|
|
| (Above) The Hay Wain by John Constable
– Source work for Park Village East by Frank Auerbach (below) |
 |
There is at present, at the National Gallery
in London, an exhibition entitled Encounters, where
twenty-four contemporary artists of international stature were invited
to choose a work of art in the famous collection as a starting point
for a work of art or series of works. The artists included Auerbach,
Bourgeois, Clemente, Freud, Johns, Kiefer, Hockney, Viola, Rego
and Tapies - an international and varied line-up of artists spanning
cultural phenomena and style. The result is one of the most creative
and inspiring exhibitions. Indeed, as an artist/visitor to The National
Gallery, one embarks on a creative adventure with the past and present
simultaneously. Further, the manner in which the works are located
throughout the large building (rather than confined to a single
gallery or level) means that in order to locate the next section
or group of works, one has to travel visually through various centuries
as if by chance. And so, on the way to see how Kossoff responds
to Rubens one encounters quite by chance, a room containing Gauguin,
Van Gogh and Rousseau and to one side Monet and Picasso. Serendipity
within the walls of the gallery seems to parallel aspects of life
that provide inspiration and visual excitement at unexpected moments
from the unlikely events.
Many artists can experience insights in the
ordinary aspects of life and learn to develop an individual harmony
between the mundane and the sublime. The uneasy juxtaposition can
evolve into a process that can be adapted in due course to altered
circumstances. In this situation the unexpected is almost assumed
in the creative act. Dialogue in whatever form helps to anchor artists
so that there is a constant thread connecting thoughts and acts
as their career unfolds. The exhibition to celebrate The Millennium
Year provides a most remarkable range of artists' creative methods
and processes that one could imagine. Encounters is
the brainchild of Director, Neil MacGregor. He describes the exhibition
thus:
"This is an exhibition of snatches or dialogue.
We invited, a few years ago, twenty-four great artists of our
time to converse with the greatest artists of all time, and the
fruits of those conversations are the works of art now on show
..... " (1)
MacGregor continues:
"Every day, in the rooms of The National
Gallery, similar conversations go on. Rembrandt talks to Titian,
Velàzquez looks at Rubens, Seurat nods to Piero della Francesca,
and Turner, by his own express wish, hangs forever beside the
artist whom he revered and admired above all others, Claude Lorrain
.....
The artists taking part in this exhibition
are not just letting us see the work they have produced as a result
of our invitation to respond to a painting in the National Gallery.
In the process they allow us to look again at pictures we thought
we knew well. And to look at a painting through the eyes of an
artist is, in many cases, to discover a new painting or perhaps,
more accurately, to be reminded that great paintings are inexhaustible,
and always have more secrets to yield." (3)
This exhibition is layered with human reactions
to ideas, to personal dilemmas or issues; it is also layered with
personalities, cultural manners, stylistic considerations and history.
The sum total is profoundly moving. It is the best way to begin
to comprehend who we (as artists) are and where we come from. The
experience of Encounters throws up the simplest question
about what art is and what it is to interact as individuals that
are often deemed somewhat naive in academic circles. To have a conversation
with the past requires the simplicity of a child, and a sophistication
and knowledge of a poet and scholar. The juxtaposition of naivety
and the sublime, of the practical preoccupations and skills of creating
a work of art, and the spiritual and intellectual, at once creates
tension and energy. The choice of artists and in turn, their choice
of artists from the past and the manner in which their responses
were executed was "masterfully steered to completion" (3)
by Richard Morphet, former Keeper of the Modern Collection at The
Tate Gallery. The catalogue is a masterpiece, one of the finest
collections of essays on contemporary art for many years. Certain
factors, such as employing one author, curator Christopher Riopelle,
to write all of the entries on the artworks in The National Gallery
- results in a very fine and accessible sourcebook on contemporary
art - with a consistent thread linking the vast range of artworks
chosen. Riopelle's essays combine scholarship and clarity that are
a pleasure to dip into and then re-read.
