Author / Estelle Lovatt

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Posts by Estelle Lovatt

Art Critic, Writer, Lecturer & Broadcaster.
by Estelle Lovatt

Jane McAdam Freud, Gazelli Art House

As the daughter of probably the most famous portrait painter of his generation, Jane McAdam Freud’s latest exhibition pays tribute to her beloved father, Lucian. “I am channelling my artistic heritage and focusing on familial relationships,“ admits the London-born sculptor. “It is part of a continuing theme I have been exploring about my family. It includes a very large bronze portrait of my half-sister Annabel and sculptures of my husband and children as well as work relating to my father.“

And with a strong artistic background – her mother Katherine McAdam was also an artist – and a mixture of religious influences being half Jewish and half Catholic, Jane is continually inspired by her experiences.

“Everything in this exhibition is about the internal struggle with who I am and what my family represents to me. Family memories of my childhood are defined with positive experiences to do with art. My mother kept all my sketches and books, which I still have, and my father, Lucien, gave me most attention as a child when I was drawing. I remember him watching me when I was sketching.

“I was also very close to both my paternal grandparents, Lucie and Ernst Freud,“ she adds. “They came to visit, wrote regularly and sent wonderful birthday gifts. For those formative early years they had an influence on my life and my aspirations. In fact, I’m sure that my paternal grandmother, Lucie, was much more of an influence on me than I realise. I think that I connected to my father indirectly, through Lucie, as much as directly with him.“

But her connection with art started early. “My first experience of being enchanted with the materials and tactility of sculpture was in the sandpit at nursery school,“ she recalls. “When I first put my hands through the water into the sand I felt transformed. I cannot put into words the way it made me feel, but I knew then that I wanted to do more.”

“Then when I was at primary school, I overheard the headmistress telling a visitor during an open-day about my ability in art. She showed her some drawings that I had done in an exercise book. Overhearing the awe with which this teacher spoke was incredibly bewitching and exciting. This, I think, sealed it for me about being an artist. And it instilled in me a certain confidence about my future as an artist.“

And although Jane’s mother and paternal grandparents influenced her most growing up, it was unequivocally the act of drawing her father as he lay on his deathbed that has inspired her forthcoming exhibition more than anything else.  “That’s the last time that I saw my father,“ she admits.

“It was an extremely challenging experience but also most stimulating and very motivating. It means, meant, has been, and is, everything to me. I am highly influenced by my family and my family history, but also have something to say myself and I’m compelled to express it in an attempt to make sense of my life. Making art has given me breath – it is and has been a means of conveying my perceptions.“

 

“The other highlight of my exhibition is the large-scale relief of my late father, ‘EarthStone Triptych’, which is inspired by the sketches I made of him on his deathbed. It’s a memorial to his life and legacy.“

Her close-up pencil drawings look like sensitively observed donor drawings prepared for 15th century tombs, keeping his spirit alive. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…“ from Genesis, makes this sculpted portrait a wonderful ‘memento mori’. The process of mortality is not forgotten in the fact that clay – more than any other medium – is all about the manifestation of the four natural elements of antiquity – earth, water, air and fired combined to survive and stand along.

‘Earthstone Triptych’ is a complete installation – placed by a mirror enabling one to see both sides of the sculpture simultaneously; one side depicting “Lucien awake.  His eyes wide open. The other, not“. Getting down low to view it, I’m reminded of Holbein’s anamorphic masterpiece, The Ambassadors, with the skull of mortality only visible when vying the artwork from certain angles.  There’s also a plaque with her initials, ‘JMcAF’, on it: “this part of the sculpture“, she confides, “broke off being moved to the kiln for firing“, but it works as an effective persuasive symbol for many things, including separation.

Jane recalls her father leaving when she “was a child of eight years old, not seeing him again until I was 31, arriving back in London after studying sculpture at the Rome Academy of Fine Art.“

The rocky application of clay not only resembles him, but it is ‘of’ him, ahead of the Freudian psychological perspective that exists beyond philosophy; beyond science; beyond truth; beyond life after death (think of how flowers grow, even when beneath blankets of freezing snow).

Knowing how Freud ‘sculpted’ with paint, did he ask his daughter to teach him to sculpt? “My father did. Yes“, she says; she taught sculptural techniques during her time at the Royal Mint in South Wales. “And it shows in his painting techniques that he loved sculpture. That he was a fan of sculpture even though he was a painter! I’m sure he would have loved to have been a sculptor.“

©Estelle Lovatt FRSA

by Estelle Lovatt

Anti-Americanism in the Art World

The public resentment and hostility for America is striking in the art world as well as the political arena. It has been for a spell. The penchant to burden America for all the evils of the world, even the art world, is completely surreal. But it is real.

