Exhibitions, Museums andGalleries

CE

ZANNE IN THE STUDIO STILL

LIFE IN WATERCOLORS
carol armstrong
The J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles 2004 d27.00
$34.95
160 pp. 102 col 13 mono illus
isbn 0-89236-623-0
UK Dist. Windsor Books, Oxford
A
dmirers of small-scale objects such
as manuscript pages or drawings,
needing lengthy and ruminative
study, suffer more frustration than many
other visitors to exhibitions. And when the
works are framed or conned to cases
with reective glass, close study is almost
impossible. Museum publicity brings
crowds of people for almost any special
exhibition and viewers have to manoeuvre
in order to see the works at all let
alone have enough time for a lengthy
examination. The sad fact is that what
is required of the gallery visitor is cun-
ning timing to choose an unpopular hour,
and then some wisdom to nd a mean-
ingful trajectory through the works on
display.
Exhibition catalogues and the like,
lled with information on context and
weighted with complex essays, often
do not do justice to the works on dis-
play. The photographs tend to be too
small or not accurate enough in terms
of colour and detail. This catalogue,
however, is an exception because it is
intended to be more of a guided visual
experience. It is not pretentious with
fancy design or ambitious, as are too
many catalogues (always hoping to have
the last word), but leads the viewer,
helping one to see the works very
closely, as if in the hand. The text
illuminates this visual exploration while
nearly all information on background and
references to other pertinent publications
are found in notes at the ends of the
chapters. It is a very well considered and
beautifully designed publication of the
highest quality.
Ce zannes position as the heroic
progenitor of modernism has been well
discussed, mostly in terms of his monu-
mental paintings in oil, but the other part
of his oeuvre, the more human and
approachable one, is more convincingly
seen in his watercolours. As a test case
almost, the J Paul Getty Museum orga-
nised this exhibition, entitled Ce zanne in
the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors, which
ran into January 2005. Their large Still Life
with Blue Pot (c 190006) is the centrepiece
for the exhibition and the focus for this
catalogue.
The Getty watercolour, named as all
still lifes are for its objects, is on an
important scale, nearly 19 25 inches.
The objects themselves are very ordinary
and simple and some of them (or others
like them) still exist in the artists studio at
Les Lauves. The work is rather large for
a watercolour, suggesting an importance
not usually connected with this elusive
and transient medium. It is clearly more
than just a study, rather a carefully crafted
and fully nished painting. The author,
with great delicacy and restraint, rst leads
the reader into a discourse on the history
of watercolour as a valid and portable
medium and then discusses the status of
still life painting as an indicator of an
artists sensibility. She cites both Roger
Fry, who believed that objects in a still
life were directly expressive of an artists
personality, and Meyer Shapiro, who
pursued Cezannes objects and saw in
them indications of the artists re-
pressed sexual desires. The author here,
evidently deeply involved in this beauti-
ful watercolour, wants to give what
she calls this splendid thing . . . its due.
She steers her way carefully between
those earlier critics and provides us
with refreshing ideas. At times, one
sees that she becomes entangled, even
repetitive, and too pleased with her own
verbiage, but not so much so that she
loses her way. She is at her best when
(obviously) captivated by Ce zannes linear
and colouristic deformations all the
peculiarities of the artist. She readily
admits to a kind of bodily excitement
on the journeys through and among the
objects in the work. Such an approach
makes this study a thrilling and joyful
exploration especially for a painter
because it involves so many frissons of
delight. Hours spent examining every
nuance, each movement of the brush and
pooling of pigment is bound to result in a
deeper understanding of the work. For any
artist, or even the art historian with an
acute sensibility, this approach is far more
rewarding than any amount of factual
information obtained from a catalogue of
the more usual kind.
Using Still-life with Blue Pot as a centre-
piece, the author sets the watercolour in
relation to other still lifes and other works
in oil and watercolour. She uses a close-
up, interior vantage point, working in
and out but following a general structure
based on four aspects: The biography of
the object, The landscape of the still life,
The picture and sketch and Pencil lines
and watercolour. These are her chapter
headings.
The three main objects of the Getty
watercolour, the white porcelain pitcher,
the blue enamel pot and the other enamel
pot, are seen in other works of a similar
date. They are arranged as a trio with care
and solidity rather like family members
awaiting a photograph. Following her
theme of biographical resonances and
taking a lead from Roger Fry but stopping
short of Shapiros more lurid belief in the
relationship between still life objects and
the personality of the artist, the author
embarks on a discussion of Cezannes
complex family relationships. In his
paintings she notes the conjunction be-
tween intimate and dispassionate observa-
tion shown on some sketchbook pages
(particularly the one of Madame Ce zanne
with Hortensias, for example) and the
somewhat unsettling studio still life ar-
rangements crammed onto a table, along
with other works showing more formal
dining tables situated in a real space but
awaiting, rather anxiously, the still ab-
sent guests.
In a journey through Still Life with
Blue Pot the writer offers us a kind of
geographical landscape in which we
can observe the richness and variety of
formal relationships within and between
14 The Art Book volume 12 issue 2 may 2005 r bpl/aah
the vessels and fruit and material of the
watercolour. In the crevices, valleys and
falls of material and in the clustering
of the apples we see how closely these
relate to contemporary watercolour
landscapes of Mt Sainte-Victoire and
the road to Les Lauves. The water-
colour takes its place at the end of a long
tradition of still-life painting from six-
teenth-century painters such as Kalf and
Chardin to Fantin-Latour, and yet it
escapes all the boundaries of its prede-
cessors. There is a curious quality found
here, and in many other still lifes by
Ce zanne, in which the material seems
inhabited or alive, almost as if it wants to
become a landscape. The conguration
of the multi-coloured tapestry bursts
through the horizontal of the wainscoting
just as the mountain (Mt Sainte-Victoire)
rises from the plain, and its fall is as
precipitous as a cliff face.
