Kay Sage: Catalogue Raisonné

There has been a boom in publications and exhibitions relating to the female Surrealists in recent years. Leonora Carrington, Claude Cahun, Leonor Fini, Lee Miller and Aileen Agar have all benefitted from academics, curators and writers wanting to break new ground. Dorothea Tanning’s retrospective opens in London early in 2019. The latest figure to receive reappraisal is American artist Kay Sage. The imposing and lavish Kay Sage: Catalogue Raisonné finally makes available all known works by this intriguing and little understood figure.

Katherine Linn Sage (1898-1963), called Kay Sage and Kay Sage Tanguy, was born in New York State. At a young age she travelled in Europe with her family. She moved frequently, living an international lifestyle in New York, Washington DC and Rapallo and Rome in Italy, studying art as she did so. After a period of academic realism, Sage took up a Modernist style with reduced, geometric, semi-abstract forms. In 1936 she moved to Paris and committed to Surrealism. She deliberately did not meet the Surrealists in person until she considered she had painted enough work to be accepted on its merits. In 1938 she exhibited her Surrealist paintings and met the Surrealists. She was impressed both artistically and romantically by Yves Tanguy (1900-55), who was well disposed to her and her art. They began an affair. At the outbreak of war, the well-connected Sage (who knew Ezra Pound, Ford Maddox Ford and T.S. Eliot) organised a fund to support the evacuation of artists from France. The couple fled France for New York City, where they married in 1940. They later moved from New York City to Woodbury, Connecticut, where they spent the rest of their lives.

Sage’s paintings are notable for an absence of figures. Her paintings typically show unidentified geometric objects, structures of lattices and rods and drapery set in imaginary landscapes with far-distant horizons. Sometimes there are personages wrapped in rumpled drapery. Sage’s best works – the mature paintings of landscapes occupied by a few elements, lit by harsh raking light – are locations one inhabits. JG Ballard often used the landscapes settings of Delvaux and Dalí as backgrounds in his stories but in many ways Sage’s mental landscapes are ideal analogues for Ballard’s harsh alien terrains.

Sage’s visions are bleak and arid. They are neat worlds – vast expanses of immaculate desert and steppe. (As an individual, Sage was compulsively tidy.) Even the seas seem orderly and dry. (You have never seen drier water.) These are vistas that have never seen a drop of rain fall or a blade of grass grow. If any beings ever inhabited these places, they are long gone, leaving only enigmatic structures and the detritus of obscure activity. Her visions are also static. The drapery she painted never seemed to be captured in movement. Everything is frozen. There is a touch of depressive paralysis to the art – that sense that change is both impossible and futile. The pleasure one gets is the complete immersion in a world utterly fixed, clear, dry and sparse. It is asperity in paint.

The comparison with Tanguy’s lunar/submarine terrains populated by biomorphic and petrological objects is unavoidable. Sage knew Tanguy’s art before she met him and her unpeopled world is related to his vision. Both were meticulous in technique – the oneiric or veristic branch of Surrealist painting. What distinguished her art from that of Tanguy is Tanguy’s multivalence. Tanguy’s worlds could microcosms or macrocosms, desert plain or seabed, something alien, ancient or many millions of years hence in a post-human universe. Sage’s world is human-proximate: these are potentially liveable places with signs of human (or pseudo-human) activity. The very indication of human life makes these deserted settings even bleaker. Sage’s palette was drab, exploiting the emotional muteness of earth colours, half-tones and greys. Her paintings are rarely enlivened by the rich colour that one finds in Tanguy’s biomorphs, and then only in small areas. Psychological research shows that individuals experiencing clinical depression are less receptive to colour than non-depressives are and Sage’s muted palette seems indicative of psychological numbness and isolation.

Another touchstone in evaluating Sage’s art is relating it to that of de Chirico, who influenced so many of the Surrealists. In de Chirico’s Metaphysical paintings we encounter everyday objects that carry the associations and emotional connections of their usual existence. In Sage’s paintings we encounter materials rather than objects. The materials form structures that are potentially useful but their uses are obscure to us; the structures might actually be useless. There is no way for us to understand the functions of the structures. Sage shares with de Chirico a predilection for bright sunlight, long shadows, clean lines and deep pictorial recession. Sage was closest to de Chirico’s Metaphysical art in the 1937-40 when she was formulating her mature style.

Sage takes de Chirico to an extreme by mostly eliminating figures. One of the few exceptions – and it is a notable one – is Le Passage (1956). This shows an adolescent woman with her bared back turned towards us, who looks out over a strange and desolate landscape. It is probably her most reproduced work, which is understandable. However, it is atypical and anyone seeking similar works in this catalogue will be disappointed. There are no other such combinations of realistic figure and Surrealist landscape. (One suspects that had she pursued such a line she would have achieved more prominence.) There are paintings of subdued light with shreds of cloud or fog (Tomorrow is Never (1955)). The best of Sage’s paintings are already known and reproduced; most of these are in American museums: In the Third Sleep (1944), Men Working (1951), Quote, Unquote (1958). A number of paintings, which were sold from early exhibitions, have not been located or photographed, so there may be a handful of fine Sage paintings in private collections, waiting to emerge.

It is accurate to say that Tanguy’s reputation overshadowed that of Sage but it is also unarguable that Tanguy’s art was more important to Surrealism – indeed it influenced Sage’s art. Tanguy’s art was innovative and came to the fore in the mid-1920s, when the movement came into existence, therefore it is natural that Tanguy was more prominent than Sage. Sage was devoted to Tanguy’s art and seems not to have resented his prominence. After his death she spent a lot of time to cataloguing and conserving his art. She seems very proud of her association with an artist she considered great. What this catalogue confirms is that Sage was also a serious and individual artist and that her painting deserves to be more well-known. How much Sage’s own choices played in limiting the dissemination of her art is not clear. She had solo exhibitions in New York and Paris and was included in Surrealist group exhibitions. The lack of sensational content (no burning giraffes, floating rocks or somnambulant nudes) definitely meant her art was less eye catching than those of her colleagues. One could not say that Sage has been treated any less well than Wols or Pierre Roy, two other lesser known Surrealists, and there is no indication her gender has contributed to her secondary status.

