Curators: Roxana Marcoci, Senior Curator, and Sarah Meister, Curator with Drew Sawyer, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography at MoMA
Horacio Coppola (Argentine, 1906-2012) Calle California. Vuelta de Rocha. La Boca 1931 Gelatin silver print, printed 1996 7 5/8 × 11 5/16″ (19.4 × 28.7cm) IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern
The work of Greta Stern is the better known of these two artists (Ringl + Pit studio and the surreal, psychoanalytic 1950s work), but I find it is the underrated photographs of Horacio Coppola that are the gems in this posting.
It is a bit rough that Richard B. Woodward, commenting on the exhibition on the Collector Daily website (below), observes that with no production after 1938 it “raises suspicions that he was not an artist who sustained himself at a top level.” I beg to differ. Many illuminati have short, explosive and powerful careers before giving the game away, or changing to a different medium or form.
He also observes that, “Coppola failed to channel the nocturnal otherworldliness of the city found in Brassäi and Brandt, only a few of these photos have the haunted quality they achieved,” after the curators of the exhibition, in the catalogue, compare Coppola’s work to those two esteemed individuals. He cites a “sneaky street picture” from 1936 as evidence and instance of an image where Coppola captured a magical moment. I think both curators and critic are missing the point. Coppola is certainly NOT like Brassäi and Brandt in that his photographs at night are not ROMANTIC photographs of the nocturnal fabric of the city. Coppola’s images do NOT possess the kind of magic that Woodward is looking for (that of Brassai’s Paris at Night for example), that he believes should be there, simply because they are of a different order. But that does not make them any less valuable in terms of their insight and energy.
Coppola’s images, steeped in his training at the Bauhaus, are objective, modernist magic. By that I mean they possess a most uncanny use of form, of space and light. Day or night, he places his camera so carefully, in such a controlled and ego-less way, that the precision of his renditions is exquisite. For example, look at Calle Florida (1936, below). What seems an ordinary street, a photograph that anyone could have taken. But no! look again. That perfect rendition of shadow, darkness, movement and the spaces between the figures, The eye is led down the street to the vanishing point and then is released with all that pent up energy in to the V of the sky. Magnificent.
I wish I had more of his photographs to show you, especially his night shots. Coppola wasn’t a Walker Evans or a Paul Strand, certainly not a Kertész, Brassäi or Brandt because he simply was himself, with his own unique signature. He should NEVER be put down for that. I hope this wonderful artist starts to get the recognition he deserves.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum of Modern Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Horacio Coppola (Argentine, 1906-2012) Buenos Aires 1931 Gelatin silver print 3 1/8 x 4 9/16″ (8 x 11.6cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Vital Projects Fund, Robert B. Menschel
“The catalog contends that Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola created a stunning body of work, but the show argues, in many ways, for two discrete bodies of work. What might have been accomplished instead of trying to insert two lesser known figures into the canon is to highlight what’s really interesting about their lives and careers: that they – and particularly Stern – were migratory and interdisciplinary, harbingers of the kinds of artistic practice we see today in which commerce, parenthood and politics can no longer be elided, and so they become part of the work. The museum could have showcased their work along with that of their friends and compatriots, from Bauhaus to Buenos Aires, from the literary world to the poets, writers, activists and psychoanalysts with whom they interacted and not just as mute players in this narrative. Now that would have been an extraordinary show.”
“Coppola (1906-2012), on the other hand, has no paper trail of distinction. Outside of his native Argentina, where he was an early convert to Modernism in the late 1920s and later an evangelist for the style, his name draws a blank in most art circles. Parr and Badger cite his Buenos Aires, published in 1937, in volume 2 of their photobook history. But not until 2011 were Coppola’s photographs exhibited in New York, and then only in an imported group show titled Light of Modernity in Buenos Aires (1929-1954) at the Nailya Alexander Gallery. Since then, nothing until now…
The wall of photographs in the next room, done after 1935 when he returned to Argentina – and the basis of the book Buenos Aires – are meant to present Coppola at the height of his powers. Meister puts these views of the Argentine capital – teeming with urban crowds on the streets or at racetracks, shopping at department stores, walking through illuminated streets at night – on a par with Brassäi’s of Paris and Brandt’s of London.
This is a stretch. Perhaps because the prints are hung salon-style, many of them too low for their details to be read, or, more likely, because Coppola failed to channel the nocturnal otherworldliness of the city found in Brassäi and Brandt, only a few these photos have the haunted quality they achieved. If I knew Buenos Aires and had an interior map of these places in my head, I might change my mind. But a sneaky street picture from 1936 of three passersby looking into the front windows of a bridal shop, which are filled with staged, idealised portraits of marriage bliss, is one of the few instances where Coppola captured a magical moment. The absence of anything he did after 1938 raises suspicions that he was not an artist who sustained himself at a top level.”
Richard B. Woodward. “From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola @MoMA” on the Collector Daily website June 17, 2015 [Online] Cited 01/10/2015. No longer available online
Horacio Coppola (Argentine, 1906-2012) Rivadivia between Salguero and Medrano 1931 Gelatin silver print, printed 1996 7 5/8 × 11 5/16″ (19.4 × 28.7cm) IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern
Horacio Coppola (Argentine, 1906-2012) Still Life with Egg and Twine 1932 Gelatin silver print 8 1/8 x 10 1/8″ (20.7 x 25.7cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection. Acquired through the generosity of Peter Norton
Horacio Coppola (Argentine, 1906-2012) London 1934 Gelatin silver print 6 x 7 5/8″ (15.2 x 19.3cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Latin American and Caribbean Fund
Horacio Coppola (Argentine, 1906-2012) London 1934 Gelatin silver print 5 11/16 x 7 3/8″ (14.5 x 18.7cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Committee on Photography Fund
Horacio Coppola (Argentine, 1906-2012) Avenida Diaz Velez al 4800 1936 Gelatin silver print, printed 1952 16 3/4 x 23 1/2″ (42.5 x 59.7cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Agnes Rindge Claflin Fund
Horacio Coppola (Argentine, 1906-2012) Avenida Diaz Velez al 4800 (detail) 1936 Gelatin silver print, printed 1952 16 3/4 x 23 1/2″ (42.5 x 59.7cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Agnes Rindge Claflin Fund
Horacio Coppola (Argentine, 1906-2012) Balneario Municipal 1936 Gelatin silver print 8 1/4 x 10 7/16″ (21 x 26.5cm) Estate of Horacio Coppola; courtesy Galería Jorge Mara – La Ruche, Buenos Aires
Horacio Coppola (Argentine, 1906-2012) Balneario Municipal (detail) 1936 Gelatin silver print 8 1/4 x 10 7/16″ (21 x 26.5cm) Estate of Horacio Coppola; courtesy Galería Jorge Mara – La Ruche, Buenos Aires
Horacio Coppola (Argentine, 1906-2012) Directorio and J.M. Moreno 1936 Gelatin silver print 6 5/8 × 7 13/16″ (16.8 × 19.8cm) Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
Horacio Coppola (Argentine, 1906-2012) Plaza San Martín from Kavanagh 1936 Gelatin silver print 7 5/16 x 10 1/2″ (18.5 x 26.7cm) Private Collection
From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola is the first major exhibition of the German-born Grete Stern and the Argentinean Horacio Coppola, two leading figures of avant-garde photography who established themselves on both sides of the Atlantic. In Berlin in 1927, Stern began taking private classes with Walter Peterhans, who was soon to become head of photography at the Bauhaus. A year later, in Peterhans’s studio, she met Ellen (Rosenberg) Auerbach, with whom she opened a pioneering studio specialising in portraiture and advertising. Named after their childhood nicknames, the studio ringl + pit embraced both commercial and avant-garde loyalties, creating proto-feminist works.
In Buenos Aires during the same period, Coppola initiated his photographic experimentations, exploring his surroundings and contributing to the discourse on modernist practices across media in local cultural magazines. In 1929 he founded the Buenos Aires Film Club to introduce the most advanced foreign films to Argentine audiences. His early works show a burgeoning interest in new modes of photographic expression that led him to the Bauhaus in 1932, where he met Stern and they began their joint history.
Following the close of the Bauhaus and the rising threat of the Nazi powers in 1933, Stern and Coppola fled Germany. Stern arrived first in London, where her friends included activists affiliated with leftist circles and where she made her now iconic portraits of German exiles. After traveling through Europe, camera in hand, Coppola joined Stern in London, where he pursued a modernist idiom in his photographs of the fabric of the city, tinged alternately with social concern and surrealist strangeness.
In the summer of 1935, Stern and Coppola embarked for Buenos Aires where they mounted an exhibition in the offices of the avant-garde magazine Sur, announcing the arrival of modern photography in Argentina. The unique character of Buenos Aires was captured in Coppola’s photographic encounters from the city’s centre to its outskirts and in Stern’s numerous portraits of the city’s intelligentsia. The exhibition ends in the early 1950s, with Stern’s forward-thinking Sueños (Dreams), a series of photomontages she contributed to the popular women’s magazine Idilio, portraying women’s dreams with urgency and surreal wit.
The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication edited by Roxana Marcoci and Sarah Meister with a selection of original texts by Stern and Coppola translated into English by Rachel Kaplan. The catalogue will consist of three essays on the artists written by the exhibition curators and scholar Jodi Roberts.
Text from the MoMA website
Ringl + Pit (German) Ringlpitis 1931 Artist book with collage 7 7/8 x 7 7/8″ (20 x 20cm) Estate of Horacio Coppola, Buenos Aires
Ringl + Pit (German) Ringlpitis (detail) 1931 Artist book with collage 7 7/8 x 7 7/8″ (20 x 20cm) Estate of Horacio Coppola, Buenos Aires
Ringl + Pit (German) Columbus’ Egg 1930 Gelatin silver print 9 1/4 x 7 7/8″ (23.5 x 20cm) Collection Helen Kornblum
Ringl + Pit (German) Hat and Gloves 1930 Gelatin silver print Image: 14 7/8 x 9 3/4″ (37.8 x 24.8cm) Sheet: 15 11/16 x 10 1/2″ (39.8 x 26.7cm) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Ringl + Pit (German) Ellen Auerbach Grete Stern Soapsuds 1930 Gelatin silver print 7 x 6 1/4″ (17.8 x 15.9cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Roxann Taylor
Ringl + Pit (German) Komol 1931 Gelatin silver print 14 1/8 x 9 5/8″ (35.9 x 24.4cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell
Grete Stern (Argentine born Germany, 1904-1999) Self-Portrait 1943 Gelatin silver print, printed 1958 11 x 8 11/16″ (28 x 22cm) Estate of Horacio Coppola, Buenos Aires
The Museum of Modern Art has organised the first major exhibition to examine the individual accomplishments and parallel developments of two of the foremost practitioners of avant-garde photography, film, advertising, and graphic design in the first half of the 20th century: Grete Stern (German, 1904-1999) and Horacio Coppola (Argentine, 1906-2012). From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola will be on view May 17 through October 4, 2015, and features more than 300 works gathered from museums and private collection across Europe and the Americas – many of which have never before been exhibited in the United States. These include more than 250 vintage photographs and photomontages, 40 works of original typographic design and award-winning advertising materials, 26 photobooks and periodicals, and four experimental 16mm films. From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires is organised by Roxana Marcoci, Senior Curator, and Sarah Meister, Curator; with Drew Sawyer, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography.
Stern and Coppola were united in their exploration of a modernist idiom, yet despite their relationship as husband and wife (from 1935 to 1943) they pursued this goal along remarkably original paths. Having started their artistic careers within the European avant-garde of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Stern and Coppola produced their major body of works in Argentina, where they thrived amid a vibrant milieu of Argentine and émigré artists and intellectuals. As harbingers of New Vision photography in a country caught up in the throes of forging its own modern identity, their distinctly experimental styles led to their recognition as founders of modern Latin American photography.
The earliest works in the exhibition date from the late 1920s to the early 1930s, when both artists began their initial forays into photography and graphic design. After beginning her studies in Berlin with Walter Peterhans, who became head of photography at the Bauhaus, in 1928 Stern met Ellen (Rosenberg) Auerbach and together they opened the pioneering studio ringl + pit, specialising in portraiture and advertising. Named after their childhood nicknames (Stern was ringl; Auerbach was pit), the studio embraced both commercial and avant-garde loyalties, creating proto-feminist works. The exhibition presents a large number of photographs, graphic design materials, and advertisements by the duo that explored alternative models of the feminine. Defying the conventional style of German advertising photography in this period, ringl + pit emerged as a dissident voice that stirred the interest of critics, artists, and consumers.
Coppola’s first photographs, made in Buenos Aires in the late 1920s, reveal an optical curiosity completely out of sync with prevailing trends in Argentina. Instead of using the camera to accurately render the details of the visible world, Coppola instead explored its potential to complicate traditional understandings of pictorial space. Like Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy, he was interested in the effects of light, prisms, and glass for their visual and metaphoric potential, and he photographed his native city from unexpected perspectives akin to Germaine Krull’s images of Paris from the same decade. These early works show the burgeoning interest in new modes of photographic expression that led him to the Bauhaus in 1932, where he met Stern.
Following the close of the Bauhaus and the rising threat of the Nazi powers in 1933, Stern and Coppola fled Germany. Stern arrived first in London, where her friends included activists affiliated with leftist circles, and the exhibition presents her now iconic portraits of German exiles, including those of playwright Bertolt Brecht, actress Helene Weigel, Marxist philosopher Karl Korsch, and psychoanalyst Paula Heimann. After traveling and photographing throughout Europe, Coppola joined Stern in London, where his modernist photographs depicting the fabric of the city alternate between social concern and surrealist strangeness.
The exhibition’s third gallery includes films that Coppola produced in Berlin, Paris, and London during these years. The first of these films, Der Traum (The Dream), bears the strongest relationship to Surrealist filmmaking, while his next two films, Un Muelle del Sena (A Quai on the Seine) (1934) and A Sunday on Hampstead Heath (1935), are increasingly ambitious, using the film camera alternately as a still camera and for its unique capacity to pan across a scene and to capture action in urban environments.
In 1935, Stern and Coppola married and embarked for Buenos Aires, where they mounted an exhibition in the offices of the avant-garde magazine Sur, announcing the arrival of modern photography in Argentina. Following the exhibition’s successful critical reception, their home became a hub for artists and intellectuals, both those native to Argentina and the exiles continuously arriving from a war-torn Europe. The fourth gallery in From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires presents Coppola’s photographic encounters from the city’s centre to its outskirts and Stern’s numerous portraits of the city’s intelligentsia.
In 1936, Coppola received a career-defining commission to photograph Buenos Aires for a major publication celebrating the 400th anniversary of the city’s founding. Coppola used the opportunity to construct his own modern vision of the city, one that would incorporate the celebration of the local and his appreciation of the city’s structure inspired by the architect Le Corbusier. Concurrently, Coppola made his final film, The Birth of the Obelisk – an ode to Buenos Aires and its newly constructed monument. The film combines dynamic shots of the city with sequences of carefully constructed stills, demonstrating in six-and-a half minutes a vibrant, confident mix of influences, from Moholy-Nagy and Krull to the Concrete art movement in Argentina to films by Walter Ruttmann, Charles Sheeler, and Paul Strand.
Throughout the 1940s, Stern took incisive portraits of artists and writers, many of whom were aligned with the international antifascist cause and the emergence of an emancipatory feminist consciousness. These included playwright Amparo Alvajar; socialist realist painters Antonio Berni, Gertrudis Chale, and Lino Eneas Spilimbergo; poet Mony Hermelo; and graphic designer Clément Moreau. Among Stern’s numerous other subjects were poet-politician Pablo Neruda, abstract painter Manuel Ángeles Ortiz, and writer Jorge Luis Borges.
The exhibition concludes in the mid-1950s, at the end of Juan Domingo Perón’s era, with a large presentation of Stern’s Sueños (Dreams), a series of forward-thinking photomontages that she contributed on a weekly basis to the women’s magazine Idilio (Idyll) from 1948 to 1951. In Dream No. 1: Electrical Appliances for the Home, an elegantly dressed woman is converted into a table lamp that waits to be turned on by a male hand, using electricity as a sexual pun to expose feminine objectification. In Dream No. 24: Surprise, a female protagonist hides her face in shock as she confronts a larger-than-life baby doll advancing toward her. Debunking fantasies about women’s lives, Stern plumbed the depths of her own experience as a mother and artist to negotiate the terms between blissful domesticity and entrapment, privacy and exposure, cultural sexism and intellectual rebellion.
Press release from the MoMA website
Horacio Coppola (Argentine, 1906-2012) Untitled (Staircase at Calle Corrientes) 1928 Gelatin silver print 13 3/4 x 11 3/4″ (34.9 x 29.9cm) Collection Alexis Fabry, Paris
Horacio Coppola (Argentine, 1906-2012) “¡Esto es Buenos Aires!” (Jorge Luis Borges) “This is Buenos Aires!” (Jorge Luis Borges) 1931 Gelatin silver print 8 11/16 x 5 7/8″ (22 x 15cm) Estate of Horacio Coppola, Buenos Aires
Horacio Coppola (Argentine, 1906-2012) Avenida Corrientes towards the West 1936 Gelatin silver print 8 1/16 x 5 5/16″ (20.5 x 13.5cm) Estate of Horacio Coppola; courtesy Galería Jorge Mara – La Ruche, Buenos Aires
Horacio Coppola (Argentine, 1906-2012) Buenos Aires 1936 Gelatin silver print 8 3/16 x 5 15/16″ (20.8 x 15.1cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Latin American and Caribbean Fund
Horacio Coppola (Argentine, 1906-2012) Calle Corrientes at the Corner of Reconquista 1936 Gelatin silver print 11 × 7 11/16″ (28 × 19.5cm) IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern
Horacio Coppola (Argentine, 1906-2012) Calle Florida at 8 pm 1936 Gelatin silver print 14 3/4 x 11 7/16″ (37.5 x 29cm) Eric Franck Fine Art, London
Grete Stern (Argentine born Germany, 1904-1999) Brecht 1934 Gelatin silver print 10 1/4 x 6 11/16″ (26 x 17cm) Private Collection, Boston
Grete Stern (Argentine born Germany, 1904-1999) Gyula Kosice 1945 Gelatin silver print 11 7/16 x 9 1/8″ (29.1 x 23.2cm) Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany
Gyula Kosice, born Fernando Fallik (April 26, 1924) in Košice (Slovakia) is a naturalised Argentine sculptor, plastic artist, theoretician and poet, one of the most important figures in kinetic and luminal art and luminance vanguard. He used his natal city name as artist name. He was one of the precursors of abstract and non-figurative art in Latin America.
Grete Stern (Argentine born Germany, 1904-1999) Jorge Luis Borges 1951 Gelatin silver print 10 13/16 x 8 1/4″ (27.5 x 21cm) Estate of Horacio Coppola, Buenos Aires
Grete Stern (Argentine born Germany, 1904-1999) Sueño No. 7: Who Will She Be? 1949 Gelatin silver print 15 1/2 × 19 1/16″ (39.4 × 48.4cm) Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
Grete Stern (Argentine born Germany, 1904-1999) Sueño No. 1: Electrical Appliances for the Home 1949 Gelatin silver print 10 1/2 x 9″ (26.6 x 22.9cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Latin American and Caribbean Fund through gift of Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis in honor of Adriana Cisneros de Griffin
Grete Stern (Argentine born Germany, 1904-1999) Sueño No. 28: Love without Illusion 1951 Gelatin silver print 19 11/16 × 15 3/4″ (50 × 40cm) IVAM, Institut Valencià d’ Art Modern
Grete Stern (Argentine born Germany, 1904-1999) Sueño No. 27: Doesn’t Fade with Water 1951 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 11 7/16 x 9 1/16″ (29 x 23cm) Collection Eduardo F. Costantini, Buenos Aires
Grete Stern (Argentine born Germany, 1904-1999) Sueño No. 31: Made in England 1950 Gelatin silver print 19 11/16 × 13 3/16″ (50 × 33.5cm) IVAM, Institut Valencià d’ Art Modern
Grete Stern (Argentine born Germany, 1904-1999) D.L.H. 1925 Photocollage 8 7/16 x 6 5/16″ (21.5 x 16cm) Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany
Grete Stern (Argentine born Germany, 1904-1999) Photomontage for Madí, Ramos Mejía, Argentina 1946-1947 Gelatin silver print 23 9/16 x 19 7/16″ (59.8 x 49.4cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Latin American and Caribbean Fund and partial gift of Mauro Herlitzka
“She also photographed members of Madí (from the first two letters of the words “materialismo dialéctico”), who were committed to abstraction as an antidote to the propaganda disseminated by Juan Perón. One of Ms. Stern’s best-known works, on view here, is the “Photomontage for Madí, Ramos Mejia, Argentina” (1946-1947), which she made for the second issue of their journal. For the images, she used the “M” from a neon sign advertising Movado watches and superimposed “Madí” over the obelisk designed by Alberto Prebisch to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Buenos Aires. The obelisk symbolized, for her milieu, abstract geometry.”
“The untold want by life and land ne’er granted, Now, voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.”
Walt Whitman (1819-1892). “Untold Want,” from Leaves of Grass. 1900
Joseph Cornell is my favourite artist who has ever lived on this Earth. I do not make this observation lightly, but after much consideration, thought and reflection.
I have always loved his work, from the very first time I saw it in a book. To then see a recreation of one of his 1950s exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2001 was one of those seminal moments where you are lifted out of yourself, where your life becomes forever changed. For me that transcendent experience is up there with being alone with the Rembrandt portraits in the Louvre for 10 precious minutes. Both were among the most exquisite, poignant and beautiful spiritual experiences I have had in my life.
