Blackpaint 683 – Michelangelo: Animals, Trees, Colours and Tits

Modern English

Forgot this one last blog – “At this moment in time…”

Why not “Now”?

 

Michelangelo’s Animals

“I’m an admirer of Michelangelo’s representations of animals, none more than the mighty fish flanking Jonah on the Sistine Ceiling.”: (Martin Gayford, the RA Magazine, winter 2020).

I’m an admirer of Martin Gayford’s writing on art, especially his great book “Modernists and Mavericks”, second only, in my view,  to “The Dream Colony”, the book of Walter Hopps interviews.  Gayford’s book is really interesting in its examination of the links between London artists of the 60s.  Brilliant book, marred  by the omission of Albert Irvin, surely a very important London painter.

I find this remark about Michelangelo’s animals puzzling, however.  Offhand, I couldn’t think of any animals M had actually done, apart from the odd snake.  A few years back, I did several blogs on the theme  “Michelangelo doesn’t do trees”(see Blackpaint 112)  This was in response to a report that someone, a German expert I think, was proposing a” Sermon on the Mount” as a previously unacknowledged Michelangelo.  The painting portrayed a heavily wooded mountain top; I showed, I believe, that M never painted trees, and if this was by M, it was the only one he’d ever done that included trees (apart from a couple of dead ones and the tree of knowledge in Garden of Eden – see below).

Just for fun, then, I’ve researched Michelangelo’s animals to see what Gayford means, and if his portrayals are anything special.  Results below:

 

Here’s the image that Gayford cites above.  It’s like a big trout, sucking at Jonah’s left thigh.  Sort of colourless; reminds me of those Billy Bass talking fish.

 

Here’s Paul on Malta(?), struggling with a serpent.

 

 

Here’s another serpent, this time handing Eve the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Not really an animal, is it?  More of a woman, really.  As for the tree, this is about as complete and leafy a tree as Michelangelo ever painted.  It looks as if the serpent has interrupted Eve in some activity…

 

Here’s Minos, with yet another snake attacking his penis.  Michelangelo gave Minos the face of Biagio, an old enemy.  He doesn’t look too bothered. does he?

 

Here’s Noah and his sons, sacrificing rams in thanks to God for the survival of the Ark  There’s a touch of Wallis and Gromit about the cow’s face; I think it’s the eyes.  I’ve noticed that in some medieval paintings, usually horses.

 

Tityan attacked by an eagle.  feathers and neck are rather odd..

 

Ganymede being abducted by the same bird, by the looks of it.

 

Looks like a Barn Owl on a tomb.  Face looks accurate; not sure about the legs.

 

 

Two versions of Phaeton tumbling from his chariot as it falls; contortions of the horses are great.

 

Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus.  Horse is OK but not stunning…

 

Couple more mounts at the crucifixion of Peter (off picture to the right).  Again, OK but stiff and nothing special.

 

A very pithy critique offered by Alan Bennett, through the words of a character in “The History Boys” (I think the James Corden character):  “Michelangelo doesn’t do women, Miss – he does men with tits.”  Spot on, at least for the sculpture above.  there’s the owl again, under her/his leg.

Another great insight from Waldemar Januszczak; he talks about Michelangelo’s “Opal Fruit colours” with regard to the Sistine ceiling.  Spot on, again.

That’s pretty much it.  I don’t think Michelangelo’s animals are anything special;  His trees are almost non-existent; his landscapes are arid, rocky, desert-like, featureless.  What he is rather good at is the human body, especially the (naked) male body.

A couple of my figure drawings/paintings below, Definitely NOT offered for comparison  with those above.

Rising in the Mist

 

Seated in the Dream Studio

Blackpaint

11/12/20

 

 

 

Blackpaint 675- Camus, Sade, Satan and Still Life

Apples, Pears and Paint: How to make a Still Life Painting

Staggeringly beautiful paintings and detailed almost beyond possibility, especially those by Kalf and the other Dutch show-offs.  This programme traces the development of the still life from Caravaggio’s flowers sitting on the bottom of the canvas, through to present day tableaux which reproduce Old Masters on film and in which bullets are shot through the fruit.  It looks back to classical times, fabulous wall paintings of Pompeii for instance, and mosaics from Roman villas in Britain and elsewhere in the Roman Empire.  Some examples below:

 

Cezanne Apples

 

Asparagus

 

Not sure who this is…  Conspicuous consumption in the Netherlands.