The last two chapters have to do with
the making of the painting. Ce zanne asks
his viewers to see as the painter does, to
see as if with the hand, to imagine the
movement back and forth between eye and
hand. The author retraces the painters
steps in the understanding that Blue Pot is
a nished painting, and not a sketch or
study. As no preparatory study is known to
exist, we see this watercolour from start to
nish. Its conception and all the painters
fascinating changes of mind are seen all
together on the same sheet. It is a multi-
layered work with the transparent veils of
colour that have been allowed to dry before
another is added. This is an unusual
and laborious process for a watercolour,
similar to the operation of oil painting, but
it is clearly characteristic of Ce zannes way
of working.
The writer takes us on a visual excava-
tion of the process of painting using
different ways of looking at different
passages in the work. The central unpig-
mented area that coincides with the visual
focus of the painting carries more optical
weight and illusionistic charge than any
other passage in the work. Seeing beneath
the surface layers we see a tangle of
graphite lines laying out the central
composition. These are loose, loopy and
free, meandering, sometimes repeated,
sometimes interrupted and trailing off.
They are used to establish the central
composition in a very generalised way. The
objects are laid in by applying thin veils of
a kaleidoscopic mix of colour, rst pooled,
then washed to feathered extremities. The
clarity of the translucency is obtained by
allowing each layer to dry before another
application. The last activity of the painter
was to reinforce some of the outlines, in
blue pigment, interrupted and uneven,
and then sometimes with pencil. We
gradually gain a picture of Ce zanne,
loaded brush in one hand, stub of pencil
in the other, working his way around
and across the paper. Passages where
adjacent pigments offer an optical mix
suggest that the painter is using the
paper as if it were a palette. His changes
of mind and tiny drops of paint bring us
face to face with the very process of mark
making and colour judgements. We realise
that the process of painting is that of
coming to a resolution through irresolu-
tion and, more denitively, in unsettling
every act of object denition. The open-
ness and fragility of the skeins of colour
and the pale, insubstantial lines of gra-
phite work together and, as we examine
the work, the still life comes into being
before our eyes.
eleanor robbins
Independent Art Historian, London
RUSSIAN LANDSCAPE IN THE AGE
OF TOLSTOY
david jackson and patty wageman
(eds)
Groninger Museum, Groningen, The Netherlands,
and National Gallery, London 20034 d25.00
$42.50 172 pp. 77 col/118 mono illus
isbn 90 76704 49 x
T
he Russian landscape was celebrated
in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries by novelists and painters
in Russia. Common to both arts was the
experience of the vastness and grandeur of
the Russian landscape. Artists expressed
both an observation of natures magni-
cence as something outside the human
scale, and an enquiry into that intimate
and inescapable human relationship with
nature. Russias enormous and varied
landscape, from high forests to broad
steppes, seemed to embrace the enormous
and varied landscape of human feeling and
spiritual experience.
There were 70 paintings in this
exhibition, the rst of its kind in the West.
The works came mainly from the State
Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and some
works from the collection of the Russian
State Museum in St Petersburg. The catalo-
gue essays provide an excellent artistic
and historical view over this important
genre of Russian nineteenth-century paint-
ing, and they reveal the soul of these works
in context.
The canvases are very large in size,
showing the inuence of French Salon
historical painting especially. The Russian
works are purely landscape, however, and
this in the wider tradition of European
romantic landscape painting found in
France, Italy and Germany at the same
time.
Paul Ce zanne Still LifewithBluePot (detail) c 1900.
Los Angeles, J P Getty Museum83.GC.221
volume 12 issue 2 may 2005 r bpl/aah The Art Book 15
Exhibitions, Museums andGalleries
However much they belong to this
Europe-wide tradition, both in subject
matter and world view, since several of
the artists studied in these countries, this
Russian romantic painting is determined
by its own landscape. For the subject
matter of these grand paintings is space,
depicted in great perspectives and in
contrasting arrangements of light. Not
only are space and light the most effective
means of transforming vastness into the
pictorial, they are also the subject matter of
the human soul that artists were wanting
to capture in this reciprocal relationship
between nature and the human being.
There are, certainly, peasant scenes not
unlike Dutch seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century painting, and there are works in
which landscape is the setting for folk
tale, or in which social commentary about
the human condition is evident. Although
such subject matters gure prominently in
Russian painting of the late nineteenth
century, the general idea of this exhibition
is an abstract subject matter: the landscape
as a parallel to the soul of the Russian
peoples.
Most of the painters whose work is
exhibited belong to the group, founded in
1870, known as the Wanderers. Shishkin,
Repin and Levitan are the most promin-
ent of them, and so famous that their
surnames were enough to identify them.
There are also Aleksei Savrasov, Mikhail
Klodt, Fedor Vasiliev, A. Popov, Vasili
Perov, as well as the mystic, Mikhail
Nesterov. The Wanderers certainly tra-
velled about Russia in search of dramatic
scenery and effects of light in nature.
Shishkin was famous for the many kinds
of subtle but powerful light contrasts
he was able to capture in woods in spring
or winter, and Levitan is interesting
because he moved from the inuence of
the French Barbizon painters to that of
Monet, having seen the Haystacks in 1899
on view in Moscow.
There is one spectacular painter, how-
ever, whose name was Arkhip Kuindzhi.
Even if inuenced by Caspar David Frie-
drich, Kuindzhi went well beyond this
inuence to an incredibly modern sensi-
bility in the 1880s. Kuindzhi dared to paint
striking and bold contrasts of forms,
with coloured light as his medium for
effecting dramatic scenes. Kuindzhi was
truly unique, and truly original.
