Blackpaint 615 – London Art Fair, Saatchi and Angelopoulos

London Art Fair

This was a couple of weekends ago, but I thought I might put up some of my favourites:

 

Chloe Lamb

Great little corner of abstracts.  One of her big ones is a little Lanyon-ish (didn’t see any Lanyons this year) but the colours are very strong, I think.

 

Dorothy Mead

Terrific drawing by the Bomberg acolyte.  I actually prefer her stuff to the Master.

 

William Brooker

I put up a photo of a Brooker painting at the fair last year; it was a beautiful table assemblage in that precise Coldstream/Uglow style (see below).  This one of the nude in bed reminds me more  of Sickert, however.

 

Patrick Proctor

Huge, screen-like painting – actually, they ARE screens in the picture, aren’t they?  Great painter, often similar to Hockney.

 

Duncan Grant

Typical Grant piece, maybe a little conventional, but I like it.

 

Iconoclasts – Art Out of the Mainstream, Saatchi Gallery

The Ice Cream Seller, Danny Fox

That blue cheered me up on a cold, dismal morning in the week.

The Professor, Josh Faught

Faught does loose textile pieces hung with bits and pieces, joke cards, badges, a spilt coffee cup, most of which relates to the gay scene in the US.  They are colourful and funny and sad.  I love that spilt coffee disc, made out of resin; had to touch it when the attendant wasn’t attending..

 

Corvid, Kate MccGwire

The external skin of this giant intertwining black sausage is composed of crow feathers – hence the title.

 

Philip Pearlstein, Saatchi Gallery until 25th March

Eight of Pearlstein’s intricate, crowded pictures of pallid, pensive nude women, sort of interacting with various props, mostly by being draped around them.  Sometimes, the toys, animals, dinosaurs and duck lures seem to be eyeing them.

Models and Blimp (1991)

Apparently, they are done from life, although the angles and proportions sometimes suggest photographs.

Theo Angelopoulos

I’ve just completed viewing another box set of this fantastic director’s films.  They are often “stately paced” and solemn; sometimes he lectures you on history through the mouths of the characters; but they are operatic, visually arresting, the ever- present music is plaintive and beautiful.  The Greek and Balkan landscapes are rough and mountainous; it’s often snowing, raining, flooding.  Groups or pairs of weary individuals lug dusty suitcases along empty streets to deserted railway stations, drink in shabby, bare cafes; suited men and women in 40s dresses dance to guitar, sax and accordion jazz in bare dance halls or on promenades, until Fascists. or police, or soldiers show up and everyone scatters; occasional outbreaks of violence, hangings, rapes, shootings – and the slow unrolling of history.  Often, he uses major international actors; Marcello Mastroianni, Harvey Keitel, Irene Jacob, Bruno Ganz, William Dafoe.

Ulysses’ Gaze (1995)

A giant, disassembled statue of Lenin floats down a Greek (or Romanian?) river to a new home.

 

The Weeping Meadow (2004)

Carcases of slaughtered sheep festoon a tree outside the village big house, to signify the neighbours’ disgust at the occupants’ actions.

 

The Dust of Time (2009)

Prisoners of the gulag climb and descend an open stairway in a snowbound Soviet landscape.

 

 

 

Flame Landscapes

Blackpaint

30/01/18

 

Blackpaint 595 – It’s British – but is it all Queer?

Queer British Art 1861 – 1967

There is a fair bit of great painting in this show, some of it problematic in terms of its queerness.  When you see a Tom of Finland show, like that at the ICA a while back, or Mapplethorpe photos, as in Helsinki, there are no doubts – it’s full- on queerness.  Here, it’s not so clear.  The Hockney “Physique” picture apart, none of the paintings below are queer in the sense of openly celebrating queerness.  Hardly surprising, given the discriminatory laws in force in Britain between those dates – however, what makes the Singer Sargent portrait of Vernon Lee “queer art”?  Or the Laura Knight self-portrait, of her painting a female nude?  Or William Strang’s picture of the woman in the red hat?  The answers, presumably, are that Sargent and Vernon Lee were both queer, as was Vita Sackville-West (the sitter for the Strang portrait) and Knight’s self-portrait was a conscious protest against the art school ban on women artists painting nude women models.

