Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Art from the Late Thirties and Nineteen Forties (Tate)

William Coldstream
Standing Nude
1937
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

"In 1937 Coldstream founded the Euston Road School with fellow realist artists Claude Rogers and Victor Pasmore.  Believing that avant-garde art had lost touch with all but a small elite, they aimed to record the visible world in an objective manner and re-establish a connection between artist and public.  This work was painted in the School's first location at 12 Fitzroy Street in autumn 1937.  Coldstream's practice was based on an idea of 'straight painting' in which disinterested vision and precise measurement would replace the personal and subjective, thus creating a direct transcription of what the painter saw."

Alexandre Jacovleff
A Model seated on a Bed (recto)
ca. 1937
tempera on paper
Tate Gallery

Alexandre Jacovleff
A Model seated on a Bed (verso)
Nude Figures in a Room
ca. 1937
tempera on paper
Tate Gallery

"These two tempera sketches on verso and recto of a single sheet are from a series of experimental studies in a freer, more imaginative style which Jacovleff executed in the last two or three years of his life.  His friend and biographer Martin Birnbaum records, 'Early in May 1938 while he was preparing to leave Paris, he told me that all these sheets of fleeting notes would soon be destroyed, and in his studio in Capri he would do the permanent work which he was impatient to begin and which he believed would be the solid lasting achievement of his career.'  Shortly afterwards, however, he was stricken with cancer and died.  This sheet was purchased from the artist's mother in 1939 and presented anonymously to the Tate."

Julian Trevelyan
The Potteries
ca. 1938
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

"The painting dates from the years when Trevelyan was allied with the left-wing Mass Observation group.  Founded in 1937 by anthropologist Tom Harrison and writer Charles Madge, Mass Observation was a study of the British working class.  It was a purely information-gathering project, intended to accumulate data for future generations to analyse (presently housed in an archive at Sussex University).  While the primary agents were hundreds of amateur diarists, photographers and painters also participated.  Trevelyan traveled through The Potteries, a group of manufacturing towns in the region of Stoke-on-Trent, describing the area as 'a landscape full of drama and pathos,' where 'human beings seemed to creep about almost apologetically among the man-made disasters."

Man Ray
Pisces
1938
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

Jackson Pollock
Naked Man with Knife
ca. 1938-40
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

"This picture, which was never exhibited or titled in Pollock's lifetime, has been given the title Naked Man with Knife by the compilers of the catalogue raisonné (O'Connor and Thaw) who assign it to the period ca. 1938-41.  In his article in Artforum, O'Connor stresses the influence of José Clemente Orozco on Pollock's work at this period and suggests that this picture (as well as showing Orozco's stylistic influence) utilizes figure motifs borrowed from Orozco's frescoes at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, painted in 1932-34 (now lost)."  

Charles Ginner
Snow in Pimlico
1939
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

"The view in this unusually small painting is from the second-floor window of 66 Claverton Street in Pimlico, where Ginner lived from 1938.  He painted it during his first winter in the house.  The woman in No. 73 opposite is brushing the snow from her steps and the pavement.  The dark orange color of her pullover is repeated in the curtains in the ground-floor windows.  The niches at the bases of the porch columns are boot scrapers.  Ginner plays with the pigment as both a representation and a material: the white paint sits like the white snow on top of the red pillar box, as do the painted footprints that mark recesses in  the snow on the pavement."

Charles Ginner
Emergency Water-Storage Tank
1942
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

"The London Fire Brigade constructed 'emergency water supplies' during the Second World War to supply water to their fire engines.  There was a particular problem with water supply, both because the water mains were broken during bombing and because the river Thames is tidal and so at low tide it was difficult to pump water.  At the beginning of the war 'portable dams' which held 1,000 gallons of water and were placed on open ground were ready to be moved into threatened areas of the city.  These were supplemented later by larger steel structures that held up to 5,000 gallons, sited in the middle of streets and kept full with water changed every month or so.  In the event, both these types of structures were of limited use as they were not large enough to provide water for more than a few minutes.  London was bombed between September 1940 and May 1941.  As buildings were destroyed, the water supply for the Fire Brigade was supplemented further by reservoirs built in the basements of bombed buildings and sealed in concrete.  Although much larger than the tanks on the ground, these were also of only limited help.  The water tank depicted was at the building which was formerly 222 Upper Thames Street, between Boss Court and St. Peter's Churchyard in London.  The building had been the offices of a firm of twine makers, Morrison, James and Son Ltd.  The scene looks oddly like a Roman bath, as Ginner included a little classical- style column at the right, which was presumably once part of the interior structure.  The pre-war plan of this street is unrecognisable today."

