Pastures Green and Dark Satanic Mills at the Princeton University Art Museum

Pastures Green and Dark Satanic Mills: 

The British Passion for Landscape

Princeton University Art Museum 

January 23 - April 24, 2016

Reviewed by Ed Voves

The British are an inventive people. Many of modern times's great innovations are products of British ingenuity: steam engines, the postage stamp, the chocolate bar, the miniskirt ... and many, many more.

The British did not invent landscape painting.  After viewing the Pastures Green & Dark Satanic Mills exhibit, however, a visitor to the Princeton University Art Museum might well credit landscape art as another British "first."

The rise of landscape painting in the West is a complex story. The Dutch during the seventeenth century were the real pioneers of the genre. 

The British, as the subtitle of this wide-ranging exhibit rightly proclaims, do have a "passion for landscape." This emotion-driven response to the natural environment is not a matter of pure sentiment. It is actually a consequence of the "conquest" of nature. 

Tim Barringer, one of the curators of Pastures Green & Dark Satanic Mills, writes that "visions of nature are at their most intense when the viewer inhabits an urban, industrial world..."

Evelyn Mary Dunbar, Baling Hay, 1940

Humans, of course, have been shaping nature to suit our needs for thousands of years. But a staggering manipulation of forest, field and stream began in Great Britain during the 1700's. Nature was altered to an unprecedented degree - first in Britain and then worldwide.

Pastures Green & Dark Satanic Mills is an exhibit of 80 paintings and a selection of photographs which document the artistic response to the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions in Great Britain. Along with British masters of landscape painting like J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, the exhibit includes paintings by artists from other nations who lived or worked in Britain such as Claude Monet and Oskar Kokoschka. 

All of the works in this special exhibition come from one institution: the Amgueddfa Cymru–National Museum Wales. Welsh artists and art collectors have played a decisive role in the evolution of British art as this exhibit continually - and correctly - affirms.

The Welsh are the descendants of the Celtic peoples who were driven into the mountainous extremities of Britain by the onslaught of the Anglo-Saxon invaders during the early Middle Ages. Wales preserved its independence until a new set of aggressors in the thirteenth century, the Normans under Edward I, seized control. 

Wales languished as a political fiefdom of England and a cultural backwater until the mid-1700's.  A talented Welsh artist, Richard Wilson (1714-82) then sparked a century-long renaissance of British art that was to culminate in the mighty landscape paintings of J.M.W. Turner.

Richard Wilson, Dover Castle, ca. 1746–47

Initially a portrait painter, Wilson took to portraying "topography," especially landmarks like Dover Castle. In this striking early work, Wilson brilliantly included small human figures - including himself, painting en plein air - to give an indication of scale, of insignificant man in relation to mighty nature. 

Wilson's success promoted a sense of the awesome expanse and dramatic effect of nature. A few years after Wilson painted Dover Castle, Edmund Burke wrote his influential treatise on perception, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.

In 1750, Wilson went to Italy, joining the cultural pilgrimage known as the Grand Tour. There he discovered the works of the French classicist, Claude Lorraine (1604-1682). 

Wilson was greatly taken by the lengths to which Claude went to evoke light on his canvases. He was also impressed by the way that Claude created landscapes that recalled the hallowed realm of Arcadia, the idyllic abode of gods and heroes.

Claude Lorrain, Landscape with St. Philip Baptizing the Eunuch, 1678

These two states of mind, the Sublime and the Arcadian, entered into the lifeblood of British art thanks to Wilson. Many British painters followed his lead but unexpected political events also contributed to the growing cult of nature and landscape art in the British Isles.

France went to war with Britain in 1778, in support of the American Revolution. The Grand Tour hit a roadblock. Things got even worse in 1789 when the French Revolution engulfed nearly all of Europe. Travel to Italy became difficult and dangerous.

Prevented by the French wars from visiting Italy, the British "milords" sought the Sublime and Beautiful closer to home. Unable to reach Italy, the British went to Wales.

The change of scenery was not as surprising as one might think. The late eighteenth century witnessed a revival of interest in the folklore, legends and poetry of the ancient peoples of Europe, notably the Celts. These tribesmen, once deemed as barbarians, were placed on a pedestal previously reserved for Greeks and Romans.

In 1757, the English poet, Thomas Gray, published The Bard: a Pindaric Ode recalling the heart-rending purge of Welsh poets by the blood-thirsty Edward I. Tourists flocked to visit the locations mentioned in Gray's tragic verse. 

Thomas Jones, The Bard, 1774

A Welsh painter, Thomas Jones, created a visual epic to match Gray's poem, depicting the last of these bards, about to hurl himself from a cliff rather than surrender to Edward I.

British landscape painting took many forms in what is now regarded as the "golden age" of British art, roughly from 1768 to 1851. Almost all of the British artists of this amazing era followed the lead of Wilson, but their emulation took a variety of forms. There was little of the "sublime" in the works of Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) or of John Constable (1776-1837). 

