ANSELM KIEFER AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY

ANSELM KIEFER AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY

This is a summary of an article: Grappling with history’s dark angel – a review by Jonathan Jones of the exhibition of works by Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy, London from 27^th September to 14^th December 2014. 

The article was published in the Guardian newspaper on 23^rd September 2014.

Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy

Anselm Kiefer was born in Germany in 1945: his works are concerned with the terror of the 20^th Century. 

Kiefer’s works take in both beauty and horror: his purpose is to put the pleasure into perspective in the light of 20^th Century history. 

Nazi imagery is present in Kiefer’s works.  ‘He is not tasteful: he has resurrected the terrors of the 20^th Century in a shocking, pungent and explicit way’.   His aim is to provoke anger in order to dispel forgetfulness.

Kiefer’s very large painting ‘Ash Flower’ is done in a number of materials including ash, described by Jones as ‘death dust’.  The painting presents a ghostly structure – a Hitlerian neoclassical building.  One large sunflower occupies the 4 metres height of the painting: a symbol of hope among the ashes. 

Kiefer is compared with Jackson Pollock: he is the ‘most liberating painter since Pollock’.  Kiefer’s works, like Pollock’s ‘splash out into the world’.  Each of Kiefer’s works is a witness to the moment of the spontaneous making of each mark of the painting. 

A work by Kiefer may have been made over many years: the work shows the layers and surfaces that have accumulated over time.  In the same way, for Kiefer, history is not only his subject: it is also encapsulated in each painting. 

Kiefer has illustrated the poem Death Fugue by the poet Paul Celan, a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust.  This poem has inspired and permeated a number of Kiefer’s works.

Like Celan, Kiefer asks ‘whether culture and beauty can still mean anything after the Holocaust’. Jones concludes: ‘Only by dedicating his art to memory can an artist work with honour after Auschwitz’.

THE AMERICAN ACTION PAINTERS

The American Action Painters.  H. Rosenberg.  1952. 

This is a personal summary of H Rosenberg’s ‘The American Action Painters’, an essay which was published in Art News 51/8, Dec. 1952, p. 22; then published in Tradition of the New, Horizon Press, 1959.  ‘The American Action Painters’ can be read online at, for example: www.artnews.com/2007/11/01/top-ten-artnews-stories-not-a-picture-but-an-event/

The American Action Painters

Individualistic American painters

Any definition of a movement in modern art is limited in its effectiveness because the most profound artists that the definition seeks to define always evade the definition; and yet definition is needed in order to denote something essential in these most profound artists.

There has been a profusion of 20^th Century styles of painting in the USA in the post World War Two era.  When we explore this phenomenon, asking whether this is the USA emulating European art, or whether something new is being created, definitions are necessary.

The borrowing of compositional elements and styles from, amongst others, Kandinsky, Miro and Cezanne (‘The School of Paris’) may be seen in many of the works of American painters in the post World War Two era.  These American works are in the nature of studies for the benefit of the painter but they do not indicate the future.

But some American painters do have ‘a consciousness of a function for painting that is different from that of the earlier “abstractionists”’: these are individualistic painters who do not belong to a School. 

The canvas as an arena

Particular individual painters have come to understand the canvas as an ‘arena in which to act’, rather than as a place to paint a picture: there is no longer an image in the painter’s mind when he comes to apply paint to canvas; the outcome of the artist’s encounter with the canvas is always a surprise.

One or more sketch may be made in advance of an encounter with the canvas.  This does not invalidate the work on the canvas.  The continuity of a number of encounters may be a ‘prolonging of the act’.

In this approach to painting there is a ‘special motive for extinguishing the object’: this approach is not the same as Abstract, Expressionist or Abstract Expressionist art; this approach is one in which nothing is allowed to intrude into the act of painting. 

The outcome – the work of art – will have an effect on the viewer that will be ‘a tension’.  

A painting that is an act breaks down the distinction between art and life

A painting that is an ‘act of painting’ is an integral part of the life story of its artist.  Anything in human existence is therefore relevant to the painting except art criticism.  The critic is a stranger to the ‘act of painting’: any criterion that a critic may apply is inappropriate.

Some painters who are engaged in ‘act of painting’ seek the critics’ approval and thus invalidate their work.  The value of a painting that is an ‘act of painting’ must be found outside art.

It is the inner life of the artist that brings any relation of a painting that is an ‘act of painting’ into relationship with art history, but the resulting work transcends these relationships. 

