Studies in World Art

The big exhibition of Matisse's Cut-Outs at Tate Modern in London was, certainly on the face of it, everything that a major museum of modern and contemporary art should be doing. It was beautifully presented, very professionally curated, had an extremely thorough, excellently illustrated catalogue, and was greeted with ecstatic reviews.

In 1975, the American critic, Laura Mulvey, published an article entitled "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". This has over the years been one of the most influential of all feminist texts. In it, Mulvey made use of a version of Freudian theory, as reinterpreted by the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Freud referred to scopophilia - the pleasure of look at other people’s bodies as erotic objects. Mulvey applied this to the cinema.

More than 30 years ago - in 1977, to be exact - I co-authored a book called Work and Struggle: The Painter as Witness. Its subject was one aspect of the academic painting of the late 19th and very early 20th century - art which dealt not with the comfortable lives of the rich but with all the social problems of the time. There were over 200 illustrations, most of them drawn from publications issued in conjunction with the official Salons of the period, but when we searched for these, they were largely missing.

This year sees the 300th anniversary of the foundation of St. Petersburg, an event that is being widely celebrated here in London as well as in Russia. And today The Times of London carried a story about the "widespread sleaze" that is hampering the restoration of Russia's former capital city. Though Oleg Kulik is not a Petersburg artist, these two facts help to provide a context for his career. Western interest in and curiosity about Russia is acute. The tendency is, however, to look at the Russian past, not at the present.

The show of Michelangelo drawings at the British Museum in London counted as one of the artistic events of 2006. It is unlikely that the public will have another chance to see such a complete panorama of the artist’s achievement as a draughtsman for many years to come, if indeed ever again. The reasons for this rush to get in are not hard to discover. Michelangelo’s reputation is that of the greatest of all artists. Most of his finished, or near-finished, works are in marble or fresco, and can never leave their locations in Florence or Rome.

In the early years of the 20th century, Paris became the center for an international community of artists. Some of them were French, but the city also offered its hospitality to artists from an increasingly wide range of other nationalities. Some, like Marc Chagall, came from communities that had never produced artists of international note before. The result was a mixture between a stewpot and a laboratory.

Philip Pearlstein is a paradox. He is one of the great survivors from a time when American art was at its most creative and influential. And at the same time, he seems to oppose everything that the two major revolutions in American art - Abstract Expressionism and Pop - seem to stand for.

How do we expect public art to function in a contemporary society? By public art, we mean art that to some extent at least ambushes us. We encounter it as we go about our everyday lives, not in some special art-dedicated space. In other words, certainly not in a museum. However, Aida Mahmudova notes, in her introduction to this public art project for Baku organized by Yarat! Contemporary Art Space, conditions for public art are now very different from the way in which art of this kind operated previously.

Of the three great Italian High Renaissance masters, Raphael is now the most problematic. Leonardo and Michelangelo continue to fascinate, even though some of the modern audience - myself included - find some of Leonardo's output faintly creepy. Raphael is a different matter. In his own lifetime, he was perhaps the most admired of the three, successful with every type of patron and every type of audience. Where his rivals delayed, Raphael delivered, unflappable and omnicompetent.

Art in the Caribbean is culturally of great complexity. This complexity reflects the intricacies of the colonial history of the region, with the different islands and territories divided between many different European powers. Artists in each territory tended to mesh into a different education system and a different set of preconceptions about art.

Renoir’s reputation has long been in decline with intellectuals. He is seen as sugary and self-indulgent, to the point where his work gives the whole of the Impressionist Movement a bad name. The thing that has contributed to this fall from grace is, of course, the late work, with its bloated nudes and curiously hot colors. Yet even the work of Renoirís best period tends to seem uneven, despite the continuing popularity of undoubted masterpiece such as La Loge [1874].

The new exhibition at the National Gallery in London ought to be yet another triumph for an institution that is now running a very ambitious exhibition program. Yet this event makes a curiously uneasy effect. There are several, not just one, reasons for this. The first is that Rubens, of all great artists the one who enjoyed the greatest degree of worldly success, had distinctly uneasy beginnings. Of sound Flemish bourgeois stock, he was born in 1577 at Siegen in Westphalia.

Rothko is now one of those mythical artists, an icon of 20th century creativity, the central figure in a tragic legend. Which means to say that one is pretty much compelled to agree that everything he did was wonderful, a manifestation of genius. I have to say that I find myself increasingly resistant to this approach. Some works by Rothko I do in fact respond to, with their glowing blocks of color.

Flying into Sarajevo is no big deal nowadays. Customs and immigration are quick. You don't need a visa if you hold an EEC passport. Perhaps the only noticeable difference between this and other flights within Europe is a slightly increased degree of airport security. Hand luggage goes through a scanner at two different points, before you board the aircraft. Nor is arrival at the hotel any different from arriving at big chain hotels in other European cities. The Holiday Inn is transatlantic in style, with a big fountain outside and a soaring atrium within. Things are busy - the receptionist leafs through lots of different pieces of paper before finally, and rather reluctantly, locating our reservations. "Do you mind having a room that overlooks the big boulevard? It might be a bit noisy." But when I get there, it's double-glazed, so there is no problem.

The Tate Britain’s "display", Seeing Africa - it was hardly big enough to be called a proper exhibition - raised more questions than it answered. Consisting of paintings and sculptures drawn from a single private collection, it aimed to explore the subject of Africanisme through images of African people and African landscape made by European painters who traveled to the Dark Continent at the height of the colonial epoch. That is to say between the 1870s and the 1950s. 

The Gale Dictionary of Psychoanalysis defines ‘self-representation’ as “the image the subject has of him or herself based on his or her own interpretation.” The hugely influential 20th century psychoanalytic researcher and philosopher Jacques Lacan enlarges on this by speaking of “the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark [the subject’s] mental development with its rigid structure.” Not surprisingly, psychoanalysts see this construct as a manifestation of the ego, and also as something intimately linked to narcissism.  

Works of art have often been endowed by their audience with talismanic force. Their impact exceeds the visual impression they make. This seems natural enough when we consider the fact that the most ambitious works of art produced by ancient civilizations were religious. To those who originally encountered them, they seemed to speak directly from the gods. Their makers were very seldom recorded, though the names of those who ordered them to be made - pharaohs, emperors and kings - quite frequently survive.

This article is essentially a follow-up to a piece by The Jackdaw’s revered editor, David Lee, published in The Times on July 25, 2013. In it, he detailed just what a fiasco the Arts Council’s contribution to an otherwise successful Olympic year was, with £5.4 million spent and nothing to show for it.

Here can be no doubt that the Chinese exhibition at the Royal Academy in London is more than a merely artistic event. It represents a new stage in the burgeoning relationship between contemporary China and the West. The opening, originally scheduled for January, was brought forward to coincide with a State Visit to Britain by the Chinese president, Hu Jintao. The "Three Emperors" of the title were the second, third, and fourth rulers of the Qing Dynasty, and their period in power spanned nearly a century-and-a-half, from the mid-17th century until the end of the 18th.

The magnificent Veronese show that opened at the National Gallery in London in 2014 met with a curiously subdued response from local reviewers. They recognized that it was a magnificent event of its kind, and one that was especially appropriate because the gallery has an important group of works by this 16th-century Venetian painter in its own collection, among them the famous Family of Darius Before Alexander.