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Art Exhibitions visited in London May/June 2018

Thursday, 31 May 2018, 18:17
Visible to anyone in the world- Edited by Steve Bamlett, Friday, 1 Jun 2018, 16:29
– Edited by Steve Bamlett, Thursday, 31 May 2018, 18:30

Art Exhibitions in London May/June 2018

This was our annual London extravaganza, starting with:

Rodin and Classical Greek Art

It was a common-place of the revues I read to marvel at this exhibition in toto but to assent (‘with civil sneer’) to Rodin’s ‘obvious’ inferiority to the Greek masters. Yet this didn’t cross my mind whilst there.

The curation is subtle enough to provide opportunity for seeing the learning involved in Rodin’s tactile love of the Parthenon marbles without seeing a need for easy comparisons of purely aesthetic value, since aesthetic value is the least interesting way to compare these sets of sculptures. The texts from the poet Rilke helped here because they reflected the ways in which Rodin’s contemporary, and assistant, focused on the major differences in the ontology of art between the two exemplar sculpture sets.

They are not the same thing at all – such that even shared monumentality has a different set of sensations and meanings attached to it in each case.. Rodin’s fragments are self-conscious not accidental – the effect of past and passing time on culture and identity not just on the physical imprint of age and conflict on stone.

The effect of fragmentation (say of figures from The Gates of Hell) is that, in taking-on autonomy, they take on different identity and scale in freeing themselves of their context. The key to this is ‘The Thinker’, who separated from the gate on which he looks down is also severed from easy acquisition of any straightforward claim to ontology – as god or man, saint, sinner, angel, devil, artist, philosopher and so on. Alone and monumentally so he merely reflects and thinks the questions: What am I? Who am I? Do these questions matter?

Nothing in Greek art can go there, though it can evoke severance from a divine it once pretended to as ritual object, whilst articulating some kinds of very close perception of the feel of spirit, body and clothing and the relationships between them. Yet The Burghers of Calais are locked in distance from each other – unsure as a group as is each figure whether it is like each other figure, even in its reflection on itself and the others. They are even locked in their own private symbols as the comments from Rilke’s commentary show us.

Having said this, I loved seeing the London Parthenon marbles in a context other than their rupture from any proper context within the clinical situation of the Duveen Gallery – that gallery of body parts divorced from any appropriate housing. For Rodin, the dispersal of the ‘marbles’ was inevitable consequence of the effect of a contemporary Imperialism that he just accepted grumpily after the manner of Zola.

Picasso 1932

You leave this exhibition unsure that you could have really seen such a magically haunting set of pictures from one year of Picasso’s life as painter, curator and self-reflector. What can one say?

These pictures are as terrifying as they are lovely. You feel as if it is difficult to divorce even feelings of revulsion from ones of awe and even humour – but revulsion certainly in the constant dissonance between animal and human, still-life stasis and motion, fertility and decay, water and stone, sexual parts and anuses – as well as ambiguous orifices that suck and bite and close and open, like eyes – even like the eyes of octopi (visitors to the exhibition will know to what I refer here).

The chances of seeing the like again as an exhibition are almost nil. But it can’t be reviewed, it must be seen. Strange how even the sparest of monochrome in-drawings can evoke other pictures whose affects you believed were mainly ones of colour and more solid illusory form. You go back to Picasso’s use of line with a new respect.

All TOO Human

What a massive multiplicity there is here – perhaps even too much to convince that the narrative progression of this exhibition is anything other than tenuous, whilst not wanting to complain because you were bowled over again and again in different ways by Bomberg, Bacon, Freud, Souza, Kossof, Auerbach (how much bowled over by him), Kitaj, and … By the time we reach Paula Rego, we wonder if the idea of the figurative isn’t far too wide to hold this all together. You come out needed to go in all over again — and again!

This can have an unsettling effect of reducing some of the greatness you see here – particularly in neglected artists like Bomberg and Kitaj. It is fashionable to sneer at the latter these days and you do wonder that neglect by the art establishment and overt Jewish themes and meanings often seem to come together.

