophobia) were rampant. The painting is still amazing, presaging blockbusters like Roland Emmerich's recent 'The Day after Tomorrow' and '2012' which keep alive the spirit of Martin and of the public's obvious enjoyment of grand spectacle, destruction on a vast scale alongside a grandiosly obvious, bombastic biblical moral message. His last work, the triptych The Great Day of His Wrath (1851-3), The Last Judgement and The Plains of Heaven are similarly gargantuan offering terrifying visions of apocalypse, judgement, damnation and salvation. They have to be seen to be believed. They also influenced the Hollywood animator Ray Harryhausen and other sci-fi artists of our own era and continue to do so.
Martin's life was also tainted by tragedy and crisis. His brother went tragically insane, burning down York Minster and consequentially became a patient in a mental hospital. Martin busied himself with his brother's legal defence, later visited him in hospital, bringing him artist's materials where he painted a version of Martin's own painting The Fall of Babylon with the Houses of Parliament replacing Babylon. Obviously Martin was able to harness the grandiose visions whereas his brother unfortunately succumbed to them. His son Charles was also a gifted artist, his painting of his father exhibited here provides evidence of these gifts.
This exhibition is a great introduction to the works of John Martin who pre-dated our own era but also foretold it. His work went out of fashion in the early Twentieth-century but is now part of our artistic language and heritage again.
Paul Murphy, The Tate Britain, November 2011
John Martin (1789-1854) was a British artist born in Newcastle into a working class family. Martin's work contrasts with that of contemporaries William Blake (1757-1827) and JMW Turner (1775-1851). Technically he was compared to Turner and his subject matter overlaps strongly with that of Blake. His reconstructions of biblical scenes offer a great urge towards verisimilitude even if there's always a hotch potch of details as in his painting The Fall of Babylon (1819). Ancient Babylon with 18th century-style ships, Babylonian soldiers in Roman uniform climbing into Victorian carriages under what seem to be Japanese bonsai trees. However, Martin wanted to be taken seriously and often provided keys and appendixes to his paintings demonstrating their links to actual history. He sought to engage with Victorian populism, which was very unfashionable among the intellectual elites but also dearly wished to be taken seriously by the art establishment.
Contemporary critics were often uncertain about Martin's art even though the general public uncritically endorsed it. Martin was also endorsed by aristocratic patrons like Prince Albert. However the Royal Academy never opened its doors to him and probably disdained the mix of populism, biblical apocalypse, sensationalism and what William Hazlitt called the 'gaudy panoramic view'. His skills are not those of the oil painter either for he commits many errors especially in using non-naturalistic colour, laying down inert blocks of paint alongside his trade mark and oft repeated lightning bolt. However, Martin was a technician with visionary scope. His basic training was in craft painting, for he had been apprenticed, but not in fine art. It's easy to see then the reasons why his art was never accepted critically but for all that Martin made a fortune, then managed to squander it.
Martin's art is grandiose, sensationalising subject matter and quasi-biblical apocalypse in his blockbuster period which began after his period of early development (1807-1820). The height of his success can be traced to the years 1816-1824 in a series of blockbuster paintings which include Belshazzar's Feast (1820), Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand still upon Gibeon (1816) and The Fall of Babylon (1819). He didn't always choose biblical subjects but even idiosyncratic or odd choices of thematic material based on popular public poetry of the time such as James Ridley's Orientalist popular fantasy Tales of the Genii (1764). He never really matched Turner in terms of technique, his approach to his subject matter pre-dates yet anticipates photography but moreso cinema. It also offers a contrast to Blake's idiosyncratic yet vivid, primitive approach. Martin seems to be like D.W.Griffith who made 'Birth of a Nation' then realised that public opinion viewed the film as racist then made 'Intolerance' which demonstrated that the film maker was actually a liberal interrogator of history. In fact Martin's painting The Fall of Babylon can be seen as an adumbration of 'Intolerance'. Because of Martin's technical failings but visionary scope he seems to anticipate the blockbuster films of our era but, as the exhibition demonstrates Martin was a showman who went out to create works for the public imagination which then went out of fashion as contemporary culture changed. Martin's work was immensely popular and large chunks of it went on travelling shows throughout Britain. The later mezzotints also ensured that his work was seen all over the world. Martin constantly circled his subject matter, endorsing then distancing himself from it. Biblical topics provided him with a good deal of his subject matter but also Milton's 'Paradise Lost' which he illustrated but he would also depict other kinds of apocalypse such as his work The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum (1822). This is an undoubtedly portentous work. It's hard not to attach the tag 'great' to it with its depiction of the death of Pliny the Elder against the backdrop of the catastrophic destruction of Pompeii in a swirl of boiling hot reds. This is great panoramic painting achieved with immense talent and obvious showmanship. For all that it encountered criticism for its populism and bad taste.
