Tag: art

Review of Anthony J. Cascardi’s ‘Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique’

By Christian Kile

http://www.sehepunkte.de/2023/10/38493.html

This ambitious study centres on a broad range of Francisco de Goya’s (1746-1828) work, along with its relationship to the elements of “modernity, Enlightenment, and critique.” (9) The author, Anthony Cascardi, concentrates on the artist’s paintings of polite society along with those mordant attacks on stupidity and cruelty in works such as the Caprichos and the Disasters of War, rejecting what he sees as the general view that it is mainly Goya’s darkest works which “establish his relevance for modernity”. (10)

Goya is presented as a man placed between an acutely backward Spain, lagging behind the more sophisticated civilisations of England, France and Germany which nonetheless also harbour the capacity to produce their own barbarity and limitations. Reacting to the forces of Enlightenment Europe and traditional Spain, Goya formed his project of “critique”, a technique that supplies to criticism a “self-conscious dimension that incorporates reflection on history, on tradition, on the underlying accepted categories and conditions of knowledge and belief, as well as on the medium through which these are represented.” (10)

The development of a secular nature in Goya’s work is introduced in the first chapter. His fresco, The Miracle of St. Anthony, with its stripped back religious elements, lack of a settled focal point for its subjects and its sky “vacant of anything heavenly”. (26) With his San Antonio commission that questions the traditional combinations of religious faith and painting technique, Goya may be seen as anticipating modernism, thus providing impetus for critical works probing both conventional methods of visual art and the world from which they supposedly came.

The critical strategy develops through Goya’s tapestry cartoons or large-scale oil sketches. Produced to convey “a distinctively Spanish social landscape”, certain of these works, despite their aspects of social harmony, are seen by Cascardi as including underlying elements of violence, “unsettling distortions of balance and perspective”. (55) There are intimations of the more biting images to come, like the Caprichos but Goya’s progressive political stance is somewhat repressed by the expectations of his court patrons.

To further define Goya’s contribution to a modern art, one committed to figuration and an ardent critical approach, Cascardi compares the Spaniard’s work with readings of Édouard Manet’s Execution of Emperor Maximilian, Goya’s The Third of May famously acting as its model. Another of Manet’s great images, the Dead Toreador is presented as a work of aesthetic modernism, moving away from reference to the world, reflecting on itself and “being nothing other than what it itself presents, and not anything in the world.” (95) On the other hand, Goya, with The Third of May, paints with intense emphasis a concrete event, one manifesting apparent revolt at the actions of a French regiment. Here the famous lantern at once illuminates this scene, aiding artistic representation, but also allows the regiment to make their kill. Such is the bind that the Enlightenment finds itself in, argues Cascardi, where its rationality tends to produce its own special kinds of barbarism, despite shedding a world of superstition. Within The Third of May we are presented with Goya’s own critique, that of modernity’s own flaws. Cascardi finds this tension present in Goya’s portraits too; the painting of Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos at his Desk is said to portray a man dissatisfied by self-cultivation and a life of ‘good’ breeding. Neither are enough to stave off melancholy, boredom and scepticism.

Next, the Caprichos, an uncommissioned print series undertaken by Goya. Beginning with a self-portrait frontispiece, the remaining plates are split between the conscious or waking world, and that of nightmare. Between these two spheres, both producing their own kinds of horror, Cascardi provides some particularly engrossing readings of their text and images. The conventions of traditional perspective inherited from the Renaissance through to Velázquez give way to figurative wrenching and distortion, combined with the wit of Goya’s darkly comical captions. The critique element is seen to be born of the conviction that self-deception and virtually every other shortcoming are rife, and new methods for presentation of the world must be realised to divulge it. Critique is here defined by Cascardi as “a reflection on the limitations of the conventions of representation, including the difficulty involved in isolating a position within the social world from which to see the truths that society endeavors to hide.” (145)

Goya’s attitude towards secularization is developed further in a chapter contrasting him with the German philosopher Kant, described by the author as “wedded to the idea of reason’s autonomy […] he presupposed the irrelevance of the preexisting contexts of belief–contexts that reason saw itself as having successfully overcome.” (190)  Goya, on the contrary, made works which graphically expressed reason’s failure to achieve this Kantian design, continuing to be dogged by antiquated and base tendencies. Moreover, it could not supply an alternative salvation comparable with religion.

