Anselm Kiefer Exhibition at Royal Academy

I really "get" this artist.  Some of his ideas about the cosmos and nature, life, death and renewal, chime with my own.  The scale of his work is breath-taking, quite literally.  One of the features of his work is its unpretentious honesty.  It is always seeking to explore elemental truths about the basic "stuff" of life and how it resonates within a vast spectrum of human history, legend, experience, yearnings and tragedies.  It somehow opens up the core of things to the spectator, and that is his strength.  Technically, the work is quite beautiful particularly some of his later work produced for the exhibition.  The texture helps to explore depth of meaning, and the choice of the materials  and mediums is exciting and tactile.

I left the gallery having gained an insight into full reach of his ideas, an infinite questioning of what is.  There is mention of a couple of things in the catalogue of Kiefer's work that touched me, in particular a quote about the child being able to put her hand over the viper's den, which was a quote from Revelations after the new heaven and earth had been formed, following the destruction of the old heaven and earth.  It echoes the optimism that is sought in Kiefer's work and alludes to the tragedy of his own time and country after the terrible events of the last war.  The cleansing that he pursues not just for himself but for his country is linked to this idea.   On the infinite scale of the universe the other quote was the one that says that "in the beginning is the end and in the end is the beginning"¹. There is something remarkably optimistic and profound about this statement too. It is symbolic of the Ouroboros, which is a symbol of the Alchemist, one of Kiefer's main pre-occupations.
The symbol denotes wholeness and infinity, as well as the idea of something constantly recreating itself, in a cyclical way. Carl Jung apparently interpreted the Ouroboros as an archetypal significance to the human psyche, representing the "dawn state" of mankind as well as the individual child. All of these ideas are reflected in Kiefer's work.

Kiefer himself says "When I use objects and substances such as straw and lead I distil from their spirit...I discover the spirit that is within these substances.  I upheave it and display it"².
I think this is exactly what Kiefer does, and for this reason it is possible to re-visit his work and sense different things because his paintings work on so many different levels to reveal that "spirit".  It is interestingthat he uses the word "spirit" because his work echoes earlier Successionist painters who fell into the Symbolist style.  His subject matter is dark and esoteric, and he paints woodlands invoking ancient myth and legend.

I feel inspired to grapple with some of the techniques that Kiefer uses to express my own work, but realize I could never achieve the same poignant resolve.







Reference: Ansem Kiefer  by Kathleen Soriano, Christian Weikop and Richard Davey,  published by Royal Academy of Arts on the occasion of the exhibition Anselm Keifer, 27 September - 14 December 2014
¹ p49, Chapter Title of the above catalogue
² p. 21 of the above catalogue.

Sainsbury Centre, Norwich - Art and East Anglia

The exhibition was a diverse collection of exhibits and objects with links, sometimes a bit tenuous, to East Anglia. There were sculptures ranging from Elizabeth Frink to ancient Romano-British, gold branks and bracelets from antiquity, silver gilt, the Concort's throne (it's link was through Houghton Hall where it is normally housed), beautiful Fabergé animals.

The exhibition was for me, very successful and included a number of disperate artists, ranging from Anselm Keifer, Mary Newcome, John Constable, Ivor Hitchens, Paul Nash, Colin Self, Cedric Morris, L S Lowrie, John Piper, Fabergé, Stubbs and Claude Lorraine, amongst many others.

The Centre also houses a permanent exhibition which included works by Francis Bacon and the wonderful sculpture of a running man by Boccioni.  The latter for me was the highlight of the day as it was unexpected, yet so familiar to me from illustrations.  It was a moment similar to the one I had in Russia when, in the Pushkin Museum I rounded a corner to be surprised by Degas' Blue Ballerinas, it was so breathtaking.

It was also a delight to see the Mary Newcomb works, The Apple pickers' feast, and Apple pickers going home. They were small pieces but so identifiable as her style.  I believe she worked canvas backgrounds initially storing them ready for use.  It highlights for me the importance of working backgrounds.

There was also work by Venessa Bell using distemper on paper mounted on to canvas, a technique apparently used by Thomas Gainsborough except that he would have used oil as a medium, not distemper.  Another of her works was printed on linen, and this enabled the image to sink into the linen.  A technique that I want to try to emulate using Silk Screen Printing in the same way that Rauschenburg printed his canvas.  This too has the effect of the actual canvas containing the image rather than it being applied on top.

