Blackpaint 654 – St.Catherine, Cleopatra and the 27th (Penal) Panzer Regiment

Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon

Continuing with galleries in Lisbon, here are some paintings from the modern(ish) section of the Gulbenkian, fantastic museum in beautiful landscaped gardens.  Again, surprising number of British artists represented.

Love this, but unfortunately, didn’t get name of artist.  Think it’s Portuguese but looks Mexican, doesn’t it?

 

Howard Hodgkin – an early one, obviously.

 

Joe Tilson – painting, sculpture, collage – or all three?

 

OK, we’re in the same museum, but a different section.

 

Museo de Art Antiga, Lisbon

Another staggering collection – or rather set of collections – to rival the V&A.  Well, resembles it, anyway.  Below, triptych, showing the martyrdom and apotheosis of St.Catherine.

God has caused the torture wheel to shatter –

 

…but unfortunately, God’s intervention was not enough to save her.  Perhaps His attention strayed…

 

But never mind; bring her up to heaven (and don’t forget the head).

 

Bronzino, the Holy Family (not sure if this is correct title).  Notice the infant Jesus’ hand, near BVM’s breast – echoes the titty tweaking in Bronzino’s better known painting below:

 

Demon’s head

 

St. Jerome by ?  Charming little picture.

 

Studio of Ribera (obviously)

We didn’t have time to go round the lot, unfortunately, but it’s a huge museum.  Particularly striking were Japanese screens, showing the arrival of the first Portuguese to arrive on Japanese shores in the 16th(?) century.  For some reason, they’d brought elephants with them, apparently.

Tate Britain – Hoyland and Ayres

There is a great pairing of two major abstract artists, very different but, like Bellany and Davie at the Newport Street Gallery recently, they complement each other wonderfully.  I think it’s the colour and the size.

Gillian Ayres – Something Blues (forget the name).  It’s about the size of the other two below.

 

 

Ayres, Phaeton – I presume the arc is the route of Phaeton’s chariot across the heavens

 

Ayres, Cleopatra – fabulous tangle of colours, each of them absolutely right, it seems to me.

 

John Hoyland – this is best viewed from across the gallery; near to, the scrapings in the dark red look a little muddy.  Same order of size as the Ayres.

 

Hoyland again – sorry, took no note of titles.

Tate Britain rehang (sort of)

They haven’t done a full rehang by any means, but I noticed a batch of new paintings in the 50s/60s sections, a few of which I’ve put in below:

This is by Mary Martin, and it grabs your attention from the neighbouring room when you see it through the arch (whoever places the pictures really knows which ones should be seen through the arches – perhaps best example is the big blue Ayres above).

The Martin is actually a long sheet – or maybe four long sheets –  of metal (aluminium?), crumpled into triangular shapes; the faces of the triangles reflect the colours of the paintings around it.

 

Keith Vaughan – great figure study, with his characteristic blue background.

Gillian Ayres again – something of Whistler’s Nocturne here, maybe (is it Nocturne?  The one that Ruskin described as a pot of paint thrown in the face, or somesuch…)  Fantastic, I call it…

 

Sven Hassel

A bit of a mood change now…

My latest reading; I see Joseph Porta as a thin Falstaff, going into battle with his flamethrower and top hat (prototype of many Satanic majesties in rock music and Gothic horror), with Tiny, Pluto, the Little Legionnaire, the Old ‘Un and Hassel himself, the anti-Nazi soldiers of the 27th Tank (Penal) Tank Regiment.  OK, it’s not great literature but it hits that late night Discovery Channel spot, beloved of British men of a certain age…

Latest Lifeys

No new paintings this time, so a couple of my life drawings to end with:

 

 

Blackpaint

29/09/19

 

 

 

 

 

Blackpaint 634 – Review of the Year; a Jaundiced and Unbalanced Appreciation…

Exhibitions of the Year

Great shows this year:  All Too Human (Tate Britain), with that Bacon landscape and Freud’s portrait of Frank Auerbach; Charles 1 (RA) with the giant Mantegnas and Van Dyck silks and satins; Aftermath (Tate Britain), with the airborne Kathe Kollwitz, Grosz, Beckmann, Kirchner, Dix and some British artists too; and, obviously, the Bellini-Mantegna show at the National Gallery.  And, obviously, the Picasso 1932 (Tate Modern).