Goya is portrayed as an artist who feels something is terribly wrong with his world, and something ought to be done about it, but all he can do is make art about the spectacle. As Cascardi asserts, when considering Goya one should bear in mind that he challenged “the idea that any single framework of principles can underwrite the whole of cultural life.” (228)

With the Disasters of War Goya switches his gaze to “historical events” rather than the “social ones” of the Caprichos, events dealing with the most extreme violence. These works conjure both a vivid impression of wartime suffering, its mutilation and repercussions. The argument for Goya’s attitude towards Enlightenment’s deficiencies resurfaces, evidenced by French aggression, whilst the inability to turn back to a reactionary life associated with Spanish history make each unbearable in its own way. This impasse “contributes to the sense of cultural and historical dislocation in the Disasters.” (237)

Cascardi’s book complements the substantial list of earlier scholarship on Goya, through a blend of art history, intellectual history and the wider humanities. The volume integrates insights from major thinkers, expressly those of Kant and prominent writers on Goya, including Janis Tomlinson, Fred Licht, and Robert Hughes. [1] The discussion of the relationship between Goya’s tapestry cartoons and later works is especially absorbing, such as the comparison between, at first glance, the buoyant and refined Blind Man’s Buff [sic] and the crude state of aggression in the Black Painting, Duel with Cudgels.

Darkness is a word chosen frequently to describe Goya’s work. When he brilliantly exposes self-deception, wilful ignorance and corruption, it is not political,in the sense that no matter who is in charge, flaws remain, often horrifying ones, regardless of whether the artist finds a way of ‘out enlightening’ the Enlightenment.

Despite Goya’s respect and sympathy for the talents and actions of a few individuals, it is difficult to see the artist offering a panacea for the ills he pictured so mercilessly. Along with Cascardi’s admiration for the critical element of Goya’s nature, he chooses to close his chapter about the Black Paintings on a utopian note, where we encounter the author’s own bias or ideology. Throughout the book’s notes the thought of figures associated with the student upheavals of the sixties, thinkers like Althusser, Adorno, Barthes and Derrida, appear. The wide and varied range of texts contributing to Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique suggests Goya lends himself, perhaps exceptionally, to extensive speculation, and in the case of this book prompts as much interest in the ideas of the author as its subject.

[1] Janis Tomlinson: Francisco Goya y Lucientes, 1746-1828, London 1994. Fred Licht: Goya: The Origins of the Modern Temper in Art, New York 1979. Robert Hughes: Goya, London, 2003.

Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris at Pallant House Gallery 13 May – 8 October 2023

By Christian Kile

https://newcriterion.com/blogs/dispatch/tone-poems

Gwen John, The Seated Woman (The Convalescent), c.1910–20. Oil on canvas. Ferens Art Gallery: Hull Museums

The essence of Gwen John’s art is summed up by her teacher James Abbott McNeill Whistler: tone. When her brother Augustus John talked about the character of her work, Whistler fired back, “Character? What’s that? It’s tone that matters. Your sister has a fine sense of tone.”

Whistler touched on something important. Gwen John’s penchant for more analytical methods, frequently returning to the same subjects, often emphasizing formal elements and with subtle variations, helps explain what makes her work so striking. Her paintings can convey a notion of “impersonality” or purity, a vital strand of modernism, more Continental in nature and closer to the maelstrom that came with the demolition of humanist optimism in the twentieth century.

Gwen John, A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris, c.1907–1909. Oil on canvas. Sheffield Museums Trust
Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior with Writing Table and a Young Woman, 1900, oil on canvas, private collection

Drawing and painting were a habit from her early years, and the strength of her draftsmanship is on display from the first room in a new exhibition at Pallant House Gallery, “Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris.” This is the first major showing of John’s work in twenty years, with oils, works on paper, archival material, and personal possessions. The full course of her career is traced chronologically, and the exhibition includes a select group of works from her contemporaries. In the second room, Vuillard and a marvelous Hammershøi hang close by a selection of John’s interiors. In one corner there is a small-scale plaster head by Rodin, Head of Whistler’s Muse (ca. 1906), a monument to Whistler for which John modeled.

As the show progresses there is in John’s work an increasing economy of style: whether still life, portrait, or interior scene, images tend to be expressed with a more muted palette; colors lighten, diffusing into patches with little voids of finely primed canvas emerging through strokes of oil paint. Society figures are absent. Often subjects are anonymous female sitters positioned within a sparse studio interior as in The Convalescent (ca. 1923–24), The Seated Woman (ca. 1910–20), and Girl in a Mulberry Dress (ca. 1923).

