Some say this artist is England’s best loved landscape painter; he is, of course, John Constable.

If you are hoping for a nice bit of art appreciation on Constable’s use of light, or the way in which he painted clouds/trees, please look away now.

One of the main problems Barrell and others have with Constable’s paintings is the way in which he depicts the rural poor. To understand where Constable’s critics are coming from we have to look at what was going on in late 18th and early 19th century  England. It was of course a time of great change, with the country shedding off its old paternalistic way of doing things in favour of the launch of a new capitalist society; in sharp contrast to trying to shore up a failing capitalistic society as today’s Tories are.

The Marxist writer E.P.Thompson tells us in his book  The Making of the English Working Class  that the change resulted in a reduction of the poorer members of rural society to the condition of a landless proletariat.

Old style Marxist history maybe, but this is a somewhat different view from the sickly chocolate box paintings, gushing poetry, and prose, which depict the time as ‘Merrie England’.  The same England Thompson speaks of was represented in the arts as a period alive with rosy-cheeked contented peasants doffing their caps to the moral and caring landed gentry with a cheery cry of  ” Gawd bless yer sir!   Yer a luvverly man.”

In reality, the emerging capitalism had brought the danger of class struggle, which unnerved the wealthy, and well it might; the French had taken the matter very seriously in 1789.  Merrie England wasn’t really so merry, especially if you were poor.

What has all this to do with Constable?

Look at his most famous painting The Hay Wain (1821).

None of the figures have very discernable features and the few workers in the fields are reduced to mere specks of paint.

Dorothy Wordsworth, sister to William the poet of  Daffodil fame, writes about a journey at dusk on which she sees groups of workers resting, she tells of the twilight ‘masking the unlovely and the harsh’. This gives a softened view of the workers and masks their exhaustion and ragged clothes; she does not have to recognise their poverty or think about it. The harmony and the picturesque quality of the landscape are not spoilt by the great unwashed: out of sight and out of mind. For Barrell and others, Constable was doing the same thing in his paintings; he was masking the poor from view. We are not allowed to focus on the figures in the Hay Wain (and other Constable paintings) as recognisable real people with identity, lives and a history. To recognise the poor meant that had to be acknowledged; and clearly, they do not deserve to be acknowledged. And so they are depicted, at best, with a brushed out face or merely as a shape bent over a plough or as a blob of paint. Trees and clouds are given the artist’s full attention; poverty-stricken humans are barely painted.

Ironically, Constable is often praised for the ‘reality’ in his paintings; the trees look real, but you are supposed to look at the trees to draw your attention away from the harsh reality of rural poor. These are images of an England that never existed. They depict England as a sunny day, with a happy contented poor, happily working, looked after by caring and responsible nobility. It’s all false; it hides a bitter reality and should be recognised as such. In Ways of Seeing the writer and broadcaster John Berger taught us to look for what is hidden as much as what we see, a lesson, hopefully, not too late for the learning.

The Hay Wain detail.. Wiki commons

For a high quality image see:   http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/john-constable-the-hay-wain
Barrell, J.,1980. The Dark side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730-1840, Cambridge University Press.
Berger, J.,1972. Ways of Seeing, BBC/Penguin.
Thompson, E.P., 1963. The Making of the English Working Class, New York: Vintage.

Biographies of artist’s lives started in the sixteenth century with Giorgio Vasari’s magnum opus ‘Lives of the Artists’. The problems started here too, as until that time artists were not very highly valued members of society, no blockbuster shows in those days. Vasari valorised artists and created the myth of the artist as genius. This myth was Vasari’s pet subject, being an artist as well as a biographer he had a double vested interest. Giorgio did everything in his power to advance artists importance and role in society, including reinventing the artist as a special being. The social improvements no doubt did their bank balance a lot of good, but the ultimate aim was eternal fame. Ideas of artists as tortured souls only able to express themselves through the medium of art stem from Vasari’s work. It was all good PR; Caravaggio was cast forever as the bad boy of Baroque due to this kind of mythical writing. Vasari was also less than accurate in the fact department. ‘Lives’ tells the tale of one artist killing another, a nice dramatic story, only his alleged murderer had died of plague four years before the ‘murder’ – clever.

