THE "JEWISH MARK" IN ENGLISH PAINTING

Wolff, J. (2003) ‘The “Jewish Mark” in English Painting: Cultural Identity and Modern Art’.

This is a personal summary of Chapter 6 of the book by Janet Wolff:  AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press.  Pp159-167

The Chapter is entitled ‘The “Jewish Mark” in English Painting: Cultural Identity and Modern Art’.

In the early Twentieth Century in England to be English was, among other things, to be not Jewish

In England at the start of the Twentieth Century it was believed that some Jewish quality might be detected in a work of art.  Wolff quotes the memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell in which she writes of the paintings of Mark Gertler in 1914: ‘In those early days there was still the Jewish tradition, the Jewish mark, which gave them a fine, almost archaic quality’.

Social historians have shown that at this time Englishness was defined by that which it was not; to be English was, among other things, to be not Jewish.   Wolff focusses on the end of the Nineteenth Century and the start of the subsequent Century. 

The Jew is the archetypal ‘Other’

The 1986 work by Colls and Dodd - ‘Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880-1920’ - is seminal.  The redefinition of England during the forty years that are the subject of the book had implications for England that continue to be relevant at the start of the Twenty-first Century. 

In his work of 1978 ‘Culture, Ideology and Social Process’ Davies showed that literature was important for the formation of national identity in England in the late Nineteenth Century.  ‘Standard English’ and English literature provided a binding agent in the face of social divisions. 

In his ‘Englishness and the National Culture’ in Colls and Dodd’s 1986 work, Dodd argues that in the late Nineteenth Century two specific groups that were marginalised and at the same time invited to participate in Englishness were the working class and the Irish, Scots and Welsh (‘the Celts’).  These groups had been initially identified as excluded from the dominant culture.  

Englishness ‘is not so much a category as a relationship’ that thrives on the identification of enemies both within and without.  The Jew is the archetypal ‘Other’.

The Jew was always in an intermediate state between exclusion and inclusion

Wolff’s main concern is the discourse of art critics about Jewish artists and their work. 

Between 1880 and 1914 large numbers of Jewish people from Eastern Europe settled in Britain.  The 1905 Aliens Act was intended to reduce Jewish immigration.  Amongst other pressure for this legislation was that from Jews who were well-settled in Britain and who were fearful of ‘less respectable’ Jews from rural Eastern Europe.  Reference is made to works by Feldman and Stedman of 1989 and 1994 in which Feldman explores the extent to which it would have been possible in early Twentieth Century England for Jewish people to ‘become English’ in this era.  He concludes that the ‘new immigration’ made it more likely that the Jew would be regarded as ‘the necessary other in the construction of Englishness’ and that it was this immigration from Eastern Europe that provided the ‘ideal alien for the construction of Englishness’. 

In his work of 1993 ‘Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations 1875-1945’ Cheyette has shown that in English literature of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century ‘the Jew’ is not a fixed figure and is one that signifies ‘protean instability’.  Thus in the necessity of Englishness to define itself against alien groups, ‘the Jew’ was always in an intermediate state between exclusion and inclusion. 

A parallel issue is to ask how Englishness is manifest ‘in the discourse of the visual’.  Pevsner’s work of 1955 ‘The Englishness of English Art’ has been regarded as the starting point for this.  Wolff shows that by 1975 Pevsner’s defining characteristics of the English – climate and language – had been redefined by David Piper for British art in his ‘The Genius of British Painting’ as the island nature of Britain.  Both Pevsner and Piper assert that ‘linearity’ is a defining characteristic of English art.  Piper compares English light with Mediterranean light: the former is ‘more hazy’, and consequently the painterly qualities of the art of Mediterranean cultures become more linear in English painters’ works. 

Wolff reviews a number of authors and he observes that, whilst the concepts of both ‘Englishness’ and ‘English art’ have changed over time – before and after the end of the 19^th Century -  a constant has been the pre-eminence of landscape painting depicting an essentially southern English scene as typifying Englishness in art.  Thus, Wolff argues that discourse on the visuality of Englishness also depends on a dynamic of exclusion, with ‘the Other’ being ‘the northern English’ or ‘the French’ or ‘the Celts’.

Wolff asserts that in the early Twentieth Century ‘the Jew’ was the paradigm of ‘the Other’, and that whilst we may read anti-Semitism in this, many Jewish people ‘colluded in this belief in ethnicity as a foundation for art-making’. 

Jewish acceptance of the paradigm of the Other

Wolff describes three occasions of Jewish acceptance of the paradigm.  Wolff’s interest is in the texts that ‘position the Jewish artist (and his work) as Other as part of the project of (negatively) producing an English identity’. 

The first occasion of Jewish acceptance of the paradigm of ‘the Other’ is the curating by David Bomberg of a special room devoted to the work of Jewish artists in an exhibition in 1914 at London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery.   The second occasion is Mark Gertler’s apparent acceptance as a complement of D H Lawrence’s statement to him about his 1916 painting ‘The Merry go Round’ that “It would take a Jew to paint this picture”.  The third occasion is the Jewish Chronicle’s description of Jacob Epstein’s sculpture as “entirely Hebraic” at a time when non-Jewish critics used this formula to serve anti-semitism.

Wolff notes that the ‘Jewishness of art’ was still being referred to in the mid-1980s by Frederick Gore, writing of Gertler’s early work in ‘British Art in the Twentieth Century: The Modern Movement’ (ed. S Compton, London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1986).  

The complementary position of the ‘quest for Jewish style’

The complementary position is the ‘quest for Jewish style’ referred to by Avram Kampf in his ‘Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in Twentieth Century Art’ (London, Barbican Art Gallery / Lund Humphries, 1990).  

Wolff notes that Kampf reviews Russian writers of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries who discussed the ‘quest for Jewish style’.  The focus moved from ‘aesthetic characteristics’ (particularly ‘realism’) in the Nineteenth Century to ‘content’ so that Chagall typifies the latter focus.  By the time of the Revolution in Russia, ‘realism’ has been displaced by the ‘avant garde’.  Kampf concludes that by 1922 the notion of ‘an essentially “Jewish” art’ had faded.  

Milly Heyd and Ezra Mendelsohn’s ‘”Jewish” Art?  The Case of the Soyer Brothers’ (Jewish Art 19-20 [1993-94], 196) – which does not address English or British art - concludes that ‘one can only describe the work as Jewish in the particular sense that much of it contains themes related to Jewish life, including the artists’ own ambivalence with regard to their heritage’. 

Wolff concludes that in English art the ‘”ideology of Jewishness” is founded on a generic conception of Jewishness’, which means that this same ideology – this search for the ‘Hebraic’ – this search for the “Jewish mark” - could take place anywhere else in the world.  But critical analysis easily deconstructs this approach so that one must enquire instead about the “Jewishness” of each individual work of art.

The art-critical language employed of Jewish artists in England in the 1910s

On this basis Wolff will enquire into the ‘art-critical language employed of Jewish artists in England in the 1910s’.  Subject matter and style were the two main reasons for describing a work as ‘Jewish’.  Styles that led to this attribution were ‘primitivism’, ‘modernism’ or ‘being foreign’.  The aspect of subject matter was ‘less ideologically weighted’.  ‘Family life’ and ‘traditional Jewish themes’ were often the subject matter of Jewish artists in England in the early Twentieth Century.

Jacob Kramer

The artist Jacob Kramer (1892 – 1962) is discussed by Wolff.  He was born in Ukraine and came to Britain at the age of eight.  Kramer was a student at the Slade School of Art and subsequently worked in Leeds.  Much of his work depicted Jewish life including religious practices.  ‘Day of Atonement’ (1919) shows Kramer’s participation in modernism – specifically vorticism.  The most straightforward reason why the painting was described as ‘Jewish’ is its subject-matter: it shows ‘the rhythm of prayer in the repetition of the human figure’. 

