Jan Vanriet: The Music Boy

Photograph, photograph, photograph, photograph. Jan Vanriet, like Gerhard Richter and Marlene Dumas, among others, often uses photographs as source material for his paintings. The Music Boy is a quadripytch based on a photograph of Vanriet's Grandmother and Uncle prior to the Second World War. Vanriet paints the same innocent image - a mother and child, folk music in a family setting - four times in varying degrees of detail and focus, as well as different colour combinations. These different renditions of the same image serve to engender a variety of emotional responses to an autobiographical image which is in some sense universalized through its varied repetition.

Repetition of the image also brings an element of uncertainty to a seemingly innocent image laden with a multiplicity of artistic and literary associations. Use of different degrees of focus and detail - the image fading in and out of focus - raise questions of memory in family and oral histories together with issues of endurance both personally - Vanriet's Uncle died of tuberculosis developed in Dachau - and in terms of the media we use to tell our stories and retain our images - in this cases images based on a photograph (a medium with built-in fade and frailty).

Vanriet repeats the trick in The Contract, a polyptych of the artist’s parents together on the dance floor having survived a concentration camp. He draws out the combination of happiness and hope with suffering and grief which is contained in this image and its history through the variation in his treatment of it. Focusing on particular details, changing backgrounds and colours, using silhouettes and patterns, he evokes nuances and perspectives of memory and consequence. Mauthausen, the concentration camp in Austria where his parents first met, is referenced by a panel where the couple’s feet are superimposed on a red triangle, the badge worn by political prisoners in the camps. The combined effect of the eleven panels is to evoke and explore the nature of the contract entered into by this traumatized yet freed couple.

Vanriet is “a pivotal figure in the world of contemporary narrative painting” (Jan Vanriet, The Music Boy Press Release - http://www.thenewartgallerywalsall.org.uk/info/press/press-releases). Narrative, however, has been a major 'no, no' in much modern art. As a reaction against historical, mythical and religious painting, the literary and the linear were anathematized. As a painter who is also a poet and who collaborates with his novelist wife, Simone Lenaerts, Vanriet is clearly a counter-reaction to this anathematization of narrative in modern art. However, in his art, this not primarily expressed in terms of the linear and literary.

Modernist narratives are multi-layered with contradictory voices creating polyphony. That phrase from a musical concept is relevant to the diversity of voices found in many modernist novels and to the multiple panels of works like The Music Boy and The Contract. Simultaneity, contradiction, polyphonic fragmentation, paradox; these are modernist techniques revealing transcendental negativity; that is, what cannot be spoken and the existence of worlds beyond limits. This world of contemporary narrative painting, inhabited by Vanriet, Richter, Dumas and Luc Tuymans, among others, is one in which “events and ideas are not expressed explicitly, but implied through subtle hints and allusions, creating an ambiguous collage of disconnected fragments and details” (http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/luc-tuymans); a world of modernist narratives visualised.

Vanriet’s contribution to this world is an art which makes significant reference to autobiography, history and memory as they feature in the mythical, political and religious stories we tell. Lenaerts is also closely involved and both create using Vanriet’s family history including that of the Uncle who was arrested in Antwerp and transported to Dachau; a “descent into hell which he, once back home, wrote down with his last remaining strength as his life flickered out silently on the flowered sofa, in his mother's arms.” (S. Lenaerts, ‘A Scrap of Time’ in De Morgan, July 2012 - http://www.citybooks.eu/en/cities/citybooks/p/detail/a-scrap-of-time)

Martin Herbert writes that Vanriet’s work reveals “a world that glimmers with significance” but, in which, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, we cannot “connect signifier and signified.” We can’t “hold onto the past for lessons,” as we are fragile, “as fragile and fallible as our memories” (M. Herbert, ‘Hide and Seek’ in Jan Vanriet: The Music Boy, The New Art Gallery Walsall, 2016).

This sense is, perhaps, most clear in Vanriet’s Horse series. These paintings update The Contract by featuring a husband and wife - Vanriet and Lenaerts - together in a shared activity; in this case, that of playing a pantomime horse. However, Vanriet removes the costume that would make comic sense of their shared activity leaving just the awkwardness of their unusual posture in settings which reference Edvard Munch’s Moonlight or Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto. Vanriet and Lenaerts play out their shared activity in a role and settings which no longer make sense.

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James Horner - Remembrance, Remembrance.

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.

Culture longing for revelation

I received the latest edition of Image today which contains an excellent interview with Godfriend Cardinal Daneels, Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels.

The opening summary of Danneels' career and thought suggests that he "argues for an incarnational model of the relationship between faith and religion, in which God the creator has entered the world integrally in order to divinize it." Danneels has written that "culture becomes a kind of blueprint of revelation: not the object of worship, but of divinization. Creation awaits re-creation and culture longs for revelation, as the stem for the flower."

In the interview Danneels says that "ultimately the one who is the object of our faith can't be fully grasped with concepts. In theology and catechesis there is room for symbolism and poetry, which are means of saying much without pretending to say all." He returns to this theme later in the interview saying that "symbols and narratives ... are not matters of clarity and correctness, but of suggestiveness and waking enthusiasm and appealing to intuition and the senses."

Jesus was the greatest artist, he says, pointing to "something greater, something deeper - to the truth." "Such beauty disarms us when we find it. It shows us our own possibility and opens us to what lies beyond ourselves."

In the interview he discusses the work of four artists that he thinks have this effect on us through their art: Jan Vanriet; Michel Ciry; Father Maur; and Arcabas. Vanriet's, Danneels suggests, is a "purely evocative art" that "suggests everything and shows little." Michel Ciry's work is "intense," "it burns, as in the Emmaus story." "Father Maur," he says, "invites us to see in another way" with the Spirit as "the ordering principle." Finally, Arcabas' works are, he thinks, very accessible, full of warm colours, and reminiscent of the paintings of Fra Angelico.