Between: auerbach

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Thursday, 1 December 2022

Artlyst: Lucian Freud And His Circle Surveyed In Two London Exhibitions

My latest exhibition review for Artlyst is of: Lucian Freud: New Perspectives; Friends and Relations: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews; and Bruce Bernard: Portraits of Friends.

'The exhibitions explore aspects of the camaraderie and interrelationships of these four painters whilst also highlighting the intimate relationships between artist and sitter, including artist and lover, partner, and offspring.

While figuration, existentialism, and portraiture remain significant strands within their work, the critical debate between them, within their works, seems to have been about distortion versus clarity and fine versus broad brushstrokes. Freud moves from his crisp, clear early style, which shows a debt to Neo-Romanticism, to a much more expressive use of broad brushstrokes, presumably somewhat influenced by Bacon’s distortions, Auerbach’s layers and Andrews’ mix of loose and tight passages of paint.

Bacon distorts his portraits to reveal the underlying existential angst found within, while Auerbach’s layers serve to suggest the subject’s presence more than their features. Both operate primarily in the liminal hinterland between figuration and abstraction. Andrews and Freud, while using abstract passages, remain more fundamentally figurative artists. Andrews’ use of looser and more tightly painted passages within the same painting is a way of indicating focus and creating atmosphere. Freud, who spoke of “wanting the paint to work as flesh does,” increasingly comes to paint flesh and how flesh forms and fails us as human beings.'

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -

Monthly diary articles -

Articles/Reviews -

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Michael McDermott - Hit Me Back.

Monday, 25 December 2017

The Bus Stop Nativity

Here is my sermon from Midnight Mass at St Stephen Walbrook:

Each year the Church Advertising Network creates a new advertising campaign for churches to use at Christmas. Their 2008 campaign featured a specially commissioned painting of the nativity, set in a freezing bus shelter, which was displayed in bus shelters across the UK throughout December that year. The painting is by Royal Academy Gold medal winner, Andrew Gadd and depicts the holy family, with halos, in a dark bus shelter. The shepherds and wise men are replaced with fellow passengers waiting for a bus. Some are watching the nativity intently; others appear oblivious and are checking the bus timetable and flagging down a bus.

Francis Goodwin, the Chair of Church Advertising Network, said: "We are very used to the Renaissance image of the Nativity. But what would it look like if it happened today? Where would it take place? We want to challenge people to make them reassess what the birth of Jesus means to them.” Andrew Gadd answered that question by setting the nativity in a bus stop. He explained that: "At first I didn't like the idea of painting a nativity scene in an urban setting. However, once it was explained that it was to be designed for bus stops, it gave me an idea... this idea. The bus stop when simplified is like a stable. It is after all a shelter; a place people go to but never want to be. So where better to stage a nativity? How unlikely!”

The details of the Christmas story — the visit of the angel to a poor Jewish girl, the humble occupation of the man to whom she was betrothed, the birth in a manger, the visit of the shepherds — are unlikely but not in terms of being out of the ordinary; instead they are unlikely precisely because they were ordinary.

Paul Richardson, writing in the Church of England Newspaper, reminds us that: “In the ancient world, gods were seen as superior to human beings but they remained alongside them, fighting with them, tricking them or sleeping with them ... When Homer wrote his epic poems, he wrote of kings and warriors, not ordinary people. Aristotle admired the kind of superior people who had the wealth and leisure to reflect and take part in the government of the state. Such people did not soil their hands with work. Ordinary, everyday work was left to slaves, an unimportant class of people whose job it was to free the aristocratic elite to get on with things that really mattered. How different the gospels are. In the words of the literary critic, Erich Auerbach, ‘Christ has not come as a hero and king but as a human being of the lowest social station. His first disciples were fishermen and artisans. He moved in the everyday milieu of humble folk. He talked with publicans and fallen women, the poor and the sick and children’.”

The Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, has noted, that “as a consequence of Christianity people began to view the world from the perspective of ordinary human beings. It took time for the implications of this radical development to become apparent (we are still in the process of working things out), but it led eventually to the abolition of slavery, the extension of the vote to all adults, and the view that government should exist for the benefit of everyone, not just of the rich and powerful. Almost immediately in the early years of the church, Christians were known for their readiness to care for the poor and the sick. Hospitals began as a result of the church’s work.”

This focus on ordinary people is what the bus stop nativity reminds us of. It reminds us ultimately that Jesus was born to be Emmanuel – God with us. That is what the incarnation, “the union of the human and the divine in the life of a humble Jewish carpenter,” is all about. As John 1. 14 says, in the contemporary translation of the Bible called The Message: “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood.”