I will be returning to this programme to find more treasures; Chardin, for example – but right now, I’m in a hurry to publish.  Some interesting points;  the still life was at the bottom of pile as far as prestige was concerned; history and mythological painting at the top. portraiture next, then landscape, then still life.  Many of the Dutch and Flemish still lifes. perhaps most, contained aspects of decay and corruption – rotting fruit, insects – mementos mori, in fact.

 

Albert Camus – The Rebel (1951)

I love the cover; painting by Andre Masson, “The Suntrap” 1938 (Penguin Modern Classics, 1971).     I’ve had it since then, but found the philosophy quite hard going after his brilliant novels and short stories, so never finished it.  I think I’m finally ready for it.  I find his style of reasoning exhilarating – no tiresome linguistic analysis in the manner of Ayer or Ryle or Russell, but a flowing series of assertions, several ( but not all)  of which follow from what he was asserting before.  Examples;  “Undoubtedly, he (the rebel) demands respect for himself, but only insofar as he identifies himself with humanity in general”; or, “the rebel, on principle, persistently refuses to be humiliated without asking that others should be.  He will even accept pain, provided that his integrity is respected.”

This is what I never understood about critical theory until a couple of years ago; you come up with a “reading” of a topic or proposition, rather than examining it to see if it holds water.  Then, having asserted your “reading”,  you can storm on to conclusions and build castles of thought in the style of Nietzsche, or proclaim that everything is relative like Derrida. without that irritating business of interrogating the truth of your assertions.

To be fair, I’m early on in the book; he’s just dealt with de Sade and is moving on to the “Dandies”, the first of whom appears to be Milton’s Satan in “Paradise Lost”.

Old Friends from Paris

Got some paintings back from shows in Paris.  I was very glad to see them again (not really; rather have sold them) – but they always look better when you haven’t seen them for a while.  I think so, anyway.

 

God Only Knows

Not a religious observation – I was listening to the Beachboys while painting.

 

On the Rocks

Mine’s a Martini.

Tenby Wall

In 2013, my son Ted and his friend Dave Greaves swam, rode and ran the Iron Man Triathlon at Tenby.  Anyone who’s been there and run on the beach will know the stretch between the fort and the wall of rock; I remember running it with “Baba O’Reilly” blaring on the Ipod;  You know, “Teenage Wasteland”…

 

And a New One

Louisiana Blues

Not only  the state in America, but also  the fabulous gallery near Copenhagen, with the Giacometti landing and the view over the sea.

If you are lucky enough to be in London, drop down to Tooting and see our window exhibition in Sprout Gallery, Moyser Road SW16, 10.30am – 8.00pm every day until next Saturday inclusive.

Blackpaint

19.07.20

 

 

Blackpaint 673 – Smug Dutchmen, Michelangelo and Mermaid Sex

Andrew Graham Dixon, Art of the Low Countries, BBC4

Must be an old series, since not much is getting made at the moment, but it was new to me.  It had the usual Graham Dixon startling and rather dubious suggestions – for instance, the Dutch bourgeoisie portraying themselves in art was a sort of collective depiction of a revolution comparable to that of Russia in 1917.  However, the revelation for me was the later paintings of Frans Hals.  The so-called Laughing Cavalier was highly finished, ornate and rich, the subject plump and smug: look at the pieces below it; the hands and the woman from one picture and the self-portrait with baggy eyes.  The brushwork is loose, the woman has a face out of Van Gogh – and it’s hard to imagine that the same artist painted those hands and the moustached smirker above.

 

 

 

 

The two paintings below were not identified in the programme, but I think they are both superb, whoever painted them.

 

 

 

Michelangelo, Love and Death, Sky Arts

Again, I think this was maybe an old programme – it brought home to me just how staggering his achievement was in painting that ceiling – I’d not really noticed how strong the trompe l’oeil effect was when I visited the Vatican.  The crowds and the continual chanting from the attendant of “no talkin, no photo” , coupled with the need to keep moving, didn’t allow much in the way of close scrutiny.