A number of John Piper pieces adorned the walls, which I was pleased to see as I admire his work and feel he is very under-rated, not only for his paintings but for his stained glass too.

The Fabergé pieces was lent by Her Majesty the Queen, presumably from the Sandringham collection, and I particularly liked the Mouse with its delicately set tail in  exquisite small diamonds.

John Constable's Landscape with a double rainbow was on dispay and one oil on paper Study of a cart and horses with carter and dog, which was  sketchy in style and therefore free and more spontaneous.  There were also a number watercolours by John Sell Cotman including Storm on Yarmouth Beach.

A beautiful Keith Vaughan gouache was on display with its subtle colours and interesting composition.  I don't know much about this artist but will certainly look him up.  Likewise there was work by Martin Bloch, whose subtle palette I am now reading more about.

Altogether an inspiring exhbition which could easily be seen for a second time to discover other delights.

Facing the Modern Exhibition - National Gallery

The interest in this exhibition for me was to see portraits by Gustave Klimt and Egon Scheile, although the thrust of the exhibition was to explore portraiture in the light of the historic background of the Austro-Hungarian empire, focusing on Vienna.  Through the portraits it is possible to gauge the impact of social economic changes during the period up to the First World War, when ideologies were see-sawing, from relative equality and liberalism in the late 1800s to the collapse of the Empire after the First World War, when Makart was producing traditional portraiture.

The fortunes of new immigrants led to the desire for family portraits.  These were initially painted in the traditional style.  As tensions started to display themselves with the move away from modern multi-culturalism, families were confined to their homes and the portraits of the time displayed some of those tensions, particularly through the portraits of artists like Egon Schiele.  Some artists used themselves, their family and friends as models in order to explore new ways of painting.

There is a typical 'Victorian' macabre interest in death and deathbed portraiture which coincided with the increasing pessimism felt by dispossessed. At this period the mood was echoed by the loss of Klimt and Schiele, the latter died as a consequence of the worldwide Spanish 'Flu epidemic. Some of the work by artists was therefore unfinished or abandoned, suggesting the failure of the Empire.  Nonetheless, the innovative art that was explored at the time sets a regenerative tone to the historic context.

The work of Schiele, for me stood out and I was impressed by the beauty of the subtle colour and  bold brushwork.  Klimt had produced two in memorium paintings of a young girl, the first was rejected by the family who commissioned a second which depicts the girl as living and smiling.  The original remained more moving though less colourful.  It was also interesting to see a Klimt worked in a very traditional David/Ingres style.

The Kokoshka portraits displayed the style that would eventually mark him out as an Expressionist painter reminiscent of The Tempest.

HERMITAGE MUSEUM, St Petersburg

 Visit, September 2012

  

I was lucky enough to visit the above for a second time during September 2012, my first visit was in 1993.  Anyone who has been there will know that tour groups are strictly controlled.  However, I was able to explain to the guide that I had visited the Hermitage before and really only wanted to see the paintings and that I knew where the gallery was.  She very kindly permitted me to leave the group.  When I arrived in the gallery it was completely empty of visitors so I was able to view and photograph some 38 of the exhibits.

One of the paintings which I had seen illustrated many times was really exciting in it’s colour.  It was Winter Landscape by Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) painted in 1909.  The vividness of the colour made it look almost luminescent.  It seemed small, though measurements are given as 75.5 x 97.5 (29” x 38”)  This would have been a painting of snow yet the colours are vivid and there is virtually no white at all.  Blues, yellows, pinks and greens dominate the canvas.  It is interesting to see the beginnings of abstraction in the work.  The canvas is almost divided vertically into thirds within which areas one can almost see individual compositions.  These are divided again, on the right, by half horizontally and on the left almost into one third and two thirds.  The top left “square” again almost forms a picture in itself and becomes quite abstract.  A road with trees in the centre “third” is virtually the only element of perspective, most other areas are rendered flat. (you may need to paste the links into your browser)

 http://www.wassilykandinsky.net/ then search for Winter Landscape

   

