A Minor Revelation

It is the evening after a day out in Manchester and I am sitting at home spending some time with the new objects I returned from my trip having purchased. I slowly turn the pages on the Callum Innes catalogue for his 2013 exhibition History held at the Whitworth Art Gallery, which the gallery were selling off cheap in a sale, whilst listening to my new Biosphere album Shenzhou, when I am struck by a minor revelation. Callum Innes is known primarily for large minimal oil paintings in a high modernist style, but this exhibition was of a series of watercolours, a medium for which Innes is not normally associated. The twenty watercolours follow the familiar style of Innes, being comprised solely of large blocks of colour, in this instance squares where two colours have been applied one on top of the other and scraped back to create a semi transparent plane. The two colours used are visible around the edges of each piece where they have not been scraped back. The series as a whole acts as an extended colour study, exploring the results of combining different pairs of colours. The title of each piece tells the colours used, for example Cobalt Blue Tone / Quinacridone Gold or Red Magenta / May Green. The Biosphere record is a 2017 vinyl reissue of a 2002 album, named after a Chinese spacecraft. Every one of the twelve tracks on Shinzhou takes as it’s starting point a small section of music by Debussey, which Geir Jenssen has removed from it’s context, looped, and put through various electronic filters and reverbs to create a series of minimal ambient sound pieces, which serve as a musician’s study of Debussey. The minor revelation was my realisation that these two art works, although made in completely different media, are the same.

Both the watercolours and the music are, to first appearances, very plain. They both follow, and do not divert from, the application of one or two simple rules. Some may describe them as quite empty. They are flat. Pick any point and compare it to any other and it may well look or sound the same. Their tone does not change across each piece’s entirety. But, upon closer inspection, both the watercolours and the music share a deep and rich texture. The more time spent with the work, and the longer one looks, or the deeper one listens, the richer and more subtly diverse the texture becomes. This revelation of the similarities between these two art works led to another revelation about my own taste when it comes to art, music, books, film, culture generally, and even perhaps people. I don’t like work that shouts, or demands attention, which unfortunately is the majority. I like work that quietly goes about it’s business, seriously, attentively, with an open curiosity and pleasure in enquiry; work that does not immediately reveal it’s depths and richness, allowing the viewer/reader/listener the opportunity to peel back the layers slowly, over an extended period of time; art and music that gives more with every listen or view; art and music one can live with, that grows and develops with the viewer/listener’s ongoing interaction with it. I am not one for instant gratification. I find the greatest pleasures are to be found in quiet and continued contemplation. 

Richard Hamilton: the Late Works – National Gallery, London

To enter the world of Richard Hamilton’s late works is to enter a self-contained closed world of reflections and mirrored fragments. Endlessly self-referential, works reappear in other works, which themselves refer back to yet other works. To view them is to participate in a post-modern game through art history. And it is a thoroughly enjoyable game to play.

The first works we see are paintings where the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing has been transformed into a vast cathedral, sparsely populated by female nudes and tiny reproductions of earlier Hamilton works. These two paintings (The Saensbury Wing (1999-2000) and Charity), like many in the exhibition, reference a painting in the National’s collection, Pieter Saenredam’s The Interior of the Grote Kerk at Haarlem (1636-37). And with these paintings we are introduced to all of the main themes of the exhibition: interiors, paintings in the National Gallery, the female nude and other works of Richard Hamilton.

In Lobby (1985-87) a hotel lobby is painted with unwavering verisimilitude, the planes within fragmented by carefully rendered mirrored surfaces. It is a meticulously measured photo-realistic painting. The only ‘painterly’ marks are to be found on the flowers in the foreground and the painted paintings reflected in the two large mirrored columns. Lobby reappears in a later work, Hotel du Rhone (2005), where it hangs prominently on a wall in a digitally rendered collage of a hotel room being hoovered by a naked chambermaid. The contents and layout of the room bring to mind Hamilton’s most celebrated image, probably the most famous collage in art history, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? (1956).

Other than Lobby and The Saensbury Wing not many of these works could be described simply as paintings, although Hamilton did refer to them as such. They are mostly digital mash-ups incorporating elements of painting, collage and photography and finally printed onto canvas.

