Art History Certificate

The Artist’s Studio. Week 8: The Modern Studio

Barry’s Broken Studio.

“In the chill winter of 1804, the fifty-four year old Irish painter James Barry was living in distressed circumstances in London, just north of Oxford Street. He huddled in an upstairs room, his ground floor studio too cold to inhabit, the windows blanketed with snow, blocking out any vestiges of daylight. Barry’s magnum opus, The Birth of Pandora, stretched across the studio wall: a vast canvas measuring 10 feet high and over 17 feet wide. The front of Barry’s house, in an otherwise, smart, newly constructed terrace, was spattered with mud; the shutters were jammed shut, the windows smashed by the regular incursions of local street urchins. The yard was littered with with detritus and the carcases of domestic animals, the parlour window still adorned by the rotting body of a dead cat. In place of a smashed window pane Barry had posted a hand  written note offering a reward for information leading to the conviction of unnamed individuals who had hatched a “dark conspiracy” against him; the rest of the window frame being covered by the design for a large historical canvas turned upside down.”[1]

The Bohemian Studio.

“As Bratby’s star faded in the early 1960s, his career had already been eclipsed by an artist whose life was far more genuinely Bohemian, and whose art Bratby himself labelled as “deacadent” andf “evil.” This was Francis Bacon, whose decrepit studio in South Kensington became a shrine to self-imposed artistic squalor, and, to some, a work of art in its own right. In 1961, Bacon moved into 7 Reece Mews, a converted carriage house situated off Old Brompton Road, close to South Kensington tube station. Above the vacant garage space on the ground floor, a Spartan bed-sitting room and the squalid studio were reached via a steep rickety staircase. To the rear of the pokey apartment was a galley kitchen containing a cooker and bathtub. Bacon’s home, with its whitewashed walls, cheap furniture, and bare light bulbs, was a study in self-denial, at odds with the extravagant life he led outside the studio and the astronomical prices fetched by his art. Over the years, the studio walls and door were streaked by a mélange  of multi-coloured paint marks, while debris associated with the creative act littered the shelf and floor: old paint brushes, ripped canvases, tins, shoes, clothing, tattered and torn photographs, cast aside art books, wine bottles, and a small plaster life mask of William Blake, whose writings Bacon admired (if not his art). Following Bacon’s death in 1902, his companion and the sole heir of his estate, John Edwards, offered Bacon’s studio to the Tate Gallery, which declined. In a remarkable coup, Dublin City Art Gallery, The Hugh Lane, employed a team of conservators and archaeologists to relocate the studio structure and its entire contents to Dublin, the city of Bacon’s birth. It was put on permanent display at the Hugh Lane in 2001.[2]

Reconstructing Francis Bacon’s Studio.

Works on Paper

Over seventy works on paper were found in Bacon's Reece Mews studio and these are now in the collection of the Hugh Lane Gallery. They are among the most important discoveries of the project. In all the interviews Bacon gave from around 1962 onwards, he denied that he made any preparatory drawings before he started to paint. Some of his close friends knew that he produced drawings and even owned some of these works, but they followed Bacon's wish to keep them out of the public domain. The Hugh Lane collection of drawings is one of the most comprehensive and provides a good record of the type of works Bacon was producing from the 1930s to the 1980s. Collectively, they provide new perspectives on Bacon's thought processes and working methods. All the works are unsigned and most are undated. Most are monochromatic. Some can be related to finished paintings whereas with others the links are more tenuous.Photographs

Photography played a major role in Bacon's work, and almost one quarter of the material found in the studio is of a photographic nature. Many of these photographs are of Bacon, his friends and various other subjects. During his lifetime, Bacon accepted only a handful of commissions. From the early 1960s he chose his closest friends as sitters, preferring to work not from life but from their photographs.

Slashed Canvases

One hundred slashed canvases were found in Bacon's studio. The larger ones were stacked up against the walls and windows, while some of the smaller ones were found piled on shelves or discarded on the floor. These works, although destroyed, often show what a Bacon canvas looks like before completion. His unorthodox techniques are revealed in their raw state. The practice of destroying canvases is not unusual among artists. Apparently, Bacon destroyed the small works himself and John Edwards destroyed the larger ones at Bacon's request. The slashed canvases span some five decades of the artist's career, with the earliest known work dating from around 1946. In most cases, a painting was taken to a relatively advanced stage before a canvas was destroyed.Over half the canvases found in the Reece Mews Studio are in a small format (approximately 35.5cm x 30cm). Some were used as palettes or have initial preparatory layers, whereas others have portrait studies in varying degrees of completion. The artist may have used other canvases to test paint colours and techniques or possibly to clean his brushes. The human figures in Bacon's paintings tend to be two-thirds to three-quarters life size so the majority of his large paintings are of full-length figures. Consequently, the smaller paintings tend to be of heads. However, the head area of every portrait study found in the studio, has been cut out. As the images generally only show a small area of the neck, edges of the face and head, it is frequently difficult to identify the sitter.

Books

Over 570 books and 1,300 loose leaves torn from books were found in Bacon's studio. Numerous books on subjects as diverse as art, photography, history, politics, cinema, sport, supernatural phenomena and medical textbooks have heavy paint accretions and pages torn out. Bacon often ripped out salient images from books and mounted them on pieces of card. As well as drawing on visual imagery, Bacon also relied heavily on literary sources for inspiration. Bacon read voraciously and had a profound interest in the poetry and prose of classic authors including T.S. Eliot, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Federico Garcia Lorca and W.B. Yeats. Copies of books by these authors and many others feature prominently in the studio contents.

Furniture

1.        Door. The door of Bacon's Reece Mews studio is probably the best-known image of the artist's studio. Bacon tested paints on the door and walls of his studio. He jokingly referred to these as his only abstract paintings. Bacon also printed corduroy and other fabrics into this wet paint presumably to apply to his paintings. The fact that both the front and back of the door have paint accretions would indicate that Bacon sometimes painted with the door open and also with it closed.

2.        Easel. This large easel, one of two in the artist's possession, seems to have been used for most of Bacons' paintings. It was positioned almost centrally in the room facing away from the skylight in the ceiling. The artist is generally thought to have painted in the mornings up to about midday and the positioning of the easel may suggest that he preferred to paint in natural daylight. The height of the easel may be adjusted to cope with different canvases of different scale. It was found extended to its maximum height, reminding us that from the late fifties onwards Bacon's work was usually in vertical format.

3.        Mirror. Bacon's large circular mirror was perhaps the most singularly striking item in his studio. It was placed in a central position on the back wall of his studio and appears to have remained there unchallenged throughout the artist's time at Reece Mews. Bacon may well have designed it himself. Circular mirrors appear to have been a consistent feature of his early interior designs. Furthermore, the artist appears to have had a similar mirror in his Queensbury Mews studio as early as 1932. As well as giving a sense of space to Bacon's small studio, the mirror may well have performed a role in the production of his paintings. The mirror hung almost directly behind the artist's easel. Bacon could have turned and looked at the reflection of his work in the mirror. Interestingly, mirrors make repeated appearances in the artist's paintings but these are almost invariably rectilinear in shape.

4.        William Blake’s Head. This replica plaster cast life mask of William Blake (1757 - 1827) is signed by Deville and was found in the bedroom at Reece Mews. J.S. Deville, a sculptor and phrenologist, made the original cast of Blake, four years before the poet's death. The composer Gerard Schurmann set some of Blake's poems to music and requested Bacon to design an image for the cover of his song cycle. He took Bacon to the National Portrait Gallery where he saw the mask and during the mid-1950s Bacon painted a series of paintings based on photographs of this mask, five of which survive. Three versions of this life mask are held by public collections in England. It is not known when Bacon acquired this life mask.

Group Discussion: Look at Bacon’s Studio. How might it relate to any of the ideas taught on this module?

Images on skydrive here.

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[1] Martin Postle, “Everything, including the kitchen sink: studio squalor from Barry to Bacon” in The Artist’s Studio, 43.

[2] Postle, “Everything, including the kitchen sink, 37-38.

Module 3: In the Artist’s Studio. Week 7: The Virtual Studio.

Defining Virtuality in 17th Century Dutch Art

A number of scholars of 17th century Dutch art have used the phrase “virtual reality” to describe the startling realism of many of the paintings of the period; the art seems to possess a kind of “reality effect” making it seem more than painted materials applied to a surface.[1]A painting like Van Hoogstraten’s Interior of 1662 encourages such comparisons: with the aid of computer magnification you can take a “virtual” walk around this spacious interior, loosing yourself in the strange angles and through-views as you navigate Dutch pictorial space. In her book, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, Anne Friedberg discusses the term “virtuality” and its development in the seventeenth-century: “In seventeenth and eighteenth- century optics, “virtual” was used to describe an image that was seen by looking through a lens or that appeared in a mirror. The term “virtual” first appears in English in the writings of Sir David Brewster about the properties of refraction in his Treatise on Optics (1831). Best known for his 1816 invention of the kaleidoscope (an optical device that demonstrated the principles of reflective symmetry), Brewster described the differing properties of an image seen by the eye and an image seen through the mediation of a lens. A “real image” is formed by the convergence of rays of light and is visible to the eye, but will also appear on a surface that is placed in a plane with the image. A “virtual image”- perceived in the brain- is visible to the eye but will not appear on a surface placed in its plane. Hence a “virtual image” in Brewster’s optics is not recuperable to representation. This meaning of “virtual” suggests an intangible, uncapturable, ineffable appearance- more imago than pictura.”[2] Following on from this, Friedman concludes that the virtual image “has no material existence (appears in the brain, or on the retina) and the virtual image that is formed in representation signifies a subtle shift in its materiality.”[3] It is interesting to think of the artist’s studio in relation to this distinction between imago and pictura, specifically Vermeer’s studio as it appears- or doesn’t!- within his masterpiece The Art of Painting. Other painters in Vermeer’s hometown- Delft- used scientific methods in the construction of compositions. Carel Fabritius, who came to Delft from Rembrandt’s studio, in the 1650s, employed a lens in his view of Delft; Samuel van Hoogstraten is his wonderful perspective box in the London National Gallery (1655-60) devises a series of virtual worlds that are only visible through the peephole of the camera obscura.

The Virtual Studio and the Art of Painting.