A detailed chronology and Mary Ann Caws’s introductory essay covering the life and work of Sage are followed by the catalogue section. The art is separated into oil paintings, collages, works on paper and objects; a selection of early academic works are reproduced; the comprehensive exhibition history, bibliography and index round up the book. Illustrations of the paintings are full-page, facing catalogue data. A handful of pictures have no known illustrations or only older black-and-white photographs. Generally, the reproductions are good and data is thorough.

One usually finds that painters produce a lot of drawings – scraps of visual notation, thumbnail scratches of ideas, studies of details, technical designs, compositional sketches, fully worked compositions and so forth. Kay Sage was not that type of painter. Her drawings were independent from her painting activity. The drawings and collages catalogued function are highly finished and act as independent pictures and there are relatively few of them. No artist’s prints are mentioned in the text. The objects Sage made are small, often in frames and include found objects. Some are ludic and pleasing but none of the objects have the gravity of the paintings. The drawings and collages do not attempt to replicate the pictorial completeness of the paintings.

The chronology includes photographs of the artist and her exhibitions. The Surrealists feature largely in that chronology. Sage and Tanguy travelled to Sedona, Arizona to visit Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. Sage and Andre Breton disliked each other. Breton and Tanguy had been close but Tanguy’s desertion of his first wife to marry Sage cooled the men’s relationship. The fact that Tanguy chose to remain in the USA after the war rather than return to France with the other formerly exiled artists was something Breton took as a patriotic slight. When, in 1953, Tanguy and Sage came to France for an exhibition of Tanguy’s art, Breton did not come to the gallery but instead rather aloofly suggested Tanguy make an appointment to visit him at his Parisian apartment. The couple did not visit Breton and never returned to France.

In 1955 Tanguy died. Sage entered a prolonged depression and this marked a long and permanent decline. Plagued by health issues, she became more reclusive than she had been. Her eyesight was seriously impaired by cataracts. Multiple operations were either unsuccessful or only partially successful. Unable to make the precise and clear paintings – the last of her around 200 oil paintings is dated 1958 – Sage turned to making sculptural objects and writing poetry. She had an affinity for verse and that verbal flair is apparent in her titles; the evolution was a natural one, albeit forced. Sage worked on an unpublished memoir China Eggs, covering her life before she joined the Surrealists. In 1962, fellow expatriate Surrealist Kurt Seligmann (the artist who introduced Sage to Surrealism) died in a hunting accident. He slipped on ice and shot himself with Tanguy’s hunting rifle. Sage took it as a premonition. Days after she had seen her third book of poems through to publication and posted inscribed copies to acquaintances, Sage locked herself in her bedroom and shot herself through the heart. Her final written words were “L’extinction des lumières inutiles” (extinction of useless lights).

A lot of care has been put into the design and production of this catalogue, which is likely to contribute to Kay Sage: Catalogue Raisonné becoming a prized collector’s piece as well as a useful reference work. The metallic-sateen-style cloth covering gives the book a touch of shimmering elusiveness, which is fitting for the artist, and the pictorial slipcase is sturdy and attractive. Sage appears to us here as a secondary but significant painter of the French Surrealist movement and this publication is sure to secure her reputation as a fastidious and imaginative creator. For any comprehensive library on Surrealism, this title should be a necessary addition.

 

Mary Ann Caws, Stephen Robeson Miller, Jessie Sentivan (ed.), Kay Sage: Catalogue Raisonné, Delmonico/Prestel, 2018, cloth hardback in slipcase, 520pp, fully col. illus., US$ 165/£120, ISBN 978 3 7913 5785 0

 

© 2018 Alexander Adams

View my art and books at www.alexanderadams.art

The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature

As the last unpublished writings of the original Beat Generation (Burroughs, Corso, Ginsberg and Kerouac, plus others) reach print, the memoirs of their most distant associates become public and text-critical editions of classic texts are issued, the seams of iconic writers become exhausted. Notwithstanding the academic study of ever more obscure aspects of those writers and application of new theoretical systems of interpretation, the scholarly searchlight inevitably moves to unfamiliar territory. In terms of the Beats, the unfamiliar is foreign writers who were liberated by the Beat example of free verse, Buddhist mysticism, sexual freedom, drug use and radical politics.

The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature is a survey of the non-American Beat writers, written by multiple specialists, divided by country. Many of the specialists are natives of these countries and understand their subjects from the inside. These texts have been marshalled by Professor A. Robert Lee, an authority of the subject of Beat literature and author and editor of previous landmark studies.

The core first-generation Beats travelled relatively widely and some lived abroad for periods. All lived long enough to become famous and lauded outside of their homeland. In old age, Burroughs and Ginsberg toured – reading their writings, signing books, attending events, teaching classes and performing various public duties which brought them into direct contact with fans and allies. Yet Beatism is not a socially transmittable disease. As Lee sets out in the book’s introduction, the Beat movement spread directly through books, newspapers, chapbooks and fanzines, quite independent of the proximate presence of the writers. Indirectly, it spread through films, documentaries, the lyrics of singer-songwriters such as Bob Dylan, David Bowie and Jim Morrison and – most loosely – the pop-culture caricature of the Beatnik.

The definition of “Beat” in this handbook is somewhat elastic. Lee specifies no exact parameters for the authors. Is Beat a discrete period or is it open ended? Is Beat a movement (with a circumscribed set of stylistic tools, thematic concerns and political tenets) or is Beat an affiliation, tendency, influence or (in the most cynical light) simply mercenary appropriation of iconic cultural production of a past era? There is no manifesto, no defining compilation or event, no strict criteria for inclusion, no school, no necessity for apprenticeship and no arbiter’s blessing to confer Beatitude upon supplicants. Or rather, there are myriad manifestoes, compilations, events, criteria, schools, apprenticeships and arbiters – none authoritative.

