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2010-12-09T14:31:00.000Z

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Computer, Art and Design.

2010-08-02T15:18:00.000+01:00

Here are the links and reading for today's session.

Babbage and Lovelace
Science Museum
BBC Radio 4 In Our Time on Lovelace, with further links and reading list.

Colossus
Wikipedia entry
Bletchley Park visit

HAL
on Wikipedia
BBC Radio 4 In Our Time on AI

Marhsall McLuchan
1967 interview
Canadian TV The World is a Global Village

Wired
Wired Magazine
The Long Boom
Apple in crisis.
Apple, Evil Genius

Walter Benjamin
One Way Street and Other Writings, Penguin Modern Classics, 2009
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Penguin Great Ideas, 2008

Umberto Eco.
The Holy War: Mac versus DOS.

Glasgow Boys - Second City Painters

2010-06-14T23:03:00.001+01:00

Illustration: Joseph Crawhall, The White Drake - Watercolour and gouache on unsized brown linen, 1895.

“And at this end of the nineteenth century, in the midst of one of the busiest, noisiest, smokiest cities, that with its like fellows make up the sum-total of the greatness of Britain’s commercial position, there is a movement existing, and a compelling force behind it … which .. may yet, perhaps put Glasgow on the Clyde into the hands of the future historians of Art, on much the same grounds as those on which Bruges, Venice and Amsterdam find themselves in the book of the life of the world…”
Fra Newberry, Introduction to “The Glasgow School of Painting”, David Martin, 1897.

Precursors: East Lothian
• Gemmel Hutchison (1855-1936)
• Sir James Lawton Wingate (1846-1924)
• W. Darling McKay (1844-1923) [also wrote The Scottish School of Painting 1906]
• J Campbell Noble and Robert Noble
From 1874 onwards these artists were making small scale works in response to the landscape and people of the Borders. Wingate later moved to Perthshire. They saw themselves as in the tradition of the French Barbizon school.

Glue-Pots
• Duncan Mckellar RSW (1849-1908) and Alexander Davidson RSW (1838-87) were popular artists whose pictures sold well at the Glasgow Institute exhibition.
• These artists specialised in sentimental pictures of archaic-looking Scottish interiors. Often badly painted, the canvases had a ready-made aged appearance through the use of a medium called “megilp” or painter’s malbutter.

Literary parallels
• The burgeoning Industrial Revolution needed a literate and numerate working class, who began to read for pleasure and the Whistle-Binkie pamphlets brought stability and couthiness to every home. The Whistle-Binkie collections did not represent the only kind of writing, nor the only writers working in Scotland from 1832 to 1890, but they were extremely popular and presented a cosmeticised view of Scottish life and values which ignored or distorted the social and political realities of the time, especially the Highland Clearances and massive urbanisation, something the Kailyard exploited.
See Writing Scotland. Learning Journeys Tartan Myths website

The Kailyard dream got a rude awakening when The House With The Green Shutters by George Douglas Brown was published in 1901 and John MacDougall Hay's 1914 novel Gillespie is similarly unrelenting.

'Brown's masterpiece was practically the first Scottish novel since Galt which dealt with nineteenth-century Scottish life as it really was; to do this, and to get away from the sentimentalism of the Kailyard, it had to be sharply, almost brutally realistic.'
Kurt Wittig, The Scottish Tradition in Literature

Whistler
• Guthrie in particular was an early admirer of James McNeil Whistler. The American was an outsider figure during the 1870s and 80s; he accuses Ruskin of libel in 1878-9 and gives the “Ten o’Clock Lecture” in 1885.
• Simple execution, avoidance of narrative incident, decorative flair were all admired.
• “Aspect is Subject” – Macaulay Stevenson.
Whistler's "Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 2: Portrait of Thomas Carlyle" 1872-73; Oil on canvas, 171.1 x 143.5 cm; Glasgow Museum and Art Gallery.
Note: the painting was shown at the GIE in 1888 on sale for £1000. It had nearly been bought by Edinburgh in ‘84 for £500 however Whistler upped the price when he saw the list of subscribers to the painting. Walton organised a petition to the Art Gallery Committee signed by 89 including 64 artists. Whistler sensing interest said the price was now 1000 guineas. A Corporation representative attempted to haggle with Whistler over tea laced with rum and lemon. He failed to get a discount.

French influence
Whistler's subject matter did not immediately attract the Boys. They preferred a rural setting and peasant subject matter.
• Key artists; Jean Francoise Millet and Jules Bastien Lepage.

“one of the busiest, noisiest, smokiest cities”
• Pop of 1 million: 4th largest city in Europe.
• Textiles, engineering (especially ships and locomotives) and steel.
• Had a public museum collection from 1807 (from William Hunter). Had a municipal art collection from 1855 onwards.
• Exhibition societies begin in Glasgow in 1811. Early societies eventually lead to Glasgow Institute founded 1861.
• Art dealers were based in Glasgow such as Alexander Reid, friend of the van Gogh brothers.
• Art education minimal however until Francis Newberry takes over Glasgow School of Art in 1885.

2 Boys groups
• A tradition has grown up of dividing the Boys into two; a group around Paterson and Macgregor and one around Guthrie and Walton.
• All four had been rejected by the Glasgow Art Club in 1877. Macgregor then went to London to study with Legros at the Slade. Paterson left for Paris, Guthrie for London then Paris.
• Macgregor’s studio in 134 Bath Street, Glasgow post-79 was a key meeting place. All the boys would drop in, bar Guthrie. Macgregor ran an informal drawing class.

French visits and studies
• John Lavery
• Alexander Roche
• Thomas Millie Dow
• William Kennedy
• All visit Grez-sur-Loing 1883 and 1884. They do so in explicit emulation of Bastien-Lepage.

Clausen in the Scottish Art Review on Bastien-Lepage, October 1888.
• “It is not a comic countryman, nor a sentimental countryman as seen from a townsman's point of view, but his own home life that he paints – one feels in his work a deeper penetration and a greater intimacy with his subject than in the work of other men.”

Melville
• Born East Linton, studied Edinburgh. Then to Paris to the Academie Julian.
• Visited Grez (78-9) where he met Robert Louis Stevenson. Adopts watercolour after Parisian demonstration.
• Travels in Middle East and India. Ripping Yarns style adventures.
• Exhibits in London 1883 to be called “blottesque” (ie dubiously French…) and Glasgow (the now lost Evie).
• Visits Cockburnspath in 1884 and goes to Orkney with Guthrie in 85.

Crawhall
• Joseph Crawhall was from a dynasty of Newcastle art collectors, each called Joseph.
• He had known Guthrie since 1879 and had visited Cockburnspath frequently.
• Inspired by Melville he travelled to North Africa.
• Left: Portrait by Walton, 1884.

1888-9
Glasgow International Exhibition, Kelvingrove
Guthrie and Walton visit Paris in company of Melville.
Henry and Hornel painting in Galloway push limits of decorative surface technique.

Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys 1880–1900 Kelvingrove Art Gallery until 27 September 2010
"is the first major exhibition devoted to this influential group of artists since 1968. It will be the definitive Glasgow Boys exhibition, comprising around 100 oil paintings and 50 works on paper. All the important artists associated with the group, including James Guthrie, EA Hornel, George Henry, Joseph Crawhall and Arthur Melville are represented."
See Exhibition Website for more information.

Diane Arbus (1923-1971)

2010-05-25T21:02:00.001+01:00

Photo: Dean Gallery Grounds, PQ.

"A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know." (Diane Arbus)

Visit Artist Rooms, National Gallery of Scotland

1923
Born Diane Nemerov
Her family owned a successful NY department store. Her father retired early from business to become a painter. Her brother was a published poet and the US Poet Laureate 1963-4.
1941
Aged 18 marries Allan Arbus
Two daughters: born in ‘45 and ‘54.
Seperated from Arbus 1958, divorced 1969.
1941
Visits Steiglitz’s gallery “The Place”.
Takes advertising photos for the family dept store.
Husband a U.S. Army Signal Corps photographer
1946
Establishes "Diane & Allan Arbus," photo studio.
Takes many fashion photos at this time and one photo that was selected by Steichen for the Family of Man exhibition 1955
1956
Diane stops working in the business. She takes classes with Lisette Model and does photo assignments for magazines.
1962
Switches from 35 mm to 2 ¼ inch twin-lens Rolleiflex camera.
1963
awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for a project on "American rites, manners, and customs"
1966
Renewal of Guggenheim Fellowship
1964
First use of TLR Mamiya camera with flash
During the 1960s, she taught photography at the Parsons School of Design and the Cooper Union in New York City, and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island.
1967
Museum of Modern Art "New Documents" curated by John Szarkowski
Also included work by Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander.
1972
Venice Biennale
MoMa with the accompanying Diane Arbus: an Aperture Monograph)
1973
Susan Sontag writes “Freak Show”, re-printed in On Photography as the chapter America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly.
“It is obviously too easy to say that America is just a freak show, a wasteland - the cut rate pessimism typical of the reduction of the real to the surreal. But the American partiality to myths of redemption and damnation remains one of the most energizing most seductive aspects of our national culture. What we have left of Whitman’s discredited dream of cultural revolution are paper ghosts and a sharp eyed witty program of despair.”

1984
Unauthorized biography by Patricia Bosworth. No participation by family or friends.
2003-6
Diane Arbus Revelations, book and exhibit with first approved chronology of Arbus’s work and life
2007
Moma makes large Arbus purchase and receives archive material from family.
2010
Artist Rooms: Edinburgh till 13th June; Nottingham Contemporary 24/7-26/9/10
See Artist Rooms, on tour with the Art Fund.

"Nothing is ever the same as they said it was."

Read
Diane Arbus Revelations, Jonathan Cape, London, 2003;
Diane Arbus, Aperture, New York, 1997 (2nd edition);
Diane Arbus Magazine Work, Aperture, New York, 1984.

Constructivism

2010-05-19T08:49:00.000+01:00

Illustration: Rodchenko, Photomontage for rear cover of Mayakovsky's "A Conversation with a Tax-collector about Poetry," 1926.

22 Dec 1921
Vavara Stepanova presented “On Constructivism” to her colleagues at “Inkhuk” Ie the Moscow Institute for Artistic Culture. Inkhuk was the one year old research wing of IZO, the Department of Fine Arts of the Peoples Commissariat of Enlightenment, Nakrompos.
Kandinsky had been involved in its beginnings but now he had left and a new broom was sweeping through the studios. The artists were concerned with how they might face the future, what contribution might they make to Soviet life, on Constructive principles.
Stepanova:
'Composition is the contemplative approach of the artist. Technique and Industry have confronted art with the problem of construction as an active process and not reflective. The 'sanctity' of a work as a single entity is destroyed. The museum which was the treasury of art is now transformed into an archive'.
1922 Stepanova designed the sets for The Death of Tarelkin.
1923 with Popova, became designer of textiles at the Tsindel (the First State Textile Factory) near Moscow.
1924 became Professor of Textile Design at the Vkhutemas (Higher Technical Artistic Studios)

Post-1917
Artists, poets and writers became radicalised in a way which had never been possible before:
“Order to the Army of Art” “the streets are our brushes, the squares our palettes.”
In line with the new organisation of society there would be a completely new way of dealing with visual culture, ie both art and design. Part of this was an expression of animosity towards the art which they would sweep away:
"Down with ART, the shining patches on the talentless life of a wealthy man.
Down with ART, the precious gem in the dirty, dark, life of a poor man.
Down with ART, the means to ESCAPE FROM THE LIFE which is not worth living.
CONSTRUCTIVE LIFE IS THE ART OF THE FUTURE.
Conscious and organised LIFE, the ability to SEE and CONSTRUCT, that is the modern art.
Work amongst everyone, for everyone and with everyone,
DOWN WITH monasteries, institutes, workshops, studios, studies and islands.
ART which has no part in life will be filed away in the archaeological museum of ANTIQUITY.
It is time for art to flow organisedly into life."

Rodchenko.
Born 1891 in Smolensk he went to art school in Kazan were he met the woman who was to be his wife and co-worker Varvara Stepanova [slide]
Going to art school in Moscow in 1914 he soon left the formal academy, having already been introduced to modern art, in the form of the Futurists.
In 1915 and 16 with the Revolution developing around him he was working independently on Futurist inspired compositions. He met Tatlin and Malevich at this time and joined a branch of IZO in 1918.
“After exploiting the object in every possible interpretation, from Realism and Naturalism to Futurism, painting reached Cubism and, almost with a knowledge of anatomy, dismembered it - until painting at last freed itself completely from this defence and reached non-objectivity. After reaching object and subject, painting began to occupy itself exclusively with its own specific tasks : these expanded more than replaced the object and its interpretation which painting had excluded.”

For Rodchenko this use of Line was the embodiment of the revolutionary ethos: Line has bid a red farewell to painting.

“Line has revealed a new world view - to construct essence, and not to depict, to objectivise or to non-objectivise; to build new, expedient, constructive structures in life, and not from life or outside life. A construction is a system by which an object is realised from the expedient utilisation of material together with a pre-determined purpose.”

In the twenties Rodchenko developed a photographic technique which used his formal researches to
i)produce a photography based on the diagonal, the shot from below, the acute angle
ii) a photography based also on sequences of images : a factography as he called it.
“Don’t try to capture a man in one synthetic portrait but rather in lots of snap-shots taken at different times and in different circumstances.”

We also examined Suprematist art by Goncharova, Larinov and Malevich. We discussed Tatlin's Monument to the Third International.

Read
Brettell R.R. (1999) Modem Art, 1851-1929, Oxford, Oxford History of Art
Russian Constructivism, Christina Lodder, Yale University Press, 1983.

March 16th, 1972: When An Era Ended With a Bang

2010-05-12T16:09:00.003+01:00

The Demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe Building.

"Happily, it is possible to date the death of Modern Architecture to a precise moment in time." Charles Jenks.

After months of preparation, the first building was demolished at 3 p.m., on March 16, 1972. The second one went down April 22, 1972. The first stage of demolition completed on July 15.
Pruitt-Igoe was a large urban housing project in St. Louis, Missouri.
Built 1954-5
Architect - Minoru Yamasaki, who also designed the World Trade Centre, New York.
Architectural Forum praised the layout as "vertical neighborhoods for poor people"
Each row of buildings was supposed to be flanked by a "river of trees"
By 1968 the authorities were encouraging people to leave.
By 1971 it was calculated that the estate had cost $57 million yet had never been more than 60% occupied.
By late 60s it was notorious: extreme poverty, crime, and segregation.

32 buildings were demolished in total from1972-4.

Lots more info and links at Wikipedia, click here.
What is modern?
Are we modern?
Are these modern times?
Is modernity something we value or mistrust?
What is not modern?

“Modern began to appear as a term more or less synonymous with “now” in the late sixteenth century, and in any case used to mark the period off from medieval and ancient times. By the time Jane Austen was using it ....she could define it (in Persuasion) as a state of alteration perhaps of improvement, but her eighteenth century contemporaries used ‘modernize’, ‘modernism’ and ‘modernist’ without her irony, to indicate updating and improvement. In the nineteenth century it began to take on a more favourable ring : Ruskin’s Modern Painters was published in 1846, and Turner became the type of a modern painter for his demonstration of the distinctively up-to-date quality of truth to nature. Very quickly, however, ‘modern’ shifted its reference from ‘now’ to ‘just now’ or even ‘then’, and for some time has been a designation always going into the past with which ‘contemporary’ may be contrasted for its presentness. ‘Modernism’, as a title for a whole cultural movement and moment, has been retrospective as a general term since the 1950s, thereby stranding the dominant version of ‘modern’ or even ‘absolute modern’ between say, 1890 and 1940. We still habitually use ‘modern of a world between a century and half a century old.”
from When was Modernism, Raymond Williams, (1989)

20th c Art
1900, Universal Exposition in Paris: the art of the new century already showed some telling characteristics: this was an art which seemed responsive to the new urban experiences of the modern city; there were artists who were fascinated with movement, change and speed; some of the art focussed on the body and sought a liberation from convention and restraint; there was also a sympathy with the poor and the dispossessed and finally there was a self-conscious awareness of the special nature of artistic production, in particular the posing as bohemian, radical or avant garde.
We can say that an unconventional, experimental and at times revolutionary art developed. By mid-century it was being cited in the great conflicts of the period, the fight against fascism and the East-West Cold War. By 1960 Modernism, Modernist Painting, Modernist Sculpture had developed into a conventional set of attitudes and strategies. These received great critical and institutional backing in the United States.
In the 1960s the cracks began to show: land art, performance art, installation art, minimalism, feminist art each presented a critique of the dominant narrative of modern art.
In the nineteen eighties critics began to talk of a new kind of art. It was in turns nostalgic, decorative, involved copying (appropriation), seemed accessible but was steeped in difficult theoretical explanation. The new art was said to demonstrate “the post-modern.”

Did the Modern end?
Some writers have been helpful enough to give a time and a date: 3,32 on the afternoon of the 15 July 1972.
This day is important argues Charles Jencks because it was the day on which the first demolition of a tower block took place : the Pruitt-Igoe housing development in St Louis USA based on designs by the high modernist architect Le Corbusier. These were flats built to modernist criteria in which form and function were supposed to fuse, making the archetypal Machine for living in. In fact these and other developments were badly designed, badly maintained and un-loved by those who had to live in them or near them. The intervening years have been full of the noise of estates crashing down. New housing is more likely to be on a smaller scale, decorated in a more homely manner.

Other writers are not so sure : they talk about post-modernism as something much more general.

“A change of sensibility” according to Huyssens writing in 1984 and Jencks himself all but admits the inadequacey of simply giving a date by listing in his essay The Postmodern Agenda, some 38 key words or concepts which he feels have been altered radically in this new post-modern period.