In an essay on the “imagined studio” of Vermeer, H. Perry Chapman ponders whether we are actually looking at Vermeer himself or the idea of the painter in The Art of Painting (1665-7). In this celebrated work Vermeer shows an artist from the back which Chapman believes could indicate Vermeer’s wish to efface himself from the painting, to negate his persona and artistic identity.[4] As Chapman says, the anonymity of the painter makes him the ideal painter, not a specific one. Vermeer was known as “the Sphinx of Delft” since his biographers do not really reveal him, probably because there wasn’t much textual data on him. Attempts to give Vermeer and his studio an identity, like in the movie The Girl with the Pearl Earring, really are romanticizing an enigma. The film shows Vermeer in his studio, but he never shows himself, except maybe in the Procuress (1656) and there he is clothed in the kind of period garments that the painter wears in the Art of Painting, which doesn’t help to place him in a specific social situation. Even when the curtain to the painter’s refuge is drawn back in the Vienna painting, the artist’s rear view seems to act as a barrier to entry to the studio, an idea that crops up in many artists’ studios examined in this series. If we need proof that Vermeer’s strategy is completely different we need only compare the allegory with another complex meditation on self-representation. As shown a few weeks ago, another 17th century painter Johannes Gumpp turns his back on the viewer, but he shows his own features through a complex system of representation involving canvas and mirror, not self-effacement at all.  Vermeer’s artist does no such thing and that rejection of the viewer could support Chapman’s theory that this figure is an idea of painting, not Vermeer himself, or even a physical artist in a studio.  Chapman’s reading is persuasive and might help to explain why Clio- the muse of history- is present instead of some allegorical figure representing Pittura or painting itself, as this work is supposed to demonstrate the art of painting. An example of this in 17th century Dutch art is a woman painted by another artist, Frans van Mieris the Elder, Pictura (1661) an un-idealized female dressed in eye-catching garments, holding a sculpture- a reference either to the paragone, or the triumph of painting over sculpture.  Yet if the painter sitting in the Art of Painting is a masculine version of Pittura, and the female muse is History, where is the painter himself? Could it be that he is an invisible presence revealing the studio to the spectator, and that the seated artist is a simulacrum of the painter, a virtual Vermeer?[5] A similar idea appears in another famous representation of a 17th century studio: Velasquez’s Las Meninas: The Maids of Honour. In that complex painting, a figure framed in a doorway suggests an echo of Velasquez, maybe another simulacrum. The figure is actually a Velasquez: Jose Nieto Velasquez, steward of the palace. “Velasquez 2” seems to be entering the studio and seeing what we can’t see- Las Meninas being painted.[6]  It’s true that in the Art of Painting, we’re allowed to see into the studio but we don’t really see what is being painted since it’s partly occluded by another Vermeer, whom I’m tempted to call “Vermeer 2.” Instead, we see an imago, which means something that cannot be seen or measured, as opposed to the pictura, which is something that can be focused on walls and surfaces, and thus measured with an instrument like a camera obscura- see below. The pictura belongs more to the process of representing and picturing, while the imago suggests the mystery at the heart of the artist’s studio, which we are never allowed to penetrate.

Vermeer's Virtuality: Looking Through the Camera Obscura in the Seventeenth-Century.

In her ground breaking The Art of Describing, Svetlana Alpers cites Kenneth Clark’s comment about Vermeer’s The Art of Painting being the “nearest painting has ever come to a coloured photograph.” Indeed, some modern artists have tried to capture the “look” of a Vermeer in photographs and coloured prints.[7]  The idea of Vermeer’s paintings resembling photographs goes back to the nineteenth-century when connoisseurs employed photographs, or reproductive media such as etchings, lithographs, when identifying and presenting a painter’s oeuvre. As Ivan Gaskell shows, photographic pioneers like Fox-Talbot turned to the conventions of Dutch art:  his photograph Open Door seems to reference Vermeer’s The Little Street.[8]This interest in Vermeer’s photographic realism has centred on the device known as the camera obscura, although it is not known whether Vermeer used optics to help him create his pictures.  His paintings with their sharp clarity suggest optical precision, although there is no documentation to back up these claims. Unperturbed by the lack of textual evidence, Philip Steadman, an architect and professor of Urban Studies, has written a book called Vermeer’s Camera.[9] Steadman has meticulously reconstructed Vermeer’s studio using models of the paintings to plot out the angles that Vermeer may have used to create his “virtual” worlds.  The camera obscura (Latin dark chamber) is an optical device used, for example, in drawing or for entertainment. It is one of the inventions leading to photography. The principle can be demonstrated with a box with a hole in one side (the box may be room-sized, or hangar sized). Light from a scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface where it is reproduced, in colour, and upside-down. The image's perspective is accurate. The image can be projected onto paper, which when traced can produce a highly accurate representation. Using mirrors, as in the 18th century overhead version, it is possible to project a right-side-up image. Another more portable type is a box with an angled mirror projecting onto tracing paper placed on the glass top, the image upright as viewed from the back. As a pinhole is made smaller, the image gets sharper, but the projected image becomes dimmer. With too small a pinhole the sharpness again becomes worse due to diffraction. Some practical camera obscuras use a lens rather than a pinhole because it allows a larger aperture, giving a usable brightness while maintaining focus. In the movie The Girl with the Pearl Earring, we see Vermeer allow the serving maid Griet to look inside the magic box where she thinks the artificial model that the painter uses is located. Here we have another reconstruction of Vermeer’s studio, but this time in the cinema. The interiors are cleverly devised, but again, we have no idea if the movie is recapturing the reality of seventeenth- century Delft, or whether it is simply another virtual Vermeer created by imagination and trickery. The coordinates of Vermeer’s studio remain uncertain and his art an eternal mystery.

Discuss the concept of the artist’s studio in relation to Vermeer’s The Art of Painting.

Skydrive images here.

 

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[1] For example Mariet Westermann, The Art of the Dutch Republic 1585-1718, 1996, 71-98; H. Perry Chapman, “The Imagined Studios of Rembrandt and Vermeer” in Inventions of the Studio, Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Michael Cole & Mary Prado, 2005, 108-146.

[2] Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, (MIT, 2006), 8-9.

[3] Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 9.

[4] Chapman, “The Imagined Studios of Rembrandt and Vermeer”, 137-8.

[5] Chapman, “The Imagined Studios of Rembrandt and Vermeer”, 142.

[6] Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, 1995, 436.

[7] Kenneth Clark, quoted in Alpers, The Art of Describing, 1984, 27.

[8] Ivan Gaskell, Vermeer’s Wager: Speculations on Art History, Theory and Art Museums, 2000, 142.

[9] http://www.vermeerscamera.co.uk/home.htm

 

The Artist’s Studio: Week 6. Studio, Space and Sociability

The Easel & the Family.

When considering the relationship between the family and the artist’s studio, it is necessary to bring in the notion of space, which we’ve seen is important in a variety of other contexts. The question to be posed is this: in what ways did family and artistic space overlap in the history of the studio? To help us focus on this problem, we can look at an unusual painting by the 17th century artist Gerard van Honthorst: Margereta de Roodere and Her Parents (1652, Centraal Museum, Utrecht). In this image, one parent is shown on the canvas, and the other outside in the physical studio in which the painter, Margareta, sits. Note how the easel acts here as a way of breaking down the barriers between the artist’s studio and family life. At the same time we should be aware that this barrier between the studio and the space that the family of the painter occupies is a perceived bar, not one that definitely exists. Honthorst’s painting is also compelling because it suggests the link between artistic production and the family. Margareta significantly points with her finger at her father as if indicating that he is the most important figure, which in a sense he is. Without him the daughter would not exist; in a sense he has created a masterpiece, albeit in human form rather than on canvas. Note also that the artistic implements, brushes, palette, maulstick stand idly by while the woman designates. This is not a serious painter, but a member of a prosperous Dutch household who is taught painting as part of an elegant education, not as a trade or a profession. In the words of one scholar, this is “a well to do amateur who painted for pleasure.”[1] For a woman to achieve the status of a master painter was a very rare feat, although there was a wonderful exception to the rule, Judith Leyster, though her success should not be attributed to a craving for genius, but other factors. In the words of Germaine Greer:

“It would be crass to suppose that female relatives who copied, imitated, etched and engraved the works of their better-known menfolk were all much better artists prevented by naked tyranny from making their own designs or accepting their own commissions. Their participation in the graphic arts was probably a filial and submissive response to the family environment and family pressure. Such motivation springs from a desire to conform and please others, and has little to do with the self-generated determination to produce great art.”[2]

Another interesting example of the family appearing on a canvas in the studio is this Self-Portrait (Rijksmuseum, 1699) by another Dutch painter, Adriaen van der Werff, in which he proudly displays a painted image of his wife and child to the viewer; this also underscores the link between a painted creation and one made biologically.  What’s also interesting here is that his wife is dressed in an antique costume; she could function as an allegory, maybe Pittura, the personification of the art of painting, as well as being a spouse of the painter in real life.

 

 

 The Renaissance: Tintoretto’s Daughter.

In the renaissance workshop, family relationships are usually patterned after fathers and sons. The father recognizes the talent of the son, especially if the latter’s surpasses his own as in the case of Raphael Sanzio.[3] This would have been unthinkable with a daughter in the Sanzio family. Had Raphael’s father had a daughter, she would have been confined to what Germaine Greer calls “the nurturing activities of the family.”[4] Women were in the shadow of the easel, not because of any tyranny imposed by a domineering or unreasonable painter-father; but because of family pressures that forced them to conform. Still, there are accounts of women painters in the renaissance, daughters and sisters. We know of a sister of Hubert and Jan van Eyck, mentioned in an ode on the Ghent Altarpiece, although that document could have been an eighteenth-century forgery. Margarethe van Eyck remains in the shades of history despite enterprising art historians with a penchant for romanticism, trying to connect her with figures like the Virgin in Jan’s extant masterpieces.[5]

Much more famous is the daughter of the Venetian maestro Jacopo Robusti, better known as Tintoretto. Marietta Robusti (Venice, circa 1552-1590) was dressed in boy's clothing until the age of 15, so she would not look out of place accompanying her father who took her everywhere. Marietta, who was given the sobriquet ‘La Tintoretta' was the apple of her father’s eye, the most cherished of his seven children. His eldest daughter, Marietta took the name from her father who had in his turn inherited it from his father, a dyer. Hence we have an interesting transmission of the “brand name” of the workshop along the lines of inheritance, although it’s unclear how the daughter fits into the patrilineal course along which artistic talent usually passes. Marietta worked in her father’s massive bottega from her years as a teenager up until her death in 1590. The daughter specialized in portraits of noble Venetians, these executed in the style of her father’s work. Feted by both the Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian II and King Philip II of Spain, “La Tintoretta” was invited to be a painter at court; but Tintoretto did not want to lose the company of his daughter who delighted her father with her singing and playing after the rigours of the day. In order to keep her in Venice, in 1578 Tintoretto engineered a marriage to a wealthy Venetian jeweller, Mario Augusti, conditional that Marietta would remain in Tintoretto's house until his death. These terms were accepted by wife and husband, but sadly Marietta predeceased her illustrious father in childbirth, at 30. It may have been the death of his daughter that plunged Tintoretto into prolonged depression eventually resulting in his own death in 1594. Father and daughter are buried next to each in the Church of Madonna dell'Orto in Venice. The relationship between Tintoretto and his daughter has been the subject no little speculation. Greer says that although it might be thought that Marietta was destroyed by her father’s egotism, things might have been more complex: “Her talent might have after all been for being a daughter, rather than a painter.[6]

