Surrealism at the Hayward

acephale.jpg

Something I’ll definitely be going to see, especially given the emphasis on Georges Bataille. Above: André Masson’s cover design for the first issue of Bataille’s Acéphale (1937).

UNDERCOVER SURREALISM: Picasso, Miró, Masson and the vision of Georges Bataille. The Hayward Gallery, London, 11 May–31 Jul 2006.

This major Surrealist show, curated by Surrealism specialist Dawn Ades, documents the extraordinary cross-currents of Paris in the late 1920s, through painting, film, sculpture, music, photography, masks, ritual objects – all subject to the provocative vision of Georges Bataille.

Featuring works by Miró, Dalí, Giacometti, Brancusi, Boiffard, de Chirico, Arp, Nadar and Ernst, and an entire room of works by Picasso, it brings together loans from major collections around the world.

Bataille waged war on the “idealism” of the Surrealist movement, using his famous magazine DOCUMENTS as his weapon. Undercover Surrealism takes his magazine’s subversive juxtapositions as its starting point, and shows how Bataille unflinchingly exposed the raw underbelly of the human creative impulse.

The Hayward Gallery first explored Surrealism almost 30 years ago in its legendary 1978 show, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, co-curated by Dawn Ades. Ades, now regarded as one of the world’s greatest Surrealism experts, returns to curate this exhibition.

Arnold Böcklin and The Isle of the Dead

iod_basle.jpg

Another favourite painting for many years and Böcklin’s most well-known work.

Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) produced several different versions of the painting. All versions depict an oarsman and a standing white-clad figure in a small boat crossing an expanse of dark water towards a rocky island. In the boat is an object usually taken to be a coffin. The white-clad figure is often taken to be Charon, and the water analogous to the Acheron. Böcklin himself provided neither public explanation as to the meaning of the painting nor the title, which was conferred upon it by the art dealer Fritz Gurlitt in 1883. The first version of the painting, which is currently at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, was created in 1880 on a request by Marie Berna, whose husband had recently died.

Continue reading “Arnold Böcklin and The Isle of the Dead”

The enigma of Desiderio

King_Asa_Of_Juda_Destroying_The_Idols.jpg

Explosion in a Church.

“Enigma” or “mystery” are the words usually associated with “Desiderio” (or even “Monsù Desiderio”), due to years of misattribution that made two obscure painters of the same period with similar styles appear to be a single artist.

Until some fifty years ago, the identity of François de Nomé (ca. 1593–after 1634) was hidden by confusion with another contemporary painter from the Lorraine, Didier Barra (called “Monsù Desiderio”), whose work was at times disturbingly similar. In the 1930s, when the Surrealists were searching for forerunners, there was a revival of interest in Nomé, a painter most noted for fantastic architectures, eerily lit night scenes of the ruins of cities, and of catastrophic visions. He has continued to fascinate the modern mind for fifty years.

Continue reading “The enigma of Desiderio”

Evolution of an icon

Flandrin.jpg

Jean Hippolyte Flandrin (1809-1864) was a Neo-Classical painter whose work tends to lack the sensuality of his master, Ingres, yet who managed to produce one picture at least which has been an inspiration to subsequent artists and photographers.

Jeune Homme Assis au Bord de la Mer (Young Man Sitting by the Seashore) was painted in 1836. The simplicity and directness of the rendering is probably intended to be reminiscent of Classical sculpture and the figures seen on Greek pottery and bas-reliefs. There’s nothing in Flandrin’s history to suggest a homoerotic intent but the picture has that effect nonetheless, and it’s to gay artists (and viewers) that the work has mostly appealed since, as can be seen below.

gloeden.jpg

The first (?) copy, usually dated as being from 1900 although it may be earlier, and a very careful imitation of the original pose. Photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden specialised in Classical-themed gay erotica and gave his figure a Biblical allusion by titling the picture Cain. Gloeden’s follower, Gaetano d’Agata, produced his own version.

Day.jpg

Ebony and Ivory (1897) by Fred Holland Day.

tremois2.jpg

L’Apocalypse by Pierre Yves Trémois (1961).

mapplethorpe.jpg

Ajitto by Robert Mapplethorpe (1981).

tremois1.jpg

A rare sculpture version, L’Homme de l’Apocalypse by Pierre Yves Trémois (1998).

fallenangel.jpg

Finally, here’s my own Fallen Angel picture from 2004 which added wings to the figure.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The recurrent pose archive
The gay artists archive

“One measures a circle, beginning anywhere…”

Robert Hughes writing in The Guardian about Rembrandt this weekend had this to say about one of the painter’s later works:

He had done pictures of himself that fairly radiate a gloating success, but the deepest was saved for the last decade of his life, when he painted himself as a painter at work, holding brushes, palette and maul-stick. He has his back to a wall, or perhaps a large canvas. On the canvas are two large arcs, incomplete circles. What are these abstract forms doing there? They come from Rembrandt’s reading of a well-known and indeed exemplary story in Pliny. The great Greek painter Apelles, so Pliny’s story goes, went to visit an equally famous ancient master, Protogenes, on the island of Rhodes. But Protogenes was out, and so Apelles, rather than leave him a note, drew on his studio wall a perfect circle, freehand. Protogenes would realise that only an artist of Apelles’ skills could possibly have done this. So Rembrandt places himself before the message that compares him to Apelles, king and ancestor of his art. Old age has at last freed him to make an incontrovertible, utterly simple proof of mastery.

This may be an artistic equivalent of one of those ideas Borges discusses in essays such as The Fearful Sphere of Pascal, where he plots the recurrence of the concept of “the circle whose circumference is everywhere and whose centre is nowhere.” The artist version emerges again with the pre-Renaissance painter Giotto:

According to a story related by Vasari, Pope Benedict XI wanted to employ Giotto and sent an emissary to visit the artist. The messenger asked Giotto for a drawing he could submit to the pope, to prove the artist’s worth. Giotto smiled and took a sheet of paper, dipped his brush in red paint, closed his arm to his side, and with one twist of his wrist drew a perfect circle freehand. Giotto handed this drawing to the messenger, who stared back in disbelief. ‘Is this the only drawing I’m to have?’ asked the messenger. Giotto answered, ‘It’s more than enough. Send it along and you’ll see whether it’s understood.’

Several hundred years later, Tom Phillips painted Fifty attempts to draw a freehand circle inspired by Giotto’s example. I remember being told the Giotto story in school art class and we all had a go at drawing freehand circles. It is indeed a difficult business but after a while your arm starts to get used to the motion. Like many things in art, practice is the key.

m_chat.jpg