L’Art en guerre, France 1938-1947

After the Nazis occupied France, Pablo Picasso could have sought exile abroad. Instead, he remained in Paris, a form of protest in itself. It was risky but the Spaniard, by virtue of his incredible fame perhaps, managed to escape the absolute horrors of the war, as well as outright persecution.

He was hounded nevertheless. The Gestapo endeavoured to find evidence of his links to the French resistance, but failed. They did however succeed in diminishing the visibility of his art, which both the Vichy government and the Nazis termed as degenerate, a perversion of what art should be.

Still, he lost none of his power, nor his acidic wit. For example, there is a famous incident where a Gestapo officer, on coming across a reproduction of Picasso’s monumental work Guernica, asked the artist if he had made this. “No,” he retorted. “You did.”

An entire section is dedicated to the artist in a new exhibition at the Guggenheim Bilbao. L’Art en guerre, France 1938-1947: From Picasso to Dubuffet examines the way in which artists responded to the “ominous and oppressive” environment of Nazi-occupied France during the Second World War. Art was not just about existing, or a way to escape; it was also a weapon against tyranny.

Eleven other sections provide a sweeping, poignant and thoughtful overview of this period, which are comprised of 500 works by over 100 artists, across various media such as paintings, sculptures, documents, films and photographs.

“The pieces created over the course of those years reflect very different aspects of the daily reality of those who lived through that period: their dreams, nightmares, and hopes – in short, the cognitive, creative and emotional atmosphere that made life meaningful in different sectors of society,” the gallery explains.

“Yet that context of social chaos and spiritual darkness was also a productive and innovative time for art, which survived everywhere and flowed forth in all variety of circumstances, both as an underground trend and within the parameters of official taste.”

Even against all odds, artists endeavoured to create, utilising whatever tools and materials they could. The art that was created during this “spatiotemporal framework” was unlike anything before it, surprisingly dynamic, full of energy and, at times, monumental. To be able to express oneself through art was vital. Otherwise they would truly have vanished into oblivion.

Below is a succinct breakdown of the various sections that make up this seismic show.

Section 1: History

The exhibition opens with an overview of the important events that occurred after France was occupied, resulting in the creation of a double-dictatorship. Through this came the French resistance and a spirit of unity, among ordinary citizens and artists. There was, in short, a resolve to live and see a better world again.

Section 2: The Official Taste

Official taste was something that left a bitter taste. This section reveals the art that was effectively sanctioned and ticked off as acceptable during this period. The likes of Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró and Pierre Mondrian were ostracised, while movements such as cubism, fauvism and surrealism were neglected.

Section 3: The Surrealists

“The Parisian art world, now cleansed of ‘undesirables’, was every bit as dark and dismal as the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (January 1938) had predicted,” the gallery highlights.

“Organised in Paris by André Breton and Duchamp, this show offered irrefutable proof of the growing strength of the surrealist movement, but the exhibition’s disconcerting atmosphere also turned out to be an uncanny premonition of the horrors of war.”

Section 4: The Camps

Even in horrific, inhuman conditions, the desire to create art endured. The French internment camps, originally developed to house refugees fleeing Franco’s Spain, were later used to intern a strange mix of anti-Nazi and pro-Nazi Germans, people from countries that were sympathetic to Hitler and French communists.

Here we observe the co-option of miscellaneous items into art. From cans to matches, to fragments of wood and iron, artists manufactured works that captured the terror of this period.

Section 5: Exile, Refugees, and Concealment

An interesting aspect of this section is dedicated to the American journalist Varian Fry, who was sent to France by the US government as a representative of the Emergency Rescue Committee. His responsibility was to rescue intellectuals, artists and Jews who were being persecuted.

Some, of course, had no option but to go into hiding within France. Joseph Steib was such an individual, who produced caustic works of art that reflected the hardships, humiliations and atrocities experienced by many.

Section 6: Masters of Reference and the Young Painters in the French Tradition

The Young Painters in the French Tradition were a group of artists that included Jean René Bazaine, Francisco Bores, André Fougeron, Charles Lapicque, Jean Le Moal, Édouard Pignon, and Alfred Manessier.