The exhibition Saved! (100 Years of the National Art Collections Fund, Hayward Gallery, London), 2004, shows anti-Americanism in the European art circuit, with the saving of Botticelli’s The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child, c. 1485 (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh). This painting was saved for the nation in 1999 with the aid of 550,000, the biggest grant the National Art Collections Fund has ever transferred. It is one of the greatest Renaissance paintings secured for any museum in the UK since the Second World War. It was about to be sold to the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, USA, when the Art Fund learned of its impending export to America from editorial in the press and saved it. The idea that America would have plundered and deprived us of this Botticelli masterpiece had us digging deep into golden purses, crying and hissing that America is not worthy of it.

But how much do we in this country really think of art? Consider, that in Britain, history of art was not thought of as being important enough to be taught as an academic subject until 1932. By then it was all too late, for the French and German art fascists had already invented anti-Americanism way back in the 1920s and 1930s. The French and German were partisans of a close-mouthed pure country, against the cosmopolitan melting pot of America.

Why had the French and German such disrelish for America, when on the whole and for various reasons, the USA was more receptive to the art of continental Europe with L’Esprit Nouveau, the School of Paris and the Bauhaus? Proven, when the Nazis shut the Bauhaus, and many teachers and artists went into exile in the United States.

France and Germany wanted to challenge the United States. The anti-American feeling spread amongst the arts world intended to blitz the command of the American art scene. Why? Such a slow project, you’d go through purgatory quicker than understand this. Today it is the 1930s all over again. European artists are jealous of their American cousins.

I thought art was supposed to deliver the universal qualities within us. To pass boundaries. To identify us from one another. To be the best form of diplomacy. Instead, it is surprising that European artists should have so little respect for American art and culture. A bit too humdrum and impotent in their anti-Americanism, what the Europeans don’t realise, is that America’s culture, makes America the greatest mechanism of modern art. Remember that America has two margins; The Atlantic and the Pacific. On the one side it looks towards Europe, on the other to the Far East. From European art to Oriental painting. This is an example of the roads of culture crossing paths. And that from the USA began the all-influential shaping of an international art and culture, that I shall name Internationalism.

The American dream then shifted, as the new artist hijacked art of its antique responsibility of bearing witness to events, to political beliefs that enabled us to ‘live’ in art, politically. When Andrew Wyeth, Grant Wood or Grandma Moses painted a farmer and his wife, the American painter was unconditionally preoccupied in the passion that is only the American life – the American dream.

American art and culture is not only songs by Madonna and sci-fi action films starring Schwarzenegger the governor of California; it is 1,700 symphony orchestras, opera visited by 7.5 million people annually, and museums that are seen by 500 million every year. All American museums where entrance is free owe their existence and subsidy to private supporters. Isabella Stewart Gardner is an inspiration. So is the Harvard University Art Museums collection donated from past graduates. And the Las Vegas casino billionaire, and one of the world’s biggest private art collectors Steve Wynn.

The narcissistic use of American symbolism grows as the world becomes more fearful of terrorism. Why? Because the animosity attached to America is stuck on American culture, as American culture is so all-powerful.

Take a look as German artist Sigmar Polke takes pot shots at American gun law, Afghanistan, Iraq and al-Qa’eda. And the French, who opened Disneyland Paris in 1992 and unveiled the event as a ?cultural Chernobyl.? But, the Europeans can’t get enough of America’s 3 Cs (culture, cinema and consumerism). Ironically, the anti-American extremists triumph in making Europe even more clinging on the United States.

Works by Turner Prize artists Jake & Dinos Chapman show African masks and fetishes as ideal and appropriate for celebrating contemporary leading culture by applying American McDonalds symbols and emblems.

Inasmuch as six hundred galleries up and down the country benefit from the NACF, the Arts Council is supposed to be the national development agency for the arts in England. The problem was, and is, the total inadequacy of government funding for the arts here in this country to create anything of any benefit. Distributing public money from Government and the National Lottery, where are Tessa Jowell and Estelle Morris keeping England in the first rank of world arts?

The Arts Council England serves the truly talentless. With a grant from the Arts Council, a replica of Camp X-Ray complete with blindfolded prisoners in orange boiler suits was built in Manchester. This mock Guantanamo Bay prison is nothing but a Herculean political misappropriation and an outrageous waste of public money, on a political subject, that has nothing to do with art. The Arts Council is simply being dishonest funding this as art, when it is nothing more than anti-Americanism expressiveness.