Many compositions are repetitive in John’s drawings and paintings, sometimes highly so—the variations between images, often portraits, remain within a particularly narrow range. Seeing these works as reproductions does them few favors but viewing the originals hanging together, the nuances of the paintings achieve a satisfying effect, notably in one room where they sit comfortably opposite Cézanne’s oil painting Head of a Boy (1881–82).

Paul Cézanne, Head of a Boy, 1881–2, oil on canvas, private collection
Gwen John, The Convalescent, c. 1923–4, oil on canvas, The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge

“It is not unreasonable in Paris,” Paul Valéry observed, “to disguise what one has which is substantial and painfully acquired, under a lightness and grace which serve as a protection for the secret virtues of attentive and studied thought.” John’s art is often an embodiment of this insight. Despite her modest background, she established herself as an artist, becoming a recognized and respected figure in Paris during its modernist high tide. Following schooling at London’s Slade School of Fine Art, and further tuition under Whistler, she moved to France for good, living between the capital and its suburb of Meudon.

There on the continent, John found herself at a fountainhead of European modernism and became acquainted with many of its foremost figures: Picasso and Matisse, Braque and Wyndham Lewis, Brancusi and the poets Pound and Rilke. She became Rodin’s model and lover. It was a troubled affair, but, despite this he, like many others, esteemed her art.

This show does well to avoid focusing too much on John’s personal life as a means to understanding her art, rightly placing emphasis on her work. The once-overriding image of her as a recluse, apart from the avant-garde and intellectual currents of her time, is long gone. Given the marked increased focus on female artists in recent years, it’s surprising a figure this consistent has waited until now for a show of this standard.

The American lawyer and art collector John Quinn, an eminent enthusiast of John’s work, provided robust support, his period of patronage coinciding with her most prolific years as an artist (1910–24). He helped persuade John to part with her work as well as providing opportunities for her during wartime privations. Quinn said, “If I had to make a choice between the painting by you . . . and the Picasso, I should cheerfully sacrifice the Picasso.” Sometimes a little money and admiration are all that’s needed for encouragement.

During John’s final decade, her artistic pursuits apparently dwindled, and, due in part to illness, she became increasingly aloof and reclusive. Her work, however, remained desirable, and her family continued to offer support. The Brittany and Normandy coastlines were her retreat, and during a last visit to the sea she died in Dieppe at age sixty-three.

One leaves the show feeling John remains an underappreciated figure; putting this down entirely to her sex is unconvincing, for other twentieth-century female artists have gained much more notice. Without political diversions or manifestos, she knew her works were significant, and labored hard for them; perhaps she thought the personal cost too much and stopped her production early. Regardless of the cause, her self-imposed exile from the London scene and turn to Catholicism contributed to a body of work with an understated quietude. She reflected that for her, art came before children; who, she said, is remembered by history simply for becoming a mother?

Review of Shulamith Behr’s ‘Women Artists in Expressionism: From Empire to Emancipation’

By Christian Kile

http://www.sehepunkte.de/2023/03/37885.html

The general view of Expressionism tends to be a male affair; the women of the movement did not enjoy the degree of institutional support their counterparts received during the 1920s, nonetheless they too were considered deserving of the term ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis, and many of their works and writings were ruined or broken up during Allied bombing. Within the secessions and independent artists’ groups, movements which rejected traditional academic standards, it was rare for women to establish themselves. Käthe Kollwitz and Charlotte Berend-Corinth were the only two women to attain the status of men on the jury of the Berlin Succession.

Shulamith Behr’s Women Artists in Expressionism has evolved from her earlier publication, Women Expressionists [1], which “introduced a range of women artists with the realization that there were inevitable links, networking, and cultural exchanges to be forged in a major tome” (239). Here, in-depth chapters on Kollwitz, Paula Modersohn-Becker and Gabriele Münter aim to show these artists “in a new light” before considering lesser-known names and expanding beyond Germany to reveal links between Expressionists in the Netherlands and Scandinavia (20).

Between 1890 and 1920, whilst male insecurity made itself felt, the presence of women was increasingly marked in the arts; labelled as Malweiber, in “art and literary journals, they [women] were portrayed either as immodestly clad, albeit unbecoming, or as severely masculinized” (8). Besides this denigration, there seemed to be a sheer lack of ability to evaluate this new phenomenon of the woman artist. Women Artists in Expressionism centres on the period from around 1890 to 1924, spanning the late Wilhelmine to early Weimar period and aims to show the significance of women artists’ “to the shaping of Expressionist avant-garde culture” (20).