Identifying Marietta’s work has proved difficult since her contribution is buried deep within the productions of the workshop. One painting attributed to her is this allegory of the merchant Ottavio Strada, 1567-8, Stedelijkmuseum, Amsterdam), which seems suspiciously similar to Titian’s portrait of Jacopo Strada, Ottavio’s father. This shows a winged female figure (presumably Fortuna?) pouring gold coins into the young merchants lap; the life sized statue of Venus some consider a portrait of the painter herself, although there is no foundation for this identification. The Uffizi does contain what is thought to be indisputably her Self-Portrait,  Here, Marietta is shown as a musician; she was an accomplished singer and played lute and harpsichord, which doubtless delighted her father in the evenings. According to sources, the musical score is Madonna per voi Philiane, by Philippe Verdelot, the father of the Italian madrigal. Its lyrics translate as ‘My lady, I burn with love for you and you do not believe it.' The story of Tintoretto’s daughter caught the imagination of artists right up into the Victorian era. The nineteenth-century became fascinated by the relationship between Tintoretto and his talented painter-daughter. Obsessed with the story was the French artist Leon Cogniet who portrayed Tintoretto painting Marietta on her deathbed in 1843. It would appear that Cogniet created this subject- which does not appear in the renaissance biographies- in order to manage problems of “discipleship” and “artistic posterity” in his studio.[7] In 1873 the Pre-Raphaelite artist Henry Nelson O’Neil painted a similar picture of Tintoretto painting representing his dead daughter; but this reveals more about the mawkishness and sentimentality of the Victorians than Tintoretto’s family and studio. It seems that O’Neil went in for death bed scenes: he painted both Mozart and Raphael in their final moments.

 

Group Exercise. Discuss and compare Cogniet and O’Neil’s paintings of Tintoretto and his daughter.

Images  here     

 

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[1] Mariet Westermann, The Art of the Dutch Republic 1585-1718, 1996, 32.

[2] Germaine Greer, The Obstacle Race, 1979, 13.

[3] On the parallels between the workshops where Raphael learnt his craft and the family, see Jeryldene M. Wood’s “Young Raphael and the Practice of Painting in Renaissance Italy” in The Cambridge Companion to Raphael, 2005, 15-18.

[4] Greer, The Obstacle Race, 14.

[5] Greer, The Obstacle Race, 29.

[6] Greer, The Obstacle Race, 15.

[7] Marc Gottlieb, “Creation and Death in the Romantic Studio” in Inventions of the Studio: Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Michael Cole and Mary Pardo, 2005, 175-183.

Module 3: In the Artist’s Studio. Week 5: Dreams, Symbol and Space in the Artist’s Studio.

The Mental Studio

“The studio is no more than a container, a kind of equipment, a room in which to paint or sculpt, a necessary space. In its isolation the artist watches a painting or sculpture, adjusts it, instinctively responsive to pigments, colours and materials, resolving their conflicts, bringing them together. In this way the studio is also an arena in which controlled yet instinctive and unpremeditated discovery unfolds. It is both a space apart and an essential arena for action.”[1]

The studio is also a space for thought as well as action: a place in which the mental processes of the artist can be sensed, especially if it is a studio taken over by another artist. However, usually, it is the haunt of one artist who has the opportunity to turn the space into anything he or she wants. It could be treated as a sleek, efficient machine with every component in its place; it could be a dirty, dishevelled eyesore with pots and implements left in chaos; it could be a threadbare, almost minimalistic space; it could be a studio that spills over into a voluminous library full of books and sculpture. The ways in which a studio can appear are infinite…

Studio Space and the Mind.

We shall consider symbol later, but let’s remain with space, especially as related to metaphor. We might like think of the studio as the the brain of the artist. In this lithograph of M.C. Escher (1935) , we see the artist and his studio captured in a glass globe held by a hand, a juxtaposition that immediately invites associations between the operations of the hand and the eye, as the globe is an optical instrument. Both hand and eye are directed by the brain, and retaining the studio as brain simile, with Escher the impression is created of simultaneously looking into his brain whilst being physically separate from it. More adventurously, we could read Escher’s hand –eye coordination governed in terms of where his identity is in space. In the twentieth- century, scientific ideas might have influenced the way artists showed themselves in their studio. For example, Picasso did a series of images of the artist’s studio in which the painter and their model are treated in a very abstract way, as we shall see later on. It’s tempting to say that Picasso’s studio is in Einsteinian space rather than Cartesian space, with its mind/body dichotomy. As an example, compare Poussin’s Louvre Self-Portrait done in the age of Descartes to Picasso’s spatially fragmented studio.

Studio and Dreams.

Connecting this metaphor of studio-as-brain with symbol, we could think of the objects within representations of the artist’s studio as thoughts, impressions or dreams, not yet realised in some kind of gestalt or ordered pattern, as in a composition. Once we start to think about this, it doesn’t seem so strange because the studio may be a place, not only of painting-making but also a place of fantasy and dreams. In a remarkable representation of his studio, the 19th century English painter of fantasy, John “Fairy” Fitzgerald, shows himself asleep in front of his easel. He is deep in a dream, probably hastened by artificial stimulants! His magical and artistic dream is cloudily presented as the artist – out of his body- painting a woman in white at an imaginary easel. Back in the real world, creatures from the artist’s dreams crouch around his sleeping form. One creature, painting at an easel that Fitzgerald has abandoned, admires his alterations with the affected pose of a proud artist, thus connecting the real painting to the dreamed painting, whilst at the same time confusing them.[2] In this striking image, the association between dreams, hidden in the artist’s mind, and the reality of the studio is mediated via the easel. Usually, an easel at which an artist sits or stands, can be seen in some corner of the studio.  One of the most famous easels is the large one in Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour), which the artist stands beside. Velasquez has stepped back from his easel and his paint brush seems to be suspended mid way between himself and the canvas. Usually when an artist shows themselves at a distance from the canvas they are working on, (e.g. Rembrandt’s Boston Self-Portrait), it indicates the meditation and thought that accompanies mechanical execution. In Velasquez’s case, we are not certain whether he has stepped back to add a final touch to the work, or whether he has even begun it and is pondering on how he should start. Returning to the studio and the life of the mind, we might try an experiment in which the canvas functions as a “screen” onto which the artist’s thoughts are projected: the initial marks of paint that Velasquez is about to make - or has made - on his canvas could be seen as the equivalent of painting’s dream thoughts metamorphosed, or ‘translated’ into visual images within the representational system exposed in Las Meninas.[3]  There are problems with assuming that painting in its unformed and embryonic state mimics the operation of dreams which can’t be gone into here. However, Fitzgerald’s studio image suggests that the easel in the studio could be regarded as a studio prop that crosses over into the world of dreams, and the private space of the artist’s mind.

Symbolic Death and Literal Death in the Studio. 

From the renaissance onwards, death is symbolised by a skull in the studio. Skulls were traditionally linked with the vanities of human life, most noticeably in the 17^th century. They also turned up in religious paintings with the theme of penitence; the combination of skulls and candles may have conveyed the mortification of the flesh and the idea of inner illumination only attained far from the flesh.  Such an ensemble of symbols is present in the French painter George de La Tour’s paintings of the Penitent Magdalene. Sometimes La Tour would add mirrors as in the Washington Magdalene. Here, the mirror is a vanitas symbol, but the light reflected in it must be understood as a symbol of God, as per the Gospel of John.[4]. Later the skull became linked with artistic creativity in the studio, rather than vanitas. In 1872, the Swiss artist Arnold Bocklin painted a Self-portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle. The link between the art of painting and death is made explicit here: the artist holds palette and brush while staring out at the spectator; death seems to play the part of skeletal “muse” as the violin was a symbol of inspiration in the romantic period. Another work, a drawing by Louis Corinth (1922) has the artist, with shrunken body and bulbous head, holding a pen whilst mocked by a skull. The symbol of vanitas and anatomy, has transmogrified into the presence of death itself, a necessary part of the artist’s studio in the romantic period. Nineteenth-century art contains either cases of real artistic death (Gros, Haydon, von Rayski), death-in-the-studio mediated through art (von Rakski, Manet). In a grisly drawing by Ferdinand van Rayski, we see the artist hung from his own easel in a studio that resembles a prison. These telling lines are written by a poet: “On the highway of true art// Life on earth is all too short// Seeds of death within him sprout/ All too soon the light is out.” The poet is represented by a portrait with a knife stuck in an eye, the whole of which- according to Batschmann[5]- implies the legitimation of the artist by his own death, maybe brought on by exposing his art to the public outside the studio. Opening up the studio door makes symbolic death real, and these examples suggest that some artists of this era considered death as part of their studio.[6] Opening up the studio to the eyes of others results in the paralysis of the artist followed by death.  Whilst living isolated in the studio, death present in props such as skull, is suspended, neutralized by the artist’s creative illusion.

The Studio and the Pursuit of the Perfect Motif.

Fitzgerald’s painting shows the process of creativity in the studio, but in the nineteenth-century such glimpses into the private domain of the artist were forbidden. The best illustration of the mystique of the studio is told in a short story by Balzac: Le Chef-d’oeuvre (The Unknown Masterpiece), published in 1831. This story concerns an artist, Frenhofer, who is working on his masterpiece in his studio, safe from prying eyes. However, two other painters persuade Frenhofer to open up his studio and show the work that he is creating. Eager to see the work, and fully expecting to see a great painting, Frenhofer’s companions are utterly dismayed at the unveiled master work. Instead of a classically conceived figure, or at least a realistic image, their eyes fall upon a shapeless mass of colours and swirling lines. While this tale certainly deals with themes of creativity, representation and the mysterious space of the artist’s studio, it also concerns the relationship between painting and death, which Perhaps the ultimate message of Balzac’s story of the tragic artist Frenhofer is that art can only really live as an idea, which is lost when it is realized, given form and substance in the studio: a kind of death of the idea. This had occurred to Picasso since he had done a set of 13 illustrations to Balzac’s Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu in 1927, although he produced more in later years. And as Picasso said in an interview of 1935, the theme of Balzac’s story was the destruction of the motif, something which he considered part of his own painting practice. “In my case, a picture is a sum of destructions” and he went on to connect what Hans Belting calls the “metamorphosis of a picture” with discovering the path “followed by the brain in materializing a dream.”[7] This seems close to the examples in the studio suggested earlier in which the studio functions as a space for producing dreams, whose essence cannot be captured perfectly by the material canvas, the screen of representation. Picasso was aware that this pursuit of the perfect motif held implications for the struggle between abstraction and figurative art, present in the formative stages of modern art in the twentieth-century. 

