All posts tagged Lee Miller
Dora Maar @ Tate Modern
This is the most comprehensive retrospective of photographer and painter Dora Maar ever held.
Dora Maar photographed by Man Ray (1936)
Maar was a successful fashion and commercial photographer in the early 1930s
a social documentary photographer in the mid-1930s, as well as being a left-wing political activist, signing manifestos, going on marches
she developed into a dazzling surrealist photographer in the mid to late-1930s
Maar was introduced to Picasso in 1935 and was his mistress for nine years, documenting the creation of his 1937 masterpiece Guernica, providing the model for thirty or so many paintings and many drawings on the theme of the Weeping woman, and under his encouragement taking up painting again
1944 saw the break-up with Picasso, and the start of years struggling with depression – she never returned to photography
1940s to her death in 1997: experiments with a range of painting styles from her home in rural France
Dora Maar
Born in 1907, Maar was encouraged and supported by her father to study art, but became more attracted to photography. Living in Paris, by the late 1920s she had become proficient at photography and made contacts in the Paris artworld, She studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian, and frequented André Lhote's workshop where she met Henri Cartier-Bresson. She became friends with the surrealist Jacqueline Lamba, who went on to meet the godfather of the surrealist movement, André Breton.
At the beginning of 1930, she set up a photography studio on rue Campagne-Première (14th arrondissement of Paris) with Pierre Kéfer, photographer and decorator. Though many prints during their collaboration were signed 'Kéfer–Dora Maar', Maar was usually the sole author. When their partnership ended around 1935, Maar established her own studio in central Paris and took independent commissions.
Through the early 1930s she undertook a wide range of commercial photography for advertisements and fashion magazines, travel books and some erotic magazines. All the photos from this period are crisp and clean and attractive, several shots of men and women in sporty poses reminding me of glamour photos from 1930s Hollywood of the likes of Gary Cooper or Jean Harlow.
Model in Swimsuit (1936) by Dora Maar. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019
The exhibition has nine rooms and the room of fashion photos and nudes is arguably the most enjoyable, for their variety and their tremendous evocation of 1930s glamour, Paris-style.
But what's also interesting is you can see the logic of a sort of progression from fashion photos, sports photos, through tasteful nudes, and then increasingly experimental commercial photos, promoting shampoo etc, and then, suddenly…
A severed hand holding a bottle. A fashionably dressed woman in a long backless dress with… a star for a head… Suddenly Maar is a surrealist!
A very successful surrealist. She was one of only a handful of photographers to be included in the big surrealist exhibitions of the 1930s (in Tenerife, Paris, London, New York, Japan and Amsterdam), her work appearing alongside that of Man Ray (for me, maybe the greatest photographer) and Hans Bellmer (very disturbing chopped-up mannequins).
Interestingly, the early surrealists couldn't quite see how photography fit into their idea of foregrounding the imagination and above all, the unconscious mind, because photography was associated, up till then, with documentary recording of portrait, landscapes or cityscapes. It took the development of photomontage – the cutting and pasting of several photographic images over or on each other – which persuaded the surrealists that photography could, indeed, be a hugely powerful disruptor of 'bourgeois reality'.
Room five shows photos by her, alongside photos of the leading lights of the surrealist movement, friends ad fellow activists, male and female, including: Man Ray, Ren Crevell, Paul Eluard, Leonor Fini, Christian Berard, Lise Deharme – she was right in there, in the thick of the movement and the contemporary arts scene, and alongside photos of her famous friends, the exhibition displays catalogues and invitations to the surrealist exhibitions where her work was shown.
Anyway, the main thrust of the surrealist room is to showcase a range of experiments with surrealist photography, from fairly basic ideas of cutting and pasting one image onto another photo, to more interestingly experimental.
Several tropes recur:
Cut out a naked woman and stick it on almost any other image and it looks surreal/silly. Eyes.
Cut out eyes and put them anywhere, or create a flock of eyes with wings, or eyes on a beach with legs like crabs.
Shop-window mannequins. Stick them in any window and take a photograph and – hey presto! – poundshop surrealism
But a handful of the images are world class, as good as anything any of the men ever dreamed up.
Untitled (Hand-Shell) (1934) by Dora Maar Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019
Far more troubling was a set she made where she took the curved vaulted ceiling of a church somewhere, turned it upside down and then superimposed figures on it, on one version a street boy bending his body unnaturally backwards is a genuinely disturbing image (see end of this review).
My point being that a lot of her surreal photographs are relatively smooth and acceptable (like the shell-hand above) – extensions of her fashion shot style. But just a few of them are genuinely chilling and disturbing…
Social documentary
Another big room (room 3) is filled with Maar's social documentary photographs from the 1930s. She took bleak, honest photographs of the terrible poverty to be found in 'La Zone' – a sprawling shanty town on the outskirts of Paris that was home to around 40,000 poverty-stricken Parisians and immigrants.
In 1933 she travelled to the Catalonia and took photos of street people in Barcelona.
Surprisingly, there's an extended set of photos she took of street people in London, including pearly kings, blind musicians, and all manner of beggars, from the smartly dressed to the really worn-down and impoverished.
And there is a whole room devoted simply to every day scenes, the oddity or strikingness of sudden moments in the city, the kind of moments which the surrealists' godfather, André Breton, tried and – in my opinion – miserably failed to capture in his self-important and banal 'masterpiece', Nadja, which photography, as a medium, is much better equipped to capture than prose.
Girl Blocking the Doorway by Dora Maar (1934)
To be honest, a lot of these are not classics, nothing like the images of the Depression being create by Dorothea Lange at the same time in America, and not as brilliantly composed and framed as the social documentary photos of Edith Tudor-Hart, both of whom have had exhibitions devoted to them recently.
Dorothea Lange @ the Barbican
Edith Tudor-Hart @ Tate Britain
The first five rooms, then, have shown us an extensive selection of photos across a number of genres – commercial, fashion, erotic, nudes, social realism and art-surrealism – that really make the case for Maar being a very significant figure from the time, and a handful of really outstanding surrealist images she created.
Then it all goes pear-shaped.
In 1935 she asked a mutual friend to introduce her to Picasso, who fascinated her and, she became his mistress. Unfortunately he already had one mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, mother of his daughter Maya. Between 1936 and 1938 they spent summers at Mougins in the South of France, with a group of other artists that included Paul and Nusch Eluard, Man Ray, Roland Penrose, Lee Miller and Eileen Agar, and their relationship lasted until 1946.
I suppose the curators couldn't avoid this big chunk of her life, but it has a very negative effect. The two rooms which deal with it unavoidably bring out that Picasso was a genius, and seemed to indicate (the narrative was a little unclear) that she more or less abandoned photography.
As to his genius, one entire room is devoted to the masterpiece Guernica, for the slender reason that Maar took a series of seven photos showing the progress of its creation during May and June 1937. Her photos are projected onto the wall and are nearly as bit as the original. This ought to have been fascinating, but wasn't. They show us that Picasso's initial pencil composition changed as he painted but beyond that…
Installation view of Dora Maar at Tate Modern showing the projection of Maar's photos of the progress of Guenrica
The displays also tell us more than once that Maar was the model for the image of the Weeping Woman, an image which is included in Guernica and which he made about thirty versions of. This story is undermined a bit when we read Maar denying it, and claiming all these weeping women were nothing to do with her, but Picasso's own invention.
'You need to know that I never really modelled for Picasso. He never painted me "from nature". One or two drawings, maybe, that's all, although he did hundreds of portraits of me.'
The exhibition includes one of the Weeping Women (the one, in fact, owned by Tate) and this has a deleterious effect on the rest of the show because it is so brilliant.
Weeping Woman (1937) by Pablo Picasso. Tate
The exhibition includes an experimental series of portraits they made together, combining experimental photographic and printmaking techniques, and one big figurative painting she did during this time. But it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the relationship was a catastrophe for her.
In the late 1930s she was a photographer at the top of her game, firing on all cylinders, experimenting and developing. Then it all grinds to a halt. She helps Picasso with his work, she gets fed up with being excluded from his circle.
Why did she do it?