Hamilton’s nudes are always beautiful young women and it is in two more of these nudes that we find the final preoccupation of this exhibition, and a major preoccupation of Hamilton’s career. Descending Nude (2006) shows the same woman four times, three times reflected in a mirror walking down a flight of stairs, and the fourth facing the mirror. In The Passage of the Bride (1998-99) the female nude is reflected in the glass of a section of Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), otherwise known as The Large Glass, which is seen hanging on the wall of another domestic interior. In the nineteen sixties Hamilton played an important role in the rehabilitation of Duchamp’s reputation in the art world, not least by remaking many of Duchamp’s works and bringing them to a new and wider audience. Duchamp blessed this project, even going so far, in typically Duchampian manner, as to sign Hamilton’s versions of his work. Another Duchampian aspect to Hamilton’s work is the delight he takes in replicating his own work on a smaller scale, as in Duchamp’s Box in a Valise (1935-41).

The clumsiest aspect of Hamilton’s work on show here are the titles, bad puns and unsubtle allusions, as if he hasn’t got the confidence in his audiences ability to ‘get’ the references. And one or two of the works are considerably weaker than others. I wasn’t entirely convinced by The passage of the angel to the virgin (2007), Hamilton’s updating of a Renaissance favourite, the Annunciation, for example. But these are minor quibbles. The exhibition is worth a visit alone for the opportunity to view Hamilton’s last work, Le Chef – d’oeuvre inconnu – a painting in three parts (2011 – printed 2012), which will probably pass into Hamilton legend as his last, great, unfinished, masterpiece.

Hamilton was working on Le Chef… for the final eighteen months of his life and he described it, according to this exhibitions catalogue, as his Etant Donnes. This is a slight exaggeration. Duchamp worked on his final piece in secret for twenty years when everyone thought he had given up art, releasing it only after his death as a way of upsetting Duchampian scholars from being able to sum up his life’s work into a neat little Duchampian shaped compartment. Hamilton’s final work doesn’t really deviate from the well-trodden Hamilton path. It is a nude, a particularly beautiful one. It references, and indeed collages, a number of old masters. And it is a digital mash-up of photography, painting, and collage. Based on a short story by Balzac, Le Chef… tells of a young painter trying to paint the perfect nude, produce the epitome of beauty and desire, but when he shows his work to a couple of other painter friends all they see is a mess of paint except for one beautifully rendered foot.

Light and Colour, Up Bubbles All His Amorous Breath

Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings, Tate Liverpool

This is one of those summer blockbuster shows and, as such, had it been in London, the galleries would have been heaving and the visit would have been an unpleasant experience of jostling and aggravation. But this is Liverpool, I am in a provincial Tate, it is a beautiful day outside and the steady but far from overcrowded stream of visitors are in friendly and conversational spirits. This is also one of those conceptual shows, hung around a usually ill-conceived idea dreamed up by a curator, where the merits of the works on display are sacrificed for the good, or often not-so-good, of the concept. Thankfully, in this instance, the concept works and the curator, Jeremy Lewison, has done a remarkable job.

Three painters, separated in time. Monet was only 11 years old at the time of Turner’s death and Twombly wasn’t born until two years after Monet’s own death. All three in their own times were derided as ‘daubers’, challenging received notions of what a painting could, or indeed should, be. The exhibition concentrates on the mature work of its subjects at a point in their respective careers when their reputations and public profile were assured, and it opens with a grand statement.

To the left as one enters is Turner’s The Parting of Hero and Leandro (1837), to the right facing it and equal in scale and ambition Twombly’s Hero and Leandro (to Christopher Marlowe) (1985), and on the wall at the back, between the two, Twombly’s painting in four parts Hero and Leandro (1981-84). And this is the exhibition in a nutshell: conversations between painters 150 years apart with similar aims and shared concerns and themes. The conversations continue throughout: Turner’s paintings of Waterloo Bridge face Monet’s paintings of Waterloo Bridge; Turner’s sunsets face Monet’s sunsets; Monet’s water lilies face Twombly’s peonies; and on; and on.

The most successful conversation, to my mind, and the one I returned to again and again over the course of my visit, was between a series of Turner’s small oil-on-board seascapes (c.1840-45) and Twombly’s epic Orpheus (1979), which share a minimal palette of off whites and creams and the splicing in two of the picture plane by a muted horizon line. Orpheus has been placed such that it dominates the largest room of the exhibition. Possibly the wittiest conversation was between Monet’s Water Lilies (after 1916) and Twombly’s Petals of Fire (1989) where Twombly’s diptych of smears and drips of black, red and white, seems to be mocking Monet across the decades, goading him for being the acceptable face of modernist painting.

