Barbara Lewis
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.
Swinging London: A Lifestyle Revolution. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Swinging London: A Lifestyle Revolution
Venue: Fashion and Textile Museum, Bermondsey, London
Dates: Until June 2
If Brexit is the result of a backward-looking nostalgia, the Swinging London of the Chelsea Set was the opposite: it marked a determination to move on from the devastation and austerity left by World War II.
Around half a century on (the exhibition spans 1952-77), the time is ripe for reflection on whether the impact endures as some of yesterday’s bright, young, fun-loving things are among those backing today’s reaction – just as their parents and the more conservative provinces did not inevitably approve of short skirts and psychedelia.
This time the establishment is a driver of disruption that goes well beyond fashion. Conversely, the Chelsea Set – a group of architects, designers, photographers and artists who redefined the concept of youth – were extremely well connected.
The exhibition’s claim that their rebelliousness from previous style led to an inclusive, multi-cultural, liberal society is in question as we ask whether the openness of the sixties and seventies – when Britain voted to join the Common Market – was no deeper than a fashion.
Symbolically, Terence Conran’s Habitat shop has left Chelsea’s King’s Road as the brand in latter years has been taken over and its high street presence drastically shrunk.
The commentary, however, doesn’t dwell on the contradictions and in the tradition of previous displays in this museum founded by Zandra Rhodes, Swinging London speaks primarily to design students of style’s power to lift our collective mood. The appeal that its educational, fashion-history approach also has for the anxious liberal classes, looking for light cultural fare before they hit the humming bars and eateries of Bermondsey Street, is almost accidental.
We begin with the opening of Mary Quant’s Chelsea boutique Bazaar in 1955, when the hottest item in stock was a pair of “lounging pyjamas” for saucy day-wear inspired by Victorian underwear.
The interplay of decades continues as the flapper’s drop waists of the roaring twenties inspire Quant’s 1960-61 flapper-style dresses, which dummies sport against a backdrop of Conran’s slick furniture.
We’re also told to imagine that the slim figures clad in Quant’s designs were nourished by the cooking of Elizabeth David, whose continental cookery books had at least as much influence on the way we eat as Quant and Conran had on changing how we dress and furnish our homes.
I found myself remembering the scene of Michael Caine cooking up a gourmet storm in The Ipcress File, but the Michael Caine of the exhibition is the one starring as Alfie alongside Jane Asher, then Paul McCartney’s girlfriend. Asher’s outfit is a Mary Quant mini-skirt suit in a Liberty print as Art Nouveau meets psychedelia and proves the best designs are relevant to every generation.
Perhaps the exhibition’s biggest surprise is the inclusion of Bernard and Laura Ashley. We discover they explored “urban ruralism” from their kitchen table in Pimlico before decamping to Wales in the early 1960s and their fashion empire began, not with the flowers and frills for which they tend to be known, but with very simple gardening smocks and basic dresses.
They don’t come across as radical now, but they were a liberating leap forward from the prim, restrictive couture of the 1950s.
Barbara Lewis © 2019.
Othello, Union Theatre. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Othello
Venue and town: Union Theatre, Southwark
Writer: Shakespeare
Director: Phil Wilmott
Cast includes: Matthew Wade, Carlotta De Gregori, Rikki Lawton, Jerome Dowling, Claire Lloyd, Maximilian Marston, Megan Grech, Jeremy Todd, Kit Carson
Dates of run: Until April 6
Running time: two hours, 45 minutes, including interval
Almost exactly 100 years ago on April 13, in Amritsar, the British Indian Army fired into a crowd of unarmed Punjabis, killing and harming hundreds.
Director Phil Wilmott marks this appalling example of man’s inhumanity to man by transporting Othello from Venice and Cyprus to the India of the British Raj, making the Moor a Sandhurst-trained officer and his lieutenant Cassio a fallible army chaplain prone to women and drink.
In so doing, he creates a realm where the word “honest” that resonates tauntingly throughout the play has only the depth of British hypocrisy.
It’s also a heady atmosphere in which we can well believe manipulated men lose all sense of judgment as unfamiliar forces reign and it’s appropriate that the Union flags draped around a piano look flimsy, while the renditions of Jerusalem and Rule Britannia are sadly out of tune.
So far, so good and for the first half, we charge through the action building to by far the strongest scene in which Iago (Rikki Lawton) transforms Matthew Wade from an upright Othello, the confident general blissfully in love with his wife into a physical wreck as wretchedly jealous as Iago himself.
Lawton’s Iago, short but muscular beside the tall, lean Othello, shares with us the exhilarating, nerve-racking challenge of executing his malicious plot. It’s expertly paced as every time Othello’s love nearly saves him, Iago’s hateful determination prevails.
But once Othello is caught, the momentum dwindles into a second half that drags and the character interpretation, however well-acted, doesn’t convince. Rather than making the play topical and relevant, politically incorrect assumptions leap to the fore. The Raj setting confuses our response to Shakespeare’s most emotionally direct play and a tale that confirms the prejudice against mixed marriages makes uncomfortable viewing for a contemporary audience.
Casting Cassio (Jerome Dowling) as a chaplain with a mistress who treats his Bianca (Megan Grech) with mocking contempt strips him of the nobility Othello had seen in him. Bianca is a dispensable strumpet or whore – a word Desdemona cannot bear to pronounce.
Desdemona (Carlotta De Gregori) combines modern physical strength with girlish wiles. With a power built up over 14 years of dance training and work as an “advanced combatant”, collaborating with fight directors, De Gregori’s fascinating Desdemona puts up a mighty struggle with Othello.
But she doesn’t win it. The victor is Lawton’s Iago, maddening, even triumphant, when cornered, in his refusal to say a word as an evil we cannot get the better of.
Barbara Lewis © 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.
L’Aventure Michelin, Clemont-Ferrand, France. Review by Barbara Lewis.
September 15, 2019 by Barbara Lewis • added recently on London Grip, exhibitions, technology, travel • Tags: Barbara Lewis, exhibitions, technology, travel •
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