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All posts tagged Hannah Höch
Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-Garde @ the Barbican
This is an extraordinarily packed, dense and demanding exhibition.
The basic idea is deceptively simple. The show looks at over 40 artistic couples who were pioneers of early 20th century avant-garde art, photography, design and literature, and explores the stories of their sexual, emotional and artistic relationships, liberally illustrating the narratives with photos and art works, books and pamphlets, fabrics and ceramics, chairs and bookshelves, which one or other or both of them produced.
Women first
One central aim of the exhibition is to show that, more often than not, the women in these artistic relationships were as, if not more, important and influential (and creative in their own right) than the male artists and male critics of their time – and ever since – have acknowledged.
So, in a small but telling detail, in all the displays of couples, it is the woman who is presented first, the woman's name which appears first and the woman's work and contribution which is most explored.
Thus in the opening room we are told that the model Camille Claudel played a larger role in the career of sculptor Auguste Rodin than is usually credited, as well as being an interesting sculptor in her own right, with samples of her work to prove it.
The same goes for Maria Martens, who enjoyed a long and passionate working relationship with the more-famous Marcel Duchamp, but was a notable artist in her own right.
Later on we learn that Gustav Klimt's lifelong soul-mate, and the model for some of his most famous paintings – Emilie Flöge – was more than just a muse and model, but a talented fashion designer who ran her own very successful couture house, the Schwestern Flöge (1904–1938), in Vienna.
Emilie Flöge and some of her dress designs c.1900
The exhibition works through scores of other examples, in each case showing that the women in each famous couple were often notable artists, sculptors, designers and business people in their own right, as well as contributing ideas, designs and artworks to what would nowadays be seen more as collaborative relationships than the old-fashioned story of an active Male Artist and a passive Female Muse.
Natalia Goncharova, the Russian Futurist artist, painter, costume designer, writer, illustrator, and set designer was every bit as innovative as her lifelong partner and founder of Rayonism, Mikhail Larionov.
Frida Kahlo, during the 1930s overshadowed by her husband, the famous mural painter Diego Rivera, has subsequently emerged as a powerful artistic figure in her own right.
Leonora Carrington has traditionally been seen as a 'muse' for the Surrealist artist, Max Ernst, during the three intense years of their relationship, 1937-40, but she was a sculptor and painter in her own right, as well as the author of a harrowing account of her experience of mental illness, Into the Abyss.
Early in their relationship Georgia O'Keeffe was the junior partner to her husband, the famous New York photographer Alfred Stieglitz, but her career as a painter would go on to eclipse his reputation.
In fact, the show at moments suggests that it was sometimes the men who were the muse figures for a woman artist, for example in the section on Picasso and how his image was crafted and shaped by his lover Dora Maar, in her own photographs and sculptures.
Picasso en Minotaure, Mougins, 1937 by Dora Maar © ADAGP, Paris. Photo © Centre Pompidou
So, on one level, this exhibition is a massive, encyclopedic review of twentieth century avant-garde art as retold from the women artists' perspectives. Redressing a balance. Restoring, or creating, a new feminist interpretation of many artistic relationships, from the super-famous to the sometimes relatively obscure.
But this theme – rediscovering and rethinking the importance of the women collaborators vis-avis often more famous male artists – is not the only one. It is complemented by explorations of the diverse meanings of the very ideas of 'working relationships' and 'collaborations'.
Take homosexual partnerships. Alongside the long sequence of heterosexual couples, there are rooms devoted to gay, lesbian or bisexual couples, for example the passionate same-sex relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West which inspired Woolf's novel, Orlando. Or the room devoted to the long-lasting artistic relationship between transgender couple Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore.
Other rooms expand the notion of 'relationship' beyond the idea of a simple binary couple, for example the relationship of the three Magic Realist painters – Paul Cadmus, Jared French and Margaret Hoening French – who worked together so closely that they attributed their works to a joint pseudonym made up from the first two letters of their first names – the PaJaMa collective.
Other rooms move beyond threesomes to explore larger groups of artists who collaborated and worked together during this exuberant period. Thus one room focuses on the community of lesbian writers and artists in 1920s Paris, while another explores the Surrealist idea of the 'Chance Encounter' in a room which brings together some ten or so artists, male and female, who collaborated together in loose and shifting networks of co-operation.
Paul Cadmus and Jared French (1937) photographed by George Platt Lynes © 2018 Estate of George Platt Lynes
In other words, the exhibition starts off by exploring the notion of modernist artistic couples but quite quickly deconstructs, reconfigures, explores and rethinks what working artistic relationships actually meant in practice for a wide variety of artists.
It may begin with women who challenged conventional notions of female behaviour and the role of 'the wife' or 'the mistress' or 'the muse', but soon becomes an investigation of a number of types of artistic working relationships, between not only heterosexual and same-sex couples, but among larger and more fluid groupings.
Is Modernism about Love or the Machine Age?
But alongside the notion of the couple, the collaboration and the group, the curators make a bold assertion which I find hard to agree with, namely that artistic modernism was coterminous with 'modern love'. To quote the introductory wall label at the start of the exhibition:
Modern art. Modern love. From the 1890s through to just after the Second World War, these two phenomena were interwoven and indelibly linked. Side-by-side, artist couples forged new ways of making art and of living and loving.
And in the scores and scores of wall labels which follow, there is much, much more along the same lines. All of the artists are given thumbnail biographies and these tend to focus as much on their love lives, on their bohemian rejection of bourgeois conventions around love, marriage, sexuality and so on, as on their actual artistic achievements.
Central to the exhibition is the claim that Modernism, or the 20th century avant-garde, was about love and sex and desire. Or, as the curators put it:
'Modern Couples' roots Modernism in the field of desire.
This claim, or assertion, allows the curators to present a coherent and persuasive narrative. Modern Art is about love and desire. 20th century women artists and authors invariably depicted love and desire. Therefore women artists are central to Modern Art.
Or: If love and desire are the core subject of Modernism, then women artists, who focused on love and desire, must be central to Modernism.
It is a circular, self-fulfilling and self-reinforcing argument.
Having established this axiom, the show can then settle down to ticking off a familiar checklist of feminist art concerns, demonstrating how these radical women artists 'subverted' traditional 'patriarchal' ideas of 'gender stereotyping' and explored 'transgressive' sexuality i.e. by having numerous lovers or by being lesbians.
By selecting love and 'desire' as the central theme of Modernism, the curators are able to pull together:
the heterosexual and homosexual relationships of women artists
women artists' ambivalent roles as sexual objects and muses to men
women artists' own sexual feelings and needs, expressed in infidelities, affairs and multiple partners
the fact that women artists sometimes got pregnant and gave birth
the way women artists explored and mythologised the condition of femininity and fertility
alongside the legion of lesbian artists, seen as social and political pioneers in the way they explored man-free notions of same-sex desire
All of these multifarious activities and interests can be pulled together as if they make up a single coherent movement, all saying the same thing, all addressing the same handful of 'issues', all united in the same aim.
And the way the same theme and subject – love, sex and the (generally female) body – is repeated on all the wall labels and is exemplified again and again in the artworks also contributes to this sense of a huge transcontinental network of artists, sculptors and writers all inspired by the same theme. Reinforcing the curators' premise that 'modern art' is coterminous with 'modern love'.
This strikes me as being very neat, very convenient and not completely true, for one very big reason.
At university I was taught that the huge array of new artistic and literary strategies which we call 'Modernism' was, at least in part, a reaction to the ongoing dominance of the Machine in modern life, and a response to the hectic pace of technological change which accelerated from the 1890s onwards.
Electric lights, bicycles, skyscrapers with electric elevators, motor cars and airplanes, the cinema and portable cameras, were just a few of the technologies which didn't exist in 1890, were only just being developed in 1900, and which had become almost commonplace by 1910, in a few decades of dizzying technical and engineering change.
I was taught that T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land and James Joyce in Ulysses and Alfred Döblin in Berlin Alexanderplatz and John Dos Passos in U.S.A. use techniques of collage, parody and fragmentation to convey the disorientating experience of life in modern, fast-moving cities and the way it had uprooted sensitive people from their cultural and communal identities, producing a blizzard of fragmented experiences.
The City of Ambitions (1910) by Alfred Stieglitz. Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum
Same with the photomontages of Alexander Rodchenko and the Russian Constructivists, or the zealous machine-worship of the Futurists, or the angularities of the Vorticists, or the geometric forms of Fernand Léger, or the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich, or the shock close-ups and split screens and montages of Sergei Eisenstein, or the grid pictures of Piet Mondrian which began life as attempts to capture the energy of fast-moving traffic around modern city blocks.
I was taught that all of these undeniably 'modernist' books and artworks were first and foremost responses to what many artists felt was the disruptive impact of a host of new technologies on modern life. They have nothing – visually or intellectually – to do with love and desire.
So it's a surprise to realise that this indisputably key element of Modernism – the hectic, alienating, urban, machine-riddled aspect of the Modernist movement – is largely absent from this exhibition. If it's mentioned at all it is only to be quickly downplayed.
Thus when the exhibition describes the Futurist poet and provocateur, Marinetti it does so mainly in order to prove that his partner, Benedetta, was a pioneering artist in her own right, who feistily stood up to Marinetti's misogynist rhetoric and co-wrote a lot of his most famous works.
Fair enough, but this perspective downplays Marinetti's importance as (half-crazed) apostle of The Machine – of the new age of fast cars, planes and trains, a mania which influenced the Surrealists in Paris and the Vorticists in London.
Room 20, devoted to Russian Modernism, describes the artistic output of Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Lilya Brk and Osip Brik, and Vladimir Mayakovsky mainly in terms of their fluid relationships and collaborations i.e. in order to justify the curators' central premise.
What is underplayed is the crucial importance of The Machine Age to their development of new styles of photography and photomontage, design, experimental film and so on – radical responses to the impact of new technologies on human life which were so acute and perceptive that many of them still influence us to this day.
A. Rodchenko and V. Stepanova descending from an airplane in a still for the film The General Line by Sergei Eisenstein (1926). A very rare appearance of a machine in an exhibition overwhelmingly devoted to bodies and desire. Courtesy Rodchenko and Stepanova Archives, Moscow
Some of the exhibition wall labels do refer to the new experience of the modern city, a bit, where absolutely necessary, reluctantly – but overall the exhibition systematically downplays or ignores it in order to focus on its core concern – with relationships, love, 'desire' and the female body.
For me, this is simply to ignore, underplay and obscure a vital element in early 20th century avant-garde modernist art and literature.
Moreover, if you think about it, the curators' unrelenting focus on love, sex and (generally) women's bodies leads to a deep irony.
By choosing to equate Modernism exclusively with love and desire, an exhibition which sets out to reject sexist stereotypes of women in a subtle way ends up limiting women to – the realm of the emotions, of love and desire.
