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An O'Keeffe Centenary

June 23, 2016, 4:51 am
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Georgia O'Keeffe, Drawing XIII, 1915, Metropolitan Museum of Art, copyright artist's estate.
A hundred years ago an unusual exhibition was held by photographer and impresario Alfred Stieglitz at 291 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. Previously Stieglitz had shown work by Picasso and Matisse, as well as pioneering American artists like John Marin and Arthur Dove, but the works on display this time were by an unknown artist. They were not paintings but charcoal drawings on paper. And the artist concerned only found out that they were being exhibited when a stranger came up to her in New York and asked her, wasn't she Virginia O'Keeffe, whose work was on display at Gallery 291?

So the well-known story goes, Georgia O'Keeffe had sent the drawings to a friend in New York, who had seen fit to show them to Stieglitz, who immediately displayed them. When the artist found out she furiously demanded they be taken down (according to legend, at least), and so began a long and often rather difficult relationship between this pair of driven individuals.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Drawing VIII, 1915, Whitney Museum of Art, copyright artist's estate.
I love the immediacy and simplicity of these drawings. In 1915 O'Keeffe was in a sort of artistic limbo, having been through the whole rigmarole of training in Chicago and New York before deciding that she didn't want to be the painter she had been taught to be, ie a realist with a French accent. So she trained to be an art teacher, and while teaching and studying at Columbia College, South Carolina, met Arthur Wesley Dow, exponent of a very different way of looking at the business of making pictures. This is from his 1899 book 'Composition' (with thanks to wikipedia):

Composition ... expresses the idea upon which the method here presented is founded - the "putting together" of lines, masses and colors to make a harmony. ... Composition, building up of harmony, is the fundamental process in all the fine arts. ... A natural method is of exercises in progressive order, first building up very simple harmonies ... Such a method of study includes all kinds of drawing, design and painting.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Drawing XX, 1915 National Gallery of Art (US), copyright artist's estate.
Another teacher was encouraging students to draw to different kinds of music, the aim again being to express the feelings and ideas that lay within, rather than focus on external things. Evidently stimulated by these methods, and with plenty of free time for experiment, O'Keeffe set to work. Having been a perfectly good painter of conventional subjects, she put her training aside and made compositions with charcoal that expressed something important to her. Feelings, mental images, personal visions.

It was the combination of intimacy and design that I think appealed to Stieglitz. Here was an artist working in a modern idiom, and an artist of a kind he had been particularly looking out for: a woman. With his encouragement, O'Keeffe became over the next few years a formidable modern artist. Then came the flowers...

Look out for the Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition this summer at Tate Modern, starts July 6.



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Coming soon! Angela Carter at RWA Bristol

June 30, 2016, 8:47 am
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Frontispiece to The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, by Corinna Sargood
An exhibition of artworks relating to the work of British fiction writer and all-round fabulous fabulist Angela Carter will be bringing some winter cheer/terror to Bristol art lovers this December. I understand that one of the contributors is Corinna Sargood, whose illustration work you might have seen in the book of fairy tales Carter edited for Virago in 1991.

There's some info on the exhibition here. 







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Century: 100 Modern British Artists

July 4, 2016, 2:08 am
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Dora Carrington, Iris Tree on a Horse, c1920s (Ingram Collection)

Monday got off to a good start with the press release for 'Century', the exhibition I'm curating at The Jerwood Gallery, Hastings, in October. Somehow I've managed to choose more than a hundred works, spanning a hundred years, by a hundred different artists - I hope it will be not only the most-wide ranging Modern British show in years but also an adventure in art - by turns funny and moving, quiet and boisterous, technically dazzling and delightfully simple.

I've chosen what I feel to be the strongest works from the Jerwood and Ingram Collections, focusing particularly on artists of historical importance and/or those who are well represented in one or both collections. I hope people will come away feeling that Modern British art is lively and fun.