The editor has allowed essayists to use their own judgment as to what “Beat creator” means in their studies, be that creators who claimed affiliation or lineage from the American Beats, those who created like them or those who adapted Beat principles to their native culture. In practice, it means all three groups. Katharine Streip covers the influence of the Beats on film maker David Cronenberg (director of Naked Lunch), musician-writer Arish Ahmad Khan and multi-media artist John Oswald. Much of Frida Forsgren’s essay deals with the sculptor Marius Heyerdahl, as one of the leading Beat creative figures in Norway.  We encounter snippets of unexpected information: women Beat creators in Italy were all involved primarily with music rather than writing; two of the leading German Beats were struck and killed by cars; the father of Lars Ulrich (Metallica drummer) is Torben Ulrich, professional Danish tennis player and Beat writer.

In some cases the reception of the Beats was impaired by cultural resistance. Alberto Escobar de la Garma notes, “Publishing houses in [Mexico] have been reluctant to make the Beats available in part because of historic antipathy towards the USA (to include its language) and in part because they so expressly flaunt Mexican conventions of conservative cultural manners and behaviour.” Conversely, there was sometimes antipathy from the American Beats towards creators in other countries. Luke Walker describes how Corso, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg all felt that the British poets who appeared at the Albert Hall International Poetry Incarnation in 1965 to be mediocre and derivative. They considered Great Britain a drab and socially constrained place, as did Burroughs, who lived there for a long period. When Corso read his poem “Bomb” it was denounced by the British audience as pro-war. Fiona Paton’s summary of the Scottish response to the Beats is called “Cosmopolitan Scum” and discusses Scottish writers Alexander Trocchi, James Kelman and Irvine Welsh. Their response was more assertive, rebarbative – in short, more Scottish – than those of their English colleagues.

The essayists give a sense of the creators’ achievements and their significance (or insignificance) within their national scenes. Many of the writers were peripheral and published sporadically. Very little of this work has been published in translation, thus this Handbook provides valuable guidance regarding inaccessible work to international audiences. Authors acknowledge that often it was the example of the Beats and their literary liberation that freed foreign writers without those inspired writers becoming Beat themselves. This seems particularly true in the cases of Poland, Russia and China where access to imported subversive Western writings was tightly restricted and translations were almost non-existent. Pieces on Morocco and Turkey foreground the very different social, political and religious climates which shaped responses to Beat creativity. Essays on Japan and China take us even farther afield.

While writers sometimes closely analyse a poem and passage of prose, the essays are jargon-free, light on theory and highly readable. Quotations are necessarily restricted in length but even so one encounters some striking excerpts. Consider this by Leopoldo María Panero, quoted by Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo:

El palacio de la locura está

lleno de animals

verdes con

motas anaranjadas como ácidos y

cubierto de polvo: entra ven.

 

The palace of madness is

full of green

animals with

orange dots like acid

covered in dust: come inside.

 

The extensive bibliographies will send readers in search of the original texts. The footnotes and index will prove useful to researchers.

This book is an essential starting point for Beat fans’ parlour game of “debate the inclusion/omission”. No gathering of Beat academics or readers would be complete without fiery dissent on the status and relevance of writers included in the Beat canon and passionate advocacy in favour of omitted personal favourites. This book will be the starting point for such discussions for decades to come and a touchstone for Beat scholarship for a generation.

Let us hope that in time a cheaper paperback version is published, allowing the rich and enlightening scholarship in The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature to reach an even wider audience.

 

Contributors: Thomas Antonic (Austria), Franca Bellarsi (Belgium), Nicholas Birns (Australia), Thomas Epstein (Russia), Alberto Escobar de la Garma (Mexico), Frida Forsgren (Norway), Alexander Greiffenstern (Germany), Benjamin J. Heal (China), A. Robert Lee (Japan), El Habib Louai (Morocco), Polina Mackay (Greece), Erik Mortenson (Turkey), Lars Movin (Denmark), Lisa Avdic Öst (Sweden), Peggy Pacini (France), Fiona Paton (Scotland), Andrzej Pietrasz (Poland), Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo (Spain), Tomasz Sawczuk (Poland), Maria Anita Stefanelli (Italy), Katharine Streip (Canada), Jaap van der Bent (Netherlands and Flanders), Harri Veivo (Finland), Luke Walker (Great Britain).

A. Robert Lee (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature, Routledge, 2018, hardback, 350pp, £175, ISBN 978 0 415 78545 7 (also available as an eBook)

 

© 2018 Alexander Adams

See my art and books at www.alexanderadams.art

Van Gogh: A Life in Places

Vincent Van Gogh lived in the Netherlands, France, Belgium and England. This small-format hardback book is a brief biography in the form of a guide to the places Van Gogh lived, illustrated with some of his art. There are many quotes from Van Gogh’s letters, which give his own words about his surroundings. Drawings from letters show how Van Gogh presented places to his family, mainly his chief correspondent brother Theo. Contemporary photographs show buildings and people the artist would have known. And – of course – the artist’s paintings are reproduced too.

Van Gogh’s stints in school teaching, bookselling, art selling and missionary work are presented summarily. Much of this time was before the artist’s commitment to become an artist, so there is little art to display. The majority of the book is taken up with the last decade of Van Gogh’s life, 1880-90, when he was producing art.

Van Gogh stayed in Kent, Isleworth and London, teaching boys. The author mentions Van Gogh’s lay preaching and church going around London, consumed with an evangelical fervour. A pencil sketch of two churches is included. Two of the best drawings are early large elaborate landscapes drawings in pencil heightened with white chalk. These are not often reproduced, so it is nice to see them. They well portray the gloom of the Dutch landscape. Nature inspired Van Gogh from a young age, when he drew and described insects and plants. Nature would underpin his best art. Van Gogh spent time in Drenthe, where the population harvested peat, which was transported away by barge. It was a singularly bleak region. Borinage in Belgium was a mining area. There Van Gogh ministered to the local population and made himself ill with his Spartan living, giving away all he had to the bemused mining families. He then decided to study art in Antwerp and Brussels.

