painting
Women body and image, between symbol and revolution. Review by Carla Scarano.
Donne corpo e imagine, tra simbolo e rivoluzione
Women body and image, between symbol and revolution
Municipal Gallery of Modern Art
Via Francesco Crispi, 24 Rome
24/01—13/10 2019
The ideal venue of the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in via Francesco Crispi in Rome displays a vast range of pictures and sculptures from the Capitoline collections retracing the interpretation and development of the female form and her artistic personality from the end of the nineteenth century until today.
Apart from a great few names such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Rosalba Carriera, Frida Kahlo and Benedetta Cappa, women artists are a minority in the art world of the past and still struggle today to find their place. Most of the works on display testify the strong presence of the female form in all periods as a naked body studied and explored by the male gaze. Ambivalence and contradictions characterise the depiction of women as an angel figure, embodiment of the ideal mother and wife, or, on the contrary, as a threatening temptress, source of all sins. This reflects the ambiguities of the twentieth century, a time of social changes prompted by the two world wars when women showed their commitment at patriotic, social and civil levels. This commitment was acknowledged by political authorities but unfortunately no laws supporting women’s rights were promoted before the second half of the century. In fact, in Italy women were granted vote only in 1946, divorce was introduced in 1970 and abortion became legal in 1978.
The exhibition shows in different sections how women are depicted in art from the personification of the sacred and profane love to focusing on the beauty of her naked body and the Freudian exploration of her psyche. This reveals a crisis that runs across the twentieth century expressing a desire for change and emancipation often in contrast with the traditional roles of mother and wife.
In pictures such as ‘Wise Virgins and Foolish Virgins’ by Giulio Aristide Sartorio (1890) the two groups are separated in two different sections of the triptych highlighting two different aspects of femininity. A similar vision is in ‘Sacred love and profane love’ a pencil and watercolours exquisite piece by Senio (1900), in which a Red Cross nurse wrapped in a dark cloak is opposed to the vanity of a coquette in a flapping flowery dress. Naked women playing in Baths and interiors offer their voluptuous bodies to the viewer in provoking poses apparently oblivious of their identity as in Alessandro Pigna’s ‘Frigidarium’ (1882), Adolfo De Cardis’ ‘Naked woman with roses’ (1910), Camillo Innocenti’s ‘The Sultana’ (1913), or Istvan Csok’s ‘Corner of a studio’ (1905).
The beauty and gracefulness of woman’s naked body is celebrated in intimate contexts that underline its powerlessness but also its value which has allegorical and aesthetic importance in the art world. It personifies the skill of the artists and conveys their emotions expressing vitality and fragility. They also comment on the female role as in ‘Malice’ by Tommaso Bertolino (1950) where the naked composed figure with her arms crossed under her breasts communicates modesty rather than malice. The beautiful ‘Naked woman’ by Arturo Dozzi (1926) exposes her flawless form in an act of donation that is a defenceless surrendering to the viewer. Raffaele Costi’s ‘Two naked women’ (1945) is more unsettling in the expressionist depiction of two stylised nudes back to back, provoking and self-sufficient at the same time. ‘Bathers’ by Attilio Torresini (1934) is reminiscent of Manet’s ‘Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe’, but no man is present here, it is an isolated all women’s world.
In the section Gazes of the Soul, elegant middle class women communicate their emotions through their ‘looks’ captured by the artist in an exchange between viewer and sitter creating empathy. In the portraits of Amedeo Bocchi, Nicola Fabbricatore, Lionne, Marius Ledda, Antonio Donghi, Ildebrando Urbani and Vittoria Morelli there is an attentive study of the subject that highlights distinguishing personalities that seem to suggest an alternative to traditional roles. It is the representation of the intellectual woman with distinctive ideas and autonomous look. A similar view is in the works inspired by Freudian theories. Solitary women are depicted in silent interiors absorbed in their thoughts, withdrawn in their own inner space. It is an intellectual response to the classical exposed nakedness and to the roles of angel and temptress. Paintings such as Vincenzo Irolli’s ‘Waiting’ (1915), Felice Casorati’s ‘Susanna’ (1929), or ‘Old cards’ by Baccio Maria Bacci (1953), testify this alternative vision that reveals a crisis of the traditional roles and a search of identity.
One of the highlights of the exhibition is ‘The Doubt’ by Giacomo Balla (1907), a portrait of his wife Elisa, where seduction and curiosity mix in the woman’s gaze turning to the viewer. It is an invitation and a provocation to see more deeply beyond stereotypes. A similar view is found in Mafai’s ‘Women undressing’ (1934), picturing dynamic disharmonious figures that challenge the stillness of classical pictures.
The contemporary works of Giosetta Fioroni, ‘The Other Ego’ (2012), Amparo Sard, ‘Part ¼’ (2014), Paola Gandolfi, ‘Ambra Jovinelli’ (2000) and Luigi Di Sarro, ‘Untitled’ (1975), are subversive and thought-provoking. They reject the traditional roles subtly exposing the traps that imprison women as in the wired cage wrapping a crouched woman (Di Sarro), in the brick pattern that covers the woman’s figure (Fioroni), or in the nude outlined in pierced paper (Sard). the works reveal the consequences of the diminishment and exclusion from leading roles women suffered throughout centuries.
A collage of videos from the archive of Istituto Luce (Cinecittà) recreate the feminine image of the twentieth century. Different models of women are presented though motherhood and care of the family are primary. Women are seen from the male point of view, they are advertised in magazines and films and emulated by the female audience. They can be intellectual and mundane like Edda Mussolini, the Duce’s daughter, or the personification of the ideal mother like Rachele Mussolini, his wife, or Mussolini’s lover, Claretta Petacci. The queen Elena embodied love for the nation donating her golden wedding ring to the cause, a role model for many Italian women. Besides, there are the mondine (workers of paddy fields), seasonal workers in the rice fields of Po Delta and Po Valley who longed for stable works in factories that could grant them an independent life.
During Fascism the attitude towards women was contradictory, she was supported during pregnancy and rewarded for her role of mother and wife, as big families were funded by the state, but her place was at home. It was a ‘libertà vigilata’ (freedom under surveillance), as the commentator of the video clip cleverly expresses. The interviews interestingly include both women who joined the fascist Republic of Salò and women partisans.
A visible change starts only after the second world war when women acquire the right to vote. They fought for Italian liberation during the war and gained the right to speak and participate in the political debate. The first MPs are Teresa Noce, Nadia Spano and Rita Montagnana, a minority compared to the vast male participation but a good start. The 1960s and 1970s are the years of the revolution. Feminist groups fight in streets, squares and assemblies to demonstrate in favour of divorce and abortion. Monica Vitti, Caterina Caselli and Gianna Nannini are icons of women’s emancipation. The exhibition recalls the movement in the display of feminist posters such as ‘Le streghe son tornate’ (the witches are back) and women metaphorically crucified by history. Social challenges and gender selection are still problems of today in spite of all the fights won by feminist movements. Guerrilla Girls wonder if women need to be naked to enter museums still today and how long it will be so.