Through Christ’s birth, God has entered our world and moved into our neighbourhood. In Christ, God has identified with us by becoming one of us. The entire movement of the Bible - from God walking with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, through God having a tent (the tabernacle) and then a house (the Temple) so he could live with the Israelites - led up to this moment in history when God became flesh and blood and entered our world. That is why Jesus is also called Emmanuel, which means God is with us.

What does it mean for God to be with us in the way? It means that God becomes a human being experiencing the whole trajectory of human existence from conception through birth, puberty, adulthood to death including all that we experience along the way in terms of relationships, experiences, emotions and temptations. Through his experience as a human being God understands us in ways that he could not if he had remained solely as our Creator. The letter to the Hebrews puts this well: “Since the children [meaning ourselves; all human beings] are flesh and blood, Jesus himself became like them and shared their human nature … he had to become like his brothers and sisters in every way … And now he can help those who are tempted, because he himself was tempted and suffered.”

This is what we find when we reassess what the nativity means. It is what the bus stop nativity reminds us of and, as Paul Richardson, reminds it is a major way in which Christianity marked a break with Greece and Rome: “The message of Christmas is that … it is the incarnation, the union of the human and the divine in the life of a humble Jewish carpenter, that transformed our understanding of the significance of ordinary, everyday life and led ultimately to a world where it is possible to talk of human rights and even of the fundamental equality of all human beings.”

Rowan Williams, when he visited one of the Bus Stop Nativity posters, as Archbishop of Canterbury, made just that point when he said that: "Jesus, the Son of God, … knew what it meant to be without wealth, he knew what it meant to grow up disadvantaged, he knew what it meant to turn to God in prayer, faith and hope.” And so he hoped that this image of the Holy Family, in a contemporary setting, would move those who see it “to stop, pray and reflect on what the birth of Jesus means to them in their daily lives."

Look again at the image of the bus stop nativity. A bus stop is a place that all of us go to. We are there, included in the image. Are we among those who are watching the nativity intently or are we oblivious, checking the bus timetable and flagging down a bus? What, I wonder, does it mean to us that God has become flesh and blood and has moved into our neighbourhood?

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Jon Foreman - Instead Of A Show.

Thursday, 26 May 2016

Ben Uri: 100 for 100

Founded 100 years ago in London's East End Jewish quarter, Ben Uri is now located in a small gallery in Boundary Road, NW8 and houses a 1300-piece collection largely hidden from view. Ben Uri is ending its centenary year with a larger and extended version of Out of Chaos held at Christie’s South Kensington.

100 for 100 provides a rare opportunity to enjoy spectacular works from the Ben Uri collection at Christie's South Kensington saleroom by showcasing works usually hidden from view, including David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein, Mark Gertler, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach, alongside their international contemporaries including Marc Chagall, Chaïm Soutine and Georg Grosz.

The exhibition also includes lesser-known but no less historically important artists, whose stories help trace complex narratives of war, forced journeys, migration and loss. The final room features contemporary artists from refugee and migrant backgrounds, accompanied by newly-uncovered archival material illustrating Ben Uri’s colourful history and wide cultural programming as well as the far-reaching impact of émigré artists on 20th century British art and design. These spectacular highlights secure Ben Uri’s future as a museum of identity and migration.

Exhibition open 21 May – 9 June
Closed 28th, 29th, 30th May.

Held at:
Christie’s South Kensington
85 Old Brompton Road
London
SW7 3LD

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Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy - Symphony No.2 "Lobgesang (Hymn of Praise)".

Thursday, 24 October 2013

Exhibitions round-up

London's commercial galleries currently have high profile exhibitions featuring many of the major figures in later Modern Art.

Throughout the autumn, Hauser & Wirth is devoting all three of its London galleries to a presentation of works from the collection of Reinhard Onnasch. A celebration of Onnasch’s longstanding passion for art and collecting, ‘Re-View: Onnasch Collection,’ the exhibition focuses on the period between 1950 and 1970, which saw the birth of some of the most important artistic movements of the 20th century. It features significant works including iconic examples of Pop Art, Fluxus, Colorfield, Assemblage, Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism from the New York School of Art, many of which have never been presented before in London.

Raw Truth: Auerbach-Rembrandt is at Ordovas and brings together a striking group of landscapes and portraits by the 17th century Dutch painter, Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, and Frank Auerbach, the renowned British artist. This is the first collaborative exhibition to be presented by the newly renovated Rijksmuseum and Frank Auerbach is the first contemporary artist ever to show alongside works from their collection.

Candy, at Blain|Southern, is the first time that paintings from Hirst’s Visual Candy series have been presented together exclusively, and candy spill works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres serve as a counterpoint to the paintings. The exhibition showcases the ways in which each artist used the signifier of candy during the early 1990s, exploring questions of pure aesthetics and identity.

