Great Women Artists - Helene Schjerfbeck

There's a really interesting short video here about the current exhibition at the Royal Academy in London of work by Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck.

Helene Schjerfbeck at the Royal Academy

She's an artist who is little known outside her native Scandinavia, but here's a short crash course, which you can also read here HERE, plus a interesting article on her portraits HERE.  Do go and see the show - women are grossly underrepresented in art history, so it is always good to reappraise and acknowledge their contribution.

Self portrait, 1895

She was a childhood prodigy who overcame family tragedy

Schjerfbeck’s talent was recognised when she was just 11 years old and she began attending art school. Her family could only afford to educate one of their children (her brother Magnus), but luckily her tutors believed in her potential and she was offered a full scholarship. When she was just 13, her father died from tuberculosis and her family fell further into poverty. But Schjerfbeck continued to receive funding, and by the age of 18, she was studying art in Paris on a trip paid for by the Finnish Government. 

She was independent and a risk taker Schjerfbeck lived through some of the most seismic shifts in modern art, from Impressionism to Surrealism. But she was never one to follow the crowd and forged her own path. She drew inspiration everywhere from Old Master paintings to contemporary fashion magazines – and in the process she developed her own distinctive, expressive style. Her work defies categorisation and she is often seen as a “painter’s painter” - someone who constantly experimented with techniques, and was willing to push and take risks rather than repeat past successes. 

She is little known outside her home country...…but Schjerfbeck’s fame may have spread further, were it not for the outbreak of war. In 1914, she was the only Finnish woman artist who took part in the prestigious Baltic Exhibition in Malmo, Sweden. The event was designed to show off the industry, art and culture of Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Russia but was interrupted when Germany and Russia entered the First World War on opposite sides of the conflict. Some 25 years later, Schjerfbeck’s work was due to be displayed in the USA for the first time, but the outbreak of the Second World War led to the exhibition being cancelled. 

She travelled widely throughout Europe Schjerfbeck lived with limited mobility after a childhood fall that broke her hip. Despite the barriers this would have posed to her, she travelled widely during her younger years, making trips to Vienna, St Petersburg, Florence, Paris and St Ives. While in England, her work was exhibited in a gallery on Piccadilly in London, close to where the Royal Academy of Arts still stands today. Schjerfbeck’s travels helped shape her unique style and she drew on everything she saw in Europe once back home in rural Finland. Although she wasn’t able to travel later in life, she never stopped painting. When she died in 1946 she had devoted more than 70 years to her art. 

She was never afraid to take a long, hard look in the mirror Schjerfbeck created self-portraits throughout her life but in her final two years, she drew and painted her own face more than 20 times, seemingly fascinated with the physical and psychological process of ageing. As she commented in a letter to a friend, “this way the model is always available, although it isn’t always pleasant to see oneself.” These later works show a move towards radically abstracted figuration that foreshadowed the portraiture of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach.

Circus Girl 1916

View of St Ives 1887

Self Portrait 1912

Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape

I was at the Royal Academy in London at the weekend to see their landscape exhibition of Constable, Gainsborough and Turner.

It's quite a small exhibition, very academic, but strangely lacking in paintings.  

There is Constable's The Leaping Horse, all pre-Impressionist sparkly white blobs of paint imitating the passage of light (his famous 'Constable snow')

 

 

John Constable, The Leaping Horse (Oil on canvas, 1825)

Constable's subject is ordinary contemporary life, rather than a landscape inhabited by gods and goddesses or the backdrop for historical events.  Landscape itself becomes the subject of the painting.  Constable paves the way for the Impressionists to stride out into the countryside they knew and were familiar with, on the cusp of industrial change, and to record what they saw for its own sake - but this isn't really a point that is made extant.  (Perhaps if Constable had had portable collapsible tin tubes of paint and had lived in a better climate, he would have been an Impressionist 50 years before the Impressionists.)

There is Gainsborough's large dark and dreary romantic landscape with its spotlit sheep, like a more sedate Salvator Rosa landscape but without the bandits or exciting sense of brooding menace.

Thomas Gainsborough, Romantic Landscape (Oil on canvas 1783)

Then there is Turner's rather dull Dolbadern Castle - not exactly the exciting swirl of colour and light that is The Fighting Temeraire.

JMW Turner, ‘Dolbadern Castle’, 1800. Oil on canvas

And then there is a whole load of black and white prints.  

The thrust of the show is that before 1814 and the opening of Britain's first public art gallery (Dulwich), there was no way of seeing grand paintings apart from at auctions or in stately homes.  Prints were an affordable way for the ordinary person (and other artists) to access works of art and put them in their homes. Controlling the output of good-quality prints was also the way for artists the disseminate images of their work, controlling and furthering their careers and making another stream of income.