The bookshop at the entrance of the museum features books by Serena Dandini, Lilli Gruber, Luciana Littizzetto and the memorable Alda Merini. They are the new role models of today’s society proposing different views in their stories, interviews, examples of women undertaking autonomous creative paths, as well as poetical and political visions. A perceptible alternative towards equality and change.
Carla Scarano © 2019.
Edvard Munch ‘Love and Angst’. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Edvard Munch
Love and Angst
The British Museum, London
Until July 21
We’ve all seen it a hundred times, identified with it and even messaged using an emoticon version of Edvard Munch’s skull-like face, clutched by hands raised in horror in a distorted, nightmarish world.
But it takes a trip to the British Museum’s expertly-curated Love and Angst to appreciate the man and the artistry that built to this moment of intense anguish, known as the Shriek in Norwegian, and for Munch not just a personal, but a universal pain – hence his original title The Scream of Nature.
Neither was it just a moment. Rather it was a part of a series of images, named by Munch The Frieze of Life, a reference to his experience of the emotions of losing his mother and a sister, then a string of affairs as he was attracted to women but unable to commit to any one of them.
The exhibition sets the scene for his restless anxiety with the observation that his life-time (1863-1944) coincided with the advent of railways that allowed him to speed between Paris, Berlin and Kristiania, as Oslo was then named, mingling as he went with fellow fine artists, novelists and playwrights, often leading to at least as much drama offstage as onstage.
His native Kristiania, ruled by strict Lutherans who were scandalised by the works of Ibsen and Munch, was stifling and restrictive.
At the start of the exhibition, Munch depicts himself as an austere Kristianian in Self-Portrait with Skeleton Arm. His head emerges from a black background, like a Lutheran preacher, and at the bottom of the frame is a skeleton’s arm as a reminder of death, which stalked Munch’s anxious world.
The portrait is a lithograph print, setting the tone for an exhibition, which is the first in London to focus on Munch’s prints taken from blocks of stone, copperplate and wood. Its version of The Scream is a stark, black and white lithograph. (Munch, whose habit was to repeatedly revisit subjects, created two paintings and two pastel versions as well as numerous prints.)
The blocks, which Munch obsessively kept, are a fabulous insight into the careful determination and innovation as he strove to express his tortured world view. Their texture and physicality makes us look anew.
Two Human Beings: The Lonely Ones is one of the most appealing examples of his use of jigsaw-style woodcuts, made up of more than one block of wood. The effect is to emphasise the isolation of the two figures, underlining their inability to be together in what otherwise would be a moment of serenity at the side of the fjord.
In Separation, Munch again takes up the loneliness theme and makes use of long wavy hair, one of his leitmotifs. It recalls the waves of the fjords and evokes the feelings that in Munch’s universe ripple through nature. The two characters move apart, tenuously linked by the sweep of the woman’s hair, or, as Munch put it “the long hair is a kind of telegraph wire”.
Apart from being long and wavy, the hair in Munch’s universe is often red, suggesting passion and death.
The two are perfectly linked in Vampire, which Munch originally called Love and Pain. It shows a woman with flame-coloured hair kissing the neck of a man against a dark, mysterious forest-like background.
His famous Madonna has black hair, but with a halo of red, echoed in the red frame that caused outrage because of its daring depiction of swirling sperm and a foetus crouching in a corner.
And then there is his late sister Johanne Sophie, who died of TB, as did his mother. Munch is haunted by the memory, which he revisits in painting after painting.
The Sick Child depicts his sister as feverish beneath her disorderly red hair, while a grief-stricken woman bows her head, crowned with black hair in a tight bun. For Munch the picture was a turning point, but it also belongs to a more sentimental tradition compared with the direct, modern appeal of Munch’s most radical work, most notably The Scream.
While one sister died, another in 1894, was diagnosed with schizophrenia, adding to Munch’s anxiety about his own mental health.
As if in a premonition, he created The Scream a year before in 1893. In an instance of Munch, as he would have said, of painting not what he sees, but what he saw, The Scream portrays his experience of walking at sunset when the setting sun turned the clouds “a blood red” and he sensed an “infinite scream passing through nature”.
The flowing hair has gone, although the wavy lines of a malign energy pervade the image in the graphic black and white of the lithograph as if engulfing the skull-like, androgynous face at the composition’s centre. It recalls death once again, and its gender neutrality helps to explain the universal appeal as the anguished figure is neither male nor female.
It’s the climax of the British Museum exhibition but not quite the end. First, we have a gentler home-coming section as Munch forsakes his European train journeys and focuses on images inspired by the fjords of Christiania and the small town of Asgardstrand, where he bought a fisherman’s cabin.
Munch may never have found equanimity, but in Asgardstrand, he accepted a life without love and embraced his angst, without which there would have been no art. In his words: “For as long as I can remember, I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety, which I have tried to express in my art. Without this anxiety and illness, I would have been like a ship without a rudder.”
Asgardstrand was the setting for Girls on Bridge, which by comparison with The Scream possesses an almost chocolate-box calm.
The girls mark a transition from extreme emotion as we exit the world of Munch for the inevitable shop, selling screams on pencils, napkins, sketch pads, T-shirts and ear-rings for those who want to turn up to the office with an attitude or for protests on Palace Green.
Barbara Lewis © 2019.
Jeff Koons, Ashmolean Museum. Review by Carla Scarano.
Jeff Koons
Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology,
Oxford
7 February – 9 June 2019
The vitality of breath and its life power expressed in Jeff Koons’ sculptures and paintings mesmerise the viewer at the Ashmolean exhibition. His work ranges from the Equilibrium series to Banality, Antiquity and the Gazing Ball sculptures as well as reproductions of balloon objects in stainless steel. The display features seventeen works, of which fourteen are exhibited in the UK for the first time in a project co-curated by the artist himself. It also responds to the collection of the Ashmolean Museum that comprehends art from prehistory to modern times. His artworks refigure the past connecting them to a contemporary perspective inevitably linked to the consumerist world of mass production and the glossy ‘reality’ of advertising and marketing.
Koons, born in Pennsylvania in 1955 and working in New York, is a renowned artist who gained success in the 1980s. His work sells for millions of dollars and is exhibited in major galleries such as The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Serpentine Gallery in London and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In interviews and videos, he claims that there are no hidden meanings or ironic intentions in his work and there is no judgemental intent. Some critics disregard his production as kitsch, others view it as important in a historical connection with past artworks. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to interpret his work as a prudent comment of American society at least, with its sometimes banal iconography and simplified representations that feed mass production and sell widely and easily.
The reproduction of ready-made toys, such as ‘Rabbit’ (1986), or ‘Balloon Venus’ (2008-12) inspired by the Venus of Villenford, are the most significant examples of the exhibition both in their originality and appeal. They look like inflated balloons on a large scale but are made of shining steel. They are seamless, deceiving the viewer who wishes to touch it to be sure it is not made of plastic and full of air. Wonder of wonders, the viewer’s image is reflected in it in multiple distorted ways in a fascinating play of mirrors. Pleasure and guilt mix in a slightly anxious awareness that there is no reliable referent and yet we participate and like it.