Both Gainsborough and Constable were born in East Anglia, a region much influenced by Dutch art. Gainsborough, sick of pleasing lords and ladies as a society portraitist, painted landscapes to please himself. Constable so loved his boyhood home that he was unmoved by other regions of Britain with more spectacular scenery, even the fabled Lake District.

Thomas Gainsborough, Rocky Wooded Landscape with Lovers, Herdsman, and Cows, 1771-1774

Constable's technique in painting out-of-doors and his "everyday" subject matter were anything but conventional. Constable, a "quiet revolutionary" in his art, set the stage for Impressionism in France. Yet, there was an ironical undercurrent in Constable's art which would flow through British art to its disadvantage.

A devoted family man and generous friend, Constable was also a right wing reactionary. As Britain came dangerously close to revolution in 1830, Constable rejected even the slightest political reforms to prevent social dissent. 

Even though his paintings won widespread acclaim in France during his lifetime, Constable never crossed the Channel to collect the gold medal awarded him in 1824. Remaining a "Little England" man, Constable helped create an invisible barrier to a wider role for British art in the modern world.

Constable did praise his colleague, J. M.W. Turner for having a "wonderful range of mind." The Princeton exhibit certainly bears this out with a superb selection of Turner's works on view, including water colors made during visits to Wales early in his life and a brace of major works from his later "soap suds and whitewash" period.

Constable's homebody attitude, more than Turner's embrace of new ideas, came to characterize British art in the Victorian era. A change of attitude toward landscape art had earlier begun to emerge in reaction to the Industrial Revolution - as William Blake poignantly expressed:

And did the Countenance Divine,                                                                                       Shine forth upon our clouded hills?                                                                                   
And was Jerusalem builded here,  
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

The Princeton exhibit includes some early depictions of industrial sites that were neither dark nor satanic. But by the time Turner died in 1851, steam engines and engineers no longer appealed to the British imagination as heroic or sublime. In a reaction to urban squalor and  harsh working conditions, most Victorian painters banished the Industrial Revolution from their canvases.

In an amazing twist of fate, foreign artists refocused the artistic dialog in Britain back on the "real" world of the nineteenth century. Claude Monet painted the reality of London with its "pea souper" fogs  and the open sewer of the Thames. Monet, in keeping with the Impressionist credo of "the heroism of modern life," exulted in scenes that native British artists preferred to ignore.

Claude Monet, Charing Cross Bridge, 1902

"Without the fog London wouldn't be a beautiful city," Monet proclaimed. "It is the fog that gives it its magnificent breadth." 
  
There is beauty - of a type - in the flame-tinged sky above the Dowlais steelworks in Cardiff, Wales, as captured in the stunning oil painting by the American-born Lionel Walden (1861-1933). Steelworks, Cardiff, at Night, 1895–97, is a huge, brilliant work, the center piece of the Pastures Green & Dark Satanic Mills exhibit. 

Walden cast an infernal pall over what was the world's biggest, most modern steel mill when the painting was created. But one should not focus on the brilliant color effects at the expense of Walden's skillful design. The exhibit also displays a small oil sketch which Walden used to prepare this finished painting. In the preparatory work, the curve of the train tracks is less pronounced and less effective than in the final version.

Lionel Walden, Steelworks, Cardiff, at Night, 1895–97

Steelworks, Cardiff, at Night is truly a stunning work of art. It took my eyes a short time to adjust while studying it, as if I was actually focusing on a harsh light while standing in shadow. It was some minutes before I realized that there is a solitary, shadowy figure standing mid-canvas, holding a dimly glowing lantern in his hand.

Works by foreign-born painters like Monet and Walden gave some impetus to the British art establishment to move in the direction of Modernism by 1900. But what really created the decisive breakthrough was the London exhibition staged by Roger Fry in 1910, Manet and the Post-Impressionists. Fry was no great admirer of Monet and Renoir but had come to regard Cezanne as a "kind of hidden oracle of ultra-impressionism."

Cezanne exercised a major influence on British art in the twentieth century as can be seen in very different works in the exhibit such as Stanley Spencer's Snowdon from Llanfrothen, 1938, and Graham Sutherland's Road at Porthclais with Setting Sun, 1975. 

Graham Sutherland, Road at Porthclais with Setting Sun, 1975

The really notable point in Fry's estimate of Cezanne, however, is his figure of speech: a "kind of hidden oracle." 

The British passion for landscape derives from the conviction that are indeed "oracles," underlying strata of meaning, deep integral truths, to be found in these depictions of the natural world. 

Perhaps this search for meaning can be traced to the ancient Celtic bards. Even if it is a more modern sensibility, dating to the 1700's and Burke's theories of the sublime, landscape painting in Britain represents a sustained commitment to the vital, living spirit of the natural world.

Blake's vision of building "Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land" may be a long time coming. But the theme of Pastures Green & Dark Satanic Mills is not easily dismissed. This provocative exhibit, on view for one more month at the Princeton University Art Museum, reminds us that the landscape painter's credo of "truth to nature" is a lot more than a figure of speech.  