Or is it so “new”?
Some theorists identify the post modern as an element of the modern: they argue that this idea of eclecticism and renewal was always one of the ways in which the modern renewed itself, that it is only high modernism with its blank canvases, silent music and curtain walls which sought to erase difference and plurality. These theorists (they include Habermas) confuse matters further by arguing over how long the modern has been in existence: since the nineteenth century, since the Enlightenment of the Eighteenth century, since the beginnings of commerce and industrialisation, or since the Rennaissance.

In a sense this crisis over its identity and definition is in itself an element of the postmodern ( we are entering an arena in which the old certainities, the old narratives by which western man explained the world have, for one reason or another been placed in doubt and subject to crisis) .

Art and architecture discussed
Universal Exhibition, Paris 1900
Camille Pissarro
Giacomo Balla
Medardo Rosso
Wassily Kandinsky
Edvard Munch
Carl Andre
Joseph Beuys
Robert Smithson
David Salle
Belluschi, Equitable House, 1944
Richard Daley Center, Chicago.
Corbusier Unite d’Habitation, Marseilles.
Peter and Alison Smithson, Robin Hood Gardens 1966 see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_Gardens
Pompidou Centre.
Portland Building, Michael Greaves, 1980
Venice Beach House, Frank Gehry
Gordon Matta Clarke

Read
Harvey, David, (1989)The Condition of Postmodemity, Oxford, Basil Blackwell.
Jencks C (1992) Post-Modem Reader, London: Academy Editions
Jencks C (1992-6) What is Post Modernism? London: Academy Editions.
Hopkins D (2000) After Modern Art 1945-2000, Oxford, Oxford History of Art
Taylor, B (2005) The Art of Today, London, Laurence King.

Free Lunchtime talk

2010-03-23T11:39:00.000Z

Paint, Poetry and Politics in Turner's Hannibal.
A close look at the context surrounding the creation of "Snow Storm: Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps." (1812).
Laing Art Gallery
24th March 2010
12.30-1.30
Details here.

Louise Bourgeois (Born 1911.)

2010-03-08T13:02:00.001Z

Maman, outside National Gallery of Canada.

Art is about life
DK: What do you think about modern art in general, if you want to talk about it generally? How do you see yourself in the history of modern art?
LB: I am not interested in art history, in the academics of styles, a succession of fads. Art is not about art. Art is about life, and that sums it up. ……

“But I can say this. I studied in Paris in the thirties at a time when artists had ateliers that were open to students. My favourite teachers among many were Fernand Leger, Othon Friesz and Paul Colin. Michel Leiris and Andre Breton were also part of my education. Also, I taught for a long time and was given many honorary doctorates. Flattering as it is, it has little to do with my ongoing self?expression. Also, I valued my friendships with Corbusier, Duchamp, and Miro, Arp, Brancusi and Franz Kline and Warhol. Today I value my friendships with Robert Mapplethorpe and Gary Indiana.”

“and that sums it up.”
• 1911 Louise Josephine Bourgeois born, Christmas Day. Parents Josephine Fauriaux and Louis Bourgeois. They run a tapestry repair business.
• 1912-17 Family live in Choisy-le-Roi, near tapestry atelier.
• 1919 move to Antony. Mother seriously ill with flu.
• 1922 Louis hires Sadie Gordon Richmond to teach his children English. She becomes his mistress, living in the family home for the next ten years.
• As a child she was an avid drawer, often helping in the factory drawing office. She also kept a diary.
• 1932 graduates in calculus, geometry and philosophy. Her mother dies and Louise starts serious art study.
1936 she rents a flat in the same building as Gravida, the gallery in which Breton showed the Surrealists.
1938 after studying art history, working in the Louvre and opening her own gallery she meets the US art historian Robert Goldwater. They marry and move to New York.

“I married a man who was a feminist.” Said LB
“He was running away from his mother and establishing himself. Not his father (like me), but his mother (who was German)…”

Bourgeois’s early work shows echoes of the new architecture of NY and the “primitive” art concerns she shared with her husband.
The Blind…etc Was titled only after it had been exhibited, was re-worked at least five times and was in three of its versions painted pink during the 1970s.

Bourgeois showed alongside surrealists in the 30s and abstract expressionists in the 1940s. By the mid-60s she was being seen as a “post-minimalist” and by the mid-70s she was seen as a “feminist” artist. Aged 71 in 1982 she held a retrospective at Moma in New York. Many have spoken of this show not as an end but as a beginning. The period of her greatest influence and activity lay ahead.

In the recent tate catalogue historian Elisabeth Lebovici took on the question “Is She? Or Isn’t she?” … a feminist
The answer : “Yes. No. A Bit. Not me. Not Really. Bourgeois’s remarks about her feminism are scattergun.”

A key issue for women of her generation was how to have their work taken as seriously as that of their male counterparts. This was part of the wider “Great Artists” question.

In 1971 Linda NOCHLIN asked “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”

Why have there been no great women artists? The question is crucial, not merely to women, and not only for social or ethical reasons, but for purely intellectual ones as well.

One way of answering the question is to say : there are/were you just forgot to recognise them

The feminist’s first reaction is to swallow the bait and attempt to answer the question as it is put: to dig up examples of insufficiently appreciated women artists throughout history….

Another approach might be to say that there is a different kind of greatness attaching to the work of female artist: that they should not be judged alongside their male contemporaries because in “essence” femininity is distinct from masculinity. Ie an essentialist argument.

Nochlin felt uncomfortable with that, what was this essence? It didn’t seem to match the evidence of the work of generations of female artists. Their art was usually in a dialogue with other art whatever its gender.

Noclin writes:
The problem lies not so much with the feminists’ concept of what femininity in art is, but rather with a misconception of what art is: …..

“The fact is that there have been no great women artists, so far as we know, although there have been many interesting and good ones who have not been sufficiently investigated or appreciated — nor have there been any great Lithuanian jazz pianists or Eskimo tennis players…”
….
“But in actuality, as we know, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, things remain stultifying, oppressive and discouraging to all those — women included — who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class and, above all, male. The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education”

How does this apply to Bourgeois?
Late in life she encountered an art world much more willing to engage with women artists than it had hitherto. She has also been shown at a time when art’s formal pre-occupations with the status of sculpture or painting have been laid to one side. A diverse practice with strange materials is now commonplace. She has also taken advantage of the idea of “liberation”: following new freedoms in the making of art and its subject matter.

Key to this was an article which she wrote and art designed for Art Forum vol 20 no 4 PP 40-7, December 1982, Child Abuse. See Tate cat p.80

“On the left, the woman in white is The Mistress. She was introduced into the family as a teacher but she slept with my father and she stayed for ten years.
Now you will ask me, how is it that in a middle-class family a mistress was a standard piece of furniture? Well, the reason is that my mother tolerated it and that is the mystery. Why did she? So what role do I play in this game? I am a pawn. Sadie is supposed to be there as my teacher and actually you, mother, are using me to keep track of your husband. This is child abuse. Because Sadie, if you don't mind, was mine.”

For Bourgeois modern art has no set form of expression:

LB: What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself. This is why modern art will continue, because this condition remains; it is the modern human condition.

• ….Art is a way of recognizing oneself, which is why it will always be modern.

Interview quotes from "Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art A sourcebook of Artist's writings" Stiles and Selz P41 Louise Bourgeois Interview with Donald Kuspit in 1988.

Useful Links
US PBS Art 21 series, videos
Documentary excerpts on You Tube (Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine)
Exhibition materials, Pompidou Centre
and Tate Modern

Read
Louise Bourgeois, exhibition catalogue, joint production of The Tate Modern and the Musée national d’art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Tate 2007, edited by Frances Morris
Hopkins D (2000) After Modern Art, 1945-2000 Oxford History of Art.

Landscape and Art: Cold North

2010-03-07T22:48:00.004Z

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970.

“Landscape”
•View
•Setting
•Amenity
•Topography
•Experience
•Environment
•Process
•Land

View
Claude Glass, 18th century
“The person using it ought always to turn his back to the object that he views. It should be suspended by the upper part of the case…holding it a little to the right or the left (as the position of the parts to be viewed require) and the face screened from the sun.” Thomas West, Guide to the Lakes

Pastoral Landscape, Claude Lorrain, 1638, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

“A succession of high-coloured pictures is continually gliding before the eye. They are like visions of the imagination; or the brilliant landscapes of a dream. Forms and colours, in brightest array, fleet before us; and if the transient glance of a good composition happen to unite with them, we should give any price to fix the appropriate scene.” Remarks on Forest Scenery 1795, The Reverend William Gilpin (1724-1804)

Camera Lucida, Manufactured in England, 19th century
Paul Sandby, Roslin Castle, C 1780

Joseph Wright of Derby, Rydal Waterfall, dated 1795
Sir Michael le Fleming’s summerhouse at the falls.

Jacob More, Cora Linn, Falls of Clyde, 1771

René Magritte, La condition humaine,1933

Setting
Giovanni Bellini, St. Francis in the Desert c. 1480
Lorenzo Lotto, St Jerome, 1506
Albrecht Altdorfer (c. 1480 1538 )Landscape with footbridge" (National Gallery, London) of 1518-20.
“He prised landscape out of a merely supplementary relationship to subject matter.” Christopher Wood.

Amenity
Giorgione or Titian, Concert champêtre,Paris, Musée du Louvre, 1508-1509,

Renaissance Italy saw close connections between literary pastoral, landscape painting, land as an aesthetic asset and the development of a distinction between the domestic and the wilder areas of estates.

James Thomson 1700-48 The Seasons
“I know of no subject more elevating, more amusing; more ready to awake the poetical enthusiasm, the philosophical reflection, and the moral sentiment, than the works of Nature. Where can we meet with such variety, such beauty, such magnificence.”

Illustration by Kent and Tardieu of Spring from Thomson’s The Seasons, 1730
William Kent designs for Lord Cobham’s estate at Stowe in Buckinghamshire.

Topography
Strindberg
Munch
Peploe and Cadell

Experience
Joseph William Mallord TURNER (1775-1851) Rain, Steam, and Speed--The Great Western Railway
184, Snowstorm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps
“I had once given to these sketches the title of Picturesque; but the Alps are insulted in applying to them that term…..” Wordsworth

Burford's Panorama, Rotunda, Leicester Square, 1801.

“I own I have not as yet anywhere met with those grand and simple works of art that are to amaze one… but those of nature have astonsihed me beyond expression….it is one of the most solemn, the most romantic and the most astonishing scenes I ever beheld.” Horace Walpole visits Grande Chatreuse Monastery in Alps 1739

“the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence of reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings and hurries us on by an irresistible force.”
Burke, “Enquiry into the Origins of our ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful.”
Salvator Rosa (1615 – 1673)
An Avalanche in the Alps, Loutherbourg 1803.

Michael Snow The Central Region»
«La Région Centrale» was made during five days of shooting on a deserted mountain top in North Quebec.

Environment
Guardian feature on Andy Goldsworthy in Alps.
Andy Goldsworthy, Snowball made from last remaining patch of snow left in the shadow of a tall hedge High Bentham, Yorkshire February 1979 Bentham.
Ice arch left to freeze overnight before supporting pile of stones removed (made in a field of cows - tense wait) ….1982

Snow brought to an edge to catch winter light on a clear day Brough, Cumbria 25 January 1984
Snowballs in Summer, June 2000

Process
Richard Long
My first work made by walking, in 1967, was a straight line in a grass field, which was also my own path, going 'nowhere'. ….

Hamish Fulton
Slioch Hilltop Cairn/Circling Buzzards 1980

Land
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970; Asphalt Rundown, 1969.

Landscape and Art: Warm South

2010-03-01T10:18:00.003Z

IKB 191, monochromatic painting by Yves Klein.

What is “Landscape”?
• View
• Setting
• Amenity
• Topography
• Experience
• Environment
• Process
• Land

What is “South”?
• Warmth
• Escape
• Classics
• Youth
• Colour
• The body
• Simplicity

What is the South, really?
• Heat
• Poverty
• Under-development
• Migration
• Environmental hazards
• Globalisation economics
• Junta politics and Drug gang culture.

Artists featured
Howard Hodgkin
Santiago Sierra, 3000 HOLES OF 180 X 50 X 50 CM EACH Dehesa de Montenmedio. Vejer de la Frontera (Cadiz), Spain. July 2002
John Craxton
John Minton
Emma Hamilton
Yves Klein
Vincent Van Gogh (Francis Bacon and Kirk Douglas)
Tony Hancock, The Rebel.(see BFI screenonline entry)

Read
Andrews M (1999) Landscape and Western Art, Oxford History of Art.

Next Week: Cold North.

Joseph Beuys (1921-1986)

2010-02-18T16:47:00.000Z

Notes from a lecture delivered Monday 8th Februaury 2010, Newcastle Arts Centre, Westgate Road. Part of the Visions strand of the Explore Membership Scheme of the North East Centre for Lifelong Learning.

"Art is a genuinely human medium for revolutionary change in the sense of completing the transformation from a sick world to a healthy one." (Beuys quoted in Quartetto, exhibition catalog, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1984, Milano, p. 106)

Strange materials
Fat
Felt
Honey
Copper
Animals
Plants
Basalt

Installations
All round (Plight)
Enclosed: the vitrines
Changing (Tramstop)
Interactive (Kinloch Rannoch Scottish Symphony)
Editions (Mary Boone Jan 2010)

Performance
Action (I like America)
Film (Arena)
Lectures (in 1973 he gave a lecture “A Homage to Anacharsis Cloots” at Richard Demarco’s Arts Summer School. Lasted 12 hours)
Symphonies.

Subject (Beuys installing Sled)
His own self
Myth
History
Culture and science
Philosophy
Natural history
Alchemy
Redemption/healing/repair.
Ecology

Legacy
Frivolous cult of the personality
Or
Liberating/ involving and democratic?

Brief Chronology
1921 Born in Krefeld. Grows up in Kleve near Dutch border. Father runs a dairy co-op, mother is the receptionist, both Catholic.
1930 Hard times for his father. Beuys begins interest in plants and animals.
1933 Nazis take control of local government in Kleve.
1936 participates in Sternmarsch to Nuremberg organised by Hitler Youth.
1938 Runs away to Circus
1940-5 wartime career
1950s trains as an artist, personal problems but at end of decade has position as professor and is married
1960s begins exhibiting career. Controversial avant garde activities culminate in support for student occupation of the Kunstakademie.
1970s regular visitor to Edinburgh Festival.(70, 73, 74, 80, 81) Part of his Free International initiative. Travels to US for first time. Holds retrospective at Guggenheim 1979-80.
1980-86 inaugurates the 7000 Oaks project at Dokumenta VII. Writes Anti-Reagan pop song, is elected Green Party candidate for Bundestag but withdraws disappointed by level of support. Hugely active in international art world. Develops lung problem in 1985 leads to death from heart attack in his studio, January 23rd 1986.

War-time
1940 takes his final school exams. Decides to volunteer for the Luftwaffe: “If the others go I go to.”
1941 training as radio operator.
1942 Russian front, Czech training school.
1943 writes to parents from Italy that he has decided to become an artist.
1944 recieves the “Medal for fighter pilots”. Crashes in Crimea, hospitalized, receives Iron Cross. Continues training as combat pilot.
1945 part of the “Erdmann Phantom Division” on Western Front. Wounded late April, awarded medal then captured by British May 9th. Returns home to family August 1945.

Early Years
1946-7 studying for entry to art academy
1947-51 Kunstacademie Dusseldorf Taught by Ewald Mataré (1887- 1965)
1950s Self-doubt, money troubles and PTSD. Works as a sculptor in Dusseldorf but suffers depression for which he is treated at psychiatric clinics in Dusseldorf and Essen. By end of the decade he has large commissions for war memorials and has married.
1961 holds first one person show, Kleve. Appointed professor at Kunstacademie Dusseldorf.
Meets Yves Klein, Naim June Paik and George Macunias.
1963 exhibits in Fluxus festival in Dusseldorf. First “Action”. “Life with Pop. Demonstration for Capitalist Realism.”

Read
Andrew Causey (1998) Sculpture Since 1945, Oxford History of Art. Pp.139-44
Mark Rosenthal (2005) Joseph Beuys Actions, Vitrines, Environments, TATE.
Joseph Beuys in Scotland, Cencrastus Issue 80 Spring 2005

Links
Transformer (Documentary dir. John Halpern, 1979)

Max Beckmann

2010-02-03T10:37:00.004Z

Carnival, 1943.

Max Beckmann (1884-1950)

Exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art, New Burlington Galleries, London. 6 paintings and a print shown. Curated by Herbert Read. At the opening Beckmann delivered “On My Painting” a lecture in German.

“… I have never been politically active in any way. I have tried only to realize my conception of the world as intensely as possible… My aim is to transfer this reality into painting – to make the visible invisible through reality… In my opinion all important things in art since Ur of Chaldees, since Tell Halaf and Crete have always originated from the deepest feeling about the mystery of Being. Self-realization is the urge of all objective spirits. It is this self that I am searching in my life and in my art … The greatest danger that threatens humanity is collectivism. Everywhere attempts are being made to lower the happiness and the way of living of mankind to the level of termites. I am against these attempts with all the strength of my being .. I am immersed in the phenomenon of the individual, the so called whole Individual, and I try in every way to explain and present it. What are you? What am I? Those are the questions that constantly persecute and torment me and perhaps also play some part in my art.”

Overview
1884 born near Leipzig
Pre-1914 successful history painter, highly critical of many trends in art
1914-15 stretcher bearer, suffers breakdown
1917 begins to re-make his art in new angular way.
1920s paintings of carnival etc Identified with Neue Sachlichkeit.
1930s declared degenerate by Nazis
1937-47 years of exile in Amsterdam
1947-50 America.

