Tag: art

Escape from the country

And from politics!

Some days stay silent in the memory, other days won’t let go. I’d planned a day visiting galleries in London, and last Wednesday didn’t disappoint. The 17th century Spanish painter, Zurbaran, at the National Gallery, was my focus in the morning and, by way of a total contrast, two much talked-about exhibitions, Tracey Emin and Frida Kahlo, at Tate Modern, in the afternoon.

For the Zurbaran, I headed down a vast flight of stairs to a subterranean space they keep for special exhibitions. It can be a little gloomy down there, which added to the impact of the crucified Jesus in the very first room, Jesus brilliantly lit, against a black background. There’s also St Peter, crucified upside down. Objects of veneration, commissioned by Carthusian (and other) monks who had no doubts, valued immediacy not elaboration, they knew their God. A world so different from ours.

Other commissions didn’t quite match that opening room for impact. But there is magic in a small still life, lemons, oranges and a rose, with a small cup, almost real, touchable, against a stark black background. And finally, ‘Agnus Dei’, a lamb, its legs bound, as brilliantly lit as the crucified Christ, and again, a black background.  

An hour later, the magic colours and serenity of a Virgin and Child, by the Dutch artist, Gerard David. Painted in 1515, two years before Martin Luther turned the world upside down and reduced the virgin to an ordinary mother. No more had she her role as a pathway to paradise.

From the National Gallery to the Tate Modern, and two exhibitions by remarkable women artists. Zurbaran and Gerard David belong to another age. Tracey Emin and Frida Kahlo are absolutely of our time.

First, Tracey Emin, an exhibition by a living artist opening her life to the public gaze. I wanted to see it, but as a man I simply didn’t and don’t feel competent to comment. Better I leave to a review in the Guardian: ‘Tracey symbolises the height of the 90s, its sex, drugs and booze, successes and excesses, but this show isn’t about that. It’s about how she has put her life out there, laid herself bare – and pushed us all to come to terms with our own emotions in the process.’

It’s that level of engagement, whether or not her paintings and bronze sculptures measure up, that is extraordinary and unprecedented.

A short hop across the Tate Modern’s third floor took me to the Frida Kahlo exhibition. Again, so much hype. Another woman artist who has become iconic, but in her case, long after her death. Her self-portraits are like no others, and her clothes: I now know what rebozos (shawls) and huipiles (sleeveless blouses) – the tehuana dress that she adopted – look like. Her honesty about her disabilities is unflinching.

She lived, like Emin, exactly the way she was, totally honest, but by contrast she had all the advantages of stable family and a marriage to Diego Rivera which is a story in itself. We watched Salma Hayek as Frida in a 2002 movie a month or two ago. In truth, I learnt more from the movie than the exhibition about Frida.

What the exhibition also focuses on, maybe to excess, is her legacy, as a champion of ‘Mexicanidad’, that is, being Mexican; as an icon for feminists and the LBGTQ community; and as the subject of a quite amazing breadth of Frida-celebrating merchandise.

Media and merchandise can fragment a legacy, take out meaning and substituting display. A sign of our times. What no-one is trying to do, as far as I am aware, is produce Tracey Emin merchandise. The real Tracey is simply too powerful, too immediate for that.

The sleep of reason (2) – Goya

I mentioned ‘the sleep of reason’ in my last post. I had in mind Goya’s Los Caprichos print series, and specifically plate 43, ‘the sleep of reason produces monsters’. Owls gather above the sleeping artist’s head, no owlish wisdom here, just confusion, compounded by bats swarming behind – the owls lit, the bats unlit, and below two cat-like creatures look out, lynxes maybe, one directly at us, black and ominous, drawing us in.

By 1799 when Goya published Los Caprichos the high hopes of the Enlightenment had faded – his time maybe not too similar to our own.

Sleep of reason

Goya is clear that we cannot live by reason alone. ‘Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders.’

We have in recent times been short-changed on both. Imagination looking back not forward, reason pilloried as ‘expertise’. And for many us, for the first time in our lives, we feel the tide of human improvement, I won’t say progress, is running against us.

Can music help? Leonard Cohen’s words from his song, Anthem, have helped me. (I love singing it!) Simply the idea that there’s a crack, however formidable the surface textures might seem just now, there is a crack. A crack in everything.

Rings the bells that still can ring/Forget your perfect offering/There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.

Applies to the whole Brexit edifice. And the Trumpian. We haven’t come so far that we could now go back. Surely not.

I see that the artist Sarah Gillespie has made ‘the crack in everything’ the title of a painting. Maybe I’ll make it the title of a poem.

And another artist, Turner Prize-winner Wolfgang Tillmans, quoted in the RA Magazine: ‘ …this amorphous, right-wing, nationalist sentiment … has become the central issue of world politics …how, as a sort of avant-garde artist, do you engage with the number one political subject?’

How does an artist respond? Or a writer? A musician?

Propaganda has its place, but propaganda and art are not easy bedfellows. Caricature if it points up absurdity, gross behaviour and the like has a powerful role to play. But not if it only appeals to the already converted. In the hands of Hogarth, Rowlandson and Gilray caricature becomes an artform in itself. But we must tread carefully.

What we can’t do, in our anger or frustration, is allow ourselves to abandon reason, to let reason sleep awhile.

‘Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders.’