Anyway, the riches on offer include:

• Three beautiful Keith Vaughans in his characteristic blue, cream and brown hues, all figure studies I think, including the one below.  Best in show (Crufts again);
• The Laura Knight self-portrait I mentioned;
• A couple of terrific Patrick Proctors, quite like Hockney – but different;
• Ethel Sands – shades of Harold Gilman, Sickert and Vuillard, I thought;
• A Lord Leighton classical theme that looks like a Bright Young Things fancy dress ball;  fine-boned, handsome youths with lower lips seemingly a-tremble;
• Duncan Grant swimmers and divers.
• There are Cecil Beaton and Angus McBean photographs and posters for cross-dressing music hall acts Vesta Tilley et al.

 

Henry Scott Tuke

 

Vernon Lee (author of “The Virgin of the Seven Daggers”) by Singer Sargent

 

Hockney, of course

 

Keith Vaughan

In addition, there are some interesting oddities, such as Oscar Wilde’s cell door from Reading Gaol and Noel Coward’s dressing gown.  Go and see it; interesting history – not all the art is great, because the queerness is maybe more important here than the quality – but enough is great to make a visit worthwhile.  Still not totally comfortable with the idea of using “queer” out loud, though…

Cataracticus

Blackpaint

 

Still on for another week and several paintings still unsold!

Blackpaint

24/04/17

Blackpaint 586 – Voodoo and Venus in Barcelona and Bloomsbury

MACBA, Barcelona

Museum of Contemporary Art.  Fabulous white Bauhaus-y building, reminiscent of  Helsinki, besieged by surly, hooded skateboarders.  First, “Hard Gelatin” (1977 – 82); politics, pretty much Anarchist/punk/porn/activist, two fingers stuff; some comic called “Buttafera” was the focus of much.  Porn drawings and posters featuring sucking, dismemberment; old photos of protests, “happenings”; video of transvestite Spanish Donna, roaring songs in alternate deep voice and falsetto…

 

Wow – radical.

 

 

Next, science/tech “experiments:  above is Jordi Benito, “Hands transforming ice into water by body heat”; like a hand dance, strangely beautiful (he wrote pretentiously).  Also Beuys – like pieces, producing spunky white froth under a glass dome – and a giant wooden barrel rocket ship by Mireilles.

Rather like Keith Arnatt, I think.  There’s another series of her gradually disappearing into a hole in the ground; even more like Arnatt.

Plenty of other stuff, but the real hit for me was Antoni Miralda, or Miralda Madeinusa, as he styles himself.  His first installation (below) is in a disused chapel next to the museum and is called “Santa Comida” (Holy Food) – series of shrines round the inside of chapel, Yoruba deities, transformed in the Americas to Santoria or Voodoo.  Ogun was the main deity.  Offerings of food – sardines, cod, herrings for the fish god, bay leaves, bananas, canned goods for the earth god; loads of little figurines – one was Oliver Hardy – mostly South American by appearances.

This is all from Miralda’s personal archive; but he is also a forerunner of Jeremy Deller, in that he gets lots of people to take part in, or mount exhibitions, parades, events and then makes videos of it all, and related artworks.  This one dates from 1984-89.

 

Holy Food

In the MACBA building, several more Miralda installations and commemorations:  in “Wheat and Steak” (1981), in Kansas City, he got people to parade with floats and placards of steaks and a three -tier “Tri-Uni-Corn” (below), which was the main float.

