Wednesday 24 April 2013

Sheffield based chamber music organisation Music in the Round are holding a Silent Auction during the week of the 13th May (the week of their annual May Festival with a series of concerts at the Crucible Studio in Sheffield). This Auction of sculptures by artist Vivien Whitaker will raise money for the Ebony and Ivory Fund to buy a new piano for the organisation.

Over the next few weeks I will be posting images, sound and video relating to the sculptures and 'days' featured in this auction, as well as talking about my own impression of the pieces. I would love you to get involved and comment on the works, maybe describing what you see in them and what you think of them.

For more information on how to bid for these sculptures/days please go to www.musicintheround.co.uk/silent_art_auction.php.


Thursday 11 April 2013

‘Becoming Picasso’ at the Courtauld: How grief makes for really great art


There is no denying that Pablo Picasso – who died forty years ago this week – was an extraordinarily talented young man. His dedicated museum in Barcelona reveals that he could appropriate the great masters like Michelangelo and Vermeer whilst still a teenager, and the fact that he never stuck to one style for very long is testament to the versatility of his abilities. A new exhibition at the Courtauld Institute at Somerset House in London offers a focus on his output from just one year, 1901, and presents an interesting transition from appropriation to an uncertain individuality.


In 1901 Picasso moved to Paris, having been promised an exhibition by the dealer Ambroise Vollard in his gallery on the Rue Laffitte. He took a studio in Montmartre and set to work producing paintings for this show: the final number exhibited was 75 and media from the time reports that Picasso worked at immense speed, sometimes painting three canvases a day. These works can be found in the first room of the exhibition ‘Becoming Picasso, Paris 1901’, and show an incredibly talented painter, with a striking sense of colour and form, but with few ideas of his own. The nineteen-year-old Picasso had absorbed so much of contemporary art – as well as works from the art historical canon – and was creating work that constantly referenced other people’s ideas.  One work (which actually is in the second room), called ‘The Blue Room (The Tub)’ illustrates this well. In it the rug belongs to Vuillard, the bath to Degas, the female figure to Vlaminck or Matisse, and the poster on the wall in the background to Toulouse-Lautrec. All these pieces of iconography are – of course – likely to recur in art of this time, but it is not just the theme that Picasso appropriates, it is the style.


Picasso was good. Really good. But he knew it, and unfortunately confidence and assurance do not often – in my opinion – make extraordinary art. It is the fragility, the nervousness in works that make them so thick with thought and feeling. It is often where something is very hard – either literally in terms of difficultly drawing, or in terms of expressing an emotion – that the artist end up recording more of themselves in the artwork, making it infinitely more absorbing for us, the spectators.

With this in mind, to me, the second room is infinitely more interesting. This is the room of paintings done after the summer exhibition at Vollard’s gallery, and it seems that without the pressure of needing to produce works to display, impress and sell, Picasso felt able to explore the more private and personal ideas within him, and in this we have the birth of the ‘blue period’.

If you are only familiar with Picasso’s brilliant and distorted paintings from the middle of his life, or with the cubist pieces from the 1910s I would urge you to familiarise yourself with his ‘blue’ and ‘rose’ periods. These works are devastating in their anguish and deep sadness. Ordinary people caught in a moment of thought form the basis for many of his works in this period, and this subject may have been a direct result of the impetus for this aesthetic: was he really exploring the inner sadness of someone else as he drew his models?

In the beginning of 1901, Carlos Casagemas – a friend of Picasso’s – shot himself in front of a group of friends in a cafe in Paris. Picasso was in Spain at the time (something that he may have carried guilt for), and felt the loss of his friend keenly. Interestingly, though Picasso was open about many biographical details concerning his friendships and lovers, he did not reveal that the death of Casagemas caused the change in his style in 1901 until the 1960s. We know that the young Picasso was quite secretive (when his monumental ‘Demoiselles D’Avignon’ met with shock from a few of his friends he hid it away for six years), but there is a sense that in this case, he might have felt regret or shame in not being able to help his friend. He searched the souls and hardships of others, in the way he perhaps should have done with Casagemas.

All this is speculation, but several works from the Courtauld exhibition see Picasso playing out his grief in his work. The most obvious of these is ‘Casagemas in his Coffin’, in which the head of a man lies enveloped by white sheets with darkness surrounding. This is an extraordinarily powerful work, in which Picasso reduced the palette entirely to blues, browns and white. The blues are rich and electric; there is a strong intensity of feeling in the work, and the paint is layered in thick empasto which is fairly unusual for Picasso in this period. We feel the energy and desperation in each brushstroke, and yet the subject is cold and still. Picasso exaggerates the upper lip of his friend, in the way that he would go on to exaggerate fingers and chins in other blue period portraits. Here we find the beginnings of Picasso using physiognomy to draw out expression and character.


In this second half of the exhibition we find ourselves forming a portrait of the teenaged ‘genius’. As well as the works that directly reference Casagemas and the melancholy harlequins – who recurred frequently in his blue and rose periods – we find a recurring theme of care. Two works (which appropriate the style of Daumier) show a mother and child, and the famous ‘Child with a Dove’ drives the point home as a fragile and awkwardly positioned young girl stands, carefully cradling and protecting a dove. Surely these are unusual subjects for an ostentatious, 19-year-old man?


Two self-portraits give us a greater sense of his personality. Both named ‘Yo – Picasso’ (‘I – Picasso’), one is large and confident in presentation, while the other offers just Picasso’s face, almost shyly etched onto a canvas. In the first of these, he appropriates Velasquez, depicting himself as the Romantic Artist with a billowing white shirt and orange cravat. The rich blues of the background are reminiscent of Van Gogh’s palette, and the unusually wide ear might be a reference to Van Gogh’s powerful late self-portraits (done after the severing of his ear). However, in the face of this portrait, and in the smaller one, there is a distinct anxiety and unsureness. He is wide-eyed and open: a young soul in an older body.

 

This exhibition is small with just 20 pictures, and is perhaps not worth the £6 entrance fee (though it is free for full-time students), but if you already hold some level of information about Picasso and an interest in who he was then I would recommend a visit. Picasso does not often reveal to us his fragility, but a display of a talented painter struggling to find his brilliance is an extraordinary thing to behold.