Mark Gertler

Mark Gertler (1891-1939) was born in England and spent part of his early childhood in Galicia, returning to East London at the age of five.  Like Kramer, he also attended the Slade and, again like Kramer, his early work showed traditional Jewish themes.   Lady Ottoline’s comment about Gertler was made in 1914: her comment (‘in those early days there was still the Jewish tradition, the Jewish mark, which gave them a fine, almost archaic quality’) seems to be about style as much as about content. 

In 1915 Gertler abandoned subject matter ‘drawn from Jewish life’. 

D. H. Lawrence’s remark (“It would take a Jew to paint this picture”, which Gertler took as a complement) is problematic.  ‘The Merry go Round’ (1916) is one of the first of Gertler’s paintings not to deal with Jewish themes.  ‘The painting is a comment on the futility as well as the horror of war’.  Lawrence begins by stating his belief that there must be a dichotomy between Gertler’s outer life, and his inner life ‘which must be a “violent maelstrom of destruction and horror”’.  Lawrence then suggests that Gertler’s national history – stated by Lawrence to be a long history of over 3000 years that is much longer than Christian history - must have sustained him to enable him to reach the apex of ‘The Merry go Round’ which is both ‘great and true’ and ‘horrible, terrifying and obscene’.  Lawrence suggests that the Jewish race is dying and that ‘The Merry go Round’ – and other paintings like it – are its death cry.   Wolff considers that Lawrence’s focus on the ‘archaic qualities of “Jewishness”’ is similar to other descriptions of Jewish paintings as ‘primitive’.  The most significant example concerns Jacob Epstein. 

Jacob Epstein

The work of the sculptor Jacob Epstein (1880-1959) is documented by Elizabeth Barker. Epstein was born in the USA and grew up in New York City’s Lower East Side: he studied at the Art Students League.  He moved to Britain in 1905 and he remained in London for the rest of his life.  ‘Epstein was the first truly modernist sculptor in Britain’. 

Epstein’s work was criticised for its ‘obscenity’ and its ‘uncompromising anti-naturalism’.  Barker shows that this hostility was directed at Epstein’s Jewishness.  In 1912 Epstein visited Paris and was influenced by African and tribal art that he saw there.  Barker shows that the ‘racializing of this discourse’ (ie. art criticism) increased after 1917.  Barker has noted that a 1925 review of Epstein’s work described his ‘primitivist style’ as “an atavistic yearning of like for like”.   Barker states that a 1933 history of English sculpture omitted Epstein because his ‘ancestry and early environment go far to explain his art’ which was described as ‘essentially oriental’: Epstein was ‘with us but not of us’. 

The response to Epstein’s sculpture ‘Risen Christ’ of 1917-1919, which was exhibited in 1920, exemplifies the equation that was made between Epstein’s primitivist-modernist style and his Jewishness.  Wolff writes that the sculpture was intended as a personal memorial to the First World War and was an allegory of suffering.  Barker’s view is that the sentiment underlying criticism of the work was the principle that Jews had no right to portray Christ.   Barker writes that ‘Risen Christ’ was ‘a direct challenge to the moral and aesthetic values native to contemporary Christian art’.  Barker sums up the values that Epstein’s work was alleged to embody as: ‘”archaic”; “barbaric”; “Oriental”; “Egyptian”; “aesthetic”; and “revolutionary”’.  These ‘signify the otherness of Epstein’s Christ’, ‘offering a counter-image to the gentle divinity of Christian conventions’.  Barker refers to sensationalist and exaggerated criticism in the press.  In one example she quotes, the ‘“degenerate” racial characteristics of Epstein’s figure … suggested “some degraded Chaldean or African, which wore the appearance of an Asiatic-American or Hun-Jew, or a badly grown Egyptian swathed in the cerements of the grave’.

Wolff’s aim is to highlight particular instances ‘in this critical historical period’ (ie. the end of the Nineteenth Century and the start of the subsequent Century) that indicate the process of racial or ethnic exclusion that is necessary to construct ‘Englishness’: ‘Jewishness is invoked in art criticism’ …. ‘in such a way as to reinforce its obverse, namely ‘Englishness’.  

David Bomberg

The artist David Bomberg (1890-1957) curated the Jewish section of an exhibition in the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1914.  Bomberg’s parents emigrated from Poland to Britain and David Bomberg was born in Birmingham.  The family moved to Whitechapel, London in 1895 and Bomberg studied at the Slade School of Art.

In the period until 1913 Bomberg painted ‘Jewish themes (biblical as well as secular scenes from daily Jewish life)’.  His most radical work from this time is ‘Ju-Jitsu’ of 1913, which ‘verges on the entirely abstract’.  In the 1914 exhibition Bomberg included some of his own works including ‘Vision of Ezekiel’ of 1912 which shows stylized figures, ‘Ju-Jitsu’, and the abstract ‘In the Hold’ of 1913-1914. 

Wolff discusses the manner in which the necessary identification of ‘the other’ in order to maintain a definition of Englishness applied not only to ‘Jewishness’ but also to ‘modernism’.  The 1914 Whitechapel exhibition led to the equation that Jewishness in art equals the avant garde: Wolff shows (after Steyn) that this equation was as distorted as the notion that Jewishness had no place in art in England.  But in the case of the 1914 Whitechapel exhibition, the hostile critics’ identification of modernist and Jewish was correct, and Bomberg was the artist who embodied the connection. 

Wolff concludes that in the years immediately before the outbreak of the First World War, the search for ‘the Jewish mark’ had progressed to the point at which it was no longer to be found in subject matter that was alien to the English pastoral idyll but was now to be seen in ‘the very different equation of Jewish-foreign (in this case continental European) – modernist – a triple formulation which produced “Englishness” as both visual realism and ethnic purity’.

Conclusion

Wolff concludes by suggesting ways in which the circumstances of individual Jewish artists in England in the 1900s and 1910s may be relevant to interpretation of their work.

Wolff considers Rosenberg’s 1966 article: ‘Is there a Jewish art?’ – see in this blog 14^th October 2014.  Wolff asserts Rosenberg’s conclusion that there is no Jewish art in terms of a specific style.  Wolff also asserts Rosenberg’s statement that in the Twentieth Century concern about identity - within the great displacement of populations that has taken place - has been the setting that has stimulated Jewish artists, and that this ‘has constituted a new art by Jews which, though not a Jewish art, is a profound Jewish expression’.  Wolff concludes that the displacement of people ‘moving from one class into another, from one national context into another’ is a potentially useful way to discuss the work of Jewish artists of the end of the Nineteenth Century and the start of the subsequent Century and is, indeed, the only way to talk about ‘the Jewish mark’.

All four artists – Kramer, Gertler, Epstein and Bomberg – were in the avant-garde of modernist experimentation in England.  These were ‘Jewish men from immigrant, working class or lower middle class backgrounds’.  They had all had ‘a particular training in art, a relatively easy cosmopolitanism and a clear position of marginality within contemporary British society, together with its correlate, a certain detachment from that sense of “Englishness” which was both entrenched and in the process of being re-formulated’.   Many Jewish artists in England at the same time had similar backgrounds, and all had to come to terms with their own heritage and their changing attitudes to the role of Judaism in their lives.  These influences manifested themselves in these artists’ work.  

LEWIS BALTZ: OBITUARY

Lewis Baltz: Obituary

This is a personal summary of the obituary of Lewis Baltz who was born on 12 September 1945 and who died on 22 November 2014. 

The obituary, by Sean O’Hagan, was published in The Guardian on 6^th December 2014.

Lewis Baltz: Obituary

Baltz grew up in Newport Beach, California.  He graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969.  He considered himself to have always been an artist: he considered photography to be the best way of making a visual record.  His works ‘echoed and criticised the soullessness of urban planning and the corporate rationale that lay behind it’.  His photographs contributed to the redefining of American landscape photography in the early 1970s. 

