Art that remains "Bang up to date"

That perspicacious genius, Pablo Picasso, once said, about his art, "All I have ever made was made for the present, with the hope that it will always remain in the present."

His work has just been tested again from this point of view, with an exhibition, Picasso by Picasso, on show at Zurich's Kunsthaus, until the 30th January, 2011. This is a semi-repeat of an exhibition that Picasso himself selected in 1932; he chose 225 of his works from different periods and styles, and the show was very successful. This time, one hundred of the original works selected have been reunited, and according to William Cook, writing in The Spectator on October 30th, 2010, the exhibition is again very successful. Since the works are all pre-1932, there is not the political element that appeared in Picasso's work after Guernica, and apparently, the works appear far more optimistic than later paintings. Most importantly, the exhibition passed the acid test of Picasso's work remaining relevant, present and with impact for today's viewers. In William Cook's words, the show still seems "bang up to date".

For art to remain in the present, what does it need? I am sure everyone has a different answer, but for me, it boils down to art that contains a passionate message about human values, aspirations, emotions... The great art that has come down to us from past centuries and from different cultures all touches a cord in us, reminding us of universal bonds. The art can tell us of people, places, plants and trees, animals - in stylised or realistic fashion - but there is always a depth of emotion in the overt or subliminal messages.

Think of a Rembrandt portrait with its psychological impact, such as this masterpiece from the Frick Collection, a 1658 Self-Portrait (on the right) ... Or a Vermeer with the heart-stopping clarity and elegant stillness that nonetheless manages to encompass complex human moments. His Music Lesson (1662-1665) in the Royal Collection is a wonderful example (on the left).

Go back some six to seven thousand years to the Romanian Man from Cernavoda, the tiny

clay man seated with his elbows on his knees, who conveys just as much deep introspection today as when he was made - we can all relate to his pensive, eloquent melancholy. In this image, he is shown with his companion Woman. (Image courtesy of the National History Museum, Bucharest.)

Remember, too, Rodin's The Kiss, with its utterly memorable evocation of romantic love.

When one thinks of the innumerable works of art that bring joy, compassion, delight, insights and understanding, they all touch those cords that bind one to the present. William Cook, in the review to which I referred to above, also alluded to modern art as having become "introverted, a reflection of our times". This brought me up short, but then I remembered the works so prized today - of Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, for instance - and I do rather wonder where many modern works will be in fifty years' time... In the basements or still in pride of place on display? Time is not kind to superficial art. Each century proves that out, with scores of now-forgotten artists who were lionised in their time.

For an artist to find a voice that talks of the universal "now" is truly a gift. It is a goal to which every artist aspires, for, in a way, that is the overwhelming "raison d'être" of making art - to remain in the present.

Parables of Creation

The celebrated art dealer and collector, Ernst Beyeler, who died in Basel, Switzerland, last year, remarked, "I have always perceived works of art as parables of creation - analogous to nature, as Cezanne once said - an expression of joie de vivre". That perception and keenness of eye made him famous for his choices in art.



Art as a parable of creation is an interesting concept. In a literal sense, there has long been art which illustrates and teaches aspects of religion, particularly when the Catholic Church was, de facto, the sponsor of some of the world's greatest artists during the Renaissance time and beyond. One of the most celebrated examples is, of course, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling.

This is one of the most iconic parts of that vast series of paintings, when God gives Adam the gift of life.

Artists explored every way they could conceive of conveying interpretations of creation, as written in the Bible. Some of this art also spoke of joie de vivre, of sensuous love, of beauty and of life. Nature came once more into prominence, as it had been in earlier Medieval art, when depictions of flowers, birds, landscapes... had symbolised holy matters. As the 16th century moved on in Italy, for instance, more and more artists were combining the richness of the new technique of oil painting with their draughting skills. Their subjects expanded to landscapes, cityscapes, everyday scenes... art where creation could have a much wider meaning. The same movement was happening in Northern Europe.



Rembrandt, for instance, was magisterial in his ability to create art that evoked deep meaning about creation, about man's condition, and - sometimes - joie de vivre. Interestingly, as highlighted by an exhibition this year at the Louvre and at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rembrandt broke with artistic tradition by using Jewish models to depict Christ and made his Christ a living person, not an icon due great reverence. Indeed, by the 17th century, the artistic vocabulary had become much more elastic; it could allude to many more emotions that were not so dictated by religious concept.