Their bright, abstract and colourful works were inspired by both Romanesque and modern art, echoing the ideas of Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque and Henri Matisse, which jarred against the official idea of what art should be.

Section 7: Picasso in His Studio

Picasso was supremely productive in isolation, producing masterpiece after masterpiece. It didn’t matter if pro-German painters like Maurice de Vlaminck derided him, the Spaniard endured.

It was nevertheless difficult, with Vlamick’s assertion that Picasso had “dragged French painting into the most fatal dead end, into indescribable confusion” a sentiment shared by Nazis and their sympathisers.

Section 8: Galerie Jeanne Bucher

Jeanne Bucher was one of the few gallerists who did all she could to support arts during the occupation, opening her gallery to artists like André Bauchant, Francisco Bores, Louis-Auguste Déchelette, and Paul Klee.

Section 9: Camps and Prisons

“As the years passed and the number of detainees in French camps continued to swell, living conditions became increasingly harsh,” the gallery notes.

“For these prisoners, creating works of art was the only way to make sense of a cruel and absurd existence, fashioning surprising objects from the scant resources and materials at hand.”

Section 10: The Liberation

Exaltation came to Parisians in August 1944, when the city was finally liberated. The French communist party, with Picasso in tow, began to reclaim the cultural scene and judge, albeit it with compassion, those artists who had collaborated with the Nazis.

Section 11: Decompressions

A postscript, this section explores how artists, after the war, sought to understand what had happened through their art. This can be see in the morose works of Bernard Buffet, Olivier Debre and Hans Hartung, as well as in Wols’ (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) fraught scratches.

Section 12: The Anartists

The concluding part of the show looks at the Anartists, who were artists that rebelled against the established order, as well as those who were keen to journey forward into the unknown, to know more about life, spirituality and the human condition.

L’Art en guerre, France 1938-1947: From Picasso to Dubuffet opens at the Guggenheim Bilbao runs until September 8th 2013.

Seasons

You rattle my soul,

Out of its mournful reverie,

With your lipstick medicine.

You are summer to my heart,

Spring to my grey autumn,

A sweet interlude to my winter loneliness.

New Year’s Eve 2012

“Long time!” said the barman, smiling with teeth.

“It’s all relative,” replied the iconoclast, smiling. He felt tired.

“The same ole difference.”

“That it is.”

“What that in mind, a pint of decadence once again?”

“What if I said a martini?”

“Splendid!”

“With a slice of lemon peel and two olives that don’t like each other.”

“Keep them coming all night?”

“One empty glass for a full glass till the wee small hours of the morning.”

“Take a seat sir and let the world fall from your shoulders.”

The barman had burnt his thesis during the summer and with it everything he knew. It was nonsensical. I wake up to fall asleep he said and with that supremely brilliant realisation he had never looked back. He was happy.

“I dreamt I was an asteroid,” said the iconoclast.

“I dreamt I was a giraffe and so we are brothers,” said the barman.

The iconoclast thought of an elephant.

“Blue like Picasso and blue like Yves Klein.”

He had not remembered what he had done the last year and the year before and the year to come and the year long, long ago and the year long, long after.

“You know Rome wasn’t built in a day?” said the barman.

“Everything crumbles.”

“Except…” responded the barman, slicing a red apple.

“For…”

“Her.”

“Sunshine.”

“Moonlight.”

“Cat.”

“Piano.”

The iconoclast thought about it and sighed. I like jazz.

“When is the last train out of here?”

“Ask Pessoa.”

“To think is to destroy.”

“Alas sir, you are not an ordinary man.”

They both smiled.

“What are we doing?” asked the iconoclast.

“Falling in and out of love sir,” said the barman.

And with that, the woman in red walked in. She was red shoes, red dress, and red lips.

“Just like that I am in love,” thought the barman and a star exploded far, far away somewhere. Boom boom bang it went.

Ice cream always melts thought the iconoclast and so it is that my heart will stop beating one day.

“You were alive once weren’t you?” said the barman, passing him another drink.

“I figure so.”

“Another galaxy, another world, another language.”

“Something like that.”