Vasari and writers of biographic accounts conflate the artist’s life and allude to artistic intentions we cannot confirm. We do not have to know how a man lived to see how he painted. We have the evidence in front us every time we stand before a work of art. We do not need to know, or fabricate,  an artist’s intentions.  There is no need to rewrite a life and fit it to a work of art.

We have the work; it is enough.
Mark Twain asserted that biography could only give us ‘the clothes and buttons of a man’.  A biography full of deliberate lies and myth must give us even less.

Few artists have left us with any primary evidence of their intentions or thoughts about their work.  Even Vincent van Gogh’s magnitude of letter writing fails to shed light on some of his work.

Do Vincent’s letters tell us much about ‘Starry Night’?

No, the information is scant, he certainly does not tell us that it is religious painting or all done from memory, but books have been written claiming this as fact.

Myths of the artist as a tortured genius, lunatic, depressive, etc. do not really inform us about the work. Artists do, of course, respond to the cultural and socio-political nature of their times, if you want to get all Hegelian, the Zeitgeist. Picasso is said to have painted Guernica as his reaction to a dreadful act of aggression.

Lives of Artists - wiki commons

Wild assumptions about work and the need of some writers to fit works into their own mythology of an artist abound. These mythologies distract from the work, change the viewer’s relationship with the work and in some cases take over. The artist’s life becomes the reason people go to see the work. Biography is not an accurate method to assess art work; they may be interesting to read, but best taken with a large pinch of salt.

Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge

Graphite, the stuff inside pencils, is the subject of this exhibition.  The artist can use graphite for a huge range of drawing effects. On view are drawings from four centuries exploring the use of graphite.

Graphite is the first in a series, Grey Matters, which sets out to explore the impact of the greyscale on the artistic imagination.

Go to website for more information and to download free ebook.  http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/whatson/exhibitions/article.html?3097

Grey Matters: Fitzwilliam Cambridge

Friday 17 February 2012 – Sunday 18 March 2012
Manchester Art Gallery
FREE
Manchester Art Gallery’s new collaborative programming relationship with London’s Serpentine Gallery launches this February with the opening of a major exhibition from Turner Prize winning artist Mark Leckey.

See website for more details    http://www.manchestergalleries.org/whats-on/exhibitions/index.php?itemID=86

Mark Leckey: Work and Leisure

16 February – 4 March 2012

Royal West of England Academy
Queen’s Road, Clifton, Bristol BS8 1PX

Margaret Gregory was a poet and painter, and an active member of the RWA. A year after her death in 2011, her son, musician Will Gregory, is presenting a retrospective exhibition of her paintings and drawings.

Go to  http://www.rwa.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/2012/02/exhibitions-margaret-gregory/

Margaret Gregory RWA

for more details

Value, Brand and Notoriety

I think the way in which we actually view art in churches and the way in which we view art in museums differs enormously. If I look at art in a church, it is not removed from its context or from the fabric from the building, the purpose of the artwork is clear. The work is usually there to tell the story of the gospels, or as a warning against various sins, etc. The beautiful lime wood altarpiece by Viet Stoss in St. Mary’s Basilica, Krakow is viewed, mainly, as a religious work. Thoughts are not generally turned to wondering what the piece is worth in monetary terms, or wondering about the life of the artist. It is unlikely that huge numbers go to Krakow just to see work by Viet Stoss, as they might if it was in a block buster museum show.  It is a religious piece and mainly viewed as such; value, brand and notoriety do not really enter into the viewing experience.

