BARBARA HEPWORTH

Barbara Hepworth: Mark Brown on the exhibition at the Tate Modern from 24^th June 2015. 

This is a brief summary of the article that was published in The Guardian of 20^th January 2015: ‘Out of the shadows and back in focus – display to highlight Barbara Hepworth’.  The author of the article is Mark Brown, Guardian Arts Correspondent.

Barbara Hepworth

Barbara Hepworth is one of Britain’s most important 20^th Century sculptors.  Hepworth has international significance, and a main aim of the show is to emphasise this.  Hepworth’s work Single Form is outside the United Nations building in New York.

More than 70 of Hepworth’s works will be brought together for the exhibition at the Tate Modern.   The show will include abstract carvings and bronzes, and photographs by Hepworth, including photographic collages and photograms.

Hepworth is often over-shadowed by Henry Moore, her contemporary: Hepworth’s work is more refined and more abstract than Moore’s.

Hepworth was born in Yorkshire.  During the Second World War she moved with her husband Ben Nicolson to Cornwall, where she remained for the rest of her life.  Hepworth died in a fire in 1975. 

After London, the exhibition will tour to the Netherlands and Germany.

CHAIM SOUTINE: 'PATRIARCH OF GESTURAL ABSTRACTION'. S.SCHAMA

Chaim Soutine: ‘Patriarch of gestural abstraction’.  S. Schama. 

This is a personal summary of the chapter in the book by Simon Schama ‘Hang Ups’ entitled Chaim Soutine: Gut Feeling.  The book was published by BBC Books in 2005. 

Chaim Soutine was the subject of a previous blog post, dated 6^th January 2015.

Chaim Soutine

Simon Schama delights in finding a publicity brochure for an exhibition at a Jewish museum – apparently at New York’s Jewish Museum - of the works of Chaim Soutine.  The brochure publicises the museum’s café which has a ‘new menu inspired by great French painter Chaim Soutine’.  The joke is that at various times in Chaim’s life, his subject matter was dead and decaying animals, fish and birds.  Soutine’s works were ‘shockingly visceral’.

Schama assert the apparent central role that Soutine’s stomach pain played in his selection of subjects to paint and in his style of painting.  Soutine painted in an Expressionist manner, and expressed not only his inner mind but also his whole afflicted body.

Schama describes Soutine’s contradictory approach to personal relationships: he argues that Soutine’s physical suffering inspired him to achieve some of his greatest works, and that this affliction was a controlling influence on his friendships. 

Schama observes that dietary concerns are key to Jewish identity. 

Kleeblatt and Silver

The catalogue to the exhibition is by Kleeblatt and Silver: it is ‘illuminating’ and it ‘reads well’; some of the contributions to the catalogue are ‘Judenschmerz’. (In his ‘Portrait of American Jews: the last half of the Twentieth Century’, Samuel C Heilman describes Judenschmerz as ‘the pain of being Jewish’ and ‘being torn between social integration and the pressures of Jewish group survival’.) 

Kleeblatt and Silver assert that Soutine functioned as: ‘Necessary Wild Man’ at a time when modernist painting had become increasingly cerebral; re-interpreter of Rembrandt, Chardin and Courbet; and retrospective forerunner of ‘American gestural abstraction’.

Soutine was not isolated in pursuing a painter’s life

Schama asserts that shtetl culture within the Pale of Settlement of Soutine’s origin may well have been inhibited by the Second Commandment against figurative depictions in art, but that city life – in Minsk, Vilna (Vilnius) and Kovno (Kaunus) - was different.  These and other cities in the Pale were centres of creativity that produced ‘an entire generation of Jewish modernists, including El Lissistzky, Jacques Lipschitz and Marc Chagall, so Soutine was not isolated in pursuing a painter’s life.

Soutine in France

Schama writes that Soutine’s portraits of Parisian figures were a response to the death of Modigliani in 1920, which was partially due to Modigliani’s abuse of alcohol and drugs: these par traits by Soutine were ‘personification of the dangerous pleasures of Montparnasse’. 

In 1918 Soutine moved to Ceret in the South of France: he lived in poverty and was taken in by two elderly women.  His ‘Expressionist landscapes’ painted at Ceret are ‘of dumbfoundingly original power’.   The Tate Gallery’s ‘Landscape at Ceret (The Storm)’ is described as ‘one of the most radical pictures’ of this time.

The patronage of Soutine by Albert Barnes from 1922 was a surprising phenomenon: Soutine returned to Paris as ‘primitivist poster boy’.   But Soutine remained the tortured ‘wild man’. 

In the mid to late 1920s Soutine returned to the Masters whom he believed ‘had treated painting as a perpetually incomplete creation’.  At this time Soutine had a habit of destructive dissatisfaction with his works and simultaneous inability to let go of them. 

