Patrick Heron, Azalea Garden
A visit to Tate St Ives’ recent exhibition Object: Gesture: Grid (subtitled ‘St Ives and the International Avant-garde’) has left me pining for an artistic return to the intellectual mores of mid-century modern. Where now the ‘blank’ canvasses, the black squares, the simple and elegant architectural forms, the slashes of visceral colour, the naturalistic pagan shapes, the fragile perfect lines, the balance between the minimalistic absolute and the subliminal terror of free expression?
The Tate exhibition was a lovingly put together disarray of post-Second World War art, either made in St Ives, or influenced by it, or complementary to the work produced there. It highlighted, as the Tate put it, “a shared visual language of artists working in Europe and America from the 1930s to the late 1970s”. Hmm, actually there was art there from the late 1980s too, but let’s not quibble.
The exhibition included work by Constantin Brancusi (his gold flash of a fish), Naum Gabo, Mark Rothko, Carl Andre, Willem de Kooning, Barbara Hepworth, Sol LeWitt, Eva Hesse, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braques, Sandra Blow, Jackson Pollock and Peter Lanyon. The usual suspects, perhaps, but it was, quite simply, the kind of ‘modern’ art I love.
It’s also the kind of modern art that a lot of people really hate. In fact it’s the kind of modern art that makes grumpy broadcaster John Humphrys groan ‘but is it art?’ It’s the kind of modern art that your dad says ‘I could have done that!’ about. It’s the kind of modern art that I’ve even heard people who supposedly like art moan ‘I like art but this kind of stuff just takes the p!ss’. It’s the kind of art that, even though it might have been made well over a century ago, some gallery visitors still recoil in front of – as if it were a shock of the new that was shocking and new.
Why do people get upset by Bob Law’s ‘black’ watercolour without stopping to notice that it’s not black at all, but a beautiful mood piece made of a rainbow of different colours? Why do viewers walk past Robert Ryman’s ‘Ledger’ and assume it’s just a blank? Why not stop to consider the construction, the different materials, the balanced assemblage? Patrick Heron’s ‘Azalea Garden’ – is it really just blobs? Why, then, is it so affecting? Eva Hesse’s intricately drawn grid? Why did she do that? Would it not be good to stop and think? Sandra Blow’s epic ‘Vivace’ with it’s Clifford Still vibrancy and Matisse-like paper cuts – it’s a whole history of 20th-century modern in a huge square frame. But, of course, is it art? Surely I could have done that? Let’s just walk on by, or recoil and shake our heads in dismay.
While in St Ives we got to wondering why this kind of modern art – minimalism, abstract expressionism and beyond – still divides opinion. What made many of these artists paint and draw and sculpt as they did? Well, obviously the violence of the 20th century cannot be avoided. Russian Revolution, two world wars, the Holocaust, the A bomb/H bomb/nuclear bomb and then the ensuing Cold War/Suez/Cuba/Vietnam scenarios. Depressing, isn’t it?
Bob Law, Black Watercolour
So Pollock gets primitive, drinks, listens to jazz and paints accordingly. Rothko flees the crowded subways and reduces the rugged landscape of a whole continent into floating, isolated forms. Picasso and Braques energetically, neurotically, restlessly, reinvent whatever they see in front of them over and over again and sometimes all at once. In Cornwall, St Ives becomes a port in a heavy storm. And, preceding them all (although not in this exhibition), Duchamp blows a raspberry to the horror that will come, leaves a urinal in the white cube – and signs it R Mutt.
I often feel amazed that these kinds of art still have the power to shock and that many people don’t yet understand them. Then I remember that they are about humanity, dread, time, space, the brave new world of mechanical reproduction, the inability to speak (to have poetry after Auschwitz), about looking outwards and turning inwards, about frustration and fear and, most of all, about not having all the answers.
These questions do not fade. The more they are asked the more we face the debris of the past piling up at our feet – the more the future feels impossible to turn towards. And yet… the subtle, warm, composed, sometimes humorous forms of the work also highlights a deep sense of humanity and of hope. If you want art that is simply pleasant and well-crafted, or art that is recognisable, easily definable and doesn’t make you think too much, then mid-century modern is not for you.
P.S. In the previous post Ella and I are at Barbara Hepworth’s studio, St Ives.
Robert Ryman, Ledger
Sandra Blow, Vivace
Eva Hesse, untitled
MW Bewick's Fingerprint 