Of the big ones, I enjoyed Bellini/Mantegna the most, as well as Oceania at the RA, but since this is totally my blog and I don’t have to bother with paying due respect, my favourite shows were as follows:

Roy Oxlade at Alison Jaques

Amy Sillman, Camden Arts Centre

Ed Kienholz at Blain Southern

Howard Hodgkin at Gagosian

Joe Bradley, also Gagosian

Disappointment of the Year

Ribera at Dulwich Picture Gallery- fantastic;  but just not enough HUGE flayings (I think they’re at the Prado).

 

Photography

Alex Prager and Tish Murtha at Photographers Gallery – totally different, but both fascinating.

 

Films

Cold War (Pawlikowsky) – hands -down winner on a number of fronts, including music, cinematography, acting and just seriousness really.  I thought the ending was unnecessarily final…

Roma (Cuaron) – Christmas Eve film at Carlton Soho; Black and white, set in Mexico in 1970 ish, examines the relationship between a young Indian maid/nanny and her middle-class, European descended employers.  Shares all the attributes of “Cold War” except the music and has some real “wake-up” set pieces: street riots, a murder in a department store, a nail-biting childbirth sequence in a chaotic hospital, a near drowning – but none of this is melodramatic. in the sense that it somehow emerges from and sinks back into the main narrative, if that makes sense.  The martial arts and the airplane are good too.

TV

Trust

Great on every level; Donald Sutherland, Luca Marinelli, Hilary Swank – the whole cast brilliant.  Superlative.

Snowfall

Gets better all the time – except now, the great Mexican boxer is dead and his lover bereft…

The Sinner

One or two unbelievable moments (I use “unbelievable” in terms of the series’ own logic, not real reality); “They” would never have allowed Bill Pullman’s detective to take a convicted murderer on an outing alone.  Very tense and steamy, notwithstanding.

John Minton – Mark Gatiss’ absorbing documentary on the illustrator/painter.

Sad deaths this year – well, these are the ones I’m sad about

Tony Joe White – grinning rocker from the swamps

Dudley Sutton – best known as Tinker in Lovejoy, but he’ll always be the baby-faced killer in “The Boys” to me.

Some of my pictures to end with, as always:

Ochre Back

The Southern Ocean

Blackpaint

2/1/19

Happy New Year (if it is your new year)

 

Blackpaint 628 – Skinned Alive in Dulwich and Striped in Hanover Square

Jusepe de Ribera, Dulwich Picture Gallery

The most effective heir to Caravaggio, Spanish painter who worked in Naples (1591 – 1652)

I’ve been looking forward to this exhibition for months, having seen fantastic de Riberas in the Prado last year; vast canvases of stretched, prostrated male bodies undergoing torture… hang on, this is becoming rather weird.  They are not actually all that gruesome and it’s the brilliant rendition (unfortunate term, but the correct one) of the human body that’s fantastic, not the torture or bloodshed.

There are only four or five large canvases in Dulwich – St.Bartholomew, about to be skinned alive (two of those, I think); Marsyas, being flayed by Apollo; St Sebastian, having his arrows pulled out by a couple of women (the women rather perfunctory – de Ribera seems more interested in men).  There is a portrait of a man holding a knife and a flayed human skin, obviously inspired by the Michelangelo self portrait on the Sistine wall.

Additionally, there are a number of beautiful little drawings, some in red chalk, that are reminiscent in style of Leonardo, but Goya immediately comes to mind; the subject matter?  Executions, tortures such as the strappado, hangings, crucifixions, facial deformations…  You can imagine the visitor to Ribera’s studio, after seeing these: “And the one you’re working on at the moment, upstairs – would that be a harbour scene or some nice flowers in a jug, with butterflies?  Oh, a flaying…”.