After Picasso
Picasso bought Maar a house in Ménerbes, Vaucluse, where she retired and lived alone. She turned to the Catholic religion, met the painter Nicolas de Staël (who lived in the same village), and turned to abstract painting.
The final two rooms give us a cross-selection of her paintings. These come in a bewildering variety of styles.
In the 1940s, hugely under the influence of Picasso she made still life oil paintings, which were well received when she exhibited them in a joint exhibition at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher, alongside those of Georgian artist Vera Pagava.
Still Life by Dora Maar (1941)
She painted semi-abstract landscapes of the countryside around her house in the Vaucluse, some of which are very pleasant. La Grande Range was included in Maar's last exhibition, held in the Leicester Galleries, London, in 1958 and the curators quote the Times's art critic, John Russell, praising their sensitivity and feel for large, open rather lonely places.
La Grand Range (1958) by Dora Maar
Another wall shows experiments with very small oil abstract paintings . The fourth wall displays a series of larger abstracts, often with black lines drawn over turquoise colour washes. I liked these more than the rather washed-out landscapes.
Untitled abstracts from the 1970s
And the final room shows her experiments with taking photographs without a camera, camera-less photographs or photograms. A photogram is made by placing an object on photo-sensitive paper and exposing it to light. Where the light strikes the paper, it darkens, where the paper is covered by the object it remains lighter. Maar experimented with household objects with differing degrees of transparency to control the amount of light let through to the paper.
Installation view of Maar's late photograms
Paintings of the landscapes around her house in Ménerbes,[23] showed locations dominated by wind and clouds, strongly revealing the struggle of an artist with the ghosts of her past.[24]
Well, if the exhibition's purpose was to pull Maar out from Picasso's shadow and rehabilitate her as a photographer and artist in her own right, then it certainly succeeds.
However, the effort to rehabilitate her as an artist and painter is, I think, a failure, especially after the curators dazzled us with the Picasso room: nothing from the 40 or so years of painting in the second half of her life comes anywhere near matching the genius and intensity of the Master. Some of it's attractive, some of it is competent enough cubist still lifes, or a certain type of washed out 1970s abstraction, but…
No, it's back to the multitude of photos which fill the first five rooms that the visitor has to go to catch the range and inventiveness and technical competence and restless inquiring mind which made Maar such a presence in the world of photography in the 1930s, and which is surely her lasting legacy.
A handful of the images are quite stunning (this is not a subjective view, as the same three or four images – the shell-hand, the face with a spiderweb projected on it, the woman in evening dress with a star for a head – appear on all the posters, on the front of the catalogue, as postcards and associated merch in the Tate shop).
And many of the social documentary photos are good, if lacking the bite of Edith Tudor-Hart.
But scattered in among these 60 or so images are a handful which, as I mentioned above, I thought penetrated to a deeper level, were neither 'acceptable' images of poverty or slickly-made surrealism – but took us somewhere quite different, deeper and more disturbing.
Though not reproduced on book covers or postcards or posters or mugs or fridge magnets or tote bags or t-shirts, I thought this small handful of genuinely creepy images captured something genuinely profound and chilling, something which gestures towards real greatness.
The Pretender by Dora Maar (1935) Photograph © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019
Dora Maar continues at Tate Modern until 15 March 2020
Room by room exhibition guide
Surrealism reviews
Dorothea Tanning @ Tate Modern (2019)
Jean Arp: The Poetry of Forms @ Turner Contemporary (November 2017)
Dalí / Duchamp @ the Royal Academy (November 2017)
Surrealism by Michael Robinson (2005)
Surrealism by Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy (2004)
Surreal Lives: The Surrealists 1917-45 by Ruth Brandon (1999)
Marcel Duchamp by Dawn Ades, Neil Cox and David Hopkins (1999)
Dalí: Genius, obsession and lust by Ralf Schiebler (1996)
Salvador Dalí: Exploring the irrational by Edmund Swinglehurst (1996)
Nadja by André Breton (1928)
Reviews of other Tate exhibitions
John Opie @ Tate Britain (November 2019)
Mark Leckey @ Tate Britain (November 2019)
Nam June Paik @ Tate Modern (November 2019)
Kara Walker @ Tate Modern (November 2019)
William Blake @ Tate Britain (October 2019)
Natalia Goncharova (August 2019)
Art Now: France-Lise McGurn: Sleepless (July 2019)
Mike Nelson: The Asset Strippers (July 2019)
Frank Bowling (July 2019)
Franz West @ Tate Modern (May 2019)
Van Gogh and Britain @ Tate Britain (May 2019)
Magic Realism: Art in Weimar Germany 1919 – 1933 @ Tate Modern (April 2019)
Dorothea Tanning @ Tate Modern (March 2019)
Don McCullin @ Tate Britain (February 2019)
Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory @ Tate Modern (February 2019)
Christmas slugs @ Tate Britain (December 2018)
Turner Prize 2018 @ Tate Britain (December 2018)
Edward Burne-Jones @ Tate Britain (October 2018)
All Too Human @ Tate Britain (March 2018)
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Not Everyone Will be Taken Into the Future (January 2018)
Red Star over Russia (December 2017)
Giacometti @ Tate Modern (September 2017)
Soul Of A Nation: Art In The Age Of Black Power @ Tate Modern (July 2017)
Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 @ Tate Modern (June 2017)
Queer British Art 1861-1967 @ Tate Britain (April 2017)
The Radical Eye @ Tate Modern (March 2017)
David Hockney @ Tate Britain (February 2017)
Robert Rauschenberg @ Tate Modern (February 2017)
Paul Nash @ Tate Britain (December 2016)
Painting with Light @ Tate Britain (August 2016)
Georgia O'Keefke @ Tate Modern (July 2016)
Performing for the camera @ Tate Modern (March 2016)
Frank Auerbach @ Tate Britain (February 2016)
Every Room in Tate Modern (January 2016)
Every room in Tate Britain (part one) (January 2016)
Every room in Tate Britain (part two) (January 2016)
Artist and Empire: Facing Britain's Imperial Past @ Tate Britain (January 2016)
Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture @ Tate Modern (December 2015)
The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop @ Tate Modern (November 2015)
Agnes Martin @ Tate Modern (September 2015)
Fighting History @ Tate Britain (August 2015)
Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World @ Tate Britain (August 2015)
Sonia Delaunay @ Tate Modern (May 2015)
Salt and Silver @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
Sculpture Victorious @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
Conflict, Time, Photography @ Tate Modern (March 2015)
Late Turner @ Tate Britain (January 2015)
Malevich: Revolutionary of Russian art @ Tate Modern (August 2014)
British Folk Art @ Tate Britain (June 2014)
Ruin Lust @ Tate Britain (March 2014)
Richard Deacon @ Tate Britain (February 2014)
Paul Klee – Making Visible @ Tate Modern (January 2014)
Art under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm @ Tate Britain (December 2013)
Lowry and the painting of modern life @ Tate Britain (September 2013)
Lichtenstein: A Restrospective @ Tate Modern (March 2013)
Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian avant-garde @ Tate Britain (September 2012)
Damien Hirst @ Tate Modern (September 2012)
Picasso and Modern British Art @ Tate Britain (July 2012)
John Martin @ Tate Britain (December 2011)
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Photography
Tagged abstract painting, activism, André Breton, art, Barcelona, Christian Berard, commercial photography, Dora Maar, Dorothea Lange, Edith Tudor-Hart, Eileen Agar, fashion, France, Guernica, Hans Bellmer, Lee Miller, Leonor Fini, Lise Deharme, Man Ray, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Ménerbes, Nadja, Nicolas de Staël, nude, Nusch Eluard, Pablo Picasso, painter, Paris, Paul Éluard, photograms, photographer, photography, photomontage, Picasso, Politics, Ren Crevell, Retrospective, Roland Penrose, socialism, still life, Surrealism, Tate Modern, Vaucluse, Vera Pagava, Weeping woman
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/12/23/dora-maar-tate-modern/
Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-Garde @ the Barbican
This is an extraordinarily packed, dense and demanding exhibition.