Neglected during her short life, Modersohn-Becker posthumously received Van Gogh-like comparisons from some critics: both artists’ works shared motifs; they both died early and experienced negligible sales and recognition from the public and artistic milieus in their lifetimes. Following a particularly scathing review Modersohn-Becker halted exhibiting in public and took part in only two more group exhibitions. Estimation of her work grew dramatically only after her death, “her images uncannily evoking the lost simplicity and harmony of the preindustrial idyll” (52).

Kollwitz is the most established artist with a chapter here, she “has become canonical, as well known as many male artists of the period, like Grosz or Dix” (55). However, despite distancing herself from Expressionism’s major figures, Ernst Barlach aside, through her images, often characterised by wretched maternal and proletarian suffering, it has been suggested that she is “mother” of the Expressionist movement, at 53 becoming the first woman nominated to the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts (55/79).

Active in the politics of artists’ associations, Kollwitz had a part in forming the Freier Verein der Berliner Künstler (Free Society of Berlin Artists), set up in response to an Edvard Munch exhibition that had been forcibly closed by an official body. She went on to exhibit with Munch and Max Liebermann. Criticism of her work as “immoral and anti-German, symptomatic of a larger malaise of cultural degeneracy” came from the conservative critic Ludwig Pietsch. With one of her portfolios entitled Ein Weberaufstand (A Weaver’s Rebellion) and her drawing series Bilder vom Elend (Pictures of Misery), images of “unemployment, alcoholism, domestic violence, and unwanted pregnancy” no doubt contributed to this view (63/68).

Counting Freud and Rodin amongst her most revered figures, it was the latter’s “Promethean restlessness” on show at his house museum in Meudon that so struck her (72). Kollwitz remained unconvinced by elements within Expressionism and considered herself an “outsider” detached from the movement’s “discursive practices” (74). There is a tension here noted by Behr of Kollwitz: she embraced “modernity and radical politics on the one hand while rejecting modernism on the other” (74). According to Behr, it was Kollwitz’s will to locate “a medium that would satisfy the joint desiderata of moral duty and subjective agency”, which led her from etching and lithography to the woodcut; through which her response to the war came in the damning cycle Krieg, used by the pacifist movement around the anniversary of the declaration of World War I (80). Together with the print cycle Der Krieg by Dix, her portfolio was shown at Ernst Friedrich’s Anti-War Museum in Berlin.

Of aristocratic birth, Marianne Werefkin enjoyed “both private and academic tuition” together with the benefits of an artist mother and supportive father (91). On receipt of a pension Werefkin decided to move to Munich drawn by its international appeal for artists along with its salon life and “ambience in which incipient emancipation, progressive modernism, and the international (or foreign) fulminated against the local and the conservative” (95). She helped found the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (Munich New Artists’ Association, 1909-1912) along with Gabriele Münter which provided more opportunities for women artists. This group was seceded by the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider, 1912-1914), a modernist movement that emphasised “spiritual and artistic renewal via the ‘primitivism’ of folk art” (113). Historically, Werefkin and Münter have tended to attract less attention than their better known partners: Alexej Jawlensky and Wassily Kandinsky, and a chapter gives a rigorous look at the women’s work, ideas and reception.

During Münter’s emigration to Sweden, she found her way into avant-garde circles and saw her work, increasingly portrait focussed, subject to the country’s prevalent critical criteria: “psychological interpretation of nation, style, and character” (129). On a series of works Behr remarks that Münter depicted her subjects as “new women”, engaged in aesthetic and intellectual pursuits generally allocated to male portraits (146).

Celebrated in her day but now relatively little known, the Dutch-born artist Jacoba van Heemskerck was “one of the few to emerge as a major abstractionist in the second decade of the twentieth century” (155). Turning away from the modernism of French and Dutch varieties, her ‘abstract spiritual’ works consisted of various materials from oils and mosaic through stained glass. This acknowledged theories of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), memorably expressed through Richard Wagner’s theory of synthesising the arts, and that of Adolf Behne and the Einheitskunstwerk (unified art work), said by the architectural historian Kai Gutschow to have “achieved a new art form through a common inner motivation and artistic principles” (181). For painted glass experimentation Van Heemskerck installed a firing oven in her studio whilst admiring and drawing on the writings of “the anarchist and fantasist” Paul Scheerbart (181).