His aesthetic was minimalist and dispassionate.  It ‘drew on contemporary art practice and rejected the romanticism of traditional landscape photography’.  The style was known as the ‘New Topographics movement’.  Particular concerns were the spread of the city into wilderness and the anonymity of suburbs.

A significant exhibition of the work of Baltz and seven of his peers was held in Rochester, New York, in 1975: ‘New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape’.  Compared with the other photographers’ work, Baltz’s work ‘was the most stark, his subject matter the most ordinary: concrete walls, garages, vast industrial warehouses, metal fire escapes, anonymous buildings, an absence of people’.  Baltz produced a series of photobooks in the late 1960s and early 1970s that typified his minimalism. 

The publication in 1975 by the Leo Casteli gallery of Baltz’s ‘The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California’ ‘signalled the artist’s entry into the conceptual art world’.  In the late 1980s Baltz moved to Europe where his work was identified alongside the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher (see the entry in this blog of 6^th November 2014) and the Dusseldorf School.  The Bechers had been the only European photographers included in the ‘New Topographics’ exhibition of 1975.   Baltz was now working in colour, and making large-scale prints.  This led to a fascination with digital technology and its use in surveillance.  In 1992 the ‘Ronde de Nuit’ installation at the Pompidou Centre in Paris presented the subject of surveillance.

Baltz is recorded as having said: ‘I didn’t want to have a style.  I wanted (my work) to look as mute and as distant as to appear to be as objective as possible, but of course it’s not objective’.  O’Hagan observes that this is the essence of the power of Baltz’s work. 

ASKING THE UNANSWERABLE QUESTION: THE PROJECT OF HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL. GODFREY ON NEWMAN'S STATIONS OF THE CROSS

Asking the unanswerable question: the project of Holocaust memorial

Godfrey M. (2007). Barnett Newman’s ‘The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’, from Abstraction and the Holocaust. 

This is a personal summary of the article by Godfrey. M. (2007) ‘Barnett Newman’s The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’, from Abstraction and the Holocaust.  New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, pp51-77.

Godfrey shows that this series of fifteen works (‘The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’) by Newman was intended to compel the viewer to consider the question posed by the Holocaust: ‘Why did you forsake me?’

The compromised position of the post-Holocaust Jewish intellectual

In 1953 Morros Louis exhibited a series of paintings in Washington entitled ‘Charred Journal: Firewritten’. 

In 1954 Barnett Newman gave one of his paintings the title ‘White Fire I’.  Newman then painted three further ‘White Fire’ paintings, the last in 1968.  Godfrey asks whether these four paintings by Newman have a strong connection with each other and their titles in the manner of the Louis works.

Early analyses of the Louis works paid no attention to Jewish mythology but in the first account of the Newman works after that artist’s death, Thomas Hess described the Newman ‘White Fire’ series in terms of Kabbalistic texts.  Godfrey is sceptical of Hess’ ‘non-Greenbergian approach’ to Newman and his lack of depth of critical analysis.  In 1995 Newman’s widow - Annalee Newman  - asserted that although her late husband used Kabbalistic titles for some of his works, this was only for their poetic effect and had no deeper significance.

But Godfrey wants to explore further the titles of Newman’s four ‘White Fire’ works.  At the least, the titles show Newman’s identification with ‘Jewish religious and literary traditions’: this was a public statement by Newman who was also ready to assert himself in the public realm in ways other than art.  But a series of incidents in the 1960s show that Newman’s assertion of his Jewishness was ‘far from straightforward’.

In 1965 New York’s Jewish Museum held a symposium entitled ‘What about Jewish art?’  Prior to this event Newman had had a warm relationship with the museum, but three days after Newman attended the symposium he wrote a highly critical letter to its Director asserting that the symposium had compromised him as an artist because he was Jewish.  Newman then severed all ties with the museum. 

The notes for the speeches at the symposium indicate that all the speeches of those on the panel resisted the title of the symposium.  There is no record of any other aspect of the event. 

Godfrey writes that the symposium took place at a time when art historians and critics desired to ‘proclaim the category ‘Jewish art’’ as a response to the destruction of Jewish culture in the Second World War and subsequent claims that Jewish culture did not exist.  But Newman made the counter-claim – that Jewish art should not be specified as a category.  Godfrey writes that Newman feared ‘the risk of pigeon-holing his work’ within the ‘Jewish art category’.

Nevertheless, five years after Newman’s death his works were included in the 1975 exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum entitled ‘Jewish experience in the art of the Twentieth Century’.  The curator – Avram Kampf – wrote, of Newman’s work in the show: ‘if there were a Jewish art, Newman’s work would be regarded as its most authentic and classic expression’. 

Despite the episode with the New York Jewish Museum, Newman continued to show interest in Jewish culture by signing declarations in support of Jewish existence and identity in Israel and the USSR.   Throughout the late 1960s Newman continued to title his works with ‘Kabbalistic phrases such as ‘Voice of Fire’ (1967) and Biblical names such as ‘Jericho’ (1968-69)’. 

Godfrey asks what we are to make of Newman’s contradictory assertions. 

He writes that although Newman’s actions might be regarded as the ‘idiosyncratic behaviour of the strong minded and obstinate artist’, they should more accurately be understood as ‘the compromised position of the post-Holocaust Jewish intellectual’.  Godfrey sees that a series of conflicting impulses led Newman to swing backwards and forwards as he sought to maintain control of his identity: ‘”yes” to Jewish intellectual-artist-architect’; “yes” to scholar; “no” to maker of Jewish art’. 

The work of Newman as a ‘post-Holocaust Jewish subject’

We may therefore consider the artist Barnet Newman as a ‘post-Holocaust Jewish subject’ in the aftermath of war.

Godfrey writes that the Holocaust and Hiroshima would have been both too painful and too obvious to address explicitly by Newman and his contemporaries.   In 2002, at a symposium in Philadelphia, Benjamin Buchloh referred to Newman’s ‘skinny paintings’ of 1950: he advanced the view that Newman’s abstract style is an acknowledgement of the ‘impossibilities of lyric painting in the wake of the Holocaust’.   A number of sources lead Godfrey to suggest that Newman understood his works of the 1960s as his recollections about the impossibilities of painting during the War and the necessity to reject all styles in painting that pre-date the Holocaust.  But Godfrey acknowledges that this approach does not help us to distinguish the processes behind Newman’s works of the late 1940s such as ‘Onement’, from his works of the 1950s and 1960s. 

Godfrey argues that the titles that Newman gave to his works indicate that he was concerned with origins and ‘what it meant to begin art again after Auschwitz and Hiroshima’ (titles such as ‘Genesis’ and ‘The Beginning’) and he acknowledges that a further question needs to be asked about Newman: ‘Were all his works equivalent parts of this response?’ 

In particular, Godfrey asks whether the series ‘The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’ specifically addresses the meaning of the memory of the Holocaust?  This series of works by Newman was exhibited at the Guggenheim between April and June 1966.  Godfrey will show that this series is intended to compel the viewer to consider the question posed by the Holocaust: ‘Why did you forsake me?’

The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani

Godfrey then introduces this series of works that Newman painted between 1958 and 1966: it comprises a total of fifteen paintings, fourteen of which are six and a half feet high by five feet wide.  The fifteenth painting is slightly larger and is the only one that contains any colour: the previous fourteen are all done in black and white.

By 1961 four of the paintings had been completed, and in this year Newman is recorded to have come to understand what he was doing: that these were to be the first of a series of works, and the whole series would be entitled in such a way that it would have public significance. 

Godfrey describes these four paintings – ‘First Station’, ‘Second Station’, ‘Third Station’ and ‘Fourth Station’.  He observes that these paintings are ‘calibrated to the size of the (human) body’: each one of ‘around the breadth of an arm span’.  These four paintings do not contain Newman’s previous handling of colour, and instead they employ a limited palette of greys, blacks and raw canvas.  Newman is recorded as having stated that the white line in ‘Fourth Station’ was understood by him as ‘a cry’, and that the whole series would be the Passion of Christ.