Although Levitan was a transitional
landscape painter, fromRussian Romanti-
cism to Russian Impressionism, he was
also singled out by the newyoung painters
of the early twentieth century. Kazimir
Malevich, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail
Larionov, David Burliuk and others cited
his work as an example of an outmoded
way of looking at nature. The young
painters looked at French Impressionism
but went beyond it, drawing lessons for a
new way of seeing. This made it possible
then to drawlessons fromMatisse, Braque
and Picasso, which the older generation
derided. From this the new artists went on
to create an abstract painting around 1912
15 that announced a change in the history
of seeing and of painting in Russia. It was
a painting that also reected the Russian
soul, but now through the eyes of space
and light, of colour and movement itself.
Nineteenth-century romantic landscape
painting had placed the spectator outside
the picture and separate from it, accom-
panied by a sense of isolation in the
vastness. For the newpainters, this was an
outworn way of seeing the world: they
placed the spectator in the middle of the
painting from where he participated in the
landscape of natures forces and the space
of his creative imagination. Abstract and
non-objective painting were the means of
a new and dynamic way of experiencing
nature, but they arose out of the nine-
teenth-century romantic sensibility, made
visible by painters whose work is shown to
such effect in this exhibition.
patricia railing
Director, Artists . Bookworks
HENRY MOORE AT DULWICH
PICTURE GALLERY
ian dejardin, ann garrould,
anita feldman bennet
Scala Publishers Ltd 2004 d19.95 $29.95
176pp. Fully illustrated
isbn 1-85759-352-9
US dist. Antique Collectors Club
T
he exhibition that this catalogue
accompanied took place at Dulwich
Picture Gallery from May to Septem-
ber, 2004. At rst sight, this choice of
location for an exhibition of the work of
one of Britains most important twentieth-
century sculptors might have seemed a
little incongruous, since the gallery is
best known for its outstanding collection
of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
paintings. Desmond Shawe-Taylors intro-
duction to the catalogue serves to eluci-
date this choice, explaining that it had
been felt that a Moore exhibition in
London [was] long overdue, and that this
coincided with Lisa Sainsburys desire for
an exhibition which would celebrate the
friendship between herself and her late
husband Bob, and Henry Moore and his
wife Irina. The source of a number of the
exhibits, the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury
Collection at the University of East Anglia,
reected this relationship, a connection
also, of course, commemorated in the
dedication of the Sainsbury African Gal-
leries at the British Museum.
In the context of this background
information, the impression of intimacy
that this exhibition gave seems appropri-
Isaak Ilich Levitan (1860--1900),TheVladimirka
Road, 1892, StateTretyakov Gallery, Moscow,
rStateTretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
16 The Art Book volume 12 issue 2 may 2005 r bpl/aah
Exhibitions, Museums andGalleries
ate. This was reinforced by the nature
of the gallerys layout, which meant
that the typically modernist installation
usually considered appropriate for Moores
sculpture would have been out of the
question. The exhibition occupied four
rooms in the gallery, with four larger
works displayed in the gardens. The
rooms devoted to the exhibition were
arranged thematically, though covering
all Moores working life, and the cata-
logue reects this arrangement, with high
quality illustrations supporting detailed
discussion of the works in relation to
these four themes.
The rst room focused on Inuen-
ces: the British Museum, Abstraction
and Surrealism. Anita Feldman Bennets
catalogue essay, Surrealism, space and
string: Henry Moores Bird Basket, am-
plies the theme of this section. Her
essay is supplemented with detailed illus-
trations of this work, which was last
exhibited in the UK in 1978. The next
room documented Moores develop-
ment of the theme of the reclining gure,
as did three of the large outdoor exhibits,
Reclining Figure, 195662, Draped Reclining
Woman, 19578, and Two Piece Reclining
Figure, No. 3, 1961. In the light of the
personal connections celebrated in the
exhibition, the theme of Mothers, fa-
milies and single gures seemed particu-
larly appropriate, and was developed with
a display of two- and three-dimensional
works, including the green Hornton stone
Mother and Child of 1932 (Cat 8) from the
Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection.
Finally, a section devoted to Moores work
as a war artist featured a selection of both
the well known shelter drawings and the
slightly less familiar mining subjects. This
was complemented by the welcome op-
portunity to see the wartime documentary
lm Out of Chaos, which, like this exhibi-
tion, emphasises the personal, even do-
mestic, dimension of Moores work. This
aspect also emerges in the introductory
catalogue essay Henry Moore and the
Sainsbury family by Moores niece, Ann
Garrould.
In the exhibition, this impression
extended to the large sculptures in the
garden, where visitors sat and looked or
sketched, and even the huge bronze Large
Two Forms could be explored at close
quarters on a rare sunny afternoon. The
catalogue offers a useful addition to the
literature on Moore, recording the exhibi-
tion both in relation to the Sainsbury
collection and through the overall quality
of the illustrations of the works that were
featured.
veronica davies
The Open University
CHINA: DAWN OF A GOLDEN AGE,
200750 AD
james c y watt
The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University
Press 2004 d45.00 $75.00
416 pp. 479 col/35 mono illus
isbn 0-300-10487-1
T
he aesthetic and scholarly heft of
this exhibition and catalogue com-
bine to elevate the greater part of the
period 200750 AD (the latter date well
into the High Tang) from a relative dark
age overshadowed by the brilliant Han and
Tang dynasties to a glowing era in its own
right, illuminated from within (as by the
development of Buddhismand its material
culture) and by reected light from both
ends. Artistically, claims James C Y Watt,
Chairman of Asian Art at the Metropolitan
Museum and principal author here, the
rst half of the sixth century emerged as
one of the most brilliant eras in Chinese
history. The change in perspective has
been made possible by unprecedented
archaeological discoveries in China over
the past 30-odd years, a span now richer
still but proclaimed by an earlier exhibi-
tion as The Golden Age of Chinese
Archaeology. That show virtually ignored
the period between the Han and Tang
dynasties, making China: Dawn of a
Golden Age and its catalogue valuable
corrective supplements. Equally unprece-
dented and contributing to the perspective
change has been the increased openness
and international cooperation of Chinese
institutions in the past few years. An
exhibition and catalogue of this richness
would not have been possible without the
cooperation of 46 Chinese museums and
institutes, who lent all but two of the
works. The catalogue itself is a beautiful
collaboration, up to the usual lofty stan-
dards of both the Metropolitan Museumof
Art and Yale University Press.