It is ‘role’ that gives meaning to a painting that is an ‘act of painting’: the way in which the artist ‘organises his emotional and intellectual energy as if he were in a living situation’.  The painter becomes an actor: he must ‘become a connoisseur of the gradations between the automatic, the spontaneous, the evoked’. 

The new movement in art is essentially religious but on secular terms

Most of the artists to which this description applies are not young, but are ‘re-born’ through the events of a ‘grand crisis’.  The decision ‘just to paint’ liberates the artist.

Americans are reluctant to talk about the impact of world affairs upon their own emotions: there is no evidence that ‘painting as an act of painting’ is a response to ‘the war and the decline of radicalism in America’.  Even so, individualistic painters in the past ten years have been affected by the need to abandon or destroy their current work: they have wanted their canvas to become a new world so that past inheritance and future possibility could both be rejected.  This has taken place within a mood of optimism: America is the land of the pioneer and the immigrant; there is weariness at the burden of past history but there is also exhilaration at the new adventure.  Every move on the canvas would now be an opportunity to reveal the true nature of the artist and his art.

This new movement in art is therefore essentially religious, because there has been a conversion, but this has been on secular terms: private myths have been created.  Each act on a canvas is a re-creation of the moment when the artist was first liberated.

The artist lives with constant possibility: the artist’s reality only exists in the process of creating.  The motto is “Except the soul has divested itself of the love of created things”.   There is the constant risk that the artist’s possibility lacks any reality: the artist must constantly deny that this is the case.   Aspects of mysticism and philosophy come to the fore.  American painters do not readily philosophise: they simply paint.  And there is currently no effective language to talk about painting in which the act of painting is itself the art.

The ‘new painters’ exist in a spectrum between, at one extreme, ‘Whitman’s Open Road of Risk’ and at the other extreme the ‘Weak Mysticism of Christian Science’.  The former pursues ‘the ineffable in all behaviour’, so that the work on the canvas shows itself as a work of complete commitment by the artist, to the extent even that the canvas itself may have responded to the artist as he works, and in so doing has stimulated the artist in an exhausting encounter.  The latter ‘tends towards easy painting’ and ‘unearned masterpieces’: the artist lives by luck and self-satisfying gestures on the canvas; the outcome is ‘apocalyptic wallpaper’.  There is megalomania in the artist who lives and acts for sensation but who has little more to offer than a ‘unique signature’ or a ‘single stroke’.  When the challenge of ‘a real act’ is avoided by the artist then the artist’s process of transformation has ended.  When this happens the artist ceases to have presence as an artist: he has become a commodity. 

Modern Art is not a style

‘The new painting’ needs a new kind of criticism.  Unfortunately, Modern Art arrived in the USA at the same time that the Modern also arrived in many genres and fields of design and product.  This symbiosis generated aspects of relationship between Modern art and the rest of the Modern world that have the characteristics of hierarchy and preference.  But Modern Art confounds this because Modern Art is not a style: Modern Art is that which authoritative voices (‘social power and pedagogy’) have identified as being culturally relevant to the present epoch; it is a ‘revolution of taste’ which identifies those people who are at the forefront of the revolution.  Responses to Modern Art are therefore primarily responses to those who are responsible for the revolution, and this leads to attacks against it by a wide range of vested interests in society.  Indifference is therefore characteristically shown to the work of the ‘vanguard painter’, although public appetite for the Modern has tended to comodify ‘today’s advanced paintings’ but with no understanding of them.

LATE TURNER: PAINTING SET FREE

LATE TURNER: PAINTING SET FREE

The Guardian newspaper of 9^th September 2014 published a full page piece about the exhibition at Tate Britain that runs from 10^th September to 25^th January 2015: Late Turner – Painting set free.

This is a summary of the main article by Jonathan Jones (‘Visionary, mythic, extreme ... Turner’s late work is like Wagner transmuted into paint’) and a summary of a smaller article on the same page by Mark Brown (‘Dazzling colour that baffled the Victorians’. 

Late Turner: Painting set free

‘Visionary, mythic, extreme ... Turner’s late work is like Wagner transmuted into paint’.  J. Jones

Wagner and Turner are both artists of myth on a grand scale.  They both influenced the Impressionists and early Modernists ‘who learned from them how colour could be expressive, atmospheric, even abstract’. 