 

In “Breadline” (1977), there are videos of the Rangerettes of Kilgore College. Texas, going through their training routines; a long line of dyed bread slices, green, red, yellow, orange (below); “Texas TV Dinner”, a series of disgusting, video images of fast food, franks etc., appearing on screens set in a counter next to groups of condiments.  Also, videos of dyed macaroni “landscapes”…

 

Hail Caesar (Coen Bros, 2016);  Trumbo (Jay Roach, 2015)

Both of these films set in the McCarthy era in Hollywood. the Coen Bros one, features George Clooney in his manic comic mode, as a star kidnapped by a group of Communist screen writers, and is a skit, complete with a Russian submarine and a cowboy hero who I guess is based on Audie Murphy.  A brilliant dance scene, sailors in a bar, worthy of Follow the Fleet, or more closely, On the Town.

Trumbo is a conventional biopic, featuring Bryan Cranston as the left-wing screenwriter who did time for refusing to cooperate with HUAC et al and had to use a front man to submit his scripts, including Roman Holiday.  Heroes: Kirk Douglas, Otto Preminger, both of whom hired Trumbo and credited him; villains: John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, but above all, Hedda Hopper, played here by Helen Mirren.  Good, but weak; Edward G Robinson, who initially stood out against the witch hunt but buckled to pressure in the end and named names.

Sussex Modernism at 2 Temple Place

Stunning wood -pannelled house, built by David Waldorf Astor, watched over by a gaitered officer (of the Temple? Church?), thronged with grey and white heads on Saturday we visited, as might be expected.

A bizarre Venus and Adonis by Duncan Grant (below); just look at that twist and the positioning of the head!  Also by Grant, a beautiful still life with wine bottle and flower.

A life size Christ from the wall of Berwick Church, based, I think, on David Garnett (quite wrong about this – it was either Edward le Bas or poss. Leonard Woolf).  A most impressive table model of the De la Warr Pavilion in Bexhill and the David Jones (below) done at Capel-y-Finn, I believe.  Several Vanessa Bells, but nothing remarkable; Gaudier-Brzeska, Wadsworth and other surrealists and of course, several Eric Gill pieces to raise the aesthetic, if not necessarily the moral tone.

 

Next blog, Picasso in Barsa, Soutine, Swinton and Fiennes in Italy.

Time and Place no.7

Blackpaint

13/2/17

 

 

 

 

 

Blackpaint 508 – To the Finland Station

Amos Andersonin Taide Museo, Helsinki

The only art museum open on a Monday in Helsinki.  The exhibition was based on Work.  A number of OK paintings of tradesmen in a Realist style – I was going to say Socialist Realist, but that’s really anything but Realist, of course.  Blacksmiths, factory hands, supervisors, technicians, seal hunters, even two portraits of a famous conductor (orchestra, not bus) – but above all, log rollers.  A pretty big feature of the Finnish economy, log rolling, by the look of it.

My favourite exhibit was this group of workers, maybe a factory committee meeting, made of wood, each about 9 inches high:

There was also a short film about an anxious young man starting work in a big factory somewhere in the 50s or 60s – a sort of “Look at Life” type thing for those who remember; he keeps getting reassuring smiles from older, experienced hands.  The result is like a sort of gay industrial promo, if there were such a thing.

Didrichsen Art Museum

A 20 minute bus ride from the centre, a Bauhaus-y building on a lake, set in a sculpture garden (Moore, Bernard Meadows), reminiscent of the Louisiana gallery outside Copenhagen, but much smaller.  Pictures by Finns painting from pre WW1, influenced by Fauves and Seurat, Symbolism and Expressionism.  Best were by Enckell, “the Awakening Faun” ( see below, rather like Duncan Grant, I think) – Ollila, “Four Women”, Ruokokoski, “Girl, 1911”, Sallinen, “Mirri” and “Landscape” and Makela, “Bridge Construction”.

Enckell, The Awakening Faun

Additionally, there were paintings by the mysterious AW Finch, a painter and potter whose works showed up in several galleries and museums, but about whom there was no info.  turns out he was Belgian but of British extraction, and settled in Finland, pursuing a career first as painter, then potter, then painter again.  Here’s a Finch from the Didrichsen:

AW Finch

He normally works in short, diagonal strokes. top left to bottom right – unless he’s doing pointillism, of course.

