Natalia Goncharova at Tate Modern

My meeting in London finished earlier than expected and as I’d booked an Advance ticket on the train I had a few hours to kill before I could set off back home. I wasn’t too far from Tate Modern and as I hadn’t been there for a while decided I’d wander over and see what was on.

Taking advantage of my Tate membership I decided to have a look at the temporary exhibition devoted to a Russian artist from the first half of the 20th Century, Natalia Goncharova. Not someone I’d heard of before and I don’t recall seeing any of her works previously. The exhibition has had good reviews in the press, so I was interested to find out more.

Self portrait

Goncharova came from a family of “impoverished aristocrats”, and grew up on the family estate in Tula, 200 miles from Moscow. I don’t know what the Tate mean by “impoverished”. They were certainly considerably better off than the peasants who worked on their estate. So it’s perhaps not so surprising that although her art was radical she wasn’t a supporter of the Russian Revolution. She’d left Russia and went to Paris on April 29, 1914 Goncharova came from a family of “impoverished aristocrats”, and grew up on the family estate in Tula, 200 miles from Moscow, but they moved to the capital when she was 11. I don’t know what the Tate mean by “impoverished”. They were certainly considerably better off than the peasants who worked on their estate. So it’s perhaps not so surprising that although her art was radical she wasn’t a supporter of the Russian Revolution. She’d she left Russia Paris in April 1914, stayed there during WW1 and didn’t return after the events of 1917.

The Tate’s website tells us that

Goncharova found acclaim early in her career. Aged just 32 she established herself as the leader of the Russian avant-garde with a major exhibition in Moscow in 1913. She then moved to France where she designed costumes and backdrops for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes. She lived in Paris for the rest of her life, becoming a key figure in the city’s cutting-edge art scene.

Goncharova’s artistic output was immense, wide-ranging and at times controversial. She paraded the streets of Moscow displaying futurist body art and created monumental religious paintings. She took part in avant-garde cinema, experimented with book designs and designed for fashion houses in Moscow and Paris.

The exhibition spread over 10 rooms and featured a wide range of paintings, sketches, costumes and other items.

The 3rd room had a large number of works from a retrospective of her work held in September 1913 in the Art Salon in Moscow. There were more than 800 works in a vast range of styles. The Tate tells us

it was the most ambitious exhibition by any Russian avant-garde artist to date

and that

The term ‘everythingism’ was coined by Larionov and the writer and artist Ilia Zdanevich to describe the diverse range of Goncharova’s work and her openness to multiple styles and sources. 

These are just a small proportion of the works on display

In another room there were a number of lithographs – Mystical Images of War was published in autumn 1914 – created in response to WW1. To me they largely glorify the war (they’re certainly not critical images) and, at least to some extent, see it as a patriotic and religious “crusade”

She was clearly religious and another room was devoted to religious paintings. I wasn’t so keen on most of them, but did like these fourApostles

The Evangelists (1911) The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg. Gift of A.K. Larionova-Tomilina, Paris 1966 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019

Like many Russian artists in the early 20th Century, she was influenced by Futurism. She developed her own approach which was known as Rayonism . This painting was my favourite from this room and probably from the whole exhibition.

Cyclist 1913

Another room featured works created while she lived in Paris. I particularly liked this painting of a Spanish woman

The final room was devoted to sketches, costumes and set designs from several ballet productions. Goncharova had worked with Russian composers, dancers and artists for Diaghilev  Ballets Russes creating an ‘exotic’ vision of the east . I particularly liked the costumes on display that she’d designed for a production of Le Coq d’or

I enjoyed looking around the exhibition. Goncharova was a talented artist and although I didn’t like everything I saw, there was plenty to keep me interested. It’s always good to discover a “new” artist (well, new to me!) so I wasn’t disappointed that I had a few hours to kill before my train.

Later that afternoon I received a text from Virgin Trains to tell me my train had been cancelled. Fearing the worst – that there was major disruption – I was relieved to find that it was due to the train breaking down. Arriving at Euston a little early I was able to transfer on to the train before and managed to get home half an hour earlier than expected. So all worked out well in the end!

