Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was born in Milan in 1571. He trained with the artist Simone Peterzano and went to Rome in 1592. There, Caravaggio went to work in a studio that undertook papal commissions and became specialised in still-life.
In 1595 Caravaggio acquired for his patron the Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte. The artist worked privately for him until 1599 when the cardinal secured his first public commission. This was to be the decoration of the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesci with scenes from the life of Saint Matthew.
One of these paintings, The Calling of Saint Matthew, - not included in this exhibition – was rejected on the basis that it was too crude and ‘realistic’. From then until the end of his life in 1610 Caravaggio was to produce many more paintings. Several, like the Saint Matthew, were rejected but many more, to use modern terminology, were snapped up by patrons and collectors like Cardinal Scipione Borghese and Prince Vincenzo Giustinani.
On entering the exhibition, Caravaggio: The Final Years, at the National Gallery, it is at once evident that the artist has rejected the ‘plaster saint’ notion of piety. The faces of his saints, Madonnas and apostles are not visions of idealised beauty but drawn from the people he saw in the streets about him. Even the handsome face of his Saint John the Baptist (c.1610) is that of a ‘real’ youth.
However, using real people for his models was not the only way in which Caravaggio spearheaded a new type of art. The subjects in all of his paintings are suffused by an eerie glow that heightens the grizzled hair and furrowed brows, the threadbare clothes and work worn hands.
Caravaggio’s teacher, Simone Peterzano, had been a pupil of Titian, the Venetian colourist. Caravaggio’s early biographer, GP Bellori, noted that the painter showed no interest in bright blues and reds, which he always subdued ‘saying that they were the poison of tones’.
No doubt Caravaggio had absorbed the lessons on the brilliant colouring of the Venetian painters from Peterzano and then interpreted them in a new way and so became the pioneer of tenebrism, a word meaning shadow, a way of depicting light by painting subdued colours glowing in darkness.
Such a technique serves the subjects of paintings like The Supper at Emmaus (1601) and Saint Francis in Meditation (1606) exceedingly well. Only tenebrism could have captured the light of the supernatural glowing at the heart of the earthy subjects.
Influences
Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction by John Gage, Thames and Hudson, 1993.
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To describe Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (1924 – 2005) as a sculptor would be grossly incomplete. During his life he was a pop artist, a teacher, an entrepreneur and an architect. He had the ability to absorb a constant flow of images and abstract ideas, then produce his own creations from the often discarded materials he found around him.
Paolozzi was born in Edinburgh of Italian parents. Although they ran an ice-cream shop where he worked initially, his talent for drawing brought him to the Slade School of Art in 1947. There he gained renown for the collages he produced from magazine photos and other sources. A later spell in Paris brought him into contact with sculptors like Brancusi and Giacometti.
He returned to London where he became a renowned pop artist. In the 1970’s he moved to West Germany where he taught first in Cologne and later became professor of sculpture at the Munich Academy. There he worked until he retired in 1994. But he had only retired from teaching. He began to write his autobiography and continued to take commissions for public sculpture.
His output has been so prolific that defining his works in terms of importance isn’t really possible. But London dwellers can visit the underground station of Tottenham Court Road, the mosaic walls of which he designed and then continue north to the courtyard of the British Library on Tottenham Court Road, where his statue of Sir Isaac Newton can be seen.
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Frida Kahlo’s life, short as it was, was one that folklore and legends are made of. Her life was punctuated by spells in hospital and her friends and lovers included Trotsky, Tina Modotti, Nelson Rockefeller and Andre Breton. As if this was not enough she married another legend, the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. As a result her work has often been marginalised. However, commentators have begun to recognise her contribution to art; this has recently been highlighted with the increase in the value of her paintings and a major retrospective by Tate Modern planned for summer 2005. Many of Frida’s paintings are internalised self portraits that are symbolic of experiences in her turbulent and troubled life.
Her father, a photographer, was of German origin and her mother was Mexican. Frida was involved in a bus accident that left her for dead, she had broken her spine in three places with several other injuries. The accident left her bed ridden for several months and would blight the rest of her life. During this time, and initially out of desperation to alleviate the boredom, Frida took up painting. Subsequently out of economic necessity Frida was required to supplement the family income; her medical bills were taxing the Kahlo’s resources.