The final chapter centres on the patronage, collecting and dealing of women. Rosa Schapire was “one of the first women to pursue the art-historical profession” (189). A critic and collector of Expressionist art, she championed the artist Schmidt-Rottluff and formed a collection of his work. Under the Third Reich her Jewishness, leftist politics and feminism grimly hampered her professional life, and in 1939 she left for London and a life of exile.

Johanna Ey became one of Germany’s foremost modern art dealers, beginning her enterprises by accepting artworks by students and staff from the Düsseldorf Art Academy at her own bakery café to sell. Eventually she gained establishment acceptance, becoming known as the “all-embracing, nurturing ‘Mutter'” (228).

Extremity is one of the overarching themes throughout Women Artists in Expressionism. Charting the various responses of women to politics, art, ideas and war, it acknowledges the great Jewish contribution to modernism just before that sense of assimilation was annihilated by the Nazis. For all the presence of salon affairs, it’s curious there is no mention of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, a highly divisive philosophical work of history which, appealing to an abnormally broad audience, reached a peak of debate in 1919, with its insight into the resurgence of primitive values. [2] Behr’s book does at times slip into verbosity: an oeuvre does not change but instead undergoes “stylistic diversification” and “gendered spectatorship serves to underscore their [women’s] socialization” (162/20). Nonetheless the book is well researched, providing an absorbing picture of some neglected figures and revealing the interminable discord between sexes.


Notes:

[1] Shulamith Behr: Women Expressionists, Oxford 1988.

[2] H. Stuart Hughes: Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate, New York 1952, 89, 163-164.

Amedeo Modigliani

On Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920)

By Christian Kile

‘…and all around us raged Cubism, all conquering but alien to Modigliani…’- Anna Akhmatova

‘Modigliani’s drawing is supremely elegant. He was our aristocrat. His line, sometimes so faint it seems the ghost of a line, never gets bogged down, avoiding this with the alacrity of a Siamese cat.’ – Jean Cocteau

The first sculpture I saw by Amedeo Modigliani was the kneeling Caryatid (1914) in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, carved in limestone, with both arms raised and planted on one knee – a reprise from the antique. Hung beside it was a reclining nude by the same artist painted five years later, about as carnal as painting is likely to get.

nude

Reclining nude, 1919, oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) – Seeing the Venus de Milo, Modigliani told his friend and muse, poet Anna Akhmatova that ‘women with beautiful figures who were worth modelling or drawing always seemed unshapely when clothed.’

They are far removed from the preoccupations and modern approaches pursued by Modigliani’s contemporaries: anxiety, the cult of the machine and Futurist rejection.

No doubt this plays a part in his immense popularity today, augmented by his life that conforms to the reckless, romantic stereotype of the artist: his appeal to women, self-destructive behaviour and early death; he died from tubercular meningitis in 1920 at the age of 35.

Modigliani is the type of artist that many people feel they ‘get’, whose work does not draw blank or bemused looks − the sense of accident and ugliness so often felt to be characteristic of modern painting and sculpture is absent.

His works are instantly recognisable, which may explain why, despite their popularity, he did not spawn a school. His stylisations are not something that can be easily absorbed by other artists into their work without seeming glaringly derivative.

Studying art was an escape for Modigliani from the maltreatment, poverty, distress, suicide and tuberculosis that plagued his family. Born in 1884 in Livorno, Tuscany, he was a young boy when his mother Eugenia Garsin said he ‘already sees himself as a painter’.

As his father Flaminio was absent for parts of his childhood, his mother was often the sole provider for the family and a dominant figure in Modigliani’s life. As the youngest child, she mollycoddled him and later accompanied him to southern Italy, and then on to Florence and Venice where Modigliani enrolled in fine arts courses.

At the beginning of the twentieth century Modigliani relocated to the town of Pietrasanta in Tuscany and, despite his lack of prior training, began to sculpt. It was a medium that he eagerly embraced. But having previously suffered from pleurisy as a youth, the quantities of dust involved in the process wreaked havoc on his already weak lungs, eventually blighting his efforts and physical and mental health.

His most prolific period for creating sculpture coincided with the zenith of Cubism in 1911-1912. This possibly explains the lack of success Modigliani had in realising his hopes for his sculptures to be incorporated into an architectural scheme.

Only one of his Caryatids, executed in limestone, is now known to exist. But his concept remains valid: one can imagine many of his works enlarged to a monumental scale and placed into an architectural arrangement.

 
caryatid

Caryatid, 1914, limestone, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

Sadly, some two figures and 23 heads are all that remain of his sculptural output, their finishes ranging from the coarse hewn to a soft lustre. The characteristic curvature of the head that eventually found its way into his paintings is already present.