 

The Altar wall (detail).  Michelangelo did the wall some 30 years after the ceiling.

 

St. Lawrence with his grill on the left, and St. Bartholomew with his flayed skin in the centre (supposed to be a self portrait – of M, not Bartholomew).

 

This is a scene from the programme, NOT a painting – imagine it without the cars; could be Brueghel or Carpaccio.

 

You can really see the trompe l’oeil effect in this section, 

 

Go and put your pants on immediately, says God…

 

The Lighthouse, dir. Robert Eggers (2019)

Fabulous cinematography, recalling the work of Bela Tarr- say, Satantango or The Man from London, I thought.  Some rather strange accents, here and there hints of Monty Python – but plenty of violence against seagulls and humans, masturbation, drinking, frenzied dancing, more drinking, imaginary mermaid sex, a live burial, axe and pickaxe attacks and a naked man being eaten by seabirds.  All this, and a recording over the credits of AL (Bert) Lloyd, a famous British folk singer and researcher, performing the shanty “Doodle Let me go, me boys”, which turns out to be a genuine earworm.

The film is a basically a two-hander (sorry), William Dafoe and Robert Pattinson.  There is, of course, the mermaid and the seagull but they don’t have speaking roles.  Dafoe has made a career out of films which “push the boundaries”, as they say: I’m thinking of Antichrist (Von Trier) and Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini, with the long and energetic sequence of oral sex in the car park.  I’ll certainly be watching The Lighthouse again, for the heroic drinking and the AL Lloyd, as well as the classy cinematography – but not for the mermaid sex, which, like many men, I get enough of in dreams…

As a painter, it’s dispiriting when you realise that paintings you were doing 10 years or more ago are better than the ones you are doing now….  Here are a few examples:

 

 

 

Blackpaint

16/06/20

 

Blackpaint 669 – From the Lockdown

Some pictures that I really like

Very lame heading, I know, but no exhibitions accessible during the lockdown, so I’m forced to improvise and go back to the archives.

 

Red Nude, Karel Appel (Ghent)

He can smash those colours together and they never turn into mud.  the black ground too…

 

Sleeping Child, Will Barnet (Washington)

I’d never heard of this US artist, despite the fact that he lived to over 100 (died 2012) and ran a famous print studio in the States.  Very stylised, Japanese-y…

 

The Entombment, Caravaggio (Vatican)

Nothing needs to be said about this – so I’ll say nothing.

 

Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling, Holbein (London)

Is there another portraitist who comes anywhere near Holbein?  Might get a blog out of that in the future…

 

Orange and Black Wall, Franz Kline (Madrid)

The colours here I think  detract from the trademark starkness of Kline’s monochrome pictures – but they add something too; variety obviously!

 

The Rape of Europa. Titian (Boston)

There was a TV prog last week on the series of paintings which Titian did for Philip II of Spain.  The paintings are, or were, on exhibition at the National Gallery – but the lockdown has closed the NG.  Some of the TV prog was taken up with discussion about objectification and sexualisation of women by male artists and purchasers.  Mary Beard opined at the end that the pictures should be shown because they tell us a lot about sexual violence against women.

I seem to recall reading or hearing on TV somewhere that the word rape, as in the example above and in the various kidnappings of the Sabine women, meant abduction, rather than the assault itself.  That’s clearly the case with Titian’s painting – yet Beard asserted several times (I think) that we were seeing a rape in progress.  It’s confusing for us old, white men.

 

Comtesse d’Haussonville, Ingres (New York)

Stunning portrait, but like the paintings in the Tate Britain’s “British Baroque” exhibition, the real focus of interest is the dress.

 

Cemetery in Corsica 1948, John Minton

A re-showing last week of Mark Gatiss’ great documentary on the painter, teacher and illustrator John Minton.  I have to say that I loved the Cornish pictures, reminiscent as they were of Sutherland and Piper, but found the bright colours of his Thameside paintings rather jarring.  I really like this Corsican one with the green sky, though.

