Deja vu (literally) - Manet, Bellows and Picasso

Manet's The Railway from the National Gallery, Washington

If you go to most of the major shows as I do, sooner or later you will come across a work you have already seen in another exhibition. This phenomenon went into overdrive recently, when this happened at all three shows I went to most recently. I popped into the Royal Academy to catch the last week of the Manet show, and saw The Railway, which I had last viewed in Liverpool at the wonderful Walker Art Gallery exhibition Art in the age of steam some years ago (one of the best shows I have ever seen). As it is one of my favourite pictures, I was more than happy that it has been lent from Washington again. Two of the other paintings, Dejeuner sur l'herbe and Music in the Tuileries Gardns, I had seen before in the Courtauld and the National Gallery respectively. The Luncheon (lent from Munich) was new to me, and was easily worth the trip on its own  - Manet at his enigmatic best. The exhibition as a whole looked at Manet as a portraitist, and I have to say it failed to convince me that he had any great talent in this area. Furthermore, it is debatable that some of the paintings, such as those mentioned above, are actually portraits in the usual sense - they do use friends, acquaintances and members of his household as models, but they seem exercises in form and colour, and depictions of aspects of modernity, rather than attempts to capture the likeness and personality of the sitter. Only the two paintings of Zola and Berthe Morisot seemed both genuinely portraits and genuinely good; the others seemed to lack conviction to me, as if he knew he should be doing something else.

Upstairs, the RA was putting on a show of paintings and prints by George Bellows, an American painter of the first half of the last century who was best known for lively and sympathetic depictions of lower class New York life - part of a group known as the Trash Can artists. His best known work is Stag at Sheeneys, showing a brutal illegal boxing match. Bellows is also known for his highly accomplished prints of everyday scenes, and the print of a boxing match (very similar but not the same as the painting) I had seen at the British Museum years ago at a show of American prints. If anything I prefer the print, as it appropriately gives the scene the look of a newspaper illustration. His later paintings were unknown to me and of a wider range of subjects: some match Manet for their enigmatic quality - one commentator  identified this as a search for something he did not live long enough to find (he died at only 42). This was a very good introduction to an artist not well known in this country, just as illuminating as the Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven show at Dulwich Picture Gallery was with regard to Canadian work of the same period.

Before the RA visit, a friend and I went to the Becoming Picasso show at the Courtauld. In this case, seeing a painting again was also an opportunity to say goodbye. Girl with a dove has recently been sold to the Qataris for a reputed £20 million. This painting was much-loved in this country, but I'm not too sure it's worth that much; still, it will be a shame to see it go. The show as a whole was probably aimed more at those with a greater love of Picasso than I have (I never know where to draw the line between genius and charlatanism with that wily old goat), but it did demonstrate his incredible facility at the age of only 19. One half was from his first Paris show, and consisted of lively works influenced (but not slavishly) by most of the well-known artists of the day, while the other half was done later in the year after a great friend committed suicide and often pay homage to great Spanish artists like Goya, Valazquez and El Greco. They are much more melancholy and chart the beginning of the development into his blue period. I always look yet again at the rest of the Courtald exhibits when I visit exhibitions there, and thus came across the last example of deja vu - a small Picasso drawing of a nude woman which ably supported the claim that he was the greatest draughtsman since Michelangelo, and which I had seen not too long ago at a Royal Academy show of Spanish drawings. I'm beginning to enjoy all these second viewings, and look forward to meeting lots of old friends at future exhibitions..

Art or craft?

I was prompted to think about the difference between art and craft by a visit to the London


Inspired by Hockney

Glassblowing Studio in Bermondsey. The studio mainly produces pieces designed by the owner, Peter Layton, but the other glassblowers also produce pieces to their own designs so a variety of individual styles is displayed. Although the glassware is blown and is hollow, it is not intended to have a practical purpose (even as a vase). The glassblowers make pieces which are recognisably from the same design but unique because of the nature of their production. All this makes the work seem like "art" - expressions of individual visual sensibility, each piece unique, of no practical purpose. To complicate matters further, the studio has been commissioned to produce works for the Royal Academy and the National Gallery inspired by famous artists - one is inspired by Hockney's Approach of spring, for example - echoing the inspiration artists get from their predecessors.  On the 

Louis-craftsman or artist?

other hand, watching Louis use his 25 years of experience to make a work certainly demonstrated the craft skills involved and there was no chance of dispensing with taught techniques in the way some modern artists choose to do. Nevertheless, all "artists" use craft skills of one kind or another as what they do is still handwork. All the same, there are those who maintain that the definition of craft work means it should be useful, and do not approve of work which is purely decorative.

The visit was a reminder that the distinction between art and craft only began in the Renaissance, and though breaching the divide is possible it can be controversial. Not that any of this is likely to be a consideration for those buying the glassware, who are no doubt just looking for something which is beautiful, small and affordable to enhance their home (though don't purchasers of "art" often buy for much the same reasons......?).

Catching up - Schwitters and Estorick

I finally got around to seeting the Kurt Schwitters exhibition at Tate Britain, and visiting the Estorick

gallery of Italian art in North London  (having declared an intention to do so in my January post). Both, I'm glad to say, proved rewarding.

Kurt Schwitters was a German pioneer of collage who fled Nazi Germany, having been condemned as a "degenerate" artist, first living in Norway and then, when Norway was invaded, coming to Britain. In London, he made contact with and greatly influenced the more avant garde British artists of the time, but eventually moved to the north west and continued his collage work while also making a meagre living as a portraitist. He received notification that he had been granted British citizenship on the day of his death. The exhibition not only showcased his well-known collages, made up of things like bus tickets and adertisements, but his lesser-known three dimensional works and small sculptures, which were a surprise to me and which I actually preferred by a small margin. The influence on artists like Richard Hamilton was very clear, and complemented the recent Courtauld show on the relationship between Mondrian and Ben Nicholson. The debt to British art history from refugees from 1930s Nazism is well known, but I for one was not so familiar with the debt to refugee artists. All in all, a good story well told.

The Estorick gallery of modern Italian painting is rather out of the way in Highbury (though now easily accessble to me on the newish East London Line), and is based on the Estoricks' private collection, most famous for its Italian Futurist paintings. The permanent collection was a reminder to me that Modigliani and di Chirico were Italian (I had tended to subsume them within international modernism) and there were some very good Futurist paintings on view, but the revelation was the show of works by Giorgio Morandi, previously unknown to me but a favourite of Estorick, who visited him in his studio in the 1950s. Morandi was whatever is the diametric opposite of showy, and the publicity for his etchings and watercolours had it spot on in describing him as "the master of poetic understatement". The semi-abstract still lives and landscapes required a fairly close look, but the reward was a feeling that he had captured the essence of the objects and discarded the rest. On top of that, there was an amazing exhibition of distorted polaroid photographs of an area of Italy much represented by Morandi, produced by Nino Migliori - again, I had never heard of him, so if the Estorick is hoping to raise awareness of contemporary Italian art, it certainly succeeded with me!