I am not an expert on Cornell, although I have read many books on his work and on his spirituality. He saw himself as an “armchair voyager”, a bit like a latter day Baudelaire, a man who has romantic notions of travel but never actually goes anywhere, who has romantic notions of love but never finds it, except in his imagination. Cornell never left his native New York. Cornell expressed his self through a passion for the artefacts he collected, through his assemblage of those artefacts into magical boxes that addressed unrequited love and faith – for Hollywood and movie stars, ballerinas, hotels, birds, the Renaissance, princes and princesses, the stars, games and chance. He was an avid collector, rummaging through the junk shops of New York and storing his collectibles for his art, something to which I have an affinity, being an avid op shopper (or thrift shopper) myself.
Here I can see an association with the words of Walt Whitman in his lines “Untold Want” from Leaves of Grass, those lines forming the title for the book upon which the film Now Voyager (1942) with Bette Davis was based. “The untold want” of Whitman’s lines are whatever you yearn for and cannot get in the social context (“life”) and place (“land”) where you are born. Whitman says, stop “studying the charts,” and “now obey, thy cherish’d, secret wish,” – in other words he’s saying that your heart’s desire is the best indicator of where your destiny lies, but it is possible to miss out on it by not going for it. Fast forward to Now Voyager where frumpy Bette Davis has an affair with a married man, becomes independent, defies her tyrannical mother who promptly dies, and ends up circuitously looking after her lover’s daughter. They decide to have a platonic relationship “sustaining a romantic, unconsummated relationship and creating a ‘family’ by becoming the surrogate, adoptive care-giver for his daughter.”
There is a specific desire here. Davis and Whitman are freed to love without restriction in a romantic way, and after the end of Now Voyager, perhaps Cornell is channelling Bette Davis. He loved in his mind, he created boxes in his imagination (and then physically), he astral travelled through the stars, he created games of chance (such as penny arcades and slot machines) and shooting galleries (that exposed his inner mind) letting the air rush out into the world. He created surreality itself but he was never surreal, for his work is always based on the collision of realities. His boxes are tiny cosmos, like the Tardis from Dr Who, the interior (under a microscope, within four walls) larger than the exterior … yet, magically, they inhabit the whole world, they inhabit our mind. He used the alchemical reaction of elements, the elementary, to affect travel, love, life and change. And he did it in four dimensions for his boxes affect us as much today as he did when he created them. Perhaps that is why I like his work so much… he used seemingly mundane materials, multi/media objects, imagination and love to let’s our spirits soar into the universe. No other artist has ever affected me so much. No one ever will.
Undeniably, Cornell’s poetic theatres are joyous creations that free our soul from the everyday.
Perhaps it is through love, or in death, or the afterlife, that the Voyager can seek that untold want.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
My Mind to me a Kingdom Is
Sir Edward Dyer (1543-1607)
1 My mind to me a kingdom is; 2 Such perfect joy therein I find 3 That it excels all other bliss 4 Which God or nature hath assign’d. 5 Though much I want that most would have, 6 Yet still my mind forbids to crave.
7 No princely port, nor wealthy store, 8 No force to win a victory, 9 No wily wit to salve a sore, 10 No shape to win a loving eye; 11 To none of these I yield as thrall, – 12 For why? my mind despise them all.
13 I see that plenty surfeit oft, 14 And hasty climbers soonest fall; 15 I see that such as are aloft 16 Mishap doth threaten most of all. 17 These get with toil and keep with fear; 18 Such cares my mind can never bear.
19 I press to bear no haughty sway, 20 I wish no more than may suffice, 21 I do no more than well I may, 22 Look, what I want my mind supplies. 23 Lo ! thus I triumph like a king, 24 My mind content with anything.
25 I laugh not at another’s loss, 26 Nor grudge not at another’s gain; 27 No worldly waves my mind can toss; 28 I brook that is another’s bane. 29 I fear no foe, nor fawn on friend, 30 I loathe not life, nor dread mine end.
31 My wealth is health and perfect ease, 32 And conscience clear my chief defence; 33 I never seek by bribes to please, 34 Nor by desert to give offence. 35 Thus do I live, thus will I die, – 36 Would all did so as well as I!
“Beauty should be shared for it enhances our joys. To explore its mystery is to venture towards the sublime.”
“Life can have significance even if it appears to be a series of failures.”
Joseph Cornell
Bette Davis ~ Don’t Let’s Ask For The Moon (Now Voyager 1942)
“Cornell was a voyager, travelling through space and time to dimensions of the imagination and the spirit. He infused this sense of adventure and an infinite beyond into modestly scaled works whose fragments of reality give way to worlds to be explored.”
Robert Lehrman, Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay Eterniday, 2003
“White is just what I mean. Not monstrously, but in wonderful variations. All I want to perform is white magic.”
Joseph Cornell quoted in Tracking the Marvellous: A Life in the New York Art World, John Bernard Myers, 1984
Unidentified photographer The Cornell family c. 1915 Joseph Cornell (far right) with his parents (Joseph I. Cornell, Sr. and Helen Storms Cornell) and siblings (l to r: Elizabeth, Helen, and Robert) Joseph Cornell papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
“What kind of man is this, who, from old brown cardboard photographs collected in second-hand bookstores, has reconstructed the nineteenth century “grand tour” of Europe for his mind’s eye more vividly than those who took it, who was not born then and has never been abroad, who knows Vesuvius’s look on a certain morning of AD 79, and of the cast-iron balconies of that hotel in Lucerne?”
Robert Motherwell on Joseph Cornell, Joseph Cornell’s Theatre of the Mind, 1993
“He uses selected, sought-for, desired objects. He must have been clipping all the time, poring through magazines, collecting things and haunting junk shops and flea markets, looking for the images that corresponded to his imagination.”
Susan Sontag, Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box, directed by Mark Stokes, 1991
“Creative filing Creative arranging As poetics As technique As joyous creation”
Joseph Cornell, diary entry, 9 March 1959
“On the way to ART OF THIS CENTURY from Julien’s, carrying De Medici girl Slot Machine and bird with cracked glass saw Marlene Dietrich in polo coat and black beanie cap on back of hair waiting at curb of Jay Thorpe’s for a taxi. First time I’d seen her off screen and brought an unexpectedly elated feeling. Working in cellar that night on Soap Bubble Set the green glass locket portrait of her on the floor evoked very special feelings.”
Joseph Cornell, diary entry, spring 1944
“Original inspiration of the bird store, windows, simplicity of magic, pet shop.”
Joseph Cornell, c. 1943, Joseph Cornell Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
“Some of his boxes are less cryptic, and more naturalistic, such as Untitled (Owl Habitat), from the 1940s. The snowy owl trapped behind a pane of glass is not a fancy piece of taxidermy fit for a natural history diorama, but a mere paper illustration pasted onto plywood. The midnight-blue forest the owl inhabits is contrived from painted bark and lichen. Cornell, of course, was himself a famous night owl. In some ways the owl box can seem as close as he ever came to self-portraiture, with its majestic creature alone in the woods, eyes wide, watching.”
The title of our Joseph Cornell exhibition is Wanderlust. Curator Sarah Lea describes how this theme is closely linked to Cornell’s artistic practice, and his travels of the imagination.
Joseph Cornell (1903-1972), born on Christmas Eve in Nyack, New York, remains one of the most enigmatic yet influential American artists of the twentieth century. Almost entirely self-taught as an artist, Cornell lived quietly for most of his life with his mother and younger brother, crafting in the confines of his basement or on the kitchen table the ‘shadow boxes’ for which he is best known.
He rarely travelled, and almost never left New York, yet his work, based on collage and assemblage, resonates with references to foreign places and distant times. In the course of his life he befriended ballerinas, film stars, poets and generations of world-famous artists. He showed in a succession of New York galleries, participated in landmark group shows at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was honoured before he died with major surveys at the Pasadena Museum of Californian Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
A popular romanticised image of Cornell pervades as an ascetic outsider – a shy, eccentric man yearning for intimacy, unable to converse with the women who enthralled him but with a vibrant interior life of daydreams and an imagination capable of crossing oceans, centuries and the celestial realm. Yet this mythologised version of the man belies his active interest in the art movements of his time, and the innovative nature of his creations which have paved the way for today’s appropriation and installation artists, contemporary collage and archive based practices.
This exhibition at the Royal Academy brings together 80 of Cornell’s most remarkable shadow boxes, assemblages, collages and films, including many works held in private collections and a number never seen before outside of the USA. The first major UK exhibition solely devoted to Cornell in almost 35 years, it presents a rare chance to experience a concentrated survey of his oeuvre, and to journey inside the mind of an artist who described himself as ‘an armchair voyager’. The ‘wanderlust’ referenced in the exhibition title – the desire to explore and travel the world – is central to Cornell’s art, as was his penchant for collecting and his astonishingly wide-ranging interests. His creations transport the viewer into private universes, populated with objects and ephemera imbued with personal associations.
From a basement in New York, Joseph Cornell channelled his limitless imagination into some of the most original art of the 20th century. Step into his beguiling world at this landmark exhibition. Cornell hardly ventured beyond New York State, yet the notion of travel was central to his art. His imaginary voyages began as he searched Manhattan’s antique bookshops and dime stores, collecting a vast archive of paper ephemera and small objects to make his signature glass-fronted ‘shadow boxes’. These miniature masterpieces transform everyday objects into spellbinding treasures. Together they reveal his fascination with subjects from astronomy and cinema to literature and ornithology and especially his love of European culture, from the Romantic ballet to Renaissance Italy.
Wanderlust brings together 80 of Cornell’s most remarkable boxes, assemblages, collages and films, some never before seen outside the USA. Entirely self-taught, the independence of Cornell’s creative voice won the admiration of artists from Marcel Duchamp and the Surrealists, to Robert Motherwell and the Abstract Expressionists, with echoes of his work felt in Pop and Minimalist art. Wanderlust is a long overdue celebration of an incomparable artist, a man the New York Times called “a poet of light; an architect of memory-fractured rooms and a connoisseur of stars, celestial and otherwise.”
Early Life
Joseph Cornell was the eldest of four children – he had two sisters, Elizabeth and Helen, and a brother, Robert, who suffered from cerebral palsy and was confined to a wheelchair for most of his life. When Cornell was thirteen, his father died of leukaemia and Robert became Joseph’s responsibility (partly to assuage their overbearing mother). Robert however was a cheerful child and took pleasure in drawing and collecting model trains. Cornell considered Robert to be a pure soul, and willingly took on his brother’s care. A salesman and textile designer, Cornell’s father had left considerable debts for his family to manage and for several years Cornell’s mother was forced to take odd jobs to support the family, and move them into a succession of smaller rented houses. In 1917, with the help of his father’s former employer, Joseph was able to enrol at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts: a highly regarded private school. There he discovered an interest in American and European literature, poetry, history and French. Yet, away from his close knit family and after the relatively recent death of his father, Cornell struggled and was a mediocre student. He developed the first in a lifelong series of nervous crises and stomach problems, and left the Academy in 1921 without graduating.
Upon his return home, Cornell assumed the role of ‘man of the house’ and became a sample salesman in his father’s trade for a wholesale textile business, the William Whitman Company on lower Madison Avenue. Cornell found the job mundane and himself unsuited to its demands. In his twenties, a time when the stress of supporting his family was exacerbating his stomach ailments, he converted to Christian Science. This religion teaches that reality is purely spiritual and the material world an illusion, so disease and other afflictions associated with the physical body are thought to be manifestations of a troubled mind that ought to be treated with prayer, not medicine. Joseph remained an active member until his death and recruited his brother Robert and sister Elizabeth into the fold.
In 1929, Mrs Cornell moved the family to an unassuming house at 3708 Utopia Parkway in Flushing, Queens, New York. Here, Cornell would live with his mother and brother until he died. His main escape from the tedium of domestic life and the awkward social interactions thrust upon him at work was to walk the city streets in his lunch hour, browsing the second-hand bookshops on Fourth Avenue, the flea markets and dime stores, collecting keepsakes and scavenging for relics and once-precious fragments of other people’s lives. Cornell loved to explore Manhattan and the ‘teeming life of the metropolis’, which seemed to him the epitome of glamour. These wanderings led to Cornell amassing a vast personal archive of treasured finds – books, prints, postcards and three-dimensional ephemera such as clay pipes and watch springs – often tinged with the romance of foreign places and the nostalgia of times past, which would in due course form the material elements of the very personal poetry that is his art.
Play and Experiment
Although he did not complete his formal education, Cornell was extremely well read and kept abreast of Manhattan’s literary, musical and artistic events. Not only did he regularly attend the theatre and the ballet, but he also became an avid cinema-goer, thriving on the excitement of the city. Indeed, Cornell often waited at the stage door of theatres and opera houses for a glimpse of the female performers he idolised. He also spent time in art galleries, and in 1931 at the Julien Levy Gallery he came across collages by Max Ernst (1891-1976), a pioneer of Surrealism, who combined high art and popular imagery in his work.
Although Cornell was never officially part of the Surrealist movement and came to dismiss Surrealist associations with his own practice, it had a major influence on him, most notably inspiring his embrace of unexpected juxtapositions in his assemblages and his experimental films, like Rose Hobart (1936). Rejecting Surrealism’s more violent and erotic aspects – the shock effect of jarring images – Cornell preferred instead what he described as the ‘white magic’ side of Surrealism, and the poetic connections between everyday objects.
By 1931 Cornell had shifted from simply collecting objects to creating them. He began to make collages and assemblages first in a style resembling Max Ernst’s, then in his own manner. The basis of collage – piecing together and assembling – would be central to Cornell’s works throughout his life, be they two- or three-dimensional. At this early stage he took images from the dense dossiers of engravings and clippings that he had accumulated by this time, fashioning compositions from seemingly unrelated cutout images to create whimsical pairings, which often revealed his dual interests in science and the world of children. Both these themes would recur and overlap throughout his career…
After viewing a number of Cornell’s small surreal collages, such as Untitled (Schooner), 1931, Julien Levy invited him to show in his exhibition, Surréalisme, which opened in January 1932. Later, Levy offered Cornell a solo show, the first of several that were held at his gallery. Entitled Objects by Joseph Cornell: Minutiae, Glass Bells, Shadow Boxes, Coups d’Oeil, Jouets Surréalistes, it included a series of collages and small three-dimensional objects such as bell jars and pillboxes. All the works were made at his kitchen table at night as his mother and brother slept.
Uneasy about his work being associated with Surrealism, Cornell later wrote to Alfred H. Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and organiser of the 1936 exhibition, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, in which Cornell’s work was to feature: “In the event that you are saying a word or two about my work in the catalogue, I would appreciate your saying that I do not share in the subconscious and dream theories of the Surrealists. While fervently admiring much of their work I have never been an official Surrealist, and I believe that Surrealism has healthier possibilities than have been developed.” Regardless of Cornell’s own attempt to distance himself from the movement, Surrealism provided him, at least, with a context in which he could make his collages and objets, and understand them as deserving of a mature and discerning audience.
Around this time, Cornell encountered the collages and box constructions of Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), composed of urban detritus, and the ‘readymades’ of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), which are ordinary, unaltered manufactured objects designated by the artist to be works of art. In Duchamp, Cornell discovered an unlikely friend; the two regularly corresponded throughout their lifetime. When Duchamp visited New York in the 1940s, he enlisted Cornell to help him with a new project, a miniature ‘museum’ of his work, known as the Boîte-en-valise or ‘box in a suitcase’. Cornell already had his own ‘valise’ experiment, Untitled (The Crystal Cage: Portrait of Berenice).
Collecting and Classification
In the 1930s, Cornell began to make the ‘shadow boxes’ for which he is best known – glass-fronted box constructions containing intimately-scaled arrangements of found objects and paper ephemera, assembled in a sort of three-dimensional collage. The 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at MoMA, New York, showed one of his first shadow boxes, Untitled (Soap Bubble Set) (above). This was the first in a long series of the same name and recalls the children’s pastime of blowing bubbles, as well as the eighteenth-century European painting association of bubbles as memento mori, a reminder of the transience of life. Precisely what led Cornell to the idea of the box remains unclear. In a Life magazine article from 1967 he said that it came to him during one of his walks through Manhattan, as he passed a collection of compasses in the window of an antique shop:
“I thought, everything can be used in a lifetime, can’t it, and went on walking. I’d scarcely gone two blocks when I came on another shop window full of boxes, all different kinds […] Halfway home on the train that night, I thought of the compasses and boxes, it occurred to me to put the two together.”
Before Cornell developed his own carpentry skills, his early shadow boxes were housed in prefabricated, semi-antique wooden boxes, popular during the Victorian era for displaying small paintings, ship models, ladies’ handiwork and mementoes. In the nineteenth century, a similar tradition existed in China, where hardwood boxes with sliding glass covers and papered or silk-lined interiors were used to display fine ceramics, especially figurines made for export. Cornell’s approach also recalls European traditions that began to appear in his research dossiers during the 1930s: small seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch and Flemish kunstschranke or kunstkammer – cabinets that housed separate elements assembled to represent the world in miniature. In the mid 1930s, Cornell’s neighbour Carl Backman taught him some basic carpentry skills, which allowed him to construct his own boxes. The boxes are often hard to date accurately, as Cornell would tinker with and refine his constructions over several years, returning to them gradually. However, except for his early boxes which tend to be singular, we can see patterns emerging in his practice as he worked on larger ‘families’ of works that share discernible visual motifs, often unfolding over a decade or more. These series include: ‘Hotels’, ‘Pharmacies’, ‘Aviaries’, ‘Dovecotes’, ‘Observatories’ and ‘Night Skies’.
The ‘Pharmacy’ assemblages, with their compartmentalised structures and associations with collection and classification – a nod to the ordered world of museum display – are a good illustration of one of Cornell’s ‘families’. Here, in this early example of a series that stretched over a decade with at least six similar works, we see a small specimen case containing four ordered rows of five glass jars. Its title appears to refer to medicine and healing, yet as a practising Christian Scientist, Cornell was forbidden to take medicine. Instead, in this miniature apothecary, he has created tonics for the soul and the imagination, with each fragile jar containing an object or substance that has poetic connotations – shells and sand for travel, feathers, delicate butterfly wings, tiny snippets of parchment. The interior is lined with mirrors, creating echoing reflections of the jars that line the shelves. Though its contents may seem trivial, each jar is imbued with significance, its humble items elevated and made precious through the language of their display. Looking into this box, we see a world of associations, nostalgia and elusive meaning.
By the time Cornell created Pharmacy, he had stopped working, and was pursuing his art full time. From this point on, Cornell regularly exhibited and sold his artwork. He also did freelance design work and picture research for magazines such as Vogue and House & Garden. He set up a workshop and storage area in the basement of the house on Utopia Parkway. Working in his new studio, which he sometimes referred to as his ‘laboratory’, Cornell was able to conceive works with more complex craftsmanship than he had been able to do when working at the kitchen table. While most days were spent at home, he would still escape into New York in search of inspiration and to visit friends. A keen diarist, he would sit in Manhattan coffee shops, indulging his notorious sweet tooth with sugary snacks while furiously scribbling notes on scraps of paper that would later be typed up into more formal diary entries.
As well as being an avid people-watcher, Cornell enjoyed ornithology and expressed his love of birds in the ‘Aviary’ and ‘Habitat’ series, which speak of their exoticism and beauty. Birds often symbolise freedom, their flight paths linking the heavens and the earth. In myths and religion, small birds in particular have been used to represent the souls of children freed from their earthly bonds.
While visually distinct from the ‘Pharmacy’ series, Habitat Group for a Shooting Gallery (above) continues the theme of arrangement and classification in Cornell’s work, with the cut-out illustrations of macaws, a parrot and a cockatoo mounted like museum specimens or dioramas against a bright white background. However, this dynamic construction has an uncharacteristic aura of violence, and contrasts with other pieces where the box is seen as a safe environment in which objects could be placed, secure and cherished. In this case, the glass that protects the sanctuary of the box has been cracked, its contents exposed to external elements. The central ‘bullet hole’ directly in front of the cockatoo’s crown acts as a focal point for the assemblage, guiding our eye in and then out to the four corners of the box. Bold splashes of colour convey a sense of theatricality and drama (Cornell referred to some of his boxes as ‘poetic theatres’), and the game counters placed over each bird evoke the targets of shooting galleries in penny arcades. Scattered feathers at the bottom of the construction, the shot glass and splotches of paint all suggest a violent event. In a rare moment of political commentary in Cornell’s work, this habitat serves as a metaphor for the horrors of the Second World War, with the birds embodying the innocence of victims caught up in the destruction of war.
Observation and Exploration
One of the great paradoxes in Cornell’s life was the gulf between the multitudinous references in his work to distant times and foreign places, and the fact that he himself never physically left the USA. He was a devotee of nineteenth century European culture and a collector of Baedeker Guides (to travel, published in the 1830s), timetables and travel literature, yet he never went abroad – not because he didn’t have the means to do so but because, as one commentator noted, he ‘preferred the ticket to the trip’, which makes his evocation of a traveller’s sense of wanderlust even more remarkable. Cornell let dreams of voyages, particularly to Europe, remain imagined and thus unrealised, preserving his reveries in the same fashion as his glass-fronted boxes. Recurring often in his work are poignant emblems of transience and travel – birds, celestial maps, exotic-sounding hotels and luggage tags – but they remain frozen in their boxed confinement. Thus, fittingly, the central paradox in Cornell’s life found expression in the very medium for which he is now best known.
“Original inspiration of the bird store, windows, simplicity of magic, pet shop.”
