Kim Lim

Outing to Roche Court today, the New Art Centre sculpture park which is always beautifully atmospheric, whatever the weather (in today's case, grey and rainy). Craig Martin's colourful teapot looked strikingly cheerful in the drizzle, Gormley figures surprised you from behind a hedge, and Richard Long's path of flint and David Nash's burnt wood pieces looked satisfyingly at one with the Wiltshire landscape. In the gallery is the work of Kim Lim (1936-1997), a new name to me. I found the pieces instantly engaging: most of the work on show is sculpture in different types of stone (marble, Portland and granite) dressed and incised with simple flowing lines, creating a harmony of mutually respondent curves and receding planes. The exhibition was evocative of deep time, mass answered by space, the beautiful surface of stone given a rhythm by fissures and simple shapes. The work carries suggestions of Eastern philosophy, though apparently this artist was inspired at least as much by Cycladic sculpture, and Indian and South East Asian art as well as ancient Chinese vases: the common quality is a deep response to simple form, primal matter and simple but exquisitely judged decoration. Lim was Chinese-born but studied in St Martin's, settled in Britain and was married to William Turnbull. Her work could be placed in a minimalist context, suggesting through taut economical means elemental qualities of air and sea; it has the strange quality of the best minimal art and music of being cool and mathematical yet at the same time emotionally affecting. Equally the work could be set alongside Moore and Hepworth and an engagement through material with the flow of air, sea and earth. Above all it invites a meditative relationship, taking us to an experience of shapes and sensations in which contextual matters drift away. Nice to have the company and expert commentary of Kimvi Nguyen, who was especially taken by the 'Twelve Grey Colour Chart Paintings' (2013) by David Batchelor in the Artist's House. There is always exciting work to discover at Roche Court, and the idyllic setting between Stockbridge and Salisbury creates a viewing experience beguilingly different from that offered by the busy and trendy London galleries.

Cézanne and the Modern, Ashmolean

The Ashmolean, Oxford is giving the inaugural European outing of the important North American collection by Henry and Rose Pearlman. Cézanne is the centrepiece, taking up the whole of the first room. The works on display illustrate the remarkable tensions which energise Cézanne: two drawings of a scene from The Aeneid reveal uncertain draughtsmanship combined with an obsession with form. And a remarkable series of watercolours bring other opposites into view: solidity against space; the figurative verging on abstraction; the freedom of the eye and the controlling hand. The oil painting of Monte Ste-Victoire, with its characteristic choppy brustrokes, conveys an effortful gathering together of a myriad sense impressions. Cézanne dramatises the act of looking, the intellectual processing of sensory impressions. I was struck by 'Three Pears' (initially bought by Degas), a beautifully tender observation of the sensory qualities of fruit and plate, balanced by an intense formal sense of complementary forms and patterns.

For some reason the Pearlmans didn't acquire Picasso and Matisse; but it was rather refreshing to see early modernist works without the presence of these two Masters. There were works by Lipchitz, van Gogh, Soutine, Modigiliani, Degas, Sisley (a lovely account of a river scene , colours rippling across the pictorial plane) and a remarkable relief piece by Gauguin, 'Te Fare Amu'. The show as a whole brought across the sense of intense exploration and excitement in the early twentieth century, as new pictorial vocabularies were being forged. And it convinced in its assertion of the centrality and patriarchal status of Cézanne. The opening reference to Virgil and the striking watercolour of a skull, together with references to the minotaur and the primacy of canonical genres throughout (portrait, landscape, still life) all reminded the viewer of modernism's deep roots in, and engagment with, the classical meditearranean tradition.