The iconoclast remembered a memory of a dream of a memory of something that happened when he was the he that he no longer is.

“Memories,” he said.

“What of them?”

“Nothing.”

The barman reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a small sun.

“I am going to mix this into your next martini.”

“Marvellous.”

“Quid pro quo – I’m going to smile for you in return.”

And so the iconoclast smiled and so too did the barman and the lady in red.

“Best martini ever,” he said.

“Happiness in a glass my friend,” said the barman.

“Enjoy your dance,” said the iconoclast.

My pygmalion

I saw her in a dream once,
In a city we both didn’t belong to.

She was a foreign language,
Beautiful to listen to,
But a mystery.

Time knocked on the door,
Like death’s shadow.

I didn’t want to wake up,
One more dance, one more kiss.

But she was already gone,
A memory of something unreal,
My pygmalion.

Royal Academy delivers a landmark show with Bronze

One word and nothing more, Bronze is the magnificently pithy title of a new exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. It is the accurate and compendious description for what is an incredibly remarkable show that covers over 5,000 years of art making at its best with this perennially popular material.

There’s something special about bronze. It was the first metal that human beings started to properly manipulate, the second great technological accomplishment that sought to philosophically and physically emancipate man from the natural world.In prehistory, this first began with stone and ended with iron.

The Royal Academy has gathered over 150 of some of the most exquisite sculptures to have ever been made using bronze, be it in Africa, Asia or Europe. Cross-cultural and global, the show celebrates the workmanship of ancient civilisations to the modernists of the twentieth century.

For such a succinctly named display, this is a decidedly sweeping presentation, expertly put together. For example, the curators have ingeniously decided to band the works of art thematically, which offers a subtle displacement of time and location that suggests any given art movement over the ages could have existed now, yesterday and anon.

An instance of this can be seen in the beautifully patterned Elephant-shaped Vessel from the Shang Dynasty. Here, the unknown artist has truncated the natural characteristics and contours of the large animal, and covered its entire body with the kind of patterns that wouldn’t have gone amiss on one of Gustav Klimt’s gilded paintings.

Another case in point is articulated by Auguste Rodin’s The Age of Bronze (1876), an almost full-scale statue of a nude man that could arguably have been at home during the time of the High Renaissance; something produced by Michelangelo no least.

That’s not to say that some works betray the era they have come from. Adriaen de Vries’ Vulcan’s Forge (1611) is palpably a fitting example of the eloquent style sensibilities of baroque sculpture, while there is something about Pablo Picasso’s Baboon and Young (1951) that revels in a sort of mischievousness that only he could have produced.

So too does Constantin Brâncuși’s Danaïde (1918) hark of something only imaginable at its point of creation. A featureless head upon which sits a quasi-futurist and Romanesque helmet, Brâncuși’s abstract sculpture was even ahead of its own time, suggestive as it was of the Art Deco movement that was soon to come.

Bronze, we learn, is a metal made chiefly out of copper, with elements of tin added to make it hard. What makes it useful for artists as a material – or else it wouldn’t have endured for so long – is that it allows for detail, explains Michael Prodger in the Guardian.

“The most prevalent form of casting from antiquity onwards is the ‘lost wax’ method in which a full-scale model, usually of clay, is coated in a layer of wax – on to which can be scraped the most delicate of effects – and then covered with a plaster mould,” he adds.

“When the mould is heated the wax melts away and molten bronze can be poured into the gap. After cooling the metal is malleable enough to be further chased, chiselled, polished or treated with acid to give a variety of patinas.”

The Royal Academy has thus done a commendable job in gathering a superlative cast of stars to really bring home the hard work that goes into making bronze sculptures. Yes it is conducive to composing elegantly refined components, but make no mistake, bronze is tough.

It’s incredible then that so many distinct works of art have been possible. From the emboldened Chimera of Arezzo (400 BCE) to Giovanni Francesco Rustici’s enormous St John the Baptist Preaching to a Levite and a Pharisee, the craftsmanship is startling. It’s enough to knock you back a few steps, all with a beatific smile of course.