Art historians argue that Turner was a Romantic whose work embodies myth, and that to view Turner as an abstract artist is to transfer 20^th Century ideas inappropriately to the mid 19^th Century.  But the exhibition under review is a riposte to this viewpoint.  

The Turners in the exhibition foreshadow not only Monet’s Impression: Sunrise, but also the surrealism of Dali and Ernst in ‘(Turner’s) trees that float in the sky like glowing jellyfish, his encrustations of edible-seeming paint’.

The exhibition presents the many forms of painting that Turner engaged in during his last 16 years until his death in 1851. 

Both Wagner and Turner ‘take Romanticism to such an extreme that it breaks apart and becomes modernist’.  

‘Turner paints his own need to paint’.

‘Dazzling colour that baffled the Victorians’.  M. Brown

Turner’s nine late square paintings are hung together for the first time in the exhibition. 

In 1846, John Ruskin – formerly Turner’s champion – reacted sceptically to Turner’s late style: he considered it to be ‘indicative of mental disease’. 

Turner’s late style was radical.  He asked a great deal of his contemporaries as they viewed these works.

ARSHILE GORKY - AN INTRODUCTION

ARSHILE GORKY – AN INTRODUCTION

The book Arshile Gorky – The breakthrough years was published in 1995 by Rizzoli International Publications in association with Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. 

The book is described as ‘Organized by Michael Auping’. 

The book includes essays by Matthew Spender (Arshile Gorky’s early life), Dore Ashton (A straggler’s view of Gorky) and Michael Auping (An erotic garden).

This is a summary of the Introduction to the book by Michael Auping.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Arshile-Gorky-The-Breakthrough-Years/dp/0914782924

Arshile Gorky – an introduction

Forging a new identity

Some of the most significant art of the twentieth century resulted from artists adapting to a new culture, while retaining powerful memories of their homeland: Picasso, Kandinsky, Beckmann, Mondrian, Leger and de Kooning being prominent examples.  Arshile Gorky is another such artist.  At their deepest level his paintings result from Gorky’s desire to connect memories of his homeland of Armenia with his new home in the USA and to forge a new identity between the two.  But this does not come easily to exiles and refugees, and Gorky’s story is a poignant one.

The artist was born Vosdanik Adoian in 1904 at Khorkom in Armenia.  His parents were Lady Shushanik der Marderosian and Sedrak Adoian.  On his mother’s side he was descended from a family of Armenian Apostolic Church priests; his father’s family were landed gentry.  The Turkish invasions of Armenia interrupted his childhood.  His father left for the USA in search of a new life for the family: the trauma of this separation left the young Vosdanik Adoian speechless until the age of five.  By the age of fifteen he had seen his mother die from starvation during a forced march across Armenia. 

It was Gorky’s mother who most strongly fostered in him the notion of being an artist.  The landscape of Armenia left a strong impression on Gorky, and in particular the garden around his parents’ house. 

Gorky arrived in America in 1920.  He resolved to pursue life as an artist.  He took the name Arshile Gorky, claiming to be a cousin of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky.  In legend Arshile was an Armenian Achilles – powerful but flawed. 

Gorky learned modern art in an old fashioned, self-taught way: he visited museums, studying and copying styles and techniques.  In the 1920s his style was an imitation of Impressionism, Cezanne and Synthetic Cubism.  His heroes were Picasso, Kandinsky, Miro, Matisse and Leger.  Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Gorky also painted self-portraits, imaginary companions and his own family – the most noteworthy being the portraits of his mother that he painted between 1926 and 1936.

The desire to create deeper and purer work

The 1930s were important for Gorky’s eventual maturity but they were also a low point in his life.  In 1938 he wrote to his sister Vartoosh describing his melancholy and the way in which he could concentrate on nothing except his work.  He says that his painting style is changing and that he suffers ‘extreme mental anguish’ and that he does not expect to be satisfied about his works.  He says that he ‘desires to create deeper and purer work’.

Auping writes:

‘It was in the 1930s that he applied many layers to his canvases in an effort to locate a sensibility that reflected his increasingly complex psychological state; as well, these images would somehow come to embody and reflect the psychology of his time.  Of course, it was not just Gorky who was anxious and searching. The war in Europe would allow New York to imagine itself as the new centre of the art world.  New York criticism and gossip were abuzz with how art there might radically overthrow that of the School of Paris.  As an artist who understood modernism intuitively, as it were, Gorky was in a position to be a new spearhead of the possibilities’.