Godfrey observes that Newman could have interpreted the cry as that of Adam or Abraham or the Psalmist, but Newman explicitly understood the cry to be the cry of Christ’s Passion.   Godfrey asserts that although Newman was not specific about his meaning, ‘through the title (of the series) Newman was able to partake in an established metaphor that had been used to address the suffering of Jews and other groups under Nazism for almost thirty years’.

Christological Symbolism and the Holocaust

Ziva Amishai-Maisels has written extensively on the subject in his Christological Symbolism of the Holocaust. 

In 1933 the German artist Otto Panok painted ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’  In this work Christ is painted with the features of the artist’s friend Karl Schwesig who had been assaulted by the SS in 1933 for being a Communist and actively anti-Fascist.  Later Panok painted Christ with explicitly Jewish features.  Artists employed the Crucifixion in order to engage with current events. 

At the liberation of the Nazi death camps one photographer’s composition has the outstretched arms of a corpse ‘spread vertically down the plane of the photograph, like a bright white band against a grey ground’ – an image that prompted the artist Harold Paris to continue to use the metaphor of the Passion of Christ.  It is not known if this photograph was known to Americans at the end of the War.  In 1945 Newman had written about ‘the photographs of the German atrocities’ and he had criticised surrealist artists for failing to respond to the Holocaust.

Chagall’s ‘White Crucifixion’ (1938) was widely known in the USA: it was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition of 1946.  Some American critics did not acknowledge as significant   Chagall’s presentation of the crucified Christ surrounded by burning synagogues and scenes of destruction in the shtetl.  Most critics however, including Harold Rosenburg and Herbert Howarth, did understand the significance: ‘in the European Holocaust Jewry has undergone a new mass crucifixion’. 

American Jewish artists used Christological symbolism in the 1940s, and Amishai-Maisels writes that by the late 1950s this had become a mannerism, although its use continued in the early 1960s at the time of the Eichmann trial.

In the 1940s Christological symbolism for the Holocaust was also being used in the USA by writers: this was continuing in the early 1960s at the time of the Eichmann trial.  Eichmann referred to himself at his trial as Pontius Pilate.  Godfrey writes, quoting in part from Hannah Arendt in the New Yorker: ‘The Holocaust posed the unanswerable question of human suffering, and the idea of Christ’s Passion (the single moment when he posed that question), could be used to address the Holocaust’. 

Newman did not directly relate his ‘Stations of the Cross’ to the Holocaust, but in an interview in 1966 Newman spoke about his admiration for Matthias Grunewald’s Isenheim altarpiece.  Newman stated that the Isenheim altarpiece is significant because the artist, who was making the altarpiece for a hospital for syphilitics, portrayed Christ as himself being syphilitic.  Newman seems to have been affirming the importance of the Christian narrative as a means of addressing the most pressing concern about human suffering in his own time. 

Newman also alluded to the scale of human suffering in the world in 1966, and he suggested that current suffering exceeded the suffering of Jesus Christ on the cross; the Holocaust was not specifically mentioned by him.  These comments were excised from the interview as presented in the public domain and no similar assertions were made when the ‘Stations of the Cross’ series was exhibited.  The ‘specificity’ of these comments was probably seen to be a greater problem than possible accusations of blasphemy.  When ‘Stations of the Cross’ was exhibited, statements tended instead to the universal. 

Asking the unanswerable question

20^th April 1966 was the opening date of ‘Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’ at the Guggenheim.

The question posed by Godfrey is: ‘How did the paintings themselves and their arrangement contribute to Newman’s ambition to make of his viewers the subjects ask “the unanswerable question”?’

The arrangement of the works in the gallery forced the viewer to be close to the paintings: this was Newman’s intention.  The person standing before the works would have been drawn to concentrate on the differences between the paintings and the methods of making them: ‘the intensity of process’.

In the catalogue statement Newman wrote that the series was not the ‘terrible walk’ of the Via Dolorosa, but the ‘question that has no answer’: not a series of events but the one event of Jesus Christ uttering ‘Lema’. 

But how could a series of works embody a single moment?

The successive arrangement would have meant that as the viewer moved from one work to the next, the two works most recently seen would be the reference point for the one about to be encountered.   Anticipation and memory between the various works would have held all of the works together at once in the viewer’s mind.

Prior to 1966 Newman had stated that to view one of his works enabled a person to have ‘a sense of their own scale’.   Newman had also asserted the distinctiveness of places.  Newman wrote: ‘Some places are more sacred than others, and that depends, it seems to me, on the quality of the work of art, on its uniqueness, on its rigor’. 

Godfrey asserts that the manner of display of the ‘Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’ in the Guggenheim and the appearance of the last six works in the series ‘confirmed the specific kind of place that this was: a place of loss’.  By the ‘Eighth Station’ the canvasses have lost the little drama and signs of process that the earliest works had.  Contrast is re-introduced in the ‘Twelfth Station’ and the ‘Thirteenth Station’ but the ‘Fourteenth Station’ ‘is an extraordinarily blank painting, emptied of the minimal incidents that might have engaged the viewer before.  Seen with the earlier ‘Stations’ in mind, its sparseness is more apparent still’. 

Some critics were fiercely opposed to the exhibition, describing it as empty rhetoric.  Newman answered the strongest criticism, accusing the critics of anti-Semitism.   But other criticism was perceptive, even if its effect was to undermine Newman’s work.  In the Herald Tribune Emily Genaur described her visit to the exhibition as ‘an adventure in emptiness’. 

The fifteenth painting is entitled ‘Be II’: it is slightly larger than the previous fourteen paintings and it is the only one that contains any colour.    At the Guggenheim it was installed apart from the preceding works: it was the ‘end point’.  ‘Be II’ is more than an arm-span wide: its centre is white and it has slender bands at each side edge: black to the left and cadmium red to the right.  Some critics saw this work as a cheerful resolution to the series.  Godfrey suggests that a better way of seeing ‘Be II’ is to regard it as ‘a kind of re-beginning, as a moment of confirmation or awareness’. 

Godfrey writes that in 1948, when Newman was working on his ‘Onement  I’ ‘when he first intuited that he had answered the challenge of “what to paint” in an adequate manner”, Newman was also working on a text entitled ‘The New Sense of Fate’.  This addressed the difference between the Ancient Greek artists’ attraction to beauty and their poets’ attraction to tragedy. 

Newman favoured the tragic approach for contemporary artists.  He contrasted the surrealists’ understanding of tragedy as terror with the tragedy that was disclosed in the Second World War – tragedy that has been made real.  Awareness was the key for Newman in distinguishing between the two types of tragedy, and for him awareness involves the gaining of both knowledge and a sense of responsibility.

Godfrey considers that ‘Be II’ exists to ‘produce a moment of awareness’ and that it may be intended to ‘point to the individual responsibility that the viewer may come to realise.  He sees the whole series of the fifteen works as having ‘a tragic theme’. 

By 1966 the awareness of responsibility for the Holocaust had evolved from the circumstances of 1948 when Newman first formulated his ideas.  In the mid 1960s this responsibility had become, amongst other things, ‘the responsibility to Be’: ‘the responsibility of continued life’.

Godfrey concludes that Newman had a moral purpose in ‘Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’: to make the viewer aware of their own responsibility. 

Godfrey writes: ‘the project of Holocaust memorial is not constructed as a project involving the acquisition of knowledge about history, nor the recollection of historical detail.  Holocaust memorial instead requires the subject’s repositioning of themselves with regard to the demands of memory’.

Modes of Jewish commemoration

Godfrey suggests that by placing the viewer before the metaphorical Crucifixion in order to induce in him/her the asking of the question that was demanded by the Holocaust in the mid-1960s, Newman might have been avoiding a specifically Jewish approach to Holocaust memory.   We know that Newman rejected the notion of ‘Jewish art’. 

Two modes of Jewish commemoration are advanced by Godfrey in order to understand Newman.  These modes are set out in the book Zachor by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. 