There is also a great collection of Central and South American figures and artefacts, mostly Peruvian and Mexican – examples below:

OK, enough Finland for today-  more next blog.

John Cheever and Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff and Donald Barthelme

I wrote last time, or time before, about “The Swimmer”; both the Cheever story and the great film based on it, featuring Burt Lancaster.  Predictably, the short stories pulled me back in and I’m ploughing through the great 700 odd page brick of the collection again.  Not that it’s in any way a chore – they are brilliant little masterpieces, polished and elegant (but not twee), undercut by humour, tragedy – “The Hartleys”, for instance – and with frequent interjections from the author to remind you that these are works of fiction, after all, and he can take them anywhere he feels like going.

The problem is that I now have to read the different, but equally brilliant Carver stories again – the one about the boys who catch the fish and cut it in half so they can both take it home, or the one about the carpet cleaner salesman that was referenced in “Mad Men”… Then of course, there’s Tobias Wolff – closer to Carver than Cheever, but a voice of his own (why hasn’t he published more lately?)  And Donald Barthelme; I think I caught a whiff of Barthelme’s light mania in one or two of the Cheever stories.

Stalker

As for films, I’m back in the Zone again, with Tarkovsky’s nervous guide throwing his nuts around in a sling, as the water pours down in the tunnel and the great black dog watches, while the Writer disobeys instructions.  Half an hour at a time is the way to watch Tarkovsky.

 

Bloody Wakefield Revisited

 

Spider’s Song Again

Blackpaint

23.08.15

 

Blackpaint 462 – Constable, John and Albert, Turtle Burners’ Best

Alastair Sooke on Constable

Two things surprised me in this programme:  first, the fact that Turner was established as a Royal Academy member before Constable; I’d always thought it was the other way round (I suppose because Turner strikes me as the more “modern” of the two); second, the great enthusiasm for Constable in France.  Delacroix apparently repainted one of his own works after seeing a Constable.  The latter treated this adulation with contempt and steadfastly refused to go to France to promote his work.

Still not convinced by Sooke’s case that Constable was a revolutionary figure in the art world, however.

Programmes on Abstract Art, BBC4

I found the Matthew Collings prog great – an hour and a half on abstract art, what could be wrong? – but inevitably, some omissions.  Nothing, I think, on Lanyon, Frost, Hilton, Blow or any of the other St.Ives painters.  Hoyland was there, but not enough and the fabulous Albert Irvin surely was worth another ten minutes.  I like Collings’ own paintings – they always remind me of Festival of Britain motifs – but they don’t look much fun to produce.

High time Hoyland and Irvin had books on them produced by Tate.

 

 

Hoyland

 Irvin

Virginia Woolf at the National Portrait Gallery

Not that many paintings – lots of photos, diary extracts etc. – but the few that are there are great.  There’s the Duncan Grant portrait of Virginia that looks like a Toulouse Lautrec, the Vanessa Bell portrait of her with the features practically omitted, except for the mouth and the Grant portrait of a Strachey (I think), sprawled along or across a red sofa.  The best to my mind though, is the little Bell portrait of Saxon at the piano; looks like a Gwen John to me.

BP Portrait Exhibition, National Portrait Gallery

The two paintings that I thought stood out at the Turtle Burners’ prize this year were by Richard Twoze and William Kloze – I hope I have spelt them correctly.  I didn’t pick them because the names rhyme; didn’t even notice until later.

Twoze painting of Jean Clark got second prize; the Kloze one, of his wife at home in Thailand, has that thing that Freud was so keen on – everything in picture is given equal attention (almost); the metal lamp, the copper-lit doorway; the rendition of the wife has something of Euan Uglow.

 

Twoze

 

Klose

 

I am in Crete at the moment, but back next week.  Until then, old ones will have to suffice.