Early life
1884 born near Leipzig
1900 aged 16 goes to grand Ducal Art Academy Weimar
1903-4 lives in Paris. Enthusiastic about Cezanne, Courbet and Pissarro.
1904 travels through Italy Switzerland and S germany: Visits studio of hodler.
1905-6 painting in Berlin. Prize-winner of Italian scholarship.
1907-9 paints large history paintings. Sees work by Matisse (“too aesthetic for me , too delicate…”)
1910 more success as he becomes the youngest member of the board of the Berlin Secession. At this time the Secession refused to show work by German expressionist artists.
1912 The Sinking of the Titanic. Writes a review attacking Franz Marc and the expressionists.
1913 successful one person show. Follows Liebermann and Corinth out of the Secession to form Free Secession. Writes of his art as spiritual and spatial trying to get to the heart of things as opposed to decorative frivolous modern art.

War July 1914- October 1915
Volunteers to work as an able seaman then switches to nurse in East Prussia.
“I have experienced some truly horrible things….” (1914)

“I myself constantly vacillate between great excitement at everything I see, depression at the loss of individuality, and a feeling of deepest irony about myself and, occasionally the world. Finally however the world always compels my admiration. Its capacity for variety is indescribable and its power of invention is unlimited.” (1915)

Revelling in the experience of mass conflict which he claims is feeding his art he eventually succumbs to a breakdown.

Frankfurt
1917 starts work and with a burst of activity produces a set of prints and three large paintings on religious themes for a one person show.
1918 follows the new work with a new statement of intent and belief “A Confession”
“I believe that essentially I love painting so much because it forces me to be objective. There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.”
Says he will use “crystal clear, razor sharp lines and planes…”

“right now we have to get as close to people as possible. It’s the only course of action that might give some purpose to our superfluous and selfish existence – that we give people a picture of their fate…”

Begins to read philosophy and theosophy particularly the works of Madame Helena Blavatsky.

1919 paints the Night and draws the lithographs Hell.

1920 tries his hand at writing (Ebbi and Hotel) Turns down a teaching position.
Signs a contract with a gallery (I.B. Neumann)
Neumann holds a show in Berlin and then moves his gallery (1923) to New York.

1923 writes Self-Portrait
“what shall I say… the result will be music that consists of nothing but pauses.”

“We live from one day to another…..”
“Beckmann had the bad luck not to have been endowed by nature with a money-making talent, but rather a talent for painting….”

1924 Piper publishing house brings out a large monograph on Beckmann. A one person show seems to celebrate his importance. His paintings appear in the landmark exhibition “Neue Sachlichkeit: German Painting since Expressionism.” (Mannheim)

1925 Beckmann marries for second time: new wife is Quappi (Mathilde von Kaulbach)
At this stage he exhibits regularly and has a guaranteed income from picture sales through Neumann’s gallery. He also began teaching at Stadel Art school, Frankfurt.

1927-9 wins prizes, has works in major collections, and writes on the role of the artist. Is appointed professor.
1930-1 plans to compete with French avant garde. Shows in Paris where he keeps a studio and flat until 1932. Attracts first criticism by the fascist press. Attacks by fascists increase over the following three years.

1932 Berlin National Gallery shows his work in a room of their own.
Begins work on “Departure.” (completed 1935)

Berlin 1933-7
Beckmann moves to capital in Jan 1933. Hitler assumes power in March. Beckmann is sacked from teaching position the following month. His paintings are removed from display at the National Gallery.

1934 Beckmann is fifty. In 1936 he shows in Hamburg. Weeks later the Nazis ban all art criticism.
Beckmann begins to plan his escape; he travels to Paris and discusses emigration to the US.

1937 entarte kunst: Degenerate Art show Munich. 500 works by Beckmann removed from German museums. 10 paintings and 10 prints shown in Munich.
2 million visit the show which then travels around Germany.
Hitler opens Haus der Deutschen Kunst, Munich.
Beckmann leaves Germany next day never to return.

Amsterdam 1937-47
Max and Quappi arrive with little luggage or cash. However the wife of the janitor of their Berlin apartment building manages to post many belongings and art works to them before the Gestapo can act to stop her.
Studio found at Rokin 85.
Sells work in Switzerland and US.
1938 New Burlington Galleries, On My Painting.
Admires work of William Blake at the Tate.

1939 Nazis make a bonfire of the confiscated art works from museum collections. Others are auctioned by them in Lucerne, including 3 Beckmanns.
Temptation wins a prize in San Francisco.

May 1940 Germany invades Holland. Beckmann burns his diaries. He continues to work at Rokin 85 studio. However secret stashes of paintings need to be established in fear of confiscation.

June 44 fighting begins in Holland. Liberation of Amsterdam followed by peace in May 45. Beckmann under surveillance and unsure of his future.
Stedelijk Museum buys Double Portrait of Max Beckmann and Quappi.
1946 sell out New York show.
Beckmann declines offers of teaching positions in Germany. He shows there but despite planning to visit does not.
August 1947 officially classified Non-enemy.

America
Moves to US teaching first at St Louis then at Brooklyn Museum Art School. (1949)

“I hope that you won’t expect me to instil in your minds at once – like a mighty magician – the spirit of fiery genius. In my opinion you ought to learn very much, in order to forget most of it later on. That means that I wish you to discover your own selves, and to that end many ways and detours are necessary….”

Boxing Day 1950: he finishes The Argonauts. 27 Dec suffers a heart attack while walking to Metropolitan Museum to see Self-Portrait in a Blue Jacket on show in American Painting Today. Dies at corner of 61st street at Central Park West.

Lecture delivered Monday 18th January 2010, Newcastle Arts Centre, Westgate Road. Part of the Visions strand of the Explore Membership Scheme of the North East Centre for Lifelong Learning.

Further Reading

Wikipedia entry. (includes image used above)

Rainbird S ed (2003) Max Beckmann, Tate, London.
Copeland Buenger B (1997) Max Beckmann Self-Portrait in Words, Collected Writings and Satements, 1903-1950, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
O’Brien Twohig S (1984) Beckmann Carnival, Tate London.

“As a boy I always wanted to be an artist…” Ralph Hedley (1848-1913)

2009-12-07T14:50:00.002Z

St. Nicholas Square & Town Hall, Newcastle-on-Tyne

Valentine's Series (no: 70892) Found here.

In October I introduced you to the work of John George Brown, the Bootblack Raphael. Brown attended art classes in Newcastle run by William Bell Scott during the period 1845-52. Brown, specialising in images of children, workers and the poor, went on to great celebrity in New York.
Ralph Hedley also attended classes at the Newcastle School of Art. His period at the school lasted from 1860-64. These were the last three years of Bell Scott’s time in Newcastle and the first year of the new master William Cozens Way. Hedley, specialising in images of children, workers and the poor also progressed to some celebrity albeit limited to the North East of England.

In his 1895 self-portrait we see the forty seven year old artist framed in a mirror. The mirror is on a stand sitting on the top of a chest of drawers, or table. Beside the mirror is a partially concealed still life: an ornate vase with brushes not flowers casually placed inside it; a hat; a pair of gloves; a small bottle of oil; matches and a pipe. Behind is a basic frame. The artist is lit from one side, he is wearing an elaborate collar and he holds a palette and more brushes in his left hand. He has a moustache and goatee beard and his hair is fashionably tousled.
Although Hedley was now a success in local terms and a regular exhibitor nationally he continued to run the carving business. His presence in the studio was as a result part-time: it is fitting then that the self-portrait captures a night-time scene.
Hedley was still puzzling over how to paint, how other artists painted, what worked best. At the Royal Academy show in London of the same year he showed Old Pension Day. He visited the show and made his habitual notes of things that caught his attention. In front of a Lavery (Lady in Back) he writes
“Keep the shadows not so strong show [sic] the contrast in colour rather than in density”
Later
“don’t work so slow. Find out what colour then go at it and leave it right or wrong.”
Hedley extols himself to be direct, to attack the painting in a straightforward way. The artist should truthfully respond to nature, rather than conceal it beneath trickery and technique. However the technique of this truthful approach concerned him greatly.
“some pictures are painted direct and toned in the colour when in frame if required”
Elsewhere he notes:
“Do not be afraid of showing the drawing”
Orchardson’s work he found “rather like a tinted drawing.” Brangwyn was “all in low toned mouldy grey.”

The problem of how to be an “artist” rather than an “artisan” was a sensitive issue. Although Hedley received favourable reviews from the time of his first exhibition of work onwards, he had been attacked in 1889 in the press and in a lecture by the Newcastle Daily Leader critic Harry Barnett. The charge was levied at Hedley that although he could ‘imitate’ he could not ‘express’:
“Art is primarily expressive rather than imitative… Mr. Hedley is a capital imitator, but he expresses not much.” (Newcastle Daily Leader, 19Sept 1889, p.8)

Hedley Timeline
• 1848   Born Gilling West, North Yorkshire, 31/12/48, parents Richard and Ann Hedley.
• 1850   Family moves to Newcastle
• 1860   Enrols Newcastle School of Art
• 1863 starts apprenticeship as carver and gilder with Thomas Tweedy
• 1864    Ends time at Art School receiving a certificate and a glowing reference.
• 1869 terminates apprenticeship: works for Gerard Robinson for “few months”
• 1869-70 sets up his own business with James Wishart.
• 1870 carving display at the CEAG
• 1871 death of James Wishart, move to 11 New Bridge Street

1860-64
William Bell Scott stopped teaching, and left Newcastle, in September 1863. One of his final tasks was to write a reference for Ralph Hedley. It is in his characteristic style:
“ a steady, persevering, well-conducted youth, sensible rather than clever”

Hedley first went to the school as a twelve year old. Most of his class mates would also have been young boys. Some of the boys were “students” but the vast majority were already at work in trades. The annual report for 1864, for instance, tells us there were among others glass stainers, engravers, coach builders, plasterers, upholsterers and engine fitters taking classes at the school. Hedley and his colleagues went to the school not because they had a burning desire to be artists but to acquire the drawing and design skills which would allow him to follow in the footsteps of men like Ralph’s father Richard Hedley, a skilled carpenter.

At some point in the year 1850 the Hedley family arrived in Newcastle from North Yorkshire to start a new life. The attraction of Tyneside was the promise of jobs in the rising industries. Richard Hedley would soon be working as a builder. As the nineteenth century drew on the Tyne became increasingly industrial. Tonnage of goods and materials carried on the Tyne would increase fivefold from 1834 until 1912.
There is no record of how the Hedleys arrived in Newcastle. Perhaps like earlier travellers, carpenter Richard Hedley, his wife Ann and their two year old child Ralph caught their first glimpse of their destination from a wagon rolling through Gateshead and down to the old bridge across the Tyne.
The “dense population” of the old town increased dramatically from the 1840s onwards with influxes of migrants from Ireland, Scotland and other parts of England. We now know that, like the Hedleys, many came as family groups. Richard Hedley and his family lived in the new suburb of Elswick, then fast expanding.

We know from Bell Scott’s correspondence that by 1860 the Newcastle School of Art was well-established having paid off debts incurred earlier. There is also some indication that despite Bell Scott’s personal teaching style, the school conformed to national standards and expectations.

We know from his letters that he showed an interest in the careers of a number of his pupils and assistant masters. His classes were conducted on the basis of inspiring the pupil to practice their skills out with the school. This was unusual. Bell Scott was one of a number of masters who admitted that he favoured giving pupils individual attention, a variety of tasks and encouraging them to work between lessons.
However the young boys engaged in little that we would recognise today as creative work. They were taught how to copy, diligently and to order.

In 1860 Bell Scott delivered a course of lectures which set out the rules of design, colour and art. It is unlikely that the twelve year old Ralph Hedley attended these but they were subsequently published and used as a textbook in the Government Schools of Art: Half-Hour Lectures on the History and Practice of the Fine and Ornamental Arts.
Ralph Hedley was a government art school boy working his way through the stages of instruction. In its final version there were twenty three stages of instruction. A watercolour exists dating from 1864 [Art School Study (Still Life)] which shows him to have been an accomplished student. This was probably in fulfilment of Stage XIV, “painting (general) direct from nature: a. Flowers or still life in watercolours…” Stage XIII was to copy a standard example of such art. He may not have completed the nine further stages of instruction.

Ralph Hedley’s day work before 1863 was various: a newspaper office, a grocer’s, a hairdresser, an engine works.

1866
The weather was bad in Newcastle in the latter part of September 1866. Despite heavy rain and strong gales, the town was abuzz with a new art exhibition. On the 19th of September the Mechanics’ Institute Art Exhibition had opened there featuring works gathered from local collections. There were a vast variety of works on show including some of the best and most daring recent English painting. If you were eighteen and keen on art you would certainly have made the after-work journey to that “ugly and expensive excrescence”, the Town Hall. (Newcastle Daily Chronicle March 8th 1866)

“Polytechnics” had been held in Newcastle in 1840 and 1848. These were spectacular displays of art, machinery, natural history and science. During the 1850s shows dedicated to art alone were rarely attempted by local committees or artists. It is incorrect to give the impression that there were no art exhibitions in that time. An active exhibition organiser in this period was the master of the Newcastle School of Art who supervised travelling exhibitions from the Government Science and Art department. These were occasionally supplemented by work from local collections: so for instance there was a Government Loan exhibition in 1850 and a Travelling Exhibition from Marlborough House. Bell Scott also regularly showed student work on the school premises and he showed each of his Wallington Hall paintings in Newcastle before sending them to Wallington.

There was also a major show in Sunderland in 1860.The young Ralph Hedley would undoubtedly have seen some of these shows. The September 1866 exhibition was however the first major exhibition in Newcastle since Hedley’s art school days.

The exhibition was a fund raising exercise for the premises of the New Bridge Street Mechanics’ Institute. It was to be “EDUCATIONAL.” It included a programme of lectures and there were cheap days when it was expected the working man and woman would attend. There were more than five hundred works of art on show and there were numerous tables with objects of historic and scientific interest. The exhibition was also an opportunity, like many such Victorian gatherings, to rehearse the story of art in the North East. Bewick, Clennell, Gray, Martin, Stansfield, Perlee Parker, Nicholson and Carmichael were all celebrated, as was more recent resident William Bell Scott and the young Henry Hetherington Emmerson.The idea of there being a Northern, North East or Newcastle school lay behind the local art display.

There were also paintings by Turner, Holman Hunt, Madox Brown and Millais and in the photography section there was a portrait by Julia Margaret Cameron as well as examples from Mawson and Swann.

In March when the show was first publicised the Daily Chronicle had at some length berated the town for its poor taste and its lack of a permanent gallery of art.
“pitmen, mechanics and puddlers [steel workers] would become better, broader men if they were brought more constantly than they now are into contact and communion with the beautiful.” (Newcastle Daily Chronicle 8 march 1866)
The Chronicle’s plan was to spread the good work which the School of Art had begun into the general population.

The Express wondered if a love for the beautiful might be encouraged to promote a “higher sense of the noble and the true.”

To Twenty-first century readers the Daily Reports issued by the show’s organiser’s seem hectoring and patronising in turns. These were a daily publication acting partly as exhibition guide, partly as advertisement. Relations between worker and employers were strained at this time and this is apparent in the Daily Reports. In 1866, the year before the 2nd Reform Act, there were several labour disputes on Tyneside. Workers were campaigning for a shorter working week. Engineers had been locked out at Jarrow. Strikes and court cases had dominated the news through the summer months. A small recession was underway and at least one company went bankrupt under the strain.ii The new building for the Mechanics’ Institute was behind schedule due to a strike by masons: comments on the opening day highlight the tension which the worker’s demands were causing.

The “mechanical orders” were at first slow to turn out to see the show but by the end of the first week their presence was being commented upon favourably. The visits of postmen, jokingly called “gentlemen of letters”, and children from the “ragged school” were given special mention in the Daily Reports. It seems that the issue of special worker’s tickets guaranteed a large attendance, as did special train excursions running from York, Darlington, Hartlepool. On the final day for instance 2,721 people attended. There is no doubt that the young wood carver Ralph Hedley was among this throng.

The Chronicle used the exhibition to voice the opinion that art appreciation should be encouraged, that art should be popularised and that all should be given access to the “beautiful” through an engagement with art. Artists were, the Chronicle told its readers, moral guardians akin to parsons. (Editorial September 13th 1866)

There were articles and letters decrying the faults of the Pre-Raphaelites (an old bugbear as they had been lambasted when their work first appeared in Newcastle in 1850) “Work” by Ford Maddox Brown for instance was said to be too busy, perhaps it should have been three paintings the Daily Report writer suggests. The Express took exception to the “Hireling Shepherd” by Holman Hunt: it was a departure from and exaggeration of the elements of art, particularly colour and perspective. Even “Autumn Leaves” by Millais was seen as lacking: the girls were stiff and the leaves artificial. On the 1st October the Fourth notice in the Journal declared that Arthur Hughes would never make an artist and should study the human figure much more closely. G.F.Watts was also warned off painting figures by the reviewer: best to stick to landscape he is told. By the end of the show the criticism of the too meticulously painted Pre-Raphaelites (all from Leathart’s collection) had become a matter for some after-dinner jocularity. Emmerson, a one-time star pupil of Bell Scott, replying to a toast from Leathart to the artists, said he would not go into “details” as he was not a Pre-Raphaelite.

The young Ralph Hedley would have walked away from the Town Hall in October 1866 with the impression that art was important, moral indeed; that challenging and unusual art was little appreciated in the town; that art had a strong local history; and that there might be a place in the art world for the talented painter whatever his background.

1870
In Newcastle the immediate impact of 1866 was the opening of the Central Exchange Art Gallery as a subscription reading room and art gallery in which Barkas and his partner Thomas Tweedy showed rolling exhibitions of art, science and curious objects.