Viet Stoss Altar piece

In April this year the Tate Modern is to hold an exhibition of Damien Hist’s work. On view (free for the first few weeks) will be Hirst’s in/famous work,  ‘For the Love of God’  a diamond encrusted skull. The work apparently cost £14m to make, the debate goes on about how much it is worth as a work of art as there is confusion about who actually owns the work. No doubt the work will attract visitors to the Tate. The value of the piece (Hirst says it was sold in 2007 for £50m), the notoriety – the amount of media attention the work and Hirst have attracted – and the brand of ‘Hirst the Artist’ will be the main reasons many will take the trip to the Tate. Few will wondering about the meaning of the work.

In a museum setting it is very difficult to separate the artist from the work. The fame of an artist can cast a long shadow over his or her work. Often, the work itself has celebrity standing, this changes our relationship with the work. Would we view the Mona Lisa differently if the artist was unknown, and it was worth £250 ? Of course, we would. I often think that museums should exhibit recently discovered artwork by famous artists as ‘artist unknown’ just to see the media and public reaction, and then reveal the artist. This would test  what they thought of the work without the baggage of an artist’s brand.

Meaning

To look at art in museums in the same way as we look at art in churches would need a huge paradigm shift in our relationship with art, meaning would have to be clearly set out. In a church setting it is usually pretty easy for anyone with a basic understanding of the bible to work out what the art is about. This is not the case with art in museums, particularly abstract art. The French philosopher Roland Barthes claimed that once a work was finished the author/artist was ‘dead’, and that we should not try to guess the artist’s intentions or the meaning of the work. The artist Mark Rothko – labelled as an abstract expressionist – refused to give explanations for his work telling journalists that ‘silence is so accurate’. Placing such work in categories like beauty, love, etc. as de Botton suggests may be problematic as someone has to decide, what each painting means and where each painting belongs. This is very subjective, as my picture for beauty may not be yours.

Block buster art shows mean people go to tick off the art they fleetingly see in over-crowded museums; they go to see what a £30 million artwork looks like. The celebrity culture that now surrounds art, and artists has changed our relationship with secular art forever. We will never be able to see museum art in the same way as we see art in churches.

* http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_atheism_2_0.html

Picasso and Modern British Art
15 February – 15 July 2012

Tate Britain

Starts today.

This one needs no introduction as it has been widely reported in the media.  At Tate Britain not modern as you might have thought. Over 150 works on view.

It will be busy so pick your time carefully, to avoid gallery rage!

For details go to

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/picassoandbritain/default.shtm

Pablo Picasso wiki commons

Quentin Blake’s illustrations have been used to decorate the walls of 4  hospitals in the UK and France the exhibition features sixty of these works.

Quentin Blake:As Large as Life exhibition

Go to    http://www.foundlingmuseum.org.uk/events/view/quentin-blake-as-large-as-life/  for more details.

There is also a FREE  As Large As Life  app available at  http://www.artfinder.com/app/quentin-blake-as-large-as-life/

We know that Starry Night was painted in June 1889 whilst Vincent was a voluntary in-patient at the Saint Paul-de-Mausole asylum at Saint-Rémy. Theo, his long-suffering younger brother, had arranged for Vincent to have two rooms at the hospital; one was set up as a studio. The large white star near the cypress tree is Venus also known as the morning star. Vincent wrote to Theo in June 1889 telling him that he had seen the morning star before sunrise and that it was very big. The morning star – or Venus – was at the end of an eight-year cycle and being at its brightest in the spring and early summer of 1889 the public were advised to get up early and see it. Vincent was an insomniac so probably didn’t have to make a special effort to get up early to see it.

Biome enlisted help from the Astronomy Dept at UCLA and with their help, he asserted that Starry Night was painted at around 4.00am on the morning of 19th June 1889 – the day Vincent wrote to Theo that he had finished Starry Night.