The basic idea is deceptively simple. The show looks at over 40 artistic couples who were pioneers of early 20th century avant-garde art, photography, design and literature, and explores the stories of their sexual, emotional and artistic relationships, liberally illustrating the narratives with photos and art works, books and pamphlets, fabrics and ceramics, chairs and bookshelves, which one or other or both of them produced.
Women first
One central aim of the exhibition is to show that, more often than not, the women in these artistic relationships were as, if not more, important and influential (and creative in their own right) than the male artists and male critics of their time – and ever since – have acknowledged.
So, in a small but telling detail, in all the displays of couples, it is the woman who is presented first, the woman's name which appears first and the woman's work and contribution which is most explored.
Thus in the opening room we are told that the model Camille Claudel played a larger role in the career of sculptor Auguste Rodin than is usually credited, as well as being an interesting sculptor in her own right, with samples of her work to prove it.
The same goes for Maria Martens, who enjoyed a long and passionate working relationship with the more-famous Marcel Duchamp, but was a notable artist in her own right.
Later on we learn that Gustav Klimt's lifelong soul-mate, and the model for some of his most famous paintings – Emilie Flöge – was more than just a muse and model, but a talented fashion designer who ran her own very successful couture house, the Schwestern Flöge (1904–1938), in Vienna.
Emilie Flöge and some of her dress designs c.1900
The exhibition works through scores of other examples, in each case showing that the women in each famous couple were often notable artists, sculptors, designers and business people in their own right, as well as contributing ideas, designs and artworks to what would nowadays be seen more as collaborative relationships than the old-fashioned story of an active Male Artist and a passive Female Muse.
Natalia Goncharova, the Russian Futurist artist, painter, costume designer, writer, illustrator, and set designer was every bit as innovative as her lifelong partner and founder of Rayonism, Mikhail Larionov.
Frida Kahlo, during the 1930s overshadowed by her husband, the famous mural painter Diego Rivera, has subsequently emerged as a powerful artistic figure in her own right.
Leonora Carrington has traditionally been seen as a 'muse' for the Surrealist artist, Max Ernst, during the three intense years of their relationship, 1937-40, but she was a sculptor and painter in her own right, as well as the author of a harrowing account of her experience of mental illness, Into the Abyss.
Early in their relationship Georgia O'Keeffe was the junior partner to her husband, the famous New York photographer Alfred Stieglitz, but her career as a painter would go on to eclipse his reputation.
In fact, the show at moments suggests that it was sometimes the men who were the muse figures for a woman artist, for example in the section on Picasso and how his image was crafted and shaped by his lover Dora Maar, in her own photographs and sculptures.
Picasso en Minotaure, Mougins, 1937 by Dora Maar © ADAGP, Paris. Photo © Centre Pompidou
So, on one level, this exhibition is a massive, encyclopedic review of twentieth century avant-garde art as retold from the women artists' perspectives. Redressing a balance. Restoring, or creating, a new feminist interpretation of many artistic relationships, from the super-famous to the sometimes relatively obscure.
But this theme – rediscovering and rethinking the importance of the women collaborators vis-avis often more famous male artists – is not the only one. It is complemented by explorations of the diverse meanings of the very ideas of 'working relationships' and 'collaborations'.
Take homosexual partnerships. Alongside the long sequence of heterosexual couples, there are rooms devoted to gay, lesbian or bisexual couples, for example the passionate same-sex relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West which inspired Woolf's novel, Orlando. Or the room devoted to the long-lasting artistic relationship between transgender couple Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore.
Other rooms expand the notion of 'relationship' beyond the idea of a simple binary couple, for example the relationship of the three Magic Realist painters – Paul Cadmus, Jared French and Margaret Hoening French – who worked together so closely that they attributed their works to a joint pseudonym made up from the first two letters of their first names – the PaJaMa collective.
Other rooms move beyond threesomes to explore larger groups of artists who collaborated and worked together during this exuberant period. Thus one room focuses on the community of lesbian writers and artists in 1920s Paris, while another explores the Surrealist idea of the 'Chance Encounter' in a room which brings together some ten or so artists, male and female, who collaborated together in loose and shifting networks of co-operation.
Paul Cadmus and Jared French (1937) photographed by George Platt Lynes © 2018 Estate of George Platt Lynes
In other words, the exhibition starts off by exploring the notion of modernist artistic couples but quite quickly deconstructs, reconfigures, explores and rethinks what working artistic relationships actually meant in practice for a wide variety of artists.
It may begin with women who challenged conventional notions of female behaviour and the role of 'the wife' or 'the mistress' or 'the muse', but soon becomes an investigation of a number of types of artistic working relationships, between not only heterosexual and same-sex couples, but among larger and more fluid groupings.
Is Modernism about Love or the Machine Age?
But alongside the notion of the couple, the collaboration and the group, the curators make a bold assertion which I find hard to agree with, namely that artistic modernism was coterminous with 'modern love'. To quote the introductory wall label at the start of the exhibition:
Modern art. Modern love. From the 1890s through to just after the Second World War, these two phenomena were interwoven and indelibly linked. Side-by-side, artist couples forged new ways of making art and of living and loving.
And in the scores and scores of wall labels which follow, there is much, much more along the same lines. All of the artists are given thumbnail biographies and these tend to focus as much on their love lives, on their bohemian rejection of bourgeois conventions around love, marriage, sexuality and so on, as on their actual artistic achievements.
Central to the exhibition is the claim that Modernism, or the 20th century avant-garde, was about love and sex and desire. Or, as the curators put it:
'Modern Couples' roots Modernism in the field of desire.
This claim, or assertion, allows the curators to present a coherent and persuasive narrative. Modern Art is about love and desire. 20th century women artists and authors invariably depicted love and desire. Therefore women artists are central to Modern Art.
Or: If love and desire are the core subject of Modernism, then women artists, who focused on love and desire, must be central to Modernism.
It is a circular, self-fulfilling and self-reinforcing argument.
Having established this axiom, the show can then settle down to ticking off a familiar checklist of feminist art concerns, demonstrating how these radical women artists 'subverted' traditional 'patriarchal' ideas of 'gender stereotyping' and explored 'transgressive' sexuality i.e. by having numerous lovers or by being lesbians.
By selecting love and 'desire' as the central theme of Modernism, the curators are able to pull together:
the heterosexual and homosexual relationships of women artists
women artists' ambivalent roles as sexual objects and muses to men
women artists' own sexual feelings and needs, expressed in infidelities, affairs and multiple partners
the fact that women artists sometimes got pregnant and gave birth
the way women artists explored and mythologised the condition of femininity and fertility
alongside the legion of lesbian artists, seen as social and political pioneers in the way they explored man-free notions of same-sex desire
All of these multifarious activities and interests can be pulled together as if they make up a single coherent movement, all saying the same thing, all addressing the same handful of 'issues', all united in the same aim.
And the way the same theme and subject – love, sex and the (generally female) body – is repeated on all the wall labels and is exemplified again and again in the artworks also contributes to this sense of a huge transcontinental network of artists, sculptors and writers all inspired by the same theme. Reinforcing the curators' premise that 'modern art' is coterminous with 'modern love'.
This strikes me as being very neat, very convenient and not completely true, for one very big reason.
At university I was taught that the huge array of new artistic and literary strategies which we call 'Modernism' was, at least in part, a reaction to the ongoing dominance of the Machine in modern life, and a response to the hectic pace of technological change which accelerated from the 1890s onwards.
Electric lights, bicycles, skyscrapers with electric elevators, motor cars and airplanes, the cinema and portable cameras, were just a few of the technologies which didn't exist in 1890, were only just being developed in 1900, and which had become almost commonplace by 1910, in a few decades of dizzying technical and engineering change.
I was taught that T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land and James Joyce in Ulysses and Alfred Döblin in Berlin Alexanderplatz and John Dos Passos in U.S.A. use techniques of collage, parody and fragmentation to convey the disorientating experience of life in modern, fast-moving cities and the way it had uprooted sensitive people from their cultural and communal identities, producing a blizzard of fragmented experiences.
