PICASSO AND MODERN BRITISH ART: THE TATE BRITAIN EXHIBITION 15 FEB - 15 JULY 2012

Picasso and Modern British Art: the Tate Britain exhibition held 15 February – 15 July 2012

This is a brief summary of the free guide to the exhibition ‘Picasso and Modern British Art’ that was held at Tate Britain from 15 February to 15 July 2012.

Pablo Picasso was born in 1881: he died in 1973.

Picasso and Modern British Art

Picasso’s works were first shown in Britain in 1910, and then in 1912.  Picasso had few supporters in Britain.  Those who favoured his works were associated with the Bloomsbury Group: Roger Fry and Clive Bell were to the fore in this.

Duncan Grant (1885 – 1979) was the British artist whose work was most clearly influenced by Picasso in the period before World War One.  Grant had been in Paris before the Great War and he maintained contact with Picasso until Picasso’s death.

Wyndham Lewis (1882 – 1957) lived in Paris from 1902 until 1908 .  In 1914 he initiated a new art movement – Vorticism – and defined it as being a reaction against Picasso’s studio-bound inertia.  Wyndham Lewis’ ‘aggressive, cynical figures first appeared at the Leicester Galleries in London in April 1921, only weeks after Picasso’s first post-war exhibition in London’.

In the summer of 1919 Picasso resided in London with Serge Diaghilev and his Russian Ballet: he designed sets and costumes for the ballet ‘The Three Cornered Hat’ which premiered at the Alhambra, Leicester Square on 22 July.

Ben Nicholson (1894 – 1982) first saw Picasso’s work in Paris in the early 1920s.  In the early 1930s he painted in a Cubist style which tended more towards Braque than Picasso, and he and Barbara Hepworth visited Picasso in Paris.  Nicholson’s works subsequently tended more towards Mondrian’s non-representational style.

Exhibitions of Picasso’s works were held in London in 1921, 1931 and 1932. 

The sculptor Henry Moore (1898 – 1986) was inspired by Picasso after about 1924.  The magazine Cahiers d’Art reproduced illustrations of Picasso’s works, and these were stimulating for Moore.  Moore’s increasing abstraction in the 1930s seems to have been influenced by Picasso.

Francis Bacon (1909 – 1992) stated that he abandoned interior design and took up painting after seeing an exhibition of Picasso’s work in Paris in the late 1920s.  At the time that he produced his ‘Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion’ in 1944, Bacon sought to destroy all his previous work.  Surviving works of Bacon from before 1944 show that he was influenced by illustrations of Picasso’s paintings of figures on a beach.  Until Bacon’s death the only 20^th Century artist he would consider was Picasso.

In 1938 Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ of 1937 was sent on tour to London, Oxford, Leeds and Manchester.  ‘It left an indelible mark on artists who saw it in Britain and in reproduction’.

Graham Sutherland (1903 – 1980) is recorded as having acknowledged his debt to ‘Guernica’: ‘by a kind of paraphrase of appearances things could be made to look more vital and real’.  Immediately before World War Two Sutherland produced works with a ‘tortured and anxious appearance’ that were based on natural objects.  Sutherland recorded bomb damage during the war and he used ‘Guernica’ as a reference point.  In his religious paintings after the war he also drew on ‘Guernica’ and on Grunewald’s ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’.  In the late 1940s Sutherland continued to be influenced by Picasso: he moved to the south of France and became acquainted with Picasso.

In the 1940s and 1950s Picasso was a controversial figure in Britain.  He had become established as a widely recognised artist but he attracted criticism as well.  In 1960 the largest retrospective exhibition of Picasso’s works to date in Britain was held at the Tate Gallery. 

David Hockney (born 1937) has long been inspired by Picasso.  He made several visits to the 1960 retrospective show at the Tate Gallery where he learned that an artist may work in more than one style.

In 1965 Roland Penrose persuaded Picasso to sell ‘The Three Dancers’ of 1925 to the Tate Gallery.  This was the first time that Picasso had sold directly to a public museum.  ‘The Three Dancers’ and ‘Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon’ were regarded by Picasso as his two greatest works.  

‘MARC CHAGALL: FOSTERING A FAMILY OF IMAGES’ IN ROSEN. A. 'IMAGINING JEWISH ART'

‘MARC CHAGALL: FOSTERING A FAMILY OF IMAGES’ IN ROSEN. A. 'IMAGINING JEWISH ART'

This is a summary of Chapter 1 of Rosen’s book: ‘Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters with the masters in Chagall, Guston and Kitaj’ (2009, Legenda). 