While bronze from a sporting point of view is tantamount to coming a respectable third place, in the case of this landmark show, it certainly trumps gold and silver for a top podium finish.

Bronze at the Royal Academy of Arts runs until December 12th.

Only in America

Only in America can a judge uphold an Oregon death row inmate’s wish to be executed, even when he has been afforded clemency, while also arbitrarily sealing the fate of another prisoner in Texas who, contrary to everyone else’s assessment, is deemed not to be mentally disabled.

Mud Dirty

A quick evening,

To pass the time,

Looking for love.

Maybe.

Lost in the rain,

I am challenged,

By hungry white wolves.

Hey black boy,

Why so blue?

The skies are grey.

Am I so coloured,

That I stand out?

Stained without choice.

I am diaphanous, I retort,

That much is true.

But hate isn’t blind.

The rain endures,

It doesn’t bleach,

Me under my umbrella.

I am still mud dirty.

Gig posters show potential as an art investment

The discussion about the purpose of art, what it means, what it is, is something that has no definite answer. It’s incapable of being settled and for there to be unanimity in opinion because principally, it exists as an expression that can be full of poignant, multilayered and affecting meaning or, to be blunt, exist purely as a creative but simple conduit through which we pass the time.

As such, art, as a human activity, is just that, a thing to do, something that is very natural to our existence – a compulsion that one doesn’t fully understand as well – and an outlet for human beings to express themselves. Not all of us are artists, but we doodle don’t we This argument bases its conception on the idea that beyond love and work, what else is there to really do?

Of course, this is very disagreeable. You can look upon art as being a criticism of life – to take a novel turn on the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold’s famous insight on poetry – in the sense it fictionalises reality and condemns (fictional being utopian dreams and condemnation afforded to, for example, government misdemeanours). In a nutshell, like a Mark Rothko painting outside of a contextual frame, what is seen and experienced will not be uniform. Art divides.

So is a poster a work of art? Yes? No? How long is a piece of string? As was highlighted above, a resolute answer is impossible. We can only discuss, till maybe, one day, the proverbial penny will drop and we’ll know. Until then, let the markets decide – put a price on something and if people are willing to match that price, to outbid one another and elevate that figure to something unconceivable, then brilliant, this is the zeitgeist of today.

In a wonderful article for the Independent, the writer Nick Hasted suggests that such a reality is not only possible, it is already in bloom. Gig posters – to be very specific – past and present, generate powerful sentimental feelings because they act as a visual reminder of a great concert and a memorable night out, a souvenir of an unforgettable evening made into Hollywood though nostalgic embellishment.

They are products of art if they are scarce, within which is couched the basic tenet that such posters cannot be mass produced. Instead, as Mr Hasted observes, what is emerging is a sort of renaissance of considered posters, silkscreen printed in short batches – usually in the modest hundreds – similar to those that help defined the 1960s San Francisco rock scene. And what does scarcity equal in the art world, where critical acclaim and popularity combine? Value.

Although the price for an authentic gig poster is markedly lower than a classic work of art – let’s say a typical Gustav Klimt painting – they can sell for a lot of money, especially when they become the possession of powerful collectors and establishments. For example, what could be an innocuous poster from a Rolling Stones gig in 1973, has by virtue of association – hanging at D. King Gallery – become a valuable commodity, a “work of art”. It is worth $5,000 (approximately £3,213).

And it’s not just old classic posters that are valuable. Speaking to the Independent, Chris Marksberry, owner of Flood Gallery in London, a boutique store and space that is carving out a reputation as a leader in this niche but budding scene, remarked how commissioned pieces from Chuck Sperry, rock art illustrator, experienced a very sudden spike value.

“It was an edition of 50 that we sold at £90 per print, and sold out within half an hour online. The next day they were available via trading sites or eBay for $400, and I’ve seen one for $1,000,” he noted.

What emerges is a picture of two worlds. While establishments like Flood Gallery owe their existence and growth to the affordability of their rare products – opening up very collectible items to genuine music/art aficionados – on the flipside, the very same item can sell in certain circles for so much more. In some ways this comes across as paradoxical, but as Damien Hirst’s 1,500 plus and growing spot paintings testify – the very opposite of what it means to be distinct – all art, even duplicated, can be expensive. Trite as it may be, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”.