The City of Ambitions (1910) by Alfred Stieglitz. Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum
Same with the photomontages of Alexander Rodchenko and the Russian Constructivists, or the zealous machine-worship of the Futurists, or the angularities of the Vorticists, or the geometric forms of Fernand Léger, or the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich, or the shock close-ups and split screens and montages of Sergei Eisenstein, or the grid pictures of Piet Mondrian which began life as attempts to capture the energy of fast-moving traffic around modern city blocks.
I was taught that all of these undeniably 'modernist' books and artworks were first and foremost responses to what many artists felt was the disruptive impact of a host of new technologies on modern life. They have nothing – visually or intellectually – to do with love and desire.
So it's a surprise to realise that this indisputably key element of Modernism – the hectic, alienating, urban, machine-riddled aspect of the Modernist movement – is largely absent from this exhibition. If it's mentioned at all it is only to be quickly downplayed.
Thus when the exhibition describes the Futurist poet and provocateur, Marinetti it does so mainly in order to prove that his partner, Benedetta, was a pioneering artist in her own right, who feistily stood up to Marinetti's misogynist rhetoric and co-wrote a lot of his most famous works.
Fair enough, but this perspective downplays Marinetti's importance as (half-crazed) apostle of The Machine – of the new age of fast cars, planes and trains, a mania which influenced the Surrealists in Paris and the Vorticists in London.
Room 20, devoted to Russian Modernism, describes the artistic output of Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Lilya Brk and Osip Brik, and Vladimir Mayakovsky mainly in terms of their fluid relationships and collaborations i.e. in order to justify the curators' central premise.
What is underplayed is the crucial importance of The Machine Age to their development of new styles of photography and photomontage, design, experimental film and so on – radical responses to the impact of new technologies on human life which were so acute and perceptive that many of them still influence us to this day.
A. Rodchenko and V. Stepanova descending from an airplane in a still for the film The General Line by Sergei Eisenstein (1926). A very rare appearance of a machine in an exhibition overwhelmingly devoted to bodies and desire. Courtesy Rodchenko and Stepanova Archives, Moscow
Some of the exhibition wall labels do refer to the new experience of the modern city, a bit, where absolutely necessary, reluctantly – but overall the exhibition systematically downplays or ignores it in order to focus on its core concern – with relationships, love, 'desire' and the female body.
For me, this is simply to ignore, underplay and obscure a vital element in early 20th century avant-garde modernist art and literature.
Moreover, if you think about it, the curators' unrelenting focus on love, sex and (generally) women's bodies leads to a deep irony.
By choosing to equate Modernism exclusively with love and desire, an exhibition which sets out to reject sexist stereotypes of women in a subtle way ends up limiting women to – the realm of the emotions, of love and desire.
An exhibition which ostensibly sets out to tell us that women were interested in more than just the stereotypical concerns of love and sex (they were also successful businesswomen and designers), paradoxically goes to great lengths to tell us in sometimes embarrassing detail about the love lives, partners and sensuality and eroticism of these same women.
Which tends to have the cumulative affect of confirming the stereotypical prejudice that women, at the end of the day, aren't interested in wider ideas, social change, technology, science and engineering, in designing better engines, cars, planes and trains.
No, with a handful of exceptions, most of the women in this exhibition are described as being predominantly interested – in their lives and art and writing – in love and sex. The lesbians, gays and transgender people, too, are defined, categorised and interpreted in the light of their sexual preferences, not in any wider social or intellectual concerns.
[At a more remote level, for people who don't give a damn about art or artists (90+% of the population), this exhibition confirms every philistine prejudice they've ever held about the art world, namely that it's a Sodom and Gomorrah of sexual perversion, infidelity, adultery and pornography. (There is quite a lot of nudity on display, as you'd expect in an exhibition about desire and the body, lots of bare boobs and one or two naked penises. Visitors are warned that the room about the Surrealists' 'Chance Encounter' has so much explicit content that it might not be suitable for under-16s. Oooh er.)]
Meanwhile, beyond the artists' studios and bedrooms in the 1910s and 20s, there was an immense and exciting world – the world of motorbikes and racing cars and fast trains and ocean liners and skyscrapers and high speed elevators and escalators and department stores and cinemas and world wars and machine guns and tanks and airplanes, the world where people tested themselves against machines, climbed mountains, did solo flights across the Atlantic.
But all this is ignored, left out, omitted, elided and glossed over, in the curators' keenness to assert that the essence of Modernism was… love and desire, marriages and mistresses, 'transgressive sexuality', 'the queer citizen', 'women's liberation', 'same-sex acceptance' and so on.
It is difficult to read every word of all the wall labels, not only because there are so many of them, but also because so many of them end up saying the same thing. The circumstantial details of each artist and their relationships maybe be distinct and individual but so many of the labels take us to the same destination – explaining that so and so made 'the body' the centre of their practice or 'the site of transgressive desire' or an epitome of 'queer citizenship', and so on.
The explosively diverse and often fascinating works of many of these artists are time after time reduced, interpreted via the same handful of ideas which rotate obsessively around sex, 'desire', the body, and transgressing gender stereotypes.
It is, in my opinion, both a narrow view of Modern Art, and a very narrow view of the female, lesbian and gay achievement of the time, both in the art world and beyond.
A tsunami of information
So much for the core ideas of the exhibition, and my issue with some of them.
The actual experience of visiting Modern Couples is to be completely overwhelmed by a tsunami of names and stories. The two floors of the Barbican Gallery have been divided up into some 23 small rooms, into most of which have been crammed displays about at least two sets of couples, with each couple introduced and explained by sometimes lengthy texts on the wall, as well as scores and scores of key quotes from the respective artists and authors.
It's a lot to take in – to read the explanation of each couple, and then try and match the quotes to what you've just read about their lives – and then to find the energy to look at the actual art works.
To give you a sense of the scale and the deluge of information, here's the list of the Artist Couples:
Aino and Alvar Aalto
Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry
Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant
Lilya Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky
Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore
Benedetta and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst
Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin
Nancy Cunard and Henry Crowder
Sonia Delaunay and Robert Delaunay
Lili Elbe And Gerda Wegener
Emilie Flöge and Gustav Klimt
Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí
Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov
Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici
Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson
Hannah Höch and Til Brugman
Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera
Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso
Alma Mahler and Oskar Kokoschka
Alma Mahler and Gustav Mahler
Maria Martins and Marcel Duchamp
Margrethe Mather and Edward Weston
Lee Miller and Man Ray
Lee Miller and Roland Penrose
Tina Modotti and Edward Weston
Lucia Moholy and László Moholy-Nagy
Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky
Winifred Nicholson and Ben Nicholson
Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz
PaJaMa: Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French
George Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescott
Lavinia Schultz and Walter Holdt
Varvara Stepanova and Alexander Rodchenko
Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean Arp
Toyen and Jindrich Štyrský
Marianne von Werefkin and Alexej von Jawlensky
Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West
Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf
Unica Zürn and Hans Bellmer
That's a lot of biographies to read and digest, that's a lot of names to remember.
Nude with Poppies (1916) by Vanessa Bell. Swindon Art Gallery
Here are the names, careers, art and writing of the 'Sapphists' featured in just one room, the one dedicated to 'The Temple of Friendship' i.e. the lesbian writers and artists of 1920s Paris:
Djuna Barnes and Thelma Wood
Natalie Clifford-Barney and Romaine Brooks
Natalie Clifford Barney and Rémy de Gourmont
Natalie Clifford-Barney and Liane de Pougy
Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien
Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier
Luisa Casati
Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge
Ida Rubinstein
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas
And that's before you get to the artists featured in the Surrealist 'Chance Encounter' room, namely:
Eileen Agar and Joseph Bard
Eileen Agar and Paul Nash
Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy
Leonor Fini and André Pieyre de Mandiargues
Gala and Salvador Dalí
Gala, Paul Éluard and Max Ernst
Valentine Hugo and André Breton
Jacqueline Lamba and André Breton
Kiki de Montparnasse and Man Ray
Nadja and André Breton
Nusch and Paul Éluard
Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff
Valentine Penrose and Alice Rahon
Valentine Penrose and Roland Penrose
Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst
Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst with his sculpture, Capricorn, 1947 © John Kasnetsis
Not only must the visitor assimilate this tsunami of names, relationships and diversity of artistic and literary practices, but every visitor to the exhibition is given a free handout, a 'glossary', which includes even more themes to think about.