***
Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved 

Images courtesy of the Princeton University Art Museum 

Introductory Image: 
John Constable, A Cottage in a Cornfield, 1817. Oil on canvas. Size: 31.5 x 26.3 cm Amgueddfa Cymru–National Museum Wales. Accession Number: NMW A 486 Purchased with the assistance of the Art Fund, 1978. Courtesy American Federation of Arts

Evelyn Mary Dunbar, Baling Hay, 1940. Oil on canvas. Size: 45.8 x 61 cm. Amgueddfa Cymru–National Museum Wales. Accession Number: NMW A 29396 Given by the War Artists Advisory. ©National Museum Wales Collection / Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Richard Wilson, Dover Castle, ca. 1746–47. Oil on canvas. Size: 90.5 x 116.8 cm Amgueddfa Cymru–National Museum Wales. Accession Number: NMW A 66  Purchased with the support of subscribers, 1928. Courtesy American Federation of Arts.
      
Claude Lorrain, Landscape with St. Philip Baptizing the Eunuch, 1678. Oil on canvas. Size: 88.0 x 142.2 cm Amgueddfa Cymru–National Museum Wales. Accession Number: NMW A 4
Purchased with the assistance of the Art Fund, 1982. Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Thomas Jones, The Bard, 1774. Oil on canvas. Size: 114.5 x 168.0 cm Amgueddfa Cymru–National Museum Wales. Accession Number: NMW A 85 Purchased, 1965. Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Thomas Gainsborough, Rocky Wooded Landscape with Rustic Lovers, Herdsman, and Cows, 1771–74. Oil on canvas. Size: 147.0 x 175.0 cm Accepted by HM Government in lieu of inheritance tax and allocated to Amgueddfa Cymru–National Museum Wales, 2001. Accession Number: NMW A 22780 Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Claude Monet, Charing Cross Bridge, 1902. Oil on canvas. Size: 65.4 x 81.3 cm Amgueddfa Cymru–National Museum Wales. Accession Number: NMW A 2483 Bequeathed by Margaret Davies, 1963. Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Lionel Walden, Steelworks, Cardiff, at Night, 1895–97. Oil on canvas. Size: 150.8 x 200.4 cm Amgueddfa Cymru–National Museum Wales.  Accession Number: NMW A 2245 Given by the artist, 1917. Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Graham Vivian Sutherland, Road at Porthclais with Setting Sun, 1975. Oil on canvas. Size: 52.7 x 50.4 cm Amgueddfa Cymru–National Museum Wales. Accession Number: NMW A 2267 Transferred by the Graham and Kathleen Sutherland Foundation, 1989. © Estate of Graham Sutherland 

Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change at the Barnes Foundation

Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change

 

Barnes Foundation - February 21– May 9, 2016

Columbus Museum of Art - June 10 – September 11, 2016

Reviewed by Ed Voves

The First World War entered its first full year in January 1915. Gone was the nearly universal belief of August 1914 that the war would be a short and glorious campaign.

To mark the occasion of the grim New Year of 1915, the French Minister of War, Alexandre Millerand, declared, "There are no more workers' rights, no more social laws. There is nothing now but war."

A world defined by mass, industrialized slaughter was the setting for Pablo Picasso's Great War years. The decade between 1914 to 1924 witnessed a career-changing shift from Picasso's "periods" and his dedicated allegiance to Cubism toward a restless, multi-faceted approach to art that would continue for the rest of his life.      

Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change brilliantly explores this time of transformation in Picasso's art. This major exhibit is now on view at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. It will appear at the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio later in June 2016.

One of the signature works in the Picasso: The Great War exhibit is a star of the Columbus Museum's collection. This is Still Life with Compote and Glass,1914–15, which Picasso painted around the time of Alexandre Millerand's "nothing now but war" chant. 

Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Compote and Glass, 1914–15

Still Life with Compote and Glass represents the apogee of pre-World War I Cubism. It combines the major elements of the two phases of Cubism. Here we can see the interlocking of geometric planes of Analytical Cubism combined with the enhanced use of color and concrete imagery in Synthetic Cubism. The contribution to Cubism of Picasso's Spanish countryman, Juan Gris, is apparent in the representational tone of this work. Still Life with Compote and Glass shows how Cubism would likely have developed had Europe not plunged into war in August 1914.

Europe did go mad and Picasso could only paint Still Life with Compote and Glass because he was a Spanish neutral. He did not have to dodge bullets and shrapnel like his Cubist compatriot, Georges Braques, who was seriously wounded in 1915. 

Picasso later defended his greatest work, Guernica, declaring that painting "is an instrument of war against brutality and darkness."

The art works presented in the Picasso: The Great War exhibit may not be overtly anti-war like Guernica. But the masterpieces on view at the Barnes certainly attest to Picasso's creative and compassionate response to Millerand's "nothing now but war" proclamation.