Watt provides by far the longest of
six essays preceding the catalogue section
(seven, if you count his About this
exhibition), an overview of Art and
history in China from the 3
rd
through
the 8
th
century. Boris I Marshak of the
State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg
discusses imported luxury vessels and
their Chinese replicas in Central Asian
metalwork in China. An Jiayao of the
Institute for Archaeology, Chinese Acad-
emy of Social Sciences, provides a gem
of conciseness and clarity with The art
of glass along the Silk Road. Zhao Feng
of the China National Silk Museum in
Hangzhou presupposes some familiarity
with the technical vocabulary of weaving
in The evolution of textiles along the Silk
Henry MooreDrapedReclining Woman 1957-- 8
Robert andLisa Sainsbury Collection, SCVA,
University of East Anglia, Norwich. rHenry Moore
Foundation
volume 12 issue 2 may 2005 r bpl/aah The Art Book 17
Exhibitions, Museums andGalleries
Road. Professor Su Bai of Beijing Uni-
versity covers Buddha images of the
Northern Plain, 4
th
6
th
century, and
Angela Howard, Professor of Asian Art at
Rutgers University, summarises Buddhist
art in China from the late Eastern Han to
the Tang Dynasty. A map with the relevant
cities identied precedes each well-illu-
strated essay, while endnotes are keyed to
the bibliography of works cited.
The earliest Buddhist images in China
are late Han, and the material and
aesthetic transformations of these images
from roughly 200750 AD are a remark-
able record whose developments can
only be hinted at in the exhibition and
catalogue. Of perhaps equal import for
this period is the extensive cross-cultural
fertilisation of ideas and artefacts that
spread between Central Asia and China
through the various routes of the Silk
Road; many of the items unearthed from
Chinese tombs and in this show are of
non-Chinese origin (extending even to
Roman glass and Byzantine coins) or bear
striking non-Chinese inuences (such as
the Central Asian facial features and dress
of many Tang tomb gures).
The catalogue proper organises 247
entries into seven sections corresponding
to those of the exhibition, each centered
on a particular geographic area that would
eventually constitute part of the greater
Tang empire at its height in the seventh
and early eighth centuries (Watt). Each
entry is rich with historical and artistic
context and is accompanied by one or
more photographs of the object. Most
of the objects were excavated in recent
decades from protective enclosures in
tombs, and to this fact owe their generally
remarkable state of preservation; textiles,
understandably, have fared least well. Vital
statistics for each piece include, if applic-
able, place and date of excavation. The
materials represented range from humble
wood, earthenware, and ink on paper to
Roman glass, gold, silver, bronze, marble,
jade and other precious stones. Catalogue
entry 1, a Han stone chimera with a
staggering height of six feet, is said to be
the largest among all extant stone chi-
meras (Zhixin Sun); yet a caption de-
scribes another stone chimera, which
appears from the photograph to still exist,
as nine feet in height. Contributors to the
catalogue include the aforementioned
essayists (with the exception of Su Bai);
Prudence O Harper, Maxwell K Hearn,
Denise Patry Leidy, Chao-Hui Jenny Liu,
and Zhixin Sun, all of the Met; and
Valentina Raspopova of the Academy
of Sciences of the Russian Federation in
St Petersburg.
The bibliography of nearly 30 pages
gives names of Chinese (and a few
Japanese) authors in the original language
and in romanised transliteration. Chinese
and Japanese titles of works are given
in English translation as well. Likewise,
Chinese names and terms in the index are
alphabetised by the romanised form but
accompanied by the native form. Other
features include an elegant graphic chron-
ology and two double-page maps: The
Silk Road in the 5
th
Century and China:
Archaeological Sites, 1
st
8
th
Century.
Even at this stage of great archaeologi-
cal and diplomatic progress in China, there
can be no nal word on any of the subjects
surveyed here, but China: Dawn of a Golden
Age lays a solid foundation. Highly recom-
mended for academic, museum, and public
libraries, and indispensable for institutions
and individuals interested in the Asian art
and material culture of this period.
craig bunch
Librarian, Houston, Texas.
THE GREAT PARADE
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST
AS CLOWN
gerard regnier (jean clair) (ed.)
Yale University Press/National Gallery of Canada
2004 d50.00 $65.00
424 pp.
isbn 0-300-103751 (Yale) 0-88884-779-3 (NGC)
T
his is the catalogue of an exhibition
which took place at the Grand Palais
in Paris and then the National
Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in Spring
and Summer 2004. It provides a hefty
survey of nineteenth-and twentieth-cen-
tury circus entertainers and their appeal
to modern artists. The exhibition and
the catalogue were both inspired by Jean
Starobinskis classic text from 1970,
Portrait de lartiste en saltimbanque, which
showed how the myth of the clown was
invented between 1830 and 1870 by French
writers such a Gautier, Baudelaire and
Laforgue, then developed by painters
such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Rouault and
Picasso. Writers and artists identied with
the circus clown, whom they saw as a
maverick outsider and entertainer, root-
less, lonely and misunderstood. Staro-
binskis study was mainly literary, but his
illustrations, including paintings, photo-
graphs and lm stills, also recognised
precursors, such as Holbein, Callot and
Tiepolo, and reached back to the deepest
roots of circus traditions in Greek and
Egyptian antiquity.