As art - and Western society - moved on through the centuries to our own, both the definitions of creation and joie de vivre have evolved hugely. Art became less and less "coded" and straightforward, so that knowledge of symbols, especially religious, became unnecessary. There can of course be many layers of meaning, but most paintings can be read to some degree, with consequent enjoyment. (Think of people's reactions to Impressionist paintings, or those of 20th century artists...) Nature has always contributed greatly to the joie de vivre of viewers, from flower paintings onwards. Now the parables of creation are more about general celebrations of life, our world in general.



Meanwhile, other civilisations' art (China, Japan, Korea, India, Islamic art, etc.) have been equally eloquent spokesmen for parables of creation - just in totally different fashion. In truth, personally, I have always found Japanese art totally intoxicating in its beauty and thus, joie de vivre. (At left, Hasogawa Tohaku's six folded screens on paper, Pine Trees, courtesy of the Tokoyo National Museum.)

Quick or Slow - which is best for Drawing?

The life drawing group in which I participate has a very sensible programme of one session of short poses, and then - normally - the following week, the same model poses for one long pose.

These sessions always get me thinking about the speed at which I draw and how fast or slowly other artists there draw. Some people can produce a very finished drawing in a remarkably short time, while others seem barely to have made many marks in the same time period.

Historically, drawing have always fallen into the categories of quick studies and finished drawings, but history seldom tells us how long each artist actually took to accomplish the drawing. Rembrandt, clearly, had a wonderful ability to draw fast and evocatively; his pen and ink drawings have a breathless immediacy on occasions, blots, drying pens, scribbles and everything in between. His drawing of Jesus and the Adulteress is spare and fast, as if he was thinking, planning, organising. Other drawings evoke a spur-of-the-moment view as he sees someone asleep or sitting in a moment of introspection, a moment that he wants to remember, a scene that he wants to record for the pure joy of drawing. Spare and elegant, his lines are fast and fluid.

Granted, the medium somewhat dictates the speed at which an artist draws. Pen and ink, conte, graphite or charcoal are all relatively fast, and marks can be made expressively with quick results. When you get to silverpoint, things tend to slow down a lot. The time available to make a drawing is therefore important, and subject matter tends often to dictate the medium... if the scene is about to disappear, you chose a quicker, more impressionistic way of capturing it. Each artist also has an individual eye, chosing what is important to record. Some aim mainly to capture the essence of the subject; others get fascinated by the play of light, the spatial composition or other aspects which are more time-consuming to depict. Adolph Menzel, for instance, often used a wonderful technique of drawing a person doing something from multiple poses on the same page. In a way, he was a forerunner to William Kentridge, with his many images being drawn, erased, filmed and then refilmed after changes. Menzel was drawing fast, fluently - he was a master draughtman. Kentridge is a superlative draughtsman too, but his approach, innovative and very much of our era with its mix of media, tends ultimately to be a slow and meticulous process, as each drawing evolves, is recorded and then evolves again until its final concluding version in narrative.

Lots of approaches to drawing - mercifully! It means that each of us can be a tortoise or a hare in our drawing methods. The results are really what count.

The Shock of Recognition

You enter an exhibition, perhaps almost by chance. You see the title of the show, and you are trying to orient yourself as to what it is about.

Then you round the first corner in the exhibit room, and boom, you get a jolt. Straight in front of you, out of the blue, you see a piece of art that you know well, something that has resonated with you before. And there it is again, quietly hanging on the wall. This shock of recognition, a thrill of interest and delight, are what makes me realise how much art means to me in daily life.

This reunion with pieces of art that I admire happened a little while ago when I strayed into the lovely CaixaForum exhibition hall in Palma, in the elegantly restored modernist Gran Hotel. I saw that there was an exhibition of etchings entitled, "From Durer to Morandi. Engravings from the William Cuendet Foundation and the Atelier Saint-Pret". It was a large Swiss collection of very fine editions of work by innumerable artists from Durer to Rembrandt, Canneletto, Piranesi, Goya, Degas and many others.

One of my first delights was a Rembrandt work - The Holy Family with a Cat, from 1654 - a work that always enchanted me with the inclusion of the cat. I had not seen it for a while, and so lingered to savour of the composition, the feeling conveyed by the whole harmonious order of the etching.



Another happy reunion amongst the other one hundred and thirty works was this deliciously memorable work by Edgar Degas, At the Louvre, Painting, Mary Cassatt, 1879-1880. I have always loved its daring composition and essentially late 19th century French atmosphere. Both these images are courtesy of the Jenisch Museum, Vevey, Switzerland.

My impulsive choice to walk into this exhibition, as I hastened through a list of errands, was such a bonus. The shock of recognition jolted me again and again. I came out exhilarated and grateful for the serendipitious gifts of art.