Yerushalmi describes to ways in which Jewish people responded to calamity during the Medieval period: by superimposing the ritual arising from a current disaster upon existing ritual that existed for the same purpose; and the way in which the person who has suffered recent calamity is invited to identify with those had had suffered calamity in a previous era.

Thus, argues Godfrey, Newman’s ‘Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani’ employed the Crucifixion as a means of bringing that previous event into play to help to address a more recent calamity.  And by the progressive series of the fifteen paintings, and the manner in which they were shown at the Guggenheim, Newman provided a kind of ritual that enabled the viewer ‘to identify with the question imposed by the Nazi death camps’.  

ANSELM KIEFER AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY: A PERSONAL RESPONSE

Anselm Keifer at the Royal Academy: a personal response  

I visited the Keifer exhibition at the Royal Academy on 25^th November in the company of Andrew Baker.  I had summarised two reviews of the show on this blog but I had done no other preparation about Keifer before going to the Royal Academy.  

The war with Germany between 1939 and 1945 was a subtext to my growing up in late 1950s and 1960s suburban London, but with a maturing conscience and a teenage affinity with the anti-Vietnam war movement, interest in World War Two became increasingly distasteful for me.  It was a two week journey through Hungary, Slovakia and Ukraine in early 2010 with an old friend and seasoned lone traveller east of Berlin that awakened in me a sense that in Central and Eastern Europe there is vital 20^th Century history and meaning for the 21^st Century that Western Europe has forgotten. 

Keifer confronts in his works the triumph, decay and legacy of Nazi Germany. 

The German Third Reich seems to be a subject that will not go away, and if anything, it gains in interest with every new European generation.  Keifer grew up in the ruins of Germany and he will not give up re-working the theme of Nazi Germany’s catastrophic hubris which he represents by destruction, dereliction and ruin.  But ‘ruin porn’ is everywhere to be found on the internet, so what’s different about Anselm Kiefer’s work?

For a start, there is an awful lot of it, and each piece is big. 

Many art works by Kiefer, whilst being paintings on the wall, are also assemblages and collages of raw materials.  Others are free-standing installations.  Kiefer’s history that he presents to us is visceral and relentless.  Many of the works in the show are weighty assemblages that include sand, lead, dead vegetable matter and other raw materials. 

The compositions are assured and the images are strong.  Keifer has developed personal symbolism and styles that lead the viewer into his world.  It is a disturbing journey. 

Is Keifer a great artist?  A cynic would say that his output is so prodigious that some of it must be good.  A small part of Keifer’s oeuvre is on show at Royal Academy: some is mediocre and mannered; mostly it speaks loudly of the monstrous folly of Hitler and his war, and its voice remains loud after leaving the gallery.

What does it all mean? 

In his review of the Kiefer exhibition, Martin A Ruehl, writing in Art & Christianity 80 (see this blog, 17^th November 2014) takes issue with the curator of the exhibition – Kathleen Soranio – who asserts that Kiefer’s work shows a link between the divine and the human.  Ruehl argues that there is no cosmology in Kiefer’s works and that Kiefer is Earth-bound and denies transcendence.  I agree with Ruehl in this.  There is no hope of redemption in Kiefer: no means of salvation for the German nation. 

In his review of the exhibition in The Guardian (see this blog, 26^th September 2014), Jonathan Jones concludes that Kiefer ‘provokes anger in order to dispel forgetfulness’ and that ‘only by dedicating his art to memory can an artist work with honour after Auschwitz’. 

Kiefer relentlessly presses his point – that all that Germany lived for and fought for in the mid Twentieth Century had no other intrinsic meaning than the substances that he uses to make the pieces of his art.

MARTIN A RUEHL: ANSELM KIEFER - COSMOLOGY AND HISTORY

Martin A Ruehl: Anselm Kiefer – Cosmology and History

This is a summary of a review by Martin A Ruehl of the exhibition of works by Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy, London from 27^th September to 14^th December 2014. 

Martin A Ruehl teaches German cultural and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge.

The review by Martin A Ruehl was published in Art and Christianity 80, dated Winter 2014, on pages 8 and 9.

Art and Christianity is the quarterly journal of Art and Christianity Enquiry (ACE).

This blog published a summary of Jonathan Jones’ review of the Kiefer exhibition from the Guardian newspaper on 26^th September 2014.

Martin A Ruehl: Anselm Kiefer – cosmology and history

Ruehl writes about Kiefer’s ‘relentless, obsessive engagement with his country’s past’. 

He writes about Gallery 4 of the exhibition in which Kathleen Soriano – the curator of the exhibition – states her understanding of Kiefer’s cosmology, which is that Kiefer shows a link between the divine and the human.   Ruehl is dismissive of Soriano’s analysis. 

In its place Ruehl advances his view, which is that if Kiefer subscribes to a cosmology it seems likely to be that of the ‘black fairy tale told by the grandmother in Buchner’s Woyzeck’. 

This fairy tale as retold by Ruehl is, in summary, that there was a time when an orphan child found that he was the only person alive in the world.  The child’s desire was to ascend to heaven, and he managed to reach as far as the moon, but he found that the moon was no more than rotting wood.  The child travelled as far as the sun: he found that it was a decaying sunflower.  Upon arrival at the stars, the child found that these were ‘tiny golden insects stuck there as though by a butcher-bird on blackthorn’.  When he returned to the earth the child found that it was no more than ‘an upturned cooking pot’.  The child cried, alone, and he remains there to this day.

Ruehl describes Kiefer’s ‘sustained, determined resistance to transcendence’.  He argues that this arises not so much from a cosmology as from a specific understanding of history.  Ruehl argues that Kiefer depicts a world that is ‘man-made, or rather German-made’.  Kiefer’s world, writes Ruehl, is a world that survives after ‘an all-consuming conflagration whose charred remains are the only possible, or at any rate, the only legitimate objects and materials for the post-apocalyptic artist.  That conflagration is, of course, the holocaust’.

Kiefer is probably the only artist who has successfully presented Germany’s post-war reckoning with Nazism as visual art.

And Kiefer’s engagement with his subject is ‘monomaniacal’, and ‘deadly earnest’.  Ruehl is critical of Kiefer’s lack of irony, finding his work wanting when compared with that of Beuys who was Kiefer’s teacher.  Kiefer’s later works are ‘literal, heavy-handed and overly didactic’. 

Ruehl criticises Kiefer for his lack of awareness that his placing of National Socalism in a direct lineage from Nordic mythology and Prussian militarism perpetuates the Nazi understanding of German history.  Ruehl argues that the frequent motif in many of Kiefer’s works of parallel lines leading to a point in the distance may show Kiefer subconsciously subscribing to Sonderweg – Nazi Germany’s understanding that by rejecting the liberal ethos of Western Europe and adopting a ‘fateful special path’ for Germany, the Third Reich was inevitable. 

Thus, Ruehr argues that Kiefer is showing ‘death and destruction as the necessary vanishing points of German history’ and he is showing his belief in ‘German singularity’.   ‘Death is a master from Germany’.

GEOFFREY CLARKE: OBITUARY

Geoffrey Clarke: Obituary

Geoffrey Clarke was born on 28 November 1924: he died on 30 October 2014.  This is a personal summary of his obituary that was published in the Guardian newspaper on 8 November 2014.

Geoffrey Clarke: Obituary

Geoffrey Clarke was a British sculptor of ecclesiastical art and a stained glass maker who was most active and prominent in the 1950s.

Geoffrey Clarke was born in Derbyshire, the son of John Clarke - an architect who was also an etcher – and his wife Jean.  A grandparent had been a church outfitter.  Geoffrey Clarke attended three northern art schools and served in the Royal Air Force.  In 1948 he arrived at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London.

Early in his time at the RCA, Clarke opted to work in stained glass and a piece of his work attracted the attention of the college principal – Robin Darwin.  The piece was awarded a silver medal.  In 1950 Darwin proposed Clarke to be a member of team working with Basil Spence to rebuild Coventry Cathedral.