An exhibition which ostensibly sets out to tell us that women were interested in more than just the stereotypical concerns of love and sex (they were also successful businesswomen and designers), paradoxically goes to great lengths to tell us in sometimes embarrassing detail about the love lives, partners and sensuality and eroticism of these same women.
Which tends to have the cumulative affect of confirming the stereotypical prejudice that women, at the end of the day, aren't interested in wider ideas, social change, technology, science and engineering, in designing better engines, cars, planes and trains.
No, with a handful of exceptions, most of the women in this exhibition are described as being predominantly interested – in their lives and art and writing – in love and sex. The lesbians, gays and transgender people, too, are defined, categorised and interpreted in the light of their sexual preferences, not in any wider social or intellectual concerns.
[At a more remote level, for people who don't give a damn about art or artists (90+% of the population), this exhibition confirms every philistine prejudice they've ever held about the art world, namely that it's a Sodom and Gomorrah of sexual perversion, infidelity, adultery and pornography. (There is quite a lot of nudity on display, as you'd expect in an exhibition about desire and the body, lots of bare boobs and one or two naked penises. Visitors are warned that the room about the Surrealists' 'Chance Encounter' has so much explicit content that it might not be suitable for under-16s. Oooh er.)]
Meanwhile, beyond the artists' studios and bedrooms in the 1910s and 20s, there was an immense and exciting world – the world of motorbikes and racing cars and fast trains and ocean liners and skyscrapers and high speed elevators and escalators and department stores and cinemas and world wars and machine guns and tanks and airplanes, the world where people tested themselves against machines, climbed mountains, did solo flights across the Atlantic.
But all this is ignored, left out, omitted, elided and glossed over, in the curators' keenness to assert that the essence of Modernism was… love and desire, marriages and mistresses, 'transgressive sexuality', 'the queer citizen', 'women's liberation', 'same-sex acceptance' and so on.
It is difficult to read every word of all the wall labels, not only because there are so many of them, but also because so many of them end up saying the same thing. The circumstantial details of each artist and their relationships maybe be distinct and individual but so many of the labels take us to the same destination – explaining that so and so made 'the body' the centre of their practice or 'the site of transgressive desire' or an epitome of 'queer citizenship', and so on.
The explosively diverse and often fascinating works of many of these artists are time after time reduced, interpreted via the same handful of ideas which rotate obsessively around sex, 'desire', the body, and transgressing gender stereotypes.
It is, in my opinion, both a narrow view of Modern Art, and a very narrow view of the female, lesbian and gay achievement of the time, both in the art world and beyond.
A tsunami of information
So much for the core ideas of the exhibition, and my issue with some of them.
The actual experience of visiting Modern Couples is to be completely overwhelmed by a tsunami of names and stories. The two floors of the Barbican Gallery have been divided up into some 23 small rooms, into most of which have been crammed displays about at least two sets of couples, with each couple introduced and explained by sometimes lengthy texts on the wall, as well as scores and scores of key quotes from the respective artists and authors.
It's a lot to take in – to read the explanation of each couple, and then try and match the quotes to what you've just read about their lives – and then to find the energy to look at the actual art works.
To give you a sense of the scale and the deluge of information, here's the list of the Artist Couples:
Aino and Alvar Aalto
Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry
Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant
Lilya Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky
Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore
Benedetta and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst
Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin
Nancy Cunard and Henry Crowder
Sonia Delaunay and Robert Delaunay
Lili Elbe And Gerda Wegener
Emilie Flöge and Gustav Klimt
Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí
Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov
Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici
Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson
Hannah Höch and Til Brugman
Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera
Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso
Alma Mahler and Oskar Kokoschka
Alma Mahler and Gustav Mahler
Maria Martins and Marcel Duchamp
Margrethe Mather and Edward Weston
Lee Miller and Man Ray
Lee Miller and Roland Penrose
Tina Modotti and Edward Weston
Lucia Moholy and László Moholy-Nagy
Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky
Winifred Nicholson and Ben Nicholson
Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz
PaJaMa: Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French
George Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescott
Lavinia Schultz and Walter Holdt
Varvara Stepanova and Alexander Rodchenko
Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean Arp
Toyen and Jindrich Štyrský
Marianne von Werefkin and Alexej von Jawlensky
Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West
Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf
Unica Zürn and Hans Bellmer
That's a lot of biographies to read and digest, that's a lot of names to remember.
Nude with Poppies (1916) by Vanessa Bell. Swindon Art Gallery
Here are the names, careers, art and writing of the 'Sapphists' featured in just one room, the one dedicated to 'The Temple of Friendship' i.e. the lesbian writers and artists of 1920s Paris:
Djuna Barnes and Thelma Wood
Natalie Clifford-Barney and Romaine Brooks
Natalie Clifford Barney and Rémy de Gourmont
Natalie Clifford-Barney and Liane de Pougy
Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien
Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier
Luisa Casati
Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge
Ida Rubinstein
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas
And that's before you get to the artists featured in the Surrealist 'Chance Encounter' room, namely:
Eileen Agar and Joseph Bard
Eileen Agar and Paul Nash
Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy
Leonor Fini and André Pieyre de Mandiargues
Gala and Salvador Dalí
Gala, Paul Éluard and Max Ernst
Valentine Hugo and André Breton
Jacqueline Lamba and André Breton
Kiki de Montparnasse and Man Ray
Nadja and André Breton
Nusch and Paul Éluard
Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff
Valentine Penrose and Alice Rahon
Valentine Penrose and Roland Penrose
Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst
Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst with his sculpture, Capricorn, 1947 © John Kasnetsis
Not only must the visitor assimilate this tsunami of names, relationships and diversity of artistic and literary practices, but every visitor to the exhibition is given a free handout, a 'glossary', which includes even more themes to think about.
For when the curators had collated this much information about this many people and assembled this many works all in one place – it turns to be an interesting exercise to detect all kinds of further links and connections between the huge diversity of artists, activities or artworks on show.
Thus the free handout suggests that, as you walk round the exhibition, you look out for the following themes:
Agency – 'Feminism, agency and the desire for independence underpins much of the work by women artists in the avant-garde period.'
Businesswomen – Emilie Flöge, Sonia Delaunay, Aino Aalto
Chance encounter
Chloe liked Olivia – quote from Virginia Woolf epitomising 'the new queer citizen of the 20th century'
Co-authored – or collaboration, one of the show's central themes.
Communicating vessels – 'Two different bodies, rubbed against one another, attain, through the spark, their supreme unity in fire' – André Breton, 1932.
Daring – 'What have I dared embark upon by entering your life?' Dora Maar to Picasso, 1936.
Elegy – 'Butterflies represent a scene of your life in which the dawn awakens on your lips. A star takes shape according to your design.' Jean Arp remembering Sophie Taeuber-Arp after her death.
Feminism – 'We will be better than the wife, the mother or the sister of a man, we will be the female brother of the man' – Natalie Clifford Barney
Homoeroticism – 'The work that came out of Monroe Wheeler, Glenway Wescott and George Platt Lynes's at times uneasy polyamorous relationship opened up a queer utopian space, away from 1930s American conservatism, in which the male subject could be liberated.'
Liberation – sexual liberation, liberation from Victorian clothing and Victorian morality, liberation from constricting fabrics and dull designs, liberation from boring interiors, liberation from artistic naturalism and even from language
Mirroring – 'I am one, you are the other. Or the opposite. Our desires meet one another.' Claude Cohun, 1930.
Muse – Dora Maar took photos of her lover Picasso in 'a turnaround of gender expectations'.
Non-binary – 'Gender fluidity, sexual empowerment, awakening, and the fight for safe spaces of becoming, were part of the avant-garde currency.'
Printed word – 'It could be a political text, a perfect branding platform, a token of love, a site of artistic collaboration or a platform for transgressive or erotic content.'
Publishing – Many modernists experimented with setting up their own publishing company, most notably the Hogarth Press of Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
Radical abstraction
Reinvention – The importance of the portrait, in art and literature. Claude Cohun and Marcel Moore, life partners for 45 years, and produced a huge body of work playing with 'gender politics'.
Revolution – Alexander Rodchenko and partner Varvara Stepanova's revulsion for the West's cult of 'Woman as object' and determination to embrace 'gender equality'.
Sidelined – women sidelined by men, obviously
Total work of art
Triadic
Two-people movements – Rayism invented by Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, the Mask Dancer movement of Lavinia Schultz and Walter Holdt, the Tactilism of Benedetta and Filippo Marinetti, the Orphism of Sonia and Robert Delaunay.
X-rated – 'Many artists in this exhibition used eroticism in their art as a way of fighting bourgeois conformity, propaganda and artistic censorship.'
Is that enough to think about yet?
A self-portrait by Claude Cahun, subverting gender stereotypes. Courtesy of Jersey Heritage Collections
This is what the exhibition is like. Overflowing with texts, quotes, references, biographical data, artistic theory and, underpinning it all, emerging sooner or later in every wall label for every artist – the axioms of modern identity politics and feminism – gender politics, the body, gender fluidity, transgressive art, gender equality, and so on.
I counted a total of 103 paragraphs of wall text – sometimes very long, densely factual paragraphs. It would take at least an hour just to read them, and that's before the 50 or so quotes from artists' letters, diaries and so on.
There are over 40 couples, but many more 'couples-plus' – groups and movements of artists and writers to get a handle on – with the result that the exhibition features more than 80 writers and artists in total.
And there are a staggering 600 objects on display, including paintings, sculptures, models, furniture, personal photographs, love letters, gifts, books – 35 first editions from Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press – magazines, rare archival material and much, much more!
Les deux amies (1923) by Tamara de Lempicka. Association des Amis du Petit Palais, Geneve. A portrait of two naked women painted by a woman!
In the event, this was simply too much for me to take in. I started off dutifully reading every wall text but quickly got tired, saturated, full up – I started skimming some and then just ignored others. I went round about five times, each time reading at new bits of text, toying with quotes here and there – above all, trying to let the actual art fight its way through the jungle of biography and interpretation and bitty quotations and make its impact.
I came to roughly two conclusions.
1. One is that, if you're a student or have an educational motivation, this is a spectacular opportunity to see works great and small, by artists famous and obscure, by men, women, gays, lesbians and trans people, from what feels like all the most important art movements of the early 20th century.
(In fact it's far from being a complete overview of early 20th century art – that would fill ten Barbican galleries – but it is an impressive stab at conveying a really comprehensive overview of important modern art as retold with women, gays and lesbians to the fore.)
2. The second point is that among the 600 paintings, books, photos and furniture on display there are some real masterpieces, many on loan from abroad, and so a rare opportunity to see many beautiful things in the flesh.
Small is not necessarily beautiful
In this respect – my response to the art – I found the smaller, more cramped rooms to be unconducive to aesthetic enjoyment.