Garden in Sochi

The last nine years of Gorky’s life (c1940-1948) were a time of great expansion in American art, and for Gorky himself.  A ‘more spontaneous, expressionist aesthetic’ was taking the place of the styles of the 1920s and 1930s. 

Auping identifies two styles that particularly influenced artists in New York in the 1940s: ’the colour-inspired gesture of Kandinsky’; and European surrealism. 

And New York was becoming a home to European radicals who had been exiled from their homeland.

Auping summarises Surrealism as the belief that ultimate reality could be achieved by unifying two apparently contradictory states – the dream and reality.  Surrealism pushed Gorky to new experimentation.  Auping states that Miro and Kandinsky particularly inspired him to achieve in the early 1940s ‘an intriguingly hybrid image of description, memory, and pure abstraction’. 

Between 1938 and 1942 Gorky worked on paintings that he entitled ‘Garden in Sochi’.  This is the time of Gorky’s breakthrough to his mature imagery: ‘Remembered landscapes from his childhood in Armenia fuse surrealist imagery with abstract bursts of line and colour, anticipating the expressive gestures that are the hallmarks of the movement that would later be called Abstract Expressionism’.

Auping writes that although the paintings refer to Sochi – a resort on the Russian Black Sea coast, Gorky was explicit that his inspiration was his childhood home at Khorkom.  He wrote a letter to his sister in 1943 that he felt an American audience would be ‘more receptive of a Russian home than an Armenian home’.

Crooked Run Farm

In the early 1940s Gorky’s life and work was renewed.  In 1941 he married Agnes Magruder, who gave her husband a new sense of mission.  A survey exhibition of Gorky’s work took place in 1941 at the San Francisco Museum of Art, and, whilst this gave Gorky a valuable opportunity to show his work, it probably also stimulated him to further development.

After their marriage, Arshile and Agnes began a series of retreats to Agnes’ parents’ home at Crooked Run Farm in Virginia.  Here Gorky completed many drawings and paintings.  The rural setting enabled Gorky to engage with his memories of Khorkom. 

Auping writes:

‘Nature, and its abilities to catalyse his memories of Armenia, became the central element in inspiring Gorky’s breakthrough years of the 1940s’.

A more fluid medium, Kandinsky and drawing in the open air

Auping identifies three factors that contributed the development of Gorky’s work in the early 1940s.

Gorky met the Chilean Surrealist artist Matta Echaurren who encouraged Gorky to use a more fluid painting medium achieved by the addition of turpentine.  This achieved ‘fluid, spontaneous veils of thin paint (which) operate between keen observation and expressionist fantasy’.

Kandinsky’s early paintings influenced Gorky in the way that they are ‘an emotional response to nature, rather than direct observation’.  Kandinsky’s ‘The Waterfall’ of 1909 may have partially inspired Gorky’s ‘Waterfall’ of 1942-43.  Aupin describes Gorky’s ‘Waterfall’ as ‘one of Gorky’s most brilliant accomplishments in combining emotional spontaneity and direct observation’ and ‘an inspired abstraction in rich greens and blues’. 

The drawings made by Gorky in Virginia are described by Aupin as having been a transforming influence on Gorky.  Aupin emphasises that Gorky valued drawing as ‘the scaffolding for all his imagery’.  Gorky wrote: ‘Drawing is the basis of art.  A bad painter cannot draw.  But a good drawer can always paint’.  In the 1930s Gorky’s ‘precise line’ had enabled him to produce ‘intimate and elegantly outlined portraits’; in the 1940s his drawing skills enabled Gorky to investigate ‘ambiguous plant and insect forms’ at Crooked Run Farm as he sketched in the open air.   The landscape was the setting in which Gorky could reconcile the different parts of his inner world. 

The exhibition in the Spring of 1945

In 1944 Gorky met Andre Breton – poet and champion of surrealism – and Breton persuaded the gallery owner Julien Levy to represent Gorky’s work.  Levy held an exhibition of Gorky’s work in Spring 1945 and this was probably the most significant show of Gorky’s work during his lifetime.  This established Gorky’s presence in the developing school of Abstract Expressionism. 

Breton wrote an introduction to Gorky’s work in which he acclaims Gorky as ‘the first painter to whom the secret has been revealed’: Gorky’s works are not of any established genre of painting because they are ‘hybrid forms in which all human emotion is precipitated’. 