Which is all well and good, but unless you're into rows and rows of black and white prints, it makes for a very dull show.

The only time I got really excited about any of the exhibits, was when I spied a case containing Turner's brushes.  Why, they were very long, ideal for loose expressive brushstrokes, just like Whistler's long brushes which are on show in the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow!  How thrilling! 

However, it was brought to my attention that actually, this was in fact Turner's fishing rod.  

For more information about the exhibition, which continues until February 17th 2013, click here.

Bronze at the Royal Academy, London

Brace yourselves, this one's a biggie!

As well as the latest Bond film, I managed to take in something a bit more cerebral when I was in London, namely the Royal Academy Bronze exhibition.  Initially, a show about bronze didn't sound very enticing, but it's a show that's had gold-star reviews from the critics.  

So, flashing my 'Friends' card at the door, I went to see what all the fuss was about.

The first room sets the tone.  In the centre, there's a single large statue - the 4th century Dancing Satyr, pulled from the ocean by a fisherman off Sicily in 1998.  The year before, the same fisherman trawled up the left leg, and amazingly then found the body and head of the statue to which it belonged the following year.  Apparently it was brought out of the sea headfirst, as if swimming up from beneath the waves.

It's a truly stunning, gorgeous piece.  Life size, it has the most amazing presence and movement to it.  It reads as a fluid form from all angles, with an inherent  movement and life of its own.  Thanks to its centuries in the water and the chemical reactions of the salt on the metal, the bronze has a beautiful green patina and texture to it.  The lack of arms and a leg actually add to it, giving it a very modern and abstract feel, and a certain poignancy, as if it it is something beautiful and triumphant and timeless against adversity.

The Greeks were the first to perfect the techniques of casting life-sized figures in this amazing medium, and there is a room which explains the casting method with a very informative display.  

Casting bronze is a painstaking process, involving wax models, plaster jackets, baking and firing and pouring of metal and finishing.  It's a big commitment to make a model of something in bronze, requiring a lot of resources, money, time and effort.  The reward is that you are making something permanant, and something of great beauty.  Bronze confers status and permanence on the object, elevating and preserving it for all time.  Especially interesting in this part of the exhibition is the display of bronze casts of a raven's wing, to demonstrate the different patinas (or finishes) that bronze can have.  You can touch the wings, and they are indeed very tactile.  Bronze can be polished like a mirror, or have a surface like satin, or rough and patterned and textured, or coloured black or green or gold. 

The exhibition's strength is that it displays objects by themed rooms, and mixes them up chronologically.  So you can see that very ancient work has resonance in modern work and vice versa.  Sometimes the most ancient piece looks like it could have been made last week.  

So in the first room, there is an Etruscan piece made in the 2nd century BC, called Evening Shadows (how they know this I don't know).  It's a long tall, skinny stylised figure,  which looks like it was made by Modigliani.

There's Donatello's exquisite little Putti with Tambourine of 1429, and Giovanni Francesco Rustica's three huge figures, bearing all the hallmarks of his collaborator Leonardo da Vinci.

Giovanfrancesco Rustici, The Pharisee, St John the Baptist and The Levite from The Sermon of Saint John the Baptist, 1511

Then there's the vast. towering Perseus by Cellini, made in a single casting (rather than in sections), and possibly the most ambitious statue ever made - how on earth did they ever physically make such a thing?

And in the same room there's also something which was, for me, the most exciting piece, Portrait of a Painter by David Smith, from 1954.

This was made from lots of found art-related objects, such as an artists palette, which were textured with plaster and resin before being assembled and cast.  I can't tell you how exciting an object this was.  Unlike the Perseus, this is something you can imagine making yourself, so I guess that was its attraction and what I could identify with.

Room 3 was all about animals, such as another assemblage of found objects, this time by Picasso, wittily made into his 1951 Baboon (which included his son Claude's model car for the head - bet he was pleased)

to Louise Bourgeois' creepy 1996 Spider IV perched menacingly on the wall

to Giambologna's 1567 Turkey, all life-like feathers and free and textured surfaces - the most life-like and heart-felt thing he's ever done, so different to his highly-finished, mannered Mercury in room 9.