Edward Burra (1905-76)

The Edward Burra exhibition at Chichester's fine Pallant House Gallery is in its last week. It's a good place to view and think about this marvellously eccentric English artist. Burra was based in the nearby town of Ryde - he called it an "overblown gifte shoppe" - and spent his whole creative life trying to escape the deadening clutch of English gentility. Despite a lifetime of ill health, he travelled to Harlem and Marseilles, and painted sailors, prostitutes, lowlife and streetlife, with a manic glee in this teeming, vibrant subject matter. Burra absorbed the graphic language of Hogarth, Beckmann, Grosz and Dix but turned their acerbic vision of humanity into something much warmer: his chaotic letters are alive with excitement at the life he observed in the bars and dives he visited, and this affection comes through in the colour, the jazzy angles and attention to detail. He takes the tubular. His friend the American poet Conrad Aiken reckoned Burra to be the best observer of Harlem life, a tribute all the more impressive when you learn that Burra remembered everything he saw and painted it afterwards. He loved films, and we can see this in his staging of scenes, his use of close-up and long shot. Today he might have made animated movies, I think. His love of the theatrical is illustrated by his stage designs, seductive mixtures of realism and fantasy.

The Spanish Civil War and Second World War inspired some extraordinary visionary pieces, images of dancing skeletons, conquistadors mingling with tanks, a malevolent blue figure blitzing London. Goya is there, and Dalí, and Burra briefly exhibited with the English Surrealists. But he was always too idiosyncratic to belong to any group. Throughout the work there is a Dickensian transformation of humans into objects and the other way around, a living, often violent energy coursing through all phenomena. The later landscapes are neither rural idyll nor a mythic chamber. Burra's nature is a hard place, there to be worked, trees bending beneath the Sussex wind and stumpy clouds. Figures become transparent - he said to a friend that as you get older you see through people - and there is a concern, too, with man's violation of the natural world: one extraordinary late painting has a shrine over a tin mine, where intrusive man seems to be meeting some unpleasant fate, his noisy yellow robotic machines waiting outside. The video int he show shows Burra refusing to answer any questions about his art or influences: 'I can't remember' he says shiftily; he can;t see the point of questions or bringing an artist's personality into it. 'why not just look at the pictures?' One of his contemporaries says that his generation were more frivolous than the serious young of today, and never talked about art: it would have been regarded as vulgar and common to do so. But even to a common vulgarian like me, Burra's art is a constant wonder. He's up there with the great English visionaries like Blake and Palmer. Remarkably, the medium he used most often was watercolour, usually associated with delicate tonal nuance but here employed - often on a large scale, several sheets joined together - for visceral dramatic effect. Another act of defiance against prim English respectability perhaps.

Image from the Tate Gallery. This picture is on display in the Pallant House show. I particualrly liked this review by Andrew Graham-Dixon in the Telegraph.

Matisse: Drawing with Scissors

Winchester Discovery Centre is currently showing the touring South Bank exhibition, Henri Matisse: Drawing with Scissors, Late Works 1950-54. It comprises 35 lithographs of the large-scale cutouts Matisse made in the last years of his life. The technique of cutting coloured paper with scissors was an answer to the limitations imposed by physical incapacity, but also a perfect means for Matisse to express his ongoing artistic vision as it reached its final stage. With scissors, he could create coloured forms without a preliminary stage of drawing, and this immediacy helped him to release a whole world of joyous, musical life. Dancers, nudes, animals and plants are reduced to their essential forms,  on the threshold between figuration and abstraction. Often they are set against blocks of clashing vibrant colours, overlapping in syncopated rhythms. Sometimes fruit and swaying plants floats over empty space. A series of blue nudes, showing the same figure in slightly altered positions, is a lesson in perceiving feeling shimmering through shifting form.

The atmosphere is one of vitality or serenity: the images are too deeply contemplated to be wild and disordered, and one feels a sense of passionate life lived within the frame, within a proper harmonic pattern. It is festive art but not anarchic, decorative but dramatic, never insipid. The accompanying music by Satie, with simple lines hinting at an ancient, timeless origin, seemed perfect. Within the joyous and dreamy world of these images one sometimes senses a darker note: the mysterious black in Zulma, or the sorrowful king and phantasmal figure in Tristesse du Roi (pictured). So the show is many things. A final and glorious leave-taking. A parting masterclass in exactness: Matisse was very precise over the exact colours his assistants were to prepare, and his sense of form here is the result of a lifetime of clarifying discipline. It is an escape from the confinements of the world and the wheelchair into the boundless world of imagination and grace, a voyage from the modern world to its ancient, mythical roots, a return from the end of life to its beginning, to find the child's eye still lively and intact. The best way to enjoy the cutouts is no doubt to do them yourself, and Sophie Higgs's Education pack has some hints on this, as well as all the essentials on Matisse. We're fortunate to have such a high-class exhibition close at hand. It's a perfect Mediterranean antidote to the February chill.

