The Engine

Matisse: Cut Outs: Tate Modern: London: August 2014   Henri Matisse’s (1869-1954) cut outs are pictorial icons of the Twentieth-Century avant-garde but this exhibition explains their evolution in terms of the context of Matisse’s ageing and declining health. In a sense Matisse’s rejection of painting was an aesthetic choice but since he was primarily a realist painter cut outs offered Matisse a new direction. Obviously they allowed him to re-assemble his images, to test out the composition, allowing him to re-establish his images and their contexts. However, cut outs were also a practical response to the artist’s loss of mobility which had been caused by a colostomy, (a medical cut out). Matisse found novel ways of overcoming declining health and immobility. Yet Matisse, the great rival of Picasso and along with Picasso and Marcel Duchamp a key innovator in modern art, was creatively vital and energetic to the very end of his life.   Matisse’s initial attempts at...

KASIMIR MALEVICH AT THE TATE MODERN  Born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1879 to Polish parents, Kasimir Malevich (1879-1935) could hardly be said to be Russian so unsurprisingly his initial attempts at art sought to establish his personal surroundings and then his”Russian” identity. Malevich lived through a time of incredible turmoil and rapid change in Russia. The serfs had only just been emancipated in 1861, a liberal constitution was still a dream and an ineffectual Duma (Parliament) largely served the Tsar's interests. Opponents of autocracy included Liberals, Social Revolutionaries, Social Democrats and Anarchists. Some of these groups had indeed given up democratic politics in the face of intense repression on the part of the Tsarist regime and had begun to embrace political violence and assassination as legitimate forms of dissent. Malevich represented a new class of artist revolutionaries who were rapidly outpacing both anti and pro democracy groupings. He recognised that his task w...

Jamie McKendrick: Out There: Faber & Faber: 2012  Readers who like poetry and, more specifically, those who like the poetry of Jamie McKendrick won't be disappointed by this volume. Others seeking a more restless, engaged voice which seems to be reaching out to the reader and the world may need to look elsewhere. Its not the language that the author deploys or the esoteric knowledge and polyglot foreign languages that are all amassed with some panache that will disappoint because, in some superficial sense, Out There , is a pretty persuasive volume of poetry. The language is dense, thought-provoking and multiple layers of references cleverly arranged cannot detract from the author's efforts. The trouble with this book is the author's dearth of anything much to talk about. In a poem like Psychostasia which seems to meaningfully sum up the futile stasis of the poem, a cathedral of language replete with references to Christianity, Classical mythology and the Ancien...

THE GREAT WAR OBSERVED IN ITALY AND IRELAND: FROM THE SOMME TO THE PIAVE 1914 - 2014  Today, Sunday 2nd March 2014, there was a table tennis tournament in Meolo, a town half-way between here and Venice, so I set out on the bike about 1.30 but didn't arrive until just before 3pm even though Meolo is only about 15km from here. The tournament was already finished, in fact my club, San Dona, had already gone but it wasn't a problem because I had enjoyed the bike ride. I cycled on the road past Musile di Piave and then turned left towards the mountains which were visible even though it was a dull, overcast yet dry day. Yesterday had been incredibly wet, torrential downpours and I had to endure a good soaking on the way back from college. I turned left and cycled inland to Fossalta di Piave. At last I had found the town where Ernest Hemingway sustained his wounds. There wasn't much in Fossalta, just some houses, some basic services and a small railway station. The countryside a...

Gottfried Benn, Impromtus: Selected Poems, translated by Michael Hofmann (Faber & Faber, 2013)  The poetry of Gottfried Benn (1886-1956) explains a gap in the coherence of Twentieth-century literature. Benn was a doctor, a scientist who served the interests of German militarism and latterly the Nazi regime and was possibly one of the few men to have served in both wars. As a poet he might have reflected that once was enough but his disappearance into the military a second time has a different explanation. Benn was more than a poet, a surgeon specialising in skin diseases and venereal disease. His role was therefore vital to an army displaced from its normal civilian functions, his age largely irrelevant. He cared for the health of prostitutes who have followed every army in history and he therefore had a role as a sensitive interrogator of often brutal realities.  Benn’s poetry career began before 1914, when his profession of surgeon and dissector of bodies led him to ...