 

 

Blackpaint

18.09.14

 

 

Blackpaint 456 – Malevich, Bohemia and Bloomsbury

Among the Bohemians, Virginia Nicholson

Just finished this rambling, but most enjoyable tour of “Bohemia” by Vanessa Bell’s granddaughter.  It suffers from jumping up and down the decades within themes, often without giving dates, but a good episodic read all the same.  I was astonished to read that Dora Carrington, whose appearance and paintings  give one an impression of strength and intelligence, shot herself after the death of Lytton Strachey.  Bohemia was about drink, drugs, sex and all that – but also about free thinking, freedom from convention, the use of the intellect; pity to read of a great woman artist destroying herself over the loss of a companion (Strachey was homosexual).

Nicholson seems to me rather reticent about Eric Gill, given his unconventional home life and the current climate of opinion in the UK about child abuse; since the word “Bohemian” denotes, among other things, unconventional behaviour, I expected to read more about Gill than was there.  She describes Gill’s behaviour as “preposterous”.

The Art of Bloomsbury, Richard Shone

This book was published in conjunction with a Tate exhibition of 2000; I’ve only just got round to reading it.  The painters it deals with are Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry.  I was surprised by the colour, beauty, variety and technique displayed by all three artists,,  having always thought of them as a bit “brown” and boringly British.  Just flicking through, there are works that resemble Lautrec (Grant’s Virginia Woolf), the Scottish Colourists (Fry’s Blythburgh and Studland Bay), William Nicholson (Bell’s Iceland Poppies), Bonnard (Bell’s The Open Door and Grant’s Window, South of France and the Doorway); there are fabulous abstracts by Bell that look like Winifred Nicholson, more by Grant and luscious still lifes by both Bell and Grant, the best of which is Grant’s Omega Paper Flowers on the Mantelpiece.  A lovely book and I’m off to Charleston as soon as poss.

Grant

Bell

Grant

 

Bell

 

Malevich, Tate Modern 

So, enough of all this Bloomsbury and Bohemia stuff – off to TM, where proper theoretical painting is on display.  that is to say, it’s underpinned and driven by theory, a good analysis of which can be found in Boris Groys’ “The Total Art of Stalinism”.

In the first room, there is all sorts, as Malevich casts around for a style – some of it looked to me like German Expressionism, nudes surrounded by heavy black lines; Seurat – style landscapes; little collections of figures with Toulouse Lautrec figures; Munch/Nolde – like paintings; a strange, frog-like “dancer” with huge, clubbed hands and feet.

Next, Larionov/ Goncharova influenced peasants, growing more abstract, peasants with metallic, Leger like bodies; Theatre costumes like later Bauhaus efforts; the famous Black Square.

Next, floating, coloured geometric shapes on white, the Suprematist paintings, seeming to be in the process of flying apart or coming together and, in one or two cases, resembling abstractified figures, despite the fact that Malevich gives one or two ironic “realist” titles when they clearly don’t represent the indicated “real” thing at all.

There is a room of drawings arranged by decade, often showing rough, freehand sketches of the geometric paintings; then, back towards figuration, with highly stylised peasants, metallic, harlequin, clown-like figures that wouldn’t have been nearly realist enough for the regime and finally Social Realist portraits that show the final capitulation of any independence or experimentation.

Malevich died of cancer in 1935, not in the gulag (although he had been imprisoned).  If he’d lived, I’m sure he would have been shot at some stage, despite the SR stuff.

Orlando, book and film

Back to Bloomsbury for a moment; I’ve started Woolf’s book and watched Sally Potter’s film of the same.  There are big differences in the narratives, but they are each great works in their own right.  It’s fascinating to read Woolf’s work in chronological order and see how she changes; this novel is certainly the easiest read yet (not quite Stephen King, but getting there) and the most visual.

The Potter film has strong resemblances to Greenaway’s style, in the use of location and music; the violence and grossness are missing, but it does have Tilda Swinton.

Big Painting

I’m trying to go big by sticking two canvases side by side and painting one image across them.  Results below  – the second image is  the painting as it stands now, but no doubt it will change.  It’s called, for obvious reasons, “Critical Theory – a Guide”.