The Introduction to this work by Rosen was summarised in this blog on 22 October 2014.  Chapter 2 of Rosen’s book, on Phillip Guston, was summarised in this blog on 16 March 2015.  Chapter 3 of Rosen’s book, on R B KItaj, was summarised in this blog on 19 May 2015.

Marc Chagall was born in 1887; he died in 1985.

Marc Chagall: Fostering a Family of Images

Chagall was born in 1887 in Vitebsk – then in Russia and now in Belarus – and in 1910 he moved to Paris.  He decided that his future as an artist lay in Paris and that it could not thrive in Russia. 

Chagall observed that the artistic tradition of his homeland was that of Christian icon painting, and that while he valued this tradition and considered Christ ‘a great poet whose poetical teaching had been forgotten by the modern world’, the Russian, Christian tradition remained strange to him.

Rosen’s aim is to explore Chagall’s identity as a Jewish artist.

Rosen discusses ways in which some of Chagall’s works indicate the artist’s alienation from the Christian artistic tradition.  His ‘Pregnant Woman’ of 1913 can be read as an irreverent observation on the immaculate conception of Jesus Christ. His ‘Abraham and the Three Angels’ of 1956 is a re-working of Rublev’s icon ‘The Holy Trinity’ of 1410-1420: instead of presenting the angels of Genesis 18 as a prefiguring of the Christian Trinity, Chagall has the angels with their backs to the viewer.

Rosen asks why Chagall felt so comfortable in Western Europe where the Christian tradition in art is also dominant.  Rosen quotes Harshav, who states that Chagall would have come to Western art in the same way as a newcomer who encounters all periods of art history as parallel galleries in a museum.  This would have stimulated Chagall’s creativity.  In this setting, for Chagall Christ is no longer Christ of the icons but Christ the ‘great poet’.  Thus, the New Testament and the Western tradition of art become for Chagall a source of stories and symbols, and in paintings with a New Testament setting Chagall introduces his own life-story.  In contrast, when Chagall paints from the Old Testament, these external references are less common.

Rosen refers to research that has been done by Meyer Schapiro which shows how, in some of his paintings of Old Testament subjects, Chagall has been influenced in his compositions by the works of Rembrandt and Ribera.  In his ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ of 1956 Chagall has added a Hasidic Jew who points at Jacob.  This, states Rosen, is Chagall showing that Jacob’s dream is a specifically Jewish story with promise of future blessings by the Lord for the Jewish people.

In Chagall’s ‘Promise to Jerusalem’ of 1956, Chagall refers to the promise made to Israel by the Lord in Isaiah 54: 7.  For Chagall this would have been an assertion of future hope for both the Jewish people after World War Two and for himself as he mourned the death of his wife Bella.

Thus, Rosen shows, Chagall finds ‘spiritual teaching’ in the Christian Old Testament and ‘poetical teaching’ in the Christian New Testament.  The crucifixion is the primary New Testament image that Chagall draws on. 

Chagall and the crucifixion

Rosen will examine how Chagall approaches the crucifixion before, during and after World War Two.

Rosen refers to the novel by Chaim Potok: ‘My Name is Asher Lev’.  Asher Lev is a young Hasidic Jew struggling to reconcile his ability to paint with his religious upbringing.  He takes tuition from a secular Jew who instructs the young artist to study paintings of the crucifixion in order to learn about composition and the handling of space.  After a while Asher Lev protests that he wants to see no more crucifixions, but his teacher challenges him with the assertion that the history of art is predominantly a non-Jewish history, and that this is exemplified by the crucifixion.  An artist must engage with the crucifixion if he or she is to be found in the history of art. 

This would have been particularly challenging for Chagall – a Jew originating in the Pale of Settlement.  In Chagall’s move away from Russia he was assisted in meeting this challenge by being able to encounter the Western artistic tradition in the galleries and museums of Paris.

Chagall himself commented on this in 1931 when he stated that ‘Jews perform a kind of purging function’ in bringing to birth ‘an age of free creators …. when people were people and not calculating machines, and society immediately recognized the creators and not their imitators’.  Chagall understands himself as a Jewish artist, not imitating the past but adopting it so that he may stand alongside it as a family member.  It is only by being a member of the Western artistic family that Chagall may see and understand his childhood and youth.  Chagall identified in particular with Rembrandt, whose ‘rich emotionality’ and treatment of figures in his paintings resonated with Chagall as he sought in Western Europe for understanding of his Jewish European heritage.  Rosen states that Rembrandt also appealed to other Jewish artists – specifically Guston and R B Kitaj.

Chagall also identified with other artists from the Western tradition: Rosen will look at Chagall’s post-war crucifixions in the light of the work of Matthias Grunewald (c1475 – 1528). 