The influence of American culture is now so all-pervasive, it seems like art history has come full circle, and imperious European artists just about cope with their American peers. Take a look at Paul McCarthy’s video, showing the Queen hosting a disgusting tea-party orgy for George Bush, with Bin Laden. It’s a cathartic artless and boring insult, screened at you.

Bill Viola best uses video to illustrate his interest in religion. I’ve heard people say “what a waste of money! Religious voices drive us mad!” But they are positively at home in a country whose money has “In God We Trust” on each coin and note. Viola champions differences between the religious right and the non-religious left, between conservatives and liberals.

America’s monumental personality is victorious in symbolising free-expression in art. We can bear democracy and individualism, so long as it’s not American. When you get to this, the scale of antipathy and disdain of the perverted level of which you would associate with propaganda about an enemy in wartime, you realise European art that is anti-American is nothing more than a little cultural jerk, done by the same.

© Estelle Lovatt FRSA

by Estelle Lovatt

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective | Tate Modern

arshile_gorky_restrospective_0

In Tate’s ‘Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective’ it is fascinating to see how, for most of the 20th century, American modern art was far far behind the European modernist brush of Cezanne, Picasso, Leger and Matisse until Gorky transcribed their techniques.  Painting in the manner of, rather than directly copying from, existing paintings, Gorky was manifest in bridging the gap between the 1920s Paris School of Art and 1940s New York American Abstract Expressionism (Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko).

Listening to his widow, Agnes ‘Mougouch’ Magruder, at Tate’s press view, still a great engineer of his legacy, enthusiastically claiming this exhibition is “wonderfully hung!”, I have to agree.  Spanning his short-lived 25 year career, the show exposes how, single-handedly, whilst developing his own art language of animated abstracts motivated by memories of his childhood in Western Armenia, Gorky is of great artistic breadth and lyricism.

After fleeing the massacres and arriving in America,  Gorky much employed his favoured yellow ochre, for looking at the spaces in between things as much as the objects themselves.  An exquisite draughtsman, drawing from 19th century the Classicalist Ingres, Gorky’s precision of line mixed with a range of paint handling techniques make him simply superb.

By engaging the eye and the mind with his imagery, his pulsating canvas becomes something compelling.  Mechanical and biomorphic forms are integrated into abstract compositions that establish a rhythmic division of space, thick under layers of paint showing how he reworked the canvas over many years.  With influences of Ucello, Poussin, David, Bosch, Michelangelo and Piero di Cosimo in ‘The Artist and his Mother’ to ‘Waterfall’.  In 1946 a fire in Gorky’s studio destroyed his work.  Then diagnosed with cancer, he required emergency surgery.  His marriage suffered.  And he committed suicide in 1948.   

©Estelle Lovatt FRSA

by Estelle Lovatt

Van Doesburg & The International Avant Garde: Constructing A New World | Tate Modern

Theo van Doesburg Composition II (Still life) Museum Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Theo van Doesburg
Composition II (Still life)
Museum Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

In 1924, after van Doesburg and Mondrian argued over a diagonal line, Mondrian (believing the horizontal and the vertical line, straight up, down and flat, to be far more vital than van Doesburg’s visually idealistic diagonal line) broke with De Stijl.  Then by means of retaliation, he created his ‘double-line’ painting ‘Composition with Double Line and Yellow, 1932’.

Academically thought-provoking, Tate’s superbly installed Van Doesburg & The International Avant Garde: Constructing A New World confirms what a lot of people don’t know; van Doesburg is to Mondrian what Picasso is to Braque.

Impressively rich in art historical detail with 350 works and documents, the exhibition’s organisation is roughly chronological.  From van Doesburg’s very early, subtle, organic embryonic ‘Girl with Buttercups’, 1914, with no hard edges, to the rigorously strict geometric stained-glass design of the beautiful ‘Composition IV’, 1917, (offering two different interpretations from either seated woman to Bach’s music), to the influence of Kandinsky’s expressionism, philosophy and Cubism.  Obsessing about a mathematical approach to composition in Mondrian’s late ‘fourth dimension’ van Doesburg wanted to make an all-encompassing universal art, applying the fourth dimension to architecture too.

By way of explanation, in a house plan, van Doesburg combined his three-dimensional coloured planes with the idea of a hypercube.  The original concrete notion of it, as, van Doesburg rationalizes, as, “The new architecture is anticube; its different spaces not contained within a closed cube. The different spaces develop unconventionally, from the centre to the periphery of the cube, so that the dimensions of height, width, depth, and time receive a new plastic expression, giving the impression of floating, suspended in air, in opposition to the natural force of gravity… The new architecture takes account not only of space but also of time as an architectural value. The unity of space and time gives architectural vision a more complete aspect.”  Allowing this collaboration and partnership of art and architecture caused great conflicts and tensions as it consented to the break-up of facades of the buildings in plans schematic about movement and passage.  By representing the fourth dimension – as a conceptual reality of an abstract non-objective expression – van Doesburg gets rid of that which already exists as being considered as conservatively behind the times, for a more modern, rhythmic and dynamically spatial effect of the future.