The essay by Robert Rosenblum, Remembrance
of Art Past, establishes the significance of the exhibition
in terms of how we have perceived modern art:
"Of the abiding myths about modern art, one
of the most stubborn would tell us that artists of the last two
centuries kept unburdening themselves of the past, hoping forever
to wipe their eyes clean of history. Like many grand generalisations,
this one is both true and false and something in between. If the
history of modern art is taken to begin with such masters as David
and Goya who, born in the mid-eighteenth century, responded to
the irreversible upheavals that marked the next revolutionary
decades, then this precarious balance between respecting and destroying
tradition is at the very roots of our heritage."(4)
Rosenblum traces the establishment of museums
and the degree to which artists such as Manet, Matisse, Kandinsky
and Mondrian copied from art of the past or were influenced by the
great themes in art history. He quotes Fantin-Latour's advice to
Renoir: "There is only the Louvre! You can never copy the Old Masters
enough."(5) Picasso, Rosenblum claims:
"once heralding everything new in the twentieth
century, has slowly been transformed into the guardian of the
past, as we discover that his terrorist attacks on tradition turn
out to be a way of rejuvenating, not destroying, our heritage,
even preserving for us the conventional subject hierarchies of
ambitious figure paintings, ideal nudes, portraiture, landscape
and still-life." (6)
Rosenblum links some of Kandinsky's most apocalyptic
explosions to Breughel's fantasies of Hell's chaos.
The Australian artist Arthur Boyd, who died
last year, would have been a natural candidate for this exhibition.(7)
As a response to the Second World War in Melbourne he painted some
of Australia's finest works of art inspired by the work in reproduction
of Bosch and Breughel. His career was fundamentally inspired by
art of the past and he had a great dialogue with the Old Masters.
As a young artist he worked with inspiration and borrowing from
reproductions, at The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Subsequently,
in London, he used The National Gallery there over a thirty-year
period, while living mostly in England. Boyd's creative process
is complex and interesting, for he also recharged his imagery by
working on key collaborative projects with the medieval scholar
T S R Boase and the distinguished Australian expatriate poet, Peter
Porter. Throughout Boyd's prodigious career a vital part of working
as an artist had been to connect with other artists, so creating
a dialogue with our cultural heritage, and to reassert the fact
that an artistic impulse is there only to be realised as best we
can, on the basis of whatever inspiration if selected, a conscious
act of creation.
In his fine analysis of modern art Rosenblum
observes:
"With the triumphant story of modern art
safely turned into a catechism endlessly repeated in textbooks
and lecture courses, artists of the later twentieth century could
relax again and look back not only at the Old Masters but at the
early twentieth century revolutionaries who had become Old Masters
themselves. It now seems predictable that, as the twentieth century
drew to a close and its inherited myths of progress turned into
naive anachronisms, artists become, like everyone else, more retrospective,
contemplating the known and more comforting terrain of history
rather than the scarier prospects of the future.(8)
In Richard Morphet's essay, Using the Collection:
A Rich Resource, he provides something of an analysis of the
exhibition.(9) For example, nine of the twenty-four artists
participating in Encounters had previously exhibited in direct
connection with the Collection. Twenty-one works in Encounters
(by two artists) were executed in the Gallery. Many works in the
exhibition reveal an ongoing or frequent use of the collection by
the artists; others are more specific in terms of the response,
that is, less an ongoing dialogue within the particular artist's
oeuvre. Morphet relates the various responses to the "source"
in the creative process to, "the way images are transmitted in the
contemporary world".
"It corroborates the importance of art museums'
dual capacity as a place of display and the propagator of visual
information about its works by many additional means, all of which
have the purpose and effect of attracting people to view the actual
works of art. Even a glancing encounter can be the catalyst for
remarkable work that could not otherwise exist. As Keith Roberts
wrote in the catalogue of an earlier related exhibition, "Works
of art become part of the imaginative landscape of the artist"."(10)
There are obvious limitations of this exhibition:
twenty-four artists cannot possibly create a comprehensive expression
of contemporary art practice; limitations of space meant that the
whole exhibition could not be housed in one area of the museum.
But these facts do not detract from the strengths of the show and
the standards of absolute excellence achieved. Indeed the space
question precipitated the need for the viewer to have to travel
every which way through the gallery to locate the next group of
artists, but as I have already noted this makes the exhibition all
the more a creative adventure.