Bernard Meninsky
Standing Female Nude in a Landscape
ca. 1940-43
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

"Soon after the outbreak of war in 1939 the activities of the Central School of Arts and Crafts, where Bernard Meninsky had taught for many years, ceased in London.  As a consequence Meninsky lost his job, and in 1940 he moved to Oxford where he taught at the City of Oxford Art School.  While in Oxford he painted this picture, among a series of figures in landscapes, all from the imagination.  Dr. Marjorie Franklin, who bequeathed the painting to the Tate Gallery, lived in Oxford during the war and met Meninsky in 1940, acquiring this work soon after it was painted."  

John Piper
Seaton Delaval
1941
oil on canvas, mounted on panel
Tate Gallery

"The baroque castle of Seaton Delaval, Northumberland, was built by John Vanbrugh between 1718 and 1729, and destroyed by fire in 1822.  Piper visited the surviving ruin in 1941.  He had previously made records of major buildings in anticipation of their destruction through bombing or modernisation.  He had also recorded bomb-damage, and found parallels between the ruined castle and these recent subjects.  Piper described the castle's colouring as 'ochre and flame licked red, pock-marked and stained."

Lawrence Gowing
Mrs Roberts
1944
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

"A student of the Euston Road School, Lawrence Gowing attended throughout its existence.  This later portrait of Mrs. Ellen Roberts, the Gowings' cleaning lady, was painted at their home in Paultons Square, Chelsea.   In 1945 the Daily Sketch reported the sitter's comments: 'It's me, isn't it? Perhaps in another hundred years I will be hanging in a national museum.'  In 1983 Sir Lawrence described Mrs. Roberts as 'gaunt and gracious.'  He also recalled how, when studying the work of Masaccio at that time, he 'realised that not only the transverse lighting but the unidealised sympathy and the visual authenticity that I prized in painting were all his invention.

Graham Sutherland
Horned Forms
1944
oil on panel
Tate Gallery

"Despite the heavy commitment demanded by his status as an official war artist, Sutherland continued to make personal pictures derived from natural sources throughout the war.  This threatening creature was based on a root which Sutherland found in Kent and which he took back to the studio.  Through his characteristic 'paraphrasing' of its form it has metamorphosed into an image of ambient violence."  

Graham Sutherland
Feeding a Steel Furnace
1941-42
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

"During the war the production of steel was especially urgent as Britain, cut off from foreign imports, sought to correct the arms shortage that, despite the process of rearmament that had begun in 1936, had left the nation vulnerable at the end of the 1930s.  The arms crisis had been exacerbated by the abandonment of almost all of the British army's equipment on Dunkirk Beach in June 1940.  Such was the demand that nationwide collections of scrap iron and steel were instigated; most famously, the cast-iron railings in many cities were removed to be turned into weapons.  The inclusion of scrap metal alongside pig iron in the steel-making process was normal practice, and it is the introduction into the furnace of the 'scrapbox' at the end of a long delivery arm that is depicted in this work.  The opening of the door of the furnace allowed in air, creating the tongue of yellow flame at the centre of the composition."

Roger Hilton
Woman with Dark Hair
1949
lithograph
Tate Gallery

 
Giorgio Morandi
Still Life
1946
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

"Still Life was made in Bologna in 1946.  The canvas was prepared with a white ground layer; an underdrawing made with graphite is visible around the central vase.  The oil paint was then applied in thin layers, wet on wet, with lively brushstrokes.  Morandi kept a supply of vases, bottles and jars in his studio, which he used as models for many of his still life paintings in a variety of arrangements.  In his treatments they lose their domestic purpose, tending more toward sculptural objects of contemplation.  However, his fondness for the earthy colours of his native Bologna helps to anchor such works in the artist's own life and surroundings."

 quoted passages based on notes by curators at the Tate in London

London Photographs by Wolfgang Suschitsky (1912-2016)

Wolfgang Suschitzky
Lyons Corner House, Tottenham Court Road, London
1934
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

Wolfgang Suschitzky
East End, London
ca. 1934
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

Wolfgang Suschitzky
East End, London
ca. 1936
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

Wolfgang Suschitzky
Charing Cross Road
ca. 1936
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

"Although born in Vienna, the photographer and cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky, who has died at 104, forged his career in the UK where, as a Jew and a socialist, he took refuge in the 1930s.  His best-known photographs remain those taken at dawn on Charing Cross Road in London at that time.  The steam rising from the asphalt as cloth-capped workers lay the road surface ahead of the steamroller, and the whitish glow of milk bottles on a float, are eerie period essays in black and white, a paean to the dignity of labour."