Highlights of the exhibition include Dame Elisabeth Frink’s 'Walking Madonna', Sir Eduardo Paolozzi’s 1988 self-portrait sculpture, the delightful 'A Curious Cat' by Ruskin Spear RA and David Hockney’s 'My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean'. The show introduces artists as individuals, but also explores the movements and groups to which they belonged; with a room devoted to the Pop Art and collages of John Piper, Gerald Laing and Sir Anthony Caro.

Women artists are represented with works by Dame Laura Knight, Mary Fedden, Eileen Agar, Rose Wylie and Dod Procter given co-starring roles amongst the box office draws of Dame Elisabeth Frink and Dame Barbara Hepworth. In the case of Hepworth, her reputation is enjoying a renaissance and 'Century' gives Jerwood Gallery visitors a chance to see why.

'Century' also includes works drawn from local artists, as Jerwood Gallery Director Liz Gilmore explains: “We are particularly pleased to be displaying outstanding works by so many artists who lived and worked in East Sussex: including, John Armstrong, Frank Brangwyn, John Bratby, Edward Burra, Eric Gill and Eric Ravilious.”

The show ends with a room which is slightly crazy, which I hope will send people away with the feeling that they’ve had an adventure. It will feature Dora Carrington’s charming portrait 'Iris Tree on a Horse' realised in oil, ink, silver foil and mixed media on glass (see above).

'Century' opens at Jerwood Gallery, Hastings, in October. For further info, please contact the gallery.

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V&A #MUSEUMOFTHEYEAR Right Place, Wrong Time?

July 7, 2016, 6:15 am
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If I was a betting man I would have put a pony on the V&A winning Art Fund Museum of the Year 2016, a contest with only one likely victor, given that the stated criteria for the museum's success - a globally significant exhibition programme and major investment in the permanent display galleries - were ones in which the Arnolfini, York Art Gallery and the rest could not compete. According to a write-up in The Guardian, judges said that 'the sheer number of visitors to the V&A was impressive'. Again, no contest.

I don't wish to criticise either the V&A or the judges. I have great respect for the Art Fund as well, but something is not quite right here. It's all, well, a bit too London. It was fine when the British Museum won the award five years ago, but things were different then.

Over the intervening period regional museums have seen funding cut and cut again. In towns and cities around the country are museums staffed by absurdly small numbers of passionate individuals, who work against the odds to maintain collections and put on exhibitions. I've met numerous curators of small museums and they are universally helpful, positive and full of ideas for exhibitions and improvements. A thriving museum can offer so much, but no museum can thrive on idealism alone.

Given the voting pattern in the recent referendum, and the strong suggestion of an economic, cultural and political divide between the capital and the regions, I wonder whether any of the Art Fund judges suggested awarding the prize to an institution outside London - as a cultural olive branch, if nothing else. But then, how on earth would you justify not giving it to the resurgent V&A?

OK, I'll stop grumbling and accept that the best team won (been doing a lot of that lately). Besides, there is much to be learnt from the V&A's victory. Look at those numbers, first of all. Almost half a million people went to see the Alexander McQueen exhibition, which suggests that we are hungry for culture. That rogue one-man art corporation Banksy has shown more than once that people will travel a long way if you offer them something new or exciting enough - to Weston-super-Mare, even. It's up to curators everywhere to think creatively, break down boundaries between art, fashion and pop culture - and really put on a show.

PS If you like a flutter, I'd put my money on Tate Modern for next year's prize.

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Edward Bawden's Greenhouse

July 8, 2016, 12:44 am
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Edward Bawden, My vegetable love (aka The Greenhouse), 1932, Manchester Art Gallery (artist estate)

Cucumber plants fill a greenhouse, pressing so close together there is barely room to squeeze between them. Darkly veined, variegated and disorderly, they seem more alive than they ought to be, an impression enhanced by the contrast between the twisting plants and the pale, angular timbers of the greenhouse roof. Whereas the plants in Eric Ravilious’s later paintings of greenhouses seem to be trapped for ever in a particular moment, these cucumber plants appear to be growing before our eyes; at any moment they might burst out of the picture. Ravilious was, by his own admission, no gardener. Bawden, on the other hand, cared so passionately about horticulture that he rushed home from the Private View of his Zwemmer exhibition to unpack a parcel of plants sent to him by his old friend Cecilia Dunbar Kilburn. It was perhaps through his love for all things vegetable that he met Mr Clapson, the local market gardener who owned this greenhouse and tended these vigorous cucumber plants.

