Blackpaint 667 – From the Belly of the Beast

British Surrealism at Dulwich Picture Gallery until 17th May

Well, it was to be until 17th May; now, gallery is shut down for the duration of the crisis.  I was surprised by how good or interesting some of these paintings are; like many people, I loved surrealism in my teens and twenties, but sort of grew tired of it of it when I discovered colour, texture and form in paint.  I’m less interested in the stories paintings tell, than in paintings as sensual entities in themselves.  Here, there’s plenty to enjoy in the pictures before you even have to try to understand them.  So, below are some of the pictures that please me as arrangements of paint on canvas, not necessarily as surrealistic experiences:

La Cathedrale Engloutie, Ithell Colquhoun

Colquhoun is the most interesting painter here (apart from Bacon and Freud, who have one painting each in the exhibition).  Reminds me I need to make a dental appointment, if I make it through the pandemic…

 

The Oneiroscopist, Edith Rimmington

Yes, Rimmington does a good surreal bird.  Has it eaten the deep sea diver, or is the helmet its own?  If so, how does it get the helmet on over the beak?  Sorry, getting involved in the narrative…

 

Aftermath, Marion Adnams

I used to have a skull the same as this – fox, I think – that I found in an abandoned Scout hut in 1962 or 63 – no bow, though.  I see there’s barbed wire on the parapet, so I guess it may date from WW2 – the picture, not the skull.

 

Graham Sutherland

Slightly blurred photo, sorry; and that’s my reflection in the glass.  Is it really a surrealist painting or one of Sutherland’s stylised landscapes?  I love the colours.

 

The Old Maids, Leonora Carrington

Elongated women, small heads, crab-like chair, naughty monkey – classic Carrington.  I still mix her up with Dorothea Tanning (style, name, Max Ernst connection) and also with  Leonor Fini…

 

Nocturnal Drama (Fantasy), Merlyn Evans (detail)

Reflection in glass again, I’m afraid.  Such a good painting, though.

 

Guardian of Memories, Eileen Agar

You can get this one on a tea towel at DPG – when it re-opens of course.  Great sharp image and execution – Agar is the other champion here, bigger name than Colquhoun.

 

Francis Bacon

Bacon’s dogs remind me of Bonnard’s cows.  I think I read somewhere that the face of the tree thing is supposed to be Goebbels or Goering…

Some other great stuff, but it’s all on hold now.

 

Dulwich Picture Gallery Collection

Copy of work in Uffizi by Cristofano Allori

Surrealistic handbag?  Fabulous little painting. Judith with head of Holofernes, of course.

Willem de Kooning

Just to illustrate that pretentious nonsense I wrote at the beginning, about paintings that you like not for the “story” but for the paint itself, here are a few from the Master (the Mistress would be Joan Mitchell, naturally).

 

I hardly dare to include my own latest painting to follow this group, but it’s my blog, not de Kooning’s, so here it is, entitled “Lockdown” – not for the content, but for the times:

Lockdown

Blackpaint

17/3/20

 

 

Blackpaint 650 – White Show, Bacon and Sea Star

At the The Edge  of Things, Agnes Martin, Jo Baer and Mary Corse, Pace Gallery until 14th August

This is a very white exhibition, as can be seen from the examples below.  In the words of the booklet, these three painters “paint what we don’t yet know.  They make paintings about how the eye sees, not what it sees – altogether sidestepping the problems of illusion, illustration, even expression.  For them, a painting is not an image that says or shows us something, it’s an object that does something to us.”

Baer’s pictures have a dark blue border round them; some of Martin’s have patterning that resembles tiny bricks and one has faint, wide pastel stripes.  Mary Corse did the one immediately below.

 

 

I’m generally not a fan of minimalism, so not the target audience, perhaps – I should say however that the other visitors to the gallery there at the same time as me were very enthusiastic, as are the comments on Twitter etc. that I’ve read.

 

 

Couplings, Francis Bacon, the Gagosian Grosvenor Hill until Aug 3rd

I’m not sure I fully understand the rationale behind this exhibition – the title and the Bacon quotations cited seem to suggest that the pictures are those that involve more than one person, or entity; as Bacon says, (I paraphrase) once you have two people in a picture, you have a narrative.  One of the paintings, though, is Bacon’s famous picture of Peter Lacey, who is alone.  Who cares, though?  Great show, including some of his best figure studies (the early 50s ones are the best, for my money).