"Suschitzky's father, Wilhelm, and mother, Adele (née Bauer), were secular Jews who owned a radical bookshop in Vienna.  Wilhelm, a noted free-thinker, killed himself during the rise of nazism.  Woflgang's elder sister, Edith (later Tudor-Hart), was also a photographer, and a great influence on her brother."

"Suschitsky left Vienna, and the Austrofascist regime that seized power in 1934, for Amsterdam, where he met and married Helena "Puck" Voûte, with whom he opened a photography studio.  By 1935 the marriage was ailing and he left for London.  There, he met film director Paul Rotha and they began to work together."

"Suschitsky was committed to photographing his adopted homeland and to helping others escape from his former one, including two cousins who, having been held at Dachau, were eventually released, only to be interned on the Isle of Man."

"Suschitsky believed that great photography is 'a combination of the right choice of detail, the elimination of all that is inessential and the right moment that makes the picture.'  He demystified his technique still further by adding, 'I was always quite content to be a good craftsman.'

– extracts from the 2016 obituary in the London Guardian

Wolfgang Suschitzky
Charing Cross Road
ca. 1936
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

Wolfgang Suschitzky
Sheep in Hyde Park, London
1937
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

Wolfgang Suschitzky
Near Monument Station, London
1938
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

Wolfgang Suschitzky
Victoria Bus Terminal
1939
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

Wolfgang Suschitzky
Hurlingham Club, London
1939
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

Wolfgang Suschitzky
Trafalgar Square
1942
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

Wolfgang Suschitzky
Hampstead Heath Fair
1949
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

Wolfgang Suschitzky
Easter Fair, Hampstead Heath
1964
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

Wolfgang Suschitzky
Fair on Streatham Common, London
1976
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

Wolfgang Suschitzky
Rupert Street Market, Soho, London
1980
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Nineteen Fifties in Art (Tate)

Joseph Cornell
Planet Set, Tête Etoilée, Giuditta Pasta (dédicace)
1950
glass, crystal, paper, wood
Tate Gallery

"Joseph Cornell dedicated this work to the memory of the famous Italian singer Giuditta Pasta (1798-1865), noted especially for her roles in the operas of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti.  A lifelong bachelor, the artist had a very idealised attitude to women and set high among the objects of his adoration certain of the great prima donnas of the Romantic period such as Pasta and Maria Malibran, and ballerinas such as Fanny Cerrito, whose art, considered sublime by their contemporaries, is now sadly lost to us.  Pasta was one of those on whom Cornell assembled a dossier of engravings, articles and other related material, and to whom he dedicated works as an act of homage." 

Nigel Henderson
Stressed Photograph of a Bather
ca. 1950
photograph
Tate Gallery

Nigel Henderson
Stressed Photograph of a Bather
ca. 1950
photograph
Tate Gallery

"A pair of black and white photographs with the same title  both works are part of the series of distorted or 'stressed' images that Nigel Henderson produced in the early 1950s.  He explained that the process involved 'stretching and distorting the printing paper while enlarging, in order to stress a point or evoke an atmosphere.'  Both photographs show a male figure wearing striped swimming trunks standing with his hands on his hips on a beach at the sea's edge. At his feet is a pile of clothes. The two pictures, in fact, derive from one original negative, but one is reversed and each has been distorted to create different visual effects.  The original image used for the 'stressed' photographs of bathers did not derive from a picture taken by Henderson, but from a Victorian lantern slide.   In 1954 Henderson exhibited examples of his 'stressed' photographs at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, where French artist Jean Dubuffet saw them.  Dubuffet bought six for his own collection, and wrote to Henderson encouraging him to produce more in this vein.  The painter Francis Bacon also owned one of the 'stressed' images of male bathers, possibly received as early as 1950 as a gift from Henderson with whom he was friends."