For example, the small first room which is shared by the story of Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin, and the story of Maria Martins and Marcel Duchamp, included some plaster busts and faces by the former pair, and some bronze casts of Maria's body parts (her buttocks and vagina) made by Duchamp. But it was so small, cramped and crowded that it felt more like a reading and learning space, than an art space.
The reduction ad absurdum of this shoehorn approach was the way that the no doubt complex and interesting working relationship between modernist designer Lilly Reich and her long-term partner and collaborator, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, was explained via one chrome and black leather chair and three paragraphs of text plonked at the bottom of the stairs to the first floor.
He claimed to be the sole designer of this classic and hugely influential chair. Only decades later did it emerge that she had as least as much input as he did into the design. What a beast!
Barcelona chair by Mies van der Rohe (1929)
Interesting story, but blink and you might miss it altogether.
The show is co-curated by Emma Lavigne, Director of the Centre Pompidou in Metz. The French connection made me think of some of the smaller displays as types of 'bonnes bouches' or 'tasty bites' – fleeting treats designed to add to the overall argument, but whose main function would be to inspire you to go away and find out more.
Big rooms where art can breathe
By contrast, I only really felt comfortable – and that I was really getting an aesthetic kick (as opposed to processing large amounts of biographical and art information) – in some of the larger rooms. There were plenty of other highlights, but I would single out rooms 14, 15 and 17.
Room 17 displayed the work of two and a half couples: of the English artist Ben Nicholson, who 1. enjoyed a close working relationship with Winifred Nicholson (whom he married) in the early 1930s before 2. then partnering with the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. The wall labels quote letters they exchanged in which they spoke of becoming, literally, one person, with one taste and one artistic motivation.
In this same room, on the opposite wall, was a suite of work by Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. I found the juxtaposition of the sculptural abstractions of Nicholson and Hepworth with the playful abstracts of Arp really interesting.
But I was transfixed by the four or five 18-inch-high marionettes made by Sophie Taeuber-Arp for a puppet production of a folk tale about King Stagg. These possessed something almost nothing else in the exhibition did – which was charm and humour.
Marionettes by Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1918)
Room 15 is a rare example of a room devoted to just one couple, in this case the wife-and-husband partnership between Sonia and Robert Delaunay (who were married from 1910 to Robert's death in 1941). This married couple developed a movement variously titled Simultanism and then Orphism, in which different patterns of colours are set against each other to create disruptive effects.
The Delaunay room benefited immensely from being just about them, with no other couple squeezed in. It had more than twenty works hung around the walls, most of them – from what I could see – the calm, restful abstract designs by Sonia, mostly for fabrics and dresses. This made for a really absorbing and beautiful space.
Design B53 (1924) by Sonia Delaunay
But the room I found it literally hard to leave and, even when I'd left it, found myself walking round the entire ground floor in order to visit again with a renewed frisson of delight, was room 14 devoted to the overlapping artistic partnerships of Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky, and Marianne von Werefkin and Alexej von Jawlensky.
This foursome produced German Expressionist paintings of wonderful colour and vivid design at their self-styled artist colony at Murnau in Bavaria, in the years just before the Great War. Wow.
I liked lots of other things in the exhibition (the enormous painting of naked lesbians by Tamara de Lempicka, the thrilling Constructivist photos of Varvara Stepanova and Alexander Rodchenko, the dazzling photos of Lee Miller done by Man Ray, the couple of small but wonderful paintings by Gustav Klimt, some of the abstract paintings produced by Roger Grant and Vanessa Bell's Omega Workshop, the wonderfully aloof portraits painted by Romaine Brooks), but for sheer visual pleasure, nothing beat this room of hyper-bright, vivid brushstrokes, bold childlike designs, and colour-drenched splashes and flourishes by this German foursome.
Improvisation III by Wassily Kandinsky (1909)
Probably I should have been reading up on how their work 'subverted' this or that tradition, and 'challenged gender stereotypes', or how the two women definitely contributed as much or more to their commune as the men.
But I switched off all that curatorial chatter, and just stood in awe of these wonderful, beautiful, transcendent works of art. No reproductions can do justice to the shiny vibrancy of the real thing in the flesh. Go and see them for yourself.
It must have taken an immense amount of effort by the four co-curators to bring together such an epic collection of objects and art works and to bring order, coherence and meaning to the multiple stories behind them.
If you are a feminist I can see how this exhibition of feminist artists lovingly assembled by feminist curators with scores of texts by feminist scholars would thunderingly confirm all your feminist beliefs. That's what it's designed to do.
And I wondered, as I left, whether this exhibition now and in the future, might be seen as a landmark show, a really massive rethinking of early 20th century modern art which reinstates women's stories in all these important relationships, and often rehabilitates them as being as, if not more, creative than their male partners.
And also for the way it explores the idea that modern art was characterised, more than any previous type of art, by its collaborative nature, by the way it was produced by partnerships, by trios or quartets, by small groups working, thinking and making together.
It is a strong, well-argued, illuminating and very thought-provoking show.
But, that said, it's hard to imagine that a lot of these artists and their stories won't already be well known to the average gallery goer – the stories of Picasso and Dora, Frida and Diego, Virginia and Vita and the names of Dali, Ernst, Man Ray, Klimt, Marinetti, Nicholson and Hepworth are hardly unknown, and the notion that, 'behind every great man there's a great woman', is hardly a radical thought – as indicated by the fact that there's a centuries-old proverb on the subject.
Similarly, it's hard to imagine that the fact that there were lesbian writers in the 1920s or gay photographers in the 1930s, will come as a great surprise to the average gallery goer. Homosexuality is not really news to most people. Most of the people the exhibition is targeted at will, I suspect, have heard of Virginia Woolf before, and will know she had a lesbian affair with Vita Sackville-West.
My position, after forty years of studying twentieth century art, literature and history, is that the Century of Catastrophes is too diverse and complex to be reduced to any one narrative or interpretation. From about the 1890s onwards there was (and still is) too much going on in an interconnected world of billions of human beings for any one narrative or story to hope to tell any kind of definitive 'truth'.
For example, this is an exhibition, at bottom, about European and American white women, often very wealthy women (Nancy Cunard, Natalie Barney). You can immediately see that focusing on these often very privileged people tends to omit the stories of working class people of both genders in those continents. You could be forgiven for not realising there were things called the First World War and the Russian Revolution during the period the exhibition covers. Not enough 'same sex desire' to merit inclusion.
Similarly, there is precious little (surprisingly) about the black experience of modernity (there is one black person in the exhibition, the jazz musician Henry Crowder, who is included because of his influence over the immensely wealthy patron of the arts and writer, Nancy Cunard).
In fact, now I think about it, jazz is a crashingly obvious and central element of Modernism, from Stravinsky to Eliot, and is depicted in countless modernist art works. But it doesn't fit with the curators' insistence that Modernism be defined by couples, love and relationships, sex and partners and gender and desire and so… it isn't here.
My view is that the 'Modern' experience of humanity, the bewildering catalogue of technological, scientific and cultural change which overwhelmed Homo sapiens in the early twentieth century – is too vast and multiform for any one narrative to encompass.
The curators make a powerful and persuasive case that Modernism was characterised above all by new thinking about love, eroticism, desire and relationships, much of which promoted the liberation of women (and trans people and gays).
Lee Miller with a cast of her torso, Downshire Hill, London, England 1940 by Roland Penrose
© Roland Penrose
I accept all their points as valid, and the body of evidence they've assembled is pulverisingly persuasive. And yet I still think that an equal if not more important element of Modernism was artists' reaction to the revolution in everyday life caused by new technologies. And everyone's world was turned upside down by the Great War. And the entire intellectual world was galvanised by the radicalism of the Russian Revolution. And I haven't mentioned the famously disruptive discoveries of Einstein and others, undermining the static view of the forces of nature held since Newton. Too much was happening. No wonder the art from this period is so excited and effervescent.
But I'm well aware that my own interpretation can itself be trumped by other competing narratives. That there are numerous ways of looking at this period of cultural history.
For example, arguably the most important aspect of the era was the collapse of the old European empires – the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires. The entire art of the period could be interpreted in terms of the breakdown of the ideologies, laws and customs which supported them, of which conventions about relations between the sexes are just a small sub-set.
Or there's a Marxist interpretation which suggests that the era was characterised by unprecedented wealth derived from the West's imperialist domination of the rest of the world – wealth which gave rise to a new class of super-rich collectors and connoisseurs who patronised 'modern' art and literature and experimented with new 'decadent' lifestyles. (Vide Nancy Cunard, Natalie Barney and the numerous other rich American women who populate the 1920s lesbian room).
Or there's a strong post-colonial interpretation which says that the decisive impetus for Modernism and its revolutionary overthrow of 400 years of realistic art came from the cultural appropriation of the African masks and Oceanic art looted by imperial collectors, which were enthusiastically copied by Picasso and Matisse, and which had a transformative effect on everyone who followed them.
To give just a few of the most obvious interpretations of the art of the period.
This exhibition is an impressive and stimulating attempt to write one particular story about early twentieth century art. But it is only one interpretation among a sea of alternative stories.
The promotional video
P.S. What does 'modern' mean?
When I told my wife I was off to see an exhibition titled 'Modern Couples' she thought it would be a V&A-style celebration of contemporary celebrity pairs like Elton John and David Furnish, the Beckhams, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, and so on.
No, I explained. When art and literary critics say 'modern' what they mean is art from the 1900s, 1910s and 20s. They mean art and literature which is over a hundred years old. That's what they mean by 'modern'.
And even as I explained it, I realised how odd this use of the word 'modern' is. Eventually this stuff is going to be 150 years old. Will we still be describing it as 'modern' in 2050? At what point will someone have to come up with a better name? Or will Modernist art remain 'modern' forever?
Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-Garde continues at the Barbican until 27 January 2019
Women, Art and Society by Whitney Chadwick (2012)
50 Women Artists You Should Know (2008)
Women artists in the 20th and 21st century ed. Uta Grosenick (2003)
Reviews of artists featured in this exhibition
Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up @ The Victoria and Albert Museum (September 2018)
Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One @ Tate Britain (September 2018)
Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932 (September 2018)
Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy @ Tate Modern (August 2018)
Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece @ The British Museum (June 2018)
Dalí / Duchamp @ The Royal Academy (November 2017)
Arp: The Poetry of Forms @ Turner Contemporary (November 2017)
Georgia O'Keeffe @ Tate Modern (July 2016)
The Radical Eye @ Tate Modern (March 2017)
Vanessa Bell @ Dulwich Picture Gallery (February 2017)
Rodin and Dance: The Essence of Movement @ Courtauld Gallery (January 2017)
Paul Nash @ Tate Britain (December 2016)
Sonia Delaunay @ Tate Modern (May 2015)
Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World @ Tate Britain (August 2015)
Art and Life: Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, William Staite Murray, 1920 – 1931 @ Dulwich Picture Gallery (June 2014)
Man Ray Portraits @ the National Portrait Gallery (April 2013)
Bauhaus: Art as Life @ the Barbican (July 2012)
Surreal Lives: The Surrealists 1917-45 by Ruth Brandon (1999)
Marcel Duchamp by Dawn Ades, Neil Cox and David Hopkins (1999)
Dalí: Genius, obsession and lust by Ralf Schiebler (1996)
Salvador Dalí: Exploring the irrational by Edmund Swinglehurst (1996)
Kandinsky by Hajo Düchting (1993)
Bauhaus by Frank Whitford (1984)
Nadja by André Breton (1928)
Reviews of previous exhibitions & concerts at the Barbican
Vanessa Winship: And Time Folds (August 2018)
Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing (August 2018)
Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins (April 2018)
Basquiat: Boom for Real (November 2017)
Purple by John Akomfrah (October 2017)
Into the Unknown (Science Fiction) (August 2017)
Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers (March 2016)
Where The Shadows are so Deep by Imran Qureshi (March 2016)
The World of Charles and Ray Eames (November 2015)
Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector (April 2015)
Pop Art Design (February 2014)
Toru Takemitsu (February 2013)
Everything Was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s (November 2012)
Bauhaus: Art as Life (July 2012)
Music by Jonny Greenwood and Krzysztof Penderecki (April 2012)
The Sinking of The Titanic (April 2012)
by Simon on October 10, 2018 • Permalink
Posted in Art, Biography, Books, Exhibition, Feminism, History, literature, Photography, Poetry, Russia, Sex, World War One
Tagged 20th century, Adrienne Monnier, Aino, Alexander Rodchenko, Alexej von Jawlensky, Alfred Döblin, Alfred Stieglitz, Alice B. Toklas, Alice Rahon, Alma Mahler, Alvar Aalto, André Breton, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, art, Auguste Rodin, avant-garde, Barbara Hepworth, Bavaria, Ben Nicholson, Benedetta Marinetti, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Camille Claudel, Chloe liked Olivia, Claude Cahun, cultural appropriation, design, Diego Rivera, Djuna Barnes, Dora Maar, Dorothea Tanning, Duncan Grant, Edward Weston, Eileen Agar, Eileen Gray, Emilie Flöge, Emma Lavigne, Federico García Lorca, Feminism, Filippo Marinetti, Frida Kahlo, Gabriele Münter, Gala, gay, George Platt Lynes, Georgia O'Keeffe, Gerda Wegener, Gertrude Stein, Glenway Wescott, Grace Pailthorpe, Gustav Klimt, Gustav Mahler, Hannah Höch, Hans Bellmer, Henry Crowder, Hogarth Press, Homoeroticism, homosexual, Ida Rubinstein, Jacqueline Lamba, James Joyce, Jared French, Jean Arp, Jean Badovici, Jindrich Štyrský, John Dos Passos, Joseph Bard, Kiki de Montparnasse, Lavinia Schultz, László Moholy-Nagy, Lee Miller, Leonard Woolf, Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, lesbian, Liane de Pougy, Lili Elbe, Lilya Brik, literature, Lucia Moholy, Luisa Casati, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Moore, Margaret French, Margrethe Mather, Maria Martins, Marianne von Werefkin, Marxism, Max Ernst, Mikhail Larionov, Modernism, Monroe Wheeler, Murnau, Nadja, Nancy Cunard, Natalia Goncharova, Natalie Clifford-Barney, Nusch, Orphism, Oskar Kokoschka, Pablo Picasso, PaJaMa, Paul Éluard, Paul Cadmus, Paul Nash, photography, post-colonial, Pygmalion, Radclyffe Hall, Raoul Hausmann, Rayism, Rémy de Gourmont, Renée Vivien, Reuben Mednikoff, Robert Delaunay, Roger Fry, Roland Penrose, Romaine Brooks, Rrose Sélavy, Salvador Dalí, Sergei Eisenstein, sex, Sonia Delaunay, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Surrealism, Sylvia Beach, T.S. Eliot, Tactilism, Tamara de Lempicka, the Great War, The Temple of Friendship, The Waste Land, Thelma Wood, Til Brugman, Tina Modotti, Toyen, transgender, U.S.A., Ulysses, Una Troubridge, Unica Zürn, Valentine Hugo, Valentine Penrose, Vanessa Bell, Varvara Stepanova, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Walter Holdt, Wassily Kandinsky, Winifred Nicholson, women
Posted by Simon on October 10, 2018
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/10/10/modern-couples-art-intimacy-avant-garde-barbican/
Aftermath: Art in the wake of World War One @ Tate Britain
The First World War ended on 11 November 1918. To mark the end of the conflict Tate Britain has been hosting an extensive exhibition devoted to the aftermath of the war as it affected the art of the three main nations of Western Europe – Britain, France and Germany.
Thus there is nothing by artists from, say, Russia, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Serbia, Bulgaria, nor from the white colonies, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, nor from America which entered the war in 1917. It is a Western European show of Western European art.
Paths of Glory (1917) by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson © IWM
The show includes a staggering number of masterpieces from the era, interspersed with fascinating works by much less-well-known artists.
For example, room one contains the Rock Drill by Jacob Epstein, possibly my favourite work of art anywhere, by anyone. For me this hard brooding metallic figure contains the secret of the 20th century, and of our technological age.
Torso in Metal from The Rock Drill (1913-14) by Jacob Epstein. Tate © The Estate of Jacob Epstein
The exhibition is in eight rooms which take you in broad chronological order:
Images of battlefields and ruins, early movies, and memorabilia (helmets, medals, cigarette cases)
The official War memorials of the three featured nations (statues, designs and paintings by conventional artists such as William Orpen and the sculptor Charles Sargeant Jagger)
A room devoted to images of disfigured and maimed soldiers
Dada and Surrealism i.e. the extreme irrationalist response to the war of Swiss, German and French artists – including signature works by George Grosz, Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters
A room of black and white prints showcasing series of lithographs and woodcuts made by Max Beckman, Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Dix and Georges Rouault
The 'return to order' in a revival of nostalgic landscapes in works by Paul Nash and George Clausen, sculptures of sleek femininity by Eric Gill and Aristide Maillol, neo-classical portraiture by Meredith Frampton, and the revival of a strange post-war type of Christian faith in the work of Stanley Spencer and Winifred Knights
Politics and pass-times – divided between gritty depictions of a newly politicised working class by socialist and communist artists, such as The International by Otto Griebel, and a rare opportunity to see an original 'portfolio' or pamphlet of lithographs by George Grosz – and on the other hand, depictions of the newly fashionable night-life, the craze for jazz dancing depicted in The Dance Club 1923 by William Patrick Roberts, cabaret clubs of the Weimar Republic, or the Folies Bergère as painted by English artist, Edward Burra
The exhibition ends with brave new world visions of technology, machinery, skyscrapers, Russian constructivist images by El Lissitsky, the geometric paintings of Fernand Leger, and the sleek new design and architecture of the German Bauhaus school
1. Images of the battlefield
First impressionistic indications of the appalling nature of the war. A display case contains an original infantry helmet from each of the three featured nations, one French, one German and one British. Oil paintings of corpses in trenches or hanging on barbed wire. A rare black-and-white-film shot from an airship shows the devastation
2. Memorials
In terms of memorials I don't think you can do better than Edwin Lutyens's Cenotaph in Whitehall, arresting in its monolithic abstraction. But the show includes three large memorial sculptures by Charles Sergeant Jagger.
No Man's Land (1919-20) by Charles Sargeant Jagger
3. The disfigured
The room of disfigured servicemen is hard to stay in.
The grotesques of Otto Dix and Gorge Grosz are bearable because they have a cartoon savagery and exaggeration which defuses the horror. But the realistic depictions of men with their jaws shot away, half their faces missing, skin folding over where their eyes should be, and so on by artists like Heinrich Hoerle and Conrad Felixmuller, are almost impossible to look at.
Prostitute and Disabled War Veteran, Two Victims of Capitalism by Otto Dix (1923) © Estate of Otto Dix
4. Dada and Surrealism
The exhibition takes on a completely different tone when you enter the room of works by Dada and Surrealist artists – although the grotesques of the previous room make you realise how so much of Dada's strategy of cutting up and collage, of rearranging anodyne images (especially from glossy optimistic magazines and adverts), to create incongruous and grotesque new images, is actually a very reasonable response to the grotesqueness of war and its dismemberments.
Here there are works by Kurt Schwitters, pioneer of cut up and paste art, as well as the stunning painting Celebes by early Surrealist Max Ernst.
Seeing a number of examples of post-war collage – works by Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, the English Surrealist Edward Burra and their peers like Hannah Hoch and Rudolf Schlichter all together – brings out the superiority of George Grosz.
It's probably because I'm a longstanding fan but he seems to me to combine the best eye for design and caricature, with the best feel for how to create a collage of elements cut out from newspapers and magazines.
As well as a good selection of his biting political satires, there is an opportunity to see a reconstruction of the Dada-mannequin he created for the 1920 Berlin Dada exhibition.
Why be sensible? How could you be sensible and take any of the standards and values of the old order seriously? After what they had seen in the trenches? After that old order had brought about Armageddon?
The Petit-Bourgeois Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild. Electro-Mechanical Tatlin Sculpture (1920) by George Grosz © Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, N.J.
5. Prints, lithographs, woodcuts
In the print portfolio room it is interesting to compare the style of the four featured artists: Max Beckman was too scratchy and scrappy and cluttered for my taste. The Georges Rouault images are harsh but use shading to create an eerie, gloomy depth, as if done with charcoal.
'Arise, you dead!' (War, plate 54) (1922-27) by Georges Rouault. Fondation Georges Rouault © ADAGCP, Paris and DACS, London
By contrast Käthe Kollwitz's series War is made from harsh, stark, pagan woodcuts, which exude a really primeval force. This set is a masterpiece. You can see the continuity from the harsh emotional extremism of pre-war German Expressionism, but here a widely used technique has found its perfect subject. Kollwitz is a great artist. Her images may be the most profound in the show.
The Survivors (1923) by Käthe Kollwitz
6. The return to order
After the physical and metaphysical gloom of the print room, room six is large, well lit and full of images of sweetness and delight. In all kinds of ways the European art world experience a post-war 'return to order', a revival of neo-classical technique, in music as much as in painting. It had quite a few distinct strands.
Landscape One strand was a return to painting idyllic landscapes, represented here by a haycart trundling down a lane by the pre-war artist George Clausen, and a similarly idyllic but more modern treatments of landscape by the brothers Paul and John Nash.
