All images from Gagosian Gallery:
http://www.gagosian.com/
Tuesday, 8 June 2010
Monday, 7 June 2010
On the road again...
Paul contemplates going out on the road on his own. It'll end in tears.Photo by Craig Leng
Picasso: The Mediterranean Years
Pablo Picasso in front of Portrait de femme à la robe verte (May 1, 1956) La Californie, 1956Photo by Edward Quinn © edwardquinn.com
Picasso: The Mediterranean Years (1945-62)
Gagosian Gallery, London until 28 August
Details:
0207 841 9960
Adrian Searle
guardian.co.uk
Sunday 6 June 2010 22.15 BST
Curated by Picasso biographer John Richardson, this exemplary show is full of astonishing things – from great paintings, sculptures and ceramics, to hilarious little cartoons and playful little cardboard cut-outs of faces and birds.
Gagosian Gallery, London until 28 August
Details:
0207 841 9960
Adrian Searle
guardian.co.uk
Sunday 6 June 2010 22.15 BST
Curated by Picasso biographer John Richardson, this exemplary show is full of astonishing things – from great paintings, sculptures and ceramics, to hilarious little cartoons and playful little cardboard cut-outs of faces and birds.
Sylvette, 1954Better installed than most museum shows and made in conjunction with Picasso's grandson Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, this exhibition takes us from the aftermath of the second world war to the 1960s, and from Paris to the Mediterranean. It was here that Picasso was to reinvent ceramics, to revisit his own past as well as the history of art. This show is in part devoted to pleasure – with paintings of and for children, with a suntanned terracotta pot wearing a painted-on bikini, with the famous sculpture of a baboon whose face is a real, toy car, and with Picasso's bestiary of bulls, goats, minotaurs and priapic old satyrs.
Toros en Vallauris, 1954As the current show at Tate Liverpool demonstrates, Picasso was a communist, or at least carried a party card and was generous with both his creativity and his money in supporting all kinds of good causes. This show, which covers much the same period, gives us Picasso the hedonist, who in his art and in his love affairs felt unconstrained by any rules except his own. But death is never far away in Mediterranean culture – and in Picasso's art. A swimmer splutters to shore; a god scatters seeds of death around a group of dancers; a devil smiles, but is still a devil. Ancient myth, modern lovers: the products of Picasso's endless work populate these beautifully redesigned galleries, and we go from well-lit open spaces to a darkened treasure chamber of ceramics, bronzes and cut-outs. This is a wonderful exhibition. There is such variety. A shelf of small objects, flippant little bits of clay and cardboard, is worth dozens of lesser careers. Overwhelmingly beautiful.
Centaure, 1952http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jun/06/picasso-mediterranean-years-review
http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2010-06-04_picasso/
Sunday, 6 June 2010
Picasso at Tate Liverpool
Picasso: Peace and FreedomTate Liverpool
Laura Cumming
The Observer, Sunday 23 May 2010
A cat and a lobster have taken each other by surprise. They are eye to eye, claws to the fore. The crustacean lunges, pincers aloft. The cat hisses and bristles. This potentially tasty item of seafood is not dead after all, but snapping back, a match for the cat. The dinner tables have turned.
Lobster and Cat was painted in 1965. Is it a study of universal conflict? Possibly, if you ignore the graphic exuberance and humour. But does it refer to the Cuban missile crisis, as claimed by the curators of this show, who have discovered telegrams from Castro to Picasso in the archives (though, significantly, none in return)? To me, the idea is absurd.Picasso accepted the Lenin peace prize in 1962; he was an unwavering communist. You might then ask which critter represents which side of the crisis? The idea that this comic stand-off approximates to that most horrifying of cold war confrontations only stands up if one imagines that Picasso found the situation somehow touched by farce. He made the picture three years after the event, in a long sequence of lobster scenarios. There is more visual evidence that he had been looking at Chardin's masterpiece, The Ray, in which a cat is confronted by another goggling sea beast, than that he was replaying Florida versus Havana.
But paintings present their own evidence. Look at this one – then you decide.
This is precisely what Picasso: Peace and Freedom aims to prevent in its dogmatic way. It is very sure how you are to understand the artist. Every text reads like a directive; every work is interpreted with clodhopping literalism; all are construed as political messages. This is not Picasso as the most protean and inexhaustible genius of 20th-century painting: this is Picasso as singleminded propagandist.
About the politics, so much is known that it seems fanciful to claim, as the catalogue does, that the relevance of Picasso's communism to his art is little considered. It is certainly true that the works made in the decade or so after the end of the last war – his most politically active years – are not often shown together and anyone visiting Tate Liverpool will understand why.