Nigel Henderson
Wig Stall, Petticoat Lane
1952
photograph
Tate Gallery

"Wig Stall, Petticoat Lane is one of an extensive series of photographs of street scenes form London's East End that defines Nigel Henderson's output during the late 1940s to early 1950s.  In the immediate foreground of the composition is the market stall, its surface covered with packaging and the paraphernalia connected with the products on sale.  The middle ground is carefully grouped around five female heads.  Four of these are the heads of mannequins mounted on short poles, dressed in fashionable wigs.  Between them appears the fifth: a middle-aged woman who pauses to look at the wigs, her face caught in an impassive attitude.  The series demonstrates Henderson's fascination with the performative and transitory nature of the urban context.  He connected this interest to the sense of separation he experienced from the working-class neighbourhood in which he lived.  This sense of separation endowed the street scenes he encountered with a closed, ritualistic, unreal and theatrical quality, the meaning of which was far removed from his own experiences and background." 

Barbara Hepworth
Group I (Concourse) February 4 1951
1951
marble
Tate Gallery

"Hepworth said that this work was inspired by the interaction of people and architecture in the Piazza San Marco in Venice.  Each form bears 'a specific and absolute position in relation to the others'.  Her use of Serravazza marble, a quintessential classical material, is appropriate to such an Italianate source.  The artist associated white marble with the Mediterranean sun.  In fact, the base and the figures were all carved from a mantelpiece salvaged from her neighbour's house."

William Scott
Mackerel on a Plate
1951-52
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

"Scott became interested in painting realist still-lifes in the 1930s, often portraying the kitchen implements that he kept around his studio.  He considered his work to be influenced by the French still-life tradition, particularly the eighteenth-century artist Chardin.  As he developed, the objects became flatter, and later in the 1950s became abstract shapes."

Victor Willing
Standing Nude
ca. 1952-53
oil on panel
Tate Gallery

"Willing attended the Slade School of Art from 1949 to 1954, studying both sculpture and painting.  For both disciplines, much time was spent drawing and painting in the Slade School life room, where this work was executed.  At this time Willing was interested in the work of Giacometti and Bacon.  From Giacometti Willing learnt how to capture resemblance to the model by a painstaking concentration on perception, while from Bacon he learnt to seize the presence of the subject."

Wolfgang Suschitzky
Whitehall from Trafalgar Square
1953
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Drawing of figures moving boulders
1953
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Mario
1956
drawing
Tate Gallery

Jacques Lipchitz
Study for monument to The Spirit of Enterprise
1953
bronze statuette
Tate Gallery

"In 1950 Lipchitz was commissioned to contribute a work to an open-air collection of sculpture commemorating American history at Fairmount Park in Philadelphia.  This is a study for the five-metre-wide Spirit of Enterprise that resulted.  It shows a striding pioneer, bearing a caduceus (the ancient symbol of commerce), being led by an eagle."

Marc Riboud
The British Museum
1954
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

Peter Coker
Sheep's Head
1955
charcoal, watercolor and pastel
Tate Gallery

"In 1955 Coker began a series of paintings inspired by a butcher's shop near his home in the East End of London.  The drawing above was used as preparation for one of these paintings, Table and Chair, in which the lively and enquiring face of a child contrasts with the impassive face of the dead animal."   

René Burri
Suez Canal, Egypt, 1956
1956
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

"This image is part of a portfolio of twenty-seven prints, selected and compiled by Swiss photographer René Burri as a cohesive group shortly before his death in 2014.  The selection spans his sixty-year career and includes a number of his best-known black and white works as well as a group of lesser known colour works.  The portfolio was printed by Burri in 2014 and issued in an edition of five, plus one artist's proof."

 quoted passages based on notes by curators at the Tate in London

Nineteen Fifties Paintings (Tate)

Ivon Hitchens
Study for the mural painting at Cecil Sharp House, London
ca. 1950
oil, tempera and pastel on canvas
Tate Gallery

William Roberts
The Temptation of St Anthony
1950-51
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

Jesse Dale Cast
Miss Beatrice M Dale Cast
1950 and ca. 1964
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

from An English Garden in Austria (Seen after "Der Rosenkavalier")

. . . It was not thus that you sang, Farinelli!
By graver stages, up a sterner way,
You won to those fields the candelabra lit,
Paused there; sang, as no man since has sung –
A present and apparent deity – the pure
Impossible airs of Arcady: and the calm
Horsehair-wigged shepherds, Gods of the Arcadian
Academy, wept inextinguishable tears.

Such power has music; and the repeated spell
Once a day, at evening, opened the dull heart
Of old mad Philip; all his courtiers wept
And the king asked, weeping: "Why have I wept?"
And Farinelli sang on; Ferdinand
Buried his father, ruled –
                                         and heard, paused, heard again:
The years went on, men withered, Farinelli sang.