For when the curators had collated this much information about this many people and assembled this many works all in one place – it turns to be an interesting exercise to detect all kinds of further links and connections between the huge diversity of artists, activities or artworks on show.
Thus the free handout suggests that, as you walk round the exhibition, you look out for the following themes:
Agency – 'Feminism, agency and the desire for independence underpins much of the work by women artists in the avant-garde period.'
Businesswomen – Emilie Flöge, Sonia Delaunay, Aino Aalto
Chloe liked Olivia – quote from Virginia Woolf epitomising 'the new queer citizen of the 20th century'
Co-authored – or collaboration, one of the show's central themes.
Communicating vessels – 'Two different bodies, rubbed against one another, attain, through the spark, their supreme unity in fire' – André Breton, 1932.
Daring – 'What have I dared embark upon by entering your life?' Dora Maar to Picasso, 1936.
Elegy – 'Butterflies represent a scene of your life in which the dawn awakens on your lips. A star takes shape according to your design.' Jean Arp remembering Sophie Taeuber-Arp after her death.
Escape to the country
Feminism – 'We will be better than the wife, the mother or the sister of a man, we will be the female brother of the man' – Natalie Clifford Barney
Homoeroticism – 'The work that came out of Monroe Wheeler, Glenway Wescott and George Platt Lynes's at times uneasy polyamorous relationship opened up a queer utopian space, away from 1930s American conservatism, in which the male subject could be liberated.'
Liberation – sexual liberation, liberation from Victorian clothing and Victorian morality, liberation from constricting fabrics and dull designs, liberation from boring interiors, liberation from artistic naturalism and even from language
Mirroring – 'I am one, you are the other. Or the opposite. Our desires meet one another.' Claude Cohun, 1930.
Muse – Dora Maar took photos of her lover Picasso in 'a turnaround of gender expectations'.
Non-binary – 'Gender fluidity, sexual empowerment, awakening, and the fight for safe spaces of becoming, were part of the avant-garde currency.'
Printed word – 'It could be a political text, a perfect branding platform, a token of love, a site of artistic collaboration or a platform for transgressive or erotic content.'
Procreation
Publishing – Many modernists experimented with setting up their own publishing company, most notably the Hogarth Press of Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
Radical abstraction
Reinvention – The importance of the portrait, in art and literature. Claude Cohun and Marcel Moore, life partners for 45 years, and produced a huge body of work playing with 'gender politics'.
Revolution – Alexander Rodchenko and partner Varvara Stepanova's revulsion for the West's cult of 'Woman as object' and determination to embrace 'gender equality'.
Sidelined – women sidelined by men, obviously
Total work of art
Triadic
Two-people movements – Rayism invented by Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, the Mask Dancer movement of Lavinia Schultz and Walter Holdt, the Tactilism of Benedetta and Filippo Marinetti, the Orphism of Sonia and Robert Delaunay.
X-rated – 'Many artists in this exhibition used eroticism in their art as a way of fighting bourgeois conformity, propaganda and artistic censorship.'
Is that enough to think about yet?
A self-portrait by Claude Cahun, subverting gender stereotypes. Courtesy of Jersey Heritage Collections
This is what the exhibition is like. Overflowing with texts, quotes, references, biographical data, artistic theory and, underpinning it all, emerging sooner or later in every wall label for every artist – the axioms of modern identity politics and feminism – gender politics, the body, gender fluidity, transgressive art, gender equality, and so on.
I counted a total of 103 paragraphs of wall text – sometimes very long, densely factual paragraphs. It would take at least an hour just to read them, and that's before the 50 or so quotes from artists' letters, diaries and so on.
There are over 40 couples, but many more 'couples-plus' – groups and movements of artists and writers to get a handle on – with the result that the exhibition features more than 80 writers and artists in total.
And there are a staggering 600 objects on display, including paintings, sculptures, models, furniture, personal photographs, love letters, gifts, books – 35 first editions from Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press – magazines, rare archival material and much, much more!
Les deux amies (1923) by Tamara de Lempicka. Association des Amis du Petit Palais, Geneve. A portrait of two naked women painted by a woman!
In the event, this was simply too much for me to take in. I started off dutifully reading every wall text but quickly got tired, saturated, full up – I started skimming some and then just ignored others. I went round about five times, each time reading at new bits of text, toying with quotes here and there – above all, trying to let the actual art fight its way through the jungle of biography and interpretation and bitty quotations and make its impact.
I came to roughly two conclusions.
1. One is that, if you're a student or have an educational motivation, this is a spectacular opportunity to see works great and small, by artists famous and obscure, by men, women, gays, lesbians and trans people, from what feels like all the most important art movements of the early 20th century.
(In fact it's far from being a complete overview of early 20th century art – that would fill ten Barbican galleries – but it is an impressive stab at conveying a really comprehensive overview of important modern art as retold with women, gays and lesbians to the fore.)
2. The second point is that among the 600 paintings, books, photos and furniture on display there are some real masterpieces, many on loan from abroad, and so a rare opportunity to see many beautiful things in the flesh.
Small is not necessarily beautiful
In this respect – my response to the art – I found the smaller, more cramped rooms to be unconducive to aesthetic enjoyment.
For example, the small first room which is shared by the story of Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin, and the story of Maria Martins and Marcel Duchamp, included some plaster busts and faces by the former pair, and some bronze casts of Maria's body parts (her buttocks and vagina) made by Duchamp. But it was so small, cramped and crowded that it felt more like a reading and learning space, than an art space.
The reduction ad absurdum of this shoehorn approach was the way that the no doubt complex and interesting working relationship between modernist designer Lilly Reich and her long-term partner and collaborator, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, was explained via one chrome and black leather chair and three paragraphs of text plonked at the bottom of the stairs to the first floor.
He claimed to be the sole designer of this classic and hugely influential chair. Only decades later did it emerge that she had as least as much input as he did into the design. What a beast!
Barcelona chair by Mies van der Rohe (1929)
Interesting story, but blink and you might miss it altogether.
The show is co-curated by Emma Lavigne, Director of the Centre Pompidou in Metz. The French connection made me think of some of the smaller displays as types of 'bonnes bouches' or 'tasty bites' – fleeting treats designed to add to the overall argument, but whose main function would be to inspire you to go away and find out more.
Big rooms where art can breathe
By contrast, I only really felt comfortable – and that I was really getting an aesthetic kick (as opposed to processing large amounts of biographical and art information) – in some of the larger rooms. There were plenty of other highlights, but I would single out rooms 14, 15 and 17.
Room 17 displayed the work of two and a half couples: of the English artist Ben Nicholson, who 1. enjoyed a close working relationship with Winifred Nicholson (whom he married) in the early 1930s before 2. then partnering with the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. The wall labels quote letters they exchanged in which they spoke of becoming, literally, one person, with one taste and one artistic motivation.
In this same room, on the opposite wall, was a suite of work by Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. I found the juxtaposition of the sculptural abstractions of Nicholson and Hepworth with the playful abstracts of Arp really interesting.
But I was transfixed by the four or five 18-inch-high marionettes made by Sophie Taeuber-Arp for a puppet production of a folk tale about King Stagg. These possessed something almost nothing else in the exhibition did – which was charm and humour.
Marionettes by Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1918)
Room 15 is a rare example of a room devoted to just one couple, in this case the wife-and-husband partnership between Sonia and Robert Delaunay (who were married from 1910 to Robert's death in 1941). This married couple developed a movement variously titled Simultanism and then Orphism, in which different patterns of colours are set against each other to create disruptive effects.
The Delaunay room benefited immensely from being just about them, with no other couple squeezed in. It had more than twenty works hung around the walls, most of them – from what I could see – the calm, restful abstract designs by Sonia, mostly for fabrics and dresses. This made for a really absorbing and beautiful space.
Design B53 (1924) by Sonia Delaunay
But the room I found it literally hard to leave and, even when I'd left it, found myself walking round the entire ground floor in order to visit again with a renewed frisson of delight, was room 14 devoted to the overlapping artistic partnerships of Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky, and Marianne von Werefkin and Alexej von Jawlensky.