The gallery had a high profile through constant advertisement and notices in the local press. Paintings ancient and modern were on show. A reputed Titian appeared in May 1871, for instance. Henry Hetherington Emmerson was the first of the local artists to use the Central Exchange as a way of publicising his activities: paintings would appear there before being sent down to London. Notices in the Newcastle Daily Journal could be lengthy: such as the attention paid to “The Branks” in 1873.

The Central Exchange and Art Gallery began the eighteen seventies full of confidence and optimism. Scientific innovations were demonstrated by Barkas who was also a regular lecturer on scientific developments. The two thousand or so subscribers had much to entertain them. In 1878 Barkas installed electric light in the Art Gallery ( Newcastle Daily Journal 6th April 1878 p1) ; a telephone and a microphone were also installed (Newcastle Daily Journal 2 June 1878 p4). In 1896 "the latest scientific marvel" the Cinematograph was shown there (Newcastle Daily Chronicle 5 Sept 1896 p.1) Some were practical others less so. In 1873 there appeared: "Musical Promenades and the Rearing of Young Salmon. The young salmon are now escaping from the ova and are very interesting.." (Newcastle Daily Journal 24 Feb 1873, p.1) Art and salmon were tried with some china thrown in as well: "Musical Promenades, Rearing of Young Salmon and Mr. Emmerson's New Painting - 2000 young salmon have now escaped from the ova and are very interesting... Several valuable assignments of old China." By the time of the Annual General Meeting most of the salmon had died and only a small number could be released into a stream. Undetterred a display of "chicken rearing apparatus" was planned (Newcastle Daily Journal 31 May 1873 p3.)

The Central Exchange was a commercial venture relying on subscriptions, sales of art work and special events to finance the building. Ralph Hedley is unlikely to have been a regular visitor: there were only two thousand or so subscribers. However he was there during the opening exhibition with his partner James Wishart, demonstrating wood carving.
“In the south western corner Mr Tweedy has fitted up a somewhat elegant workshop for the accommodation of carvers (Messrs Hedley and Wishart, formerly pupils of Mr Tweedy) who will pursue their wonderful art in the presence of auditors, and produce copies of any given subject.” (NDJ 16 Nov 1870)
The given subject was political and topical: the warring heads of state of France and Prussia.

Art School

2009-12-03T15:24:00.004Z

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.

[The front (north) facade of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Glasgow School of Art on Renfrew Street, Garnethill in Glasgow, Scotland. Taken by Finlay McWalter on May 7th 2004.]

“I remember vividly the first day of the [Preliminary Course]. Josef Albers entered the room, carrying with him a bunch of newspapers. ... [and] then addressed us ... 'Ladies and gentlemen, we are poor, not rich. We can’t afford to waste materials or time. ... All art starts with a material, and therefore we have first to investigate what our material can do. So, at the beginning we will experiment without aiming at making a product. At the moment we prefer cleverness to beauty. ... Our studies should lead to constructive thinking. ... I want you now to take the newspapers ... and try to make something out of them that is more than you have now. I want you to respect the material and use it in a way that makes sense – preserve its inherent characteristics. If you can do without tools like knives and scissors, and without glue, [all] the better.”

Hannes Beckmann, ‘Formative Years’, in Eckhard Neumann ed., Bauhaus and Bauhaus People, New York, 1970, p.196, quoted Josef Albers, Eva Hesse, and the Imperative of Teaching, Jeffrey Saletnik. Available on Tate website here.
Eva Hesse 1936-70
Studied at Cooper Union, New York, 1954-57
Received a Yale-Norfolk Fellowship, 1957
Studied at Yale University, New Haven CT, 1959

Academy / Modernist
• Talent / Creativity
• Romantic lonely (male) genius / everyone an artist.
• A potential / a given
• Skills taught / art taught
• Art is specialist / art is general, the disciplines of art special.
• Metier / medium
• Mastery / questioning or critique
• Past / the future
• Imitation / invention

Sixties Düsseldorf.
1961: Beuys appointed Professor of Sculpture.
1967 founded the German Student Party.
1969 founded the Bureau for Direct Democracy.
24 Nov 1970 Action Dead Mouse Isolation Unit
1971 Beuys changed his title to Professor of Free Art. Students applied to study with individual professors in Germany. Beuys abolished academic entry requirements, abolished fees and replaced degrees with a 'Master Student' certificate. He accepted all applicants and 20 others who had been rejected elsewhere.
1972 a new Director of the Academy rejected 125 applicants and told Beuys to get into step with the school policy. Beuys replied by offering them all a place. When admin refused to register the students a 24 hour occupation began. A street protest coincided with a professors’ meeting which voted for Beuys’ dismissal.
Friday October 13, after three days of protests political police broke up the occupation.

Sixties Newcastle
The basic design course {or “basic form” or “foundation course”} in the department of Fine Art of Durham University at King’s College, Newcastle was innovative and attracted a deal of publicity. As a result it was hugely influential on the “modernisation” of art education which takes place in England in the 60s.

The course followed on from the experience of Pasmore and Hamilton working at the Central School of Arts and Crafts under the Scottish painter William Johnstone.
Inspired by the pre-war activities of the Bauhaus, the course sought a complete revision of art teaching.

The Newcastle revisionism was based on a series of beliefs and observations which overlapped:
Children are intuitively creative; their creativity is often stultified by education.
Nature’s microscopic structures could provide key insights into design problems.
Popular culture is all around us and worthy of notice and respect.
“The production of art is a developing process which originates in the first dimension, the making of a single point.” (Pasmore)

John A. Walker: “One purpose of the basic design course was to provide all students with a common starting point; another was to destroy any preconceptions about the nature of art that students might have acquired at primary and secondary schools.”

John A. Walker: “The Department had three schools: painting, sculpture and design. Design included printed textiles and stained glass. In addition to these subjects, basic design, printmaking, life drawing, and the history of art were taught. During the first year, students were regularly taught in groups; they were set projects and given a range of exercises to perform in formal, classroom-type situations. Like current foundation years, they were exposed to a variety of materials, media and techniques. Again, like present-day foundation courses, the first year served a ‘diagnostic’ function – students could discover what media and practices interested them and suite d their abilities. As time passed, students were allowed more and more freedom until their work became entirely self-directed. Students were also encouraged to specialise in particular art forms”

“Students were taught to analyse and explore the elements of art and design but little or no advice was given concerning their re-combination or synthesis; the issue of content was also neglected even though Hamilton’s first pop paintings were rich in subject matter. ” (John A Walker)

Thistlewood D (1981) “A Continuing Process. The New Creativity in British Art Education 1955-65”, ICA London
Pasmore and others eds (1959) The Developing Process
Walker John A (2003) LEARNING TO PAINT: A BRITISH ART STUDENT AND ART SCHOOL 1956-61

Sixties Hornsey
It began as a dispute over student union funds it became:

“a planned programme of films and speakers expanded into a critique of all aspects of art education, the social role of art and the politics of design. It led to six weeks of intense debate, the production of more than seventy documents, a short-lived Movement for Rethinking Art and Design Education (MORADE), a three-day conference at the Roundhouse in Camden Town, an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, prolonged confrontation with the local authority, and extensive representations to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Student Relations.”
Tickner L (2008) Hornsey 1968: The Art School Revolution, Frances Lincoln Publishers Ltd, United Kingdom, pages 13-14.

Today and tomorrow.
'They say you should be wary of desire lest you are granted that which you wish for. The elevation of modular over linear teaching programmes, the educational incorporation of theory, the breakdown of modernist medium-specificity, the critique of the (mostly male) expressive author, perhaps even a questioning of the authority of the western canon, were all songs in our radical repertoire. Yet the fact that these have come to pass, and now count if not as the norm, then as significant components of a contemporary education in art and design, has counted in the end for less than the fact that the underlying structure (and of course, the wider structure-beyond-the-structure) has remained intact.'
Paul Wood, Debate about Art education, Art Monthly October 2008/ Issue 320, from 'Between God and the Saucepan: a study of English art education from the 18th Century to the present day', History of British Art (tate 2008)
Click here to go to the archive of Art Monthly Debate about Art education.

Read
Thierry de Duve, ‘When Form Has Become Attitude – And Beyond’, in Stephen Foster and Nicholas de Ville ed., The Artist and the Academy: Issues in Fine Art Education and the Wider Cultural Context, Southampton, 1994, pp.23–40.

Pattinson and the daguerreotype

2009-11-30T14:19:00.006Z

Hugh Pattinson and the daguerreotype. The beginnings of photography and the first photograph taken in Canada.

Boulevard du Temple, Paris, 3ème arrondissement, Daguerréotype by Louis Daguerre (1787-1851).

"At the monthly meeting of the Literary and Philosophical Society, on Tuesday last, after the election of members, &c., Mr. H. L. Pattinson gave a minute description of the Dauguerreotype [sic], an invention which was, some time ago, announced as being likely to occasion quite a revolution in art. From Mr. Pattinson's description, however, we should consider it as a process tedious, expensive, and uncertain, and as to its being even a useful auxiliary to the progress of the fine arts, extremely problematical.

Mr. P. exhibited some drawings taken by himself, one of Ravensworth Castle, and two or three views of the Falls of Niagara, which were examined with considerable interest. As a proof of the incertitude attending the invention, we may state that Mr. Pattinson visited the Falls with the intention of bringing away sixty or seventy drawings, but found, on his arrival, that most of the plates were defective, owing to the silver not being pure, and he was obliged to return with a smaller number of drawings than he originally calculated upon.

Mr. Pattinson uses thin copperplates, coated with silver, and highly polished. The defective plates were purchased in New York. Mr. Pattinson lauded the King of the French, for having purchased the secret of M. Daugerre [sic], and thrown it open to the French people, and stated his belief that if our government were to purchase Mr. Talbot's secret, and make it common to the public at large, considerable benefit would be derived from it. ……." Newcastle Chronicle December 5th 1840

Mr. H. L. Pattinson gave a minute description of the Dauguerreotype [sic], an invention which was, some time ago, announced as being likely to occasion quite a revolution in art.

• Hugh Lee Pattinson, metallurgical chemist and industrialist, born Christmas Day 1796, Alston. His father was a grocer, the family were Quakers.
• By 1821 he was working as a clerk at a soap boiler, Claphams. In 1822 he joined the Lit and Phil before moving back to Alston in 1825 to become assay master to the lords of the manor. Ie he tested the local gold and silver.

Silver and lead
• At this time he began chemical experiments aimed at finding a method for extracting silver from lead ore.
• He devised a method which he patented in 1833.
• Meanwhile he had become the manager of a lead works belonging to Wentworth Beaumont in 1831.

Felling Chemical Works
• Pattinson left in 1834 to open a chemical works in Felling.
• His partners were his uncle John Lee and George Burnett. The works lay between Green Lane and Brewery Lane. Ie near the Gateshead Stadium today.
• It grew to cover 17 acres, had a work force of 1000 and produced lead for paint, soda crystals, caustic soda, bleach and Epsom Salts.

Washington Chemical Works
• Opened 1837 under Pattinson’s sole ownership.
• When the following year the British Association for the advancement of Science held its annual conference in Newcastle, Pattinson was Vice-President and elected a Fellow.
• In 1839-40 he made a trip to America in the hope of business and mining opportunities there.

a minute description of the Dauguerreotype [sic], an invention which was, some time ago, announced as being likely to occasion quite a revolution in art.

What was a daguerreotype?
A small copper plate of about (at its largest) 6x8 inches, one side of which was silver plated.

The silver side was polished like a mirror and then sensitised to light by holding it over a box which contained iodine.

The plate was then put inside a camera and an exposure made.

To make the image appear the plate had then to be held over a box of heated mercury.

To prevent further exposure to light altering the image the plate was washed in salt thereby removing the remaining silver iodide. The plate was then washed and dried.

Non-reproducible: each daguerreotype is unique. The highly detailed imagery was best shown when the plate was manipulated in a cross light.

Giroux
• Pattinson seems to have spent around £50 acquiring a camera and kit from a New York dealer and chemist.
• Americans had tried to reproduce Daguerre’s experiments in the spring of 1839
• An early enthusiast was Samuel B Morse (of the telegraph/dots and dashes)
• Giroux and Co was a Parisian firm with the rights to make Daguerre-approved equipment.

Gouraud
• François Gouraud was the agent for Giroux in the US.
• He held a number of demonstrations in New York in December 1839.
• Using high quality examples Gouraud appeared to be an expert. Morse and other American enthusiasts were not so sure.
• Americans were hugely enthusiastic. The magazine the "Knickerbocker," declared the daguerreotype "an instrument destined ultimately, we believe, to be the companion of every man of taste, particularly in his travels"

Niagara April 1840
• Why did he go there?
• Was he ordered there by Noël Marie Paymal Lerebours? Seems unlikely.
• Was he a tourist? More likely as by then the falls were on the tourist trail. Falls were popular among Romantic tourists in early Nineteenth Century. At Niagara local farmers had been “facilitating” the viewing of the falls since at least 1818. There had been a lodge there for visitors since 1827.
• By Spring of 1840 photography was spreading throughout the US however by viewing the Falls from across the border Pattinson takes the honour of having made the first photograph in Canada.

Noël-Marie Paymal Lerebours
• Lerebours was an early teacher and advocate of the new technology. One of his disciples was Antoine Claudet. He demonstrated the process to the Royal Society in London in March 1840 (while Pattinson was in the US)
• Claudet practised in London where he had several studios. He bought the English rights from Daguerre. He photographed the rich and powerful and received plaudits from Queen Victoria. He innovated the chemistry of the process.
• Claudet passed on Pattinson’s images to Lerebours. It is assumed from clues found on the backs of the Pattinson plates that he called in at the shop in London, showed off his Niagara efforts and either purchased or swapped for two of Claudet’s examples.

Note. Among Claudet's photographs is an example in the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland. Sir Charles Augustus Murray, and his Egyptian servants. 1806 – 1895 taken about 1851. Murray had travelled widely in America in the 1830s living with native Americans. He published a novel in 1844 based on his experience including his forbidden love for a Pawnee squaw who lived near Niagara. In 1846, he was appointed Consul-general for Egypt.

What happened next?
• Pattinson lived on till 1858. He was one of the organisers of the chemistry exhibits at the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition.
• A large funeral was held on his death and a chapter is devoted to him in the volume Worthies of Cumbria. Neither that account nor his lengthy obituary in the Gateshead Observer mentioned his short photographic career.
• It was said however “Nor, to the latest year of his life did he cease to be a student, but was ever careful to keep pace with the science of the day.”

Further Reading
Links
Photo: Niagara Falls, 1840 How academics found the first photograph to be taken in Canada
The University of Newcastle Robinson Library onThe Discovery.
Pattinson's Obituary
Making a Camera Obscura -The Genius of Photography- BBC Four
Edinburgh's Camera Obscura
Dumfries Camera Obscura
Books
Clarke G (1997) The Photograph, Oxford History of Art.
Overell M (2003) American Photography, Oxford History of Art, especially Chapter 3 “Viewing the Landscape”.
Davis K.F. (2007) The origins of American Photography 1839-1885 From Daguerreotype to Dry Plate, Hall Family Foundation.

Bauhaus 1919-33

2009-11-25T15:51:00.005Z

Bauhaus
• Weimar: initially handicraft based with debates on suitability of industrial and commercial design.
• Dessau: new buildings, new timetable, more commissions and an emphasis on “constructivist” style and theory.
• Berlin: short-lived 1930-33 Closed by Nazis April 1933.
• Chicago: modern movement architecture and design.

Bauhaus Basics
• Founded in 1919 the “Staatliches Bauhaus in Wiemar, United former Grand-Ducal Saxon Academy of Fine Art and former Grand-Ducal Saxon School of arts and Crafts.”
• Launched with a nationally published Manifesto which set out the programme of the school in which artists and craftsmen would work together to create the building of the future.

• Important personalities involved included Walter Gropius (1883-1969), Johannes Itten (1888-1967), Josef Albers (1888-1967),Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956), Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Paul Klee (1879-1940), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943).

Precursors
• English influence: Ruskin’s critique of the social and aesthetic impact of Nineteenth century capitalism; William Morris and Arts and Crafts movement.
• Hermann Muthesius: 1896 appointed attaché for trade and industry to the German Embassy in London
• Produced Das Englische Haus (1904-5)
• Based on his widespread research and contacts with the English workshops and architects.

German art school reforms
• End of 19th Century saw English-inspired reforms at Dusseldorf, Breslau and Berlin.
• Arts and crafts based however they also developed industrial design using factory methods.
• Formation of German Werkbund to promote quality work.
• Education reform (“Reformpädagogik”) encouraged activity based teaching.

Arbeitstrat für Kunst
• Begun 1918 as an “art soviet” alternative to the Werkbund.
• 1919 Gropius approaches Weimar authorities with a plan for a new school.
• Permission granted March 1919.
• Bauhaus manifesto published April 1919.
• This was inspired by a revolutionary spirit: artist, craftsman and layman would be brought together in the intellectual, symbolic and social act of building.
• Feininger contributed a woodcut of a cathedral to launch the manifesto.

Gropius
• “The dominant spirit of our epoch is already recognizable although its form is not yet clearly defined. The old dualistic world-concept which envisaged the ego in opposition to the universe is rapidly losing ground. In its place is rising the idea of a universal unity in which all opposing forces exist in a state of absolute balance. This dawning recognition of the essential oneness of all things and their appearances endows creative effort with a fundamental inner meaning. No longer can anything exist in isolation. ..”

• We perceive every form as the embodiment of an idea, every piece of work as a manifestation of our innermost selves. Only work which is the product of inner compulsion can have spiritual meaning. Mechanised work is lifeless, proper only to the lifeless machine. So long, however, as machine-economy remains an end in itself rather than a means of freeing the intellect from the burden of mechanical labour, the individual will remain enslaved and society will remain disordered. The solution depends on a change in the individuals attitude towards his work, not one the betterment of his outward circumstances. And the acceptance of this new principle is of decisive importance for new creative work….” From Theory and Organisation of the Bauhaus 1923.

