exhibitions
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.
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.
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.
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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