At the back of these often androgynous, anonymous carved heads there are usually sections of the raw stone material.  That he did not complete most of these sculptures in the round may have been due simply to his inexperience as a carver and poor health. But perhaps keeping some of the surface of the original block was deliberate − a key signifying unrealised projects: conceived architecturally, some of his sculptures could well have been installed as corbels or keystones in a building.

For in common with other artists of the period, Modigliani dreamed of completing monumental works, his idea of a temple supported by caryatids being a prime example. A series of preparatory studies boldly reveal the breadth of his vision even if they are too impractical to have served as working drawings.

‘Heads−a decorative ensemble’, comprising seven stone heads he exhibited at the Paris ‘Salon d’Automne’ in 1912, is probably the nearest he came to attaining his grand ambition.

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Head, 1911-12, limestone, Tate

Drawing from the influence of primitive art, prominent in Paris before the First World War, Modigliani sought to achieve an ‘archaic simplicity’. His carved heads, with expressions ranging from the inscrutable to the enigmatic, exhibit the characteristic elongated elegance with which we associate him.

Modigliani’s understanding of primitive art and its relationship to the modern were acquired in Paris. When he arrived there in 1906, Braque and Picasso were embarking on a period that was to produce some of their greatest work. But aside from a brief period in 1915-16 when Modigliani’s paintings show shades of a Cubist influence, he drew less on the art of his contemporaries than might have been expected.

Rather, at a time when the appeal of Renaissance classicism was on the wane, Modigliani chose to filter his artistic experience in Italy through the avant-garde atmosphere of Paris.

He used the Renaissance tradition of Giorgione and Titian as his foundation and was attracted by the way in which Manet, Degas and Cézanne applied this classicism to their own work. Significantly, it prompted him to develop the distinctive richness of his colours – nowhere more pronounced than in his nudes. I struggle to think of another 20th century artist who achieved such sumptuous colour.

Modigliani believed that ‘beauty’ is ‘truth’, and to capture what he perceived as the essence of his subjects he was obsessed with achieving purity of line, simplifying and discarding all excess.

Which is why the vitality of Modigliani’s drawing is never in doubt. It formed a vital part of his practice, often lightly handled and produced in great quantities. Their linear characteristic was developed early and remained ‘…a silent conversation. A dialogue between his line and ours’ observed Jean Cocteau.

The figures and faces of classical antiquity, from the simplicity of the Cycladic art to the Egyptian goddesses spoke directly to Modigliani, as his enthusiastic visits with the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova to the Louvre indicate, and their influence can be seen in many of his compositions.

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Cycladic female figure, 2700-2600 B.C., Marble, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The 1918 oil of a seated Jeanne Hébuterne, with her exaggerated long neck, more serpent-like than swan, and Egyptian hairstyle, comes to mind. Then there are his ¾ length portraits of her, which, like the caryatid sculptures and other portraits, are presented with a slant of the head and sometimes blank eyes, conveying a remoteness verging on apparent obliviousness to the artist.

 
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Jeanne Hébuterne in profile, 1918, oil on canvas, Private Collection

Modigliani achieved his greatest paintings during his final years when he was riddled with ill health and anxiety.  Always improvident – he spent money as soon as he earned it − he became increasingly despondent at the failure of his sculptural ambitions, exacerbated by his lack of patronage and the success of his contemporaries such as Brancusi and Epstein.

Nonetheless his contribution to The School of Paris was substantial. He developed a new style of reduction, simplicity and approach to colour that utilised his instincts, skill and discernment in uniting elements from a vast range of cultures.

Modigliani’s achievement is all the more impressive because he did not embrace any particular ‘ism’ or group but worked alone throughout his life to expand and develop his visionary statement of intent, made at the age of 17 years:

‘…I am trying to formulate with the greatest lucidity the truths of art and life I have discerned scattered amongst the beauties of Rome; and as their inner meaning becomes clear to me, I shall seek to reveal and re-arrange their composition. I could almost say metaphysical architecture, in order to create out of it my truth of life, beauty and art.’

