Henri Matisse

So. Today is the very last day of the Matisse cut-out exhibition at the Tate Modern. Last week I had the fortune to be able to go to it, after realising with a panic that it was ending soon.

This was an exhibition I had been very excited about seeing. Although I enjoy matisse’s work as a painter, I have always been drawn more to his cut-outs. Perhaps because they were a little mis-understood and under-apprecatied in their beginnings. They have struggled for the recognition they have achieved, which is always admirable. I find it hard to put into words how I feel about them, but I shall very much try!

For those of you unfamiliar, this was a technique that Matisse starting using after having some serious health problems that brought him to the brink of death. Unable and unwilling to hold a paint bush, he took to cutting out shapes from pre-prepared sheets of painted coloured paper to create the objects of his fascination.

 

The first and undeniable impression that you get from these is movement. Of course the subject matter is movement, but always the form, the colours, the composition, are all heavily suggestive of dynamism. You can sense the re-arrangement of the pieces, and I love that he hasn’t attempted to hide the tacks that keep the pieces together but formed them as part of the piece.

The work is in the result.

 

Matisse produced a book of cut-outs called ‘Jazz’. The notes that accompanied the exhibition hinted that this name was’t particularly relevant; but I can’t think of one that is more apt to this bold, strange, unique way of working. The colours and shapes jump off the page in a very musical and scattered way.

 

 

These works I found to be very human, very honest. Also quite scary, violent and dark. Matisse was working on this book just at the end of the Second World War, and some of the ideas and images have a under-tone of terror, enhanced by the saturated colours. His Icarus looks trapped in motion, propelled, pinned, a man falling to his doom.

 

 

The walls of his studio in Vence became covered with these amazing images and motifs, past memories of traveling in Tahiti many years ago. I love that these memories were so strong they came back to him at this time, years later, as his strongest inspiration.

 

 

He was commissioned to design a chapel in Vence by a friend, and designed everything from the windows to the priests’ gowns to the wall murals. It must be an a beautiful thing to be in that space, surrounded by such light. I also like that the Madonna and child that he painted was criticised for being ‘too booby’! (of course not in those exact words…!) A woman breastfeeding a child is going to be booby.

 

This image is one of my favourites in the exhibition. In fact I went back to it a couple of times. It is huge, this image does not really do it nay justice at all. The dancer is so alive. The way it looks too big for the canvas makes me think it’s trying to burst out and get free. I love the different pinks and peaches in the background as well. It is fearless and full of controlled passion.

 

The ‘Blue Nudes’ series are some of Matisse’s most famous cut-outs. He manages to use white to create the lines that define the limbs. In these you can really see how much he understood the medium and used it to his advantage. Very spectacular!

I love that a lot of his cut-outs have names that sound like great children’s books. This one, ‘The Parakeet and the Mermaid’ is a brilliant example. As you can see from the woman in this photograph, it is really really huge. And very beautiful. Even looking at it from a few metres away, it took me a while to see the parakeet. Matisse was a master of suggestion through the simplest and barest of lines and shapes. In order to use the most simple of shapes to define something you must understand it’s visual form completely. This is very brave.

Another work I went back for a send look at was ‘The Snail’. Here the name is undervaluing I think the work itself. It’s very beautiful, the way the shapes curve round. He’s managed to make something made of polygons look somehow soft and sensual.

 

It was a great exhibition and I’m only sad it wasn’t on for longer. If you want to ind out more about Matisse and this period of his work, I highly recommend Alastair Sooke’s book ‘Henri Matisse: A Second Life’.

Rothko’s return

So. Had some exciting news a few weeks back. The Rothko painting that was defaced by a vandal is back in its home at the Tate Modern after months of painstaking restoration. I’m sure you were all on tender-hooks for this moment of home-coming to happen! It is, however, quite an interesting, melancholy story.

Firstly, I want to explain why I’m such a fan of Rothko. I can understand why a lot of people are underwhelmed by his huge, sometimes colourful, sometimes a bit, well, boring canvases. But I find his work incredibly powerful. And I’m not the only one. Just this year Paul Allen from Microsoft sold this Rothko at auction for 56.2 million dollars:

Now that is a seductive blue.

Rothko built up the colours slowly, many layers of oil and glues. This creates an almost hallucinogenic, hologram-like effect. To sit in the ‘red room’ at the Tate, (officially it’s called ‘The Seagram Murals‘) surrounded on all walls by huge canvasses of deep dark reds and purples, it is strangely simultaneously calming and frightening to me. Comforting and scary. How can these paintings produce two distinctly opposing feelings in me at the same time? Here lies Rothko’s genius.

Because they are so large, so bright, so dark, a Rothko painting refuses to be ignored. It draws you into it whether you want to be drawn in or not. The simplicity of the paintings takes us back to deeper, unvoiced desires and dreads. That strange feeling it the pit of your stomach. Just from some blocks of colour on a canvas.