Kitaj’s Cecil Court is a great picture, but I wonder if it belongs here other than to be submerged under the Bacon and Freud. It is a wordy story-filled picture, like Rego’s pictures are, where the stories are occult and difficult to restore and insufficiently conveyed by thought about visual impressions alone. Moreover, great pictures by Kossof and Auerbach here are not primarily important because of the figures created therein but because of the new spaces and underscapes that painting began to explore after the Second World War, particularly those of excavation and demolition. The more pictures took on narrative and/or ambivalent or liminal spaces, the less they seemed to belong here. Freud could suppress story by sheer volumes of visual effect – my favourite version of that effect being in the smaller portrait of the dying Leigh Bowery.

But I find it strangely perturbing how few visitors this exhibition welcomed unlike either Picasso or the Hockney exhibition last year. The Bacon paintings alone are worth seeing – the late George Dyer triptych for instance or, in comparison, is earlier wonderful dog and baboon paintings in an early room. See it – it won’t come together like this ever again.

In some ways this is because the curation is less than convincing but sometimes, as shown in the sample of Picasso’s curation from 1932 in the other exhibition, strange curation is compelling. When asked how he wanted to curate his retrospective he said ‘badly’. And in that bit of typical humour he cocked a snook at conventional art-history. So, see ‘All Too Human’ – like its title it implies both magnificence and a set of huge and irreducible limitations.

MONET & ARCHITECTURE: 

This exhibition’s curation is a return to the tradition of the ‘monographic’ (as NG calls it) exhibition. Obviously, the work of a senior academic art historian it is of the ‘old school’ while dressing itself up in a trendy and novel theme: architecture. However, architecture is widely understood to include village church spires, older picturesque built phenomena in ruins or restored or the new build villas of the bourgeoisie who formed the clientele of Monet’s Art.

Within this remit a lot gets included and one can’t help but see how the thematic structure of rooms – picturesque village & town, urban modernity and finally monumentalism is a cover for largely preserving a chronological presentation of remarkable stylistic developments.

This isn’t true entirely though because the themes also expose the contradictions that make up the whole phenomenon of Monet’s art. Whilst producing some instances Thomson calls ‘modern’ and that are self-consciously aware of industrial and commercial capitalism as a change-agent, Monet concentrates on the media we see landscape through – space, time, light and variant density of volumes including smog.

It is these latter media that allow London’s polluted fog to become a subject as much as the motif – say Waterloo Bridge – we see (sometimes dimly) through it. But for me Monet’s take on the produced landscapes of capitalism is weak. The Coal-Heavers (1875) is a remarkable picture in which, as Thomson says, everything is man-made. I was dying, as they say, to see it but it disappointed.

The depiction of working-class people turns them into ciphers and their impact on the environment likewise eradicated. The planks over which they carry heavy bags of coal do not even receive their weight and, likewise, the Seine beneath them is barely touched by the coal droppings which must have discoloured it. One effect is of a Monet water piece (with all the shimmering play of light on water) that sort of blithely ignores the labour going on round it. It strikes me, as Ruskin would have said, as ‘untrue’.

So, this was a wonderful experience – not least because as Monet ages we see the increasing ways in which purely visual effects – things we notice as a surprise by virtue of heightened perception – become less cognitive and more emotional. Though Monet still thought that he painted only what he saw, expression seems to be as dominant as impression in the Rouen West Front of the Cathedral series or late Venice or London paintings. And this is not all about stylistics. The concentration of Monet increasingly on effet rather than motif or a balance of the two, allows him to remove all figures from his late pictures – those tourists he so hated and lambasted – although he was one such.

But these are beautiful pictures. They aren’t though, to my mind, great pictures – although the chance to see this collection made something wondrous accessible – a man’s journey through the psychology of vision. I say not ‘great’ though because that psychology was far from a social psychology. It eradicates the social eventually – although only via some wonderful experiments in urban art – which we see here in his mid-career Paris pictures.