This new volume opens with an extract
from Starobinskis book, point of depar-
ture for an extensive investigation of the
spell that the circus has cast over modern
and contemporary artists, throughout
Europe and America. Turning the pages,
one views a wild, razzle-dazzle parade that
is often sad and sometimes sinister, and
stretches from Daumiers shadowy cari-
catures to gaudy videos and photographs
by Bruce Nauman and Cindy Sherman.
The word saltimbanque is hard to trans-
late, as its meaning includes acrobats,
tumblers and sideshow entertainers. The
title of this catalogue is thus something of
a misnomer, as the eld of discussion
and illustration encompasses all travelling
circus performers, from clowns to trapeze
artists, as well as fairground freakshows,
theatrical mime artists, harlequins and
seaside Pierrots.
Jean Clair is characteristically erudite
in his opening essay, dening the exist-
ential and metaphysical resonance of
circus, referring particularly to Picassos
1917 stage curtain for the Russian Ballet
Parade. This key painting could not be
displayed at the Grand Palais, because
of its scale and fragility, and so was only
shown in Ottawa. According to Jean Clair,
circus, as wordless as painting and reliant
on mimicry, may be a baser artform
than literature and yet, within the univer-
sal circle of the ring, it presents a total
hierarchy, from animals, via uncouth
clowns, to the celestial ying trapeze. Life
unfolds on a tightrope that every human
being treads, over a yawning chasm. When
acrobats counter the pull of gravity in
death-defying leaps, they recall and per-
petuate sacred rituals that date back to
Minoan Crete, where young men somer-
saulted over the horns of a darkly mena-
cing bull. Such melding of the sacred and
the profane, and the dual nature of both
Man and animals, inspired the winged
horse and acrobat, the baboon, ladder and
ball that Picasso grouped together in the
Parade curtain.
Didier Ottinger, from the Centre Pom-
pidou, looks at the clown in contemporary
art, where he is often a vulgar, violent and
18 The Art Book volume 12 issue 2 may 2005 r bpl/aah
Exhibitions, Museums andGalleries
disruptive gure, debunking all human
certainties and artistic pretensions. Ottin-
ger suggests that this type of clowning
began with a troupe of six Irish brothers
called the Hanlon-Lees, who became
hugely popular in Paris from about 1872.
After the mode for pallid Pierrot mime
artists, and after the bloody suppression of
the Commune, the Hanlon-Lees put on a
hectic showthat incorporated slaps, kicks,
exploding cannons, disintegrating scenery
and all-round chaos. These were the pre-
cursors of the late twentieth-century
clowns in the work of Bruce Nauman,
for example, whose performances turn art
into music-hall skits, spliced into endless
loops that parody the absurdly repetitive
cycles of human history. Ex-communist
Jean He lion used clowns to express life as
a circus during the events of May 1968,
Philip Guston adopted a loud and clown-
ish style at about the same time, and Paul
McCarthys 1995 lm Painter shows a
clown with a brush, cack-handedly par-
odying abstract expressionism. Works like
these set out to demolish ideologies and
the artists that serve them, but they also
ridicule the dogmatic narrative of Green-
bergian modernism, which afrmed
constant progression from Cubism to
Abstract Expressionism. In tragi-comic
representations of universal chaos, the
clown is our new Sisyphus and the only
Christ we now deserve, slapped and
publicly humiliated, repeatedly splattered
with custard pies.
Ann Thomas contributes an essay on
the history of circus photography, begin-
ning with Nadars 1854 portrait of Pierrot
as Photographer, the cameras rst re-
presentation of the artist as clown. The
clowns rubber features have attracted
countless photographers, but most circus
photographs can be divided between
performance shots and backstage report-
ing. In the ring, Rodchenko xed the
abstract beauty of a human pyramid while,
in the 1960s, Harold Edgerton pioneered
stop-motion photography to capture
sequences of acrobatic movement in
single works. Izis famously followed
Grock from his trailer to the edge of the
ring, Edward J Kelty took backstage group
photos which emphasise the companys
collective identity, while August Sanders
shots of off-duty performers strip away the
glamour but show circus as a model of
social and racial integration. Bruce David-
sons 1958 photo of the dwarf Jimmy,
dining in a cheap restaurant, shows,
however, that outside his professional
environment, the performer is still a
derided outcast.
Sophie Basch nally presents a pick-
and-mix survey of clowns in nineteenth-
century French literature, beginning
with Jules Janin in 1831, thus conrming
Starobinskis chronology. There are some
unusual bibliographical references here,
including, for example, Jules Clareties
1886 short story Boum-Boum, on the
clown Geronimo Medrano, who founded
the circus near Pigalle that inspired
Picassos greatest Pink-Period paintings.
The Basch essay is also illustrated with a
fascinating photo of two of the Hanlon-
Lees, dressed in stovepipe hats and heavy
overcoats, with gaping expressions on
their thin and oury faces, carrying
complicated luggage, as if to emphasise
their rootlessness and transience. Comic,
lost and macabre, looking like a cross
between a doctor, an executioner and an
undertaker, they are major stars in this
strange parade.
The catalogue proper comprises 211
photographs, paintings and sculptures,
all brilliantly reproduced and grouped to
demonstrate various themes and narra-
tives, including the artists social descent
from nobleman to vagabond, a trajec-
tory which here begins in the 1730s
with Chardins portrait of the artist as
a monkey in a frock-coat, seated at his
easel. In English, a parade may be a
spectacular procession, but in French the
word signies the barkers presentation
of what lies in store inside his tent. This
catalogue shows how circus imagery
replaced triumphal imperial processions
and discourse, and the circus parade
became the funeral corte`ge of Napoleonic
and Classical history painting.