The Antiquity and the Gazing Ball series are the major links to the Ashmolean context. Past and present combine in the reproduction of Greek and Roman sculptures in collage paintings where a sketchy vulva is superimposed referring to Courbet’s painting ‘L’origine du monde’ (1866); or in ‘Antiquity 2’ (dots, 2009-12) where the actress Gatchen Mol in girdle and lace bra is riding an inflatable dolphin. She is compared to Aphrodite or Galatea and the Monkey, an inflatable as well just in front of her, represents Eros. This is not only an interpretation of ancient iconography from a ‘free love’ American point of view, it is also an explicit comment on what art means today compared to past mythology.
Gigantic sculptures of ballerinas in softly coloured stainless steel are reminiscent of Degas’ famous dancers but actually imitate, in a huge scale, tiny porcelain ceramics by Oksana Zhnykrup. Once again, any chance of originality is deviated from the content to the form, in a presentation or production of the artwork that is captivating and luxurious at the same time, though representing mass production objects. It is a pleasantly acknowledged simulation that blurs the difference between high and low quality products.
The last room displays the Gazing Ball series where a blue shining ball is positioned near or in the centre of an iconic artwork of western tradition, such as Gericault’s ‘Raft of the Medusa’, or Titian’s ‘Diana and Actaeon’. They are copies of old masters’ paintings that his assistants painted using colour-by-numbers to maintain an even effect. Famous ancient sculptures in plaster cast are present as well, such as the ‘Belvedere Torso’. The gaze balls are hand made objects exclusively produced for Koons. They represent a link between the viewer, who reflects their deformed image in it, and the artwork, in smaller scale this time compared to the original. It is a way to bring the audience near to art allowing a more relatable approach.
In the shop there are two of his balloon stainless steel sculptures, a yellow swan and a blue dog on sale for about twelve thousand pounds each; they affirm and encapsulate the appeal and purpose of this enthralling exhibition.
Carla Scarano © 2019.
The Swan Princess: Russian Art, Munch Museum, Oslo. Review by Barbara Lewis
Munchmuseet/Munch Museum,
The Swan Princess: Russian Art – 1880-1910
Oslo (Until April 21)
Edvard Munch from next year will be displayed in a new aluminium tower that has divided local opinion as it changes the skyline near Oslo’s iceberg-like opera house on the waterfront.
Until then, the Munchmuseet, opened in 1963, the year that marked the 100th anniversary of Munch’s birth, is showing a tiny fraction of its 28,000-strong collection.
By way of compensation, visitors get a chance to see Norway’s most famous artist in the context of some of his Norwegian and his Russian contemporaries. The Russian art is loaned by the Tretayakov Gallery as part of a cultural exchange, including a major Munch exhibition in Moscow and a series of three Russian exhibitions in Oslo, the first of which is in the old Munch museum, while the second and third will be in the museum’s new home.
Munch’s expressionism, which draws on the subconscious, stands apart for its boldness, individuality and modernity. Ahead of his time, he was an exponent of Nordic noir. But, although a leap in his day, his work is a logical extension of the exploration of landscape, folk art and fairy tales Norwegian and Russian artists had embarked upon as part of an awakening of national consciousness.
The links are underlined as 13 lesser-known Munch works are hung among works of painters collected by Pavel Tretyakov, a rich industrialist and art collector, who founded the Tretyakov gallery in Moscow. His portrait, at the start of the exhibition, by Ilya Efimovich Repin shows him standing thoughtfully beside his art.
Repin is among the artists who came together at the Abramtsevo estate in northern Russian, which influenced the creative arts in general, including providing the inspiration for the house in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
The Abramtsevo artists sought to recapture the spirit of medieval Russian art in a manner parallel not just with a Norwegian interest in traditional inspiration, but with the Arts and Crafts movement in Great Britain and overlapping with the wider European Art Nouveau.
The exhibition takes its name from the work of one of the Abramtsevo colony Mikhail Vrubel, whose The Swan Princess was based on the opera The Tale of Tsar Sultan by Rimsky-Korsakov. It captures the moment when the swan, a role performed by the artist’s wife, turns back into a human princess, staring out with haunting blue eyes from a satiny froth of glamourous, opulent feathers.
She sets the tone of an exhibition that combines the other-wordly and magical with the believable and reveres both the natural and the supernatural.
In the intense political ferment of late 19th-century Russia, artists’ quests for Russianness drew them to depictions of the landscape that enhanced its natural mysticism, and to seek out authenticity in peasant workers and Orthodox monks united in a silent, rugged pursuit.
Ivan Kramskov’s Beekeeper is old and weary and bare-foot as he sits contemplating in front of his beehives on a summer’s day. The pastoral idyll is shot through with endurance.
Mikhail Nesterov’s Silence shows two working monks in two separate canoes that serve to underline their isolation, paddling past their monastery high above them on a forested spur.
The kind of peace we may dream of in today’s noisy times is seductive in Isaak Levitan’s Silent Monastery. A rickety wooden bridge over the Volga draws the eye into the forests on the opposite bank, where the gleaming golden onion towers of the monastery, reflected in the river, lure us to another world. Chekhov was among the painting’s admirers.
Victor Vasnetsov goes a step further to let his imagination fly. His Knight at the Crossroads, an interpretation of a Russian legend, depicts the hero in an impossible dilemma as he reads on stone: “If you go straight ahead, there will be no life, there is no way forward for he who travels past, walks past or flies past.”
Vasnetsov deploys the clichés of good and evil: the horse is white, black ravens loom and skulls, animal and human are scattered, implying the fate of an earlier knight on horseback.
The bleakness continues as some of Russia’s fin de siècle artists explored the landscapes of the north. Alexander Borisov pioneered the subject of the Arctic in Russian visual art. His Eternal Ice stretches to the horizon. As we contemplate global warming, the sense of danger has only increased.
Borisov’s more or less literal journey and Vasnetsov’s unsubtle dichotomy of good and evil become disturbingly psychological in Munch.
His Two Children on their Way to the Fairytale Forest surpasses the cosy menace of traditional fairy tales and borders on the modern terror that can befall innocence, represented by tiny figures, approaching the vast, unknown evil of an amorphous forest that seems to be making its way towards them rather than the other way around.
Other Munch is more playful. The Big Codfish again draws the contrast between a giant of another world, in all its over-sized weirdness, and a tiny female human. The relationship between the two figures in his Black and Yellow Man in Snow is equally puzzling, if relationship is not too strong a word for the link between the two characters. One could be the alter ego of the other, but in every other respect, they just happen to be alive at the same time in the same cold, snowy place.
Munch in some ways was at a great distance from his contemporaries in both Russia and Norway, but fellow Norwegian Gerhard Munthe also delved into the subconscious, albeit in a way more closely linked to traditional folk art, while bordering on the stylisation of Art Nouveau in, for instance, Afraid of the Dark.
As the artists of the turn of the century faced the tension of preserving the old and embracing the new, Yelena Polenova, another of the Abramtsevo group, was the first Russian artist to collect and illustrate Russian folktales. Her goal was to preserve an aspect of Russia’s cultural life seen as under threat from French influence and modernism. She succeeded in that her illustrations, such as the charming War of the Mushrooms, inspired other illustrators, including Norway’s Erik Werenskiold and Theodor Kittelson.