Joseph Cornell, c. 1943, Joseph Cornell Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
Cornell also dreamed of celestial navigation and was fascinated by the night sky and planets. In Soap Bubble Set (1948, below), Cornell arranged fragments collected during his Manhattan wanderings against the backdrop of an antique lunar map, the roundness of the moon alluding to the titular spherical soap bubble. In his shadow boxes, soap bubbles came to symbolise the relationship between science and childhood imagination, knowledge and wonder, as well as serving as an allegory of vanitas and the ephemerality of life. White Dutch clay pipes, the signature motif of the ‘Soap Bubble’ series, are positioned symmetrically in side compartments, laid out like scientific instruments in a lab, gleaming against the dark velvet interior of the case. These pipes, used as toys for blowing bubbles, suggest the element air, while at a lower level a fragment of driftwood (probably scavenged by Cornell while beach combing on Long Island) grounds us in the natural world and hints at the weathering effects of wind and water over time. A cordial glass stands alone, delicate and vulnerable, empty in this construction but in others from this series cradling a marble, perhaps as a metaphor for forces securing the planets in place. At the top of the construction, the artist has hung a row of seven cylinders, the number possibly invoking the Copernican model of the solar system (in which seven planets orbit the Sun). The overall impression is of a poetic understanding of science, the infinity of space made bearable by the inclusion of objects whose culturally recognisable associations position us, along with Cornell, on Earth.
Ironically, Cornell’s first recorded response to the cosmos was fear. According to his sister Elizabeth, after having returned from school for the Christmas holidays, he woke her one night, ‘shaking like a leaf’, and stood at the window while confessing his anxiety about the concept of infinity. His concern translated to intrigue later in life and his shadow boxes abound with references to astronomy and space exploration. Cornell kept up to date with the latest scientific discoveries and was a keen stargazer, regularly observing the night sky from his backyard, or his kitchen window, sometimes referred to as his ‘observatory’.
In 1949, Cornell joined the Egan Gallery in New York, run by Charles Egan. Around this time we can see a fresh approach emerging in his work, as he branched away from the more theatrical Victorian constructs of his early career, which can appear comparatively dense. This may have been a reaction to Abstract Expressionism, a new movement developed by American painters such as Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) who used abstraction and gesture to convey expressive content. The Egan Gallery’s roster of artists included notable Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) and Franz Kline (1910-1962).
Cornell continued to explore themes of astronomy and celestial navigation in the ‘Observatory’, ‘Night Skies’, and ‘Hotel’ series (the latter also playing with the notion of a hotel as a microcosm of the wider world and, for Cornell, the universe). This work, Andromeda: Grand Hôtel de l’Observatoire (1954, above), combines many of the motifs prevalent in these series, yet is noticeably pared back. The deep, contemplative blue of the composition suggests a starry night sky, and the cracked, aged, white frame evokes the faded grandeur of forgotten European hotels, built for wealthy travellers between the 1880s and 1920s but now fallen into disrepair. Cornell scrapbooked the names of the hotels in this series from adverts in turn-of-the-century guidebooks to European cities.
Despite the smallness of the box, Cornell has created a sense of space within by foregrounding a delicate silver chain and white dowel against the rich starry expanse beyond. The female figure we see in the background is Andromeda, a character in Greek mythology who was chained to a rock as a sacrificial offering to a sea monster because her mother, Cassiopeia, had angered the sea god Poseidon and the Nereids by boasting of her and her daughter’s beauty. Andromeda was rescued from her plight by the hero Perseus, who then married her. Upon her death, she was placed in the skies as a constellation alongside her husband and her mother. Like her rescuer, Cornell has liberated Andromeda from the chains that bound her to the Earth. She is not attached to the silver chain, which both recalls the myth and suggests a ladder to the heavens. With the lightest touch, Cornell has skilfully created both the physical presence of a beautiful woman, and her heavenly equivalent as a constellation in the night sky.
As well as seeking inspiration across galaxies and the limitless expanses of space, Cornell would also delve into myth and history, both factual and personal, to seek out the characters who reside in his shadow boxes. In one of his most famous series, the ‘Medici Slot Machines’, Cornell superimposed memories of his own happy childhood (before his father’s death) onto reproductions of portraits of Medici princes and princesses by the Renaissance artists Sofonisba Anguissola (1532-1625), Bronzino (1503-1572) and Pinturicchio (1454-1513). By mixing his personal history (Cornell recalled with fondness the outings to penny arcades and shooting galleries of his youth) with these Florentine children, and further juxtaposing Old Master paintings with symbols of popular amusement, he created a mysterious world that contrasts high and low culture with haunting beauty.
This elegiac composition centres around Bronzino’s posthumous portrait of Bia de’ Medici. Bia, the illegitimate but beloved daughter of Cosimo I de’ Medici, died from a fever aged 6, and Bronzino used her death mask as a model. Around her neck, she wears a medallion with her father’s profile on it. Cornell has effectively enshrined Bia in this box, simultaneously surrounded by the trappings of childhood (marbles, jacks, toy blocks), and, notably, the metal spirals of watch springs in the upper corners, which act as a metaphor for time cycles and life repeating itself. A bright red ball in front of the young girl attracts the viewer, as do the sightlines, mimicking the cross-hair targets of amusement park shooting galleries, which converge over one eye. Bia is flanked by columns, decorated with Baedeker maps of Italy, and further side compartments stacked with repeated images, like the spliced frames of a film, recalling Eadweard Muybridge’s (1830-1904) early sequences of animal and human movement, as well as foreshadowing Pop artist Andy Warhol’s (1928-1987) multiple silkscreen homages to celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. There is a concealed drawer at the base of the box, containing a bundle of letters tied with thread, and a paper fan, perhaps a nod to the attributes of the courtly life of a princess. Cornell’s creations often included kinetic elements like marbles or toy balls, although they are seldom activated now, as the assemblages are too delicate. In this box, the unfixed objects placed around Bia accentuate her stillness and steady gaze. Perhaps because of the blue staining of the glass, we become more aware of the wall that separates us from this young girl, frozen in a world that we can look in upon, but not enter. She looks out at us directly, but is she imprisoned or merely on display?
“Peering into glass panelled boxes to inspect their contents is not unlike looking through a telescope in order to bring the distant closer. Windows, doors, compartments, drawers, cross-hair targets – all of these elements grant access or focus as we navigate the world Cornell has framed.”
Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay Eterniday, 2003
That he visited the opera and the ballet in New York is not surprising, as his miniature dioramas also recall stage sets with a scenic and narrative quality. As Mary Ann Caws writes in Joseph Cornell’s Theatre of the Mind, “Cornell’s shadow boxes invite us to peek, to peep, and finally to yield to our imagination… We meet in the confines of this tiny frame, this microcosm of complicity.” The boxes are filled with potential energy, as if just about to move, and are spaces in which multiple scales co-exist: time and history, the natural world and the cosmos. They are places of curious juxtaposition: take Untitled (Celestial Navigation) (1956-1958, above), in which the universe is depicted through everyday objects.
Longing and Reverie
For Cornell, a relationship with a woman (other than his mother) seemed unattainable. He never married, and for him the female figure took on an elevated accumulation of hope and desire of almost mythic proportions. Throughout his life he developed obsessions with opera singers, waitresses, film stars, shop girls and most vividly, ballerinas (alive or dead). In the 1930s he discovered the international revival of the Romantic ballet, and spent the next 30 years exploring his fascination with the ‘queens of the dance’. His favourites included Romanticera prima ballerinas Marie Taglioni (1804-1884) and Fanny Cerrito (1817-1909), and their modern counterparts Tamara Toumanova (1919-1996) and Allegra Kent (b. 1937). He also became good friends with Pavel Tchelitchew (1898-1957), the Russian Surrealist painter and set and costume designer who, as a well-known figure on the international dance scene, introduced Cornell to dancers and other balletomanes.
This box (Naples, 1942, below) is a tender homage to Fanny Cerrito, a nineteenth-century ballerina who captivated Cornell (he first came across her likeness in a bookstore on Fourth Avenue, on a souvenir lithograph from 1842). Cerrito was best known for her 1843 performance in Ondine, a ballet based on a fairy tale about a knight who falls in love with an ethereal water sprite. For her first entrance on stage, Cerrito posed in a giant cockleshell, rising up on a platform through the stage. In this assemblage, Cornell celebrates her birthplace of Naples, illustrating its famously narrow streets festooned with lines of laundry. The luggage label and the handle of the box, which recall a suitcase, give a sense of travel and distance, but the seashells propped up in the corners of the box and the faded sea-green paint that borders the scene speak to Cerrito’s most famous role.
Another example of Cornell’s devotional works is this stunningly austere piece entitled Toward the Blue Peninsula: for Emily Dickinson (1953, below). The purity of this box and the inclusion of a grid-like structure recall the signature style of Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), a Minimalist artist who radically simplified the elements of painting to reflect the underlying spiritual order of the visible world that he believed in. Cornell admired Mondrian’s work and mentioned him in his 1946 diary: ‘Mondrian feeling strong. Feeling of progress and satisfaction.’
As the title suggests, this shadow box was created for the nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), with whom Cornell felt a deep affinity. Like Cornell, Dickinson lived with her family, never travelled far from home or married, and translated her intense longing into her art. A withdrawn and enigmatic woman, she rarely left the upstairs bedroom in her home in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she wrote her poems. Dickinson’s bedroom inspired the setting for this simple, white-washed box that resembles an abandoned aviary. At first, almost everything about this box suggests containment – the white mesh cage, the dowel perch and bird feeder – but we find no resident here. In fact, the mesh has been cut open and to the left we see a rectangle of clear, refreshing blue suggesting a window open to the sky – the infinite beyond into which our bird has flown. Emily Dickinson sometimes referred to herself as a ‘little wren’ and often, like Cornell, included birds in her work. Here, Cornell ensures that she has been set free, present only in spirit, with two small scraps of printed paper at the bottom of the case the only physical reminder of her presence. The empty box is silent, a vacuum left after the action has occurred. The title of this work comes from a poem by Dickinson that begins: ‘It might be lonelier / Without the Loneliness / I’m so accustomed to my Fate.’ It ends:
It might be easier To fail – with Land in Sight – Than gain – My Blue Peninsula – To perish – of Delight –
Here, Dickinson is asking whether longing is better than having, a question that clearly spoke to Cornell and his own deep-seated yearning. Better that dream remain imagined but unrealised, the poet advises, lest it disappoint. It seems these are words that Cornell heeded his entire life.
In the early 1960s, Cornell did finally break with tradition and became attached to a young woman, a New York waitress named Joyce Hunter. This was Cornell’s first real-life romance and he was dazzled by her, making her several gifts of his boxes and collages. Joyce eventually stole artworks from his home (though he refused to prosecute her), and was later murdered by an acquaintance in an unrelated incident in December 1964. Her death devastated Cornell, and marks the beginning of his decline into isolation; his brother Robert died in 1965, his mother a year later. In the winter of 1965 he began a series of collages dedicated to Robert’s memory…
Now alone in his family home, Cornell still received visitors (an invitation to Utopia Parkway had become something of an art-world trophy) but conditions in the house declined as his involvement in Christian Science and the metaphysical world increased. He would write letters to the ghosts of his former life – Robert, his mother, Joyce Hunter. Cornell became more and more interested in sharing his work with a younger audience and one of his last exhibitions in 1972 was expressly for children: A Joseph Cornell Exhibition for Children at the Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture, where cake and soda pops were served instead of the traditional champagne and canapés. He often said children were his most enthusiastic and receptive audience, and lent boxes to children in his neighbourhood for their enjoyment. Cornell continued to work until the end of his life, although he stopped making new boxes sometime in the 1960s, after which he focused on ‘refurbishing’ earlier boxes by breaking them down and reconstituting them. His main focus was a renewed interest in creating collages, which he saw as freer and more spontaneous than box construction. He also concentrated on making films and re-editing earlier cinematic work. Following prostate surgery in June 1972, he spent several months recuperating with family in Westhampton before returning to Utopia Parkway in November. Cornell died of heart failure alone at home, just a few days after his sixty-ninth birthday.
Conclusion
What can we make of the life of Joseph Cornell? From his shadow boxes we get the impression of a man who preferred fantasy to reality, finding inspiration and affinity with long-dead characters from history, from Renaissance princesses to Romantic ballerinas. But Cornell was also conscious of and responded to the changing landscape of twentieth-century art – Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and Minimalism – and had a tremendous influence on other artists during his lifetime. He had an appetite for subjects that were as far ranging as his imagination, and was able to express, with the deftest of touches, huge concepts within intimate, self-contained spaces. Cornell’s cloistered worlds seem to encompass the entire universe in microcosm – its infinity, wonder, mystery and power all contained within a small box. Their appeal can only be accentuated by the fact that their creator conjured these worlds purely from imagination rather than experience. His last reported words to his sister Elizabeth on the day he died were, “You know, I was thinking, I wish I hadn’t been so reserved.” While this restraint may have caused him regret in his daily life, we see little trace of it in his art, which seems instead to be a magical, generous invitation to the viewer as a gateway to reverie, and to dream.
Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust offers an overview of the American artist’s inventive oeuvre, surveying around 80 of his remarkable box constructions, assemblages, collages and films. The last major solo exhibition of Cornell in Europe took place nearly 35 years ago, originating at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1980, and travelling to the Whitechapel Gallery in the UK. With very few works on permanent display in European museums, the exhibition is an opportunity to see rarely lent masterpieces from public and private collections in the United States, Europe and Japan.
Cornell (1903-1972) never left America and hardly ventured beyond New York City, yet through his art he set out to travel through history, the continents of the globe and even the spiritual realm. His works are manifestations of a powerful ‘wanderlust’ of the mind and soul.
Collecting was central to Cornell’s creativity; he amassed a vast and eclectic personal archive of paper ephemera and found objects, eventually numbering tens of thousands of items. This material revealed his wide-ranging interests from opera, ballet, cinema and theatre to history, ornithology, poetry and astronomy. Europe held a special place in Cornell’s imagination, and many of the works selected for this exhibition highlight his love of its historic cultures, from the Belle Époque to the Italian Renaissance. Inspired by these interests, he incorporated his collected materials inside glass-fronted wooden box constructions creating miniature worlds known as his ‘shadow boxes’, as well as producing collages and film.
Cornell was entirely self-taught and has often been characterised as an outsider to the New York art scene. In reality, he was highly engaged with the art movements and artists of the time, exhibiting regularly alongside the Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists, whilst carefully maintaining his independence from any one group. He counted many vanguard artists among his friends including Marcel Duchamp, Robert Motherwell, and Dorothea Tanning.
The exhibition is arranged thematically in four sections that reflect the artistic processes expressed in Cornell’s diaries and notes; Play and Experiment, Collecting and Classification, Observation and Exploration and Longing and Reverie. The selection brings together key works from his major series: Museums, Aviaries, Soap Bubble Sets, Palaces, Medici Slot Machines, Hotels and Dovecotes.
Press release from the Royal Academy of Arts website
“Impressions intriguingly diverse – that, in order to hold fast, one might assemble, assort, and arrange into a cabinet – the contraption kind of the amusement resorts with endless ingenuity of effect, worked by coin and plunger, or brightly coloured pin-balls – travelling inclined runways – starting in motion compartment after compartment with a symphony of mechanical magic of sight and sound borrowed from the motion picture art – into childhood – into fantasy – through the streets of New York – through tropical skies – etc. – into the receiving trays the balls come to rest releasing prizes.”
Joseph Cornell
Royal Academy of Arts Piccadilly site Burlington House, Piccadilly London W1J 0BD Burlington Gardens site 6 Burlington Gardens London W1S 3ET
Curator: Dr. Mikhail Dedinkin, curator from the State Hermitage Museum supported by NGV Director Tony Ellwood and Dr. Ted Gott, Senior Curator of International Art at the NGV
Hermitage Museum, the Winter Palace in Winter, St Petersburg Photo: Pavel Demidov
Some beauty to cheer me up from my sickbed.
These are the official press photographs for the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great. To see my installation photographs of the exhibition go to this posting.
The paintings look as fresh today as when they were first painted, some of them in the early 1500s. To see the thumbs up gesture in Diego Velázquez’s Luncheon (c. 1617-1618, below) echoing down the centuries, is worth the price of admission alone.
We cannot imagine what life would have been like back then… no medication, rampant disease and malnutrition, little law enforcement with danger lurking around each turn (see Matthew Beaumont. Night Walking: A Nocturnal History of London, Chaucer to Dickens. London and New York: Verso, 2015).
And yet these talented artists, supported by the elite, produced work which still touches us today.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the art works in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the art works. See Part 1 of the posting.
Chinese Cup early 17th century Silver, enamel 4 x 3 x 7cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ЛС-133, ВВс-250) Acquired before 1789
Chinese Teapot with lid 17th century Silver, enamel 18.0 x 5.5cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ЛС-80 а, б, ВВс-219) Acquired before 1789
Sèvres Porcelain Factory Sèvres (manufacturer) France est. 1756 Cameo Service 1778-1779 Porcelain (soft-paste), gilt The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg Commissioned by Catherine ll as a gift for Prince Grigory Potemkin in 1777; Potemkin’s Taurida Palace, St Petersburg from 1779; transferred to the Hofmarshal’s Office of the Winter Palace after his death; 1922 transferred to the State Hermitage Museum
Grand Duchess Maria Fyodorovna (Russian, 1795-1828) (engraver) Russia (manufacturer) Catherine the Great as Minerva 1789 Cameo Jasper, gold 6.5 x 4.7cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. К 1077) Acquired 1789
James Tassie, London (England, 1735-1799) (workshop of) Head of Medusa 1780s Coloured glass, gilded paper 7.6 x 9.2cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. R-T, 3296 a) Purchased from James Tassie 1783-88
Chinese Toilet service early 18th century Glass, mercury amalgam, paper, silver, filigree, parcel-gilt, wood, velvet, peacock and king-fisher feathers, mother-of-pearl, crystals The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ЛС-472/ 1,2, ВВс-373)
Chinese Table decoration in the form of a pair of birds 1740s-50s Silver, enamel, silver-gilt 26.0 x 26.0 x 15.0cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ЛС-26, ВВс-189)
Chinese Crab-shaped box on a leaf tray 1740s-50s Silver, enamel, silver-gilt (a) 4.0 x 14.0 x 13.0cm (box) (b) 3.0 x 22.0 x 17.0cm (stand) The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ЛС-9 а,б, ВВс-186)
Marie-Anne Collot (French, 1748-1821) Voltaire 1770s Marble 49 x 30 x 28cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. Н.ск. 3) Acquired from the artist, 1778
Jean-Antoine Houdon (French, 1741-1828) Catherine II 1773 Marble 90 x 50 x 32cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. Н.ск. 1676) Transferred from the Stroganov Palace, Leningrad, 1928
Jean-Baptiste Greuze (French, 1725-1805) Head of an old man. Study for The paralytic 1760s Red and black chalk 49.3 x 40cm (sheet) The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ОР-14727) Acquired from the artist in 1769 for the Museum of the Academy of Arts. Transferred to the Hermitage in 1924
François Boucher (French, 1703-1770) Study of a female nude 1740 Red, black and white chalk on brown paper 26.2 x 34.6cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ОР-382) Acquired from the collection of Count Cobenzl, Brussels, 1768
Charles-Louis Clérisseau (French, 1721-1820) Design for the paintings in the cell of Father Lesueur in the Monastery of Santissima Trinità dei Monti in Rome 1766-1768 Pen and black and brown ink, brown and grey wash 36.9 x 53cm (sheet) The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ОР-2597) Acquired from the artist by Catherine II on 5 May 1780, Provenance: before 1797
Carlo Galli-Bibiena (Austrian, 1728-1787) Design for the interior decoration of a library 1770s Pen and ink, grey wash and watercolour over pencil 32 х 44cm (sheet) The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ОР-231) Acquired before 1797
Giacomo Quarenghi (Italian, 1744-1817) Façade of the Hermitage Theatre 1780s Pen and ink, watercolour 33 х 47cm (sheet) The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ОР-9626) Acquired from Giulio Quarenghi in 1818
Konstantin Ukhtomsky (Russian, 1818-1881) The Raphael Loggia 1860 Watercolour 42 х 25cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ОР-11741) Acquired from the artist, 1860
Over 500 works from the personal collection of Catherine the Great will travel to Australia in July. Gathered over a 34-year period, the exhibition represents the foundation of the Hermitage’s collection and includes outstanding works from artists such as Rembrandt, Velasquez, Rubens and Titian. Exemplary works from Van Dyck, Snyders, Teniers and Hals will also travel, collectively offering some of the finest Dutch and Flemish art to come to Australia. The exhibition, presented by the Hermitage Museum, National Gallery of Victoria and Art Exhibitions Australia, is exclusive to Melbourne as part of the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series.
The Premier of Victoria, the Hon. Daniel Andrews MP said: “Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great will showcase treasures from one of the largest, oldest and most visited museums in the world. Another major event for Melbourne, this exhibition will provide visitors with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see first-hand the extraordinary personal collection of Catherine the Great, drawn from the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.”
NGV Director, Tony Ellwood said, “This exhibition celebrates the tenacity and vision of a true innovator in the arts. Catherine the Great’s inexhaustible passion for the arts, education and culture heralded a renaissance, leading to the formation of one of the world’s great museums, the Hermitage.”
“We are delighted that we have the good fortune of bringing one of the world’s most important collections to Australian audiences. The exhibition is a rare opportunity to be immersed in the world of Catherine the Great and her magnificent collection of art,” Tony Ellwood said.
Catherine the Great’s reign from 1762 to 1796 was known as the golden age and is remembered for her exceptional patronage of the arts, literature and education. Of German heritage, Catherine the Great was well connected in European art and literature circles. She saw herself as a reine-philosophe (Philosopher Queen), a new kind of ruler in the Age of Enlightenment. Guided by Europe’s leading intellectuals, such as the French philosophers Voltaire and Diderot, she sought to modernise Russia’s economy, industry and government, drawing inspiration both from classical antiquity and contemporary cultural and political developments in Western Europe.
A prolific acquirer of art of the period, Catherine the Great’s collection reflects the finest contemporary art of the 18th century as well as the world’s best old masters of the time, with great works by French, German, Chinese, British, Dutch and Flemish artists. Notable in this exhibition are entire groups of works acquired from renowned collections from France, Germany and England representing the best collections offered for sale at the time. The exhibition will feature four Rembrandts, including the notable Young woman with earrings, known as one of most intimate images Rembrandt ever created. The exhibition will also include 80 particularly fine drawings by artists including Poussin, Rubens, Clouet and Greuze.