Her first works were in the main portraits of family and friends and include such paintings as Portrait of Adriana (1927) and Portrait of Cristina Kahlo (1928). The paintings, which are reminiscent of European portraiture (Frida had studied art history), depict each of Frida’s sisters. The sisters dominate the foreground and there is a landscape in the back of the composition. The sisters are clearly defined, simplistic and lacking detail except for their dark eyes and dark hair.
There are several versions of how Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo met. One account is that Frida sought Rivera’s advice on her potential as a painter. Rivera pronounced that she did posses talent and he continued to champion her for the rest of his life. From then on Frida moved in Rivera’s world. She became involved in politics -left wing- and was caught up in the Mexican consciousness that was, at that time, experiencing a revival. Mexican traditions, particularly those of the indigenous population and ancient worlds, would impact not only on her wardrobe - Frida abandoned European dress for the traditional dress of the Tehuana - but also impact on her work. In 1929 Frida and Diego were married. Her mother reluctantly accepted this and stated that it was a marriage between an Elephant and a Dove. The relationship was one of contrasts; he was tall, big, voracious and painted large-scale murals, she was small, petite (although at times equally cantankerous) and painted small easel paintings.
In 1930 soon after their marriage Rivera and Frida visited San Francisco where he would begin work on murals commissioned by San Francisco Stock Exchange Luncheon Club and the California School of Fine Arts. Rivera was a workaholic and during this time Frida started to develop a style that would continue for the rest of her life. Luther Burbank (1931), depicts the scientist Luther Burbank. The scientist occupies the centre of the canvas, the bottom halves of his legs have been replaced by a tree trunk, the roots of which feed of a corpse. The scientist appears to be holding branches with oversized leaves. In the background are trees. Some commentators have suggested that this painting represents the mutual dependency of man and nature. By juxtaposing and entwining the tree with the man, Frida has created her own personalised portrait. This imagery that was symbolic of Burbank’s work; Luther Burbank was a plant breeder who created new varieties of flowers and vegetables.
After San Francisco Frida and Diego visited Mexico and stayed for a short period. They moved on to New York where The Museum of Modern Art was staging a one-man show by Rivera. He then went on to Detroit to paint a mural commissioned by Henry Ford. Frida was pregnant but she suffered another miscarriage which left her seriously ill. She had to stay in hospital for three weeks. She has transmuted her pain and suffering via the painting Henry Ford Hospital (1932). The painting depicts a nude Frida lying down on a hospital bed, both saturated with blood. Frida clutches six strings which have on their ends a foetus, a snail, a pelvis, a orchid , a lock, and a woman’s torso. In the background appear those symbols of capitalism, the factories of Detroit. Frida left Detroit for Mexico to look after her mother. On her return to Detroit she painted My Birth (1932), which portrays a bed with a woman giving birth to an oversized baby. A sheet covers the head and upper half of the woman, leaving the viewer attracted to the birth and nothing else. These images are not idealised but brutal, revealing both the pain of miscarriage and birth. Both these works are painted on tin and evoke the traditional methods of Mexican retablos.
Retablos are small religious images painted on tin, wood or other cheap materials. These gained popularity in Mexico during the nineteenth century. Ex voto retablos are described by Elizabeth Netto Calil Zanir and Charles Muir Lovell in their book Art and faith in Mexico as a personal crafted piece that provided a specific narrative of events. Combining text and images, these votive retablos record the tragedy or challenge the devotee faced with the precise petition for divine intercession being invoked and the miraculous outcomes. Often Frida would combine words with her images.