Another work which indicates early signs of abstraction is The Luxembourg Gardens (2901) by Henri Matisse (1869-1954) 59.5 x 81.5cm (23” x 32”)

http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/fcgi-bin/db2www/quickSearch.mac/gallery?selLang=English&tmCond=Luxembourg+Gardens&go.x=12&go.y=10

Like the Kandinsky, there is a road leading into the picture, which again is more or less the only element of perspective in the picture.  The trees and shrubs are rendered fairly flat and the composition is almost abstract particularly on the right hand side.  Patches of colour are occasionally outlined but the whole composition is reliant on colour and colour relationships which are conceived in terms of contrasts.  The green on the right is contrasted with the red on the left.  The centre is a mixture of yellow/ blue, orange and purple.  The related purple/red of the overhanging branch in the middle ties everything together, and the colour is used sparingly in other parts of the painting and achieves the same stabilizing effect.  Colours are used almost arbitrarily in an abstract way to produce a design or composition that pleases the eye.  Thinking back to my research into colour and Edith Anderson Feisner’s book on Colour, the proportions used by Matisse are more or less equivalent, i.e. Yellow 4, Blue 9; Purple 8 Orange 3; Red 6, Green 6.  The tonal relationships are almost inverse to what one would expect with the distance being darker than the foreground, which eliminates perspective, as indeed abstraction does.  The objects become shapes on which to drape colour, not realist representations.

 I felt like a child in a sweet shop on the occasion of my visit and it was a sheer delight to view the gallery unhindered by other spectators.

 

Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter

I went to the Panorama Exhibition in November 2011 held at the Tate Modern.  Whilst Richter’s actual work is breathtaking, trying to make sense of its raison d’être, particularly when reading through some of the high flown oratory of some of the art world’s cognescenti, is difficult.  In doing so I am concentrating on the grey paintings, photograph paintings and abstracts, in an attempt to satisfy my own curiosity and understanding of this remarkable artist, and to try to unravel the ambivalence of his work.

In 1932 Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in what was then East Germany. Inevitably therefore Richter grew up at a time of great conflagration. Indeed although the family moved from Dresden in 1935 before the Second World War some of his family remained.  Five years after the destructive air raids of 1945 Richter returned to the devastated City, which had been almost completely obliterated by the bombardment.  Richter became a member of the Hitler Youth. “I was impressed by the idea of soldiers of militarism, maybe Hitler, that was impressive” nonetheless he goes on to say that he was not sporty and didn’t like fighting games; he knew he was better than they were. One can identify with the “boyish” thoughts of the adolescent Richter.  Richter’s father was imprisoned by the Americans and was released in 1946, but his teaching post, as an ex-Nazi, was no longer available to him.

In 1948 Richter left home and read Friedrich Nietzsche, one of his mother’s favourite philosophers.  She had been influential on her son and was well read. By the age of 16 or 17 had rejected the idea of a God despite his Christian upbringing.

I feel that this brief glimpse into Richter’s early life gives us clues as to how and why he may have arrived at his style of painting, which he himself would say is “style-less”.  “I like everything that has no style, definition, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings”

In 1955 the first Documenta exhibition introduced Richter to avant garde pre-war artistic movements, Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Orphism, and to some contemporary post-war artists. Surrealism and Dadaism had very limited exposure.  The second Documenta exhibition of 1959 focused on American Abstract Expressionists, Colour Field painters including Robert Rauschenberg, Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman who became one of Richter’s favourite artists and may have been influenced by the overall field painting style.

Despite the impact of the Documenta exhibition it was two years later in 1961 before he and his wife, seized an opportunity that presented itself of moving to West Germany.

At that time interest in John Cage, the composer, sparked the reappearance of Marcel Duchamp on the art scene who subsequently travelled to Europe including Germany and influenced the younger generation of artists interested in Pop Nouveaux Realism. The Dadaist early nihilistic, anti-art legacy had allegedly influenced Duchamp not to paint since the 1920s.  It was 1965 in Krefeld when Duchamp’s exhibited in Germany, his work having been excluded from both of the previous Documenta Exhibitions.

Richter knew nothing of Duchamp and Dada when he arrived in West Germany but it was an exciting environment that he had discovered, and he felt he had to start from scratch with his art, if he was to find a “third way” between capitalism and socialism, between tradition and the avant-garde. Duchamp’s Nude descending a staircase influenced Richter’s painting of Ema.