A few works at Tate Modern

After looking round the Red Star Over Russia exhibition, I spent about an hour having a wander round some of the free galleries at Tate Modern.  I’ve been to the Gallery several times recently, but it’s so big with a massive collection (of which only a fraction is on display at any one time) that I always seem to spot something I hadn’t seen before.

This poster from a collection on display from the May 68 events in Paris (50th anniversary coming up soon)  by the Atelier Populaire rather resonated with the exhibition I’d just seen

I rather liked this 3 dimensional work by Victor Passmore

Abstract in White, Green, Black, Blue, Red, Grey and Pink (1963)

A pleasing discovery was a number of photographs by the German photographer Werner Mantz.

Werner Mantz began his career as a portrait and advertising photographer, later becoming known for his architectural photographs of the modernist housing projects in Cologne during the 1920s. His work is linked with the “New Objectivity” Movement in German photography before the Second World War which was concerned with using the clarity and precision of the camera to depict the everyday world in structured and organised compositions.

The photographs again linked with the Red Star Over Russia exhibition as they were similar in many ways with the photographs by Rodchenko.

I particularly liked this image dominated by the shadow of the lamppost

Detail of Kalkerfield settlement, Cologne 1928

Red Star Over Russia

November 7  2017 marked the centenary of Russia’s October Revolution when the workers and peasants overthrew the oppressive Tsarist regime. The apparent contradiction arising as Russia at that time still used the Julian Calendar which was several days behind the Gregorian calendar used in the West so as far as the Russians were concerned the date was 25 October.  This exhibition at Tate Modern featuring posters, prints, photographs and other images collected by the photographer and graphic designer David King, who died only recently in 2016, is meant to mark the historic event.

The Revolution started with great hope and optimism about creating a new kind of Society, unleashing enormous creativity by artists who supported its aims. Sadly in the face of counter revolutionary forces supported by the west the early idealism turned sour leading to the vicious dictatorship of Josef Stalin.

David King collected over 250,000 books, journals, posters, documents and newspapers dating from the Russian Revolution to the Khrushchev era which were acquired by the Tate just before his death. A cross section of the collection is included in this exhibition, which uses them to give visitors a glimpse of life in the Soviet Union during this period. As the Guardian’s review puts it, it’s

a condensed vision of five decades of Soviet hopes ending in devastation and despair.

 

I’m not going to attempt a full survey or critique of the exhibition but, as photography was allowed, here’s some of my favourites from the items on display.

From the early optimisitic days of the Revolution, the first room included this banner

and a wall covered with prints and posters

which included El Lissitzky‘s well known Supremacist poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919)

The red triangle driving into a white disc against a black ground, urging the revolutionary Bolsheviks to defeat the reactionary White Russians. 

Underneath, this imaginative work – a photomontage making up a hammer and sickle by Yakov Guminer

The next room was my favourite with the photographs and graphic work by Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky both of who also produced works in collaboration with their wives, Varvara Stepanova and Sophie Küppers respectively.

There were a number of extraordinarily brilliant ground breaking photographs by Rodchenko

and a series of abstract graphic works by El Lissitzky

There were also examples of the journal, USSR in Construction, to which both couples contributed photomontage and other design elements.

In the next room the walls were lined with a series of photographs providing snapshots of the history of Russia from 1905 until WWII.

Unfortunately the period of experimentation and radical art didn’t last long. 1934 saw the dawn of “Socialist Realism”, the Stalinist State dictating that artists should use realist styles to create highly optimistic depictions of Soviet life. There was a typical example of this in the next room with a series of large paintings by Alexander Deineka  produced for the 1937 International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life in Paris, portraying   which “fused reality with aspiration”.

The next room brought us back down to Earth. Here there were “before and after” photographs showing us how leaders and other individuals who fell out of favour with the Stalinist regime were “erased from history”. And there was a particularly moving display of photos of some of the many hundreds of thousands of people, many of them true Revolutionaries, who were murdered by the Stalinist State.

The final room featured posters and photographs from the period following the German invasion in 1941when artists were mobilised to create propaganda, in some cases reworking images from the early revolutionary period.