By 1952 Clarke had ten years’ worth of commissions.  These included the cross and candle sticks for the high altar in the new Coventry Cathedral and three of the ten nave windows in the new cathedral.  In 1962 a critic of the Sunday Telegraph newspaper listed the works that Clarke had completed in the previous ten years: a wide range that included relief panels, doors, light fittings, a mosaic, a tapestry and a relief sculpture in settings that included banks, an ocean liner, university colleges and a theatre. 

In 1952 the critic Herbert Read had given a name to the style of the group of eight sculptors who had exhibited in the British Pavilion in that year’s Venice Biennale: ‘the geometry of fear’.  These sculptors’ work was ‘spiky, organic ..... mutant, angry’.  Other artists in the group were Lynn Chadwick, William Turnbull, Reg Butler and Kenneth Armitage: several of these ‘dominated British sculpture for the decade to follow and, in some cases, beyond’.  Geoffrey Clarke had ‘a less enduring fame’.

Subsequent to 1964, Clarke’s popularity waned.  This is attributed to Clarke’s identification with Christian spirituality.  Clarke had been ‘one of the most experimental of the Geometry of Fear sculptors’ and he remained innovative.  At the height of his popularity, Clarke had modelled his works in polystyrene rather than in the traditional manner in clay.  The polystyrene gives the cast a ‘rough-hewn, bark-like quality that gives them the look of a medieval take on Anthony Caro’s contemporaneous Early One Morning’.  But this was not to Clarke’s advantage: fashion was ‘turning away from skill’: the contemporary pop art ‘demanded slickness and appropriation’ which was not Clarke’s forte. 

Clarke had ‘ceased to be a churchgoer’ in 1954 and ‘his leanings were roughly Jungian’.  His focus on the cross in his work is less a response to Christian symbolism and more a presentation of a universal archetype.  He remained amiable towards the religion that had ‘been both his salvation and his downfall’.

SUSANNE LANGE: 'HISTORY OF STYLE - INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF BERND AND HILLA BECHER'

Susanne Lange: ‘History of style – industrial buildings: the photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher’

In 2005 a book was published by Thames & Hudson: Bernd and Hilla Becher: Basic forms of industrial buildings.

The book comprises:

a)      Foreword;

b)      an essay by Susanne Lange: ‘History of style – industrial buildings: the photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher’, dated ‘Cologne, June 2004’;

c)       61 illustrations in duotone which are photographs by Bernd and Hilla Becher that ‘constitute a representative selection from the broad range of subjects chosen by the Bechers in what are characteristic ‘portraits’ of the objects in question.  Subjects include cooling towers, water towers and winding towers, blast furnaces, lime kilns, gravel plants, grain elevators, gas tanks and even details of the interiors of these industrial edifices’.

The endpaper note states: ‘Rendered timeless by the camera and isolated from their original, often perplexingly complex surroundings, the structures photographed by the Bechers appear as monumental symbols of their own history – with all the stylistic diversity of great masterpieces of architecture’.

This is a personal summary of the essay by Susanne Lange: ‘History of style – industrial buildings: the photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher’

Susanne Lange: ‘History of style – industrial buildings: the photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher’

The photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher are found in widely differing collections throughout the world.  They are found alongside major figures in minimal and conceptual art, as well being counted with leading documentary and narrative photographers.  They are also highly esteemed by industrial archaeologists and architectural conservationists.  The Bechers also set new standards in perceptual aesthetics, showing heavy industry as art.  

‘The Bechers’ black and white photographs are ultimately alienated quotations of reality, their objective dimension developed mainly by the artists’ insistence on recording motifs with prosaic precision’.  

The Bechers’ imagery is not a subjective response: it refrains from metaphor and symbolism.  The lineage of the Bechers’ work is the ‘international avant-garde of the 1960s in minimal and conceptual art’.

Bernd Becher

Bernd Becher had a childhood interest in industrial buildings: he grew up in Siegen (in western Germany) close to a steelworks.  In 1954 he enrolled at the State Art Academy in Stuttgart to study art.  Here he was encouraged in his interest in industrial architecture.  In the mid 1950s Bernd Becher became aware that economic change would lead to the decline of heavy industry in his home area: he would return here to sketch plant and buildings.  In 1957 he photographed demolition under way at the Eisenhardter Tiefbau mine near Siegen to assist him with sketches he intended to make.  Soon afterwards Bernd Becher abandoned sketching for photography so that he could record the industrial landscape that he knew so well before it was lost.

In 1957 Bernd Becher moved to Dusseldorf Art Academy where he decided that juxtaposition would be the most effective arrangement for ‘formal analysis’ of the subjects of his photographs.  This approach was perfected from 1959 when Bernd began working with Hilla Wobeser who was also passionate about technical and industrial themes: she was also accomplished in photographic technique. 

Hilla Wobeser

Hilla Wobeser had been encouraged in photography from the age of 13 by her mother who had had photographic training in Berlin in the 1920s.  In 1951 Hilla Wobeser began a three year apprenticeship at the Eichgrun photography studio in her birthplace – Potsdam, in eastern Germany.  At the end of the three years Hilla moved westwards to Dusseldorf to work at an advertising agency where Bernd Becher also worked occasionally.  She subsequently enrolled at Dusseldorf Art Academy.  In 1961 Bernd and Hilla married and they left the Academy.

The industrial landscape

In the early 1960s the couple photographed in western Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom where, in 1966, they benefitted from a British Council grant.  In 1968 the Bechers produced their first photographs of industrial areas in North America.  Since the 1960s the Bechers have revisited many places to fully record the industrial landscape that was being lost.  This work was done at their own initiative with no patron to satisfy.

Anonymous sculptures in a process of constant transformation

Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typological style of juxtaposed similar subjects has a systematic approach that is essentially a scientific method of verification.  At the same time, the typologies are enlivened by the aesthetic sensibility of the two photographers.  And the ‘anonymous sculptures’ that are the subject of each of the Bechers’ collections of photographs are presented as a type that is in a process of ‘constant transformation’. 

Through the gallery in Dusseldorf that was owned by Konrad Fischer, the Bechers met ‘the international avant-garde’ including the artists Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt.  This led to exhibitions that innovated by combining film, performance and installations.  In 1972 the Bechers had their first show in New York with the sponsorship of the gallerist Ileana Sonnabend.

Subsequent exhibitions were held in the USA and Germany in which the Bechers’ significance in the history of photography was acknowledged. 

The Bechers built up their own archive of historical photographs of industrial structures and landscapes.

The Bechers’ work has led to industrial structures being conserved and re-used, rather than being demolished when their original purpose had ceased.

Awards granted to the Bechers in recent years have been in honour of their time as teachers at Dusseldorf Art Academy.  The couple held the first chair of artistic photography at the academy between 1976 and 1996.  

ART AND COAL

Art and Coal

In 1982 and 1983 an exhibition was organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain with the National Coal Board and supported by Barclays Bank: Coal - British mining in art 1680-1980.

The exhibition was shown at five locations around Great Britain: Stoke on Trent; Swansea; London; Durham; and Nottingham. 

An illustrated catalogue of the exhibition - Coal: British mining in art 1680-1980 - was published.  This is a personal summary of the section of the catalogue entitled ‘Art and Coal’, written by Douglas Gray. 

Art and Coal

The 150 pictures in the exhibition depict fully coal mining in the British Isles in the period 1680 – 1980.  Each of these works shows the artist’s response to coal.

The seminal image of the Industrial Revolution

The publication of Georg Agricola’s De Re Metallica in the 16^th Century marks Europe as the originator of a new view on life: the use of illustration to describe metal mining.  Contemporary artists and craftspeople also showed aspects of miners and mining. 