          

Marcel Duchamp                                                                                                 Gerhard Richter, Ema

Nude Descending Staircase                                                                               © Bridgeman Library

© Bridgeman Library

At the Düsseldorf Academy he made work with cardboard and  impasto paint, and was influenced by Fontana’s canvases.  He painted “like crazy” and has some success but eventually he felt nothing was worthwhile and burned everything in the courtyard.  “…and then I began.   It was wonderful to make something then destroy it, I was doing something and I felt free”.

He went on to say that ‘Informel’ art had influenced most of his work …”the ‘Informel’ is the opposite of the constructional quality of classicism – the ace of kings, of clearly formed hierarchies”  Therefore although this may not have been psychologically a sympathetic approach, nonetheless he took what Abstract Expressionism revealed to him about all-over paint quality and gestural marks producing incidents or accidents, so that no particular area of the painting appeared more important than any other.

Richter’s first ‘photograph picture’ came about whilst painting an ‘Informel’ picture in gloss influenced by Winfried Gaul.  By chance he had a picture of Brigitte Bardot and he painted it into the picture in shades of grey.  He was fed up with painting at that particular time and felt “painting from a photograph was the most moronic… thing anyone could do”

http://www.gerhard-richter.com/art/search/detail.php?6367

The Party, painted in 1963 is a painting taken from a photograph, painted mainly in grey but it has the influence possibly of Fontana’s slashed canvas, which in this case has been stitched with red and overpainted in a macabre way. It is presumably meant to be satirical.  The image was taken from Richter’s “Atlas” which houses his own photographs as well as many images from the media. This for me shows the influence of Dada and the nihilist thoughts of Nietzsche.  It seems to pre-cursor the idea of death (and with it destruction), which is prevalent in Richter’s work, indeed is integral to his painting method.  The Coffin Bearers was painted at about the same time and shows the respectful as well as the gauche at a funeral service, the accidental moment.

http://www.gerhard-richter.com/art/search/detail.php?4954

The Table, although not the first of its type, represents the future facture of Richter’s working method, from the overpainted photographs right through to his “unpainted” abstracts.  It is similar to the transfer prints he had seen of Rauschenberg’s several years before.  The table although appearing to be  representational is wiped out by a grey expressionist swirl of destructive paint, obliterating part of the image below.  The simulacrum of a table remains, the painting is valid and homogenous, and the technique thereby established.  Thus begins the destruction of reality which brings about a picture with a different reality.  It also simultaneously evinces the idea of a “third way” somewhere between classicism and the avant garde, and for me has reverberations of the destruction of Dresden the loss of religious belief and the confrontation and eventual abnegation of memories of Richter’s early life, associated with the Third Reich, which as a youth had made him feel slightly ambivalent and it is no surprise that Richter rejected all ideologies after that.

Sigmar Polke had become a friend at this time and we can also see some of the influence of his style in Richter’s later work, particularly from Lovers II painted in 1965 by Polke, where he uses similar overpainting that Richter would later adopt.

Growing out of the then extinct Dadaist movement, German Pop art developed and Richter and his friend Polke saw Lichtenstein’s paintings in a gallery in Paris and were inspired by the anti-painterliness of his style.  Richter and Polke, aware of contributions to the movement by painters such as Andy Warhol and Richard Hamilton, in the US and the UK, developed their own individual ways forward.

Eventually photo-realism appeared with artists like Malcolm Morley. However, Richter distanced himself from this idiom because he wanted to explore the reality of the photograph itself rather than reproducing it, so one might say that he interprets it.  Richter used the projector to project photographs.  “By tracing with the aid of a projector you can by-pass this elaborate process of apprehension.  You no longer apprehend to see and make (without design) what you have not apprehended.  When you do not know what you are making you do not know either what to alter or distort.” 