Chardin and Courbet appealed to Soutine as ‘the least academic and most painterly’.

Rembrandt was his main inspiration.  He was particularly drawn to Rembrandt’s obsession with the texture of paint in the late part of his life.  Schama describes Rembrandt as the ‘proto-patriarch of Expressionism’.  Soutine was especially drawn to Rembrandt’s slaughtered beasts: ‘profound meditations on the relationship between sacrifice and redemption’.   This was the impetus to Soutine’s ‘slaughter’ paintings.

Schama asserts that Soutine’s attraction to ‘sacrifice and redemption’ was ultimately religious.  From his upbringing he would have had understood Jewish and Christian traditions of sacrificial atonement: as an Orthodox Jew, he would have been averse to the Christian amalgamation of God and sacrifice.  But Soutine’s blood-filled carcasses are ‘adamantly unkosher’.  Jewish ritual slaughter requires the draining of blood, but Soutine painted dead creatures hanging inverted, so that the blood would not drain.  And there is a hint of life, still, in these dead bodies: these paintings have an ‘element of self-portraiture’.   Schama considers that these paintings of slaughter have the meaning only of Soutine’s personal fate. 

The patriarch of gestural abstraction

In the early 1940s, as Soutine’s death approached, he had already come to the notice of Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb in the USA.  In 1950 Soutine’s works were shown for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York: he had become ‘the patriarch of gestural abstraction’.

GEOMETRIC ABSTRACTION: EXHIBITION AT THE WHITECHAPEL GALLERY, LONDON FROM 15th JANUARY

Geometric abstraction: exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London from 15^th January

This is a personal summary of the review by Frances Spalding that was published in the Guardian newspaper on 10^th January 2015 of the exhibition Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915 – 2015 at the Whitechapel Gallery, London from 15^th January until 6^th April 2015.

Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915 – 2015

Malevich’s ‘Black Square’ (1915)

The title of the exhibition alludes to Malevich’s ‘Black Square’ of 1915: this painting served as a new beginning which provoked a response.  Russian art is significant in the history of geometric abstraction but the exhibition shows that it is a style that became ubiquitous in western culture in the Twentieth Century.   Even so, Malevich’s ‘Black Square’ remains influential. 

Mondrian’s ‘Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red’ (1937-42)

The painting at the centre of the exhibition is Mondrian’s ‘Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red’ (1937-42).  The red square at its centre has Malevich’s ‘Black Square’ as its inspiration.  In producing the work Mondrian was searching for ‘dynamic equilibrium’ and in the red square he recognises ‘the human hunger for the absolute and immutable, created by the relativity and mutability in things’.

British antipathy to abstract art

In 1936 the first British international exhibition of abstract art – ‘Abstract and Concrete’ - was held in Oxford, subsequently moving to Liverpool and then Cambridge.  The auction house Christies testified for customs and insurance purposes that the works in the collection, including those by Calder, Gabo, Kandinsky, Giacometti and Miro, were ‘almost worthless in terms of monetary value’.  London was belatedly added to the list of venues, when two Mondrians were added to the collection.  ‘Abstract and Concrete’ was organised by Nicolette Grey. 

The exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery makes few references to British antipathy to abstract art.  There is only limited British presence in the works in the Whitechapel Gallery show.   British artists who are absent include: Marlow Moss, Bridget Riley, Jean Spencer, Gina Burdass and David Hepher.  There is no mention of the magazine ‘Axis’ by Myfanwy Evans which inspired Nicolette Grey.  

The exhibition is a strong one

Nevertheless the exhibition is a strong one, with four themes: Utopia; Architectonics; Communication; the Everyday. 

The threads include: Architectonics’ ‘three dimensional abstract imaginings’ and Malevich’s models of ideal cities; the integration in the 1920s of abstraction with interior design; Mondrian’s quest to construct the perfect domestic living space; and the integration of art, architecture and life that provided the editorial agenda for several magazines. 

Van Doesburg’s ‘Concrete Art Manifesto’ was published in 1930.  Max Bill was Swiss: he founded the Allianz group of Swiss Concrete artists.  Bill understood Concrete art as works that exist uniquely and which express purity and harmony.  Bill particularly influenced Brazilian artists where ‘his ideas fused with the ambitions and utopian modernism of the country following World War Two’.  The Brazilian Concrete artists Lygia Clark and Waldemar Cordeiro have works in the show at the Whitechapel Gallery.

By the 1960s the value placed on geometric abstraction had lessened.  Abstract art was now engaging at a quotidian level and it had lost its radical spirit.  

CHAIM SOUTINE: 'THE BIRTH OF JEWISH PAINTING' / 'THE BIRTH OF A JEWISH ART'. COGNIAT, 1973

‘The birth of Jewish painting’ / 'The birth of a Jewish art': Chaim Soutine (1893-1943). Raymond Cogniat, 1973.