The painting by Peter Hartover, dated 1680, of Harraton Hall and Lumley Castle in County Durham ‘should be considered as the seminal image of the Industrial Revolution’, although it was not until a further 70 years had passed (ie. in 1750) that ‘artistic imagination and temperament are stirred again’ with Abraham Darby’s paintings of iron foundries and smelting furnaces in the ‘picturesqueness’ of Coalbrookdale, in Shropshire – the ‘cradle of the industrial revolution’.  Darby gives prominence to the ‘heat and light’ of ironworking, whilst the ‘damp and darkness’ of coal mining is relegated to the representation of ‘remotely situated coal pits’.

Edmund Burke’s Inquiry into the Origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was published in 1757. 

The first painting of a coal mine

The first ‘realistic representation of a coal mine’ dates from 1788: George Robertson’s ‘painting of the mouth of a coal pit near Broseley’ which now only exists as a print published in 1788 by Francis Chesham.  It seems that this work was never exhibited.

The first painting of a coal mine that was exhibited appears to be William Williams’ pair that were shown in 1788: they are both views of Coalbrookdale.  In one of the paintings the pastoral idyll is being replaced by the needs of industry: ‘the first inevitable step from picturesque landscape to industrial wasteland’. 

‘Wild romantic scenery’

Artists in the late 18^th Century were also seeking ‘wild romantic scenery’ elsewhere in the British Isles’.  Paul Sandby – ‘a less passionate artist than those who had visited Shropshire’ – painted collieries in Wales in about 1775 / 76 in a ‘cool and restrained way’. 

Other artists visited Wales at this time in search of romantic subjects and they ‘have bequeathed a major legacy of industrial paintings and drawings that are unique in art history’.  These show all the aspects of industrial enterprise in Wales at that time including the coal industry.  These artists are listed as: John Hassell, George Robertson, George Samuel, Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, J M W Turner (who was there in 1792, 1795 and 1798); Francois Louis Francia; William Havell; and John Laporte.  But the landscape setting of all these artists’ works in the late 18^th Century / early 19^th Century is the rural environment, and there is no hint of the national significance of what is depicted.  Social realism was precluded by the factors of the dominant aesthetic philosophy, the pressures of patronage and the desires of the art market. 

The widening availability of printed publications in the early 19^th Century enabled a broadening of awareness of the realities of coal mining.  Three significant publications were: W H Pyne’s Microcosm; George Walker’s Costume of Yorkshire; and William Daniell’s A Voyage Round Great Britain.  Walker includes an illustration showing a miner in a mining landscape which includes a colliery, a steam winder, and a train of coal wagons hauled by a locomotive.  Pyne shows coal mining in the ‘archaic’ style of Sandby.  Daniell travelled with Richard Ayton from Lands End to Whitehaven from 1813 to 1823.  At Whitehaven Ayton visited the William Pit and Daniell sketched ‘on the windswept quay’  Ayton described his experience of being underground in the coal mine: he was ‘alienated and overwhelmed’.  Daniell did not make any drawings of coal mines. 

The Royal Academy

The Royal Academy (RA) exercised a strong control that defined acceptable subject matter, and this was rarely breached in the first 25 years of the 19^th Century.  ‘Industrial genre painting’ would not find a place in the RA’s stated list of acceptable subject matter that had ‘High Art – Sacred and Secular’ in first place, and ‘Sea and Landscape Painting’ as the last of the seven acceptable categories. 

Henry Perlee Parker’s ‘Pitmen at play near Newcastle upon Tyne: painted from nature’ was probably the first ‘true’ mining painting to hang in the RA, in 1836.  Parker lived in Newcastle upon Tyne from 1815 to 1840: his works at this time ‘predict the social realist subjects that became firm favourites with the Royal Academy in the late Victorian period’.  His patrons and friends included prominent mining engineers who will have given him access to coal mines. 

J M W Turner’s ‘Keelmen heaving in coals by moonlight’ dates from 1835 ‘but as with all his work it is so much more than just ‘coal’’.  Its roots lie in Turner’s ‘brilliant watercolour study of ‘Shields on the River Tyne’, painted in 1823.

These two works – Parker’s of 1836 and Turner’s of 1835 – both symbolise the dynamism of the change that the coal industry effected at this time: the human element and the organisation and transport of coal that together were providing the momentum for massive social and economic upheaval. 

In the late 18^th Century a number of less-well-known artists also illustrated the growing coal industry.  In the vicinity of Newcastle upon Tyne these included William Beilby, Thomas Bewick and Luke Clennell who took as their subject the relatively advanced collieries of their area.  Other artists at this time also showed human aspects of mining, and marine painters depicted the transport of coal by sea.

1842

Three events in 1842 are significant. 

Firstly, the publication of the First Report of the Commissioners (Mines) from the Children’s Employment Commission included diagrams and illustrations: this caused an outcry, and at the same time paved the way for ‘a new form of artistic realism’. 

Secondly. the founding of the Illustrated London News was the first mass circulation journal that used pictures as a means of communication, and other similar publications soon followed.  The coal mining industry and associated economic and social change were reported and illustrated.

Thirdly, a ‘relatively obscure artist’, Thomas H Hair published his Views of the Collieries in the Counties of Northumberland and Durham.  This was the result of Hair’s travels from about 1837 to 1840, during which he made ‘objective watercolours of the most advanced and profitable pits’.  The published illustrations were ‘etched rather than engraved’.

During the next fifty years there was frequent illustrated reportage of aspects of life in the coal industry in mass circulation publications.  

Dramatic illustration

In 1875 John Ruskin deplored the tendency that had developed by that date for ‘young socially concerned artists’ to depict subjects in the genre of the popular taste for dramatic illustration of contemporary scenes.  But in 1882 Vincent Van Gogh took the opposite view, writing that ‘the English black and white artists’ have the same sentiment as Dickens – ‘noble and healthy’.

‘Genre painting’ was accepted in 19^th Century Britain but most artists who produced such work have now been forgotten.  Genre paintings that are remembered are those ‘whose subject matter is of historical or sociological interest or where the work maintains a very high quality and can be measured in terms of virtuosity’.  A work that is remembered is William Scott Bell’s ‘Coal and Iron’.

After the death of the Prince Consort in 1861 the ‘acceptable tragedy of modern life’ was increasingly depicted in illustrated publications by portraying contemporary situations of suffering such as colliery disasters.  Previously the acceptable manner for artists to engage with human tragedy was through ‘history painting’.  The Hartley Colliery Disaster in 1862 was the subject of a painting in the Royal Academy exhibition of that year: Frederick Bacon Barwell’s ‘Unaccredited Heroes – A Pit Mouth’. 

The ‘sentimentality, mawkishness and complacency of mid-19^th Century art continued unchanged for the larger part of forty years’.  The extremes of sentiment within society were reflected in the wide range of approaches taken by artists to the coal industry.

A preference for photography

In 1893 William Thomas – the Camborne Superintendent of Mines – criticised the ‘mining genre art’ for its lurid approach and he expressed a preference for photography for the portrayal of mining.  Thomas was not a disinterested observer: he was championing his photographer friend John Charles Burrow whose underground photographs of Cornish tin mines are ‘technical masterpieces’.  ‘After Burrow’s documentation ..... a more realistic and informed method of representation had to be adopted’.  By the time of Burrow’s death in 1914 many photographers had achieved a massive archive of documentary record of all aspects of coal mining in Britain. 

‘Modern artists have to search for ..... adaptations of old ideas to the spirit of our time’

Writing in 1903 in the Art Magazine of 1903, P G Konody wrote that ‘modern artists have to search for ..... adaptations of old ideas to the spirit of our time’.  This reflected the writer’s optimism and his understanding of changes taking place in art elsewhere in Europe.  But the First World War ‘made irrelevant the entire scale of sensibilities held previously’. 

The ‘New Realism’ of German artists in the 1920s had no equivalent in Britain. 