This is ‘Black On Maroon’ as it should be:

 

 

So this leads us to the moment of the crime itself. In Autumn 2012 Wlodzimierz Umaniec, an artist and blogger, stepped over the rope barrier in front on the painting and sprayed his ‘artist’ name, along with: “A potential piece of Yellowism.” It did make me laugh that he did not have the visual ability to get all the letters in one line, and was forced to squish the last M underneath. 

 

This horrific damage took 18 months to undo. As Nicolas Serota commented : “It’s not a single painting, it’s a painting in a group. And the overall impact of the group is very significant and an important part of the experience of seeing the paintings. So this was damage not to one but to nine.”

His reasons? In a video to the media released shortly after the incident took place, he said that he had nothing personal against Rothko. He does not see the act as vandalism, he was simply signing the painting, therefore giving it, as messages reads, the potential to be part of Yellowism. Yellowism is said to be, very un-specifically, ‘not art of anti art’. He also argued that the painting would be more valuable now: whether that is true or not could be a matter or some debate, but I fear is not really the point. The point is that it was a finished work of art, a piece, it is entirety, and therefore has the right to remain exactly how it is, exactly how Rothko intended. Wlodzimierz Umaniec got two years in prison for his efforts.

I’m glad to see the painting back in its tribe with the others. I was sadden to learn, while doing research for this post, that Mark Rothko committed suicide at the age of 66 in his apartment in Manhattan. We can at least now remember his legacy in its full, powerful glory.

Read more about this:

An interview with a member of Yellowism

Video of Wlodzimierz Umaniec

Article about the restoration of the painting

Tate Britain

So. One bright and breezy Tuesday I decided to go and visit the newly refurbished Tate Britain, to check out the changes. Perhaps I had been influenced by the persistent advert campaign on the tube declaring ‘you must come see’, or maybe I was just looking to be inspired. A bit of both most likely.

First impressions – it is light, bright, and lofty. Well, it would be if there hadn’t been a gaggle of school children clutching fresh sketchbooks.

 

I particularly loved the overlapping tile design on the floor:

 

 

And this beautifully simplistic map to help with orientation, that brought to mind images of a lift in 1920s New York.

 

 

This mural was here before the renovation I think but still adds a great and a little unexpected sense of humanism to the building:

 

 

Genius idea. And now, onto the art itself. Each time I visit something different usually catches my eye, but there are a handful of regulars that always make me stop and stare. The principle one being ‘A Bigger Splash’ by David Hockney. I love the way he’s captured a moment after it has just happened. There is a perpetual sense of a motion drawing to end, a gesture in its last drag that is both futile and alluring. The composition is bodily boring and daringly cold.

 

 

Howard hodgkin has again always been a favourite. That red just pops out with all the life that an inanimate object can ever project.

 

 

On to Bridget Riley, an Op-art legend. She sure knows how to manipulate the eye. I always feel like looking at one of her pieces is like having and eye-test. I love the way this piece, ‘Nataraja’, seems to come out towards the viewer.

 

 

 

This nude by Matthew Smith is precisely the kind of drawing my art teacher at school used to show us before life-drawing class. A perfect example of how colours can be manipulated to create something that is while not a true representation, is still a true likeness.

 

 

I’ve recently discovered this artist, David Bomberg. This work, ‘The Mud Bath’, reduces the human form to vague, geometric shapes that seem to be in constant movement.

 

 

This rather small painting by Edward Wadsworth is by far not his most famous, but I quite like the secret interplay between the two suspended amorphous shapes.

 

 

Peter Doig, ‘Ski Jacket’. Makes me of a friend who recently moved to Montreal, Canada.

 

 

I’ll be honest; I usually find sculpture very hard to understand, let alone like. Tony Cragg‘s sculpture here, ‘stack’, has appealed to me on this occasion I think because it fulfils some OCD thing inside me to have everything slotted in together in perfectly fitting, compact shapes. He must be very good at packing for holidays! His sketches are worth a goggle as well.

 

 

 

I found this composition by William Scott very calming.

 

 

One of the larger works that took up a whole room was this installation by the Chapman brothers, entitled ‘The Chapman Family Collection.’ I really liked this piece. As you walk into the room, the lights are dimmed, its cosy and at the same time a little sinister feeling. You see several what appear to be wooden carvings from what you assume are tribal communities around the world. On closer inspection, there’s signs all is not as it should be. Ronald McDonald peers out at you through the gloom. ‘McDonalds’ is lovingly inscribed into a wooden shield. These objects are highlighting the superficiality of not own our contemporary lifestyles, but our inability of perceive things as they really are. It a simplified version of a lot of wider issues, yet sometimes the most simplistic messages are the most powerful.

 

 

 

Lastly, a question to you:

do you read the description first or look at the painting/sculpture first?!