In 1933 Rivera had received a commission by Nelson Rockefeller to paint a mural at the RKA building. However its subject matter, particularly the portrayal of Lenin, proved too risky and Rivera’s commission folded. After many long arguments Frida and Diego returned to Mexico to their new modern house in the San Angel area of Mexico City. Rivera, a notorious womaniser, started an affair with Frida’s sister Christina. This wounded Frida immensely and she moved into a small apartment. The painting A Few Small Nips (1935) reflects this. It shows a naked woman lying on a bed wearing only a shoe, stocking and garter on her right leg. Her body has been mutilated by several stabs carried out by the man standing over her. Blood saturates the bed, floor, man and the red spots extend to the picture frame. At the top of the frame is the words Unos Cuantos Pique Titos (a few small nips). The source for this painting was the printmaker José Guadalupe Posada, Mexico’s much loved and popular artist. He was an illustrator of Mexico’s broadsides. During this time Frida abandoned her native clothing and took up wearing a European style of dress to get back at Diego. Although she would resign herself to Christina’s affair, Frida developed an independent life and started playing Rivera at his own game. But she never rejected him totally. Frida went on sojourns to New York and in early 1937 she and Diego provided a safe haven for the exiled Trotsky. Frida would also have a short-lived affair with him. Trotsky was assassinated in 1940.
Julian Levy staged a solo exhibition of Frida’s work in New York. She was without Diego and, buoyed by the success of her show, started to enjoy the town. Some writers believe this was because of her affair with Nicholas Murray. She reluctantly left New York for Paris where Andre Breton planned an exhibition of her work. When Frida arrived in Paris nothing had been organised. With the help of Marcel Duchamp the exhibition took place but it turned out to be group exhibition concerning Mexican art, rather than a one-woman show. Frida was disgusted and set sail for New York where she would find out that Nicholas Murray had taken another lover.
Frida set sail for Mexico and lived in the Blue House (the family home). In 1939 Diego and Frida divorced. In 1939 Frida painted The Two Fridas (1939) which illustrates two Fridas sitting on a bench, holding hands. One Frida wears traditional Tehuana dress, the other wears the stiff dress of the bourgeoisie. The Tehuana Frida holds a small portrait of Diego from which stems a vein that passes through her heart to the European Frida’s heart, and to her lap. The European Frida clamps the vein but does not prevent blood from escaping and falling on to her dress.
Although Diego and Frida remarried in 1940, it was not a conventional marriage. Frida lived in the Blue House, Diego in San Angel. From the beginning of the 1940s. Frida painted portraits, usually head and shoulder portraits and in1945 began to teach at a small art school. However, Frida’s health deteriorated and every new operation caused other problems. In his book Frida Kahlo: A Spiritual Biography Jack Rummel writes: “Between 1944 and 1954 she wore twenty eight of them (corsets), one of steel, three of leather, twenty-four of plaster.” In 1950 Frida spent the whole year in hospital and this prevented her from doing much painting. In 1953 a one-woman show was held in Mexico. Frida turned up, carried in a bed. On July 13 1954 Frida died.
Books
Hayden Herrera’s FRIDA a Biography of Frida Kahlo
Jack Rummels’s FRIDA KAHLO A SPIRITUAL BIOGRAPHY
Links
guardian.co.uk/arts
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Gwen went to Paris in 1904 and rarely returned to the United Kingdom. She remained Rodin’s mistress for fourteen years and consequently her own work took a back seat. In 1911 she moved to Meudon in the suburbs of Paris and after Rodin’s death in 1917, found solace in the Catholic religion. Her move to Meudon was to impact on her art and her subject matter is confined to the interior. Her paintings evoke a quietude and calm. This is suggested in the painting of the artist’s room depicting nothing but a sparsely furnished space. The cool, light palette emphasises the calm surroundings. Gwen repeated her themes (which were few) and her figurative paintings were just that – figurative paintings. She moved away from portraiture, her aim being not to depict the physical characteristic of the sitter but to portray the essence of the subject matter. She succeeded through composition and the utilisation of subtle and muted tones. Gwen exhibited in Paris and London
Augustus received commissions for portraits and this exhibition reveals bold, upfront depictions of people. Augustus does not hold back and captures the core of the sitter through physical characteristics. In contrast to his sister’s palette he uses the dark, bold paints of the masters such as El Greco and Velasquez. One room of the exhibition is devoted to Augustus’s large-scale murals mainly of gypsies – some are incomplete and reveal the artist’s technique. Augustus achieved fame and fortune through his portraits, which left little time to experiment. Nevertheless a few of the paintings communicate his interests in Postimpressionism and Fauvism.