P G Konody’s challenge was not taken up until the 1930s.  Various trends developed over this decade and during the Second World War.  Pre-war initiatives were: the documentary film crews of John Grierson; the Mass Observation Unit; the photographers Bill Brandt and Edwin Smith; and the ‘pitmen painters’ of the Ashington Group.  The War Artists Advisory Committee placed artists - Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Stanley Spencer and other artists - ‘in the midst of industry’ during war time.  Sutherland and Moore painted among the coal industry.

The artist Josef Herman arrived in the Swansea valleys, ‘via Warsaw, Brussels and Glasgow’ in 1944.  He stayed for 11 years and produced ‘images of Welsh miners (that) are probably the most well known symbols of British mining’.  The artist who settles in a mining community to paint is an ‘outsider’.  Herman’s paintings show a mining community that has ‘returned to those votive symbols of primitive religions’.  The ‘outsider’ ‘has to become an ‘insider’ even to half understand the nature of coal mining or the special qualities of the miner and his community’.

The photographers Robert Frank and Eugene Smith worked in the Welsh mining communities in the first few years after nationalisation in 1947.  They became ‘insiders’.  For these photographers ‘the individual is of overriding importance’. 

The opposite view was taken by Bernd and Hilla Becher in their photography of the British coalfields in 1973.  These photographs record 19^th and 20^th Century industrial structures in a way that is closely controlled in order to contain the meaning of the image: these are sculptural forms ‘that make no comment or protest concerning the mining industry or its workers’.

Artists have continued to work in the mining industry: ‘individual approaches ...... are manifested most clearly by those artists who have continued to search for the equation that will transcend mere reality’.

INTERPRETING THE ART OF TOM McGUINNESS

Interpreting the art of Tom McGuinness

This is a personal summary of the section of the book McGuinness: Interpreting the art of Tom McGuiness that is entitled ‘Influences on the art of Tom McGuinness’.  The authors are Robert McManners and Gillian Wales.  The book was published in 2006 by Gemini Productions.  The book is dedicated to ‘The Bevin Boys – especially Tom McGuinness’.

The sections of the book are unnumbered and are as follows: Acknowledgements; Foreword; Preface; Introduction; Influences on the art of Tom McGuiness; Development of the characteristic McGuiness style; Epilogue; Plates; List of plates; List of exhibitions; Glossary of art terms; Glossary of mining terms; Bibliography.

Wikipedia on Tom McGuinness: ‘Tom McGuinness (1926-2006) was a British coal miner and artist.   He studied at the Darlington School of Art, and was one of the artists at the Spennymoor Settlement, where his contemporaries included Norman Cornish, Herbert Dees and Robert Heslop’.

Interpreting the art of Tom McGuinness

Coal

Coal mining was unique among the heavy industries that dominated North East England in the 19^th and 20^th Century: it was both the source of power for all other industries and it was a complete way of life in itself.   This way of life included ‘a corpus of experiential art’.  Painters of coal mining subjects included both members of the mining community and artists from outside that community.  Tom McGuinness is the supreme exponent of coal mining art.

McGuinness painted from direct personal experience of coal mining in County Durham.  Much of the content of his many sketch books was drawn at the mine and down the mine.  These sketches were the origin of many of McGuinness’ paintings.  This makes McGuinness unique among painters of coal mining subjects. 

McGuinness worked in collieries until he was made redundant in 1983.  At the end of his life he became a witness to the end of coal mining in County Durham and its social aftermath.

Witton Park

McGuinness was born in Witton Park in the year of the General Strike and the subsequent Miners’ Strike.  In the early 20^th Century Witton Park suffered high unemployment and great poverty.  This arose from the sudden decline in iron-making at Witton Park in the late 19^th Century, due to technological change.  As McGuinness grew up in Witton Park, he was more interested in the local environment than in school work.  Significant influences on McGuinness are described as his childhood observation of the derelict landscape and machinery, and his interest in human behaviour.

In 1940 McGuiness left school.  In 1944 he was conscripted under wartime regulations to work in coal mines as a ‘Bevin Boy’.  He had not wanted to be a miner.  With mines in the Witton Park area closed he had to travel elsewhere in County Durham to work.  McGuinness considered that if he had not worked in mining, art may have been less important to him. 

Darlington

In 1944 McGuinness enrolled at Darlington School of Art after being encouraged to do so by the Colliery Training Officer.  McGuiness attended this art school for six years and studied life drawing, portraiture and ‘antique drawing’.  His art teacher, Ralph Swinden, urged McGuinness to adopt a bold line in drawing and this was remembered by McGuiness as significant.   McGuinness was self-taught in anatomical drawing.  McGuinness travelled in the UK to see other artists’ work in public galleries: Daumier’s lithographs particularly inspired him.   He collected reproductions of artists and was particularly influenced by the works of Rembrandt, Durer and Goya, as well as Daumier. 

In 1947 coal mines were nationalised.  Many Bevin Boys left the industry, including McGuinness who took up other work, but he soon returned to coal mining.

Spennymoor

In 1948 McGuinness enrolled in the Sketching Club at the Spennymoor Settlement – an educational and recreational organisation that had been established in 1931 to help to alleviate the effects of the Great Depression.  This is where McGuinness met other ‘pitman artists’ including Norman Cornish.   Cornish and McGuinness became close friends.  McGuinness was inspired by the Spennymoor Settlement in the same way that Cornish had been when he joined in the 1930s. 

Bill Farrell – the first warden of the Settlement – advised both men to ‘paint what they knew’.  There was no tuition: the Sketching Club worked together by peer support and shared problem solving.  Farrell insisted that all work be drawn from life.  This led McGuinness to draw and paint directly from his working environment.  Farrell also insisted that only the best materials should be used. 

At this time McGuinness began to rent an attic room at a boarding house in Bishop Auckland, to use as his studio. 

McGuinness attended the Spennymoor Settlement until 1951 when he returned to art classes in Darlington: this is when he produced his first oil paintings.

Durham University

In 1956 McGuinness met Gill Harman (later Holloway) who was art tutor at Durham University Extra-Mural Department.  Gill taught many artists from North East England who later had succesful careers.  Gill advocated study of art history alongside the practise of painting. 

In 1958 McGuinness had his first solo exhibition, at the Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation in Hobart House, London.  Subsequently Gill Harman arranged that a room at the City Hotel in Durham could be used as a gallery: many artists’ works were shown here and the gallery was an artists’ meeting place.

Newcastle upon Tyne

In 1969 an exhibition was held at The Stone Gallery in St.Mary’s Place, Newcastle upon Tyne, showing the work of McGuinness, Cornish and Josef Herman – a Polish artist who had painted in the Welsh Coalfield ‘in an expressionist manner’.  On 30^th November 1969 Bill Johnson – art critic of the Manchester Guardian – reviewed the show and concluded that Herman’s work was inferior to that of the two Northeasterners. 

London

In the early 1970s McGuinness was commissioned to work for three years under the patronage of Lady Hirshfield – a Labour peer in the first Wilson government.  This led to McGuinness’ work being known nationally, and London exhibitions were held, with many sales taking place.  McGuinness continued to work as a miner.  He saw himself as a ‘miner who could paint’ and not as ‘an artist who was trapped in the stony grasp of the coalmine’.  In 1972 Lord Hirshfield encouraged McGuinness to broaden his subject range to include more above ground scenes ‘in brighter colours’ so as to be ‘more commercially acceptable to the London market’.  Having produced a number of beach scenes, McGuinness did not take the experiment further.  In 1974 the patronage ended.

Durham

At this time McGuinness was featured in the National Coal Board’s ‘Mining Review’ news film and in a BBC ‘Omnibus’ documentary, and this led to a valuable commission in 1976 from Barclays Bank.  The resulting work – a painting entitled ‘The Miners’ Gala’ – hangs in the Market Place branch of the bank in Durham.

In 1978 McGuinness organised his own show of seventy of his works in London.  This was successful.  It led to an exhibition of works by artists of Northern England in Moscow in the early 1990s, including works by McGuinness.