Wonderful as are the worlds depicted by all of these artists, ultimately the exhibition serves to confirm the striking originality of Munch. Regardless of whether the local residents approve of the somewhat brutalist tower that will be his new home, the contents will be well worth a visit.
Barbara Lewis © 2019.
Marthe de Meligny, Pierre Bonnard exhibition, Tate Modern. Review by Jane McChrystal.
For many of us stuck here in the grey fastness of a London winter, a visit to the 2019 Pierre Bonnard exhibition has brought some welcome relief.
The crowds at the Tate Modern don’t care if Picasso didn’t think he was a painter and didn’t even want to hear him talked about as a painter. They thirst for the landscapes where colour and composition almost blend into abstraction yet still create recognisable images of a warm, sensuous French countryside, which they can store up and dream about on chilly days in March.
One of Bonnard’s most well-known subjects was his partner of fifty years, Marthe de Meligny, who appears again and again in his work, sprawled naked on their bed, standing, crouching, getting into the bath, bathing, getting out of the bath. He must have spent hours observing her in their home, gathering material for the time he spent alone in the studio painting her from memory.
The paradox is that Marthe herself has almost disappeared.
To the odd friend who knew about her place in Bonnard’s life she was “sauvage”, a fiercely reclusive woman, who would only let him go out if he said he was going to walk the dog. One described her as a raucous bird-like creature, frequently silent, constantly bathing to soothe the respiratory problems which filled her with anxiety.
Marthe de Meligny was born Maria Bouchon in 1869 to a modest family in the Berry region. She moved north to Paris in 1891, reinvented herself as an orphan child whose new name, de Meligny, faintly suggested aristocratic origins and supported herself by sewing pearls onto artificial funerary flower arrangements.
In 1893 she met Bonnard when she was 24 and he was 26. He showed remarkably little curiosity about her past and only discovered that she was eight years older than she’d told him, when they married in 1925. Indeed, as he reworked her image repeatedly over the years, her face remained indistinct and her body unmarked by age.
He must have known that a girl engaged in her occupation really wasn’t concealing an aristocratic background and he did not tell his wealthy family about her existence, even after their marriage. But the gap between them worked well in some ways. Marthe benefited from his riches and her lack of presentability freed him from the constraints of bourgeois respectability. Neither was very interested in domestic comfort and they both enjoyed moving around whenever they pleased.
Life with Bonnard cannot have been easy for Marthe. He formed two very passionate attachments during their relationship and the late marriage raises the question of whether he contracted it in order to reassure her of his loyalty as their erotic attraction declined. Marthe’s well-known distaste for keeping company must also have proved convenient as Bonnard’s craving for solitude grew with age.
But there is no reason to suppose that they did not share a genuinely affectionate bond and he wrote of her loss with great sorrow in the six years he outlived her.
Marthe had another identity as a painter who displayed her work under the name of Marthe Solange. She left 700 paintings and drawings behind, which were distributed between her sister and the nieces who were discovered after her death in 1942. Some of these still turn up in the art market today, so she hasn’t quite been erased.
Still, it’s no surprise though that even one of Bonnard’s admirers, the art historian Linda Nochlin, was driven to exclaim:
“…I am … so repelled by this transformation of woman into thing .., such melting of woman into the object of molten desire of the male painter, that I want to plunge a knife into that delectable body surface and shout “Wake up. Throw him into the bath tub. Get out of the bath tub and dry off”.*
Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory is on at Tate Modern until 6 May 2019
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue raisonne which has been a valuable resource in putting this article together.
*The quote from Linda Nochlin appears on page 207
Jane McChrystal © 2019.
Your Culture is not mine…or is it? America’s tense relationship with high culture. By Stephanie V Sears
Your culture is not mine…or is it?
America’s tense relationship with high culture.
By Stephanie V Sears.
As a half French, half American individual, I give in to a pastime common to double nationals, which consists of regularly comparing both countries of origin. A particularly provoking exercise in the case of France and the United States, because though the two nations share history, values, cultural ties, (in that profound sense of artistic, religious and philosophical influences), they also encounter some mutual irritation and bickering. My intention is to point out these differences, only in so much as they may clarify the decidedly diverging relation the two countries entertain with high culture. While this divergence may, to a certain extent, be explained historically and geographically, it cannot be so entirely.
High culture has been defined generally as” ….all that is best in a culture.”1 And the ruling consensus is that high culture includes all traditional artistic expression – ballet, poetry, theater, opera, painting, literature, classical music, film – of a quality surpassing national frontiers, by way of a universal appeal, even if such artistic work is clearly identified as originating from a particular culture. Leo Tolstoy, for one, noted the importance of a spiritual connection between the author of a work and its recipient.2 The American philosopher John Dewey,3 for another, considered that the individual artist’s creative expression could, by being ‘consumed’ by another person, reveal by the same token the character of that recipient. Finally, high culture is seen as transcending any immediate moneymaking goal.
In the 1964 French film sketch ‘Les Routiers melomanes’ (The music expert truck-drivers), starring Jean Yanne and Paul Mercey, two truck-drivers are doing their night shift together. Wearing wife-beaters, both display, in appearance and language, the plebeian coarseness expected of their profession. Yet as the one not driving, prompted by boredom, turns on a favorite radio station, we discover that they are both highly sophisticated connoisseurs of classical music, deftly able to argue the merits of a Beethoven quartet interpretation, as well as of other classical pieces; even as they continue to intersperse their highfalutin exchange with vulgar invectives directed at passing drivers. They amaze us still more, later on, by discussing the poetry of Charles Peguy, (who, to be fair, is about as easy to read as it is to listen to music by, say, Karl Heinz Stockhausen), with the same passionate expertise and sensitivity. Some of us may laugh at the contrast between blue-collar status and such an unexpected display of rarefied erudition. Some of us may not. Indeed, such socio-cultural discrepancy is not so far-fetched in France, a country renowned for its native infatuation with high culture, French or otherwise. High culture is enthusiastically promoted in public and private schools alike and, generally throughout a society that is close to its culture; literally, at every step, be it in its urban centers or in its countryside. In no other country, that I know of, is public opinion more indulgent and admiring of an individual’s inclination towards high culture. Ultimately, one’s relation to culture is considered to be a personal exchange between artist and recipient, a deeply sincere, quasi-religious one. From a French point of view, therefore, the situation depicted in the sketch ‘Les Routiers Melomanes’, may be considered as less of a joke about the contrast between social status and the expert refinement displayed by these individuals, and more of a poking fun at the native frenzy for culture in any circumstance.
I am almost certain that in the United States the sketch would be understood as a warning against class prejudice and division.
Famous actors Gerard Depardieu and Fabrice Luchini are both from very modest social backgrounds, the former having sojourned in prison in his nearly illiterate youth, the latter having begun his career as a hair-dresser’s assistant. Yet, both have risen today to fame, not only as icons of classical French literature through their enacting of well-known literary characters, but also as legitimate authorities on French literature and poetry.
Over time, French education has also inoculated citizens from former colonies with some of the same passion for French culture, and culture in general, and it is not unusual to find oneself discussing Balzac or Rimbaud, with a Senegalese taxi driver during one’s ride through Paris.