 

Is this an appropriate frame for the contents? Hmm….  Love the bedsheets.

 

Detail of the above.

 

The above picture with admirers.

 

Not keen on this one, of naked figures working on an allotment(?); I include it as an example of later work.

 

 

Bacon’s marching men, apparently unaware of the polar bear lurking on top of the glass cube….

Sorry about the levity – I am a genuine fan of Bacon and thoroughly recommend this show.

 

Sea Star, Sean Scully, the National Gallery until 11th Aug

A fabulous exhibition, free like the Bacon and the white one, based on Scully’s response to Turner’s “Evening Star”, which is also on show.  I’m not sure about the connection – but Scully’s work, as in Venice two years ago, has sections of fabulous slippery, syrupy paint applied with a looseness of brush technique.  The green square in the centre of the painting below, for instance, has a richness of brushmarks that almost makes it a painting within a painting.  I’ll stop now, before I get into Pseuds Corner country.

 

 

Sometimes, he does these inset squares in the larger picture…

 

 

 

 

A couple of details, showing the brushmarks I’m on about.

 

Bermejo, National Gallery

No photos of this, I’m afraid.  He clearly loves doing armour; a pair of soldiers in the resurrection are clad in armour that makes them look like samurai.

 

Loveless, Dir. Andrey Zvyagintsev 2017

Fascinating film.  Bourgeois Moscow couple, marriage collapsing, at each other’s throats, ignoring the suffering of their son.  He goes missing and the film shows the attempts of the voluntary organisation that searches for missing children to find him.  The police can do no more than take details; the actual searching is done by the volunteers.  In this respect, it strangely resembles a public information film – but not too much.  The sulphurous relationship of the parents keeps the focus tight.  There is a great cameo of the boy’s grandmother, a blistering, hate-filled babushka living in a rural cottage, visited by the warring couple and the volunteers, on the off chance that the boy may have fled to her – some hopes!

Some of my efforts to finish, as usual:

 

Judgement

 

Judgement (Detail)

 

Headless 1

 

Headless 2

Blackpaint

23/07/19

 

 

 

 

Blackpaint 588 – Fundamental! Wolfie and Hockers at the Tates

Wolfgang Tillmans, Tate Modern

Huge blown-up photos on the walls, but also desktops full of his “snaps” (and pro-Remain, anti-Brexit propaganda posters/leaflets he presumably produced).  He calls each room an “installation”, the nature of which he expounds in the booklet, to avoid explanations on the walls.  My favourite below:

 

Try to see that right arm and hand as a leg and foot and you get a totally different image…

Additionally, you can see –

A drainpipe and drainhole, with water running down through soggy litter; an amazing starscape over a dark hillside; a male bumhole close-up; a close-up of a vagina which appears to be that of a transsexual, judging by the hairy legs (echo of the famous Courbet picture); several large, beautiful colour field abstracts, red and ochre mainly, recalling Hoyland or more, Diebenkorn’s desert colours combined with his Ocean Park structures; crystalline car headlight; that strange shape of the swimmer picking his foot; enormous, rather touching blow-ups of delicate weeds sprouting in his backyard – and a simple image of a man in a blue T shirt, that is startlingly clear and 3D, when looked back on through the arch, from a short distance – try it.  And, of course, those great ones of pigment threads, slowly floating and whirling in fluid.  Great exhibition; Tillmans can find beauty in strange places – drains, for example.  Not sure about the other apertures.

Hockney, Tate Britain

After the big RA Hockney exhibition of 2012, I was expecting a bit of deja-vu; there was a bit, but I was surprised at how informative and enjoyable the Tate show is.  I’ve been twice, on a Saturday and a Thursday, and both times, the Tate was rammed with white-haired, retired schoolteacher types, along with the tourists and students.  Hockney is definitely a Treasure of Middle England, comparable, I guess, to Alan Bennett in his fanbase.

I reckon there are about ten or twelve different “sections”, some of them being distinct phases in his painting, others different areas of activity; here’s my breakdown of the show:

• The earliest real Hockneys from the early 60s – textured, splashy paint, cartoon boys, areas of raw linen, words and letters (cf.Johns), jokey content – Boys Together, Typhoo Tea, toothpaste, the boys speeding towards Italy (see below).  I can’t get away from seeing a similarity to Bacon in the brushwork, splatters and bare surfaces here, if not the content (although one of the shower ones could be).

