Welcome! (to read a blog click on the title)

This is an introduction to a blog that I will be writing every couple of weeks. I am an artist and writer, and in my capacity as cultural critic my membership of the London press community allows me to get a preview of all the major exhibitions in London’s museums and galleries. I will also be covering exhibitions abroad. So I hope to share my ideas, ride my hobby-horses and air the debates that, as an artist myself, are part of my everyday life. My background in the history of art and my authorship of many books on art and artists, for adults and children, allows me to be a theoretician as well as a practitioner, so everything I write about will reflect my particular interests and expertise. I intend to write think pieces to enthuse or infuriate the everyday reader and don’t assume any previous knowledge on your part. I very much hope you will enjoy the blog, and let me know your thoughts too.

Robin

www.robinrichmond.net

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Twitter: @robinrichmond51

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Dear readers

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Howard Hodgkin: Absent friends NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON 23 March – 18 June 2017

Going for a walk with Andrew, 1995-98

There is a readable image here in the Normandy coastline with the figure of  Andrew Allfree in the foreground       

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DH in Hollywood 1980-4

David Hockney stands to attention among the palm trees

 

Wordsworth said “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” If this is the case, then Howard Hodgkin is the real deal – a true poet. He died earlier this month, aged 84, as this show was being prepared. This was a sadness for many people; those who knew him, those of us who were taught by him aeons ago, and the general public who loved his painting. I saw many of his friends standing in front of their portraits at a private view, in a state of communion with his evocation of their friendship. They were present. He was now absent.

I don’t think this exhibition of Hodgkin’s “portraits” reflects much of Wordsworth’s vaunted tranquility, but it certainly contains oceanic emotion and powerful feelings in bucket loads. Hodgkin was given to gusts of tears when looking at his own work and when talking about it too. He was someone who embraced the subjective, the romantic, the lyrical, the intuitive, and the personal – a man to whom both joy and melancholy were vividly familiar – stalked both by his creative “daemons” and his psychological demons.

These portraits are not portraits in any familiar sense of the term. They are not literally descriptive nor are they transcriptive in any way at all and “reading” them for meaning is very difficult if one is searching for clarity. He is interested in presence and absence. His currency is memory and emotion recollected. Titles are important and we are told in accompanying text the precise place and names of his “sitters” but these are very private paintings – evocations of very private moments. We really don’t need to know any of this. The paintings should speak for themselves.  They are variously glorious, bloated, bombastic, over-egged, subtle, exuberant, unrestrained, pretentious, elegiac, beautiful, ugly, overwhelming and ultimately deeply mysterious. In his own words, it is all about “simply a matter of seeing and feeling” and paintings “should be like memorials.”

This is now a memorial exhibition.

RIP Howard Hodgkin 1932 -2017

Vanessa Bell: on being a Woman Artist

I have been an artist, art critic, and writer for more years than I care to remember but this is my very first blog post. I am entering the digital age kicking and screaming being an old fashioned kind of person and painter ( I still use paint!) but I can see how liberating it will be to have no restrictions on word count or editorial censure, and I intend to be as idiosyncratic and personal as possible in my blogs. They will mainly focus on art exhibitions and cultural events in London and further afield. But I will dip my toes into other things, as I’m an unrepentant culture vulture and closet bluestocking.

I’m very fortunate that my more conventional work as a journalist and radio critic in the past gives me access to exhibitions and work in museums and galleries before they open to the public, and also allows me direct access to the curators responsible for the shows. I can ask museum directors awkward questions about anything from how something is made, to contentious issues of provenance, to awkward problems of authenticity.  In the stagey choreographed context of a press view, museum directors and curators have to be polite and answer. I know some of them cringe when they see me coming and often my hand is the first up in the air when question time arrives. I am shameless. I want to use this privilege to write in these blogs about what interests me, infuriates me and perplexes me – what editors in my past have pompously called “think pieces”. Is there any other kind of writing?

Last week I went down to Dulwich in south London to the Picture Gallery, one of the best small museums in the world. It’s always worth paying a visit to Dulwich to see the 600 world class artworks on show, among which are the mind-boggling Rembrandts, not to mention the majestic Van Dycks, the stately Gainsboroughs, the austere Poussins and the voluptuous Rubens, but right now a monographic retrospective of Vanessa Bell ( 1879- 1961) is a real treat. 

Vanessa Bell is too often reduced to a flighty pretty bit-player in the great drama that was Bloomsbury, but she was a good painter and an even better designer. The Tate has a few of her paintings on show sometimes, but a retrospective exhibition of her oeuvre has never happened before. Being Virginia Woolf’s older sister is a real curse, and her notoriety as unfaithful wife to the equally unfaithful Clive Bell, lover of both Duncan Grant and Roger Fry, good friend to Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes among countless other luminaries of early 20th century intelligentsia gathered at the Charleston Farmhouse, has caused her to be banished to the wings – sort of visual footnote to a literary phenomenon. 

But she is so much more than this. She is also so much more than the proto-hippie pacifist feminist  – a role to which she has been consigned, mirroring the contrasting reflection of austere and suicidal Virginia.  She was irreverent, iconoclastic and utterly unafraid. To Duncan Grant, a homosexual and also the father of her daughter, she writes about abstraction, “I believe distortion is like Sodomy. People are simply blindly prejudiced against it because they think it’s abnormal”. Indeed!

