Engineer's Daughter

picasso: challenging the past at the national gallery

I was just chatting with my family tonight about how I'm going to try to see at Picasso's Three Musicians at MOMA when I'm in NYC next week as it's currently on display there, and now I coincidentally find out Picasso is also currently enjoying his first show at London's National Gallery.  The British exhibit is called Picasso: Challenging the Past and attempts to show how the painter grappled with the work of the masters that preceded him in art history.  It's a potentially great concept, but Adrian Searle has some quibbles with the show's installation especially when compared to an exhibition with a similar theme he saw in Spain a few years back:

Picasso in London is a disappointment. Given the exhibition's subtitle - Challenging the Past - one expects to find him in yet another head-to-head, still life-to-still life, nude-to-nude series of confrontations. This is exactly what Paris and the Prado managed. Here, Picasso is alone in the basement: to see his predecessors, you must climb the stairs or take a lift, and try and keep Picasso in mind as you go looking for Degas's La Coiffure, Ingres's Madame Moitessier, or the odd Sabine Woman or two. Few of the paintings that mattered to Picasso, or that really provoked him, hang in the National Gallery in the first place; the Picassos with the strongest links to the gallery's collection (his reworkings of Manet's Déjeuner Sur l'Herbe, for instance) haven't come to London, either. So you end up deciding you are in the wrong museum in the wrong country at the wrong time, stuck here with Picasso, and that the two of you had better make the best of it.

To me many of the paintings stand on their own nevertheless, and you can see a selection in the gallery here.  I do love his take on Manet, though his portrait of Lee Miller utterly confounds me.  You'll have to click through to see what I'm talking about. 

van dyck at tate britain

In contrast to the vast retrospective that blew me away at the Royal Academy back in 1999 celebrating the 400th anniversary of Anthony Van Dyck's birth, a new exhibition at Tate Britain concentrates on the paintings the artist created during his seven-and-a-half-year tenure in Britain (and is the recipient of another five-star review by Jonathan Jones).  Endlessly influential on future generations of portrait painters such as Thomas Gainsborough and John Singer Sargent, Van Dyck is famously memorable for the deep, shimmering textures of his subjects' garments.  And memorable for good reason, writes Keith Thomas:

A haberdasher's son, Van Dyck was intensely interested in clothes. His English portraits of women often show a preference for informal dress: loose shifts, flowing drapery, open necks, bare bosoms and uncovered lower arms (so much quicker to paint than intricate lace collars and cuffs, and also more titillating - the bare arm, it has been said, was to the 1630s what the ankle was to the Victorians). This was what the poet Herrick meant by "a sweet disorder in the dress"; no one represented that liquefaction of the clothes better than Van Dyck. He loved exotic costumes, such as the "Persian" dress in which he painted Sir Robert and Lady Shirley, or the Indian pyjamas worn by the oriental traveller William Feilding, Earl of Denbigh. Many of his subjects wear fantasy costume, derived from the court masques of the 1630s. Van Dyck was the first "that e're put ladies' dress into a careless romance".

Oh, the sensuousness of the bare arm, making another comeback in 2009 thanks to Michelle Obama.  Now if only Van Dyck were still around to paint her portrait.  You can see a gallery of some of the Van Dyck exhibition highlights here, including some of those dead-sexy dishevelled ladies of his.

shah abbas: the remaking of iran

In the early 17th-century Iranian art was experiencing a golden age due in large part to the country's ruler Shah Abbas, famous for his political and cultural ambitions.  The British Museum in association with the Iran Heritage Foundation has just opened an exhibition called Shah Abbas: The Remaking of Iran that illustrates his many achievements including the building of his new capital of Isfahan, a marvel of architectural planning and still, as Madeleine Bunting claims, "Iran's most beautiful city".  Bunting goes on to elaborate on why this exhibition of art from 400 years ago is so important right at this moment:

This is a timely exhibition: a bold attempt to deepen understanding of a country with which our own is locked in a hostile diplomatic impasse. It is only four years since the museum mounted the Forgotten Empire exhibition on Iran's ancient history; it is as if the museum is conducting its own independent foreign policy, using culture as a form of exchange between countries for which other methods of communication are difficult.

To see some highlights from this show Jonathan Jones gave a rare five out of five stars, please click here.  In a separate article Jones also wrote about how the fearless 17th-century globetrotting couple Robert and Teresia Sherley connect the Shah Abbas exhibition with the new Van Dyck show at Tate Britain.  But more on Van Dyck in a few days.

rodchenko and popova at tate modern

Russian constructivism is easily in my top five favorite art movements of all time owing to its bold experimentation coupled with the cleverest of modern graphic design, and Alexander Rodchenko and Liubov Popova were the masters of the form in a time when innovation was busting out all over.  Popova is pictured here to the right of Varvara Stepanova, Rodchenko's wife and an artist in her own right whose fabric designs are referenced in the current Mai-Thu Perret show at SFMOMA.  Curator Margarita Tupitsyn has paired work by Rodchenko and Popova for a new exhibit at Tate Modern entitled Defining Constructivism, and Adrian Searle found himself absolutely entranced:

They began as painters, working through the heady influences of cubism, futurism and expressionism, and Malevich's suprematism, with its overtones of religiosity. In Popova's earlier paintings, bars cross the surface as though they were in a great hurry to get somewhere. Her percussive rhomboids have all the emphasis of a hand slamming a desktop. She mixes metal dust and sawdust into her paint, giving her forms extra oomph and weight. Sometimes these experiments give her work a weird, lumpy tactility. At other times, it is as bright and unexpected as a chaffinch. You can lose yourself in her paintings' complications. In Rodchenko's works, lines take decisive turns, ricocheting back from the edges. There are flat, eclipsed discs, with penumbras of light. His shading is insistent, as if daring you to doubt. Rodchenko could turn his hand to anything, and would adopt whatever artistic position was necessary at the time. I wonder if the two artists, working at the service of the new state, knew how good they were, and how prophetic their paintings now seem to be.