Group Exercise.

Discuss the use of dreams, symbol and space in John “Fairy” Fitzgerald’s Artist in his Studio.

 

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[1] John Milner, “Locating the Studio” in The Artist’s Studio, 65.

[2] For a discussion of this see Jeremy Maas and others, Victorian Fairy Painting, ex. cat., London, 1998, 114.

[3] See Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman, Cambridge Mass., London: MIT Press. 427.

[4] See the discussion in the exhibition catalogue, Georges de La Tour and his World, (Washington, 1997), 105.

[5] Oskar Bätschmann, The Artist in the Modern World: The Conflict Between Market and Self-Expression, 1997, 100.

[6] Bätschmann, The Artist in the Modern World, 100.

[7] See the discussion in Hans Belting, The Invisible Masterpiece, 206-7.

Skydrive images here.

Module 3: In the Artist’s Studio. Week 4: The Studio and the Market.

Artists despite being under the spell of the muse, were under pressure to sell their art to make a living, unless they were economically self-sufficient. To use Bätschmann’s terminology, the artist was caught between self-expression and the market.[1] However, Bätschmann looks mainly at the situation from the late eighteenth-century onwards, but perhaps the conflict first emerges in the previous century with the Italian artist Salvator Rosa. Rosa came from Naples, and because of the lack of interest in his art, he was obliged to remove to Rome, and after that, Florence. We may also encounter in Rosa the first independent artist determined not to sacrifice his artistic vision to the whims of patrons or the pressures of the market. The traditional view of Rosa is that he was contemptuous of the normal mechanisms of patronage, the court and the church, and sought to promote himself outside the normal spheres of artistic production and reception. This view holds that Rosa is the first really independent artist declaring defiance to patrons and organisations intent on controlling the output of Rosa’s studio. Recently another interpretation has been advanced: Rosa- for whatever reasons- felt himself severely marginalised and sought to present his work in the hope that it might catch the eye of patrons and buyers; he exhibited his art in places like the cloisters of San Giovanni Decollato, Rome, because he wanted to attract attention.[2] Whatever his motivations, Rosa did not make life easy for himself. Cursed with a fiery temper, he loathed working for commissions, hated the commercial side of painting, refused to name prices, and wanted freedom to create subjects congenial to him and not his patrons. On one memorable occasion, he said that he let his pencil do the negotiating, a typical Rosa comment. Of course all this could have been a pose: Rosa promoting the image of an independently-minded artist, uninterested in money, and painting intellectual subject matter, particularly philosophers who relinquished riches. But could these depictions of philosophers like Crates and Diogenes be seen as figures of classical wisdom, or indications of Rosa’s own attitude towards money and economics? We know that on one occasion Rosa did a drawing of Pittura (Painting) as a beggar out in the streets of Rome. It has been suggested that Painting as a Beggar might not express the subject of painters’ fees, but the ‘low status of painting in Rome’ as written in Rosa’s famous satire La Pittura probably dating from the early 1650s. Yet, the drawing might also be linked with a debate between Rosa and a Florentine servant in which philosophical poverty seems to dislodge economic necessity. In this exchange, the servant conjures up an image of Rosa the mendicant standing at the porch of one of the Holy Churches with his staff and poor box. Here, a link between begging and painting is made, and Rosa seems to be conveying much the same idea in the drawing, save instead of the staff and poor box, Pittura has the maulstick, brushes and palette. Another drawing- in Geneva, shows Rosa’s customary satiric slant on the relationship between painting and riches. Inside the artist’s studio Pittura waves a flag at flies that are infesting Rosa’s canvases, a strange conceit symbolising the neglect of the artist’s work and his genius. Two putti representing aspects of the artist’s genius stand idle in front of brushes, perhaps suggesting the artist’s temporary cessation of painting at the lack of interest in his art. Rosa once said in response to the lack of commissions: “I might as well plant my brushes in the garden.”

Later in England, a direct link would be made between the arts and the giving of alms, as in the title illustration to the catalogue of an exhibition of the Society of Great British Artists. Here a winged genius next to an easel hands out coins to a beggar watched by a woman and children signifying charity. In his The Artist in the Modern World, Bätschmann discusses Joseph Anton Koch’s The Artist as Hercules at the Crossroads (1791).[3] As the title suggests, this recalls the iconographical convention of showing the strongman at a junction where he can choose the direction of either Vice or Virtue, symbolised by two different female figures, one stern in mien, and one lax in disposition. In 1791- the time this drawing was done- Koch had escaped the Court College of Art in Stuttgart, and this singular image might be connected with that flight. The statuesque figure on the left represents Art-Virtue, and bears the legend “Imitatio’ which makes her a distant cousin of Pittura, who we last saw begging in the streets of 17th century Rome. The other figure, decked out in garish clothing, could not be further removed from the family of Pittura: she is ‘Art the Whore’ who disconcertingly binds Koch with a chain around his ankle. In addition to symbolising the affected manner of the court, this figure, with its grotesquery, mocks the kind of training that the artist received there. As Bätschmann observes, though this image can be located in 18th century debates about virtue, notably Lord Shaftesbury whose political ideas were linked with the iconography of Hercules at the Crossroads, it also concerns artistic freedom.[4] An artist is free to give up the rewards and riches at court; but the consequence of that is that he may find himself on the stony path of poverty. This was a brave move for Koch because he came from humble origins; he started life as a goatherd, and progressed to painting portraits of bishops, and eventually landscapes modelled on Poussin and Claude. Many of Koch’s predecessors trod the safe road of court patronage which brought distinction and monetary success such as Titian whose paint brush was retrieved by no less than the Emperor Charles V himself, although there is no proof of this event. Assuming that Charles visited Titian’s studio, this would indicate painting appreciated by the powerful and influential, and of course wealthy. Although it may be unsafe to generalise, Koch’s rejection of all this courtly favour reflects the fiercely independent attitude of post-renaissance painters in Germany who exchanged the high wages- and associated arrogance- for humility, artistic integrity, and inevitably, poverty. According to Bätschmann, Koch started a trend of artists moving from state service and the academy to the stand-alone studio best exemplified by Asmus Jakob Carstens who stated that he “did not belong to the Berlin Academy, but to mankind.”

Our third example is an American painter, from Boston, John Single Copley. As Copley’s parents were tradesmen, and women- his mother owned a tobacco shop- the idea of painting for money wouldn’t have been far from Copley’s mind. Copley’s training in Boston is a matter of speculation, but he seems to have been self-taught. Eventually Copley was to shake off his handicaps and raise himself through thrift, hard work and luck to the status of a full member of the Royal Academy in England, encouraged by its President, and another American history painter, Benjamin West. Copley submitted a number of paintings to the Royal Academy for exhibition, but he attained success with the monumental painting Watson and the Shark, representing a terrible accident in Havana in 1749-see below. This tour de force concerns Copley’s client Brook Watson who was business partner of Copley’s brother-in-law, Jonathan Clark. Watson lost a leg to the shark at the age of fourteen, but kept his life due to being rescued, the scene that Copley paints. Interestingly, we never get a real self-portrait from Copley, let alone a peep into his busy studio. His grand portrait of himself with his Boston family throws little life on his methods and attitude towards art. Positioned at the rear of his relatives, the artist clutches a group of drawings, a reference to his artistic profession; he also is standing before the Medici Vase, maybe an allusion to connoisseurship and the Grand Tour. The artificial backlit landscape is typical of the numerous backdrops he would have used to paint fashionable portraits of the rich in society, and this kind of portrait would have found a place on the portrait market in the late eighteenth-century. This elegant group portrait can be compared with the only other self-portrait of Copley. Here, his personality retreats into himself while presenting the shiny surfaces of his art to the viewer. Had we been allowed to venture into Copley’s studio, we would probably have found ourselves surrounded by elegant furnishings admired by a finely dressed painter surveying precious objects obtained from overseas. Copley’s studio reflects his milieu- the world of money, shining social surfaces and colonial expansion. Copley’s other main genre was history painting, particularly works commemorating current events like the defeat of French troops on St Helier, Jersey on the 22nd May, 1781. A gallant young British officer, Francis Pierson, less than twenty-four years of age, had resisted the French and eventually drove them out, though he lost his life in the battle. The painting shows portraits of officers of the 95th Regiment of the Jersey Militia in the fray, and a black servant of the fallen Pierson, revenging his death. This composition evolved from 17 preparatory drawings and an oil sketch, all united with the finished painting in 1996.[5] Although Copley’s The Death of Major Pierson of 1782-4 was an artistic success, it needed business acumen to make it financially rewarding. To achieve this Copley formed a partnership with John Boydell, dealer in engravings, who paid the painter £800 for the commission, and continued to show the work in his own Cheapside shop after the official exhibition closed. Subscriptions would also be opened for prints of the painting, although the secretive Copley did not record his dealings with Boydell. This sort of commercial activity would have been frowned down upon the Royal Academy and its founder Joshua Reynolds, who chose to ignore the fact that fame did not pay the rent. Things were not improved by the established view that painters were ‘mechanicals’ because they used their hands, and hence could never be intellectuals. This idea was opposed by a number of theorists who believed that painters were capable of intellectual discourse, and so theory became an integral part of art historical teaching, literally illustrated by Reynold’s allegory ‘Theoria’ on the ceiling of the Royal Academy. Copley was certainly in the thick of this debate and his letters speak occasionally of ‘improvement’ which has to be taken as both commercial as well as academic advancement. This is significant because Copley believed that art should refer to the subject of trade, however indirectly, an attitude completely at variance with the Royal Academy. Not that Copley had to worry on this score: he had married the wealthy Susanna Farnham Clark, and begun acquiring property on Beacon Hill, one of Boston’s wealthiest districts. With his temporary exhibitions bankrolled by wealthy patrons like Boydell, he was assured a wealthy sideline outside the main exhibition system. John Singleton Copley had all the trappings of success; he dressed like a dandy, and was quietly amassing a fortune as a portraitist, while his Death of Major Pierson and Watson and the Shark marked him out as rising star in the artistic firmament of eighteenth-century Britain, despite the R.A.’s raised eyebrows at his method of promotion. In this case Pittura’s begging bowl was not required because the cupboard in the artist’s studio was full, business was booming and Pittura had turned into Profit.