The nine sections into which the works
are divided produce some revealing juxta-
positions and impressive series, including
a magnicent set of drawings by Tou-
louse-Lautrec, recalling his visits to the
Cirque Fernando. The graphic intelligence
and vitality of these works secured the
artists release fromthe mental hospital in
which he had been interned. Overall, the
stylistic diversity of works in the catalo-
gue, mixing innovative masterpieces with
conventional and retrograde paintings, is
sometimes disconcerting, but doubtless
justied by the historical nature of the en-
terprise and the eclectic identity of circus
itself. There may, however, be another
unspoken agenda here, as if these artists
are somehow on a par, all part of a single
narrative, as if such a mixing of con-
servative and avant-garde artists could
somehow discredit the latters claims to
conceptual and aesthetic primacy. Such
a hypothesis would chime with recent
polemical texts overtly hostile to the avant-
garde published by the editor of
this volume, and that line of thinking
may explain some apparently incongruous
inclusions, such as the iconic photo of
Joseph Beuys in 1972, marching resolute-
ly forward, inscribed La rivoluzione samo
Noi (We Are the Revolution). Is this to be
understood as a portrait of the artist as
clown?
The nal section begins with an
introductory note which recalls that Har-
lequin was originally Hellequin, a ferry-
man between the living and the dead and
an animal-faced demon who, deep in the
forest, led a howling retinue of lost souls.
Picasso dominates this nal section, for he
was always drawn to such divine monsters
and hybrid creatures, and often portrayed
himself in Harlequins spangled outt.
The catalogue concludes with an ex-
cellent chronology, which provides a
concise history of circus fromthe fteenth
century to the present, and a parallel
account of the representation of circus
and related themes in art, music and lm.
There is also an extensive bibliography of
English and French publications on the
history of the circus and its representation
in art, all of which enhances the scientic
credibility of this volume, making it a
valuable work of reference on this specta-
cular and poignant topic.
peter read
University of St Andrews
WILLIAM HODGES, 17441797:
THE ART OF EXPLORATION
geoff quilley and john bonehill
(eds)
Yale University Press 2004 d40.00 $60.00
212 pp. 140 col illus
isbn 0-300-10376-x
W
illiam Hodges (17441797) well
deserves this publication and
the exhibition it accompanies.
Already well known as the artist who
accompanied Captain Cook on his second
voyage to the South Pacic, a limited
selection of his work is familiar to anyone
studying eighteenth-century ethnography,
volume 12 issue 2 may 2005 r bpl/aah The Art Book 19
Exhibitions, Museums andGalleries
exploration or art history. This has led to
a neglect of his appreciation as an artist,
indeed he is an extreme example of an
artist valued principally for his non-artistic
achievements. Here at last is a full re-
appraisal of his work in a wide-ranging,
detailed and scholarly study that discusses
his considerable achievements as a pain-
ter, and argues that he occupies a much
more central place in the development of
British art than the minor role with which
he has previously been credited.
The publication accompanies the ex-
hibition William Hodges 17441797:
The Art of Exploration at the National
Maritime Museum, Greenwich (5 July21
November 2004), and the Yale Center for
British Art, New Haven (27 January24
April 2005). The new art galleries in the
Queens House at Greenwich have enabled
the Maritime Museum to mount large-
scale temporary exhibitions, and much of
the material for this show has come from
the Museums own collection, the largest
art collection relating to maritime history
and culture in the world.
One of the notices for the exhibition
described Hodges as the 18th century
world landscape painter, hardly an over-
statement for a man who painted in New
Zealand, the South Pacic and India, and
produced among the rst sometimes
the very rst European views of these
locations. Hodges patrons were lucky to
have him with them on their explorations.
As David Attenborough points out in the
foreword, Hodges was both the rst
and the last professional European artist
to have encountered a civilisation as
yet entirely unaffected by European
ways; neither the Spanish conquistadors
in Mexico nor the Jesuit missionaries in
Japan took with them a trained artist.
Hodges accompanied Cook on his second
voyage aboard the Resolution (17725)
and on his return was employed by the
Admiralty to nish his drawings and
supervise engravings from them by Wil-
liam Woollett and other artists. In 1776 he
exhibited at the Royal Academy for the
rst time. Then, in 1778, he left for India
under the patronage of Governor Warren
Hastings, returning a wealthy man six
years later and settling in Mayfair, where
he built himself a studio and exhibited his
Indian views. In 1790 he was off again,
touring the continent as far as St. Peters-
burg, and publishing more views from his
drawings.
Hodges style and technique are in-
teresting and to some degree innovative.
A Londoner, he started his career rst
studying at William Shipleys school and
then spent some years as a pupil and
assistant to Richard Wilson, who very
much formed his style. Wilsons style was
inspired by the seventeenth-century idea-
lised views of Italy epitomised by Claude
Lorrain, and after a spell in Italy he
returned to interpret the British landscape
in a Claudian style, and trained a genera-
tion of younger artists who continued
the inuence. Hodges applied these layers
of stylistic borrowing to representations of
the Pacic and India, for example in his A
View of the Marmalong Bridge with a Sepoy and
Natives in the Foreground (Yale Center for
BritishArt, Paul MellonCollection, c 17801)
painted soon after he arrived in Madras,
which looks very reminiscent of a view of
the Ponte Molle in Rome by Claude
Lorrain. This style of landscape painting,
so familiar to British audiences, served
to make scenes that were new to British
viewers less daunting in their foreignness,
and also rather more attractive than a
schematic recording of the locations
might have done.
The most interesting and original
feature of Hodges paintings is his use of
the actual paint, freely handled to the
point of being described as impression-
istic, and very much ahead of his time.
It led to criticisms about lack of nish,
and one critic wrote in 1777 that The
public are indebted to this artist for giving
some idea of scenes which before they
know little of. It is surprising how-
ever, that a man of Mr Hodgess genius
should adopt such a ragged mode of
colouring; his pictures all appear as if they
were unnished, and as if the colours were
laid on the canvas with a skewer (quoted
by John Bonehill).