The author strikes a good balance, explaining the significance of different locations while avoiding detailed specifics of individual pictures. Heslewood takes us around Paris and environs to show us the places the painter worked in when he absorbed Impressionism into his technique: Asnieres, with its distant factories and chimneys, Montmartre, with its windmills and dancehalls. When the artist moved to Arles he made a point of travelling in the region as much as he could afford to. Pictures and text refer to the Camargue, the coastal village of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, Montmajour and other locations.

For Van Gogh, Arles became the centre for a longed-for School of the South – to complement Schools of the North (Pont Aven) and West (Martinique) already pioneered by Gauguin, Laval and Bernard. Provence, for Van Gogh, resembled the Japanese woodcut prints that he had pored over in Paris. It had bright light and intense colour as well as a distinct (if not precisely exotic) regional culture. Provence could be their Japan.

Van Gogh’s painting excursions were curbed by his confinement to a hospital in Arles and later his voluntary commitment to the asylum in Saint-Rémy, following his infamous self-mutilation and breakdown. The grounds of the asylum and a view of a wheat field are the most common motifs for 1889. In the summer he moved to the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris, to be under the care of Dr Gachet. There he painted his last works – views of wheat fields, Daubigny’s house and garden, ivy thickets of undergrowth. This was a very productive period for the artist and some of his best loved landscapes come from this period.

This book would make an ideal addition to a school library and is recommended as reading for anyone passingly familiar with the art of Van Gogh who would like an introduction to his life.

 

Juliet Heslewood, Van Gogh: A Life in Places, Unicorn, 1 November 2018, hardback, 172pp, 85 illus., £15, ISBN 978 191 160 4648

 

© 2018 Alexander Adams

View my art and books at www.alexanderadams.art

Colonialism & Realism in Art (Gauguin & Laval in Martinique)

[Image: Paul Gauguin (1848 – 1903), The Mango Trees, Martinique (1887), oil on canvas, 86 cm x 116 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)]

A current exhibition explores art made by Gauguin in Martinique, pairing him with a lesser known Post-Impressionist painter who worked beside him there (Gauguin & Laval in Martinique, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, 5 October 2018-13 January 2019). This review is taken from the exhibition catalogue. That catalogue announces the forthcoming publication of a volume dedicated to scientific and historical analysis on the same subject, which should – considering the quality of the contributors and standards of the Van Gogh Museum – be a landmark in Post-Impressionist studies.

The art of Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) is too well-known to need introduction; the art of Charles Laval (1861-1894) is hardly known at all. Laval was a young painter (Parisian by birth) who came into the orbit of the older Gauguin in July 1886, while they were in Brittany. Both had lived in Paris and exhibited at the annual Salon. Gauguin had the cachet of exhibiting in the final Impressionist exhibition (1886) following the tutelage of Pissarro and the patronage of Degas, though that had not translated into sales.

Gauguin and Laval decided to travel to Panama, planning to paint on the small island of Taboga. Gauguin’s brother-in-law could provide him with a job to finance living and material costs. At the time the French were building the Panama Canal (a project later taken over and completed by the Americans), so there was work available on the project. Gauguin summoned his wife from Denmark to collect their son before his departure. The couple had not seen each other in 22 months and spent only hours together before Gauguin left. (The more one learns about Gauguin the man, the more one dislikes him, regardless of how highly one rates his art.)

In search of noble savages and exotic locales, Gauguin and Laval embarked for Panama on 10 April 1887. On the way to Panama, the pair’s ship put in at Fort-de-France, Martinique. They arrived in Panama on 30 April. They were soon disappointed by Taboga (too touristic) and Panama City lived up to its notorious reputation for unpleasantness: hot, humid, impoverished, isolated and plagued by mosquito-borne diseases. Gauguin’s in-law had no work for him. A position in the canal-construction project that Gauguin secured independently lasted only days before political events led to mass lay-offs, causing Gauguin losing his job. Disillusioned, the pair decided to try Martinique, where they arrived on 11 June.

Martinique was in all respects more suitable for the artists. It was a healthier location with picturesque views, an efficient French colonial administration, relatively direct communication with Paris and some colonists with disposable income which could be spent on art. They found a shack in the hills near the port of Saint-Pierre. A very useful map shows the precise locations the artists painted. All are on tracks within a 3-km walk from their hut.

The exhibition gathers paintings by the two artists, as well as sketchbook pages, plus a selection of associated letters and later art. Relevant pieces not exhibited are illustrated in the catalogue. Doubtless the forthcoming scholarly volume will include the text of letters by the artists (seven extant by Gauguin, two by Laval), as well as more data about the places they visited and their interactions with the Martinican population. Gauguin produced 17 oil paintings in Martinique. Notable features of Gauguin’s Martinican landscapes are the warmth of his greens and light dabbing brushwork. These elements assist in creating an impression of tropical heat and profuse foliage. At this stage much of the artist’s approach can be considered Impressionist in character. Gauguin’s best works must be his still-lifes and landscapes with few small figures, those paintings where the artist’s ego has little scope to suffocate his considerable sensitivity and skill. His paintings of exotic fruits are richly coloured, with highlights deftly represented. Authors have taken time to identify the fruits, using information about the local produce and indigenous flora.

[Image: Paul Gauguin, Head of a Woman from Martinique (1887), coloured chalk on paper, 36 × 27 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)]

Gauguin had a keen eye for the local women, whom he drew and wrote about. His pastel and watercolour sketches document faces and costumes. (There are almost no nudes.) To be fair to Gauguin, he did seem keen to record the ordinary lives and typical scenes of local people, albeit ones that conformed to his idea of picturesque. A number of Gauguin’s later carvings, ceramics and zincographs (lithographs on zinc plates) were inspired by memories of Martinique and these are included in the exhibition. There is a still-life with flowers in a vase and a statuette made by Gauguin himself. This works as a pseudo-landscape, with the flowers as a tree and the statuette as a seated porteuse (female native fruit carrier). It is wonderfully restrained in colouration and delicate in execution. The Martinique period is Gauguin’s painting at its best – carefully made, chromatically rich, well observed.