Group Exercise: Painting for Money in the 18th Century. Discuss the Royal Academy’s view of Copley’s history painting in the 18^th century. What does it suggest about their attitudes towards painting as a trade and money-earner?

 Images on Skydrive here.

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[1] Oskar Bätschmann, The Artist in the Modern World, Cologne, 1997.

[2] See Xavier F. Salomon’s “Ho Fatto Spiritar Roma”: Salvator Rosa and Seventeenth-Century Exhibitions in Salvator Rosa, ex cat, Dulwich, 2010, 74-99, 75.

[3] Oskar Bätschmann, The Artist in the Modern World, 24-5.

[4] Paolo di Matteis’s version in the Ashmoleon was commissioned by Lord Shaftesbury in 1712.

[5] Emily Ballew Neff and William L. Pressly, John Singleton Copley in England, ex. cat., Washington and Houston, 1995.

Module 3: In the Artist’s Studio. Week 3: An Academic Space

Last week, the artist’s studio was presented as an introspective space; an area where the painter contemplated himself either through the self-portrait in the studio, or the studio itself, which could be seen as a metaphor for the artist’s mind. This probably gave the impression of a solitary space, a place into which no other soul intruded. However, the artist’s studio was not only a space for reflection, but a realm where information was conveyed between painter and others through the process of teaching. This could take many forms: the rational, disciplined space of the academy (Carracci); the artist’s own private studio in which he taught paying pupils (Rembrandt); an indeterminate space where pupils learnt through the division of labour (Raphael’s bottega); family concerns where relatives, as well as external members, cooperated in the enterprise of the workshop (Tintoretto). Learning could take many different forms. A pupil could be given the task of copying the artist’s work, trying to reproduce their style, and the master would subsequently evaluate it, correcting it where necessary. There could be a much more systematic, hierarchically organised programme of study, and the pupil would be allocated certain tasks depending on their place in the pecking order. There could be a more informal arrangement where a recognised teacher would visit every week and comment on work. 

The Parts of Painting.

It is instructive to examine an image of a workshop by the Flemish engraver Cornelius Cort, after Jan van der Straet, and so perhaps a reflection of his own studio. Equally, as the title of Cort’s print suggests, it is meant to show the mechanics of painting, its operations broken down into parts within the studio. The objects that we see symbolise learning in the studio. The statues of Venus stand for female beauty, the books humanist knowledge, the skulls and animal skeletons the importance of anatomy. In this image we get a striking sense of how important learnedness was in the artist’s studio. The young apprentices in van der Straet’s studio not only draw the limbs of the body, the effects of light and shadow on classical sculpture but also pore over texts, some of which are likely to be anatomical manuals. The elderly man who dissects the arm of the skeleton may be the master but he is more likely to be an elder artist delegated to supervise the work of the pupils. It is likely that the master is the artist working on a large history painting at the back of the studio.  What this print hints at is a division of labour within the Flemish studio; it also promotes the idea of an advertisement for the painter’s studio, a site of artistic skill and humanist virtue, qualities that the master hopes his pupils will learn from his teaching.[1] In another image of the workshop, this time from 17^th century Rome, perhaps illustrating the working practices of the Academy of St Luke, we see even sharper sub-divisions of painting. Amongst the studio activities we see a dissection of a cadaver, study of a statuette, lessons in geometry, the mapping out of a cartoon observed by a teacher, the sketching of a lower limb, and the inspection of a set of eyes drawn by a pupil.

Towards the Academy.

As Carl Goldstein states in his survey of the academy in western art, the organisation should be distinguished from other entities like workshops, clubs and schools, although there was inevitably a certain amount of overlap.[2] Clubs existed in the early modern to bind artists, intellectuals and men of virtue together; the workshop would be an additional presence but not the same as a workshop in itself. There were differences too: a workshop would not encourage the study of literature and poetry, or music. For example, this painting of members of the French Academy, set up in 1642, shows a fairly relaxed gathering of fellows, some of whom paint, play music and stroke dogs!

This low key attitude would eventually be swept away by the reforms of Louis XIV. According to Goldstein:

“A workshop, by contrast, was organised around a whole range of strictly manual as well as technical procedures, from the grinding of pigments and preparation of panels to the practice of drawing, the skill basic to visual representation, whether in painting, sculpture, or architecture, taught alike to students preparing for careers in any of the three disciplines.”[3]

The central tenet of the workshop would be learning from the masters, and this would entail lots of copying, both paintings, drawings and classical sculpture. The latter was especially important because of its figurative nature; the representation of the body was a key humanist idea that pupils were expected to adhere to. The emphasis on copying the works of the past would bring the working space closer to the idea of a school. Michelangelo’s famous ‘Battle of Cascina’ cartoon, destroyed through the enthusiasm of other artists, was called a “school” of art, according to his biographer Giorgio Vasari. So, Vasari seems to have been making a direct connection between the practice of copying and the notion of a “school.”   In an important representation of the renaissance artist Bandinelli’s workshop, drawing is obviously highly important, but another theme is suggested allusively by the sad, “melancholic” pose of a pupil who immediately conjures up the introspection and self-reflexivity we saw in the artist’s studio last week. This note of sadness chimes in with the light shown in the image, which conveys the idea of inner illumination. Goldstein links this use of light to the concept of disegno, which on the one hand can signify drawing, but also a kind of inner, hidden design located in the artist’s mind. What Bandinelli was seeking to bring to his art was intellectual respectability, a body of theory to underscore the manual craft of drawing.  This is taking the workshop further away from a space in which manual functions are carried out and nearer to a philosophical view of art, which is essential to the intellectual theory behind the academy.

An Academic Space.

The idea of the academy brings us back to teaching, because the name refers to the grove of trees where Plato taught his pupils philosophy. Yet an academy in Plato’s sense would be about talking and discussion, usually about morals and ethics, and not about art. Plato and art do come into contact in the renaissance in Raphael’s seminal fresco, the School of Athens where the young master shows himself in the company of Plato, Aristotle and other wise men. This image would serve other artists who wanted to make connections between philosophy and painting, most conspicuously in the art and writings of the seventeenth-century painter Pietro Testa, who in his Liceo or Lyceum- another philosophical teaching space- incorporates Plato and Aristotle as well as allegorical figures referring to the three arts: painting, sculpture and architecture. The use of philosophers in 17^th century representations of the academy is a complex issue, but essentially it seems to boil down to the idea of discourse in the workshop and studio. It wasn’t “academic” enough to just practice the art of painting; it had to be discussed, analysed and presented as a set of theoretical precepts in a teaching programme.

Women,Academy and Studio.

As should be obvious by now, the academy was exclusively a male space, though the female form was drawn, mainly from classical statues. Until the late 19^th century, women were excluded from academic life, although there were plenty of situations where they did paint, earn honours and distinction.[4] Yet, it must be stressed that success stories like Sophonisba Auguisolla, Angelica Kaufmann and Artemisia Gentileschi were rare. Generally, women were barred from practicing the highest form of painting, so they fell back on the so-called lesser genres. They were definitely not history painters, but had to settle for painting still-life, portraits and types of art at the “lower” end of the academic hierarchy. However, with women gaining more economic independence and with a thaw in the academy’s attitudes towards, them, opportunities became more available. Private academies appeared such as Heatherley’s School in Newman St, London, and most significantly of all the Slade School of Art, which from its opening in 1871 admitted women to its classes. Women were also granted the right to draw and paint from male and female models. Reproduced in Waterfield is Elizabeth Brown’s ‘Female Figure Lying on a Bed’, which won first prize(equal) in the Slade Figure Painting Prize in 1931.[5] More well-known than Brown is Gwen John who turned out to be one of the Slade’s greatest pupils. John was a pupil at the Slade between 1895-98. At the end of that stint John went to Paris and studied under Whistler at the Académie Carmen. A painting of John’s room in the rue du Cherche Midi, Paris nicely encapsulates the privacy and intimacy of her painting space. The room’s pared down minimalism suggests a retreat to the interior away from the crowded and competitive Slade School of Art. As Greer has said of Gwen John, she “painted her paintings less and less, leaving the ground showing through, never touching the canvas twice, in the same place, risking failure with every move. While her brother (Augustus John) spread himself very thinly, she withdrew into a single drop, forever compressing and concentrating her art and her feelings to an inner end, the intense, energetic, but utterly circumscribed life of a mystic.”[6] Something of that retreating nature is present in this painting which does suggest the hermeticism of a saint crossed with the atmosphere of a Parisian bohemian.  Of course women had entered the studio as wives, lovers and models, and in some cases both. John had been model and lover to the sculptor Rodin, for example.   The nude model comes to symbolise a variety of different artist’s studios encountered in the history of art. William Orpen’s ironically titled ‘The English Nude ‘–Orpen was Irish- is wonderfully realistic.[7] It references a number of famous nudes: Emily Scobel’s unflinching gaze owes something to Manet’s success de scandale Olympia; and the pose of the model is taken from Rembrandt’s ‘Bathsheba’, modelled by his mistress Hendricje  Stoffels. In this clever and knowing representation of the artist’s model, Orpen locates the model in the history of the studio and conveys something of the overlap of academy, gender and family.

Group Exercise. What does Orpen’s “English Nude” and Rembrandt’s “Bathsheba” suggest about the role of the female nude in the academic tradition?

Skydrive images here.

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[1] See Giles Waterfield’s discussion in The Artist’s Studio, 18.

[2] Carl Goldstein, Teaching Art: Academies and Schools from Vasari to Alberti, Cambridge, 1996, 10-11.

[3] Ibid, 11.

[4] See Germaine Greer, The Obstacle Race,

[5] Waterfield, The Artist’s Studio, 24.

[6] Greer, The Obstacle Race, 110.

[7] On Orpen and the model, see Various, William Orpen: Politics, Sex and Death, ex. cat., Dublin, 2005.