The sheer number of articles and essays published on the United States’ educational and cultural decline – tainted either with suspicion, resentment or nostalgia – as some question the value of high culture or, on the contrary, deplore its abandon, or again, propose a blending together of high and popular culture, or even the deletion of the former, deemed passé – illustrates how, in America, contrarily to France, socio-political ideology has intruded in the arts domain, and how strained and somewhat unspontaneous is the country’s relationship with high culture.
In her 2013 New York Times piece4, Patricia Cohen gives the statistics, from 2008 to 2013, of an overall decline of visits to museums, to the theater and classical music concerts, ballet shows, (despite a slight rise in attendance at jazz concerts and movies). Her conclusion remains, nonetheless, mildly optimistic as she evokes rising costs of tickets for the performing arts, the degree of accessibility to shows, and the availability of modern home technology allowing households to enjoy the arts at home. Daniel Asia, more pessimistically,5 notes ,already for the earlier period 1982 to 2008, a drop in attendance from a previous 13% to 9.3% for classical music concerts, from 12% to 9% for plays, a sharp fall of 50% for ballet. Jazz concerts – spared a decline in Ms. Cohen’s article – show a fall from 10.8% in 2002 to 7.8% in 2008.
In fact, virtual connection to culture often does replace the direct, physical connection that is yet so essential for a full impact of a performance or an exhibit on our emotions. But a more fundamental reason for this distancing with high culture, is, most probably, poor schooling – what the economist and socio-political commentator, Thomas Sowell, calls ‘gimmicky education’, one pervaded by the notion that a student must ‘feel good’ about himself rather than receive a formal education.6 The gradual disappearance of cursive writing from school (though some schools are now bringing it back after noticing the nefarious effects of its vanishing)7, may, all at once, be a symptom of this distancing and underscore a tendency to simply abandon certain cultural habits that used to link the individual more seamlessly to his history. Another cause or derivation of this cultural deficit may be the overall drop in literary reading.8 It is, however, the pervasive ideological discourse on social equality and how to achieve it, that must be held most accountable for this avalanche of sorrowful assessment of a general alienation from high culture.
Indeed, this scrutiny in favor or against high culture in America, reveals the interference of a socio-political self-consciousness in the world of the arts and high culture. The moral posturing employed in this interposition, in an attempt to impose a corresponding social framework, tampers with creative integrity as it proclaims authoritatively what is moral and ‘right’.
This is not to say that all earnest affection and cultural identification with certain American artists has disappeared. In my New England region, Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson are examples of such enduring and sincere cultural attachment. And yet…and yet one can’t help wondering, amidst the country’s current cultural climate, if there is not also, beyond a genuine appreciation, the hint of a surrender to politically correct pressure, to a tacit consensus that these poets are ‘safe’ to admire, unlike other great authors.
Jack London, Henry James, (and to include international anglophone authors) C.S.Lewis, Charles Dickens, J.R.R.Tolkien, Joseph Conrad, are all morally condemned for reasons not pertaining to the intrinsic quality of their work. Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’, commonly accused of racism, is a case in point. One can’t help wondering why, then, that particular novella has been so consistently studied in America, (knowing that Conrad wrote so many other exquisitely well written stories giving central stage to non-white indigenous characters), if not to select a work that may conveniently support the discourse of pernicious colonial mentality rather than be simply read as great literature.9 The character of Fagin in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, has had the same fate.10 And such damning criticism extends even to music. Richard Wagner is a prime example of unredeemable musical offensiveness.11
The resistance against high culture entails, therefore, the suppression of works regarded as offensive, by first ridding them of a certain majesty and placing them on a level with popular and commercial culture in the name of a more ‘modern’ cultural outlook. Such a process may lead to adapting a great work by selecting parts of it and reducing that selection to an identifiable icon or slogan, that can then be introduced to the realm of marketing and commerce. Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and ‘The Kiss’ by Gustav Klimt typify such a process.
The American consumer of the arts is made uncertain of his taste for high culture in an environment in which high and popular culture become increasingly co-mingled, and in which moral criticism, condemnation, are in constant ebullition. The consumer of high arts is directed or pressured towards a more ‘omnivorous’ consumption, implying a less ‘elitist’ spectrum of culture.12 This broadening process, which, by the way, any cultivated and culturally confident individual performs on his own, at his own pace, out of natural curiosity, is force-fed to him by mass media and other forms of public prepping as an exercise in redemption or prevention from ‘elitism’.
The fundamental difference in cultural outlook between France and the United States may perhaps be reflected in the twin expressions: Down to earth and Terre a terre. The former, frequently used by Americans, conveys a positive and enviable quality. The latter, in France, connotes, to the contrary, a certain disdain and suggests a lack of aesthetic, intellectual and ultimately spiritual elevation of the sort that should spring directly from the human heart. In the American expression can be found the influence of a democratically egalitarian ideal. In the French expression can be found the remains of a chivalrous ideal fraught with romanticism, and which America characterizes with some diffidence as ‘elitism’. And yet it is not as if Americans have always been blind to those effects of a certain type of egalitarian idealism on individual self-determination and creativity. In fact, in the American passion for individual freedom and devotion to a certain view of social equality, there is a strange yet fundamental paradox. Ultimately, the two sides seem fated to clash until one is defeated one way or another. It is worrying to see individual freedom being challenged and restrained in the United States’ leading democracy, in a way somewhat reminiscent of regimes vigorously condemned by American principles.
In his time, Henry Adams noted the negative influence exerted by democratic principles on the making and enjoyment of high culture: “What Adams plays upon is important- the hurts that Democracy inescapably inflicts on the intelligent, cultivated high culture, the traditionally artistic sensibility, the individual.”13 The constant moral pressure imposed by the democratic ideal on American society gave birth, as a matter of course, to a suspicion of so-called ‘elitist’ culture and, thereby, of a taste for it. In Henry James’ book ‘The Ambassadors’, that same suspicion felt by the main character, Lambert Strether, is key to the plot in which Strether ultimately succeeds in resisting the seduction of European high culture, seen as the manifestation of a decadent society. To the contrary of Strether, Henry James’ writing, one of the most sophisticated in American literature: “privileges many of the things that American life barely tolerates and certainly has no notion or means of helping to flourish.”14 Davidoff goes on to add that such literature as James’ does not serve the large categories of activism.”15
Though noble and, in many cases, necessary, activism in the United States has also, to a considerable extent, given in to political bias and propagandizing; which, in turn, has led to an abuse of socio-political interventionism. In still more sinister fashion, however subtly it may have been conducted, activism has led to the censuring of individual freedom of thought and speech. Certain types of activism in America that are focused on culture, are clearly over-stepping the line that separates democratic values and the invasion of individual freedom.