Later works

Gorky continued to work with memories of his homeland.  In 1946 and 1947 the titles of Gorky’s works indicate melancholy, and Gorky’s physical circumstances became tragic.  In 1945 a fire in his studio destroyed many of his works.  In the same year he underwent an operation for cancer. 

The last one-person show of Gorky’s lifetime took place in February 1948.  Of the show, the critic Clement Greenburg wrote: ‘Gorky at last ... takes his place ... among the very few contemporary American painters whose work is of more than national importance’. 

Later in 1948 Gorky and Levy were in a road traffic accident leading Gorky’s back being broken and his painting arm being paralysed.  Gorky and Agnes separated soon afterwards with Agnes taking the children with her. 

On 21^st July 1948 Arshile Gorky took his own life at the age of forty four.

Gorky’s legacy to Abstract Expressionism

Auping concludes by saying that conventional wisdom places Gorky between Surrealism of the 1930s and Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s.  He states that Gorky’s work resists classification. 

Soon after Gorky’s death Willem de Kooning wrote a letter to Art News extolling the value of Gorky’s work and claiming Gorky as an original inspiration for his own work. 

Auping writes: ‘Gorky ultimately inspired many more (than de Kooning), laying the aesthetic groundwork for the greatest revolution in American painting’. 

He concludes by printing a photograph from Life magazine dating from the 1950s of ‘The Irascibles’ – the key figures of Abstract Expressionism – to whom he states that Gorky left ‘an eloquent legacy of images’.  The artists in the photograph are: de Kooning; Gottlieb; Reinhardt; Sterne; Pousette-Dart; Baziotes; Pollock; Still; Motherwell; Tomlin; Stamos; Jimmy Ernst; Newman; Brooks; and Rothko.

ALAN REYNOLDS - OBITUARY

ALAN REYNOLDS - OBITUARY

This is a brief summary of the obituary of Alan Reynolds that was published online by the Daily Telegraph on 3^rd September 2014. 

Alan Reynolds

Alan Munro Reynolds was born in Newmarket, Suffolk, in April 1926. 

In 1944, aged 18, he joined the Highland Light Infantry.  At the end of the Second World War Alan Reynolds trained as a teacher and took up a teaching post at Hanover, West Germany.  Here he ‘was introduced to the avant-garde’.  He described it as “the most important experience I had”.

After teaching in Hanover for 18 months Reynolds returned to London.  Reynolds attended Woolwich Polytechnic Art School from 1948 to 1952, and later the Royal College of Art.  He had a one man show in London whilst a student; his first New York show was in 1954.

Reynolds’ career as an artist falls into two halves: landscape and abstract painting in the 1950s and 1960s; and constructive art from the 1960s until Reynolds’ death. 

Landscape and abstract painting in the 1950s and 1960s

Reynolds’ landscape works of the 1950s are described as a series of ‘spectral scenes’ of his childhood Suffolk: they ‘hum with elemental anxieties’.  ‘The war’s legacy’ is stated to have ‘echoed through his strokes’.  In Winter Pastoral, Kent (1952) a Kent landscape becomes a ‘sepia-toned necropolis’.  Frances Christie, Head of Modern and Post-War British Art at Sotheby’s is quoted as saying of Reynolds that “he had that rare ability to capture the essence of British landscape and render it completely contemporary, a feat that not many artists were able to achieve so successfully”.  Reynolds won acclaim as ‘the golden boy of post neo-romanticism’ with the success of his 1956 exhibition at the Redfern Gallery.

Reynolds was constantly reinventing his approach.  He is reported to have said that, apart from one occasion, he never painted landscape en plein air.  Reynolds had pursued ‘a quest for equilibrium’ since he left the Royal College of Art in 1953.  Reynolds particularly valued Herbert Read’s Faber book on Paul Klee. 

The concrete image: from 1968

In the 1960s Reynolds work became dominated by ‘structures’ and ‘forms’.  From 1968 onwards Reynolds abandoned representational painting and concentrated on the ‘concrete’ image: ‘for more than 45 years Reynolds made tonal modular drawings, woodcuts and constructed reliefs – many completely white’.

Reynolds achieved international success in this style, and he was particularly admired in France and Germany.  In Britain his landscapes of the 1950s remained the favoured style.

Alan Reynolds died on 28^th August 2014.