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28 October 2004 – 23 January 2005
“Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world” Jack Kerouac
Robert Frank moved to New York from Switzerland in 1947 and began work as a fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar. Dissatisfied with the superficial and shallow aspect of his work, he embarked on the first of his travels starting with his trip to South America. Subsequently he visited Europe and produced series of images associated with Paris, London, and Caerau (Wales). Frank’s images have the qualities of the documentary style that is associated with photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothy Lang and the painter Reginald Marsh. In the main his work is an intimate reflection of the lives of his subjects. Frank achieves this effect by the cropping of his frames and from the different viewpoints that are adopted; these techniques are illustrated in Elevator – Miami Beach and U.S.90, en route to Del Rio, Texas. His travels evoke the relentless search for the unknown that is epitomised by the restless character, Sal Paradise, in Kerouac’s book On The Road. His seminal piece of work is the book titled The Americans, which was the culmination of four years of travels across the United States. Frank took 28, 000 shots but only 83 were included in his book. They are representations of a post Second World War America with its subcultures all living and vying with each other.
The exhibition at Tate Modern is a comprehensive collection of Frank’s work. The layout of the exhibition has been borrowed from The Americans, that is, images presented on white space with black typography for the titles; this way nothing is allowed to detract the viewer from the subject matter. During the sixties Frank dispensed with photography and turned to film. As filmmaker Frank collaborated with the Beat poets and made Pull My Daisy. He also made the film Conversations in Vermont (screened in the exhibition), which concerns the past and present and is a highly personal and tragic representation of Frank’s relationship with his two children, Andre and Pablo. Andre would die in a plane crash and Pablo committed suicide after a struggle with schizophrenia. Frank’s later work concentrated on photomontage with which he would experiment and produce powerful and at times, tormented images.
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The portrayal of the life of the artist Tamara de Lempicka has often been a concoction of truths and untruths. This inexactness has sometimes been at the hands of the artist herself. As famous for her lifestyle as much as her art, Jean Cocteau maintained that "she loved art and high society in equal measure. If her pursuit of society resulted in opened doors and enviable pleasures, two-timing the art world would also prove to be the bane of her existence. To artists she appeared to be an upper-class dilettante, and to the nervous haute bourgeoisie she seemed arrogant and depraved.''
She was born into a privileged life in Moscow during the final years of la belle époque; one that was a rollercoaster of social engagements punctuated with visits abroad. It appeared at this stage of her life that Tamara’s end game would be that of wife and mother. Fully aware of the necessity to marry well to gain social standing, Tamara married Julian Taduez Lempicki in 1916 in Petrograd. The revolution in Russia forced the couple and their daughter to flee, initially to Poland and then to Paris.
Tamara and Taduez arrived in Paris in 1918, part of a lost generation. The displacement of individuals from their native homelands was a consequence of the First World War, of social and political upheavals around Europe and the rest of the world. On arriving in Paris Tamara and Taduez had very little money and their only support network consisted of other exiles. Economic necessity compelled Tamara to find employment. At the beginning Taduez was very reluctant to find work and imagined the revolution in Europe to be a blip in the ocean and he would soon return to his previous life. It was her sister Adrienne (architect student at the Ecoles des Beaux Arts) who suggested painting to the impoverished exile. Tamara was motivated by her sister’s idea and by the end of 1919 had enrolled in the Academie Ransom, who's most celebrated teacher was Maurice Denis.
Denis was a member of the Nabis (others include Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard) and is famous for claiming that a painting is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.
In 1920 Tamara moved into a small flat in Montparnesse, an area that has become immortalized in the history of art. This was home, permanent and temporary, to artists with many of them being expatriates. Gertrude Stein, Modigliani, Jules Pascin and Luis Buñuel are just a few of its famous residents. The salons of Gertrude Stein and Natalie Barney, the bookshops of Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, Shakespeare & Co, and La Maison des Amis de Livre, the cafes Les Deux Magots, Le Coupole, La Rotonde and La Dome were hosts to this meeting of minds and nationalities. The following statement by Maurice Sachs embodies the creative fervour that existed in Montparnesse at the time: for fear of passing by a genius we will soon be encumbered with them that one will be able to walk along with a lantern saying I’m looking for a man with no talent.