The process adopted by Richter is almost autonomous and by eliminating subject matter there is no need to enhance or change things.  The object is seen as an abstract fusion of shades of grey.  This enabled him to impersonalize the images in the words of John Cage to embrace randomness, to represent everything without saying anything, thereby becoming dis-engaged giving freedom from self. The fact that he brings about a different perception suggests that he did not dis-engage himself entirely, and I am thinking of the Jacqueline Kennedy photograph.  Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing”  recalls the quote: “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it”. Richter himself quotes this saying as it epitomizes what he was trying to achieve with his photograph paintings, but it may be that he used this as a deflection.  The word “nothing” conjures J-P Sartre’s Being and Nothingness a treatise which elucidates the dilemma confronting man about his own mortality as well as the decay of things over time reducing them to nothing.  We may get an idea of ‘nothingness’ but it is self evident that we cannot apprehend it - it becomes a tautology.  To that extent the atheist may need to fill the void with something ‘other’, and I wonder if Richter’s work explores, maybe subconsciously, a transcendental approach in an attempt to overcome this insoluble predicament.  Sartre says ‘man is condemned to be free.’ And in a sense condemned to nothingness.  Although there is no mention as far as I am aware of Richter reading Sartre, it is unlikely that he would not have known his ideas.

It is interesting here to mention what Roland Barthes, the philosopher, has to say about photography.  He says life is stopped with the click of the shutter.  Suggesting that in that moment something is rendered in the past and becomes a recollection (when printed) implying ultimate death, It is true that images freeze a moment which can be recalled at a later time as a souvenir of the person or place in time. The theme of death is redolent in Richter’s work.

Barthes refers to two states within the photo, studium (overall scope of picture) and punctum (the unique detail that captures the imagination).  This is something that Richter does with his paintings and confirms that he is not endeavouring to paint a photograph but using painting as a means to photography.  Therefore by blurring the scope of the picture and exaggerating the unique detail, with minimal artistic intervention he re-makes the photo.  This for me was enlightening.

The use of grey paint made things neutral in the full sense of the word, it also made things remote and associates with the idea of loss. Richter used it almost as a veil, particularly in the paintings of his wife with her baby, but whether this is used as a deflection device or not is questionable, as at least one painting is left as it is.

One cannot help drawing the comparison between Richter’s grey ‘period’ and Odilon Redon’s “noirs”, though the chronology may not be as significant as the latter.  Redon was about 56 by the time he first used colour and this coincided with the sale of the house he was forced to share with his aunt as a child  whilst suffering from epilepsy, the place from where his nightmare images appear to originate.

Of Richter’s curtain paintings, doors and glass mirrors of the mid to late 60s, Richter is supposed to have said: “Perhaps the doors, curtains, surface pictures and panes of glass are metaphors of despair, prompted by the dilemma that our sense of sight causes us to apprehend things but at the same time restricts or partly precludes our apprehension of reality.  He later disliked these paintings which were not done from photographs but were his own image.

Psychologically, I would like to suggest, that these doors, which are usually ajar in Richter’s paintings, indicate pathways into the unknown leading to possible adventure or catastrophe and they ambiguously suggest revelation or concealment, a constant theme in Richter’s work.

Despite Richter’s avowed wish to remove Expressionism or Symbolism and other aesthetic modes, he admits that even with a straightforward copy “something new creeps in, whether I want it to or not, something that even I don’t really grasp”  This may seem a contradiction but it is an acknowledgement that the projected self cannot be eliminated from a painting  evidence of the ‘handiwork’ is inevitable.  Indeed everyone’s handwriting can reveal change of mood and mental states when analysed by a specialist, so this is no surprise.

Richter picked up on the media’s, and therefore the public’s, fascination with horror and his paintings which are taken from the press, inevitably echo that fascination, but he attempts to eliminate and often softens the elements of horror, through blurring (half-closed eyes), eliminating the anaesthetizing effect caused by over-exposure, so we see things in a new light.

The artist, Sol Lewitt once said: “ 3. Rational judgements repeat rational judgements. 2. Irrational judgements lead to new experience.  L. Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists.  They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.”  From this definition it would be easy to mark Richter as a conceptual artist, but he is more than that. Trying to pin him and his work down is like trying to capture one of his gestures whilst in the act of painting.

As early as 1965 Richter says “All that interests me is the grey areas, the passages and tonal sequences, the pictorial spaces, overlaps and interlockings.  If I had a way of abandoning other object as the bearer of this structure, I would immediately start painting abstracts.