Hodges was not only a landscape
painter. He also painted several portraits
that are better known today for the identity
of their sitters than that of their creator,
for example Captain Cook, and the young
Tahitian, Omai, more familiar to us in
the elaborate full-length by Sir Joshua
Reynolds.
Hodges excelled in landscape painting
and it was his attempt to use landscapes as
a means of expressing moral values that
caused his downfall in career terms. In
London in 1794 he exhibited two large
canvases, The Effects of Peace and The Consequ-
ences of War. Their political nature offended
the Duke of York, and the exhibition
closed abruptly. By this time Hodges had
spent much of the fortune he had made,
and he abandoned painting and left
London to establish a bank at Dartmouth.
However, the contemporary political si-
tuation in Europe made it impossible to
succeed in the venture. He died two years
later, possibly by his own hand.
The publication comprises a series
of eight essays on the various strands
of Hodges life and artistic achieve-
ment, followed by a well illustrated
and detailed catalogue. Along with the
editors Geoff Quilley and John Bonehill
of the National Maritime Museum in
Greenwich, the essayists are experts in
their respective elds, with a long-stand-
ing interest in Hodges, for example
Giles Tillotson, who has previously pub-
lished research on Hodges landscapes
Monuments of Easter Island, 1775. National
Maritime Museum, MODArt Collection. From
WilliamHodges, 1744--1797: TheArt of Exploration
20 The Art Book volume 12 issue 2 may 2005 r bpl/aah
Exhibitions, Museums andGalleries
of India (The Articial Empire: The Indian
Landscapes of William Hodges, Richmond:
Curzon, 2000). The exhibition showed
over 50 key oil paintings, many of which
had not been seen in public since Hodges
own lifetime, and Charles Greigs essay
deals with attribution issues. There is a full
bibliography and index. The enterprise
invites a pun on Hodges travels, for
even without the exhibition this publica-
tion would serve to put Hodges rmly on
the map.
patricia r andrew
University of Edinburgh
ANA MENDIETA: EARTH BODY,
SCULPTURE AND PERFORMANCE,
19721985
olga m viso
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smith-
sonian Institution, in association with Hatje Cantz
Verlag 2004 d39.99 $49.95 h49.80
288 pp. 220 col/100 mono illus
isbn 3-7757-1395-6
UK dist. Art Books International, Portchester, Hants
A
na Mendietas earth-body works, a
unique combination of conceptual,
earth and body art, continue to capti-
vate audiences and fascinate scholars. Men-
dieta, an American artist born in Cuba,
created a remarkable body of work ephe-
meral outdoor performances and creations
documented in photographs, 35mm slides
and Super-8 lms, as well as sculpture and
drawing before her life tragically ended in
1985 at the age of 36. Ana Mendieta: Earth
Body, Sculpture and Performance, 19721985 is
a catalogue for the travelling exhibition
of the same name, on view in the United
States until early 2006. This book is the
most thoroughly researched, well illu-
strated, and balanced account to date of
this singular, extraordinary artist, and
through the work of the exhibition curator
and primary author Olga Viso, Mendieta
conclusively takes her rightful place as one
of the most important and inuential
artists of the late twentieth century.
In her introduction, Viso considers
previous interpretations of Mendietas
art: the artists interest in the art of pre-
Columbian cultures; issues of female id-
entity, voice and authority; expressions of
loss, absence and displacement; and her
relationship to and reinvention of concep-
tually based process and performance
practices. Viso describes her purpose:
By correcting a number of biographical in-
accuracies and challenging long-held assump-
tions about Mendietas evolution as an artist
and the critical contexts in which her art has
been framed, we are able to examine compre-
hensively her signicant contributions to the art
of our time.
This project is important, Viso claims,
because until the mid-1990s Mendietas
work was rarely shown outside a feminist
or Latino/a context a problem that
beleaguered the artist even during her
own lifetime.
Thus, for this exhibition and the
catalogues main essay, The memory of
history, Viso researched the biographical,
creative and professional elements of
Mendietas life, seamlessly weaving family
history, personal details, artistic achieve-
ments and critical analyses. Following
Mendietas footsteps, she travelled to
Cuba, Italy and Mexico (the latter country
with Hans Breder, the artists teacher,
mentor and lover during the 1970s), as
well as across the USA, to gather her
material. Incredibly well researched 344
endnotes identify a vast well of sources,
from the artists personal archives and
interviews with family members to news-
paper accounts and critical essays the
book is traditional art history at its nest.
Written for both the specialist and a
general audience, Visos text is the most
readable of any account of Mendietas art
and life. The author sets the stage by giving
a general overview of mid-century avant-
garde practices and movements and by
providing a general overview of the early
days of the University of Iowas Intermedia
Program. There, we nd the source of
Mendietas working practice: Viso writes,
Breders teaching emphasized the follow-
ing process, to which Mendieta subscribed
throughout her career: 1) formulate a
proposal for the work; 2) execute it; 3)
document the activity. Viso also credits
other key inuences on the artist: literary
and artistic sources, her visits to Mexico
from1971 to 1977, and her friendship with
the critic and art historian Lucy Lippard,
who was the rst to write about the artist.
Viso then traces chronologically both
Mendietas biography and her body of
work, from her early student perfor-
mances to her sculpture, drawing, and
the outdoor projects created in the last few
years of her life. The authors interpreta-
tions are subtle yet complex; they may
disappoint those readers interested in
postcolonial, feminist and critical theory,
as the author favours a close examina-
tion of the works, their background and
context, and their multiplicity of meaning
over themes of identity and sexual poli-
tics (though Viso does not avoid these).