Woman After the disfigurements of the war and the parade of grotesques in the previous galleries, this one contains a number of images of complete, undisfigured bodies, particularly female bodies, used as celebrations of beauty, fertility, of life. These include the big, primeval statue Humanity by Eric Gill, alongside a more realistic depiction of a naked woman, Venus with a Necklace by Aristide Maillol. After such horror, why not? Why not unashamed celebrations of peace, whole-bodiedness, beauty, youth, fertility – a new hope?
Venus with a Necklace by Aristide Maillol (cast 1930) © Tate
Interestingly, this room contains three or four works by Picasso, portraits of women or a family on a beach, done in a kind of revival of his rose period, with the figures now more full and rounded.
Neue Sachlichkeit Another strand was the particularly German style known as 'New Objectivity' which I've written about extensively elsewhere, not least because it was itself sub-divided into a number of strands and styles.
The New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic 1918-33 edited by Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (2015)
The New Objectivity
It's represented here by a signature work from the era, Christian Schad's half-realistic, half-cartoonish, and wholly haunting self-portrait of 1927.
Self-Portrait (1927) by Christian Schad © Christian Schad Stiftung Aschaffenburg/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn and DACS, London
Christianity Amazingly, after such a cataclysmic disaster, many artists retained their Christian faith, although it emerged in sometimes strange and eccentric new visions.
These are exemplified by the English artists Stanley Spencer, who is represented by one of the many paintings he made setting Christian stories in his native home town of Cookham. And also by the strange and eerie vision of Winifred Knights, here represented by her unsettling vision of the Flood.
The Deluge (1920) by Winifred Knights
Not so long ago I saw a whole load of Knights' paintings at a retrospective at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Seeing it here makes you realise the link to the stark geometric modernism of someone like Paul Nash. But also to the deliberately naive style of Spencer. It is a kind of Christianity by floodlights.
Portraiture Separate from these varieties of self-conscious modernism was an entire strand of neo-classical portraiture. A style which had observed and absorbed the entire Modernist revolution from Cezanne onwards, and then reverted to painting exquisitely demure neo-classical portraits, generally of demure and self-contained young women. Exemplified here by Meredith Frampton's still, posed portrait of Margaret Kelsey.
Marguerite Kelsey by Meredith Frampton (1928) © Tate
Is this a portrait of refinement and sensibility? Or is there an eerie absence in it, a sense of vacuum? Does it have all the careful self-control of someone recovering from a nervous breakdown?
7. Politics and pastimes
Room seven juxtaposes images of The People, The International and the proletariat – with images of jazz bands and people getting drunk in nightclubs. Which is the real world? The International by the German communist painter Otto Griebel faces off against William Roberts modernist depiction of a jazz nightclub (heavily influenced, I'd have thought, by Wyndham Lewis's pre-war Vorticism).
The Dance Club (1923) by William Roberts. Leeds Museums and Galleries © Estate of John David Roberts
By now it felt as if the exhibition was turning into an overview of artistic trends of the 1920s. A number of the works were painted 10 or 12 years after the end of the war. When does an aftermath stop being an aftermath?
8. Brave new worlds
The last room is devoted to technocratic visions of the machine age. Russian constructivists, French futurists, some of the old Vorticists, all the Bauhaus artists, looked to a future of skyscrapers, chucking out Victorian ideas of design and taste and creating a new, fully twentieth century art, architecture and design.
Fernand Leger perfected a post-cubist style based on brightly coloured geometric shapes suggesting a new machine civilisation, and the exhibition includes footage from the experimental film he made, Ballet Mechanique with music by the fashionably machine-age composer George Antheil. The Russian constructivist El Lissitsky devised an entirely new visual language based on lines and fractured circles. Bauhaus teacher Oskar Schlemmer is represented by an abstract figurine. Oskar Nerlinger evolved from pencil sketches of the war to developing a distinctive style of constructivist illustration featuring stylised views of up to the minute architecture.
Radio Mast, Berlin (1929) by Oskar Nerlinger
Now I like this kind of thing very much indeed but I feel we had wandered quite a long way from the First World War. Much of this last room struck me as having next to nothing to do with the war, or any war, instead being the confident new visual language of the hyper-modern 20s and 30s.
Wandering back through the rooms I realised the exhibition splits into two parts: rooms one to five are unambiguously about war, the horrors of war, trenches and barbed wire and corpses, moving onto war memorials and horrible images of mutilated soldiers, how those disfigurements were taken up into the distortions and fantasies of Dada and Surrealism and then extracted into a kind of quintessence of bleakness in the woodcuts of Kollwitz.
And then part two of the show, rooms 6, 7 and 8 show the extraordinary diversity of forms and style and approaches of post-war art, from nostalgic or semi-modernist landscape, through neo-classical if unnerving portraiture, Christianity by floodlight, from bitterly angry socialist realism to the frivolities of jazz bands and strip clubs, and then onto the Bauhaus and Constructivist embrace of new technologies (radio, fast cars, cruise liners) and new design and photographic languages.
Whether these latter rooms and their contents can be strictly speaking described as the 'aftermath' of the Great War is something you can happily spend the rest of the day debating with friends and family.
But there is no doubting that the exhibition brings together a ravishing selection of masterpieces, well-known and less well-known, to create a fascinating overview of the art of the Great War, of the immediate post-war period, and then the explosion of diverse visual styles which took place in the 1920s.
From the po-faced solemnity of:
To the Unknown British Soldier in France (1921-8) by William Orpen © IWM
to the compelling crankiness of:
'Daum' Marries her Pedantic Automaton 'George' in May 1920, John Heartfield is Very Glad of It (1920) by George Grosz © Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, N.J.
From the earnest political commitment of:
Demonstration (1930) by Curt Querner. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie © DACS
to the vision of an all-metal brave new technocratic future:
Abstract Figure (1921) by Oskar Schlemmer
Aftermath continues at Tate Britain until 24 September 2018
Complete text of the exhibiton wall labels (without illustrations)
Other blog posts about the Great War and its aftermath
Politics and soldiers
The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End 1917-1923 by Robert Gerwarth (2016)
Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (2010)
Warsaw 1920 by Adam Zamoyski (2008)
Forgotten Victory: the First World War Myths and Realities by Gary Sheffield (2001)
The Great War (BBC TV series)
Elgar's Great War music
Complete Memoirs of George Sherston by Siegfried Sassoon (1936)
The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme And Ancre, 1916 by Frederic Manning (1929)
Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (1929)
Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel (1926)
In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (1925)
Under Fire by Henri Barbusse (1917)
The Great War in Portraits @ National Portrait Gallery
Frank Brangwyn and the First World War @ William Morris Gallery
Winifred Knights @ Dulwich Picture Gallery
George Grosz: The Berlin Years by Ralph Jentsch (1997)
From Weimar to Wall Street 1918-1929 (1993)
Art Deco by Alastair Duncan (1988)
The Weimar Years: A Culture Cut Short by John Willett (1984)
The New Sobriety: Art and Politics in the Weimar Period 1917-33 by John Willett (1978)
Weimar: A Cultural History 1918-1933 by Walter Laqueur (1974)
Weimar Culture by Peter Gay (1968)
A Small Yes and a Big No by George Grosz (1946)
Reviews of other Tate exhibitions
All Too Human @ Tate Britain (March 2018)
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Not Everyone Will be Taken Into the Future (January 2018)
Red Star over Russia (December 2017)
Impressionists in London @ Tate Britain (November 2017)
Giacometti @ Tate Modern (September 2017)
Soul Of A Nation: Art In The Age Of Black Power @ Tate Modern (July 2017)
Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 @ Tate Modern (June 2017)
Queer British Art 1861-1967 @ Tate Britain (April 2017)
David Hockney @ Tate Britain (February 2017)
Robert Rauschenberg @ Tate Modern (February 2017)
Painting with Light @ Tate Britain (August 2016)
Georgia O'Keefke @ Tate Modern (July 2016)
Performing for the camera @ Tate Modern (March 2016)
Frank Auerbach @ Tate Britain (February 2016)
Every Room in Tate Modern (January 2016)
Every room in Tate Britain (part one) (January 2016)
Every room in Tate Britain (part two) (January 2016)
Artist and Empire: Facing Britain's Imperial Past @ Tate Britain (January 2016)
Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture @ Tate Modern (December 2015)
The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop @ Tate Modern (November 2015)
Agnes Martin @ Tate Modern (September 2015)
Fighting History @ Tate Britain (August 2015)
Salt and Silver @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
Sculpture Victorious @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
Conflict, Time, Photography @ Tate Modern (March 2015)
Late Turner @ Tate Britain (January 2015)
Malevich: Revolutionary of Russian art @ Tate Modern (August 2014)
British Folk Art @ Tate Britain (June 2014)
Ruin Lust @ Tate Britain (March 2014)
Richard Deacon @ Tate Britain (February 2014)
Paul Klee – Making Visible @ Tate Modern (January 2014)
Art under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm @ Tate Britain (December 2013)
Lowry and the painting of modern life @ Tate Britain (September 2013)
Lichtenstein: A Restrospective @ Tate Modern (March 2013)
Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian avant-garde @ Tate Britain (September 2012)
Damien Hirst @ Tate Modern (September 2012)
Picasso and Modern British Art @ Tate Britain (July 2012)
John Martin @ Tate Britain (December 2011)
by Simon on September 1, 2018 • Permalink
Posted in Art, European History, Exhibition, Great War, History, War
Tagged 1918, Aftermath: Art in the wake of World War One, Aristide Maillol, art, Ballet Mechanique, Bauhaus, Berlin Dada exhibition, Britain, Celebes, Charles Sergant Jagger, Christian Schad, Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, Cookham, Curt Querner, Dada, Edward Burra, El Lissitsky, Eric Gill, exhibition, Fernand Leger, First World War, France, George Antheil, George Clausen, George Grosz, Georges Rouault, German Expressionism, Germany, Hannah Höch, John Nash, Käthe Kollewitz, Käthe Kollwitz, Kurt Schwitters, Max Beckman, Max Ernst, Meredith Frampton, Neue Sachlichkeit, New Objectivity, Oskar Nerlinger, Oskar Schlemmer, Otto Dix, Otto Griebel, painting, Paul Nash, Rock Drill, Rudolf Schlichter, sculpture, Stanley Spencer, Surrealism, Tate Britain, Vorticism, Weimar Republic, William Orpen, William Patrick Roberts, Winifred Knights, Wyndham Lewis
Posted by Simon on September 1, 2018
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/09/01/aftermath-art-in-the-wake-of-world-war-one-tate-britain/
This is a much better book than the Taschen volume which I've just read – Women artists in the 20th and 21st century edited by Uta Grosenick (2003) – for several reasons:
1. Although, like the Taschen book, this was also originally a German publication, it has been translated into much better English. It reads far more fluently and easily.
