Mexico and Australia at the Royal Academy

I paid a second visit to the Royal Academy Mexico show when its Australia show had started, which prompted me to wonder why the Mexico show - A Revolution in Art 1910-1940 - seemed very "Mexican" while the Australia show - covering the later 18th-century to the present - by and large didn't feel very "Australian".

By this I mean that the Mexican works marked the period when Mexican artists moved away from European models and developed a style which still defines Mexico for many people - strong colours and shapes, unsentimental depictions of peasants and workers. The show has many works by the large number of artists who visited Mexico in this period, but the subjects are set in Mexico (not surprisingly, as otherwise why visit?), as are the numerous photographs by Mexican and visiting photographers (including Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa). There is no doubt at all which country is being showcased.

The international interest was originally sparked by Mexico's ten year revolution and its aftermath, at the time a social, political and economic cataclysm which was only equalled in Russia. But native and visitor artists alike clearly found Mexico visually as well as politically inspiring. The exhibition certainly brings home the extent to which European and American artists and photographers both worked there and brought Mexican art home, including the surrealist Andre Breton. This helps to explain the international reputations of Mexican artists like Diego Rivera and Frieda Khalo (both represented here). I was not expecting that a the large proportion of the show was taken up by photographs, though perhaps it should be no surprise that photographers should be drawn to Mexico during the golden age of photojournalism. I found the work of Tina Modetti particularly impressive. Another surprise was to find two fairly large gouaches by Edward Burra, partly because I did not know he visited Mexico, but partly because I associate him with quite small works usually showing the urban marginalised, whereas the two works shown here of the three he did of Mexican subjects (never before shown together) are of a church interior (Mexican church) and what looks like a small town street scene (El Paseo).


Edward Burra's El Paseo

The Australia show covers a much longer period, and the earlier works demonstrate that their artists were still in thrall to Europe, emigrants who perhaps did know how to get to grips with a very different environment. The result is paintings which often need close scrutiny to realise these are not European landscapes, and, though often accomplished enough and of historical interest, inevitably seem derivative. Unlike Mexico, Australian artists continued in the European manner into the early 20th-century: although the subjects became more recognisably Australian, the style follows Northern Hemisphere and still feel rather derivative. I did admire a group of very accomplished watercolours, J J Hilder's Dry Lagoon in particular. I also found Grace Cossington-Smith interesting; she introduced postimpressionism to Australia but had a strong individual style which makes her anything but a slavish follower.

Nevertheless, to me the mid-20th-century art is the strongest in the exhibition, and the first to be recognisably Australian. Sydney Nolan's Ned Kelly paintings are already well known in the UK, and the selection shown here are as strong and striking as ever. (I have to admit he was the only Australian artists I knew before this show.) The later work first concentrates on the yellows and browns of the outback, apparently ignoring the areas where most Australians actually live, and then there is contemporary work which fits into the "International" mould seen everywhere. In both cases there is interesting work - I enjoyed works by Margaret Preston, Russell Dryscale, Jeffrey Smart, Fred Williams, Bill Henson, Denis Nona, Fiona Hall and Danie Mellor -  but the overall impression is not particularly striking in relation to the number of works on show (this is quite a big exhibition).

 

I have not mentioned the exhibits which are iconically Australian to most people - the aboriginal art. There are two problems with this kind of art: firstly, it is very difficult for a European to interpret these paintings, as their original meanings relate to religious and other practices usually unknown to the viewer, so the tendency is to treat them as decorative objects. Thus they may be admired for the "wrong" reasons. The other problem is that these are modern versions of art which was site specific - painted on rocks or on the body for example, not on bark and therefore transportable as they are here. It can be argued they lose their force when divorced from their original settings, and like any modern art it can be painted purely for the market or be the expression of a personal vision. The trouble is that the European audience is unlikely to know the difference. All I can say, therefore, is that while I found much of this work attractive but rather repetitive, it may be of more sociological and economic significance than artistic. I would rather see aborigines successfully work in mainstream art - as Albert Namatjira does in this show - but if individuals can make a living producing this kind of art good luck to them.

Albert Namatjira's Central Australian Landscape (1950s)

The Mexico show has gone down much better with the critics than Australia. I think the latter suffered by aiming at being a showcase for Australian art over the time of European immigration, when there really isn't enough really good quality work to justify such a large show. The early landscapes in particular could have done with a cull, and many critics wondered why the end of the show consisted of just one work by a large number of contemporary artists. All done for reasons of national pride no doubt, but I think it backfired. Still, I did find it interesting to see what was produced in an area which was for a long time very much cut off from the rest of the world and there was definitely some work which was well worth seeing.