This foursome produced German Expressionist paintings of wonderful colour and vivid design at their self-styled artist colony at Murnau in Bavaria, in the years just before the Great War. Wow.
I liked lots of other things in the exhibition (the enormous painting of naked lesbians by Tamara de Lempicka, the thrilling Constructivist photos of Varvara Stepanova and Alexander Rodchenko, the dazzling photos of Lee Miller done by Man Ray, the couple of small but wonderful paintings by Gustav Klimt, some of the abstract paintings produced by Roger Grant and Vanessa Bell's Omega Workshop, the wonderfully aloof portraits painted by Romaine Brooks), but for sheer visual pleasure, nothing beat this room of hyper-bright, vivid brushstrokes, bold childlike designs, and colour-drenched splashes and flourishes by this German foursome.
Improvisation III by Wassily Kandinsky (1909)
Probably I should have been reading up on how their work 'subverted' this or that tradition, and 'challenged gender stereotypes', or how the two women definitely contributed as much or more to their commune as the men.
But I switched off all that curatorial chatter, and just stood in awe of these wonderful, beautiful, transcendent works of art. No reproductions can do justice to the shiny vibrancy of the real thing in the flesh. Go and see them for yourself.
It must have taken an immense amount of effort by the four co-curators to bring together such an epic collection of objects and art works and to bring order, coherence and meaning to the multiple stories behind them.
If you are a feminist I can see how this exhibition of feminist artists lovingly assembled by feminist curators with scores of texts by feminist scholars would thunderingly confirm all your feminist beliefs. That's what it's designed to do.
And I wondered, as I left, whether this exhibition now and in the future, might be seen as a landmark show, a really massive rethinking of early 20th century modern art which reinstates women's stories in all these important relationships, and often rehabilitates them as being as, if not more, creative than their male partners.
And also for the way it explores the idea that modern art was characterised, more than any previous type of art, by its collaborative nature, by the way it was produced by partnerships, by trios or quartets, by small groups working, thinking and making together.
It is a strong, well-argued, illuminating and very thought-provoking show.
But, that said, it's hard to imagine that a lot of these artists and their stories won't already be well known to the average gallery goer – the stories of Picasso and Dora, Frida and Diego, Virginia and Vita and the names of Dali, Ernst, Man Ray, Klimt, Marinetti, Nicholson and Hepworth are hardly unknown, and the notion that, 'behind every great man there's a great woman', is hardly a radical thought – as indicated by the fact that there's a centuries-old proverb on the subject.
Similarly, it's hard to imagine that the fact that there were lesbian writers in the 1920s or gay photographers in the 1930s, will come as a great surprise to the average gallery goer. Homosexuality is not really news to most people. Most of the people the exhibition is targeted at will, I suspect, have heard of Virginia Woolf before, and will know she had a lesbian affair with Vita Sackville-West.
My position, after forty years of studying twentieth century art, literature and history, is that the Century of Catastrophes is too diverse and complex to be reduced to any one narrative or interpretation. From about the 1890s onwards there was (and still is) too much going on in an interconnected world of billions of human beings for any one narrative or story to hope to tell any kind of definitive 'truth'.
For example, this is an exhibition, at bottom, about European and American white women, often very wealthy women (Nancy Cunard, Natalie Barney). You can immediately see that focusing on these often very privileged people tends to omit the stories of working class people of both genders in those continents. You could be forgiven for not realising there were things called the First World War and the Russian Revolution during the period the exhibition covers. Not enough 'same sex desire' to merit inclusion.
Similarly, there is precious little (surprisingly) about the black experience of modernity (there is one black person in the exhibition, the jazz musician Henry Crowder, who is included because of his influence over the immensely wealthy patron of the arts and writer, Nancy Cunard).
In fact, now I think about it, jazz is a crashingly obvious and central element of Modernism, from Stravinsky to Eliot, and is depicted in countless modernist art works. But it doesn't fit with the curators' insistence that Modernism be defined by couples, love and relationships, sex and partners and gender and desire and so… it isn't here.
My view is that the 'Modern' experience of humanity, the bewildering catalogue of technological, scientific and cultural change which overwhelmed Homo sapiens in the early twentieth century – is too vast and multiform for any one narrative to encompass.
The curators make a powerful and persuasive case that Modernism was characterised above all by new thinking about love, eroticism, desire and relationships, much of which promoted the liberation of women (and trans people and gays).
Lee Miller with a cast of her torso, Downshire Hill, London, England 1940 by Roland Penrose
© Roland Penrose
I accept all their points as valid, and the body of evidence they've assembled is pulverisingly persuasive. And yet I still think that an equal if not more important element of Modernism was artists' reaction to the revolution in everyday life caused by new technologies. And everyone's world was turned upside down by the Great War. And the entire intellectual world was galvanised by the radicalism of the Russian Revolution. And I haven't mentioned the famously disruptive discoveries of Einstein and others, undermining the static view of the forces of nature held since Newton. Too much was happening. No wonder the art from this period is so excited and effervescent.
Alternative interpretations
But I'm well aware that my own interpretation can itself be trumped by other competing narratives. That there are numerous ways of looking at this period of cultural history.
For example, arguably the most important aspect of the era was the collapse of the old European empires – the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires. The entire art of the period could be interpreted in terms of the breakdown of the ideologies, laws and customs which supported them, of which conventions about relations between the sexes are just a small sub-set.
Or there's a Marxist interpretation which suggests that the era was characterised by unprecedented wealth derived from the West's imperialist domination of the rest of the world – wealth which gave rise to a new class of super-rich collectors and connoisseurs who patronised 'modern' art and literature and experimented with new 'decadent' lifestyles. (Vide Nancy Cunard, Natalie Barney and the numerous other rich American women who populate the 1920s lesbian room).
Or there's a strong post-colonial interpretation which says that the decisive impetus for Modernism and its revolutionary overthrow of 400 years of realistic art came from the cultural appropriation of the African masks and Oceanic art looted by imperial collectors, which were enthusiastically copied by Picasso and Matisse, and which had a transformative effect on everyone who followed them.
To give just a few of the most obvious interpretations of the art of the period.
This exhibition is an impressive and stimulating attempt to write one particular story about early twentieth century art. But it is only one interpretation among a sea of alternative stories.
The promotional video
P.S. What does 'modern' mean?
When I told my wife I was off to see an exhibition titled 'Modern Couples' she thought it would be a V&A-style celebration of contemporary celebrity pairs like Elton John and David Furnish, the Beckhams, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, and so on.
No, I explained. When art and literary critics say 'modern' what they mean is art from the 1900s, 1910s and 20s. They mean art and literature which is over a hundred years old. That's what they mean by 'modern'.
And even as I explained it, I realised how odd this use of the word 'modern' is. Eventually this stuff is going to be 150 years old. Will we still be describing it as 'modern' in 2050? At what point will someone have to come up with a better name? Or will Modernist art remain 'modern' forever?
Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-Garde continues at the Barbican until 27 January 2019
Women in art
Women, Art and Society by Whitney Chadwick (2012)
50 Women Artists You Should Know (2008)
Women artists in the 20th and 21st century ed. Uta Grosenick (2003)
Reviews of artists featured in this exhibition
Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up @ The Victoria and Albert Museum (September 2018)
Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932 (September 2018)
Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy @ Tate Modern (August 2018)
Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece @ The British Museum (June 2018)
Arp: The Poetry of Forms @ Turner Contemporary (November 2017)
Georgia O'Keeffe @ Tate Modern (July 2016)
Vanessa Bell @ Dulwich Picture Gallery (February 2017)
Rodin and Dance: The Essence of Movement @ Courtauld Gallery (January 2017)
Art and Life: Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, William Staite Murray, 1920 – 1931 @ Dulwich Picture Gallery (June 2014)
Man Ray Portraits @ the National Portrait Gallery (April 2013)
Kandinsky by Hajo Düchting (1993)
Reviews of previous exhibitions & concerts at the Barbican
Vanessa Winship: And Time Folds (August 2018)
Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing (August 2018)
Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins (April 2018)
Basquiat: Boom for Real (November 2017)
Purple by John Akomfrah (October 2017)
Into the Unknown (Science Fiction) (August 2017)
Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers (March 2016)
Where The Shadows are so Deep by Imran Qureshi (March 2016)
The World of Charles and Ray Eames (November 2015)
Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector (April 2015)
Pop Art Design (February 2014)
Toru Takemitsu (February 2013)
Everything Was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s (November 2012)
Bauhaus: Art as Life (July 2012)
Music by Jonny Greenwood and Krzysztof Penderecki (April 2012)
The Sinking of The Titanic (April 2012)
Posted in Art, Biography, Books, Exhibition, Feminism, History, Literature, Photography, Poetry, Russia, Sex, World War One
Tagged 20th century, Adrienne Monnier, Aino, Alexander Rodchenko, Alexej von Jawlensky, Alfred Döblin, Alfred Stieglitz, Alice B. Toklas, Alice Rahon, Alma Mahler, Alvar Aalto, André Breton, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, art, Auguste Rodin, avant-garde, Barbara Hepworth, Bavaria, Ben Nicholson, Benedetta Marinetti, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Camille Claudel, Chloe liked Olivia, Claude Cahun, cultural appropriation, Design, Diego Rivera, Djuna Barnes, Dora Maar, Dorothea Tanning, Duncan Grant, Edward Weston, Eileen Agar, Eileen Gray, Emilie Flöge, Emma Lavigne, Federico García Lorca, Feminism, Filippo Marinetti, Frida Kahlo, Gabriele Münter, Gala, gay, George Platt Lynes, Georgia O'Keeffe, Gerda Wegener, Gertrude Stein, Glenway Wescott, Grace Pailthorpe, Gustav Klimt, Gustav Mahler, Hannah Höch, Hans Bellmer, Henry Crowder, Hogarth Press, Homoeroticism, homosexual, Ida Rubinstein, Jacqueline Lamba, James Joyce, Jared French, Jean Arp, Jean Badovici, Jindrich Štyrský, John Dos Passos, Joseph Bard, Kiki de Montparnasse, Lavinia Schultz, László Moholy-Nagy, Lee Miller, Leonard Woolf, Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, lesbian, Liane de Pougy, Lili Elbe, Lilya Brik, Literature, Lucia Moholy, Luisa Casati, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Moore, Margaret French, Margrethe Mather, Maria Martins, Marianne von Werefkin, Marxism, Max Ernst, Mikhail Larionov, Modernism, Monroe Wheeler, Murnau, Nadja, Nancy Cunard, Natalia Goncharova, Natalie Clifford-Barney, Nusch, Orphism, Oskar Kokoschka, Pablo Picasso, PaJaMa, Paul Éluard, Paul Cadmus, Paul Nash, photography, post-colonial, Pygmalion, Radclyffe Hall, Raoul Hausmann, Rayism, Rémy de Gourmont, Renée Vivien, Reuben Mednikoff, Robert Delaunay, Roger Fry, Roland Penrose, Romaine Brooks, Rrose Sélavy, Salvador Dalí, Sergei Eisenstein, sex, Sonia Delaunay, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Surrealism, Sylvia Beach, T.S. Eliot, Tactilism, Tamara de Lempicka, the Great War, The Temple of Friendship, The Waste Land, Thelma Wood, Til Brugman, Tina Modotti, Toyen, transgender, U.S.A., Ulysses, Una Troubridge, Unica Zürn, Valentine Hugo, Valentine Penrose, Vanessa Bell, Varvara Stepanova, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Walter Holdt, Wassily Kandinsky, Winifred Nicholson, women
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/10/10/modern-couples-art-intimacy-avant-garde-barbican/
This is an almost square, thick, glossy art book (17.1 x 16.1 cm) whose 384 pages – after the brief foreword and introduction – contain nearly 200 colour reproductions of Surrealist works of art. Each one gets a 2-page spread, image on the right, text giving the artist, title, medium and some interpretation, on the left. A kind of flip book of Surrealist painting, divided into four sections – Movement overview, Influences, Styles & techniques and Places.
The left-page analyses vary widely in quality, some telling you really insightful things, others little more than recaps of so-and-so's career or an anecdote behind the picture. There is an obtrusive political correctness in many of them – Robinson is the kind of white man who has to make it quite clear he is on the side of feminists in their struggle against the patriarchy, and regrets the cultural misappropriation of colonial exploiters like Picasso, Matisse and the rest of those awful white men.
Here he is discussing Meret Oppenheim's Occasional Table (1939):
Occasional table (1939) by Meret Oppenheim
In this work Meret Oppenheim continues with a number of Surrealist preoccupations, the most significant of which is the preconception of specific gender roles and stereotyping in a patriarchal society. At first this object may appear as an opulent or even decadent excess of Art Deco design for the bourgeois market, particularly in its use of gold leaf. Oppenheim is, in line with Dada and Surrealist ideals, commenting on bourgeois excesses, as well as on gender stereotypes.
Let's just stop here and ask if you, the reader, can identify specifically how this work of art is tackling 'the preconception of specific gender roles and stereotyping in a patriarchal society'. Spotted it? Good. Now, read on:
As a (male) viewer one is drawn to the legs to consider their shape before considering their functionality. There is an obvious parallel here with women being viewed in the same stereotypical manner. The viewer is also being denied access to the rest of the body, emphasised by the flatness and width of the table's top. (p.224)
So, if I'm reading this correctly, Robinson is claiming that if you are struck by the fact that an ordinary-looking table is being supported by a pair of bird's legs, this is not because it's rather unusual and incongruous – in the deliberately disconcerting Surrealist/Dada fashion – it's because you are always looking at legs and sizing them up, because you are a misogynist member of a patriarchal society guilty of gender stereotyping. Unless you are a woman. In which case you just see a pair of bird's legs.
I hope all my male readers have gone away suitably chastened and reformed.
Here he is preparing to talk about a work by Wifredo Lam:
At the turn of the nineteenth century many modernists adopted and adapted ritualistic or totemic motifs from Africa, the Indian subcontinent and Oceania – in fact from most places that were European colonies. The use of these misappropriated motifs can be found in the so-called 'primitive' aesthetics of Paul Gauguin's Post-Impressionism, the Cubism of Picasso and Georges Braque, much of German Expressionism and some of the Fauvism of Matisse. However, Surrealism differed in this regard thanks largely to the multi-ethnicity of its group and a genuine interest in anthropology. (p.184)
Will all those white European artists who 'misappropriated' motifs from non-European cultures please stay behind after school and write out one hundred times 'Michael Robinson says I must only use subjects and motifs from European culture and not misappropriate motifs from any other source'. Naughty Picasso. Naughty Matisse. Unless you're black or Asian or non-caucasian, in which case it's fine: you can use any motifs and imagery you like.
Your use of non-European motifs is cultural misappropriation; our use of non-European motifs is different, because we have 'a genuine interest in anthropology'. Michael says so.
The sheer number and variety of art and artists tell their own story about the Surrealists' broad-spectrum dominance of the inter-war period.
First conclusion is there were so many of them – Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Jacques Baron, Max Morise, Pierre Naville, Roger Vitrac, Gala Éluard, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, Hans Arp, Georges Malkine, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Antonin Artaud, Raymond Queneau, André Masson, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, and Yves Tanguy – just for starters.
Surrealism followed on from Dada, founded in 1916 in Switzerland as a really angry response to the pointless barbarity of the Great War.
By 1920 a lot of former Dadaists had gravitated to Paris and were experimenting with Freud-inspired ideas of accessing or depicting the unconscious, via stream-of-consciousness prose or automatic writing. One of them, the bullish, domineering poet André Breton, decided the trouble with Dada is it had been too anarchic, chaotic, unfocused – which had led to its eventual collapse.
Breton decided to form a real movement, not just literary but with social and political aims. This led in 1924 to the publication of the first of numerous Surrealist manifestos.
It was primarily a movement of writers – poets and novelists – not artists. Artists came later. Ironic, because now we are soaked in the artists' imagery and I wonder if anyone reads the old surrealist prose works, or could name any.
And Surrealism was political, designed to undermine and overthrow the existing scheme of things, opposing traditional bourgeois values (kinder, küche, kirche), religion, the rational, the scientific – all the things which, it was claimed, had led Europe into the inferno of the Great War.