 

St Sebastian

The sprawling male bodies are the obvious focal point – the skin often white or greyish, grainy, rippled over the belly, livid white and scooped out by shadow in turn.  Wher the flaying is actually in progress, it is the foot or arm that is being “done” and is easy to miss.  De Ribera is also pretty hot on fabric; see the example below.

 

By coincidence, the night before going to this, I watched the film “Bone Tomahawk” (dir. S.Craig Zahler, 2015) on TV, in which cave-dwelling cannibal throwbacks scalp a living man, then upend him and chop him in two from the crutch; it seemed to make an appropriate double with Ribera.

Amy Sillman, Camden Arts Centre, Finchley Road tube

By way of slight contrast, this beautiful set of paintings and drawings, and a cartoon film in the overheated Camden Arts Centre.  Lovely big, green, pink, blue abstract canvases (see below) and cartoony characters, like the crawling, vomiting (?) creature that make their way, like Kentridge’s people and coffee pots, into the film.  The pictures have surface; sometimes hard, smooth and glazed, sometimes rough, scraped, paint in bobbles and rills.  She seems, again like Kentridge and many other artists, to have recurring images; the thing that looks like an old vinyl record pickup in “TV in Bed” below; or is it an unconscious deep sea diver, lying on his back on the sea bed and wearing flippers…

Apart from Kentridge, Guston (the pinks), Oehlen and for some reason, Marlene Dumas came to mind.

 

What the Axe Knows

 

TV in Bed

 

Slant

 

 

 

Sean Scully, “Uninsideout”, Blain/Southern, Hanover Square

For some reason, someone tweeted that Scully “should be ashamed of himself” for this exhibition…  Why?  He did stripes before and he’s doing stripes now – what’s wrong with these stripes?  Too colourful, maybe…

Anyway, they are huge; lush, syrupy sweeps of paint on aluminium supports, very painterly, with a depth of colour like those he showed in that fabulous palace in Venice, at last year’s Biennale.  Additionally, there are a couple of enormous, quilt-like assemblages with inset panels (three pictures down, below).  Downstairs, smaller works on paper in pastel.  In Scully’s handwriting, some guff about clashing colours suggesting The Clash rock band – great art doesn’t, or shouldn’t need explanation or justification.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two of mine to finish with, somewhat smaller than Scully’s:

Ice Candle

Blackpaint

 

Little Crashing Out

Blackpaint

21.10.48

 

 

 

Blackpaint 611 – Caravaggio, de Ribera and the Catflap

National Gallery – de Ribera, Caravaggio

I got the Taschen Caravaggio for my birthday and I have to say that I’ve revised my whole system of preferences on 16th/17th century art: the stylistic realism (Death of the Virgin, for instance; an actual dead body, no choirs of angels on cloudbanks), the drama and focus of the figures emerging from the gloom and the subtle use of colour (green, blue, red and ochre in The Entombment of Christ) – and those muscular arms, hands and feet (The Crucifixion of St. Peter); fantastic.  Unfortunately, only two Caravaggios currently on display at the NG and none of those I’ve mentioned.  The NG has The Boy Bitten by a Lizard and a Supper at Emmaus; both brilliant but very familiar.

Entombment of Christ

Crucifixion of St. Peter

Akin to Caravaggio in style, born 20 years later  in Spain but moved to Rome, de Ribera is another stunning painter of twisted bodies emerging from a surrounding darkness.  His bodies tend to be white, shading into the murk in a sort of dry sfumato; they are often sprawling across huge canvases, as in the Prado.  Exhibition coming to Dulwich Picture Gallery next year, which will be one not to miss.

Lamentation over the Dead Christ, Jusepe de Ribera

Again, only two Riberas on show in the NG; this one, and another of some biblical character – Laban? – with a goat.  No chiarascuro (the Spanish followers of the Caravaggio style were called Tenebrists); looks like a completely different painter.

In Holofernes’ Tent, Johann Liss

I had to include this; Caravaggio did the same subject, setting it a few seconds earlier, when Judith was sawing the head off.  This one though has the most remarkable rendering of the folds and billows of Judith’s white chemise.  The detail hasn’t come out so well in the photo – it needs to be seen on the wall.