David Hockney, A Bigger Picture

In the first room of A Bigger Picture, the Hockney show now on at the RA are two of the artist's student works, street views in the style of the Euston Road School: muted, muddy colours in thick paint, a heavy louring atmosphere filling the canvas. Everything that follows represents a flight from this beginning: the drab enclosed world of the industrial town is exchanged for the vast spaces of California, with its warm colours and clear vistas; cloudy skies give way to endless blue space; paint becomes lighter and flatter, and the works themselves become vast in scale. Canvases are joined together, as the scene relentlessly escapes confinement. The 1980s landscapes from America are full of the passions that Hockney is pursuing to the present day. The huge size of works like Grand Canyon, Looking North, September 1982 recalls the mountainscapes of the American sublime; but there is a poppy, Californian cool in there too, a delight that comes from a flight from introspection. They do not seem to be referring to heroic transports in the soul of the artist; instead they offer worlds to get lost in, absorbed by.

I remember watching a programme on Cubism many years ago, in which Hockney remarked on how the Cubist experiment had freed Western art from the tyranny of single-point perspective, introduced in fourteenth-century Florence. Throughout this show we see him exploring the possibilities of looking at the same scene from different points of view. From Nichols Canyon (1980) through to the various depictions of 'The Tunnel' in paintings of Woldgate woods, the landscapes do not conform to one viewpoint: different views coalesce in one image, taking away the privileged observing position of single-point perspective and making us part of the scene, not external to it. There are no figures in the paintings because we are ourselves the figures, moving around withing their shifting space. Then there are shifts in temporal perspective too. Some scenes, like the views of Yorkshire made when the artist was driving daily to visit a dying friend, are not the record of a single moment in time, but an accumulated impression built up from various journeys. The same scene or motif - there is a tremendous sequence of images of a tree stump - is painted across the seasons, drawn from life and then recreated in the memory, where colours can take on the intense luminosity of Winter Trees (2009, reproduced above). All the time the artist and viewer is moving, looking again, reassembling the scene. as well as the multiple perspecdtives in space and time, there is the further variety of spectacle offered by different media: drawing, photography, watercolour, oil, film, the ipad. There is a tension running through the show: a painting fixes something in colour, yet Hockney is fascinated by the way in which Nature cannot be formulated and is constantly changing. It is a story of process over product, of art constantly trying to keep up with its subject.

A Bigger Picture is a huge show, and perhaps is like a film that's half an hour too long. After the Los Angeles room and the first set of Yorkshire paintings, I found the wall of watercolours less engaging, more like exercises than performances.  The reworking of Claude's Sermon on the Mount was an interesting view of the artist's preoccupations with space, but seemed rather dry compared to the gorgeous depictions of woods and hawthorn blossom. I thought the drawings might have been given some more space: the charcoal sketches of the tree stump were a wonderful exhibition of draughtsmanship and it would have been good to see more. There is a selection of sketchbooks, but these are tucked into the smallest room and harder to get a good view of. Hockney's drawings are different from the paintings, exquisite moments of observation which hold their own against the huge visionary creations. But perhaps it is good to have everything, as an indication of the artist's zest and ceaseless curiosity. Overall the show gives off a tremendous sense of energy and enthusiasm: it is inspiring to think of Hockney, at a senior stage of life, getting up first thing to catch the blossom, excited by new media, passionate about the endless particularity of the natural world. There are no clever ideas to pick up. It's all about looking. As he says of spring blossom, 'it is a pleasure to witness, just an intense visual pleasure'.