Module 3: The Artist's Studio. Week 2: A Portrait of the Artist’s Studio

Framing the Self

When thinking about the problem of self-portraits and the artist’s studio it might help to use a concept used by Giles Waterfield in his essay on the studio- self-framing.[1] A few hundred years later than Poussin, artists in Britain began to show themselves looking at themselves through mirrors in their own studios. As Waterfield says, such mirroring apparatuses gave the artist the opportunity to reflect on their own reflections. This sub-genre can be traced back to Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait of 1524, painted just after he arrived in Rome. In this virtuosic and somewhat arrogant demonstration of painting, Parmigianino shows himself reflected in a convex mirror. As Richard Brilliant has said, the spectator is made to feel that in looking at the mirror image he is intruding into the apparently reciprocal relation between the artist and the mirror”, although he goes on to say that the large hand might act as barrier between the viewer and artistic space.[2] A more famous example of the mirror occurs in Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait in which the artist may be shown deep in the mirror witnessing the wedding of the Arnolfini couple in the room. This mirror may have been the inspiration for a self-framing image: Mark Gertler’s Still Life with Self-Portrait of 1918. Here, the Bloomsbury Group artist shows himself painting in a mirror; the still-life he is representing stands below the mirror, and Gertler shows his studio reflected again in the bottle in the inanimate group. A curious feature here is the looming Japanese figure, which may not only betray Gertler’s interest in Oriental art but suggest his impending doom- he threw himself under a train several years later.

Painting as a Mirror.

In the process of creating a self-portrait an artist obviously makes use of the mirror; without it they cannot paint a self-image unless they rely on memory, but that would lead to errors in representation. Of course we seldom see the mirror in the self-portrait because that is what the artist is looking into as they paint themselves. I say “seldom” because there are notable exceptions: firstly, the Triple Portrait by Johannes Gumpp, executed in 1646.  In this extraordinary image Gumpp shows himself three times: in person, in his studio painting, in the mirror and on the canvas. Here the distinction between the physical mirror in the studio and the “mirror” of the painting is made; the artist has to continually look into the former in order to realize the latter. The difference between the two is also seen in relation to doing and seeing. Gumpp regards himself in the mirror, a purely optical strategy and uses his hands to paint the image he sees, a mechanical activity. The skill needed in realising the Self-Portrait is to negotiate between hand and eye, which inevitably leaves a gap, a blind spot which is neither painting nor the artist’s studio. We could, at a pinch, even imagine ourselves in the place of the artist who seems to be looking out directly at the spectator unlike the reflection in the mirror which looks to the side. We could try another experiment if we don’t feel confident at imagining ourselves in the space of the painter- imagine another artist realising the self-image. Actually we don’t have to envisage this situation as we have a ready-made example. The 16^th century painter Sophonisba Auguisolla did a painting of another artist, her tutor, Campi, painting her own image; so this is a self-image created via the mediation of another painter, who being her mentor, immediately raises questions about lineage, influence as well as gender. It is a striking image, and Sophonisba may be perpetrating an elaborate joke, which is lost upon us. AS Germaine Greer has observed, the head of Campi is finely executed but Sophonisba’s features are vague, unidealised, sketchily conceived.[3] Is the female artist, probably under cultural pressure, playing down her ability as an artist in a self-deprecating way?

A second example of the mirror in self-portrait is provided by the Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci who played with the vocabulary of the self-portrait by showing himself as a self-portrait in his own studio in a painting of 1604.  Perched on an easel, Annibale’s framed self-image regards the spectator with his trade mark melancholia, while his palette hangs forlornly from his easel. A shadowy lurks by the window and a little dog stands nearby. The animal quotient was cut down in the final version; the sketch for it has a cat under the easel. Annibale’s drawing is a highly complex meditation on the relationship between the self-portrait and the studio, underscored by the relationship between reality and illusion.[4] In the top rectangle, a quick sketch for a conventional self-portrait is drawn, and in that an image is an oval mirror; this could be the artist’s own as he would have faced the mirror with his right shoulder towards it resulting in a reversed image as he worked. In the bottom rectangle, the self-portrait is placed within Annibale’s studio. This has a beamed ceiling, three dogs, one of which barking at his master’s canvas- this is a witty way of suggesting the dog thinks it’s the real person. A cat cuddled up under the easel lends a note of domesticity and informality. The mysterious figure framed at the window may be the artist himself, peering into his studio, and in the process emphasising the dynamic between the real world and the realm of the studio, reality and artifice respectively. Finally, the bearded man to the right might relate to the clothes in the original self-portrait, which have been changed in the final version to convey less grandeur and more humility, not to say sadness, Annibale’s customary expression according to his biographers. Many more ideas are contained in this fascinating drawing, but enough has been said about its representation of the self-portrait within the studio.

Expanded Repertoire of the Self-Portrait.

“A beautiful woman, with full black hair, dishevelled, and twisted in various ways, with arched eyebrows that show imaginative thought, the mouth covered with a cloth tied behind her ears, with a chain of gold at her throat from which hangs a mask, and has written in front ‘imitation’. She holds in her hand a brush, and in the other a palette, with clothes of evanescently coloured drapery…”[5]

 Sophonisba’s unusual mediated self-portrait, Gumpp’s tripartite representation of himself and Annibale’s complex configurations indicate what could be called the expansion of the repertoire of the genre of the self-portrait from the late 16^th century into the 17^th century. Conventions of self-representation were being challenged resulting in singular iconography that we’re seeing these examples. But perhaps the most radical departure from the conventions of self-portraiture is Poussin’s contemporary, Artemisia Gentileschi, who was in contact with one of his patrons. In her Self-Portrait, sometimes called Self-Portrait as Allegory of Painting, Artemisia shows herself painting at her canvas, seen from the side. This in itself would be eloquent testimony to her ability since it would need two mirrors to capture this oblique figure. More significantly, she shows herself as Pittura, the female personification of painting – see above-. Conforming to Ripa’s prescription for Pittura- with the odd change such as omitting the blindfold symbolising the muteness of painting- Artemisia is clothed in the cangiante gown showing a characteristic of the art. In showing herself as Pittura, Artemisia avoids the masculine tradition in which Pittura is shown as a female muse to the painter who is inspired by her to paint.

One of the most famous examples of this is the beautiful woman in a canvas in Poussin’s Self-Portrait. She too wears colourful garments, but Poussin has made some modifications. She is held by an invisible figure- the painter himself, perhaps?- and has an eye in her diadem. This has been interpreted as optical perspective, or what Poussin called “prospect”, a clear way of seeing necessary to the painter’s art.  Though Artemisia’s self-portrait lacks such intellectual qualities as Poussin’s, it is a remarkable pictorial essay on the role of the female painter fighting to carve out a career and artistic reputation in a predominantly masculine world. It was probably painted in 1638 when Artemisia was working with her father at the court of Charles I in England.[6] As some have speculated, Artemisia may have seen Van Dyck’s renowned Self-Portrait with Sunflower- the latter a symbol for the king- and resolved to have created an equally memorable self-image. There is no doubt that she did that and revolutionised the genre of the self-portrait in the process.   

Group Exercise.

In this painting by the early 20th century artist William Orpen, the artist shows himself as the French 18th century painter Chardin in a studio. In your groups, discuss the representation of self and studio in this painting of 1908.

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[1] Giles Waterfield, “The Artist’s Studio” in The Artist’s Studio, Compton Verney, 2009, 12-13.

[2] Richard Brilliant, Portraiture, London, 1991, 157.

[3] Germaine Greer, The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and their Works, London, 1979, 181.

[4] Various, The Drawings of Annibale Carracci, ex cat., Washington, 2000, 274.

[5] Cesare Ripa, description of Pittura (Painting),

[6] Various, Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, ex cat., New York, 2001, no. 81, 417-21; Germaine Greer, The Obstacle Race, 189-207; and references in Mary Garrard,  Artemisia Gentileschi : the image of the female hero in Italian Baroque art, Princeton, 189 and R. Ward Bissell, Artemesia Gentileschi and the Authority of Art, Pennsylvania, 1999.

Skydrive images here.

Module 3: In the Artist’s Studio. Week 1: Inside the Artist’s Studio.

The Artist’s Studio in History.

This module has its origins in an exhibition on the theme of the artist’s studio held at Compton Verney in 2009. From notes made at that show, and subsequent sketches I saw the idea had the potential to be worked up into a full course. What follows is a laying- in and blocking out of the theme which will be become clearer as the course evolves. Some key ideas to be kept in mind are the following. “How have artists’ studios been seen by the artists who occupy them, and by other artists, and by their publics, over the past four hundred years? What are the myths that have developed around this type of space? Do certain ideas, or motifs, characterise depictions of the artist’s studio? And can types of studious be arranged into valid categories? These are some of the issues that this book, and the exhibition that inspired it, attempt to illuminate, using examples primarily taken from the British tradition.”[1] Over time the artist’s studio has retained the unmistakeable image of a place of creativity; a space where the artist conjures into existence, through the medium of paint, memorable images. Yet, as will be shown on this module, the studio can be regarded as much more than that. Throughout this module we’re going to view the studio through a number of filters:  the studio as a metaphor for the artist’s mind; the studio as a family space rather than as exclusively a work space; the studio as a symbolic space; the self-portrait as a mediated image of the studio, and many other interpretative meshes. 

The Studio as a Space.

If we start in the renaissance period we can immediately see a variety of contexts for the idea of the studio. Studio comes from “studiolo”, meaning a room for contemplation, like a study. This differs from the renaissance workshop or bottega.  Although these two rooms would have different functions, they could be in the same building. Waterfield gives the example of Tintoretto who would have worked and supervised painting operations in his bottega, but he would have had a studiolo in which he could quietly ponder ideas for his paintings, or even attend to business matters there. Already we see here a division emerging that might be characterised as a split based on the mind/body dichotomy.  The private room could be likened to the mind; by contrast, the busy workshop would be analogous to the outward body, busily functioning. We can also see division occurring between the idea of contemplation and that of acting, although that is to simplify. An artist like Raphael could be working in his own industrious bottega, but that would not stop him from contemplating the art he was working on amidst the din and distractions. When we arrive in the seventeenth-century, the idea of a private room separate from the noisy, busy workshop or household, is more visible as a concept. We famously read of Montaigne’s “room at the back of the shop”, which is a metaphor for the human mind as well as a physical space in the aristocrat’s house. My own research[2] has looked at the idea of Montaigne’s room in the context of Poussin’s Self-Portrait, but I’ve been less convinced by it suggesting the isolation of the painter from his household and the world. The large oblong in Poussin’s representation of the studio could be regarded as canvases stacked up against the wall, thus reinforcing the idea of a quiet space of creativity; but what if it is a door? It would lead out of Poussin’s studio into the house where his wife Anne Marie, her parents, and the rest of Poussin’s extended family lived.  That sort of problem alerts us to the dangers of seeing the painter’s studio as an exclusively artistic space. This view doesn’t take into account the overlapping of the domestic, commercial and artistic spheres. In the same century, the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens was said to be able to paint, dictate letters and listen to somebody reading the classics to him- all at the same time! This was nothing less than multi-tasking, the ability to work on a variety of tasks efficiently and without losing concentration.