Laval’s landscapes are very similar in handling, coloration and tone to Gauguin’s. They have less intensity and confidence than the older artist’s. There are two landscapes in oil and one scene of people bathing in the sea. It seems much of Laval’s art made in Martinique has been lost or has gone unrecognised. The catalogue authors note, “Laval’s oeuvre is small and very poorly catalogued. New works crop up from time to time, shedding fresh light on his artistic production.” It is hard to assess Laval capabilities based on such a restricted sample. On the evidence of the art in this catalogue, Laval seems on par with Émile Bernard and Louis Anquetin – second-rank artists capable of producing attractive and memorable art but who made few powerful pictures. Bernard may get more credit of late as an innovator but he managed to turn relatively little of his original ideas into synthesised art works that satisfy.

[Image: Charles Laval (1861 – 1894), Self-Portrait (1888), oil on canvas, 50.7 cm x 60.4 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)]

The stay proved difficult for the two painters. Laval became sick; Gauguin contracted dysentery and caught malaria (the latter probably caught in Panama). Gauguin wrote letters requesting money so he could return to France. As soon as it arrived he left, leaving Laval behind. There is a case to be made that Laval was abandoned. Gauguin’s heroic self-interest necessitated the ditching of friends, colleagues, lovers and family members on a regular basis. It seems Laval’s adulation of Gauguin was untarnished, as he was wrote an admiring letter to him soon after Gauguin returned to France. Landscape on Martinique (1887-8), painted by Laval after Gauguin left, shows a degree of abstraction and greater ambition than his other paintings. The swirling brushwork of the clouds recalls the style Van Gogh would start to use in 1888. That year Laval, Gauguin and Bernard worked together in Pont Aven and all three sent to Van Gogh their self-portraits with dedications. Gauguin and Laval fell out when the jealous (and married) Gauguin resented Laval’s engagement to Bernard’s sister. Laval died of tuberculosis in 1894, aged 33.

The exhibition and catalogue open a window on to a fascinating episode in Post-Impressionist painting.

* * *

There is, regrettably, a misstep in the catalogue. It is a political one. Curator Dr Maite van Dijk writes: “The western image of the colonial world was remarkably unsubtle and superficial, creating a highly, subjective and misleading image.” One might equally write, “The post-colonial-studies image of the colonial world is remarkably unsubtle and superficial, creating a highly, subjective and misleading image.” Her extended passages on colonial attitudes are poorly judged – full of dismissive attitudes, application of retrospective moralising and omission of context.

There are numerous instances of Western travellers and administrators visiting colonies and engaging sympathetically and in an open-minded fashion with the local population, being critical of authorities and advocating for decolonisation. Many of these narratives have been subsequently published. The fact that the preponderant narratives that appeared in print at the time were largely favourable towards colonialism and overseas colonial-owned agricultural industry was in part due to the sponsors (and publishers) of those writers/artists being colonial authorities or agricultural companies. Often writers had vested personal interests in presenting the colonies in a good light. Missionaries had a theological imperative to present the Christianisation of the non-West as a virtuous mission, and so forth. There were many reasons of justifiable self-interest to present the colonial project as mainly favourable. Whether or not pro-colonialist viewpoints expressed publicly were sincerely and constantly held is another matter.

One finds similarly idyllic narratives regarding remote rural communities in colonial home countries. Consider all those bucolic paintings of buxom milkmaids, rosy-cheeked country children and sturdy fishermen, which were exhibited in salons and reproduced as lithographs in mass-circulation journals. Consider the Breton paintings of Gauguin and Laval and the Arlesian paintings of Van Gogh, both groups where the picturesque costumes, physiognomies and landscapes of remote rural regions were treated like those of the colonies. A dissenting attitude was inaugurated with Courbet’s Stone Breakers in 1849. The subsequent trends of Social Realism and Naturalism grew slowly and only became prominent strands in fine art in the 1870s. Even then, Social Realism, Naturalism and (later) Cosmopolitan Realism frequently had a maudlin, sentimental and essentially paternalistic attitude towards the rural poor of the painters’ homelands – exactly mirroring what one sees in art depicting the colonies.

Consider Van Gogh’s use of working-class types in his art. Although he frequently expressed his genuine heartfelt concern for the miners, labourers, weavers and prostitutes he lived beside, he almost never adapted his opinions or art after consulting his subjects. In his many letters he names hardly any of his numerous models and does not discuss their characters. He treats them as types, categorised by region or employment. He shared the working people’s suffering at times but was never accepted as one of them. Numerous statements attest to the fact Van Gogh was considered by locals to be the painter son of a middle-class Dutch pastor, who used workers as pictorial subjects. In other words, if we adopt a Marxist/post-colonial viewpoint we must consider Van Gogh hardly more than a class colonist or deprivation tourist. Yet this view is ultimately demeaning and devalues the insight and empathy elicited by Van Gogh’s art – and all successful art. If van Dijk’s assessment of colonialist patronisation and exploitation (dare one say “cultural appropriation”?) of the colonised natives holds true then practically every painter who has ever attempted to portray groups outside of his or her demographic origin is guilty of similar insensitivity – including Van Gogh.

In short, this line of reasoning is unhelpful, divisive and destructive. It is essentially a moralistic stance which simplifies the complexity of a historical situation (or – more accurately – multiple historical situations over many places and periods) in order to gratify the moraliser. Relations between colonisers and colonised were complex, interdependent, shifting and personal. Making gross generalisations about Nineteenth Century colonial visitors, administrators and journalists is as dismissively ignorant as the purported ignorance within those colonialist societies.

Dr Maite van Dijk is an esteemed scholar of Van Gogh and his era, whose work has earned her justified respect. In her text about the art of colonialism she has seriously erred. Curators and art historians should be wary of uncritically adopting tenets of feminist and post-colonialist studies. These fields are essentially political in content and purpose. It is right and valuable to selectively study and discuss art issues related to gender and colonialism – but not to take any of those ideas directly from fields which are specifically orientated to push express political agendas. Unless they are willing to assess evidential bases for claims regarding social issues considered indicative of injustice or power relationships (as opposed to taking on trust the interpretations of social activists holding academic positions), art historians might be best advised to largely avoid those approaches.