Flight to Italy

• Next, the Kitaj-like ones, where Hockney makes well-drawn, naturalistic figures, often alongside flat cartoon characters (see below).  Various palm tree and pyramid pieces, chaps in pants on bed or in shower.

Man in a Museum (You’re in the Wrong Movie)

• Swimming pools, snakey surface reflections, Bigger Splash of course.
• A roomful of drawings, from early “cartoons” through beautifully, sparingly executed portraits, Kitaj, Kasmin etc.
• Raw red USA desert canyons and Yorkshire Dales – hills and winding roads, flattened against invisible glass of the surface, shining with vivid colours, which I thought were a bit much in 2012, but I see from a TV film on Hockney last night are pretty accurate.  That one of hawthorn trees with maggot blossoms and the Van Gogh pink and grey sky..
• A room of beautifully drawn but underwhelming drawings of woodland scenes.
• The static portraits of Ossie Clark, Celia Birtwell, Henry Geldzahler, Hockney’s parents  et al; they recall della Francesca in the respect that the characters appear self-absorbed, or at least, uninvolved with each other.  There is a della Francesca on the wall behind Geldzahler, Baptism of Christ, I think.
• Piercingly psychedelic verandahs, blue with red flowerpots, overlooking fiercely green lawns.  Those flowerpots really cut through.
• A roomful of his composite videos of wood and meadowland in different seasons, taken by a battery of cameras from a moving car.
• Ipad drawings and pictures he has worked up from them.
• The psychedelic woods and landscapes from the 2012 exhibition.

I like the early stuff best, but it’s an impressive body of work, to understate the case.

To finish, a series of quick life drawings done with a brush and black acrylic.  Picasso at Barcelona next time.

 

 

 

 

 

Woman with Fan, 1 – 6

Blackpaint

26/2/17

 

 

 

Blackpaint 584 – Uluru, Falling Space and Ken’s Ceramic Lava

One of mine to kick off –

Little Fire and Sea

Blackpaint

 

Now on to proper artists:

Michael Andrews, Gagosian, W1

A great exhibition of paintings by this lesser-known artist (lesser-known, that is, than his contemporaries such as Bacon, Freud and Auerbach; obviously, all my British readers will know him – you do, don’t you, both of you?).  It covers his whole career, starting with a couple of those eerie group paintings, people lying about singly and in couples, in a garden, staring out at you, some of them, as at a camera, or mingling in a club (the Colony Room, Bacon seated back to viewer, Freud staring out).  Then the balloon pictures, and an arresting picture of a plane about to hit us, above the lights of a city – bit like an Italian Futurist.  Then to Australia and the pink, rounded stone hills of the outback.  Then deerstalking in the Scottish hills.  Portraits in between.

Laughter, Uluru (Ayers Rock) The Cathedral I, 1985

Strangely like a Bacon, the mouth I suppose.

The Thames at Low Tide, 1993-4

His last painting, I think.  Strange angles..

School I, 1977

I love that black to dark blue water.

 

Swimming Pool with Two Girls, 1982

From a photo, surely.

A lot to see; sixty-one pictures in all.  It’s on until March 25th.

Marcus Harvey, Vigo Gallery, W1.

This is the artist who caused the big stir back in 1995 at the Sensations exhibition,  with his portrait of Myra Hindley done in children’s handprints.  Nothing like that in this collection, but some interesting pieces, like below:

Maggie, 2011 – surely not Mrs. Thatcher?

The English Cemetery, 2016 – like Kiefer doing Isle of the Dead, floating in a Richter sea…

 

Richard Wilson, Annely Juda, W1

This is staggering; can’t work out how he did it.  He’s taken whole sections of space within the gallery itself (a stairway, curtains, wall), sculpted the space in wood. and then dropped them – gently – into position as below.  The drawing shows the section he has constructed.  Sorry about my mania for comparisons, but the effect is Louise Nevelson, positioned by Phyllida Barlow.

 

 

 

Ken Price, Hauser and Wirth, W1

Ken Price, Bay Area sculptor (see him in “The Cool School” film about the Ferus Gallery, Walter Hoppe and Irving Blum and their artists, fantastic film);  yes, there are his big breast shaped ceramics, nipples pointing to the roof.  Unbelievably, this whole collection of outlandish pieces are ceramic; several look like molten lava, others like huge gemstones, and there are a pair of high gloss pots, as if to show he can do conventional brilliantly too.