 
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Jeanne Hébuterne, 1919, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art – Jeanne Hébuterne, an art student, was Modigliani’s lover during the last three years of his life and mother of his child. Pregnant with their second child, she committed suicide after his death

The exhibition, Modigliani, is at Tate Modern from November 23rd 2017 until April 2nd 2018

 

 

 

Chaïm Soutine

On Chaïm Soutine (1893-1943)

By Christian Kile

‘The main reason I bought so many of the paintings was that they were a surprise, if not a shock, and I wanted to find out how he got that way.  Besides, I felt he was making creative use of certain traits of the work of Bosch, Tintoretto, Van Gogh, Daumier and Cézanne, and was getting new effects with colour’

Albert C. Barnes, Art Collector 1950

‘Houses’ (1920-21) – a group of twisting, contorted buildings pinioned between land and sky – is one of the surviving Céret landscapes painted by Chaïm Soutine. This painting, now in the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, shows the subjects linked and interdependent, yet, at the same time, individually competing for their space in the landscape.

“This would be unbearable on acid”, said one of my friends on his first visit to the museum’s Soutine rooms.  And his work does have a hallucinogenic quality.

Soutine is an artist who destroyed to create, willing to slash and burn his paintings to ashes, keeping only the versions he liked, a process that has resulted in infusing them with an unsettling intensity.

houses

‘Houses’, 1920-21, oil on canvas, Musée de l’Orangerie

But consciously or not, this painter of swooping churning anguish reigned himself in and probably saved his sanity with the use of restraining external influences.  He played Bach, the most ordered mathematically precise composer, when he painted; he adapted his primal social behaviour in the company of his highly-cultured patrons, the Castaings, and throughout his career he reworked the old masters, respectful and always mindful of their discipline.

Soutine was stirred by the work of Rembrandt whom he revered, and was particularly fascinated by his idol’s depiction of flesh, returning to an interpretation of the Louvre meat carcass more than once.  His one-time neighbour, the writer Henry Miller described his preoccupation with flesh as an obsession.

The way in which many of Soutine’s images produce an effect of life in death, notably the poultry and bulkier carcasses – mouths, beaks and eyes open wide – make us feel we have just missed the slaughter and that only moments ago these were living creatures.

Indeed, Soutine’s carcasses seem more alive than many painters’ live subjects. Adjust the canvas by 90 degrees and his ‘Hare Against Green Shutter’ (1925-26) would be seen to be loping along!

Soutine worked in spates, not painting for days, weeks or even months, and then would set to with a ferocious intensity, often for many hours at a time.  The decomposing animal carcasses sometimes had to be infused with formaldehyde to dull their stench.

It was testing for his sitters, even verging on cruelty.  Determined to see through their surface appearance, Soutine subjected them to long days and weeks of concentrated and sustained looking followed by furious action. One of his models tells of being made to pose for so long that it verged on a hallucinatory experience for both of them.

While no group claimed him, Soutine is classed as an Expressionist. Essentially though, his art is his direct response to confronting nature, and his trademark intensity is probably due to his working in isolation in France, away from the influence of the Expressionist group of artists based in Berlin, Munich or Vienna.

Soutine was not one for words.  He neither kept diaries nor written correspondence about his work, and whether he made preparatory drawings remains contested.  If he did, then like many of his canvasses, he probably destroyed them.  What remains is a small collection of photos taken throughout his life and the paintings.

still life

‘Still Life with a Pheasant, circa 1924, oil on canvas, Musée de l’Orangerie

Soutine grew up in the small, poverty-stricken Jewish village of Smilovitchi, Belarus.  His father, a strict disciplinarian and devout Jew, discouraged him from pursuing his interest in art for which he had shown a marked talent from an early age.

Despite much opposition, he eventually moved to Minsk and embarked on a drawing course, followed by three years at the Vilna Academy of Art in Lithuania. Afterwards in 1913 Soutine moved to Paris to further his career.  He was alone for much of the time and poor but he allowed nothing to get in the way of painting.

Here, through the artist Jacques Lipchitz, he met Amedeo Modigliani. Theirs was a close if tempestuous friendship – aggravated by heavy drinking – despite their radically different temperaments and work styles.

They were a familiar sight on the town.  Modigliani drew out Soutine socially; he complimented him and encouraged him in his work, and his premature death deeply affected Soutine.  Alcohol was blamed and from then on Soutine limited his drinking.

Through Modigliani Soutine was introduced to art dealer Leopold Zborowski, who represented him from 1917 to his death in 1932.  He also benefited financially from the arrival of Dr. Albert Barnes, an American businessman, in Paris in 1922.