 

 

 –

First Version

 

 

Current Version

Blackpaint

22.07.14 

Blackpaint 350 – Bomberg, Belle and Munch

Picasso and Britain

Last days at the Tate Britain, so went again.  The Duncan Grants I still like, in spite of everyone else, it seems; especially “Interior at Golden Square”; also, one or two of the Nicholsons, especially the pink one.  The Picassos themselves blow everything else out of the water, of course, for confidence, inventiveness, use of colour… but there are a couple of duff ones (see previous Blackpaint ).

Bomberg at South Bank University

Turns out that only four or five of the drawings and paintings on show at the moment are Bombergs – but this was not a disappointment, as those by his followers  are great.  There is a beautiful charcoal sketch by Edna Mann, of a nude woman stoopimg to pick up something from the floor;  paintings that are very Auerbach in colour and structure by Dennis Creffield;  Cezanne-like bathers heavily outlined in black by Cliff Holden; and a big, dark, swerving, black-outlined head by Dorothy Mead.  Great little exhibition, and more to be shown in October, I was told.

Patrick Keiller at Tate Britain

This “exhibit” comprises an exhibition within an exhibition, based on the “Robinson Institute”, a fictional entity based on a fictional character invented by Keiller.  It is concerned with English landscape (which I got, without reading) and the development of capitalism (which I didn’t).  Along with Keiller’s own photographs, some brilliant, interesting works by Turner, James Ward, Paul Nash, Gursky, James Boswell, John Latham (huge black blot), Fiona Banner (small black blot)…..  I find these fictional conceits increasingly irritating – why not just stick a load of paintings you like together, like Grayson Perry at Bexhill a couple of years ago? – then again, Keiller has used the Robinson thing before, so it’s got the integrity of a previous history.

Edvard Munch at Tate Modern  

This, I have to say, is the worst exhibition I’ve ever seen.  Or, to be fair, it’s a very good exhibition of one of the worst painters I’ve ever seen.  The paintings are in dead colours, crudely painted, many figures cursorily executed with round, turnipy heads.  One “Kiss” looked like a man kissing a Labrador standing on its hind legs.  There is a series of seven or eight “Weeping Woman”s, in which she looks like a pale corpse, going greenish here and there, like something out of “The Shining”.  His wallpaper – lots of claustrophobic interiors – looks as if it’s patterned with dried blood.  Banal, flesh-creeping subject matter:  vampire women, a post-sex (rape?) scene, operating theatres with huge blood stains, a man aiming a rifle at someone through a window..  Lots of photographs, with “ghosts” hovering in them, but too small for me to keep looking at.  It’s crap, but good value – there’s lots of it.  I never did understand why The Scream has resonated with so many people.

Belle de Jour 

The original, Bunuel – Deneuve, of course.  What does the Japanese customer have in his little box?  Why does the coffin rock beneath Severine at the Duke’s?  And did Rebekah Brookes get the idea for the demure, white-collared, black Leverson dress from Belle, rather than the Salem witch trials, as the papers and TV here suggested?

Melancholia

It’s drenched in Tarkovsky, on second viewing; “Hunters in the Snow”, the music, the theme, even (“Nostalgia”)…

Blackpaint

13/07/12

Blackpaint 326 – Proper Painting and Fucking

John Hoyland

Must have missed the death of the above in 2011; one of the most colourful British abstractionists with those fluorescent colours – only Albert Irvin is as bright that I can think of.  I’ve a book of his paintings and prints on cotton duck; they’re blinding, especially the greens and blues.

Lucian Freud

BBC prog on him mentioned two incidents that I find interesting in terms of the sort of bloke he was;  he made his wife, Kitty Garman (Epstein’s daughter) sit facing the wall while he worked; and he ran up £2.6 million debts with the bookies.

William Feaver, one of the pundits on view, kept referring to” proper painting”, meaning figurative painting that attempts to render reality more intensely, and painting “that is any good” being perpetually in a state of transition…  I love that art critic thing of making definitive assertions  that are really contentious. but that sound obvious because of the arrogant certainty with which they are delivered.