Conversely, the Mexico show benefited by concentrating on one period of intense productivity, a period which is already known to European audiences but brings something new by emphasising the historical context and the resultant interest from abroad. I suspect this show was based on purely art historical and curatorial impulses, whereas the Australia show probably had a large political and Australian art establishment input. Maybe another show in a few decades may fare better, though by then it might be taking place in Shanghai rather than London.

Impressions of the Queen's Thames Pageant 2012

A number of artists were commissioned to produce images of the Thames Pageant which celebrated the Queen's Golden Jubilee in 2012, and others did work off their own bat. As a lot of the pageant took place in torrential rain, this turned out to be a more onerous task than perhaps they had imagined, although the weather did not put off the large crowds which turned out to watch what was probably the largest flotilla ever to sail the Thames. About fifty works were put on show at the Pump Room gallery in Battersea Park, which is a listed Victorian industrial building owned and run by Southwark Council. It was interesting to see what so many different (nearly all professional) artists had made of the same subject - judge for yourself from the selection below.

The Pump Room Gallery

David Hockney's iPad sketch

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This was made from objects from charity shops and skips.
The first "ship" represents the golden barge which carried the Queen and the Duke of Edinbugh

 

When does photography do it better?

When I go to the Courtauld Gallery I look in on the other galleries in Somerset House as there are always exhibitions of very high quality photography, and recently I caught two exhibitions showing simultaneously - the fashion photography of Erwin Blumenfeld and exhibits from a project to photograph the architectural features of Hawksmoor's London churches. Along with a display of astronomical photography shown at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich earlier this year, these three were easily the most striking photography shows I've seen this year.

Erwin Blumenfeld was unknown to me, but he is clearly revered in some quarters because the prints on display were painstakingly produced in Paris from original negatives and plates as the existing prints were no longer available. He is best known for his post-war fashion photography in New York, but that was only the end of a long journey which enabled him to absorb influences from many sources. He was born in Germany but moved to Holland to run a leather goods store, where he found an unused dark room at the back of the stop. He exploited his interest in art by teaching himself photography, incorporating the local Dadaism and surrealism into his work. He then went to Paris and earned a high reputation for his fashion photography. He escaped to America during the war, where he continued to work in fashion, becoming one of the most famous colour fashion photographers in the USA. (Look out for a BBC4 documentary on him next year.) Given his varied background, it's not surprising that his work shows wit and inventiveness as well as great technical skill, while giving due respect to both the clothes and the models. Frankly, I never expected to find fashion photography so fascinating. Blumenfeld's work stands out because he treated fashion photography as an art while remembering its purpose is fundamentally commercial.

Next door were photographs from a project which set out to fill a gap by documenting the surviving seven London churches built by Nicholas Hawkesmoor in the early 18th-century. The show was curated by the Dean of Harvard University Graduate School of Design, who commissioned architectural photographer Helene Binet to photograph the exterior and interior of the churches, and also to consider their urban context. The images particularly feature the churches' spires, each one different, and each blending fantasy and rationality, inspired by ancient architecture but considered radically contemporary in their day. The large black and white photographs were a wonderful record of Hawsmoor's work, some of them taken from angles which looked distinctly perilous. Resin models showed its connection with the wider city. This was architectural photography at its best, apparently straightforward shots which would undoubtedly have required a huge amount of work (I have commissioned event photography from a photographer who usually did architectural work, and he said the main drawback was the amount of time you had to wait around for the lighting to be right). The newspaper-style free handout giving the gist of the exhibition was also of high quality and an excellent souvenir.

The third exhibition was of the category winners of an annual international competition for amateur astronomical photography, which requires huge patience, skill and (I suspect) good luck. But the results were dazzling, with the dramatically beautiful colours and shapes of deep space, the deep shadows of rugged moonscapes, and eerie darkened landscapes filled with spectacular images of the night sky. The display at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich was beautifully staged, with the images shown in large photo boxes which really brought out the scale and detail of the subjects. (By coincidence, one of the images was taken nearby on Blackheath Common.) It was difficult to believe the photographs were the result of a part-time hobby. I would have been interested to know which came first for these photographers, the science or the art, or were they equal?

It now strikes me that all these shows related to subjects where photography has rightly pretty well taken over from other media. Although in the past fashion and theatrical costumes were recorded via sketches, often of great skill, and many painters recorded the clothes of their sitters with great realism (though only Tissot seems to have regarded the clothes as equally important as the sitter), photography is far more immediate, and the clothes are clearly being worn by a real (if not typical) human being. Similarly, in the past buildings were recorded in sketches, engravings and watercolours - I remember the Cotman show last year at Dulwich, which skillfully did just that for the architecture of Normandy just after the Napoleonic wars, for the benefit of those who could not travel to France. But again, colour photography works much better. People still use buildings as subjects for paintings, but rarely as a straightforward record. The astronomical photographs brought to mind the apocalyptic 19th-century paintings of John Martin, but the reality dwarfs even his imagination. I can recall paintings of astronomical features in children's books, but these photographs transported me to outer space in a way those illustrations never did.