Exquisite decorative arts will be brought to Australia for this exhibition, including 60 items from the Cameo Service of striking enamel-painted porcelain made by the Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory in Paris. Commissioned by Catherine the Great for her former lover and military commander, Prince Grigory Potemkin, the dinner service features carved and painted imitation cameos, miniature works of art, based on motifs from the French Royal collection.
Director of the Hermitage Museum, Mikhail Piotrovsky said, “These outstanding works from the personal collection of Catherine the Great represent the crown jewels of the Museum. It was through the collection of these works and Catherine the Great’s exceptional vision that the Hermitage was founded. Today it is one of the most visited museums in the world. We are very pleased to be able to share these precious works with Australian audiences at the 250-year anniversary of this important institution.”
Catherine the Great’s love of education, art and culture inspired a period of enlightenment and architectural renaissance that saw the construction of the Hermitage complex. This construction includes six historic buildings along the Palace Embankment as well as the spectacular Winter Palace, a former residence of Russian emperors. On view in the exhibition will be remarkable drawings by the Hermitage’s first architects Georg Velten and Giacomo Quarenghi, complemented by excellent painted views of the new Hermitage by Benjamin Patersen. These, along with Alexander Roslin’s majestic life-size portrait of Catherine, set the scene for a truly spectacular exhibition.
Visitors to the exhibition will be able to immerse themselves in Catherine the Great’s world evoking a sensory experience of a visit to the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. The exhibition design will have rich treatments of architectural details, interior furnishings, wallpapers and a colour palette directly inspired by the Hermitage’s gallery spaces. Enveloping multimedia elements will give visitors a sense of being inside the Hermitage, evoking the lush and opulent interiors.
The Hermitage Museum was founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great and has been open to the public since 1852. With 3 million items in its holdings, the Hermitage is often regarded as having the finest collection of paintings in the world today. In 2014, The Hermitage celebrated its 250-year anniversary and opened a new wing of the museum with 800 rooms dedicated to art from the 19th to 21st centuries. The exhibition is organised by The Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg in association with the National Gallery of Victoria and Art Exhibitions Australia.
Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great will be at NGV International from 31 July – 8 November 2015 and will be presented alongside the David Bowie is exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image as part of the 2015 Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series.
Press release from the National Gallery of Victoria
Jean-Baptiste Santerre (French, 1651-1717) Two actresses 1699 Oil on canvas 146 х 114cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-1284) Acquired 1768
Anthony van Dyck (Flemish, 1599-1641) Portrait of Philadelphia and Elizabeth Wharton 1640 Oil on canvas 162 х 130cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-533) Acquired from the collection of Sir Robert Walpole, Houghton Hall, 1779
Jean Louis Voille (French, 1744-1804) Portrait of Olga Zherebtsova 1790s Oil on canvas 73.5 х 58cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-5654) Acquired from the collection of E. P. Oliv, Petrograd, 1923
Peter Paul Rubens and workshop (Flemish, 1577-1640) The Apostle Paul c. 1615 Oil on wood panel 105.6 х 74cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-489) Acquired before 1774
Leonardo Da Vinci (school of) Female nude (Donna Nuda) Early 16th century Oil on canvas 86.5 х 66.5cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-110) Acquired from the collection of Sir Robert Walpole, Houghton Hall, 1779
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669) Portrait of a scholar 1631 Oil on canvas 104.5 х 92cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-744) Acquired from the collection of Count Heinrich von Brühl, Dresden, 1769
Jean-Baptiste Perronneau (French, 1715-1783) Portrait of a boy with a book 1740s Oil on canvas 63.0 х 52cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-1270) Acquired from the collection of A. G. Teplov, St Petersburg, 1781
Domenico Capriolo (Italian, c. 1494-1528) Portrait of a young man 1512 Oil on canvas 117 х 85cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-21) Acquired from the collection of Baron Louis-Antoine Crozat de Thiers, Paris, 1772
Alexander Roslin (Swedish, 1718-1793) Portrait of Catherine II 1776-1777 Oil on canvas 271 х 189.5cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-1316) Acquired from the artist, 1777
Titian (Italian, 1485-1490 – 1576) Portrait of a young woman c. 1536 Oil on canvas 96 х 75cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-71) Acquired from the collection of Baron Louis-Antoine Crozat de Thiers, Paris, 1772
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669) Young woman trying on earrings 1657 Oil on wood panel 39.5 х 32.5cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-784) Acquired from the collection of the Comte de Baudouin, Paris, 1781
Francois Clouet (French, c. 1516-1572) Portrait of Charles IX 1566 Black and red chalk 33.1 x 22.5cm (sheet) The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. OР-2893) Acquired from the collection of Count Cobenzl, Brussels, 1768
David Teniers II (Flemish, 1610-1690) Kitchen 1646 Oil on canvas 171 х 237cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-586) Acquired from the collection of Sir Robert Walpole, Houghton Hall, 1779
Cornelis de Vos (Dutch/Flemish, c. 1584-1651) Self-portrait of the artist with his wife Suzanne Cock and their children c. 1634 Oil on canvas 185.5 х 221cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-623) Donated by Prince G. A. Potemkin, 1780s
Anthony van Dyck (Flemish, 1599-1641) Family portrait c. 1619 Oil on canvas 113.5 х 93.5cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-534) Acquired from a private collection, Brussels, 1774
Charles Vanloo (French, 1705-1765) Sultan’s wife drinking coffee 1750s Oil on canvas 120 х 127cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-7489) Acquired from the collection of Madame Marie-Thérèse Geoffrin, Paris, 1772
Peter Paul Rubens and workshop (Flemish, 1577-1640) The Adoration of the Magi c. 1620 Oil on canvas 235 х 277.5cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. № ГЭ-494) Acquired from the collection of Dufresne, Amsterdam, 1770
Diego Velázquez (Spanish, 1599-1660) Luncheon c. 1617-1618 Oil on canvas 108.5 х 102cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-389) Acquired 1763-1774
Melchior d’Hondecoeter (Dutch, 1636-1695) Birds in a park 1686 Oil on canvas 136 х 164cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-1042) Acquired from the collection of Jacques Aved, Paris, 1766
Frans Snyders (Flemish, 1579-1657) Concert of birds 1630-1640 Oil on canvas 136.5 х 240cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-607) Acquired from the collection of Sir Robert Walpole, Houghton Hall, 1779
Curators: curated at Tate Modern by Juliet Bingham, Curator International Art, with Juliette Rizzi, Assistant Curator.
The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay at Tate Modern
One of my favourite female artists of all time. Up there with Georgia O’Keeffe, Lee Krasner, Agnes Martin and Louise Bourgeois.
The early portrait paintings are a revelation. And then, how avant-garde are her Electric Prisms paintings, fashion designs, theatre costumes, embroidering poetry onto fabric, turning her apartment into a three-dimensional collage… the very epitome of a “progressive woman synonymous with modernity.”
I have always loved her creativity, vibrancy, colours and asymmetric, musical rhythm – her photogeneity, in the sense of her works producing or emitting light, like an organism does. They seem to grab you, like a jolt of electricity, saying “Wake up!” and “Look at me!”
Perhaps I’m a little bit in love with this very wonderful women.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Tate Modern for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“In this case, the pram in the hall was not the enemy of promise. (In any case, surely poverty is the more likely candidate.) It is still rare, however, for a cradle cover to be given gallery space and acknowledged as an important artwork. The little blanket Sonia stitched for her son, Charles, in 1911 [see image below] is to be exhibited, and it seems to have been a breakthrough piece which moved her from figurative work to abstract. The coverlet is a patchwork medley of pinks, creams and greens with hints of maroon and black. It shows how Sonia melded Russian folk-craft with Parisian avant garde, and anticipated the experiments with colour and shape that would become the Delaunay hallmark style, simultané.
As well as the baby quilt, there is on display the child’s painted toy box, and the outfit Sonia made in the same manner, the one in the photograph mentioned above: by 1913 the Delaunays had found a babysitter and were setting off to the dancehall, the Bal Bullier. As well as making clothing for herself and her friends, Sonia still painted. Next to the dress, which is composed of swatches of fabric in different textures, is her large canvas ‘Bal Bullier’. A flow of colour and rhythm, it shows several couples (or one couple twirling) under a new Parisian sensation: coloured electric lights.”
Unknown photographer Sonia Delaunay (right) and two friends in Robert Delaunay’s studio, rue des Grands-Augustins, Paris 1924 Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris
Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979) was a key figure in the Parisian avant-garde, whose vivid and colourful work spanned painting, fashion and design. Tate Modern presents the first UK retrospective to assess the breadth of her vibrant artistic career, from her early figurative painting in the 1900s to her energetic abstract work in the 1960s. This exhibition offers a radical reassessment of Delaunay’s importance as an artist, showcasing her originality and creativity across the twentieth century.
Born in Odessaand trained in Germany, Sonia Delaunay (née Stern, then Terk) came to Parisin 1906 to join the emerging avant-garde. She met and married the artist Robert Delaunay, with whom she developed ‘Simultaneism’ – abstract compositions of dynamic contrasting colours and shapes. Many iconic examples of these works are brought together at Tate Modern, including Bal Bullier 1913 and Electric Prisms 1914. Her work expressed the energy of modern urban life, celebrating the birth of electric street lighting and the excitement of contemporary ballets and ballrooms.
The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay shows how the artist dedicated her life to experimenting with colour and abstraction, bringing her ideas off the canvas and into the world through tapestry, textiles, mosaic and fashion. Delaunay premiered her first ‘simultaneous dress’ of bright patchwork colours in 1913 and opened a boutique in Madrid in 1918. Her Atelier Simultané in Paris went on to produce radical and progressive designs for scarves, umbrellas, hats, shoes and swimming costumes throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Clients included the Hollywood star Gloria Swanson and the architect Erno Goldfinger, as well department stores like Metz & Co and Liberty. The exhibition reveals how Delaunay’s designs presented her as a progressive woman synonymous with modernity: embroidering poetry onto fabric, turning her apartment into a three-dimensional collage, and creating daring costumes for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
The diverse inspirations behind Delaunay’s work are also explored, from the highly personal approach to colour which harked back to her childhood in Russia, to the impact of her years in Spain and Portugal where she painted The Orange Seller 1915 and Flamenco Singers 1915-1916. The show also reveals the inspiration provided by modern technology throughout Delaunay’s career, from the Trans-Siberian Railway to the aeroplane, and from the Eiffel Tower to the electric light bulb. It also includes her vast seven-metre murals Motor, Dashboard and Propeller, created for the 1937 International Exposition in Paris and never before shown in the UK.
Following her husband’s death in 1941, Sonia Delaunay’s work took on more formal freedom, including rhythmic compositions in angular forms and harlequin colours, which in turn inspired geometric tapestries, carpets and mosaics. Delaunay continued to experiment with abstraction in the post-war era, just as she had done since its birth in the 1910s, becoming a champion for a new generation of artists and an inspiring figure for creative practitioners to this day.
The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunayis curated at Tate Modern by Juliet Bingham, Curator International Art, with Juliette Rizzi, Assistant Curator. It was organised by the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris-Musées and Tate Modern, and was realised with the exceptional help of Bibliothèque nationale de France and Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou.
Sonia Delaunay was a multi-disciplinary abstract artist and key figure in the Parisian avant-garde. Alongside her husband, Robert Delaunay, she pioneered the movement Simultanism. Her exploration of the interaction between colours has created a sense of depth and movement throughout her oeuvre.
What is her background?
She was born Sonia Illinitchna Stern to a Jewish Ukrainian family. At the age of seven she went to live with her comparatively wealthy uncle Henri Terk and his wife, Anna, in St Petersburg, Russia. The Terk’s offered her a privileged and cultured upbringing in St Petersburg. Nevertheless, her childhood memories of Ukraine remained with her and she often referred back to the ‘pure’ colour and bright costumes of the Ukrainian peasant weddings.
How did she start her career as an abstract artist?
“About 1911 I had the idea of making for my son, who had just been born, a blanket composed of bits of fabric like those I had seen in the houses of Russian peasants. When it was finished, the arrangement of the pieces of material seemed to me to evoke cubist conceptions and we then tried to apply the same process to other objects and paintings.”
What does she do?
“I always changed everything around me… I made my first white walls so our paintings would look better. I designed my furniture; I have done everything. I have lived my art.”
Delaunay’s creativity expanded beyond painting to include many other outlets such as Casa Sonia, an interiors and fashion boutique that she set up 1918; The entire set and costume design of Tristan Tzara’s 1923 play Le Cœur à Gaz; An illustration for the cover of Vogue in 1926; Costumes for the films Le Vertige directed by Marcel L’Herbier and Le p’tit Parigot, directed by René Le Somptier; Furniture for the set of the 1929 film Parce que je t’aime; And her textiles label Tissus Delaunay, which sold her designs worldwide.
What is Orphism?
Orphism is a term originating from 1912 when French poet and art critic Guillaume Appollinaire identified the new style of Cubist painting. Appollinaire was inspired by the work of František Kupka and the Delaunays, who, although channelling the Cubist vision, prioritised colour in their work. Appollinaire felt this use of colour brought movement, light and musical qualities to the artwork and therefore referenced the legendary poet and singer of ancient Greek mythology, Orpheus, when naming the movement.
What is Simultanism?
Simultanism is the strand of Orphism practised by the Delaunays. The name comes from the work of French scientist Michel Eugène Chevreul who identified the phenomenon of ‘simultaneous contrast’, in which colours look different depending on the colours around them. For example, a grey will look lighter on a dark background than it does on a light one. The Delaunays dispensed with form and aimed to created rhythm, motion and depth through overlapping patches of vibrant hues.
What are her key artworks?
Prismes électriques (Electric Prisms), 1914, displays Delaunay’s trademark concentric circles at their best. Interpreted as an ode to modernity, Delaunay refracts the lights and bustle of Boulevard Saint Michel into almost complete abstraction. Everything disintegrates into colour except two figures, which remain discernible in the lower centre of the piece.
Nu jaune, 1908, juxtaposes the models’ warm yellow skin against lashings of cool emerald. This is one of Delaunay’s most striking uses of tone. The bright colours are frequently offset by black marks. These create a bold and heavy outline which is primitivist in its intention. The face of the model is mask like, suggesting melancholy. Delaunay makes no attempt to depict her as attractive, giving the artwork a brusque, modern feel.
What are her thoughts on colour?
Colour is the skin of the world.
Colour was the hue of number.
One who knows how to appreciate colour relationships, the influence of one colour on another, their contrasts and dissonances, is promised an infinitely diverse imagery.
Unknown photographer Sonia Delaunay in Simultaneous dress c. 1913
Unknown photographer Bathing suits designed by Delaunay c. 1920s
It was extremely inspiring to see a woman working with different disciplines – design, painting, textiles. Her reach was enviable. She was part of a tradition of Russian artists such as Liubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova who combined their knowledge of artisanal techniques with their beaux arts training as a way into the world of fashion. And her designs were outstanding. Look at her marvellous knitted bathing suit or patterned overcoat. If you were to walk into an exhibition and saw a woman dressed in that overcoat, she would steal the show.
Of course in Paris there were other powerful women designers, such as Madame Grès and Coco Chanel. The former’s designs were very sinuous, and Chanel was cutting back to the bone, whereas Sonia seemed to work on a frontal level. I like the powerful geometry of her designs – encasing a curvilinear body, contained and boxed-in like a walking cubist form. They were definitely not cute; they were harsh designs for husky women. I would have loved to see Gertrude Stein dressed in Sonia Delaunay’s clothes.
I admire her early paintings, especially Yellow Nude from 1908. You can’t really tell if the reclining figure that she has painted is male or female. It is coy, seductive, androgynous, as if she didn’t seem to care whether it was either. And if you read her biography, you find that she had a rather open attitude to sexuality – her first marriage was to a homosexual, and later to Robert. It was probably part of her shrewdness too – in making things work for her.
Has her work influenced mine? I came out of the Josef Albers camp, where colour was more magical and less obvious than Delaunay. I tend to go for unexpected nuanced colour combinations. So I would say not, but her workaholic attitude and willingness to experiment and try out things in different ways has. She was fearless, so why shouldn’t we be fearless. And I am very influenced by her teamwork – the big mural paintings she did for Palais de l’Air in 1937. I love those. She would have had teams of people working on them. They are such powerful works, so present and timeless. They send out a strong message – pronouncing a new world. They are not domestic works done at the easel. They are out in space. They are universal.
Curators: Dr Mikhail Dedinkin, Deputy Head of the Western European Art Department at the Hermitage, working Dr Ted Gott, Senior Curator of International Art at the National Gallery of Victoria
Installation view of room 1 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne featuring Alexander Roslin (Swedish 1718-93) Portrait of Catherine II 1776-77 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
A scintillating exhibition at NGV International which showcases one of the world’s greatest art collections. Exhibition design is outstanding (particularly the floor tiling), as are the Da Vinci, Titian, Rembrandt, van Dyck, Rubens and Flemish still life. Among my favourites is a small Watteau Savoyard with a Marmot (1716) which is absolutely still, delicate and exquisite: I thought of the photographs of Atget, his street sellers, when I saw this painting; and Frans Snyders’ tour-de-force Concert of birds (1630-40) which has such presence.
Well done to the curators, the Hermitage Museum and the NGV for staging such a magnificent exhibition.
Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great showcases one of the world’s greatest art collections. Featuring works by artists including Rembrandt, Rubens, Velázquez and Van Dyck, the exhibition offers a dazzling array of works including the finest group of Dutch and Flemish art to come to Australia.
This exclusive Melbourne exhibition will also highlight the innovation and vision of Catherine the Great, whose inexhaustible passion for education, the arts and culture heralded a period of enlightenment in the region. The extraordinary works sourced and commissioned by Catherine during her thirty-four year reign, created the foundations for the Hermitage today – considered to be one of the world’s greatest treasure houses of art and decorative arts. The exhibition will offer audiences an immersive experience, recreating the rich atmosphere of the Hermitage to showcase these exquisite works.
German-born Catherine the Great (Catherine II) came to power in 1762, aged thirty-three, and ruled Russia for the next thirty-four years, until her death in 1796. She saw herself as a Philosopher Queen, a new kind of ruler in the Age of Enlightenment. Guided by Europe’s leading intellectuals, she modernised Russia’s economy, industry and government, drawing inspiration both from Antiquity and contemporary cultural and political developments in Western Europe. A fluent speaker of Russian, French and German, Catherine was largely self-educated, independent, idealistic and visionary.
While her reign was not always peaceful, Catherine sought to bring order, stability and prosperity to the vast Russian Empire. Her ideals of abolishing serfdom and ensuring the equality of all citizens under the law were ahead of her time, and strongly resisted by the nobility of the day; however, she achieved numerous other reforms, including the introduction of paper money and modernisation of Russia’s education system. French philosopher Denis Diderot, who visited St Petersburg in 1773, described an audience with Catherine as being ‘more like study than anything else: she is a stranger to no subject; there is no man in the Empire who knows her nation as well as she’.
Room 1 Catherine the collector
Between 1762 and 1796, the years of her reign, Catherine the Great oversaw a period of cultural renaissance in Russia. The world of ideas in which she was deeply involved from an early age found tangible expression in the material world the Empress later created around herself. The great complexes of imperial buildings Catherine constructed reflected her informed interest in both Classical and Chinese culture.
Catherine not only assembled a collection of Old Master paintings equal in scale and quality to leading European collections, but also paid considerable attention to the acquisition of contemporary art. While the richness and technical perfection of her diverse collections of decorative arts aimed to dazzle and please, they also had the more practical purpose of raising standards of artistic production in Russia. The fact that more than 400 exemplary works of art from her personal collection, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, porcelain, silver and precious gems, are seen here for the first time in Australia is cause for celebration.
Installation views of room 1 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne featuring Alexander Roslin (Swedish 1718-1793) Portrait of Catherine II 1776-1777 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of room 1 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne featuring in the last three photographs, the Sèvres Cameo Service. Cameo Service 1778-1779. Sevres Porcelain Factory (manufacturer) France, est. 1756. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Sèvres Cameo Service
The Sèvres Cameo Service (1778-1779) relates to Catherine’s great passion for collecting engraved gemstones. Comprising 797 individual pieces designed to serve dinner, dessert and coffee to sixty people, the Cameo Service was commissioned from the celebrated Sèvres porcelain manufactory outside Paris as a present for Catherine’s court ‘favourite’, Prince Grigory Potemkin. The Empress’s monogram, ‘E II’ (the Russian version of her name being Ekaterina), woven from garlands of flowers and surmounted by a crown, adorned almost every object in the service.
Production of the service was both time consuming and labour-intensive. The exquisite blue element alone – made from separate layers of copper enamel that gradually seeped into the porcelain and set the pure colour – required five firings. In addition to the hundreds of porcelain objects decorated with painted and sculpted cameos and related silverware, the service also included grand central table decorations fashioned from biscuit, or unglazed cream-coloured porcelain, by the sculptor Louis-Simon Boizot. These decorations illustrated tales from Greek mythology, and were presided over by a grand biscuit statue of Catherine the Great as Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and the arts.
Installation views of room 1 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition passageway
Installation view of passageway video of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Room 2 Italian art
When Catherine the Great began collecting European art, opportunities to acquire fine Italian Old Master paintings were already severely limited. Demand from wealthy collectors was high and the marketplace was saturated with misattributed works, some of which inevitably made their way to the Hermitage and other great collections.
Despite this, Catherine achieved great success collecting sixteenth and seventeenth century paintings, particularly from Venice, including great paintings by Titian, Paris Bordone and the enigmatic Lorenzo Lotto. These are complemented by fine examples of Roman and Florentine paintings, such as the famous Female nude (Donna nuda), by an artist very close to Leonardo da Vinci. This select group of paintings beautifully illustrate developments in figurative art, portraiture and religious art in Italy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.