 

Gerhard Richter, Untitled © Bridgeman Library

 The idea of erasure, scraping down and repainting in work was already being practised by Alberto Giacommetti and Willem de Kooning.  Richter’s paradigm is to produce a cumulative effect by adding to the surface.  His abstracts have as many as 30 or more “iterations” when the painting is radically altered by adding new pigment with the use of squeegees, putty knives and other tools, until the work is finished.  Reaching that point is what is difficult. Those serendipitous interventions which appear as if by magic are elements that the painter has to learn to see and value when they occur, and this is part of the process which Richter presumably uses when deciding the next step.  Apparently, Richter doesn’t examine areas of the painting in relation to one another but makes a thoughtful analysis of the whole picture, which the following statement seems to contradict.

“Any thoughts on my part about the construction of a picture are false, and if the execution works, this is only because I partly destroy it, or because it works in spite of everything – by not detracting and by not looking the way I planned.”

He wants to achieve what he considers to be right without reasoned thought, without personal input, but almost intuitively.  He says the painting “always gets harder and harder the more advanced a picture gets.  It all starts out easy and unspecific but gradually the context starts to take shape and this has a coherence that is the utter opposite of randomness”

I don’t quite grasp this as I feel Richter’s paintings are: either random or are controlled.  He admits to having no stylistic input apart from choice of colour, movement of gesture and tools and he says “any thoughts of construction are false”  So for me this is where it becomes difficult to comprehend his proposition that any unity achieved in the painting is the antithesis of randomness.  The language Richter uses makes it difficult to appraise his work with any certainty. Though I suppose there is no reason why this should be an either or question.

He says he tries “in each picture to bring together the most disparate and mutually contradictory elements, alive and viable, in the greatest possible freedom”  This statement reflects one made at the time when he destroyed his work whilst at the Dusseldorf Academy after which he said he felt liberated.  It also links with the idea of liberation after the destructive force of Hitler’s menacing regime and from Richter’s memories of it. 

When you look at the various iterations it is difficult to see how the point of completion is arrived at, as much of the early work is completely obliterated and has seemingly no bearing on the finished picture. Nonetheless, I can see it is a journey of discovery, the outcome of which is unpredictable so Richter can only decide it is finished when as he says, “there is nothing more I can do”.  That is the way of all paintings, the artist decides when it is finished when he can do no more and he is satisfied with the result.  The artist may have scraped it back changed the colours, glazed, altered the forms, whatever, but in Richter’s case the over-working is different in that each change is as dynamic as a “motor-drive” sequence in photography where each iteration is made frame by frame.

So by destroying his work he is also liberating it, whilst at the same time freeing himself, a concept which is difficult to tease out after contemplating the work and reading what Richter himself and others have said of his oeuvre.

After 1977 however there is a change in Richter’s work colour becomes more important and the grey paintings, disappear, it is also the year he met his second wife Isa Genzken.  Even later he paints intimate paintings of his third wife nursing her baby (1995) and son Moritz (2000), flowers, his daughter Betty, landscapes and Jerusalem.  They are almost sentimental, but it would be more apt to say they project feeling, which is somehow not quite the same. Nietzsche said that Truth had become a metaphor, and I think what Richter does is to remove the metaphor in order to try to reveal the truth  The culmination of this period is the exquisite painting Reading, (1994) a profile of Sabine, his third wife reading.  The earlier ambiguity and confusion is somehow purged. 

An interview with Gerhard Richter by Robert Storr in April 2001 is revealing.  It seems likely that all along Richter may have been a frustrated Traditionalist. When asked “...How would you like to be understood?” Richter replies: “I don’t know how I would like to be understood.  Maybe as the keeper of tradition [laughter] rather than any other misunderstandings.” He had admired Tititan but most of all Vermeer and felt he could never replicate the perfection of their technique in the present day, though he did attempt a copy of Titian’s Annunciation.  He also painted in 1999 a self portrait standing alongside his friend the art critic Buchloh outside a Dresden chapel.  It seems Richter wants to rebut much of his earlier posturing which he used to protect himself from criticism thus enabling him to paint, he also seems to embrace religion in that he calls himself a “sympathiser”.  If that is true the Dresden Chapel picture becomes even more poignant, it is laying to rest the memories associated with the place; a return to his roots; and the doors of the Chapel could be read as ajar.

So what are we to make of his work? What we are left with is a beauty that confronts us in a compelling way.  It speaks to us in a polemical dialect which is familiar but remains hidden, just as the paint beneath the alluring textured surface remains hidden interred in the object which ultimately transcends itself despite, or because of, the inclusions that are buried.