Manet, Déjeuner sur l'herbe

As Macaulay's schoolboy knows, Edouard Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe was (according to Antonin Proust) inspired by the sight of bathers at Argenteuil, refused by the Salon in 1863, subsequently shown in the Salon des Refusés the same year, scandalised the Parisian establishment (or at any rate the tiny handful of them who would raghe in print about such matters). It refers to works by Raphael (more strictly, a print made to his design), Giorgione, and Titian, and places itself very consciously in the fête champêtre genre. At the same time, it passes on the realism of Courbet while inspiring the loose brushwork of Monet and the Impressionists, rejects the official art of gradual tonalities for harsher transitions, answers Baudelaire's call to paint scenes of modern life, uses real people - the men are from the artist's family - for the models, employs studio lighting (look at the shadows), and distorts perspective (the girl behind is too big). The girls may be prostitutes (Matthew Collings says the painting is 'about prostitution' which seems to me a little over-confident), but the scene is certainly two men taking them out for a picnic.

These facts, and many more, and commentaries about them, can be retrieved from the sources below. But looking at the painting now, leaving the art historical erudition until later/never, what experience do we get? To me it seems astonishingly contemporary, like a postmodern exercise in ironic quotation. The world of river gods and Venus of Urbino is summoned up only to be collapsed into the modern scene of profligate flaneurs and courtesans. Heritage alluded to and deconstructed with irony. Very modern, very modernist. It's a picture about taking girls out for some fun, yet as the men are obviously wittering away about some poet or philosopher it's hard to feel an erotic charge (we're told the girl looks at us confrontationally, like Manet's Olympia (same model),but I wonder if she isn't appealing to be rescued from these bores). It's a classical pastoral scene, except it isn't because it's in modern dress, and it's as much about city types as the pleasures of the countryside. Modern and ancient, sexy but not really, town and country, shameless (as the nude girl staring undemurely out was by 1863 standards) but also dressed up.

Above all, it seems to be a fiction which keeps reminding us it's  fiction. One of the very unintellectual pleasures of the classical landscape is that you can, in your imagination, step into it, feel the soft breeze, watch your long shadow in the grass, catch the last glow of the sun on the back of your hand, exchange verses with a shepherd, scramble into a ruin to contemplate time, that sort of thing. But as soon as we step into this scene, we're reminded that it's just pretend: the lighting, the abruptness of the brushstrokes seems, in a very postmodern way, to call attention to its own artificiality (and to its own painterly skill, especially in the superb still life of fruit, a painting within a painting). Of course an artwork loudhailing its own arfulness is classical too: Claude paintings shout at us 'Look how well composed I am! Look at the way the tress frame the scene, and chromatic perspective takes your eye from one plane to another!'. Yet there it seems not to obstruct us getting into the stage set and making believe it's real. Manet's Déjeuner seems more intent on this, though that may just be because it cannot shake off its iconic status, and we know we can scarcely escape standing before it and congratulating ourselves on how our sensibilities are more generous than the benighted Salon jury's (which they probably are). The works iconic modernist status must owe something to its references to the past, and if it announces the arrival of the new, the honest eye looking at real life in all its unmythical ordinariness, that authenticity is somehow bound up with the obvious artifice of treatment and composition. So modernity needs the past, and truth needs artifice? All of this is to see it from a contemporary perspective of course, but - as the painting seems to remind us - that's the only one we have.

Sources
Helpful entry in Wikipedia
Entry on Musée d'Orsay site
Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen What Great Paintings Say (Taschen, 1997), vol. 3, 156-60.
New Britain Museum of American Art covers the story and reproduces some later versions of the painting, by Monet, Picasso and others
A nice personal reflection by Blake Morrison

Video
Short video on painting on SmartHistory
Clip from Impressionism: The Revenge of the Nice by Matthew Collings
Programme devoted to Déjeuner on Private Life of a Masterpiece
Film on Manet by Waldemar Januszak, embeds painting in biography and historical context.