In the early years of her reign, Catherine the Great acquired en masse several large collections of drawings representing all the main European schools. This set the foundations for the current Hermitage Museum’s outstanding Cabinet of Drawings. In terms of quality, Catherine’s acquisitions of Italian drawings were of the highest standard. The majority of these date from the mid sixteenth to late eighteenth centuries and include many rare and precious works.
Installation view of room 2 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne showing at centre, Domenico Fetti (Italian 1589-1623) Portrait of an actor 1620s Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Domenico Fetti (Italian, 1589-1623) Portrait of an actor (installation view) 1620s Oil on canvas The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Domenico Fetti was court painter to Gerdinand II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, when he made this striking portrait of an actor. It is though to be Tristano Martinelli who made his fame working in the commedia dell’arte tradition. It is believe that Marinelli created and popularised the standard roll of the Harlequin in theatre. Fetti himself was involved with the theatre in both Mantua and Venice.
Installation view of room 2 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne featuring at centre, Paris Bordone (Italian 1500-1571) Portrait of a lady with a boy Mid 1530s Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Paris Bordone (Italian, 1500-1571) Portrait of a lady with a boy (installation view) Mid 1530s Oil on canvas 97cm (38.1 in) x 77cm (30.3 in) The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg Photo: Marcus Bunyan
This work by Venetian artist Paris Bordone is a typical example of formal Renaissance portraiture. Bordone’s main aim was to show the high social standing of the sitters, so he painted their luxurious costumes in great detail. He draws our attention to the sumptuous sleeves of this woman’s dress, the headgear resembling a turban, as well as her opulent jewellery. Bordone was one of Titian’s most talented pupils whose work is characterised by a level of precision not often present in his master’s work. This painting entered the Hermitage as a work by Giorgione.
Paris Bordone (Italian 1500-1571) Portrait of a lady with a boy Mid 1530s Oil on canvas 97cm (38.1 in) x 77cm (30.3 in) The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg Public domain
Installation view of room 2 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne showing at left in the bottom image, Domenico Capriolo (Italian c. 1494-1528) Portrait of a young man 1512 and to the right, Lorenzo Lotto (Italian c. 1480-1556) The Rest on the Flight into Egypt with Saint Justine 1529-1530 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Portrait of a young man by the Venetian master Domenico Capriolo captures the intellectual values of Renaissance art. Everything that surrounds this youth speaks of his interests, such as the church that indicates his piety; the statue of Venus that reveals his passion for Antiquity; and the folder (containing verses or drawings) that illustrates the richness of his inner world. The painting is dated 1512 and the artist’s name symbolised by a medallion containing a Capreolus, or deer, which is a play on his name. Such allusions were common in Renaissance art and would have been readily understood by his contemporaries.
Lorenzo Lotto (Italian c. 1480-1556) The Rest on the Flight into Egypt with Saint Justine (installation views) 1529-1530 Oil on canvas 82cm (32.2 in) x 133cm (52.3 in) The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Lorenzo Lotto is a much admired sixteenth-century Venetian artist. The Rest on the Flight into Egypt with Saint Justine has the typical dynamism of Lotto’s work, achieved not only through the poses, gestures and movement of the foliage, but also through his intense colour palette and the juxtaposition of resonant blues with red and yellow tones. Here, the Holy Family has been joined by Saint Justine of Padua, martyred in 304 AD, identifiable through her attribute of a sword piercing her breast. Justine was a very popular subject for artists of Northern Italy.
Lorenzo Lotto (Italian c. 1480-1556) The Rest on the Flight into Egypt with Saint Justine 1529-1530 Oil on canvas 82cm (32.2 in) x 133cm (52.3 in) The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg Public domain
Installation view of room 2 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne showing Leonardo da Vinci (school of) Female nude (Donna Nuda) Early 16th century Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Leonardo da Vinci (school of) Female nude (Donna Nuda) (installation view) Early 16th century Oil on canvas 86.5cm (34 in) x 66.5cm (26.1 in) The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg Photo: Marcus Bunyan
This painting entered the Hermitage collection as a work by Leonardo da Vinci, but is now widely accepted to be by one of his close followers, possibly his pupil Salai. Perhaps more important is that it may be a close copy of a lost painting by Leonardo. Female nude (Donna Nuda) also shares some of the qualities of the famous Mona Lisa c. 1503-1519, in the Louvre Museum, Paris; namely the repetition of the pose, the position of the hands and the landscape setting seen behind a stone ledge in front of which the figure is set. This is the most refined of numerous variants of this composition in existence.
Leonardo da Vinci (school of) Female nude (Donna Nuda) Early 16th century Oil on canvas 86.5cm (34 in) x 66.5cm (26.1 in) The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg Public domain
Room 3 Flemish art
In the seventeenth century, Flanders comprised the Catholic-dominated Southern Netherlands or ‘Spanish’ Austrian Netherlands, an area larger than modern Belgium. Thanks in large part to the talents of artist Peter Paul Rubens, the Flanders or ‘Flemish’ school in this era became very prestigious. While chiefly a painter, Rubens had far-reaching stylistic influence on many visual art forms, from prints to silverware and architecture. Every leading artist of seventeenth-century Flanders studied in, passed through or was connected with Rubens’s studio.
A diplomat and court insider, Rubens operated on an international stage. His art was correspondingly monumental; characterised by large forms modelled with loose brushstrokes in glowing, brilliant colours. Rubens’s pupil Anthony van Dyck and collaborator Cornelis de Vos led the way in bringing new naturalism to portraiture. While they catered to different markets (van Dyck to the nobility and de Vos to a rich merchant class) their mutual influence is apparent.
Flanders was a nation built on trade, and Flemish artists travelled widely, especially to Italy. From Italy they brought back new pictorial trends, such as the theatrical naturalism of Caravaggio. Flemish artists excelled in naturalistic effects, which they applied even to traditionally humble subjects, such as still lifes and animal pictures, seen to brilliant effect in the art of Frans Snyders and David Teniers II.
Installation views of room 3 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne showing in the centre in the bottom photograph, Peter Paul Rubens and workshop (Flemish 1577-1640) The Adoration of the Magi, c. 1620 at centre Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Rubens painted the subject of the Adoration of the Magi (Matthew 2:1) more often than any other episode from Christ’s life. Rendered at life-sized scale, this painting combines the humility of Christ’s birth with splendid, worldly pageantry. Three Kings from the East are shown crowding into Christ’s stable (portrayed as a cave, in an allusion to Christ’s later interment) wearing gold- embroidered silks and satins, and offering gifts. The eldest king, Caspar, kneels before Christ with gold; behind him is Melchior, with frankincense; and Balthazar with myrrh, used for embalming. With the help of his studio, Rubens produced more than sixty altarpieces during his career.
Installation views of room 3 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish 1577-1640) Roman Charity (Cimon and Pero) (installation view) c. 1612 Oil on canvas 141cm (55.5 in) x 180cm (70.8 in) The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg Acquired from the collection of Count Cobenzl, Brussels, 1768 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Roman Charity (Cimon and Pero) depicts a story told by the Roman historian Valerius Maximus in his Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium libri IX (Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings), written around 30 AD. The story involves Cimon, an old man awaiting execution in prison who was not given food. Cimon’s daughter Pero visited him, and suckled him at her breast like a child. Pero’s nourishing of Cimon was considered an outstanding example of paying honour to one’s parents.
Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish 1577-1640) Roman Charity (Cimon and Pero) c. 1612 Oil on canvas 141cm (55.5 in) x 180cm (70.8 in) The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg Acquired from the collection of Count Cobenzl, Brussels, 1768 Public domain
Room 4 Dutch art
The Hermitage holds the finest collection of Dutch art outside the Netherlands. While Peter the Great (1672-1725) had a passion for Dutch art and acquired some notable masterpieces, Catherine the Great established the depth and breadth of this extraordinary collection, beginning in 1764 with her first acquisitions. In that year Catherine purchased 317 paintings that had been assembled for Frederick II of Prussia by the German merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky. Among this substantial group were more than 100 Dutch paintings by the most notable masters.
In 1769 Catherine purchased the collection of Count Heinrich von Brühl, which included spectacular landscapes by Jacob van Ruisdael, Isaack Jansz. van Ostade and Aert van der Neer, as well as four Rembrandt portraits, including the wonderful Portrait of a scholar, 1631. For the rest of her life Catherine continued to add outstanding Dutch works to her rich collection.Although the paintings and drawings from the Dutch school included here are only a fragment of the extensive and diverse collection assembled by Catherine the Great, they reveal her artistic preferences and taste.
Installation views of room 4 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne with Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (Dutch 1606-1669) Portrait of a scholar 1631 at centre Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Rembrandt painted Portrait of a scholar shortly after moving from his native Leiden to Amsterdam in 1630. He had already established a growing reputation in Leiden and was enticed to the capital by the art dealer Hendrick van Uylenburgh, father of his future wife Saskia. Once completing the move, Rembrandt rapidly became the city’s leading artist, mainly on account of dazzling portraits such as this early masterpiece. He then secured the most prestigious commissions from wealthy and powerful citizens of Amsterdam.
Room 5 French taste
The Russian aristocracy spoke French and modelled their manners and style on those of the French Court. Catherine followed the vast intellectual strides of the French philosophes with passionate interest. She also embraced the arts, luring French artists, architects and craftsmen to St Petersburg.
Catherine relied on agents and advisors in France and Germany to identify and acquire works of art on her behalf. In this way she acquired the collection of Paris banker Louis Antoine Crozat, Baron de Thiers and other important bodies of work in France. Her holdings of French art came to encompass works by Renaissance masters as well as seventeenth-century landscapes and history paintings.
Catherine also acquired examples of work of her own century by Rococo artists such as Antoine Watteau. The playful, erotic and at times wistful art of Watteau’s generation gave rise to the intimate and worldly art of François Boucher, whose pictures Catherine also purchased. The Empress collected modern masterpieces created in reaction to French courtly and decadent styles. Her paintings by Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin are premier examples of a new, moralising directness in ambitious French art.
Catherine’s buying in France was not limited to French art. Also in this room are paintings by great German, Spanish and Italian masters that were acquired in Paris from prestigious collections under the direction of Catherine’s French advisors.
Installation views of room 5 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Room 6 Catherine and the world
For Catherine the Great, collecting art was part of a wider economic and diplomatic program designed to stimulate economic and cultural activity at home and abroad. At a meeting in December 1762 with the Moscow Senate, Catherine suggested that consuls be stationed in Spain, Holland and England not only to promote maritime trade but also to source luxury goods and works of art as examples for Russian artists and manufacturers to aspire to.
Through Catherine’s consuls and agents, such items began to flow into St Petersburg, steadily elevating that city into a vibrant centre of European culture. While her cultural sympathies were French, Catherine was also very curious about Britain – the economic success story of the age. She informed herself about Britain’s trade, commerce, manufacturing, philosophy and political system, and purchased works by modern British neoclassical masters, such as Joseph Wright of Derby and Joshua Reynolds. Examples of Spanish, Italian and German art were often not sourced in their own countries of origin but acquired as a part of larger collections.
Installation views of room 6 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne with the 1773 sculpture Catherine II by Jean-Antoine Houdon (French 1741-1826) at centre Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Room 7 The Walpole collection
In 1779 Catherine the Great acquired 198 paintings from a celebrated collection formed by Sir Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford, Britain’s first prime minister. They were bought from the family estate, Houghton Hall, and sold by Walpole’s grandson, George Walpole, 3rd Earl of Orford, who approached the Russian ambassador to Britain directly about the sale. At more than £40,000, the price was high, but the transaction was concluded in only two months. Attempts were made to keep this famous collection in Britain, to no avail.
The Walpole collection was outstanding in quality, and significantly enhanced the Hermitage’s range of Flemish and Italian works. The Russian ambassador to Great Britain, Alexey Musin-Pushkin, who organised the valuable purchase, wrote to Catherine the Great: ‘The greater part of the nobility here are displaying general dissatisfaction and regret that these paintings are being allowed out of this country, and are setting in train various projects to keep them here … No little assistance comes from Lord Orford’s zealous desire to unite [the collection for] the gallery of Your Imperial Majesty, rather than to sell it to parliament itself or, least of all, to divide it through sale to different individuals’.
Installation views of room 7 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne showing in the bottom image, Frans Snyders (Flemish 1579-1657) Concert of birds, 1630-1640 at right and Frans Snyders (Flemish 1579-1657) Cook at a kitchen table with dead game, c. 1636-1637 at second left Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Frans Snyders (Flemish 1579-1657) Concert of birds (installation view) 1630-1640 Oil on canvas 137cm (53.9 in) x 240cm (94.4 in) The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg Acquired from the collection of Sir Robert Walpole, Houghton Hall, 1779 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
An important place in Flemish seventeenth-century painting is occupied by two specific genres: animal painting and the still life. One of the most important animal and still-life painters was Frans Snyders, a very close collaborator of Peter Paul Rubens who often painted still-life details and animals on the master’s canvases. Snyders’s superb skill as a painter of animals is revealed by Concert of birds, based on a subject from Aesop’s Fables. It shows a gathering of feathered creatures screeching and singing under the direction of an owl seated on a dried branch in front of an open music score.
Frans Snyders (Flemish 1579-1657) Concert of birds 1630-1640 Oil on canvas 137cm (53.9 in) x 240cm (94.4 in) The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg Acquired from the collection of Sir Robert Walpole, Houghton Hall, 1779 Public domain
Frans Snyders (Flemish 1579-1657) Concert of birds (installation view detail) 1630-1640 Oil on canvas 137cm (53.9 in) x 240cm (94.4 in) The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg Acquired from the collection of Sir Robert Walpole, Houghton Hall, 1779 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Frans Snyders (Flemish 1579-1657) Cook at a kitchen table with dead game (installation view detail) c. 1636-1637 Oil on canvas The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Frans Snyders was the son of the owner of one of Antwerp’s largest wine and eating houses. His dramatically realistic still lifes celebrate the exotic variety of rare fowls available at Antwerp’s markets. Images of dead animals being prepared for a banquet were understood in Snyder’s time as lessons in Christian morality. Many Dutch and Flemish still lifes featuring the sacrifice of an animal for the table functioned as allusions to Christ’s Passion and the transience of the flesh.
Frans Snyders (Flemish 1579-1657) Cook at a kitchen table with dead game c. 1636-1637 Oil on canvas 171cm (67.3 in) x 173cm (68.1 in) The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg Public domain
Installation views of room 7 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne showing at left in the bottom image, Anthony van Dyck (Flemish 1599-1641) Portrait of Philadelphia and Elizabeth Wharton, 1640 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
This is one of the most charming portraits of children paint by van Dyck, who had particular talent for such works. It is one of a group of family portraits commissioned from can Dyck by Philip, Lord Wharton in the late 1630s. Van Dyck worked in England for approximately ten ears and brought a new standard of elegance and style to English portraiture. He largely conveyed this through his flair for painting lavish costumes and sumptuous fabrics, a sensibility he carried through to his portraits of children.
Anthony van Dyck (Flemish 1599-1641) Portrait of Philadelphia and Elizabeth Wharton 1640 Oil on canvas 162cm (63.7 in) x 130cm (51.1 in) Hermitage Museum Public domain
Room 8 China
Eighteenth-century Enlightenment fascination with the East, particularly China, is reflected by Catherine the Great’s architectural and landscaping works completed in St Petersburg and at her summer and winter palaces, as well as by her collecting of Oriental curiosities and philosophical texts. Russian interest in China can be traced to the reign of the Romanov tsars in the seventeenth century, when several missions brought back Chinese treasures and goods to the Russian Court. Importantly, in 1689 the first treaty between Russia and China was signed at Nerchinsk, outlining the border between the countries and rules about caravan trade.
Like many educated people of her time, Catherine was fascinated by the concept of the enlightened ruler thought to be found in China, such as the Kangxi Emperor (reigned 1662-1722), Yongzhèng Emperor (reigned 1723-35), and Qianlong Emperor (reigned 1736-95). One of her regular and most influential correspondents was French philosopher Voltaire, who praised the Celestial Kingdom, its monarchs and men of wisdom; only in China, he thought, was a man’s life, honour and property truly protected by law. Such a clear link between Catherine’s desire for justice and order in Russia and general perceptions of good Chinese government, combined with the Enlightenment fashion for curiosities of all kinds, led to great Russian interest in China in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Installation views of room 8 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Artists:Clarice Beckett, Dorrit Black, Bessie Davidson, Ethel Carrick Fox, Joy Hester, Nora Heysen, Hilda Rix Nicholas, Margaret Preston, Jane Price, Thea Proctor, Kathleen Sauerbier, Grace Cossington Smith, Clara Southern and others.
Clarice Beckett (Australian, 1887-1935) Winter Morning, Beaumaris c. 1927-1931 Oil on canvas 39.3 x 55cm
A delightful exhibition on a subject I freely admit that I knew very little about. An intelligent opening speech from Associate Professor Alison Inglis from The University of Melbourne helped me to be more informed about this fascinating period in Australian art history.
The hero for me in this posting is the work of Clarice Beckett. The atmosphere of her paintings when seen in the flesh is incredible, perfectly capturing the suffused light of the bayside suburbs of Melbourne where she painted. Her impressions are so purposeful and vivid; no extraneous flourish is necessary. Look at the painting The Red Bus for example (below) … the brief almost cartoonish outline of the bus hugs the right hand side of the composition, the red picked up by one of the two people walking in the middle of a road that runs behind the tea-trees that shield the beach from view. Every Australian would understand the symbolic quality of this mythic road.
Shadows are delineated by a few patches of darkness, telegraph poles by four swiftly drawn lines balanced on the left-hand side of the painting by a faint sign post that is almost not there, reinforced spatially by a ghostly white figure further up the painting in the middle of the road. We can almost hear the cicadas song, feel the heat rising from the tarmac, a little breeze rolling in from the sea every now and then. These cultural memories, as annotated by Beckett, will last forever.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Lauraine Diggins Fine Art for allowing me to publish the text and art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the art.
Clarice Beckett (Australian, 1887-1935) Morning Ride Nd Oil on canvas on pulp board 29.5 x 35cm
Clarice Beckett (Australian, 1887-1935)
Clarice Majoribanks Beckett (21 March 1887-7 July 1935) was an Australian painter whose works are featured in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Beckett is recognised as one of Australia’s most important modernist artists. Despite a talent for portraiture and a keen public appreciation for her still lifes, Beckett preferred the solo, outdoor process of painting landscapes. She relentlessly painted sea and beachscapes, rural and suburban scenes, often enveloped in the atmospheric effects of early mornings or evening. Her subjects were often drawn from the Beaumaris area, where she lived for the latter part of her life. She was one of the first of her group to use a painting trolley, or mobile easel to make it easier to paint outdoors in different locations..
Australian Tonalism
Australian Tonalism is characterised by a particular “misty” or atmospheric quality created by the Meldrum painting method of building “tone on tone”. Tonalism developed from Meldrum’s “Scientific theory of Impressions”; claiming that social decadence had given artists an exaggerated interest in colour and, to their detriment, were paying less attention to tone and proportion. Art, he said, should be a pure science based on optical analysis; its sole purpose being to place on the canvas the first ordered tonal impressions that the eye received. All adornments and narrative and literary references should be rejected.
Tonalism opposed Post-Impressionism and Modernism, and is now regarded as a precursor to Minimalism and Conceptualism. The whole movement had been under fierce controversy and they were without doubt the most unpopular group of artists, in the eyes of most other artists, in the history of Australian art. Influential Melbourne artist and teacher George Bell described Australian Tonalism as a “cult which muffles everything in a pall of opaque density”.
While painting the wild sea off Beaumaris during a big storm in 1935, Beckett developed pneumonia and died four days later in a hospital at Sandringham. She was buried in the Cheltenham Memorial Park (Wangara Road) not far from another noted female artist, Mary Vale. She was only 48 when she died, the year after her mother’s death.
Clarice Beckett (Australian, 1887-1935) The Red Bus Nd Oil on canvas on composition board 36.5 x 44cm
Dorrit Black (Australian, 1891-1951) The Parish Hall 1937 Coloured linocut 23 x 36cm
“It is the artist’s business to reveal to mankind a new outlook on life and the world.”
Dorrit Black, 1946
It should come as no surprise that Dorothea Foster (Dorrit) Black, like other women artists, would be scorned by the sexist, conservative Australian art establishment during her lifetime. When her life was tragically cut short by a car accident in Adelaide in 1951, artist and critic Ivor Francis’s obituary declared Black was that city’s first and, perhaps least understood “modern” artist.
“She has so consistently been artistically cold-shouldered and ignored since her return here about 20 years ago that it is amazing how she maintained the courage to fight on against so much prejudice and misunderstanding,” he wrote. “… It will be many years before her exceptional talent can be properly appreciated in its right perspective, as it most certainly will be.” …
Black was part of a generation of women, alongside Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington-Smith and Grace Cowley, who took risks by travelling overseas, painting in modernist styles and pursuing artistic careers often against the wishes of their family.
“What decided me to throw in my hand altogether the other day was your declaration that I ought to consider my time as belonging to the family first, leaving my painting for my spare time …” Black wrote in a letter to her brother in 1938. “After more than 20 years of struggling to make an artist of myself, I cannot give it all up and settle down to being nothing but a good sister and daughter.”
“She was a very modern woman which meant she belonged to an age when educated women started to break out of Victorian traditions and become independent and self-determined,” Lock-Weir says.