“We score the blank surface of reality with the longitudes and parallels of concepts, but the concepts and ideas are ours, and they have not the slightest basis in fact” Arthur Danto (Philosopher)

The quotations by Gerhard Richter and others are taken from  Gerhard Richter, Forty years of Painting by Robert Storr first published in 2002, and from Gerhard Richter Large Abstracts Ulrich Wilms.

I drew this picture in pastel after being influenced by Richter's Exhibition:

 

Godfrey, Mark: Gerhard Richter Panorama Exhibition 6 October 2011-8 January 2012, Tate Modern 

 

Storr, Robert: Gerhard Richter, Forty years of Painting, The Museum of Modern Art, NY, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2007

 

Wilmes, Ulrich: Gerhard Richter - Large Abstracts with essays by Benjamin H D Buchloch, Beate Sontgen, and Gregor Stemmrich, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2008

Fitzwilliam Museum and Kettle's Yard

CAMBRIDGE VISIT

Fitzwilliam Museum – Art Galleries

Kettle’s Yard

On the 25^th March 2011 I visited Cambridge to see the exhibits in the Fitzwilliam and Kettle’s Yard.

I was interested by the paintings by Bonnard, Vuillard and various other artists of the period.  I have always liked the way the Nabis reduced their work to flat colour but kept the subject matter clear.

However, Afterlife was one of the special exhibitions with prints by Jake & Dinos Chapman, Paul Coldwell, Mat Collishaw, Jane Dixon Paul Morrison, Hughue O’Donaghue and Marc Quinn. 

Whilst touching on mortality themes, the exhibition was so named because of the print process transfiguring and re-cycling nature.

The Prints of Mat Collishaw were particularly exciting, although I did not know the print process.  What I found particularly interesting was the way in which the digital image had been used:

I also found the Italian Drawings interesting.  It inspired me to use some of the methods and materials used.  For example the blue paper with black pen and wash and white gouache.  Also the brown paper with black ink, on brown wash with white gouache.  As well as the brown ink and wash  on white paper.  It reminded me of the drawings of Watteau which used red black and white chalk,  on white paper.  The possibilities are endless but it made me more aware of the use of washes when using pen.

I have simultaneously been reading about Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpture and paintings, so a visit to Kettle’s Yard was a must.  The cottages themselves, the former home of Jim and Helen Ede, are a delight and are filled with marvellous work of various avante guarde artists including Ben Nicholson, Joan Miro, Constantin Brancusi, Willliam Congdon and Alfred Wallis.

The Dancer, a beautiful bronze is a reproduction, the original having been sold, but it demonstrates perfectly the idea of potential energy which interested Gaudier-Brzeska.  The sculptures of  Birds Erect, The Mermaid, Bird Swallowing a Fish as well as a relief of The Wrestlers.  In terms of actual artwork there is a large painting of a man in Blue, it is reminiscent of Klimt and Scheile.

Gaudier-Bzreska uses pure line with pen and ink, also with charcoal or black chalk, his later work is influenced by Picasso whose work he would have seen when he was in Paris in 1909.  The amazing and sad thing is that Gaudier Bzreska has produced all this work yet he was killed in the first World War at the age of 23years.

I am particularly interested in the idea of potential energy and hope to explore this further in my work.

William Congdon’s Venice, Istanbul and India were also exhibited there and whilst these were rather dark paintings they were full of energy and life and used metallic paint in a way that I want to explore.  I have used metallic paint in the past but the way Congdon uses it is much more interesting, it is applied with a palette knife mixed in with the darker brown paints, he then outlines with the end of a brush to create the subject matter and this technique appeals to me.

It was a pity one couldn’t take photographs but I am hoping these few notes will remind me of what I saw and also to explore some of the artists on the internet.

Gaudier-Bzreska Birds Erect,
© Bridgeman Library

     Female  Nude Seated © Bridgeman Library    

                                                        

 Gaudier-Bzreska,   Crouching  Monkey, © Bridgeman Library

Italian Drawings 

                                                           Carracci,  Head of a Young Woman,  © Bridgeman Library

This drawing is just to remind me of the Italian Drawing Exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, so that I can use similar materials, i.e. red chalk, black ink, brown ink, washes: brown, black, red; paper: blue, cream, white.