This is a personal summary of the account of the life and work of the painter Chaim Soutine by Raymond Cogniat: ‘Soutine’. Crown, New York. 1973.  The book was translated into English by Eileen B. Hennessy.

The headings below are the chapter titles in the book.

Antibourgeois Art

Chaim Soutine was an ‘artiste maudit’, and may even be regarded as the first of this kind: an artist who finds himself at odds with his surroundings and yet who thrives in this marginal condition and who thus comes to be representative of the era in which he lives. During the Nineteenth Century spiritual values were regarded with indifference.  The ‘artiste maudit’ symbolises this neglect.  An artist in this situation is misunderstood because his circumstances are not his deliberate choice, and because his standing in society is a function of ‘ineluctable predestination’.  Soutine was born in 1893, at the time when the increasing tension and desire for change was exacerbated by political regimes that actively resisted change.  Soutine’s life is to be viewed ‘from this viewpoint of inevitable protest’.

The Formative Years

Chaim Soutine was born in Smilovitchi – a small village near Minsk.  From a young age Soutine believed he had an artist’s vocation.  At the age of ten Soutine began work as a tailor, but four years later he was working in a photographer’s studio in Minsk, and he took drawing lessons.

At this time Soutine befriended a young man named Kikoine.  An anecdote from this time tells of one or more people assaulting Soutine because he had painted a portrait: in one version the assault is said to have been made by the son of a rabbi who was angered that Soutine had defied the injunction against representative painting in the Second Commandment.  Soutine received compensation for his injuries: this was partly given to his family and partly used by Soutine in 1910 to travel to Vilnius where he was accepted at the art school and where he stayed for two years.  Kikoine was also at the school but he soon left for Paris. 

Paris, Crossroads of the World

In 1912 Soutine moved to Paris.  Fauvism had originated six years previously and Cubism was four years old.  Aspiring artists from Eastern, Central and Western Europe were arriving in Paris to take advantage of the new opportunities.  Soutine joined Kikoine, along with other artists recently arrived in Paris including ‘Kremegne (another compatriot and friend), Chagall, Fernand Leger, Robert Delaunay, and Blaise Cendrars, as well as Laurens, Zadkine, and Archipenko.  ‘Soutine was the junior member of this motley group’. 

Soutine spent much time in the Louvre.  He particularly studied Courbet’s The Burial at Ornans which Cogniat describes as realism that exceeds visible reality.  He suggests that this – and other works by Courbet - would have liberated Soutine.  Rembrandt’s works in the Louvre were also a revelation to Soutine: he ‘discovered (in Rembrandt) the constantly renewed, shifting play of colours in relation to one another, and ….. the poignant exploration and externalisation of the inner life’. 

Despite the fertile atmosphere in Paris for painters, Soutine did not identify himself with any of the artistic movements that emerged at this time. 

The birth of Jewish painting

Cogniat writes that another element to be introduced at this point is to relate Soutine’s work not to French art but to the German Expressionism of the time.  He argues that it is appropriate to attempt a ‘definition of a Jewish art style created to a large extent by the artists of Central Europe, fortuitously congregated at this time in a flight from the menace of ill-treatment and racial hatred that promised to grow worse’. 

Cogniat accepts that ‘the idea of a Jewish style of painting’ is controversial.  He considers that there is no tradition of Jewish painting prior to the Twentieth Century because of the prohibition of the making of images and objects contained in the Second Commandment.  He argues that any Jewish artists who pre-date the Twentieth Century ‘were not distinguished in any way from the other, Christian artists of the same period’.

Cogniat argues that a complete change occurred with the start of the Twentieth Century and that Soutine was in the vanguard.  He writes: ‘Several artists from Central Europe and Russia have introduced a very special note into the art of our age, a feeling for the pathos of daily life, a latent despair, or even simply a melancholy and a resignation, forms of Eastern fatalism expressed in the choice of themes and style’.    This is a style, Cogniat writes, that delights in bold brushwork that results from the artist’s ‘overstimulation … being held in check by the rules of an aesthetic system’.  Cogniat attributes this style to the ‘state of mind resulting from political circumstances and the climate of permanent anxiety in which the Jews of certain areas live’.  In the early Twentieth Century the more relaxed atmosphere of Western Europe stimulated Jewish artists to ‘give free rein to the hitherto suppressed nostalgia to which they had become accustomed’.

Kikoine – friend of Soutine – has written that he considered Jewish painting to have had its birth at the start of the Twentieth Century.  He stated that he and Soutine and other Jewish painters who were ‘exiled in a foreign country’ were preoccupied with their own lack of a pictorial tradition – a lack that the culture of their host country did not satisfy.  Cogniat presents this as evidence that Soutine’s art is unique and without precedents.

