Magic Realism, Tate Modern
This is an excellent exhibition. free for a start, and always interesting, though the art is not all to my taste. The term Magic Realism has come to be associated primarily with Latin American writing and implies a sort of teeming, intensified, intoxicated hyper-realism, spilling over into surrealism at times and then reeling back. It is characterised by exaggeration, violence, a sort of profusion or excess that goes well with jungles, dictators, extremes of every kind – think Jodorowsky as well as Marquez. The term was coined apparently back in 20s Germany, however.
Well, it’s all here: sex murders, suicides, hanging women, prostitution, garish, lurid colours, reds, sulphurous yellows, acid greens, paint like shining varnish. The circus is a big thing, as are nightclubs, cabarets… seems to me there is something of a spillage into the stuff of “Aftermath”. Grosz is well represented, with his scathing, precise caricatures – he’s very hard on prostitutes, it seems to me; he treats them not as victims (unless it’s a “Lustmorder”), but as predators and exploiters of the poor. Dix also has plenty of drawings: ringmistresses with whips, circus cowboys and Indians tearing round on horseback.
A selection of the pictures below:
Albert Birkle, The Acrobat Schulz (1921)
A terrific portrait – reminds me somewhat of Wyndham-Lewis, “The Tyro” maybe, BUT-
Albert Birkle
-the same artist was responsible for this monstrosity of a crucifixion.
George Grosz, Suicide Street with Dog
Rudolf Schlichter, Woman in Red Scarf
One of several excellent portraits, the best, I think. These artists seem to favour a confrontational representation, the subject staring straight out at the viewer.
Max Beckmann, Woman with Fan
Didn’t get this artist’s name but the colours and texture are typical.
Lovis Corinth
This Corinth is completely different in style and execution and feel from everything else there. By the way, that is a white tee shirt and rucksack in the foreground, not a woman in Handmaid’s Tale dress..
Mark Gatiss on John Minton: The Lost Man of Art (BBC4)
A brilliant programme on Minton, painter and illustrator of the 40s and 50s, who killed himself in 1957. Gatiss feels that his stature was never properly recognised, partly because he was branded “illustrator” (that is, not a proper artist): he did lots of book covers, famously Elizabeth David’s Mediterranean cookbook. Also, like many others, he was left behind when Abstract Expressionism arrived. His students, for example, Robyn Denny, attacked him for his inability to embrace abstraction, “action”, gesturalism, whatever you choose to call it. Then, there was the heavy drinking (par for the course in the London art world of the time) and the homosexuality, illegal and physically dangerous in post WW2 Britain.
I was struck by how similar his more stylised representation of human figures was to other painters on the scene: Colquhoun and MacBryde, for instance, and early Prunella Clough. all friends of his. Like Kitaj and Hockney a little later, he was also capable, however, of a naturalistic precision in his portraits, like the one of Nevill Wallace below – looks a bit like a Degas to me. The others I show were, I think, from his Cornish sojourn and resemble in some degree Sutherland, Piper and maybe Lanyon.
Ghost Geese Fly West
Blackpaint
August 2018
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