Readers will still want to consult Gloria
Moures 1996 monograph on Mendieta,
especially Charles Merrewethers insight-
ful essay, and Jane Blockers theoretically
charged Where is Ana Mendieta? to nd out
what Viso gracefully sidesteps.
The outline of the female formin nature
that stresses a feminist sensibility, if not
feminist politics, is clear in Mendietas
work. To this end,Viso examines the artists
relationship to the leading women artists of
the day, including Mary Beth Edelson,
Carolee Schneemann and Nancy Spero.
Viso connects Mendieta more closely with
European-based artists such as Marina
Abramovic, Hannah Wilke, Teresa Hak
Kyung Cha and Rebecca Horn, whose work
is perhaps more poetic and less didactic
than that of their American counterparts
(but no less imperative and poignant). I
would add to this list Valie Export, whose
urban Body Congurations photographs
of the mid-1970s uncannily parallel Men-
dietas contemporaneous work in nature.
In the 1980s, Mendietas creative pro-
cesses moved from photo-documentation
of ephemeral events to make works that
were more readily marketable, which aided
her quest for gallery representation. This
under-studied work freestanding sculp-
ture, oor pieces, wall reliefs, and draw-
ings is ripe for re-evaluation, and Visos
research will surely help to launch further
studies. Concluding her essay, the author
touches on Mendietas personal and
professional relationship with the sculptor
Carl Andre, whom she met in 1979 and
married in 1985, but generally avoids
speculating on the circumstances sur-
rounding her death. Not to leave us with
a grim ending, Viso traces the inuence of
Mendieta on artists working today.
Mendieta is one of the few contem-
porary artists who have achieved acclaim
for student work. Julia Herzbergs essay,
Ana Mendietas Iowa years, 19701980,
chronicles the artists growth from young
graduate student to sophisticated artist.
Mendieta attended the University of Iowa,
one of the most progressive art schools in
the 1960s and 1970s, from 1966 to 1977,
earning a bachelors and two masters
degrees (the work for which she is known
today comes from 1972 and after). Breder
was certainly a crucial force for many Inter-
media students during this time: he brou-
volume 12 issue 2 may 2005 r bpl/aah The Art Book 21
Exhibitions, Museums andGalleries
ght in several visiting professors Scott
Burton, Vito Acconci, Robert Wilson and
Willoughby Sharp among them who pro-
vided direct access to major art-world
gures and trends. Herzberg also identi-
es Mendietas rst summer trip to Mexico
in 1971 with an archaeology class as an
experience that opened her fully to the pre-
Columbian art, which she came to believe
was superior to Western art. Like Viso,
Herzberg performs excellent close readings
of Mendietas student work, including her
provocative blood pieces and tableaux of
violence works. By 1977, the artist had
already completed a formidable body of
work: her best-known works, the Silueta,
Fetish, and Tree of Life series, establish
her today as a leading practitioner of
emotionally and physically charged process
and performance art.
Guy Bretts essay places Mendietas
work in the context of her Latin American
peers an interesting perspective that, the
author admits, deserves additional study.
He writes, Mine is not an attempt to trace
inuences, but rather afnities, parallels,
simultaneities, resonances, ideas in the
air at given moment. . .. Brett explores
two themes in Mendietas work, re and
earth, and connects themto a certain Latin
American sensibility that is also found in
the work of He lio Oiticica, Marta Minuj n,
Cildo Meireles and Grupos Escombros.
These artists use re and earth, however,
to engage social and political issues more
directly than did Mendieta, who strove
for the personal and timeless. His third
theme, Self, Selves, which contrasts
Mendietas solitary gures with the Lygia
Clarks social performances, fails to con-
vince as a specically Latin American
construct. Each artists work is open-
ended and emphasises an exhaustion of
the self, but by the mid-twentieth century,
artists around the world were exploring
concepts of the self and the body.
In Subtle bodies: The invisible lms of
Ana Mendieta, Chrissie Iles duly notes
that Mendieta created the largest number
of artists lms in the 1970s 80 in all
but has only recently received proper
recognition: in fact, with this very exhibi-
tion. Iles points out that Mendieta used
three-minute Super-8 lm cartridges, a
mediumthat in the 1970s many artists cast
aside in favour of newer video technology.
As most video equipment was rare outside
the television studio, Super-8 was still the
medium of choice as was 35mm slide
lm for families, amateurs, and popu-
list-minded artists. Interestingly, Iles men-
tions that Mendietas lms lack a
soundtrack, acting as . . . silent wit-
ness[es] to her ephemeral sculptural
works and actions in the gallery, on the
street, and, most extensively, in the
land. . .. In contrast, she also notices
strong feminist overtones in lms such
as Untitled (Body Tracks) that demonstrate a
visceral side to the lms contemplative
and occasionally lyrical atmosphere.
At the end of the book appears a chrono-
logy, compiled by Laura Roulet, which
alternates between the artists biography,
family history and artistic milestones and
general social, political and art history. An
extensive bibliography, a detailed exhibition
history and a complete checklist of the
exhibition are also included (the latter
essential, as the illustrations appear thro-
ughout the volume in random order).
An exceptional monograph, Ana Men-
dieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance,
19721985 will be the rst resource
interested readers will consult; however,
since biography plays a central role in
the book, previous scholarship, includ-
ing Moures catalogue and Blockers
study, should also be consulted for
their theoretical approaches. Nonethe-
less, Viso and her contributors have
provided a thorough history of Mendieta
with splendid reproductions from every
part of her career.
christopher howard
Writer and editor, New York
Ana Mendieta. Untitled(Sandwoman), 1983.
Sand andbinder onwood. rTheEstate of Ana
Mendieta Collection. Courtesy Galerie Lelong,
NewYork.
22 The Art Book volume 12 issue 2 may 2005 r bpl/aah
Exhibitions, Museums andGalleries