Black travelled to Europe on three occasions, including a two-year stint beginning in from September 1927 when she studied with printmaker Claude Flight at London’s Grosvenor School of Art, and cubists Andre Lhote and Albert Gleizes in Paris. In the summer of 1928, she travelled to the south of France with Crowley and Anne Dangar, where each painted views of the medieval hillside town of Mirmande. Black returned to Adelaide in 1935 to care for her ailing mother, building a studio-house on the city’s edge at Magill where she mainly painted landscapes of the Adelaide Hills and south coast. She also continued to advocate modern art and taught at the South Australian School of Art, influencing a generation of artists led by Jeffrey Smart and Ruth Tuck.
“Plump, dignified, black-haired and well-groomed, she was regarded as a mother-figure by younger artists,” wrote Ian North in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.
Black’s untimely death in 1951 at the age of 59 left a small legacy of around 130 oil paintings, 159 watercolours, 50 linocuts and a handful of drawings, according to art consultant John Cruthers. “Some painters paint a lot, some paint a little, and then there’s Dorrit.”
Miriam Moxham (Australian, 1885-1971) Country Morning c. 1940 Oil on composition board 94 x 182cm
Bessie Davidson (Australian, 1879-1965) Autumn Table at Villeneuve 1935 Oil on plywood 44 x 82cm
Bessie Davidson (Australian, 1879-1965)
Bessie Davidson (1879-1965) was an Australian painter known for her impressionist, light-filled landscapes and interiors.
Davidson traveled to Australia to visit family in 1914 and was there when World War I began. She returned to France immediately, where she joined the French Red Cross and served in various military hospitals. During the war, she met the woman who would be her companion for the next two decades, Marguerite Leroy (d. 1938), whose nickname was “Dauphine”.
The postwar period between 1918 and 1920 saw Davidson producing quiet, intimate, loosely impressionistic paintings – mostly interiors, still lives, and portraits – in muted tones. Her style evolved in a more vigorous direction in the 1920s and 1930s, with rich, vibrant, often dramatic colours laid on with a palette knife. In this period her work sold well and was well-received by critics. She traveled around Europe, Russia, and Morocco making outdoor sketches that she used as the basis for paintings later produced in her studio. Her landscapes are notable for their quality of light and sense of atmosphere.
In 1930 Davidson was a founding vice-president of La Société Femmes Artistes Modernes. She was a founding member of the Société Nationale Indépendentes and a member of the Salon d’Automne. In 1931 she was appointed to the French Legion of Honor, in part for her cofounding of the Salon des Tuileries, the only Australian woman to receive that honour up to that time. She exhibited widely with such artists as Mary Cassatt, Tamara de Lempicka, Camille Claudel, and Suzanne Valadon.
Although still a citizen of the British Commonwealth, Davidson decided to stay in France during World War II. She lived with friends in Grenoble, and some sources say that she was a member of the French Resistance. Her paintings from this period are strong, bright, and lively. In 1945, she returned to her old studio in Paris, occasionally spending time at a farm she bought near Rouen. In the postwar period, she painted mostly outdoors on small wood panels. She died at Montparnasse in France in 1965. She was buried in Saint-Saëns, Seine-Maritime.
Bessie Davidson (Australian, 1879-1965) Still Life with Flowers and Pears Nd Oil on cardboard 61 x 46cm
In the period between the wars, Australian women artists were leading the way by challenging traditions and exploring new ideas in art with a focus on colour, form and design, and subjects such as urban culture.
Role models like Jane Price, Jane Sutherland and Clara Southern had provided women with a basis to seriously pursue art as a profession. Circumstances and opportunity1 saw a flourishing of female artists establish a career through dedicated studies at a growing number of art schools, combined with travel overseas and, quite often, financial independence.
Painting en plein air was continued but rather than romanticised landscapes concerned with effects of light, the rise of the modern woman artist painted the landscape familiar to them with an adventurous attitude towards colour: from the buses and telegraph poles of Beckett’s Melbourne bayside suburbs; to the South Australian landscapes of Sauerbier; urban scenes such as Tempe Manning’s Princes Street and the intimate depictions of home or studio as seen in Gurdon’s Under the Window and as favoured by Cossington Smith.
Whilst there was no overall identifying modernist movement, a common experience of nearly all the women represented in this exhibition was travel and studies overseas, particularly to Paris and London,2 where the exposure to influences such as postimpressionism, modernism, futurism, cubism shaped each individual artist’s subsequent style.
Seemingly traditional and feminine subjects such as still life, flowers, intimate interior and leisure scenes and were invigorated through the work of artists such as Proctor (The Sewing Basket); Preston (Flowers) and Davidson, who maintained her career in France.3 Women artists were also exploring more modern and urban subjects, such as Craig’s HMAS Cerberus and the iconic renditions of the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Women artists tackled a wide variety of subjects, including those more accepted in the male domain, and which modern women now inhabited. Rix Nicholas ventured out to capture Australians in remote rural areas as seen in the well-known Fair Musterer (1935, QAG) and as in Boy on a Horse. Nora Heysen was the first woman awarded the Archibald Prize4 and appointed as an official war artist in 1943, as was Sybil Craig in 1945. Printmaking was also a key to the rise of modernism, most effectively by Dorrit Black as seen in TheParish Hall and also by Mabel Pye and Lisette Kohlhagen. Greater commercial and domestic design opportunities were a further important influence, including murals as undertaken by Haxton5 and the frieze-like Country Morning by Moxham.
There is an ever-growing understanding and appreciation of women artists and their influence in shaping Australian art, from ‘lost’ moderns6 to the household names such as Preston and Cossington Smith.
Text from the catalogue to the exhibition
Footnotes
1/ For example, the massive impact of the First World War allowed a shift away from the role of women simply as wife and mother and the economic affluence post-war, prior to the Depression, facilitated the ability to travel and contributed to opportunities for commercial art; the growth of art schools; the rise of domestic decoration.
2/ For example, Black studied in London with Claude Flight 1927 and with Andre Lhote and Albert Gleizes 1927-1929 in Paris; Proctor studied in London with George Lambert in 1903; Sauerbier studied at the Central School of Art in London 1925-1927; Cossington Smith attended the Winchester School of Art in 1912; Crowley studied in Paris 1926-1929; Davidson attended the Academie de la Chaumiere in Paris as did Syme and Rix Nicholas, among other studies in Paris and London; Heysen travelled to England, Paris and Italy; Carrick Fox travelled extensively throughout her life including London, Paris, Spain, Italy, Northern Africa, Australia, Tahiti; Preston travelled to Europe and her work was hung in the Old Salon in 1905.
3/ Davidson was appointed Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur for Art and Humanity by the French Government in 1931.
4/ Portrait of Madame Elink Schuurman, 1938.
5/ Elaine Haxton was awarded the Sulman Prize (AGNSW) in 1943 for her mural designs.
6/ See Dessmann, J. and Edwards, D., ‘The lost moderns: Tempe Manning, Niel A Gren and Norah Simpson’, Sydney Moderns: Art for a New World, Art Gallery of NSW, 2013.
Sybil Craig (Australian, 1901-1989) HMVS Cerberus, Half Moon Bay, Melbourne c. 1927-1928 Oil on paper 44.8 x 49.3cm
HMVS Cerberus (Her Majesty’s Victorian Ship) is a breastwork monitor that served in the Victoria Naval Forces, the Commonwealth Naval Forces (CNF), and the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) between 1871 and 1924. Built for the colony of Victoria under the supervision of Charles Pasley, Cerberus was completed in 1870, and arrived in Port Phillip in 1871, where she spent the rest of her career. In 1924, the monitor was sold for scrap, and was sunk as a breakwater off Half Moon Bay. The wreck became a popular site for scuba diving and picnics over the years, but there was a structural collapse in 1993. Cerberus was sold to the Melbourne Salvage Company for £409 on 23 April 1924, with the buyer to break her up for scrap. The warship was towed from Corio Bay to Williamstown Naval Dockyard on 14 May for disassembly. After the salvage company removed what they could, she was then sold on to the Sandringham council for £150. The monitor was scuttled on 26 September 1926 at Half Moon Bay to serve as a breakwater for the Black Rock Yacht Club.
Sybil Craig studied privately with John Shirlow before attending art school at the National Gallery of Victoria (1924-1931) with Bernard Hall, William McInnes and Charles Wheeler. She also took private classes with George Bell and held her first solo exhibition in 1932 and as well as painting (in oils, watercolours and pastels) she also undertook more graphic work, including prints.
Craig was a founding member of the New Melbourne Art Club and was appointed an official war artist in 1945 (the third woman to be appointed after Nora Heysen and Stella Bowen) and depicted women workers at the munitions factory at Maribyrnong. Her paintings are particularly characterised by her use of colour and strong design. She is represented in key texts covering modern women artists.
Nora Gurdon (Australian, c. 1881-1974) Under the Window 1922 Oil on canvas 44.5 x 54.5cm
Nora Gurdon is well known for her late impressionist landscapes and is also associated with the Heidelberg School with Streeton a frequent guest at her country property. In 1914 Gurdon went to England and during the war nursed for two years at the Le Croisic, France. Streeton was also in Europe working as an official war artist often painting hospital scenes. In 1920 Gurdon returned to Australia and from that time added scenes from domestic life to her painting oeuvre (Peers p. 149). However she remained independent, did not marry, and made further trips to Europe in 1927 and 1937.
She was a member of the Australian Art Association and the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors, (MESWAPS) joining as early as 1923. From her country property, Gurdon welcomed many fellow painters. For the members of the MESWAPS ‘successful outdoor painting days were held at the studio of Nora Gurdon in Mount Dandenong’.
Nora Heysen (Australian, 1911-2003) Self Portrait 1936 Charcoal on paper 35 x 25cm
Thea Proctor (Australian, 1879-1966) The Sewing Basket c. 1926 Watercolour 13.5 x 14cm
May Moore (New Zealand, Australia 1881-1931) Mina Moore (New Zealand, Australia 1882-1957) Thea Proctor 1912 Gelatin silver photograph, brown tone 18.5 x 10.0cm
“… the portrait of Thea Proctor is brown-toned, although the minimal studio background and the very direct gaze of the subject signals change. Jack Cato wrote of May and Mina that: ‘these enterprising young women were unable to afford the great studio premises filled with light from glass roofs and glass walls that were then the order of the day. By necessity they devised a method of portraiture by using the meagre light from an ordinary window in an ordinary room. It made their work so distinctive.’1 Despite the strong chiaroscuro, Proctor’s face is clear and her gaze direct. Her very upright pose, with her hand on her hip and no props to lean against, is that of a modern woman. Proctor’s dress was made by herself for the going-away party of her relative John Peter Russell in 1912. Other photographs from this shoot were published in The Lone Hand in July 1913 where it was noted that ‘she is singularly free from feminine tremors concerning her own work’.”2
1/ Cato J. (1955), The story of the camera in Australia, Georgian House, Melbourne p. 136 2/ Engledow, S. (2005), ‘The world of Thea Proctor’, The world of Thea Proctor, S. Engledow, A. Sayers and B. Humphries, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra p. 37
Mabel Pye (Australian, 1894-1982) Blue Vase c. 1936 Coloured linocut 22.7 x 18.7cm
Mabel Pye was a printmaker and painter from Melbourne who studied with Adelaide Perry and Napier Waller under Bernard Hall at the National Gallery School. Mabel introduced the use of linocuts into her work in the early 1930’s with bold colors and lines. Her work encompassed the use of the everyday including landscapes, portraits and still life. Mabel was a member of both the Victorian Art Society from 1918-1941 and also the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptures from 1920-1950.
Ethel Carrick Fox (Australian, 1872-1952)
Ethel Carrick Fox (Australian, 1872-1952) Arabs Walking Down a Street Nd Oil on canvas 45.7 x 37.9cm
Ethel Carrick Fox (Australian, 1872-1952)
Ethel Carrick Fox (1872-1951) was the wife of painter Emanuel Phillips Fox and a major artist in her own right. Carrick studied at the Slade School. She married E. Phillips Fox in 1905 and moved to Paris. She exhibited at the Salon D’Automne, Royal Academy London, Australian Art Association, Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors, as well as at solo exhibitions and dual shows with her husband’s work.
She travelled extensively from 1920-1940, and lobbied Australian public gallery directors and curators to buy her husband’s works. During the 1920s she was recommended by the Atelier Grande Chaumiere as a private teacher of still life painting in Paris, and included a number of Australians and Americans in Paris amongst her students. Carrick died in Melbourne in 1951.
Again, I am drawn to these impressive avant-garde works of art. I’d have any of them residing in my flat, thank you very much. The Dalí, Delaunay and Léger in painting and drawing for me, and in photography, the muscular Ilse Bing, the divine Umbo and the mesmeric, disturbing can’t take your eyes off it, Witkiewicz self-portrait.
Marcus
Many thankx to the Art Institute of Chicago for allowing me to publish the art works in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Everything had broken down in any case, and new things had to be made out of the fragments.”
Luis Buñuel (Spanish, 1900-1983) and Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904-1989) Un Chien Andalou
1929
Director – Luis Buñuel Writers – Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel Cast – Simone Mareuil, Pierre Batcheff
Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) is a 1929 Franco-Spanish silent surrealist short film by Spanish director Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí. Buñuel’s first film, it was initially released in a limited capacity at Studio des Ursulines in Paris, but became popular and ran for eight months.
Un Chien Andalou has no plot in the conventional sense of the word. With disjointed chronology, jumping from the initial “once upon a time” to “eight years later” without events or characters changing, it uses dream logic in narrative flow that can be described in terms of the then-popular Freudian free association, presenting a series of tenuously related scenes.
Ballet Mécanique (1923-1924) is a Dadaist post-Cubist art film conceived, written, and co-directed by the artist Fernand Léger in collaboration with the filmmaker Dudley Murphy (with cinematographic input from Man Ray). It has a musical score by the American composer George Antheil. However, the film premiered in silent version on 24 September 1924 at the Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik (International Exposition for New Theater Technique) in Vienna presented by Frederick Kiesler. It is considered one of the masterpieces of early experimental filmmaking.
Ballet mécanique (1924) | MoMA
Ballet mécanique, conceived by painter Fernand Léger and photographed by filmmaker Dudley Murphy (possibly with some involvement from Man Ray), is a rhythmic interplay between human and object. Affected by his experience of fighting in World War I, and in particular by the mustard gas attack that left him hospitalised for a year, Léger became fascinated with mechanical technology, which would feature heavily in his post-1917 art. Ballet mécanique, his only film, is an example of this juxtaposition of man and machine: gears and pendulums vs. eyes and mouths, pistons pumping vs. a woman’s endless climb up the stairs, clocks vs. legs. A kaleidoscopic combination of faces and kitchen utensils, Ballet mécanique was completely unlike contemporary commercial movies, and would pave the way for other revolutionary films like Metropolis and Limite.
If you were to see Ballet mécanique installed in one of our galleries or projected in one of our theaters, it would look a little different than it does here – the frameline would be stabilised and the edges of the picture would either be cropped or camouflaged with masking around the screen. However, we are presenting this version the way a scholar visiting the Film Study Center would see it on a flatbed viewing machine, with a slight bounce to the image and the sprocket holes visible, and without live musical accompaniment. (The score, composed by George Antheil and usually performed as a separate concert piece, was finished several years after Ballet mécanique premiered and is significantly longer than the film.)
MoMA text from the YouTube website
Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) Object
1936
The Art Institute of Chciago
Through prior gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman
A century ago, society and life were changing as rapidly and radically as they are in today’s digital age. Quicker communication, faster production, and wider circulation of people, goods, and ideas – in addition to the outbreak of World War I – produced a profoundly new understanding of the world, and artists in the early years of the 20th century responded to these issues with both exhilaration and anxiety. Freeing themselves from the restraints of tradition, modern artists developed groundbreaking pictorial strategies that reflect this new shift in perception.
Shatter Rupture Break, the first exhibition in The Modern Series, explores the manifold ways that ideas of fragmentation and rupture, which permeated both the United States and Europe, became central conceptual and visual themes in art of the modern age. Responding to the new forms and pace of the metropolis, artists such as Robert Delaunay and Gino Severini disrupted traditional conventions of depth and illusionism, presenting vision as something fractured. Kurt Schwitters and George Grosz explored collage, using trash and bits and pieces of printed material in compositions to reflect social and political upheaval and produce something whole out of fragments. In the wake of new theories of the mind as well as the literal tearing apart of bodies in war, artists such as Hans Bellmer, Salvador Dalí, and Stanisław Witkiewicz produced photographs and objects revealing the fractured self or erotic dismemberment. The theme of fragmentation was ubiquitous as inspiration for both the formal and conceptual revolutions in art making in the modern age.
Shatter Rupture Break unites diverse objects from across the entire holdings of the Art Institute – paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, decorative arts and designed objects, textiles, books, and films – to present a rich cacophony that exemplifies the radical and generative ruptures of modern art.
The Modern Series
A quintessentially modern city, Chicago has been known as a place for modern art for over a century, and the Art Institute of Chicago has been central to this history. The Modern Series exhibitions are designed to bring together the museum’s acclaimed holdings of modern art across all media, display them in fresh and innovative ways within new intellectual contexts, and demonstrate the continued vitality and relevance of modern art for today.
Text from the Art Institute of Chicago website
Robert Delaunay (French, 1885-1941) Champs de Mars: The Red Tower
1911/1923
The Art Institute of Chicago
Joseph Winterbotham Collection
Stuart Davis (American, 1892-1964) Ready-to-Wear
1955
The Art Institute of Chicago
Restricted gift of Mr. and Mrs. Sigmund W. Kunstadter; Goodman Endowment
Designed by Ruben Haley
Made by Consolidated Lamp and Glass Company “Ruba Rombic” Vase
1928/1932
Art Institute of Chicago
Raymond W. Garbe Fund in honor of Carl A. Erikson; Shirley and Anthony Sallas Fund
The Art Institute of Chicago is introducing an innovative new series of exhibitions that presents works from the museum’s acclaimed collection of modern art in reimagined ways that demonstrate the continued vitality and significance these works have today.
The Modern Series debuts with Shatter Rupture Break, opening Sunday, February 15, in Galleries 182 and 184 of the museum’s Modern Wing. The exhibition unites such diverse objects as paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, decorative arts and designed objects, textiles, books, and films.
“We wanted to explore how the idea of rupture permeated modern life in Europe and the Americas,” said Elizabeth Siegel, Associate Curator of Photography, who, with Sarah Kelly Oehler, the Gilda and Henry Buchbinder Associate Curator of American Art, took the lead in organising the first exhibition. “It served as an inspiration for revolutionary formal and conceptual developments in art making that remain relevant today.”
A century ago, society was changing as rapidly and radically as it is in today’s digital age. Quicker communication, faster production, and wider circulation of people, goods, and ideas – in addition to the outbreak of World War I – produced a profoundly new understanding of the world, and artists responded with both anxiety and exhilaration. Freeing themselves from the restraints of tradition, modern artists developed groundbreaking pictorial strategies that reflected this new shift in perception.
Responding to the new forms and pace of cities, artists such as Robert Delaunay (French, 1885-1941) and Gino Severini (Italian, 1883-1966) disrupted traditional conventions of depth and illusionism, presenting vision as something fractured. Delaunay’s Champs de Mars: The Red Tower fragments the iconic form of the Eiffel Tower, exemplifying how modern life – particularly in an accelerated urban environment – encouraged new and often fractured ways of seeing. Picturesque vistas no longer adequately conveyed the fast pace of the modern metropolis.
The human body as well could no longer be seen as intact and whole. A devastating and mechanised world war had returned men from the front with unimaginable wounds, and the fragmented body became emblematic of a new way of understanding a fractured world. Surrealists such as Hans Bellmer (German, 1902-1975), Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) and Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904-1989) fetishised body parts in images, separating out eyes, hands, and legs in suggestive renderings. A more literal representation of the shattered body comes from Chicago’s own Ivan Albright, who was a medical draftsman in World War I. In his rarely shown Medical Sketchbook, he created fascinatingly gruesome watercolours that documented injured soldiers and the x-rays of their wounds.
Just as with the body, the mind in the modern era also came to be seen as fragmented. Stanislaw Witkiewicz (Polish, 1885-1939) produced a series of self-portraits as an act of psychological exploration. His work culminated in one stunning photograph made by shattering a glass negative, which he then reassembled and printed, thus conveying an evocative sense of a shattered psyche. The artistic expression of dreams and mental imagery perhaps reached a pinnacle not in a painting or a sculpture, but in a film. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s film Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog) mystified viewers with its dreamlike narrative, dissolves from human to animal forms, dismembered body parts, and shockingly violent acts in an attempt to translate the unconscious mind onto a celluloid strip.
Kurt Schwitters (German, 1887-1948) and George Grosz (German, 1893-1959) explored collage, which took on new importance for avant-garde artists thanks to the aesthetic appeal and widespread availability of mass-produced media. Schwitters used the ephemera of German society to create what he called Merz, an invented term signifying an artistic practice that included collage, assemblage, painting, poems, and performance. The Art Institute owns a significant group of these collages by Schwitters, and six will appear in the exhibition. The use of thrown-away, ripped up, and scissored-out pieces of paper, divorced from their original meaning and reassembled with nails and glue into new objects, was an act that exposed the social and political disruptions of a German society that seemed broken and on the edge of collapse in the aftermath of World War I.
Shatter Rupture Break is unusual in that it unites objects from across the entire museum – from seven curatorial departments as well as the library. This multiplicity is significant because modern artists did not confine themselves to one medium, but explored different visual effects across a variety of media. As well, the show prominently features the voices of artists, writers, scientists, and other intellectuals of the period. The goal is to create a dynamic space that evokes the electrifying, disruptive, and cacophonous nature of modern art at the time.
“We hope to excite interest in the modern period as a crucial precursor to the changes of our own time, to show how what might seem old now was shockingly fresh then,” said Oehler.
Considered one of the finest and most comprehensive in the world, the Art Institute’s collection of modern art includes nearly 1,000 works by artists from Europe and the Americas. The museum was an early champion of modern artists, from its presentation of the Armory Show in 1913 to its early history of acquiring major masterpieces. This show highlights some recent acquisitions of modern art, but also includes some long-held works that have formed the core of the modern collection for decades. Shatter Rupture Break celebrates this history by bringing together works that visitors may know well, but have never seen in this context or with this diverse array of objects.”