Next door, there is another galleryful of his drawings in colourful inks.  Those ones of the naked women are a little Aubrey Beardsley, a little R. Crumb…

 

 

400 Blows, Truffaut, 1959

I’ve been meaning to buy this DVD for ages.  A school rebel film, developing into a reform school film. it’s the forerunner of several British films.  I reckon Ken Loach saw the games master leading the boys through town at the trot – Brian Glover, those shorts,  in the football match in “Kes”.  I reckon “Scum” too – and “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” at the end.  When the boy pockets the cash he steals from home, he swings his shoulders just like Jean Gabin.

Another one of mine to end with:

Time and Place No 8

Blackpaint

29/1/17

Blackpaint 560 – England’s Great Disaster (England 1, Iceland 2) and some art, of course…

 

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Monkey Man, Blackpaint 2016

National Portrait Gallery – Lucian Freud/Chantal Joffe

A few erstwhile unknown works by Freud, well worth a look; a lovely drawing of a sleeping girl and an unfinished self-portrait, a drawing in paint of another girl, as well as a childhood drawing from a sketchbook.

The Joffe painting, a self-portrait with her daughter, is in the characteristic, elongated Joffe style, the proportions making it appear that they were looking into a convex distorting mirror; (relatively) small heads and feet, bulging tums.  Check Joffe’s feet; the toes are just like Captain Lee’s (he who forgot to put his trousers on – see Blackpaint 510).

Gothic, Ken Russell (1987)

An unholy (!) screaming nightmare, Natasha Richardson as Mary Shelley, at risk from the attentions of Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne), when he’s not attending to her half-sister Claire; several images from paintings:

• Fuseli’s painting “The Nightmare” of a demon squatting on a sleeping woman’s abdomen;

• Bacon’s painting of the Muybridge crippled boy, walking on all fours (Percy Shelley playing the fool on the chateau’s roof);
• Magritte’s bandaged heads and faces in the sex scene with Byron and Claire and the clearly Magrittean breast with eye-nipple.

For me, the abiding images those of Timothy Spall’s (Dr. Polidori’s) decapitated head smiling up out of the basket and the final one of the baby Frankenstein monster at the bottom of the lake.  A noisy mess of a film but unmistakeably Russell, and therefore brilliant.

Incidentally, it can’t be the case that there are many blogs where you can see breasts with eyes and friars emerging from a demon’s bottom (Blackpaint 452).

Colunga, Blackpaint

Just watched England lose 2-1 to Iceland – art no longer seems important.  As Captain Scott said (under even worse circumstances) “I do not think I can write any more”.

Blackpaint

27.06.16

 

 

 

Blackpaint 540 – Bacon, Bela, Berlin and Dental Horror

Russian Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

Went to this again last Wednesday and it was thronged; while I was standing looking at the Vrubel portrait of Mamontov (see below), one of the two women in front of me declared “It’s just like a Francis Bacon!”  This seems to be a common observation to make about anything which isn’t a straightforward “realistic” representation – bit of smudging round the features? “Just like Bacon”; limbs a bit oddly positioned? “He’s doing a Francis Bacon”.

It’s not like Francis Bacon, is it?  Or maybe I’m missing something…

This is like Francis Bacon.

My partner, however, says that I’m just as wrong in comparing, as I did last week,  the Vrubel to Sickert or to Ruskin Spear – she says it’s more like Braque.

Whoever, if anyone, is right, it’s a brilliant exhibition.  A painting I didn’t mention last time is Repin’s Rimsky Korsakov; the hands again and that “fleshy” paper (can’t see it properly below – you need to go to the exhibition).

Repin is like Adolph Menzel, the painter who nearly fills the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin (Blackpaint 473) ; history scenes, portraits, pastorals, scenes from plays, Repin does it all, much more than competently.

Autumn Almanac (DVD), Bela Tarr (1984)

The melancholy Miklos Szekely (tight-lipped, sour featured) is present, on the right in the photo above.  It’s claustrophobic, intense, violent – a man gets a beating (actually, nothing by today’s standards; more like a roughing up) which is filmed from below, through a glass floor, like that film of Pollock painting.  Like other Tarr pictures, notably Damnation, the characters speak to each other in undertones, smiling all the time even when angry, abusive or threatening; in one scene, the two women in the film fight, each smiling into the other’s face the whole time.