 

I haven’t mentioned any films of late; in recent weeks, however, the virus has led me to do little else but watch DVDs.  Here are a few-

 

Caravaggio, Derek Jarman (1987)

Tilda Swinton as Lena, an angel with a dirty face.  I don’t know if Jarman’s film has any connection to historical reality, but it’s certainly visually brilliant, especially the colours and the bodies on show – all swathed in Caravaggian blacknesses as above.  Sean Bean and Dexter Fletcher sneer, grin threateningly, brandish knives, pop their pecs and sweat glossily and Nigel Terry, as the adult Caravaggio, has the necessary authority – and looks just like the painter.  There is also the impish Dawn Archibald, who does amazing things with her body – to loosen up after modelling.  I was saddened to discover that she died in her 50s in 2016, having been a peace activist for some time in the Edinburgh Women in Black group. RIP.

Dawn Archibald in Caravaggio

 

Le Jour se Leve, Marcel Carne (1939)

Jean Gabin and Arletty in a Parisian bar, prior to the killing of the dog trainer (don’t ask) and the ensuing siege in the top apartment.  Gabin’s character, despite the gangster cap and hard man expression, works as a paint sprayer and rides a drop handle bike…

 

Hotel du Nord, Marcel Carne (1938)

Arletty again, this time with pimp Louis Jouvet and a couple of police heavies.  Arletty, also a star of Carne’s Les Enfants du Paradis, was imprisoned for collaboration after WW11; she “had an affair” (seems a quaint phrase to me now) with a German officer who later became a diplomat in Africa – and was eaten by a crocodile.  Which has nothing to do with the merits of the film; like the other two Carne fims mentioned, it’s still sort of hypnotic and archetypal in settings, characters and story.

To end, two recent paintings of mine:

Drop in the Ocean

Sonia’s Twisting Pose

Blackpaint

15th April 2020

Blackpaint 641 – All About Me and my Partner

Sprout Gallery

This blog is a departure from all others; we are exhibiting at the world-famous Sprout Gallery in London (Moyser Road Tooting, to be precise) until Sunday 31st March, i.e. ONE WEEK only left so I thought it only fair to devote a blog to it at this time, so that readers across the globe can arrange to fly in before we close.  So – no trenchant, perceptive arts critique this week, just staggeringly wonderful painting, reasonably priced too….

 

Left to right: Yellow Triangles 1 and 2 (Marion Jones), StormFront and The World Turned Upside Down 1 (Blackpaint)

 

No Exit 2 and Old Blue (Marion Jones)

Clockwise from top left: Bloody Glacier, Suez Canal Zone, Still Life Blue Jug on Fire, Zig-Zag Path (Blackpaint)

 

Midnight Train to Nowheresville, The World Turned Upside Down 2 (Blackpaint)

 

Left to right: Storm Front, World Turned upside Down 1, Oceanic Divide (Blackpaint)

 

Come and see.  Normal service will be resumed next blog.

Blackpaint

24/3/19

Blackpaint 640 – Bill Viola, Michelangelo, Ken Kiff and Fellini – the sublime and…

Bill Viola and Michelangelo, RA

No photos allowed, so can only comment on this.  The Michelangelo drawings, Archers Shooting at a Herm, notably, are as wonderful as one might expect and would constitute a great exhibition alone (as I think several have, a few years back at the Courtauld – I’m sure Tityas was there and Phaeton). It seems to me an enormous stroke of hubris to display them with Viola’s works, as if there were something fundamental that they had in common.  As it is, it strikes me as two separate exhibitions in one space.

As for Viola’s videos and installations, there’s no doubt that they are striking – who wouldn’t pause and watch transfixed as a baby emerges from the mother, who squats facing the camera?  I’ve been there (childbirth) three times, but I was always at the other end so the view was obscured.   At the other end of this triptych, Viola’s mother is dying – one might think filming to be an intrusion at such a time, but I suppose it’s easier than getting a stranger or his/her family to consent…  Can’t remember what’s in between; life, presumably.