Martin experienced financial vicissitudes as the public lost interest in his work but later on managed to re-invent himself. He was therefore palpably capable of a degree of self-criticism. Martin's re-inventions were mainly in terms of technique, abandoning oil painting in favour of mezzotint from 1824-37. Mezzotint was a form of printing popular in the early Victorian era. It preceded photography but offered a similar range of effects. Martin had real dramatic, narrative skills although only one theme, destruction, or damnation, and, concomitantly, salvation. There's no evidence of a neutral middleground or even the sublimity evident in Turner's painting. Martin was an artist with one grand theme that he circled endlessly. Martin depicts crowds effectively, whether vast armies, hordes or banqueteers but seems to ignore portraiture or the individuated subject. Martin's figures are always part of a vast homogenous crowd. He therefore seems to have no interest in the individual but only in stirring, sensational public effects which deliberately worked upon an enormous God-fearing public who had a seemingly endless appetite for his work. Once Martin found his blueprint he stuck to it unlike the great masters who were capable of self-criticism and of instigating new periods throughout their lives.
Martin's key innovation was undoubtedly his work in mezzotint but he eventually abandoned these to work on vast engineering schemes which included the reform of London's sewage and transport systems. However, these ultimately came to nothing and were probably blocked by then prevailing interest groups. Martin was a reformer but also a commerical artist, a contradictory figure who summons up all the sublime, slightly tragic tropes of the era: immense endeavour, incredible energy, fervent moralising, apocalypse or salvation. He had many flaws but it is still impossible to pin down exactly what he was although he was undoubtedly an important Victorian reformer and prophet.
Eventually Martin returned to oil paint and his favourite topics which became ever more extravagent, garish and absurd. Two works depict the flood, The Eve of the Deluge (1840) and The Assuaging of the Waters (1840). The first painting was criticised for its garish colouring and artificial effects but was bought by the Prince Consort. Martin was extremely proud of the connection with the Royal Family and of his other achievements. He seems to have been extremely vain yet inherently decent, an odd combination. At the same time he painted his only realist painting, Queen Victoria's coronation in 1838, depicting a real-life moment of crisis when a peer tripped on the red carpet. Victoria is humanised by her instinctive attempt to help. Martin wanted to celebrate the new monarch who turned out happily to be an improvement on the previous two.
Martin lived in a pre-Freudian era, his work The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (1852) undoubtedly underline the brilliant qualities of Martin's art alongside the tripe, the populism, the bad taste. It's hard to see such a work being presented in our own era without a great deal of ensuing laughter but Martin was painting in the mid-Victorian era when biblical concepts of judgement (and populist homophobia) were rampant. The painting is still amazing, presaging blockbusters like Roland Emmerich's recent 'The Day after Tomorrow' and '2012' which keep alive the spirit of Martin and of the public's obvious enjoyment of grand spectacle, destruction on a vast scale alongside a grandiosly obvious, bombastic biblical moral message. His last work, the triptych The Great Day of His Wrath (1851-3), The Last Judgement and The Plains of Heaven are similarly gargantuan offering terrifying visions of apocalypse, judgement, damnation and salvation. They have to be seen to be believed. They also influenced the Hollywood animator Ray Harryhausen and other sci-fi artists of our own era and continue to do so.
Martin's life was also tainted by tragedy and crisis. His brother went tragically insane, burning down York Minster and consequentially became a patient in a mental hospital. Martin busied himself with his brother's legal defence, later visited him in hospital, bringing him artist's materials where he painted a version of Martin's own painting The Fall of Babylon with the Houses of Parliament replacing Babylon. Obviously Martin was able to harness the grandiose visions whereas his brother unfortunately succumbed to them. His son Charles was also a gifted artist, his painting of his father exhibited here provides evidence of these gifts.
This exhibition is a great introduction to the works of John Martin who pre-dated our own era but also foretold it. His work went out of fashion in the early Twentieth-century but is now part of our artistic language and heritage again.
Paul Murphy, The Tate Britain, November 2011
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