Daniel Asia,16 points out that in the USA, popular culture was always taken more seriously than high culture, partly because of the moral approach evoked above. Yet the upsurge of popular culture in the 1950s, instead of melding different racial and economic groups of Americans together, opened the way to aggravating forms of blame and division, and led to what is commonly called ‘identity politics’. Homosexuals, women, Native Americans, African-Americans, demanded to be acknowledged as significant yet, somehow, separate segments of American society. As Michael Sliwinski indicates,17 this popular movement, improperly structured because devoid of intellectual leadership, and which, later, vented its views through mainly virtual modes, gradually led to a phenomenon of protest for the sake of protesting; as if mere agitation and clamoring could culminate in the desired result, whether the result was clearly determined… or not.18 In the 1960s, culture became a political weapon towards change.19 Any residual individual aspiration to experience the arts, unfettered by politics, seemed to gradually dwindle on the American horizon like a lonesome cowboy of the past. Meanwhile, activism seemed to spread like a rash across that previously hallowed ground of creativity.
One may legitimately wonder, in such circumstances, what happens to an artist’s freedom of expression, but also to the consumer’s right to his own personal cultural inclination. What happens when whole segments of society forcefully adapt the cultural environment by way of socio-political subterfuges? What happens to that sincere and earnest search for “a shadow of the divine perfection?” (Michelangelo Buonarroti quote)
The direct encounter between artist and individual is increasingly and conveniently replaced by a ‘plug-in’, emotionally atrophied globalism. Easy access to text, image, music, etc, and the consequent fluid virtual traveling of works of art and their swift manipulation by technology, blurs more and more the distinction between the genuine creative act and the consumer; useful, and to an extent, educational, giving quick access to information, virtual engineering also facilitates, with growing shamelessness, the possibility to ‘correct’, according to current acceptable socio-economic norms, any given artistic expression.
American activism employs the ‘soft’ method of victimization to filter its demands. Even nature, in its unsullied grandeur, was once, as a purveyor of personal solace to all, left outside of political debate. But it seems that it is now also being implicated in an environmental activism that does not seek strictly to help preserve nature, but also feeds a political debate with an over-all socio-political message.
In ‘Histoire du Juif Errant’ (1990) the French writer Jean d’Ormesson wrote that one would have to travel very far indeed to no longer be able to appreciate emotions common to all mankind. In fact, unlike much of today’s activism in America, that only pretends to speak for the individual, authors like Tolstoy, Victor Hugo, Dostoevsky, Steinbeck, though considered as social critics of their time and place, spoke, in fact, first and foremost to and for the individual’s sake, wherever he might be.
Any intervening force, be it religious or political, that tampers with a personal encounter between artist and consumer of the arts, is bound to lead inevitably to a culturally impoverished society and a manipulated individual; or, to what Joseph C.Hermanowiecz calls: ‘The Culture of Mediocrity’ (2013). One possible outcome of such cultural activism might be a backlash from a growing portion of society refusing to be herded into a single cultural format. Activism having such a consequence, would, therefore, increase social strife and division rather than achieve the proposed goal of a multicultural harmony.
Cultural activism in the United States attacks a perceived supremacy of European culture as a villain holding hostage the vital innards of American society. One may fear, however, and with good reason, that one form of supposed supremacy may, ironically, serve as excuse to shape another far more inescapable supremacy: of a sanitized culture ruled by a singularly undemocratic globalism. In such a case, individual imagination is bound to wither. If high culture is the self-consciousness of a society18, yet is contained or eliminated by a biased form of censorship, and replaced by cultural standards that fit a certain contrived idea of social harmony, that society is bound to become troubled and emotionally void.
Rather than diligently warn against cultural expressions arbitrarily identified as passé, racist, supremacist – a method which undermines the individual’s right to self-determination – it could be more to the point, and more inclusive, to simply acknowledge the benefits of high culture to everyone.
Through the individual, any kind of cultural encounter is possible. It has been shown that great art welcomes tribute from any kind of individual variant at the intersection of social, economic, educational factors. Here lies the magical appeal of the high arts for anyone, if experienced on the grounds of intrinsic merit; in other terms, at a level where neither ideology, racial/racist considerations, social gradings, nor commerce are given precedence over a work’s essential appeal to an individual.
Authentic human emotion creates bonds that irresistibly breach conventional social types, bringing humanity together far more efficiently than any ideology. And left to its own devices, the power of culture is unstoppable in bringing together, say, a Chinese accountant and the short stories of J.L. Borges, an Ojibwa Native American and the Indian sitar, Mike Tyson and Baroque castrato music.
In summary, to privilege high culture, is, in my humble view, a way to bypass the sadly unsatisfactory bouillabaisse of the multiculturalism offered by media and commerce, for a far more genuine meeting between individuals of different cultural origins and/or social circumstances, bolstered by the highest levels of artistic expression, where they may seek together common values.
Sources
1 Fahad Al Kubaisi cites Tuchman, Gaye, and Fortin 1989
2 ‘European culture’ is an invented tradition/Benjamin G. Martin/January 2017
3 Art as Experience/John Dewey/ 1934
4 A New Survey Finds a Drop in Arts Attendance/ Patricia Cohen/NYT December 2013
5 The Future of (high) Culture in America/Daniel Asia/2015
6 Inside American Education: the decline, the deception, the dogmas/ 201565 Diane Rehm Show with Thomas Sowell/ Washington DC 1993
7 Is cursive handwriting slowly dying out in America? PBS News2014
8 The long steady Decline of Literary Reading/ The Washington Post 2016
9 Out of Africa/Caryl Phillips/ 2003
10 The Faces of Fagin/Paul Vallely/2005
11 As if music could do no harm/ Alex Ross 2014/Can we forgive him?/Adrian Mourby/2000
12 Whatever happened to high culture?/Joseph Epstein/2015
13 Robert Davidoff/Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage/72/2016
14 Robert Davidoff/Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage/133/2015
15 R. Davidoff/Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage/134/2015
16 The Future of (high) Culture in America/Daniel Asia/ 2015
17 Michael Sliwinski/The Evolution of Activism: From the Streets to Social Media/2016.
18 Frank Tommler/Mixing high and popular culture: the impact of communication revolution/ German Pop Culture:’ how American is it?’ U. Of Michigan Press 2004
19 Roger Scruton/ High Culture is being corrupted by a Culture of Fakes/2012
Three free exhibitions at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology. Review by Carla Scarano.
Three free exhibitions at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford.
Antinous: boy made god. Until 24 Feb 2019, Gallery 8
Lui Shou-kwan Centenary Exhibition: Abstraction, Ink and Enlightenment. Until 7 April, Gallery 11
Plum Blossom and Green Willow: Surimono Poetry Prints. Until 17 May 2019, Gallery 29
Sometimes free exhibitions are as interesting as ones you pay for. This is the case of three free exhibitions displayed in three different rooms at the Ashmolean museum in Oxford. Though each exhibition is presented in only one room, they all show enough objects or pictures with effective explanatory captions that allow the viewer to successfully understand the subject.
Antinous: boy made god in Gallery 8, focuses on the figure of the handsome young man from Bithynia (present Turkey) who was the beloved lover of the emperor Hadrian from AD 123 till the boy’s death in 130. He drowned in the Nile, and there are no records to ascertain if it was an accident, suicide, or if he was killed. Possibly it was a self-sacrifice in favour of the emperor. Antinous did not hold any official or public position and was not a Roman citizen. However, his cult spread throughout the empire; he was represented in statues, busts, coins, bronze statuettes, and was celebrated in poems, hymns and festivals.
