British Museum Prints and Drawings (cont.)
Baselitz – Seated person in looping and criss-crossing black ink – but upside-down, as usual.
Hans Hoffman – A surprise for me to see this most painterly of painters in a drawing exhibition. More looping and straight black strokes, a little like Bram Van der Velde, on red and … white, I think. From the other end of the room, looked like an abstract Rouault, if such things there are.
Anastasi – New one on me; “Subway Drawings”, because done on the subway – with his eyes closed. Little clouds of fine black lines on either end of a thicker black bar, like a barbell with fuzzy knapweed instead of weights. I don’t know what the idea was (maybe just to see what came out).
Jay Defeo – Wrote about her one or two blogs back; a friend of the 1st generation “Beats”. This a technically superb rendering of the top of a camera tripod (a little like Richard Hamilton in 60s). Apparently, she did this stuff to relax between her proper abstracts.
Franz Kline – Instantly recognisable thick black calligraphy, like a letter K on its side. Called “Untitled”, of course.
Seliger – Forgot first name. Looping marks like etching (maybe it was) or staining in grey. Like a cross between Jaap Wagemaker andLucebert.
Franz Ackermann – Modern white apartments, stadium, seashore, brightly coloured and as if through a fish-eye lens.
George Grosz – Street scenes of Weimar Berlin with usual caricatures – none the worse for that.
Dubuffet – “Landscape in Yellow” – usual scraped and scored surface, about as much like a landscape as a rhinoceros – which brings me to…
Durer – The famous rhino, etching and original drawing, in the permanent display bit. As everyone knows, he’d never seen one and was going on a written description of the one delivered to Brussels(?) Zoo during his time. If it’s true that he’d never seen one, it’s a pretty miraculous likeness, allowing for a few bizarrities (I know, but it should be a word).
Mehretu – One of those precise, exploding lines abstracts that look like computer graphics (probably are).
Merry Christmas to Christian readers – probably aren’t any left, by now.
Blackpaint
24.12.10
Tags: Ackermann, Anastasi, Baselitz, Defeo, Durer, Grosz, Hoffman, Kline, Seliger
Blackpaint's Blog 
Leave a Reply