Cubism joined the casualty list of the Great War, seriously wounded if not killed. The Barnes exhibit includes a provocative short film which explores how the French government during World War I viewed Cubism as subversive and unpatriotic. 

This bizarre theory was based, at least superficially, on the fact that German art enthusiasts were among the first to embrace Cubism. The German-born Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884-1979) was the art agent for both Picasso and Braques. Kahnweiler's Paris gallery, located at 28 rue Vignon, became a rallying point for avant garde artists like Picasso, whom the German art dealer loyally supported.

In August 1914, Kahnweiler had to flee to Switzerland and his stock of paintings was seized by the French government. At the same time, German authorities impounded a collection of Matisse's paintings owned by the Stein family which was part of an art exhibit in Berlin. The Steins, even though the U.S. was not yet in the war, had to sell their paintings at a loss to a Danish collector. Kahnweiler's art was auctioned by the French to support the "nothing now but war" effort.

The "Great" War was a war on art. Cubism and all other forms of independent thought and expression were thrown into the furnace of militarism. But Picasso, the Spanish non-combatant, could resist this mindless, soul-consuming tyranny - and he did.

Picasso retained Cubism as the dominant style of his painting during the early war years. His greatest work during 1915 was the Harlequin so admired by Henri Matisse and now on display at the Museum of Modern Art. Yet Picasso, like so many great artists, admired the portrait sketches of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). In 1915, Picasso began doing a series of portrait sketches of fellow artists like his friend Max Jacob, some of which are on view in the Barnes Foundation exhibit.

Pablo Picasso, Olga Picasso, Seated, 1918

  

It is no exaggeration to say that the exquisite portrait sketch of Olga Picasso, created in 1918, bears a comparison with those of Ingres from a century before. This work is such an astonishing demonstration of the ideals of classical composition that a passing glance might well mislead a viewer to think that the drawing was from the hand of the French nineteenth century master rather than the Spanish modernist.

The real significance of Picasso's "rediscovery" of Ingres lies in the 1915 date of his first efforts like the portrait of Max Jacob. Picasso returned to classicism in 1915 before the controversial debut of Les demoiselles d'Avignon at the 1916 exhibition organized by André Salmon,  before he ventured to Italy in 1917, before the famous "call to order" by Jean Cocteau in 1918.

All of these events have figured prominently in accounts of Picasso's return to realism from Cubism.The Picasso: The Great War exhibit shows that Picasso never entirely abandoned Cubism nor did he completely embrace classicism.

The Barnes Foundation, Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation & Change, 2016 

On view in the exhibit is a major Cubist work from the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Harlequin with Violin (Si Tu Veux), painted in 1918. Displayed next to it is a realist depiction of the other mainstay of the Commedia della’arte, Pierrot. This too was painted in 1918.  

To underscore Picasso's ability to engage in seemingly contradictory forms of art, the exhibit curators positioned another Cubist work, a portrait of the celebrated Spanish dancer, Blaquita Suarez (1917), to the right of Pierrot.

Interestingly, the piece of sheet music held by the Cubist Harlequin with Violin is entitled Si Tu Veux or If You Like. It is hard to resist the conclusion that Picasso was including the viewer in an open secret: he, Picasso, painted the way he wanted to, when he wanted to, because he was Picasso.

Another significant work on display in Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change is Studies, dating to 1920.  Life-like oil sketches of a head and hands share the canvas with Cubist still-life studies. It is an ensemble effort, with Picasso preparing for a future work before he had decided upon the style he wanted to paint.

Pablo Picasso, Studies, 1920

If there was a motivating factor for Picasso's embrace of classicism - beyond his own creative impulses - it was his friendship with the poet, artist and film producer, Jean Cocteau (1889-1963). Cocteau introduced Picasso to the ballet impresario, Serge Diaghilev, and in 1917, Picasso traveled to Italy to collaborate on a modern ballet called Parade.

Parade was a meeting of minds and work of genius. The script was written by Cocteau, the music by Erik Satie, the choreography by Leonide Massine and the stage curtain and costumes designed by Picasso.  Misia Sert, the queen of Paris society and Diaghilev's muse, provided the money. Parade debuted at a benefit performance for wounded Allied soldiers on May 18, 1917.

The premier of Parade became the stuff of legend. The opening was more of a "Friday night fight" than a cultural event. It was greeted by jeers on one side and cheers on the other. Cocteau and Satie commenced an ugly quarrel with a hostile dance critic that landed Satie in jail and left Cocteau nursing bruises from a police baton. Picasso, at least initially, emerged unscathed, marrying one of the ballerinas, Olga Khokhlova.

The Barnes Foundation, Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation & Change, 2016  

Echoes of the mythic events surrounding Parade are very evident in the galleries of the Barnes Foundation. Large format photos of Picasso with the team of painters who assisted him and of the finished stage curtain are powerful reminders of the labor involved and the scale of this storied production. 