The show opens with a dud – Monument to the Spaniards Who Died for France, the monument in question surrounded by a clutter of programmatic emblems – and ends with a surprising attempt to make a proto-feminist of Picasso, pretty much against all the biographical evidence, in a room full of senile lechers and open-thighed nudes. In between are some pictures that have nothing to do with politics (tremendous) and many that do; these are among his very worst works.Picasso joined the Communist party in 1944 and remained a member right up to his death in 1973. Stalin may have despised modern art just as much as Hitler, but the communists had been enemies of the fascists and many of his friends were members of the French Communist party. At the height of his involvement, Picasso was debriefed by top party apparatchiks, toured Europe from Warsaw to Sheffield to promote the international peace movement (perceived as a communist front in America), gave large donations to many communist causes, indeed could almost be said to have bankrolled the French party. He churned out emblems, posters and portraits for communist publications on demand. His dove became (and arguably remains) the ubiquitous symbol of peace.
If you want it, there is an entire gallery devoted to the dove, reprised and customised over and again down the decades. Swift and elegant, it is a flight of a drawing in itself. But the dove is already a biblical symbol of peace. The artist's signature, like his style, was as crucial as the olive branch: this was no ordinary pigeon, but the dove of the world's most famous artist.Picasso gave the communists far more than money. The show includes a lot of promotional ephemera – the miner's lamp, the Spanish republican wife in her headscarf, the Polish wife in her rustic shawl. Picasso goes to live among potters and produces simple ceramics; he designs cheap posters (snapped up by collectors as precious prints). He is a communist figurehead, the artist of the people.
When Stalin dies in 1953, he immediately draws a commemorative portrait for the communist paper Les Lettres françaises. It looks very simple today – Stalin the young Georgian, firm and direct – but to the party it was disgracefully unheroic. Picasso was everywhere attacked and you might think such hostility would have given him pause for thought. But he looks away, refuses to notice.
Even during the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, he would not condemn the aggression, despite an open appeal from the great Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz, and despite the pleas of a group of former students "to do for Budapest what you have done for Guernica: Help us!". It may be instructive to note that at exactly the same time, Picasso's 75th birthday was being celebrated with large shows in Moscow and Leningrad.
What to make of this long-term membership? For the curators, it proves how politically engaged Picasso was, but it might just as well demonstrate inertia. One of his lovers, Françoise Gilot, said that in Russia they hated Picasso's work but liked his politics, whereas in America it was the reverse. Looking at this show it seems clear that he could tailor his art to fit both.
Even the dove turns out to be a fudge. The poet Louis Aragon arrives in search of a poster image for the 1949 Paris Peace Conference and seizes on a painting of a dove. Picasso shrugs: "I have never understood how one could make it a symbol of peace. It is an extremely cruel bird." But by evening it is rolling on the presses.This exhibition is itself an extended compromise. It finds politics in pictures where none is apparent – still lifes of crockery, jubilant cockerels. Any reference to a dove or a shield and the work gets in. On the other hand, what the curators don't appear to notice is Picasso's sheer force of virtuosity, his ceaseless experimentation, his astonishing originality. And all of this is to do with picture-making, not politics.
The political statements, such as they are, are nearly all lifeless. Even the show's centrepiece, The Charnel House, apparently based on footage of a Spanish republican family murdered in the kitchen, is unlikely to arouse horror or sorrow. Done in newsprint monotones, its pile-up of limbs, hands and throats is so densely patterned as to present something like a puzzle or jigsaw. What one is aware of, above all else, is the optical tangle of the picture: you can't get your eye around it at all. That's a virtue when Picasso is trying to navigate Velázquez's Las Meninas, inch by mysterious inch, in his many reinterpretations of that painting, but not when the intention is to lament the disasters of war.
There are marvellous still lifes here: a particularly vivacious death's head on an open book, jawing its last words; a stupendous painting of a knife, all Euclidean incisiveness; a drawing of a tomato plant, in counterintuitive blue crayon, that is supposed to illustrate wartime deprivation but bursts with celebration instead. A terrific lithograph in red, black and yellow of a light dangling over a table is more radiant, in its sharp line and explosive colour, than the bulb itself. It gives to the eye exactly what it shows: the sensation of an electrical charge.But it feels like luck that these works are here. The justification is that death and destruction are so present in the 1940s still lifes that the content must be political. But the tone is more often of joie de vivre. Still, the claims made for these paintings are small by comparison with the final rooms, where the curators attempt to persuade you that
Picasso's versions of Las Meninas – in which he tries to isolate some of the singular elements of that masterpiece, from the pressures of light and shadow to the solitary figures in their different planes of reality – satirise Franco. Or that his rehearsals of Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe were inspired by the sexual revolution of the 1960s, when he started making them in the late 1950s.I don't say that Picasso never created great political art. On the contrary, one only has to cite Guernica itself, and the drawings in The Dream and Lie of Franco, reminiscent of Alfred Jarry, depicting the general as an absurdly aggressive vegetable. But alas for visitors to Tate Liverpool, the former cannot be moved and the latter don't fit with the curators' historical remit.