Alma by Tom Lehrer. Click here to go to You Tube.

Johannes Itten
• Gymnastics and breathing exercises.
• “intuition and method”
• “subjective experience and objective recognition”
• Taught in three areas: studies of natural objects and materials, analysis of Old masters and life drawing.
• Students would subjectively respond to found materials. They would also be required analyse in terms of contrast, form and colour.
• Itten was a follower of the “Mazdaznan” movement.

Course
• “The guiding principle of the Bauhaus was therefore the idea of creating a new unity through the welding together of many arts and movements: a unity having its basis in Man himself and significant only as a living organism.”

Timetable
• 6 month preliminary course “Vorlehre”
• Three years of workshop training and form theory.
• Between 1919 and 1922 the masters increased the amount of theory offered. However “bau” was as yet unavialable.

Paul Klee
• By 1921 Klee was well known in radical circles but unheard of by the public.
• Although his art is often thought of today as frivolous and decorative, his teaching was based upon a strict analytical approach to coloured panels and natural observation.
• His essay “On Modern Art” was written in 1924. It cryptically outlines the theories of Colour, form and tone followed by Klee.

• Line, tone and colour he speaks of in terms of Measure, Weight and Quality.
• The motivation of his theories was to produce an art which was “pure”, rising above the “chaos and confusion” of the moment.
• He sought an art in which “I” and “Eye” were united.

Wassily Kandinsky
• Klee had been associated with Kandinsky in the pre-war Blaue Reiter. Kandinsky’s lengthy statement of theory is “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” published 1912.It was inspired by his theosophy beliefs.
• A Russian from a wealthy background he had returned to his homeland during the revolution and took part in the new art teaching which was being developed there. However he was soon seen as too subjective and insufficiently social.
• His Bauhaus teaching revolved around the exploration of the process of abstraction from nature or the object which he had made the basis of his own art.
• The object was to be reduced to a memory or simple motif.

Oskar Schlemmer
• A painter who taught in the theatre workshop during the nineteen twenties.
• Triadic Ballet : a dance, costume, pantomine and music performance combined.
• The costumes dominated the dancers, restricting their movements.
• Students at Bauhaus developed a “Mechanical Cabaret” 1924.

After
• Dissolved in 1933 many of the teachers moved to the US.
• Gropius and Breuer to Harvard
• Mies van der Rohe to Chicago
• Albers to Black Mountain College
• Moholy Nagy opened a “New Bauhaus” in Chicago.

Links: Bauhaus Today
Bauhaus Archive and Museum of Design in Berlin
The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation
Chicago Bauhaus and Beyond.
Farnsworth House
Zentrum Paul Klee Bern.

Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity (November 8, 2009–January 25, 2010)
MoMa New York. Exhibition site: Click Here

Being Modern

2009-11-18T09:56:00.005Z

The Blind Man No. 2, page 4. Editors: Henri-Pierre Roche, Beatrice Wood, and Marcel Duchamp. Published in New York, May 1917 Fountain by Marcel Duchamp. 1917. Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz.

Case Studies: Self-taught artists
• Henri Rousseau 1844-1910.
• Jean Dubuffet 1901-85.
• Francis Bacon 1909-92.

The Douanier Rousseau
• His art was said to break away from the false tradition of the masters : to show a vigorous alternative viewpoint on human experience.
• Picasso held a “Rousseau banquet” in his studio in November 1908 to celebrate the Douanier.
• DR: “You and I sir are the two greatest painters of our time. You in the Egyptian style, I in the modern.”

Jean Dubuffet 1901-85.
See Dubuffet Foundation
• May 1946 Gallerie Rene Drouin, Paris.
• In the wake of the war, the liberation, the gas chambers and the atom bomb the French art public expected an art that was redemptive, sublime, humane. It got Dubuffet’s “informel.” Art critics were quick to condemn the artist and likened his work to bodily excreta.
• Dubuffet had already prepared his answers.

“The Author answers some objections.”
• No special gifts or skills had gone into the making of the show.
• Provocation: “in the name of what – except perhaps the coefficient of rarity – does man adorn himself with necklaces of shells and not spider’s webs, with fox fur and not fox innards? In the name of what I don’t know/ Don’t dirt, trash and filth, which are man’s companions during his whole lifetime, deserve to be dearer to him and isn’t it serving him well to remind him of their beauty?”

“Art Brut preferred to Cultural Art”
• 1948: Compagnie de l’Art Brut.
• “We understand by this term works produced by persons unscathed by artistic culture, where mimicry plays little or no part (contrary to the activities of intellectuals). These artists derive everything – subjects, choice of materials, means of transposition, rhythms, style of writing, etc. – from their own depths, and not from the conceptions of classical or fashionable art. We are witness here to a completely pure artistic operation, raw, brute and entirely re-invented in all of its phases solely by means of the artist’s own impulses.” (Dubuffet)

Egs Scottie Wilson 1891-1972; Alfred Wallis 1855-1942.

Francis Bacon 1909-92.
See The Official Site of the Estate of Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon interviewed by David Sylvester.
"Where did you go to school? Or did you not?
I went for a short time to a place called Dean Close, in Cheltenham. It was a kind of minor public school and I didn't like it. I was continually running away, so in the end they took me away. I was there only about a year. So I had a very limited education. Then, when I was about 16, my mother made me an allowance of £3 a week, which in those days was enough to exist on. I came to London, and then I went to Berlin. …….And the nightlife of Berlin was very exciting for me, coming straight from Ireland. But I didn't stay in Berlin very long. I went to Paris then for a short time. There I saw at Rosenberg's an exhibition of Picasso, and at that moment I thought, well I will try and paint too.

How did your parents react when they heard about that idea?
They were horrified at the thought that I might want to be an artist. "

Aspects of the Modern
The following aspects of modern art reinforce the rejection of the academic and traditional: Avant garde; The Going Away; Manifesto Art; Alternative audiences, the Unconscious.

Avant garde
• French term derived from military vocabulary: the vanguard troops who explore the terrain in front of the regular infantry.
• Why did it come about? Nineteenth century capitalism reaching such a pitch that the art object became fully implicated in the commodity market. Seen as eroding the special nature of art.
• Paris had become a huge cultural centre with art training bottlenecking hundreds who hoped to be artists. Highly trained and motivated individuals seeking alternative outlets for their talents, interests and criticism.

Paradox 1: avant garde often acted in the name of everyone, the common person, the excluded. However the nature of the gesture, difficulty of the language or shocking tactics involved often alienated those in whose name the art was supposedly created.

Paradox 2: the difficult or unexplained art ideas often suggested that the art was elitist despite intentions to be otherwise.

Paradox 3: modern artists presented themselves as heroes fighting for our self-expression and creative freedom. However these male heroes did little to include the female half of the population. Women artists and viewers were often treated poorly in avant garde circles.
see Cottington D. (2005) Modern Art, A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, OUP.

The Going Away
Paul Gauguin, Breton Shepherdess, 1886.
Paula Modhersohn-Becker, Self Portrait 1907

PMB went away to Worspede as a 22 year old in 1898, met her husband Otto Modehrsohn.
Visited Paris in 1900 were she saw work by Cezanne, Vollard, Van Gogh.
Her work engages directly with the experience of childbirth, motherhood, and fertility.
Whereas Gaugin eroticised his naked women, Becker was much more able to identify with the experience and make it complex albeit in very simply painted and realised images.

“to employ the closest observation in seeking the greatest simplicity is the source of greatness.” (1898)

“I should like to endow colour with intoxication, fulness, excitement; I should like to give it power” (1907)
slide: Reclining Mother and Child

Going Away: Die Brücke, Playing Cowboys and Indians. Artists include Fritz Bleyl (1880-1966), Erich Heckel (1883-1970), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884-1976).

Rejecting the traditional: manifesto art
Futurist Manifesto, Marinetti, 1909

“We declare that the splendour of the world has been increased by a new beauty ; the beauty of speed. A racing car, its body ornamented by great pipes that resemble snakes of explosive breath... a screaming automobile that seems to run on grapeshot, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace.”
“We want to glorify war - the world’s only hygiene - militarism, patriotism, the destructive act of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas for which one dies, and contempt for women. We want to destroy museums, libraries, and academies of all kinds, and to make war on moralism, feminism and on every opportunistic and utilitarian vileness...."
it ends

“We launch from Italy into the world this our manifesto of overwhelming and incendiary violence, with which today we found Futurism, because we want to liberate this land from the fetid cancer of professors, archaeologists, guides and antiquarians.”

In 1909, with Futurism only one year old, a Manifesto of Futurist Painters was published, written by Boccioni.

“Come, come! Let’s make and end once and for all to the Portraitists, the Genreists, the Lake Painters, the Mountain painters! - We have put up with them quite enough, with all those impotent painters of rustic weekends.”

“Everything moves, everything runs, everything turns rapidly. A figure is never stationary before us but appears and disappears incessantly. Through the persistence of images on the retina, things in movement multiply and are distorted, succeeding each other like vibrations in the space through which they pass. Thus a galloping horse has not got four legs: it has twenty and their motion is triangular....”
“Only becoming - moving forward - has value for us!”

Alternative audiences: Cabaret.
Paris, Zurich, Berlin. Dada. Artists include Duchamp, Ball, Grosz.

Alternative marks:
The unconscious, paint and the world of dream. Artists include Andre Masson, Dali, Bunuel.

Read.
• Cottington D. (2005) Modern Art, A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, OUP.
• Brettell R (1999) Modern Art 1851-1929 Oxford History of Art
• Foster and others (2004) Art since 1900,, Thames and Hudson.

France

2009-11-11T10:53:00.004Z

All as it used to be by George du Maurier. 1894. Wood engraving, 13 cm high by 20 cm — illustration for Du Maurier's own Trilby as serialised in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 88 (March 1894): 575. Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

Paris and bohemian rebellion: the French ateliers and radical art.

Compare and contrast.
•    Octave Tassaert (1800-74) The Artist’s Studio, 1848.
•    Gavarni, No2. in the series The Artists, 1838.
•    Thomas Couture (1815-79) The Realist (1865), oil on canvas National Gallery of Ireland.
•    Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) The Stove in the Studio c.1865-70 Oil on Canvas National Gallery London.

Bohemia
•    “The ordinary mania of young artists to wish to live outside their time, with other ideas and customs, isolates them from the world, renders them strange and bizarre, puts them outside the law, banished from society; these are today’s Bohemians.” Felix Pyat 1834.
•    Henri Murger, Scenes of Bohemian Life (Scénes de la vie de Bohème), instalments 1845, book 1851.
•    A musical play: 1849
•    Puccini’s opera, 1896, La Bohème.

Eduard Manet
Manet: born in 1832, father a magistrate and Chevalier of the Legion of Honour; mother Eugenie was daughter of a sometime Vice-Consul to Sweden.
At school he was dubbed backward despite his obvious talent for art and gymnastics. Failed entry exam for Naval College then enrolled in the Merchant Marine.
1848-9 sails for Brazil.
1850 enrols at studio of Couture where he studies for 6 years.
1863 first one person show at Martinet’s gallery

Ecole des Beaux Arts
•    The Impressionist group were initially opposed to the stuffy regime of the Ecole and the assumption that mythological subject matter and correct drawing were the only way forward for an artist.
•    Cabanel and Gleyre were particularly criticised.

Henri Matisse (1869-1954)
•    1882-7 attended the Lycee Saint-Quentin: a grim barracks-like school with antiquated teaching methods. “I realised that I had a certain facility in drawing without having the least notion of going on with it.”
•    1887-8 Law studies in Paris leading to clerk’s job in Saint Quentin.
•    1889 Morning drawing classes. Paints first studies, copies old prints.

Matisse’s first tutor.
•    1890 appendicitis leads to prolonged period off work. Paints throughout. On his return to law he enrolled in nearby art classes
•    Paints out of doors for first time with tutor Emmanuel Croizé.
•    By end 1890 Matisse and 2 colleagues had rebelled against the local art master feeling that Croizé had been badly treated. This meant that when they sought to leave the local classes and move on to Paris they did so without the usual official blessing.

Matisse in Paris
•    1891 moves to Paris to enrol at Ecole des Beaux Arts.
•    Has small allowance (100 francs a month) from father despite his opposition: “But it’s a career for down-and-outs, d’you hear, you’ll die of hunger.”
•    Presents letter of recommendation from Couturier to the then 67 year old William Alphonse Bouguereau. (“Master of joy, grace and beauty.”)

Matisse at Académie Julian
Bouguereau recommended “modelling in twenty lessons” at the Académie Julian. The course cost 306 francs and was seen as a way into the Académie des Beaux Arts.
•    Rodolphe Julian offered basic facilities and occasional visits from tutors. By this time the studios were at 31 rue Dragon on left bank.
•    Feb 1892 takes the Beaux Arts entrance exam and fails

Matisse and Moreau
•    Feb 1892 takes the entrance exam and fails. Pass rate was only 1/3rd.
•    Meets Gustave Moreau and unofficially sits in on his classes drawing from antique. Takes evening class at Ecole des Arts Decoratif.
•    1893-4 copies in Louvre
•    Feb 1895 finally passes entrance exam.
•    1895-6 officially joins Moreau’s class. Things initially go well: Salon de Sociéte des Beaux-Arts hangs 4 of his paintings. Elected Associate Member of Sociéte Nationale.
•    Spends 1898-9 out of Paris (Brittany, London, Corsica)
•    Returns to Ecole des Beaux Arts but is asked to leave when the new man in charge discovers he is over 30.
•    Returns to studies with Eugène Carrière where Matisse acted as “massier” ie registrar/janitor. As a result there were no fees.
•    Also attended free municipal evening class. Starts sculpture work and works as a labourer in the decoration of the Grand Palais for the 1900 Universal Exhibition. His own painting was rejected from the show.

Matisse c.1900
•    In the meantime Matisse had two children (1894 and 99) and a wife (1898). She ran a hatshop. Third child born 1900.
•    In 1899 Matisse bought works by Cezanne, Gauguin, Rodin and van Gogh.
•    1900 classes with Antoine Bourdelle, sculptor in Montparnasse.
•    1902 as Matisse takes up etching, his family is plunged into crisis by a legal and financial scandal.
•    1904 first one person show.

Trilby
•    George Du Maurier (1834-1896)
http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/dumaurier/index.html
•    Serialised in American Magazine Harper’s Monthly 1894. Published thereafter and a huge success in US and worldwide.
•    Trilbymania took hold for 2 years. A stage play opened in New York and was revised by Du Maurier for the London Stage. The book was endlessly parodied: eg Drilby Re-versed, Twillbe, and Thrillby: A shocker in One Scene and Several Spasms.
•    Film versions in 1913, 1923, 1931, 1954, 1983.

Trilbytube
•    1906 recording of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Svengali. With accompanying photographs of Tree as Svengali, Dorothea Baird as Trilby from his production of George Du Maurier's famous novel "Trilby".
To view click here to go to Youtube

Read
Sturgis A and others (2006) Rebels and Martyrs, the Image of the Artist in the Nineteenth Century, National Gallery, London.
Spurling H (2006) The Unknown Matisse: v. 1: Man of the North: 1869-1908: Man of the North: 1869-1908 v. 1, Penguin.
Krell A (1996) Manet and the Painters of Cotemporary Life, Thames and Hudson.
Du Maurier G, Trilby (currently available in paperback from Penguin or Oxford Classics)

Teaching Victorians

2009-10-28T10:49:00.002Z

Art skills for the working man: Industry and the Schools of Art.

Illustration: William Bell Scott, detail of Hall of Machinery, 1848 Newcastle Polytechnic, Gateshead Observer.

pernicious hotbeds
“The other evening my Sunderland friend Dixon and his protégé, Mr. Ruskin’s pupil visited me at the school, on their way to Manchester by a moonlight trip. The rising artist is now “copying the Liber in Vandyke Brown.” If all the youths who aspire to be artists with merely the qualities as yet apparent in this youth, Schools of Design would become pernicious hotbeds.” (Trevelyan Papers, letter dated 12 Sept 1857.)

Note: Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) Liber Studiorum (1806-1819)
A set of seventy based on the idea of Claude Lorrain's (c.1604/5-1682) Liber Veritatis [Book of Truth]. Ruskin was a keen collector and user of the Liber, claiming that he understood light and shade after studying the prints.

Crystal Palace
1st May 1851 : Queen opens Great Exhibition in Hyde Park.
300,000 pains of glass; built in just 17 weeks; enclosed two 90 foot elm trees under glass
Fourteen thousand companies exhibiting. Science, art, technology, goods wrapped into one giant spectacle and sold as family tourist attraction.
Mixing of classes and visitors in the capital a cause for anxiety and new techniques of surveillance.
The Duke of Wellington insisted on 15000 troops being stationed in the capital.
Admission prices varied according to the date: 3 guineas a day, £1 a day, five shillings a day, down to one shilling a day.
141 days : six million visitors
[ 17 million lived in England and Wales in 1851]

See THE GREAT EXHIBITION In Our Time BBC Radio 4. The programme archive includes full programme and good reading list

May 1839
Benjamin Robert Haydon Lectures in Newcastle, at the Nelson Street Music Hall.
“Be assured the people are alive to sound art, and only want instruction. My first three lectures are only upon the construction of the figure, and yet they are listened to with an attention the Greeks could not exceed.”
Haydon was opposed to the monopoly of the Royal Academy and campaigned from 1835 onwards for an alternative to be widely available.