Theo van Doesburg Composition I (Still Life) 1916 Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo

Theo van Doesburg
Composition I (Still Life) 1916
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo

And that’s what interested van Doesburg.  The future.  From typography to furniture.  Relentlessly continuing using the fourth dimension, long after Mondrian abandoned it, as a way of naturally continuing his work; the combination of coloured planes in three dimensional compositions.  The abstract notion of the fourth-dimension of negative space – as represented by shades of grey in relation to positive space shown in primary colours – that eliminated perspective, whilst maintaining the appearance of a three dimensional space and indirectly representing the fourth dimension, in a sense, colour was the fourth dimension, influencing Constructivism and Dadaism, designers, poets, musicians and architects such as Rietveld and Oud.

Mondrian’s appreciation for mathematics led him to his unique style of representing the fourth dimension, “by both their dimensions (line) and values (colour), arithmetic compositions can express space without the use of visual perspective.”  His experiments with the fourth dimension were interpreted through Einstein’s theory of relativity.  The complexity of van Doesburg’s art embraced Einstein’s relativity theory too, in that the fourth dimension sought to make an art form that was more ideal and more perfected than previous works.  However, Einstein rejects the opinion that the  artistic language has anything in common with his discipline, stating, “In science the principle of order which creates units is achieved through logical connection while, in art it is anchored in the unconscious.”

Then by eliminating gravity, no longer was one direction defined as ‘down’ and opposed by ‘up’, nor did the words ‘left’ or ‘right’ have meaning. All directions were equal, and only their relative orientation to each other mattered.  The machine-made look of stencil and stamp employed so you couldn’t see the ‘hand’ of the artist.  Quitting complicated forms to just use squares.  Big to small, to give a rhythm of beauty, equilibrium and stativity, about ideas of time, as in ‘Arithmetic Composition’, 1929/30.  Quite exceptional.

In 1931 van Doesburg founded another group, Abstraction-Création, which attracted the troubled American painter Arshile Gorky, who later went on to shake up the New York art scene.  After World War II, American art articulated the post-war American spirit for their go-get-ahead overconfidence, that is typically the American brag and the envy of the art world, as non-figurative modern art – Abstract Expressionism – was born.

by Estelle Lovatt

Chris Ofili | Tate Britain

Chris Ofili, Blossom, 1997 © Chris Ofili Photo: courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin

Chris Ofili, Blossom, 1997 © Chris Ofili Photo: courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin

Tate let-down is Chris Ofili.  I’m sorry, this exhibition stinks.  As an art critic it’s my job to honestly tell you this.  Masquerading under the black African experience Ofili is still, hopelessly, lacking in skill as he tries, painfully, to express the wonderful primitive fetishism of African art.  His doctrinaire formula of decorating his canvas with elephant dung and glow-in-the-dark dots of bright fluorescent colour are now nothing more than simply naïve.  Much overworked and predictably garish.

It all started going wrong when Ofili was a student. Over-rated, over-praised, he received eulogize for the superficial four-letter expletive art he created, and it destroyed him.

Look around the walls.  A firework explosion of decorative doily patterns of paint overlaid with a collage of porno photos, glitter and a beadwork of counterfeit Zimbabwean paint blobs covering elephant dung, doing the same thing, over and over, there is no development.

Enter Michael Landy’s Art Bin.

Ofili, a Turner prize winner and trustee of the Tate, saw their purchase of ‘The Upper Room’ (for £705,000), which, no doubt references the Christian’s The Last Supper.  Either, so overpoweringly unimportant as a work of art, or by design a heretical slight, his monkeys hold chalices, prove to be the best piece of this juvenile run.  What a sham(e).

©Estelle Lovatt FRSA

by Estelle Lovatt

Isis by Simon Gudgeon

Isis

A major statue, ‘Isis’ (pictured above), has been donated to London’s Hyde Park – the first major installation to a London ‘Royal Park’ in 100 years.

The Halcyon Gallery has arranged this commission and a commemorative book, and asked me to write a profile on the sculptor, Simon Gudgeon (page 26).  These books – with a forward written by Prince Charles (page 6) — are not for sale but will be given to people who sponsor a plaque at the bottom of the statue for £1,000.

Read the press release.

©Estelle Lovatt FRSA