It strikes me that, unlike the great Tarr  films based on the books of Krasnahorkai ( Satantango and The Werckmeister Harmonies), and even The Man from London (taken from a Simenon story), Autumn Almanac shows violence and corruption developing out of the situation itself, with no need of an outside catalyst – in this, it resembles Damnation.  In Werckmeister, the cataclysmic violence arrives with the travelling show, the Prince and the whale; in Satantango, the “community”, such as it is, is destroyed by the arrival of the satanic pair, Irimias and Petrina.  In “London”, the agent of disturbance is the case of money which Maloin sees flung into the harbour when the murder takes place.

I’m not absolutely sure about this; you could argue that the schoolmaster in “Almanac” is an outsider and his ejection allows the others to achieve a sort of twisted, corrupt equilibrium.. or maybe not.  It’s Tarr anyway, so worth seeing, and uniquely for him, in colour (pretty dark, though).

Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women, Selected Stories (Picador)

First heard of this book when it was reviewed before Christmas; her stories were compared to those of Raymond Carver and you can see why.  There’s a similar economy (she often dispenses with verbs), a conversational tone and the settings and subject matter are “dirty”, as in Dirty Realism; alcoholism, abortion, dysfunctional families.  The second story, “Dr. H.A.Moynihan”, is a groin-shrivelling tale of manic dentistry that is the most horrific piece of fiction I’ve ever read – that’s if it IS fiction.  The stories appear to be strongly autobiographical.  I think she differs from Carver, in that he is maybe more experimental with point of view.  he writes as a female character in several stories, “Fat”, for example, and successfully, I think.

Anyway, the blurb on the front says her stories “are electric, they buzz and crackle”.  They don’t, but they are a great, if occasionally gruelling, read.

Actually, I’ve just thought of a piece nearly as physically wrenching (literally) as Berlin’s story – Ted Hughes’ poem about de-horning bulls.

I’ve done no new paintings since last time, so here’s an old one for now, appropriate to Berlin and Hughes perhaps;

Close of a Long Day

Blackpaint

9.4.16

 

Blackpaint 502 – What’s the Meaning of this?

Meaning in Abstraction

Jonathan Jones on Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots (Tate Liverpool) in the Guardian and now Laura Cumming in the Observer, also on Pollock, raise the question of meaning in painting.  Cumming writes eloquently about “Pollock’s leaping black lines – apparently describing nothing – as free as a bird to be purely, sheerly visual as they dance across the canvas”; she then spends much of the rest of her article spotting images in the paintings – “a massive figure powers along against a billowing yellow sky”.

No.12, 1952

Jones, earlier in the week, also wrote about the images in Pollock’s work, quoting him: “I choose to veil the image”… and then commenting, “In other words, the image is there – meaning is there – always.  And in his later paintings it breaks out like a sickness.”

The image is there – meaning is there… so no image, no meaning.  How does this square with his recent championing of Bridget Riley and Howard Hodgkin?  She was doing “science” (opticals etc.), he was doing emotion. What about painters like Hoyland?  just decoration, presumably.

It’s irritating to read critics spotting shapes in the painting, even if everybody does – I was seeing tits everywhere in Diebenkorn’s “abstract landscapes” the other week; but worse is the implication that paintings without images from “reality” are meaningless.  The meaning is the picture, the picture is itself.

Neil Stokoe: Paintings from the 60s on. (Redfern Gallery, Cork Street W1)

What a pity that this finishes today (Sunday)!  I only discovered the exhibition (and the painter) on Wednesday, when I went looking for an upcoming William Gear exhibition at the same gallery.

Stokoe is now 80; he was at the Royal College of Art with – get ready – Hockney, Kitaj, Frank Bowling, Allen Jones, Derek Boshier; Pauline Boty was there and Caulfield the following year.  He was a friend of Bacon.  He had a canvas bought by the Arts Council in 1970 after his first exhibition and then – not very much for 30- odd years.  He went into teaching at Wimbledon, but carried on painting.

The astonishing thing is the size of the paintings he was producing – and stacking against the wall, presumably.  They are massive – “Man and Woman in Room with Spiral Staircase” (1970) is 214 x 214 cms and the others are around that size.