London Group Open Exhibition, The Cello Factory, Cornwall Road – last day Friday, 1st December

Great little gallery in the streets behind the South Bank opposite the ITV tower.  London Group venerable, founded by Camden Town and Vorticist painters (Gilman, Gore, Wyndham Lewis et al).  There is a Frank Bowling – you can see it below, pink, grey and yellow in the middle, end wall on right – at £48,000, but the others are more reasonably priced;  my partner’s diptych, “Catflap” (below) , for example.

 

Catflap (diptych) Marion Jones

It’s a very eclectic collection; the one thing I noticed was that there were a lot of windows in the paintings.

Monochrome, National Gallery

If the London Group was “diverse”, this outstrips it by a mile; Mantegna, Van Eyck, Bruegel, Memling, Moreau – to Stella, Malevich, Ellsworth Kelly, Picasso, Marlene Dumas.  It ends with a room suffused with orange light, by Eliasson.  It goes from grisaille and drypoint to the black square, Stella’s thin white geometric lines, a Las Meninas sketch by Picasso.  Some great works but a little colourless….

Ingres

 

Dumas

My latest to finish with-

Crossfire

Blackpaint

28/11/17

 

 

 

 

 

Blackpaint 600 – “FOOD….AWLRIGHT?” Orange, Dogs and Prado

A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick (1971)

I was discussing High Rise (film of) recently with Paul Tickell and Phil Cairney, my director friends, and I compared it to Clockwork Orange.  No, they both said, check out the  theatricality of staging and acting in Orange, compared with High Rise (I paraphrase, of course; neither of them would say “check out”).  They were right, naturally.  The choreographed gut- kicking during the house invasion – “I’m SIINGING in the rain (thud)” – along with the cutting of Adrienne Corri’s cat suit, while Patrick Magee is forced to watch, and the attack on Dim to the Thieving Magpie music are theatre and opera, and I was going to say unique – then, of course, the attack by the nazis on the bouncer in  Cabaret, that’s to music, but not choreographed – and I suppose West Side Story…..  and  just about every Ken Russell music biopic has a sequence of classical music with violence, or sex, or sex and violence… so not unique then, or even rare.  But maybe uniquely malevolent and chilling.

For my money, the best line in the film is Magee’s; he is entertaining the hapless Alex and has come to realise that the youth he is sheltering was his main assailant:  “FOOD (bellowed suddenly)……. Awright? (strangled attempt to get voice under control).

Straw Dogs, Sam Peckinpah (1971) – now available on DVD

Invaluable for its accurate and touching portrait of Cornish country folk in the 70s – a giggling, knife-wielding ratcatcher, a teenage nymphomaniac, rustic rapists, a mentally challenged killer, a drunken malicious patriarch (Peter Vaughan, prefiguring Robert Shaw in Jaws).  Into the village to settle  come Dustin Hoffman, nerdy American maths genius and his wife, escaped local girl Amy (Susan George, in a tight white roll-necked sweater), who disports herself innocently before the depraved locals (with one of whom she has “history”).

The inevitable, in cinematic terms, happens; Hoffman’s character is enticed away and Amy’s old boyfriend turns up at the cottage; a double rape follows.  The furore about the film and its troubles with the censor arose from the fact that Amy appears to be enjoying and responding to the violent assault (the first one, by her old boyfriend, anyway).  Peckinpah has form in this elsewhere; see, for example, “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia”.

What I find interesting, watching it again after 45 years (!), is that Hoffman is apparently unaware of the attack on his wife (he must be both blind and stupid).  His defence of the cottage in the subsequent siege, his ruthless use of deadly violence, is motivated not by revenge, but by the territorial imperative.  “This is my house!” he asserts, as he chucks boiling water, bashes brains in and wields the huge mantrap.  Amy wants him to abandon the house and the mentally challenged killer (David Warner), who  he is ostensibly trying to protect.  She is VERY slow to blast the last assailant with a shotgun, when he attacks Hoffman from behind.  So, not a revenge movie; arguably, the Amy character could have been left out altogether and the story would have worked – although the atmospherics would have been less charged…  Unaccountably, Warner was uncredited in the cast, so I’ve made sure he gets a credit here.