Amidst all these well known names I was also interested to discover P.J. Crook at Alpha Gallery. Brian Sinefeld cites Balthus and Magritte as artists who have worked within a similar framework as PJ Crook. These artists 'whose surrealistic works of static, quirky realism belie a powerful mysticism lying below the surface' are akin in their sense of mystery to P J Crook. Cressida Connolly writes: "There is mystery at the heart of these paintings, as if something momentous might be about to take place; or as if a seismic event has already happened, perhaps still unbeknown to the people in the picture. The viewer may be lost within this world of the artist’s devising, or impose a narrative of their own. Like the silent white owls which swoop though some of the night-time paintings, PJ Crook always invites the imagination to take flight."

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King Crimson - The Power To Believe.

Friday, 14 June 2013

R. B. Kitaj: Diasporist art

Diasporist art is the art of movement, change, migration, contradiction, dislocation and dissonance. R.B. Kitaj was both an artist and theorist of such art; writing two manifestos on the phenomenon and creating paintings which cleaved to his “own uncanny Jewish life of study, painting, unthinkable thoughts and near death …”

Because Kitaj’s childhood was spent in the US and much of his adult life in the UK, he was something of an outsider to both countries. Before becoming a student at the Royal College of Art, he travelled widely as a merchant seaman. Befriending the likes of David Hockney, Frank Auerbach, Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon, he spent the best part of 40 years in the UK as part of the self-titled ‘School of London’ before the death of his second wife Sandra Fisher, which he blamed on negative reviews of his Tate retrospective, led to a final move to Los Angeles where he was to die in his studio by his own hand.

Kitaj defined the Diasporist artist as living and painting in two or more societies at once. It therefore seems appropriate that this retrospective is split between two venues; the Jewish Museum in London and Pallant House in Chichester.

Many of the works displayed are multilayered in their form and meaning. As works intended to provoke conversation they require our eye to roam because of the difficulty in focusing on a single part of the image. When combined with written commentaries for his Tate retrospective (inspired by the dialogical nature of Midrash) this approach in part provoked the furious reaction of some critics to the exhibition. Kitaj, however, understood his intent in terms of Diasporism:

“Diaspora is often inconsistent and tense; schismatic contradiction animates each day. To be consistent can mean the painter is settled and at home. All this begins to define the painting mode I call Diasporism. People are always saying the meanings in my pictures refuse to be fixed, to be settled, to be stable: that's Diasporism …”

Juan De La Cruz equates the uncertainty about their role and impact felt by US soldiers in Vietnam with that felt by St John of the Cross when torn between his loyalty to the church and his involvement in the reforms of St Teresa of Avila. Kitaj’s skill as a draughtsman can be seen in the wavering pose and questioning features of the conflicted African-American soldier on a transport plane around which Kitaj has collaged the crude scenes of wartime abuses which are troubling the soldier’s conscience. His name tag is the clue to the creative dissonance Kitaj introduced into the work by linking the soldier’s conflicts to those of John of the Cross.

The Church is called to be a pilgrim people journeying in the tension of the now and not yet. As a result, we have much, potentially, to learn from Diasporist art and yet our frequent tendency is to bathe in a nostalgic yearning for days of ‘glory’ past in Christendom. Diasporism is for Kitaj an engagement with the outsider; not Jews alone, but also homosexuals, women, Palestinians, Afro-Americans, and many of the Modernist artists he so admired. Such inclusivism challenges our nostalgia revealing the hidden oppression and abuse which can accompany the accumulation of authority and power.

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Lou Reed - Strawman.

Saturday, 16 February 2013

R. B. Kitaj: Identity and Analysis

A major retrospective exhibition of the work of R. B. Kitaj (1932-2007) - one of the most significant
painters of the post-war period – will be displayed concurrently in two major venues for its only UK showing.

This international touring show is the first major retrospective exhibition in the UK since the artist’s
controversial Tate show in the mid-1990s and the first comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s oeuvre since his death in 2007. Comprised of more than 70 works, R.B. Kitaj: Obsessions comes to the UK from the Jewish Museum Berlin and will be shown concurrently at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (23 Feb – 16 June 2013) and the Jewish Museum London (21 Feb – 16 June 2013).

The presentation of the exhibition over the two venues will enable different facets of Kitaj’s identity to be explored in depth for the first time in the UK. Both venues share links to the artist – Kitaj's London studio was designed by the American architect M.J. Long, whose practice Long & Kentish also designed the extensions to Pallant House Gallery and refurbishment of the Jewish Museum London.

