Category: {art}

Art

Smoke

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Advertising poster for Job cigarette papers by Alphonse Mucha (1898).

The law forbidding smoking in public places finally came into effect in England on Sunday, something that the nation’s smokers are still coming to terms with. I’ve never been a smoker but have always been easy-going about the activity, having had smoking parents and been around smokers for years. That said, it’ll be nice to go out now and not return home smelling like an ashtray.

To mark the passing of a nicotine-stained era, here’s a few of the many representations of smoking in the art world. Until I started looking for pictures today I hadn’t realised how many paintings there are of people (and dogs!) having smoke blown in their faces, like this one and this one.

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The Opium Smoker by Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte du Noüy.

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A Voluptuous Smoke by Charles Edouard Edmond Delort.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Perfume: the art of scent
• German opium smokers, 1900

Shadows at Compton Verney

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The Candles by Christian Boltanski.

The Shadow is an exhibition at Compton Verney from Saturday 30 June–Sunday 9 September, 2007. I’d been considering a post about shadows in art for a while so this has forced my hand. There’ll be some follow-ups in the coming week, work permitting. I’m busy with a big new piece of Lovecraft-related art at the moment, among other things. More about that later.

Shadows carry with them a range of associations. Whilst the shadow exists as a scientific phenomenon, its presence, from the Greek philosopher Plato through to JM Barrie’s children’s story Peter Pan, reflects the values and beliefs of society as well as an expression of psychological states.

The Shadow is the first extensive group show of its kind to look at an ancient theme that continues to emerge particularly in the work of contemporary artists. The exhibition will provide the viewer with a series of atmospheric encounters where sometimes the source is revealed but frequently the shadow exists independently, often revealing a presence outside the space represented.

The exhibition includes painting, sculpture and video by international contemporary artists such as Doug Aitken, Laurie Anderson, Christian Boltanski, Ceal Floyer, Mona Hatoum, Gary Hill, Tracey Moffatt, Anri Sala, Fiona Tan, Andy Warhol, William Wegman and Francesca Woodman.

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The Choirboy (A Young Singer) by Georges de La Tour (1640s).

To compliment The Shadow exhibition, Compton Verney will present a number of key candlelight works by the French artist Georges de La Tour (1593–1652).

La Tour was born in the Duchy of Lorraine and influenced by the work of Caravaggio. His works have been attributed to a number of artists and it is only since 1915 that a group of his signed paintings were linked and attributed conclusively to La Tour.

It was not until 1972 when all his surviving works were brought together in a major retrospective exhibition at The Orangerie, Paris that he came to the attention of a wider public. This exhibition will represent a rare opportunity for British audiences to view La Tour’s paintings and will focus on a number of powerful works, mainly from La Tour’s late period, which concentrate on the effect of light on the human figure.

• Georges de La Tour at ARC

The art of Takato Yamamoto

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Takato Yamamoto was born in Akita prefecture (Japan) in 1960. After graduating from the painting department of the Tokyo Zokei University, he experimented with the Ukiyo-e Pop style. He further refined and developed that style to create his “Heisei Esthiticism” style. His first exhibition was held in Tokyo, in 1998.

There’s much that’s superficially familiar in Takato Yamamoto’s art—“Boy’s Love” tableaux with fey young men in various states of undress mooning over each other, then the perennial Japanese obsession with naked women bound by ropes. But closer examination reveals a degree of finesse and imagination that elevates his work away from the porn ghetto into the rarified realm of Decadence (as if those favourite Symbolist themes of Saint Sebastian [above] and Salomé [below] weren’t enough of a clue). For a start the drawing style is a great amalgam of influences from Beardsley through to Harry Clarke by way of the finest Edwardian pornographer, Franz von Bayros. Then there’s the curious details of severed heads, claws, sundry bones and eyeballs which decorate the otherwise florid arrangements supporting the figures. So far there don’t appear to have been any books of Takato Yamamoto’s work produced in the west and it’s possible that the sexual content and grotesquery limits that possibility. But you can some galleries here, here and here. His official site is mostly Japanese and has to be navigated from an interior page since there seems to be a file missing from the index.

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