More Prado

Impossible to go fully into the riches of the Prado (which I started last blog): so, two painters of whom I was aware, but only just, before seeing them here.  First, Joachim Patinir (Charon, St.Jerome, Temptation of Anthony Abbott) – blue, lowering skies, small, strange figures in a landscape, something of Georgione about him, maybe.

 

Patinir – Charon crossing the Styx

 

Patinir – St Jerome

Then, de Ribera – grey-white distorted bodies, sprawling across huge canvases. his Tityus lunging towards you across the gallery.  The obvious Caravaggio influence, coupled with a sort of dry abrasiveness of surface…

 

de Ribera – Tityus

 

de Ribera – Martyrdom of St Philip

Finally, Titian’s Andrians, having a fine old bacchanale, below; I like the little kid – is he/she about to urinate?   Hope not, for the “relaxed” lady’s sake.

Titian – Bacchanale of the Andrians

 

Lake District

Blackpaint

20.6.17

 

 

Blackpaint 533 – Brussels; a Dog’s Breakfast and God on an Egg

Musee Des Beaux Arts (Museum of Ancient Art) Brussels

OK, a selection of the fantastic art in the above, starting, oddly, with the massive Alechinsky below – just like an Asger Jorn, lots of little animal and elf heads swirling around in it – but not exactly ancient.  It’s in the vast entrance hall, as is the Wappers below it.

 

 

Scene from the 1830 revolution, this has got everything in it, all going on at once.  Even a dog in there, women with babies, drummer boy…  Reminds me a bit of that Copley in the Tate Britain, gates of St. Helier, death of some officer..?

Magnificent picture by??   God appears to have four legs, two of which are balanced daintily on a big egg.  Looks like a Last Judgement to me.

 

de Ribera – Apollo Flaying Marsyas.

Apollo is delicately stripping the skin from Marsyas’ leg as if it were a salmon steak.  And look – the raw flesh echoes Apollo’s lovely gown!  I’m sure M would appreciate that.

Now, a series of huge Rubens:

Titian-like compo; and that cadmium red against the yellow ochre, against the blue…

 

I think Lucian Freud did a painting looking down on a man in bed with his arm raised like that.  Look at the muscles in the shoulder and arm of the kneeling woman and the red dress of the fleshy angel on the left.

The Martyrdom of Saint Livinus.  He’s had his tongue torn out; that’s it, in the pincers, being offered to the dog.

 

 

A couple of the dozen or so Rubens sketches on show.

 

I don’t know who did this picture – the label was too blurred to read in our photo.  Look at the grubby left hand clutching the  – what is it? a bobbin, maybe? – whatever, its one of the great hands.  And the absorbed expression..

Kitaj, Marco Livingstone, (Phaidon, 2010)

Kitaj – Cecil Court

Consider this quotation from the end of Livingstone’s account of Kitaj’s life and work: “… he provided both clues to the meanings of his pictures and traps with which to ensnare the inattentive spectator.  The more knowledge one brings to his work, and the more prepared one is to follow up the references and the quotations…..the more one is rewarded.  Long after the artefacts made by many of his contemporaries have exhausted themselves and been drained of content, Kitaj’s paintings will continue to gnaw away at our curiosity and to yield their secrets.”

Or not.  Kitaj’s work is abstruse and impenetrable in many cases because it makes continual reference to his own reading, and his cultural, historical, political and sexual interests (obsessions).  Read the same books, live the same life – you might get it; but you might not, because he likes to be puzzling.  For me, the interesting information in the pictures concerns form, colour, line, composition, texture and a whole load of other things to do with painting that can’t easily be put into words.  That’s the point of painting pictures, figurative or non – figurative.  I don’t want to “follow up the references and the quotations” or avoid the “traps with which to ensnare the inattentive spectator” – PAY ATTENTION, you at the back there! – I just want to look at the pictures.