Now, I must admit that I was not a fan of Monet before I came to this exhibition. I was excited at the prospect of Turner and of seeing how Twombly fared in proximity to an undeniable master. And I must also confess that my opinion has not been greatly changed. I find Monet’s use of colour to be gaudy and somewhat vulgar in a polite kind of way. Although he does improve when he allows himself to copy Turner and to soften his palette, as in Morning on the Seine, Giverny (1897) or Waterloo Bridge, London, at Sunset (1904).

The star of this show is undoubtedly Twombly and I don’t think I was alone in coming to that conclusion on the day of my visit. I suspect most people came for either Turner or Monet, having little or no prior knowledge of Twombly, and if nothing else this show, through careful and considerate curation, has done wonders towards furthering the acceptance and understanding of contemporary painting in the view of the average art going member of the public. I heard several visitors comment that when they first saw the Twombly’s they ‘didn’t get it’ but the longer they spent with them and saw the connections with the more acceptable paintings of Turner and Monet the more their appreciation grew. And vice versa, by placing Turner and Monet in proximity to Twombly it becomes clear (especially with Turner) how radical they were in their own time and how common acceptance is something that only comes about with the distance of hindsight.

Materiality, Surface and Illusion

If anything links the diverse approaches seen in the work of Gerhard Richter currently on display in an extensive retrospective at Tate Modern it would be materiality, surface and illusion. One thing pretends to be another - a photograph is a painting - a sky is a sea. Seascape (Cloudy), (1969), offers a view it would be impossible to see, the horizon being below eye level. Some of the early work appears crude (Himalaya (1968), Folding Dryer (1962)), and the dry brush scraped over wet paint becomes a little tiresome. In the first few rooms there is a sense of relief when one comes upon a painting which uses colour – there is only so much grey one can take. And even the first colour chart is poorly executed (192 Colours (1966)). But the sheer variety of styles, often painted alongside each other, shows Richter to be a painter exploring all aspects of his chosen medium with the attention of a serious artist. 

Richter is not an artist with clearly defined ‘periods’ depicting linear progression, he moves from one approach to another and back again with seeming ease, merely adding to his oeuvre over time – photo-realism, abstraction, abstract expressionism, figurative, landscape, and with his Grey paintings and colour charts the introduction of random processes. The colour charts improve with a switch to enamel paint (4096 Colours (1974)) where the surface becomes flatter and more pure. In Double Pane of Glass (1977) a change of surface (glass as opposed to canvas) transforms the quality of the paint (oil) and therefore the surface of the painting and the quality of the brushwork. A change of tool (roller as opposed to brush) does the same (Grey (1974)). Richter’s approach is that of a scientist changing a single parameter of an experiment to see the change in outcome. This is most clear in the Grey paintings.

There is something very clinical about even his ‘loosest’ paintings. The meticulous nature of the work makes the minor deficiencies more apparent, imperfections on the surface (cracks, blemishes, a thumb print, staples and folded canvas visible on the sides of unframed paintings) break the illusion momentarily, offering the work a fragility and impermanence that they otherwise seem to be denying. And across the two canvases of Moonscape II (1968) the colours are ever so slightly wrong.

By abstracting photographs almost beyond recognition as he does in Tourist (With 1 Lion) and Tourist (With 2 Lions) (both 1975) is Richter trivialising an event (the mauling of said tourist by lions), or guarding the viewer from the horrible reality, or does the fact you have to work harder to ‘see’ the image heighten the horror? Similar could be asked regarding his portraits of Nazis and the 18^th October 1977 series.

The Cloud paintings of 1970 are beautiful and manage to avoid the slight frustration felt by his other smooth surfaced photo-realist paintings. Richter’s most iconic painting, Betty (1988), also achieves this. This painting, a portrait of his daughter, could be regarded as Richter’s Mona Lisa, except we are denied her beauty as she is facing away from us and once again all we can do is wonder at the surface, stepping closer in an effort to break the illusion. This is the one painting that looks no different to its often seen reproductions. This is the slight frustration of which I speak – the reproductions (photographs of paintings of photographs) are always smoother and flatter than the actual paintings and so the ‘real’ painting, being merely a painting, although a marvel, is almost always a slight disappointment.