I enjoyed looking around the exhibition and was pleased that I’d had the opportunity to catch it before it closed. And I still had an hour or so to spare to look round some of the free displays before I had to leave to catch my train.

 

Night Time City

Last Friday I had to go down to London for a meeting. As it was scheduled for the afternoon I got the first off peak train down so the first train I could get home left at 7:30 p.m. Luckily there’s always something to do in London and on Friday evening Tate Modern is open late. As my meeting was on the South Bank, that seemed like a good option, especially as I quite fancied seeing the Red Star Over Russia exhibition that was coming towards the end of its run. A review of that to follow, but while I was in the Tate I got the lift to the viewing platform in the Switch House to take a look over a night time view of the City.

 

Modigliani at Tate Modern

The first Friday in January and our first full day in London in 2018. I was up fairly early as I needed to make a work related call but after that we left the Premier Inn, leaving our bags to pick up later, and took the Tube over to London Bridge. We were heading for Tate Modern as we wanted to visit the Modigliani exhibition that had opened at the end of November. A Sephardic Jew originally from Livorno in Italy, Modigliani moved to Paris in 1906. He had a hedonistic lifestyle drinking to excess, indulging in other chemical highs, and died young from the complications of alcoholism at the age of 35. This exhibition is a comprehensive survey of his work created during his all too brief time in the French Capital.

 

After visiting the Cezanne exhibition at the NPG the previous evening, this was our second exhibition of portraits in 24 hours and a chance to “compare and contrast”, especially as Modigliani was influenced by Cezanne’s work. I think that of the two exhibitions I enjoyed the Modigliani more. The paintings were easier to like – Cézanne’s were more complex and darker in some respects. And Modigliani has been a favourite for some time.

Self portrait (1919)

Unlike Cezanne, who also well known for his landscapes and still lives, Modigliani was something of a “one trick” artist , a painter of portraits. There is one small landscape included in the Tate’s show, but it’s best forgotten. But I love his distinctive portraits with their stylised long necks, oval faces and almond eyes, influenced by African and Egyptian art. Looking up close at so many of his paintings it was possible to see that he used paint sparingly, applied thinly compared to Cezanne. Possibly a stylistic choice but also, no doubt, influenced by financial considerations.

Portrait of a Girl c.1917 Amedeo Modigliani 1884-1920 Bequeathed by C. Frank Stoop 1933 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N04723

He did try his hand as a sculptor, though, and there’s a room full of his sculptures early in the exhibition. As with his paintings, they’re stylised heads

As Modigliani was almost a caricature of an impoverished, bohemian artist, he surreptitiously “procured” his stone from building sites around Montparnasse and this was evident in some of the pieces on display where decorative architectural features were visible.

Many of the portraits were of his friends and patrons, including

 

 

 

Room 8 was largely devoted to female nudes

Nu couché, (1917-18)

The exhibition website tells us that

At the time, these modern nudes proved shocking. In 1917, when some of the paintings were included in Modigliani’s only lifetime solo exhibition, a police commissioner asked for their removal on the grounds of indecency. He found their pubic hair offensive. Traditionally, in fine art, nudes were hair-free.

Personally, I found these some of the less interesting paintings in the exhibition. In a few cases paintings of the model clothed were displayed next to the nude painting. I found these much more interesting and attractive.

The exhibition blurb also tells us that

If Modigliani made these paintings for male buyers, their sensuality suggests changes in the lives of young women, who were increasingly independent in the 1910s. The models dominate the compositions, often making eye contact with the viewer, their made-up faces hinting at the growing influence of female film stars.

I’m not convinced by this analysis. I’m pretty certain that these paintings were created for the titillation of their wealthy male buyers and I doubt Modigliani’s motivation was to make a feminist statement.

Following on from the nudes there were portraits painted during a stay in the South of France from the end of 1918, returning to Paris the following year.  The exhibition guide tells us

Modigliani made some of his strongest works in Nice. ………… In the absence of professional models, he painted local children and his friends, capturing them in warm Mediterranean colours.

The Little Peasant c.1918 © Tate

The next section of the exhibition was something different – a virtual reality experience. After queuing for a short while we entered a room where we sat down and were given a VR headset and were able to view the interior of Modigliani’s studio in Montparnasse.