Turner at the Tate

A discussion I heard today on the BBC World Service was well worth seeking out: Tim Marlow taking a walk around the just-opened exhibition at the Tate, Turner and the Masters. His discussion about J.M.W. Turner's early endeavours to make his way as an artist and his audacious attempts to measure himself against other master artists was fascinating. From Constable to Caneletto, Rubens, Titian and Rembrandt, Turner used their work as excuses to measure himself against them, to surpass them and to use them as a springboard to develop his own voice.

It was a fascinating series of insights about how even the most amazing and inventive of artists has to work, work, work and relentlessly push forward eventually to become a wonderful artist. Lots of food for thought.

Defining your identity as an artist

Defining yourself as an artist is a lifelong endeavour. Each of us aspires to have a singular voice, a hallmark style and an artistic identity unlike anyone else. Achieving one's own style as an artist is complex, on-going and both technical and psychological. First of all, I believe, it has to do with defining who you are as a person and what you want to say, overall, through your art. It also has to do with hanging on to your belief in yourself, being willing always to learn and adapt, but nonetheless, being true to your own core identity. Sometimes that can be hard, especially when tough economic times demand lots of compromises.

One tool which I find very useful to help me define my identity is drawing. Whether it is with charcoal, graphite, pen and ink, conte crayon, chalk or silverpoint, it does not matter. It is the act of drawing that helps strip things down to bare bones, to try to get at the core of what I am trying to say. In other words, to define my art and thus to define me as an artist. Drawing is a tool with two rather different uses. The first is to make a finished drawing, a work of art that stands alone. The second is to draw small, quick studies for composition, distribution of lights and darks, etc. in preparation for a painting.

Drawing, unlike painting, is a direct, spontaneous act, indicative of emotions and thoughts in fresh and unadorned fashion. Many of the great Old Master drawings will leave errors and show corrections - a new line of a cheekbone on top of one that was off in proportion, an arm which has changed position slightly since the first line was put down, a tangle of lines where the artist was thinking of how to depict something or even blobs of ink where the pen "misbehaved". Rembrandt had many a tussle with his pens and ink but very frequently, that drawing could be readily recognised as one done by Rembrandt.

Try using drawing, any drawing, as a pathway to defining more clearly who you are as an artist. It is often a surprising and enlightening exercise - and fun as well.

Lost and found edges

Yesterday I spent time again at the Telfair Academy in Savannah, looking at Dennis Martin's amazing metalpoint drawings, in preparation for a silverpoint workshop I am giving there today.

One of the aspects that has fascinates me about Martin's approach to drawing is his superb use of lost and found edges. By this, I mean his method of making a transition from a contour line to shadows and ill-defined edges of an object. The defining line gets lost, then reappears again, and the overall effect allows for a very satisfying, yet often mysterious integration of subject matter into a background, for instance. Sadly, I cannot find any illustration of Martin's work that can show his skilled drawings. He uses a mixture of goldpoint, platinumpoint and graphite, all media that do not change colour (unlike silver which tarnishes eventually in the marks on paper), and thus they can be used as three different values that can seamlessly move from very light to much darker, even extreme darks of graphite.

Lost and found edges can add greatly to the interest of a piece of art, not only in drawing. Many wonderful artworks are strengthened in this manner.

Rembrandt, for instance, frequently used this method to anchor and enhance the atmosphere in a drawing, often in pen and ink and ink washes. These are just a few examples of his superb sense of darks and lights and their use and placement in the drawing.



From a self-portrait to a small quick drawing of his wife, Saskia, sleeping, one of his wonderful lion drawings (courtesy of the British Museum) to studies of Women and Children (courtesy of the Swedish National Museum), they all show his ability to merge the subject with the background in darks that anchor, meld and ground the subject.



Seurat was another artist whose consummate skill with atmospheric transitions from dark to light often involved the use of lost and found edges. His charcoals were especially famous for this. These are examples of a lady embroidering and another reading - intimate, shadowy drawings that evoke the dim light of a Parisian apartment, where edges are ill-defined and light falls fitfully (courtesy of the Fogg, Cambridge).

The Whole Composition

A visual artist always has a set of decisions to make at the beginning of a work - how to compose the picture, what to emphasise, what to convey by the way the picture is composed. That is in part why so many people advocate doing thumbnail sketches before embarking on a painting or drawing; one needs to work out a sensible road map, a composition that works.

Henri Matisse once remarked, "I don't paint things. I only paint between things." He paid close attention to the relationships between objects and how they relate to the whole composition. In a way, he was, in essence, creating an abstract web and underpinning to the composition by looking at the negative spaces, versus focusing on the "things".