Interestingly enough, in the one area where you would expect photography to have wiped the floor with the opposition - the portrait - painting and drawing have held their own, and for most people have higher status than photographic images. Perhaps this is partly the result of the ubiquity of the family snap, or maybe the portrait painter's longer contact with the sitter allows him or her to portray the person behind the image in a way that a photographer's studio session rarely does. When it comes to landscapes, colour photography probably has the edge these days, and of course photography is unsurpassed for instant impressions and reportage, to the extent that artists in other media now imitate photography, from Andy Warhol to Gerhard Richter. An interesting reversal from the early days of photography when posed photographs often imitated contemporary paintings. But I don't think there is any real rivalry nowadays - individuals are free to choose which media suit their interests and abilities, and use them individually or mixed together according to what works for them, with photography as much an accepted part of the repertoire as any other.

 

 

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Lowry at Tate Britain: acceptance at last?

Tate Britain has long had a significant holding of works by L S Lowry, but seemingly has been reluctant to show them, prompting the Burnley-born actor Sir Ian McKellen to demand recently that either Lowry gets greater acknowledgement or the collection should be given to Manchester Art Gallery. Given the time these things take, the current major retrospective cannot be a direct response, but it was about time the Tate overcame its lack of enthusiasm, no doubt helped by the recent reassessment of 20th-century British painting (see previous posts). I went to the last major London show, as long ago as 1976 at the Royal Academy - I remember chatting to an artist (not an Academician) who was rather dismissive of Lowry, a common metropolitan view then, though then as now Lowry was highly popular with the general public and the RA show was a great success. No doubt to balance Lowry's populist reputation, the Tate show's intellectual chops are maximised by being curated by the heavyweight Marxist art historian T J Clark and his wife, in spite of Clark's major work being on Manet.

So is the exhibition turned worth the wait? On the whole yes, even though I'm not Lowry's greatest fan. It starts with a roomful of what are claimed to be among Lowry's strongest works; I'm not sure I agree, as eight of the eleven works are post-WW2 when I feel his work was beginning to decline. The blurb claims they show Lowry's "appetite for the life of the crowd" - well, yes, maybe, but this was mostly participation at a distance, more interest in the crowd as a crowd, not as a group of individuals.

The next room emphasises Lowry's links with France. His tutor was a talented French Impressionist, Alphonse Vallette, who wanted to take Impressionism to industrial Britain and taught in Manchester for many years. (I recall seeing his works for the first time in Manchester Art Gallery, and being disconcerted by his Impressionistic images of Manchester - very different from the more familiar Paris of course.) Lowry also exhibited in Paris more than in London in the early part of his career, and paintings by French artists are shown as points of influence - I wasn't entirely convinced except in the case of the two Utrillos, which were well worth seeing in their own right (La Porte St Martin  and La Place du Terte, both from 1910). Clark makes a direct link between Lowry and 19th-century French art's interest in modern life, via Vallette, but the chronological chart outside the exhibition says that Lowry himself said it was after seeing the play Hindle Wakes in 1912 that he "first saw beauty in the industrial landscape". I think Clark is being too Francophile: no doubt Lowry was influenced by France, but I think his real starting point was British.

For me, the following rooms showing Lowry's streetscapes of the inter-war years were the real meat of the show. Lowry was famously a rent collector in poor areas of Manchester until his retirement, and, as someone who knew him has pointed out, his was the viewpoint of the rent man - always in the street, never over the threshold. But there was plenty going on in the street, including evictions, suicides, fist fights and sickness, as well as in public areas like football fields, fairgrounds and factory gates. Later, his depictions of these scenes tended to repetition and exaggeration, but the paintings of this period depict working class life truthfully, unsentimentally and with flashes of humour. This is what makes them such a vibrant record of a way of life and a landscape which has now vanished. These rooms also demonstrate Lowry's drawing skill - he is no unskilled naive as has sometimes been thought.

Lowry painted other subjects, which apparently show him in a different light, but the only aspect of this shown here is a group of landscapes produced in the 1950s; these are impressive but not in my view outstanding.

Before I visited the show, I was in a commercial gallery which was selling works by Lowry (mainly prints), and a salesman was assuring an Antipodean visitor that the Tate exhibition had attracted international attention and raised prices. I suspect he was right and that Lowry has attained secure mainstream status; he will join the other 20th-century British artists who have been accepted on their own terms at last, their failure to embrace abstract modernism now forgiven.

The Fever Van,  1935