For in the end, Picasso: The Communist Years 1944-73, as the show might more accurately be titled, appears more interested in biography than art. Picasso the peacenik, propagandist, image-maker, figurehead: it is easy to find political passion in the life. As for the art, the great works in this show are not political and the political works are not great. Politics turns out to be the least interesting aspect of Picasso's art.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/may/23/picasso-peace-freedom-tate-liverpool
http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/Picasso/default.shtm
Saturday, 5 June 2010
Friday, 4 June 2010
Bright Lights Film Journal - Nuts and Nice Messes: Laurel and Hardy
"Life isn't short enough . . ." — Laurel in Sons of the Desert (1934) By Dan Callahan
There are some performers who were meant to be together on screen. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers balance each other so perfectly that watching one of their dances is akin to a religious experience; everything works, everything shouts "Kismet!" William Powell and Myrna Loy already had long careers behind them playing mostly villains before she literally fell into his lap in Manhattan Melodrama (1934), whereupon they started up a dry repartee that lasted through many years and movies; again, it was "Kismet!" But the biggest "Kismet!" of them all took place in the mid-twenties at the Hal Roach Studio, when two jobbing comedians, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, gradually came together to create their own world on screen, aided at the beginning by the story-writing talents of Leo McCarey and the camerawork of George Stevens. Thus, two of our best directors learned their trade under the unbeatable auspices of Laurel and Hardy, known the world over as an image of unbreakable friendship pledged to love through all disaster. After borrowing John McCabe's useful Laurel and Hardy biography from the library, I placed it on a counter to be checked before I left; the very young checkout girl glanced at a photograph of the boys on the cover and instantly started laughing, warmly, affectionately. I asked her if she'd seen their films. "No," she said. "They just look funny together."
Read the rest at:
Bright Lights Film Journal :: Nuts and Nice Messes: Laurel and Hardy
Thursday, 3 June 2010
Wednesday, 2 June 2010
The Man in the Picture - Susan Hill
The Man in the Picture by Susan HillReviewed by Sarah Vine
October 26, 2007
In a world full of gruesome, graphic and all too often sadistic literary violence, Susan Hill's old-fashioned ghost story is a welcome reminder of the more noble origins of the horror genre.
Like her earlier novel, The Woman in Black, it harks back to a time when terror was as much a product of the reader's imagination, expertly planted there by the author, as it was spelt out on the page. In cinematic terms, it is The Shining versus Saw III; Don't Look Now v I Know What You Did Last Summer; The Omen v Scream. It has class, it has style and it has pedigree.
In many respects The Man in the Picture owes a considerable debt to the father of the fireside chiller, M.R. James, probably best known for his 1925 collection A Warning to the Curious and Other Stories.
James was a master of understated horror and dramatic tension. The fear and foreboding in his stories is palpable, the doom-laden action no less exciting for being so darn obvious. That sense of inviting disaster which characterises some of the greatest Gothic horror — why must the hero venture into the cellar when he knows it contains a foul fiend; why does the heroine leave her window open when she knows a “vampyre” is on the loose? — is ever present in his work. Yet his protagonists, and the reader, are glued to a narrative that is devilishly, hypnotically elegant.
James had certain themes, and they are present in The Man in the Picture. Here is the eminent academic, nearing the end of his life, living out his days in comfortable penury. Here is the naive pupil, in awe of his mentor's intellect but unaware of the true depths of the dark secret that he harbours. Here is the bright promise of happiness, a romantic idyll, doomed to destruction.
At the centre of everything is a supernatural black hole, an object of extreme malevolence (in this case, a painting) that, while not necessarily intrinsically terrifying, is tenaciously successful in its evil purpose. And there is no happy ending, no redemption — the only escape for its unfortunate victims is the grave, or worse.
But The Man in the Picture is no mere carbon copy. It has real, defining qualities of its own. Hill brings her unique take to a somewhat careworn framework and produces a tale brimming with excitement, mystery and vitality.
Her language is crisp, concise and elegant, and, although she makes concessions to a more old-fashioned style, she does so knowingly and with verve. The story unfolds at a thriller's pace, and the setting is reassuringly contemporary.
Thanks to this, Hill can lure the modern reader in with a sense of the brightly familiar. Not until it is too late – both for the hero and for the hooked reader – does the realisation dawn that everything, even a plate of piping hot buttered crumpets, has been contaminated by an intangible, insatiable evil. In the capable hands of Hill, the Gothic novel, that venerable but undeniably pensionable genre, finds a new lease of life.
The Man in the Picture by Susan HillProfile, £9.99; 160pp
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/fiction/article2745724.ece
Tuesday, 1 June 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