 

The colours are pinks, bright blues, acid yellows sometimes set in dark surroundings, as above; in one or two, the face is “Bacon-ised” but I think the settings show more of the influence of the older painter – the spiral staircases, somehow (a recurring feature in Stokoe’s work; I count seven in the catalogue) and in “Figure with Black Couch” (1968), the couch itself provides an arena very like the rails and circles Bacon used.  Something else that occurred to me is the resemblance to Joanna Hogg’s last film, “Exhibition”.  It’s not just the spiral staircase thing, but the colours as well – that acid, lurid, neon, ice cream palette.

Anyway, I guess it’s finished now, so look him up online – there’s a great photo of him from “The Tatler”, which covered the private view of his earlier exhibition at the Piper Gallery.

All is Lost (JC Chandor)

Got this on DVD, having missed the release.  Redford is pretty good for 79, although I noticed there were a couple of stunt doubles in the credits; I’m sure that was him up the mast though.  Classic American lean, hard, nameless hero against Big Nature, not giving up, fighting on to the bitter end.  Facially, he seemed at times to be morphing into Burt Lancaster.  Great shots, particularly those of the life raft from below, in tandem on the surface with the moon’s reflection.  I wonder how many, like me,  were expecting the oceanic white tips to show up again at the end (see previous Blackpaint on “Gravity”).  Great film; awful, portentous score.

Les Enfants Terribles, Cocteau

I’ve been re-reading this because it’s thin; I was surprised to find how much it reminded me of MacEwan’s “Cement Garden” – or the other way round, I suppose.  No doubt I’m about 45 years late in making that observation.

Hepworth at Tate Britain

Had to put these torsos in – there are three in a case together, but I can’t remember who did the third; Skeaping, I think.

Hepworth torso

Gaudier Brzeska torso

By the way, if you want to buy a Barbara Hepworth style duffle jacket at the Tate, you can do so for £400+; a sculpting shirt will set you back £300 odd.  Bargains, I think you’ll agree.

Red and Blue on Ochre – NB It’s without meaning…

Blackpaint

05.07.15

 

 

 

 

Blackpaint 437 – Platypus, Nest Eggs, Algerians, Burmese Days

Brett Whiteley

I’ve been looking at this artist’s work again, and I must say I love the way he draws – sometimes!  he has a bold, clean line when he wants, and it mixes with areas of tangled line that have been erased and sometimes picked out with ink or pencil.  He’ll elongate and distort as the fancy takes him, like a cartoonist, Scarfe maybe.

A lot of his work is in dubious taste (I don’t mean porny, that’s fine as far as I’m concerned); for instance, the Christie drawings and paintings, based on the 10 Rillington Place murders, that he actually mixed with zoo drawings, for example “a Cheetah at Ten Rillington Place” – good painting, though.

I love some of his Lavender Bay verandah-scapes and the series of landscapes he did with an “S” shaped river included.  he’s also notable for the number of different objects he stuck on his canvases; birds’ eggs (often in nests), birds, his own ginger hair on a self-portrait, coins, a brain, a duck-billed platypus (stuffed)…..

The boxing and cricket paintings reminded me of Francis Bacon, as did the Zoo paintings.

The Brits Who Built the Modern World (Rogers, Foster, Shuttleworth etc.) BBC4

TV progs about these; thought some of their stuff was brilliant, for example, the Pompidou Centre, for which they claimed there wasn’t even an overall drawing existing when they excavated the vast hole in the middle of Paris for the building – yeah, hippy architects, cool…  They, well, Rogers anyway, claim to have been lefties in the 60’s, building workers’ recreation projects and the like.  Now, however, they do prestige airports and such for the Chinese, which is much better in many ways, because they carry long-term projects through, being a dictatorship.  Over here, you have to worry about democracy; governments, and hence plans changing, unions being a pain, people refusing to move….  The Chinese can guarantee you a cleared site for your shiny project, no problem.  And they’re communists, Chinese gov. that is, so it’s all in the Peoples’ interest.

Good Men (Ismael Ferroukhi)

Great film (2011) set in WW2 Paris, concerning Algerians.  It stars Tahoor Rahim, the young gangster in Audiard’s “A Prophet”, doing a similar turn; he’s a black marketeer and informer, naive, poorly educated, amoral (to start with), ducking and weaving, an eye to the main chance; slowly, he acquires a conscience and a loyalty to his compatriots.  There’s something of Pontecorvo’s “Battle for Algiers” to it – I suppose it’s the similarity of Rahim’s character to that of Ali la Pointe, and their “journey” towards activism.