Picasso's continuing fascination with Cubism is evident in the reconstructions of several of the costumes from Parade. One costume, that of the Chinese Conjuror, is an actual survivor from the original ballet.

Pablo Picasso, Costume for the Chinese Conjuror from Parade, 1917

The romance with Olga Khokhlova, begun during Parade, certainly propelled Picasso along the path of classicism for the remainder of the war years and into the early 1920's.
 It was a measure of Picasso's idea of the woman he set out to marry that he produced such an amazing portfolio of portraits of Olga. Given his infamous remark that women were either goddesses or doormats, I think the 36-year old Picasso had set his heart on a goddess. Olga Khokhlova looked, acted and indeed possessed the virtuous and strong-minded character to fit the role. 

The courtship and early married life of Picasso and Olga Khokhlova was an attempt to transform the ideal into reality. If their marriage ended in disaster, it produced some of the most beautiful portraits of a woman created during the twentieth century. It also inspired a remarkable series of works evoking the primal, nurturing female principle. Only Picasso could have  achieved this creative triumph - even as his marriage was headed toward the rapids.

Pablo Picasso, Olga Khokhlova with a Mantilla, 1917

Picasso painted Olga Khokhlova in a Mantilla in 1917 and presented it to his mother, Doña María. It is a beautiful, haunting work, a tribute to the great Spanish portrait masters, Velasquez and Goya. It says something about the ironclad formalities of Spanish society that Picasso created this magnificent work to please his mother, rather than his bride-to-be.

Picasso married Olga Khokhlova in 1918 and their son, Paolo, was born in 1921. During these sunny years of their marriage, Picasso painted some of the most extraordinary evocations of motherhood ever created. The Barnes exhibit has one of these on view, albeit without a child in the mother's arms, as is usually the case with these distinctive works.

The large, nurturing "earth mother" is not conventionally beautiful, certainly not by 1920's standards. Instead Picasso's "mothers" radiate strength and love, and, in this case, are marked by anxiety for their children's welfare. 

Pablo Picasso, Seated Woman, 1920

Picasso, in fact, created images of motherhood in the way that very young children experience their mothers. Children see and depend upon their mothers as the providers of unstinting, unquestioning love. Mothers are the arms that hold, the hands that caress, the faces that reassure.

After the horror of the trench warfare of World War I, society in Europe and America craved the "normalcy" of tradition, a "return to order" as Cocteau proclaimed. And the survivors of the Great War yearned for the kind of nurturing that Picasso depicted with his "earthbound" maternal angels. That state of desperate desire is where the superb exhibit at the Barnes Foundation concludes.

For Picasso and his world, however, there would be no lasting "return to order." Picasso's marriage foundered. Yet, he would not agree to a divorce that would cost him half his property. Olga Picasso lingered, married but unloved, until she died in 1955. Picasso, tormented by his inner demons, came to see himself like the fabled Minotaur of antiquity, half-man, half-beast.

And then war came again, in 1936. This time armed conflict shattered Picasso's beloved Spain. Bombs rained down upon a vulnerable, undefended city called Guernica. Pablo Picasso took up his paint brush and once more matched his awesome talent and creative vision against the forces of brutality and darkness, in a world reduced again to "nothing now but war."      

***
Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved 

Images courtesy of the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia 

Introductory Image: 
Picasso, Pablo (Spanish, 1881-1973) Harlequin Musician, 1924. Oil on canvas, 51 3/16 × 38 1/4 in. (130 × 97.2 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Given in loving memory of her husband, Taft Schreiber, by Rita Schreiber, 1989.31.2 © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881 - 1973). Still Life with Compote and Glass, 1914–15. Oil on canvas, 25 x 31". 1931.087. Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH. © 2013 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York | Gift of Ferdinand Howald
Picasso, Pablo (Spanish, 1881-1973) Olga Picasso, Seated, autumn 1918. Pencil on paper, 14 3/8 × 10 13/16 in. (36.5 × 27.5 cm). Private collection Courtesy, Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte Photo: Marc Domage © FABA © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Installation of Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change, 2016. #11 Image © 2016 The Barnes Foundation

Picasso, Pablo (Spanish, 1881-1973) Studies, 1920. Oil on canvas, 39 3/8 x 31 7/8 in. (100 x 81 cm). MP65. Musée Picasso, Paris, France. © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso /  Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY / René-Gabriel Ojéda

Installation of Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change, 2016. #10 Image © 2016 The Barnes Foundation

Picasso, Pablo (Spanish, 1881-1973) Costume for the Chinese Conjuror from Parade, 1917. Silk satin fabric with silver tissue, 65 5/16 × 59 1/16 × 19 11/16 in. (176 × 150 × 50 cm). Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Museum no. S.84&A&B-1985 Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Picasso, Pablo (Spanish, 1881-1973) Olga Khokhlova with a Mantilla, Barcelona, summer–autumn 1917. Oil on canvas, 25 3/16 × 20 7/8 in. (64 × 53 cm). Private collection. Courtesy Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte. Photo: Gasull © FABA© 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Picasso, Pablo (Spanish, 1881-1973) Seated Woman, 1920. Oil on canvas, 36 1/4 × 25 9/16 in. (92 × 65 cm). Musée Picasso, Paris, MP67 Photo: J.G. Berizzi. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

International Pop at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

International Pop

Philadelphia Museum of Art

February 24, 2016 - May 15, 2016

Reviewed by Ed Voves

Pop Art, like most of the cultural innovations of the 1960's, took a lot of people by surprise. In some cases, it came as a  revelation. For others it was a shock. 

