Braque the Fauve

It's always fascinating to see how artists try things out and re-invent themselves before they have their epiphany, and as a painter it lets me know there is still hope ;-)

Sometimes a painter goes through all sorts of metamorphoses before this moment. Last year's Malevich exhibition at the Tate is a case in point with the artist trying many things from Russian peasant art up before bam! the black square changed everything. Things were a lot more straightforwards for Braque. Two years into his career, he saw two Cezanne retrospectives, met Picasso and the rest is history. For those first two years though tried out being a Fauve.

Seen collectively they seem very tame and ordinary now, but at the time it was a new approach to art so it would have been a great adventure for a young artist. The Fauves really aren't my thing; anyone who has dropped in and of this blog much will know that I don't think that is how colour works. This one I found at the Courthauld last week really caught my eye though.

Port of L'Estaque, 1906

What makes this stand out for me is that Braque manages to unite the Fauve ideal of the brightly coloured surface arranged for decorative and emotional effect with more traditional and Impressionist values of a depiction of light and space all within a simple picture. This ability to pull together disparate things is perhaps key to the way he later developed cubism - the multi-facetted approach of the early days, the convincing integration of shallow spaces and textures without breaking the surface and later on the integration of ever more overt elements of collage. It is also obvious from this painting he understood - unlike some of his contemporaries - that it is impossible to make the most brightly coloured picture unless you incorporate less intense colours and even areas without colour. There are clear signs that he was going to develop into a top class painter.

Goya's Witches & Old Women at the Courtauld Gallery

The Courtauld has the most exquisite exhibition of Goya's sketches at the moment. Just two rooms, but full of the most powerful and delicate little drawings you could hope to see.

I don't want to talk about the content of the drawings here - on the one hand the Guardian talks us through the drawings with intelligence and insight here and the on the other hand I don't see the darkness that everyone else does - I see the humour and I see the solace that can be found in the drawings but not the horror.

I don't even want to talk about the Goya's astonishing and economical draughtsmanship; again others do it better elsewhere. Instead the aspect that really did catch my eye was Goya's use of white space. This is a common trick among artists nowadays but I don't think I have ever seen it done better and I can't think of too many earlier examples.

In this first drawing, two figures tumble through a space without any definition at all. The far happier shades of another two figures, or perhaps the same ones, are behind them. The couple are falling due to their fight as the title makes clear and they do so with incredible dynamism. The second couple are intriguing but I'm inclined to see them as indicating from where the main characters have fallen - both physically and in terms of mood. From the Renaissance onwards creating weight and solidity within a figure and locating it precisely in space was a great priority, even in preparatory work. The Courtauld has drawings on display in other galleries at the moment which demonstrate just this so for Goya to muck round with weight and dislocated spaces was quite radical, even if the drawings were private. The near complete absence of cues for the brain to use to establish where the ground is or where anything is is used with incredible skill, creating hints of space, narrative and movement out of quite literally nothing.

In this second drawing he uses the white space quite differently. Here, simple marks indicates the ground. The figure, bent double under the weight of his years, is right at the bottom of the page and this really gives him a sense of smallness and a beaten down but resilient quality. There is a strange mix of acceptance and determination in his face, and his location relative to the empty space is all Goya needed to give that expression meaning and context.

The exhibition is only on until 25 May but is well worth a trip.

Brancusi: A vignette

You know how sometimes you start digging and things get a little out of hand?

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across some interesting geometric abstract pieces by Al Held. Knowing nothing about him or the work but understanding the difficulty in comprehending giant paintings when you've only seen reproductions I started reading. The more I read, the more complex he became - although his work seemed simpler and simpler and perhaps less interesting. Anyway, the point is I found a gem of a resource - the Archives for American Art at the Smithsonian have a cache of in depth interviews with artists. In his one, Held describes a trip he took to visit an elderly Brancusi when he was living in Paris.

"There wasn't really too much of a conversation, it was a very primitive conversation. But it was a piece of theatre, it was marvelous theatre. I sort of called him up and said that I was a young artist, a student and I admired his work and that I'd like to have the opportunity to visit his studio if it were possible. All I got back was: Tuesday at three o'clock. Well, I presented myself at his door on Tuesday at three o'clock or whatever. I'm making up Tuesday at three o'clock but it was something like that. I rang the bell. There was a crack in the door. I said, "I have an appointment with Mr. Brancusi." 

Sculpture for the Blind (Beginning of the World) - Brancusi, 1916

"The door swung open; there was no answer but the door swung open. By the time the door had swung open all I saw of him was his back. He was already sort of like he was going into his studio and expected me to follow. Which I did. The studio was like a maze. Remember this was about 1952 or 1953 so he was quite old at the time; and ill. The studio was very much like the facsimile in Paris, there were three ateliers there, three French ateliers. It was so full of stuff it became like a maze. There was no real open space. He took me around this path and without ever turning around he would sort of reach out and take a chamois off and say "Fish" and then he'd sort of shuffle down the row and his other hand would reach out and take another chamois off, say, "Bird", and he would go through this maze. I would be following this shuffling figure, all I saw was his back and kind of white slippers, and this one word thing and... he slowly shuffled around the whole studio and never once turned around. Then he sort of led us to a kind of opening and the opening was something like where we're sitting now -- I don't know exactly -- but I think it was some of his stools, you know, and a kind of carved table, a little sitting area. That's the first time I saw him as he turned around and gestured for me to sit down and he sat down.