The music in the film is staggering; I had the volume low on the the first song and couldn’t hear the words – it sounded like a ballad done by the Watersons or Martin Carthy.

Burmese Days

Just finished the Orwell book and of course, now I’m going to have to read the lot again – Clergyman’s Daughter next.  I thought it a much cruder portrayal than Passage to India, but of course, Orwell was an officer in the Burmese police while Forster was a visitor to India, so maybe Orwell’s first-hand knowledge of the Burmese and the ex-pats was superior.  I thought the characters of Verrall, and Elizabeth were beautifully drawn.  From reading the Crick biography, it appears that the incident in which Ellis attacks the students with his stick might have been suggested by a similar incident in which Orwell, or Blair, himself laid into a Burmese youth at a railway station.

RK Back – An old one, I’m afraid.

Blackpaint

07.03.14

Blackpaint 401 – Manhugging at the Fair; Annoying in Chechnya

Lowry at Tate Britain

I think he’s more important as a social historian than as a painter; the old Mitchell and Kenyon films which play in this exhibition show that his particular vision was spot on.  No-one else was covering this sort of industrial, municipal vista so consistently.

As I said in last blog, I think there’s something of Brueghel in there and not just the small figures and the white background.  B documented the lives of his peasants and Lowry  is doing the same for the people of his northern towns, to an extent; the Fever Van, the Funeral, Going to and Coming From Work, the Fair at Daisy Nook (twice, at least).  His figures are less solid than B’s, caricatures really, but he does give them individual details, even if they come out looking the same.

Several characters recur; a pair of drunks (?) “man-hugging”, kids, and those two dogs – probably more that I didn’t notice.  None of the figures seem to cast a shadow – indeed, they look somehow separate, even when they overlap, as if collaged.

No dogs in this one.

When you see the paintings surrounding you, their filmic quality is obvious; you can easily imagine the figures coming to life and swarming through the factory gates towards the smoking chimneys.  I thought of that film of snow-covered Nevsky Prospect and the people  scattering under fire during the 1905 revolution.  It’s on the cover of the paperback of Trotsky’s “History of the Russian Revolution”.

My favourite painting is uncharacteristic and one of the first in the exhibition – it’s the little brick terraced house with the flowers in the window.  Look closely at it- it’s beautifully painted, especially the brickwork.

Another interesting and uncharacteristic painting was a Welsh scene, I think called “Bargoed”; somehow, the perspectives are more conventional (his townscapes often look like two or three different photographs cut up and collaged together and the diminishing size of the figures as they recede is often “wrong”) and the whole picture has a more “muscular” feel – not better than the townscapes, but much more conventional.

Quick visit to our favourite room, the one with Bigger Splash and the red Caro – I looked closely at the Bacon triptych and was interested to notice how thin the paint was – the weave of the canvas fabric was clearly visible.  His own remarks about the role of accident and chance in a painting and the common (mis)conception that he painted with a sort of vigorous abandon had led me to believe that the paint would be applied more thickly.

The Tony Cragg “Stack” – how did they install it without its falling to pieces?  It’s surely not stuck together and yet there is no way it could be raised – unless it was on a palette that was somehow slipped out from under it when it was in place…

Aleksandra, Sokurov

How irritating Sokurov’s characters can be.  This is the film about the grandmother who visits her army officer grandson when he is on active service in Chechnya.  She goes around being provocative, as if the presence of a matriarchal figure, overweight and with  bad legs, should be treated as completely normal by the gormless boy soldiers.  They have to help her out and keep her safe.  She meets some Chechnyan counterparts and treats them, and a young Chechnyan assigned as her guide, to a string of platitudes that, I’m sure, would have gone down really well with the population during Russia’s war on the Chechen “rebels”.

I was reminded of the diplomat in Russian Ark; he is also an irritating figure, pushy, inquisitive and  annoying to everyone in the film.  Unlike Alexandra, of course, he (the character, that is) is not Russian, but French or Swiss.  And then there is the Mephistopheles character in Faust – but its right for him to be annoying, I suppose.