The lively and informative exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, International Pop summons this tumultuous era to life. "I Pop" provides insight into the emergence of Pop at a time when representational art in the West was considered passé. 

To many sophisticated art scholars around 1960, anything approaching realism was considered "illustration." It was acceptable on the covers of magazines. It was not art. 

Pop Art changed that situation  - radically. Abstract Expressionism, the canonized art form of 1950's America, was suddenly dethroned. The flowering of primary colors, figurative depiction and references to mass media in Pop took the world by storm. Many, like the influential art critic, Harold Rosenberg, were not pleased.  

Joe Tilson, LOOK!, 1964

Pop Art, declared Rosenberg, was like "a joke without humor, told over and over again until it begins to sound like a threat..."

Rosenberg's assessment was wide of the mark and yet closer to the truth than he perhaps realized. There was plenty of humor to Pop Art. But the "threat" was real too. It lurked not in the themes and techniques of the practitioners of Pop Art but rather in what they perceived was happening in the world around them.

Examples of the upbeat Pop Art of the early 1960's are well represented in the galleries of International Pop. Roy Lichtenstein's clever parody of Disney cartoon characters, Look Mickey, is a notable work of" populist" Pop. There is also Gerhard Richter's Woman Descending the Staircase, an apparent homage to one of the most celebrated works in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase.

It is easy to focus on these two major works in the spirit of art critic Lawrence Alloway's interpretation of Pop as "mass popular art."  Perhaps it is too easy.

Roy Lichtenstein, Look Mickey, 1961

In Look Mickey, Lichtenstein "recomposed" a scene from a familiar Disney book, Donald Duck: Lost and Found. Lichtenstein's young sons were fans of Disney cartoons. By transforming the Little Golden Book illustrations into a comic-book format, replete with Benday dots, Lichtenstein created an image that would appeal to kids, parents and (hopefully) lovers of modern art. 

In the case of Richter's 1965 "photo painting," the obvious reference to Duchamp's work was further reinforced the following year when he virtually re-staged Duchamp's 1912 work with a sensitive depiction of his wife in the role of Ema, Nude on a Staircase.

Yet, there was a seed of iconoclasm in both these early Pop works which would grow as the Pop movement spread. We need to look closely at both to grasp the implications for Pop Art as an international movement.

Only two years separated Look Mickey from the "blood and thunder" war scenes, Whaam! and Torpedo ...Los! which Lichtenstein based on early-60's DC Comics series, All-American Men of War and Our Fighting Forces. These garish depictions of combat present war as only a twelve year-old boy could applaud. Lichtenstein, a World War II veteran, surely intended subversive social commentary in these 1963 works - but cryptically refrained from providing any overt indicators.

Gerhard Richter, Woman Descending the Staircase, 1965

Richter's relationship to Duchamp is also problematical. In a 1991 interview, Richter declared that Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase "rather irritated me. I thought very highly of it, but I could never accept that it had put paid, once and for all, to a certain kind of painting."

That "certain kind of painting" was, of course, representational art. Richter turned the tables on Duchamp and transformed his abstract nude into a realist figure. Both of his re-stagings of the 1912 work, the elegantly dressed version on view in the Philadelphia exhibit and Ema, Nude on a Staircase, are defiant rejections of Duchamp. 

Pop Art was often called NeoDada. Like the World War I era original, Pop/NeoDada turned the world upside down and inside out. What looks like a celebration of the good things of life might well be a cunning, satiric put-down of consumer society gluttony. 

Tom Wesselmann, Still Life #35, 1963

The vast Still Life #35 by Tom Wesselmann (1931-2004) certainly seems to be later-day Dada, skewering the insatiable appetites of the post-World War II era. The rather malevolent glint in the eyes of the Aryan-looking Sunbeam Bread girl is profoundly unsettling.

Anne Lloyd, Detail of Tom Wesselmann's Still Life #35

Tom Wesselmann, however, emphatically rejected such an interpretation of his work and always tried to distance himself from the Pop Art School.

"I used what was around me, so my culture was what I used," Wesselman declared. "But I didn’t use it for cultural reasons, it was not a cultural comment.”

Wesselman's artistic aims were to be upstaged by the impact of his paintings. Many other Pop artists would experience the same surprising reception of their art.