Another example – John Richardson, another pundit, used the word “fucking” several times (in its verb function) in that clipped, upper-class, English accent, asserting that, to Freud, painting and “fucking” were somehow the same, Freud approached both activities in the same way – interesting, since he often painted his numerous daughters at all ages, as well as the queen.

The great paintings made an appearance – the Auerbach head, the naked woman with her arm arching over the mass of bed linen, the Leigh Bowery’s, the Big Sue’s, Harry Diamond in the sweater, the Irishmen, the big man’s head, the back garden, the sinks with running taps, the fantastic self portraits…

There was a fascinating bit of film in which Freud demonstrated that insane stare, where he suddenly widened his eyes like an owl – perhaps explaining why he frequently got into fights on his night expeditions.

Picasso and Modern British Art

At the Tate Britain.  Loads of Picassos, crying woman, triangular jug and candle, women of Algiers, Meninas – a few early ones that are Impressionist in style – a race meeting,  flowers – that you would never guess were Picassos.

A couple of real clinkers, in my view – a woman with arms above her head that looked like a parody; her body exploded into large parts and stuck back together at random, but each fragment carefully and sculpturally painted.  Also, a “homely” woman with her features and spectacles distributed randomly, for no reason I could discern – when I saw a photo of this painting in a newspaper, I assumed it was an awkward imitation by an English admirer.

General impression of the Picassos – unbelievable creative energy and inventiveness, constant innovation, no interest in surface texture (when did that start. I wonder?  Fautrier, de Stael, Burri, Tapies, Dubuffet..? thesis there for someone, no doubt already written).

As to the Brits –

The Duncan Grants are decorative and colourful, much better than you’d think from the crits; Wyndham Lewis shows only the most general signs of influence  – I love those grotesque faces and the long, cut-out woman; Henry Moore, yes, definitely copied The Source for Reclining Figure, but in a different medium, so that’s alright somehow; Sutherland didn’t seem to me overly imitative; Ben Nicholson, yes, definitely!  One Nicholson, dark grey with white sratched lines, contained that profile  that Picasso hid in the Three Dancers.  It looked like a Picasso drawing before he opened his paintbox and coloured in.  Bacon; the crucifixion shapes again recalled to me the Three Dancers, and I suppose those bulbous shapes at the Base of the Crucifixion resemble, as Laura Cumming points out, the Dinard Picassos – but not overmuch imitation.  One of the Bacons reminded me strongly of a Tunnard, though.  As for Hockney, his paintings were more of a tribute to P. than imitation or influence – presumably he was included to bring the thing up to date and to chime with his exhibition at the RA, maybe.

Migrations, Tate Britain

Returned to this for a bit of peace after the crowd at the Picasso.  Forgot to mention Gustav Metzger’s little film before – set on the South Bank, Metzger destroys, with acid, a canvas or linen work – actually, not sure if it was painted-  opposite St. Paul’s, which appears regally through the rent.  The growing holes in the linen resemble, first, Fontana slashes, then feathery plumes and laddering that brought Kirchner’s insect women to mind,  then, those amoebic psychedelic light shows at Pink Floyd gigs at the Roundhouse and Middle Earth (reference for the elderly).

Then, the Tissots – I think the Norman Rockwell of his day – those lovely Victorian girls, lounging against the ship rail; you can hear them in your mind… “Yeah, it was really, really nice?  And then we, like, went on to Boujie’s, and it was totally, like, packed out?”

The Mondrian in the show  is not square – the left-hand side is roughly cut and slants slightly to the left in the frame.  How did he let that happen?  I thought he was a Poirot when it came to symmetry.

John Cassavetes

The recent death of Ben Gazzara and the photos of him with Peter Falk and JC reminded me of Johnny Staccato, the New York jazz pianist/private detective played by Cassavetes in the 50’s – and in particular, its great theme music, composed and played by Elmer Bernstein; Staccato’s Theme, backed with the Jazz at Waldo’s,  one of the first 45’s I owned.  Still got it, still play it.

Trying to do some more conventional stuff, and not pulling it off – but trying.

Blackpaint

20/02/12