Salter, “Light Years”

There’s a great scene in this, where Viri, the central male character, is at a party, getting drunk – except that you don’t know he’s plastered, until he insists on doing a costumed imitation of Maurice Chevalier, unbidden, before the guests, forgets and repeats lines, then passes out in the maid’s bedroom as the others go in to dinner.  It’s a trick that Richard Yates also uses, I think in “Easter Parade”, where the male lead instigates a punching contest with a younger character who is annoying him by being younger and having opinions…

Imagine, Vivian Meier

BBC programme on the staggering work of “amateur” photographer and professional nanny Meier, who printed only a tiny proportion of her 100, 000+ negatives and kept the rest in storage, to be sold off after her death.  She seemed to have taken pictures in just about any style, all good, many stunning.  Joel Meyerowitz made a good point about her portraits, which were often of street people; he said that using a Rolleiflex, which you looked down at while you pointed it at the subject from your midriff, meant that you didn’t have to confront people by raising the camera to your face and looking at them directly.  Maybe that helped – whatever the reason, great pictures were the result.

Poor Tom – an old one, but I like it…

Blackpaint

4.07.13

Blackpaint 319 – The Slipping Glimpser

De Kooning

I gave myself the Thames and Hudson Retrospective of DK for Christmas.  It seems to me that you need a label different from Abstract Expressionism to fit him – a third part of his work seems to me to be figures, another third landscape in some way and only maybe a third abstract.  Proportions probably wrong, but you get my drift, no doubt.  I was interested to read that he called himself a “slipping glimpser” – nice phrase, which I take to mean he tried to capture some fleeting moment, or movement, or impression that he received on the corner of the eye or maybe was gone before he could even identify it, like catching hold of a dream.  I’m not sure this would make any sense in the context of abst ract painting – but it certainly does with figurative.  Trying to think of other painters who do that, and Bacon and Auerbach come to mind. 

Sometimes it’s hard to describe or pin down painters’ techniques (or tricks – or is that the same thing?)   I remember in the Diebenkorn book, Jane Livingston talks about Dieb.’s subversion of his own graphic skills, to draw intentionally awkwardly, “even clumsily”, to achieve the effect he wanted.  I think that she means the achievement of a rich surface by means of  smeared or broken lines, reworkings with “ghost” marks left in, clotted, grooved or scraped areas.. or maybe she is referring to his figurative paintings, his drawing style. 

The Artist

Saw this last week, and was unable to understand the universal acclaim.  I found the jaunty music and silent movie cliche really irritating at first, but as the story deepened and the charm of the two stars took hold, I enjoyed it more.  Nevertheless, an hour after seeing it, it was fading from my mind.  The French do pastiche very well, though.  I used to go to the Django Reinhart Gypsy Jazz festival at Samois every year, and whatever type of jazz was being performed – blues, jug band, Glenn Miller, bebop – a French ensemble was there to do it perfectly.

Bloomberg New Contemporaries at the ICA

Website tells me this is now finished, but I was intrigued by the relatively few paintings and sculptures on show.  There was one that resembled a Frank Stella; dreamcatcher shape, smooth surfaces, straight lines, airbrushed – “cherry” as the Cool School would have called it; another, the opposite, roughly painted, crude colouring, called “Garden ghosts” I think; another composed of long green and brown and yellow(?) streaks, like an abstraction of a tropical tree, a bit Richter or Irvin maybe.  What occurred to me was that, despite their differences, they shared with the smaller sculptures the advantage of being easily saleable, transportable and hangable;  Ideal commodities, that is to say.  How the hell do you sell a shallow flight of stairs, leading to a narrow window, which lights up every few minutes? 

The Mystery of Appearance, Haunch of Venison, Bond Street

Free exhibition of English painters of 60s on – Auerbach, Freud, Bacon, Kossoff, Hockney et al.  Three beautiful Auerbachs, two of Primrose Hill, but the best a very small picture of a prone male(?) figure lying face down, it appears.  The background is dark grey or brown, with a raised central square panel, and the figure is picked out in loops or petals of white, green and blue-maybe yellow too-paint.  Then, there is a large Andrews, a reach of the Thames or some such that has a tract of mud and shifting sand that recalls the surface of the early Sandra Blow pictures.  Another Andrews is a large reception at Norwich Castle, showing Frank Thistlethwaite, the VC of University of East Anglia when I was there.  I recognised the painting – I think it hung somewhere at UEA, the Union maybe.  What I didn’t know was that the blobby nature of the faces wasn’t just bad brushwork, but a comment on the old Victorian- style VIP painting. Like Diebenkorn, intentionally clumsy.

Blackpaint

16.01.12