Through study of documentary material and of Modigliani’s works themselves, the environment in which the artist made his last works is reimagined. In this room you can immerse yourself in a virtual reality recreation of Modigliani’s final studio, which uses the actual studio space as a template.

The next room featured portraits of Modigliani’s “intimate circle” – his closest friends, including his art dealer, Léopold Zborowski and his partner Anna Sierzpowski (known as Hanka Zborowska).

The exhibitions ends with a row of portraits of his last lover, a young aspiring artist, Jeanne Hebuterne who he met in the spring of 1917 when she was 19. Despite the objections of her parents they set up home together and a daughter was born in November 1918 while they were briefly living in Nice in the South of France. Tragically, the day after he died, despite being nine months pregnant with her second child, she threw herself out of the fifth-floor apartment window the day after Modigliani’s death, killing herself and her unborn child.

Modigliani’s portraits of Jeanne are a marked contrast to Cezzane’s painting of his wife. Unlike poor Mrs Cezanne, Jeanne comes across as a strong, beautiful young woman.

All in all a very enjoyable exhibition. Together with the Cezanne exhibition we’d seen the previous evening it made it worthwhile staying down in London for a night.

 

Clocking in

A little before we clocked in and joined the production line in Tate Exchange we’d seen a series of 8,627 photographs and a film showing someone clocking in on the hour, every hour,  24 hours a day for a full 12 months during 1980-1981. One Year Perormance was undertaken by Taiwanese artist Tehching Hsieh in his studio in New York.

Marking the occasion by taking a self-portrait on a single frame of 16mm film, the resulting reel documents a year in his life at approximately one second per day – a pace that is polar opposite of the enduring length of the original performance

At the beginning of the project he shaved off his hair and we can see it gradually grow back in the series of photographs and the film.

It seemed such an odd thing to do. It meant that he was unable to sleep properly for a full year. He missed 133 clock-ins, and the reasons are documented on a note which is displayed amongst the contextual materials included in the exhibition along with letters, statements, uniforms, photographs, the punch clock itself and a time card. The main reason given was, not surprisingly,  sleeping through.

According to an interview in the Guardian the artist, the work

recalls the labours of Sisyphus, who, in Greek mythology, was forced to roll a rock repeatedly up a mountain, only to watch it fall down again

while it may seem to convey a message about the tedium and conformity of industrial labour, he tells Guardian Australia he is “not a political artist, although people are at liberty to interpret my work from a political standpoint … I’m interested in the universal circumstances of human life”.

Although clearly a crazy thing to do, there was something rather fascinating about the project and, personally, I can certainly see a political message about the alienation of work and how people are enslaved by work that is certainly relevant in this day of zero hour contracts and so-called self employed status workers employed by the likes of Uber and courier services.

Production at Tate Modern

After wandering around Borough Market and visiting Southwark Cathedral, we walked the short distance along the South Bank to Tate Modern where we spent the afternoon. The Bankside gallery is huge, even more so since the addition of the massive extension, that it would take more than a day to see everything. During this visit we concentrated on the extension (now named after a rich foreign mogul who contributed to Trump’s election, so no name check for him, as far as I’m concerned it’s the extension or “Switch House”) which occupied the rest of the afternoon and we still didn’t have time to see everything in it.

The exhibition space on Level 5 of the extension is devoted to the Tate Exchange which is described as

A space for everyone to collaborate, test ideas and discover new perspectives on life, through art

Currently the space has been transformed into a pottery production line by the artist Clare Twomey an artist who

works with clay in large-scale installations, Sculpture and site-specific works

and whose

installations have the social and historical context in which the installation is created as their point of departure

Entering the gallery we had to pick up a clock card and “clock in” and were given an apron to wear .

We were then invited to join one of the production lines where gallery staff were instructing visitors on how to weigh out materials, cast vessels from a slurry of clay (known as “slip”) or bone china flowers.

We joined the slip casting production line. We were shown how to assemble a mould, pour in the slip. The filled moulds are left a short while for clay to deposit on the sides, forming the shape of the pot. We were given one that was ready for the next stage, pouring off the excess slip, cutting off the excess clay and then opening the mould to extract the cast object.