Claude Lorrain

Managed to catch the last day of the Claude exhibition at the Ashmolean yesterday. Over a hundred drawings and etchings and a central room with thirteen paintings. With the exception of some etchings of a firework display, all the works show Claude working steadily away at his trade: depicting poetic landscapes, catching the light of dawn and dusk, creating a poetic mood through the arrangement of trees, classical buildings, banks descending to the water's edge and the water carrying our eye to distant shores. Year after year he did this, sketching in the open air, altering details in the studio, recording real scenes and making other ones up. Whole landscapes could be created using the various elements - towers, branches - roots - in different formulations. The same theme can go through any number of subtly textured variations. Quite often works were sold in pairs: a seascape and a landscape, a dawn scene and a dusk scene. Everything is about ambiance, the depiction of a mood through landscape.

Did Claude feel inspiration, a sense of personal expression? Or was it all a job of work, turned out for rich and fashionable patrons? More likely the second, I would say, for this pre-romantic, but his personality remains elusive. He lived and worked in Rome from 1627, and the external life seems to have been uneventful. And the internal life can only be guessed at. Yet he must, surely, have had some deep personal affinity with the natural scenes he saw in his wanderings down the Tiber Valley. The play of light on leaves, the pattern of shadow around tree roots, have never been observed more attentively. The figures are mainly there simply to give scale, and perhaps some kind of narrative vitality, to a scene. They are actors upstaged by the scenery.  The relation that matters is the viewer's response to the scene, which is half real, half-theatrical, a matter of planes softly receding, and tones moving through subtle chromatic stages. Subject matter is simply the starting point for exercises in composition and tonal harmony. The sketchbook drawings are free and direct in a way the finished academic paintings cannot be, and yet the paintings, for all their theatricality and artificiality, can sing. The bend of a branch and the contours of a building become part of the mood of a scene: in Landscape with Psyche Outside the Palace of Cupid the whole visible world becomes a natural extension of Psyche's melancholy. In Landscape with a Country Dance an idealised, fantasy world gives us access to a deep serenity. The artificiality is a necessary part of the authenticity. The etchings collection contained an excellent case explaining the processes of that craft. Claude would take an etching through several stages of biting to get the varied stages of shade he wanted. You wouldn't put him up there with Rembrandt as a printmaker, but every now and then a piece has the Claude magic. The show is accompanied by an outstanding catalogue. There is a good piece by Julian Bell in the LRB.

Sculpture: The Figure in the Landscape

There’s a gem of an exhibition at the Winchester Discovery Centre, called The Figure in the Landscape. It brings together works by sculptors who are all responding to the landscape, and shaping their responses through different materials methods. One striking feature of the show is how individually each artist responds to the land and its elements. For Barbara Hepworth, ideas of community are essential: the dolmens of Cornwall evoke individuals, linking culture across time; and the landscape itself is a palimpsest of human communities, a place where land, mind and spirit are integrated. Henry Moore, represented here by a small reclining figure, turns figures into landscapes: we seem to catch the human form as it is shifting through some metamorphic process into the contours of mountains and hills. Some artists are drawn to the pure forms and geometric patterns of the land: Tim Harrisson captures concentric ripples in marble in Double Vision, while Peter Randall-Page’s Entomology II arranges ceramic shapes in a symmetrical leafy pattern, like a picture of the fractal series underlying natural phenomena. Charlotte Mayer and Lotte Glob respond to seismic forces and the rough textures of the earth in their work, which somehow imbues inert matter with a feeling of potent force and the character carved into it over great passages of time.  

Sculptures are not only finished products, They also tell a story of a process which, when we know about it, becomes part of our apprehension of the work. Keith Rand’s abstract constructions are the end result of walking, absorbing and exploring the downlands of Salisbuy plain, while Chris Drury – represented here by a video of an iceberg – is another walker, whose work offers traces of journeys, captured in different media. Simple images can have multiple resonances: Roger Stephens’s Shore, made up of three marble forms, irresistibly suggests a group – a family – looking expectantly … where? Out to sea, or from sea to land? Or from past to present? From one work to another we become conscious of the quality of the different materials – marble, chalk, bronze – and  their suggestive, expressive qualities. In the synthetic world of the modern city, it is refreshing to have an exhibition like this to bring us, so to speak, back to earth. The Figure in the Landscape is curated by Rachel Bebb of The Garden Gallery, Broughton.