The only work on display here where the audience isn’t aware of the surface is Mirror (1981) (which, as the title suggests, is a mirror hung in the place of a painting). Here the viewer looks beyond the surface to see only themselves. The relationship between viewer and work is made explicit in Mirror, the artist is saying look at my work, or indeed any work of art, and you will see only yourself.

In the 1980’s Richter, an artist always at odds with fashion, momentarily joins in with the popular style with his large brash abstracts. The abstract paintings have everything the majority of the photo-realist paintings lack – texture, thickness, and vibrant colour. Interestingly, Richter’s early abstracts (where he blows up and reproduces details of other paintings) retain the smooth surface of the rest of his oeuvre. His 1980’s landscapes however are a disappointment, well executed but uninteresting. They are reasonable paintings of badly taken photographs, neither good photographs nor good paintings. 

In his 1990’s abstracts Richter starts to cut into the surface of his paintings, revealing other surfaces beneath, other potential paintings, partially revealing also the processes behind the work.

In the late 1980’s Richter, who has spent so much time replicating photography in paint, began a series of small scale works applying paint directly onto photographs, personal family snapshots and portraits obscured by often a single brush stroke. Providing respite from his monumental paintings these ‘sketches’ are simple, quick and intensely beautiful. There is an apparent casualness to them unseen anywhere else in his body of work, almost as if he simply picked up the photograph to wipe his brush clean (I know this is not the case and these pieces are far from casual, but they successfully give that impression). These pieces are direct, they contain less illusion than much of his work, they are not paintings manifesting as photographs, or vice versa, they are what they are, a photograph daubed with paint, the successful merging of two media Richter has spent so much time questioning and separating. 

Maybe he finally realises the limits of painting with September (2005), in which he obscures a painting he had begun, depicting the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre as they were destroyed on September 11^th 2001. It is a modest painting but it shows his failure. His painting of an atrocity fails to evoke any of the powerful emotions - dread, fear, awe - that the photographs of the event so successfully induce. Why did he abandon this painting, deface it and then choose to exhibit the defacement? Is he, after a lifetimes work pushing at the limits of painting, acknowledging his failure? Is there nowhere else to go? Is the photograph of the painting, no matter how wonderful the paining is, always going to be better than the painting itself? This, ultimately, is the question we always return to with Richter’s work.

Fake or Real?

In October’s issue of The Art Newspaper there is a story, subsequently reported in a number of other media outlets, of a painting which until recently had been considered a valuable forgery. The painting, ‘The Procuress’, a brothel scene, owned since 1960 by the Courtauld Institute in London, was thought to be a twentieth century ‘fake’ in the style of the Dutch Golden Age by notorious counterfeiter Hans van Meegeren, known for his exceptional Vermeer copies. Scientific studies performed over the last year by Courtauld specialists and The Art Newspaper have discovered ‘The Procuress’ is more likely to be an ‘original’ by a fairly average painter of the Dutch Golden Age, Dirck van Barburen. What was once valuable because it was a brilliant fake becomes less valuable because it is a mediocre original.

What does this story tell us about the current criterion used to value a work of art? Physically it is the same painting, but with its new context it becomes an entirely different work. Roland Barthes discussed the ‘Death of the Author’ in his seminal essay of that title. Michel Foucault responded with his question ‘What is an Author?’ Both were interrogating the relationship between a work and its creator. Can one be separated from the other? Can we understand a work fully without knowing its back-story? Or do we need an intimate knowledge of the author of a work and the cultural context of its creation to be able to judge its artistic (and indeed fiscal) value? Barthes said the work doesn’t have a single author. It cannot be separated from its context and time, as it can only exist as an amalgam of the ideas, words and thoughts which preceded it. Foucault added to this saying if we wanted to understand the meaning of a writers’ work we should place as much weight on his shopping lists as we do on his masterpiece.

Surely this is the same painting? It is the same pigment on the same canvas depicting the same scene; the same quality of brush stroke; the same insight into light and colour, shape and form? The same talent, or lack thereof? Apparently not. Apparently we now have two paintings: the potentially true and the potentially false, each living their own life depending on which context, which author, you the viewer, believe in. And it is the potentially false version of events which the art world values highest.

Albert Camus said, in ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, his study of the absurd, that the act of creation is ‘the absurd joy par excellence’. Nietzsche is quoted in the same work as saying ‘we have art in order not to die of the truth.’ Can we not value art without knowing the truth of it? Or is all art a lie?