Exhibition dates: 12th December 2014 – 22nd February 2015
Unknown photographer Members of the Ishmael Club
c. 1900
Gelatin silver photograph
State Library Victoria
Definition
Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, with few permanent ties, involving musical, artistic, or literary pursuits. In this context, Bohemians may be wanderers, adventurers, or vagabonds. (Wikipedia)
A Bohemian is a person, as an artist or writer, who lives and acts free of regard for conventional rules and practices.
This is a fantastic exhibition at the State Library of Victoria, one of the best I have seen so far in Melbourne this year. I have seen it three times and each time it has been a thoroughly rewarding experience.
~ Visually and intellectually stimulating, with a plethora of artefacts, texts and photographs
~ Excellent curatorship, with the exhibition logically structured in order to cohesively display the history, characters and stories, and strands of creativity and rebellious spirit that make up Melbourne’s cultural life
~ A great hang, with disparate elements and mediums all informing each other, pithy quotes, unique film footage, video, music
~ Not too big, just the right size to indulge your senses and brain power
One downside was that the exhibition needed a book or exhibition catalogue to flesh out the themes. Hopefully this will eventuate down the track. Also, it would have been nice to see more of what I would call ‘vernacular bohemianism’ – not just the famous people in each era, but the people that lived the life out on the streets, that supported the subcultures that sprung up from the 1950s onwards, but in a small exhibition it is understandable that there was not enough space.
Another perspective is that, in ordering such a diverse group of people who don’t want to be classified, who lived on the edge of society – you remove their cultural and historical ability to be transgressive, to cross moral and social taboos. By naming them as “bohemian” you seek to classify and order their existence and bring them within a frame of reference that is about control, power and visibility. This disciplinary power, Michel Foucault maintains, relies on surveillance to transform the subjects and the exhibition taxonomy is just that… a form of surveillance of the subject as well as a form of ordering it. Under this phenomena of power, dissonance / dissidence is neutralised and human beings are made subjects: through ‘the systematic linking of the categories of power and knowledge to form a hybrid, power-knowledge.’ (Hirst, 1992, “Foucault and Architecture,” in AA Files, No. 26, Autumn, pp. 52-60)
As John Tagg notes in his book The Burden of Representation (and this is what this exhibition does, it ‘represents’ a particular construction of identity as seen from the viewpoint of the establishment, the institution), “when Foucault examines power he is not just examining a negative force operating through a series of prohibitions … We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms – as exclusion, censorship, concealment, eradication. In fact, power produces. It produces reality. It produces domains of objects, institutions of language, rituals of truth.” (Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988, p. 87)
Ultimately, that is what this exhibition does, it produces a reality that many of these bohemians would not have bought into, for they lived outside the fold. It produces domains of objects, institutions of language, rituals of truth that, through their naming, seek to classify and negate the transgressive and subversive nature of many of these people and groups. These people lived in opposition to the tenants and morals of everyday society and that is why we still love them – for their creativity, their individuality, their thoughts and above all their panache, stepping outside the orthodoxies and regi/mentality of everyday life. Against the system, for life.
“The mania of young artists to
wish to live outside of their time,
with other ideas and other customs,
isolate them from the world,
render them strange and bizarre,
puts them outside the law, banished
from society. These are today’s
bohemians.”
Félix Pyat (French, 1810-1889)
Artist, rebel, hippie, hipster?
Revealing Melbourne’s enduring counter-cultures, Bohemian Melbourne celebrates a who’s who of creative free spirits through their art and the bohemian legacy that has shaped the character of this city. The exhibition shines a light on Melbourne’s cultural bohemians from 1860 to today, tracing individuals who have pushed against convention in their lives and art, from Marcus Clarke, Albert Tucker and Mirka Mora to Barry Humphries, Vali Myers and Nick Cave.
Venture into history’s backstreets and smoky salons to discover the stories of the daring poets, artists, visionaries, rebels and rock stars who changed Melbourne forever.
Text from the website
Marcus Clarke: “A Punk in the Age of Steam”
Marcus Clarke, writer, journalist and later a librarian at the Melbourne Public Library, is generally celebrated as the father of Bohemian Melbourne – although he was more its wild child. After a privileged start in a wealthy English family, which allowed him to cultivate the life of a young dandy and to indulge his passion for the writings of Honoré de Balzac and others, a 16-year-old Clarke suddenly found himself in colonial Melbourne in 1863, thanks to a turn in the family fortune.
Determined to maintain a semblance of the life to which he had become accustomed, Clarke was soon to be found strolling the streets of Melbourne as a flâneur, an observer of the city spectacle. A short-lived post as a bank clerk was followed by a stint on the land as a jackaroo, but by the age of 21 he was back in Melbourne and working as a journalist for the Argus newspaper.
Clarke’s bohemian ways soon attracted other young journalists and writers, and they began to congregate at various Melbourne watering holes, in particular the Cafe de Paris establishing the Yorick Club, the early members of which included fellow writers Henry Rendall, George Gordon McCrae and Adam Lindsay Gordon. The Yorick had a human skull for a mascot and rules that parodied the gentleman’s clubs of establishment Melbourne. Its members gathered in rooms adjoining the office of Melbourne Punch to smoke clay pipes, drink from pewter mugs, recite poetry and generally engage in horseplay. Bohemian society had found a Melbourne home and a creative community was born.
Wall text from exhibition
Unknown photographer Marcus Clarke
1866
Albumen silver photograph
State Library Victoria
Bohemian culture in marvellous Melbourne
Marvellous Melbourne, which arose out of the egalitarianism of the gold rushes, gave birth to a strong bohemian culture. Marcus Clarke, the London-born journalist, writer, librarian and professional bohemian, joined the Athenaeum Club and founded in 1868 the Yorrick Club, Australia’s first bohemian club, which became a magnet for men of letters.
He was a dressed-up dandy, a flâneur and a heavy drinker, but had a touch of genius with his novel, For the Term of His Natural Life(1874/75), one of the classics of Australian colonial literature. He was dead by the age of 35, with suicide rumoured but rejected by his actress wife, Marian Dunn, the mother of his six children. Clarke in his behaviour and creative achievement became a model for other Australian bohemians to follow.
Unknown photographer Marcus Clarke (detail)
1866
Albumen silver photograph
State Library Victoria
In 1863, when the young Marcus Clarke arrived in Melbourne, he could have slipped easily into what passed for mannered society in the booming gold-rush city. His uncle was a County Court judge, his cousin a politician, and Clarke himself was granted honorary membership of the elite Melbourne Club. But he chose to turn his back on the bunyip aristocracy. “I am a bohemian,” declared the man who would go on to write the first great Australian novel. “I live, I walk, I eat, drink and philosophise.”
All of which sounds perfectly normal – except, perhaps, for the philosophising – but in reality, Marcus Clarke’s life was far from average. He became a celebrated satirist of Marvellous Melbourne, by turns outraging and titillating 19th-century sensibilities in Australia’s modern metropolis. He befriended fellow intellectuals and bon vivants to form underground literary clubs that didn’t so much turn their backs on as raise an insulting finger to colonial mores. He was a poet and a playwright, a journalist and a novelist, a jackaroo, a wastrel and, above all, quite the tremendous wit.
Clarke’s most enduring gift is his writing, particularly the classic convict novel For The Term Of His Natural Life. But a new exhibition at the State Library of Victoria pays tribute to his other major legacy – that of Australia’s first bona fide bohemian.
“Clarke was an iconoclast, dangerous to know and a dandy about town,” explains historian Dr Tony Moore, author of Dancing With Empty Pockets: Australia’s Bohemians…
“Most people think of him as a venerable old Victorian gentleman, but I characterise him as a punk in the age of steam.” [Marcus: I don’t know why a venerable old Victorian gentleman – he was dead at 35]
Moore, who is a Monash University academic and passionate chronicler of unconventional Australians, was an adviser to the exhibition and worked alongside curator Clare Williamson to create this retrospective of radicals. Melbourne’s roaming free spirits have been corralled together for the first time using material – some of it never previously displayed in public – drawn from State Library archives and borrowed from public and private collections. Viewed en masse, they comprise a rogues’ gallery of some of the country’s most indelible cultural icons…
His [Clarke’s] image adorns the exhibition posters, a larger-than-life bohemian in breeches and knee-high boots with a cabbage-tree hat perched jauntily above his broad, handsome face. Melbourne’s original radical would be thrilled to see that his notoriety lives on, more than a century after his death.
Extract from Kendall Hill. “Bohemian Melbourne: Exhibition” on the Qantas Travel Insider website [Online] Cited 03/02/2015. No longer available online
Installation views of the exhibition Bohemian Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Wall text from the exhibition Bohemian Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Justus Jörgensen (Australian, 1893-1975) Fifteen of the Founders (installation view)
1944
Oil on canvas and gauze mounted on panel
Collection of the Montsalvat Trust Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Montsalvat is the result of Justus Jörgensen’s vision for a collective experience of art and life. Jörgensen had trained in architecture and then in painting with earlier bohemian Max Meldrum. His studio in Queen Street, the Mitre Tavern and the Latin and Chung Wah restaurants were sites for lively discussions in which Jörgensen put forward his philosophies of art, the revival of medieval craftsmanship and communal living. This vision began to take shape in 1934 when he and his wife, Lily, brought land at Eltham; with the assistance of friends and followers, he built Montsalvat, an artists’ colony of studios, workshops and the communal Great Hall.
While Justus Jörgensen rarely exhibited, his great love was painting. This multi-panelled work comprises portraits by Jörgensen of 15 significant figures from the early years of Montsalvat. They are, from top to bottom, left to right:
Ian Robertson – student of Jorgensen who also ran an antiques shop
Leo Brierley – businessman and backer of Mervyn Skipper’s Pandemonium journal
Helen (Nell) Lempriere – niece of Dame Nellie Melba, painter, sculptor, and an earl student of Jorgensen
Norman Porter – friend and student of Jorgensen and lecturer in philosophy
Mervyn Skipper – author, journalist and Melbourne editor of the Bulletin Helen Skipper – Mervyn’s first daughter, Jorgensen’s partner for many years, and mother of Sebastian and Sigmund Jorgensen
Justus Jorgensen – founder and architect of Montsalvat, painter, assistant to artist Max Meldrum and teacher.
Sonia Skipper – second daughter of Mervyn Skipper, and painter and teacher
Arthur Munday – law student, sculptor and stonemason trained by Jorgensen
William (Bill) Cook – teacher, philosophy and president of the Victorian Rationalist Society
Norman Radcliffe – student and friend of Jorgensen, and philosopher
Ray Grant – student of Jorgensen and philosopher
Edward Goll – internationally renowned pianist and teacher at Melbourne Conservatorium of Music
Arthur (George) Chalmers – pharmacist, student of Jorgensen, stonemason and carver, who also planted the first vineyard at Montsalvat
(Label texts)
Montsalvat is an artist colony in Eltham, Victoria, Australia, established by Justus Jörgensen in 1934. It is home to over a dozen buildings, houses and halls set amongst richly established gardens on 48,562 m2 (12 acres) of land.The colony of Montsalvat has a detailed history that reflects the life of Jörgensen and his friends and family; there is also a legend behind its name, while its buildings and gardens are steeped in the art and culture of Melbourne and its surroundings.
Visitors can pay a small fee to walk throughout the colony’s historical gardens, artists’ houses/workshops and explore the surrounding buildings. All of the buildings on the site were designed and built by residents with locally available materials, from various sources. The Great Hall offers an extensive network of spaces from extravagant halls and vast exhibition spaces, to small corridors and tiny balconies overlooking the gardens.
Percy Grainger (Australian, 1882-1961) Ella Grainger (Australian, 1889-1979) Towelling tunic, shirt, leggings, belt, shoes worn by Percy Grainger (installation view)
c. 1934
Cotton bath towels, plastic, leather and metal
Grainger Museum collection, University of Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
“In 1932 or 1933 my wife and I took up again this idea of clothing made of towelling and when in Australia in 1934 and 1935 we were amazed by the beauty of the bath towels on sale in Australia – some imported from England, Czechoslovakia and America, but most of them (and among them the most beautiful ones) manufactured in Australia. Here was a chance to show what could be done with the beauty born of machinery – a beauty as rich and subtle, in its own way, as anything made by hand or loom.”
Percy Grainger, c. 1955-1956
Unknown photographer, New York Percy Grainger wearing a towelling clothes outfit at his home in White Plains
1936
Silver gelatin print
Grainger Museum collection, University of Melbourne
Installation photograph of the exhibition Bohemian Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria February 2015, including at left Albert Tucker, Self-portrait with Joy Hester, 1939 (see below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Albert Tucker (Australian, 1914-1999) Self-portrait with Joy Hester
1939
Gelatin silver photograph
State Library Victoria
Albert Tucker Interview with an Australian Artist – Heide Museum
An Interview with Albert Tucker conducted by Justin O’Brien in 1997.
Albert expands on his many insights,during the time he spent with John and Sunday Reed and other artists at Heide during the1940’s. An intimate insight into a unique man.
Unknown photographer Opening of Mirka Café
1954
Gelatin silver photograph
Courtesy of Heide Museum of Modern Art and William Mora Galleries
Unknown photographer Opening of Mirka Café (detail)
1954
Gelatin silver photograph
Courtesy of Heide Museum of Modern Art and William Mora Galleries
These clips features home movie footage taken by Gertie Anschel (c. 1953-1954) with audio commentary by film director Philippe Mora.
Part 1 of 3 features scenes of Melbourne, The Mirka Café and Joy Hester and Gray Smith’s property. Philippe reflects on his childhood and identifies key figures of the Melbourne art scene.
Part 2 of 3 features the property of Roger de Stoop, artist friends and Arthur Boyd at work on his 1956 Melbourne Olympic statue. Philippe reflects on his childhood identifies key figures of the Melbourne art scene.
Part 3 of 3 features the Moras, the art gang at a balcony party and late American actor Melvyn Douglas. Philippe reflects on his childhood, parents and identifies key figures of the Melbourne art scene.
Making Your Own Fun in the 50s
On the surface at least, Melbourne in the 1950s was a rather dour affair. For some non-conformists, such as Vali Myers and Barry Humphries, it was a place to escape rather than a place to be. For others, however, it was a site for creating underground cultures that were largely invisible to the mainstream.
This was no more so than in the case of gay and lesbian, or ‘camp’, culture, as it was known at the time. Homosexuality was illegal in Victoria until 1960, and in the 1950s it was sensationalised in the tabloid press as a subject for mockery if not horror. As a result, homosexual men and women developed alternative bohemian cultures and communities, with their own covert venues, house parties, secret languages and dress codes.
The gala costume arts balls that raised money for mainstream theatre and other arts charities were grand exceptions to the generally underground clubs and private parties. They offered rare moments in which camp culture could be expressed in public without fear for reprisal. Theatres and dance companies provided employment for many, and bars, such as the one nicknamed the Snake Pit at the Hotel Australia, and restaurants such as Val’s Coffee Lounge, provided opportunities for the camp community to meet and to mix with others who were outside the establishment.
Norman Ikin (Australian, 1925-1962) Vali Myers
c. 1949
Gelatin silver photograph
State Library Victoria
Mark Strizic (Australian, 1928-2012) Barry Humphries in Melbourne
1969
Exhibition print from flexible-base negative
State Library of Victoria
Courtesy of the Estate of the artist
A never seen on broadcast TV programme with Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage made in 1975. Barry Humphries was promoting his film ‘Barry McKenzie holds his own’. Films clips were provided officially by EMI. The interviewer trying to hold things together is Mark Caldwell. The programme was made in black and white.
Wall text from the exhibition Bohemian Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation photograph of the exhibition Bohemian Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria February 2015 with, in the distance, Henry Talbot Portraits of actor Frank Thring 1963, with Thring’s jewellery box and contents in the foreground Photo: Marcus Bunyan
It has been said of Frank Thring that he could make most stages or foyers seem small. His larger-than-life personality was almost matched by his frame, often decked out in imposing black and with flamboyant jewellery. Son of Frank Thring snr, founder of Efftee Films and 3XY Radio, Thring jnr earned fame as an actor in London’s West End and in Hollywood films such as Ben Hur, often playing sinister or decadent characters. In the 1950s, he would recite poems laden with innuendo and hold court at the ‘head table’ at Val’s Coffee Lounge. To be welcome at his table was a sign one was part of the ‘in’ crowd.
Label text
Unknown photographer Arts Ball, Palais de Danse – John Anderson as Sun God
c. 1963-1964
Gelatin silver photograph
Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives
John Anderson was first-prize winner at a number of arts balls in the 1960s. His costume shown here reflects the creativity and effort that many put into their outfits. Costumes and headdresses were sometimes so large that Anderson and others regularly hired furniture vans to take them to the ball. One year the van that was transporting Anderson broke down and he completed the journey strapped upright on the back of a ute. His Sun God costume wowed new audiences when he was invited to take part in a pageant on ice base on the theme of The Kind and I – with Anderson as the King – at the Southland shopping centre ice rink around 1970.
Label text
But you will go to the ball, you will sweetie!
Richard Walsh (editor) The Review, Vol. 22, No. 22
Melbourne incorporated Newsagencies Co.,
March 1972
State Library of Victoria Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Before editing the irreverent Melbourne weekly The Review (Nation Review from July 1972, Richard Walsh edited counter-cultural Oz magazine with Richard Neville and Martin Sharp. Contributors to Nation Review included Max Harris, Bob Ellis, Phillip Adams, Michael Leunig and Germaine Greer. Greer had been part of the Drift in Melbourne, a loose association of artists, students and graduates. Enrolling in a Masters degree at Sydney University, in 1962 she becomes a leading light in the Sydney libertarian Push, an intellectual bohemia of larrikin anarchists. Gaining her PhD at Cambridge University, Greer then published her groundbreaking book The Female Eunuch.
Label text
Ashley Mackevicius (Australian, b. 1958) Nick Cave
1973
Gelatin silver photograph
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
Gift of the artist 2006
Installation photograph of the exhibition Bohemian Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria February 2015 with artist Ponch Hawkes’ work at right Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Vali Myers (Australian, 1930-2003) Passions 1981-82
Pen, black ink, sepia, burnt sienna and watercolour
Vali Myers Art Gallery Trust
Vali Myers discovered a love of drawing at an early age. Over the years it became her primary mode of artistic expression in place of contemporary dance. She dedicated her life to her art and would spend up to two years creating each of her intricately drawn artworks. Passions contains many elements that symbolically represent aspects of Vali Myers’ art and life. These include a fox (referencing her pet Foxy), ravens (Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven being one of her favourite poems, a gypsy-like figure playing a violin and, at the centre of it all, a woman with flaming red hair.
Label text
Liz Ham (Australian born England, b. 1975) Vali Myers in her studio in the Nicholas Building
1997
Gelatin silver photograph
State Library Victoria
Ed van der Elsken “Vali” 1972
Australian artist Vali Myers moved to Paris from Australia at age 19 where she lived on the streets, danced in cafes, met Satre, Cocteau, Genet and Django Reinhardt. She moved to New York, tattooed Patti Smith’s knee, befriended Salvador Dali and met Andy Warhol and Tennessee Williams.
Vali was a great influence on lots of famous people Tennessee Williams, Jean Cocteau, Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Debbie Harry, Patti Smith, Jean Genet and Kate Bush.
Installation photograph of the exhibition Bohemian Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria February 2015 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Howard Arkley
Australian artist Howard Arkley interviewed by ABC television shortly before his untimely death in 1999.
Howard Arkley (Australian, 1951-1999) The Ritual 1986
Synthetic polymer paint on canvas
State Library of Victoria
Howard Arkley is recognised as one of Australia’s most significant 20th-century artists. He is unique in embracing not only urban culture but also life in suburbia, a space generally shunned or scorned by bohemians, with exception of that other flaneur of suburbia, Barry Humphries. Like many bohemians before him, Arkley lived on the edge and experimented with mind-altering substances, and, like a good proportion of them, his life was tragically cut short as a result. Despite its large scale, comic-book style and pop colours, The Ritual is as much a cool and judgment-free study in composition and the human form as it is in the rituals or ‘habits’ associated with drug use.
Label text
State Library of Victoria
328 Swanston St,
Melbourne VIC 3000 Phone: (03) 8664 7000
Exhibition dates: 17th September 2014 – 1st February 2015
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Figura davanti alla volta blu
1911
Gouache on paper
A bumper posting on this glorious artist – another who, too late, realised the threat of Nazi Germany and only survived deportation and death by the skin of his teeth. It would have been a sad loss, for he possesses an unbridled passion for life. Social conscience, mythology, iconography, place, identity, race, religion, beauty, war and tragedy. And the exemplary use of colour in his metaphysical, fantastical scenes. But above all…. MAGIC!
Marcus
Many thankx to the Palazzo Reale for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.”
Marc Chagall
“Chagall a pioneer of modern art and one of its greatest figurative painters… [who] invented a visual language that recorded the thrill and terror of the twentieth century…
On his canvases we read the triumph of modernism, the breakthrough in art to an expression of inner life that … is one of the last century’s signal legacies. At the same time Chagall was personally swept up in the horrors of European history between 1914 and 1945: world wars, revolution, ethnic persecution, the murder and exile of millions. In an age when many major artists fled reality for abstraction, he distilled his experiences of suffering and tragedy into images at once immediate, simple, and symbolic to which everyone could respond.”