This is an extract from 'The Lost Watercolours of Edward Bawden', coming soon from The Mainstone Press.

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Edward Bawden: Larchwood

July 16, 2016, 10:07 am
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Edward Bawden, Larchwood, 1933-5, Graves Sheffield (artist copyright)

Looking through his friend’s new work in the early summer of 1935, Ravilious was struck by its freshness, and this may well have been one of the pictures Bawden carefully pinned up for him to enjoy. The motif of the lane disappearing enigmatically into the woods is one that has attracted numerous modern artists of a Romantic disposition, from Paul Nash to David Hockney. Bawden’s treatment of the subject is extraordinary, the palette colourful but crisp and the woodland to the right veiled in diaphanous scratched lines which suggest shadow and mystery without attempting to represent directly the dim space beyond the trees.

As so often with Bawden, the originality of the painting lies in his uncanny ability to communicate graphically both the appearance of a place and his feelings. Across the lane – probably looking south from Beslyns [near Great Bardfield]– the bare trees face one another, hinting in their pallor at the lances borne so decoratively by the knights in Paulo Uccello’s celebrated painting ‘The Battle of San Romano’ (1438–40).

This is an excerpt from 'The Lost Watercolours of Edward Bawden', out soon from The Mainstone Press.
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Hiding Out in the English Countryside: Geoffrey Household & Samuel Palmer

September 27, 2016, 2:02 pm
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David Rooney, illustration for 'Rogue Male' by Geoffrey Household, Folio Soc, 2013 Whenever I investigate an artist described as Neo-Romantic I discover that they either a. disliked the term or b. vehemently rejected it. Was there anyone who actually wanted to be thought of as Neo-Romantic, in the way that artists queued up to be labelled Surrealist? I'm not sure it's a very helpful term
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Tirzah Garwood & Peggy Angus in the ODNB

October 7, 2016, 4:17 am
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Tirzah Garwood by Duffy Ayers, 1944 Earlier this year I wrote entries for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography on two remarkable women: Peggy Angus and Tirzah Garwood. The former was born in Chile to ex-patriot Scottish parents, then raised in Muswell Hill, London. She won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in the early 1920s and there met Eric Ravilious, who in turn met Tirzah
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'Century' at Jerwood: John Piper

October 10, 2016, 3:17 am
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John Piper, Beach and Starfish, Seven Sisters, mixed media, 1933-4 (Jerwood Collection) Like many British artists of his generation Piper was inspired from an early age by places – rather than people – and here he has used the avant-garde medium of collage to bring the venerable British genre of coastal painting up to date. Look carefully and you can see how cleverly he has combined paint and
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'Century' at Jerwood / Bowie at Sotheby's

November 7, 2016, 12:03 am
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Century: 100 Modern British Artists from Jerwood Gallery on Vimeo. The twentieth century was an exciting time for British artists. Inspired both by the revolutionary art movements of continental Europe and by deeply-ingrained insular traditions, painters and sculptors explored the world around them in thrilling new ways. At a time when photography, film and TV threatened to make traditional art
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'The Lost Watercolours' is an Art Book of the Year!