Art belongs to the individual then and their world shapes how a work of art is perceived and what its market value is. Unless you think otherwise, divisive as art can be.

A work of art is a confession, the result of a unique temperament, an imitation of life, a revolt against man’s fate, the proper task of life and the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers and never succeeding, so said Albert Camus, Oscar Wilde, Seneca, Andre Malraux, Friedrich Nietzsche and Gian Carlo Menotti. They were all right…or not.

Presenting the new Tracey Emin

Every artist, to a certain extent, gets saddled with one of their works in perpetuity, the pervasiveness of it, good or bad, making its stamp on the world – for better or worse – a titanic monument or something ugly, like the scarred battlefield after a war.

Why we remember certain things in the context of others can perhaps be best answered by Ivan Pavlov, the great Russian physiologist, best known for contributing to the body of knowledge concerning classical conditioning and behaviour modification.

Or we could go for a more simplified approach and attribute it to the connected field that is concerned with the psychology of association. Either way, the outcome is similar: things stick and become hard to shift.

When we’re presented with Tracey Emin, the inevitable image manifests itself in the mind … a messy bed. 14 years after it was first created and 13 years beyond its exhibition at the Tate Gallery – as part of the shortlist of works for 1998′s Turner Prize – My Bed, a seemingly vacant, innocuous and unoriginal work, remains one, if not the, most famous creations to have come from the British artist.

She might have produced other “noisy” works as is befitting her status as one of the much lauded YBAs (Young British Artists), like the vanished Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (destroyed in the 2004 Momart London warehouse fire), but the image of the bed endures.

Regardless, she has, like her YBA counterpart Damien Hirst – possibly the clumsiest banding of relatively disparate artists who shared a degree and a show together in the late eighties – grown to be, if anything, a very visible and prominent artist, confusing, with critics and observers always unsure what to make of her naked abandon in art, itself garbled.

Ten years after the bed was first constructed, the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones mentioned, as a prelude, the classicist Nicolas Poussin complaining about the Baroque sensibilities of his contemporary Caravaggio: “He has come to murder art!”

“He meant that Caravaggio’s paintings refused to sublimate the undigested stuff of life, that they did not ennoble it. My own problem with Emin has been similar,” Jones wrote.

“A magician such as Damien Hirst or Joseph Beuys makes everything symbolic. Emin’s readymades, on the other hand, remain flat, unredeemed; she transfigures nothing. But in many ways Emin’s achievement is the same as Caravaggio’s: she rubs our noses in reality, in a way that subverts all our illusions, fantasies, snobberies and repressions, those barriers we put up between us and death.”

With her new show, She Lay Down Deep Beneath The Sea, her first major solo exhibition at the Margate’s Turner Contemporary, the viewer is once again thrust into Emin’s world of incongruent works, ranging from paintings to sketches to neons and sculptures. It is a very personal show, made all the more special by the fact that the artist was brought up in the popular seaside town.

“I started to write something and research the ideas about love, like does love really exist, is it something we imagine?” said Emin, in an interview with Another Magazine, explaining part of the concept of the exhibition.

“And the times in life when we’ve thought we’re really in love and often then when we’ve realised that we were most definitely wasn’t, you go ‘Oh that was a lucky escape’ and we somehow delude ourselves about what love is.”

Gone is the exuberance of youth, the need to be polemical, to live up to some half-concocted public persona and the cliche of youthful brazenness and disrespect for authority, and in its place, in this homecoming of sorts, is a more reflective show, pondering, an artistic meditation on what one has learnt over the years. The conclusion being, well, we keep making mistakes.

Heartbreak becomes the theme of our lives, a regular occurrence as time passes, made so through failed relationships, the death of friends, all of which serve to remind us, as Hunter S. Thompson famously observed, that we are born alone and die alone. That’s not to mistake this as an absolute tragic truth, for, as Emin’s work points out, being alone is not just synonymous with loneliness; solitude is a beautiful and very natural state to be in. And anyway, memories, of people, good times, sunsets and banal things, they endure. They make you smile.