Back in 1984 you needed a university astronomy department to check out what the sky was like in 1889. Today it is easier so to test Boime’s theory (and because I am a bit of a geek) I turned the date on the excellent free Stellarium software (see http://www.stellarium.org/) back to June 19th 1889. I set the  location  to St Remy, and as we know van Gogh’s room faced east, to an easterly setting.  Vincent wrote to Theo on 19th June 1889 that he had finished Starry Night, so the date is correct. Given that Vincent was looking at the sky from the second floor and through barred windows, we can see that he has squashed the sky a little vertically, but all the sky is there. The white star towards the base of the cypress tree is Venus, the bright yellow star near the top of the star is Hamai with Sheratan above  and to the right, together with the star next to  Sheratan  we have Aries, the first star being lost in the cloud to the left of the tree.  Biome had Aries as Hamia and the two big stars close to the moon, but I think they are more likely to be part of Pisces. The moon is wrong; Vincent has shown it as a crescent not in the gibbous phase it would have been in.   However, there is evidence to suggest he changed this, maybe it just didn’t look right and a crescent moon gave a more pleasing and recognisable  image the moon. We have to remember that there would have been very  little light pollution and the stars would not look as they do in present day cities and towns.

Some say  the cypress trees were an imaginary addition, but Boime produced a contemporary advert for the asylum which shows they were there in Vincent’s time. We also know that Vincent wrote to Theo about  wanting to paint the cypress trees at St Remy, commenting on their colours he was also incredulous that no one had painted them before. The Church steeple is probably imaginary as this type of steeple was not seen in St Remy.  However, we must remember that Vincent was an artist and he was a post impressionist and not confined to impressionist notions of only painting what you see.

The vexed question of the swirling sky is next to be answered, some at MoMA (where the picture now hangs) say that Van Gogh was harking back to art-historical sources namely his love of Japanese wood prints, especially ‘Great wave’ by Katsushika Hokusai .  Biome claims that it is more likely that Vincent would have seen pictures of various comets and constellations, van Gogh did read scientific texts, including work by the astronomer Camille Flammarion who was  very popular at the time.  Biome asserted that the illustrations in such books are closer to the swirling patterns in the sky than the big wave.  Van Gogh also loved maps, Biome claims that Vincent is mapping the stars in Starry Night.

To me the swirling pattern between Venus and Aries seems to resemble clouds more so than comets or constellations, if you look at the swirling pattern, it appears to cover stars.  You can see a faint image of a star through the cloud. I tend to think that Vincent painted them to give a feeling of movement of clouds which resemble both the Great Wave and the images Biome puts forth. The strip of light just above the hills could be the first hint that dawn was breaking – sunrise would have been at about 06.12.

Debates about whether Starry Night and other van Gogh ‘star paintings’ have a religious significance will, no doubt, continue.  I feel that some art historians and critics are unwilling to let go of their notion of van Gogh the tortured, mad, religious genius.

We have no idea what Vincent’s intentions were when he painted Starry Night, all  that we do know is this painting is not  from van Gogh’s imagination.  Vincent did not paint Starry Night adding in imaginary cypress trees and random stars.  It is a record of what he saw out of the barred windows at St Remy in June 1889, not totally accurate maybe, but how van Gogh saw it. He writes to Theo about painting the cypress trees as he sees them, so I think we can allow such a genius a little artistic licence.
* see http://www.albertboime.com/Articles.cfm

For a higher resolution image of Starry Night go to http://www.googleartproject.com/museums/moma/the-starry-night

Art images via Wiki Commons; Images  in public domain.

Click on Stellarium screenshot to open in own window and then again to view full sized.

Starry Night: Vincent van Gogh oil on canvas, 29x36 MoMa New York

14 January 2012 – 12 May 2012

Chinese Arts Centre

Market Buildings
Thomas Street
Manchester
M4 1EU

In January 2011, Jeremy Hutchison sent an email to factories all over the world. He wanted to know what happens when you lodge an error in the ‘smooth wheels of globalisation’.

Err features objects made my factory workers with an error of their own choice.

Ladder - Jeremy Hutchison Err

see website for more info

http://www.chinese-arts-centre.org/residencies/first-step/jeremy-hutchison/