Chagall’s crucifixions changed during World War Two

Chagall’s ‘Dedicated to Christ’ of 1912 is one of his earliest masterpieces.  From the writings of Chagall it is apparent that the Christ figure is himself as a child and that the two figures standing by the cross are Chagall’s parents.  The style is that of Paris in 1912, and specifically of the Orphism of Robert Delaunay.  In this painting Chagall rejects the Christian icons of his youth, subverts Christian doctrine and asserts his own identity.  In his own writings in 1977 Chagall asserted: ‘For me, Christ has always symbolised the true type of the Jewish martyr.  That is how I understood him in 1908 when I used this figure for the first time […..] It was under the influence of the pogroms.  Then I painted and drew him in pictures about ghettos, surrounded by Jewish troubles, by Jewish mothers, running terrified with little children in their arms’. 

Rosen states that Jewish artists had previously painted crucifixion scenes in response to persecution by Christians – both as an indictment and as an appeal for justice. 

‘Dedicated to Christ’ shows the twin poles of Chagall’s painting of the crucifixion throughout his life: expression of his Jewish identity, and as an appeal against persecution; Christ as the ‘great poet’, and Christ as ‘the true type of the Jewish martyr’.

Before World War Two the primary mode for Chagall is as Christ the Jewish martyr with his paintings being appeals for justice; after the war Chagall tends more towards Christ as poet. 

In 1930 Chagall had not painted the crucifixion since ‘Dedicated to Christ’, but in this year he travelled to Berlin and then to the south of France ‘shaken by a premonition of Jewish catastrophe’: he painted his ‘Vision of Christ on the Cross’.

Chagall’s ‘White Crucifixion’ of 1938 includes scenes of attacks on Jews in Nazi Germany.  There is no-one watching at the foot of the cross; the ladder for the deposition is burning; there is no hope of redemption or resurrection.

In 1944, after he learned of the destruction of Vitebsk and of the scale of the Shoah, Chagall painted ‘The Crucified’: in the snow death pervades the shtetl as if in an inversion of the Passover; bodes are attached to crosses and the artist sits on a rooftop as the silent witness.

In 1941 Chagall and his wife Bella left France for the USA where they settled in New York City.   Chagall was a double exile: from both Russia and France.  He kept the company of those who spoke French, Russian and Yiddish: his English was only rudimentary.  Chagall came to understand the crucifixion as an expression of his personal alienation and his helplessness as the events of the Shoah took place.   In 1941 Chagall had produced a small gouache: ‘Descent from the Cross’.  This is a deposition, but in place of the body of Christ is a body that is shown by the inscription above the cross to be that of the artist himself.  An angel gives to Chagall a palette and brushes, granting him revival in his art and the possibility that in his art there may be revival of the Jewish people.

The theme of the crucifixion was used by a number of Jewish artists during World War Two to communicate Jewish suffering. 

Chagall’s ‘Resistance, Resurrection, Liberation’ and Grunewald’s ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’

Chagall is unique in continuing to work to the theme of crucifixion after the war.  His triptych painted between 1937 and 1952 – ‘Resistance, Resurrection, Liberation’ - shows ‘overlooked elements of hope in Matthias Grunewald’s ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’ of 1515.  The original setting of the ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’ was an Anthonite monastery that cared for sufferers of ‘the burning sickness’.  Christ is shown as being ‘flayed and pestiferous’: ‘made in the image of the ergotics who prayed to him’. 

Rosen writes that the ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’, which was ‘discovered’ at the start of the 20^th Century, spoke to contemporary viewers of current-day horrors.  He writes that Picasso’s meditation on the work assisted him in achieving his ‘Guernica’ (1937). 

Rosen writes that the ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’ ‘served artists as an aesthetic model for coming to terms with the grisly images emerging from the liberation of Nazi concentration camps’.  He writes that Sutherland’s ‘Crucifixion’ of 1946 is influenced by images of emaciated corpses in death camps and that the iconography is that of the ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’.

Chagall worked with the ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’ in a manner that was more profound: he uncovered its ‘underlying promise of redemption’.  The altarpiece was a series of folding panels.  The crucifixion scene was followed in sequence by glorious images of triumph, redemption and salvation in Christ which would have been unfolded on feast days.  In this way the afflicted worshippers were given meaning and hope.  It is this succession of resurrection after crucifixion that is essential for Chagall after the Shoah.

The titles of the three panels in Chagall’s ‘Resistance, Resurrection, Liberation’ evolved as Chagall worked on the painting. 