Encounters, succeeds then in a number
of important ways: the role of the museum or in this case a most
wonderful collection is brought into focus. The conversations that
take place between the chosen artists and their chosen works from
the past precipitate a most exciting series of dialogues between
other works. Once Turner is experienced through Cy Twombly's eyes
and visual skill, other paintings of his come to life almost independently.
The layering of paint, translucent washes, the effects of light
are suddenly of paramount importance. A great thrill for me was
Anthony Caro's treatment of Duccio - Caro intended to make one sculpture,
"but as work advanced the process itself provoked additional variations,
eventually numbering seven in all".(11)
"Throughout his career Caro has been more
inspired by past painting than by sculpture. Paradoxically, this
is because the discipline within which he constantly seeks new
forms of structure is itself that of sculpture, which has its
own structural repertoire. By contrast, painting - another world
- abounds in hints for structures unexplored in three dimensions
that he can develop and make his own. The need to make it his
own is the key. All artists draw on past art at will for their
own work but those who make something distinctive assimilate the
earlier material, transforming it into their own fabric and communicating
their own vision, rather than the earlier master's."(12)
Morphet points out that:
"Only four of the artists, Freud, Hodgkin,
Kossoff and Oldenburg/Van Bruggen, have made works that resemble
their source works at a glance. A fifth case, that of Auerbach,
is complex in this respect, as explained in the essay on his picture.
In two further works, those by Caulfield and Kitaj, the source
can be identified reasonably quickly by sight. That leaves as
many as seventeen works that appear independent of their sources".(13)
The general standard of the works in Encounters
is, as one would expect, exceptional - the skill and craft as well
as the intellectual aspirations and personal poetry convey a great
range of contemporary ideas and issues. Twombly, Caro, Hockney all
display a preoccupation both with the physicality of their materials
and the craft of their art. The thoughtfulness is in marked contrast
to the manner in which ideas are communicated in today's culture.
"All these features, which imply a savouring
of continuity and of making, are to some extent under threat today
in a culture that lays emphasis on speed and simplicity in the
consumption of information, and limits the opportunity to concentrate,
or to explore anything in depth. These developments are combined
with an information overload compounded by the speed and technological
sophistication of its transmission. The pressure on artists to
produce is a related problem. Not surprisingly, therefore (as
Robert Rosenblum's essay shows), much new art quotes and combines
available images from both the recent and the farther past with
promiscuous abandon, in the process creating effective markers
of contemporary existence. The works in this exhibition connect
with their heritage in a slower way. They also lack the sense
of irony and the detachment that are widespread in art today.
Nevertheless, many on today's "cutting edge" would agree with
the exhibition's implicit assertion of the inseparability of living
art from the great art of the past". (14)
Leon Kossoff has taken inspiration by drawing
from paintings at The National Gallery "for most of his life", since
first visiting it sixty-six years ago. For Encounters Kossoff
chose Rubens, as he has in the past. The result is one of the finest
responses in the exhibition; the sheer volume of drawings and etchings
is incredible. Done quickly, they capture Kossoff's lifelong commitment
to drawing and the manner in which he infuses many of his own discoveries,
his dialogue with self into his dialogue with Rubens. From his resultant
work one may experience the combination of that visual and mental
working knowledge of Ruben's painting in general as over a lifetime,
together with the experience of "mark-making" itself. So the vital
act of drawing, distilling thereby his own living experience, is
a reciprocal process, via both drawings and etchings. The most effective
process is through etching, where the mark-making process is intensified
by the nature of the medium. In his essay on Kossoff, Richard Morphet
writes:
"Since at least the 1960s Kossoff has been
widely admired for the strength and distinctiveness of his drawing.
Nevertheless in 1987, nearly forty years after starting to draw
there, he stated: 'In my work done in The National Gallery and
elsewhere from the work of others I have always been a student.