The next room was dedicated to groups, which I have to say didn't do anything for me, and Room 6 was all about Objects, both decorative and functional.  This included such diverse items as the green-man-like 1170 Sanctuary Ring from Durham Cathedral (which I have seen in situ - it must have been quite an undertaking to remove it for the exhibition) to Barbara Hepworth's 1956 Curved Form (Trevalgan). I can understand the Sanctuary Ring as object (and it is such a singularly fierce and grotesque face that you would have to seriously be in dire need of sanctuary before daring to use it)

but putting the Hepworth in that section puzzled me.  However, as it is a sculpture about landscape, I suppose there wasn't really another heading under which it could have been included.  Curved Form is just that - a winged shape; feminine, uterine, pelvis-like, encompassing.

I was at Trevalgan Hill in Cornwall near St Ives earlier in the year.  It's a place where Peter Lanyon also used to return to frequently, as it has long, sweeping curved views right along and round the coast.  The sculpture is a direct response to that view, encompassing many viewpoints.  It's the big, sweeping curve of the coast as you stand on the  top of the hill and look around you.  There are large rocks on the top, and gorse, so that although it is exposed and you have this amazing, powerful view, it is at the same time secret and enclosing, like a castle or fortress.  It is a sculpture about a landscape, but also about a feeling, an experience, and the action of looking.

The next room is about Reliefs, and includes Matisse's clunky Back 1-4, which he worked on over 20 years and moves towards an increasingly abstract and simplified figure.

Room 9 is 'Gods', and includes a Hellenistic Dionysis from 1st century BC.  This figure lay for years on a river bed wrapped in a loose fabric, and this has left a textural imprint on the right leg.  

Room 10 is 'Heads', and again the stand-out is a Hellenistic portrait head of King Seuthes III.  It's so immediate and modern-looking.

There's much, much more, for this is a show that's a brilliant demonstration of what an exhibition should do.  It takes a subject, and it explains and demonstrates the medium with a freshness and a logic that astounds and delights.  Just the sheer physicality of getting all those objects into such an show is amazing enough, but to see how such diverse pieces inform and complement each other within the logic of the arrangement is a thing of great pleasure.

What struck me, though, is how few women cast in bronze.  I could only see two women represented, Louise Bourgeois and Barbara Hepworth (although obviously we don't know the identities of the uncredited ancient pieces, but I'd take a stab that they were done by men).  In any art exhibition, there are going to be far fewer women than men represented (for the reasons for this I would point you to Germaine Greer's The Obstacle Race), and I have a personal peeve about gender-based women-only shows.  

However, it did make me think about the gender-implications of the medium.  Bronze is about making a bold, permanent, costly piece, a statement that your art is so important it will last for ever.  That's quite an egotistical in-your-face thing, and it demands a lot of time and effort (or arranging a lot of someone else's time and effort).  Very often, women's art tends to not be about these things, tending towards the more fragile, ephemeral, physically smaller mediums, the stuff that's apologetically in the corner rather than 90 foot tall in the middle of the town square. However, look how the women artists use the medium here -  Bourgeois' spiders are menacing giant-sized overbearing mothers, Hepworth takes a very masculine, hard medium and makes it feminine, organic and nurturing.

If you're in London, please do go and see this show.  I doubt you'll get the chance to see anything like this again.  It's on until December 9th.

For more information, go to the Royal Academy website.

David Hockney: The Art of Seeing

As a landscape painter, it's a big thrill to see a huge landscape exhibition taking pride of place at the Royal Academy, and one which is such a talking point.  

David Hockney's A Bigger Picture really is that - a vast exhibition of big, big paintings, in a big big space (all 13 rooms of the RA), which is ironically filled with huge amounts of sharp-elbowed folk in a marked contrast to the empty people-free calm of the pictures.

Sometimes as a painter of landscape, you feel that you might be considered to be at the edge of things, painting in some sort of old-fashioned sub-genre whilst the real artists get on with cutting sharks in half and embedding skulls with diamonds.  

"Landscape finished?" snorts the eloquently plain-speaking Yorkshireman Hockney in his BBC Culture Show Special film, "Only our way of looking at landscape is finished - so find a new way".  

And here is that new way, with i-Pad print-outs and multiple viewpoint films and great pulsating canvases of colour, all expanding on the sense that landscape is something to be experienced and lived and moved through like life itself.

If you've got any interest in the exhibition, or in landscape, painting, or just the way that paintings make us look at the world afresh and feel alive, then take a look at  David Hockney: The Art of Seeing on BBC i-Player.  It's a treat.

David Hockney painting on location in Yorkshire

Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement

I thought I'd mention a really excellent show which I saw recently at the Royal College of Art in London - I don't know if anyone else managed to see it.  (It's unfortunately finished now, but I hadn't started the blog last year, so that's why it's only just getting a mention!)  