Look, for instance, at this Still Life with Geraniums which Matisse painted in 1910 (image courtesy of the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich). There is a wonderful, energetic structure going on thanks to the contrasts between the horizontals and verticals and the organically curvaceous objects and flowers. Half-closing your eyes and looking at the negative spaces in the painting leads to a really strong, dynamic underpinning to the work. Yet there is also a sense of space and airiness that was one of Matisse's great skills. His paintings looked out, not inwards in a hermetic fashion.

In the same way, the 1912 painting, The Window at Tanger, relies heavily on the relationships between the sense of space and spaciousness and the "things". (The image is courtesy of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.)

The deep blue knits everything together, but flattens the space into a near-abstract image. Matisse visited Morocco in 1912 and again in 1913, and the bright colours and flat perspective show the influence that Islamic art was having on Matisse. He had already brightened his palette considerably with his Fauve period, so it was a logical development to embrace the brilliance of the Moroccan world. He used the "differences" in this scene from his hotel window to knit together an enormously evocative and energetic composition.

Another very different approach to the concept of composing a picture by concentrating on the spaces between objects can be seen in Rembrandt's prints. When he was working on his etchings, he was so technically skilled that he could fade out the contours of objects he was depicting and allow the "differences between things" to evoke the desired effect. Seventeenth century Italian art historian and connoisseur, Filippo Baldinucci, remarked, "that which is truly noteworthy of this artist (Rembrandt) was his remarkable style that he invented to etch in copper - that is, loose hatching and irregular lines and without contours he succeed in making profound contrasts."

Rembrandt's 1654 etching, The Descent from the Cross, is one example. Few contours, wonderful spaces between "things" and an arresting composition all are rendered more powerful by this technique that Baldinucci described.

In the same way, the spaces between, so expertly depicted and so vital to the composition, are masterfully achieved in this 1658 etching, The Woman before a Dutch Stove.

For every artist working now, it is always rewarding to go back and study attentively what has been done by the great artists of the past. The Internet helps greatly in allowing us to see these images, but there is, even now, a huge difference between these digital images and the actual artwork. That is when seeing how Matisse actually applied paint to the canvas as he evoked those relationships between things, or peering at Rembrandt's etchings, with their amazing hatching, through a magnifying glass, allow us to see the artist's hand and deft, skilled touch. Those details allow the ultimate consolidation and achievement of the composition, the relationships of things one to the other and thus to the whole work.

Dutch Utopia tour at Telfair Museum

Today's visit to the Telfair Museum's exhibition, Dutch Utopia: American Artists in Holland, 1880-1914, was a fascinating delight for a huge group of art lovers from Savannah and beyond. Curator Holly McCullough led everyone through the genesis, choices, history and social background of an exhibition she had worked on for long years.

Holland became a magnet for many American artists, men and women, who chose to work, sometimes in colonies, in many small towns throughout the country. They created paintings that reflected Holland's silvery light, seascapes and dunes. Other work depicted Dutch society, selectively and with an emphasis on older, traditional mores. People were portrayed as sober, hardworking, church-going, mostly garbed in costumes that were chosen more for their pictorial value than any accuracy of local costume. Gari Melchers, one of the main artists represented in the exhibition, with dramatic paintings large and small, had close ties to the Telfair as he was Fine Arts Advisor to the Museum early in the 20th century. His choice of art to be acquired, during his tenure at the Museum, led to holdings of these American artists working in Holland, such as Walter MacEwen and George Hitchcock. Other artists represented in the exhibition range from Robert Henri, William Merritt Chase, John Twachtman and John Singer Sargent to women like Elizabeth Nourse and Anna Stanley. They all spent time in one or more of the small towns and villages favoured by the artists for their timeless beauties.

The 17th century influences show in much of the art, from Franz Hals to Rembrandt or Vermeer, and the silvery light is a hallmark of many of the paintings. I delighted in some of the depictures of the leaded glass windows, always with spindly pot plants reaching for the light but managing to add touches of background colour to interior scenes. Other aspects of the paintings dwell on the essence of Holland - windmills, tulips, orderly streets and fishing boat scenes. It was thus not surprising that a number of these paintings had been in European public and private collections from the time they were produced, although many others had been purchased by the new collecting public in this country. The Telfair had assembled this show from public and private collections and many had not been exhibited in public for long years.

If you miss this exhibition in Savannah, you can catch it at the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, the Grand Rapids Art Museum, and finally at the Singer Laren Museum in the Netherlands. Thanks to Holly McCullough and her team, this exhibition is an unusual, fascinating and often very lovely exhibition well worth visiting.