Blackpaint 678 – Andy, Ed and Death in the Snow

Tate Modern – Andy Warhol

 

Great, clean, single line drawing – wish I could do it too.

 

From the Ten Most Wanted series.

 

Red Riot

 

 

Elvis.  touch of Bollywood in the image, I think.

 

More violent death in the media…

 

Older readers will remember those retouched photos you used to get of murders and murderers in the 30s and 40s in American magazines like True Detective.

 

 

Touch of Rauschenberg here – or maybe Richard Hamilton, more like?

 

Never noticed before that the mauve (purple?) blotches were little Maos as well.  Must be more observant…

 

Great use of colour in these laughing skulls.

 

Don’t know who the woman in this portrait is…

 

…but no problem with these two.

 

Lenin in red, with a touch of ruthlessness around the eyes – surely not…

 

Her expression strangely reminiscent of Lenin’s above.

 

Although this is such an iconic picture, it’s an unusual image of Warhol, who was more often photographed smiling vaguely, or peering thoughtfully at something.

Ed Ruscha

 

Typical Ruscha – the incongruity of the slogan and the image; see also John Baldessari.

 

Love these pipes. straining at the edges of the picture.

 

You can hear Johnny Cash reciting  “Ragged Old Flag”, looking at this.  Or I can, anyway.

 

Started with a typical Ruscha, so ending this bit with an unusual one.  Something Chinese about the image, I think, or maybe Vietnamese – makes me think of peasant revolutions.  Maybe it’s an age thing, all those marches and posters in the 60s and 70s.  I do have a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book still…

 

And This…

What a great photo.  There were actually two photos, both showing resigned commuters forced against the glass – but the other one came out blurred (my picture, not the original, of course).  Sorry to say I didn’t get the artist’s name.

The Victors, dir. Carl Foreman (1963)

Oddly reminiscent of “All Quiet on the Western Front”, the Lewis Milestone classic of 1930.  I think it’s the episodic structure, the scenes with the various civilian women and families, and the general anti -war message.  The most famous scene, of course, is the execution in the snowbound countryside of the American GI, which takes place as Frank Sinatra sings “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” on the soundtrack.  More shocking though, is the arrival of George Peppard at the British hospital where his sergeant is a patient, to find him badly disfigured and not wanting visitors…

The scenes are separated by newsreels and headlines; it’s raining – well, pouring – most of the time in Belgium, France, Germany and especially Britain.  The film is full of stars – Peppard, George Hamilton III (pre – permatan), the great Eli Wallach, Peter Fonda, and is that Robert Mitchum? No, it’s his son.  The women – Melina Mercouri, Elke Sommer, Romy Schneider, Senta Berger and Jeanne Moreau.

The film ends with a knife fight in the ruins of Berlin, between Hamilton’s character and a drunken Russian soldier.  Who plays the Russian?  Albert Finney!

 

 

And so, to my offering; I have actually managed to complete a couple of paintings since last blog.

 

Seated Red

Blackpaint

1/09/20

 

 

 

 

Blackpaint 539 – the Firm of Repin, Serov, Vrubel, Astrup, and Vinyl

Russia and the Arts: the age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky ( National Portrait Gallery)

Lovely show.  I’ve started with Repin, who is the most famous, but I think Serov and Vrubel run him pretty close.

Repin, Turgenev – great hands, aren’t they?

 

Repin, Stasov – surely Michael Gambon in a Russian shirt..

.

Repin, Baroness Hildebrandt – love the red star hat; probably not a revolutionary though…

Serov, Madame Ermolova – Really impressive full-length painting of this theatrical woman in a jet-black dress; I thought Singer Sargent at first, but now I think maybe more like Toulouse-Lautrec in execution.  However, can’t find a picture, so you will have to go see.

Vrubel, Mamontov – Jonathan Jones reckons it’s sort of pre-Cubist, the angles and especially the shirtfront.  I think it looks like a Sickert, or maybe even Ruskin Spear.

 

Serov again, Morozov – reminds me of a Scottish Colourist, Fergusson or Cadell, with those flowers behind.