The exhibition further returns the American-born Kitaj to the UK, his country of residence from the 1950s until his abrupt departure in the 1990s. In 1994 the great retrospective of his work at the Tate triggered a flood of negative reviews, which Kitaj termed the “Tate War”. This, combined with the sudden death of his second wife, painter Sandra Fisher, led him to leave London for Los Angeles in 1997.

During the 1960s Kitaj, together with his friends Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud were
instrumental in pioneering a new, figurative art which defied the trend in abstraction and conceptualism. Known collectively as the ‘School of London’ - the term Kitaj had first proposed in his seminal exhibition The Human Clay in 1976 - most of them were cultural ’outsiders’, who remained fiercely loyal to the human figure.

From the mid-1970s, Kitaj began to position himself explicitly as a Jewish artist coupled with his study of role models such as Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin. In 1989 he published the First Diasporist Manifesto, the longest and most impassioned of many texts discussing the Jewish dimension in his art and thought. Confronting the history of the mass murder of Europe's Jews, and reflecting on his identity as an outsider, he created a Jewish modern art, which he termed “diasporic”, with a rich palate of colour and enigmatic, recurring motifs.

For Kitaj, art was a medium of emotional and intellectual exploration. An avid collector of books, his work frequently referenced themes and motifs in intellectual history and literature. The exhibition at Pallant House Gallery, subtitled ‘Analyst for Our Time’, will feature over 50 major paintings, sketches and prints presenting an overview of all periods of Kitaj's extensive oeuvre from the 1960s to his death in 2007.

It will consider Kitaj's early presentations of a fragmented world, reflecting his interest in art history and intellectuals such as ‘Aby Warburg’, and his paintings and collages addressing issues of European politics, philosophy and literature such as ‘The Murder of Rosa Luxembourg’ and ‘The Rise of Fascism’.

The exhibition at the Jewish Museum London, subtitled ‘The Art of Identity’ will focus on how Kitaj explored and expressed his 'Jewishness'. The exhibition will feature over thirty works, including iconic paintings such as ‘If Not, Not’; ‘Cecil Court, London W2 (The Refugees)’, ‘The Wedding’,
and ‘The Jewish Rider’. It also includes Kitaj’s portrait of the author Philip Roth, ’A Jew in Love’.

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Bob Dylan - Desolation Row.

Tuesday, 8 December 2009

Bus Stop Nativity

This Christmas, a specially commissioned painting of the nativity, set in a freezing bus shelter, is being displayed at selected bus shelters across the UK. The painting is by Royal Academy Gold medal winner, Andrew Gadd and depicts the holy family, with halos, in a dark bus shelter. The shepherds and wise men are replaced with fellow passengers waiting for a bus. Some are watching the nativity intently; others appear oblivious and are checking the bus timetable and flagging down a bus.

This bus shelter image reminds us that, in the words of the literary critic, Eric Auerbach, ‘Christ has not come as a hero and king but as a human being of the lowest social station. His first disciples were fishermen and artisans. He moved in the everyday milieu of humble folk. He talked with publicans and fallen women, the poor and the sick and children’.

It reminds us ultimately that Jesus was born to be Emmanuel – God with us. That is what the incarnation, “the union of the human and the divine in the life of a humble Jewish carpenter,” is all about. As John 1. 14 says, in the contemporary translation of the Bible called The Message: “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood.”

Through Christ’s birth, God has entered our world and moved into our neighbourhood. In Christ, God has identified with us by becoming one of us. The entire movement of the Bible - from God walking with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, through God having a tent (the tabernacle) and then a house (the Temple) so he could live with the Israelites - leads up to this moment in history when God becomes flesh and blood and enters our world. That is why Jesus is also called Emmanuel which means God is with us.

What does it mean for God to be with us in the way? It means that God becomes one of us. He becomes a human being experiencing the whole trajectory of human existence from conception through birth, puberty, adulthood to death including all that we experience along the way in terms of relationships, experiences, emotions and temptations.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, when he visited one of the Bus Stop Nativity posters last Christmas made just this point when he said that: "Jesus, the Son of God, … knew what it meant to be without wealth, he knew what it meant to grow up disadvantaged, he knew what it meant to turn to God in prayer, faith and hope.” And so he hoped that this image of the Holy Family, in a contemporary setting, would move those who see it “to stop, pray and reflect on what the birth of Jesus means to them in their daily lives."

Look out for the image of the bus stop nativity or look it up online at http://www.churchads.org.uk/2009/index.html. A bus stop is a place that all of us go to. We are there, included in the image. Are we among those who are watching the nativity intently or are we oblivious, checking the bus timetable and flagging down a bus? What does it mean to us that God has become flesh and blood and has moved into our neighbourhood?

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Joan Osborne - One Of Us.