Besides their paintings the show includes an entire section on the artists' design projects, from awesome posters by Rodchenko to Popova's sketches of dresses Tilda Swinton might still be inclined to wear today.  You can see some highlights from the exhibition here, and then click here for an excellent interview with Rodchenko's grandson Alexander Lavrentiev in which he talks about his grandpa's prankster side.

guess who came to dinner?

Now through the end of February Birmingham's Black British arts and culture center the Drum is hosting an exhibition called Guess Who is Coming to Dinner.  Focusing on some of that city's first mixed-race families, the show was put together by Birmingham native Tracey O'Loughlin, herself the child of a black father and a white mother.  Chris Arnot spoke to her about her memories of growing up mixed-race:

She says of her father, who died 14 years ago: "He was 6ft 4ins and 18 stone, so we didn't get too many comments when he was around." There were plenty of hostile stares, however. As her mother, Sheila, records: "We were considered trash. And you were treated like that, so you felt like that."

The show could not be more timely here at the beginning of the new age of Obama and also at a moment when mixed-race is the fastest growing ethnic group in the UK.  You can see some pictures from the exhibit, mostly taken in the '50s and '60s, in the online gallery here.

inequalities in liverpool

All eyes were on Liverpool in 2008 while it enjoyed its year as the European Capital of Culture and hosted everything from a massive Klimt exhibit to a giant mechanical spider.  However, a mere two years earlier a study had found Liverpool's historic ward Everton, perched on a hill that overlooks the city center, to be the poorest area in all of Britain, and it is a part of the city that faces continual closures and general abandonment.  Photographer Christian Petersen has been attempting to draw attention to Everton's plight by capturing its struggling residents and workers on film, and his images are the most melancholy kind of street photography.  They were recently on display in downtown Liverpool in what I hope was an eye-opening exhibit for residents and tourists alike.  You can see some of Peterson's Everton pictures in the gallery here or on his Web site.

david lachapelle retrospective

Famous for his candy-slick photographs of celebrities and models, David LaChapelle is currently enjoying a mid-career retrospective at (appropriately enough) La Monnaie de Paris, the Paris Mint, at a moment when the artist has been insisting his work has an anti-capitalist message.  Syma Tariq covered the show for the Guardian:

LaChapelle received his first professional commission from Andy Warhol, who encountered him while he was a bus boy in Studio 54. The influence is clear when viewing the Marilyn Monroe-like rendering of Amanda Lepore, the transsexual who is one of the photographer's muses (Amanda as Andy Warhol's Liz RED, 2007). "I want to communicate, without my work needing a paragraph on the wall next to it," he says.

While I have always liked LaChapelle's wild imagination and his over-the-top portraits, I also think his portrayal of women often leaves much to be desired.  For example, I wonder what exactly he is trying to communicate by photographing a woman lying unconscious on the ground or inert under a giant slice of cheese while Jeff Koons leers above her.  You can see those particular images and more, and judge for yourself, in the NSFW gallery here.

john gay retrospective

British photographer John Gay would have turned 100 this year, and to celebrate English Heritage is hosting a retrospective of his 60 years of work at Kenwood House called England Observed.  His casual black-and-white shots of the everyday people and places in Britain are exquisite, whether he's capturing a joyful moment on the Hampstead Heath swingboats or the insane pigeons of Trafalgar Square.  The Guardian has a nice selection of pictures from the exhibition here.

ben nicholson at tate st ives

The small seaside town of St Ives in England holds a very special spot in my heart as the very place where I first fell desperately in love with modern art in Barbara Hepworth's sculpture garden.  Hepworth's husband Ben Nicholson was an artist in his own right, and Tate St Ives is currently displaying a retrospective of his work entitled Ben Nicholson: A Continuous Line.  Nicholson is most respected for the meticulous shapes of his abstracted white-on-white paintings, but Maev Kennedy describes how this new show intends to reevaluate the assumption that the landscapes he also painted were merely money-makers for him:

In this exhibition, however, curator Chris Stephens is trying to persuade visitors to look more kindly on the figurative work, and to see the continuous line of the exhibition's title running through Nicholson's art, encompassing as it did abstracts, reliefs, landscapes and cubist still lifes.

Nicholson's off-kilter Cornwall land-and-sea-scapes remind me fondly of the much-lauded light in that part of England that seems to bathe everything it touches in warm radiance, and you can see some examples of those paintings along with other work from the exhibition in the online gallery here.  I am also reminded of how urgently I need to get back to St Ives.

gerhard richter at the national portrait gallery

I do love Gerhard Richter's abstract paintings, but his photorealist works just blow me away, how the edges of hard lines soften ever so slightly or sometimes blur completely.  I remember the first time I saw Lesende at SFMOMA and was dumbstruck by its beauty.  I just wanted to step right into it.  That particular painting is currently taking a short vacation in London, however, where it is being featured in a show of Richter's portraits at the National Portrait Gallery that will open a little later this month.  The Guardian, who has in the past called Richter "the grandaddy of contemporary painting", has a wonderful gallery of some of the paintings featured in the exhibition here, but it is taking every last ounce of willpower in my body not to plan a quick jaunt over there this spring to see them all in person.