“What’s different is the atmosphere. Gone is the anger. Gone is the man-bashing. In their place, an air of wistful nostalgia seems to have seeped into her art,” wrote the Sunday Times’ Waldemar Januszczak. “Where previously it was Margate’s darknesses and cruelty she remembered, here she seems to be reliving the nice bits. The sensuous experience of making love. The good side of having a boyfriend.”

This exhibition is thus emblematic of Emin, still distinctly “her”, and echoes of her past articulated in her artwork, but reasoned, conceptualised through the eyes of a 48-year-old-woman, who has become “a somebody”, even if all she ever wanted – realised in hindsight – was enduring, forever after love.

“I want love,” she told the Guardian at the back end of last month. “I want to spend my life with someone and do nice things and go on adventures, read books and have nice food and celebrate things. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in the bedroom like some people who just go to bed and never get out again.”

There’s that bed again, but after you’ve seen the show, you’re not thinking of it anymore, that famous messy bed. It doesn’t matter. Instead, you’re caught up in your own memories, priceless and yours.

She Lay Down Deep Beneath The Sea runs until September 23rd.

Richard Hamilton’s final exhibition announced

On the tombstone of Marcel Duchamp his epitaph reads: “D’ailleurs, c’est toujours les autres qui meurent.” Even in death, the great French Dadaist and Surrealist felt the need to confound the limits of reality. In English, the inscription translates into: “Besides, it’s always other people who die.” Ever the iconoclast, Duchamp perhaps wanted to believe in something more than just nothingness, art being one’s religion.

It is left to the imagination to ponder whether Richard Hamilton considered the above words of his friend as he worked on what he understood to be his final exhibition, and indeed, his swansong work of art. Aged 89, Hamilton, though incredibly active, knew he was ill. He saw the Sunset Seine of life lingering poetically in the not so far distance. Can you beat it, he may have inquired, meditatively.

Duchamp was, after all, a huge influence on Hamilton’s ideas of what purpose art served, and of course, why he himself engaged with it. Credited with coining the term Pop Art and thus making possible one of the most visually stunning and provocative movements in art, Hamilton has, beyond the grave, realised Duchamp’s philosophical tombstone musing. This autumn, the exhibition he was working on, of which his unfinished work will figure as the showpiece, will be launched at the National Gallery, poignantly titled The Late Works.

Most famous for, though not defined by in a limiting way, “Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?”, dry British wit articulated through collage in a most refined sense, Hamilton was one of the most important artists of the post-war period, gifted with a superb mind and a polite detachment from his contemporaries.

It is this intelligence – described by Roxy Music’s Brian Ferry, a former student of Hamilton, as frightening – and unwillingness to be defined by any given movement, however important, that sets him apart from the likes of Andy Warhol and David Hockney, the latter being the last of the great pop pioneers.

“I do whatever I feel like,” he told the Guardian’s Rachel Cook in 2010. “People don’t seem to understand that an artist is free to do whatever he wants, and I’ve always relished that possibility.”

He added that, like Duchamp, he was keen on originality, to constantly push the envelope, at least to his own understanding of what it was he was creating: “In art, it’s the mind, not the eye that should be active.”

It is therefore erroneous to class his work as Pop Art. Though we understand this generalisation, it is not sufficient enough to describe his oeuvre. Though kitsch, would Pop Surrealist be more applicable? Certainly, his upcoming show explores various themes that emerged during his long and illustrious career, including single-point perspectives, and the power of female beauty and renaissance artists. All can, from an informed perspective, allude to Surrealist sensibilities.

With that in mind, his last work gives some indication of such leanings. As the gallery notes, the painting, which is based on Honore de Balzac’s short story Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece), shows three seminal historic figures – Titian, Gustave Courbet and Nicolas Poussin – pondering over a female nude. It is believed to be a response to Etant donnne, which was, coincidentally, Duchamp’s final work.

“Your labour of love has produced a monster of veracity,” wrote Duchamp in a letter to Hamilton, after the first of his Green Books had been published. Though unfinished, the echo of that line might find itself reverberating in the gallery come October 2012. It is a monster of work.