Manchester and Birmingham
•    Art schools existed in both these cities: 1821 for Birmingham; in Manchester from 1803 (which closed) then 1831.
•    The Manchester school was the first to apply to the Council of the Board of Trade at Somerset House for funds to keep the classes going.
•    They asked for money for a “school of drawing.” They were told to run only classes in “ornamental design.”

Newcastle
•    A paper had been read at the Lit and Phil in September 1836 on the want of provision for Fine Arts in the neighbourhood, particularly in relation to “designing for manufactures.” A lecture was held at the Mechanics Institute.
•    The result was the formation of a committee to investigate setting up a school. Letter were written to the Royal Academy in London and to the Royal Institution in Edinburgh.
•    The objects of the school included the teaching of the “higher departments” of the fine arts as well as design for manufacturers.
•    Formed the North of England Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts. Held exhibitions in 1838 and ‘9.

Select Committee
•    The Newcastle activity came in the wake of the “Report of the Select Committee appointed to inquire into the best means of extending the knowledge of the Arts and Principles of Design among the people (especially the Manufacturing Population) of the Country….”

First Classes in Newcastle
•    1838 classes begin under the auspices of the North of England Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts
•    William Harrison had begun to teach Geometry, Projection and Perspective his pupils paying 6d/week.
•    A Mr.Scott was to teach carving and a Mr. Oliphant drawing. Arrangements were underway to incorporate a landscape class

Bell Scott : 1843
•    Parliament did not vote a grant of money to the Board of Trade for the schools project until 1841 at which time Newcastle submitted a petition in the form and language required by Parliament.
•    This document asserted the national importance of the local industry, the lack of educational facilities, the strong local feeling in favour of the introduction of an institution and the dangers from foreign competition.

Students
•    Among the 106 students attending the classes were glass painters and cutters, paper stainers, engravers, carvers, clerks and shop workers, house painters, joiners, plasterers and engine-wrights. The largest number were entered as unemployed

“Drawing the human figure shall not be taught to the students.”
•    Bell Scott claims to have hung up the rules but ignored them.
•    Private classes were given by Bell Scott in the school, despite resistance from long-established local artists such as Thomas Miles Richardson, who is said to have written to the Department of Trade to complain.

Closure 48-9
–    Report of the Select Committee of 1849, Appendix No. 5, Letter from the Committee of the Newcastle School appealing for a reinstatement of their grant.
•    “The local expenses having to be met by fees and voluntary subscriptions, any unpopularity brought speedy bankruptcy, and the device for keeping up the public interest was a public meeting at the end of the season, when some magnate, member of the House of Lords, or political agitator, was induced to preside, and astonishing speeches about Greece and Rome and Palissy the Potter, speeches anticipating a golden age next year if the school remained open, were listened to with delight! The writer of the journal in question looked upon the whole as a hopeless imbroglio, and sooner or later every provincial school was closed for a time.” WBS

The development of a Universal System
•    1849 : Enquiry and reform: Richard Redgrave and Henry Cole.
•    “I have personally arranged the entire course of instruction, the examples, the mode of examination, not only for the central school but also for the provincial ones, which are all thus brought under a common system. I have been enabled to get it so thoroughly into working order, that I feel it would go on if the original mover were away”

System
•    “...the student learns geometrical drawing and perspective, together with an admirable system of free hand drawing instituted by Mr. Dyce, who laid the foundations of the best part of the system of instruction. The student then proceeds to copy, in chalk drawing and painting, works of the greatest excellence of all periods of art. At most schools he is taught to paint from natural objects, - flowers, fruit animals, etc; and he is surrounded by examples of art calculated to excite his emulation....” (Introductory Lecture by Henry Cole, in Address to the Superintendents op cit. p.19.)

A Manly Feeling
•    “However there is a certain manly feeling in helping forward so many young men although by drudgery, and if I gave up the school, the endowment will be certainly withdrawn and the new system carried out. Whether this would be a real misfortune to the locality or not is by no means certain, but it would be so viewed by the committee and others here.” (William Bell Scott Letter to Lady Pauline Trevelyan, 27 Mar 1856, University of Newcastle Special Collections WCT 73.)

Attendance
•    In 1850 a table appeared listing the numbers of students attending each class at each school, distinguishing male and female students. So, for instance we know that of a total of 97 students at Newcastle the average daily attendance was 82. The largest class was the most basic : the 51 males who attended the evening class in Outline Drawing from the Flat

Personal Attention
•    We know from his letters that he showed an interest in the careers of a number of his pupils and assistant masters.
•    His classes were conducted on the basis of inspiring the pupil to practice their skills outwith the school. Some masters were confident that within forty hours of tuition in a year a child could be taught to draw.

Ruskin vs WBS
“From his home we went to the Working Men’s College, where they utterly repudiate copying and the ideal. Here every student has a piece of rough stick hung up three inches from his face to copy, and after two or three sticks they are encouraged to draw the human figure and face in the same manner. The mind being thus uninfluenced, and the taste untrained by the antique or miles of art you cannot believe what hideous things are produced as pictures of children or other of God’s creatures that sit to them......This system is a most interesting experiment, the conventional artist and technical art would quickly expire through inanition if this education were general and that would be a happy day, but it requires yet a fuller development.” William Bell Scott, Trevelyan papers.

Patient hands only…
•    “the Department system appears to repress originality and make patient hands only, and I would willingly see many alterations, but yet on the whole I am certain that the masses must be guided and taught by all the ordinary means of furnishing the mind.” WBS

Ruskin's “The Stones of Venice”
•    “Since first the dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands: the thrones of Tyre, Venice, and England. Of the First of these great powers only the memory remains; of the Second, the ruin; the Third, which inherits their greatness, if it forget their example, may be led through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction . . . I would endeavour to . . . record, as far as I may, the warning which seems to me to be uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves, that beat like passing bells, against the Stones of Venice.”
the warning
•    [Tyre’s] successor, like her in perfection of beauty, though less in endurance of dominion, is still left for our beholding in the final period of her decline: a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak--so quiet,--so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and which the Shadow. I would endeavour to trace the lines of this image before it be for ever lost, and to record, as far as I may, the warning which seems to me to be uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves, that beat, like passing bells, against the STONES OF VENICE.

William Morris
•    “To some of us when we first read it, now many years ago, it seemed to point out a new road on which the world should travel. ……..For the lesson which Ruskin here teaches us is that art is the expression of man's pleasure in labour; that it is possible for man to rejoice in his work, for, strange as it may seem to us to-day, there have been times when he did rejoice in it; and lastly, that unless man's work once again becomes a pleasure to him, …. all but the worthless must toil in pain, and therefore live in pain.”
•    Morris Introduction to Ruskin’s On the Nature of the Gothic in Stones of Venice 1892

•    'If you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing: and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dullness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure after failure, pause after pause” [Ruskin]

•    'It is not that men are ill-fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they earn their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure' [Ruskin]
•    By 1860 economic conditions were such that men were often “ill-fed”. Ruskin changes his emphasis from that point, seeking alternatives to the economic and political system that seemed so wasteful.

Workers and Artists.
•    “A true Artist is only a beautiful development of a tailor or a carpenter.”
•    “My efforts are directed not to making a carpenter an artist, but to making him happier as a carpenter.” Ruskin

Fallacies
•    “The tap-root of all this mischief is in the endeavour to produce some ability in the student to make money by designing for manufacture. ...the very words “School of Design” involve the profoundest Art Fallacies.” Ruskin

Thomas Dixon (1831-1880)
•    1851-2: first Sunderland classes. Dixon the first secretary.
•    1860 the Sunderland master “starved out”.
•    “I think it was closed for want of support on the part of the district : they found that they were some few pounds in debt, and they allowed the casts to be sold and several things to be sent to Carlisle.” Select Committee Report.
•    1869 Sunderland resumes classes.

Dixon’s Contacts
•    Alphonse Legros (1837-1911) French artist
•    James Grinrod, American bookseller
•    Thomas Coglan Horsfall (1841-1932), Manchester: a Peoples Palace, Ancoats
•    William Morris

Read
–    Some Antecedents of the Department of Fine Art, Newcastle Upon Tyne, Durham University Journal, Vera Smith 1951-2 pp50-58;
–    The School of Design at Newcastle, Quentin Bell, Research Review, 1958, pp187-192.
–    The Schools of Design, Quentin Bell, London, 1963
–    Milburn, Geoffrey, (1984) Thomas Dixon of Sunderland (1831-1880). A study in local and cultural history, Antiquities of Sunderland, XXIX 1984 pp.5-45.
–    The Great Exhibition of 1851: new interdisciplinary essays Edited by Louise Purbrick, Manchester University Press (2001)

Romantic inspirations

2009-10-20T22:52:00.003+01:00

The rejection of the Academy and the pursuit of nature.

Compare and Contrast
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Self-portrait 1748.
William Hogarth, The Painter and his Pug 1745

Reynolds, Discourse III, 1769: “Nature herself is not to be too closely copied. There are excellencies in the art of painting beyond what is commonly called the imitation of nature…”

Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, 1753: ..”I would fain have such of my readers be assured, that however they may have been aw’d, and over-born by pompous terms of art, hard names, and the parade of seemingly magnificent collections of pictures and statues; they are in a much fairer way, ladies, as well as gentlemen, of gaining a perfect knowledge of the elegant and beautiful in artificial, as well as by natural forms, by considering them in a systematical, but at the same time familiar way, than those who have been prepossess’d by dogmatic rules, taken from the performances of art only: nay, I will venture to say, sooner, and more rationally, than even a tolerable painter, who has imbibed the same prejudices.”

Reynolds Ideal Art
-improving
-“intellectual dignity” : which was culled from heaven and arrived at by mental labour.
-the fruits of experience
-ideal beauty
-an understanding of the principles of Beauty
-simplicity of nature based upon antiquity ie NOT based upon the faddish or the contemporary.
-nobleness of conception ie not low
-subject matter carefully selected from history or literature (Shakespeare was a particularly English source
-grandeur of scale

Compare and Contrast
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Self-Portrait. 1780
James Barry (1741-1806) Self Portrait, 1803.

Reynolds on Michelangelo
“I will not say Michael Angelo was eminently poetic only because he was greatly mechanical, but I am sure that mechanic excellence invigorated and emboldened his mind to carry painting into the regions of poetry.”

Barry the Hero.
Sculpture - Hercules crushing the serpent Envy.
Note the date: Barry was 60 years old. He paints himself as the young hero he once set out to be.
The painting he holds is Sleeping Cyclops.
This is his version of Pliny’s description of a painting by Timanthes, the early Greek artist famed for his naturalism.

Bread and apples
1777-83 Barry painted - at no charge - The Progress of Human Culture for Society of Arts.

“Who will dare say that polite art is encourages or either wished or tolerated in a nation where society for the encouragement of Art suffer’d Barry to give them his labour for nothing, a society composed of the flower of English nobility and gentry? – suffering an artist to starve while he supported what they, under the pretence of encouraging, were endeavouring to depress – Barry told me that while he did that work he lived on bread and apples.” William Blake’s marginal comments of Reynolds’s Discourses.

Reynolds Third Discourse, 1769
“Every species of the animal as well as the vegetable creation may be said to have a fixed or determinate form, towards which Nature is continually inclining, like various lines terminating in the centre”

The basic theme in the Third Discourse was that the business of an artist was not the mere slavish copying of Nature. The “mere copier of nature” would never produce “great” work, something further was required. The painter was to do more than entertain, to delight or to fool. The painter was to realize grand ideas and captivate the imagination. This consisted in realizing the perfect form, the ideal beauty:

“The principle laid down that the perfection of this art does not consist in mere imitation, is far from being new or singular. It is, indeed, supported by the general opinion of the enlightened part of mankind. The poets, orators, and rhetoricians of antiquity, are continually enforcing this position, - that all the arts receive their perfection from an ideal beauty, superior to what is found in individual nature.”

Central form
The object itself is real but its identity is to be judged against an ideal reality which exists in the natural conception of the object. The recognition of this ideal is a problematic for artists. The person, argues Reynolds, who has viewed as many examples of an object as possible is the one most able to discern the degree to which it coincides with the ideal.

“Thus it is from a reiterated experience, and a close comparison of the objects in Nature, that an artist becomes possessed of the idea of that central form, if I may so express it, from which every deviation is deformity.”

The accumulated observation of the particular was therefore the basis upon which Reynolds initially approached the perception of beauty : “To distinguish beauty, then, implies the having seen many individuals of that species.”

“..the power of discovering what is deformed in Nature, or, in other words, what is particular and uncommon, can be acquired only by experience; and the whole beauty and grandeur of art consists, in my opinion, in being able to get above all singular forms, local customs, particularities and details of every kind.”

1772 The Fifth Discourse
“If you mean to preserve the most perfect beauty in its most perfect state, you cannot express the passions, all of which produce distortion and deformity, more or less, in the most beautiful faces.”

“We need not be mortified or discouraged at not being able to execute the conceptions of a romantic imagination. Art has its boundaries, though imagination has none.”

Marginalia
“Our minds should be habituated to the contemplation of excellence.” Reynolds
“Reynolds thinks that Man Learns all that he knows. I say on the Contrary that Man Brings All that he has or can have Into the world with him.” William Blake

Compare and Contrast
Sir Joshua Reynolds The Ladies Waldegrave1780
Henry Fuseli The Nightmare exhibited 1782

Henry Fuseli 1741-1825
1799: Professor of Painting at Royal Academy
1804: Keeper of the Academy
"Damn Nature! she always puts me out!"

“Talent thinks, genius sees.” William Blake
“This man was hired to depress Art.” William Blake on Reynolds
“the Poetic Genius is the True Man!” William Blake.

Nature
Jean Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality in 1750.
Joseph Wright of Derby, Sir Brooke Boothby, 1781 (Tate)
Edited and translated into English by Brooke Boothby .
Here in an obviously stage managed portrait. In his hand is Confessions, Rousseau’s autobiography.

Rousseau’s fundamental idea was that the contemplation of nature could be illuminating and liberating.
By encouraging us to experience feelings internally nature might lead us to truth.

Hitherto emotion had been mistrusted, seen as anti-philosophical. In the pre-Rouseau world the seeker after truth was cold and calculating.

Thereafter the Man of Feeling (the name of a novel by the Scottish writer Henry Mackenzie pub 1771) could use emotion to work out what was virtuous in the world.

Rousseau believed the man was fallen from a state of nature. This original state represented the core of truth which the philosophical contemplation of feeling and nature was calculated to revive.
For Rousseau this original state was essentially moral, stable and good.

For Rousseau natural man was good and lived in a harmonious and beneficial commune with the world and all the creatures in it.
The men (and ladies) of feeling were also interested in early societies; antiquity promised closeness to nature.

Some of the late 18th century preoccupations now seem elaborate, overwrought and misguided; the cult of Ossian for instance. The supposed Northern bard was largely a fiction created (1762-3) by its “translator” James MacPherson.

“Had I been a painter I never would have copied the works of “Old Masters”…. I would have gone to nature for all my patterns, for she exhibits an endless variety – not possible to be surpassed and scarcely ever to be equalled….. in art nothing is worth looking at but such productions as have been faithfully copied from nature.” Thomas Bewick, Memoir written 1823.

Read
extracts from Reynolds and Hogarth in Art and Its Histories: a Reader,ed Edwards S. (1999) Yale University Press

Next week: Art skills for the working man: industry and the Government art scheme (South Kensington, John Ruskin) 27th October.

John George Brown 1831-1913

2009-10-19T13:09:00.004+01:00

Most popular American artist? The reputation of the Bootblack Raphael was sky-high in his own lifetime. It has dipped considerably since.
“ We have no more popular artist in America than J.G. Brown. He is more certain of his audience, and more direct in his appeal to it than any other.” 1882 Harper’s Weekly.

“I stand today where I did forty years ago. I believe in the people and consider it enough for one man’s life work to interpret what the people like.” JGB in New York Times 1904

In the late twentieth century a retrospective set out to remind America of its past master. Country Paths and City Sidewalks: The Art of J. G. Brown Exhibition at George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, Springfield, Massachusetts. 1989. Catalogue by Martha J Hoppin. 50 works on show.

The New York Times was unimpressed:
“In Brown's formulaic and insipid work, no one is a threat; hardly anyone is even real.”
“He is one of the leaders of what might be called the ''Aw, Shucks'' School of American art.” New York Times Review By MICHAEL BRENSON, Friday, September 1, 1989

Four years later he was still being called a “Lesser known” and damned with faint praise.
"It remains only to say that Brown, one of several lesser knowns in the show, proves himself a competent painter in it and in his study of a young woman reclining on sand dunes." New York Times, ART; The Good Life as Led a Century Ago VIVIEN RAYNOR, Sunday, May 9, 1993

Early Years
Brown was born near Durham on 11 Nov 1831. No further detail seems to be recorded of his family background.
At 14 he left school and started working in the glass industry in Newcastle. Glass was one of the trades identified early on by William Bell Scott as likely to provide boys for his evening drawing classes at the newly formed Newcastle School of Design. Scott came to Newcastle in 1841 to run a design school backed by local charity and a government grant. The school was still in its early un-reformed state when Brown attended classes. Later it would become part of the Government Art School system run from South Kensington. In the 1840s the master, Bell Scott, still had a great deal of independence. However he was committed to teaching the careful copying and drawing which would be useful to the boys in their trade. Fellow students at the time Brown attended included the later President of the Bewick Club, Henry Hetherington Emmerson.

The Government schools at that time were intended to teach art skills to those working in industry. Bell Scott was criticised for running a class for genteel lady art lovers. Indeed in the years (1845-52) in which JGB attended classes the running of the school was frequently criticised by its central government sponsors, partly in the shape of the inspector, artist William Dyce.
In the year 1844-5 the official report recorded that there were 9 boys under 15 attending classes. 18 boys were between 15 and 20 and 4 over 20. So the school was small. Bell Scott later stated that he believed in giving his pupil’s individual attention and encouraging them to practice their exercises out of school. There is no reason to suppose that he treated young JGB differently.