‘Resistance’ extols the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943.  The crucified Christ is surrounded by energetic figures, some of them the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto, but a figure lies on the ground at the foot of the cross – asleep or dead: it is the artist himself. 

In ‘Resurrection’ the body of Jesus is still, surprisingly, attached to the cross but the resurrection is found in the figure of Chagall, now alive and standing, and in the figure of John the Baptist, also once again alive, and serving as the herald of the coming of Christ.  ‘Liberation’ is a ‘flood of illumination’: Jewish life is revived; there is no risen Christ: the Jewish people, by their own efforts are revived.  Chagall shows that this revival will come through ‘the mortal hands of lovers, painters, poets, and fiddlers’ and it is only in this panel that he shows himself painting again. 

Chagall’s primary purpose of rapprochement

Rosen describes how Chagall’s own writings show that his primary concern in producing ‘Resistance, Resurrection, Liberation’, and in using the ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’ as inspiration, is that of rapprochement with the people of Germany. 

Despite the artistic and cultural heritage of Germany, its people failed in their humanity.  Hitler was an artist and yet he had pursued a vision of death and destruction for Jews.  The descendants of the great Western European artists had eliminated the Jewish people, and thus ‘the ashen air of the Shoah not only begrimed the canvases of the Gemaldegalerie and the Alte Pinatothetek, its miasma hung over the whole of Western Art’.

Chagall’s post-war crucifixions state that the artistic past is now both available to Jews and a means of asserting a Jewish future.  Art history is to be the field of peace-making.  Chagall has repainted the great German masterpiece of the ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’: he has asserted that he is both a brother of Jews who died in the Shoah and the son of the German Grunewald.  

SUMMARY OF CHAPTER 2 OF GEORGE PATTISON: 'CRUCIFIXIONS AND RESURRECTIONS OF THE IMAGE'

Summary of Chapter 2 of Pattison. G. Crucifixions and Resurrections of the Image: Christian reflections on Art and Modernity'.  SCM.  2009.

Chapter 2.  Art, modernity and the Death of God.

The Second Commandment has long had an effect on Western culture that is deeper than the puritan’s hostility to images.  The Second Commandment was broken at the outset, and ever since worshippers have found it difficult to worship that which is not represented.  Battles in Christian history arising from iconoclasm show, after Nietzsche, that ‘the spilling of blood lies at the basis of all great cultural phenomena’.  The iconoclast affirms the power of art

But iconoclastic controversies also have positive outcomes because they heighten cultural sensitivity about the way in which images of God function.  And Christianity has shown that there is a limit to the extent to which it will accommodate iconoclasm: the church needs to speak about Christ as the image of God; Genesis 1 tells us that humanity is made in God’s image. 

The complexity of the Gospel’s portrayal of Christ poses its own challenge: the ‘image of God’ who was Christ was himself destroyed on the cross.  The Death of God is therefore a profoundly Christian theme but it is difficult to distinguish what is authentically Christian from what is secular or nihilistic.

Pattison presents the reality of the dead Christ as a mutilated cadaver and asks, after Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’ (1869), Holbein’s ‘The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb’ (1522) and Manet’s ‘Dead Christ with Angels’ (1864), whether the disciples of Christ would have lost their faith before the dead body. 

Edouard Manet

Pattison extols Edouard Manet as the originator of modern painting. 

Manet makes paintings that have abandoned the attempt to present an illusion of reality and instead makes paintings that are knowingly two-dimensional artefacts.  Manet’s paintings are made so that they can stand alone.  His works are statements of fact and they eschew sentiment.  This emphasises the significance of Manet’s ‘Dead Christ with Angels’. 

Pattison reviews Manet’s career and the role that Charles Baudelaire played in recognising Manet’s talent and encouraging him.  Baudelaire saw as early as 1860 that Manet recognised the necessity of engaging with the ‘here and now’ of the present: ‘its fashions, its morals, its emotions’.  He wrote that art must show the ‘quality of modernity’: ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable’.  Baudelaire also observed that the ‘uniform’ for men of the age was the ‘frock coat’ because ‘all of us are attending some funeral or other’.  Thus, Manet’s ‘The Concert in the Tuileries’ of 1860 shows the hubbub of the crowds in the Tuilerie Gardens in the centre of Paris: a scene of jollity, shot through with death by the presence of the many men in funeral attire. 

The critics considered Manet’s ‘Dead Christ with Angels’ to be ‘audacious bad taste’.  Pattison considers other representations of corpses painted by Manet.  He concludes that Manet approached death in a ‘matter of fact’ way: his corpses were only corpses; his everyday scene of promenading was attended by men on their way to a funeral. 