From the earliest days when I scribbled from the Rembrandts in
the Mond Room my attitude to these works has always been to teach
myself to draw from them, and, by repeated visits, to try to understand
why certain pictures have a transforming effect on the mind. In
the copies, made in the studio, I have always tried to remain
as faithful as I was able to the original, whilst trying to deepen
my understanding of them. I have always regarded these activities
as quite separate from my other work and only once, a long time
ago, have I consciously used one of these works in the making
of my own pictures'."(15)
Video artist Bill Viola, by contrast, chose
Christ Mocked by Hieronymus Bosch. He sees Christ as calm
in the centre of storm, inspiring to individuals who stand secure
on their own. This aligns with Viola's ensuing work, The Quintet
of the Astonished. He worked from reproductions of the painting
rather than from the original. The five figures framed in the video,
as for a painting, and painterly qualities are evoked, in both light
and colour values. Viola is able to reduce the time-related sequence,
to one of slow motion, and this time relativity enhances that painterly
aspect of the work, bringing it into close relation with the original
Bosch work. So Viola is seen here to be reinterpreting and re-investing
the traditional criteria for the painting. "I don't believe in originality
in art", says Viola. "I think we exist on this earth to inspire
each other, through our actions, through our deeds, and through
who we are. We're always borrowing. I think it's a beautiful, wonderful
thing".(16)
Encounters is a wonderful exhibition.
The works themselves have an enduring quality that comes about from
the dialogue with the past, with self and with the materials and
the craft of art. A special effort seems to have been made by all
those associated with the exhibition: the artists themselves, the
curators and staff at The National Gallery and by the authors of
the excellent essays in the catalogue. As with artists themselves,
art historians and critics work in a cyclical mode in which a great
sense of clarity and achievement can be replaced with great despond,
where all writing on culture, ideas and art seems disappointing.
This exhibition leaves one on an absolute high. It is like an adventure,
a rivetting conversation in which endless new avenues for one's
work and personal endeavour seem possible. This is perhaps because
we are forced to begin with and concentrate on the creative act
itself. In doing so we return to the essential and spontaneous moment
in which ideas are conceived and a dialogue struck. Ron Kitaj's
quotation from Walter Sickert which he used to preface his catalogue
introduction for The National Gallery's 1980 exhibition and which
Richard Morphet re-quotes is particularly apt and moving:
"And this, gentlemen of the press, curators,
critics, experts and others, is the claim we painters make in
regard to the Old Masters. They are ours, not yours. We have their
blood in our veins. We are their heirs, executors, assignees,
trustees. We are the pious sons, but henceforth it is we who are
the interpreters of their wishes, with full power to set them
aside, and substitute their own, whenever and wherever it seems
fit for us to do so. They would have wished it so."(17)
FOOTNOTES:
1. Neil MacGregor, "Directors Foreword",
Encounters, The National Gallery, London, 14 June - 17 September
2000, National Gallery Company Limited, London, 2000, p.7.
2. Ibid, p.7.
3. Ibid, p.7.
4. Robert Rosenblum, "Remembrance of Art
Past", Encounters, ibid, p.8.
5. Ibid, p.11.
6. Ibid, p.13.
7. See Janet McKenzie, Arthur Boyd: Art
and Life, Thames and Hudson, London, November 2000.
8. Rosenblum, op.cit., p.16.
9. Richard Morphet, "Using the Collection:
A Rich Resource", Encounters, op.cit., pp.24-29.
10. Ibid, p.24.
11. Morphet, "Anthony Caro: Duccio Variations",
ibid, p.71.
12. Ibid, p.77.
13. Morphet, "Using the Collection: A Rich
Resource", op.cit., pp.24-25.
14. Ibid, pp.25-6.
15. Morphet, "Leon Kossoff: Drawings and
Prints after Rubens' Judgement of Paris, 1996", pp.224-5,
quoting a letter from Kossoff in exhibition catalogue Past and
Present: Contemporary artists drawing from the Masters, South
Bank Centre, 1987-88, p.38.
16. Bill Viola quoted by Marco Livingstone,
"Bill Viola, The Quintet of the Astonished, 2000, Encounters,
p.322.
17. Morphet, "Using the Collection: A Rich
Resource" ibid, p.28.
|