My favourite of the Viola’s is the one with the diving figure that never arrives at the surface of the pool.  Reflected in the water can be seen the upside down images of poolside people walking – but they are not there.  The most annoying film is that of the two old people examining their naked. scrawny bodies with pencil torches – saw this in Bilbao a while ago and it annoyed me there too.

Here’s a Viola from Bilbao – not in this exhibition, but it will give you an idea…

 

Ken Kiff, Sainsbury Centre, UEA Norwich, until 23rd April 2019

This is without question the strangest exhibition I’ve seen for a very long time.  Kiff, who died in 2001, started a sequence of paintings in 1971 that eventually ran to around two hundred.  He called it – The Sequence.  The catalogue refers to Bosch, Klee, Chagall and Samuel Palmer as possible influences, or “fellow travellers” at least, and the Jungian influences are hard to miss; or so the book tells me.  Ovid, Yeats and Rilke also get a mention.  He was in psychoanalysis from 1959 onwards and this also informs the work, to say the least.

No title given in book

 

Love and shadow – sorry about the reflection; she’s holding his leg, by the way, not a stick

 

Crouching Man (1)

 

Dignified man in a respectable London suburb, passed by a girl

Talking with a psychoanalyst; night sky – the analyst is the black seated figure; the pointing finger is mine

The poet; Mayakovsky – For what its worth, Kiff is wrong – Mayakovsky shot himself in the chest, not the head (photograph in David King’s brilliant book, “Red Star over Russia”).

 

(Woman with) protruding tongue – reflection again

The works are all small (the largest is 113×76 cm) and are in acrylic on paper, gummed to board.  The book claims him as, for a time, a very influential figure in British art.  I can’t see any obvious evidence of his influence, however; he seems a complete one-off to me.

City of Women (Fellini, 1980)

Watched the DVD of this fevered and feverish film, starring Anna Prucnal and “Fellini’s favourite alter ego”, Marcello Mastroianni as Snaporaz,  and was deeply moved.  In the age of #MeToo, it seems to me that Fellini’s film still has much of relevance to tell us.

Next time, Don McCullin, Franz West and Dorothea Tanning.

 

Free Radicals

Blackpaint

05 March  19

Blackpaint 637 – Bonnard, Nolan and Lift to the Scaffold

Bonnard, Tate Modern

I can’t really recommend this show too highly; I’ve been looking forward to it for weeks, been twice already and like everyone else, took photos of everything possible.  The colours are beautiful; mauves, blues, oranges, yellows (don’t know why I’m listing them, you can get a fair idea from my crappy, fuzzy snapshots below – all the good, clear ones were taken by my partner.

I was surprised at Adrian Searle’s negative review in the Guardian; despite giving a reasonably fair assessment of Bonnard’s achievement, he ended by saying he couldn’t get away from it fast enough.  No accounting for taste and Bonnard WAS a pretty dyed-in-the-wool bourgeois – he certainly looked it, anyway.  I suppose it’s all a bit old, white, privileged, domestic, smug, middle-class for Guardianista taste – but at least he’s Euro, not British.  Wonder what he thinks of Matisse?

One thing Adrian Searle is right about is Bonnard’s wobbly portrayals of people.  The faces are pretty rudimentary; Monchaty, his lover, for example, in the first real portrait in the exhibition.  One of the Marthes, emerging from the bath(s), actually looks like a sea lion to me.  Now and then, though, they are close to Degas.  While I am on about resemblances, here’s a few:  Peter Doig, Klimt, Degas, Vuillard, Goncharova, Van Gogh.  Didn’t bother with titles; too crowded to get them.

Something that the exhibition touched on was Renee Monchaty’s suicide, after Bonnard had decided to marry Marthe.  It didn’t say that Bonnard found her body in the bath.  This is of interest, given that Bonnard spent years after, painting Marthe in, and getting out of , the bath – you’d have thought he would avoid the setting.

 

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Very fuzzy – a bit Vienna Secessionist, I think, with that monumental prone nude on the wall.  Dodgy armpit..

 

 

Detail of a garden – Doig-y?

 

Unusual sharpness to door frame.

 

In one of the rooms, some frames have been removed – I think the result is a big improvement on those great wooden gilt jobs.