A discerning collector, intent on buying paintings for his Philadelphia Art Foundation, Barnes swiftly saw the quality of Soutine’s works: delighted by the painting of pastry cook Rémy Zocchetto, he bought the series of below stairs hotel and kitchen staff portraits* by the artist.  Barnes acquired some 52 paintings, maybe more, that have contributed substantially to Soutine’s posthumous success and recognition.

The artist’s fortunes continued to look up when he met Marcellin and Madeleine Castaing in the late 1920s.  Two of the most influential figures in his career, they became his patrons and supported him for the rest of his life.  For ten years Soutine was invited to stay and work at their pastoral retreat at Lèves.

Madeleine was a successful interior designer and her circle included cultured members of the French establishment, bringing Soutine into contact with leading lights such as Cocteau and Satie, and art historian Elie Faure, who became an enthusiastic champion of his work.

If he personally seemed one step away from self-destruct, many of his paintings were not spared.  We are lucky that any of his Céret landscapes survive.  Faure said of them: “In his studio, he lacerates them with rage.”

An impoverished Soutine spent time in Céret, a town in the Pyrenees, between 1919-1922, where he was unable to get on with other artists and locals.

Nonetheless, this period resulted in a series of his most distinctive and bacchanalian paintings.  Here, figures, landscapes and buildings are compressed, distorted and thrust towards the viewer on claustrophobic canvasses.

Madeleine Castaing recalls: “While he was painting, everyone … had to disappear.  We always waited in fear of that sinister noise.  If he didn’t like the painting, he’d take a knife and slash it…Then he had to like the painting when it was finished…He would call us to come and see it…If he saw the smallest trace of disappointment, he would grab the gasoline which he had next to him and a sponge…”

photo

Soutine and Madeleine Castaing during the mid 1930s

Perhaps Soutine believed that his later work surpassed the Céret paintings that might have signalled a dead end – that is, he felt he could go no further in this artistic direction without straying too far into abstraction.  Or, perhaps, they were simply a reminder of a difficult period he would prefer to forget.

Soutine’s late period is generally considered to be from the mid-1930s to 1943. Some critics and writers have dismissed these works as regressive. He is accused of needlessly reining himself in and being so enthralled by past masters that it reduced the urgency and potency found in the earlier paintings.

Regardless of the reduced pictorial aggression—allowing the faces in his portraits to be averted, ridding them of their dramatic confrontational stares found in the earlier works, and producing landscapes that are more classically formal in structure—Soutine’s vision, energies and painting process in these late works remain consistent.

The images– landscapes, portraits, still-lives – are a natural progression from the artist’s earlier ones and reflect the artist’s dedication, throughout his career, to achieve ever-increasing clarity and concentrated expression.

Unfortunately, assessment of Soutine’s late paintings is hampered by the lack of them on public show (many are in private collections) and that they are disproportionately few in comparison with his earlier works; 100 paintings are known dating from the 1930s onwards, compared to 400 painted in the preceding 15 years. And that does not include the early paintings he destroyed!

During this latter part of his life and despite his notorious unsociability Soutine sustained close relationships with women.  He met Gerda Michaelis, a Jew from a prosperous family, who had fled Nazi Germany to live in Paris, where she was working as a house cleaner.  Gerda kept his studio and apartment clean and orderly, and helped him seek treatment for his crippling stomach pains.  They separated in 1940 at the onset of the Second World War.  Gerda survived but never saw Soutine again.

In November 1940 Soutine met Marie-Berthe Aurenche, recently divorced from the Surrealist Max Ernst.  With the Nazi threat looming she and her friends helped Soutine escape from Paris and he took refuge near Richelieu.

But the constant worry of living as a fugitive aggravated his stomach illness, and he was forced to return to Paris for urgent treatment.  After a treacherous journey into the city Soutine underwent an operation for his ulcer but he died soon afterwards on August 9th 1943.

Soutine was buried at Montparnasse Cemetery, the service attended by a small group of artists and friends, including Aurenche, Picasso and Cocteau.

Although Soutine cannot be described as an under appreciated artist internationally, he certainly has been overlooked in the UK.  Fashion and poor critical opinion have seen to this.  So this is a rare opportunity to see a collection of his portraiture.

portrait

The Pastry Chef (Baker Boy) (Le Pâtissier), c. 1919, oil on canvas, The Barnes Foundation

The upcoming exhibition, Soutine’s Portraits: Cooks, Waiters and Bellboys*, is at The Courtauld Gallery (October 19th 2017- January 21st 2018)