The Studio in Paintings.

The image of the artist in their studio constitutes a genre in itself, but where did it originate? There are not many examples of the painter at work in their studio in the renaissance period; artists would not have felt the need to represent themselves at work in their studio, especially as there wouldn’t be a market for it. The “studio” appears in the very composition itself with its draperies and figures suggesting drawing and modelling respectively. The odd representation of the artist in their studio don’t throw much light on it as an idea in the renaissance. In this engraving of young Raphael in a corner of his studio, we have a portrait of the man, not an image of how he worked. It is only in later periods that Raphael, Michelangelo are shown in a studio situation, as in the case of Delacroix’s painting of the latter. After the renaissance, images of the artist in their studio become more common, especially in the Netherlands. Here, where matter-of-fact realism conditioned life, we see the space of the artist’s studio becoming more recognisable as a real space. Rembrandt is, of course, the main exponent. In this early painting in Boston, we see him staring intently at a canvas he has either painted, or is contemplating putting his brush to. Behind the young painter are jars containing pigment and oil to bind the former; on the wall hangs a palette that he may eventually use, assuming that he has not started painting. This painting is also a self-portrait, and it was via this genre that the artist’s studio became more visible, both explicitly and by implication. In a later self-portrait at Kenwood House Rembrandt shows himself before an easel which we assume was in his own studio. This may be true, but the studio is also “present” as an abstraction: the circles on the easel probably refer to the theory behind the practical side of painting. This theoretical representation of the studio can be contrasted with this magnificent painting by C. N. Gijsbrechts who shows us items in a studio such as a skull, the peeled stretcher of a canvas, a little miniature- possibly the artist’s wife- and other details such as his oozing palette and brushes stacked up against a ledge. These and the back of the painting obviously prove it a representation of the artist’s studio, but the skull, which must be a prop too, places it in the tradition of the vanitas- a meditation on the transience of life, and in the case of this image, art too. The vanitas appears in another image of a painter in his studio, but this time in England. A portrait of the artist Edward Collier in his studio shows the Dutch artist –who visited England- painting a vanitas still-life of a book propped against a book, placed in the foreground near the spectator. In this unusual image, Collier wittily uses props such as the still-life implying the dynamics of illusion and reality, and the curtain, suggesting the exclusion of the studio from the world, to comment on the  art of painting. It is almost as if we have stepped back from Gijsbrechts baroque vanitas which must have been painted from objects from the studio, and seen another painter at work drawing it on a canvas. This image of the artist at work is a visual convention that runs right through from Vermeer’s famous The Art of Painting through to representations of the studio in modern times. If we compare Eric Ravillon’s Edward Bawden in his studio we can see similarities between this and Collier’s self-portrait, though the chronologically later painter adds a note of informality by having a cat playing behind the artist. Sometimes we do not even see the artist at all, or the artist does not make it obvious he is the craftsman making pictures in his studio. An image of Henry Fuseli’s studio is captured by an anonymous artist of the British school. He does not show Fuseli at work, but the watercolour shows the paraphernalia of painting: cheval glass (for self-portraits), palette, pigments and a large figurative painting on an easel. We could consider this image as a snapshot of a studio observed by an almost detached eye; we could equally see it as the artist viewing his own workspace from a distant point. Commenting on this watercolour, Wakefield says that the work plays with themes of presence and absence:[3] is the artist there viewing his painting, or is it a view of his studio in his absence. In another painting, the British artist, William Coldstream, seems to have painted himself at a short distance from his easel; we have no means of identifying him as he obscures the face of the man with the palette with grey paint.  It is almost as if Coldstream wanted to efface his presence from the artist’s studio, but not completely as we are meant to associate the anonymous figure with the art of painting due to the palette he is holding. Another take on this is that Coldsteram has almost turned himself into one of the props in his studio, a figurative twin of the sculpture bust this artist is meant to be painting. Coldstream said that the painting of the face was taboo, and that to make such things clear would amount to “vulgar particularization”. The process of negation in the artist’s studio will result in the complete elimination of the painter from the space and what will remain will be the physical coordinates and objects of the studio itself. Some artists like Rodrigo Moynihan have turned to the content of the studio itself; he painted his studios in France, eventually paring them down to the artistic objects on shelves and ledges in his studio. Moyihan’s The Shelf: Objects and Shadows- Front View of 1982-3 lifts the mundane materials of the studio and makes them almost transcendent. This is selection in action, reducing the studio to essentials and in the process simplifying it. This isn’t always the case. Some artists, most noticeably Francis Bacon, see clutter and chaos as essential for their workspace. Although there was logic to Bacon’s studio squalor, you wouldn’t think so looking at the remnants of his studio, now reassembled – in its original chaotic state- in the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin. We might look askance at such working conditions, but could we imagine Bacon working in any other way?

In your groups discuss what this artist's impression of Jan van Eyck's studio tells us about the training and education of artists?

Skydrive images available here.

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[1] Giles Waterfield, “The Artist’s Studio” in The Artist’s Studio, Compton Verney, 2009, 4.

[2] David Packwood, “From Pictor Philosophus to Homo Economicus: Re-negotiating Social Space in Poussin’s Self-Portrait of 1649-50” in Spaces and Self in Early Modern Cultures, ed. David Warren Sabean and Malina Stefanovska, forthcoming (University of Toronto Press, 2011).

 [3] Wakefield. “The Artist’s Studio”, 32.

Module 2: Week 9; Defining Culture Wars.

Defining Culture Wars.

  “A legacy of 1960s-70s socio-political movements, issues of identity framed in the Decade Show remained a potent aesthetic directive during the 1990s. But earlier emphasis on claiming race, ethnicity, and gender as art subjects, and on creating generally affirmative and positive images of women and non-whites, was now complicated by recognition of America’s conflicted and abiding history of multiculturalism, and by increasingly sophisticated understandings of the hybridic, or syncretic, realities of contemporary cultural identity in the United States. Importantly, fervent debates over ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’ faded in the 1990s, permitting artists and critics to pursue fresh aesthetics and perspectives. End of the millennium exhibitions, including the 1999 Carnegie International (which focused on the ‘conceptually oriented realism ‘ of 41 artists) and the 2000 Whitney Biennial (the first to feature net art), disclosed a robust multiplicity of identities and art-making practices at the close of the ‘American Century’. The 1990s opened, however, amidst a climate of violence and disaffection, fallout from economic inequities and continuing culture wars.”

Erika Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art, p. 227.

  The 1980s was marked by many disputes about art. The cultural discord appeared against a backdrop of radical political and economic change. The communalism of the 1960s was replaced by growing dissatisfaction in the 1970s, and with the triumph of neo-conservatism, the privatisation of the pubic sphere and the erosion of civic liberties had begun. Threatened by politicians that sought to curtail arts funding, education and ethnic projects, art grew more politically aware. To give a few examples of cultural flashpoints in the 1980s: Maya Lin’s ‘Veterans Vietnam Monument’ (1980-2) caused controversy because of its design. Stark and minimalist, the work was called “a nihilistic slab of stone”, but eventually the protest evaporated with the monument treated almost as a shrine. Another example: Richard Serra’s ‘Tilted Arc’ of the early 1980s. This was a sculpture commissioned by the US’s Arts-in-Architecture program for the Federal Plaza in New York. Many people- including a chief judge- opposed the sculpture on grounds of cost- $175,000 for a solid block of steel. Unlike Maya Lin, Serra’s art was not accepted by the public: after a public hearing in 1985, a jury of 5 (voted 4-1) to remove the sculpture. There are many other examples of culture duking it out with the public and the authorities, but these are two of the most famous examples.   

 Culture, Baroque and Greed in the 1980s.

  If the 1980s was characterised by anything, that quality would be greed, immortalised in the slogan “Greed is Good” from Gordon Gecko in the film Wall Street. Far from worrying about politics and social problems, there were some artists in the 80s who sought the three ms: money, marketing and me first. This cocktail of greed, egotism and ambition was evident in the art boom of the late 1970s and mid 1980s. We’re talking the decade of Ronald Reagan here: public sector cuts, increased militarism, corporate funding of art, and the emergence of the art pop star buoyed up by the cult of celebrity. An art movement that had all of these qualities was Neo-Expressionism which had its origins in the New York art scene of the 1980s. Neo-expressonism was spearheaded by Julian Schnabel (b. 1951) with others including David Salle (b. 1952) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988). As Erika Doss says in her Twentieth Century Art, the neo-expressionists were scavengers plundering from a variety of styles and sources. Chief sources would include graffiti art, graphic design handbooks, magazines, and the literary and art historical canon. Interestingly, Schnabel felt drawn to the baroque and developed a style that fused saintly subjects with a gestural technique: his painting surfaces were encrusted with bits of crockery designed to give the look of a new painting aesthetic. Yet, broken crockery aside, Schnabel’s art was essentially derivative. In one of his paintings, Exile, Schnabel even quotes Caravaggio’s Boy with Basket of Fruit presumably to draw parallels between the Italian artist’s isolation and his own. In reality Schnabel preferred crowds; his first show in 1979, masterminded by the go-getting Mary Boone, sold out before it had even opened; and by the mid 1980s, the artist’s paintings were fetching such amounts as $65,000- 90,000. Schnabel’s overnight success and fame earned him censure from critics who deplored how the hyped art market had taken over from the real purpose of art: to provoke intellectual and cultural debate, the fuel of the culture wars. It could be argued however that the young Haitian painter, Jean-Michel Basquiat, or Jean-Michel Basketcase as Robert Hughes memorably dubbed him, was more redolent of the excesses of the art boom and the move away from social commentary. Basquiat epitomised how celebrity and culture could fuse into a perfect marketable package, but tragically Basquiat would turn out to be damaged goods due to his drug-taking lifestyle which saw him party to an early grave in 1988. Basquiat first started producing paintings in a NY cellar for $19,000 a throw; within 5 years he was dead of a heroine overdose.   Although Basquiat’s art has points of interest, it is difficult to evaluate when it comes to the cultural issue. If culture wars in art appeared in response to the dominance of the art history canon which squeezed out issues like ethnicity, race, feminism and hybridity, then JMB does not really figure in the ranks. His art may contain allusions to the black experience- Puerto Rican immigrants, street and graffiti art, jazz musicians like “Bird” Charlie Parker and Miles Davis- but Basquiat’s art merely functions as a kind of consumerist montage picking up images and experiences rather like the random channel-hopping of our own times . Basquiat’s art is ‘post-modern’ in its rich welter of background cultural noise; but this is culture wars for the post-literate, short attention span generation who experience cultural ‘protest’ via T.V. or the Internet.