I'm sure you're all familiar with the work of Degas and his Impressionist paintings of young, ballet dancers, women bathing and frisky horses.  Certainly, the image used on the poster would lead you to believe that this was going to be a very sickly sweet show all about pastel-coloured young girls in tutus, ending with a nice line in fridge magnets in the gift shop.

However, what this exhibition managed to clearly document (and all kudos to the curators for putting together such a well thought-out and thought-provoking show) was the development of Degas' lifelong obsession with the figure in movement.  

Degas was working at a time in the 19th century when there were great technical advances in photography and early film, which were embraced by the artist in the same way that David Hockney is embracing the i-Pad as a tool to make art in his new show at the Royal Academy.  

Degas' compositions were pieced together from various studies made from various sources, so that a group of ballet dancers could come from a variety of different studies of individuals or small groups, made in a number of media.  The information from all the sources was then jigsawed together to make the final picture, giviing an informed sense of a place and an event, rather than an actual documentation of one specific event - almost like one of his early history paintings.

The pose of the figures would often have a casual, fleeting sense to them, as figures can when caught off-guard by the camera, giving a feeling of capturing a moment in time and a fleeting glimpse of something temporal. 

The really exciting thing in the exhibition was the inclusion of his little-seen photographs and their relationship to other work.  Here's one of his photos...

Degas, Dancer Adjusting Her Shoulder Strap (Modern gelatin silver print, 1895)

And a pastel and gouache based on the pose - note all the changes made whilst working out the composition, almost as if the figure is blurred in movement, or as if several viewpoints of the same figure were amalgamated into one - which of course, is what Picasso was doing later in 1907 at the birth of cubism.

Another photograph (the intense colour is due to a chemical reaction during development of the plates)...

Degas, Dancer, Arm Outstretched (Collodion on glass, 1895)

And a related pastel with the figure from the photo at the left hand side

 

So far from being a chocolate-box artist, Degas was instead a modern, radical artist who thought profoundly about visual problems and was fully attuned to the technological developments of his time.  

Born in 1834, largely self-taught, this free-thinking and experimental approach paved the way for others in the modern age - look at his incorporation of real objects into his bronze sculpture of the little dancer aged 14, with its ribbon in the hair and tutu made of actual material.  That's something everyone from Picasso to Rauschenberg has done.

 

 

Again, giving her age of 14 in the title emphasises the temporal movement, and the quick passing of youth.   

Increasing blindness forced Degas to give up working in 1912, and for the last 5 years, he was a sad figure shuffling around Montmartre.   

One of the most touching things in the exhibition was a short piece of film taken of Degas walking on a street in Paris with his niece.  It is strikingly ordinary, with chattering shop-girls on a break at lunchtime walking sassily down the street and playing to the camera.  But Degas doesn't notice he's being filmed.  It's both ordinary and extraordinary, in that those few seconds capture a fleeting glimpse of one of the true great of art history, just for a moment, not doing anything special, but preserved on a short loop of time.  It's strangely appropriate, rather profound, and very touching.  It's a work of art in itself.

Tatlin's Tower

If you're passing by the Royal Academy in London over the next couple of days, take a quick look in the courtyard at the amazing recreation of Tatlin's Tower.  I took this photo of it when I was there in November to see the Degas exhibition.

Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) designed his Monument to the Third International in 1920, but it was never built.   When I studied it as part of my Fine Art degree, it was an enigmatic unfulfilled idea, so it was a big thrill to finally see it in real life, even if it is just a 1:42 scale version!

Left: Computer visualisation of Tatlin's Tower by Dixon Jones Architects 

Right: Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953), Monument to the Third International: side elevation, 1920, N. Punin Archive © Anna Kaminskaya 

Planned as a 400m tall symbol of moderntiy in St Petersburg after the Bolshevik Revolution, it would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower.  Built from steel and glass in double helix spiral, it consisted of a main framework which people could travel up, inclined at the same angle as the earth's axis, and 4 large geometric structures which each rotated at different speeds.  

At the base was a lecture theatre which completed one rotation a year.  Above that was a pyramid housing offices which rotated monthly.  Above that was a daily-rotating cylinder housing a radio station and information centre with loudspeakers for disseminating news and manifestos, and a projector for beaming images onto clouds.  

How brilliantly mad is all that?  But I can imagine that if it had been built, it would never have actually have worked - a bit like the Science Tower in Glasgow!  Plus, there's just far too much rotating going on...

There's an interesting article here if you'd like to read more...

Blueprint Magazine - Rebuilding Tatlin's Tower