Wullschlager, Jackie. Chagall: A Biography. Knopf, 2008. p. 4
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Daphnis and Cloe
1911
Watercolour 16.5 x 21cm
Private collection
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) The Blue House
1917
Oil on canvas 66 x 96.8cm
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Liège, France
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Matrimonio (Wedding)
1918
Oil on canvas 100 x 119cm Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Modello di grande scena per “Mazeltov” di Scholem Aleichem (Model of great scene for “Mazeltov” Scholem Aleichem)
1919
Oil and black pencil on paper pasted on cardboard
Private Collection
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Composizione con cerchi e capra (Teatro d’arte ebraica) (Composition with circles and goat (Jewish Theatre Art))
1920
Oil on cardboard laid on wood agglomerate
Private Collection
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Angelo cadente (The Falling Angel)
1923
Oil on canvas 148 x 189cm
Private collection
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) The Red Circus
1956-1960
Oil on canvas
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Big Sun
1958
Oil on canvas
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) War (Guerra)
1964
Oil on canvas 163 x 231cm Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) The Players (i giocatori)
1968
Oil no canvas 150 x 160cm
Private collection
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) The Grand Parade
1979
Oil on canvas 119 x 132cm
Private collection
“Will the hurried men of today be able to penetrate her work, her world?” is the question asked by Marc Chagall in 1947 in the postface to the memoirs of his wife Bella, who left him “in the shadows” following her sudden death three years earlier. However, this question could also be asked about his own work, the work of an artist who speaks such a universal language that he is loved by everyone alike, both young and old, men and women, scholars and men on the street. Chagall is an artist who is known and recognised by everyone and, out of all the 20th-century artists, was one of the few to remain faithful to himself despite living through a century of wars, catastrophes, political and technological upheavals.
The exhibition narrative has arisen from a question and a need: on the one hand, the attempt to understand the strength that an enabled an artist who experimented with the styles of all the avant-garde movements, to remain so consistent to himself, always curious about the world around him, developing a style that can be recognised immediately by people of any age and any social status; on the other, the need to study Chagall’s work in order to identify the secret behind the poetry of this fragile man who was yet able to keep faith with his traditions and with his humanity, despite living in a world shaken to the core by indescribable and until then unimaginable catastrophes.
The exhibition opened on 17 September at the Palazzo Reale in Milan and is the biggest retrospective ever devoted to Marc Chagall in the last 50 years in Italy, with over two hundred and twenty works – mainly paintings from 1908 onwards, when Chagall painted his first work Le Petit Salon, right up to his final, monumental works of the 1980s – which guide visitors through the artistic career of Marc Chagall. Works from the collections of his heirs, some of which have not been exhibited to the public before, feature alongside masterpieces from the world’s most important museums, including the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the National Gallery in Washington, the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg, the Centre Pompidou, and over fifty public and private collections that have so generously collaborated. The exhibition theme therefore focuses on a new interpretation of the language of Chagall, whose poetic vein developed throughout the 20th century out of a blend of the best western European traditions: from his original Jewish culture to the Russian culture and his encounter with French avant-garde painting.
“The exhibition features a comprehensive chronological narrative, which is divided into sections, starting with his earliest works painted in Russia; his first visit to France and his subsequent return to Russia where he stayed until 1921; the second period of his exile, opened by the autobiography written by Chagall when he left Russia forever, living firstly in France and then, in the 1940s running away from Nazism, in America where he endured the tragedy of the death of his beloved wife Bella; his return to France and his decision to settle permanently on the Cote d’Azur, where Chagall rediscovered his most relaxed poetic language, calmed by the colours and atmosphere of the south.
The exhibition provides visitors with an understanding of how, despite living in perennial exile, Chagall never lost hold of the thread that kept the child he used to be in his heart; how, over the years and throughout the terrible events that marred his existence, he succeeded in preserving his sense of amazement, joy and wonder inspired by nature and humanity, as well as his strong faith that led him to believe in the possibility of a better world and seek to build it in all possible ways. Visitors will also discover his highly original poetic language, born out of the assimilation of the three cultures to which he belonged: Jewish culture (the visual tradition of its ornate manuscripts inspired the expressive, non-perspectival and sometimes mystic elements of his work); Russian culture (evident both in the folk images of the luboks and the religious images of the icons); western culture (in which he assimilates the great artists of tradition, from Rembrandt to the avant-garde artists whom he frequented so assiduously). They will also observe his sense of wonder at nature and the amazement inspired by living creatures that places him closer to mediaeval sources than 20th-century ones.
Flowers and animals are a constant presence in his paintings, enabling him on the one hand to overcome the Jewish interdiction of human depiction, while on the other becoming metaphors for a possible world in which all living beings can live in peace as in Russian mediaeval culture. In the words of Giovanni Arpino: “The soul of Chagall is a bleating soul, as mild as it is invincible because it escapes the horrors, the snares, the outrages … His paradise is an earthly Otherworld that encompasses the simulacra of life, a physical place that becomes metaphysical precisely because we have all killed it during daily life.” His art constitutes a sort of metissage [mix] between cultures and traditions. The fundamental key to his modernity lies in his desire to transform contamination into a value, a work of art into a language able to ask questions that have as yet been left unanswered by mankind.
After Milan the exhibition will travel to the prestigious Musees royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique / Koninklike Musea voor Schone Kunsten van Belgie, Bruxelles.
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) The Soldier Drinks (Soldato che beve)
1911
Oil on canvas
109.8 x 94.7cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Bride with fan (Sposa con ventaglio)
1911
Oil on canvas
Private Collection
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) I and the Village
1911
Oil on canvas
192.1 x 151.4cm
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Nude with comb (Nuda con pettine)
1911-1912
Black ink and gouache on paper
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) The Fiddler
1912
Oil on canvas 188 x 158cm Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Soldiers
1912
Private collection
38.1 x 32.4cm
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) The Old Jew (il vecchio ebreo)
1912
Oil on canvas
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Self-portrait in profile
1914
Oil on cardboard 34 x 27.9cm
Private collection
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Blue Lovers
1914
Tempera on paper pasted on cardboard
49 x 44cm
Private collection
Marc Chagall in his studio of Saint-Paul de Vence
Nd
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Red Jew
1915
Oil on cardboard
Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Mondo rosso e nero o Sole rosso (Red and black world)
1951
Gouache, watercolour, pastel on paper pasted on canvas
Private collection
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Il trionfo della musica – Maquette per il murale Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Art Center, New York (The triumph of music – Maquette for the mural Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Art Center, New York)
1966
Tempera, gouache and collage on paper
Private collection
Exhibition dates: 12th October 2014 – 19th January 2015
Curators: Stephanie Loeb Stepanek, Curator of Prints and Drawings; Frederick Ilchman, Chair, Art of Europe; and Mrs. Russell W. Baker Curator of Paintings.
This one is for me, this man of darkness and light.
Marcus
Many thankx to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the images for a larger version of the art.
Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
The Family of the Infante Don Luis 1784
Oil on canvas 630 x 838cm
Fondazione Magnani Rocca, Parma, Italy
Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828) A heroic feat! With dead men! (Grande hazaña! Con muertos!), Disasters of War 39
c. 1810-1813
Etching, direct etching, and drypoint
Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828) Unfortunate events in the front seats of the ring of Madrid, and the death of the Mayor of Torrejón (Desgracias acaecidas en el tendido de la plaza de Madrid, y muerte del alcalde de Torrejón) 1815-1816
From the 35 etchings making up the Tauromaquia (“Art of Bullfighting”) series
Etching with burnished aquatint, drypoint and burin on paper
This fall, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), presents Goya: Order and Disorder, a landmark exhibition dedicated to Spanish master Francisco Goya (1746-1828). The largest retrospective of the artist to take place in America in 25 years features 170 paintings, prints and drawings – offering the rare opportunity to examine Goya’s powers of observation and invention across the full range of his work. The MFA welcomes many loans from Europe and the US, including 21 works from the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, along with loans from the Musée du Louvre, the Galleria degli Uffizi, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art (Washington) and private collections. Goya: Order and Disorder includes some 60 works from the MFA’s collection of Goya’s works on paper, one of the most important in the world. Many of these prints and drawings have not been on view in Boston in 25 years. Employed as a court painter by four successive rulers of Spain, Goya managed to explore an extraordinarily wide range of subjects, genres and formats. From the striking portrait Duchess of Alba (1797) from the Hispanic Society of America, to the tour de force of Goya’s Seated Giant (by 1818) in the MFA’s collection, to his drawings of lunacy, the works on view demonstrate the artist’s fluency across media. On view in the Museum’s Ann and Graham Gund Gallery from October 12, 2014 – January 19, 2015, the MFA is the only venue for the exhibition, which is accompanied by a publication revealing fresh insights on the artist.
“This exhibition offers a once-in-a-generation look at one of the greatest, most imaginative artists of all time,” said Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director at the MFA. “Goya: Order and Disorder reflects the Museum’s close collaboration with the Prado, and builds on our proud tradition of Goya scholarship.”
As 18th-century culture gave way to the modern world, little escaped Goya’s penetrating gaze. Working with equal prowess in painting, drawing and printmaking, he was the portraitist of choice for the royal family as well as aristocrats, statesmen and intellectuals – counting many as acquaintances or friends. Living in a time of revolution and radical social and political transformations, Goya witnessed drastic shifts between “order” and “disorder,” from relative prosperity to wartime chaos, famine, crime and retribution. Among the works he created – some 1,800 oil paintings, frescoes, miniatures, etchings, lithographs and drawings – many are not easy to look at, or even to understand. With a keen sensitivity to human nature, Goya could portray the childhood innocence of Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga (about 1788, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) – his most famous portrait of a child – or the deviance of the Witches’ Sabbath (1797-1798, Fundación Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid).
The full arc of Goya’s creativity is on display in the exhibition, from the elegant full-length portraits of Spanish aristocrats that first brought the artist fame, to caustic drawings of beggars and grotesque witches, to his series of satirical etchings targeting ignorance and superstition, known as the Caprichos. Rather than a chronological arrangement, exhibition curators Stephanie Loeb Stepanek, Curator of Prints and Drawings, and Frederick Ilchman, Chair, Art of Europe and Mrs. Russell W. Baker Curator of Paintings, grouped the works in Goya: Order and Disorder, and its accompanying publication, into eight categories highlighting the significant themes that captured Goya’s attention and imagination. From tranquil to precarious, Goya’s art made the diversity of life, and the conflicting emotions of the human mind, comprehensible to the viewer – and to himself.
“We decided to juxtapose similar subjects or compositions in different media in order to allow visitors to examine how Goya’s choice of technique informed and transformed his ideas, since the characteristics of each medium – and the intended audience – influenced the final appearance of the work,” said Stepanek.
Noted for his satirical eye, Goya reserved his closest scrutiny for himself. The first section of the exhibition, Goya Looks at Himself, is a sweeping group of self-portraits. In the MFA’s etching, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (El sueño de la razon produce monstruos), Caprichos 43 (1797-1799), Goya offers himself as a universal artist sleeping at a desk, while the creatures of his dreams swirl about his head. This print is grouped with two loans from Madrid, The Artist Dreaming (about 1797), a drawing from the Prado that preceded the famous print, and Self-Portrait while Painting (about 1795), from the Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. Together, these works reflect Goya’s tendency to insert his persona into allegories and fantasies. At the entrance of this section is an imposing group portrait of The Family of the Infante Don Luis (1784, Fondazione Magnani Rocca, Parma, Italy) – the brother of King Charles III – which features 14 figures, including Goya, who depicts himself working on a sizeable canvas on an easel.
“Just as Goya’s imagery is determined by whether he painted, drew or made a print, he also reconsidered certain favoured subjects, reviving them from his memory and returning to them again and again during his long career,” said Ilchman. “Examining his compositional preoccupations across decades – often in the same room of the exhibition – reveals the continuity of Goya’s imagination.”
Through his art, Goya sought to describe, catalogue and satirise the breadth of human experience – embracing both its pleasures and discomforts. The artist tackled the nurturing of children, the pride and infirmity of old age, the risks of romantic love, and all types of women – from young beauties to old women. In the section dedicated to Goya’s depictions of the stages of life, Life Studies, the exhibition explores how the artist transformed observations of human frailty, creating allegories of vanity and the passage of time. A wizened woman, who is unsuccessfully attempting to adopt youthful styles in Until Death (Hasta la muerte), Caprichos 55 (1797-1799, The Boston Athenaeum), is revived in one of Goya’s most haunting monumental paintings – Time (Old Women) (about 1810-1812, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille). The aged woman is now decayed and diseased, but still clings to her outdated fashions, and is soon to be swept away by the broom of Time. Goya’s tapestry designs frequently depict young people, with relationships between men and women marked by affection, disaffection and tension. The Parasol (1777, Museo Nacional del Prado) presents a young woman who poses under a parasol with her docile lapdog – she seems to ignore her male companion in favour of engaging viewers who would look up at this tapestry, which was meant to hang over a door.
In the Play and Prey section, Goya’s creative process is revealed through representations of a popular game in which young women toss a well-dressed mannequin in a blanket. In Straw Mannequin, this carnivalesque reversal of class and gender roles is seen in a tapestry (1792-1793, Patrimonio Nacional, Spain), as well as two preparatory paintings (1791, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and Museo Nacional del Prado). A late print, Feminine Absurdity (Disparate femenino) Disparates 1 (1815-1817, Fundación Lázaro Galdiano), imparts new meaning to the previously simple image of young women at play, as the women now strain to lift several figures, including a peasant and donkey. This more sinister vein is reflected in many of the subjects the artist returned to later in life, following the devastation of the Peninsular War and its political reversals. “Play and Prey” also explores Goya’s famous images of men engaging in hunting (his own favourite pastime) and the bullfight. In these works, including examples from the series of prints, the Tauromaquia and the Bulls of Bordeaux, Goya celebrates both activities while also subtly portraying their darker sides.
The precarious relationship between order and discord, balance and imbalance, is fundamental to Goya’s work, and the subject of the section In the Balance. The theme appears vividly in images of the punishing forces of nature, figures losing their balance and others fighting. This topic is particularly noteworthy given the tumultuous social and political change during Goya’s lifetime, as well as the artist’s own struggles with illness, dizzy spells and deafness. The MFA’s print, The Agility and Audacity of Juanito Apiñani in the Ring at Madrid (Ligereza y atrevimiento de Juanito Apiñani en la de Madrid (Tauromaquia 20) (1815-1816) depicts a precarious matador, who is poised midair as he vaults over a charging bull, anchored only by his upright pole.
Goya earned widespread fame through grand portraits executed in the 1780s and 1790s, and the exhibition displays some of these masterpieces alongside more intimate likenesses of his artistic and family circle. Focusing on the painter’s approach to portraiture – from relations with sitters to his handling of paint – Portraits explores the discipline that remained central to his reputation as Spain’s leading painter and helped sustain him financially throughout his career. Paintings of the Duke of Alba (1795, Museo Nacional del Prado) and Duchess of Alba (1797, Hispanic Society of America), shown together for the first time since the early 19th century, are superb examples of his aristocratic portraits and illustrate two of his most important patrons. In the Duchess of Alba, the darkly clothed sitter points a finger to the ground, where the words “Solo Goya” are written in the sand. The assertion that only Goya was worthy of this commission and that only he could have pulled off such a dramatic likeness, changes the painting’s focus from the aristocrat to the artist.
Other Worlds, Other States features two facets of Goya’s spiritual explorations – Christian religious belief and its opposite, superstition. While Goya frequently focused on clerical abuses, religious commissions helped pay the bills throughout his life, and there is no evidence that he lacked personal piety. One of Goya’s greatest legacies is his ability to represent mental and psychological conditions. His depictions of illusions and inner reality are also on view in this section, and include visions, nightmares and the deluded mind of the insane. An imaginative rendering of a particular Spanish nightmare – a witch riding a bull through the air – is depicted in the drawing Pesadilla (Nightmare) (1816-1820).
Many of Goya’s deranged characters highlight the fragile boundary between lunacy and sanity. A luminous painting on copper from the Meadows Museum in Dallas, Yard with Madmen of 1794 – which shows distressed and helpless lunatics – anticipates a sequence of black crayon drawings made three decades later. In these later works, the individuals, whom Goya labeled as “locos,” are in even more desperate condition, restrained in straitjackets or trapped behind bars. Also in this gallery, a “learning space” offers additional educational materials and a timeline that provides context and insight into the mind of the Spanish Master.
A keen awareness of the weight of historical events pervades Goya’s work. Although he belongs in the ranks of great history painters who narrated courageous acts, he is not preoccupied with generals, patriots and battles. Instead, he focuses attention on the anonymous victims of the horrors of war or the Spanish Inquisition, and rarely fails to raise moral questions in these works. In Capturing History, works that blend the epic and mundane include a painting of an imagined scene, Attack on a Military Camp (about 1808-1810, Colección Marqués de la Romana), in which a woman holds a screaming infant as she runs from assailants who have already wounded several people. In One Can’t Look (No se puede mirar),Disasters of War 26 (1810-1814), the viewer is only a step or two away from the victims and the advancing bayonets of the print’s aggressors. The work is part of the wrenching print series, Disasters of War, which depict the artist’s thoughts on violence during the Peninsular War that ripped Spain apart from 1808 to 1814.
The final section of the exhibition, Solo Goya, summarises the characteristics that establish the artist’s greatness – exploring themes such as Goya’s imagery of swarms of human figures as well as his periodic reflection on the concept of redemption. The same artist who took on the abuses of war could also evoke the most sympathetic and poignant moments of human experience, such as the Last Communion of Saint Joseph of Calasanz (1819, Collection of the Padres Escolapios). The altarpiece depicts Joseph of Calasanz, from Goya’s home region of Aragón, who founded the order of the Padres Escolapios (Piarists) to educate poor children. Goya may have attended one of the order’s schools, known as the Escuelas Pías, and might have felt a personal connection to the protagonist of the painting – his final major religious work – which comes to the US for the first time in this exhibition.
One of Goya’s most resonant themes addresses the problem with power, embodied by a central character: the giant. Conditioned by the events of his day, particularly the sudden rise and fall of military and institutional fortunes, Goya explores how power is not necessarily inherent, but comes with a cost. Goya’s Seated Giant (by 1818), from the MFA’s renowned collection of Goya prints and drawings, is among the most enigmatic and compelling of the artist’s graphic works, depicting a looming figure immobilised by the burden of power. While no single work can epitomise an artist’s achievement, this figure embodies the grandest of Goya’s great themes.
The MFA’s Goya collection owes a great debt to former MFA Curator of Prints and Drawings, and esteemed Goya scholar, Eleanor A. Sayre, who worked on the exhibitions The Changing Image: Prints by Francisco Goya (1974) and Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment (1989) at the MFA. Many of the works on view in Goya: Order and Disorder were acquired by the Museum during her tenure, including the Seated Giant; Woman Reading to Two Children (about 1819); Resignation (La resignacion) (1816-1820); Merry Absurdity (Disparate alegre) (1816-1819); and the oil sketch on canvas of the Annunciation (1785). The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (El sueño de la razon produce monstruos), Caprichos 43 (1797-1799) and the drawing of Two Men Fighting (1812-1820) were part of Sayre’s bequest to the MFA after she passed away in 2001.
Press release from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website
Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828) Duke of Alba
1795
Oil on canvas 195 x 126cm Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain
The most inquiring self-portraits often display a cool detachment almost to the point of impersonality. These are the real backstage revelations, where the painter’s high seriousness and insight are as palpable as the flaws exposed by these virtues.
Goya in his studio is dressed like a matador or majo, a wideboy, a mistake as he himself owns: his jacket is too tight and the trousers are straining around his bulging thighs. At nearly fifty he is too old and too stout for such clothes, as he very well knows, for in letters to his boyhood friend, Martin Zapater, Goya periodically laments his snub nose, and increasing girth. Yet he chose to paint himself in the least flattering position – side on – and the worst possible light, silhouetted against a whiteness so shattering that every contour is emphasised. He might as well have stood there naked.
It is high noon in the studio. The light is so bright that nothing is visible beyond the window as reflected in the mirror, and you need to squint to see this man of darkness. The brim of his hat is ringed with candleholders; according to his son Javier, Goya preferred to paint in the clear morning light but give ‘the final touches at night in artificial light’. He may not have been the only painter to get a close glow by turning his hat into a lamp stand but he is the only artist to paint himself wearing one of the candle-hats and thus revealing a trick of the trade. Presumably it is acting as an eye-shade at this moment, though he could have taken it off in the final painting for the sake of vanity, this cumbersome pot that’s too tall for his head. But size is a running gag here. Look at the tiny brush he is using to prod away at a painting so big it makes the artist look even smaller beneath his outsize headgear (matador and bull), a painting that is too large to correspond to this one for the self-portrait is surprisingly small – not quite two feet tall.
So small and yet strong enough to carry the full force of the scene, the stark light and the stark disenchantment of a man who turns upon himself very suddenly out of a spell of protracted thought. Just as in his portraits of the Spanish royal family – like the corner barker and his wife, as the French writer Théophile Gautier once described them – Goya doesn’t lay a gloss upon the facts. He is a fat man, quite probably a small fat man, tousled, unshaven, unsuitably dressed and able to see the truth quite clearly. That is what his look declares: I see how I look, I know what I am doing and who I am in this world.
Goya is probably stone-deaf by the time he painted himself in his studio at number 1 calle del Desengano, Madrid, the final cruelty of a long and mysterious illness. And the world is shut out of this picture, the window a white-out, the artist all alone in the little kingdom of his studio. The solo studio – as opposed to the buzzing workshop or atelier – was still quite a recent luxury in Goya’s day, only just becoming a place of withdrawal. It plays its part in the history of self-portraiture not just as a room of one’s own, or a refuge from society; but as the cell that throws you back on yourself and your misfortunes.
Laura Cummings. A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits. London: Harper Press, 2009, pp. 110-111.
Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828) Until Death (Hasta la muerte), Caprichos 55
1797-1799
Burnished aquatint etching with drypoint
The Boston Athenaeum
Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828) Time (Old Women) c. 1810-1812
Oil on canvas
Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille
Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828) Straw Mannequin 1791
Oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Avenue of the Arts
465 Huntington Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts
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