The exhibition displays several marble statues such as the beautiful ‘Antinous from Syria’, a naked bust with an inscription, ‘To the Hero Antinous’. The ‘Townley Antinous’, a head that was part of a statue, wears a wreath of ivy reminiscent of the figure of Dyonisus. His face looks down, in a modest pose as in the life-size statue of the ‘Capitoline Antinous’. This modesty represented the attitude the elders expected from a well-educated youth, similar to the ‘Venus pudica’ (modest Venus). The hairstyle, curls at the front and long hair at the back, is reminiscent of figures of heroes such as Achilles. However, there are no records of heroic acts or other particular events he performed, except the fact that he was Hadrian’s lover. He represented homoerotic attraction, which was subsequently repressed under Christianity, and had followers in local and popular worship. This widespread and enduring veneration is considered unusual by experts and though Hadrian founded a city in his honour, Antinopolis, and supported his cult, it does not seem enough to justify it. The most feasible explanation about this success is that he probably answered a need in society. The worshippers identified themselves in this country boy who became a hero and a god for them, and his life was exemplar. The exhibition also displays plaster casts and a statue of Antinous as Osiris, found at Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli in Italy. This representation as the Egyptian god of the underworld testifies the versatility and popularity of his cult.
A very different and equally engrossing exhibition is in Gallery 11. It is dedicated to the Chinese painter Lui Shou-Kwan (1919-1975), who lived in the mainland China and in Hong Kong working for a Ferry Company and teaching art. In his work he developed spiritual themes connected with Buddhism and Confucianism expressed in his landscapes and abstract paintings. His apparently loose, though carefully controlled, use of black ink in thin lines as well as in large patches reveals a traditional approach that records the physical object or landscape but aims to a spiritual connection. This is very clear in his Chan paintings (Chan meaning ‘Zen’ in Japanese) where large brushstrokes in black ink are juxtaposed to small yellow or red marks, probably linked to the symbols of colours in Buddhism where red is traditionally associate to life and virtue and yellow to renunciation and emptiness. They might allude to Zen practices focusing on meditation, a point in time and space to contemplate. The lotus pictures symbolise the openness of this practice to the world and to others, while the landscapes show the dreamlike quality of the land in its expanding, almost boundless reality, that seems to reach beyond the page. The abstract paintings are fascinating in their simplicity and yet highly evocative of a possible different dimension. The centenary exhibition dedicated to this remarkable painter displays a riveting selection of his works; this gives the viewer a deep and vivid awareness of the interests and development of his art.
In Gallery 29 the Surimono prints’ display from the Ashmolean’s collections offer an interesting view of Japanese poetry, custom and art of the early 19th century. The Surimono, meaning ‘printed thing or object’, is a woodblock print of about eight by nine inches commissioned for special occasions such as New Year greetings, the Cherry Blossom season or other particular events. They wish good luck combining images and poetry with pictures linked to nature, historical events, symbols or still life. They often illustrated a particular poem that won a competition or publicised Kabuki actors and did not have a commercial distribution but were privately published and privately owned. The text was paramount and was the main inspiration for the illustration which interpreted and added layers of meaning to the poem.
The exhibition, though displayed in a small room, offers a good range of examples from Kabuki actors, historical figures, symbolism linked to Buddhism, iconic characters of literature and legends, and festivities. The exquisite elegance of the pictures and their connection with the importance of harmony in life, convey a spiritual influence that, according to Japanese tradition, was present in the words of the poems.
The three exhibitions, though limited to one room, give a vivid and extensive view of the themes they address. The viewer cannot be but fascinated by their original finesse, vision and artistry.
Carla Scarano © 2019.
A place that exists only in moonlight. Turner Contemporary. Katie Paterson & JMW Turner. Review by Fiona Sinclair.
A place that exists only in moonlight.
Turner Contemporary.
Katie Paterson & JMW Turner.
January 2019.
There is a natural symbiosis between the two artists in this exhibition. Both, although divided by centuries, seek to present the relationship between man and his place in the universe. In the artists minds’ there is no binary distinction between art and science that would later develop. Just as Turner worked at the RA with the Royal Society housed adjacently, so Paterson with a cheeky ‘don’t ask don’t get ‘attitude has suborned everything from university science departments to Nasa to aid in her exploration of not just the history of our planet but our relationship with other planets and the nature of space itself. Where Turner begins Paterson continues then. As such given her subject matter is broadly earth’s geology, time, the finite nature of planets and the possibility of eternity. Consequently, the Turners selected by her with evident care complement both their enquiring minds and their intellectual courage to seek for the truths that underpin our existence.
It is clear as we view the installations and engage with the concepts, that the artist has a brilliant intellect that is aided by a keen sense of curiosity. This is borne out by the book that accompanies the exhibition. This brims with ideas. As such it charts the beginning of the artist’s process. These thoughts are distilled on paper and developed from there. The cover of this book is again a product of her ambition and cheekiness. It is made from an assortment of stellar debris sourced anyway from universities to eBay.
The exhibition begins with a rotating colour spectrum that represents the big bang, our own starting point in time. The large spinning disc encapsulates the colours of the origins of the universe, the rotational aspect creates a dizzying even hypnotic response in the observer, that whilst beautiful also disconcerts. Indeed, much of Paterson’s work moves from pure thought to sensory experience, born out in past works that seek to emulate the smell of planets and the crackling of artic ice. This exhibition then moves from the starting gun of the universe to beguiling us into contemplating the earth’s geological history manifested in a suspended pendent comprised of beads from each of eras up to the current day. The artist herself when questioned made it quite clear that all her works are authentic but also precise otherwise ‘’What is the point?’’ It is a fascinating exercise to examine this necklace that tells the story of our planet. Here Peterson’s fascination with geology chimes well with Turner’s own interests.
Having reminded us of our planetary past, the artist then reminds us of the passage of time with a row of clocks on the wall; each set not just to earth time but also at the times of neighbouring planets. This are cleverly worked out by mathematicians and scientists in some fantastic logarithms that as accurate as possible and are the artist wryly comments even beyond her understanding. Again, to maintain authenticity, the artist is not afraid to ask experts for help. Time is a recurring theme for the artist. She takes pains to remind us that nothing in the universe lasts. Thus, we have a string of bulbs ingeniously arranged as a constellation. Some bulbs burn bright others are fading, many have burned out. Whilst aesthetically pleasing, its darker purpose is to remind us that inevitably all planets die. This sobering thought of not just our own mortality but on a larger scale the earth’s, is reinforced by a sequence of letters written to an academic informing him, rather in the manner of a war time fatalities, that a numbered star had died. Indeed, the artist bemoans the demise of telegrams which she felt created a more dramatic effect. It is made clear that within the set time frame of the project these letters are only a few of the notifications sent.
Other works such as planetary maps, reinforce this idea of a galaxies whose planets are extinguishing over time rather like bulbs that cannot be replaced. In the final gallery, one installation dominates. It recreates with a mirror ball and projected light, the brilliance of a galaxy seen at night. There is a sense of awe as one looks up and experiences not just the sheer volume of planets represented but their beauty. In this manner Peterson gets us to see not just the science that governs the solar system but the beauty and awe that she herself feels.