Cogniat argues that any prior inhibition that Soutine may have had because of the Second Commandment is irrelevant compared with Soutine’s opportunity in Paris to enjoy the experience of personal freedom.  Cogniat concludes: ‘This is the basis for our opinion that a Jewish art was born with Soutine’.

In 1915 Soutine met the painter and sculptor Amadeo Modigliani (an Italian Jew), and the two of them became close friends – or more accurately ‘companion hermits’, both living in ‘extreme poverty’.  Soutine and Modigliani were drinking companions, and temperamentally they were opposites: Modigliani’s extraversion, his detachment, and his ‘controlled’ painting style contrasting with Soutine’s introversion, his ‘hunted demeanour’ and his violent method of painting.  ‘Alcoholism’ was a source of the conflict between the two men, and yet Soutine received ‘daily nourishment’ from his friendship with Modigliani.

Modigliani introduced Soutine to Zborowski – a Polish poet and art dealer.  Zborowski and a small number of other patrons assisted Soutine financially and by preventing Soutine destroying all of the paintings that he was dissatisfied with.   Cogniat refers to a catalogue recently published by Pierre Courthion that contains fifteen canvasses painted by Soutine before 1915.  In this catalogue Soutine’s style shows the ‘impastos and bright colours that nevertheless form refined relationships’ which also characterise his later works.  In the catalogue some of the works show a severity and stiffness that suggest a style still in the process of being formed. 

Cogniat describes Soutine’s mature style as one that typically shows constant movement and ‘jostling, overlapping, interlacing whirlpools of paint that invade the entire surface of the canvas’. 

Cogniat argues that other extant paintings from 1915 and 1916 show Soutine’s immersion in anguish and misery.  Landscapes have a sense of impending doom; still lifes have a ‘despairing, aggressive realism’.

In 1918 Soutine moved to the south of France.  He was accompanied by Modigliani; Zborowski enabled the move.  The experience precipitated in Soutine greater liberty and a more violent and intense vision.  Cogniat writes: ‘His art now fully attained its apocalyptic character and became a suitable vehicle for the painful revelation of its creator, who continued to live in materially deplorable conditions …. increasingly harassed by his stomach troubles’.  Cogniat concludes that Soutine’s works at this time are an ‘affirmation of catastrophe couched in the form not of a probable future but of a visible, present reality’. 

The Charm of Ugliness

In the period 1920 to 1927 Soutine experienced the loss of Modigliani, who died in 1920, and a sudden upturn in his situation in 1922 when Dr Albert C Barnes of the USA purchased seventy five of Soutine’s works from Zborowski.  In 1927 Soutine had his first one-man exhibition, in Paris.  In the late 1920 and early 1930s Soutine achieved some stability through friendship with the Castaing family.  Zborowski died in 1932.

Soutine has a unique role in promoting the significance of ‘ugliness in art’.  Goya, Breughel, Bosch and Grunewald all paint ugliness but ‘in all these painters the existence of a less grim version persists.  With Soutine ugliness is a permanent condition ….. which reunites with that abstraction that may be an ideal beauty’.  Ugliness is the condition that typifies Soutine: it is a ‘translation of beauty’.

The carcasses of animals that Soutine painted emerged from Soutine’s exposure to ritual sacrifices that he witnessed as a child ‘with their atmosphere of religious terror’.

Cogniat uses the words ‘luminous’, ‘supernatural’ and ‘religiosity’ to describe Soutine’s works.  Soutine paints within his own spiritual parameters: his paintings may not be compared with the work of other artists because each one by Soutine is a ‘mystical window’.  The dominance of red in Soutine’s works ‘does not correspond to a factual reality: it expresses an obsession and an exasperation’.

Failure in success

In the latter part of his life – the late 1930s and early 1940s - the dominant red in Soutine’s earlier works gave way to a dominant green in his portraits of trees, often shown battling against the wind.  In 1941 Soutine escaped from Nazi Paris and, due to misunderstandings, was not able to reach the USA.  He moved to Touraine in Vichy France in the company of Marie-Berthe Aurenche.  In 1943 surgery on Soutine’s stomach became essential, and on 8^th August 1943 he was operated on in Paris.  Soutine died the following day.

Soutine’s life was typified by misperception and ambiguity.  This was caused by Soutine’s own ‘soul in search of the absolute’, his self-doubt and his pride.

There were several women in Soutine’s life: Paulette Jourdain – his assistant and model in about 1925; Deborah Melnik – a Pole who may have borne Soutine’s son; Gerda Groth – who was captured by the Nazis in 1940 at the Hiver velodrome and who was placed in the Gurs concentration camp; and Marie-Berthe Aurenche who was with him at the end of his life.