 

Culture Wars at the Wallace Collection.

  In 2009, a collection of 25 paintings entitled ‘No Love Lost’ by the very controversial and very wealthy Damien Hirst landed right smack in the middle of the Wallace Collection in London. Clearly, some kind of culture clash had to be imminent: how were paintings by the enfant terrible of British conceptual art supposed to harmonise with the gallery of venerable old masters hanging nearby?  The wave of critical scorn that this exhibition provoked was immense, even by Hirst’s standards. Amongst the many criticisms labelled against Hirst, barbs exacerbated by the juxtaposition of ‘No Love Lost’ with the old masters, was the issue of why he had painted these works in the first place. Soon it transpired that it was an attempt by Hirst to align himself with old- and modern masters like Rembrandt, Velasquez and Francis Bacon, a policy that invited hubris. Just in case you didn’t get the message that, despite his ‘Shock of the New’ Tee shirt, Damien was communing with the old masters, a booklet with his own observations on the paintings in the Wallace Collection could be bought for £1.

 “In its inflexible formulation, axiomatic and extreme, the enigma is completely at home in the art of Damien Hirst. In the iconography of art, skulls were always contemplative objects. In the British Museum there is an ancient Aztec skull sculpted from gleaming transparent rock-crystal. Even then the dazzling hardness of the Hirst skull is really without formal genealogy. It entered the work and then is there as if, by incontestable logic, it was always meant to be. We knew what a skull is and signifies but that now has changed. The image is immovable in my head. Remember the shark the artist famous? A legendary killing machine, an embodiment of cruelty and danger and fear, that via the title of that work: the Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, became an object of philosophical contemplation. In retrospect, that irrefutable image was somewhat of a distant prologue to the skull. After all, Damien Hirst’s art is concerned with love and fear, with death, malady, physical decay, medical practice and pharmaceutical illusion. But for all its compelling imagery, his work is not sinister. He is not a surrealist. The inevitable proximity of death is the most real thing in human life. Fear of death is a more powerful emotion than love or lust. To some extent fear of death keeps us alive.”

 Rudi Fuchs in ‘For the Love of God’ catalogue.

 
Much of the iconography of ‘No Love Lost’ dealt with death, the transience of life and ashtrays, another indication that Hirst was trying to cloak the superficiality of his art within some more profound and universal meaning. He’s already attempted this with other works in his canon like the ‘Physical Impossibility in the Mind of Someone Living’, the unforgettable icon of the tiger shark; and ‘For the Love of God’, an 18^th century skull covered in 8,601 diamonds. This skull was conceptually related to the Wallace paintings, as they both derived from the baroque convention of the ‘momento mori’ convention- a figure holding a skull representing the vanity of all earthly things and the uncertainty of life. However, Hirst’s skull despite its religious title was concerned with money and the market; it was a symbol of how a concept could be turned into a commodity in an art market that saw prices skyrocketing. Hirst’s skull sold for a staggering £50 million.

Exercise. What does Hirst's "No Love Lost" suggest about the state of modern art today?

 Skydrive images images here.

Module 2: Week 8: Defining Modern Art.

Defining Modern Art through Abstract Expressionism

The term ‘Abstract Expressionism’ is something of a misnomer, as not all of the work was abstract, nor expressionist. The ‘group’ shared no common purpose (except the struggle for genius and self-expression), issued no manifestoes and embraced a multiplicity of styles and techniques. Their spheres of influence were the two major European movements of the early C20: Cubism and Surrealism. The key artists associated with abstract expressionism are Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning (above), Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, orbited by others like Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt and Clyfford Still. They were somewhat in awe of the Surrealist contingent in New York which included Ernst, Tanguy, Masson, Breton and Duchamp, but two European émigrés in particular influenced their development: Arshile Gorky and Hans Hofmann (right). Gorky was a transitional link between surrealism and abstract expressionism, while Hoffmann’s School of Fine Arts on 8^th Street provided a meeting place for like-minded artists who would form the nucleus of the group. Gorky’s use of surrealist biomorphic iconography after Miro, Dali and Tanguy seeped into the early work of many of his new friends and colleagues. Hofmann was a kind of father-figure for the group, and in 1944 he anticipated Pollock’s experiments with drip-technique.

 Discovering the Drip.

  If there is one aspect of Jackson Pollock’s art that has intrigued viewers over the years, it is the technique of the artist, the famous ‘action painting’ or ‘drip painting’ that earned Pollock the memorable name ‘Jack the Dripper’. The moment when Pollock ‘discovers’ how to drip and project paint down onto the canvas is treated as some kind of sartori, a mystical kind of enlightenment- a flash of spiritual awareness. However, in 1940 the German artist Hans Hofman had created a painting called ‘Spring’ by dribbling, splashing and pouring paint directly onto the canvas; some critics believed that he influenced Pollock. Despite this, in an essay on Hofman, Clement Greenberg is more guarded about this unsubstantiated influence. In Greenberg’s words, instead of directly influencing Pollock, Hofman belonged to “the same moment in the evolution of easel painting as Pollock…” 

 “To the same painterly powers are owed most of the revelations of Hofmann's first abstract period, before 1948-when, it is interesting to note, he painted almost exclusively on board. In a picture like Effervescence of 1944 he predicted an aspect of Pollock's "drip" method and at the same time Clyfford Still's anti-Cubist drawing and his bunching of dark tones. In Fairy Tale of the same year he expanded and deepened a hint taken unawares from Masson (whom Hofmann has never admired) in a way that anticipated Pollock's great Totem No. 1 of a few months later. In the tempera-on-gesso Cataclysm of 1945 (subtitled Homage to Howard Putzel) still another aspect of Pollock's later "drip" manner was anticipated ("drip" is inaccurate; more correct would be "pour and spatter")”. Clement Greenberg

 Pollock didn’t work from drawings or sketches; he didn’t make studies and colour drawings into a final painting- that would have been inconsistent with the method of creative automatism. He also said that he agreed with the reviewer who said that his pictures didn’t “have a beginning middle or end”- most of the figures and forms came out of his unconscious. For Pollock, the frames and boundaries of the canvas needed to be pushed back, and, most importantly off all he said that he when he was painting he was “in the painting”.

  "When I am in a painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc, because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

  Pollock was so incensed by charges made against his art that it was chaotic, uncontrolled and random that he let Hans Namuth make a film of him painting in 1950. The film begins with Pollock explaining his approach to painting, his complete control, a counterblast to Time’s label of ‘Jack the Dripper’, a handle coined to suggest complete lack of technique. In the Namuth film we see how Pollock draws using enamel paint off the end of a stick, but the paint does not ‘drip’ off the end of the stick, but is the result of a whiplash like action with the wrist that sends it across the canvas.  The critic Arthur Danto has argued that the drip would have been unsuitable for Pollock because the artist needed to be disciplined in bringing up thoughts from the unconscious; the artist therefore had to find a technique by which the creative unconscious could be put on a canvas in an ordered way.

 The  Greenbergian Line of Descent: From Pollock to Frankenthaler

 In Fate of a Gesture, Ratcliff sees Pollock the ‘father’ leading to Frankenthaler the ‘daughter’, but what evidence is there for such a claim? Born and raised in Manhattan, Frankenthaler graduated from Bennington College in 1949. Exhibiting after this she drew the fire of Clement Greenberg, but despite this they became friends, often coming out to Springs to visit the Pollocks. Although she was inspired by De Kooning, Frankenthaler saw Pollock’s ‘pouring’ method not as a dead end as Guston had, but a way out of the void that “ab-ex” found itself in. As she put it “You could become a De Kooning satellite or mirror, but you could depart from Pollock”. And traces of Pollock could be found in Frankenthaler’s art of the 1950s such as her Painted on 21^st Street of 1951 which suggest that she had looked at Autumn Rhythm and One when they had appeared at Betty Parson’s gallery in 1950. In addition to seeing Pollock’s black and white abstract canvases at Betty Parson’s, Frankenthaler travelled to Nova Scotia with Greenberg in 1951, and out of that memorable experience of seeing the northern landscape, and viewing Pollock’s art, was born perhaps her masterpiece- Mountains and Sea of 1952 (above). When Greenberg saw the picture, he immediately discerned a new type of painting, and the artist Morris Louis went much further. He said that Mountains and Sea “formed a bridge between Pollock and what was possible”. During the 1950s Frankenthaler continued to pursue the use of shimmering veils of colour, canvases soaked with pigment seemed to be visible examples of Greenberg’s pronouncements. “[The canvas] becomes paint in itself, color in itself”. Greenberg swept away on the wave of his own rhetoric declared that Frankenthaler and her associates were perfecting the dream of pictorial art that Pollock had started. This was the culmination of all the experiments with paint on the canvas; it referred to itself- the era of ‘pure painting’ had arrived.

 Philip Guston the Renegade.

  One of the unsung heroes of the so-called New York school is Philip Guston, whose paintings reflect the painful search for identity, form and style of American art as a whole. Guston first encounter with Pollock was at the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, from which both artists were unceremoniously expelled in 1928-29 for attacking the faculty. When Pollock relocated to New York, Guston and other artists would often drop by and stay with him, and then exhibit paintings with him. Guston became along with Pollock, Kline, De Kooning a member of ‘The Club’ a group of artists formed in 1949 who held their meetings at the Cedar Tavern. Here, the Pollock’s hard-drinking, rabble-rousing persona really came to the fore with stories of him overturning a phone booth whilist Kline was using it. Eventually, Guston became disenchanted with “ab ex”, seeing it as an intellectual and artistic dead end; he turned away from formlessness to a more graphic abstraction. Guston’s later work belonged to the so-called ‘Bad Painting’ style – bleak, sardonic, cartoonish, deliberately rejecting conventional ideas about avant-gardism. Although Guston was never really forgiven for his rejection of the values of “ab-ex”, his art is enjoying a revival of interest, best exemplified by the magnificent show held at the R.A. in London in 2004.

Exercise. Imagine that you are going to introduce somebody to modern art. You choose the American abstract artist Al Held's Pachinko (1989, Private Coll). How would you demonstrate to your friend that this was an example of modern art?

Images available here.