– Randall Jarrell (1950)

Carel Weight
The Rendezvous (Holland Park)
1953
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham
Composition February I
1954
oil on panel
Tate Gallery

Joseph Beuys
From the Life of the Bees
1954
watercolor
Tate Gallery

from More Fables from La Fontaine

Book Twelve
XVI
The Woods and the Woodman

A woodcutter had split or perhaps had mislaid
The axe-handle to which he had fitted the blade.
Replacing it meant that the man was delayed
And the forest was spared from which wood was conveyed.
            A suppliant then as his manner made plain,
            The man asked the woods to afford him again
            A branch, just one which he would take
            For one more haft which he would make,
And he would fell trees in a place further on,
Permitting oaks and pines to flourish where they'd grown,
Since everyone admired their vast height and fair form.
This was a service the woods did without alarm,
Followed by deep regret, since with his axe helved as before,
            The hard wretch slashed to the core,
            The very trees that had staunched his grief,
            Felling trunks he could barely span
            Although they groaned as their sap ran –
            Martyred to benefit a thief.
Ingrates are typical of our world everywhere –
Downright turncoats against him who made them his care.
I tire of laboring the point. Show me the kindly wood
            That has not known ingratitude
            And could not tell what I'm telling you.
Irony, alas, for one to argue long and hard.
            Ingratitude and violence too,
            Are evils nothing can retard.

– Marianne Moore (1954)

Alberto Giacometti
Portrait of Jean Genet
1954 or 1955
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

Terry Frost
Khaki and Lemon
1956
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

John Wells
Painting
1956
oil on panel
Tate Gallery

Edward Middleditch
Flowers, Chairs and Bedsprings
1956
oil on panel
Tate Gallery

from Corps de Ballet

But there is still the old sentimental balm
With which sneakingly to soothe ourselves: discerning
Posterity, improved from the present, will accord us
The vulgar plaudits we shun in our lifetime.

None can disprove it; which, as with all faiths,
Makes it as handy for corrupt as for holy uses,
Gives us leeway, as far as we let ourselves
Believe it, to go on plaiting hope
With more than one cheap strand of excuses
Which we know must rot soon and ruin the fabric.
While the truth of it is that time
Is the talent trusted to us for trying,
Our matter to be made, that takes our measure,
Tricks us out, our witness and sentence.

Watching us as we watch these dancers.
Our impatience they use to play against,
Take from it tension, which they turn to our pleasure;
By long study learn the arduous motions
Of grace, that can command our suspense,
How our breath can be baited with pure excellence,
Ourself stilled to the silly story.  For while we are here
We are their future; they have no other.
And though they grow weary in our entertainment,
Such ease they will feign as will convince us
That we are clement, made generous with enjoyment,
Our strength new and gentle, our motion glorious.

Yet only a few can our minds keep,
Later, when they have gone and the playing;
A few figures with that authority
Invade us that can move there still,
Themselves sharp, as though the clear light were still on them.
And what of the rest who blur already
Like features carved in the desert, but fading more quickly;
Who fall from us like sleeping or waking,
Their colours as snow, their limbs as dust drifting;
Who work hard as any, with less consolation,
Hope shrinking in many, surely, with chances shortening?
Well, from habit strong in them, or the love of it
They still divert us; at their truth we have assisted,
Been moved by the subdued music of a dedication
Which to lay ears must seem like a monotone.
Minded of that music, we may see again
Their motion's meaning, the grace of their labour.

– W.S. Merwin (1956)

Adrian Stokes
Olive Trees
1958
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

Michael Andrews
Study for a Man in a Landscape (Digswell)
1959
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

Kenneth Martin
Seventeen Lines
1959-63
oil on panel
Tate Gallery

Jack Smith
Figure in a Room I
1959
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

The Fountain

Her agitation suddenly stops.
The pumps that worked her have shuddered to their last stroke.
The water falls back into the pool at the base of the statue.
Lying for once quite still
It reflects the sky
The motionless marble horses
The shapes of trees nude or covered with leaves
The faces of women who lean to the water as to a primping-glass
The hands that dip to cool themselves or to break the ice-skim.
When it rains she feels blessed
Remembering the vigor and beauty of high white arcs crossing in sunlight
Streaming downward in wind
Far out to one side beyond the basin's rim
Splashing the dusty cobbles
The shoulders of passers-by
Obliterating the pattern of rain in the basin.
At night she cannot sleep
Thinking of the wide heavens whose lights bury themselves in her.
I take what I reflect to be part of myself.
She says it also of the jars that come to draw off her substance.

– Barbara Gibbs (1959)


Poems from the archives of Poetry (Chicago)