 

Very poor photo, great painting, VAST bath (in one picture, it looks to be floating about six feet off the ground.  I think some of the background is reminiscent of Klimt.

 

Love the various planes of colour in this and the woman just visible through the opening.

 

Bonnard’s windows and doors are often wobbly; when the scene is outside, it can look like a heat shimmer.

 

 

Very unusual scene for Bonnard; non-domestic setting, lots of people.  Placement and execution of distant figures rather like Lowry, the colours pastel-like.

 

This one says Van Gogh to me (or might, if it was a person, not a painting…)

 

I love the orange cow, or calf, on the left – that’s where I got Goncharova from.  The painting’s massive, by the way.

 

Lovely painting – no comment necessary.

 

Ditto.

Sidney Nolan, BBC4

Some stunners in this great programme last week – and also some not so stunning (to my eye, anyway).  I was surprised that some of his portraits, especially the early ones, reminded me a little of (early) Lucian Freud; some of the later ones, veiled and distorted, of Bacon.  Here and there, you could see vegetation and rock as Bacon would have rendered it – and also, maybe, Michael Andrews.  And an echo, sometimes, of John Bellany (maybe that should be the other way round, but anyway).

 

 

 

 

touch of Brett Whiteley here?

Lift to the Scaffold, dir Louis Malle (1958)

Doing what the French do best.

Otherwise known as Elevator to the Gallows, tense, clear, cold film noir with perfect Miles Davis music and beautiful Jeanne Moreau, haunting rainy Paris by night, searching for her lover (Maurice Ronet, above right) – who is stuck in the elevator, after killing her husband on the top floor.  Like a fool, he left the rope and grapple he used to scale a couple of floors to the victim’s office, dangling from the balcony and had to go back to get it….  A couple of juvenile delinquents, as they used to be called, nick his car and his gun and go on a spree, just to complicate matters further.

Here’s mine for this week:

Slouching to be Born

Next blog – Bill Viola and Michelangelo at the RA.

Blackpaint

30.01.19

 

 

 

Blackpaint 636 – Vishniac, Wallace, Schiele and the Giant Slug

Roman Vishniac, Photographers Gallery, until 24th February

Unique and fascinating photos of  life in pre – war Jewish ghettos in Poland, resettlement camps in Europe and Israel after the war as well as war-ravaged Germany and miscellaneous pictures of life in the USA at that time (is that Josh White on guitar? it is!) .  A selection below:

Somehow, looks earlier than 1935; I would have guessed the early 20s, or even 1919 – the soldiers look more like Freikorps than regulars…

 

Berlin street –  see the statues over the doorway.

 

Pre-war Berlin – love the saint/patriarch on the right, watching the men up the ladders.

 

Wallace Collection – Manchester Square W1.

Great paintings in an ornate – to put it conservatively – setting; in fact, I find the gold leaf and plush a bit too rich for my taste, but it fits the paintings right enough.  As usual, a few of my favourites below:

 

Esaias Boursse

A beautiful little jewel of a painting – look at the bonnet and the fabrics; super realism, visual poetry.

 

Gabriel Metsu

Reminded me of that Velazquez with the fish and the servant woman in the foreground and Christ in the room behind..

 

Van Der Velde

A couple of lovely seascapes by the master.  The frames are just too much for me, so I cropped the second one.

 

Van der Velde

 

Watteau

An early Dejeuner sur l’herbe, but without the nude woman and the men in top hats – so nothing like it really… but still….

 

Jan Weenix

Weenix had to be included, both because I like his name and because he is the master of dead game, especially hares.

Plenty more to look out for: more Watteaus and Lancrets, a Canaletto with a tiny Dutch flag on a vessel exactly equidistant from left and right side of the canvas (well spotted, Bernard); and some interesting Richard Bonningtons – I’d thought he did intricate scenes of ships’ rigging and the like, but some nice theatrical pictures here.  And some lovely Rubens sketches.

 

Renzo Piano, RA – ended 20th January, unfortunately.  

I felt I had to include this building, which I think is a film museum in New York – it looks like a big slug to me.  I rather like it.