There is a lovely dusty looseness to her brush marks in the paintings and a particularly fluid design sense that came to fruition in the Omega workshop years, so copied by other British fabric designers of the 20th century. Designers Guild, Conran, Cath Kitson eat your hearts out. This show has fabric designs, paintings, screens, and lovely book covers she made for Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press. The show is a reflection of a life devoted to art, friendship, free love, light, sensuality, motherhood, domesticity, craft, beauty, and life itself. Patti Smith, the singer, poet and keeper of the flame, has been given a small room to complement Vanessa’s photographs with her own.  A revelation.

It seems very fitting to me that my first ever blog post should be about a woman artist- and a progressive and unconventional one at that, who has served as a beacon of hope for generations of woman artists for well over a century. Vanessa Bell was born in the stifled Victorian age when women in the art world were at best models, appendages, muses or lovers of famous men. That she became the sure-footed and wonderful painter she clearly was, evidenced by this show, makes a mockery of this presumed fate.

In the next few weeks, I will be London-based.

Michelangelo and Sebastiano del Piombo at the National Gallery, Howard Hodgekin at the National Portrait gallery. 

Michelangelo and Sebastiano by Robin Richmond

Michelangelo and Sebastiano

15 March – 25 June 2017

North Galleries 

The National Gallery, London

Sebastiano del Piombo, The Raising of Lazarus, 1517-19. The National Gallery London. The figure of Lazarus is based on a drawing by Michelangelo.

Michelangelo, The Cumean Sybil, Sistine Chapel, Rome, 1508-1512. Notice the similarity in the twist and snap of the figures, what Michelangelo called “La Figura Serpentinata”.

 

As the possessor of what, in my family, is euphemistically known as an artistic temperament I know a fellow sufferer when I see one.  From 1985 to the publication in 1992 of my first book on Michelangelo, I visited the Sistine Chapel ceiling at least three times a year, and from a vantage point of over 60 feet in the air I became intimate with the cycle of magnificent frescoes. I lived and breathed Michelangelo and his complicated life and work, his arguments and grudges, his complaints and his moaning. Proximity to greatness was not inspiring but profoundly overwhelming and ultimately dispiriting. It did my own work as an artist no good at all.  How could it? But touching the frescoes with kid gloves, examining his work under a microscope, reading his letters and sonnets (some of which I translated for my book), and drawing the frescoes from close up, it felt to me as though I grew to know the man himself. I dreamed about him constantly and my own work as an artist developed a colour range that owed a great deal to his “colori cangianti” – his shimmering silky colours that dominate the Sistina. I drew Michelangelo’s figures within touch of the ceiling vault (they were immensely distorted when viewed so closely, designed as they were to be seen from the ground) and later on, when the restoration began on the altar wall, I climbed on ladders all over the Last Judgement. Surreal or what? Humbling for sure.

The restoration scaffolding, which moved slowly across the ceiling over 12 years, used the anchor points of Michelangelo’s own original scaffolding, and over the years I grew used to his ghostly presence. I had the immense privilege of lying on the floor of the Sistine chapel for an hour, on my own in the magnificent space – a gift from the restoration team who became my good friends. They taught me how to recognise his “divine” touch as opposed to the touch of his numerous assistants, summarily and regularly fired from 1508 to 1512. I grew accustomed to his shifts in style across the ceiling, from the cramped hieratic stillness of the first half, before God comes into the cycle, to the larger magisterial figures of the second half, (painted after 1510), when he moved the scaffolding and could see his own work for the first time.

The restorers and academics, under the leadership of Fabrizio Mancinelli and Maestro Colalucci, talked intimately of Michelangelo like a much loved but cranky old friend, a victim of his own grand artistic temperament, a friendless case of alienation and misanthropy. They knew his moods on a particular day (fresco by its very nature is done in sections called “giornate” or days) and they taught me to see when he was frustrated by his technique, or when he was flummoxed by an awkward piece of painting, handing it over to a mediocre helper. For Michelangelo was a reluctant painter and a volatile, arrogant, angry, rivalrous maverick. He possessed that elusive quality ascribed to him by his contemporaries – “terribilità”. You could translate this as an artistic temperament writ as large as the Sistine Chapel itself.

And so, the very premise of this brilliant and revelatory new show at London’s National Gallery is a huge surprise. Sebastiano does not come out of the story as well as he might (who could, against the might of Il Divino?). But nevertheless it’s the first exhibition of its kind, and the first to showcase Sebastiano in the UK. And I believe it will be surprising to art historians and the wider public too.  Michelangelo’s distrust and dislike of other artists, his assistants, his peers –  most notably his handsome and short-lived rival Raphael, is very well known. That the Venetian oil painter Sebastiano del Piombo was a collaborator and creative partner is also documented. But this show is much more than the sum of its parts. The extent of this creative friendship is astonishing and unprecedented. It has yielded some very great paintings. By both, individually, and sometimes even by the two of them in the same painting. It’s enough to make one think that Michelangelo was a generous man and a generous artist.

Needless to say, the relationship did not end well.

 

To come