Between: freud

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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.

Wednesday, 18 May 2022

Artlyst: Sensuous Sickert and Philpot Two Major UK Solo Exhibitions

My latest piece for A rtlyst compares and contrasts the Walter Sickert exhibition at Tate Britain and the Glyn Philpot exhibition at Pallant House Gallery:

"Both exhibitions provide comprehensive overviews of their subject’s works; Walter Sickert primarily uses a thematic structure to do so, while Glyn Philpot: Flesh and Spirit’s aim is to combine the thematic with the chronological. As an exhibition enhancing one with an established reputation – albeit one that has faced questions about the dynamics of power depicted as well as those exercised by the depicter – Walter Sickert can include works by the influencers of Sickert – Whistler and Degas – and those influenced, including Lucien Freud. By contrast, Glyn Philpot: Flesh and Spirit seeks to rehabilitate and re-establish a reputation on different grounds from those on which his reputation was originally gained. As such, the focus is on Philpot’s work with a sense that the edginess of his work was what undermined his original reputation without gaining, either at the time or subsequently, the recognition it deserves.

Between them, these exhibitions provide and open up the foci and tensions of British art in a period when the traditional and the modern were, within British art, effectively counterbalanced. That balance was lost with Sickert’s reputation rising and Philpot’s, despite his effective embrace of modernism, falling. Interestingly, it is Philpot’s engagement with racial and sexual power dynamics which is playing a part in rehabilitating his work, while raising questions about aspects of Sickert’s work and reputation."

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -

Articles -

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Steve Taylor and Danielson Foil - Nonchalant.

Thursday, 31 March 2016

The New Art Gallery Walsall & Jacob Epstein

The New Art Gallery Walsall is the home of the distinguished Garman Ryan Collection, which was donated to the Borough in 1972 by Lady Kathleen Epstein (née Garman).

"Two remarkable women created this collection: Kathleen Garman, lover and later wife of artist Jacob Epstein, and her life-long friend Sally Ryan, a talented sculptor." "Kathleen was originally from Wednesbury and, although had spent much of her life in London, wanted to give something back to the Black Country where she had grown up. She had formed this important collection with her close friend, Sally Ryan, granddaughter of an American tycoon and talented sculptor in her own right, following the death of Epstein in 1959." "Together, they formed an art collection that is intimate, adventurous and eclectic, reflecting their wide-ranging tastes."

They "collected 365 important works, including those by renowned artists such as Van Gogh, Monet, Constable, Picasso, Degas and Matisse, as well as by friends and family members, such as Epstein, Matthew Smith, Theo Garman and Lucian Freud, alongside artefacts from many cultures around the world. Works are displayed in the thematic groupings proscribed by Kathleen on her donation, which allows the opportunity to make unexpected links and comparisons across different cultures and centuries."

The Collection "consists of three hundred and sixty-five works of art, over a third of them being three-dimensional works from many different cultures and periods around the world. It also contains a wide-ranging body of the work of Sir Jacob Epstein and many significant works by European artists such as Van Gogh, Monet, Turner, Corot, Renoir and Constable represented in prints, sketches and drawings as well as paintings and sculptures." "The galleries chart the long, productive and often controversial career of Jacob Epstein, and serve as a memorial to the Epsteins extraordinary circle of family and friends - Augustus John, Modigliani, Gaudier-Brzeska and Epsteins one-time son-in-law Lucian Freud."

"Jacob Epstein grew up in the ghettos of New York; his parents emigrated there to escape the anti-Semitism and poverty of Poland. As a young man, Epstein delighted in his vibrant, multi-cultural surroundings. His creative talents were evident early on, but his father disapproved of his chosen profession. In 1901, Epstein received his first commission to illustrate Hutchins Hapgood's Spirit of the Ghetto. The money he earned enabled him to study in Paris. The excitement that Epstein felt is reflected in his self-portrait: staring defiantly at the viewer, he presents himself as unconventional and rebellious. His hair is unkempt and his shirt unbuttoned, he appears dynamic and oozing with confidence. After only a few years in Paris, he relocated to England. Mixing with artists and intellectuals, Epstein soon integrated himself into the London art scene. After a brief association with the Vorticists - during which time he created his monumental Rock Drill (1915) - he remained independent of any movements. He caused a great deal of controversy throughout his career - his Tomb for Oscar Wilde (1912) caused such an outcry that the French authorities tried to have it banned. He was fascinated by so-called 'primitive art' from Africa, Asia and Oceania and collected many art objects, some of which are on display in the gallery. He was also a skilled portraitist and many busts and sketches can also be seen in the Garman Ryan galleries. The Garman Ryan Collection is a visual guide to Epstein's life, career and artistic interests."

"Epstein was a man of intense feeling who did not hold back from injecting his passion into his religious works. Although ... much of Epstein's public had difficulty accepting the novelty of his work, some contemporaries did grasp the significant transformational potential of Epstein's art ... Epstein's original interpretations were recognized as bringing new life to a religious art that had become moribund."

Additionally, the Garman Ryan Epstein Collection "contains over 100 art works by artists closely related to the Garman Ryan Collection, in particular works by Sir Jacob Epstein, which have been purchased, bequeathed or donated to The New Art Gallery Walsall." Throughout 2016 the Gallery will display some of the newest acquisitions to its Permanent Collection, in the lead up to its 125th anniversary next year. Part 1 looks at People and Artistic Connections. It premieres two works by Frank Auerbach which were the Gallery's first acquisitions through HM Government's Accepted in Lieu Scheme, and belonged to his great friend, Lucian Freud. They are also showcasing The Garman Ryan Shroud by Birmingham based artist Sarah Taylor Silverwood, the resulting commission following her residency in their Studio in 2014.

The Garman Ryan Collection includes many parallels with works from Tate's extensive collections of British and European art and, as part of a three year partnership with Tate, 16 Tate artworks have been paired with related works in The Garman Ryan Collection, linked either by artist, subject or theme. Included are key examples of work by Eric Gill, Cedric Morris, John Nash, Picasso and Rodin.

The Gallery is also hosting "the prestigious John Ruskin Prize, which is now in its third year as an open exhibition inviting artists, both emerging and established from across the UK, to respond to the theme, Recording Britain Now: Society."

Its other current temporary exhibitions are:

Jan Vanriet: The Music Boy - Much of Vanriet's work "is rooted in his family history. His parents met in the Mauthausen concentration camp and their stories and memories of the Second World War and its aftermath continues to influence his paintings. Themes of love, loss, identity, destiny and disappearance pervade his work. Yet there is also an inherent playfulness and lightness of touch and an evident mastery of the medium of paint. The Music Boy is a polyptych of four paintings depicting his grandmother and uncle - his mother's twin brother - playing accordion as a boy before the war."

"Laura Lancaster is a painter who draws inspiration from forgotten and discarded photographs and home movies, found in flea markets, charity shops and through ebay. Once precious and significant to someone, they are now detached from their original contexts and instead, they become animated through Laura's luscious, gestural and expressive application of paint. These lost and dislocated souls, caught in the ambiguous space between figuration and abstraction, compel us to reflect on time, memory and loss."

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Mavis Staples - Tomorrow.

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.