 

Egon Schiele at the RA, on with drawings by Klimt  until 3rd Feb- a couple more.

Some homosexual activity to offset the risque pictures of women I posted a couple of weeks ago…

 

…and back to women…

The Passenger, dir Michelangelo Antonioni (1975)

This is on at the BFI at the South Bank in a new print.  I watched it on my DVD.

The three main characters in one shot – Jenny Runacre, with the long legs, in the phone booth; Jack Nicholson with his back to us; and Maria Schneider with the bag.  Don’t know who the receptionist is.

One of the things about this film is the scene at the end, in which a character is shot in a hotel room, while the camera gazes from the room’s interior at the window through which the fatal shot is fired.  I’ve watched it over and over, and I still can’t pinpoint it.

 

Detail of “Golem“, one of my old ones.  Next blog – Bonnard at the Tate Modern.  Nice.

Blackpaint

24/01/18

Blackpaint 632 – Horse Head, Flick Knife and Trick Mirrors

British Museum Print Room – New Acquisitions

Great prints, from Rembrandt to Auerbach and beyond, a small sample of which follows – annoyingly, I didn’t take note of all the names, but decided to trust my memory (not a good decision).  However, you get an idea and can look it up online, no doubt…

 

James Ward

 

Did know who did this, but now forgotten…. oh yes, Villon, Marcel Duchamp’s brother

 

Fred Williams

 

Afro

 

Bea somebody, an Australian

Another forgotten name….

Always worth keeping tabs on the Print Room at the BM, they mount some excellent exhibitions and they’re free to get in.

The Boys, dir. Sidney J Furie (1962)

Another excellent recent resurrection on the Talking Pictures channel, a story of four Teds, attempting to have a night “up West” on virtually no money between them, creating minor disruption in dance halls, cinema queues, aboard a bus and in the street, who wind up charged with the murder of a nightwatchman at a garage, killed in the course of a robbery that nets 15 shillings (75p).

The story emerges in flashbacks during the courtroom examinations and cross examinations and the cast list is distinguished, if you are British and of “a certain age” – otherwise, it will mean nothing.  Richard Todd and Robert Morley as prosecution and defence barristers, Felix Aylmer as the judge, Patrick Magee as a parent, Wilfred Brambell as a lavatory attendant…  “The Boys” themselves are: Ronald Lacey, Jess Conrad, Tony Garnett (later a distinguished director and collaborator with Ken Loach) and finally, the wonderful Dudley Sutton (above, with the flick knife, cleaning his nails in the totally unthreatening and unprovocative manner he uses habitually in the film).  Another baby-faced tearaway, like Richard Attenborough as Pinky in “Brighton Rock”, Sutton has a memorable scene just standing, legs apart, engrossed in cleaning his nails, in the doorway of a snooker hall, unsettling the occupants for some reason…  The other boys are excellent too and there are the location shots, which make it worth watching alone.  And yes, there WAS a film called “Hungry for Love”, in English anyway, with Signoret, Mastroianni and Riva; that’s the film showing where the boys disturb the queue.

Dudley Sutton’s best film work, I think, unless with Ken Russell and Vanessa Redgrave in “The Devils”, tossing a charred bone, remains of Oliver Reed, to the demented Mother Superior, Redgrave….

Space Shifters, Hayward Gallery

Some big names from the west coast “Cool School”, Larry Bell and Ken Irwin, and also Anish Kapoor and Yayoi Kusama, with a flood of silver reflecting spheres the size of bowling balls, but with no spots on them, or penises attached;  basically, this is a set of novelties and illusions, distorting mirrors and such like.  I was craving paintings within a few minutes, but none were forthcoming.

 

 

Distorting mirrors, like an old fairground (read “The Dwarf”, Ray Bradbury short story, in “The Small Assassin” collection).

 

See those rocks?  They look green through the glass, but are in fact silver – or have I got that the wrong way round?

 

Burne-Jones, Tate Britain (again)

A few more from the BJ; I thought the figures on the right below were very reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Sistine altar wall:

 

 

Great Perseus and Andromeda here, giving us a frontal view of A (see back view in last blog):

 

Atlas – hated this, included it as contrast to P and A above.

