The Engine

The Avante Garde of Fin de Siecle Paris: Signac, Bonnard, Redon and their contemporaries: at the Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art, Venice, Italy  This exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim modern art gallery, Venice, charts the evolution of French painting at the end of the 19th century. The Impressionist movement was beginning to become the kind of tired art monopoly that it had once rebelled against. France had been defeated in the war of 1870 by the Prussians and Germany had thus been unified. In the fin de siecle France was to be rocked by the Dreyfus scandal but also by a political ferment including Bohemians and conservatives, radicals and anti-republicans, anarchists and supporters of the status quo. Artists began to either retreat from the political turmoil around them into a purely aesthetic movement or fervently embrace predominantly left wing alternatives.  The period was summarized by five separate, disparate groups: the Nabis, the Fauvists, the Pontillists, the Post-Im

IBRAHIM EL-SALAHI at the Tate Modern  The Tate Modern is beginning to exhaust its cultivated eurocentricism, itself a curious, affable ploy and so has welcomed the work of an African artist who can also be defined as a Modernist and therefore an African waiting to be defined as a European. In previous epochs the work of El-Salahi might have ended up in the Museum of Ethnographic Art, patronised by white european art critics as primitive, curious yet worthless and laughably inept ethnographic artifacts. There is no protracted postscript or apology at the end of the El-Salahi exhibition and certainly none to rival the postscript at the Museum of Ethnographic Art in Dalheim, Berlin which seeks to "contextualise" the entire museum within a revision of the recent past and not an entirely convincing one either. El-Salahi is more captivated by his own mind than by what's happening in the external world to the extent that his technique is very often burnt off and seems to be

LS LOWRY AT THE TATE BRITAIN  There is snow in Manchester. It is 1946. Tiny figures, they are human beings, are walking past, a vast indifferent crowd. The crowd is organic, has a palpable life of its own. The city backdrop is immeasurable, like a vast sprawling beast. This is the art of LS Lowry (1887-1976). His dates are almost identical to those of Picasso although that is where the resemblance ends. Lowry is an artist of the north east of England. He lived in Pendlebury and depicted the life of the people of Manchester and Salford. The exhibition implies that Lowry is a Van Gogh figure (the exhibition counterpoints this idea by exhibiting one of Van Gogh's works). He is an untaught or self-taught primitive with gut instincts about what art is rather than formulated concepts. He is a person who just goes out and paints and never attempts to conceptualise his craft.  Lowry was a northerner and most of his work was concerned with the squalor, dirt and decline of Man

ROY LICHTENSTEIN at the TATE MODERN Roy Lichtensten (1923-1997) was born in New York City into an upper-middle class Jewish family. He studied fine art at Ohio State University during World War 2 then went to the army (1942-45). His father Milton was a real estate broker, managing parking lots and car parks. After the war he continued with his studies at university. Throughout the 1950s he learnt his craft by imitating the works of the European masters, Picasso, Braque, Matisse and learning from the art movements, surrealism, cubism, expressionism, they represented but ultimately either destroyed or lost his work from this period by 1960. He initially adopted then rebelled against the prevailing orthodoxy of abstract expressionism represented by the works of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky and Mark Rothko. However, his great breakthrough into a personal voice was his work 'Look Mickey' (1961). Lichtenstein found this image in his son's comic but hi

SCHWITTERS IN BRITAIN at the TATE BRITAIN  Kurt Schwitters (1887- 1948) worked in Germany before World War 2, a member of the European avante garde based in Hannover in Niedersachsen, Germany. He initially became famous as the author of Dadaist poems and satires on traditional German love poems, sending up trite conventions of love and romance. He also worked as an artist, pioneering a form of Dadaism based on his preference for collage known as Merz, especially the Merzbau, two rooms of his own house in Hannover transformed into an installation (1929). Eventually his work was condemned by the Nazis and placed into the entarte – degenerate art exhibition at the Haus der Kunst, Munich. Schwitters had been working in Norway since the early 1930s but now took unofficial exile in that country. Then, three years later, Norway fell to the Nazis necessitating Schwitter’s rapid move, along with his son Ernst, on an ice breaker to Britain in 1940. When he arrived in Britain, instead of rece

It little dreamed (though on the morrow of the 2d December, 1851, Prince von Schwartzenberg, congratulating Prince Louis Napoleon on a success, destined in seven years to be so fatal to Austria, had said: “You can do anything with bayonets but sit upon them"), it little dreamed the Empire, defended by half a million bayonets, entrenched in a city whose streets were laid out upon the strictest principles of military engineering striving for best attack and defence, should one day tumble like a castle of cards at the breath of men with brains—those despised fellows who could make good speeches.