The glass trade was the largest art-related trade in Newcastle at the time. However the official report for 1845 was sceptical of the ability of the school to sustain itself in the years to come. More finance was needed and the committee should “induce the pupils to attend with more constancy and permanence; the average duration of attendance being little more than three months.”

By 1850 the school reports made easier reading for Bell Scott. There was still a good cohort of boys from the glass trade. However it was noted that two of the youngest boys (so not by then JGB we can assume) were being deliberately kept to “geometrical drawing” under the impression that if they learnt too much they would be “set above their business”. The glass trade in Newcastle at that time had become resistant to change and this would eventually be its downfall. Indeed the government school report stated as much in 1850: the trade was pre-dominantly one in which the glass of the middle ages was reproduced complete with fake dust.

Many other trades were by this time represented in the classes and the committee reported that attendance was improving: boys were staying longer and attending more regularly. In 1849 they moved premises: from the Academy of Arts building Blackett Street to the rooms previously occupied by the Society of Antiquaries at the Lit and Phil. This was near the Museum of Natural History.

It is worth recording that a key cultural moment during JGB’s time in Newcastle occurred in summer 1848: the polytechnic exhibition. This complex exhibition featured art and science, industry and craft in a series of crammed rooms in the Academy of Arts building and the Music Hall next door. The show pre-figured the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851 and for a time entered local folklore as the polly-nick-sticks show.
By the end of his time with William Bell Scott in Newcastle JGB would have acquired some proficiency in painting. By 1852 a new era was being ushered in. The Newcastle School was one of many which had adopted a hierarchical approach to teaching allowing the better students to acquire advanced art skills. Based on old academy-style teaching the student could advance through the drawing course to a painting course in which he or she worked in colour, from casts and from nature. They might also do some basic “modelling” ie sculpture.
In addition Brown may have attended two lectures given in 1851 by RALPH NICHOLSON WORNUM on ancient and classical art. A crowd of 400 turned up for each of these.
Interestingly the school reports also tell us that the students’ work was continually on display. Members of the public could pay a penny to be shown around the rooms.

Scotland.
Brown moved to Edinburgh in 1852 studying part-time under Scott Lauder at the Trustees Academy while working in the Holyrood Glass Works. The glass works was located in the Canongate: the historic street that by the mid-nineteenth century had developed into an industrialised area with accompanying slum dwellings.
The Trustees Academy however was held in the New Town in one of the key buildings of the Nineteenth century development of Edinburgh: the Royal Institution Building on The Mound.

In 1760 the Board of Trustees for Fisheries, Manufacturers and Improvements in Scotland (est. 1726), established The Trustees Drawing Academy, which became known eventually as The Trustees School of Art. Classes were originally situated at Picardy Place, but moved to The Mound in 1826. It promoted the art of drawing for the use of manufacture. However the Master of the School was always a fine artist, the first being French painter William Delacour and subsequent masters included Alexander Runciman and David Allan. The school would not join the South Kensington scheme until 1858. Hence Scott Lauder was still able to offer an individualistic teaching regime to his pupils when JGB attended.

JGB won second prize in the annual competition for a drawing from the antique ie from the collection of casts. Lauder was innovative in the way he arranged the cast collection, emphasising light and shade rather than dull detail. JGB was still working in the glass trade. He would later relate how his workshop gave him three cheers when he won the prize.
Turning down the chance to stay on at the Trustees and unable to find suitable work in London, he emigrated to the United States of America in 1853, aged 22.

New York
In New York he continued as he had hoped in Edinburgh and London: working in the glass trade, trying to improve his art skills and intending to set up as an independent artist. The difference was that in New York he had money in his pocket.
“Why in the first week I earned four and twenty dollars. My board and lodging only ate up seven and my washing – well ran to three dollars and fifty cents. This left me fourteen dollars clear. I had never seen such a sum before!”
He enrolled at Brooklyn’s Graham Art School and listed himself in the Brooklyn trade directory as a portrait painter.

Within a year he was married to the company owner’s daughter. A short spell of independence was halted by his father-in-law’s death and the collapse of the company – a yellow fever epidemic followed by a credit crunch-style economic crisis. Instead of returning to jobbing glass work JGB signed up for classes at the National Academy of Design and began to send work to the large open exhibitions. From this point onwards he regularly showed with the Brooklyn Art Association and the National Academy of Design. He also began a long friendship with the wood engraver Samuel P Avery. Avery would become a full time gallerist in the 1860s. When JGB first knew him he was running “Art gatherings” in his Brooklyn home. JGB’s new connections led him in 1860 to move to a studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building, New York. He stayed there 53 years becoming its longest running tenant.

The building was specially designed for art use. In the heart of Manhattan at 51 West 10th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues it was partly responsible for establishing Greenwich Village as an art community. Alas it no longer exists, pulled down in 1956. (Slide includes present day view, 1997 Washington University catalogue and Worthington Whittredge in His Tenth Street Studio, Emanuel Leutze, 1865)
JGB lived at first in Brooklyn, then New Jersey and finally moved to New York in 1869.

Brown’s Art
Initially his painting resembled English and Scottish genre art.
Compare Harvey and Lees from National Gallery of Scotland to this Curling in Central Park scene.
Compare also MacTaggart to the child paintings of 1860s
Indeed in this painting of 1867, the young artist studies a still life in front of a copy of the Blind Fiddler by Wilkie.
Compare his female-in-the-woods figure painting (Thus Perish the memory of our Love) with works by Millais and by Hughes.
Compare also the Music Lesson with Hunt’s Awakening Conscience.
Indeed through his early membership in the American Watercolor Society (founded in New York City in 1866), Brown was associated with the American pre-Raphaelite movement. In particular he knew and collaborated with Charles Herbert Moore.
We know that Brown in turn had followers among his fellow New York artists amongst whom he was not alone in his child, rural and genre scenes: compare his Picnic Party in the Woods with Samuel Carr’s Pic-Nic Prospect Park, Brooklyn
Compare also Henry Mosler’s umbrella painting with JGB’s parasol in the same year.

Among the tenants in the Tenth Street Studio building were Eastman Johnson and Winslow Homer.
Whilst both these artists acknowledge the events of the Civil War in their work, war and social upheaval rarely feature in JGB’s output.
Examples are The Young Recruits and The Deerhunter in the woods

In the 1860s and 70s both Johnson and Homer shared a subject matter with Brown. Later they would diverge considerably from the path Brown would follow.

That this was the case depended partly on the three artists responses to travel to Europe. Brown crossed the Atlantic in the summer of 1870 accompanied by a New York art dealer. They visited “Scotland and England” were most impressed by Turner and then set off for France. Their stay however was cut short by the advancing Prussians (in July 1870 one assumes).

According to Martha Hoppin he may have crossed the Atlantic on one other occasion in 1885. We do not know if in 1870 or 1885 JGB came near home or family. Hoppin states that the visits had no effect on his art. Indeed he would advise young Americans to go abroad to complete their training after they had developed their individual style at home. He felt though the American should always return to paint American subject matter.
Winslow Homer of course travelled to Europe, to Cullercoats in 1881 surely at Brown’s recommendation. He would return to paint American subject matter indeed the time spent in the North East was a water-shed in his career.

Brown’s later work was dominated by paintings of street children, mainly boys. Often the children act out little dramas. Frequently there is a studied cuteness which today’s viewers may find cloying. Indeed as witnesses to social conditions the paintings seem rose-tinted to say the least. The end of the nineteenth century sees social documentary photography highlight the plight of the urban poor as never before. New York in particular was the subject of the work of Jacob Riis (1849 - 1914) and his follower Lewis Hine (1874 – 1940).

However Brown would have 20th century followers of a sort: New York was home to the Ash Can School in the early years of the century. Their subject was frequently urban and lower-class although their primary inspiration was French, not English, painting.

In a late interview Brown said:
“When J.G. Brown is no more, those who come after me will be rummaging about this studio and they will discover scores of canvases which will show, I hope, that I was not a painter of one idea.”

Perhaps there were just too many boot boys stacked away for that to be possible.

References
J.G. Brown, The Bootblack Raphael, Pierce Rice, American Art and Antiques, 1979 pp90-97;
Country paths and City Side walks: The Art of J.G. Brown, Martha Hoppin, George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, Springfield , Massachusetts, 1989.
The development of the glass industry on the rivers Tyne and Wear, 1700-1900 Authors: Ross, Catherine Mary Issue Date: 1982 Publisher: Newcastle University http://hdl.handle.net/10443/192
Page 1 of 12

Lecture delivered Monday 19th October, Newcastle Arts Centre, Westgate Road. Part of the Visions strand of the Explore Membership Scheme of the North East Centre for Lifelong Learning.

Beginnings: Art, genius and starting out.

2009-10-14T09:58:00.001+01:00

Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Giorgio Vasari, pub 1550 and ‘68.
• Biographies of artists in chronological order, highlights development of their work and the creation of a canon of significant art works.

Art
• Vasari introduces key concepts
• Art as primarily an aesthetic concern
• The artist as a special kind of genius
• Art’s preoccupation with imitating the natural world.
• The progressive nature of art through the ages.

Michelangelo Buonarrotti 1475-1564.
• Vasari saw him as representing a pinnacle of artistic genius.
• Depressive and argumentative, he was seen as capable of great feats of creative energy.
• Nothing, it was said, would stop him from realising his god-like vision.
• In particular the mere everyday tasks of washing and eating were insignificant when art was at stake hence the tale of Michelangelo’s socks.

Ascanio Condivi
• Was commissioned by Michelangelo to write an official biography, to correct Vasari’s inaccuracies.
• Or rather to strengthen the Michelangelo-as-God myth by denying Michelangelo’s past as a trainee in the workshop of Ghirlandaio.
Vasari’s second edition 1568
• Included evidence to support his earlier claims: the contract of apprenticeship.
• Vasari however repeats his version of the story: Michelangelo’s genius was discovered by chance in early childhood and that once in the workshop he soon surpassed his master in skill and artistry.

Pliny
• This narrative theme stretches back to the earliest descriptions of artist lives found in the works of Pliny the Elder.
• A study has been made by Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz
• Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the artist: An Historical Experiment (Yale University Press 1979)

Ernst Kris, 1900-57
1922 completed his PhD and appointed assistant at Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum.
1927 marries and with his wife begins to study and practice psychoanalysis.
1929 publishes two volume work on gem carving: Meister und Meisterwerke der Steinschneidekunst in der Italienischen Renaissance.
1930-8 lectures at Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute while still working at museum. A close associate of Freud, he edited Imago magazine.
Kris, E., & Kurz, O. (1934). Die Legende vom Künstler: Ein historischer Versuch. Wien: Krystall Verlag. (Translated by Alastair Laing and revised by Lottie M. Newman. Additions to the original text were made by Otto Kurz). Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
1938 flees Vienna, to London.
Works for BBC analysing Nazi broadcasts. Moves to Canada and USA with similar role.
Post-war lives and lectures in New York.

Otto Kurz 1908-75
From 1927 studied art history in Vienna. While still a student, he was attacked by Nazis who took advantage of the police immunity in the university, bludgeoning Kurz, a Jew, in the middle of the university library. Worked for a time in Hamburg at the private Warburg Library. When the Warburg moved to London, Kurz was invited to emigrate to England as well.
He was Librarian at the Warburg Institute, 1944-1965
Later Professor of the History of Classical Tradition with special reference to the Near East, University of London, 1965-1975.

Shepherd Boy artists
• Artist as boy discovered in field by passer-bye who recognises wonderful talent in his sketches.
• Eg Cimabue spots Giotto drawing animals in sand while tending his father’s flock.
Also Eg Sienese nobleman discovers Beccafumi drawing in sand while tending flock….
Also Sansovino
And Andrea del Castagno…

Tricking the eye
• Kris and Kurz identified another major set of stories or narrative formula.
• In these we are left in no doubt of the artist’s tremendous powers. Typically the artist executes a work or alters a work in such a way as to trick the eye: a painted spider being mistaken for a real one for instance.

Anecdotes
• The shepherd story starts with Giotto, the realism story with the competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasios told by Pliny.
• Are Anecdotes just jokes? K and K see it as a link to the “realms of myth and saga from which it carries a wealth of imaginative material into recorded history”.
• So artists, even the moderns, are tied to the god and hero filled world before the dawn of history.

Academies
• Florence: Cosimo I de' Medici, 1563, Accademia e Compagnia delle Arti del Disegno
• Compagnia: any artist in Tuscany could join
• Accademia: the elite artists with a courtly role.
• Students learnt "arti del disegno" with lectures on anatomy and geometry as well as practical classes.

Rome and Bologna
• The Accademia di San Luca, Rome 1570s
• 1582 Annibale Carracci, Academy of Desiderosi, Bologna.

France
• Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture founded in France in 1648,
• Modelled on Academy of St Luke, the French adopted term “arti del disegno."
• Members were "gentlemen practicing a liberal art" ie not craftsmen.
• Re-organised under Louis XIV 1661. Becomes an instrument of courtly control of French culture and cultural production.

Roman Holiday, the Grand Tour.
• Paris and then overland through Switzerland to Turin, Milan, Florence and then to Rome.
• Or via Lyons to Nice by sea then by boat to Genoa and to Livorno (which the British still call Leghorn) and south to Naples (nearby Vesuvius, Herculaneum [from 1738], Pompeii [from 1748] and Paestum)
• Addison’s guidebook (Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, 1705):
• “There is certainly no place in the world where a man may travel with greater pleasure and advantage then in Italy.”
• “it abounds with cabinets of curiosities and vast collections of all kinds of classical antiquities.”

Culture Dust
• Those who travelled were generally around twenty having completed their education at home.
• Tourists would stay in Rome for a period somewhere between a 6 weeks and a year. Greatness and refinement would literally rub off on you if you spent time in this most ideal of locations.
• “The man [there were women on the Tour as well] who occupies himself solely in the study of Antiquities and the fine arts, or he who has no other ties in life, should live at Rome. The very stone that he treads on will speak to him; the dust blown by the wind around him will be decomposed particles of some great human being.”
• De Chatueabriand 1803

Apollo Belvidere
• Central to the experience of Rome was a visit to the huge Vatican museum. This was of vital importance in framing the European response to classicism for the galleries contained the finest examples of Roman and Greek antiquities. It came to be understood throughout Western Europe that it was Greek art which represented the purer and better rendition of truth.
• Winkellmann, the German writer and art historian described Greece as the source of good taste in the arts. In 1764 he published his Geschichte der Kunst des Altherums (History of Ancient Art). He highlighted the Apollo Belvidere.
• It is from this time that the use of casts and the study of the nude by artists became a formalised part of the training of the artist.

Pre- Royal Academy
• Hogarth: St. Martin’s Lane Academy began 1735, an artist’s club based in the Slaughters Coffee House and offering Life Classes in nearby studio.
• Glasgow: Robert Foulis, a publisher and collector, established a school of art and design at the University in 1753. It became known as the Foulis Academy.
• Edinburgh: 1760, Trustees Drawing Academy of Edinburgh established by the Board of Trustees for Fisheries, Manufactures and Improvements in Scotland under powers in an Act of Parliament 1727.

Royal Academy
• Founded 1768. The Royal Academy was so-called because it was enacted by a document signed by Geo III . It therefore took on the nature of a state institution, however it was actually based upon the private association of artists which had been organised some 8 years previously to form what was called the Society of Arts.
• In 1761 they had hired rooms and held an exhibition, being granted a Royal Charter in 1765. However it was felt that the Society was of limited use because it was not exclusive, anyone could join.
• The 1768 charter from GEO III was based on the feeling that a limited number of artists, the elite in the realm, should control the institution guarding against outside intervention and meddling.

Angelica Kauffmann 1741-1807
An associate of Gavin Hamilton and Winckellmann, Kauffmann was a neo-classical painter, painting large scale and ambitious history paintings at a time when such works were considered the most important and difficult which a painter could execute. Reynolds who encouraged aristocratic patronage of her work and promoted her as an academician championed Kauffmann.

Mary Moser 1744-1819
A flower painter, she too was an RA in 1771. Her father, George, was Keeper of the Royal Academy. Her intricate paintings had been admired and bought by royalty and she had been long recognised as a prodigy winning prizes as young as 14.

• The women were unable to attend life classes or the regular meetings of the Academy. But they did take part in judging medals and scholarships.
• The next woman Associate member of the RA was not elected until 1922 and no full woman member was elected until 1936.

Reading
Johnson G.A. (2005) Renaissance Art A Very Short Introduction, Oxford.
Vasari G Lives of the Artists, Penguin Classics.
Kris E. and Kurz O., Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the artist: An Historical Experiment (Yale University Press 1979)
Craske M (1997) Art in Europe 1700-1830, Oxford History of Art.
Vaughan W. (1978) Romantic Art, Thames and Hudson
Chadwick, W (2007 4th ed) Women Art and Society, Thames and Hudson, World of Art.

Art Beginnings: Apprentices, the Academy, Art School, and the Self-taught.

2009-10-11T12:48:00.000+01:00

We will examine the history of artist beginnings. We start with the Eighteenth century art academy and follow developments to the art school of today. Artists include Reynolds, Blake, Ruskin, Matisse, Boccioni, Klee and Beuys.

Art in the pre-modern period was learnt as a special craft passed from master to apprentice. In the modern period art academies and art schools developed as part of the professionalization of the arts. Today art schools offer a baffling diversity of approaches and experiences. Despite the development of institutions in which art is studied and trained, ideas have long persisted which deny art’s capacity to be taught. Alongside these the genius or special gifts of the artist are often seen as all important. The self-taught or visionary artist continues to be highly valued within the contemporary art world despite the wide-spread teaching of art.