One of mine to finish, as always:

Oceanic Divide

Blackpaint

15.12.18

 

 

 

Blackpaint 629 – Venice under Water and Anni Albers at the Tate

Venice under Water

Just back from flooded Venice, where I ran the 33rd Venice Marathon with my three sons, to raise money for Myeloma UK and to celebrate, if that’s the right word,  my 70th birthday.  This year, the conditions were the worst ever, at least for us slower ones ; a blasting headwind, driving hail into one’s face for several kilometers on the long bridge over the lagoon, followed by a step into calf-deep salt water on the car-free touristy stretch.  Sloshing on to St.Mark’s Square, with some desultory jogging over the seven or eight ramps to the finish by Giardini.  The day before, we were laughing at the tourists buying blue, orange and green galoshes; the day after, my eldest son had to go out early and find four pairs for us at E20 a pair.  BUT I did spot a peregrine falcon, cruising among the gulls in the red dawn sky over the Grand Canal, on the way to the start.

What has all this to do with art, you say?  Well, not a lot, but on the Monday (a dry day- the water comes and goes quickly with the tide and the wind), we came across the following, in a silent campo with several trees and surrounded by cloisters, on the other side of the island near Ospedale, and opposite the cemetery island:

Church of St. Francesco della Vigna

Big, white austere frontage with two huge bronze(?) statues, one a Moses horned like Michelangelo’s,  looming from alcoves about halfway up the wall – it’s got the feel of an abandoned Hawksmoor church about it (it’s not, of course – it’s Palladio; and it’s not abandoned).  And there’s the cloisters and no-one about at midday, a miracle in Venice.  In the gloom inside, there are a couple of great Veroneses, Tiepolo and the Negroponte below;  a fantastic painting, and no, I’d never heard of him before.  You have to drop a 50 cent piece in a box to get lights on the pics for a minute or so, like with the Bellini in S. Zaccaria.

 

 

Holy Family with Saints Anthony Abbot, Catherine and the infant John the Baptist, Paolo Veronese

Look at those fabrics, especially Catherine’s.

 

Resurrection of Christ, Veronese

 

Virgin and Child Enthroned, Fra Antonio da Negroponte

 

Another view of the above.  Love those putti swimming about in the sky under God, and the birds at the bottom; you can just make out a duck (mallard?) on the left and a hoopoe, last but one on the right.

Anni Albers at Tate Modern

I have to admit that this is not amongst my favourite exhibitions of all time, although I acknowledge the skill involved and the quality of the textiles displayed.  It’s all a bit too brown, grey and beige for my taste (although the examples I have picked to photograph seem to contradict that – because I picked ones I liked, I suppose).

I think you can see a resemblance to Paul Klee’s work in the second example especially; the interlacing tendrils in the 4th and 5th remind me of Brice Marden’s patterns – and maybe there is even a touch of Sean Scully in the pieces in general.  I thought the bedspread was nice, but better in a furniture showroom than an art gallery.  Yes, I know about the Bauhaus ethic of producing “practical”items, teapots, plates, chairs etc – I just like Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and Joan Mitchell and the AbExes better.  No doubt, a major failure of taste and intelligence on my part, but I am an old white man, after all.

 

I really like this one.

 

But not so keen on this.

 

Crap frame.

 

An apology

First one above is blurred and I’m not sure it’s the right way up.

Trust (FX, Simon Beaufoy, Danny Boyle et al, 2018)

The US made, Simon Beaufoy version of the Getty kidnapping has to be the best thing on British TV this year.  Donald Sutherland is turning in a brilliant performance as the old man (Venice connection here – “Don’t Look Now” of course, and Fellini’s “Casanova”) Luca Marinelli, Hilary Swank.. well, they’re all terrific, as is the soundtrack, as is the camerawork and the script.  Shades of Godfather obviously, but also Fellini, I thought – or maybe the Sorrentino of “Il Divo” and “The Great Beauty”.  And there was all that hype about “the Bodyguard”…

Pictures of mine to finish with:

Rain over the Sound

 

Still Life with Milk Bottle

Blackpaint

02/11/18