Breton conceived of Surrealism as a philosophy and a way of life, rejecting the stifling repression of bourgeois society, setting free our deep inner selves. It wasn't just teenage rebellion for its own sake. Breton and many of the others thought that Western society was really seriously crippled and doomed by its steadfast refusal to acknowledge the most vital part of the human being – the unconscious, source of all our creative imaginative urges, which can only be accessed via dreams and other specialised techniques.
Only if we can tap into our unused creativity, into our irrational minds, into the sensual part of our psyche, can we ever hope to change the repressed, uptight, bourgeois, scientific, technocratic society which is leading us to destruction.
You can see why this genuine commitment to radical social change led many Surrealists, as the 1920s turned into the Fascist 1930s, to declare themselves communists and how this led to numerous splits and bitter quarrels among them.
In his rules Breton declared that surrealist writers and artists (and film-makers and photographers) could work in any medium whatsoever, depicting any subject whatsoever, with only one golden rule – it must come from inside, from the unconscious, from the free imagination untrammeled or restricted by conscious thought or tradition. You could use realistic figures and objects from the real world – but only in the service of the unconscious.
Of the scores of artists connected the movement, probably Dalí and Magritte created the most widely recognized images of Surrealism. Dalí joined the group in 1929 (after his brief abandonment of painting for film and photography) and played a crucial role in establishing a definitive visual style between 1930 and 1935.
The Persistence of Memory (1931) by Salvador Dali
The Mystery of the Ordinary (1926–1938) by Rene Magritte
Assuming we're all familiar with the usual suspects – Dali, Miro, Ernst, Arp, Magritte, Ray – one of the interesting facets of the book is how widely it casts the net, to include artists never part of the official movement but clearly influenced by it. I enjoyed the inclusion of English artists like Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth and, especially, Roland Penrose.
Circle of monoliths (1938) by Paul Nash
Bien vise (1939) by Roland Penrose
The conquest of the air (1938) by Roland Penrose
The real pleasure of the book was coming across quite a few artists I'd never heard of before:
Paysage meduse (1937) by Wolfgang Paalen
Lion Bicycle (1937) by Oscar Dominguez
The Germ of the Night (1937) Jacques Hérold
The man in the street by Paul Delvaux (1940)
The great jungle (1943) by Wifredo Lam
Cup of doubt (1946) by Victor Brauner
There were quite a few women surrealist artists and it was genuinely interesting to a) learn about them and their work, considered purely as artists b) to learn how many of them really were feminists, how many disliked the bullying male environment created by Breton, how many of them tried to develop an aesthetic which escaped male stereotyping and the sexualising of women's bodies. From a crowded field I think Dorothea Tanning stood out for me.
Dejeuner en fourrure (1936) by Meret Oppenheim
A little later (1938) by Kay Sage
Muse of construction (1939) by Eileen Agar, whose work looked more interesting than Nash's own when I saw samples of both at Tate's recent Nash exhibition.
Rivieres Tiedes/Tepid Waters (1939) by Ithell Colquhoun
The Spotted Ousel (1942) by Grace Pailthorpe
At the chateau Lacoste (1946) Toyen (pseudonym of Marie Čermínová)
Plain chant (1947) by Leonora Carrington (in the late 1930s Max Ernst's lover and collaborator)
The Friend's Room (1950) by Dorothea Tanning (married Max Ernst in 1946)
Composition with figures on a terrace (1939) by Leonor Fini
Lee Miller was an important muse for many of the male Surrealists. She had an intense affair with the photographer Man Ray, who taught her photography as well as making her the subject of many of his greatest works. Later she married Roland Penrose, the English Surrealist painter. His painting, Bien vise, above, depicts her naked torso. But Miller also painted, created surrealist objects and took surreal photos in her own right (as well as her later, awesome, war photos).
Good and Bad Posture, Vogue tearsheat by Lee Miller (1942)
Montage of photos by Lee Miller
Surrealism and gender
The gender issue with Surrealism strikes me as simple enough: all these men thought they had a duty to express the unconscious; the dominating master and 'discoverer' of the unconscious was a man, Sigmund Freud; Freud insisted that the unconscious was drenched in repressed sexuality (only later adding aggression and violence in the form of the Death Wish); which meant that this large and influential group of male artists felt it was their moral and artistic duty to be as frank as possible about sex and sexuality, to be as shocking and provocative as they could be; and so they saturated their works with erotic images and symbols; and, being men, these tended to be images of women, their own objects of desire.
And almost all the women, in one way or another, reacted against this use of women as sex objects, as objects of desire, in male painting, and tried to redress the balance by painting women fully dressed or in poses where they obviously dominate men or as girls on the cusp of adolescence (or abandoned figuration altogether to paint abstracts).
The really interesting biological-anthropological question is about the difference in 'desire' which this tends to bring out. Men paint women, but women paint women, too. Everyone seems to take 'women' as a fit subject for painting. Very few of the women artists paint pictures of big naked men or fixate on the penis in the same way that men paint countless breasts and vulvas. Why? Broadly speaking, feminists from de Beauvoir onwards say that gender differences are entirely due to social conditioning; the vast majority of the population and all the biologists and evolutionists I've read point out that there are certain unavoidable differences in DNA, physiology and behaviour between males and females of almost every species: why should we be any different?
All that said, I've just flicked slowly through the nearly 200 images in this book and only a handful of paintings – about ten – actually depict realistic images of naked women (and some of those are by women e.g. Dorothea Tanning's Birthday; among the men Paul Delvaux had the most persistent in (admittedly dreamy zombie) naked women e.g. The Sleeping Venus).
If you go looking for naked women to support this thesis, they are in fact surprisingly absent from the classic surrealist images (by Magritte, Dali, Ernst).
I had no idea that Desmond Morris, author of the immensely popular Naked Ape/Manwatching books, was an official member of the Birmingham Surrealist group while still an undergraduate studying biology. This work, painted when he was just 21, is immediately pleasing, in colour, design and the formal symmetric arrangement. It also demonstrates the general rule that Surrealism, which set out to turn society upside down, ended up producing charming and delightful images which could safely hang on the walls of any investment banker or corporate lawyer. Art changes nothing.
Rank and file (1949) by Desmond Morris
Conc
This book is a useful reservoir of some classic Surrealist images, but its real value is as a stimulating introduction to a far wider range of less well-known artists.
Surrealism by Michael Robinson was published by Flametree Published in 2005.
Surrealism on Amazon
Surrealism-related blog posts
Arp: The Poetry of Forms @ Turner Contemporary
Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture @ Tate Modern
Dalí/Duchamp @ the Royal Academy
Georgia O'Keeffe @ Tate Modern
Paul Klee – Making Visible @ Tate Modern
Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
Paul Nash @ Tate Britain
by Simon on November 8, 2017 • Permalink
Posted in Art, Books
Tagged 2005, André Breton, André Masson, Antonin Artaud, automatic writing, Benjamin Péret, Braque, Cubism, Dada, Dalí, Desmond Morris, Dorothea Tanning, Edward Wadsworth, Eileen Agar, Fauvism, Freud, Gala Éluard, Gauguin, Georges Limbour, Georges Malkine, German Expressionism, Grace Pailthorpe, Great War, Hans Arp, Henry Moore, Ithell Colquhoun, Jacques Baron, Jacques Hérold, Jacques Prévert, Joan Miro, Kay Sage, Lee Miller, Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, Luis Buñuel, Magritte, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Marie Čermínová, Matisse, Max Ernst, Max Morise, Meret Oppenheim, Michael Robinson, Michel Leiris, Oscar Dominguez, Paris, Paul Éluard, Paul Delvaux, Paul Nash, Picasso, Pierre Naville, Post-Impressionism, Raymond Queneau, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Roger Vitrac, Roland Penrose, Salvador Dalí, stream-of-consciousness, Surrealism, the Naked Ape, the unconscious, Toyen, Victor Brauner, Wifredo Lam, Wolfgang Paalen, Yves Tanguy
Posted by Simon on November 8, 2017
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/11/08/surrealism-michael-robinson/