Whilst the artist is clearly mindful of the demise of solar systems, the flux of galaxies she does have a firm belief in the future whatever its manifestation. This is evident in one of her most ambitious plans called ‘Future Library’. Here the artist has planted 1000 trees, near Oslo, which will supply the paper for a library of 100 books. Significant writers, judiciously chosen by a panel, write a piece that will be held in trust and not read until 2114. This is a leap of faith by both writer and artist, into an unknown world where books themselves may well be redundant. Nevertheless, this stab at immortality has been signed up to by writers such as Margaret Atwood who find themselves intrigued by the idea.
It is this unknown future that seems to most drive the artist. A fact that does not evoke fear in her but curiosity. The exhibition’s walls are punctuated by her epithets that reveal a philosophically enquiring mind. Perhaps the most telling of her quotes is in the final gallery that states to the effect; that it is the unknown, the place beyond knowledge that interests her most. Here again is the curiosity of a brilliant mind that sees no barriers, is not fazed by time or the demise of galaxies but rather strains intellectually to see what’s around the corners of the next galaxy, and the next.
Fiona Sinclair © 2019.
Balla: Villa Borghese. Review by Carla Scarano.
Balla: Villa Borghese
Museo Carlo Bilotti
Aranciera (Orangery) di Villa Borghese
Rome
29/11/2018 – 17/02/2019
‘Ho lavorato molto cercando sempre di ritrarre il vero ed attraverso ad esso l’intimo spirito delle cose’
Giacomo Balla
(I have always worked a lot trying to portray the truth and through it the intimate spirit of things)
The Museum Carlo Bilotti is located in the elegant edifice of the Orangery in the park of Villa Borghese. It is one of the many and interesting museums of the Municipality of Rome scattered around the capital, and is free of charge. It is hosting an engrossing exhibition of the first period of Giacomo Balla, a painter and sculptor whose works developed in the first half of 20th century going from realism to abstract art; he was also a major representative of Futurism, an avant-garde movement. Balla lived near the park in 1904 in a large apartment in via Paisiello in the chic district of Parioli. He depicted the trees and landscapes of Villa Borghese from the balcony of his study or immersed in the green just outside his house.
Villa Borghese is in the heart of the city stretching from Pincian Hill facing piazza del Popolo to Parioli for eighty hectares. Besides strolling in the beautiful park, visitors can admire the Lake Garden, various temples and fountains, piazza di Siena, venue of the renowned international horse show, look at the Water Clock and at a reconstruction of the Globe Theatre, as well as visiting the Borghese Museum and Gallery and the Rome zoo (Bioparco). The Orangery is another interesting place to see. The edifice was deeply altered throughout the centuries. Its original structure dates back to the 16th century but was completely refurbished in the late 18th century by Marcantonio IV Borghese in a new project that involved the area of the Lake Garden where the Orangery was a place of leisure. The building was severely damaged during the battles of 1849, when the Roman Republic fell under the pressure of the French army. It was acquired by the Municipality of Rome in 1903 together with the rest of the park.
Museum Carlo Bilotti is an important example of collaboration between public and private enterprises. It is a meeting place of art and culture situated in the centre of Villa Borghese thanks to the donations of Carlo Bilotti, an Italian-American entrepreneur who worked in the field of cosmetics. He was a collector who opened his collection of renowned art works to the public both in Rome and in Cosenza (his home town), donating twenty-two works to the museum. They are paintings, sculptures and drawings mainly by Giorgio de Chirico, but there are also works by Larry Rivers, Andy Warhol, Gino Severini and Giacomo Manzú. Unfortunately, the room dedicated to de Chirico is temporarily closed due to repairing works. The areas dedicated to temporary exhibitions are a large part of the museum both at the ground floor and at the first floor.
In a room by the entrance, a video clip introduces Balla’s art and career from his beginnings as a student at the Royal Albertine Academy in Turin to the time he spent in Paris and his arrival in Rome where his fame soared. At first he became famous for his portraits, where he applied the techniques of light and shadow from photography. Among his students there were Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini who introduced Balla to Futurism. He signed the Manifesto of Futurism in 1910 moving to an abstract pictorial style that conveyed sensations through colours and geometrical shapes. The study of movement and speed was paramount in this period. Even his daughters’ names, Luce (light), and Elica (propeller), were inspired by this avant-garde movement. Futurism meant to destroy the past and rebuild a new future in a constant change and regeneration. It relied in slogans such as ‘we will free Italy from her innumerable museums which cover her like countless cemeteries’, or ‘a racing motor car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace’. In politics Balla was a socialist, opposed the establishment and was involved in the literacy campaign together with Duilio Cambellotti. They meant to improve literacy in the countryside around Rome, the Agro Pontino, where there was a high percentage of illiterate peasants and very poor conditions due to the Pontine marshes and the spreading of malaria. At the end of his career, Balla embraced a more realist, figurative style again.
The exhibition displays enthralling pictures, mainly pastels, of views, trees, fountains, alleys and sculptures of Villa Borghese. The artist explored the park over and over again, simplifying the forms and modifying the colours. For Balla, Villa Borghese was like the mount of Sainte-Victoire for Cézanne, a great source of inspiration, that allowed him to investigate reality to the point of an abstract research of purity. The core of his art remained the study of light and movement throughout his career.
A few portraits on display testify his skilful use of chiaroscuro merging the lesson of the masters, such as Caravaggio, and the new techniques of photography he learned in Paris. The influence of Impressionism and Divisionism, characterized by the separation of colours in spots, are also present in some of the works, such as ‘Germogli Primaverili’ (spring buds), ‘Villa Borghese dal Balcone’ (Villa Borghese from the balcony) or the pictures of trees. They emphasise the attentive study of shades that create dynamism and movement. A nocturnal study of ‘Le Torri del Museo Borghese’ (the towers of Borghese museum) reveals a modern interpretation of light and shadow reminiscent of van Gogh’s lesson. A research of simplified forms almost to the abstraction is in ‘Fontana’ (fountain) and ‘Cantano i Tronchi’ (the trunks sing), where the lines evoke the shapes in deep contrasts with the background. Some landscapes depicting the suburbs of Rome are also on display showing how Balla was a complete artist, mastering portraits, landscapes, close up details as well as sculptures. ‘Linea di velocità + forma rumore’ (1913-1914, 1933) is the only futuristic work of the exhibition. It is an installation in chromed brass showing in its sharp angles and convoluted curves the vibrant quality he attained in his investigation of movement and speed.
This is a compelling exhibition that successfully presents some of Balla’s less known yet fascinating pieces centred on the theme of Villa Borghese in the enchanting atmosphere of the Orangery, immersed in one of the most beautiful parks of Rome.
Carla Scarano © 2019.
London Grip Poetry Review – Derek Sellen
July 11, 2019 by Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • books, painting, poetry reviews, year 2019 • Tags: books, poetry, Rosie Johnston • 0 Comments
Rosie Johnston enjoys a collection of ekphrastic poetry by Derek Sellen More →