 

 

Maite van Dijk & Joost van der Hoeven, Gauguin & Laval in Martinique, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, 2018, paperback, 176pp, fully illus., €24.95, ISBN 978 90 6868 769 9 (hardback, Dutch and French versions available)

21 October 2018

© 2018 Alexander Adams

View my art and books here: www.alexanderadams.art

Corot’s Women

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot Woman with a Pearl, c. 1868–1870 oil on canvas overall: 70 x 55 cm (27 9/16 x 21 5/8 in.) framed: 93 x 74.5 x 9 cm (36 5/8 x 29 5/16 x 3 9/16 in.) Musée du Louvre, Paris, Département des Peintures © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo by Stéphane Maréchalle

While the best known art of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875) is landscapes – those small, dreamy, smudged, grey-inflected views of northern France, which can be found in collections worldwide – the current exhibition in Washington DC displays a secondary facet of Corot’s output: his paintings of women (Corot: Women, 9 September-31 December 2018, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; formerly at Musée Marmottan, Paris). Forty-three paintings by Corot of women have been gathered to demonstrate Corot’s strengths (and weaknesses) as a figure painter. (Reviewed here from the thorough and attractive clothbound catalogue.)

The figure paintings comprise 10% of Corot’s output. “Most were done in his last two decades, the later 1850s through the early 1870s,” according to Mary Morton, curator of this exhibition. Although some of the nudes were exhibited, most of the figure paintings were done for Corot’s private satisfaction. Few are dated and many were in his possession at the time of his death. Corot followed the French academic fashion of painting picturesque types in the form of figures wearing national costumes. Examples in Corot’s output included national dress of Italy, Bulgaria, Greece, Switzerland and Algeria. He also made a series of paintings of women in domestic settings. One (Woman Reading in the Studio (c. 1868)) is effectively a precursor to the paintings of Degas, Sickert, Vuillard, Bonnard and Valotton of disengaged preoccupied women absorbed by their own thoughts (or existential ennui, if you want to approach it intellectually).

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot Woman Reading in the Studio, c. 1868 oil on paperboard on wood overall: 32.5 x 41.3 cm (12 13/16 x 16 1/4 in.) framed: 50.5 x 59.1 x 6.4 cm (19 7/8 x 23 1/4 x 2 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon

Corot’s pallid figures in static poses against schematic landscape backgrounds as flat as stage backdrops are the starting point for almost Puvis de Chavannes painted.

In the portraits, Corot sometimes used Old Masters as sources. Woman with a Pearl (c. 1868-70) is based on Leonardo’s La Belle Ferroniere. The painting now belongs to the Louvre and rightly belongs there as it is a memorable and refreshing restatement of a standard portrait format, brought to life with a mixture of modesty, panache and directness of approach.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot Young Greek Woman, c. 1870–1871 oil on canvas overall: 84.14 x 70.49 cm (33 1/8 x 27 3/4 in.) framed: 102.3 x 73.7 x 10.8 cm (40 1/4 x 29 x 4 1/4 in.) Collection of Shelburne Museum, Gift of the Electra Havemeyer Webb Fund, Inc.

Some of the portraits are very fine. In particular, Young Greek Woman (c. 1870-71) has the feeling of a very particular person caught in the act of posing. It combines a sense of a momentary rest with the monumental strength and an enduring classic beauty. The merest hints of the eye whites give a delicate hypnotism to the dark eyes. It is no wonder that Lucian Freud was an admirer of Corot and bought a portrait by him (included in this exhibition). The subject slumped in the studio while being observed is the core of Freud’s work.

Notable in Corot’s portraits is the simplicity of the compositions and forms. There is a near geometrical quality to many pictures. It was no wonder that the 1909 Salon d’automne of Corot figure paintings caught the attention of Braque and Picasso. A number of Corot portraits were reinterpreted through a Cubist lens. Corot can also be considered a major influence on Picasso during his Neoclassical period (1915-25). The plain modelling of faces, classical physiognomy, half-length figure format, minimal settings and pale pastose scumbling over darker underpainting that one finds in Picasso’s paintings of his wife Olga, Sara Murphy and fictional women all match Corot better than they do Ingres or Renoir, two other painters Picasso was looking at at the time.

Many of the pictures are sombre of palette and modest of size. These are the best. The energy of the brushwork and sense of freedom enliven these pictures. The larger more finished works (probably bound for specific buyers or public display) are considerably less engaging. This is not just a matter of our modern taste and eye. The larger pieces lack invention and intensity. The skins have an unpleasant lifeless overworked quality. All were painted in the studio. Even the paintings of figures outdoors are – from the evidence of the lighting – made in the indoors. Not until the Naturalist movement of the 1860s and 1870s did any artists attempt to portray figures in natural lighting conditions. Often these failed to replicate the unique effects of outdoor lighting in their studio-derived works.

There are similarities between Corot’s nudes and Courbet’s, though how much they knew of each other’s art is not covered in the catalogue essays. Both artists publicly exhibited their nudes in Paris so must have been familiar with other’s activity in the genre. Catalogue authors point out that Corot used the nascent genre of academic nude photography as a source for some of his paintings. Sebastien Allard notes in the catalogue that Corot’s move into making nudes may have been an attempt to display himself as a more versatile painter than the landscapist he was known as. His reputation was long established by the 1850s – in some respects too well established, as although his work sold well it was judged tired and repetitive.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot The Repose, 1860, reworked c. 1865/1870 oil on canvas overall: 57.8 x 101.6 cm (22 3/4 x 40 in.) framed: 83.8 x 127.3 x 12.1 cm (33 x 50 1/8 x 4 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (William A. Clark Collection)

His nudes puzzled many viewers. While the artist invoked classical allusions, his figures were clearly drawn from living women (with all their imperfections) and his style fluctuated between the schematic, idealistic and realistic across the passages of the pictures. What were viewers supposed to make of Corot’s nudes? Was he mocking classical values or trying to revive them? The same questions would be asked in later controversies related to Courbet and Manet’s nudes. To the modern eye, Corot’s nudes are still awkward. They evoke the idyllic past and idealistic mission of classical art but fail to fulfil requirements of those touchstones, fail to meaningfully advance them and fail to effectively undermine the grounding for those aspects. In these respects, Corot’s nudes are less satisfactory than his portraits, as he is caught disadvantageously unable to fulfil the demands of an old tradition and unaware of how to liberate the genre in a suitable manner.