Man Ray's portrait of Brancusi

"All I saw was this maze of white: white beard, white smock, white trousers, white shoes, white hat. He had one of these little -- what do they call those? They're not yarmulkes, they're not sitting on the back of the head, they're sort of like modified baker's caps -- well, anyway, that was white; and it was white beard, white hair and only those two black eyes. And that was it. It was a maze of -- the whole thing was white. I'm sure he was totally conscious of the theatricalness of the whole thing."

The interview goes on to detail Brancusi doing what artists do, bitching. In this case it was about how the people who had commissioned a sculpture from him were compromising it too much.

I find it pleasing, from the theatricality (one of the reasons that the most famous artists are famous is because they're great showmen) to the dismissal of his own work with a single word. That dismissal is fascinating - it could be a loss of interest in work as soon as it is finished, it could be a belief the work was so simple it could be summed up with a single word, it could be acknowledgment of the limitations of language and his knowledge of French.

The full interview, both as an audio recording and a transcript, is at http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-al-held-12773

Finished!

As of today, the Magna Carta paintings are finished. I'll post some pictures when I have taken a proper batch.

The work is far from over though! My flyers and posters have arrived and need distributing - tomorrow will have to be an internet day, arranging their display. Thankfully the press release was done and dusted a long time ago. The framing and other aspects of presentation have been devised but still need making (and paying for) and then of course there is delivery and hanging in just over a month. Last but not least, I have to drop the photos into a little catalogue I'm putting together and then get it printed. There is a reason I've avoided solo shows up until now!

Meanwhile I've got to sort out work for a second exhibition running concurrently. There is a collective called More Arts running a pop-up over in Wokingham and I have two months as a guest there. In contrast to the big, ambitious and expensive stuff at Magna Carta, the emphasis will be on affordable work. I'll be showing small paintings, prints and oil sketches. Its lovely to let my hair down and just paint speculatively - the small scale and low prices means I can afford some rejects, so I'm playing with a different approach to colour sequencing. Normally I work from light to dark with transparent paints and then back to light again either by using opaque paints or removing paint and at the same time I work from delicate colours to intense and then back down again. This gives good intensity, clarity and subtlety. For some of these little pieces though - skies around dawn and sunset, autumn leaves, all chosen for the intense colours - I'm trying the opposite - starting with sledgehammer colours and then dulling down. It does work, but it's harder to generate convincing space and light and produces a very different tonality. It may get better with practice so I'll push on a little longer. Even if the experiment fails, it is important to stretch yourself and try new things and I have found a couple of interesting colour combinations I hadn't spotted before.

Reading Museum

I lived in Reading about 15 years ago, but I don't think I ever went to the museum. Recently I rectified this and I'm glad, because Reading Museum has had two good ideas for hanging art. Sadly, a strict no photography policy means I can't illustrate them but they are worth discussing.

The first is in the main body of the museum. There are spaces where art is hung as in a conventional gallery but for much of the space, paintings are shown individually, in a display case alongside related artefacts from the Museum's collection. The paintings and objects end up contextualising each other and the display is visually richer than if the artefacts were left on their own. I do think the provision of context is massively important as it can fundamentally change our understanding of ambitious paintings. Equally, if the painting happens to be a very ordinary portrait of an industrialist then the objects can make it seem far more interesting than it is and in return the painting can give a human touch to the artefacts and make it easier to connect to them. I applaud them for doing this instead of doing what most other regional museums do - commissioning second rate illustrations which communicate little.

The other idea could perhaps be of benefit to many museums. Thanks to a long tradition of public museums and of bequests being set against death duty in this country, many galleries, museums and public collections have far more art than they have wall space. A few highlights of their collection are shown repeatedly while the poor relations (some of the work isn't good enough, some is in poor condition and some is just too similar to other pieces in their collection) languish in vaults and stores. What Reading have done is to take a room which isn't used as anything other than a space to marshall school trips, pulled down the blinds to reduce the light levels and absolutely covered the walls from floor to ceiling salon-style with as many paintings as they could cram in. There is no attempt at curation. There are no labels except on paintings which were framed at a time when fashion meant the details of the image were written on the frame. There is no information other than a pile of photocopies crammed into a leaflet holder. The quality ranges from the decent to the painful and the condition of the work is just as varied. In spite of this, it's a wonderful thing. Every single one of these paintings would otherwise be locked in a vault unless there happened to be a temporary exhibition which could use them. Not only does it get these paintings seen, it also draws attention to the scale of the problem. Go to the Your Paintings website, search for your local museum and you will be amazed at what they have in storage - even museums which have almost no art on display at all.