Pattison considers Manet’s portraits: he considers that in the way in which Manet painted their eyes Manet has the ability to paint ‘metaphysical shock’: Tillich’s ‘shock of non-being’.  This is the deep understanding in all people that ‘the possibility of death, extinction, oblivion’ is our constant companion’.   In Baudelaire’s words: ‘modern man’ is no longer sustained by religion but is an ‘infinitely suffering being’ in the midst of the mundane modern urban world.  

Manet shows this by his depiction of death and by the ‘inner shock’ shown by the eyes in his portraits.  Manet should not be understood as a ‘religious’ painter, but in his ‘Dead Christ with Angels’ Manet shows us – after Baudelaire – ‘the funeral we are all attending’.  Manet therefore confronts modernity’s unspoken assumptions. 

'The Death of God’ is not a negation of Christianity and neither is it a death that closes a chapter.  The ‘unbearable secularity’ of a world without God carries its own memory and grief for that which has been lost, and it is this which both sustains an awareness of God and provides a remedy for despair.  

Pattison compares Manet’s ‘Dead Christ with Angels’ with his ‘Olympia’ of 1865.  The prostitute Olympia gazes back at the viewer.  Pattison writes, after Sartre, that Olympia’s gaze conveys resentment and indignation: she has been handed over to an existence that denies her a ‘higher life’ of ‘beauty, truth, goodness or religious transformation’. 

Pattison again considers the characters and plot dynamics in Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’.  He concludes that comparison of Manet’s ‘Dead Christ with Angels’ with his ‘Olympia’ is valid because Dostoevsky also uses contemplation of  Holbein’s ‘The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb’ and a portrait of a ‘fallen woman’ to ‘mark out the metaphysical space within which the action moves’. 

Pattison concludes that Manet’s choice of these two subjects and his treatment of them in his two paintings ‘establishes a force-field of extraordinary metaphysical potential’.  Through these two works the ‘Death of God’ is ‘obliquely reflected’.  Manet’s presentation through his paintings of ‘statements of fact’ - without any attempt to construct the illusion of a world within the painting - strips away any pretence that the divine can be visualised. 

In the words of Simone Weil, Manet asks us to ‘refuse to believe in everything that is not God’.

Godlessness as an ‘indirect and ambiguous moment of encounter between faith and modernity’.

Pattison then gives several examples of response to the Death of God in modern art ‘that we might also call a loss of belief in everything that is not God’.  

He reviews the artists: Vilhelm Hammershoj (1864 – 1916); Edward Hopper (1882 – 1967); and Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987).  These artists’ works show that the world is godless, but they do so in a way that reminds us that the world is godless and ‘not simply a neutral or value-free surface’.

We may either see Godlessness as a sign of complete secularization, or as a way of presenting Christianity’s own narrative of the death of God on the cross.  The latter mode is an ‘indirect and ambiguous moment of encounter between faith and modernity’.

Vilhelm Hammershoj was a Danish painter whose works are becoming better known outside his native country.  His most frequently painted subject is the interior of his home in Copenhagen.  Although the interiors are enclosed from outside, they are always lit by an unseen source within.  In his works God is absent but signs of God are glimpsed.

Edward Hopper’s world has ‘pitted itself against the vastness of the North American continent and installed 24 hour a day lighting to keep its ancient darkness at bay’.  The characters in his paintings are ‘living in a situation that exceeds their power of comprehension, and yet they know it’.  Hopper is painting Kierkegaard’s ‘anxiety and nothingness’.  Pattison writes: ‘How could one depict nothingness?  Perhaps by painting what there is to see in modern urban life – and nothing more’.

Like Edouard Manet, Andy Warhol was obsessed by death.  Car crashes and the electric chair are part of his oeuvre.  These, and other aspects of his works, was a presentation by Warhol of modern life being governed by death and no longer with a link to God who is the source of life.

Conclusion

Pattison concludes that ‘the God of Death’ was successively ‘unmasked and critiqued’ throughout the Jewish scriptures and that the cross enacted the ‘final exposure’ because a God of Death can only exist in concealment. 

The Death of God theme in modern art likewise draws the God of Death out of his hiding places within contemporary culture.  Art shows that the gods that are worshipped today are ‘no-gods’.  Even nihilistic art prompts us to consider what it is that ‘truly belongs to life and so to God who first truly begins to live when death begins to be undone’.   Nihilism may in fact be iconoclasm.

Christian theology asks of any work of art: “does this work reveal death in such a way that it make us more powerless before the God of Death, or does it help us name the God of Death for what he is and so open up the possibility of the God who, through the cross, comes to us as the God of life and of the living?”