2. It is much bigger at 24cm by 19cm, so the illustrations are much bigger, clearer and more impactful. There is more art and less text and that, somehow, irrationally, but visually, makes women's art seem a lot more significant and big and important.
Judith beheading Holofernes (1602) by Artemisia Gentileschi
3. It is a chronological overview of the last 500 years of women's art. As I explained in my review of the Taschen book, because so many female artists have come to prominence since the 1960s and 70s when traditional art more or less collapsed into a welter of performance art, body art, conceptual art, video, photography, digital art and so on, that book gave an overall impression that 20th century women's art was chaotic, messy and sex-obsessed, with only occasional oases of old-style painting to cling on to.
By contrast, this book gives a straightforward chronological list of important women artists starting with Catharina Van Hemessen born in 1528 and moving systematically forwards through all the major movements of Western art – Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, Rococo, Neo-Classical, Romantic, Victorian Realist, Impressionist, Fauvist and so on. It kind of establishes and beds you in to the long line of successful women artists who worked in all the Western styles, long before it arrives at the chaotic 60s and beyond.
4. The Taschen book – again because of its modern focus – invoked a lot of critical theory to analyse and explicate its artists. Here, in stark contrast, the entries are overwhelming factual and biographical, focusing on family background, cultural and historical context, the careers and achievements of these women artists. Although this is, in principle, a more traditional and conservative way of writing about art, the net result is the opposite. Whereas you can dismiss great swathes of the Taschen book for being written in barely-comprehensible artspeak, this book states clearly and objectively the facts about a long succession of tremendously successful and influential women artists. It's all the more effective for telling it straight.
To sum up, 50 Women Artists You Should Know makes a really powerful argument for asserting that there have been major women artists at every stage of Western art, holding important positions, forging successful careers, creating really great works, influencing others, contributing and shaping the whole tradition.
It is the History of Western Art, but done through women, and women only.
Self-Portrait (1790) by Elizabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun
Quite simply it destroys forever the idea that there haven't been any significant women artists until the modern era. There were loads.
Ironically, this goes a long way to undermining the common feminist argument that women have been banned, held back, suppressed and prevented from engaging in art for most of history. This book proves the opposite is the case: again and again we read of women artists in the 17th and 18th centuries being encouraged by their fathers and families, supported through art school, securing important official positions (many becoming court painters), being given full membership of art academies, awarded prestigious prizes, and making lots of money. It's quite a revelation. I never knew so many women artists were so very successful, rich and famous in their times.
Take some examples:
Surprisingly successful woman artists
1. Old Mistresses
Catharina Van Hemessen (1528-1587) Trained in the Netherlands by her father Jan van Hemessen, Catharina specialised in portraits which fetched a good price. She was invited to the court of Spain by the art-loving Mary of Hungary.
Sofonisba Anguissola (1532-1625) her art studies paid for by her father who networked with rulers and artists to promote her career, Sofonisba was invited to Spain by King Philip II to become art teacher to 14-year-old Queen Isabella of Valois. By the time Isabella died, young Sofonisba had painted portraits of the entire Spanish court. She went to Italy where she taught pupils and was sought out by Rubens and Van Dyck.
Three Sisters playing chess (1555) by Sofonisba Anguissola
Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614) Trained by her artist father, Fontana became a sought-after portraitist, even being commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII to paint his portrait. She married a fellow artist who recognised her superior talent and became her manager, helping her paint a number of altar paintings. – Venus and Cupid (1592)
Artemisia Gentileschi (1598-1652) Taught by her father who was a successful baroque painter, Artemisia moved to Florence and was the only woman admitted to the Accademia del Disegno. She painted dynamic and strikingly realistic Bible scenes. In her 40s she was invited to paint at the court of King Charles I of England. – Susanna and the Elders (1610)
Judith Leyster (1609-1660) Unusually, Judith wasn't the daughter of an artist but made her way independently, studying with the master of the Haarlem school, Frans Hals, before at the age of 24 applying to join the Guild of St Luke. – Boy playing the flute (1635)
Rosalba Carriera (1675-1757) forged a lucrative career as a portraitist in pastels in her native Venice with a clientele which included the Elector Maximilian of Bavaria, the Danish King Frederick IV. In 1739 the Elector Frederick Augustus II of Saxony bought her entire output of paintings which is why Dresden Art Gallery has 150 of her pastels. In 1720 she was invited to Paris by an eminent banker who gave her a large suite of rooms and introduced her to the court. – The Air (1746)
Anna Dorothea Therbusch (1721-1782) Seventh child of the Prussian court painter Georg Lisiewski, Anna received a thorough training and went on to a successful career painting portraits around the courts of Europe, being admitted to the Stuttgart Academy of Arts, the Academy in Bologna, the Academie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture in Paris, the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, working at the end of her life for Tsarina Catherine II of Russia. – Self-portrait (1776)
Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807) Kauffman was encouraged from an early age by her father, himself a portrait and fresco painter, who helped his child prodigy daughter go on to become one of the leading painters of her day, known across Europe as a painter of feminine subjects, of sensibility and feeling, praised by Goethe and all who met her. – Self-portrait torn between music and Painting (1792)
Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1755-1842) was taught by her father the painter Louis Vigée, soon attracted the attention of aristocratic French society and was invited to Versailles by Marie-Antoinette to paint her portrait, eventually doing no fewer than 20. Forced into exile by the French revolution, she eventually returned to France, continuing to paint, in total some 800 works in the new classical, unadorned style and published three volumes of memoirs. – Portrait of Countess Golovine (1800)
Rosa Bonheur's father was a drawing master who encouraged her artistic tendencies. She sketched and then painted the animals of her native Bordeaux and struck it rich with a work called The Horse Market which made a sensation at the Salon of 1853. An enterprising dealer had it displayed all round the country, then sent to England where Queen Victoria gave it her endorsement, and then on to America. It toured for three years made her a name and rich. She bought a farmhouse with the proceeds and carried on working in it with her partner Nathalie Micas.
Horse Fair (1835) by Rosa Bonheur
2. Modern women painters
Somewhere in the later 19th century in France, Modern Art starts and carries on for 50 or so years, till the end of the Great War.
Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) was the female Impressionist, her family being close to that of Manet, so that she got to meet his circle which included Pissarro, Degas, Cezanne, Sisley, Monet and Renoir. She had nine paintings in the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874 and exhibited in each of the subsequent Impressionist shows until 1886. – Reading with green umbrella (1873).
Lady at her Toilette (1875) by Berthe Morisot
Mary Cassatt (1845-1926) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia before moving to Paris where she was taken up by Degas and exhibited in the 1879 Impressionist exhibition. Later in life she was awarded the Legion d'Honneur and the Pennsylvania Academy of Arts Gold Medal. – Woman in a loge (1879)
By the time Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) was 30 she was one of the leading portrait painters in America. I love Reverie or the Dreamer (1894).
Elizabeth Armstrong Forbes (1859-1912) was Canadian, moved to New York, Venice, Munich, to Pont Aven where she experimented with the new plein air technique, but it was only when she moved on from London to Newlyn in Cornwall and married the artist Stanhope Alexander Forbes, that Elizabeth found a permanent home. The couple went ton to establish the Newlyn School of open air painting in Cornwall. – A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach (1885)
Gabriele Münter (1877-1962) progressed through the Munich Art Academy and is famous for the affair she had with Russian avant-garde painter Wassily Kandinsky. They bought a house in 1909 which became a focal point for the painters of the Blue Rider movement, Franz Marc, August Macke and so on. Her clear bold draughtsmanship and forceful colours are well suited to reproduction. – Self-portrait (1909), Jawlensky and Werefkin (1909).
3. Twentieth century great women artists
Summer Days (1937) by Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) was the first woman to be the subject of a major retrospective at the New York Museum of Modern Art (1946). Her paintings are super-real, occasionally sur-real, images of desert landscapes and flowers.
Georgia O'Keeffe @ Tate Modern
Hannah Höch (1889-1978) famous for the photomontages she produced as part of the Dada movement. – Cut with Kitchen Knife DADA through Germany's Last Weimar Beer Belly Culture Era (1920)
Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980) fabulously stylish images of 1920s women caught in a kind of shiny metallic blend of Art Deco and Futurism. What is not to worship? – The telephone (1930) Auto-portrait (1929)
Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) politically active Mexican artist who painted herself obsessively, often in surreal settings although she denied being a Surrealist. – The Broken Column (1944).
The Two Fridas (1939) by Frida Kahlo
Lee Krasner (1908-1984) American abstract expressionist, worked as a mural painting assistant for socially conscious works commissioned by the Federal Art Project before developing an interest in abstract art and exhibiting in the 1941 show by the Association of American Abstract Artists. In that year she met the king of the abstract expressionists, Jackson Pollock, and married him four years later leading to an intense period where they influenced each other. After his death in 1956 she developed a new style taking the natural world as subject. – Abstract number 2 (1948)
Abstract Expressionism @ the Royal Academy
Louise Bourgeois (1911-1993)
Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985) was only 23 when she created the work she's known for, Object – a cup, saucer and spoon covered in the furry skin of a gazelle. – Object (1936)
Eva Hesse (1936-1970) died tragically young but not before making a range of stimulating abstract sculptures. – Accession II (1967)
4. Contemporary women artists
With Hesse's work (maybe with Louise Bourgeois's) the book swings decisively away from traditional art, from oil painting and recognisable sculptures, into the world of installations, happenings, performances, body art, conceptual art, the style of art we still live among. This means, in practice, fewer reproductions of 2-D works and a lot of photographs.
Rebecca Horn (b.1944) German. Rooms filled with objects, photographs, films, video, mechanical works made from everyday objects. – River of the moon (1992)
The Feathered Prison Fan ( 1978) by Rebecca Horn
Barbara Kruger (b.1945) American leading conceptual artist noted for large-format collages of images and texts. – Your body is a battleground (1989), We don't need another hero (1987).
Marina Abramovic (b. 1946) Yugoslav performance artist often directly using her body, sometimes going to extremes and inflicting pain. In The Lovers: walk on the great wall of China her boyfriend started walking in the Gobi desert while she started from the Yellow Sea and they walked towards each other, meeting on the Great Wall whereupon they split up. In Balkan Baroque she spent four days surrounded by video installations and copper basins cleaning with a handbrush 5,500 pounds of cattle bones. – Balkan Baroque (1997)
Isa Genzken (b.1948) German artist producing abstract sculptures and large-scale installations. – Schauspieler II (2014)
Jenny Holzer (b.1950) American 'neo-conceptualist' famous for her projection of texts, often pretty trite, in large public spaces. – Jenny Holzer webpage. In her hands art really does become as trite and meaningless as T-shirt slogans.