The Philadelphia exhibit is the third and final U.S.venue of International Pop, following displays in Minneapolis and Dallas. Tate Modern in London also presented a version,The World Goes Pop, during 2015. Different works by artists represented in The World Goes Pop appear in the American exhibition such as Oiran, one of the signature series by Japanese artist, Ushio Shinohara (b. 1932).

Ushio Shinohara, Oiran, 1968

According to the standard history of Pop Art, this radical departure started in Britain and the United States during the 1950's as artists grappled with the explosion of product brands and the unprecedented marketing campaigns. Abstract Expressionism's cult of the obscure was left behind for big, bold and bright images of the profusion of goods and services of the post-war boom decades.

Interestingly, a painting on view by the British Pop pioneer, Richard Hamilton, has more elements of abstract theory and design than is generally accepted. Hers is a Lush Situation - the mystifying title comes from a Buick automobile review - distributes car parts over the canvas with almost Cubist precision.

Richard Hamilton, Hers is a Lush Situation, 1958

The revolutionary Brazilian artist, Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980), also embraced Pop after exploring other art forms. He engaged in geometric and non-representational art forms early in his career. During in the 1960's, Oiticica launched ambitious efforts to create art that was evocative of Brazilian life and to break down the barriers between art, as a process of observation, and life as an active struggle to survive. Oiticica aimed to make art and life one and the same.

Pop art seemed ready-made for Oiticica and other Latin American artists. But Pop art to Latin American eyes was compromised by the U.S. counter-insurgency campaign against Communism. 

In the United States and Western Europe, Pop art dealt with social themes, such as the way that life was being packaged into boxes, whether Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes or the "little boxes made of ticky tacky" of the Pete Seeger song. In Latin America, the "boxes" were coffins of martyred victims of political oppression and U.S. intervention.

Hélio Oiticica, Be an Outlaw, Be a Hero, 1967

Unable to oust Castro's regime in Cuba, the United States launched repeated anti-Communist efforts elsewhere in Latin America, sparking anger among political liberals. In 1964, the United States supported a military coup in Oiticica's homeland, Brazil.The following year, U.S. Marines landed in the Dominican Republic, crushing left-wing protests and in 1967, U.S.-trained forces killed the Argentinian Marxist leader, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, who was supporting a revolt in Bolivia. 

Oiticica's Christlike image of a dead rebel was created the same year as "Che" Guevara's death. It vividly illustrates the response of committed activists like the brilliant Brazilian artist for whom a work of art was a political manifesto first and foremost.

The 1960's was a revolutionary decade throughout the world. The curators of "I Pop" at the Philadelphia Museum created a brilliant timeline chart tracing the interrelated relationships of Pop art movements among the various nations and linking these developments in the arts with notable political events.
        
One of the 1960's most significant legacies, however, eluded the grasp of the curators of International Pop. This was the impact of the "Sixties" on the rise of the Feminist Movement of the 1970's.

To give due credit, a conscientious effort was made to include many significant women artists in the International Pop exhibit. Evelyne Axell (Belgian,1935-1972), Pauline Boty (English,1938-1966), Niki de Saint Phalle (French,1930–2002), Marjorie Strider (American, 1934-2014) and Jann Haworth, (American, born 1942) are all represented in the exhibit. Most of the works by these women engaged with feminist themes that were to be major topics during the 1970’s when women asserted control of “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” 

These talented women artists are generally represented by only one piece in the exhibit and this is a major stumbling block. They are less well known than their male counterparts in Pop Art and thus more difficult to appraise on the strength of a single work of art. 

In the case of Pauline Boty, anyone unfamiliar with her work will be left in the dark by the exhibit. Boty, a gifted artist and a charismatic figure in the London art scene, tragically died in 1966 from cancer at age 25. She is represented in the exhibit by a sedate work of collage. This choice gives no indication of the highly charged erotic paintings that Boty created to repudiate the way that women's bodies are treated as objects by the male establishment. 

Boty is an extreme case, but International Pop is generally short on insights into these remarkable women. In an otherwise cohesive exhibit, Axell, Boty and Strider seem to be latecomers to the "swinging 60's" rather than major artists in their own right and forerunners of the art of the 1970's Feminist Movement.

Fortunately, "I Pop" has two other major works of art that help assert the growing role of women in art and modern society. These are Dinner Date, the 1963 sculpture group by Marisol Escobar and Andy Warhols's Sixteen Jackies, created a year later. 

Anne Lloyd, Gallery View of Marisol's Dinner Date, 1963

Marisol (as she was universally known) was born in France in 1930 of Venezuelan parents. She came to New York in the 1950's as a painter. Deeply impressed by pre-Columbian art, she launched a unique and unforgettable sculptural series incorporating either realistic portraits or mask-like representations (sometimes combinations of the two) on blocks of pine or mahogany, with disembodied hands, legs and feet to complete the unsettling effect. 

