The Engine

  AUBREY BEARDSLEY at the TATE BRITAIN on the 20 th August 2020   Aubrey Beardsley was born in Brighton in 1872.   Beardsley lived his life with an awareness that he would not live long for he suffered from tuberculosis which was at that time incurable.   Beardsley was not the only artist to have contracted the illness.   Poets and composers like John Keats, Frederic Chopin and Carl Maria von Weber all died from TB.   The German novelist Thomas Mann wrote a study of the treatment of TB in his novel Die Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain).   Beardsley seems to have been determined to perfect his art which was reduced to the simplest materials and means, black ink on paper (there are some few exceptions where he uses colour).   His work is condensed, reduced in size and scale, yet Beardsley’s imagination was expansive, his creativity seemingly inexhaustible, playful, and boundless.   Significantly, there is no trace of self-pity to be found ...

  TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG dir Justin Kurzel   The True History of the Kelly Gang comes complete with bearded, corpulent Russell Crowe as a Godfather of crime (not a Godfather of acting although one suspects that this was his actual role).   There have been other interpretations of the Kelly legend, previously in 1970 a version with Mick Jagger as Ned and in 2003 Heath Ledge assumed the mantle of the eponymous anti-hero and bushranger, Ned (Edward) Kelly.   Heath Ledger’s interpretation of Ned is more like a western shot in Australia, Ned speaks with a strong Irish accent and his protest is coherently and vividly depicted. Justin Kurzel's film True History of the Kelly Gang concurs with the Postmodern dogma that, in the words of Nietzsche, 'there is no such thing as truth, only interpretation.'   Kurzel had previously shot Shakespeare’s Macbeth in the manner of a Sam Peckinpah flick with lots of groaningly awful slow-motion decapitation.  ...

  ANDY WARHOL AT THE TATE MODERN, 19 TH AUGUST 2020   Andy Warhol was born in 1928 in Pittsburgh, USA, the son of immigrants from Slovakia whose original name was Warhola.   Warhol began his career as a graphic designer, the clean delineation and unindividuated use of blocks of colour is unmistakable.   Warhol’s main aim was to make money from his talents, but he also wanted to be taken seriously as an artist.   He therefore sought to create an artform based on the mass production techniques of post-war American capitalism.   Warhol’s images of Campbells soup cans ( 100 Campbell’s Soup Cans 1962 by Andy Warhol, Casein paint, acrylic paint, and graphite on canvas) and coke cans ( Green Coca Cola Bottles 1962 by Andy Warhol) imply the equalising impetus of US capitalism where rich and poor consume the same products.   The repetitious banality of mass production techniques implied in such artworks as a legitimate source of inspiration and influence...