Abuse of power comes as no surprise (2017) by Jenny Holzer
Mona Hatoum (b.1952) Palestinian video and installation artist, producing dramatic performances, videos and unnerving installations. – Undercurrent (2008). In 1982 she did a performance, standing naked in a plastic box half full of mud struggling to stand up and 'escape' for fours hours. – Under siege (1982) I love the look of the crowd, the sense of complete disengagement as a pack of blokes watch a naked woman covered in mud.
Kiki Smith (b.1954) German-born American who, like so many modern women artists, is obsessed with the female body, in this version stripped and flayed as per Gray's Anatomy. – Untitled (1990)
Cindy Sherman (b.1954) American photographer and art film director. Lots of photos of herself dressed as historical characters or as stereotypical 'types' from Hollywood movies, 'questioning stereotypical depictions of "the feminine"'. As she's gotten older her the subjects have changed to spoofing Old Master paintings, and she increasingly uses dummies and models in her mock-ups. – Untitled film still #206 (1989)
Shirin Neshat (b.1957) Iranian visual artist producing black and white photos of women in Iran e.g. her series Women of Allah. Her videos emphasise the distinction between West and East, men and women.
Still from Rapture (2000) by Shirin Neshat
Pipilotti Rist (b.1962) Video artist who works with video, film and moving images, generally of herself. – Selfless in the bath of lava (1994)
Tracey Emin CBE (b.1963) English artist making provocations, interventions, installations which are often powerfully autobiographical, like the tent, the unmade bed. Also hundreds of scratchy prints. – Everyone I have ever slept with (1995), My bed (1999).
Tacita Dean OBE (b.1965) English visual artist working in film and photography. – Bubble House (1999), The Green Ray (2001).
End thought
I'm not sure – it may be because I'm simply exhausted at the end of this thorough survey – but it does feel to me as if the contemporary art of women born in the 40s, 50s and 60s, with its interventions, installations, film and video and photos and happenings and performances – is somehow much the most unhappy, most neurotic, self-punishing and self-flagellating body of work, than that of any previous era.
Maybe their work simply reflects Western society as a whole, which has got richer and richer and somehow, as in a children's fable, more and more miserable.
50 Women Artists You Should Know on Amazon
Related book reviews
Women artists in the 20th and 21st century
Reviews of exhibitions of women artists I've been to
Vanessa Bell @ Dulwich Picture Gallery
Emily Carr @ Dulwich Picture Gallery
Metamorphoses by PJ Crook @ The Royal West of England Academy
Sonia Delaunay @ Tate Modern
Tracey Emin – My Bed and J.M.W. Turner @ Turner Contemporary
Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World @ Tate Britain
Emily Jacir: Europa @ Whitechapel Art Gallery
Tove Jansson @ Dulwich Picture House
Rachel Whiteread @ Tate Britain
Agnes Martin @ Tate Modern
Conflict, Time, Photography @ Tate Modern included the photography of Jane and Louise Wilson, Sophie Ristelhüber and Ursula Schulz-Dornberg.
The American Dream: pop to the present @ the British Museum included prints by Helen Frankenthaler, Carroll Dunham, Ida Applebroog, Dotty Attie, Kiki Smith, Lee Lozano, Louise Bourgeois, Emma Amos, Kara Walker
The World Goes Pop @ Tate Modern included work by Joan Rabascall, Kiki Kogelnik, Judy Chicago, Evelyne Axell, Ángela García, Mari Chordà, Jana Želibská, Dorothée Selz, Beatriz González, Anna Maiolino, Uwe Lausen, Eulàlia Grau, Ulrike Ottinger, Nicola L, Ruth Francken, Ángela García, Mari Chordà, Marta Minujín, Isabel Oliver, Teresa Burga, Martha Rosler, Dorothée Selz, Delia Cancela, Renate Bertlmann, Chryssa Vardea, Romanita Disconzi, Natalia Lach-Lachowicz (Natalia LL), Sanja Iveković.
Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers @ Barbican included works by Edith Tudor-Hart, Evelyn Hofer, Candida Höfer, Tina Barney and Rineke Dijkstra.
The World of Charles and Ray Eames @ Barbican featured the design work of Ray Eames.
America after the Fall @ the Royal Academy included a section on Georgia O'Keeffe.
Abstract Expressionism @ the Royal Academy included works by Lee Krasner, Janet Sobel, Joan Mitchell and Louise Nevelson.
A Crisis of Brilliance @ Dulwich Picture Gallery included work by Dora Carrington
Art and Life @ Dulwich Picture Gallery included work by Winifred Nicholson.
Queer British Art 1861-1967 @ Tate Britain included works by Gluck, Ethel Sands, Clare Atwood, Ethel Walker, Laura Knight, Cecile Walton.
Ruin Lust @ Tate Britain included works by Jane and Louise Wilson, Rachel Whiteread, Tacita Dean and Laura Oldfield Ford.
Shoes: Pleasure and Pain @ Victoria & Albert Museum featured the work of shoe designers including Sandra Choi, Caroline Groves, Vivienne Westwood, Sophia Webster, Fleur Oaks, Zaha Hadid.
Killer Heels @ the Brooklyn Museum featured work by shoe designers like Westwood and Hadid, but also stunning videos by Marilyn Minter, Leanie van der Vyver.
by Simon on November 27, 2017 • Permalink
Posted in Art, Feminism, History
Tagged 2008, 50 Women Artists You Should Know, Abstract Expressionism, Angelica Kauffman, Anna Dorothea Therbusch, art, Art Deco, Artemisia Gentileschi, artist, August Macke, Barbara Kruger, Baroque, Berthe Morisot, Blue Rider, Catharina Van Hemessen, Cecilia Beaux, Cindy Sherman, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Elizabeth Armstrong Forbes, Eva Hesse, Feminism, Franz Marc, Frida Kahlo, Futurism, Gabriele Münter, Georgia O'Keeffe, Hannah Höch, Impressionism, Isa Genzken, Jenny Holzer, Judith Leyster, Kandinsky, Kiki Smith, Lavinia Fontana, Lee Krasner, Louise Bourgeois, Marina Abramovic, Mary Cassatt, Meret Oppenheim, Mona Hatoum, Newlyn School, painter, Pipilotti Rist, Rebecca Horn, Rococo, Rosa Bonheur, Rosalba Carriera, Shirin Neshat, Sofonisba Anguissola, Tacita Dean, Tamara de Lempicka, Tracey Emin, woman artist
Posted by Simon on November 27, 2017
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/11/27/50-women-artists-you-should-know/
Taschen is an art book publisher founded in 1980 by Benedikt Taschen in Cologne, Germany. They specialise in publishing art books about less well-covered topics including queer, fetish and erotic art. This relatively small-format (15.3 x 20 cm), high-gloss art book does what it says on the tin and features four-page spreads on 46 women artists of the 20th and 21st centuries – each gets two pages of text about them facing two pages of representative images, whether paintings, sculptures, photos of installations or performances etc.
The text is sourced from a range of experts on the various artists, but they and the introduction by Ute Grosenick, are all translated from the German. The resulting prose often feels heavy, in fact is sometimes incomprehensible – and is not helped by the liberal use of the kind of artbollocks which is required to explain and make sense of most of the artists from the 1960s onwards.
Wordy yet uninformative
Here's the opening of the article about Andrea Zittel.
An inundation of stimuli and pressure to consume are two of the operative terms continually used with regard to the influence of mass culture on the individual. The former supposedly leads to distraction and nervous overloading, the latter to an awakening of futile needs, prestige thinking, and meaningless superficiality. Andreas Zittel's blithe 'applied art', at first glance ascetic but in fact quite sensuous, can be interpreted against the background of this discussion. She stands, as it were, on the other shore and her mundane 'art world' lacks every form of moralising attack, overhasty critique, or complaining cultural pessimism. Rather, the lifestyle she offers is rife with both pragmatic and utopian aspects, and upholds the dignity of the individual within mass culture without losing sight of the factor of desire. (p.186)
On the basis of this passage what do you think Zittel's art consists of or looks like? Would you expect to see paintings, installations, sculptures, film or video?
For me the key word in this verbose, pseudo-intellectual but strangely prim ('with regard to') and ultimately uninformative style is 'supposedly'. The use of this word in the second sentence undermines the whole of the remainder of the paragraph. It indicates that the writer (Raimar Stange) is hedging their bets. Mass culture and consumer culture 'supposedly' lead to nervous overload and superficiality.
Stange invokes these concepts (which are key to understanding Zittel's resistance to them) but is anxious to emphasise that she is not so naive as to actually 'believe' in them. No, the use of 'supposedly' indicates that she is dealing with ideas which may satisfy the mainstream media and uneducated plebs, but that you and I – who have read our Foucault and Lacan and Barthes and Derrida and Deleuze (heavily referenced in her text) always use with forceps (even if we are forced by the demands of publishing and writing for morons) to base our entire analysis of a living artist on them.
She wants to use pretty straightforward banal truisms of our time to explain Zittel's work – but she is painfully aware that the ideas she's invoking are, well, pretty commonplace, and so writes supposedly just to let us know that she's cleverer than that. She's having her cake and eating it.
(If you want to understand what Zittel's very distinctive 'art' is like and how it 'lacks every form of moralising attack, overhasty critique, or complaining cultural pessimism [but ] rather …. offers a lifestyle rife with both pragmatic and utopian aspects, and upholds the dignity of the individual within mass culture without losing sight of the factor of desire' check out her Wikipedia page, where you will discover that some of those descriptions are actually very accurate – once her project has actually been explained a bit.)
Alternatively, the writers resort to clichés and truisms. Admittedly, writing about art is difficult. Having read all the introductions and all the wall labels for over 100 exhibitions over the past five years I am all-too-aware of how you have to say something, and so there is a terrible temptation to just fill up the space with plausible-sounding padding. Still, there's no excuse for just writing empty clichés.
Which artist would you say this is describing?
This is an art on a continual search for the meaning and possibility of personal identity, which both emotionally appeals to and intellectually challenges the viewer. (p.44)
It could be quite literally about any artist, ever.
Alphabetic order
The artists are arranged in alphabetical order, which is one way to do it. But an unintended consequence is that the first 40 or 50 pages are of modern artists, whose work, dating from the 1960s and afterwards, tends to be highly experimental, with lots of installations, photos of performances, film and video and so on.
Women's bodies / sex
Also women artists from this era often depicted the naked female body in ways designed to subvert the way it's depicted in 'traditional' male art, undermine 'the male gaze' and so on. But the unintended cumulative effect is of lots of chaotic scenes and naked women. The Vanessa Beecroft entry features 16 colour photographs of extremely attractive naked or scantily clad woman. We're still on B and this tends to set the tone for the way we read – and see the images of women in – the rest of the book.