About 11 paintings in Corot’s studio series have been identified. These show women in Corot’s own studio. They differ from the portraits in that they include detailed depictions of the studio and its contents as well as the women. (Corot only rarely painted men.)  Some show women seated contemplating a painting on his easel or with a musical instrument. It is unknown what prompted these paintings or if they had any particular significance for the painter. These are not so much “problem pictures” as “puzzling pictures”. It may be that Corot wanted to do nothing more than put women in strongly colour clothing in a dim earth-hue setting. It seems unlikely that these pictures will be decoded – indeed it is quite likely there is nothing to be decoded.

It is disappointing that there is not more discussion given to the portraits in the catalogue. Nevertheless, both catalogue and exhibition provide welcome attention for an unusual and rich seam in this landscapist’s output. Although a couple of Corot’s portraits are recognised as fine examples, this exhibition should serve to establish Corot as an original and accomplished portraitist. As for the nudes, it may take more advocacy to gain Corot more than a footnote in studies of the nude in Nineteenth Century French painting. Visitors and readers can decide this for themselves.

Mary Morton et al, Corot: Women, National Gallery of Art (distr. Yale University Press), cloth hardback, 180pp, 99 col. illus., £39.95, ISBN 978 0 300 23673 6

© 2018 Alexander Adams

View my art and books here: www.alexanderadams.art

Publication: “Culture War: Art, Identity Politics & Cultural Entryism”

I am pleased to announce the publication of my book “Culture War: Art, Identity Politics and Cultural Entryism” (Societas/Imprint Academic).

“Why has identity become so central to judging art today? Why are some groups reluctant to defend free speech within culture? Has state support made artists poorer not richer? How does the movement for social justice influence cultural production? Why is post-modernism dominant in the art world? Why are consumers of comic books so bitterly divided?

“In Culture War: Art, Identity Politics and Cultural Entryism Alexander Adams examines a series of pressing issues in today’s culture: censorship, Islamism, Feminism, identity politics, historical reparations and public arts policy. Through a series of linked essays, Culture War exposes connections between seemingly unrelated events and trends in high and popular cultures. From fine art to superhero comics, from political cartoons to museum policy, certain persistent ideas underpin the most contentious issues today. Adams draws on history, philosophy, politics and cultural criticism to explain the reasoning of creators, consumers and critics and to expose some uncomfortable truths.”

180pp, 3 b&w illus., Societas/Imprint Academic, March 2019, ISBN 978-1845409982

Link to publisher’s selling page: http://books.imprint.co.uk/book/?gcoi=71157100083870

Link to Amazon book description:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Culture-War-Identity-Politics-Cultural/dp/1845409981/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1536611127&sr=8-1&keywords=culture+war+alexander+adams

Encountering Pontormo

[Image: Jacopo da Pontormo (b. Pontorme, Empoli, Italy, 1494; d. Florence, 1557), Visitation (ca. 1528–29), oil on wood, 207 × 159 cm Carmignano, Pieve dei Santi, Michele e Francesco, © Antonio Quattrone, Florence]

Jacopo da Pontormo (1494-1557) was considered one of the leading painters of the Late Renaissance period in Florence. We define the Late Renaissance of Italy as commencing with the death of Raphael in 1520. It is his unfinished painting of the Transfiguration (1520; completed posthumously) which marked a move away from the combination of idealism and verisimilitude – typical of the High Renaissance – towards Mannerism, which is characterised by reduced realism and study from life, greater artificiality, more anatomical distortion in the service of emotional extremity and to display the artist’s originality, increased levels of strangeness and cultivation of the novel for its own sake.

Miraculous Encounters: Pontormo from Drawing to Painting (7 September 2018-6 January 2019, Morgan Library, New York; touring to J. Paul Getty Museum, 5 February-28 April 2019; previously at the Uffizi, Florence) is an exhibition which brings together some of Pontormo’s best paintings Visitation, Portrait of a Halbardier and Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap. All of these works are approximately located in the period 1528-30, a period of turmoil in Florentine history. From 1529-30 the city was besieged by forces intent on overthrowing the Florentine Republic, which they did in 1530 and installed Alessandro de’ Medici (r. 1531-7) as ruler of the city. During this time, able-bodied Florentine men were under arms defending the city, perhaps a reason why a number of Pontormo’s male portraits of that era show the subject with weapons.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is the newly restored is Visitation (c. 1528-9), loaned from Pieve dei Santi Michele e Francesco, Florence. The painting shows the encounter between the Virgin Mary and her cousin Saint Elizabeth on the streets of Florence. They are watched by two female spiritual attendants. What is striking about the painting is the simplicity of the clothing, the clarity of the colour and the gentle rhyming of forms. The faces of the attendants echo each other; the cousins mirror each other. The cousins interlock their arms. There is essentially nothing in the picture other than this group of figures. While the drapery is realistically rendered, there is no sense that this is a scene taken from life: the colours are simplified, the setting rudimentary, the perspective is inaccurate. The faces of the two cousins are wonderfully vivid and tendered depicted. The attendants are more ciphers, less substantial in presence and appearance.

It seems that Pontormo set his painting beside a prison building in Florence. There may be symbolism to that. There is – perhaps more plausibly – a more pragmatic reason for the choice of that building: it has no windows and decorative detail visible from the position he chose and was thus an easy building to paint.

 

[Image: Jacopo da Pontormo, Study for the Visitation (ca. 1528–29), black chalk, traces of white chalk, squared with red chalk, paper, 32.6 × 24 cm, Florence, Gallerie degli Uffizi, Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle, Stampe, inv. 461 F, © Roberto Palermo/Gabinetto Fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi/Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali e del Turismo]

A preparatory chalk drawing has come from the Uffizi. It is squared and scans of the painting reveal a grid. So Pontormo used a grid to transfer his design rather than a cartoon. Both were common methods of the time. Vasari (who rather negative about Pontormo and his pupil Agnolo Bronzino (1503-72)) suggested that Pontormo was greatly influenced by Dürer’s prints. His engraving Four Naked Women (1497), a print that was known to have circulated in Italy by the time Pontormo painted Visitation. We know that Pontormo used Dürer’s print designs for a series of frescoes (now lost), so it is a possibility.