For many of the expatriates Montparnesse meant freedom; they weren’t chained to the social mores of their native homelands. Stein proclaimed it was not what Paris gave to you but what it did not take away from you which was important. In la vie boheme ambiguities; sexual, social and artistic only added to the intensity of life. It was not surprising that many women were drawn to the left bank of Paris given the fluidity of its social and sexual boundaries. Tamara participated in the salons of Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein, and the nightlife of Paris. It was only after returning home in the early hours of the morning that she could then start to paint. Although Tamara was not puritanical she had aristocratic pretensions; she was more interested in those residents of Montparnesse that held and clung to their aristocratic posturing, as opposed to the majority of artists who had political leanings to the left.
In 1922 Tamara began to work with the painter and teacher Andre L’hote. In 1912 L’hote introduced Cubism to the public by helping to stage the exhibition La section d’or. Under L’hote’s tutelage Tamara’s individual style began to emerge. Techniques such as the repetition of form, expanses of colour, shallow pictorial space and the inclusion of geometric shapes were to become trademarks of her paintings. Tamara’s work has often been linked to Cubism and some commentators have gone as far as to label her work a toned down form of this style.
One of De Lempicka’s paintings Autoportrait exemplified not only Tamara’s technique but also her new-found independence that was achieved via sales of her paintings. It depicts a woman driving a car; the picture contains only the upper half of the body. The diagonal lines defining the side panel of the car draws the viewer’s attention to the woman. Her features are angular; the folds of her scarf are repeated several times. The folds are reminiscent of the draperies of the Renaissance but differ in the fact that Tamara’s appear metallic in their folds. Her dress depicts the latest fashion and the image is one of a woman, independent and fashion conscious. What is represented here is not only the new role of women but also the beauty of speed . The early part of the twentieth century witnessed significant advances in technology: electricity, automobiles, air travel, sea liners. Tamara was not the only artist to find subject matter in modernity. The Futurist Manifesto declared that Nothing is more beautiful than a great humming power-station holding back the hydraulic pressures of a whole mountain range and the electric power for a whole landscape, synthesized in control-panels bristling with levers and gleaming commutators. Technology was now the inspiration for many of the avant garde.
In 1925 the Expositions des Arts Decoratifs Industriel Moderne opened in Paris. Concentrating mainly on design, it was a defining moment for the decorative arts. Metal work, furniture, fashion and architecture were also exhibited. The names Brandt, Lalique and Ruhlman dominated the exhibition catalogue. To try to categorise the exhibits into one style would only reduce the significance of the exhibition. Art Deco is a phrase that has become synonymous with this exhibition. The style associated with Art Deco is complex as there are as many exceptions as there are rules but it came to exemplify the decadence and the luxury of the time. It was a sleek, sophisticated and slender art, excluding the details that were associated with Art Nouveau. People wanted to embrace the spirit of the new age, putting the austerity of the war years behind them.
The painting Group of Four Nudes,(1925, private collection), is again a representation of the new woman. The women are depicted with their heads thrown back. With the monumental stature of their bodies, their nonchalant poses and the shallow pictorial space, four confident women are suggested. Again the forms of their bodies are replicated in each nude; their limbs are tubular and cylindrical.
These techniques of Tamara are replicated in the majority of her paintings, regardless of subject matter. Her commissions were to become, in the main, portraits of wealthy patrons like Portrait of Dr Boucard,( 1928, private collection), and Portrait of Prince Eristoff. However, Tamara did paint historical subject matter, for example, Adam and Eve,(1931, private collection), a subject that has been depicted by artists through the ages. This painting bears all the traits of her other work. A male nude with his back to the viewer is painted alongside a female nude who is facing the spectator. The nudes monopolizes the pictorial space, they are monumental in stature. The background of modern buildings is a substitute for the Garden of Eden; the modern metropolis now becomes the centre of temptation.
Tamara continued to paint in this manner up until the late thirties. The fear of war instigated her flight to America with her new husband Baron Kuffner. Although Tamara continued to paint, she did so with less intensity and less enthusiasm. She had gained financial security when she wed the Baron.
The Art and Times of Tamara De Lempicka, By Baroness Kizette de Lempicka Foxhall as told to Charles Phillips, Phaidon, Oxford 1987
Tamar a de Lempicka- A life of Deco and Decadence, by Laura Claridge, Bloomsbury 2001
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