By the way, Cecil Court, above, is one of the few Kitaj pictures in which there’s any sense of perspective.  Most of his pictures  seem to press up against the “screen” of the front of the canvas.  Not a criticism, just an observation.

Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel

Fascinating explanation of the reason why miles (leagues) are shorter near to Paris and get longer as you head towards Brittany etc.  There’s a great deal to learn in this riveting old book.  I wonder why it was never made in a children’s version, the old Classics Illustrated for example.

WIP.  Seems to be a droopy charcoal penis in the left centre, on a pink background.  It has no significance to the picture, which is totally abstract.

blackpaint

Blackpaint 409 – Baroque Carrots, Bertolucci and Lautrec in the House

Guggenheim (Cont.) – Riotous Baroque

Concluding last week’s blog on Bilbao; “Riotous Baroque one of those exhibitions that mix modern works with 17th century and Renaissance paintings on “similar” themes (sex, death, supernatural, drunkenness, riot, religious transport, violent death etc., etc…)

The old paintings include Teniers animals aping men, drinking, spewing, fighting, wearing clothes; witches’ sabbaths, flying ghost ships, gaping-mouthed devils, drunken oglings and gropings in Dutch taverns, mythological figures tearing their own innards out – all good stuff.  There are three, big, beautiful paintings of saints in ecstasies on huge dark backgrounds, that could have been Caravaggios or Zurbarans – but turned out to be by de Ribera, de Piola and Jan van Bathurnen.  Never heard of the last two.

The modern stuff:  Jurgen Teller photographs of Charlotte Rampling and Raquel Zimmerman standing naked amidst white baroque statuary – rather like those Richard Hamilton pictures recently at the National Gallery, naked hoovering and the rest; Glenn Brown doing the usual thing of old-style pictures, swirly, sickly, layered paint, simulated decay; several simple, patchy paintings by Dana Schulz that recall Gary Hume; a painting by Urs Fischer of a woman in an Ingres dress, her face and body obscured by an enormous erect carrot, peeled, ridged and glistening – what could it represent?

Actually, this is one of a number Fischer has done of portraits with face obscured by vegetable or fruits such as bananas and lemon slices, so perhaps I have misread any phallic significance.  Fischer, I find, is a man; I’d thought the Urs was short for Ursula, like a German friend of ours.

Finally, three large white Albert Oelhens.  Sprays and splashes and  swatches of delicious paint, mauve, mint green, crimson, over his beautifully applied CGI images – on one, a metallic, psychedelic starburst; on another, a big “per cent” sign.

Toulouse Lautrec Museum, Albi (Southern France)

Stunning town and so are the paintings in the TL museum.  Woman on a Divan,  Comtesse Adele de Toulouse Lautrec (1895) –  my partner says she has Cezanne hands – Carmen la Rousse, tousled hair, startled eyes;

sketches for posters fabulous, with a depth that the posters don’t have; Caudieux the actor; the brothel pictures, women in chemises, lounging on divans, in bed together…

The woman doing her hair – that white and black on brown board; it looks like pastel and charcoal, but it’s paint.

 

Inspired me to try same; results at bottom.

The Conformist

Watched Bertolucci’s great film again, and found it more balletic and operatic – without the singing – than last time.  Trintignant’s gliding walk in the fedora and overcoat, Sanda’s Lady Penelope face, the dance of the two women, the Paris shops by night with the blue windows, the Caesar-esque assassination in the forest, Sanda’s face a blood mask…  great film.

The Dreamers

More Bertolucci; Paris 1968 this time.  Great scene where the three protagonists race through the museum in imitation of “Bande a Part”; the run is intercut with the original film, the runners interchanging, colour to b and w…

Sweet Tooth

Reading McEwan’s last book; marred only by too much local colour.  I’m sure that all the London pubs and bands mentioned are accurate – I know they are, I was there too – but they can be distracting.  BUT – the book is written from the point of view of a woman; I can’t think of any other male writer who has done this, apart from Joyce with the Molly Bloom bit at the end of Ulysses.

 

 

 

 

 

Blackpaint

Life Drawings from Millman Street

31.08.13