The next stage would be firing the pot but we were told to take the pot we’d extracted to the end of the line and exchange it for another that had already been fired, which we were then free to take home with us after clocking out and having a photograph taken of the selected objects and clock cards.

The final stage in real pottery production would be to apply a glaze and give it a second firing. But the pots available were all unfired “biscuit”. I guess the objects made will be fired and added to the exchange for another visitor to collect.

I’ve never been in a real pottery production factory although because of my job I know about the production process and the health hazards associated with it. The main concern being exposure to silica dust from the clay, talc dust used as a parting material to stop the clay sticking to the moulds, and toxic materials, such as lead, in the glazes. So it was interesting, as well as fun, to participate in the installation.

The pottery production was the first part of the installation, lasting a week. During the second week, 5 to 8 October,

The production line stops, the workers have left and you will enter a factory soundscape. The now redundant factory becomes a space for questions. Talks from industry specialists, researchers and makers will explore how communities are built by collective labour, look at where the industrial processes of our past are informing our future and consider what we will need from factories in years to come.

Cards placed throughout the factory floor invite you to think about raw materials, how knowledge is acquired and shared, where transformation takes place and the different systems of value we apply to material culture and human relationships. Leave your thoughts and share where production exists for you in exchange for an object made in the factory.

It would have been interesting to return and participate in the second phase. Like most tradition al industry in the UK, the pottery industry which used to dominate the Staffordshire Potteries around Stoke on Trent, has declined as production and jobs have been transferred to countries where labour is cheap and conditions are often significantly worse for the workers. So the exhibition mirrors what has happened to the pottery industry in the UK. Given my professional interest, and political philosophy, I’d have plenty I could contribute to this discussion.

Everything we, and other visitors, were doing during our participation, seemed to be logged. There was a phone app we could download and log in and out of the different stages of the process. It was also possible to see the towns where the objects produced had ended up (we had to include this on our clock cards). So no doubt there is more to this project then meets the eye.

Giacometti at Tate Modern

I’d been looking forward to seeing the retrospective of work by Giacometti, a favourite artist of mine, that opened recently at Tate Modern. So when I was down in London a couple of weeks ago, I made time to visit the gallery on London’s Bankside.

Giacometti is a favourite artist – I like his trademark sculptures of elongated figures – walking men and standing women – with their rough, textured surfaces. The exhibition included plenty of those, with works from the Tate’s own collection, like Man Pointing  (1947)

with other examples from public and private collections. As usual with these paid exhibitions, no photos allowed so the pictures in this post are either photos I’ve taken during previous visits to Tate Modern, or from the exhibition website.

As a retrospective, it included earlier works before the Swiss artist developed his signature style. In particular, his surrealist works from the 1930’s

The first room contained a large table covered with a large number of sculptures of heads in different styles and made from various materials – some quite tiny – covering his career, Being displayed in this way really allowed visitors to see how his style developed – initially relatively ‘lifelike’

Head of Isabel 1936

they evolved into more abstract, fatter forms, eventually becoming flat and featureless rectangles from his Surrealist period. Then the later sculptures in the style for which he is best known. The heads included sculptures of his family members, friends and some famous individuals, including Simone de Beauvoir.

Bust of Annette IV (1962)

Moving on through the other 9 rooms was a progression through his career. The next few rooms displaying abstract and Surrealist works – sculptures, decorative pieces (lamps, vases, jewellery and wall reliefs) and sketches in his notebooks.

Probably the most Surrealist of the works in the exhibition was the rather grusome Woman With Her Throat Cut (1932) – more of a weird insect than a human being

After WWII, he returned to Paris where he began to produce the elongated figures for which he is best known. These dominated the final 5 rooms

Three men walking (source: Wikipedia)

The dog (1951)

This is what I’d come to see. They’re simple, almost like 3 dimensional versions of L S Lowry’s ‘matchstick men’ in their complex simplicity

The thin figures that emerged like wisps of smoke out of Giacometti’s conscience in the second part of that murderous decade seem barely to exist. They are not so much statues as mirages of people glimpsed far away, shimmering on a horizon of ash. The human form, starved, bereft, but somehow standing tall. (Guardian)

There were paintings too. Again, he has a distinctive style. The figures are made up of a series of lines which merge to form an image rather like the dots in a Pointillist painting

Seated Man (1949)

Caroline (1965)

This was a marvellous exhibition that didn’t disappoint.