Imponderabilia (1977) by Marina Abramovic 'Body material'
VB 36.048 by Vanessa Beecroft 'Waiting for beauty'
Teenage girls on a beach by Rineke Dijkstra 'Identity and gaze'
Caressing the Pole (2000) by Marlene Dumas 'Identity as interpretation'
Blinding (2000) by Tracey Emin 'The tyranny of intimacy'
Genital panic (1969) by VALIE EXPORT In 1968 Waltraud Lehner (who had renamed herself VALIE EXPORT) cut a hole in the crotch of some trousers and walked through a cinema with her naked crotch at viewers' head height. 'Her action was intended to confront and communicate the cliché of women's cinematic representation as passive objects. This was aimed to change people's seeing and thinking.' In fact the most striking thing for me was how hairy her crotch is (and the crotches of most of the nekkid women in these photos). Modern pornography, fashion shoots and pop videos by the likes of Miley Cyrus have accustomed us to images of women who are completely hairless at crotch and armpits. Looking at many of these old photos reminds me of the notoriously hairy illustrations of the 'scandalous' book of the period, The Joy of Sex (1972), whose male figure was full bearded and about as hairy as a man could be. Illustration from The Joy of Sex. It was the early 70s man. Let it all hang out.
Chelsea Lights by Elke Krystufek
Take, for example, the work of Viennese artist Elke Krystufek (b.1970). Her entry begins by describing how, at a 1994 group exhibition JETZTZEIT, she bared her breasts and masturbated in a mock-up of a comfortable bathroom in front of gallery guests, starting with her hand and progressing to using a dildo and vibrator. After she climaxed in front of everyone, she got into the bathwater and relaxed.
As in many of Krystufek's works, the performance addressed the interrelationship between (male) gaze and (auto)erotic pleasure, as well as the interplay between artistically staged identity, feminist emancipation, and the female body. What at first sight may seem like a crude and narcissistic provocation, brusquely ignoring the distinction between the public and private spheres, turns out in the end to be a deliberate game in which social orders and their unconscious normative ascription – intent on authoritatively determining all expressions of sexuality – are consciously subverted. (p.116)
I know plenty of men who'd love to have watched their 'unconscious normative ascriptions' being subverted in this way. I wonder if she videoed it? Can't find it on YouTube, but there is this work, which, I think you'll agree, pretty much annihilates the Male Gaze.
Here's another 'subversive' work by Marlene Dumas.
Fingers (1999)
'Because the images are culled from porn magazines, sex in Dumas' paintings is stripped of its erotic charge'. Got that? These images have no erotic content whatsoever.
Phallocentrism and the castrated woman
In a 1973 essay titled 'Visual pleasure and Narrative Cinema', the film director, scholar and feminist Laura Mulvey examined the relationship between the patriarchal unconscious, the pleasure derived from looking , and the conventional image of woman in cinema and society. Male phallocentrism, Mulvey observed, has defined woman's role in society as 'an image of the castrated woman.' In order to 'arrive at a new language of desire', this definition must first be analysed, after which the (visual) pleasure derived from perceiving these images should be destroyed. (p.116)
44 years later I wonder how the project to destroy the visual pleasure to be derived from viewing 'the conventional image of woman in cinema and society' is getting on. Maybe it will take a few years more. Or decades. Or centuries.
Away from hard core sexual imagery, 'traditional' art – in the form of oil painting – is relatively rare in this book. The names which stand out are Sonia Delaunay, Natalia Goncharova, Frida Kahlo, Lee Krasner, Tamara de Lempicka, Georgia O'Keeffe and Bridget Riley, with Barbara Hepworth as a 'traditional' Modernist sculptor. Reading their entries is a relief because there is a lot less about masturbation, sex, vaginas, gender and identity.
Also their work, being so traditionally restricted to painting and sculpture, has been thoroughly assimilated and so is easy and so is a 'pleasure' to read.
But there is another group, a sort of middle way of plenty of women artists who don't feel the need to masturbate in public, paint themselves or other women naked or generally harp on about female sexuality. There are plenty of strange and interesting women artists.
Hanne Darboven's obsession with numbers which seems to have led to walls covered with sheets of papers with various mathematical formulae or combinations of numbers all over them – Wunschkonzert (1984)
Isa Genzken's abstract sculptures – Guardini (1987)
Mona Hatoum's cool detached sculptural objects – Kapan (2012). She is now widely acknowledged as one of the leading living artists in the world.
Eva Hesse's minimalist sculptures – Right After (1969)
Rebecca Horn – admittedly more naked women, but in a genuinely beautiful, aesthetic way – Unicorn (1969), and the later work seems entirely abstract – High Noon (1991)
Kiki Smith – disturbing installations featuring animals and birds – Jersey Crows (1995)
The list of artists
I've read criticism saying there's a bias in the artists selected towards German and European artists, though the bias I noticed was towards American artists. A third of them are or were based in New York, testimony to the centrality of that city – centre of global capitalism, awash with bankers' money – to the post-war art world.
Here's the full list. I indicate country of origin and country where they ended up working, link off to some works, and link their names to reviews of exhibitions about or featuring them:
Marina Abramovic – b. 1946 birthplace Yugoslavia, Workplace Amsterdam – Performances
Eija-Liisa Ahtila – b.1959 Finland, Finland – The House (2002) 14 min DVD
Laurie Anderson – b.1947 Chicago, New York – Home of the brave
Vanessa Beecroft – b.1969 Italy, New York – VB45 (2001)
Louise Bourgeois – b.1911 Paris, New York – Cell
Lygia Clark – b.1920 Brazil, Brazil – A Morte do Plano (1960)
Hanne Darboven – b.1941 Germany, New York
Sonia Delaunay – b.1885 Ukraine, Paris
Rineke Dijkstra – b.1959 Netherlands, Netherlands
Marlene Dumas – b.1953 South Africa, Amsterdam
Tracey Emin – b.1963 England, London
VALIE EXPORT – b.1940 Austria, Cologne – Action Pants, Genital Panic (1969)
Sylvie Fleury – b. 1961 Geneva, Geneva
Isa Genzken – b.1948 Germany, Germany
Nan Goldin – b.1953 Washington, New York
Natalia Goncharova – b.1881 Russia, Paris
Guerilla Girls –
Mona Hatoum – b.1952 Beirut, London
Barbara Hepworth – b.1903 Yorkshire, St Ives
Eva Hesse – b.1936 Hamburg, New York
Hannah Höch – b.1889 Germany, Berlin
Candida Höfer – b.1944 Germany, Germany
Jenny Holzer – b.1950 Ohio, New York
Rebecca Horn – b.1944 Germany, Germany
Frida Kahlo – b.1907 Mexico, Mexico
Lee Krasner – b. 1908 New York, New York
Barbara Kruger – b.1945 New Jersey, New York
Elke Krystufek – b.1970 Vienna, Vienna
Tamara de Lempicka – b.1898 Warsaw, Mexico
Sarah Lucas – b.1962 London, London
Annette Messager – b.1943 France, Paris
Mariko Mori – b.1967 Tokyo, New York
Shirin Neshat – b.1957 Iran, New York
Louise Nevelson – b.1899 Kiev, New York
Georgia O'Keeffe – b.1887 Wisconsin, Santa Fe
Meret Oppenheim – b.1913 Berlin, Basle
Elizabeth Peyton – b.1965 Connecticut, New York
Adrian Piper – b.1948 New York, Cape Cod
Bridget Riley – b.1931 London, London
Pipilotti Rist – b.1962 Switzerland, Switzerland
Niki de Saint Phalle – b.1930 France, California
Cindy Sherman – b.1954 New Jersey, New York
Kiki Smith – b.1954 Nuremberg, New York
Rosemarie Trockel – b.1952 Germany, Germany
Rachel Whiteread – b.1963 London, London – House (1993)
Andrea Zittel – b. 1965 California, New York – A-Z
Insights from Ute Grosenick's introduction
In the second paragraph of the introduction Ute Grosenick says there is a 'gender war' going on. Alright. It does seem likely when you read any academic work about modern art or any newspaper.
It's interesting to learn that the first women-only exhibition was held in Amsterdam in 1884. Women-only exhibitions were held in Paris in 1908 and 1918. But there were few female art teachers, women members of national art academies, women art dealers networking among women artists, as well as bans on women attending some or all classes in most art schools.
Grosenick gives the impression that there were two great boom periods in 20th century art:
The decade from just before to just after the Great War saw Art Nouveau, Expressionism, Fauvism, Futurism, Cubism, Vorticism, Constructivism, Dada, Abstract Art, Neue Sachlichkeit and Surrealism.
The decade from the mid-60s to the mid-70s saw an explosion in the possibilities and definitions of art, exemplified by Pop Art, Op Art, Conceptual Art, Land Art, Fluxus, Arte Povera, Happenings, Performance Art, Body Art and Minimalism.
She says the 1980s were 'a decade of disillusionment for most women artists'.
She says that the rise of gender studies in universities reflects the way 'the critical examination of the significance of one's own and other people's gender… is becoming ever more central to art'. In my experience of recent exhibitions, I would say that gender and identity are becoming almost the only way in which gallerists and curators can now relate to art.
Women artists in the 20th and 21st century on Amazon
A Crisis of Brilliance @ Dulwich Picture Gallery included work by Dora Carrington.
Queer British Art 1861-1967 @ Tate Britain included works by Dora Carrington, Gluck, Ethel Sands, Clare Atwood, Ethel Walker, Laura Knight, Cecile Walton.
Killer Heels @ the Brooklyn Museum featured work by shoe designers like Westwood and Hadid, but also videos by Marilyn Minter, Leanie van der Vyver.
Posted in Art, Feminism, Photography, politics, Sculpture, Sex
Tagged 2003, Agnes Martin, art, Barbara Hepworth, Barbara Kruger, Bridget Riley, Cady Noland, Candida H?fer, Candida Höfer, Carolee Schneemann, Cindy Sherman, Elaine Sturtevant, Elizabeth Peyton, Ellen Gallagher, Eva Hesse, Feminism, Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe, Germaine Richier, Hannah Höch, Hanne Darboven, Isa Genzken, Janine Antoni, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Katharina Fritsch, Kiki Smith, Laurie Anderson, Lee Krasner, Louise Bourgeois, Louise Lawler, Louise Nevelson, Mariko Mori, Marina Abramovic, Marlene Dumas, Meret Oppenheim, Nan Goldin, Nancy Holt, Natalia Goncharova, Niki de Saint Phalle, Pae White, Pipilotti Rist, Rachel Whiteread, Rebecca Horn, Rineke Dijkstra, Rosemarie Trockel, Sherrie Levine, Shirin Neshat, Sonia Delaunay, Susan Rothenberg, Sylvie Fleury, Tamara de Lempicka, Toba Khedoori, Tracey Emin, Tracey Moffatt, Uta Grosenick, Valie Export, Vanessa Beecroft, women, Women artists in the 20th and 21st century, women's art
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/11/26/women-artists-in-the-20th-and-21st-century-uta-grosenick/