Nightcrawler (2013), Dan Gilroy

Gyllenhaal’s eyes must surely have been “enhanced”; They looked too big to be real to me.  He reminded me of a meerkat.  Obvious comparisons: Jim Carrey in “Cable Guy” and maybe Robin Williams in “One Hour Photo”.  I’d be interested to know just how far they were pushing it; are there really TV stations in LA that would show footage of murder victims in a private house, filmed before the arrival of the police (even with faces and wounds pixillated)?

Vinyl

I liked the comment about Elvis, singing Polk Salad Annie in Vegas: “He’s singing about lettuce…”.  It’s way by far the best thing on TV at the moment.  The man who played Elvis in the white- suited Vegas era was brilliant.

Art of Scandinavia, BBC4

What happened to the 20th century?  The Denmark episode dealt with LEGO and furniture and the Danes’ supposed love for cosy miniaturism in architecture – no mention of Asger Jorn, Per Kirkeby, CoBrA…

Swedish episode was better;  Zorn, Gan(?) – but then, more furniture and design, model housing for 30’s factory workers…  The only 21st century art mentioned was the graffiti artist who covers everything in black swirls.  More painting in future, please (and sculpture, I suppose).

Nikolai Astrup (Dulwich Picture Gallery

Norwegian painter, died 1928.

My first impression on entering the gallery was green – and brown and blue, but mostly green.  The canvases are nearly all landscapes, or lakescapes, with trees and they are  crowded.  There are blossoms that recall Hockney’s “maggot” hawthorns from his huge show a few years ago; there is a breast-shaped dark mountain that pops up in several pictures.  Where there are people, they are mostly women or girls in long peasant dresses that remind me of Munch’s figures.  In the last room, the green is relieved a little by yellow, in a series of pictures depicting enormous bonfires in the dusk.  His brushwork is somewhat rough and blurry – one of the most effective pictures was of Monet-like blurred trees in twilight with a couple of lanterns glowing in the background.

He also did woodcuts, which show a distinct Japanese influence (and a much lighter green), like the one above.

 

St. Anthony and his Pig

Blackpaint

02.04.16

 

 

Blackpaint 129

Bomberg (again)

Just to demonstrate how wrong your (actually my) assumptions can be, I read on Wikipedia that the first version of his “Sappers at Work” was rejected as a “Futurist abortion” and he came up with a more figurative one, presumably based on the one hanging in the Tate Modern (Blackpaint 128).

Actually, Bomberg is rapidly becoming one of my heroes, for the following reasons:

• I like his paintings.
• His work, hung outside a gallery in Chelsea, frightened the horses that drew the 29 bus.
• He was one of the most “brutally excluded” British artists ever – expelled from the Slade in 1913 for being too avant-garde, unable to get a teaching job at an art school after WW11 – Wikipedia doesn’t explain this, which is odd because his paintings by then were far more conventional, although brilliant.
• He died in poverty.

Guston

Philip Guston was another artist who comes to mind as one who turned from abstraction to figurative painting around 1970.  He was already an established and lionised figure of abstract expressionism and attracted deep hostility when he went figurative, rather like a jazz musician going “modern”, or Dylan going electric in 1966, was it?

Why the change?  Politics seems to be the answer.  with the Vietnam war in full swing, Nixon as president, the recent memory of the Chicago Democratic Convention, Guston felt he could no longer paint paintings about painting.  Hence the change, the cartoon figures, the big boots, KKK hoods, cigarettes, seas of blood, Nixon’s bandaged leg, prick nose, testicle cheeks.  The only thing which stayed similar, it seems to me, was the general “pinkness” of his paintings, pinks, reds and greys being distinctive (but by no means exclusive) in his abstracts.

Blackpaint, Election Day.

OK, that’s it, I’m fed up with art for today – so here in no particular order, my 10 favourite rock records.

• 20 Flight Rock, Eddy Cochrane
• Crazy Legs, Gene Vincent
• Hot Dog Buddy Buddy, Bill Haley
• Bye Bye Baby, Johnny Otis
• Rave On, Buddy Holly
• Whole Lotta Woman, Marvin Rainwater
• That’s Alright Mama, Elvis
• Round and Round, Chuck Berry
• Down the Line, Jerry Lee Lewis
• Midnight Shift, Buddy Holly
• Ready Teddy, Little Richard

Alright, that’s eleven, but mine goes up to eleven.

Listening to all the above,

Blackpaint

From the Socialist Republic of Tooting

08.05.10