[Image: Jacopo da Pontormo, Portrait of a Halberdier (Francesco Guardi?) (ca. 1529–30), oil on canvas (transferred from wood), 95.3 × 73 cm, Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, inv. 89.PA.49]

Two fine portraits of young gentlemen are of subjects who remain unidentified. Texts in the catalogue set out the suggestions of the identities of the paintings. Bronzino was a worthy successor to Pontormo as a portraitist. The exhibition and catalogue shed light on the collaborations and borrowings between master and pupil. For example, there is Pygmalion (c. 1530), which was designed by Pontormo but executed by Bronzino. Illustrated in the catalogue is a nude study by Pontormo that Bronzino used in his painting.

Exhibited is Martyrdom of Saint Acacius and the Ten Thousand (1529-30), Bronzino’s variation of his master’s painting of the same period, which was derived from a design Pontormo had made for a commission of 1521-2. The idea of originality and plagiarism was a complex one. During this period the transmission of figures, details and layouts through pattern books – shared by master and pupils and later passed down to other painters – as an example of the artisan creator in the manual arts, was being supplemented by the jealous guarding of prerogative of the artist as creator in the liberal arts, where artists began to guard their intellectual property. Dürer went to Venice (in part) to curb the activity of a copyist using his designs and Michelangelo was furious that his unfinished Sistine Ceiling was seen by Raphael, who incorporated Michelangelo’s innovations into his own frescoes. Yet shortly after Michelangelo made designs specifically for Sebastiano del Piombo to paint in competition with Raphael. Artists could be generous or stingy towards artists outside of their workshop.

There is a long essay on the Visitation and shorter essays on its restoration history and discoveries of new technical analyses. The results of visual analysis allow us to understand that creation process, showing underpainting and underdrawing. Restoration data is given in the information for the paintings. We shall see if this takes off in future catalogues. Such information is often kept confidential, not least due to some terribly destructive restorations. The footnotes are of heroic extensiveness and will be a mine for future researchers. For even an average reader, such long and thorough notes are an absorbing diversion. The catalogue illustrates the paintings and drawings and there is an index and bibliography. This book will be of value to anyone wanting to understand the Late Renaissance in Florence, Mannerism and the careers of Pontormo and Bronzino.

 

Bruce Edelstein and Davide Gasparotto (eds.), Miraculous Encounters: Pontormo from Drawing to Painting, J. Paul Getty Museum, 11 September 2018, hardback, 160pp, 60 col. illus., $40, ISBN 978 1 60606 589 1

 

View my art and books at www.alexanderadams.art

© 2018 Alexander Adams

Thomas Rain Crowe and the San Francisco Scene

After many years of curating, cataloguing, collecting and selling books, Arthur S. Nusbaum has moved into publishing with his first book. This extensive transcript of interviews between Third Mind Books and Thomas Rain Crowe (b. 1949) forms a fascinating first-hand eye-witness testimony of the boom in Beat, Hippy and Yippy cultural production in San Francisco from the 1960s onwards. Crowe was one of the central figures of the San Francisco poetry scene in the period and he describes the interactions of writers such Neeli Cherkovski, Jack Hirschman, Ken Wainio, Harold Norse, Bob Kaufman, Diane di Prima, Jack Micheline and – a central figure – Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The way they responded to visits by the original Beats Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso is covered. Ferlinghetti was artist, poet, publisher and bookseller. He had direct connections to the original Beats, published them and his bookstore City Lights acted as a hub for poet activity in San Francisco (as it still does, even as Ferlinghetti approaches his 100^th birthday).

Nusbaum and Joe Provenzano interviewed Crowe and curated his extensive archive. Items from that archive illustrate the book. The images include broadsides, posters for legendary gatherings and poetry readings, photographs, letters, book covers and art works, many of them unique. There are covers of Beatitude, the revival of the Beat magazine, which was resurrected in San Francisco to publish the work of the Baby Beat or Second San Francisco Renaissance writers. Crowe founded New Native Press, with a focus on the Baby Beats and Native American writers.

One tantalising project that is discussed is a collection of Beat letters, which was intended for publication by City Lights and used letters by Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac and Corso written to Ferlinghetti. Crowe collated the letters, which were apparently vivid and various. The book was never published and the manuscript has since disappeared.

Crowe talks about his own development as a poet and his reactions to his contemporaries. He relates stories of lifelong friendships between writers and occasional animosities. He recounts how Norse was offended by being omitted from the line-up of the first annual San Francisco poetry festival (held in 1976), which Crowe co-directed. Norse ran a guerrilla campaign to undermine the festival, piqued at being overlooked. He made a point of avoiding the festival when it took place. Crowe talks about the drug and drink scene and the importance of left-wing political activism to the poets. There is discussion about campaigns to support political dissidents and the Indian Rights Movement.

There are some rare pieces reproduced, including facsimiles of Ferlinghetti’s Populist Manifesto and Cherkovski’s satirical broadside Syropa, a cutting satire on the Naropa Institute poets who were due to speak in San Francisco to promote the Naropa Institute for Disembodied Poetics at Boulder, Colorado. The book also includes a poem by Cherkovski about his friend Crowe. This book is a useful contribution to studies of San Francisco literature and a very enjoyable and informative read. We look forward with anticipation to the next publication from Third Mind Books.

 

Thomas Rain Crowe and Third Mind Books (ed.), Starting from San Francisco: The Baby Beat Generation and the Second San Francisco Renaissance. Thomas Rain Crowe in Conversation with Third Mind Books, Third Mind Books, 2018, paperback, 184pp, col. illus., $20, ISBN 978 0 692 13076 6 (Hardback collectors edition also available)

View my art and books here: www.alexanderadams.art

(c) 2018 Alexander Adams