The Ziggurat

Tate Modern Switch House

Between Object and Architecture

This was one of the free exhibitions currently showing in the Switch House at the Tate Modern during my visit last weekend. As I was down in London to run a course for Construction companies it seemed quite appropriate to take a look!

The first work I looked at was The Passing Winter by the eccentric Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.

It’s a box with a mirrored surface punctured by a number of holes. Looking inside it’s filled with circular mirrors that create a virtual infinite space

The box is made from six panels that are secured together, yet the box itself is not fixed to the plinth, but simply rests on it. As a result, this extremely fragile sculpture must be handled and approached very carefully, and it requires regular polishing to maintain a clean, highly reflective surface.

This fragile wire structure was created by Gego, a Jewish artist born in Hamburg but who had to leave Germany to escape from persecution by the Nazis and who moved to Venezuala.

Horizontal Square Reticularia by Gego (Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt)

The cube forms are not all closed on all sides and some of their edges are missing, therefore the sculpture forms an imperfect grid, based on a play of positive and negative space. This ‘incomplete’ structure, as well as the relative thinness of the rods and the scale of the cubes cause the rods to bend. As such the sculpture demonstrates an irregular geometry, subject to distortion and movement. (Tate website)

These two towers by the Lebanese artist, Saloua Choucair, are constructed of twelve rectangular stone blocks piled one on top of each other.

Infinite Structure (1963-5) by Saloua Choucair

I’d seen, and enjoyed a retrospective of her work at Tate Modern a few years ago.

The centre of the room was dominated by this work by Cristina Iglesias

Pavilion Suspended in a Room 1 (2005) by Cristina Iglesias

Constructed from a number of latticed panels made of braided wire suspended from the ceiling, visitors could wander around and through the structure.

This carefully arranged stack of rubbish, tightly packed to form a large cube is by Tony Cragg. He’s going to be the next artist featured at the Yorkshire Sculpture park and I’m rather looking forward to seeing that exhibition.

Stack (1975) by Tony Cragg

Levels (2012) by Jac Leirner

This work was quite appropriate given the purpose of my trip down to London. Hung high on the wall, well above the viewer’s eyeline, it wasn’t apparent at first that it was made up of eight differently coloured spirit levels lined up end to end. Simple, but thought it was quite effective. The same was true of this work which rather reminded me of the molecular models I used to play around with when I was studying for my degree in chemistry at University.

Lovers (1968) by Rasheed Araeen

Simply constructed from sticks of painted of painted wood it took on a different form when observed from different positions.

It’s composed of two separate open prisms constructed out of a series of triangles. These prisms can be rotated and orientated in different ways so that the work can be shown in different configurations.

I thought this simple cube of cast glass was quite attractive

Pink Tons (2009) by Roni Horn

The base and four sides of the cube are composed of frosted pink glass and maintain scratches and irregularities generated by the casting mould, while the glass at the top of the sculpture is clear. When viewed from the side, the sculpture appears cloudy; when viewed from above, the work seems transparent, with the glass inside taking on a rippled or watery effect. (Tate website)

Unfortunately it wasn’t possible to get a proper view down into the block, even craning over as far as possible (as many visitors were trying to do) as the “exclusion zone” marked on the floor was too wide.

There were a couple of works that consisted of simple rectangular elements lying on the floor.

This collection of fourteen rectangular polyester resin made by taking a cast of a wooden floor  blocks was created by Rachael Whiteread . They’re arranged  in two even columns of seven. The pattern of the wood grain is clearly visible on the surface of the blocks which have been installed to loosely replicate the layout of the original floor.

Untitled (Floor) by Rachael Whiteread

And then the famous pile of bricks

Equivalent VIII (1966) by Carl Andre