The topics which we will cover in this roughly chronological survey of art beginnings are:

1 The Academies and the myths of the artist. 13th October.

2 Romantic inspirations: rejection of the Academy and the pursuit of nature. 20th October.

3 Art skills for the working man: industry and the Government art scheme (South Kensington, John Ruskin) 27th October.

4 Paris and bohemian rebellion: the French ateliers and radical art (Manet, Monet, Matisse) 10th November.

5 Early 20th C modernists: rejection of the academic (Futurists, Expressionists, Dadaists); the visionary and self-taught (Rousseau, Dubuffet, Bacon) 17th November.

6 Bauhaus: new art principles for a new world 24th November.

7 Everyone is an artist Sixties sit-ins: radical ideas and the old art schools (Pasmore, Beuys) 1st December.

Begins Tuesday 13 Oct 18:30
E20091VI000108 Art Beginnings: Apprentices, the Academy, Art Schools
7 x 1.5 hour sessions
Ridley Building 2
Weekly
Booking Required

part of Explore, North-East Centre for Lifelong Learning.

Beginnings

2009-10-05T13:46:00.001+01:00

Apprentices
Thomas Bewick and his apprentices

Luke Clennell and Robert Johnson.

The stories of the apprentice boys who worked in the Bewick workshop feature the ill, the ungrateful, the rogueish, seducers, depressives, and the unlucky. It is tempting to wallow in the melodrama of it all. Indeed some who have told these tales were attracted to them for that very reason.

William Bell Scott for instance, a Victorian witness to the poetry and art world of the North East and a man frequently attracted to tales of heroic failure, revelled in the high drama and emotion of the story of Luke Clennell when he met his son, also called Luke Clennell.

“Over his charming little corner fireplace there hung a water-colour portrait of the Duke of Wellington, evidently from the life. In this I observed some points of great exactness of observation, particularly the continued attachment of the lobe of the ear to the jaw, which distinguished that organ on the head of the Iron Duke. Rising to examine this in an interval of the incessant talk and recitation, I saw the drawing had been violently torn in two and mended again. In an impulse of curiosity I asked him how that had come about. At once a dark cloud came down over his eyes ; he covered his face with both hands, and for a few moments was evidently moved profoundly, occupied, it might be, as indeed he was, in prayer. I learned afterwards that such was his habit when reminded of his father's affliction. Hesitating how best to act or speak so as to show my sympathy, or to appear not to observe his agony, I was relieved by his recovering himself at once ; and he then told me that the drawing was one of the studies for the last picture his father was engaged upon, "The Assembly of Plenipotentiaries after the Peace," and that in a moment of failing reason he tore up this and other preliminary studies. " My dear friend, innocently and unknowingly, you have touched the central sore in my life ; but it is over."

(WBS meets Luke Clennell junior, Autobiographical Notes )

Luke Clennell (1781-1840) was born 8th April at Ulgham.
Clennell’s apprenticeship ran from his sixteenth birthday in 1797 until 1804.
According to fellow apprentice Edward Willis, Luke was ‘rather little, somewhat in-kneed, and having a peculiar look in his eyes’.

After his apprenticeship he worked for a short time in Newcastle then moved to London, where he had some success. He married Elisabeth Warren, daughter of engraver Charles Warren and they had three children. He illustrated Sir Walter Scott’s The Borders Antiquities of England and Scotland (1814-1817) producing 68 out of the 76 engraving. He began to gain a reputation as a watercolourist and oil painter encouraged by friendly support of the history painter Benjamin West.
Dashing hunting and military scenes were a favourite.

In 1814 he was commissioned to paint a giant work The Banquet of the Allied Sovereigns.
Chasing all the portraits was said to be too much for him. Given the way in which he executed the giant task of illustrating Border castles for Scott’s Antiquities, it is probable that Clennell had an obsessive and perfectionist streak.

Within three years melancholia laid him low - one account mentions “uncontrollable insanity”. He was admitted to a London asylum. His wife Elisabeth died in 1817. Luke spent time in Salisbury Asylum where he received some support from the Artists Fund. He returned to the north east ten years later in 1827 to live on the Quayside with his brother but he was never able to revive his career and in 1831 he landed in Newcastle Asylum.

He cut a tragic figure when the historian of engraving William Chatto described his situation in a melodramatic and contradictory passage:

“Poor Clennell, though dead to the world, is still living in a lunatic asylum in Newcastle, where though all recollection of his former self be lost, he still retains his fondness for drawing and sketches and sketches those object which he has an opportunity of observing; such as the labourers he sees riddling the walks, and the peacocks, in the garden; the keeper who locks him up; the tomcat which disturbs his rest at night, and the bird which sings to him in the morning.”

Clennell died in 1840 aged only 59.

He was one of the most accomplished of all the Bewick apprentices. A characteristic of his style is the sweeping, large–leaved foliage in the foreground of many of his vignettes.
Several of the tailpieces in British Birds, II are his:

Today there are art courses and art schools all over this region and the country. The choice is endless for those wishing to develop their creativity or get some sort of art training.
There were few opportunities to learn to be an artist in 18th Century England. Those with a high income and grand social status might employ a drawing master. Those of a lowly status might think of entering a trade. Apprenticeships were the route to do so.

Thomas Bewick has left us an account of his own childhood and the circumstances of his finding a “master”. It is in Chapter 4 of his Memoir.

“Being now nearly fourteen years of age & a stout boy, it was thought time to set me off, and my father & Mother had long been planning & consulting what business it would be best to put me to, in which they were greatly at a loss what to fix upon – Any place where I could see pictures, or where I thought I could have an opportunity of drawing them, was such only as I could think of…” [p.35]

They apply to a bookseller initially but hear reports of his bad character and take it no further.
Bewick godmother, Mrs Simons at Bywell (widow of the vicar Robert Simon [s?]) intervened extolling the boy’s virtues to William and Ralph Bielby.
The Bielbys, Mrs Simon her daughter and Ralph’s daughter arrived at Cherryburn one summer afternoon and the deal was done.
£20 left by Thomas’s grandmother would be the apprentice fee.
Thomas preferred Ralph who would be the master.
The arrangement would start on 1st October 1767.

In old age (70) Bewick had mixed memories of his own time as master who trained apprentices.

“You know a part of those I met with in the course of my business, in which my time was mis-spent – and also the waste of it bestow’d upon useless & wicked pupils – I know you wish me to give you a history and description of such – but to do so, would be an irksome task & I cannot now be troubled to think about it…” [p.195]

Elsewhere in a private letter he wrote: “I find it expected that I will give some account of my pupils – this I feel to be an unpleasant task, as some of them were beneath contempt as either men or Artists….”

Perhaps he had in mind Henry Hole, an apprentice from 1794-1801, for whom Bewick had to make bail to secure his release from prison when accused of being the father of a child out of wedlock,

Looking at this scene by the late Victorian painter John Eyre you would assume that Bewick and his apprentices had an idyllic existence.
Eyre flourished from 1877-1914.
The watercolour, now owned by the Laing, was shown to some acclaim at the Royal Society of British Artists in 1896 and was later engraved for the Illustrated London News.

Eyre was shown the workshop room in St Nicholas’s Churchyard and did a small sketch. The rest (the stuffed birds, the game, the rifle, the litter of sketches) is imaginary.

In the Memoir Bewick admits that he had originally intended to work alone, with no apprentice to bother him:

“I had formed a plan of working alone without any assistance from Apprentices, or of being interrupted by anyone – and I am not certain at this day whether I would not have been happier in doing so than in the way I was led to pursue – I had often in my lonely walks, debated this business over in my mind, but whether it would have been better or worse, I can now only conjecture – I tried the one plan and not the other – perhaps each way might have had advantages and disadvantages – I would not have experienced the envy and ingratitutude of some of my pupils, neither should I on the contrary have felt the pride & the pleasure I derived from so many of them having received medals or premiums for the Encouragement of Arts - & also of their taking the lead, as Engravers on Wood in the Metropolis.” [p.79]

When things were bad with apprentices they could be very bad indeed:
Charles Hickson, apprenticed 18 April 1795, absconded in February 1800. Bewick does not name him in the Memoir but he relates the story as a cautionary tale:
“being obliged to take one of the most impudent – malignant & worst apprentices, we ever had, before the Magistrates” The magistrate thought that the apprentice had fallen into bad company.

The rascally Hickson gets little invective aimed at him compared with the long monologue of disgust which Bewick musters against an un-named apprentice who had the temerity to ask for a share of money earned from some of his workshop efforts. We know this from other sources to be Robert Johnson.

Johnson appears twice in the Memoir: the first time anonymously on page 79 as the subject of Bewick’s disappointment but is named and celebrated later (page 199) for his exceptional skill.
Born in 1771, he was in the workshop longer than most between 1784 and 1794.

Bewick had sold watercolours by Johnson to the Earl of Bute for the princely sum of £30. Johnson then at the end of his apprenticeship demanded that the money should be his. Bewick argued that the productions of the apprentice belonged to the master. The apprentice asserting his independence as an artist argued before a jury that the productions of drawings and watercolours was not a part of his training and as such did not belong to the master.

Bewick was still fuming nearly thirty years later when he makes his Memoir account. Indignation and disappointment ring from the account:

“It is painful to me to dwell on a subject of this kind, which indeed I might spin out to a great length with much additional matter, but it may be sufficient to observe that I have taken a Boy & behaved to him uniformly with the kindness of a Father or a Brother & have watched with every pains in my power to instruct him-been liberal to him in pecuniary matters-employed the best physician to attend him when he was unwell-let him want for no thing-paid him his wages besides, whether at work or not at work, & in this my partner con¬tributed his share,-and along with myself used every endeavour in our power to advance him in the world, & when all this was done, he shewed not a particle of gratitude, but observed that any "cart-man would take care of his Horse", & then put himself under the guidance & directions of a Company or confedracy of ill disposed envious & malignant persons, who after having laboured to poison the ears of the public & of the Jury-to bring us to trial, for the pay for work done without the leave of his masters, while he was our apprentice! & the business was so managed that a verdict was given against us-I did not fail to attack this Jury individually & to send the confiderates a message, that there was not a man among them who was not a coward & a scoundrel.”

Although Bewick comes across in an unsympathetic light here, in general he is thought to have behaved well to apprentices. That he did so was in part due to his own experience learning his trade. Indeed the good character of boys was something that prayed on his mind not least because his own character and reputation for wild behaviour had nearly stopped him from taking up Bielby’s offer of apprenticeship.

At the point in Newcastle when the young Thomas was to be handed over to his new master Ralph hesitated. He had heard Thomas could be trouble. His old teacher and a family friend attested that Thomas was never “saucy or sulky, nor in the least indulging in anything like revenge” {p38] and the deal was done.

At first Bewick lodged with the Bielby family. (in their house at the Town wall) Now Platform One of the railway station.

Bewick tells a tale of youthful indiscretion on his part: taunted by three “low blackguard ‘prentice lads form the Close” he leveled one with a punch before being set upon by the others. From that Sunday onwards Ralph Bielby required TB to attend two church services, morning and afternoon and read the Bible “or some other good book” in the evening.

Bewick does not tell us when he moved out of the Bielby household and began to cater for himself on 4/6 afterwards 5/-. He lived with Aunt Blackett on Pudding Chare. She had cows on the Moor and they drank plenty of milk. She however disliked noise, especially whistling and so the young lad took himself to lodge at ned Hatfield’s. Around this time Bewick developed bookish habits: always reading and working at a “low bench.” He became sickly. Bielby was clearly concerned and called the doctor. Nathaniel Bailes took a liking to Bewick and lectured Bielby on the lack of freedom and long hours the apprentice lad was subject to

“He urged upon me the necessity of temperance and exercise – I then begun to act upon this advise – and to live as he directed, both as to diet and exercise – I had read Lewis Cornaro and other Books which treated of temperance & I greatly valued the advise in the Spectator, which strongly recommended all people to have their days of abstinence, in this thro’ life, I have experienced he uncommon benefits derived from occasionally pursuing that plan – for this always kept the stomach in proper tone…”

He would go to the Hog’s Tavern at Elswick for milk and bread. Run by Goody Coxon the milk was sour and the bread “hot brown cakes.”

But what of the Robert Johnson dispute?
Was Bewick right to be so irked?
Did Johnson have a case?
Did Johnson enjoy a future after taking on his ex-master?
We see echoes of Bewick’s own apprenticeship in the story of Robert Johnson (1771-1796).
He seems to have started in the workshop in 1784, Aged only 13 he was too young to be apprenticed. (14 was the usual age)
Bewick tells us in the Memoir that he lavished attention on the boy. His mother had been a great family favourite. She had intended Thomas to be Robert’s godfather but the 17 year old Bewick was too bashful and Bewick senior stood in his place.
It became part of family legend that young Robert would be apprenticed to Thomas.
“He looked up to me as a kind of deity…” and had drawn pictures from an early age. Keen on drawing and copper–engraving. Did he draw better than Bewick? Chatto certainly thought so.
The boy was sickly and would be sent to work in the open air by Bewick, following Cornaro principles: “he was of so delicate a constitution, that he could not bear confinement, we for that reason set him to work to make sketches & views, where he had both air and exercise.”
Hence by thirteen he could take his place in the workshop living under the “fostering care” of Bewick, then a 30 y old single man living with his sister Ann.
Bewick felt the boy needed hardening and would give him no medicine. Ann felt they would be open to an accusation of mistreating him.
Boys should exercise with dumb bells half and hour or so before bed, Bewick tells us.
He applied Cornaro to Johnson’s diet:
“I began by cutting off for him almost everything he had given him to eat – the animal food with which I helped his plate at dinner, did not exceed in bulk, the size of my three fingers, to this was added, a portion of vegetables – for breakfast and supper he got a pint of milk, with leavened rye bread, to which last article I did not prevent him form helping himself…”
Because or despite Bewick’s dietary regime the boy suddenly began to thrive.
In the workshop apprentice Johnson would be given drawings or designs to copy. Complete accuracy was expected. Bewick describes how he instilled this: if the drawing failed he would put it away, perhaps he would say Oh fie. Otherwise silent disapproval was the order of the day.
Johnson was an excellent colourist and Bewick in the Memoir was very appreciative of his water-colour abilities.
He also praises his ability to draw landscape, trees and figures.
He trained him by encouraging him to draw actual trees, ie not simply to copy artistic styles or predecessors. He recounts sending him to Adonis Grove to draw a particularly memorable tree. [a garden in the suburb of Westgate]
Four years into the apprenticeship the lad became entitled to wages.
Father and mother moved to Newcastle and had the boy move in with them. Bewick is said to have got the father job as the keeper of a poor house. Robert’s health deteriorated from this point on Bewick tells us. He had a year off before finishing his apprenticeship late. Then followed the acrimony of the court case.
Johnson had a year working for himself, taking up oil painting. He received a commission from the Earl of Breadalbane at Kenmore in Scotland. Bewick tells us he became ill and died there aged only 26.
Bewick does not explain how young Johnson happened to be in Scotland.
A Perth bookseller had commissioned a set of engravings for their forthcoming “Gallery of Scottish Portraits.
Johnson was charged with copying 19 works by George Jameson (1586-1644)
He had completed 15 when he became ill. Seized with a fever he was thought by the villagers to be mad. Result his early death was hastened by his being restrained by ropes and beaten. A doctor found him in a poor state but too late.
The portraits were published posthoumously

Pinkerton John "THE SCOTTISH GALLERY; Or, Portraits of Eminent Persons of Scotland."

Bewick was horrified to read that the author claimed that Johnson had drawn the illustrations to Quadrupeds, Bewick first published work of 1790.
“however trivial this may appear to you- it does not by any means appear so to me, & my friends – it is making me look ridiculous (or worse) in the eyes of them & the Public, & must continue to do so, until it is contradicted & they are informed of the truth.”
Bewick felt that an “informant” [the family still bearing a grudge perhaps] had malicious motives and was trying to ruin his good name.
We can leave the final verdict to the Bewick scholar Iain Bain. The poem’s of Burns published by Davison of Alnwick was titled “engravings on wood by Mr Bewick”. However we know that the principal illustrations were drawn on wood by artist john Thurston, they were engraved by Henry White, then an apprentice. The tailpieces were the work of White and other apprentices Nicholson and Willis.

“But they were of the workshop and nothing would have gone out without the check and guidance of the proprietor. Whatever may have been said by Bewick’s detractors and those who attempted to diminish his reputation as an engraver, it is remarkable that, when independent, none of his pupils – with the possible exception of Clennell – came anywhere near to approaching his achievement, nor indeed did they match him in the distinction of character so displayed in his writing.”

Reading
There is a page of examples and some basic introductory information on the Bewick Society website.
A good account of Luke Clennell was given last year at the Shipley Art Gallery’s exhibition 18th-Century BLUES Exploring the melancholy mind. You can find the accompanying pamphlet by clicking here.

You can read about the Apprentices in Jenny Uglow’s Nature’s Engraver (2006) which includes a detailed list of Workshop Apprentices on page 407-8.

Iain Bain has much to say about them in his notes to Bewick’s memoir published in 1979 by OUP. See in particular pages 263-5. He also contributed the Oxfrod Dictionary of National Biography article on Clennell. There is also an account of Robert Johnson on ODNB, available online use your local library card to log on.

Nigel Tattersfield has gone to great pains to check and update the details of the apprentices’ lives and careers and much new information will be available next year (2010) when his long awaited 3 volume The Complete Illustrative Work of Thomas Bewick is published.

©Peter J. Quinn 2009

Lecture delivered Monday 5th October, Newcastle Arts Centre, Westgate Road. Part of the Visions strand of the Explore Membership Scheme of the North East Centre for Lifelong Learning.