November 27, 2016, 11:51 pm
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Lovely to see 'The Lost Watercolours of Edward Bawden' featured as one of the Art Books of the Year in The Sunday Times yesterday. You can read what Michael Prodger had to say about the book here, though the website is subscription-only... The book is more expensive than most art books but the cover price reflects the fact that it's a limited edition of 850 copies. Anyway it's cheaper than a
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Powell and Pressburger: 'Gone to Earth'

December 13, 2016, 1:10 am
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If you ignore Jennifer Jones's curious accent and a fairly creaky plot, this is a bit of a classic. As with more famous P&P outings like 'I Know Where I'm Going', the characters are strongly drawn, the dialogue snappy. And the sense of place is as powerful as you'd expect, both on the large scale - the landscape is breathtaking - and the small. The interiors are awesome, from the lowly cottage
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Reasons to be cheerful...

March 20, 2017, 2:12 am
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Edward Bawden, Gnat and Lion, linocut, 1970 (copyright EB estate) It's been a long winter. This has never been a particularly personal blog, but there may be people out there wondering why I haven't posted much over the past six months. The main reason (aside from habitual laziness) is that my mother has been struggling with a severe (but curable) mental illness, which has been harrowing for
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Angie Lewin: A Printmaker's Journey

April 15, 2017, 6:41 am
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Angie Lewin, Lakeside Teasels (artist copyright) I feel slightly embarrassed to admit that I have never been to Winchester. But then I suppose there are far more places I haven't been to than places I have. Anyway, I'm hoping to put things right, Winchester-wise, by paying a visit to Angie Lewin's exhibition at Winchester Discovery Centre. I've been meaning to go since it opened, but now I've
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Paula Rego in Hastings? It's up to us!

April 19, 2017, 8:47 am
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As director of the Jerwood Gallery for its first five years, Liz Gilmore has demonstrated ambition, courage and a refreshing willingness to speak directly to the public. A couple of years ago her 'Bring us your Bratbys' appeal had people queuing up to lend their paintings to an exhibition that was, I suspect, much more popular and widely discussed than anyone imagined beforehand. It seems
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A Secret Artist

April 26, 2017, 10:11 am
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Roger Cecil, Untitled 1 (MOMA Machynlleth, copyright artist estate) One of my great pleasures is to find an artist I know nothing about. Come to think of it, I also enjoy helping other people discover artists they might not otherwise know. Once I was at Bristol Central Library, home of one of the country's best (and probably least used) non-university art libraries, and asked to see all the
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Room and Book: Mark Hearld's Lumber Room

May 16, 2017, 2:17 am
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The Lumber Room, York Art Gallery, photo by Jonty Wilde from Random Spectacular website Some time last year I was up North and went to have a look at the revamped York Art Gallery. I hadn't visited the city since 1980-something and my abiding memories are of wet cobblestones and of climbing up a drainpipe to visit a friend who was incarcerated in a boarding school. Who? Where? Why? All gone...
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Secret Postcard Auction at RWA Bristol

May 19, 2017, 12:01 am
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Yes is that's time of year again. The RWA's ever popular Secret Postcard Auction is next Thursday (25 May). They're not really postcards, since each work is more like A5 size, but the identity of each artist IS a closely-guarded secret. Well I certainly spotted a few pieces made by a familiar hand - artists whose larger paintings sell for thousands - so if you're in Bristol this weekend go
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Bawden! Bawden! Bawden!

September 27, 2017, 1:36 am
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Edward Bawden, Brighton Pier, 1958, (detail) Linocut on paper, Trustees of the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery (The Higgins Bedford), © Estate of Edward Bawden So here is my excuse for not posting in months... Major Edward Bawden show to bring unseen works into the spotlight 23 May - 9 September 2018 In summer 2018 Dulwich Picture Gallery will present a major retrospective of work by the
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20th Century Treasures at Towner

September 27, 2017, 2:08 am
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Christopher Wood, PZ 134, 1930 (Towner) On 15 October I'll be at Towner, Eastbourne, giving a talk as part of the snazzy and up-to-the-minute Ink, Paper + Print fair. I'll be taking a personal and (I hope) entertaining look at the Towner's remarkable collection of twentieth century art - principally paintings - and I'm looking forward to it. Thanks in part to the generosity of gallerist Lucy
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