Dinner Date, which is part of the collection of Yale University's art museum, is positioned close to Still Life #35 by Tom Wesselmann. These two works complement and counteract each other. Marisol's mute, rigid figures are poised to eat "TV dinners," the epitome of the processed foods extolled in Still Life #35.Their faces (which bear a resemblance to Marisol's own features) are gripped in a trance-like state, as frozen as the "TV dinners" they will never consume.

The artificial, emotion-drained world which Marisol evoked in Dinner Date came to an abrupt end on November 22, 1963. 

Andy Warhol's Sixteen Jackies is a testament to the defining moment of the 1960's and the Pop era: the assassination pf President John F. Kennedy. Its significance is even wider.

Anne Lloyd, Gallery View of Andy Warhol's Sixteen Jackies, 1964

Warhol was strangely unmoved by the murder of Kennedy but very much aware of the significance of the event, as it transpired on television. Warhol's famous remark about the endless, repetitive broadcast of events in Dallas and the state funeral was both perceptive on the cultural level and incorrect in the instance of the role of Jacqueline Kennedy. 

“The more you look at the same exact thing," Warhol later declared, "the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel.”

The ad nauseam stream of media images which is now part of daily life certainly proved Warhol right. In the case of the Kennedy events, however, that did not happen. The "grace under pressure" courage of Jacqueline Kennedy, watched by millions, invested this sad drama with a nobility lasting to this day. One can feel the numinous outpouring of her spirit, even now, standing before Warhol's Sixteen Jackies.

Anne Lloyd, Detail of Andy Warhol's Sixteen Jackies, 1964

If Jacqueline Kennedy transformed a media circus into a moment of everlasting reconciliation, her example also marked a decisive shift in the role of women in the arts. The static place of women in society, so brilliantly skewered by Marisol's Dinner Date, was not going to continue, unquestioned, after Jacqueline Kennedy's strength of character was displayed to such an extraordinary extent.

The International Pop exhibit, now on view in Philadelphia, deftly contradicts Andy Warhol's "fifteen minutes of fame" dictum. Some images and the people they portray take on a life of their own. By virtue of the insight and inspiration they provide, these images become indelible, marked forever in the human mind and soul. 

These images keep on living.  And keep on living. And keep on living.

***
Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved 

Images courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Introductory Image:                                                                                                         Anne Lloyd (2016), Gallery View of Marisol's Dinner Date, 1963, and Tom Wesselmann's Still Life #35, 1963.

Joe Tilson (British, born 1928), LOOK!, 1964. unframed 73.5 × 76.75 × 3 inches, oil, acrylic on plywood. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis: Art Center Acquisition Fund, 1966 © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London

Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923–1997), Look Mickey, 1961. Oil on Canvas, overall: 121.9 x 175.3 cm (48 x 69 in.) framed: 123.5 x 176.9 x 5.1 cm (48 5/8 x 69 5/8 x 2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art. 1991.41.1

Gerhard Richter (German, born 1932), Woman Descending the Staircase, 1965. Oil on canvas, 198 x 128 cm ( 79 X 51 in.)The Art Institute of Chicago; Roy J. and Frances R. Friedman Endowment: Gift of Lannan Foundation) 1997.176 © Gerhard Richter

Tom Wesselmann (American, 1931–2004), Still Life No. 35, 1963, Oil and collage on canvas, 304.80 x 487.68 cm. The Estate of Tom Wesselmann, New York, © Estate of Tom Wesselmann/SODRAC, Montreal/VAGA, New York (2012), Photo: Jeffrey Sturges

Anne Lloyd (2016), Detail of Tom Wesselmann's Still Life #35, 1963.

Ushio Shinohara  (Japanese, born 1932), Oiran, 1968.  Plexiglass and acrylic on canvas, 72 1/4 x 72 1/4 in. 183.5 x 183.5 cm.  Museum of  Contemporary Art Tokyo © Ushio and Noriko Shinohara.

Richard Hamilton (British, 1922–2011), Hers is a Lush Situation, 1958.  (Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK, Wilson Gift through the Art Fund, 2006)

Hélio Oiticica (Brazilian, 1937–1980), Be an Outlaw, Be a Hero (Seja Marginal, seja herói), 1967. Screen print on fabric, 41 5/16 × 35 3/8 inches (104.9 × 89.9 cm). 2007-10-1 Purchased with funds contributed by the Committee for Modern and Contemporary Art, 2007, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Anne Lloyd (2016), Gallery View of Marisol's Dinner Date, 1963. Painted wood, plaster, textiles, oil on canvas, metal fork, leather boots, paint, graphite 139.7 x 135.9 x 111.8 cm (55 x 53 1/2 x 44 in. ) Gift of Susan Morse Hilles 1973.86 Yale University Art Gallery

Anne Lloyd (2016), Gallery View of Andy Warhol's Sixteen Jackies. 1964, unframed 80.375 x 64.375 x inches, acrylic, enamel on Canvas. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Art Center Acquisition Fund. 68.2 © Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/ARS, New York

Anne Lloyd (2016), Detail of Andy Warhol's Sixteen Jackies, 1964.